Anticipation

Anticipation is the greatest moment. Better than the action itself, better than the aftermath. You can have a million scenarios, you can have perfection in any way you dream it can play out, riding high on adrenaline  and excitement. In anticipation, one can revel and delight for hours, compared to the ultimate blip of disappointment built up to be so much more. Anticipation is the building, the imagination, the moment where everything is possible. But on so many levels, it's the farthest from reality.

Choices

I wish now that I had been rejected. What an easy answer, what a solid "no." No choices. No expectations.
 
On some level, I knew I had to go. I had to leave. Or I'd be cursing myself now, cursing myself for never knowing anything, never doing anything, never trying. But now I'm trying. And it's one of the hardest things I've done. And I'm scared.

I'm scared now of expectations, and success and failure, scared of ambition, and the novelty of it all. And I wish for rejection.

Mimic Poem

To the reader who suggested mimic poems, thank you. I had fun.
I hated the idea at first. Why steal writing so blatantly?
But its interesting to steal a voice, and try to talk in it, to feel out their words and phrasing, and become more aware of your own.

Oh, and Phenomenal Woman was simply to see if I could change the  meaning of a poem, not some deep traumatic self consciousness. Thanks!

Mimic Poem: Phenomenal Woman

Other women giggle, judgment in their eyes.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But if I try to teach them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's not about makeup
Or the clothes we wear,
The friends that we have or
How we do our hair.
I'm just a woman
Uncomfortably.
Uncomfortable woman,
That's me.

If I walk into a party,
My heartbeat will speed up,
A flower on the wall,
Ignored by
Lovesick pups.
No one ever would ever see me,
Behind my plastic cup.
I think,
How desperate are we,
For attention of boys
To wear such short dresses,
And dance to loud noise.
I'm a woman
Uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable woman,
That's me.

Lovers are meant for others,
Prettier, not me.
I cannot try
They don't know why
I'm such a mystery.
When I try to show them
I know just what they'll see.
Just the,
Frizz in my hair,
The flaws on my face,
The lack of my breasts,
The fat on my waist.
I'm a woman
Uncomfortably.
Uncomfortable woman,
That's me.

Can't you understand
This pressure to be perfect
Hurts the girls like me.
Self confidence wrecked,
So much effort lost
In the mirrors that reflect.
I see,
The pale untanned,
The stubby bitten nails,
The brown of my eyes,
Clothes bought on sales,
'Cause I'm a woman
Uncomfortably.
Uncomfortable woman,
That's me



NOW GO READ MAYA ANGELOU

Mimic Poem: Grasshopper

                                                             r-e-t-h-o-b-r  o-h

                                                                   who

                                                             a)s i w(at)ch

                      gathershimselfinprepa 

                                                          REHTBOR

                                                                                ration  (and-

                                                               Ju

                                                  M!p

                                                    s         lanDInG 

                                     oTerHbR                            !onThE

                                                                                fl(cou)y(ch)ing.

                          ,brother;

Irene

It's a rocking, a vibration, as though the garage door is opening. All of the garage doors. At once. I pause, and lift my fingers off the keyboard for a moment, hovering off the desk, but I still feel myself shaking. I stand, and pull back the gauzy curtain to peek outside for a cause, perhaps unexpected yard work of neighbors. Nothing. I let the sheer fabric flutter closed. The chair in the corner catches my attention, a rocking chair, an old birthday present, currently used as a makeshift coat hanger. The strap of a dark grey messenger bag is slung across the back, and the bag shakes gently as the entire chair rocks back and forth. I stare at it, but I'm still without any real explanation for it. Moderately annoyed at the interruption, I sit and resume my writing, and make a mental note to blog later about how easy it is to ignore some phenomenon for the mundane, how set we are in our ways, and how determined we are to ignore anything magical. But then, as quickly as it came, it stops, and I freeze again, struck by the reality of it. It happened, didn't it? I couldn't have imagined it.

