Writing prompts
Story on the skin
18 May 2012 10:06 AM
I remember the days of skinned knees, the loping run over cracked sidewalk, the fall, the tears and then pain as a grownup cleaned up the wound and attacked it with stinging solutions, Bactine or hydrogen peroxide or mercurochrome. This is good for you, the grownup would say. You don't want to this to get infected, do you? Perhaps an East Coast child wears shorts more often than a Bay Area child, perhaps the boy is more a more careful runner than I was, but I don’t remember him ever skinning a knee. He rips out the knees in his pants instead, one fall, bend, and awkward leap at a time.
Skinning a knee. Writing it twice, three times, in rapid succession accentuates the skinning part of it, the removal of an outer layer. We looked at the rip in his pants, we looked at my knobby knees. I saw the old scar again, the one that was more of a novelty when I had fewer scars, the one that has lessened in importance. I probably got it on a Wilmington summer day, in pursuit of MA, or running away from her in anger, too quick, too quick, and then the stumble on the sidewalk and the insulted tears. It’s a messy scar, an oval of forgotten insult, but it doesn’t stand out much anymore. My memories of those years really have become sepia-toned, where everything happened because it couldn't happen any other way and I got through it so quit whining about that scrape, though, of course, I don’t want to minimize the importance of bodily integrity, of keeping the skin intact. Now hold still!
At the playground the boy performed as I watched. He poured sand over his feet and mine. He climbed up the sliding boards backwards and leapt off into the shade. I stayed on my island of bright, hot sand, soaking up the sun’s attention like a cat, letting the rays stroke my skin. When my eyes were closed, the boy wrote something in the sand and then erased it, telling me about it afterwards: Sometimes I like to be alone.
I get it. Sometimes I like to be alone, too. We talked about how this isn’t necessarily a common thing, how people often don’t get it and worry or feel sorry for the solitary, wonder what's wrong. He’d seen a book at school called Alone at Recess. On the cover was a picture of a sad child sitting by himself while the other kids played in groups. But he doesn’t feel that way when he is playing alone. He likes playing with other kids, too, but has no problem with solitude, with the life of the internal imagination, the scenarios played out without interference.
At the moment, the boy has no visible scars. I know they will come, both physical and emotional. No one grows up without a bit of scarring, without learning how to handle adversity and skinned knees and the judgment of others. Sometimes his parents will be the scarring culprits. Maybe the scars will be out of necessity, like the jagged lines around my husband’s shoulders from long-ago surgery.
Scars are how we recognize ourselves, a way of telling our stories, the little historical guidemaps on our hands, our knees, our faces. The boy will have stories without me, a narrative over which I have no control. I can only encourage him to glide along, to dig in when necessary, to cry if he is in pain, and to move forward and do the right thing. My job is to foster resilience in a world where solidity is an illusion, to show him how to revel in solitude, to appreciate being alone when you want to be no matter what other people may think.
Adapted from the prompt "the tenderest little smile of a scar."
Image by Ed Schipul
Comments
Gloriously f***ed up
16 May 2012 12:03 PM
In a long Facebook chat with an old friend last night, he said that life is ultimately fucked up. He then corrected himself: life is gloriously fucked up. Yes. There is a beauty to all of the complications of life, the ones I’ve been avoiding, the dusty corners with the cobwebs and behind the baseboards and wallboards there are circuitous electric lines and mouse dens, and pipes that climb to the second floor, the third floor, the attic with all of the things I’ve put away to make nice, the grumbling, growling boxes, the ones that deal with emotions and the complicated gains and losses of sex. The boxes contain parts of myself that have seemed inconvenient, perhaps dangerous, definitely put aside.
I’ve made some calculated leaps in my time. Transferring to a college in Washington, DC after a small town life, graduate school in Illinois, a job in Columbus, the rush back to Washington, DC, the short stint in cooking school. Now I’m taking another leap, another grad school leap, and I am excited and it’s a mystery what lies ahead except I think it will be good, a growth experience, an immersion in other people, a path to using my strengths to help others.
Gloriously fucked up. I’m thinking about it, about immersing myself in it again after hiding out for years. Hold it together, hold it together, and then BOOM, everything explodes, like one of those Christmas poppers with the confetti and the prize and the smell of gunpowder. There is no need to be afraid of the noise, to ask why I want it to break apart. I want to see the mystery inside.
***
I had a dream last night that I was sharing a single bed with a stranger. We had taken over an old dormitory, more like a mansion that had been converted into dorm rooms. I knew the place was haunted, wanted to cling to this man in fear under the false hope that he would protect me. Every time I shut a door – to our room, to the bathroom across the hall, to the rooms adjacent – the door would either resist my pushes or pop open again of its own volition. The man couldn't take my tossing and turning, my tugging and slamming. He threw off the covers and went to another bed in a different room. I pushed the door closed. It opened again. The doors in the hallway flapped open and shut, open and shut as I stood like a ghost in the hall.
Their eyes were upon me. They were watching me, not out of curiosity, but because they loved me and didn't want me to be alone. Show yourself, I thought. Stop playing games. But they could only do what they were capable of doing, pushing the breeze from window to door to hallway, reminding me that a shut door can open again, that it doesn't always take a tight hold to love.
It was close to morning when I finally gave up. I curled up on that single bed in an iron frame, shuddered slightly as the wind caressed my back, and fell into a dream within a dream of hands reaching out in the fog, always searching, never finding.
Props and love to rcb.
From the prompt "A big leap," barely edited. Dream added in an edit later in the day.
Image of me by me. No, I am not "gloriously fucked up." I just liked the ambiguity of the image.
Even under darkened storm clouds
12 May 2012 03:39 PM
Yesterday I sat in a room in San Francisco with my future classmates, all of us succesfully through the apparently rigorous process of getting into the university's graduate counseling program. We were there for orientation. I am happy that when I applied – it was the only program I applied to – I didn’t know they only accept 1 or 2 people for every five who send in applications. I admit, this makes me feel good about myself, to see that I’ve gotten through a gauntlet without even being aware of it. The fact that I have absolutely zero experience in the field means that I probably got in on the strength of my five-page essay and through the generous recommendations of my colleagues from the librarian days.
I took a chance writing that essay. I got personal. I felt like I had no choice. It was a measured sort of personal. Over four years of blogging and writing about my past, I have gotten used to telling my story. I've created enough distance between me and my early life to describe it calmly. Still, it was unsettling to know that these professors, these professionals, knew about the stillborn baby, the Little House, the way I was left to handle the aftermath on my own. But they also knew I have dealt with that primary story by shaping it into a narrative (as well as by going to therapy).
A personal approach is appropriate for this sort of graduate program. What happened to me and how I’ve dealt with it shows my strength, and part of my strength is self-reflection. But in that room with my future classmates, the professors alternately inspiring us and scaring the shit out of us (how will I be a present parent and an attentive student simultaneously, even doing the program in three years instead of two? Will finding traineeships be impossible?) – I wondered if they made a mistake.
I can no longer afford to think this way. I will take their confidence in me and what I know of my talents and go with it, open up, be the person I know I am and quit hiding it. I am up to the challenge. The same goes with connection. Instead of guarding myself against loss by courting anxiety and worry, I have starting accepting and letting things be, knowing – knowing – I am worth loving just for being who I am, that there is no discarding those we love, that I can stop being vigilant.
Open. Like a flower in the rain, a shaggy peony, complicated, multilayered, all of me out there to see, to love, and to be loved, to live fully, knowing everything is change, temporary, with a beauty even under darkened storm clouds.
Expanded from the prompt "garbage."
Image by Julie Weatherbee.
Return to the scene of the crime
05 May 2012 04:29 PM
And you know how music takes you back – to the time and place where you first heard it (there I am in Chesapeake City watching Maureen and her brother and sister at karate class, or we’re walking around barefooted on Canal Day, at fourteen-ish just old enough to start attracting the attention of creeps – I think the word we used was “scumbians”).
Or it takes you back to the concert you went to years ago. I saw the Cramps at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC on November 11, 1997 – thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I can even give you the opening lineup – Guitar Wolf (a Japanese band) and the Demolition Doll Rods (who were all scarily thin and androgynous and wore skimpy outfits; the only song I remember was, predictably, about Darby Crash, an icon of the punk OD). And while I wish I could tell you what the Cramps set was like, the only other thing I remember was someone in Guitar Wolf flinging a guitar pick into the crowd, which ricocheted off my then-husband’s head, leaving a mark.
I haven’t been posting prompts here lately. Sometimes it’s because they aren’t particularly blog-worthy (the problems with wolves from Yellowstone branching out and killing cows on nearby ranches, for example). Or they are slightly new takes on old themes.
Because the Cramps take me back to that pivotal time, when the switch turned for me, when I went from Duran Duran to the Dead Kennedys, from INXS to the Circle Jerks, from Wham! to the Cramps. I was alone and angry and the music fit my life, and so I sought out the albums in record stores in Pennsylvania and Delaware when I could, flipping through the bins, looking for the strangest, most bizarre band names or the ones I’d read about in those British magazines I’d pick up at the Smoke Shop along with my unfiltered clove cigarettes.
I remember when I returned to high school for sophomore year with my striped eye makeup, my safety pin earrings, and my asymmetrical haircut (and my Circle Jerks t-shirt nicely coordinated with a pair of red shorts), the school nurse, who was also the cheerleading coach, looked at me with sad eyes and said something that gave me the impression that the balance had been tipped and I was now immersed in some sort of teen thing, lost to the grownups. Lost and waiting to be found.
The band names are like brand names, shorthand for a certain time and a certain type of music, which brings to mind a certain kind of person. The pastels and espadrilles-wearing me of early high school would not have been pegged as a fan of Suicidal Tendencies or the Dead Kennedys and she wasn't.
There are other brand names from that time, identifiers, words that bring back entire evenings, entire eras, or parts of them at least, before the drinks kicked in. And this was part of the switch for me, too, when I went from good to bad, from pale pink to pitch black.
I don’t remember the first time I tasted beer, when I tossed off the goody-goody and embraced the bitterness, the smooth, cool feel of it on my throat, the floaty, everything will be ok quality of it after a bottle was gone, followed by the half a six-pack sob fests, the opening of the gates of emotion.
The boys I hung out with were men, the crowd liked their Budweisers and their Elephant beers, and in the china cabinet in my grandfather’s house there was a limited supply of Paul Mason wine and Johnny Walker Red. In the freezer at home, Mom kept the gin that kept Kevin going for those dinners and hot summer days that always concluded with gin and tonics and acid remarks. I pilfered gin for my weekend excursions to Maryland, pouring it into a jar on my way out the door. Sometimes the jars would leak, giving my overnight bag a medicinal smell.
Oh, the drinks of the past, the whiskey and cokes, the vinegary wine, the Captain Morgan, the Southern Comfort, the watery beer of mid-adolescence. On hot summer Chestertown nights, my college roommate and I wandered the brick sidewalks barefoot, our plastic cups filled with gin and tonic topped with healthy slices of lime and there were Tequila Thursday nights and winey Saturday afternoons.
Dark and Stormies. Black Russians. White Russians. Dirty Irishmen. Bass Ale. Long Island Iced Teas. Berghoff Bock. Red wine. Champagne. Drake’s IPA. Which brings us to the present.
It sounds like a love affair, doesn’t it? A love affair bound to go wrong at some point. I‘ve let these beverages prop me up, open me up, keep me interested. This isn’t the story of someone who has given it up, but rather someone recognizing the pattern, the ebb and flow, the tidal qualities of me and alcohol, my coping mechanism of choice. The soundtrack has largely changed, but the beer remains the same (although of a much higher quality).
So here we have the band names, the booze names, the long-ago switch within me. What gives, girlfriend? Why the punk rock, booze-filled nostalgia tour? I think it has something to do with the discovery of my mother's birth mother, the aha, the recognition that my mother's extremely ambivalent feelings about being a mother, largely a product of her feelings about being adopted, affected how she parented or didn’t parent. It saddens me that her ambivalence was so deep and I wonder if we had made contact with her birth mother earlier whether things would have been different for both of us.
OK. I was just about to give this a positive spin, something about how I am happy with who I am today and I wouldn’t be that person without the kind of upbringing I had. Fuck that. I can be happy with who I am today, I can love the mother I have today and the mother of yesterday, be grateful for the myriad good things she brought to my childhood, and still think that my abandonment was unnecessary and undeserved.
So there. A mixed ending, just like life in all its complicated forms.
Adapted from two prompts, "my epiphany," and "faster, faster"
Image of Lux Interior (RIP) and Poison Ivy of the Cramps, not at the 9:30 Club, by Diego's sideburns.
Corner of Dwight and San Pablo: a tryptich
02 May 2012 11:42 AM
She’s an obstacle, see? It’s her way or the highway. Her way or the no-way. She strikes the match against the box and holds it under the cigarette, but never inhales and the flame flickers out in the exhaust-laden breeze.
I fix her with a tight, joyless smile. It’s like she doesn’t even see me. Then I try the flirt technique, the hair flip, the lip lick, the fidgety fingers. She just leans against the light post, a small grin on her face, like I’ve gotten through to her, but only just, that I exist in some small way, like the shadow of a bird passing overhead.
I get it. She doesn’t need me to give her life. She’s got one, enough of one, apart from me. I’m the one who is disappearing. She takes me in like a puff of smoke, a long intake of air. She holds me in until I’m spent, the ideas pulled out of me, and then lets go of my remains and watches them float away.
Who’s using whom?
***
This was a nowhere sort of place, a place of nonexistence. In this world it was always night and the stars were out and I was on the edge, the very edge, right before it all happened. Sometimes you recognize that you were on the edge after you’ve leapt off or tripped up. You look back, look up, and there is the jagged cliff, the crumbling rock, the stones still skipping down from where your feet just were, and you wonder how you missed the precariousness of your position.
I kept trying to tell them that I'd lived there once, that this was a place in which I belonged. Nobody listened. The man leaned over and refilled my glass, brushing his hand against mine in the process.
I took a step. I waited to fall. I wanted to make the choice before somebody pushed me.
***
I feel my way along the papered walls of the dimly lit hallway, sensitive to the faint lines that delineate one sheet from the next. Or an amateur in a cheap but serviceable suit leads me to the room. I am a woman on assignment. I am a man following a series of hang-up phone calls to the source. Here there is darkness, my sight obscured, but the one I am going to see knows everything. His eyes cut through darkness, his hearing is acute.
I secure a thick rope to a tree and toss it to the bottom of the well. I carefully climb a ladder down into a tunnel. It’s just as dark there as in the borrowed room with the thick white curtains and it takes my eyes some time to adjust. I can barely make out the rough stone walls. I plunge my hand into the silence and touch the mossy coolness, smooth in some places, furred in others.
The well is a place to hide. The tunnel, a path within. Both lead me into someone else’s mind. I am not safe in this place.
I make my decision. I slowly climb up the ladder. I fight my way out of the stranger's hotel room. I take one step into the bright unknown. Things will never return to their “normal” state. There is no normal, just shifts in the earth, anomalies in the night sky, great green clouds stretched across a pale atmosphere.
The last section is adapted from the prompt "another world."
First image by Jeremy Brooks.
Second image by Liz Kasameyer.
Third image by SantiMB.
Grown up and gone
22 March 2012 10:59 AM
When I met T senior year of high school, he had just dyed his straight hair jet black. He lived with his mother and stepfather in a small townhouse on Brandywine Creek, the house cozy with big furniture, and his father was an academic at some university up north. We hung out on the school bus together, talking music, cracking jokes. He made me a Big Black and Hüsker Dü mix tape. He was the only friend I made in high school after the stillbirth, not that I talked about it with him or anyone else.
What I remember: going with him to that Mexican place downtown that would serve alcohol to anyone; watching After Hours at his house in the waspish den on a snow day; playing against him in the video game Street Fighter at the sub shop we went to after David Anderson’s funeral; the notes we passed back and forth in trigonometry class; the jokes we made about the kid I was babysitting, a sweet boy, son of my mother’s boyfriend Kevin, who always demonstrated baseball games (in excruciating detail) between the cats and dogs and would tell me that his cat, Rags, had something to say about me: “Jennifa, Wags says youwa bum!” Somewhere I still have a note that T wrote that on.
We met up once in Wilmington the summer after freshman year of college (or so) and it was awkward. After that we may have exchanged a letter or two, and that was that. He’s now a professor in a corporate-related field at a university in a conservative western state. Actually, I think he’s the department head, which is impressive enough from outside the world of academia, but also knowing what goes on behind the doors of academia. Go, T, go! I want to say, but also, Corporations? Cash flow, T? Really? The punk boy I knew has grown up and gone.
When I had my first Facebook account, after years of confessional blog writing, I wanted to track certain people down. I even wanted the people I barely knew in high school to know what had really happened to me in those terrible isolated years. I got my need to tell secrets out of my system, shut the Facebook account down, and began again in a smaller fashion, but I never befriended (or found) T. I still wonder about T, would love to run into him somewhere, have a cup of coffee, talk about our lives now and what was going on then. I don’t mind saying – here is where I was, still neglected, probably depressed, leaving one world of pain for several years of avoidance. Or maybe I just want to acknowledge the difficulty of my teenage years (and everyone else’s) with a phrase or two before making small talk about grownup life. And then let T disappear into the ether like the rest of them.
From a prompt "Someone you remember from high school," one that initially made me roll my eyes. Aren't I done with that high school shit?
Thank you for all of your encouragement and kind words about my recent fall into sadness. I've been looking ahead, to grad school (it will happen one way or another, and I'm also acting "as if" it will anyway -- thank you, Anne -) ), which helps enormously. Still waiting to find out what's going on with the boy, waiting for him to get sick in the next few days, waiting to see what the specialists say. Or maybe he won't get sick and this was just a bad year for fevers.
Image: My senior picture.
I got by on illusion
19 March 2012 01:45 PM
It was all images, all touch and love-flow, pure, without agenda. I slipped in through your open window, let the filmy curtains caress me as I reached for you. I was the faceless girl in your sleep. I was the girl behind you. I was the tree growing in front of your childhood home. I defended you to my friends. I laughed with you in the dark. I stared at you across a classroom. I hung out at your hangouts and one day you saw me and that was that.
Some days I felt the pain when you did, when everything was quiet and soft, the barriers forgotten. My imagination used up all my romance. I left none for the real world, but in my mind we laid naked, dripping with sweat on an unmade bed and you ran your hand up and down my slippery body as you kissed me again. It was better than candlelight and midnight serenades. I stored this moment for my long winter, for when my hair turned white and my gait slowed and my mind went wandering more and more, weaving in and out of the past and fantasy, until the truth no longer mattered.
I lived in a prison.
I was want. I was desire fulfilled. I was sex with no target, love with no home, my body no temple.
I did what I had to. I was as evasive as you, with a smokescreen of emotion, a pretense of no control. I gave up. I didn't give up. I was craftily foolish. I slept in the deep jungle of my imagination and you were there with me, safe and present, the thing I wished for and never got.
From a photo prompt -- though I changed this so much from the original that it is barely related.
Image: Sunday shadows on Strawberry Creek, by me.
Torn
17 March 2012 05:07 PM
If Marylou were walking around the block Friday morning with her greyhound and a cigarette, there’s one thing I can guarantee: that cigarette wouldn’t stay lit. One raindrop after another would extinguish its will to live, would blacken the burning ember. And that’s why I’m glad that I don’t smoke cigarettes in the rain. Too frustrating.
I could have walked the boy to school Friday, 1.2 miles in the rain, the 53-pound first grader shoved into a bike stroller built for two toddlers, me getting overheated, feeling humiliated. But today, for the first time since the mid-1990s, I drove a car without another adult in it. To his school. That this minor-seeming event is so huge is revealing, revealing of my driving phobia, the psychological significance of it, the way it is packed and heavy with the past. Maybe I can lighten the load one brief drive at a time.
Still, two hours after my drive, I left for an even longer walk to my therapist’s office (one route at a time, too, I tell myself). I got there soaked through, a little pride knocked off, ready to spill my guts and feeling so weak about it.
I no longer want to hate my weakness. Thursday night, walking the dog (sans cigarette) in the surprisingly dry air, I tried to hug my poor defenseless unsupported sixteen-year-old self, the one who was thrust into an adult situation too early, the one who decided to live within me in defiance of what was expected of her. This is not a metaphor I usually like to cling to, the inner child, the dusty versions of ourselves that we need to make peace with, but I have to say it rings true in this case (and perhaps others – there are more of me in here).
She thought she had escaped her reliance on adults and in many ways she had. She lived as an adult, with the boyfriend sleeping over. She had no real supervision. Made her own meals. Bought her own clothes. Drank like alcoholic. The problem was that she wasn’t an adult. But no one stepped in to help and she ground her weakness into herself, like pressing out the glowing ends of cigarettes into flesh to put them out, in the same spot sometimes, and later they only reminded her of her shame.
I don’t want to focus obsessively on her story, on my story. I know healing comes through action. And those hugs were genuine, felt real. I love that girl. But I feel guilty for being that girl. It’s like being torn between two worlds.
From the prompt "Marylou walks around her block with a greyhound and a cigarette." Yeah, sometimes I'm not all positive thinking. I'm a survivor trying to live like a normal human being (apologies for the melodrama; I blame . . . myself. :-) ) Written yesterday in the gloom of a rainy day.
Image of a rainy day in Portland by drburtoni.
The Tuesday when the rains came
13 March 2012 08:20 PM
When all else fails, when the sugary sticky bun and not quite enough sleep take your mind to a place of no concentration, you can always write about the sounds, the grey light falling through a dirty skylight, the feel of a down blanket on chilly thighs.
Less than three hours now. A walk to the school, a walk back pushing two boys jammed into a bike/jogging stroller meant for much smaller children, another change of clothes when we finally get here. Then, chaos. Do all first grade boys doff their clothing on play dates? (I'm guessing that's a no. I just take it as a sign that they both feel at home here.) Do I really have to play the role of the big bad grownup: “There will be no snacks until you put on some pants!”? Ah, the noise, the potential fights, the backdrop of personal history. Then at 5:30ish, one father will pick up his son and the other father will come home for dinner.
The transition, the interplay between what was and what wasn't and what could be and what could have been, and I don’t know which is which is what. The four of them are/were/weren't and I am talking in riddles. I apologize. Life is a continuous string of events, the fabric folded and unfolded and folded again. Today I protect my divided character with anger. She forces her way to the front of the crowd, through the nattering empathies and sympathies, past the sallow guilts and the shaking sadnesses, the serpentine shoulds, reminding me that she keeps us safe, that I am the one in control. I embrace her, one quick, tight hug before she disappears back into the group.
And the rain still doesn't stop.
From the prompt "Choose your spot."
Image by john curley.
The trick is to hope with(in) reason
12 March 2012 11:08 AM
I had a therapist who made hope sound hopeless, the kind of thing one clings to without evidence, or maybe it was the way I talked about it, hope without effort, hope in the face of reality. “I hope it doesn’t rain today,” is fine, unless storm clouds are hovering over your street. “I hope [he] will finally see, really see me,” is probably asking to be crushed, unless you give it a try, a risk, show yourself to [him] without agenda (not an easy task and not one that the 28-, the 35-, the 40-year old me could have done), and be willing to accept the negative possibilities. He may not be capable of clear vision.
Hope. I have seen how I push and build and protect, with the hope that someone will see the shining jewel buried in the muck of my heart, despite the barrier, despite the guard dogs at the perimeter. The hope was that anyone who cared enough, who caught the gleam of the real me, would push through my reluctance, would leap through the series of flaming hoops, arms ready to hold me at the end of his perilous journey. I’ve realized, however, that I have been making the decisions here, the decisions to either be safe (when safety is totally necessary) or to avoid intimacy (when I am already very safe). No one can come in without my permission and I already know how to keep myself intact without isolation. The perimeter is mine to dismantle, to pierce.
How do I explain my slow conversion, my change in perspective? I no longer want to speak in terms of hoping it will stick, hoping that I will not backpedal. Some things are permanent, or close enough. After an earthquake ricochets through the earth, even after slow seismic adjustments over decades, the land does not return to its former shape. The trees, the animals, the survivors, adapt. And in those moments after the quake, when the earth mourns its losses and the world is confused – there are stirrings of hope. Hope that good will come out of change, that new things will grow, that the structures in rubble were ready for jettisoning. We have to accept the death of the old, sometimes the death of what we loved, who we loved, in order to step into the future, hopeful with reason, clear-eyed and strong. No feathers necessary, just a belief in oneself.
From the prompt "Ever hopeful."
Image of "guerilla muralist" ELBOW-TOE's woodcut and acrylic paint on paper Brooklyn mural ("Icarus") by guy_on_the_streets.
Anger to action
11 March 2012 04:23 PM
Anger is an implement, a clean, gleaming knife, a scalpel that lets you cut to the heart of the matter, if you don’t turn it on yourself. I woke up angry this morning, I woke up angry yesterday morning, and part of me wants to direct the anger at the ones who deserve it (and they do, in some ways) and part of me knows directing it at them or myself is counterproductive. I want to take this raw material, this molten metal, and turn it into something useful, something that propels me forward.
My life, my mind, my psyche, are controlled by metaphor. If I change the metaphor, I change the way I see things, change my approach, or maybe it’s the very process of changing the metaphor that is a sign of what shifts within. Anger, the metal’s forge, the process of taking the unformed and making it into something useful . . . I don’t need a knife. I need a form of transportation, a gleaming board on wheels, a scooter, a pair of skates. And each of these images makes me think of childhood, of an adult riding on a kid’s toy. A kid’s form of freedom, the kind I didn’t take advantage of then and have very little desire to take advantage of now. I’m not skating away with my seventies knee pads and my terrycloth headband. Escape is not on the table.
Let's return to the knife, to the art of chopping, the creative process of cooking, of taking ingredients and transforming them into something else. With some exceptions, cooking hasn’t satisfied me for years. Very few things have, and yesterday I was trying to figure out the missing link, what makes things pleasurable, what has been drained out of my life.
Other people. Conversation. Art. The feeling that I can have these things again. That I ever deserved them. Other people . . . this is the need that I have been suppressing, that I have been pretending for years was not important. The cooking (the isolated years, the meals alone, the pull towards ingredients and the art of family, the way I have to learn and relearn what it means) – it truly is an activity of connection, and yet I am often alone in the kitchen, chopping, providing, attempting to get back the art when it feels like an obligation, a separation, and I cook for two (the third of us eats the most basic of foods, all carbs, cheese, carrots, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes, with the odd piece of seaweed tossed in for flavor).
Hmmm. The anger is tied to a few things. This is one of the joys of therapy, the simmering mind, the heat turned up just so slightly, and then the detective hunt for the source of the pain, for the obstacle, the force field that I have allowed keep me in place (am I being obscure? I apologize.). My needs? Other people. The process of learning how to be a mother and a human being simultaneously, the realization that having an outside life does not mean I will become a bad, distracted mother. The paralyzing fear of causing damage. Of going to the dark side. Anger. Anger. The knife that I take to the onions, the garlic, before I toss them into the shimmering oil, before I perform the alchemy that allows the flavors to mellow and blend.
From a prompt "Sunday morning." Can't say it has much to do with Sunday morning, except that I woke up angry on this particular Sunday.
Image: Me and the boy at the Berkeley Art Museum, today, taken by the husband (who didn't even know that I put art on my list of needs).
My life, my mind, my psyche, are controlled by metaphor. If I change the metaphor, I change the way I see things, change my approach, or maybe it’s the very process of changing the metaphor that is a sign of what shifts within. Anger, the metal’s forge, the process of taking the unformed and making it into something useful . . . I don’t need a knife. I need a form of transportation, a gleaming board on wheels, a scooter, a pair of skates. And each of these images makes me think of childhood, of an adult riding on a kid’s toy. A kid’s form of freedom, the kind I didn’t take advantage of then and have very little desire to take advantage of now. I’m not skating away with my seventies knee pads and my terrycloth headband. Escape is not on the table.
Let's return to the knife, to the art of chopping, the creative process of cooking, of taking ingredients and transforming them into something else. With some exceptions, cooking hasn’t satisfied me for years. Very few things have, and yesterday I was trying to figure out the missing link, what makes things pleasurable, what has been drained out of my life.
Hmmm. The anger is tied to a few things. This is one of the joys of therapy, the simmering mind, the heat turned up just so slightly, and then the detective hunt for the source of the pain, for the obstacle, the force field that I have allowed keep me in place (am I being obscure? I apologize.). My needs? Other people. The process of learning how to be a mother and a human being simultaneously, the realization that having an outside life does not mean I will become a bad, distracted mother. The paralyzing fear of causing damage. Of going to the dark side. Anger. Anger. The knife that I take to the onions, the garlic, before I toss them into the shimmering oil, before I perform the alchemy that allows the flavors to mellow and blend.
From a prompt "Sunday morning." Can't say it has much to do with Sunday morning, except that I woke up angry on this particular Sunday.
Image: Me and the boy at the Berkeley Art Museum, today, taken by the husband (who didn't even know that I put art on my list of needs).
Paradise tossed
09 March 2012 08:24 AM
You could say we were in Danger or that we pretended to be there, slumming on a dead-end street in Paradise, walling ourselves off from the rest of life, always with the tension, the threat of a bullet flying through the locked door. We knew a man tailed us every week. He left his outline against the brick walls of the apartment complex. His aura pulsated with anxiety through the door. We got off on it, imagined his ear pressed against the bland metal, one trembling sweaty hand on the knob, as he listened for the thing he was missing, what he wanted but could not have. Afterwards I stretched like a cat, my fingernails sharp as claws, my ass raised up for your stroke, for your admiration. I wished for the days of keyholes, for the bit of exposed skin, to the show the hidden truth of myself to the man, to show a stranger how I was vulnerable and out of reach and cruel.
Still, every time you left I wondered if our imaginary man, our phantom peeping Tom, was waiting for you in the hallway, with a garrote, with his bare, meaty hands, or with a frozen leg of lamb (a black joke, a nod to Roald Dahl, a laugh at the absurdity of the man's anonymous animosity. He didn’t even know our names.).
Danger is an exciting place. It quickens the pulse, brings blood to the cheeks. It is a fine aphrodisiac. Knowing that life is tenuous, in someone else’s hands and out of one's responsibility, frees you for living. I gave myself over, let whatever was going to happen, happen. You could say we were in Danger, but it was really I who was in Danger, and I knew it. If I could take those summer afternoons, our blind attempts at escape, and acknowledge what I knew but ignored – maybe the hours would have been worth it, something to savor in old age, to tell a friend in a barroom confessional: this is who I used to be. But on those afternoons that sometimes bled into night, I playacted. I walked the perimeter of reality. I pretended that we were authentic, stripped bare. I played us both. I turned against myself. I was not myself. I knew it.
What we had evaporated in an instant. Your needs were suddenly met elsewhere. My explosive hysteria consumed the all the oxygen, all the space between us, until neither of us could breathe or see the other clearly. Danger became Tenuous Obligation. But what vitriol you threw at me, your insults jagged with contempt and hatred! When a dirty fighter realizes he has no legs left, he aims low (Jennifer McDonald, in a New York Times book review). And then you were gone. I was left with my bargain against myself, my sell-out.
I've come to terms with it. Still. I recently let the wind free a loose board in my heart. The rainy day gloom splattered across the floor. Raindrops darkened the concrete. You flew in on a bleak gust, dripping with what might have been regret. Dry-eyed, I held you briefly before waving you out and nailing the board back into place.
Paradise looks lush from a bus window, the fronds of the palm trees sway in the breeze, but it really is a walled-off world, a series of strip malls and plastic greenery. The food is deep-fat fried and comes at the expense of the animals, at the price of their misery. Paradise is thin-walled apartments and walls creeping with mold, the television and radio blaring to stave off loneliness. Fantasy is the city that glitters in the distance, a two-dimensional dream world. Danger was where I spent one frantic summer, with you but not with you, as we eluded Pain and Fear.
From the prompt "In danger," heavily reworked. I liked the idea of being in a place called Danger. Or Paradise. There is a bus to Paradise, but I know nothing about the destination. This all comes from my head, not from any actual knowledge. And then there is the etymology of paradise, which basically meant to build a wall around (that's my rough summary), an appropriate meaning for this bit of fiction.
Image of a bus in Malta (cropped by me) by Neil Howard.
Nothing compared with the power of the sun
06 March 2012 11:07 AM
Saturday I sat on a crumbling plaque in Live Oak Park. The bridged creek was in front of me. Underneath the bridge, the boy and his father sat, dragons in Dragon Castle. To my right was a grove of swoopy trees, limbs strong and flexible, each tree reaching out for another. These were the sensual live oaks, ladies all of them, grounded, sure of themselves, sure of their connection.
There are moments when I am simply happy, content, and so many of them are when I am one with the wind, the night sky, the trees. Nature wipes away doubt, it is pure experience and beauty, and even if the connection makes me cry, makes my heart ache with the temporary nature of life, the moment is as clear and heavy as a quartz crystal in my hand. I go back to being six, nine, twelve, when the trees and I whispered to each other. I thrust myself into the future, too, picturing the shrunken, cotton-haired me sitting in a chair in the midst of all of this, in my decline but still able to appreciate the feeling of the sun filtered through leaf and branch, the ruffle of wind through my sensible short cut.
When I walked the dog that night, I looked up at the clear sky, the bright pinpoints of Jupiter and Venus, the constellations and the moon. I thought of their continued existence, before me, after me, without me. The thing that feels so strong – my self, my personality, my being – is more contingent than fire and stone. Its individual quality is fleeting, the things I am attached to heartbreakingly temporary. It’s not always a comforting thought, my someday absence, the world and universe existing without me, but last night I let it wash over me, let it reassure me that my pains are nothing compared with the power of the sun.
From a photo prompt of a curvy portion of a tree.
Hipstamatic image of the trees to my right at Live Oak Park.
With immense tenderness
04 March 2012 07:01 AM
In the vision, you hold my face with immense tenderness. And then the other versions of ourselves fly across the screen. Once we passed walking in opposite directions on a mountain trail, each lost in the path ahead. The only sign of our connection was the slight heartache at the end of that day, the shared loneliness of what was but remained unrealized. For one horrible span, a short life in harsh times, you were not on this plane. I existed alone. But you were all around me, in the air, in the sunlight. You were the brick hearth that caught my final collapse one summer evening as I reached for your hand.
Monday, late afternoon, I was doing the usual mundane things that bind each moment to the next, sweeping the front steps, thinking about the cigarette I wouldn’t have and the drink that I would, when I glanced up to see myself walk by. I dropped the broom and ran to the gate just fast enough to watch the she of me, solid as stone, fluid as water, crossing the street. She walked with purpose. I knew she was going to meet you, whomever you are now. I did not call her back. I let the idea of me go to the idea of you, two Platonic forms, the shadows on the wall of the cave.
But I waste myself on idealism, the notion that human beings arrive at this point unsullied. The lives add up. Life adds up. I no longer know what is real and what is warped by pain, memory, and bleakly hopeful expectation. We are regal. We are inevitable. We overlap and twist and strangle. The layers of it happen simultaneously. If I could reach through striated time I would tap each version of you on the shoulder and show myself as I am at this layer, battered, a cynical romantic, a sensual anti-sensualist who so wants to believe the lie, wants to surrender to emotions that could be reflections of illusions on the hope of feeling the real thing.
Can you see how I’ve trapped myself, this body prison I’ve chosen? How much is under my control? Why have I let life press me down? The idea is to shake it up, to lighten the darkness, to swish the sediment in the creek and watch it wash away and settle, to let go and see the beauty while releasing my expectations.
Lord. I don’t even know what I am writing or why I am writing it. All I can say is Friday night in a womb-warm peaceful attic in a backyard house on MLK, I talked to an intuitive. I listened, too, accepted this netherworld of image and color and chakra and loosening of energy. She handed me visions and metaphors and a certainty in uncertainty, in my control, in my grounded being. I left feeling the energy bounce from the earth to me to all those I love and have loved. I saw how deluded and self-protective we can be and I wanted to erase it, to take you all in and tell you it would be ok.
It’s easy to do this in a cave. It’s easy to do it in metaphor, to see the hidden you, beautiful but so tight against the sides of your being. I want you to flower. I want to feel the energy flow, to see the tight bud unfurl. I have my own blockage, the slow steps through grasping muck that I am making towards whom I need to be.
When we clung together in the cabin you showed me your life. You traced your bruises and hidden scars and I revealed my vulnerability, held your hand and ran it along the whip-seared path from my neck to tailbone. We have forgotten the trust that bound us. We recognize the other, see the familiar outline, feel the knowledge of the other appear from nowhere, but have been unable to sweep the rest of life from our vision.
Let us erase the marks left upon us by the misguided and blind, by our own confusion. Let us free our souls up for love, put our opened hands up to the sky. I am crazy for the visions of what once was, deluded by overlapping time, hopeful for the future. The ending is not yet written, the connection not yet betrayed, and yet my soul has freed itself from expectation. What will be will be.
Inspired in part by a visit to an intuitive counselor and by the prompt "Stick to your guns." I don't know what I think of it all, but I had to write it.
Image by bricolage 108.
I selected this post to be featured on Personal Blogs. Please visit the site and vote for my blog!
What disappears
29 February 2012 05:56 PM
Familiarity is comforting, people knowing the little things about you, the drink you like, your favorite table in a restaurant. Virtual strangers learn your daily routine, know your habits. They ask after you when you're gone. It’s like being known intimately, or just enough to feel like you exist, like you really exist.
I’ve been wanting to tell you about Gene. Remember Gene? He lived on the corner of Myrtle and Camelia in that white spic-and-span house. Never any lights on in that house, but you could see him in the dining room sometimes, staring out. Mainly, though, he’d be outside listening to Motown, working on his car, shooting the shit with the neighbors. A friendly man. I hadn’t see him for a while, wondered what he was up to. Yesterday, on my way home, I saw the notices plastered to various telephone poles. There was Gene, not quite smiling, in black and white. Below his picture was an announcement for an informal memorial service in his honor, this Saturday, on his lawn. Lit candles and flowers adorned his front steps. His curtains were all closed.
Do you think I should go?
I can't find a single person I know who remembers Gene, but nobody walks the neighborhood like I do. Walking is all that I do. The rest of the neighbors are strangers, a friendly hello from a porch, the waft of pot smoke floating over a privacy fence, the party that ends right before I want to call the cops. The people that knew him don’t know me and the people that know me didn't know him. I find myself desperate to talk to somebody who would remember Gene. Like you.
There are a lot of things I’d like to talk about with you. I want to know about the people at work and whether your mother finally left that lout. I wonder how Rex III is and whether you put up that painting or put it out in the trash. Do you tell our jokes to other people? Do you think about me, remember my small habits, the mundane details, the minutiae? I want to talk about familiar times, the routine of our lives that is slowly slipping from memory, lost to history like so much of life. It was so important while it was happening. I lived those days, my emotions tossed and turned. It is all lost now, the feelings shadows and my actions pantomimes.
I don’t know how Gene died. I don’t know anyone else who remembers him. And so I think about him tonight, commit him to memory knowing that a part of him lives in me and dies when I do and as I sit here nursing my drink, I picture you a year ago town, legs crossed, hair pulled back, enjoying a glass of wine in the sun as I sat beside you.
From the totally unrelated prompt, "The sweater."
Based on a real Gene, a neighbor who died last week, a friendly man. The only person I know who remembers him is my mother, who lives thousands of miles away, but also walks a lot when she visits and pays attention.
Image by David Sawyer.
Alive by rights
27 February 2012 01:14 PM
Then we moved to California, to a house with a yard and enough sun and I found myself flummoxed by the weather, by the snap of broken expectations, by the continuing thread of intense parenthood. I keep on trying and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don't and the constant watering tires me in this land where nothing ever dies so I stop watering and watch the green harden to lifeless mottled stalk.
The conversation between me and the earth, the soft green that leads to glossy leaf and delicate frond, has been stilting, erratic, and intermittent. I need to press my bare feet into the ground, put my ear against the dormant garden. I must listen hard, let the joy of being alive, of fostering growth, fill me again.
Here is the surprising shift: what do I do without drama, without the distraction of easy intensity, the thing that pulls me from my real tasks? I sometimes focus on the sun instead of what the sun feeds. I tether myself to fantasy, break my brittle hopes against its compelling illusions. I avoid deep connection, let my roots grow shallow and exposed in sandy soil. I've spent most of my adult life avoiding the heartbreak of getting it wrong or of making mistakes as I learn how to do it right. I have confused my mistakes with myself, have mixed up my bad deeds with who I am.
I want to end every post these days with an affirmation -- of my rights to exist, to have needs and to enforce them. I do this as a reminder, but also for the novelty, to admire the filagreed beauty of the feeling. My existence is a fine, good thing. Expressing my needs is not a risk. It is being authentic, showing the truth of me. I have spent much of my life hiding out, worried about the moment when everyone would know my game, know the truth about me. I have let this feeling of ugliness keep me from taking risks and giving myself fully. This is a disconnecting, lonely world to occupy. It's kept me from digging deep into life, from soaking up the sunlight and setting out great heavy blooms.
Yesterday we bought soil, compost, seeds, and plants. I emptied pots, mixed the old dirt with the new, and the boy and I plunked seeds and greens into rich blackness. This week I will look at the back yard again, so wild and inappropriate, as neglected as I've let myself become, and imagine how it can be coaxed into beauty and comfort. Dirt burrowed under my nails, face smudged and dusty, I will sing out the heartbreaking mix of joy and sadness, the proof that I am alive by rights.
From the prompt "What they're saying."
The phantom in two parts
25 February 2012 06:42 AM
I have no siblings. I am an only child. I never wanted a sibling, never dreamed of bouncing a baby brother or sister on a pudgy knee. Sometimes I tortured friends' siblings, which perhaps was a kind of want, a desire for shared DNA and parental experience, someone to cling to when there was no one else, but I think it was more about getting a reaction, provoking a response. Even now, comfortably plunked into life, well past the age of dependency, I do not regret my only child status. If there had been another he or a she or more than one, the competition for love and affection would have been brutal. Someone would have ended up hurt, more deeply hurt than I was on my own.
My not-siblings are ghosts on either side of me. They multiply, slowly filling the room as I type, looking at me with eyes that have never been hooked up to the real thing, have never seen true light but only the special kind of brightness that is the combination of all the energy of those who have ever lived. Or never lived, or lived barely long enough to grow from a fat bundle of just-differentiated cells into something that thrives and kicks and grabs.
Even when I picture them in this room, the kids who never existed, they are versions of myself, silent and staring, like something I buried in a hexed cemetery (shades of Stephen King) returned to life. Their eyes are dead, their limbs sluggish and while they have very few intentions, are simple creatures, I sense that they want to take something from me, take what little bit of enthusiasm I have, the soupçon of talent. They want to rob me from me. They are jealous of my corporeality.
See? Even my fantasy siblings want to steal, rob, plunder. We are in competition even now, me against the phantoms of my imagination. I’m winning the race, but someday I will join them. I will be an idea, a fading memory, a mote of light in the great river of brightness. Still, I will have been a veteran of the big game, of the struggle with meaning and self and how to treat others. I’ve been lucky, blessed with senses and emotions, with hands that can truly grasp and tear and punch, with a mind that takes me to a room filled with ghosts of ghosts, and a heart that feels in spite of itself.
The air in the cottage midwinter was still. It crackled as it caught my breath and suspended the exhale in place before letting go. My first winter in the Little House was episodic, occasional weekends of escape from my mother and her absence, and the cottage was entirely unheated. I slept under three layers of blankets, got dressed under the covers, and in the morning broke the thin layer of ice on the glass of Coke on the bedside table, holding off on my trip to the main house to use the bathroom for as long as possible.
Later, when I lived there, I trucked in warmth, two electric heaters in addition to one fueled by kerosene. I slept to their sunburst glow, to the on/off hum of electricity and the hum-rush sound of the flame reanimating. Winter smelled like kerosene fumes and burning ozone. With my sleeping boyfriend D's arms wrapped around me, I watched the long slow golden flicker of the kerosene flame, content in that feeling of safety I chased for so long, a feeling that always came with the undercurrent of inherent badness and the risk of getting caught.
The space obsessed me. I drew up diagrams, measured furniture, drew schematics with various configurations of bed, bureau, desk, and chest. When I returned the week after the birth/death, I went into a frenzy of rearrangement, remaking, and forgetting.
This is the ghost movie of the past. The furniture rises and flips in the air before finding its new home. It does it again and again until the months and years of control of space are blurred with movement. The fading me paces back and forth, she jerks her body to the music, angry waves that buffer her, her aura of noise, when it slows, quiets to silence. She cries, but the tears float before they can fall; the air consumes them. Her still solid hand holds a glass of whiskey and Coke and as she drains the drink the wall opposite with its clippings and jokes becomes visible through her pellucid torso. The kerosene flames flicker with violent intention before burning out. D sleeps beside her, cradles her small form. They shrink. They shrivel. They dry up until they are nothing, not even a rustle under covers. They simply don't exist.
This is what I "got away with." But I know my rights: I did exist. I do exist. I am solid. Real. I will no longer pretend otherwise.
From the prompts "My siblings" and "New information." I edited the penultimate paragraph on 2/26 because the sentences felt too abrupt. Maybe they still do, but the words flow more freely now.
Images: I've been at this blog so long that I am inevitably recycling images. This top one is me, 1986-ish (oh, so very long ago) doing something stupid with a safety pin and my arm -- was I drawing the anarchy symbol? Writing Chaos UK (a band I had heard of, but never actually listened to)? D documented my half-assed attempt at hurting myself. That's "Gail" next to me. The other is a photo of one of my Little House walls. I wish I had taken more pictures of that place.
In rewriting the second prompt, or going over it again (and again), I remembered a note D left for me one night when he came into the Little House when I was asleep. It didn't make sense to put it in this post, but I have scanned it and you can look at a (redacted) version here. I miss that kind of simple love (though ultimately it wasn't simple at all; still, it was first). Really, I don't know what I miss about it. Maybe it was his simplicity and my naive hope, the fights that cleared the air, the basic feeling of being 17, free, in love, and fresh from the cut. Plus, the big bad grownup D sounds like such a kid, which he was, even at barely 22.
Insensate
23 February 2012 01:26 PM
I imagined her in a long wooden box, dressed in blue, wearing the diamond band my grandfather gave her at some unknown, perhaps happy time in their marriage. It was the band that gave me the most trouble -- why waste diamonds on a corpse? Why leave her with a false symbol of a businesslike union? Her flesh would wither away, her skin would break down, and there that ring would be, uselessly encircling one bony finger. Maybe a family member would filch it at the funeral, lean over the casket and yank it off her formaldehyde-plumped hand. Anyway, it was a piece of her, and I wanted it to stay.
Our families stashed my cousin and me at the Poe’s place down the road for the funeral's duration. The wake, at my grandfather's house, was cacophonous with family and memory, with smoke and coffee and tears. I moved through the crowd in a daze. The only thing I remember clearly is my cousin crying after an uncle pulled out her loose tooth. It was a high-pitched offended sound, the only thorough expression of sadness or pain I heard that day.
