Closet Shrine- Child

I wound up with a shrine because it felt right. The weaving became an integral part of this worship; it’s a cloth that holds magical powers, an heirloom, a piece of cloth full of ancestry and awareness of time and magical faith. The relics are artifacts from my growing up, my confirmation saint, a memento from a first love, the tag from my beloved dead dog. All seem appropriate to me. It’s a collection, ideally, in my mind, gathered odds and ends into a closet as a private place of reflection. The ladder fits a childs body, its a childs imagination and faith in objects and believing. It’s a fantasy. It’s an offering to my grandmother. An acknolwedgement of my heritage- my way.

Love

Sometimes the way Gabriel Garcia-Marquez talks about love it seems to be a delusion, it seems to be, in fact, an element of magical realism, a far-fetched, magical thing we are made to believe in.

The way, for instance, Fermina decides upon maryring the doctor Urbino, after a long torture of vehemently denying him in his advances, and then accepting him; from the moment she accepts his proposal to their first night in bed together nude to her true happiness returning home from her honeymoon young and pregnant and in love. It’s as good as a spell. As unbelievable yet as true, as blatantly true, as an old man asking a plague of ants to leave a farm.

Walking on Eggshells

In my memory everything is sharp and clear even though it is wrong.

For example, everyone is smoking these long blue cigarettes turning everyone’s mouths blue and it’s all so peculiar and specific:  five long slow inhales followed by five bored irritated exhales, a blue something dripping down chins and into messy shirt collars. Trails of smoke disappearing into the brown-green Atlantic. Brown-green, the color of algae and crisp school mornings. We all cross and uncross our legs at the ankles saying how we were “bored as fuck,” which is something we used to say. A strange cabaret of inflated geniuses lined up all in a row. Sequins and top hats and short shorts. That part’s not even an exaggeration, and instead of canes we have didgeridoos. And if I’m there too, the asthma mouse, then I know at least some of these details must be wrong. Something like a chorus line, passing on gestures like old hat.

“What did you do this weekend Miss Anna K?”

“Nothing, sweet nothing, dear Vronsky.”

I’m sure we laughed about it.

It seems to me as if it were every weekend, but it couldn’t have been; gas was expensive and only a few of us had jobs. Food services mostly, and me in the bookstore.  And Norfolk was only a city over, but we still had homework to do come Friday night. I forget sometimes that we were still kids. I forget about the weekends when I sat around watching the men I knew play pokemon in someone’s garage.  I think that the time we dressed up in sheet-togas at the tourist beach and performed a ritual sacrifice of fish sticks to the giant statue of King Neptune must have been pure brilliance or a dream. But it was just a bunch of kids fucking around, showing off brains to that one burned-out hippie who really dug us. Really thought we were something wild.

So then maybe it was every other weekend that we drove over into Norfolk, windows down even in the winter filtering out our basement music obsessions and leaving it scattered down the interstate. I didn’t have a car, so maybe that’s why I remember everyone’s cars so vividly. The clusters of bumper stickers, the peeling, rusted roofs, the one air freshener that I always thought was or wanted to be play dough. I fiddled with anything I could pick up in those cars on our trips to Norfolk, distracted, anxious, preemptively disappointed conjuring up self-fulfilling prophecies. There was some sort of transition that occurred, a mental hyper sleep that wore off once I finally stepped into the record store and moved from one particular mass to another. We bled out of the beach and into the manifestations of everything we mocked and everything we were.

And here’s what everyone says about these kinds of places, that everyone who tries to be different in the same way winds up being just like everyone else. And we were and we weren’t, it’s hard to say. There is something more in the air, less in the body, less in the way we dressed or moved our hands or leaned against walls projecting apathy, laughing about the things we knew. There was something in our off-ness, our almost there, our association with the cool that kept us rooted. And at every show I remember pretending to care, but we always wound up in the back looking at the crappy art, trying not to fall asleep on the crude Victorian-esque couch interrupting the crates of records against the wall. Our mismatched socks made love while we bitched about whatever we could think of to destroy and assert our knowing.

