Growing Sideways

I’ve already forgotten the way your arms felt like when they wrapped around me. I would like to imagine that you had felt the same way the warmth that envelopes you on a sultry August evening inside of a car with all the windows down does. I cannot quite remember the sensation of the way your fingertips felt as they quietly pressed into my skin. Four sided designs would trickle down my spine disappearing seconds after their surface. During the summer months our legs would peel away from each other with a soft tug. Some film using mirrors as motifs was playing on mute while a song we didn’t hear enough of would accompany our nights underneath those itchy and thinning blankets. A small blue glow from the wall where the subtitles of dialogue we couldn’t relate to would seep out. We spoke with our lips and our hands, our hipbones and our sweaty skin.

I regret not being able to make each other’s lives easier and brighter for longer. More kisses and less screaming could have been of some help, but I have never thought the end of it all was about falling out of love. I have perceived our entire almost five years together as a reverberation of scenarios we were both hoping for inside of our heads. We would watch these scenarios unfold in real life as plans disentangled themselves from our calendars, our late night conversations obsessively ending on punk music or the places we felt most like climbing in our car and driving to. I cannot remember who started having different plans first. I cannot remember whose changing scenarios began to clash first. A feeling less like guilt and more like growth leads me to believe that the change started inside of me. I think it was because of that impromptu middle of the night road trip I took to Chicago that one night, when I was still living in Michigan. I went without you, with my three closest friends. It was only a twelve-hour trip, eight of those on the road, but it snagged on this sensation that sat like a rock inside of me. An uncomfortable pebble that lay stagnant at the very bottom of my stomach where it had sat still for three years. I had never felt it as consciously as I did when we drove between the endless, looming buildings which seemed to be the only thing holding up the dusty, black blanket the sky had turned into, completely bare of the stars I knew from home. I felt it shiver beneath me, and as I felt the knot swell, pushing against the constraints of my skin and bones and I understood that this knot had been formed out of complacency. I understood that I needed more buildings and more people. I needed less television and most importantly I felt that I needed less exchanges of extraneous and meager words. I could tell it was too big to stay inside of me anymore. And rather than having my body burst, I chose to leave.

Maybe I’m growing up and you’re growing sideways. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the other way around.

***

The cold linoleum feels smooth beneath my fingertips. My heavy arms slide forwards and backwards across the grimy stretch, as far as my hands could reach. I write my name in the thin layer of ash and dirt, digressing from the “N” to paint small designs into my apartment’s floor. My eyes lose sight of the etchings I have made, their impression unable to delve below the surface of my new canvas. My arm sticks out from me like a ragdoll hanging upside down by her legs, and in slow and deliberate movements I touched and I felt the linoleum. And it reminded me of the way the freshly poured cement of the driveway of the house I grew up in would feel after a chilly summer drizzle.

I spend nights in my bed, running my hands over the cold sheets in a hope of finding a sliver of the way you felt. I walk along train platforms and my hands drag lightly against the cardboard advertisements, the metal benches and escalator railings. I search for you in my every day, beneath the damp and dripping towel from my early morning shower, behind the glossy exterior of a brand new book, or somewhere between the sticky residues that gather on your fingers after playing with the label of a beer bottle.

Following the Summer

THE GOING AWAY PARTY PART ONE
I ran the two blocks home from the coffee shop where I had started working a few months earlier. It was a balmy August night and there was that consistent Chicago haze hanging above our heads; thick but not suffocating, it rested easily on my tongue and I was content to taste this night. The stairs slammed hard into the bottoms of my feet as I climbed up the two flights to my apartment. There are six units, but never more than five occupied at any given time. The woman in the apartment next to mine was screaming at a man whose deep bass vocals shook the already quivering windows. I walked up to my own black door and pushed inside of it. He was sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. He was using that shitty old suitcase we had found at Value World four years earlier. It had deep tears in the front of it, as if someone purposefully pulled a knife across it. He had separated our vinyl and his sat in a milk crate next to him. Movies and books were absent from our bookshelf and it looked like a man with missing teeth. He kissed me one last time before he left, and I have never had such a bad taste in my mouth.
A CASUAL ENCOUNTER
We had left our empty glasses and  glassy eyed friends behind at the bar. The wind crashed hard into our faces leaving them raw and warm to touch. We stood wrapped up in each other staring down Halsted for a bus that would never come. We wandered in the direction of home, walking straight into the night’s angry gusts of air, taking turns holding onto your bike. Your brand new bicycle that was the color of dry blood remained between us when you turned me around as we stood over the Chicago River, the metal bridge shuddering every time a car would drive by. My back pressed against the cold metal of the railing and the water shivered beneath us, colder than the air. You kissed my eyelids, my cheeks, your bicycle caught on my sweater and your beard tickling my face.

