ipanema

A simple silence; the look of longing in your voice, your smile. The serious stare that seeps from your eyes. They darken; a firmness in your voice. I can’t tell what you have

been thinking but know that you are contemplating death. Hustle, hustle.

I watch the pattern of light behind you: blurs of reds, goldenrod, and charcoal. The building has a smell, the back of the building with its shifting brick and endless decay. The

linoleum is cracked that I step on, but I will not submit to failure.

The dust falls, sliding down the long, strong whitewashed boards.

Everything is in slow motion; the world has stopped its violent spin for a few milliseconds of bliss.

I say, “I am so happy I could kiss you.”

You say, “Do it then.”

A deft movement as you draw me near. I scramble for my mind but I am mindless. Our lips brush together and I say, “No, I can’t.”

We fumble to the floor all the same, at a loss of our sanity and free will.

”…..tall and tan and young and lovely

the girl from Ipanema goes walking

and when she passes each one she passes goes “ahh”

when she walks she’s like a samba

that swings so cool and sways so gently

that when she passes each one she passes goes “ahh”

oh but he watch her so sadly

how can he tell her loves her?

yes he would give his heart gladly

but each day when she walks to the sea

she looks straight ahead not at he

tall and tan and young and lovely

the girl from Ipanema goes walking

and when she passes

he smiles but she doesn’t see..”

fight or flight

 Life is contradictory in that to survive, we assume we must survive alone, yet we are generally made for procreation. After we find ourselves, the next logical chapter is to test this,

and put someone else’s needs before our own. In our twenties, we experience our first real taste of loss, whether through marriage, deaths, or loss of friends and the promise of

romance or the lawfulness of the universe. As we age, everything falls away and all things must come to an end. We will lose our parents, our friends, our homes, and possibly

even our children. And they will likely lose us. Life is impermanence. Life is possibility. So we must evolve. We must take this time, our only time in this life, and transform it. We

must push good energy out into the world, be kind and good despite all of the unkindness that surrounds us, and remove the barriers that inhibit transfiguration. We must

appreciate the beauty of a smile, of laughter, of the forest, of the holy mountain, and of the perfections and imperfections that exist within and without. You must give in to change,

and trust in God and life, embrace the uncertainties of it all, and jump in sometimes. It is the only way we can learn and grow to our full potentials. Inactivity is lazy. Inactivity forms

habits, hurts others, and destroys integrity. Be happy, be industrious, and don’t fight against life for fear of the unknown. Take a risk.

excavation

 I stare into the great divide of Time. Standing in the middle, there are so many possibilities and so many failures. I find myself testing the limits of life and life testing its limits within

me. At times, I feel as if I am pure and at one with the universe. At other times, I want to disappear into the ground altogether— to become bark, twigs, and pine needles.

There is a passion in life that relinquishes us from pain. There is a small light, like a distant star, that flickers in our hearts and grows as we distance ourselves from the maelstrom

of disillusionment. I became the recluse; I became the hermit. I spent almost a year alone, on a star-crossed voyage and searching for tranquility, to realize that by closing myself

off from the intimate experience of human existence, I was stuck in a perpetual state of stagnation. It was only by losing everything that I gained back the happiness and love of

the self. To grow, we must become vulnerable. We must allow ourselves to experience the pitfalls of life, no matter how much it destroys us. I have been twisted and broken apart

more times than I would ever like to admit. But, after all of this, how strong I am now. I no longer fear death, for i have been reborn. If we shut down and put up walls against that

which is good and pure, we become feral and foolish. We become that which we despised in our significant others. We become heartless and cruel and forget beauty and

honesty.

But it is a choice. We choose to learn from our experiences, and we choose to find a mode of transfiguration that alters the fabric of Time. With distance from the past, we can

analyze and rebuild. We can be less biased and capable of seeing what is real and what is theory. We can see our weaknesses and our strengths, and see where the fault lies

and how we can alter our own futures to preserve our pasts.

I have walked to the desert. I have been lost in the valleys, struggling for air, waiting for the sand to bury me inside myself permanently. I have been empty space and full of life. I

have experienced the depths of sorrow where one feels as if their entire body with spontaneously combust— where you feel there is no respite but to feel powerless and helpless.

I have experienced losses that would injure a weaker man, and I have seen God and the Devil in utero. I have seen the night eclipse, sitting in the corner of a darkened room,

waiting for it to overtake me. I have lost a forming child, with blood on my hands, and I have sacrificed myself and torn out my own heart from my breast to save face.

I have drowned myself in drink, cursing my failures at not being able to keep it all together, and extended my mind outward to where I became everything I most feared. I became

a creature that existed purely for pleasure, the carnal creature of night that only arrived at decision and derision through instinct and primitivism, and not a day goes by that I don’t

pay for this reversion to savage nature. By experiencing the loss of reason and refinement, and allowing my lower nature to take hold, I only fell further away from myself, and

lashed out at those that I loved the most. To become the darkness, the wilderness, I had to become all the things I hated in my significant other to experience what it meant to be

human, and ultimately to surpass that and become whole again. I fucked without feeling, I left without warning, and into the wilderness I became predatory and ultimately hated

that which I became. Once, a creature of love and light, i became cruelty, dishonesty, and all those hurtful things that bring out the malevolent nature in mankind.

It was in this rebellion that I isolated myself from the world to regain my humanity. I became the lone wolf, I hunted my prey and returned to the primitive hut, and embraced the

rawness of Nature and slept in the arms of the mighty spruce. I went out into the world shooting arrows and was forever transformed by it. i became silence and became the cyclic

nature of seasons. I became a ghost of my former self, and I projected myself into the world wiser and humbled by the passage of time. I traveled great distances to live on the

cruz of experience, to allow myself freedom from the structures and plans and lists. I became a seeker of truth, and beauty, and knowledge. Like the phoenix, I was reborn from

the primitive into civilization. as in all things, to live we must experience death. And so, in 2009, I accepted my fate and embraced change.

But, there were still these great walls. Masses of stone and aggregate rock, in which i could not see out and others could not see in. I built up a wall around myself so high which

had once felt so safe, and now felt like a prison ward. I was haunted by the past, afraid of the future, and afraid of giving up my freedom for fear of ruin. I was afraid of losing

myself again in someone else, and ultimately afraid to experience being loved and loving because it is something I had never experienced on a “normal” or “healthy” level without

extreme sacrifice. I had worked so hard , jumping through this fire, to regain my freedom that I feared being vulnerable. It is human instinct to run away from the fire, to run away

from everything that could potentially hurt or break us. So, in my walled fort, I ran around fighting invisible battles. I built a roof, I locked all of the doors, and without windows I was

enshrouded in darkness yet again. I had spent so much time trying to build a barrier between myself and the pain that awaited me outside, that I was beginning to become less

happy and unfulfilled. Reality had set in, as it always does. The icy waters inside my heart were replaced with the lukewarm, and in the darkness I began to feel cold for the first

time. I began to grasp at the cave-like soil, to smell the frigid air, screaming in agony at the error of my deliberation. I had planned everything to perfection, but did not plan on

isolation breeding intense loneliness. Perhaps it was reparations for my previous cruelty, but after two years of failing to be moved by humanity, I cried in my fragility. I cried for the

loss of love, cursing myself for my weakness and foolishness. I cried because there was nothing left to do but grieve the loss of innocence, of childhood, of unrequited love, and of

the falsities of modern romance.

A shaft of light broke through the darkness, and when the dust settled, I embraced the warmth. And i was hurt by its inert beauty, and I felt that this time, I must surely perish. But I

did not. I had given up my deviance, to become pure and humbled by it, and in finding my true nature the walls began to fall away. In the end, i stood in a clearing, mobile and

unafraid, and there were trees, sunlight, and air— beauty all around. I had recognized that life is a transient state, and that although bloodied and bruised my heart was at the

time, it could be mended. I took a sewing kit out of my pocket and stitched the wounds back together. It stung, this needle’s new sensation of fear and mistrust, of taking risks and

the potential for more wounds, but it only hurt for a short while before it healed. And despite years of failures, of heartbreak, and bouts of intense sadness or longing, I would take

the needle and thread and sew myself back together again. Time may not heal all wounds, but the body is quite malleable and able to resurrect itself in dire times. With faith, all

things are possible.

Thus, in twenty-six years I have experienced abandonment, ecstasy, countless betrayals, transformation, pain so harsh that you felt crushed by it, impulse-driven actions,

happiness so profound your heart might burst (but it doesn’t, of course), disappointment (in myself and in others), jadedness, isolation and seclusion, harsh criticism, intense

anger, lunacy, tenacity, debilitating depression, indifference, apathy, empathy, tragedy, multiple deaths, misguided love, broken bones and broken hearts, confusion, longing,

passion, fear that shook me to the marrow, mistrust, failure, lack of faith.....but despite these mixed emotions endured, I never truly lost who I was and the goodness that was in

my heart. And despite how you feel right now, someday you will see that the cruelties of others are no match for your good heart. When we are hurt, we become blind. We choose

not to see how our actions transform us and how we affect others, for fear of having to scrutinize ourselves. Instead, we run. We build up walls. We resurrect the night and

become carnal.

We live on pretense for our rations because it is far easier than experiencing loss again. We look for shelter within ourselves or within the inner cavities of others. We believe we

fear nothing, and create distance between ourselves and others, convincing ourselves that we don’t need anyone or anything to sustain us. We even throw ourselves against the

rocks, like crests in an ocean, believing that we no longer fear God or isolation— that we are immune to human emotion; that we have overcome that fatal flaw of existence. We

spin out of our reality and into the storm, all the while believing we have made ourselves whole and that there is stillness were we stand. We do not see the broken bodies we

leave in our wake. We destroy what we love and push everything away that might love us because we feel inadequate and childlike again. We may run through the forest and feel

free and unafraid, but as we tumble down the hill in our haste to experience everything we felt we did not have to freedom to do before, we find ourselves much further down the

incline and must climb our way back up again to the precipice of the existential.

I created a self-defense mechanism when I was hurt and at times revert back to this behavior. I became extremely critical or angry— I would be hateful and vengeful, like a

termagant, forgetting my morality and good nature; my aversion to conflict. There is a warrior within me who fights against injustice and the cruelty of man. I felt that by defending

myself, it was confidence and shutting my emotions off from the situation, I would maintain my integrity and independence. While this impulsive behavior is not always easy to

navigate or control, it leads predominantly to a cold and calculated degree of self-control. I would create an allowance of slights against me, but afterward would become cold and

apathetic and completely removed (which is what happened with Brandon, Graham, and Chris). And in doing so, I realize that the greatest sin of existence is to be apathetic. It is

far better to exhibit anger or tears, to admit that we are human and fallible at best, capable of feeling, than to become like a stone and immoveable.

It is when we open our hearts to others, and take the blinders off, that we may heal ourselves. Before that, we stubbornly only believe that we are “healing,” yet in reality we are

simply being cowards and running away from our problems due to fears and insecurities. It is instinctual to preserve the self. It took me several years to come to terms with this,

and it is unfortunate, because in reality life is far too short to spend years to come to such an elementary conclusion. Most human motivations are caused by manifestation or by

fear. It is the people who process their emotions, work through it, and try again that master their fears. And truthfully, failures are successes in that they get easier as time goes

on— we learn from them. We must live through tragedy to feel alive. It is a system in which I will never understand and causes me to question the kindness and benevolence of a

higher power. The Buddhists believe the way to Enlightenment is to suffer and experience pain. And yet, I cannot fully disagree. There is a very transformative quality to pain, and

death and life are multifaceted yet not dissimilar. That which breaks us, shakes us, bends our wills, and brings us to our knees ultimately transforms us. You were a different

person behind the curtain than when the curtain was removed, and so will be a different person five years from now when everything from the present is just a distant and

profound memory.

i am trying to break your heart

cruel summer

september rain

The rain beats down on the pavement outside my office; the stale rattle creating a tapping noise on the steel siding like the rhythmic pulse of warring drums. I find myself staring off in a stupor, my memory serving correctly of a time long past when I was very young.

