hey remember that time earlier this year when you went to that house you love and you tried to hold a seance. a handmade ouija board with crooked letters and an upside down teacup you used as a pointer and:
“SO THIS IS WRIT: NEVER LET MAX”
“RED OWL IN MY GUT”
(direct speech, from the beautiful man who graduated earlier today and is off to canada to cook equally glorious food) “girl, you are on my level today” (because the two of you were flying across the board, hands in tune)
and the spirit you raised up called itself NOCHE which was part of something longer and because all combined the lot of you spoke six languages you figured that your ghost probably did too, and it was witty, wasn’t it, and old enough to forget what sex it had been
and they asked noche “why does the back door keep coming unlocked?” and remember, you’re all sitting on the floor in the front hall with just a ring of candles lighting up your chins and goosepimples and you remember just how old that house is and noche, beautiful noche, says:
“Y R U FEARD? DEY HU GT TO GO.”
why are you afraid? they who got to go. they who have to go. something’s leaving. but it’s okay. why are you afraid? don’t be. how soft. how lovely. that phrase. why are you afraid?
you end the seance by putting a candle on the board and placing the cup over it until it goes out. just because you wanted to. just because you felt that urge. you put out the rest of the candles like this. each one slowly extinguishing itself— the tiny plume of smoke. the soft smudgy smell. you sit there quietly together in the dark.
i am thrifty and i am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.
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rara avis
ghost(s) at the door
i’m suddenly reminded of that time that i was taking the train to new york city to visit a friend. my freshman year. perhaps october? november? the woman next to me was reading a book of calvin and hobbes comics but smiled at me when i sat down beside her. we talked about our lives and what we were doing on metro-north on a friday afternoon— she was a medical student, pakistani, visiting her cousin. we had a nice talk, then lapsed into an amicable silence.
when i get sleepy it’s pretty obvious— i can’t keep my eyes open and i flop over like some sort of wilting flower before i wake myself up and sit upright again. the first few times it happened, my neighbor didn’t say anything, but when i apologized for the third time she said, “why don’t you just lean on me?” and produced a paisley shawl from her bag, folding it and putting it on her shoulder.
“i don’t want to bother you,” i said.
“no, it’s okay, go ahead.”
“really?”
“i wouldn’t be offering if it weren’t the case,” she said. smiling. her voice fruity and rich. i leaned on her shoulder and slept until we got to harlem. deep. exhausted. dreamless. at times i think i heard her laugh to herself, quietly, or hum.
don’t worry, we weren’t late. you weren’t late.
the carpet in the buddhist temple in southeast portland that your family goes to every so often is squishy, so soft you could sleep on it, curl your toes. which is a good thing, because when you pray, when you mourn, you spend a lot of time on your knees, forehead pressed to the floor.
love in pious immigrant vietnamese-america means buddha gets not just one neon halo, but three, and there’s a slow rotating pyramid of golden shakyamunis on either side of the altar. two posters on the wall remind you: everything is impermanent. flesh, sickness, even death and the void. you take your shoes off before you even walk in, and the door’s always open, so even complete strangers can drop by while the prayer chants are being sung. summer air blowing through. the caretaker’s kids giggling in the background.
the photo of your grandmother that your family decides to use on all the altars was taken in the living room. it’s several years old, and in it, she’s smiling wide, hair permed. this is how you choose to remember her, too: still luminous. still with the brightness that your mother carries around with her like a blade. “hi grandma,” you want to say. you’ve taken to talking to her as if she’s still around. asking her what offerings she wants today— your aunt admits to praying with pudding, arguing that she liked it when she was alive and she’d still like it now.
and it’s— joyous, somehow. with the summer air pouring in and the brightness of the temple and the caretaker’s kids who dart across the carpet, not caring that half your family is there with the white headbands of mourning that you can’t manage to tie properly even though it’s been enough deaths that you should’ve had the practice. your head swims with two hours of buddhist sutras, you can’t keep up with the chanting monk whose voice is almost as soothing as the ocean or an electric fan, the kind that buzzes all night long in a rooftop garden in saigon. his robe is saffron. when he is done he smiles benevolently at you— right at you— and says something that makes your mother laugh.
she tells him she’s been seeing your grandmother around; at least for the week right after she died. how she turned off the stove for your younger brother.
“was she happy?” he asks.
“yes,” she says.