I ran downstairs quickly, and asked everyone in the house. Did you feel it? Did you feel that? The house, it shook. They look at me, and break into laughter. No, of course not. Of course not. And then I'm crazy.

But I wasn't crazy. I was right. My phone lit up with the same question I'd been asking, and I was validated. My friend grumbled about it. "Now this is all anyone will talk about for days," he moped, "no body got hurt, but you won't hear about anything important until this entire thing blows over."

He was right, in the first bit of his prediction. Facebook and Twitter flooded with bits and pieces blown out of proportion. From victorious declarations of survival, to threats of more of God's wrath. But at the same time, I'm pleased. Of course you won't hear of anything else important, but why isn't this important? The usual garble is meaningless as well, teenage angst and celebrity obsession. But this, an earthquake, however minor, is something. The planet, solid rock tore beneath us. It ripped, scraped, and shook land for miles.

The speculation over Irene is overblown (pun) as well. At worst, category one. Some rain. Some wind. But now, how can I help not being excited? As I type now, the gutter complains noisily outside, and I wish for something. For excitement. For something important.

Resemblance

Movies make me sad, tearing into secrets I didn't know I had. The actor's profile and stuttering strikes a particular note. There's a friend onscreen instead, and I miss him. I feel hollower for being reminded what I'm missing.

The hollowness makes me feel delicate, as though one more crack could send me crying, so I get up, and walk to the kitchen, shuffling gently, through glazed eyes. Absentmindedly, I grab the refrigerator door, but  don't open it. I wrap my fingers around the cool handle, and lean my forehead against it. I ache.  

Maguire

For the first time, I find myself itching for a pencil while I read, as though my rambling thoughts are somehow worth recording. Then again, reactions to Gregory Maguire are always nothing less than orgasmic. His writing is beautiful and intricate, and I delight in pulling it apart. I savor the delicious bits of description, of a nougat white against rain soaked black. I wonder how often his inspiration is visibly and immaturely woven to mine.

NYC

     Every sidewalk sparkles. Under all the tar and gum and dirt and grime, it sparkles. Deep in the cement, there are small flecks that seem to shimmer, like the heart of the city itself. With every step into the smoggy cold air, I love this city.

     At night, I stare out the window. The sky is a sickly grey, lit by the waste below. As I drift off, the blinking lights in the skyline of the people that never sleep all start to look like little stars, and sleep takes me to fuzzy memories of a different sky, with different stars.

Airport

An elderly couple sits at a food court table in the middle of the airport. Impatient people drag their luggage to their respective concourses, grumbling at delays, but the pair seems lost in their own world. They sit across from each other, holding hands over the scratched plastic table. Heads bowed, they mouth words in unison.

Oddly enough, their prayer isn't cheapened by the unopened styrofoam packages of tasteless food on their table. In a world of chaos, they seem to have found what matters. I watch them as I eat, and catch my mother watching them too. When she thinks I'm not looking, she starts to cry.

Metaphors

"A gallon of rich country cream

 hand-whipped into stiff peaks

flung from the beater

into dollops

across a blue oilcloth."

I believe it was in third or fourth grade, we read a poem about the sky being a stretch of blue canvas, with dollops of cream whipped into stiff peaks of clouds. I remember it perfectly, even now, and I was entranced by this, such a beautiful view of the sky. We were told to write poems of our own, each with a metaphor, akin to the sky being a canvas.

I decided to write one about the sky too. It seemed to me so fragile, a delicate balance it showed between night and day, like a perfectly planned game. I wrote about a marble game. A perfectly circular ring, well worn and gritty, with pluming dusts of clouds and edged by the horizons, was the playing field. I wrote about the fiery dragon eyed marble of the sun, and the cool glassy roll of the moon, about how they knocked each other out of the ring and back again, two perfectly balanced opponents in an endless game.

