tuckova

a quaint misunderstanding

It feels very much like anger except whereas anger is pointed and sharp and fast, an arrow, this feels more jagged and stuck inside. It feels like sadness except the ache of tears is behind my eyes instead of falling from them. It is not released. It feels like the sour taste of any feeling held in instead of let go. With anger I have a choice: either I say that I'm angry and there is a chance to make it right, or I say I'm done and there's never a chance for it to happen again. With sadness I cry until it is washed away. But this, why does this bother me so, why does it sit inside me for so long. I can't look at you. I really can't make my eyes rest on your face. I have brooded on this for weeks now and brooded is a good word because it's a mother feeling in some ways. What makes it stick like tar inside me? The problem is not you. The problem is me. The problem is I hoped for something intensely enough that I thought it would happen, and the dissonance between the hope I had and the reality you hand me is echoing inside me and the hollow sound of it is more than I can bear. I'm not angry, I say to myself, and hear the truth of that. I'm not sad. I'm disappointed. Words I never wanted to hear in my own voice. Never wanted to hear them because never wanted to feel it, but also never wanted to fall down the hole in which I realize who the actual architect of my disappointment is. I hoped for different. I hoped for more. I hoped for better. I asked for something, and I got something else; either you gave me the best you could, which is less than I wanted, or you gave me something less because that's all you wanted to give. And in any case, it's my hope that led me here, to where I can't open my mouth because I know there's nothing to say. Oh, I am so disappointed. One of the few feelings I have trouble expressing. I swallow the words instead. The bitter burn on the back of my throat. The churn in the belly. It's not what one could call delicious, but it will pass. Some day I might even be able to look at you again, but probably not today. 

connected but not dependent

First: This sensation. That you thought you were fine, nourished, well fed even. That there was nothing you wanted. And then someone waves this past you, this thing that you suddenly want in such a primal way, the thing that has been missing from your life. Oh, it's so exciting to want something, isn't it? Want want want because now that you've caught the scent, you know that want will be followed by have. And then suddenly it is taken from you. Mmmhmm and what now. Do you go back to wanting nothing, your smug contentment? Or do you reach out your hungry fingers and try to clutch at what is already out of your reach, just waiting for you to acknowledge your failure? Or do you, perhaps, try to build one of your own, a thing to satisfy the desire that is eating through your thoughts? This feeling. But I didn't want. But then, let's not forget, but then you did. 

Second: This sensation. The thing that you wanted and desired and begged. The round holes you hammered your square self into, to turn want into have by force of will. The fire that consumed you and you tried feeding it small branches, twigs, pinecones, anything, and everything you gave it sparked and ashed away and left you burning. Burning to the extent that you thought it was your natural state, the human condition. And then one morning to wake up with a cool pillow by your head, the fever gone. Clean. 

Third: Clearly you pour that which is full into that which is empty. Your hand wraps around the full vessel, prepared to tip the contents into the empty one; balance is important. Isn't it? Hesitating. Probably this is right. The sensation of being pretty sure, hovering in the space between decisions has never been your strong point, plunger of worlds, but here there is suddenly a moment to look around, so you do. 

carrying stones across a stony field

When I was little I had a best friend. I don't mean my best imaginary friend, but a best real friend. She lived across the street. We walked to school together. We rode our bikes after school. We had birthday parties together, played together, read books together. As twilight came on I would ask to walk her home, then when we got to her door she'd walk me back home, back and forth until somebody's parents caught on, and then she'd run back across the two front yards alone, her hair caught the moonlight; she was magic. She was wildly different from me in many ways that were probably important -- she was sporty, tireless, not given to long periods of day-dreaming -- and we were brought up with radically different values and perspectives. I remember particularly playing badminton in her yard and every time I missed the birdie, which was often, I would go to retrieve it while she or her sister listed out everything that was wrong with me. But I loved her so fiercely and so completely and on days when she loved me back my world was perfect. Some days she played with other kids and I would fling my whole tiny jealous body across my bed and weep. How could she? Why? Why couldn't she just love me back as intensely as I loved her, why couldn't we be best forever and only friends? I read so many books about best friends and I guess I thought I could will it into being, that I could will her into loving me like Diana Barry loved her red-headed Anne.

