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.