Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option

my thought was to begin with "therapy: week X." In all honesty, I can't remember what week it is. I went from once a week to three times a week back down to two, with intermittent visits to other mental health professionals to manage the cocktail, to manage the OCD, to manage the ED.
I sit on the pink couch in the pink room at the therapist with a pink button-down and hair as white as an old witch atop her head.
I sit in front of her, our eyes meet on the same level.
She tells a story, I reveal a sliver, embedded visibly beneath my flesh, waiting for me to pick at it with a dull knife and tweezers.
Surfacing now.
Watching my mother with a drink in her hand. Then another. Then another.
Watching my dad with one drug or another in his lungs, in his nostrils, and another, and another.
And my mother picks up another drink. Everyone picks up another drink.
And i don't. And i can see what they hide.
And so i am distrustful and have every reason to remove myself and be the hidden reason.
The one left behind. The one with burns and blood.
I am beginning to shut the door on this
I can't stay out in the open and be left behind for another. and another.
And watch you hide from something that i see so clearly.
I stand on the gravel behind the house, staring up at the sun.
My arms are underneath the lid of the recycling can, attempting to mute the deafening sound of bottles pouring to the bottom.
I recall therapist's question.
"Are you strong enough to leave him when there's nothing left that you can support? When he's taken every ounce of love and turned it into nothing? Can you watch him slowly kill himself like you've watched everyone else fade and die and give you nothing?"
That answer weighs heavily.

that sheet pisses you off anyway

As I am sitting at my desk, preparing to create busywork for myself,
The sun beams through the window
I finger through my make-up bag, pulling out little orange pill bottles.
There are seven now.
What was it like before the morning cocktail of anti-psychotics, anti-anxieties, anti-depressants, supplements?
I look in the tiny mirror lying beside me.
Do I look like that person? Like the person who relies on three psychiatric professionals to structure her day?
Like the person who needed the fires put out in her head?
It is much cooler beneath my skull.
There are no flames spurting from between crooked fissures.
I still don’t sleep. Vivid nightmares wake me from a Benzedrine state.
A non-relaxed state, more of a sweaty sleep state
In which I expect those dreams. I expect the noises and familiar voices.
They cannot escape during the day, so they wait.
Yesterday, I walked out of the therapist’s pink, cheerful office
Out into the sunshine and to the car
And to the gym
And home
Where I sat, speechless, dead-eyed, staring at the television.
Not even at the television. At the fireplace. At the curtains.
Before we left for the market, I bent forward and laid my head
On the leather ottoman, stretched, and cried very silently.
There was no reason for him to know.

its behind you

i have to ask you.
why you won't cross the bridge anymore.
you only follow until we come to the grating.
then you fall and soundlessly hit the water.
and you follow me into vivid, recurring nightmares.
disappearing after i have chosen my weapon.
staring out the opposite window facing me.
pointing down from the 10th floor.
motioning.

i have not slept in days.
i sit here now, in a dark kitchen at the sharp-edged wooden table.
These chairs don't match the table. They don't match anything.
Odd how familiar this light is, the only light we see in homes.
Ginsberg walked along avenues noticing the televisions all on
in every home blinking wildly, pounding out lip-smacking propaganda
and variety shows.

my eyes hurt today.
sitting slumped into the couch, staring blankly at the television,
wavering whether to go out and be social or
sleep.
yet here i am. not asleep.
it's worse when i drink, much worse when i don't.

retract. there is a vulnerability surrounding me like a duststorm.
i am safely swirling in a comfortable vortex of particles
waiting to be thrown to the ground
my eyes teary and torn by debris.
what if i start fighting myself?

(ironic)

what if i stop.

nameless

I have become an unwilling participant on stage.
Not even in my own life.
On display,
constructing props, setting the stage, raising and lowering a curtain, waiting for the other me to arrive, to critique, to write about it later.
Shakespeare said "All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances"
I feel like I'm watching myself play this role.
That I'm not a real part of it, like a dream. Its not being controlled by me.
Sometimes I go out there, out onto the stage and act my own part,
but it's just an act, and the other me is sitting in the audience,
arms crossed, waiting for intermission so she can go to the lobby
and swig her gin.
"Break a leg," she says to me.
But i know she really means, "don't fuck up this time."
She's watching like a hawk,
meanwhile, I'm attempting to quell this wave of nausea
with a dose of what they've handed me to numb the nerve endings.
I wake up and cheer myself on in the mirror
Smile and wave like a delicate princess,
but my reality, my deservingness of these titles have been challenged.
My leading men they face me, and they turn.
They grab the hand of another
and she looks at me with a speck of disgust
How will I get through this act? I have no costume, no makeup, no lighting,
no magic.
Peering out into the dark audience, gripping at this restraint, this skin
no bouquet of flowers lands in front of me as i bow,
no curtain comes down and ends this act.
This is how i get through, half-believing and pretending,
shaking like a small dog, pissing on myself,
Unable to escape the breathy-humid confines of this arena.
Not knowing the script.
Doppelganger, double-entendre.
I step out of the spotlight.

"I'll be there in an hour"

Move here.

Father's Day

This is my dad.








Ask me why I can't have normal relationships.

two very different erics

"oysters, black morels, homemade vino"
posed atop a white table cloth, perfectly sunset-lit
left to right,
two glasses of sweet white wine
a small white plate
oyster shells and a delicately-carved, butter-smeared knife
a black bowl filled with ice, small oysters
a small white plate
succulent black morels
a large white plate of crusty french bread
buttered
with sprigs of fresh chives
from their garden.
They are more in love in their home.
Smiling in dirty overalls from a wet, lush vegetable patch
from over the handles of shovels
in falling snow, flakes caught in mid-air flurry.
Our conversations were sporadic, predominantly of
love and architecture.
There was a pinhole of hope as we parted ways at the bus stop,
each in the hands of partners who would soon be
shadows.
I scattered the photos and looked into her eyes,
believing it was two very different people
sitting, sipping wine
white tablecloth table,
food and home
created out of love more than out of necessity
"cheers. to us."

but how do you fill that hole?

For one human being to love another:
That is the most difficult of all our tasks,
The ultimate, last test of proof,
the work for which all other work
is but preparation.
--Rilke

isis

Watching first dates at Barrio, he and i munching on chips and salsa
over purplish-red wine, I contemplate the women that surround me,
and the words that people say when they see me in something other than jeans and a black shirt.
Their eyes open with disbelief. "Is that a skirt?"
I'm still exploring my adolescent, 32 year old, puberty-stricken body.
I stare at it in front of the mirror in disbelief, reciting a mantra over and over and closing my eyes to eliminate the existence of these new curves.
Eyes focused on the couples that flock to dimly lit booths, you can always tell.
There is too much smiling. Too much hope, optimism.
You lose that later, you learn to disagree.
We, sitting side-by-side at the bar. I take a sip of my sangria, dip a warm corn chip into a chunky, green tomatillo salsa, spicy, when he comes up with a gem.
"I like that neither of us have anything."
And that is true. It has always been true. I have whittled my life down to a shitty bed, clothes, half of the wedding presents and kitchen appliances, all of my books, my records.
I drift back to this afternoon, "Nothing matters when you're riding. Everything melts, doesn't it? That's it."
I drive back to my house, find ribbons in a box. I have thrown most of them away. I decided i didn't need those trivial mementos to remind me that this is the only real talent i have. Blue and red ribbons, reminding me that after almost five years of silence, my muscles remembered where they were when they hit the saddle.
I take another sip of sangria, eyeing the couples that are now silent, uncomfortable silence.
Ruminating. Masticating.
I tug at my hoodie, feeling squishy under the PMS. I'm in jeans and a black t-shirt, a black hoodie. It's how i always am.
I mull my strength as an athlete and how to balance it with the anorexia that i wish would magically re-appear.
"Once you're outside you won't want to hide anymore."
I've only been on one date in the past six months.
We've accomplished our goal, backwards.
"That one isn't a first date. Dude is in a t-shirt and flip-flops. You at least put the button-up over the t-shirt on the first date."
When the guy who sits across from me at work shows up in a button-up, he is striking enough for me to try to think of things to talk to him about. Although when he strips off his black hoodie, exposing sexy grey t-shirt and jeans, i stare at the tattoo on his left forearm. I cannot think of anything to say, so i turn back to the computer.
The girls at the bar, backs straight, arms draped over the back, eyes on the punk-rock, coked-out bartender. High-heels click along the wooden floor. Back and forth, strutting. Ritualizing.
Their waists have not yet thickened with age and stress.
Beneath stylish low-cut blouses, artificially made-up flesh reveals
Considerable cleavage.
Revealing. Riveting to watch the mating dance
As our tapas show their artful faces,
We don't name what we are. There's a certain comfort that comes
without a title.

Porch. Beer. Ex-girlfriend.

--"So if I absorb my environment, what do I want to be absorbing?"

My response: Last weekend, I rode with a friend down to the Red Hook Brewery. As we rode past urban sprawl, construction sites, through the tunnels, it opened up suddenly into the marshy farmland surrounding the Sammamish River. We stopped on the side of the trail to talk about it.
"Would you ever live down here? Farm? Horses? Vineyards?"
"Yeah. I would."
It was a response precluded by a heavy sigh and a look into the distance, into the tall ornamental grasses on the bank of this rushing, clear river.

"Me too. I've thought about it. I'd love some place outside the city. Close enough to go back to the city, but far enough that it's this quiet, this incredible."

At the brewery, we sat down with a beer, there were babies. An abundance of babies, toddlers. We sat there, half-paying attention to the pints, absorbed in these novel interactions between fleshy fat alien babies.

"You think they know? Look how everything is new. Everything is amazing and honest."

"Organic. They touch each other like it's the first time they've ever experienced anything. It's pure joy. Honest joy and discovery. Color and form, touch and feel."

"Don't you think everything is like that anyway? The first time you fall in love, the first time you touch someone intimately? The first time you read Kerouac, the first time you learn about crayons or clay?"

A glance in each other's direction. Honest.

This is my response to absorption. Making love to every moment. Realizing that death is an invitation to live. I have to remind myself not to be rote, and to open my eyes, acknowledge what i'm doing, what i'm touching.


--"Is it enough to just be loved by someone? If I am who I think I am, then I think it's got to be sad for [someone else to know this about me]. This is the man who got an open-ended date tattooed on his body - the day we got married and an empty spot for the day I leave or the day I die if I go first. What does that mean to enter a committed relationship with such an eye towards finality? Is that the ultimate realist or does he really understand that I might not be here forever?"

My response: Finality. I knew from the beginning that my marriage had an end date. I saw it happening. There was a tattoo on him with the foreboding warning, "caveat emptor." I didn't know then that i took what i couldn't handle.
An empty spot filled with room for the sadness that a final breath brings. That final kiss that disappears into thin air when you shut the door, falling on silent lips. Is life or death really relevant at that point?
I see it not so much as finality, but as an open-ended question.
I have this irrational fear. This terrifying fear that I'll be left standing, dead eyes welling with confusing, burning tears.


--"A friend of mine said I needed to find out who I was without a man in my life. What does that mean? I asked him. I don't mean that you need to be alone forever, but that you need to know who you are on your own, he replied."

My response: I spent my whole life alone. So did you. Man or not. This alone-ness in our heads becomes an obsessive full-time job. Reeling over these chest-rattling sobs, these uncertainties. Who exactly are any of us without each other? This isn't Walden Pond and we are unhappily attracted to people who willingly give attention, but what are we without homes? How do we know where to go? So we go where our food bowls are, as far as our chains will stretch and bend instead of finally putting out a hand and finally admitting that you can't run anymore. That you're so tired. I don't necessarily agree with "alone." I run in circles alone. Mama raised an independent woman. She also raised a woman who never trusted anyone else to help her up.
Yesterday, I was taking a CPR course. There was a point when we had to lie on the floor with our partners, putting each other on our sides into an appropriate position so we didn't choke on our own vomit. After it was over, I was lying on the floor, ready with my palms placed by my side to hoist myself up, and there "ES" was, bending over me with a hand out to help me up. I wondered why he did that.
Then i remembered what I'd said, "you're the first person I've not walked in front of or behind, but truly beside."
We've been alone in our own heads so long, having these conversations in our heads, lips barely moving, the words are dying to escape.

--"At the same time, I don't know if I could live the life in my mind if I was on my own. But would I have that without him? Could I love myself without seeing myself through his eyes?"


My response: Again, my marriage was an error in judgement. Pun intended. We judged each other unfairly. He watched everything i did and followed, in suit. I hated myself for it, for being weak. I hated him more for being weak. I always saw myself through his eyes.
I was never allowed the life I wanted, the only way was without him. I planned for it. For years, I thought about it. I thought about what my life really was. I was a woman stuck in a little-girl body, stuck with little-girl thoughts because I knew he'd take care of everything. I knew he'd bail me out. I had to learn how to bail myself out again.
The other day, lying on the bed, I realized something I'd never believed before. I didn't even recognize the words, the voice that was confident in who I was because I knew who I was in ES's eyes. There was no judgement there. There was no weakness or fear.

--"Over the years I've resolved that if this didn't work out, I would likely never marry again. If anything long-term arose, I would consider long term commitments, but not marriage. It's something I should have learned early, though my husband has said that if I hadn't wanted to marry him, he would have ended things. He needs that traditional form of commitment and I, now more than ever, know I don't. Granted, I enjoy the security and soft-landing of my marriage. In fact, the fact that I never had anything secure and stable in my life, let alone someone to love me and push me to be free, is precisely why it's so hard to think about walking away. It's an addiction. It's too easy. I doubt that if left to my own devices I would actually be able to follow through on the things I speak about for a life of my own: Can I live alone? Not the being alone, but the day to day practicalities of living...could I do that?"

My response: Is it not easy because it's right? Why walk alone when you have someone to willingly give you that cushion with no strings attached? With nothing but a beaming pride that you're his? Or are you? Are any of us when we give ourselves, emotionally to others? It's not physical contact, a quick fuck with another woman that I fear. I fear exactly what I gave to other men when I was married--what I should have been sharing with husband, I gave to them. I gave myself to everything else. I was allowed to, but there were terms. There was no feather-pillow, marshmallow landing. The mundane practicalities, we all struggle with, our kind, our generation of etherial attention-span-less-ness.

--"What he wants out of living life is different than what I want. Regardless of any deep psycho-emotional connection and understanding and love we have...this is the realization I am coming to and it makes me ill...I don't want this to be the truth...I want the other life...but I want him to be in that life, too. I think."

My response: I'm leaning over my computer with my hands covering my face thinking about what to say to this. I've never had this. I've never walked hand-in-hand with someone down the same road, with the same objectives, the same goals, the same life, looking at each other, completely content, completely without words.

You were right...it was a date

My therapist asked me last week if what happened last weekend when I went cycling with my new cycling friend was a "date."
I said i didn't think it was a date.
She said, "it was a date. You need to decide what to do before you get yourself into a situation."
Can't i just avoid this and hope it goes away?

We cycled this weekend over on one of the islands. There were moments when were forced to dismount on the side of the roads, these roads lined with tall grasses, vibrant wildflowers and dilapidated wooden fences, just to take in the view of the snow capped Cascades, of Rainier, seemingly on fire, floating on an island of its own.

I'd notice him peripherally, taking my sweatiness in, and at one point he reached to sweep my bangs out of my eyes.

This lighthouse at the pinnacle of an adjunct island. It reminded me of the old lighthouse in Milwaukee, the one that was being restored, that I'd run by through the park along Lake Michigan. White with a black ring, an enormous swirling lantern at the top. The metal casing would let out a flash reflecting the sun.

Low tide, we walked down to the beach, leaving our bikes on the rocks above, taking in cliche salty, fishy air.
"It doesn't smell like this in the city," he said.
"Can you imagine yourself living on an island like this?"
I said it depended on the reason. It depended on my age, my intentions.
"I can see that. It would probably depend on who you were with, too."
I bit my lip.

We finished our ride at a sushi bar on a little strip of touristy-looking buildings, old. Maybe they weren't touristy. There were no locals hanging out. I wondered if the island had locals at all.
"I don't know much about sushi anymore," he says.
"I think it is basically always the same. You spent 4 years on a boat and you don't know about fish?"

Two beers and a spicy tuna roll later he reaches over and touches my wrist.
He asks if we can consider this a date.
"You have to have felt this. Am I the only one?"
"I'm seeing someone."
i look out towards the patio, noticing the sun begin to set. I felt a slight warmth on my arms where the punishing orb had attacked me underneath his fingertips still resting there.

"So, is it serious with you and this other guy?"

I thought back to every email, every text, every conversation, every time my I would lose my breath, every day, every night, every time we'd managed to dislodge the sheets from every corner of the bed.

"It is getting serious, yes."
"Can we keep this friendly and see what happens? I really like you. I can't believe you hadn't noticed this at work. Do you think this could get awkward because we work together?"

It might. His eyes changed from bright green to stormy blue, dipping a piece of albacore into the wasabi, looking straight into my own eyes.
I wondered what color they were right now.

I thought about the veins on his arms and the lack of tattoos. I always expect to see them when I see guys in T-shirts.

Today, I saw him at work, he was in a meeting with one of the other engineers. He turned to look and flashed me a smile. Wearing those dark-rimmed glasses, poring through papers. I stopped for a second outside the glass, cocked my head, thought of how i hoped to god he wouldn't try to kiss me as I left his house, salty and wet.

Setting my file down, I closed my eyes and opened them only when i knew i was facing far enough to my right.
I opened them only when I felt the cool breeze from my fire-escape window.

We've only had one date.

breakup letter

Sitting cross-legged, entangled in a damp sheet,
This was the moment.
The last moment of epidermal strength
infallibility in droplets
stuck in a well-woven web
hanging by the last sticky thread.

visceral deconstruction
a rearrangement

i hesitate to define courage by fearlessness
contraction, expansion
only when we allow the air in the room
to clear

absinthe, cocaine, fulci or "it's your turn to clean the glue machine"

It's been since I left the brewery and went to Eastern Europe that i'd talked to J.
Facebook, you've done it again.

I can't really remember the first day we met. It must have been when i started at OBC. I would be out in front, my first position was as a retail girl. Folding shirts and serving beer to groups of frat boys. 3 or 4 o'clock would roll around, the bottling run would be over, the boys would start to gather in the tasting room, filling pint glasses with their celebration, or with infuriation.
I did remember thinking that I wanted that.

I wanted to stroll in after a bottling run, after cleaning tanks, after struggling with labels and glue, wet and tired, clad in big rubber boots (I never did get over the "wet" part). Mostly, I wanted to be one of the boys.

After a few months in retail, I asked for a transfer to production. I remember walking onto that bottling line and knowing that the next two years would entail dragging hoses and attempting to end a run without throwing bottles at the German machinery.

As with any job, you start to develop close relationships with co-workers. I remember my first days bottling and kegging with J. Patience beyond belief, that boy. We'd arrive at 4 AM to start the keg run. He did everything those first couple days, never left my side, even though i know he had partied till just about the time he had to come to work. Sometimes we'd find our bottling supervisor still sleeping in the large bin of plastic wrap that our bottles would come packed in, maybe in a pool of vomit, maybe not.

There were times that J showed up so late that i'd already kegged half the tank. He'd walk in, reeking of the night before, be very sorry, and offer to clean everything. Inevitably, on those days, the machines would break down and we'd spend hours fiddling with wrenches, nuts and bolts. J taught me how to be spatial. How to use my left brain for good, instead of evil. He taught me the finer points of not being killed by heavy machinery and the forklift.

We had such shitty days, he and I, scrubbing pig-intestine glue off of the machines, water so hot we had to wear thick, awkward-fitting black gloves, scrubbing the dreaded pink mold from the bottom of the filler. Shitty days when bottles exploded out of nowhere and shot amber glass in all directions. Days when we'd have to unpack the bottles by hand onto the conveyers. Our hands were always cut up from bottle caps. We took care of each other, he and I. He'd rarely not be by my side in rotation, and we'd take such painstaking effort to make sure that nothing would go wrong for ourselves. Those days were long.

But nothing replaces those conversations in the early mornings, the sky was always dark, the air in the brewery smelled like malt-o-meal. J would be so angry sometimes, we'd start drinking early. Sometimes, I'd change the schedule so that we could be on the same runs.

Sometimes, I'd change the schedule so that we could go out to the bars and clean the beer lines, but really all we'd do is get really drunk and end up somewhere in Old Town, talking about drinking even more.

Many an evening was spent in J's basement apartment with the cat and the cold tiled floor, fat rails of cocaine, a bottle of absinthe, and horror movies, up until dawn, talking about music, about Lovecraft, bitching about work.

Nothing replaces those days. They were long. I think about them and that stale beer and crushed hops smell runs from my brain into my nose. We missed a lot of each other's lives.

I still have that poem that he wrote me on the back of the 90 Shilling coaster.

you smell like glitter and cotton candy

Paperwork.
I write emails to friends, chat, look at other people's profiles on Facebook.
Look out the window, longingly, at my fire escape and the crows that gather there.

My eyes take in brief sunshine. Glance at my Outlook, notice there's a message from the person who sits to my right.
One word answers to my questions.

I sit here and try not to eat out of boredom. I try to chew gum. Bubble gum, minty gum. I think minty gum works. I chew piece after piece out of sheer boredom.

I walk into the production room on my way to the bathroom and run into my new cycling friend.
"We should make this a thing."
I have a hangover. Don't speak in riddles.
"What? What kind of thing."
"Cycling on the weekends."
"oh. that thing."
"Yeah, so this saturday, then. I'll think of a route, we'll go out to dinner again. Cool?"

I look past the papers he's carrying and notice the prominent veins on his arms, leading up to his neck. And then I am looking into his eyes and today, they are bright green.
I'm considering the scars on his chest from lung surgery.

He smiles and tells me about the fieldwork he's been doing. I fiddle with a pair of scissors and listen, thinking mostly about the hockey game i missed while cooking dinner last night.

I'm listening, but only half-heartedly. I'm thinking about last night. About making dinner for a chef. About making dinner. I suck at life, I'm thinking. I should do this more often.
Domesticity is not my forte and i forget about it, at the mercy of the wine.

But the chef's roommate was at the kitchen table with me, drinking wine, we were talking about something, laughing, chopping vegetables. I don't look at him, he brushes the back of my neck with a kiss.

I'm startled by new cycling friend's laugh.
I think he said something funny.
"What?"
He tells me about something that happened on Sunday. I look back into his eyes and again, he smiles and asks where we should go for dinner.

A friend asked me the other day what i'd say if new cycling friend asked me out on a date, or if i even thought these were actual dates.

Would i tell him i were seeing someone?
Part of me wants to say no.
The part of me that traces veins with the tips of my fingers and thinks grey hair and scars are hot.

I walk back to my desk, throw on my headphones and think about where I want to go to dinner.

things that aren't appropriate

I had a drink with my roommates last night.
A couple of drinks.
A couple of drinks after i had already had a couple of drinks. It's funny, when you don't see people in a while, you remember why you liked them.
or why you didn't.

I was sitting at the head of the table that the landlord left. It has an antique cover that i'd set my hot coffee on, and it left a white ring. We're trying to figure out how we can hide it. I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what to say, facing both of them again.

I never know how to begin conversations with my ex-husband.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
We didn't just laugh. We didn't just connect. We were good friends. We occupied each other's time, space, void.
We snarled and poked at each other until we bled.
And so we resort to suspicious behavior, snapping, hiding.

There is an air of un-forgetfulness, un-forgiveness.
No guilt, no remorse, only something left behind.

Our roommate decides to walk to the kitchen and pop open another Fat Tire. He asks if we want a chili dog.
I don't want a chili dog, but it breaks through the uncomfortable tension of me questioning my ex-husband about his new "friend."

She's married. I wonder about this girl, this married "friend."
Is she as unhappy as I was? Does she want out?

Why would he choose someone in exactly the same situation as we were in two years ago?
Wanting out, but wanting the security. Wanting the greener grass, but wanting to come back to the food bowl.

Does he wonder what she says to her husband? Does he wonder if her husband is expecting her home for a candlelit bubble bath, and what he is thinking when she doesn't show?
He explains that it's because there's no chance of it working out. Ever. This is the reason he sees her. They talk, they have coffee. They must have something in common.
They must share a passion for something. They must share experiences.

He doesn't ask about my relationship. I've told him that it's none of his business and that I don't want his opinions about it.
We're just not there, yet.

He has another drink and walks to the kitchen to sort out some cast iron skillets.
"These are mine."
I tell him he can't take everything.
"This is mine."
I tell him he can't have it.

He sits down with his chili dog.
I ask about his other girlfriend, the sugar mama that he doesn't want because he doesn't want a serious relationship right now.
I get nowhere with my questions.
And i'm too drunk to argue anymore.

I decide that, when i look at him, I don't like him anymore. It's not because he's being insolent, it's because i really don't like him. I don't know what he's about anymore, and he makes comments, likewise.
"I didn't even know you liked hockey."
I do like hockey.

I look at him and I cannot, for the life of me, remember what we had in common, what we talked about, if we ever really opened up to each other.
This was a good example of our relationship.

We made better roommates than spouses.

Detachment

"Do you know what the procedure is for detached retina?"
No.
"They place this little gas bubble behind your eye and...you have to look in one direction, not moving your eyes...for 2 weeks."
(It's called pneumatic retinoxepy)
Not moving your eyes.
Not moving your eyes.

One stray look
Might have adverse, lifelong effects.

Permanent detachment.

"I'm your typical boy."
I've never dated a "typical boy."
I have no idea what that even means.

Am I your typical girl?
I don't know if my eyes could ever be still.

There was a very long time when I was stereotypically
on a deteriorating raft
surrounded by thick, salty air and hungry sharks.
And sun that pounded my skin into blistery, bloody sheets.

"If you had a theme, what would it be? A theme. A word."

Suffocation.

And it will be a most undesirable way to die.

i brought a 4-pack of Guinness and potato chips to my first therapy session

I spent this past saturday with someone who told me that the reason they were 34 and had not ever had a serious relationship was because of their mother.
I spent that morning walking along the beach, sunlight finally beaming in a cloudless sky.
When he left me in the truck, i opened his wallet and peeked at his license.
It's the same as looking through people's drawers.
Piecing together their fragmented lives, snippets of an entire life before you came together. Bills, tickets, half-written-in journals, statements about their existence, condom wrappers, photos.
He spent that day looking at me, hard.
I couldn't quite figure it out, what he was looking for.
I couldn't quite put my finger on it. There were a few glances.
Hazel. Blue-green. Like mine.
You can't ever tell through the glasses.
I decided I didn't date light-eyed men, fair-haired and fine-boned.
It's a trust issue.
Which is ironic. Because i have light eyes. Although not fair-haired or fine-boned.
I did notice his room, his bathroom. The window that looked over the cherry blossoms and the lilac bushes and the quiet street.
And then we were cycling on the island.
And he always wanted to be on my left side, talking, questioning.
I wanted to know what he meant by that.
By stopping and mentioning where we were on the water, and the reflection, and the gin.
He didn't let me lead. I took it.
Sunset over the I-90 bridge.
On my ride home, alone, I was still asleep on the pillow. I had pulled the sheets from the corner.

bedside table drawer

The first memories i have are of my dad leaving for work. He worked swing-shift sometimes, and when he came home at odd hours
from the metal forge plant,
he would take off his burned, ashen clothes, pile them in the corner, and go to sleep.
I remember seeing a picture of him in front of the enormous drop forge, a furnace burning hundreds of degrees hotter than my little body could ever imagine.
In the summer, when my mom would take the scissors to my faded, worn-kneed jeans, she would give the legs to him. He used them as a layer of protection against the searing sparks that flew as he brought the heavy hammer down on a piece of iron,
molding it into a tool,
something practical, something useful.
I imagined the jean-legs disintigrating with each firey ball that collided with the layers of fabric, finally contacting the skin, the smell of singed hair melding with the smell of hot melting metal
He would come home, sleep, get up and leave for baseball practice.
There was a dirty, grey uniform that he wore. Stirrups and white socks.
I remember the uniform had a number on the back, maybe his name.
I cannot remember the number. Maybe it changed.
I don't remember watching him play.
I was small then. I'm sure i never knew the size of his hands, or if mine would fit into his palm.
I don't think that i ever knew if he had scars or callouses from work, from the baseball or the smooth wood bat.
There were so many rough surfaces, so many edges.
I ran into them all.
Get up, look around, find a band-aid for the wound.
"Don't bleed on my things."

if you can cheer me up, i can learn to love you

The quote of the day concerned two awkward goof-balls attempting to wax poetic about social cues.
this is something we do every day, pick apart a social structure or two until we've beaten it like a bad dog, until it's on the ground, begging for air, for the chance to show us a "different side."
these conversations last days. we can pick up where we left off, always, and let the disintegration begin.
i could potentially describe the bus ride that i had the other day,
the one that began with my partner-in-crime and i walking to the bus stop on a cloudless morning, i hadn't noticed until we arrived at the stop and he followed me that he hadn't lit a cigarette. I raised my eyebrows. The #3 comes every ten minutes. Of course it was full, it was nearing 8:00, filled with junior professionals heading down the hill, downtown to the high rise cubicles that we all occupy, even on beautiful days.
And then the Can Lady got on. The Asian lady with the half-drooping face. Some sort of deformity that i cannot define. She carries cans in ripped black hefty bags onto the bus, and they leave a slithery trail of flat beer and soda to the back door, where she absolutely needed to be, even though there were shoulder-to-shoulder bodies in the aisle.
I think the drippy mess crept onto my jeans as she dragged her bags on the floor through our legs. I smelled old beer all day.

i wish i were a better writer, i could describe what we talk about on a daily basis.
i could describe a certain friend's descent (or ascent, really) into unemployment. fun-employment.
everyone looks and says, "tsk tsk. jeez, aren't you looking? can't you find anything? aren't you bored?"
the answer i received, once, was..."no, i'm not looking."
not looking not because she didn't want to, but because this forced break from the rat race was exactly what she needed to be able to sit down and really take a look at herself and her own needs.
We work in this giant machine.
I'm a firm believer that the machine works. It serves its purpose.
That micromanagement is how people are "motivated" into doing "work."
That nagging barb in the back of your neck that walks by your desk, employing some secret mix of formulated bullshit to suck your soul out and thereby rendering you able to do no more than make charts and graphs (not using red).
The machine means that we all have a place.
But when she left it, it meant that she didn't have a place.
Accepting this was the first step. Because it doesn't come without withdrawal
that longing...wishing you could score a job, any office job, temping
anything to be able to prove your worth for 8-10 hours a day.

camera obscura

my perception of space is slightly skewed.
i grew up not having space
not having time
or privacy.
all of these things were occupied or taken away.

