The Development and Birth of an Unwanted Thought

If I had a contraceptive

To protect against

Unborn ideas in my mind,

Or some abortive option

For the third-term thoughts

And feelings

Fertilized by your words,

Those are pills I would add

To my daily regimen.

But short of lobotomy

Or cardio-biopsy,

Unfortunately no options

Remain, and I

Am forced to nurture

To full gestation, then tear

And bleed to deliver

This bitter brainchild.


.

I recorded another song. Listen here.

JUST THE FACTS, SIMPLY STATED

I've been forgetting to pray
Lately I guess there's not much left to say.
I'm not feeling so well,
Though no one seems to be able to tell.

Oh my God, I can't pretend anymore
That I'm ok with this
I used to live
But these days I just survive.

Not all the symptoms are plain,
Just like the scars don't measure up to the pain.
These aren't very nice dreams
I can't find relief, awake or asleep.

I'll paint a sign: I need a rough and low voice
To sing to me
A lullaby,
Slightly off-key, and tired.

They say I'm too good at this game,
Like telling the truth would change anything.
Besides, I'm too tired to explain,
And I'm afraid of what my voice might betray.

Don't touch that dial; leave the radio on
So I don't feel
So alone,
Just let me hear one more song.

Most days the cost is too high,
And leaving my room is just not worth the price.
I'm losing my concept of time,
Though it's been so long, I think I'm almost resigned.

.

Balloon Theology

I like to write letters to people who will never read them; letters I know I’ll never send, usually to “past-tense” people. Not deceased, necessarily, but long gone from my life. The letters don’t even mean anything, really; not many are angry or forgiving or seeking of any kind of closure. I just like to write letters. They’re scattered everywhere: a box in my closet, half-filled notebooks on my bookshelf, word documents on my computer. Little stashes hidden where maybe someday someone will find them and know that I at least had something to say to someone, anyway.

When I was a little girl, I would write letters on helium balloons from the county fair or a birthday party, then let them fly away. I imagined God blowing it to some “meant-to-be” destination, in a way similar to when I would blow dust motes across the sections of golden light that streamed through the windows when the sun set. Only, I imagined God had more control over the balloon than I had over my dust mote; I never could stick the landing properly. I thought for sure that God meticulously piloted those balloons; that He influenced the weather and treetops and houses to guide them where they were supposed to go. Like pinball.

Everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences. Everything works out for the good of those who love Him.

Right?

For having a mind that so adamantly demands pure, unadulterated reason, I am surprised I hadn’t questioned these things until recently. Ideally, I would like to avoid this progressive cynicism (both in experience and admission), but I feel that belief without question only makes me naïve. And denying any doubts only makes me a liar.

At one time in the past year, I thought, “I am doing well. I love God and I am moving forward. He will open and close doors and guide me wherever He wants me to go.” Upon deeper introspection, I was reminded of my childhood Balloon Theory; I was reminded of pinball.

It can’t be that simple.

I played pinball in the arcade at Pizza Street when I was ten. I was good at it; I held the high score on many occasions. It was no easy machine, either. Two of the buttons were sticky, but I figured out exactly when to start pushing them, how many times and the way they felt right before their most forceful hits. I saw the ball coming. I pushed the buttons in just the right way. I got the ball where I wanted it.

This can’t be how the Higher Power guides us, can it? God is not playing pinball. Even including sinful detours and mistakes, there has to be more to it; more than just moving forward with a love for God and going wherever circumstances propel, believing that they all act as His hand.

It can’t be that simple.

There is no free will in pinball. Not for the ball, at least. No choices, no resolve, no goals, no living mind sparkling with thoughts of its own.

So not pinball, then. Chess? God has a plan, makes a move; if we make a move to hinder Him, He plans around it and moves accordingly. Both free will and divine omnipotence. But two mere humans can play at chess, trying their best to defeat one another. Dear Lord, check mate?

It can’t be that simple.

I am too tired for fundamental questions. I am too tired and my feet are too cold. My toes are purple, when I take my socks off long enough to look.

I have to have all the answers.

You say words to pray, right? Or think them at least? You thank God for your blessings, then ask for this or that, for wisdom or strength or energy or clarity, or ask them for someone else. A thank-you card and a wish list. Dear Grandma, thanks for the money, please send more.

It can’t be that simple.

