Writing

Drizzle

Last night I slept as well as I’ve ever slept. I woke up at one point just long enough to think Oh God I’m sleepy! Could I sleep any better than this, ever? before falling asleep again.

But now that I’m up, my head feels like a bowling ball. How much does this thing weigh anyhow?

I just looked it up: about 12 pounds. That is a lot of weight for my delicate neck to manage. No wonder I have tight shoulders and suffer from neck pain. No wonder my trapeziuses are overdeveloped and make me look slightly freakish with my shirt off. (And yes, trapeziuses is the plural form of the word trapezius. I looked that up, too.)

My shades are closed because I still want to inhabit the small domain of my house for a while longer before acknowledging that the world extends beyond my doors, windows and walls.

I can tell it’s out there even without seeing it. Birds twitter and cackle. I just heard the shrill reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of someone’s scooter trying to make it up our hill. The street’s incline is so steep that it always taxes underpowered vehicles and makes them sound like wind-up toys.

Now I hear a small airplane rattling its way from somewhere to somewhere else.

If I were to tell you what the world consists of based solely on what I hear, I would say there are scads of birds, a scooter and a single plane. Wait, there go two cars. Add two cars to the list. The world is growing larger with each moment.

Now it’s silent. The world, for the moment, is empty.

Even with the shades closed, I can tell it’s cloudy and will probably rain. What little light comes through the blinds is as diffuse and gray as the sky. I hate it when the sky holds the sun hostage this way, blanketing it in dark wool as if its rays need to be dampened for our protection.

This is another reason I am reluctant to look outside. I know we’re in for about six months of this nonsense, and I am not ready to acknowledge it: sky whose color ranges from wet cement to drying cement to freshly dried cement, mountains obscured by clouds that try but fail to mimic the shape of mountains, everything running for cover from rain that’s not even heavy enough to earn the label rain—more like the effect produced by the Wham-O Fun Fountain I had as a child than anything wondrous or natural.

How I long for Midwestern thunderstorms, the way light and sound move through everything. I want a storm that shakes my windowpanes and rises through my feet. I want rain with rhythm and intensity. I want an unapologetic downpour, not its inferior substitute, drizzle.

I Want

I’ve woken up feeling comfortable, relaxed even, which leaves me not knowing how to go about writing. I like to work against something when I write, and often what I work against is my own feelings of discomfort, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. My state of comfort will pass, of that I am sure. But for now, I feel untethered—not quite sure how to write what I want to write, so instead I will focus on what I want to write.

I want to write about holograms. I want to write about time, space, the notion of self.

I want to write about authorship, the need to author. To own. To get credit. To take credit.

I want to write about poets being so obsessed over having “publishable” work. When did publishable become our standard for writing?

I want to write about women who are obsessed with acting like and being seen as girls. When did womanhood go out of fashion? When did we decide we wanted to trade whatever level of empowerment we have as women and go back to having much of our lives scripted for, dictated to us, as girls? It’s not all baby-doll dresses and piccolo voices and hopscotch on the asphalt playground. When did we forget that?

Do we really want to feel our first abuses all over again? Do we really want to be dismissed? Do we really want to unlearn our bodies? Have we forgotten what it took for us to survive, and do we not want to own, get credit, take credit for what we’ve managed to grow into, even as forces worked against us all along the way?

I want to write about my strange dream, where a room in my house was filled with plants. I could see spores rising from every leaf, wafting toward me. Some were threads, others particulate, the majority large and ethereal with skins thin as oolemmas and insides like jellyfish. I tried to grab the large ones, but my hands cupped nothing. I batted at them with my arms. The heat my movements generated made the spores move faster and more unpredictably. I want to write about how it felt to take those spores into my lungs.

I want to write palindromes but can’t seem to find anything worth saying as a palindrome.

I want to write about how thick the body can become with wanting.

From Personal Letters Written Between Ages 14 and 19

I’m no poet.

I love being by myself when it rains. It’s the only time it feels right to be alone.

This part of the day isn’t bad. I like it.

I can hardly picture your face anymore.

I hate people.

I’m talking like a soap opera star again.

Everything comes naturally to you and you don’t have to work at things very hard. Then there’s me.

I’m already putting decorations up and singing Christmas carols.

I feel so lonely but it’s not because I’m alone.

Last night I had a dream that my dad was alive. I didn’t like it. The thing is, I never see him in my dreams. There’s just some reference to “dad” or it is understood that he’s alive.

Today was a strange day. I’m not sure if I liked it.

I like you more than Spam. I feel like you said that to me once.

Today we broke up. It was terrible.

I’m cuter than my senior pictures make me look.

I’m really not a good writer. It’s like that poem about the thought flowing and the words lagging behind. I think about my idea or emotion, but the words don’t convey the intensity of my thoughts.


