tuckova

younger then than now

Oh, this one I remember. Curly mop of copper hair and eyes that saw so much and could hold you still until everything around you faded. He was an artist, a photographer, a sweet heart. He took pictures of me, all eyelashes and cheekbones; I wrote him poetry. We traded scar stories, cooked together, played like a basket of kittens. He wanted my heart and I showed him what I had, still beating but ragged around the edges where it had torn when I tried to take it back from the last love. 

We sat in the kitchen one morning, that last love and I, laughing over coffee. Meanwhile, the photographer squeezed under the bed where it was too dark to see anything, not even a way out. I brought his coffee into the room, surprised he hadn't come into the kitchen for it. A hand sudden around my ankles and I fell, he crawled into me, sobbing and choking while he ate his own heart. You need to be a little braver to love someone than I was then and I felt my ragged heart locking itself away from him.

I saw him years later, and he still looked the same, a little less hair. Softer around the eyes, too, but still able to hold me in place. He'd won awards, toured. I hope somebody loved him really hard. I am sorry I couldn't, but I was so much younger then and even my coffee was weaker. 

 

inlaid

In 1994 we went to Telc for the first time; there's a beautiful castle there. This was before Western tourism had really hit the country and we pretty much had the run of the place (now it has the red ropes that all castles buy in bulk). We posed in embroidered chairs at the dining hall table, slid around on the ballroom's parquet floor in the ubiquitous Czech slippers, took flash photos of the sgraffito which was not a misspelling. There was, in one room, a puzzle box. According to the guide, the box had 20 hidden compartments, of which they had only found fifteen. We fiddled with it for a while before zooming off, high on kofola and drunk on antiquity.

In this room now you arrive. With your wide eyes you open one drawer, with your careful mouth you speak and open two more. Clever fingers open the velvet drawer where a woman could store her jewelry, find the hidden latch and the lid flies open, and music pours out of the puzzle box, all the secrets but one revealed now. It is part of your genius that in this moment you pass your hand gently across the lid and stand and walk away, leaving that one last mystery for later, or for someone else, and go on to join the others while the music plays on behind you.

holding back the years

The summer of 1986, and I'd already been through so much. Thinking of the fear I'd had so long. I remember thinking that I'd had plenty of experience with feelings and that I wasn't going to let myself feel anything again. Listen to the fear that's gone. I had just turned 18. Strangled by the wishes of pater, hoping for the arms of mater. I'd started college broken-hearted and for that first year tried to not talk to anybody unless it was related to school. Get to me the sooner or later. I dressed in oversized shirts and jeans and shaved my head down to a soft fuzz that was, I believed, the only thing soft about me. I'll keep holding on. I worked in a movie theater and spent most of my free time in a dark room watching a flickering screen, and I lived on popcorn. Chance for me to escape from all I'd known. He opened the door to the ticket booth and sang "Pure Imagination" and I fell. Cause nothing here has grown. That was the summer we drove and drove everywhere. I wasted all my tears, wasted all those years. We drove to UC Berkeley and spent hours reading all the graffiti in the hallway of the observatory before we finally got to the roof to count the stars and I still thought I could keep it all in my head. And nothing had the chance to be good. One late night he stayed in my room, we slept curled like kittens, gentle and innocent, and in the morning I kissed him for the first time. I'll keep holding on, so tight. When the radio alarm went off it was playing this song, and I every time I hear it I remember how it felt, how sweet it was to open my heart again. That's all I have to say.

embellished

When I was in college, I used to go to poetry readings pretty regularly. One of my favorite poems of all time was from one of these readings. A guy gets up, kind of nebbishy, shaking a little bit I assumed from nerves, the paper rattling in his hand, tentative voice into the microphone:

Relationships

And if you've been to many poetry readings, you're picturing immediately where this poem is going: there will be a metaphor, there will be 

line

breaks

there may be a few really nice images, the kind that pour from the reader's mouth and float up around his head like Disney helpers before slowly evaporating from memory, there may be a line you write down in your notebook to store for later. 

So there he stood, in my memory he has glasses, and he read in his quiet bookish voice, "Relationships" and paused, and looked out at the audience, and

SCREAMED. A long, agonized, primal scream. 

 

True story.

"but monkeys are so ugly they're cute"

This picture was taken in January 1995, my first winter here. I was 26. I recently spoke to two friends that age, one visiting the Czech Republic for HER first winter, and the other working abroad for the first time.

Since I kept a diary back then, I was able to visit that younger Anne, to see how much of what I remember now was what I thought was important at the time and to ponder how much of who I was then informed who I am now. 

And mostly I'm the same. I wrote sentences like "I think sometimes people practice being unhappy to remind themselves they are still alive." I had a weakness for gimmick novels. I had a dream about a writer whose fingers turned to fountain pen nibs and she ripped apart a person she was trying to hug. 

But I was so fixated on how unattractive I was. For example, I wrote about the boy who took this picture, and how much it meant that he let his skin touch mine here, because it meant he wasn't afraid my ugliness would infect him. 

Now I look and I think -- I was not ugly. How did I think I was ugly? Was it being female, was it the people I socialized with, was it how any insecurity I felt manifested, was it the hair (it's always the hair)? I wish that I had a time machine to go back and tell that girl she was okay. I would have told her she was fine, that there were so many other things worth having all those feelings about. I would have told her that her eyes were incredible and that she should learn to use them to see things more clearly, that her skin was lovely and doing a great job of holding her guts in so she could quit spilling them to dingbats who didn't deserve it, that her hair was perfectly fine and to hell with anybody who told her differently. I would have told her that her beautiful heart was the only thing that mattered but also that she had amazing bones. 

