dream of twisting your hands backwards
until time reversed and the currents paused
but you get swallowed by the turning world
that cares not for your stillness
read
I was once a real rat in a race over reading, only for the sake of saying I’d read. Running front to back to the next and the next one in record-breaking time. Competition for the sake of winning. I held the corners of my pages under my fingernails, curling their edges around my thumb, anxiously awaiting the moment my eye hit the last word on the page to hear the sound of paper vs spine, always keeping an ear out for a rival flip. I consumed letter after letter, sentence after sentence, and I was spitting them back out into grade-A essays on command. That was the game I loved to play, simply because I was good at it, and more importantly, was told I was good at it. Chased that cheese through a labyrinth a thousand times before stopping to ask myself why. I was sweating to sweat and eating to my pleasure. That’s all there ever was. But then one day, instead of getting dropped in and darting straight towards the end goal, I got distracted. I heard the voice of an angel.
I get this ghost sensation of a sour taste thinking of the way I used to think of people. How they couldn’t regurgitate numbers and letters with the kind of vigor I did, and certainly not with the ease and grace with which I did that regurgitating. I thought something ugly of it, that I was the proud owner of a superior brain with neurons locked and loaded, firing like a precision squad, but that an ordinary brain just made random flashes, meaningless signals making meat move across space and through time. But when I finally stopped to listen, when I took a hare’s nap by the finish line, I realized something I couldn’t have known until I chose to know it.
She never spoke very much, didn’t have a lot of answers to share in class, or a lot of gossip to spread on the blacktop. All I knew was that she had a terribly hard time focusing, could’ve put a great deal more work into her penmanship, and that she stole my best friend. Because at that time in life, a friend was something that could be stolen. But when she opened her mouth, the air suddenly transformed into the sweetest sound. Even though I only heard it in that instant, I knew it was a sound she’d been making for as long as she’d been making sounds. I couldn’t place what it was about the quality of the noise, though these kinds of things can technically be quantified, I just knew. I knew it had been tried without being tested, and it expressed something real. It told me there was something more real inside her than there was in me. And it didn’t hurt me. It didn’t make me lose. It just made me so very thankful to be there, then. To be aware.
It is wild, how much starts to make itself known once you notice the seed of being. You know nothing around you has changed all that much since yesterday. It all looks the same. Same plastic wooden desks full of the same wide-ruled notebooks and the same little sticky notes and jars of Play-Doh and mechanical pencils and Ticonderoga #2s. Same chalkboard with the same stains of an impeccable cursive script that had to have come from the hands of a priest. Same posters on the wall, same paper wrapped around the room with the digits of Pi, whatever it actually meant. Same girls giggling in the corner and twirling their ponytails, same boys generously spraying Axe on their newfound armpit hairs. Same Grace at lunch, same grades passed back, face-down for your privacy, though we all know the hierarchy remains the same.
News today, a bit of history for us, a bit of factual story time about people who left behind some evidence before departure. I could never retain any of it. Names and dates were hard enough when they had to do with real people living in my life right now, there was hardly a chance I’d recall them from a story. Unless they were so famous there wasn’t a way around not-knowing, but that day, I remembered the name. Her name was Joan. Of Arc, of course. I kept in mind just enough to not look like an idiot if the subject were brought to conversation, but if I were put on the spot, asked about a single detail, to identify the term and state the significance of it – I’d be doe-eyed in the headlights. We must have been writing essays on the matter, and I’m not sure if we were all assigned a creative task about it, but I am sure Ana was standing at the front of the room reading hers aloud.
