I put my pants on to go the bathroom

and I shouldn't have to.

Let's write a poem

Let's call it something inspirational
or unique
or mythological
or traditional

Let's make it about
the insufferability of modern existence
simple contentment
love
things that are outrageous

Let's put it in meter
like Shakespeare and them
or invent our own
and call it something new

Let's abandon all rules
like we know what they are
like they repress us
and craft our own

Let's create a whole world
of meaning of words
of desolate love
and tragedy-comedy

Let's finish the thing
stuff it in a drawer
then pull it back out
and sign it like that

The Paradigm Shift

So I thought I should post an actual blog, as opposed to my self-serving pieces of fiction. But it's fun, is it not?

Okay, so let's talk. Future. What is the future? My mom keeps pestering me about this abstract concept of having a "job" after college. First off,  such things do not exist. Fairy tale. More likely to find a unicorn after college. So of course I keep trucking in my absolutely esoteric academic focus: writing.

So let me validate myself a little. I'm not going to be so vain as to say that I think I'm just damn good enough to make it on my own, off the written word. It's hard to get people to pay you for what you do with a pen, or a computer keyboard. Like everyone else who wants to make a living off this type of stuff, I'll have to secure myself a "real" job (pfft. unicorns) and just write on my off time. This most likely won't relate at all to what I'm doing in school now, but I think I like the idea of that. I want to spend a few years, maybe a decade or two, pulling my head out of my ass enough to look at everything around me and gain a sense of what the grounded world looks like. I think if I just nosedived into writing as a career, I'd get completely lost in my interiority. I've been in these places, and it's kind of scary to just keep falling into that pit of contemplation.

I don't know. I think I saved a boy's life. He was this sixteen-year old at a Halloween dance party, and he had that hallowed look in his eyes. And me, on some kind of high of happiness and feeling the thrust of life, I gave him this speech. He probably affected me more than I did him, actually. This was probably the first time I'd actually felt like I'd touched someone. I'd removed myself from myself and actually listened to someone else. All night he'd been very annoying, and I'd been telling him to bugger off or whatever. Then I entertained the thought of listening to him, and I don't know. It felt good to just be totally about someone else for once.

Words! I touched him with words! Words aren't really anything in themselves. Once you start giving them agency you lose the ability to manipulate them. You become their slave, and you fear doing them a disservice. Words are really the bridges we build. Like, I have these thoughts in my head, and I want to convey those thoughts to other people. So what I do is I sit down and I write my thoughts on the page, and maybe, hopefully, someday someone out there will happen upon this bridge. Even if we're far removed in space and time, there will be a connection made between us. This is the "meaning" of life, in my book. We're here to relate to each other and form deep relationships with people. Life itself is so full of tragedy, and so we build these connections to each other as a way of creating our own meaning. We define our own "meanings" of life by the relationships we form.

I want to do this. I ramble a lot, and I tend to be redundant, and I can't ever really articulate my thoughts out loud, but I feel like I can connect to people, or maybe just learn to connect to people, through writing. I feel like both of my parents had all this energy boiling up inside them. From what I can tell they both have this intense interiority. It's beautiful and passionate in one way, but sometimes I think they kind of self-destructed because they never found an outlet for this. Instead they tried to fit themselves into social molds they felt comfortable with on the front end and just boiled over on the inside. Even if I just end up telling the story of my life and of the people around me, and this just sits on my bookshelf while I go on forming a family and hopefully starting a career, I think I can be happy. Writing is often tormenting, but I've found the pay off to be so much greater than the pain on the front end. Interiority on the page becomes beautiful, where on the inside it holds the capacity for ruin.

I think these are the reasons I'm telling myself it's okay to take years of very expensive school to craft something that's not strictly utilitarian. It's a process of self-aggrandizement, sure, but I think it's necessary. It's the reason I started this whole blog thing to begin with. To call it therapy would kind of dust at the top of the iceberg, but I think it's a worthy summary. What's the end of this writing? I'm not sure.

I do know that it feels right. When I finally admitted to myself that this was what I was going to try and do with myself, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I remember the night I decided this. I was walking over to Fido's to have some coffee with Ellen, and the world suddenly felt full of purpose and brightness where before it had just been a burden, a forest that I had to wade through and cross my fingers that I'd taken the right path. Paths, paths. It's not a path thing. It used to be a path thing. Now? It's fearlessness. The future's hazy and more unpredictable than I can imagine, but I don't fear it. I feel like I have a sense of purpose, and that no matter where I go or what I do, I'll do just fine because I'll be happy.