I left my phone at work.
I feel slightly disconnected, so i make up stories to pass the time.
I sit here in silence, because music distracts me from my original intent.

I climb the stairs to the anne frank room and look at the photo album.
The first photo is of our wedding day.
It's the newspaper shot. I don't know where it came from, or which paper it was from.
Its the first photo.

The pictures aren't chronological.
There are some of us in bulgaria, in the mountains, hiking with our colleagues.
There are some of us with friends, some with family.
Some of those profile shots of me in the sunset.
There are some of babas we passed in the streets, dressed in traditional
Rhodope baba gear.

I turn the pages, think about where we were.
I think we went in circles.
I think we came full circle, a complete 360 regression.

I told a friend the other night that i really have faked a lot of orgasms.
It was the truth.
"Fourth time, one hour. No lie."
That's what you said, right? An hour on the fourth go? The first one's for you, the second one's for her, the third one is for both of us, the fourth one is...an hour. It really had no point.

I talk to him when i have questions about things neither of us have a clue about.
I can always tell that he's laughing on the other end.
He tells me what he thinks i need to say when i have sex with other men.
"Mostly just don't say anything."

He talks to me when he has life crises. We've spent the last year re-evaluating his life, from one end of the country to another.

"Meet me in Idaho."

I think of all the opportunities in that album.
There were pictures of us at camp, pictures of us in florida, in mexico, in Hong Kong.
There was just no love.
There was no place in my heart for that kind of love. The love that one should see when they open a photo album.
"Look how in love you were."

I feel slightly disconnected.
So i write stories.

"Now is the time when your relationship will take a turn. You have a choice.
You can sabotage it, or you can stay and face it."

"We make a good team."
We make a good team when i make you laugh. When i get hyper in the middle of the afternoon because i want to come over and make out with you.

"What do you want for Christmas, little girl."
That was ironic. If only you knew what that little girl wanted.
Every Wednesday, she asks me what that little girl wants.
"Love. A home. Attention."
That's all she ever wants.

She doesn't get her childhood. I took her and ran, already.
We live out of a backpack.
A backpack that i set on the floor in the bathroom, and rummage through
in the morning
wishing i could just leave it there, and put my clothes away
in one place.
and not have to carry (enter heart skipping a beat)
everything.

"you know me, I'll walk away and never look back."

It might end at the point when I give up on having a childhood. It might end when I pick up my backpack for good, leave you all behind. Leave all of this behind. But those are irrational thoughts, unproductive thoughts. These are angry thoughts. I have learned that I have to stop asking so many questions and learning to actually answer them. I leave too many questions unanswered.

The end is here. The end is now. The end of my fear of everything has to be now or it will never come. It will never come and I will be lost.

I can only write these stories about my nonexistent childhood for so long before they consume me and my unrealistic expectations about the way things are supposed to fall into place.

“Everyone is like that. No one can commit completely. It’s not human nature to just fall into one thing. To love one thing, one person, to work one job, to have one dwelling, to have things that they cannot rid themselves of.”

When you are lost, go back to what you know. Now I have to come up with the answers about what I know.
I know that I never feel the same today as I did yesterday. I know that yesterday is, in fact, always dead. It is the ashes of what I burn in my sleep.
I know that my brain is on fire sometimes, and it is all I can do to soak it in a shower of cold chemical to cool its rampant flame.

So does it end with the cold numbing of neurons? Does it end with the deadening and dampening of neurotransmitters?
And when my eyes are dull and dirty, and my hair is matted and I haven’t been out of my pajamas for weeks, and I am still convinced that it is yesterday, and never today, and I can never persuade the sun to burn the memories into spots.

where did you sleep last night

Last night, quite aware of 3:14 A.M.
Restlessly weighing my conscience
And it being early enough in the middle of the night
To not medicate, I considered keeping this at arm's length
At a tolerable distance
As I secure a comfortable spot
Perched, watching,
hollow-boned and aeriform,
a tiny beating heart,
a tongue that never speaks more than antediluvian riddles
she watches her hair cascade
over his dark eyes
and remembers that there are still pancakes in the cast iron,
forgotten, burning;
left behind when they walked down the steps
together, already replaying the scene in their heads,
already drinking cheap wine on a warm patch of blanket, moonlit grass
already out of love.
already her lips sip the last drops of wine
hands fall to the ground.

truth or dare

When I was younger, I learned to allow words to resonate in my thoughts.
I took them very seriously.
I took apart every word, learned to play them, juggle them.
Every.word.counts.
Dare.
That was fleeting. It was only an action; the flash of a camera, a brief crescendo.
But the voices lasted longer.
Truth.
I'm leaning over my laptop watching a jungle flourish in my back yard, watching the black cats roll around on their backs in the grass that we should cut soon.
Dare.
I never told anyone. When they ask, I say we're friends.
Truth.
I think he still thinks about her.

i have is stories that i should write down, that i have begun to reveal.
pasts that begin to melt together in a swirl of place and time, kisses, addictions, and flesh and suicidal rage.

and i am told that none of these occurrences is in the least bit average.

Truth.
There used to be very little of my heart that i left exposed to be broken. I have always done the shattering.
and silently walk away, closing the door so i couldn't hear it fall to the floor.

Dare.
Being still is a challenge.

Truth.
He doesn't want to know what's inside my head because it scares the hell out of him. What he wants is to look into bright, clear eyes that aren't painful and stormy.

The distractions are imminent.
I take off my glasses so that i don't see them.
so that i can only see what is close to me.

i took a step slightly to the right, to make a point.
but he followed.

And when she returns, I wonder whose bright steps he'll follow.

some things will never wash away

unforgiving subtlety
nuances that barely reach the surface
cracks in the surface that never seem to burst
but spiral until they ripple
creating mountains, a frozen tectonic movement
inching towards certain misplaced eruptions
vigilantly upwards
nothing grows there
nothing grows when there is no air to breathe.

expectations

"Dating has been the sad, small experience that I always remembered it to be. Pretty girls with amusingly high expectations, and not quite as pretty girls with yet still higher ones...Sometimes I find find myself out with a girl, and halfway through the "date", I find myself just so annoyed, and wondering "WTF am I even doing here?". I think: "this girl will never really 'get' me, and I will never really 'get' her, and why the hell should I anyway?"

When i read these words this morning, I thought that it was self-defeatist. I thought, there are millions of people in the world who have this ability to go out, connect, be normal, have a life, live a dream.

Then I realized I wasn't any further along than he is. I read those words over and over. Realized that connection is relative. I've felt that annoyance. I know that feeling because the more i open up to people, the less i feel like i can control it, the less i feel like they don't "get" it.

It's a daily occurance that I chat with a few friends and debate what life is worth to us. Sooner or later, it will be par for the course that i will inadvernently try to find a reason to stop dating, find a reason that no one needs to know what is going on, a reason why I should be alone.

And so it comes back to the earlier statement, "WTF am i even doing here?"
But this is part of what has recently become, once again, a part of what I have become.

Yes, my therapist says that we are more than our diagnoses, but she also knows how personal and how safe I keep them. I keep them in my heart, save them from the world, from destruction.

Dating is hard. Dating is harder than before. Before, it was quirky. I was moody and foreboding. I was punk rock, I was emo. I was my soundtrack.

Dating is hard. I go back and forth. I think in black and white. I call it all-or-nothing. I'm supposed to say something about how "things" affect me.

All of you will nod your heads at this. You will say, hmmm...that's our girl. She has her own page in the DSM-IV
http://www.fortunecity.com/campus/psychology/781/bpd-dsm.htm

"You cannot have your childhood."
What can i have, then?
"You can have right now. You can start from nothing. You have nothing to lose. The only way you fail is if you take that last step off the bridge."

So what the fuck am i doing here, anyway.

be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

First of all, let me preface this with my middle of the night anxiety attack. The one where i can't breathe, where I clocke my pulse at over 100bpm when i should have been fast asleep. Blame my lack of available medication. I usually don't bring it with me. I usually sleep more soundly there, even though I am still awake most of the night.
I lie there, thanking god the window was open a crack, being able to concentrate on people walking through the gravel outside, birds still chirping in the early morning, chilly breeze brushing my cheeks, barely extinguishing the small fire in my brain.
Earlier that day, I was thinking about how well I'd been feeling. My happiness was walking down 21st street from Cherry to Madison, there are rows of Cherry Blossoms in bloom, and in the wind as i stood underneath them, their little pinkish petals would fall into my hands and onto my head.
Early this morning, I realized exactly who i dreamt of when i finally fell asleep at 4AM.
There may be people who read this and know exactly who i'm referring to when I tell this story.
Years ago, when I worked at the brewery, there was a friend of Chad's who worked with us, he married one of his best friends from home.
Sure, we all partied. We drank alot. But he never knew when it was enough. I guess we all knew he was an alcoholic. I guess there were a few around that place.
There were times when his wife had to come pick him up from work after he'd worked his shift, but was too drunk to move, asleep in the cardboard boxes of soon-to-be recycled plastic wrap from the empty bottles.
During the day, whether we were bottling or cellaring, he'd be drinking. It started early. 9 or 10 AM and continued until late in the evening.
I dreamt of being back in the brewery, I could smell the mash. It permeated the air a mile from the brewery. It was strong inside, warm on those snowy days. It was comforting to walk in, see the brewer over the kettle, steam rising above our heads.
It was still early, or late. Dark, though. The doors were slightly open, letting in cool, fresh Colorado air, filled with dirt and pine.
There, over the lauder was jake. Of course, there was Helmet playing. He loved that CD. It was always on, and i'd fill my ears with orange plugs that would scratch my sensitive ear canal.
I walked further to the switch on the wall, and the flourescent lights slowly flickered on to reveal our beloved bottling line. There were bottles still tightly wound in plastic. I looked over towards the cellar and it was GW with big brown boots and an orange hose that he was dragging over to my tank. He looked at me and said, "I do love her, I always have. I'm just not good enough. She deserves better. I chose it over her." I turned away.
I woke up with that feeling in the pit of my stomach, cool breeze on my face, and a man lying next to me in the same t-shirt that GW was wearing in my dream.
I rolled over to face the dresser, the closet mirror in the dark reflected the ghost that i held inside about not being able to surpass that power.
And i remembered every time someone chose something over me, and my ears were filled suddenly with the soundtrack that perforated my skin, my heart, every crevice that i failed to protect.

stitched to my heart

As i watched the sun actually peek out over the city this morning,
through the windows on the 14th floor of the municipal building,
i realized that i needed to take five minutes out to tell a few people how incredible they are.
Ft. Collins, Chicago, and SF--(you all read this ridiculous drivel) you all know that this was one of the most difficult weeks that i've ever had, and you stood with me, felt that pull, looked that shit in the face, took every second you could out of your days for me, took my hands, and never told me that this was a conversation for another time, never left me alone for a second.
There were some moments this week where you really had to work hard to keep me off that ledge, because it was close, and you knew it.
So thank you. Because of you, i live another day to create endless charts and graphs for "the man."

Spies like us

"Here are the shackles for us: we fear success because we spent our whole life being told we were failures, but we fear failure because there is no net. So... we are somewhat paralyzed with fear, in a lot of ways. We can't go too high or too low. Just under the radar... not to be noticed."

I was an easy birth. A quick, painful birth. Like a gunshot wound. My mother said that i came out with my eyes and fists clenched so tightly, and i didn't open either of them for an entire day. As if I was already fearing what lie ahead, already fighting.

It's the "borderline" between neurosis and psychosis.
"At least you've finally achieved some balance in your life."

I was born during a time when clothes were uncomfortable. They didn’t breathe. Nothing breathed. The entire nation was holding it’s breath under an ill-fitting, stuffy suit. I was born, and in my hospital picture, I was a strange green tint. I looked uncomfortable already.

well, i guess we can call that conversation over.

"I think that if you can imagine [the person you love] dying without you being there for them, then you aren't willing to pay that price."

silly girl, i'm in love with you

"I want to be the boy you trusted and cared for."

There was a white phone on the kitchen wall, a rotary dial phone that my mom bought so that she could put a padlock on it to prevent me from making phone calls.
The only other phone in the house was the one she had hidden behind her bed.

My flesh was barely touching at this point. I watched it peel back, separate, and for a split-second, i watched the bloodless halves fill and spill over onto the floor.
Then it came very quickly and my daydream was shattered by not droplets, but pools.

I broke the lock on my mom's door, found her phone and called you.
i slid past her in the kitchen, sitting in a hard wooden chair, with my sister at her side, coddling my arm like a baby, hiding the blood with my black hoodie.

You put the Descendents tape in. We drove to your house.

"You need to go to the hospital."

I did. I needed my arm sewn back together.

You ask me now why i called you.

find it

I was reminded of those moments that no one knew.
In the basement of the bookstore downtown.
The bookstore. I never entered again.
I always thought maybe those boys who were working that morning
Listened to our conversations
Spanning four floors
Of replicant novels, forgotten books,
Old magazines in the basement, so yellowed i could barely breathe, itchy from my scarf
and from the collar of my P-coat.
Or guilt.
I was watching a movie
and someone mentioned Baudelaire. And my eyes cast downward, sighed heavily with sudden wet tears,
scanned the room
for someone who knew those verses as well.
Flowers of Evil, indeed.
The capture of a truth in plain clothing
Smelling of the dirt of the streets,
Scratching at my neck
Feeding on the filth that gathered under my collar.
There was one photograph that I did not burn.
Hidden in that bookstore, on the second floor
Between the crumbling pages of Rimbaud.

displaced

"Did you have an overprotective mother?"
I've seen overprotective mothers. That was not my mother.
My mother was busy with her own life.
We're on barstools, with gin.
We're talking about art, talking about the past.
"There's a lot of my life that no one knew about."
He turns his head and says, "I figured that was true."
He talks about his string of girlfriends, girls he cared about, girls he didn't.
We psychoanalyze my track record.
I admit that his findings are without a doubt true.
Order another drink.
I have no place to go.
This, here, now. This is the only place I am.
Barstool, couch, bed.
My home is not my own. Even when I am there, I cannot sleep.
This, now. This cafe in Capitol Hill, watching typewriter man eat butter out of a single-serving container with a plastic knife.
Watching rain fall, still wondering where I lost my bus pass.
Debating whether to stay to go.
Another break-up letter.
Written, torn up.
And he asks me about you, "you seem like a couple."
And in fast-rewind, my head spins into all of the days since new year's eve.
i count each one of them.
i contemplate sending a text with the same amount of words, but there are no such words.
There are never such words.

pandora

“Eat your chocolates, little one!
Eat chocolates!
Know there are no metaphysics in the world but chocolates.
Know that all the faiths don't teach more than confectionery.
Eat, dirty one, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same veracity you do!
But I think, and when I lift the silver paper of a leaf of tin-foil
I let everything fall to the ground, as I have done to my life.”—Fernando Pessoa

"you like mentioning how i don't pay attention.
i would like to point out however i did very much pay attention to your response..."

And everything falls to the ground.

dharma map

i crept up the stairs to the anne frank room where you had moved all your belongings.
our bed, the red-painted table, a chair.
stupidly, in my bare feet, i slid across the plank floor
dirty,rotting wood slightly emanating attic-dwelling rodent excrement
i'm looking for a book.
a book i know is packed away in a box
a box that you packed when i told you i was leaving
even though i didn't actually leave.
it must be at least ten degrees colder in this part of the attic
and i feel as though i should leave you some arsenic-laced donuts
to set beside the day old coffee
and the lid to the ice cream and the half-bottle of red wine
and i look at the studs that constitute your walls
interlaced with substance that fills the cracks, it leaks out over itself, forming hard globs of grey matter.
on the wooden posts
i see with colored tacks
are pictures
black and white photographs.
they are arranged in a time-line
a spiral.
and i picture you squeaking around on loose floorboards up in that drafty attic
wringing your hands in despair
looking at us all through the fingerprinted lenses of
your German watchmaker wire-rims.
where did we go wrong
where did we lose touch with you when you lost yourself.
and what have you to gain
as you willingly give up everything
in an attempt to cleanse
to purge.
to pick up pieces
and assemble them neatly into your next life.
how will we all connect
when there was no road to lead us back to each other?

tuesday

I pictured this ending with something more dramatic than a limp rubberband
lying on the dirty brown Berber carpet, waiting to be stretched, wound-up and shot.
I pick it up and throw it in the trash. Dig it out, twirl it around my index finger and stretch it around my hand.
Place it on the desk and stare at it, contrasting with the grey-white desktop, smothered by old brown rings, reminders of morning.
Consider rekindling and firing this rubberband at you. That would defeat the purpose.
Instead, I stretch it to its limit and it snaps, reddening my skin with a sharp slap.

idaho or "i have a layover in Salt Lake City"

it's not real. none of it is real.
but all of it is very real. isn't this real life anyway? we go to work, we go to the gym, we eat, we fuck, we sleep. isn't that all very real?

i'm just leaving it all and all of a sudden there is talk of possessiveness.
There is talk of possessing. there is talk of i am yours and you are mine.
and then i am not supposed to take it personally.
i am taking it all personally.
none of this is real. none of this is real until it is real. i have no idea when it is real. but it is not real now. it is not real. it is not real. none.of.this. is. real.
cancel the trip.
i talk to myself in circles
i want to leave it alone.

Two weeks later. House-sitting. Playing house. Watching someone else’s life, on someone else’s television, with someone else’s dog, cat, fucking in someone else’s bed, and waking up to someone else’s sun at the wrong angle.

i got to thinking on my run today about the conversation that we'd had

i was thinking about you...and i took our coversation too far.

it was all in metaphors.

hardest.press.send.ever.

Sea-Tac. 4pm. Southward bound to San Diego.

I bend over, stretch and reach for my phone.

Reread the messages in my inbox, reread them and don’t delete them, yet. Not until we land.

Easy to tell which nights I slept at home this week, a multitude of messages from him, always ending with, “sweet dreams, love.”

It’s the same phrase I respond to when we’re lying next to each other.

The same voice to which I respond, in kind.

I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first, except to answer it as honestly as I knew how.

No questions, no holds barred.
“Do you want this?”
“I want this. I’m past wanting this. I already have it. I feel it and now there’s no turning back.”

How could I feel this with so much truth and joy in my heart? I spent the last five years lying to myself about being happy, fulfilled. That there was something that could replace the emptiness I felt.

Nothing.

Nothing except food could fill that void for me. I turned away from him years ago. And he was right when he said I never looked back. I never did. I ran.

As many times as I could, I ran. I had one foot out the door that I had left propped open, that I would peer out of every once in a while to see if maybe I could live again.

And when I knew I could. When I’d reached a level of security and confidence that I could handle, I bolted from the frozen tundra of the Midwest back to the mountains of Colorado. And then I hid for six weeks.

I’d been hiding for so many years that I’d forgotten what I looked like.

Now, as I undress, I peer into the mirror, pore over myself. I still have no idea what they see, but it is obviously more than I see. I slide my rough hands up my thighs over my new hips, up to my new breasts. I look down at them, still not used to the idea.

He comes up behind me, and he’s incredibly sexy, looking into my eyes through the mirror, takes my hands and says, “you’re beautiful.”

Our skin is the same color. There is no distinction in our flesh. Pinkish-flesh. Flesh colored flesh.

I thought of it the other day, as I was walking in the rare Seattle sunshine.

I thought of the way that my ex and I fell for each other.

Even that was not easy. It was painful and poetic, nondescript and it was always between a monster and a girl. It was never between two people who loved equally. It was one or the other doing the loving.

For a time, in the beginning, it was me. I would partly chase, then when he turned to grab, I would run to another boy. This continued for quite a while—a year, two years. It was heartbreaking. It was pushing and pulling. It was pulling hair and then it was quiet.

It was not. This.

This, even here, 30,000 ft in the air, somewhere in the pit of my stomach, actually in my heart, and not just in my head, I know. I’ve always known because I’ve always been here.

We have an ocean view from this hotel room. I catch a glimpse of him in against the cloudless sky, leaning over the railing with a smoke in his hand.

When I read the quote to myself, I knew. He knew.
“I do have some anxiety. I don’t know if I deserve this kind of happiness. I can’t let myself have it.”

If you’re not ready now, you’ll never be ready.
“I knew when we were together, that we were already at that level. We were already at the next level without even knowing it.”

That we were.

With one simple question and one innocent interaction.

The text from Neumos. I waited.

And then I saw him. And we never let go.
I think we just had the most perfect nap ever. There we were, lying on this perfect bed, having these perfect moments. I suddenly had the urge to get up and run. I suddenly couldn’t handle everything that was in my heart in that half-sleep, listening to the ocean, hearing him breathe. I suddenly knew that it was terminal. I knew he’d die. And I would be left without him.

hi, remember me, we used to be in love...

(radiohead)
"15 years later, a man and a woman debate the details of their teenage love romp..."
it began as innocently as any teenage love affair begins.
a ride in the backseat.
"you sit next to him. he likes you."
a phone call.
a friend of a friend.
plans laid. best laid plans.
when is it worth it to look back and feel the strings of attachment still tugging
silky, sticky cobwebs
clinging to the back of your head
when is it time to shake them
shake off the disconnect.

saturday

6pm
beer. hockey. nap.
i'm watching this from the life that i want.
watching intently, despite irrational fear dragging me by my feet into the other room to be in the body that really exists.
i'm watching this happen to a boy
and a girl
but i don't know if they know i am watching.
they are on the couch, she is in his arms, i can hear the puck glide across the ice, i can hear him breathe.
and i can hear what he whispers into her ear as she sleeps against his chest, pressed close to his heart.
i don't think they know that i am watching.

west seattle isn't like real seattle

it's a monthly ritual.
"poetry submission deadlines"
newsletters appear at the forefront in my inbox.
browse through them, read a bit about them, about the judges.
sometimes they seem fitting, most times, i cringe at the thought of even submitting another round.
"read the winning entry here:"
the winning entry. if it's a woman, it's about abuse, it's about mislaid plans, unrequited love, about feeling trapped, running away from the trap, it's native American, it's African American.
it's not me. i never seem to fit within your confines, guidelines.
i'm a working-class white girl of Mediterranean descent. i have an office job that supports me until i make it big on the scene.
I struggle to not let the joy in my heart reflect in the pools of blood that spatter onto these pages.
For anyone who glances at their shuffling feet, to come across the inky red splotch and see my joyful little heart on the pavement would be devastating.
People only know me by my small, coal-black heart and the soul i sold in another life.
I wonder if that deal still holds.

fell in love with a girl

I was thinking about writing about how much i hate valentine's day,
or how i'm sitting here on the couch and i can't figure out how to turn the tv on because my right hand is stuck in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
"but you're doing something with your life."
I go home and dig around in the basement, searching for something gone long ago. Looking for ribbons. Reminders that this all actually happened.
These ribbons meant that we existed, once upon a time, that I was doing something with my life.

pillow

This ravine of feelings eludes me and i shove them back into a cold, Spanish-tiled recess and remember reading about in books and i read something today that was interesting.
she talks about not handing a child a copy of Crime and Punishment before they have learned to read.
this is what happened.
i had no doubt that this is what happened.
i was given the manual to myself and did not know how to read or decipher it. i started with the hardest reading and had to then go back to learn the alphabet. it only comes back to me when i smell that smell.
it comes from the kitchen.
and i know that smell. it smells like toasting frozen waffles and cheap syrup and butter that her mom used to microwave in a coffee cup so that it melted all over the frozen waffles. it smells like those cheap brown vinyl chairs and teenage boys. it smells like dolls and toys and shag carpeting with dirt and chlorine ground into it and ripped wallpaper and basement. there are posters on the walls and his sister was born the year before me. her room was very orange-pink with frilly curtains and valances, porcelain nick-knacks, one for each year of her life.
rotting fruit, sweat, and chlorine, the smell of his room.
i was seven or eight; he would invite me into his room to listen to his 7" collection.
and to test the pillows on the bed.

one step back

I learned today that there is a fine line between vulnerability and need.
Between openness and "open"
At this very moment, my phone is in the other room on "silent" because i want it that way. Because I'm distracted with banter.
Distracted.
By conversations that are about me, by me, yet don't include me at all.
They wonder what they'll do next.
Which road do they take now that they are sated?
I figured out why I suddenly dread waking up in the cave and it has everything to do with warmth.
The phone is on silent because i'm avoiding answering any questions that might arise.
It's on silent because I suddenly cannot play outside. Because rain is falling right into my heart
and i know that sooner or later i will be in my room, with my turntable, listening to scratchy vinyl.
i will be on the bed, craving the warmth and comfort that i denied. that i pushed away.
now it is too silent, and i have to turn on music to cut through the misplaced energy, bouncing from wall to wall, cell to cell.
waiting to be fed.

when i get to cali, i'm buying you a bff necklace

"I knew, within 3 times of hanging out with him, I KNEW that if ever there was someone I could commit to, it was him, and that if he felt the same way, we were done. I knew..and I knew because I had never known before."

i didn't count on this

I have so many stories that begin and end in airports.
Not a story line, just thoughts scribbled on the faces of models in magazines,
between the blank boxes of unfinished crosswords.
I don't write in journals anymore.
My brain works faster than my thumb and forefinger.
Settling it down into the inky point of a pen onto paper would mean a grandiose loss of information.
It would mean less conscious soliloquy at 30,000 feet with my head against a thick cataract window, watching mountains stream below.
My calmest moments are spent alone in an uncomfortable row of greasy airport chairs, staring out at the tarmac, not quite with my head on straight, take-off, landing.
Eyelids collapse onto themselves and the flicker of white candles on the ledge ring my periphery.
Tracing outlines with a silky, slippery finger, still my eyes are closed, inhaling the sheets, cognizant of the cocktail that saturates each thread.
Simplicity of an indigo woodblock print, uninhibited by cords of stained umbilicus
leaking out of my inky pen onto paper-thin skin.
"Everything in our lives has led us to this."
I stare at my hands.
They look older.
Six years older.
I notice a trickle of blood as the arid cold wind constricts vessels and skin stretches taut, separating from the nail.
It is still snowing.
"Come back to bed."

