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| part eight, i think |
| 06.16.04 (5:46 pm) [edit] |
Since Greg was fourteen, there had been few days when he had eaten anything but egg whites, broccoli, strawberries, peanut butter, or ice cream, and few days when he had drunken anything but water diet coke, or alcohol. “I don’t know why it is,” he wrote, “It just is.”
Greg, as we know, had always been a very intuitive person. He imagined that self-understanding, the kind that sometimes requires biting honesty, is an essential element in the search for meaning in life, so he routinely evaluated himself in ways that others didn’t think or care to do.
How is it, then, that such an introspective person couldn’t understand why he felt obliged to stick to a very regular and entirely boring eating routine?
If he were giving advice to someone else, a friend maybe, he would probably say something like: “Most people choose not to reflect, really reflect, on their lives and behaviors because, well, they just don’t want to think about those things. Others, though, take a different route. They build an exterior of apparent intuition and self-understanding so that they can hide from or neglect the things that really matter. There’s a good chance I’m one of those people.”
And if Greg had permitted himself the introspection he claimed to have, he would have recognized that his fear of foods, most foods, is a symptom of, well, perhaps, this particular existential problem:
He was afraid to trust anything or anybody.
He imagined, for instance, that most food, no matter the quantity, would make him fat or sick. And perhaps more direly, he imagined that most people, no matter how good they seemed, were dishonest and, eventually, unfaithful.
And where did he develop this pessimistic outlook on life?
From inside.
He couldn’t trust himself. He imagined, at times, that his feelings and passions were real. But when those feelings and passions waned, as they tend to do, he realized that what seemed so real wasn’t ever so. And if he couldn’t trust his own feelings and passions, then he certainly couldn’t trust anyone else’s. Or even food.
So why do I delve into this mumble jumble? Well, now you understand, I mean, you really understand, why he was such a bad cook.
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He fretfully explained his humorous predicament to his mother. “She’s sooo beautiful,” he said. “What else could I do?”
She laughed and said, “You could have told her the truth, and offered to take her to a nice restaurant.”
“But cooking is so much sexier,” he pleaded. She laughed again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be alright. I know some very easy salmon recipes. Salads and sautéed vegetables are a cinch to make too.”
His mother dictated the recipes to him over the telephone. He hung up and drove to the supermarket to buy the necessary ingredients like garlic powder, green peppers and bread—food items he never imagined he’d touch. When he arrived home, he put the food away and frenziedly cleaned his apartment. And as he scrubbed the toilet seat, she called.
“Do you mind if we get together a little early?” she asked. “I told a friend I’d see a play with her later tonight. Oh, and it’s cold outside. I can either freeze while walking to your apartment, or you can pick me up. Umm… and I’d like to buy us a bottle of wine, but I forgot my driver’s license. Can you drive me to the liquor store when you pick me up?”
He didn’t clean the toilet nearly as well as he would have liked.
He picked her up. “She wore a tight black dress that revealed most of her perky breasts and cut off just below her, um, well, panties. And her legs and lips were glistening in the moonlight.” It wasn’t his most prosaic diary excerpt, but for our purposes, it does well.
They went to the liquor store, and, true to her word, she paid for an eight-dollar bottle of wine. “It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t do my part,” she said.
Upon entering the apartment, she spent a few minutes touring its three small rooms. As she left the bathroom, she said, “Even your toilet rims shine. I’m very impressed.”
Inside the kitchen, she uncorked the bottle of wine, poured two glasses, handed him one, and raised hers to toast. “To the beginning,” she said. They clinked glasses. “To the beginning,” he replied.
He had forgotten to buy measuring cups and spoons. So he improvised and said “Measurements are no fun for professionals like me.”
He coated twenty ounces of salmon with a hodgepodge of breadcrumbs, salt, garlic powder, eggs, oil, baking soda, and other ingredients that he knew nothing about. As he was coating, she asked, “How should I cut the vegetables?”
He answered, “Cooking is about self-expression. Cut them however you feel. That’ll be perfect.” And though she followed suit and cut the vegetables into unique shapes and sizes, she wondered whether he was as good a cook as he advertised.
Luckily, by the time the fish, sautéed vegetables, and salad were done, and he couldn’t find the cooking mitten that lay on top of the oven, or the napkins that hid in the cupboard beside the oven, she had already finished two glasses of wine, and she didn’t mind as much as she otherwise might have.
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| working out |
| 06.09.04 (12:29 pm) [edit] |
Greg and Tatiana finally started a bottle of wine together a month after beginning their final year of college and twenty minutes before starting their second bottle of wine. Admittedly, I had hoped for something less. I wanted their stories to be more authentic, and never begin, or at least never come together.
What happened?
Before her final year of college, Tatiana decided to be more independent and less reliant on the courtesy of boys. “I want to buy my own clothes,” she told a friend. “Or at least some of them” (Her boyfriend and others had been buying clothes for her throughout college). So she acquired a job working at the front desk of her college gym checking student identification cards and making sure everyone wore close-toed shoes. But she didn’t do her job well. Instead, she studied for medical school examinations and admired the beautiful people that walked by, among the many not-so-beautiful ones, and watched them all admire her.
As he progressed through college, Greg tried to pursue an objective aesthetic ideal in all facets of his life. For instance, he wasn’t satisfied with just any true love, he wanted perfect love. And he wasn’t satisfied with self-understanding, he wanted to understand everyone and everything. And he didn’t just want to be a good friend, or good in bed, he wanted to be the best friend, and last forever in bed, or at least as long as needed. And, of course, he set the same standards for his body. Despite a slight build that made it difficult for him to put on muscle, and hollow cheeks that seemed not to want to fill out, he wanted a perfect body. So he still attended the gym everyday. And it was there that he and Tatiana were again reacquainted.
And though they had once engaged in a wonderful conversation on a park bench, the one I’ve told you so much (or little) about, their gym exchanges were short and trite at first. Why? Well, she had had intimate conversations with many boys, and she didn’t feel the need to extend herself, because she knew that most boys eventually would. And he was embarrassed. Though she had been a learning experience that he didn’t regret, she had also been a failure. “She was my first love,” he had written. “But also my first love lost.”
And unsurprisingly, at least for her, Greg one day furthered the conversation. “I like your short cut mini-skirt and revealing tank top. It brings out the color in your eyes,” he said. But he wasn’t thinking about her eyes at all, and she knew it. Perhaps that’s why she blushed. “I like your eyes too,” she said. And she really was thinking about his eyes. She remembered that those same eyes had fascinated her once before.
And though they both appreciated [i]light[/i], pithy, and shallow conversation, perhaps ironically (or maybe not so, as they both attended an elite liberal arts college), they valued depth, and intellectuality just as much. So when she commented on the upcoming Presidential election, and he alluded to Kant and his view of the aesthetic, conversation was [i]light[/i] and fulfilling, and they remembered how easy things had been at the picnic table years before.
(Though they talked about many facets of life and their lives, I don't want to slow the pace of the story with specifics. You’ll learn everything you need to know as we go. I promise.)
For instance, know this: their political and philosophical views were at times similar and at times different, but even their differences were inherently compatible.
She was passionate about being passionate, and he was passionate about understanding passionate people like her. And they were intrigued by their differences. So when her work shift finished, it shouldn’t have been too surprising when she asked, “When will we drink that bottle of wine that we promised each other so long ago?”
And Though he felt a deep connection with her, the same connection he had felt with her twice or three times before, he was admittedly stunned and, for the first time he could remember, speechless.
Why?
Because he had counted her out: “My existential failure,” he wrote in his diary. Yet she had defied him. And though he imagined he was good, very good, he never dreamed he was quite this good.
“How about tonight?” he responded, wondering if she still had a boyfriend.
“Dinner too?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“Can you cook?” she asked.
“Anything you want,” he said.
“Fish,” she replied.
“Of course,” he said.
“What time?” she asked.
“Seven…at my place,” he said. They shook hands. He walked into the gym, and she punched her time card, grabbed her bag, and headed home to get ready.
When he was sure she had left, he stood in the corner of the gym, opened his cell phone, and called his mother. “How does one cook fish?” he asked. A bead of sweat had appeared, as if from nowhere, on his forehead.
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| Part seven or whatever. By the way... I'm a college graduate now... if only i can put that piece of |
| 06.07.04 (10:37 am) [edit] |
On occasion, it’s important for an author to step out from behind the veil and remind you, the reader, that your reading isn’t in vein, and that somewhere, somehow, there’s something beautiful and maybe even worth keeping in what you’ve read.
And I hope there really is something in these words. But I can’t promise you beauty or anything more. Because I am, after all, just an author, and not somebody responsible for the world my characters create or the games they play. I don’t pretend to be God… or even if do… I still wouldn’t know whether or not there is something beautiful or fulfilling to hold onto here. This is Greg and Tatiana’s story; they’ve got the power, they’re acting it out. I’m just writing it down.
So what?
On a most basic level this means that I’m asking you, my friend, to lower your literary expectations for this one. I got ahead of myself or even lied to you when I said earlier that Greg and Tatiana would finally enjoy a bottle of wine and start their real story. They may not. They may have already ended their story together (the story of Greg and Tatiana) at that picnic table. And if they did in fact end it there, if their story never began, they’d be forced to resolve their own existential problems elsewhere, without each other, and without us watching. And that’s entirely plausible.
If there’s nothing here, or if there’s something here but no resolution, I don’t want you to feel too bad or let down. Because mostly, this is how our stories go. Either they don’t happen at all, or they happen all wrong.
So relax. Take a deep breathe, settle into your chair, and let things unfold or not. The most interesting part of this adventure, I think, is knowing that you may come up empty, but reading on despite that knowledge. Because who knows what you’ll find. And if you do find something, and you don’t expect it, think how much happier you’ll be than if you’d expected it all along.
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| Part 5? here goes... we get to find out more about tatiana!!! |
| 06.04.04 (8:45 am) [edit] |
And (maybe not so) coincidently, ever since Tatiana was a little girl, she wanted love, perfect love. Even her mother admits, “When Tati was younger she knew exactly how things would be. She would be a doctor and travel around the world and dance and search for all things passionate in life. And her boy, the one she fell in love with, would inexorably be one of those things passionate. His aspirations and interests didn’t have to fully match hers—that’d be too boring— but they did need to complement her quite well. And she would need space from him. She has always been her own woman, yes woman, and he’d need to respect that. Because she requires social, intellectual, emotional, and physical intimacy with many people, and he would need to understand that her proclivities have nothing to do with him, or her love for him, rather, they are the part of what makes her special and unique. And he’ll love her for that. She knows it. ”
Tatiana understood, even at a young age, that by flaunting her beauty or even revealing it at all, she obtained extraordinary power over most boys and some girls. She knew, for instance, that by touching Greg lightly on the shoulder, or batting her eyelashes at him, that he would imagine fucking her later that night, and that even in that moment, he would do anything for her, or at least anything for what she represented: the possibility of beauty conquered.
And because she knew that most boys and some girls would sacrifice lots, maybe too much, to ‘have’ her beauty, or even imagine ‘having’ it, she learned never to compromise her own desires with others. She didn’t need to. If she wanted something, she asked for it, and more often than not, much more often, she’d get it, if for nothing more than for beauty’s sake.
Her boyfriend, whom she had dated through most of college, the one with the eye-catching cleft chin and broad shoulders, was one of the most desired boys on campus. He was strong, athletic, artistic, musical, and, according to his pastor, “a very good guy.” Yet, none of these qualities “really did it” for her. “He lets me go elsewhere to fill the rest of my needs,” she once admitted to another boy while holding him closely at night.
A cheater? Another fucked up love story? Not quite. Don’t rush to judgment.
Even then, she admitted that she was socially, intellectually, emotionally, and physically promiscuous. And she will tell you, as she told Greg while innocently crossing her legs on that park bench, that “there are two types of promiscuous girls. There are those that have a set ideal of perfect beauty (love) and search for it in everything they do, in every person they’re with. And there are those that imagine there is the possibility for perfect beauty (love) in everything they do, in every person they are with. I am, of course, one of the latter.”
Wait. You, my friend, have no right to make arbitrary judgments. You don’t yet know what promiscuity means… for her. And you know, as well as I do, that it’s impossible to judge a girl by what she says if you don’t know what she means. So let’s find out.
Promiscuity, for her, back then, had no more sexual connotations than anything else universal. “It’s the act of being indiscriminate with people and things in life,” she might have said. “And it has nothing to do with faithfulness.” Because she would have argued, back then, that “despite my sleeping with boys, I was no less than completely faithful.”
