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.