Grandma
Category: Religion and Philosophy

(It's my dearest sister's birthday; this one is for her. So I apologize.)

She gets violent when the sun goes down; her eyes turn tawny and lion-like with the last yellows of the day. I often catch her out in the garden punching butterflies out of the air with her tiny white fists, knuckles warped red in rage.

"I'm just so fucking angry," she says, swatting a monarch. "I could just spit."

Booze has nothing to do with it. I've conducted experiments; written down my findings and analyzed my data. It comes on like a headache, her rage, and we weather it like truckers; popping pills and taking time-outs in strange places. One time she lost it in a dressing room and I smothered her in a prom dress for fifteen minutes before she collected her cool.

"It fucking itched," she explained later. "Why the god damn fuck do they insist on making clothes that itch? And thanks for almost smothering me with the most ugly god damn dress in the world. I thought you were my friend."

She punched a hole in the door yesterday.

Sometimes her voodoo is passive. That is when it's the most dangerous. I wake to a pillow case full of the smell of burnt hair and sheets peppered with chicken bones and am unable to walk right for days.

"You should have done the fucking dishes when I asked you." she grins when I mention my aching joints.

I shouldn't have locked her out. I should have had the lights on and the door open and maybe some flowers.

I have learned to always flush kleenex and used band-aids down the toilet.

At night, she's always smooth and calm like bath water; sweet smelling and serene. Her breath smells alive as she leans over and whispers soft, "I love you so much. Oh fuck, I love you so much; I could just spit."

Today I found splinters of wood in my soup.

It was delicious.

I didn't spit.

4:02 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Coffee Conversations
Category: Friends

Kilt tilted rakishly and beer in hand, he clasped our shoulders and leaned in, serious as a mass grave. "Listen guys, it's time to stop fucking around. We're going to get down to some serious drinking now....

Hey barkeep! Do you have any Tequila Rose?!"

10:46 AM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Skinny

She's mostly light, on the outside. The sort I could stuff in my pocket. The sort that gets patted on the head and and told "awwww". She's mostly light, on the outside; a figment of random sparkles and smile and wisdom; for she's older than she looks, my dear, she'll fool you. I've seen men try to "guess nice" and still land 20 years younger. She's a salve, a sprout, a pure soul trapped in an enviable shell.

She's mostly light, on the outside. Loose limbed and goose-necked, a picture of grace drawn abruptly on the concrete wall of one's heart; something seen from behind moving glass and never forgotten, the sound of certain mouths saying certain words in a certain tone of voice that haunt the most intimate moments. She's that small.

She's that great.

I found her stuck to my sleeve once, like a forgotten post-it, a personal (while not prying) question marked in Sharpie across the front. I was caught off guard in a winter frozen moment; breath and panic visible in the exhale of a second, the wonder of what to say as dazzling as lights and foreign gifts and resurrection:

"My name is *static*. What's yours?"

100 days later, she's written herself into my will.

200 days later, she's lighter, and that scares me. Her thoughts and questions slice through my hands like balloon tails made of razor wire and while her face gets younger, I watch her eyes gleam dangerously old; a violin string pulled too tight. Caressed the correct way she sings. One false move and she'll take your finger off.

She's that great.

"Hey hey hey hey," she screams over the P.A. system at work. "If your name is *static* and you've ever desired a praying mantis, get your ass back here 'cause I caught you one."

In a Starbuck's Venti Clear Cup, He's huge; fills the entire thing. Seems to be able to break out with the power of his forearms alone so we tape down the lid with miles of masking stuff. The thrill of the catch has caught us and we gasp and giggle like reality show starlettes drooling over Jimmy Choos, but are instead surrounded by miles of mall parking and giddy about peering through the plastic of a middle-class morning trophy at a small thing with a triangle head and forearms of death.

"You know," she says, her arms sticks, "We should really eat more."

"What should we name him?" I reply.

She's light. On the outside and on the inside. Life has made her mantid; has pulled her legs lengthy, has stretched her shadow svelte. When we walk home from work, the moon tugs her shadow like taffy until she's almost gone. She always buys me a sandwhich from the station.
"Eat this. You need to."

I have never. Yet.

I give it to my mantid.

For something so small, his hunger is insatiable. And yet he's so small. So light.

So skinny.

So young.

For now.

1:47 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Moving Out
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

I have a hard time letting things go.

I want to become new. Green. Alive.

I want to grow.

I want these things we've let turn brown and brittle and frail to age and decay and let sprout Spring.

Sleeping outside didn't help. The smell was still there. Everywhere. Even the air couldn't stifle it. I think it was mostly Sam.

I have a hard time letting things go. So I gave them away.