OLD WOMAN
Her skin crinkled the way fire burns paper, creasing to connect and release. The lines around her mouth revealed her teeth and she smiled. They were jagged and yellow with vast slopes and holes in the back of her mouth where she was once whole. They were the kind of teeth you see in old storybooks that tell about an old wicked witch that bakes children in a fiery oven. I wanted to reach forward and place my hands on either side of her sagging and leathery face. I could hear the soft “swish” of air escaping her cracked and bleeding lips. She breathed in short, steep breaths and her chest deflated over and over again. I leaned forward, just in case she whispered something to me as I handed her the $2.81 in change. Her bottom lip seemed adhered to her top lip as they struggled to part, and I moved in even closer, the counter digging hard into my side, in order to hear anything this woman would say.

UNTITLED
He had sent us messages to say that he was done with us, and so long. He wouldn’t be our friend anymore. He was finished with us in the worst way he had said. And that was day one. Day three came and he called me on the phone. His voice dripped through the receiver like a slow jazz song. He was apologizing but I couldn’t quite follow. He spoke in metaphors and analogies, but he had always been inelegant when it came to dialogue. Day four he disappeared completely. When we saw him next, his face was blank and dark, situated next to the dirty taupe colored walls behind his head. The walls, that looked disgustingly similar to day old sauerkraut, or maybe that was just the smell.

I don’t remember what I said to him that day.

THE GOING AWAY PARTY PART TWO
The pint of gin shook in my hand as I chain-smoked. I surveyed my apartment, running my hand over the thick lines I had pained on the walls a few days earlier, trying my best to imitate some kind of 1970s bowling alley. A nervous laughter broke out of my lips and I stifled it with my bottle. I poured it down my throat and it was dry, rough and noticeably cheap. But it coated my mouth like tar, dripping down thickly and slowly inside my throat and through my chest before making a heavy splash in my stomach. I began to move fluently throughout the cramped apartment, gathering all the things that smelled like, looked like, felt like him. I climbed outside onto the fire escape and began to relinquish all of these parts of him. They floated lazily down to the pavement, but I wanted them to crash, shatter, burn. As soon as they rested on the pavement their shapes changed form, an old toaster turned into a mortgage payment, and that old Bowie record became a screaming infant. And his old dented drumsticks barely made a clatter against the ground before turning into a sad sort of couple that looked remarkably like a fusion of our parents, except older. When I had finally woke up from Seagram’s-induced coma the sun was bleeding through my blinds and I remembered that I had never made it to Amanda’s going away party. Today she would fly to her new home in Hawaii. That seemed to be a bigger loss than living alone.

Left & Leaving

Leave

[leev] verb, left, leav⋅ing.

–verb (used with object)

1. To go out of or away from, as a place: to leave the house monotony.

Leaving

Using the back door

A car

A bicycle

A pair of shoes

Different ways to stay awake

Cigarettes

A boyfriend

Different ways to dream our dreams

A bus ticket

Demanding a frivolous lifestyle

A plane ticket

A stolen bicycle

A stolen car (surely, not…)

Attacking morality

Cigarettes

Looking forward

Blacking out

Multiple stolen pairs of shoes

No bus ticket

Overdraft fees

Backtracking

Train hopping

Vagrants

Hits of something flat

Hits of something bright

Cops

Pulling the “suburban white girl”

Anarchists?

Bloody nose

Perpetual vomiting

Rejecting sleep and simple acts of kindness

Hand rolled cigarettes

Hitchhiking

Hide in backseats

Hide in trunks

Hide beneath blankets

An ex-boyfriend

Drop off at gas stations

Drop off at rest stops

Drop off at side of the road

Leave

[leev] verb, left, leav⋅ing.

–verb (used with object)

2. To allow to remain the same; place, condition, etc: Are there any bottles reasons left?

Dear Chicago,

I returned to Detroit after a seven month hiatus. I returned for the shortest period of time I could, while still justifying the five hour bus ride there and the idea of another five hour bus ride home. I once heard that “A  (wo)man travels over the world in search of what (s)he needs, and returns home to find it.” (but who the fuck is George Moore anyways?).  But, where is home? What is home? I think you are my home. I think you are my home, but you are not my family. And I think my family is home, but they are not you. I am no longer able to hear anyone call out my name to come “home”.  There is only silence besides Detroit’s shallow death rattle as houses continued to go up in flames (insurance fraud takes the place of Friday night at the movies), people continue to flee the decaying city leaving only those unable to move and I continue to fall out of love with all I have left behind. I return because of my family (my home?). A family that continues to let themselves be surrounded by filth, sadness and the same kind of emptiness that can be heard at the bottom of a hollow aluminum can. Is it possible that I am perhaps feeling a bit superior to those I’ve left, because I’ve left? My days are long and bland. Work, drink, smoke, repeat.  Learning is situated somewhere in between the times where my eyes are closed and glazed over. I’m terrified of admitting the truth. Truth. The word leaves you without hurry. It falls out of your mouth and drifts slowly away, never quite reaching the ground.  I stay the same while only my scenery has changed.

