The bruise I have a taste for pushing is watching the video of you at a birthday party four years ago. You're laugh catches, and rings in my ears like a brass bell, or reveille. Instantly making my eyes flicker and dance across the computer monitor trying to memorize the lines in your face, making sure I still don't forget them.
If it's a chain that binds me to the past, I'm not in a hurry to break it. If it's a signal beaming out to the world that I still hate nameless Supreme beings for taking you away, then so be it.
What gets me going on diatribes about God and politics is the fire that you gave me. The no bullshit, take-no-prisoners, sentimental Downy comforter repartee that weaves in and out both sober and drunken conversations. I hold it in. What gets me going on being able to stare at the setting horizon and not feel completely cynical, and grateful for the juice in my cup and the blood in my veins. Little moments, pouring out of my palms and into the cycle of the plants, and trees, and tiny bumblebees, all keep me marching to my own drum-set. As peculiar as it sounds, I can still hear you telling me to 'be a good girl'. I can still read the fine print at every contract because you told me to.
If you are still waiting for the Rapture in a few years and the nameless Supreme Being decides I won the spiritual lottery and I get to go to the clouds, I hope that the clouds have a pool table and you're playing. I can only imagine the intangible pub in the clouds. I can only resurface old wounds and hope the sky walkers bring me to your healing station.
As every day inches along and ends up coiling into tightly wound years and millenniums, and as he gives one thousand kisses and the night sky tickles my imagination; I say 'hey'. And somewhere I have to hope you are hearing me and saying it back to me.
I don’t ever want to lose the sun. Waving good-bye hurts worse than any needle, worse than any thing they could do to me. When it comes down to the wire, and its crunch time, the time where things are meant to happen or never, ever be mentioned again, I always come back to your face. I always come back to the words you liked to say, to the way you gave up at times, and they way you brought her carnations.
My whole thought process to becoming an exceptional adult and a woman of promise is that never ending merry-go-round of making you proud. Are the attempts of trying to make you proud no different than those people in church, trying to make someone God they only vaguely believe in proud? Sometimes, I don’t believe in anything. Just when I wanted you to stay, you left. Just when I started tightening my grip on myself, learning how to handle left hand turns and launch out a hundred or more bullets from my mouth, the train left, with you on it. Through mountains and plains with cowboys worshipping the evening breaks in heat, and with horses frothing and kicking up dust, that belongs to men, you are a part of that dust now.
I’ve gone home. I’ve headed back to the beaches and the cobblestone streets. I even walked past pieces of whom I was and who you were. But you aren’t there. You are under her bed. You are in our heads. I asked the psychic if you were nearby, and she told me yes, but I know better. I’d rather not look through the dark and find a small light. If I had my choice, and I know I don’t, none of us – I’d look for a small haven of darkness in a room to bright to squint.
There are mirrors out there, and when they spread their wings and play their sad songs I open up my lungs and tell the universe what I want. I want to grow old now, listening to other people’s prayers only aid in my motivation to age. Breaking promises to stay on a path with a beer in one hand, and looking at for others? It’s just what I want to do now; I don’t care about others anymore.
But for now, the bruise I have a habit of pushing, is simply thinking of you. When I hear a joke, when I cook – when the moon goes behind the trees. It is all geometry, its all rules and unspoken wishes. When I look up to the sky, I don’t think Heaven is there. I don’t see past precipitation and lightning bugs. How desperate can the sun be if it is lies down and let’s the moon take over? Pretty desperate. Desperate for attention, for love, for the feeling of knowing it isn’t alone.
Through all of it, I still think you are behind my left shoulder.
At least, that’s where I hope you are.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
condition
I purposely cut ties with people I do not like.
I really do wish that town would dissolve onto itself - sparing only the good ones.
If I could sit down with my 16 year old self, I would tell her to join the Navy, and never trust anyone.
I don't want the rest of the world to wait for me, while it rides itself into a storm.
If you waste your time wondering why you didn't get an invite, or why people don't trust you to pay the gas bill, then that's sad.
The fact that people tell me I'm wrong on a daily basis, makes me at least know that I get people's attention.
I don't want people's attention just to dance in front of them. I have something to say.
I'd give anything to have a family.
I hate feeling this way around holidays. Fucking holidays, now I know why people kill themselves during this time of the year.
crawl out of whatever kind of ship you are building - it isn't worth it.