He and I stripped ourselves to the bone from the beginning.
We imposed upon our bodies, these conditions, forcing ourselves to live on the bare minimum.
This is what was expected of us. We were hardcore. There was a stigma. This is where we should have been, it's what all the magazines said.
We stripped every ounce of carnal joy and when we had nothing to eat, we ate ourselves.
There was no meat to our relationship,
so we sustained ourselves on each other's psyches.
I called it Vegan.
I called it minimal.
I called it reduced calorie, living longer and stronger.
Training for the marathon.
He snuck food on the side. I binged and purged and starved.
We deprived ourselves living in a dark, post-communist nation, surviving on bread and potatoes, and what little vegetarian treasures we could find in Sofia.
We called it enlightened.
I hit a bottom. I hit bare bones.
I hit androgyny. This is when it was real. When people would tell me i looked gaunt. Now he looks gaunt and I have finally hit puberty. A real woman.
The tables have turned and we are weaker for it.
I am not strong enough to resist.
"Don't get caught up," he says.
There was no snare to get caught up in, because there was no line cast.
No net to trap me this time, left to sink, gnawing at my limbs to be free.

Is that my copy of Lolita?

It's me and you, Futon of Death. We sit here alone in the room, sans rug, and torture each other with our inability to be forgiving.
Why submit? In hopes that maybe I'll be discovered on the diner-stool of life, in some obscure Seattle hideout, belting out my life story on a MacBook.
I don't even have a Mac. I'm not part of that club, either.
So, what do i submit, then?
More cliche notions of how I got to be so fucked up and jaded? How about some random story about how my life ended up with me sitting in a cubicle next to "sullen CAD guy," plotting our next rubberband-slinging session.
Once in a while, I catch him looking over at me.
I wonder if he's judging me, if he's thinking about how he could possibly push me down the 10 flights of fire escape without getting caught.
Here's my life. Here's me without my words, without my saddle, without my subtlety, still listening to records alone in my room, me and my thin futon.
So, what do I write about anymore?
Do I write about the divorce? It wasn't my intent to be jaded.
The rug hasn't quite been pulled from under my Allstars yet, so maybe I'm still standing, firming my grip on the fringe.
My books were packed for me. Was it because the collar of my coat was scented with aftershave?
"New Year's Eve. Something changed. I noticed it. Sure, you'd just snorted a bunch of drugs, but something had changed."
"What?"
How could he possibly know this. My heart is never on my sleeve.
"I think someone kissed you on New Year's Eve. It wasn't me. I think someone kissed you and you knew, then. You knew what was coming. You knew."
"Maybe I did."
Rewind.
Three hours earlier I had, indeed walked into that party looking for someone.
That someone ended up not leaving my side. That someone is literally, always
at my side.
So what do I write about?
"Womanhood suits you."
Fifteen years later I hear this.
Fifteen years after we tried to stand so tall against skyscrapers we would never move, not even in our Doc Martens.
We stood facing the exit door, clawing at the night air with our bare hands, tearing it away from our faces.
We couldn't grow up, not now. We couldn't not live this moment.
We couldn't leave until we heard those songs.
Now, I hear those songs in my sleep. I hear them speaking under the guise of breath, from across the room, from the MacBook of someone who never left my side.

emasculation

January is never pretty.
Even less so on these days,
When we sit across from one another
Contemplating our level of honesty over afternoon coffee
as droplets of rain fall onto the numbered tops of city buses,
carrying our dirt down the side,
dropping it in front of our faces.
"Everyone knows."
If everyone knows, then I might actually be achieving what I set out to achieve.
If, after so many years of guarding myself, hiding myself
thinning and shearing myself,
i can let go and still be able to look into the mirror without Sonic Youth boring into my skull, i can drop the tunic.
i can drop the act. and nothing is broken except our hearts,
but i never looked back because i knew what i'd see.
I'd see the judgment, the "what did you do now?" slapping me in the face.
"I trust that you made the right decision, even though I hesitate to believe it.You always did have a hard time committing."
I cringe at my failure.
Anyone else would have silenced that thought in midair.
"So, what happened? What did you do this time?"
It rolls off his tongue so easily, and i feel my neurosis rising from the place where I last left it.
"I guess marriage is not for everyone, including you."
And yet, I am still listening.
Watching myself in the mirror, being tried for my apparent failure as a daughter.
The difference is that this time, I don't actually believe it yet.
Black Shoe. You're a figment.
This time, I click the phone shut and my limbs aren't glued to my sides, numb and resistant. I move around the room.
I find no residual. I look under the rug. Nothing.
I shut my eyes and recall his words.
They morph into something much worse than he realizes.
"You can't ever be truly happy."
I pick the tunic up.
At my fingertips.
The phone maddeningly alerts me with a message.
"Sigh"

More

Three hours of sleep.

Two-and-a-half if you count the interim that I was half-awake, debating whether or not to throw the alarm across the room, watching its digital guts spill across the hardwood floor.

“What are we doing here?”
I felt the sick rise from the bottom of my stomach.

Wall of innocent flirtatious security, ether-thin with the utterance of five words. Broken apart.

“I—don’t know. Do you need me to leave?”
“No. I just. I don’t. I know that we’ve been more attentive to each other lately. That’s all. And now you’re here.”
“I am here.”
I am here. I am here on your ex-girlfriend/still-girlfriend’s black leather couch, inundated by the usual soundtrack of our words and Isis.

It works.

I am here in a house I have never been in before. I’m here on this couch. I’m here with a glass of deep red Chianti in my hand. I'm here, watching the transgression from the stairs.

I miss trash TV.

We draw closer. I don’t know what to do with it, yet.
Don’t look like you want it. Don’t give it up.

Don’t pretend like you can’t hear it, smell it.

Later.

Lyrics stream through my head like silky ribbons. There’s a scent on his sleeve and I cannot tell what it is, at first. I know, though, what it is. I know where it came from.

Part of me urges myself to grab my keys and escape, pretend like this never happened.

The others inside of me allow me to stay and play this game. I am no good at this game. This is illogical. I am no good with these things.

How do I make a move? How do I move? Where do I move? What counts against me?
How do I score this?
Is she still watching us play?

bright red snowflake

"So you're a cutter, then."
Run. Fucking run. Now.
Flash of disappointment.
Lie.
"Sometimes the pain is fucking unbearable and there is no other way out. Sometimes my heart beats so fast and the tears burn so badly that there is no other way. Sometimes I hear the disappointment in their voices, and it sounds so much like home and I walk into the bathroom with the X-acto knife I keep in my drawer. Usually, nothing happens. I just need to know it's there."
No. I didn't say that.
"It's fine now."
This is what I said. I could hear those words forming before I spoke them. I had to visualize saying them because they were so untrue.
There was nothing more I could say.
My throat was oddly raw, although all the screaming was inside, well-hidden.
To divulge such an esoteric need would be freeing
Allowing you to bruise my wrists, grasping at what panic remains
until the adrenaline has run its course through burning, open veins,
this is the violence that has ravaged my heart.
Don't. Let. Go.

Super 8

Every morning, I finger each strand of my hair, straightening the stiff, black edges, in a steamy mirror that i wipe down with my shirt, on wet, towel-littered tiles.
Cold, cracked tiles, stuffed with smudged grime and dirt, ages of dead skin sloughed and pounded into forgotten mildew pores.
Ceiling tiles, I tilt my head upwards to examine the water stains, rust-colored rivulets.
She edges closer to me across the slick, salmon-colored, soapy counter top.
"You didn't ever like anything. You never liked anything except for music and books.

I want to say that it was not always this way, but it was. Pensively monitoring the world with distrust.
There is a neglected universe outside.
I watch my family disappear. I watch their grainy, film-shattered eyes fill with laughter and scotch in my grandparents' drop-ceiling basement.
Trailing off, I hear their voices as I turn away from the screen.

I want to run after you. Tugging on your coat.
But I have learned restraint. After years of being smacked away.
Years of being followed, I learn to shrug you off.

Mall. 2pm.
He cannot possibly have just said the words, "Orange Julius and hot pretzel."
I stopped breathing for almost 60 seconds. I doubt he noticed.

"I can't backtrack. I can't say that there won't ever be temptation."

Again I watch the old movies, backdrop minimal. I scan for signs. I need to fight that urge. Fight the urge to look for an indication that I felt. At all.

Bed. 8am. Eyelids slowly part as I brush the hair from my face. I feel an unfamiliar swell in my chest. Tactile. Cast my eyes up towards the window, grey snow melting in midair, tapping at the pane.

Bed. 9am.
I should get up and go for a run, but I cannot move. Is it fear or contentment that keeps me wrapped in layers of decorated flesh and warm blood.

It is better not to know where the blood originates.

it's complicated

"Relentless prison of a body."
I only quote Hee because I still believe that she has something inside of her that is exhausted, being held up like a drowned body, wrists bound, hair dripping, half-alive. Half-awake at the wheel.
How else do you end up lost on an island?
Easily, I suppose, when your vision is obscured by tears of incarceration and a slight tilting of head towards the sky, begging for a break in the night sky.
There is no break. There are only ripples that cannot be grasped by such tiny fingers.
It is complicated.
It's complicated to lower your head and speak the words into your own ears. No one hears them, but you know them. They resonate and ripple through everything you touch.
If only you could touch.
I am now a product of my learned behavior. I am what I believed I could save myself from.
Except that I am a product of the product. I am second generation. I am the carrier gene. It does not mean I am infected. It does not mean I am afflicted.
I went in as an observer, behind the safety glass, peering through the lens. I caught a convex glimpse of a parody called "marriage."
Puppets on strings, smiles painted on, brightly, whoreish.
Dancing, running back and forth between the walls of a small brown box, magnified by this lens. Time and time again, they would crash into the walls, fall down, rub their wooden heads, get up and do it again.
And then I was there. I was peering out the wrong end, and the eyes peering in were meaty and alien. I fell down, rubbed my wooden head, felt my body shaking as if it were going to collapse on top of my heart, but there were no tears.
Void. Silence. The velvet curtains were drawn and strings left slack.
When I could say nothing, what did I say?
When I was danced to music I could not hear, how did I dance?
And now, now faced with a newly-drawn door, sunshine pouring in from cracks, I turn. I do turn and look. I look back at the other, slouched in the corner, sewn limbs pointed with inhuman disproportion, blinking with heavy eyes.
I blink and again I am wretched, soft, beating.
I am faced with the sound of my own heart. But something stops me before I tear it from my chest in terror.
"You don't need to know everything now."

mke

Six hours of light.
I stood staring over that bridge as the snow would fall. again.
Lightly atop the grey knit cap
given to me by someone named "Mitzi"
Milwaukee River
frozen.
Six months. Six hours of light.
"It's the shortest day of the year."
Milwaukee was tinged with a blue hue. A working-class undertow. Sweeping the business class
under the rug.
"Do you like it when I have to wear a tie?"
My first inclination is disgust.
Suit-and-tie guy.
Dead Kennedys would never let me live this down.
Those trees were dormant for so long I thought they'd never bloom again.
We were shaded.
We were the background noise
in a sketch that we weren't in.
We were paths that never should have crossed.
icy fork in the river,
trapped. trapping life with it's tundra tines.
Sustaining under a thick crust.
I had traversed every bridge within city limits
in the snow.
Run every mile.
I had no idea how far.

boys are dumb

My mother knew. She was the first to shrug her shoulders, sitting across from my grandmother, they thinned their lips into a frown and mumbled a, "meh, we knew. didn't you?" no. i was obviously too naive to have noticed. you don't notice. it's unnoticeable until people point out differences.
i said, "yes, of course. i just...didn't know if you did." My mother turned her back to me and shrugged another shoulder, shrugging me off, giving me the sign that they were done talking about it, it was a non-issue.
it was a non-issue. wasn't it? did something change when the words were spoken? since the mysteriousness was revealed, as if they had just discovered DNA on the Shroud of Turin. Most of those things were invisible until they were wagged in our faces like maggoty meat on a stick. "Did you know Nicolette's mother came from Poland? That means she's a Pollack." I had no idea at the time of it's saying, what that meant. I said, "Her mother has two-toned hair, that's all I know." "Don't you know that Pollacks are stupid?" That's funny, because Nicolette was one of the smartest girls in our class. "They are? Why?" "Because they come from Poland."
Apparently, this was resolve enough for a third grader. I was an outsider, myself, not wanting to commit to charging anyone with any wrongdoing or stereotyping, since, a few weeks before, I had been called out on my week-long shower protest. "Do you wash your cooter? Because it smells." I had no idea, of course, what a "cooter" was. "Yes, I wash my cooter, don't you wash yours, you dirty four-eyes?"
Laughter. "He doesn't have a cooter, stupid. He's a boy." Lesson learned. Boys don't have cooters.

here's where it takes a turn

...and so we end up at this bar. Sitting on either edge, like an angle, facing each other. His right knee is near my left knee. I try not to move. Try not to be jittery. Try not to have to say, "oh, sorry, was that your leg?" Awkward pause.

The sun was setting then. Spreading like a swirl of melted dreamsicle over the bay. We were laughing. The sun was reflecting off the bar mirror. Why are there always mirrors behind the shelves of alcohol? Is that to create a feeling of depth? To create a feeling of watchfulness. Watch your back.
Anyway, the sun. He suggested we go outside, he needed a smoke. American Spirit. Yellow pack? Blue pack? I suppose its irrelevant now. We sat on the cold, black metal chairs. Not "black metal" chairs, but they were metal, black, and they were freezing. I had a hoodie on and a scarf, and didn't want to admit I was cold. I knew the next play. I didn't want to flip to that page.
We watched the sun set over the bay. I know. Corny. I doubt he noticed. He doesn't pay attention. Never pays attention. I always have to bring his attention to those things. Those things right in front of him.
He always says, "damn. i missed it."
"Yeah, you missed it, alright."
This is where it always takes the same turn. Where I turn my barstool to face the mirror. Turn to face those fears.
This is where I make the grave error of expecting to see something slightly different when I raise my head to finally look.
This is where I look.

Pier 67

A disconnect. A fire escape.
My new office window looks down into the alley. I could crawl out the window onto the fire escape and enjoy the 10th floor wind whipping through my hair. Climb up and down the building on the old, painted iron ladder.
A bird. A recurring guest who lands on the edge of the gate.
Phone calls. We can hear up and down the rows of cubicles. I hear you. It is hard to avoid listening. It is hard for coworkers to avoid responding, in kind.
Air blows above, in a great circulating puff hidden by the white-tiled drop ceiling. It's always intriguing to me how comforting the din of circulating air is.
The sound of the heat kicking on in your home, the white noise that muffles any echo bouncing off the walls.
Bouncing off the walls. Leaning on closed fists, I stare intently at a screen that offers no solace from the hum. It hums. The street hums below. Looking out onto 2nd Avenue, I see the rain pounding on the rooftops of buildings beneath us. Stop and go. Red. Green. Red. Tires squeal up the hills, skid down the hills.
And then the rain stops. At least the snow has gone. We are free of that burden, free to walk along the Sound, punishing whitecaps.
Dad would always look out at Lake Michigan and say, "that is angry."
Today is an angry sea. It is grey-green, tossing and turning, wretching its guts relentlessly.
My blue and white patterned scarf flaps like a flag against the air that is swept from my lungs, briefly. It is returned with a splash from below the pier.
An alarm. Reminding me not to look down.

"You hate my mother" or Why I refuse to hang out with people that are fake

My conscience weighs heavily and the lesson I learned was that I have to remove myself from the situation if it is too dark for me. If I feel myself falling backwards into that vortex of hatred and mean-spirited angst...I have to leave because no one likes that person. I don't like that person. My little pebble of a heart cannot handle having to deal with people who are un-real. Unlike the undead, which are totally real, the un-real think they have problems like, "trying to be more real."
Well, let me be the first to tell you...when you say you're "working on being more real," you've completely defeated the purpose, thereby rendering yourself completely fake to the point of no return. A little secret...you cannot change. You can change things like, oh, maybe drinking...maybe...the twinge is always there after an addiction, though, isn't it? You're never completely cured of an addiction. You can't change what you've chosen to be. You can reprogram your little neurons to fire differently, by thinking more positively, getting some exercise, eating better...but you can not ever really stop thinking about the things you once thought about...
How do you stop being fake? How do you get over thinking everyone is below you?
How do you get over treating everyone like shit after you've already done it for A QUARTER of your life?!
Think about doing drugs, or drinking...for 25 years...and for those 25 years, or maybe more...people CONDONED that. They said, "you're right...do what you are doing...we do it too."
Then one day, someone came up to you and said, "you're a moron...no one does that except your family."
So you stop. Even if you're successful, the feelings are always there...it's like being racist. You never change your mind even if you try to convince people you have. And the people you were racist toward, or the people you hurt with your addiction, or your condescending attitude...they don't forget. You're not Men In Black, you don't have that little gadget that erases minds.
So when I choose to not engage in situations where I have to actually interact with known purveyors of fine fake, I expect people to respect that decision. Isn't that more grown-up of me? Admitting that the hatred I feel gets in the way of hanging out and that I shouldn't hang out with those people?
I feel bad that I actually use the word hatred...maybe it is too strong...maybe a word like...ire...contempt...rage...but those words are actually too poetic for people that don't even see themselves as they are.
My dad always coins a good phrase of intolerance, "They're all assholes. They'll nickel and dime you for everything you're worth...even your words."
It's snow, it's rain, snow. rain.
Seattle can't seem to decide what exactly it wants to do right now.
I woke up and pillows of new white snow were falling from the sky
Creating a cartoon "splat" noise when they hit the ice on the sidewalks.
Now it's raining. Hard. It's icy rain pounding against the window.
but these windows are only single-pane relics so you could hear a fly land on them if it's quiet enough.
This rain has nice legs. It's thick, like an icy gel slapping and sliding down the glass.
So this is Christmas.
There's a pumpkin smashed in the middle of our slushy street, gooey orange innards slime and stain, creeping down the road with the passing of each vehicle.
Better than bees, treads on tires will pollinate the city with the sprinkle of pumpkin seeds, eaten and shat.
So this is it, a flurry of over-confident text messages. My new role is undefined.

it all began here

at this very moment
with this voice
over the phone
1992. It began with a girl in green and black plaid shorts
a pair of green 10-hole doc martens
and a white jane's addiction t-shirt
at a house
that i barely remember
except the smell
of sour syrup.
sticky things and rotten fruit.
And before I had a chance
he was at my door
time and time again.
At my door with nothing.
and for a
very
long
time
I have not even gone near those things.
When he left...
that day he pulled up to our house on McKinley Ave and said his goodbyes,
I left all of that behind me.
And I don't want to make this about the past,
I keep pouring this out
and
as i'm writing, I'm not even sure I'm remembering the stories how they happened.
I'm sure it happened.
But for every story I tell,
there's another one
that causes me to wince
that sends me reeling backwards
and as i walk backwards
facing
this again. this...thing that i had buried
god, i swear i buried this shit so deep that it would never escape.
and now here it is,
in shadows behind waves.
i buried this shit so deep i can barely remember it.
and i...actually have tears in my eyes right now because i cannot remember.
i actually may have to call camille.
is this what Alzheimers is like?
I can only remember certain portions. I only remember the day I met him.
At Creighton's house.
I remember...
I remember walking into Kramer's mom's house
and it smelled sharply of hair dye and rotten food.
And
i saw that picture of him and Karen on the refrigerator
and i
looked at Jeanette and then i knew.
Right then i knew.
and then
i knew.
that
was the beginning. that...was a defining moment.
and then
my senior year...
he showed up at my house all bloody.
begging for attention.
Again having redefined himself.
Yet i knew
that nothing had changed.

Pick my jaw up off the floor, please.

I hesitate with my words, sometimes.
because it is surreal.
I don't know what's appropriate or not.
I'll be very honest.
This
is
rapidly creating a spiral.
i never thought i would hear from him again.
And now.
To hear him apologize for those acts
which turned me into someone
who was madly distrustful.
I am the girl.
I am that girl.
who sits at the end of the bar and stares you down.
and who intimidates you into submission.
Until you slink away.
I never wanted to be so alone inside.
Ravens pecking at my sores, swarming overhead,
attempting to evoke a response
I
was stronger
to hear him say that he never loved me
That was a moment of composure I was not ready to maintain.
To hear him say that in the years of our friendship
He never felt.
Anything.
And never laughed.
Was only
The knife plunging more deeply.
I walked home today
Over the bridges
Overlooking the shipyards
and the bay.
I looked down, deeply.
Drank in the thick sea air and the fishermen below
Were they wondering if i would jump? They must look up often
And wonder
if it's something they will need
to clean up later.

you can't pound a nail where someone's already pounded a stake

maybe that statement is true for reasons other than the intended.
maybe he actually meant that someone can't ever be someone's "first" again.
Or break someone's heart the same way again.
You can't keep going around in circles, digging a rut in the same worn path again, because
obviously
you've left that far behind
and moved on.
right?
every direction i turn, i try to leave the past in the past.
Instead of flashing lights in my rearview,
Someone flashes a picture.
A glimpse of myself
A snippet of no one I ever was.
I dust off an apron,
It's scent wafts through the air as it's shaken
Relieving it of it's burden.
Years of hard time.
The strings wrap themselves around my middle
Cinched tight
Constricting, unforgiving arms of domesticity.
I was never you.
Never near you.
I fed you with what I had
but it was never enough to fill you.

Rejection or "They all stare, don't they"

"Don't you remember when we used to pass each other like strangers? That's no way to live."
No, I don't.
I don't remember that because I was too busy waiting.
Happiness is grey.
I disagree with happiness being yes or no
black or white
it's a grainy photograph, a snapshot,
a glance upwards to watch stars streak across the sky.
Happiness is situational. Happiness is tentative and dependent.
Survival is dependent upon only one thing.
Baseline criteria
The challenge is to claw above that minimalist fear
of having nothing
of keeping nothing
open to examination
to destruction and exposure.
To live without the bubble.
My happiness is in question by someone who
questioned his own reflection
and ran.
Farther than my two legs could take me.
Instead I stood, and my layers were stripped
One by one. Searing. Voices competing in pitch black
Until I backed away, silently. They didn't notice. Didn't turn.
Bandaged my wounds
Closed my eyes to the burning daylight
And carried
your remnants
as far as I could without touching them
And I buried them
As deep as I could
Sobbing uncontrollably in the dark
Stabbing at frozen ground
But you never reached up from that place.
And I never reached you at all.

a funny thing happened on the way to Friendster

Apparently, the notion of "out of sight, out of mind" is true. If you don't think about something, it disappears.

But the moment you open that box up again, it comes back to you ten-fold, like a curse; and more ridiculous than going through puberty as a 32-year-old woman who used to wear an A-cup, but now wears a B, grew hips and started to wear make-up.

More ridiculous than that, is that a mere two weeks ago, my roommate and I were sitting at the kitchen table in our usual half-drunk, friendster-trolling state when I dropped the "my ex-fiance" bomb on him.

He looked at me like and shook his head, "wha-what? It's like I don't even know you."

Well, truth be told, I did actually have another life (lives) before Peace Corps, before my husband, before Colorado, before I had even graduated from high school.

This life involved a boy, aptly nicknamed "Wheels" by my best friend's father, who only saw "Wheels" when he would come screeching into the driveway in his Trans Am to pick me up from practice.

My friends weren't all that impressed with "Wheels." They had no idea why I would waste my time on someone like that. Someone who spent all of his money on bikes (the man-powered kind), worked in the bike shop, made very little money, didn't go to college, stole cars, wore ridiculous hippie necklaces, and cheated on me multiple times.

Well, there are more questions than answers, arent' there.

I forget the details of how we spent that jobless summer after graduation, but it involved a lot of fighting with my parents, moving in with my grandparents, my sitting on the Metra between two towns, Cami picking me up in her red escort, sitting at the bike-shop waiting. Waiting. We were always waiting for someone.
This all happened because my mother happened to stumble upon "Wheels" leaving our house early in the morning after the Late Night Ride in Chicago. I swear we slept.
This turned into one of the most physical fights with my mom. We laugh now about rolling on the floor, her mom-hands digging into my skull in true cat-fight form, my hand reaching for the phone to a) call the police; b) smack her in the head with the receiver.
Both happened. I can't really remember who initiated the phone call. Before I knew it, the police were answering a domestic disturbance call at...my house.
Sigh. How many times does that actually have to happen, anyway.
I was asked if I wanted to "be a ward of the state."
Didn't sound like a good option. I mean, the whole point was that I wanted freedom, not incarceration. I was only 17, though. We had to come to an agreement.
So, the next day, I called my grandparents, packed my shit, said goodbye to my sister and walked out the door.
This wasn't how I had pictured my "summer before college," but then again, not much in my life has turned out like I'd had planned...or how I had pictured it.
In a box of crap from high school, which I found before we moved to Seattle, and subsequently threw out, I came across a letter.
This letter was something we had to "write to ourselves" during the last week of senior year. They would mail it to us a year later, and we'd be able to note what actually happened against what we thought would happen.
I found that letter 14 years after I had written it.
My goals were the following:
1 year--finishing my freshman year at NIU (which i did)
1 year--married to "Wheels" (which i did not do)
Work for NIU paper (check)
4 years--graduate from NIU--Journalism (nope)
travel to Russia (check)
work in Russia (working on it)
move to Chicago with Ryan (nope, woulda shoulda coulda)
work for a major newspaper (did i mention, no?)
get published (other than newspaper) (mmm.yeah...still, uh, working on that)
Have my own horses (been there."rich man's sport")

Guess my priorities changed after we moved to Colorado. I think they involved thanking god i wasn't still living in that town.
My priorities with "Wheels," however, involved moving into our own apartment in Fort Collins, whereupon we developed a fun little friendship with our neighbors. Don and I kept it real. "Wheels" and Don's girlfriend kept it naked.
We broke up. People break up. I gave the ring back. Then he started showing up at the bars.
Then he moved away.
It all seems that simple.
It's not. It was all much more involved.
And last night, I received an email from him, wanting to get back in touch with me.
Looking to reconnect.
I can't really pinpoint the reason. People don't just "keep in touch" with me. I'm not that kind of person. People don't "remember" much about me or care, for the most part. I can't imagine that they would.
Cami, however, the kindred spirit that she is, busted me out when she asked me if i didn't just have an ounce of curiosity about what he'd been up to, what his wife was like, his life, what he looked like now...she knows I think about that. We wonder about everyone.
That is the worst part about it. Knowing people don't waste their time on you, even though you think about them.
So, yes. I wonder. I wonder why I was so annoyed. I wonder what made him email me after years of no contact.
I wonder why certain people haunt me. Why they show up suddenly, without warning, and throw my sensitive ecosystem into a spiral of cookie-eating curiosity binges.
Cami convinces me I care. "Don't try so hard not to care," she says.
I've always not cared. Caring means having expectations. Having expectations means more waiting. It means depending on others for something they can not provide.
Cookies cause less heartache.

glass houses

There are irritated, red bumps in places I have never seen. They itch. They rise like demons above my epidermis, begging me to scratch. Pleading with me to rub them raw. Their life depends on it.
Facing another window, a half-mirror. Looking at me looking out, looking in, until the reflection fades. Here, it never fades. There is only slight light. There are low-hanging clouds, clouding my vision and obscuring.
It’s an epic. I’m reading an epic and I decide we do not inhabit the same genre. What I write, I have lived. What you write, you embellish and walk back to a beach, to watch a sunset, deciding how to next martyr yourself through words that bear no fruity truth. They are the fruit. Sugary and soft, ready to use for tasty vegan banana bread. Consumed too quickly, the crumbs are taken up one by one with a sticky finger.
“It smells like rotten bananas in here now,” he says, turning from the computer screen. From the edge of his glasses, I can see the blue hue of the screen. I stare past the muted colors in this office and out toward the windows of a corner office. Still raining.
“Seven more months of this,” I hear as I walk past a maze of cubicles known as cube-land.
My reward for this existence? This existing from dark to dark, living only on the weekends. A fake life of fake hobbies and fake reports with fake data. This is a godless office. There is no worship here. There are successes and failures. No one wears the demagogue face and no one is blinded. We all see that we are all seeing the demise of civilization.
I wake up from a dream that we had money for cocaine. We don’t. No one does. The economy is sinking and the middle class is pissed off because things are taken, silently. Those indulgences. Those triple-grande-soy-chai-lattes of life.
No one seems to recall when they took the farms. No one seems to recall the Department of Agriculture pushing to feed this country with fake food. We cannot feed ourselves. Reliant upon industry to feed us, chemicals that nourish without nutrients, we are dependent. An experiment with our youth that ends with an entire generation of corn-fed children with high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart problems.
The need for medical professionals has never been greater. The level of care will decrease, the cost for care will increase.
But I lose these things at my Fisher Price desk, behind cardboard doors. I lose myself and everything that goes with it.
I lose the girl I was. The girl that wrote her own zine in Chicago. The girl that won a scholarship because she could write, and because she wanted to own C-Span.
Someone reminded me of that the other day, someone who stood beside me over a hot oven, wearing an apron stinking of dough and cheese. Someone reminded me that there was nothing flowery about my life, that I still couldn’t be the eternal optimist, hoping upon hope that I would end up on stage with Oprah, new novel in-hand, because there was nothing beautiful about my life.
There is nothing beautiful about poor. “Poor makes for a good read.”
I lose that poor when I am forced to interact with the non-poor. When I have to put on my, “I’ll never own my own sailboat, but I love hearing about yours” face, then end up at a dirty punk rock show that night. They are still mine. Those moments are still mine.
When we talk about running, we talk about running. We run from one moment to another, in a chaotic flap of wings, rippling the atmosphere. We are our distractions. We are these carpeted walls of enslaved sound and the din of electricity.
The man who sits with his back turned to me for most of the day, swivels only for a sleight-of-hand in his direction, slithering out the back door, down the stairs for a cigarette in the rain, black jacket slick with oily droplets, draped over his head, not to protect his soft, black hair, but more for the cigarette. They’re so expensive now; it’s hard to think about wasting this precious tobacco. He returns to his desk, feigning dramatic exhaustion with work, of which he has none, flipping through virtual pages of virtual news. We tire ourselves with politics, collapsing with sheer joy.