I didn’t have many friends that would visit because my folks had a house on a ridge that was about fifteen minutes from town or so. Most people didn’t like to come up in those parts because the area was very steep and

the townspeople were not accustomed to driving outside of the town anyhow. Our house was built a few years before I was born and was, as my mother would state- “assbackwards.” It was true that it was built with the

front door facing towards the valley below, rather than facing the street, so people would constantly wander to the back door rather than the front. When they first built the house, my parents had the acreage cleared off so

that one could view the large valley. By the time I was five, however, it had long since grown up. I’ve seen pictures, though, and it was quite a sight indeed, especially around my birthday when the leaves turned golden.

Our home was rather large for the time, even before we built the addition to it, with spacious rooms and huge skylights. I remember many a time watching the Dallas Cowboys with my dad, eating dinner on a TeenageMutant Ninja Turtles tin tray, unaware of what football was about but just enjoying the rare time I was able to spend with him. My sister and I shared a room when we were younger, and I remember my mother building elaborate walls of canvas and 2x4s to separate our areas. She painted popular characters on them that we liked and from an early age she would have us do workbooks and craft with her. I remember her teaching me how to cook and my favorite things to cook were French toast, “cheesy” potato soup, and sautéed mushrooms. We had a big wicker chair that I used to sit in and I would draw dinosaurs and houses and people that

looked like monks. My sister and I would make elaborate tents out of sheets and pillows in our dining rooms, and pretend we were back in the olden times. My mother would let us play dress-up and although meek, my

big personality would shine through when I was play-acting. She felt I was a born actress.

For a kid in the late 80’s, the wilderness that surrounded me was full of adventure and mystery. First, there was the mysterious meteor hole in the woods on our property. It has eroded into a gully by now, but when I was

a kid it was a large conical hole in the ground. Then, down the street from us there was the “cow graveyard” where you could find the bones of cows from back when the ridge was farmland. Sometimes in the mornings we

could hear Cherokees chanting as they made their way through the woodlands in the valley below. We knew they were on our acreage, but in a way we understood that it was their land long before it was ours. I would

stand outside before we left for school, listening to the beautiful vocals that echoed out from the fog. In the fall, you could hear wild turkeys calling to one another and if you were lucky, oftentimes you could see 20–30 of

them through the underbrush. One time we found what looked like a fresh burial mound in our woods. We tried to dig to see what it might be (we assumed a deer, but it could have been a human!) but we became scared

and decided to let it be. After that we started hearing recurring noises every night near that area and often joked that it was the ghost of whoever was buried there. To this day, I bet one could hear the sound of footsteps

in the leaves as the ghost walked near the lights of the house only to turn back around again.

Nature was more a friend to me than anyone at school, and so after doing homework I would embark on a quest into the unknown. I would walk for hours into the woods, my tracks lost forever in a sea of leaves and roots.

I would call to birds and deer, play in the creeks, discover old buildings, look for caves, and play with earthworms. I did not feel like the master of my domain, but there was a sense of wilderness in me that I could not

ascertain by sanity’s standards. In the woods, I was wild. I was a Cherokee princess; an astronaut; an explorer; a warrior. I would study rocks for fossils, watch the clouds and name them, and curl up on rocks and draw

on them with pieces of shale and coal, imagining I was part of some ancient civilization. I would run barefoot at times, my hair unkempt, sometimes getting caught in briars and thistles. Lizards and snakes were fearful

allies, but I was fascinated with them and the writing spiders whose webs I would be careful to leave unharmed. The bats would come out at night, their little bodies fluttering in the lamplight as I would sit and watch the

moths gathering. I saw a Luna moth once and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever witnessed. My mother would take me out with the telescope and we would look for faraway planets. Sometimes we would

drive down to the Ponderosa and watch meteor showers for hours until well after midnight. On winter nights I would watch the snow drift down past the floodlights and when the blizzards would come in, I would wrap

myself up in a blanket and sit by the fireplace, listening to the wind howl and shake the trees as the snow would pile up outside.

My great-grandmother (Nana) gave me an Audubon nature book one year and so often I could be found with it, identifying insects and trees and speculating on the significance of feathers or remains I found on my

journeys. The bagworms would come out some years and their dingy cocoons could be found all over the plants and the trees and when we removed them, the green slime would get all over everything. Detested pine

beetles and Japanese beetles came in swarms over the years, as did the ladybugs, although I rather liked the cicadas and their mechanical drone that filled the air in the late summer. I used to climb up in our cedar trees

looking for cicada shells, marveling at how they stayed so perfectly formed. Click beetles would always get in our pool and I would save them from drowning, although I was always amazed by how they would jump right

back into the water and swim around. I would journey with my friend Ben and I would watch him find crawdads in the dried up creeks and search for big, red shiny mushrooms that we didn’t touch for fear of getting their

poison on us. I would often sit on the terra-cotta porch, playing with beetles and lighting fireworks that would leave black marks on the tile.

We had a pet cemetery near our shed for all of the animals that died. Our dog, Jesse, was buried there as well as countless fish, lizards, frogs, and birds that spent their brief lives with us. We raised ducks once and I was

very sad to have to give them to a neighboring farm when they became too old for us to raise anymore. We had iguanas for several years and my parents built a large habitat for them outside when they became too big to

stay in the house. We had plum and crabapples trees outside my house and my mom used to lift me up and let me pick fruit off of them during the summer. When we built the addition, the trees were cut down. We would

pick muscadines and I used to spit out their leathery skin and seeds which were almost impossible to eat, but they were delicious all the same.

fit to be tied (from mirim to perse; unfinished short story)

Sometimes we, as people, have to place ourselves in isolated situations to gain some sense of perspective in a world gone awry. At times, we may alienate ourselves to become more introspective

and retain our mental aptitude. I have spent the past few months alternating between being sociable and isolating myself from the world, trying to find answers to some of the questions that plague

my mind and heart. If I have isolated myself from you or caused you any grief whatsoever, I am sorry. It is not that I didn’t want to be around you, but simply that I couldn’t until I formed some

stratagem.

It has been almost a year since the bottom fell out and I find myself not much further than I was before; only wiser and obviously more vulnerable than I ever could have imagined. I am still in debt;

I still make mistakes with people/relationships intentionally and spend too much money on things I don’t need. I still feel like I am in limbo between where I want to be and where I am. There is so

much uncertainty in my life right now and I think that is what haunts me the most. It seems like the scales can tip one way or another and I could find myself in the affluence of wealth or in the

depths of despair. I think stability is a good thing for most people, but it is something I know I would not be satisfied with long-term, if I could be at all. In truth, if life were stable and uneventful, I

would be bored. I keep doing foolish things hoping to counteract my dissatisfaction with my life, but in the end I simply become miserable because I lose friends and the things that are most

important to me. I am happy with who I am, at the very least, but I feel like I should be doing more than I am right now. My friends who have been in this situation tell me that it simply takes time to

move past everything, and not to close myself off from life and love, but I am afraid. I want to run away to the hills of Oregon. I want to disappear into antiquity where no one will ever know my

shame or my wounded pride.

So this time is a time of reflection for me. I have begun to reevaluate every facet of my life and who or what I want to be involved in it, if anyone at all. It is a growing stage for me but also a chance

for me to realize where I purposely am sabotaging situations or relationships. What I have found, thus far, is that fear is my greatest motivation for self-destructive behaviors. I know how to push

buttons and get reactions from people; I know I purposely push people away because of my fear of attachment to them (and worse yet, I fear their attachment to me, if applicable). I have always

felt like I am temporarily here so forming friendships and relationships has been particularly stringent to me. Knoxville has always been a big part of my life, but I feel like I am just a visitor here, for

the most part. That is something that hasn’t changed since I came here. If it wasn’t for my home, I probably would not have stayed, honestly. I haven’t had a real home since the loft in Dayton all

those many years ago, so it is easy to see why giving that up is such a difficult task for me. I haven’t had a real relationship since my marriage ended, if that even counts as a relationship, and I

fear getting involved with someone because I fear losing myself again in them. I have hurt people these last few months, people that now I would have probably loved to be involved with longterm,

but was far too jaded by my failures to see this. My independence is necessary for me to be truly happy and although I know I will love and support whoever crosses my path, I don’t want to have

to answer to anyone for who I am, or change who I am to please someone. I have a zest for life and can be rash and impulsive at times and tend to keep myself extremely busy and these attributes

tend to be problematic for anyone I associate with. What I feel one day may be entirely different the next until I make up my mind officially, which usually involves many tests on the merits of people

and space to leave some rationality in perspective. I have been so scattered the past few years and am in constant motion that I don’t know if things will ever settle down again. I think settling

scares me, because I would much rather run away from my fears than to face them head-on. I am afraid of love because love equates suffering to me. All my life I have never been loved without

experiencing some sense of loss or pain. Even with my own family.

I habitually take on more burdens than I can manage, the burdens of others, because I sincerely want to help them find happiness. I have been doing this since I was a little girl, and I realize now

that this is an issue for me. In the end, though, I feel laden down with the weight of so much sorrow and animosity and this causes me to become greatly unhappy or irritable. These are two things I

don’t like, because I empathize with people and feel negativity very strongly (to the point it can make me ill- I do NOT like negativity in any form unless it is constructive). I overextend myself and

end up spreading myself too thin, or get too involved with the affairs of others, and then I have to take a step back out of the situation just to breathe and regroup (or risk losing myself again and

becoming severely melancholic). I wish it were only a boundary issue, but people will weasel their way in and suck the life out of me, and I let them do it because of this great love and compassion i

feel towards all things, despite all of the horrors I have witnessed.

Some may consider me selfish, changeable, or unreliable right now, and maybe that is the truth. I certainly feel this way. Many of you that have known me for years know that this isn’t who I am

right now and probably won’t be who I become, either. I have come to the realization that right now I haven’t the emotional clarity, dedication, or the drive to be a good friend, girlfriend, etc. Nor do

I have the time or patience, honestly, to put effort into what I feel are potential one-sided relationships. This has nothing to do with any of you and is purely my vehicle for transformation and

something I personally have to evaluate. In retrospect, I would say for the most part I am happy-go-lucky and enjoy life, but there is that 20% or so of my life that seems much unfulfilled or

dysfunctional and this is what I am reflecting on now. I am taking time to look inside myself and really find who I am and where I want to be, at least for the next few years.

I guess everyone goes through this stage of life in their 20s, when they recognize that they should have done more or been more in the first part of life. I feel like I made many, many errors,

whether professionally, financially, or emotionally, and that is something I am suffering for now. My greatest regret is not taking the full scholarship when it was offered to me in 2004, because I

would have finished college last year and not be having to wheel-and-deal just to survive a semi-comfortable life. I like the stability of having a home now but in the end I don’t like being tied down

by so many responsibilities and am always the eternal opportunist. At best, I feel I have accomplished more than many people my age. At worst, I feel as if I have alienated the very people I

consider valuable because I have taken my failures out on them or detached myself from them entirely, although I know they are not to blame for my unhappiness. If I have pulled you too close at

times, it is because your presence has caused something to change in me and it has caused me to panic. If I have pushed you away, it is because I am afraid of one or both becoming too attached

only for me to leave again. If I have done both, it is because a big part of me can’t imagine life without you and the other part of me is afraid of what that means. I’m afraid to fall in love again

because I am afraid of being hurt again and so I put up barriers or scare people away with my emotions. This is because I don’t want to look back in another 6 years and realize I made the same

mistakes again, or worse. The only difference is that in another 6 years, I will be much too old to pick up the pieces once again and regroup.

There were and are so many things I simply can’t talk about; So many secrets and dreams and ideals hidden in my mind that I can’t put into words. So many horrible, horrible things that

happened that fucked me up for such a long time. The abuse that went on for years is still with me and alters my perceptions greatly, much to my dismay. There are things that still bring

tears to my eyes; things that still sting and wound, years after they occurred. I can be so excited about the world in one moment but as soon as something changes for the worst, I become

frightened and immediately retaliate with force. My insecurities, my fears, and disappointments are so clearly evident on my face at times and the worst part is that I cannot handle feeling

vulnerable. Writing this alone makes me feel vulnerable, but I know the only way I will ever find some sense of inner peace is to develop a tougher skin. And because I think I owe all of you

an explanation for my frequent disappearing acts or occasional harsh criticisms and my coldness. It isn’t a bipolarity, so much as at times my life seems like a balancing act and I can’t keep

all the pieces in constant motion without losing some here and there. I do FEEL, I do care for you, and I don’t want you to leave because of my unpleasantness and aloofness. It is a mask.