The grownups had an immediately problem to solve -- what to do about my grandfather. He couldn't drive at the time. He needed a special gas pedal and brake arrangement that would allow him to use his left foot, his "good" foot -- that is, his only foot, since the right one had been amputated in the late 1960s. Because his hearing was shot, he also needed a modified phone with a special volume dial and a switch to flash a table lamp when it rang. Essentially, he needed to learn how to live on his own, but that would take time. Someone had to move in with him.
The decision might have been made over one of the dozens of games of Spit my aunt, mother and I played the week my grandmother died. Or on the day she died, when my grandfather and I ate fish sticks at another neighbor's, waiting for news that I already knew. Or it was made when I was asleep or pretending to be, tossing on my mattress in our one-bedroom apartment while my mother paced between kitchen and living room, phone receiver pressed between her ear and shoulder. I use the passive voice because that's how we've always told this story. One minute my mother and I were living the good life in student housing at the University of Delaware, the next we were gasping for air in the den of cigarettes, mildew, and sawdust. The decision was made for us and she went along, obedient and compliant, her unemployed boyfriend coming along for the ride.
I remember very little of the transition, the packing up, the saying goodbye to my school friends in the muddy slush of early March. Suddenly it is spring and I'm staring out an open school bus window, breathing in the rich smell of freshly fertilized fields. I am wearing that dress my grandmother made me the year before, though it barely fits. I spent most of the prior school year living with my grandparents and going to the local school so the kids are familiar, but I like to sit here by myself, watching the fields and woods blur by.
I cauterized my losses, both of my grandmother and of my mother's attentive presence. My mourning never found a home. And I learned a little more about self-sufficiency and the small, closed worlds of adults, about how to turn inward and never rely emotionally on anyone but myself. It's one of the lessons I am trying so hard to unlearn now.
From today's prompt "At the funeral," which seemed appropriate because today is the 33rd anniversary of my grandmother's death. I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about what her death meant for me and it came up in therapy today, too. Feeling more at peace with it now, like I understand the puzzle pieces. This post is highly modified from the original. I hope I didn't write the life out of it. So to speak.
Image of my grandmother from 1934, taken somewhere in Delaware, I presume. I have very few pictures of her and have used this one before.
Vivisection
18 February 2012 12:46 PM
One by one, I had popped the buttons on my virginal pajama top (the pattern of pink roses on flannel, my good intentions and pure thoughts at the moment of purchase, my freshly laundered white cotton underwear, my trim, rounded nails, the perfection of thought and form). I had stroked my belly, soft and firm, before reaching in. The matron told me I held the power here, that as I reached past skin I would feel a light burning sensation, more heat than pain. She didn’t tell me that it would be both pleasurable and familiar, a reunion of sorts, me meeting me.
As I palpitate my organs, my hand damp with internality, I search for the hard diamond core, the little treasure within. I stroke the liver, caress a larded curve of kidney, tug on a rope of artery, my eyes closed, but everything visible, a mind movie of what glimmers under the skin. Before I checked in, I poured over glossy pages of anatomy, placed each transparency, each system, in its place over and over again in the heavy book, but now that I am on the inside I know the territory implicitly. I love my body for its efficiency, for the way it has served me through abuse and worship. It purrs at my attention, at the healing power of touch. I lean back against the pillow and run my index finger along a hard rib as I make my way to a spongy, rhythmic lung.
My purpose forgotten, all I want to do now is explore. What is it like to feel a heart as it pumps, to feel the power of life, my power? Must I contort myself to reach it? Can I pull my hand out (the mourning for what it is leaving behind) and press it through a thin gap in my ribs? And then, as I am lost in the texture of life, I feel it, a hard, multifaceted object, the ostensible point of this exploration. I pull it out and drop it with a ting on the metal tray on my bedside table, and, with a pang of regret, of instant nostalgia, I feel my abdomen close up, and my hand lose its power to go beyond the surface.
From today's prompt "Describe the treasure (or the treasure hunt)."
Image by jabenaki.
There's got to be a morning after
15 February 2012 06:00 AM
The box was small. Pink. Glossy. It was tied with a white satin ribbon, a spray of fake miniature roses at the knot. All the girls in the office were gathering round it, cooing and oohing and jabbing Marianne in the ribs, sometimes with more force than necessary. Open it! Open it!
She held it with both hands. It was surprisingly heavy. When she moved it gently from side to side, whatever was in there moved in a solid moist fashion. There was no note. It just appeared on her desk, was waiting for her when she returned from lunch. Surely it was from Peter, though things were a little early for a glossy pink box to appear, for the jewelry or the, she didn’t know, specially prepared muffin? The box was heavy enough for that. In that case, it was a joke and everyone was gathered round to see her humiliation.
Marianne had no choice. She carefully removed the ribbon, put the spray of roses to the side, lifted the lid with trembling fingers, pushed apart the pale pink tissue paper. The women gathered closer, they pushed into each other to get a better look. Whatever it was, it was dark. It took up most of the box. Marianne plucked at the plastic covering the gift, attempted to pull it out, and gave out a scream.
It was a heart, too small to be human (she thought). The plastic clung to it like something from the butcher’s counter. It exuded a slight heat, as if it had been ripped from an unsuspecting mammal’s chest only moments before.
From the prompt "I was already on the second floor when I heard about the box."
Something short and sweet for your post-VD blues. The last time I wrote a Valentine's Day story, I killed off a (fictional) chihuahua. Maybe I have issues with the holiday.
Image by ktvyeow.
The thing I get away with
10 February 2012 06:30 AM
Lord knows the moon's motives, why it hides in the lake, holds its breath all day while above our turgid bodies tread and dance, push and kick. I swim over it at midday when sunshine outshines waterlogged moon glow, but as dusk hits the lake town like a thud the patch of water lights up from below. I sit in my Adirondack chair surrounded by the other tourists, the droolers and yellers, the drunks and the toddlers, the mamas and papas and cold-hearted stepparents. We watch the moon slowly ascend. This is how I learn that the moon isn’t just a ball or a flat disc, a scrap of fingernail. It’s got arms and legs, it pushes itself from the lake floor and hitches its fingers around something – a low-hanging cloud, the wooden raft that looms over it during the day, the rope that delineates the swimming area from the rest of the lake – and pulls itself up before flinging itself into the sky.
The folks around me know the drill. I watch them surreptitiously, their blank stares, their gappy grins. The stink of the day hangs over us, lake slime and struggle. My shoulder aches from his blows and the scratches on my neck and thighs sting. I smile a small smile thinking of where he is now, no longer a threat to me or anyone else and turn to the pale-bodied woman next to me, raising my whiskey-tinted water in salute, a toast to survival of the fittest.
From the prompt “I watch the full moon pull itself from the blue water.” I finally pull some fiction from my brain, a bit of dark whimsey before another day of hanging out with the sick kid begins.
Image by gravity-grave.
Changing spaces
06 February 2012 09:42 AM
One stall, of course, with a toilet that was constantly clogged, that you hovered over while letting loose, closing your eyes in relief. If you were lucky, your friend came up with you and could guard the door, which never latched properly, or perhaps you would make friends with someone behind you in line who would be your sentry or maybe you were so drunk that it didn’t matter anymore. You were so drunk you might sit on that stained toilet seat.
Yes, (dc) space was the place. You ran into Peter there once, from Chestertown to Silver Spring to Washington, DC, a bike messenger in the city (now a cross country ski pro in a faraway place). You met the bassist from the Thangs there, leaned on him after their set and danced to the twanging sounds of the band that played after them. That relationship is truly blurry. You don't remember how it ended, you were drinking so much and everything was so dark and maybe you were depressed even then, or dealing with delayed grief and self-hatred. Maybe that was just how it had to be with you, isolated, wanting, covering everything over with alcohol and ill-advised sex.
One of salient questions in that first visit with the new therapist two weeks ago: has this pattern of isolation been in place for a long time? You thought, remembered cold empty rooms and the strangely barren college years (yes, you had friends, close ones, but they didn't know everything; you didn't reach out), the oddness of graduate school, the times in the early years when you almost broke down from grief and loneliness, from the feeling of having no footing, nothing within you or without to hold onto. Even in the busiest years in DC, you so stable and professional, with the job and the occasional dinners out with friends: yes. This has been you since fifteen, keeping close, holding yourself safe.
Yes. dc space, where your roommates left you one night, you drunk and belligerent and insisting you were fine. On the prowl, in search of something, someone. The boys, the men, the lying down and standing up, the going along. The desperate searching. The turning away from that life, an act of will and of choice, to something flattened and grey but safe. The way you've kept it grey, as if that were the only option.
You are learning that it doesn't have to be that way. You are not destined for this aloneness. You have a shining core.You are true and real, damaged as we all are, but not cruel. You deserve to be in the world.
So you write about it to understand it, you capture the past and see the rambling narrative, to let it go, let it loose. Of course these feelings are not all of you. But you will not deny them, for denial gives them strength. You write and you feel it and give yourself footing before you turn to something else.
Image of a toilet at dc space by Dot and Charles Steck.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with this. For some reason, the stairs and bathroom of dc space came to mind last night, that long-gone world. Today dc space is a Starbucks, all light-filled and caffeinated.
Cognitive dissonance
25 January 2012 10:32 AM
I play with the edge and no one even knows that I’m doing it. You may think you’ve got me pegged, but you’re wrong. My soft exterior belies my second carapace, the protective armor I developed over time to keep my integrity, my authenticity. Where my heart used to be, there is fire, my hands and feet are ice, and my mind is calm and cool and driven by anger layered under years of self-control.
I love children and animals and kind men, but I have a soft spot for the rebels, the ones who must be free. I look at them and I see what I want for myself, an open life, a fluid carapace that falls away when needed, a life only controlled when necessary. They ride the edge without resentment, take on stray dogs and people in need of a schooling. I watch them from my window on their motorcycles, with their tattoos or piercings or pointy shoes. I watch them and feel my carapace start to dissolve, with lust, want, desire – or maybe I’m just making plans for my future.
Three things most people don’t know about me:
That I learned how to shoot a shotgun in sixth grade
Where the fiction ends and the truth begins in my writing
The true content of my innermost thoughts
From the prompt "Allow me to introduce myself," which is always the first prompt of the Round Robin (including telling three things that most people don't know about me). This is the first time I went for something outside of the standard. Very lightly edited.
I really wanted to write more today, to take some time to craft something, but I am working on very little sleep and the stuff I am coming up with is so dark and filled with loathing that I don't think it belongs here or anywhere. I have to accept that today will not be productive for writing and acknowledge that when I am this tired, moments of levity are hard to come by.
Image by bábo gábo.
The undammed
14 January 2012 07:03 AM
Last winter there was a drought, and the winter before that, and for all I know, next winter will be dry as well, arid with clear, deceptive days. At night, the stars will be so crisp, bright, twinkling that I might be able to grab one, to feel its hotness in my dead palm. There is a beauty in dryness, a sparse beauty. The plants turn in on themselves. They conserve energy and let go of their weaker parts, drop leaf and kill off useless branch. Under the ground, their roots reach for hidden water, and the sunlight just soaks into them, burning away the frivolous.
Some people would divert this creek, would send the water rolling into a reservoir, pump it into a water tower, would mete it out over rainless nights and days on scraggly fields of wheat and soybeans. They would dip into it slowly, drink it drop by rationed drop. Or maybe they wouldn’t save it for themselves, but for others, the ones who depend on them, while inside things dry up and their organs rattle and rasp against each other.
I refuse to do it. At night, I walk to the damp edge where the dirt threatens to crumble under my feet. I kneel with cupped hands and wash the day off my face, listen to the power of it. I know the dangers, the way it might pull me under or drag me to a new place, a town where I am a stranger. I know that this rush may be temporary and that by letting it flow I am taking my chances for next year.
I am not afraid.
From an old Round Robin prompt, "Push it." The funny thing is that is hasn't rained here in quite a while. Last winter was much more water-filled. And do people really divert water from creeks? No matter. This was fun to write.
Image by Joe Plocki.
Desire's filament
20 December 2011 05:52 AM
Desire requires distance, the gap, two separate beings looking to conquer, to discover. The smaller the gap, the more desire is likely to be choked out by the soft supple hands of familiarity, blundering in their closeness, not knowing their strength, the damage they can do when they wrap themselves around desire’s surprisingly slender neck.
Keep him at arm’s length until you can’t stand it anymore. Flirt across subway cars, in cubicles with rectangular desks and masses of electronics between the two of you, letting the images develop in your mind. Get too close on elevators, at parties, and then let the distance roll out, a filament of connection, of want, of the never-extinguished, until you meet as embodied souls, or souls embodied, electric and tangible.
Try to extinguish it. Try your best. Savor the marks left behind, the way your scents intermingle, as you sit on the subway, hair tousled, shirt askew. You are going away, going away, you dash from the scene, revel in your singularity, the apartment, the old couch, the plants that have followed you since college. The familiar. A place to sink back and sleep and ponder him, across town, ensconced in his separate life. Deliciously unknown. Maybe unknowable.
You don’t know whether it will happen again. You’re not sure what you think of the whole business. You run your hands through your still-tousled hair and flashes of the moment of two bodies meeting run through your mind.
The conflagration begins. The dance starts, the filament unscrolls and lengthens. You want to tug on it, to wake him from his sleep with thoughts of you, with want, of the immortality of the chase.
Everything comes to an end. Desire burns out. Death extinguishes life. Savor the moments when desire rises up. Let it remind you that you are still here, with a strong heart and impatient lips.
A new take on the prompt "My mouth." I've been feeling a need to write lately, but haven't wanted to go where my mind goes naturally (does anyone really need to read about how to sit with loneliness? or, really, do I need to focus on sitting with loneliness when the act of writing about it makes it more like "obsessing about loneliness" or "wallowing in loneliness"?). Hence the return to old prompts.
I had a practically uninterrupted night of sleep last night for the first time in months, though I woke up at 4:59 a.m. in the middle of a dream about statues coming to life and the fight against evil.
Image by Vivian Chen.
Playing with the edge
19 December 2011 05:16 AM
Or maybe your version of simplicity is the quick flip of lovers, the chase of the rush, the projection of qualities and values, the disappointment and regular rethink.
In my experience, love is not simple. Affection is not a given. There are complicated paths that fork through heavy jungle. There are walks in the dark, in the thick fog, and you are holding the hand of someone, it is warm, tangible, and you are comforted just knowing they are there, next to you in the great unknown.
If given the chance, I would become addicted to complication, to the murkier, ambiguous path, circuitous, up and down mountain passes, discovering the other, their depths and peaks, and the mundane would be replaced with discovery, surprise. This isn’t about constant excitement. It’s about challenge, about being prodded out of myself.
When I was younger, straight from a childhood of too much (instability, fighting, excitement) and not enough (attention, stability, unconditional love), I wanted a life on solid ground, an unmoving life on a plain where each summer the wheat would emerge, go from green to brown, and be mown over again, where the winters were cold and predictable and the springs fresh with expected growth. I’d come from a land of earthquakes, over-fertilized with drama. I wanted seismic stability and English gardens.
The life I have is straight and plumb. It’s paths of gravel crisscrossing fields of daisies and sunflowers. It’s maple groves where the trees and I confer from bare-boned winter to the conflagration of leaves in autumn. It’s apple orchards with flashes of pink blossoms that lead to the sacrifice of fruit for cider and pies. In short, it’s sweet and predictable with occasional bursts of seasonal color.
The things we cover over have a way of emerging over time, of showing themselves. Beyond the gravel path there lies an old-growth forest. At dusk the foxes yip and play along the border between the two worlds, chasing rabbits and mice.They kill because it is in their nature. I’ve taken to hanging out at the edge of that forest on nights when the moon hangs low. The clash interests me, I like to watch the chase, though I turn my head at the moment when tooth meets fur, right before the death shake.
That forest is alive with animal sounds, trilling birds in the early morning hours, the crunch of leaves as the white-tailed deer emerge from hidden groves arched over with briars. The foxes, the deer, the owls whose hoots break the midnight silence, they all rely on the play between forest and clearing, on what is covered over and what is exposed. They need it wild and cultivated.
The (overextended) metaphor has gone beyond love. We expect too much of it, too much of the people we choose, to make up for the rest of our lives, to cover our wounds over with kisses and absolute acceptance and knowledge of our motives and needs, to be what we need when we need it, even if what we need is out of their purview. If I want to explore the forest at night, to hold a flashlight against the thick growth with a trembling hand, it is up to me to do it. I don't need to do it alone. But I do need to decide on a path.
From the November 30th prompt "An addiction," cleaned up and expanded.
Image by Nick Kenrick (ZedZap).
In anticipation of breathing freely
13 December 2011 06:00 AM
The boy loves Christmas. He loves the tree. He is interested in the story, too, the original one, about the son of the God we don’t really believe in. In fact, he recently said he likes Christmas better than Halloween because of the religious story behind it. We’ve got lights strung all over the house, bits of celebratory brightness, and he would eat every meal on the rug in front of the tree, pausing occasionally to climb up on a stepstool to get a closer look at the ornaments up top, if we’d let him. The topic of presents hasn’t come up much with him, though of course I know he’ll enjoy that, too, the only grandchild, the prince, the once and future king, feted at every opportunity.
My therapist warned me against smoking as a stress-buster. I promised my husband last spring (when I bought the pack during a time of huge emotional stress) that I wouldn’t smoke any more. I wasn’t lying, exactly, I just didn’t anticipate the need, the urge, months after the fact. I don’t think this is a permanent habit. It’s a telling one, however, a return to a misshapen coping mechanism, like punk music played at earsplitting levels and other adolescent forms of rebellion.
Talk of where our next Christmas tree would go started last January. This was an important topic, a vital one, and we had a family confab before buying this year’s tree, an attempt to avoid last December’s little boy meltdown when we put the tree in a different spot than years previous. But he’s a different boy now, a bit more flexible, a bit more agreeable. The tree is in a new spot, sparkling in the corner by the fireplace.
Maybe my urge to smoke is telling me I have to go back in time to confront certain things. I have to relive the past (in new ways; what a clever subconscious I have) in order to climb up on its remains and shake my fist at it before pumping that fist in the air, victorious, breathing freely, my fingers garlic- and mint-scented, the stink of tobacco and its byproducts long washed away. My grandmother smoked. My grandfather smoked. My friends used to smoke. The point is to figure out what the act of smoking means to me, outside of self-destruction. I do it alone. I hide the evidence. On the days when I am less hazy or stuck, I can barely draw in one poisonous breath, and sometimes, after I have unloaded whatever it is that is bothering me, I take out the pack, reach for a cigarette, and change my mind. So maybe it’s about the suppression of something important.
The tree is in front of me, the lights still on. The boy, my responsibility, my cuddly creature, the one I love unconditionally, is at school. I hear the washing machine, the grumble of a car going down our street, the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. Asher the gray loaf of a cat is snoring lightly beside me and the dog is curled up in her bed. I have not yet washed my hands, so I still smell the past on me, the scent of smoking courts and high school and winter nights without gloves. It’s my roommate letting the smoke trail out of her window. It’s the way I used to smell after hitting the bars back when people could smoke in bars. It’s the smell of my sickness, of my inaction, the temporary stay.
In ten days, our family will start arriving for the holiday. Somehow I will have gifts, small tokens. I will prepare the cioppino, refill the drinks, smile and be polite when I need to be. We’re providing the kid with a Christmas story, with memories of family, with the illusory feeling of permanence that is so necessary in childhood.
And I won’t light a single cigarette. I won’t be able to. I won’t be alone. My mind, however, will be turning, turning, turning on itself, trying to figure out answers to questions it doesn't fully understand.
Wrote this yesterday for last night's writing group, from the prompt "Holidays." I was exhausted and emotionally spent, but so glad I went. Thank you, ladies. And thank you to rcb, for being there and for gently pushing me to actually talk instead of volleying messages back and forth or IMing.
My therapist has broken her leg. She's ok, but will be out of commission for a while. Unfortunately, this happened in the midst of opening something extremely painful (and related to abandonment). I feel like I pried open a box that I shouldn't have and now I have to deal with what popped out of it. Hence yesterday's emotional exhaustion.
From a prompt for my writing group: "Holidays."
Image by strollerdos.
The way in
12 December 2011 05:20 AM
Once you’re in, forget the rest of the world. It’s you and the words and whatever story you’re telling and even if it’s a shitty first draft, if you can lose yourself in it, if you can feel the flow, then something about it will be good, true, authentic, real. Don’t think too much (I write after pausing for a few seconds to think). Sometimes it won’t work out, sometimes what you first come up with will just be the kernel of what you are going for, but who can resist the feeling of being totally there, completely immersed, going for something more solid, more revealing, than reality itself?
I’m no good at fiction. Or the kind of fiction I write is in brief spurts, nothing extended (I don’t count the “novel” I wrote during nanowrimo a couple of years ago). What I mainly write is “fact” filtered through my mind and packed with metaphor. It’s true, it’s a story and some of it really never happened, or what really happened, what I really thought, was so long ago that it has become a fiction itself. What ends up mattering are the remains, the ideas, the impressions that other people left upon me, gathered up in my mind and associated with other times and with stories I’ve read and with the long walks in the middle of the night along tarry roads.
And there are stories I return to again and again, even in the brief fictional pieces I occasionally write. The themes are large – grief, guilt, desire and one’s attempts to stamp it out. My main characters are conflicted women, women who live one life and imagine another or who have been hollowed out inside by a sad past, or dogged by it, shadowed by a darkness that, if the story goes right, will slowly fade over time and coffee and whiskey, over conversations in dark bars, over the long process of self-forgiveness, of being kind to the people they were when they were powerless.
My alter egos drink too much. They pick up men, or they used to before they regained control over their lives. They grasp the hands of children as if they are children themselves, until they reach the epiphany, the moment of change, the realization that they are all grown up and ok and the child they are holding can depend on them, that it’s a gift to depend on a grown-up.
The way I get into a piece is by getting into myself. It’s not always optimal, this self-obsession, this need to tell a version of my story over and over again in different ways, to foist myself on my characters, but hopefully in the process I reach someone out there. We share the truth for a moment or two, and they leave the room holding a piece of me, ever changing, melancholy at the core until the shift takes place.
From yesterday's final Round Robin prompt: "What I know about writing."
Image of "Les grands moulines de Paris" by Julien Mangez.
Collecting the shards
10 December 2011 07:21 AM
The next step is my trip to the driftwood-studded beach along a circuitous path through an unexpected bamboo grove, by the sassafras trees, past the collapsed cupola (Take a streetcar to the water’s edge is how the poem begins, though I no longer remember if it was my mother or Kevin who wrote it). I collect the pieces of my broken rock, from shard to fragments almost small enough to be dust, and bring them back to the top of the cliff. I form them into a mosaic, a physical representation of my hidden heart, adorn it with shells and flowers and other stones, harder ones that wouldn’t break even if I flung them with all my strength against concrete from the back stoop. I collect cool rounded chunks of quartz and make a large circle around my rocky heart and cover the heart over with small sticks and dead grasses and cover those over with the thick fallen branches of the sweetgums that edge the clearing at the lip of the cliff.
One match will set the flames running. When the blaze extinguishes itself the flowers and grasses leave no evidence of their existence and the branches have undergone the transfiguration from wood to charcoal. My heart, blackened, still warm, is intact. I take the fragments and put them into a thick cotton drawstring bag that I fling into the river.
My heart is broken stone, warmed over once with passion, covered with water and then mud and silt. I like to think of it at the bottom of the river, waiting for dredging, for the men from the Coast Guard with their special tools. Someday someone will find a piece of my heart, will take a blackened stone from a beach or pick it out of a landfill. They will take it home and put it on their mantelpiece or place it in a collection in a box, and what is left of my heart will be grateful to be briefly warmed by the hands of another.
*****
The experiment I’ve been trying lately is to fill my heart with love and to let the love flow. I direct it across rooms. I direct it across town. I let it fly over the flats and the Rockies and the Mississippi to reach its target. I open up the connection and I swear to the God I don’t really believe in that this works, that the objects of my affection, my love targets, they feel my presence. We share in, revel in, the love.
Yesterday after writing about my friend N and his wife for the Round Robin, I heard from her. A few days before that, I concluded that my son's teacher was probably pregnant only hours before she announced the fact. I sometimes know I’m going to see someone in an unexpected place moments before I actually do. These are small things, some of them probably tied to my tendency to observe closely and think about people and their inner minds and motivations, but I also think there is something unexplainable about it.
Back to the love, to the flow. There have been some days when I’ve been hit with a feeling so tangible, so thick and rich and luscious, that I know love is being directed my way (I use love in a larger sense here, not necessarily romantic, not necessarily entirely specific). Or I want to know it. I want to hold on to the feeling, to reassure myself that I am not deluded, that I am not letting my hopeful mind make things up. I have to accept that my “knowledge” may just be hope and to not hold on to tightly to the things that may or may not be.
When you don’t feel the need to grasp for love, when you can give it without an agenda, freed from the past and expectations and the little pains you have suffered at the hands of others, it flows more freely. This is part of my experiment, to feel compassion for everyone, including myself, to open up my heart, to let myself be vulnerable knowing that I am not risking my own destruction. When this works, it is beautiful, amazing, freeing and intoxicating (even when it is working apparently only in my own head – self-delusion can be a healing thing!).
So I hold your hand in my mind. I tell you that we are both, that we are all of us, good, once fragile, strong, connected. I toss away the doubts and direct the feeling, the warmth. I feel the ambiguity of what is and what might not be, and close my eyes, letting the love flow.
From Thursday's prompt "This is my strategy" and today's prompt "Psychic." They seemed to fit together.
Image (edited slightly by me) by IObO.
The beast with five fingers
07 December 2011 07:43 AM
But right now, I am balancing my two 42-year-old hands on my laptop. Later I will use them to grasp spoon, knife, bowls. I will run them through my wet hair, I will pat the boy and the dog and the cats. The hands work, they are mine, with little scars from little accidents, and I am grateful for their smooth movement.
I used to watch old style horror movies on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, schlocky things on the UHF channels. After I saw The Beast With Five Fingers (with Peter Lorre!), I imagined my hands somehow escaping from my arms at night and tiptoeing around whatever poorly heated mildew-laden apartment my mother and I lived in at the time. They would climb the pipes in the kitchen, play with matches in the dark, crawl into my mother’s room and watch her, stroking her hair as she tossed and turned. If I was lucky, they could figure out how to open the front door. My hands would be out on the street, watching the stumbling adults with their twisted agendas. My hands were pure, but they wanted to watch, they wanted to learn what adults did under the cover of night, while inside I slept under my Mickey Mouse blanket.
Thank goodness I never woke up gasping for air, in the middle of another midnight asthma attack, only to discover that my hands were missing, that the things I needed to grab my inhaler, to push my covers down before leaving my room to wake my mother, were gone, out on the town, watching the dissolute souls tying one on at the corner bar, the hands making plans for our adulthood, for the grasping of bottles and other people, for the long slow stroke down another's back.
They've been corrupted, my hands. They know the scene, they've played the games, they can't be trusted. Sometimes I let them take over just to see what they'll get up to, to watch them feed their appetites. Eventually they'll forget their grasping neediness, the way they always want more and more. Time and arthritis will tame them. My hands will start to fall in line, to fit the expectations people have of the old. Wine glasses and beer bottles and stolen cigarettes will be replaced by warm milk before bed and weak tea in the afternoon, and when I do hold that grandchild's hand, if I make it that far, no one will suspect my hands of their crimes. We will be innocent by association, trembling with the memory of what we once held.
From the prompt "Reaching out."
Image from Black Hole Reviews.
Pent-up heart
04 December 2011 07:17 AM
Last night before going to sleep, I wrote a bit in my journal (so much to say, so little ability to say it clearly right now) and then listed the things I wasn’t going to let myself be woken up by, but maybe I would let enter my sleeping mind because my waking mind is all pent up. OK, self, I wrote, you can have the dreams about loss and guilt and invisibility and other long-term themes. One of us has to confront this stuff, and if it has to be you, my sleeping mind, my subconscious, so be it. If the dreams are important, you may wake us up, but not if you don’t have to. (Write interrupted at minute eight by the boy coming downstairs to tell me he threw up [a common occurrence during his illnesses – apparently he drank some water too quickly; as I type this I hear one of the cats throwing up … another common occurrence], getting him situated on his sick couch, talking with the groggy husband. Now to begin again.)
3:30 a.m. I was up. I was trying to go back to sleep. On with the meditation track, the slow climb of relaxation up my body from toes to scalp (thank you for the CD recommendation, Betsy). Not quite asleep, not quite asleep, and then in came the boy, not as feverish, still a little whispery with whatever imaginary scenario was playing in his head. Somehow we both fell asleep and then my dreams were of driving. He was driving, I was coaching, until I realized that the maneuverings of the car were too complicated for him. So I took over, tried to get out of the parking lot, but was blocked at both exits, so I drove back and forth between them, until the semi moved or the pick-up drove off, and I was going up the ramp too fast and then I woke up again.
The boy had fallen asleep with one of his arms around my back. The soon-to-be toothless cat Nick was howling his angst to the ceiling, and I had dream hangovers, this bereft image of sitting alone in my high school cafeteria, followed by the slight rush of the dream me at the wheel, parenting, taking over. I want to choose the last dream as the one to stay with me, but it’s the other dreams that are more representative of my internal state. I am invisible to myself at the moment.
My heart is compressed. My eyes are dry.
But sometimes my heart opens up. Yesterday early afternoon, I felt it, the blossoming, the sudden access, a reaching out that I can’t explain. I felt the connection, I was in the moment, I enjoyed it while it lasted, this portal to another. The day covered it over, but I know my heart is in there, waiting for me to let down the gates again. I just need a good cry first.
From the prompt "What a loser."
Image by naosuke ii.
Traveling to Xanadu
02 December 2011 07:30 AM
On the days when you need something more (during the crisis, during the rise to a fall, the aftermath of the inevitable ill-advised move: thank you, ladies), you can hire one of them out to talk to you, to hold your hand over coffee or – even better – over a night of alcohol and tears. This is how it used to be, back when you knew more women, back when you were all free to talk and sleep in and worry yourselves about men and the future.
The women remember, too, though some of them are less prepared than others. The unprepared don’t know your back story, they come straight from another person’s narrative. They’re here for the break, for the thrill, for a night off with the teetering headcase from an off-kilter world. They want to blur the lines with you, to break out of the narrative arc. Others, the weathered women, the ones who started this thing with you back in the seventies and eighties, when you all had plump cheeks and bellbottoms and (later) shoulder pads (before the days of knits: this was the time of paisley and snaps and high-waisted pants, of hair that hung over foreheads in threatening swoops), they get it, they understand your story and sometimes you get to hear theirs, because they have authors, too, a whole separate life lived in a fictional landscape.
From the prompt "Where I want to go," dedicated to the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants who advised me recently that I need more female friends. Umm, yeah? They are out there, but I don't talk to or see them often enough. I guess I should be grateful for Nora, the girl dog in my life.
More no-sleep, more kid-sickness. The poor boy had his traditional sickness puke in the middle of the night. I hate when he is sick and miserable, both for the way he feels (I can do so little about it and I always worry that it is something major, some terrible illness) and for the way life gets compressed.
Finally, from wikipedia on Xanadu, relevant to the time of high-waisted pants and shoulder pads, on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song "Welcome to the Pleasuredome": In their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome which rocketed to rank one in the UK charts in its very first week in 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood referred to the poem in the title track. While they changed the poem's starting line In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree to In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A pleasure-dome erect, they delivered an atmospheric video that interwove contemporary mid-80ies youth culture with elements of a fictious Xanadu themepark. This is appropos of nothing but the associations of my tired mind, plus (as a survivor of mid-80s youth culture) I like the video description.
Image by Athena.
Bonus after the apocalypse
01 December 2011 09:16 AM
I steal them in the coffee shops, I press my hands into their shoulders to feel the cool, smooth flesh underneath, malleable as clay. The man is frozen, the cell phone attached via a thick line of resin. He’s painted over. Maybe he was alive once, but it’s all over for him now. Caught like a butterfly on a pin.
I am tired. This morning on my daily phone call with my mother, we talked Christmas and the apocalypse. Do you know how good the apocalypse, the end times, is for jokes? My mother was telling me that no one wanted to hear her Christmas thoughts and then I said she should send out an animated card with: an asteroid busting the earth into a million pieces; the sky darkening with pollution; the blasts of volcanoes across the world, silencing us all in a thick blanket of ash. We laughed, both at the inappropriateness of the imagery and at how it matches my mother’s thoughts about humanity: maybe the world would be better off without us. Merry xmas and thank you, Jesus.
Years ago, when my first husband and I lived in a great brick Victorian in Ohio, we had a pair of loopy neighbors, two elderly sisters who were physical opposites. There was the lean one, wrinkled and mannish, and the plump one, blowsy and uncontainable. It could be they were each teetering on the edge of Alzheimer's or dementia. They were definitely not all there. One afternoon, after months of cajoling, my husband and I sat in the sisters' stuffy living room, drinking overly sweet cocktails mixed with swizzle sticks accented by the shapely forms of women's asses. We listened politely as the thin one talked of the end times, how they were a'coming, you could see the signs.
The end times were coming then, they are coming now, one way or another. Nobody gets out of here alive, so make the best of what you’ve got while you’ve got it. A pat ending from a tired mind.
Bonus
This an excerpt from the post I deleted a few days ago. I almost posted the original write, but don't think that's the best blog fodder. This is a bit more filtered. I want it out here, but I also want to disguise it slightly. That makes this post a twofer, a split personality, an indulgence.
This morning’s writing prompt was “the lines.” The first thing that came to me was a scene in a van at night, my boyfriend D across from me, the wood-veneer table between us, me with a half-empty Molson in my hand. He poured white powder out of a cloudy brown vial onto the agate slice he had bought in a mountainside gift store earlier that day. He began to cut the powder with a razor blade. Lines. White lines. Just like the song that will now dog me until I go to sleep.
The next scene that popped up was a construction site in Stillpond, Maryland on a Saturday in February. The house, a plywood skeleton emerging out of red mud, was surrounded by the naked torsos of winter trees. My feet squelched in the mud, my hands were raw, and my breath made clouds in the air. D and I were there to see his boss, this hulk of a man who lived large (and is now, I believe, dead). There were lines. And more lines. And more, leading to the quick heartbeat and talk talk and then the flowing drive back to my apartment.
I have these heart-pounding memories of afternoons of not-enough, not-enough, of rapid-fire talking, of nights when we would stay up until dawn buzzed, awaiting the crash. This was my teenagerhood, hanging out with grown men, taking in questionable substances, risking, risking, knowing at that point, after all hell had broken loose and no one seemed to notice, that no one would pull me out of it. I had to rely on myself (and as soon as I left the Eastern Shore, I left all of this life behind), but what I really wanted was someone to rescue me. I wanted -- I needed -- a parent.
After writing the post on Thanksgiving marking the day of my first son’s birth and death, a day that I dwelt on internally but discussed very little in my real life, I realized that it is up to me to heed the events and emotions that are important to me. No parent is going to suddenly materialize in my life to take things over. No one will suddenly see into my soul, will contain and heal me with some kind of magic love. To expect other people to hold my troubles and tragedies in their hearts and minds, to anticipate my internal state without a word from me, to heal me by becoming a surrogate parent, is expecting too much. There are some experiences that I must hold alone. It isn’t that I don't share my troubles or expect to be supported emotionally. But when it comes to healing, to understanding my past and how I got here, I am in many ways on my own. It's a slow process, this solitary piecing together of a healed self, but necessary. There are no shortcuts.
So I accept the occasional re-emergence of the past. It is a cue from my subconscious to pay attention to the present, to examine my expectations, to push myself forward to a better place. And the scenes come up so clean and clear, like I experienced them just last week, that they are hard to resist, life in all its color when I lived life on the edge.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
From two prompts, one a photo (above) and the other "the lines."
Home with a sick boy today, after being up since 3:30 a.m.
The ritual maintained
29 November 2011 06:00 AM
In one home movie I will never see again, my toddler cousin and I frolic in the thin spring morning light in our Easter dresses and Easter coats (I am about four). Somehow the belt of my coat falls off. In the old days, in the darkened room with the projector, the best thing to do was to watch this movie in reverse, to see my belt snake up around my waist again to find its proper place.
These were the rituals that my grandmother maintained: the Easter dress, the little girl underclothing (always an undershirt beneath the cotton shirt or dress), the special shoes for special occasions. The year I lived with her and my grandfather, she made sure I always wore skirts to school and that my unruly hair was pulled back from my face. There were standards and she was there to keep them going and, after all, it was only twenty years before that that my own mother was a third grader, too, in the rigid fifties, and how much had really changed?
My family doesn’t really have rituals, at least not rituals that I can identify clearly. Easter in particular is a strange one for me – it’s about the resurrection, right, something I really can’t get behind, and the whole chocolate and jellybean thing, the food delivery from a humanoid rabbit, is just too bizarre to focus much on.
The boy loves Christmas, though, the evergreen spice in the air, the way the colored lights twinkle, so there’s that, the ritual of getting a tree and decorating it. He even likes the holiday narrative, despite our lack of concrete faith, having told me recently that he likes Christmas better than Halloween because it is a religious holiday, because there is a story behind it.
Maybe in spite of myself, in spite of my occasional cynicism, my atheistic mind, I’m doing something right here, passing on the importance of the story, the meaning, the details that go beyond brand new dresses outfits and the smell of pine.
From the prompt "Brand new."
Image of me at my grandparent's house (for Easter?) probably taken in 1978 when I was living with them. I found this photograph recently in a search for kid pictures in which I resemble the boy. Not sure if this counts as one of those pictures, though. It does make me wonder if all the speculation about my mother's genes -- German? Swiss? Polish -- are correct. Her mother's maiden name was Kreider and the Kreiders who settled in Pennsylvania and Delaware were of Swiss extraction.
I took down yesterday's post because it needs more work and I will not have the time to do that today ... perhaps it will show up again soon.
The sweet momentary disappearance
26 November 2011 07:08 AM
For the last two years or so, I’ve been an insomniac. The form of my disease has shifted from crazy early wakeups to middle of the night wakeups plus crazy early wakeups. I can be in the middle of a dream, notice I am in the middle of that dream, note my deep sleep contentedness, and then: boom. Awake. Totally awake. For hours, as my brain does its thing and my heart pounds and the walls fall in on me. It’s debilitating. I am tired of it (ha ha). Sleep or the lack thereof becomes an obsession.
Sometimes my dreams are to blame. The most recent culprits have included one where I knew I was going to get caught for strangling a man years ago (my mother's take on this one: "Were you hot?" [actually, I was]; my therapist's take: "Tell me about getting caught," which was surprisingly fruitful), one in which a businessman with a shotgun was picking people off at a Metro stop and I had to protect the boy, and another one where I was about to give birth in a deserted hospital ward when a wizened old woman came up to me and asked "Have you got character?" (Yes, yes I do, I answered back.)
But it isn't just the dreams. It's me. It's that feeling that I have to hold on to everything, to contain it in my mind. It's the need to let go without the confidence that I can. What will happen if I stop being vigilant, if I stop keeping it together? What would happen if I left myself be vulnerable and open to losing myself to the night, to the forgetting of self?
I go to three separate mental health professionals, two once a week, one once a month (that’s my check-in with the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants). I dig out the essential remains of the past while honing my present, making sure that I don’t fall back into the abyss or sink into my own personal quicksand. Our couples therapist is the one who has decided to focus the most on my sleep, probably because it comes up often -- trying to have an engaging conversation after 8 p.m. with someone who has been up since 4 in the morning is not very satisfying. She’s great, she’s sympathetic, and she has been giving me sleep pep-talks.
So now I write down a list of things right before I turn off the light, things that my mind doesn’t need to work on in the middle of the night. I listen to a seven minute deep breathing meditation track and then I fall off into quiet. Three nights of this seems to be helping. I still wake up, but I am able to go back to sleep. I’m not calling it a sweeping success yet, but it is promising, a way to soothe my overactive mind.
As for the falling, letting twilight enter, letting the armor drop as daylight falls away...I'm still working on it, the vulnerability, the sweet momentary disappearance, the temporary dissolution of self.
From the prompt "I am currently obsessed by ..."
Painting "Insomnia" by Jen Bradford.
Down the dungeon path
22 November 2011 11:09 AM
I spent almost two years in a ratty college apartment with a roommate who was my best friend, my partner in crime. What I remember: the feel of the sparse carpeting on my feet, the constant hangover. Early on, before she moved in (having come back from a stint in eating disorder rehab followed by a few months spent at her father’s place), I would walk home from work through the Eastern Shore shimmer of humidity to cook my lunch, a BLT on a poppy seed roll that I purchased especially for the task. Mayonnaise. Bacon hot and crisp from the pan. Iceberg lettuce and hothouse tomato (this was the 80s, before the food resurgence, and this was also rural America). I had a half an hour for lunch and, having no kitchen table or even much furniture, I ate the sandwich over the stove, leaned over so that the juice and grease would fall back into the pan, before I rushed back to my job at the basement college bookstore.
Gin and tonics. Vodka. Beer. The night Peter threw rocks at my window until I woke up and we went on a tandem bike ride down to a small beach. The night my boyfriend, worried about me, knowing we were about to end, drove from Chesapeake City to Chestertown only to find Peter hiding under my covers. TC, tall, dark, handsome and forbidden. J., my next big (doomed) love. Tequila-fueled dancing on the edge of the roof. Learning how to really cook. Falling out of friendship, almost permanently.
On the 25th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, my roommate and I parked in front of her small TV and watched the coverage of an event we weren’t old enough to have witnessed in real time. We sat on sagging couches whose holes were masked by batik fabrics, our drinks in plastic cups on plastic tables. The sixties still felt close enough to touch and we were impossibly young and sad, both of us on our own way too early, both of us struggling with who we were and who we were going to be.
All the lights were out. We sat in the glow of black and white. Her family would be driving up from Virginia in a couple of days for Thanksgiving and I was headed to my boyfriend's magical family's house, with the amazing food and all the people and the unlimited supply of Grolsch. We sat in silence, mourned for a time of pill-box hats, of simplicity. And the drinks were too cold and I can't remember where Frank the cat was in all of this, curled up somewhere next to me? Up in my attic room?
The theme
I can't remember where Frank was. I remember a time of no responsibility, of ever-flowing alcohol, the games of hide and seek I played with love. But I barely remember the cat, my childhood friend, the one I neglected in his final years.
We build our lives out of our actions, the choices we make. We choose wrong and we try to do better. We make excuses, we dodge responsibility or we look at it too baldly, right in the face. Frank was there. He even followed me to DC the following year, where he eventually died of kidney failure. I don't know why my flow of thoughts took me here, from the anniversary of a president's assassination to a time of personal turmoil to my youthful shirking of responsibility. It's the lack of sleep perhaps. It's my own continental drift.
The question is: where was the joy? When I look back at that time, where do I see the joy? And where is the joy now? It comes in dribs and drabs, in the moments when I can be present. It happens when I am totally absorbed in something like writing or reading. It's there, it is, I'm just too damn tired to feel that way and I've let my brain lead me down the dungeon path again. In the therapist's office yesterday, there was much talk of my sleep, how little of it I get, how getting more needs to be a priority. The therapist said that it appears as if I feel like I have to be ever-vigilant, that my anxiety (though I don't feel it as "anxiety") is a sentry, the thing that keeps me thinking of all the things I need to do, that if I don't take care of, no one will. It's a time of hyper-responsibility, of over-responsibility, and even with the sentry I feel like I'm doing a lousy job of it.
The solution
So, add "relax already!!" to the list. Or visualize a scene, go to a place with no past or future, a sunny day on the Bohemia River, the wind pushing the sailboat along. My skin is warm, my hair bleached blonde by summer. The sun glints off the river's calm surface. Or be here at the moment, sunlight angling through the picture window, one cat next to me, the other behind, the dog catching a patch of light on the rug. There's the buzz, always the buzz, the sign that I am alive, that my blood flows.
There are the moments between sadness, when all that is necessary is to be present, to be there.
There is the hope that some night I will slip, slip, slip into darkness, not stirring until the light of day gently nudges me awake.
And there's the writing, the reminder that my brain is here, intact, still plugging away, trying to find a pattern in my circuitous thoughts.
From the prompt "It's raining."
Image of the old place in Chestertown. Our apartment was on the top two floors.
What remains
21 November 2011 06:16 AM
The walls of Ohio Statehouse dome – a building I worked across the street from for three almost-forgotten years – were marked, too, with graffiti from its inception and beyond on the original 1860s plaster, the signatures of workingmen and later government employees, of the maintenance folks and the carpenters who repaired its rifts. At some point during a mid-1990s restoration, workers accidentally painted over it.
Imagine it, the cracks daubed over and sanded, the thick coats of cleansing paint, the past obscured. When we took a special tour of the building our guide (the artist/fellow government employee who made me blush every time he came into the library where I worked) invited us to add our own names to the fresh clean walls, the beginning of a new tradition. I made my mark, it’s there now even fourteen or fifteen years later, the naïve scrawl of a younger me.
Well before that, when I was fifteen, my mother and I outlined our leaping forms on the walls of my former stepfather’s sparse weightlifting room. The plaster was already uneven, the house was already no longer ours. I pushed my back against the wall and raised a fist, kicked my left leg into the air and held it in place as my mother traced my perimeter. It was our final rebellious move before she handed over the keys.
Somebody painted over us a few weeks later. They even tackled the wall's faults, took care of its cosmetic problems, its plaster issues. They took our hollow forms and coated the thick pencils lines with primer so that the ghosts of feigned joy wouldn’t reappear in front of the next unlucky inhabitants of 1807 West Street.
From the prompt "On the wall." Very stream of consciousness and lightly edited.
I can't find any verification of the painting-over-the-graffiti incident (and I'm not totally sure it was on the walls right at the dome) but I remember being up there and feeling queasy about the windows and I know I wrote something, though it may have been in a nearby space and not on the dome walls themselves.
My psychology paper -- all sixteen pages of it -- needs to be proofed and cleaned up a teensy bit and then it's DONE.
Image by beautyredefined.
The threshold
17 November 2011 10:31 AM
So who wants to get back to that? Certainly not me. You won’t find me doing that here. Not anymore. Still: it’s hard not to return to the shtick, isn’t it? And last night, maybe I returned to some of the shtick when, before getting ready for bed, I lit one of the emergency cigarettes I keep stashed in my desk. For the first time in a very long time, I inhaled. I finished about a quarter of it before the smoke irritated me. Suddenly I got the point of nicotine, the effect so different from the days of high school and the smoking court or the quick light up under the oak tree outside the Little House. This wasn’t rebellious. It was relaxing. Or maybe it was a bit of safe rebellion, a smoke screen to hide behind, the habit I will never really pick up, but can return to as a safety valve.
