an interview in the dark

“Í guess to start with – what is the best part of being you. “

She is sitting across from me, legs tucked beneath her in that way leggy blond cheerleaders have of making themselves comfortable anywhere. Anytime. Even aafter announcing her project was to be me. Even after dropping to her elbows on my carpet and throwing herself on my bed in a dramatic surrender. I wasn’t sure what she was surrendering though. Or to whom.

“the best part?” I was deeply immersed in a book. The life and times of Julie Anderson – an autobiography written in such compelling detail that the author’s voice came lilting off the page in all it’s rich British authority. I looked up from the pages with reluctance. She was still lying there. Waiting. Expectant.
“the best part of being you. You. You you” she added this with a flair for the dramatic. I dog eared the page and looked down at her from my lofty three foot height. My massive California bed sprawl, all covered with pillows and quilts, remonstrances from our mother and time long since passed.

“the best part about being me is that I’m funny.” I grinned. “yep. That’s definitely the best part.”
She set her pen aside and looked at me. All serious dark eyes and blond perkiness. Was this “the talk?” the time when interviewer told interviewee how it was going to be? I closed my eyes and braced myself for the imminent fall, but she just let the pause hang on, silence filling the room until it seemed there was nothing to do but speak. Even if my voice would crack the silence and leave it shattered. A thousand angry pieces lying broken on the floor. Kind of how I felt about myself sometimes. Maybe I would remember that, use it later. Much later.

I looked out the window. There were no trees here. No tapping branches or places for light to refract poetically through the window. Somehow the absence of trees seemed just as gorgeous. Illuminations of light going on forever, stretching like pastures in an empty and deserted land. Colorado is like that. Immense.

You remember that God is your friend in Colorado. Also that there is a God.

“the best thing about me” I repeated, as though in grammar school, complete thoughts and sentences. “the best thing about me is my flexibility. Without that - without that I’d simply be lost.”

I am 16 again. There are couches and chairs in this place, badly stained and smelling at once of disinfectant and piss. There are nurses and doctors who talk in loud voices as though we are at once deaf and dumb.

We come in together – mom and dad and me – and the doctor asks “can you promise not to hurt yourself?” I can see them waiting. The adults pacing like frenzied nuns in a line outside as children burn … I know if I answer yes they will let me out of the smelly cubicle with the posters of children keeping themselves safe … becoming happy.

“no” I cry, tears streaming down my face, “no I can’t”

The locked door clanging behind my parents is the loudest sound I have ever heard until the sound that comes immediately after. The lock. Keeping me in.

”there are things you don’t know unless you’ve been inside a hospital. You can’t have spiral notebooks in there. Pens made of metal. Shoelaces. The lace from inside a pair of sweatpants.” I look up over the book I’m not reading at her. “if you don’t feel crazy going in, they make you feel crazy when you’re in there. Taking away everything that keeps you put together.

I was lucky. My parents brought me wireless notebooks, pencils. Sweats without laces. Socks. The other kids in there … there was a three year old who’s parents put her in because she was too hyper. A boy who was too angry. We were all just a little Too something.

It was the week before my prom. The last few weeks of sophomore year.

“so you didn’t go to prom?” she is taking notes, or sketching. I can’t tell. I think that might be a horse on her pad – then again it might be numbers. I remember mesh wire covering the windows. The way the couch felt, sticky and sweaty against my back. The feeling that nothing would be the same after this – that everything was suddenly and dramatically going to be very different. The failure – for me – had been that it wasn’t.

I look out the window. The sun has lessened, which is to say the brightness permeates from one side of the earth instead of from the center of the sky. In Colorado it’s never dark, it’s just not as bright.

“I went.” I grin at the thought.

he is a too tall virgin with feverish eyes and a ready smile. I am embarrassed to be with him, but we are friends and I said yes. I try to sleep with him for the challenge – but he is destined for the priesthood and maybe it is God’s will that I fail. Two weeks after prom we end out 10 day “relationship” loudly in Super Kmart where I work.
He demands the golden eagle he brought me from Vegas back. I laugh as I hand it over.

