Indecision

So much depends upon indecision
while
the wind winds my hair around my head
like a poor man’s crown
at once devastating and
forgotten

I lie
Tattered beyond recognition
Beside his bed
While the sky remains
Cobwebbed with night
Skittering across my life
And reminding me of his absence

He is tangled in my hair
Passing for a stranger in the car behind mine
Driving down Harlem at night

He is every white sports car I see
Found his way into my students faces
And ruined me

I no more want him inside me
Then he wanted what he put inside of me
But he is inextricably bound
To my indecision

I am to much bound to him
To much a part of his heart
To ever let him go

my secret:

I see every careful imperfection in his face
I know the hardest scars and darkest hollows of his heart.
I’ve blessed his anger, tasted his self-loathing.
I have run my finger across his pain and heeled it with my tears
For two years I cradled his child’s heart in mine
Tried to fuse his brokenness with my own
Painted him into myself
Allowed him to be my beautiful disaster
He knows my mean imperfections
Every saccharine corner of my heart
I’ve watched him look into my brokenness
To see himself reflected in my eyes
Despite everything
Despite brokenness and because of it
I would willingly pour
Myself out to fill him.
He cast me aside
Still, I would gladly give years
Of peaceful solitude for
One more
Tortured moment of his heart

solitude

When I was in high school I was hyper religious in an isolated sense. By the time I entered college, however, I was hyper employed and way too involved in my current relationship to have even muscle memory of my prior allegiances. That relationship was followed up, with literally no downtime, by another even less productive relationship. That relationship was punctuated by another brief relationship. When I returned to the prior relationship I was desperate for someone to hold my hand and my heart. I was seeking what I had lost by neglecting my spirituality and openly defying nearly every comforting aspect of it.

Now I am sitting at a hard surfaced table at Borders books surrounded by people nose deep in magazines and books, and I am wondering how much I have in common with each of them. I am relationship deprived in a way I have never felt before. I am without a significant other for the first time since I was licensed to legally drive a vehicle, and I am unsure how to proceed.

On one hand, I am terrified. I’m frightened of not having a body to hold and an ear with which to share my day. I am also frighteningly calm for having only recently become single with only slight input into the termination of the original coupling. I am reflecting on my new loneliness, but also on the loneliness I felt while still in a relationship that was falling to pieces even I scrabbled to paste it back together.

At the end of my mental scrambling, however, I feel an intense need to walk and reflect in solitude, and an equally strong need to be surrounded by God and people that love him. Oddly, I am uncomfortable with this declaration. I am at ease with my need for solitude, but uneasy with my need for relationships. I feel an almost desperate need to scramble for romantic involvement that I could no doubt find with relative ease. I am also hesitant to indulge this need because I do not wish to find myself, several months, or even years from now, in the same place, struggling to extract my heart from its entanglement in the arms of a man that no more wants it than the responsibilities that come with it. Even to say that out loud is crushing to my new fragility. I must say it however, out loud and frequently. I must repeat it to myself as frequently as I have dried tears in these last few days, and as frequently as I will regress in the next few days.

I anticipate these regressions, however, and I will fight them vigilantly. I am afraid that I will repeat past mistakes; that I will seek solace in the superficial comfort of coupling, or act out in an attempt to distance myself from my pain. In either case I will only be delaying the inevitable heartache. Right now I am determined to embrace the pain and work it out. Whatever that might look like.

What it was

I’ve been avoiding this. The thought of reflecting has been a little too much for the past few weeks. A lot has transpired, however. Ron and I broke up at the end of May. He broke me. Easily. I cried and drank, acted out, acted stupid. Fuck a few people over. Led a few people on. Drank some more.
At the end of all that, despite my intentions, all I had to show for it was a rip in my favorite jeans and a badly scarred heart.
All I wanted was to forget. All I wanted was to put him as far outside of myself as I could. All I ended up with was a piece of him growing inside of me that he didn't want.
Even now, having committed to reflection, I’m fighting it. I feel the tears forming at the backs of my eyes and breathe, blink and try not to go to deep.
I can’t do this right now. I was wrong, I’m not ready to look at myself yet.