When I was 13 we moved across the country and since unlike me she was not much of a writer we fell out of contact. I went back to visit the house where I grew up and the yards weren't nearly as big as I'd thought, her sacrifice in walking home alone might have lasted two minutes. There were not a lot of kids in the neighborhood, but there was a neighborhood and there were kids; I played with Kelly sometimes and with Sara, or with other girls from school, but it wasn't the same. Why was I so fixated on this one person, accepting no alternatives; why did I want one friend, one special friend, a best friend so much and why was I determined it should be her?

I've been thinking about this lately, that after the bottom of that basket fell out, I never again put all my eggs in one place. Not that I haven't had friends -- I absolutely have, intensely close friends, people I would honestly kill or die for. And having friends has gotten easier as I've gotten older, much in the same way that letting myself recognize and say "I love you" got easier when I realized that loving one person will not rob me of the ability to love another -- in fact, rather the opposite.

But sometimes I think there is a small Anne inside of me that still wishes for one person. We would know each other so well, where we were and how we got here, someone who would know me and still be interested in me. Someone who would be genuinely curious about hearing my dreams, someone who would be eager to tell me theirs. Someone who could not get enough of me, the way I can never get enough. And people do like to listen to me, and people like to tell me things, and I'm happy to sit and converse about just about anything as long as you don't want me to play badminton while I do it. The things I once did for love, the things I did to be loved. But I don't think it's possible now to put it all on one person, if it ever was. Poor small Anne, it was hard enough when you were eight and nobody could sit still now for your fifty years of metaphors and details, the intensity of the obsessions, much less the tiny day-to-day stuff, even if you could sit still long enough to tell them. I'm happy where I am now, happier than the little freckled girl soaking her pillows with hot tears could have ever imagined. I wish I could pat her back and tell her it's going to be okay, better than okay, just different, some day.

come find me when you wake up

Every time the wheel goes around it goes bigger, the view gets clearer. "Back when I was an asshole" we say, with the understanding that those days are gone, until the next time around when we see that our understanding was little more than smug assholery, and refer now to that understanding as "back when I was an asshole" until eventually on one turn of the wheel or another the dissonance of seeing ourselves as assholes twice, three times, three hundred wears even us down and we get it: we will always be verging on hubris after insight and the best thing is to keep it to ourselves. Even now I'm still speaking aloud so I will have to go around again and see it again and learn it again.

Sometimes therapy is like that episode of Star Trek or whatever, name your favorite time loop story, where you learn the same lesson and forget it and learn the same lesson and forget it, and Die Taschen, three turns should do it, I assure you the cards are sufficiently randomized, don't forget your booties. A second of stunning clarity, an understanding, a view of how it could be outside of the cave, the pit, a moment, then the realization that I've seen that before but when but how and if so why am I here still. Sometimes life is like that. 

Hovering between wanting to be kind, to stretch my arms out beyond my fingers, to hold everyone, to love until my heart breaks and then on the other hand wanting to get the oxygen mask firmly over my own mouth first, secure. Between apologizing for being too rich, too heavy, too intense and saying "well fuck them if they don't like cake" to the walls again. I wanted the taste you had of me to be sweet. I'm sorry I overwhelmed you. I'm sorry I spilled over and stained your clothes. I'm sorry. 

I am the most myself when I am alone, probably falling down an internet hole, just as in my youth I easily fell into books. The lilypad jumps of the internet are also pleasurable, maybe more than books even, scratching the curious itch. Second most, talking to people who share my greedy mind and give me the same feeling of learning and growth without making me feel like shit for having not known, before. I am blessed to have friends who think about things and take the time to share their thoughts and know how to challenge me to be my best self while understanding that I'm most likely only going to be better, never best.  Conventionally you would apply such a computation repeatedly a finite number of times, and then settle for the better, but still approximate, result. 

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am still so fully in my dreams that their vague images cloud the whole solitary day. Sometimes I wake up and I start talking to you before I even open my eyes. Sometimes you are there. When you're not, sometimes I write a long story about how that feels but usually I don't send it. 

how many questions can I ask?

