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.

It's Been Awhile (Listening to: The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine, Spoon)

I haven't had time to write in a while because I've been so busy with school. Merchant rehearsals are pretty much eating my life.
Anyways, I had an essay due for American Studies about the table I eat at and that larger community, and I incorporated parts of my previous writing about my dad into that. I figured I'd post my rough draft here and any revisions I do I can add as time goes on. (P.S. I love feedback, if anyone reads this)
Without further ado:

My Daddy's Daddies

I don’t eat at my house anymore. Breakfast is coffee and a scone at Stumptown, lunch is something wolfed between classes, and dinner is anyplace but home. My daddy says I live off air and good intentions. He’s wrong, of course; I eat a lot, just not the way I used to.

I remember a time when our house was filled with music. I would sit at the table, tucked into my daddy’s hearty booms of Dylan and Cash. “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” The air was always warm with the smell of a roasting chicken and boiling dumplings.

Today, this big old house is almost always empty. The rooms are caves where my mama and daddy and baby sister are hibernating bears. I am the quiet ghost, wandering the kitchen like a blind girl, fingers to the fridge and the wooden tables, bare feet numb against the icy floors. The air feels too thin to breathe, but it is somehow heavy, weighing me down all the time with the cold, cold clink of forks and spoons and the things we leave unsaid.

Our kitchen table is a wooden rectangle with carved legs in the shape of spirals. My mama sits at one end, and my daddy at the other. My sister and I have the other two sides. Dinner around this table has become an empty ritual; we push food around on our plates with slack jaws and tongues that do not taste. I don’t eat at all. The food here feels thick and it is hard to swallow. But attendance is mandatory, so I sit at the table tapping my foot until I’m allowed to leave.

No one says what she means. My parents bury their intentions in forced politeness. My sister and I sit in surly silence. None of us ever make eye contact.

“How was your day, Laura?” my daddy says.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to be rude.”

One by one we leave the table and retreat back to our caves. The silence makes me tired; it wears me down until I don’t have the energy to think. I creep back into the kitchen to brew some tea.

As the water in the kettle comes to a boil, it starts to rain. The fat droplets burst on the skylight above my head. The wind picks up. I hear my daddy’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.

It is always raining with me and my daddy. On sunny days, I stay out as late as possible to avoid the silent dinner table. But when it rains, I stay home and my daddy quits his work to come up to the kitchen and listen to the raindrops hit the roof. And when the sky opens up, so does my daddy.

I like talking to him. The table feels smaller when it is just him and me. It might be the tea, but I feel a little warmer.

When he speaks, his voice is soft. His daddy died in the war. His mama was a beautiful war widow, just twenty years old, already alone with two babies and not even old enough to drink. My daddy never says so, but I know this is how he and my mama got close. They were just two grownup kids with no daddies, crying about submarine explosions and heart attacks on the front lawn and the way their hearts were broken before they were old enough to drive.

He had three baby sisters and two baby brothers and they grew up poor. At Christmas, all they got were plain black turtlenecks. He tells me he felt lucky, because new clothes were a luxury his beautiful mama could not afford. “You girls don’t realize how good you have it,” my daddy says. He leans back in his chair, resting his feet on the beams under the table.

His new daddy beat on him.

My daddy is quiet for a long time. I take a sip of tea.

He says he’s proud not to be the same man his new daddy was. “I promised myself I would never be that way with you or your sister,” my daddy murmurs. I hear in his voice a terror that maybe that beast was nurtured in him too, that maybe one day something in him will break and he will be the same monster his new daddy was. Maybe the world spins in a set pattern, and maybe fate knew my daddy’s life would end up the way it did before he was even born. Maybe no matter what my daddy does he will end up retracing the steps of his adoptive father.

My daddy wouldn’t talk to his new daddy for fifteen years. None of us ever spoke of him at all. As far as I knew, I had no granddaddy. Then my daddy’s mama died and my daddy boarded a plane to California to be with his new daddy and mourn their loss. Before he leaves, he sits my baby sister and me down at the kitchen table. “Life’s too short,” my daddy says, and starts to cry.

Later that night I walk in on my daddy in the kitchen. He is wiping dust off the black and white photograph of his real daddy. My daddy’s daddy’s face will always be young, but the buttons on his naval uniform have dulled with time. His hat sits at a nervous angle. “Can you remember him at all?” I ask.

“Sometimes I think I can,” my daddy says. He smiles, but there is no joy in it.

