It's all opening up.  The boys, my marie, the married couple, and I are moving in together.  We found a blue house in a quiet neighborhood up north, a house with enough bedrooms and bathtubs and windows and tiny doors, a house with enough for us all.  This is my old room, the room that's been faithful to me this past year, my little white box.  Thank you, box.  I don't think I'll miss you, but I'll remember you and all of the ways you were good to me.

Silvernell asked me to write her something for her senior thesis of art school, something profound about her life, something all-encompassing.  That's why I'm posting pictures on the internet.  I don't know how to write a thing like that!  

I can write only about teeny tiny things, like fruit trees in the back yard and my friend's beautiful chin.  

Sweeet

Breakfast: Peeps

Lunch: Safeway Brand Sour Gummi Worms

Dinner: Chocolate Fudge Brownie Ice Cream

photo: pink albino dolphin seen in Louisiana

Touch / Don't Touch

Beneath the skull these days, it's cold and dry.  Try to touch it, and it brushes off on your hand like a butterfly wing, just dust.  

So I don't touch it.  Instead, I take long walks with a big stick and march until the straps of my Jansport pull my shoulders down to my waist.  I walk and think no thoughts, notice no things, worry no worries.  I miss no person.  I hum, sometimes.

I love this city, its million grays.  And it's come to my attention that I have been here long enough to run into people I know on the street!  At the store!  At OHMSI AFTER DARK!  

On my last collision, A boy I worked with last year wrapped his big pillowy arms around me.  What's new? he asked, still holding me, looking down at me with beatific affection.  

Besides the joy of seeing him, the immediate flash of joy to be in arms again, I could think of nothing.  

Nothing, I said, and smiled as a clue to him that he should be happy for me.  He took it and we went on.  

In truth, in the deep worrying heart of me, I can't tell for sure if I meant that smile, that clue.  I can't tell for sure if it's all neutral beautiful grays, or if slowly, I am rubbing away, blowing away, dust.  

The fact is that I want to touch.  Always, I want to tunnel down into things, maul lovers on beaches like otters, punch and bruise, claw and retrieve.  I can't go into a store without running my hands over everything, they watch me more closely, I don't want to take, I just want to touch.  

But I suppose, I'll just have to wait a while.  Maybe in March, maybe in mid-July, I'll be a jungle.  

[illustration- vivienne flesher]

Death Dream

In a dream, I asked the shooter to shoot me, shoot me.  He was gunning down everyone else on the street, 

ha- 

ha- 

ha.  

I had to run to keep up with him.  Wait! I called.  Shoot me, over the sound of people falling, Shoot me.  Finally, panting, he turned around and remembered; we had been walking arm in arm a ways back.   He looked upon me kindly from across the street.

Before he could take another step, I closed my eyes to ready myself.  I was at once swathed in the dark and warmth.  Please, I thought, with swelling hope, please.

And in the dark, the first bullet passed into my arm from the side.  

And the second followed shortly after, as silent, as swift.  

My body swallowed the fire.  It swam straight to my heart.  There was an explosion under water from which all turned to liquid lead.  I'm dying.  I relaxed.  Here's death.  

From under my tongue, it gushed.  

[schlieren photography]

My father's Mandarin is terrible.  He always mixes up the words for eggplant and automobile, steamed dumplings and the phrase, "Let's go."  But no matter.  The company still sent him from St. Louis to Wuhan, a booming city by the Yangtze River, because he looked the part: dark oily skin, black eyes and shiny black hair, the bulbous nose, and the long earlobes.  He was their China man.

After a while, we all went and stayed with him for two years in a gated neighborhood built for foreigners on the outskirts of the city.  We lived between mouthless government officials and sexy European couples with kinked hair and small dogs.  

In the fall, we enrolled in public school and sat still for hours of class without understanding a single word.  We didn't do our homework, had no idea what the other kids were learning, and wondered why they were being punished, why not us.  We kept our minds quiet and empty throughout lectures, lest we remembered how much we wanted to wiggle in our seats, to grasp something.  Our teachers adored us, or at least pretended to.  They would not let us go out for recess with the other students, but kept us instead with them in their chilly offices, asking us to draw them pictures and practice English with them.  

