Playing Catchup (Listening to: Nitrogen Pink, Polly Scattergood)

It's been almost two months. This blog thing is hard to keep up. And it's not like I've been writing too much lately.

I have a lot of things to say now.

Family: It's a Thursday. My daddy says he wants to take me out to dinner. No reason, he just doesn't feel like cooking. We go to a tiny Chinese restaurant he's been eating at since the '70s. Order the usual. The new rules (or lack of rules) he says, are because he doesn't want me to have to lie. I nod. We're quiet. The food comes. "In the interest of full disclosure..." he says. "What?" I say.

My mama sits at her computer, typing numbers into boxes for fun. She doesn’t cook dinner anymore. Her cheekbones are highlighted with the blue gleam from the light of her monitor. She drags her heels with a tiredness she doesn't know how to shake. The gray beast of depression hangs over her shoulders like a worn-out sweater, lurks in the corners, shrouds her in a murky light.

“It’s just chemicals. She takes a pill,” my daddy says.
"Oh."
In the car on the way home, he starts talking. He never used to talk. What I know about our family has had to come from the simple knowledge living in my gut. What I know about my daddy's adoptive daddy's abuse. What I know about the fear in my mama and daddy's hearts, the sadness. But now, my daddy lays it all out. It makes sense, everything he says. It makes sense and it is not surprise. But that doesn't make hearing it any easier.

He carries the ring to the altar where his beautiful mama waits in a white dress, a glowing angel. She marries the man who will kick her son’s dog five dark years later. The man whose presence will hang over their house like a thundercloud. She hasn't stopped crying for the man she lost. It took years, and my daddy still ran into the arms of any man in khakis. Any man in a naval uniform. My daddy would hug his knees and cry, “Daddy!” His beautiful mama would stare at the pavement, unable to look into the stranger’s eyes. Embarrassed, alone. “Baby, it’s time to go. Leave the nice man alone.”

Windsurfing Boy and I started dating on Friday, March 13^th. For me, it was a very lucky day. Right now, he is on the senior bonding retreat. When he gets back (and when I return from college visits), we are going up to spend a week at his summer house on a nearby island. I have butterflies, but I cannot wait to spend some more one on one time with him. A few weeks ago, we played beer pong against Batman boy and a girl who graduated in ’07 and did advanced acting at our high school. Every time I see my boyfriend outside of school, Batman Boy is sort of lurking around. They are best friends, but it’s getting a little ridiculous. My Old Best Friend told me that as he was driving the carpool to school one day, Batman Boy’s hitting on other people’s girls came up. He said that if Batman Boy made a move on me, he would beat the shit out of him. This was before we were even officially together. Besides Batman Boy, everything with Windsurfing Boy is perfect. I visited him at work (the surf shop) and brought him lunch. He is the sweetest, most trustworthy guy I have ever known, and I usually fall for guys who are so bad for me. He thinks I’m beautiful and amazing. And he’s gorgeous too. How did I get this lucky?

Expelled Boy has started hitting on me. I can’t remember whether I’ve talked about this before. But I volunteered to help student government with our class t-shirts by designing the stencils. I stayed after in the art room, and he and my friend Cambridge were there too. He told me I had really pretty eyes. And he never shuts up about how I’ve “changed,” how I’m not the girl he remembers from last year. And on some level, he’s right. I’m not. I’m happy and I feel confident. I feel pretty, I feel special, I feel loved. He says he misses the Old Wendy. Well, Expelled Boy, Wendy doesn’t miss the Old Wendy. Wendy is happy to be happy. She is happy with her boyfriend and she is happy with feeling beautiful and talented every day. She doesn’t want to go back to loneliness, not for you, not for anyone.