Forever Yours

Leave

[leev] verb, left, leav⋅ing.

–verb (used with object)

3. to let remain or have remaining behind after going, disappearing, ceasing, etc. : I left my wallet dignity home. The wound bastard left a scar [inside of me].
The gas station held only a single rack littered with out of date porno magazines. Behind it a glass counter with cigarettes and liquor bottles sat under a thick skin of dust. The bells on the door made an erosive clanking when I opened it and I felt an announcement I didn’t expect. I smelled of whiskey and pot and my face was covered under a veil of dirt. There was blood caked to the side of my forehead and when I tried to wipe it away, it flaked off like dead skin, and I watched it float down to the dirty orange tiles crooked beneath my feet.
“$16.54″
The voice came from a middle-aged woman standing behind the counter. She reminded me of someone I couldn’t quite remember and I couldn’t tell who looked worse out of the two of us. Her hair was long, thinning, greasy. She had fake gold rings on most of her fingers. Her eyes looked hard or sad, I couldn’t tell which. I wondered what she had really wanted to grow up to be instead of a gas station attendant. My blood stained fingers shakily pushed a twenty-dollar bill across the counter. It was the same twenty dollar bill that I watched my best friend snort thrills through a few hours earlier. She swore to me it wasn’t a habit, but she looked like a liar when she spoke. I grabbed the pint of some cheap whiskey and cigarettes and shoved the change into my pocket. I softly walked to the door and stared outside. It was darker than it should be for a summer night and it looked like it might smell like rain. A gray mass hung low in the sky, lazily loitering above us.
“I hope you’re not driving.”
She spoke to me again while she wiped off the counter with a grimy rag. I stared at her coldly and I could feel an excess of despair leak out of me like sweat, leaving each of my pores relieving me of a tangible kind of sadness. Without a word, I left the gas station and started down the road back towards the ditch where I had left him. The clouds looked weary and I hadn’t gotten far when they opened above me. The rain hit me like a million tiny secrets and I saw the dirt running down my arms and dripping into the wet street. My hair was matted with blood and rain and sweat and I forced myself to keep walking. I couldn’t think, I could hardly breathe, and the rain was blurring an already skewed perspective. I walked until the sounds of the faraway city were drowned out by my heavy footsteps and trying breaths. I climbed back inside of the ditch, in an effort to disappear completely. Water was filling in the ditch and it felt like silk wrapping around me. I wanted it to encase me and prevent me from leaving this place. I struggled to open my whiskey bottle, the rain making it slippery against my fingers. I turned the cap and escape wafted out in a slow, twirling vapor rising up towards something more than what lay on the ground.

Morning came and with it, a clear sky. Dripping wet and ragged, I unsteadily pulled myself out from the ditch, and out of the water. My chest felt deflated, as if someone had stood on top of me, until my ribcage gave in, revealing my guts. My toes sank deep into the mud, my arms and legs in the shape of star, and I was exposed for some God and his army* to see me, to redeem me, but they never came. My bones felt cold, and the skin that held them together felt even colder. I became aware of the way my heart pulsed and sagged with every pull and tug my body created inside of myself. My broken body ached from a night of bad dreams and the humidity had found a home deep inside my lungs, all the way down into my stomach. It lingered and danced, unaware of the destitute scene painted on the outside of me. My dirty hands arrived at my stomach and they rested there, intent to feel a life inside.

This isn’t what you think. I know what you think. I know the implications that these words reverberate inside of your head . This has nothing to do with wire hangers or a fall down the stairs. It has nothing to do with the kind of violence that shows up in the middle of the night in the form of an old Lifetime movie. The blood exists out of my tears and the tears exist from this rusty old planet. Her water is my tears and her water is my blood.

Leave

[[leev] verb, left, leav⋅ing.

–verb (used with object)

4.To depart from permanently; quit: to leave a job home.

A girl that is me stands in the middle of a huge empty theatre. The wooden floor is old and stained. A bright, white spotlight hums to life and it moves on top of her and it moves on top of me. She and I are folded up inside a tattered red dress covered in dust and worn from years of performing. We raise my arms up in front of her eyes, squinting. In a bold voice she yells. No, I scream.