In truth I am still a little girl, scared out of my wits, afraid of being abandoned and hurt yet again.

Because, in truth, I’m just not sure how I feel. When I see you, I can’t help but smile. I enjoy our time together and I truly want you and want us to be happy together. I think fondly back to

when we first met, the kindness you showed me, those long nights where we would talk for hours, airing our dirty laundry, and fall madly to the floor in a sea of arms and legs. I think of the

fights, the kinetic energy that runs between us, the loyalty, the love. And then I panic. I want to be free! I am single and want to stay that way! I don’t want to settle down, even if I would be

happy! It’s not even that I want to see other people, because my feelings for you are stronger than anything I could feel for them, but I don’t want to lose my freedom. I don’t want to lose

who I am in someone else, someone else. I don’t want to get hurt again or be vulnerable again, and so I shy away from you despite how much I want to be with you. It’s too soon, I keep

telling myself. I don’t want you to be my rebound. I want to fix what is wrong with me and then come back to you so that we can have a good life together. But I don’t want you to wait on me.

I want to see where this goes with you, but I don’t want to be tied down again. I don’t want us to fail and hate each other. When you yelled at me the other day for giving you the runaround,

it really hit home. I haven’t been very fair to you and I am so sorry. My feelings for you are true and valid, and my ambiguity is simply because I am afraid of everything. Out of the numerous

people i have dated or been involved with, no one has known me as well as Chris did, and now you. No one knows me inside and out, and it frightens me that you see through the veneer.

That you not only haven’t given up on me, but take my contradictory behavior with so much strength and compassion. You call me out for my transgressions when a weaker person would

simply vanish. And you vanishing from my life in these next few months, as I become more and more vulnerable to you and work through the hurt, is something I don’t think I can handle

right now. As independent as I am, and as much as I love my freedom, I can’t forget you. No matter how angry I am at you, or how much sense you make when I am acting irrational, at the

end of the day I don’t want to lose you. You have had such a profound effect on me in these last few months. You asked me the other day to be faithful to you, and I panicked. It isn’t that I

don’t want to. I keep telling myself, “It’s not going to work out, it’s not going to work out!” but I know in my heart it would work and I could potentially be happy with you for a long time.

The problem is that I convinced myself that I don’t believe in marriage anymore; don’t believe in relationships. I just believe in a self-sustained life, where I only have to depend on myself

and no one else. I don’t like being held accountable for my actions, I don’t want to be responsible or have to answer to anyone, and the trappings of love are less suited to me than lust,

which is fleeting. You keep telling me that I am simply afraid of being hurt, and hiding away because of these fears of my newfound freedom being stripped away. I think it is a fear of

loneliness that makes me prefer to be alone, you’re right on that. I just am so happy being by myself, because at least I am responsible for my own self-destruction in this way. It took my

trip out to Oregon’s wilderness to make me realize how much you mean to me, and even then I still can’t get past my own fears. I was sitting in the Columbia Gorge, it was pouring rain and

the light filtered through the douglas firs so vividly, and all I could think of was that you should have been there with me and not sitting back home, licking your wounds. Everything happened

so fast with us. I question “fast.” I have a hard time trusting to begin with, but I question “us” because I don’t know what it entails if we fail. Everything in my life that is meaningful falls

together very quickly but not always seamlessly. I used to think that if there were some hiccups that meant it was wrong, but despite the last many years of a failed marriage, I can say that

the first two were worth all of the pain and ultimate loss because it made me a better person. I don’t want to push you away, but I am. It is not a reflection on you— you probably are the right

person for me, but I am so blind right now and so jaded by love. I know I have told you that I am over everything, but in truth I am still well under it.

I guess what I am trying to say is that please just give me time. My feelings for you are valid, and despite my roaming around and experimenting to get it out of my system, if you are still

around in a few months and still want me, hopefully I will be in a better place so that we can give things a try. It has never been that I don’t want things to work out with us— we have such a

strong connection and mutual appreciation (and great sex, to boot) it would be foolish to throw that away. I just don’t trust myself right now, with you or anyone. I am still hurting and still

working through things, and I don’t want to drag you down with me if I fall apart again. But, conversely, I can’t seem to completely let go of this. So if i disappear for a while, it is not because

I don’t care about you, but because I don’t want to hurt you. I want to be ready for you. And most of all, I want to be ready for myself. I can’t heal myself if I am burying all of my energy in a

relationship, and it isn’t fair to you to make you wait on me to heal, because I’m not sure how long that will take. But please don’t give up on me. I realize I keep going back and forth on

everything, but it is only because I sincerely like you and I have faith that once I work through this, it will be good for us. So I want us to get to know each other, to test the waters of

vulnerability, but if I pull away at times it isn’t a reflection on you or our future. It is because I’m not ready yet. I don’t want to be without you, but I know the more I am around you the more I

will want what you want (and what I want with you but am afraid to try because of all that happened), and until I feel prepared enough to be there, I won’t be good for either of us. I’m not

trying to downplay my feelings for you— I just am saying that please don’t expect much from me right now. You have been putting a lot of pressure on me, and I realize I have brought that

on myself by the way I have been acting toward you, so believe me when I say i completely understand your frustration and impatience with me right now. Everything you have said I

completely deserved and I hope you can understand now that I keep pulling away BECAUSE I have strong feelings for you and not the other way around. No joke. I’m terrified because it

opens up hopes that I am not ready for and fears of idealism and mistrust that I haven’t worked through yet. I adore you and want this to work— so please just take everything with a grain of

salt right now. I haven’t treated you very well, have ignored you and said mean things, avoided you, and for that I am so sorry. Truly, I thought I was being strong, but I shouldn’t have allowd

my self-preservation to hurt you like I have. Being away from you is harder for me than you will ever know, but I HAVE to do it right now because I can’t get attached to this yet on the level

you deserve. And I hope someday we get the opportunity to do so, when I am better. Now I hope you understand why I have done all this, and hope you don’t judge me too harshly for it. I

am not in my right mind right now and you don’t deserve such ambiguity. And this is coming from a “glutton for punishment!”

pine needles

Sometimes when the rain falls, I remember. I remember the cold pane of the window, the way I would breathe in the old factory dampness. My face would be cold to the touch, pressed up against that

tempered glass. I would hear the rain fall swiftly, thudding on the roof, hitting the glass with effortless wandering as the drops fell to the street below. But that was long ago; another story of another time

when life was full of wonder and merriment.

Now, four years later, here I am, my face pressed against new windows in an old house, feeling the fall season climbing into the crevices; The rain swiftly pattering on the roof, daintily patterned with the

silvers and blues of the morning’s waning light. The hardwood floors creak as I set the table for breakfast, the coldness of the house invigorated by the lamplight above. It is very quiet here; quite peaceful,

in fact. The animals are still sleeping snugly in their beds, opening their eyes for just a moment to sense my passing shadow. I imagine they think of me as a giant, in this place.

The pine cones are falling now, the delicate branches drooping in the rain. The garden is starting to look sparse as the threat of winter slowly creeps in, but I imagine it much like a jungle in weather such

as this. I try to be quiet, moving across the room in mock silence, my bare feet softly gnawing against the hard planks. In the kitchen I stir my tea and fry the beignets, a lone candle guiding my way. I have

been reading a Sartre novel about Existentialism lately, so my thoughts are varied throughout the day as I expunge myself into that state of being. As I set my breakfast out to cool, I hear a familiar jingle

of my dog’s collar. She crawls out of the bed and stands at the doorway, looking at me quizzically.

I slip into my galoshes and grab a warm sweater, getting ready for the chill. Securing her harness and leash, I grab the umbrella and stand outside. She hates being out in the rain, so she does her

business quickly. It is a very quiet Saturday, I remark. The neighbors are still sleeping; the birds are sleeping. The world is asleep.

We enter the house and I dry her off with a warm towel. I always like wrapping her in a towel and holding her close because it reminds me of when she was a puppy and I used to bathe her. She was so

much smaller back then- I could pick her up in one hand practically! My cat peers warily from the living room, carefully taking stock of the motion occurring. He finally makes his way into the kitchen, his

nose lifted in the air to smell the beignets.

It is 6 AM. I’m not really sure why I am awake, honestly. It’s the weekend and I should be sleeping in, but it is so nice to know I have a day to myself to create; to ponder; to think; to dream. I don’t know

what I am doing today, but I have tons of lists of things I would like to do. I am eating breakfast now, the smell of tea and powdered sugar sifting through the rooms. The silence is almost stifling, but after a

while I hear cars pass by and know the world is waking up, too. I love the light here; the way it transgresses throughout the rooms and becomes oblique.

I stand in front of a round mirror on the wall, taking stock of myself. I have lost a lot of weight these past few weeks, but in some ways the peace in my face makes me seem healthier than I actually am.

My hair is disheveled, my teeth need a good brushing, but I look overall sane (although a bit sleepy). I walk into the bathroom, wash the sleep from my face, and step into the shower. The water is cold at

first, to my dismay, but after a few moments it is surprisingly pleasant and warm. I take a long, luxurious shower, pausing only momentarily to grab a towel from the linen closet. Afterward, I glower

displeasingly at the gold accents on the faucets, and brush my teeth. I then apply my makeup and spend a while searching through my closet for something comfortable and weather-appropriate.

I received my downtown parking pass earlier in the week, so I consider going downtown to take photos. My divorce will be final in two weeks, which is a mix of both sadness and relief, but I know it is only

the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I have to be strong, I tell myself, and not let his daily dalliances get to me. At the thought of all this, I decide to stay in. The pets need me now more than ever, so

the more I am home, the better we will all feel. I turn on the TV and the pets curl up on the couch, catching up on worldly events. I spend the next half hour cleaning the kitchen and floors, taking the trash

out, and getting some bills ready to drop in the mail. The proof of my second magazine issue is supposed to come in the mail either today or Monday, so I am looking forward to perusing it.

I open the door to my “sanctuary” (or “sewing room”) and browse the multi-colored facets of my fabric. I would like to make some things today, but I don’t know what yet. I am supposed to do a craft fair

next week so I still need to make about ten more items. My etsy store is doing pretty well, despite my limited schedule of creation, so I have to get a few items ready to ship today. My birthday is in a few

weeks, so I am thinking of taking a trip to Asheville for the weekend, by myself. I could stay downtown, walk down Lexington, eat breakfast at Izzy’s, and maybe take some photos (for old time’s sake). Life

is such an influx of memories sometimes that it can be frightening to say the least.

My mother calls, and I pace around the house, dusting the mantle of the fireplace and fluffing pillows, laughing jovially at a story she is telling me. She is curious to know how things are going, and for the

first time in a while I can honestly say they are going well. Now that I’ve been settled in a few months, the fear is slowly melting away. The permanency of my situation is starting to settle in as well, so I am

starting to feel freedom where for a long time there wasn’t one. I am able to live for myself; not for someone else all the time.

I make the bed, pulling the sheets taunt. We talk for a few hours until my doorbell rings. A friend of mine has brought me lunch, surprisingly, and we sit out on the gazebo and chat about different things

going on in our lives and her travels (She just got back from being overseas). We huddle close together, speaking of many things yet often wordlessly aloof. Sometimes the silence makes you feel a little

less alone, when it is shared. When she leaves, I decide to head downtown on my scooter to the farmer’s market to get some vegetables and to the library to rent a film. I decide to rent “Intolerance” and

return to curl up on the couch with the pets for a nice, safe afternoon at home. We end up falling asleep on the couch for a nap, but after a while my dog awakens me to go to the bathroom. Afterward, I

grab my knitting needles and begin working on the scarf I am making for a friend. I remember to set the lemon basil out to get some much-needed watering and take a cutting to place in tonight’s feast.

