Hot in the Vein

My stomach shifts in my midsection and I cannot tell if it is dread or disease as I stare at the online application page for a new credit card. Dread. I close the browser. I will not go there, yet, but fucking close; the distant walls are ever changing.



Paper, pencils

Collect cobwebs.

Shearing time

Peals waken

Rending

Moments ripen

Split

Join anew

Eating Crow

Well if I was a carnivore, crow would be the last thing I would eat because those highly intelligent birds would stalk me all over the city and my life would spiral out of control.

That being said I am making a horizontal list right here (colon) rip every single thing out of my room and then put it back in a nice way (semi-colon) keep it all together (semi-colon) keep waking up before six for the rest of my life (semi-colon) find something that makes sense of all of this confusion (semi-colon) learn how to identify the questions before trying to answer it.

Living life through a fractured lense (and yes, I checked, it is okay to have an e on lens, it's better that way, for me, more clear and really what else matters?) takes a toll. I am looking forward to being able to focus and direct my energy toward a specific target, in the mean time, I hope to find ways to express how truly grateful I am for this human experience. It seems that more wildly unpredictable it becomes, the more the steel fibers in my heart soften, the deeper the sorrow the greater the joy. When I find a way to describe that everyday, I will be getting closer to asking the right questions

June is more than summer

This tide is momentous and perhaps at some point the high will match this low. As this year progresses, I learn that there is no way of knowing or holding onto water or sand, I work to flow out and disperse into the greater waters of the ocean. I fantasize about floods, their hunger for low laying lands and trailers. Floods are things of beauty which cannot be suppressed. Fire, in its consumption of all things which leaves only charcoal ash soot, shoots fear to my bones. Fire is individual, a flood is bad luck and low lands.

So this tide that carries me, I drift on it.

I lose my second job of the year, the third of my life, this is not a year for having jobs if you are me and I am, so I don't have jobs. Again, fine, and better still, because the sucking of marrow from the inside of my bones to deliver it into the waiting maws of man ends.

So catch my breath, find a minute, breath deeply, and wonder about all of this.

standing in the dark

Every few months my sleep health goes to hell and my days turn into endless streams of lost moments and missed opportunities. I wake drenched in sweat, legs trapped in my sheets having forgotten my name and hoping that the stranger in the bed next to me doesn't mind my nakedness. Heart in my throat, my eyes search the dark room for clues, until slowly I come back into my body which has been sleeping in the same bed next to the same stranger for years.

I push pull my mind now. I heard a quote from a famous man whom I will not attribute as I have no desire to fact check and the last time I failed to fact checked I got checked publicly for not doing my research: "When your dreams turn to dust it is time to vacuum."

It is father's day. I love you.

unwashed vs prewash*td

Time in all its glory follows the sun. It is no small act of truth that time in all of its implications is uniquely personal. My time is marvelously slow and as minutes linger under the beading rim of a glass, I know my skin over bones hides more than it reveals.

There exist one pair of cut-off levi's, faded, almost white, loose around the pockets and thighs; one black tshirt with printing, including, and, yet not limited to the search for Carmen San Diego, a graphic, and a streak of turquoise oil paint; one gray graphic tshirt which can never be washed, a sliver ghost to hang smock like over my torso; one pink and yellow tie-dye, worn down to sheer threads: That is love.

Time is in those clothes. Their folds hold the soft scent summers past, long warm nights that dipped into the mind of a tomorrow that has never unfolded. These shirts are crickets and roller skates and speed and the rolling years, years of ambiguity, there is moon in the fibers and sun too, and when I wash them all of that gets a little further from my fingers and my eyes see less and heaven knows I remember much less than I hoped.

New Faces

I wish I knew you, knew your life, what it looks like each day. What your bliss is, if I knew that I would wager that we'd be friends. The world is so big small, and, yet, each day, I struggle to connect.

Transitorily Honest

I consider myself to be an honest person. Most of the time. I cheated on a test, once, in college. It was my second term at community college and I was figuring out the ropes of how to juggle the grief of my father's death with the academic rigor of a twelve credit term. I took night classes and kept my mouth closed. I pulled A's for the first time in my life. I don't know what I did during the days besides sleep and ignore the pounding hangovers my insomniac brain demanded.

Is that even honest? Honesty is a mistress of opportunity, she ages well and if not provoked to rage will offer lessons in reality. At that time, I was as honest with myself as I possibly could be. The trappings of truth I invented kept me safe from too much self harm and away from desperation. Now, I look back and with the clarity of time can see a different truth, the truth of the broken spirit that needed spring to come with warmth and flow blood up through my veins and into my heart. The heat of those March days crept into the ice and thawed out my bones, steam rose from my feet as they touched the ground, and that is lucky for if we spend too long frozen our souls will be trapped under ice and may forget to surface. That is what happens with time, the pain, while no less tangible becomes less visceral and safe to look at, to inspect the shards of ice beneath a microscope to learn that ice is teaming with microbial life.

