There were days when she simply wasn’t there. Entire days during which she worked on autopilot, keeping her head down and moving from one place to the next: from bed to the breakfast table and from there to the bus which took her to work and on and on until she was back in bed. She knew what was happening during those days – she was in there, somewhere, behind the dead eyes that looked out at the world – but she was stuck in some sort of conscious torpor, unable to speak a sincere word or process a complex thought.
She could never predict when this sort of day might occur. It could be a bright, sunny day in early June – then she’d miss the beauty of the hummingbirds surrounding the trees in the garden and the sweet smell of night-blooming flowers that wafted in through the windows during dinner. Sometimes it would be a blustery, rainy day in November, and she’d be immune to the blue mood that engulfed everyone else.
Whenever these days happened, she’d mark them down in her calendar when she woke up the next morning. She monitored the empty days, hoping and praying that they wouldn’t increase, but trying to find a pattern in them. Were they part of her menstrual cycle? Did they have something to do with her diet or the amount of exercise she took? She kept meticulous notes on all of her activities
She refused to believe that the empty days were absolutely random. If there were no triggers, she had no way to prevent them. If she couldn’t prevent them, then it was only a matter of time before she would walk off a bridge or in front of a speeding truck. She didn’t want to die, but the emptiness didn’t care about living.
blogging
Locally Grown
The thunderstorm storms,
And the rocking-chair rocks.
And the town across the water is impoverished
Except there is no water,
There are only train tracks
Which were built on purpose –
Deliberately –
So that now there is a right side
And a wrong side.
All the after-school programs
In the world
Won’t help me recognize those children as my own.
Classroom
At 1:30PM, fifteen students and one teacher gathered around a table. It was on the top floor of a building that was normally inhabited by much younger children who knew it as their nursery school, but at 1:30PM all the children had gone home, as had their teachers.
The group of students in the white-washed, fluorescent-lit, mildly air-conditioned room were definitely not children, although their parents might have had a different perspective on that. They were all young adults, college-aged, facing the world on their own to some extent.
No two of them looked alike. Each had his or her own unique style of dress, whether it was blue hair, a classic polo shirt, or a t-shirt bearing an illustration of the Peanuts cast of characters on it.
The one thing they all had in common was their fear. It was palpable; they themselves could almost taste it in the air of the stuffy room, the sickly smell of fear with some odd sweetness in it that might have been just the hint of excitement. They knew that in the coming months they’d be baring some part of their soul to these strangers.
Two hours isn’t a lot, but sometimes it’s enough. At 3:25PM, the fear smell was a little less dominant. Laughter had relaxed the students, as had the teacher’s laid-back manner, the way he literally leaned far back in his chair and lounged like a teenager. There was comfort in his ease, and it spread to the others by osmosis.
At 1:30PM a group of fearful strangers entered the room. At 3:30PM, a group of curious, uplifted, excited acquaintances left it.
She Doesn’t Believe Me
She looked at me in the mirror and said “I did one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do today.”
I looked back at her and asked her how she managed to do it.
She blinked, and tears welled up in her familiar eyes, and she told me about how she had to think about it for a long time, how her heart told her one thing and her mind another, how she had to kick her heart over, sideways, so it was now lying crooked in her chest and thumping painfully. She told me that she didn’t think that she’d be happy ever again.
I told her she was being an idiot. That she would be happy again. Maybe not soon, but eventually. She smiled sadly and nodded, but I knew she didn’t believe me. She was just pretending, so that I would leave her alone.
Where No One Can See
The floor shook, and ornaments began to rattle on the shelves, the painted china ladies knocking elbows and skirts with the delicate porcelain men. There was no earthquake, no shifting of plates deep within the earth, no shifting of magma or stone so old that it remembered what it was like to have the weight of much larger creatures stand upon it. The house that the floor belonged to looked peaceful from the outside, every blade of grass intact and the little red bench on the porch perfectly clean and gleaming cheerfully.
The disturbance, as the reader may have deduced, was arising from one of the rooms. It was a small one, near the back of the house, far from the street as well as situated at equal distances from the neighbors on either side. It was the only room in the house from which sounds would not emerge for the entire neighborhood to hear and judge, as members of small, well-mowed neighborhoods will. A woman named Gina stood within this room, which was hardly a room at all, more like a linen closet that had been stripped of its shelves.
Gina wasn’t remarkable looking, for she had no one feature that stood out particularly, nor was the symmetry of her features pleasing enough to be remembered. There was an aura of the average about her, a sense of potential that may have shone for a while but was quickly snuffed out by its owner for no real reason except, perhaps, laziness or lack of motivation. This is not to say that she seemed defeated. At the moment of the shaking floors, she looked, in fact, full of restless, angry energy as she screamed and jumped up and down again and again until her voice became ragged and her throat raw.
No one who knew Gina would ever believe that she went into this middle room several times a day to perform this ritual, this cleansing of all the sour emotions that would build in her over the course of her day. Her husband, with whom she was in the process of getting a divorce, would have been surprised to learn that Gina had any such strong emotions at all. As far as he was concerned, she had taken the news that he wanted to marry one of his graduate students quite well. He even entertained the notion that they would be able to remain friends and support each other emotionally during their later lives. He thought he would rather like that, because the graduate student he was engaged to was quite vapid and, if he was truthful with himself, was mostly attractive to him because of her smooth skin, her bouncy hair and her insatiable sexual appetite.
The ornaments settled, the floor ceased its tremors and Gina emerged from the room; slightly breathless and only a little red, she resumed the duties of her everyday life.