Advanced Acting: I have been looking for a piece to use as my audition to be in the ensemble next year. I don't know if poetry is allowed, but I really want to do Daddy, by Sylvia Plath.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

There's also a recording on youtube of Sylvia Plath reading it aloud. I have been practicing her accent and I pretty much have it down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

Anyway, life is kind of a strange mix of delirious happiness and weird melancholy. Full disclosure can certainly be painful, even if you already knew the truth. Sometimes saying it out loud is what makes it real. And God, how good does it feel to be loved, to be wanted, to be talented and beautiful? Life is amazing and beautiful, if melancholy.

Love, Life, and Loose Ends (Listening to: Yayo, Lizzy Grant)

Writing from a few weeks ago:

In a dream I saw myself on the floor of a cathedral. Beams of golden light, dancing with dust. A ceiling so high it seemed vaulted with stars. I was just waking up. Lying, in that half dream state where the world spins around you to a haunted cotton candy melody. Duvets and comforters and fine cotton, pleated and pulled around me like a bird’s nest. Each tuck dotted with a tiny jewel. And the ceiling is so high and so far away…
I like feeling small. And sleep-walking among redwoods or the trunks of pillars makes me feel safe. Echoes, rings of high heels on marble floors bouncing back to me from the lofty ceiling. A small noise when it returns to me.
And looking up at people. Tipping my head back, feeling my hair graze my back. I like that too.
And dresses that make me feel dainty and delicate. Fine-boned, slim, tender. Stepping along the broad bare shoulders of the dusty highway with the sunlight fingering my own bare shoulders. Being passed from one set of giant’s hands to another. A small bird, fragile, wings folded.
And the black beast of night pushing in around me. The hungry dark, gobbling at my footsteps, nibbling at my neck, biting my earlobes. Climbing on top of me, rolling over me in waves, pressing the air from my lungs. Hugging my body like an ebony glove over ivory fingers. I like that too.
And there are times when plucking dandelions from the interstate median sounds beautiful to me. Times when I am almost willing to throw all my principles away for one clouded night and one boy who tells me I am lovely. There are times I want to be passed around the circle like a pipe, smoked and passed along again. When I like to feel used up, beaten down, and trampled underfoot. Some forgotten blue forget-me-not with a little yellow center.
I’ve been asked who it is I want to be. I want to be sheltered. By starry ceilings and comforters and tree trunks, by tall boys and the terrible tangling dark. I want to never have to be alone.

Salamander's Response:

With the beams of golden light - SO you. It reminds me of something else you wrote, talking about bubbles of light... I think you were talking about your room in that one, I might have to look it up. Your writing a lot of times goes back and forth between stuff that's amazing because I feel it and stuff that's amazing because it's so pure you, and Wendy is beautiful and so is Wendy In Words.
With the vaulted ceiling, it's like pure dream state. Amazing and you. And little feelings, like looking up at people...I like you in dresses that make you dainty and delicate. I like you beautiful, small, held in hands rougher than yours. I don't know. Something soft and infinitely intricate that needs your hands cupped to hold it from falling into the breeze. It's not that I like you weak, it's that I like seeing you cherished.
The night? That is you, perhaps, but a part of you I barely know, and it's not there in me. I love the night and hate the dark. Love screaming but deep down know it's just because I hate the silence. Night for me isn't about dark, it's about the light and noise that people create to get themselves away from the blackness that goes on forever.
And "I want to be sheltered" is probably the biggest thing I identify with. "By starry ceilings and comforters and tree trunks, by tall boys and the terrible tangling dark" is just beautiful. Like you. It fits.

Valentines Day is Saturday. And for the first time in my life I might have a Valentine.
Winter Ball: In the car he tells me I look gorgeous. We accidentally order the same thing at dinner. We dance all night. I get drunk at a party at his house and he smokes a joint with his buds. "Wendy, do you like Windsurfing Boy? Good. Because he fucking loves you. You need to hook up. There is his room. Do you understand? Good."
It didn't happen. He was too much of a gentleman. He drove me to my friend's house for the night, and at 2:30am Sunday morning he kissed me in the middle of the dark street. "I should go," I say. "But I don't want to." So we kiss again. "I really have to go....okay one more." And again. "You have to go," he says, and sends me off to a floating drunken climb up concrete steps to my friend's house.
"He was telling me he wants to ask you out but he is too nervous," is what I'm hearing all the time now.

