tuckova

I keep forgetting your name while I'm writing this.

This happened after I ate all my teeth, maybe even the same night. Running my tongue across the new smoothness, salt and blood. How quickly I could destroy things simply by not paying attention. Driving around all night, coming at the sunrise from that side. This was the summer everything was on the other side of the glass from me, not a bell jar but more often a car windshield, cracked, covered in dead bugs and the half moon smears of windshield wipers and the last few desperate drops of blue fluid. Everything hurt me and nothing touched me. This was the year you came through the door and sang children's songs to me and I fell in love and rubbed ice into my hands until they were raw and senseless. I practiced not reacting, though I would blink to show I could understand. And so that night, or that morning with the sun coming up and my teeth gone and you ran your hand over the scar on my leg and said you'd like to know me. I don't think anybody knew me before that. I'm not sure anybody's known me since. You came close. Anyway that's what I remember, that moment nestled in a night, in a summer, in a year when I thought somebody might really want to know. 

shadow of a doubt

It is like in the horror films when the character is running and running to get away and turns back to look and see if enough distance has been gained. The running, this constant treadmill of activity is in itself good, and a solid, sensible plan is to keep moving. It is work coming in, and the pleasure in doing a job well. Friends who hold your hands to steady you as you run. It is feeling strength in the legs pumping under you, feeling again capable of getting away from it, away from it finally, away from it for good...and then you glance behind and trip over a tree root you didn't see. And you are suddenly down, raw and scraped, knees bleeding, tears pouring out of your eyes because it hurts and because you forgot to see it coming. And the tree root angry in the ground, torn because you weren't watching. And while you sit there picking the dirt out of your bleeding hands it has caught you, enveloped you again. Did you really, really think you could get away? Did you think you could just pause for a second there, lean on a tree, catch your breath, and nothing would happen? Sometimes you are foolish and silly, and sometimes you are just plain stupid.

diamond scattering in the park

How going out at night made me feel like being a teenager again, though I did not have to crawl out the window but just walked down the hall, quietly closed the front door on the sleeping family inside, gently turned the key in the lock and then skipped down the stairs. How the night sparkled, with frost on the grass, and how beautiful it is to walk with headphones, so that everything seems faintly unreal, like a film or more likely a music video. So many people are asleep and the streets deserted, and then inside it is so alive that the walk through the silent park now seems impossible. How you kissed me in the taxi and it was sweet and I skipped back to the door just like I did 25 years ago, as if I would never be tired.

Propinquity

I had nightmares on Saturday from which I have not yet recovered. The feeling of being trapped inside of a need I fear to articulate, and then, having spoken it aloud not having it met, or not merely not met but not even acknowledged. Please help me carry this or I will drop it, please call me when you get there so I'll know you are safe, please look at me when I talk to you and I'll believe you're listening, please please please. And then the vase shattered, flowers strewn, water soaking into the carpet; or the phone unrung, deciding when to call the police and admit how afraid you are; or the sentences unspooled from a broken mouth, unheard.

Sometimes the level of fierce independence that I claim to practice runs up against my frank need with such force that everything is broken for a while. 

I've worked at a job calling people for an English survey for the last two weeks. It is universally acknowledged that I have a very pleasing speaking voice, especially when my mouth is filled with other people's words and not my own blather (that is to say: you may not like what words my own brain puts in my mouth, but you very much want me to read to you). So I made a tidy just-in-time-for-Christmas sum calling people and getting them to give me their time, their honesty, and in some cases full life vignettes, just because I asked. Talking to a man in Ireland who was telling me about riding horses on Catalina, and I wondered why it was easy to ask him for things and how I knew I would get them. Later my mouth covered with my hands so that I wouldn't ask you for anything, for nothing at all. It's fine; I'm just noting it. Silently, just to myself.

I want to tell people when they're nice to me, too. I mean my desire for post-game analysis is equally strong after a win or a loss. I want to say, here is where you delight me. Here is where you are special. But when the game is lost it seems somehow nobler to just walk away, even while my pointy head arranges short time travel trips back to fix it where it went wrong. It is the worst form of staircase wit, the wagging finger of but-if-you'd-listen-you'd-know-I-was-right, the same thing that will wake me up in a week with regrets that don't matter because they are over. 

What else? 

 

Dummy

Okay, let's break this down into small, manageable parts. Let's get real on it. Let's call it what it is. There was something you loved. You loved it in the pure open-hearted way that comes from getting so exactly what you need without even asking that it seems like the object of your affections is itself perfect. I'm saying you loved it because it seemed to love you so well. It's okay, it's natural, everybody does that, everybody loves a provider. So that was the first part, the part where you loved that which met your needs.

And then that was irregularly available. 

And the thing is, the reason it was gone, the most likely reason? Is because you really didn't need it anymore. Somewhere along the line you I don't want to say lost interest but there were a lot of other things that drew your attention. Pretty things. New textures. Flavors. And that which you loved because it gave you what you needed became that which you loved because it reminded you of how you felt when you needed it. You went from loving it for what it did to loving it for how you felt about it. 

