on the effects of the instruments of patriarchy

"you can be almost anything
when you're on your fucking knees"

she took all her anger out on her knees: the knees are the worst part of the human anatomy. what do you do when you're on our knees? you can pray, or you can suck a dick. she took offense to this. the knees, she firmly believed, exist solely for submissive acts; the knees exist solely for submission to men; and thus, the knees are an instrument of patriarchy.

she took all her anger out on her knees: i am not submissive, i am not submissive, she looked at them while she told them. and with a meat cleaver in the kitchen, she spread newspaper out on the linoleum floor and cut them off, first the right one, then the left one. bleeding on the kitchen floor in the moments following her act of defiance, she did not feel pain, but rather, she felt the pleasure of free will bubbling up from the chunks of missing flesh, bubbling up through her heart and lungs and in to her mind and in to the sky. looking up at the kitchen ceiling she thought, tomorrow i will make myself a skylight. this kitchen needs a window in the roof. so, she told herself, i will make myself one tomorrow, because this is not my father's house, this is my house. and so, she told herself, after tomorrow i will spend all day and all night looking up at the sky, because it is not The Father's sky, it is my sky. My sky, my sun, my moon, my stars. My house, my body, mine.

she woke up in the morning ready to do anything. In bed with her eyes closed she began to fantasize about her skylight, preparing to make it "by any means necessary" - with bricks, with fireworks, with her fists, whatever. But to her dismay, upon opening her eyes she discovered that on the floor next to her bed lay the bottom half of her legs. Shins and ankles and toes, her legs lay there next to each other like mannequins with nothing to hold on to.

tangerine fire

today --
today i saw your flowers stretching out in the dirt beside me, white and narrow and strong. with your knee digging in to my back and your hand pushing my face in to the ground, choking on mud and earth worms. your flowers grew before my eyes, stretching up and out like a pencil sketching a wall paper pattern, i thought i was watching vines climb a horizontal fence on fast-forward. but it was you. drowned in dirt that was both sweet and heavy, i couldn't gather the breath or the diction to tell you i saw your goodness manifested on the ground beside me, and it was so fucking beautiful.

yesterday --
yesterday i confused your persimmons with tangerines. i did it on purpose and i don't regret it, even now. one winter in a supermarket check-out line someone told me: the tangerine is the greatest gift of winter. so to your branches, empty besides those orange fruit who hung noble and intentional like ornaments and the shiny black crows who were endlessly perched adjacent to them, i applauded.

tomorrow --
tomorrow you will be free. at night the crow's wings will grow to cover the whole house, and all of me. it's shadow will be a thick blanket, i can feel it already. it's hard to breathe under water; it's hard to breathe under anything at all.

mutually assured destruction (church)

it was a humid summer, a long summer, but i only remember the sunday's. sunday's were the best days and the worst days. mother went to church and i was never invited. that summer, after the accident, mother found god's love (06/18/1998 god is love, she wrote in her diary). mother wanted god's love all to herself because she felt empty and needed to be filled up. on sunday's, i tried to find god, so that i could find what she was buried under and try my best to dig her out.

that summer we were crazy, mother and me. katy was my best friend from down the street and she was crazy, too. she told me she could help me find god's love, so on sunday's when mother was gone we went to our own church, in the bushes half-way between her house and mine. we made an alter of sticks and stones. we gathered a pile of elicit materials to help us really feel the spirit of god: needles, lighters, candy, plastic shooters of vodka stolen from 7-11, playboy magazines, cigarettes, mother's diary.

sunday mornings were a religious experience for all of us. katy and i were always high and so was mother, sitting in a wooden pew 20 minutes out of town.

on the day i died, i did not feel god's love. i felt my body fill up with heat and light, and i thought, 'is this him?' but i was just melting away in the summer sun, melting into earth like it was a swimming pool. i saw the light and it shone bright, it shone like the sun because that's what it was. and i felt the love but it wasn't god's love, it was mother's love, it was katy's love, it was summer's love. and then the lights became bright and fluorescent as they wheeled me down the hall of the hospital. i opened my eyes and i felt new, i felt alive, i looked up at mother to smile at her and let her know that it was ok. but mother was looking up, she was trying to find god somewhere in the ceiling, she was shouting "god please let her be ok! god please save her!"

it was sunday and mother was still buried in god's love when i died and came back to life. mother was still buried in god's love and she was buried so deep that she could only look upwards; if she had just looked down, she would have known, i was there and i was smiling.

