I Wrote This When I Was Sad

I want to be automatically inspired.

I want inspiration to come with my breath in the morning, I want it to flow from my mind to my fingertips and my mouth and my eyes and my tongue, and I want it to spread out from my body and fill my field of vision like water drowns the air. I want exhilaration to flood out my brain and I want it to burn me alive and scar my imagination. I want ecstasy at the sight of Something New to starve out my laziness — I want peace in the chaos to drive me insane — I want the same song to play over and over and over and I don’t want to notice. I want to stop seeing child’s play and chubby baby fingers when I look at my hands. I want to stop the contest and the competition and I want to streamline my functions and I want to commit suicide a thousand times until my rebirth is complete. I want Something New to make me sick, I want Something New to make me cry, I want Something New to force me to write songs and cut my fingers on guitar strings and drink tea because I tore my throat. I want Something New in my writing and my words and my pen and my ideas. 

I want to be trapped out of the spiderweb and I want to ignore the unbearable urge to tangle myself. I want to look at the paper and I don’t want to see child’s play and fat fat fat fat fat fat fat baby fingers and bitten nails and swollen veins. I want to see my work come to life like I see when it isn’t my work. I want to forget to breathe as I create and I want to suffocate myself silently inside my own conceited, self-righteous God-play. Do you see what I have to work with? I’m too cheap to buy new pens, I’m too shy to buy new pens, I’m too afraid that I’ll waste the ink on something that someone else could have done better.

I think I’m going to throw up, and I think that’s a good sign. I want Art to make me sick. I want it to scald my biases and scorch my prejudice and slice away my folds of self-importance. I want it to make me burn my paintings and save my 3am scribbles. I want it to make me cry myself sick and I want it to make me have nightmares. I want it to be real and raw and horrifying. I want it to shock me awake. I want it to keep me up at night. I want it to haunt me, and teach me, and terrify me, and rebuke me, and carry me.

Holier Than Thou

“God, I don’t know.”

I held my breath, waiting for the inevitable “amen” to float off in the undertow, but it never came. Mama dropped her hands and opened her eyes and the blasphemy shook the house with that one unused exhalation. 

I never claimed to be a religious person, but the Holy Father had been a perpetual force in my soul for reasons that were never fully explained to me. It was just the way the world spun. Who was to argue? God sat in his heavenly throne and watched us scamper around, scared human squirrels, scavenging the wreckage in which we wasted away. I could never tell if that was a comforting thought or a terrifying one. I could never tell my dreams from my nightmares. Were dreams a glimpse into paradise or were nightmares a taste of Hell? If Heaven existed only in our minds, who was to tell is that the pills and the knives and the ropes and the water wasn’t the way to go?

Mama left us silent at the table and cleaned up the last supper. Papa pretended he hadn’t heard her and began to recite the holy scriptures, encouraging us to join him in the least subtle way possible. I thought Mama was speaking along but when she passed behind me I heard no voice. I pinched my wrist to remind myself that I wasn’t in Hell.

Papa cried himself to sleep more than Mama ever did, and I stayed awake with an uncomfortable feeling in my chest and wished I could be anywhere else. In the morning I would change all the sheets in the house to ensure that his sorrow would not carry through the bed and into his body, but it persisted in the air and in his thin lips and in his ashy blue eyes. When August was born and Mama wouldn’t let him name the child Esther, his Bible grew tear stains and aged wrinkles. Carefully he painted over the blessed letters on the first page and wrote in August in trembling type. Who was to say if it was worse to sin against his wife or sin against his Holy Father? In the morning, Mama would still be there.

August whimpered in her highchair and Papa rose abruptly, but not to save his daughter. Her bright brown eyes defied his own blue ones, and all at once I guessed the truth and sank below my prayers, into my mind, into my nightmares. Mama hummed to herself in the kitchen and Papa’s footsteps followed him from the table to the tired night air. August cried. August screamed. Mama’s humming changed from a flute to a full orchestra and glass shattered on the tile. Matthew closed his eyes and I took his hand and squeezed his fingers and I knew he was falling into Heaven or Hell or maybe nowhere at all.

When Mama and Papa were married, he should have known that the blue flower was his first warning. But she kissed his virgin lips and he didn’t stop her, and when she slipped the flower’s stem into his coat pocket he didn’t stop her, and when she stepped so gracefully from her white dress... Papa’s righteousness got him into more trouble than his sinfulness ever did, and life is unfair and I don’t think I was ever supposed to be born.