When the venue changed to the white upper middle class Italian restaurant which, for some reason, they thought was a good idea, I knew as I tried rocking out to my favorite bands in a dining booth to avoid blocking the views of thirty-somethings sipping wine, I knew that it was over and I wondered what it had all meant. I always carried my harmonica and he always ruffled my hair but none of that meant anything, and it still doesn’t mean anything but enchantment.

The drive home from Norfolk didn’t mean much. I left a lot in the city, and by the time I left I was usually interested only in falling asleep and forgetting. Washing off the suburban turned art kid gig. Come Monday, we had our homework done, or at least knew who to copy off of. Come Monday, the genius cabaret would start its weekly run, and I would fall back into it all.

(from my fiction class)

On Passive Sadness

Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. Lately I can’t really get to sleep until everyone in my house is asleep. That stage of being half-awake? Mostly asleep with a part lingering in wakefulness. I have a habit of composing letters/ novels/ poems as I’m drifting off to sleep. Have to keep a stack of post-its and a pen on my nightstand in case I need to scribble something down. Precognative dreams. What’s up with those? And I’ve had some awful dreams. Death death death and ghosts.

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold a death is predicted ambiguously through a series of symbols and religious/ “mythical” beliefs. Characters observe it in passing, but the author lays out the magic for us as point of fact to lead the story onwards.

I remember when I was a little girl going to sleep in my father’s boyhood home a chorous of bodyless (read: disembodied heads) ghosts sang me to sleep. Seriously. I didn’t tell anyone about it until years later; my dad said he saw stuff there too.

Not too long after we were camping on the beaches of an area notorious for pirates long long ago. I remember peeking out of my tent and seeing a translucent man in 18th century sailor dress standing on the dunes not too far in the distance.

For some time I saw a black cloaked figure hover above the ground and float slowly across my backyard. A few times, then never again.

When I was little I thought that maybe I was posessed by a demon. That the devil had control of my thoughts. I had thoughts I couldn’t explain, that I didn’t want. That scared me and frustrated me.

At some point I started announcing that I would die young, probably before the age of 25. I don’t know where that came from.

Sometimes I’m afraid that it’s all true. Especially since I believe in the ghosts.

This is What I’m Talking About

http://www.regretsy.com/2009/10/05/fish-and-foul/

On Ghosts and Dreams

This is another short story I wrote for my fiction class, but it relates. Followed by slightly unrelated commentary.

Heat is an expansive blue; a baby blue, but yes, there is heat there. A baby blanket blue smothering and suffocating. She didn’t mean to do it, didn’t mean to hurt it and I feel guilty for the association even as I know she’s coming to make good.

Though now I can’t discern whether or not it is there by suggestion (that heat!), a genius of color, or the bright, bright lights making me sweat in this barbed wire wool sweater. Who dressed me this morning? Couldn’t have been me.

In the blue there is a circle made to look like a sphere with its shadow, with its glint of light, a stroke of white paint. I can feel her in that little bit of white. To me it resembles a doorknob, too hot to touch in a stop drop and roll kind of way. But I long to touch it, to make it a sphere, to turn it and open the invisible door that I know must exist because I want it to be there. I want to go through. To be in the heat. The heat is easier than where we are now.

I’m having a moment and I think maybe it’s because of the heat, maybe it’s the heat getting to me. I’m having a Kansas-Dorothy out of Kansas moment. A Glinda the Good Witch moment. That circle, it’s becoming a sphere, and it’s glowing and getting bigger and I want to touch it, to turn it, but I know there is no door there under the glowing heat. The blinding heat. No longer blue but white, but a white that is mostly red or orange; a blue like water so hot or so cold it could be either extreme. I remember running baths as a child and not knowing; she always had to test the waters.

Either way it kills the nerves. Dulls the senses. Puts you to sleep just to avoid the not knowing.