I have always known that UPS presented a unique working environment, but in the last two weeks, it has amazed me with its strangeness. Let me tell you what i mean. Yesterday the entire irregular expediting operation ground to a halt over a failed threesome. In our presort today, a tiny piece metal in my nose garnered more attention than the 270 we hit as an outbound.
In the last three working days I have ripped the crotch out of my pants and worked an entire day without the support of an under wire without drawing the slightest bit of attention, however every time I bend over I have an audience. Yesterday the acting fulltimer in my outbound told me PPH means nothing, despite the fact that my PPH had a large role in putting me at number 1 for the southside and in keeping the rest of my slacker outbound at plan for the last 4 months.
UPS is a place where you can get hit on by male coworkers you've never met over the phone and propositioned by the same three guys you turned down yesterday in the same hour. It is a place that fires people for fraternization but boasts a large number of happy couples and an even larger number of fuck buddies. It is a place where you can flirt your way out of pretty much any situation, and flirt your way into a clean dock, but get fired for the same behavior.
And despite its idiosyncrasies, I'm not sure that I'll ever be ready to give it up.

On missing leaves.

I miss leaves.

At the present moment I am sitting at a comfy booth in the Corner Bakery in Orland reveling in the fact that I just laid the smack down on two out of my three final papers for the semester. Having completed these two papers I feel completely justified in doing a happy dance. Summer seems so much closer now that some of the weight of the Mariner's bird has been lifted from my neck.

Finals not withstanding, I'm done with school. Done. I'm excited for next semester and terrified, but the simple fact that I will no longer have to measure my life by semesters in less than a year feels so liberating.

fuck-ups.

I really really really really really really really really really hate my job.

I also hate Jean Paul Silva.

and I'm not too big a fan of my new fulltimers.

and I miss Malcolm.

I really miss Malcolm.

Nothing unusual, nothings changed, just a little older thats all.

I have spent a significant portion of my life ridiculing the type of women that read Cosmo for dating advice and spend copious hours obsessing over whether or not this or that current insignificant infatuation will ever reciprocate. Until recently, I was never one to be terribly concerned about the status of my relationship, nor was I the type to hypothesis about the activities of my significant other when they were not in my presence.

Two things have occurred in the recent past to change this.

I read in a book somewhere, I do not remember were, but I don’t suppose that is terribly significant at present, that in a relationship one person is always more in love than the other. Until recently I have never been on that ass end of that equation. I don’t know that I believe this quotation to be scripture true, but I do believe that it has applied to every relationship I’ve been in thus far. Both of my prior long term relationship placed me in the position of cherished goddess of sorts, allowing me to act pretty much as I pleased and get away with it, make nearly any demand and be accommodated, and have as much or as little access to their time as I might like. Suffice it to say, I am a bit of a relationship princess.

In my current relationship I have been relegated to the status of one who chases after, and I am neither accustomed to, nor appreciative of my role. Our ridiculous schedules, though relatively similar, do not allow for much face time, which leads to me inevitably vying for attention with his friends on the weekends, and perpetually self conscious of my actions when I am around him so as not to irritate, offend or otherwise disturb his disposition.

Since the reification of our relationship, my significant other has had an insatiable need to go ‘out’ to clubs/bars/house parties, and drink. While I do not oppose his alcoholic consumption, I do have certain misgivings regarding the situation that he places himself and, vicariously, me in. The club situation, from my limited experience in it, being more the type to read books and rollerblade than to participate in partially clothed group copulation, seems absurdly sexual. From what I have seen and heard of the culture, it places a large group of horny, drunk 20-somethings in a dark room with loud, sexually charged music with very few restrictions. While I do trust my significant other, I do not trust alcohol, women, or the combination of the two. From a moral, relational, or personal perspective, despite the fact that it has become culturally acceptable, I cannot accept my significant other putting his hands, or any other body part, on another woman, drunk, sober or otherwise. I am also not terribly at ease with him placing himself, again and again, in a situation designed to foster such an action.

Unfortunately, my opinion on the subject does not seem to be terribly significant.

So, I will go to work and do my job. I will come home and do my Shakespeare homework, and I will wake up in the morning and attend my biology lab. Then from Thursday night until Sunday when he returns, I will spend every unoccupied moment begging myself not to think about where he is or what he’s doing while he’s at Wesleyan. I will try not to wonder if the real reason that he has never invited me to go out with him, and patently refused to if pressed, is that he does not want me to bare witness to the goings on. I will spend Friday night out with anyone that will go out with me so that I am occupied until I am so exhausted that I will not be able to reflect before I sleep. I will spend all day Saturday writing papers, working out or cleaning compulsively to maintain my distraction until I can go out again and repeat the previous nights technique. Sunday I will pull on my Easter dress and paste on a smile and endure the questions of my extended family and offer the simplified truth when his absence is questioned. Then Sunday night when he returns I will beg his audience and sit in the straining silence for as long as I can stand it as a pauper at his side waiting for the scraps of his affection.