I volunteered to read mine out loud. I stood, and proudly told the class of my marbled metaphor.

Nobody understood it.

Memory

One of my games, when I was very small, was to make up a cleaning service. I would grab sponges, buckets, brushes, and redo entire walls, cleaning off grey sludge and leaving them new and beautiful. I remember how perfectly this worked, I remember how I was surrounded by lots of friends that helped and laughed at my brilliant jokes. One time, my mother sat and watched this magnificent operation, laughing with a camera in hand, probably to record my dizzying wonder at such a small age. I remember explaining to her my system in perfect eloquence.

Curiously enough, in what is the resulting video, I'm not in it at all. Instead, a small, frizzy haired and big-eyed girl is standing against a wall with yellow striped wallpaper, holding one of those dishwashing wands with a sponge on one end and soap in the handle. Without making any difference to the wall, she clumsily slaps the wand against it. While spinning around in lopsided, lumpy circles on her heels, she speaks around the pacifier in her mouth in third person, both to her imaginary friends, one of which seemed to be Winnie the Pooh, and to the camera, explaining that Onyon (my nickname at the time), was cleaning the walls.

What a difference the imagination of childhood makes.

Steady Goes

My belly swells with food; Cajun, pizza, candy, topped with the exhaustion of travel. In a strange bed, on top of starchy hotel sheets, I feel lethargic, as though I'll never move again, and I flash back to when I was little.
Greedy childish hands not knowing when to stop, filling to bursting until I felt sick. I crawled upstairs, to the cool undisturbed, and fell onto my favorite couch. Thick, hard, floral swirls over stiffly packed cushions, meant for show, but the fabric was cool and steady against my feverish cheek.
I wonder what happened to that couch.

Sister Dearest

     A scream tears through the room, leaving us vey nearly deaf in its wake. Almost drunkenly, my sister stumbles out of the tiny bathroom and into the nearly as tiny cabin room, already occupied by my mother and I. There's blood. Sister dear looks crazed, with wet, uncombed hair decorating her shoulders, and little else, standing naked and oblivious to the growing puddle the dripping is creating about her ankles. She repeats, "there's blood," and holds up a towel, still edged with creases from being folded on the rack, and true to her word, stained with ripples of deep red.

     Generally, we are simply amused by her, taking in her antics with gentle smiles, waiting to see what she does next. This time, all amusement is drained and replaced by silent shock. The blood blossoms through the damp terrycloth as the recent shower drips in the background. We all hang in terrified confused silence.

     "Are you bleeding?" An obvious first question, but one that has eluded us in its simplicity, my mother's the first to grab hold of the situation. Eager to hand control to someone else, my sister drops the towel and spreads her arms in display. It flutters to the floor, creating peppermint stripes of red and white. Her nakedness is displayed to validate her sanity; free of any cuts, gashes, or wounds of any kind. Still, we refuse to believe it, hoping to pin the accident on an owner, but the unclaimed blood screams up at us from its heap on the floor. We three stare at each other, looking from person to person for answers none of us know. From the next room, my father remains unfazed by the overheard scene my sisters created, suggesting, "Your nose?"

     "No," she protests, as she pushes both index fingers into nostrils to prove it. She removes them, and there's a moment before she notices the blood now covering them. She explodes into laughter, screaming, "Nosebleed!" and reclaims the towel, returning to the bathroom with her bloody nose. She's gone in a whirlwind, sweeping up all the terror that has settled into the room, and leaving me completely enraptured and still confused, spinning in the dust of her nonsense. Nothing new.

Belize

We drift gently in our tubes, reveling in the cool water and soft currents. Our guide leads, explaining plants and history and landmarks all in a thick but unrecognizable accent. He gestures grandly behind him, at the yawning mouth of a cave. Vines drip over the entrance and trace lazy designs in the water with the tips of their tendril fingers. The limestone ceiling is massive and ornate, lined generously with stalactites. Darkness calls out from within. "Dis is called da gateway to hell," calls out our guide. Comforting.