I had a dream that you were a space man. We got married and had a half-space baby. You also couldn’t breathe oxygen or eat soft brownies.

Question: Am I completely—or mostly—self-concerned? Do I only care about that which affects my life? Do I only like people because they give me something?

I hope the ’90s are better than the ’80s. I have a feeling they will be—people are becoming more accepting and more socially conscious. That makes me happy.

When we see each other, can we play Yahtzee?

The ever-present question: Are you still in love with me?

I’m not spastically paranoid of parties anymore.

I’m scared that this whole weird thing will repeat itself.

My dead bird’s name was Parker. He was named after Charlie Parker, the sax player, whose nickname was Bird.

We’ve really messed up the environment—who’d ever think we’d have 60+ degree weather here in Kansas City in February.

Well, I don’t like the whole music “scene.” Everybody criticizes everyone else and only picks out the bad aspects of other people’s music.

Unfathomable

I remember when 1 million seemed unfathomable—the number of zeros strung along after the 1, as well as what they signified, impossible for me to envision.

I remember people telling me things were supposed to be awkward during what they called my awkward years. I’m not so sure I ever grew out of my awkward years, although I am no longer gangly and my teeth managed to grow in straight.

I used to run away from everything by climbing up a tree or running along an overgrown path to one of many hiding places. It’s not so easy these days to run away.

As soon as I think I’m good at something, someone comes along and reminds me I am not, then tells me the reminding is for my own good.

They tell me I know what I want to say when I write, but that I don’t know how to say it. They tell me my writing is uneven, slightly wrecked. Of course that’s the case, since my writing reflects my life. How could it be any more together than I am? And what’s better: writing that is even and predictable, or writing with a pulse—albeit sometimes weak and irregular—writing that moves under its own control and in ways you, and I, could never anticipate?

For a time after my mother’s death I forgot how little I like people. I thought it was her I disliked and that her death had freed me from that feeling. Turns out it had not.

I went to the grocery store yesterday to have a cheese sandwich. I looked around as I ate it. I had no idea what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Not one person in that store made any sense to me.

We are all wasting our lives in so many and varied ways.

Writing is just another way to waste time, but at least it allows me to keep a record of how I’ve wasted it. I will always know that yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and took a nap. I will always know the sadness I feel right now, even if one day I manage to move through and beyond it to something else—something that at this moment feels unfathomable and that I can’t yet see clearly.

On Spending Time with Myself

If things get fouled up, I have nobody to blame but me.

If things go well, I don’t have to share the credit with anyone.

I waste no time other than the time I choose to waste.

I rarely have a disagreement with myself that can’t be mended relatively quickly.

I never make myself feel self-conscious or weird.

My values, beliefs and general worldview are always relatively consistent with myself.

I work hard when I am alone—at learning to write and learning to love, the two things that matter most to me.

I know when I am full of shit and am not afraid to tell myself so.

Some of the best conversations play out inside my head. I need to be alone to hear them.

If I want to suspend disbelief, I usually indulge myself.

We should always spend time with those we love, and one of the people I love most is myself.

In some ways, I remain a mystery, one I alone seem interested in unraveling.

The Sixth Bird

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Evening. My husband and I walk south over wet sand at Cannon Beach, roughly parallel to the ever-shifting waterline. We come across a dead seagull. Another. Another. A carcass every few hundred feet. Each body we come upon is more recently dead than the one before—more in tact, more body-like, more recognizably bird.

We pause at the fifth carcass. It is clearly only hours dead, if that. Thirteen seagulls surround the body. They systematically strip it of flesh.

It seems at first like a random attack but is in fact an organized effort. At any given time, three gulls have the dead bird in their beaks, one at the neck, two clasping either leg. The three pull in unison, stretching the still-pliant body into an expanding triangle until chunks of feathers and flesh tear away. The body breakers hop off to devour their share as three gulls from the larger group move in to perform roughly the same maneuvers as the last.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Sky burial, this is a kind of sky burial, I think. The flightless, the dead, being consumed by the living. The dead weighing down the living. The dead being carried off in so many ever-expanding stomachs.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Here and there, clumps of feathers stick out of the sand: What is left over after the harvest cannot be called bodies, can it. Cannot be called flight, since it takes more than feathers to fly. Half-buried dirty broken ornaments these feathers are, nothing more.

The sixth bird is not yet dead. It sits facing the wind. It does not move, except to blink, shiver. Between the wind and the cold, it has been a hard day here for gulls. A dog named Lana tries to attack the dying bird. Lana’s owner pulls her away. Wind blows sheets of dry sand just over wet sand. A pile of sand accumulates in front of the dying bird’s body. Soon the bird is caked in sand, most of its feathers no longer visible. It continues to blink.