The summer is a riot of color, wine coolers, pot. The sex is an afterthought. I don’t remember well if that summer or the next Danny and I ended it for good and somehow, now, so long after I don’t care. We drove my jeep around and watched people playing baseball while we watched. Voyeurs rather than livers, until band camp and school re convened. Then summer ended and the drudgery resumed.

“but junior year wasn’t as good”

“no.” There is a book I read long ago – Lisa Bright and Dark – and at the time I thought I had found a manual to myself. I remember one scene where her friends try to tell her parents there is something wrong with her. her parents don’t listen and so Lisa walks through a plate glass window. Just walks through it – and then, cut, bleeding, she smiles.

I understood that when I read it.
After the hospital I thought things would change. That people would understand how much it hurt me just to breathe. That sometimes simply movement was too much to bear. But everything clipped along in the way it has of doing. My friends and I hung out, played pool, sneaked cigarettes. My parents wanted me home some of the time, my sister was doing her thing – and I – I ached.

“I wrote a suicide note. Before.” I pause and reach as though I haven’t quit smoking five years before. As though there might be a lighter just on the other side of my leg. I rub my head instead. Not the same.

“I wrote a suicide note.” I look off and laugh. Short. Sharp. “on my 16th birthday they threw a surprise party at my house for me – sweet 16 and all that … I came to my room and found a friend reading my poems. She had that on top. She especially liked it.”

I had such anger at that moment. It didn’t matter that I didn’t particularly like the girl, or that she was annoying – that there was something off about her. she was sitting there reading my stuff and liking something so intensely sad … I smiled. Said thank you.

Took the pages and stuffed them somewhere.

I never forgot.

“People have to care to see the signs that you’re going to fall off a bridge. They have to love you enough to stop you and say “don’t”.” I shrug. “but you have to care enough about yourself to listen.”





“so …”
“so”
The breaksfast nook is creepy after midnight. It reminds me of a place where children come to play hide and seek, then are lost for hours. These things are then reported on the news so that mothers everywhere can forbid their children to play hide and seek. Maybe that’s not the moral of the story. Maybe the moral of the story is that parent’s just need to put locks on drawers and washers. But no … personal accountability is something we don’t believe in anymore.

She settels into the chair across from where I am eating cocoa puffs and life cereal drowning in a bowl of skim to make it healthy.

“I was thinking that I could interview you.” I nod. Coffees getting cold beside me and I still really want a cigarette. Or some vodka. But both of those are long gone and certainly not in this house any longer. “like – you know – about ...” I take a bite while she thinks through the things she wants to ask me. What she wants to know versus what she does know. she shrugs. Helpless. “how you do it I guess.”

“how I do it?” I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it. the water washes in rivers down the drain. The clock on the microwave clicks from 1:21 to 1:22 to 1:23. I look back. She is still waiting for an answer. Not put off by cocoa puffs or wry responses.

“one day at a time”
“one day at a time.”


The sixth vodka and lemonade – make it a double – goes down just as smooth as the first. Suddenly the room is spinning. The bar is a mess of dark carpet and darker corners. “Get her out of here” the very friendly, overly friendly, manager who has poured as many shots as he has stopped, is pushing me to the door. My friends, two of whom I’m sleeping with when my husband isn’t around, are propelling me to the doroms.

It’s 8:00 on a Monday.
I’m celebrating my divorce.
Father’s Day was yesterday.
I am 21 years old.

We drive for a while. Drive until I beg them to stop or I will be sick. I can’t push the car door open or roll down the windows – they are driving and have child proofed the car – my car – so that I can’t jump into traffic. Drunk and suicidal I run into traffic. Directly in front of the headlights of Jimmy’s truck. My girlfriend, a butch dyke with choppy red hair who recently told my husband to “suck her dick” sits crying on the curb.

My parents and the cops arrive simultaneously. There is something surreal about red and blue lights, a father’s arms. I go slack as they load me into the car.

I cannot live like this anymore.
I just can’t.