Now I am getting ready to make leek soup and naan bread. Life is never perfect, but I feel so much more accomplished today than I have in a long time. So much more alive…..free.

cedar

remnants

Now, I recall it with such bitterness.

I am pained with my embittered solitude, confined to the darkness of concrete rooms and half-closed doors. The dim light creates a binding facade that follows the contours of the molding,

carefully hallowed by lines of duty. The linens are cold, stained, exasperated. The pale orange light of artificial lamps plays Nordic folk images in my head as the flicker dances across the

hallway in a disjunct waltz. The faint sound of music from far away, a gentle muffle nearly lost in the rattle of the furnace and electrical pulses, filters through the din creating a myriad of hums

that are neither lost nor found with no end nor beginning in sight. I cough, I wretch, a fevered monotony that has coalesced to sleepless, dreamless fancy. The darkness surrounds me with

broken images, much like the skipping of a timeless record, and abruptly i am lost in India, Peru, Naples....I am drugged and intoxicated; the science of illness-- the precipice above the depths

of a depression. For two weeks I have been in a lucid state that I dislike, yet I cannot shake my ailment. My husband has vacated the residence temporarily for his other marriage: his love of

music...and conversely, of younger women. After all, why should he he stay and rebuild what is broken? As with all suffering, we must experience true despair alone. Unlike most marriages, we

are resigned to be two different entities rather than one singular union.

Now, I know that it doesnʼt matter if I am home or alone. Even when we are together, we are apart. I am afraid of him-- afraid of the power he wields over me. As I am regaining my

independence and sanity, he has become violent and the toxicity in the air has inhibited me. There is some sinister void inside my soul that cannot be avoided, might as I try. It is a parched

sanity, one with a stubborn beauty that eclipses the very mindful way I have of living. Chores has been left undone for what seems like months; laundry piled up and dishes in various states of

decay. My face hanging dejectedly, the feeling of infinite disillusionment clings to my bones with an icy accomplice: Failure. It is an isolated sense of rejection, one so bleak and demanding that

one is lost within its peculiarity. It is as if there has been a death in the family, the feeling of loss magnified by the coming of a dying season and waning light. Sometimes I move the sheets and

sit up halfway in bed so that the only light I can see is the faint glimmer of the smoke alarm above the bed. It is like a tiny red star in the night sky, guiding me home. On the far wall, the dresser

sits absentmindedly, piled with clothes, hats, jewelry, and an old tiny television engraved with “Spirit of ʼ76.”

So many items in my life are antiquated, much as I am. For twenty-two years I have lived so many lives that I canʼt keep my own straight enough. So many feelings, some not my own, flood

through my mind and cloud my judgment, causing irrational thought processes as I contend with them to sort everything out. There is no room for change here, the halls cluttered with

silhouettes and forgotten promises. My phone lights up the room, a momentary beaconʼs glare in a sea of dark bodies. I pick it up, glance at it momentarily then replace it, recognizing the name

but not the purpose. I am at a loss of words, out of touch with reality at this point. I am living under pretenses that are false: that I am loved, that I am happy, that my husband will not rape me

again or belittle me. My feet gingerly step onto the cool concrete floor as i stumble blindly for the doorway. My eyes adjust to the light and I find myself in a room rich with the blues and grays of

twilight and the faint flicker of the orange streetlights across the alleyway. Elliot Smith on the record player; repetition only unifies his despair with my own shortcomings. The refrigerator hums,

the icebox shifting in careful unison. I want to believe that the answer is lying here somewhere but my needs are so illumined by my wants and expectations that one would think Iʼm entirely

selfish.

I place my steps carefully as I float across the floor, taking special consideration of the many furniture items we have collected over the years: a collective artistry. I can be found clutching our

wedding album, the photographs so vivid to me in this half-dark. Day after day I sit at work, the photographs a reminder of the hopes and dreams we once shared together. A screensaver

flashes years of my life in minutes, memories that remain almost untouched for what feel like centuries. Past regrets. It is not so sudden that I realize with the bleakest sense that things have

changed and we have changed. Part of my reclusion has taken its toll on me. I have found that no matter what is on paper, no matter what you tell yourself when you go to sleep at night, across

the bed, across the room-- we are alone. It is with a fair sense of sadness that I realize this. Perhaps I always idealized it, assuming things would be different, that we are different than all the

other couples we know. I felt I could mold myself to the ideals of matrimony, yet in reality the entire time I was trying to adjust, he was simply and covertly making a mockery of our union. I make

my way to the hall and realize that the deadbolt is unlocked. A sense of alarm and regret enters my mind. The fact of the matter is that no matter how much someone claims to care about you, it

is the little things like this that determine how much worth you carry.

The fact is that for five years I have put him first in all cases and he has rarely ever conceded to do so for me. It is quite an astonishing revelation. But who has died? Or has it been my marriage

that is withering away? I wonder if I shall mark a gravestone, carve out a box, and hammer out a key. I want so badly to begin again, to change the sequence of events that forced us from each

other. I want to forge that bond again, to renew the wonder and amazement that we shared. Why is love so tainted and bittersweet? Why is it so hard to renew love yet so easy to regenerate so

many other feelings? I fix some cold soup, toast some broad, and regard my belongings with an icy stare.

Our children, my dog and cat, sit around anxiously, waiting. When will I know who I am and who I am supposed to be? Right now I wish so much that I was who I needed to be, yet I know

everythingʼs wrong and I am not at that point yet. I know I have side-stepped somewhere, lost my way. Nothing is permanent, not even bonds. All I can do is wait for my life to pass me by, or

wait for some sort of absolution. I am still but a child in so many ways. Why must I have to be the one to make such a defining and damning decision? I thought he was supposed to love and

honor the sanctity of our marriage, yet more and more I realize that he doesnʼt want to have this love, this responsibility. He feels only obligation and comfort, and my bankroll is the only reason he hasnʼt disappeared altogether. He is out all the time, taking up hobbies. I pretend I am glad about his newfound interests, but word has reached me that these “interests” are of a sensual nature. And yet, in my weakness and fear of confrontation, I say nothing. If he stays preoccupied, I know he wonʼt come after me or slander my name and more than he already has.

Can he not see that I myself am drowning? I sink into a chair, into oblivion. I do everything in my power to keep myself sane, yet it is all a result of pushing and prodding my innermost thoughts

and feelings away. I canʼt deal with reality anymore because it is too complex and there is too much room for error. I am trying so desperately to hold on to our life together, trying to paddle to

keep my head above water. The panic I feel is so vivid, the reality that our ship is sinking and the waves are trying to pull me asunder. The pain I feel when I realize he isnʼt listening to my calls,

isnʼt listening to my sullen cries and my ultimate destruction. The disappointment in my disillusionment, the bitter realization that my head is almost underneath, arms flailing, and yet he fails to

see or perhaps intends to look away. It is easier this way, isnʼt it? Easier to push me to the brink of sanity than to save me from the wreckage? And I wanted so desperately to be saved, for I am

can no longer save myself. I am a seasoned sailor but too tired and too old to go on. I want a hand to hold me up, a dolphin to steer me into bar, an anchor to steady me from being swept away.

My mind is so clouded now, my memory so shrouded in the past few days, I cannot recall when I have been awake, or asleep, or if I am sleeping even now. The driving force in my mind, the

source of light, is one of the only things sustaining me. It has been eight hours already. I remember he had only said he was going to run to the gas station to buy some cigarettes...

I remember walking back from the sad cafe alone, my footsteps echoing down the street as it inclined. The air was lukewarm, a faint breeze muddling the otherwise still night. The sun was

nearly fading away into the clouds; lone birds flew to power lines without cries or calls. All life was stillness; all life was meant to be still. It was like looking through a viewfinder, only to find that

the world was enveloped in stills. I turned the corner seeing couples in love, couples smiling and laughing. I brushed past them and retreated to my lair, incapable of love, incapable of feeling

anything other than exhaustion and resignation.

Now I sit with my eyes open, staring, at the blank dreariness of the ceiling. The smoke alarm light still glows from the deep black of night. I am not sure how to act, so I put on a show. I am

happy, I keep telling myself this. There is nothing to be sad about. I am overreacting. I am jealous. I am irrelevant. My feelings are irrelevant. This is not about me anymore. I gave up my needs

a long time ago. I am meant to feel this way because this is who I am meant to be. People of my type are not meant for happiness. We are not meant to be loved fully for who we are. We are

not meant to be loved at all.

I curl up in the icy sheets, a slight shiver. The pets gather around me, one on each side, blanketing me with their love and devotion, their understanding, their trust, and their attention. I am

ashamed of myself for not being stronger. I am weak. I feel drunk on this affirmation, this shame. My body languid, my repetitions of vanity so carefully exposed. I am waiting for a resolution of

this, a voice to tell me that there is some finality. People are not meant to live this way, they say. Yet I am living, arenʼt I? I am living, right?

We walk around doing our own activities, sometimes bless each other with our presence, yet there is a strange distance between us. He does not want to change things the way they are, for

better or worse, and I cannot change any more than I already have without losing everything that I am. I want to believe that we are stronger people, that we can work through this, but the

painful realization that I am the only one who wants this is evident now. He blames my depression for all of our problems, blames me for not fitting his ideal of a mate, and I walk on eggshells

these days. How does one say goodbye to the person they love most in the world? How does one give up on something that they themselves believed to once be so infallible? So I am living

two lives now. The one with the stark reality that someday soon we will know each other no more and the life I want to live where I am holding on to what my life was once meant to be like with

him. Yet, realistically, the inconsistencies in that ideal life spin me back into true reality.

I stare out the window at the dirt, realizing that one day that will be me. There is so much beauty in dirt, yet there is little comfort in realizing you would someday be forgotten; that there is no

stability in life; to believe so would be a falsehood. Yet I want stability in chaos. I want to know that no matter what the state of the world, I am alive.

We are on two very different paths that I cannot alter no matter how much I want to. I am helpless against his anger towards me, his preoccupation with loose women, and his complete

disrespect for my body and mind. He seeks a life that I cannot give him; that I cannot compete with. I seek a life more settled, more stable. I want to be a contradiction-- to be wild and free

within the confines of stability and faithfulness. He seeks a life of fame and fortune, of unpredictability, and agelessness.

I turn down the shades, adjusting my eyes to the night again. It is ten degrees colder now, at least, and I watch the streetlights across the alley dim and fade only to brighten moments later with

a faint clicking hum. A few lone headlights dance across the ceiling, emitting from the hill across the way. I see the traffic lights change from green to yellow to red. I hear the rattle and thud of

something falling on the floor upstairs in another apartment much like our own. I stare down the empty hallway, retracing my steps just months earlier when we first moved in this place. i recall

the darkness of our old house, where I never felt quite alone enough, ironically. Yet now, as I stare into the darkness, I realize what true loneliness feels like. I retire to the bedroom, the solid

clicking of my clock as it returns to the time of 7:12 every moment of the day as it has for three weeks since the batteries died. I begin to wonder if I am dead or alive, asleep or awake, dreaming

or exaggerating. I curl up into the sheets, letting my hair fall down where it may, and close my eyes. The smoke alarm light stares, a beacon, down on my restful sleep, wary of my isolation. I

fall into a deep sleep, wondering when my husband will return or if I have lost him already to something I canʼt understand or appreciate. The refrigerator hums in its stale manner, the ice in the

icebox shifts, and somewhere across the alleyway a dim street light surges on and off throughout the night.

gay street

….and in the dawn they waited,

beached like stalwart sea gulls, raising

their heads to the din of cannon-fire,

debating the debauchery of human

kindness and the mystical emphatic

atrophy of logical existence..

...so we asked ourselves, ‘What if sentiment

did not exist?’ Would we placate the halls,

burden the steers, force our words to be

heard above the rising dissolution of a

melancholy system? It was a social injustice

we could not avoid so we conjured up our

discernment and joined the force with great

tribulation and thorough tenacity ..and waited

until another day when a more deserving

action ought be fortified and forgotten…

retrospect

(note i)

the last 12 hours of my innocence

The Curious Girl Under Glass (unfinished short story about maps)

The Curious Girl Under Glass
“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the Summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” - Pierre Teilhard de Charden’s “Omega Point”, which could have just as easily been written about a most beloved city in the Pacific Northwest-- Stumptown. 

