Follow the Leader

Matt is in the front room. Thought-provoking hip-hop is playing. My mother is lying on the couch, her face is covered in a blanket and I assume she’s sleeping.

“Is she okay?”

“She just took a Valium.”

It's a fucking mad house in here.

“She’s sleeping, right?”

“Don’t look so worried. I just checked her breath.”


“I think Andrew and I are breaking up.”

“What? He just came to visit you.”

“I know. So, Matt, do you want to come with me?"

He looks young and his eyes fold into his face, wanting to go back from where they came.

“I don’t know Marla. I get why you want to talk to Dad’s old wives but it was a lot of work to get a picture of Dad that I like. I don’t want to fuck with it.”

I nod.

“This is a good song.”

“You’re telling, me chicken-head.” He starts clucking like a lunatic.

“You’re going to wake up Mom.”

“Yeah, she’s sleeping so lightly over there.”

He takes my hand and we start dancing. We hop around my drugged mother, hop around the memories of my father, hop around the house we grew up in. We pretend we’re fish and we swim to each other through all the rooms on the bottom floor. Then he’s a fisherman and he casts his rod and hooks me. I swim towards him and we waltz for a bit until I tell him my dyscalculia makes it hard for me to follow the leader. After he does the running man for five minutes straight, I fall to the ground laughing.

I start laughing with such hysterical feeling that I feel like I’m breaking something inside me. I think if I decided to, I could easily start crying. I think whether or not I decide to, I might start crying.

Matt reaches down and grabs my hand.

“It’s time for the robot.”

I don’t want to get up.

Opaque

“Ours is the strangest meeting of my life,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because, I think you know me."

I would meet him every week. Get togethers, always with other people, that weren’t platonic and for a long time, not consummated. But the consummation was in the complicity; that we agreed to meet when I was not to be had.

Language is not transparent, but sex is.

He didn’t need to be inside me to see my infidelity, to see the sin of my new friendship. Sex was everywhere between us. There was sex in how he looked at me, sex in how I felt around him, sex when he put me down. Sex when I fought back up. Sex, and it’s sad uncontrollable movements in how we struggled just being near each other. Sex, in it’s service and it’s selflessness in how much I admired him, how desperately I wanted him to need me.

Sex, in all it’s intimacy, in all it’s glory, in all it’s human disgustingness.The alive vulnerability that is pushed through your body, fluids expelled onto another person.

I felt shy, desired and controlled when I was with him. I spoke with a higher voice, my breasts grew and I only felt beautiful in a dress. I became a woman just thinking about being touched by him.

The concreteness of genders stood between us like a person.

Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other would it take to make love?

Finally, a week before everything changed, I let him make love to me. There was a violence in the way he touched me, but a gentleness in how I moved with him. I thought of Leonard Cohen as every breath we drew was hallelujah.

The first time he climaxed, pressed up against me in his bed with no sheets, my heart began to race. It hasn’t stopped.

In the beginning when I was with him, I was trapped in the feeling found when you use a word in a sentence that you can’t define, but it sounds right. I didn’t know what we were. I had a feeling I knew what we meant.

Still, I find myself locked in suspended breath, wondering what would have happened had it all turned out differently.

What is the Victory of a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

Heart Music

"Your heart breaks and you worry that you'll never love again."

"Maybe you never do, not in the same way."

You love differently; more cautiously and more recklessly, smarter and senseless.

"You can't try to control life. There's something uncontrollable in the principle of the thing."

"The more you try to force it the more it runs away from you."

"Yeah, sort of. It's just scary."

Everything's cyclical. I used to be this person I am now, when I was as a child. I'm tired. I'm more solitary but protected because the world changes with you to fit your shape.

"You were in a Mars retrograde. In January, it will go back to how it was before."

God or Mars, Jesus or stars, neither or both, the message is the same. It's out of your control.

Or maybe you meet your soulmate and everything goes back to how it should be.

Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

One night around that time my Daddy sat me down. It was a quiet night, a night not defined by anything but cold weather and space. He looked at me in the penetrating way that only his eyes know, burrowing deep inside me.

“You have two downfalls Katie. Alcohol and bad men. If you avoid them, you’ll be fine.”

He patted my knee. I looked back at my book, not speaking.

For me, men and alcohol go hand in hand. I force situations with men, drunk, believing love is something I can catch. Three-quarters of the men I’ve known would not have been in my life without beer.

I love alcohol. I love how it makes me feel in my body, I love how it makes me feel about myself, I love that for a few short hours I don’t have to hear voice that constantly scolds me in my head. I feel, for the only moments in my life, that there is no one watching.

The next morning I always feel like I’ve slept with someone I shouldn’t have. I wake up feeling dirty. I shower, violently, trying to scrape the mean hangover off me. I’m so sick I can hardly walk. I’m always so disappointed in myself, the disappointment vibrates through every part of me.

There are many definitions of alcoholism. It’s not that I can’t stop drinking. It’s not that I drink all the time. It’s that alcohol changes me more than it changes most people.

...

As winter dawned, the separation between my mother and I was volcanic. My mother has the gift of honesty. Her ability to see and speak the truth is supernatural.

“Katie, you have a drinking problem. What are you doing?”

I wasn’t ready to meet that truth. Instead, I yelled at her, I distanced myself from her, I convinced myself that she was always wrong. And in some ways, maybe she was. You can’t expect people to hear what they don’t want to.

“We have a family history of alcoholism. I’m one. You’re one. Get your life together.”

I’d leave the room. I’d drink in secret. Her concern for me was palpable, the judgement so heavy it suffocated me.

I would try every month to quit drinking. With a really bad hangover, I’d promise her it’d be different. I’d tell myself to stop obsessing over men, to quit them until I was healthy.

Today is a new day. Tonight is the last night. Tomorrow you’ll stop. You only need yourself to be healthy.

The thing is, I wanted the strength to believe those things. I wanted the strength to be clean, in a soul way. But the temptation was too great, the relief they provided was too sweet, the crutch was too comfortable.

A quote I read once rings true. “You’ll do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit.”

The escape became the habit. I just wasn’t ready to admit it yet.

Black Sheep

I watch him, like a dancer who's partner left him on the floor with the music still playing.

This is the story of my rambling father, and one day, in your own way, it will be your story, too.

(Not) A True Story

Its strange, seeing your parents for who they are. Maybe it's sad and I'm scared, that's why I feel angry.

My mother and I were the same height briefly when I was twelve. For two months, we were both just under five feet. Now, I think she's shorter. I grew a few more inches but I'm still not tall enough. I compensate with my personality.

My mother has blonde hair, cut like all sensible women, short and permed. It reminds me of those wigs you buy at the dollar store to be a granny at Halloween. She has a child-like face, round and seemingly boneless. Her eyes sit too far apart and radiate a hopefulness. When I was fifteen I saw a picture of her when she was the same age. She had the same hopefulness then. Life had not kicked it out of her.

She wears makeup but is convinced the point is to look like you're wearing none. Just a little lipstick and in the sun, you can see her rogue. She still calls it that. She is not a woman who fusses. She never wears high-heels, because she considers vanity a sin. She is practical, my mother.

I am different. I'm garish. My hair is always a new colour because I get bored easily. I like popular music just because. Right now, I have five tattoos, all of birds, and I'm planning three more.

My mother always worried incessantly, but I only noticed as I got older. We're the same like that, but I only noticed as I got older. Her worrying is effective; she raised children, had a home, married my father, for better and ultimately, for worse.

Mine is not. I understand why my mother worries about me. I married a man when I was twenty-one for no reason other than fun. We separated six months later. Then, I left school to travel cross country with a not-quite divorced man and I haven't returned. He's long gone. I shouldn't drink as much as I do. My weight is always changing. I am now engaged again but I think she senses that I have it in me to break it off any second, with no warning.

"It's so good to see you, darling."

Despite our differences we are supernaturally connected. I can feel my mother's quickened heartbeat like my own.

Soft

"He had such a hard time. He was such a good person when he was a little boy. He was so smart. So soft, you know? That gets kicked out of you when you're a boy."

"It's no cake-walk for girls."

"No, but it's harder for little boys."

I always cry thinking of my brother's childhood.

"But he's so smart. He'll only become better."

"He's the best brother in the world."

"I know people that peaked young. High school, some before. They're on a downward slope. Mike knows everyone is full of shit and that's valuable."

"I know. You're fucked if you drink the Kool-Aid young."

"I look at some people I know and I can see middle age encroaching. You watch them. You think you're getting older, not younger. The light's gone out."

People change, and a change can be a bloom as well as a withering.

Death Valley

I almost died in Death Valley.

The day was warm but not as warm as would be expected; the desert isn't only cold at night. He drove wearing a red baseball cap and green army jacket that had been given to him. He was handsome in the sunlight, so devastating I thought I never wanted to see another face, not ever again.

His hand was on my leg and I hoped it'd always stay there.

There are several ghost towns near Death Valley. They are haunting; you can feel the disappointment, the no hope, the having no choice but to leave and never return. Cutting your losses is about the saddest thing in the wide world if you ask me.

But I'm drawn to the desolate and the deserted. Ghost towns are beautiful, too, because history hangs in the air. Time is stopped. Cars that don't drive anymore, magazines from the eighties, colourful signs advertising businesses that are no longer in fashion. I admire the buildings that remain without owners. They're rebels.

We stopped in Yermo, California. It's the kind of place with a volunteer fire department and three active churches; two Baptist, one non-denominational. There were six houses and three stores and I couldn't help but think of faces, children and families, of lives now gone.

We left after after trying to use a taco shop's restroom.

"Who eats here? Ghosts?"

...

Two minutes later, he saved my life, like a knight, like a cowboy, like a hero, mythic, masculine and strong.

A man and wife with two children tried to overtake, driving the wrong way in our lane on the two-lane highway. We came over the rise and he saw us too late.

We swerved to the shoulder, and then, so did he. We swerved back to the road. Two seconds later, two seconds different and we'd be dead. Instead, we felt the gravel spray.

"Son of a bitch," was the only thing he said, taking off his red cap, pulling over.

Things are never how you think they are. First, I lunged towards him and held him, laughing. He laughed. I thought of how hard it must have been for him. I didn't feel like it happened to me. I felt along for the ride, I watched like I wasn't part of it.

He lit a cigarette, shaking like a leaf.

I've never seen him shake before.

"I've never come that close to dying," he told me.

We got back on the road. The CD continued to play but sounded wrong and different, so I turned it off.

...

Shock coming to an end is like ice melting. Physical states change. It's gradual, and though you can watch it happen, you're confused when you're left with just warm water.

An hour later, we stopped at an I-Hop for coffee. We drink so much coffee it's a sin.

When he pulled in, we became attached, our empty coffee cups resting in holders, sticking into my side.

"Thank you. Thank you," I told him.

We walked into the diner and when I was in the restroom, looking at my reflection, he told an older woman with a kind face what had happened.

"Get there and God bless," she said

We talk about God a lot. Maybe he hears us and that's why we were blessed that day.

"We're just so lucky." Once I started crying I couldn't stop.

Thirty minutes later he told me it was the best coffee he'd ever tasted.

Don't Take Your Love To Town

"The definition of sanity is to be able to work and love."

They were driving to a diner on Route 66.

Like the country that wasn't their own, their closeness was founded on ambition, dreams and finding home when home had been lost.

They loved each other but also the future. The hopeful, beautiful future. United in believing in it's possibilities, haunted by pieces of the past, they became something bigger than just the two of them.

They passed through a ghost town on the way home, needing to stop for gas. He turned up a road, once called Main Street, that acted like coffin's wood, boxing in a once breathing place.

"I wonder what happened."

"Look at the train tracks there. This must have been a train town."

"I guess the train doesn't matter anymore."

There was dust everywhere. Old cars that had rusted into the ground. She admired them. It was hard times but they were still blue, still proud. Foundations of houses stood without walls, brick exposed, grass and gravel for floors.

Windows without glass were boarded shut with plywood. "Keep Out" was scrawled across the yellow grain. "No Trespassing" stood in the middle of a vast space with no border.

What were they protecting? Can you still trespass on something abandoned?

Maybe they wanted to keep the ghosts safe. Maybe when something ends, that will never begin again, the ghosts matter. You want to protect them. Even if you couldn't keep your home or your heart safe, even if you ruined everything and left it for the wind, you protect the ghosts. You want the memories to be respected. You want to pay reverence to what could have been, to what was.

...

They sat in the diner. A group of four sat near them wearing leather. They were old and loud with complexions like sand paper. She wondered if the lines in their faces had been carved with a knife.

"Don't bikers have the most amazing faces?"

"Yeah. You can see the road on them."

Later that day, looking in the mirror, she thought she was beginning to see the road on them, too.

America was founded on principles of freedom, it just got lost along the way.

You could say the same of most great love.