this is a funeral procession: chapter three

i remember that conversation clearly because it was that night that jackson killed himself. bill found him hanging in the closet, their shared closet in their shared bedroom with two twin beds that had replaced their original queen. their shared bedroom in their shared apartment where they had long since stopped fucking.

i found bill walking downtown, in the middle of the street with cars honking. i put my arms around him and steered him on the sidewalk, and you may imagine it like a good Samaritan leading the blind but it was nothing like that because he was seeing so much more than any of us.

the worst had finally happened and bill was ready to take the world down with him; there would be a revolution and it would be bloody, it would be bloody, it would stain the streets red from all his broken hearts and battle wounds. we didn't speak as we walked, with bill reaching in to the passing trash cans, pulling out glass bottles and smashing them in the gutter. "this is a funeral procession!" he yelled. and then he stopped at the corner of pine and 2nd, he took off his ugly brown jacket, he took off his shirt and jeans and shoes and socks and underwear and scarf and gloves and he stood there, so unafraid, naked in the autumn wind.

"bill," i said, pulling him close to me, "come on bill, let's go home."

but this was the breaking point and you can't go back from there, this was the breaking point and he smashed glass after glass into the concrete. naked and loud, interrupting lief as we know it, bill stood there, a spectacle, an eye sore, a Fuck You.

and then the siren came, the cop car pulled up, its driver eying us with something like disgust.

"arrest me, kill me, rape me in your back seat," bill spat at the cop as he read him him 'rights.' "no amount of cruelty could surprise me anymore."

"bill!" i cried, horrified and terrified for him, pleading with the cop and explaining what he had been through. and as the cop handcuffed him and ducked him in to the back of the police car, i followed behind like a worried mother. the officer held out his hand to stop me - "are you kidding me? this isn't a fucking ambulance, it's an arrest. you can just hop on in to provide moral support."

"arrest me too," i pleaded, hands up and palms together, my first prayer in years.

"you're not disrupting public, you're not even drunk; you're just standing there. i can't arrest you. now go home, lady."

i looked at bill sitting in the backseat, arrested on charges of being too honest. hands locked behind him and face red and wet, eyes full of ghosts. ghosts of love lost, ghosts of life lost, the ghosts of the empty space that is supposed to be full and alive between us.

these are the hardest moments. when everything falls apart and all the struggles and heartbreaks and nightmares inside of us all collect into one, into one culminating event, one convergence of time and place; something terrible, something tangible. and these are the things that we can't do alone. so i stood in front of the cop car and i took off all my clothes too, standing naked in the middle of the city, in the middle of the world, where bill had just been. and i held my arms out in to the sky and i gave myself away for jackson, for bill, for you, and i screamed this is a funeral! this is a funeral! this is a funeral! this is a protest!

last year and the year before that and the year before that

sometimes when i lie on my back on my bedroom floor and listen to music with my eyes closed, i forget how old i am, i could be any age i've already been. because these are the things i do, these are the things we do, things that people do. we feel sadness and we feel longing and we stare up at the ceiling for hours. we play the same songs on repeat and memorize all the words and apply them to ourselves and sing them out loud in the dark. i eat the same food and watch the same movies this time of year, to feel less lonely and excuse my annual urge for hibernation as something to do with tradition. i stay in my room, i stay in my bed, and it's all i want to do until i start wondering what you're doing, how you're doing, what we'd be doing if we were together right now, or down the street from each other still. and then i lie to myself and say that winter's just like that, autumn's just like that, breeding time for nostalgia; brooding time. but really, that's just all the time, every season. we all know.

and every winter, every autumn, i romanticize the cold season of last year, or the year before, years where i felt just the same as i do now except it looks so much better in retrospect. knowing you lived through it, maybe. you pause in the present to look back, look at all the details, up close and with appreciation. the colors of the walls and the songs on the radio and the way the living room was arranged that year. and in all the time it takes you, you can finally see all the beauty, the every day beauty, what was real, what was pictureque, what was perfect, what you missed.

this is a funeral procession: chapter two

the next morning bill called me early, urgently, demanding an emergency coffee date. "this is serious," he told me, "we are both really fucked up. we all are. we can't just get drunk and make confessions and then forget half of what was said."

