dear rachel

I am writing this to you from the couch, from the barely-morning hours, from the place where overzealous Spanish television is cheering you on, urging you forward. I am writing to you Rachel, from a place outside yourself.

I am writing to you because you should know that you have become a glutton, a lush. Baudelaire told you that you needed to be drunk, and so you are. He said that Time must be avoided, that in order that you might not be crushed you must drink deeply and "be drunk without ceasing." He commanded that the poison be of your choosing and you listened. He offered virtue, wine, poetry arrayed in an intoxicating buffet and demanded that if you were to hide from the gallows of time you must take the heavy drought of ordinary conviviality and drown in it.

And because for all my attempted objectivity I am you, with your weaknesses and impulses, I did. I stole from e.e. cummings to describe rainy days. I made cups of tea events and imagined the liquid warming away all weariness, and because I imagined it, my pretense won. I spent an hour and a half (stonecoldandschoolmarmsober) peeling the skin from a grapefruit, separating the sections, laying them side by side, like so many swaddled babies in a nursery, tenderly peeling the bitter white sub-skin from the sections, and teaching my tongue to separate and love every single miracle bubble of juice. I ate the most expensive sushi roll on the menu, slowly; alone. I showed cleavage. I refused to tan or brush my hair. I loved the hell out of the man most dangerous to my heart. I accepted an apology. I kissed asses that needed kissing. I sympathized with a woman who hated me, I ached for her when she hurt.

And above all, the part that makes me life's addict, it's endless gorging glutton is this: I softened it all with the grany lens of the poetic mind. I drizzled it all with the honey of a heart released from pain and I watched it baptize the world's horrors.

I frivolously made every single day of my life more than it ever was. I celebrated and drank mediocrity by lending a charming blessedness to the simple difference between my smell before and after a shower. I allowed this. I toasted and blessed this continual drunkenness on the simple breaths of mortality as a means to survive crushing defeat. But we have survived. And now I am asking for a change.

We have made a glass half-full (a life half-empty) into a cup overflowing, by pouring the entirety of my, your, (our?) purpose into the smallest glass to be found. While this is a charming quality for the dowdiest of starving artists, this is not enough.

There is more. You have more within you.

So, I'm not asking. I'm telling. Get a bigger cup, child. Fill it up. Expand your drink with the effervescence of purpose and thrive at the challenge. Let the quest be your new drug.

Then, when we've filled the oceans, the swimming pools, the rivers, and the water towers, we'll toast Baudelaire, and get drunk on our own vitality. Then, my dear, time cannot touch you.


salud,
the prodigal child.

mine

Forgive me, but I'm about to be a girl.

I shaved my legs today, I put on a tiny, pretty, white nightie. It's the kind with lace, a ribbon, satin. It's the sort of thing that belongs in an old movie. It's too small to be worn by a grandmother, and somehow too nice, unsuitable for the more tawdry purposes of small silken underthings. I made my bed just to unmake it. I folded hospital corners into the sheets just so that my smooth toes could have the joy of rumpling them again. I let my hair down.

I read a cookbook, and something a entirely too girly to admit to publicly. I appreciated myself in the mirror and watched myself glow in the low lighting.

I felt pretty and spoiled wrapped in my new, perfectly white comforter in spite of the fact that it has no cover yet. I let myself feel the luxury of new sheets and ignored, for the moment, my bare white walls and my blinds open to the shrubberies behind my apartment, still sleepy with the naked late-winter midnight. I let myself be a silent pink cricket and rub my legs back and forth against each other just enjoying a pretended femininity implied by all the softness. I leaned into my brand new pillows and inspite of my revelry, was lonely.

I remembered a couple I saw a few years ago on a hiking trail in oregon. He was balding, and she had long braids and as many white hairs as black, as if her hair couldn't decide whether or not to match the age in her skin, or the youth in her eyes. They wore identical rain slickers, broken in rain proof shoes, and their hands were joined.

Each of their knuckles were swollen, as though time, and great love, had determined they must never let go, and so had manifested these fattened joints to lock them together, to jigsaw their wrinkles, one into the other, so that either hand alone was the lost piece of a two-part puzzle. The fit implied an intimacy which belied their long years together, and spoke not of one becoming accustomed to the other. There was no weariness in his eyes to complain of the sinking of her breasts.

