i seem to have lost my gloves.

I have been monumentally right about things I was trying so desperately to be wrong about. I walked home at one thirty this morning crying and laughing endlessly. Three campus security officers passed me and I was sure they were going to take me to the drunk tank. I laughed because I have built myself around an illusion, and given my love to a creature who fancies itself tortured by me, so endlessly that it's gone feral again.

And because of my choice to do this, I am alone again.

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

--piet heim

I've been avoiding this blog like the plague, because I couldn't face myself. I'm a bad liar.

That's all I've got tonight. Being right makes me so, so sleepy. And tomorrow I've got to get up, brush my teeth, and find some gloves.

happy anniversary, baby, you can have the flamethrower

Today, I have two things.

a) I have found solace since my last post. In this


Yes, we all make mistakes, even if we are Kevin Smith's version of God. Poor , Alanis. She went on to bigger and better things, like cussing out Uncle Joey in this gem Which is further proof that I am redeemable. Ish.

b)

This is a phase of renewal. Of taking all the things that broke me before, looking them in the eyes and saying, you scare the crap out of me, but even if you beat me before, I'm going to try again. Because before I didn't know things about myself, like how to know the difference between betrayal and paranoia. I didn't know how to take care of me, and therefore be someone who could be taken in, and treasured. I didn't know so many things about myself. But now that I know, now that I have perspective, I want to try them again.

That includes Harry. No, that's not his name, but for our purposes here, it is. Harry and I stomped all over each other. We got scared, and in our circular stampede, endlessly carouselling between the shelter of each other, the (unpiercing, shallow, and therefore safe) refuge of our endless backup plans, and the assurance of the exit, we trampled each other. Until, in November, we found ourselves flattened and dirty, the sorry refuse left for the streetsweepers at the end of the parade's reveries. Our injuries to one another are the pi of numbered indiscretions. Not infinite, but far too close to list. And so I will round it up. We assailed each other with 3.14 units of insult and blasphemy against the very name of that love which we claimed strung us together. And pi is the key to the angry circle. The numbered faults are the equation by which we find the circumference of our grudgery. Towards the end, we were conjoined by the pain. Made siamese twins by the constraining ligaments of our mutual anger. It held us together and forced the endless stepping-on-toes sloppy foxtrot of those who cannot seem to love each other in step.

Our trespassed are ours alone, and not to be shared with any web aside from the one woven between us. But in spite of having watched all the anguish heaped and gathered like the garbage of one infamous Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, we found ourselves in need of one another. For he is the only man, aside from my mother and the lawyers who knows the words that ended the world, and he's the one whose hair I cut, and who knows exactly what I'm talking about when I start singing the lyrics to songs from The Goofy Movie. He knows I hate underwear and when I demand romance, he gives me the flamethrower in Zombie Apocalypse.

And when I stay the night, and wake up with terrible breath, I sunlight against red eyelashes, and the strangest mix of blue and brown in wide open eyes, who haven't yet remembered to be afraid of me.

It's not perfect. It still hurts. I ask 800 masochistic questions a day, and catch myself looking for proof that I'm failing. Everything feels like a clue, but I am no detached Sherlock Holmes, and I am making clues to fit theories, and not the other way around.

But I want to try. Some part of me has to know that I did my best to hold on to the man who knows all my shame and secrets, even if he doesn't remember them. Because even if it isn't movie perfect, when someone lets you have the flamethrower, you don't walk away from that lightly. So maybe I'll lose, but you never know, I've got the flamethrower now.

because my tears were full of eyes

Today, I am cleaning up wreckage from hurricane Rachel; today, and tomorrow, and for quite some time. Slowly, always, and daily.

There's an e.e. cummings poem that google, for all it's omniscience, is unacquainted with.

It's about an organgrinder and a fortune telling cockatoo whose tidings make all of New York's 14th Avenue disappear. He interrupts the word disappear to elaborate, in true Ed style. Like this:

dis(because my tears were full of eyes)appeared.

And that's what it's like. That one line encompasses everything I'm trying to say today. I'm trying to say that sometimes I can't even finish the word. I have to stop saying what I'm saying and being who I am just to feel it all. I am my own arrhythmia. I am the girl who gets so wrapped up in exactly what I'm feeling that I forget to look around.

The world disappears because my eyes are bobbing uselessly in the vat of my emotion. I miss the opportunity to improve, and I cannot see the ground in front of my feet. My vision drowns in a sea of strangely intense feeling. In the times of great travesty, I stumble, and become more tear than eye and the life I am making falls away.

But not this time. In the still following each of the storms of my life, I find myself prostrate and breathless before the fact that irrevocably, my life is mine.