Halloween

House party, political pundit ironic experiment.

squash

Exploding glass, shards scour the metal sheeting inside the oven.

Obama Block

Republican implosion leaves two dead in the water, for the fish.

economic downturn

Tele says Obama might not win, hair on end, what then, will I leave?

Heart-shaped

Bowling pin, decorated shape of a woman, knocked onto the floor.

Moderator

"You come looking for things we don't have."
Incriminating, sullen
I watch my footprints disappear as wind moves through knap
as others take up my path
drink up my wrath from seething buckets outside impenetrable doors.
stand there, like that, improbable pose
forcing compression
a lasting impression, holding ground
on moving ground, falling into spaces between,
neither hiding nor searching
slipping or fighting.

the problem with structure or "day and night"

Dream-colored lives that yet exist yet color my thankless waking life.

Multitasking girl Friday sings your praises and picks up your laundry.

I drive through plight with my windows rolled up and my GPS turned on.

"first thought, best thought"

Fat pants hide the obviousness of my tender femininity.

The reason I downloaded Power Ballads

Why leave poetry? Structure for structure? Un-structure for de-structure. Deconstruct. Instead add more power to words. More depth. No more participles. No connection. Connect words with no conjunction junction. Gaps filled with mortar. Filled with gaps that you fill in, yourself. No play on words because there is something you cannot remove from the words except origin. Roots. Only what we extract from each other. Roots. The beginning and the end, prefix and suffix, are irrelevant and only change the root when they are present, adding irritation. Are you this or are you that? The root remains the same.

yeah, daddy-o

Sensationalism swings our vote, candidates swoon for your money.

ginsberg for breakfast

Ecosystem beneath keyboard: crumbs of crumbs, pieces of past tasted.

why i dread this day of all days

because i hear from people who haven't forgotten.
who haven't been so consumed.
who haven't disregarded the e-reminders, the sidebar content.
unpacking the explosion, the tidal wave of nonsense.
a bottle of wine emerges from a phone call.
because when i wake up and fear that someone will find out
that the fear is real.
that what i've heard will become unreal.
that i will not remember
that this day
when pint glasses were real, filled with reddish amber ale
clank in time with sincerity.
and gifts arrive with some surprise.
and i recall a phone call,
the contents of which are only real if i make them real.
and the indication of a call i have not heard
is not real unless I listen.

"it was all a dream, a dream in death."

i don't sleep anymore.
part of me feels like i have tyler durden in my head,
watching the plane crash. smiling.
part of me remembers a time when i slept soundly on a waterbed
in a small illinois town
in a house that was on the same block as my best friends
in a room that was purple, with graffiti and joy division posters lining the walls.
smearing on lipstick
as boards were nailed above my head
shut
the window that i would enter after the morning sun had risen
like a flag
waving in the cool ripples of chlorinated water, my hand skims the surface
hitting fat green leaves, drowning
i make contact with the sun
drawing my arm to my forehead, beading
i wipe it with the bleachy water
filling my face with dead, disinfected skin
thinking about my dilated pupils
looking into the sun
and waiting for the vitamins to digest
waiting for the deficiency to subside
and myself to appear
noises as i raft to the other side of the pool
with my clothes still on from the night before
my mother appears with the pool cleaning net
in a bathing suit
i watch as her skin is consumed by the colorless refraction
distortion and depigmentation
rushes over the wrinkles that have not yet formed
skin-deep
at this point she is little older than i am now
she is always only a little older than i am now.
and only a word divides us
a word and a presumption concerning the word
a word about what i am
and what i will become
and where i had been
and why i had to sleep on the pool deck
and why boys would sneak into my window
it wasn't for what she thought.
and what the songs meant
it wasn't what she thought.
when the neighbors would reveal secrets
it was only the neighbors being revealing
reveling in their secrets.
i was watching the plane crash
sucking on a balloon
sucking the life out of me
from dizzying heights above me
a vortex in the ripple.

Stood up or "why you shouldn't let people buy you off"

It's a recurring comedy, the different perspectives of siblings.
Given, the age between my self and my sister has always been an issue, she is seven years younger.
It makes a difference.
I happen to believe she's also a much younger soul. She's trusting and rather willing to give people what they want, instead of being cynically unforgiving.
She recently took a trip to the homeland, and having a debrief with me over a martini.
"I just think that it's comforting to be back around people that shared your life with you. They have the same mannerisms, you know, it's your family."
"I don't think we share the same perspective on this. They might be relatives, but they have never shared my life."
People who don't actively participate in my life, nor me in theirs...I don't call that family. I call it being related.
Semantics.
Then she lays another random flaming bag of dog-doo on the conversation.
"So, there was this dress that I liked...and I was going to pay for it, take out a Bloomingdales card...but, then Grandma offered to buy it."
And although I did not say a word, I'm sure my disdain was heard.
You see your estranged grandmother, who you have not had any great relationship with, after more than 10 years, and you let her buy you an expensive dress.
"Maybe I should just chalk it up to her trying to make up for the past."
Maybe...you should have said NO.
Because for all her money, she could never buy what she really needed. She still tries. To this day, she tries to buy her happiness...buy people off so that she can say she did something for you and she will never.let.you.forget.
People don't really understand the issues I have with both sides of the family.
There are people who actually are not soulless, that have been side-less, that have been nurturing.
But there are more that have hidden agendas, dirty hidden lies and secrets.
"What you hear in this house, stays in this house."
Unless, of course, it has to do with my personal issues, then it's a free-for-all on the horn, clucks and shaking of heads.
I'm unforgiving. I don't consider forgiveness something that is given outright.
In this manner, yes, I am exactly like my living grandmother. She has the ability to hold a grudge as long and as hard as it takes to squeeze blood from a stone.
And she does draw blood.
Am I petty and godless for seeing through their bullshit? For always seeing through them?
Do I need them at my bedside to hold my sad, clammy hand as I leave this earthly constraint?
I'm going to have to say No.
Did I move to the northest-westest corner of the US for a reason?
"I think I won't wait so long to go back next time."
"To...Chicago?"
"It was good."
Good to be coddled by those people who only knew her as a little girl. Who never had the time to judge...
They always judge.
They smile on the outside and laugh with you and tell you stories, but they are judging your answers, your reactions, your calculated trust.
They will serve their best lasagna and wine. Take you to the best cafe. Take you to Macy's and Bloomingdales, spend money on you.
And then they will open the gallows.
Dangling, you will wonder what the fuck just happened. Why you trusted them. Why didn't they help you?
Why couldn't they see that you needed them?
And they will divide.
And they will leave.

Give them an inch

"You, my little girl, were also hers. You were hers, nobody elses.
She had convinced herself that your parents did not want you. And it didn't help when your mom said she should have aborted you. But she, and she alone mind you, forced your dad to marry your mom so YOU could be born. She was more responsible for you on this earth than anyone else. Thats what she thinks. And she will tell you that if you ask."

Revealing, isn't it?

The slivers of bamboo under my fingernails are slowly removed, reinserted.
There is no way for me to respond to these conversations with any civil tone, only the tone I know.

They only bring back into light what I fight so hard to keep under layers of scar tissue, addiction, and eating disorders.

They only fortify what I have feared would reveal itself.

I have to let go. I cannot keep competing for something I will never attain. I might say that it was like a blind person attempting to climb Everest, but a blind person has climbed Everest.

Yet, a man with nothing to lose still cannot gamble with his pride.

feeeear.of.the.daaaaark. or "my dad went green and switched to koolaid instead of soda pop"

Many an adolescent memory for me are forever swathed in a black band T-shirt covered by a thin, red or blue flannel, torn sleeves and a collar tattered. Sometimes there were jean jackets with patches, and bandannas, and this was back in the day when our school carnival was the event of the summer, the reason for summer, the only reason to go back to the school before it was time. The St. Chris Carnival. Here were feather clips and the crazy round and round ride that rocked metal till late in the night, the Zipper ride that only the bravest would dare due to the extensive rumors of some girl puking all over the seats when they were stuck at the top...or was that the Gravitron. It doesn't matter, because for this shitty suburban town, the St. Chris Carnival was your life for one week in July.
Thankfully, our aunt lived right across the street from metal-fest, carnie-central, our beloved Catholic school. My sister was too young to remember days when my friends and I envied the black-wearing outcasts, tagging the St. Christopher statue, chipping away at it's delicate marble base with repeated skateboard attacks. Our parents would pack us only as far as the beer garden, then leave us with money for tickets, let us wander the hot asphalt, begging for loose change so we could eat our weight in funnel cakes and spun sugar.
"We saved all year for the carnival when I was a kid. It used to be 10 days. The church ladies ran that thing, baked pies and cakes."
I don't remember those church ladies. I don't remember pies. I remember bare-chested, beer- bellied men with American flags, eagles, and wolves on their shirts, stinking of the stink-weed, sticky on their fingers.
In this little Italian neighborhood there was always the smell, the taste you could taste all year long, but only satisfy at the carnival.
Italian beef with mozzarella and green peppers, soggy Vienna bread, soaked with pepper and beef juices, steamy and soggy, I know if I had it today, it would be a disappointment, so I leave that memory amongst the snow cones and elephant ears, the Poison and Alice Cooper mirrors next to the tilt-a-whirl.
We would beg to stay out later, to stay at the carnival past dark, to catch a glimpse of what the bad kids did, the vampires, the lost boys of our south suburban ghetto, long, greasy bangs tucked behind their ears, leaning against the evergreen trees next to the school, ripped-kneed jeans dragging the ground, cigarette in one hand, skateboard in the other.
The sun would slowly set, slowly, our shoulders burning from the heat, still pleading to be granted a small bit of freedom because we'd seen some cute boys. We wanted to be older, wanted more trashy stoner clothes, bigger hair, greasier hair, blacker hair and blacker eye makeup.
The Carnival was the first place I heard Chrissie Hynde's husky voice, the place I found out why arena rock was arena rock and why chicks dug Journey. These were the days when my 350 lb Aunt MJ was still a voluptuous young woman, lusted after by a stoner named Tony and still willing to let me rifle through her KISS records upstairs in the scary attic of her house.
I suppose we denounced that Carnival as we got older. I suppose we found better ways of scoring drugs or alcohol than from the same stoner kids that were still hanging out on that statue of St. Christopher.
I suppose they always are there, shadows pushing greasy hair off of their faces, smoking like they're cool, skinny and sinewy, hoping to reinvent themselves at the height of the summer, amongst creaky carnival rides and scantily-clad, corn-fed girls with taut ponytails and red lipstick, waiting for a ride in their boyfriend's Trans Am, lipstick circling the butt of their Parliament, waiting for a kiss that never comes in front of their friends for optimal effect.
Some of the pixilated faces I can hardly remember, they still live there, as I barely feel out of my 20s, they're venturing into raising teenagers. With that thought, a lone locker combination is forgotten, emptied into the trash as some new bit of information is stored. I slammed that high school locker door for the last time fourteen years ago. I flipped it off and kicked it, hated that it forced me to consolidate my filth into one strip of wall half the size of my body.
The last time I walked across St. Christopher's parking lot was almost five years ago. I threw my hands up and examined the blight that had eaten holes in our roots. I remembered every step I took from school to church to home, every step I refused to hold my sister's hand in the presence of my friends, every step that I fought with my existence as a product of that family.
Things were dead. There were no more beer gardens, rides, cotton-candy fingers, or scurvy carnies blasting Iron Maiden. There was no more field behind our house, and no more moth-ball church ladies and no more woods to sneak away and smoke in.
We peered in at all angles, squinting at the prism of light that blinded us from an end we could not reach.
Things were dead.

the gray braid

"Remember when we used to have to clean those cemetery offices? And you got bit by the goose and you ran screaming through the cemetery?"
"How could I forget? I ran screaming through a dark cemetery."
It's hard to wrap my head around now, how I could possibly have come out unscathed, having been so young, circling in the dusk, a murky, dank pond, which I considered might held the dead people's fluids. A pool of intermingling biomass. Undead organic ooze simmering in a giant cocktail of algae and goose droppings.
My little legs led me around this pond while my mom and grandma worked their side-job, cleaning the offices at different cemeteries around the city. The noise seemed deadened, numbed while we were inside those gates. It was energetic and frightening, running my fingers along cool marble headstones, lightly spinning the pinwheels that kids may have left for some loved-ones, tearing petals off of fresh flowers, which never smelled fresh, they smelled like someone made them fresh-smelling, like the flower shop had a spray called "fresh flowers" and they would spray it on the flowers...maybe so that the dead would smell the fresh flowers and not forget that they were dead and could no longer smell, anyway.
We would arrive in my grandmother's old yellow Toyota Corolla, open the towering iron gates, disturbing the ivy that rested six feet above my head, creaking open, bolting them shut behind us.
I didn't particularly like being inside the offices. They held dusty old ledgers, ashtrays filled to the brim with foul-smelling butts, and coffee stains on the desks. I knew what their breath smelled like without even meeting the day-inhabitants.
The ashtrays that sat atop their shiny, mahogany desks that we polished with Pledge were always the bean-bag ashtrays. The 70s ones with the Tartan beanbag design below the aluminum ashtray, soiled with dark black spots, where cigarettes were outed repeatedly. Intersecting lines from coffee cups laced through piles of papers. Papers I would read, and only began to really understand, as I looked at these papers, typewritten and stamped, that these were the papers of the dead that lay in those graves outside, the dead that swirled in masses of uncontrolled energy above our heads, buzzing like powerlines.
I would go to the stained-glass windows as shadows would fall through them, an indisputable message was being transmitted. To someone.
I'd run outside, trapped indoors was too overwhelming, stifling. I would walk the paths, keeping the Toyota in my sight, the geese in my periphery. Darkness in the summer was thick and heavy. Winter darkness was ominous and illuminating. Winter darkness meant there were no new graves. No freshly dug earth, smelling like freshly dug earth after it rained, pools of mud and pastel flower petals sinking back into the brown ground, spraying onto the slick, varnished casket of someone's loved-one. The winter meant that the breath I could see would only be mine. There was breath. A grim reminder that breath was taken.
Inside the office, my mom and grandmother would often talk about "terminal...she was terminal with..."
I would watch my breath, crystallizing in the deep, dead winter, when I could see the moon through the menacing, tangled branches of tall Oaks. I would watch it and then it would end.
I said aloud, "we're all terminal, aren't we?"
My grandmother walked down the steps to the cold headstone upon which I was perched, gazing, and said, "you're too young to know that we're all going to die. Don't you want to live, first?"
"What if I'm too young to know if I want to live, first? Don't I have to live first to know if I want to die?"
"Do you want to die?"
"Don't you?"
Those words would resonate, echoing in my head, twenty years later, when she finally answered.

extraordinary machine

Monday night. Book club. I usually shun these girly get-togethers, especially with middle-aged women that have toddlers. Inevitably, the conversation will always turn on you if you're not careful, towards potty-training, funny things kids do, and reading Harry Potter.



I arrive at Nichole's little blue-green rambler in West Seattle as the sun is just beginning to make it's way west. Her house is cute, what I'd expect from a cute indie environmental scientist who married an aeronautical engineer--organized.



The other ladies arrive, one-by-one, we gather snacks, wine, books, and head out to the back patio. Her house smells like candles. The good candles from Bed Bath and Beyond. Not cheap candles. And with those great iron candle holders. Not a small plate or mason jar lid, like I use because I'm too cheap to buy candle holders. We begin by sipping on some red wine, casually eating crunchy snap peas and peppers from her garden, dipped in fresh hummus, and she presents us with a red pepper soup that she's created, also with the offerings from her garden.



We talk about Three Cups of Tea. I actually had the pleasure of attending a reading in Milwaukee, whereupon Greg Mortensen presented his passion, his stories, his pictures, his extraordinary life...although he would never deem his life extraordinary. People would comment that he wasn't the man they thought such an entrepreneur would be. But he is exactly like what I thought he would be.



At that point, I hadn't read the book. After I did, confirming my suspicions that he was exactly like what entrepreneurs should be. Not a shirt and tie MBA, but a disheveled passionate spirit, a faithful man. There was a question, towards the end of the discussion, about extraordinary people. Did we know any or did we know anyone who had changed lives in this way, did we ever do anything to change lives in this way.



Off the top of my head, I could think of at least 30 people or experiences I'd had. I kind of think everyone, with the exception of a few, have done amazing things in the lives of others, or in their own lives. I kept looking around, expecting the others to chime in.

They all shook their heads in dismay, thinking "no, we don't know anyone who has changed lives. We haven't done any volunteer work."

"You've not ever done any volunteer work?"

"We didn't have to."

"Have to? Since when is public service a 'have to'?"

"Well, we had children."

"So that's your service to the community?"

At any rate, what have i done for you, lately, community?



Sitting here in my cubicle, my "opening" faces our IT guy, who consequently just promoted himself to some higher position in the world of Internet security, but who had no idea, while using the reference "Big Brother," where it actually came from.

I know because I gave an Orwellian response and he didn't get it.

I think you should always be conscious of where your references come from.

"I don't really read novels, just geeky stuff."

"You never read 1984?"

"I don't remember. I don't like those futuristic, apocalyptic stories."

"So then you don't actually realize that it's all happening?"

"I don't want to realize that it's happening. What can we do if we realize it's happening anyway?"

Be conscious of it, i guess. Our lives have changed drastically in the past hundred years. We're small-community people, tribal people.

We aren't able to handle the connectedness that consumes us and isolates us. We have to find ways to cope with the fact that everything we do now affects someone on the other side of the planet. Subconsciously, I think this weighs heavily on us, consumeristically-speaking. We're torn between needing our Venti latte every morning and our ever expanding waistlines (corpulence = greed = wealth) and not really wanting the latte at all, because it's a waste...a 30 minute jolt of energy and warm, sugary, milky goodness draining into your body, which turns it into fat because we just sit in our cubicles all day anyway, and draining our resources, filling landfills with the remnants of that foamy goodness, left to sit...sit and rot...just like it does in your body.



We're all guilty.



I live in a city where a "gay man and a lesbian were attacked by eco-terrorists."

Once again, people, leave the anarchist kids alone. They haven't realized that they need to move to places that aren't a city. Cities have to be governed. People have to be productive. But could they handle the isolation? The type of isolation that actually comes with not getting your fair-trade, vegan snacks and having to DIY everything? Not being able to look for trouble?



"The social anarchist, according to Murray Bookchin, is committed to four basic tenets:

1. Creating confederations of decentralized municipalities

2. Unwavering opposition to statism

3. Belief in direct democracy

4. Fostering libertarian communism "



I don't think these tenets say "go out and fuck with other people who don't subscribe to your dogma."

It's all still dogma. That's the problem. Some of the anarchist kids in our city are a bit confused, maybe, and get a little caught up in the catchiness of the movement rather than being a part of the movement. Again, dogma. Movements always catch people in vulnerable situations, connect with their dissatisfaction, and draw them in. So how do you know if you're a real part of the movement, or not? How do you know if you're a pawn? Or if you're just dressing the part, and not really living the part?

Maybe it's best not to be too concerned with any of it, drown it out with fluorescent, buzzing lights and lattes, breed and build new houses out of the forest that you cut down to make your house, drown it out, throw it in the river.
Wash your hands.
All clean.

This time it'll be different

My little land of paper-pushing make-believe;
made up work.
Creating charts and graphs in thick recycled air
out of thin air, printed and recycled.
Calculations of calculations
and proof of the final measurement.

summer camp or "drink the kool-aid"

While chatting with a couple of friends recently, neither of whom i had spoken to in quite a while. i can remember the last time i spoke to one of them. i think he thinks i want something. i don't actually want anything. I'll never forgive "networking sites" for having the audacity to let us all reconnect, as if we would. As if this were high school all over again and we could do more than laugh about our ignorance and our angst.
Unbeknownst to them, our credos are all the same. We don't dwell on the past, even though the only thing we talk about is the past. Still, never having lived down the ridiculous plethora of boys i dated, that subsequently ended up in mental institutions, jail, the mafia, or gay, I try to uphold my credo. Never dwell on the past.
The other friend that I'd spoken to, was someone I really hadn't even thought of since I left NIU after my freshman-hell year. It's hard to start different relationships with people that you have nothing in common with, except what you did in the past. I don't really want to relive our high school years, or that god-forsaken first year at NIU, so why delve into a conversation about it?
Why relive old, dead, jailed boyfriends and knocked up girlfriends?
As I learned this week, ridding oneself of useless appendage friends, needy friends, longtime friends who've not contributed anything, yet attached themselves to you during a vulnerable time, is actually an excruciating process. Imagine an exorcism, only with an overwhelming sense of grief attached.
Suddenly, there was a silence, a void. A shallower void than had been there with this person attached, but still an emptiness. It wasn't real. They didn't exist. They were ghosts. This void didn't need to be filled, but more soothed, as if it was a burn needing salve. But the silence was real, and overwhelming. It was the same silence I'd felt as I stood in front of a church full of people, reading a poem I'd written for my grandmother, at her funeral, when all i could hear was my own breathing, through my nostrils, into my throat, through tears, heavy, wet breath and my words, on top of that godless silence.
It was through that, through my heaviness, that I looked out, and sitting in a very familiar wooden pew, was first friend, blue eyes gazing, thinking completely inappropriate thoughts in said house of worship.
Swimming through this silence, grasping at the air just above the waves, water plunging into every orifice, I wondered how I would go on with out them. I was exhausted by their self-serving notions and summer camp counselor way of approaching life. Then I simply did. I looked up and simply let go of the rope, untethered my neurons. I simply told them they had to leave. Parasites.

conversation

the way the conversation always goes.
slip back into drivel.
quote. i quote, you quote.
you shy away from the past, i try not to think about the past.
you don't dwell on the past, i failed everything but the past.
i failed the now. the test. one point. away.
a bit of flesh hanging from the side of the can where i ran my finger
across the sharp edge.
luckily it is the same color as tahini
so i eat it along with the glob that i scoop from the same side,
lining up old boundaries is not easy.
resetting the past
running to catch.
the practice that i missed.
because we were laughing in the car.
the sounds had begun.
the haunting.
the steps we took to the room.
listening for drumbeats.
for crashing cymbals
for electric buzz of a cold cord
hitting the warm female end of the flange pedal.
These thoughts are dangerous.
Finding this. These stowed away.
So many years after I threw that shit away.
I threw it all away.
i threw it in a bin and kept it.
until i knew i would never use it.
and in the deepening winter
i saw you plundering through my garbage
out where the cats had been digging.
where there were claw marks in the snow.
deafening falling snow.
falling and falling.
until i made out your face.
deciphered a cryptic haunt of
crumpled papers and notebooks of a blood-filled secret.
grey, felt high school letters and pins
a reminder of what we became
and how I left.

marshmallow bed

yet another story i cannot organize. I pick apart the details, there are so many. Everything has a process, a predecessor, a dependent, a relation, a soundtrack. My earliest memories of catholic school all contain his many shapes and forms, the scents that permeated the enormous attic room, plastered with posters and smattered with clothes. Dewberry followed us everywhere for a year or more. Liquor followed us farther. Silence. In a room filled with darkness we would, with sharp, loud amplified beats still ringing in our ears, whisper to each other and giggle. One after another would enter and leave, through a door that we held judgment upon. And judge, we did. We would gaze at the stars from his house, his yard. Through an endless screeching, crackling bonfire surrounded by all our friends. We would laugh so hard in the truck that he would have to pull over and make us late for work. Then those days died. The songs I heard when I pulled out of his driveway for the last time, I still have on my Ipod. They still bring forth a cloudy, tearful memory of knowing we'd only see each other once a year, then once every five years, and he'd go on with his life, and we'd have painful phone calls, and he would torture me with postcards from Europe when I could not go because I was still had "wheels." And I would torture him with Colorado, knowing how much he loves the mountains. The torture was only surface. He could look into a ripple and believe that he always saw the mirror image of this blackness. The writing that he saw never resembled the firey spew that was directed at all the others in my life. Maybe it was because he was a solace. Because we didn't have to explain our families to each other, or hide them behind masks of fragile powder, powerful, hateful rage from 100 proof breath. Maybe it was because I tortured him first, I made him cry first and he forgave me only because he had to sit next to me during the Seder. We were so small. Now we are much bigger, and our tiny breaking hearts barely know where to float in our bodies. So small when such tragedy was life-shaping. And we would hold each other and hold on to our glue, our ever expanding soundtrack, the soundtrack he wrote when we had the little asian girl on keyboards, the little irish kid on drums, me on bass and him on the glittery guitar. He was there when I bought my first bass guitar. And when we spent our meager earnings on pedals that would amuse us to no end, and when we spent more of our dwindling paycheck on everypunk rock 7" we could find at Record Swap that was worth a shit. And he knows all the songs that we used to dance to at Off The Alley. Those moments strike like lightning and evaporate like clove cigarette smoke. There's only a trace now. A thinning, evaporating trail of what we were, lying in that attic room, sitting on mountains, I could always look out of the corner of my eye at a packed show at the Metro, he would never lose sight of me, lost in a swirling crowd of mezmerizing amplification and doc martens. He would never lose sight of me, I thought.