i nodded solemnly, still holding down last night's leftover bile. i took bill's word for it; he seemed to understand more about me than myself. "we're fucked up," i agreed, holding my hand against my collar bone, checking my pulse, making sure i was still there

we spent the next week hanging flyers all over town: FEEL LIKE SHIT? WE DO TOO, it read in big, blunt words. (MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT GROUP), it explained below, featuring a yin-yang and those theatre faces that are half happy and half sad. "this represents how our goal will be to find balance in our lives," he shouted over his shoulder to me as he stormed the neighborhood blocks, using his staple gun on the telephone poles like it was a real weapon (which perhaps it was). i trailed behind, holding stacks of flyers and quarter-sheets, averting my eyes from strangers. "maybe at the next meeting there will be an artist who can make a better flyer for next week," he reassured me.

but no one came to our meeting. we sat waiting for an hour, perking up with hopefulness every time someone nervous or tired walked in for their afternoon coffee. "maybe the flyer was too intimidating," i suggested. "maybe no one can tell who we are," he countered, "maybe we don't look as depressed as i thought we did."

"do i look depressed?" i asked, tucking my hair behind my ears self-consciously. he shrugged, making a big sign that read: WE ARE THE DEPRESSED ONES, leaning it against the wall between our heads. i hid myself in my hands, tried to scoot away from the sign.

he looked at me knowingly. "this scares me too, you know. you think i'm not scared shitless? trust me, i am. i'm just more angry than scared."

and so began our mental health support group - meeting once than soon twice than soon three of four time a week - just the two of us. soon every time we were together we would discuss and maybe even dismantle all the little pieces of our self-loathing, not procedurally, but slowly, surely.

bill spoke big and grandiose and conceptual, talking about capitalism and media representations and patriarchy and alienation; college words that i had missed with my business and economics degree. i would walk him through my collection of stories, the ones that left me with scars or nightmares, and he would slam his fist on the table or furiously jot down notes on napkins and scratch paper. i told him about being 8 years old and stepping on our newborn orange kitten as i ran through the house, the crunch under my bare feet, carrying him in to the corner of my room and watching him die there, telling my parents i didn't know what had happened. about the boyfriend i had who fucked me on prom night in a hotel, his hand over my mouth so as not to wake our friends passed out on the floor next to us, the blood i left on the couch and everyone noticing it in the morning. about the one i fell in love with, an old neighbor who i would watch come home through the peep-hole in my door, walking down our gray apartment hall, how our beds were on opposite sides of the same wall and i would masturbate as i heard him fucking his girlfriends, feeling the thin wall shake between us.

"if jackson were here," bill said one say, "i think he'd feel better. he's getting worse. he's getting so much worse."

"if jackson were here," i told bill, "i'd give him a hug and tell him to join the club."

this is a funeral procession: chapter one

"i know my coat is ugly," he told me when we first met, "that's why i wear it."

bill and i were sitting next to each other, an awkward coffee shop arrangement where you are sitting too close to the stranger next to you. we sat in armchairs and shared a tall table, a boring lamp. "oh!" i stuttered, caught off guard at being spoken to. "no no, oh, no, it was just reminding me of something. another coat. my grandmother's coat."

bill looked at me, eyebrows raised, not angry or patronizing. just honest. "that's bullshit," he told me.

this is how bill and i met. we're not best friends but we might as well be, considering most days he's the only other human being i can handle. "that's really sad," he responded when i told him, "but i feel like that sometimes, too."

i knew bill for weeks - meeting once then soon twice then soon three or four times a week to drink coffee and talk shit - before we got drunk together. he called me one night to meet him in a park, greeting me with two fifths of whiskey cloaked in paper bags.

despite the fact that he wasn't wearing a ring and had never mentioned anyone, i wasn't surprised when bill told me he was married, because i had always known that he, like me, was the kind of person with things hidden. bill was sobbing when he told me. he and jackson wanted to love each other like everyone else could, he explained. they were married in the three month span where it was legal for them. but they were never really marriage people, and they were never really in love. they shared an apartment, a bed although it was awkward, cooked dinner sometimes like best friends would and sometimes fucked when they were especially bored or lonely. it was a union born from the passion anger brings, from knowing something is right and holding on to it in your heart so tight that your knuckles turn white and your body goes numb. it doesn't guarantee a happy life. jackson and bill learned the hard way.

two months into their "marriage" jackson fell in love with a co-worker, mis-read signals (perhaps out of desperation?), and confessed his devotion. the man sued for sexual harrassment; jackson was fired.