Matthew and I followed Papa’s bootprints from the back door to the river, and from the river to the highway, and that was where the dust and wind betrayed us and we sat on the shoulder and hoped a car would drive by. The starlit air blew us Bible pages and we read each one aloud before tossing them back up to be caught by Fate, or the Hand of God, or by the breaths of the Earth to be taken to the next needy soul.

“We never did ask God for Papa to leave, did we, Dinah?” Matthew’s baby voice broke through Hell and settled sadly into his soft lungs. “We never did.”

“No, Matthew,” I said.

“Who’d ask God for something like that, Dinah? Who’d do that?”

I kissed his curls and blinked through my ignorance. The stars stared down at us scornfully, mocking our blind belief and our scripture-saturated minds. In the stillness I heard gunpowder find its violent death, and I drew Matthew close to me and began to sing, closing out the Earth and its cheating ways. Matthew did not yet know to interpret Nature’s unnatural voices and he slept and drifted into Hell again, easily and simply.

Who was to say what anything was, really? Mama’s prayers had paid off, and our lack of prayers died in our lack of sin. Papa’s Bible blew through Earth’s lungs and I wondered if he passed with his faith or with his religion. I wondered where he had found the pistol. I wondered who August would call her father. I wondered what Matthew would remember when he escaped from Hell. 

I wondered if I would ever sleep again.

for him

He’s too hard to explain. 

I bent my head and my heart and I listened to the beat beat beat and I didn’t cry

and I want you to know that that’s a really big thing

and that crying comes easier to me than breathing and I want you to take note of that

He makes me cry but it’s not

it’s not painful

Does that make sense?

I’d like to own a typewriter because it would make me feel better about how awful I feel when I write. I see quotes about writing and writers and words and I tell myself and everyone else that I relate to them, but then I don’t write and nothing happens and I’m just a hypocrite like everyone else. I’m not sick and writing doesn’t solve anything. I want to be something I’m not, I want to love something I can’t. I used to tell them that I hated writing and I think I still do. It’s not an escape, it’s a trap. I love it and I hate it and I don’t know how you expect me to produce any original content because I’ve read too many books and seen too many films and I’m a mess of this and that and I can’t create anything.

I bent my neck, my back, to kiss him and I thought

“this isn’t where I live”

and I threw up my hands

and heaven swallowed me up

and God took me in and said,

and said,

and said nothing

and I woke up crying in my bed because I had almost forgotten to breathe

Don’t talk to me about writing. I’m terrible at writing and I’m trying to tell you that it’s not an escape and that you don’t understand the relationship I have with the dictionary and the thesaurus. 

I’m talking to the voices in my head again, because I’m too afraid to dial any numbers and words never came easily to me. Everything I say condemns me as a liar and I don’t expect anyone to trust me. I write poems and then I burn them and pretend they never happened. I’m not a poet. I’m not anyone. Don’t listen to me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t breathe.

He cried at daybreak

I shouted at the stars and I can’t understand why it had to happen this way

I can’t understand why I can’t be beautiful and 

and

and

and I don’t understand how I can write something I love and then hate it in the morning.

These are my children and I

I abuse them because I don’t know how to love them anymore

I don’t think I ever did.

I won’t curse because I’m too scared. My dreams are too big for my own procrastination and I don’t expect anyone to love me at the end of the day because there is too much wrong with me. Three in the morning and I am writing letters and letters and letters and shouting silent prayers and I think I am drowning in the loneliness and that doesn’t mean anything. I shattered but I don’t want you to think I want to be glorified for that. Everyone shatters. Nobody is anybody special.

I can’t understand him so I melt for him and

I’ve never been a poet and

If you could interpret my dreams I don’t think we’d be friends anymore.

expectations and Mona

Whenever I asked Cora what it meant to be normal, she’d say all she had to do was look at me and she’d see normal. “Everything about you,” she’d say, “everything in your mind is completely normal.”

I don’t know what Cora thought normal was, but she was wrong and I didn’t know it.

I had three friends growing up, and they all died. That was normal. I always thought that people just couldn’t stay around one another for very long. I always thought you expected your friends to die. That’s just what happened. You made a friend and then they died.