There was a time when I almost never discussed anything until I'd made up my mind how I felt about it, because I wanted my answers and my decisions to be my own, uninfluenced by others. I didn't ask questions because I felt like if I didn't answer them for myself then the answers didn't count. And now I'll ask anything, I'm shameless, my curiosity wins first. The problem is that I can't boil it down to one question, because for example I have a hundred questions for you, and you're just one person, and now you want me to ask one question. Ask what? Under the circumstances my first thought turns to human nature and then because I'm me I start with Who. Who are we supposed to be kind to: the people who earn it or the people who need it? What is the nature of that kindness; do we give people what they want or what we think they want, what they should want? Where are the scales that weigh our deeds, and are we weighed according to what we did or what we could have done; what could I have done for you that I did not do, what does that do to my scale in the end? When is the end? If I knew when I was dying, surely life would be much easier for a pointy-headed planner like me. Why, then, does the absence of that knowledge as well as the knowledge itself seem to bring so many people unhappiness; why can't we skip the question of when and live for the day as if it were the last even if it's not? Kiss me now before time runs out. How would I like to be kissed? Like it's the first time. Like you mean it. I'm actually a little troubled that I don't have a better question, a more meaningful one. If given wishes I would wish for more, but I don't know the same solution for questions. Why can't I have more? Maybe that is what I would ask. Except sometimes I know that the answer would be because I don't deserve it. What one question could I ask that would give me an answer that would satisfy me? Ah, there it is. 

legerdemain

When you were little you sucked your thumb at night, the sweet wrinkled fruit of it. It was your talisman, an everlasting gobstopper, the one thing that made it better. Nothing could entice you to give it up, not reason, bribery, punishment. The bitter liquid painted on at night took hours to get through. Picture yourself with bloodshot eyes in the dark, swallowing acetone and formaldehyde, desperate to get past the nausea to the comfort. This is how you learned to be stubborn. The shape of your mouth deformed, your hillbilly teeth that eventually had to be pulled in with braces that tore blisters into your cheeks and still there was nothing that stopped you crying as well as your thumb fit in your mouth, thumbprint pressed against the roof, tongue to nailbed, and finally sleep. 

You sucked it so hard that it melted down into nothing. It wasn't immediate; it was smaller and less comfort and smaller and less comfort and smaller still and one day you woke and you had no thumbs left. Gone. And you tried to talk about it, about how your thumb was gone, but your tongue was searching inside your mouth for what it lost and it stuck to your palate and everyone said you were sulking so you were. How can you complain about what you have lost when everyone was trying to get you to let it go anyway? You can't. Your mourning is ridiculous so you make it a secret, make a curtain of hair and cry behind it and learn swallow your tears, more bitter medicine.

Of course you didn't suffer forever; you're not suffering now. At some point you learned to enjoy your fingers and all the things you can touch when your hand isn't covering your mouth. Velvet, polished wood, the soft fur of some animals. The spines of books and people. You learned words like prestidigitation and dealt cards in a club where, as someone said, what we risk reveals what we value. You have nothing to lose anymore and so mostly you win. 

Sometimes you bite your fingers, not the nails but the skin around, until they bleed. Sometimes you eat like you're afraid someone will take your plate away even though you don't understand words like hungry and full. Sometimes you smoke cigarette after cigarette and for a moment it's like the red glow in the dark is going to get you where you want to go, an airplane light across the sky of your need, but this never comes true. 

Most of the time you are fine, mostly you don't think about it, you are a grown up now, for goodness sake. What are thumbs for, really, to a person who has so much. Some people have lost fingers, all of them; some people have lost hands, arms. You look at the palm of your hand, the life line's elegance. Your hands are strong; your fingers are electric. Also you can break out of handcuffs without even blinking. What's the opposite of sour grapes? You have eaten the sweet deliciousness of a life made simple by loss.

