Emergency Room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Fifty finches, parakeets, cockatoos. My name is Mr. Rivera.

Ambien, Ativan, Lipitor. My beautiful wife—she’s 10 years older.

I already have three psychiatrists! I came for a psychologist. My beautiful wife, I’m driving her crazy. I want to talk and she doesn’t want to listen.

She’s an alcoholic. I steal for her. I steal six beers for her, every day, for the last 10 years. Never get caught, and I’m worried. I am committing a felony.

I didn’t say that I am Santa Claus. I said that I like Santa Claus. He brings presents to children. Six beers, every day, the last 10 years.

Yes, a referral, that’s what you call it. You can call Dr. Joseph but you will probably get Dr. Elaine. She helps Dr. Joseph.

It is Thursday or Friday. I am 48 years old. The month is July. Yes, I know.

I told you. Fifty finches, parakeets, cockatoos.

Great Day for a Breakdown

The last time I sputtered—that’s what I’m calling it—was two years ago and tears—the fibrous heart-kinds and saline face-kinds—but not as chilly or cerebral, at least how I’m remembering it. I never got around to writing about the incident (I will) because there are a lot of supercilious details: non-FDA approved caffeine pills; Mets at Cubs, seven rows behind dugout, soundly believing one in 42,000 spectators had to be a doctor; sitting on the shower mat for hours, warm streams reviving nothing and waiting for vultures; riding to the hospital, straddling a forgotten quart of tom yum soup in a slow-moving cab; EKGs and IVs and residents’ pens scribbling, reducing me to an incident that happened 11 years earlier; midnight sedation and afternoon revival and dropping my cell phone in a glass of water, the first motion—the first test—of my groggy new life.

Tell me—what sick clown runs into somebody they know in the emergency room? I was inexplicably self-conscious that this patient, this acquaintance—an alcoholic gay sex columnist from my college newspaper, remembered for such headlines as "Barebacking is Whack", and presumably admitted for the same anxieties or overdoses and looking just as shitty and unhygienic—saw my nipples peaking through my gown. More self-conscious about him than the tattooed, hetero-anesthesiologist pricking me four, five, six times and making frustrated jokes about uncooperative veins, unmistakably gawking at my splayed and shivering chest.

No, I’m not going to talk about the last time. It wasn’t an artful trough. The latest sputter might’ve been, as far as breakdowns go. It began:

“Manager, I’m not coming into work tomorrow,” shaky, but so are sailors, at times. “I’m very much freaking out.”

It continued like this:

“Boy I Slept With Two Years Ago, do you want to buy me a Manhattan? If I don’t have bourbon and bitters, I might die.”

Repeat times four. (Rejection, from even the girls.)

Then tears, strictly saline face-kinds. Those all-familiar goosebumps; wobbly and wavering and blinded, and I sit naked for hours, nowhere to go, renewing my predilection for memorizing nuance of ceiling, cracks, without something tactile (necessarily).

I stare off into atoms. They found my brother naked—a grisly, unmentionable detail—and I regret revealing my own blatant exposure to my mom the next day. I spend the better part of morning trying to convince her, “No, I’m not depressed. This is exhaustion. This is a sign of loving life with every ounce of being, and being let down. I’m your happy kid.”

It goes:

I can’t sleep so I text Ricardo to ask if one-year expired sedatives are passable—he is in law school, not medical school—and he prescribes only one. I take two. Potency undergoes a half life. He expects good things for my 89 years and I shall not disappoint.

I try:

To play it cool. I go to a pizzeria-brewery, the daytime talisman for ‘back to normal,’ considering the stay-at-home dad clientele, my usually stabilizing bacon-mushroom-clam order. I can do this. I am an object of interest. I switch to the charcuterie-whiskey bar, the early evening harbinger of hope. I write 12 pages of notes, mute and right-leaning, like drugged ants crossing a page. I read all cuckoo’s nest.

And:

In a stupor, I try going to my job the next morning, a fish with wings. I feel obtuse and duckling, like I’m jutting out and spilling over. Revolving doors and minutes after my security badge takes me past the last portal, I’m ushered into an accusatory ambush—a peer mediation meeting with someone I didn’t even know I had a problem with?—and I erupt and quiver and make pet sounds.

This is highly unlike me. I am sent home with pay.

Then:

Naked, again. On a bed without sheets. I ask Cait what her favorite Audrey Hepburn movie is of three. “Sabrina,” she says. And I vow to watch Sabrina, because I can never sit and watch a movie; I can never give myself time to myself; to rest wringing hands or tautological thoughts, for even two hours. I can never do what regular people do, even though I promise, my leisure isn’t spent any less self-interestedly.

I watch Sabrina. By that I mean, I eyeball the DVD case, still shrink-wrapped and balanced on its centimeter spine next to a horizontal me, still very naked in bed. I don’t open the case or view the movie. But I watch Sabrina, next to me, upright in compendium with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Roman Holiday, simply there if I want those two hours, or four hours, or six. I pay for my time.

At dusk, the last shiver dissipates—a smoke ring, a fugitive pall. I could handle this any number of ways. Another bath, where I run the chance—rather, penance—of having to look at myself. A resignation letter. Pills with more potency and less half life.

If:

I sunk too low, I wouldn’t have stories.
If I rose above, I wouldn’t have pride.
I never knew either to make a distinction;
That’s why the coroner will find me alive.

Letter from Los Angeles

We saw Greenberg and Greg wanted to know why a 25-year-old would willingly subject herself to a 40-something misanthrope and all I could say was um; I need to treat my stomach better when I get back, better than tacos and milkshakes, I had this episode where I was swimming in dark beer and medication and deposited three pounds of puppy chow on the sidewalk, and then we took a picture of the vomit, I had never seen so much, it seemed like the Hollywood thing to do; I'm not sure about graduate school, I don't do well in institutions, I'm bootstraps and breadwinning and there are many names I haven't read, and every year that passes, it seems like there are more; when I crashed my bike I was filled with a liter of wine and my arm turned purple, then yellow, aurora borealis from wrist to shoulder, and I took pictures of scars because that, then, seemed like the Chicago thing to do; and I remind you that you have to be careful, you are irreplaceable, I saw you made your dad write in all caps, don't keep doing that. Last day here, can I bring you a souvenir?

Twenty to a Pack

Last night put me on some crazy eightfold path shit, Vee. Vee? Vee! Are you listening? Scraping the bottom of the carton, spoon that could knife. It doesn’t always come full circle. Sometimes it comes serpentine, meanders; doesn’t come at all. That was some closure, you can’t get mad at it. Have you ever seen Strangers on a Train? I whacked yours and you whacked mine. They could never muster the courage. We overlap; all fuck-me boots and whiskey smiles and ten-car pile-ups (could they, really, pile up)? Let’s go to sleep. Yes, now. Now. Lights.

==

If I smoked cigarettes I’d be more deliberate. It’s worked into the play. It’s puff, consideration, puff. Eyes skyward, ash, exhale, ash. I’m much too straightforward a girl to sail, did you know that? I hate jargon and I hate strings. [Ash.] Sailing is just jargon and strings. [Ash.] Knots. You know what? If you were my boyfriend, I could say, “I love my boyfriend,” and for the first time in my life, actually mean it. [Flick.] There’s no ocean. It’s Chicago. There’s no fucking ocean.

