I generally don't post any of my writing on forums or in blogs or anything, because I don't really like forcing people to read personal stuff. But you asked, so sure. If you get pissed off/think I'm angsty or self-indulgent, blame Derek.
Trench by Trench
(December 2006)
I am trying to find
and I am trying to find
and I am trying to see how much of myself I can fit in a jar
I have a bathtub full of coral in my head
and I have a shark’s jaws inside me
I have an ocean in my veins
and I tried to love
and I tried to love you
and I have scars where my efforts bled
I am unsure
and I am impure
and I have the ocean under my ribs
and fish in my lungs
and I can’t stop staring at the dots as you float away
you are above me
you are above
and I have darkness on my ocean floor
I wish I could fix you
and I wish I could put myself underneath it
I have an eel in my arms
but I can’t put myself aside
and I can’t swim away
I trust you
I trust you
I give my ocean to you in a jar
with tiny minnows swimming
but I bring out the worst in you
you are empty
and I am full of the sea
but you are ripping the blue angelfish from my hair
you’re hurting me
you’re drowning me
and I have no shell above my skin
I took you with me
but you poured me out
and I have sea stars in my hope
and clownfish in my trust
and I never wanted to let go
and you’ll never see the sand dollars I saved for you
I am trying to fit myself into a jar
I am trying to put an entire sea into one piece of glass
I am spilling
and I am spilling
and I can only bring out the emptiness in you
Jungle
(May 2006)
She and Ryan were best friends for years until he moved away to Colorado and they both forgot about each other. Before, when they were ten years old, and the two of them would go on adventures through the woods near his house. She always called it a Jungle, and Ryan would tell her she was stupid because jungles didn’t exist in America. She stopped when he started punching her lightly on the soft curve of her upper arm, but to her mind, in her recollection, it would always be a Jungle.
The last time they ever went to the Jungle together, they found a dead body. Ryan was so frightened that he ran away the instant he realized what was in front of them, not even hesitating to pull her away with him. She stared at it, pupils the size of needlepoints in the bright summer from above the trees. The figure of a bulky human with blue-tinted white skin was tied to a tree around its waist. It was naked, and dark, dried blood covered its arms and chest and legs and pooled beneath its feet. She couldn’t tell from where it was bleeding. Its eyes were still open, and she was mesmerized.
Almost ten minutes later, she noticed that Ryan was gone. She called out his name, and ran through the trees looking for him. When she could not find him, she went home. He refused to go back to the Jungle the next day. Two weeks later he was gone. There were no jungles in Colorado.
Almost nine years later they met each other for the first time again. She and Ryan lay in a field together. After their initial Hello-how-have-you-been?s, they were silent. She didn’t know if he even remembered the day in the Jungle. Ryan had been so scared, and sometimes people forget the things they fear. It was all she could think about. After he left, she was captivated and curious, and the sight of the corpse never went away. She began to sleep less and bite her fingers more, never letting go of the image of the body so mutilated that the bluewhite of its skin was barely visible beneath caked brownred. She never explored anymore, never found anyone to fill in for Ryan. She would only remember the ropes digging into the flesh, and the needful eyes.
Ryan remembered seeing a body before he moved. He told his parents; they told the police. He had adjusted to Colorado and thrust the memory away. Someone had died; he had seen it. Nothing more.
But on that day, seeing Ryan again, the apprehension devoured her until she left him with little more than a Goodbye-it-was-nice-seeing-you. He watched her leave the field, bare heels kicking up stray patches of dirt, and he was disappointed by the loss of their previous connection. It was a shame. She had grown up to be beautiful.
The Exhibitionist
(excerpt, August 2005)
Cecilia’s face was like margarine – soft to the eyes, smooth to the fingers, sweet to the tongue. But when faced with reality, it was a façade. To the casual observer, she was beautiful, and all the casual observers agreed––she was. But those with keen eyes could see that it was artificial; her beauty was a thin mask of physicality spread over a lifetime of melancholy. Margarine is not butter; it is chemicals mixed together to produce an illusion, a façade.