Calumet Bakery

The chubby years.
My family was on this "atomic bomb cake" kick. Every holiday, birthday, anniversary, or graduation was to be adorned with this cake. A monstrosity of cake. Each layer of chocolate fudge, banana, strawberry, wafer, and chocolate and vanilla cake was at least two inches thick, and was topped with a thick buttercream frosting. We loved this cake. This is why I was fat. Not the only reason, by far, but a contributor, nonetheless. I used to sneak to the fridge to take big handfuls of said cake, shove them into my little mouth and run back to my room. It was this way with a lot of things from the kitchen; Little Debbie brownies with the walnuts on top, nutter butters, anything with marshmallow, anything with frosting.
My sister developed the same very sweet sweet tooth. Last time I was there, I opened the freezer and found a half-eaten can of Betty Crocker frosting. The grandmas always had sweets. They had homemade cakes and fresh candies, licorice, Klondike bars, cans of frosting, homemade frosting. My Grandma B was famous forangelic Divinity--which was hardened meringue, bite-sized and sugary, a throwback to the 30s, only to be made when the humidity was low.
She was an amazing baker. Not so much a cook. I remember very basic meals. Basic meals topped off with homemade cookies, or a piece of the german chocolate cake that caused such salivation even before you'd finish removing the lid from the cake pan.
My Italian grandmas were cooks. Not bakers. They made bread and they made cannoli, but other sweets came from the store. Coffee cakes. There were always coffee cakes and sanka around. You'd think that because they came from Italy, they would have been purveyors of finer coffee. I hated those coffee crystals. I dreaded coffee because of them. I swore I'd never drink it. Then, there I was, 15, in the cracked red booth at Denny's, across from the Orland Park Mall, with a cup of coffee in my hand, piles of creamer and sugar packets in mounds, plates of our favorite Denny's meal--hash browns topped with mashed potatoes and gravy, and thick steak fries to dip into our milkshakes. It would have been our dinner, our dinner after the dinner we ate at the mall, at China Charlie's, where we worked, eating odd little concoctions of oily fried rice and fake krab, fawning over sexy Trent Reznor, who would one day preside over our wedding. The wedding of gay Ryan and fag hag H. We didn't admit it then. But that's how it was.
Ryan never had anything good to eat at his house. Only Tang. Lots of Tang. We drank Tang and played dirty pool in his living room, listened to Seven Seconds and Pumpkins. Lots of Pumpkins in those days. We even stood in line for them, at Tower records, when Siamese Dream came out. I remember walking up to Billy Corgan to have my record signed and I said, "I saw you years ago in a garage in Elgin. Nice job being a rock star." To which he replied, "Thanks. I like your shirt." Joy Division. He signed my record, handed it to D'Arcy, and went back to his business.
His business of rock-stardom.
I can't really recall many of my sister's birthdays. We always celebrated it on the 4th of July, complete with a huge cookout and, you guessed it--Atomic Bomb cake. When my family really went downhill, it was less elaborate cakes and more trays of jello shots. More beer and swimming pools filled with teenagers trying to rub up against each other. I can't remember her being small. For such a long time she's been over six feet tall. But I do have a picture of me placing her in a spaghetti pot full of water, fat bellies of small children in bathing suits, wet footprints on a concrete lawn.
I ignored her most of my life. Either that or tortured her. We were too far apart in age, really, to have much in common until we were older. She never got to taste any of that Divinity. My grandma was personally offended by her birth, somehow. The decision was left up to me, the ultimatum...who do you choose? Your sister or one of the women that raised you because we were shitty parents?
Who do you choose? A woman who shuns your sister's very existence or a sister that you have nothing in common with?
There was no end to that. I oscillated for years. I was mistrustful of my parents for giving me that ultimatum. I didn't know why she hated my sister, or why I was supposed to hate someone who supplied me with both basic needs and psychoses aplenty.
Today is my sister's birthday. I was thinking of the cake that my mom and grandma spent hours in the kitchen slaving over, a large cake shaped like Big Bird. Painstakingly mixing colors with frosting and applying each glob, singulgarly a perfectly daisy-yellow splat of sunshine, sinking into warm, soft cake, some fell to the side of the lopsided cake, leaving a trail of yolky-colored goo and sliding into the pan. She was two. She clapped when she saw that cake, hardly contained in her chair, white chicklet teeth beaming with joy over this large, yellow beast of a cake. We placed the candles at the top, by the feathers that stuck out of Big Bird's head, turned down the lights and sang "Happy Birthday." She blew them out with one spitty toddler mouth breath and clapped again. Rising up and down in her chair, barely able to keep her tiny fingers from the sugary goodness. She didn't know anything.

"I'm just kidding America, you know I love you."

I kind of just looked blankly at the screen for a while after I read this. seriously. i'm still laughing my ass off.

"I had just picked up my daughter from her father's house and my daughter said that she was hungry. I guess her father did not bother to feed her. We stopped in at Pizza Hut. It took ten minutes before we were seated. I know that there were people in line before us, however very few had children, and I bet none of them make as much as money as me.(I am a registered nurse and make 80,000 a year) Despite the fact that I had a hungry child with me and the fact that I probably make twice as much money as most of the couples make together I had to wait in line with everyone else. I even called the one of the waitresses. I told them that I had a hungry child and was a registered nurse and asked if we could be served before the other's. She just looked at me and told me that I would have to wait my turn since these people were here before me.

When it was finally our turn it took another ten minutes for them to get our drinks. Both our drinks were filled with ice and only two sips of coke. On top of that we had to wait for half an hour for our pizza, this left both of us thirsty and hungry.

We had ordered a medium pizza. There were 3 left over slices and we asked them to wrap them up. I asked for my bill. The waitress took a long time to give me my bill so finally I decided to walk out and not pay the bill.

I later complained to the manager of the restaurant and he apologized. I told him that an apology was not good enough.

If you really care about my business you would send me a coupon for a free medium pizza for the terrible service that I recieved. The total bill would have come to 9.99 plus tax. My daughter and I also had a coke. (or rather iced water) which was $2.49 each and I think I should get two free cokes since the service was terrible and the coke was mainly filled with water. Again I could have afforded to pay the bill because I am a registered nurse that probably makes three times the amount of money the manager makes and I am not asking for something free because I can't afford it. I just think that proper customer service would be for me to get a free medium pizza and two free soft drinks."

i LOVE that you caused us all to get reprimanded. you know better than to disgrace the party. heil."

For all my blinking memories, synesthetic shards of glass that pierce my cortex, I cannot bring myself to locate the prisoners of my past, to know about their lives now, to bring them up to speed on my life. They are painted there as they appeared to me, then. Knowing them now would disappoint me, make me feel hopeless or envious. They have either succeeded or failed. There is no in-between.
What I know, what I think I know, may not be what they know at all.
I met JJ when we were small. He was a tiny boy. A tiny Mexican boy. Our last names begin similarly, so we were often placed next to each other. He and I, and the two Dans. Often, our solid metal and wood parochial desks were set up into blocks of four. Me, JJ, and the two Dans. It was this way from Second grade till Eighth. I blame the alphabet on our fateful friendship, our extracurricular partying as we entered adolescence. I am positive that it was in 7th grade, I was writing something in John's notebook, flipped it over to the thin, crinkled, cardboard backside, and discovered something that would change my life. One of many profound moments, sitting in my itchy uniform, tugging at my skirt, sweating through my white blouse, I read and reread those words. My eyes were used to pentagrams scribbled on our torn notebooks, the bottoms of our shoes...statements of injustice, statements of rebellion hidden, waiting for discovery by the women in black.
"An unforeseen future nestled somewhere in time. Unsuspecting victims no warnings, no signs. Judgment day the second coming arrives. Before you see the light you must die." It wasn't just the words, even though I thought about them the rest of the day. I walked home with JJ that afternoon and asked to hear the tape. We got to the garage, loaded the tape and through the un-acoustically pleasing tinniness of the boom box, "The root of all evil is the heart of a black soul. A force that has lived all eternity. A never ending search for a truth never told. The loss of all hope and your dignity." JJ, soft, straight, black hair, skater bangs dyed blond, had just introduced me to my soul. I heard Araya's voice and never looked back. I couldn't remember what I'd even been listening to before hearing that tape. We played pool in his garage and listened to that tape over and over, for hours, flipping it over, over, over in our immature, less-than developed abstract brains. Other bands now seemed juvenile, less. Motorhead seemed like bubblegum. New Wave seemed overdone, outdone. Punk was dead.
The four of us would hang out in the garage, mason jars full of stolen liquor from cabinets, mixed with Kool-Aid, taking turns on JJ's guitar attempting to piece through each riff until it was time for us to walk home, viewing our neighborhood with darker eyes, open eyes. We were only 12 and felt like we were the proprietors of a dark secret, the secret no one talked about, the godless pit of despair that was pushed aside to make room for horse-toothed actresses and evangelists. It wasn't anymore south than here. It was here.

The email said that all our diving would be free.

There was a time, before premature menopause, when I didn't dream. Or, I didn't really remember what I had dreamt about. Now I dream in vivid nightmares. I just finished Augusten Burroughs' new book, "A Wolf at the Table," and having read it at night, before I'd fall asleep, I'd find myself ridden with some crazy anxiety. Judging and terrified.
I used to have anxiety attacks living overseas, usually following or during chaotic events, like, waking up in the morning. Sometimes I would have them in my sleep, sometimes I would be asleep on someone's floor, on the flip-n-fuck mattress, there would be an orange and white cat attacking me, and I'd have to pull a Jack Bauer on that cat, happening between the hours of 2 am and 3 am.
Oskar, cat from Hades. That cat belonged on the streets in Bulgaria. It needed daily affirmation of it's masculinity. We were no challenge for it, it had left blood, scars, tears.
Once, I got an email, "is it ok to fight back when the cat attacks me like that?"
This cat, given as a gift from the heart her by a then-boyfriend, also picked out by said boyfriend, resembling said boyfriend in many ways, including inner-ugliness and passive-aggressive bullying.
Said boyfriend encountered me as we climbed a mountain in the Carpathians, in a blizzard. "So, I think she's amazing. Can you talk to her? Get her to maybe go out with me?"
"Why? You live pretty far apart. Besides, I thought you...were..."
"What? Thought I was what?"
"Uh, you were just telling me about another person in your life...back home."
"Oh, him. My gut told me..."
And that was the beginning of the end. The gut. This plane had come crashing down before it even took off. I blame myself for saying, "Sure, I'll talk to her. It'll be fun to all hang out together."
This was before he drove her to the brink of a suicidal breakdown, before he turned on us all, before we were exploited our instant messengers to deliver scathing words to each other, about each other. This was before our trip home on the Russian train of icy-finger death.
"So, I don't know, he says he likes you."
"How does he even really know me?"
He got to know. He would travel from his town to hers on the weekends, when he was done doing heroic deeds in his town. He turned into single white male. He wanted a new personality and she was his fodder, his host.
I called him one day and he answered the phone listening to AFI. Keep in mind, our superhero was a Rufus Wainwright-kind-of-guy.
"What the hell are you listening to."
"This band AFI, they're from Cali."
"C-Cali?"
"You know, California. I used to live there."
"mmm. I know California. Why are you listening to them?"
"I thought if I was going to hang out with her, I'd have to get to liking punk."
"As a thirty-something year old man, you're deciding to 'get to like punk'?"
"I like to meld."
I heard a bomb drop in the background somewhere, and wasn't sure if it was just the Bulgarian hunters throwing leftover grenades at deer or if it was all in my head, a harbinger of things to come.
Anxiety. Panic. You name it, we'd all suffered from it there. Good thing the government didn't ask relevant questions about our mental health, or we would have not been so fortunate with the piles of Xanax that were handed out like stotinki to orphans.
Sometimes, I pretend like we've gotten over it. Then i step back and see that we haven't. We strip ourselves of our pasts, convince our limbic system that it never happened. Close the door, close the door, but it's still open a crack, lets this grey light in, and beckons us like little girls in pigtails, pale yellow Monchichi pajamas, stuffed animal in tow, heading for the door, we never know if we'll open it and face the demon, or if we'll shut it completely. This actually sets the tone for the rest of our lives. I always needed someone else to shut the door. I was terrified of what was in there. I knew what was there and still I will not face it. I always shut the door to dark places.
My parents would get high and be funny with me sometimes, come into my room and open the doors back up. I'd wake up and be terrified. I never knew why they did it. I was never sure which one of them did it. My grandma would yell at them, "leave her alone."
"Why does she care about the door being open or closed?" they would ask.
Our parents still torture us today. They drag us to the middle and use us as a barrier, use us as punching bags, let out all the dirty laundry until we have no room to breathe, until we choose a side. This is why I close the door. So I don't have to hear it. So I don't have to see their faces. So I can't hear their whimpers, barely audible.
Bulgaria brought out those fears in us again. Fears of being alone, being someone we wanted to be, being someone we weren't. Fears of being helpless, of needing to help. We began to strip ourselves of what we thought we were, down to the bone. Some of us continue to strip, like taking old wallpaper off, deciding the bare underneath is much prettier than what we covered it up with. Some of us continue to travel, running, searching, falling into the same trap.
"I follow girl, girl decides she doesn't want this anymore. How many times does this have to happen?"
Enough for us to realize that if we chase, we will never get anything but turned on and bitten out of fear.
I look out the window and see this driving rain that has just begun. It's June. 55 degrees. I check the Yahoo weather page. 66 in SF. It's always the same. It's always pleasant. Maybe that's why she moved from the south to California. Maybe volatile turbulence there leads to such chaotic family situations. Never knowing what to expect, never know when you're going to be roused in the dead of night by the wail of a haunting tornado siren or the sound of an alcoholic mother screaming.
There were tornado sirens that night. It was green everywhere. My grandmother and I were upstairs in my grandfather's room, he was still at the VFW, a pint of pale Pabst in hand. We were digging through his old cedar chest, as I often liked to do. Scrambling through bits of a past, newspapers that raved WAR! He was in that war. He fought on a ship in that war. He was awarded medals for his heroic service in that war. He came home from that war. Broken. Like all the other men who came home from that war. He lied about his age, fought like a man defending his country, came home and gambled the rest away. I didn't know what this all meant. I don't claim to have had such abstract adult thought patterns at that age. I do know the look in my grandmother's eyes. She would tell me stories about the man she was supposed to marry. Someone who had died earlier in the war, someone who didn't come home. She settled for a man with money, instead of love. A man who wasn't so sensitive to her fragility, her depression, her captivity. A man who wasn't thrown by her model-esque looks, her magazine shoots. He simply wanted a wife.
Bradbury reveals endless bounty and seasonal beauty when he speaks of Illinois. I suppose I could, as well, but the day we sat in front of that chest, the sheer white curtains sweeping in and out, attaching themselves to the screens, holding their breath before they exhaled, falling to the floor in a sigh that filled the room. She explained every medal to me. We read the papers. She told me who we'd fought in that war and why, and why it was important to us. But she never explained why she was so unhappy, why they fought constantly, why they never spoke otherwise, or what was hidden in their closets.
We listened to the radio, and to the sirens that blared in town. We needed to go to the basement. I didn't want to leave the chest. I was afraid that if tornadoes came, the chest would be swept away, along with all I knew about my grandfather.
He came home, drenched with rain, wet leaves, he took off his filthy fisherman's hat, stinking of beer and cigar, sat down in his leather chair, and asked us if we'd heard the sirens.
I nodded, ran over to him and asked him why he never talked about what was in the chest.
"The past is the past. No one needs to talk about that."
I had a feeling the chest was not the only place he buried things. Something felt heavy.
"But you have medals that say you were hurt, and a hero,"
"There are no heroes in war. There are no heroes, period. And there were people hurt worse than I was. People who didn't need to be hurt, men, women and children that didn't need to die. I didn't need to die inside, either. But they don't give out medals for emotions."
He went to bed.
I turned to my grandmother. She shrugged her shoulders.
"What if the tornado comes and he's sleeping?"
"I'm pretty sure it wouldn't matter."

confederate flag bandana

This wooden Ikea chair that I bought from a Bulgarian in Seattle that we randomly met on the side of the road tends to make my thighs splay in a way that is most unflattering...and with that, I glance down at my lifelong friend, belly, wondering when this unwanted houseguest will leave. Then the horrifying thought of going to get fitted for a bridesmaid dress hits me. I picture myself standing there, naked, draped in a thin, yellow measuring tape, "Tsk tsk," says the seamstress, or...conversely, the skinny, tanned, blond bitch who works at David's Bridal as a summer job between her junior and senior years of High school. Whatever. I was that skinny once.
Now I just need some help from a corset. My husband says, "you're an athletic build."
That means, "you're average."
Welcome to my average life. My average job as office monkey, my average apartment in Seattle, my average friends. (Ok, none of them are really average. I tend to take on a collection of schizoid types who never fail to amuse and are often fodder for my drunken rages).
Contentment. I had a friend (a non-average one) ask me yesterday if we were ever going to be content. The answer is...if you have to ask...the answer is no.
If you're questioning your ability to be content and not contemplate other parts of life, yet to be lived, then you'll not ever be content. What is contentment, anyway? I've always equated it with complacency. Buddhists would say I was wrong, but this is what a life in America arms you with. Competitiveness and vigilance.
I pity the fool who has to run around town in an SUV, consuming, being consumed by the nature of needing more and more. Consuming more and more. Admittedly, our little toyota truck gets put to good use when we need to go to the mountains, but neither of us really drives in this city. There are days I really dislike cycling here--like the mornings that every bus cuts me off and tries to kill me. But there are times when I sail down those hills as the sun is already above the horizon, making a sharp left onto 3rd, which is only open to busses and bikes during rush hour, and the combined wafting of diesel, pastries, and coffee into my vasodilated nostrils, the Isis flowing from my ipod, brings a kind of contentment.
But not really, because then I get to work and all I can think about is going back outside.
My mother didn't teach me contentment. To just be happy with what you are and have at that moment. She had to learn it and only now does she tote that kind of crap in her briefcase as she jets around the world, advocating her cause. Ironic.
She equates being average with being happy with failure, running blindly instead of fighting and making something of yourself, even if you are blind. Pun intended?
I had a conversation with our secretary this morning about the tricks that her parakeets perform. In my head, I was thinking, "my.god.are.you.serious."
But then, oddly enough, I received a text from husband, and remembering that he, also trapped in a cage of sorts, can perform Yo-Yo tricks like no other, I proceeded to listen to secretary, and realized that this is her glory--teaching her parakeets to perform these simple acts. This makes her happy. Content. She's content going home to her birds and hanging out with them. It's simple, simple.

21, the girlfriend or "how i endure pictures of baby animals attached to the cubicle wall"

i kept thinking i should write a story for some zine I'd found. A story about my own experience with sterilization and the consequences that follow. check. been done. done and left sitting on the picnic table in the sun for the flies to lay their maggots in.
"there's nothing new under the sun," i tell myself.
nothing new.
but something is new. something that attracts a semi-ok-not-really attractive 21 year old law student to a bitter, aging old man who, up until about a month ago, was missing one of his incisors and still ate white bread and ham sandwiches. no condiments. no. nothing.
i can never remember who was more humiliated as we were at the drive-thru. me, ordering a cheeseburger, no burger, extra condiments; or he, ordering a plain burger, dry.
What attracts a 'barely legal'-year-old girl to an aging, divorced man who hangs out with his golden retrievers and who only hikes the same trail every weekend with those dogs, and who returns home to watch Indy races on his new big-screen TV that "fell off the truck."
He doesn't pay attention to his own daughters, and yet again, apparently we aren't good enough to hang out with, as he has obviously found a younger replacement for us, more fun, more of a drinking buddy (although my father apparently just started drinking wine at the swanky wine bar).
This all sounds like a complaint, but it's more of an eyebrow-knitter. We've seen my father in all of his family-avoiding glory, his violence, his anger, his inattention, his harshness in every way. Never soft, never gentle, never kind fatherly words.
But when 'barely legal' and my father picked me up from the airport in February, (to my surprise), I ask, "how did you meet?"
"Carpooling."
Carpooling? My father has never carpooled in his life. He drives to and from Denver every day and gets reefed alone, listening to the White Stripes. He refused to even drive us to school during thunderstorms.
"Carpooling?"
"He was really sweet about it, and he waits for me when my classes run late."
"He waits for you?"
Last time I was late, he drove home without me, and got stoned. Meanwhile, I had to find a way home from Denver (For those of you not familiar with Colorado, there is no public transportation worth the hair on your chode).
"Yeah, I know it's a pain in the ass."
"I just get some work done, that's all," father quips from the driver's seat. I look out the greasy jeep window, past his hair, looking quite like his own father's hair, grey, cowlicked, but not as curly as it used to be. I wonder if the thc that is now embedded in his DNA weighs the curls down and straightens the hair.
I don't answer. I give my best snarly smile and face the clear night of the Colorado sky.
But this was before my mother found out.
"He went to a Luau the other night. That's what he needed the 'Hawaiian Salad' recipe for."
Smart move."
For those who aren't experienced enough with the Illinois White Trash Cookbook, Hawaiian Salad is a mixture of canned pineapple, canned mandarin oranges, mini marshmallows, coconut (out of the bag, sweetened) and sour cream.
"He wore one of his Hawaiian shirts and danced."
"D-danced?"
He never dances. My dad wanted our father-daughter dance to be "The End," by the Doors. There was no dancing at my wedding.
And so I call him up. I get nothing. I get the usual conversation about the horse that didn't win the Triple Crown, or if I think Brett Favre is really going to retire.
I call my sister.
"Maybe he just didn't like us all along. Maybe there are people he actually likes. I find it hard to believe it's us."
"I had to watch her dogs and his while they went out the other night."
"Great. Now you're a babysitter for the babysitter. That's pretty awesome," I reply, wryly.
Very Very Wryly.
"He's depressed."
"He's been depressed for 50 years. Why would 'barely legal' make a difference?! Is she a ray of sunshine? No, and she listens to shitty music."
My sister listens to shitty music, too, though. I pity the fool who doesn't know that John Mayer is a HACK. YES JOHN MAYER YOU ARE A HACK and anyone who likes your stolen, broke-ass, plagiarized riffs is a fool for not knowing better.
"I'm surprised he hangs out with someone who doesn't know music."
"Why? Who cares?"
"I guess no one, when they're getting 'barely legal' ass."
"Does make you wonder. About the secret lives of people."
In fact, I do wonder.
I wonder why grown adults like Disney characters. How is it that you can possibly relate to a fairy that dresses like a whore and never grows up? Or a mermaid that wishes she were a human. You already are human.
I wonder if she is secretly a dominatrix. She sets her Tinkerbell stationery very nicely up on her desk, its gluey binding and stubby pink pencil anxiously animated, silently waiting for her secrets to be spilled. I have to wonder if deep in her closet isn't a heap of sweaty leather accessories, lying in wait for the same thing.

Solstice or "the aging punk rock kid's guide to outdoor activities"

Forevermore rule #1: If the guidebook says "popular" or "stunning views, a must-do," it means, lots of slow people on the trail talking really loudly. And remember that this is just outside of Seattle, so these "stunning" views are limited to the amount of low-cloud that Superman can see through with his X-Ray vision.
Rule we do not break #2: "Dog-friendly hike." Because I don't actually want your dog sniffing me or jumping on me. It should be labeled "dog-people friendly", because dogs are dogs, but dog-people are fucking crazy and gather in the middle of the trail to oooh and aaah over their gangly mutts and teehee look at Fido run through the woods and eat natural habitats. I remember when my mother's golden retrievers found a nice stream on a hike in Colorado, oh they were so cute licking out of the stream and rolling in the stream, weren't they? but oh how I laughed for the two months my mother had to deal with the giardia.
Most important rule #3: "Family-friendly hike." You're an idiot for climbing this mountain with one demon-seed on your back in that crazy carrier as he's slapping the top of your balding, sunburning head, and another ginger kid in-tow about to fall off the side of the trail into pine-needle oblivion. All I can hear is jibber-jabber from your three-year-old and it's about as appealing as shaving my bikini area with a dull razor.
Don't get me wrong. We take the blame. When we pulled into the parking lot and saw 800 other cars, we could have turned around and gone to a more desolate trailhead.
“She comes with two wheels and a handle. She holds his personal items.”
I reread this.
Then I rearranged it for someone else in the same predicament(dear Sister, no one likes your boyfriend and he brings you down. Stop pulling a Freud and dating your father. Love, X).
"He comes with one non-functioning wheel, the other squeaky wheel has fallen off, and he has no handle, so she has to fucking carry him everywhere, no...not like a comfortable backpack, but like a really awkward polygon full of rocks."

These are the people in your neighborhood...in your neighborhood...

"No one leaves. We're all fat and no one leaves here."
"Cami, is it just more comfortable to stay and drink beers (said with a Chicagoan accent) at the bar that is still owned by our old high school gym teacher, the short little fat guy that flunked me sophomore year, with the same people you've been drinking with for fifteen years? And we're just in our thirties! It's not like you moved there and found a nice group of people. I mean, is this what people do? I guess this is how towns like that stay populated. I can't believe you still talk to people from high school."
"ALL the people I talk to are from high school. What are you talking about?! That's all there is. We are all from high school, and now we all have kids, we all have homes, we all fire up the grill, we all mow our lawns, we all go to the dumb restaurant that your entire family worked at one time or another. We all go to St. Chris for mass, we all force our kids to go to CCD just like our parents did. We all wonder which of our kids is going to grow up like you, and we fear...we fear it. We fear having to lock our bedroom doors at night, having to put deadbolts on the doors so that people can't get in or out, having to padlock the windows shut so that people can't get in or out...We fear those kids the most, because we know they have that itch. I didn't have that itch. I stayed here and got pregnant when my mom got pregnant. We can't leave now. My kids are in school. We have a life here, I think. And when I think too much, I want someone else's life. I want to move from one place to another. I want to be a ski bum, work at camp, work abroad, travel, hike, dive...yes, we're scared of you and your friends because you represent everything we cannot ever get back.
We see your family, they ask about you. They have no idea where you are. They think you have no idea where you are, but you know better than anyone. You didn't run from. You ran to. I tried to talk you out of that abortion, out of leaving NIU, out of moving to Colorado, out of leaving the country, out of taking up dangerous, thrill-seeking sports, but you didn't listen. I didn't want you to listen, I just wanted you to be able to talk me out of something. But you didn't. I wanted my babies, but I didn't want this life. I didn't want to get fat. I didn't want to still live next door to the boy who I first had sex with and he doesn't remember because he was drunk, so drunk he didn't even really get hard. But I remember. I remember running over to your house with his flannel wrapped around my waist, tight, because I thought people would know. My shorts were dirty on the bottom, and my butt was dirty underneath. I ran over to your house and knew you were home because you were always grounded. Remember? You were always grounded and your mom was always yelling. Your family was so Dago. They still ask about you. When I see them at church, I laugh because you don't even believe in this shit and neither do I, but I go because we live here, and this is what we do.
They laugh because they think you 'go to yoga or something crazy.' That's crazy to them, going to 'yoga.' You laugh because you sit in your apartment, married to someone no one knows, and you look at old yearbook photos, but those never show our age. I had to sit here and watch us all age, get fat, get pregnant, get saggy, get bored, get too comfortable, get into affairs with each other, and still go to the bar on Friday night and have a MGD together while you..."
"I have problems."
"Really? What are your problems, then?"
"I don't know. Same as everyone's problems."
"Name them. Besides your obvious mental health issues, what are your actual problems."
"Are your problems actual problems? Or do you just make them problems because you want something to whine about because you live in a town you hate, and you have to see people that you hated all your life, every.single.day."
"I'm tired of people making weird generalizations about my life."
"They don't really know you anymore. What would happen, do you think, if you came back?"
"After hanging a noose from the rafters?"
"Before."
"I don't know, guess I'd go look for some trouble, like I always do. Hold-up the SubPort or something. Eat some Italian Beef from the 'Judy's Red Hots'. Maybe there's a grocery store I could work at with my half-retarded cousin and her boyfriend with all the prison tattoos."
"You should call your family."
"You should leave yours."
I often wonder what the conversation might actually consist of if I called my family. I wonder if we ever really knew each other that well to even have a conversation. Our family, all of it, fell to the floor in a heap of dirt, strewn about not by pretty, swirling wind, but by big black boots with dogshit on them, when my grandma died. Our matriarch was gone. Our martyr had no more pious guilt to spread. My mother calls me all the time, in tears, "I have no family. It feels like...I mean, these people raised me. I grew up with them, and now we have nothing to offer each other."
"Sounds to me like you should just get over it. Move on. Think of them like a boyfriend that no one liked, and you broke up with, and maybe it hurts for a little bit because he had a nice car or something, but you'll get over it. Maybe I could come over and you could burn some of my poetry, would that make you feel like you had something to offer? Make you feel like 'the mom'."
And then I get a text message from my dad. Communicating nothing. There's a picture attached.
"[golden retriever name here] says hi" and there's a picture of a dog lying in the dirt with all four paws in the air.
I think about texting him back, then decide it's not worth the effort. It never is. I think when he gets lonely, it's worth my effort to cheer him up, talk him out of his depression, make him think he has "daughter who cares." Really, I'm not sure I do care. I don't even know this person. I cannot even count the times I have said to people, "you don't know me," when it was just me who didn't know them. I could come and go in those relationships without warning, without any notice of passage.
I decided the other day that my relationship with a certain cranky Irishwoman had evolved, or had always been, really, into the perfect relationship for "memoir book." "Letters from X to CrankyIrishGrrrl." Our masterpiece. We have this complex, layered friendship that has spanned over an entire globe. over a country, a state, a few miles...and back again. It's letter-writing at it's most convenient, and when everyone asks, years from now, "I wonder what X was doing from 2007-2008," it will be published, in the form of reprinted emails and IMs that will have been stored in the "history" on our computers. I think we like this relationship. We notice intonation without voice inflection, we know our curtness, our cynicism, our "get down to business and tell me the truths" with out ever really having contact.
It's obnoxious that we can both have such a close relationship with each other, never even looking each other in the eye, sipping wine together, eating together...and yet the man-boys who raised us, who were in the house with us every day, albeit ignoring us, never once spoke to us. We were right there. RIGHT THERE. and yet. nothing. our dads would have trouble telling you vital bits of information, or even just...telling you anything.
This is why we left those towns. We couldn't live with people who didn't know us anymore.
And it's true, I do sit here, in my apartment, not listening to the sounds of smelly, noisy children, not wishing I had another life, thinking about my problems...and wondering if, "where should i run in the morning" or "is the liquor store still open" are really problems at all.