With frozen veins I made way in and out of class rooms. I showed up physically into rooms full of strangers and sat in hard chairs under florescent lights which hummed inside my ears. The sound pulled me out of my body where I would wait for a chink in my thawing veins and reenter my body disoriented and unsure of my surroundings. I fell in and out of my body. Time moved forward without me. I cheated on a test. Time was so slow and my body so light that I hovered above the room looking at answers, marking my sheet correctly. It was terrible to do so well as the professor wrote out our rankings on the board. "And, one of you," he said his voice full of pointed accusation, "Received one hundred percent." That was me, I shrank into my chair. I am not supposed to be seen and now all the eyes in the room shift focus on to me and I am visible as their eyes cast disbelief in my direction.

I had to study so hard after that. To ensure a repeat performance when one cannot rely on out of body experiences to succeed, one must take notes and study notes and spend hours examining them from every angle.

Dishonesty took more work and even if no one knew, I did, and it was wretched. I proved nothing only that I had to overcome more isolation as the space between me and my peers grew ever wider. So I studied and read and sat on the earth warming my legs and felt the breath of summer on my neck and melted into the body of flesh.

Gravel

Leggings as pants are wretched, we all know that, right. So tell me, how does the girl packing an extra 35 pounds not know that?

More than leggings I despair when I am faced with the thought that I may not have enough creativity to manage getting through this month with my tongue as I am growing sick from biting it. The inside of my cheek is welted from my incisors; it is the holding of thoughts that drives my teeth into my tender flesh. That sounds morbid and it is not entirely untrue.

More than the taste of pennies, I hate when I am a coward. I am a coward now because I am biting my tongue instead of speaking up and saying what I believe to the few people who need to hear it. It is an adult decision not to call someone out, ask them to sit down and have a conversation. I suppose that I could write a letter I never send, or I could burn an effigy, or, like a normal person, drink too much.

Until I realized why I was so damned angry. I was mad because I felt my power stripped away. By being 'let go' from my not so reliable, horribly underpaid, working almost for fucking free for a year without so much as a thank you very much, I felt myself adrift on the wind of chance and it scared the living shit out of me. When change is forced upon me, I tend to spiral.

What an opportunity to recognize that no one has the ability to dictate my response. What a chance to realize that I am now more in control. In the odd twist of fate the awakening to the fact that I do have a choice even while my options are being limited. It is not that I am no longer angry, but I recognize that I am not beholden.

Also, for the record, I think that people tell all kinds of stories to make themselves okay. Self reflection is not a quality for those weak of stomach and tender of bone.

And finally, I dreamed I had cloudy vision as if my dreams were out of focus.

Rock's Bottom Line

Braiding twigs, straw, smoke and mirrors together I made a life. I thought that I could run a little faster than my shadow, but as we all know shadows are tricky and have a way of leaping from behind bushes, scaring horses, exposing a chinked chimera fastened with duck-tape and putty. Now exposed my shadow feels better and is doing a great job making me work harder to have less.

I convinced myself that I need a truck—a big fat fuel monster to haul horses to expensive events where their coats would glisten in the sun and my boots would be polished mirrors—with some hesitation my bank said okay, I with no hesitation said yes. I told them, hey no problem, I've got this and I pretended that it would. But now, oh now the pain of a beast with no hope for resolve, gulping fuel I can little afford. It is my own little budget ceiling and I have hit it.

The plan is simple--sell the beastly truck for pennies on the dollar--take the hit of a poorly invested venture and add in the depreciation and I'm talking thousands of dollars lost. But, that's what it is now, people everywhere have lost thousands of dollars, I am not alone on the Titanic.

But no one wants a truck a big beastly truck. Especially now and especially not from a young lady who can barley put boots on. No it's not that, what it really is is that it's not no one who buys trucks. Men buy trucks and my flitzing floating voice over the digital wires throw them into a state of shattered world view and no one with a shattered world view spends money on a truck.

So now, what now? Maybe I'll start advertising, 'this rig is being sold by a lady,' or as my brother kindly suggested pose in a camo bikini on the hood of the truck, or maybe just put my husbands phone number on the add, because at this point the sexism is not the point of the bottom line.

Fine.

I was what, seventeen, sixteen? who knows now, riding shotgun while my mom drove five miles under the speed limit, "Chaya, how are you?"

The ubiquitous 'fine,' seemed less than satisfying to my mother who replied, "I don't remember what the eFF stands for, but Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional."

Well, now I know, Fucked Up completes the acronym and am happy to say that I am far from fine, I am dandy.