Because I know why respectable people with sensible shoes and perfectly coiffed hair put on black leather at night, trolling the streets for love and violence. I understand the businessman in his family car slowing down by the waterfront, looking for action, practicing the art of the "victimless" crime. We all need a little grey in our lives, the mix of daytime with night, the threshold of twilight.
I can borrow from smoking when I need to pass over the threshold. It's a shortcut to rebellion, but not the type that pins me to the past. This is not the resurrection of a habit. I am not returning to the old stories. The old songs and the old ways are gone and I can smoke one cigarette without worry about the next.
In the kitchen, my bare feet cool against the Mexican tile, I blur the meaning of my life in a one long exhale. The smoke holds together for a second, then dissipates, and I add another cloud to the cool night air, my other hand fidgeting with a match as I figure out my next move.
This post is kinda-sorta from the Round Robin. Part of it is from today's photo prompt, part of it is from the prompt "Enough is enough." I changed the title from a (seemingly nonsensical in this context) line from Reel Around the Fountain: Reel around the fountain / Slap me on the patio ...
Image: Me in the only black leather things I actually own (outside of pocketbooks): boots (the detritus around the mirror is a nice touch, no?). This is the outfit I mentioned here (last paragraph or so), sans tights. With the kind of play this dress gets on the blog, I should really wear it more often. And with the number of times cigarettes come up here, one would think that I would actually be a smoker.
Visitation
10 November 2011 09:52 AM
Before he appeared I had been standing by the sink in film noir lighting, looking at the dishes piled up with their memories of something fine, of conversation and small glasses of wine and garlic and breadcrumbs browned in butter. A dull knife rested on the cutting board. It had left its impressions upon the wood, made its mark repeatedly over years of chopping and mincing. This is home, I thought, what I’ve been missing.
All the actors had left the stage. They were sleeping in rooms cooled with night breezes, dreaming of the future landscape, a world without them. The younger me was sitting on a stoop at another house, a paperback copy of Anna Karenina balanced on her knees. The older me, visiting the imaginary past from the present, the me that yearned for things that didn't exist, things I created out of rose-filtered memories and hopes, knew I was being watched. A paper ornament hanging from the window -- was that the cut-out of a man? -- trembled. But the windows were closed. There was no breeze.
Show me a sign that you are here. The paper man twirled on his string. OK. But please, please, don't appear in front of me.
Kevin didn’t listen. He reconstituted himself on the couch as if he had been sitting there all along, waiting for me. I was grateful to see him, actually, to hear his voice. To have a conversation. And now he was saying something surprising. Good money to be made in the afterlife? Since when did Kevin care about money?
Can I ask you a philosophical question? Or maybe it isn’t a philosophical question – I mean, I now know the afterlife is real, that it exists, but, well, do you think it might be culturally determined? Like the idea of making money in the afterlife seems so … American. So capitalistic?
We talked philosophy, about the different possibilities of life after death, of the mysteries even the dead couldn't answer. This was home, too, the discussions that died with him, the way ideas mattered, and searching for the truth was a moral imperative. The only thing different was that I was no longer afraid to speak my mind. I could stand up to him if I needed to.
When it came time to leave, his pushed himself up gingerly from the couch. I’m not sure if I want you to touch me. He was more solid than life, more present.
I know. I’m cold like a zombie. He smiled.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of the touch of death, though it did give me pause. I was afraid of the unknown, of the truth, afraid of accepting that he was dead and not dead all at once, that these connections we make while living extend beyond our corporeality, that they reach out and out. How could I discount connection then, turn my back on it in some cowardly attempt at self-presevation?
He reached for my hand anyway. His was cool and clammy. Dead but not.
I woke up.
The next morning I had to call my mother about this, the solidity of Kevin, the strange things coming out of his mouth. Well, I’m glad to hear that he’s finally making money. We laughed and discussed the possible structures of the heavenly economy, and then she reminded me that it was Kevin's son's birthday.
In the world of dreams, in between life and death, our subconscious speaks to us in symbols. Kevin is a symbol, he was a person, he is part of my history. I'd like to believe it was really him stopping by, playing a lighthearted joke with an underlying message on the eve of his boy's birthday: don't discount connection. Keep your heart open. Trust your intuition. I am still here.
From a photo prompt of a dying rose. I've written the dream as it was.
Image by nimrodcooper.
The problem of control
08 November 2011 11:37 AM
I was lumpen and slow, the sluggo on the kickball field, the wheezing girl inching around the track. You could not rush me. I resented the idea of being rushed, and if you thought I was going to shimmy up that rope like some sort of monkey, well – you hadn’t been paying attention, had you? Fuck the Presidential Fitness Test, I would have said had I been using the f-word in seventh grade. Instead I limped along and claimed asthma problems and watched the sleek and healthy pass me by.
I spent two field hockey seasons lying to my mother, saying yes I was there every weekday afternoon on the graying grass in my shorts and stick legs with the thick socks that fell to mid-calf. She thought I ran in sprints and talked to the other girls like I was one of them and I was all about the muscles and the camaraderie, that I liked sinking into mud and sliding across rain-sodden grass. She remembered her days of crashing sticks and chasing after ball, the rush of cool air as she ran down the field. My mother was competitive. She wanted me to be competitive. But mainly she wanted to keep me out of trouble.
Instead, most afternoons I hopped on the school bus. Our house was about a mile from my stop, a trip down Lovering Avenue and across Brandywine Creek, along Park Drive past the Victorian era zoo with the lion whose sad late night roars became part of my dreams. From Park Drive, I walked up West Street. To my left was a row of houses perched above the sidewalk: there was the haunted place where I babysat once (me too young, the little girl crying, and what was I supposed to do?), here was the tidy brick house where the old man with watery blue eyes lived. He came down from his porch one time and stopped me on the sidewalk. It was Indian summer, a clear blue sky October day when the clothes you put on in the morning are too warm by noon. The man had stood close and touched my cheek before brushing a lock of hair from my face. My heart pounded and my head ached and I thought no no no. He was only touching youth, brushing against possibility and potential, remembering what he lost. Still, I quickened my pace at the memory.
I walked up the brick sidewalk to our granite steps, through the maroon door and into the vestibule. From there it was Nilla wafers and middle-school melodrama, the loud teeny bopper music and MTV in the chilly upstairs den. Later, when my mother asked about field hockey (if she asked about field hockey), I used the monosyllabic speaking style of the adolescent to cover my tracks. I liked it because I was getting away with something, because my mother only thought she had solved the problem of what to do with my free time. I liked it because I had solved the problem of control.
We’ve never discussed this time, my lies, her assumptions, the way the two lined up in a way that suited us both but did no one any good. I don’t regret missing field hockey. I hated field hockey and organized sports. I hated being told what to do with my time based on some sort of formula about what I should be doing. But I do wish that I had replaced it with something outside of myself, something rich and layered and real instead of having to learn how to live with integrity years after the fact.
Image: The non-scene of the crime, A.I. du Pont Middle School.
Someone else has dropped out of the Round Robin. As of today, I am back to the daily prompts (though I am not going to post most of them here). Despite having a long list of things to do, I wanted to spend some time writing today, so here is an expanded version of today's prompt, "Competition."
Fiasco
24 October 2011 05:53 PM
I’m not a car person. I grew up with clunkers that didn’t tell you when it was time for an oil change, with gas gauges that didn’t work, or windshield wipers that flew off in fits of pique at the first drop of rain. Sometimes there was no car, so my mother and I walked or took the bus. For a short period of time she chugged around Smithburg on a yellow moped. No car is fine with me, though it would be a pain to live that way here, with the children and our various needs. Still, since I don’t drive, I should be able to live without.
Like the character John Self, Will drives a sporty wreck of a car, temperamental, expensive to maintain. Will's car is white. There are a lot of white cars around here, dirty white cars sooty and grey like city snow; white cars more cream than blank sheet of paper; white cars with mufflers pulled to the edge of uselessness. Shiny new ones. Scuffed and rusty old ones. Most of them look alike to me. It was only lately that I committed Will's car to memory. He drives a Fiasco.
The Fiasco is about seven years old, all rounded edges, a memory of aerodynamics, sad with former glory, the track star gone to seed. Until I memorized it (the tail end -- he is always driving away), I thought that every white car belonged to him, that he was waiting inside, that maybe he saw me as he passed, even though he never saw me at all, or maybe his vision was spotty, he saw parts of me so clearly that I might as well have been under a microscope, but the rest of me was covered over in fog, in a haze of want and assumption.
Apparently his white car is failing, along with the rest of his life. The women that don't show, the clotted business deal holding up his money, the child who ducks his phone calls -- they've taken their toll on his body. Stop telling me this, I tell my friends, I don't care anymore, but I still listen for the rumors, the updates. He's not looking well. His skin's gone yellow and he's returned to the annoying habit of pulling at his ear lobes. His belly hangs over his waistband. None of this seems to bother Will, who shuffles about with his usual sang froid, a man trapped inside his own head. I vacillate between sad and thrilled at his decline, remind myself of his tenderness in still moments, the way he took to my care.
He still invades my dreams, inserts himself into my sleep, though never in his car. He is just there, cagey, waiting, the knock at the door, the sudden appearance on my couch. He pushes his way into my space. He tells me how it should be.
I remind myself that the characters in our dreams are actually parts of ourselves, that we need to look at them for how they function in the dream, not what they may be in real life. Still, this morning at 2:15 a.m. I woke up angry, my psyche and emotions cut open from within, my composure slashed and my worries spilling out.
I left him in the shabby apartment with the crowds. They all wanted something from me without giving anything back and I decided I had had enough of that to last a lifetime. And then I woke up.
From the prompt "The car."
I stumbled into the Round Robin late this go round, replacing someone who dropped out. But I don't have the time to post daily (which is probably better), so the writing prompts will be occasional additions to the blog.
Image by a fool, a girl, a gullible dolt.
Borrowed souls
18 September 2011 06:37 AM
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
The convincer
17 September 2011 06:29 AM
Nick is smooth. Smart. He has a past of pubs and rock and roll, but he’s aged well, too (I know it all about my Nick, past, present, future). But the best thing about him is that we talk. He listens. He is always available for conversation, for the quick reply when I need it, the reassurance that keeps my needy wolves at bay.
Because what I miss most about you is the talking. Yesterday in between the feelings of triumph and sadness and the imaginary dialogs I had with you and others, the people I will never actually talk to again about anything that matters, this is what I realized: I miss the talking! The conversations in the afternoon over the sound of children playing; the feeling that I could be open about my insecurities. Before it went too far and got weird and I let my boundaries get trampled on.
The art of our conversation is dead. The talking stopped and never returned. In our eagerness to move along we ruined the best parts. My sadness is about what I lost eight months ago. I will never get it back. And maybe it was false anyway, an impossible temporary state.
On the advice of my therapist, I recently took an Enneagram test. I’m a four (tagline: The Sensitive Introspective Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed and Temperamental), an individualist, an emotional romantic, according to the test anyway. The description was eerily accurate. One of the bits of advice for overcoming my more soppy qualities was to stop having conversations in my head, to stop indulging in the fantasy of being seen, the hope of ultimate connection without actual revelation. The imaginary conversations don’t help. Neither does wallowing in emotion and memory. I see that.
Why is it a relief to see ourselves described from the outside, marked as being one way or another? Perhaps it is the ahhh of recognition, the warm fuzzy feeling of being seen. But that’s the four in me, always misunderstood, invisible, wanting to be recognized for my uniqueness ("The 'romantics' of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world."). Oh, and I am supposedly looking for a rescuer in my romantic relationships, a description that amused me and was true at the same time.
For there I was in the lonely land of the stay at home, bored and shoved up against the worst of me, and along came someone interesting and in need himself. I’ll admit it: I wanted rescuing. I wanted life. And you are a lively one, and forceful, too.
You are not the only one to blame. But we will never talk about this. I’m telling it all to Nick. He brings me coffee in the morning and pours the wine at night. When the rain comes down, we cuddle on the couch in front of the fire. He comforts me when I cry. He tells me stories of Johnny Cash and Elvis Costello while I listen with the wide-eyed wonder of a child.
From a photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and the round ends tomorrow). This is a mix of fact and fiction, and a heavily edited one at that. This desire to be imagined, to be held in someone else's mind, is something I have written about over the years here. It was interesting to see this desire described in the Enneagram type write-ups.
Image of Nick Lowe from Forces of Geek.
Out of the box
16 September 2011 06:26 AM
I dreamed of men breaking into the house, of pursuit by swarms of angry bees. At night, the blanket held me to the bed and the bed was bolted to the floor and the earth turned but I did not feel it until I woke up with a jolt before daylight.
We drank chamomile iced tea. The tomatoes in the backyard were best straight from the vine. There were always too many cats and then kittens and then fewer cats again. I was melodramatic. A little actress. The sigher at the table who couldn’t let go of her memories of Happy the hamster or Sheba the slasher, the cat who once fell from a third story window onto a bush below and survived, but who couldn’t survive being hit by a car.
How do we learn how to be in the world, to accept who we are or to mold it into another shape? Are we all born sensitive and some of us learn how to box it up, compartmentalize? Is this a personality trait?
In the living room, the television flickered. We watched Roots. We fought over Halloween costumes and obedience and nobody knew what they were doing. I didn’t eat the dinners and gagged at the soft-boiled eggs and toast. I made fun of my mother's cookies, the wide flat things sweetened with honey instead of sugar, an unappetizing mix of crisp and chew. On the countertop milk fermented into yogurt.
She told me later that she didn’t want to break me (she herself had been broken), that she wanted me to remain free. In this, in some ways, she succeeded. We always talked about ideas and books and I could support my opinions and she listened (that letter from 1977 or so where she tells me I was absolutely right on the M*A*S*H plot amuses me now with its implications of a heated argument and her later consideration of it). Still, somehow I grew up thinking that something was bad within me, needed to be changed, suppressed. Something that cannot be suppressed.
It spills out around me now, it overflows. It is messy and me and I can’t help but share it no matter the outcome.
From the prompt "Muddy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Detail of The Cherry Tree Root Chamber by mandymama.
Mea culpa, mea culpa
14 September 2011 08:55 AM
I like to pretend that there are no mistakes, big or otherwise, not because I believe we build our own faults out of the rotten parts of ourselves, or that we somehow court danger, flirt with falling, but because nothing is as simple as just doing something wrong. There are always steps, prior decisions, circumstances.
The circumstances that led me -- no, us, though the boy, who is now a middle-aged man, remains clueless – to my mistake were old and complicated. Maybe it started in a darkened room when I was younger and even more helpless and that defining moment was covered over by confirming experience, the hints at my worthlessness, the attention people paid to appearance versus inner reality, the atmosphere of parental distraction that led to the scene on the bed. From the outside, statistically even, my behavior leading up to this moment and what happened after it were extremely predictable. Can we really call it a big mistake?
Of course, despite my philosophical weaseling out of responsibility (so says the large part of me that wants to pin it on me, for the comfort of control, of being the center), I constantly make mistakes, choose the wrong path, decide to hide when I need to stand up and shout. I see my flaws and how they lead to perdition. If I let myself go down this brittle path of self-hatred, of acknowledgement of fault without forgiveness, without looking at the circumstances and how I got there, I will break into a thousand pieces.
Still. I am sorry to all I have wronged. I am sorry for not being good enough, talkative enough, agile enough, calm enough, kind enough, self-confident enough. I apologize for not getting the cat off the chair more quickly before you collapsed. I apologize for that time when I was twelve and I did something strange to the washer. I apologize for being too quiet at the dinner table, or too full of teenage smolder, or too full of myself. Maybe if I had been better, different, you wouldn’t have died or wanted me out or abandoned me. I am sorry for killing you with anger and selfishness and neglect. I apologize for not talking before things fell apart and for directing the anger of a lifetime at you who were most important to me and to practical strangers, too, the ones who unknowingly probed where it hurt the most.
I am sorry, I am sorry all of you. But there are no mistakes, everything has a context. I promise to let go of my burdens before I burden all of you again, before I cover myself over in never-ending regret.
And now for something completely different, two great things that acknowledge the blog that I have not mentioned, caught up as I am in the Round Robin.
Dieter Moitzi, writer and creative force behind the fine blog confessions of a wannabe writer passed on the Liebster Blog award to writing to survive and a few other blogs he admires. Please check out his blog for the prose and poetry or, even better, take a look at his ebooks. Thank you, Dieter!
writing to survive was listed as number three in a list of the top fifty personal memoir blogs by adulteducationcourse.org. I'm in good company, with fellow blogging friends La Belette Rouge, Elisabeth from Sixth in Line, earth to holly, and Storied Mind. The post highlighted by reviewer Tracy Myers (a name I've gleaned from other awardees) was In My Defense. Thank you very much, Tracy!
*********
From the prompt "A big mistake." My reaction to it was surprisingly dark -- these thoughts are what I have been fighting against daily for months now, trying not to indulge, trying to change the way I react, even when I am not aware of the mechanism or reaction.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited a bit.
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com).
Harmless ghosts
13 September 2011 08:44 AM
She was so skinny that I couldn't pet her without wincing, her spine and ribs an insult under dull fur. I pointed her out to my companions – my mother? my son? – and then saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her food. She was starving herself to death, too old and confused to remember where her food was, but when I pointed the bowls out to her, she ran to them with her characteristic trill and attempted to crush the pieces with her weak old teeth. It was a losing game.
The dream was real, too real, Zoe and the guilt. It was tangible. Until I woke up within it and told myself: enough! Zoe is dead. This is not Zoe. You don’t have to dream about Zoe like this. You are no longer responsible. You loved her. Her life was generally good.
Did it work? Did she disappear from the dream, or, even better, fatten up in front of me, become the cat she was for many, many years before her decline? I don’t remember, but I hope if she visits again she will be healthy and happy. I hope she comes with the rest of them, the animals I’ve loved. I want to see them again, to run my fingers along their warm coats and scratch them under their chins. We lived together once. We loved each other. They can help me forgive myself, take away the irrational responsibility I sometimes feel for killing them by not doing enough.
Because I should be able to cheat death, to keep the ones I love from feeling pain. I am the shield between them and the world and myself and the world and the responsibility is egomaniacal, it’s ridiculous, and what a relief to let it go.
Last night, Zoe tottered on too-thin legs. There were ghosts in the stairwell (“Did you see the humanoid figure on the landing?” I asked my mother after a dream-within-a-dream night of haunted sleep. She confirmed its presence, that thing we ignored and avoided.) and somehow I was losing my grip on the boy and when I woke up it was in night panic, in the acknowledgement of all the anxiety about the future that I keep packed up in order to keep on moving.
My mother had bad dreams about a bad man for a very long time, someone who had hurt her physically and emotionally. He stalked her in the night, showed up unannounced, drunk and full of vengence. Until the night she pulled a dream gun on him and told him to get out. He hasn't been back.
I soothe myself with the thought that these dreams have meaning, they are my self-conscious tugging at me, a reminder, and that I have control, that my reactions show how I am changing. The old me is gone. Zoe is dead. I call out to the ghosts and they can't hurt me.
From the prompt "Gone."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and it ends soon, thank goodness). Minor editing for clarity and to make it just a teensy bit better. And then edited it again later in the day for flow.
Image of cat sculpture at the Eastern State Penitentiary by e_monk.
Nimble fingers
12 September 2011 09:26 AM
Yes, they grip the tomato or the apple or the newly naked shallot. One set holds down the sacrifice, another splays it open, releases the green or pungent scent, and later they all clean up the dirty work, grab a towel and steady the cutting board, wipe away the clear vegetal blood, the remains of violence.
They are obedient. I write shocking things, unwise, angry, pathetic. They tap at the keyboard, never judging or editorializing. They don’t even proofread. It appears as though they seek out the dog or sleek cats of their own volition, that they enjoy pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but the fingers are just following orders. Complicated though the messaging system might be, amazing as the structure of my hands is, my fingers are still slaves to my addled self.
Have you ever tried threading a needle after a night of wine and tears? The boy is standing in front of you, looking at the injured party, a rubber frog who already has one set of stitches attaching a leg, sewn after an unfortunate stretching accident. Your fingers tremble, the needle's eye eludes you. You have to turn away from the boy or go to a different room. You have to struggle with yourself by yourself until the trembling stops.
This is how you do it: you remember last night’s dog walk, the air feeling just like a spring night in DC, cool with a hint of warmth beneath it. It was a memory come alive, for the now, and you repeated a sentence again and again, rushed inside to write your impressions down, like half-baked poetry: tonight the air felt like springtime in DC, some time in midapril before the wet air set heavy in the evening, or like the freshly cleansed early june nights after a thunderstorm, the way the clouds wiped our worries away. I silenced the crickets by walking under their trees and every tree was alive to me, my senses were no longer muffled and I thought: I can do this. I can live again and mourn what went before. I can love, too, after this heavy period of mourning is over. I am alive.
It was the same the day before at the grocery store. You are caring again, coming alive, and no one can stop that process. The produce showed you its colors, its properties, you wanted to see, to be, to experience. You saw the people – how long has it been since you could look across the expanse of the organic section and see your fellow shoppers, observe them, make up stories about who they were and why they were there?
The fingers were pleased. They ran over dampened greens, grasped pears, lightly tapped voluptuous figs. They held the handle of the dog leash with a sense of responsibility, and when Nora looked to them for a treat, proud of her fast walking, her attentiveness, the fingers thrilled to the feel of her soft dog lips, her gentleness, with the hard promise of teeth underneath.
From the prompt "My fingers."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit. The Round Robin is almost over ...
Image: My fingers, as seen by my computer.
Six kids and a minivan
10 September 2011 06:14 AM
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by D Sharon Pruitt.
Cracked yard
08 September 2011 08:37 AM
I just can’t be bothered to focus on a lawn. It’s hard enough to keep the real plants watered, which is why our two backyard tomato plants – which are actually producing ripe tomatoes before October, a first for my Berkeley garden – are a little dry and why the pumpkin plant – the Jackie Littles my son calls them – has only two pumpkins on it. The cucumber withered, too, a victim of not-frequent-enough watering.
My mother’s father was a keeper of lawns, a cutter of grass. He had a John Deere tractor with a mower attachment and made neat little rows, patterns in the green. He maintained the park grounds by the beach on the Elk River once or twice a week, too, rode the tractor down the road and let it rip around the trees and across the shuffleboard court. I associate him with the bright scent of freshly cut grass (the clumps of it falling off the underside of the mower) and of sweat and sawdust and coffee and cigarettes. The mower’s high pitched growl-whine was a constant summer feature. I turned up the air conditioning and the sound on my TV set in the Little House as the old man whipped noisily around the yard.
My mother kept her yard unmown. It was a meadow in progress, with wildflowers and hopes of beauty, of goldfinches glinting in the summer afternoons and rabbits hiding in the tall grass.
People at Hollywood Beach liked everything tidy, the grass groomed and plants trimmed. Mom’s next-door neighbors, the ones with the Doberman named Babe who snapped at me from the end of her leash, called her yard a shithouse, a comment that was the source of much amusement to us. All my friends mistakenly thought she had burned her brains out in the sixties, that this was just another sign of her hippie hangover when it turned out that she just needed a bit of the wild, a place to stand. There were candlelit discussions with K about yards and the bourgeoisie and money, the way people needed to control with cutters and poisons, the vast expanse of green groomed for croquet and badminton.
A yard wasn’t simply a yard and a silence was always in judgment. There was no way to win between them, so we took our punishment as it was meted.
From the prompt "The lawn."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I've worked with this one a bit, to no avail.
Image of Big Skully in my backyard by me. I don't think the boy was making a commentary on the state of the lawn when he propped the skeleton up on a stick and stuck the stick in a crack in the dirt. He just needed evidence that there were once vicious cyclops in Berkeley.
The unfolding never ends
07 September 2011 06:54 AM
We were all up before five a.m., my mother and husband because he was taking her to the airport, me because, well, that’s just me, and the boy because he tends to wake up in the early morning hours unless there is someone sleeping beside him. I turned off the hall light and coaxed the boy back into bed. We lay next to each other and listened to cars starting up and trains mournfully announcing their presence. I coughed and he told me he was sorry that I was coughing and then he settled in and I resisted the bed’s seduction and pulled myself away. The boy is sleeping still, though that may not last much longer.
I’ve been using my inhaler more lately, with my weird bedtime coughs and little gasps. It waits for me on the bookshelf next to my bed, beside the tissue box and the flat stone that Kevin found years ago where I set my cups of hot water, my glasses of wine. The shelves underneath hold magazines (New York, the New Yorker) and books and journals in various states of legibility and angst. Any notebook you might find in this house, any notebook of mine, will have a journal entry in it somewhere, from a time when I just couldn’t help myself and had to write to get something out of my head, to figure out how I felt.
Journal writing hasn’t interested me lately. There’s too much that I am not yet ready to make real. I tire of speculating and predicting and sounding like I know what the future holds. While it may be comforting to believe that, it’s a lie, a form of control, one of the things I need to leave behind, this death grip on an idea of reality. I have to ride reality out in its solidity, let it reveal itself to me gradually, a toe here, an ankle there, the slow striptease, the show of flesh.
Ah, and here is where my mind gets caught on the feel of a hand on a knee. I distract myself with the vision where nothing exists but touch and desire and the unfolding, the never-ending unfolding, the story without end, the landscape rolling out in front of me.
From the prompt "Bedside table."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ♥KatB Photography♥
Must be some kind of way out of here
06 September 2011 06:01 AM
I have decided that there is no past, nothing to talk about, that I have detached myself from it, have jumped off the side of memory into the deep, into the ever-present now.
There will be no more conversations about the cold hospital room at Georgetown and how the phone lines didn’t work, the frantic call earlier in the day from my mother to get out and the way my coworkers and I didn’t know where to go and gathered around a Capitol Hill fountain under a searing blue sky before walking home, the forced march with the others, and the rumors flying about bombs and planes intermingling with the truth.
I don’t want to discuss dead pets. Or the way K had a way with the rhetorical knife. Or the summer the three of you spent on Smith Island, sunburned under dead sky, the fights about evolution and carpentry, the way the ice cubes melted in the glasses of gin and tonic, and the son sat quietly, protected but not, because we know now that his reticence was a permanent condition, not something stuck to childhood.
We agree on the facts, most of them, and we share the history, and it is not comforting to me now as it gets further and further away. The main characters are dead. They have moved to distant states with people we've never met. We shared houses once and meals and sometimes conversations, and there were summers of entwined limbs or afternoons on the damp couch with the paperbacks, and the road shimmered in the heat. I am in the dark now, in the waiting room (so many times this comes up, the waiting room) and if I look back, I am afraid I might get stuck.
On that day almost ten years ago, I walked home. I made sure my boyfriend, who was at a meeting in northern Virginia, was ok. In the surreal beauty of a Washington DC September afternoon, he and I walked to the hospital. It was one of the last “normal” afternoons for K, although the world was changed from the outside, soon to be changed from the inside. Then it was bleeding and ventilators and tubes shoved down K's throat. It was traches and Factor VII and anthrax and for one week I had “All Along the Watchtower” going through my mind when we thought K was going to die. He was, but it was months away, and everything was burning.
Before that it was sickness. Before that, anger mixed with talk. Neglect tempered with love. Insanity, insanity, and I detach myself from that. But I am just detached right now and I hate it, I am searching in the dark for a path, making sure that it takes me forward, not back into the muck and if I am not careful I will spend every moment lost, in tears, holding it together so tightly I destroy myself, wondering how the story will end.
From the prompt "Ten years ago."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by lost in pixels.
No place like home
05 September 2011 06:36 AM
In my sleep last night, I created new homes, new spaces where we tried to fit in old furniture. Some rooms were filled, others empty, and we hadn’t gotten it down yet, how to fit it all in or talk about how to do it, and I fumed, looking at where he put everything, without consulting me and where was he, anyway?
Before sleep, as we hurtled here and there and looked at the view, after we pushed through sand (the finds! a pale sea star, tiny, near death, that slowly caressed my hand; a mussel covered in purple barnacles, exotic ladies with their fans that my mother tossed back into the ocean) and then went up and down the steps to the lighthouse, I thought: I miss home. Not my home –- though I miss that, too, the stately townhouses of DC and the fields and water of the Eastern Shore – but a sense of home.
I am disconnected, floating along, detached, and a person can’t live like this, in the emptiness. In my mind, a home, a personal culture, is often a shared thing, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. Is it fear? Is it something else? What am I looking for? We are cowards. We are delicate, easily bruised. We are all wrong.
This is what I grew up with: me and her, me and her, my mother, my grandmother. The men were interlopers and the best times were when we were alone. The last man was bad and also good. We shared something, the three of us. But he’s dead now and that life has been gone for ten years. Then it was me and my man and then me, my man, and the boy, and I realized: I don’t know how to do this. To make the world larger. To contain a family. I flirt with it. I want it, this sense of shared self, but it is as dangerous as a riptide, and unfamiliar.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting somewhere. But I feel like I am treading water and I am alone and I can’t do it alone but I can’t do it together either.
Yesterday we stood in line as a foursome, waiting to get a peek at the lighthouse lamp. My legs trembled like they never have before. They were tired. They needed more fuel, more food. We watched my knees shake and felt the tremors in my thighs. But I kept going. I waited. I stood. And when the ranger's talk was over, my mother and I tackled the stairs, walked thirty stories up without stopping, barely looking behind us, knowing the man and the boy were somewhere down below. Five minutes later, there they were, fifty pounds of boy on his father's shoulders, clinging against the wind.
Together we started the long walk back to the car, the tired stumble, preparing for a quiet ride against the earth's contours, the long ride home.
From the prompt "Undeniable."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit, though it feels unfinished. Funny how groggy I can be when I sleep in until 5:30. Groggy but slightly more refreshed.
Image: The boy and his father at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Hipstamatic by me.
Pattern recognition
04 September 2011 06:08 AM
They went away on Canadian vacations. I sometimes accompanied them for weekends at his trailer near the ocean (but actually on a manmade lake dug out of red clay, the water too still, where mosquitoes bred in the relentless summer sun and once I came back from with a shimmering jar of tadpoles). My mother brought me carved wooden animals, maple sugar candy, books of Canadian stories. One of the stories angered me. It was about a girl who spent time with her grandmother, baking cookies, mixing up the flour and sugar and butter, dropping the dough by tablespoonfuls on a baking sheet. Another girl came along, an orphan or someone else with a sob story, diverting the grandmother’s attention. The orphan needed her too, needed her more, and eventually the granddaughter understood this. I never did. Wasn’t there enough love and time for both? Did one need to be excluded to save the other?
I was always jealous, there was never enough for me, and I was melodramatic, too, with my heavy sighs and foot stomps, my silences heavy as lead. I’m not sure what she could have done differently. I was raised in an atmosphere of debate and art and anger (suppressed until it exploded) and last night I realized how many dinners and afternoons of soothing, of ignoring, she must have colluded in back then. It was all fine, it was important that it be fine, when clearly it wasn’t fine.
There is nothing to be done about it now, as I make my own mistakes and accept my feelings as real. I recognize the continuation of a pattern (with a different flavor). I name the emotions, I tell myself they are legitimate and that I am ok for having them, I promise that I will always acknowledge those of the boy, and that I will never, NEVER tell him that I know exactly what he is thinking, that I knew he would say that. I won’t take away his emotions or his autonomy. I will not rob him from himself.
From a photo prompt that has nothing to do with my text.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. It's probably a bit obtuse, this post, but I can tell you that it is based on a (calm) revelation and conversation I had with my mother last night, something that reminded me how far both of us have come and how separate I am feeling from the past (with a few exceptions). There are still some sore spots, of course. One thing at a time.
Image by godzillante|photochopper.
Chimera
03 September 2011 05:51 AM
“It could be much worse,” I told my mother as we completed mile four of our Berkeley march, the meandering from resale shop to park rock to bakery to salon product pick-up to iced tea to waiting for the boy outside his classroom. “We’re both lucky in so many ways.”
I am loved and have enough money and a lovely place to live. I am healthy. The boy is healthy. My brain still works, although it is leakier than it was before, and when I am not healthy (the brain fog, the never-ending crying jags, the unexpected blood) I have health insurance to cradle me and doctors and a phalanx of mental health professionals waiting to reassure.
It could go away at any moment, all of it, a heavy fact that lurks in the back of my mind, along with the discontent, the ugliness. It could go away. I don’t deserve it. I have been a passive player in my life, a provider of care and user of someone else’s money, piggybacking on the labors of my husband. If I went with the usual flow of words here, I’d call myself a parasite, but that isn’t quite right. There is an exchange, some of which is implicit, some of which is my self-sacrifice to the gods of luck, the gods that know I don’t deserve a damn thing.
I clean. I cook. I do the laundry and the dishes and organize much of the boy’s life. I have taken the things that I love – cooking high on the list, emoting and caring on a deeper level, deep thought and appreciation of art and the world in the mix, too – and boxed them up, the small and large parts of me. No one asked me to do this, but I don’t know how to live my current life, how to join it to those parts of myself that feel … deviant? No. Subversive? How could that be?
It’s suppression, plain and simple, and I’ve written about it for years, usually indirectly, often with anger. But it’s nobody’s fault (but mine). I’m chipping away at the boxes and trying to give the feelings room. Still, in that conversation about the things to be grateful for, the many things, I realized how little enthusiasm I have for my life. That pisses me off, because I remember caring a lot about the world and life and emotions, and I’m tired of not-feeling, of not wanting to go to the edge of the emotional sea, to the churning and tossing and the moments of beautiful calm, the uncertainty about the weather, the immersion in warmth and sunlight.
I’m tired of the suppression and I’m grateful for the good things and I still haven’t figured out how to join selves, to take the pre-parenthood me and the mother me and join them to make a new creature. Or maybe I’m doing it, but it feels so slow and there are so many other pieces of baggage along the way, the heavy legacy of the past, that it’s sometimes hard to see my way forward.
From the prompt "I am so grateful for..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Note on the title: I spent more time debating the title than I did writing the post. Ultimately, I think it fits. You can find out more about chimeras here and here and draw your own conclusions.
Confidential to people looking for my yicky post. I deleted it.
Image by Stuck in Customs.
Born again
02 September 2011 05:47 AM
I tossed one leg over the other. The hanging foot twitched and bounced. I knit my fingers together and took them apart, knit together and took apart, and when that was no longer satisfying, I tapped my fingernails against themselves, hid one set under the other. My hands were one creature, my arms connected, they would never separate, would never open up for another again.
I distracted myself with thoughts of sex, of fields at night, the trembling under a fitful breeze. Every landscape was dark, the sun gone, but the moon made shadows of trees on the ground. The stars twinkled. Every cliché about light in the dark came true, and I didn’t know who was beside me and I didn’t care. The glow from his cigarette hung in the dark. I knew the other end touched his lips, the lips that didn’t let words out, that caressed the edge of wine glasses and pecked me on the cheek in the morning. He turned his head to the side and removed the cigarette, the glow moving with him.
I knew his hands once, the long thumbs, the thin fingers and broad palms. What was it about men’s hands? I used to watch him write letters on Sunday afternoons. I glimpsed his fingertips as they held the newspaper or tapped out email. I reached for those hands, he reached for mine, but now there was no familiarity. I had taken to looking at the hands of strangers, the men at the coffee shop grabbing distractedly at sheathed paper cups, the guys on the street clutching cell phones or holding the looped ends of dog leashes.
He extinguished the spark and said goodnight, his footsteps crunching up the dune. Waves returned to the beach again and again and again. I buried my feet in the cool sand and closed my eyes against the murky dark, imagined a man who spoke, who knew how to use his hands. I conjured him up from dream and memory, and in my mind we walked along the edge of water, talking, never stopping. There was no barrier and the words were born, they lived and died and were born again.
From the prompt "Pregnant," which is almost as bad as "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
I dreamed last night about planes and crash landings, about people holding blowtorches to boxes of raw popcorn in order to cook them in the heat. Small explosions and runways carved out of dirt: what does it mean?
Image by ElvertBarnes.
Off the hook
30 August 2011 06:09 AM
I crammed my head full of self-help books this summer and Mad Men and file-sorting. I read about standing on your own feet, about hugging until relaxed, about the way children of trauma meet children of neglect in adulthood and fuse, bond, until the bond frays and rips and tears your heart out. I did this as I gave away old shoes and baby clothes and put aside an item or two to remember my son’s early childhood by, imagining the moment in ten or fifteen years when we open the box and compare the small garments against his long, almost-adult frame. What will he think of them then?
The last self-help book I read, inhaled, really, as I was exhilarated to recognize myself in some of it, helped me in unexpected ways. We can change, it reassured me. We can take these childhoods without foundation, or with foundations of broken brick, and still move forward. We are not permanently molded by them.
It made me feel hopeful, that these feelings of inadequacy, of evilness, of being wrong and responsible for every bad thing in my life and the lives of the people I love and take care of, are mutable. And then there is the boy, the child, the one I parent: even if we mess up (and who doesn’t mess up?), chances are that he will be ok, and if he isn’t (it won’t all be our fault, will it? though I tend to think parents should take responsibility for the bad stuff and give their amazing children credit for the good.), he will be responsible for creating his own change. No one gets through childhood unscathed.
We are not static. We flow. We can’t live as if every decision will mold us into something more brittle, will permanently scar us or our children. If we are already worrying about the effects of our actions on our children, chances are that our concern will be a buffer. Treating them as if they are delicate pieces of china, too fragile for the world, unable to stand out in it without our assistance, might only reinforce a feeling of helplessness, of can’t do, of not being able to be independent when the time comes.
A foundation of love and trust helps, with a gentle tug here, a push there, buttressed by the fact that we always have their back, that we trust them to do the right thing given that we know them and have kept them close when they needed it. For those of us who had very little of this in our early life -- love without trust, good conversation and debate without the surety of stability, sad nights crying alone in dark rooms -- we can still make it in the world. We have emotional texture. We have stories to tell, of quirkiness and (sometimes) adventure and survival.
I stand at the doorway to the world. I try not to let my isolated past generate my future. Change is possible. It is necessary. The people who raised me (or didn’t) are off the hook, struggling to move forward in their own lives and I hope to be off the hook myself someday, loose and free, a flawed human being who continues to do her best.
From the prompt "To be continued."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited a bit. Up before 4 a.m., anticipating the first day of school for the boy and my mother's arrival later this morning. Is this post any good? I have no idea and I'm not sure I care at the moment.
Image by D. Munoz-Santos.
Connection resurrection
29 August 2011 06:05 AM
These are the things I’ve left behind: midnight solitary walks under a canopy of stars; slow trips to the market, my only agenda being taste and texture; art (the museums, the words, the way sculpture is larger than the space it inhabits). Every moment has to be practical, a push towards something necessary.
Yesterday, irritated, angry, unable to shake it, I took a bath in the upstairs bathroom. The room is lovely, with curves against angles and an old-fashioned tub. I tossed a soothing, fragrant bath bomb into the wet. I immersed myself in hot water under natural light and remembered other times, the hung-over soaking at my place on E Street in a room yellowed with age, the bathtub small and stained. How my head ached. Maybe it was afternoon or close to evening and I’d been in bed most of the day, recovering from the debauchery. I dunked my head under water and listened to the sound of my blood flowing, proof that I was still there.
I don’t want to look back on those times with nostalgia, those days of lonely drunkenness, of the obvious stares across smoky beer-soaked barrooms and the weekends lost to the hangover and the hair of the dog. That’s not what I want to return to or to resurrect. But I do miss the connection I felt to the world, the way it was alive to me and I was alive, walking under low tree branches, looking at the sky, spending my time picking out the perfect mix of flavors and enjoying it happily, by myself or with another. I saw the stars. I walked under a canopy of night on one-lane roads where the trees reached out and the corn rustled conspiratorially in the breeze and I cared about ideas, too, let my mind run free.
Do the stars still exist? They have taken on the feeling of myth, of childhood story. There I am on a grassy lawn in Lake George, bundled up on a chaise lounge, staring at the sky with my father and his girlfriend. It is late August and we are looking for meteorites, for the streaks of light in the darkness. The sky is heavy with stars and I’m up later than usual, safe and cocooned, with no one looking to me for my reaction. It is pure experience, unfiltered through expectation.
I could take midnight walks in Berkeley, but the fog here obscures the sky most nights. I could take my time shopping, selecting each item I put into the cart for its scent, the way it feels in my hand, but the store is all about the agenda: get in, get out, put away, prepare. I want to spend my time immersed in feeling, in sensation, want to be taken away from the obligations. I want to stand in the gallery to take in the color, the shape, the form, to be impractical and connected and alive.
I don't know how to get back.
From the prompt "The stars."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Lightly edited and in need of expansion. Tired brain. Round Robin burnout. Me, me, me.
Image by Werner Kunz.
Now I (don't) wanna be your dog
28 August 2011 06:01 AM
My life appears the same. Stupid wake-up time. Round Robin write that turns into post fodder. The coffee. Soon, the pill. This morning my husband will go running and then we will go to the Berkeley Bowl and then we will clean in preparation for my mother’s arrival (visit delayed three days because of Hurricane Irene – she’s fine and her house is intact, thank goodness). I will run the vacuum cleaner and the dust rag. I will prepare dinner and load the dishwasher. I will toddle off to bed too early after sleepy conversation with the man.
Internally, however, it is all shifting. I am holding off on the confessional. I know that the only behavior I can change is my own. I will slowly build my arsenal of classes to move on, I will sculpt a resume. My fall won’t be quite as out in the world as I was hoping – the classes I will take will all be online – and I have had to let go of my disappointment, see hope as a long-term thing.
When I am feeling optimistic, I know I can do this, that I don’t need a hand to pull me up (though I do need other people, I do need other people, I do need other people – the mantra I must repeat because I have a tendency to withdraw from them in times of great need). I can carve out something for myself, I don’t need a rescuer or a soft surface. But if I think about it too much, I will falter, so let’s change the subject.
I had a dream last night that I was back with the old crowd. A person I had wronged, someone who got angry at one of my recent posts, was there. I told him I was sorry. I told him that the posts from prompts were most likely to be half-thought out, not careful enough in their treatment of other people. He was ok with it (in real life, he sent me a terse Facebook message, unfriended me, and didn't respond to my measured apology, which included an offer to delete the post). I told him that because I wanted to, not because I wanted to feel better about myself, to show that I was good now, see. I told him because I felt it, not because I wanted to be the dog who flipped on her back, belly exposed in submission.
I don’t have to prostrate myself before anyone. I don’t have to mold my behavior to fit what I think they want. I don’t have to confess into the void, desperate for a reaction, a sign of caring. Fuck that. And when I’m feeling weak, like reaching a hand out to nothing, like proving my goodness when there is nothing to prove and no one to prove it to, I will read this. Again. And again. And again. Until it forms a ridge of thought in my mind, protective, permanent. An indication of self.
From a photo prompt, completely unrelated to what I wrote.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. It must be my general mood, but I keep on wanting to use the word "fuck" in the titles to these posts (what would it be in this case? Fuck you? Fuck 'Em All?) Today I also wanted to use that picture of Johnny Cash, you know, the one where he brandishes the bird? Not a very friendly shot and perhaps an indicator of how pissed off I am in general. It's an old, old feeling and I am tired of it, of its fire and the way it projects shadows of the past on the present. I am dealing with that one over time.
The Stooges "I Wanna Be Your Dog" via YouTube.
Image by dimmerswitch.
The silent treatment
27 August 2011 05:44 AM
I was meting out my punishment to the man behind the camera. He wasn’t committed enough. He wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do. My needs were paramount, his needs were hidden, and so I spent that trip in a pretty California town pouting and silent.
Yesterday it was more of the same, a continuation of a game of no-speak, of withdrawal. I didn’t need to stomp my feet or tear at my hair as I screamed. Instead I kept my distance, kept quiet and tidy and far away, until I realized that I wasn’t having any fun. I was punishing someone else and punishing myself, too, and what sort of outcome did I expect from this anyway? It wasn’t an effective method, it was childish, and dulling.
What relief, to let go of the game, to be able to be there without a need to disappear or punish or put the whole interaction on the other participant.
On a long-ago night in a small Michigan town by the side of the lake, I sat with someone else’s family in a vacation house living room. They wanted to play cards (earlier it was croquet) and I had decided a long time ago that I was not a player of cards or croquet or charades or mass Monopoly. It was me against them, asserting my individuality. Being a pill but wanted to be loved for it. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t loveable. I just wasn’t able to meet them on their own terms. It had to be on mine, all of it, another test in the wasp’s nest, in this strange place with its accepting snobs. They were willing to take me in, but I wasn’t willing to take them on.
I sat reading a book as someone dealt. Outside it was crickets and stars. The light in the living room drowned out the night noises. I wasn’t able to listen. I should have dropped my book and walked to the table. I should have smiled on that trip to Santa Barbara and reached out my hand to the one who loved me. At least I figured out my childishness yesterday before nightfall, but I’m afraid I’ll have to recognize it again and again before I get it right, before I acknowledge the need and separate myself from it. Another process to churn through.
From the prompt "Ah, now I get it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: Not smiling in Santa Barbara, 2000?.
In search of relief
26 August 2011 06:59 AM
I contain the knowledge of change, the acceptance of it, and yet my stomach is a knot. My psyche demands permanence, unwavering support, the strength of others against my woozy frame. Can I hold out a pale, shaking hand to steady myself against your shoulder? Are you telling me you have your own worries? Should I get out the hammer now and destroy everything, leaving the scrap for kindling, or is it time to think about the structure, to see how I or we or the elements – the shifting earth, the angry skies, the relentless wind – will change it so that it fits, it works, so that there is no need to destroy?
Even my writing is controlled. Last night I was talking to my son about something or other before leaving his room for the night. We’ve had some of our best conversations in these in-between moments after his light is off and we cuddle in the dark. Somehow, we got on the topic of what it feels like to bite oneself. He does it sometimes, all kids probably do. For him, it’s curiosity, a desire to see the marks of his own teeth on flesh, to look at the patterns they make. I did it, too, but I did it when I was angry, and I did it in anger for years, well past adolescence.
The feeling is primal, like fear, the run from death or the devil, from the knowledge we all contain about our ultimate impermanence. The feelings bubble up within me, and for a long time they had no place. I took that kid anger out on myself, I didn’t know what to do with it, but here I am a grownup, shifting in good ways, my life changing, and yet I am so afraid and I am angry and I want to separate it out, take the chaos of feeling under my exterior and figure out what belongs where, like sorting clothing for the seasons before packing it away. I want to put the bad stuff in its place, or remind myself that, although it is still there, reaching out a clawed hand from so many years back, it is past, that where I am now doesn’t need to be affected by it.
Riding out the change without destroying the framework takes trust, faith in oneself, so here I am, eyes closed, hands out, shuffling forward.
From the prompt "Relief."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos, though I'm not sure one can talk about "clarity" with my prompts lately.
Image by paulscott56.