Of course I turned out okay; I'm 95% less likely to stay inside because I am too afraid of frightening people in the street with the horror of my face. So since I like who I am I probably wouldn't use the time machine to go back in time to change anything.* But I have decided to try to tell people a little more often how beautiful they are on the outside. Just in case they don't know.  

_{*Also if you have a time machine you go back and invest in Apple or something USEFUL, duh. TM MIG.}

and it's been so long that I can't explain

It's December 2nd, the fourth birthday since you died. Sometimes I think about how when I am dead the entirety of our friendship will be dead, every experience we shared, every conversation, everything. We were the only witnesses. How we raced elevators, drank beer, tormented the people in the video store with our increasingly obscure requests; how hard we laughed. How much of my time was spent on thinking towards amusing you, just to hear your devil laugh, and even now whenever I find something funny half the time my mind races towards you and then stumbles around on itself, mouth gaping with the loss, fresh wound. I have other friends who have cut themselves off from me and my memories, people who want to pretend like we were never friends because it would mean living up to something they'd promised me, or actually I don't know what, I don't even get the Christmas cards. This time of year I feel all these absences. As good as dead, except you really are and I will never get over it. I miss you so much, I loved you so hard. 

 

breaking the girl

In search of a poem that I had mostly memorized in 1990 but was a little hazy on, lo! these many (23? sheesh) years later, I went digging through a box of paper that will either fascinate or terrify whoever goes through my stuff after I die. Here are poems I liked, torn out of the New Yorker in this case, or often photocopied or even copied by hand from books. Notes I took during poetry readings when I used to go, and even some fliers I made for readings of my own. The best reading I ever did was with Scott Soriano, who put a steak on his face and squirted blood out of it while reciting a poem that was a revision of Howl, but about Carls Jr., this was 1989 I guess. Most performance art seems kind of a disappointment to me after that. 

What else was in that box, Anne? Oh, children, gather round and see. Here are poems that a friend wrote, and songs. I haven't talked to him since he left Prague, that was 1995 I guess, but I can still sing one of the songs and every year I tell the joke I first heard from him, that Jan Hus was a man with a lot at stake. Also poems by my former insane roommate, no longer my roommate and probably even no longer insane. Poems by people I took classes with. No letters, because those are in another box around here somewhere. 

So many things by other people. I can't bear to toss it (and anyway it's just this one box) because even though the smell of the mimeograph machine has faded from them, my memory of exactly how I felt the first time I read some of these poems stays fresh, and I am transported back to sixteen, or twenty-six. 

And things I wrote as well. Mostly poetry. Oh, so young and earnest! My love was a tree, you guys, and also a glass of water. Already with the metaphors, and THAT earnest. And also one letter I wrote that I made a copy of for myself, stored separately from the other letters. It is three pages long, and tearstained, and so absolutely naked with pain that I want to get that girl a blanket and cover her. It has the range of a great battle, from the personal to the general, from Greek mythology to Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics, except it is clear that I was mostly fighting with myself, as the object of my affection had long since left me. I sat there this afternoon, with these pages in my hands, thinking: should I throw this out? Because this does not really go with how I see myself now, and it is so painful to remember this that it is almost embarrassing. Back when I used to find it easier to tell the whole truth than to hold it in, even if it sliced me open on the way out. 

I mean: now, I want to finish something, and I know I can just just sit very still until you go. It's to the point where sometimes I hear the words before you say them, and I smile and say lightly that it was my fault anyway, sorry, and my teeth clamp over my tongue before I can say another word, and I wave goodbye and I don't look back until I know you're not looking. No more tearstained outpourings from this corner, no more bleeding the truth. So now I remember why I keep the letter, and fold it back into the box, as gently as I wish someone had been with me, put a lid on it, put it back in a quiet safe place. 

the only thing that shines

A deep sadness that I have examined EXHAUSTIVELY over some 23 years and which would not go away and so instead became a story I am tired of telling; tired of telling myself, tired of telling others. Do you get tired of telling the story of how you met, your first death, your first birth, a funny mistake you made in a foreign language? I have told this story until I could tell it to anyone, until I had nobody to tell it to anymore, until I could tell it in my sleep, until it had no power over me. Yet it still exists, the sadness that made the story. Still a thing that happens, a tide that pulls up with some regularity. And I have to say, ah, there it is, that again. But I just don't feel like telling the story anymore and so instead there is a silence to observe it, like some sad anniversary. Maybe some day we will have picnics and fireworks and completely forget the meaning, though I don't think so, not in my lifetime.

Another story I promised to be done with already in 2009 that keeps telling itself while I curl away, ears plugged, wishing for some lizard-skin spine to keep it off of me, yet it settles on my shoulders again and again, this disappointment, this anger, black wings that are incapable of flight.

Heard the title of a song I once loved, a madeleine, so I went and dug out the tape. This is a tape he made for me before he left and so it belongs with him in my mind but it is also entirely mine. The plastic stretched and warped beyond repair, I can't even play it anymore, but now I can download the song in a heartbeat and listen to it again, remember curling around a speaker so that the sound reverberated through my body, how much I felt music then, literally. Listening to a song over and over; how it was to believe that if I listened enough it would be more than an echo of my feelings, that it might explain how to get out, because there is always that next song. 

 

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. 

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sue did this when she was mad." Sue being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but for 50 cents an hour I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting relationship with that family. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".