“… and the sweat ran down her forehead while flames licked at her feet.” Sometimes, you hear someone talk, someone your age who has seen just about as many suns as you have, and you realize your eyes have been shut to the skies above for the greater part of the last 12 years. My heart pretty much just up and stopped beating. I don’t think I’d ever thought enough about a single character, be it from a novel, a history book, or my own classroom to entertain what a slow-burning moment in their life could possibly be like. Like, not even one dimension of accuracy. Where the hell did she find forehead, flames, and feet when all I heard was “burned at the stake”? I probably didn’t even know what a stake was, except that my dad could cook a mean one, and that context clues suggest it must be something you could cook a person on too. Organic, salty H2O. I hadn’t thought really about the way water just escapes us like that. Never do until it’s too late. I hadn’t thought about how you could expel it from the inside out, and it could also be extracted from you. I hadn’t thought about how some fears begin at the crown of your head, how you don’t really start nervously sweating from the center of your extremities, but always from the source of the heat and how your mind can be a real stove even when you aren’t tied to a stake. I hadn’t thought about how it all runs down when you’re not running yourself. Hadn’t noticed that the sweat I knew was one that you could fling off with the back of your hand, that would cool you as it blew with the wind. Gosh, being 12, the only flames I knew were the ones we used for prayers and butchers. And the legends. That big fire, the one everyone mentions when I take them home. Was this here before the fire? What fire? I had to ask once and only once, and then pretend, from then on, to have the slight inclination as to what that fire might have been. We built this after the fire. She said it licked though. Not just consumed, but licked for Christ’s sake – slowly, sensually – actually worshipping at her feet? How did she tease out a place between feet and forehead to dare the fire to extinguish? Sweating for no resolution, just for relief. It’s the last little joy, drops of sweat breaking bonds and dispersing atoms into air. Energy released, temperature dropped by a droplet. She saw a lot more than I did, that was for sure. I asked myself about all the books I said I’d read, asked if I knew a thing about any of them or if I was just a very well-trained parrot. Grade A bullshit, the teacher’s just too in-her-own-head to see past the bad spelling and grammar. Ana was a songbird. I did as I was told. And I’d been doing it for so damn long I couldn’t see the possibility that I’d ever be anything like her. If I tried, it’d just be a cheap show. I held my essay with two fists wrapped around the title line, thumbs daring to rotate and rip. As my grip tightened, excitement in the arena took a crescendo.
“What arena? Weren’t we in a classroom?”
INT. MGM GRAND GARDEN ARENA - FIGHT NIGHT
LEFT THUMB’s infamous cuticles are on display for the crowd in the arena and the pay-per-viewers behind the screen. He bounces around, showing off his Knuckle sponsored shorts before backing into his corner of the ring.
“Rings don’t have corners, I don’t think?”
CUT TO:
RIGHT POINTER FINGER
(jittery with excitement)
I’ve got a grand on clockwise. Parlay for a perpendicular tear down the center.
LEFT POINTER FINGER
(shaking RIGHT POINTER FINGER’s hand)
Easy money.
CUT TO:
LEFT AND RIGHT MIDDLE FINGER in box seats, surrounded by shrimp lounging around cocktail glasses and steaming spinach artichoke dip.
LEFT MIDDLE FINGER
(with a sense of urgency)
I can’t watch this. Grab the blueprints ASAP.
RIGHT MIDDLE FINGER
(on the phone, looking at LEFT MIDDLE FINGER)
Get me the Steps to Success in STEM. Stat!
The stories science had to tell were more defined than those of history, with a lot less resolution. The stories are half-assed, hugely entertaining at the start, but very quickly footnoted into logical oblivion. Science can perform a good deal of magic tricks, and it can do them on command. Thing is, scientists try to explain it all in a way that makes it sound like they know what’s up and what’s down. And they do know a lot of things about how things work, have worked and probably will work in the future. But at the bottom of the barrel, the truth is as vague as it gets. Every piece of the universe is made of matter. Matter being a word for “stuff”. And if we break that stuff down as small as we can get it, we get down to atom. Some positively charged stuff stuck to neutral stuff, and some negatively charged stuff that always wants to exist within some infinitesimally small radius of the other stuff. And will be generally around there until further disturbance. The theory is that they mashed and split an incomprehensible number of times, performing a recursive trial and error experiment on every inconceivable scale until we arrived at this present day, at my exact deoxyribonucleic recipe.