He is leaving for Sun Valley on Saturday and I am leaving Sunday for Hawaii. People tell me they will keep an eye on him for me. We aren't dating, officially, but we might as well be. We are getting lunch on Thursday and Friday and I cannot wait to see what happens next.
Merchant of Venice closed this last Saturday night. He came on Thursday, opening night, and told me I looked beautiful and was amazing. He won't stop telling me and he says he's making me a mix cd.

On the downside, Batman Boy has started hitting on me. He grabbed my ass before the curtain call, and I didn't have time to slap him. He flirts with me and Windsurfing Boy is pissed at him for all the flirting, because apparently it's typical of Batman Boy.
But I don't even care. Life is too wonderful and it snowed yesterday night and the world was white and I am so happy these days.

Acting Like a Junior Girl (Listening to: Consequence, the Notwist)

I almost had a really shitty day yesterday.

This story starts a few days ago though. Monday: a really gross guy from my grade who I've never talked to asked me to winter ball over facebook.
I said I was really sorry but I didn't think so, and he asked me if there was another time I wanted to hang out. I hate it when that happens. I had to reply and say I didn't want him to get the wrong message and I was really sorry but I didn't think it would work.
He sits across from me in Calculus and stares at me awkwardly. It's terrible.

Anyways, I was picking out objectives and memorizing my lines after school yesterday, and Batman Boy and his friend Windsurfing Boy come into the room. I say hi to Batman Boy and keep working. A few minutes later, they both walk over to me. I look up, and Batman Boy says: Wendy, do you know how to work these calculators? We need your help. So I say sure and Windsurfing Boy hands me his calculator. Typed across the screen it says: WINTER BALL?
I smile and laugh and say sure. He says really? We exchange numbers and he says he'll call me to hang out sometime.

I found out later that the gross guy who asked me on Monday had been in the room when Windsurfing Boy asked me. The gross guy sent me another awkward facebook message that had a subject of "The Wrong Message" and said I'm assuming the message you were trying to send is that you aren't interested. I don't feel like replying, because it's kind of a drama queen thing to say to me and I don't want to deal with him.

Windsurfing Boy drives my Old Best Friend to school every day, and apparently he'd been planning to ask me for over a week and the whole carpool knew and was helping him plan it. He was so nervous he almost didn't ask me. We're getting lunch next Wednesday. I feel very very happy.

Merchant of Venice Update: Monday rehearsal was pretty terrible. We ran the kissing scene and there was no energy and it was not believable at all. Then Tuesday I had an amazing rehearsal with Glinda and we really connected and the rest of this week rehearsals have gone great. Actually having objectives helps. Haha.

It has been a stressful (American Studies Midterm Exam) week, but it has also been delicious. Tomorrow Old Best Friend and I are going shopping so I can find a sexier Winter Ball dress and a pencil skirt for my speech and debate tournament this weekend.

Weekend (Listening to: Hometown Glory, Adele)