==

How We Met, because we still haven’t. Nobody asked you to fall for the idea of me. (That would be exhausting.) You were selling your dead girlfriend’s belongings on the front lawn in the summertime. I looked to passersby for the source of ice cream sandwiches. They melt; her paperbacks and records and coats won’t, will never. I have reverence for dedications, the inscribed. You’re older, I want older, but we must matriculate together; to-get-her.

==

Contraction, I have favorites. Excited apostrophe, rashly stamped, too late for some. You wrote me on my birthday. “I know we’re not friends, but.” Prove that I’m not your adversary; anniversary! Does your hair still fall over your eyes? I don’t want to see you, but I kind of want to know.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre: 81st Year Commemorative Edition

A little blood, a little moonlight. See, I'm not so useless after all.

"When You Have The Gift, Like We Do..."

VII.

What the palm reader said. We wait until we are settled—sidled—onto bar stools, wind left whipping—wincing outside—to talk about indentations and impressions and fates. Kay’s aura is relatively clean and Stevi has a cracked crown and I, well. My heart is blocked.

“She said I have to free my brother from limbo,” I confess.

“How are you supposed to do that?” Stevi wonders.

“No fucking clue. Maybe instead of calling her hotline I should sleep with another Crowley Brother?”

Our cackles hit the ceiling before our chins tilt upward and, elbows bent, we wield beer cans like archers, aiming acutely. For all the ill prognoses, we can’t dismantle the mirth. Kay is first to leave.

“There she goes, there she goes again.” But we don’t grieve.

This was supposed to be my year to be selfish and now I’m half-considering what munitions are required for an overnight in purgatory. I am $20 poorer and cannot contentedly believe such restlessness could be my vocation, that such a waiting room could even exist. I can only shrug and sigh. And acquiesce.

I will spelunk for story’s sake. I will set you free, on my own terms. If you promise not to climb on my back.



VI.

“Ter, raise your hand,” Dean implores.

“Why, what was the question?” I ask dazedly.

“The question was, ‘Who actually liked high school?’”

My palm obligingly shoots up and the room giggles, not at my expense, but at my distance, distinction. I am a girl off-tempo, particularly this evening, and never quite deserving of the extemporaneous Most Likely to Succeed.

My forearm retracts when I remember that I had dreams.



V.

I lose three pounds while I’m home for Christmas. I want to gorge on meats and cheeses and pastries, but I can’t choke it down. The refrigerator squeals at me, smugly, like a malevolent bottled-nosed dolphin, every time the door is opened and closed. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me—only what’s not wrong with me—and I frankly stop caring after I am prescribed something strong and given permission to get back on the bottle.

When I am autopsied, you will find your burden, writhing or swimming or circulating. I take on your burden, and yours, and yours. People will tell you that I’m mature, that I’m responsible, that I’m an old soul. I hate that. They can’t see me collapsing under the weight of their shortcomings.

“Why do you keep chasing after your brother?” My mother is serious, almost grave, and she turns my chin with her right hand so I can’t divert my gaze. “Why do go for these charity cases? You’re not going to save him.”

When you cut open my insides, it will be hard to tell that I was striving for immutable beauty. That I was trying for ineffable truth.



IV.

Boxing Day feels like a blanket. I am somewhere else, but clothed and centered. I don’t parade my quixotic residue in a sad or impaired or lofty way. It’s just how it is; I moved. But this couch is still crouched in my heart; this basement is still my brethren. I make promises to play songs on a guitar, songs that I never learned. I drink more than I need and stay longer than I intend. My left hand delivers a heavy pour into a steaming mug at my right, and a boy who knew Older Brother compliments, “Definitely his sister.” Or, I take it as a compliment. The intonation crosses air to remind me of blood we shared. And I remind the boy that I met him 14 years ago, maybe, when my dad drove him home to save a batch of cookies he accidentally left in the oven.

There are new friends in old places because I choose centrifugal force.



III.

I can’t think about One without thinking of The Other. I’m prone, squirming, sweating, reliving the 11 courses of Christmas dinner, the table wine and lager, the rote of early morning catechism. Littlest Brother wants to know why lone tears keep forming at the crest of my eye, submitting to gravity in soundless cascade, and I can only lie: I’m drunk. There’s a worm eating my stomach. I’ll tell you when you’re older.

Anger was never my forte; it never seemed an evolved enough emotion to dedicate myself to fully. I’m reluctant to dabble in negative space. But what I would tell One—I deserved better than I Don’t Know. And what I would tell The Other—You got your Validation of Marketability and I got my Free Beers, so let’s call it a draw. I am loath to loathe, but I can escape. I will escape and sing.



II.

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” he says.

“It’s knowing when to fight,” I volunteer.

“Shakespeare said that. But what do I know? I’m just your cab driver.”

“With all due respect, sir. William Shakespeare didn’t drive me home tonight.”

He smiles with his eyes closed. I exit before he can speak. I need a bed and I don’t wait for my change.



I.

I was conceived after a wedding, which I knew. I was a week late, which always surprised me. (I mostly make excuses to leave bed early because I realize this doesn’t last forever.) And, my mother tells me now—as I unwrap a layer of aluminum foil, a layer of banana leaf, to reveal chocolate molé and sweet corn masa, a chunk of pork and a strip of pimiento—she tried to dislodge me from her womb by eating only tamales, but I wouldn’t budge. Then she tried to induce labor with a gigantic heart-shaped box of chocolate. Only when the grid was emptied, and the snowstorm had stopped, and the post-Valentine’s Day sales died, could I fathom an entrance.

She tells this story like my foray into living was regal and pronounced. When I unwrap layers it reminds her of lengths. I hope that after twenty-five years I may weave a tale of indigestion for my brood.

This is a happy anecdote that will never make it to a book. To you, it hasn’t made a murmur. But I keep it here, waiting for something to kick.

A Brief History of Dads

If you've tried looking me up, the DSM IV doesn't have a place for my kind. So here it is, succinct susceptibilities to explain my predilection for the older gents. By no means complete, but some of the features that make me complete, birth to present.


1985

Pushed out of the uterus on the early morning of Mardi Gras. Adapts well to the notion of being naked and ogled by elders in exchange for beads.

Spends crucial mental- and pulmonary-development months starring as The Lucky Baby at Babylon Lanes, a tobacco-tarnished talisman passed around her parents’ bowling circle.

1986

Dad introduces his wobbly, clapping daughter to the Amazin’ Mets in a victory against Houston on July 3. Apt preparation for the coke-snorting, room-wrecking, egomaniacal jocks who would hit on his wobbly, clapping daughter in fraternity houses 20 years later.

1987

Demands to dress up as “Chinese food” for Halloween, prompting her mother to tailor a politically incorrect interpretation of a Japanese geisha and forevermore equip her with an alias to entertain businessmen at tea houses in Kyoto.

1988

Imaginary boyfriend, Billy, debuts. He is 21, drives a red Cadillac, lives on Mexico Island and does not win Mom’s imaginary approval.

Learns how to play poker in Atlantic City, and is thereby inducted into one of the largest of old man milieus before entering kindergarten.

1989

Develops first pseudo-sexual crush on Mike, her public pool’s swim instructor. Foreign to effectual flirting, takes to splashing at inopportune, unrequited moments. Never advances beyond the level of Guppy.

1990

Develops first pseudo-puppy crush on Steven, the oldest kid on the school bus. Vaguely familiar with the biological concept of peacocking, she is drawn to his Reebok Pumps and his ability to consume a whole cupcake in two bites.