I do feel happy.

The Girl and the Book and the Ice Cream Truck

Don’t listen to the birds. Don’t smile at the wind when it brushes against your bare arms, or when the sun warms your face just to the degree that the boundary between you and the outside disappears. Don’t laugh at Katie’s joke, her eyes lingering on yours to see if you thought she was funny. Pretend you don’t notice as you continue reading, brandishing the cover of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Katie. Maybe she’ll get the idea.

“How’s your book?” she asks you. Guess she didn’t get the idea.

“Good.”

“What’s it about?” She grabs a finger-full of her hay-blonde hair and stares at it while she twists.

Put the book down and fold your hands over your lap. “The beauty of literature is that it can’t be summarized, you see. Sam Clemens—I mean, Mark Twain—he’s a genius author. He creates this world in only so many words, and it pops up in my mind. I don’t see words running around each other, I see trees, and a river, and a young boy and his friend.”

“Sounds neat. What do the boy and his friend do?” She’s involved her other hand at this point, creating intricate twirls around two fingers on each hand.

“I guess since you’ll probably never read it, it wouldn’t be bad to summarize it. I won’t do this for every book I read though.” You raise your eyebrows at her. After she nods, you continue. “Basically, it’s about a boy named Huckleberry. And he frees himself from people who are trying to control him. And he goes down a river, just him and his friend, looking at the world and having fun. It’s on a river.”

“Sounds interesting, I guess. I don’t like to read much though. You know who I like? Beverly Cleary. She’s a wonderful author too.”

You grin to yourself and pick up your book again. In the corner of your eye you see your mother approaching the back door.

She pushes open the back door and leans her head past the three little steps between the kitchen and the patio. “Dinner’s about ready, Lainey. You enjoying yourself? It’s much nicer out here than it was in your dark, stuffy room, isn’t it?”

The leaves in the sky are shimmering with the wind, and the sun makes everything a golden-yellow color. Yeah, mom, you say. Great. Beautiful day.

Now she turns to Katie. “Dinner will be ready soon. Why don’t you girls go wash your hands.” Katie pushes out of the chair. But before she goes in, she pauses. Her ears perk up. She jerks her head around.

“You hear that?”

“No? What is it?” You look up too, and the wind pushes the pages of your book together in a slow fan, but you don’t notice. Five kids that look to be about your age run through your yard to get to the street out in front. You finally hear what they all must have heard—some notes carried by the wind. You didn’t hear it before, but now you listen. The ice cream truck. Last time he came it was the beginning of summer, but you only know this because Katie ran to your house after the USA red white and blue ice cream had already dried sticky on her hands. She turns around to you, her eyes wide and her smile growing ever larger. “I’ll pass,” you say. “I’m coming up on the end of this chapter and I want to finish it before dinner.”

“Come on, Lainey. Don’t be boring.” She runs around the corner of your house along the same path the other kids took.

You force a loud sigh, but Katie’s too far away from the house to hear you. You close your book and rush around the corner of your house. You see Katie and the rest of kids crowded around the ice cream truck parked five houses away. They look silly out there, jumping and screaming for something that’s probably not even as good as the ice cream in their fridge at home, but you run faster toward them anyway. You run and you run and you’re getting closer to them, and the closer the get the faster you run. The wind is whipping past your ears now, and the music is even louder. A smile breaks on your face. And you cough up a laugh. In fact you can’t stop laughing. Even as you skip up to Katie you can’t stop the laughing.

And now you’re running back to your house with Katie, the marshmallow eyeball melting on your tongue. Katie’s dripping her ice cream all over her hand, the blue running over the red running over the white. You might have scolded her, or you might have suggested that you walk. To savor the flavor of the ice cream.

You lift up your strawberry-chocolate fist and slurp up the bits of ice cream melting across your hot skin. You take it all in.

The Inescapable

Morning streams in through the window veiled by a pale, translucent curtain across a square room with squarely-kept bed sheets and watches and notebooks and pens and maps sorted neatly atop dressers. In this new morning I am created. I am first short on the pillow when he raises his head, until he stands, and I stretch across the floor and up the wall. I cross the room with him all the way to the bathroom door. In the sheltered, windowless darkness of the bathroom I disappear.

