one week

I had to travel about 10,000 miles before receiving the inspiration to write a single line.
-- Henry Miller

We get married next Saturday. This morning we took a trip down memory lane and read some of my old journal entries from October 2002. Sean and I met on October 19th at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, formerly Emil White's cabin, at Big Sur. There was a short film festival there and I was "volunteering" at the library. I had made a couple of friends (fans) there, so I was welcome to go behind the counter and pretend to work there. Note to young single girls: you too can work at the Henry Miller Library, just smile and act lost, desperate, and open to chaos, preferably involving nudity.

Sean walked in to the library in a navy pea coat (where is that coat?). He must have looked pretty rough after what he'd been through, but he was amazing to me.

The day before we met, I spent the whole day at the library, and wrote this (among many other pages of literary dung):

it just occurred to me that i want to fall in love, no matter how impractical that is...

On October 20th:

Tonight we go to Esalen, to the baths, Ted, Andrew, Sean and I. I can't wait. I didn't want to leave anyway.

On October 21st:

In Ted's cottage, we were alone for 20 seconds of awkward silence. I should have said, "I like you, you know." or something honest like that. Instead I rambled about not wanting to leave Big Sur and sounded moronic. Sean is one of those wonderful types who only talks when he actually has something to say. God, I wish I were like that.

I still do.

I still have my receipt from my first and only purchase at the library. On 10/18/02, I bought two postcards, a CD of Henry reading "Black Spring," the book "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," and a collection of Hafiz poems called "The Gift." I don't know what became of the postcards. I listened to the cd many times and read the book, and gave the Hafiz poems to Jeanine in Big Sur, along with a Rumi book. I wonder what ever happened to Jeanine.

A few days later in Pacific Grove, I wrote the following (yes it's cheeseball but come on!) narrative:

It was after the baths, I think. We'd been naked together, although we barely knew each other. Everyone was loose and calm after, the sulfur having removed our anxieties and social constraints. I hadn't thought much about him there--not consciously anyway--although i had noticed that he had beautiful reddish hair, which was tied up in a bun, the front pieces shorter and lighter and radiating out in a solar fringe. he was very jesus, very serene and bearded like an old wise man, but bright-eyed and quiet. in fact i'm quite shocked it didn't hit me before, but no, it didn't.

we'd sat together on the porch earlier, talking about our lives and the movies we'd seen, and andrew popping up every now and again and talking incessantly as andrew does, and i hadn't seen any of his favorite movies. when he told me that he'd been illiterate until 16 and didn't read his first book until 22, i couldn't grasp it. he was so intelligent, and i was reminded again of the schism between intelligence, or potential, and education or actual achievement. he knew so much about a variety of things. at moments i thought perhaps he was one of those who uses big words and quotes obscure philosophers to project learnedness, but in the end i settled on the idea that he was a man of ideas who genuinely liked to talk about them.

he'd come to big sur to "kick heroin" and had done so in a meadow in the state park. the baths had helped him, and he seemed happy to be back in the tubs. so yes, it was after the baths, after we'd showered and dressed and walked the steep hill back up to the car. we were all so much looser than we'd been on the ride over, and i sat closer to him this time, on the bench seat in back, my leg resting heavily on his, our upper arms touching. it was very dark, and there was a hum in the air--not an audible one, but some sort of mystical low-down feeling of satisfaction.

it was then that, for some reason that escapes me now, i reached my arm out and wrapped it around his shoulders, like a teenage boy at the movies, and laid my head on his chest, laughing. it was all so gay and not serious in the least, but he reached his hand up into my uncombed hair and dug his fingers in and squeezed the back of my head somehow, and i felt something i hadn't felt in a long time. a thousand fleeting images flashed longingly through my slow brain. i wanted him desperately in that moment.

then the car lurched to life and the moment ended, and we rode silently back to the library, where i tried to convince everyone to sleep on the porch with me but i ended up out there alone, with the ghosts of henry and emil scaring off car horns in the middle of the night.

i can't stop thinking about big sur and a man named sean who made me smile to myself in the dark, floating in a black van on the way home from paradise.

And now I get to marry him.