Tag: college

Where I Am Now

My favorite days are like earth after rain, rich with soft soil smell, a little warm, a little damp. I make tea but forget to drink it, and the smell of it, heavy and sweet, fills the room. I spent a Saturday sobbing, once, and the Sunday after dying of laughter. It served as a good reminder: putting on clean jeans and making it outside, that’s heroic, sometimes. My heart is a silly thing, half-formed, still catalyzing, but it’s still my heart. I am no Achilles, no Alexander, but I don’t mourn it, this mortal that I am, these places where I am now.

On bad days, there isn’t a prophet alive who can help me out of the darkness, but my mother’s face, blurred almost beyond recognition by an Internet connection strung across the Atlantic, does the trick. When I look at her, I remember how she never cried the day I left home, and I now realize that was the greatest kindness she could ever have showed me. I’m realizing a lot of things, as of late, and they make me want to punch myself in the face and kiss a stranger, in equal measure.

My body, this year: the back of my ankles dry, the curve of my wrist warm, some parts of me like peeled oranges, yellowing wheat, husks of cinnamon, belly flab, short legs, acne on my chin; I should get more sleep, I should eat better. It’s hard, and getting harder; nobody ever told me that. Even for the stars in space, life is nothing but resisting inner pressure and external gravity, inward and outward forces. But I think life can’t be measured according to difficulty, along a spectrum of extremes. I am not better, I am not worse. What I am, where I am now: that has yet to be determined.

I am nineteen in two hours.

Not A Good Day

A pair of young women came to calligraphy class today. They stood up to introduce themselves: slender, rounded arms, soft sweaters, pleasant voices. We practiced writing earth: pronounced chi, thick lines and threads of black, flecks like kicks, dense and hard. One of the women stops behind me, steadies herself on my shoulder, leans in and takes hold of my writing hand, guiding my strokes.

Her touch is all over me, gentle, and suddenly I cannot breathe. I feel like I’ve been robbed blind, like my inner organs have been removed and replaced with seawater, dark matter, heavy liquor; I am light, I am lightless. My ribs open up and invite it in, and there are branches around my waist, and blood up to my neck, and I’m overwhelmed with it, staying power, saving grace, movements like the wind on rooftops, because she’s touching me, her slim, cold hands are on me, her liquid-smooth, heart-soft palm is on the crushed metal of my shoulder blade, her fingers are resting in the gaps between my knuckles, like warm air rushing to fill an empty space, and she’s telling me that the fourth stroke ends in a stop, not a curve.

It’s been six months since someone’s touched me.

I need to control myself; I can’t control myself. I assumed this unease was temporary, but now it’s getting too familiar with me, softening the vertebrae that care for the frame of my body, licking at the falling walls of my mouth. I can’t control myself. I can’t control myself.

Fire, honey; liars, money. Put me to sleep; set me on fire. I’m so stuck within this life that a woman’s hand is enough to rip me apart. These hours I live are not whole; these places I go are not homes. What am I living, where am I going? I CAN’T CONTROL MYSELF.

Me: earth when it is dying, bruises that are flowers, empires of leaves and dog days that shatter, dust and dust and want and want. I was going to be a hero, but why would that be, when I am made of the stuff the galaxy wouldn’t put in its stars? I sit on my bed, dark outside, back to the wall, and I look at my hands, where I saw worth, once. Now I only see weapons.

I go to sleep praying that, during the night, I’ll change into someone better than this. When I wake I take in a single breath, my eyes open like gunshots, and I know: nothing has changed. You can’t control yourself; who would ever touch you.

Adultlike

I am traveling. On the second floor of a train, knees pressed to my chest; I have not slept in two days, my mind is a terrible place.

The trees are barely visible in the swollen dark, but thin branches spread up and out, gracing the curves of my peripheral vision; they tremble a little, a colorless, sleepless parade spiraling out along the tracks. The train is an incautious and indelicate creature, shaking hard, making disconsolate sounds. My face is dirty, and my hair lies in a dry coil at the base of my neck. Sweat dotting the insides of arms, coffee stains like animal stripes on the sleeves of my down jacket: it’s easy to see where I have been, the symptoms and saviors of my life are all about me, visible, deducible. I’m a victim at the scene of a crime, silhouette traced out in yellow tape, what’s the cause of death? And what are you going to tell me when I peel myself off the hardwood floor, scratch at the fingerprints of blood at my collarbone and ask where the nearest subway is, if I can go home now?

I’m not getting any rest tonight, that much is certain. So I pile my bags at my feet and keep watch, as wide swipes and swatches of land come and go. Patches of city, blurred out by motion and the gray morning hours, as though partially erased by a fidgeting and forgetful goddess. Spots of yellow-orange light flooding warehouses, parking lots, silver trucks. A factory, huffs of smoke, expanding and retracting in the air, like blood flowing down the tar roads or rainwater tonguing lazily at rock, just like your legs stretching out from underneath the sheets, curling around the piles of slightly wet laundry at the foot of your bed. Train tracks clot and congeal, dipping underneath bridges, around lakes that shine like oil spills in the night, skimming the surface of the planet, taking us along with it: anywhere, everywhere.

I don’t know where I am, sometimes. I’m caught between worlds, pinned underneath a membrane. Living feels like an out-of-body experience; see Emma walk, see Emma run. Someone I don’t know is walking around in my clothes, and I hang from traffic lights, watching them cross the street in the old jean jacket I took from my mother, in my black slacks and chapped lips. I won’t grab at their shoulders, yank them into an alley and steal it all back, I won’t pull my fleshy, stretch-marked skin over my knees and talk with my real eyes. I don’t feel safe, or trustworthy, not yet. Is this what growing up feels like? Is that what growing up is (deciding: I am dangerous)?

