Death Daydreams
I looked out onto the glass of ocean and was home. I had always admired Virginia Woolf, her lackluster determination to walk. And keep on walking. As the water crept into her nostrils and to the back of her throat. I wondered how many stones she had chosen to fill her pockets. Had she planned her outfit for that day? Were they cargo pants of sorts—of the time or had she merely plopped on her usual house dress and closest overcoat. Then I’d let my thoughts meander to my own wardrobe and think about the pitiful lack of pockets at my disposal. I’d have to diversify.
I could never seem to float properly, even in the ocean. My feet would sink slothenly to the bottom, tugging me down with them as my neck would strain to convince my head that it, alone, could hold my body above water. It never did. But my instincts to breath another breath never quite could let go either. I’d sink, and stare. Mesmerized. Maybe I could breathe under water like Darrel Hannah in Splash. If I just took one breath. Then I’d know.
But I never did. I wondered, with my evident lack of buoyancy, would I take fewer stones than Virginia? Maybe my wardrobe wouldn’t hinder me after all. I couldn’t float! Perhaps, only a couple of weightier ones would be enough to do the trick. Zip pockets, of course, would be the best. Maybe ones with the little safety hooks for anti-pickpockets. I had, of course, never seen those in actual stores. Nor would I—in most likelihood—really want to be caught dead, in the most literal of senses, wearing anti-theft cargo pants and a multi-layered Woolworth’s overcoat (it seems like someplace like Target or Woolworth’s would have coats with effluent zippers and snaps). Oh and the shoes, the shoes would really have to be clunky. Even though I was already a sinker, some sort of lead tipped boots would really add a ‘you’re not getting out of this one’ touch to it. It was useless. I would be found. Dead. Bloated and looking like a deer-hunting, pocket-protecting dyke. How had Virginia done it with such grace?
Unfortunately, not only the outfit was in my way. I kind of liked my life. Most of the time. I could honestly tell people when they asked the oh-so-intriguing question of ‘how are you’ with “fine” and mean it. I was fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Great, even, at times. And it was unbearable.
I watched the waves, sitting in a peaceful meditation stance to let the infrequent passerbys know ‘She’s healthy! She’s doing yoga. It must be some sort of enlightened meditation. Ahh… How nice. And by the ocean too.” My thoughts dipped. I was good at lying. Lying to myself and lying to others. I hated them. Not just one, or two, or three even. ALL of them. Disgusting. Boring. Sickening. And I was the pugnacious Leader of the Pack. I was a Pied Piper. Leading them to their little mass graves in my mind—one by one.
Of course, they all loved me. And really, I loved them too. I thought about all of them as I sat by the ocean, breathing deep Buddha-belly breaths into my taught stomach. With each meditative breath, the fiery knot curled its’ fingers just below my exposed ribs, invadin my lungs. Could I kill myself with my own breath? Did I even need to fantasize about dear old Virginia? How dramatically fabulous would a self-imposed ulcerated internal organs beyond repair look? Oooh. ‘She was loved by so many. And died tragically, yet so strangely poetically, of an ulcer of the heart. It must have been over the anxiety of the beauty in the world that she tried to capture in her work.” Yes. That would be a nice one. But a little too flighty and not very likely.
I was a pragmatist. And my stomach did tense into knots at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was anxiety. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was some sort of hidden tumor, ready to take me down without my strategic planning and foresight. I didn’t know. But I hated it. I hated it for being out of my control. I hated it for knowing that it was in my control and being anyways. I could release it, if I concentrated enough or distracted myself. However, the moment I would realize that it was released, then it would reappear with its ugly little fangs around my upper intestine (heart sounds so much more romantic, but it was really the shit-train duct).
Yes. I was home. The ocean and me: Two peas in a pod. Two deep vats of bacteria and filth combined with copious amounts of water: ready to wipe out a village or a fleet of ships at any moment.
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White Walls
The white walls in Geoff’s bedroom plunged me deep into a psychiatric daydream. It was a recurring one: me in a white gown with speckled blue flower pattern. Mental hospital. Insanity abounds. I throw myself gleefully on the cold linoleum floor, prostrating myself in slow motion as orderlies and nurses rush to find a way to make the madness stop. The screeches emanate from my slobbering, cracked lips as I piss defiantly in my pants. The temper tantrum continues as fellow mental crack-ups watch with mouths agape. The monkey show! The cracker box lady is at it again! Come one, come all ladies and gentleman. Is she a grown woman or is she a small child? You won’t know until you come and watch this fantabulous, eerily annoying temper tantrum extraordinaire!