Somethings may change; but somethings, they stay the same, like time.

I passed the English content area test.
In the wake of this blessed miracle my life has begun to spin into and out of control at high velocity, and also in the same motion. This morning I was accosted by Dr. Jones my Shakespeare professor who informed me that the likelihood of ENG 380 being made a night class, and I would therefore be able to be able to take the class, was slim to none. What this means for me is that my academic fate would ostensibly being riding waves on limbo beach until the fall of 2011, the next time the class is offered.
Shortly after this abrupt information was foisted upon me I sought out Prof B-C, the man that evidently found humor in dangling my bachelors degree inches out of reach, to see what he had to say for himself. Our brief encounter spiral rapidly from a polite question and answer to an all out assault on my plan to teach and work in the same semester. B-C informed me that if I attempted to do so, even if I was working only 2 days a week, I would either be dead or in a mental institution by Halloween.
On the up side, he did provide a recommendation to the Education staff to place me in an Urban school. It was a decent little ego boost to hear a man whose teaching style I so envy inform me that he had reassured a skeptical secretary that I was more than capable of teaching in the city, and also that he “could not be more confident in my abilities.”
Go me.
I do hope he’s wrong about that whole dying thing.

Love me wide awake

I read a post secret postcard today that said, “I believe that the only way you can be happy is if I shut you out of my life.” I started crying before I could even completely process why. I am struggling right now to decide the course that my relationship should take. I feel neglected and alone a lot of the time. My boyfriend asked my permission to go out to lunch with a girl he works with that I know, and he knows I abhor a couple of days ago and last night a friend of mine told me that he has been going to her area every night after work to talk to her. This made my stomach hurt. I don’t know why its bothering me so much more than any of the rest of his female friends, but I honestly do not know what to do with this information. Outside of this, I see him only on the weekends, partly because of our busy schedules, but that isn’t the whole reason. As I pointed out to him when he asked me if he could go out to lunch with this girl, he doesn’t even go out to lunch with me. On the weekends, we bicker over stupid pointless things and it causes stress throughout or relationship, because he brings up our constant fighting over and over again. This weekend in particular, I spent the night at his house on Friday night, and everything was perfect. Saturday when I woke up he was watching TV and he informed me that he had to clean the house and that he was going to a bar that evening with friends. I was not invited, but that part was assumed, I’ve never been invited. Actually, I’ve never met any of his friends that I didn’t already know by any means other than coincidence. I spent two hours cleaning his kitchen in tears as I pondered the fact that the only time I had to spend with the man I love was now to be spent washing dishes that had been sitting on the counter for a week because spending time with me was not a high enough priority to cause him to clean up after himself once all week. After the house was clean, and he sensed that something was not right, we went to the mall to buy him a wallet and me a navel ring. The whole time we were at the mall and while we were eating everything was fine. The next day he text me and told me he had a midterm on Monday that he needed to study for that he forgot about. He expected me to be mad at him because I wouldn’t get to see him, but I wasn’t. I had a paper to work on, and I offered to meet him at Panera so that we could study together so that I could atleast see him for a while since I wouldn’t see him again for another week. He didn’t say anything at first, just acknowledged the offer and moved on, when asked directly if he was coming he said no. At this point I was on the verge of tears. I felt like he had no desire to see me at all. He tells me that he wants to marry me. At times he can be very affectionate, but a lot of the time I feel like I’m an extra in his life. The point at which my friend told me, not knowing that I was with him again, that he had asked this girl why she hadn’t asked him out since he obviously likes her, was the point at which I was no longer sure that I was expecting too much. I feel isolated and alone. He has no interest in my life. I write poetry, essays and short stories, have been published multiple times, and he’s never read anything I’ve written. We spend more time talking about how much we argue than we spend arguing, but he is convinced that we fight constantly. A typical argument for us is about what we should do with either party concerned that they might offend the other with their desired activity. This seems so insignificant to me, but it consumes him. He told me the other day that he wishes it could be like it was before. He wants to go back to his idealized hindsight of the first handful of dates we went on before we really knew each other well enough to fight about anything. This has created so much anxiety in me the last few days that I nearly choked Saturday from trying to keep him from knowing that I was crying in his kitchen. And Sunday, though I felt abandoned and unwanted, I tried desperately to hide this fact and cheerfully accept it when I was rebuked. I’ve been hesitant to call or text my own boyfriend for weeks because I don’t want to give him anymore reason to think we fight to much, and I don’t want to irritate him by talking to him too much. I love this man with all my heart, but I feel like he’ll never voluntarily do any of the things I need him to do in order that I would feel loved. I have been doing everything possible to avoid thinking about this for the last several weeks. I haven’t slept two nights in a row outside of his bed in weeks. I don’t know what to do. I need him, but this is hurting me right now.