I sit alongside until dark. My husband stands behind me. A woman pauses, looks at the bird, says Circle of life before moving on. I pick up a small stone near the bird, slip it in my pocket, wish the bird well. We make our way back down the beach, toward the dead, deader.

I wonder if the gulls will wait or begin eating the sixth bird while it is still alive. They gather around the dying gull as we move away.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Flight

Because during the poetry class I was just in, a moth flitted across the room. Scratch that. Shot across the room with a speed and straight-line purpose seldom seen in moths, even those under round-the-clock observation. The moth went right into my left eye. The instructor was trying to keep things on task as I, an impacted vessel, held my hand to my face and listed a bit in the direction of my injury.

I believe all the voices in my head are my mother. My father has not once spoken to me since his death.

Nothing dramatic, not like the time a gnat flew into my right eye at full force over at Yellowstone when all I wanted was to relaxedly take in a little scenery. I was convinced the gnat had grown a stinger for the sole purpose of injecting me on the cornea. It had not in fact stung me, but came as close to the sensation of stinging as anything without a stinger could, so to this day I maintain that it stung. I screamed, jumped about and generally carried on.

Let’s face it. I make people uncomfortable. Even when I’m not screaming, jumping about and generally carrying on. Add to this winged creatures coming at my eyes, and (I can only envision) the feeling of uncomfortable-ness I cause in others would be increased, though by what positive exponent remains to be documented. If you are interested in that degree of specificity, further experiments and data analyses will be necessary, and I’m not really down with all that, being, as I happen to be, so uncomfortable both with: 1. making people any more uncomfortable than I usually do, and 2. having things with wings deliberately sent into my eye. I am a human, after all. And these are only moths and such. I am not earth, and they are not bombs. Let’s not forget these vital distinctions.

I want also to touch on this: Things without wings going into my eye I am not fond of either. Grit, pencil shavings, salt, etc. have all made their way in at one time or another. I can only imagine what’s accumulated behind my retinae. Some things might not dissolve and instead be siphoned up through my optic nerve. Especially et cetera. I bet et cetera has a long half-life. Can you imagine how long the list would be if we detailed everything et cetera houses? Set end to end, et cetera ‘s contents would entirely wrap each and every one of our bodies, like a good bandaging job for an everywhere injury. Imagine how et cetera weighs, what we’ve made it take on, you and I. It must surely feel like a moth is always in etc’s eye. Then, to add insult to injury, we abbreviate it. How etc. aches to be longer. For recognition of all we’ve made it become. Et cetera is a moth with its wings pulled off, a thing whose shadowy undertow has been erased.

But I risk losing my point if I start talking about anything other than today and this moth. So let’s stick with the moth for now. Actually, I feel I have exhausted the subject. I wouldn’t want to write past my ending. I could go into how I had to excuse myself from the class and make my way to the restroom, how the instructor did not acknowledge what was up with my eye and the whole leaning-slightly business, or how perhaps he did acknowledge it because I do seem to recall a disembodied voice saying “I saw that” after I finally worked up the courage to say, “A moth just flew into my eye. I am hurt.”

However, I couldn’t tell you with certainty if the person who replied was the instructor, a male student, or some voice of recognition in my head. The last notion really isn’t that absurd, except that studies show almost all imagined voices are female, not male. Something about the cadence and lilt women lend to the words they/we speak. (Sorry for the slip. I sometimes forget I am a woman when I speak of women. I wonder if “a moth” ever forgets it is “moth” and what it thinks it is instead, or if it ever feels it is nothing. If I were a moth, which I am not, I believe I would lapse into thinking I was all wing. Single wing like a small fan in nothing’s hand.)

But back to voices. I believe all the voices in my head are my mother. My father has not once spoken to me since his death. I do not love him less for it.

I almost forgot to mention how I could mention why I didn’t go back to the class. It wasn’t my hurt eye, although my eye hurt. It was fear. Or poetry. In that room, there was no air for poetry, not for me. My way of writing it. I should mention this was all playing out inside me, again no fault of the class or instructor. In fact nobody saw my discomfort, the air being pushed out of my lungs one breath at a time, less air coming back with each inhalation, a kind of measured dirge toward suffocation.

The moth knew this was happening, something close to panic but not quite panic. It doesn’t surprise me the moth would recognize panic in the making, given the tizzy of a short moth-life. Poetry was unsafe for me in that moment, and the moth knew it. Hence the speed. The direction. Self-sacrificing it went into me, my light, the window of my lighthouse, to protect me. It’s the only logical explanation.

A woman just slipped into the seat across from me in the computer lab where I’ve set up camp to write this. I told her my story. She listened. She said to take a spoon, fill it with water, and lower my eye into it. She, too, is a moth. Another kind of savior.