Of all the ghosts I’ve seen the one I’ve been most afraid of is her. With the dark eyes and olive skin I always wanted and were buried with her even though I have nightmares of those colors being smeared across canvas. It’s funny that in my mind she should be a doorknob. She thinks so too, as we stand there together in the heat. We were never good with heat. But it’s easier now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams and imaginations. I get carried away, a lot. Especially with phone calls. If I’m expecting a phone call and it doesn’t come on time, I immediately jump to the worst.

Last night Bryan was going for a bike ride after class at 9, and I was worried about him because it would be dark. When I called him when he was suppose to be home and his phone was dead, I panicked. And my internet wasn’t working, so I couldn’t check for him online. But I decided he was ok, and resolved to just go to bed. But of course I couldn’t fall asleep. Everytime I closed my eyes I saw horrific accidents and I started to believe my imagination- just a little bit. My breathing got heavier, and by the time some tears worked their way into my eyes I knew I needed to try calling him again. Thank goodness he picked up that time, because I was pretty shaken up. And of course he was ok. I knew he was ok. But why do I do that? It happens a lot. To convince yourself of something so unnecessary? To run away with fear.

I remember when my dog died, and I cried for hours, curled up on my bed, pounding pillows and throwing pillows. Pillows had a rough day, that day. I cried more than when my great grandmother died. I felt bad about that. But isn’t that funny?

If I was a Child

Still haven’t seen the mouse. But while I was doing dishes other day I spoke aloud to the kitchen addressing him. I wonder if he left. Wouldn’t that be something?

Magical realism: taking the unknown, supernatural, surreal, otherworldly, MAGICAL, and turning it into something realistic and believable.

Sounds a lot like life.

We insist when we’re children (at least I did) on never ceasing to believe in things like unicorns. And then somewhere we do stop believing in unicorns. What’s so different when we’re children? It wasn’t being naive. It was a willingness to believe something I knew I shouldn’t. Someone once asked me if I believed in dinosaurs.

It’s an interesting thought. What makes me believe in you? I don’t have to believe in you. I don’t have to believe in any of this. We choose to believe in life. And we can choose to believe in unicorns. Man, unicorns are pretty creatures.

Edgar Cayce

“Each one who has a soul
has a psychic power…”

http://www.edgarcayce.org/

Rupert

We have a mouse living in our kitchen; my roommate has named him Rupert.

I thought that maybe I might ask Rupert to leave in lieu of setting up a trap, but I haven’t seen him for a few days, though I’ve heard him and I know he’s still there. The problem is, if I don’t see him I don’t know how to talk to him. I can’t call out to him- Rupert is the name we gave him, it’s not his real name and I don’t want to be insulting by just shouting “Hey Mouse!”

So I guess I’ll have to wait.

Thanks, Leroy Bananas

I had an interesting discovery today practicing piano. For awhile now I’ve been working on this Bach Invention (Invention in A Minor) and I love playing it even though I make a million mistakes because playing it makes me feel like a master (even though it’s relatively tame for an Invention). If you are unfamiliar with music of this kind, an Invention was invented to make people pull their hair out and twist up their fingers: essentially, it’s a song with two voices, that is, meoldy in both parts, the trebel and the bass clef. It’s hard. And I love it. It’s a great finger exercise, a great way to develop control on all technical levels.

So out of some silliness I brought my roommate’s sock monkey to practice with me, and I sat him on my lap and had the idea to give him my headphone. I began to play the invention without listening to the notes, and I found that my fingers stumbled in the same places, paused before the same passages, but my fingers knew, without hearing, that they were wrong. I could feel in my hands the difference in spacing, the knowledge that my fingers just weren’t landing right. I’m not sure where this obvservation is going, but it was neat, and filled me with some strange sense of the re-newed confidence I’ve been searching for in my playing. I think it comes down to knowing my hands and trusting them. They are my art, and they know what they’re doing.