No, it isn’t. I know it isn’t. But no matter how extensive my analysis, I can’t ever be right. Who am I to timidly raise my hand in answer to any of this? I don’t know.

It can’t be that simple.
It isn’t.
Then what’s the rest?
I don’t know.

And I should know. I have this infuriating, destitute feeling that I should know and I just don’t.

Prove that what you believe is true.
I can’t.

I can’t. I can’t and I can’t and I don’t I don’t I just don’t know. I have claimed these beliefs as my own. I hold them; I have tried for years to live my life by them. Shouldn’t I be able to provide undeniable evidence for this concept around which my entire being has been shaped?

In every other aspect of my life, I don’t trust anything without solid proof. I am a skeptic, very much to a fault. The concept of “faith” in any capacity is completely contradictory to my every other thought process. And yet, I have stuck with this one—in theory, at least—as long as I can remember. I’ve believed it, as much as I can possibly conceive believing in anything. And I still do. But…why? What cold, falsifiable evidence can I give to explain that all of this is true?

Am I Judas if I wonder now?

I’m not the first to think of this, I know. Everyone scrabbles for some soul-level meaning and God or something to treat as god. Of course I’m not the only one. I’m a single voice in the angry majority. I’ve just joined the clamor, desperately declaring the intellectual plight of the middle-class white girl.

Who cares?

I admit I do. If there were picket lines for this, I think I’d be in them, but right now all I have is to deliberate. And end up exactly where I was before.

Why bother?

We’re squandering our potential right now, but there are better ways we could be doing it. We could at least enjoy it, if this is what’s going to happen, and we might as well do it together. Procrastinate, laugh too hard at jokes that aren’t funny just because you haven’t laughed in a while and you feel like maybe you should; like you might lose the ability if you don’t practice. Come squander with me. We’re doing it anyway—I see both of us—we might as well serve as one another’s buffer for the guilt and emptiness. The laziness. You know, that feeling you get when you feel so lost you don’t know what to do so you just don’t do anything, maybe for a long time.


I'm so tired.

That feeling of being fat on the inside. Like my soul has been sleeping through the flu, half-roused only briefly for some inconsistent feeding; a “filler”, as if my thoughts were Mac & Cheese from the box. It squats in my brain or my heart or wherever the soul supposedly dwells and makes no use of itself—the dazed, bloated, phlegmatic soul.

I am too tired to think up anything nutritious to feed it. I try, but only end up with a few pretzel-thoughts, an apple-thought maybe, a thought like raisins or that fake whole-grain toast. A bit better, but ultimately nothing more than negligent snacks. Not enough to keep a soul in ideal health.

Am I a pest to feed?

I can’t deny that sometimes you are. I never asked for the responsibility of caring for you. When did the Balloon Theory stop being enough? When did you make me crazy, obsessing incessantly about who what when where why?


I wrote a prayer
On a rubber red balloon,
Then sent it up to God
On a hazy afternoon.
I found it the next morning,
It was caught up in a tree.
I thought, “If I don’t hear from Him,
Then He won’t hear from me.

But I’ve never been good at keeping up the silent treatment for long. He keeps hearing from me. Broken, chaotic communication, but desperately desired nonetheless. Because I need it, this faith that so often makes no logical sense. And I will remain in dogged pursuit of what it might have that I don't, because I know it can’t be that simple.

.

A Brief Portrait of the Narrator as a Young Girl

I didn’t really start thinking, intentionally, anyway, until I was around fifteen. It’s not that I didn’t think at all, or didn’t have some kind of insight. I just hadn’t really applied it to anything yet.

I was eating French fries when my grandma died. I'd been in the hospital for hours, just waiting, but of course she slipped away in the few minutes it took me to get Steak n' Shake to-go. I came into her room and she was so skinny that for a second I thought the slight bumps of her legs were wrinkles in the sheets. It hadn't struck me just how frail she was until after she passed. I was around fifteen.

I had just grown out of my cargo-pants-only phase and that day I was wearing jeans for the first time. Scratchy, trendy, hip-hugging denim. They were so tight and stiff, big thick seams pulling and pushing on me. I tried not to pull at them too much as I sat on the floor in the hospital corridor, listening to my mother, aunt, and grandpa discuss my grandmother's remains. I didn't know how I felt about their varying opinions regarding whether to donate her body to science. What is truly irreverent to the deceased, and how does that change (or does it at all?) if potential discoveries in medicine hang in the balance? I knew that her heart had been the subject of three experimental operations, and in years past I'd heard the doctors say how her brain was a unique Alzheimer's case study. But the thought of her being all hollowed out—her insides not being hers anymore—made me feel as if I shouldn't stand for it.

