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.

winter window

The window was open in the middle of winter, and i would not be closing it because given my luck, the night i shut it would be the night you tried to come in. After two years and six days, irony would not miss an opportunity like that. After two years and six days i lay wrapped up and in a cocoon of blankets and wished to be born again into something beautiful, a moth that could fly blindly and happily towards the light, or a butterfly that children would extend their hands out to.

January wind blew in through the window and i wrapped myself tighter. This was a window that would stay open forever.

people are tired and take a day off

it is almost summer and she wakes up at 6 AM and her roommate's bedroom door is open and his room is empty, so she sits on his bed and looks out his window because he has an ocean view and the early morning mist floats at the treetops and the tips of the roofs of houses and over the ocean like a blanket, and it is totally beautiful. she feels two conflicting urges of simultaneously wanting to curl up in bed all day and also ride her bike through town screaming, or some other confusing combination that indicates: what the fuck is happening and how are we supposed to feel?

on this day, no one wakes up. they are not dead, they are just resting, they will wake up tomorrow, and she isn't concerned for the state of the world but she is frustrated because she can't fall back asleep and there is absolutely no one to hang out with and no coffee shop open. she attempts walking around the neighborhood but the silence is uncanny so she returns home. instead, she spends the day reading the newspaper on her roommate's bed and watches the ocean, where you can just barely make out tiny ripples of movement, waves crashing and retreating.

it is a long and quiet day and she misses everyone. she can't wait for tomorrow when people wake up and are well rested and she can exchange smiles with friends and neighbors and strangers and there will be this unspoken understanding between everyone that yes, that day was needed, whew, what a treat to get a whole day off, things feel so much better now. she falls asleep thinking about being tall and holding her head high, and other metaphors for confidence. tomorrow will be better.

things are not going well

things are not going well, he admits to his online journal. it is his first online journal - lots of last resorts have come to fruition lately, precisely because of how terribly things are going. he admits he is severely depressed and then goes on to explain to this online community things that he would not normally express, like how he secretly looked at self-help books in the library but was too embarrassed to check them out, like how he wants to have really rough sex to get his aggressions out, like how he spent the morning punching the wall after his parents had gone to work and the house was empty. now there was a hole in his bedroom.

examining his hands, he is reminded of a girl that he used to know in college. actually, he did not really know her, but he saw her around in classes and remembers getting stomach aches when he would see her bloody knuckles while she was taking notes (he always made a point to sit by her), indicating that she had a habit of punching hard surfaces - maybe concrete. it was something he had not understood until now. he thinks about how girls wear rings but men never really do unless they are married or are the creepy type, and he thinks about perhaps defying norms and purchasing many rings so that tomorrow, things could get really messy and all cut up.

later that day someone leaves a comment on his online journal entry. it says: "you need to get out of town. maybe go back to africa." he is shocked and instantly uncomfortable. how does this person know he went to africa in college? clearly it is someone who knows him and he is humiliated and deletes the online journal. he thinks about this recommendation. perhaps it is a genuine piece of advice, but when written down the words look like either a joke or an insult. good advice is hard to come by.

he suddenly recalls this experience he had in high school once. he was in this hippie class at a hippie school that involved ideas of changing the world. on the first day of this class they were instructed to write a phrase repeatedly on a long and narrow strip of paper that would then be hung in the doorway for the students to walk through like those beaded curtains, only on these strips of paper would be extraordinary positive and encouraging phrases that would make everyone feel accomplished and proud when they entered the classroom. he wrote "we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there" and the teacher looked at him and said, no, that is not positive enough, you need to think of another phrase, something better that represents a more tangible accomplishment, something that is already great and beautiful and successful.

he thinks to himself now of the perfect comeback, because of course those always come minutes or days or in this case, years too late. he thinks, who are you to say what accomplishment means to me? accomplishment is movement.

thought experiment

in a thought experiment you closed your eyes. you imagined a life 15, 20 years from now. a normal life, adult, parental, a couple kids, house, front lawn, dog or maybe a cat, a job that you don’t totally love, a wife that you sometimes feel regret towards. you imagined being that future version of yourself reflecting back on where you are now. you imagined remembering the pink house and chairs on the front porch, the cracking plaster, the mice scurrying through the ceiling as you lay trying to fall asleep, the thrift store mugs, the stacks of dirty dishes, wine stains on the furniture and beer cans in the bedrooms, ice cream for breakfast and pancakes for dinner, dust on the floor, dust on the stairs, dust in our eyes. and the future version of yourself reflecting on it all in a thought experiment in your mind thought, just one day, i want to go back for and relive it for just one day, for just one day.