I'm in kind of a weird mood.
Salamander's boyfriend (they're in an open relationship) has been hitting on me. And the attention is nice, and he's a nice enough person I guess, and I suppose he has a great body, but he sort of creeps me out. He's hooked up with the majority of my friends, for one, and for another, the whole open relationship thing kind of freaks me out. My Alaskan friend who stayed with me over break hooked up with him, my friend who went to Germany hooked up with him, and Carmen San Diego has also. Along with a long list of girls and boys (According to Salamander he's probably not bisexual, but just horny) I don't know and will probably never meet. Did I mention he and Salamander had sex for the first time less than a week ago?
Anyways, the one rule Salamander has with him is no sex with other people. Anything but is fine. And sex is defined as intercourse, anal and oral are a-okay. Which freaks me out more.
I've only met him two or three times, and already he seems to be targeting me as his next catch. When we were high on New Years, my Alaskan friend and my other friend and I were lying in his bed in his dad's house (his dad wasn't home), and he was sort of making the rounds as the "communal boyfriend." I can't remember for sure but I'm pretty sure he felt me up.
A brief history:
1. Beginning of summer kick-off barbecue: he makes an appearance. Salamander and he discuss the rankings of all the girls present in ranks of attractiveness. Wendy is placed number one, according to Salamander and the Communal Boyfriend (I guess we can just call him that now).
2. New Years: He spends all night either hooking up with my Alaskan friend (We can call her Forty Cows, I can explain why later...she's not obese or anything) or telling Wendy she is "heartbreakingly adorable", telling her her eyes look sad, touching her face, ears and nose, or feeling her up in other less pg manners. Wendy is high out of her mind and doesn't really see a problem.
3. Last Night: volunteers for a photo shoot Carmen is doing of Wendy, (Wendy and Art School Boy broke the ice with a romantic photo shoot at art school), and suggests Wendy and he hang out sometime one on one after crew.

Oh that's some other news, I went to National Portfolio day today with Carmen and my other friend, Jewel (who has also hooked up several times with Communal Boyfriend, coincidentally), and Carmen had some pictures from a photo shoot she did with me at the beginning of the school year. I had to leave early to make it to the memorial service for a girl from my grade I knew who died over break, but according to Carmen there were some rave reviews about my modeling in her photos. One college rep asked if the girl in the pictures acted, because there was phenomenal depth to her expressions, and said that I had the perfect model's body and insisted that Carmen use me again. All the reps said that a few of her photos could be high fashion photography.
So Carmen and I were brainstorming photo shoot ideas last night, and Communal Boyfriend got wind and said: I'm first in line if you need a boy.
Which Carmen took him up on.
Which means I may have to kiss him.
Which may give him the wrong idea.

I wish we had another option.
I wish I weren't so lonely. It would make this an easier decision.

Fever (Listening to: Friday Night, Lily Allen)

I don't really know how to introduce this. I had a fever and I started writing, and here's what came out.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. And a character in my book says, as she reads, that the words don’t belong to her. They are and will always be the author’s. And she says all she wants with her life is to be something to somebody.

I feel like I’m recognizing myself. It makes me want to write and put myself on paper and make some other girl sigh out and moan me too to the moon and the small hours of the morning, and the blue Vaseline gleam of her face in the light of her computer screen.

Maybe finding yourself is like art. Maybe the negative space can be more important than the positive, the invisible defining the visible. And maybe if I focus on everything around me, I will know by default. Maybe I will be left with a hole shaped like my soul. Like how when you put a puzzle together you don’t know where the last piece goes until you don’t have anywhere else to put it. How all the other pieces tell you what shape you are.

It’s funny, any time I try to write about myself I end up a puzzle piece. Wondering why when I’m filled I still feel empty.

And lonely, I end up lonely. Every time.

They shouldn’t call it high. It wasn’t like that. Sure, my mind was up there with those fuzzy shapes in the ether wrapping itself like a lonely girl around these hazy truths. And it wasn’t thinking, really, it was like touching with my mind. Mental, emotional antennae. Touching, stroking those unimaginably immense, insane things all melting together in the car or bobbing around the ceiling of that smoky little room upstairs. With the window open and Hendrix talking to us. But high isn’t right. My mind was away, that’s all, but my body was so grounded and messy and sloppy and lonely all over the bed, drawn up in a bundle and splayed out for the world and Hendrix to see.

I want to surround myself with beauty. Beautiful things, beautiful people. Negative space, defining my inside by my outside and my surroundings. It’s what art is about. Interior equals exterior, unless it doesn’t. And you’ll know when you see it, unless you don’t.

I don’t know how to paint this.

I don’t feel like I know anything anymore. I don’t feel like I have anything in me worth expressing. I can only grab at those balloons bobbing around the smoky ceiling when I am full of weed and empty of everything else, and in the morning even those serene dreams have left me.