I was confused and I wanted very badly to draw my own ethical, logical conclusion (even though I of course had no say in the matter), but all I could really think about were those damn jeans.

Before that age, my mind had wandered aimlessly through tangled thickets of concept and experience, picking such an exquisite bouquet from some sweet things that grew there while the more thorny things scratched at my legs at times, or caught in my hair.
I had only a vague sense of guilt for a little childhood mischief or ignorance. I was barely self-aware and it was blissful.

So I think that’s why it’s only recently that I’ve realized: we were perfect, you and I. We just didn’t know it yet. We thought—-because we were told-—that we were bad little girls; irreverent, scandalous. Though, the way I remember it, we didn’t really mind except for when we were being scolded. It never stopped us from clinging to opposite fire escapes, giggling together through Boy Scout walkie talkies, pilfered from older brother’s dresser drawer, or sneaking around the sanctuary to brush our little hands across the quilted wall-hanging. There was glitter on it, and sequins, and it sparkled as our nimble fingers traced the burning bush and the Hebrew inscription just above the hem. How could they expect us not to touch it? It sparkled and we were little girls.
The sequins would cast light on the ceiling sometimes, and the reflection of the wavy pattern in which they were sewn made me feel as if I was underwater. I loved that feeling.

Grandpa had a swimming pool in the back yard, and as a child I spent most summer afternoons there. It was so blue and clear and clean--it even smelled clean and I liked the way the scent of chlorine would linger in my hair all day, if Mom didn't make me shower right after a swim. I loved the feeling of myself in the water; it was suspension, the only time I felt graceful. Like I was covered in cool glass, the old-fashioned kind—the hand-blown glass with ripples and dimples that they show you on field trips in second grade—but better because it was so pure and bright. Nothing makes a little girl feel beautiful like being covered in things that glint in the sunlight, and nothing made me feel beautiful like watching my limbs glide under that liquid crystal. They were distorted though, and strange, so it was easy to pretend I was no longer human. I was something else; anything else. I'd be Something Else for a while, then run inside to be a little girl again, dripping water on the carpet and getting chocolate everywhere after Grandpa gave me Butterfingers.

I would paint rainbows on my face as a little girl, too, or paint my entire body all different colors. Mom tried to scold me but laughed instead. As I aged my childhood inclination toward coloring my very person grew into a fascination with bright hair dyes. Blues and greens and pinks; they made me feel like magic, an ever-present rainbow to toss in the sunlight and release a thousand shining strands of color into the wind.

I think it takes a certain lack of self-awareness to feel like magic. Even writing the phrase seems ridiculous to me now, from a more cynical perspective. I don't see my mind as a thicket so much anymore. Now it feels more like clipped hedges, a manicured lawn being constantly and meticulously treated for weeds or moles or anything else spontaneous or unplanned.

I remember the thicket fondly, though; it was a place I wanted to be. A happily disheveled little girl in a creek-splashed dress; twigs, dandelion fluff, bits of leaves and some of those crawling blue flowers you see in springtime making nests in the tangles of my hair. Wildflowers everywhere, entwined in the bramble. It was warm, too, and quiet; a peaceful sort of chaos.

.

Sometimes to Me

Sometimes to me—like the bones of birds—
We seemed so fragile, as though
If touched by anything but the air we share,
We would fracture.
As per my prediction, here we were rift
By the uninvited grit and gravity
Of circumstance.
Now—cold cold cold—curled in frigid limbo,
I deliberate.
And sometimes when I think of you,
I find a second of enveloping warmth,
As if your ghost blocked a freezing wind
For just a moment.

.

A Day, a Night, a Week, a Month

It is very blue here; blue paintings on blue walls, blue cushions on the chairs, cheap, blue-flecked carpet. Even the young man next to me is wearing a blue t-shirt. He is fat and his hair is oily. He looks at me too long; I want to change seats. I chew my lip distractedly, pausing when the metallic taste of blood washes over my tongue. For maybe ten minutes I try to make myself stop, but before I realize it I am biting again, about to make the other side bleed, too.

