I don’t much like how women’s personalities get subsumed in relationships– every time I see it, it irks me. not that I see it everywhere, in each case– but the exceptions prove the rule. I see otherwise strong women pull back into themselves, defer to men– I see myself in relation to men, defer to their somehow more innate authority– and I don’t like it. I don’t like the combined complacency and flattening of women in relationships. in truth I like myself better spikey and spinning. there are times I crave the anchoring and smoothing, but at what cost? at the risk of making myself into a flat and stationary cutout object. in my heart I spin and spike and spur myself along. if I could be in a relationship that allowed and appreciated that… that would be something.
following cords
I’m walking up a hill, and my legs are like lead, struggling with each step to lift the leg enough off the ground to move it forward and set it down again, and then the next one. I’m embarrassed by my infirmity and try to hide it from anyone’s notice– I can’t hide the slowness of my progress, but I hide every other telltale sign, grimacing only inwardly. finally, in sheer gratitude, I make it to the top of the hill.
we’re in a lawyer’s office to discuss some type of pro-bono case, when the lawyer has to rush off to a high-profile meeting– he seems kind of hassled out that we’re there, but we have nowhere else to go. he’s rushing around, looking for something he’s misplaced– at first I think it’s his pen, but then he says his cell phone– he’s all irritated and can’t be bothered to ask for help looking. I suggest the couch cushions, and he impatiently says, no, no, I already looked there, but the couch has a bunch of stuff on it and looks to me like the likeliest place– so I go over and start pawing through the piles of newpapers and stray cushions and see a couple of cell phone earbuds and am sure I’m on the right track– I hear a beep, followed by a girl’s voice saying, hello? hello? out of the depths of the seat cushions and dig around and find a blackberry, all illuminated, and a girl on the other end of the line and hand it over to the lawyer– but it only turns out to be his daughter’s cell phone, and her voice on the end of the line– so I go back to searching, following cords down into the very guts of the sofa, inside the stitching, but come up only with dead ends.
I go down the hall in my dormitory to the room of a girl who keeps to herself and whom I’m not entirely sure I like– I think I’ll catch her while she’s out, but she’s there, just for a moment– I’m eyeing a little dollhouse-type structure that looks like it’s filled with tiny chili pepper lights and trying to figure out how it works– she lifts off the roof and unwinds the lights from the tiny chimney and hands me the plug end and points past my shoulder to another plug end, and I attach them and, hey presto, string lights. I’m a little disappointed that the lights aren’t set up the illuminate the tiny house– there’s some resistance I feel about investing in this temporary place, and it bothers me somehow that she’d blythely set up string lights in the room as if they’d be there forever.
home and away
I’ve spent all day at some fun, sxsw-type conference with friends and am planning to go back out again but have stopped back at home to change. the family is having dinner, so I sit down with them– just my mom and dad and one of my brothers, actually– and my mom starts pissing me off and I don’t feel like humoring her or backing down– so I start to say all the horrible things I feel– like, it always has to be about you— which feels like the greatest sacrilege, speaking such a huge, bald truth. my brother leaps to her defense, putting me right back in my place, making reference to what I’ve been doing before I came to the table– and it’s true that out with my friends I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and smoked some pot– but I know that’s not really why I’m saying the things I’m saying, that they’re true. I keep saying this, and my brother mimicks me, you keep saying that, (his voice going up) ‘it’s true, it’s true.’ at that point I lose it, so angry at being made into a cartoon, and fling my plate at the wall like a frisbee, and, amazingly, it doesn’t shatter, only bounces off and crosses the room and bounces off the opposite wall and ricochets back again, finally clattering the the floor whole. we all just kind of sit there for a minute, processing, and then I get up and walk off to change.