I end up lonely, every time.

My optimist pleads,

maybe you’re just hard to pin down, baby. maybe you’re just so complicated and tragic and sad and full of wafting inspiration that even you yourself don’t know how to explain it. Maybe you need to look to your negative space. maybe, sweet girl, no one is ever going to understand you because you’re more than what can be understood. and maybe we’re all like that, baby. maybe when it all comes down to it, we’re all shells that don’t start being filled for a long way down into the earth. and maybe humans, the people you see on the street, are a lot denser than you’d think. maybe there is so much packed inside each collection of limbs and features that it’s a miracle we haven’t sunken into the earth. and maybe that’s because the earth is even denser. and maybe everything in the universe is so incredibly dense and packed and full of thought and life and those bobbing balloons all melting different colors and your parents and your sister and the people you know are all sitting around wondering if they will ever be understood either, and, just like you, whether they even want to be. and honey, maybe you don’t know shit, but maybe nobody else does either. and maybe, baby, you’re going to realize this someday. maybe you’re going to be lying awake at night and it’s going to hit you, like that funny combination of letters that night when your stomach was sore with loneliness and the cyclops ceiling of the spare room in your grandmother’s house was watching you with that single, lonely eye. your life is going to mean what you believe it will mean. you will fall in love with who you let yourself fall in love with, and if you don’t loosen up and RELAX, nothing for you is ever going to work itself out.

because you never relax, baby. you never do. and it is so hard for us to see, locked up inside, dense and packed. and being carried around by boys with hands like men, and being touched with those big hands that don’t seem to change from one boy-man to the next, that won’t do you any good. sweetheart, it never will. and baby, you need to grow up. you need to love and hate. and feel things! baby, we swear you do. you hide in your room and in the park and inside your head. and even, lately, when you’ve acted, you’ve felt empty. and we know you felt different, that smoky night when you lay on that bed and felt the world pushing in around you, pushing itself on top of you, and the corners of the room rounding and your head so thick and your mouth nibbling and feeling and feeling so strongly. you used to like to drink, baby, and get out of your head. you used to like the release. but honey you were so empty! and that night, baby, you relaxed. it was a sweet, silent presence and we know you felt that. we know how feeling small comforts you, and how those big hands made you feel so safe because they dwarfed you. we know your life spun in circles around you. and it’s like you read, and they aren’t your words, but it’s like you read: The Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow together in the sea-green deep, and Now spins in circles on the surface. all melting together, spinning circles. and how reality is greater than the sum of its parts. He was right about that too. And they aren’t your words, baby girl, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

Dirty Golden (Listening to: Mouth Full of Bones, Natalie Portman's Shaved Head)

Little pieces keep coming back. They float in and out of my head. Impermanent, detached fragments of a foreign person, weaving in and out. Fingers on my earlobes, hands on my body. Palm to my face. Words, strings of crepe paper words fluttering just out of reach. Time spreading over me so quickly. Losing track of hours, wrapped up in dreams I can’t describe, mysteries I no longer understand. Lonely, needing love so badly. Aching for contact. Please just touch me. Make a mummy of crepe paper words, tell me I’m beautiful. Tell me anything. Stories about a girl like myself with a beautiful soul. I like that you think my eyes look sad. Kissing a finger quickly, thinking it’s a bite. Trying not to laugh, so very immeasurably floatingly sad. Forgetting to breathe. Losing track of the inhale exhale rhythm. And time running over me like water. Feeling dirty and messy and so warm and comfortable and uninhibited. Sloppy and so lonely. Begging for love like a dog for a treat. Wanting to be patted on the head and told good girl. Fingertips on my nose, my whole body following. And music, bathing me golden. Dirty golden lonely liquid touching. And that swimming pool longing for it. I want to go back.

White Flowers (Listening to: A Dustland Fairytale, The Killers)

I don’t really know what to say. Maybe I’ve lost sight of words. They haven’t come as easily lately.