Magic

An Excerpt from Magic by Colbie Caillat

All i see is your face
all i need is your touch
wake me up with your lips
come at me from up above

Oh baby i need you
to see me, the way i see you
lovely, wide awake in
the middle of my dreams

Happy Birthday

Today is my best friend's 22nd birthday. She will have been dead 3 dead years on March 28th of this year.
To start off this overly cheery day, I woke up at 7 o'clock this morning to a sky the color of socks that haven't been bleached in years after having slept a total of three hours. The sky was leaking as I dashed to my automobile. When I turned the key in the ignition, my darling means of transportation reminded me, again, that her oil needed desperately to be replaced, and that I forgot to turn down my radio last night. I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on my way to school as I do on any day I have to be awake before 8AM and was rewarded for my frigid patience with a 3/4 filled latte with entirely to high an espresso content.
In my 8AM Shakespeare class I learned that we have an exam on Friday that covers the three plays that I read, as well as the three plays that I did not read. After my 9AM western history class my professor took time out of his busy day to tell me that he had given me a C- on a perfectly good paper because I approached the subject with the mind of an English student and not that of a history student. Doctor Fry has known me for four years and is well aware of my major.
My lunch date ditched me, again, and then proceeded to whine at me through electronic means about her unsympathetic, and plainly uninterested boyfriend of 1 month and blithely overlook all attempts I made at giving her the sound guidance she was begging. In lew of actually eating lunch, I spent an hour playing tag with every US Cellular store on the south side of Chicago before finally resolving to pay for damage I did not inflict under the pretext of “physical damage.” After my joy ride, I spent 50 minutes furiously taking notes in Latin History before finally determining that I could not handle Biology and going home to take a power nap.
I dreamt about failing load quality for two hours and woke up with a headache.
Traffic was abhorrent all the way to Hodgkins. I, who am generally an hour early, was nearly late to work. As had been the case for the prior three work days, I was allotted 5 people to run a dock with a planned staffing of 7 while every other dock had 7 minimum.
I failed the shit out of load quality.
At 10 o’clock I found myself wrestling horribly loaded and generally missorted bulk off a coffin being pulled by a bulk driver so hung over from the previous evening he still reeked of tequila. I clocked out 10:15.
My boyfriend, who had requested my indecent presence in his bedroom that evening the night before did not return my call until I was half way home. Even then, before I could ask him if he wanted me to come over or not, he told me he would call me right back and proceeded to have another 30 minute conversation before doing so. By the time he did I was so irritated and emotionally retarded that I completely pissed him off, which in turn completely pissed me off because he immediately reverted to saying whatever he thought would get him out of the conversation the fastest. I know this game well and was neither fooled nor amused by my forcible recruitment. The conversation was ended after a bit of pointless parlance that served to neither sate my current desperate need for affection, nor abate either of our frustration.
After giving myself 30 minutes to breathe deeply I called him back to tell him I loved him and to sleep well and was greeted by a crabby and irritable “what”, informed that he just wanted to go to sleep, and parted by a an equally irritable “bye.”
So much for sleeping beside the only pulse in this world that can make me feel her absence any less.

Comfort

I intended to say something profound.

I thought if only I sat here long enough my mind would clear and something intelligible would eek out and I could know what I really meant. I did not take into account the terrible ability of time and tears to exhaust even the strongest will to profundity.

Lets go for a picnic.