At the end of each day, my brother and I sat together at the end of the long driveway and waited for our mom to come and take us home.  Our classmates, otherwise silent throughout the day, crowded around us to shout and see.  The one we called Ghostface cried out like a bird.  He leaned in close and flipped his eyelids inside out.  He laughed hard at himself, rubbing his gums and breathing in our faces.  I was afraid of him but tried not to show it.  Other boys wailed songs to each other in broken English, "Tink-o Tink-o Nit-o Stah!"  The girls bit into shoulders, giggling in fits.  It was hard for me not to hate them.  I thought they hated me.  I was eight years old.

Finally, we were pulled out of school and sent to take lessons from our neighbor, Auntie Marlene, who taught us about Marco Polo and Totoro.  I loved Auntie Marlene, and she loved us back.  She gave me my first journal.  She never wore a wedding ring.  Even after she moved to the hills with Frank, my brother and I were invited for sleep overs, and in the morning, after she read over my papers, she taught us how to make tea with milk and sugar.    

As for the rest of the city, we came to know it by bus and maa-muu, we rode our bikes to the market, and swam in the new pools of gorgeous hotels where my dad met friends from work.  My brother and I learned watercolor painting from the neighboring university's art professors, and my mom worked for hours at a budding seminary with missionaries and Chinese students.  As time went on, we all learned Mandarin, we learned how to squat and pee, we learned how t0 eat from the street carts and sing the national anthem, and bargain with cloth dealers on Pet Street.

What we didn't learn was how to pass.  

In all of two years, no one ever mistook us for native Chinese, even with all of our straight Chinese hair and soft Chinese noses, even in a sea of sixty other Chinese girls and boys.  Through the last couple of months, we were still stopped on the streets for a photograph and a "Hello!"  They still stared at my sisters on the bus and asked, "Why do you have stars on your teeth?"

Maybe we didn't want to pass.  We were Americans.  We were so proud of that still.  That and our boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, our stash of Bumble Bee Tuna, and that huge plastic tub of garlic salt.  

I saw the Moon and the Moon saw me.

  

At this hour, the moon is low in the sky, hanging where it does not belong over the Nike Factory store, behind the flashing red light.  Something like embarrassment fell over me in a shudder tonight, when I saw it in all of its old-fashioned glamour.  You shouldn't be here.  You're too good for this crowd.  

I want to stand in the street and just point with my arm, direct traffic toward the moon, direct eyes, hearts, and minds to The Great Aged Cheese.  Who else is looking tonight?  Who else saw it and with me will stand in applause?  

Why shouldn't we applaud the moon?  And for that matter, the sun, and the mosses, the great shelves of cloud that shuttle through the city, week after week?  Why shouldn't we applaud morning?  and why not mid-afternoon?  All of these things together are marvelous and ancient orchestrations, unseemly in grandeur and masterful in subtlety.  

I am the flashing red light, a streak about to die out.  The street on which I live is a blip, a scratch that will soon fade and smooth back into the great skin of things.  I love and fear the sight of the moon.  The old, old song rising with it reminds me of all the things I do not know, have not seen, will not live to tell.  Hallelujah, Amen.  

[painting: winslow homer, summer night]

One of these things...

Suddenly I realize.

I hate that all of my friends in Portland are 25 years old and white.  

I'm trying not to hate it, because friends are good.  My friends are so good.  

But, fuck,

  

in a trillion invisible, unremarkable, ways, 

(the way white lies flake off and dissolve on the tongue, 

disappear into the sidewalk, slip into tea at a fancy brunch) 

I think

it could kill a person.  

 

I need to collect my thoughts on this one.  

Liars

I read the article about feminine desire 

in the New York Times Magazine, and now 

I can't stop thinking about arousal.  At work

I look at women coming in, 

wet and glittering from freak snow showers,

and wonder, What a creature you are, like me.  

I am not, 

they reported. 

I am not. 

I am not. 

I am not.

Yes I am! 

cried their bodies.

Yes I am!

Yes I am!

Yes I am!

See?

