racing

I offer a few excuses. One, I'm neurotic. Two, I'm a perfectionist. Three, I'm an introvert. They seem to serve me well. Or rather, they seem to accomplish the job. The job? The job of avoiding people, intimacy, responsibility. The job of putting off life until I'm prepared to meet it with a fresh-pressed shirt and tied laces. I won't allow the possibility that I may trip. So let me just sit until I'm ready to begin. I'm at the starting line, biding my time until the gunshot.

But no one's going to pull the trigger for me. Or maybe they already have, I just didn't hear it? Who wouldn't hear a gun fire? Only a liar. Only a saint who lays around and waits for a wild card. Only someone with imperfect grammar waiting for an editor. Well, what if I realized I've been the editor all along? I can cut and revise and revive at my choosing. I can take this manuscript and rip it into confetti to throw at my own party. But where are the guests? I must have forgotten to send out invitations.

Let me stay in. Let me rent out a space in my head where I can sit down and let go of wherever, whomever, whatever I'm grasping. Let me surround my vanity with pillows until it suffocates and lets in other voices. Let me let you in.

And it's only a sin if there is a sinner. And there's only an end if there is a beginner. On your marks, get set...

unveil

The words are both a cover-up and an unveiling. I write what I know, but I take poetic license. I am frank, but I also fudge the truth. Simply put, I create. I control, I claim, I can't help but commiserate with the self I choose. Which self will I express sadness for today? Which self will I celebrate?

And I inebriate the text. I get the paragraph drunk and take advantage of it. I punctuate the exceptional and cut out the casual. Give me a sentence not up to speed and I will weed out the sluggish. I want it to move. I want it to run right off the page and into an unknown horizon. My writing will, ideally, become a stranger to myself. It will set and I will watch; it will rise and I will see.

But for the reader I expect nothing more than their time. Give me one minute to prove that words can soothe even the most temperamental souls. Give me one hour to shower your head with ideas that will lift your everyday life into lands bizarre and troublesome and ultimately rewarding.

But don't give me a medal just yet. I haven't proven a thing to you and especially not to myself. I'm still struggling with the rough draft.

viewing

When will we wake up to life? When will we shut it down? Every moment we have is either a birth or a death. We have it; we own it. Which story will we tell today? Our words will either resurrect or bury. Choose wisely.

And the world took on a different shape. The colors both bled and stood out. I stepped off of the curb and into a universe controlled by the hands without a body, without a face. They were hands that held a minute's worth of sand. They were hands that had no life line, a fortune teller's conundrum. They were hands with bones already dreaming of being bleached by the sun.

Is this the way to waking up? Or have the arrows been switched by a trickster waiting for me to step off course so they can of course devour my insecurities. Is this it? Or this? The questions can't help because I am only here for the answers. But I keep asking. But I keep expecting a detailed map.

The road is unpaved. It doesn't matter because I don't have a car. Concrete hurts my feet anyway. I better keep standing here or maybe walk on occasion. The view is so nice right here. What's it like over there?

aroused

Every morning I wake up to coffee and avocado on toast and a wild heart. It's the heart that won't sit still, which sends ridiculously elaborate messages and plans to the tired brain. Wild heart, tired brain? Is that a saying? Because currently the brain can't handle the constant flow of dreams the heart creates before the sun even has a chance to rise. The brain begins to tuck itself back into bed, hoping for a dreamless sleep. Let the coffee attend to the heart's demands.

And I set my eyes to the East, to an island grossly populated with society's best and worst. I search online for a life to lead, one handed to me on some kind of velvet pillow or included in some carefully planned package. And I deserve it, do I not? I deserve to untie the knot I've tied these past four years without a problem. I deserve to be given a ticket out of the quicksand. I want it to happen quickly. I want it to happen while my brain sleeps away the day.

But that's not how it will happen. It will sneak up on me mid-bite. It will happen when my toast has gone cold and I am distracted by the light shining through the blinds. It will happen when I am busy sticking my hands underneath the water, washing away yesterday's disaster. I was too tired last night to worry about hygiene.

I am too awake today to relax into the mess. It will happen, but it won't be obvious. It will happen, but it will take work. I don't want to know where I am when it happens; I just want to know that I have arrived.

So am I about to run away? Or am I finally arriving home?

intermission

The blank page is an unblinking eye. I'm not sure it's even alive anymore. But I have no qualms about scribbling on a corpse. It's probably best that it can't see my errors and terrible first drafts.

My brother-in-law told me to have fun wasting my life as a writer. And I am. It has been a blast so far and I don't see it taking a turn for the worst anytime soon. It should be noted, however, that poverty and failure is not the worst to me. It's close, but it's not the worst. The worst is shrinking away from a life that can be spent lit with inspiration and angel saints and excursions into places reached only by the overgrown path. I haven't finished growing. I hope I never stop reaching my hands up the wall to places I hope to stand.