We sit at our table, the four of us, one to a side. The heavy air presses us from all around, like a long, drawn out punch in the stomach. Our family is a table whose sides don’t quite fit together the way they are supposed to. We are barely held together; each side looks without with a terrible longing, wishing to be a part of something else. We pull at each other, cling to the windows and the doors trying to escape. The weight of the air beats us back together.

When my parents die, when my mama and daddy are only ghosts, when I sit up at night wiping the dust from their portraits, I’m going to feel guilty. I’m going to feel like there was something I could have done to fix the table and our family, like I should have done that thing. Like maybe it wasn’t too late.

I am going to regret not doing anything. I know that. It’s like I can see a car crash years before it happens, but I can’t stop it. I don’t know how to stop it. The world is so huge, and there are so many forks in the road. I feel lost.

This knowledge aches in my gut and my throat. It nags at me, like my broken daddy and this cold house are things I should be grateful for. I resent the silent kitchen with its silent dinner table; I resent our silent house with its silent rooms and the silent spiders that wait in the silent corners. I think our house is perpetually holding its breath, and I resent that, too. I resent my daddy for not singing anymore. But at least I have a daddy to resent. And we aren’t as broken as those families with the daddies who beat on their babies. Like how my daddy’s family was.

My daddy is alone, orphaned. His beautiful mama and both his daddies have sunken slowly into their graves. This silent house and this silent family are all he has left. Thinking they aren’t good enough just doesn’t seem right.

Daddy (Listening to: Muddy Hymnal, Iron & Wine)