9:00 on a Monday
The day after Father’s Day. 2001
I’ve been married one year and two months. My husband is 32 years old. I am 21. I feel the adrenaline drain out of me. We sit on the back porch of my parent’s house. I chain smoke cigarettes and swear in front of them for the first time.
A night of firsts
My lesbian lovers bicker over who loves me more
I cannot take it.
I run to the bathroom. Shut the door. It does not lock.
My mother finds me, pills scattered like so many jelly beans. It’s like a bad movie. A bad after school special. the parademics, the screaming. My sister comes down. My baby sister – just started in college – she touches me.
To this day I don’t know what she says but I stop.
I go.

The hospital is the same white linen and smell infested nightmare.
The door and the lock and the infestation of madness are as I remembered. In five years, nothing has changed. I argue with a nurse when she offers me a blanket to cover my inappropriately short tank top and talk my way into the smoking room.

“somebody give me a cigarette.”

I blow a .387 8 hours after my last drink
Someone – everyone
Tells me how lucky I am to be alive

All I can do is wish the car had gone off the cliff into the ever lasting darkness.

Sometimes I still do.

“I’m sorry” I bite into a scone. “I didn’t catch that”

“are you suicidal now?”

I shake my head “of course not.” I look at her. she doesn’t know from angry. From sad. The inside working of a mind so messed up that suicidal is the norm. that non suicidal feels odd.

“really?”

“really” she sits. Well. She wanted honesty.

“a long time ago someone told me that it was okay to be melancholy. I think that’s what she called it. that that’s something that everyone experiences. The inability to be really happy.” I close my eyes for a moment. “I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that it is possible to be really and completely and fantastically – orgasmically happy – if only for brief intense bursts of time, and if only they have to be followed by maddening sadness.” I close my eyes. It’s tiring to be entertaining.

“do you ever feel normal?”
Open eyes
Shock and awe.
“I do actually. I really do”
“is normal a harder emotion than depressed or manic?”

I nod. Normal is impossible to describe or define. It’s the paradoxical equivilant of nothing or a black hole appearing (do black holes appear?) in the middle of a tea party. Normal is just … so ….

When you attend psychiatry classes for any period of time you start to wonder if everyone and anyone in the field isn’t just a little mad themselves. I mean – is it possible to study so many different modes of thinking and not completely lose your mind? You start to wonder this after your Psych 101 class where you dabble in a little freud and then a little Aristotle, mixing in for flavor Pavlov and Ericson. It’s not until the next class – which is all phallus all the time – that you realize. Your own theories aren’t your own. You are plagiarizing the entire of human existence. Nothing is new, there is no original thought. And then you calm down. You can’thelp it. it’s just one of those things.

“my therapist always said there was no such thing as normal.” I laugh. “I don’t believe her.”


Sometimes when I’m walking down the street – always, when I’m walking down the street, I make up stories in my head. About me. About my friends. Just in general making my life more interesting. When I was young – really young – I used to wish I was adopted, or an only child, or that I would wake up one day and have some terrible disease so everyone would have to pay attention to me.

I had dreams when I was younger too. Ferocious evil manifestations of someone’s sub conscious – I don’t know that it was mine. In my dreams people smelt of death and decay and they dug their own graves in a pile of coals. Coals that never disappeared. Coals and pickles.
My mother used to comfort me by telling me everyone has those kinds of dreams. Everyone has those dark demented places. I know now that this is not true.

In search of normal.

”If I write a book, that’s what I will call it”
“what about cold feet?” the short lived name for the short story collection I created and then left to rot inside my computer.
“that wasn’t a bad name either” I lean back. It seems like I am always leaning back, or dragging on a cigarette. Or moving. Running my fingers through my hair. Making some motion that will detract from someone’s ability to see me as I truly am. Some motion that will detract from my own ability to see myself as I truly am.

If I could I’d wear sunglasses all the time. Except on those really clear, wonderful days, when the world is perfect and everything is happy. I wish my Aunt were my mother. I wish my Grandmother were still alive. I wish I were still a child and none of this had ever happened. I wish I were still a lesbian and I could remain curled forever in bed with my husband watching endless spiraling tapes of my life.

The bushes play a part.
The bushes and the cigarettes and the way it was all so easily broken. I think of Mary Poppins. Pie Crust Promises, easily made … in search of normal. That would be a good name for a book. “when we were kids we would play pretend and I would pretend to dislike it, the mashed bodies against one another, in the darkness. Newly budding breasts. The dirty excitement of it.” I shake to think of it now. It was so bad. We never talked about It when the lights were on. It was something we did in the shadows. Even though I was the oldest I always felt the youngest.