She doesn’t fuck them,” her mother once said to her stepfather. “She sleeps with them, sure, but only because she needs somebody different to hold sometimes. She’s a very tactile girl. But she would never cheat. She just needs to feel touched, loved. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all need that feeling sometimes. ”
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| next part-- this one is more about Greg... it will, of course, even out |
| 06.02.04 (4:51 am) [edit] |
“Talking with Tatiana was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Greg wrote months after their conversation on the park bench. “She gave me the confidence I needed to talk to other girls, and to eventually to be with them. Now I think I’ve got it down. I know how to do it.”
His confidence, those days, endured frequent and fleeting stays on both extremes. When he wrote that diary entry, that confidence must have been spiraling out of control. No boy can purport to know how to [i]be [/i]with all girls. It’s an intangible, inexpressible, and practically impossible feat. Or is it?
In the same diary entry he wrote: “A girl, any girl, wants a boy that can listen well enough to know her. Well, she doesn’t want him to completely know her; she just wants him to listen and try to figure her out. For instance, if she likes to laugh, she wants him to know to be funny for her; if she likes to be romanced, she wants him to know to romance her; and if she likes to talk or be protected, she wants him to want to listen or protect her. Oh, and if she likes to have sex, she wants him to be coordinated, somewhat flexible, and last for more than a few minutes. It’s that simple really. I think.”
Is he right? Is it that simple?
In the thirty months and seventeen days between their picnic table conversation and that first shared bottle of wine (we’ll get to the latter soon), he set about ‘figuring out’ girls in the same way he figured out so many of his favorite philosophical proofs. He listened. He learned. And he became the boy that he imagined each of his girls needed. “It’s coercion. I’m coercing them to fall in love with me,” he wrote.
And (he would like us to think that) his system worked. During those in-between years, nine pretty girls fell hopelessly (or hopefully) in love with him. They imagined that he was the boy they had always imagined, and that their feelings for him, the ones that seemed so real and touchable, would last forever.
And despite his attempts to philosophically distance himself from his own feelings, he felt the same intense love that they did. Yet it didn’t seem to matter. Those relationships never lasted long.
“What is it about me?” he often wondered. “All I want is love. Perfect love.”
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| I'm tired, so for now, i've stopped writing here... though it's not the greatest stopping place |
| 05.31.04 (2:18 pm) [edit] |
“So how did the conversation go?” you, the reader, ask. Well, I can’t tell you. Or rather, I don't want to tell you. I’m afraid you will read too much into his words or too much into her body movements, and as a result, you will develop ill-informed prejudices about two exceptional and dynamic characters.
Upon a moment’s reflection, I’ve decided to fill you in on the last part of their conversation. But if I do this, you must promise not to label them. Remember, he was nervous despite his apparent confidence, and she was enchanted by his eyes despite her suspicion.
“So do you have much schoolwork this weekend?” he asked.
“Yeah, tons,” she said.
“Well, screw it. I mean, just screw it. Because do you know what I think?” She didn’t know. “I think romance is dead in this world. I think you should come over to my room tonight and share a bottle of wine with me. I think I want to play a song for you on my guitar. I think I want to talk with you until the sun rises, and then we can do all that other bullshit that romantic people tend to do.”
“That’d be nice,” she said. She meant it. He could tell because she was smiling. “But I really do have too much work to do. I’m sorry. Maybe next weekend. And if not, I promise to do it sometime.”
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They didn’t share a bottle of wine the next weekend. Or the one after that. Or the one after that.
Eventually, as the weekends piled on top of one another, she forgot about his eyes and he forgot about the wine. But this time neither forgot about their beginning. She remembered the conversation: “he was very philosophical and mostly up high,” she admitted to her boyfriend. And he remembered his love for her: “she will always be the first,” he wrote in his diary. But though they remembered, and though their memories were good and even hopeful, their lives, like their emotions, were jagged and confused, and not yet ready to travel down a complementary path.
For example, despite her bawdy clothes and flirtatious nature, she really did have a boyfriend. He was the captain and star running back of the college’s undefeated football team. And though this boyfriend seemed to epitomize male perfection (i.e. he was tall, attractive, athletic, artistic, musical, and rich), she promised her friends that that wasn’t the reason she had fallen for him. “It’s because he’s a hopeless romantic,” she explained. Her friends didn’t believe her.
Let’s clarify that last sentence. Her friends certainly believed that her boyfriend was a hopeless romantic-- everybody knew that. But they didn’t believe she had fallen for him. “Either she’s in love with love,” one friend said to another, “Or she’s playing some really fucked up games. But she’s certainly not in love with him.”
“Or both,” another friend piped in.
The second friend was the wiser. Tatiana was in love with seduction, manipulation, and the other love games that so many of us so often play—if we can. And her conversation with Greg, the one you missed, evidenced that love.
She listened to him; she really listened to him. And she paid attention to him. And opened herself up to him. And touched him: on his arm, his hip, his thigh. She told him that he was special and even “one of a kind.” She had even promised to share a bottle of wine with him. “Wine is for lovers and old friends,” he later wrote. “We will be the former.”
Of course, they didn’t become lovers. At least not right away. She had a boyfriend, though she told Greg nothing of the sort, and she “wouldn't dream of cheating on him."
And though he gradually gave up hope that they would ever share a bottle of wine or a night under the stars, he was far from bothered by her absence in his life. “We all need a first,” he would later write, “before we can enjoy a second, third, fourth, and fifth.”
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| Part II (sorry, I've been away on a post-college graduation trip) |
| 05.30.04 (7:24 am) [edit] |
A year after their beginning (or lack thereof), Tatiana sat on a park bench reading Jacque la fataliste. When her eyes tired from reading too much, she’d look up at the sky and imagine that her life choices, the ones that seemed so difficult, really hadn’t been choices at all. Rather, they had been written long before on a typewriter somewhere up high.
Greg, by chance (or maybe it wasn’t chance at all), saw Tatiana on the park bench. If you’re like most readers, you’ll wonder where he was coming from or, at least, where he was going. And though his immediate past and future add nothing to the story, you’ll still want the facts, all of them. So here you go.
He was coming from a political science class where he had been investigating the usage of art, public and ephemeral art, as a political tool. And he was going to a coffee shop. He sipped coffee and tried to reconcile faith and faithlessness with his school’s Chaplain every Tuesday afternoon. They hadn’t yet been successful.
And maybe this information does have a place. Maybe he stopped walking when he saw Tatiana on the park bench because something in her reminded him that Tuesday with the chaplain would be no different. They would look far into faith’s eyes and he would not understand. They would delve deep into faithlessness’s heart and he would come up empty.
But he wasn't thinking so deeply.
He stopped walking when he saw her sitting cross-legged on a picnic table, with a book in her lap and a fire in her deep brown Latina eyes because, well, he was in love.
And this time, unlike all the times he had passed her before, he knew. They would talk. And she would fall in love with him. Well, [i]at least [/i]they would talk. And he’d ask her to share a bottle of wine with him that weekend. “It was written somewhere up high,” he would later write.
And you, the reader, are probably confused. You remember that just a year ago, he had sat next to her in a classroom. He was aroused by her, as was his professor, yet he didn’t ask her to coffee. He was timid and scared. And now a conversation? A bottle of wine? What changed?
Well…
A year before, Greg was tall but not athletic or toned. His arms and legs were skinny, but his stomach contrastingly showed a noticeable bulge. He didn’t mind though. He would discover a vaccine for AIDS, he knew, so his mind needed to take precedence over his body.
But things changed in the health center, before he met with the psychiatrist about his anxiety, when he fell in love with her. He knew right then, for perhaps the first time, that “a girl with like that would never go for a guy like me.” So he transformed himself. For the next year, he lifted weights, ran, and ate lots of protein. When he saw her at the picnic table, he was no Brad Pitt, he knew, but he might just be good enough for her, he thought.
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| the beginning of a new story |
| 05.18.04 (1:56 pm) [edit] |
Part I
Tell them lies and they will believe you
When you’re honest they will deceive you
If you love them they will just leave you
But if you play them they will be with you
(We could have all written this!)
It’d be a nice beginning if she had sat next to the boy in their first college class—we’ll call it Latin American philosophy 101. Or better, instead of sitting, she’d recline in her chair and splay her legs on top of the table in front of her. The professor wouldn’t ask her to sit up straight or put her feet down because, well, he couldn’t argue with her beauty. And the boy wouldn’t stop looking because, well, he couldn’t contemplate her beauty.
She was small and skinny, they noticed, like most of the girls they preferred, and sleek and seductive, they knew, like all of the ones they fell in love with. And her lips were like… "Rose petals that need to be kissed," the boy would later write, or "A songbird that inspires me to sing," the professor would later say.
For weeks, the boy and the professor didn’t notice that this girl’s intelligence rivaled her beauty… or maybe, that this girl’s beauty rivaled her intelligence. But it wasn’t either of their faults: she veiled her intelligence almost as well as she flaunted her body.
Her persistent classroom questions (not her answers) eventually gave it away. She said things like, "Bolivar is the liberator and founding Republican of Latin America… yet he was known to give unilateral orders to kill and torture diplomatic opponents. Is that Republicanism… or is it Authoritarianism?"
The professor, like the boy next to her, would be stumped. How could a girl with such sensuous curves ask such cogent questions? And though they imagined that there must be a catch, that she couldn’t be so perfect, they still so quickly fell in love.
"I want to ask her to coffee, or a moonlight walk, or even a romp in the sack," the boy wrote.
"But I can’t do it, because I’ve done it before," the professor said to a friend.
The professor, unlike the boy next to her, knew better. He was in a position of power, and consequently, he was powerless to take advantage of the girl. He had slept with a student once before, and the penalty hadn’t been worth the pleasure. He was determined to contain his fire.
It was a shame. This particular girl was turned on by smart, passionate, and powerful people… like her professor. But that story wasn’t meant to be.
So we turn to the boy who wasn’t very smart or powerful… We learn that he never followed through on asking the girl out either, and we wonder why. So we look to his journal. "I feel so passionate," it says. "But a girl like that would never go for a boy like me." And we understand that feeling because, well, we all feel that way sometimes.
So does the story end here before ever really beginning? Of course not. This wasn’t the real beginning. I just thought it would have nice if things started this way… tender and innocent.
The truth: this boy and girl, we’ll call them Greg and Tatiana, met inside their university health center. They were both freshman and somewhat anxious. He was waiting to talk to a psychiatrist about his anxiety, and she was waiting to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
They traded introductions in the waiting room, and they didn’t say much after that. But they didn’t need to. He was already in love (with her), and she was already nervous about the test.
Greg’s anxiety problems diminished with medication and therapy over the years, and Tatiana was nervous about the needles, not the results. She had been safe, she knew, but she wanted to be sure.
And though their first meeting was less than ideal, they smiled and exchanged greetings a few days later when they passed each other as while walking to class. He was hesitant to stop and say more because, he imagined, she might see through him. She was hesitant to stop and say more because, she too imagined, she might see through him.
(In those days, pretty girls tended to be wary of talking for too long with strange boys. They knew that boys were always falling in love for the wrong reasons.)
They attended a small and secluded liberal arts college. So they inevitably saw each other around campus. And because she was polite, by nature, and he was in love, by nature, they greeted each other whenever they saw each other on the street or in the gym. Eventually, they had smiled and said hello so often that they forgot how or even where they even met. It was as if their beginning—brief and slightly awkward, but very real—had never really existed.
Had they consciously forgotten? Or did forgetfulness just accompany the passage of time?
She forgot because she had no reason remember. She’d met many people since entering college, and he was just a face in the crowd.
He forgot because he loved hopelessly, and as we know, when one loves hopelessly, as he did, even imperfect beginnings become perfect. For instance, he still imagines that it all started in a classroom.
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| a letter i could never send! |
| 05.13.04 (6:01 am) [edit] |
May 8, 2004
Kathleen,
I am writing openly because I cannot imagine writing in any other way. As you know, I have philosophical troubles with truth and trust, so I try as best I can to be honest with the people I care most about. And that isnt easy. Openness and honesty are dangerous, as you know, because they tell us about things we arent ready to hear. But I think well be okay.
Kathleen, before you left the party with that boy last night, you whispered into my ear and asked me to call you later. I called twice that night, and once more in the morning. It was evident that you werent there, and in fact, that you never arrived home.
And if you slept with that boy (as I am fairly certain you did), I shouldnt have minded. Hes a good looking guy, youre a strong, young person, and you have every right to do whatever gets you off as you can justify it in your heart.
But I did mind; I minded very much. And it hurt.
I imagined that you had led me astray; I imagined that my conversations with you, the ones that seemed so real, really werent.