Theresa told me one night that some mornings she wakes up, stares up at the sky from her pillow, and starts to cry because the day is already too beautiful, already too good, and she has ruined it, simply by seeing it so.  I turned my head so she wouldn't see my eyes roll, come on, even while, with all my heart, I wanted to see the world her way, to feel the shape of every hour falling away.  Those days, instead of doing Illustration homework, I would sneak up to the sixth floor to be with her.  She fed me hot butter croissants spread with Brie and milky tea, we danced and held our bellies laughing, we were so generous to ourselves, secreting away our time.  

I thought she was a planet, touching down to meet me.  I thought she knew of better things.

And the things she spoke of, all of that melancholy, all of those roots and nuts and leaves fingered to lace, those things were real to me.  To be overwhelmed by a pungent rotting fruit pit, to drown in every shifting mood and melody, to stand awestruck and bleary-eyed on a Baltimore side street, gaping at the sky and the night clouds coming in, was a new lifeblood multiplying with a billion more red blood cells than I'd ever had before, thundering little life-savers shoving their way around the universe.  The more I knew her, the more the world exploded into ecstatic particles, and soon it seemed that every cell of me should meet every second of my life with the crashing of cymbals, the gasping of waves, more, more, more.  

  

  

It was too much.  For all of us.  Within a year, every member of our tribe fell to pieces.  Some of us ran into hospitals and watched the doctors watching, another flew home to West Virginia and burrowed in the undergrowth.  I slipped out of the city and spent the winter in a Massachusetts group home where they read O'Connor and Twain to us after dinner.  I slept so much that winter, slept inside of books, inside of woodboxes, inside of snow drifts and sunken gardens, then one morning woke up and taught myself how to fold fitted sheets.  

The mycologist found me in the basement doing laundry.  He always wanted to share his feelings with me, even though I had nightmares about his red face and naked body.  I think he liked my black eyes.  They reminded him of a dark haired girl he used to baby-sit, back when his skin was still fuming with alcohol.  He remembered everyone being so disappointed with him, buddies from high school, his brother who ran marathons, his mom and dad who continued sending him small things in the mail even before he could call for help.  But this little girl turned to him with glad eyes, she lifted her arms to him.

I didn't want the mycologist.  Didn't want his own red river of feelings.  He would cry when I asked, How are you, press his praying hands into his eyes, and thank me for asking.  He carried field guides and photo albums from room to room, aching for someone to notice and inquire.  In his helper room on the first floor, he drank tinctures and sweat alone over the humidifier, desperate for a cure.  He wanted to cure me, but I didn't let him.  

Instead I ran outside to the icy clearing and slid on my back to stare at the sky, silent and black.  Everything important was light years away, burning away, unfeeling.  Take me, I would ask, take me.  But nothing moved, and the quiet settled over me like a comfort.  

I want to be alone these days.

Akin to Wyeth

Tierney Gearon

I suppose I should write words about these images.  My art history prof would want me to.  But I can only say how much I don't understand what art is, why it affects us, why we see an image and it compels us to cry out silently, 

YES!

I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN.

Happy One Year Anniversary To Me

A year ago today, the Empire Builder swung into Portland, Oregon from the north and the east, carrying me in its carpet belly.  Knees up on my wide Amtrak seat, I pressed against the window and through the green, I watched the industrial yards and piney hills grow and shrink back, fell in love at first sight with the slinky gray Willamette, followed tiny cars with my eyes as they swooped over the river on the great winged Interstate, and tired to imagine it all in the moment, the life I would lead, the people I would know, the bed I'd fall into, the neighborhoods I'd roam, my places, my own, all inconceivable.

And this past Thursday, on a whim, I threw a potluck, called out to my friends, "Please eat with me!"  Bring your oafy boyfriend and your bearded husband, maybe carrot sticks and wedges of grapefruit, let's sit together and tuck in to a giant pot of vegetable soup, let's split a beer, let's gather up our knit newborn caps and send them overseas in a cardboard box, let's groan together over sweet vanilla ice cream laid over slices of hot zucchini bread.  And they came, and they filled up the room.  We ate to the bottom of the pot, we crowded the kitchen and stepped on each others' toes.