1992

Sees her grandfather for a final visit before mandatory estrangement, the direct result of him trying to strangle her grandmother with a telephone cord. The first of the familial males to isolate her, she mourns a Dennis the Menace-watching and soft-boiled egg-eating partner-in-crime.

1993

Seeks counsel in her five-years-older BFF on How to Write a Dirty Letter. Drops a note that alludes to “playing doctor” in the sweatshirt hood of yet another schoolbus crush—Sean, the freckled, brace-faced and ribbed sweater-wearing elder statesman of Hobart Route 9.

1994

Takes the amateur pornography short story circuit by storm with an offering penned by herself and a sleepover accomplice, in which protagonist Sydney Cartwell, an Australian with a BIG PENIS, decides to HAVE SEX while using A CONDOM with a girl who says MMM. For an entire paragraph. Her mother finds the story on loose leaf paper in her bookshelf. The accomplice is, undoubtedly, never invited to sleep over again.

Harbors an improbable crush on Rob, the affably misunderstood community college professor who runs an astronomy course in her enrichment workshop. Quickly learns that inflatable starlabs are the most romantic place to meet your fellow air sign.

1995

Copes with the stroke of her non-estranged grandfather, a pitfall that renders the mental and physical faculties of her biggest fan completely non-responsive. Noticing the incalculable vacancy in his eyes when she floats her softball sportsmanship trophy before his face, she internalizes this as her symbolic death of patriarchs.

1996

Wooed by the wondrous world of America Online chat rooms in a hot, dial-up minute, she lures such luminaries such as SirSexySam, Shlngboy99 and KingSc0rp with pictures of girls cut from magazines and promises of future nudies.

1997

Develops the most inappropriate, never-to-be-seen-or-mentioned-again crush possible on her brother’s uncle—no, not her uncle—at her brother’s understatedly tragic funeral. Um. Don’t judge her grief.

1998

Male history teacher wins her over with such lines as, “You’re much too fun for the Ivy League,” and “Yours was the second-bloodiest diorama I graded this year.”

Fine-tunes the finite identity of Julee Wellington, her promiscuous 23-year-old Manhattanite artist Instant Messenger alter ego. Forms lasting correspondence with Brian from Seattle, with help from a picture of her friend’s skate punk older sister. And promises of nudies.

1999

Reads Lolita. Claims to not see “what all the fuss is about,” but curses her rearing and genetics for not allowing a nymphet pre-pubescence to take hold.

Watches Robin Ventura hit his legendary Grand Single in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series on television, in a 15-inning game lasting five hours and 46 minutes. Masturbates for the same length of time immediately following the game.

2000

Remains completely undaunted when mother gives birth to a miracle baby and the hometown populace immediately assumes it’s hers.


2001

Wins first prize in a poetry contest for an entry with graphic references to statutory rape. Reads prize-winning free verse in a hotel banquet room before her parents. Oh, joy.

2002

Watches the movie Beautiful Girls. Not Timothy Hutton’s best role, but it basically. explains. everything.


2003

Male English teacher writes in her senior yearbook, “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.” Swoon.

Loses virginity to a junior after senior prom. Never sleeps with a younger guy again. Ever.

2004

Assumes a three-year-long crush on The Boy in the Study Lounge, the lone of her dormitory contemporaries to use a trucker hat to hide male pattern baldness and wear old man slippers to solve problem sets.

Finds a minefield of dejected dads when she starts working the overnight shift at Home Depot. Just sayin’.

2005

Creates a football home game T-shirt slogan that attempts, for the first time, to elucidate her long-standing unnatural proclivity in a Big Ten forum. Ahem: Thank Your Dad for Parents Weekend.

2006

Nearing blackout, puckers up for the kiss that lives in Evanston infamy—her coordinates, Bill’s Blues, and her victim, a 50-year-old golf course groundskeeper unflatteringly dubbed “Mike the Irish” by his cohorts.

2007

Tiring of peers, opts to date a 37-year-old part-time tennis instructor, beach bum, drunk driver, progeny of an electrical engineering professor and Mike the Irish acquaintance. Breaks it off after he texts her a picture of a rainbow, but not before employing his brute strength to help her move to a new Lakeview apartment.

Joins an intermediate-level co-recreational slow pitch softball team in Roscoe Village. Embraces her veritable-ringer status as the cookie-baking, sock-wearing, youngest 20-something on a 30-something squad.


2008

Forms the band Weekend Dad with Kay and Espe. The Hawaiian shirt-and-Doobie Brothers concept never makes it past the first rehearsal.

Finds unhappiness with a 34-year-old reformed heroin addict and ex-convict bartender who is evicted during their courtship. What else is new.

Tries to semi-retire the term “dad” in favor of the acronym “IUs” (Irresponsible Uncles) to better describe her conquests. “Dad” rebounds as the irremovable colloquialism when she considers the probability of her trysts’ seeds’ whereabouts.

Forms a fleeting penpalship with a 43-year-old NASA rocket scientist and microbrewery stakeholder from Maryland. His Julie Newmar fetish take correspondence to a taxing level, then a very terminated level.


2009

Sensing distance from her roots when she takes to dating guys within ten years of her own age, registers “worldsgreatestfather” as her personalized Facebook URL. Blessed be.

Tributosaurus

Acceptance is malleable, 12 years having known you hidden, 12 exhumed. We overlap. Specious zipped sterility. To anything I give humans; circling packless, patchwork of whereabouts, requesting cirrhosis as finale. Slept with two brothers to figure you out. Human skull, utility knife, two beer bottles filled with piss. Why I shared a room with the younger, perioding between the legs. Strategy, soundly, to make not noise; rope on flannel, tightened till I belted. Uniformed reform, prepared for auspicious noon. Sleeping bag, minus musk, Seminole Indians to distract me. (Bitch didn't do her half of the report.) Overcast, overture. Canon, cannon, canyon; easy to fossilize. Finalize, as a mutable thing.

From the Archives of a Very Dead Brother

Internal debate: One of many warning signs?

My Heart's Just Not In It

September makes a good case for reincarnation—tired-but-crisp panoramic, silent-but-rustling demeanor. I feel old tracing the contours of new objects. This is supposed to be makeout weather, but it's making me wither.

For the purposes of this blog, I'm on extended book leave. You might see me in a coffee shop, slouching, backspacing, contrabanding my banishment. I haven't been stringing sentences to my liking. Memories are in danger of being corroded by revisionists. Five weeks ago, my mom apologized for letting my brother abuse me as a child. I can't be so sure that he did.

Simply: I'm getting to a point where I will have known my brother dead as long as he was alive. I'm nearing a limit of minor authority and major storytelling; I'll turn the option to audience to determine relevancy. When People in Bars ask how many siblings, I might just cut him from the list. It will pain me, in the beginning.

Superficially: this is the third straight week my morning commute has involved fantasies of hurling myself before an oncoming train or being carried away by red balloons or being kidnapped by a schemer who mistakes my family for having savings. Something is off. I'm her anxious kid, and sometimes her grisly one, but never more than that. Never requiring disinfectant, reprimand, tourniquet. She’s overheard me eulogize, “Life is beautiful, even when it isn’t.”

It seems as if I want to jettison baggage, but I keep boarding passengers. Zealots with charisma—always unemployed—accusing me of sacrificing dreams to day jobs while accepting my handouts. Rasputins who drink my beer, make my clothes smell like cigarettes, eat ribeye steaks in my bed. Amazed at how easily I bruise. This is where I could use, at least, the disinfectant and the reprimand.