Peter was my first friend. He was quiet, never speaking to me unless I asked him a direct question. We were friends solely on the fact that I liked his muted voice and he could tolerate my piercing one. The best we ever did was talk about the rain and why we liked it. He liked the color. I liked the way it washed away my chalk drawings, because I figured that even the sidewalk couldn’t put up with my people for very long. That’s what happened to Peter when he died. The rain took him. And it wasn’t unexpected.

“I made a friend, Cora. I made a friend and then he died.”

“It’s okay. That’s how it’s supposed to happen. It’s normal.”

The second friend I had was called Boxer, and I still don’t know if it was a girl friend or a boy friend. It didn’t matter. Boxer hated the rain and Boxer hated chalk drawings. Boxer liked to sing, and its voice grated over my ears and sent my heart into heaven. I sang with Boxer but I could never hear my own voice over the sandpaper notes pouring from its mouth. Boxer told me I had the most beautiful voice it had ever heard, and I believed it. I still believe it.

Boxer died full in song, and it wasn’t unexpected. 

“What happened to Boxer?”

“Boxer died, Cora.”

“What happened?”

“They always die.”

I never took my friends to meet Cora, and she said she didn’t want to meet them anyway. She liked to watch me, and write things about me, and get A’s written on her papers and keys in her hands and gas to drive her car. I was never allowed in the car. It was normal. I stayed home and Cora went to get A’s and keys and gas. Each time I thought she wasn’t coming back. Each time she did. It was normal.

The last and longest friend was so old I couldn’t see her eyes. I called her Mona, but Cora tried to tell me her name was Oma. Cora told me again and again. Oma, not Mona. Oma, not Mona. Mona. Oma. Mona said I could call her whatever I wanted to call her, and I touched her papery skin and told her about Boxer and Peter and the chalk and the rain and the sandpaper, and she would tell Cora to stop writing and to listen to me. 

“Where’s Boxer?” Cora would ask.

“Boxer died.”

Mona would sigh a little bit. 

“Who was Boxer?” Cora would ask.

I didn’t understand the question and I never answered it. Boxer was my friend. Boxer was my second friend. Boxer came when Peter died.

Cora didn’t understand Boxer, but she understood Peter. She never asked questions about Peter. She never asked questions about Mona, only told me that it was Oma, not Mona. 

“Why didn’t you cry when Peter died?” Cora asked.

“It was supposed to happen. You said it was normal.”

“Sometimes people still cry when normal things happen.”

“Be quiet, Cora,” Mona would say and her voice sounded tight and sharp. “Be quiet.”

Mona died inside herself, and then they took her away. Cora cried, and her face turned red and swollen and she put away her paper and keys and I didn’t see her for three days.

“Why are you crying, Cora?”

“Be quiet.”

I didn’t make any more friends after that. I got into a car and I drove away, and it was dark and cold and frightening. I lived in an enormous white house with hundreds of rooms for a long time, and didn’t see Cora or anyone. They all asked me questions about Peter and Boxer but nobody wanted to hear about Mona. Nobody ever wanted to hear about Mona.

Cora was married when I came home, and everyone told me that that was perfectly normal and that I was safe now and someone would come by every few days to make sure things were “going smoothly.” They took me to visit the cemetery a few times. Peter Mousekiller and Margaret Shawn. Nobody knew how to make a grave for Boxer and they never tried.

It was not unexpected.

traffic

To me you are as a yellow stoplight and I can't shake that feeling that you're going to turn red and everything will crash in a fire of metal and screams and broken glass and the sirens, sirens, sirens.

To me you are the first chapter and The End and you aren't even the same language. Trees were never meant for this. Synthetic parchment like our first kiss.

When music makes you me us cry, I think it's a good thing and it reminds me that there is not just a brain inside your skill and not just blood inside your heart. Did you hear that? Dear God, what's the point?

You say, I want this stitched up Flesh Body and I want to hold it and feel the blood inside its wrapping and I want to act like this is important to me. You say, I see these eyes and these glass eyes and those brown eyes and the chemicals are reacting and I think it's love.

I want to understand how you can be so emotional and not see what I'm seeing. I want to understand you and you are too much, too little, too significant and I get lost in lyrics and blankets and foggy nights and then, and then again you're gone.

those strings are not sufficient, please replace them i cant use them like this i cant understand your voice your eyes your tears why are you crying

My hands are ugly and my teeth are ugly and do my eyes make your heart beat like that or is it because you are worried about your ugly hands, ugly teeth

Wait a minute, a second, an hour. The light is going to change, I just need you to say that

I need you to say

I need

To me you are a yellow light and it's too late.