When flying into Portland’s International Airport, there are two things you can be certain of: 1. That the air around you will generally be at least 20 degrees cooler than the location you departed from, and 2. That you will feel as if you have just entered a 1980’s carpeted shopping mall and that you have somehow beaten the time-space continuum by traveling backwards rather than forwards. As humans, we tend to believe that time is a concrete ideal; a tangible reality that brings forth structural significance in our daily living. But when you step off that plane for the first time (or the second, or the last), you will feel as if you are partaking in just a fraction of time, as the world spins effortlessly on its axis in its rapid movement.

Sometimes I feel like I am always running away from something. I just can’t seem to escape the complexities of human relationships that bring me to their bidding. I want to believe I can transcend these things; to rise above the fallacies of temporal cogency that time and time again tends to test my very will. The reality of this is never simplistic in assumption; there is always room for blundering introversion and despicable controversy.

After standing at the baggage terminal for a while, my bags finally made it around the conveyor, with labels stating “Jen Elliot” scrawled in half-hidden cursive with an even less intelligible address written thereafter. It is times like these that I feel rather nomadic-- as if I might join the natives in a round of hunting and gathering and go live in a buckskin yurt or a cave out in the middle of the woods somewhere. The inevitable times of change tend to bring out the more animalistic qualities in me; the ones that cause me to revert to some facet of my former self long lost in the concrete wilderness of $5.35 chai lattes, weekend trips to IKEA, and long nights in dive bars wishing I was somewhere or something else.

Brightly colored posters, reminiscent of the Bauhaus era, are staring at me in their laser-printed exuberance,  telling me to “Shop. Dine. Fly PDX.” I don’t even bother pulling the departure schedule for the TriMet or reading every fine detail. I already know where I am going. As I push my way through the gate to board the railcar, the summer air hits me so suddenly to the point that it is almost nauseating. I adjust my bags in the candy-colored fiberglass seat next to me and watch as the world whizzes past me in a flurry of greens and yellows, with the occasional white and grey of the looming clouds about me.

I close my eyes and put my headphones on, feeling the low rumble of the railcar as it slides its way across an electric wonderland of lightrails through the Cascades. As we round a corner, the car slows and squeals as it rearranges itself on the tracks. Overhead, the announcements blur, one into the other, stating that we are in a fare-free zone. I lean on my elbows, absentmindedly thumbing through songs on my iPod, waiting for the twenty-eight minutes that would pass before I would reach my final destination. The other passengers seem equally wrapped up in their own states of ennui. It crosses my mind to ask them where they are from, or where they are headed to, but instead I try to decide between listening to Beach House or The Monitors. It is a tough decision, so I opt for silence instead and get lost in the narrow hum of the lightrail as we skid along to our next stop.

As the spruce trees rise and fall around me in rapid succession and my journey takes me alongside I-5, I feel as if I am standing on some monumental precipice of lethargy. What started as a chance to reignite my adolescent life has become an attempt to replace the imbalances that convoluted my adult life. I turned twenty-five about three months ago and the inertia of my existence up until then has weighed very heavily on me. I have never been much of a champion of my own complacency, for the story of my life is one of wonderful events and painful regrets. On the plus side, the stagnation of mediocrity is only partial to my subsistence. On the negative, I feel constantly plagued by the doubts of others and by my own internal infatuation with societal meanderings.

I thumb through my copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge relating my journey to Julian’s and how apathetically inconsistent human morality is.  How, much like now, we still relate to others with a marked disinterest or indifference, unless they have something to offer us. Although some of her writing is rather reclusive, I like O’Connor. In comparison, I can say she and I have much more in common than I would ever want to admit. I start thinking about her work being published posthumously; wondering if it is a disappointment to have your work so overlooked while you are alive and prized after you are no longer around to receive the recognition for it. The car slows and passengers are exiting. I grab my bag and walk onto the cobblestone near Skidmore. From there, I begin my wayward descent to Burnside, past dilapidated factories, pizza parlors, and the Salvation Army. I stand on the bridge for a while, taking in the scent of licorice and sea air that has filtered in from the coast, while watching the tiny tugboats bobbing like little ducks in the water below.

Sometimes I feel as if I never left. There is sort of a peculiar feeling when one is coming home to Stumptown. It is the inert equivalency of seeing a good, old friend that you haven’t seen in almost a year. It is awkward for the first few seconds as you get your bearings, but suddenly you pick up where you left off and it seems as if you never really vacated the friendship. Or maybe the aunt or uncle that you were close to while growing up is now racked with cancer and you want to spend every waking hour attending to them and counting those precious hours that you have left. That is how I feel about Portland. It is a subdued homecoming, yet a powerful force of nature all the same. I walk past Hippo Hardware, my shoes cracking the tranquility of the block, thudding against the empty crevices of construction below my feet. The world is changing in its slow-as-snails pace and I am but a fleeting moment in time; the sound of feet on pavement as the world evolves and devolves around me.

Standing at the crosswalk, I walk with strangers with a malleable fate. We smile vaguely at one another; the end result being an ambiguous posting on Craigslist’s Missed Connections for the “hipster chick in the green dress” or a vague description of my glasses martyred for all the city to see in a rapid inflection of words upon a computer screen. Many times in my life, especially now, I feel like I am missing the connectivity that I used to reject for fear of vulnerability. I want to believe that there is someone or something more prominent in my life, but I am lost in my own thoughts these days. My emotions rise and coalesce like some furtive scheme, lacking the substantial sequences that used to keep me in check during more lackadaisical procedures. I see an advertisement for Lazybones, a friend’s eclectic brewpub, and it further confirms the fact that I am back “home” in a philosophically Yo La Tengo way.

I pass by an old friend that now works at Simpatico and we exchange phone numbers, although it is likely that we will probably not get in touch until months later when we run into one another again at random. Technology is such a commonplace diversion at times. Even with all of the best intent in the world, we are failures at relating to people on the intrinsic levels that we yearn to. Instead, we make superficial alliances based on what we perceive as being a “good person” and doing “good things” or seeing oneself reflected in the eyes of another. They are a blessing and a curse-- these social deviants and useless coercive palindromes in the absence of true logical rhythm.


When I get to his apartment, I loosen the key from the tiny crevice we always have hidden it in with a deft movement and proceed to unlock the door. The stagnant air (for lack of air conditioning) hits me and his dog greets me eagerly, carrying the present of a shoe or other inanimate object of some sort. I pet Gage and run my fingers through his coarse fur, as we both crash on the couch. I’m so tired that I don’t even bother locking the door. I curl up on the 1970‘s velour floral couch that smells like a cross between mothballs and old pizza and I wake up to the television on some sort of cable access show, although thankfully the volume is low but audible.

Derrick is eating a bowl of pasta and is propped on the couch next to me, in his boxers and an old ratty Bad Brains shirt that I could have sworn I threw out three years ago. We don’t date anymore, he and I, for a multitude of reasons, but we have always made good roommates and partners in crime. I yawn sleepily and he proceeds to masticate the pasta into a fine pulp before asking me about the events (or lack thereof) of my flight from Philly. He didn’t bother asking me about my father, and I was glad. I wasn’t quite ready to talk about all of that with him yet, honestly. I don’t think the shock of the funeral had really quite worn off, even though I knew it was an inevitable part of life. I didn’t even cry this time. I just stared gravely off into the sunny graveyard and pretended I was in an old film and that none of it was real; that I would go back to his house later that day and he would be there, watching boxing matches on thrifted cable and eating four-day-old potato soup.

Even after my flight west, I still expect my phone to ring and to hear my father on the other end, coughing and hacking away and telling me how great life is, despite the obvious limitations for him. I knew I would gradually adjust to this obvious change in my circumstances, but for right now I felt predominantly listless. I felt cold, so I grabbed a blanket and looked out the cracks of the blinds to see the sun dimming its lights as it arranged for its finally nightcap before descending into the rugged terrain of houses on Mt. Tabor. Derrick pours me a shot of whiskey and fills me in on the various happenings of our mutual friends. Since we talked almost daily when I was away, there wasn’t too much to go over, but I enjoyed the little dramas that he had stashed away for my return. He is tired, too, so we curl up in bed with Gage between us and fall asleep for a while. We have sort of settled into a slightly sexual living situation that is compartmentalized by our unabashed devotion to each other but also our personal need for independence from one another. So far, it has worked out.  In the morning, Derrick stirs me with the robust flavor of coffee and we walk over to Safeway to get some much-needed supplies. Derrick left a bit later, hopping on his fixed gear bike to go make his rounds as a courier. I watched him ride off down our road and noticed that a canister of engineering drawings strapped to his back was fighting against the wind as he swerved around the corner and out of view.

I was able to get my old job back at Tabla, but I had a couple days to get situated. My old room was still in the disarray I left it in, so I spent a few hours organizing my few belongings and planning my next steps. I took the long way down to Laurelhurst Park, walking Gage, and we sat for a while in the grass, taking in the sunshine that rarely graces us with its presence. I decide to put my hair up in a bandana and watch the clouds for a while, feeling the warmth of Vitamin D surging through me. The air is so clean here that sometimes I forget what it was like where I lived before; although industry exists here, it is so much more regulated than the Northeast. The smokestacks and oil wells seem so far away now; almost as if in a dream. I breathe in the oxygenated air and read for a while, although Gage tugs at me restlessly from time to time as the squirrels scamper near us.

Later I find myself walking aimlessly, surveying the changes that had occurred while I was gone those few months. I watch the people‘s faces, enclosed inside tiny vehicles that pass by, while they converge upon insoluble dalliances that present them with a chance to make decisions that affect their daily routines. Will they turn left or right at this traffic light? Are they going to use a turn signal or are they just going to haul ass and go? I trudge along, peering into vintage shops and automotive repair places, hearing snippets of isolated conversations. I wonder if my conversations with others sound just as lifeless and generic as theirs do. I walk in a liquid fashion, right foot and then left foot, my internal compass leading me up towards the Steel Bridge and towards the inane mediocrity that is the Pearl District. Pella windows face me on a shiny, newly renovated building, complete with eco-friendly bamboo flooring and recycled fiber facing. I sit down for a while near a diner against a wall, my head just barely reaching the flood mark plaque on the brick from a major flood that happened a long time ago; long before I even existed. A police officer on horseback eyes me warily, and even though I don’t look like a felon or anything, I saunter innocently off towards Whole Foods and grab a container of Kombucha in retreat, in case that unpaid parking ticket comes back to haunt me.

Where did I go wrong? I often ask myself conceptually what I could have done to repair some of the things I was running away from. I have begun to feel like every time something worthwhile has happened to me, I have purposely alienated myself from situations in attempt to balance my cultivations and inclinations. Some days I wish I was like everyone else and did not feel everything on such an amplified level. Maybe it is just natural intuition, but the lines get crossed somewhere sometimes. I feel everything around me and can note the discrepancies in human behavior, but sometimes I invent discrepancies in order to compensate for my lack of control. It is the equivalent of having radar sensors all over everyone and everything, yet by not being able to truly experience things in their personal position, I can’t fully rectify what my perceptions are as realistic functions. Many people go through life feeling nothing at all, and some days I would rather feel nothing than feel everything coming at me all at once. Lines get crossed much more easily when you feel like you are in a constant state of emotional ADD and have to analyze the motives of others and their responsiveness in a variety of bodies and situations. Life often feels like a still life and I am in the middle of it, watching the scenic world surpass me in its indifference.

When I left my hometown back east for the first time, I uprooted myself from everything I knew and branched out into the Mississippi neighborhood with an open mind and a naive heart. A student of architecture, I would make the trek to PSU with dedication and regardless of the weather, I would walk there every day, fascinated by every little avenue of character that Stumptown was built upon. Now, I am a voyeur of people, taking in the creatures in their natural habitat, and watching how their environments stifle them or cause growth and impermanence. I have walked these streets so many times that I could name every speck of dirt, or tell you to the day when the last heavy rain was, or what houses used to be old shacks that were bought for less than $40k that have been doctored and priced as $300k homes now.