But tourniquet, I turn to quit. I wither in this weather, when I should know better. We all know better. I could afford to sit up straight.

Mass Romantic at Critical Mass

When everyone had viciously paired off—girl with boy, in bathroom, in coat closet—my crush had left because his crush disappeared—I left. I went to find my shoes, I waded through vomit on the stairwell to find my shoes, and I left. It was the 54,864th time I had wished the story ended differently, and the 54,864th time I had done nothing to protest.

..

Geoff thought he owed it to me to wipe the slate clean. “Every time she saw you in here, she told me, she wanted to win,” his confession, on New Year’s. I have this terrible habit of returning to the scene of the crime at critical points of absolution.

“How do you mean?” I ask. I’m naïve, but maybe not.

“Courtney. She would ask me, ‘Is that Bobby’s girl?’ And then she would tell me that, the times when you would leave, she would go home and sleep with him and consider it a victory, considering your popularity here.”

I just assumed that Bobby, a fuck-up at so many things in life, was at least faithful to me. I indulged most of him—jail time, drug addiction, eviction, forgery, unpaid tabs, onions from a previous tenant rotting in the refrigerator, pathologies, fisticuffs, fetishes. I shrugged bemusedly when I started getting phone calls asking for him by birth name (the calls bore a welcomed semblance to the Popcorn & Movies Video calls that would plead for me to return Dead Brother’s porno rentals on behalf of his soul). I turned my head when he ruined his best friend’s credit. But now I knew there was a Courtney and another girl named Terror, who spelled it differently. Now I knew that I would spend January 1 drinking until blackout and January 2 getting tested for everything.

“Kay, it shouldn’t bother me like it does, but it does. I thought I was the one unsociopathic and unselfish thing he had.”

“Terror, stay there. We’re coming to get you and we’re bringing you to Little Vietnam and we’re not coming back to Lakeview for a really long time.”

My head drooped in my bowl and my hair entwined with pho noodles and I meditated on the positives of coming up negative.

..

I only went home with you because you looked like Charlie Day—he’s the likeable one on that show—except in the morning, you didn’t. Your boss had announced last call and I knew I had, maybe, 45 seconds to convey my best and worst intentions; which, I swear, I only needed five of those seconds, wallflower I’m not. Even though I had sworn off bartenders, swore I was cured, I told you my name and why I was staring, and you said, “I work here, you don’t have to go.” You were an actor (once) and I indulged this, until I couldn’t, and so I suggested a 4 a.m. tour. You took me to inspect the lines, showed me the inventory, told me the names of ghosts haunting the bar. We caught a cab on Armitage, and before you told the driver where we were going, turned to me and started, “I don’t mean to be forward, but…”

You didn’t ask me any questions and your radiator made it too noisy to sleep. Your apartment was messy; you owned trunks and instruments and chairs without knowing their histories, a personal vexation; you owned books whose plots and characters you didn’t understand. You thought we were kindreds because we cried at the same two Eels shows. The only thought that stalled my morning beeline for the door, my half-sweater still half-off, was that maybe I should steal your pot. But Logan Square is far too incestuous for souvenirs.

..

Because, the rule is, Sir, that in those 45 minutes, I am not an abstract. In those 45 minutes, because my night could have wound any which way, and I chose you, I must insist that you care about the one you’re with. Even if you must lie. I can only live regretless when I know the present is accounted for.

..

“I want to make pretentious mix CDs for you.” – m4w, 23, Logan Square

I didn’t go in trying to prove that I could, connect with a peer, that is, maybe. That I could have sex that didn’t make me sad or dizzy or prompt me to count plaster cracks or ceiling tiles. I found you in Strictly Platonic. And you were good on your promises, and I on mine—e-mails, B-sides, bourbon pecan truffles, apple pear pie. It took an adorably long time for you to undo my belt—“It’s a military issue”—and you fake-snored and I thought you could be enough for a Chicago winter. But we watched a movie with subtitles and at the credits you pulled away. “I might be moving to Los Angeles this weekend.”

That is, maybe. This town is selfish.

..

I will tell you swiftly: you are not my soulmate so stop texting me. I don’t know what that word means. “It was so good meeting you. I would like to take you out to dinner sometime.” *Meeting* you. I am wary of gerunds. Regretful that I know stories about your mom, the school teacher who remarried your dad’s best friend; and your lesbian stepsister—you two are inseparable; and the intricacies of Minnesota, sleepier than I had guessed. Buddy, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. You interrupted when I tried to count off ghosts who matter to me.

..

For my birthday I wanted nothing more than to serve guests drinks while wearing roller skates for eight hours in my party dress. This domestic subservience fetish may be the salient (rather, lone) anti-archetypal trait a Type A mother passed on to her Type A daughter. I find it endearing, and maybe you do too?

A guest texts me while I’m blow-drying, eyelining, blushing.

“Is ur 80yo boyfriend gonna be there?”

I don’t know which boyfriend he’s talking about, 80 years old or otherwise. Shrug.

I text back. “He has his kids this weekend.”

..

“How many guys did you date this week?” I hang up. I hang up on Dad. I’ve never hung up on a parent—I am (typically) that mature—but I’ve never heard him drip so snidely, judgmentally, at this distance. He calls two minutes later. “I’m sorry. I know there are a lot of losers out there. I wouldn’t want you to rush into making a mistake.” I don’t rush; I painstake. “Eff you, lemme talk to Mom,” I demand.

My dad is in the business of odds, it seems. He likes to tell me when the Mega Millions jackpot is running above $100 million, and what recent karma (I think Catholics call it something else) is sectioning off his prize share. I should have leveled. “See, Dad. The odds of you winning the lottery are one in 175,711,536, whereas as the odds of getting someone to come home with me is about one in two.” Or. The sad part is that I think I’m leveling.

I don’t hunt for sport. I am guilty of peacocking, chasing boys who make me cringe, over-committing time to casualties. You are not trophies, but aversions averred. We don’t have much time! But never sport.

At the end of Raising Arizona. “But I saw an old couple being visited by their children, and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren't screwed up. And neither were their kids or their grandkids.” I cry because I want that.

..

“How come your room looks like a hotel?” Kay quizzes me from home.

“I don’t… know?” I inflect, uncertain. “How does it look like a hotel?”

“Your bed is made. Who is this guy?”

“Oh, that’s Sean. We met at InnJoy. Total Captain America. He’s from Oregon and teaches physics to minority students in Garfield Park and bikes everywhere and lived in Guatemala and speaks better Spanish than I do and he gave me a book to read on government-assisted coups, it’s weird.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Yeah, also, he’s really aerodynamic. He has a shaved head and the rest of him is kind of hairless. I guess it helps out with his superhero speed and costume.”

“So are you going to get a date out of this?”

“I dunno. I can’t date a Captain America. I mean, how long until he finds out that I’m a complete asshole?”

“You’re not an asshole!”

Which counts, if only a little bit, coming from the roommate who punched a friend in the head while vomiting over a balcony.

“But I'm not Wonder Woman, unless we're going by my FICO score.”

..

Back to odds. I try so hard 100 percent of the time, I leap so fast for love, that it’s only natural to believe (in a vacuum) that someone would try for me.

And that’s how I found myself flailing and screaming and crying at a party (unprecedented) and kicked out of three cabs in one night at a windchill of 25-below-zero, wearing only one mitten and lugging a fifth of whiskey, dripping on and over and inside my messenger bag.