And then it was gone altogether. 

And then there you are, fist jammed against your mouth, weeping. Distraught. Casting about, as it were. And you fish up something shiny and smooth and new. A thing that makes you feel the way you used to feel when your needs were being met, a thing that you perform towards as you performed before. The crying stops. Things get hopeful. And this new thing is yours, yours, yours. Smells like comfort; is comfort. 

And then they want to take that away from you, too.

They say, oh, clever things. You're supposed to get over it. Move on. This love you imagine is deforming you in ways you can't understand. Oh grow up and stop crying. Try talking through your empty mouth, form your weak tongue around the words for how you feel, distract yourself with movement, let it go. And you want to, because everybody wants you to, but you don't want to really at all. They make a chart of how many days you can go without it, and you try to be brave but inside your mouth the sour taste of tears you don't cry and the lack of comfort, that little comfort that they insist on taking away. Why. 

And then it's gone. 

And you're ... okay. That small comfort, that dummy, that idiot, your little peacemaker, whatever. I'll tell you what, you can get over it. Because here's the secret they haven't told you; the thing that makes it okay is quite simple: you loved something, but it didn't love you back. It was incapable of loving you back. So it's really, really okay to let it go. You will not starve, because it never fed you. And now you are free to find something interesting, something complicated, something real. Something delicious.

parlayed into a memory

When I met you, I was crying, because it was cold. An involuntary response, I would have explained if you'd asked. Fortunately I'm a master, and it is possible that you didn't even notice.

We talked for hours. I learned so many things about you. It is my best trick, to lay myself out as on a blanket at a flea market, so obvious in terms of tarnished and broken and hidden treasures. You couldn't help but pull the trinkets from your own pocket in response, a snowglobe holding a childhood memory, a knife you'd used to cut yourself free. By nightfall I'd wrapped my blanket back up again, stuffed everything into a carpet bag, and you were showing me your scars. It is interesting how quickly one can establish intimacy, when it's needed, how fast we can go from perusing the menu to tearing flesh from the bone. 

But eventually it is over. It is always over, one way or the other. These things don't end themselves, and so somebody has to end it. You did the honors, surgical and simple, none of the nonsense of waving a tear-soaked handkerchief as the train pulled away. I am glad it was clean like that, I am. And yet when you left I was crying, because it was cold. An involuntary response, I would have explained if you'd asked.  Fortunately I'm a master, and it is possible that you didn't even notice. 

Good Charlotte (in which I distill some Czech history)

I keep thinking about her and wanting to say something that is as deep as her feelings, something worthy of her pain and her sacrifice, her love. And because there is nothing really to say beyond the fact of herself, and nothing more important in my mind, I find myself nearly mute.

She came from the future, I start, because how else could she have continued into a future that offered her little other than one disaster, one rejection, one sad ending after another. How could she have gone on unless it is because she knew she went on. Her dedication to each thing, and failure, and dedication to the next thing, it's almost too much to bear unless I think that like me she sees the future and knows that her dedication will ever be enough but it is what she has to offer, and offer, and offer. Hands crippled by one love nevertheless reaching out in optimism? or certainty? to take up the next goal, purposeful. 

Even in love, I don't begin to understand the strength she had. To love a man who took her name when she took his; it must have felt at the time like she was the equal she knew she deserved to be.  She learned his life so that she could help him lead it; learned his language to help him preserve it. And he listened to her, believed in her, credited her. And yet when I mention her to others she is most famous for how he betrayed her, again and again. 

What would it be like, to watch your husband leave to do work you find important, to watch your son die, to write your daughter cheering letters because it's the only thing you can use to sustain her in prison? What would it be like to know you'd given up your own freedom, things you were promised with ease, in exchange for this? I mean, he won; she won. She had five years of knowing they won, but that whole five years she had to remember all the things she lost to get there. I can't imagine. Or rather I can't stop imagining. 

you connect the dots

‎"all that a woman of forty-three need do to become invisible is to go without makeup, leave her hair uncolored, and wear ordinary clothes" -from an article in the New Yorker about Daphne Guinness.

At the Burger King at the bus station in Prague, you can get 10 Kc off your meal if you first have a ticket from the bathroom proving that you paid 10 Kc to use it. The rule used to be that BK would give you a ticket that you could take to the bathroom, and get in for free, but now it's reversed. No signs anywhere to explain this to you of course, which resulted in the BK employee getting all mad at me, and me reminding him that it wasn't my rule, etc. It was necessary to ring up each order separately in order to get the full available discount (10% of the total, so it seems worth fighting for). I have nothing more to say on that except obviously one should never use public bathrooms or eat in restaurant chains and then be surprised to need to argue other concepts of "fairness" with anybody.

