When I was twenty I convinced the appropriate people to allow me to live in a seedy apartment alone in the town where I went to school. I worked a part time job that paid well for a college student and I always had completely full coarse loads that kept me tapping away at my laptop until the wee hours every morning.
Everything about my apartment was ghetto. I lived in the basement, it smelled like mold and bug spray. The first week when I came home my neighbor was pressed against her window screaming for me to call the police. When I should have gotten in my car and driven anywhere but there, I went in my house called the police then called my friend Michael that lived a few minutes away to keep me company until the blue lights disappeared and the screaming went to a whisper. I think that he slept on my second-hand flip-couch that night.
When I moved into the apartment I signed one of those flood release forms and didn’t think a thing about it, until the hurricane came. I was evacuated. I went to a friend’s apartment where we played outside in the rain and mud, wrestling and laughing about how my place was likely underwater by now. The next day my mattress (I had no bed), had floated into the living room. My response? I laughed.
I had big dreams in that crappy apartment fighting cockroaches the size of my hand. Though I was maintaining an extraordinarily long distance relationship with my then army boyfriend and now husband, something in me still dreamed of being a big time New York City reporter. I made a pact with myself that if anything happened to my husband while he was in Iraq that I would dedicate my life to war reporting. The reality of my own jading and over-protection was too far in the future to see.
It was the year of my very first Orphan’s Thanksgiving! I don’t remember what I cooked, it was probably terrible, but I remember the people standing around my tiny ghetto apartment eating off of paper plates and enjoying one another’s company. It didn’t matter that we were poor and that all of my furniture came from the D.A.V. on the roof of my friend’s second-hand Ford Taurus. It didn’t matter that none of us were anybody yet and that we all had a great deal of potential to waste.
They were years of dial-up internet and no cable bills. It was me and the smuggled cat that still looks at me as if she remembers before, when it was just she and I and the red walled basement apartment filling up with water and over-sized dreams.
The pink orange light crept in where I thought there was no color left staining the backs of my eyelids. I felt the warm wash over me, it was like listening to a crashing wave before feeling it slowly start to drown you, lying face up on the shoreline. It came with no sound, no pomp and circumstance, the forces of life pushing you forward staining the sky in the dreadful candy colors not once, but twice every day. Nature was cruel like that, flaunting it’s tarty happiness in front of those of us living in the gray world awaiting death. I kept my eyes closed hoping that the clouds would come to save me, make everything gray and cold like me but my lids were paper thin and my skin burned even from behind the thick grungy glass. And this was just the Candy Land Morning, I’d have to make it to the evening showing without swallowing it with a hand-full of painkillers and a bottle of scotch. Color nauseates me.
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It reminds me of his fingers playing over my skin, the pink of the evening sky working over me, bathing me in it’s fabrics. I watch as the world silently shifts each second changing the hues in a dramatic way. Sunset was every day’s forbidden lover, touching her, molding her, changing her, making her feel things that the pale blue day couldn’t. It was a shame that other people didn’t notice how she bent to him calling him back to her flaunting her beauty in his changing light. He touched her softly whispering words of love, he would be back tomorrow, they would play again, she would orbit slowly turning towards him, he would watch bathing her in his most brilliant rays. Two lovers playing cat and mouse. How cruelly beautiful it all was, how fortunate I am to see it all.
I watched time like a bird moving without care to anyone. It ticked and fluttered sometimes moving so quickly that my eyes couldn’t see it, other moments it sat stationary watching a spot on the ground as if it would open up and swallow us both.
I watched it knowing that time was the master of all things. Doling out too much or too little of itself as it saw fit, never being what we tried to make it. We are simple minded people, never satisfied with what we’re given, always hoping for something different. Time knows. Time always knows.
I find it hard to open up to even those closest to me. I find myself hiding awkward pieces, the feelings with jagged edges, the ideas with with twisting roots. I’m afraid to be so exposed, to wonder if I’ll be cared for or if someday I’ll watch as my being is tossed about as if it isn’t attached to my deeply rooted emotional instability.
I was thinking today about the scars of my past that still hurt when they’re spoken of. The things that have been so greatly misunderstood, the things that I misunderstood as they were happening. They’re those stories that get brought up in mixed company when my worlds collide, those from my past and those from my present. I don’t like when my worlds meet, it’s hard for me, I’m unrecognizable from who I once was, but sometimes those things hold on and creep out to cut you open again when you hoped that they were dead.
I was a terribly imaginative child (big surprise), I made up stories for as long as I can remember. There was always a doll, or animal, or Gumby-esque clay blob going on an adventure, saving a princess, running from bad guys. When I learned to write I wrote little stories and adventures and passed them out to my family.
The older I got the more solidified into my psyche the need for storytelling became. They started visiting me then, I didn’t understand them as I do now, the images that dance across my ceiling and walls when I’m just about to drift to sleep. They embedded themselves in me and I didn’t know what to do with them. I honestly don’t know that I was aware of what I was doing, but I started telling stories again only I told them as if I believed that they were true. I clung to every word as if they were my only friends, and at some points in my life, they were. I wanted so much to believe that I lived a special life, I didn’t realize that I already was, how many others could see stories as I did? These stories got me in a lot of trouble, storytelling made me into a liar, a creep, a weirdo, a freak. Storytelling got me mocked and spat at, it socially tore me apart.
I’m almost thirty and I am still haunted by those stories that my friends from the past like to bring up for a good laugh. They don’t realize what they do to me, how it tears me at the seams all over again. They don’t know that those scars from my past have kept me so reclusive in my present life, that I won’t open up to people, that I’m afraid to let anyone in. I don’t want people to know me.
Though I’ve since grown to understand who I was becoming, though I control the stories now, keep them to paper or tucked away inside of my head. I do still hunger for an exciting life, for adventure, for something new that makes my heart flutter, but I avoid telling my stories as if they’re true. I have an entire arsenal living inside of me, and to the average person, that’s a terrifying thing.
I don’t like the general public to know that I watch images dance in my head, that as they’re speaking to me so are the characters, whispering their stories, hoping that I’ll put them on paper, make them as real to someone else as they are to me. I don’t like average people to know that I make up worlds and destroy them, that I kill innocent women and children, that I make love to strangers who quickly become my own personal antagonist gnawing away at parts of me. I don’t like them to know that a genuine concern is my eventual madness, the day when the stories will take over again and I’ll tell them as if I believe they’re real, and I will, and there will no longer be moments of clarity or a time of recovery. I don’t want people to know this.
She was the kind of girl that got lost a lot on the way to her destination, not because she was dim but because there was so much to see between here and there. She grew up to be the kind of woman that forgot who she was on occasion and needed to be reminded; she remembered the look in a stranger’s eyes, the smile of someone she loved once, a touch.
She was a woman that would be lost for days at the time in the sea of her own mind, bobbing about aimlessly, memorizing the individual bubbles in the frothy waves; the taste of salt that stuck in the cracks of her lips. She knew that one day she would drown there, that there were few people that could navigate the seas well enough to bring her out, and fewer still that she would allow to sail her back towards land. She would lie still and feel the ocean lapping hungrily around her, lifting and dropping her tiny body like the spec in the foreverness that she was. She drank in the feeling of nothing and feasted with the beast that gnawed at the corners of her limbic system.
When the motion-sickness washed over her she emerged, bubbled and popped quipping as if she never knew the sea and the deep purple gray of the saddest sky.
She Writes Darkness
