Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Black Sheep


I am sitting with Matt at the bar around the corner. His curly hair is sticking up in every direction. His eyes wide apart and darkly likable are translucent tonight, like ale held to the light.

His new tattoo says, “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” It’s a Dylan quote. Its sprawled across the bicep of his left arm. We’re halfway though a bottle of Jack.

My brother is a lonely planet. A strange, singular orb in a universe that can sometimes sustain itself, sometimes not.

I search his eyes for some clues. I want to run my fingers along his face, treating it like a map with some destination I can get to. Has he just come out of a sadness or is he going into one? Is he manic right now? Are his pills making him dopey? Is this Matt? Is this the illness?

He is a language that I understand but don't speak.


I am never really insane except upon occasions when my heart is touched.

...

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll start crying. I can't stop. Everything inside comes undone, gets born, learns to die. Out of nowhere, these genuine feelings will rush to the surface and I don't recognize them. I have wondered if I'm a vessel, if other people had these feelings and didn't want them.

Even if their owner's had no room left, they existed and needed to find home.

It’s not one thing. When is anything ever one thing? Sometimes, I’ll start crying about everything sad that’s ever happened to anyone in the world. I’ll think, why’d my sister’s husband have to die? Why’d Mike have such a hard childhood? Why do you always remember what you want to forget and forget what you want to remember?

Or I’ll cry about nothing at all, because I miss my sister even though I saw her last week, because my Dad’s face looks older than it used to, because time's passing too quickly.

Or everything marvelous, beautiful, glittering, ecstatic.

I’m grabbing at these unspeakable things, these concepts, these waves of thought that stretch forever and farther.

I wonder if I prefer to have a broken heart.

If I’m lucky, for one small second, I can see the order of everything. It’s like I’m standing on a building, on top of the world, taller than anything I’ve ever known. I can see my Mom, the size of a pea in Paris, dancing around the streets and I think everything that’s sent here there was meant to be. That the cruelty had purpose. I can see the invisible red string that connects us all. No matter how it’s tangled and stretched it is never broken. It’s only a second though, a flash, a glimpse, a secret. I'm jumping off docks.

So, sometimes I’ll cry.

When I stop I fall asleep quickly without noticing.

It's over as quickly as it's begun and I wake up like it never happened.

My heart has left and I'm just going in tandem.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Black Sheep



And, it's just as simple as that. I see him. I can't reach out and touch him, hold him, be against him, but I can know that he's there and I can be anchored in the strong feeling that nobody else does.

Monday, May 23, 2011


Last night, Andrew looked at me, briefly, out of the corner of his eye.

“You want me to leave.”

I didn’t nod but I didn’t shake my head either.

My boyfriend gentle man with periods of violence. Not real violence, the emotional kind. His feelings kick the shit out of him. He’s tall, standing six feet two, although he swears he was once taller. We're twins. My feelings kick the shit out of me, too.

“Dad,” I say to the ceiling, “He’s leaving, isn’t he?”

The night before their separation, my father didn’t speak to my brother or my mother, just me.

I learned young there was no point in asking why.

“Your mother’s leaving me, isn’t she?” he asked, hacking a dart outside our house as the night laid upon the sky.

“Probably not.”


“She means it this time.” He looked so confused, like, how could she mean it this time? My question was, how had she not meant it before?

“No. Probably not.”

“Your brother is not going to take this well.”

“No, probably not,” I said again.

“You’re going to have to be strong for him.”

I nodded.

“I told you don’t get married, kid.” His hands were shaking and his coffee spilt over his pants. “Shit,” he said, not like he was shocked or burnt, just disappointed.

That’s how I see my father always, drinking coffee and smoking. But how much do you manipulate your memories? Do I just place the coffee in his hand, the smoke between his fingers?

I know that it’s only because he’s gone that these things spin around me, echoing on and on.

People think I’m like my mother because we both laugh a lot and have blonde hair. Those are ridiculous and superficial similarities.

Once, when I was a girl, my mother told me, “Your father suffers from a strange condition of chosen loneliness. He has a lot of friends and no one knows him. He knows he’s smarter than everyone but feels stupid a lot. People want to be close to him but he doesn’t let anyone in.” We were watching television. I remember the deadpan expression on her face, how she was laying on her stomach with her head in her hands.

And, “Oh shit,” I thought. “That’s me.”

I have always been my father’s daughter even though I never wanted to be.


He told me that I'd know when the ending happened. That I'd feel it.

I'm not so sure that's true. I've got a problem with endings and I'm not convinced that they are preordained or organic. He told me they happen quite out of the writer's control.

No way, Jose.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011


The summer Andrew and I got together, we sat on a couch in my mother’s living room. She was out of town and the sun was setting. Or maybe it had become dark and I hadn't noticed. We had spent days intertwined, one person, lost in time. Back then, I didn’t notice anything except him. Back then, he was the most important thing in the world.

He took me in his arms and held me like a child.

“I need you,” I told him.

Back then, I did.

“I’m going to marry you,” he told me.

Back then, our two hearts beat like a metronome.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt


Then, as Andrew turned out the lights and fell asleep next to me in the earliest hours of that morning in March, a Tuesday morning like any other, I was overcome with a queer feeling. A foreign silence impinged on the normal nightly Hollywood noises - on the keening chorus of coyotes, the dry scrape of cars moving up hills, the racing, receding wail of helicopters in the air. I didn’t know then, but no one heard that silence. Not a single soul in miles.

Just me.

Afterwards, I found myself looking back on that night, on that giant, peaceful silence. I found fantasy trying to recreate it over and over again.

If only I’d known my life was about to change.