Mimesis

Forgive me, I cannot write poetry, but I find it necessary to prove this to myself repetitively.

She haunts
Me
Like nitrogen

Light that nearly smells of her
Fell from the child’s eyes

As her unimpressive and
economical voice, pushing cracking,
Spun up
Toward the watered stained ceiling

My fingers, unwillingly,
Press into her arm

Looking down I see
The blood pricking up
From my fingernails

They tasted of metal
And salt
And regrettably tangible

And as I walked from the room,
Forsaking my shoes
and stood in the center
Of the courtyard adjacent
To stare blankly toward the sky

the scent of the grass
Robbed me:
the taste of her blood

"Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;." Baudelaire

This part of year is always complicated for me.
In 4 weeks time I’ll be sitting on the damp cold grass of Katie’s grave trying to bend my heart into the ground with empty words that can no more console my loss than bring her back. This thought, though it is constantly out of place in the steep velocity of my life, seeps in constantly. I dread it longingly. Something about the season struggling to change makes this moment more acute. She becomes the first tulip every spring.
Recompense is impossible, of course: the past is always irrevocably terminal, but the irreverence of the present is always shocking. Breathing almost feels like an affront to memory the last weeks before her death day.
This year, life’s failure to reflect feels more abrasive than it has in the past. Everyone is letting go. She’s slipping through the cracks. I can still hear her voice in the background of certain songs. I can still hear her reading Sunday Morning in a whispered voice that smelled like oranges. She still charges into my thoughts anytime I smell Happy or wheat grass, or see red polka dots.
I’m glad of her memory, but fragile in her absence. I don’t think I’ll read any more T.S. Elliot till April.
“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

Bitchassness

Last night at about 1AM I got a text from my ex. he would like to inform me that I am never to contact him again and wish me, and I quote, "A happy life with that fucking nigger." We've been broken up for 2 months, and yet this dude is evidently hacking my facebook in order to read my E-mail. My first thought, after i calmed myself down from blind rage to seething anger, was to ask why this grown man felt the need to read my email when we have been broken up for months. I can really only say it's over in one language, but I genuinely thought at the time that one was sufficient to convey the basic message.

I spent my entire childhood and a good portion of my early adulthood thwarting every effort my mother made at loving me. Yet some how, it wasn’t until she fell off her thrown that I gave her my heart. For what ever reason, I never let her have me, though she made me, until she proved to me that she was just as broken as I was.

To be perfectly accurate, my mother did not fall off of her thrown, she was pushed. In the earliest memories I hold of my own demonic mutiny, my mother is alone, in a dingy apartment, surrounded by the surging tide of her husband and her then two children. She had no buoy, no raft, no life guard. None held her above the water. And in this tumult, she held the heads of two small children, 2 and 4, above the tossing tide if often at the cost of her own breath. Even in the absurdity of our situation, she withstood the temptation to swim ashore. She held us up in a world bereft of climate control and garbage bags. In a world peopled with the sordid behavior and instability of my father.

In this strange environment she grew. From the childhood of 19 into the motherhood of 20 and even into the servitude of her 25 the isolation of 30 and the violence of 40. Through the escalation of every torment, through the spirited cousin of slavery, and on into harassment and betrayal.

Withstanding in grace.

She was convinced of her savior, harkened to his side and heartened by her one salvation. By some instilment of heavenly fortitude she subsisted on the repose of righteousness and crackers and ketchup. Feeding her children on the milk of her diligence and little else while protecting them from their fathers perpetual absence.

My mothers living motto was never to speak a harsh word about my father in front of her children. And she succeeded. Through his alcoholism, his verbal abuse, through his continual absence and neglect she bolstered the myth of him to both of her children, then to three, four, five and six.

She educated us beyond the scope of motherhood. She gave us a Father God where she could not provide us our father live. Through out our lives we never saw the truth of him. We never saw him either, but that was certainly his doing, not hers. And for 20 years, 19 years longer than anyone should have the strength too, she endured. Not only did she endure. She strove. She strove to provide her children with two parents in one, and to protect them from every conceivable harm. She also strove to fill her children with the wisdom she took from every page of scripture. She raised us with God as father, chancellor and judge. Love they neighbor and above all God.

