stories about hugs (a post which was saved in the drafts for a few months for reasons I have since forgotten. perhaps my standards have lowered.)

1. arrest

I walked into orchestra and set my ukulele down beside the trashcan, as I do every class day, and stretched my shoulders back, squinting at the board to see what scale I was supposed to have learned by now. A spunky little violinist with short hair and a leather jacket skipped in front of me, slowed down, and asked if I needed a hug.

In truth, my first instinct was to say no. The tactile defensiveness surged back up in my gut, and my brain clicked at the sight of her face, quickly categorizing her into the "haha, haha, not today, Shady" section of potential disasters.

She knew the answer before she had asked it. She walked towards me, her arms slowly stretching outward, wrists up. Like she was surrendering to arrest. And then, in this proximity, I sighed, registered her question, and answered it in an honest and resigned, "Why not?"


2. headlock

My brother snuck up behind me in the hallway while I looked for cereal in the cupboard. He chuckled, giving himself away as his little arms slowly crept around my waist. On instinct, I spun around and grabbed his wrist and put him in a headlock as he laughed and laughed and laughed, struggling to change his nearness.

"What are you doing?!" I asked ironically, which only made him laugh more.

"I just wanted to hug you!" he said.

My brother's nine-year-old hugs are typically violent and unsolicited. He squeezes as hard as he can for as long as he can, until the victim asks to be let go of. This is probably a healthy phase of development, but so far it has lasted his entire life.

I held him back at arms length. He tried to stop smiling and failed. "Please can I hug you?" he begged, erupting into giggles.

I looked at him sideways, testing him. He did nothing. "Alright, fine."


3. grace

"You did not speak to her with grace," Martensen said in a grossly accurate honesty which is always refreshing and never helpful. We sat beside each other on the windowsill, looking straight ahead.

"I know. I know that. I wasn't aiming for grace."

He shrugged, and walked outside, and I met him there, tossing my backpack against a brick pillar. It landed suddenly and fell slowly forward with a pitiable concrete sigh. Martensen laughed.

"Grace," I said, looking at where it had fallen. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me sideways, lifting his chin to rest it on my head, pinning my arms to my frame. He stayed like that for some time, not moving. Charlotte looked at us, puzzled, and said, "That doesn't look reciprocated."

"It's not," we said in unison.

tiny girl

There's a tiny girl at the laundromat with light-up sneakers running up to me and back to her mother, playing leap frog on the floor.

titles of unpublished (or unwritten) blog posts

• of all the tigers I have seen

• only a psychopath

• an actual flannel shirt

• sunflowers: how someone could hate a thing for dying

• astounding: a dialogue

• nyquil

• untimely nostalgia: hope, codependency, & the end of moonbeams

• apple: a dialogue

• grace

• records of a human phonebook

• the patriarchy & victoria's secret

• ting ting & the tilapia

• subliminal (a list of casually violently homophobic things that I have heard, and laughed at nervously)

• reasons for punching

• spring fling foresight

• whale aftermath

• to all the old men who have winked at me, as if expecting some sort of response

• lockdown [pt. 2]

• if you give a mormon coffee

• crying about rocks

gender & giraffes (or, why you shouldn't lie to kids, ever)

My youngest sister Saraiah is four years old.

On father's day, my stepdad took his son to a race track, leaving my mother, sisters, and myself to do whatever we wanted.

"Today's an all girls day," my mom told Saraiah. "It's just you and me and Selah and Shady!"

"Shady is not a girl," Saraiah responded emphatically. "Her's a boy!"

My mother was baffled. "...Why would you say that?"

Saraiah sighed angrily and folded her arms. "Because she is as tall as a giraffe, and giraffes are all boys!"

Our mother reasoned with her about how both boy and girl giraffes have to exist for the species to survive, and how Shady is neither of them, because she is a human, and then she pulled out her anatomy and physiology textbook and explained what made a boy and a girl, because that's who my mother is. Saraiah remained skeptical.

When she told me this happened, I laughed for a while, and then remembered a day about ten months earlier when I had told Saraiah I was a boy -- partly just to mess with her, and partly to see what she would do. She frowned, and said, "You not a girl?

"No."

"But I still a girl."

"Yes, you're still a girl."

Then she moved on and, as I had believed, promptly forgot the whole conversation.

At first we all thought she was just being silly, and would adjust easily to the new information regarding my gender, but throughout the day she would continue to bring it up, making sure. Even for weeks afterward.