(this conversation is in vietnamese. you are happy that you understand.)
the temple cooks food for you, as they always do. it is meant to be an offering, but after it’s offered, it goes into the bellies of the living because the dead can’t chew. you sit together and eat. the kids run in. the monk, whom you all call teacher, changes into his brown robes. you do not cry. you do not feel as though you have to. in the waiting room you see the sun coming through the single curtain. it is bright, bright gold.
clio and another friend (i’ll call her freya, and i’m not sure how she hasn’t managed to show up on here yet) and i biked out to wintergreen lake tonight. in my backpack a brush, a chocolate bar, a towel, another sweater. we’d been planning this for weeks now.
how lovely the evening was— and the ride— the wind in our faces and the sharp little arrow we rode in, a gang of girls on shitty steel road bikes, once we hit rural roads and the lights started to go out. how good it felt to sweat and move, the pocket of heat building under my sweater, the baby bird buzzed part of my head so cool and free. dancing on the asphalt.
maybe everything sad about me can be cured by water. i’ve never been so cold in my life before. how we stripped on the shore, and walked in— every cell recoiling. and we all dove in at once, and i cut the water like a knife. i’ve never felt such a tremendous constriction. my heart beating beating beating and my lungs asking god you idiot what are you doing this is freezing you are too soft and warm you do not belong but soon enough there i was and there we were, suspended, bathed in the most sublime cold.
there is dry cold and there is wet cold and then there is this cold: rhapsodic. a prickle all along every limb, every inch of skin and— it felt like a baring. as though i had excavated myself and the water took every organ in. warm in that moment. we swam until our hands went numb and our legs and our feet, hovering far above the bottom.
the jittershake of clothing. the dull ache of cold, cold, cold, the poor pink shells of my ears. the breathless ride home— downhill, and loki’s lights a godsend, and my heart high and happy in my chest. and i was not dead before but i was somewhere low and hungry, and this night made me feel alive again.
(this is a daily theme i just handed in. please don’t reblog— this could be considered academic writing, and i’d like it to stay here.)
I.
I am sitting in a white plastic chair. Z has turned up the tungsten lights to their brightest setting and the small music room has turned cramped, stifling; I want to take off my sweater but I’m not wearing anything underneath so my skin crawls with heat. The camera is on. Recording. My mouth is dry.
“So.”
“So.”
“Tell me a story.”
I laugh. I can’t find any words.
A huge stillness stretches between us.
“My high school calculus teacher and cycling coach died last night.”
II.
Z leaves the room. The lights are still on. He’s asked me to dance. I put on Midnight City. I peer out the window to make sure he is gone. I start to move.
III.
The lights are off now. I am sitting in the white plastic chair and Z is adjusting the focus of the camera: the lens like a huge and shiny black eye. I curl my fingers into a circle and hold it up to my face.
“I’m you, looking at me.”
Z laughs.
“It’s true.”
“Can you dance again?” he asks.
“Are you leaving?”
“No. I’m staying for this one.”
“I hate you,” I say.
IV.
I put on Midnight City. Z is standing behind the camera. Watching me dance while he watches me dance. I try not to imagine what my frenetic body must look like multiplied at a fraction of the size, arms, legs, my hair a dark shape, moving.
“I have an instruction for you,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Dance harder.”
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” I say. The room is hot and small and my body takes up too much space and I want to cry. My face is burning. I dance, throwing myself left and right, burying my hands in my hair, not looking at him. Not looking at anything. Pretending I don’t exist for a moment, that I have disappeared in front of the camera’s shiny black eye.
i almost forgot to write about this.
after dropping dzana off at the train station i took the shuttle back to campus. a kid was waiting at the stop, smoking a cigarette; he wasn’t a student, but got on with us anyway. he sat next to me on the bus, a seat away, and as we got rolling, he leaned over and started talking.
“i know you’re a complete stranger, but i just gotta talk to someone.” i didn’t notice at first, but he was crying. the sort of wretched embarrassed crying boys do. he couldn’t have been older than nineteen, my age.
“i’m in love with this girl, right? and i just messed it all up. i fucked it up. i’m devastated.”
i sat there and listened as he told me the story. when he started crying more i panicked and rummaged in my bag, found a crumpled paper napkin, handed it to him— “i swear it’s clean. don’t cry,” i added pathetically.
“i would take a bullet for this girl, i really would,” he said.
“i believe you,” i told him.
there wasn’t much i could say, really. he talked all the way to the green, curled up in his seat (he looked so small, and he cried so much) and all i could do was smile at him from across the aisle and tell him everything was going to be ok.
he was going to go to the library to use a computer and get on facebook and write to her and tell her that he loved her. as he got up i caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. “thank you,” he said. but i hadn’t really done anything.
“take care now,” i told him. “everything will work itself out.” and he nodded, and got off the bus, and walked across the green, and i’ll probably never see that kid again.
this is the one piece that i inadvertently forgot to mark as “don’t share” — so of course it was one of the five that got distributed to the entire class… but meta-meta-meta-embarrassment aside, i really did like writing this.