Two rooms
25 August 2011 06:57 AM
Wood is complicated. Warm. It is direct, sure of itself, with no need to put layers of paint between it and the world. She rubs her hands across it for comfort and reassurance. A circular oak table, the type with clawed feet at the end of its curvaceous legs, a walnut roll-top desk battered with age and use, a birdseye maple vanity with its mottled grain, remind her of a man who knew what he was doing. He wielded saws and hammers and drills, coaxed rounded shapes out of flat boards with attention – the lathe, the sander, his calloused hand intimate with chisel and splinter. She swept the sawdust out of his woodshop, saved it for the creation of flame, tossed it in the compost, breathed in the sharp rich scent of life that permeated the room.
There is no wood in this room, or at least none that hasn’t been choked out by paint. Everything is glossy, her thoughts bounce off the surfaces and back to her, mangled on the return, emphasizing her aloneness, her single quality in the emptiness, the only other living thing to exist.
The man was strong. He used to carry her high above his head and twirl her around. She protested, as anyone would, as she giggled. She couldn't stop. The confusion between yes and no was forged here, along with the paradoxical nature of the tickle, the way being pinned and tortured had an element of pleasure to it. Still, she turned off her skin. She stopped feeling the sensations. She locked herself inside her head, made the room with warm wood furniture and soft dark fabrics.
It is a comfortable mind, a retreat, a place where a fire burns contained in an open brick sarcophagus, chaos in a box. She sits in the overstuffed chair with a cat on her lap and another beside. The dog snores in his corner. People don't give animals credit for having emotional lives, she thinks. It's not as simple as dumb love and loyalty, and in her head she can acknowledge that, be open to it all, to the differences outside her perceptions.
She pages through a book of photographs from the past and watches the people come alive. She runs a cool hand up and down the inside of her arm until the goosebumps start. She closes her eyes as the fire crackles and the sun streams through a closed window. Outside there is weather. The trees struggle silently against the wind. Dead leaves dance across streets. Unsecured doors swing open and closed again and couples fight in person, on cell phones. They have silent conversations, the words felt rather than heard, and hold hands across great divides. She sits. The fire accepts her handfuls of sawdust, her sacrificial logs. In another room, cold and hard and bright, the other part of her waits in chilly silence.
From the prompt "Minimalistic." I wanted to call this post "Fuck Minimalism," more because I am in a foul mood than for any other reason, but that didn't seem appropriate.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one took a lot of editing, in part because I am tired. Nora-dog chuffed in the stairwell at 12:30 a.m. I finally went downstairs with her to see if there was anything to chuff about and opened the door to the back room where Nick the cat was mysteriously sitting (it's a no-cats-allowed room, for good reason). I evicted him before going upstairs. Then my brain raced here and there and THEN a car horn, constant and sharp, faded in and out of the bedroom until it finally stopped. I got back to sleep somewhere in the 3 a.m. hour and was up again by 5:20. I'm so tired that I am going on and on about this. And because no one in the house is up yet, anyone who has gotten this far in this long and boring paragraph might be among the first to know about my night.
Image by geoffbarrattgeoff.
Sound barrier
24 August 2011 06:01 AM
First it was the people, with their yammering, with their jabs and petty squabbles. Leaving them behind was no big deal, considering how little I interacted with them anyway. And I took it slow, stopped asking folks at work how they were or about their weekends, about their perfect children. I didn’t make eye contact when I walked the halls, the street, the parks, the supermarkets. People respond to feedback or its lack. They didn’t know what my game was, they didn’t care or notice or even think about it, until finally I lived in glorious silence, alone, unmolested.
I even turned the sound off on my television set. I watched the faces of the actors, the anchors, the grinning and grimacing idiots on the commercials, and tried to interpret the action without sound. This gave me the idea of walking around with earplugs. I practiced in my living room, my ears stuffed with a magical synthetic, pliable and complete in its blockage, a sound barrier. I danced to music by feeling the beat in the floor. I held my hand against the walls as they trembled with treble and bass. I watched the phone quiver in its cradle.
Living without using your ears is not easy. The cues we get from sound – the rumble of a car engine, the crash in the back of the house as a cat knocks over a plant – I had to intuit, to tune into the vibrations, the way movement disturbs the air and the waves of sound glide past one’s skin. It almost became too much, the soft touch of the small sounds – the cat licking its chest, the refrigerator’s sigh – intermingling with the macho waves pushing their way out of the garbage truck, the slaps from ambulances, a neighbor’s shrill screams at her daughter or her dog or her husband a nasty cut across my cheek.
But most of the disturbances came from cars. The highway, with its low rumbles and its pretensions to ocean waves, was a constant undercurrent. My insides felt like they were being jumbled by the trucks of San Pablo. I thought about constructing a suit out of sheets of aluminum, something to deflect the noise, but I knew that would have its own cadence and would rob me of my anonymity. I had to be like the rest of them. I had to stop noticing, had to let the sounds pass through me as if they didn’t exist, another way to erase the world, to stop containing it in my body.
From the prompt "A time you let go."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. LIghtly edited.
Image by lemasney.
Family table
23 August 2011 06:38 AM
If you want to get decadent, peel four cloves of garlic. Take the bread – Acme sourdough works well, and it doesn’t have to be stale – and slice it thickly into four to six pieces. You can cube it or you can keep the slices. It depends on your willpower, what you are going for. Heat four tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan (low to medium heat), toss in the garlic cloves, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown on all sides. Remove the golden cloves. Cool them. Eat them. Puree them. Smash them with a knife and breath in the scent of tamed garlic.
Turn up the heat – not too much – and toss the bread cubes/slices into the hot oil. They will sizzle. They will drink in the garlic-scented oil and turn crisp with joy at what they are about to become. Stir them occasionally, until they are mostly brown, and then remove them from the pan.
Try your best to let them cool. Try your best not to eat them all before the family comes into the kitchen and claims theirs. Wait for the salad, for the romaine and the chickpeas and the feta, for the red onion and cherry tomatoes and kalamatas, for the red bell pepper and vinaigrette. Wait! Wait I tell you!
If food was purely love and not also fuel, then this is what I might make every night. Croutons. Real macaroni and cheese, bubbling and unctuous. The things that we used to call things (corn tortillas, faux sausage patties, salsa, green onions, tomatoes, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, avocado and sour cream cooked on a griddle until the tortilla was crisp and the cheese was melty, a combination of spicy, crunchy, and smooth). Pumpkin waffles, despite the dog’s fear of the iron’s dangerous beep.
Every Saturday morning I used to make pancakes, always the same, oatmeal batter with blueberries, and then I just stopped. Maybe this was the end, the line in the sand, the snap of the rope. I took one step back, and then another, watched them as they sat with their cereal, as they got smaller and smaller. I accepted that some children might like prepared rice and beans better than my own. I had ideas about the dinner table and family, ideas from an early life of meals where I was excluded or ridiculed. I swore this would never happen in my own family and so I made it easy, with as little conflict as possible.
If food was purely a combination of love and fuel and not also a tug on the heart, if childhood meals and tables weren't forever linked in my mind with my worth, with myself, the separation would not feel necessary. While they talk, I let my mind wander. I think about the dishes waiting to be cleaned, the lunches I have to make, the next task, because the moment is so hard to be in, with its associations, its sad recipes and I wonder if they notice me as I float above the room.
From the prompt "The wall."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit. And please remember that these prompts are just little snapshots of writing, that they don't necessarily represent my continual internal state. In other words, it's not always that bad.
Image by kevindooley.
Indulging the fear
22 August 2011 05:48 AM
The popular girls didn’t wear primary colors, but they were bright, the Esprit t-shirts and the jeans in shades that never occurred in nature. That was how we measured value, in the clothes, the labels, the human search for approval and status in the most base of ways. You needed money, you needed to be an extrovert, you needed connection and cotillion tickets and a house with a yard. Your family needed a new car, or at the very least a car, and maybe even two parents, two parents who were supportive and together, with an entire ensemble of family behind them, too. You needed a group to support you, to ride along until you were able to swim by yourself, to be on your own.
I don’t want to come across as bitter – no, I’m not bitter – but I am close to the edge this morning, thinking about how we measure our value and the value of other people. It’s a strange way to think about humanity, to think in terms of how much a person is worth, not in dollars, but in the right to take up space, to demand attention and love. Aren’t we all worth the same -- that is, aren't we inherently valuable? We may be, but that’s not how it works practically speaking.
My fear is that I will die alone. We all die alone, of course, unless perhaps we take someone down with us, or go out in a jetliner crash or a conflagration at a packed hotel or train car or apartment complex, but I mean alone. The family that buffeted me when I was small has died and dispersed. The people I trust are few, and my own little family may not be enough. I can be brave, I can, I try, but sometimes it just hits me, the fear, the paralyzing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I may not be capable of creating the connections I need and crave, my self-protective shield is already in place, and I am not of enough value for people to reach out for me.
Yes, I am getting better, I am healing and I am brave and strong and capable, but this feeling of not mattering, of being existentially alone, is overwhelming right now. Maybe it was the continuation of our home reorganization, the weekend spent emptying a closet that has been packed with boxes since we moved here, the dismantling of the antique armoire we bought a decade ago to make room for a new configuration in the back room, this rifling through a recent past, through days of connection that feel very far away. Maybe it’s the process of making the room into something else, a physical acknowledgment of change. At any rate, I’m drowning, the whirlpool is pulling me underwater, my lungs are filling up, and I don’t know who to reach for. I feel like an item on discount at the dollar store, unwanted and cheap. Disposable. I am on my own.
Dying alone, living alone. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t see how I can get out of it at the moment. Surely I’ll feel better tomorrow or the next day or next week. For now I’m just going to indulge this feeling, tinged with fear and self-pity, for a few more minutes before I put it away, box it up until I am ready to feel it again.
From the prompt "Very popular."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one took a bit of editing for clarity.
Image by Sebastian Fritzon.
The sacred against the asphalt
21 August 2011 05:45 AM
It is easier with my eyes closed, with my mind only on sensation, on the thick succulents with their reservoirs of water at the center. Even the bees don’t mind my gentle touch, and the ladybugs tickle the back of my hand, while the praying mantises dart away. I can feel their presence, their fear, and so I hold my hand still until they take cover.
In the room there is nothing but a cool breeze, the sound of the neighbor talking in German on his cell phone. I hear the highway traffic, the soft thump of cat paw on roof shingle. You are silent, I feel the warmth of your breath, and if I pay enough attention, I hear the flow of blood, the heartbeat, my own life humming in my head against the rhythm of yours.
The garden, the room, the smooth coolness of the pillow, the heavy hot weight of a cat against my hip: I am not to open my eyes, I don’t want to, but one can’t stay closed forever. The challenge is to open up, to acknowledge the world, to take it in all forms, to let it enter you as you enter it.
Last night on the dog walk I looked across a quiet side street and saw a tree, its trunk like grey withered skin, its canopy high and round and dignified. I saw the tree, green and grey, with leaves like hands. It had being and separateness, its own life in the world. I remembered the closeness of childhood with nature, the way I befriended trees and said goodbye to them when my mother and I moved on. There was no barrier between me and them and I didn’t need to close my eyes against the world, to distract myself with chatter and the glowing screen, with a book cracked open at every opportunity.
This is what I want, no division between me and you and trees and plants. I want to take it in, to see it clearly, the sacred against the asphalt and cracked sidewalk. My hand reaches for yours in the evening fog, both of us aware of the music of blood flow, of life, separate, related, part of the world.
The photo above was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
Testing, testing ...
20 August 2011 05:46 AM
Today I am taking the GRE . The last time I took this was probably in … 1991? Twenty years ago. I took the train to Mom and Kevin's place in Wilmington and she later dropped me off at the testing site which was in Newark or in Philadelphia, where I sat with a bunch of other children in the high-ceiled room of a library, us with our scratch paper and our pencil marks and our dim light and our nervousness. Five years before, I had taken the SAT – my main memory of that is that it was scheduled the day after a Halloween party and I was tired and slightly hung over, but it went fine, because my brain was young and supple and accustomed to tests.
In the fall of 1985, along with every other junior in my high school, I took the PSATs. Except that I had to leave early for my ultrasound appointment, so that they could check on the age of the fetus, which I fudged the whole time, holding on to my lie until the pregnancy’s sad end six weeks later. All I remember about this pretest was the auditorium, my unexplained secret, the way we had to talk to the guidance counselor about my early dismissal without actually telling her the reason I had to have a doctor’s appointment right then. Now I wonder if I really have to have it then. We were in emergency mode by that time and skipping one half of the PSATs probably seemed unimportant.
I remember the before, sometimes a bit of the during, but I hardly remember the aftermath of these tests. Generally, I did ok. But here I am, over 25 years from a math class, knowing that I am going to totally screw that part of the GRE up. I’m worried and not worried about it at the same time. It’s like the logic midterm, knowing that I am going to toss myself over the side of a cliff and knowing that there is little I can do about it.
I failed the midterm, but luckily almost everyone else did, too. This is where my connection to my fellow philosophy students, all young men who were at CUA on a special scholarship where they were in the seminary (none of them became priests) while simultaneously getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. They used their power (not that they had a lot of it – these were tough years for these guys) to toss the results of the test out. It was true, our instructor was an ethicist, not a logician, and often would write long proofs on the chalkboard only to have a student point out a flaw in his formula, necessitating an entire rethink. There was a lot of crumpled paper in that classroom, a lot of groans. In the end, I got a C.
Last night I went to bed before ten p.m.. I read my escapist romantic book, A Town Like Alice, and I dreamed of phone calls that didn’t go through and children waiting for absent parents. In the last dream, I was in an elevator that was fluffy with loose insulation. I took it down to the basement, to the place of secrets where the walls were ripped away, showing their vulnerable insides. I watched the men working. I worried about their lungs, about the fibers floating in the air, about the way we contain the past. I waited for a sign that it was time to go back up again.
From the prompt "Surprise, surprise!"
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited slightly beyond the 12-minute mark.
Image by randomduck. This picture makes me homesick. The Childe Harold is no longer there, but I spent a lot of time in that basement bar in my 20s. J's cousin was a bartender there. My husband and I had at least one early days date there (I even remember the conversation) and a coworker took me there for a final beer after I quit my last full-time library job. Zorba's, the Greek restaurant to to the right of the Childe Harold, was where I went for an (illegal) Guinness on my first or second night in DC in the summer of 1989, drinking, eating, and reading under a Dupont-blue night sky, watching the people go by.
I need to visit. It's been too long.
The match in the dark
19 August 2011 06:12 AM
I can coax the words out of parched fingertips, start with just one sentence and then let things take me where they will, with my attempts to let go of control, to flow along and let my subconscious or my barely conscious mind do its thing, its amazing thing. But my mind frustrates me, what with all this talk of me and my inner life and the pain and I worry sometimes about how it all comes across: who is this chick?
Data in means words out and my data in has been parenting, getting my fingers dirty in the garden, suppressing bad thoughts and feelings and attempting to fit them into a nice neat framework. I’d like to tidy it all up in my head and say that it’s under control, that I’ve weeded and pruned my thoughts and the paths of my mind are gravel lined, but would that be me?
I can’t always separate out who I am from who I think others want me to be. I want to appear to be in control on one level (while always being tautly in control in a different sense internally). But this idea of my mind, my psyche, my inner being as some sort of tamed garden leaves me cold. It’s the imposition of thought control, and though the idea of my thoughts, of my self, being nice and neat and tidy and always kind is soothing, it is also dead.
These are my fears at the moment, at least the ones bobbing to the surface: I will never be able to write fiction that sticks, it will all be this talk talk about me or various vague inspirational chitchats. One of my August tasks was to file up my old writing, the stuff I’ve kept in piles in my desk and in our back room, which was a humbling experience. The drafts of my never-ending story (Has it ended? Maybe it has.) from its painful and self-conscious beginnings, my attempts to write memoir, good but still tinged with pain. The fiction isn’t bad, at least it has its moments, and maybe I should pick it up again, but I don’t have any ideas.
There seems to be this dichotomy of literature, fiction is the primary branch, thriving in the sunlight, while personal essay and nonfiction are shadows on the sidewalk. Do I want to write fiction because that’s what I think I should write? Am I any good at it? How do I embrace my style and continue when I feel like an asshole, like a writer of tripe, the always autobiographically based chest-beater?
I am just beginning to figure out who I am, setting out a foundation. The process involves exploration and pressing forward against self-doubt. Let’s toss aside extreme self-consciousness, not let my questions, the bottomless pit of analysis, get in the way. This is what I can write now and later I will be able to write something else and the wit is there no matter what, my substrate of dark humor and dark life, the match in the dark against the dripping brick wall.
From the prompt "I can do it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Data in means words out and my data in has been parenting, getting my fingers dirty in the garden, suppressing bad thoughts and feelings and attempting to fit them into a nice neat framework. I’d like to tidy it all up in my head and say that it’s under control, that I’ve weeded and pruned my thoughts and the paths of my mind are gravel lined, but would that be me?
I can’t always separate out who I am from who I think others want me to be. I want to appear to be in control on one level (while always being tautly in control in a different sense internally). But this idea of my mind, my psyche, my inner being as some sort of tamed garden leaves me cold. It’s the imposition of thought control, and though the idea of my thoughts, of my self, being nice and neat and tidy and always kind is soothing, it is also dead.
These are my fears at the moment, at least the ones bobbing to the surface: I will never be able to write fiction that sticks, it will all be this talk talk about me or various vague inspirational chitchats. One of my August tasks was to file up my old writing, the stuff I’ve kept in piles in my desk and in our back room, which was a humbling experience. The drafts of my never-ending story (Has it ended? Maybe it has.) from its painful and self-conscious beginnings, my attempts to write memoir, good but still tinged with pain. The fiction isn’t bad, at least it has its moments, and maybe I should pick it up again, but I don’t have any ideas.
There seems to be this dichotomy of literature, fiction is the primary branch, thriving in the sunlight, while personal essay and nonfiction are shadows on the sidewalk. Do I want to write fiction because that’s what I think I should write? Am I any good at it? How do I embrace my style and continue when I feel like an asshole, like a writer of tripe, the always autobiographically based chest-beater?
I am just beginning to figure out who I am, setting out a foundation. The process involves exploration and pressing forward against self-doubt. Let’s toss aside extreme self-consciousness, not let my questions, the bottomless pit of analysis, get in the way. This is what I can write now and later I will be able to write something else and the wit is there no matter what, my substrate of dark humor and dark life, the match in the dark against the dripping brick wall.
From the prompt "I can do it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
What I don't want to write about
18 August 2011 06:10 AM
It seems I spend half of these appointments in tears or pressing my fingernails together or taking tissues (the preliminary step is to place the box near me on the leather-cushioned couch as I sit down) and forming them into shapes, compressing them, combining them into one huge ball that I lob at the trashcan as we leave.
I can’t write about it. I can barely talk about it. And I don’t even know what “it” is, except this amorphous and yet specific feeling. After the appointment, I traveled the wormholes of the Internet, looking for verification, for clues from the outside that once or twice or more a long time ago, something made me this way, made me angry at touch, at being robbed of something, of having my body be out of my control.
It’s a relief, actually, to just go with my hunch and see how it has played out in my life, in my history and present. Having a name for something, trusting in myself, makes a huge difference. It’s all part of the same journey that I’ve been on for a few years now, and suddenly I could see another source of the self-blame, of the anger turned inward, of the unspoken belief that I was responsible for every bad thing that happened to me or to the people I love.
I still struggle with the beliefs of a child, that I am the center of other people’s reactions to me, that the world somehow revolves around me in a negative way. My mother once told me that she thought her mailman was angry at her because her Netflix movies weren't arriving on time, a ridiculous thought, but I understood it, this frozen feeling of being important, the negative focus. It’s both egotistical and withered and part of the same game, the child alone in the room, while her parents fight outside of it, the girl who thinks her thoughts can be read, that everyone knows how bad she is, and there he was in the room with her, in the dark, in the light, when no one else was around, to prove it.
From the prompt "What I don't want to write about." For some reason, it makes me think of a song. Belle and Sebastian, Fox in the Snow.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by renee.hawk.
They hover in the air
17 August 2011 05:21 AM
My dreams are all about train stations and men in suits and lost dogs. I walk across moonlit fields against the sound of rustling in the trees. In the dark, I reach out to touch the gnarled bark only to discover old bones grasping back at me, my predecessors. It’s a dangerous journey, alone at night, and sometimes I wish I’d brought a dog or a cat or a friend. I am lonely and the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with (this loose cadre of disconnected souls) are wrapped up in their own lives. They emerge out of the evening fog only to let it swallow them back up again after a hug, a supportive talk, a shared beer in bar laden with the memory of smoke.
This is what scares me, this stepping through the swamp of loneliness, of total reliance on self while still trying to be open to the wills and ways of others. I remind myself that I am lucky to feel, to palpitate the heart of darkness, quivering and clammy where its exposed to air. I am being here now, that’s for damn sure, and I allow the feelings their moment when I can. There will be no suppression, but it all feels like a juggling act, a balancing act, like I’m in some sort of fucked up circus with the tightrope and the scuffed ballet shoes and the bowling pins hovering in the air in their struggle against gravity.
But I am here, trying my best. Sometimes I comfort myself with thoughts of a different age, the wake-up in a room spicy with Vick’s VapoRub, the green glass of the humidifier lit up by nightlight a glowing beacon. My breathing is tight, my flannel nightgown is sweat-soaked, but I know that soon my grandmother will be in with a cool washcloth and a warm dry hand.
I hold it all together myself, I have to, I’ve always had to, so this is no different. The difference is that I am grasping my own hand, pouring the cool glass of water, hugging myself in the dark, knowing that this is what we do when no one else is able to, that this is the reality of life.
Still. I want to lie on cool sheets and have them minister to me, bring me weak tea and cinnamon toast. I want them to talk to me, to tell me stories. I want to know their problems. I want an even exchange. But none of us are there yet and so I wait, I prepare, I make my plans in the darkness of four a.m., waiting for the comfort of another life.
From the prompt "Looking up."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Double-M.
Soothing
16 August 2011 06:40 AM
I’m through with the melodrama and the 3 a.m. thin hopes, about love, or the pursuit, or this idea that my savior awaits with capable, nimble fingers and an accepting disposition. I’ve let got of the fantasy, of the idea that I deserve something, that someday, as I am walking down the street, or as I sleep at night, a team with bandages will come upon me and wrap me from neck to toe, will take me away to a calm grey room where the meals always come on time and I never run out of time, and there are books and visitors and all the responsibility for my trajectory has been taken out of my hands and that’s fine.
I’ve stopped reaching out desperately with clawed hands and a tear-streaked face. I’m no four-year old or five-year old or fifteen year old, waiting for the parent, for the delivery of food and love and support. Find it within yourself, the books said, learn how to soothe yourself, and I see the wisdom in it, the softening when I need to, the surreptitious hugs, my arms firm, my hands stroking my shoulder blades, there, there, you have five minutes to feel crappy and then you move on to the next task.
It helps to keep busy, to move or organize, to swipe dust off of shelves and scrub the bathtub, the sink, the dirty tile. There is always work to do. The Internet, with its playacting, its attempts at closeness, can make it worse sometimes, those moments when I am aware of being alone, a person by myself connected to a machine and no one else is out there looking out for me and I need looking after, I need it, and doesn’t anybody care?
This is what the self-soothing is about, caring for myself, understanding that I can’t expect others to take over the caretaking, that I am the parent, the responsible party. Even the old fantasies, the being imagined and held in someone else’s mind, are no longer appealing. Why give over my autonomy, my sense of self?
What is next? Is this about building a different kind of wall, the I am me and I don’t need other people? I am all about worry, about preparation through anxiety over the things I can’t control, but I can answer this question. No. That’s not what this is about. It’s about boundaries and being who I am. I have nothing against the conversation, the back and forth. I am not without hopes and the occasional fantasy, the feel of a hand on my back as I look into the other’s eyes, the soft lips, the yielding, two adults, two equals, in their lovely exchange.
From the prompt "Quitting."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. More of the personal growth thing. Hope it isn't getting old for you guys.
Image by Lovin Earth.
The reorg
15 August 2011 06:00 AM
The things I’ve uncovered. The things I had forgotten about, had jammed in the back corners of my mind and my underwear drawer. Ancient, redundant, and obsolete forms of birth control. Orphan plugs to long-gone electronics. A disposable camera two-thirds finished with photos from my December in San Francisco, the days of my brief internship at Greens, shots of my little rental in the Inner Richmond, where I slept poorly with thoughts of the surprise baby to come and worries about the ghost I knew was floating somewhere above me, somewhere in the house or in the air. My fear and my newly pregnant state meant that I took midnight bathroom breaks with my eyes closed, my hands feeling in front of me for the wall and the light switches.
I’ve gone through files, too, the piles of stuff that I’ve meant to deal with for a long time now. We have reams of house-buying papers, many redundant since the short sale took nine months (oh, like a gestation, the closing practically a stillbirth) and we got duplicates of things, the same mailings only slightly different, for months. There’s the baby stuff, with the baby almost a first grader now. Yesterday afternoon, the depressing Mad Men on in the background, my new addiction, I went through the boy’s file to divvy it up. There were doctor’s reports from his various “well baby” appointments, vaccination records, the hospital bill. And there, tucked in with his stuff was an ultrasound picture, his first photograph. I picked it up, then saw the due date printed on it: January 23, 1986. Different baby. Different life and death, not so painful now, but still, part of my history.
So I comfort myself with thick red wine. I allow myself tears and then move on to the next box, the next pile of papers. I shop for new underwear, thinking of the smooth fabric of microfiber bras, the enhancement of cleavage, the way I can present what little I have to the world. As if the world cares. But I do. I’m going to move on and look good and I’m fine, or I will be fine, and at 5:00 p.m. today or maybe earlier, I will open the next bottle of wine.
From the prompt "Comfort food." Here is an earlier take on the same prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by anandham.
Under the surface
14 August 2011 06:13 AM
She had alibis, the appearance alibi, the shyness alibi. A coworker once told her she would make a good drug mule. No one would suspect the hint of darkness at her core, the nights she spent watching her boyfriend break apart cocaine with a razor before handing her the rolled dollar bill, the bottle she hid in her underwear drawer, her dreams of men knifed in broad daylight by women in leather catsuits and masks. She could exploit her appearance, or, really, exploit their inattention, so there she was, pinned and loving it, in the backseat of a broad car from the late 60s, the car older than she was and made for large families or the creation of them, her parents clueless, her boyfriend elsewhere.
Sometimes she would go down to the bar a few blocks away and sit, waiting, waiting for the lonely men with their beer or whiskey, the ones who treated her to new things (oysters on the half-shell, too-spicy salsa, the layered shots and stories of grownup life). They touched her hand, they stroked her hair. Most of them didn’t want a thing but conversation. They liked to take her apparent innocence, make a fetish out of it, the girl they were protecting from their like, the quasi-daughter, the fantasy.
On her last night in her hometown, she befriended an elderly man at the bar who regaled her with New York jazz tales from the 40s and 50s. He told her she looked like Veronica Lake. He spoke of his dead wife. And when it was time to go home, she walked with him hand in hand, accepting a chaste kiss on the cheek before he stepped, alone, into his house.
From a photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by shimonkey.
And so I emerge
13 August 2011 06:27 AM
But also: love and its loss and what the others are saying about me, judging my value by what I provide, saying that if I can’t do that, then what am I good for? Oh, it still scares me, love and its exit, its decisions about me, my value going down, down, like the stock market and housing prices, like interest rates. This is part of my shifting thinking, realizing that I am not a commodity, that I have intrinsic value, that sometimes love does a turnabout and it isn’t necessarily about me, it’s about chemistry and its lack, or the way history piles up on us and changes us and our viewpoints. It’s about someone else’s history and what they are capable of, too, something that is out of my hands.
It wasn’t until a few days ago, with all this practice at staying in the moment, feeling the fear without trying to buffer it, feeling the pain, too, that I realized this was part of my underlying assumption about myself, that my value was only in relation to what other people thought of me, to how they felt about me, that I had to keep on dazzling them (with words, with deeds, with a show of my goodness) to keep the feelings alive. My feeling of self has moved here and there, attached to those who attach themselves to me. Love and its loss means my creation and destruction. It’s no wonder that I avoid getting any deeper into it. Immersion into the other means potential death, my self reflected in black, fading into nothingness.
And under all of this was a self that I had submerged, something that felt ugly and wanting and bad, just plain bad. Well, she’s here, she’s scrubbing off the blood and dust, she’s exposing her wounds to the sun. Underneath it all, her skin gleams and her smile surprises and she has things that anyone would want to be close to, an agile mind, a quick step, a surprising viewpoint. She is me and she’s not perfect, but she has a right to be here, to exist in the world, and we’re still scared, we’re both scared, but getting stronger every day.
From the prompt "I am no longer afraid of it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of a Wonder Woman wall mural in Rio de Janeiro by Digo_Souza
Cleansing ritual
12 August 2011 06:14 AM
Against graying tile the splashed remains of coffee create a Rorschach test, along with the grounds from last night’s bungle with the grinder. They play beside the ghostly circular outlines of a wine glass and a hardened brown remnant of a banana peel. Dirty dishes lie dormant in the dirty porcelain sink. Recycling, all bottles: beer, wine, gin (the odd duck in this household of soft liquor), a large caper container, waits for someone to walk with it in arms across the house, through the front door, and down the steps to the bin.
A knife lies ominously next to a partially autopsied peach, the fruit’s pit moldy and split, its juice adhering it to the battered cutting board and still on the knife, too, waiting for her to clean it off.
On the floor, the ridiculous Mexican tile that takes in every stain, every remnant of cat puke and the overflow from the animal’s water dish, every sticky watermelon drip (oh, that he would stop just ripping into it with his teeth right beside the refrigerator), there are crumbs from a late night attempt at a sandwich. And here’s the bread, too, left out, gone hard by the darkened cheddar and bleeding tomato.
Did she do this? She remembers a dinner without eating, the preparation in the kitchen that took too long, their impatience, the bottle of Zinfandel heavy on the grape (now in the recycling to-go stack). There was an argument, something about politics or was it love or the two of them combined, and she cried or maybe she made the kid cry, and then there was the sob over the sink. Later, after her coffee and her little pill, she will check the sent file in her email, will cruise Facebook for the trail of oddities, of strange comments and overwrought complaints, but for now, it is time to clean up.
Hot soapy water, coffee with soymilk, oatmeal with blueberries and maple syrup, the sink bubbling and steaming like a cauldron, the cleansing ritual, the soothing ritual. She will wait until they wake up to take the bottles outside. The dishes watch patiently as she rolls up her robe sleeves and gets to work, wielding her water and vinegar spray against last night's kitchen transgressions.
From the prompt "On the kitchen counter." Yes, the setting is my kitchen counter, but the writing is not about my life.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by TimeMachine Sailing.
Ironic pants
11 August 2011 06:34 AM
When did the poufy sleeves come back and the little gathers at the waist, the floppy jackets with the frou frou and the belts and buckles, like some romantic domantrix’s version of warmth in the city? I want flat, classic lines and all black. I want inscrutable t-shirts. I want formfitting -- but not second -- skin. I want a little hug near the tummy while I still have what it takes. I want non-ironic pants.
Slowly slowly, between the self-help books and the New Yorker and New York magazine and the New York Times Sunday paper (What I am doing in California? Clearly my literary loyalty lies elsewhere.), I’ve been rereading Martin Amis’s Money. His best book, I think, and quite a contrast to his last, The Pregnant Widow, which I read a couple of months ago. Still, there are parallels: Martin has a thing for women’s pants. Our pants have power, or they can, over the salivating male, the one who is helpless in the face of heavy breasts and a pendulous ass, helpless against the sway of hips. Pants are the thing, with their waist-love and the way they cling to form.
With this return to the 1980s in fashion, or the return I see reflected in the clothes at Crossroads Trading Company, my main source for duds, I wonder if complicated high-waisted pants are the next style to be resurrected. I wore them, yes, I did, those things that crawled up past the belly-button, with complicated clasps and foldovers, waistband compensations for style, an obfuscation of fabric, a militaristic series of pleats and flaps. Everything I’ve put on in the last couple of years has been hiphuggerish, though not hippieish, and I like the unfettered feel of shirt fabric against my belly, the unconstructed nature of pants that cling below the waistline.
I burnish my belly. I wave the kettlebells every other day, I praise the antidepressants that help keep me here, that wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, along with the dreams. I clothe myself in simple shirts made of natural fabrics, am continually in pursuit of the perfect pair of pants, of the right skirt with the right black boots and the soft clingy sweater. I am not going to give up on fashion, to pretend that it no longer matters. I will age gracefully or not at all, never having been one to embrace teenybopper, there in my flat-waisted pants and my too-cool t-shirt.
From the prompt "In fashion."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
And maybe someday I'll write a post about my heavy-on-the-symbolism dreams last night, me with a house ripped from its foundation, pulled on a truck, looking for a new place to call home. In the last version of it, right before I woke up, the house and I were returning to the original site, thinking, "why not back here again?"
Images by Huzzah Vintage and funkomavintage.
The bigger picture
10 August 2011 08:58 AM
The cracks in the parched ground represent lives lived, paths that no one should have taken, the way one thing flows into the next and then it’s all over, that brief period of time when we lived, when our blood flowed and our muscles were strong, our joints unfettered, our minds still clear and easy and free of clutter. It stretched off past the horizon, looked eternal, but this was an optical illusion. Somewhere at the end there was a grassy field, a meadow with flashing larks and swooping sparrows, a beach where waves lapped at the dry earth before disappearing, the sun boiling it down to nothing.
The earth started as an amorphous cloud of gas. Gravity pulled it together, the heaviest metals sunk to the core, meteorites pummeled the unsettled surface. It was fire and magma, volcanoes and explosions, and then it was rock and the oceans formed and life began, the bacteria, the protozoa. There were no vertebrates, no invertebrates. Slowly things changed, so slowly, and would you believe that trilobites, those marine arthropods, lived for something like 270 million years while humans have only been here a relative millisecond, around 200,000 years?
The continents were one. Lizards came and fish and amphibians and mammals. They predated the dinosaurs and then they died out, too, or most of them did. The dinosaurs had their reign, the large continent cracked into pieces that slowly drifted apart. The mammals reign now. Human beings are at the top of the heap with our big brains, upright forms and opposable thumbs. We burn the remains of plants that once furred the earth, releasing the carbon dioxide that has been stored as rock. We steal the energy of what was formerly alive, killing the earth in the process. Or changing it in ways that we can't fully anticipate.
The world we will leave behind will be wet, humid, with heaving oceans, our plastic and Styrofoam and electronics floating in the soup. Those left will have adapted to the heat, will be able take the supersatured air and the rays of the sun that knife through thinning ozone.
I find it comforting to imagine that our time here is short, that the average human lifespan is nothing compared to the earth’s epochs, that when our struggles are over, they are over, not even a memory. Human beings matter no more than trilobites, except that we are taking down the earth with us and the animals, we are changing the landscape. We are the catastrophic event, but our personal catastrophic events, the small tragedies of life, don’t matter against the backdrop of the whole of earth's history.
History without humanity becomes something else, a story without a narrator, without a theme, nature and its forces ruling without regard to conclusion or story arc. Does unwitnessed violence exist? There is just life, lived for the moment, trying desperately to reproduce itself before burning out.
From the prompt "Another country," which was actually the prompt for July 29th. My response for today's prompt was too personal to put up on the web (but not too personal to share with a stranger). I haven't fact-checked this one, so I could be wrong about the earth's formation, etc.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Most of the time. This one has been heavily, ponderously edited.
Image by mozpkim of Chile's Chaitén volcano erupting in 2008.
From where I stand
09 August 2011 06:24 AM
I have lived off the bravery of other people, have let my opinions lie in an unopened room, have held myself back out of fear of rejection. I’ve simpered and smiled and played the little girl, I’ve put my freak flag in the back of the bottom drawer,
So the fantasies are of escape, of a woman driving the getaway car through streets of flame, full of power, full of dark arts leavened by joy and confidence. They give me just enough life to not pursue life, and there are too many steps to get there anyway, and there’s the risk, the risk …
And meanwhile, things rearrange themselves. I can say what I want to say – outside of saying things that cause pain – and if what I say brings on rejection or challenge, I can stand up to it. I can have opinions and I can speak my mind. You don’t really know me, none of you have met me in real life (or only a select few have), but can I tell you how amazing this is? Years of fear of being crushed if I reveal myself? Decades of quietness, because to not express myself in one way means that I am paralyzed, that the words don’t come, or if they do come, they are mumbled, mangled, easily abandoned?
This is all new, you know, and requires practice and constant reminders that I am ok, I’m good, I’m good, that I need a place to stand, that I have a place to stand, and I can offer up what I think because what I think has merit, it has grounding. And in the process, I accept what you have to say, too, knowing that it doesn’t threaten my small self, that I don’t need to crush it. I am large. I contain multitudes.
So ineloquent. Or not enough. But within me I can’t contain my excitement, the unrest, the feeling that I am about to step outside, that I am preparing myself for any weather, for the rebirth, for the light dance in the rain and the sprint against thunder, for the stroll by the riverbank in the heady air of springtime and the decay of fall, my feet crunching on gravel or fluffing up the dirt, crackling the fallen leaves. In the winter the snow silences my step, but I can see my breath. I can feel the life within me, reaching out for you.
From the prompt "An escape."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: My mother's shoes, my shoes, taken by me.
Risky business
08 August 2011 06:14 AM
This is not the time to worry about how you look, about the sags and the stretch marks and the jagged lines. This is not the time to insist that the other does the same. Just stand there, vulnerable, naked, open to whatever happens next. Yeah, you try it, lady, you tell me with a roll of the eyes. You’re right, you’re right. I don’t know if I could do it either.
There are certain kinds of risk-taking that are appropriate, times when you make the leap off the cliff knowing that the drop off isn’t far or that there is a soft surface waiting to envelop you below. There are ways to game this, though the word game implies a calculated process. There are ways to remember that risking connection doesn’t mean risking your soul, baring yourself before the fully clothed. There are ways to practice it, too, ways to take little steps towards emotional freedom.
I’ve been reading lots of self-help books, oh so many, not so much on the cheesy side of things, but still, they are self-help books. The latest is about relationships when one of the partners has been through childhood trauma. Not PTSD trauma, necessarily, but, well, trauma. It’s taken me a long time to think of myself as someone who was traumatized by parts of my childhood, but now I, umm, own it. Not in a self-pitying way, but in a “yep, that was pretty bad” kind of way.
Not surprisingly, as someone who was abandoned at times, neglected and left to deal with overwhelming circumstances on my own as a child, as someone who was specifically told how bad I was and then saw how the people around me acted to prove it, well, getting naked (metaphorically) isn’t so easy. Oh, sure, it's become easier, especially in my writing. And I was reassured to read that traumatized people who can tell coherent stories about their childhoods tend not to pass the buck on to their own children, though I know I still have a ways to go there. It’s the closeness, the skin to skin stuff, that has me flummoxed, that has my heart pounding in the middle of the night, that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. with soothing dreams of escape, of sweet sweet aloneness.
My childhood was a set up that made any deeply intimate situation feel like soul risk. It was also a set up that led to poor boundaries, to giving myself over to those who retreat, the constant pursuit of approval. I understand it more now, I do, and I think I am on a different path, but it’s still so fucking hard. To stay in the moment, to stay in my head, to read these reactions of panic as vestiges from long ago. What you think about me says less about me than it does about you, and your reactions come from your own place of darkness. It's not me, it's not me, and what is me I see with clarity now, with the distance of someone who lived those things long ago. Or I am slowly slowly getting there, on the path to freedom of a sort.
From the prompt "Time out."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Gaellery.
Goodbye to all that
06 August 2011 05:37 AM
We have boxes and boxes of baby stuff, things we kept around, you know, just in case. Just in case we went crazy and did it again. We even tried to go crazy and do it again, but it was a half-hearted gesture and now I know it will never happen again for me. So I go through the boxes. I remember a different time, one that was simpler in some ways, though it was also overwhelming and painful and I was so strung out from lack of sleep that I couldn’t enjoy what enjoyable bits there were.
When we moved here from DC four years ago, the boy wasn’t even two years old yet. We actually moved from Alexandria, Virginia, where we lived in a cold drafty house, a place where we spent less than six months. The wind was biting that winter and the snow piled up and then there was sleet and rain. I felt so isolated from our cozy DC Adams Morgan neighborhood and then we were in Berkeley and the isolation continued. There was the strangeness of being in a new place, knowing no one, with a kid that was a homebody who needed me intensely.
“We need to be nice to each other,” I told my husband at the time. We were not up to the task. The stress of isolation, of moving, of his new job took it out of us. Maybe we both were depressed. My mother’s visit that first summer showed me how sludgy my life had become. Often I wouldn’t get dressed until after noon and couldn’t manage to even get out of the house once the day really began. My husband and I were snappy with each other. Mom was embroiled in her own troubles, too, the same troubles that had been distracting her before we moved.
So: the boxes. I have been going through them slowly, deciding what to hold onto in a sentimental nostalgic time capsule of unreality, deciding what is saleable (money would come in handy right now), what we should give away. I go through the geological layers of our son’s early life and our lives, too, as a relatively recently married couple with a baby, following the traditional pattern of man in the world, woman at home.
Who are we now? We are parents. Our son is an elementary schooler. There will be no more babies. Eras are ending all around me. I no longer cling to them, but take my comfort in thinking about real geologic time, how our existence on this earth is but a spark, a spark quickly extinguished. My only choice is to get on with it, be kind to those around me, and forgive myself and others for the mistakes we’ve made before I am covered by dirt, turned into ash. Before I return to the battered earth.
From the prompt "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. (Yes, I skipped yesterday. The prompt was "Obama." I didn't feel like getting political here, plus the boy is sick and I was otherwise occupied for much of the day.)
Image: The boy, me, and Nora-dog, summer 2005.
Packing heat
04 August 2011 05:36 AM
I like to pretend that I don’t get angry, that it’s all modulation and reasonableness and no drama (oh, God forbid the drama, which translates into inconvenient emotion). Sure, there are flare ups, sudden explosions of short shouted words, bitter and small as they leave my mouth. Yes, there are times when I navigate my grocery cart around the morons and the clueless in the Berkeley Bowl that I might, just might, want to slam my cart into someone, knock them to the ground or at the very least leave a nasty bruise on their yoga- and Pilates-muscled thigh.
But yesterday I realized that I had been a ticking time bomb, a powder keg waiting for a spark, a heady mixture of really pissed off and really sad and the tears intermingled with the tooth grinding and I woke up this morning with a headache and memories of random dreams, of the old classmate with the black Mini, of the old love interest who showed up and stripped down to his boxers, made himself at home in the living room reading the New York Times.
Ah, but I dance away from the topic even now. Nice girls – sweet girls – don’t get angry. What is it about anger that scares us so much? When I was little, my mother was explosive, a shouting, glass-tossing, running out of the house like a maniac angry person. This was my emotional incubator, a place where insults were regularly traded during moments of hotheadedness. Not a functional model, but neither is ignoring anger or controlling it to the point that it is as if it never existed.
I want to feel this anger, to ride it, to let it dissipate slowly, slowly as I heal or change or get used to the new landscape of my life. But I feel guilty about it, too, because anger usually has a target and my target doesn’t seem to be able to take it. The anger enters this person and does its internal damage. It smashes and destroys and brings on paralyzing guilt. It clears the shelves and drinks all the whiskey. It was precisely this dynamic that made me tamp down the anger in the first place, but the dynamic has been rendered meaningless. It matters less now, and so my anger is back. With a vengeance.
It’s packing heat. It doesn’t care who it tramples. It hates itself at the same time, a bully without a home, a feeling without a use, the furnace of pain personified, directed, because without a direction the anger has nowhere to go but inward. It pummels me, or I pummel myself, because the anger and I are one, we dance together, her and me. She’s my skin, my teeth, the glint in my eye when I walk down the street.
From the prompt "It makes me mad."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ElRobboz.
Exit stage left
03 August 2011 06:23 AM
The kitchen has a door to the back deck. The hallway has a door to the deck. The back room has a set of French doors that lead to the deck. Our stairway has a door, too. None of these doors are solid, they are transparent, glass-paned, they let in light and a view and keep things airy. We live in a house of glass thresholds, where supposedly there are no secrets, but some of the doors are covered over, in film, in fabric, the crannies of hidden disorganization, the jammed rooms and closets and the places where private things go on.
Someday one of us will open the front door and walk away. That one of us, the she or the he, will carry his or her life on his or her back. I used to have just enough stuff, enough belongings, to fit into a car, and then it became a small truck, and now our things intermingle. They traveled across the country a little over four years ago in a massive truck. Slowly we’ve been acquiring more as we’ve also slowing been shedding the old, the clothes from fifteen years ago, the things that are no longer age-appropriate for the kid.
What do I stake a claim to here? Almost all of it is us. I imagine the men, anonymous in their jeans and sweaty t-shirts or their incongruous bland blue uniforms, moving the boxes out. One of us, the he or the she, is crying or trying not to cry, and the other one, the she or the he, is maybe not even here, or is on the phone in the yard, or pacing in front of the privacy fence, one hand gesturing, the phone crooked between chin and shoulder.
Someday, we will divide these things. The door will become someone else’s entry. I will walk or drive or be driven past the house, will note the new trim, the bikes locked on the porch, will see how someone else has taken this shell of a house and made it theirs. The new folks won’t know our story, or the story of the people who went here before us. The house will be wiped clean of context, ready to be painted with fresh emotion.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The main door to the house is to my left. The heat hums in the corner. I have a cat behind me and a cat beside me, two lightly snoring sleepers. Nothing has changed and yet everything may be different, unless I can score a lucky card today, or this week, unless someone yanks our arms and pulls us away from the precipice, a good Samaritan, one who knows the worth of one plus one plus one plus history and heartbeat and shared brainwaves against just enough doubt to make it all feel impossible.
From the prompt "Walk through the door."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by *Fede*.
Dithering in the dilly-dally
02 August 2011 09:19 AM
In the last week or so, I seem to have lost something. The words I use to describe my life at the moment run from feeling trapped or having no place to stand or feeling like I have no viewpoint. It’s a type of freefall, though I am not falling at all, I am hanging. The chair is suspended in mid-air. I am tied to it. Every hour or two or every 18 or 113 minutes – my experience of it is random – the chair pivots and at each turn whatever my view is at that moment is the absolute truth, until the chair turns again, and the views get all mixed up in my mind.
It’s impossible to live without a hypothesis, without a point of view. Try it, try losing who you are in emotion and its source and look at your life and your reactions to it and pretend that your reactions all stem from your past. Then change it up and pretend that your reactions are totally about the moment. Briefly see the truth of both sides, of the melding, and sit, paralyzed in your chair as it twists this way and that.
It’s all so obtuse, gentle reader, or so it feels as I try to explain without really getting into the nitty-gritty of it. I need to find the path again, to move forward, to jettison the chair. I either move forward on my own or with a companion, with a posse even. I’m getting impatient, having lived with ambiguity for months now. My world feels like it is shrinking, that my options are few, and while so much of it is sweet and right and smooth as whipped butter, something vital is missing.
