i slept in an extra half hour this morning, curled around a person i have been curled around for the past month or so, and when i woke up, it was almost twilight. the jury is still deliberating whether or not stephanie meyer has forever ruined the word ‘twilight’, but it was almost not dark. confusing and joyful, 5:30am is always dark. we got up and stretched and ate and dressed and went out the back door to the shed that i have thought of as ‘my housemates’ bike storage shed’ because i have never used the shed once in the six months we’ve lived here, but today i went in the shed because i have a bicycle to ride. its name is Little Sky and it lives in the shed and I rode it to work today.
The ride takes 25 minutes if you are new to bicycle riding and have small legs. It is cool and crisp with little ups and downs and three quarters of the way through it you ride over my favorite bridge in seattle.
You spend the first fifteen minutes crisscrossing treelined residential streets that smell like flowers because tomorrow it will be april and THERE ARE FLOWERS EVERYPLACE and the whole world smells like my mother when I was six and we whooped and hollered and sang about that all the way to my job, that I arrived at 5 minutes early after sleeping a half hour later (fuck you seattle bus system), sweaty and happy.
this feels worthy of an introduction, but i’m not really sure why. just a second version of a freewrite about a visit with an old friend/ex that i am still friends with. we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, our visits are always a little awkward, but i think we’re both invested in maintaining our friendship. emotionally i think it feels like when you broke your arm five years ago and no one can tell you ever broke it, and it never hurts, and you don’t have your old cast anymore you kept when they sawed it off, and you don’t even totally remember how badly it hurt when you broke it, but you still remember that it happened, and you cried a lot, and now you have that funny little bump that nobody else notices, but you still know that its there, and sometimes you rub it and wonder why you ever decided to jump out of that tree in the first place. you know?
This will not be weird, you think, as you tap your foot to your Gossip cd, four rows back on the discount fare bus taking you from your sister’s apartment in Boston to your ex-girlfriend’s apartment on the upper east side.
It has been three years since you ended your two year relationship with this woman, during a silent but otherwise unremarkable handjob in your college dormitory bed. Stuck tears and sweaty hands mechanically moving in the same directions that used to do all kinds of cliched magic, move mountains bring this woman to her back to her knees to herself, oh, yes, please, i can’t do this, anymore.
Three years later and you’ve recidivated (i like this word a lot but can’t tell if i’m using it correctly here. feedback?) to a place no other partner of yours has ever ventured with you. You call each other occasionally just to say hello. You tell your friends you are happy for her and you mean it she asks how your parents are doing you finally come home to the coast you belong to and without thinking anything you sit down in front of the greyhound website and buy the ticket.
Only in New York would you feel lucky to pay nine hundred dollars to share a one bedroom hallway, you realize, as she opens the door which bangs into the half size oven, bisecting the part of the hallway you are supposed to intuit as the kitchen. You don’t have a toaster?
You freewrite about this visit on the bus. So much time has passed. Not like that first visit six months later when you visited her first new apartment in Boston before she met someone and moved to this hallway. You awkwardly shared a bed–her housemates had cats–slept with both socks and everything else on– and woke up from nightmares in which you were forced to have sex with her. She woke up frantic maybe even crying maybe you’re making up that last part from the same kind of dream and you both laugh, sigh, spoon, and finally sleep. Happy new year.
No. There are multiple birthdays and women now between that night and this one. Almost too many to remember those years ever happened except you still call each other old nicknames, hey kid, where do you keep your can opener?
Let’s put on some music, remember when we listened to this album, you say, thinking about college and things that were a long time ago and not your relationship so much, but it is kind of implied, and you can’t lift your eyes up until you change the topic, that isn’t what i meant. Those pictures hanging on the wall used to hang above the bed I slept in with you, that blanket kept me warm on your couch in your unheated house, I knit you that hat because I loved you. You want to speak and laugh about yourselves but every memory you have together is one of this relationship, better pretend that the whole thing never happened keep in touch it was great to see you I think I can get back to the bus depot myself from here.