We float into the cave, and click on our headlights, small beams strapped to our foreheads. The outside light quickly abandons us, as though it too is terrified of what may lie within. We paddle nervously with our fingertips, lost in blindness except from the small circles of blueish light we each cast. Sticks caught in notches high above us serve as a threatening reminder of how high the water can rise, when it feels like it.

"We ah in de deepest part of da watah now, ova 55 feet deep. Der ah feesh hea, dey ah blind, but can be as big as five feet long." My fears shift from the scuffles and squeaking along the ceiling to a hypothetical nudge from below. The ceiling lowers as the walls narrow, and I can see bats now, dipping into holes in the ceiling. My light flickers and dies, leaving me only with the other softly glowing heads around me. What a luxury light is. 

There are soft splashes around us, dripping from the points of the ceiling. The water bunches at the tips of stalactites, forming perfect beads of water, until they're no longer light enough to stay up, and fall to the water with a delicate splash. Blindly, I float under a ridge in the ceiling and a drop forms, as it has for hundreds of years, and falls, a perfectly full and heavy diamond, as it has thousands of times before, and splatters on my face, landing squarely on my nose.

Roatan

     There's another world under the surface. The sandy ledge gives way to a deep crevice, bordered by coral on either side. The rocky walls are alive with oranges and purples, coiled into brain-like blobs and veiny webs fanning out over the coral. On the bottom, seaweed and depth invite darkness, and small flickers are all that suggest scavenging fish. Bigger fish dart through the coral labyrinth, and a large emerald fish simply holds out its fins and wiggles the edges to slip past my right.

      I can only hear my breathing through the snorkel, mechanical and hollow. In. Out. In. Out. A school of yellow stripes dances beneath my flippers, inviting. I push the last of my air out and spit out the plastic mouthpiece, before sinking beneath the surface and pushing down to meet them. Sudden silence. All sound disappears, lost under the crystalline water. Pressure comes next, just a few more feet under and I can feel it inside my mask, pushing into my eyes, my nose, popping my ears. I kick and swim down farther, until I'm surrounded by the utterly fearless group of fish. They're curious, and bump up around me. 

      I hear soft clicking now, growing louder as I get used to submersion. The reef crackles and pops around me, as fish feed and swim. The silence is gone, completely replaced by underwater chaos.
I look up, and I'm suddenly stuck by how deep I am and the burning in my lungs. For a moment, I'm entranced by the glimmer of reflecting off waves above, and a deep blue all around me, reminiscent of massive aquariums whose glass windows I'd stared through as a child.

     I don't dare kick off, scared of breaking the delicate balance, so I move my legs slowly, together, gently and rhythmically, kicking harder as I get nearer. I hit the surface hard, and gasp for air I didn't know I needed. Bobbing on top again, the world below is completely lost under the shimmering blue of the surface.

At the Buffet

     I think I love the way melted chocolate ripples more than the ripples of water. It's thicker and flows slower, with its narcissistic own sheen of dark browns. It piles on top of itself selfishly, gentle ribbons of chocolate upon chocolate, but only for a moment, before it melts into a puddle again. The fountain twirls it, spinning it into glory. I watch intensely through the plastic.

     "Want some?" Caught off guard, I stutter and nod. The woman who spoke takes a rainbow skewer of fruit and dips it under the fountain, expertly coating it as though it's an art. She smiles, as does one with experience does when introducing another to something new. 

     Hours later, I approach again, and timidly ask for another. Please. Something flits across her face, maybe exhaustion or annoyance, and without returning my smile, she dips it quickly and hands it to me, seemingly glad to be rid of it. I'm left confused, wondering what happened in between, and when, that let her start hating chocolate.