Is the missing piece within me, the answer in my heart? Do I need to work harder at creating this piece in my current context? Is there something I can do with my life to bring the piece to me?
Frankly, I’m tired of the dithering and dilly-dallying and the thinking about this. It’s the type of exhaustion that leads to something rash, the packing of a satchel and taking to the rails, the slow melt into an unmade bed. These are easy, relatively, and don’t require the assistance of others. My chest is tight and my heart moves from here to there and they tell me to quit it with all of this ambiguity, to clean the windows of my mind and sweep the floors and just fucking get on with it. But I’m not the only one in this game, I am responsible for others, I don’t want to do anything rash and so I do what feels like nothing at all.
Determination is easy if your mind is clear, if the consequences seem less dire, if it feels like you aren’t in the middle of a choice about so many different things, if you trust your own mind.
From the prompt "I am determined."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Images of spinning chair by me.
Let it rain
01 August 2011 06:47 AM
My eyes are dry, though rain threatens daily. My muscles ache, like I’ve been running, though whether it is away from something or towards something or merely running in place, I don’t know. I ended yesterday thinking about desire, for escape or for fulfillment, the desire for companionship, for touch, the radiation out of us, the force field. I don’t want to want a thing, but I want, and the want grows in the fetid hidden dark.
For almost my entire life, I’ve wanted to escape. First it was from my home life, the kid’s imaginings of being a grownup, out from under the control and capricious decisions of adults. Then in my first marriage I focused on the crush, this person that represented something else … art, instability, dark emotion. There has always been something outside of my life to focus on, to stare at in my mind, a pretend safe/unsafe place where I would be challenged (emotionally? sexually? physically? I’m not sure.). A new career. A new place. A changed and charged conversation.
If my individual therapist were up to the task – lately we’ve just been having conversations. I see her put her notebook down and I know that the rest will be pleasant, but not about where I, um, need to go – I’d bring this up, because I think this is the tip of something large, something that I can chip away at or work on in some other context. Maybe when our needs aren’t met as children, they live on, they rise like some sort of mutant dough, ever-expanding, like something in a sick sit-com, and the room we build for them keeps getting bigger, too, it presses against the sides of our mind and things leak out and the way to deal with the pressure between needing in real life (the way we need and love those around us) to the fantasy needs that necessarily separate our bruised selves from the real needs …. Well, it all intermingles.
I fought the need to escape last night, felt the pressure in my chest, a version of the same tension I’ve been carrying around for days. I don’t know if I am up to the task, but I have to keep on going forward. I still can’t tell the line between real needs and fake ones and so I am here, I am here. I am trying.
It's hard to be good, to be clear, to know my own motivations.
From the prompt "If only ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Pinkat, cropped slightly.
Distracted
31 July 2011 06:41 AM
This week has been a bad one for writing. Everything has layers and requires more work than 12 minutes, more time to be thought out. The old stuff, the bad stuff, comes more easily but writing about it is a sham, like going back to my old high school decades after graduating. Everything is smaller, not true to memory, and the teachers are different and they painted the lockers a darker shade of blue. The guy who called the vice principle a corpulent bovine is working on Wall Street and my friend with the dyed black hair, the one I probably should have kissed at least once, who turned me on to Steve Albini’s band Big Black, teaches graduate students in conservative Arizona about the ways of corporations, the world of finance.
Therapy has rendered my creative mind useless. That and spending every day organizing things, tossing out this, boxing up that (this isn’t metaphorical, unfortunately, though the house is looking better and my son’s room is improving incrementally from a hoarder’s paradise to a place where we can see the floor). Yesterday was all about birthday party preparation, the house cleansing, the frosting whipping, the cake baking, the Chex mix roasting, the goody bag stuffing.
So I could write about my aching muscles, the way I sweated and gasped through the kettle bell workout and through the Berkeley Bowl shove, through the vacuum pushing and the dust rag dampening and the hot stove slaving. I finally sat down after 8 p.m. to organize the goody bags and then it was up to read 3.5 pages of Martin Amis’s Money (my third reading of the book. He’s so good.) before collapsing in a beery puddle.
Then … then! One of the cats went on a one a.m. tear and the dog barked to be let up the stairs at three (I’d closed the door to the stairs in error) and the boy came into bed at 3:30, all cold hands smoothed on my belly and back. Up at four, asleep again until 5:20, and then the stumble, the rumble of heat and my belly and the thoughts about what needs to happen before one p.m. today. It’s life, it’s dull, and so is my brain. And the tension, the tightness in my core, just doesn’t let up.
The image was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Jane Underwood, of the Writing Salon.
Adulterated joy
30 July 2011 08:58 AM
Except for me, it’s all at the surface, I have a direct line to my emotions, to what is going on, though I don’t always know the source. I knew that the very idea of family was threatening, the translation of woman/man/kid into me against them, but it had never occurred to me why. Years of threes, me on the outs, the sacrifice, the undesirable, the way I had to build a framework to protect myself, the avoidance even now, now at 41 -- it pulls me back to the days of John the Murderer or Jim the Silent or Kevin the Troubled Genius. That's the background, anyway, for my internal tightening, my bracing against rejection. I am not thinking of these people when I am locked away inside my own head.
I walk past whitewashed bungalows in our neighborhood, grandparent houses with stiff drapes browned by years of cigarette smoke and television rays. Inside the furniture is dark and it smells like sauerkraut and over-boiled hot dogs, like coffee and fake cream, like sewing machine oil and old man sweat. I ache for my grandmother, for the simplicity of two, of being enveloped by love. The year I lived with her and my grandfather is summed up by memories of breakfast on a tray in the kitchen, toaster waffles with margarine and syrup, sausages, and a jelly jar of orange juice. The filtered light of a winter Eastern Shore dawn comes through the casement windows. The kitchen is warm. I am safe. It mixes in with the memory of getting into her bed on snowy weekday mornings, cuddling up close and listening to the radio for school closings. There were quite a few in the winter of 1977-78.
If you ignore mourning, if you try to pretend that loss is all about self-development and looking on the bright side, or if you’re a kid and don’t know how to deal with it, it pops up at the oddest times and years later. The bungalows tell me of other peoples' grandparents, of love going stale in empty houses, and the television is on constantly and the threat of loss hangs everywhere.
My mother and were sometimes two and then a man came along and we were three and I was on the outs, the three-year old standing every night at a dinner table set for two, the melodramatic seven-year old shunned, the preteen who was excluded from dinner conversation the teenager eating alone and living on her own in the year-round coolness of a summer bungalow.
My grandmother and I were always two. She shared her Coke on ice with me, let me lie next to her in her bed. She taught me about double-lined two-way streets and the rules of swimming after eating. She was there on weekends and school holidays. And then she died in front of me and I could do nothing about it, watched helplessly as she slumped on the chair. Nine years old without an advocate.
Maybe this is the tension I’ve been carrying all week, since that session of threes. Connection means loss and relying means loss, too, and so I see the lines of it all, I see it, but you still can’t remove the truth from the matter. There is no pure joy, no happiness without pain, no life without death. Someday I’ll be the one going out, or the one left alone, and my heart tells me “don’t’ get used to it. They all leave and no one will care about you when they are gone.”
From the prompt "Pure joy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one was lightly edited. Yes, I skipped yesterday. It was taking too much time, had too much to develop. Maybe I'll post it someday.
Image: Me at around three years old, my grandmother's cigarette smoldering in her hand. I've posted this picture before. Unfortunately, I don't have any other pictures of my grandmother and me.
Desire's silhouette
28 July 2011 02:03 PM
Other people watched, too, like that guy in C-town who befriended my roommate and me, said he spied on us, that he used to take binoculars and set himself at a window in the house across the street, could see our nubile forms through the loose weave of the curtains. He told us about watching girls in the daylight, too, girls lying out by the pool in their string bikinis or one pieces with plunging necklines. He loved the beauty of young flesh, the fantasy of his hands on it.
This was being wanted. In the first case, the want was amorphous. Did D come in search of sex, for a bit of warmth, to see his face reflected in my eyes, all adoration, my sense of self shaped by his choice to be there? I tell myself now, practically thirty years later (oh aging, oh early introduction to sex) that he liked something about me beyond the thrust. We certainly moved past those early days, got deep enough for me to break his heart.
In the case of the peeping Tom, my value came from being a desirable object. Yes, it was creepy that he sat in the crepuscular fading of day to watch us undress or walk around naked or pick our noses or whatever he could witness through greened tree limbs and curtains and evening glow. But I had been taught that to be desirable to men, to be pretty and thin and – above all – yielding was not only proper but the way to see myself, the thing that men wanted to grasp, to kiss, to fuck. It was validation, a measurement of worth.
Darkness allows the stare through bedroom curtains, the ramping up of desire, desire of something, the warmth of another human being, the opening of legs and a mouth panting for acceptance, for the entry. We all want to be desired, we keep our baser needs in the dark, too, the shame of the unfulfilled self. The key is to get a sense of self from within, to accept the desire by others as an extra, the bit of honey in the coffee, the icing on the brownie, that soupçon of want that we separate from our self worth.
From the prompt "Black." This is something I wrote before 6:00 a.m. and returned to after getting home from a therapy appointment, the type of appointment that left an ache in my chest and a sense that the day has been bifurcated into distinct moods: before the appointment and after the appointment. It's a good ache, or a kind of good ache, but, damn, I wish it would go away now. It's affecting my ability to think. It's affecting my ability to be effective. It's affecting me.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This is a 12-minute prompt with a bit of editing,
Image by Smedenborn.
Peevish
27 July 2011 10:28 AM
I am eminently reasonable. So reasonable that you can’t fucking believe it. Problems don’t stick to me, to my Teflon psyche, my nonstick emotional surface. I am cool.
I have a neighbor, a woman who’s all stick arms and knee bones, her hips two spikes jutting through her clothes. You can count the woman’s ribs from fifteen feet away through her tight shirts. But her chest, this heaving thing, two solid breasts that truly do bring melon/tit comparisons to life! She sits out on a chaise in her yard – the front yard – her private bits barely covered with a shimmering swimsuit (though I don’t think she uses that bikini for swimming), eyes closed, body buttered, some surprising periodical at her side (the New York Review of Books? Come on, babe, we know that’s above your mental age, above your brain-stretching capacity).
Why the front yard? Does she enjoy the slowing of trucks, of cops, of the cyclists riding innocently to work, staring, not daring to honk or slam on the brakes, but taking all of her in? She stretches her delicate toes, the nails pale pink, her ankle accented with a golden bracelet so fine that I can’t see the links from the upstairs window. “Get a job!” I want to scream at her, I do scream at her, internally at least, and then I return to my computer, for my flipping around the Internet, to my Go Fug Yourself and my Gawker and my Facebook friends.
I read about bad men and drug habits, sneer at politicos who wax rhapsodic about their dicks to strangers. I IM with some dude in Toronto, tell him what I’d like to do to him while he sits passive as a blinking cursor. Sometimes we Skype, both of us silent and staring. I reach out to touch my computer screen – the surface of it is smeared with fingertip marks, with the juices of nectarines and plums, with bloody dots of cherry juice – when I want to touch him or for him to touch me, but the screen is as close as we get to touch.
In the store strangers give me a wide berth, but I don’t take it personally. My aura is dark brown, it’s black, I know it, and that’s bad, bad, but what am I to do? I watch. I message. I dream of the melding, of the veil between me and them dissolving. I forgive the people who ignore me, who brush up against me without knowing that I am there. I wake up and stare at the ceiling. I prowl the virtual streets of shame.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber.
From the prompt "Pet peeve."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one is lightly edited. And, despite the first person point of view, it really is fiction.
I have a neighbor, a woman who’s all stick arms and knee bones, her hips two spikes jutting through her clothes. You can count the woman’s ribs from fifteen feet away through her tight shirts. But her chest, this heaving thing, two solid breasts that truly do bring melon/tit comparisons to life! She sits out on a chaise in her yard – the front yard – her private bits barely covered with a shimmering swimsuit (though I don’t think she uses that bikini for swimming), eyes closed, body buttered, some surprising periodical at her side (the New York Review of Books? Come on, babe, we know that’s above your mental age, above your brain-stretching capacity).
Why the front yard? Does she enjoy the slowing of trucks, of cops, of the cyclists riding innocently to work, staring, not daring to honk or slam on the brakes, but taking all of her in? She stretches her delicate toes, the nails pale pink, her ankle accented with a golden bracelet so fine that I can’t see the links from the upstairs window. “Get a job!” I want to scream at her, I do scream at her, internally at least, and then I return to my computer, for my flipping around the Internet, to my Go Fug Yourself and my Gawker and my Facebook friends.
I read about bad men and drug habits, sneer at politicos who wax rhapsodic about their dicks to strangers. I IM with some dude in Toronto, tell him what I’d like to do to him while he sits passive as a blinking cursor. Sometimes we Skype, both of us silent and staring. I reach out to touch my computer screen – the surface of it is smeared with fingertip marks, with the juices of nectarines and plums, with bloody dots of cherry juice – when I want to touch him or for him to touch me, but the screen is as close as we get to touch.
In the store strangers give me a wide berth, but I don’t take it personally. My aura is dark brown, it’s black, I know it, and that’s bad, bad, but what am I to do? I watch. I message. I dream of the melding, of the veil between me and them dissolving. I forgive the people who ignore me, who brush up against me without knowing that I am there. I wake up and stare at the ceiling. I prowl the virtual streets of shame.
Cool as the proverbial cucumber.
From the prompt "Pet peeve."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one is lightly edited. And, despite the first person point of view, it really is fiction.
Throw those crutches away!
26 July 2011 11:00 AM
This makes it tolerable, the lack, it lets you wallow in it, brings dreams of escape, of the trip across a continent for love, the feel of a stranger’s hand on your fishnet-clad thigh, the adoration from hundreds (ok, dozens) of readers, writing you about the way you captured it, you nailed it, you got ‘em right in the eye.
Then? Nibble. Rip off a bit of bread, shove it in, chew surreptitiously as you chop the garlic. Allow yourself a bit of cheese. Sample the vinaigrette, a drop here, a dram there. Listen to the sounds of your family laughing, playing, arguing while you are there in the sanctum, the kitchen, the locus of creativity and loneliness, your task to provide, to pretend that you still get 100% satisfaction out of caregiving.
At dinner you can eat, one helping is all because that’s all it takes to fill you up, the plate sparse with pasta, the asparagus piled next to the sandwich. You’re stuffed. If you've been drinking beer, now is the time to move on to wine. Wine burns a trail down into your stomach, it clears a path for tears if you’ve been holding back, for fantasy if that’s what you need.
It’s the only way you can take it, the tasks without interest, the empty life of dust removal and scrubbing and wondering what is next. You love them, love the people in your life, but they are not enough. There is something lying ahead of you, some quest or discovery and you will not let the alcohol get in your way. You can cap the bottles, let them remain in the refrigerator, on the shelf, these substitutes for feeling, these maudlin tear-producers. (Or, let's not kid yourself, you could just cut back.)
The wine days are over, a memory of the need to loosen after holding it together. The key to maintaining a self is to listen to your heartbeat, to what stirs the pain, to building a flexible framework for love and self-support. Where wine fails, conversation and action take over. You are on a path now, necessarily alone, naked, your feet moving forward while your mind, two steps behind, looks back at what you once were.
From the prompt "Too much."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spent a little time editing this. Clearly my brain starts out in the old way (the melodrama, the desperate wish for escape) and then is surprised to find itself in a more hopeful paradigm.
Image by cabbit.
Beyond the flip side
25 July 2011 09:26 AM
Some may be lucky (or un-) enough to die quickly (the major coronary, the proverbial bus or truck, the burst aorta), but for most of us, death is slow and sneaky. There are warning signs, there is the long waiting, the room full of loved ones and stale, sickened breath or empty except for the one on his way out. (Don’t feel sad for the person dying alone. That is how it works for everyone, even those in a roomful of love. Support is good, but at the very end, the gathering is more for those left behind, staving off loneliness. Or so I tell myself when I imagine my own death, my letting go in a sparsely furnished room.)
And what about life? My son has finally showed an interest in learning where he came from, the result of some questions about the difference between male and female bodies, and of our reading of the book It’s So Amazing. His birthday is coming up and last night he asked me "How did I start?" We talked about sex (glossed over for the most part, though he knows the mechanics), the meeting of sperm and egg, the cell division, the way he grew inside me and how we anticipated his arrival. It is so amazing. And a long process. That bundle of cells, the zygote future boy that we didn’t even know existed, is life of a sort, but not quite.
When does death become death and life bloom into its full being? I’ve been at one deathbed knowingly and at a deathchair in ignorance. I’ve watched someone’s body wind down until the final moment, but before then, before the fundamental change, the person in front of us, the himness of him, was already gone. His body was stuck in the waiting room of death for a long sad day and then it was over, yes, the switch was flipped, but the process had been going on for days, months.
Death and life overlap, what was supposed to be the beginning can be the end (the miscarriage, the stillbirth, the end of quickening and the heavy knowledge that you contain death).
And what about the death of love, the way something within us goes flat, but not all at once? It happens after years of holding the love underwater, of neglecting it while it plays in traffic. If you get to it early enough, you might be able to resuscitate it. Its death is a process, like all the rest, like the falling, the immersing, the way two people briefly become one.
From the prompt "In the space of one minute ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I could delve much deeper into this one if I wanted to.
Image by redwood 1.
Making the break
24 July 2011 06:30 AM
Yesterday’s internal premise was about growing up. Not the physical process, the way that cells divide and hormones push changes, but the internal process, the maturity of mind, the separation of self from others, the necessary break. I realized that this was a break that I’d never really made, that a lack of childhood made me cling to childhood, that I’ve been wandering around in an adolescent (or worse: toddler) miasma half the time. Once you notice that, there is no choice but to grow up and it’s a relief, to let go of the need to be parented, the need to be seen by the love object, seen and supported like a babe in arms.
Lest you think that this means I’m “over it,” that what happened to me doesn’t matter anymore, I have to say that this just means I own it and the results, the hidden fears, the needs that I must meet by myself. I still cry about it, cry about her and what she went through, cry for her clueless sad parents who couldn’t help her, cry for the way she’s spent years being controlled in part by a past that is long gone. Her is me, a version of me, and I embrace her, but I also tell her that the time has come to let go of adolescent views on love and its expression, to embrace herself and what she wants, to reach out without being crushed when other people don’t automatically reach back.
I no longer stamp my feet when things don’t go my way, but I do have a way of disappearing when angry, of putting up a shield, of deciding that the mortals around me don’t deserve my delicate thoughts, that they are part of the problem and my solution is to disappear, to send out a cloud of ink and anger and blame. Now I feel the feelings, watch the others, separate myself from their reactions. I differentiate.
I take responsibility. Maybe I take the wheel, or control my own destiny. The clue is deciding how to balance connection and independence, to really feel that they don’t need to be separated, to keep on acting “as if.”
From a photo prompt (above). Image by Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Dulled
23 July 2011 05:43 AM
I remember the sharp object, the way it glittered under the kitchen lights, the nicks along the blade, the way you told me that it was more dangerous this way, blunted so that you had to use more power to cut. The blade could slip, it could jump from the red bell pepper on the cutting board (our sacrifice, still intact, unaware of the awaiting evisceration), jump from its flesh to your opposite hand.
“A sharp knife is your most important kitchen tool,” you told me. I watched as you straightened it against a steel, remembered a time when we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other, the panting across tables, the wanting and wantonness. Time and proximity had dulled us, too.
The nape of your neck looked cool, too cool for me to touch. The kitchen tile held my feet. I decided not to say anything, to let this lesson be without subtext, decided to ignore the dangerousness of blunted emotion. Straightening over, you took a thumb to the blade. You showed me the difference, held down the pepper, and sliced into its crispness.
Love, when it is sharp and new, when the couple is like a single knife blade, has its own dangers: the melding, the way the we are reflected in the metal, the way love's intensity threatens our core. Time dulls, and little pains do, too, and then you press too hard and someone gets cut, the sanctity of skin and blood vessels and self violated.
We ate salad that night, crisp romaine and bell pepper, the vinaigrette sharp, the olives a sour counterpoint to freshness. We sat across from each other, silent under the sounds of knife and fork, under the soft collisions between metal and ceramic and tooth. I watched you, the observer. I prepared myself for the cut, for the jagged gash, like I’d been preparing myself since the beginning.
You would not disappoint.
From the prompt "I remember."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by GavinBell.
Listen to the silence
22 July 2011 01:41 PM
One or two times a week, my husband or I sit down with our son to practice his writing. We're gentle. We're nonthreatening. Still, the pressure comes from within: nearly every time he dissolves into tears about selecting a topic. The subject is too large for him to narrow down. He claims to know nothing about x, a subject he's been talking about for days. He rejects all suggestions. There are too many choices (this is a child who is plagued by choice), too many things to be anxious about: the topic, the creation of sentences, the frustrating way that his brain still flips letters, the actual sounding out and writing of words. We push through and I try not to get frustrated myself, to remember that this is for encouragement, to help him in a no pressure environment. No matter. I end up feeling like a torturer. Still, we generally get through it. He's learning perseverance as well as getting comfortable with writing.
And what about me? I’ve put off this write since 6:00 this morning. Perhaps I don’t want to think about the sound of my narrative voice, don’t want to let the outside world into my head (the rumbling of a muffler on the fritz, the whine of the washing machine, the actual buzz in my ears that is a side effect of the medication). Or perhaps there are too many topics, from real to metaphorical, that I don’t want to write about, topics pressing at the edges of my skull that I am not yet ready to let out.
Last night I had a dream where I was staying at a hotel with three friends. The hotel was fancy and expensive and we each had our own room. But two of us were placed in an annex of the hotel, a long walk outside to a cinderblock structure that was dirty and cold, more motel than hotel. It took some time to find it, and my fellow Siberia-dweller wandered off to the bar. I knew she’d be getting drunk and I was hoping to get there with her once the whole room thing was straightened out, even though I knew this was bad, that I was encouraging her alcoholism. I prepared myself for a confrontation with the staff, felt my anger start to burn before I badgered the bored desk clerk for room changes, for what we paid for, was finally making a stand when … I woke up, right before the boy came into our room for his nightly sleep migration.
This happens more than I’d like, my wake up moments before the boy appears, my dreams interrupted and then interrupting my ability to return to sleep while everyone else in the room dozes. Did the sound of him wake me up? Am I "listening" to the boy in some other way? Are there other ways of hearing? And were the three of us in that dream different parts of me coming together again?
Lately I’ve been feeling a strange connection to someone I thought was a lost cause. This feeling is bodily, visceral, the feeling of music coursing through me, the "sound" of connection. I can't verify it, feel almost crazy to attribute it to what will remain unspoken. But I know what it is.
We cut ourselves off from the sound and beauty of the world around us. We block the signals of other people, switch off our receptivity and in the process lose ourselves. I’ve been tuned out for a while, scared by what the world might reveal about me. I've been afraid of other peoples' needs negating my own. I can't live that way forever, risk becoming dead inside, cold, like marble, like a smooth stone drowning in a rippling creek.
I am emerging, I am sending off welcoming signals. I am me and you are separate and beautiful. You shine in the dark, not waiting, but knowing that I'll be there soon.
From the prompt "The sound of ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. The words are not coming to me easily this week. Maybe I've been talking to my husband too much (a joke, a joke). Maybe there are many things percolating, waiting to ripen in my mind. This one took some work and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It certainly does meander.
And because this is the first song that came to mind when I was thinking of a title, here's a link to Transmission by Joy Division.
Image by theclyde.
Desk neurosis
21 July 2011 01:12 PM
So: this is today's prompt ("On my desk"), as I felt it at 6:00 this morning, a little edited for your consumption. As I type now, it's 12:05. I got back from a therapy appointment a half hour ago and suddenly this write feels ... not irrelevant, but obsessed. Obsessed with others, with dead feelings, with a world that marked me but no longer exists. The desk exists. We have a history together, long and mixed. And when I have that prompt in front of me, this is still where I go, to sad memory, to this idea of disconnection, to the need for distance. Maybe because I'm still in the throes of disconnection, debating with myself about what I am capable of, what I really want, what moving forward really means.
It's exciting and scary at the same time, this continual shifting, the feeling that bravery is required and I am up to it, or have to think that I am. I wish I could go into more detail , need people to share this stuff with, but I don't know how to do it safely. What am I capable of doing? How will facing my fears and going forward change my life? It's easy to speculate about it, much harder to do it, but I am almost there.
It's exciting and scary at the same time, this continual shifting, the feeling that bravery is required and I am up to it, or have to think that I am. I wish I could go into more detail , need people to share this stuff with, but I don't know how to do it safely. What am I capable of doing? How will facing my fears and going forward change my life? It's easy to speculate about it, much harder to do it, but I am almost there.
***
In middle school I rifled through the drawers, looking for proof, for my mother’s journal, not hidden enough, somewhere in the bottom drawer perhaps. I opened it to look for evidence, to invade her privacy, to make sure that no one would leave me in the middle of the night. In it I found deep unhappiness starkly sketched. The journal verified my stepfather’s dislike of me, my role as a roadblock, the tight arguments they apparently had about my existence.
When she kicked him out two years later, she used me as an excuse.
Before I was aware of the desk, it traveled with my mother and me from apartment to apartment. It witnessed dead air, electric violence. When I was three years old, it came with us to live with a man named John. Here it absorbed fights and alcohol fumes, witnessed slaps and yells and John’s large hands moving toward my mother’s throat. Stoic, it watched as I stood at the dinner table night after night, the desk as silent as any adult in my life, foretelling my future. When my mother left in a hurry, me safely ensconced at my grandparent’s house, the desk migrated to the basement of John’s apartment building. Someone broke into it and stole all of my mother’s records, the Beatles, the Doors, the jazz albums that originally belonged to my grandfather.
She gave the desk to me when I got married the first time. It’s inhabited apartments and houses. I keep the checkbook in here, bills that need filing, old cell phones and computer cables. In the bottom drawer I keep old love letters that no one but me cares to read, the ephemera of what went before, when everything about life was unsettled but exciting all at once.
This bottom drawer contains emotions lost and volatile. I keep the journals my grandmother wrote after my grandfather was burned in an industrial accident, two notebooks of medical scares and bitterness, next to the love letters. Kevin’s teenage angst and poetry notebook lies on top of the burn diaries. The drawer contains them and so do I, these two suppressed lives gone, the words of the dead. I am the keeper of memory and severed connection, of history and sadness, of other peoples’ secret thoughts.
The desk holds hidden lives, realities experienced behind a mask. It reveals the deceptive moments when everything is either clear and bright and easy or muddied with uncertainty and censored thoughts, as if these were the only two possibilities that life and love offer. It holds privacy invaded, shows the way that thoughts living in isolation wither, how I hold on to our idea of other people without their input, keep them frozen in time.
I keep the evidence of infatuation and anger, the proof that once I dazzled strangers, that love and hatred interlink.
From the prompt "On my desk."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited beyond the 12-minute prompt mark.
Out the window
20 July 2011 07:03 AM
What was inside was bloody, raw, contained in plastic and paper towels and then the butcher’s paper, like it was your heart, or maybe even part of your brain, some vital part of you that held you back, but something that you needed, too, and then it was push up the window and toss it out and nobody was there to catch it, to hear the thud, to notice what you were doing.
You threw caution out of a side window by a part of the house where no one travels, near the winding blackberry bush and the invasive trumpet vine. You threw it and forgot about it and inside whatever it was, that vital part, just rotted away, and you told yourself how foolish it was to toss it out the window as you stitched the wound and changed the bandages.
The scar was ridiculous, too, a sign of your haste, your foolishness, this lightning rod on the side of your chest, like the clichéd tattoo of a teenager. “I’m stuck with it now,” like you were stuck with every other bad decision. You skin was crisscrossed with marks from other times, the times you let your boundaries be violated (so many small marks in the same place created a trough across your stomach), the indentations of withdrawal, the craters on your feet from all the running away.
To experience the metaphorical as the physical is a gift, a curse, a way to read the past and to hide from the future. In the bathroom, a cabinet of salves and gauze and ace bandages awaits. Wrap yourself protectively. Sit in the sun and reflect. Let caution grow again in you, slowly, a small protective thing. Let your decision-making be brave, do not toss the caution away, nurture it but ignore it when it leads you in the wrong direction. Just don’t kill it.
You are not brave, but you can be. Act as if, as if you had the heart and mind of someone else, as if you were whole, as if the most important thing in the world was the separation and then the connection, the only way to live life fully.
From the prompt "Out the window."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Debbi Long.
The stand-in
19 July 2011 06:21 AM
Sometimes a young man shows up on the porch. The door opens, a hand reaches out, the house swallows him up. He might live there, the only male I've seen enter the sanctum. Presumably a husband/father figure exists. He works in Belgium, in Luxembourg, in Italy. He wires money to a joint bank account, sends letters home in a tight script, the words leaning back in resistance. The mother homeschools the children, teaching them about revolution, about biofuels and flouting convention.
We watch them from our living room window, from the gaps in the privacy fence gate. In the beginning, both girls were friendly, but now it is only the towhead who raises a tentative hand in greeting. A silent figure on a small porch littered with leather booties and biking shoes, she watches my son and me when we walk home from school, when we trace chalk robots on the sidewalk out front.
They travel with their own personal force fields. I do too, I do, and I want to disable the protection system, mine, theirs. I want to borrow a cup of sugar or toss the turbinado on their scraggly lawn in some sort of magical gesture: make me part of this place, bring me into your home, show me the books on your shelves. I will take broken eggshells and make them into a potion (add sourgrass and fennel fronds and blackberry leaves, crush them with honeysuckle) I will mix it into a pitcher of plum-spiked lemonade. I will pour the mother a glass and convince her to tell me their secrets, to take me in like a lost dog.
From the prompt "My mother."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this one from the original, though not much.
Image: View from our living room window across the street.
Fictionalized
19 June 2011 06:40 AM
I’ve become accustomed to writing in bursts at 4:30 in the morning, giving the quick impression, the fast take. The rest of my time lately has been spent in household tasks and I tell myself this is fine, really it's fine, at least I have something to show for it, some signs that yes, I can write. Maybe I’m not meant to write drawn out stories. Maybe these bursts are my thing. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that, like most writers, I’m just going to have to plug along without ever selling or really publishing a goddamned thing.
Why is it so important to have thousands of readers? What is it about the mind meld process of reading someone else’s words? Is this a power trip, me wanting to insert a bit of me into you? What do I expect from this process? I am trying to let go of the shoulds, the idea that I should be writing one thing or another, that I need to please everyone in my life, that I should ignore my core in order to satisfy what I think other people want from me.
I don’t want to write for the masses. I have no desire to do the marketing dance, to write stories that will fly off of bookstore shelves (it’s good to not have desires for impossible things anyway). In order to please myself I probably need to write more, but, as with everything else, I have a hard time separating me out from the rest of it. I need to be disciplined, to push beyond the ease of four or five paragraphs. But what to write about that will please me, will keep my attention through self-doubt and difficulty?
My past is no longer up for being detailed. Leave me alone, it tells me. Make me into something else, please. Fictionalize me. In these conversations, I have to talk back. Then, past, why do you insist on historical accuracy? When I escape you in words, why do you hang over my shoulder and correct my “facts”? The past is fading, it no longer speaks in full sentences, but still, it can correct with a look. I parade it out in therapy sessions and crying jags, give it its due so that it will dissipate or return to the files in my mind, the places I will refer to when I need a situation, a fight, a season of loneliness and booze.
Still. I turn to the rest of you. I borrow your sentences, I watch the sunset filtered through filmy blinds. I see your lives reflected in mantel mirrors. Sooner or later, you will show up in my words, barely disguised. I promise to treat you with kindness, with affection, with acknowledgment for your strengths and flaws. So please talk to me, will you? Give me material, give me conversation. Don’t leave me alone by the side of the road, wordless, my head resting in my hands.
From the prompt "What I know about writing."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This is the final prompt of this session. The next one starts up some time in July. The boy is home and campless for the next couple of weeks, so I'm not sure what my writing time will be like.
Image by Ben Fredericson (xjrolokix).
Tear down this wall
18 June 2011 06:03 AM
When the wall is old and deep and wide, a familiar part of the landscape, a barrier of your own ingenious imagination, choose a time to tear at the crumbling edge, at the bits of mortar and brick that are coming loose, carefully. Bring a friend. Work slowly. Words will tumble out of the gaps, and emotions, full situations from childhood, or dense chunks of suppressed feelings, the things you think you shouldn’t feel, but do, the fears, the dark sticky evil thoughts oozing through the cracks.
.
I didn’t totally appreciate this until yesterday, after my appointment (Take a minute to pay attention to how you are feeling my therapist told me. “The tension runs from my head through the middle of my torso, the center of me. There is a burning sensation at my heart, like a fire. It is wordless, a mix of anger and sadness.”). She told me to leave the feelings there, to walk away with a light step and calm interior. I made a half-hearted attempt, but my tears were insistent. My life was disappearing from underneath my feet. At home I tried to stop the flow of thought and escaped emotions, but the wall would not be patched.
It was an unsettling feeling, to be teetering over the void again, but to recognize that I had some control over it, that this was part of a process, of healing, of change. I also saw how I tried to cope with it, by distracting myself with fantasy, with escape. The fantasy no longer works. I see it for what it is, a delusion. It makes me feel old and sick and dirty and undesirable, which is part of this whole sad journey, the separation of me from the old emotions.
Walls on their own aren’t necessarily bad things. We don’t need to have minds like open fields where every plant, every hillock, is visible to passersby. But the walls could come with doors, or they could be beautiful constructions, wrought iron fences where clematis vines travel, simple picket structures with wide gates and daisy borders. Or maybe the way to think of our vulnerable selves is to picture a library, the books finely bound. Some are old. They crumble and you must treat them delicately. Others are new and shiny and beg to be opened. Know which is which. Share the brittle volumes, the dark histories, with people whom you can trust. Take it slowly. Know you deserve good things, that you can treat people well, that we’re all mired in something or other, the past, the search for acceptance, the stress of life, of money troubles, of lost love.
From the prompt "Good advice." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by michaelgoodin.
Soul container
16 June 2011 06:10 AM
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.
Baltimore pastoral
15 June 2011 05:51 AM
Norm's father was a drunk and he is a heroin addict. His mother, Anna, took the beatings and she lives with two sons who don’t speak to her or to each other. One sits in his room, drinks beer and watches television, the other lives like an alley cat, thin and sly. He slinks between neighborhoods and drives other peoples’ cars. He hides his works under seat cushions and stows away the crack pipe in holes in the upholstery.
He says he is going to get clean. He doesn’t mean it. The life suits him, the cheap beer in boxcar bars, the in and out familiarity of Central Booking and the Baltimore jail. He gets arrested for stupid stuff, loitering, driving without a license, uses the jail time to detox, then goes back to it when he is released. You can go for a long time on heroin, years lost to its pleasures, the nodding in front of the TV set, the corner deals. His friends are prostitutes and homeless men and when the nice naïve lady moves in across the street, lonely on her stoop, the clothesline burning her hands as she wrenches it too hard, he sees an opportunity. She sees self-destruction incarnate, the desperate eyes and trembling hands.
He has an easy way, she tells herself, and easy way and a light touch. And when he’s sober, Norm has a talent for carpentry. He works with his hands and she’s always been a sucker for that, the three dimensional knowledge, the things of beauty that men can create. Wasted, wasted, wasted. She must reveal his goodness to him, save him from the streets.
From the prompt "Promises." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take. This one is based in reality.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm working on fourish hours of sleep and have no idea about the quality of this one. A little too much tell and not enough show, but that's how it goes.
Image by ktylerconk.
Reluctant room parent bares all
14 June 2011 05:21 AM
When we sat in the florescent-lit classroom last September, our five-year-old children ensconced elsewhere as we learned about the year ahead, what kindergarten would be like, I had no idea what I was doing. Yes, I signed up to be a room parent, one of the first on a list of four or five. I thought that it was part of my job as a sometimes-disgruntled stay-at-home mom, a hyphenated sort, to do that kind of thing, you, know, for the children or more specifically for my child, though I’d be helping other peoples’ children along the way.
Confession: I am not a gung-ho type. I like to be left alone and I don’t like to incite others to give group presents or bring treats to various parties. I don’t have fun ideas for teachers and if I had my way my son and I would spend long afternoons in imaginative splendor, him hopefully with a friend along, me coasting and thinking and being.
Another confession: I didn’t realize back in September that I was depressed, that I would take my family along on a melodramatic ride this school year, that many of our post-school afternoons would consist of me being cranky and removed, anticipating the four p.m. IPA. I didn’t know how lonely I was or how desperate, or that I would find it difficult to get motivated to even cook dinner, let alone organize our disparate group.
I know it all now. I’m feeling better, though with the new uptick in the antidepressants my sleep has gone to shit again. The lovely thing about a long stretch of insomnia is that it forces you not to care about the little things (unless it makes you a sodden sobbing mess, but the meds have dried up most of my tears). It gives me a clarity and I see our classroom, our sets of parents with their home lives and their work lives and their problems like everybody else’s and I just don’t care. I have a job to do, the gathering of cash, the classroom squirrel storing things up for the teacher’s present. I harangue you all to sign the card, to bring sugary crap to the end-of-school party. I forward the many missives to give money here or provide food there.
Some of you know me better than others. But I realize as the year winds up and I look back at my mistakes, at how my hopes for this brave new world of elementary school were naïve, at how I was looking for a way out or a new path and was misguided … I realize that it takes a long time to know anybody. My public face is deceptive, though not deliberately so. I am contained. I am a good girl with snarky, dirty thoughts. I look sweet and I may even act that way, but in reality, I am a pit of twanging nerves and imagined violent scenarios.
Or, families of Room 188, that’s how I feel this morning, up before the morning birds have started their business. I hear one of them warming up now. I thank him for his perspective, for the liquidity of his voice. I’ll get another cup of coffee and think of my day. I’ll think of the children.
Sincerely,
Jennifer (blonde boy #3's mom)
From the prompt "Warning signs." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of shadows on playground sand by me.
Take it without tears
13 June 2011 05:57 AM
Somewhere in one of the hodgepodge boxes in the back room, in one of the dilapidated cardboard containers stuffed with what remains of my childhood and my foolish teenage self, is a small ornamental box, a box within a box. In the smaller box is a strange collection of ephemera: Loudon the sheltie dog’s puppy teeth, a tangle of bobby pins, a small card from my high school boyfriend D where he wrote “I love you,” and an orthodontic "appliance" called a rapid palate expander.
My orthodontist hammered the rapid palate expander into my upper mouth in front of an audience. Every procedure was a performance. The three chairs for patients in varying states of pain, their mouths agape, were in a row in front of two similar chairs for waiting teenagers, which were all part of a large common room. You either got a front row seat while you waited for your own torture or you were only a moan away from it all.
Waiting patients tried not to stare, and when I was in the chair, drooling as they made a mold of my teeth, wincing as the cruel dental hygienist twisted the wires, eyes watering as Dr. Tjersland wielded the rubber mallet, I pretended there were no boys in the room. I closed my eyes and thought of the fish in cylindrical tanks in front of me or quietly hummed Duran Duran songs.
According to one orthodontist’s web site, the rapid palate extender – or RPE – works by “simply activating the expander through turning a screw in the center, with a special key . . . [placing] gradual outward pressure … on the left and right halves of the upper jaw. This pressure causes an increased amount of bone to grow between the right and left halves of the jaw, ultimately resulting in an increased width.” Simple. Painful with each turn of the screw. Food often got stuck in between the roof of my mouth and the RPE and I’d hack it out like a cat rids itself of a furball, complete with raspy sound effects.
Eventually, the thing was pulled out in a public removal, pried off with pliers or some other piece of handyman equipment adapted for exquisitely sensitive mouths. With more room to grow, my teeth could now be jacketed in metal and connected by rubber band. It was progress. My tongue explored its new cave with a growing sense of freedom, anticipated the taste of metal and blood, excited about the straightened teeth to come.
I kept the device as a reminder of what doctors do to unsuspecting children, as a record of public stoicism. Someday I will point to my now crooked teeth and will show my son the torture device in a stern warning to follow doctor's orders, to keep turning the screw and accepting the metal, to wear the retainer.
From the prompt "Boxes."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit.
Image by mag3737.
Stay
12 June 2011 06:31 AM
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
Why I've gathered you all here
11 June 2011 06:00 AM
I still walk, I wander the streets of Berkeley and Albany. I take in the flowers, the bungalows in various states of repair, stuccoed in purples and calming greens. This is my secret life, going from appointment to appointment, from therapist to counselor to doctor, observing the lives of others, their public faces. It's the slow way to travel, though I am a fast walker, and my mind records and remembers. Here is where I waited in the rain, my head filled with me, with friendly warnings for the coming earthquake, waiting for the car with my husband and son to whisk me away from the flood.
The sidewalks are empty and the houses silent. I wander during weekdays when the rest of the world is gathering cash and stress and knowledge and I go to my helpers, the people who prop me up and make me hopeful, like an old lady grasping the arms of youth, one on either side, as she attempts to make it up the hill.
I have dreams about children running away from me and lost pets, about clocks that don’t work and friends who tell me that they won’t invite me over. Last night, my heart trembling, I broke out in a sweat and dreamt of the end of the world by machine, the last of humanity stamped out by falling metal. I woke up from that, and from the next, an old friend in a ratty apartment by the ocean, the dangerous walk to her place from a bus stop. She’s a mother of two now, two southern babies that I’ve never met, and I’ve consigned her to the past, to memory, have kept her there like a fine piece of china, delicate and easily broken.
I’ve consigned you all to memory, I make up my mind again and again, keep you trapped here. You can’t talk unless I tell you to, and eventually you listen to my ramblings, to my explanations, the perfect imaginary audience.
From the prompt "Whispering."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by striatic.
Chasing the dragon
10 June 2011 06:40 AM
We chase down the moment of first contact, of redemption by touch, again and again, try to make it real, to give over to surprise. That’s how you find yourself a year later, sitting at the bar in a too-short dress with uncharacteristic sheer black stockings. Your cleavage shows beneath a silky shirt. You are relieved to have made it successfully to the bar in your fuck-me heels without twisting an ankle. Your toes ache. You rehearse the scene again in your mind. I’m a working girl and he’s here on business. I’m a working girl and he’s here on business.
When he walks into the bar, the reality of him makes your heart sing, the familiarity, the knowledge of what is underneath the suburban exterior, the dirty mind he hides under an actuary's precise language. Suppressing an urge to smile, you smolder instead, remembering your kohled eyes and your thong (but who could forget the thong? It lodged itself uncomfortably in your crack two seconds after you put it on).
There’s the chit chat, the role play. Your knees inch closer. His hand appears on your thigh. Under your skirt. Dangerously close to private places. He tosses down enough cash to cover the tab and you leave together, hand on ass. You don’t wait for a hotel room for the decorum of cover, but do it right then and there in the back seat of the car, under a fog of breath, clothing pushed aside.
And it’s close, it’s close to that first moment, the role play, the games. Still. You knew what was going to happen, knew the shape of him and the way his fingers danced, his scent, the weight of what was going on between you.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Helga Weber. It took me more time to find a suitable picture than to actually write this thing. And I'm sure it shows.
Forever young
09 June 2011 05:57 AM
It was true, I would sometimes see her getting out of her car at Northeast Liquors by the golf course, alone save for a yapping rat terrier in the back seat of her boxy Ford. I was always gliding by in a car, in the passenger seat, my mother or boyfriend at the wheel. The cars were small or large, old clunkers at any rate, with gas gauges that were out of tune, the remains of someone else’s childhood on the back seats, the scuff marks of small rubber soles, the sticky soda stains.
Once, in the confusion of spring, when all the kids wanted to be outside, making out under the bleachers or smoking pot in their cars, Elliot, my blue-eyed middle school crush turned 6’2” stoner, offered me a line. Of what – speed? cocaine? – I don’t remember, but I took it. I snorted a line of something in social studies class while Mrs. Ackerman lectured us in her high whiny voice, the voice of loss of youth and idealism. A few months earlier, I had scored some mushrooms for Elliot, courtesy of my older (also stoner) boyfriend. Maybe he was repaying the favor. I don’t know.
She talked on and on and we looked at her with the cockiness of 16 and 17, disgusted with her weakness, the weakness of flesh and adult predilections. My mind in a rush, my words suddenly tumbling, and the images, too, I tried to imagine her as we were. Perfect, without decades of questionable decisions behind her. We would never drone on to classrooms of hormone-engorged teenagers. We would do amazing things, would never get old. There would be no rumors of our youth, and when people looked at our old pictures, they wouldn’t be able to see the difference between yesterday and today. Our skin would remain tight, we would always be up on the latest music.
The 80s would last forever and so would we.
From a photo prompt that wouldn't look related to what I wrote, but is in a roundabout way.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image (from found film ) by hartman045.
Pep talk
08 June 2011 06:11 AM
What I have instead? Something small and organic, pliable, a brain stem, a heart beat, the lungs that sometimes wheeze and cough. I make promises that are hard to keep. I lash myself to those with troubles. My soul filters my experiences through the past and desire. The exterior is banged up, carved with initials, the marks of my old self (the childish lines) my middle self (the legible signature), my current self (a scrawl), of the people I have loved and lost. My stories are written on it, they emanate from it, and now I bathe it with sympathy and talk and pharmaceuticals.
This is it. This is what I’m stuck with, this humanity (this pretension!), this scarred and mangled thing. I can picture it as a thing of light and beauty, pure and warm, the best parts of me, whatever those might be, but that would mean ignoring the rest. But it purrs and hums, it loves this attention, it tells me that it’s worth it. I give it pep talks, show it the good amongst the bad, remind it that its brethren, the souls of other people, are sullied, too, not clear and hard and pure. It’s what we’re stuck with.
We make promises we can’t always keep. We hurt the ones we love. We cut ourselves off from other people in order to protect ourselves. We pretend we are atoms, disconnected from the world, ok on our own. My soul is reaching out to yours, it extends acceptance and love and warmth and the knowledge that perfection isn’t possible or necessary, that pain is a part of the game, that all of this is too hard and yet we have no choice.
From the prompt "Promises."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm getting to the "I don't know exactly what to write, so I'll fall back on something philosophical" portion of the RR. It's getting boring even for me, so I thank you if you've gotten this far. Only one more week ...
Image by Travelin' Librarian.
Dry spell
06 June 2011 06:08 AM
Then her stories went, or her understanding of them disappeared. The past that she had mined so well and for too long fell away. Turned out everyone in it, the villains, the protagonists, hell, even the animals, would have benefited from therapy, from antidepressants, from a little change in perspective. That would have changed everything, the group sessions with her mother, Kevin, her father and stepmother, the circle in the room with uncomfortable chairs and threadbare carpet, her balancing a quiet newborn on her knee because he would have been saved, too, killed by the darkness as he was.
