We are all weirdos.

Post-coitally this evening I was asked why I thought novels like The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby continue to enthrall readers. I think about books a lot, about why I read, why I value language and written expression so highly, and I have thought about this question. It is after 3 a.m. (isn't it always, when I find myself here?) and I am still thinking about this question.

I think that all great works of literature endure because they are about the human struggle to make connections (with ourselves, with each other, with the world) while understanding that we are all fundamentally alone. It's why The Old Man and the Sea is so haunting, why The Road, for all its bleakness, ends with a sliver of hope, why Holden's quest to find out what happens to the ducks is so critical, why Gatsby's impossible dream continues to attract us.

There is glory in human struggle. It is, ultimately, all we have. John the Savage flogged himself because he knew it. Guy Montag smuggled books into his vents instead of burning them up because he knew it. The Old Man fought the sea because he knew it. And Nick Carraway recognized the significance of the green light at the end of Daisy's dock because he knew it.

And if these novels continue to find themselves on high school curricula, it is because adolescence is that time when we become aware of the disconnect and, subsequently, the struggle to make those connections with fellow human beings. We are all weirdos.

I am often moved by these moments of connection in my life. The oddest, most trivial-seeming things bring me to tears. Most recently, I was sitting around a table outside of Dairy Queen with a Skor Blizzard and some friends and it was a gorgeous sunny day in spring and our feet swung lazily beneath too-tall benches and there we all were, eating ice cream together in the sun like children, and my eyes welled up behind my sunglasses.

Another moment occured in Costa Rica, the Arenal volcano rising behind us as we paddled in the bath-warm water of a hot spring, drinking daiquiris and laughing together as the sun set on a warm night in a strange country.

There are more of these moments, of course, a lifetime's worth, but it is late and I am tired and I just wanted to let you know that the struggle is what makes us lovely, even when it hurts. And that everyone feels alone and lost sometimes and that that is okay because we ARE alone and lost (ah well), but we are also part of something, a human interconnectedness, that makes those moments, however trivial-seeming, what life is all about (riot on).

Hand

A blue-green Y runs up my left hand, branching into capillaries that disappear into the thicker skin of my fingers. My thumbnail is cut down to the quick, victim of an avocado-slicing incident, protector of flesh. Pale moons rise from pink nail beds, ending in white curves, paper-thin and peeling, like old wallpaper. My life line, my love line; creases like a roadmap of a European city. The base of my ring finger is callused and rough; I pick at it absently, fidgeting, thoughtful. Or unthinking.

Unthinking. Not thinking. An impossibility.

Do you understand why I jig and amble? Why I lisp? I play the fool, the idiot, the harlot, the virgin. The whore.

I flex my forefinger and a rope of blood pulses beneath the skin like a subcutaneous creature from a horror film. My life in my hand.

I turn my hand over and offer it to you, palm up, the blue-green veins in my wrist the tributaries of my heart.      

Monkey Bars

If you believe the myth (and I don't, in case you were wondering), Adam and Eve were booted out of the garden for daring to know too much, and ever since that fateful transgression, humankind has been cursed with the knowledge of both good AND evil. Yin and yang. Pleasure and pain. The eternal paradox of being human.

So tonight I was lying in bed, thinking my way to dreaming, and my thoughts wandered to the way I would climb things as a child. Trees, walls, monkey bars. Which got me thinking about the absence of monkey bars on modern playgrounds, which got me thinking about pain. I have not experienced a great deal of physical pain in my life, with the exception of the transient pain I frequently experience as a result of my innate clumsiness (a bonked head, a stubbed toe) and the odd pain associated with getting older (heartburn, a strained muscle). Two of my notable moments of pain, however, occured as a result of monkey bars.

The first incident occured when, from my seated perch atop the monkey bars, I attempted to swing down between two bars, misjudging and smashing my face against the iron. My nose erupted in a spray of blood and such pain as I had theretofore not experienced. My little brother frequently had nose bleeds, so the blood itself was not really a concern; the bloom of pain that faded into a steady throb shocked my young self's sense of indestructibility.

The second incident occured during a game we children would play of standing on the step of one end of the monkey bars and leaping forward to grab the farthest bar we could reach before swinging along, appropriately monkey-like, to the other end. The first bar was easy; the second, hardly a challenge; the third, more difficult, but attainable; the fourth was my goal. I climbed the rungs, stood on the edge with my hands outstretched above me, holding onto the bar above my head. I gathered my courage, bent my legs, sprung forward, and missed, fingertips grazing iron as I fell to the packed dirt below. It could hardly have been graceful; I landed with a horrible thud and the wind was knocked out of my lungs and I remember the panicked feeling of being unable to breathe, gasping, dying. I did not die, of course. Sweet air came rushing back into my lungs in a moment, but the memory of suffocating on the playground remains to this day.

Which brings me to my point: children these days NEED monkey bars. They need danger and risk and excitement. There is a growing desire to protect ourselves, our children, from harm. Cars full of airbags, protective bumpers on sharp corners, bicycle helmets, warnings on television programs, warnings on coffee cups. But if we succeed in eliminating all of the dangers of living, where will we be? Will we be content to be merely content, or does life involve something more? Eve risked a lot, the daring little minx, to give us the freedom to understand pain, and I, for one, am not going to let her (mythical) sacrifice be in vain.

We shouldn't be afraid to read or watch or do something that has the potential to hurt us. We should all make that leap to the next bar, because life is a risk, man (and check out how that story became allegory without my even realizing it). As human beings, we are both fragile and fallible, but we shouldn't let that make us fearful. So bring monkey bars back to playgrounds. Let children get bloody noses and broken arms. As soon as it is warm enough, I'm going to ride my bike, helmetless. I might fall off and crack my skull, but at least I will have felt the wind in my hair.       

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.