After I called your room in the morning, I decided to take a drive. I ended up at a state park a few miles past Bennington. I found a bench, stepped on top of it, paced slowly back and forth, and did what I always seem to do in existentially confusing moments I called my mom.
It was five am in Los Angeles, but she didnt mind. She wanted to hear everything from the beginning. So I told her about a friend that I had lately gotten to know better. I told her about dinner at my house, the first time, and the whatever-it-was special that I felt then and that I think this friend felt too. I told her about this friends boyfriend, and her disregard for him the second time we had had dinner. I told her that we drank too much over wine, and I that I had said something that maybe I shouldnt have, something that perhaps I didnt mean to say. I told her that this friend and I had planned to go to Boston today, together, but that she never came home. I told her that I had seen a different side of this friend, and that I was confused.
The first words out of her mouth were, whats new? She reminded me that things with me never seem to change. A new girl but the same problem, she said. And I pleaded with her. I told her that this time it was different. She agreed that it was probably different. I told her that it was painful and I didnt know why. She said that she once felt that way too. I told her that this friend is a slut, a whore. And she stopped me. She said something like, Life is too short and too complex to demean yourself and someone else by making silly judgments like that. You know better; youve told me so.
And I knew she was right. So I apologized, told her I loved her, promised to call her later, hung up, and stepped down off the bench. I realized that life, for all of us, is confusing and full of misguided and misinterpreted signals. The least I can do for you, for me, is mitigate my own confusion and maybe yours (but also maybe not), by processing my thoughts, putting them into words, and giving the words to you.
I walked through the park until I stood beside a river. I stared into the water, which reflected a distorted image of myself, and I asked questions. Is her relationship open? Did she really hook up with that boy? Did she sleep with him? Has she hooked up with others during the course of her relationship as well? Does she question her reasons and motivations for doing the things she does? What drives her explicit sexual behavior on the dance floor? Is it a feminist thing or maybe a rejection of feminism? Is it cultural or maybe personal? Does it boost her confidence when guys look at her that way, or feel that way about her? Does she need to be one step ahead? Is she trying to constantly reaffirm her strength her power over boys? She likes that power, I know, but why?
And somewhere on route 7, I stopped my car, stepped outside, jumped onto my trunk, lied down, looked up at the clear blue sky, and realized, like I often do, that my thoughts and emotions were wholly hypocritical.
(I am about to tell you something, Kathleen, than I have not said to any girl)
As you know, when I was fourteen my father sat me down, gave me a beer, and said, Greg, sexuality is expansive. You can learn to like anything. And I encourage you to do so. Just remember two things. First, never have sex with a man that just makes things too confusing. And second, never do a girl in the butt thats just gross. I laughed at the time, but later, I took his advice.
And Ive been umm lucky enough to experience a lot in the realm of sexuality. Like my father, I am not classically handsome or overly manly, but I have a funny sort of intuition with life and with girls. I tend to understand needs or desires better than most people, and my responses are automatic. I talk the way a girl talks in conversation, so that she imagines we are on the same page, I move the way a girl moves on the dance floor, so that she imagines she is good, I kiss the way a girl kisses in bed, so that she imagines we fit together well, and I do whatever she wants or fantasizes about in bed (as long as it has nothing to do with butts or boys), so that she feels comfortable sharing herself with me.
I could tell you stories, Kathleen, and Im sure you can do the same. But thats the problem. Sexuality can be a very slippery slope. On the one hand, I believe (and Ive been taught) that experience and openness is a good thing. On the other hand, sentimentality, for me, is so much better.
Ive usually resolved this conflict by experimenting inside the realm of relationships but all-to-often, those boundaries have been stretched. What happens when a girl wants to bring another girl into the mix? Or when a girl says that it would turn her on for you to kiss a guy? Or when you develop a strong emotional bond with someone else while in the midst of a relationship?
Or. you get the point. Sadly, or maybe not, when difficult questions like these have arisen, Ive trusted my heart and done what feels right.
I jumped off of the trunk, got in my car, and drove home. I was still sad, but I wasnt upset with you anymore. Because Kathleen, I dont know as much about you as maybe I should know I dont even know what happened last night. (If I did, it wouldnt change the content of this letter at all.) I only know that it's my place to understand and not to judge, and that if I had imagined something between us, it was probably nothing at all, or at the very most, alcohol.
When I arrived home, I put on my workout clothes and went to the gym. I worked out for too many hours. But when I finished, I knew how I wanted to end this letter.
Kathleen, I feel good about writing to you because these words are an honest and open representation (whatever that means) of me, and because there are no frills attached. Ive realized, over the years, that I cant and wont play games with the people that matter most in my life. Games are silly, counterproductive, and very tiring unless both people know the rules. Honestly and openness, on the other hand, create and sustain friendships like ours.
And so Kathleen, for you, I end this letter with the truth:
I am upset with myself for thinking good things about you. I am upset with myself for thinking bad things about you. I am upset with myself for judging you. I am upset with myself for not being able to understand that most things in life require understanding.
I am upset with myself for giving you a piece of my heart. I am upset with myself for giving a piece of my heart to you, a great girl with a nice boyfriend. I am upset with myself for not following through, finding the things that turn you on, and giving them too you. Mostly though, I am upset with myself for not being as good a friend as I should have been.
-Greg
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| Meditations on Discontent |
| 04.30.04 (10:59 am) [edit] |
[i]When I began college four years ago, I never imagined Id find best friends like the ones I had in high school. I had been lucky, I thought, and luck rarely follows through. [/i]
I met James and Mike at an orientation for student athletes the day before classes began. Like me, they were wrestlers. Yet unlike me, they had been accepted to college on academic merit alone. And it showed. Their wit and intelligence was aggressive, uncompromising, and much more than anything I could hope for. Yet for them, it didn't matter. There was something special about us, the three of us.
They imagined, like I did, that our overwhelming drives for success had brought us togetherdespite our slightly different orientations towards life.
James was a methodical thinker. He never acted before considering any and all possibilities. And as long as he stayed away from emotional issues, he was usually right. Mike, contrastingly, was moved by inspiration, both philosophical and other. He would ponder and toil, as artists usually do, until it all made sense. And when it did, he would finish the poem, make the contribution to science, or act on his primordial instincts.
So where did I fit in? Well, whereas James and Mike took different paths to arrive at relatively concrete truths (so it seemed), I never seemed to get it right. I worked methodically, like James, but it didnt help. I was moved by inspiration, like Mike, but nothing ever made much sense. Yet people still listened to me, and even believed in me, though often they werent quite sure why. "With your pretty sounding faulty logic, you'll be a billionaire," James used to say.
And that was the plan. I'd make billions in business, Mike would use a lump of that money to find a cure for aids, and James would bail me out of the legal troubles that I would inevitably face.
Of course, things rarely work out the way they are supposed to, or the way we imagine they will.
I'm still trying to figure out when and why we fell apart. Did they take it personally when I decided to quit the wrestling team after tearing cartilage in both knees? Or was it something else? The side effects of the medication maybe? Could they not understand what I was going through? Is that when they started to drift farther away from me? Or was I drifting farther from them? ... Or what about the deal with Natalie? I had cried on Mikes shoulder when she slept with two of my good friends a week after we had broken up. And then he slept with her a day later. And he couldnt understand my devastation. "Guys need to get off. Girls help them. It's nothing personal," he had said. Was that it? I remember feeling broken. Yes, that must have been the beginning. But what about James? He hadn't slept with her.
And, of course, my search for an answer, a reason, a beginning... it's a meaningless search. Life, as you know, is not a subjective narrative. All stories will fail to tell you why things are the way they are because stories, by nature, have limitations. There are always too many missing variables.
So reality will forever be distorted by memory, nostalgia, and fiction and unadulterated facts and immutable truths will forever be relegated to fantasy. Or if they're real, they exist only within us in a world no one else can see, let alone understand. And so we dance. Because there is tension. And we need to recognize that tension, embrace it, and let go of it.
It's been about two years since we fell. James and Mike studied abroad at Oxford, and I stayed on campus and wrestled. The blue in their veins got bluer, and the layers of my skin got tougher. When they returned, we imagined things would be the way they were. Or rather, we imagined things would be the way we chose to remember them. Just perfect. But things predictably werent that way. James and Mike had changed and so had I.
James was eventually accepted to each of the top ten law schools. Mike was named a Rhodes scholar. They were well on the way to the success we had once imagined for ourselves. Yet what had happened to me? Youre floundering, Mike said recently. Get it together.
I had told him that I didn't want to be a businessman and I didnt even want to make billions anymore. I just wanted to write.
We went out drinking last night. Actually, they took me out drinking. We don't have much to talk about anymore, so we just toasted to rounds of tequila like we had done four years before.
"To art, to poverty, to Greg," James said before we downed the first round. "To a lost cause that I never really saw coming," Mike said before we downed the second round. They were joking, I knew, but it still hurt. "To friendship," I said before we downed the third round.
We stuck to beer after that.
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| Angela |
| 04.29.04 (10:14 am) [edit] |
Angela is a waitress at a hole-in-the-wall bar in West Hollywood, and she feels out-of-sync. The city is so big and she is so small. Her arms dangle, her hips are diminutive, and her breasts arent quite developed. She hasnt grown into her body, and she knows it. But she doesnt mind because she wants to be a star.
She is from a midwestern town with a population of five hundred and twenty-three. Her high school theatre teacher, who was also her english and history teacher, said she had a chance to make it big. But how could he know; he had never traveled outside the state.
She believed him anyway. So she quit high school and traveled to Hollywood. She doesnt have any money or family here, and shes only seventeen, but her morale is high. All great actresses begin their careers as waitresses, shes heard.
And though she hasnt yet been to an audition, and she doesnt even know what headshots are, she is brimming with a confidence unusual for a girl of her age and demeanor. Despite this confidence, she is not a good waitress.
She is clumsy. She cant even balance a serving tray with one hand. And already today, she has spilled champagne on a customer and hot mustard sauce on another. And when the cooks or customers look at her in that way, she doesnt quite know what to do. She is shy and doesnt understand the power of her beauty.
A boy at the bar is calling for her. He is holding a beer and smiling innocently. Whats your name? he asks. His voice is youthful. She is not frightened. He cant be much older than twenty-one or twenty-two, she thinks.
Angela, she says.
Thats a pretty name, he replies. She smells alcohol on his breath and wonders if he is drunk. I think youre very pretty, Justina. Do you think, maybe, youd go on a date with me sometime? His eyes are deep and dark brown. There is something fascinating about him, she thinks.
I dont know, she says. He lowers his eyes to the ground.
Angela, my mother says that to get a date with a girl as pretty as you, I have to act like someone that Im not. She says I should forget to shave for a few days and act like nothing matters. But I cant do it. Its not me. It does matter. Theres something about you.
She smiled. She wondered what that something could be. But she didnt want to think about it too much, because she feared she might lose it. So she blushed. Just do what youre doing, she said. Youre doing fine. And she walked away.
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| World Hunger |
| 04.28.04 (10:23 am) [edit] |
A couple sits alone in the far corner of the hotel dining room. At a glance, they seem rather ordinary. She is pallid and skinny, and wears a modest flower-pleated dress. He is scruffy and long, and wears black slacks and a polo shirt. They dont talk too loudly or too softly, and they dont even touch each other. At least, not visibly. Yet the patrons, waiters, and waitresses cant help but stare. Theres something about that couple, everyone thinks.
Yet they dont know what it is. The man with the top hat at the table next to them imagines its the way they look at each other. They know something that we dont, he says to his wife. She disagrees. Its in their lips; their smiles tell the story of love, she says. And she thinks about her own smile. But the man with top hat doesnt agree. They arent even smiling, he notices. But he is afraid to tell his wife.
And the waiter that once loved, the one that stands idly at attention ready to take the couples order, but is afraid to interrupt, has his own theory. Its the calm before the storm, he says to nobody in particular. And he thinks about his own storm.
And the couple, oblivious to all that surrounds them, tries to solve the problem of world hunger.
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| Johnny Dolan |
| 04.27.04 (1:39 pm) [edit] |
Johnny Dolan struts into the hotel dining room with a scantily clad girl hanging on each of his arms. He wears brown cowboy boots, black leather pants, a muscle shirt, and a sparkling beige cowboy hat. The dining room patrons cannot help but stare.
He enjoys the attention; he walks the scantily clad girls to a table overlooking the strip; he seats the girls first; he bows for apparently no reason. He must be important, the restaurant patrons think. But theyve never seen him before.
A waiter walks over to Johnnys table. You cant sit here, the waiter says. This table is reserved for Paul Newman.
Who? Johnny asks.
Paul Newman. Johnny looks queerly at the waiter. The actor, the waiter says. You cant sit here.