We'd be lying in my bed, which she sleeps in since she's scared of the dark, and she'd be playing with my hair and then whisper softly, "Shady?"

"What?"

"You a girl."

"Yes."

Or while we're playing with my dog, "Shady? Calley's a girl. Her's a girl, right?"

"Yeah, she is."

"And you a girl!"

"Yes!"

"And me!"

"Yes!"

After all these conversations one would assume it would be enough.

But one day, we had a small family over for spaghetti and bread.

Half of my family is allergic to gluten: my mother and sisters. Whenever we do get supermarket bread -- a rare delicacy -- only my stepdad, brother, and myself eat it. On this day, one of the other little girls at the table picked up a piece of bread, and Saraiah gasped. "Mom!! Her's is eating wheat!"

"Saraiah it's okay, she's not allergic."

"But her's a girl!!"

I sighed, exasperated. "Saraiah, I'm a girl!"

Saraiah's eyes widened, fork held tightly in hand. She looked around the table, at the two separate pots of noodles, at the plates, at the faces of our guests. You could see how hard she was trying to understand.

I realized then what made it such a problem. If I was four years old, I would definitely categorize my family with my mother and sister on one side, and my dad, brother, and Shady on the other. It made perfect sense as a social binary. We all eat wheat. We're all tall. We all have slightly lower voices, all wear baggy pants and button-down shirts. None of us wear jewelry.


I had been debating whether or not to cut my hair off, but then realized at that moment, watching my sister try desperately to understand the world around her, it would only make Saraiah's life that much harder.

perry

An urban legend.

back

Young girls, middle school girls, matching patriotic bikini tops. They are slouching, nervous, happy, yet to understand the mystical qualities of the shadows under their own shoulder blades of which they cannot see. Skin stretched over spines, told too skinny by their mothers, browning in the sun above the amusement park.

And boys, boys who travel in herds, remove their shirts in herds, swing them over their shoulders in herds, hair short and wet, eyes grinning. Backs straight and tall, lean and proud, some flexing uncomfortably as they approach the backs of girls.

And the backs of children, in the backseat with the windows down. Children running towards the water rides unsupervised, all ribs and spines and healthy hunger, hunger which cannot be filled with the food stamps keeping them alive. Hunger to run and chase and catch and throw, to laugh and cry and shout and scream, to bend backwards, to break bones.

The backs of pennies in a dirty fountain, backwards wishes in the water where a dead bird floats where birds do not belong.

Nine years old and the boys stand up straighter and the girls slouch shorter; the boys get louder, the girls get softer; and you notice the backs of them in the crowds, watch the gradual realization of bodies, the gradual stretching of spines.

From the back of the line, backs of men beneath t shirts, some soft and padded, muscled and slouching under the weight of family backpacks. Backs of girls in crop tops, above the hems of faded jean shorts, soft and dimpled and they know what they're doing though they know not what will be done. Backs of women, seemingly burdened, shirts that hug the skin and bra straps of infinite variety all consistently more interesting colors than the clothes that cover them.

And all of them move to the front of the line, and all of them lean back in their seats, and you are looking at your shoes, looking for something you want to have back, something you left here in middle school. Something in the scaffolding, something in the framework, something in the chipping paint. And you're waiting, searching for words abandoned in this place, words of great significance, and you want them back somehow. You want them back.

Backs of hands lifted in the swirling blue sky, screams tossed backwards and hurled into the air behind, you want them back, you want them back, you want them back.

Backs of nickels, backs of dimes, backs of quarters collected at the bottom as the bird is fished from the surface of the water, floating on its back. The wishes are more expensive these days. You wonder how much they all add up to. You wonder how many came true.

You wonder how many wishes were never asked for, lying on your belly in the grass during the homecoming picnic last year. Unnoticed freckles on your back. Unnoticed beauty on the undersides of leaves dancing above you, everything backwards, everything wrong, everything alive and holy.

And you want that wish back like the bird wants its life back.

Everything alive and holy.

unholy underwear

When I was maybe eight years old, I discovered slips.

I call it a discovery because it happened entirely on my own. I noticed these off-white silk skirts my mother and sister wore under their church dresses, and asked nothing about them. But when I found one in the laundry room, I figured I should wear it.

Because that's what people do, right? They wear slips under their church dresses.

I had no hint of understanding as to the reason and function behind slips, and I wasn't about to ask. I just slipped it on (ha ha) and got my books and went out the door.

As I walked out of the car and through the parking lot outside the church, the slip -- much too big for my frame -- slowly fell from my waist and eventually gathered in a small silk heap around my ankles. I looked down, stepped out of it, and put it in my bag.