Lights

The lights in this building need to be replaced.

I can't see myself in the window reflection anymore. I'm nervous in the dark, I like to be able to see my eyes and remind myself I'm not dreaming. It's been hard to separate those dreams from reality lately. Sometimes I don't think I would even be surprised if that fat old woman down the hall knitted her fingers into her never-ending scarf. Maybe she really does turn into a green-eyed cat when I'm not looking.

The dreams started a few months ago, normal dreams, quiet dreams, the ones that you'd tell your best friend about. Little, impossible things would happen... I cut down trees with a pair of scissors and a little man in yellow followed me around the garage. He frightened me, but when I woke up he was just lemon mist in the cold steel of reality. Sometimes I'd try to write the dreams down, maybe turn them into stories to tell people when I couldn't entertain any other way, but my attention span was too short and the dream journals were left unfinished and sorrowful.

After a time, the dreams started switching around. Sometimes I'd be sitting in that fat old woman's living room, smelling the curry she was always burning and watching her knit and listen to her talk about highschool sweethearts and limited-edition tea. I'd done this thousands of times, counting it mentally as assisting the elderly, like it was a wild card for the Good Person title. So she'd knit, and talk, and I'd eat stale cake and sit and sit and listen, and then her fingers would weave in and out of the knitting and stretch down her arms. Soon the scarf was up to her shoulders, half yarn and half fingers. The cake would fall out of my mouth and I'd just watch, her voice drifting into the background.

I'd wake up after that.

The walls in my apartment were never very solid. The woman next door can't stand her boyfriend anymore, but is too shy to say anything to his face. She just cries whenever they have a disagreement, and he turns into a long green snake and the room starts filling up with shoes and broken bracelets.

And I'd wake up.

The lights in this building need to be replaced. They're yellow and dreary and remind me of horror flicks and too much caffeine. I can't see my reflection in the window anymore and it's uncomfortable. I think that I'm dreaming when I listen to that poor woman next door crying, but I don't hear the sound of that green snake and broken bracelets don't come pouring out of the air shafts.

Maybe I'm not.

I'll go and replace those spooky yellow lights and they'll be nice and bright. I forget to look in the mirror on my way out the door, but when I walk down the hall again, it's all back to how it was before. It's too dark to see my reflection. I hurry to the fat old woman's apartment and eat her stale cake like it's the only food I've ever tasted... but her arms never knit into her scarf and her stories keep dragging.

The woman next door tells her boyfriend it's over.

And again the next night.

And again.

The fat old woman has four hundred and thirteen scarves and none of them have her fingers in them. I counted them all while she was baking more cake, already stale from the oven.

The lights go back and forth from shiny-white new to Frankenstein-eye yellow. I cut off my hair and it's down to my ankles when I wake up. I sleep and I'm tired, I drink and I'm thirsty. The lights still need to be replaced. My reflection talks to me when insomnia is my only friend. Memories bounce back and forth, numbers stand on their hands and strangle the letters. Books are too hard to read; I forgot everything I knew.

Yet when I wake up, the lights are white and the woman next door is still crying and the fat old woman is still working on the same scarf she's been working on for the past month. Or year. Or seventy years. My reflection blinks at me, perfectly lined up with my own eyes. I'm sure I forgot my college thesis, I think I've been fired from my waitressing job. I wander down to the restaurant anyway and they put me to work as if nothing's happened.

"Are you losing your mind?" I ask myself. Nobody answers.

I turn in my college thesis and graduate.

That night, I scramble to finish the paper, proofreading it four times before noticing I spelled "fanatic" with a K and an E. I spill my tea and have to rewrite a whole page. The woman next door screams that it's over, it's over, it's over. Bracelets flood my carpet. I can't remember how to read, the letters bunch up and fall over and it's just scribbles. I wrote my whole paper scribbling like a child.

I wake up and it's quiet.

So quiet.

And white.

I sit up and the bracelet on my wrist falls to the ground.

Beyond Deception as a Victor

It was then that I knew that my world was ending. Jamie took my hand and squeezed it, her lips spilling words I didn't hear, her eyes releasing her surplus of emotion. And so came the end in the middle of the beginning, a breath taken in and released, and I knew my world was ending.

When the funeral procession dragged across my bleeding thoughts, I saw Jamie standing a little bit away, pouring forth a river from her never ending soul. Inside my heart a voice cried out to her, but she had long been blinded to my words and I had forgotten how to communicate.

