wish you were here

I’m at work posting this.

If tonight here is any indication, this weekend is going to suck ass.

I don’t know where this is going. Yet. I’ll let you pick out what’s true and not. Or maybe none of it. Or maybe all of it.

Somehow, after the initial shock and blur of her mother’s death, she became obsessed with trying to see Mom’s face. It wasn’t enough to have Mom’s picture tacked next to the mirror, to always compare the hair or eyes or face that looked like Dad too and somehow was a complex amalgamation of every bruise and tear and of the generations that got her to this point: standing naked in the bathroom, towel wrapped around her head, she tried to picture herself bald. It didn’t work.

She stubbed her toe on the cabinet underneath the sink. Fuck, it hurt.

She wanted to dream about her mom, see a transparent figure in the dark, feel some kind of heat at her back when she was driving in the car. Even her vivid imaginations couldn’t build a person she didn’t know. She could only remember all the freckles on Mom’s arms and how soft she was. She didn’t want to invent the sex life that surely existed before she met Dad and before the older brother and herself emerged in the world, nor did she want to question the fact that neither Mom nor Dad ever wore wedding rings. Some couples just aren’t ring people.

She wanted to talk to her mom in her sleep, get some kind of wisdom during the night. That toe was hurting something awful. She looked down. No bruises or scratches. Yet.

She put her cloth robe on, the pink one Mom gave her when she’d left for college. That picture was looking at her funny, even though she knew better. It was bad enough she’d always had this feeling of being watched, and she tried to trace it back to some UFO article she’d read in the newspaper once, but now it had lost that true Extra-Terrestrial-ness surrounding it. Aliens weren’t watching her anymore– it was Mom and maybe even Grandma and Grandpa too, whatever memories she had of them. There might’ve been a whole gang of relatives and ancestors behind her, judging the result of all their genes put together. It made her feel like she couldn’t walk around her bedroom naked anymore.

E.T. was her favorite movie when she was little. It was the first movie she’d ever seen in the theater. She was four years old. She remembered sitting in that big dark room and just letting the light of the screen hold her in there. She was E.T. for Halloween that year, back when her everyday wear was a rainbow-colored striped t-shirt, jeans, and black cowboy boots. She ate Reece’s Pieces like they were quickly going out of style, and just because she was E.T. for Halloween.

Her first obsessions were aliens and cowboys. Cowboys she grew out of because they were earthly and dirty and had human voices. She never wore the hat because she didn’t have one– except in the picture she took in front of Lucky’s that same year she saw E.T., on a real pony and a fake blue background with some haphazard hay all over the ground that didn’t even end up in the picture anyway. It was a long memory she didn’t recall all that often. Memories like to be long, because in order to reach out you have to be able to stretch: she wore rainbow t-shirts and cowboy boots and talked to herself all the time, and even now, sans the t-shirt and boots, it was one thing she still liked to indulge in when the house was quiet and she had no one else to talk to but her own lonely brain.

Maybe she was still talking to her imaginary friends, and how silly is that, when a 24 year old woman is frantic in her kitchen cooking pasta, the moths assaulting the light bulb the only ones getting half the conversation? Even ghosts are able to read minds. But would they see what she saw? Did they pull out those random lesbian sex dreams with faceless, pierced girls, just to check and see what’s really being hidden away? How did her dreamlife turn into Skinimax anyway? Why does it get to that point? Should she conjure up Freud and Jung and have a power lunch? Maybe they’re no more knowledgeable than they ever were. What would the t-shirts and cowboy boots mean?

But aliens were whatever she wanted them to be, not just the wide eyes of a Spielberg movie. They didn’t have weird accents; they sounded just like her, at least sometimes they did. They could have any body they wanted, and when she’d speak to them in her imaginations they spoke right back from her head with her own inflections.

I splurged on the Six Feet Under DVD set. I had to. While all you guys are watching The Sopranos, I like to watch the show about death. Sort of.

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.

We’ll miss you, Mr. Rogers.

Woke up after a healthy night of sleep, feeling a little down, when this horoscope came in:

Put your best foot forward. Which is your best foot? Why that�s easy. It�s whichever foot you didn�t put down last. Walking is a rhythmic process best achieved by employing alternate legs. It is possible to proceed on just one � but that�s called hopping and it�s different. Whether by accident or design, certain people seem to be eroding your confidence. It is very important that you don�t allow yourself to feel, today, as if you haven�t got a leg to stand on. Saturn�s harmonious link to your ruler insists you have every reason to be sure-footed as you now stride confidently towards a much-deserved success.

Usually when I go off to do work, I have several notebooks with me, depending on what projects are going on at the time: a couple of notebooks for random paragraphs of fictional thought and/or bigger works in progress, and usually a smaller journal for ideas, quick jots of one-liners, poetry, and miscellaneous bits and pieces– a journal I tend to take everywhere with me.

Back when I finally disciplined myself to write in a journal on a regular basis (when I went overseas and kept a meticulous unruled journal with Virginia Woolf on the cover, now filled with very small handwriting and a couple of drawings and flattened mementos from cover to cover), I used to write actual entries about what was happening, various mental states, train wrecks of thought. Then, because I’d started blogging on a regular basis, I’d just written poetry and ideas in the journals.

Now I’m back to writing entries again. Maybe I just want to get my thoughts in order for myself and nobody else. I mean, no offence if you’re reading this and wondering why I just don’t spill it all here for you. But I’m a firm believer that it’s okay to have purely private things that you do for yourself, especially if it’s writing for your own sanity (okay, relative sanity.)

I guess a part of me wants to have it there on paper to laugh at in a few months. But I’m also one of those people who remembers most of the gist of what she writes, especially with journals who all have their own trappings and designs and periods in my life. I can laugh at it without having to read it again. I go through 3 to 4 journals a year, depending on the circumstances.

Sean caught me playing (and singing) along to Travis’s version of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” today. I think he got embarassed for me.

Here’s a question for you: is it possible to act on patience? Is the quietness of being patient a way of action?

I think I need to brush up on my Taoism.

I have to say I love Vegas rain more than England rain.

Why does everyone want me to just jump on a boy in order to make things happen? Can’t I just let him chase me for awhile?

Random blogsurfing quote for the day: “In the early stages of dating, you gotta sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

Did I mention my favorite song right now is “What We Do” by Freeway with Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel? I honestly think it’s taking me back to ’88 when Sean and I were doing homework to NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (still a classic in the MP3 player), in that time before the ’90′s fucked everything up.