My aunt, who had witnessed the whole thing, approached me laughing. I asked blankly what it was she was laughing at, and she stopped and looked at me, puzzled.

"Well--" she tried to explain, "your slip fell off..."

I looked at her.

"And slips -- slips are kind of like underwear. ... So, it was, you know, embarrassing."

I looked at her.

"...Since I could see it." She was beginning to feel cruel.

"Oh," I said, and looked at the undergarment in my bag. I blushed, and laughed, immediately embarrassed. On command. Feeling exactly as I had just been told to feel, as it had been explained to me.

---

Since then I have, of course, learned the function of slips, acquired ones which fit, and worn them appropriately, careful that they are not noticed, simply because of what I was told that one unfortunate evening when I was eight.

Children are only ashamed of what they are told to be ashamed of.

And proudly so.

They hide what they are told to hide, and they do not really think of how the slip must feel to be kept so carefully from public view -- every edge of lace, every small seam. The children are proud of their proper embarrassment, and why shouldn't they be? Undergarments never ask why you are embarrassed of them.

You hold no obligation to them.

Everyone wears underwear, and so everyone knows that everyone else does too. But whenever you see it in public (outside of the purposeful sagging-pants look, or maybe not), you are immediately embarrassed. Because underwear is meant to stay under whatever you wear.

Do you hide what you're ashamed of, or are you ashamed of what you hide?

Is it only the function of the slip -- the purpose of residing under a proper skirt -- that produces embarrassment? Or is it because of embarrassment that the slip must belong under a skirt?

You are proud of this shame. You are. You're supposed to be.

---

People aren't like underwear. That's what I'm saying.

cigarette daydreams, cage the elephant

The milk aisle of a Safeway in Old Town, Fort Collins.

Empty florescent lights and hollow aisles, slightly stained off-white tiles, rows and rows of pristinely packaged food stuffs, neat and clean.

White gallon jugs and white cartons and white bottles, almond and soy and rice and dairy: like a little refrigerated city stretching down the back of the store, and there was no one else and the young girl sat cross-legged on the floor with the city of milk behind her and I sat in front of her.

Something was in love. Something soft and humming like the moths in the lights, something sleepy and beautiful but it wasn't young love between people, it was something more. Something louder than a shadow of wet floor signs and something rarer than the vomit beside them.

The same feeling occurred then that occurred in the music store: the feeling of childhood. Of fragility and safety and calm. Void of responsibility and consequence. And somewhere in the empty superstore a squeaky cart moved down an aisle and somewhere a restroom door closed and the lights hummed down in a softspoken splendor over the milk, the milk, the milk.

And it was love, all of it love, whispering through the music in the car. Familiar and warm, without the repercussions of being held in human hands, it fluttered and flew in and out the car windows, in and out of our lungs. It rejoiced and it told no lies.

And remnants of this love stuck to the kitchen sink, and it was smiling and laughing and holding on to the edges of light and happiness and sound as the music played while music could be found.

An enormous weight removed itself, if only for a moment. A hand of love on your shoulder. Refuge in the milk aisle of a Safeway, holding a ninety-nine-cent bag of off-brand marshmallows, laughing in the afternoon.

Moments of believability. Small glimpses of bliss, shouts from the other end of the void. Caught in the milk net. Tumbling out, laughing. The humming of florescent friendship.

Moments.

Take pictures. Write notes. Sign 'love' before your name.

Pain does not make joy. Objective perspective changes no substance of these theocratic moments held suspended in space and time. We hold a responsibility to touch the beauty of our lives, to hold it where it can be held and to watch it as it leaves us.

I hold no obligation to edit this post.

Poetry makes no difference to the recorded occurrence of love in a Safeway milk aisle.

anticlimax

Cool beans.

Why do you have a thing
against cool beans.

New number?

No, just the one I use at night.

Oh lord please don't tell me
you have a whole separate
nocturnal life

...

Dude, like, several

I am not a fan of your life choices

I am aware

I have a thing against cool beans because 

you use the expression in times of great 

anticlimax thus resulting in frustration

Because I can't stand reaching for 

something and finding nothing. 

That's the worst thing, holding onto 

nothing.

Ah

Wait no

I'm not going to argue philosophy with you tonight 

Okay

...What else am I here for then?

How are you?

Debating whether or not to restart therapy

How are you?

