what happens in san diego doesn't stay

i think i had an idea about how this all was supposed to work, but then it went away,
and i couldn't find a trace of it anywhere.
i was left with a list of all the people i thought i was supposed to be.
i could cross of most of them, having been them for a little while before moving on,
and was a little bit anxious about the ones that i hadn't tried yet,
but looked like they might take too much time, and those were the same ones
that weren't very interesting to me any more.
on the other side of the list, written in the dirt,
another list, things that i knew would come true, a list of things that hadn't come true yet.
and i had an inkling that they were on the way, but it would take some time yet.
and i had a little more time than i had thought.
they depended on favors from ghosts i had not yet met.
when i was sixteen, i had a feeling that the things that caused knots in my stomach,
the ones that doubled me over,
would not go away in my lifetime, they were the things that i would be expected to be
and do in the world, and that these things depended on the concerns of people i did not
care about very much, and lived in ways that i did not respect,
and that my only hope was to start paying attention
to the things that wrote on me from the inside,
and to pay attention to those people
who were being written from on the inside,
and that this would be my source,
where i would fall in love,
and where love might give birth to art.