“some day this house will burn down and we’ll be long gone by then”

may day every day

it was a beautiful day, and the world was going crazy. smashed glass decorated the store fronts of main street, and periodically the rich would march through town with their guns and pitchforks, calling for the immigrants and anarchists to show their faces. the sun shone of spring and all the trees sprouted tangerines and cherry blossoms and a fire streaked the sky and and a scent of fear floated about with the spring pollens and the ocean waves rose and crashed, reverberating and resonating down through concrete roads. a bouquet of wildflowers sat on the counter. so its true - april showers bring may flowers. this month, the world seemed to be telling us, every day would be may day. every day would be may day. every day would be may day. every one on all sides felt afraid but at the same time every act of kindness had an irreplaceable beauty, every little bit of truth and love and realness was so profoundly human.

how cinematic!

Blood, how cinematic. Blood has cinematic effects on reality that should not go under-acknowledged. The time we killed the kitten was just like that, I said fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck while crouched on the edge of the sidewalk as you paced back and forth. At that moment I was sure I was not really living - no, this was the sad ending to a sad movie that I would never watch again. At this point in our relationship the screen went blank and the credits began to roll: teenage boy skillfully played with anguish by Michael Matthew Rodgers; teenage girl portraying shock and disbelief in an incredibly realistic manner played by Yours Truly; and sweet, innocent kitten played by Someone's Pet. Whose, we'll never know. Maybe we could have loved each other, but after this day, I couldn't even look you in the eye. Maybe we didn't kill the kitten, maybe we just happened to be there, maybe it was God's Will; but sadly, context doesn't matter when a kitten dies. It's just a dead bleeding kitten and it's the worst thing in the world.

It was like that in the hospital, too. It happened the time you fell in the hallway when you saw us for the first time. And when that little bit of blood oozed from your big toe and dripped on to the carpet, I realized this, this, this was not happening, this was not life. This was a movie that groups of friends would watch together in someone's basement over the weekend and at least one person would secretly cry in to the blanket.

teen angst rules the world

she lies on her bedroom floor with the lights off at 4 in the afternoon. her father wonders whats wrong with her, as all fathers do of their daughters at some point. she is lying on the floor with her arms spread out wide sort of like how jesus must have looked on the cross. she wonders about public executions. then she wonders about private executions - which is worse? shoegaze is her passion of the month, currently all she will listen to, and she especially enjoys that song where the girl's voice says, "I'm only 15 and I feel as if it's already too late to live," convinced it was written about her. at this point in her life, she believes her misery to be unique and exceptional. mr. perry, the school therapist, tells her that someday she will be "A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH," but she doesn't believe him because she doesn't trust anyone with braces. "SUPERFICIALITY RULES THE WORLD," she tells mr. perry knowingly in one of their lunch-time sessions. mr. perry nods in agreement, and she crosses her arms across her chest and leans back in her swivel chair, satisfied, maybe even confident, thinking that perhaps she will be "A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH" after all.

the wreckage

"if there is an earthquake before i count to 10, i will open my eyes and the world will be falling. and if there is an earthquake before i count to 10, it will knock my secrets off their shelves, and i will walk through the city across the bridge and over the ocean to your house, through everything falling, yes. i will pretend to be surprised when you spot me from your front porch as i am walking down your street (but you will know the truth). i will say, 'how funny to run in to you. i was just recalling the time we threw glass plates off of the parking garage on second avenue, the scratches and scent from the rosemary bush we hid in. why would we hide in a rosemary bush?' everything around will be crumbling to dust and you will casually hold your hands over your head as if it is just a light rain, and you'll say, 'i don't know, kate, i guess it was just there. would you like to come in?'
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10."

at this point the earth feels still, although really it's not, it never is. you know the big quake is coming, you can feel it in all of your being. there are fruit flies in the garbage can but soon the trash will be inconsequential. asbestos and drawings are peeling off the walls. everything is doomed but you feel romantic and wild and free.