Terrible

Goodnight

Goodnight

I care about you greatly

Cool beans

summer and a leaky roof

Something happens in the summer. I don't know what to call it.

Something sleek and spineless and dangerous, something very dangerous. It crawls out of muscle memory like clockwork. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's good or bad, but it's bright and slow and foggy and every memory of it disappears as soon as it leaves.


The roof was dripping into a trashcan in the middle of the floor. The music store was dark and quiet, the ceiling covered with hanging half-translucent plastic sheets where cloudlight shone onto the dark green carpet. Barely anyone was there.

I sat on a speaker beside the guitar counter, where a man I almost recognized re-stringed the resonator I brought in after trying to do it myself and breaking a string, along with a good section of mental and emotional denial and blockage.

My lungs felt new and tired, like the streets after rain, and I realized the music store held the calm protection of a nursery. A nervous-looking old man thumbed through records. Someone somewhere tuned a piano. A mother and young girl opened the door where the light fell softly on the carpets, and their footsteps made no sound. The water from the plastic sheets dripped and dripped and dripped, and I wondered how heavy the trashcan was.

"So you play the cello, huh?" the man asked hesitantly, remembering what I had told him some minutes before and making an effort at quiet friendliness.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

"Since you were real young, or...?"

"Since I was eight." He spun the stringwinder around the peg and looked up at me briefly. "My grandpa taught me," I added.

Within this conversation we had both gratefully concluded neither of us wanted to talk, and so we happily continued in silence. He worked, and I watched, and learned through watching.

In that dimly-lit damp empty music store, time had slowed and settled, and the world wrapped around it in a tumultuous echo of struggle and chaos.

From where I sat on the top of a speaker, tapping the soles of my shoes on the carpet, I was a child. Everyone was. Frowning in their sleep, twitching their toes, breath catching inwardly every few minutes from all the crying it took to fall asleep.

The man behind the counter would not hurt me, nor would I hurt him, and I watched his face carefully as if in awe of this fact. He fine-tuned the last string and picked up the instrument and rested it on his knee, and I watched as he played something blues-y and beautiful and the both of us enjoyed it and I paid him in exact change and thanked him and he wished me a good day and I wished him likewise. And I walked back out into the soft sunlight, where cars rushed into brightness and brightness rushed into sound and the asphalt all around sucked up the sky where brightness sang.

discovery

On a warm afternoon last autumn, Charlotte brought her dog to school.

She was supposed to be in history class, but couldn't bring herself to the classroom that day. Roonie and I didn't have a class to go to, and so we walked out to the parking lot, where the spaniel, Lily, sat in the passenger seat of Charlotte's car, wagging its tail.

The first thing Roonie said when she saw Lily was,

"Dog!"

Lily wagged her tail and pawed at the window, and Charlotte opened the door and brought her into the parking lot on a leash, where Roonie crouched down to pet her. "Dog!" she said again. "You're a dog!!"

This was all Roonie could think to say for a very long time as she sat ecstatic in the school parking lot with what truly was a dog.

And the dog licked her face and wagged its tail with every word, as if joining in on the discovery. "Yes! A dog!! That is me!!!!! I am dog!!"

I remember a time that autumn when I was sitting in the grass by a tree, and Charlotte looked at me very seriously and studiously, and with what seemed to be utmost amazement said softly, "Your eyes are so green."

And I nodded.

That is exactly the color of my eyes. They're not rimmed or freckled or striped or centered with any other hint of color. Nothing left to the imagination, nothing for metaphors to work with. They are constantly and completely the color green, and Charlotte marveled in this fact, like holding a single crayon from an eight-pack of Crayolas for the very first time.

The amazement of this commonplace simplicity was held as if of great significance, as if the color of the grass and trees and fences and highway signs has never been seen nor will ever be seen again.

And there were other times when she would state, astonished, other amazing facts, such as, "You're a girl."

The funniest part of all this is that, every time she would say something like that, I would feel almost exactly like the dog in the parking lot. "Yes!! A girl! That is me!!!! I am girl!!" 

As if I had never noticed before.

The familiarity of a silhouette on a stage is so stirring and powerful because of its factual actuality. It is as sure and simple as the glossary of a seventh grade science textbook, made no less astounding in its certainty. 

All that is is all that ever will be, and yet never will be again.

And so these small moments of discovery must be reveled in, closely and passionately, every dog and every color and every feeling ever felt. Nothing is new under the sun, this is true, but no sunrise is the same. No morning. No moment.

Everything is dying all the time, and so its worth is held in its entropy.

