(accepted for publication in the 2008 edition of Ephemera)
30
there sits an attic
atop of every house this street.
and while we sleep
the soundless footsteps
are the soundtrack of survival
timing is vital
when there's too much time left.
it's what comes away
when the beads from her necklace
roll across the floorboards of this room.
days go by
but we can't tell the morning
from the night.
we wait for cover,
for blizzard winds to white out the bodies,
the things we did.
but memories creep up
through the snow.
we'll never recover
from all of the others
on whose footprints we tread.
(accepted for publication in the 2008 edition of Ephemera)
Sediment
she pores over conversations
like an amateur archeologist.
imagined histories, created facts -
the words just bones of the meanings.
dig deep underneath the sounds
he makes when he is half awake.
some things are better left buried.
I Love You, But I'm Not In Love with You
There are many hazards that plague the average undergraduate. The high cost of chinese food. Caffeine addiction. HPV. There is one though that is seldom recognized, but still ever-present and irritating: psychology majors. They're easy to make friends with initially. They seem intelligent and well-read, and are in general excellent conversationalists. You bond with them quickly; words flow freely, then opinions, then secrets. They then reward your confessions with opinions on your secrets in true amateur-analyst fashion. And it's about then that you lose all desire for conversation.
The worst of these was Brian*, a co-worker at the family-friendly restaurant that I worked at throughout my last two years of college. He wasn't even an actual psychology major, but had taken Intro to Psychology the previous semester and fancied himself a therapist in the same way my neighbor fancies himself a DJ and I fancied myself a graphic designer in high school. He was right in the middle of a love-affair with Freud, and during the slow lag between lunch and dinner rush he would unload a string of questions on the staff, making us all his de-facto patients. On one occasion, it was the day after a relationship of mine had ended, and he annoyingly-accurately surmised that it was probably my emotional neediness that had caused the breakup. I told him to go fuck himself. He was a little lacking in bedside manner.
It may not need to be said, but he was sexy as hell. Born in China-mainland, raised in Poughkeepsie, he had a deep voice, loved soul music and worked the uniform black Dickies and pastel polo shirt like no other employee in the restaurant. I was entirely attracted to him, and as a result completely despised him. The only times I didn't have disdain for him was when he offered evidence from his own experiences into his prognoses; when he let himself slip from self-satisfied arrogance to slight self-deprecation.
"Have you ever been in love?" he asked on one particularly slow day. I like to have a catalogue of stock answers for certain questions; those loaded questions that, unless thought out in advance, tend to make the person answering offer up a pathetic half-answer, inarticulate and rarely eloquent. What kind of music do you like? ("You know...stuff, all kind of things really. I like rock, but am into alternative too I guess. I'll basically listen to anything as long as it's good" turns into "I like a variety of genres, I've been really into indie-rock and dance-electro lately, but am always up for listening to anything from jazz to classical to post-hardcore.") So what do you want to do when you graduate? ("Well, I'm studying journalism and music, so something to do with that. I'd like to travel, or work for a magazine maybe. I don't know, I might go to law school" turns into "I'd like to go into either music journalism or publicity writing, and am considering law school.") I came up with an answer for this particular question a few years back, when a potential love interest sprung it on me one day, although in a different variation. ("How many times have you been in love," he asked, just assuming that I had, and that it had been on multiple occasions.)
"I'm not sure if I've ever been in love, which I'm assuming means I haven't been." It's clever, telling, and to the point. It's another way of saying, in short, no. But if the person is listening closely, it says more. It says that there have been times that I've though I've been in love, but that those times didn't last, that I outgrew them. It says that I don't really know what it means to be in love. It also has the slightest sense of bitterness, which would be accurate.