I kicked myself out of three cabs to vomit in the snow. I’m scrupulous.

The first cab let me go. The second cab didn’t want to. “Miss, stay here. I can’t let you freeze to death.” The driver clutched my palm with his right, stroked the back of my hand with his left, the engine idling. This was the human contact I had been waiting for all week. Most girls would have freaked. “Miss, I can’t let you go. I’m not saying this as your cab driver,” he intoned. “I’m saying this as your friend.”

Always was a flight risk, Friend. The third cab didn’t want to let me go, either. “I’m new in town.” Breaks off, reaches for the glove compartment. “Here, I have some napkins. I’m new in town and I’m looking for friends. Will you be my friend?”

I exit. Still immaculate, but I feel like irrefutable trash. How, I wonder as I stumble up sickly fluorescent stairs, did they see the goodness in me?

..

Captain America calls and I’m not sure if I want to answer. I pick up; I don’t bother to disguise my surprise.

“This is really awkward for me,” he begins. “The doctor said I should tell everyone I’ve been in close contact with…”

This is it. This is the end. The death of my sex life. People are never who they seem to be and there is no such thing as a liquor-logged 3 a.m. lesson learned and I need to cloister myself and, of course we were protected, but stop it, don’t look at me. Holy fuck. Bobby didn’t give me anything communicable—not after cheating on me with two girls or getting evicted or the cat with fleas or those onions that would probably still be in the crisper had I been able to go back to bed that morning without the mold haunting my dreams. Captain America, you ruined my life.

“The doctor said I have bed bugs.”

I exhale and then I pause and then I repeat his last words, alternating pitch on the syllables: relief on “bed”, levity on “bugs”...

“Bed bugs? Bed bugs?”

“It’s not really that funny,” he insists. “It’s pretty painful.”

“Oh, no. I’m a writer—this is hilarious.” I catch my breath. “It could have been something so much worse.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Let me know when you read that book. Maybe we can do lunch and talk about it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I hang up and I laugh. Just a little bit, and then a lot. Buddy, that’s the only way to look at it. Trademark guffaw, head thrown back, I can’t contain myself; I roll off the bed. “FUCK.” The floor hits hard and doesn’t care that my life has gone back to normal. Pause. Raucous laughter resumes! I continue laughing under my bed, knees tucked at my chest, feet hitting the radiator. It sounded like he had a lot of calls to make.

..

I haven’t burnt out, and despite your fears, I don’t expect to. Sad and beautiful are inextricable adjectives. I believe that, and so long as the two words remain appendages to these nighttime ambiguities, I don’t worry about me. You don’t worry about me, and I don’t worry about me either.

..

“Free Asobi Seksu ticket for victim of ennui.” I posted that Craigslist ad because I needed someone who needed to believe (again). Know that the audition was an invitation to distraction, because I can’t take myself too seriously.

The Winner, tattooed all over, in only black ink—brackets and prime numbers and summation signs. His ennui extended to writing unsettling letters to his ex-girlfriend on Craigslist and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that his muted serial killer tendencies—unemployed and roommateless and lifeless art hanging as a reminder that he didn’t matriculate; immaculately clean apartment that he insisted was dirty; not wanting to ask me to take my shoes off at the door, but twitching when I pretended I wouldn’t; a dog, Harvey, named after the Jimmy Stewart film—turned me way, way on. Loneliness packaged in pleasantry—“we’re the hottest people here”; “you’re wise beyond your years”; “I can’t thank you enough.” We ended on a “see you soon,” a beautifully sad see-you-soon, him in boxer shorts and me bounding to Casual Friday in a recycled, off-the-shoulder, ripe with Empty Bottle beer-and-hipster stench, and me being the one of us two who actually believed it.

I thought I learned my lesson, but I drank half a bottle of Bushmill’s just to make sure.

..

I spend my days alternately wanting greatness and praying I am swallowed by the jaws of dark matter. It will take a special person to understand my desires to be both famous and infamous. I am self-aware; I know how to read for comprehension, how to write for an audience. But these are compromises, not avenues.

It was the 54,865th time the cab driver had no idea where I lived, and maybe the first time I wasn’t sure I could help him out.

..

“Do you want to come over?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I don’t want to be like that guy in your blog. That’s Not the Kind of Love I’m Used To.”

“There were different elements at play,” I insist. “There was another girl there that I didn’t write about in case she read this, it was complicated.”

I have more damaging first impressions than anything I could possibly hide here, but I am forced to consider that I might have never been the underdog that I think I am.

..

Her husband is dead by the first week of May and my Bartender regards me, not differently, not peripherally, but not quite directly, as if I’m either in the foreground or background of objects: short (whiskey) or tall (Pabst Blue Ribbon), edible (bereavement casseroles) or legible (sympathy cards); tangible and memorable (photographs) or untouchable and inconsequential (“I’m going to have to ask you to leave”). But with this foreshortening, she is strongest for me, in a way I didn’t ask of her.

“I loved him so much, Terror. I had to prepare for this day. He’s 15 years older, oh, but I loved him so much. I didn’t want to have to leave him. I would stay for 12 hours and drink coffee and rest in that uncomfortable chair until I could see him smile. That’s how he would repay me, because that’s all I needed to see. And I told him. Whenever you’re ready to go.”

I take a sip from the short, a gulp from the tall. “It would be my great fortune to have a fraction of those feelings.”

“Niña. It will take you time. You see things nobody else sees.”

Getting back to ghosts. I don’t see them, but I feel their urgency. We’re going to die soon. We don’t have much time! With love, you’re supposed to be fundamental and rapture-ready. And you can scratch your head—why now, Terror?—but this has always been me, matchmaking and leaning against walls at parties and scoffing at mortals, knowing that the world will see me as a cynic, but acquiescing to the notion because it’s somewhat cynical to believe that you’re the last living romantic.

..

Interlude: This Isn’t the Kind of Love That I’m Used To.

..

I practically gave you the lead for your story: Air Sex Championships lead to real sex. I hope this works out, if only to tell everybody how we met.

Everything else I said last night? Let’s not over-think it.

Requiem For a Backyard

What I Remember About Summer (not Last Summer, but Two Summers Ago): Nightswimming before the lightning came, Me and Five Guys, drinking with an unusual two-piece confidence. Subscribing to simplicity, swaddled in towel, not thinking my feet were ugly. Watching others cannonball; hating our jobs, caring for jokes. The dog licked my hand and I did not blink. Dean let me drive his car home. I don't have a driver's license and I had a three-beer buzz. This town used to tie me down but now I do the tying.

I was the Only Girl in the War Room. Seamus and Eric were as passionate as the night before, scribbling questions for the lawyer, poring over maps. Developers wanted to build so that they wouldn't have access to the top of their hill. "This is your birthright, Dean. If you don't fight now, there won't be another fight." I was stoned on the sofa, lying on my back, legs imaginary-cycling in the air, moved by rhetoric, evermore in love with the David versus Goliath. But I couldn't get angry. I left this town and I changed my name and in my mind there was no way I thought they'd lose. Seamus trusted the lawyer. "His name is Bennett and that's Latin for 'blessed' and I'm glad I looked it up." I'm glad he looked it up.

