same thing every time

a recorded dialogue of all of the small talk interactions that she had attempted and failed in the last year would, she was sure, serve as proof that she was unfit for human interaction, and conversation in particular. perhaps if this could be indisputably proven, she continued to muse, god would exempt her from the general life expectation of communication. sometimes she daydreamed about waking up one morning to find that she had no vocal chords. then she couldn't speak even if people wanted her to - and, even better, they would feel sorry for her, and grant her sympathetic smiles without extraneous commentary.

she stacked up the examples in her mind until they got so high that, like a towering pile of books of cassette tapes or some other precarious resource, they began to waver and tremble with all their weight and height. she would have written it all down on a list, but she had no pen, no paper, and no person to share a list with.

emotional

They met in the depths of the lake, under water, wet hair, bare legs touching.

A series of words memorized, ingrained, repeated, appearing even in her dreams. Something of potential, but also of failure; of love and of lust, but also of loneliness. Shout it, scream it, sing it even: They met in the depths of the lake! They met in the depths of the lake! They met in the depths of the lake!

DRUNK READING FEAR OF FLYING IN THE BATH

drunk reading fear of flying in the bath on a tuesday evening, angelica elizabeth barea-marie ponders the spectrum of intimacy between women, half listening to the ten o'clock news playing on the television in the next room. she recalls how her mother, when she had been alive, used to do this same thing. it strikes her as incredibly romantic - to lay there as her mother once had, reminiscing the days of the radio. oh how beautiful her mother seemed, in retrospect. despite her loneliness and graying hair and sagging tits that floated to the top of the bathwater, angelica elizabeth barea-marie's mother had been a beautiful woman; strong, full of grace. she wonders if her mother had been a lesbian, or just heavily wounded, or maybe just uninterested in anyone.

angelica spreads her legs and let the hot water graze her insides, the drone of the news fading away. she pictures margot tenenbaum in the bath and touches herself. she pictures her ex-husband in an apartment three blocks away, masturbating at the same time to the same image.

at this moment angelica hears a lone note play from the wooden piano in the foyer. there is someone in her home. she raises herself out of the bath, surprisingly prepared and unafraid, wraps herself in a towel, and walks to the hallway. she finds herself standing at the opposite end of the hallway as an older man, his finger suspended above the key. both angelica and her intruder appear equally surprised, and also equally drunk and depressed. the man, without saying anything, turns and leaves. angelica locks the door behind him.

the bath water is now lukewarm. the note rings in her head - A flat, she thinks, but she is just guessing. she imagines how different her life might have been if she had been born with perfect pitch. she thinks again of margot tenenbaum and tells herself, this week i will learn how to accomplish basic tasks with my toes. i will get a pedicure. maybe this will bring me closer to beauty. i need something special, she whispers out loud to her now empty home.

the spectrum of intimacy between women, a feminist studies professor had explained to her and a couple hundred other eager and anxious young women, is everything that has ever happened between women. every bit of love and conversation. angelica elizabeth barea-marie touches herself again and falls asleep early, naked, above the comforter on her bed. and the note plays on, in all of her dreams.

Trying to Be Someone

Your therapist asks you: "hypothetically, if you were depressed, what would you do?" You answer: "write about a life of depression and drinking coffee, while drinking coffee, depressed." You are pleased with this answer, an artist's answer, a writer's answer, until your therapist responds: "case and point." Case and point? You distrust this phrase, find no validity in it, and are pretty sure it has no real meaning. You would not be surprised if all therapists have a clipboard of phrases behind their desks to tell to patients, all equally meaningless - like "Does this ever make you feel like sleeping all day?" or "I think we are making some serious progress." You sit there refusing the label of depressed until you realized that if you were an artist, if you were a writer, you probably would have produced at least one suicide-attempt-inspired masterpiece by now.

gingivitIs, or, against the sedative nature of suburbia

"And then the lady wept!!" he cried from atop a shoebox/soapbox in the middle of the high school cafeteria, concluding a dramatic description of a teenage girl's self-loathing and depression. Jimmy Jones, a boy from a somewhere suburb, was preaching to his peers about his current crusade against the sedative nature of suburbia. "The ever-so pervasive epidemic of apathy and unhappiness knows no class boundaries, right? Right?!"