You think in facts. You don’t believe in objectivity but you do in these moments and you want everyone else to do the same so you can stop feeling around for the boundary that separates nostalgia from possessiveness, a darkness you thought your eyes had long adjusted to with this one. this time. Maybe it is walking through the park and past the walkups your parents and other people’s parents once lived in that makes you so uncharacteristically uncharacteristic.
You are overflowing. You are leaving in fourteen hours.
When you get off the bus again in Albany, calling her to say you have arrived safely and thank you for your warm hospitality, and then you will hang up, put your phone back silently in your left pants pocket, and get back to the business of your life.
An update to the world:
The anonymous recipient of my bone marrow donation is in remission and doing well. She is alive, and if she is still alive and feeling chatty in a year and a half, we can contact each other.
This kind of news comes in a phone call, like any other phone call. My phone rings exactly the same way it does when it is my mother calling me to tell me about the cute email she forwarded to me or when it is some woman i am trying to convince to make out with me calling to coordinate our plans to go dancing. Beep. Beep Boop. Be da doo boop. Be da doo boop beep beep beep. Catchy. Crazy.
I am on the bus talking to Ellen, the woman who coordinated my donation, and we are talking loudly about blood counts and remission and acute lymphocytic leukemia or whatever the fuck they called it and folks are staring at me because i am talking about cancer on the bus and we are driving over the montlake bridge and it is so sunny out, it is perfect, and my forehead is plastered to the window so i can get closer to the view and i am crying happy tears about cancer for someone i do not know.
I try not to think about who she is. I want her to be a woman with a career in social justice, a woman who has adopted a whole passel of special needs children, a woman who saved the historic movie theatre in her town the year after she won the pillsbury bakeoff with her cherished old world family recipe for upsidedown cherry crisp. i want her to be beautiful and well loved. i know that i want these things. i feel sheepish and unworthy thinking these things, and so i try not to think about it. maybe she won’t want to meet me. maybe her cancer will return and she will die.
some of the people i have told don’t know what to say, and it is awkward, but it is a joyful awkward. how can you be happy for someone who just found out they saved a life six months ago? how can you practice your social graces for that moment? but sometimes people smile and cry and hug me, and i do the same back, and we acknowledge that same moment again in time, and then we move on, because we can, and it is good.
the cancer saga is littered throughout my blog, if you want to read the whole story. it is over now, but in a nutshell, last august i cured cancer.
It is another Monday
and I am bent over in front of the cash register
reading some headlines
and
making some coffee
and
wishing hoping praying that i was an activist changing the world a baker making a souffle a grown adult doing her laundry and paying off her student loans and figuring her shit out
instead of scurrying around this store trying to find more sixteen ounce lids
because the girl who gets the tall iced americano with room every day
can’t go to her psychology class
until she has a lid
nobody tells me to smile here
i print out extra pieces of receipt paper so i have something to write on
pray the creative juices will flow from somewhere
not there
pick up a pen i use to mark drinks on students coffee cards
you are three dollars closer to a free white chocolate mocha my friend
and start to write
write a poem
write a poem for example about the sex i had last night
but i get as far as
’she hit me but only because i asked so nicely’
my words are tiny and stained
and someone wants to buy some pop tarts.
i am taking a writing class at Bent, which looks like a basement room full of pillows and mismatched queers and chairs nine uphill blocks from myself compassionately encouraging one another to write. We read things by other writers, we write in and out of class, we read out loud and offer positive feedback. The most commonly uttered phrase in the class is ‘tell me what you like about it’. And I like that.
We read ‘Dear Susan’ by Jamie DeWolf, which I could not find online with a google search, but it is about the narrator watching someone die from addiction.
The prompt (derived from the poem): ‘I never touched a ______ again”.
Prompt #2
My sister and I are waiting for the bus
I am nine I am bored I am nine I hate my snowboots
I am dancing around my street’s sign songsparrow lane
Little Mermaid backpack heaving up and down with me, I used to sing songs
I brush my face against the cold steel of songsparrow
touch my tongue to that first s and i am stuck
I lose a quarter inch of my tongue
I never touched a street sign the same way again.