They said they would have accepted $600,000 for two acres (and, knowing what you know about how my people live, know that this would have changed lives), but they were only offered $100,000. You don't take money for land purchased in the Hamptons in the 1970s. The mother was working three jobs and land was what they had. I had my prom night on that hill. This was what was left of their father. Seamus and Eric fumed and their cigarettes crept inward. "Fuck, I'll just give it to the Shinnecocks and make 'em call it Crowley's Last Stand. No one builds on native land." I sat up. I am a native son.

We welcomed the downpour. "You can sleep over if you want." That was the line Seamus used all week. It had become our punch line, but we didn't laugh, even though I don't think we were hiding it from anyone. "I wish I could, but my flight's tomorrow." The shuddering of shutters and throes of thunder and shaking of sheets could have forced us to show a little depth. Like the hole. Seamus said a couple of things when he was naked, but I remember the bit about the hole. "Today we filled the hole in the backyard." His father had dug it 25 years ago for a foundation that never came. Nobody knowing what it was for, what grandiose plans he had for the earth, steered us from talking about my brother or his divorce or me convincing him that 34 was going to be better than 33. It tampered the dirt, packed it tight, over the things I would have said, so I said nothing and stayed completely still as the wind whipped through my four-man tent and grazed at the tiny hairs on my back. I thought of mankind in a quest to secure life's metaphorical tent flaps, like me fucking your friend to osmosize the good parts I tricked myself into not remembering. I wish I could, but this time I walk away.

Paid Furlough, Vernal Guilt

The sun is reflecting, transmuting, bouncing from abandoned storefront to dented car hood to sinewy bicycle spoke; the air is ripe with lust, mulch. I spend the morning heaving and dry heaving and taking names in vain and I don’t leave my bed until someone tells me it’s 81 degrees outside, start your weekend, yayfuckingyes. I exhume flip-flops, willing to expose chipped nail polish at the expense of painfully severing winter webbed feet. Neighbors take notice. “I love me some white girls!” he yells from his station in the semi-circle, onlookers in the arc tittering, my belly's contents rebubbling. He means me, though I’m not girls plural. I can never bring myself to check WHITE (NOT HISPANIC) on a form and the flip-flops are a minute feature of the composite. I waddle to the wireless café, so I can osmosize weather via customer joviality, a door propped open with a tub of wall putty, while I reply to Dad’s e-mail, which begins, “Honey Child, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am.” He really has no reason to be sorry, to begin with Honey Child, to begin calling me Honey Child. The professors lean against the red wall (not the burnt orange or taupe walls) and talk of peace marches and social movements, but add buoyant words to the discourse—“gleeful.” I will work toward glee. The inescapability of ultraviolet waves brings me back to a dysfunctional relationship two summers ago—he was older than the usual elders, had an awful proclivity for daytime drunk dials that shared the state of his dividends, the temperature of lake water, the disdain for my day job. We only started dating because my jankyass phone dialed his number when my bag pushed against the partition on a rush hour train. After the initial palpitation (it went to voicemail), I decided: girl, you’re in it now. Usually Kay is the Ernie and I am the Bert. “You called before?” “I only called because I was returning your call. Is everything alright?” “I called you? Oh, I must have accidentally dialed when I was looking up your phone number to get the discount on toilet paper at Dominick’s.” “Do you realize how many tard clauses there are in that sentence—you forgot your card, you use my number, you’re buying toilet paper, you accidentally dial? This is good TV.” I want a summer of reflection, transmutation—I want to bounce, short of encouraging my parents to feel embarrassed for me, which has been the custom between April and September (and sometimes the clowning bleeds into October, if the right teams reach the playoffs). They don’t need to know I killed the last of my sick days.

I'd Prefer the Corporate Ladder if it Were Shaped More Like an Escalator

Terraism #148, as provided by Mace: The best way to celebrate a promotion, and to really show management they made a solid choice, is by calling in sick the day after its announcement.

I'm such an asshole.

A Device to Buoy Vessels Over Shoals

I've been putting off real work by making collages for Mr. Lincoln's birthday. Like this one.


Gosh, I have too much emancipation on my hands.

Exultation in the Modern Era of Japanese Weaponry

My checkerboard slip-ons slipped halfway off, laptop dangling dramatically in hand, bomber jacket draped over forearm, I attempt an exasperated simper, hoping to signal to security that I have less than six minutes to make this plane. I must board this plane. For the first time in the history of dysfunctional homecomings, I have complete immunity from killing Baby Jesus—for on this day, exceedingly east of Bethlehem, I learn that Little Brother has blown a sizable chunk of his college tuition on a sword.

I don’t know much about the sword. I don’t know what the fuck my brother—already on academic probation and berated daily for sleeping until two or three in the afternoon—was thinking. I only know that I could have breezed through baggage claim at Islip-MacArthur with graphic recollections of a botched double abortion and not raise as many eyebrows as He Who Thinks He’s Ninja.

I feel for the kid. I know first semester culture shock is debilitating. I know my parents will chart his missteps according to my academic trajectory. I know that I am a horrible person because I will publicly condemn the sword, but truly cannot wait to see that shit unsheathed—can I hold it, have you named it, can you take my picture with it?

I sprint to Gate B16. I will make it in time to not ruin Christmas.

..

When I set my luggage down in a bedroom that was once mine (1988-1994), the first thing I notice is a crucifix made out of clothespins tacked above the twin bed. Really.

At this juncture, the most I can do is shrug and comment bemusedly—“well, that’s special”—in the way that Kay did when a man sitting behind her on the Clark Street bus started stroking the faux fur lining the hood of her winter coat. My parents’ fundamentalism leaves me fundamentally unphased.

I decide that part of my mother’s Christmas present will be me dressing up and going to Mass and eating Jesus wafers, even though I haven’t been confessed or holy watered in years. Personally, I’m curious to see if that Eagle Scout with the Prince Albert I blew sometime ago in Manny’s mother’s car will be sitting a few pews ahead. Or I can climb the donkey in the manger and ride. Sacrilege, yes—but I’m not the one who squandered my tuition on a sword.

..
As is the native custom, we go to a casual dining establishment my first night back in town. We decide on Smokey Bones, though the parking lot is shared with a marginally superior Red Lobster. Well, I’m not so sure about this—I debate the competitive virtues of congealed butter versus congealed barbecue sauce, but end up casting my vote No Confidence when it dawns on me that both meals end in a moist towelette.

Am I getting too old for calamity? I’ve been away so long that I can’t tell, but by the way my parents fret over (possibly recessionary) portion sizes and swear that $11.49 once bought more than a plate of buffalo wings, cole slaw and fries, I reassure myself that I am not an entitled snob. I feel sorry for them for dragging us into deep-fried purgatory, but that doesn’t keep me from wearing everyone’s palpable discontent as a narrowed and vacant expression on my face.

“Go hit on the old men,” Little Brother goads. These are not my old men. Smokey Bones is No Country For Old Men. The restaurant (“restaurant”) services a nearby Courtyard by Marriott and lures a combed-over business class with a circumstantial lust for chatting up local horse faces—makeup by Mary Kay, wardrobe by Donna Karan, perfume by Kohl’s—slurping Long Islands (“wow, that’s original”) by the bar. Despite a yearlong intensive tutorial, Little Brother still can’t identify a colloquial Dad. No wonder he's on academic probation.

“Would you like to see a dessert menu?”

“No, we’re going to Dunkin' Donuts. This place sucks.” Ever tactful Littlest Brother comes to our rescue. Since last I saw him, he’s packed on fifteen pounds with his Michael Phelps diet—apparently it doesn’t work when you don’t swim eight hours a day—and is testing the tensile strength of his cuteness.