"if there is an earthquake before i count to 10, i will not duck and cover. if there is an earthquake before i count to 10, i will stretch my hands out to the clouds, and i will celebrate the wreckage.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10."

owen (in the summer of 2009)

Owen, Owen, I thought his name over and over again as I sat in my room waiting to hear him pulling in to the driveway, ascending the stairs, opening the front door without knocking like he always did. He had been here one hundred times before, but today was different, today was tense and weighted. Today I felt pathetic and dull, sitting on my mattress on the floor, suddenly embarrassed at the record player, guitar and empty walls that I had in common with all of our cynical-twenty-something friends.

Owen was different, with four bedroom walls completely covered in photographs and taped up letters, articles and comics; there was no blank wall space in Owen's room. Owen had a round face full of light and sweat.

Owen, a person in my heart and in my dreams, a name I spoke in my sleep -- something I never would have known if it weren't for too much whiskey two nights ago and an attempt to capture the music from my record player on to my tape recorder. I faded in to sleep and the next morning, headache and pajamas, I heard my own voice murmuring beneath the fuzzy music -- Owen, Owen, whispered sweet like how you would say the name of someone who just had their heart broken, or your heart had just been broken by. Owen, Owen, over and over.

This was how I knew I was in love with him

This, I knew, was an unrequited love, a love that would never be.

My bedroom door swung open as if by a breeze, and Owen stood in the doorway. Owen had big eyes that shined of something like youth, he wasn't spoiled by time or politics, he was the only carefree person I knew. Tall skinny body, the carefulness of all his words; Owen was alive, so everyone else was probably dead.

"Jacob," he spoke, easy and gracious because he could always read me.

Owen borrowed books from me and lent me some of his. He sat at the foot of my mattress playing with the corners of the sheets, describing plot summaries and telling me what I should read first (enthusiasm can feel so novelty). Saying: "Sometimes I just want to read really sad books, where the characters are more miserable and flawed than I am." Saying: "Everything ever written is about love. If everything ever written doesn't break your heart, then there is something wrong with you."

Owen, Owen, Owen, I kept saying it, out loud this time, after he had left -- hoping the repetition would do something, like burn his name inside of me so that no matter how much things changed I would always remember him this perfectly. Through all his girlfriends and lovers, and mine, too, through old age even if we stopped being friends. Through new love, through tangible love, forever, Owen.

expressing little pockets of self-loathing and self-doubt is healthy, but only in moderation

The Writer has just returned from the coast and slumps over a recent photograph, scrunching up her face and eyes so that the rest of the girls in the photo become blurred, allowing her to focus in on her own indignant look; all of her friends are smiling with open mouths, showing white teeth with confidence. All of The Writer's clothes are dusty and smell of campfire and are covered in little specks of dry crusting ketchup and other condiments, and they make her feel as if she has accomplished something somehow, and she wishes dirty clothes were the kind of thing that demonstrated good character. Something about the coast made The Writer daydream about starring in a romantic comedy. The Writer has mixed emotions about boys in band tee's and is embarrassed by her reliance on male approval and the acceptance of subcultures to feel some sense of self-worth. What a let-down. The Writer comes to the conclusion that she should no longer continue on the career path of becoming an author, grudgingly admitting to herself this: "there is no need for fiction." The Writer considers driving straight back to the coast, into the Pacific, to lay down on the ocean floor forever.

love and its absence

Sylvia disapproves of the way that contemporary American culture revolves notions of happiness and sadness, of success and failure, around love. This obsession with relationships, she thinks, is "totally freaky and sort of sad." Sylvia wants you to believe that she is different.

Sylvia detests her last lover, Paul, for dumping her and then moving to Prague on a whim and almost immediately reaching new heights of success in some European art and sculpting community. Sylvia is depressed by her current lover, David, who talks on the phone at night about how bored he is, and who recently joked that if things don't work out, they should consider modeling their relationship after Liz Lemon and Jack from 30 Rock because he is "clearly the successful business type" and she is "clearly the struggling middle-aged woman type."