This vivid little fantasy of mine didn’t always come with white-walled background. An extra long line at the supermarket could spur another like-minded gaunt down tantrum-fantasy lane. As could a particularly nice, stuffy restaurant. If only! If only adults---a certain ME, in particular—could just throw nice little fits occasionally that involved gesticulating violently on the floor and screaming at the top of one’s lungs. It was the kind of action that only epileptics and mentally handicapped were allowed. But it was truly an unfair, dumbfounded societal rule and I, for one, was going to let my imagination continue to run wild-as-horses with this one. Unlike others, it was this kind of fantasy that would bring a happy little smirk to my mouth.
Geoff peeked around the door with a blue towel at his waist. A timid smile pressed his lips apart to reveal a tantalizingly jagged-toothed smile.
“Hey,”
“Hey you. “
“Well, I’m magotted.”
“Interesting choice of words. I take it you mean your tired, huh?”
“That would be another way to put it.”
I smiled loosely as I cat-stretched my way into Geoff’s arms. His towel hung seductively over the edge of the bed to reveal what looked like stretch marks on his milky thigh. My eyes strolled from one etched line to the other, imagining the awkward tweeny Geoff sprouting instantaneously into the oh-so-masculine body draped around me.
“Did these hurt?”
I dabbed at the cat-claw designs while putting on my best sympathy pout.
“These what? “
Geoff wrenched his arm around and glanced at his exposed side. “Nah. Nope, not a thing.”
“Oh. I was hoping there was some delectable tale of suffering behind these battle scars. But alas."
I winced at my own attempt at small talk and we both began to laugh. Geoff smothered me in a kiss-laugh .
“I burned a movie for us to watch.”
“Oh, really?”
“Hah. Well, um. It’s The Muppet Movie. I thought we could watch it when it snows. “
Snow? It was mid-September and snow was a long way off, even if it was New York. Not only had Geoff somehow remembered the off-topic rave reviews I had given about Muppet Treasure Island (really, a cinematic gem of a masterpiece, if I do say so myself), but he had also dropped the future bomb smack into my unprepared lap.
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Crazy is Just a CFL Away
You talk at me with your stain-soaked I “heart” NY t-shirts over sagging breasts and an eighties-esque headband. “There are always the lies”, you say, through a dangling bit of phlem stuck to your plump bottom lip.
Toothless. Sauntering. Swinging. You are Republican with too much make-up who still wants to “save energy”, even though she doesn’t believe in global warming. Sunken face. Stuck in Woodstock. Paranoia.
Talking at me. Talking at me. Talking at me.
Smile. Smile.
Talking at me.
I reply, “Well, I’m not sure which lies you are referring to. Could you perhaps be more specific?”
You were concerned about me being relaxed in the photo. Do you take pictures of people with your little disposable camera and paste them on your walls? Or do you put them methodically into journals all night and day?
It was the first thing you said when I came to the security desk, “I’ll take your picture”.
Well, thank you.
There you were, an hour later. Hovering behind other info table loiterers, a nervous smile, “You learn a lot by reading. I learn from reading. I didn’t finish high school. My father was from Naples. Naples, near Sicily. He was a tailor. He used to wear a three-piece suit.”
Shuffle Shuffle. Three front teeth. Blue bead necklace.
“He wore a three-piece suit. I used to work for the YMCA. You know the old YMCA. That was when I was 18. I’m sixty. I stopped high school. You know, when President Kennedy was shot. My sister lived in a six family house in Bed Stuyvesant. Well, my dad gave it to her. I went to Florida and they said ‘take care of your brother’. And I’m five years older and I knew what that meant. She was supposed to pay things but they keep cutting my cable down. I had more and more, you know, the pay-per-view channels. But now they’re gone. My dad was, you know, they thought he was in the family. You know, the mafiosa. I met Joe Torre. I’m Italian. I speak Italian fluently all the time. I like those Italian and Spanish guys. Fiesty. You know what I mean, hot blooded.”
You grasp our joint reality for a second and sign up for a list that you don’t care about. Take some more brochures because you just can’t get enough. Go ahead and read.
Get more afraid about the poisons in your house, in your food, in your clothes, in our air, in the water. Don’t worry, you’re not the only paranoid one. We just have better drugs and expensive yoga studios.
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The First Days of American High School
It’s all the latest fad, just like the half-hour lunch breaks at the American highschools, “I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing. Are they trying to make it miserable?”