At the end of the night, with all guests gone, Kellam threw off the lights, and I turned on the dishwasher.  The three of us fell into our chairs in the dark.  We sat and talked for a long time about generations and then about Battlestar Galactica.

Oh!  Sometimes I remember!  I didn't buy this life at the Target Greatlands or from a college catalogue.  I didn't inherit it from my mom or dad or older sisters, I'm not borrowing from my little brother's posse anymore.  One year in the Pacific Northwest and this is what I have.  It is so quiet, most of the time I don't even notice it on my skin.

But for the record, I know something's stirring.  I feel it in my sleep as I turn to my side.  I remember in a blue glimpse, a half-breath.  I hear it in a church service, burning against the wall, words coming from a man I hardly know, I hardly care to know.

I want to call the stirring growing.

I want to call it Lies-Turned-Down.

I want to catch it Once in my palm, just to see if I'm getting it right, just to see if I'm aiming true and not wandering, not wasting, not passing on the great adventure.

Onward and Upward?

ONWARD AND UPWARD!

Love Woman

On the last night of my stay in St. Louis, I slept with my mom on an old twin mattress down in the basement where I used to live.  It's her bed now, they don't say how long she's been down there in that blue windowless room.  She worried if we'd fit.  But of course we fit, we're family.  And after we pulled the covers up around our ears, and after we closed our eyes, she told me about all of the boys in college, the other students she knew from China and Hong Kong, how they made a list of girls, how they ranked them, and how for no conceivable reason ("I don't know why!") they put her at the top of the list.  They really liked her! those boys in school.  They tried to kiss her and she'd duck away.  And under the covers of our little bed, under the darkness of our eyes, I heard her true surprise.

How did she find her man, the man she leaves each night to sleep alone in her daughter's cold bed?  How did he find her and pluck her from the top of so many lists?  How did they love each other before they stopped?  Why did they stop.  Why did it end.  

The Deer

You never know.

The body of night opens

like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.

And on the hillside two deer are walking along

just as though this wasn't

the owned, tilled earth of today

but the past.

I didn not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind's eye-

there they are, in the long grass,

like two sisters.

This is the earnest work.  Each of us is given 

only so many mornings to do it-

to look around and love

the oily fur of our lives,

the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle,

Days I don't do this

I feel the terror of idleness,

like a red thirst.

Death isn't just an idea.

When we die the body breaks open 

like a river;

the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

-Mary Oliver

V-Day

This shall evermore be my day of victory.  

I punched and jabbed in a boxing ring, shoved my hands into damp and sour bag gloves, felt my quinoa dinner rising through my throat, but sashayed out at the end of the night, red-faced and laughing.  

I wrote a boy a note, my very first proposal, I said, Sir, I've been thinking.  We should pet kittens together.  We should attend snobbish literary events together, sir.  Listen here, sir, I believe this is what we should do.  

And in reply, he wrote, "Ma'am, I *completely* concur."  With stars around completely just like that.  We shall snuggle kittens together.

Home Again/Where It Lives

A week later, and I'm back in the same little room, in the same quiet.  

I've been to the Midwest and back, touched my old place for a moment, my old bed for a night, my old mother and her softening back, my old dog and his firm gray chin.  I took a seat by my father at dinner and watched his eyes go dark and bright as we took turns speaking around the table "out of concern," my sisters said, "for your health."  

But now I'm home, here I am at home again.  

  

K's parents are in town for the holidays.  I've tried to avoid them for as long as possible, until I accidentally walked in on them sitting together in the dark, watching their grown son sleep on the couch.  

"Oh, hello," they greeted me in quiet pleasant voices, "We're just letting this guy nap before his gig at the Moon tonight."   

I've never seen a family like this before.  He is their only one, their greatest adventure, their living hope, their best love.  From Mother and Son to Son and Father and Husband and Wife, there is no gap, no loose end, nothing forgotten.  They will sit together and speak with each other in the same language each time.  