This has always been true, and has always been known, and yet is at this moment and every moment after discovered again and again. So I write it and type it and read it over again. And again. And again. 

And the dog wags its tail and paws at the window and barks at the knowledge of its name.

analysis of evil

I want a story about a villain.

This has, of course, been done before. But whenever it is done, the villain becomes the protagonist. He gets to be the good guy, gets to tell his side of the story, because in his eyes he is the good guy.

What I want is a bad guy -- a bad guy who knows his role. Not some lost soul who through choice or circumstance, through selfishness or greed or envy or any other deadly sin, ends up harming others. What I want is malice. Malice is not listed in biblical sins to avoid because no one seems to ever, when explaining what led to their mistakes, claim they wanted to be cruel.

I want cruelty. I want someone to tell the story of who they are and what they did while knowing the audience will fall in love with every other character while wanting the narrator's head on a stick.

And for that narrator to tell the story anyway.

It doesn't happen like that. Because no one sympathizes with malice, no one understands it or relates to it because no one -- absolutely no one -- considers themselves a villain. No one considers themselves evil or cruel. Selfish, maybe. Greedy, maybe. But these are only flaws, and you are not your flaws.

No one can wake up every morning understanding fully that the heart within their chest is stone through and through. They have to put their feet on the ground. They have to put on pants. They have to put food in their mouth.

How can anyone do this with their mistakes being those of cruelty? Selfishness is human. Rage is human. Revenge is human. But malice? Wanting to injure others purely for injury's sake? No, this is for the monsters under the bed. The monsters can't tell the story because no one can believe it in their hearts when they hear it.

No matter how much you hate yourself, you cannot truly believe who you are is evil.

You have to put pants on in the morning.

You have to put your head on a pillow at night.

And in the meantime all the other characters, all those whose hearts are brave and kind and selfless and honest and loving and human, are suffering and crying and dying because of you. Where are your pants now?

I don't think anyone can survive being the villain, not for the whole story. Accepting their role only leads to trying to change it, trying to find the ever-present goodness at the center of every human heart. You don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe in the Universe. But you have to believe in that goodness. There is no way to survive your life without that belief.

Is it true? Of course it is. There is no pure good, and there is no pure bad, not in human terms.

But we wouldn't be able to survive a different answer.

some cute stories

1.)

My stepfather recently remodeled the kitchen in our house, which isn't really news, as our house has been in a constant state of reconstruction for the entire time we have been living in it. This isn't a bad thing by any means. If you are going to marry someone, I think you should marry someone who is constantly trying to improve.

My mother has recently been growing plants with an almost obsessive desperation and meticulous attention. There have been plants crawling all over the house since January. We have full-grown potted tomatoes on the piano.

And, because these two things have been happening at the same time, my stepfather decided to put in a big bay window in front of the sink (you know, the kind that sticks out of the house a bit), with glass shelves for her plants. And because of this, the faucet which he chose to accompany this sink is a great monstrosity stretching way up into the air which can be bent like a garden hose to water all the plants on the windowsill.

The problem with this -- which he found out only after ordering and assembling the sink -- is that the water which comes out of the sink is softened, and would therefore kill any plants watered with it.

So my mom is standing in the kitchen asking why he ordered this huge purposeless garden-hose sink faucet, taking up all this ugly space. And he stands there and thinks for a moment before unlatching the hose, holding it out in front of him like a pistol, and, grinning, says, "For getting into arguments."

And my mother's laughter sounds like forgiveness.


2.)

My father's doppelgänger's girlfriend was telling me the other day about a paper she had to write for English class, a story about her life told with symbolism.

"I decided to use fire as a symbol," she said, "which was very cliche and juvenile, but it's what I did."

"The thing is," she went on, "I kind of lied a little when writing the paper, trying to make it more dramatic, make me look more cool and angst-y. Because it was a very angst-y story. Embarrassingly angst-y."

I asked her to tell me about it.

"Well, okay," she said. "So it was, like, 4:30 in the morning, and I tried to sneak out of my window. But it's a very small window, and I'm not very limber. So I sort of got stuck, and --"

"Wait, why were you sneaking out of your window?"

"Because I wanted to burn this letter."

"Oh, okay. Alright. Continue."

"So I ended up just going out the backdoor, and my mom heard me. And I had a lighter with me, and she came outside and she thought I was smoking pot. And I was like, 'why would I be smoking pot at 4:30 in the morning, half an hour before you wake up to go to work?' Besides, I have a very good sleeping schedule. Sleep is important to me.