Who are you? Johnny asks. If you arent an owner or something, I dont want to speak with you.
Who are you? the waiter asks.
Johnny Dolan.
Who? The restaurant is silent. Who the heck is Johnny Dolan, everyone wonders.
Johnny Dolan, one of the scantily clad girls says. She smiles. Everyone knows Johnny Dolan... right?
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| my writing is taking me where it will, i guess |
| 04.27.04 (1:28 pm) [edit] |
A stout little man enters the hotel dining room. He wears a faded blue blazer, an outdated collared shirt, dark blue jeans, and bright red converse tennis shoes. And his clothing isnt the saddest thing about him. He holds a single flower destined for nobody. Its a daffodil, he thinks. And as his eyes dart around the room, it is evident that he cant find whatever it is that he is looking for.
He motions to a waiter. But the waiter doesnt seem to see him. So he hesitates, takes a step towards the waiter, and says, uh um excuse me. But his voice is too frail. Or the waiter pretends not to hear him.
His hands twitch, his feet shake, and he wonders if this was such a good idea after all. Shell never show up, he thinks. And hes probably right. Shes a beautiful girl. Or at least, shes better looking than he is.
He caresses the dying orange-pedaled flower in his hand. If only it were a rose, he thinks. And as he imagines what could have been or maybe what should have been, a girl walks through the hotel lobby. Its her! He takes a step forward and holds his breath. But she passes without even a glance. And he wonders what its all supposed to mean.
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| Insanity |
| 04.26.04 (11:23 am) [edit] |
(Again, I'm sorry for not continuing with the story. This is just some rambling)
[i]The definition of insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.[/i]
I want beauty. Perfect beauty. I know thats impossible (especially for me), but I want it anyway.
I want to fall in love with her. But mostly I want her to fall in love with me. I want to live the rest of my life with her. But mostly I want her to want to live the rest of her life with me. I want to be a great husband, a great father, and a great philosopher. But mostly I want her to want me to be all of those things.
Does your heart go pitter-patter when you see her? Because mine does. And if yours doesnt, why doesnt it? Do you not imagine that shes the one? Oh, thats unimaginable to me. Because the world would be unbearably heavy without her.
Shes not just one girl, of course. Shes the girl that inspires me to think, feel, and be the things in life that matter most. And sometimes I know her well. But usually I dont know her at all. And I dont mind because names arent important. Its the feeling that matters. And if that feeling is strong enough, then Ill probably ask for her name anyway. Theres something special about you, Ill tell her. Im not quite sure what it is, but
And if she isnt too surprised or turned off, then Ill ask her to coffee or a walk. And I wont be surprised if she says no. People dont trust other people these days, I think. So if she says no, Ill wonder what could have, should have, or would have been, but I wont be too hard on myself. But if she says yes, I will be happy. I will take her out to coffee or on a walk, and we will talk about life and love and other similarly abstract ideas and ideals.
And no matter how much she resembles the last oneI tend to pick the same girl over and over againshe will be different somehow, better. Yet I wont be able to communicate the difference. Ill try using words and lyri cs, but I will predictably fail. Its beyond me, Ill probably say to myself.
And if Im luckyits been awhileshell write back to me afterwards. Shell say that she had a wonderful time, and that what she likes most about me is that Im real, so to speak. And Ill wonder what real means. But I wont let my regressive thoughts get in the way of the progression of life. Ill tell her that she seems real too. And shell say something like, Though I have a boyfriend, I still want to get to know you better. And Ill laugh and smile innocently and tell her something like, You can always trust my intentions. And I will be lying, of course, but at least Ill be real.
And the next time we go out for coffee or maybe walk through a cemetery, I will tell her that Ann Rand is terrible and Milan Kundera is beautiful. And then later on, as we sip our lattes or read the headstones, I will ask, Would it be the worst thing in the world if I kiss you right now? And she wont refuse me. She never has. And as we kiss, fireworks will explode and shooting stars will fly farther than ever before.
But the sun will have already been setting. And it wont matter whether we are in the coffee shop or the cemetery, or whether its night or day, because this sun isnt real; it sets after that first kiss. Like clockwork.
Ill imagine shes in love, and thats enough. Because I once loved. I mean, I really loved. And it was beautiful. Perfectly beautiful. And that wont ever happen again.
And when she is gone, Ill start looking for her once more.
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| Grinders |
| 04.18.04 (11:03 am) [edit] |
I was certain that Chad would eventually kill me. And I figured hed do it late at night because, well, he was too busy during the day. So when I was ten, I started saying my prayers before falling asleep. I asked god to forgive me, and to help me, and if not me, then at least them.
I knew that I didnt [i]really[/i] need Gods help. I could have helped myself. For instance, I could have apologized and promised not to do it again (whatever it was) or I could have even eaten the steak. But for me, there wasnt ever really a choice. I had to protect them and I had to protect myself. And that meant I had to fight. Dad taught me to fight, I think.
He didnt believe in violent or capricious authority. He imagined, even before he knew about Chads abusive tendencies, that all human beings were smothered against their will by illegitimate power of one kind or another. Thats why you have to fight, hed say. Because if you dont stand for what you believe in, nobody else will.
I understood. If I hid from Chad, listened to the names he called me, or lowered my head when he hit me, I would forever be afraid of him and the world. And I didnt want to be afraid. Anything was better than fear. I was sure of that. So I took Dads advice. "Confront, outwit, and ridicule people like him whenever possible, hed say.
David didnt see it that way. He lowered his head when Chad screamed. He looked into Chads eyes when Chad told him not to lower his head. He went to his room when it was over. And he cried. But at least he doesnt hit me, he used to tell me.
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After Dad and Caron separated, we moved into a small ranch-style house just outside of Santa Monica. The good neighborhood was just up the street, and the bad neighborhood was just down the street. We lived somewhere in between. I usually felt safe and scared simultaneously and I had good reason.
Two gang-members accosted me when I was nine. They shoved me against a wall and took two dollars and thirty-seven cents from my pocket. Soon after that, our house was robbed for the first time. Over the next ten months, we suffered five more break-ins. They stopped soon after the riots when the National Guard stationed itself just a down the street.
Yet though danger always seemed to be lurking, I felt safe. I even felt at home. It makes sense, Dad says now. [i]He[/i] couldnt get to you. But I dont think that was it. In my eyes, it had more to do with our regular dinners at the family restaurant just down street.
We started going there because it was easy. Dad didnt have to cook food and David and I didnt have to starve because we refused to eat it. We continued going there because Dad liked the tuna sandwiches, and because he likes to stick with things that work.
So Grinders (the name of the restaurant) became my home away from home. I looked forward to sitting with David and Dad at the corner table with wobbly legs. There was something magical about that table, I used to think, that pushed Dad and I to imagine even the most unimaginable possibilities for my life.
Our heads were always stuck in the clouds there. On some nights, I was the best president ever, on other nights I was the best dancer, and on still other nights, I was the best rabbi. And Dad and I couldnt figure out why David didnt want the same things. And as we continued to drift upwards and past the clouds, Davids feet remained firmly attached to the ground. He just didnt seem to care about the same things we did.
When it became apparent that David refused to enter our world, Dad stopped trying. He wondered if David was stupid. He still wonders that. What a waste, he says.
So I no longer think of my memories at Grinders as treasures because, well, they came at the expense of my brothers happiness. And I still dont understand how I could have overlooked something so important. I was willing to sacrifice myself physically and perhaps emotionally to save David from Chad, but I wasnt willing to let go of my hopes, dreams and ambitions to save him from Dad because I was too wrapped up in my plans. And recognizing Davids needs wasnt a part of those plans.
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Dan, youre ten years old. Its about time you made your mark, Dad said to me between bites of a tuna sandwich one day. I listened attentively. David twiddled his fork. President of the United States, I thought, here it comes. Treasurer of your school, he said. I frowned. That was a different story.
Elections were two weeks away, and Jason, the boy with the purple pants, had already put up posters and handed out stickers and buttons. I tried to reason with Dad. Everybody loves his pants Ill never win. I said. He smiled. None of that matters. You dont need posters or campaign materials; you just need a great speech. Remember, rhetoric is the drug of the masses... he said. I remembered. I had heard him say that many times before.
He and I mapped out the winning speech over the next few dinners at Grinders. We polished the final draft the night before the elections. This is spectacular, I said. Ill never lose. Dad laughed. Youll be the next Eisenhower, he said. I smiled. The buck will stop right here, I said. And as we left Grinders late that night, David sleepily rubbed his eyes and said, Youll win it Greg. I know you will.
I left the winning speechbells, whistles, and allon my bedroom floor. I realized my mishap as Dad drove his car out of the elementary school parking lot. I chased after him. But he couldnt see me, and I wasnt fast enough to catch up. The election speeches were in thirty minutes and I was out of breath and in tears. I had failed him, I knew.
The school bell rang. I needed to be in class. But I ran to a payphone instead. Dad wouldnt be at work, I knew, but Mom would be home. And she always understood what to do in situations like these.
Dont worry, she said. It happens to the best of us. It even happened to me once. I was running for seventh grade class representative and I lost my speech I just couldnt find it anywhere. So I called my father just like youre calling me now, and he helped me scribble a few words down. I didnt win but at least my speech was unforgettable. I asked her what she had said.
About thirty minutes later, I stood on a podium and stared out at a packed elementary school crowd. I wasnt at all nervous. Hello, my name is Greg and I am running for treasurer. Im not just going to ask you to vote for me because Im funny and cool and smart. There are lots of other reasons, like for one thingum. I stalled. Really, there [i]are[/i] lots of reasons or at least, some reasons. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and pretended to look flustered. It was part of the plan, and the students were buying it. They were on the edges of their seats. They wondered if I would crack. And I did, purposefully, because there was nothing left to do. Wellum I guess Im just going to ask you to vote for me because Im funny and cool and smart. I smiled and walked off the stage. Many of the students laughed. Some cheered. A few of the girls giggled, I think. And as I walked backstage and felt strangely pleased with my performance.
I didnt win the election. But surprisingly it was closer than many thought it should have been. You scared the purple out of his pants, a friend said in reference to Jason, the winner. I knew that most of the votes for me were pity votes. But I didnt care; votes were votes. And though I came away from that day feeling okay about my performance, I was sad that I had let Dad down. But, the next day, when I saw him again, he looked in my eyes and said, You lost the battle, not the war. Dont forget that.
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| Hyperboles of the Heart |
| 04.13.04 (7:04 am) [edit] |
(I'M SORRY. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ELSE I'VE WRITTEN. I'VE JUST BEEN WORKING ON IT FOR AWHILE AND DECIDED TO THROW IT IN UNTIL I GET BACK TO THE REAL STORY. ONCE I PUT UP THE NEXT CHAPTER, I'LL TAKE THIS AWAY. I HOPE, THOUGH, THAT YOU LIKE THIS
I
When I was little, I dreamed I would meet the perfect girl. She would be smart, pretty, athletic, and good in bed. But not too good, because then I'd wonder if she had had too much practice before me. I didn't care if she was Jewish (though my parents certainly did), but I knew she needed to be organized. I lived a cluttered life, and she would give me some balance. That's why I imagined she wouldn't be completely nuts. It's difficult enough to deal with one person.
And she would sleep erratically, like me. But we would keep the same erratic sleep schedule because I would want to hold her at night and because our conversations (and other pleasurable activities) would be fertile. We would talk about life, philosophy, and epistemological reality for hours into the night. And while conversing, we might even enjoy a good bottle of wine. But it couldnt be too good, because we'd need to be frugal, especially after college, in the early years, when money would be tight.
And it wouldnt matter because wed be in love. Shed know it and Id know it, and wed be sure of it. Wed even say the words every now and then.
II
I met her in the middle of March. We kissed two weeks later. We slept together (in the same bed) a week after that. When my junior year (her sophomore year) of college ended, we had been naked together just twice.
We never did have sex. If my friends (back then) knew, they probably would have laughed. I wouldnt have cared though. She was perfect.
Well, not quite. I mean, she wasnt everything I ever imagined in a girl. She was straight up about life and didnt understand sentimentality at all. For her, two people engaged in a relationship because it worked right then, in the moment, and not necessarily anytime after that. She didnt even believe in marriage, kids, or the unconditional kind of love. Yet, despite these shortcomings, she was still pretty close to perfect. And that was good enough for me.
III
When the summer began, she traveled to Ohio to teach the art of the trapeze at a summer camp, and I traveled to Argentina to find myself. We didnt make any promises. Relationships are rarely worth the distance, she said. But I called her at the airport anyway. I told her that whether she liked it or not, I would miss her a lot maybe even like somebody I loved. She said she would miss me too.
