An Envelope Full of Fewdstamps
A minute feels like an hour,
An hour that would never be enough.
A minute feels like infinity.
Infinity and yet the abrupt
ending sure to come, in a minute- maybe.
And so I’ll stroke your hair,
I’ll maybe steal a kiss.
I’ll find a reason to make a joke-
A reason to not disappear.
I’ll find your eyes in a minute,
Your lips in a minute more.
And when I bring yours to meet mine,
That’s the hour-
and it won’t be enough.
Ah, hello.
I'm so relieved to finally tell my story.
You see,
I had no one.
No one,
I could tell.
No one to trust.
No one to whisper
No one to catch me
No one to call me
No one to
No
one
punch.
I took a deep breath in. My fingers danced together at the side of my red, Georgia Bulldog chair. I got four of these bulldog chairs for free a couple of St. Patricks Days-ago, a decently drunk family didn’t want to haul them around. They hadnt even pulled the tags off. Anyway, I sat in the loud red chair with various paints and hobby-type things scattered around me. Staring off, imagining I might look kind of intelligent or mystery- a modern thinking (wo)man. But my panic was probably as loud as the chair. Thinking too much about whether or not that woman walking the dog even thought about me or my chair. Whether the same passing men are passing because they are there to see me, monitor me, know me.
To know me
is to loathe me
is to blow me
is to duck and cover,
oh no, here she comes
don’t look now
it’s the bipolar mom girl
And at this moment the loud singing dude came running by.
I consume more coffee than certainly healthy and even effective for any productivity. I stand in front of the mirror and wait for the ding, 30 seconds to a minute depending on how much coffee was left in the pot. It’s as if that ding is the insurance that whatever I do next will be productive! Will be like some confidence boost crossed with anti-depressants. I’m not exactly down everyday so I guess it’s working.
Before I sit down to write I’ve already drafted at least one manuscript. If my motivation and fingers could keep up with my mind I’m sure I’d be halfway to Hemingway. Then a dog barks; I left them sleeping in the bedroom with Spencer. I quickly get up the stairs and let Hush Puppy out. We get back to the stairs and she looks up at me sweetly, begging that she needs me to carry her down the stairs. I tell myself that as some weird over-affectionate pet owner, I need that purpose- or I just was way too into stuffed animals as a child and now this is the play as an adult. So, I pick up the 45 lb. german shepperd-corgi, slip and recover half way down the steps, and put her down at the back door. She runs out, pees in my garden, and returns for me to clean her muddy paws. Finally I sit back down at the computer. The cat swats at the dog, I yell at them, and begin to write the third sentence. The second dog barks. Why I never have foresight… I suppose it’s time to microwave my coffee again.
I need to tell someone. I’ve got to be frank.
I have this conversation in my head a lot, in the mirror sometimes, walking to class, elsewhere I’m sure. Always with other people of course. A professor, a friend, someone I see as a mentor although the relationship I see in my head is probably delusional. And that’s it, I need to be frank that I fear delusions. I fear my own insanity. I fear failure, mediocrity, regret, overt drunken behavior, judgement, misspellings and bad grammar. To compensate I convince myself that I am great! I am meant for extreme notoriety in creative success and for this I have overwhelming fear of failure and mediocrity… and for that I fear my insanity and trickle-down-to-psychosism. Which is all relative. Edgar Allan Poe had similar cognitions of self as ‘unrespectables,’ yet achieved timeless notoriety (though mostly post-death as is the case with many a creative chaotics.) I don’t compare myself to Poe though, only to reference the great referential divide between ‘acceptable’ psychosis and unsuccessful psychosis. To treat or not to create, that is the question. To believe or not to ego. To exist or to exist in reality- within the sober norm. Is it a commonality or is it a common insanity?
Anyway, I can’t actually be frank with anyone.
We went to the Smokies spontaneously in early March and found one patch of early Spring flowers. I’m sure there’s much more to see now, but this is what I have for reminiscing on adventures today.
Today is one of my favorite kind of days. It’s Halloween and besides the fact that it’s a fun holiday that you don’t have to travel or do a huge family event, or even celebrate at all, it’s a quiet windy Fall day. A text book kind of fall day, not too cool or too dark, the birds are relatively quiet and leaves are quick to fly from the trees and join a quick ballet before rustling to the ground. It’s therapeutic and reminds me why small towns are beautiful in Autumn and the charm LA is missing. So while I miss the hustle of big cities and a little of the “opportunities” there and in the Northeast, I really feel like I can hear my heart of my head here in Knoxville. Really what are opportunities in the Big Picture. I guess it depends on how you value and define your life; but for me at least and when considering what little time I will have in the Big Picture, I want more days like today where it’s quiet and I have the time to see the leaves move and follow them with words.