When my daddy dies I’m gonna be a broken girl.
When I was little I was scared he’d notice when I stopped calling him that. I switched to dad because I felt like a baby, and my best friend didn’t call her dad daddy anymore.
How am I supposed to forgive him? My daddy is a grownup but he’s lost. He’s so confused sometimes I think, like he’s got this forking of the path in front of him and he can’t pick which way to go. And I don’t feel bad for making him choose, even though I probably should. I mean they always said you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Your best friend and your baby girl.
This Thursday is thanksgiving and I’m thinking about living on my own. I joke about running away. I’d go out in the rain, just leave. I would. I’ve tried. I feel bad joking about it, because I know my face is way too serious.
Sometimes we talk about politics. Vietnam. He dodged the draft, faked diabetes and all they cared about was the psych he saw.
His daddy died in the war. His mama, a beautiful war widow just twenty years old and already two babies and not even old enough to drink. His new daddy beat on him. His sisters and his brothers, they grew up so poor. At Christmas, they got turtlenecks. Black ones, that’s all, and they were happy.
I guess that’s how my mama and him got close. Two grownup kids with no daddies, crying about submarines and heart attacks on the front lawn and the way their hearts were broken before they were old enough to drive. When I have no daddy, I’ll be able to cry on cue. That will be a useful skill, I think. I’ll put it on my resume: can cry on cue, no daddy to hold those tears in.
My daddy is too silly, sometimes. He jokes and jokes, when all I want is him to look me in these big brown eyes and tell me it’s okay. My daddy has never been good at that.
Sometimes, late nights, we’ll go driving through the rain in his station wagon with the blankets in the back and the radio on, just him driving and me in the passenger seat, talking. We don’t do that too much. When we do, he puts on his favorite station, because it’s a Friday night and Shake the Shack is on. They play rockabilly which has nothing to do with rock, actually, is just country songs with some dirty jokes in between.
My daddy doesn’t believe in God, just Bob Dylan. And Johnny Cash. We watched Walk the Line together, one late night, probably raining.
Oh god, it is always raining with me and my daddy. On sunny days I run, run away to my friends or my baby sister. But when it rains my daddy and I sit inside and he reads the newspaper and I talk about The World We Live In. We agree about Lyndon Johnson, for instance.
Sometimes we talk about photography. He loaned me his favorite photography book, this subversive book from 1948 that was published in France first because no American would publish something so unpatriotic. My daddy used to be a photographer you know. He wasn’t creative enough to be an artist, but he did ad campaigns. For beer.
My daddy likes to feel rebellious. He educated himself because knowledge is power and you can’t trust The Man. I think my daddy is scared to be middle class, old, and white. He always surrounded himself with black panthers and radicals and people who acted instead of thinking, these dangerous, glamorous people he wanted to be but couldn’t quite imitate. Even when he was a photographer he was still working for corporations, just a white guy from a poor background at a steady job with average income.
When my daddy was this young guy he had a brain tumor in his head, but he was in China with his beautiful young mama, where she taught English. So he gets his head all fixed in China in the jungle with the only machine they have and he cuts the line in front of all these Chinese people because he is American and his mama knows the right people. Because even though they are dirt poor, tired, working Americans, they are still Americans. And my daddy feels bad, but what can he do?
I think my daddy feels this way a lot. Helpless. Like The Man is beating up on him like his new daddy used to do, like his new daddy who is dead now, the only daddy my daddy ever knew, was really just another lost guy who fell down and made mistakes.
My daddy didn’t talk to his new daddy for ten years. Wouldn’t say a word, hated him. It’s a sad story, I guess. But that’s who my daddy is, stubborn, confused, lost, and he tells me to try and be understanding. To see things as a cultural difference between families. Mistakes, and not to hate.
And I want to tell him hey it’s thanksgiving and it’s supposed to be a day for our family to be thankful and eat turkey and cranberry sauce and that stuffing you make that tastes delicious. But here I am, sitting on the couch with a lump in my throat punching at the tears on my face with my fingers like I’m some boxer, wondering why I can’t talk to him, why he doesn’t understand.
Last month I left the restaurant we were eating at because my daddy didn’t understand me and started walking home. It was only twenty blocks away, but he came after me. It was after dark, and even though I was crying, he made me come back inside. I think parents are like that. They don’t understand enough to care when you need them to care, and then when you hate them for that they don’t understand enough to back off when you need to be alone.
When my daddy is just a ghost, I’m going to feel bad about all these things. Like there was something I could have done to fix them, like I should have done that. Like maybe it wasn’t too late. And hey, we’re not as broken as those families with the daddies who beat on their babies. Like how my daddy’s family was.
I think my daddy is proud, proud that he is not that way with me and my baby sister. I think he feels so scared though, that maybe that beast was nurtured in him by his new daddy, and that my mama might become his beautiful mama any moment, and we be his little sisters, his real sister, his half sister, or his little baby adopted sister.
My baby sister has a temper like nothing I’ve ever known, and she gets it from my daddy. When she was just a little girl, my baby sister spit in my daddy’s face. And my daddy exploded, he hits her and yells because he is so mad and when he was just a baby and his new daddy came to his little house, he was never allowed to be disrespectful. My daddy is always saying things like kids these days, because when he was little he still had to be a grownup. Five little siblings, three sisters and two brothers and he had to take care of them with his beautiful mama and all her mistakes.
When we go to Canada and we’re on our way home, my daddy always gets us into trouble at the border. His documents are never current and he gives the border police lip. He likes to joke, and he doesn’t know when to turn it off. We have to remind him, say Daddy, don’t get mad and don’t feel scared when we get to the border. You’re our daddy and we love you and please shut up for long enough to drive us home.
My daddy doesn’t come up from downstairs very often. He works on computers all day all over town, and then he drives home in that station wagon and works on computers downstairs. Sometimes he comes up for dinner, and sometimes not. He works late, a lot of the time.
He is always gone at funerals. His daddies, his friends, friend after friend after friend and they all fall away into the ground, deep into the ground until all that is left is his brand new best friend by default and his best family, also by default. Only because we were the last ones left standing. And I do feel bad, wishing that all my daddy has left will die before he does, so I won’t have to see him at my daddy’s funeral.
It’s a lot like this at my house. My big house that is so empty so much of the time, with my mama in cold Alaska and my daddy out working or with his machines in the basement, and my baby sister gone or holed up in her room. And me, wandering the kitchen barefoot, fingers to the fridge and the wooden tables, and the way the floors are old and cold and the carpets are worn out because they are fifty years old now and have never been replaced. The air, so heavy all the time with the clink of cold, cold forks and spoons and the things we leave unsaid. My sister and I, fighting, fighting because we’re mad at our family, at our mama and our daddy but we yell at each other instead. The rooms, so cluttered because my mama and daddy never made us clean them. The smell, so dusty and so cold, and the sound of the rain, coming down in sheets and buckets and farm animals across the skylight. That rain, that to me is more constant than any daddy.
I’ve got this ache in me like my daddy and I will never know each other, like this old cold house full of secrets and empty of everything else is somewhere where my mama will live alone someday, somewhere I’ll never come back. Like someday, my mama and daddy will be people I don’t talk about anymore, and like someday I really will be all alone.
I talked to my daddy for real today. About ourselves, not about Vietnamese civilians or the people he used to know. I walk downstairs and tell him I have a place to go if I need to leave. I don’t think about what I’m going to say because then I will be too scared to say it. He says no, no he is not kicking me out because I am a part of this family. And that if he had been a better daddy or faster on his feet we wouldn’t even have to worry about it in the first place. He gives me a hug and I start to cry, cry like the rain on our roof and the puddles on the sidewalk. My daddy loves me.