As I traveled around Argentina, I wrote to her often. And she wrote me back just as much. I imagined our letters were the kind that lovers wrote.
We returned to college in the fall. Everything was supposed to be perfect (or close to it). Sure, we had experienced a world away from each other, but I hadn't stopped feeling close to her.
I met her for coffee a day after classes began. She told me she didnt want to be with me like that. She said, "The hyperboles in your head are different from the hyperboles in mine". I asked her what that meant. She didnt elaborate. If you want, though, we can still be friends, she said.
A few weeks later, after she had refused multiple invitations for lunch, dinner, coffee, a moonlight walk anything, she told me that even a friendship wasn't possible. Lets just let things fade, Barthes style, she said. I asked her what that meant. She told me to read Lovers Discourse.
V
When I was a little boy and I thought about pretty, I thought about her. I just didnt know it yet.
We met over breakfast one morning in the university cafeteria. My girlfriend at the time introduced us. They were track teammates. Natalie just qualified for the national championships in the 1500-meter race, my girlfriend said. I congratulated her. She smiled politely. Then someone at the table said something about Kant and his absolutist views. A vibrant conversation ensued. I was lost. I didnt know Kant. So I said the only thing I knew for sure: Theres only one Absolut, and thats vodka. She laughed.
She wasnt a supermodel, or even a Gap girl, but I don't prefer those types anyway. I like the natural, non-plastic kind. I imagine its because of my mother. Mom doesn't wear makeup or accessories and shes prettier that way, I think.
Natalie didnt wear make-up either. She didnt need to. Her smile was bright, her eyes were deep, and her skin color and tone were ideal. Coffee with milk, she used to call it. Her hair was brown like her eyes, her frame was skinny and small, and she had no hips. Running does that to girls, she later told me. Her breasts (I should probably mention those) were small, but not too small. They were like everything elsejust right.
VI
I didnt see her for another week. If we hadnt run into each other, literally, our initial meeting would have faded (maybe Barthes style?). Life would have been easier because, well, I wouldn't have known.
Natalie had had a long day. She had won another 1500-meter race (she would win them all that year), and then she rode the team bus for five hours back to school. During the drive she read The Alchemist twice to catch the metaphors and allusions. She was walking, exhausted, through the campus mailroom when I saw her.
I was tired too. I had played the Beer Pentathlon all night with my wrestling buddies (The game consists of ten drinking events; the winner retains his pride). I didnt come close to winning, but at least afterwards, I could walk. I could think too, I thought.
Quite mindlessly (as it so happened), I bumped into her. I apologized. She laughed and told me not to worry. I asked her about the race and I wondered if she could smell the beer on my breath.
She couldnt. At least, I didnt think so. She said the race was fine, but that she didnt want to talk about it. Instead (incredibly), she wanted to know how I had been.
Your girlfriend has told me so much about you, she said.
I hope good things, I replied. She smiled. We sat on a bench and started talking. The conversation was deep and, I imagined, mutually fulfilling. Though our paths in life up until that moment had been different and seemingly irreconcilable, we were (at least momentarily) moving in the same direction.
For instance, she had been studying Tolstoy. "His understanding of the dimensions of the novel and his command of language are like none other," she said. I told her that I too understood the weight of his words. In fact, I once picked up one of his books--Anna Carolina I thought it was-- and immediately, intrinsically, I felt how heavy it really was. She laughed. She said that Tolstoy would have liked my down-to-earth style. I shrugged my shoulders and agreed. That was just the beginning.
She told me she liked to read anything she could get her hands on because she wanted to better understand the intricacies and oddities of life. I told her I liked to write anything that moved me because, well, writing is in my blood. My father is a technical writer for a computer company, and my mother is a typist for our county court.
I felt comfortable with her, and I think she felt comfortable with me. She talked about different literary characters, and I talked about people in my life that seemed like literary characters. Our experiences, both fictional and factual, were amazingly similar.
She said that Nabakovs prose was beautiful. "One cant help but sympathize with Humbert Humbert even if he is a despicable pedophile," she said. Because his prose is too beautiful. I told her I could relate.
"When I was a freshman in college, I kissed a fifteen year-old girl and, well, I though she was beautiful." She said I was a joker. I said she was pretty even prettier than the fifteen-year old. Perhaps even the prettiest girl I'd even seen.
She blushed. You dont look too bad yourself," she said. I winked. She looked into my eyes and I looked into hers. "I need some sleep," she said. I agreed; sleep would be best. We went our separate ways.
When I got back to my dorm room, the sun was rising and my girlfriend had long since closed her eyes. I gazed down at her (she looked so peaceful), and shook my head. I slipped under the covers, held her tight, like I might hold a stuffed animal, and refused to close my eyes.
VII
When she awoke, I told her I couldnt do it anymore. Were better off as friends, I said. I wanted to let her down easily.
She agreed. She said she had been thinking of me as a friend for quite a while and that she just didnt have the heart to tell me. I felt betrayed. Breaking up was my idea, I thought. I should get the credit.
When I called Natalie, a day later, I asked if she wanted to go on a walk with me. She said she couldnt. "I'm trying to understand the nature and function of Faulkners literary misogyny, she said. I told her there was nothing misogynist about taking a road less traveled. You know the difference between Frost and Faulkner, she said. I didnt. But I wanted her to think I did. "Well maybe," I said, "But there's no difference between studying now and studying later." She agreed.
I got off the phone, changed my shirt three times, sprayed on too much cologne, and brushed my teeth too hard. Then she knocked on the door. She wore sweats, her hair was disheveled, and I couldn't have felt more enchanted.
I put my hand on my heart, dropped to my knees, and buried my face in the carpet. I was symbolically dying for her. She looked at me quizzically and asked if I was a regular Lazarus. I rose from the floor, gazed into her eyes, and promised myself Id start reading. Then I tried to explain my actions: I don't know," I said, "But for you, girl, I just rose from the dead. Her eyes were tearing with laughter. I thought that was better than nothing.
She asked where we were going. I told her I didn't know. We walked outside and the sun was setting. The orange sky and the purple mountains might just be the essence of poetry, she said.
Or a badly bruised pumpkin, I reasoned. She shook her head. We walked towards the soccer field. The sun sunk below the mountaintops and the moon shone high in the sky.
She asked me about the meaning of life. I told her I wasnt sure, but I would do my best to find out. She said, Life is short and we should make each moment count. And I was confused. Was life really that easy to explain? I didn't know. But I wanted her to think I did. I agree completely, I said.
Its amazing, she said, Our thoughts are so intimately linked.
Yes, I said, Amazing. I pointed to a log beside the soccer field and asked her if we could sit. She questioned my intentions. Its the stars, I said, Theyre beautiful. We sat on the log. A regular Emerson, she said. I nodded. Thats what they say.
VIII
I wished, in that moment, that my parents had taught me a few rules of sexual propriety. I wanted to kiss her, and I was fairly sure she wanted to kiss me, but I was scared. I couldnt risk being let down.
We pretended to watch the stars in the sky. Or maybe she was really watching them. But after awhile, I couldn't take it anymore. Would it be terrible if I kissed you? I asked.
Shooting stars blazed through the sky, and I never once bit her tongue. I didnt even brush her teeth with mine, or make her choke. She asked me afterwards if this-- the walk, the question, the kiss-- was all planned. I didn't know what to say.
We didnt talk about marriage or even our futures together that night. But it didnt matter. That kiss was the essence of life or something like that.
IX
As you already know, when I was a little boy, I thought a lot about my perfect girl. I knew exactly how she would be (if youve already forgotten, reread the first page). But after that first kiss with Natalie, I realized I had missed one fairly big part of the equationsex.
I had been so hell-bent on making everything else perfect that I forgot to imagine the actual intercourse the physical consummation of everything thats right in our universe. What would it be like? Fast or slow? Long or short? Playful or not so much so? I had no idea!
And it wasnt like I had never done it before. My first girlfriend liked to do it a lot. I think she liked it too. But she seemed to do all of the work. And anyway, I didnt love her. I just, well, moaned.
Natalie was different. She was the first. And I was scared.
X
She didn't call for five days. I was sure shed forgotten me. Or at least, she didnt care. But finally, my telephone rang. She said she had received my messages but that her athletic and academic obligations had been overwhelming. I havent had time, she said, But that doesnt mean I havent been thinking about you. I have. And I hope maybe you could stop by some time tonight.
I smiled. I had never imagined that my perfect girl would neglect me for five days. I had thought that to love is to love completely and to give yourself wholly and unreservedly to the other person. But right then, I realized I had been wrong. To love, I was sure, is to love whoever she might be and whatever she might do, even if it means having to wait sometimes.
When I entered her room later that night, there were magazine cutouts strewn across the floor. Gremlins in your room again? I asked. No. She was putting together a collage evidencing the progression of Phillip Roths life and work.
I looked more closely at the pictures and noticed a phallic trend. Was he a porn star? I asked.
She groaned. No, but he probably thought he was. Have you read Portnoys Complaint?
I dont need to, I said, My uncles last name is Portnoy and he complains enough.
You must be more cultured than you let on, she said. I told her I thought so too.
XI
I am embarrassed to admit that I don't remember what happened next. I imagine that we discussed philosophy or maybe some recent New York Times editorials. Then, probably, we went on a walk and talked about the nature of life and love (or rather, the nature of our lives and our loves). I probably said something like, I really do think there is such a thing as pure, unadulterated love. She probably said something like, No, actually, there isnt. Then, Im sure, she told me to read one her hundreds of enlightening books. And by then, we would have arrived at the Moonlight Diner on Route 8. After a cup of coffee, it was probably late, certainly past midnight. And we were closer to my room than hers. Thats why we must have ended up there. Well, something like that.
We were kissing lightly on my bed when she grabbed my arm and said, Ive only had sex with one guy. And it hurt so badly. I could never imagine doing something like that again. I didnt know how to respond. I hadnt touched her breasts, or even her butt, and already she was thinking about the consequences of sex.
Dont worry, I said. She looked puzzled. I tried to elaborate. I wouldnt do anything you wouldnt want to do. And besides, some guys fit better than others. She laughed. What are saying about yourself? she asked. I blushed and didnt quite know how to respond. So I kissed her. Luckily, she kissed me back. But her body trembled.
I tried to make it stop. Im just scared, she said, I dont know how this is supposed to work.
That's not fair. You cant be scared. Life, you say, is about letting go, trusting the moment. And here we are. In the moment. And youre not letting go, youre not trusting. I want so badly to understand. But I cant, I wont. Because at least my feelings are reliable. Ive always been scared. Ive always been wrong. And Ive never let go. But that makes sense. Because Im me and not you.. Im irrational. A dreamer. I live in the past and in the future, but rarely in the present. And thats why I need you. Because you do. Because youre not scared. Because I want to be. And you cant take that away from me.
But she couldnt hear me. Even if I had screamed my thoughts out loud, it wouldnt have mattered. I know that because she once told me so. You might make a person think differently, she said. But you can never make them feel, really feel, differently.
So I held her tight. Because I didnt want to let her go. And I kissed her. Because I didnt know what else to do. And she kissed me back. And I touched her. And she touched me back. And I took off her shirt. And she took mine off too. Then she stopped. She looked into my eyes. I dont want you to think Im some Emily Dickenson or something, she said. I told her I never had a girlfriend named Emily, and even if I did, I certainly wouldnt confuse the two of them. She smiled softly.
I kissed her lips, her ears, and her neck. She reciprocated. I ran my hands up and down her stomach, over her bra, and around her face. She reciprocated. After awhile, she even humped me back a little. I knew she wanted me to remove her bra. But this time I was scared.
My fingers are stubs when it comes to bras. They will not and cannot unhook even the most user-friendly ones. My first girlfriend, the one who liked sex, told me after a month that she wouldnt let me take hers off anymore. Its just too dangerous, she said. I was more relieved than embarrassed.
Is it that difficult? Natalie asked. I didnt respond. She took my hands away from her bra and she slipped it off with just a finger. The air was light, her breasts were beautiful, and I imagined I was floating.
After that, I thought the sailing would be smooth. So I touched her chest (her heart) and I knew that was all I needed to feel. Perfect love means ignoring the Little General even when he most wants to take charge, I thought. So I held her until morning.
And when she woke up, she turned around in my arms and looked into my eyes. Who are you? she asked.
I thought it was a silly question. Who do you think I am? I replied.
I had a feeling youd say that, she said. She stepped out of bed and hastily dressed.
Theres so much to do, she said. I asked when I might next see her. I dont know, I mean, I cant know. But hopefully soon. She smiled and left. She had forgotten to kiss me goodbye.