Cities split into suburbs: neat rows of pastel-colored houses, lawn ornaments. Then the sidewalks disappear and green-bright, nut-brown fields whiz past, lines of buds tended by old hearts in wife-beaters, blessed in the springtime by the bees that lay low and silent now, pressed into the cells of their golden hives. Boarded-up convenience stores, iceberg blue water towers, red barns: a little chewed-up at the edges, but all the more beloved. These towns don’t warrant a mention on the map, but there are men here who will be born in puddles of slick blood on cotton blankets and who will be buried near the fringe of trees, caked by cold and dirt, underneath Midwestern petunias; they will live out the entirety of their days in homes that are more unknown to the rest of mankind than the outlying strips of the universe.

It’s seven in the morning, now. I’m eating an overpriced chocolate bar, rolling sugar in my mouth, and my head lolls against the seat, and I am fighting sleep. The train turns a corner and I see the river; the first river in over a year. It hits me hard in the face, a fistful of gunshots, gold dust. I never realized that those threads and layers of water, strung out across the bowl of the land, could mean so much; my heart grows in some indeterminate but definite way. The sky, rubbed raw, is softening slowly; there is sunlight coming through the creases, cracking the ribs in the curvature of the Earth, soaking in like ink through paper veins, like time oxidizing faces, fire through the cover of trees.

I am in a moment of my life and I can’t decide if I like it or not. I’m awfully confused. But, all things considered, this is a pretty world to be confused in.

I remember a good song and tap it out on the carpet, I finger the ticket stubs in my pockets, I watch warehouses, men, rivers and it reminds me of the places I have been, the people I have been in those places. I have been the dollop trollop, I have been lady disquiet, I have been the corpse under your floorboards. I have been the songbird, the murderer, I have been the child lost in the forest. I am dangerous now, but I have been safe. Where do I have to go, to be safe again?

I am traveling. I have not slept in two days; my mind is a terrible place.

Some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions

I’m learning to read Japanese; each step across the page slides cleanly through me, sun cutting across the undergrowth. The characters fill me to the brim with the sticky reminder of their shape and meaning, stuck to the nape of my neck like the odor of spoiling summer fruit. I stand over a desk in the clouded glow of early morning, tracing their forms with a fingertip. Hiragana, katakana, kanji. I thread them together and run my tongue through them, and they are as new and tender to me as the the birth of the first moon is to the insecure god. I want to own and preserve these characters, cup them close to my chest; I want to mutilate them, too, test their breaking points. Indecision takes root. I remember that boy from high school; how the only thing I could tolerate less than his sadness was his joy. Someday I will be sitting on my haunches at the beach, dipping my hands into sand, writing him a love letter onto the body of the coast that the sea’s blood will soon take away.

My father doesn’t approve. Why Japanese? he asks me during our telephone conversation, his voice ground into pulp by some faraway satellite. Anxiety breathes deep and pure into my stomach; I press my forehead to the window glass and I thank God, not for the first time, that he is not here with me, and that he cannot see my expression. I look too much like my mother when I am upset.

Japanese at nine o’clock in the rain, footsteps up the sidewalk like the drip drop of a bar’s painful piano, my lips twisting at the language as though insistence could return color to the dying leaves of my thoughts; Japanese when I find myself on the floor, crying, folded up, creases and edges pinched to a close. Japanese because when all else fails, at least I have the frustration of a liar’s love to keep me alive through the change into the shattering season. Japanese because I am unhappy and there is no one left to blame.

I come up with a story for each character. Sa is a ghost, cooling touch and grace, wiry frame, wound up by childhood death. Tsu is the soft-eyed and slow-smiling boyfriend I’ll never have. Hi is a town near the seaside, done up in pastel and gold, where mermaids come to be buried. Ku is the secret that would break my dear mama’s heart.

In response to the first draft of my paper, my professor writes: Your paper has some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions. On the one hand, I like this structure, as I’ve said. On the other hand, the high ratio of questions to emotions makes me wonder whether the questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings.

I have to laugh. Oh, the transparency of my doleful and doe-eyed deceit! A few thousand words and two weeks of class, and this man can see into the fleshy glass of my sinner’s heart. The questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings. Damn straight they are. Bless the questions that keep me from feeling.

Na is a good girl who loves raspberries and spelling bees and dies of alcohol poisoning at nineteen. Shi is an orphan in charge of a city’s courier system. Ka is a white cat with the gift of speech and a duty to mankind. Chi is a fleet of transport trucks on the highway, going a thousand different ways, to opposite sides of a country. A is all I want, all I have ever wanted: a little house, by a river maybe, a good kettle, and someone warm who wouldn’t mind holding me when I’m tired.

Learning to read Japanese reduces and simplifies me, stripping me down to a few elements, as though I were a chemical experiment in the hands of the scientist, a clunky metal some lab technician will cut into with a diamond knife. I sit and forget everything about myself (a great feeling, the greatest of feelings, for a monster like me). The look of the characters, the sounds they carry in their curves, the way they fit in a sentence, inside my mouth. I cover each of them with the flat of my hand, and then slowly reveal them to the light, trying to say their names as quickly as I can. They don’t promise me more than exactly what they can give, but there’s a warmth to them that indicates, perhaps, the possibility of things to come.

In Japanese, someday I will: read a letter, talk to a cat, ask for directions to a town where mermaids go to die, listen to the advice of a ghost, buy a kettle, seduce a sweetheart boy, greet the conductor of the train that will take me somewhere (somewhere I won’t break my mother’s heart or disappoint my father or cry in the dark or run myself down into the slick pools of thick tar I mistake for rivers). Somewhere faraway where it snows the whole year and little houses aren’t too expensive and the locales smile often. Somewhere I can save myself, questions or no questions. And then maybe the scales will fall from my eyes and be replaced with stars.