I don’t want to regret anything that has happened.
I’ve got a box of treasures in my room. Pictures of my sister. Folded paper from my first boyfriend. Airplane tickets and the broken pieces of an old pearl necklace. It’s a trunk for doll clothes from the fifties. It was my mother’s. Dusty white with red trim. Brass corners and rivets. So very dusty.
I get tired. I am tired all the time. And I don’t really know what that’s about.
Maybe I’ve been focusing for so long on what’s inside that trunk that I’ve lost sight of the trunk itself. Maybe I was worried over details and I forgot about my life. The big picture. I feel like I don’t really know anything anymore.
I know I’m not who I was. I know I’ve changed. And I don’t know whether I am not myself or whether who I am is changing. I don’t know whether to push ahead or turn back, tail between my legs.
I know it’s a pattern I should recognize. Innocence is always corrupted. Good girls never last. They never do. And being good never really did me any good, did it? Maybe I’ll be better off.
I see it as white flowers. Dusty snowy petals scattered in that trunk. And lately they’ve withered so quickly. Dried up. It happened so quickly. And I know it always does, and that that’s no excuse.
I never used to do things. And now I find myself doing things when my body is not my own and seeing things happen that I don’t want and don’t not want and I don’t know what to think. Before when I wasn’t sure, I’d do nothing. Hole up in my own head. Get tied up in thoughts until the moment for action passed. I’m acting and I know they’ll tell me that’s better. Action. Doing instead of thinking. Empowering. But I sometimes feel like, with this little nagging doubt, like I just wasn’t looking ahead. The girl I know would never do these things.
I am not that girl these days. I don’t know what caused it. And it’s fun now. Parts of it are really fun. The not caring, the recklessness. The recklessness I never would have done before. But I’m scared I’ll find out too late that those dirty white petals were my soul, my real and actual soul, and that when I realize it, they’ll be gone. Only dust.
My pearl necklaces break, one by one. My first boyfriend broke one. Clean, straight in half. I saw it coming.
The others are harder to notice. Maybe a bead chips here or there, or a strand falls away. But slowly they all decay. It’s a pattern I do recognize.
People tell me I’m smart. I don’t feel that way. They tell me, you are so smart. You know so much. Don’t sell yourself short. And I feel, I feel so much, like I know close to nothing.
Because I never used to make mistakes. And getting caught at lying and playing games I never used to play feels so foreign to me. I don’t recognize myself sometimes. It scares me when all I have are little pieces of a night. And I can’t remember parts that scare me most of all.
And it scares me that I can have wanted contact so much that I wouldn’t have refused.
It scares me that I am that alone.
Because it doesn’t last very long, that temporary high you get when someone tells you you’re beautiful. I’m worried I’m trading my soul for that drug.
And it scares me because I know one day I’m not going to have anything left to trade.

Very In Trouble (Listening to: Nugget, Cake)