XII
When I was a little boy, I imagined that love, the real kind, means knowing your lover better than anyone else, knowing her inside and out but especially inside. Because thats where it really counts, I thought. Somewhere deep down, theres a part of her that wont ever change. And I have to know that part.
XIII
We were hiking through green mountains and talking philosophy again. Life, she said, and motorcycle maintenance are intimately related. I couldnt see the connection. If you read more, she said, it will make sense."
What if thats not what I want?" I asked.
Why wouldnt you want things to make sense? she replied.
Because nothing in my life has ever made sense, and I figure things shouldnt have to change now."
What hasnt made sense?
Its a long story...
Id like to hear it, she said.
What? I asked.
"Your story."
"Why,"
Do I need a reason? she asked.
I stopped walking. We were at a clearing near the top of a mountain. The trees around us were green and brown, but the hills in the distance were purple. I guess you dont, I said.
XIV
Three days later, (and to nobodys surprise), Natalie won the 1500-meter race at the track and field national championships. I wondered, while sitting in the stands, if I could ever show that kind of grace and confidence. I didnt think so. Some people have it, I thought, and others dont. But I didnt care. I was happy, at least, to cheer her on.
XV
After her Championships finished, I drove back to school and she rode the team bus. During her four-hour ride, she read On the Road twice. She said she wanted to "better understand Kerouacs sardonic madness." When she arrived home, I told her she had been amazing. She didnt want to hear it. Tonight is your night," she said.
Are you sure, I asked.
Yes, she said, If not now, then when.
I laughed because I thought I had heard that somewhere. But what about final exams? I asked. (We were scheduled to take our last two final exams the next morning.) She grabbed my hand and walked me to the library. It was full of frantic students. So we went to the farthest aisle on the highest floor. Nobody ever comes here, she whispered. We sat, facing each other, on the carpet.
Where should I begin? I asked.
It doesnt really matter, she said, As long as you don't forget anything."
When the lights shut off (meaning the library was closed), we pretended not to notice. When the security guard walked by, swinging his flashlight, hoping to find stragglers, we pretended not to notice too. He walked back downstairs and locked the library doors. Only then did she let me stop talking.
XVI
Her kiss was soft, her breath was hot, and her body didnt shake. But, still, I knew, she was scared. I didnt mind though. Love, I thought, is knowing when to slow down and when to speed up.
And somewhere in middle, she stopped completely and looked into my eyes. If I said you could have sex with me tonight, would you? I didn't understand why she asked.
No, I said, We have all the time in the world. And I really did mean it.
But her eyes pleaded. Please, tell me what to do. I'll do anything. I mean it. I knew she would have. And maybe I should have. But I didn't. I held her. I didn't ever want to let her go.
In the morning, when the library doors opened, she went one way and I went another. Our exams, which had already begun, were in two different buildings. I walked away without looking back. I didn't think I needed to.
XVII
And now Im looking back. I know she asked me to read A Lover's Discourse because its a logical (if not absurd) analysis of love. And I know she defended Absolutism because it asserts that the values and laws in this world are absolute, unchangeable and completely explicable-- something she so badly wishes for. And I know Tolstoy would have liked me because I am confused, like he was. And Nabakov's prose has nothing to do with my desire for another kiss from that fifteen year-old girl. His was artwork and mine was a drunken kind of lust. And Emerson liked to sit on logs. And Frost liked nature as a metaphor. And Faulkner liked two-dimensional southern women. And Jesus helped Lazarus rise from the dead. And Philip Roth is a pervert. And Emily Dickenson spent her life looking out a window. And there actually is Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I learned this because I imagined that somewhere, in one of those books maybe, I'd understand why we're not still together.
XVIII
And if she ever reads this story, she'll probably say something like, Youre a liar, or at the very least, a fiction writer.
Ill pretend not to understand. Huh? I'll say.
"You changed my name," shell reply.
"Everybody does that."
"I was on the tennis team, not the track team. And I was never any good, shell say.
Thats not how I remember it, Ill reply.
"Well, it's true. And anyway, you're not that funny and I'm not that smart."
Thats how it should've been."
And youre just as well read as I am. You've always been.
Dont fool yourself.
"It never happened in the library.
It could have.
This girl isnt me, shell plead. Shes a fabrication, an illusion.
No, Natalie, its you.
"Then change the story. Make it true."
I cant.
Why not?
Because it was written on high, Ill tell her.
"What does that mean? shell ask.
It means I cant change it. This is how it was supposed to be."
She'll pause to think.
"Well, at least tell me how it ends?"
"Huh?" I'll ask, momentarily confused.
"The story hasn't ended yet," shell remind me.
Oh that I know."
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| Vegetarianism |
| 04.10.04 (5:36 am) [edit] |
David was seven when Chad first hit him. He crumbled to the grass holding his stomach and didnt make a sound. He just looked at Chads feet and waited for him to finish. Afterwards, I ran to his side. Are you alright, I asked. Yeah, Im fine, he replied.
I told Mom what had happened later that night. She was very upset. Dont ever hit my son again, she said to Chad. Dont ever tell me what to do again, he replied.
He spanked David the next day. Davids legs jerked and his toes curled, but he didnt make a sound. Afterwards, he tenderly walked to his room. I walked with him. Are you alright, I asked. Yeah, Im fine, he replied. And he shut the door.
For a long time, I stood outside that door listening to him cry. I was just six years old then, but I knew I couldnt watch him hurt. It hurt me too much.
The next day, I slipped on the flowerbed in front of the house. Chad smacked me. Later, I didnt sit up straight in my chair at the dinner table. He whacked me. And that was the beginning.
------------------------- -----------------
I stopped eating meat towards the end of third grade. I might have done it to save the chickens or cows, or the rain forests, or the starving people in Africa but I didnt care about things like that back then. I was only nine and the clock to save the world wasnt yet ticking for me. I had other things on my mind like Mary.
Yes, I became a vegetarian because, well, Mary was a vegetarian.
Dad didnt seem to mind. Its good to believe in something anything, he said. Mom wasnt so happy though. Big Daddy wont go for it, she said. (Chad had recently instructed the family to call him Big Daddy. We thought it was a bad joke at first, but he didnt.)
Its for the environment, I told her. Cow farts are melting the ice caps.
She laughed. I can appreciate that but. I frowned. Okay, she said. I wont pack bologna sandwiches in your lunch anymore. But you have to promise not to tell him.
We kept the secret for five weeks. It wasnt difficult because spent most of the time with his anorexic and bulimic clients anywaythe tinniest of the tiny, hed boast. When he did arrive home, always long past dinner, hed want quality time away from David and I. Scram, hed say. So wed go to our rooms, hold our bladders through the night, and make a beeline to the bathroom after he had left for work the next morning. We saw just as little of him during the weekends. He spent most of his free time in the garden with his real kids and he refused to eat with us because we were slobs and our eating habits made him lose his appetite. With his schedule, I imagined I could be a vegetarian forever. Then my grandparents decided to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary at a steakhouse.
It was a festive occasion. Three generations of Lewis gathered to honor an increasingly obsolete and thoroughly remarkable achievement: fifty years with the samefucking person. But I wasnt thinking about prolific marriages or even sex between old people. I had more important things on my mind.
Chad had ordered a steak for me. He sneered when I tried to refuse it. I wont have little anorexic boys running around my house, he said. I looked at Mom. She shrugged her shoulders and looked towards the ground. She looked helpless. And I felt hopeless. But I smiled and tried to pretend. I talked to my cousin Rachel who sat next to me. She had ordered pasta.
The food eventually came. I ate the potatoes and the vegetables. He watched. Your cow isnt getting any deader, he said. I didnt reply. Eventually the waitress returned and took the plates away. As the family fretted over dessert choices, he stood up and asked me to take a walk with him.
Once out of the dining room, he dragged me by the shirt collar to the coatroom When inside, he shoved the coats aside, pushed me into the wall and whispered expletives into my ear. But I didnt listen. I was thinking about my family. They knew what he was doing yet they hadnt tried to stop it. Nobody cared, I realized.
I tell myself now that that wasnt the case. They did care. But they knew also thatd Id be okay. Gregs too strong, they probably said to themselves. No one can break him. Not even Chad.
He was still whispering in my ear. Are you listening to me? he asked.
Im a vegetarian, I said.
No youre not, he replied.
A skinny man entered the coatroom. Yes I am, I said.
Chad pointed at the skinny man. Leave, he said. The man left.
Then he punched me in the stomach. I sunk to the ground. He pulled me up. Someones going to kill you one of these days, he said. I laughed because I was sure itd be him. He hit me again. I didnt care. He pulled me up again. I was ready. But he opened the door and pushed me outside. I didnt touch you, he said as we walked back to the table. So dont go crying to your mother.
Im still a vegetarian, I replied.
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| Squiggly-Lined Masterpieces |
| 04.05.04 (3:36 pm) [edit] |
[i]Someone once told me that life doesnt really begin until the first time you fall in love. I laughed. Then I thought about Mary. [/i]
In the third grade, she and I were both in Mrs. Hansons class. Im not sure if I knew her before then, but I really cant say because I dont remember any purposeful interaction I had before I was eight. Maybe thats because they say life doesnt really begin until the first time you fall in love.
Anyway, even then, Mary was perfect. She was quiet, smart and respectful, and she even had a principal role in the schools ballet production of The Nutcracker. Id watch her from across the room in class. I loved it when she doodled. Shed draw squiggly lines all over a sheet of notebook paper. Then shed color in the enclosed areas with an assemblage of colors. Those drawings were masterpieces. Her technique was perfect and so was she.
Okay, okay, I was in love. But it was a different kind of love, better even. This was preadolescent love unobstructed by knowledge or experience.
Unfortunately, in those years I wasnt as progressive or evolved as she was. Hanson was always asking me to sit back down or to stop yelling the answer out loud. Though she, like most of my teachers in those days, seemed to know I had the right intentions, she couldnt figure out what to do with me. Back then, I figured others looked upon my outbursts with envy. I now know the truth: Mary thought I was a geek.
And who could blame her. I was only quiet when I watched her from across the room. But even then my mouth was open. I was drooling.
I wanted her, I needed to get closer to her but I knew it could never be.
I would have died if anyone found out. Eight-year old boys arent supposed to think about eight-year girls in that way. I was supposed to picking my nose, rubbing the remnants on her shirt, and winning the battle in the all-important war of boys against girls that was supposed to occupy so much of our time back then.
But I couldnt think about buggers or anything else. I was alone and I didnt want to be. I needed to sit next to her her alone. But, after musing over my predicament for weeks, I concluded that it was impossible. It seemed only Mrs. Hanson could help me, and I had used up her goodwill long before with my classroom disturbances. We were destined to be separated by rows and rows of miniature table chairs.
But one morning on the playground, in a moment of pure stress and elation, I had an idea. It was an epiphany, really. In that second of realization, all things seemed to come together. Even now, many years later, Im pretty sure that flash was as close to Nirvana or being saved or any of that shit as Ill ever come. I knew I could make Mrs. Hanson move my seat next to Marys. I could practically ask for anything, and shed give it to me if I made a concession. At the end of class, I wrote a little note, and dropped it in my teachers idea box. The next day, without comment, she moved my seat next to Marys.
If youre wondering, The note read, I promis never to talk out in class or get up without asking permishun if you move my seet next to Marys. PEE.S. Please, for the life of god, dont tell ANYWON I wrote this. That has to be part of the deel.
I was in bliss during class the rest of that year; and so was Mrs. Hanson. Looking back, I know that Mary never had a clue about my crush. And I cant tell her now. That would ruin everything.
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| My Kid Sister |
| 04.05.04 (3:16 pm) [edit] |
It happened during the fifth inning of a baseball game. David and I were shoving baseball gloves into each others faces and Mom was eating a hotdog.
Ouch, she said. Someone just kicked me.
I turned around and looked towards the row of seats behind us. Strangely, no one was within kicking distance. I was confused but also relieved. Though I imagined my muscles were big compared to those of other eight-year olds, I knew I couldnt defend Mom against a real adult. My eyes drifted back to the game and my glove found its way back into Davids face.
Oh, she yelled. Aggghhhh.
What is it Mom, David asked.
MOSES, she screamed.
Moses? I asked.
Im having another one, she replied.
Then the water broke. all over our shoes and shelled peanuts.
Luckily, a paranoid schizophrenic offered to drive us to the hospital. His name was John the Baptist, and he had heard her scream Moses name out loud. He wanted the driving time to tell us the truth about God.
He was a nice man, Mom would say later.
He drove like a nut, I replied.
He was a nut, David reminded us.
Well, he took good care of you two in the waiting room, Mom said.