I don’t want to be in the doctor’s office again, to explain and answer questions; to ask them as well, when I am so tired. It is a tedious process to begin with, and I don’t have the patience for it now. I am preoccupied; I’m supposed to find out today. I tap my foot; remember to breathe you have to breathe just breathe. I do. I breathe. I don’t want an answer, and yet I don’t want to walk away without one.

“Elsie?” The nurse mispronounces my name, like they all do. I barely notice; I just stand and follow her. Following nurses is second nature to me now. Anyone wearing scrubs could questioningly call out any name beginning with “El”, and I would probably follow them into a windowless van before I realized what was happening.

The doctor meets my mother and me in his office. It’s so white in here, I observe. I miss the pediatrics offices. My headache sprouts fifteen minutes into the appointment. I need to pee. The faux-leather chair is sticky, and I want to go home.
Dr. Jones settles into his rolling chair. I keep breathing, on the edge of the conversation I have been waiting for. Hand shakes, hi-how-are-you’s, How-are-your-symptoms-They’re-the-same-Well-we-need-to-talk-about-that. It all ran together in my mind, only certain phrases catching in the wrinkles of my brain. Chronic autoimmune disease, potential risk of organ damage, So-she’ll-always-be-sick-Yes-she’ll-always-be-sick-but-we-caught-it-earlysowithmedicationandlifestylechangesweshouldbeabletocontrolthe…lupus.

A heavy curtain is falling over my mind; it is thick and cold and all I can hear is a voice, the processed, perfectly-shaped tone of a spokesman from a commercial I heard as a child: “Lupus ruined my daughter’s life. Get information. Get in the loop. Visit the Lupus Foundation of America website and get the facts.” I see the TV screen, too; the young woman is frozen in time, scrambling for apples she has dropped. I drop things, too.

“Lupus ruined my daughter’s life.”

Yesterday I dropped my hairbrush. I couldn’t finish; my hair is still knotted in the back. This morning I fell down, walking from my bedroom to the bathroom. Last week I passed out, briefly, stepping out of the shower. These things have happened; they have been happening. They will continue? Chronic auto-immune disease. Apparently. “Lupus ruined my daughter’s life.” Yes. The curtain is heavy over my mind; it is cold and thick and white.

Dialogue continued. Information, questions, answers, brochures, prescriptions. Arthritis, fatigue, cognitive degeneration, sunlight sensitivity, thinning hair, poor circulation, chronic pain, etcetera, etcetera, whatever. I know.

I tune in and out of the conversation happening mostly between my mother and Dr. Jones, interjecting mechanically when it seems like I should. Soon I lose myself in the white of the walls, white of sterile gauze and cotton balls, the doctor’s white lab coat, the floor and the ceiling and the cupboards all white white white; so white I can almost hear it.

“Have you read that book?” Dr. Jones’ question makes its way through the static. Mom puts the brochures in her purse; her keys jingle. We’re nearly done here.

“Oh, um, what was the title again?” I mumble. When was the last time I used my tongue? Last week? Last month? Only minutes ago, though it doesn’t feel like it. He repeats the title.

“You’re interested in criminal psychology?” He asks. Apparently this had been discussed while I was lost in the white. I nod. “You might like that book, then. It’s all the rage now.”

“Oh, I haven’t heard of it.” I say. “I’ll look it up.”

“It’s Swedish.”

“Ah.”

Silence.

“But I don’t remember the author’s name.” Dr. Jones considers this with a deep frown.

“Oh. Well. I bet I can find it if I Google the title.” I assure him, because he seems genuinely concerned that this lack of information may devastate me.

“I’ll write it down.” My mother says, and does so.

More silence.

“Yes, you should look it up.” The doctor nods, as if deciding for sure that this would be a good and proper course of action.

“I will.” I lie.

Silence again, brief but long enough to make me feel awkward.

“I’m sorry.” Dr. Jones says. “If you like, we have resources for counseling and chronic illness support groups in the area.”

“Um. No thanks; maybe later.” My reply is tentative as I glance back and forth between my mother and the doctor.

“Well, alright.” He reaches for his clipboard. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, there are a few prescription treatment options…”

I leave the office with two refill scripts, two new prescriptions, some samples, and a follow-up appointment. And The Diagnosis. An answer, but no cure.

“How do you feel?” Mom asks quietly. Her hand is poised to start the van but she waits intently for me to speak.