I really do wish that town would dissolve onto itself - sparing only the good ones.
If I could sit down with my 16 year old self, I would tell her to join the Navy, and never trust anyone.
I don't want the rest of the world to wait for me, while it rides itself into a storm.
If you waste your time wondering why you didn't get an invite, or why people don't trust you to pay the gas bill, then that's sad.
The fact that people tell me I'm wrong on a daily basis, makes me at least know that I get people's attention.
I don't want people's attention just to dance in front of them. I have something to say.
I'd give anything to have a family.
I hate feeling this way around holidays. Fucking holidays, now I know why people kill themselves during this time of the year.
crawl out of whatever kind of ship you are building - it isn't worth it.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Little Sister
I feel fine.
I wanted to finish the rest of half-eaten birthday cake in the fridge, it looks like a platter where a massacre took place, a battlefield of sugar rushing agents. Kids, they will eat anything except what they should eat. When you asked me to throw a birthday party for my nephew, your son, I did it because I knew you couldn't. The medication the hospital gave you made you sleepy, often through mealtimes, and you only ate when I came to your room in my house past midnight with a plate of food in my hands. Nothing in my house is mine right now, and normally in such circumstances my attitude would resemble some form of a demonic white woman with an endless supply of Aerosmith tunes and cheap Vodka - I'm swimming in it. I'm listening outside of my guestroom, your bedroom, listening to sleep. The low, blurring, heavy breathing, interruppted by tiny whimpers.
When you whimper I remember when I was a kid and I had nightmares. Our mother was never home, a bar kept her occupied. You'd rush to my side and make me a milkshake in the middle of the night. You'd drop a couple of drops of green food coloring in it, and carry me back to my room. I sat up in bed drinking it, in my fuzzy footie pajamas, while you watched and telling me to hurry up. Now I'm bringing you plates of nutrition, feeding your kids and making sure they get to school and finish their homework. I even check the math - with a calculator, of course. This isn't a triumph, this is a very unevenly matched game that you're losing.
You came to my house, a house I managed to own at only 24, two weeks ago with a bandage wrapped around your head, and your left arm in a cast. Your son, my nephew Aven, who usually jumps around and screams when he's at his calmest, was staring at my Welcome mat, unable to look up at me. Your daughter Miri was sucking her thumb, and clutching her backpack straps, and she is in middle school. After I made the kids macaroni and chicken tenders for dinner and they showered and went to bed - you finally broke down and explained that he had finally gone way too far. Finally? I asked. After years of shoving you into walls, fucking other women, and draining your mutual accounts of everything - often making you do drastic things to feed your kids. He had broken your arm when you told him Miri was going to wear a miniskirt to school the next day. She had bought it with her own money, saved up from babysitting jobs, and it wasn't too provocative. No daughter of his was going to dress like a whore, were you some kind of whore? What were you doing when he was working 80 hour workweeks? Raising his kids?! Raising them to be whores! Fighting back was something our dad taught us, but you over-estimated your strength and under-estimated the time it would take him to jump over the dining room table in some kind of primitive lunge. Miri told me last week after coming to my room in the middle of the night, after I fed you, that she thinks it's her fault. She can't sleep, she picks at her food. Aven gets lost in my XboX, which is pretty much now his. Which I guess is fine, I'm 28 and still not married, maybe an xbox isn't what I need anymore, anyways. Aven eats everything, maybe to cover up you two not eating. He volunteers to take out the trash for me after I cook dinner.
He works at a chemical plant 15 miles outside of the city I live in, 5 miles outside of the one your mail is still going to. Mondays are my night off. I told you in a note that I knew you'd see when you woke up to use the bathroom that I had a baby shower for a friend that I needed to go to. Aven volunteered to make dinner - frozen pizza, and Miri sat with him, allowing him to teach her how to play "Left 4 dead' on the Xbox. I know his shifts usually end at seven or so. I left my house at 6, but I stopped to get Taco Bell. Carbohydrates equal energy. There is nothing like raw energy, it can take you places. When it all comes to a series of interlocking moments, we tend to examine ourselves. Morals are a badge of honor that people like to wear, bute hate to do the work to earn them. I don't wear any merit badges. Over the last few years since our father died, I don't look for badges or medals, I look for cliffs to climb, and set up shop on.