And then one day someone says that you can grow your thumbs back. That you've always been able to; that it's not too late to try. Aha and what now? Yes, now what. 

between

Work and free time, the salt of labor and the honey of a morning in bed. This and that, these and those. Wax and wane, pleasure and pain, responsibility and blame, ball and chain. Too much and not enough, feast or famine, crone or gamine. Good and evil. Your needs and mine. It can be about one or the other, a choice, two lovers. Or it can be about what's fair, about balance, correlation, equality. Oh, and secrets. The other kind of confidence, the kind you share in. Or a rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. The devil and the deep blue sea. Or those deep blue eyes. You and me (not I). Caught. Squeezed. The place that separates, the place that connects, the distance, the transitory life. The difference or the bridge.

***

Huh, I started that on a bus at some point, found it in my phone, and can't seem to make it go anywhere further, so that's that then.

 

I get up and I work, I do paid work if I have any or I try to pretend like I'm working at least. I have my days that are just me, wandering from room to room and making sure the heat is turned down in the empty rooms so that the focus can be on my room, my cozy little den, and I feel that I am writing my own quiet story on my heart. Other days I have coffee, lunch, tea, dinner, each with a different person, and when I go to bed at night my skin is thinner than parchment and I wonder what I am doing but then like any palimpsest I start again. What stories shall we tell ourselves today? I've been thinking about Scherezade lately. 

 

I got locked out of two online accounts recently because I couldn't remember the answers to the security questions. Questions I am prepared to answer promptly: Which eye I would rather have a patch on. Whether I would rather live in a tree trunk or in the branches. My least favorite vegetable. How I will die. Apparently the name of my pet is a stumper for me though, so whoops. 

 

Sometimes I feel absolutely overflowing with news, with things I want to say, stories I want to tell you, so many more than a thousand. And sometimes I don't. Most of the times I hover where I am today, in the middle.

how do you like what you have

One reason I was unwilling to believe that change is possible is that if I DO believe that change is possible, then I have to accept that the reason it doesn't happen is because people don't want to change. In some ways it was easier to believe in a lack of possibility than a lack of desire. And yet my view has changed (because change is possible, because I wanted to change). 

There's a child crying in a room somewhere
her weeping eyes are pressed against her knees
and the tears are filling up her socks

In a dream I am dating a crocodile and I am naturally very afraid of getting eaten but also I like that big smile so much. I hold the crocodile's mouth between my finger and thumb because I heard that was sufficient defense, and one night at my request it lays its full weight on top of me and I cannot tell you how safe that felt, not like being crushed at all but like being finally fully held.

I love 21st century television the same way that I love poetry. Yes some of it is bad, some of it is epic only in terms of how terrible it is, but sometimes there's a phrase, a moment, a line break or a gesture that reaches out and grabs my heart with how perfect it is. 

When you look at someone 
through rose-colored glasses
all the red flags just look like
flags

Standing in Palazzo something or another and telling my son and his girlfriend the story of Psyche. Don't think that didn't have layers. That went all the way through, every one of them, the girl and the god and the goddess, all three of them, me. Pierced me like an arrow, the burn scars on the arm, the disappointment, the irritation, the need for sleep, and not just because I need to maintain my mythic allure.

Sometimes I think that it is awesome that I care so much less about appearances in general and my appearance in particular than I used to. "How hideous am I?" has not left my lexicon but it is exists for me now more as a beautiful quote than an actual deep pain. And other times, patting various creams into my various deepening wrinkles, I think: I am so so so so vain. 

“Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.”

double you eye double el oh double you

We start with the first image, which is of shimmering green coins reflected on the water's rippling surface. I suppose it needn't be near water but when I close my eyes this is the first thing I picture, the fluttering reflection of greens and yellows, the body leaning over the water, weeping I presume since that's often part of the job description. Weep for me, or for Nina Simone. All of us. What else do I know? In Japan there are always ghosts nearby, and once there was a soldier who fell in love and abandoned everything. Tender green love. In modern mythology it hides monstrous monthly secrets and beats people who get too close, though this is not really canon for the species. Elongated leaves which I guess could mean either it takes a long time to leave or to be left, if it meant something other than what it does. Oh yeah I'm looking stuff up, you think I carry this around with me? It is described as slender although I'm looking at a picture here and that's not the word I'd use, I mean it's no oak but it's not a birch either, more like the gnarled hands of an old woman than a bunch of teenage eyes, is one thing. Pliant, it says here, which is certainly true sometimes. When it's healthy it's agreeable up to a point, which is the point of the roots tearing and then it's a hard no, a refusal to yield. I like that it is both flexible and tough, tender and tenacious. Like, it's crying all the time sure but also you can't easily bring it down. The flowers are surprisingly uninteresting, it is simply what it is, no seasonal surprise of ginkgo stench or linden delight. I'd like to say something here about shoots that hasn't been said before but I can't think of what. In the olden days you could keep your hands busy on mindless tasks, weaving over and under until something useful emerged, a basket to carry things in, a fence to keep things out, a beautiful functional object. The bark cures a bite, or most basic pain I guess, including possibly the one you're in right now, though sadly not mine. Google wants to remind me that there's also an 80s movie of course there is where would I be without the 80s. Okay we're done. 