Vitruvian woman imprinted on memory foam. I watch the ceiling fan whirl around and feel sunlight on my skin, even through the window. My greatest fear, I wonder what it was. Once I said it was people. Life doesn’t frighten me at all, write about something that frightens you. And I was taken out into the hallway with a teacher with a dirty blonde bob who had to crouch down to my level and ask me why I was crying. I said I just couldn’t do it really, because everything frightens me. Life frightens me quite a bit. I was 10. Then I feared failure, having succeeded at too many things, jumped through too many hoops, I wondered and feared what would happen if I tripped, if I stopped. Then I feared loneliness. Not my own, but others’. There was nothing I feared like I feared that. I feared I would stop paying attention, that I would be so involved in my own success, my own fear of failure, that I would turn around and she would be gone. It’s the things you’re good at that bring you the bad. Listening to people, being compassionate, it brought to me the compulsive fear of being culprit, complicit, capable of preventing tragedy and too consumed to care. I was more afraid than anything that someone I loved would commit. Little wings flutter and buzz around the room dancing in our space between four white walls. Body chained to the floor and mind drawn to the light. My phone vibrates in a sixteenth-note succession joining the symphony and none of it shakes me in the slightest. His body rode the waves of the ultraviolet 12x12x12 universe that was no less infinite than the one projected onto my mind’s eye. I pick up the phone and my skin starts to sweat, and it’s like the whole room bumps a degree and the air starts to swirl and the bee shoots itself directly into the window. It’s my mom. She wishes she were dead.
heard
My dad taught me a siren song for successful big-girl numero twos that needed adult attention. After I’d step up on my sea-foam plastic green stool to prop and perch ass on porcelain throne, I’d sing out, “I’m done, I’m done, I’m done,” until the sounds of clattering kitchen appliances were replaced with bare feet on squeaky hardwood and a familiar face came knocking with quilted 2-ply. I giggled while he recited a mantra about how it’d be over soon. Last month were cakey diapers, this month was ass-wiping, so Buddha grant him patience– maybe next month will end the reign of poop.
My best friends and I used to read to each other over group video calls. We called it Hamlet Goes Ham Parts I-IV but spent half the time listening to indie music and planning watermelon ice cooler runs. A scream bounced off the walls, travelled down the hall, over the sounds of The Arctic Monkeys, and dove down the canal in my ear like noontide sweaty thighs scraping an aluminum slide. I excused myself from the conference and pulled out left earbud, revealing a distant cackle. When pulling out right, I heard a high-pitched wail from my sister’s room. I joined the symphony with premature words that were never again remembered. The sum total was nothing but white noise, which happened to be the perfect backdrop for the image of my brain yeastily foaming with norepinephrine. Fight. I crossed over to my parents’ room and saw my mother curled up and shaking. I came closer to scratch her head like she would mine, but when I touched her she rolled onto her back and started laughing hysterically. Taking sharp breaths that tickled down her throat, she asked the ceiling why He would do this to her. Flight. I let myself feel the warm suburban night and the breeze carrying tears from my eyes to the sidewalk. I held my phone to my ear and asked a nice lady from school about what I should do when things got too scary for me to handle.
wrote
I used to keep one of those black and white dalmatian-spotted composition notebooks, filled front to back with lists scribbled in permanent black marker. I meticulously jotted down each and every mundane activity and observation I could remember to record. It rested on the bathroom sink, stained by toothpaste and spit that dribbled off my chin, verifying the truth of the ink it smudged. Every day, 7:45 sharp, Mom calls me upstairs for breakfast. Write down eggs and toast next before describing of the sun-faded color of my pink sneakers. Though I could’ve sworn I scraped the crust from my eyes first thing this morning, I notice them lodged in my tear ducts during the car ride to school. I make a note to find out where they come from. I remark that the boy on traffic duty was especially in a good mood when he opened my door at drop-off, and I wrote that it was strange how we recited the pledge of allegiance without really having a clue what the Republic was. It was also strange that I knew all the words to the Our Father, but wasn’t sure exactly what good was supposed to come from hollowing out his name. I wore a short-sleeved white button-down named Peter Pan and knee-highs under my black Mary Janes. In the early pages, I’d have to ask my mother to zip up my green plaid jumper, but by the end of the book I’d figured out a good stretch that let me yank the thing up all by myself. I even wrote down every single time I got up to go to the bathroom, and yet I’d still be caught by surprise by my own full bladder and rarely realized early enough just how badly I had to go. I thought this notebook would help me stop losing things – or at the very least, would give me some crumbs to trace that’d help me find my lost things. I hated the way I moved around the world so accidentally that I couldn’t even begin to recall the last moment I felt my glasses on my face or where I last had my blankey or if I was doing homework last night in my room or the dining room. All I knew is what I no longer had. I lived a thousand leagues deep in my head and lost myself every time I resurfaced, violently adjusting from a rainbow palette of words to a vast 360 blue. I couldn’t tell if I wanted the earth to spin slower or faster, and I supposed it didn’t matter since I was smack dab in the center. I prayed I would be able to find my things someday, or that I’d never lose them to begin with.