He jumps to respond. "Me neither," he says. "I can't imagine being that intimate, letting myself getting that involved." I could tell that he also had prepared his answer, and probably only asked so that he could give his response. I've been guilty of that many times. (How do you feel about relationships? What do you think about this class? How was work today?) His answer was telling too. For him, love was about vulnerability, about giving in, almost to the point of failure. Thinking in the same vein as another friend of mine who would be content to exist in a lifetime-long relationship without saying the words "I love you" if it meant she didn't have to say it first, he thinks of falling in love as losing. I would say this is a gendered idea, but the three-word-phobic friend is female, and I'm almost as equally guarded.
I may have never been in love, but I've thought that I have been. When I was fourteen, being in love meant wanting to spend all my time with one person. At sixteen, it meant wanting to make sure the person I loved was always happy, and never felt pain. Four years later I think love might have something to do with giving up everything for one person, about sacrifice. The negative aspects of love seem to become more prevalent the more I encounter it, and the more times I think I have fallen in love. At some point love transitioned from something light and pretty to something heavy, and hurtful, a game with winners and losers, or no winner at all. As long as I think of love as something where I have to give some part of myself away, I'll always have a hesitation towards it. The problem is making that shift, of ignoring past experiences to think of love as something that can do more good than harm.
I think about Brian, and wonder how many hours he has spent wondering why he is terrified of intimacy. Whether he analyzes himself to death, going over conversations, thinking of different outcomes for potential situations the way I do when I'm in a relationship. I wonder if there was some deeper reason why he would ask me about love, or if he just thought of me as a fellow fuck-up to gather some insight from. He may not realize it, but by asking me that question, he made a mini-confession of his own, and opened himself up to my own personal diagnosis.
It seems whatever curiosity psychology majors have is contagious.
*Name changed to protect the irritating and emotionally unavailable
my brother's musical project, Two if by Sea, recently did some recording. The first song here was recorded in studio at Saints and Sinners Studio and was somewhat of a collaboration, with him writing the music and me writing the lyrics and vocal melodies. the other two instrumental songs were recording by him at home. They are all pretty rough, but it was the first musical thing i've done in a while and thought i'd share.
Back to back with a blanket in between.
Pills and partying combined with my last-ditch effort
to steal your attention away from her
has left us stranded in your too-small bed.
Although a distinct boundary line has been drawn,
you still sleep shirtless, and there's so much skin.
Clearly I am not a threat.
Too afraid to fall asleep at first, eventually the rum,
which I had so proudly paraded hours earlier wins out
and it cuts to black.
When the dim image of the room once again
breaks in under my eyelids, it is dark,
and there has been a shift.
No longer back to back, we have both rolled over,
as if trying to find a friendly face
while we navigated our dreamless sleeps.
Your arm is draped over my side
with your hand resting on the round of my hip.
Your warm, sluggish breath is three inches from mine,
increasingly erratic, and I'm dizzy from the drinks
and the way your coal-black bangs mingle with your eyelashes.
I am overcome.
You are perfect in this moment.
How could you not be, with your sacred skin lingering
just below where my fingertrips are drawn?
I have no right.
Tilting my head forward slightly,
I let my lips gently graze against your forehead in a kiss.
I am insane, inappropriate, and completely uncalled for.
Immediately, I flip back over to face your white bedroom wall
and your judgment.
I am certain the shame echoing through the room will wake you.
It could not be any louder.
After several seconds stand in line
to move along the eternity I wade in,
your snore is still the only sound.
I am off the hook. I am entirely ashamed.
You are the most beautiful person I will ever wake up with.
Heartbroken at the veracity of that fact
or happy to have had the chance.
I can't decide.
I wish I could say that she doesn't deserve you.
But she's golden
and every freckle that you dearly adore
is a line, a laugh, and a reason to love
her over anybody else. Over me.
We are fleeting, partners in crime, and purely platonic.
Back to back, a blanket, and better off best friends.