I have never been perfect. In truth, I have always been a little different; a little bit on the outskirts of the eminent degree of normalcy that a yuppie society produces.  There is always an awkwardness resulting from remaining true to one’s self; a sort of defense mechanism against a Westernized society based on stress, drama, and perfectionism. I find myself getting older and retaining a sense of stagnancy with upward mobility, yet it is hard to face that old traditionalism is dead and we have to disconnect from what we perceive to be the reality that we were raised with: substantial integrity. When you aren’t true to who you are, every mirror you pass reflects your failures and vices. Your sins are etched so plainly on your face that you will find disgust in every action you make because it differs from who you are and where you need to be going. After living on the beaten path for a while, I learned things the hard way, and it took me several years to return to the reality that was quite elusive so long ago.

Miniature horses stand in a line on tiny patches of land and I find that it is afternoon now and I am sitting in Pioneer Park, watching someone reenact a play about some folks in the Kennedy administration. There are children running up and down through the stone levels that curve around me like the bands of a nautilus and the dry heat of the day makes me crave sustenance in the form of capitalism as I buy an iced coffee from corporate America. I beeline past Adidas and Doc Marten’s and the arid stench of old Indian food in a dumpster hits me as I round a corner to escape the heat. The alleyway is narrow, with nature overtaking the brick facades and colorful graffiti masking the imperfections of the old brick. I wonder how many sailors were shanghaied here in the old days and what happened to them when they reached the Asiatic coast. Did they raise families and retire to a sizable income? Did they become ill and perish? Did any of them ever learn the second language well or did they just retain enough to get by?



Rickshaws pass by as I walk onto a Chinese boulevard and I see the old whorehouses and buildings that seem to have eyes peering at me in a suggestive or suspicious manner. I recall all of the old westerns I used to watch when I was a kid and remember sitting on brown shag carpet that mirrored Europa only in inconsistency. The perverse fascination I had with foreign cultures seemed to stem from the unpredictable facets of existence experienced before absolute culture shock. A man blesses me from the shade of a tarp-like canopy, handing me a bookmark that he made just to give folks that he “felt an affinity with,”  and I thank him before floating into endless parking lots and establishments that seem faceless and void of life.

I pass by another alley and I recall a night walking back from an old club off of Couch that doesn’t exist anymore, back when I lived off Williams used the bridges as a form of mapping out my drunken escapades. My friends and I used to cut up aluminum RC cola cans and place the faces of them around our PBRs so that we could walk the streets with them. It was pretty ingenious of us at the time, although probably not necessary since we rarely ever were approached by police officers. The events of that night run together now, but at some point I remember running through the sprinklers on the lawn at Union Square and making out with some nameless boy in an alleyway who I never saw him again to this day. But, for that moment, I was living and breathing in the intoxication of a city of limitless possibilities and it was in that very alleyway that I truly fell in love with Portland. This became an unofficial marriage that would last a lifetime.

Making my way back to the apartment, I walk by the bread factory and watch as the golden loaves run down the conveyor and are sliced by mechanical blades and thrown into flimsy plastic packages. The air is full of the smell of yeast and sucrose and I breathe in the aroma with a mixture of hunger and nostalgia. I walk past turquoise walls with perfectly aligned trees, poisonous berries hanging down from their limbs, enticing me to marvel at their infinitesimal perfection. I watch gas station attendants pumping gas while tourists bitch about having to stay inside their cars and I laugh, remembering that I, too, was aghast at this when I first came here.

Everyone here is living for the moment. It is an atypical wonderland for those of us that refuse to experience life through the realistic spectrum of black and white, but choose to live around a scale of pigments that harnesses the feelings of wonder and whimsy that exist in a child’s heart. The lack of definitiveness, the ever-changing multitudes of partially-part-time jobs, and hosts of other maladies are dwarfed in comparison by the feeling of freedom and the prospective potential for adventure and a love of aberrancy.  It is a zeal for experience that holds us all in its talons, carrying us to destinations and exploits that we would have only dreamed about as we lived in the colorless void of media-induced civilization.

I see Allison working at her record store and I knock on the fiberglass until she smiles and rushes to greet me. We hug and make plans for drinks later that week. She places a stack of recently thrifted records in my hands and I look through them, inhaling the familiar scent of vinyl and mildew that often accompanies older treasures. The record store, with its handmade labels and endless variety of vintage Japanese Godzilla action figures invokes a certain feeling within me that I can’t quite place. Ally and I share a beer and I tell her about my father. As she has met him once or twice when he came out to visit, she is visibly floored by the news. Her aunt that she was very close to recently passed away, as well, so she knew where I was coming from. We then sat at the counter for a while in silence, listening to the Velvet Underground and talking about her upcoming wedding to a mutual friend.

When I came home, Derrick was already in the shower. I sat on the couch and flipped through the channels for a while, in zombie fashion, drinking a a glass of water. I was pretty hungry so I made a makeshift salad and checked my e-mail. Derrick informed me that a bunch of my old friends were going to join us at Doug Fir for dinner and drinks. I will be going there tomorrow morning as well for Crafty Wonderland in the basement of the lounge, and am pretty excited about it. I took a shower and changed clothes and sat in the backyard on my laptop for a while, pirating the “free” wi-fi from the neighbors upstairs. Their router is named “fuxalot” or something lame like that, so I don’t feel too bad stealing bandwidth from them. Lightning cracked overhead and within minutes the patio was drenched in rain and I was forced to move to the living room to finish reading the Willamette Week. I know it is probably pretty cliche, but they have some really good editorials sometimes and several of my friends are on staff at the creative department there.

I walked in the hallway to grab my jacket and saw all of our fantastic vintage religious relics plastered up on the wood paneling. Neither of us are very religious but Derrick has a rather abnormal preoccupation with Jesus (he sort of looks like him, actually, so that may have a lot to do with it.) Our apartment was built in 1962 and is nestled between a residential area and a commercial district, so our landlord is pretty cool with us painting or fixing things. The rent is a little steep, but a far cry from what we would pay in North Hills. We are almost on the outskirts of Gresham, but not really. I don’t like to claim that particular fact, anyway.

As the rain finally subsides, the air is moist and bustling with life once again. This time of year is my favorite because all the flowers begin blooming and the world is full of color and tends to strike me as exotic. Everything seems clean, the folks are friendly, and there are lots of festivals. Sometimes the traffic gets on my nerves during the festivities, but since I walk a lot it generally doesn’t bother me too often. When the fog begins to lift, the peak of Mt. Hood looms ominously over the city like Mt. Olympus, home of the Gods, although it actually looks more like Mt. Fuji. I keep reading about the supervolcano under Yellowstone so I am a bit wary of the mountains here in general, but they are magnificent all the same. It may sound weird but I really respect that mountain, like I have personified it as some ancient great-grandfather that tells some amazing stories about walking barefoot in the snow to school for 12 miles and having to get water from a spigot in the drylands and so on. He’s always bitching at us for spending our money frivolously on bottled water and wasting our money on the latest trends and I can’t say I blame him for it. He’s got some good points, that Grandpa Hood.

I think that when you go out west to the ancient forests, the immenseness of everything is almost overwhelming. Despite all of the logging that was done in Oregon and Washington, there are trees that are hundreds of years old that reach upward to the sky so high that you can only wish to see the tops. The mighty spruces, like the mountains, are so broad and tall that you immediately feel indebted to them in their majesty. Driving along the Sunset Highway, the broad expanse of everything and the rolling hills of forests and bluffs engulfs you in a magical sea. The fog lifts your spirits and you feel very small in a place that still seems untouched by time. I imagine that much of it today looked the same way when Lewis and Clark trudged through it. At the coast, the gigantic trees reach their arms out playfully off of the bluffs, reminiscent of lemmings about to jump off into oblivion. I look at the tiny spruce on our front porch and wonder if it, too, will be eighty feet tall one day.

When Morel season comes, the lot of us camp out for a weekend at Sauvie Island and collect some of the tastiest mushrooms from underneath the cottonwoods, although they are pretty hard to find. We spent one weekend last year foraging and came back with just a few Chanterelles. Since there are so many gourmet restaurants and people are eager to make a buck, it is getting even harder to find morels.  Despite sometimes coming back with nothing to show for all of our hard work, it is a pretty memorable experience and usually someone ends up on fire, breaking a toe, or has to get their stomach pumped. 

I really want to go to the coast before I start back for work, but not having a car makes that a bit more complicated this time around. Every spring and summer I usually fight the often inclement weather to undertake the 1.5 hour drive out to Seaside. I never swim but I like to sit on sand and watch the fog roll in, feeling the gritty sand and shells under my feet. Sometimes I get a latte at a beachside shack and walk the shore, looking for sand dollars and feeding gulls pieces of a bagel. Certain times of the year, you can walk on the rocks on Cannon Beach and see starfish and anemones latched onto rocks in tide pools. My friend Sarah and I used to take the old shells of dead mussels and make necklaces out of them. Derrick and I would bring Gage with us sometimes and he would enjoy chasing the gulls as they flew up above us, spying for fish or snacks to swipe. We spent a weekend there recently with some friends and made a camp near some of the bluffs. Waking up every morning with the fog and the sound of the crashing waves was a nice break from the sound of car horns, alarms, and the occasional racket of tires screeching.

I’ve never been outwardly religious, but sometimes this place makes me feel a bit closer to whatever it is that created us. There’s so much proof of existence here and so much life that makes mine seem minute in comparison. Even outside of my apartment, the quiet streets seem to speak to me in a language that is calming and confident. Not that Portland is the safest place to live, either, but there is a certain detached community feeling that makes you feel as if you are not ever truly alone but also that you need to depend on yourself to make your own path. It is a rather ambiguous feeling but definitely a welcome changed from some of the other places I have lived in.

As we stepped down the stairs into Doug Fir Lounge, the delightful aroma of greasy food and mixed drinks made my stomach rumble. Our friends, sitting at the bar, hugged me fiercely and we sat with them, listening to Perry tell one of his ridiculous tales of a romance-gone-wrong with his recent ex-boyfriend. Some of the stories Perry tells are extremely appalling, especially the ones about his nights out at the Matador, but he has a really good sense of humor. Perry got really drunk at a party we threw one night and ended up taking a shit in our backyard, in front of all of our guests. And then there was also that time we found that video of him masturbating to photos of a well-known American Idol contestant. He still has yet to live that one down and we won’t let him, either. It comes up in conversation once every two months, at least. The good part is that he laughs at himself so there’s no real harm done. I imagine he is quite accustomed to his own antics by now.

Derrick’s best friend Jonah came up to us and introduced us to his new girlfriend Natalie. I had actually met Natalie before at the PSU, so it was nice to catch up with her.   She is a textile designer now, although like most of us she is working a sundry mix of disproportionate jobs. She and her friend Karin recently opened up their own handmade boutique off Williams near The Waypost. When I asked what the name of their store was, she laughed and said it didn’t have one yet.

When our order came, I was in Heaven, for there is nothing like fresh salmon bisque and rosemary hash browns. Although I do love the Lebanese street food at Saturday Market, Doug Fir’s hash browns will always have a special place in my heart. I could easily survive for life on those and some of the brews at Mcmenamin’s.  While Perry was telling us another raunchy story which has to deal with a plunger and a loaf of bread (don’t ask), I started thinking about the resume I sent into Skylab Architecture. I have been applying to that place ever since I was open for internships, but to no avail. I imagine it is pretty competitive, but I keep hoping that my persistence will end up paying off. I pretty much told them that I would keep applying until they gave me a job, so I guess if it means clearing tables at Tabla for another couple years, or playing some shows to keep my student loan paid up in the meantime, so be it.