“Well, we knew it was a possibility.” I know that isn’t an answer to her question, but I’m not sure I have one anyway. I’m officially diagnosed; so what? I have a specific target for blame, but it is not as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be. I feel blank; a heavy, sort of gray indifference that leaves my mind clear. Not ‘clear’ as in ‘clean’, or as if it has been de-cluttered. More like a wide space from which everything has been emptied out, leaving me only with a vague sense of awareness that anything was ever there at all; like the faint cutouts left behind by boxes moved from a dusty floor.

I am not dying, I think to myself. I’m just sixteen and past my prime. That’s all. I think of wheelchairs and poverty and loved ones dying. There are worse things. I’m fine.

~*~

Tonight there is crying. Maybe the TV; maybe not. I can hear it echoing, some faceless mourning thrumming in the air. Maybe Mom on the phone with Aunt Janice, telling her about the Diagnosis. Maybe not. I know she wishes I would come downstairs.

When I went to sleep last night, my room was my own cozy nook in the hall. But not now, as I perch on the corner of my bed in the darkness. Now the room is part of a heavy beast, heaving great breaths through windowpane teeth. I can hear the whole house—the beast—creaking. I don’t like this sound, it’s old bones readjusting. I am in its belly and I can feel it roiling, threatening to expel me; to vomit me up, exposed into the city to be assaulted by great chunks of sight and sound and light and smells and the shadows with the lurking things. I wish it would. Those things I could run from.

I see the night outside my open window. The sky wears the Milky Way like a flimsy blouse, insufficient to completely obscure its velvet-blue breast. Stars peek out from between the gauzy folds and I don’t care. It’s not like it’s going anywhere; it’s not like it will change. I’ve marveled before; do I have to do that every time I look up? Still I feel obligated, and try to muster up some wonder. Not tonight. I try not to feel guilty.

~*~

It has been a week since The Diagnosis. I feel so dirty; so cluttered and like my insides are crusted with some sort of grime. I have been thinking this, knowing for the last seven days it is only my imagination, but I am so tired and stiff that I can’t help feeling like a rusty machine. Maybe if I drank bleach. I think. Maybe if I turned inside-out and scrubbed my veins out with soap, drained and then replaced the blood inside; put my liver in the wash on “delicates”. Surely after all sanitation measures, the disease would be eradicated.
But they tell me that bleach would do more harm than good, and that bloodletting is a primitive and medically flawed procedure. So I continue to swallow the pills they give me, knowing that they will never wash it all away.
It’s the weirdest thing, I observe, to feel claustrophobic because of something inside of you instead of because you are inside something. There must be something I can do. There is always something to be done. Doing fixes things, right? Three action-steps, or five, or twelve?

A hot shower has to suffice for now; has to leave me clean enough to function another day. Not just warm water; not just steaming. Hot, to a degree just before the point of unbearable.
I stand in the tub, directly beneath the showerhead, fifty thin jets of water stabbing into my scalp. I can almost feel blood rushing in to flush my cheeks as I scrunch my eyelids shut tight. Focus. The lava spreads through my hair, fills up every tangle until it spills down my forehead and my neck and over my ears, burning burning burning and I can feel every place it touches as it rushes down my length from head to toe.

Streams run continually down through my bangs. They grow heavy, feathered smooth against my face from the water pulling them down. I cringe as I wait for my sensitive skin to grow numb to the heat engraving rivers around my eyes, dripping from the tip of my nose, rolling over my cheek bones and between my swollen, parted lips.

I imagine the water burning every germ from the surface of my skin as it flows down, then the steam penetrating through pores to flush out the impurities inside, purging. I imagine being all clean.

Snatches of Mother Goose songs are stuck in my head. I don’t know why they are there, but I don’t fight them; they are a distracting contrast. I play the music forcefully in my mind, filling it up until there is room for nothing but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, sewing Humpty-Dumpty’s wounds shut again.

Why does everyone assume that Humpty Dumpty is an egg? I wonder for the thousandth time, running through the lyrics in my mind. The rhyme never specifies. I know that even the seemingly innocent assumptions of childhood were never actually simple; I was just too young to question them. A child isn’t capable of theorizing; of tracing the origins of Humpty Dumpty back to the bloody dismemberment of King Richard III, or the destructive fall of a massive European cannon.
All these false assumptions-—the unanticipated complexity of every little thing-—makes me feel as if everything is wearing a disguise and I can’t even trust myself anymore, with how distorted everything seems. Every unidentifiable emotion feels inexplicably fraudulent.