The day passes much like any other. I follow him from meeting to meeting. He discusses Railowsky business, and my mouth moves in conjunction with his. He greets his guests, and I extend my flat claw towards theirs. The others and me, we touch. I feel nothing.

Eventually night comes. He might be in his well-groomed den, out in California commissioning new railways to be built, or at the River City Hotel seeking some company for at least just tonight. In these hours he pushes me to the corners—dulling lamps and closing curtains. He shuts doors, walks along walls. If he had left a bathroom light on from a hurried morning and I am cast starkly against a back wall, his breath will jump. He will curse at me, with the same mouth we used to gain three hundred more miles between here and Arkansas. I am silent.

After a few moments he steadies himself and I tumble after him quietly to bed. I tip this way and that, drunk from a long day of following and obeying, of fulfilling everything that had been cast before me with perfect precision, with no protest.

With his last move he extinguishes the last bedside lamp and rests easy, as I have gone. There is no light to create me, and no eye to see me. Perhaps for these reasons he can only sleep at night, when the darkness closes in around him, and all that’s left is just his own singular self in the room. He won’t say. But for eight hours I will wait in anticipation of my creation. In the morning the man will have forgotten that I am here. He will glance up from his pillow and wonder whether today will be the first day he can evade his shadow. And I will be there to reassure him that today will be just like yesterday, and we will continue our happy and comfortable life together.

What the fuck is this

Love? What the holy fuck. It's god awful. It's consuming.

It's a drug. Maybe it's worse than a drug, but I'm too young to know. When you have it, there's nothing in the world that feels more natural or more warm. Love lets you know there's a reason to live, it gives you reason. But then it's gone. And like a drug there are withdrawals, though I have to say I've never really experienced drug withdrawals. Maybe I'm wrought-iron. But love, when it's gone you feel nothing but a vacuum of existence. You, me. I feel empty. I keep looking for something to fill that, and maybe that's my biggest flaw as a person. Maybe that's the core of my issues with my mother, because she never showed me the kind of everlasting love that comes with family, the kind that everyone deserves. I've seen it in other families, had a taste for it, but it was always a tease. I knew it was connected to my own sexual relationships, and that it was superficial at best (even if genuine).

The problem is lust can fill that hole almost as well as love can. It can make you believe anything. The kick is that it's temporary. In the end you realize you're just as alone as you were before. The difference is someone else is there, feeling lonely, trying to use you to fill their hole too. And this looks to be the most unlike-Love thing that can possibly be.

Create something for yourself no one can take away. Perhaps derive a form of self-love, just not the narcissistic kind. Maybe I need to seek a constant state of serenity and contentment rather than chase the highs and lows of romantic love. Or perhaps I need to seek both, but if only one have the former.

Bah. This is too much work.

The Entire Month of July

I don’t know why I remember this one summer night more than all the others. It’s pretty typical of the summer I’ve had so far—all of us kids meeting up in the parking lot behind the tennis courts. It’s the park where me and a guy came years ago to escape parental restraints. Over there, by the chain-link baseball backing we got close to kissing but never did. Tonight, though, Daniel and Andrew are tossing a Frisbee back and forth. I’m leaning on the trunk of Andrew’s car, the cigarette smoke wafting its way up to my eye no matter how many times I try to match the direction of the wind. Andrew’s just caught the Frisbee perfectly, and his eyes blink over in my direction. He looks back to Daniel and thinks I didn’t see him. I gaze past him too, not wanting to admit I’d been watching him either. The sky is a shit brown behind the clip-art perfect skyline the woods make, and I don’t care that it’s pollution from the power plant across the lake that clouds our view of the stars. The Frisbee hits the pavement and makes a god-awful scraping sound. Daniel grins none-too-innocently up at me as he brings the Frisbee off the pavement, but I know he’s playing the part of a lady killer with only two goes at sex under the belt. I raise an eyebrow and a corner of the mouth back at him, continuing our little game of false seduction. I toss the cigarette butt behind me. My hand feels empty and restless. I focus on Andrew in front of me. He’s talking something about what to do tonight. Like every other night this summer.