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.
writing
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.
Big Apple, Small Room
It took me a while to convince my mother that our apartment wasn’t twenty-five square feet. I needed to remind her that if it was, that would mean it was the size of my aunts’ terrace.
Nevertheless, the space is small, the bed slopes, the internet is having issues, the shower-curtain smells suspiciously of new plastic (was there blood on the previous one? Is that why it was changed so recently) and the air-conditioning not so much hums as grunts and complains loudly that its back is hurting. We shut the poor thing off and slept with the windows open.
Does it sound like I’m complaining? Oh, dear me, no! Part of life in the big city is the itty-bitty one room apartments that make up those jigsaw puzzles of lights-in-windows that can be seen anywhere, always, because it never goes completely dark here. I heard something about some legendary blackout that happened sometime, but I can’t imagine it. How would people so addicted to their machines function?
Friends, good food, and fun awaits. Oh, yeah, and then school starts in a couple days. But until then, I’m going to make the most of this place.*
*By that, of course, I mean I’m going to go with my mom to read at the Highline park. But hey, that’s pretty dang adventurous for me!
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.
Ursula Awake [Flash Fiction]
The hammering, clanging, clanking – the sheer metallic cacophony of sound was driving Ursula slowly, but surely, crazy. It wasn’t very late – only eleven-thirty or so – but there were rules about this kind of thing, even laws. No noise of this kind after eleven o’clock. Or even ten. She wasn’t sure which, but either way, by now the work should have ceased, the workers gone home for the night.
Turning over again, she lay a hand on her ear, shoving the other one deep into the pillow. Her own skin and bones weren’t nearly enough to shut out the racket, so she pulled over her husband’s pillow – he was still in the living room, watching something stupid on TV – and held it over her ear, making her head look like a strange, Ursula-faced sandwich. She began to laugh, a little at first, then harder, finally rocking with hysterical giggles, stifled behind her mouth. She tossed the second pillow away again. It wouldn’t do to be woken in the middle of the night by the sound of her husband’s ridiculing snort.
Still the noise went on. Ursula sat up and shook a couple more pills out of the plastic, orange bottle that was as familiar by now as a teddy-bear. Reaching for her glass of water, she hesitated, wondering if her habit was escalating. She decided she would think about it in the morning. Right now she needed the deep sleep that she hadn’t gotten since her daughters were born some thirty years previously. Maybe tonight would be the night, even with the pathetic stage being built in the park outside.
And that was another thing: why on earth were they building the stage at this hour? The park was controlled by the neighborhood, and they’d all signed to have the lampposts turned off there during the night. How were the workmen seeing what they were doing? Ursula mentally upbraided herself for assuming that the workmen were men. She supposed perpetual fatigue was as good an excuse as any for being a bad feminist.
A Pause, An Apology
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve not been here quite as regularly during the past few days – and that includes not reading and commenting on all your wonderful blogs as often as I’d like.
The reason is pretty much the usual one when it comes to me: I’m stressed and getting ready to pack up my essentials and move back to New York for a semester. In addition to the logistics of wrapping up my summer vacation and getting ready to go back into study-mode, I’ve also been going through on emotional roller-coaster. One of the ways I contend with it is to remind myself that everything I experience, however painful and difficult, can always be used later as material. It might be a cold way of dealing with things, but it works.
On Tuesday night, my mother and I fly to Canada to visit my aunts for a week. From there, we go to New York for a couple days vacation before I go back to university, where I get to move into my shiny, new (well, newly painted, at least) single dorm room. Once it’s all set up, I might actually take pictures and post them here. Then again, I might be too lazy. In two weeks, I’ll be part of the team of students welcoming the freshpeople into the college by helping them move their things into their rooms.
So the next two weeks are going to be hectic, full of flights, family and friends. I’m going to do my utmost to continue updating regularly and reading your blogs, but if I miss a couple days, I’m extending my apology preemptively, and hope you’ll forgive me.
Slightly Ignorant 