Meta-Weather
Loraine hated it when the weather reflected her emotions. It seemed so fake, as if she were a character in a carefully crafted novel. When she cried while it was raining, she’d try to stop and be cheerful. When it was sunny, she felt a strange obligation to be sad, or at least neutral.
The worst, though, was feeling buffeted and confused when it was windy. When she looked outside on Sunday morning and saw the branches blowing every which way, she felt immediately frustrated, which only added another unpleasant layer to her already bewildered state.
She wondered if she should just stay in. She had obligations to fulfill, people to see, things to do, but none of it was so important that it couldn’t be postponed. She could let herself sink into a good book or dance in her room while listening to music, both activities that would take her away from the world and the decisions she had to make. Then the wind wouldn’t count, because she’d be distracting herself from the thoughts that were fluttering from one end of her mind to the other like the leaves in the parking lot underneath her window.
But what if it was windy tomorrow, too? She supposed she couldn’t run away from her feelings forever. She was stronger than that. She might not know what she wanted, but she knew that much at least.
Feeling like a cliché, Loraine left her apartment and locked the door behind her, hoping that her life wasn’t actually a piece of fiction in which a writer forcibly gave her emotions the weather to match.
Irene
I was terrified of this storm. Seeing people in the grocery-stores armed with suitcases, filling them with bottled water, scared me badly. But when I woke up this morning and saw that my campus wasn’t flooded and that the wind and rain had already died down, I calmed down.
Later, I went down to our nearby town with some friends, and for the first time really believed that there had been a serious storm during the night. There is a bridge that runs over a highway here, and when we reached the bridge, we realized that instead of a road, we had a new river. There was a car stranded in the middle, lonely and almost entirely submerged. The back window was open, and I worried that someone had somehow gotten stuck and had to escape through it. I don’t know if I’ll ever find out.
This is the nearest I’ve ever come to being around a natural disaster. I’m extremely thankful.
Move-In Day
As a member of the prestigious (*snort*) welcome team at my college, I get to move in to my dorm today. Sadly, I wasn’t accepted to the tour-guide position I’d applied for, which – I’ll admit – soured me for a while. Why should I be on our welcoming team, helping new students move into the dorms easily and efficiently, for free, when my school doesn’t want to employ me as one of its representatives?
I gave myself a mental slap around the head and box on the ears, and remembered that the reason I wanted to give guided tours of my school is because I love it and wanted to help others see it in the same light that I saw it in when I first visited my beautiful campus. Sure, loving my school doesn’t mean that everything about it is perfect – our bureaucracy, for instance, is horribly and needlessly complicated and some of the important administrators are really, ahem, not nice (which is putting it very nicely). But the academics and the social life on campus are incredible, and those are the most important things at school, aren’t they?
So as I unpack in my new room today and think about the fact that I might be helping lift boxes in pre-hurricane weather tomorrow, I’ll remind myself that I wanted to do this even before I applied for a paid position, and I’ll remember that when I was a first year I was intensely grateful to this group of kids who got my things into my dorm for me, and I’ll hope that someone remembers me well tomorrow, even if it’s just as a helpful blur above a green t-shirt.
“S”
Whenever she looked out her window, she saw a big “S” on the red brick building across from her. Just one letter, a simple one, with a serif on either end. It wasn’t the most innocent or joyful of letters; “snakes” and “sadness” and “sordid” all began with it, and she couldn’t help thinking of those and other harsh words whenever she looked at her “S.”
But not everyone had a big, two-story-tall letter painted on the building across the street. She could tell it was that large because she could see the windows next to it. Okay, so maybe it was only one-and-a-half stories tall, but it was up around the tenth or eleventh floor, and everything looks bigger higher up. Or so she thought at least.
It was kind of like Stephen (another “S”, she always reminded herself) who was so beautiful and seemed so majestic. He was tall, and his head was disproportionately large for his body. But she couldn’t help being attracted to him, daydreaming about him, adding the letters to his name to her view of “S.” Stephen, for his part, didn’t know she existed because they’d never been introduced. In fact, his name wasn’t actually Stephen, it was Pedro, but she’d given him a name of her own after she’d seen him at the bagel shop on the corner for the fourth morning in a row.
She wasn’t an obsessive person, no, you couldn’t say that exactly, she thought, but she was definitely aware, and self-aware as well, and she knew there was a certain obsessive quality to her fascination with her “S.” Especially when she knew there must be more letters painted up there, hidden from her by the jut of another building that was angled just right to show her the one “S” and nothing else. She wondered whether she’d ever see the thing, the letter or the entire word, from street level and see what it was referring to. The thought was terrifying.
In Vancouver
The flight to Vancouver was long, long, long, but there were some interesting characters that my mom and I got to experience on the way. I’ll be writing about them eventually – unless I decide to hoard them in order to use them in some piece of fiction eventually.
Our first day was yesterday, and (incredibly) we dragged ourselves out for a full day of walking around and exploring the city.
Today my mom, my aunt, my brother and I walked around Vancouver some more. We went to Granville Island, this really cool inlet that has an arts university as well as an arts high school and is full of awesome young people. There’s a market there that looks like it came straight out of Disneyland – it’s too perfect and adorable. I loved it. There are also a couple dangerous stationary stores that I had a hard time tearing myself out of. I love that stuff way too much.
My hands are strangely slow and heavy as I write this, so I think that it’s time for me to fall back into bed. I got out of it a mere twelve hours ago, but a second day of walking around and a healthy dose of jet-lag is affecting me, clearly. Good night, people.
Slightly Ignorant 