Portia (Listening to: Knee Deep at the National Pop League, Camera Obscura)

I am Portia.

Glinda isn't Portia. That's what really gets me. I definitely did not expect this. I am so happy, so excited, and so terrified. Batman Boy got Antonio, which he wanted, and Bassanio is this other senior guy who I don't know very well. We're getting lunch together tomorrow, to get to know each other better. So that rehearsing our kiss isn't as awkward. Oh, wow. I'm the female lead in the Advanced Acting play.

My American Studies final was this morning, and I still kind of want to puke. Well, there's nothing I can do about it now. During my study block, Expelled Boy came up to the library from biology and snuck up behind me to give me what turned out to be the most killer back massage of all time. We discussed the final, and I told him I'm Portia. We were in intermediate acting together last year so he was really excited for me. Damn, it's hard to get over him when he comes around rubbing my back and telling me I'm talented.

Almost as hard as it was when he told me I smelled good and put his arm around me. Almost as hard.


Well, damn. Today was weird. I felt like throwing up while being the happiest and proudest I have been in a long time.

Can you see me? I'm starting to glow.

Liar (Listening to: Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan)

Well look at that, I did make time to write.

I’m a virgin. I’m not stupid. I don’t want you to break my heart.

You said you’re a romantic. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t think you even know what that means, actually.

You cheated on the girl you said you loved. A lot of times. Look me in the eye, okay?

You like me too much to fuck me? Do you get how fucked up that is? You’re supposed to like the people you sleep with. More than like. If you are really a romantic I think you would know that.

Maybe the way you are works for you. It looks to me like it is working pretty damn well, actually. You get girls. You do. If that’s enough for you, then alright. Okay. There is nothing wrong with that.

But it is not romantic. You are not romantic. You’re afraid of romance.

Maybe you do love her. Maybe it’s the closest thing to love you’ve ever known. So what? Love does not equal romance. Especially not the way you love.

You’re a liar. You lie to her when you sleep with other girls. You lie to them when you don’t tell them about her. And you lie to yourself when you tell yourself that the things you do don’t stop you from being a romantic.

Look, you’re smart. You understand a lot of things I don’t. But I understand this and it looks like you can’t. You’re handsome and you’re talented. You’re kind, charismatic, and magnetic.

But I can’t trust you when you lie to everyone.

I got drunk last night off champagne with Salamander. She's been getting to know Expelled Boy better for a while now because they go out and smoke during break together. Apparently I came up for the first time when they talked a couple days ago, about who at our school they'd fuck.

And he said:

Yeah, the difference between Wendy and other girls is that I actually like Wendy. So I'd feel really bad, because I'd probably like...

Salamander:

Break her heart?

Him:

Yeah, you know.

Well I'm hungover and Expelled Boy likes me too much to fuck me. Where does that leave me? A weird place, that's for sure. To quote The Notwist, I feel like strange, boneless.

Salamander's friend came over. I think he was nice. We snuggled when I was full of warm champagne and empty of inhibitions. I remember talking in French, but I forget the words and meaning.

Also, according to Mike, Paul said I had the best female audition for the play. Also known as, I was the only one acting and not just reading. Also known as very good news. However, he still hasn't cast the show, but he's supposed to send out an email with the list this weekend. Also known as I'm busy refreshing my email every other minute.

All I want is to surprise everyone. Expelled Boy, Advanced Acting, Salamander.
I have a giant sun inside me and I just want to let it out.

Audition Days (Listening to: We Used to Vacation, Cold War Kids)

Today we auditioned for roles in The Merchant of Venice in Advanced Acting. I was up until two last night memorizing Portia's part of the audition scene.
Anyway, my audition went pretty well. I got paired with Batman Boy for my first reading, so he took Bassanio and I took Portia in the scene where he chooses the correct box and the two get married.