Your house is beautiful at night, you put up christmas decorations, even though you are the best atheist I know. He plugged them all in before he left for work, I bet. The icicle lights are dangling from your second floor balcony. Your lamp-post has a red ribbon slithering up it, the azalea bushes have white lights twinkling in them. While I sit on the grass, next to one of the bushes, I think: What I wouldn't give for a Salvation Army - Army. His SUV pulls up in the driveway, his music up loud. He drums on the side of the dash as he waits for the garage door to open, and then barrels inside, the garage door lowering behind him. I have to admit, I don't know how I am going to do this. I've watched enough Law & Order that I think I can come up with something when I get in there. I wait a few minutes, until I see the glow of the television set from the bay windows, and then I go in. Of course he leaves the door unlocked. He's watching a show about a guy wrestling gators. He has a budlight longneck in his hands, his feet are propped up on the antique cherrywood coffee table our grandmother gave you on your wedding day. That was a really nice day, but your wedding cake was dry as shit. Nevermind.
. .. I decide to turn around and go into the garage. The television is up so loud and he's so fucked up he doesn't hear the front door close behind him. This Denali you drive, that he's driving now, takes up most of your garage. Even if you wanted another car where the hell would you put it? His tools are stacked messily in the corner, near the front left headlights. I put on my latex gloves. Disabling a garage door is like knocking a bug off the wall. The mechanisms are already so delicate that a simple cut in the chain will make it so it will not raise. I then fold the other pin over so that it won't raise at all, even manually. The alert light is easy to kill, I zap the power right out.
When I go back in to check on him, he now has three empty beers next to him, and he is nursing his fourth. He coughs and slowly heaves himself up to go use the bathroom once a commercial break comes. I replace my latex gloves with another. I take the bottle of Unisom from my pocket that you had brought in your overnight case from this house two weeks earlier. You usually needed it to sleep, but what the doctors gave you was ore than enough, and there was a heavy, full bottle left. Tiny, cerulean gel capsules of doxylamine. They burst open when I squeezed them above the rim of his beer bottle. I popped nine of them - he really needed to piss, he was in their for ten minutes. I turn to leave as I hear the toilet flush, and I watch his sillohuette sit back down in front of the bay windows from outside, crouched next to the white lighted bush. From my cell phone I call your house phone, after three rings, he answers, his words slurred.
Baby? It's me. I say.
You finally ready to fucking talk? he yells back.
Yes. Can you come and get me and the kids?
You at that bitch's house?
Yeah, I'll be waiting.
He hangs up, after burping over the phone. I know him well. He didn't leave your wedding reception until he has finished his beer. And he didn't leave his recliner until he finished his beer this time. When he did, I watched him rise from his chair and stumble towards the garage door in the back of the kitchen. From the bush, I hear his engine turn over. I hear his music start up. I watch where the bottom edge of the garage door hits the concrete of your driveway. It doesn't raise, and he doesn't make an effort to raise it. His music or his engine doesn't stop blaring, and I start to smell car exhaust.
I dart from the bush and use the shadows to get to the playground two blocks from your house where I parked my car. It's a busy playground, other sedans just like mine are crammed into the parking lot, dozens of family's watching a kid's soccer game. I drive quickly to my friend Janelle's house a few miles away. There really was a baby shower I needed to go to, I even bought her a customized Bouncy Seat for her new son coming into the world. I spend over an hour there and hit the supermarket on my way home, picking up Aven's birthday cake for his party tomorrow. I'm grateful that him and Miri are both asleep when I get home - one of them had done the dishes. You raised good kids.
The cops came after Aven's party, about twenty minutes after I gave them both money to go see a movie with some friends. You told them that the garage door had been having problems, and that you both used unisom to sleep sometimes - having two pre-teens was stressful after all. The call did come from my cell phone, but that was because you didn't have one, and land lines were a waste of money - it was the only phone in the house. In your medicated stupor, you got guilty and wanted to reconcile, you waited on him for a few hours until you took another dosage and passed out for the night. No, you didn't call him today because you just assume he was being an asshole as usual, trying to teach you a lesson on waiting on people. And you were distracted, it was your only son's birthday, so much had to get done so it was a decent one. The cops totally believed it. While they were out at the movies, we went to identify his body. The medication didn't give you much of a leash to express any sadness, but you cried quietly in the hallways while we waited for the administrator to come bring you some papers to sign.