There was once a girl named Alagaster, who, like her name, was just a bit out of the ordinary. Her friends, the three, called her Alli. Alli spent most of her days reading and drawing in the small corner nook behind a piano. There Alli felt she could escape the aging sorrow that creaked out between the molding cracks of her home- all until she grew hungry or was called to bathe. Even when she was hungry though, Alli wouldn’t leave her fantasy worlds behind the piano for long as she had only an appetite for cold hot dogs and bologna. Alli usually chose bologna and would crawl back behind the piano to dance in her pencil lines, and re-shaped bitten bologna lined the cream walls where Alli smooshed them for snacks later. Alli’s mother detested her snacking. Several times she had woken in fear to the smell of cold, raw air, thinking an intruder or dog had come in she would follow the must until she would find Alli awake and reading under an oscar meyer canopy. “I was hungry.” Alli always said. “Get straight back to bed!” her mother always replied.
I didn’t get accepted to grad school. As it was written, I was denied program. I didn’t get the job. I didn’t get that other job. I lost that one job. I gave up that other job. I look back at the last three years and I am so proud of myself. Not for what I have accomplished, but for what I have held my head up through and kept my shoes tied during disappointment, embarrassment, heart break and growth. Still, as I poor myself into another application to be judged on the one thing I’ve trusted myself with, with being good at if not gifted, and then I am denied. I feel another part of my left side brain blacken and shrink in doubt-ridden coma. I inevitably decide my father is right. I want to give up.
I don’t feel weak giving up. Then I say it out loud and I do. Then I don’t, because at the end of my sentence I need to get paid to feel worth and to get by. Okay, I drove 3,000 miles for a dream- really, a wish; I lived in my truck, I lived off of friends, then I lived off of curb cushions infested with ants. Now, I so desperately want to feel worth and get paid. Then I think, I wasn’t made for that. I wasn’t made for that big city, for those big people, or their big prices. I paid out of pocket, out of love, then out of sanity. And I survived. Thank god, and fuck yeah! I keep growing up though, and that’s the whole thing. I keep growing up.
I think about the South, my home, the sweet, humid South. At times I curse ever leaving and experiencing some of the things I did, having to look in the mirror at some of the things I did (and didn’t do). I wasn’t bred or steadied for those people and those buildings. And I’m honestly glad to be out of it now.
But I’m still heart-broken and questioning, and filled with doubt. Filled with all that crippling, ever-forsaken doubt.
today my heart hurts. my chest is heavy and my eyes carry my emotional burden. i’m confused, again. i don’t want to be here- i don’t want to be in my skin. i don’t want to look in the mirror- or the puddles- or run my hand over my face for fear of feeling the jagged creases forming on my face. every sound is painful, reminding me of where i am and what i’m throwing away. throwing away beauty and potential- happiness. over and over again. he asks me how i’m going to make this right and i have no idea, maybe that’s the problem. i don’t know what i’ve been waiting for. again, i feel the painful weight of being “in a relationship” because more than anything i want to break free of disappointment and regret and any reminder that maybe i don’t deserve someone else. ugh, i’m tired.
One woman said, “the Truth is, No One really knows…. you’ve got to know Who you are and What you are, that’s the only way you’ll survive.”
This morning, as I was watching some generic boarding school moving about ‘something something haunting happens something reality’ I started thinking about Matilda. Matilda is a woman I met out in Los Angeles. It must have been a little more than a year ago, July, when I was subletting a room in Sherman Oaks and utterly broke. I first heard Matilda speak at an Anonymous meeting- so speaking about her now is in many ways breaking the rule. I don’t think she’d mind, though. Matilda was a thin, fair-skinned, extremely beautiful woman. Somewhere in her early to middle adulthood, she had that something-peculiar-something-entirely-fascinating about her and I’m sure anyone who encountered her in a shopping mart felt the same way. Matilda was very sad with many moments of break-throughs and realizing the true beauty in life. She loaned me $20 dollars for gas at my third meeting, “to help me make it to the next meeting.” I never went to another meeting. I never saw Matilda again.
Still, I think about Matilda from time to time. I think about trying to find her address and mailing her a $20 dollar check and a note about how she touched my life, but I don’t think she’d cash it or ever wish to have that money again. She’s just one of those people who truly touched my life, who saw something in me without me having to say anything or fight. Matilda believed in me as a few have in the past and for all of them I want to pay them back by becoming someone really great. I want to shine, to light up my night sky and be so bright that Matilda and all who believe in me will see it and know they helped.
a poorly written essay on operant conditioning 