Maybe a little background on Batman Boy would be helpful here. He's pretty much the default for romantic leads in drama at our school, because he's talented and gorgeous. I've decided to call him Batman Boy because he has a minor obsession with the Dark Knight. Actually, my friend Alice dressed up as Batman for Halloween. I commented a picture of her in costume on facebook saying: wow, you make the best Batman since.....well, me. (Batman is my favorite superhero and I was Batman in 7th Grade). Anyway, Batman Boy writes on my wall: A little birdie told me you were Batman once. That's rad. See what I mean? Cute, but awkward. Anyway he's dating this girl I went to elementary school with.

Well back to the audition. Paul and Mike, the teachers in Advanced Acting, are big fans of saying: "I need more HEAT!" So, as far as my audition went, Batman Boy and I had something happening. Maybe not the strongest chemistry ever (Expelled Boy still wins in that department), but definitely something.
The other girl I'm competing with for Portia is this senior girl who is new to the class, and she's actually really sweet. We do speech and debate together too. Anyways, she's gorgeous, blonde to my red hair, and she and Batman Boy have been friends since preschool. They can turn the chemistry on and off because they are so comfortable together. My acting is much stronger than hers, but she looks like Portia more than I do (blonde), and she and Batman Boy are close. We'll call her Glinda the Good Witch I guess.

In Advanced Acting, we cast the shows ourselves. Mike and Paul give us a list of the characters and we write who we want to play each role on the sheet. I talked to Glinda afterwards, and we talked about the casting we had seen. Most people had seemed to cast me as Nerissa, the female supporting role (pretty damn good for me considering it's my first year in Advanced Acting and I'm just a Junior) and Glinda as Portia. Well, we'll see, I mean Paul has the final decision, but if most people cast me as Nerissa I will probably get that role. Which I will definitely be happy with. :) Yay for things going my way.

Anyway this is about to be a really busy run for me, so I probably won't get anything up for a while.

Polite Ghosts Fading Quickly (Listening to: Half Asleep, School of Seven Bells)

The last three days have been an odd slew of lovely, contented sighs and tense pain.

On Saturday, I spent a large part of the day with The Expelled Boy. It's been over a year since I started liking him, and it's done: Almost forcibly spreading thinner 'til it dissolves completely.

Sunday, I blew off all my homework and just felt amazing all day. I slept in. Somehow I seemed to be lighter than air, giddy but in an entirely new way. Not in the love I felt for someone else, (The Expelled Boy, Art School Boy), but for the lack of that love. Being alone, and loving that feeling of independence, of self-reliance so much. I know that what begins as an unguarded train of thought, slowly can become an addiction to the slumber of disconnection and the resonance of memory that no longer has a shape but keeps you numb through the hours 'til gone is another day.

Monday started beautifully. I had this vibrating energy inside me and I was so much happier than I had been. Advanced Acting started after lunch. We sat in our own spots on the stage. Mike says to picture someone we love, the person we love the most of all.
I remember this exercise from last year. And I do not imagine the same person.
Last year I picked the girl I now know as Old Best Friend. Our friendship the way we knew it then has also almost forcibly spread thinner 'til it dissolved completely.
This year I imagine Laura, my little sister. When we were younger, when I was six and she was four, I would dream that she had died, that the overgrown rock garden in the corner of our yard where no one goes anymore had become a pond, a deep, dark lake of green scum and shadowy fish and that she had fallen from the balcony into its depths. I used to dream that I climbed down the chain hanging from the roof gutter that directed rain water, to try and carry her out of the lake. She would drown. The sky was always stormy. I would scream and cry in these dreams, and then our friends would peer out of the shadows of our dark house and giggle, laugh and say that they were happy she was dead. They would sing and dance and I would scream and bawl and wake up drenched in sweat.
Mike says picture this person I love most, and I imagine her. Now, he says, this person is dying. What do their eyes look like? What does their hair look like? You can comfort them. Where are you?
Just like that, I am crying.
Now, Mike says, they have one minute. When I call your name, you have one minute to say everything you want to say to them.

He calls my name first.

I need you to know that I love you more than anyone. I love you so much, so much, and I need you to stay with me. I know that life for you has been so much harder than it has been for me and I wanted to take that from you and protect you from that. I never could. I wish it was me. I wish I could die and not you, I do.
Fifteen seconds, Mike says.
I love you. You're going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
Ten seconds.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Five.
I love you, I love you I love you I love youIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouLAURA.
And she's gone, Mike says.