When David, John the Baptist and I entered the delivery room six hours later, Mom was holding a new prize. Her name was Becky and she was so small. She barely fit in Moms arms.
Is she real? I asked.
David smacked the side of my head. Of course she is, dumb ass.
Then why is she so small, I asked.
Because shes a baby, dumb ass.
Mom ignored us. Would either of you like to hold her? she asked.
David furiously shook his head. Uh uh, no way. Shell break, he said.
I was scared Id break her too. But it wasnt often I had the chance to do something my brother wouldnt or couldnt do. I held out my arms.
Youre ten feet away from the bed, Mom said. You have to come over here. I shuffled across the hospital room until I was beside her. I again held out my arms.
You have to open your eyes, she said. I opened my eyes. She laughed and slowly lowered Kayla into my arms. I looked down into the little eyes that were already intensely staring upwards into my own and I was terrified.
I knew those eyes. Fierce, deep, dark brown they were his his fucking eyes! My heart beat uncontrollably. I wondered who she was. I wondered what she was. I wondered how [i]he [/i]could do this to me.
Who the fuck do you think you are? I said under my breath. WHO?
She didnt respond. But Mom was smiling. Youre so good with her, she said.
I wanted to drop her. I wanted to throw her. I wanted to do whatever I could to save us from [i]him[/i]. And I would have. I wasnt scared at all. My eyes were fixed on hers, hers were fixed on mine, and I knew it was time. I turned towards the windows.
Have you seen her eyes? Mom asked.
Yes, I said. Why? I looked out the window. I saw only clear skies.
They look just like yours, she said.
I desperately shook my head.
Its true, Chad said. I was startled. I hadnt known he was in the room. I looked at him and back down at her. I felt his gaze. I looked deeper into her eyes to escape it. It didnt help. I closed my eyes and tried to get away. That didnt help either. I cringed. God please help me, I thought.
Shes your sister, John the Baptist said. Theres no question about that.
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| Developing Pictures |
| 04.05.04 (12:31 pm) [edit] |
I have a picture in my wallet of a two year-old boy wearing movie star glasses. His Mom and Dad are holding hands, his brother is awkwardly leaning on his shoulder, and he has a big smile on his face. That boy is me. I still look at that picture everyday. It helps me remember that there must have been a time when everything was happy and easy.
The photo was taken two days before Mom and Dad separated. I should have seen it coming but I was just two at the time.
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Mom remarried when I was five. His name was Chad and he was brilliant. He graduated Harvard medical school first in his class. Its easier than you think, he said. I think he discovered his proclivity for little women (like my mother) long before that. He told me once that he never dated any girl larger that five four, one hundred twenty pounds. He doesnt consider bigger girls attractive, he said. Thats strange, considering his size. He is more than six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. It seems that average-sized girls would have better suited his body type. I wondered why he never gave them a try.
He moved to Los Angeles after medical school and started a successful private practice in anorexic and bulimic psychiatry. Girls from around Hollywood and even the world came to see him (they still do). He and mom dont say anything, but Im pretty sure thats how they met.
Mom tells the typical eating disorder story at cocktail parties. Once she was fat. She felt bad about it, so she made herself skinny. But she became too skinny. So her sorority sisters had to check her into a hospital. Luckily a miracle doctor saved her (she still wont say who). Two years later she married the fucker. Now shes five foot four, one hundred pounds, all better and married to the perfect man for fifteen years.
But he wasnt a perfect father at all. Father? Well, he pretended to be my father. But he couldnt fool me. I lived at my real Dads house three nights a week. Chad wasnt my Dad. And anyway, were nothing alike. Hes a huge physical specimen and Im a tiny little thing. He has hair all over his body and Ive got a few specs under my arms. His mind is linear and calculating and mine is fragmented and candid. Hes successful and Im, well I cant be his. Theres no way.
Growing up with Dad was difficult. In the beginning, he persistently called me his little anorexic boy, or skinny bones Jake even though I was always fairly chubby. Ironically, or perhaps not so much so, he called David his water buffalo or his big fat tub of lard even though he was extremely skinny.
I tried to figure him out. Was serious or was he joking? I couldnt tell. So I asked Mom about the truth. Shed say, Its just his way of kidding around. Youre not anorexic at all. I knew she was right. But I couldnt seem to hear her. Apparently neither could David. Since then, weve both gone to great lengths to become the people he had told us we already were.
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Dad remarried when I was seven. Caron was homely, unimaginative, and not at all his type. Im still not sure what he saw in her and neither is he. She was a good mother, he says with a shrug.
Unfortunately, she didnt have a good son. His name was Kirk, he was four months younger than I was, and he was crazy even before his stepmother murdered his father.
That murder happened a year after he moved in with us, and it pretty much shot the marriage. The kid went berserk. He had always liked to throw metal objects at us, but his grief sharpened his aim in ways that practice could not. He ran around the house screaming and attacking David and I with hammers, door handles, or whatever else metal he could find.
Dad didnt wait four years to turn his cards in this time. She fucked like a nun, her thyroid problem was visibly worsening, and her son, well, he was a risk I wasnt willing to take.
After that second marriage, Dad knew he couldnt endure another relationship without handcuffs. I need my women to be pliable in both mind and body, he says. And I dont know how to respond when he says things like that. I never have.
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| Mom and Dad |
| 04.05.04 (5:38 am) [edit] |
Dad wasnt very experienced when he met Mom. He blamed it on his parents. The closest I ever came to the obligatory sex talk was hearing my father cackle about the Jezebels in the new Macys catalog, he says.
Them whores are everywhere these days, my grandfather would say as he leafed through the catalog. Watch out for them whores Bobby; youll catch diseases!
So Dad watched and watched and had only a few compulsory sexual experiences before he met Mom. I lost my virginity when I was nineteen, he says. Well, almost. I was so scared that, uh, I couldnt get it up.
After that first experience, he was afraid to seal the deal for quite some time. Then he met Jane. She was a virgin but didnt want to be. So they smoked some hash, shared some compulsory life experiences, and got down to business. I finished the job that time, he says. But I could have done it much better alone. She was a mummy. I felt like I was raping her.
Mom wasnt nearly as sexually repressed as Dad. Some even called her promiscuous. She loved that saddle, Dad says. Thats all Ill tell you.
She slept with at least fifty or sixty guys before me, he continues. I always wondered if she thought about them when we were you know doing it.
Mom and Dad married when she had just finished college and he was still in Rabbinical School. Married life was everything I had imagined it would befor the first forty-eight hours, Mom says. But then your father got weird.
What he lacked in sexual experience, Dad evidently made up for in uninhibited imagination. And he assumed that if Mom had opened herself for so many guys she would also be open to, well so many things. Mom was open but not like that!
He asked me to handcuff him, put him in the closet, lock the door, and leave him there for the day, Mom says. I just couldnt do it. It was our honeymoon for gods sake.
Who can blame her? She had been planning that trip since she was a wee little girl. It was supposed to be perfect. There werent supposed to be handcuffsor whips, chains, rope, or any of the other things he packed in that perverted little suitcase.
Oy, I say.
That was the first sign, she tells me.
Despite the sign, they stayed together for four years. During that time Dad refined his rabbinical craft and, naturally, his sexual imagination. Yet, though he supplicated and sermonized in earnest, Mom refused to put that metal equipment on. I just couldnt do it, she says again.
So she went out into the pastures and rode at least three different colored stallions. She didnt need to, per say, it was just so, well, natural.
He eventually found out, and he was very upset. How could she do such a thing? he wondered.
Its easy, she told him. You just ride until they get tired. They always get tired eventually.
He was furious; he felt like strangling her. He knew, though, that violence doesnt solve marital problems. So he did the next best thing. He went to the house of the only stallion whose name Mom divulged, and punched nails into each of the wheels of his tow truck. I needed to vent, he says. That was all I could think to do.
A few months later, they divorced. It just wasnt meant to be, Mom says.
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| Demonstrable Love |
| 04.03.04 (4:12 pm) [edit] |
When David was thirteen, he ate Miracle Grow and grew eight inches. No really, he ate miracle grow and grew eight inches. And though I knew the fertilizer had worked wonders for him, I still couldnt bring myself to swallow the stuff. And I suffered the consequences: I didnt grow eight inches. Actually, I barely grew at all.
And though people have trouble imagining it now, we were once almost the same height and our penises once hung almost the same length. We even had similar dreams for the future: David would build Lincoln Log forts around me, and I would knock them down until the end of time.
Back then, words like success, expectation, and damn-those-breasts-are-bi g were rarely on our minds. We thought mostly about well, each other. We were so enchanted with ourselves that we neglected to learn any discernible language. Well, that isnt entirely true. We developed our own language and preferred it to the more ordinary and complicated grown-up ones.
Unfortunately, when David and I finally learned traditional language etiquettealbeit a little behind scheduleour own lexicon faded away, and a piece of our childhood innocence faded with it.
But we werent ever [i]really[/i] innocent. Dont let anyone try to convince you otherwise. We were two babies on the prowl. We werent old enough to care about girls, but we knew about trouble and we looked for it.
When I was a year old, I chased David into his crib. He hit at full speed and cracked his head open. Then he laughed all the way to the hospital. I did to even as a doctor sewed up his forehead. Mom didnt think it was so funny though.
Two years later, David watched as I climbed to the top of a refrigerator and jumped off. Mom was cooking spaghetti. She didnt see me coming. Boy did I get her and the spaghetti. She screamed. David was rolling in the noodles before she could get to him. I followed suit. Partners in crime, an early rapport; it would only last a little longer.
On his fifth birthday, David received a set of twenty-two magic markers from Mom. I dont know what I was thinking, she would later say. The next morning he and I woke up early and drew zoo animals all over his bedroom wall. As we worked, I saw a distinct resemblance between him and the elephant he was drawing. If only he had some... tusks.
I stuck two bright red crayons so far up his nostrils that we took a trip to the emergency room to get them removed. We laughed. Mom did too. He did sort of look like an elephant, she admitted.
Soon after the elephant incident, Mom bought us a case of chalk to replace the magic markers. If you two want to draw, she said. You can draw on the sidewalk. But thats it. We were ecstatic. David grabbed the weaponry and we ran outside. Lets draw zoo animals, he said.
I started drawing a monkey. (Admittedly, even at an early age I felt an affinity for my banana loving friends. Were both flexible, were both funny, and we both like to swing on trees. What more could we need?) As I drew the monkeys ears, he picked out a banana colored piece of chalk and twirled it in his fingers. Before I knew what was happening, he had pile-driven the chalk into my left ear. I screamed. He pointed and shouted, A monkey, a monkey.
He clearly wasn't very creative. I didnt look like at all like a monkey. "It was the best I could do," he says now. But you permanently damaged my hearing," I remind him.
David accompanied me to a year's worth of speech aftewards. But I had forgiven him long before those sessions ended. He was my big brother and I needed him to back me up, beat me up, and do the things that big brothers normally do. And thats what he did back then before life got hard for both of us.
When we were six, we still took baths together. I dont know why Mom let us do it, because it wasnt uncharacteristic of us to try to drown each other in four inches of water, or at least force inadvertent tidal waves to the floor. Yet Mom persisted. It saved time and water, she now argues.
Maybe it did, but it also gave David the opportunity to attack me in a way that no man should ever attack another. Luckily, we were still boys, he says now.
During an otherwise normal bathtub experience, David stood up, shook water from his body, and grabbed his weiner.
Before I had time to react, he pointed the doodle at me and opened fire. My jaw dropped. I watched the pee arch in the air and fall into my mouth. I couldnt move or even close my mouth.
But it was filling up and I didnt know what to do. So I swallowed hard. It tasted foul, it made me shiver, and it came right back up .
I spit it back at him. Then I stood up, aimed my own pee-pee at him, and fired away. Unfortunately I wasnt as practiced as he seemed to be. It flew in all directions. Today I tell myself that at least a few drops landed in his mouth.
But he denies it. "No way," he says. "It never happened."
"Like the rest of our childhood?" I ask him.
"Like that." And he looks away.
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| A Failure to Thrive |
| 03.30.04 (6:57 pm) [edit] |
I had been relentlessly kicking for almost a month. So, when the floodgates finally opened, and I sensed a metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, we can imagine a little smile appeared on my face. Mom, in obvious pain, woke Dad. He looked at the alarm clock, reading 2am, felt the puddle on the bed, realized the enormity of the situation, and did what he had to do. He put his wife in the car, drove her to the hospital, dropped her off in the ER, and went back to bed.
Seven hours of hard labor later, Dad got up and labored through rush hour traffic to get the Dennys breakfast special. Then he sauntered over to the hospital just in time to see two little feet popping out of his wifes uterus (I was trying to be a little unconventional upside-downabout the birthing process).