elpis

Pandora's box came up three times yesterday in completely different contexts and originally it was my thought to write about that, but it's actually a shitty myth so I don't know. The story I was planning to tell you is a story about a box, and for starters Pandora's box is not a box, it's a jar. Well the box in my story isn't such a fancy thing, I mean it's not a be-jeweled Waterhouse wonder, it's probably closer to a really nice box that you got a Christmas present in one year and then you re-use the box every year because waste not want not. Small tears of the original bright holiday paper are missing where the lid was taped closed and then the tape removed, but it's still perfectly serviceable. Yeah, that box. But I could switch that box out for a jar, sure, I'm not picky, box, jar, bottle, whatever, and I like staying true to the story even when the story isn't true. And the point of this story is not the box itself, but the lid. And whether it's a lid on a box or a jar doesn't matter: the point is, the lid is SUPPOSED to stay on. Lift the lid and all manner of bad things come out. 

This too, a recurring and weird element. If you don't want her to open the box, why put on a removable cover. If you don't want her to open the door, why give her the key. If you don't want me to talk about this, why ask. 

So the lid. On the box or the jar. In both containers, what is inside is a vortex of pain, I would prefer the word maelstrom except it turns out it's not from Latin but Dutch and therefore no more awesomely meaningful than whirlwind. In any case, swirling and danger and destruction. I'm thinking a jar is better, more conducive to swirling type action, so that's fine, good, we're going to talk about Pandora. 

Except Pandora is sort of a combination dingbat and jerk. Created for the purpose of being so, the gift of cruelty and deceit. And this is not the story I want to tell you. So I will tell you a different one.

I will tell you this story of a woman who has a pithos full of pathos, a turmoil of tears, a welter of memory she carries with her everywhere. She has to carry it because she has to, it's part of the story, it's not that she'll die without it but she will cease to be herself, so here it is, tucked under her arm, and there's a lid and what she really wants to do is let the curse of carrying it be the only curse on her. Like most people cursed to carry a burden she wants to give it a good hard look sometimes, take the lid off and really peer inside and find out what's so darned heavy after all, but most of the time she knows better. "What's in the jar?" they ask and she says "Oh, it's nothing really, long boring story" and they go back to talking about themselves or politics or television which is fine. "What's in the jar, though?" asks another. They are standing at the seashore in the middle of a different myth, and for a stupid moment it seems like a good idea. She sits at the water's edge, coaxes the lid off, shows the contents, the damage, the story more true than works and days, watches their feet kick up plumes of sand as they retreat forever. Too much. She catches a cupful of tears and tops off the jar, fixes the lid back in place, the ocean lapping at her feet as warm and salty as blood. 

Some days it's all she can think about. Some days she doesn't think about it at all. Some days or even weeks are taken up with thinking about how unfair it is that she has to carry this stupid jar and be weighted by it if she is silent and defined by it if she opens it. Some days she thinks about how strong she is from carrying it, how a curse that must be carried is borne; she likes wordplay and that makes her smile. Some days she passes other people carrying their own boxes or jars, some bulkier than hers, some heavier, some unbelievably fragile.  

Pandora's box is really just a dumb origin story: Men suffer because women can't keep a lid on it. The truth is that everybody's got a jar of some size or another, and that inside of this one, if you're paying attention, you can find hope. That was what I wanted to tell you.