The manual

Stephanie and I were juniors. 1993. Four years before Ginsberg died, we were at a workshop at which he was presenting, reading. He touched us, literally. He would touch a vein, a patch of skin I would watch as it turned white against the pressure of his finger, and immediately blood would swell back into the capillaries, but he would touch it as if to add punctuation as we wrote.
On the second day, he strolled into the room, peppered beard, out-of-date eyeglasses, removed the trenchcoat, set it down on the orange plastic chair, the only one left on the stage at the front of the small auditorium, he bowed.
He began to read. I knew it immediately. Howl. We were his lambs, setting our tender skin in ink and bleeding onto paper, we were entering our lives, drifting off into clubs, listening for his distinct voice, guiding us as prey and predator. I wrote much differently then. I wrote as if i wanted to live, then. For a brief moment, anyway. Brief moments when I am inspired, I want to live.
Then I don't want to live. After the moments are gone, those high holiday moments, euphoric and well-fed, you sink into the after-glow, back into those moments, but they are not really those moments. Those are the moments I don't want to live in.
Howl.
The after-glow of Howl. of seeing Ginsberg, touching his wrinkled old-man hand as he wrote, I sought refuge in stainless steel.
This bought me a much-needed rest. My mother cleaned up other people's messes. She hated to clean up mine. She dared me.
She said I should do it if I wanted to. If I didn't want to be a part of this, then I should go.
We weren't allowed to read adverse material on that ward. Anything I wrote was saved for my parents to read, and even now, years later, they still shake their heads at it, and ask me why I would hurt them, why I would do anything so selfish.
"Selfish is hanging on, ripping the threads from sweaters that unravel too easily," I say.
She would make me into something different, in front of her friends.
"She was just having some problems in school," she would say, worried that they would ask more questions regarding my absence, my bandages.
"Why don't you tell them the truth?"
"What is the truth, then?"
"That you dared me. That I'm not a pussy."
"Only cowards take the easy way out."
And at the time, I didn't have a response to that.
But people only try to prevent what they don't understand.
People are scared to lose one another, to let go. To let go without a definitive answer.
Some people are too cowardly to let go, they drag egocentricity with them into that ugly corner of the closet where the backpack sits.
You think about cleaning it, but you realize it takes work.
Too lazy for work.
Not surviving is weak.
Handle your scandal.
"rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,"--Ginsberg

once again, we revisit an old favorite

A few years back, when I was in the business of training horses, retraining horses that had some neuroses, neurological disorders, PTSD, I was expendable, which is why i was atop those horses instead of mild-mannered geldings who could walk into a ring and perform a perfect pirouette with a lonely, middle-aged housewife on his back. But this isn't about me. This is about me not being a psych. major and figuring out, on a basic level, what these horses needed to survive. Some of them had been so traumatized, that even the thought of you on their backs would send them hurtling blindly towards a barbed-wire fence. Why not the pretty white fence? Well, probably because they knew that wouldn't kill the both of you. Horses are usually into self-preservation. Not so much so when their environments have been compromised. They turned into manic obsessive compulsives frantically attempting to order their world so that nothing could come crashing down on them, so that there would be no surprises anymore. If they'd been human, they would have been down on their hands and knees scrubbing corners with a toothbrush or counting things or failingly trying to grasp for a higher meaning that they would never be able to hold on to, even if they'd reached it for a moment.
The key was knowing that i could never fix them. They had to realize they could fix themselves. They had to have the "aha" moment and think it was their idea. By thinking I could "fix" something, I unwittingly put all of my fears into that thing. I tried, when I first bought my mare, to "fix" her and her need to pull me everywhere. I thought I could demand control and demand that she be better. By demanding, I made her worse. Next thing I knew, she wasn't pulling, but had distinct fears of things that were my fears--bridges, birds.
But with the damaged horses, it was much different. I could feel their fear and had to set it aside, dip back into a dissociative state, myself, and watch from outside my saddle. I had to give them back their basic need for security and love. Their building blocks, which someone/something had slid out from underneath their well-appropriated footfalls, and when that happened, they were left with nothing. For them, the routine, every day, had to be the exact same. They were fed the same things at the same times, blanketed, groomed, worked, fed...even a small thing like being in the wrong corner of the stall while being unblanketed, or being in the wrong set of cross-ties in the barn would set them into a rage. And when I say rage, I mean taking out the walls, cross-ties still attached to pieces of wood, running around the barn, rearing at inanimate objects rage.
There were times I looked into their eyes and something in them would say, "please, just let this end. I don't want to live this way anymore. I don't want to fear anymore, I don't want to compete for air, for space, eat, sleep, shit, breathe anymore."
and the whites of their eyes, so bright, head raised in an alarming manner, they would wait for a response, a yell...a slap, a subjugation...anything so that they could be justified and say, "see? you make me this way."
but anyone who knows me knows my compassion does not work that way. and so turned my eyes back to the task, or left the barn, leaving them to deal with their emotions, needing to figure it out themselves.
Die if you want to die. I can't help you.
And later, much more often than sooner, they'd walk out of the barn, trailing cross-ties or blankets, or a hairbrush in their tail, head lowered, giving me the eye, telling me that today they made that decision themselves...the decision to get the fuck off the floor and trust, and know that they were secure, fed, loved, and trusted by at least one human.
The truth is, in those situations, I was as frightened as they were. I had to leave because i probably threw up out of fear behind the barn, or ran back to the house to start writing my resignation letter.
People would ask me how I "fixed" the horse that they just bought, now able to be led, saddled, ridden, poked and yanked by smaller humans.
I blink at people alot when i feel like they're misunderstanding the point of something.
I said i wasn't in the business of "fixing." I simply let them decide whether they wanted to live or die. Whether they wanted to stand on their own legs and work with us or be glue, because they were unproductive members of society. (I'm a socialist, yes, it's true.).
People would ask me why I even worked with epileptic horses, with autistic horses. I don't know...why do people work with autistic children? Can they ever lead normal lives? I have one friend who not only thinks so, she knows so. She has seen it happen. But it starts from the bottom up. You can't just be somewhere all at once, something bigger than life, with your problems solved. You're a toddler, again and again, relearning, relearning, restructuring, reorganizing. But those horses had lost the ability to do that. They were dangerous.
It took months, years for them to work through their issues. In the end, it was all about them, fist-sized brain and all. And i think, if horses can make the decision...

Nurse Hottie, this one represents.

"Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done."--Jack Handey

ugly backpack

you sit at the bottom of the closet
begging for attention
grabbing at my ankles like an imp
dragging me back to the closet
to observe you
and your nothingness
you're not as useful as my luggage
you're just
ripped, torn
irreparable
you don't hold things properly
your patches and markings are ages old
embarrassingly juvenile
people stare
your existence is threatened
and yet you still grasp at the air.

Dread in Monochrome

Rainy. We arrived in the stolen parent-mobile at Joe's house. His parents were actually home. We all exchanged a glance of..."his parents are home?"
Joe was one of those smart kids that went to the extra special school attached to the regular high school. POLARIS, it was called. Kanye West went there. His parents cared, too. They had a special section at the end of the regular thick, glossy yearbook. They were smart kids. They were...alternative. They had skater bangs, dyed hair, piercings, and parents who supported their art, their writing, their music.
We had parents who were alcoholic, coke-sniffing maniacs, who, in the middle of the night would come crashing into your room looking for a fight, for money, for attention...attention you couldn't quite give because you were only 15, you didn't even have a driver's license yet. We had parents who expected good grades, participation, silence, repression. Our parents were lower-middle class. When I was in high school, my dad was in school, still working at the drop-forge. Teri's parents were both on disability, Becky's dad was a union steel-worker, Amy and Dolly didn't even have dads. They would say, "you're lucky to have a dad," but truth be told, I didn't have a dad, either. We spoke about a word a year to each other, he knew nothing about me. That still remains to be true.
So, arriving at someone's house, someone being a cute, smart punk boy, and having their parents answer the door, the scent of candles burning, a table set with place-mats, a clean kitchen, a kitchen that smelled like dinner, actual dinner...we never had actual dinner. Our parents all worked. We ate out of cans, bags...wrappers...
We walked down the low-ceilinged painted stairs to the basement. Fugazi, of course, on the phonograph.
The basement was painted blue. Industrial, hospital blue. There was graffiti all over the postered walls. Skateboard decks were strewn upon the floor, next to the ping-pong table, there was a keg. We walked over in our group, doe-eyed, waiting for recognition, dressed in our best Docs, ripped tights, skirts, black shirts, hoodies...
I hear a familiar voice behind me. It's Derek, he's 21. I smile, his hawk is up. It's like a mating ritual. He's shy with me, I don't know why. I'm just a geek, in a basement, with a beer in a plastic cup, listening to Screeching Weasel. We talk about music. He tells me how he keeps his hawk up, what he did in high school. He's still in college, Northwestern. We go outside, leaving my girlfriends behind to get into harder alcohol that has just arrived. Joe's yard is huge, compared to ours. He has an entire football field of misty green grass, trees, swingset for his little sister.
I think of my little sister, at home, safe in bed. She's only 8 years old. She's just a little older than I was when she was born.
I think of her and I wonder what I am. I think of being in bed, safe, sober, asleep. There is no safe in my house. There is only half-awake-sleep. Sleep with one eye open...angry sleep, fitful sleep.
Derek brushes my cheek with his hand, I notice his Misfits Tshirt. He kind of looks like Danzig. He has a devilock, dyed blond. He asks me if I want to walk. I don't know if I do. I don't know if I trust him. I say I should probably see what the girls are up to. We walk back inside, shedding our leather jackets. He has his hand around my bicep. I shake it free and walk over to Teri.
Teri...looking so different than she did hours ago. With no make-up she is completely pale, almost albino, with bright blue eyes. She looks halfway human with pancake face. She's drunk. She's always drunk. When she's drunk, her limbs flail and she gets loud. We usually have to make a number of phone calls the next day, apologizing for her behavior as she sleeps with an ice-pack on her head, over her eyes, asprin within reach. Dolly, self-sufficient, her bleach blond hair and black headband sticking up over a croud of people. She's a big girl with cross-eyes, quiet. My eyes scan to locate Becky and Amy.
Amy is a whore. She's probably in a back room with one of the boys. I don't worry too much about her. Becky, I worry about. She's much more naive than the rest of us. She believes what they say to her. I find her slamming vodka and red pop, playing some random drinking game. My ears perk, take notice of the music...Pailhead...then Joy Division...I keep my eye on Becky. She is sitting on Joe's lap. Derek slides his arm around me, handing me a drink.
"Let's go for a walk," he prods, yanking me to the door.
"No, I'm worried about Becky."
"She's fine. She's with Joe. He couldn't hurt anyone."
Eyeroll.
"Hmm, I think she's fucking wasted. Just stay here with me. Just...just be cool."
"Anything you want me to put on?"
"Yeah, put on some Husker Du or Black Flag or something."
He walks away to find the records. I watch him, momentarily. He's a big kid. 6'2'' with dark hair, always in black. Sometimes he picks me up from school on his Triumph when he's not in class. In class. I have no idea what I'm doing with my life. He's graduating from Northwestern, going to law school, putting on a Black Flag record. He talks about things I understand, things i have abstract thought enough to comprehend, but have no experience with.
"Good?"
"Yeah, totally. Great."
"You ok? Becky ok?"
"Think so." I blink at him. I think of something to say. "Why...do you hang out here? You...you could probably hang out with better people."
The truth is, everyone here is much older than us. Teri is the oldest, 17.
"You're not so young."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"You...you're an old soul and you know it. It doesn't matter what age you are."
"Good line, though."
"I mean it. I mean everything I tell you. You're young, yeah. I just like hanging out with you. I really do. I'm not asking you to marry me or anything."
"That's good because I'm about a decade away from that shit."
"You think you'll still like me in a decade?"
"No. I don't."
I turn my attention to Becky. She has disappeared. Teri is fiddling with the record player, turns on the Adolescents. Everything is loud, spinning, hazy, smoky. I wonder where Joe's parents are. Did they leave? Are they in a soundproofed, smokeproofed area of the house we don't know about?
I look to the top of the stairs. Becky. She's white.
"I don't feel...BLEEEECCCCCHHHH"
and she pukes red...all down Joe's stairs. Everyone turns to look. Joe's german shepherd runs over and begins to lick it off the steps, smelling acrid, acid, sour, boozy, warm.
"I'm sorrrry." Tears roll down her freckled cheeks. I run over, take her to the upstairs bathroom and clean her up.
Derek grabs some paper towels and lets the dog eat most of the vomit. I scrunch my nose. The smell creeps up into my nostrils.
"Beck...what the hell."
"You know I puke when I drink."
Sigh.
"Let's go help clean that shit up."
"Derek is cute...you should date him."
"Derek is...older than me. We have nothing in common but music."
"Did you sleep with him?"
"Becky...sleep with? Are we middle aged women? And the answer is no."
"I want to sleep with Joe."
"I really doubt he wants you breathing your big stank breath on him right now."
"Should I use this toothbrush?"
"Um, sure. Go for it. You're not staying over here. We're going home...I'll ask Derek if he can borrow someone's car."
"Does he have an apartment?"
"Yes. Why?"
"You should...go over there?"
"Why, so I can get pregnant and drop out of school and work at the thrift store?"
"God, you're so un-fun."
"Babies are un-fun."
We walk out of the cinnamon-scented bathroom, ready to face the rest of the crowd. Teri and Amy are at the bottom of the stairs.
"Where the hell were you two? God, fuck off, bitches, leaving us here. Becky...seriously...thanks for embarrassing us all."
"Whatever, HEATHER."
Derek walks over with the dog, prompting it to lick Teri's exposed leg.
Devious.
I turn my head to the door leading upstairs. There were more voices. Adult voices. More of Joe's friends?
The door swings open. I almost lose my stomach out my throat. It's Teri's fat mom, my mother, and Becky's mother.
I turn to run. Teri grabs me and shakes her head.
"NOT a good idea."
I turn to run. Derek turns to the moms..."Hi, ladies. What can we help you with?"
"WHERE THE FUCK ARE OUR DAUGHTERS?"
"Who...are your daughters?"
I'm squeezing my eyelids shut, hoping I'm dead, hoping this is a fucking nightmare.
My mother walks up to Derek, looking him straight in the face.
"She's the underage one."
"Does she have a name?"
"I think you know she does."
He turns to me, apologetically.
"I'll call you later...just go. Don't get into any more trouble."
Teri's mother, just as I step forward, leans in, grabs Teri by her hair, and drags her up the stairs. I stare, terrified that my mother will follow suit. She doesn't. She just points up the stairs. Teri is screaming. I take Becky's hand and we follow up the stairs. Amy looks to the right, to the left...smiles and walks back to the keg. There was no one there for her. She stays.
"Amy..." I say.
"I'm fine."
"You should come with us."
"Why?"
"You can't stay here."
"Sure I can. I'll stay at Derek's or something."
"Yeah, awesome. You do that."
She yells after me, "he doesn't like you anyway!"
We pile in the truck. Becky's dad's SUV. The Bears-mobile.
As soon as we're in the car, my mother slaps the shit out of me.
"What the hell are you fucking idiots thinking?"
"We were thinking we wanted to hang out with the cute punk rock kids and drink," say I.
Slap.
Becky rolls down the window, puking along side the truck, staining the tan slightly pink with red pop.
I giggle, despite the stinging in my cheeks.
"Becky. hahahaha."
"WHAT!?"
"The dog ate your puke, dude."
"Shut up."
My mother agrees, "yeah, shut up. You're grounded by the way."
"Gee, really? What a fucking surprise."
"You better not be seeing that boy...the tall one. He looks like a man."
"We'll see."
"WE WON'T SEE!" SLAP.
"You know what? Let me out of the car, Mrs. Hill. I'm really fucking loving being smacked back here, but..."
SLAP. SLAP. SLAP.
My face, ears, head, pulsing with the heat of fists pounding. I'll have bruises in the morning that I'll have to face. They'll just assume, at school, that I was out being bad.
Derek calls later that night. At least she didn't yank the line out of my room like she usually does.
"Amy's here."
"I figured. So, I'll see you later..."
"NO...wait...that's not what I meant. Some of the other guys were trying to...you know...she's wasted...would you rather have her in some weird situation?"
"Amy doesn't give a shit about me. Why should I give a shit?"
"I didn't...we didn't...listen...I'm sorry about what happened tonight."
"Welcome to my own personal hell in the form of a 5'2" blond woman whose youth was taken from her by the fetus presently known as me."
"She's just overprotective."
"You are just too rational."
We talk for three more hours. It's 4AM. We fall asleep, both holding our phones. I hear him breathing on the other end, silently, I whisper a goodnight and hang up.

24

We have how many episodes left?!
We watched Taking Lives the other night.
I'm convinced that everything angelina jolie is in
turns to poo. Not even really shit, just basic poo.
she's good for gratuitous boob shots, but that's really about all. What was that movie about?
I kept thinking, you know, this movie would be so much better with Will Farrell...or a midget...or something that kept my attention.
Why do I need to see Lara Croft's BOOBS all the time? Is that just a sign of movie suck? Like, when a sushi chef puts too much wasabi on the sushi to hide the fact that his fish isn't fresh? Is angelina jolie the wasabi of the crappy movie?
"Yeah, this script ain't winnin' any awards, but i'll tell you what...let's put BOOB girl in it...and we might make back our investment."
Oh, and Ethan Hawke, you're a really really bad actor.
No, really. Please stop making movies. Your career is over.
No boobs can help you now.
I wonder what it's like to live with Lara Croft, boob girl. Is there a special maintenance routine that one has to tackle, daily, to deal with that rack?
I wouldn't know. I'm an A cup. I barely wear a training bra. I'm not privy to the care of large cantaloupes attached to my chest. Does she admire them? Does she look at her lips and her boobs and tell them how much she loves them? I would.
Boobs, you rule, I would say. You are awesome, swollen lips. Does Brad say that to her?
"Boob girl, your boobs are awesome...but you just have to do something about being so fucking stupid."
I wonder what it's like when all the stupid actresses gather in one place.
What do they talk about? What exactly does Cameron Diaz talk about with another, equally as dumb actress...
"oh, yeah, i didn't graduate from High School, either. Aren't we pretty? Let's go find someone to tell us we're pretty. Let's go find Boob Girl and compare boobs."
I kind of want to see more testicles in movies. Really big testicles. Like boobs.
Then we can say, "wow, that actor guy is realllly..." and then we'll make the boob motion with our hands cupped, but instead of in front of the chest, we'll make the gesture between our legs.
"wow, that's a sac on HIM...wooooh!"
Like, a big utter.
Maybe Iron Man should have had a big Iron Sac. That at least would have made being sober for that movie more tolerable. Then we all could have just stared at the giant testicles instead of being mind-numbed by that movie.

the new phone books are here

"this is the best trail mix ever."
that's because i made it with an entire jar of cherry preserves.
but that was only the beginning. that was the first day. we were still full of energy, full of "let's get up that mountain!"
it was the best trail mix ever.
That was before the night of horrors and communal "lice bed."
before the dog barked all night at the sounds of the only bongo players in the world who had no rhythm.
It was like a bulgarian version of "the jerk"
only nothing made it funny.
it was "keep one eye open" scary. it was wishing we had a .45 under our pillows instead of a random body part that belonged to a hairy drunk man.
wishing that my cell phone hadn't been stolen the night before.
it was the best trail mix ever. until it was gone. and we had no more food. and our friend ned consumed an entire bag of dry muesli which caused him to be constipated for five days.
it was before we walked straight down the mountains.
bulgarians don't believe in switchbacks.
it was smores in an aluminum pie tin made over a stick-fire.

Stella

Dolly had a waterbed that was never actually made. It was in a constant state of unkempt. We'd fall asleep on it, our faces skidding along the gray rubbery plastic mattress, water sloshing in our ears every time one of us would move. I'm certain she didn't own sheets. Just blankets and pillows without pillowcases. We'd reach into the side of the mattress, between the water mattress and the brown wooden frame that contained it, and find dorito crumbs, candy, pens, glitter, CDs, weed. We'd fall asleep on it, all four of us, stoned and warm. The unmade water mattress was always warm. We'd try to move in succession, making big waves underneath us until the person on the end was bumped off by a hump of wave halted by the thick bladder of old, smelly water. One time we opened the drain at the end to smell it. Unscrewed the hard, yellowing plastic at the corner and underneath the cap was a layer of greenish brown goo, attached, slimy, living.
Her room was small. The bed took up most of it, a closet full of goth clothes, garish makeup, a mirror on the wall, a mirror that was a slice of a larger mirror, broken, jagged. An entertainment center on one wall contained a boom box, CDs and nintendo. The only games she had were Mario Bros. and Tetris. We'd get stoned and play, look through the magazines that littered the entire room, the shelves, the closet, the house. Her mom would make us popcorn. We devoured it. Poured fake orange powder cheese on it, stolen from boxes of Kraft mac n' cheese, and ate till we fell asleep playing Tetris, lulled by the warmth of the bed.
Sometimes we'd make posters. She would have her mom buy huge sheets of poster board, and we'd sit in her room for hours, making posters of funny things we'd said, bands we'd seen, things we'd done to humiliate the boys, make outs with the punk kids from the other schools. We'd laugh. I don't laugh that hard anymore. I don't laugh at simple. I don't laugh at make-outs that my friends have, or that I had when I had too much SoCo. I don't laugh when someone chips a tooth puking and then we have to walk home sweaty and half-clothed because we forgot where our clothes were and had to leave the party because we were yelling obscenities at the boys. I don't laugh at "Drunk 7-11" run, slurpees and nachos drenched in pale, thick pump cheese.
I wrack my brain and try to remember what those posters said in scented magic marker, thinking that maybe if I can see those words, touch that moment, it will still make me laugh, and I will wake up with my warm cheek stuck to the waterbed, the four of us. Laughing.

cookie binge

baking vegan pumpkin cookies
something in the oven wafted
towards my nostrils and
reminded me of winter in Belogradchik
when we would buy flavored hookah tobacco
and set it atop the woodburning stove
filling the whole house
with the scent of cherry
thin streams of white smoke would rise
from the lump of greasy, red tobacco
we sat in rickety old wooden chairs
older than us, older than our grandparents
these chairs
embellished with hand-carved flowers
we would read
wrapped in wool blankets, plump feet stuffed into churapi
crafted by the baba downstairs
greasy, knotted hair pushed into knitted caps
inhaling the fire, the burning, the thin stream of scent
black and white kitten curled on his lap
red badge of courage forefront
i, staring out the warbled glass
distorted snow falling
pelting
but pumpkin cookies are not that now
they are quick
easy.
electric oven easy. dancing in my living room easy.
it is easy to leave.

allergic to everything

She was right.
He appeared in my dream to be typical.
To be how he always had been.
Self-involved and on his own terms.
Realizing his mistake,
promising a promising later.
Never a when
Only a later.

ditch (1992)

"Becky Becky Becky." That was the song that Pat Altman wrote for her. He would bang on his cheap acoustic guitar and scream her name from beneath her window. Pat Altman was very Irish. His parents emigrated from somewhere in Ireland. I never knew where. I knew he and his sister were born in America. I knew his father had a temper, his mother was overprotective, but as a stranger in a strange land, overprotective of all and nothing she knew about. The struggles here were much different than those they had endured as teenagers there.

Pat had shiny, straight copper hair cut into an angled bang, shaved in the back, and freckles the same color, they would shine in sunlight, both freckles and hair. He’d smile, not often, and his green eyes would blaze, you were sinking, melting into them, he’d shake his skater bangs around, suddenly realizing where he was and his eyes would grey again, clouding over with contempt. Pat loved Becky. He loved her and never wanted to give her up. He was volatile, borderline personality disorder volatile. He would call her up, scream at her, then hang up the phone and sink into a hole for days, strumming his guitar in a haze of weed and stolen whiskey from his father’s liquor cabinet. Their house was always dark. His father sat in it, not awake, not asleep. Thick darkness, thick with smoke and the stench of a blue collar man never at rest in a brown recliner in the gaudy, wallpapered living room, thick green curtains drawn, one small ray of dirty sunlight poking in through the bottom, twirling with speckles of dust.

Pat hated to be at home. We all hated his house, hated the tension, the high-pitched voice of his mother, needing needing, nagging nagging, always calling, screeching. Ironically, his squeaky voice called to Becky in much the same way, although he didn’t realize it at the time, he called…he needed…he nagged.

We would sit in her bedroom, flipping through Sassy, ignoring the phone, ignoring the screams. I would lie on her bed, facing the closet, admiring her Oxblood 10-hole Docs, wishing we had the same shoe size, listening to the messages he left on her private answering machine. They were desperate and lonely.
“Becky. You’re a bitch. Call me.”

She would roll her eyes and tear apart the room looking for her cigarettes, nervous habit of packing the box from both ends. Tap tap tap on one end, gripping the pack with three fingers on the top and tapping onto the palm of the opposite hand, turning the pack over and packing again. Tap tap tap. Turning. Tap tap tap. Finally, she’d open the pack and smoke out the window. Camel. Blowing the smoke upwards, curling her upper lip, exposing perfect teeth and pink gums, the underside of her lips into a perfect “O.”

“Becky, BECKY. I’m coming over there. You whore. You better be there. I need you,” the answering machine clicked off.

“Let’s go,” she says. We grab our bags and head out. We kick our way through the snow, walk to Sub Port down the street. She orders onion rings and sprays them with a barrage of ketchup, sprinkling the dirty plastic table with tiny red speckles.
Outside in the cold, thin air, there is a cloud of breath approaching. Ryan Norton. “Snortin’ Norton” we called him…for obvious reasons. Cracked out as usual, Ryan opens the grease-smeared glass door with a gesture of overexertion, as if his heart was going to leap out of his throat.

“What’s up chumps? Altman’s on his way to your house,” he says, and orders a salami and cheese sub, thick with mustard. It permeates my nose, causes my eyes to water. He sits down beside me, grubby black jeans and ripped up Vans, a sagging faded black Misfits T-shirt, ripped under one armpit, and his black sweatshirt held together by safety pins.

“God, Norton, do you shower?”

“No, do you, whore?” He takes a bite of his sub and glares at me, actually awaiting an answer. “Do you?”

“I’m surprised you’re actually eating…Don’t you usually snort your lunch off a mirror?”

“I’m surprised you’re NOT eating…fat whore.”

Becky balls up a napkin, stained pink with ketchupy finger smears, throws it in the red basket that contained the onion rings, motions to me and I crawl over the back of the bench to avoid any further conversation with Ryan.

“Where you going, chumps? You’re just leaving me here?”
“That’s what your mama said, Norton.”

We push though the doors and exit into the bitter cold, she’s packing her cigarettes again. I shove a piece of mint gum into my mouth and it feels much colder inside my mouth, aided by the wintry air, cloudless sunny day, freezing.

“What am I going to do about him?”
“I don’t know.”

“He’s out of control. He’s depressed, he’s flying, he’s depressed…it gets worse and worse, he’s sinking lower and lower, then he flies into these fits of rage. Should I tell his parents?”
“Becky. Seriously, what are they going to do? They don’t believe in feelings…they’re Irish. I don’t know. Besides, as if Altman would go to a shrink.”

“What does your shrink do for you?”

“For me? She doesn’t do anything for me. I’m there because my parents think I’m an alcoholic nutcase.”
“You are. You’re as bad as him sometimes, you know?” She takes a long drag off the Camel, arching her head and neck upwards, squinting into the sun, exhaling slowly.

“I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe I should date Pat and we could just be fucking insane together.”
“I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t like him.” (I did like him)

“I think Bob likes you.”

“Bob’s a rapist. Listen, I don’t date the locals, Becky. They’re fucking lame. All they do is sit around listening to Danzig all day, smoking weed and then calling us up trying to get us to come over, which we never do anymore, you’d think they’d figure it out. They’re going to be doing the same thing the rest of their lives.”
“Do you think we’ll be doing the same thing the rest of our lives? Like, you think I’ll marry one of these gross guys after high school and end up frumpy and fat, hating my life, hating my kids?”

I glared at her, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to pick up a stone, hurling it into the frozen creek, watching it skip off the thick ice landing near a broken bottle of Jim Beam.