- - - - -
I was happy because he’d called me sweet in a text message exchange we had right before I went to the beach. I was barefoot and in my underwear wiggling my toes in the sand. Orange and pink striped panties; silly little floral print bra. My heart aches to think of that tender girl pretending to be jaded—“ruby red grapefruit, black coffee,” I’d sing blithely, acting as though I’d already been hurt.
In this wet gray winter I can’t imagine the piercing blue of that sky; nor can I that heavy heat, rolling over my limbs, dense as bathwater. But I know it happened because there had been nights I would sleep undressed and still wake up sweating, my body never more present, never more overwhelming and dense and whole. But these are all words; I have abstracted those early days of September. I was in my underwear sitting on the beach at Lighthouse Point and he was miles away but I carried him around in my head, a reminder and charm. My rabbit’s foot. My bad penny.
I swam that day, the day he called me sweet. A week before I’d been there too, with some friends. We were naked then, vulnerable as you come. Treading water as the sun was setting and the droplets of seawater on our skins turning into goose bumps as the air grew cold. We missed the bus home, had to call a cab.
He didn’t know my body then. This is how I distinguish those two trips to Lighthouse Point. Not by the color of the water, or the texture of the sand, or the people I was with—those fade. It becomes about the before and after. With and without. Like the rest of that fall: the difference between taking a shower after getting home and somebody kneeling to kiss the salt off my skin.
today’s daily theme. i asked to keep it private. this one impressed my writing tutor so much that he wrote back to me saying he was disappointed he couldn’t share it.
- - - - -
I once had a professor who referred to color as vibration. We are a collection of molecules smashing together over and over again. You can’t ever hold a perfect platonic form because all we see are shadows cast upon the wall; this is why you will not love me. There is a difference between Aristotelian and religious teleology but both mean a means to an end. You can get onto that roof from a third story window. Bukowski said we all had bluebirds in our hearts. I hate whiskey. He shivers when you bite his right ear. He claims to have no feelings. A few weeks ago I started drinking my coffee with no sugar and no milk. He has stopped believing in love. This was September, October, November, December.
The root Janus comes from a Roman god who has two faces. Grapefruit is the king of citrus fruits; this is a personal proclamation from the hand of a nineteen-year-old girl; ruby is an entirely different shade of red. One looks forward and one looks back. I spent New Year’s Eve in the hospital. When they give you dialysis it is to scrub your fluids neat and clean and your blood whirrs merrily through plastic tubes. I get dizzy when I stand up too fast. He gave me a bruise that lasted eleven days after the last thrust, not that I was counting. My grandmother is possessed by evil spirits. My grandfather has forgotten my name.
In the Pacific Northwest we do not believe in umbrellas. A river runs through the place where I grew up in. There exists the possibility of immense beauty. Once he and I left the window open and because I couldn’t fall asleep from nervousness I closed my eyes and listened to the night rain.
puts two fingers right where plane meets plane. “that’s the past,” he says, “that doesn’t matter anymore. that’s all back there—” his hand is floating over the floor and only empty space beneath. “what matters is what’s in front of them. they saw it. they knew what they wanted.”
(talking to the prof who teaches futurism; i hope i get into that seminar)
in lieu of regular blogging please have one of the daily themes that i wrote for this week. not all of them are true, though this one is.
- - - - -
I was trying to hide how I was still a little drunk when I walked in, rain-drenched in the dead of night and my boots loud and wet against the tile floor of the chapel but Bruce o sweet saint in a fleece vest didn’t care either way: detangling himself from the lotus position he took my cold hands between his and said, “You’re freezing. Let me get you some barley tea.”
It was warm; everything was warm. The candles flickering in a blurry body of bright blots like flowers on the surface of a pond and the smooth neat mat of silence that surrounded them, a halo of meditation cushions and empty hallowed space. The mug in my hands, white ceramic, amber pool and the tears of some heavy fleshy grain and fruit. Everything translucent and hazy with absorbed light. Me. The boy I’d slept with last spring but hardly talked to since—both of us warm with the buzz and business of being human.