Of course he wasn’t an egg. My lip rises in a cynical smirk. And he was probably pushed.

I lose all sense of time in my nursery-rhyme hypnosis. I am hoping that by the time the hot water runs out and Humpty’s bleeding has stopped, I’ll feel like I can step out again, leaving my demons to run down the drain.

This time it isn’t enough, though. This time something in me needs to scream; alarm bells need to sound and say Do something Anything just Do something.
I plug up the drain, lie down in the tub and submerge myself. The showerhead continues to spray down and liquid fills every hollow-—air is pushed from my ears and nostrils; water weaves itself between my eyelashes and threatens to sting. There is a rush as it fills my ears, but then…

Hush.

Muffled vibrations from water pounding water engulf my head and pulse rapidly over the surface of my skin. Quiet reigns for moments, the silence working with the feeling of floating suspension and it is timeless. I am timeless.

Grandpa had a swimming pool in the back yard, and as a child I spent most summer afternoons there. It was so blue and clear and clean--it even smelled clean and I liked the way the scent of chlorine would linger in my hair all day, if Mom didn't make me shower right after a swim. I loved the feeling of myself in the water; it was suspension, the only time I felt graceful. Like I was covered in cool glass, the old-fashioned kind--the hand-blown glass with ripples and dimples that they show you on field trips in second grade--but better because it was so pure and bright. Nothing makes a little girl feel beautiful like being covered in things that glint in the sunlight, and nothing made me feel beautiful like watching my limbs glide under that liquid crystal. They were distorted though, and strange, so it was easy to pretend that I was no longer human. That I was something else; anything else. I'd be Something Else underwater for a while, then run inside to be a little girl again, dripping water on the carpet and getting chocolate everywhere after Grandpa gave me Butterfingers.

My lungs scream for air—air and there are the bells in my brain screeching and after a few seconds of endurance the water rolls back in a single wave from my face and down through my hair and with a gasp of oxygen I am satisfied.

I step out and my skin is bright red. Red and raw, as if I’ve passed through fire and left my old skin behind, blistered and melted away so I can feel fresh and be clean again. The red makes scars stand out. A few are darker but mostly they are pale lines and once again I wonder fleetingly if they’ll fade as the years pass; how much have they already faded since I sustained them? Some of them still sting when I’m cold. Those are the ones I know will still stand out too red red red after a hot shower when I’m forty.

Three square cages, each about five by five inches, stuck out from the gallery wall. The bars formed from frosted glass, and a strange smell hung about them. Should art have an odor? It is subjective, I supposed. I came closer to see what the frosty cages held, and when I saw it the feeling never quite left me; it stuck in the back of my mind for years, like a barbed fishhook in my brain. I could not stop wondering, who’s dried blood crusted the pieces of gauze behind the bars and how were they hurt, and what became of them? Had they died? Was that real flesh, those red chunks stuck between the folds and please please take the bloody red red red and rust and the smell away because it stirs some primal instinct of wrongness inside me; a disturbed and filthy sense of dread.

A reminder of burning submersion remains with me: the sting in my eyes, red-rimmed and blood-shot. It gives me the feeling of having had a good cry, the kind I crave but cannot seem to accomplish.

I’m full of so many screams, but I’ve forgotten how to go about releasing them.
I want so much to feel clean and fresh again—without blemish.

Purification. Refinement by fire.

I haven’t achieved it yet.

~*~

For a month I’ve been writhing inside; needing to run or scream or both and crack somehow, or shave my head. It’s time to give my hands a break. They hurt, my hands do, and my wrists—they crackle when I move them—but I can’t stop twisting my hair. I just keep curling sections round and round my fingers until they’re wound tight up against my scalp. It’s time to give my hands a break but the second my hands have nothing else to do they’re up there again, wrapped in the long dreadlocks that hang to my shoulders.

The locks are woven through with mismatched strings of colored thread, yarn, and ribbons. The colors don’t go very well together; there are too many and they don’t go with any of my clothes. I used to love it, the whimsy of those colors peeking through one another. I used to appreciate the obscurity of the compact, nappy texture of the back-combed sections of hair that hold a rainbow so tightly. But now, it is just disorganized; cluttered. Red blue brown yellow pink green black orange andeveryeveryeveryothercolorthereis. It makes me dizzy; it hurts my eyes. And the tangles; suddenly I cannot stand them.

