Mourning

I see her often out of the corner of my eye, a flicker, a shadow. She is in the creak of the house settling. She is the emptiness when I am reading on the couch late at night under a blanket. She is the emptiness on my pillow, the emptiness in the corners where her things once were. She is in the photograph hanging on the wall, she is in my heart, but she is not here.

A House of One's Own

I was lying uncomfortably in bed, thoughts twisting around in my brain like the winter wind blustering around outside the window, wondering if this pulled back muscle or pinched nerve or broken rib or whatever the hell it is will eventually heal itself or if I will just eventually get used to the pain or if maybe a call to the chiropractor would be a good idea, when I started thinking about my house, which has recently doubled in size, thanks to the recently-renovated basement, and about what feminism means to me. This is a terrible thesis. Those two ideas have very little in common, with the exception of my Virginia Woolf-inspired title. If this was an essay, I'd probably fail. But it isn't, and so here are my 3 a.m. thoughts.

I live in a house. A little grey house in suburbia. With the addition of the basement, it is about 1600 square feet. We now have two bedrooms and two bathrooms, an office, and another tv area. As an aside, while this expansion will be convenient (no more calling first dibs on the bathroom after coming home from the movie theatre-we can BOTH pee!), I am most excited about the eradication of all (or at least most) basement spider activity. Anyway, having a house is important to me, not for the investment opportunity, but because this space is mine to do with what I will (with the agreement of my dude, of course).

When said dude and I first moved in together, we bought a shitty little condo for just under 60 grand, with the help of his parents for the down payment. A few years later, we sold it and made 20 thousand dollars, which turned into the down payment for our current modest abode. We were pretty lucky. Not everyone gets the opportunity to build a house of their own.

A house of one's own is important to me because I think that everyone should be allowed to play loud music in the middle of the night without worrying about the neighbours. Because builder's beige is not a colour and because painting is a pain in the ass. (I've been painting for the last ever, so I know of what I speak.) Because you should feel comfortable and content in the place you spend more than half of your time, assuming you leave the premises to go to a workplace of some sort for a few hours a day. Because your home should be reflective of you. If you rent, these obstacles can be difficult to overcome.

My house is full of space, because I need space. Physical, emotional, and mental. Without space in all its forms, I feel ignorant and resentful and trapped.

My house is full of rectangles, because I like lines. Lines of poetry, lines of prose, lines of cocaine. (I'm kidding about that last one. Cocaine scares me.)

My house is black and white and grey, because the world is not made of absolutes, and because white is clean and pretty and pure, and because black is dark and twisted and mean, and because I am all of those things. (It is also red, but only in splashes, like menstrual blood.)

My house is full of books and music and things to cook with, but not much else, because those are the things that are important to me.

So I'm not really a feminist. (Or good at smooth segues.) But I don't expect a boy to hold open the car door for me, because, unless both my arms are broken, I can probably open it myself. I don't expect him to pay for stuff, because I have money, too. I don't expect him to know how to fix things just because he is a boy. I sort of like taking out the garbage. I will not get married, and I wish I didn't have to have my father's last name, because I am not identifiable property, but short of changing it to something (Ramone, maybe), I guess it'll have to do. I know how to open a tight lid, although I will sometimes ask for help because it's quicker and his biceps are bigger than mine. I will hang out with the boys on the patio rather than with the girls in the kitchen. I don't have babies, or even want them. I think we should all try to be nice to each other, and not rape each other or punch each other or call each other names or make each other feel bad to make ourselves feel good. This isn't about being a girl; it's about being a person.

Therefore, it is very late and everyone should have a house that they like and boys and girls should forget about being boys and girls and just concentrate on being human beings.

The Anti-Heroine

I am the protagonist, she writes, sitting on a dusty couch with her dirty bare feet crossed on the dusty coffee table in front of her. From the depths comes a baleful screeching noise that she chooses to disregard, engrossed as she is in telling her story. A story of dust and debris. A story of madness.

Shut up shut up shut up you stupid cunt. Shut your fucking goddamn fingers. I will rip your throat out, tear those pretty fingernails from their beds, leave you shrieking.

Where was she? Ah yes. The story. Once upon a time, Little Bo Peep, who was blind, lost her little lamby-lamb and all the world mourned.  A boy lied and all the world mourned. A group of children picked on someone smaller than themselves and all the world mourned. The world did not end and the world rejoiced, although some parts of the world mourned. Friendships cracked like concrete, crumbled into dust.