I buried each and every thing I own in the yard. My dishes, my notebooks, the ceramic nativity I stole from Goodwill. Plastic trash buckets from Target, crates of cd's, empty packs of cigarettes. Old love letters, plastic beads I found on the ground, bits of glass I've been collecting since the third grade. The coffee pot, my favorite bar stool, the laptop I've carried around the world. Sam.

He didn't say anything. Just gave me that look he's been giving me since I kept him from walking out after our fight. He stayed silent as a grave while the dirt blotted him out.

Given to the earth. Planted.

Rooted.

Home.

We were going to start over. I messed it up. I messed it up by holding us back, by holding on to all of my things, by refusing to let Sam walk out the door. Into this new place I brought old moldy ghosts and regrets and this is our only hope.

This is our only Home.

There's one hole left. There's one seed left.

The garden is quiet; like the house, like my heart, like Sam.

But in my trench I can hear the sneaky sounds of somethings; worms and roots and a second chance bursting forth. A second chance.

The compost pile is above me, balanced on a lever controlled by a string. I thought it would smell bad. It smells healthy. It smells like a circle. It smells like progress.

I have a hard time letting things go.

So I let go of the string.

The garden is quiet.

I scream.

But only for a second.

My new self is very still.

9:32 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Moving In
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

The new place is fantastic.  Airy, warm, and illuminated.  The ceilings are high and the walls are clean.  A perfect place to stretch my limbs and flex my fingers and start all over again.

We've really changed.  My new self is much more independent.  I set up everything myself and have been doing all the handy work around the place.  I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished. 

It was hard work moving all that stuff.  I really enjoyed opening all of the boxes and putting everything away.  It's a simple action that turns old familiar things new.  The crinkle of newspaper and the delight of digging to the bottom of a crate brings out a glee in me.  It's addicting.  I'm tempted to repack everything again just so I can unpack it all again.  Maybe the next unpacking will reveal newer, brighter, happier things.  Maybe if I put it all back in boxes and reopen them, everything will emerge more alive. 

I'm a bit obsessive lately.  It might be stress.  I'm overtired.  I'm not yet used to sleeping here.  It's a little too quiet.

As a reward for getting everything put away, I bought ice cream.  Sam and I used to eat ice cream all the time.  He won't eat it anymore.  It just sits and melts and bleeds all over the table.  When I scold him, he just gives me the look he's been giving me a lot lately.  Sam has changed a great deal too.  Sometimes I feel like repacking HIM, taking him apart and putting him back together a different, more loving way.  Instead, I go outside.  Outside I can escape his stare and collect my thoughts.

Sometimes I sleep outside.  I like the air out in the yard.  In all honesty, the house smells sort of funky.  Sour, as though all the things I'd brought with me were sullied with mold.  The yard is amazing.  Tangled, wild, and full of birds nests like my hair.  Maybe I'll take up gardening.  Try to help things grow and live.  Dig my fingers into the soil and get my hands clean.

Maybe I'll start a compost pile.  Turn old into new, brown into green, death into life.

Sam will be good at composting.  His new self is much more organic.

I like to picture us working together; me planting different seeds and him keeping them warm and fed.  At night we could sleep together beneath the stars, surrounded by our flower babies.  It wouldn't matter that he doesn't eat his ice cream or that he refuses to shower.  It wouldn't matter then that we don't talk.  We won't need to.

Our new selves will be okay with silence.

6:55 AM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Moving On
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Everything goes into boxes;  neat, stacked, labeled.  It's time.  Time to move on.

I hate fucking packing.  27 years worth of crap; Mountains of papers, old journals, letters, magazine articles, book reviews.  Piles of computer cords and wires, old cameras I'll never get around to fixing, broken instruments I've always wanted to learn to play, trinkets from trips and adventures that turned cheap and un-exotic looking once taken from their environments.  Pictures and postcards and ratty stuffed animals that smell like sick.  Notes from high school boyfriends, locks of hair from forgotten lovers, doodles of cartoons drawn on IHOP placemats complete with syrup stains.  Pictures of the past, plans for the future, the stuff I need Right Now.

We said we'd start over, start fresh.  We'd said we were going to set forth with clean feet, clear minds and grins of grim determination.  We were going to throw it all away and build something sleeker in it's place.  Streamline.  Light.

I've been with Sam for 5 years.  I still have coasters from the place we ate on our first date.

It's true the days had become heavy in the awkward sort of way that sneaks up on a person like the first day you reach down to pick up your son and notice he's too heavy to hold for long.  It's true it's easier to bat at demons when they've no objects to lurk behind, it's easier to banish shadows when there aren't any pillars of refuse to cast them.  It's time, we'd said.  Time to move on.  We could either go our seperate ways or join hands and go together.