To an eight-year-old, a twenty-hour bus ride from Sacramento to Bridgeport, Washington seemed like an eternity. It had been raining the entire time.
Cecilia had not seen her father in over two years because he had been on an extended trip to Europe. When he finally returned, he called the woman who had once been his wife solely to ask if he could see Cecilia, who had not seen him since she was six. She didn’t even remember him very well, as she told her mother, and told her it was because at six, one was not a real person yet, and not at seven either. According to her, eight marked the age that a person truly became exactly that – a person.
Although her stay was originally intended to be for a week, it was prolonged when the news came to Washington that Karen Torry, all the way back in California, had been driving drunk and crashed into another car.
She had killed another woman, as well as her five-year-old son.
Cecilia stayed in Washington until she moved out at eighteen.
Robert Torry found abundant indifference towards Cecilia. He loved her, of course, but only because of the bonds of family. He had been in no way prepared for single-parenthood, but took Cecilia because of his obligation––she was his daughter, somehow a part of him.
He was often out, away somewhere that Cecilia could not fathom––she imagined it to be dark and mysterious, too far away for her to ever touch. His thoughts traveled, scattered everywhere, but they were never focused on Cecilia. He did not think of her as his daughter in the way she was; he thought of her as some strange little girl living at his house for a week, except the week never ended. It continued for many weeks – ten years worth of weeks. After that time, he never got to know her. She was an orphan who happened to live in his home.
Although negligent, Robert had never been a bad father. He never hit her, except once – the time she set his kitchen on fire. She had been ten, tall for her age, and very skinny. Her dark hair had gotten long. While preparing dinner for herself (Robert rarely cooked anything) she had gotten distracted and left for her room, forgetting the stove she had left on.
She was reminded when she heard the angry roars of her father. She hurried back to the kitchen to see what had happened, and instantly realized what she had done when she saw him putting out the flames with a fire extinguisher.
After he had finished, he immediately turned to Cecilia, and screamed obscenities that she had never even heard before. She noticed the rage in his ice blue eyes right before he punched her for the first time.
She did not have his eyes, but her mother’s – so dark they were almost black. Throughout her life, she never saw that kind of anger in dark eyes, that kind of hatred.
He hit her several times before he realized what he had doing. His pale eyes softened, but he quickly walked away without a word, not wanting to admit his fault. Throughout the beating, Cecilia was overcome by the smell of burning house. It ran up her nostrils – invisible snakes making their way into her mind. They must have burrowed deeply in her brain, for she never forgot the scent of her father’s home on fire.
After he walked away, she lay on the kitchen floor for several minutes, sobbing, her thin, dark hair splayed around her like someone had put all of it in a jar and dropped it, and it lay scattered like dark chocolate thoughts on the tile. The smoke collected at the top of the kitchen, and Cecilia could not get the smell out of her nose or her father’s pale blue eyes out of her mind.
When she finally got up and began to walk back to her bedroom, she passed her father and did not look at him. He looked at her though, and not even the day his wife left him hurt him as much as the face of his own daughter that night – a pale margarine face covered in blood and tears.
As all artificial-faced girls are, Cecilia was set aside at home like an unwanted gift that nobody had the boldness to refuse. She sought out anyone who would share a kind thought with her. When the girls rejected her she moved on the boys, whom she knew the exact ways to impress. She gave herself to them, lusting for whatever affection they could offer her.
Her first boyfriend was named Max Kendall; she had been eleven, and he was only several months older. He would have disgusted her––his mind was comparable to that of an autistic child, and he seldom bathed––but for the way he wrapped himself around her and promised her false worlds. Every time she found herself engulfing in the muggy waters of repulsion, he would fill her with the misguided thoughts of prepubescent love, dragging her back into his skinny, blonde-haired arms.
Their sexuality was seldom and shallow. At this point in Max’s life, the gentle scent and whiskery fingertips of a girl were more than enough to satisfy his physical desires. During the rare instances in which they kissed, Cecilia felt that his aggressive slobbers were worth enduring for the feeling that he needed her, that for the first time since her mother’s death she belonged to somebody.