Despite her struggle, I rebelled. Where I did not rebel against the spiritual father she created for me, I did rebel against her. Where I could resist her I did. Where I could not, I struggled toward bare compliance. I believe the most hurtful things I could do to my mother were to be mean to her children and resist her love. I mastered both. As a prodigy of wit and the progeny of my father I tormented my peaceful mother for 19 years in the meanest ways possible.

I argued every point of discipline, every bit of correction, every word of counsel she sought to bestow until her head swam with furthermores and howevers. From her position, high upon the thrown given her, I could see nothing she said clearly, though I thought it my mission to point to every flaw in argument as if the chastisement of a child was the appropriate time to impose the regulations of academic debate. To this end, I twisted and contorted every bit of gray matter my mother possessed until at some point she let go, no longer allowing me to impose my will upon her in the same vein as my father before me.

When she, at long long last, step from beneath my fathers thumb, and fell from her thrown, though I am not certain of the chain of events, she became real to me. The point at which she put foot to soil and dealt for the first time with the reality of her life and then with the reality of separation, she became my best and most loyal friend.

Although you could not tell it from the history of 20 years, my mother is the sun in my sky. Her grace and the consequence of her commitment to kindness are the only influence God could have given me to keep me from following the madness imbued in me through my father’s blood. Her guidance, though it was thoroughly resisted, has shaped every good part of me. She is my conscience. She is my protection from myself, and she is everything that keeps me from reverting to the selfishness and insanity I am made from.

Pro

The bible, the word of God, says that “All things work together for the good of those that love God”. I’ve wondered for the last three years what good came from Katie’s death. Was there some wisdom I missed being handed down from the clouds that, had I been looking up at the right time, would have changed my life?
In the interim, I have become a completely different person. I’m unsure whether this change can be attributed to the death of my friend, or simply to career changes and college life. I do know, if she had remained I would be less afraid of highway driving and believe a bit more strongly in providence, but whether the rest of my life would have been any different, I can’t say.
March 28th, 2006, my mother’s birthday, Katie drove her tiny red Oldsmobile into a semi. She had been 18 for three weeks. Her adulthood was fragile, then extinguished. They say she died on impact, her spine snapped in two. I pray to the God I no longer trust that she did not live to realize the scent of burning hair was coming from her own head. I pray she did not scream at the sight of her hands melting. I pray that she did not live to have her flesh burned off her bones.
That night, I will never forget. I had two papers to write for American lit. I think I was somewhere near the end of the second paper, and about three quarters of the way through a stuffed pepper burrito the size of a nerf ball. Jen Essick, a mutual friend from high school, sent me a message online asking if I heard anything about Katie. She directed me to blogs of those that already knew what had happened and asked me if I knew. I was clueless. I had been in a homework fog, disconnected from humanity, for hours. Clearly it was all a joke. The goodbyes and laments meant she was finally going to India. A broken leg, I was sure, explained the RIP PRO postings all over our little internet community. Jen wasn’t as optimistic as I. She called the Prosapios and asked what had happened. When she called me and said, very slowly, like she was talking to a small child, “Sammi, Katie died,” I had no idea what she meant.
About three minutes later, I regretted that greasy, cheese stuffed pepper burrito.
I sat, sobbing, in a muddle of memory and regret on my bedroom floor for about three hours. It still didn’t make sense. I had no idea why I was crying really, I didn’t hurt yet. I didn’t experience anything but profound emptiness. I felt nothing but an intense, unquenchable need for tears. My little sister came into my room, horrified to find me soaked in the wet of my grief and propped against the wall.
She called my mother, who was drunk enough at the time to deny the conversation to this day, to tell her that I was dying of dehydration on my bedroom floor. Jen arrived about twenty minutes later. Sweet girl that she is, she tried desperately to piece me together again. After about 30 minutes she was so stricken at the sight of my unraveling, she had to leave.
I’m unsure who called my boyfriend but in the swirl of those attempting to stem the flow of my tears with the urgency of those threaten by a crack in a powerful damn, he appeared. Although he did not run at the sight of my sorrow, I don’t know that I noticed his presence until he poured me into his car, all patches and spackle, and drove me to the visitation two days later.
The visitation was surreal. All of those faces, people I didn’t know had known her name, people who had treated her badly, whom she had prayed for when they hurt her, people that had been the cause of her self injury and medication, and people that had loved her as much as I did. Her parents, teachers, family, the newspaper staff, half our graduating class: they all showed up to mourn the loss of someone they never cared enough to understand. All of it made me angry. So many premeditatedly sad faces were packed into that room, dabbing the corners of their eyes and gazing at pictures of a person they didn’t know. She was all bubbles and polkadots, every one of them had felt her grace. Not one of them knew who she was. They didn’t know that her strength came from suicide attempts and working at being strong enough to step into the next room. They didn’t want to know that her grace came from loving God and justice so deeply that she donated the money for her prom dress to a fund to combat child prostitution in India. All they knew was her smile and her eccentric beauty.
The funeral was the most painful day of my life. I never saw her body. She had been incinerated, and the casket was mercifully closed. But when they lowered that little girl into the ground, the one I had tried so hard to protect, the part of me that she had helped to grow went with her. All the loving and forgiving, the caring and trusting God, was buried under six feet of dust and marked with a little marble stone. I know she’s disappointed in me for letting something so corporal defeat my spirit. But this is the price I pay to be when she is not. Whether voluntary or accidental, I offered my faith as a sacrifice to her grave marker that day, and fertilized the grass that covers her with the bone ash of forgiveness. And this is the difference. This is the change, the wisdom and the working together for good that I have been given.