14-year-old me was sweet enough to write a letter to her boyfriend, slip it to his carpool, and hope the guys wouldn’t make fun of me for doing something so cliché. But my mind was only made up of sweet ideas and my heart begged to see them all in color. I wrote down all the things I learned from being around him. The words made them real, because he read them and looked at me, and those feelings I didn’t even know existed – did. I didn’t know a person could feel like home, even when their house wasn’t anything like yours. I told him about my fear of strangers, and my lifelong struggle with eye contact because I just didn’t know who to be in the face of a bright, piercing blue, but could manage with pleasure, staring into his green speckled ones. I said I had never really looked at eyelashes up close before, and didn’t know that they could start so dark and thick just to asymptote into the sky. I didn’t realize how beautiful they were in the morning when they were tangled and your eyes have to beat hard enough to straighten them out. I didn’t know I deserved to see his pupils emerge from between dew-covered lids, let the light spill in, and watch hundreds of invisible neurons spark to reveal your smile without touching your mouth. I told him I knew this had to be it. This is what we spent our lives looking for, and it’s all I’d ever need until I died.
If I had a greatest fear, it would be of forgetting. I try to stay calm about it now, being older and supposedly wiser, but even with the cool exterior, I can feel a little girl inside me with her spine to the ground and knees wrapped to her chest, hyper-ventilating, like very much in need of and frantically grasping for air. It’s just so frightening. Like, I’m searching for this object, one that I know I had with me earlier in this adventure. It was heavy hanging from my neck, so I moved it into the bag on my back, and I have the bag with me in my hands right now, but my camera is nowhere to be found. And my camera has all this evidence on it, of that time I will never get back. I don’t even know what kind of evidence, but I know it must be the happy kind, because I was free enough to witness instead of worry. It’s only half the sentimentality part, because I’m sure I’ll find a way to make memories of the same light. It’s just that I couldn’t even begin to fill in that hole of a memory, the part where I remove the camera from the bag and place it down somewhere I believe is both safe and memorable. I keep playing myself walking through this airport, rummaging through this sack back and forth and pulling out items and putting them back in, and I try to conceive of a moment where I remove my camera for good, and I just absolutely cannot. All I can believe is what I remember, and there is so much I never will. I try to accept the reality that sometimes in this life, I’ll just be sleepwalking. But I can’t. I keep seeing all the bad things that happen when people prance around like they’re in a dream, made up of characters of their own minds in an environment that resets with every realization, whose entire function is to blend into the background. That is where all the bad things come from, the ones where the world around them isn’t factored into the equation – at least, not fully in any capacity, as that world would regard itself. It makes me want to scream.
“People are so fucking inconsiderate.”
“What makes you think you aren’t too?”
“No one’s ever honking at me.”
“I don’t honk at people who are being inconsiderate. I don’t even tail them, I just drive around the whole thing, get on my merry way.”
“Well, I pay attention. I care about those things.”
“You don’t know when you’re not paying attention though, is the thing. I just assume whoever’s in there is having a really bad day. Or week. Or is just dealing with a rotten slice of life right now.”
“That doesn’t give them an excuse to endanger other people.”
“Well, sure. But you’re not in danger. You’re paying attention right now, and so it doesn’t really matter what he does, how slowly he turns or changes lanes. You see him. You’ll stop if you need to, go around if you need to. You should know you’ll be fine.”