It was a church, we were in it, far on the other side of midnight and the air taut as the surface of a water droplet filled with a spirit I could not even begin to register but had merely walked into conjuring silence, silence, if I tried I could make even the sound of my own breathing disappear. Swallowed up in that quiet and suspended the space fit us as perfectly as a womb. Please, whenever you have time, take the chance to stand in a large and usually crowded space alone and it will listen to you as Battell Chapel listened to me on that Wednesday night after the rain threw its glittering sparks into my hair.
excerpt from a thing that i am writing/have written.
i have caught the writing bug.
he had a tattoo on his arm shaped like a keyhole, but angular, and we were listening to grime— the music that started the riots in the uk, or so he said. the tattoo symbolized the beginnings and ends of societies. he was a poet, they were both poets, there were two of them.
up on the third floor in some house i’d been in maybe once or twice before and the air was hazy with smoke and my hot pink shorts glowed neon under the black light. it was cold, i crawled out onto the roof with a bottle of wine and sat next to my friend the mopey poet and mars rubbed my leg with one hand, saying i was going to freeze if i sat out there like that.
out over the roof we could see those bare new england trees and in the distance the moon an uneasy gibbous rind, glowing gently. and we talked then: shit, mostly, but poems, and life away from home, and love lost, and things like that. i leaned my head on the other poet’s shoulder— he was unnervingly beautiful, and not so angry, and not dangerous.
that was the night that i left the second button on my sweater undone which i was wearing over nothing so you could see the perfect teardrop of empty skin over my breasts waiting to be torn open and so bless their hearts no one did not those hungry graduate students nor the girl with the bored eyes who waved her joint at me and said “embrace it, baby” and maybe i spend too many surreal nights with painters and poets and people who bleed a little too easily.
i crawled back in through the one window and. i needed it, all of it: the strangers and the strange touches and the heavy heartbreaking moon. we were walking back and one of the poets said to me— the angry one. said. “here are two things for you. one, we are all dead inside. two, you will get whatever you want, you’ll be happy in the end.”
it didn’t make sense but none of the night did. mars and i spun circles, ran home at six in the morning— not quite sunrise, but— laughing. like we were crazy, like we had lost our minds.
(this really ought to be going on my other blog— the sex and cigarettes one, as i think of it— but i’m feeling vulnerable today, so there.)
this morning in the shower i found a new freckle on my right breast. i say new because i’d never seen it before, but maybe it was there all along.
however, this is all true.
went over to my grandparents’ old house today to clean things up and move furniture in for the new renters. my grandparents are in seattle now, as i think i’ve mentioned here, and they haven’t lived in this house in years. i haven’t really been in it, either; not for at least two years. not like how it used to be.
went in expecting everything to be different & the same. two sets of renters have passed through already; i knew it was going to be bare, i packed the boxes myself, wrote neat labels, cried over my grandfather’s poetry. but somehow i was hoping that there would be something left for me to hang on to, years later.
and there was: the couch, the way the light came in strong through the one window that meant if you napped there you’d wake up still sleepy. wallpaper. closet under the stairs. the shape of things, i mean, and what wasn’t there still left impressions in the carpet. water-stained circles from vases on the sill. i imagined all the rooms in my head. how could i possibly forget? i grew up here.
my brother and i wandered through, touching things, remembering. all my memories in that house are at their densest from birth to about age twelve, thirteen. my childhood, essentially, pre-pubescence, when things began to change—the feel of the house (medicinal, bleak, beeping monitors), not just my body or my mind.
the garden, too, had changed, and that was what really made me feel like crying. my grandfather’s garden was the most beautiful thing i’d ever seen. flowers and vegetables and apple-quince-plum-pear-cherry trees, all bearing fruit. i’d go out and water the peonies with a gallon jug filled from the hose. pick pears and hold them in my shirt. the trees are still there, but the peonies are gone now— all dug up— and the cherry tree is growing a thick coat of ivy. it’s smaller, too, than i remembered. everything got smaller. everything got further away.
i was struck with such a sense of unreality walking through the house. in my mind it will always be as it was when i was ten years old and my grandparents were healthy and there wasn’t much i ever had to worry about at all. the bareness felt fake, temporary, even though i was hauling furniture all day, real as ever. the persimmons will continue to ripen in the winter. cherry tree still has fruit— i saw one, bright red, in the dirt.
i am tempted to make this all a story. we were moving furniture, like i said, and i walked out into the garage carrying a chair nestled against my hip like a nursing infant and through the open door i could see two crows in the grassy area in front of the house. i could say it was my grandparents, or the guardian spirit of them flown down from seattle, that they stuck around longer than crows ever would, but that’s not true. what happened is that i walked out with a chair and i set it down and i saw two black birds pecking for food and that is all. that is what happened. this is the truth.
today has been the kind of day that makes me want to flop in the heavy wiggling sun; the kind of day that makes me dream of running ice cubes across my skin, though we all know that the sun’ll burn off all the moisture and sweat, too. it’s hot and bright and the air has a weight and thickness to it; it slides off me bright & viscous like a body, like one long constant embrace.
