grossly sincere

I am in a coffee shop that is also a dispensary in Portland, Maine.

I didn’t know that it was a hybrid dispensary/coffee place, but it was indeed called Higher Grounds… Google didn’t tell me that. Really, I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was looking at—what can you really do (maybe pay attention next time?)?

I’m writing here because I’ve been feeling rather uninspired and incapable of writing anything, really. I thought that including some blog posts that are more of a journal entry and putting them online would help me get back into writing every day, or at least, writing frequently.

The weather was quite nice when we arrived in Portland. The sun caressed my skin so tenderly. There was a slight feathering of clouds in the sky, and the wind blew kisses all over my face and neck. I clambered down some rocks to see the ocean, and I felt like I was supposed to be thinking about something really important and profound, but I think my mind was as blank and empty as the sea and sky in front of me. If anything, I was thinking about the song “It’s All I Can Do” by The Cars.

When the next day came, the sky was bleary and wet and miserable and every single drop of rain felt like more and more weight on my heart. And not to mention the torrential downpour. My pants were soaking wet and clinging to my legs after wandering the small town of Bar Harbor for only a few minutes—even with an umbrella. I was cold and damp and felt forlorn and pitiful, just a dog in the rain outside your door. I got two scoops of “The Dude” at an ice cream place and it made me dry heave, so I ended up throwing it out. Really, really just pitiful stuff.

When we went home, we stopped through more small towns to see if there was anything interesting to see, but it was just more of the same: plain buildings, plain people, plain roads. We went to a Goodwill in Ellsworth where, to my surprise, I found an Animal Collective CD along with a sealed CD of Actor by St. Vincent. I spent $28 there.

Returning to the town of Belfast set me off into a spiral of doubt and worry. The town had a layer of fog hugging the top of buildings and snuggled onto the sides of houses, and the distance from here to there became both so close and so far away. What are we doing up here?

Night fell, and the world turned blue. Church bells rang out above the town, above our heads, I know, but it felt like something larger in the fog was sounding out to us. We ventured out into the mist, the sound of our shoes squeaking from the moisture everywhere around us, our voices carrying down the street and into the air, lost inside what could be a cloud.

When we were wandering down the residential streets and along the harbor, I felt myself clutching onto my sides, my arms holding one another.

It wasn’t until I walked through the little town of Belfast when I realized I was hundreds of miles away from home, away from everything that I’ve been dreading. I have a job (or something), there’s someone I’m worried about, and there are people I want to get away from.

That bitter feeling of knowing something is on its way out is hard to overcome. July was so sweet, sweet like free ice cream on a sweltering day, but August holds a bitter aftertaste that I cannot seem to get out of my mouth yet.