Costa Maya

     The sand moves below me, and I squeal as I trip over my feet. A tiny crab scitters away, leaving a twisted trail of tiny sideways footprints. I chase after it, childishly, until it dives under a tangle of leaves on the side on the beach. My focus into the sand brings a crowd. My parents, our guide, and two small children, a skinnier boy and a chubbier girl, both with dark hair and wide eyes, tanned skin that makes my sunburn ivory by comparison. We all stare at the half buried crab, as our guide pokes at it, prompting it to run again. Our group scatters as the crab escapes, and the children follow it, trailing shouts of Spanish behind them. They stare it down a tiny hole in the sand as I retreat into the shade with my parents.

"Go help it," prods my mother, "or they're going to kill it." Reluctantly, I hop across the hot sand back to the little crab and the kids. "Come on little guy," I coo, trying to coax it back to the weeds. The kids catch on and coo at it too, saying things I don't understand, but the crab understands none of us. The younger boy gives up and kicks sand on top of it, burying it. The girl squeals and shouts again, and this time I catch words.

"Muerto," she yells, "Está muerto." 

"No, no," I try to comfort, limited in high school Spanish. "No creo que está, um, esté muerto." Damn subjunctive. "Um, no debemos tocar. Su casa esta en las plantas. Yo creo." His house is in the plants. I think. I scoop my hands into the sand and sift through, finally bringing up a handful, and in the middle, a very scared and sandy crab. His left eye is tucked away in his shell and he hisses at me, blowing tiny bubbles. The two kids yell and follow as we race back to the plants. I drop it gently, and it latches onto a root and refuses to let go. Our sucess is interrupted by my mother, "Roo, we've got to go." I tell her I'm coming and wave adiós to the crab. 

The kids stare at me, "Hablas inglés?"I laugh and nod, "Sí, hablo inglés." 

As we're leaving the beach, our guide tells us a crab is called a cangrejo.
"But be careful," he warns, that's another name for..." lost for words, he strikes a pose, putting a hand on a popped out hip. He gives a little wave with his other hand and whistles. It's charades.
"Hooker?" we guess, "Dancer?"
"No," he says, "the men who..."
"Transvestite?"
Finally, he remembers the word he's been looking for. Gay! We laugh, all delighted with the translation and double meaning, and leave behind our tiny cangrejo.

Vacation!

Hello dear readers! I've been rather good about blogging more often lately, but vacation has stolen me away from the internet, forcing all of my musings into notebooks this week. As I edit and type them, I'll add pictures (my sister's a lovely photographer, see above) and post them here over the next few days. Much love!

Bruised Ego

       I wake up late with a headache, which pounds harder in complaints to the light. I pull myself up, disappointed to see that the rejection and unhappiness haunting me last night has congealed into an angry mess and settled onto the floor, refusing to be forgotten. I cough, choke, and fumble on the nightstand for water, knocking over a stack of books with clumsy fingers, before closing around a dixie cup, leaking with water that sat over night in lukewarm wet paper.

       Crossing to the dresser, I can see the bruise reflected in the mirror, having worked its way into the shadows under my eyes and corners of my mouth. A restless night has left me branded with frizzy hair and lines of creases pressed into my skin, leaving me with a faraway look racked with insanity that has come to naught. I reach for my phone, but the messages waiting threaten to press onto the bruise harder. It stays off.

       With nothing else promising to do, I trudge slowly to pull down the curtains, and curl up on the bed again, cradling my black and blue, in the fake cushioned darkness of late morning.

No More Than

"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
 -Francis Crick (one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA)

What a comforting offense that is.
Nobody can ever be better than you, or worse. Or matter more, or less. Rejection, cheating, lying, dreaming, hoping, fearing. Maybe Francis Crick is right, and it's nothing deep or meaningful, just cells and molecules and biology happening.  Everything anyone is and everything they feel and think and do, matters nothing, nothing more than nerve cell behavior. You cannot hate or judge people any more than they can you, you cannot criticize molecular behavior and blame a person for it.