My life had been a veil and I unwillingly hid behind disabilities and handicaps, two words that shaped my future like patronizing hands. If I could perhaps discover my tongue inside the folds and caves of tender silence, maybe I could show that titles are simply a name. But for now I only had eyes and a mind that could not be quieted, and I watched with a dead sort of eagerness.

I saw him with Jamie often enough, even after the grass was green over the disturbed soil and the stone worn of gloss. He showed a reckless, daring sort of love that Jamie countered with her gentle and tearful ways. In time he became part of her, part of the idea she held, part of the air she breathed. It was counterintuitive that she hold him to her body when all in all, he would one day rest under the same soil, with or without the beautiful girl that seemed to float on insecurities.

The tutors came and went, but each had a shortcoming that sent them down the path of the Condescenders. Therapist and counselors were discarded with old memories, and although I clung to the milestones, they left Jamie's mind like unimportant insects. She had a Laugh-Giver and a Love-Offering and the words associated with my face grew until they were all anyone could see anymore.

I fought to believe that I wasn't drowning and that there was still air at some indefinite height that I could reach if I swam long enough. The dreams I stored were like butterflies and I prayed that they wouldn't leave in my sleep.

When Jamie was in white and was beautiful, I sat on the steps and I watched her, invisible to the cultured and forgotten to the thoughtful. Like a day, my world had ended and with it left the prizes I had gained and the truth I had entrusted in a fallible mind. Now controlled the assumptions, the impressions, the judgements, and the nights were a startling release from the tongues that did not rest.

Before long, Jamie had disappeared and left me with an empty house full of haunting illusions. And yet I struggled and I breathed and I worked, and the untarnished pages refused to burn with my wishes.

My mind was still young and my thoughts were not dull, but my voice had been lost in the wind and with death, and before death, and before life, and it was predestined and it was how it should be.

Of the two expressions I had not lost, only one was screaming. The other was more subtly discovered, like a face never forgotten or a sound always remembered. In my youthful desperation, I had misplaced the power of no names and had started believing the lies that Jamie lived. But I was not dead and I was not dull and I will not be silenced.

And when the music played, my voice mingled with the notes and again I breathed.

Life As Practical

It's a bloody business, this war and killing and all. I suppose you get used to it eventually; deaf to the gunshots like you callus to hard labor, blind to the gore like the sun becomes dim to your eyes. One letter after another floats in from unfamiliar hands, with unfamiliar writing tracing familiar dust-pictures of familiar faces, and one begins to wonder how long it will take to be hard to the pain like one is deaf to the noise.

It's bloody brutal, though, bloody brutal business, and I've seen enough of it to be eternally dulled to the reason behind it all.

Eventually, though, you learn. You learn how to deal with it. You learn to crush the pain and loneliness down into a hard stone in your chest, and you learn how to swallow sand and you learn how to drink saltwater and to look away. You learn to be the seeing blind, you learn to be the hearing deaf, you learn to be ignorant. I don't cry anymore. You gotta learn to stop crying. There's not much question about it. You've only got two choices, and that's either to be soft and continually hurt, or to be hard and emotionless but never injured.

You learn that physical pain is infinitely easier than emotional pain, and physical pain is far easier to control. I've got scars on my arms from that learning process. When one inflicts injury on one's self in a physical manner, it's a sign of emotional weakness. I didn't know that then. I'm better now.

It's still a bloody business, and you still see sights horrible enough to make your soul shatter, and you'll still hear screams long into the night when, in a perfect world, we'd all be sleeping and content. You still see corpses of former acquaintences, but you don't recognize them on an emotional level. Emotions are dangerous when you're here. You can't let them affect your vision or you'll be sightless for the rest of your life. You've gotta be hard. Like me. Gotta be hard like me.

You learn not to make friends, too. Friends, in a perfect world, would be there to get your back when you fall, but not here. Nah. Here friends are a danger to your soul, because if you're soul's not as solid as ice then you'll never survive. What's worse, to see your love die in a friend or to see that love turn to hate in the moment of betrayal? Doesn't matter. You can avoid it both.

Never said I liked it. Never said it's what I would want, but it's what's gotta be, and you gotta learn to survive here. You gotta learn that silence is better than words in any situation, and to show feeling is to bare your chest for the blade. It's just how it is. It's a hard lesson to learn but it's the only one worth teaching.

Bloody brutal business, though. Bloody brutal.