As youll find out, I proved to be an early bird later in life. I eat my dinners at four in the afternoon, get to class ten minutes before I have to, and get my papers done the day they are assigned. Why? I know the saying, the early bird gets the worm. Thats all.
Shockingly, when I did finally come out, by caesarian section, I was actually fifteen days late. I dont know what the deal was. Maybe the womb was too comfortable. Maybe I was having too much fun in there. Maybe I got dizzy and just lost track of time.
Fortunately, I did finally come out. The gift of life, any life, is a miracle. But for Mom this one was special. She had eight pervious miscarriages.
I seemed a healthy enough baby: seven pounds and a few ounces. Wacky. Dad would always say that such wackiness resulted from my upside-down position in the womb. Its a sign, Dad told Mom. She laughed.
She laughed when I spent much of my childhood standing on my head, possibly trying to get back inside that womb. She still laughs today when I dress myself in an avant-garde style, wearing things backwards, inside out or however they seem to fit (sometimes upside-down). Its your fault, I tell her.
When I was pulled from Moms belly, I was nearly bald. I would have been, except that, right there, in front, was a swirling cowlick that stuck up where everyone could see. I was like Alfalfa turned around. I still have that cowlick today. Its a part of me now. Fortunately, girls tend to like it, though the barbers tend not to.
The trouble wasnt with the surgery at all. That went smoothly. The doctor incised into the lower three inches of Moms belly, and out came a baby. No harm, no foul. Well, not quite. As Dad watched his wife get cut open, he asked the doctor, Does every woman have that thick a layer of fat? Mom cringed. The doctor, in disbelief, said nothing.
After washing the blood and uterus parts off me, the doctor put me in Moms arms; he didnt trust Dad. Dad peered down at his small, brown-eyed son. Hes not nearly as good looking as his brother, he said. I would always trust that Dad would say what he really felt.
Mom pretended not to hear him. Eight tries, and finally a living breathing baby; It wouldnt have mattered if I were the ugliest thing on earth because in Moms eyes I still would have been perfect and beautiful. A mothers perspective is never quite objective. But, then again, neither is mine.
Lets name him David, Dad said.
We cant name him David, Mom said, We already have one of those.
It was true. They had adopted my brother David just eight months before. It was also true that he was a cuter baby than I. He had blonde hair, blue eyes and a good three pounds on me at birth; I think he had more shapely thighs too.
Fine, then well name him Danny, after my great-uncle who fought in the War.
Fine, Mom said. Like Daniel in the Lions Den.
A few hours of post-womb sleep later, I engaged in my first carnal action: I suckled my mothers breast. Was the instinct hunger, thirst, or maybe even quasi-sexual? Was it natural? It was the first time I had ever suckled; and the first time she had ever been suckled (David was adopted, so he had to use a bottle), so how could we know the difference between natural and unnatural suckling?
The trouble arose with the experimental drugs given to Mom for pain during the surgery. The drugs stopped milk production in her breasts. I sucked, but nothing came out and Mom had no idea. How could she know the difference between a factory thats producing and one thats not producing if her factory had never produced before?
I knew the difference though; I could feel hunger; I could feel nothingness, but back then I didnt know what knowing meant.
The doctors sent Mom home just two dayas after I'd entered the world. I still hadn't eaten.
I cried because I was hungry. Mom stuck her breast to my mouth because I cried. Dad held the pillow over his head because that just didnt work. On my fourth day of life, Mom and Dad took me back to the hospital. I had dissipated. I wasnt crying anymore. I had lost almost half my body weight, and I was struggling to hold on.
The doctors put me in an incubator with underdeveloped and life-threatened infants that had been born too early. Dad would joke later that if I couldnt be born an early bird, at least I got to be with the other ones.
I was given a fifty-percent chance for survival. Of course, I didnt die. I lived. Can you imagine if I died? Well, I wouldnt be here. This story wouldnt be told.
Dad says my failure to thrive at birth explains a lot about who I am today. Mom says it explains nothing. I think they may both right.
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| Broken Promises |
| 03.29.04 (3:50 pm) [edit] |
My name is Greg Lewis and Im real only if you want.
If you dont want, then keep me here; dont read between the lines.
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[b]Why This Why Now?[/b]
Its true. Im not drinking with my buddies tonight because I want to begin writing this book. Silly; they dont understand. "Whats the point?" they say. "Why write about your life now? Youve got so little experience. Who could you possibly be speaking to? What could you possibly say? What are you thinking?"
"Its not what I think that matters" I say while trying to imagine an acutely philosophical rebuttal, "but what they think I think."
"You still have to think something. Every writer has some direction."
"Oh fuck off!" I say.
I wouldnt really say that. Or I might, but in a jocular manner that wouldnt betray my infuriation with any and all questions pertaining to substance or content in life.
Of course I have a reason for writing. Is it a good reason? Who knows? Whatever I write will be marred by the truth and falsity of my own experience. You can decide whether its at all meaningful to you. In the mean time, I want to share something special.
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[b]Life and Girls [/b]
Ill be the first to admit it. I dont understand girls. Okay, there, I said it. So what if its out in the open. Its something I deal with everyday. I figure, in life, there are girls, and there is everything else.
Im just as miffed by girls as I am by everything else. Its all so crazy. Im hoping God put me here to try and make some sense out of it all because I want to do it with you. Your proximity to my story validates me somehow. And if theres one thing I need in life, its validation. No, that cant be right. Im not supposed to have needs-at least, not dysfunctional ones.
Well anyway, I think my relationship with girls is a metaphor for my relationship with life. Or maybe thats not right. Maybe its all in my head. Maybe girls and this world are just part of a virtual playground created by my consciousness, possibly my self-consciousness.
A college professor once told me that life should be interpreted as a subjective narrative. Our truth, our fiction, and our nostalgia all help to inform our collective and subjective imaginations. Yet, I dont know (or care) what that means. I do know, however, that girls are just as complex as the rest of life if I say so, or if I believe so.
But hell, theres so much more to life than lust, and love, and lust. Right?
Dont be so sure. Girls are more important than you may care to admit. They help boys like me to understand life in a context of pleasure and pain and passion and intensity that I couldnt possibly experience sans interaction.
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[b]The Nature of Truth[/b]
I like to get crazy on Saturday nights. I drink with friends, dance with girls, and try to forget. Usually it works especially when I touch a girl and move with her. Because I imagine that such momentary forgetfulness might never end.
Last Saturday night, I went to a club with some friends. I didnt drink and I didnt dance. I was tired. I was tired of being tired. So I stood against a wall and watched.
Jessica approached me. She peered into my eyes, and said, "Greg, weve never had a real conversation... you know, the kind where two hearts feel like one. Do you mind if I come to your room later so we can talk?"
She didnt want sex.
"Greg, when I first met you, I didnt like you at all."
"What?"
"Well, its not that I didnt like you. I was, well, intimidated by you."
"Huh?" (I never imagined my boyish grin and small sixty-six inch frame could be intimidating)
"Its just everything you do and say seems more genuine than it could possibly be."
"Hmmm."
"And Carinne says you are a pathological liar"
"WHAT?"
"I didnt believe her. Well, I did. But I dont now; because I know you."
A pathological liar? Too genuine? These are words I wouldnt have expected had I not heard them just two weeks before. Heather, after sharing an innocent kiss with me, asked a friend Eve to give her the dirt. (Yes, its true, girls kiss and talk.) Eve replied, "Gregs a great guy except, hes a pathological liar." Twice in two weeks. This needed to be dealt with, or at least, thought through.
Am I a pathological liar? Hell fucking no. There. Done! Its thought through.
Okay, not quite.
In my interactions with anyone I seek to be as truthful as possible. Sometimes, to be safe, I even tell too much of the truth. I cross that imaginary line a lot. I jump over it, taunt it, and sometimes even defile it. And you wonder why.
Because all I can offer is my experience. Sure, I can quote books and plagiarize the experiences of others, but thats not the same. Their truth is not my truth, and inevitably something gets lost in the translation. So, when you wonder who I am, I will tell you. I will be genuine and I will be straightforward. I understand that you might not be used to such unabridged communication, but please dont call me a pathological liar. I tell the truth-whatever that means.
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[b]Tears[/b]
Sometimes I look in a mirror and I cry. I look deep into my dark brown eyes until I see red. I then fall to my knees because my legs cant support what my eyes might have seen. I cover those eyes and I cup the fluids that I imagine are vital. I wonder why. Why the fuck am I crying?
Is it a possibility unrealized? A passion unachieved? A past remembered? A past forgotten? Is it happiness? Happiness out of sight? Happiness within reach? What is happiness, anyway? If I could understand why I cry, then maybe I could at least figure something out.
Lately, I havent been so lucky. Instead of crying, or flailing on the floor, I stare bleakly into the distance. I cannot feel what I feel. Its too exhausting, I tell myself. Its not worth it anymore. And I walk away because I figure thats all I can do.
Greg has a theory. He thinks I cry because I am fat. I see myself in the mirror, and I realize I cant get away from me. He thinks Im out of control. I need to work harder until I can no longer pinch anything off my stomach. Ive done it before, he reminds me. Ill do it again: skinny like the male models, skinny with discernible, stratified muscles. But be careful, he says. Stay in control. Too much control, if need be. Because if I dont, Ill lose it and get fat again. He says its all in my head. Except it no longer is. Its on paper. You know and I know.
Of course, I dont really need to lose more weight. Even Greg knows that. But he thinks I do. And I do too.
I have a different theory. It presupposes a murder and a truth that cannot be proven. Why not? Id need to utilize statistics and percentages, and such methods are unreliable. Numbers, like words, can always be manipulated to tell a truth. Unfortunately, it will never be the truth. Theres a world of difference.
Many times we mistake our own truths to be universal truths. But theyre ours and nobody elses. We shouldnt fool ourselves.
So, when I tell you that I kill, please believe me. When I tell you that for so long Ive wanted so badly to stop, please believe me. And when I tell you that I cant stop, even now, even though Ive want so badly to stop, please, again, believe me. I know you wont.
Thats why I think I cry. Maybe.
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[b]Dancing[/b]
Ive probably done most of my learning and growth since kindergarten. But when I look to a foundation for my life and my ways, that formative first year of school sticks out in my mind. Why? Probably because thats when I met my first true love.
No, it wasnt a girl. This was a different kind of love: a love of form, of body movement, and of aesthetics: a love of dance.
Near the end of kindergarten, I participated in a school dance performance. On the night of the show, over four hundred friends and family members filled the cramped auditorium.
For months I had practiced my insignificant background role. I held a cane and swayed idly back and forth through the second dance number. This was typical and basic choreography easy enough for even the most distractible five-year old. But I wasnt just any distractible five-year old.
(Before I continue, I must admit that I have (selectively?) eliminated any memory of this night. I only know it really happened because my mother captured the entire event on film. She further immortalized my antics by sending copies of the tape to half of Santa Monica)
Donovan, the popular kid who always wore purple pants, was dramatically bellowing The Jesus Rock. I swayed back and forth behind him with nine other not-so-biblically clad background dancers.
I got bored with the swaying cane routine pretty quickly. The music wasnt at all conducive to such placid and restrained movement. So I undid a button on my flowered Hawaiian shirt. But that wasnt enough. I unbuttoned it all the way.
As Donovan began the chorus, ("Its the Jesus Rock, yeah, yeah, Its the "), I stepped in front of him, twirled my shirt in the air, threw it into audience, and used my cane to engage in phallic and lavish break dancing moves.
Donovan stopped singing. I danced on. Jesus other disciples stopped swaying. And I danced on. Eventually the music stopped playing. And I danced on. I didnt know better or maybe I just didnt care.
Years later, as I watch the end of the tape (the elementary school principal carries me away as I kick and flail and the audience cheers), I know that must have been a defining moment in my young life. Fuck the music, fuck the routine, fuck the clothes, and fuck the people who wont understand anyway. Im going to dance.
Thats it. Thats where I think it began.
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[b]The Great American Novel[/b]
We are all so fragile and easily shattered during our childhood and adolescent years. If only we could have had someone there to protect us. But for reasons I dont understand, so many of us dont. We endure needless and excessive pain. And then we are asked to survive, and also, to love and give back.
We try. Sometimes we succeed, and all to often we fail. Either way, we will look back and try to connect the dots and erase the lines that we imagine never should have been drawn. If only we had known.
So we tell our stories, mostly for external validation, but also because we hope that somewhere it might teach someone something. Or at least, it will make somebody laugh. Or cry. And then, somehow, it will all be worth it.
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