And this time, I will be more eyes than tears.

the injustice of un-learning

Read carefully. I am opening a gate. Because I cannot see how else to make you understand, I am going to tell you a story.

When I was three I was placed in a foster home. The minutes of my life before about sixth grade are only Polaroids. I have an silent album of my days that are merely a glance and a feeling; nothing more. The first is of a cabinet in the laundry room of my mother's house. It is filled and overrun by canned goods. I see in my mind the concentric rings atop a can. Then a snap inside of me and a feeling of doom. I feel apocalypse and holocaust and the end of days in an instant. I feel the world finishing it's last revolution but somehow, the green beans at my feet survive. But all I see are yawning cabinet doors; corn, green beans, and the end of all things.

The second is a twin to the other; they are born of and fed by the same action. Flesh of the instant in which I shattered the universe and all of the pieces ran off into the ether in a squabbling line and chased each other from then until now. The pieces have run one behind the other and formed my days from that instant to this.

I am three years old, just as in the first, but I am alone. I am in a big, soft bed. It is so much bigger than me and the infinite dark of the bedroom in the first of my foster homes stretches out around me. There is a door that is too far away. It is hell. I know this as surely as I know I brought myself here. As surely as I know God hates liars. The mental Polaroid is filled with the sort of shame one could only feel in the deep hateful echelons of hell reserved for conniving little girls. I think if there is a hell and I find my way there it will be a blackened room with a perfect bed in which I cannot sleep; into which the wrong person tucks me every incalculable night; in which I lay alone, with only my shame to sing me goodnight until Satan has brought upon me the vengeance which I deserve.

These Polaroids belong to each other in the way the dawn belongs to the night. One must follow the other in the perdurable loop of my story. They must and will and always have because in my tiny fluttering heart rested the conviction that I deserved the temperate inferno of that farmhouse bedroom. I could not fathom a world in which something could happen that I did not deserve.

And so, my opinion was formed, and the dominoes fell. For 16 years, they fell and threatened to fall for another hundred. The how is not so important to our tale, nor is the when, or the why; but one day, the ripples stopped. I had shaped a life around a faulty idea of what I deserved and what was to be had. I was wrong.

One of life's most poignant tragedies and one of it's greatest opportunities for redemption is that each of us alone are that which determines what we deserve. Through what we are shown of the world and ourselves, we create bounds for our own worthiness. This is who I thought I was for most of my life. A liar. A coward. A destroyer of worlds. And I will spend the rest of my life unraveling the grim tapestry of myself.

We settle. We seek the love, the life, and the future we think we deserve and immutably, we find it. Even when it is so much less than we are. While drowning in the consumptive hatred of our personal hells, we reject the redemptive oxygen of higher hopes. We hear nothing over the roaring congress of our consciences lobbying in favor of our preconceptions, and we are deafened to the unquenchable potential of our humanity.

What I am trying to say, ever so endlessly is this: you are more. Stop. I don't care what conviction holds you prisoner to your current state. It is lying to you. Any part of yourself that denies you the flight of sanguine self-reverie is not your friend. The cruel cry of your ignominy is fallacy. Your imperfection, your humanity, makes you no less sacred; it makes you no less able to be accepted and rejoiced or washed clean in the teary salt-bath of your repentance.

Can a three year old lie? Can she bring down the sky? I don't know. I may never know what I did in the instant of the cupboard or see the endless strings of damage I did, whether by my troth or my lie. But that cannot be the sum of me. The narrow damaged line of my sight through all those years cannot have taken in the totality of my possibility. Something in me tells me that it matters so much less than what happens now. I may have been the toddler messenger of Armageddon, but I am worthy of this life.

I have been unlearning and unwinding the endless threads of my assumed destiny for 3 years, and I have only in the last month seen how beautiful a job I did with what I was given, how beautiful I always was, even as the incarnation of havoc, and it has made me love what I can be all the more.The terrible injustice is this: I was told for years that I deserved more and I never heard it. You will not hear me, and it breaks my heart. You will have to unlearn on your own, and when you do, we'll be waiting.

Please, trust me. I know things. Remember, I've been to hell.

P.S. This didn't say what I wanted it to say.It's for all of us, and I would scream it if I thought a single one would really hear.

oh my.

what such thing
could deliver this hope?
this rising trembling hope
on which i am poised
high above my simple days
and waiting for a
fall.

the throat of such a thing
could from it's humid blackness
hum sweet nothings
into my ears
making my long blue veins
course lightning
standing all my greatest fears
on end.

such a thing could make each part of me
in turn
blaze with a cold fire of anticipation
and buzz with vibrating
happiness.

each in turn, but not
all at once.
that would be too much.
it would
all
be too much.
entirely too much to bear.

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.