And the present, too, the latest catastrophe after years of drought, of careful control? That could have been prevented with the right mix of drug and talk. She pictures herself in a stiff satin cloak, the collar high, her dress underneath of soft linen, distributing medication to the masses, to those who are trapped by circumstance, to the stressed, to the withdrawn, to the self-medicators slack-jawed and satiated with sex or drugs or hours in front of the television.
The need to create in her dried up. Her imagination withered. There were no more scenarios of 1 a.m. shooting galleries or people thin with want, want of love or attention or drugs. Sex became as theoretically simple as writing instructions on a piece of paper, robbed of its darker elements, robbed of subtlety and play.
Still. She wants to hold on to feeling better, so let’s not go there, ‘k? See, she’s fine, she’s good. She just slept almost 8 hours. She woke up without obsession. She is reading books. She is talking more with her husband. Every morning she has hot amaranth with blueberries and almonds. Fried foods no longer appeal. She’s healthy, she’s returning to herself – hello, self – and isn’t that enough?
Let’s let the two of them get reacquainted. Then it’s back to work. The darkness will always be there, the stories (newly shaped, someone else’s) will return. And she still feels the struggle within, hidden by newfound contentment.
From the prompt "It closed." I'm feeling insipid these days, at least as far as writing is concerned, with a trace of Pollyanna tossed into the rest of it. Maybe I just need to be in the moment of feeling good with the realization that more work remains -- because it does.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ifijay.
Like a record, baby
05 June 2011 06:51 AM
They psychiatrist asked if I had obsessive thoughts. I tend to obsess, I told her, but I thought it was a personality thing. You know, the minute examination of every detail, the post-fight righting of wrongs, the history rewrite, my chance to tell someone what I really think and to imagine them listening, the perfect audience.
In my mind, my imaginary conversational companion is unadulterated by his own problems, totally loving and caring, with a mind free of prejudice and hurt. Recently I realized again that what I am looking for is to exist in someone else’s mind, to be fully formed and real and "me" for someone else, to be their obsession. It doesn’t work that way, of course. There is no perfectly objective (yet deeply loving) mind out there where I can be held gently with understanding and grace. The people I wasted my obsessions on were as broken as I was, maybe more. My strange new clarity of vision shows me that I was a speck of a thought for them, if I was a thought at all.
I’m beginning to feel separate from the rethink and the silent conversation. I still have them – old habits die hard – but they strike me as being more and more ridiculous, a fantasy, some safe way of fulfilling a need to be heard and seen without actually communicating directly.
I finally scored some melatonin yesterday, in liquid form, and took it before bed, hoping that I wouldn’t wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. like I have lately. It worked, or my idea of what it should do worked, and I fairly sprung out of bed at 5:20, full of energy and hope, my mind clear of obsession. Is it the drugs, all of this? The way I can interrupt the thought process, the way my husband and I are communicating differently? Is it the therapy, currently at a rate of 2-3 sessions a week (and I am so tired of me, let me tell you)? Will a few more nights of good sleep make a difference, too? Even without good sleep, I've seen a difference, a return to my old efficiency, the clearing of junk both real and metaphorical.
My worry is that this is all false, that it will go away, that the pills I take are more speed than mood enhancers. The doctor will look at the side effects (insomnia, appetite suppression, the hum of my brain reaching my ears) and take away this pill. Or maybe I’m ascribing too much to it – how could I get lucky on the first try?
As with everything else these days, I have to live with the ambiguity.
From the prompt "Around and around."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit.
And because I'm feeling silly and on my usual 1980s kick, here is a television ad for Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume, circa 1985.
Image by tricky™.
Erase you
04 June 2011 07:31 AM
These are the things she lost: the desert highway, a single lane cracking the parched earth, her parents in the front seat, their voices not raised but tightened. Her brother is sleeping beside her, resting his head on her shoulder and her stomach wants to revolt. She wills it to stop. Tight words, short. Her father takes his eyes from the road, his fist shoots from his arm, a move of precision against her mother's nose. The car goes silent. By the time they get to the motel with the pool and the sheets translucent as onion skin, the blood has left a trail down her neck and into her cleavage.
The smell of sugar and butter and flour, the standing mixer going on the counter, her grandmother’s fleshy arm, her swollen hand cracking the eggs. It’s a birthday cake. Or is it cookies? The memory is slipping away. She is left with sweetness and powder in the air, the oven radiating heat, the sound of talk radio in the background.
The boy with the scar just above his lip who stared at her for two years before finally speaking, his body language suddenly confident, the proprietary lean over her locker, his breath of spearmint, the circles of underarm sweat on his polo. He fades, turns into a man, and then the man becomes mist as well, all because of the night she picked up the telephone to hear whispers and dirty words. She read the pauses, pictured the work of hands and imagination, the power of language. And now the boy is gone, every version of him, the memories sucked away.
Spring. The soft green leaves, how they feel like thin rubber between her fingers, the competing smells of flora and fertilizer and liberated earth, the year she and her daughter planted sunflower seeds by the front fence. Every morning they would tumble from bed to see if the seedlings had pushed to the surface yet, the girl pulling her mother towards the door. Her daughter's first word was flower, she remembers that, and the memory warms her skin, gives her the feeling of dirt under fingernails. She pictures the arc of a hose, watches a pair of chubby feet stumble across grass. Flower. What does it mean?
What if. What if we could erase the bad memories? It’s a movie plot, yes, and also the premise behind the development of a new drug (or, really, a new application for an old one). Why not erase the bad? But what are we without our memories, good and bad, those learning experiences that made us? And what about the integration of sense with event, the way we cross-reference smells and songs with our stories?
Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne, the ubiquitous background scent of the 80s, reminds me of a boy I knew just long enough to suffer the consequences, The smell brings back his small lithe body, the dance where we met, the quiet bit of nothingness on a bed in the Little House that led to my ruin. If I couldn’t identify the source of distress – if the smell made my heart race, switched on my adrenals without me knowing why – then how would I interpret it?
Instead, I use this stuff, his wrist with the heavy gold bracelet, the swoop of hair over his sweet young Italian face, the inexperienced handjob in the back of a family car and the way the girl doesn’t give a shit but goes along anyway. There he is at the cousin's wedding, a plastic glass of champagne in his hand. There they are in someone's parents' house, sitting on the steps after another messy event. I see his tortured face hovering over her by the light of a television. She is silent, always silent, silent and enduring.
From the prompt "We finally did it." I know that this drug doesn't really erase bad memories, that it's more subtle than that, and I know this topic has been tackled elsewhere ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but it got me thinking.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I extended this one and it feels very much like a snapshot, a work in progress with lots of flaws.
Image by paulineRroupski.
Not about Oprah
03 June 2011 05:26 AM
She was on long enough that I associate her with high school and early college, with that stretch where my boyfriend D and I played house during breaks at his brother’s place while his brother was away (me with the pork loin and the cocktails and the afternoon television, him with the construction job and the dirty laundry, the laundry that I washed). In fact, I associate her with another show that is disappearing, All My Children, my soap along with that stalwart, General Hospital. She is part of this faraway world where there was cable, yes, but not so much of it, and no Internet, and cell phones were these monstrosities that you only used in your car, and didn’t we have horses and buggies then, too?
There I am in the living room with the shades drawn. I’m nineteen years old. I’ve cracked open a beer (some habits die hard) and dinner is cooking in the oven. I’ve set myself up for the waiting game again, trapped in this house because I don’t drive and it’s near nothing convenient. Oprah is on, she comes on after GH, and there is a row of transvestites or sad broken women on their way out of the gutter. She hasn’t yet gotten to the decades of largesse, where she gifts her audience members new cars, vacations, makeovers, husband swaps. D comes home a little late, musky, he smells like sweat and pot, and I don’t want to talk to him because of the pot. Maybe I’m a little drunk, too, from the half beer, and I’m tired of waiting, always waiting for him.
The passivity of it! My ass on the floor or on the sofa, the feeling of the waiting inevitable, waiting for someone else to take over the narrative. I’ve never thought of it as passive before, but now I see it. Oprah tells me I can do it, that it will be ok, that little abused girls with moxie and ambition can go anywhere, can roll out wagonfuls of fat in front of a studio audience. They can act, they can interview, they know what the people want. So I watch and I wait and when D emerges from the shower we fight some more.
From the prompt "Oprah."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm getting to the point in the RR where it's harder to write about things that interest me.
Image from the blog Dave's Lunch. I'm sure Dave got it from somewhere else, but if you want to see a blog with lots of pictures of a man putting food into his mouth, this is the place to go.
Clarity / Insight
02 June 2011 12:07 PM
That’s not a good thing. We need to convince ourselves that our lives have meaning, that the structure we impose is there for a reason, that despite the fact that we all know how it ends (badly) we have to keep on shaping and forming and being as though it matters. This feeling was one of the worst I’ve felt in what I still hesitate to call my depression and I’ve felt pretty bad. Before I started the antidepressants, drinking was a way to access the bad feelings, to lose myself in maudlin tears. Sometimes it was a way to delude myself about the future, to be in some hazy moment where, somehow, all would be well and I would be lifted out of all of this, out of all the hard work, by some magical force.
But the drugs are giving me clarity of vision. I can’t buffer myself against the future with slightly hazy evenings of escapism. Instead, the alcohol and a triggering situation pushed me right against the edge and it wasn’t an escape, it was a dagger to the throat, the tip of the blade piercing the skin.
It’s not as if I get drunk. I have one, maybe two drinks, occasionally three over the course of three hours. But I am a small person and the beer I drink is high in alcohol. It’s been enough to smooth out the edges of boredom and worry. Or at least that’s what it used to be. Now I see that this habit has to stop, another thing to let go of, a coping mechanism that is a form of avoidance.
The next step is creating meaning. I have no idea what the future holds. I live necessarily day by day. I’m in transition though it looks like I am standing in place. It’s the internal framework that is moving, by force, by thought, by feeling, and if I concentrate too hard on the process, I’m lost.
Goodbye to all that, the escape, the avoidance, the long corridors of revisiting myself alone again and again. I'm hopeful this morning though hope feels ... odd, strange, like an exotic fruit I've never sampled. I have to taste it while it's still in my hand, ripe and fragrant.
From a photo prompt (not the photo above).
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited. Hoping something dark and fictional comes my way tomorrow.
Image by mako.
Written in the body
01 June 2011 10:15 AM
This man, the first familiarity, melts away and suddenly I am kissing my body double. His legs match the length of mine. His feet are tanned and small. Our similarities, the smallness of our combined frames, surprises me. I mourn the body who went before. It is the last time I let the physicality of someone, their solidity, the feel of their lips, the way their legs intertwine with mine, become an object of attachment.
When my body double leaves me, I don't mourn the loss of his corporeality. I mourn the loss of tenuous connection, the closeness of two damaged souls meeting periodically to solve the problem of the human need for touch. And when the next man comes along, his feet like miniature anvils, his body broad and short, I let the concept of physical attachment go completely. I don't record the feeling of him against me, the pressure of his hand in mine. It simply doesn't matter anymore. All that remains are the labels. After that marriage ends, I often catch myself almost calling the new man by the old one's name. A matter of habit.
This was the sloughing off of connection and association. We are animals of contact, of the burrowing together under covers, the familiarity of the loved one’s body, of their smell and the way their chest rises and falls, the cadence of their walk. I remember the first man best and after that let go of the musk, of the tracing of thighs and knees, of the texture of hair between fingers. I simply do not want to get too attached. The pain of the inevitable break is too much.
But to realize it! There I am in a fast car looking down at his feet, here I am on bright blue wall-to-wall and he is about to kiss me, here we are together at a country-western bar, talking talking talking. And here he is, boyfriend #4, husband #2, with me for over thirteen years now, the long history, the beauty of context. He knew Kevin, my mother’s cruel boyfriend. He met my grandfather, dead since Valentine’s Day 2002. He’s known my animals. He’s the father of my child. Our history goes on and I know the feel of his hand in mine, have cried in his arms, a sensation I have deliberately and slowly forgotten.
I need to remember again.
From the prompt "The key." But this had nothing to do with the prompt. I've been thinking about this bodily attachment, how detached I am from it now and why that happened. When I was up at 1:30 this morning, one of the images going through mind was of D's feet, his foot on the gas pedal, and how strange it was when I started dating J, how the differences between them were so obvious and palpable and how I missed what had come before. That was the last time I mourned someone's physical presence, more of my self-protection system doing its job overzealously.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I rewrote this one entirely, though I'm having a hard time taking it further. They've upped the dosage of the little purple pills (because that's how it works) and my thoughts are hard to hold on to this morning.
Image by William Degen.
We'll get clean together
31 May 2011 06:03 AM
Later, on her doorstep, the porch light on, the properly coiffed mother waiting in the kitchen, they kiss, a peck, hard lips, stiff shoulders.
The scene: blue jeans and tight shirts and fast cars, the James Dean wannabes with the whiskey and the rebellion and the Freudian underpinnings (see the mother with her clinging ways, her eyes lingering romantically on the boy as he slams the door and leaps into the heavy metal car?). The girl doesn’t wear skirts and smokes cigarettes and there they are groping in the back seat. Their hands are like smoke, they drift here and there, it’s the smell of seduction, of the hand down the underwear and the pressure of going beyond and the unbuttoning and unzipping, and who wants to go to fairs anyway unless you can start a fight?
He drops her off two blocks from home and she climbs up the trellis to her window. Ravished. Rebellious. His mother is waiting up for him with Ovaltine and crackers and runs her hands through his greased mop, tells him how handsome he looks. His entrance, all alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke, is dramatic. His father sleeps in the spare bedroom.
I want the bad dirty fun, the darkness of wrist holds and secret corners, the make-out sessions in tunnels. Don’t give me fresh-scrubbed young men or polite conversation. A friend recently told me that the stereotype is true, that every woman wants to be ravished on the dining room table, the cutlery and placemats pushed to the floor. We want the spontaneity, the badness of it.
And it might be true. It might. You can clean it all up later on, wash away the crumbs, attend to the scratches and marks, the moment of passion over.
From the prompt "Good clean fun." The post title comes from a White Stripes song, "Ball and Biscuit."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image from a 1950s album cover by K'vitsh.
I never tire of it
30 May 2011 06:50 AM
The quality of the air changes according to the season, thin and biting in the winter, the layers of shirt, sweater, scarf, coat, hat. My feet crunch in the snow, the ground reflects starlight, and every house, every window tells a story. In urban Columbus, we took our dog walks at night together, me, Mr. X, and sheltie-dog Loudon, walked by the old Victorians, the brick Italianates, the houses with brightly colored gingerbread and lace curtains. We glimpsed in windows to catch a bit of artwork, a hand caressing the back of someone’s hair, the unkempt mop, the rake of fingernails, a little girl on a swing floating across the living room.
In the country, along Eastern Shore roads, there were no streetlights, the houses kept their distance with thick boundaries of lawn. My neighbors, paranoid with their motion-sensitive security lights and their barking dogs, closed thick curtains at the first sign of darkness. I focused on the air, always summer-hot in my memory, so many stars above, the musical notes of the crickets accompanying my step. Without the distraction of sunlight, of other peoples’ lives and belongings, sensation became paramount: pushing through the thick humidity, the pain of gravel on my feet, the wind shaking tree branches.
Berkeley nights are cold and damp. During the evening dog walks, I watch the sky, dodge the street cats, glance into bungalows to see the built-ins, the families in dining rooms, reading on couches. I admire quirky artwork and wooden trim through window glass. If I’m lucky, the sky is clear, the stars low. I can trace the flight of the planes against deep blue, identify the planets to the dog, who doesn’t care a whit about the sky, but instead sniffs the flowers, the tree trunks, the bare patches in the grass.
From the prompt "I never get tired of it." This morning I slept in (until 5:30: yay!) and didn't start writing until immediately after I took my medication. Writing with the initial medication-induced heart-racing is not a good thing. It's harder to corral my thoughts. I'm beginning to have my doubts about the little purple pills, but have to keep taking them for at least a month to see if they are effective. Messing with neurochemistry is scary.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.This one needed a bit of tightening up.
Image by prophetofdelphi.
Shoeless
29 May 2011 05:47 AM
The bottom of the Elk was mud and leaves, a thick layer of it, and no swim shoes, just my feet pressing pressing, the mud getting between my toes and wasn’t high tide the best, when you had to swim out to the raft without touching? I swam until I was shivering, until it was time for dinner (5:00 p.m. sharp) and then back up the road I walked, towel around my waist, hair clinging to my shoulders, body browned by sun and mud.
It was the ethos of summer, no shoes unless I absolutely had to, the freedom to walk down to the river by myself because there was always someone familiar there to watch over me, a grandparent, generally, not necessarily mine, someone who knew my mother and her parents since my mother was a little girl. But I barely remember their names now. My grandmother died when I was nine. The other grandparents got older. I got older, too, not so cute, rebellious and angry and sneaky and can you believe the way she took advantage of her poor handicapped grandfather like that?
Still, bare feet in teenagerhood, bare as I walked the slate stepping stones from the Little House to the main one, for the shower, for the bathroom, to use the phone or make something to eat. On late summer nights, I walked barefoot down to the beach, to the parking lot with its cars and guys and beer and pot. Drunk, I drove my grandfather’s golf cart without shoes and Maureen and I were probably both barefoot when we took out my his car on that early summer night. A mistake. Not the lack of shoes, but the action, with predictable consequences.
Late that fall, I may have slipped on shoes before the ambulance took me away. More likely my mother packed me a bag, since I was half-naked anyway. It was cold that morning, but when I went into labor and had to call her, had to make the walk to the main house to use the phone, I doubt if I put on shoes, distracted by pain, by what was happening to me, by the threshold I was crossing too young.
From the prompt "Barefoot."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: My feet.
Taut framework
28 May 2011 05:10 AM
So. The framework that I built to survive, the carefully constructed structure? I’m dismantling it. Rather violently it seems. I’ve got the claw end of a hammer, I’m not only pulling at nails, but I’m ripping at the plywood, at the 2x4s, at this 70s construction of formaldehyde-soaked particle board. The photographs on the inner walls are faded, I can barely see them, but I feel the heat emitting from them, the danger. Part of me wants to just burn down the framework, maybe I’ve even started a fire in the corner with the lighter my grandfather left behind and the tinder, too, the piles of magazines, the candy, the sawdust. It went out on its own, I discarded the metaphor, or rather I am right now discarding the metaphor, realizing that I am in control here. It doesn’t have to come down all at once and if I burn it down, I destroy not only a part of myself but my ability to access it.
But the feeling. I carry it around with me, we’re familiar with each other, the tension and me, my protection system. It asks me if I really want to go there and I say I don’t have a choice. Together we go to our appointments, we wake up in the middle of the night. The feeling informs my writing. And yesterday, the two of us lying supine on the couch at my therapist’s office, enjoying the stereotypical position (we usually sit), we went down a path in the woods and met the best part of me. She was tall and maternal and kind, pale with red hair, and she enveloped the two of us in her satin cloak while we cried.
I hate the weakness, the feelings I can’t put into a framework, the little girl so controlled and angry. I don't want to forget her, I don't want to dismantle her world. But I have no choice.
Still. It all scares the fuck out of me.
From the prompt "In the middle." This is the sort of overwrought stuff I would prefer not to post anymore. Not that I think it is poorly written, it's just personal and intense in a way that I am tired of sharing. But here it is, small group of readers.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Dave Anastasi.
Tain't no big thing
27 May 2011 05:30 AM
What is so appealing about going back to the beginning, before the assumptions build up and our patterns form, patterns of avoidance, of self-protection? One could argue he was part of the forming of that system, and he certainly didn’t treat me properly for the first two years, yet I look back on him with sweetness. Maybe it was because, at the end, he really loved me, and we were young enough to be optimistic, to think that life was only going to get better and better.
As I mess with my brain chemistry, with the way my neurons fire, I’ve been thinking again about love, the way it works, its chemical properties. My nonromantic self sees it as a combination of how the love object fits one’s past (in ways we may not detect) combined with a surge of neurotransmitters. Right now it’s hard for me to think of love as anything but a series of neural equations that extend until the chemicals start to peter out and it becomes a different kind of love. Familial. Or it disappears altogether.
In my dream, I told D that I loved him. He was noncommittal. We shared someone else’s bed in a strange house in the Netherlands. The room was in a basement, anonymous white walls, anonymous sheets, no windows. When the real occupant came back with his girlfriend, we had to leave. I struggled with my stuff, the bag of spilled earrings, the clothes on the floor, while D just up and left.
Love. Past + chemicals = delusion. Is this the optimistic future I had hoped for? Is this outlook just a case of another set of faulty neurons, of a brain bathed in sadness, stuck in a pattern of blah and don’t get used to it and how could we really know anyone anyway? I return to D because of the simplicity, his, ours, for the memories of wind-whipped hair in a too-fast car. I return because of the excitement, the fights, the stupid ones about the color of a boat or the cleanliness of the bathtub, the deeper ones that always ended in something closer, closer, not further away.
I don’t want to become more cynical as I get older and yet that’s what is happening. Maybe I’m on the precipice of a choice: a return to optimism and connection or the perpetual wading through the shallows of fear-based avoidance.
I’m scared. That’s it. It’s plain and simple and deep and all I want to do is look at its depths from a distance, but here I am approaching, one foot in front of the other, ready to run, run. My calves twitch. My heart betrays me. The fear is glassy and it reflects my expression and here I am, a foot extended ….
From the prompt "The first time we met."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by drusilla Lainee.
My results may vary
26 May 2011 12:38 PM
I started taking the pills Tuesday morning, the smoothing-of-emotion pills. Side effects may include insomnia, anxiety, weight loss – and their opposites. I might find a sudden increase in my sexual thoughts and responsiveness (though no one told me this one – it came up in searches on the drug). Maybe I'll sweat more. Lose my appetite. Become restless.
It’s true, my heart is beating faster. My mouth is dry. After I finish this write, I’ll take my daily dose and I’m beginning to wonder what will happen – will there be a cumulative effect? Will I be a crazy woman by the Sunday, my heart racing, manic in my energy levels? “Some people enjoy the energy boost,” the psychiatrist told me. I could use an energy boost. I’ve been unable to get interested in almost anything lately, have had to force myself to do simple things like keep up with our bank accounts, something I would normally do with a control freak’s precision and regularity.
Mainly I don’t want to feel like life is something to be endured. I want to wipe away the hopelessness and the images I’ve been having of my own death. It is only now that I have the pills in hand, that they are coursing through my body that I can see how I was sinking into something deeply and profoundly sad. If the purple pills work, I might be able to clear a path to the future. At the moment I am in the waiting room.
It could take up to a month to see if this stuff is effective, and, to be honest, I was feeling a bit better by the time I saw the doctor. Still, the prospect of doing away with the crying jags, of scraping away the grime and seeing the world around me, is a beautiful one.
But please, little purple pills, don't take away my ability to write, to flesh out the dark underbelly.
From a totally unrelated photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I was having a hard time concentrating this morning. Hope this isn't related to the medication.
Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL).
The unseen life
25 May 2011 05:57 AM
The woman stares at the ceiling, thinks about her next move. Slowly she lifts the child’s arm from her torso. She slips out of the bed and puts on a robe. The cats leap from their places and follow her downstairs. Coffee with cream. Laptop. Email. Facebook. Writing. She sits on the couch in low light, one cat behind her, the other beside.
Later, we see her walking the dog, phone to her ear, the dog sniffing sniffing sniffing, sometimes stalking a squirrel. She sorts the laundry, unloads the dishwasher, folds, puts away. She writes. Checks the mailbox. Lets the dog out. It’s all in time lapse photography. Her path is circuitous and fast and the camera doesn’t linger on her time in the kitchen, the tears are blurs and though she is wiping her eyes it could be from laughter or maybe there’s something stuck in there, a cereal grain, a fleck of coffee grounds. When she rests her head on the counter it reminds viewers of elementary school, their own hot breath making the faux wood of the desk top damp.
Her emotions don’t matter. We want to see the flow, the beauty of sameness, someone else’s monotony turned into entertainment.
One day, in an act of defiance, a show of stamina, she turns to the camera, crooks her left arm up, and extends her middle finger. She stands in this pose for fifteen minutes, her expression a blank, bored almost, and then she drops her arm and sashays to the washing machine. After that there are other acts of rebellion: a marathon nose-picking session. Partial nudity. She starts to move in slow motion so that the film looks more like real speed. There is the day of the Nixon mask, followed by the week of the gorilla costume.
Viewership goes up. Everyone loves a crack-up, likes to see a stranger disintegrate in front of them. She expresses what we all feel in some way, what all of us want to do, to be seen as we are and then to hide it again, to give secret messages to strangers because no one else is listening. She starts writing signs: Help Me! I’m trapped. She tapes her mouth shut. Begins avoiding the cameras. And eventually, she isn’t there at all.
From the prompt "Reality TV."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by suttonhoo.
Speeding
24 May 2011 11:45 AM
I want to stay up all night and all day for a week, to feel the bugs crawling along my skin, to watch them scale the vast white walls of my apartment, black, skittering, the noise of a thousand legs on drywall.
I want to be fast, too fast, not enough time to think and when I do think it’s profound, of the moment, my synapses tossing around adjectives and verbs and nouns and somehow collecting them so that they make sense in a poetic kind of way and I would dance around with them, would need no company but my own words and the cat and maybe another friend, another speed freak. We would break into mailboxes and steal identities. We’d take shredder confetti and tape it back together, the speed freak’s dream of a task, so important, it requires concentration and a bit of lucid hallucination, us in the empty factory with the fans hovering above us and the ghosts of the old machinery whispering.
I can almost see the women with their grey faces and washed-out uniforms, can feel the suppressed thoughts and wants, the decades of tamping down of need, of creativity, so that at the end of the shift they left smaller somehow, more compact, robbed of a part of themselves, the rest stuffed into a corner in their minds.
There we’d be with our barrel of confetti and our Scotch tape, fitting together the credit card bills and the documents like puzzles, focusing on the paper, the pieces, against the shuffling of the women’s feet.
Can you feel them? Generations of women leaking lives out on the floor, leaving a part of themselves? I want to tell them that they are not forgotten, that every life matters, that I will listen to their dreams and record them after the high has worn off and I’m left alone with my thoughts, my too-slow thoughts. Their stories, meandering and long, will bring me back to earth, will be my touchstone, my grounding.
They are here. They tug at our sleeves, tells us to stop wasting our lives. “You have so much,” they gesture to the air, to the needles on the table beside us. “Don’t throw it away.” A gust of wind scatters the confetti and you put your head on the table and cry while I comfort you, touching your shoulder, remembering the solidity of flesh.
From the prompt "Speeding."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by sassymonkeymedia.
Wholly present
23 May 2011 11:55 AM
It wasn’t my life that I wanted to drop, it was my memories, the same old soundtrack in my mind. Purge, purge, purge. Familiar people were a reminder. They made it hard, not only to forget, but to forge something new. I loved them too much and they reminded me of me and so I had to get away from them.
I hoped there would be men to beat me up, not lovers, but dangerous youths with mean streaks and a hatred for the weak and the old. Maybe they wouldn’t live long, which would be a blessing for them, not to be stuck with the repetitive pace of retracing their steps. The first few beatings are beautiful, right, but after a while they would see that they were just trying to recapture the thrill of the neophyte, the gasp of that first imprint of fist upon flesh, the feeling of power in bruising and bone breaking, their bare hands miraculous in their pain-giving prowess. After trying to make the feeling new again and again and again, they would start to falter and age themselves, victims for the next set of youth with dead eyes and sculpted bodies.
The elements would punish me, too, the sun carving out wrinkles and paling my eyes, the wind making my cheeks rosy as a ragdoll's. My skin would form a true protective layer, thickening itself against the cold air. I would open myself up to the kindness of other people, religious strangers who would make up stories about me for their own edification, who would create a different narrative, one that would be out of my hands, perhaps sadder than my actual story.
Meanwhile, my family would mourn me as if I were dead.
I thought about it, the selfish escape, the endless punishment. Punish me – yes. But why punish those who love me in spite of myself? I unpacked the bag and prepared myself for years of work, years of talk and feelings, all this effort just to be here and to teach the boy how to present in his own life.
From the prompt "You dropped it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of the sign at the Evansville, Indiana Greyhound bus terminal by albany_tim.
Fifteen year cycle
22 May 2011 06:15 AM
Or the disaster will be internal, an internal flatness, an inability to think or feel. When she looks out on the world, the view through thickness like a woolen blanket, she will feel nothing, not even contempt. Her muscles will grow slack and in the end, the animals will swarm her as she melts into the couch or becomes one with the floor – after the fall, after the collapse, her electrolytes running rampant or doing nothing at all, dying with her, pushing her across the edge.
Every fifteen years she pays more attention, looks four ways before crossing the street, checks the weather report compulsively before leaving the house. She scrutinizes acquaintances to see if they are the ones bringing the danger, the cyclical danger, because, come to think of it, it has never been the earth that has brought her down, it’s been other people.
There was her birth, the sad event in a house of transients, the handover a month later to a bland couple in a white house with two other borrowed children. There was her fifteenth year, the hard skull in her abdomen, the kicks and flutters that just stopped. At 30 it was a man who wounded, a smooth talker with a lizard tongue and soft hands. She hasn’t yet reached 45, but the year looms, only 18 months to go.
So she paints the walls a soothing deep purple. She grows her own food and cans it in the late summer. She’s taken to reading romance novels and eating plum jam spread thin on wheat toast. At night she walks and memorizes the sky, connecting the dots in ways that no one expects her too.
When the time comes, she will be ready, not with sharpened spear or with the arrowheads she once flaked out of quartz. She will have hot cups of tea and long conversations with former strangers. The cats will sit on her lap and she will feed the birds in the back yard with raisins and sunflower seeds.
From the prompt "Fifteen years."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one could be improved, but I've got a busy day ahead.
Image: Playground with sky by me.
Toasted and burned
21 May 2011 06:19 AM
I am an outlier.
We had a fire in the downstairs fireplace on Sunday night, a special treat while the husband was out of town, and in preparation I bought some marshmallows and prepared the boy for the process. The firewood we used was old and eager to disintegrate in the heat. I’m nervous around fires with small children. My grandfather was burned in an industrial fire, 80% of his body covered in 3rd degree burns, a foot later amputated, hearing gone. A drooping sleeve can catch flame, a little boy's hands can get too close when putting a stick into the stack of flaming wood. Still, the boy got to contribute, collected sticks and sometimes put them in, rolled up the newspaper fire starter.
I toasted the first marshmallow and passed it to him: instant hatred and tears, at the texture, the goo in his mouth and on his finger. He doesn’t like marshmallows much anyway and a toasted one is marshmallow intensified, the flavor, the mouth feel. I ate that one, and the next and gave up on the project.
We stared at the flames. I added more wood. The room was warm. We let the fire soothe us with its smoky breath of autumn, its winter memories, and I wondered how I had ended up in a place where summer mornings are colder than November nights, where the fog obscures the sun in fits of anguish and shorts in August are ill-advised, a decision to shiver all day, the place where a fire in May makes sense.
But it’s beautiful here, once you get past the long asphalt stretches with their crummy shops and the avenues concreted up against anything green. The hills are lovely, the sky an amazing thing when it’s almost clear and the clouds puff and stretch against the blue. You can visit summer in the summer, go to the heat past the hills, and bask and swim and then, tired of sweat and brightness, return to Berkeley where you sleep under layers of blankets, waiting for the distant fog horn to wake you up. Downstairs the fireplace awaits, the tinder is dry and yields easily to the match. While the boy is content with dry cereal, you can toast marshmallows for your breakfast, let the caramelized skin give way to soft sweetness, close your eyes as the sugar dances through your body.
From the prompt "Pillow talk." Marshmallows are like little pillows, aren't they?
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spend about 20 minutes making this one flow better. Seems I'm doing that more lately, but I think my prompts just aren't as clearly written lately. Feeling much better than yesterday, however.
Image: Sunday's fire.
Up against your will
20 May 2011 11:59 AM
Less than five hours of fitful sleep, one too many Widmer Hefeweizens at the Echo and the Bunnymen show last night, the usual predawn wake-up after a week of bad nights and early mornings: I am tired.
Two years ago my husband and I went to another Echo concert, the Ocean Rain tour, and I spent the first three songs of it sobbing in my seat, bathed in the sounds that accompanied my abandoned adolescence. Ocean Rain came out in 1984. It was the soundtrack for the long lonely time when I lived almost on my own, the years of isolation and pregnancy and death and the relentless sameness of life afterwards. The music tugged the emotions out of me. Not so much at last night's show. Until the encore. "The Killing Moon" killed me and there I was sobbing and sobbing on my husband’s shoulder, crying like I’ve been crying a lot anyway these days.
Before the Killing Moon tears, I cried in the lobby. Before the tears in the lobby, I went up to get yet another beer and then stood alone, back against the wall, until my husband came to find me. We’re stirring up a lot of stuff right now, both together and on our own, and it’s good, it’s all good, but I am one with these feelings that I used to keep at bay by focusing on the stories, their origins. It’s not the why that is so important now, it’s the is-ness of the feelings and sometimes I can’t believe the depth of them. These are just feelings. They won’t drag me down or threaten my very being or toss me off the edge, but for a while last night I had the image of my body flipping over and over again after a leap off a cliff.
There was no bottom to hit, it was just the fall and the flip. My old-fashioned dress swirled around me. I looked like I was twelve years old. My body turned like a pinwheel in the wind and I fell. I fell. The image wasn’t soothing and it wasn’t disturbing. It was representative.
We’re in the middle of it now, me and him, we won’t give up until our psyches are shining, clean, clear, the emotions floating out of us like words, meaningful, changeable, whole, complete. It’s a long journey, the end is murky. I’m grateful for my tendency to worry at relationships like a dog gnawing at a bone. I’m grateful for my husband's presence, too, for the fact that he is there with me, listening, trying, supportive.
So I float, I flip, my tears stream. I stand alone with my back against the wall. I feel the threat of love’s promise to always be there when such a thing is impossible.
From the prompt "I won't give it up."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this -- a tired brain is a slow one and adds unnecessary words. Took the extra words out, made the language clearer, and there you go.
Image by James Dawson.
Clearing a path
19 May 2011 06:18 AM
We moved from the place on West Street before her clematis could take hold. In her absence, the vine shrunk, it browned with neglect, and if you drive past the house now, almost 30 years later, the only evidence of her prowess with plants is the gorgeous cherry tree out front, double-blossomed, a cloud of pink and a hail of petals for a brief time in the Wilmington spring.
Our backyard is all weeds right now, Bermuda grass and nutsedge. The sourgrass has had its season and the flowers and herbs I planted last year have survived the winter, mostly. I have plans, to choke out the bad stuff with layers of newspaper and mulch, to put a couple of raised beds in the sunniest spot and fill them with compost and manure and rich rich soil and grow vegetables, but I can’t seem to get up the energy or interest.
I could interpret this as a strike against domesticity, that this year for a variety of reasons I can take no pleasure in sinking my hands in dirt and coaxing fecundity out of barrenness. Or maybe I really am depressed, overwhelmed, stuck in place by this heavy sadness, and all it will take is a season of fainting couches and constant tears, a cultivation and purging of my emotions through the various therapy appointments, and all will be well. Or maybe I need a mental path cleared by antidepressants, though my fear is that the path will be trampled, will be clear cut or burned or – and perhaps this is worse – that the drugs will do nothing but dull my colorful thoughts.
Sometimes I can fake it: our front yard, a slab of tinted concrete, is alive with pots. We planted strawberries and sugar snap peas and carrots, and the herbs are flourishing. The flowers in front of the fence look good, too, so that if you drive past our house or approach through the front, you might think: life here is mighty fine. But on the porch, last year's plants have foundered, the pots run dry much of the time, and although the snapdragon is making a bid for life (and I think she’ll make it), the coleus have given up and I haven’t had the heart or inclination to replace them. All that remains are their browned stems, the skeletal remains of what flourished last year.
From a photo prompt of a paper cup with a flowery vine juxtaposed with leaves.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. Just realized this is the second post in five days that has mentioned making a path, the open path, and so on. Clearly I feel a need to move forward.
Image: The resurrection of the snapdragon. At some point I'll tire of the atmospheric Hipstamatic prints.
Sleeve-tugging talk
18 May 2011 05:52 AM
I’m almost done with Stephen King’s book On Writing, a quick and useful read. In it, he talks about the importance of making dialogue real, how it’s one of the things in the writer’s toolbox, and then he names some writers who aren’t too good at it (but are published: there’s hope!). Perhaps writers who are shy and quiet and don’t get out much (to listen to strangers, to talk to them) are not going to be good at writing dialogue that feels real. I’m doomed.
Here is a typical bit of dialogue from my day.
“Mom?”
Do I respond to him, to the shouts from the back of the house? I continue to cut watermelon into quarters, just the way he likes it.
“Mom?”
He'll have to come to me if he wants my attention. I put the watermelon on a plate and wet a corner of a napkin for ease of face- and finger-wiping.
“MOM!”
Officially irritated, I grab the plate and stomp it to the back room, petulant, a child myself. “What?”
“I want you back here with me.” Depending on mood and hunger level, this line can be delivered with faux tears or real ones or just a kind of excited calmness.
Do you really want to read on? I bore myself with this stuff, with the everyday nothings that add up to years of fetching and watching and picking up. Still, there are moments of beauty. When my husband is out of town, my son and I talk more. He’s almost six and still fascinated by what school and the world was like when his dad and I were kids. We’ve had evenings where I get to recreate the ancient world of the 1970s, when Nana was way too young and way too angry and I was a chatty thing who had to write out “I will not talk in the Delaware Art Museum” for my teacher one hundred times on thick-lined paper after a too-loud field trip.
These are conversations, though I would find them difficult to reproduce as dialogue, impossible to do in ten or twelve minutes because I don’t have an ear for the essential.
I’ve told him about Lillian, though I didn’t tell him her name, the woman who ran the Montessori school I briefly attended in first grade who didn’t give me a trophy when I did the number two times tables in front of the school – not because I didn’t get them right (I did), but because I was clearly adding and had not memorized them. I told him about the first day of first grade at the public school when my mother called the police because I didn’t get home on time. I'd gone with a new friend who locked me out of her house and then laughed at me as I begged to use her phone to call my mom.
We talked about school buses and the songs I'd sing on them. I added a contemporary flair to the discussion by bringing up a YouTube video of Queen singing "We Will Rock You."
This is it, this is it people, this is my life, and it’s lovely and lucky and all I can think about at the moment, my husband due back late tonight after four days away and maybe my brain will be free soon and I’ll come up with something brilliant and fictional that takes place on a faraway island with lots of sex, the smoothing together of body parts and there will be a theft and drug deals and the woman kills her adversary in the end.
From the prompt "Give us the dialogue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This week nothing is really flowing from my fingertips. I've doctored this one a bit.
Image: The boy drawing on a restaurant menu, Sunday.
A loaded term
17 May 2011 10:31 AM
I had a dream about them last night, about visiting New Jersey. We arrived in the early morning and my stepmother offered us wine from the half-empty bottle we had brought with us. I accepted and then felt embarrassed to be drinking before the sun came up and made excuses, asked for coffee. Their house was huge, more huge than in real life, with a mezzanine balcony that hung over the kitchen. It had a public bathroom and a group of school kids was visiting (dreams and their strange shifts of time, place, perspective) and I watched the kids swing from one part of a low-hanging chandelier to another as I yelled for them to stop.
Before that, I cried in the kitchen, apologizing for my sadness while hoping my stepmother, who was prepping food, would notice and ask me more. She had cut and colored her hair, was honey-blonde now with eyes to match. They were cold, nothing reflected back. What had happened over the last year to change her very being?
But back to the children who didn’t listen to me, who dangled and laughed and moved with supple limbs. I wanted to protect them. I want to protect my son. I want to go back and retroactively protect myself, an impossible task.
I have a family of my own now, a triad, a threatening triad, with the man present for the child and me off in the corner, remembering, remembering. Kindness leaves and men do too, even the women walk off eventually. The child grows up, the cats die, no one lives forever, and the memories become sweeter and more aching than the reality. I don’t fight it anymore, I am one with it, noticing the feelings, giving them their due, knowing that I survived by a certain sort of soul detachment, connected at the head, connected by jokes and fights, by tossed wine glasses and shouts. Love was worry, worry that the object would go up in a poof of smoke, would leave for a pack of cigarettes and never return.
And yet I cling to the idea of magic, to the man returning from the long journey, returning for me. There is no room for anybody else. I am a valuable object. It works for a while, his love holds me together. Time, proximity, life: they weaken the bond. Eventually I look for another to play the chase and catch game.
From the prompt "Family," a word laden with meaning for most of us. Edited for clarity and grammatical correctness and then edited again. Too loaded of a topic.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.I spent some extra time on this one. It's still raw and unstudied and I don't know how I feel about it.
Image: Me and my mother at my grandparent's house, sometime in the late 70s
D.C. envy
16 May 2011 11:12 AM
I haven’t been back to Washington, to the District, in over two years now, and don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe it’s better, like cutting off contact with a lover, knowing they are out there, trying new things, meeting new people, that the next time you see them (and you want to, you crave it), their wardrobe will be different, funky t-shirts replaced with oxford cloth button-downs, the scuffed boots now wingtips, their hair thinning but somehow more distinguished.
New restaurants have opened and friends have moved. Entire neighborhoods are shifting, and the kids that lived in the upper floors of the house with our apartment are close to high school age now. Do you remember the baby balanced on her mother’s hip, how her liquid brown eyes took us in? She and her sister were so serious and now they are wearing makeup and the skirts are too short and their French is perfect.
Truth is, I’m jealous, jealous of access to the place. If I were there, blissfully alone, I would run my hands against the rowhouse bricks, I’d breathe in the scent of power, a DC combination of sweat and testosterone, of hot ink drying on white paper, the ozone emissions of overworked office machinery. I’d go back to the apartment I moved to after my divorce, would peer in the basement windows and remember the paper thief who took off with my Sunday Washington Post nearly every weekend.
Or I’d go back even further: the house I shared with crazy Peace Corps Amy on Perry Place, the sad studio on E Street, the 60s box where Joan, Alistair and I lived in southwest. I’d return to the Corcoran Street house my ex-husband and I shared after our move from Columbus, would remember our sheltie dog, the rats, insane D. Wayne in the basement. I would rest against cold marble facades, take the Metro over the Potomac, drink margaritas at Oyamel and sangria at Jaleo.
Instead, I sit on a couch in Berkeley. I’m stuffed with leftover pizza and calming chocolate. Soon I’ll run a vacuum over the rug and I’ll brush the dog and in a few hours will pick the boy and his friend up from school. I measure my days in sleep lost and headaches averted and I maintain my form with workouts and runs, here in my beautiful box on a street that is lined with shrubs and empty air.
From the prompt "The hotel."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm beginning to bore myself. Hope I'm not boring you.
Image: The (small) two-floor DC apartment I moved into after my divorce. The future husband is peeking out of one of the upper windows.
The open path
15 May 2011 01:53 PM
And the tears, the crying, the sadness that hits me unexpectedly, it feels different now. I am not the girl that lived alone with her sadness, who carried her evil nature inside of her, a thick black thing of clotted blood, gangrenous and putrid (oh, the overwriting such feelings still produce). I was neglected not because of evil – on my part or anyone else’s – but because of human weakness. We do what we are able to do, and the flip side of maternal love for my mother was fear of attachment.
This progress will lead to a fuller life. I want the ability to love without fear, to be present when I need to be. Still, I hold others' love like a threat, I keep it at a distance and I move myself away from it. I watch my progress with a detached air, feel tension inside me like a lead cable. I feel it as I write, and I understand it better and let it be. The first step is understanding, being in the moment with it, getting comfortable with the feeling, the taut cable where my shadowy evil nature used to be.
The pain has lessened and my interpretation of it has changed. I no longer take it personally. When life imitates the past, when friends disappear, when I feel rejected by those I’ve allowed myself to get close to, I have gotten better at feeling the tug on the tension and experiencing the the echo in the empty space that used to house the mirage of my evil nature.
Still, the future is unclear. I don’t know what will happen with this new self of mine. I am hopeful that she will be expansive, forgiving, loving, that she will be able to even contain her own loneliness and sadness, but allow others to be there for her as well.
It isn’t a self-improvement project, it’s a step away from the brink, from the edge of the cliff. I’ve taken one step back, I lean over the edge and it looks like blue skies with patches of fog, a celestial fantasy of eternal falling. I haven't turned around yet. The old part of me says “Maybe there’s a pit waiting for you, deep and lined with sharpened sticks.”
When I do turn, I see a vast rolling meadow dotted with black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace. Sure, there are snakes and thistles hidden in the grass, things of beauty with teeth, but who said that I had to take a path without looking where I was going first?
From the prompt "It hurts less now."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. The result today isn't my favorite, although I like the ending. I've cleaned it up more than usual.
Image: The boy at a California mission.
Narrow focus
14 May 2011 06:28 AM
The bed is narrow, just wide enough for me, and on the floor beside it is a dog bed for Nora. Every week the farmer delivers a box of sweet summer vegetables and creamy cheese. Sometimes he takes me fishing, shows me how to toss in the line, how to be patient as dawn pinkens the sky and the sun makes the clouds boil away. He’s fine and tall, rangy, with work-bitten hands. His face is kind. He is quiet, but it is a companionable silence, one that doesn’t increase my loneliness, but lessens it, and the effect lasts until the next time I see him. I don’t want anything else but his occasional presence, his mineral-bittered greens, the misshapen tomatoes and peppers and squash (the pattypans, the zucchini, the crooknecks).
During thunderstorms I read books by lamplight and comfort Nora as she shivers on the floor. The cabin has a supply of classics, Dickens and Hardy, but I’ve also brought the latest fiction with me, the stuff that keeps a lifeline between me and the real world, so that I don’t forget the rush of cars and the stink of exhaust, the way people are divided against themselves by too much: too much screen time, too many ads, the magazines piled around them as they channel surf.
When the dreams come, when the scenes from a life that I’ve escaped enter my mind, I watch them dispassionately: this is who I was then, who I am now. Here are the people I loved, lined up, imploring me not to forget them. And there I am at 16, a girl alone in a house not so different from my cabin, telling me now, the future her: It’s ok. I’m ok. You can let me go now, because I am you and you are good enough and I am in your bones and blood, programmed into your brain cells. I die when you do.
From the prompt "This summer."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Extra Medium.
Parade of innocents
13 May 2011 05:53 AM
Desire is a tricky and learned thing, at first it is just hormones, the call of the body to make copies of itself, to love. It is green and pliant and we learn what makes it so from our environments without being aware of the influences. The ads, the television shows, the online pornography, the early experiences with babysitters that smell like apples and cinnamon and can talk lizards and salamanders with the best of them.