I don’t think I was ever cute in a way that is paraded before wait staff. Little Brother was, surely. Fuck, was Little Brother adorable. But his child actor guild badge is tarnished, unrecognizable now. Maybe this is part of what makes him sleep in so late.

..

Within a span of twenty minutes, I spill a Diet Coke, dollop my skirt with spinach dip and break a plate at our pre-pre-pre Christmas party. “Opa! This means good luck in the New Year.” No Mom, this means I’m suffering delirium tremens as a result of spending the last 48 hours completely dry. I try to reverse the course, pouring a glass that is three-quarters brandy and one-quarter egg nog. The course leads me to the couch, where I fall asleep on a partially gift-wrapped bundle of slippers and socks.

..
“Do you think Mom would like the movie Juno for Christmas?”

My father frowns. “Your mother is a conservative like me.”

“She doesn't kill the baby, you idiot!”

I can’t help what happens next. My eyes water, my face grows hot, I take shallow breaths. Every time I come home and show that I’m trying, he aches to be nothing more than an ideology. And all that I am to him—despite being his mature, unsuspicious child with an unusually oceanic capacity for love—is an oversimplified political orientation masquerading as an unruly passing phase. It takes my father a verse of Daryl Hall singing “Jingle Bell Rock” for him to realize that I’m crying.

He cuts the silence demurely. “No, I think your mother would like that.”

..

It wasn’t an outright goal, but I am completely tanked before the first guest arrives for our pre-pre Christmas party with the Polish side of the family. Not wanting a meal where I break dishes, I dust off an ancient bottle of bourbon I find on the topmost kitchen shelf, scavenge a snifter from the curio (or maybe it's a votive holder) and swallow like a sailor lost at sea. My 17-year-old cousin Ellie is the only one kind enough to call me out, unless you count my godfather demanding to know who massacred the dinner rolls (answer: me) or my cousin Sergei smiling wily every time I accidentally bump into him (or a misplaced wall). I had always thought Sergei was gay, but when I learn that he’s a University of Chicago alum, I consider that he might just be heinously awkward.

..

I had forgotten that I do, honestly, like New York City. The most immediate trade-off I observe is between cost of living and namedropping. At Harmony House, I recognize television guest star and theater actor Joey Slotnick at the table next to ours. I think he got his start in Chicago, but I could be wrong. I consider relaying the sighting to Gawker. Then I realize they don’t care about this fuzzy-haired nonentity for blind items.

We carry on to the Rubin Museum of Art. We shop for Asian trinkets near The Bowery and eat dim sum opposite a wall of television sets. We eat arepas in East Village and I treat myself to an $11 glass of non-boxed wine. We go to Arrow Bar. We take a free water taxi from Wall Street to an IKEA in Brooklyn.

IKEA represents all I’ve ever wanted out of a relationship. Minimalist, inexpensive, pre-fabricated, Scandinavian, sustainable, obnoxious, matching, adorable. Every showroom dually exposes my domestic and romantic shortcomings. Every smooth edifice of furniture yells—“Use a Phillips head, Terror, and true love will inevitably follow!”

When we take photographs of our group living out my wildest fantasies in mock homes, I am well aware of how pathetic this is. But I should be unnerved when all I aspire to is a status totally within reach. That’s probably why I’m still at my job and have no framework or future for this blog.

But I guess you would have to understand where I came from. I can’t help what I'm attracted to.

..
The misconception about me is that because I know things about some things, and because I know how to do some things, and because I can influence people to do some other things, I can’t possibly be a girl who is easily impressed. And so to the doubters, I say—you’re wrong; fuck off.

..

For reasons I can’t figure out, the little girls in Littlest Brother’s third grade class are in awe of me. Three of his classmates tug at my shirt and exclaim some combination of “You’re so pretty!,” “You’re very pretty!” or “You’re so very pretty!”

Seriously? Have they even seen Marco's mom?

This was revelatory. Why do I drop hundreds of dollars at bars every month looking for similar validations that seldom come? Do you mean to tell me that instead of drinking and being forgetful, I could volunteer and be revered? That’s messed.

Those three little girls almost make up for the class’ disorderly behavior and desecration of the "Mexican Hat Dance."

..

I don’t feel so very pretty when I arrive at Dean’s house with a bottle of Jameson in hand, but I suspect that the odds are stacked in my favor (see: bottle of Jameson in hand). I suspect that this is the Christmas where Dean and I consummate a ten-year friendship and add another chapter to the history of our feuding families. I suspect right.

To be clear, there isn’t really a feud between us and the Crowley clan. It is simply a case of my mother hating Mrs. Crowley. I know my mother hates Dean’s mom as far back as Older Brother dating Dean’s sister, and then Older Brother moving in with Dean’s brothers after he and the sister broke up. After Older Brother killed himself, my mother became obsessively fearful that Mrs. Crowley, already a mother to 11 children, wanted to steal me and Little Brother and add them to a burgeoning brood. I can’t explain how my mother became so irreparably irrational because I could never seem to see the same things she did in the same tragedy. I can only tell you that my relationship with Dean stands on the back of well-conceived lies, the faultless removal and reattachment of bedroom window screens and a three-year precautionary hiatus.

To be clearer, I should mention that I slept with a Crowley brother at my graduation party—a divorcee who lived with Older Brother and is 11 years older than Dean. I realize, Reader, that you might be polarized into Camp Creeped Out or Camp Highly Amused. Suffice it to say, this is how a small town functions. We function by barely functioning. And now I function, having been reminded that casual sex does not have to be a wrenching, dispassionate affair. Even when we were in relationships with other people, we sensed the inevitable would happen—Greg Dulli crooning from the speakers, a jealous cat clawing at my head. It was as sad and beautiful as I could have hoped.

I left his house feeling ready for winter’s wrath.

..

Sword sword sword.

My hometown suffers from severe stereotype threat and we middle siblings, though expatriates, are willing to fall headlong into diagnosis. We are in the dining room and I smile at a worked up Little Brother and tell him, “You’re the depressed one. I’m the one who suffers from anxiety. Calm the fuck down.”

The family thinks I’m incorrigible, yet they hardly know me. When prompted, they overshoot my actual promiscuity by a minimum of two standard deviations. I just say everything that I am thinking because I think it will help. It will cure us. Nothing else was working.

..

The Eagle Scout I blew in Manny’s mother’s car shows up for Mass on Christmas Eve.

..

After Mass, we pile in the Chevy. In our skirts, shirts, blouses, blazers. We go to Taco Bell. My mother has decided to give up, play dead. No fondue this year.

If she’s phoning it in, so am I.

..

Christ, a savior, is born. He brings me roller skates.

..

There is frost on the windshield but my father won’t let me get out of the car to scrape it. I can tell, not knowing when I’ll be in New York again, he is nerve-racked, a little miserable. “I wish we could do more for you.” There is a lilt at the end of his lament, but it is not a cue to have me reassure him otherwise.

“Don’t worry, Dad. You guys do enough for me. And whatever I need that I don’t have, I go out and find.” Only half true, but he doesn’t need to know which part.

When I exit the vehicle, I know I am in the midst of a renaissance.

Coming out here, I wasn’t so sure. I had spent the prior four weeks overextending myself for a small business with a questionable profit margin. Balancing the business with the full-time research gig. I had been self-medicating with booze in a less humorous vein. I had reached a stalemate with a boy I had been devoted to.

