an anatomy of a drawer:

The contents of a drawer in my bedroom dresser as of October 1st, 2008: 

1. A mix cd from Braxton entitled “And I Said Goddamn, Vol. 1" in his scrawled boyish handwriting, the other volume missing. A mix he made for my sister on Christmas, though all the songs I felt were about me. A mix with songs that always makes me think of winter. 

2. An almost empty box of bandages especially for wrapping around joints and knuckles from when I got stitches earlier in the summer. 

3. An orange post it note of directions that reads: 

Blue line to Belmont, 

#82 bus Kimball Homen Northbound, 

3301 W Bryn Mawr and Kimball. 

I didn’t remember until reading  it now what the directions were to, but it was the first bar I went to in Chicago, the Hollywood Tavern. Shane and I got in underage because I offered to carry the band’s equipment in, some all girls punk rock group. Slipped right through the bouncer with a smile and a nod to the drum in my hands. I sat and drank a pitcher of beer because the bartender was unable to make cocktails, gave me whiskey and club soda when I asked for a whiskey sour. The band members turned out to be lesbians who lit my cigarettes and bought me drinks. I stumbled home at four in the morning, Shane pissing in some house’s yard on Kimball and laughing all the way home about it. Going to a dive by my apartment for cheeseburgers and fries, passing out in a room that smells of ketchup and grease. 

4. A pencil sharpener I’ve never used but kept nonetheless because my father bought one for every member of our family on year for Christmas because he is clueless but we still love him. 

5. The following photographs: 

One black and white photograph of Megan and I with sunglasses on at the top of the hill on old Broadway you can see all of Peru from, the only place it looks stretched out and majestic, a weaving pattern of streetlights and rows of houses. Where I spent my last night in Peru before moving to Chicago, where I danced to “Last Dance with Mary Jane” on the hood of my car while it snowed, where I sat to watch the fireworks explode and crawl across the sky. 

A color picture in Portland, Maine, in front of the ocean with my sister Alison in the middle, my arm around her, and my sister Erin on her other side, smiling, some strange tourist behind the camera, face forgotten. A picture taken when I was punk rock (or when I thought I was), when I was going to be a political journalist, a picture where I barely recognize myself. 

One color photograph of my father in our kitchen, caught in a smile, much grayer than I remembered, salt and pepper hair and beard. In his work clothes still, oil on his hands from fixing the wheels of the tractor that cut his middle finger off, scrape on his forehead. The blue eyes he gave to me, the attached earlobes, the inability to truly smile unless caught completely unaware. 

Picture of my mother in the living room with a red heart drawn on her cheek for reasons unknown. Glasses on, mouth slightly open like she is about to say something, as she usually is. Wearing the necklace and earrings of gold she has always worn, the ones she loses down the kitchen sink once a year, only to find again. Her hair blonde rather than the red of her youth, the red hair she met my father with, now blonde and grey. 

6. A necklace given to me by an ex-boyfriend, a silver chain, white gold and diamonds, banished to the bottom of the drawer. Too nice to throw away, too expensive, but of no use anymore. “It is supposed to mean love forever, an eternity,” he said, and I am now of the belief that such gifts are a curse, a jinx as soon as they are given. 

7. A cut out page of GQ magazine of the dead actor Marcello Mastroianni, in an impeccable suit, cigarette to his lips, the man I believe to be the ideal. The man of La Dolce Vita, of standing in the Trevi Fountain in Rome with Anita Ekberg, the man who said, “Slyvia, Sylvia,” and made me wish it was my name he uttered breathlessly. The man I pictured naming a little boy after just so I could say “Marcello,” feel the roll of it off my lips. 

8. Sparklers I bought from the side of the road in Indiana from a man whose teeth never stayed in his mouth even when it was closed, always the ends of a few peeking out. Sparklers I bought and never set off because it never felt right, it never felt like a celebration. 

9. A round, carved wooden box my parents brought me from Haiti when they went on a mission trip there, the wood the color of cherry. It holds a few loose quarters and a sea shell, but when I look at it I see the cold cement floors of the houses they built there, of the sunburnt white faces next to the dark smiling faces, faces without names because my parents forgot to write on the back of their photographs who everyone was. “Is that Paulo? I can’t remember,” they say, eyes crinkled at the corners. 

the first line story, a work in progress:

While not the intended effect, the outcome was surprisingly satisfying. 

No one meant for the medication Julie took to make her dreams bleed into her days, but it did. She couldn’t tell when she was sleeping or when she was awake. Her life became a blend of the outrageous and the mundane, with no idea which was real. Her doctor told her she had been given a special gift, and so reluctantly Julie accepted it. "Doesn't everyone sometimes want their dreams to be real?" he asked, leaning forward in his chair. Julie stayed silent, she nodded, and he smiled and sent her on her way. 

One day the world would burst with the colors of fireworks fading across a sky, the next she would be curled up in front a fireplace in the body of herself as an old woman. She lived through tornadoes, staring as they grew so big and filled the sky with their green black mass, roaring toward her until the record skipped and she was somewhere else. She time traveled in her dreams and her life to memories until she forgot completely who she had been before she began her dream life. She went back to the basement of her Grandmother’s house, spending a whole day eating cheese and crackers and watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas Story over and over again. She went back to the first time she kissed a boy while they laid together in tall grass that itched their bare legs and arms. How he tasted like cotton candy, how he smelled of the coppery dirt. Other times she had brief glimpses where she almost realized, “Here I am, this is real!” Times where she would be in an office, working on a computer spreadsheet, something so devoid of imagination it surely could not be a dream. But then her life jolted forward and it was lost. 

