In Which I Grow Tired of the Wingman

We sat around the table and traded "I was drinking at a party and hooked up with this boy...and here's the silly story" and the only one I had to tell was how I lost a good friend because he was later embarrassed to have been seen as going with the unattractive girl. And I'm still that girl. We were out tonight at a great place, and an adorable Australian man introduces himself to us to get to my friend. And I realized I'm the unattractive friend again. And I get over it by being sarcastic, funny, stupid, and trying to get her to take his card (thinking maybe something good can come out of it, at least a nice date for a friend who needs a nice time). And I realize I'm being too over the top, embarrassing her, and pointlessly encouraging a nice man to get his feelings hurt because she's not into him.

So yeah, that's me. Not-quite-right. Never quite right. Often the least attractive girl at the bar. Always the girl the wingman takes. Not sometimes, all the time.

I know how you look is important, but I thought that at some point, it'd be less important.

I heart Tricky & PJ Harvey

They never built a life.

My parents never seemed to build a life together. For as far back as I can remember, they only stumbled through, days and years passing without a meaning, without any sort of message to their children desperately searching, asking.

My mother became depressed, I think she started to see it for what it was - living without kindness, without love, without reason, art and beauty.

My father, even now, sees it every now and again, but pushes it away. It's too hard to think so much has been wasted by thoughtless cruelty.

A friend once asked me what my childhood was like. I hadn't been keeping it a secret; it's finally starting to fade. I turned my heart inside out trying to explain it to someone who'd been well-loved, then left it as one word - fear.

My sister and I spent a night a few weeks ago trading stories. Only two years apart, and our experiences were so different. I told her about the early morning orthodontist appointment, trying to explain exactly how I fell in such a way as to drive my braces into my cheek, almost as though I'd been hit.

There were four of us, four children now adults, all still listening for what we never heard, what we never felt when we were young.

The oldest searching, always, for approval, seeking some sort of reward for self-denial. Like her father, endlessly critical, impatient with any fault. She looks for god because the gods of her childhood disappointed her so thoroughly.

Myself, the youngest girl, at 27, an uncertain lover, still asking "Can you love me?" , but always sure of the real answer. Taught to hate myself so completely, I can't bear the scrutiny of being wanted.

The oldest boy, now a bitter, confused manchild. Blame and anger seeps from every pore, and he deadens it with drugs, with danger.

The baby, he was never able to harden his soft spirit, so he pushes himself further and further away with every passing moment to save his heart, and seek his own approval.

I haven't lived with my father in more than a dozen years. How long do I live in the shadow of a childhood that should evaporate, pass like smoke through me? Now I reinvent myself, turning every fear into a question, asking, always asking, how to make a life of meaning and love. The best I've come up with is to tell myself not to waste any time telling people how unbelievably perfect and deserving of love they are. I try to let anger be only an experience, and kindness the rule. What else do I have?

My second favorite Irish man.

Okay, distant second.

If there is joy?

I have a special skill for avoiding things, it seems. Even now, the screen blank and staring before me, I rearrange my desk, pick up pieces of broken plastic, play songs I don't need to hear.

I've been wrecked by love.

And yet, I turn my hands to the sky and go again. It seems love burns out at me from the darkness but when I grasp, I come away with a handful of feathers, a few dusty curls.



I hope, that this time will the the last. That this fear, it will dissolve into him, be shriven from me finally. Self-hatred creeps, dark fingers clawing, and I wait, almost expectant, almost hoping for the truth, that this is the way.

Oh, but how my dreams dilate, expanding exponentially, his voice painting a bright streamer of desire. "Here" he says "is my heart in my hand, here is the world, here is everything and everything." and "Please, please, please."

Ember of Rage.

Go! Do something!

Rules, and having them. And occasionally breaking them.

This is clearly against the rules. Basically, all of them.

But I don't mind.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every day is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He or she may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door, laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

Open

Here, he says, is my gift.

"I dream of your hands, of your face, of your lips. I have heard your every dream and fear and bless your generous heart with every ounce of mine. These are the things that come to me over and over again: your form moving against mine in a soft, dark world of our own creation; your eyes sparking with laughter, ready to light me afire; your voice, a secret pathway to the garden exploding with the scents of my desire, ylang ylang, lemon verbena, and lily.

Ask me whatever you want; I am an open book."