She takes a sip of water, feels it thick in her throat. She wiggles her toes because she can. The same five songs run over and over in her head. She has nothing left to say. A protagonist without a story. It's not so bad. You can't really drown in dust.

(Can you?)

Uncontrolled contempt courses through her blood like dust. She lets it slip out her fingertips, caustic and hostile.  If she swallows it, she'll choke, and so she spits it out in thick bitter gobs. Shut up shut up shut up. You stupid fucking cunt. 

Courage

Here, take my courage. 

From the back porch to the fork of the tree, nimbly from the fork to the highest branches, a squirrel shaped like a girl. She looks down on the rotting train ties that divide the yard from the dirt parking lot where her father's truck is parked. She once fell off the runningboard of the green Chevy pickup while her father was backing out into the alley.

Sprinting and shrieking through the field to the dry hockey rink amid a horde of summer grasshoppers, innocuous and impenetrable as fog.

She is the lead in the play. She skips over the stage as Silver Spurs, slips through keyholes and saves Christmas. She recognizes the value of being silly, of playing the fool, of pretend.

She is not afraid to raise her hand.

In the darkened primary school gymnasium, beneath the basketball hoop, she dances. She is anonymous and alone in her witch costume, and the freedom of solitude settles over her like a song.

Knocking on the door of his house, knowing. She takes his hand and leads him down the stairs to his basement bedroom where they undress and she lies down on the boy-smelling sheets. It hurts when he enters her and she is glad to be rid of the burden of virginity. She has not yet had her first period and so when she goes to the bathroom she thinks that the blood from her broken hymen is menstrual blood and she welcomes it as a friend.

Courage is the secret I keep from the world. The knowledge that even now, in this moment of truths, I do not share. I see through you. I understand. Take my courage. You need it more than I do and I don't really use it anymore, anyway. 







  

Good grief.

Emotions are funny. Sometimes funny-haha, but mostly funny-peculiar.

Yesterday was the first day of fall, and my dude and I had to put our cat to death. Symbolic, as he pointed out. I hadn't thought about it, but it seems appropriate in retrospect.

As deaths go, it was pretty wonderful. She lay there on the table on her kneading-blanket at the vet's, bandages around both wrists and an IV in one arm. She looked small and fragile. Cancer will do that, I suppose. An injection, another, as we stroked her and cried, and the overdose ran swiftly through her blood and the greatest cat in the world laid her head gently to the side as if for a nap and the vet tucked a stethoscope up under that furry chest and said softly, "And she's gone." It took no time at all for that spark, that indefinable thing we call life, to be gone. Her eyes, still open, but glazed, lifeless. There is no other way to describe it except in cliches. That unique thing that was she was gone. Out, out, brief candle. There's a reason kids still have to read Shakespeare in school.

"If I begin to feel daunted I'll go off by myself. I'm like a cat that way." -Ernest Hemingway, from The Sun Also Rises

People deal with grief in various ways. I am, in grief, as in general, solitary. Cat-like. When I am sick and when I am grieving, I prefer to be alone. When I have something I need to handle, I handle it. I tend not to imagine during these times. I deal with whatever it is and move on. It can make me appear cold, I suppose. But that doesn't mean these emotions, such strange beasts, aren't lurking down there. Why, here they are, this minute, working their way out.

At the end of that passage from Macbeth, Macbeth observes that life is "a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." I have to disagree with old Will on that. Yes, life is full of pain and anguish, but it is also full of love and everyday joy. Life, for all its hurt and all its happiness, is all we have. And it signifies everything.



 

Cart-ography (in progress)

Prologue: The huntress need only be vigilant, because carts, like their gypsy brethren, will always travel...

The river calls to them, whispering of rust and respite, and the carts begin the arduous journey home.

The trees, complicit in this act of defiance, urge the carts on, and the wind whispers encouragement.

It is tempting to give up. I have only this plastic bag to keep me company, and the river is far and the obstacles vast. Like this goddamn wall, for instance.

One day, I will tell you how I got here. Here under this bridge in the shadows with the metallic bones of my brethren. How I was helped and how I was hindered. I have only just made it, but already I feel myself stiffening. There will be time yet for stories of a cart-life lived.

I celebrate my moment of triumph, the victory of nature over commerce, as the mud sucks me in, as the primordial ooze sucks me under, and the river whispers her welcome as I rust and slowly die.

She stepped

She stepped nimbly, or, rather, stumbled (if she is to be truthful, and not romantic) through the detritus of stale ice cubes, ill-timed advances, half-empty puke-mold highball glasses and rotting limes, and the workings of her heart (both beat and break).