 

It was a night at the end of August that Julie met Hernandez. She was never really sure if that was his last name or his first name, but it was the only name she had to call him by. She was sitting at the bar, clutching her knuckles around a long neck bottle of beer when she felt a finger poking into the back of her shoulder. “What are you doing here alone?” a deep voice asked her, not raspy, just coming from the depths of his body, somewhere near his stomach. She swivelled on her chair and saw a face, dark and crooked, the corner of his mouth turning up on one side into a grin. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” she felt herself saying, and thought instantly that she must be dreaming, she could never say something so smooth in a real life. But he smiled even more crookedly and sat beside her. She hoped it was real. 

He ordered a drink and ordered her another beer without asking her if she would like one. She felt dizzy when she felt his arm brush against her, his foot tangling with her own underneath the bar counter. They didn’t talk much, just smiled warmly at each other over the noise from the jukebox in the corner. When she finished the beer he bought her, he leaned into her hair and whispered, the cloud of his breath hot on her ear, “I have an idea. Come with me.” 

 

Julie wanted to ask where they were going and if he was real, but she was scared. Scared that the scene might change, that the colors would blur together, and that her life would once again move to another moment, the pages all out of order. 

more new work since i've been slacking:

At dim sum in Chinatown, I am wedged in between Kai's Chinese only speaking Grandmother Yin Yin and her daughter Ming. They both wear jade bracelets that are jingling in front of my face, Yin Yin speaking fast and pointing to huge platters of food on the lazy susan in the center of the table then to my plate. Ming shouts over her in English, saying, "She wants you to eat. Thats Chao Se Bao, you'll like." 

Yin Yin's eyebrows are drawn on, even her neck has thick etched rings of wrinkles. She looks so much older than my Grandmother, so much more elegant. Her skin is sprinkled with liver spots, her silk shirt with embroidered butterflies flying up the sleeves to her neck. Every time I sit my fork down on the plate, she says emphatically, "Eat! Eat!" one of the only English words she knows. 

Deftly, she snatches with her chopsticks pale dumplings for me from the passing carts of steaming bamboo baskets. I say to Kai and his mother across the table, the lazy susan spinning, "She is making me eat," and Beth replies, "Thats what she is good for." 

I feel terribly plain here as I look around at all the faces, all the children who came back to Chinatown to take their traditional Chinese Grandparents to Sunday dim sum. But feeling plain isn't a bad feeling here, I feel warmth. Yin Yin- is that her real name?- is poking me with a chopstick in the shoulder, urging me, "Eat, eat!" and in her eyes I am the too thin, too pale, curly haired blonde girl who helps her daughter in law with her children. To them, I am strange. Why do I refuse the black bean chicken feet? Why do I ask what kind of meat is in the dumpling- "Good, you try," Yin Yin insists through Ming, shoving one on my plate. 

Afterwards, once hugs and red envelopes etched with gold Chinese characters full of twenty dollar bills are exchanged, we brave the rain with still wet and tattered umbrellas, stomping through puddles, the sky a canopy of clouds. We walk across the square, to the townhouses in red brick with green doors where Yin Yin lives. She tells me to "Sit, sit," in a chair in the kitchen and everyone else goes to the living room to eat moon cakes and yell at the Bears game in Chinese. Yin Yin moves and flutters about the kitchen, packing food, strange soups made from roots in plastic tubs. 

Ming walks in as Yin Yin is shoving a moon cake shaped like a pig into my growing bag of food for the road, most of its origin unknown, and they talk back and forth for a moment. Ming smiles and looks at me. "The soup she packed you, she says it is for happiness and good health." And I remember Beth saying when she was pregnant with Kai that Yin Yin would always bring her soups especially for those about to conceive, old mysterious family recipes. I smile and thank her. She pinches my cheeks and says something no one bothers to translate. I take my happiness soup home and eat it on my back porch while I watch it rain. I'm still waiting for something to happen, like magic. 

some recent work:

I have very little to show for this summer. A pile of fireworks in my room I bought half price in Indiana from a stand on the side of the road and never set off. A summertime supply of sparklers, Chinese lanterns, tiny tanks, firecrackers, roman candles to point to the sky. A newly acquired scar on my left thumb, the holes still visible where the thread went in and pulled the wound together, four on each side of the slanting line across the bone. It still hurts when I bump into a table, when someone squeezes it too hard. And I don't even have a good story about how it came to be. I have piles of books I bought at library book sales, books I bought that I haven't read but felt I should. Books like Madame Bovary and James Joyce story collections. I have a newly found love of Phil Collins, something that started as a joke at the beginning of the summer, and now has developed to a mark of shame and guilty pleasure.

 And then there are the things that I can't prove happened this summer- nights drinking wine out of empty jars, a trip kayaking down the Wisconsin River, the Wabash River, where in some places it was shallow and I had to get out and push, ending up muddy and sunburnt but never happier.  There was the brief week I spent with a kid named Hernandez, crashing parties and telling everyone we had just gotten engaged, stealing their booze, and they were all so drunk they never questioned how no one knew us, they just toasted to our happiness with red plastic cups and cheered. We held hands and kissed for them, put on a marvelous show, talked about a wedding in Cancun which they ate up, stared into each others eyes longingly. And then I got tired of pretending to be in love and I stopped answering his phone calls. 

There is so little proof for the things that happened to me this summer, the changes I feel. It was an awful purgatory, a transition, and I'm ready for a new season. It is over and for the first time in my life I am welcoming summer's end. 

tonight i am lonely, tired, and horny. 

tonight i am most of america. 

how i feel

It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? 

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. 

Why has he gone where I cannot follow?