I wonder if I ever would have the guts to publish something, even if I knew it would break my mother’s heart. Those glistening fall days at the zoo. A back park with blue jays singing. I always thought if I swung high enough I could fly away from it all, just disappear from everything. But I could never get that high. That far. The chains always remained … intact.

In search of normal.

did someone say God?

Did someone say God?
I don’t know what it is about god that makes people start to tremble and turn away, or give you that look … you know the one, the one that says “hey crazy lady, you seemed really normal until just now”. It’s like you just dragged them kicking and screaming into a Christian Book Store and a bunch of people started dunking them into holy water to get the burn off.

And they burst into flames.

That’s what conversations about God are like. At least around the people I know and work with. It’s just one of those “not too close” kind of conversations like religion, politics, and sex.

This weekend is one of the exceptions when we all talk about Old Glory and cry when some six year old sings the Star Spangled Banner in C Minor, then talk about how great it is to live in a country like that when the world has so obviously gone to Hell. A place that, ironically, we don’t actually believe in but probably would benefit from being afraid of.

We walk and talk, meanwhile, in a place that God has so clearly blessed – even if we don’t mean God in the real sense – even if we mean him euphemistically and hiply. In the way that children refer to Santa Claus in order to obtain presents long after faith fails them.

And I do believe in God.

The one God. The true God. The Jesus Christ God guy who doesn’t apologize for who He is, but stands tall and says things, one after another, after another. Who is and will be, and is to come. He’s the guy for me.

And in the midst of all the crazy red white and blue hullabulloo and firecrackers, in the middle of the hype that is middle America, it comes to me. What if it’s not faith or God that fails, but us.

We fail
In not appreciating
Not seeing
In standing and walking but not feeling each footstep, missing the crinkle of each toe on the sand, on the sidewalk.
Being so fucking lonely and still standing in the middle of metal jungles and still – STILL – not speaking to the people lining up and just as lonely, dying inside themselves a little or a lot at a time –
We fail
Ourselves
One another
God

Our mission

The black and white of daily life is absolved in the wash of the sun each morning. The daily reprieve, color –
He gifts us with a new dawn, a glowing twilight
The laughter of strangers
The kindness of friends

I don’t want to fail anymore
I want to fly

Please help me to fly …. God help us to rise to You

instead of bringing You down to us ...

crack is whack

My friend’s husband went on a cocaine rampage while she was out of town with their baby daughter last week.

A year … two years ago my husband and I weren’t my husband and I and we went to visit them in the middle of Redemption Southland. He’s a good old boy, I’d met a few times before. Been sober a while, shorter than me, but still –
We talked about things, laughed, got a long.
They’d been married a while then. I’d been at their wedding in the hills of Tennessee. Done the requisite best friend thing and flirted with her brother even.

And now this.

He tried to score crack from a friend of theirs.
Snorted.
Stole.
There were pills in the truck he drives. The usual suspects; kolonopin, xanax …

and she’s walking this path of questioning. Anger, resentment, loathing, dread. Not wanting to see him and missing him so badly it hurts. I wonder if, when you find someone who’s broken, you think “okay – this person won’t fuck up anymore – this person is going to be fixed and I won’t have to be the glue that holds us together”
so when they break, it’s that much more heartbreaking.

Crack is whack

Maybe Whitney was a prophetess.

http://www.shelsilverstein.com/indexSite.html

we went walking last weekend and I kept seeing places in the road where the sidewalk ended. Just spots in the grass with squares of cement. I wanted to take a picture and say “this is where the sidewalk ends” but it somehow seemed too sad. Today someone sent me a card with the Missing Piece on it. It just said “I love you”.

Crack is whack and I love you too

sandcastles

There is sand beneath my toes.
I hate the feel of squishiness so I walk to the cabin to change. he remains. Cold beer in a cooler and too much ice. We watched the ice water run down to the lake for a while, form a river through somebody’s sandcastle. Somebody’s dreams dashed in the surf.
Ever since we got here I’ve been thinking about broken dreams and promises. Things that are made and cast aside.
I went inside and watched a curtain float on the breeze.
The air tastes different here. Softer. More white cotton and lace eyelet.