there's still a little bit of your taste in my mouth

Last night, after the ill-conceived bet was made, I endeavor to sleep, but was for whatever reason drawn to the living room computer instead. On the desktop was a file entitled Sam’s stuff that my brother had rescued from the hard drive before he re-birthed it last summer. The file contained the fraught musings and emotional epithets of a barely functional and wholly isolated 18 and 19 year old me. Although most of what I found there was old poetry that I probably would deny writing if anyone cared to make the accusation, there were a few documents that actually managed to stir memories I had, until then, nearly relegated to the underside of my mattress.
I hold a dear friend of mine partly responsible for this trip down memory lane, since he reintroduced a desperate thirst for Damien Rice into my blood which inevitably leads me to recollection.
Damien rice is sort of a period piece in my life. Although I doubt that I will ever outgrow his voice, it is definitely a very particular soundtrack. Blowers Daughter brings me bodily to the sunflower laden bike path behind Richards that I accidently found that summer. That place was magical. A piece of utopia in the middle of suburbia. And of course, Volcano, although never one of my favorite Rice songs, reminds me of a night that I doubt I will ever forget.
All of this at 3AM, 5 hours before Shakespeare.
I reread the rambling anguish that I scribbled in gushing fragments after Katie’s death. The slightly more poised attempts I made to write in the observational style of Bukowski, and my best attempts to emulate Cummings. Each document made me feel more and more like the hesitant, terrified person that I was, what seems like an eternity ago.
It also made me realize that I am not that unlike that frightened child. I am thinner, more social, which really says almost nothing, but I am confident only superficially. I am self assured only in my worth as a sex object to a small percentage of the population. I still allow myself to be defined by the faulty perception of my edifice. I still gutturally sell myself for empty desire. I am still willing to ruin myself for something I want only theoretically so that I can feel valuable for a few fleeting minutes.
The only calculable difference I see is that now I can be more easily sold, and therefore must almost daily remind myself that consumption is irreversible.
I’m feeling very small today.

come sit on my wall

A friend sarcastically told me that I should have a blog yesterday because I have a lot to say. I laughed at him, and yet find myself the proud mother of a shiny new blog. It still has that new blog smell and everything. I'm not sure what the purpose of this blog is, or will be. I find it most likely, since I am completely ignorant of politics and current events, and have very few remarkable interests, that it will mostly consist of hapless ramblings pertaining to my unimpressive existence. For instance.
I made the stupidest bet a person can make today. After a brief bit of unsuccessful sex, which is really never a good way to preface a bet in which there will be any kind of monetary wager, my significant other began harassing me about my supposedly unquenchable libido. Given that it was actually the second time in 3 hours we had copulated I was really in no position to defend my delicacy, so instead I proudly boasted that I could outlast him any day.
Famous last words.
He immediately called my bluff, proposing a running weekly wager of ten dollars to be payed out by the person that is the first to crack.
Why, dear God, did my scrambling imagination find it in anyway a good or constructive idea to bet money on the dormancy of my overactive sex drive, and why would anyone with as excellent a record in monogamy as I have place themselves in a position where they are unable to procure nooky from the acceptable nooky source?
I am a tragic fool.