I have a hard time letting things go.

Our pasts, the minutia of our lives, reminds us what we've been, who we are, why we're going where we're going.

The first thing he threw away was a crate of old papers.  He was right.  I felt lighter.  Giddy.

After that first crate, it was easier.  Everything went in the dumpster.  Dishes cracked, books splayed and bent, wood splintered.  When it was all gone, he stood triumphant in the empty room and dusted his hands on his pants.

"Don't you feel better?" 

I looked and saw him then, surrounded by space, light and free.  Completely forgein.  Frightening.  My feet touched nothing, my head drifted off.  The weight had kept us safe, kept us grounded, kept us in place.  Now where would we go?  How would we live?  Who were we?  Who was he?

"No.  I don't." 

The subsequent argument was inevidable, the air around us heavy like a raincloud with it for the past year and a half.  We hurled the little we had left and screamed ourselves silent. 

In the end, I just couldn't let him leave.

After the fight, I dug everything out of the dumpster and brought it back into the house.  It had aquired a not so pleasent smell but was mostly recoverable.  I drove to the grocery store and got a bunch of boxes and set to putting everything snug.  I cleaned the carpet and washed my clothes, scrubbed my hands and wrote the last rent check.  It's time.  Time to move on.

Only now, I'm taking the past with me.

The moving men will be here soon.  Everything goes into boxes; sorted stacked and clues as to the contents marked on the tops.  "Books",  "Old Papers",  "Kitchen,  "Sam".

I hate fucking packing.   I just have such a hard time letting things go.

2:41 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Coffee Conversations
Category: Romance and Relationships

The woman who runs the register at Citgo paid the 4 cent change for my apple and energy drink earlier this afternoon.  Almost immediately afterwards I involved myself in an argument of epic capabilities in hang-yourself-heat while wearing a sweater and having eaten nothing all day but an apple and an energy drink.  He turned to walk away and I started crying and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to run back to that sweet woman and give her four pennies and say, "It's not fucking worth it.  Your four pennies aren't going to make a shit of difference".

Later, after the skies turned a more subtle shade of anger, there was hugging and some teasing.

"Are you sure you want to do this?  Love me forever and always and also mow the lawn?"

He handed me a quarter, still warm and damp from his pocket.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?"

He shrugged.  "Maybe you might need it someday for the bus.  I can spare it.  It's change."  His voice got heavier.  "It adds up."

I held the silver apology in my open palm for a long minute.

"Thank you?"

"I donno," he said.  "Sometimes that extra random sense makes all the difference."

7:12 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The Stories
Category: Life

I've been amassing stories.  I swear.  My brain bursts with words and images and creepy lovely things to share with everyone.  Every day is an exercise in remembering and noticing and rearranging words.

I've been amassing stories.  I have much to tell you.  I swear.

I poise with pen over paper, I spit onto notebook pages, I record rants with my cell phone.  I've read your e-mails and noted your concerns and am flattered by the fact you miss me.

I'm pulling a Whitman.  Fail at first to find me?  Look here:
http://www.opentopia.com/showcam.php?id=1487&time=1117548056

Chances are I'm staring at the same screen and have been for hours.

I've been amassing stories.

I swear.

7:10 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

They Call Me....

Whenever She thanked me, She said my name.

I knew a girl named "Hope".  We used to joke and make puns a lot.  "Hope is an evil little thing," we'd say, thinking ourselves clever.  When she'd piss us off we'd chant "Hope is poison, Hope is poison".

Whenever She came to me in the mornings, She said my name.  "Good morning" and then a ring of bell tones and harmonics.  Even when I was so hung over I couldn't hear anything but the smell of whiskey and lonliness, I heard my name.

Sometimes I hate people based only on their names.  I've never had good luck with Sarah's.  Or Elizabeth's.  I've pretty much hated every Jessica I've ever met.  Guys named Tim I avoid like the plague.  To be fair though, I often adore Amy's and I've yet to meet a Betty I don't love.

Whenever She said my name, it was as though I'd never heard it before.  No one called me by my name.  Ever.  Not my friends, my family, the boys I took to bed.  When She said it, something in me jared awake; some primal philosophical instinct cried, screamed, sobbed; "That's me!!!"

The rest of my siblings are all named after grand important things; Relatives Who Made a Difference, Greek Mythological Characters, Dreams.  Once I asked my mother why she gave me my name and she said, "It was the first thing I saw after I gave birth.  It was the first thing I saw after I could breathe enough to read."

I am thankful Sweet Valley High was what was in my mother's room and not the Sears Catalog.