The dreadlocks seem to mock me as I look in the mirror—a physical representation of my heart’s knotted state—and so full of the cluttering color. Other things are in them too; bad things, caught up in the tangles: memories, feelings, conversations, regrets. They whisper in my ear when I turn my head, reminding me; they are heavy and everywhere. I hate them.

I fumble for a pair of scissors, start some music. At first I am careful, making sure to cut only what I need to, to make those long ropes go away. But soon my fingers are stiff and sore, and my cuts grow faster, choppy and approximate. Sad songs mostly—snip snip—upbeat makes me angry—snip—but I can’t stand silence—snip snip snip—so I am working ripping teasing out the tangles singing hoarsely along. I am pulling out the yarn and strings, dropping the rainbow on the floor where it seems to belong. With gradual relief I unravel the psychedelic mess.

I lose myself in the music, keeping time with that sssclk sound that the scissors make, slicing through my hair. Ssssclk, sssclk, ssssssssclk....it is soothing, it is hypnotizing; it is a smooth sort of destruction. I think of nothing. There is only ssssssssclk and the music, and then the fft fft fft of the comb and the occasional snap of a hair breaking as I work the remainder of the dreads apart.

I don’t know how many numb, methodic hours passed. Enough to play through eight full albums: two Sufjan Stevens, four Decemberists, two Iron and Wine. I think the sun set about halfway through Castaways and Cutouts. But finally my hair is short, the dreadlocks combed out and all of it is once again brown, all brown with comforting consistency.

My head throbs, balanced on neck muscles so tired they can barely hold it up anymore. The muscles in my back burn, too, and my hands twitch, cramping painfully. The repetitive action was too much for them. Three fingernails are broken, left thumb bleeding from a scissor-wound. The dark circles under my eyes are deep—deeper than usual. My hair sticks out unevenly in all directions, its texture a strange combination of stick-straight and frizzy.

I look how I feel: tired, wrung-out, bitter, and slightly manic. Diseased.

I look like Raggedy Ann with a harrowing meth addiction--complete with flat, plastic eyes. Broken.

I look how I will feel for the rest of my life. Sick.

There are worse things.

I stare at my reflection, for the moment indifferent, then curl up on my bedroom floor and fall asleep.

.

Nothing New

I’ve always loved autumn, the way it smells and how the air feels. So lightly sweet my skin seems to taste it, all clear and bright. The season feels dusted with a layer of sugar or something; or that sparkle powder that thirteen-year-olds are so fond of.
I’m still fond of it, actually. I admit I really would wear it if it weren’t so widely considered to be juvenile and tacky. Though maybe it would hardly matter; who am I fooling, pretending to no longer be either one of those things?

I like to glimpse in my mind the day when we’re all grown up together, when it’s really just “us against the world”. Could we handle it? Cause I feel like a child still; sheepish guilty face and hiding the frogs I caught behind my back, an impish grin that makes real grown-ups feel the need to supervise.

It reminds me of those panicked childhood nights when Mom would catch Abby and I awake, talking past midnight. The fear in the pit of my stomach—the palpable fear of one caught in a crime—as we whispered desperate prayers that we wouldn’t “get in trouble” the next day. We seemed to get ourselves in those situations quite frequently—elementary adrenaline-junkies.

As a child, somewhere around six or eight, when I felt adventurous, I would follow the leaves in the gutter and decide to just keep walking—to follow that curb wherever it went. I imagined it wound all around Rolland Park, through downtown Kansas City and far away. I wouldn’t get lost; all I needed to do was turn around when I wished and it would lead me right back home. I was never brave enough to make it too far around the first corner, though, so I never discovered that following the same curb would only lead me around the block. I suppose I was right about one thing, though: it would lead me back home, whatever the case.

I’m rarely right about what I think something is going to be like, or where it will take me. It’s never what you thought it was going to be and you never quite know for sure if it’s supposed to be this way or not. At least I don’t. Not until it has already been, and faded away.

Did you know beauty marks literally fade away? I thought it was just an expression, beauty marks fading; the abstract concept of growing old. It’s true though; they dissolve with time. Those perfect little moles—just glorified freckles, really—settled in exactly the right place to heighten your cheekbones; to give your eyes a little more glint in certain lights. I had one when I was a child. I’d always liked it, the saucy character I thought it gave my face, even before my grandpa told me was it was called. I was privileged to wear it until around five years ago, when I noticed it had spread out from itself, leaving nothing but a vaguely pigmented spot on my cheek.