“No.”

they're all about you

1992
Becky was the youngest. She was textbook youngest child. I flip through my yearbook and find her thumbnail picture. Her class picture is the only one of her any given year. She had great hair, brace-corrected teeth, and a closet full of clothes that made her look like an actual girl, not like androgynous punk-grunge that the rest of us had become. To this day, I still admire other people's clothes more than my own. I always wish I had "those pants" or "her shoes." I don't know if I was as frumpy as I think I was. I have a very different picture of myself in those days than other people did.
Becky had older sisters, still wearing out late 80s hair and silk shirt-dresses belted thick and in garish colors. They thought they were punk. Listening to New Wave doesn't make you punk rock. Becky went to public elementary school, and being that I went to private school, we entered the big melting pot of High School, unchivalrously, silently mistrusting for no apparent wrongdoing, except that I had been subjected to years of wearing a plaid skirt, knee-socks and mary-janes, listening to the pious hypocrisy morning after morning after dreadful day until, on the last day, amidst happy, weepy video-ees, I flipped off the camera and said, "i don't believe in you, jesus. you're lucky i didn't burn this shithole down." Consequently, my high school graduation video was more or less the same.
We partied a lot when her parents weren't home. And they weren't home very often. We would get the gutter punk kids to come, the SHARP kids from Blue Island, our Mexican friends from Roseland, and the lame boys from the neighborhood, although we had outgrown them considerably since we realized they were not all they thought they were. They still thought they had ownership. Like some crazy T-Bird/Pink Lady deal. We let them think they did, they called us chumps, ditched us, and went to drink in the forest preserve.
Drinking in the forest preserve. If you've grown up anywhere in the midwest, Illinois specifically, you know about drinking in the forest preserve. Kegger in the woods. Devil sign.
We'd drink the cheapest beer that our Mexican friends would buy, or Mad Dog, or Boone's Farm, and head off to the dark, fat-mosquito-ridden forest, where we'd drink until we made out with someone and let them take us home, or didn't...in which case we had to walk, basking in the moonlight, the cool darkness and the disappointment that we didn't make out with anyone, puking on the sidewalk from Boone's Farm induced sickness, dyed purple or red. Sometimes we'd even walk out onto the frozen creek in winter and puke on it just so we could come back the next day and see the color spewed, icy droplets and chunks strewn upon the thickly crusted, frozen stream.
Our fun began on nights we knew the neighborhood boys were in the preserve across the street from the high school. And this was the age before cell phones, and we were all connected by a strict, secret phone tree, complete with the cheap Conair phones that your mother bought for you at Kmart. We would call the fire department when we knew the party was in full swing, from a payphone at the High School, tell them there was a fire in the preserve, then run over to the party, so they couldn't blame us. We'd get there right on time to be chased out by sirens.
Other times we'd call the police, and not go into the forest, but watch our Heather-ness from afar.
We were notorious in school...when we were in school. For all practical purposes, we were our own Heathers, it's true. Every clique of teenaged girls (our age) wanted to think that, though. We all wanted to be the bitchiest, the most in control, the most admired by our gaggle of punk rock boys, hardcore boys, boys that took us to shows with them, let us sit at band practice while they ignored us...most of the time, we tried not to be in school. It was a waste, we knew it even then. We'd party at Becky's during the day when her parents were at work. We'd do a bunch of drugs, walk around avoiding the truancy officers, the juvenile officers, avoiding other people's parents.
Everyone has the "parents walking in on the party" story. So I digress.
Only Becky's parents sent her straight to an alternative high school. The unfortunate circumstance that her parents didn't realize in time, the really detrimental part, was that all our delinquent friends went to that school, too. so she was no better off there. We just partied somewhere else, now.
After that semester, when she came back to our HS, I felt a real change in her. There were changes all over. We'd stopped hanging out with the SHARP guys due to the random ganginess and inability to fight because they were sober. The Nazi kids, albeit trashed, would always get the better of them. It was a little humiliating to be the arm candy of losers. Besides, after the beating over the head of a now nameless boyfriend with his own skateboard, and subsequent death, we'd decided to hang out with people who were more safe. We wanted to have fun, we didn't want to be gang members. We didn't want to be watching our backs constantly, watching what we wore, what we said. We wanted to drink and hang out, listen to records, drink and...drink.
There was a trashy Italian Beef place about five blocks from our houses that we'd all gather at some nights, meet the neighborhood boys and convince them to give us drugs, cigarettes, rides somewhere. Turns out, this night, Illinois humid cold night, we were bundled trying to look as tough as we could, just wanting to escape our fighting parents, our siblings, that the boys we stumbled upon were already drunk. The Italian Beef place employees had already called the police when we arrived. They found us there with cans of Black Label stuffed into our purses, fifths of southern comfort and a couple of loosely-rolled joints, and cigarettes. They grabbed them, emptied them onto the dirty, ketchup-smeared table, just as Becky and I grabbed our identification cards (we only had high school IDs, we were only 15) and ran for the hills, we ran up towards the apartments, hoping we could lose them in the maze of disconnected parking lots. The officers bolted out the doors of Italian Beef place, forgetting the already-intoxicated boys that were left with our spoils scattered on the table. Becky and I ran, impervious to the freezing temperature that froze our lips, smeared with spittle as we ran hard up the hills, coats flapping, pupils dilated. Suddenly I felt a gloved hand on my shoulder,dragging me down to the ground, two hands on my shoulder, pushing me down to the cement.
"HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD"
fuck. I'm on the ground. i feel a trickle of warmth, thinking it is sweat pouring off my hair, down my temple, onto my cheek. I wipe it with my free sleeve, not yet cuffed by the large officer now sitting on my back. Noticing the dark stain smeared across the fabric, I rise and in one fell swoop, knock the badge off my back, handcuff dangling from one wrist, I grab Becky from the grip of the other officer and we start to run again. Breathless, she looks at me and we start to laugh. We round a corner, hear a branch break in front of us, and there are the officers, huffing as hard as we are, harder because they are fat, not used to chasing on foot.
They call out, "STOP LADIES"
yeah right.
Becky slips on ice and falls
Typical get-away scene trip-up. I grab her and pull her up, inadvertently hitting her in the face with my dangling handcuff.
"LADIES. STOP NOW."
Screech of tires. Another squad car cuts us off at the next corner, deer in headlights, we stop, frantically turning in other directions for an out, I feel a hand sweeping my legs out from underneath me. My head hits the pavement a second time, I'm cuffed, facing the dirty sidewalk, breathing in the scent snowy footsteps and frozen dog shit nearby.
We are dragged to the squad car. Becky tries to kick her way out the window, kicks through the wire screen separating us from the officers in the front seat of the Chevy.
I just sit there, shocked. Hands locked behind me. The passenger officer reaches back and pulls his gun, points it at Becky.
"DON'T MOVE. DON'T MAKE A FUCKING MOVE."
She stops moving, drops her feet to the floor.
"Fuck you," she says, turns her head toward the window and flops back into the cold leatherette.
We arrive at the police station, allowed to call our parents.
This is the worst phone call ever, and anyone who has ever had to make it, knows it.
"Mom?"
"What, where are you? It's like 10:00!"
"I'm in jail."
"Right. You know what? I work all day, so, could you just come home so I can go to bed?"
"No, really. I need you or dad to come get me."
"You know, you're already about to be grounded. GET HOME!"
"Mom, really."
"I'm not coming to get you. COME HOME!!!"
Phone slamming.
I purse my chapped, red lips, look at Officer Cowie, local authority on the bad kids, and tell him she's not coming.
"Then you realize you're staying here."
"Whatever, then."
"I still have to call them and tell them."
"She'll just ground you."

Becky had similar results, only her parents requested that she spend time in juvenile detention. She needed to learn another lesson, because Delinquent High hadn't turned out so well after all.
So Cowie called my parents and they complied by coming down to the station and bringing a toothbrush and a giant container of guilt.
Thanks, mom and dad. (eyelashes batting)

nurse asks question

"did i even know her there?"
there was a tiny bubble.
living inside of us as we ripped open immeasurably into other bubbles
rising from the bottom
a tiny don ho bubble
sticky with constituents
that we moleculed together
stitched with thick yarn
and pipe cleaners
we were unimportant
but together, stuck with cheap glue and tinkertoys and feathers
sticking out of us
we fashioned war masks
and gave high priority to situations
gave them names
gave ourselves names
slippery surfactant
particles shattered and we reached--
fizzling on a lip.

2005

Floors of a cold apartment, lying upon them, skies are suddenly light and filled with sunshine, robins come to the wavy window with an insatiable hunger, an appetite for spring. I buy bread for them, they beckon me to the balcony and I suddenly wish I were light as air, hollow bones, being fed soft bits of crusty bread. Pick and poke, they tear off a large chunk and fly away with it in their beaks. Mind is dark, filled with the animosity and numb, ambiguous motions, notions of burn blue with disuse. Original fire returns as injustice and crawls out of graves with disproportionate attachments, there in the dark, unleashed and yet more confused than I. Monsters of uncertainty and angst. Age has aged me, the captain gives no direction and has hidden the navigational equipment in his belly. Survival on such angry seas is impossible without the stars.

July 3 2005.

Staring at a clock face, 445 am.

I always seem to be staring at the clock, not sleeping.

Inter-view

Desiring the soft shoulder of comfort formless, boundless. I came down here, to the bottom of the hill, with good intentions. Instead I read about “Pope Fever” on Googlenews. I spent Thursday, five hours of Thursday, made up like a corporate doll, pointy high-heeled boots, new grey Editor pants, my cuffed, collared shirt. I spent those five hours spilling my shallow soul, using the words that I skimmed off the top like “team-player, passion for business, client relations, project assistance” and smiled my best phone-voice smile. I smile, I laugh. I throw my head back in engagement, being witty, making intelligent jokes and we all laugh a hearty “hydrogeologist” laugh. I make fun of it only because I think I’m still punk rock, and because I think I need to never grow up. But “they” grew up. I swear I saw Bill Stevenson in Target. The man has a family, he built a life. The ones that didn’t grow the fuck up…they’re dying. People are forgetting and they’re dying. When you’re forgotten, you’re dead. Bill hasn’t let himself die. He’s continued to master what he does, moved around, moved up, moved down, but has never let himself be forgotten…and not in that “really? the stones are touring again? why won’t they just die, already.” sort of way. And so I don’t want to be forgotten? Or is it my punk-rock-ness, my riot grrrl-ness that I don’t want to die? Who is holding on to it? Me or them? Not anybody but me. I came out here to live. I didn’t come out here to do what I could do anywhere. I could move back to the Fort, have it easy, have the same friends, have my family. They laugh at my jokes, we know each other inside and out, I know where to eat, where to go see bands, where to get jello shots, were to hike, where to climb, where to...the list is endless. I couldn’t take that risk. I couldn’t take the complacency. Sure, mom would have given us the condo, mom would have given me a great job. Again. Too easy. Too fucking easy. I made it in Bulgaria (minor infractions along the way, of course) and I can make it here. (I’m now twirling around whipping my beret in the air like Mary Tyler Moore only thank god I’m not in Minneapolis-St. Paul). I’m nothing in this pond. I don’t need to be. I need to be something to me. I had these conversations about “success” and “accomplishments” with someone previously, and they would ridicule me because I wanted to make some damn money and do the things I like to do. I fucking miss riding horses, people. I want to go diving. Why shouldn’t I give myself that luxury?
I want to go to Target, too…and see Rock Stars there looking at the same dishrack as I am saying, “hmm, the metal one is so much cooler and fits in with my ‘icy soul’ theme”

“yes, I agree. go with the 29.99 dishrack.” Does my soul die if I take a job that pays well? I struggle, I do.

Meanwhile, I wander the streets of seattle. I have a rain jacket and I wander. I go to the co-op and buy crazy-expensive local granola and still have not had coffee (true, gave it up a year-and-a-half ago and haven’t touched it since and now I’m pussy-scared that it will make me all crazy, but I continue to drink like a fish, so I got that going for me). It must be a sign that the first week we were here, Meat Beat Manifesto was in town and, as usual, put on a crazy-good show. I haven’t seen any rock stars on the street. We met a girl who caters parties at the Gates home. She has funny drunk-nerd stories. and so what if I want a good job. I see what happens when you don’t grow up. You end up being that girl, on the barstool, lying about her age, drinking 6 pints and then going home, snorting a bunch of coke and drinking more, sleeping with some random roadie, still trying to have “that time” that “great time.” “Remember that one time? That was awesome.” It’s not that we don’t have those times anymore, it’s just that we have to look a little deeper for them, they aren’t as easy anymore as just fucking the nearest rockstar and closing the bar with the band, hoping they’ll invite you to the party that lasts till dawn. Dawn? That’s when I get up to go running. I guess my point is, I don’t want me to forget me. I don’t need to re-hash old times with myself, “hey remember that one show? Yeah, self, that was so awesome, wish we were 16 again”

because I never ever want to be 16 again, so why would I act like it? That was as long ago as I was in age then. Well, that was a startling realization. I-I’m not sure where else I can go with that.

Except that I don't actually stand in Target ogling dishracks. That's not one of the rules of Fight Club.

We'll get you, Corey Feldman

These days, we’re all on Facebook, forging ahead. Convincingly quipping coy phrases that tell our “community” we’re much better than them. We squeeze in emoticons and comment on photos. This is the unreality of our lives. We occupy small, windowless offices, peering out others’ windows for a glimpse of something we had between our prehensile thumb and forefinger, but lost after we realized we did not know it at all, we were pretending, we were playing house in someone else’s territory. We become more apathetic than we’re used to seeing each other, which is much more dangerous than what we were before, poignant and revolutionary. Before our idealist dreams were crushed and there was a website promoting idealism we could never attain, we decided we would race back to civilian life, tempted by the luring “come-hither” wave of a manicured capitalist finger, manipulating us back into the swirl of dirty water down the drain. Swept, like a flooded neighborhood, current and deadly undertow, muddy waters and impenetrable economy. We loot and loaf, scrimp and save, stare at our laptop screens and decide that, indeed the cheerleaders have taken our jobs. It wasn’t illegal immigrants, after all, but the sorority girl with the communications degree, waiting to pounce on us. Looking back on a generation that calls upon us to render them immortal, looking frontward to a generation that has something called “blackberry-thumb” and “obesity.”

I pretend like I wake up and it is all effortless, like I remember each day how to function, like I don’t have it written down on small scraps of paper, scattered and strewn. “Do this.” “Don’t do this.” “Wash, brush teeth.” “Remember to talk to other people today.”

My life reads like a melted reel of film, blobs of cellophane, filled with frames of a former life, hanging on, ready to drip and burn, leaving a hole in the big picture, leaving an unearthly sound reverberating through the speakers of the silver screen.

the everlasting job-stopper

seriously.
i'm just so tired of sending out resumes.
why do i bother?
this is worse than getting rejection notices in the mail for my lame stories and poetry, which i should also stop bothering with.
seriously, screw you, HR, whoever you are.
it's exhausting to live in this cover letter writing-purgatory
"maybe if i say this, then they'll notice me."
maybe if i vomited on the envelope, the stench of my poverty would render them
unable to not look at the contents.
"they want a writing sample."
"don't send them poems about killing yourself."
how about if i send them a little writing sample i call
"suck my left one, employer's market recession world"
why is it that i've had tons of job offers here...somewhere i'm not staying.
Maybe I should stay. From the frozen tundra to the desert wasteland-turned-weirdly-suburban-mall everything is right here you don't ever need to leave.
"are you nervous about going without a job?"
"you mean, am i 31 years old and moving to an expensive city with no hopes of employment? am i a bit anxious about this?"
where's my xanax, NOW, peace corps. WHERE?!

Love and anarchy

Kazimierz, Jewish Quarter.

Exhausted extremities shuffled along narrow cobbled streets as the sun begins to set, trees finally give in to a light breeze, consumed by airy nothingness, ether too thin, borrowing heavy wings from obscurity and indifference. I am submerged into a wading pool of insignificance, hair tangled in a rudder slapping violently, winding me into my scalp. I peer out of an eye left dry above the water and considered my distance from the gothic temple, suddenly feeling the need to be back in the countryside, safe amongst the braided dairymaids upon wooden stools. I sit on a bench facing Wawel, consider sifting its treasures through my fingers, sunlight spackles my face, coating weariness, engrossed in the fat leaves on trees.

I notice this girl’s tattoo is a peace sign colored in with emerald green, and above it, still in the peace sign circle, is a filled-in red heart with an anarchy circle in the heart. What does that even mean? What kind of statement is that? This girl looks, and is dressed like, Marilyn Monroe. What is the fascination with Marilyn Monroe? I mean, she died of an overdose in a hotel room. Not unlike many others. Maybe it’s the same fascination we have with beats. Maybe we’re beat. We’re a beat down, beat up generation. We look up from the gum-soaked cement, trodden upon by righteous baby-boomers, and there we see a star by the name of Jack, of Neil, of Sylvia, of Elise. We look up through blood-shot eyes, wandering in our heads all night thinking of perfect metaphors for our decrepit lives on Benzedrine. Symbols of something we’ve taken too far. My cup of jasmine tea amongst the froufrou lattes, I can see through it, can they see through me? Is that why they drink cloudy masses of sugary diabetic coma? They’re hiding behind their Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain mask of sadness and metabolic syndrome obesity. Layers of fat hiding the truth, the buttons that are stuck, the inability to feel anything except a stomach that stretches with each feeding. We were fat in Bulgaria, running uphill against banitza-eating babas and an entire generation of café-culture anorexics. Those girls were exposing their souls to us, just waiting for us to offer them a clue, a free ticket. What is this girl exposing to me? Her randomly flashy, shoddily-inked tat says that she’s indecisive. Does she love? Is there love in anarchy? Does she love anarchy? Is there peace in anarchy? Maybe she wants us to sit here in our wooden chairs at our rickety tables as she orders another non-fat mocha latte with whip at an independent coffee shop, pondering her sketchy ink, fading with each passing year, until her platinum hair and perky breasts are replaced with pulled back mom ponytails and stretch marks, toddlers tugging at her skirts, that are now no longer form-fitting vintage shift dresses, but jumpers. The dreaded jumper, symbol of all that is hopeless, mousey suburban mom, lover of all things Disney and conveniently snack-packed. Still, here we are, penniless, scraping dirty gum off wet sidewalks, looking for stars through violent thrashes of wind through the city, waiting to overdose before we hit our peak and are forgotten. Waiting for our tattoos to mean what we think they mean while we stand in line for another addiction.

predators

“I’m running out of boxes of food and need to go out to eat so I have leftovers.”
“Yeah, I noticed that when I rummaged through your refrigerator the other day.”
“This is why I need my boyfriend. So we can go out to eat and I can have food.”
“I suppose that’s one reason to keep him around.”
Two sisters and their mother, struggling for meaning in the divine comedy of relationships surrounding them, will soon discover that they have entered…the twilight zone.

“But I said that if he loved me he’d call me.”
“Yeah, you sound like every other teenager that ever walked the earth, except that you’re 50 and you don’t have a math test tomorrow.”
“Why can’t he just say it? Why won’t he just call me? I lived for 32 years in a relationship where your father was just…”
“A dark void? Devoid chasm? Pit of despair?”
“Yes. That.”

And it was true, my father was now even deeper in his pit of anger and self-loathing. He and I went to the pub last week. As I sat with my back to the wall, against the hard, oak bench, stiff drink in-hand, glaring over the tops of my lower lids, listening half-heartedly to him talking about the aliens “showing themselves, the UFOs as big as 10 football fields in Texas, and the end of our existence as we know it, I was reminded of that Rowdy Roddy Piper movie, “They Live,” only dad doesn’t have the sunglasses to be able to see the aliens, so he is really no better off than the rest of us in that department. Although, I have to say, he doesn’t fare well in any department lately, including those occupied by Qwest employees.
Within the span of a month, my father has managed to piss off his cellular phone provider, whereupon they deactivated his service. Then he managed to anger the employees of Qwest, which I will admit, has the worst customer service ever in the entire world of bad customer service, but he pissed them off and they cancelled his cable/internet at home. So, the only real place my father can be reached is at work, which really does us no good at all, because he works in Denver.
“So why don’t you just go be a hermit, there, Thoreau?”
“Who is Thoreau?”

Yes, it’s true. My father survived college without ever really reading anything of value, and if he did, the lack of comprehension or gratitude for such great works was lost in the muddled puff of marijuana smoke.
“Don’t you ever think about things?”
“No, not unless it’s from Family Guy.”
“that makes no sense, family guy was already thought about and put together for the American public to not have to think about or decipher.”
“Books aren’t thought about already?”“You have to draw your own inferences about what happens in books.”
“I don’t like to have to do that.”
This is becoming my own personal hell-conversation so I cut it short and turn to Snoop Dogg’s “Father-hood” so my brain can at least begin to function again.

cliches and vodka

My mother just broke up with the boyfriend. I kind of can’t believe we’re dealing with this. It must be some sort of retribution. So I call her up yesterday on my way to a beautiful morning in the mountains, “when do you want to go shopping? After lunch?”

Her voice carries that familiar tone familiar only to other females who have suffered a breakup of similar magnitude.

Sniffle. “I’m really not sure I’m up for it.”
“Wh-at. what is wrong? What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“don’t tell me nothing. I can hear that obviously something is wrong. Why are you crying?”
“Dan and I broke up.”

So I pull over. The mountains to my left. The street I take to my mom’s house to the right.

“Ok, I’m coming over.”

“You don’t have to do that. You were on your way to hike.” (martyrdom)

“The mountains are open all day.” (sigh)

I enter her apartment, slough off my whimsical desire, kick off my shoes, and sit in the white leather chair to her left. Lifetime, channel for women is on. Oddly enough, it’s that Sally Field/Kiefer Sutherland movie “eye for an eye,” which is possibly the worst movie ever with Kiefer Sutherland in it. Tissues are scattered and fill the garbage cans, the floor near her recliner. They are wet with snot and tears.
“so you think this is a good way to lose weight, then? Sitting here crying?”
“No, it’d probably be better if you went outside.”
And so she proceeds to tell me that this boyfriend of two years, whom she has several times doubted, in words only to friends and to her daughters, does not really love or is not really in-love with her.

I’m not sure what to make of the words “in love.” Undoubtedly, these words strike fear into many. Run.

I heard this guy on the news the other day talking about the bears that he raises. He’s one of those highly intelligent people that failed in the school system, connects with these animals. He said we all communicate in the same manner. Emotions. They can sense him, he can sense them. We never really know what’s inside of each other, really inside. We never know what each other are capable of and when we’ll attack, when we’ll be attacked. You can only push so far before something has to give. If we were more in tune with each other’s emotions, we’d probably get this. we’d probably not spend our lives living with people we didn’t understand or that don’t provide us with what we need. I mean, we are that, aren’t we? providers? All through my conversation with the broken-hearted mother, I kept thinking, “you have a visual disability…what if he were deaf. what if he could only sign that he loved you, and he could only prove it…but never say it…would you still be so upset? Why are the words so important?”
I can empathize with both sides. Everyone wants to hear the words, but what if there were really no words to hear? Why is it a random word-order and annotation that makes or breaks relationships?

I have no answer. Like I said, I empathize with both sides. I am not a provider. I’m a mentally unstable drunk with a husband that both loves and for some reason is in love with me, even though I left him to come out to sunny Colorado for a month while he was stuck in the frozen tundra. I used to be a provider.

I used to think I could solve and mold and fix, too. Then I realized the reason I was doing it was because I was broken. so broken. but why can’t I just get over the broken-ness?

Sartre said, “in love, one and one are one.” Is that so true? We all struggle with our identities on a daily basis, getting out of the “one” the “sameness” the “rut.”

When two people get together, both successful idealists, each from different worlds, each enjoying the company of the other, having the same interests, but each struggling to maintain their identity, to maintain their beliefs, their faith, and their individual politic, how can they be one? Oneness is spiritual, “referring to the 'experience' of the absence of egoism identity boundaries, and, according to some traditions, the perception of an absolute unity of all matter and thought or one's ultimate identity with God.” This brings us to Tat Tvam Asi. “You Are That” according to Vedic philosophy. You are that. You are that which you are. It is not anything that is ours. It is the ultimate, the inexplicable.

Are we each other or are we not? Unconditional and limitless? Atman actually is composed of individuality, yet we spend our lives either suppressing it or flaunting it. Vedas also say that we are not ever "in" something. We are not ever "in love" or "in nature". We are love and we are nature. If we really believed this, it would not matter. Nothing would matter. We would be god.

Does this really apply to love? Love is inexplicable. If it deemed explanation, we would all be very Vulcan, emotionless, and, therefore, it would be ours. If we could explain it, it would be ours. This is not so with love. This is why I forced my sister to hang out with the broken-hearted mother and me. Something so inexplicable and painful surely needs a consolation. Serotonin. Shopping. Maybe we needed some E. Or some new shoes.
In Hebrew, words are given a numerical value. The words “love” and “one” both have a numerical value of 13. Are they equal to each other? Do they correlate to the numerical value, which is 26, of the name of g-d? the divine name of healing and love? Coincidence or not, love is connectedness. Love is being able to sense and feel and fulfill desires of the connected. Whether this be love from mother to child, love from husband to wife, it is the same love. What then disconnects us from another so instantly?

I can’t offer much except clichés. Time heals all wounds. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There's other fish in the sea. I don’t know. It’s all such crap when you’re waiting, crying and waiting for a phone call that never comes. When you’re sitting in front of the television in your sweatpants, old blanket round your stooped shoulders, wet tissues balled up in your hand, watching bad movies, blinds drawn, mind focused on one thing, one face, one voice.

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."--Anais Nin

office

Confines of the laminate wood desk, bleeding computer-eyes, and tingle of carpal tunnel remind me of Bjork. There is more to life than this. I unwrap from thin, crinkly plastic, another fruit punch-flavored Jolly Rancher and admire its inability to be anything other than a pile of colored sugar dissolving on my fat tongue, sometimes shocking me with sharp edges, possibly able to choke me if I suck too hard. My problem is biting. I never knew how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. I never will. It’s too much waiting. I’m a product of my generation. Instant gratification. I want the Tootsie Roll center now. Maybe if I knew the exact number of licks, like I knew the exact number of miles in a marathon, then I could take it one at a time, knowing there is a light at the end of the candy-coated tunnel.
Is there more to life than this? Isn’t this what people do now? Sit at their desks in their ergonomically incorrect captivity, grazing on hard candies and gum, faking reports, staring blankly at cathode rays pounding a phosphor-coated surface, waiting for new emails, funny new forwards, anything. Anything to distract them from the distraction of pacing their cage.

Disconnect

Spring robins are chirping and bouncing on the red-tiled roof beside my sister’s window. I am Savasana on her plush, king-sized bed listening to them through the silence. The cats are poised on the sill, pretending to pounce, predatory stance, swishing tails. The robins are taunting, prey, hopping from thin, bud-less branches, basking in a bit of sunshine, lurking with tiny, beady eyes.

I take a swig of red wine from a plastic cup; turn my tired head towards the sun and sleep, fitful, dreaming of an expedition, everyone has suffered an excruciating death except for me. Everyone has died on this mountain, it is a wild blizzard and we are ill-prepared. I have dug out a snow cave with a small shovel, formerly firmly attached to the pack of a dead man. I lie there, suffocating in my own carbon dioxide. I light a match, it flickers, flickers, flames blue and dies. I hear moaning of relentless wind and sleet pelting the vibrant gore-tex jackets of the others just beyond my reach. I am alone on the mountain. Asphyxiating.

Poetry. It has to mean something. Has to have deep underlying meaning so that in years to come, grad students will have something to analyze and write their dissertations on. I just read a really long theory on Plath’s “Fever 103.” Interpreted into a vapor of virtuous virginity as she always is. I have to wonder if this is what she’d intended. The explanation can never just be left simply. It’s as if we have to pick, poke and prod, dismantling the ego of a person whom we think we know better than knew themselves.
Maybe we do. The psychiatrists of the poetry world, explain poetry. Poetry, like an image of god, is not ever left in its purest form. Someone always has to be there with the towel that Jesus rubbed his sweaty face off with or a piece of hair that they found in the mountains that must be from the Yeti. do I CAPITALIZE? will it mean more if I capitalize? does it disintegrate my meaning if I write in lower-case? Someone recently told me that by simply signing my emails and letters in a lowercase one-letter, I am telling the world that I am a peon. I admit, my small “h” looked more commanding in Bulgarian, as an “X,” but am I diminishing the meaning of me? me. small little me.

“But I look in the mirror/and I’m bigger in every way.”--Sonic Youth

Sometimes I feel like I know everyone, but I have known no one. Not for a long time. Faces I perceive blurred by swirling barstools and wavy windows. My heart is racing. The contenders rear and buck in their stalls, waiting for the call, waiting for sundown, waiting for “five-o’clock-somewhere.” Sisters in tandem, discussing the effect of absent-father syndrome.