I’m in maine, walking down a sandy road, when I glance over and notice some people standing by several tall bushes that line the roadside, and as I walk by, I realize they’re blueberry bushes just laden with fat fruit. I rush off the road and over to the nearest bush, exclaiming to the person who’s walking with me, look! look! blueberries!— but she just doesn’t get my ecstasies. I’m thinking of huron mountain, thinking of the best kind of home I know, represented here and now in these dark-shining berries– and it’s better now, here, something I have discovered all on my own– more generous than the mean little bushes of michigan. there are people riding horseback along the road, and I want that, too, want all of it, am so full and grateful and happy.
inside the wright house
we go to see the frank lloyd wright house in san francisco, that neighborhood by the golden gate bridge– we walk along the steet outside of it and look up along a high cliff wall, and there are planes of water, right angles, staggered parallel lines– we can just make it out overhead, water glinting in available light. my friend has her camera and tries to shoot up the cliff– I’m dubious of the results from our angle. we find our way to an entrance, and the whole thing seems boarded up, closed down, deserted. we recall some story about the well-to-do family who had owned it, famous people, american royalty, and some family tragedy– like the lindberg baby. we sneak in through the dirty boards– I’m wearing white painter’s pants and think to myself, great choice, as I kneel on the filthy stairs. inside upstairs is still and dim, perfectly preserved– expensive, old-fashioned heavy wood furniture– darkness more like a castle than a wright house– yes, it’s sort of hearst castle, post- patty’s abduction. there’s a huge mahogany fireplace. but it all seems to be abandoned. we walk through once, whispering, looking at everything, and then leave– it’s when we go back that we get in trouble– walking through again, we notice a door closed that had been ajar before– and just as I see it, before I have time to alert the others and get us out of there, he appears, saying, well, well, well– to what do I owe the honor of this visit? we are so busted, stammering, apologizing– all but the little sister, who, unabashed, asks him for a momento. we’re down the stairs in a flash and only looking back for the little sister, wishing she would come away– but she’s unpertubed. finally, in her own good time, she shows up with a fistful of jewelrey he’s apparently given to her, none of it terribly precious, but pretty stuff. we sort it out into necklaces, bracelets, and so on, and carefully undo the knots.
treasure
weekend in chicago was lovely and bright, the possibilities there beginning to take concrete shape in people and talk of different jobs, hearing others’ moving and settling-in experiences. I’m also aware that I’m happy and awake and aware simply because I am— that I respond to everything in the outside world based on my internal weather– and the climes in here the past week or so are simply, unaccountably sunny– so the entire weekend in chicago is bright and easy because I feel bright and easy. and then back in iowa feel warm and wonderful with the circle of friends. and then all things everywhere, too many pieces to list, making me feel good connections to other people– and I just want it to go on and on– this— this feeling of all right, everything just okay. but I know it can’t always be this easy, and one thing to do is simply to be grateful for it. but really I wish I could bottle it up, save little life-saving ounces of it for the other times. make some kind of hay while the sun shines. keep writing– just writing whatever whatever whatever. god, this is a gasp– to be up out of it, in fresh air– to feel good-light, as opposed to unmoored– energized, head unencumbered, some huge impossible weight lifted so I can move freely. and from here it looks like nothing is so dire, so make-or-break– only what I do today and then what I do tomorrow, all equally viable and fine and tying together into the fine whole which is My Life– and that it doesn’t have to map to a master plan, doesn’t have to make a tidy narrative to a stranger at a dinner party– that I am me, fine, regardless of what I do– and that it’s going to be complicated being someone who wants to do so many different things– that there will be whole swaths of time when it seems to make no sense– but the sense it makes is slow and intuitive and just right for me. this is what I have to remember to trust. giving myself the time and space and permission to move forward blindly and trustingly, ending up here, here in this good good good place– warm and bright and aware that everything is just okay. I want to remember this, make a map back to this place, remember the steps it takes to reach this very spot.
hauntings
I remember the precise look you gave and the way you put emphasis on which exact words. I could write it, like music, with accents and phrasing notations– and do what with it? music for whom? why write it, what use even remembering? no use. use not the point. just something you sit with, that humbles you. because after the other person picks up and moves on– the lover, friend, whatever– after the connection is severed, the tendril hangs until it atrophies. lots of people feel a ghost limb all their lives. others train themselves to see the air that sits there and move through it, unobstructed. I keep thinking of photographic double-exposure, three-dimensional chess, avant-garde film, club sandwiches, british buses, ladies’ bathrooms with mirrors set reflecting mirrors to infinity…
vanity talcum powder that itself seemed to pull through those mirrors from another decade– so still, so expensively appointed, the very room persisting from another era, a nicer one, in the classic sense. and when I was in there, running the silver-handled hairbrush through baby-fine, staticky hair or dousing the air with sneezy powder, it was as if I too stood inside a different time– an imaginary, tidy world where I could pretend for that moment to belong.
not graduating exactly
I’m moving out of my boarding school dorm room, all these years later– all the other students are gone for summer break, and I’m scrambling to find enough boxes for all the accumulation of so many years– the boxes I had once seem to be long gone. what I’m doing living there still is a question never really answered or even properly addressed, but there’s a strong sense that I’m there long beyond my rightful time, something of an embarassment to the current students– and to myself, of course. so my moving our over break is a courtesy for everyone’s benefit. the ex-best-friend is around, voice on the answering maching or cell voicemail, somewhat at the edge of things, lurking.