They sat together on the outskirts of the park, as they often did. They waited for the sun to set so that they could watch it in the midst of each other’s embraces, unsure of what to do in the meantime. They only sat silently, trying to focus on each other, but their minds always drifted away, settling in the tops of trees or the squeaking shoes of passersby.
“You really mean a lot to me,” Max said in an attempt to break the silence with awkward, sticky romanticism. Cecilia said nothing and rested her head on his shoulder.
“I love you,” he said. Cecilia still did not rely, praying he would not demand a response. She only pushed herself closer and absorbed the silky whispers of his endearment.
Always away, her father never knew the number of barely-mature boys that his skinny nearly black-eyed daughter took into her bedroom after Max’s showy candlelit sweet-talk began to wither like the unattended housevines around the façade of the building, littering the ground and catching on her feet.
She continued this charade with a multitudinous amount of boys, rapidly growing tired of the sacrifices she had to make for even the slightest indication of passion. But she continued, taking whatever they could offer her because it was better than being alone. She waited for the one who could replace her father’s role in her life and take her away from Bridgeport, delivering to her that of which all the others could barely speak, the one who would send her away synthetic composition and make her genuine. Her desire got to the such a degree that for years every time she made eye contact with a boy she’d think to herself: Please God let this be him…
Held in December
(January 07)
You loved her for one winter
She was ice
And she was breakable
And she was love in glass boxes
She was emptiness and she was detachment
She was frozen shut
Until the day you made her cry only to see
what she looked like without makeup
She was simplicity
You were opaque and she could never understand you
But she swallowed the fire from your mouth
and cried of love
She had frost in her eyes
the plainest feelings of desire
Her cheek touched your chest when you inhaled
She was difficult to refuse
You held her ice to your body for one winter
She was cold inside your arms
and you tied her to a bed
She was the most basic kind of passion
She was frozen
But you melted her with the humidity of your breath
She was numb and she was the lack of something meaningful
You were her necessity
You thawed her and undid her
You undressed her and left the tears on her face
Every day she sacrificed a little bit more of herself
to your answering machine
Outside
she was small enough for you to hide her underneath your porch
She was still warm from your liveliness
She had movement in her dispassion
enough to melt the snow
One winter to shatter her
to spill the heat you spit into her
Spring came and you opened your windows
Flowers bloomed below the house
where she had melted and you had forgotten
Beneath your feet
she was minimalism and she was superficiality and she was the kind of love you could touch and she learned all her depth from you but she was only one winter
Coast
(October 06)
The sand crept underneath toenails
Her feet dug deep in the dunes
The world dissolves here
Land meets the endless ocean
She waited for the rain to fall
To wash the dirt from her hair and the blood from her ribs
To sit in solitude
Where no one else will abide
She sits on a towel
Trampled and torn
That somebody left behind on a brighter day
The wind blows sand in her eyes
She is a shell
A shattered crab, a sand dollar
An empty vessel to find peace in solitude
Swallowed in the sand
Fed to the fog-lit foam of the sea
Hiding
(October 06)
He was hiding
She
his whispers of devotion
slipped one last sleepy endearment from her slender lips
before she woke up
He was still dreaming
He’d spent his life sleeping
under pillows and comforts until life walked up and dragged him away
He dreamt next to his wife that night
and imagined Europe
regretless but tired
Four years
A broken vase in the kitchen
its pieces released from one another all over the tile
He stepped on them that night
and let his feet bleed in sleep
dreaming of Switzerland
He was hiding
She was gone
thrown his love letters out the window
where they fluttered and took flight from earth
He hid from mourning
His whole life was sleep
now he slept with his back turned to the imprint of her figure on the bedsheets
He buried himself in indifference
mounds of bird-stuffed blankets bore him into the ground
He never woke up
He heard her voice
captured her in a recording
Just making sure you’re alright
He slipped and the apathy built up above him
piles of dirt
fell into his throat and he asphyxiated
Asleep in his bed with thick cotton sheets