I went out last night with Salamander, her boyfriend, and this guy who I guess we can call England Boy. He used to go to my school but he is doing a year in England and was back for winter break. My parents don't let me drive with teen drivers though, so I had to lie in order to leave with them.
Last year, when my friends started driving and I wasn't allowed to come, I started being left out of things we all did together, and I began to grow apart from them. I was miserable. I didn't have a best friend for the first time since I could remember. My friends started talking about me. It was easy, I guess, because I wasn't there. And I understand that some of the time it was because I overloaded my schedule and I was too busy to see anyone. But a large part of it was that there wasn't a way for me to get around and see them. And I have learned better than anything in the past year that when a friendship becomes an effort, no one wants to put the work in.
I started lying about the driving, saying someone's parents were driving me home. I tried to negotiate with my parents but they aren't the best at listening. And I've tried to explain the effect their rules have on my friendships, but it's one of those things where no one is going to agree because we are coming from fundamentally different premises and there's not a lot we can negotiate on. Really, what's happening is that my parents are making me choose between my friendships and their rules. Which really isn't a choice at all.
But we were driving around, and I lied to my parents and told them I was with my other friend Carmen San Diego, which was more logical since I was with Salamander and her boyfriend and England Boy on New Years.
My parents are never really around. They have a lot of rules, but they don't enforce them. They tell me I can't go out for a run after dark, and then they leave. I walk right out the front door and am back before they are. They tell me I can't watch more than an hour of television a day, but they aren't home. I turn on the tv and watch what I want. They tell me I can't drive with kids my age, but they don't check to see if I go where I say I do. I lie to them over the phone and get into cars with teens behind the wheels. They're lucky I do my homework, keep my grades up, and only tried weed for the first time on New Years. They're lucky I don't abuse their lack of parenting more. I don't think they understand that.
And maybe I should have respected that freedom. But really, it's not freedom. If I followed all their rules I wouldn't have a life and I wouldn't have friends. I cannot imagine a world where anyone I know would be able to follow them all.
We were all drinking at England Boy's apartment. Salamander and her boyfriend were making out, and I was looking at the view, and then England Boy and I ended up hooking up. I figured if I was home before midnight my parents might be ticked I hadn't called, but I wouldn't be in serious trouble. In the car on the way home, I heard my phone ringing. I picked up, and it was my dad. He had called Carmen's parents and knew I wasn't over there. I didn't have time to think of anything else to say, so I told the truth. I was in the car with Salamander and her boyfriend was driving.
I was still drunk. Salamander's boyfriend hadn't been drinking and we weren't breaking any laws other than the underage drinking one. But the driving was totally legal. Salamander's boyfriend is 18 and there were only three passengers in the car.
Astonishingly my parents didn't notice I was falling down drunk when I came home. I apologized a lot but tried to explain why I had to break their rules. The thing I actually do regret is worrying everyone. I should have just said I was with Salamander. Her parents knew we were hanging out and they would have told my parents that. But I guess I wasn't thinking, and I fucked up. It's the first time I've been caught doing anything bad, and my parents do not trust me at all anymore.
I hope they ground me for a few months and that can be it. I want to go to the RISD precollege art school program this summer, and it's expensive. My parents were reluctant to let me go anyways because it is so expensive. It's likely that they won't ground me for very long but they will tell me there is no way they can trust me for six weeks across the country with little adult supervision.
I could deal with a grounding anyway, it's not like I have time to go out after break is over anyway. Not with the play, Speech and Debate, and American Studies. And RISD would be an amazing experience for me. I hope they ground me.

High on New Years (Listening to: 1940, The Submarines)

The pieces of my life are losing their shapes. The places I’ve known have switched their limbs behind my back, mismatched signs on the wrong buildings. Used furniture stores with sale signs in the windows have become ice cream parlors and I can’t quite catch my breath. Street signs are stuck into the wrong corners so that Madison Street and Rainier Avenue have traded places. A weird déjà vu and I feel so full and brimming and dislocated. Gaping windshield like a hungry mouth in this car is a window to a rusty sky and cars that fly like knitting needles towards me and away. Patterns, patterns I cannot catch a hold of. Music is a soup, a delicious sloshing liquid that runs in and out of my mouth like the tides. Tasting it, seeing its hazy clouds drift in and out. The melodies melt into each other until I am bathing in this aquarium of sound. Snatches of conversation I do not understand and a thick foggy warmth. Every now and then, my name. Words that are not my name but are myself. I think in code, and the currents in the air strip into deciphered letters falling around me like leaves. I am so breathless. The people I’ve known all fading into one another, until all I see is one strange and rippling face. And all at once the music becomes one song, the places become one place, and the people one face. It is beautiful and very, very sad. Terrible, beautiful echoes. The three fade into each other, melt and swell and I see one big, so very infinitely big, one picture of today, now, this instant, forever and everything that came before. All melted together in this car, before me and the orange sky and hard blinking lights. My big sad eyes they say look like they are just about to cry. I don’t understand it. They touch me, ask if it is beautiful. Face, face, people I’ve known, that doesn’t begin to describe it.