Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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.


Saturday, March 26, 2011

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.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

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."

Friday, March 18, 2011

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.

Friday, March 11, 2011

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.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

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.