I could keep going and going, like a winged thing fighting its way to its destination: final, temporary or insulary. But I think I will stop with the sentence, “So let’s stick with the moth for now.” That seems a proper ending. But I will add this: My only regret is not having been considerate enough to make sure the moth was OK before running out of the room. We should treat those who save us with more kindness.

The Human Sidewalk Hotdog

The human sidewalk hotdog is really excited today, jumping up and down so much his loosely attached fabric smile is flopping about on his meat face. His eyes remain hollow and unconvincing. The two stripes of mustard down his belly also unconvincing. Sometimes the human sidewalk hotdog puts one or both of his arms inside his outfit and the outfit begins to undulate. This can go on for prolonged periods. This of course leads one to wonder what he’s doing in there, if he’s making adjustments to his own hot dog, and if anyone else has to wear that getup after him.

If I had four arms and two brains, I would get a lot more done.

Lilting is not something that comes naturally to me.

Today the human sidewalk hotdog is spazzing out. Kicking, screaming, flailing about doing something sort of like jumping jacks, although he is rather constrained by his hotdog outfit. The human sidewalk hotdog is so hot he’s bound to melt the mustard right off his meaty self. He’s an amazing sight to behold. Oh, he’s lying down on the ground! He’s back up! He’s down again! I think he’s trying to breakdance!

The human sidewalk hotdog is boring today. His suit isn’t on all the way and I think it’s inside out. He’s not even moving or holding his sign. I know it is hot out, but that is no excuse for the human sidewalk hotdog to stand still, halfway out of his meat-bun casing. Dance, hotdog, dance! Oh, my mistake. That is just a regular human sidewalk person with his clothes half on and half off. My bad. Sorry hotdog.

What I want everyone to know: Any negative reaction you may have upon meeting me is entirely temporary and will not likely cause any long-term adverse effects. If you do have long-term adverse effects you feel are associated with me, please see your primary care physician. Be sure to mention your exposure to me, duration and frequency of exposure, and cumulative dosage. So far, there have only been five or so documented cases of irreparable damage. There is as of yet no cure. Palliative care is indicated.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.

Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.

This is how night should come, I thought.

Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.

But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.

The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.

Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”

This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.

Yes, it should come just like this.

Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.

But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.

On Hearing Cicadas in the Hail

We’re having another winter storm in Seattle. All day, I’ve watched the wind manhandle the trees in my neighborhood. Our power has flickered repeatedly, as if it’s flirting with the notion of going out entirely. Now hail is clinking (make that clanking, since the hail is getting larger) against our home’s gutters and windows. I just moved my car to the bottom of our hill, which means I should at least have a shot at making it to the GRE testing center tomorrow morning, when the weather is supposed to be even worse than it is now.

When I got out of my car after safely nestling it on a side street at the foot of the hill, I noticed a familiar sound. At first, I thought it was cicadas, but there aren’t any cicadas here. Even if there were, they wouldn’t be out this time of year. Still, the momentary misimpression of hearing them stirred something in me—a longing for the Midwest, for late-night walks down quaint, flat streets, the bark of the oaks and elms and maples and magnolias covered with them. The surround-sound of them above us, beside us, near and far. Every morning, the rattling was gone. Then at dusk, they’d start up with their modulated drone, vibrating their tymbals and turning their bodies into diminutive chambers of sound.

But I digress. The sound, as I was saying, wasn’t cicadas. It was the hail. I’m not sure how hail created that kind of din, but it did. While I walked back up the hill to my house, shielded from the hail by my umbrella, I felt happy as I thought about the joy of plucking abandoned cicada exoskeletons from branches and tree trunks, something I relished as a child in Oklahoma and as an adult in Kansas City. (Aaah, the wonder of their split-open backs, banded abdomens and finely haired bodies. Their alien eyes. Their hunched posture. Their clawed and crooked front arms. And oooh, how lithe they must be to crawl out of such a thin casing without destroying it. And wow, the thought of them rising up out of themselves—soft-bodied with pale-gold wings and red eyes and black bands on top of their heads—and wafting on the breeze like miniature German flags.)

But I also felt sad about moving so far away from them, both in terms of distance and, increasingly, time. As more time passes, I will forget about cicadas (and all the other details of my old Midwestern life), recalling them less often and with less specificity than I do now. One day, I will hear hail that sounds just like those ugly little racket-makers, and I won’t even make the connection.

But that’s what we do, right? Move forward. It’s the only choice we have.

So, with every step I took toward what is now my home, I exhaled. The tiny droplets of water and ice I breathed out into the cold night hung under the arc of my umbrella until I stepped forward, leaving even my last breath behind.