A shape undefined is nothing.

Lately I’ve had the worst case of writer’s block, as if I’ve already said everything I have to say. I just can’t force out any more fresh ideas, or recapture the flow I had going there for a few months. With no desire to be the author of tawdry thrills and no confidence that my efforts will amount to more than this, most of what worms its way from the wrinkles of my brain never makes it’s way to paper. Surely if it is mine it’s inadequate?
I’ve had artist’s block too, whatever the name for that is. I haven’t created a new piece in months. I seem to have other blocks as well, in my thoughts and disciplines and even my emotions. Like I had this reservoir of all of it, and it’s dried up. Or like I’m treading water, moving and moving and expending my efforts and stretching, pressing myself all the time yet I don’t get anywhere; I merely stay afloat. Which I suppose is more than can be said for some people out there, so I shouldn’t be complaining.
My frustrated fingers beg to blurt that even all of the above is no newborn brain-child, just old thoughts mashed up and hammered out again like recycled paper.

There is nothing new under the sun.

There is nothing new.

There is nothing.

My hair is brushing my shoulders again for the first time in years, and I only let it because I don’t know what else to do. It’s mattering less and less as my age increases, along with the standards expected of me. Months ago I speculated on how I might be different by the time my split ends tickled my collarbone. I didn’t consider that the only changes might be the length of my life and the length of my hair.

You try to get those experiences back, the ones that seemed so exciting two, five, ten years ago. But the veil over your eyes dissipates with the passage of time and eventually the tunnel-vision is gone; that short sight that only saw the magic in Christmas and blocked from your peripheral vision the expense and stress and pine needles stuck with sap to the carpet—it will have to be cleaned up later; just try not to step in it for now.

I think there’s potential for a little less cynicism in my future, though; I see myself being rather optimistic at around fifty years old. I think every girl has a tacky old lady inside of her, just waiting to get out; just waiting to grow a size or three for the sake of seconds on home-made macaroni & cheese, just waiting to wear snowman earrings and kitty sweaters, to laugh too loudly and just not care. Until the corners of my eyes sport crows’ feet, I will feel no right to such a relaxed state of mind.

Though I often tend to be high-strung, I seem lately to be exceptionally on edge. I washed a sizable moth down the drain a few nights ago, and ten minutes later watched it crawl back up into the sink while I brushed my teeth. I’ve never minded bugs, but for some reason my skin prickled when I saw those spindly legs wriggling up from the metal-rimmed hole, as if millions of those legs were creeping all over me. It’s antennae came next, reaching toward me like fumbling, hostile arms and my fingernails bit into my palms as I clenched my fists with a shudder. In a desperate panic I snatched up my deodorant and whacked the insect back down into the plumbing. I turned the faucet on and could have provided for a thirsty third-world village with the water I wasted in attempt to drown the moth. I eyed the sink in a skittish way as I completed my bedtime routine and saw no further sign of the creature. I plugged the drain before I went to sleep though, just in case.

What is the matter with me?

Maybe it was Ambien, maybe just the interrupted feeling of winding down and being all locked up and safe in the light while the wide world is dark outside—a void to swallow those brave enough to venture off of their front porches. I love being so embedded in my home at night. I love driving at night too, though when I drive at night home feels so much further away than it does when the sun has opened up the world for me. How I enjoy the unfamiliar look of my repetitive trek, as if I were driving across the country, or winding down through it, or anywhere farfarfar away.

My dorm room here can be distressing limbo sometimes; not “home” enough to comfort me yet too consistent—too fixed and stable and here—to rally my sense of adventure. There are some nights when this in-between seems more frightening than a free-fall.

Tonight in the dorms there is crying. Maybe someone’s TV; maybe not. I can hear it echoing, some faceless anguish thrumming in the air. When I went to sleep last night my room was my own cozy nook in the hall, but now? Now it is a heavy beast, breathing as windowpane teeth suck the night air greedily from outside. The building—the beast—creaks, its old bones readjusting. I am in its belly and I can feel it roiling, threatening to expel me; to vomit me up, exposed into the city to be assaulted by great chunks of sight and sound and light and smells and the shadows with lurking things. I love the idea of the city at night, but when actually faced with it—and all alone—I’m forced to ponder the differences between adventure under streetlamps and danger in the gutter.

.