Well, live the American dream for a few months. See how it feels. I hope it sucks. I hope you want to run kicking and screaming from suburban back-yard, sickly blue over chlorinated swimming pools and hairsprayed cheerleading does. I hope you want to call me every night and tell me what’s going on and who you talked to and what they said and what you’re going through and who you’re into and where you think you’re going and where you think you’ve been. I hope the trappedness of endless lawns and cookie-cutter mansions with collapsing mortgages and leased cars wither your soul. I hope the big-screen TV with surround sound and leased cars boil your blood.
I hope you want to live your dreams. I want you to see the world in your own way, but similar to mine. To experience life similarly—to be on the same wavelengths. To be able to speak the same metaphorical languages without translation or struggles. I want you to live with us in New York for a while and camp out and discover life and become adults together.
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Imagining Myself
[Imagining myself] is not equivalent to the image I have of how others view me---self---“isness”, you say. I is what? I is full. I is busy in my mind---like the monkey brain that you tell me about in your budda-esque philosophy-on-tape (or cd) that so keenly represents the lack of memory in my own head. I don’t remember things. I don’t remember conversations, people, names, philosophies…but I manage to keep embedded in my grey matter the images of you.
Of you, small girl fiddling with your sushi on the Manhattan street steps in the delicate white dress that doesn’t quite cover your pink-and-white pampers.
I remember you: the table in the midst of a preschool room, covered with UNO cards and sticker albums awaiting the open of childhood trading schemes.
I remember the insignificant, the little, the unnoticeable, the ineffective, the vibrant, the seeing. How is it that it takes 28 years to learn about your own memories? Or to even have the clue that they exist in such a definitive manner?
Am I as flawed as I think I am on those cavernous days of self-doubt that come without you knowing it? Am I as confused as the flitting about, bee-buzzing, scattered thoughts and “to do” lists that run through my head obsessantly? Was I so much better ‘before’?
Is this the thinking of August 27th, 2007, or the dooming, looming, freakishly scary and fateful pattern that I think it is?
You think I am a strong woman. You think that I have the ideal life. You think that I am an adventurer, an achiever, a woman who’s “got it all”. ‘Inside and outside’, he says. Yup, she’s got beauty in both. It’s sickly sad that you see that as a constant, but I manage to doubt it constantly.
You see confidence—I feel jelly.
You see beauty----I see pimples.
You see smarts----I see potential for ‘not living up to my potential’.
Aha…aha moments.
You see long legs----I see flabby calves.
You see perky breasts---I see prominent ribs.
You see ‘you could be a model’---I see, I was, and I wasn’t one of the best.
Can I live up to my own expectations for what I could be? Is it what I should be? My egocentric, inflated-head potential is so massive that it tears me down consistently and constantly. She’s got the Ivy League degree. She’s got the support. She’s got the love. She’s got the body. She’s got the freedom. She’s got the studio. She’s got the connections. She’s got the motivation (at least you think I do). What’s next?
If you read my journal---which used to be a sketchbook---is now angry writing about life---about boys, usually. About frustration, cycles, littleness, timidness, jealousness, pettiness….weakness, so little and so disgusting. And so harsh----harsher on me or on others? Aha. Aha. Right or wrong? Good or bad? Do those thing exist and does it matter?
My confidence seems to be hiding out in a dark cave. Tunneling its way into the coal mines with the trapped----choking on black lung and carbon monoxide poisoning. Death.
I’ve been imaging death sequences of late---perhaps starting in the past few months. Seeing trucks on the highway skid out---and BOOM! Imaging myself to be a psychic or a clairvoyant, seeing into the future---therefore, relinquishing the reasoning behind wasting mental imaginings and energy on doom.
Rationalization.
Ration-ally-zation.
Ration-foe-zation.
The power of the mind; The power of my mind seems to be immense. There are so many stories, so many narratives that cycle over and over. There is such a long “to do” list that encroaches on my mental energy.
Aha. Aha.
Were these “to do” lists there before and I’ve just forgotten them? I haven’t seemed to archive them like the images of red shoes against a green lawn. They haven’t stuck to the sides of my caramel coated teeth. Or, perhaps, they don’t exist.
In my image of myself: I cling to freedom. I retract from powerlessness. I quest for order without bars. I yearn for systems without restraint. I dig for acknowledgement without forcing. I teeter between being the ultimate in “doing” and feeling as a lazy person inside. All or nothing. But tired of struggling. Looking for an easy path, but never choosing it. Fear of status quo? Of normalcy? Of weakness? Of following directions?
Aha. Aha.
Have I always seen a beautiful woman and felt threatened? Always wanted to be the best or near the top of it? Have I often felt small and deflated? Far from at peace?
Am I caught in the insipid undertoe of malignant thoughts?