The shower felt good on my skin. Little pellets of salt water taffy coming through somebody’s rusted over shower head. I remembered what it felt like then. Cool hands on an overheated body. Love in a pay by the hour motel. The dirty, sticky, needless feel of it.

The sand fell smooth beneath my toes. I slipped out of the shower as messy as when I’d stepped in. you were in the kitchen. Hissing of fish frying, smell of oil on frying pan gave you away.
I kissed virgin oil from your finger tips while clean air swirled around us.

Outside the sand fell through an hourglass we could no longer see, or sense.

Grounded from my Computer

This weekend I learned how much time I spend in front of my computer. And the funny thing is I don’t even accomplish anything while I’m in front of it.
What do I do that’s so important? I certainly don’t write the way I want to – or produce beautiful things. Sometimes I try – but a lot of times it’s work. Takes a long time but doesn’t really do anything. At least not anything spiritual or meaningful. Not anything that will last forever – leave a mark on the planet or on people’s hearts …

My husband and son, the two guys in my life, were driving home and he asked where I was. My husband said I was home (I was cleaning, waiting for them, reading). My son said “probably on her computer” … telling

From the mouths of babes

I have been trying to be on less, be present more
What good is it to be a corporal being in a non physical world if I lost the precious reality of moments? How can I say I love people really if when I’m with them I’m always talking about them to other people? I’ve always hated cameras for that, it’s why I have so few pictures – enjoy where you are when you are and let the memories become that when they have to.

My Mom finds comfort in pictures. Poring over images of the past.
I find comfort in the written words, things people once imparted to other people through paper. My Grandmother wrote about her life once and I cherish it forever. I am tormented by things just out of reach. People just lost, or on the other side of an easily traversed ravine.
Ravines, though, no matter how easy to cross, are still – at their core – dangerous.

From the mouths of babes.

I want to be an earth mother, a child of the wilderness, a girl running wild, barefoot in the wood. Somehow I think I would still carry a laptop in my knapsack, some granola bars and water in a jug. Just in case one of us grew hungry.

It’s just how it goes.

Text test ;)

Happiness is a Warm Gun ... or a Chocolate Fondue

It’s hard to find really happy people in the world.
There are the fakers. People who know they aren’t happy but want you to think they are, so they go out of their way to project happiness through monetary acquisitions or body language. These are the people you see in places like Denny’s, seedy truck stops in the middle of the night. They’re the ones in shitty clothes checking out other people’s shitty clothes and making sure everyone knows they’re on a road trip, or their car broke down. They have a reason to be here, like this, at this hour – but regardless – they’re flipping happy about it.
It’s BS. They’re just as annoyed as everyone else and anyone else would be.

Then there are the “unfazed ones”.
Those people who just don’t care. Doesn’t matter what happens “no sweat man” and they move on as though nothing happened.
“Mom died”
“no problem”“I busted your car”
“not a thing, I have seven others”
“dude, I slept with your women”
“no problem, I wear rubbers”
These guys are scary for an altogether different reason than the fakers – because while the fakers will ultimately break down and freak the fuck out, “unfazed ones”, unlike the fakers who end up face up in a bathtub, both wrists bleeding, end up on the top of a tower somewhere with a shot gun and two or twenty rounds of ammo. That’s right. These are the guys with the trench coats and the bombs.
“no problem” is code for “I’m going to get you, just not today”

Then there are the people who are on drugs
These are the people you want to know
These people know they’re aren’t happy and have taken steps to improve their lot, along with everyone else’s. Whatever they’re on – drugs, alcohol, chocolate, French fries – smile, take a hit, and give them some space. these are the people who won’t rule the world, but they won’t ruin or rule your life either.

Happiness is transient.
It is an arbitrary state of mind that ebbs and flows with the world and people that surround you … spending the day with friends, sunshine, and a chocolate fondue is always a good way to stretch the happiness bubble a little bigger, make it last a little longer.

Good luck with yours.