"I told her I just wanted to burn this letter -- which was a very thin, one-page letter -- but when she saw it, she thought it was really thick and heavy, a lot bigger than it actually was. And so she said I couldn't burn it by myself; I needed my dad to help me."

At this point, my father's doppelgänger started laughing, an oh no kind of laughter, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. And she looked at him the way two people who really know each other see each other, because she knew he had heard this story.

"So my dad came outside to help me burn this letter, and it just wouldn't burn. He put it in this metal tin sort of thing, and I'd just -- I'd just really expected it to burn, you know? I just wanted my dramatic symbolic letter-burning moment. But instead my dad and I were in my backyard at 4:30 in the morning with this stupid piece of paper in a metal tin that took forever to actually light on fire and kept going out and stuff, and, God, it was so pitiful. And then after so long, when it was all burned up, he finally just dumped it out on the ground and that was it. That's the story."

"I think that's the best story I've ever heard," I said.

3.

There's an elderly and vaguely southern man at my church named Bob. He spent his whole life in "the ice cream business," and now lives in a nursing home. He preaches to all the other people in the home, and mistakenly called a woman a man, twice.

He has told me this story about five or six times, which isn't very many for Bob.

Bob wears a faded blue suit, too wide for his shoulders and too long for his torso, every time I see him. His collar is usually turned up on the right side, which I fold back down while he is talking to me, every time I see him.

Bob is my best friend.

He usually greets me with a smile when I walk in the door, and begins by asking, "Your dad, um... What's his name?"

And I respond with my grandpa's name.

"Yes, David!" he says. "You know, a couple of weeks ago I think I saw him in here, he was visiting, you know. And I had asked him to give my memorial talk years ago. So when I saw him I says, 'You know, David, I don't think I'm going to need you anymore. I'm not gonna die!'"

And he looks at me, eyes smiling so brightly that somehow you begin to realize nothing has ever been more true. Bob really will not die. It is simply not in the realm of truth for anything else to happen. This fact is an absolute, and it is standing right in front of you, beaming.

"I'm gonna keep right on living, all the way up to -" he moves his hand to his left, in a small shaky sweeping motion " - you know, when God restores the earth back to the way it was in the garden of Eden?" He looks at me for understanding, and I nod, because I have heard this story. "Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and they weren't supposed to eat it. But the devil told 'em to and so they did it. And you know what?" His eyes are shining and he taps me on the arm, smiling. "I'm not gonna listen to him!"

"Me neither, Bob," I say, every week, twice a week. And every time, the story is brand new. It solidifies. The smile only becomes more genuine, the light in his eyes only brightens, and I turn his collar down and wonder if the suit was always too big for him or if I should be worried.

But you just can't worry about Bob, not when you hug him and say, "Bye, Bob," and he says, "I love you too." 

And this is why Bob gets dropped off here twice a week: for a hug and an "I love you."

Stories are not always for hearing, and love does not always involve knowledge. I don't know much about Bob, and he knows even less about me. But every time he tells his story, I love him a little bit more, and thus it feels I come to know him a little bit better. Sometimes he tells stories about senior ditch day, or a rabbi he talked to about the sunset, and once he told me the story of how his wife died.

These stories become him, though they are not really all that he is, and it is a great comfort to hear the remembered stories of an immortal friend. 

an open letter (between myself & your medicine)

I found your medication on my windowsill this morning, and then wondered why it had taken me this long to notice it.

The pills sat like little twin robin's eggs at the bottom of the bottle, a springtime blue with little official-looking numbers etched into each smooth little side. So small and bright, tinkling merrily as I lifted the bottle in awe and dread.

Maybe you just brought extra, I thought, pretending antidepressants are in a constant ambiguous surplus, and that of all the things you must be missing this will most definitely come up first and foremost in your mind.

The question of why you left them here will, of course, remain unanswered, and the pills will remain unreturned. I do not wish to become your drug dealer. Don't be worried.

Later in the day, as I sat in bed unconsciously playing old songs on the ukulele, I noticed the bottle sitting upright on my bible-reading journal -- an elegant and extravagant-looking book with an intricate gilded design and a red ribbon. It took me until the second verse of the song to realize I was serenading it. 

The chemistry between myself and your medicine was oddly sincere, and I somehow seemed to feel I was being very attentively listened to. I leaned towards it, showing off with an unnecessarily soulful half-finger-picking type of strumming, slow and quiet and genuine. Each word was sung softly and without reserve, and I once in a while glanced shyly towards the bottle without realizing the ridiculous circumstances of the performance. 