Another name is called, but I keep crying, silently shaking and shivering and holding my empty hand tight around what I have convinced myself is her limp one. Those dark waters have swallowed her up again and there is nothing I can do.
As I walk from the theater to the bathroom, a senior from the class, Batman Boy, pats me on the back and says: Alice Cooper is a good look for you. And it's true, my cheeks are streaked with black mascara. I wipe it away.
The rest of the day my shoulders feel tense against my neck and I feel dragged through Hell. I take notes in Calculus for once. I can't laugh or make faces behind the teacher's back today.
That headache you get from crying hasn't faded yet.

Question v. Answer (Listening to: Third Planet, Modest Mouse)

We’re so very grounded on this cold Alaskan night. Above us, your sky spins a savory silk for the treetops. We look at the ground and at each other. Our bare limbs are so earthly, so low. My few words tilt softly from behind my lips. The pavement is cracked with weeds. Our feet have led us to the courtyard, the place you say you first kissed me. Maybe I’ve lost track. It would surprise me. You hold me in your arms and I bury myself in you. We both know such Saturdays breed Sunday mornings of goodbye. You nuzzle my head and kiss my lips softly. I pull the strings; I am the puppeteer. I kiss you back. Full, round, dripping fruit. I don’t mind that your hands wander. Your fingers tracing me are compliments and they are comforting. We take a walk at your suggestion (you want more), and amble down the concrete. We sit on the stoop of a dark whitewashed house. You cradle my head as you lay me down to the sidewalk. Your fingertips flow from beneath my left breast to my opposite hip. Your lips pulse at mine. Beyond your head, the frozen starlight blooms. Your warmth is pressing me, enveloping me, sweeping up and down my legs in waves of shivers. I sit up on my elbows. My naked shoulders are pale moonlit horses.

They said I love you.

I know.

He doesn’t love her, does he?

No.

She doesn’t love him either.

Good.

It’s too soon.

Way too soon.

I lay my tousled head on your shoulder. The harbor glimmers slowly. A tangled thicket of masts guards the shore. Neither of us needs to say I don’t love you.

When I first wrote about that night, I wrote about that one amazing kiss in the courtyard. Last night I realized I'd overlooked the important part.

In other news, I told my old best friend (I'm still close with her, but I think "best friend" is too black and white for us) about what happened to me on my birthday. See: Locking the Doors Isn't Enough (August 23rd, 2008) Anyways, I cried for twenty blocks or so, the most violently I have since Alaska when my parents went insane. Today was an awful day, which is what got me started. The aforementioned incident just sort of spilled out.

I had burst into tears in the middle of the restaurant, so I left my family and started walking home. My dad made me come back, because he said it wasn't safe. Funny how when you need your parents to care and notice, they don't, but when you want to be alone they care enough to ruin it. Maybe I'll write something real about this later in the week.

Blue Window, Inherit The Wind (Listening to: I'm Good, I'm Gone, Lykke Li)

I'm in the advanced acting class at my school and I also do speech. This year I have a monologue for acting class and a scene in speech, and I figured I'd just put them out there because they're pretty boss if I do say so myself.

Blue Window, my monologue:
I used to be married to a dentist. We bought a big apartment on East 71st Street. We'd been married about three months. I was standing by the window. It was late afternoon. Everything was blue, as blue as it can be before it gets black.
And Marty said, come out on the terrace. I said, I don't have any clothes on. And he brought me this little robe and we walked out on the terrace. We'd only lived there two months. And he kissed me, and I put my head back to look up at the sky. Our reflections were in the glass. And I put my head back - we lived on the seventh floor, there was another one above us - and we leaned, he leaned, I set my back against the rail...and it just...we were gone. We were over. I saw our reflections leave the window. And I didn't black out. I thought, very clearly, this is bad. This is real. And it's true, you see everything pass before your eyes. Everything. Slowly, like a dream. And Marty was...climbing up me...and screaming...and we turned over once...and we went through an awning, which saved my life. And I broke every bone in my face. I have a completely new face. My teeth were all shattered, these are all caps.
I was in traction for ten months. And Tom came to see me every week, every day sometimes. Marty's family. We sued the building. I mean, they never even attached it to the wall. It wasn't even attached. It was just a rail, a loose rail. There was another one on another floor, the same thing could have happened. I landed on him. I killed him. I can't - it's seven years. I can't have anybody hold me. I can't ever be held.