Maybe it's comforting to believe that. But to believe that, you have to accept that everything about you is nothing more than nerve cells and associated molecules as well. What are you worth?

Crush

"Unfortunately the situation was so wonderful to me that each time I saw Tommy I melted in delicious giggles and was unable to form a coherent sentence. After a while he stopped including me in his general glances." -I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I love this. So childish, so quickly infatuated and forgotten. Keep my secret, dear reader, his name's just not Tommy.

Reading at Night

There's a in magic books late at night, when exhaustion and fear of the eerie silence of the witching hour play with the mind to coax stories off pages and into life.
I lie on my stomach on the bed, propped up on my elbows, caught in an shot of light cast by a single lamp. The rest of the room seems to be sleeping in the dark greys and shadows that have seeped in from the corners. The lamp is bent over to point directly at me, skimming over the book, highlighting the textures of the pages with little bits and shadows lost in daytime. The paper glitters and my fingers' skeletal shadows grow long and dance on the paper. Each fiber is delicately woven into the page, the delicately detailed and gently yellowed paper, pressed flat and flickering, fighting, as though they're alive and trying to unwind. The ink of the print seeps into them, staining the paper in letters. In the shadows and tricks of night, the ink can leak out of its perfectly shaped letters and move around the page. I hold my face far too close, my nose almost touching the sweet old stories, and I can read softly out loud, gently repeating the words the book gives me in a soft whispers, my lips moving, nearly bumping against the pages in soft kisses.
I'm lost in the brilliant words, stories, and I'm in love.

MIKA

So I was sitting there in the bar and this guy comes up to me and he said “My life stinks,” and I saw his gold credit card and I saw the way he was looking at people across the room and I looked at his face and you know, what a good looking face, and I just said, “Dude, your perspective on life sucks.” 

Think about that. I love MIKA. I think he's brilliant in so many ways.

When the Pup Grows up

"Just as Gavroche was relieving a sergeant who lay near a stone-block, of his cartridges, a ball struck the body.

'The deuce!' said Gavroche. 'So they are killing my dead for me.'

A second ball splintered the pavement beside him. A third upset his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that it came form the baulieue.

He rose up straight, on his feet, his hair in the wind, his hands upon his hips, his eye fixed upon the National Guards who were firing, and he sang:

On est laid a Nanterre,

C'est la faute a Voltaire,

Et bete a Palaiseau,

Cest la faute a Rousseau.

Then he picked up his basket, put into it the cartridges which had fallen out, without losing a single one, and advancing towards the fusillade, began to empty another cartridge-box." - Les Misérables

     This is possibly my favorite part of Les Mis. I find it hilarious, and beautiful, and darkly disturbing. Gavroche is the urchin, kicked out of his family and forced to live on the street. He takes it upon himself to collect cartridges to support the revolutionaries, and sneaks through the barricade to do so.

     I love his exclamation of "the deuce," his twisted argot way of shouting "what the hell!" So they are killing the dead. He ignores the fact that the shot was for him, and mocks them, mocks their war and the futility of it. Killing the dead. But even that's not enough. He stands and sings to them, fighting their shots with couplets as he comes closer.

"The people in Nanterre are ugly, 
It's Voltaire's fault,
And stupid in Palaiseau, 
It's Rousseau's fault."

     He hides and dances around, closer to them, and continues to sing. "Happy is my character," he tells them, "Misery is my possession." He laughs, disappears, reappears, escapes, returns. And the insurgents were scared. Racked with anxieties of fighting, they became panicked by the boy, the child, the strange fairy, the dwarf, dancing and singing through the fog, running faster than their bullets. They knew not what he was. And they fired. A young boy became an enemy. 

     They shot him in the face, and he starts his last couplet, "La nez dans le ruisseau, my nose is in the creek," and dies before his can blame his death, the fighting, all of the misery on Voltaire and Rousseau.