I was thinking about eating the rest of Aven's birthday cake. You went back to sleep, after telling me that you loved me and that you didn't know what you'd do without me. I shrugged, and told you that we were both good liars. I hadn't even told you what I had done to him - you just knew and went with it, completely improvising in front of the cops. You tell me that you'll tell the kids tomorrow, and take them to the funeral home. I leave the rest of Aven's cake in the fridge, it could be dessert for the next few days.
I feel fine.
I wanted to finish the rest of half-eaten birthday cake in the fridge, it looks like a platter where a massacre took place, a battlefield of sugar rushing agents. Kids, they will eat anything except what they should eat. When you asked me to throw a birthday party for my nephew, your son, I did it because I knew you couldn't. The medication the hospital gave you made you sleepy, often through mealtimes, and you only ate when I came to your room in my house past midnight with a plate of food in my hands. Nothing in my house is mine right now, and normally in such circumstances my attitude would resemble some form of a demonic white woman with an endless supply of Aerosmith tunes and cheap Vodka - I'm swimming in it. I'm listening outside of my guestroom, your bedroom, listening to sleep. The low, blurring, heavy breathing, interruppted by tiny whimpers.
When you whimper I remember when I was a kid and I had nightmares. Our mother was never home, a bar kept her occupied. You'd rush to my side and make me a milkshake in the middle of the night. You'd drop a couple of drops of green food coloring in it, and carry me back to my room. I sat up in bed drinking it, in my fuzzy footie pajamas, while you watched and telling me to hurry up. Now I'm bringing you plates of nutrition, feeding your kids and making sure they get to school and finish their homework. I even check the math - with a calculator, of course. This isn't a triumph, this is a very unevenly matched game that you're losing.
You came to my house, a house I managed to own at only 24, two weeks ago with a bandage wrapped around your head, and your left arm in a cast. Your son, my nephew Aven, who usually jumps around and screams when he's at his calmest, was staring at my Welcome mat, unable to look up at me. Your daughter Miri was sucking her thumb, and clutching her backpack straps, and she is in middle school. After I made the kids macaroni and chicken tenders for dinner and they showered and went to bed - you finally broke down and explained that he had finally gone way too far. Finally? I asked. After years of shoving you into walls, fucking other women, and draining your mutual accounts of everything - often making you do drastic things to feed your kids. He had broken your arm when you told him Miri was going to wear a miniskirt to school the next day. She had bought it with her own money, saved up from babysitting jobs, and it wasn't too provocative. No daughter of his was going to dress like a whore, were you some kind of whore? What were you doing when he was working 80 hour workweeks? Raising his kids?! Raising them to be whores! Fighting back was something our dad taught us, but you over-estimated your strength and under-estimated the time it would take him to jump over the dining room table in some kind of primitive lunge. Miri told me last week after coming to my room in the middle of the night, after I fed you, that she thinks it's her fault. She can't sleep, she picks at her food. Aven gets lost in my XboX, which is pretty much now his. Which I guess is fine, I'm 28 and still not married, maybe an xbox isn't what I need anymore, anyways. Aven eats everything, maybe to cover up you two not eating. He volunteers to take out the trash for me after I cook dinner.
He works at a chemical plant 15 miles outside of the city I live in, 5 miles outside of the one your mail is still going to. Mondays are my night off. I told you in a note that I knew you'd see when you woke up to use the bathroom that I had a baby shower for a friend that I needed to go to. Aven volunteered to make dinner - frozen pizza, and Miri sat with him, allowing him to teach her how to play "Left 4 dead' on the Xbox. I know his shifts usually end at seven or so. I left my house at 6, but I stopped to get Taco Bell. Carbohydrates equal energy. There is nothing like raw energy, it can take you places. When it all comes to a series of interlocking moments, we tend to examine ourselves. Morals are a badge of honor that people like to wear, bute hate to do the work to earn them. I don't wear any merit badges. Over the last few years since our father died, I don't look for badges or medals, I look for cliffs to climb, and set up shop on.