Over time, the desire deepens, it grows smoky and contains different sorts of experiences, the boyfriend with the penchant for holding you down, for showing up late and toying with your emotions, the sudden pull in your groin on the train, the pleasure of not getting what you really want, the replayed scenarios remade at midnight. Childhood comes up again, it does, but in sepia tones, and the influences are darker, less innocent, more obvious, and there you are trying again and again to recreate green.
You are left with the scent of whiskey melting the ice, the sticky barroom floor, the orders, commands really, and the babysitter is suddenly wearing a leather bustier and she’s older now, too, though not too much, and everything that was innocent is covered over because that’s the way it is.
So why cover it over early, children? Is it because this world doesn’t admire innocence or naivety, because it’s tough out there and you have to prepare yourself, develop a thick shell to cover your vulnerability? Do you have to think about the seductive dance so early, learning your moves from the media? Can’t we protect you for a few more minutes? The rest of the dance is long and in the end you’ll be wishing for the days of innocence, for the school-boy crush, for the girls with their freshly-shampooed hair and knee socks.
From the prompt "Smoking."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by dudua.
Love is all you need?
12 May 2011 06:05 AM
I woke up this morning thinking about sex, how it’s a death-cheat, a way to stave off the coming deterioration, the crumbling of skin and redistribution of fat, a way to forget the waiting hospital room with its smells of disinfectant and its beeps of sadness.
Yesterday I wrote about time and how it speeds up as we age and maybe layers, or that’s the way our memory can experience it, the past intermingling with the present intermingling with our ideas about the future, the fantasies and reality, the nightmare waiting down the hall of our minds or maybe it’s not a nightmare, maybe I need to think positively. Sure, there is plenty to mourn and what will be is unknown, but why not at least think positively about it?
And why not embrace my luckiness, the small pieces of happiness in my life. Loving husband? Check. Sweet kid? Check. Nice house? Yes. Enough money? Uh-huh. Time to write? Oh my God: yes!
So what’s the problem? Why is my heart dead right now? What the fuck? It’s like I move in a fog or am wrapped in wool, like a skein of yarn. I want to live like the 20-year-old I never was, which says “midlife crisis” all over it. I keep on thinking of ways to embrace the crisis that aren’t self-destructive, which is how I ended up looking at pictures of tattoos and exploring the various tattoo parlors (such a Victorian word) around Berkeley online. A bit of pain, a bit of beauty, a bit of (over-done) rebellion.
In October I will turn 42, the age that my stepfather said I was when I was 12 and I see how 42 turns to 43 and 43 turns to 44 and so on until I am 50 and even crankier than I am now and if I can’t do anything about what happens to the body (outside of maintenance: I’ve become a big fan of maintenance) then maybe I can do something about me and my outlook. I’ve always been a traveler on the dark side and that’s ok, but I don’t want to be cynical or mean. I don’t want to begrudge people the happiness they have or the youth or the sunny disposition.
It may be corny and in some ways untrue, but I think that love helps. Love of other people without judgment, the understanding that we are all blocked in some way and trying our best. But it has to fall to me to love myself, too (and this sounds so corny and clichéd and I hate talk like this, but it stands). So I love on the outside, attempt it on the inside, and no matter what happens, the death grip with sex, the platonic love, the familial kind, I’ll be ok.
Right?
From a photo prompt that had nothing to do with what I came up with here.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: What my tattoo will look like -- whaddya think? My mother thought it looked like the woman had been shot, but I blame that on the fact that it looks like a very fresh tattoo. And I'm not sure I could pull off such a large tattoo, but I like the idea of a cherry blossom branch.
Again and again and again
11 May 2011 05:57 AM
Perhaps there are parallel universes, copies of ourselves at different stages, overlapping the moments we feel we are in right now. Is this comforting? Some kind of death cheat? There you are at two years old, about to plant a chubby foot into bee-heavy clover. Your parents are two states over in the dreary apartment, fighting before they fuck again, and your grandmother sweeps you up into her arms after the stinger penetrates the unblemished fine skin of your foot. And there you are again, 15 and too thin and too cynical for the age. It’s an unattractive quality, the blowing of cigarette smoke over the heads of the rose plants, the glinting smile, and your mother is in the living room watching Oprah and you’ve never heard of anything so stupid in your life.
Meanwhile, your children are being born, are entering school, are dying too young, but after you, and the world is colored over by experience repeated again and again with no hope to get it right, just to live it out until it ends and then, maybe, if the theorists are right, to be thrust back into the stream, pushed out, cut out, pulled by forceps and rubber-gloved hands.
At that point, who cares about 30 seconds? Every moment is both meaningful and out of your control. You’ve been on this ride before, and here you are on every car, and you don’t even know it. It’s the unconscious, unthinking nature of it all that would get to you. If you knew about it.
Right now, in a room made dingy by the 1970s, by the grubby sticky fingers of small children, I lie on a cot, not sleeping, not crying, staring at the cracks on the wall. I squint my eyes to make the cracks a web, imagine a spider trailing down on a thin lifeline. Someone should open up a window or get that kid in the crib to stop crying, to just stop it, to control himself. It’s all I have, control, and if I knew that at the exact same moment I was losing it somewhere else, tossing the vase, falling in love, leaping off a red clay cliff, maybe, just maybe, I would allow myself tears.
From the prompt "In as little as 30 seconds."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by jwinfred.
Sun vs. danger
10 May 2011 06:13 AM
The sweater had white sleeves and a slate blue torso. It was baggy on me, like most of my shirts, one or two sizes too big because I had not yet adjusted to nice clothes that I could pay for and I was thinking I was bigger than I was. One of the Johns, a creepy man who whistled at every “s” sound, something that you couldn’t stop paying attention to once you recognized it, did a double-take in the hallway. “It looked like your arms were bandaged,” he told me.
This was a man who fought in Vietnam, had a real combat history, and it wasn’t until this morning, letting my mind wander, that I thought about his memories, what he had been through, the combined history of these men in their suits or oxford shirts and khakis. The strange but kindly man from New Orleans who gave me a ride back to the hotel the day of my interview, a guy who liked young women and seemed harmless and vaguely disturbed at the same time, had Vietnam stories, too, and designed war games, and was so bland and unassuming and friendly that it was hard to picture him wielding a gun or thinking about maximum firepower.
What was I doing there? I lived in offices for a few years, under fluorescents and in padded cubicles. I worked in a basement for four years and didn’t emerge to see the light of day for eight hours or more at a time. I was a creature of swivel chairs and computer keyboards and phones where I could transfer calls and answer in a business-like manner.
Now I move my body around to follow the sun. I follow my thoughts and predilections, and, while I have definite responsibilities, a portion of my time is free. And lonely. And easy to fill but hard to fill at the same time. My coworkers are animals who prod me for affection and family that wants my attention and my care. The separation between work and home is almost nonexistent, though if my “work” is writing, usually the last thing I want to do is write about home, the long boring expanses of nothingness, the energy coming off my “coworkers” about a different kind of want.
A different kind of want. Attention? Yes. Love? Yes. Food? Yes. But no one wants anything else from me, there is no frisson of attraction or danger, and my own needs are shelved. It’s a problem in want of a solution.
I'm working on it.
Image by sparkleice.
From the prompt "Replace them."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. In this case, I added the last sentence, because I am working on it. Slowly.
Mind slip
09 May 2011 06:46 AM
I spent yesterday in a serious funk, an I-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed funk. It was Mother’s Day and I wanted to be left alone, to not be reminded of familial connection or maybe pressure or I don’t really know but is the point of that day to separate from the family, from the offspring, to pretend they don’t really exist? It was like a day of real depression, but since my brain is constantly connecting the subconscious dots, choosing its moments of flatness at the most appropriate symbolic times, I think my feeling of being down was directly tied to this idea of Mother’s Day and being a mother and the daughter of an ambivalent mother.
Another thing to bring up to therapy, to my lady of privilege chatting sessions, where I feel so self-indulgent and can go on and on about my self-fulfillment. During my last session, I brought up this dream I had, a very boring dream involving moving clothes from one place to another at my grandfather’s place at Hollywood Beach, moving them for some young women who were moving in. I took them in small batches from somewhere to a shed, a temporary storage place.
The week before in therapy had been tough, with lots of tears and the apprehending of my feelings about being weak, about childhood and dependency, and now I felt the pressure to come up with something, but this? The movement of clothes? Somehow, my therapist pulled me to a different place, put me in the position of the clothes, and then the tension, that feeling of taut energy thickening in the middle of my body, came to life, being shuttled from here to there, anger at the clothes, anger at the task. I even started to cry.
But it sounds so fucking ridiculous, doesn’t it? I struggle with being in therapy, with having the kind of life that allows me to schedule various appointments and go running afterwards, a life where I can write in the daylight and document my post-therapy meals on Facebook. Lucky, yes, perhaps self-indulgent, yes, and the guilt for being me goes on an on.
I forgot to get another job, I forgot what it was like to need something, I forgot my own mind and origins and yesterday I wanted to forget everything. So I kept on reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, got myself lost in the story of a family falling apart, a woman who became a stay-at-home mom in reaction to her own upbringing, the pull of danger, of not being nice, under the surface.
From the prompt "Mind slip."
Image: Boy with his "spaceship" in the back yard, taken using the Hipstamatic app.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
In my defense
08 May 2011 06:51 AM
One morning as I was walking the dog, the clouds, the kind of clouds that always have me reaching for metaphors, to go beyond blanket or miasma or oppressive, though a “miasma of cloud cover” has a nice ring to it – the clouds parted briefly, setting free a beam of light. In front of us, a crow picked at a chicken bone, spot lit from above. It hopped and cawed and Nora lunged for it, more for the bone than for the bird, and the miasma thickened again, the hole in the sky covered over. It was as though the sun never existed.
The brutality of bird against bone plus light plus miasma plus darkness made me do it, flipped the switch inside my mind. Not that it felt like a decision, it felt like a change. Nora and I walked across the street, turned around. At home, my fingers tapping on the keyboard, I ignored my husband. I ignored the boy. I let the cats meow at me without acknowledgement, and when Nora barked to be let back in, her barks stayed in place, bounced off the glass panes of the back door.
I looked as though I was sleepwalking when the truth was I was letting a scenario play out in my mind, a dream life was opening up that required me to ignore the present. What did the present care about me anyhow? The present demanded care and attention to monotonous detail. It left me cold, truly, trapped in a back corner of my mind with the hot water and the heavy robe, looking out the window of all that was required of me, that I be there and cheerful and fuck the darkness and let’s pretend that it’s all ok and if this is all to life, well, it could be a lot worse, right?
You spoiled little brat, I told myself. You are free from most want. You live pretty fabulously. What more could you want? I denied the want and then I didn’t and here I am, here we are, sitting in the waiting room, wondering what will happen next.
Image by liquidnight.
From the prompt "Defend your decision."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
The crowd
07 May 2011 07:04 AM
Hosts poured the wine and whiskey and gin and vodka with a generous hand, the glasses were bottomless. In the morning the children, five and six and towheaded, fascistic little blondes with ice-blue eyes, picked their way among the bodies of the fallen, the dissipated adults who dusted themselves off and doctored their headaches with Bloody Marys. The boy drained the cups, sometimes collapsed into his cereal bowl at breakfast, and the grown-ups with their hoary breath and bloodshot eyes would wink and laugh too loudly for anyone’s taste, the kind of laugh that enters your dreams, the sound that the man with the fingernails like claws makes as he rips at your pinafore, at your high-necked nightgown.
Everyone slept with everyone else. Desire was hidden and then revealed with the snap of a corset, with a leer and a grope. These men were artists, the women were their muses, a quickie against the walls in the host’s bedroom the price of admission. The children woke up once to see their mother and Uncle Robert (the poet, the madman who once thought he could stop traffic with his mind and his one upraised hand, standing in his underwear in the middle of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day, eyes closed, the other hand resting on his heart) settling in on the floor. Their mother was throaty, her voice slow and low, like she had scraped her words against broken glass before releasing them.
“Mama?” the girl said and the room got quiet, the form on the floor stopped cold. In the hallway a woman was crying. Everyone waited. The adults returned to the dance when the children appeared to fall back asleep.
Image from Follow My Bliss, but I am not sure where she got it.
From the prompt "The crowd." Based loosely on what I've heard of Anne Roiphe's most recent memoir.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Kind of blue
06 May 2011 05:45 AM
Sometimes my most profound (or so they seem at the time) lines come late at night, after my brain has been stretched in ten different directions by the day, by sunlight and twilight and stacks of children’s books.
Last night I thought about the area around my eyes, salt-cured by post-dinner tears, the skin made pale with deposits left by sadness. I couldn’t tell you now what those tears were about. When I told my husband about them, he asked if I was just feeling emotional or if it was a reaction to something, I had to say it’s the same thing I’ve been feeling for a long time now: Sad. Sad. Sad.
My father called a few days ago and we had a long conversation. It’s been going that way more these days, the long conversations, which I like, though I don’t always feel like I can share everything about my life at the moment. He asked me how I was doing. “Eh. Not so good.” And then he started – politely, not like a proselytizer – talking up antidepressants as a way to clear out some of the darkness.
When comedians go blue, they talk dirty. When people feel blue, they are sad. It goes beyond blues for me, it’s true, but I am functional. I feel, I move around, I do what I need to do. When I take those depression quizzes (online, in my therapist’s office), I am on the borderline. I just don’t feel depressed enough to go pharmaceutical.
Still, I imagine not existing, imagine the pain of being human wiped away. It’s not that life isn’t worth living – it is, it’s the only thing we’ve got – but I am not enjoying it and am having a hard time imagining it being joyful again. If I could take the darkness of my blues, the midnight pitch, and lighten it, make it more like the dawn sky, well, that would be the trick.
My past obscures the rest of me like a heavy blanket or a stage curtain. Or maybe it’s my present: I don’t know. Take action, people tell me. Get moving. But I am muffled by all of this, I move slowly – though I do move – and I can’t see the path clearly. I distract myself with emotional candy and I soothe my brain with wine. Instead, I need to take a clear-cutter to the forest, to the vines, I need to machete through the curtain. I need to rip off the blanket. Maybe it will take drugs, but I’m not ready to go there yet.
From the prompt "Blue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by shiftingpixel.com
Joe Lencioni, shiftingpixel.com
Good luck, kids
05 May 2011 05:45 AM
Ever since childhood, since my family used to read the Sunday papers around the table with our fried eggs and scrapple and potatoes, I’ve read the New York Times wedding section. It’s better now than it ever was because sometimes they provide a “how they met” write-up and the highlighted wedding is always entertaining and varied. I don’t read it because I am a romantic, I read it for the pedigrees, for the laughs, for the way I can imagine the lives ahead.
Marriage is an optimistic proposition and nearly every young person who gets into it has no real idea what is in store. Or maybe nobody knows what is in store, since every combination of two (and more as the kids come, if they come) is different, with an alchemy all its own. Romance dies or needs a lot of work to rekindle. Barriers form. What was once supple turns brittle and harsh, and the people in the room, together behind a locked door, they change, sometimes together, sometimes apart.
I am not yet at the end of a long marriage, an ambiguous sentence that means that I don’t have the perspective of fifty years or forty years or even thirty years of togetherness with the same person. It’s a perspective I would like to have, that I anticipate having, though I also don’t know what will happen. As we struggle through the middle-aged years, the time of falling away, the time of focus on the kid and the house and the buzz in our own heads, I have to wonder how we’ll look back on it later, from whatever vantage we have: was it worth it? What should we have done differently? How do people keep it all going in the relentless march of time and emotion and sadness?
The photo, provided by Jane Underwood (but not, I suspect, taken by her) was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Generous acts
04 May 2011 03:35 PM
You can’t win me over with acts of generosity, with the seedlings in fresh dirt left at the door, with nights of late telephone calls, you shushing and tschusing as I cry into the other end of the phone. When I am alone and you check in, saying “We’re worried about you, we just wanted to make sure that you were all right,” I’ll hang over the answering machine or maybe I’ll just hear the squawk of your voice from the safety of another room while I shake the ice in my drink.
It’s not so much that I am cynical (though I am), or that I don’t trust (though I don’t, at least not at first), it’s that I am slightly suspicious and proud. But mainly I don’t want to get used to it, to your kindness, to you being there. Maybe I question your motivations (do you really like me or is this about something else?), but really my problem is that I don’t want to get too comfortable with your kindly presence in my life.
If you prove yourself over time, if we form a relationship and I see that you are there because of a combination of you and me, then we’re golden. Not that I test, per se, but I observe. I have to observe to keep myself safe, to see what you will do, how you will hurt, to see what happens when you disappear.
Here’s the killer: if you’re a man, a romantic interest, and you disappear, I’ll fight to pull you back. This is where the dance comes in, where I pull out all the stops and use the abused child’s careful observation system, her ways of seeing the patterns and exploiting them, to reel you back in. This is where I prove that I am special and worth it. It’s not a pretty habit. It’s self-destructive too. I see it. I am calling myself on it here, right here, see? The lens is fixed on me now.
Still, I can appreciate the acts of generosity: the people who read what I write and comment, who really think about it. The ones I’ve been able to call up and talk to during my recent troubles, who have accepted my reaches even though I’m so bad at it, even though I disappear myself for months at a time. I hope that I can return the acts someday, that I will be free of these chains, free of the heavy glasses that obscure my vision, that put barriers between me and the world.
From the prompt "An act of generosity."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
It’s not so much that I am cynical (though I am), or that I don’t trust (though I don’t, at least not at first), it’s that I am slightly suspicious and proud. But mainly I don’t want to get used to it, to your kindness, to you being there. Maybe I question your motivations (do you really like me or is this about something else?), but really my problem is that I don’t want to get too comfortable with your kindly presence in my life.
If you prove yourself over time, if we form a relationship and I see that you are there because of a combination of you and me, then we’re golden. Not that I test, per se, but I observe. I have to observe to keep myself safe, to see what you will do, how you will hurt, to see what happens when you disappear.
Here’s the killer: if you’re a man, a romantic interest, and you disappear, I’ll fight to pull you back. This is where the dance comes in, where I pull out all the stops and use the abused child’s careful observation system, her ways of seeing the patterns and exploiting them, to reel you back in. This is where I prove that I am special and worth it. It’s not a pretty habit. It’s self-destructive too. I see it. I am calling myself on it here, right here, see? The lens is fixed on me now.
Still, I can appreciate the acts of generosity: the people who read what I write and comment, who really think about it. The ones I’ve been able to call up and talk to during my recent troubles, who have accepted my reaches even though I’m so bad at it, even though I disappear myself for months at a time. I hope that I can return the acts someday, that I will be free of these chains, free of the heavy glasses that obscure my vision, that put barriers between me and the world.
From the prompt "An act of generosity."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Comfort me
03 May 2011 11:30 AM
Instead, I live off of chocolate and alcohol, though I prefer my empty calories in liquid form. I don’t want the mind-dulling effects of carbs and butter. I want the emotion-tugging action of booze, the nightly IPA chased with red wine. And it has to be the good stuff. No cheap alcohol for me. I won’t drink it, will miss the sloshing effects, will go to bed clean and sober and bored as shit, that and worried, worried about what is next, worried about where I am, where I am going.
So I stock up. Soon I’ll be visiting different liquor stores on my way home from various appointments, cruising their wine selection, anticipating the velvety texture of red on my tongue. Because something is wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong and I’m not sure what it is and I’m not sure what to do about it.
But, oh, am I thin, thin as a reed quaking in the wind, thin as a sheet of paper being carried away by a wind gust. My problems are written somewhere, on my mind, hidden on my body, locked in the physicality of thin, of table manners, of the constant harangue of my mind, of them, of abandonment. I want to seduce abandonment, want to make him my lover, show him a thing or two before I abandon him myself.
I’ll leave him alone at the bar nursing his drink. There will be no announcement. I’ll excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room and won’t come back and I’ll never call. I will stop chasing beer with the wine. All my drinking will be social. After I abandon abandonment, I will eat the occasional square of chocolate. Otherwise, my diet will be balanced, a mix of green and beige and red and orange, the crispy nestled next to gooey, tart intermingling with sweet, placating comfort bustling with health.
Until then: Proost!
From today's prompt: Comfort food.
Image: Sticky bun with wine. OK, add sticky buns to the short list.
And please don't take me too seriously.
Last night, verging on sleep
22 April 2011 02:08 PM
When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Here's an experiment: me sitting at my desk, hot water on one side (in the Advertising Age mug my mother got for me when I was twelve: JENNIFER CASEY WINS "MARKETING GENIUS" AWARD it reads), smoldering cigarette on the other. Hold on while I set it up.
OK. My ashtray is a cat food bowl. I've got the kitchen matches. My water is freshly heated. Here we go. Yes, I am smoking in the house. I tried this on Saturday (outside) and it didn't go over well. Today it's easier. But disgusting. How does the cigarette stay lit? Chemicals and tobacco technology, I guess. The trails of smoke make me think of my grandparents, the ubiquitous cigarettes in beanbag ashtrays, the stink, the smell of coffee and burning, my grandfather's hacks in the bathroom trash can.
It's the exhale that's the worst, that weird feeling of dryness in the throat. Sip of hot water, please. Ah, the light head rush. I should be outside on a gray Delaware day in January, my back against a brick wall, hanging out with the stoners by the dumpsters, the boys with their stringy hair and the girls with their poufs, some guy in a acid-washed jean jacket asking me for a "cancer stick." Am I really wearing a letter jacket? Is someone quoting from Frankie Goes to Hollywood? What decade is this, anyway?
The cigarette, half-finished, is now extinguished. The cat food bowl has burn marks on it. I have returned the pack to its hiding place behind the envelopes in my desk.
But what about the quote at the top of this post?
I've been waking up in the middle of the night again, wide-eyed in that space between the close and opening of day, trying to sort out the true from the false, the real from the unreal. One a.m., two a.m., three a.m.: these are the most desperate lonely times when thoughts refuse to be corralled. After tossing around a bit last night, I got out of bed around 2:45. I walked downstairs in the dark with my faithful feline companions, did the usual Facebook thing. I responded to my partner's Round Robin write and tackled today's prompt, which was Last night, verging on sleep ...
Last night, verging on sleep, I closed my book, The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (after taking a break from it, I've picked it up again). I was tired but my body was unsettled and I had a feeling that I would be up, would be crouched over my little screen or tapping away at the iPhone at some obscene hour. The best thing for insomnia is to stay away from screens of any sort, to grab a book or a magazine and read in some relatively low-lit place until sleep overtakes you. But the screens are too tempting sometimes.
Insomnia is boring and insomniacs are dullards, their minds fried by too little sleep, their anxieties focused on what will happen in the middle of the night, the flip flop, the ceiling stare, the wandering mind. My last knock-down, drag-out with insomnia lasted months and was a byproduct of underlying life issues. And it went away. The insomnia went away.
The bitch may be back, but I still eventually returned to bed. I wedged myself between my son and the edge. I warmed myself against him. When we woke up this morning, both of us still trying to separate the true from the false, to wipe the dreams clear with daylight, he said, "Mom, tell me about when you were a kid."
I'm glad he didn't ask at night, when all I could give him would be sad half-truths, the bad bits. Instead, I left those out. I talked of the days when my mother and I lived in Hollywood Beach and had four cats, two birds, two rabbits, a dog, and a gerbil. I talked about the hamster my grandmother gave me, Happy Easter, and how I would make him squeeze through the smallest apertures possible. I talked about the time Liz had kittens in a bureau drawer, how they were orange tabbies. "Orange? Like my favorite color?" he asked.
But the best part was telling him about the tents I used to make in the backyard, four blankets pinned to a clothesline, a quilt for a floor. I spent half my summer nights out there, alone or with friends, reading by flashlight, letting the dampness of the night cover my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to a dewy world. Inside, pancakes awaited, delivered to the table by my mother as my grandfather sat in the living room in a cloud of smoke.
The cigarettes remind me. It all feels so very long ago. The memory is washed out like an old photograph, part of it has burned away, and I choose to focus on the good, the stars above the yard, the safety in the dark, the old man in his wood shop working the lathe, a Pall Mall dangling from his thin lips, lost in the dust and the ash and the smoke, occupied for the moment. Real as anything.
Image: Still life with cancer stick.
Most of the memories I told the boy this morning come from a time that I would describe as being one of the worst in my childhood, when we moved in with my grandfather after my grandmother's death. It's refreshing to remember the good stuff, a reminder that life is all mixed up.
Some of this is from the prompt mentioned.
The texture of sorrow
23 March 2011 05:41 PM
We shine them up, facet the edges, take the sorrow and make it into something else, muffle it. The transformation leaves me cold. It’s a burial, a way to take the depth of sorrow and buff it up, make it reflect light, refract it. I prefer my sorrow rough and real, my regret salty, dirty, unwashed.
It was only after my nap today (a nap after another night of four hours of sleep) that I felt real regret. I’ve been having a hard time with that, teasing out my confusion and emotions from acknowledging the pain I’ve caused. I feel regret. I don’t feel shame (I’ve read a lot about this, shame versus guilt, how shame in some cases is about getting caught, about worrying how others will perceive one's transgressions, while guilt is about not doing the right thing, is more internal, not that this is the whole of it). I make my decisions willingly for concrete reasons. I own them. But I do wish I had handled things differently, had been braver a long time ago.
There is a creek bed, a stream running over rocks, not enough water because of the drought, even after all the crazy March rain, but still the water rushes and plays. I’m at the side, I carry heavy amethysts, raw, stone mixed with stone. I walk to the water’s edge, let its coldness envelop my hands. It rushes over the amethysts, carries the confusion away. I am left with pure clean emotion. I throw the crystals one by one across the creek. I watch them arc through the air before the grasses on the other side swallow them up.
What am I to do? Do I let sorrow trump action? Do I let guilt keep me trapped? I have to acknowledge the pain, the complications, the fears in all of this, and then move forward. It’s the direction of movement that paralyzes me, the decisions that are clouded by mud, history, and the unknown.
From a prompt: amethysts.
Confidential to my Google friend: I'm ok. Maybe not well. But I'll be in touch soon.
Culpability
22 March 2011 02:34 PM
The image: a cigarette boat, one of those pointy, sleek things, the motor powerful as 2000 horses, zipping along the surface of a lake (Lake Como?). So fast, so fast, a streak of red, the laughter of a bikinied woman, the smell of exhaust and bitters and coconut intermingling in the air. Who can make a mistake when they glide, almost hover above the surface?
The hot air balloon, an effusive spot of color in the sky, the separation from earth and green and tree branch. People stand in a basket – a basket! – like a bunch of easily perishable fruit, soft-bodied and wide-eyed. From up here, there are no mistakes, just smudges on the landscape.
I want to believe there are no irreparable mistakes, that messing up huge is a temporary thing, that the skimming across oil-slicked water or floating on a rush of hot air is what life is all about. Simple. Fixed with a kiss or a kind word.
Then I remember: murder. Accidental death. The off turn of a wheel, the gaze averted at the wrong moment. A boat crash. A tumble from a basket. A series of bad decisions that lead to something impossible to fix. A railroad track of stitches bisecting a skull. The grave, deep and black. The stiff and uneven gait of the failed suicide.
In my dreams, I sometimes float above the world. I look down at the streetlights, the people safe in their dollhouses, squares of light coming from the windows. Everything is neatly packaged and I am free of gravity, of other people’s problems, of my sadness. I pilot the cigarette boat, my cocktail in my hand, the wind pulling my hair back. I laugh at the blurred landscape, the lake empty of other people. I am the only one in the basket, looking down on god’s world from his vantage point.
Other people. Other people. Other people. It is only in connection with others that we can mess up, can mess up huge. Or they can mess up huge, too, take us down with them in the sad crunch of fiberglass against bone, in the plummet from too high. Even suicides leave victims behind.
As I've been getting this ready for posting, My Kingdom by Echo and the Bunnymen has been going through my mind. It's related, though it's also related to a lot of teenage angst:
For another Echo post from a very different time: Living proof at my fingertips.
From a prompt: You messed up! You messed up huge! originally written on 11 March. Just seems appropriate right now. Almost unedited from the original.
The hot air balloon, an effusive spot of color in the sky, the separation from earth and green and tree branch. People stand in a basket – a basket! – like a bunch of easily perishable fruit, soft-bodied and wide-eyed. From up here, there are no mistakes, just smudges on the landscape.
I want to believe there are no irreparable mistakes, that messing up huge is a temporary thing, that the skimming across oil-slicked water or floating on a rush of hot air is what life is all about. Simple. Fixed with a kiss or a kind word.
Then I remember: murder. Accidental death. The off turn of a wheel, the gaze averted at the wrong moment. A boat crash. A tumble from a basket. A series of bad decisions that lead to something impossible to fix. A railroad track of stitches bisecting a skull. The grave, deep and black. The stiff and uneven gait of the failed suicide.
In my dreams, I sometimes float above the world. I look down at the streetlights, the people safe in their dollhouses, squares of light coming from the windows. Everything is neatly packaged and I am free of gravity, of other people’s problems, of my sadness. I pilot the cigarette boat, my cocktail in my hand, the wind pulling my hair back. I laugh at the blurred landscape, the lake empty of other people. I am the only one in the basket, looking down on god’s world from his vantage point.
Other people. Other people. Other people. It is only in connection with others that we can mess up, can mess up huge. Or they can mess up huge, too, take us down with them in the sad crunch of fiberglass against bone, in the plummet from too high. Even suicides leave victims behind.
As I've been getting this ready for posting, My Kingdom by Echo and the Bunnymen has been going through my mind. It's related, though it's also related to a lot of teenage angst:
For another Echo post from a very different time: Living proof at my fingertips.
From a prompt: You messed up! You messed up huge! originally written on 11 March. Just seems appropriate right now. Almost unedited from the original.
Manifesto
18 March 2011 05:41 PM
With my resolve, small, compact, like a bullet, I will get what I want: catch and keep, write until my fingers bleed beauty, pierce the publishing mystery. I will take what I want like a man, my knuckles bruised from the struggle, from pushing through brambles and misperceptions and reluctance.
We collect history. Memories cloud our vision, they clog the landscape of thought, tributes to a dead past, cairns on a moor. We react before we know why we're reacting. I’m used to my own brain fog but I sometimes forget other people have sad pasts, too, that I’m not the only one with clouded vision.
The resolve cuts through all of that – it pierces the fog, it sees the others clearly. It’s a bullet of love and clarity. With it I will get what I want. I will rip off my own shirt, muddied, dirty with leaves and sand and cigarette butts and the smell of a barroom floor, to reveal the smoothness of my skin. My candor will make the others want to do the same.
Hands intertwine, with hope for connection, with concern for the roadblocks on the way. I prefer to feel my heart rather than use my head, to let the is-ness of it be, to live in the ontology of the other, of the moment, even when I don’t understand it. The more I think, the less resolved I am, the more my heart withers in my chest. Why not let it sing, let it call out, let it ask for nothing in return but love or a facsimile thereof, the regard, the explanation-defying connection?
One target, one set of eyes, the resolve like a bullet. The rest will fall into place. It’s part of my plan to live, to write, to love both selfishly and without self. The bullet is silver, it is platinum, it is made of blood and bone, brain and heart. It waits in my chest, to fly out of my mouth, out of my fingers, from the center of my soul. I concentrate, I let it be, I see what will happen, knowing that what happens will happen no matter what I do, that the more I let go, the more I will receive.
From a prompt: Keep your eyes on the target. Edited slightly and reposted because some of the wording was bothering me.
Image: One of Jasper John's many Targets. I got this image from The Nervous Breakdown. Where The Nervous Breakdown got it from is unknown.
Before the bombs hit
14 March 2011 04:33 PM
The joke between Tina and her friends that year was that they wanted to experience sex at least once before Armageddon, before the Russians and Americans exchanged missiles over the Atlantic in a fiery aerial dance. This was when The Day After was on TV, with its bodies and radiation sickness. What was sex like? When were you supposed to have it? Was it about walls and submission, the girl protecting her reputation, her body, until she finally acquiesced? Could you want it? When would they find out, crack the mystery?
A few years before, Tina had discovered her grandfather’s stash of porn, little magazines, tantalizing, filthy, intriguing. She snuck them out of his room one at a time and studied the pictures and the stories with their bad prose and bad words and indistinct depictions of orgasm, always announced with a series of moans and Ahhhhhhhhs and Oh Gods and I’m cumming (a disconcerting spelling that she hated even back then).
The summer between freshman and sophomore years, she cracked the mystery, slipped into the stream. The college boy, the walk up a street she’d walked since early childhood, one of his hands on his bike, the other on her back, the stumble into the dark house, the smell of paneling and indoor-outdoor carpeting mixed with sweat and beer and the mildewy undercurrent of the ancient air conditioner. She was 14, he was 20. She let him do what she thought grownups did without discussion or worry.
Tina spent the rest of her nights that summer waiting in the dark by the flicker of the television set, listening for his knock, for the click-click-click of the bike as he wheeled it behind the house, for the whir and sudden stop of a skateboard in the street. She was waiting to rediscover the mystery, lost in the classic confusion where sex and love intermingled without cause.
Image: By Writing Salon Mistress Jane Underwood. The photo was the prompt.
Let's call this faction -- a nice mix of fact and fiction, the first step in leaving the past behind . . .
The dazzling core
10 March 2011 08:33 AM
After it is all over and the body rots or is burned away or pumped full of chemicals and covered in makeup as a way to convince those who are left that the loved one still exists, light remains. The flash at death, the speed up to space, the dissipation of the distilled self: once freed, light moves at its own dazzling pace.
This is life, the essence, the sparkle, the dance. Contained in a body for ten years or 41 or 87, confined by contingent flesh, pulled along through various circumstances (happy childhoods, punch-drunk marriages, depressions of the emotional or monetary types), the light whips out of the withered husk, the self it used to be, at first opportunity.
Does light remember? Are we contained in hundreds of points of light in the night sky, stardust? Starlight? I’m still trying out this theory on myself, this idea that maybe there is an underlying spiritual layer, matterless, pure light, the mystery of life underneath the machines that are our bodies.
Light does not remember. Light exists, mysterious, animating, strong, the substrate, the core, but once it leaves a body, it breaks into a million different pieces. Or waves. Who we are scatters across the universe, to be gathered in a different configuration and shot into a body again. Maybe.
But it doesn’t end, light. It hurtles, it makes us who we are, it is the purest thing about us. Don’t cover the light. Try your best to see it, to acknowledge it through the worst of circumstances. Let it simultaneously ground you and lift you. And don’t get too attached. Light resists containment. It is not individual. We exist in a community of waves, of commonalities, sparks underneath the surface.
From a prompt: It never ends. I went with something positive and never-ending. A change of pace. Lightly edited from yesterday morning's original.
Image: Me, the mirror and the flash.
Nostalgic buzz(kill)
04 March 2011 11:59 AM
When she was ten, her pet rabbit – the dwarf bunny that was later killed by her cat, the day before Halloween no less – chewed a hole in the side of her box springs. This is where she later stashed the bottles, those 7-ounce Budweisers her boyfriend liked to buy, the Southern Comfort and Captain Morgan rum she chugged straight from the bottle as a joke, but also as a shortcut. He brought them to her and she would drink them after he left, but then there was the problem: what to do with the empties? If someone moved that box spring, pushed it from its sagging spot on the floor, it would have clanked and jangled with the evidence of hidden drunkenness, of early elusiveness.
The beer and the cigarettes, the pot and the crank. The nights made lucid by cocaine and whiskey. Do teenagers still drive around drinking beer and tossing the empties at stop signs and mailboxes? On black velvet nights in August, when meteors streak and arc past the stars, are girls making out with boys on the wide thick hoods of old cars, tasting the sweetness of pot, the bitterness of beer, still believing in the promise of an endless night, the perpetual summer, their hands intertwined forever?
Back then she could escape into the drink, the buzz, the waterfalls of laughter brought on by mushrooms and acid. She knew there was a future and maybe it included babies or maybe it was her alone in the city, the career woman. But now, in middle age, there was nothing but a stretch of time, the long lean years, the acceptance of fate, the memories of subversion threatening to be the only story she ever had.
From a prompt: I would like to hide it.
Image: Me and sliver of D, 1986ish. Blurry adolescence, informing this fiction a teensy bit.
The blog isn't going away, but I am starting a new one, something less depressed and more . . . active? I'm not totally sure yet. I'll still update here occasionally, including when the new one is up and running and when I feel a need to express the dark side. But I'm mainly going to try and deal with the dark side in other ways.
It is going to happen
02 March 2011 11:11 AM
I see someone cute across the street, or getting on the bus, and I decide: they are mine. I will find them tomorrow, next week, I’ll follow them off the bus, I will charm them with my wits and my good looks, with the flash of green in my eyes, and they will be mine.
The number of worlds I can imagine is infinite. You, twentysomething girl with the straight brown hair and the earbuds and the dusky complexion. You stare insolently from your sludgy BART seat, you scrape your plump suede boots on the flattened rug. You act as if you are the only one on this train. I see you. You get off at Embarcadero and I follow, though I wasn’t planning on getting off just yet, was just riding the rails looking for destiny. You will be mine, we’ll move in together, two women surprised by the pull of our bodies, we’ll adopt babies and have torrid affairs and violent reunions. You will be mine, but you will also break my heart.
There is pleasure in the imagination, in my ability to meet, break up, and make up in the space of ten minutes. The man I pass almost every morning on my way to the café? He doesn’t make eye contact, stares at his too-white sneakers, shambles his skinny legs across the street sometimes when he sees me coming. This is a challenge, to find a life with the dodgy-eyed man whose hair is wiry and grey, who wears faded jeans and sweatshirts and wants nothing to do with me. You will be mine. I’ll stumble into you one morning, with hot coffee, with a bag of danishes. I’ll break the ice. Your eyes will meet mine and I’ll see your beauty, the beauty in ice-blue, will know that all your reticence is Scandinavian, that all it will take is my warmth, the touch of my hand on your shoulder and you will speak.
Coffee will turn to burgers. Burgers will lead to pasta. Pasta will lead to late night cocktails, to your place, a sad studio over a tattoo parlor. You’re an artist, or were an artist. There was a divorce, maybe two divorces, a child (or children) you never see in another city. I will listen. I will get you to cry to me, but I won’t tell you anything. Or I’ll give you glimpses: the story of the time I fell from the bar and broke my arm, the night my mother’s boyfriend slipped into my room, the way a book changed my life. I’ll confuse you with the stories, you won’t be able to thread them together.
Our kisses will be soft, then hard and wanting and the sex we will have will humiliate both of us in different ways. Two weeks after bumping into you, I will change my daily habits so that we never cross paths again. You will take it in stride, another cruel woman, another world glimpsed and destroyed.
In the meantime, I pass you on the sidewalk, I watch your gaze drift to the side, to the passion flower vine in full bloom knotting itself to a chain-link fence.
Thought it was time for something else besides writing on "the struggle." Another (fictional) post in first person, from the prompt "It is going to happen" from about a month ago.
Image by blmurch.
The forever passenger?
01 March 2011 12:00 PM
At 41, I'm still more than half a lifetime away from old old age. I don’t feel like I’m in my forties, though I am more tired and less connected to pop culture than I ever was. I am afraid for the future, for what is to come, and once again, I wonder what the point of it all is, living. This isn’t a new thought for me, worrying about the meaning of life in the face of sadness, seeing life's trajectory as expansiveness followed by loss after loss after loss (and the losses start early for some of us). I am prone to seeing life through cracked and blackened glass. Still, if we’re lucky (??), we get old. Our bodies melt and harden in place. Our minds leak information. We lose ourselves to time and free radicals and the sun. It’s built into us. We were made to deteriorate, to go from growth to rot in an alarmingly short period of time.
The best that I can hope for is that my memory will hold the beauty of my youth, the baptism in muddy river water, the singing in my bones as I walked under cherry blossoms, the spring night I pulled my boyfriend into a spreading azalea in full bloom near the Capitol building, the taste of good bread and ash-covered goat cheese and basil on a slow Illinois summer day. Imagination and memory allow a perpetual escape into youth, into love, into a rich internal world that almost mimics reality. Slowly my body will give up and fade. My eyes will become watery, my eyesight hazy. I will hear nothing but the buzz of my own fritzed mind. The past and present will intermingle in the never-ending movie in my brain.
I want to remember the good things: the feel of my grandmother’s bed in the air conditioning on an Eastern Shore July, the sway of my swing as I pushed against the maple tree, the first time I felt love, hot, intense, sensual. I want to remember the leafy smell of spring at Hollywood Beach, the thrill of first touches here and gone, the feeling I get when the words rush out of me and make sense without effort. Memory is the only escape I have. I am setting the stage now for the good ones. I don’t want to spend my last years caught up in the Little House, the waits, the quietness at dinner tables, the feeling of grief revisiting me again and again and again. That scares me more than losing my ability to walk, to see, to hear, this idea that at the end I'd be trapped, stuck in childhood, weak and dependent, the forever passenger.
The forever passenger. A funny thing to come out of my fingertips, rushed and without effort. Because that's what I am at the moment, a passenger. I'd like to believe I could just think my way out of this one, come up with the proper memories (the sweating glass of Coke on ice on my grandmother's bedside table; the moment of escape from school, pulling out of the parking lot in Lisa's car on our way to somewhere, anywhere, else; the conversation that doesn't stop, that is pure comfort and challenge and attraction) to inoculate me against the bad memories (waiting for my Dad to never show; waiting for D to eventually show; the ache of never being good enough, for being left in bad circumstances). But the first step is to leave the passenger's seat, to take control, to propel myself on my own power.
How long can I write about this shit without taking action? What does action look like? If I start at the beginning of this blog, go back three years, I can see progress. So I'll have to trust in the process. I'll have to give myself a kick to get started, too. Tomorrow, tomorrow, right? After the tears have dried and my heart has healed. I'm taking small steps to get there. I'll be there eventually, in spite of my current emotional wasteland. I'll make a plan. I'll trust in small things. And, hopefully, I'll stop writing about it, letting off steam in this safe contained way.
From today's prompt, the winner. Edited and expanded.
Image: Chair outside the Little House, circa 1986? I've used this before, but just like I have certain songs I return to, I have certain images that stick in my mind. The earlier incarnation was in the post Thanks for the memories, from a little over a year ago. It starts "To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite." Memory and selective forgetfulnes. A theme.
The longest strangest shortest month
28 February 2011 06:35 AM
Because it’s been a crazy unstable reach into my chest and rip out my heart kind of month, with all the intensity of tsunami, the build-up, the actual crash of the wave, and the aftermath, the search for the dead and injured, the extrication of belongings from the mud. I’ve been exposed and hidden all at once. I’ve courted danger and have turned my heart to stone. I walk along the muddy avenues, giddy with relief and fear for what I’ll find.
My legs are taut, my face is scratched, my hair tousles around me. Underneath my fingernails are mud and grit and blood. I look at my hands and remember what I’ve lost, remember what functions in my life, the careful tenting of various feelings and insecurities, the cordoning off of emotion.
Is that so bad? To live a functional life? I don’t know yet how to balance the two, the great chasm of emotion within me and the stability that I crave. They pull me in opposite directions. They threaten to split me in two. Can I figure out how to marry them so that I have stability and emotion all at once, without throwing over the rest of my life?
I give the appearance of calm, can even feel calm, when somewhere in my chest, in the bone, the feelings crackle and sizzle. I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m guilty, I’m culpable. I don’t trust my emotions anymore, my barometer on the situation. It’s both hair trigger and totally off. I see the tsunami coming and I walk on the beach. I see the gentle lap of waves against sand and I run for higher ground. I misinterpret my gut and go for melodrama.
February is almost over, thank goodness. My heart still beats and the ache has lessened. But it's changed me, this month, it's distilled my will into something strong and shiny, metallic and hard, a protective talisman. I will find balance. I will figure out what need to change in my life based on knowing my own mind. I will not return to ignorance. I will write my way into newness, will take the anger that encircles me like smoke and form it into wings. Into a cup. Into something that I pour the rest of myself into, out of, the small slow transformation, the alchemy of rationality plus emotion plus art.
From a photo prompt with a sweet-looking yellow lab on a couch. Behind the couch was a little sign saying "What the fuck?" Edited a tiny bit from the original for clarity and expansion.
Image: My twisted hands.
Bringing on the heartache
25 February 2011 04:36 PM
The scene in the therapist’s office this morning, a walk through damp breezes with the threat of rain behind sunshine, another chance to get soaked, and there I am with this motherly thoughtful woman. It was our third meeting and right away I launched into it.I can’t tell you about that here. That’s private stuff, things you are not yet privy to, things that need airing out in other areas of my life before I go there with you. Gentle Reader.
There are some things I can tell you, about threat and invisibility, about boxes and strategies and avoidance. Let’s say you feel invisible to the ones who love you. Let’s say this is a very familiar feeling, the invisibility. Combine it with another deep feeling, of being unlovable. OK. You feel unlovable. You also – lucky you – feel invisible. Maybe it’s safer to stay in a place where no one sees you, where you are invisible, because then you don’t need to deal with the push/pull of self-hatred and worry.
You’re there already, though, and trying so hard to stay in the moment. Your therapist tells you to be with your feelings, in the moment, too, and you keep on working at it, to let the feeling be without escaping (not that you always succeed on this one). The ache in your heart that you’ve been carrying around for so long? It extends low, deep, and high. Your torso is pain. You feel the pain and it doesn’t destroy you. In fact, you feel more alive because of it.
And not. See how I distance myself from all of this but using the term “you”? Do you think I’m scared? Yes. Do I have reason to be? Of course.
Outside the sun is being pushed out by wind and clouds again. The moment in the sunshine, the moment of clarity, is covering itself over. When the clouds come, I’m even less rational. How does my body feel? My chest aches. My throat hurts. My head is tight and dry. I am in the moment and I want to know when the moment will end.
I took on a man once, took him on because I wanted to, though I didn’t know what I wanted. I took him on and he me, and then he left. And I wanted to know: was it me? Or my situation? It's me, it's always me. That's the old story, anyway, one that I fight even as I let it exist. And the ache, it gets even deeper, if you can imagine it, straight into my heart. It amazes me, this feeling, how symbolic and true it is all at once. Heartache. What’s the physiology of it?
How are we centered both in our chests and in our heads?
From a totally unrelated prompt: No plastic surgery. I wrote about what I wanted to write about. Also barely edited. I'm beginning to like these spur-of-the-moment insta-blog posts.
Image by GrungeTextures.
Red
24 February 2011 12:01 PM
Primary colors are unambiguous, unadulterated, pure. When I was a child, my favorite color was red, until the world began to enter my mind. Then my favorite color became maroon, or burgundy, the color of blood after it dries on the t-shirt, on the towel, on the sidewalk.
I was a dramatic kid, took acting lessons and went to drama camp. That all faded away as adolescence with its neglect and late nights and pursuit of boys and beer came in. The last drama camp I attended included lots of song and dance and I remember singing in a circle, each of us with a line about our favorite color, looping it into the rainbow, me singing way too low for a twelve-year-old : burgundy in the rainbow. Ah, the melodrama, me singing low and deep and too seriously about the color of spilled blood.