The only things Sylvia can ever think to write about are references to either Paul or David. Sylvia despises the fact that all her stories are about love (and its absence) and relationships (in all their failures). Sylvia comes to the conclusion that she should no longer continue on the career path of becoming an author. Grudgingly, Sylvia admits to herself this: "there is no need for fiction."

Caution, Falling Limbs

one, an ocean, an adolescence. together we went swimming and me, demonstrating a consistent flirtation with death, pretended to drown. you, demonstrating your never flailing loyalty and personal commitment to bravery and danger, saved me.

two, mexico, a family vacation in the throes of teenage angst. that summer we sat in poolside chairs and refused to take off our over-sized t-shirts long enough to go swimming, despite the heat.

a gust full of wind, a hand full of sand, an envelope and a paper full of ink. yes, there have been a lot of words. there has been a lot of time that never fails to pass, however quickly or slowly or estranged, it passes, birthdays, holidays, the solstice and the equinox, 7-day-forecast upon 7-day-forecast upon 7-day-forecast and on. we started out small and i suppose we still are, really.

three, a suburban neighborhood. in old tennis shoes i run the blocks it takes to get from my house to yours, just as you have done for me. i can get there in under 5 minutes when you need me.

four, a hospital, a ward. we found ourselves here more than once, in the waiting room, or perhaps on the other side of the door. there was the time we visited and you collapsed in the hallway crying when you saw us. your big toe started to bleed.

this is a place of falling limbs, with little pieces of the world landing in our hair, rain and snow flakes and building debris. this is a construction site. this is a life full of sour grass and tree houses and sneaking out the window to walk around our empty suburban streets in the middle of the night, just to be together and feel alive.

regarding your out of body experience

(on certain mornings, with a certain electricity hanging in the air over the clouds, you wake up suddenly, just before dawn. the sun rises in the east and through your window facing west you see the sky slowly changing colors, and you are in the wrong body. the sheets and pillows are cold, clothing stiff and unfamiliar. in the hall, the missing chunks of plaster and falling posters and red bathroom door are home to no one; uninhabited. but still you find yourself here, tiptoeing down the carpet, up the stairs, over your sleeping friends, through the window, on the roof. time passes like something distant, colorless, like the fuzzy projection of an old movie that you dream you were a part of.)

it happens just before dawn, in the hours of breathing that so often go unnoticed. the space where fingernails grow and eyelids collect a thick yellow dust and the sky begins to lighten, just a little, in preparation for the slowly moving sun. it happens with the suspension of the senses and the seven wonder of the world and television.

it happens like looking down on passing time and slowly aging lives. something spiritual, in transit to the clouds, suspended somewhere close to the ceiling. tough boys drinking hot chocolate to escape the rain, middle aged women reassuring each other of their beauty, someone crying on the sidewalk outside of a funeral home, passing by as if you saw them from above. prompting the questions, is this life? do i live here?

"there was never nothing," reads the title to a gray painting that is hanging on a wall in a coffee shop -- something, somewhere.

dear you: territories, worlds, sizes

dear you,

(cue Jawbreaker)

feeling small is important. something about humbleness, about territories, worlds, sizes. something about a belly full of boredom and a highway with the promise of any destination as tall and wide as the occupied territories of the continental US, stretching until it hit the sea - something gray, or something blue, or something green, or something.

the sea was where we all started, warm and curled up in a woman's stomach. safe. so we have something in common, after all.

the sea was where it started: an ocean town, heavy fog, overflowing with mist and salt and visitors in the summer. an ocean town where on either end of that one main road their respective "welcome to..." and "come back soon..." signs proudly asserted the little known fact that this ocean town, this ocean town!, was home to the furthest western point at which the land met the Pacific.

this was something terrifying. "doesn't it make you nervous to know this is the furthest west we can go?," everyone became prone to asking, out loud or in silence.

so manifest destiny worked its way backwards, imagined as unraveling histories like a ball of string; it's not that easy, but we can pretend. this is what i mean by feeling small. and this is what kept me alive, not in heart/beat but in something like "HEART", not in blood/stream but in something like "SOUL." abstract, but still there.

skyscrapers and redwoods have the same effect: redwoods that have been tall and growing taller for millions of years, or, skyscrapers created by a million hands and nails and extracted natural resources, both towering over you (and me), both made up of so much more than me (and you). both with history and something hard to believe.