"he hates his life," bill sobbed. "i hate mine. whose fault is it? there are too many things wrong in such monstrous ways that you can't even find someone to blame. i wish we were in love, so maybe we could be happy. i wish marriage didn't exist, it turns us all into the living dead, consumed withh our failure in the one thing we are all supposed to know how to do right. and i am too bitter towards society to admit defeat."

i turned my body to embrace him, knocking my fifth off the bench, where it lay draining into the earth. and i imagine that that night the world got drunk with us, letting everything go for a split second. the worms went dancing, the grass passed out and stopped growing, the axis switched directions, slowed down or maybe sped up. i imagined the world drunk; gravity forgetting its name and all of us falling, falling. and maybe god would lose all her inhibitions and scream into our ears the secret of life.

and thinking of the earth spinning crazy and gravity failing, i vomited on bill's ugly coat. "it's ok, it's ok," he said, mopping it up with his hands. "now it's even uglier." he looked me in the eye, he said, "i wear this coat so i don't have to care so much about what other people think. so i don't feel like i have to be beautiful to feel alive."

"but that's not fair," i told him, "only beautiful people like you can make a decision like that."

summer storm

a summer thunder storm. a front porch, the kind with a door that's enclosed in a screen, where he sat and counted the seconds between the claps of thunder and the flash of lightening. he walked in to the street, barefoot in pajamas, where he could feel the warmth of the raindrops and better see the way the lightening turned the gray sky an electric sort of blue for just a brief second.

it was dusk and there was no one out. blinds were drawn shut and people were keeping dry. there was a pulling in his bones and he looked in to the sky and rain landed on his eyelids and he knew the weather was making him crazy. it had started raining harder now, only 2 mississippi's between thunder and lightening this time, but he had stopped counting. he got on his bike and rode down the street; if it had been a big enough street to have two yellow lines separating traffic, he would have been just between them. the water was heavy against his face. he closed his eyes because he couldn't see anyway, rode diligently, recklessly, north. he didn't want to die but he wanted to wake up in a hospital bed, everyone he loved with eyes only for him, saying I Love You, pleading Please Stay With Us.

many tragedies had filled the corners of his life, but they were tragedies of human error, of negligence. he wanted a tragedy he could blame on god, on the weather.

how to stand up straight

when she moved home, she decided to show up someone new. the strong and silent type, with glassy eyes and quick cool glances that no one could ever read. does she hate me? does she love me? does she want me? does she even see me?

that's who she became, because, she realized, softness hadn't gotten her anywhere. so with short dresses, messy hair and nose up, she tried to forget herself. and she was great at it. she touched boys the way they wanted, and the girls, too. she returned their calls but always vaguely, dismissively. she only listened to loud music through headphones and sung along with misinterpreted lyrics. she went everywhere with a think novel - parties and buses - and she loved their stories but she also loved who they made her; she loved the paper shield.

she slept with one boy who was in town for the weekend. the details are fuzzy and irrelevant, but he chewed his cuticles and let his hair fall over his eyes, so she took him in her arms and wet lips and even let him fall asleep holding her hand. but soon he left, and she let go, she didn't let it become love.

a month and a half later she held in her hand a pregnancy test that was positive. she thought about keeping the baby, because it was growing inside of her, because the potential of potential is strong and we are all dying to live vicariously through someone. she wondered about the baby's last name; she thought about giving it her own. but instead she took a pill, rented a hotel room, and bled for 24 hours. this is just something that happens, she told herself, this is just something.

and she cried and it sounded like howling, water after a dry spell. because sadness is always there somewhere, sadness builds up and sadness seeps in.

and next door, a married man and his Lover Next Door were in missionary position when the howling crept through the thin motel wall. the man, short and balding, primitive and panting, had his one-track mind temporarily derailed, his thoughts slipping from what his body was doing to i hope that sound doesn't last all night, i need 8 hours of sleep. the tiny hairs on The Lover Next Door's back stood up straight; she knew that sound, she had made it before.

in the morning The Lover Next Door woke up just past dawn to the hotel door clicking shut, the sound of her sin leaving for work. naked under polyester blankets, The Lover Next Door arched her head back to stare up at the wall behind her bed frame, thinking of the girl on the other side, how you could feel the thickness of her pain in her cries. and she could still hear it now, quieter, howling replaced with whimpering.

and on the other side of the building, The Caretaker was in his pajamas brewing coffee for a half-assed complimentary breakfast. he cringed remembering the sounds of last night. he had come to realize, grudgingly but fully, that this motel off the highway was a place people only came to for parts of them to die - morality, love, sanity, and other fleeting things. and sometimes the shame and longing that filled these rooms was hard to bear. but he knew this was what it meant to be human.