And oh, the bottle was beaming. It practically lit up the room. I could all but feel it harmonizing at the last chorus, you know that part. It requires two voices for the full wordless meaning to be achieved. The ending drew itself out, spacing the distance between notes like runners in slow-motion at the end of a race, wishing to hold the moment as long as it was possible to be held. 

And the last chord rung, simple and small, a few inches around us, for about three fifths of a moment.

I wanted your pills to cry.

I lifted the lid and it smelled like your mother and I wondered why I knew what that smell was. 

I could throw them away, of course, or flush them down a toilet. They're not anything heavy or serious, really. Just a temporary buoy. "To function," as you explained. Like a machine. The vastly misunderstood and complex machine of the human soul. 

Or I could take them. Two little blue robin's eggs wouldn't really change anything. It's just like coffee or whiskey or sugar or any other legal and popular drug. 

There are times in life in which it is necessary and helpful to cut your heart out of your chest, and this is one of those times. The hand must be clean and the blade must be sharp and you must be kind to yourself, please. You'll only have to break a couple of ribs. Slice the arteries first, and then the aorta, and do so as quickly as possible. Then finish with the pulmonary veins and vena cava. Lift it out gently and leave it in a clean basin of hydrogen peroxide for thirty seconds to three months, but no longer. Then stitch it back into place and realign the ribs. It is a fairly simple surgical procedure, meant to be taken entirely literally.

You must be kind to yourself. One of the most important rules, which I should have written into the list, is this: Do not ask to be understood.

sentimentality & attention

We were standing at the top of a cliff.

My sister had already removed her shoes long before our short trek to the top, and her feet moved over the rocks and red dirt and sand, silent and unnoticed. She lifted her chin and spread her shoulders back as she cast her eyes over the great Pacific crashing angrily against the rocks below.

Suddenly, she was performing.

The water was as great and as small an audience as she had ever known.

She leaned over the edge, all poise and purpose, and I remembered something she had told me not too long ago about how stupid unsuccessful suicide attempts are. "If you don't succeed at killing yourself," she said, "then you didn't want to die. You just wanted attention."

But she only said things like that when she was performing.

My sister stepped down, boldly, as if daring the ocean to make a move. The cliff tapered a little, leaving a few feet of steps closer to the water and closer to death.

I edged near her, but not too near, as if my presence alone held her back like a rope, like a buoy. But I knew it really didn't. 

If she wanted to die -- really, really wanted it -- she'd just up and do it.

"This is my favorite color," she declared suddenly, calling out into the air like a gull. She spread a single arm towards the waves like she was selling them. "It's so... angry."

The waves drew in their breaths and threw themselves against the rocks, one after another after another. They shattered in the air, great fireworks of glass droplets spraying towards the sky, and they frothed and swirled in the crevices of the land. It didn't smell like salt. It smelled like dead things. Little white lines and patterns danced across the surface of the blue -- seething, gaining momentum before crashing back again.

They shattered in the air.

My sister took off her hat and sat adoringly on the very edge of the crumbling pale lava rock. "This," she said, almost too quietly to hear over the crashing and burning of waves and rocks. "This."

I stood, and feared, and waited, and watched as she looked and smiled and sighed.

"Hey, you wanna maybe come back up here?"

To get my sister to even think of doing anything she hasn't already done, one must use the words 'want' and 'maybe'.

She did not answer, only stood very suddenly and brushed her hands on her thighs. She turned, and walked back toward me. She tossed her head over her shoulder, where the words swirled in the wind and the spray and found themselves back to me, tousled and somber. "That's all you need, really. Just two minutes with what you love."

Then she looked back at me. "Sentimentality is for lazy people."

I subconsciously gripped the hair-tie around my wrist and laughed. "Is it?"

"Why, of course." She put on her hat and began to descend the mountain, not on any trail of course, but just wherever it seemed to be going down. "Why would anyone waste so much time just thinking about things that you loved that aren't here anymore? Really now. There's so much else to do. Just move on."

My mind wandered back to the Strauss CD on my desk, and the plaid shorts I can't seem to keep from sleeping in even though they don't fit me, and how sometimes I wake up and my eyes are wet and stuck together and I can't remember what I was dreaming about.

I felt the hair-tie at its connecting point, already beginning to fray.

I thought about those stupid black boots, the ones with the duct tape and rubber cement making up for a loosening sole on one side. And that hole in the left toe where the snow always sneaks in, the old leather crumbling and folding and fraying like a memory.