No, I am an open book.

Equal Parts

I have this desire to take my posts down, to undo all that was done. To unfeel what was felt. But I won't. I'm struggling to accept what I feel and am, without editing and revising for my own satisfaction, for my own approval.

Right now, here I'm feeling everything is equal parts death and life. Things are passing too quickly, as though I were the unmoving star of a time-lapse video. I'm living like I should have years ago. I feel behind. I feel too far ahead of everyone else my age. I want to say "I'm sorry I disappoint you by being 26 and not married. Fuck you for thinking I should be." But I don't say it. I never do, instead, I cringe and say "I do hope you're happy!" While knowing they're already not.

I fall in love too easily, my heart pours itself out to every waiting ear, giving up a bit of itself every time, hoping for something back.

And I'm reluctant to even post this.

On the dream.

Waking up, after a night in the woods, I am groggy and cranky because there's no shower, no hope of one any time soon. We have pine needles in our hair. I have morning breath, and am struggling out of sleep and uncertain if I can actually live without hot water, or a comfortable bed. And then, a kiss, laughter.

And the knowledge that even now, I love you. I couldn't imagine anyone more perfect than you.

It bears repeating.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. - Neil Gaiman

"The law of averages maintains there must be other people out there like me."

I have written and rewritten this next post so many times I don't even remember what I was trying to say.

I just had a really amazing experience of knowing someone wonderful. Someone who was so like me, someone who made me laugh and renewed my faith in intelligence and caring. Someone I already miss, someone I feel somehow smaller, less without. One of the things that brought us closer when I asked these two questions - "What do you fear most?" and "What do you dream?"

My answer to the latter was I dream of the end of the world. Of an apocalypse. I dream of the coming plague, the sun dissolving on the horizon, of reality falling away like puzzle pieces to reveal another reality beneath. I dream of utter horror and loneliness and I dream of the world reborn. Mostly I dream of knowing it will end, that the power of a thousand suns will be released on earth, that what we have created will end us, and we will die in a nuclear holocaust, or worse survive.

But that's not what I fear, it's what I dream. When I asked what you fear most, I didn't have an answer to my own question. But now I know.

And even saying it turns my spine inside out, knowing who helped me find the answer turns my heart to shadow because what happened between us made it even more likely to be true.

I fear being alone. Not temporarily. I love living alone, I love being on my own. I love dancing in my car, staying up curled around trashy disposable fiction, passing hours on my own. What I fear most lead me to ask what I wanted most. And what I want most is a family. A partner to share my life with, someone committed to seeing the next day with me, and the next. And the next. Someone who knows me, is overwhelmed by love for me and the whole world, and maybe wants to adopt a kid with me. And we have friends.

That's what I want most. Stupidly simple. Maybe just stupid. Because I can't do it on my own. You can't have a dream that depends on someone else because there's no guarantee that it can happen. In fact, the law of averages maintains it cannot happen. And so that's what I fear most, dying, leaving this world, and not having had that.

A Message

I want to scream my throat raw, collapsing in the street. I want to say I feel nothing, to laugh at the mention of your name. I want to saw away at ice for hours before I find your face, surrounded by a shimmering blue halo. Instead there is only an echo, an ache. I wake up, your name on my lips, and feel (instead of anger) only want.

I turn your kindness and comments over and over again, shuffling what was said and unsaid.

Even now, I only wish for the silence before your nervous laugh.

What New Orleans was Really Like

Of course, it was wonderful, squeaks the plastered smile.

I wrote this while I was there.

I could die here and no one would know for days. Maybe I already have. I wasn't able to resist, hooked one heel over the railing and leaned...

I am in a sort of limbo, clearly neither heaven nor hell. There are too many beautiful things here - exquisite snuff bottles etched with bats and butterflies, but it is a sort of hell, each room and restaurant as faceless and unfamiliar as the last.

I Never Learn: A Follow-Up to Three Conversations

Here is the problem with resting under the hand that could strike you. Sometimes, most times, it does. Whatever the blow, it is always a shock. The explosion of light upon impact, the bursting of warm metal in the mouth, tasting iron and fear.

Without knowing it, he was

Coaxing out whatever was left, a paper
heart, carefully folded and
Refolded, easily torn
Is as rotten as
silk drapes dropping into dust.

Off to the Big Easy!