I phased back into the conversation in time to hear Jonah talking about going to the Woodpigeon show at the Crystal Ballroom recently, and part of me felt rather envious that I had missed some good events while I was gone. Although Philly has some pretty awesome acts come through town, Portland seems to be a safe haven for most of the groups that tour and the variety of great bands to come through is pretty impressive indeed.  My friend Lizzy is a booking agent for K Records out of Washington, so she usually gets Derrick and I in for free to a bunch of the local shows. 

When we left Doug Fir, it was late, and pouring rain. I feel pretty confident that most of us never carry umbrellas here-- the weather is actually fairly predictable. If it didn’t rain today, it will rain tomorrow. If it is raining, it will likely rain tomorrow. If it isn’t raining, it is usually still overcast, except for the occasional dry spells. The same can be said with snow and ice. Some winters are more fierce than others, but there is ALWAYS chaos for drivers and the scenery is always very beautiful and dynamic, which makes up for the lousy weather usually. I used to hear stories about how during the rainy seasons, loggers would leave the big logs in the middle of the street and the rains would wash them down into the Columbia River. I don’t know if I believe this to be a very feasible story, but with the amount of rain we get, it wouldn’t exactly surprise me.

Derrick and I ran ahead of the others to our bikes and I saw that Jonah’s rim was mangled. It pisses me off that people are always stealing bike parts up here. It’s probably not an isolated incident, as I’m sure it happens in a lot of cyclist-friendly cities, but it still kind of sucks. The only solution we have found is to have really cheap, beat-to-shit bikes and to lock them up as well as we possibly can, but even then the thieves are always finding new ways around the obstacles we set in place to deter them. Jonah was pretty upset but thankfully the bus lines run pretty late. Since Natalie had already left a few hours earlier, we waited with him until the bus came and watched him load his bike onto the crooked rack on the front, sad and defeated. Although it wasn’t going to cost him too much to fix this time around, it still was a pain in the ass to have to shell out money on a crappy bike every couple weeks. It was just the principle of the fact-- it didn’t seem this bad before, when less people were here. It’s like we have less violence but more petty crime now, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure which is worse, honestly.

We rode down Burnside, feeling the wind and rain scatter on our faces and laughing at Perry’s crazy antics. The playing cards in our spokes drew forth a whispering melody that amplified the wind as the rubber of our tires spun on the wet pavement.  I leaned against the stem of the bike, clutching my handlebars and feeling the repetitive motion of the crankset as the chain moved around. I marveled at this amazing piece of machinery, wondering at the simple intricacy of the design process. We wandered down hills, the reflections of neon signs and streetlights blurring into the puddles on the basalt like a German expressionist painting. I steadied myself as we rounded the corner to our apartment, feeling lighter than air and completely free. Perry waved goodbye, his hands completely void of the bicycle as he spun down the road towards his own humble abode.

Derrick pulled the key from its crevice, turned the handle, and in a few moments we had our bikes secured and could venture in to the warm, dry haven that was our apartment. We let Gage out for his nightly ritual, brushed our teeth, and chatted about the night’s delights. After we towel-dried poor Gage, we curled up in bed in our usual sleeping order and turned the lights out. 

As I drifted off to sleep, the whirlwind of events that had taken place since my return played before me in my mind. I recalled the sights and sounds around me, the people and places, and the many poignant reflections that Stumptown brought out in me. Despite often feeling as if I was on display myself, the simplicity and eccentricity of this town resonated powerfully in me, evolving my very form in new and surprising ways. I smiled confidently, curiously attaching my anxieties to what new experiences and discoveries would present themselves in the days to follow. As Derrick snored and  I could feel what I believed to probably be a wiry dog hair in my mouth (Gage had been sleeping on MY pillow again, it seemed), I closed my eyes and realized I was truly at home once again.  

Home as an Idealized Concept Where Everyone’s Viewpoints are Scarcely Valid

I was the Hans Christian Anderson character in my family. That is to say, I was labeled the “Ugly Duckling” early on by my mother, and oddly enough her prophetic perception became reality as recently as a few years ago. My early childhood was spent being sickly, slamming doors, being an extremely annoying extrovert who was mutually socially awkward, running barefoot everywhere, and mispronouncing words like “oil.” There is always that one kid who doesn’t quite fit the mold of nuclear integrity; that one lone wayward duckling that isn’t quite pretty enough, isn’t quite popular enough, and isn’t quite worldly enough to pay much mind to. I lacked the tact of social convenience, the foundations of religious persecution, and the impertinent objectification of the “class” I was born into.

Some people seem to float through life and relay through events with seamless tranquility. I have never been one of those people, although I strive to be. Whether I was conveniently thwarted or simply constantly challenging the limitations I was given is immaterial, for I was blessed (or cursed) with the tenacious and passionate nature of my realistic, perfectionistic Sagittarean mother, who balked at convention and took life by the reins, horns, or whatever witty comparison can be included therein. From my father, a Leo who paraded his public life with great dramatic zeal and his private life with endless bouts of silence and detachment, I gained a sense of heightened drama and a vivid imagination but also a curious escapism from reality. This is the fate of children born of the merging of dreamers and realists: a profound clusterfuck of confusion that results from being pulled in two very different directions mentally and emotionally.

Things we are taught a kids shape who we are as adults, generally speaking. What did my parents teach us? Love without conditions; love without bounds or limitations. We we taught to be respectful but also to rise up and defend ourselves or the underdog when necessary. They also taught us to have humility; to not value the material world but the world that remained unseen; the intuitive world that transgressed the very foundations of society, religion, or economy. Perfection at all costs; expectations should be avoided as they inevitably lead to disappointment. Not to manipulate others or treat them unfairly; to maintain a sense of justice. To not feel entitled to anything. To know very heavily the consequences of right and wrong and to keep a moral compass at all times. To enjoy the little spectacles of life and mundane existence and to not dwell in the  depths of pessimism. To balance our lives with our work. To make a name for ourselves and maintain a good reputation (because if we don’t do it for ourselves, who will?). These were some of the euphemisms and granules of wisdom ingrained into our brains at a young age.

You can spend the majority of your adult life in the bedroom, on the kitchen table, against the wall, and in the shower, but it bears no relation to civility if you don’t formulate your emotional intelligence with the appropriate degree of discernment and discretion. Maybe I took the wrong turn and ended up in the linen closet, or perhaps the carport was more to my liking, but regardless of the circumstances I drove off the cliff and went offtrack for a while.

Our society is one based on discretion, where we keep ourselves garnered in morality’s formal attire, afraid of change and never above suspicion. I feel like I, for one, have always been on the very precipice of morality’s biases. Submissive and dominant I often have trouble knowing where my place is. Perhaps it is because I was born on a cusp, or just that I was born to two very different families. My great-great-great-great-great Grandfather was a French noble on my father’s side, and an even greater woman (Whistler’s mother) can be found on my mother’s side. But where does that leave me? Entitlement, people say, can be attributed to intense egotism. And me? I don’t feel entitled to anything.

The Things I Could Never Tell You (for my former self)

I felt like I was trapped in glass and smothered in smoke. The claustrophobia was infuriating; I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think. I stared out the window, the lush symmetry of the pane diluting my harsh circumference and furious convolution. I was self-conscious, immune to false findings, although in muted reaction I could see some semblance of demonstrative dalliance. Wherewithal I couldn’t feel the misery or the pain; only jagged shards of who I once was and what I used to be. “I was human, once,” I reminisced. These echoes of confusion were unabashedly charred by guilt and an emotional incontinence. The fervent mentality was onset by a plague of doubts and inconsistencies that were bereft only with a dim misunderstanding that I myself could contend with. I would have loved to place the blame on some minimal ignorance on my part, for perhaps it would be better attributed to my lack of age or inadequate knowledge of the human genome. Instead, I find myself in a room of fog and mirrors. In these walls, I see the reflection of the monstrosity I could have prevented but did not. I see a sensual prowess capable of destruction of flesh and blood and do not feel the strength to aid in its prevention. I see her now, still, a caterpillar in want of a cocoon. I see all too well the wanton gaze and difficult smile that would hang on dull surfaces, perched beneath fragile walls and cataclysmic sub-ordinance.

I remember her sleeping form, a vagrant shape of lilac and soft blues in the morning light. She would smile, sleepily. The many curves, crevices, and dimples of her so calculated and demure. When she left, every aspect of me that was good and decent left with her. I remember staring at the door, minutes after it closed for the last time.  Discarding myself, I ceased to exist. I was a wandering ghost now. 

The walls here hold a more curious spectrum; a languid maelstrom of conceit, envy, heartache, and infinite joy. They remember the hushed voices, the slammed doors, the loving gazes, and those articles thrown about in the heat of passion. They expunge the negative artifices that clung to them, weighted by a monotonous nobility that could only seek a tragic calamity such as this. The arbitrariness of human nature cascades down the stairwell- the many ironies of the bleeding beautiful human heart.  They coincide now with a tendency to dominate, to eradicate the vicious sectarianism that would only exist in the foyer of indecency. Oh, how I would have longed for that place, even in my direst hour, but the strength eluded my promise. I would wake many nights from a frigid sleep, ill and convulsing in pain from an unknown tie to the place. It was as if I was held by many ribbons, each bound solidly to my appendages. Submission to this most adamant of dexterous fronts was clearly inevitable. My origins sought this place long before my birth and would seek her out long after my demise.

Furiousness combined with fear imitates my very façade. I feel emotionally bankrupt, starved by the prophetic lies and murky depths of the heart. Have I any heart left anymore? Perhaps it is just a naïveté; an innocent shell of the former self. Preponderance and care seems to include even the rashest of devices, yet I find my own reputation soiled with greed and lust. I reconcile my weight, furthering the inevitable opulence of segregating from my former self. My life has become a wilted flower, so to speak; a humble burning flame that is quenching its breath for its beloved. I am very self-aware now of my detriments and moreso my weaknesses. I am without conscientious tidings of good faith and choose only to reverberate false criticisms with a morose clairvoyance that strengthens my inner bindings. Shall I quicken the pace towards my rapid state of delusion?  But this inner sanctum is something I find less palatable. My current state of wanton exorcism clearly demonstrates an exercise in tranquility. Balance of circumstantial sequestering is in order. The callow finitudes are congruent. The very source of All is but a belligerent source of disparaging complication, in my mind. I could serve a blind eye to these walls and live under a pretense that they, too, are unaware of the events that have taken place. Years prior I would have sought a more visible ally, for in my home there has always been a temperament of sincere and just provision. But you will find nothing evident of compassion here. The lack of empathy is stifling. She holds only apathy now and consequence of failure. I sit by the bedside, anticipating the stillness that will soon envelop my soul. There is no light; only darkness in the void of that which I call my home.

the old mill

For eight years, I lived life as a ghost. I was obsessed with a place where time stood still. 

Mint green paint flaked from the tempered glass windows, harkening some magnetic havoc of lustron and mortar. The old mill’s machinery still sat, collecting dust mites and deluge, belonging to a void of time and space which permeated my adolescence. At age six I would sit in the parking lot adjacent to the giant, shoelaces untied, staring at the wreckage of the monolith of glass and stone with fear and determination. Perhaps my fear stemmed from its great size, or perhaps it was a result of watching the animated and anthropomorphized version of David Copperfield one too many times. Regardless,  I knew that I would conquer my fear someday and explore the fragments of time lost to human eyes.

It was during the fall when I turned thirteen that I was invited to see a renovation project occurring at the building. The massive machined parts, oil caked with dust, and nylon strings once used for women’s stockings sat in a vegetative state, with layer upon layer of pigeon fecal matter and small ragweed adhered to them. This was the cement that held my ghostworld together. We would walk the wooden floors, sweeping storms of dust up from the long wooden brooms, bristles caked with filth and history. It is strange even now that I can still see and smell everything, yet the longing is immense to journey to that timeless state once again all the same. 

When the renovation project fell through, the Old Mill became my sanctuary. I would communicate with the world there, as the silence and simplicity filtered out the bustle of the city that often surrounded me. I dreamed in a world of deluge; this building had clocks without hands and therefore time stood still. The ticking could still be heard for a while; a metronome of time passing without minutes or hours. I would speak in silence to the walls, seeing the past flowing around me in slow motion. I saw what the war of man did to Nature and embraced the embodiment of industrial dynamism. As I inevitably aged, thus the world around me would, too. But I did not want this place to be stifled by any more time than it had already witnessed. 