Observing the simple, plebe act of wiping down tables in the café. Dirty rag, bleachy water scent lingering in the air, makes it appear clean. Greasy prints streak the aluminum rim, glistening in the sunlight pouring through the floor to ceiling windows. White lettering decants liquid shadows onto the plush red couch in the front, where people lie with laptops littering, placing fat cheeks on fluffy pillows. The air now a pregnant pause of roasting beans and bleach, toasted bagels and pieces of onion that have fallen to the bottom of the toaster, blackening, sending up a smoke signal of dis-attachment.

Judge

"when any two notes are produced steadily and with great intensity, a third note is heard, whose vibration number is the difference of those of the two primary notes."

Maybe this is the reason for misinterpretation within communication. When we're not hearing what is really being said, even though it is being said clearly by two distinct parties of the same instrument, we draw our own conclusions about the voices, about the conversation, the accusations. What is heard is a sound beyond our comprehension, reaching into our insecure egos and wringing it like a wet towel. When someone stirs the air around us, the vibrations cause discomfort enough to strike with equal force. The challenge is to sit quietly and listen.

(Tartini: The Devil's Sonata)

hard candy

Putrid decay from within
a decomposing mass of borrowed time,
contemptuous organs murmuring their last beat, last breath
at any moment,
this is impending age. This age is pending.
There are futile attempts to disguise the recognizable scent,
with perfume and breath mints, but the cologne
of cigarettes, italian spices, gin
makes it more pungent if not truly rancid
and hovers about like valley vapor.
My grandmother fondled Velamints with her dessicant mouth.
She ate frosting straight from the can. At night she put on
her tattered, brown robe, sipped burning grams of gin,
and smoked cigarettes in the dark, developing
her trademark scent, her dark fingerprint.
It repulsed me as I caught a wafting breeze.
I commanded her to stop smoking in the house, coating the filthy walls.
I cached her cigarettes, her gin, and the old
brown robe, bought her a new one that she never wore,
she even owned little bottles of brown nail polish, matching the robe.
We buried her next to my grandfather, and I sorted through her bulky, muted piles of clothes,
and the stink still iced in the closet amongst the cheap wire hangers. After all these years
it still smells of her, of stagnance, Velamints, cigarettes, gin.
I crumple the threadbare brown terrycloth robe to my face now,
breathe in the musk, letting it absorb forced tears.

(Soundtrack-- Songs:Ohia, Hearts Newly Arrived)

get out and help me push

i kept trying to reiterate that i needed friends. I needed to be surrounded, needed to hear from them more. People to watch over me, get to know me, I wanted to get to know them, but they would slowly back away, cartoonish in manner, creeping ever so slowly. They still make derogatory comments and for the life of me, I can't figure out why they think I need to hear snide, indirect attacks on my character.
My sister is convinced I'm on my way to alcoholism (on my way?). She's a psych major, so she's into over-analyzing every interaction we have, I have, my mother has. I convince her that we had different parents.
That's in the past. We have even more different parents now. They don't see what we see. We only see things in the manner of who we are, not as they really are, but since every situation is interpreted differently by each set of eyes that sees it, we can never really be sure what is happening. And sometimes tears and laughter erase the truth of the reality.
"We only called you into the room because we knew you had a drug problem, but couldn't confront you because we did, too."
And so, for years, my parents would call me in the living room to have conversations with them after I would walk in the door, pupils-dilated, heart racing, wanting to escape to the confines of my purple walls and hard-bound journal.
I worry about being the person my mother talks about, this man-boy that married one of her best friends, a Lebanese woman. He was artsy, music-oriented, unemployed most of the time, couldn't get his shit together, his head on right.
"She would come home from a 12 hour shift, and he would say 'look what i made' and it was a tiny little stage...he made it out of stuff he found around the house, little nails for barstools, a little band onstage, the lights worked and everything...what a loser."
And so I'm thinking, this is what makes up a loser, someone I don't want to be...I should just give up writing and go get my MBA, take over the business. I should try to get my head on straight, be more apt to learn and apply those lessons to life.
"you and your dad are the same, you just have a hard time relating to the world."

On the ride home tonight, I stared at the sun setting behind the foothills. Then. Dark, except for the same yellowish glow that has always emanated from the old houses up there, sitting on slopes. When the sun sets, the temperature drops. It's the desert. I forget these things. The cacti are dormant, grey and limp, like flattened dead testicles. if you touch them, they are dry, like a cat's tongue, scratchy, bristly, clammy.

I have one friend that pays particular attention to my manner of speaking, tells me to keep things lighter, simpler, be more real. My attempt to be professional comes across as too formal, particular, like a school secretary with large, circular spectacles on the tip of her nose and a big bow tied around her neck. All wrapped up, protected, shielded.

But she doesn't back away. She laughs and calls me "girl."
She watches me back into my shell, behind walls, and she makes sure she knows how to pick it apart so she can see in, pull my hair and shove a vegan cookie in.

I have another friend that is convinced I will go nowhere. She doesn't know I know she thinks that, but I know she does. She wants to keep her craft to herself. She doesn't like intruders. Does creative endeavor require a PhD?
What does creative friendship require?

"You're just sensitive. You have always just been so sensitive."
So i take personally when I try to keep my friends close and it seems like they just don't care. People ask me, "did you tell all your friends you were leaving?"
If they were my friends, would I have had to tell them I were leaving?
I told someone a story recently, a story about school. When we were young, all the girls who had birthdays would come to school and find their lockers had been decorated by their adoring friends. That never happened to me. The person I told that story to, laughed at me. I proceeded to tell that person that there were some years, my parents were in such various states of fighting or being so high, they forgot my birthday. That person laughed even harder.
But this is all in the past.

Neshama

"you were right when you said manic depression's a frustrating mess."--built to spill

"do you know how many times I walked in on my sister with a gun to her head, my mother in the garage with the car running?"--mom

and this is the reason i chose not to breed. If anyone should ask me why, this is certainly tops the list.

"you were right when you said/this is the end."

"the end"--the doors
the song my dad thought should be "our song" for the father/daughter dance to at my wedding.
thank god for those tribal mayan drummers.

and so i leave milwaukee on tuesday, a fucking mess. i leave sluggish and heavy, dry and cracked, wracked and unstable.

i leave with a pity ticket from my mother to colorado, a free roof over my head from my sister, a ride from the airport courtesy of my dad.

i leave the incessant hacking and tone-deaf shower singing of my downstairs neighbors and their howling dog and say goodbye to snow in my backyard that is currently up to my thigh.

and say another hello to brown foothills. hello, grey-brown dead mountains.
hello old friends. friends and family i can actually have a conversation with, unlike the inhabitants of the frozen tundra.
I just spent half an hour trying to cut a tumor out of my knee. I'm watching "True Lies" with a dirty razor in my hand, this thin razor shard that I freed from my little pink Daisy razor, this floppy little piece of cheap metal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a little tumor that keeps pulsating in my knee.
Did i think I could just lift it out like a cesarean baby?
that it would squirm to life on the tip of my finger?
I do wait for things like this to happen.
I wait for things to happen.
until they happen.
I begged g-d for a fucking sign.
it's been coming in the form of very lucid nightmares lately.
possibly assisted by the new supplement i've been taking.
"supplement."
barack obama actually came to me in a dream last night and whispered in my ear.
for the life of me i cannot remember what he whispered.
it could be the key to everything.
including why i woke up wanting to listen to Erasure.

the wheels on the bus

it's the first of february. superbowls, movie stars, black gold, texas T
groundhog, what will my fortune bring?
six more weeks living in the frozen tundra or a get out of jail free card with my name on it
pay to the order of:
me.
yes, it's still snowing. i swear this winter has gone on for centuries. the trees have been bare since the middle of october. the sun only shines when it's -20. the cats watch debris fall from the sky from their perch on the leaky windowsill, bat at imaginary snowflakes and inside, they laugh at the idiots outside, thinking that they have somewhere important to go in idiotland. errand-running, working, kids being transported to institutions of lower learning. even the kid in the wheelchair across the street has to have the twinkie pick him up. to go where?
school?
what does he learn there?
why does he learn at all?
"requirements: Bachelors in Human Resources or Education and 6 years experience."
hello, boring called. i took a message for you, you who work in HR and consistently choose the boring over the risk. that is why you work in HR, isn't it? so you can repeatedly not stray from your safe questions behind your big desk.
"what was a time you were challenged by a difficult situation?"
how about, every day when i actually wake up, have to hear another person chew their food and gulp their tea, have to listen to people whine and cry about everything just because i wear a name tag at work, have to face the fact that between two people, in 2007, our income was less than...
less than.
i'll leave it at that.
i've been counting down since i left colorado at the beginning of the month.
but where does the countdown get me.
space?
do i blast off when i hit "0" and spew my jet fuel onto the soft heads of humans watching below?
where does the rocket take me? to another institution? another waste of time waster a purgatory like waiting to go to work in the middle of the day a constant anticipation. now? is it time now? what time is it?
when the countdown has reached nothing, what then? do i put a new "ticker" on my proverbial page? think of something else to anticipate and obsess over?
6 days and counting till i get some oatmeal.
30 minutes before i feed the cats.
there is a descendents song i still have on my ipod. well, ok, i have a lot of descendents on my ipod still (loser), but it's called "get the time."
when will i get the time.
to write a little rhyme for you...just a couple few.
i have this random time.
time that doesn't amount to anything.
"when i get the guts, to live my life for me and do what i want to do"
it sounds adolescent.
but the truth is, most of us don't have the guts to live our lives for us.
and instead of thinking, "when xyz happens, i'll do abc, but i have to wait."
we spend our lives waiting for this. there's always the next thing. always the next thing.
like we put a safety catch on our whole lives
so that we don't have to prematurely ejaculate that bullet that will change everything.
because everything would change.
all the "tickers" on my page would say "you did it, now stop relying on a measuring tape to assess your life and go play with your friends."
while i wait for that ticker to reach the end of its cartoon life, though, i think i'll keep sending out my resume to people who don't give a shit and wait for rejection via email.
it's an excuse to keep writing.

rapid cycling on the recumbent bike

Passion Fury Intensity. makes me sound dangerous. Do you think I'm dangerous?

Hungry, skinned and aching. Four feet stumbling in snow and slush. Cold but colder yet inside. Amazed that there's a place to go. that there is a quieter moment to be had and this time not alone. Four long crooked feet walking in parallel. Afraid to turn around terrified to go further. Pieces of me fall off every block and I pack snow in the holes. My gleaming wings drag in the cold, neglected but impossible to sully. Exhaustion holds me in its maw like a mother fish, safe, numb, ignorant of the true dangers. Needing sleep, needing fire. Hoping for a few more moments of peace

value. what exactly is the value...the virtue. "And yet, what otherwise remains silent,
our happy energies show themselves in these dancing tears."

you bear...swarming swarming waiting buzzing silence in our ears...i picture perfect moments and they never exist...they never exist and what is most unattainable is the wake up in cold sweat reaching reaching for things that we once touched...things that we cannot touch...things that live in the times where we are most lonely...the times when we are lonely and afraid to touch those times when what is the value of those vengeful tears when there are others that harness your energy and hold it and cherish it--what is your dance? if i could hold on and feel it if i could hold parts of skin in my hands and close my eyes to feel the energy of sadness of happiness of tears of contentment of contempt...i would know better how to answer i pick the colors of your eyes i choose the colors of your soul from women who have seen humiliation in the form of submission...true lying submission black as the shoe shined boots spit shined and bent down i knit i knit your soul as true as the color of your eyes i found that color and i sifted the soft threads between my fingers searching for the solitude the heavy heavy isolated solitude thatpatience to endure the moments of resistance the momentous moments in time which we hurdle to feel energy that could never be reached never be tangible the times when wewearise to look upon new days only too early to face the darkness and look upon the farthest foggiest peak and realize it's dawn cold frozen decadent dawn afraid of the day with tears that descend into depths we sob into dead air surrounding the old night craving sleep again living through the hope of the days that taunt us and we live until the twilight the loneliness the cold beckoning of the absolute knowledge...darting eyes...if only touching from a distance were an option...forgive the nature...forgive the vengeance...forgive the darkness and the reasons because the need is greater than the suffocating silence the air in the room is so still the lock is not enough locked in locked into it all you are purity burned into pure clean fresh pink skin as we fall...

i'm exhausted and hesitant. i'm raw and open. nowhere to turn no where to turn...sleep eludes me...

Fixation

Tempestuous roads lead us to places we have already seen.
All knowledge is
known and the man in the room next to me is listening to Little
Earthquakes.
When you see on the page your thoughts already thought and
conclusions already concluded your ability to deny is cut to shreds. Like
grinding glass into a fine powder and mixing it into a protein shake.
Millions of lesions hemorrhaging in your intestines. where does one
find redemption sitting on a gym floor lusting for the anatomical marvel
squatting in front of you?

I only feel guilty when when I sleep.
The worst part
is when she talks about the difference between two
women making love and men and women making love.


"After all, if there is an explanation of the mystery it is this: The love
between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony. In love between a man
and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each
other, brutalize each other, or find anything to ridicule. They surrender
to sentimentality, mutual understanding, romanticism. Such love is death,
I'll admit."-Anais Nin

My nightmare last night entailed the moment when I sat in my closet of a room mourning the loss of a friend
and debating what I should do with the rest of my life.
I concluded that
because I am a coward and refuse to destroy myself that I would send out resumes to unsuspecting recipients.
Woke up fearing
that I have already lost.
Leave the self behind--How about those Packers, Bill--Did you read
about the latest Britney Spears saga?
I'd have to hide my copy of Kafka's Trial like the main character
in Fahrenheit 451. Don't discover I've been discovered by
everyone.
Exile is torture.

cat power and simplicity

She was passionate and brilliant. She defied convention and sparked the imagination. I miss the
poet, the writer, the one that mourned her love of horses. I miss her so.
Where did she go.
If she ever comes back then I will have found someone incredible.
All I did was want to talk to
her.
I didn't want to drown her.
She confided a lot in me and was the one
who insisted I come to her parties and sit next to her in class. I resisted
because I always know that when I let people in I risk being abandoned. I
knew it was a mistake to be honest with her about being locked up but I just
want to be honest
I never wanted anything from her but friendship
Why does she keep shouting at me. I am trying the best I can.
I have no one
You always take what I say out of context.
You're trying to stifle me with this idea of
healing.
You accuse me of stifling you.
Your healing process seems to be
about abandoning all the things we loved about each other
I can't go down
that road
on the road.
I've been there and its not healing its repression.
You can't get bored with your healing process and come
running to the crazy
to find all those things you love.
I feel
as though you say I love all of you and then you say you're crazy
and get the hell out of my life.
I thought you were crazy when we first met
I read Anais and she is crazy and I love
it.
There needs to be balance and Anais searched for it she
never found it but she searched and we have to accept that...I
hate weakness
Being dismissive and uncompassionate is the greatest form of weakness.
Can you accept me or are you going to dismiss
me.

I'm fucking terrified.

food network

"am i the one that had this life? did i have this life?"
i hear stories one after another tumble off of familiar tongues as i lean back against an unfamiliar wooden stool watching waitresses serving me strange wine and i sniff, slurp, attempt to make a half-educated comment about the flavor. the indescribable flavor of what has transpired in my absence.
"i'm sorry you didn't have a father."
i did have a shadowy man-form that crept around the house in the shape of a father, but never fully came into existence. it never fully formed a simultaneous affinity for real and surreal. it was absent and silent. it was a concoction of memories whipped into an unstable emulsion.
a hollandaise father.
at any moment it would break apart and burst into bits that tasted nothing like what Martha Stewart said it would. it would constantly have to be re-whipped with a delicate hand. then it would sit, momentarily following the rules, waiting for the plate it would dry and harden upon, to be scratched off with a chipped red nail or a rusty brillo pad into the scum-lined porcelain sink, further removed. dissolved.

"People are not evil. They are schlemiels"

The world is too connected. There is nothing new under the sun. I research only to find out my story has been written. Only to find out there are others. That I am not alone. How can we be so alone in a world where everyone shares our story?

How can we be so friendless and disconnected and depressed when we share the world with each other with no boundaries with no walls?

Were we alone before? When we lived in an agrarian society? On farms with our nearest neighbors being a mile away? When we lived in new suburbs, utopias on blocks full of kids our age, parents who worked, june and ward and our tv shows?

Were we as alone when we were on boats, like cattle, sick and wretched, dressed in rags waking to a new sun rising over the statue of liberty only to hide at the immigration desk changing our names so that no one knows we are a jew, an italian, a pole, a russian. Were we alone in our neighborhoods of people who spoke our languages, baked our breads, tailored our clothes, and praised our gods?

There are too many of us. The gene pool is widening. We know what we are missing. We see the other side of the earth in pictures that someone else has shot. We adapt stories that someone else has written. We are jealous and envious creatures, either settling for less than we are capable of or always wanting more than we can have.

We are alone. We no longer generate our own stories. We no longer own our pasts. They are the pasts of someone who has had a more interesting past. It is no longer acceptable to be what we are. We are expected to be more beautiful, thinner, smarter, more submissive, more dominant. We hide behind these screens and make up names for ourselves, names we wish we had. Nicknames that elude parents, identities that evade authority. Projections of id and ego online. Being dominated by our desires and by instant gratification.

The stores are open earlier, later, 24 hours, we work earlier, later, 24 hours. We are awake, news shows tell us how to sleep, we sleep, wake up to the news.

North east west south. News.

Our examples are bimbos, our role models are extremists. We let daughters play with hair dyed dolls but don’t let them dye their hair. Our role models are liars, cheats. Politicians. They are groomed and schooled. Our dyed hair does not fit into the tangled mass of ivy climbing the gothic stone entrance-ways of their universities.

We are alone unless we fit in. unless we fit in, we continue to grow and expand to prove a point. We grow in out of our clothes, devouring obstacles in our paths like jays potato chips can’t stop eatin’ em.

We consume and distend our bellies with what we were never nourished with.

We have not lain the groundwork for the hierarchy of needs.

Maslow never told us how. He just told us what we were missing.

We want and want and go go go.

We pick up and we lose people along the way. We lose each other. We lose our family, our friends, our gang, our pets, our elasticity.

Our ability to stretch and reach. Out.

Elastic. Connected. Tight and disconnected.

If we are so connected, why do we scream silently behind chandeliers of tears

Why can’t you hear me? You never listen.

We are all listening. Waiting for the next report. Waiting for the next msnbc story to fill our day. To make it real. It wouldn’t be a real day without a trauma. Something we can’t relate to, but something which we can shake our heads at and connect on some level with the person next to us with, something to talk about. This way, we are not so lonely. This way, we are not alone.

purple

i come from a family of angry. angry people. hurt people. everyone owes someone something. cynical people. suspicious people.
this i carry. it is not as easy as you might think. nor is it clear. it is a burden and a defense. a wall and a window.
i spend my short life soul-searching and introspecting. this is also not as easy as it was.
i have been browsing the "childfree" blogs lately. childfree, i am, yes. by choice, yes. it is my choice and i choose not to harbor any hate towards the competent women who choose to bring lives into the world. yes, breeders, yes i do harbor ill will towards the breeders. it seems that the CF bloggers are angry. i like to see it and it bothers me. i cannot figure out which my ambivalence pendulum swings toward more. many of the blogs are filled with misinformation and pure, spitting ire towards people with children, which really doesn't solve problems. i learned that lesson when i was still a child. name-calling like a politician makes you, well, sort of like an un-trustable politician. people look at you differently after you've said that thing. it doesn't relay your thoughts. it just spews an acidic spittle from between tense lips.
i listen to my dad. bitter, angry dad.
he is still my dad.
my mom says, "you know, he used to make me laugh. he was sarcastic in that jon stewart way and he was funny. now he's just...not funny...he's just angry"
and i listen to him through almost a tearful confession on the phone. on one of those dark nights, when he enters a house that is almost not even his, resembles nothing of what he puts into it, a skeleton, living like a college freshman, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner, sleeping on the couch, we talk about football.
my mom says, "i didn't know you liked football."
football. i live in Wisconsin. i believe they still hang you here for not liking the Packers.
i have to at least be conversational.
my choice. again, part of growing up. not having to always be opposed to everything. even kevin seconds plays basketball.
but so what. i choose to be childfree. i choose to eat pumpkin pie mix out of a can or cereal and horchata for dinner. i cannot imagine what it would be like to have to also share my pumpkin pie mix or my corn tortilla and bbq sauce.
and i see an entire generation of us that are not equipped to be parents.
i see us rebelling so hard against what we knew that we fell off the other end.
i see the usual. people breeding that should never breed. it is true. they will outnumber us. does dr. phil perpetuate this?
what about the networks that air the shows about families with "multiples" (i almost fainted thinking about having multiple mental "mini mes" running around.
the fact is, i hardly even think about it.
but i do wonder why the networks make those situations into these "cool" things.
would it be "cool" to have seventeen children?
do those children not lack the attention they should be given?
bulgaria. their birthrate is falling.
why? well, the women say there are no worthwhile men to marry and are choosing to take other female partners. gee, i. can't. imagine. why.
they, on average, when they do form bulgar-couples, only have one child.
they want that child to have everything.
and they do.
those shows are filled with "christians" who denounce pro-choice, but then spend thousands of dollars on unnatural (i.e. things god did not intend to happen) procedures.
i have a quizzical look on my face when i think about that.
there is something on CNN tonight called "what would jesus really do?"
good question.
maybe the jebus would start by saying, "hey, golden rule, folks."
maybe not.
maybe he would be star-struck by hollywood, marry an olsen twin, eat bread and produce some julia roberts movies.
i have a russian friend who says we have freedom.
i tell him to shut his pie hole.
he tells me we are spoiled.
i tell him i have worked since i was fourteen years old. i may not have not lived under communism. true.
sometimes i think our government is much more terrifying than any old Russia.
at least they admit it. they want people to know what they are capable of.
they still poison people they don't like.
we all do that, though.
poison what we don't like.
taint it until we are in the majority.
maybe "jc" would tell us all that high fructose corn syrup is bad for us. would we believe, then?
who do we believe more of,
dr. sanjay gupta? oprah? dr. oz?
i wonder if "jc" would be on CNN or BBC. would Wolf Blitzer or Jon Stewart interview him?
would he do parlor tricks on stage and open for Robin Williams at a comedy club?
would he get to host SNL?
i guess i'm thinking that "jc" is funny.
maybe he used to be funny, like my dad. but now he is just at a loss for how to pick up the pieces or for where the pieces even are.
shalom.

end

I am leaving. Finally able to say the words I want to say, see the sunlight I want to see, eat without judgment. I am sinking reverting and don’t want to drown. Don’t want to drown. My black cats are creeping slowly creeping. Judgments around me as I slowly creep back into mainstream routine. Mornings I stare out the wavy panes of plastic glass, pigeons dirty with splatterings like blood of flaky dirty snow from spinning tires and spewing mufflers. Bundled in my winter navy p-coat, blue and grey striped scarf, mittens that the cats have chewed in protest, hat stinking of oily unwashed winter hair, traipsing through mounds of icy mush, left over from the first violent storm, fluff left from the second. Hands shoved deep into my pockets, in a cold ball against my thigh, counting the arctic moments like breathless drowning.

grip on the midwest

the monkey suit devolves from suit and tie
into workout pants and sweatshirt
casual everyday
hawaiian shirt everyday
ridiculousness of sitting at this desk
staring at a dumbed-down version of me
through a computer screen
i have the smallest in the room
to my right is employer A
straight ahead is, well...B
judging all and every
staring out the windows
i forget that they are old women already
not looking as such
fat flakes of wet sleet
falling outside
flakes i must shovel
so they lose their magic
everything loses appeal when work must be applied

one leva

Solace was an hour away from my mountain-town, Razlog, on the death bus--plastic windows smeared with eye-sleep, sweat, oily face prints, and carbon monoxide, head off to Blagoevgrad--to Lacy and Jenn. They were now the only reason I changed out of my pajamas and left the house. Ironic that our togetherness was limited. We wanted badly to escape, but freedom meant isolation in the homeland. It meant airfare and cross-country travel. This was only one leva, this bus ride through the treacherous Pirin Mountains. So beautiful in the winter. Ethereal. Maybe it was simply death curling above my head in the form of cheap cigarette smoke, rotting-teeth breath, and a yellowing window shade plastered with a poster of a naked tween.

I would land at the bus station in Blagoevgrad, home to the American University. Fall off the bus in a haze of asphyxiation and begin the journey to Lacy’s apartment, running gear in tow. Our runs in Blagoevgrad were sometimes our only way out. Past the high-rises and the neighboring villages, past the dogs on chains, the chickens and goats, the burning air.

We’d return to the apartment and pretend like we had something novel to eat (which we didn’t, unless Jenn was there with baked goods)…something new to read besides old copies of “Runner’s World” and “US”. We lived vicariously through Britney and through the pages of magazines that reminded us of real parks without rabid dogs and trash fires.

Living in the Desert

Living in the Desert

Where do i start "the before"? Where does the recurring theme begin and end?

For our girl, it begins again and again at a dimly lit Chinese food restaurant in Colorado.

It's funny how breaking up with someone creates a feeling of nostalgia. Start to think about irrelevant occurrences. There was a yellow TC3 lingering at a gas station that I stared at apparently long enough for the attendant to question my behavior at the pump.

I was sure I pictured the three of us whizzing around in that TC3. My dad always had cars that were broken. The TC3, the Opal.

As I recall, he gave that TC3 up right around the time of the Dodge Minivan in the late 80s or so. Lee Iaccoca genius was the demise of many a proud family man, emasculated by the new station wagon.

Our minivan was grey-blue. I remember learning to drive in that ghetto machine, being very embarrassed if my friends saw me, and almost thankful that I was never allowed to actually drive it once I got my license. I think I even begged in front of my friends for integrity’s sake, and still was thankful not to have to tote my grimy lode of friends around in the family wagon and end up downtown at some random punk show or rave, piling bodies upon bodies, yet myself being the “responsible” driver home. The one everyone called when they wanted to be toted. No. Not me.

I guess lately I’ve not really been in a party person mood. I’d much rather have my ass parked on a barstool chatting it up than standing in someone’s stanky basement drinking stale beer out of a plastic cup waiting to see who I end up leaving said party with and regretting the next morning.

It wouldn’t matter anyway. I end up talking with Kick anyway, and he’s familiar with my breakup situation. He is, in fact, the best friend of the break-up-ee. He lives a few blocks away from me and I cannot resist. I couldn’t resist before. He doesn’t care.
He’s a fucking rock star and likes to eat, sleep and shit that. He lures me in with his fantastic post-punk creations. He knows we can talk each other to sleep, if even sleep comes at dawn. He lies in bed with me and is very fragile. He is soft and we listen to music all night. He has hair that I love to run my fingers through and he will wake up and smile, talk to me until i fall asleep. The wild hair, wild eyes. A fucking rock star. He even has rock star intestinal problems. Ulcers. He plays guitar and professes his hatred for it because it makes him cheap. Says anyone can play a guitar. Says the object of the breakup has no apparent musical ability or talent. Rock stars are brash and egotistical. This coming from a man who screams as he sings and makes love to his guitar in a wild flash of rage when the lights shine into his blue eyes. Gave up the classical piano for progressive new wave, gave it up for punk rock, gave it all up to own the world and owe no one nothing. You see up, you see down. You’re stuck in a glass elevator looking any which way without escape. You’re stuck in a time warp 3D puzzle that sucks you in with no option of out.

It’s important to choose your destiny wisely. Choice is like a caste. You make the wrong one and you are never able to penetrate any other layers--any other social barriers. You give yourself a name, a timeless age and name and this is all without consciousness all without. or is it? Is neutrality without a soul? Without an active participant?

How did I choose this? I came here—landed here by default, by blood and sweat and birth in an undisclosed location—sought out by my roommate, the queen of bureaucratic red tape cutting, and instantly, I was family. I just was. I was fresh and new to those who had not really met me. Those who never knew me. They can smell it miles away. They know where you were from and this solidifies or exempts you from acceptance.

These have been long nights. Arduous, labor-intensive nights. There was a grace period of experimentation until the decisions were made based on the choices.

There is the ultra sensitive boy who watches. He used to watch with more intensity, but now it is just a slice of what it was. I notice the difference. It changes because he knows he cannot commit. He can only tear at my heart with his raging fire soul.

steam room

i woke up and wondered whether i'd really woken up
swollen
fingers chewed
i tried to play it off like it was nothing
"just write a novel, people who write poetry die poor"
i hopped up on that treadmill, swinging my arms to
"hey girl hey boy"
here we go
sometimes i wish people could listen to the soundtrack in my head
while they read this trash
then they'd understand the constant undertone of techno madness, random glam and hair metal
that