And then I thought about the delicacy of Christmas lights reflected in reading glasses.

And then a branch broke and I was on a mountain, and my sister was still talking, and she was asking where she left her shoes.

And my mind reminded me that I needed to stay alive, and watch my footing, and eat and sleep even if I can't remember why it's so hard to do that. Why is it so hard to do that? No, don't think about that right now, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Food matters. Sleep matters. And you wonder, why are you telling me that? But by then you've already remembered.

Then the branch breaks, or the coffee spills, or the alarm goes off, and you thank your mind for providing the denial and disassociation one's health requires. But you will remember anyway. It will be a loop of forgetting and eating and remembering and forgetting and sleeping and remembering, with songs and conversation dispersed throughout it generously, because it's a good life you live, and a great privilege to be breathing.

But you will remember anyway.

Only a single moment, a single silly question which you laughed at while no one else did. A word, a glance, and then your own awful laughing. But they want an answer from you, and you can tell you gave them the wrong one: the only answer that doesn't match up. And it's just the reason why. And they look at you very sadly and you sink a little smaller in your chair. Attention? 

No one would do something like that for attention, and my sister knows this as she stares into the angry swirling sea. You do it because you want to die, of course. You do it because you want to.

You want to, right? You want to loop on that word, that look, that question, so that then you won't have to think about anything else. You won't have to replace the boots. You won't have to return the books. You love those boots. You love those books. And you love those furious waves, the danger of standing too close and holding on too long.

You don't do it for attention, you do it for sentimentality.

You do it for love.

[NOTE: No, I haven't updated in forever, and yes, this is a pretty cryptic and not-very-well-written post, but it's been a weird and busy few months. I'll post something good soon. Hopefully. Oh, and by the way, it's my birthday today.]

the intimacy of spit

I'm standing in a bathroom that is not mine, in front of the mirror above the sink, wearing my sister's Elliott Smith T-shirt and another girl's red flannel, suddenly surprised that I look almost exactly like both of my parents did when they were younger.

I'm holding someone else's toothbrush.

It looks exactly the same as the one I accidentally left at home.

The girl with the overused giggle whose flannel I was wearing because I was cold had told me I could use hers if I wasn't too grossed out about it. I don't know why I accepted the offer.

Though we both have braces, the bristles of her toothbrush are softer and less abused than mine.

I try to treat them gently.

I am brushing my teeth with someone else's toothbrush and it is the most intimate moment I have ever experienced in my life, and I am not sure how I feel about that fact.

The owner of the toothbrush is in another room. Her sleeves are too short for my arms, of course, and I stare at the face of my parents in the mirror, thinking how frightening and comforting it is that I am fifty percent of both of them. And how people are made up of genetics and choice, how perhaps I am really made of fifty percent of each of my parents' decisions, and that's what I'm looking at in the mirror. Maybe I am made up of the cereals they bought and the music they listened to and the mistakes they made and the memories which they kept and threw away.

Later, I tell the girl with the overused giggle and the soft-bristled toothbrush about how my sister and I used to get a copy of M magazine - a Tiger Beat type tabloid for preteen girls - at the airport each year when we were younger. And how our dad would read it in his special serious story-time voice, making up for unread bedtime stories, teaching us not to trust the media. Like a good dad. And how he would burp a lot, because of the medication he used at the time, and how he would blow it toward the ceiling so we wouldn't have to smell it.

Gross things can be startlingly intimate.

In a gruesomely beautiful way.

I remember the years when my sister and I began to buy M magazine and no longer knew the celebrities it talked about, because we had grown out of it. We were too old. We were not only too old for bedtime stories, we were too old to make up for bedtime stories, and that was a very sad thing, but I don't mention that part when I tell the story.

I don't use the little rubber tongue bristles on the back of the toothbrush, and when I am done I wash it out carefully and reposition it in the cabinet above the sink, thinking about the grossness of kissing and what people are supposed to do with the spit in their mouths.

When we watch Breakfast at Tiffany's later that night, during the kiss at the end, the giggling girl who let me borrow her toothbrush starts laughing uncontrollably. I ask her quietly what is so funny, and she whispers back, spit, and laughs at my previously mentioned lack of understanding.

Kissing is far more romantic than a borrowed toothbrush, of course, but it is no less intimate in terms of spit.

And no one hardly ever mentions the gruesome intimacy of spit. Or how it holds the DNA of our parents' choices, spilling into our morning coffee.

I don't know.

It's just a thought.