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
February 28, 2009
February 27, 2009
"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.”
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.”
February 26, 2009
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.
February 25, 2009
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.
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.
February 24, 2009
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.
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.
February 23, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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