The boiler room, parking halls, and long corridors all became as romantic to me as the poems of Rumi. I would run barefoot in the large halls, the cold concrete against my feet, seeing the remains of the infirmary and the old black-and-white porcelain toilets with naive eyes. I no longer feared the green paint like slime that etched the windows; I embraced them as battlescars that time had attempted to cause and had failed.

I remember most the scent: a mixture of cold air, mildew, and mortar. It was a smell that was unmistakably pungent-- an aroma that I remembered once again in a similar hosiery I lived in years later. My favorite room was a large barracks with arched brick doors, where the shadows fell in a succession that always seemed starless but for bright knives of light that shot through the dusty wooden planks. I would sleep in the arms of my building; giant circles where the furnace pipes once reached out-- a small body in a frail giant. 

Over the years, my beloved building has fallen to decay and ash. It is a victim of time finally catching up to it; the war is over. Now there are large metal gates across its barracks, long since deemed unsafe. The second floor is but a shell of a body in which the heart faintly beats. My ghostworld, in which the workers once pedaled their looms, is now an ancient graveyard of dilapidated mortar and piles of amputated walls.   The clocks have long since been removed; the toilets’ broken porcelain littering the parking lots around the building. The boiler room doors are now bent and rusted and the smokestack is finally succumbing to urbanization. But in my mind this building still exists as it always did; a perfect replica of a building that is ageless.  I spent years photographing the building in vain hopes of stopping time from destroying it forever. Yet I can still hear the clocks ticking in my vanity, and for that reason, the ghosts are still alive within. 

missed connection iii

Craigslist: Missed Connection

Chicago, IL
"I wanted to talk to you. I really did. -m4w"

So I'm kind of a quiet guy, it turns out. God has given people worse curses, from what I can tell, and from what I see every day. 

But you. I wanted to talk to you. I didn't know how. Isn't that funny? There you were -- everything I've ever wanted and needed in a woman -- there you were. Standing there. Waiting. Listening. Sending those messages that women send: "I'm listening." 

I didn't know what to say. It's been buried so deeply for so long that it didn't come out right. It came out like a complicated German narrative poem on crack, or like Joni Mitchell on a 40. 

You were all, like, "um. okay. whatever." 

Later, the words came out right, and they *were* right, but you were gone.

love in the absence of meaning

A month after I filed for our divorce, I found myself sitting in a pool of cold, 360-count “chocolate” Egyptian cotton sheets, my knees held closely to my chest as the bleak darkness enveloped me. The walls and floors creaked in unfamiliar rhythms, telling me stories of prior loves and losses that they have witnessed, all of which I could not and still cannot comprehend. This was my first night of independence; of being truly alone. The kids (my pets) were staying with my parents while I  settled in to my new home; my new life.  I sat there, staring into the ebony of night and the slight hues of blue and purple, noting the faint resemblance of a chair’s arms and legs peeking out from the dark canvas. All was still and quiet in this unfamiliar territory and my insomnia was creeping in again. I listened to my breath, a ragged trail of diluted idealism that somehow meandered off-course to a conceptual ambiguity. The sound of a gunshot, off on a distant street, sent me violently into tears. It was as if every barrier I set up for myself, every armored emotion, was stripped away. I sat there, feeling my false confidence fading into dusty apparitions; my blind measure of absolution predisposing any notion of sainthood. I was devastated by loss and grief and felt ultimately abandoned by the world; cast off into some dramatic cataclysmic void all my own. My body convulsed into itself and out again, a mess of tears and transgression. I felt very much like a feral creature; my motor skills clearly intact but the mind utterly and incomprehensibly incoherent. I began to think back to a few months prior, when I was sitting in the same darkness at the loft my soon-to-be ex-husband and I once called our home.
      I can still vaguely remember the dim light that paraded across our concrete walls. Auburn street lamps were glowing, emitting a loud electrical snarl, wounding the silence of the evening and creating vague shapes dimly lit from within by some discerning apparition. The room was hot; a humid 89 degrees, despite two air conditioners and a box fan. Excess, shed animal hair spun in tiny tornadoes as the slight breeze from the box fan drifted over the concrete floors. Windowless, our bedroom was like a cage of concrete a steel, a prison in which I had resided for weeks on end now. I would watch across to the hallway as the cars would pass on the highway, their alabaster lights running across the cracked stucco surface before drifting off into darkness yet again. I would watch these shadows coalesce and descend, imagining them dance like Balkan lithographs from a time of antiquity. The only other light was from the smoke alarm; a small red star in a sea of nothingness. Life felt lucid and surreal; I felt like I was watching a tragic story unfold, yet I was on the outside watching myself fall apart. I couldn’t even go to work half the time, and when I could, I would lock my office and weep until I was practically drowning in tears; I kept a scarf in my mouth to muffle my sobbing. I tried to escape in every form I could, ranging from eating to addictive shopping.  I would sit there for hours, my depression eating away at my consciousness. I felt without form or substance; my fears and phobias had left me nearly bedridden. When the door opened and slammed violently, abruptly, I knew he was home. Would he be in a good mood or a bad mood?
       I didn’t know it was abuse at the time. I had always grown up thinking that abuse was a very physical thing; that when someone loved you they would never intentionally hurt you. I was in denial- I didn’t want to be a victim. I knew he was a troubled man, but i always assumed it was a phase; that he would change. Mental and sexual abuse were two facets that were very foreign to me, as were narcissists and sociopaths. Although my family was somewhat dysfunctional, I don’t recall ever being in the position to deal with such circumstances. Anti-depressants and therapy were a form of culture shock for me when I learned about them, as his condition became more and more evident. I was raised to deal with any problems I had, so I did, and assumed everyone else acted accordingly.   This was a misconception of mine,
and after almost six years together, I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I saw only darkness, my frailty, and the fact that I felt I was lost forever in someone else.  I didn’t care anymore if I lived or died- it didn’t matter anymore. I was the problem, he said. My depression caused him to be depressed and that is why he treated me so cruelly, supposedly. It was a passive aggressive abuse but I was but I was young and uneducated in the laws of sociopathy. I only knew my freedom, week after week, was being stripped away. The fire inside me, my independence, was burning out.
      I pretended to be asleep when he peeked in, hoping that perhaps for that night, anyway, I would be spared the lies, threats, allegations, and harsh criticisms. I shudder even now to think of his touch- this  man I was supposed to love who eventually would become the bane of my existence. When he left, I stared for a long time into the darkness, watching that lone red light in the void that seemed very much like myself; lost and fading fast. I remember listening to Holopaw’s “Quit or Fight” record, over and over again, until the record continued spinning on the turntable; a dull popping sound echoing through the dark room as the needle kept swaying back and forth. My pets, although small, blanketed me with their love and adoration and I would hold them, weeping, my face a mess of fur and saline tears. How did all of this happen? Where was God to protect me from such a fate? Where was my faith when I needed it the most?
I had never given much thought to faith or religion. I even called myself agnostic at some point, and it is still my humble belief that those with educated intellectual thought processes should never be denied the right to certain forms of skepticism. My family was inherently Baptist; Southern Baptist to be precise, and it took many years of hypocrisy and conditional love in my own family to convince me that this was not the right path for me. My mother was adamant on teaching my sister and I to love unconditionally, to fight for the underdog; to be good people. Somehow, my sister and I turned out completely different. Where I felt compassionate for others, she became self-serving and hypocritical; she built herself up on a pedestal that was impossible to topple. Calling herself a “good Christian,” she denounced us for being heathens, for we had stopped going to church long ago due to many reasons, mainly being that we couldn’t stand seeing the segregation and hypocrisy in our own sect. My mother had the strongest faith of anyone I knew, and I guess after going through so much dysfunction in her own family and life, it made her faith even stronger rather than weakening it. My family’s “Christian” beliefs are to ostracize those who do not agree with them; to punish, accuse, and change circumstances.  To them, my mother and I were scapegoats and to this day we are blamed for anything bad that ever happens in the family, even though we are really not even a part of it anymore. 

In turn, I went through every religion I possibly could connect to- a plethora of structures that I failed to completely identify with. I’ve searched for answers, leading me to gain insight as a born-again Christian, a Buddhist, a Deist, and I have even investigated Islam and Judaism among others. What I found is that everything is largely similar and despite everything, I do not truly believe that any title you give yourself changes the fundamental realities that you believe in. When people ask my faith now, I tell them I have “faith in life.” My reasoning for this is simple: How could I title myself to a certain doctrine when I question so many things about each religion? I questioned this for many years and still sometimes do.
      When I first moved in to the “Pelican House,” so named for a concrete pelican statue with peeling paint that sits outside in the flower bed, I never could have imagined how much I would change over a series of only several months, and how I would ultimately find my faith strengthened by my inner struggles and meditative isolation. When I turned to writing to externalize the events I was struggling with and the emotions that seemed so changeable, I discovered that despite the fact that the images of my previous life would play through my mind over and over, deep down I always knew that someone, or something, was watching over me and knew I could handle whatever cards were dealt. The first few months were the hardest, as I adjusted to life being completely alone and completely free. What is amazing is that you grow used to the controlled environment; of not being allowed to drive where you want to go or be around the people you love.  i know now that the things he did were wrong; that no one deserves to be treated like that.
      Admittedly, it took me a very long time to completely grasp how weak of a person I became...and how strong I would become. Freedom is something we all take for granted until it is taken away from us.  Like prisoners of war, when our insecurities and vulnerabilities are exposed, we begin to crack; we begin to question the very fiber of our beings and grasp for what little humanity is left in us. I was like an addict and it took cutting myself off from everyone and everything to gain a sense of sanity and purpose again. For weeks I stayed within the walls, which experienced my rages and witnessed the memories that tormented me, until finally peace prevailed. Lying in bed, I began to pray for protection. I begged to get through the rising and and falling emotions, the divorce settlement, and the constant harassing messages I received from my ex-husband. When the nightmare was over, I found myself scathed but more aware. I knew that regardless of whether there was a higher power or not, someone or something was holding me together again.
       For me, writing is an act of sorting out loose ends and gaining back something dear to me that I once lost: myself. The beauty of life is its malleability, whether molded and crafted by ourselves, outward stimuli in our environment, or a supernatural omniscient being who oversees the very structure of our lives. Regardless of how I define myself, on some level I have to recognize that I exist. I have lived a life of dreams and deluge and have found that life is not about permanence but acceptance. We must learn to let go of what we think we know and embrace life...and death. There is very little we can fixate as permanent, so we should look at life as an adventure; one not about the destination but the journey itself.
The beauty of faith is that it is a very personal experience- when we feel lost we can find ourselves in our faith, our family, our higher power.  It is eternal— it can sustain us when we cannot sustain ourselves. We must experience pain to know joy and adversity to know hope, and consequently must experience despair to truly humble ourselves before a higher power and gain some form of inner peace and retribution within ourselves. Everything tends to have a cause and effect, and everything affects us profoundly one way or another. I came to the conclusion that I would have to reflect on the good and bad, the moral and immoral, in order to fully understand the reasoning behind this, and the consequences of my own action and inaction. For, in effect, it is the essence of experience that brings us closer to divination and the resistant upheaval of our lives that so graciously offers us a chance to grow and to find the beauty that lies within.

In the end, I crawl into bed at the pelican house, watching the lights stream across the walls, the tires stirring a familiar racket as the rain sloshes away from them. There are dishes in the sink and piles of clothes on the floor, which would normally bother me, but I am content with my lot. I know I am safe and that someone is watching over me. My pets snuggle up to me and my cat purrs, reflecting the happiness we all feel and the serenity that exists in the absence of rational meaning. I know not what the future holds, nor what the meaning is behind the great mysteries of the universe, but I do know that love exists in whatever form it can successfully muster.  There are tears in my eyes now, but one can see that they are tears of joy. I drift off to sleep grudgingly, anxious to see what tomorrow will bring.