Quarter-20 Cap Screw
A short prose poem on leaving and not leaving.
That fucking email that I sent. I wish I could delete it, like that scar on my leg from where I ran backwards over the Rain-bird at summer camp when I was ten, and the fact that I’m hungry even though I just ate lunch. Now I’m feeling better though, having had some almond butter and a can of carbonated water while I dig out the tools from the back of the van here in the parking lot of my storage unit in San Rafael, which is just eight miles to the north of San Francisco.
Where I was born. Where I grew up, and threw papers rolled with rubber bands up three flights of stairs to hit the door just hard enough to let ‘em know, but not to piss ‘em off. Where I walked up hills at night to roll down them again and push out all four wheels sliding on fresh black asphalt, showing gravity a way it hadn’t even thought of.
Where I learned how to use tools, and also where I collected all the hungers and dust and anxieties and the twitching in my muscle fibers and in my nerves, all of which still afflict me now, although more gently. And where I collected all my doubts and wants and needs and my insecurities and my impatience—and also the little bolt that I’m looking for right now, and how to tell the difference between quarter-inch and four, or five, or six millimeter, coarse thread and fine thread, and the fact that I knew just looking at it that what I’m holding is a quarter-twenty cap screw—and how that also explains why I’m here on a Wednesday afternoon at 2:30pm, listening to the highway hum in the background and the two ladies in navy cardigans and pink masks, laughing and chatting in Spanish at the Covid test station in the next parking lot over.
This is why I’m here and not at work somewhere. Why I’m right here, and not up on the mountain which is hidden behind the red-tile roof of the Westamerica Bank where the emergency pandemic health care tent is, now closed, perhaps forever, because we don’t need buildings for banks anymore, and we don’t need banks anymore. This is why I am here and not out in the bay, in the cold water, the edges of my body merging with the salt and the whorls of the tide and the birds that cry and cry. This is why I’m here, and not doing my taxes. This is why I’m here, and not picking my kids up from school.
This is why I’m here. This is why I’m at my storage unit, digging a box labeled “S5” out from behind the living-room chairs wrapped in plastic to find the book that might help me figure out what the voice in my head meant when it told me that “love is not a promise.” And really, I just stopped here on my way, leaving yet again, on the road to see a woman who lives anywhere but here, again. A woman that showed me that I can love and be loved and be love, and who also helped me see that I’m trying to write a song here—a song about leaving and not having to leave, about having to leave and not wanting to leave. And now I do see that I’m trying to write a song here, and that part of what song is singing is that I may not have to leave after all, and that the song is about home.