But there is equal nobility and mobility in still being able to exit. And because I do, I know that I flew in for an immunity I never actually needed. I know that this time I will make him cry, because I am the one of us two who understands the difference between coming and going.

Baker's Dozen

The beginning.


Make me make you something.

Room at the Inn, Part II

The homeless Canadian left me his phone number on the back of a cookie fortune resting on my nightstand. YOU WILL SOON BRING JOY TO SOMEONE. Prologue to a proposal.

I'm Glad My Dad Replaced the Slats with a Sturdy Frame

There is a homeless Canadian rave promoter* sleeping in my bed. I hope he doesn't steal anything.

Subversion of a Crossword Puzzle

I found this creative non-fiction piece while packing up my bookshelf for the big move. The year was 2006; I was not sleeping and thinking in riddles. Naturally, enjoy.
..

Prompt: Subversion of a Text
Result: Subversion of a Crossword Puzzle

Haiku, e.g. I know what you’re asking and there are better examples. Karate: I took lessons until I was eight because I wanted to be a ninja (turtle). Sushi: I’m not good with chopsticks. Hello Kitty: Like on Danielle’s lunchbox. Hiroshima: I’m sorry. Origami: I can still make a crane and a drinking cup and I’m not someone who cuts the paper to bypass folding. JAPANESETHINGS. Doesn’t fit. Idiot. Acrostic, ballad, clerihew…

Fifty percent. Is HALF.

Anonymous writer, perhaps. Sweet Valley High, tell-all biography. Front yard pages of the magazine. Who’s kissing who, who’s backstage, who’s dining where—always uncredited. Instruction manuals, ingredient labels, billboards, graffiti, overwhelming sadness. I was once an anonymous writer, perhaps. Slipped sexually suggestive material through a SLIT (17 Across, Narrow opening) in my crush’s locker. He didn’t make a move. Mine was not a case of overwhelming sadness. SE R TAD I R R.

Genetic attribute. (TRAIT.) Belongs to Mom: Taste buds, breasts, hips, neck, chin (multiple), some freckles, cheekbones, internal suffering, tolerance to hard liquor, antibody resistance, duration of menstrual cycle, small nose, well-formed eyebrows (before she singed hers off with a Bunsen burner), acne during puberty, size of hands, back fat, size of pores, cinderblock thighs, ability to cook meals, color of irises (hers a little darker), ability to clean rooms, obsessive compulsiveness, dyed hair (affinity for), piercings, responsibility at a young age, popularity, lingering exoticism. Belongs to Dad: forehead/hairline, spatial (any type of) reasoning, jaundiced skin color, eye shape, straight hair, emotional repression, sports (affinity for), neck, chins (multiple), fingernails (bitten), feet (ugly), blood pressure, cheeks on top of cheekbones, extreme passivity, sweat glands, bone structure, crooked teeth, cynicism (not political beliefs), other freckles, more acne, calves (lean), lint-trapping innie, test scores, work ethic, no trace of exoticism. Belongs to me: scar on my nose (too late for stitches; no ball in the house), height (the average of them).

African country. This anonymous writer, perhaps, exploits the us versus them. They are savage, far away, with plenty of demarcation. Our (lack of) answer hinges on us not knowing (caring). A bushman thinks fifty states is just as absurd. Hawaii is more complicated than Madagascar. We both have territories that fit. Idaho, Texas, Maine. Niger, Egypt, Libya, Ghana, Gabon, Congo, Sudan, Benin, Kenya, it’s KENYA, it’s KENYA. Look, the map shows mountains and deserts and waterfalls and it seems to be an interesting place. I dog-ear the page, well-knowing I will never return.

Resound. Sound again. I picture myself in a tunnel, bathing in decibels. Holding a conch to my ear. HELLO, HELLO, HELLO. I am queasy. How did you fit a reverberating memory in such a tiny space? There are better clues. Greek nymph. Soviet submarine. Unix command. Internet protocol. Framework for Java programming. Marvel superhero. Between delta and foxtrot. and the Bunnymen.

New York city. Not City. You are asking to be less impressive. Focus my attention upstate, on topography, natural resources. I ache to make a borough fit. Bronx has five letters but I know it’s not what you mean. Real cities make people fit. BRONX. The joke is on you, starting a five-letter word with X. (Xerox, xenon.) Fine, hand me that eraser. If we played by your rules no one would visit cities. In five letters you must hold mass transit systems, museums, shopping districts, hot dog vendors, high rises, children playing, pollution, homelessness, apathy. Forty-four unprovoked gunshots to the body. Two very big buildings, crumbling, coming down. You skirt City to avoid sadness and now I understand. I put UTICA in its place.

Greek letters. Delta is one, but not the one between delta and foxtrot. I know Greek letters. I see them right before I blackout. In the bushes or some sophomore’s bed. (If there are no sheets on the bed.) I remember you between bouts of chastity. It took forever for me to learn your house’s name. A sign with ivy creeping: a circle with vertical line, an L turned on its head, a triangle. I know delta. I know turned on its head. I came back to learn your friends’ names. Phi, then gamma, then delta. This alphabet is only useful when you want (someone) to get to know your body. Gamma and delta don’t align. I will come back to you.

Sibilant “Yo!” Easy. PSSST.

Like liters and grams. You measure red wine in liters and pot in grams. I know(;) I squandered youth. Whites are measured in liters, too. People who do the measuring call it litres. It is: half the capacity of the soda bottles my mother buys for parties. It is: the weight of a paperclip. We learned in third grade. Somewhere around sixteen, weight became mass. We were older and they told us it wasn’t weight unless it had direction. I know no direction from too much measuring. If I had a vector to guide (pull) me, I wouldn’t be filling white boxes with black next to black boxes. It is a factory for packaging ennui. Arrow says, this side up.

Utah ski resort. My ex-boyfriend never took me. I’ve never been skiing (or ice skating) so I asked and he agreed because he has money. Not Utah; too far. I only know of their Mormons and saltiness. We decided Wisconsin, fake hills, imported snow. Something not too intimidating for a beginner. He went to Europe for Thanksgiving, skied in the Alps. I just wanted him to repeat something he had already done, this time with me. Be indulged. We didn’t end up going. We had a snowball fight instead. We’re not together anymore, but that’s not why. I just remembered (noticed) that ski is in my (Polish) last name. I will come back to you.

Piece of cake. Easy. EASY.

Wash. neighbor. Could b Ore. or Ida. or B.C. (as in not b4 christ.) Also a neighbor 2 P.O. (as in not post office), V.I. (as in not very important), P.S. (as in not post script), Mt. St. Hlns (she’s inside, actually), strts, islnds, fjrds! It must b pretty in Wash. Words muted so easily by the magnitude (as in not alt. in ft.) of nature. It is brevity. Fleeting panoramas. B sure 2 c it b4 u die.

People with a gender bias. Are men and women. Children, some. Republicans, published sociologists, transsexuals. Prostitutes, protesters, pediatricians. Feminists, for sure. Exploiters of the colors pink and blue. Designers of public restrooms. Underwear manufacturers. Advertisers of two dollar drink specials (Ladies Night). Policymakers, editors of newspapers and magazines, the inventor of the tampon. (The condom, for that matter.) East Coast companies that monogram your towels (his or hers). The writers of the Bible. Gym teachers, dock workers, etiquette coaches, rappers, pornographers. There will be bias whenever you choose. It is everyone shoved into seven little boxes, but I will make it fit.