"It smells good in here," I whispered back and shuffled into the kitchen to put my groceries away.  No small part of me lunges to resent them for the clarity of their relationships.  When he speaks well of "the folks," not even a stitch of irony sullies his tone.  This drives me insane.  Mock them! I want to howl, They are your parents.  Tell me you aren't for real!

But truth is a patient and ruthless thing.  I'm coming up on a year with this one and it turns out that this whole thing's for real.  He truly loves them, and they truly raised him as best they could.  So when the muscles in my back start coiling, and my mouth starts flooding, I have to run the tape of things I know to be true:

My family is fucked up.

Not every family is fucked up.

The un-fucked up families are not a threat to me.

I want love to live where it lives.

I want love to live where it lives.

The tape ran tonight as we made quiet conversation about the airports and the weather, a small cluster of flowers on the kitchen sill, New Year's Eve and the upcoming smoking ban.  As we talked, I stacked canned black beans and tins of sardines in the cupboard, cut into bags of cashews and dried cranberries and almonds, listened with one ear to the gentle drumming of the fruit and nuts as I stirred it all together.    

  

   

Photo credit: Alec Soth from "The Last Days of W."

Good For Me

I'm supposed to be in St. Louis tonight, sitting in the basement with my cold feet tucked under the butt of my old German Shepherd, listening to my saucy sisters yap at each other across the room, to my mother croon at the sound of all of her children home once more, listening to my father close a drawer upstairs, alone, listening to my brother tell it all to his girlfriend on the phone behind the door, he's lying in bed and has flung an arm over his eyes.

But the slick and the snow made it impossible for my airplane to take me there, so I'm here instead, in my own bed, my own room, listening to the wind shower ice against my window in the dark.  I'm not sad to be here and not there, but on Monday morning, when we try again, I want my plane to fly.  

This morning he left for his own Christmas with a back seat full of Cornish Game Hens and sleeping bags, just in case.  I got out of bed when I heard him shuffling around outside my room, and made myself a tuna sandwich for the road while he trotted stuff out to the car.  I focused on the tuna as he finally tucked his scarf into the collar of his coat, and as he stood still by the door, thinking, scanning the room for any one last thing.  

No, everything was ready.  Time to go.  He looked up at me and sheepishly waved. 

"Merry Christmas," he smiled.

  

"Merry Christmas," I waved back, laughing, "And, uh, Happy New Year!"  

I watched him stand there and fiddle with his keys, but I didn't step away from my sandwich.  I held onto the countertop with one hand and waved again.  He waited a moment longer, shook his head smiling, then went out.  

I stood fast.

What did I want to do?  Oh- you know.  Fly across the room.  Throw my arms around him like Christian the Lion.  Say Goodbye, I'll Miss You, Drive Safely, Come Back to Me, Think Of Me When You See Beautiful Things, all those kinds of words said into the collar of a giant overcoat.  Hold that thought for eighteen seconds.  Hold it until you start to breathe again, until you can really feel what it's like in there, in the space of someone else's breathing.  You know.  The things I wanted to do.

But I stood fast instead.

Good.  For.  Me.

Another Night

W. S. Merwin at the Newmark Theater was thinner than I expected.  He wore big beautiful brown leather moccasins and spoke slowly with deep authority, grace, and wit.  

He writes elegies to dogs.  He recited Hardy and Hadrian.  

I put up my feet, closed my eyes, nearly cried with relief.  Oh my goodness, a poet, alive, standing tall in this deep blue room.  Speaking about Listening and the loveliness of foxes.

Fancy

Mardi knew a woman who loved romantic comedies.  Everytime she saw one, she would break up with her boyfriend at the time.  She loved romantic comedies, but she couldn't reconcile her life to them.  Reality didn't live up to what she saw in the movies, the romance she could have, the whimsy she was missing.  I know people who get nervous about fiction, even more so about the movies.  They think you'll be like Mardi's woman, you'll fly high into the magic, then crash land back into the real world.  

I'm with those people sometimes.  I get an urge to go to the theater then rebuke the notion.  That's frippery, I'll tell myself, that's foolishness.  Don't get yourself whipped up into that nonsense, not when things are the way they are out here.  Don't convince yourself you can disappear into the make-believe. 