I am awake.
in the middle of the night during all these bouts of insomnia, I think and think through the different possibilities, turning it this way and that– never really arriving at any stunning conclusions– but just to have written one poem can carry me for days. forget audience, forget marketability. here’s a lifeline. forget a book. so many clumps of stuff that don’t quite cohere. so what. just keep trying to push myself to do some kind of work, some kind of play. don’t make it a project. there’s the struggle between the part of me that works intuitively, to the beat of an odd clock, and the other, magisterial part that tries to organize, oversee and plan ahead– feels like they’re positioned so at odds with one another. but keeping going needs to be enough.
the little engine has to believe it can.
nothing seems to have more gravity or anchor than anything else. so I fight consciousness with every stitch and fiber, struggle just to stay sleeping, where the wheel is handed over to someone a lot smarter than conscious me and, to boot, there are no actions with disastrous and disappointing consequences.
I have a sort-of date later this evening, and I approach it with utter dread, sure that toads are going to climb out of my mouth and splat all over the table. I seem to be caught in a downward vortex of not-trying, of avoidance and shame and hiding out, and everything I do seems only engineered to spin it faster, to sink me. I know I need to kick upward, push back against the momentum, but it’s hard hard hard and I can’t quite see why.
am I sinking myself? determined to fail? urging for ruin? it doesn’t feel that way. feels like I’m struggling to get through. but so much disappointment. it’s like falling asleep, like letting oneself freeze to death, succumbing. I try and try and am not sure I know how to get someplace better. it’s been so, so long, and the more progress I make, the longer and harder seems the road. part of me says, well, that’s life, chica. it ain’t easy. but I just keep thinking: broken toy– sprung mechanism.
I know it’s going to keep being hard, pushing back against the pattern of habit, hard to drag myself into thinking in new ways. I need to pick myself up, brush myself off and start trying again– just start– a little bit here, a little bit there. start with the sit-ups and keep going. treat myself like a precious object. if I don’t, no one else will. this is my life. I have opportunity– if I can just pick myself up and try to quiet all the clamoring fears– possibility blooms kind and unjudging before me, spreads wide open– only believe in it, believe in myself– and stop buying into all the mean mental rot. I have a choice– to be perfectly okay. I have the say-so, no one else. it’s up to me.
the way things look vs the way they are
we’re walking along a city street when I notice a man in a uniform bend down on one knee, brace a firearm like a bazooka on his shoulder, and fire into the building ahead of us– we duck and run away across the street and up a hill, up some steps where we encounter more men in uniform in formation, in readiness. we’re trying to make ourselves small and quick to get out of the middle of it, but there’s only just time to duck behind a low wall before it begins– there’s a lot of activity and then something in the air before the building, like a huge bird or bat– and then we see it screech and collapse, fold and fall, when they fire upon it. afterwards the men all put down their weapons and everybody falls out of character, and I realize the whole thing was a street play and that the thing in the air was a giant puppet.
we walk inside into a production in progress and are given elaborate costumes ourselves– we’re dancing girls of a sort, glamorous and erotic, and I’m entirely blue, thickly painted in layers and layers of blue makeup and glitter entirely covering my face and hair. it’s a remarkable experience to become someone else so entirely. we find ourselves in a crowded banquet room standing near one of the tables– an older gentleman speaks cordially to us, and we’re flattered and then realize he’s graciously asking us to move so his party can take their table– and we move out of the way. it’s evident we don’t belong here, aren’t of the same staure as these important people, but our costumes have gained our entrance and somewhat acceptance. eventually we leave, and I’m looking forward to getting in a long shower and washing off all the blue. every time I touch my head or face accidentally, my palms come away smudged with sticky blue glitter.
I’m at huron mountain off-season and run into a friend who’s preparing for his brother’s wedding– I ask if I can borrow his canoe– I’m swimming in the water– and he points down the river to their boathouse in the distance.