As the high school guidance counselor (and as a neurotic and maternal middle-aged woman with no children of your own to lose sleep over), Jimmy Jones made you nervous. He reminded you, with his theatricality and radical politics, of Sebastian Wright - a boy that you had known when you were young, who had sat across from you in your high school Shakespeare English class. Sebastian Wright - also political and theatrical - founded the school's peace club (Blood/Oil, he wrote on flyers, which you finally understood years later) and would often stand on his desk to read aloud from Shakespeare's texts (always being assigned the role of the Iago, the Mercutio).

In January of that school year, Sebastian did not show up for school one day. After a week-long absence, your teacher had announced that he had jumped off the golden gate bridge. You imagined it like flying. After that your teacher only assigned comedies, but it didn't matter. Life was decidedly tragic. You think: and then, Jimmy Jones, and then the lady wept.

Repetition helps. Literary devices in general help. All hope now rests on the written word. You think: defiance. You think: dignity. You think: gratitude. You are a grown woman but you still feel it, in your gut and in your toes, an amorphous blob of life gurgling misery and anxieties and coffee and beer. In bed that night you tuck aluminum foil in the Back pockets of your mouth and feel the burn above your cavities. Gingivitis, you this, is a beautiful word if you like the thought of inflammation.

sudden death sudden blindness

Eric experienced two and a half drastic life changes following the sudden death of his best friend Devin. Devin and Eric had been best friends since they were young boys, living together both throughout college and then in city apartments, the kind with fire escapes, through most of their twenties. In what was the 33rd year of life for both of them, Devin died in a freak boating accident. The results upon Eric's life were as follows:

ONE.
Eric developed an intense paranoia of becoming suddenly blind. He began having a reoccurring nightmare about sudden blindness every night, waking up in a cold sweat at the point in the dream when his nightmare persona entered complete and total darkness and the scene went black.

ONE AND A HALF.
Accompanying this paranoia was a phobia of blind people. After Devin's death, whenever he saw a blind person (and there were a lot of blind people in San Francisco), Eric became rigid with fear and could only imagine the person stepping off a curb and getting instantly flattened by oncoming traffic, a bus or a truck, something heavy and ruthless.

TWO AND A HALF.
Three weeks after the funeral, Eric left his wife of 4 years. It happened after he passed an alter of owl figures displayed in a random window across from Mission Dolores, which prompted Eric to remember a dream that he had just before himself and Devin moved out of their last apartment together to live with their respective fiances.

In the dream, Eric and Devin and a large owl sat at the kitchen table of their apartment. Devin opened his mouth to speak but instead of words his mouth hung open in silence and his tongue rolled out of his mouth and on to the floor. It must have hung six or seven feet long, stretching across the linoleum floor. Eric proceeded to roll up Devin's tongue and then, before returning the tongue to Devin's mouth, decided to place it in his own - just for a second, just to see. It was thick and juicy like a steak. In the dream Eric was vividly and positively certain that his friends' tongue was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. After taking the tongue out of his own mouth and placing it back in Devin's, the owl at the kitchen table spoke, telling Eric: "from this moment on, your taste buds will gradually deteriorate. nothing will ever taste as good as it just did. your vision, too, will deteriorate, and the colors will slowly but surely wash away, until there is nothing left but darkness."

Happens All The Time

His friend's called him Meat and he was a staunch vegetarian. He had a cat named Road Kill and a goldfish named Sushi. He was big on irony. Occasionally Meat got the urge to curl up in the fetal position, suck his thumb, and imagine he was in his mother's womb. Once he tried this in the bath, submerged in water, and almost died; it was half suicide attempt, half accident. No Big Deal. Happens All The Time. Despite depression, Meat knew he would be OK. He told me, Kyle, I know I will be OK, because at night I ride my bike around the neighborhood listening to music, and it feels good.