People like to ask children their favorite things. Sometimes they ask adults this, too, their favorite dish, their favorite place to go on vacation, their favorite television show. My five-year-old son has problems committing to favorites when pressed. There are too many nuances, too many variables. But he does have a favorite color: orange, the color of the flame, of the sky as the sun extinguishes itself in the bay, the color of pumpkins.
Committing to a color is easy at first. You know what you like. You only have so many choices. But then the rest of life marches past, the periwinkles, the variations of flesh tones, the espresso and eggplant. How can you choose?
I don’t do favorites. OK, I may have a favorite block in my favorite city (The 1700 block of Q Street NW in Washington, DC). Sometimes I have a favorite beer. I can list a handful of writers who are my favorites. But there are too many subtleties out there to hold tight to one thing and say that it is the one I prefer. I dress in blacks and greys. The room I sit in has shades of ocean green and earth-bound tan. My blood is scarlet, then burgundy, sometimes black. It is life in its infinite variety.
From a prompt, red, barely edited from the original. Last week's writing partner picked it as his favorite of my writes, so here it is, a little blog filler. More in-depth writing coming. Eventually.
Image by nahlinse.
Laired out
22 February 2011 09:10 AM
It’s sunny today, the air is fresh, cleaned by tears and stress and wonderment. I’ve opened the door to the lair, I’ve cracked a window and all the curtains are pulled back to let in sunlight. And I’m writing somewhere else, back on the couch in the living room where the sun is highlighting the opposite wall. The past week has been very lair-focused. The room became dense with animal emotion, thwarted with darkness and the unspoken. I could blame the rain, I could blame any number of outside causes, but the truth is that the lair was a hiding place, a temporary stasis station.
Yesterday, I worked and worked on a piece that didn’t want to come out. I holed up in the lair. Sometimes the boy and the man would come in with sustenance and distraction. This irritated me as I curled in place, tried to write, let myself get pulled into the Internet and pushed by my crazy mind.
But today all is sunshine and household tasks. I will take this space and make it clean again. I will let my emotions fall where they want to and will delight in the fact that I am feeling alive, that my melodramatic self is very much present, that she always has been present, just tied up in the back of my mind. I welcome her. We don’t speak of the past, but of the future, the rolling road out in front of us.
Somehow it’s possible to feel hopeful, scared, and sad all at once. I embrace every feeling. I dance and cry and fall down and get up again. I will live in the light and it will all be fine.
From a prompt: Last week in the rain. Written this morning. Basically unedited.
Image: Legs/lair/light
Recovery process
19 February 2011 04:03 AM
The heart is mangled. She keeps it in the usual place, under a the bars of her ribs, the thick door of her sternum protecting it. It’s been this way for years, the limping beat, the off-kilter pitter-pat, the feeling of weakness when a new risk comes along, a person, a limping dog, a week of thinly drawn clouds against the sky.
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
What I'm going to do
14 February 2011 05:42 AM
I kept a mattress there and a stack of books, mouldering classics from the resale shop. There was a wool blanket on the bed, old army surplus, a kerosene lamp, an vintage calendar with pinup girls for atmosphere. I pretended it was a time before the Internet and cable, that I was a pioneer woman, the first of my kind, making it alone on the misty prairie. I had a dog, a terrier with odd bald patches here and there and an iffy temper, who scared away the riffraff, and together we sat by the fire, a stack of wood in flames outside our little house, roasting squirrel meat on a stick, sharing the bones.
Some nights I thought back to my girlhood, my dreams of an adobe hut, my desire to escape my body and my mind. He threatened me, had power over me, and I eluded him, built a treehouse, a log cabin, an igloo in my head. I sat in the branches and looked over us as he did what he wanted to do. My feet grazed his hair, so short and rough, but he was so intent he did not feel them.
I used to imagine puncturing his chest with a weapon, something slim and sharp, as slim and sharp as him and just as deadly, but I forgot about it in the daylight, only remembered when it was too late.
He died eventually anyhow. They all do, thank God. But I’m still here, in my little wooden house with the brick foundation, reading by kerosene lamp, stirring the fire with a stick, letting the dead stars shine their light upon me forever.
From a prompt: What we're going to do, barely doctored from the 12-minute version.
Image by Mike Pennington.
Hope to be back writing more frequently (and in more depth) soon.
Layered
11 February 2011 11:56 AM
We share the memory of that night, and the rest of the trip to Tokyo, the boys with their long razor cuts, the girls with their striped stockings, the packed subways and trains. All unfamiliar and exciting, something our lives lack now, the little taste of the unknown.
At the time, I didn’t embrace the unknown. I’m braver now, or so I choose to think. Maybe I am more comfortable with making a fool of myself. All this bravery is wasted on cleaning and cooking, with the routine sameness our lives demand. Life is relentless and we can’t escape it, so why not embrace the relentless, think of it all as a kind of race, a slow walk towards release?
Our memories pile on top of each other, they layer, like the leaf mulch on the forest floor. The leaf becomes dirt, the dirt becomes stone, our experiences become transformed with time so that we no longer recognize them. But they are there, in the world, apart from us, intermingling with other peoples’ experiences. Because they don’t die. Please tell me they don’t die, that these parts of ourselves, these little intimacies, remain, no matter whether you or I still exist.
I can’t bear the thought of it, these little deaths. I remember those moments. I remember them all. I remember who we were and see who we are now, the layers transformed.
The photo, by Writing Salon mistress Jane Underwood, was the prompt.
Thin end of the wedge
28 January 2011 09:40 AM
Where does this couple come from? They show up sporadically, once a month or so, time travelers in their denim and leather, the woman wearing pointy-toed boots that demonstrate the thin end of the wedge, the toe jam, the man with quirkily British brothel creepers, thick-soled and wide. Both of them have artificially blonde hair, tousled, the roots a shade of anonymous brown. The quick intake/exhale, the sideways glance, the tabby or calico, all of it incongruous against a stucco house the color of French’s mustard.
This is one of my dream lives, beholden to substances, a life of no obligations, romantically influenced by the 70s punk scene, where I could reasonably write something like this:
I paid for it
A lifetime of clean living doesn’t show on the face. The late nights, the whiskies and tequilas, the hovering over a mirror with a tightly rolled dollar bill: eventually, those years catch up with you. It starts out as a slight dullness in the eyes, a yellowish tinge to the skin. One night you go to sleep almost young, the next morning, the fine lines start to appear, the fissures, the sags and bags.
At that point, it’s too late. No amount of detox can save you from the destruction you’ve brought upon yourself, the physical ruination.
At that point, then, why stop? Why not go out in a hazy glare of glory, the afternoons fuzzy, the mornings cotton-mouthed? We’re all dependent upon something. Some people need sweet-as-candy positive thoughts, the cheery aphorism, pep talks written on the bathroom mirror in styptic pencil. Others need human touch, have to feel skin against skin, insist upon hugging every acquaintance, on touching palms with strangers. You, lover of chemicals, of the products of ferment, find this need pathetic. It’s nothing that sour mash and cheap wine followed up by a pack of Pall Malls can’t solve.
So you examine your face, pinch the sagging skin on your forearms, remember the long ago days when you were young and naïve. That first drink was bitter, but the next one went down easy. It wasn’t just the taste, the feeling of looseness, like drifting on the ocean, it was the camaraderie, the friends around the bonfire, the people stacked against the bar.
From a prompt, I paid for it. The next Round Robin starts up this weekend, thank goodness. Feeling very dark today, despite my night of long-enough sleep, but there's good news: we're closing on the house on Monday.
Image by Diamond Farrah.
Watery path
24 January 2011 12:43 PM
In Wilmington, Delaware, we lived near the Brandywine, a rocky creek surrounded by trees and parkland. This is where Kevin, my mother's boyfriend, found Louise, a shivering irish setter mix, where on my trips home from college, my mother, Kevin and I walked the dogs along the race where the mill used to be. In the fall, persimmon trees dropped their fruit and shook scarlet leaves. Winter exposed the muskrats. They swam from one side of the race to the other under thin sheets of ice, their bodies dense and quick. We discussed the voluptuousness of their fur, the fact that some people still ate muskrat, how Brandywine algae and chemicals would make the meat bitter.
There was Chestertown, the year and half in college and then dropping out of college, the walks by bobbing boats, the night Peter and I rode a tandem bike through sweet summer air across the Chester to his garden patch, the strolls along the river with my roommate Martha, our sob stories, our parental complaints, our barely post-adolescent struggles. Or J's family place across the lane from the Sugar Shack, the beauty of the creek, the ominous duck blind, the backfire of shotguns on November mornings. When I told him how beautiful it was, how I loved the tall trees along the driveway and the way the moon reflected off the water, he told me he had stopped noticing such things long ago.
College in Washington, DC wasn’t about the Potomac, it was about the place, the power, the buildings, the smooth marble and cool granite. I loved it all, lived in every quadrant but southeast, but left it for library school in Illinois. Champaign-Urbana turned out to be dry and featureless, flat and sparse. On deadly August nights, the thunder reverberated as it searched for a place to call home. My next-door neighbor beat his girlfriend with muffled thwacks and I, filled with women's studies courses and a strong sense of justice, called the cops. Nothing changed.
After graduation, my boyfriend and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, a city at the confluence of two rivers. We moved in the middle of a winter so frigid that we couldn't touch our bedroom walls comfortably without an intermediary: gloves, a thick blanket, the stretched woolen sleeves of a sweater. By spring I got my first library job in a building that overlooked the Scioto River. I can only picture the river in winter, the wind flying off the water's surface to slap me in the face as I walked to work from the Short North or from Old Towne East, the way the sun reflected pure light in the late afternoon. Boyfriend, then marriage, animals, a brick Victorian: it had all the trappings of a life, but my mind was on the East Coast.
We moved from Columbus to DC, from DC to a Takoma Park house near polluted Sligo Creek, where we walked our sheltie dog and had increasingly stressful conversations about my husband's bad work situation. His old job was still available and he took it, returning to the banks of the Scioto on the weekend of our second anniversary. Less than a year later, our marriage's dissolution pushed me back to Dupont Circle, where the brick buildings soothed and I could walk for hours contemplating, comforted by the flow of traffic. It was the flood from an upstairs neighbor's broken water heater, the gush that didn't stop for three days, that floated the cats and me across the Potomac to my new boyfriend's Alexandria apartment.
Years passed. We moved to Adams Morgan, within walking distance of two bridges. We ran along paths in Rock Creek Park, watched black-crowned night herons fish from the zoo grounds. We got married on a beach in Southern California against a backdrop of rocks and kite surfers, drove up the coast for a honeymoon. Two years later, the baby arrived. We stayed as long as we could in our one-bedroom apartment. Then, another move across the Potomac, one cold lonely winter in Alexandria scuffling through snow drifts, visiting National Airport with the boy to watch the planes take off when I couldn’t take another minute of being in that house.
Today I am in Berkeley, a 35-minute walk to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. We live in one of the cooler spots in the city, where the fog collects and the breezes whip off of chilled bay water. But I am not of the water anymore. Instead, I am beholden to the land, the way it contours. Gravity plants each step I take. I know the earth will shake someday, will rattle the bricks loose from the fireplace and crack the picture window in the living room. Perhaps the bay waters will rise and lap at the concrete slab out front.
When it happens, I won't hesitate. I'll improvise a boat and float away, letting the currents pull me where they wish.
Image of Brandywine Creek and bridge (fairly certain this is the Washington Street bridge, which is where Kevin found Louise) by tcd123usa.
From a old prompt: Where am I? Sometimes the water theme feels tired to me, but what can I say? It resonates. Looking forward to starting a new Round Robin soon.
Surrender
26 December 2010 01:06 PM
What she noticed were his shoes. If you want to know how well-taken care of a man is, start from the bottom up. The state of his shoes would tell you whether he had a lover, a wife, a boyfriend who would tell him when it was time for a new pair or a shine. The socks were important, too -- were they holey or faded? -- but sock maintenance was the kind of caretaking that was hidden and intimate as underwear.
She had Owen, beautiful skinny Owen in chinos and plaid, with his knuckles banged up out of clumsiness, and his shining intelligent dome. They had been together for seventeen years now and most of the years had been good. Not sparkling, not crazy-in-love, but solid and generally competent. They had gotten most of their fighting out of the way in that first decade, fit each other comfortably now, two fading cushions on an aging couch. Natalie made sure that Owen's shoes were fresh. No one at work understood why she would want to give him a pair of shoes for Christmas every year, but she remembered that first spring, those wingtips that were a hand-me-down. How could you not love someone who thought it was OK to wear family heirlooms on his feet? He needed her.
The first time she noticed Stuart Basil was on a morning dog walk. Here was this muscular knob of a man with a head of wiry grey hair, calmly walking a great dane more than half his size. His steps were evenly paced, his running shoes newish, and he wore a pair of pressed khakis. His grip on the leather leash was loose but confident. The dog didn't pull, but stopped at every corner and sat patiently when a child and her mother passed by. Stuart saw Natalie staring and gave a quick flick of one of those confident hands, a flash of well-cared-for teeth. The man positively glowed.
Natalie began to time her morning dog walks around his, even though Schnookie, her rat terrier, was terrified of the bigger dog and exploded into a series of sharp barks whenever they saw him. Stuart and Natalie would smile and wave from across the street, Natalie blushing, and yelling above Schnookie’s snarls: Yeah -- she’s a vicious cur!
Finally, thankfully, she ran into Stuart one day downtown, saw him in the Walgreens with a basket full of vitamins. Close up, his hands looked large for his arms, but his handshake was firm, and she could still feel the crisp cut of his shirt sleeves on her fingertips ten minutes later. Back at work, she fell into a reverie, imagined those hands unbuttoning her shirt, pressing against her hips, pushing her against the cool wood of the desk.
From a prompt: Write a story about surrender. This needs a conclusion, doesn't it? But I'm not going to go there.
Image by virgilpix.
Trivia: When we moved to Ohio, my first husband ("Mr. X") wore his father's wingtips and old suit pants to work, possibly because he had been a perpetual graduate student for most of his twenties, without the cash for a new wardrobe (in addition to having very little fashion sense at the time). My coworkers were flummoxed when I bought Mr. X shoes for Christmas one year. There was something about a man who was over thirty and wearing his dad's clothes, a man who didn't mind if I bought shoes for him without him choosing them, that was endearing at the time. Until it stopped being so.
I am now married to a man who picks out his own shoes and takes care of them himself, which negates Natalie's whole shoe theory.
Sleepless
21 December 2010 08:16 AM
I want to tell my brain: fuck rational thought. Stop thinking. Pursue happiness and pleasure. If you can recognize them.
Why? Because the pursuit of happiness and pleasure can be dangerous and you, brain, are not a risk-taker.
Sure, this space is all about me (tirelessly, pedantically about me. Oh, I am so tired of me. Sometimes I think: get a job, Jennifer! That would quiet your inner voice for at least a portion of the week.). But writing about me isn't an exercise in pursuing happiness. Or pleasure. It’s about my mind. About how I think. It’s about organizing and labeling the past, the creative work of making reality into a story. Controlling reality – that’s what this blog is about. That and bringing a few people into my head, making them witnesses to the past, a warm virtual circle around the person that I used to be. If only I could have let the old me know that was possible: Dear fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old, twenty-year-old Jennifer: you will tell your story, will be observed. You existed.
There is a fine line between controlling realty and having a death grip on it, on trying to get it right or trying to write around dangerous feelings. I’ve done a lot of that, have taken anger and guilt and desire and given them a framework. I’ve transformed them into something else, but sometimes, I just want to wallow in them, to accept them as part of me. To revel in being human.
I want to stop feeling so contained.
. . .
I SLEPT ON IT
I tossed on it, ground my teeth above it, nudged the boy across it. I hung onto the edge, I waddled away, I came back and slept again, eventually.
Originally, I thought my angst was about the situation, the differences between us, my own heavy history hanging over the room like an anvil on a worn rope, gently swaying from side to side. Only I know how hard I’ve worked to create a feeling of stability, how in the process I’ve pushed things aside, cleared the room of ambiguity and risk, of the chance to cause pain, to ruin everything. But now, this: the danger was palpable. Potentially life-changing.
By design, my life is small. Contained. My forays into other worlds shake me up. I want to be shaken up (need to be shaken up), but still my security, my stability, feels so tenuous. It’s as if I’ve been holding it together with my teeth and fingertips, my arms outstretched, pulling the protective netting over my family, keeping both the outside world and the worst of me out.
I need to drop the net, to expand my life, to be in the world. I am tired of hiding. How to do it safely? If I fill the room up again with myself, take on ambiguity and risk (if I cut the anvil loose, let it hit the floor with a BANG of relief), I am afraid of what will happen.
The desire for upset, for drama, is in my bones. Like any good addict, I must avoid temptation. My fear is that I won't be able to tell the difference between temptation and happiness, that openness means pain, that my desire will betray me and hurt the people I love.
JOY DIVISION: DISORDER
Image: Me, last summer.
DISORDER is from my mainly sleepless brain. I SLEPT ON IT is a modified prompt. Is all of this too obtuse? Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am sleepless, I contain multitudes.
Witchy woman
16 December 2010 10:24 AM
It wasn’t like I was a one-night stand. Well, it turned out that I was a one-night stand, but before that, we were friends. Close friends. Talk-about-lovers friends, and tell-about-the-spinach-in-the-teeth types. Of course, you hadn’t told me that Samantha was your girlfriend, though you’d think I would have figured it out from Sam-this and Sam-that, from the fact that you had a cheesy beach picture of her on your phone. Oh, no. Your relationship with Samantha became much more serious the minute you pulled out.
Your silence covered and cooled us, a blanket of snow, the sudden blizzard of the unsaid. I took it well, pushed myself a millimeter away and said, “I have a boyfriend, too, you know.” Well – yeah. You did know. Before you kissed me, pressed me up against that brick wall (all the teenagers and the botoxed and the homeless passing us by, we were just a blip on the promenade that night, a small sin), reached for the back of my neck, you said “But what about Phillip?”
“Fuck Phillip,” I told you and you were funny, dry as always: “That wasn’t who I was hoping to fuck,” your lips so close to mine that I could taste your words. We laughed and you kissed me. You know the rest.
Now I see you and my fists clench in my pockets. In the past few years, you’ve gotten beefier, have grown into that British face. Perhaps I could hide the punch in a tender gesture, trace the edge of your chin with my talon, reach back as though I’m about to run my fingers through your hair. Then: POW! You yelp in surprise, hold your nose (cover your eyes), press your palm to your lips (caress your broken check) and I run away, cackling like the witch that I am.
From a prompt: Confess to something. It's almost totally unedited from the original 12 minutes of writing. My partner thought it was funny (as it was meant to be, in a kind of twisted way), but now I wonder. I offer it here as a diversion.
Image by me (the moment before the punch?).
Head rush
03 December 2010 11:13 AM
Over time, we were told, that rush would go away and the cigarettes would become necessary, essential to the stressful moment, the celebration, the first thing we would think about in the morning. I heard my grandfather’s hacking coughs into the bathroom wastebasket, saw the dark strings of mucus he left behind. But addiction was something that happened to old people, was part of the alchemy of time and experience and maybe even a matter of strength of character. We would be fine.
Despite my best efforts, cigarettes weren’t for me. Though I loved the romance of them, the way I could court death and look rebellious simultaneously, I smoked for less than a year. Cigarettes made me sick. Even cloves, with their thick, exotic scent, the smoke like a veil over my hands and face, made my stomach lurch. Unlike most of my friends, I couldn’t even smoke when I was drunk. The combination of blurry booze and acrid cigarette only intensified the nausea.
But everyone around me smoked. There were smoke-fogged bars with their odor of stale beer, my roommate letting the smoke rise from her open window, the clouds of pot smoke in the parking lot and the bathroom, the cigarette-scented air of my grandfather’s car, his window barely cracked to set it free. After a night out, my roommate and I would hang our clothes in the living room to air out, but the smell lingered. It clung to our hair, intensified the hangover.
The days of high school smoking courts, of workplaces glittered with ashtrays and bar rooms brown with tobacco residue, seem long ago. Many cities have banned smoking in bars (though I remember seeing scofflaws in Brooklyn when I lived briefly in New York). Even most cigarette-smoking grandparents probably go outside to smoke, are alone with their addiction in the cold, in the rain, as far as possible from the grandchildren. My grandparents lit up everywhere, didn’t connect my asthma with the billows of smoke that filled their house. It truly was a different time.
I smoked my last cigarette in the mid-1980s. It was a clear winter night and I wanted to see the stars, wanted to escape in the fleeting rush of a nicotine buzz. I walked out of the Little House with an old pack of cloves and a lighter I’d pilfered from my grandfather and sat across from the next-door neighbor's house. The ground was hard and cold. Orion hovered above. I lit up, drew in a heavy breath. The cigarette was an unfiltered Djarum, the smoke harsh and plentiful. First came bitter, then sweet, the lightheadedness, the brief forgetting. Then, nausea. I stubbed out the cigarette in the grass and covered my eyes until the feeling subsided.
The blog looks different. Expect some changes over the next month or so -- and maybe more changes in 2011.
From a prompt: Write a story about smoking.
Image by Money Munni.
For a soundtrack of the night of the last cigarette, listen to Bad Houses, by Big Black.
Fantasy interrupted
28 November 2010 08:50 PM
The other night it was an acquaintance, someone I've known peripherally for a few years. He is an attractive man, truly tall, dark, and handsome, and I’ve always had a bit of a crush on him. There he was, in the flesh, soon enough half-naked. Things were progressing when I put a stop to it: my husband would be there any minute. The acquaintance kept coming up with schemes to get together at another date, every one involving bringing our children somewhere for a rendevous.
It wasn’t going to work and I felt horribly guilty about it anyhow. I don’t have it in me to be unfaithful. I woke up, in fact, still feeling that warm tingly make out feeling that comes with new love intermingled with guilt. Although desire and guilt are a classic combination, I prefer to experience them separately. But the thrill of it all . . . not just the physical thrum of kissing someone new – it was the emotional thrill of being attractive, the idea that this person liked me and wanted to kiss me, too.
I love my husband and what we have together. Keeping my family intact and spending the rest of my life with this man are important to me. I can't imagine my life without him. But then I get these crushes, have these dreams, and I think: I am alive, I want the rush, the fluttering heart, the chance to kiss someone new. I want just a little taste again of falling in love and I want it without any of the fall-out, the doubts and worries followed by mundane reality, the clashes, the little irritations, the chores. Each relationship starts with the threat of loss, the end is written in the beginning, and couldn't I just skip all that and go for the endorphins?
So I develop crushes (long term, generally -- I am faithful in these, too), which isn't particularly satisfying, but allows me to indulge in escapist fantasy, where I am the object of desire, but also a paragon of virtue and fidelity. Sometimes I distract myself from the slog and drag with imagined scenes of a different life, exciting and dysfunctional and fueled by pursuit. In this life, I would yield to melodrama and romance. I would love and hate and fight dirty. I would experience fleeting joy (and intense sadness). I would stomp out a path of destruction, but surely life would be interesting.
I've been thinking lately about what purpose these crushes serve. A way to escape reality? Yes. A method of distraction? Of course. Compensation for the fact that, as a stay-at-home mom, the only males I've hung out with for the last five years are my husband, son, and cats? Yes: I miss men. But some of this feels like an attempt to recreate my father in other men. I want to be seen, to be noticed, to be interesting to certain kinds of men, incompatible ones who ignore me, despite my desire for attention (just like my father? well, close enough). My long-term crush was cool, unemotional, truly unreachable. My (imaginary) pursuit of him was fueled by a desire to be seen. His coolness kept my interest at a low burn for years. It was a relief when I finally figured out the mechanism and let the crush burn out. Fantasy interrupted.
I soothe myself with the idea that I tamp down these desires because of a stronger desire to do no harm, and because I already have love. I experience more moments of happiness than I often feel I deserve. Still, a small part of me wonders if I haven't taken the darker path because it isn't an option, because I am not attractive, a boring little wren of a woman, not worth the pursuit.
So I write about desire thwarted, evaded, rekindled. I duke it out in my mind. I pick apart the impure thoughts as I push them aside. Nothing is simple. The thoughts have a source, the source has a reason, and over time I uncover it and cover it up again. I file my wants, I organize them and pack them up.
I focus on the beauty of life outside me.
From a few prompts: I woke up, Down to the wire, and the photo, which is by the talented Jane Underwood.
The thin line
23 November 2010 10:29 AM
In the 1960s, when Slaughter Lane was dusty farmland and shotgun shacks, a commune colonized the Victorian on the hill. Women with long stringy hair that smelled of incense and weed did the work, the cooking and cleaning, the gardening and wood-chopping. They painted the porch and eaves mauve, the siding midnight blue. Their men, heavily bearded, absent-minded, had higher tasks, lay in the meadow and let tabs of acid dissolve on their tongues as the world dissolved around them.
Starr, a runaway, showed up in May 1972. Her body was awkward, all straight lines and angles, with the prominent exception of her belly, round and hard as horse flesh. The women took her in, fed her lentils and brown rice and shimmering river trout. When her time came, they swept a plastic child’s pool free of cobwebs and pulled it under the tulip tree. They ferried pots of stove-heated water from the house to the pool until the water spilled over the lip and soaked into the dust.
As she labored, they watched, dipped washcloths in ice to cool her forehead, let Starr squeeze and scratch their sun-toughed arms as her body worked to expel the child. Flower petals, brown at the edges and sharp with early rot, fell into the blood-rusted water. The sun dropped, the moon rose and the women gathered lanterns, surrounding Starr in a circle of light. Thirteen hours into it her belly rippled a final time, pushed the baby out like an afterthought. He was gone already, blue and silent. Still, a thing of beauty.
“Your son,” one of them said as she held him up in the moonlight.
The women covered Starr’s trembling shoulders with towels stiff from the clothesline, held the umbilical cord tight for the knife. Calloused hands massaged her belly. A soft voice whispered in her ear as she pushed out the placenta. They cleaned and swaddled the baby and lay him next to Starr as she slept on a pile of blankets on the sleeping porch upstairs.
The next morning, in the shade of the tulip, the women cut through roots and dug deep into the clay. They found a box. They fed Starr oatmeal with wild blueberries, supported her as she stood at the grave. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt, and stared, stoic, as the others finished the job.
Starr disappeared a week later. She tumbled over to the next town or hitchhiked back home, no one was sure. The commune, disquieted, slowly emptied. The men got jobs, found other women. One by one, the women left, too. They styled their hair. They tossed away their jeans and tie-dyed tunics and replaced them with floppy business suits and silky disco dresses. The tulip tree grew strong and thick, its blossoms heavy, fragrant with the renewal of life. A new family moved in, three kids and a dog, a tire swing suspended over the child's unmarked grave.
He’s there still, a silent presence swaddled in grace, the boy who never was. Visitors to the house feel him as the absence of something, love or sun or words, a puzzle piece gone missing. He comes in their dreams, the stilled body, the bundle on the floor, the baby with closed eyes.
Every mid-June, an unfamiliar car drives past the house. The driver is a middle-aged woman with capable hands, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Her two girls, just as blonde and skinny as she once was, stop arguing as the car slows. The tulip tree shudders, letting loose a flurry of petals that get tossed by the wind. The woman reaches out and catches a fully intact blossom. She will put it with the others.
She remembers the silence, her son's pale form in flat water, the taut section of umbilical cord. He showed her the thin line, the permeable border, how easy it is for birth to equal death.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
Yet another Three-Minute Fiction entry that disappeared into the ether. The challenge this time was to write something under 600 words that started with the line "Some people swore that the house was haunted." and ended with "Nothing was ever the same again after that." The first line felt tacked on (hmm, maybe this is why it wasn't picked as a possible winner), so I've just taken it off as well as done some substantial editing.
Oh, Iowa Writers' Workshop students and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, why do you deny me glory?
Image by Roger B.
Tip of the pen to Holly for alerting me to the contest a few months ago.
Starr, a runaway, showed up in May 1972. Her body was awkward, all straight lines and angles, with the prominent exception of her belly, round and hard as horse flesh. The women took her in, fed her lentils and brown rice and shimmering river trout. When her time came, they swept a plastic child’s pool free of cobwebs and pulled it under the tulip tree. They ferried pots of stove-heated water from the house to the pool until the water spilled over the lip and soaked into the dust.
“Your son,” one of them said as she held him up in the moonlight.
The women covered Starr’s trembling shoulders with towels stiff from the clothesline, held the umbilical cord tight for the knife. Calloused hands massaged her belly. A soft voice whispered in her ear as she pushed out the placenta. They cleaned and swaddled the baby and lay him next to Starr as she slept on a pile of blankets on the sleeping porch upstairs.
The next morning, in the shade of the tulip, the women cut through roots and dug deep into the clay. They found a box. They fed Starr oatmeal with wild blueberries, supported her as she stood at the grave. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt, and stared, stoic, as the others finished the job.
Starr disappeared a week later. She tumbled over to the next town or hitchhiked back home, no one was sure. The commune, disquieted, slowly emptied. The men got jobs, found other women. One by one, the women left, too. They styled their hair. They tossed away their jeans and tie-dyed tunics and replaced them with floppy business suits and silky disco dresses. The tulip tree grew strong and thick, its blossoms heavy, fragrant with the renewal of life. A new family moved in, three kids and a dog, a tire swing suspended over the child's unmarked grave.
He’s there still, a silent presence swaddled in grace, the boy who never was. Visitors to the house feel him as the absence of something, love or sun or words, a puzzle piece gone missing. He comes in their dreams, the stilled body, the bundle on the floor, the baby with closed eyes.
Every mid-June, an unfamiliar car drives past the house. The driver is a middle-aged woman with capable hands, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Her two girls, just as blonde and skinny as she once was, stop arguing as the car slows. The tulip tree shudders, letting loose a flurry of petals that get tossed by the wind. The woman reaches out and catches a fully intact blossom. She will put it with the others.
She remembers the silence, her son's pale form in flat water, the taut section of umbilical cord. He showed her the thin line, the permeable border, how easy it is for birth to equal death.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
Yet another Three-Minute Fiction entry that disappeared into the ether. The challenge this time was to write something under 600 words that started with the line "Some people swore that the house was haunted." and ended with "Nothing was ever the same again after that." The first line felt tacked on (hmm, maybe this is why it wasn't picked as a possible winner), so I've just taken it off as well as done some substantial editing.
Oh, Iowa Writers' Workshop students and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, why do you deny me glory?
Image by Roger B.
Tip of the pen to Holly for alerting me to the contest a few months ago.
Night vision
18 November 2010 10:38 AM
That night I couldn’t sleep, stirred up by a dream I forgot upon waking. From the bathroom came the litter box scratchings of Amber, her sad trill as she leapt down the hall. The cool air, the light of the moon, you barely stirring next to me, profile muted. The melancholy night noises. I tossed off the covers, wrapped myself in your flannel robe, and stared out the window. The full moon hung over the city, so juicy it looked ready to burst. It threw its light over the houses and parked cars and if I squinted your neighborhood almost looked beautiful.
Somewhere out there a man was going through a dumpster, clinking bottles into a cart like he was making overenthusiastic toasts at a party. It was eerie and familiar at the same time, the rattling of wheels, his mutterings, the explosion of each can as he crushed it, the crash of glass. A pair of women clicked on the sidewalk below, one lecturing the other, voice slightly slurred. "If he doesn't love you, what's he worth? Tell him to go to hell." You whispered my name.
Everything became clear to me, the way our relationship would deteriorate, not this year or the next, but when we were in too deep, how the things I love about you now, your hesitation, your unruly curls, your off use of slang, would be the first things to push me away. You would have your issues with me, too, the way I trampled conversations, left my clothes where I shed them, my increasing tendency to extend the cocktail hour past midnight.
In the now, you reached for me. I tossed off the robe and returned to your warmth. I let the lust last a little while longer, enough to get me through the night. In the morning the clarity of night vision would be mortared over by sunshine.
The photo, by Jane Underwood, was the prompt.
Scar stories
16 November 2010 06:14 AM
Early on, when the skin is fresh and tight and we are still hopeful in matters of love, we offer our scar stories. Enamored, we sit too close and trace each other's skin with our fingertips, tell of the night of the emergency appendectomy, the fall chin-first onto a step, the fist through glass. Later, as things get more intimate, the emotional scars get the attention. The stories grow more complicated: the nasty drunk of a father, the high school bully, the silence around the dinner table. It's a great show of vulnerability before the gates come down and love gets old. We find reasons not to trust. Our eyes dart to the side, to the ceiling, before they close in exasperation. The scar stories become faint irritations, reminders of our past.
My ex-husband had a scar I never saw. I knew the story of the kitten who gave him cat scratch fever, which led to the surgical removal of a lymph node on the underside of Mr. X's chin. As soon as the incision healed, he grew a beard to cover the scar. He was bearded when we met and was still in full beard the last time I saw him in person. The scar was his to hide. His third wife (I was no. 2) convinced him to shave it off, to show his scar to the world. I see him now in Facebook photographs with his infant in his arms, looking confident, clean-shaven, and happy.
Me? I have a short dark mark by my right eye, some jagged lines under that eyebrow. Car accident sophomore year of high school. The uneven triangle on the underside of my left middle finger came when I opened a package of smoked gouda with a dull knife on a car trip home to Ohio from Maryland. There’s a mark on my right calf from an old boyfriend’s too-sharp toenail. I don’t have to look to find it. I feel it there, remember the minor moment, the former intimacy.
As we age, the scars get more serious, the minor ones knit over with experience. These become our scar stories: The near-fatal car accident survived. The place where a breast used to be, where they excised the lump, removed the shrapnel. My grandfather was in his fifties when he was burned in an industrial accident. I never knew him without scars, his skin melted and fused, ears damaged by flames. He was always the cranky near-deaf man missing one foot, with knotty pine skin and thick fingers. No one cared or knew whether he had stepped on a piece of glass when he was ten or what that mark on his knee was all about.
When surgeons removed my mother's boyfriend Kevin's spleen, they left a thick track down the length of his abdomen, the ghostly shapes of surgical staples like railroad ties. Eight years later, after the tracheostomy, Kevin had a scar marking the experience on his neck, a scar that was reopened twice and didn't heal before he died. His frequent emergency intubations scarred his epiglottis, which meant that he couldn't swallow food properly. The food would go into his lungs, which was a pneumonia risk. He "ate" via a stomach tube for the last five months of his life. But the worst scars predated his illness. They were from his boyhood, from the beatings and the cruel words, the experiences that marked him from the beginning as the family scapegoat. Those scars affected the way he interacted with the world.
Physical scars are experience written on the body. It's the emotional scars that are more sly. They form when we aren't looking, maybe before we can even talk. They are pre-rational. These experiences change the way our brains are wired, help determine how we react before we are even aware of our reaction. And sometimes talking about them disturbs the memories, makes us focus on their creation in unsettling ways.
After about a month of appointments and increasing anxiety on my part, I dropped my therapist. Maybe it was a matter of therapeutic fit. But maybe I was stirring things up that were best left alone, tweaking scars because I thought I should, over a backdrop of bland therapeutic platitudes. Some emotional scars need space, to be apprehended on their terms in a way that acknowledges their integrity. After all, these scars mark our strength, our history. We survived. They served a purpose, protected us from total ruin, from being hurt again.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling impossibly scarred, I remind myself how far I've come since starting this blog. Telling my stories in my own time works. Maybe the best approach is to deal with the scars as they surface and to let them be until they do.
From a photo prompt very much like this image by dougfelt.
Too many to count
10 November 2010 10:12 AM
*A sampler CD from Absolutely Kosher records. I think I should know the guy on the sleeve, but I was never goth and I can’t say I was ever really punk, since I lack some of the necessary darkness. I’m my mother’s daughter, a goody-goody who lives on the dark side in my mind only. Favorite song at the moment? The very catchy Fireflies by Chris Garneau (see below).
*A platform for a Yoda figurine where my son (who can’t read yet) has pasted the thought bubble: A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. The Yoda figurine was a Halloween present to my son from my father and stepmother. Yoda's right ear broke off almost immediately and he's missing a few toes. When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not.
*A human skull. Short (dull) story that reaffirms my desire to be cremated.
*An ear of Indian corn, with multicolored kernels. Outdated American narrative embodied in decorative dried corn. The kid loves this stuff.
*A penholder made out of a baking powder can decorated by the boy, a useless old-fashioned dial timer, a zombie finger puppet, bright green vampire teeth, the empty shell of a silly putty egg, a glob of silly putty, a dessicated zested lemon half, a sign that says “Free Cookies” from a cookie jar out of my husband's childhood, a cut-out figure of the children’s book character Art Dog that my husband made out of thin foam rubber, a rubber door stop, a 1956 rupee, a pile of Sunday's New York Times, a flaccid balloon, a small griffin toy, a glass lizard, miniature fruits and vegetables made out of clay, a lump of coal, pennies marked with green ink, a "blow-out," aka noisemaker or (in our house) lizard tongue. Oh, and cup of hot water, since I don't drink coffee after 8 a.m.
Just like your coffee table, right?
Time to start cleaning . . .
From a prompt: Four objects.
Image: The coffee table at 9:30 this morning.
Oh, baby
08 November 2010 01:37 PM
Sure, you may see a sweet little bundle of innocence, quiet for once (thank god), but what I see is a life-changer, a preverbal beast that will wake you up every two hours for the next two and a half years, that will still be coming into your bed five years later, tossing and turning with that cough that refuses to go away. Between his hacks and the exploring feet (depending on his position, thrust between your thighs, wedged into the small of your back, playing against the back of your neck) and that damn cat, you’ll never get a full night’s sleep again.
Whenever I hear that someone is having their first baby, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’Roses pops into my head. This is especially true for the older parents, the ones who have spent a decade or two sleeping in and going out to dinner whenever they want. Having a baby changes things and at first the change may not be so welcome. Here is this tiny dependent creature, so sweet (truly), who can’t really tell you what he or she wants yet demands you take care of all of his needs. “Demands:” it isn’t a fair word at all. Babies need us and sometimes that can be totally overwhelming, especially when you don’t get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep for years and when you feel like you have no idea what you are doing.
Then there’s the way a baby can slam you into your past, the past that may be present anyway. When my son was born a little over five years ago, we lived on the East Coast, close to my mother and a four hour drive from my father. We had naive (and perhaps unfair) hopes that my mother would help with the baby. At the time, her life was a bit chaotic, as it was for most of my childhood. She was entangled in an unhealthy relationship with someone who had a serious substance abuse problem. This person – let's call him Ricky, the addict with the little boy's name – had access to her car even though he was unlicensed. He brought strange characters into her house. He drove her around town on scrap metal hunts, adventures in Baltimore's underbelly, and borrowed money from her when his ran out. The night I went into labor, he had "borrowed" her car. Our plans for her to help that first week were scrapped as she tried to locate her car and dealt with other Ricky-related problems.
Being abandoned by my mother at a critical moment was a familiar feeling. Having a tiny being that depended on me when I felt so incompetent and unworthy didn't help. The switch from a life of controlling my own time and being out in the world independently to being on baby time and hardly ever leaving his side was a difficult one. Meanwhile, the boy didn’t sleep in general or at all without a warm presence beside him in the bed. My mother problems, my “abandonment issues” were kicking me in the ass. Welcome to the jungle . . .
We adjust. We find our way as parents. Still, I can’t look at a picture of a baby without remembering my son's first year and wishing I could do it all over again with a clear mind, letting the baby be a baby and me be a mother, competent and necessary.
The photo was the prompt. Jane Underwood of the Writing Salon is the photographer.
The real thing
02 November 2010 02:33 PM
My grandmother kept a bowl of plastic fruit in the center of her dining room table. Heavy grapes the color of lime sherbet clustered next to just-so pears and hard-as-Tupperware bananas, bright and artfully speckled. The bowl rested on top of a frilly doily, next to the lazy susan that held salt, pepper and condiments. We removed the fruit when we actually wanted to eat, put it aside during big family meals when my aunt and mother put the table leaf in and camouflaged the maple top with a pad and a heavy vinyl cloth, its plastic disguise.
Fake fruit was an adult conceit that fascinated me, the effort involved to make something look real, down to a sprinkling of brown on a banana or a jaunty fabric leaf still attached to an apple stem. It was a testament to the illusory power of plastic. As a grownup, I wonder what sort of thinking (if any) is behind fruit as decoration versus fruit as actual food. Why not mix the two and put out stuff you can eat? I don’t remember biting into many fresh grapes or bananas or pears at my grandmother's house. Instead there were syrupy fruit cups, ice cream Dixie cups with wooden paddles for spoons, greasy Cheez-Its straight from the box. Lunches materialized out of powder, water, and starch. Dinner fell from a box or the freezer or was handed to us via the drive-thru window at Big Elk Mall McDonald's. My order never wavered: hamburger, French fries, Coca Cola.
Two years after my grandmother's death, there were still TV dinners in the old utility room freezer. When I missed her I craved salisbury steak in a thick mushroom gravy or fried chicken with crisp battered skin, wrinkled peas, potatoes whipped into paste and crumbly apple cobbler for desert. In her life, we celebrated modern technology, the power of the deep freeze, the effects of dehydration on vegetables. After her death, I was subjected more often to my mother's diet regime, which was all about freshness and sauteing in olive oil or real butter, about the taste of a peach.
Over time, I moved closer to my mother's approach to food. In 1995, I gave up most meat (though I still eat fish). Almost ten years later, I attended a cooking school where we cooked with whole grains and natural sweetners. Though my son does occasionally eat macaroni and cheese from a box, he has never tasted McDonald's french fries. I make almost everything from scratch. The freezer in our house contains blueberries, veggie sausages, loaves of bread, and ice cube trays. We have two bowls of real, edible fruit within easy kid reach. Apples, pomegranates, and persimmons intermingle with cooking ingredients, onions, shallots, garlic, with the odd squash or two. The kid may only eat pasta with butter and cheese for dinner, but he also loves fruit, thank goodness.
My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was nine, probably in part because of her chemical, salt and fat consumption, though the smoking didn't help. I wonder how she would interpret my adult self, my diet, my liberal ways. We were so close (I lived with her on an off until her death and she took care of me during school and summer vacations) – would my rebellious teenage years and outsider adulthood have turned her away? If she lived would I never have gone pescetarian? Would I still be ordering hamburgers and French fries crisp with fat?
And if not, would she have loved me anyway?
From a photo prompt.
Love letter
30 October 2010 06:31 AM
Dear DT,
Remember October 1998, when we went on the Gettysburg bike tour? I was brave and pretended that I liked cycling. You were kind and understanding when my bravery only lasted a few hours. The B&B innkeepers, a pushy woman and her Rick Moranis lookalike husband, were hard to take. That first night we went back to our room and laughed until we cried about the day, me struggling on a bike, the story of the lookalike tootling on a kazoo in a coffee shop as being the innkeepers' aha! moment, the awkwardness of it all. How we ever got into the Song of the Humpback Whale (smack smack smack the ocean is my s m o r g a s b o r d click click s m o r g a s b o r d) I don't remember, but I do remember feeling connected and happy. We had been dating for about five months and it was still new. One of the men in the group asked if we were married and another said "They like each other too much." Not a happy view of marriage, but proximity and responsibility do wear one down.
I still like you a lot. And I love you.
In those early months, I would sometimes stay at your place and then take the Metro back before work to my house in Takoma Park so that I could change. It was a rush, being in love, feeling exhausted from our late night conversations. Everything glowed. Everything was funny. Remember Smoothy Chops? Schnozola?
How about the mornings in my Dupont Circle apartment, the neighbor with the motorbike, our morning warm-up wake-up call? The motorbike rumbled and growled until finally it took off with a high-pitched buzz. "He's riding his bee to work," I said one morning. We laughed so hard that our stomach muscles ached.
Things weren't always easy. I was going through a divorce. Your mother was dying of cancer. My apartment flooded out when an upstairs neighbor's hot water heater died. You came over in the middle of the night to bail me and the cats out, took me away from that water-logged place. I never went back. It wasn't the best way of moving in with you. The cats and I were like friendly squatters at your place, loved, but not exactly welcome.
Eventually we worked it out, but in the meantime we united against a common irritation, your neighbor, C. C's house was in a constant state of renovation and repair, of work done and then torn out and done all over again. He dealt with his neuroses, about completion, about home, in public and it was painful to watch. C dug a 20 foot trench between your place and his, intending to build a brick wall. The trench was open for months. It filled with rain. The sides crumbled. It was a hazard. An eyesore. After much discussion, we set up plastic cowboys, Indians, and army men in attack mode in the trench, a mild form of revenge, laughing as we pictured him finding them.
Remember Hobo the cat? The tomato plants? The long weekend in London for my thirtieth birthday?
Sometimes I mourn the fact that discovery is behind us, that what was new will never be again. Routines and responsibility for a child change the nature of a relationship. We have a common goal -- raising a healthy kid -- but in the meantime we've settled ourselves into comfortable routines. Sometimes those routines chafe. They get me down and I wonder: is this it?
Then I remind myself of the sweetness of our early days and of our continuing story. I miss the lingering mornings, the time when all we had to focus on was the two of us. We have a good life together, the kid is great, but there is something to be said for a slow Sunday morning, no reason to get out of bed, for coffee and the paper and laughter. We'll get those days back, I promise. It will be something to look forward to.
Love,
Jenna
Image by -JosephB-.
From a photo prompt, edited 10/30.
Subprime
25 October 2010 12:53 PM
The house is empty now. The concrete front porch, cracked and unstable, falls in on itself. The paint flakes and powders in the wind. Thirty years, twenty years, ten years ago, someone planted flowers and pulled out weeds. They painted and caulked, patched the cracks. They grew old in place. They got sick. Their eyesight weakened. Their knees gave in to arthritis, until finally the people moved or died or were wheeled away. Only the man was left, too preoccupied or addled or unlucky to keep it up.
It’s not the only empty house in our neighborhood. There are a few of them, stucco bungalows limned with cracks, their front yards crackling with dead grass or lush with weeds. Passion vines crawl across windows. Tattered curtains veil darkened windows. The subprime mortgage crisis, the lousy California economy, are creating more of these houses. Our rental house, which is under foreclosure, could end up being one of them if our attempt to buy it fails. There are a dozen houses within a mile of us that may be going to auction in the next month.
Six weeks ago, I noticed a pile of junk in the driveway of a house around the corner where a white truck used to park. Every morning I would pass the truck as it warmed up. Some afternoons the grandma would be in the yard tending roses. Now No Trespassing notices are posted in the windows and a For Sale sign hangs out front. For Sale signs are everywhere in the neighborhood and I wonder: who will be buying?
The elements take over. Roofs sag, rain soaks into floorboards. Mold creeps, weeds tangle. Animals nibble at the crumbling edges. They nest in pantries and silverware drawers. And the property values, the property values. They fall all around us.
Image: An abandoned house in our neighborhood.
Originally from a prompt, Abandoned. Back to the Round Robin.