2. portrait-
this bed is strange and i'm missing you.
after a fruitless gift-shop search for your perfect souvenir
(clever, with the smallest hint of "remember when")
i attempted an afternoon nap.
tired of reaching for your strong hands in my sleep,
i give up and roll over to the night stand, fishing out
a hotel pen and pad of six square inch paper.
i start with the eyes.
no, that's not right.
the left one doesn't quite slant that way
and the shape of the iris isn't right.
i rip it up and try again.
for reference, i rifle through my purse for a picture,
tucked away between the M and the N in my address book.
the picture of you and i, in a bed just like this one
except miles and months away.
hours later i'm back in bed, tired from courtesy conversations
and waiting for your call.
when the red light and ring of the hotel phone go off,
it's you, but not.
drunk and crying in a way you'd never let me hear before.
i'm sorry, i didn't mean to, i was just so alone.
seven seconds of silence and the phone is back on the hook,
next to the sketch i finished just an afternoon ago.
i finally got your eyes right.
i rip it up, and try again.
next exit-
i made the transformation into a left-handed driver
after i would pick you up
and drive to anywhere.
with your fingertips you claimed my hand as your territory
planting flags with light grazes over my knuckles
or making a fist and allowing me to be your fortress,
covering you.
around the same time that soft forehead kisses
became conspicuously absent,
i would get in the car
and drive to anywhere.
the entire time messing with the radio
or smoking a cigarette -
anything to distract from the abandoned fortress
of my right hand.
put out-
you would light candles
and the air stung of sulfur.
ten lighters in your bag but you still used matches.
that one night, late summer
(you argued early autumn)
when we boiled with windows kept shut
to protect the flame of some candle laced
with the scent of cinnamon
and crisp, scattered leaves.
like children,
you protected the lighting-bug wicks
and they glowed until succumbing
to self-suffocation.
the smoke, sulfur, and cinnammon
still linger in the sofa we used to share.
when our abandoned bed becomes too much,
i'll curl up in the couch cushions
and i am thankful for those scents that
take up the empty space
where your apple shampoo smell used to stay.
from a twin size bed -
there were always three sharp, pitchless breaths
to signal before you spilled into me
sometimes we wouldn't move for hours
i wanted you to love me most in the morning
-but i always drove you home
COM 242 Communications and Culture
Who I Am Essay
For my first writing assignment of the semester, I was asked to write an informal essay answering the question "Who Am I?". I wrote this today. It was an assignment that wasn't turned in, but was discussed in class and kept for future reference/revision. I wrote it in literally the 15 minutes before class, but I like it. Some self-editing was done when transfering from handwritten to typed.
Trying to define who I am is a very difficult process for me. I had a hard time just filling out the "about me" section of my myspace profile. The two main reasons why this is so difficult is because of my resistance to label myself and also my confusion between the concepts of "who I am" and "what I am."
Also, where to start? What characteristics about myself do I value enough to let them define me? Do I want to be a musician? A student? A female? Hispanic? I can't even fall back on identifying myself by name, because I have two of them.
It would probably make most sense to define who I am by my permanent characteristics, because they are things that will always stay with me. However, this doesn't seem fair because these are things that I did not choose to be. Race, class, gender, sexuality, I didn't choose any of these things, and I do not want to be defined by them.
On the other hand, it wouldn't make sense to use adjectives to define myself, because those are more likely to answer the question "what am I?" as opposed to "who am I?". Creative, musical, complex, sarcastic, these are words that could describe a number of people, and these things may change. Some day I may be maternal. Right now I am not. I'd hate to be defined by things that may change tomorrow, or not at all. Having a transient sense of identity can cause a confused sense of morals and ideals.
All this musing leads to the conclusion that I have no idea who I am. I know what I am. I know who I can be sometimes, but I am not confident in any one aspect or any group of aspects of myself enough to let them be what defines me. And I think the fact that I'm okay with that speaks volumes about who and what I am.
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Laureen Guldbrandsen said:
[this is good]Oh, wow. I love the emotion and imagery here. This is beautiful, and hurts so good. read more
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madeline said:
[this is good]This is fantastic. Have any more? read more
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thanks so much. I wrote this about 2 years ago, and it took me this long to get up the... read more
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