“It’s not just about me, it’s about everyone who has to drive around them too. One day, one of them’s going to get hurt because of this.”
“Yeah, if they’re also driving around in a daze, in which case, they were just as likely to hit anyone else in the same state. Look, the truth is, you have no idea how many times you were that person. You have no idea how many times someone has politely driven past you and given you a break instead of riding your ass and screaming at you. And you never will, is the thing. You will never know that about yourself, so just give them the benefit of the doubt. For your own sake and sanity.”
“I still have them all.”
“Bullshit. No way you do.”
“Right over there, on the bookshelf.”
“Excuse me for a moment, I have to see this with my own eyes.”
He really did keep them all. Told me he’s never reread them, but I sure was glad they were preserved, if only for my eyes again. My, what a strange feeling it was to have that old paper in my hands. I saw that first one, and do remember exactly how it felt running up to Mel, probably, and handing him the envelope. I didn’t want to be someone who is so sentimental about the things they created, but there I was, just plopped down on the carpet in a room where I grew up, old, old letters in hand that said things that may as well have been spoken today. I read the way I described falling in love for the first time. I saw how it progressed and I saw how desperate I was to save the memories. Every single day in class was written down, the way I felt when he switched into English 9, or the drama between me and Nora when she wanted him and saw him first. How I truly didn’t think there was anything as dumb as a youthful relationship and the way kids talked about it, until I was in one and then completely understood how crazy you can become when your world is opened up by a whole second door. I gushed about all the ways in which I felt I had grown up, all the things I understood now that were just concrete walls to me before. And I sat there just basically sobbing, the happiest kind, like tears just running down my face, because I was so thankful. I don’t think I’d ever been so thankful. Like we were sitting here years and years later but we were still the exact same people. In a way. I don’t know who he was, I guess back then and now, but I know myself as well as I’ll know anyone. And in those letters, I recognized her. Like a mirror. She still lives in here somewhere, and I know she’s the one that gets hurt. She’s the one that was torn to shreds every time a man disappeared without giving the respect she felt she was due, and she’s the one who was so ready to give herself away to anything that would look at her with even the slightest resemblance of how he looked at her when they were kids. And she remembered all the pain she felt when she left him, because she knew he didn’t really feel that way about her. How strange it is, how much you can be attached to someone you don’t know. But it wasn’t just the ideas about him, she wrote it, she wrote down all of it, all the reasons that felt true and tried, real and remembered, why she was so in love with him and why she felt like he was so in love with her. Whether he was or not, I suppose doesn’t really make a difference in the outcome. She still became who she became because of the belief that he did. She still opened her eyes to look at him. Even if she could never remember what he looked like, they were now ready to let in the light.
said
Love was an unspoken truth. I never heard the word, but was raised under an undying belief in family, and I knew that I was supposed to know that I was indefinitely loved. I remember struggling to get those three words to roll off my tongue, since I hadn’t used them since infancy when it was cuter than it was terrifying to the people who wanted to hear them. I looked at the boy’s green eyes, and then peered through them until I could fixate on my reflection. “I love you.” It became a greeting and a goodbye, and a something we’d say until we butchered it into raw syllables that we could summon for a burst of euphoria. In retrospect, it was Too Good to Be True. But the amazing thing about being a young and stupid 15-year-old is that the world is a seemingly endless gift of novelty and euphoria. And that mantra was the most honest we could have been to each other. As far as I was concerned, nothing existed outside us in a world where I pledged allegiance to “the L word,” and could care about absolutely nothing more than how badly I wanted to see him again.
When I came up for air, I realized it wasn’t love that didn’t last, it was me. I said I didn’t really understand it. I loved her for sure, and there wasn’t a doubt that she loved me, but for reasons I couldn’t put into words that day, I knew I had to leave. What did I do to deserve a kid like this? God, please just take my life away from me so she’ll learn to be better. And I told myself I didn’t need to hear that anyone loved me to know that someone did. And I wasn’t sure how to love myself enough to hurt my maker. I looked around at the panoramic blue skies that melted into water, and felt my speck of existence wading in the center of an infinite pool. “I love you,” I said. And then I left.
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