Your house is beautiful at night, you put up christmas decorations, even though you are the best atheist I know. He plugged them all in before he left for work, I bet. The icicle lights are dangling from your second floor balcony. Your lamp-post has a red ribbon slithering up it, the azalea bushes have white lights twinkling in them. While I sit on the grass, next to one of the bushes, I think: What I wouldn't give for a Salvation Army - Army. His SUV pulls up in the driveway, his music up loud. He drums on the side of the dash as he waits for the garage door to open, and then barrels inside, the garage door lowering behind him. I have to admit, I don't know how I am going to do this. I've watched enough Law & Order that I think I can come up with something when I get in there. I wait a few minutes, until I see the glow of the television set from the bay windows, and then I go in. Of course he leaves the door unlocked. He's watching a show about a guy wrestling gators. He has a budlight longneck in his hands, his feet are propped up on the antique cherrywood coffee table our grandmother gave you on your wedding day. That was a really nice day, but your wedding cake was dry as shit. Nevermind.
. .. I decide to turn around and go into the garage. The television is up so loud and he's so fucked up he doesn't hear the front door close behind him. This Denali you drive, that he's driving now, takes up most of your garage. Even if you wanted another car where the hell would you put it? His tools are stacked messily in the corner, near the front left headlights. I put on my latex gloves. Disabling a garage door is like knocking a bug off the wall. The mechanisms are already so delicate that a simple cut in the chain will make it so it will not raise. I then fold the other pin over so that it won't raise at all, even manually. The alert light is easy to kill, I zap the power right out.
When I go back in to check on him, he now has three empty beers next to him, and he is nursing his fourth. He coughs and slowly heaves himself up to go use the bathroom once a commercial break comes. I replace my latex gloves with another. I take the bottle of Unisom from my pocket that you had brought in your overnight case from this house two weeks earlier. You usually needed it to sleep, but what the doctors gave you was ore than enough, and there was a heavy, full bottle left. Tiny, cerulean gel capsules of doxylamine. They burst open when I squeezed them above the rim of his beer bottle. I popped nine of them - he really needed to piss, he was in their for ten minutes. I turn to leave as I hear the toilet flush, and I watch his sillohuette sit back down in front of the bay windows from outside, crouched next to the white lighted bush. From my cell phone I call your house phone, after three rings, he answers, his words slurred.
Baby? It's me. I say.
You finally ready to fucking talk? he yells back.
Yes. Can you come and get me and the kids?
You at that bitch's house?
Yeah, I'll be waiting.
He hangs up, after burping over the phone. I know him well. He didn't leave your wedding reception until he has finished his beer. And he didn't leave his recliner until he finished his beer this time. When he did, I watched him rise from his chair and stumble towards the garage door in the back of the kitchen. From the bush, I hear his engine turn over. I hear his music start up. I watch where the bottom edge of the garage door hits the concrete of your driveway. It doesn't raise, and he doesn't make an effort to raise it. His music or his engine doesn't stop blaring, and I start to smell car exhaust.
I dart from the bush and use the shadows to get to the playground two blocks from your house where I parked my car. It's a busy playground, other sedans just like mine are crammed into the parking lot, dozens of family's watching a kid's soccer game. I drive quickly to my friend Janelle's house a few miles away. There really was a baby shower I needed to go to, I even bought her a customized Bouncy Seat for her new son coming into the world. I spend over an hour there and hit the supermarket on my way home, picking up Aven's birthday cake for his party tomorrow. I'm grateful that him and Miri are both asleep when I get home - one of them had done the dishes. You raised good kids.
The cops came after Aven's party, about twenty minutes after I gave them both money to go see a movie with some friends. You told them that the garage door had been having problems, and that you both used unisom to sleep sometimes - having two pre-teens was stressful after all. The call did come from my cell phone, but that was because you didn't have one, and land lines were a waste of money - it was the only phone in the house. In your medicated stupor, you got guilty and wanted to reconcile, you waited on him for a few hours until you took another dosage and passed out for the night. No, you didn't call him today because you just assume he was being an asshole as usual, trying to teach you a lesson on waiting on people. And you were distracted, it was your only son's birthday, so much had to get done so it was a decent one. The cops totally believed it. While they were out at the movies, we went to identify his body. The medication didn't give you much of a leash to express any sadness, but you cried quietly in the hallways while we waited for the administrator to come bring you some papers to sign.
I was thinking about eating the rest of Aven's birthday cake. You went back to sleep, after telling me that you loved me and that you didn't know what you'd do without me. I shrugged, and told you that we were both good liars. I hadn't even told you what I had done to him - you just knew and went with it, completely improvising in front of the cops. You tell me that you'll tell the kids tomorrow, and take them to the funeral home. I leave the rest of Aven's cake in the fridge, it could be dessert for the next few days.
I feel fine.
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