left for salt

"I'm leaving," I said, "for salt." 

Nothing new. Just leaving to feel something true. 

Leaving for a speck, for a feeling. Like the moon searching for nothing new, just her sun's light. 

What lets her be. 

Before, the daily existence was a waking up, a staying-in, a too hot to step out. An overheating dog with a tongue sticking out. Parents who accidentally leave their small kids in hot cars. Or forgot they had kids. 

I am a being. 

Before, I was a body. Well-rested. Sitting. Lower back pain from games, indigestion, unmoved. Not a feeling. "She's not a fool," my thighs and knees screamed as I sat still. They recalled all the excited walking, the uphilling, the little happy jogs out of pretty buildings. The consistent months and years of building their thicknesses.

"She's not a fool," my belly churned, after another cup of hot sauce, corn, cheese. After going unused since last season, between a sitting up and a sitting back.

"She's not a fool," my back cracked, so used to being shaped like a curve like my mother, as if it was me who breadwon for a family. 

Sat still. Stopped and stared. Curved like a cup on a dusty ass counter. 

Why all this? The stillness? 

"Unemployed" is the normal excuse. 

"I have few available friends in this city." 

"No car or insurance." 

Movement is bought then. 

It must be. I can only move freely when I can afford to. 

Luckily, I still can. Or, I can move freely when I know enough people in a city with cars who love me or who don't mind my company. A mosquito asking to be driven across midnight downtown for the city lights. A little girl in your front seat, thick from elotes and cup-shaped. Or, who had the memory to look at her yoga mat again, peacefully stretching only her back.

But today, amongst the mountainous outlines of a new memory I'm making, the Miami-like trees lining these wide-wide streets, and on concrete caked with sand, I found my salt.

I'm not immovable after all. I do have fucking feelings.

I learned to re-try salt's taste. 

Salt is in a wave. On a beach. In the eye-drying force of the winds against the surface of my chest. I lean into the wind, which salt rides. Caking my hair like the concrete I walk. Filling my mind like the vision of Huntington Beach's waves below the pier. Rolling and fucking real under a sunset, saltier with the darkening sky. It's when you can't see shit that its scent envelopes you, squeezing you in the darkness. In its stillness. 

Maybe all my stillness from before was not for naught. It was all a plot neatly set up so when I find my salt, I would be squeezed so tightly into a shape that even my disgruntled self cannot escape. 

But not even the moon can be still to accept her sun's light. Nor the sun to offer itself to its universe. They had to spin always. Never a stillness. Maybe in all my bouts of empty-feeling daily routines, I was always pulsing.

Salt cannot be buried.

Salt raises the dead. Salt is in every memory. The quantity of it I'm so certain of every time. As I sit in Phuong's room and type the softest I can when she's tucked behind me, I remember my own pulse again. I remember all my ache. The excuses to preserve each ache. The very ache that made me burn, hollowing out every cup I wanted to fill again. Moved me to fly out here to Southern California just to remember salt, this singular matter. 

I cannot be escaped. Sea, horizon, wind, and water. I cannot escape. 

Because I am enveloped by a matter. Matters. I am enveloped by forces that bring matter to matter to me, so that I may never forget how true I am.