This, right here, right now, this is only my dream you are staring narrowly at. And already you are trying to discern some kind of significance. Convinced that somewhere tucked inside of the subtext is a presage. And, just like the rest of us, you will spend your nights and your days thinking about this moment and about the complete exposition of the life you’ve lived, wasted, loved, hated and how to think about it … really think about it, scares the hell out of you.

This body falls forward, waist like a crease, stuck in a deep bow, this pretty face almost on the floor, before being pulled off stage by a great and mighty wooden hook.

---

* deus ex ma·chi·na (ěks mä’kə-nə, -nä’, māk’ə-nə)  
n.

1. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation.
2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.

A Brief History of a Boy

This is an essay I wrote influenced by Brenda Miller’s essay, “A Brief History of Sex”.

2006 – Alex

He was like a whirlwind of colors, textures, and of a taste between my teeth. Under my tongue, I could smell him inside of my head. The smoke from our newly extinguished cigarettes sat in a haze above our faces. I traced his eyes, nose, lips with my finger. Bright, rough and smooth, this is the way I remember swinging in your hammock, strung out, between two lazy trees, their branches splitting from the wind and rain. I wrapped my heavy arms around his soft belly and placed my ear on top of his navel. I made believe that it was like a conch and I could hear what was happening inside of him. Sound waves of earlier regrets and words never spoken floated around, drifting up to the surface. I promised I would rid him of these cancers, letting his miseries stumble down my throat and splash into the river my stomach had become. Deep inside of me they collided and danced, deep inside he kissed my neck.

2009 – Not Alex

The silence feels more like a sound inside my bed. The same be that has acted more like a revolving door these last few months than a place to rest my tired head. I pull all three of my blankets up to my neck. With only my head sticking out, I place my face in my hands, peeking at them through my fingers. The slow rise, the soft sigh that escapes their parted lips, red and raw, before the exploration for clothing begins.

The pants are usually found at the foot of the bed, more often than not on the floor. The grandiose, button-up shirt with golden thread stitched throughout is sometimes by the door and sometimes by the window, but never near the pants.

Through my fingers I realize that they all leave the same. Their backs slightly hunched, a perfect spine staring me down. They remain facing away from the same place they could hardly wait to be introduced to an hour ago. Their eyes fixate on their hands, following the miniature ridges and slopes in buttons and zippers. They are hurried, but not sloppy, their feet never getting caught in their pants. Around the time they start looking for their socks is when I grab whatever is nearest and dress myself. Discreetly, but not quite ashamed, I am finished before laces are tied.

We stand in an awkward unison, and I lead our scandalous dance thirtysomething feet across the living room to the front door. Then comes the part I spend all evening dreading. I brace myself for the part I can feel pushing down on me. This is the part of these poorly made decisions that turns my stomach most; the kiss goodbye.

2009: A Letter To Alex

This is not the letter I sent to you in the mail. That one cost me 32 cents plus the cost of the hours I spent agonizing over the way my X’s seem overbearing and the way my words sometimes crash into each other, my hand unable to keep pace with my thoughts. This is the letter I will hide in the lining of my winter coat this season. This is the letter I will read over and over again until the paper becomes worn and thin, small holes that look like pinpricks will dot the piece of gray paper that used to be crisp and white. I want to say “enough of this sad shit” and go on about how wonderful that week will be when we see each other, but I cannot stop this rabid loneliness that our ever-increasing distance lays over me, like a big, wet blanket.

Missing you, the way that I do, is wholly consuming. It begins at my fingertips and flows through my veins like red hot electricity. It makes my hair stand on end and my heart slam into my ribcage.

Inside my head, I tell myself that this constant feeling of absence is irrational. My constant thoughts of your soft skin and big brown eyes cause me to forget to hear the things my friends are saying to me. I meet so many men in hopes of finding one that reminds me of you. Their hands are not gentle and they never whisper in my ear the dreams we made when we were young. They do not run their fingers through my hair until my breathing slows and my eyelids quiver during a dream I won’t be able to wait to tell you about. I have waited my entire life to stop relying on men. Why do I rely on you to cure this monotonous and uninterrupted vacancy inside of myself?

Sometimes, when sleep doesn’t come easily, I can see you inside of my head. And like a broken film reel, scenes from our entanglement earlier this summer replay, on a loop. And if sleep still has difficulty finding me, different movies of how we will spend the hours together when I make my way to the Pacific begin to play. These do not sedate me, they do not make me smile, because I know you will feel just as a mirage looks.