both allow me to feel small, humbled, human, realizing: you can go and go and go and go and go and go and go and still move through the world unnoticed. you could, if you wanted to.

and the ceaseless sound of the city with cars and buses and strangers' voices and not a moment without, and the almost-silence of walking through the woods alone, these things have the same effect of feeling surrounded with the complexity of life beyond ones own.

it's a philosophical life, many academics might say. or a depressing one, others might argue. but my headphones are on and the music is playing and i breathe in and out and keep my hands in my pockets. walking backwards to changing sceneries and weather and intersections.

would it make you nervous to know if this were the furthest west you could go? then start walking backwards, or learn how to swim.

with love,

yours truly

Half-Fiction Friction

what to say about the recording of half-truths?

satisfaction

in terms of pasttimes, she preferred masturbation over anything else. between intellectual masturbation and physical masturbation, it was practically all she ever did in her spare time.

in terms of intellectual masturbation, she would write lengthy blog entries and letters to the editor to various publications that made intangible philosophical and political commentaries, most often by referencing canonized literature, foreign films, Foucault, and occasionally pop culture. she had an average of 14 tweets a day chronicling her academic reflections to everything around.

in terms of physical masturbation, she pleasured herself upon waking up, prior to falling asleep, in the shower, and a variety of other times and locations, including occasionally in the bathroom at work. sometimes there was porn or a vibrator involved; other times she used her imagination and her hand. masturbation was useful because 1) women struck her as judgmental and made her nervous, and 2) men struck her as just plain incompetent. she always came.

a fictional account of myself and all my friends

i drink coffee on nights when i drive past your house, so that it doesn't feel lonely or strange, it feels like Bravery. it feels like Truth.

somehow it's always winter. there are christmas lights strung along rooftops and mittens and scarves and the windows all frost over.

i drink coffee on nights like this, when i need to feel like an artist or an intellectual to feel alive (and yes, i remember what you told me about how those two words are interchangeable). i bought into the american myth of value and now i am stuck trying to grow into something exceptional; a writer or a musician or a profound academic or a civil rights martyr or an anarchist. there are these ideas of trying to become better than you already are; they make you hate yourself, i realize this now with my maturity and somber analysis of society, but nonetheless, it's too late for me. oh well, is my reaction. i am - you guessed it! - a nihilist and an existentialist and an atheist, too.

i was a gangly nervous girl, and then an angsty gothic teenager.

there are fits of insomnia and isolation, that i try to wear proud, like intentions.

on this particular night i drive past your house and keep going, winding up through the lost hills of suburbia, reality tv, sedatives, clean kitchens. i set up a picnic for myself in the snow and try to ignore the temperature. i lay back and in my head i can see snow angels surrounding me.

i recall previous bouts of delinquency.

there was the time that we were making out on the subway and didn't even notice when it went out of service. finally we realized, prying open the door, pressing the red emergency button just for fun and giggling as we ran down the tracks. then we noticed an old man in a wheelchair, beyond the pavement against the wall. this is when you stopped, took your leftovers out of your bag and gave them to him. he called us dykes and we just smiled and walked off holding hands, understanding our own strength and everyone else's preconditions.

after that day we didn't talk anymore. it was enough satisfaction to see in someone else something kind, something compassionate and sweet; to see in each other that with our steel-toed toughness comes something very gentle after all.

in the middle of everything i am constantly trying to prove to myself my own strength. hold head high. ignore goose-bumps and loneliness. snow turns skin blue. make plans for tomorrow, when there is a chance i could run in to you, when perhaps there will be a change in the weather.

human, being; human, (no longer) being

she imagined dragging her tongue along the gritty cracked surface of the brick wall that she sat with her back to every day; up the columns and along the rows and in the thin lines of grout between bricks. the taste, or rather, the way she imaged in the taste to be - sort of metallic and sort of like dirt - made her nerves and anxiety soften some. other times when she would sigh and lean back in to the wall she imaged doing it with gusto, with fervor, with loud cracks until the back of her skull began to bleed. she was mature and intellectual but she was, for an artist anyway, surprisingly ineffective at being introspective.

human, being, human, being, she would write on everything