I could imagine a future for myself much like theirs. A man to measure with me the trek of my breasts toward the curve of my aging hips. One who could measure with me every inch as they every so gradually fell. Humming to me in irony the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down." And celebrating each millimeter they crept toward decrepitude, because each fraction of a measurement, every hair-width down my chest was another day, another week. Each tiny evaporation of elasticity meant another Sunday morning, deep in bed, him leaned back aganst my chest, between my legs, reading the paper while I smiled at the constellations of liverspots beneath the ever thinning veil of hair atop his lovely head.

I imagined myself, rounder of the hip, fuller in the thighs, sleeping nights with him behind me, the curve around my dot, and we a formata of slowing metabolism, of hours shared, of a lengthening note of love that we would hold until both our breaths failed.

But he is not here. This night is not the night for that man whose hair will creep with every adventure we share from atop is head and sneak out the pores of his ears, his nose, his back. Tonight is not when we use my breasts as a measuring stick, to mark the growth of our time together.

Tonight I am lonely. But my chest is high and proud, and my hair is auburn and bends against shoulders who refuse to believe they might ever be anything but smooth. Tonight my prettiness and my lingerie lend themselves merely to the romanticism of my days and the calming of my tightly wound spirit. There is nothing lurid in it, nothing tawdry.

Some day, after a hundred thousand more adventures, after the faint beginnings of crows feet, or after some grand adventure, after nine thousand more trips to the coffee shop, and as many more poems as I can stand, after more broken bones, more broken hearts, and more happy lies, after a very long time of happy smooth vital limbs, after making love in ways only the very youthful can, there will be a time for measuring days in sinking breasts, and wedging wrinkles together, but not tonight.

I belong to myself and tonight, despite my loneliness, hope and my sweet bed have taken away all desire to share.

spit it out, junior.

Sometimes, like I dunno, every day since my last real blog entry, I get stuck on repeat. Too much happens and I overload and just shut down all the systems and put the overly verbose bullshit machine in neutral and try to wait things out.

This is a very bad idea. It's ignorance on my part really. I know what will happen. I have an autoimmune disease, and when I do the whole shut up lock down, lay down, hide out routine, it (for lack of a slightly less gangster term) straight trips out. I can't see and my pupils start to dilate at different times and because of all the weird scarring in my eyes, my irises start to look like ink blot tests. I look like I'm on ecstasy, and the people around me, because of my creepily shaped eyes, start to think they might be too. Then people start to get ugly and words begin to melt into them selves on the paper, as if the heat of everything I'm feeling has made literary fondue of everything I want to read. People always think I'm drunk, or high, or that I've been giving butterfly kisses to a leper.

Then, the dreams start. I am the queen of messed up dreams. Two nights ago, I had a dream that I was in an involuntary drag race with a 1965 Mustang driven by a pair of octogenarian lovebirds whose accelerator was somehow linked to mine. Everytime they sped up, I sped up. Everytime his oxygen tank fell on the floor and he slammed the brakes, my car would, with a disturbingly long lag, brake as well. All fun and grand, except for the fact that even my dreams understand the laws of physics. So, factoring in the braking lag and the weight of a my matching (but poorly repainted) STEEL deathtrap muscle car attempting to come to a dead stop from speeds that would make NASCAR widdle themselves, it was really only a matter of time before I found myself hopping out of a car mangled on the side of the road and apparently responsible for the deaths of an old couple, and, my somehow conscious real self was silently sleep raging at my dream self for being too preoccupied with glass slivers in my finger to mourn the fact that I had most definitely just killed people.

So, inevitably, when I get tired of my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend dream spitting on me, or the gustapo wanting to execute me for drunk driving, when I wasn't even in the car, I just boycott sleeping altogether. I find a stack of books, a giant mug of coffee, and sit about two inches from the page, picking my way through the static on each page, because I'm too blind to tell the difference between a cat and a towel.

This is why I write. This is why there is bad angsty poetry in red ball point pen in random storage facilities all over the country. This is why I have a blog. This is why my laptop and I are bestest of besties (yeah, I just said that.)

This is why I'm awake until four in the morning.

I know the cause and the cure.

The point is, that I just get clogged up. I know myself very well. I know that I can sort through just about anything if I can just get my brain to shut the hell up and focus on one single idea. But sometimes I just can't, and the hardest part is breaking the silence. I'm me. I always have the advice. I'm the girl who's seen too much, who says too much, who always has the words. But sometimes, I just don't know what to say. Sometimes I end up killing old people and writing bad blogs at 4:11 AM because not saying anything is just not working and I don't believe in the needless deaths of '65 Mustangs.