I am destined to spend a week in the real Sin City - New Orleans. Three days of work, three days of play. This is my first vacation on my own, so please send me good luck and safety.

I think it'd be a gross simplification to say I have mixed feelings about going. Some say it's the wicked stepsister/evil twin of my beautiful, twisted hometown, Charleston. Some say it plays hostess to a very stylish cocktail party at the end of civilization. I know it's the last place one of my best friends lived. She committed suicide in New Orleans, while we were planning my first visit. I've still never been. Will I wrestle with her ghost or her madness when I'm there? I don't know. When she died I saw her face everywhere, but it's been years, and her features have faded into a haze, I can't pick them out in my mind anymore, much less in a crowd. The reality, the bone-rattling rawness of her death is gone, in it's place only a weight, as cold and immovable as iron.

For SR

The story you told with fluid hands and tumbling awkward pauses killed me long before you died.
When I taste vodka, I kiss your mouth.
I see only your white breast, scented with clove.
How could you have left me with those witless junkies?
Did you think their chatter would be my balm?
I reread your letters, realize you were only there to chronicle the sinking ship.

How Much?

How much can change in a week?

How much? A handful of days that the swift unceasing planet dispenses with in only 7 nights. So much can change. Patrice Lamumba slid from saviour to corpse in as few days. Tulips will fail, their petals turning into a stiff memory of their vivid selves, littering the table below with a fragile shell bursting into colored ash at the touch.

Or, in a week, after the prayer for rain there might be the river running wild over the parched desperate skin of crackling dust.

There might be the chance, the distance, the transparent joy of blooming.

This Fear

That bright ribbon of trust, the delicate thread of sweetness that connects us is so fragile that someone clumsy like me can break it and not even know.

I keep moving forward, knowing that it can't last. Hoping it does.

This relationship can only end in lung cancer.

It's true.

I get weird when something wonderful happens. It makes me very nervous. I can't eat, I can't sleep at night.

No Bravery.

James Blunt's protest song.

3 Conversations

Two days ago, I had three conversations with three very different people. All three were beautiful, and made me feel alive.

It was wonderful electricity buzzing between hearts, as open and vulnerable as lying beneath the hand that could strike you.

I can never decide if I'm too broken, that no one can really know me, that some strangeness in my heart prevents it. The fear of that distance grows within me, shifts shape and size. Sometimes it is a stone at the back of my throat, worn and smooth like a river rock. Sometimes I feel it seeping out from underneath, unfurling like a flag.

It was too late

I got my returned mail from Kurt Vonnegut - he didn't get it because the day I sent it was probably the day he fell. He died yesterday, and I bought A Man Without a Country the same day.

He was right.

One life - you got to do what you can.

Well, for one I work for a large health non-profit. Let's call it the Foundation. My job is challenging, tough, exhausting, exhilarating, depressing...it tears me in so many directions I sleep it, eat it, dream it. But am I giving my all to a cause that only feeds on itself? Am I working there because it's somewhere comfortable ($, health insurance) or doing something good?

I do like the health insurance, and it's a challenge to live in a major city without money. But there are other jobs. So it's the "doing good" eh? That canned answer...

So why are you applying to law school?
What made you want to be a doctor?

I really am not complaining...I started writing this and then went to a workshop. During that workshop an oncology nurse said that when she started nursing about 25 years ago, if a child was diagnosed with cancer, they would immediately begin preparing the family for the death of that child. Now, with cure rates of the most common form of cancer at over 80% things are very different. Which is good.

Which makes me want to stay at this job. It really can't be about the money.

What exactly are you doing here?

I'm not sure.

But I think I have things to say, some of them I want to remember. Some of them I want you to know. If you are reading this, thank you. Please always feel free to email me at KindnessIsTheAnswer@gmail.com.

I just mailed a fan letter to Kurt Vonnegut. I hope it gets to him before he dies. I recently read God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, and it was beautiful. It helped me clarify some of my own thoughts about death and the afterlife.

Just some things I have been thinking about lately-

I wish I could agree with Richard Dawkins and never look back. I yearn for more, but I have a heart lead by intellect. I know this life is all that we have. But I want more. I know there is beauty beyond myself, and it seems like something Great. Things here are so laden with richness it takes my breath away. I am constantly struck/heart-numbed by what I have at my fingertips.