The Caretaker was an old and worn-down man who clutched his empathy close. he pulled out his best tray, silver and antiquated, and filled it with a red mug of coffee, tangerines, a bowl of sugar cubes, and a tall vase of flowers borrowed from the front desk. and at the same time, in the mess of plants in the cracks between the parking lot asphalt and the sidewalk concrete, The Lover Next Door was collecting blades of grass, weeds and dandelions, tying them together with the red ribbon from her hair. each left their visual condolences outside of the girls motel room - apologies.

it was just about noon when she finally opened her door to leave. it had been many hours with the blinds shut tight, and the sunlight burned her eyes. squinting, she kicked the tray she hadn't noticed at her feet, the vase shattering as it fell, the sound of breaking glass waking her up in a new way. so she sat with her feet dangling through the metal railings of the second story, sipping coffee slowly and watching the sugar cubes disintegrate. she piled the broken glass on to the tray, carefully like broken bones, and, putting the two bouquets together, hung them upside down around her neck with the red ribbon.

with spotted blood stains and puffy eyes, greasy hair and a disheveled look, she didn't even try to pull herself together.

she stood as tall as she could and walked all the way home, across town, taking all the busiest roads, letting her tears fall free, looking us all in the eye as she passed.

nancy

the search dogs followed nancy macduston's scent to the edge of a cliff. some people think that she was kidnapped, or that she's just out wandering, and she'll turn up one day. i guess it's easier to believe. the way i see it, there's only one explanation, and on most days, i don't blame her.

today, new year's eve, we are stuck in traffic on highway one, in between davenport and nancy's cliff. davenport, california, population 312, looking right in to the mouth of the pacific. not a bad last scenic view.

in the car, aaron complains about the traffic, jordan can't get cell phone service, i have to go to the bathroom. it's getting dark and we are late for getting wasted.

it was a head-on collision.

people go fast on this highway, feeling immortal against the pavement that curves around mountain ridges. everyone in the accident died - so much for the new year. and we, we don't say we hope everyone is ok, we don't say we're happy to be alive.

and i don't mention nancy macduston as we inch past her cliff, how she was a mother and a grandmother and a pre-school teacher. how her house was full of animals, frogs turtles snakes rabbits fish and birds, how before she left she taped detailed instructions on how to care for each animal on their cages. how before she left she brought all her instruments to the pre-school and organized the storage room meticulously, so people could play music and find the things they needed when she was gone. maybe she thought about leaving notes for the parents on how to help their toddlers deal with death and suicide, but decided it was too morbid.

in santa cruz, i drink too much Steel Reserve and pass out before midnight, avoid standing awkwardly in the corner at 12 am watching a room of midnight-kiss-embraces. at 3 am i wake up and stumble outside, vomiting beer, pasta and stomach acid onto somebody's rosebush.

i sit on my knees in the dirt, tucked in to the bushes. i run my fingers along all my little bumbs of scars: at the top of my ribs between my breast and my armpit; the inside of my thighs; the bottom of my ankle near the heel of my foot. secret places of raised skin. i was sixteen and nancy, last year, was sixty.

mirrored

"why do i still see you in every mirrored window,
in all that i could never overcome?"

i took your clothes out of a cardboard box in the corner of the garage (a place i hoped i would forget about, but never did). i put on your underwear, i put on your khakis, i put on one of your faded t-shirts and those old shoes that got so ripped, old shoes where i once marked my territory with a red sharpie and an asymmetrical heart. i pulled my hair up and away from my eyes, i wished they were blue.

remember that chair we bought together? a musty yellow, velvet rough with rain and time, full of holes. you said: "this chair is unlovable, let's make it ours, let's fix it up and give it a home."

and it was in this chair (our chair) that i sat now, in the corner of my room, diagonal across the right angle. with one mirror leaned against the wall to my right, and one to the left. my reflection caught between them, half of me reflected over and over, endless. i don't know about fate besides the one i hope for. in my corner between mirrors, i can close my eyes, i can orchestrate.

and so i closed my eyes, i faced forward, i lowered my voice and spoke: "i'm sorry, i'm so sorry. i'm sorry that i always move up and i always move on and things become great for me in some new way. i'm sorry i left you, i'm sorry that i didn't stop it, or hold on tighter. thank you for loving the chair i left behind. thank you for hating me for it. i'm sorry i left you, it wasn't your fault, you were perfect the whole time and you still are."

i unbuttoned your button, i unzipped your fly, i put my hands down your pants and i touched myself, dry and unloved. and the blinking lights of an airplane flew past my window, all those people over me, maybe over you somewhere, depending. all those people over me, not knowing. not seeing me being you being me, caught between mirrors, reflecting.