Mmm Pop

Gillian Morshedi is a non-practicing attorney whose job centers around helping communities improve their ability to prevent and end homelessness, and whose personal life centers around responsible hedonism. Her writing is strictly for her own amusement, though she does occasionally subject others to it.

You know when you’re sitting in traffic in a rented car–the kind you rent by the hour only, because, although you’d like to spend literal days wandering aimlessly through Target on the rare occasions you find an excuse to leave the city and visit the properly sized one in the suburbs to your south, you really oughtn’t–

singing along to the radio in one of those precious liminal periods between coordinated Clear Channel commercial breaks where the entirety of the FM radio dial is actually playing songs (!)

bopping in time to your third listen in twenty minutes to the same ubiquitous Top 40 song that even unceasing repeats cannot render grating because these rare occasions of Being in a Car are the only times you have access to radio, 

your arm stretched out the window–undulating through the air like ocean waves miles from any shore, rolling along unhurried and unbothered–because it is Spring and so it is warm but not hot in this stunning Bay Area in which you live, and because you have never outgrown the joy of your hand slicing through the breeze as your arm hangs lazily out a car window, 

and you're unaffected by the crawling traffic because you’re in no hurry, because you’ve overestimated, as you always do, the amount of time you needed for this errand, thanks to your nearly pathological caution against inconveniencing the next person who has reserved this very car by returning it even one minute late,

and so, being in no rush, and with the crawl of the traffic not slow enough to compromise the deep satisfaction of your arm carving invisible wavelengths through the balmy air, 

and, besides that, your heart is thumping pleasantly in your chest thanks to that flouncy pop song beat and those elusive pop song lyrics, which you’re not at all concerned with understanding so long as you can sing along to every sixth word, and you're thinking the moment couldn't possibly offer more, 

and then you see them.

Your California poppies, 

growing right there in the middle of the train tracks (which might as well be cutting across your skipping heart, rather than diagonally across this thoroughfare, for how fervently you love public transit), where they have no business being, and yet every year, there they are, 

aggressively, gorgeously orange and softly fluttering in the same breeze that’s enveloping your arm (the one with perfectly crafted yet inevitably paltry tattooed versions of those very same poppies decorating each side of your wrist), 

That. 

That moment there,

the moment you spot them, and the surprise that startles you out of your Pop-fueled reverie, and the moments that follow where you can't look away, because they're here again, steadfast and fleeting, impossible and inevitable, pulling focus from the soft breeze and the traffic, 

not making you feel as though life has meaning, no, but reminding you why you're not bothered that it doesn't, 

because who needs meaning when there are California poppies–occasional and unfathomable bursts of tangerine joy that stop you short every time, 

triggering an impulse to grab your phone at the next red light of not before, of trying, just like every time you’ve made this drive home from Target in the middle of spring and been struck by the gentle awe your beloved poppy pals draw from the innermost part of you, to capture them on film (but actually, you know, on whatever the hell cell phone camera rolls are made of), despite having Every Time’s worth of evidence that no picture could ever capture the beauty of these poppies, let alone the giddy serenity they evoke in you (the same way you know no picture can ever capture the moon–no matter how large and bright she looms on this night, this time–and yet you try), despite the tens if not hundreds of attempted pictures, snapped desperately and hopefully over the years, which have yielded nothing more than haphazard images of inelegantly uneven ratios of car to poppies – nevermind that the ratio is precisely what renders the real life view so whimsical!–pictures in which the loveliness of your California poppies, perched happily betwixt the charming train tracks, is sallowed by the unremarkable gray frame of an hourly rental car’s interior.

Of course no phone is smart enough to catch them in their full glory; of course the vivid orange defies collection by something so pedestrian as a camera, and yet, you know how you ache to try every time? even though you learned better years ago?

So your arm, the one stuck inside the car without so much as a tattooed poppy to keep it company, twitches with the urge to grab the phone from the console and try, just one more time, because 

what if this time is the last?

What if there are no more chances? What if by next spring, they’ll be gone, or you will, or some fundamental aspect of this life will have transformed sufficiently to rob you of this predictable yet consistently surprising joy?

What then, the nagging impulse whispers, won’t you regret that you never captured it then, that you have no proof of having seen it at all, no encased pristine depiction to turn to anytime you need it during the long months between this Spring and the next

(if the next Spring comes at all)?

And you worry the whisper is right, but you resist it, remind yourself that you’ll only be disappointed yet again, not that you can’t capture the truth of the poppies, but that in trying, you’ve deprived yourself, yet again, of the fullness of the moment, of luxuriating in the grace of your poppies dancing playfully in the same breeze that’s cradling your arm, like they’re trying to teach their tattoo playmates how to do it right, 

and you remind yourself, too, that next time you see them–extending out through a neighbor’s fence or claiming a crack in the sidewalk as their own or rising up in the middle of these very tracks next spring as you drive by on the way home from Target, you’ll get to experience this swirl of sheer, saturated delight that only exists as a companion to the pang of impending loss of this singular joy. 

You remember, then.

And you smile away the urge to reach for your phone, because you know only want to focus on this right now, on the fact that you just…love them, these delicate, vivacious things. 

You love them. Simply and breathlessly (and dopily, really), and so very thoroughly–to the depths of your marrow and thrumming just below the surface of your skin. 

You know how it would feel silly, the intensity of your love for these intrepid, temporary things,

except that they ask nothing of you but patience, require no devotion in the months between, and still they reward you, time and time again, with a vibrancy that steals your breath and replaces it with certainty,

that beauty, like love, does not, in fact, fade or fall away in the times between. 

Yeah, that. 

You know?

Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.

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