When I'm with those people, I don a black bonnet and thick, ugly socks.  I chop off my hair, crease it down the middle, and don't take care of my hands.  I'm a pragmatist.  PRAAAHHHHHHGGGG...

But I'm not really one of them.

I remembered that last night, when I slipped out of the movie theater having caught the 7:15 showing of Happy-Go-Lucky, the new film from Mike Leigh.

I'd been having a crummy day, got off of work and just slothed out on the couch all afternoon, and Kellam came home in the middle of it, witnessed my sloth.  I flared with shame, shocked by it.  I was ashamed and pissed off, at him and at myself, because Kellam would never sloth out on the couch in the afternoon, and that makes him a stand-up guy.  I'm not the stand-up guy that he is, and I don't have the balls to act like that's just fine with me.  Now I know that some people are just do-ers, they do, not because they're smarter or wiser or more mature or anything, they just DO stuff.  But so what that I'm not really a do-er, I know they're not better than me, I know this.

But, like I said, yesterday was a pretty crummy day, and at that moment, to get caught by a do-er not doing anything seemed like the most humiliating, damning thing in the world.  So, quickly and unconvincingly, I jetted, slipped away, mumbled something about needing to do something urgent downtown, something really important and intellectual.  Ha.

I went to see a movie called Happy-Go-Lucky, and into the movie, I didn't soar or disappear.  I just sat there, back-of-the-theater girl, and remained in myself, with myself, as I watched another story unfold.

Happy-Go-Lucky follows its heroine, Poppy Cross, through her mish-mash life, a life colored and sparkling with glitter, tempera paint, and leopard print boots.  She tromps around town, smiling into the gentle breeze, tipping her hat to strangers, teaching children how to fly and shout about in migration celebration.  I was, at first, appalled.  She's so cheery!  She's so flippant!  Her jokes are so lame!  I wondered, if I knew her, would I hate her.

But the film turned on my low expectations, that happiness is a frail shell, that a woman such as Poppy can't really be who she appears to be.  My poor imagination demands that a good story must steal away the trappings of happiness and reveal Truth.  (Truth, of course, being despair.) But to the credit of the filmmakers, things don't go my way.  Poppy is steadfast.  She remains steadfast, bright-colored and kind, not only in the nest of care and familiar love she has built for herself, a sort of Poppy-world, a world a lesser storyteller would never leave, but also into the world that I know, that you know, that is inhabited by angry people, little boy bullies, lonely homeless men, women fraught with worry, heavy with child.  Poppy remains steadfast into a world where the boundaries are sketchy, where you don't know what's what, where there is confusion, but maybe goodess, rage, but maybe hurt.

And so the trappings of happiness were not stolen away from Poppy, not the way I went in demanding.  Instead, in time, they wore off like a coat of paint, rubbed down, lived in.  And what was revealed was, indeed, truth, but not despair, not at all.  The truth revealed turned out to be Joy, a kind of joy I've seen before, a joy I recognize in my mother, cultivated and worked at day after day, chosen again and again in the face of angry people.  It is a joy worked for, a joy sought after, a joy decided upon.

I understand wariness of fiction.  If fiction was just flights of fancy, I'd eschew it, too.  But I see things sometimes that fly against fancy, bird against a bird, things that dig into a reality I recognize, things that say, Hold Up.  Wait a second.  Look- This is what you're for.  

photo: Robin Shwartz

Science

Reunion

Tonight Beth told me that I had beautiful feet, and I remembered that this is true.    

I've been living with people who hate feet, who get nervous around them, who'd wear tube socks with their sandals if it weren't for the dirty looks, and so all this time, I've put them away.  To be considerate, I guess.  

But I love my feet!  They are really nice.  Jason Le told me so when I was in 7th grade, my mom has loved them since I was born.  I know the feel of her hands on my soles as she held them still to trim my nails.  "These are Lee feet," she'd say and pull on a toe, "Like Bac Bac's."  

It feels kind of awful to realize you've forgotten something you really like about yourself, like taking your best friend for granted.  But in a way, tonight was like a happy reunion.  I came home and took another look down there.  Yes, indeed, they are very nice feet.  Look at you!  There you are!