Inherit the Wind, my scene:
Rachel: Mr. Drummond, you've got to call the whole thing off. It's not too late. Bert knows he did wrong. He didn't mean to, and he's sorry. Now why can't he just stand up and say to everybody I did wrong, I broke a law, I admit it. I won't do it again. Then they'd stop all this fuss, and - everything would be like it was.
Drummond: Who are you.
Rachel: I'm a friend of Bert's.
Drummond: How about it boy, getting cold feet?
Rachel: Bert knows he's wrong, don't you Bert?
Drummond: Don't prompt the witness.
Bert: What do you think, Mr. Drummond?
Drummond: I'm here. That tells you what I think. Well, what's the verdict, Bert?
Bert: No sir, I'm not gonna quit.
Rachel: Bert!
Bert: It wouldn't do any good now anyhow. If you'll stick by me, Rache, well - we can fight it out.
Rachel: I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do.
Bert: What's the matter Rache?
Rachel: I don't want to do it, Bert, but Mr. Brady says...They want me to testify against you.
Bert: You c- you can't. Rache, some of the things I've talked to you about are things you just say to your own heart. If you get up on the stand and say those things out loud...don't you understand? The words I've said to you, softly, in the dark, just trying to figure out what the stars are for or what be on the backside of the moon...they were questions, Rache. I was just asking questions. If you repeat those things on the witness stand, Brady'll make 'em sound like answers. And they'll crucify me.
Drummond: What's your name. Rachel what?
Rachel: Rachel Brown. Can they make me testify?
Drummond: I'm afraid so. It would be nice if nobody ever had to make anybody do anything, but...
Rachel: I remember feeling this way when I was a little girl. I would wake up at night, terrified of the dark. I'd think sometimes that my bed was on the ceiling, and the whole house was upside down, and if I didn't hang onto my matress I'd fall, outward, into the stars. I wanted to run to my father and have him tell me I was safe, that everything would be alright. But I was always more frightened of him than I was of falling. It's the same way now.
Random Court Official: Will Miss Rachel Brown come forward please?
Brady: Miss Brown, you are a teacher at the Hillsboro Consolidated School?
Rachel: Yes.
Brady: So you have had ample time to know the defendant, Mr. Cates, professionally.
Rachel: Yes.
Brady: Is Mr. Cates a member of the spiritual community to which you belong. Do you and Mr. Cates attend the same church?
Rachel: Not anymore. Bert dropped out two summers ago.
Brady: Why?
Rachel: It was what happened with the little Stebbins boy.
Brady: Would you tell us about that please?
Rachel: The boy was eleven years old and he went swimming in the river, and got a cramp, and drowned. Bert felt awful about it. He lived right next door and Tommy Stebbins used to come over to the boarding house to look through Bert's microscope. Bert said the boy had a quick mind and he might even be a scientist when he grew up. At the funeral, Pa preached that Tommy didn't die in a state of grace, since his folks had never had him baptized.
Bert: Tell them what your father really said, that Tommy's soul was damned, writhing in hellfire! Religion's supposed to comfort people, isn't it? Not frighten them to death!
Brady: I request that the defendant's remarks be stricken from the record. But how can we strike this young man's bigoted opinions from the memory of this community? Now my dear, will you please tell us some more of Mr. Cates's opinions on the subject of religion? Will you merely repeat, in your own words, some of the conversations you had with the defendant?
Rachel: I don't remember exactly -
Brady: What you told me the other day. That presumably humerous remark Mr. Cates made about the heavenly father.
Rachel: Bert said...
Brady: Go on, my dear.
Rachel: I can't - Bert was just talking about some of the things he had read. He...he...
Brady: Were you shocked when he told you these things? Describe to the court your innermost feelings when Bertram Cates said to you: God did not create man! Man created God!
Rachel: Bert didn't say that! He was just joking. What he said was: God created man in his own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
Brady: Go on my dear, tell us some more. What did he say to you about the holy state of matrimony? Did he compare it with the breeding of animals?
Rachel: No, he didn't say that - He didn't mean that. That's not what I told you. All he said was- I don't understand it. What I do understand, I don't like. I don't want to think that men come from apes and monkeys. But I think that's beside the point. You see I haven't really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think - so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too! Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don't know. Bad or good, it doesn't make any difference. The ideas have to come out - like children. Some of 'em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don't you, Bert?



Note: Inherit the Wind has been cut a lot...don't think this is the original text.