James Medley

@jmcopperhill

The most important things in the world, are the people who love you.

Valencia, CA

Joined October 2012

13 Following

36 Followers

116 Posts

James Medley

@jmcopperhill

about 20 hours ago

Off Point Dume the water stops pretending. You swim out on the surface. The bottom stays with you the whole way — every stone, every ripple of sand, clear enough to read. A school of bass comes through, fish the length of your arm, silver turning as one body, then gone like they were never there. A hundred yards and the pinnacles rise. Two dark towers in the light. That is where you take the breath. One hold. Four minutes. You pass the last rock and the wall drops. Not the deep canyon yet. A shelf. You settle on it at a hundred and twenty-five, spine to the cliff, and the sand dollars run out in every direction, a pale field that doesn’t end. The light up there is only a bruise. Color dies. Sound does not. Down there you hear everything, everywhere at once — the grind of sand, the click of shells, the far surge against the point, your own blood in your ears, some larger thing moving you never see. The ocean arrives all at once and there is nowhere to put it. The call of the void finds you there. Stay. Just stay. You ponder it long enough to feel how easy it would be. Then you snap back to the knock of your own heart. You are alive. You remember you have to go back. Coming back you pull until sixty. That is when you can actually see the surface — a bright, unreachable lid — and understand how far away you really are. Then the last forty feet: lungs burning, the urge climbing your throat. You breathe into your mouth just to move the sensation, swallow it down, lips locked, all will and nothing else. The surface breaks with an explosion of breath. Gasping. Air like a fight you finally won. The pinnacles are still there. You are not the same size you were when you left them.

James Medley

@jmcopperhill

about 21 hours ago

Don’t Come Off the First Ball The internet thinks this hill is a caption. A ranch that burned. A rock that held a photograph. Poison oak. The name everybody already knows. The place itself is a sequence. You enter through a hole in a ceiling. A rope that has already died takes you twenty feet onto a sandstone sphere the size of a room. That sphere sits on others. Call it sixty feet of ball on ball before anything is a floor. The stack will outlast you. You will not, if you slide off the first one. Then the morel. The walls are not walls. They are a fungus turned inside out — small cells, almost octagons, honeycomb eaten into Chatsworth stone that used to be the bottom of a sea. Tea lights in every pocket and the room becomes a lantern. The rock keeps the glow. This is the first interior that feels like someone meant it. Down from there the hill becomes a chute. People have ridden cafeteria trays on it. Halfway there is a stop. Across from the stop, a middle mouth: a little cave that curves right, narrows until you sidestep, pretends to dead-end, then offers a square you only find if you crouch. Worm through and you are on the slide. First-timers never look up. The chute only teaches fall. That is when you say it, twice, in the stupidest voice you have: uh by the way by the way you can go up too, dude. The spell breaks. The rock goes both ways. They laugh because the voice does not belong in a hole. At the bottom a V takes you on your back. The stone grips. Your feet fish for a floor three feet too soon. Smooth as water-worn skin. You slip out into a rotunda — sixteen feet high, thirty across, edges tapering — and at the far end a square monolith like a table nobody set. Names from the fifties in the soot. Fires somebody else lit. You do not. There is no chimney. Behind the altar the cave gets honest. Belly crawl. Rat shit. Debris. A hole in the ground that spits you out like the mountain is done with you. I don’t go past the altar anymore. That is not fear of the dirt. That is knowing where the piece ends. The drop is the tax. The morel is the room. The slide is the joke. The V is the birth. The rotunda is the church. Past that you are only proving you can eat the hill. The mountain is not moving. The rope is a rumor. Don’t come off the first ball.