Some things that mean the world to me.

I have a memory for places. For intangible qualities in the sunlight. For the feeling of the joining rubber fixings where the bus window meets the plastic frame, just above the dimpled and broken armrest. For how the window shook the whole way from San Francisco to Sacramento. For the deep belly freedom that I held close, like a secret. The kind of secret that is like holding in laughter, like when you are planning a surprise birthday. For the dry heat that hits when you get to the very odd, planned grid that is Sacramento city centre.

How the sun shone and I was sweaty in my denim jacket walking up 24th street in the Mission. How I got lost on the way to an old friend's house, but didn't mind. The bright orange hues of the trees and the blue of the sky, which I had not expected when I had left my hostel in the fog of downtown. How I wandered til I was certain I was wrong, and then how he spotted me out the window and met me in the street, after 2 years and little communication, with a flower and a smile. How we drank wine around a kitchen table and then got high in Dolores park. Of how he was a new person in so many senses, but an old soul trapped in a sadness. Of how I haven't seen him since.

I sat at my kitchen table three days ago and tried to recall the names of books that I had read while travelling two and a half years ago. There were four of them that I couldn't recall. But what I could tell you was the place where I acquired each one. Exactly what shelf in an Edinburgh bookstore, the kind with a coffee shop attached. How I sat in the red patterned bucket chair and read the first chapter, having known from the spine  that this would be my book. The book that took me around the world to the Canadian wilderness and taught me about death, and that I left on a white bookshelf that was afixed to a wall in a large impersonal Dublin hostel by the river.

Of the two books that were exchanged for one another in a house in East LA. The house that was half a house, a cupboard under the stairs, a cave with fairy lights that shone blue, green and red with tinfoil around the globes. One book was set in LA, the other in New York. The house where I met my San Franciscan friend (an Oklahoman at heart) and his housemate, who was a wanderer and his lioness of a cat. How time stopped for a while. The climb up the hill behind the neighbourhood park, while everyone was resting, and how I saw and drew pictures of a menagerie of animals to keep the wanderer and the lioness safe. Of the one chapter of that book in which the protagonist created his own language, which was simply the word dorky with different inflections. And how the chapter was just the word dorky, over and over, page upon page. Of the wanderer, who will continue to wander in and out of my path.

The fourth book, I couldn't remember the name. I knew it was a name that jumped out at me, that could have either been wonderful or a self-help book. I knew the cover was yellow and white, and that is was set in the Mission, and that I had bought it in the Mission. I remembered it was haunting, and that the main character broke his arm and did not have enough money to get it set, so it healed in a deformed banana shape. I managed to work out the other three books by tracing my memories back, and a little help from google. This one was stuck. And there it was. On the bookshelf under my stairs, inbetween my housemates things.

It is called 'some things that mean the world to me'.

And I guess that's it. This is an insomnia rambling of the things that mean the world to me. The unplaceable, the intangible. The incredible, incredible things I have seen and done. The imprints of people who I will carry with me forever, even if I never see them again. The ones who I have seen again, and miss again. The ones who have visited, the ones who can't. All the decisions they help me make on a daily basis.

I could not sleep, so I started reading. And as the character walked down Valencia, I could feel the sun and sweat and see the orange again. And I could see the smile and flower from a kind stranger turned friend. I stopped reading. I held it close, like a secret. I hold you all close. Thank you.