Whenever She said my name, it was as though She had picked it out herself.  It as as though it hadn't been an afterthought but instead something thought through... something done out of love instead of exhaustion. 
 
"Naming boys is easy," She explained to me one night.  "They're going to do what they do no matter what.  Naming girls is hard.  I wouldn't have been up to it."

"That's not true," I told Her.  At the time I thought I was lying.  To be nice.  Living up to my name.

I met a Naomi once.  She was really smart but in a cruel way.  I always fall in love with boys named Justin only to never speak to them again.  It's an old Flynn family rule never to get involved with an Ian.  Jennifer.....Jennifer's have always been good to me.  And Kristen's.  I try to stay away from Brian's and Ryan's. 
Jane's are always angels.

Whenever She said my name, it felt like a challenge.  When other people said it, I didn't notice or respond, it's as though they were repeating an old story or some joke I'd heard before.  When She said my name it was like lightning.  I was hypnotized and She snapped Her fingers.  The world jumped into focus.
"I don't think we're going to make it," I told Her once.  "He won't say my name."

"It's okay," She sighed and said my name.  After a pause she said,  "I'm still glad you're here."

I've never met a Joe I didn't like.  That's for damn sure.  Or an Amanda.  Or a Robert.

I know people named Azirif and Shunq and KeeKee.  KeeKee tells people her name is "Maud".

Right before She died She told me She wanted to give me something.  I couldn't think of anything.  "A name," I finally told her.  "Give me an actual name.  A name you would have given a daughter had you had one and loved her and prepared for her and if I were her."

So she did.  My own.  The same stupid name I'm never called and have always hated, the same stupid foreign word which is supposedly supposed to refer to ME.

"I would have named you just as you were," She explained.  "Even if it was a different word."

"You make your own name," She said and clasped my hand.  "Your name is only as good as you.  No matter how it sounds in your ears, you have to live up to the way it rolls off of other's tongues."

"You have to spend your moments making your ugly name, beautiful."

Whenever she said my name I was brave, I was beautiful, I was strong, I was honest, I as proud.

Whenever she said my name I was alive.

Now, with my name, my new name, my old name: I am alive.  And so is She. 

7:01 PM - 8 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Letter From Lady Jus; Part 2 (airport)
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

The Epic of Dis Mohr Von Beast Eater; Lover of Rattlebacks, Slayer of Sub-Humans, Forgiver of None.

A Memoir of Fear (written in stolen seconds) by Lady Jus; Heiress of Nothing, Eater of Nothing, Owner of Nothing, Consumer of Mad Dreams.

We have left my old home behind, a charred ruin of memories and echos. He did not look behind him as he rode away with his Army of dipsomaniacs and scamps. My city burned and He stayed crystalline. My flesh kept firm but my knees gave out and I crumpled.

He did not look behind.

I did.

I am not salt.

He is not either.

This last week has made me skinny and shaky. Filching bits of flitch from the fools who pilfer for Him has not proved opulent. The blond soldiers rarely leave anything behind but grease on bones or gristle they are too cockeyed to chew. Yet I have managed to survive, as much as a surprise to myself as it is, I'm sure, to you. I have scissored my sleeves; cut my coiffure; pulled in my pride. I made myself un-noticable in his ranks but have realized that is not a bragging right. His rows reek from the inside.

As long as I do not show my face in the light of the fire, as long as I do not undress, as long as I only grunt or shrug in response to questions; I am able to sidle along the sidelines. I believe the certain Blonde Soldier thinks I am some touched thing He took pity on and allows around like a lost, lame, bee with a back full of pollen looking for his hive. If I buzz around about enough, perhaps someone will gain from it. The Blonde gives me tips sometimes; he has no idea why they keep me alive. I have noticed he is a favorite of His and so have decided I should keep the Blonde One as a friend.

A friend.

But every time the young blonde soldier talks, I hear my young brother. I forget my purpose. My target becomes blonde and adolescent and naive. I imagine a belt of Briton tresses and the note I'd leave on my brother's grave. I remember the face the young one made after he pulled up his britches, the dead grimace on my siblings physiognomy after it was over.

I must remember, in my hunger and grief; My real target is blood-stained and mellow and sapient.

The real devil is not so easily fingered.

My goal is not revenge but instead equilibrium.

He is a briny saline shadow. He still sparkles. It seems His Sins are not the sort of those who would fuck angels. He is piquant and it stings me.

I must be twice as tireless, five times as forceful, seven times as steadfast. I must be consistent, mathematical, silent.

And so in these moments; stolen, savored, and partnered with my dead brother's rapist; I plan my next moves as a bee in a field of wasps.

Even if it kills me, He will feel my sting.

8:19 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment