Nan Nan

My grandmother lay in her bed.

"I feel too sick to sit," she told me.

My grandmother had nothing wrong with her, nothing that could be determined, anyway. She had a fragile mind and I watched it breaking as she got older.

"What'd you do today, Nan?" I sat on the chair near her bed. I should have sat on her bed with her but it scared me. It had swallowed her whole.

"Nothing, just lay here. Thinking about my life, all the people that have come in it. I have thought of every single person in my life."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Can't help but think about things, stuck here like this. I have known so many people. Even near-strangers I am thinking of. Most of them are dead now."

"It's funny how some people only come in for a short while, like they weren't meant to stay for long."

"But you never forget them. They come in and out but you never forget people."

She got up out of bed and for the first time in as long as I could remember, she didn't need my help.

Anna

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

...

My brother quit drinking and started having nightmares. We sat, as usual, at the diner up the street. He poured what looked like a million grains of salt on his eggs, one for every star in the galaxy.

"What do you dream about?"

He sighed and moved towards me like a secret. His thoughts hurt him, always had.

"Last night I dreamt of her."

She was his best friend, a beautiful girl he had fallen under when he as fourteen. He loved her so purely, the kind that is rarely returned. Even that young, she was a ghost-girl; already dead, see-through, not meant to be here. By the time they were twenty she was gone completely, this arm to that drug, that leg to that bad man.

"Why did she give herself away?" he asked me.

He needed her.

"I dreamt that I was in her house. Dad was helping her with something and then he got pissed off and started screaming at her. He left, disappeared like a cloud of smoke. I ran up the stairs and I found her all alone. She was so skinny, and she said, 'Don't leave.' I said, 'I won't.' And then she turned and looked at me, I've never seen someone so skinny, Katie. She said, 'Will you help me?' and I said, 'Help you with what?' and she said, 'The cancer.' She had cancer, I knew it in that dream way, like I had known it all along but not a second earlier. Isn't that fucked?"

"What do you think it means?"

"That I'm being like Dad by cutting her out. That she needs my help."

I took his hand.

"You did the right thing, Mike."

"Yeah," he nodded. "It's just a lot easier to stay out than get out, you know what I mean?"

I nodded.

"I just wish I could love someone like that again," he told me as he finished his coffee as if it was the first time, as if he hadn't told me that one hundred times before.

I hated watching the world strengthen the man in him, destroy the boy in him.

Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt

Everybody needs something.

It was fall. He and I were about to break up. I knew it and he knew it. Why neither of us did it, I don’t know. I’ve come to realize that you don’t know how wrong being out of love is until after the fact.

There are small similarities between loving and being unloved, so many in fact, that you can convince yourself everything is okay. They are the ones you call every night. They are the ones you share a bed with. They are the ones who hold your hand. In life’s more clever moments you are tricked. You think what you share is an intimacy with that person, when really, all you’re doing is marking time.

And so, while marking that time with him, I told myself it wasn’t so weird that we’d share a bed and not make love. It wasn’t weird that we never made each other laugh. It wasn’t weird that I could never be myself around him, that I felt like an alien, that he never understood me, that he thought I was stupid.

None of it was weird, none of it was heavy, nothing broke my heart.

There are those relationships that do not serve the usual intended purposes. Sometimes, there is no love given and so, no love lost. With he and I it was never about how he felt for me or what I felt for him.

I wanted someone.

As far as I can tell, so did he.

Til Death

He holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars, this is all I think of.



"I think I'm not married because I take it too seriously. I am too committed to the idea. I think when you get married you shouldn't take his last name, you should create a whole name. A whole new tribe, together. I think your husband should be your absolute first priority. If your husband is in a car, choking, and your mother is dying by the side of the road, you help your husband first. That's really what I think. He asked me to move to New Zealand with him and I couldn't do that because I thought of all the films I had in production, all the stuff I couldn't do there. I realized, this isn't right. Some things are more important than work. Some things should be, like your husband. I should have said to him, 'Yes, baby, I'd move anywhere with you.' I should have wanted that. I didn't."

She was the type of woman I admired but never wanted to be like.

I would have pretended to want to move to New Zealand and filed it under bridges soon to be burnt, never crossed.

And my heart aches, suddenly wanting, longing, believing and not having.

Lighten Up

Time was of no consequence and I just hoped that eternity would start now. The person I used to be had suddenly ceased to exist. I was melting and being remodeled into nothing but the hand he was just holding right now.

...

I think I'm you and he thinks he's me.

Something changed and I couldn't pinpoint when.

"And as much as I want to own you, I know I don't."

I gave him a book of these words and I wondered if he tried to read it like brail, fingers first. If he got lost in all the things I am that remain unseen. What medicine do you give the blind? I knew he was tired and all I wanted was for him to reach for me.

"Do you remember when I loved you before?"

"Vaguely."

"You had red hair."

"I always knew I was meant to have red hair." I had spent months speaking to him all alone.

I didn't know when or why, but things changed. There were two ways to look at it. In one exact and precise moment, everything had shifted and I was too dumb to notice. Or, the abstract wind in which we lived blew left instead of right, and suddenly, we were just fine.

I was always good at finding something beautiful in the ordinary.

Now, I saw the exquisite folded in the extraordinary.

I'm sorry for the long absence.

I have been shooting a lot recently, most notably a film called Ferocious to be released in 2012. I'm working on edits for my collection of short stories Eat Your Heart Out to be released in fall 2012 by the wonderful Brindle and Glass.

It's an exciting time but I have been missing the stillness I find here. I promise more updates through Christmas and the new year.

Here's to eternal sunshine.

Thinking of you.

xxx