So there is a blank page before me. There is an eye that does not watch, but rather waits. It waits for me to claim my life and to own my words. It waits for the spectacle. And good thing I put on one hell of a show.

another

Another dream about another ex. I wonder if my subconscious is going through a spring cleaning. Is my mind a cage searching for a bird? I stole that line from Kafka. Of course, the translation is a bit off.

He trusted me to drive his car during the desert drive we both knew so well. I drove fast, not knowing any other way. He took a picture of me, I have bad posture; I took a picture of him, he had a signature pose. I cringe at both photos now, yet they still stick to the walls of my memory. I won't take them down. I will let them get bleached by the sun. I don't care as much as I care. I come out even. I come out down on my luck and searching for a winning streak.

And up there in my head I will continue to sift through the drawers of my past. I will continue to take out what was better left lying down. I will curl up with the straight and try to straighten out the knots, not knowing what forgets is on purpose.

I propose a toast. I propose a toast to the most clinging mind of mine. I propose that it let go and let in what the light has avoided for so long. May we prosper. May we pretend. May we piece together the broken parts of us forever.

terrifying teepee

Last night I had another dream about an ex. But this time it wasn't my ex, but my ex's ex. Again, it was an exhausting dream. While not nearly as romantic as the dream featuring my old love, this dream still contained many of the same elements. Confrontation! Sadness! And for some reason a large teepee! I am actively trying to not make everything about me, but how can I not make dream interpretations about me? That was a stupid thought, I'll admit it. I have yet to have my coffee. (Oh! Look at me! An adult talking about coffee and how it is needed in the A.M. and boy oh boy I sure do have feelings about the weather/politics/traffic/reality show!) Anyway, back to the dream. In non-dream life, this ex of an ex terrifies me. I barely know her, but based solely on observations and what I have heard, she is perhaps the exact opposite of myself. WHICH makes me think -- shouldn't she comfort me and not terrify me? Because I terrify myself, so the opposite of me should make me feel the opposite of terrified. GUESS THAT JUST MEANS EVERYTHING TERRIFIES ME. Normal.

MORE CAPS MEANS MORE COFFEE. So do tangents and run-on sentences and "and" and being distracted and this rainy weather is so pretty I really shouldn't be sitting by a window. Why do my Hispanic neighbors have a massive stove outside in their minuscule backyard? Isn't that illegal? Are they illegal? KIDDING KIDDING KIDDING. (But really, aren't we all illegal in one way or another?)

Oh yeah, anyway, my terrifying and aggressive and confrontational ex's ex. Yes. That's what I was sort of talking about. About which I was sort of talking. Is that grammar? What is grammar? Where is my grandma? Heaven. Basically, the lessons of my past two dreams can be summed up in a couple of words, the words being THESE words: Don't run away from uncomfortable situations and uncomfortable people. And if you ever find yourself trapped in a teepee with four rabid dogs and the ghost of Lyndon B. Johnson, do NOT begin frying bacon while humming the theme song to Good Times.

Good times indeed.

chronic

I keep dreaming about him and it pisses me off.

Okay, it doesn't piss me off, but it does make for some melancholy mornings when the haze of what once was is still fresh on my mind. Again. Over and over and -- and I thought this was over? I thought he and I were over, which I am 1,000% sure we are, but not according to my subconscious mind. And so yes, it does piss me off because I want the dead to stay buried. I don't want to be visited by zombies every time I hit the pillow. Let me be the one who does the feasting; I'm bored of starving.

But in the early morning light I remember the way he laid his head in my lap while we played with the dying grass in the park. We said the insects were neon for some reason and we created canyons out of leaves. How could I have known in that moment that we were drowning?

blizzard

I get up close and personal with the lies I tell myself daily. I take off my shoes and get cozy. I curl up with the fictional pages of my life and wonder what I'll use as a bookmark. The ticket stub from the movie we saw together to escape the desert heat? The movie was foreign and so were you. None of our languages made sense. Maybe I can use the coupon for detergent I'll never buy as my bookmark. Why not use something clean to hold my place among the stained? Or I can always just remember, though I'm prone to forget.

And then I pick up the book and flip through the pages only to finally see that they are blank. What is the plot? Who are the characters? Where is the surprise twist at the end? Does somebody get tied to the tracks? Was it all just a dream? Who's the real villain behind the mask? The butler? I was too focused on where I wanted to pause that I failed to realize I never began.

But silence screams off the page just as much as letters that form words do, if not more. My life has been caught in a snowstorm, apparently. What has been buried in the blizzard will stay there until I get out my shovel and start to dig.

Where did the snow begin? When will it end?