On Facebook this week, Squire was inadvertently signed up for a group of "Let's show the atheists how much better it is to be Christian!" Uhm. Also a friend of mine posted a "One nation UNDER GOD; Love it or leave it!" thing. And another person went on a rant against feminists. What this proves is that Facebook is the devil. No, but I should probably not take things so seriously. Still, it is hard to look at people the same way when they are so clearly putting a blanket of hatred over me, even if they didn't know I was standing there. Not that I can't hate with the best of them, but my hatreds tend to be either specific individuals or are targeted at some behavior. I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it feel like --and isn't it meant to feel like-- a punch in the stomach when somebody hates a group you belong to? And so why are people stomach punching? What does that get done?

You know how when you dream of home it's often the same house, and it's not the one where you actually live? For years I have lived in the stairwell of a large apartment building, but lately I have also been inhabiting a small room hidden under the floorboards in a house downtown. It is a very nice room, kind of nest-like in its coziness. 

What else? It's fall. My parents came to visit for a few days and we managed to not see a whole bunch of things. We did drink a fair bit of booze, though. And I tracked down the cabbage they wanted. So: mission accomplished. I got a box of chocolates with a pretty orange ribbon around them. 

I almost believe that they're real

Going through a massive project of reorganizing all our photos, moving them from photo albums to boxes with little index cards. Nobody goes through these anymore, nobody is that interested in what I was doing 20 years ago that it needs to be in a bulky album taking up massive space. Yet I can't quite throw them out, and there's something about organizing things that makes it okay to keep them. And so here I am, writing in careful ink "Kokura, spring 1990, salarymen playing baseball outside the castle" even while I realize that if I haven't forgotten it yet I probably won't forget it ever; who are these notes for? And yet and yet.

Looking at these I realize I've always been the same, I'm like a tree, you can just read my rings and tell which years were sad and which were happy but in every picture I'm pretty much the same tree, hair longer or shorter, face wider or thinner, in a black tank top and jeans that don't look good at all, or in someone else's t-shirt and baggy pants rolled or cut to my knees, barefoot or boots. My insistence on lace-up shoes despite 20 years in cultures that make me take them off is a little odd, as is the fact that I only started wearing interesting socks about five years ago. My persistent dressing like an overweight stagehand even when I was slammin', and black has never looked good on me, though I feel good in it. The refusal to wear makeup even though everyone told me I would be pretty, because I knew I would not be pretty and I might as well spare myself the effort and the disappointment. I wanted to be menopausal when I was 18, I wanted to be excused from caring fairly early on and it shows, it shows, making faces to break the camera, see I'm not ugly it's just my face. 

And the pictures of other people, whoa. How to label this, to say "here's a person I thought I'd know forever, and now he's dead, or alive but we don't even talk; here's a woman I loved like a sister and now I can barely remember her last name." What it means to look and see how clear it is that I haven't changed, and so why have so many people disappeared, living only in these pictures? Did they change? I suppose people do. Or they get bored with my being the same, the way you can get tired of even your favorite picture if you have to look at it every day.

It is of interest now to watch people my age, women who were especially pretty in particular, but also the men, the sweetly balding men, watching with horror as their youth drains away but for me it is the same relief as a uniform: finally I don't have to decide. Or rather I seem to have decided finally already 30 years ago and now here I am. I could buy alcohol without getting carded from about age 15, which is possibly why alcohol was not particularly alluring for me. And now here I am, not merely the mother in the school play because I look older than everybody else, but the mother in real life and I may still look older than everybody else or maybe I finally look my age, I don't know. I recognize myself in these pictures but not because I haven't aged. The tree gets taller, and it's stronger or it's bowed but it's the same tree. Can you see what I mean? Do you want to see the pictures?

with mosquito nets for the shooting stars

A bed is so good for so many things. To slide between cool cotton sheets on a summer's night. On a winter night, it is pure comfort to get into a bed that is already warm. It is cozy to make a nest of several blankets layered on each other - the fuzzy one that reminds you of childhood slumber parties. The quilt your aunt made. Or it is nice to have a thick warm comforter stuffed inside a soft flannel cover, all that warmth in one sweet weight. It is lovely to have a selection of pillows - the big one for sitting up, the small one for tucking under one ear when you curl catlike around yourself. A big one for pretending. How absolutely luxurious it is to spend almost a third of the day with things that you picked, all the softness and color of your wishes. It is healthy to keep the bed only for sleeping, but it is also, oh such a treat to pull in a thick book, under a light that is just for you, and read until the words slide into your dream and the weight of the book falling across your legs wakes you, and the light is a reach away and you slide down under the covers, the transition from pleasure to pleasure almost seamless. It is a blessing to have a bed of one's own, to wake startled from a dream and feel immediately safe, to say, "Oh, here I am" and know where that is. And while it is delicious to wake with a heavy arm across you, long fingers spread across your stomach, the heat of love, it is also fine to wake for the sunrise, the light filling the room and the whole day in front of you and a good night's sleep behind you. But first you need to get a bed.