Sometimes

I get rewarded for being like I am, all sloppy and lovey-like.

We went to California for my sister-in-law Angel’s high school graduation. Most of the week we also spent with her boyfriend, who seems to spend most days hanging out with A and the family. I like that. My boyfriends were always dragging me off someplace; many of them never met my family.

He came to Ben’s birthday party on the beach. He had his graduation party at the house in conjunction with Angel’s. Most of their time together seems to be spent with the family. He hangs out. He pitches in. He helps. He talks when called upon, and he’s quiet and tranquil, too. He won me over in about the first five minutes and then kept growin’ on me. I told everyone who’d listen, including his girlfriend (kitchen, me: drunk on tequila, middle of the night) how much I thought of him.

I found out he had been nervous to meet me and Ben, and I was actually nervous to meet him, too (me? Nervous to meet an eighteen-year-old boy?). At the graduation party, after knowing him about a week, he thanked me for the card and few dollars me and B had given him. I gave him a hug and told him, without thinking first, “I love you, Omar,” as if I’d known him all my life, and immediately thought, Now, why did you say that? He’s gonna think you’re weird, and that’s ’cause you are!

But he responded, casual-like, without missing a beat: “I love you, too.”

Now, how do you like that?

Moira Kay

this is for you
this is for you, Moira Kay, not yet formed, not yet known,
not yet knit in your mother’s womb

this is for the dream of you that your father had:
your name, Moira Kay, he dreamed your name,
he dreamed little shirts and little shoes
golden-brown hair
(like mine when I was that small)
and nothing more

Moira
Moira Kay
Moira Kay

or whatever your name is

this is for the day
the day that you are made
the day when your path is unblocked and you rush into me like a flood

this is for the first time
you feel your sex heavy like a river dragging on you
dragging on you like a river that wants to carry you someplace
or drown you
not knowing whether to laugh or scream
for your reflection that begins to melt and replace itself
with someone else
the someone that you think they see

this is for the day that you forget what you look like

this is for the day that you remember
this sings to whatever reminds you
it stretches its arms to whatever brings you back

this is for you
slung on one hip as we blaze foreign paths
the three of us anywhere not mattering but together
fearless your blue eyes/brown eyes OPEN open
passed hand-to-hand by black hands and white hands and brown hands
tongues of all tongues shaping to say your name
Moira
Moi-rah
your hand holding fast my hand your other hand holding fast your father’s hand

this is for the hour of your coming
this is for the moment you open me like the first time I was opened
from inside this time
this is for the moment I and the world and all hearts open wide to receive you
this is for my body yawning heart and body unhinging to let you out
should it ever come
this is the herald of your arrival

pasando

I can be okay with music alone, with alcohol alone, with one emotion-tapping stimulus at a time. But put ‘em together, even in moderate amounts, and estoy perdida. I’m lost. Meltdown.

Went to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with B and E, and spent most of the not-even-particularly-great opening act crying, trying not to cry. In the middle of the crowd, the all-ages crowd. B and E took turns hugging me, hugging me like I was a falling-down building and they could hold me up with the sheer force of their love. B kept tugging out the hem of his black t-shirt and holding it out for me to wipe my face on, like a little hammock for sorrow. And B kept saying, Be here with me, be here now.

Karen O had her fingers dipped in something shiny and black, and her hair in a short kinda slick little Dorothy Hammill cut, and this Cheshire grin, and her arms swung and swayed out in these elegant slow little poses, but the best was every so often the elegance would just slip from her like a shawl and she’d bounce and dance and windmill her slim little arms over her head and she looked about ten years old for a minute or two, then stomp and wail like a factory machine stamping stainless steel parts. And then it was back to all vampy glam.

You’re leaving. You’re never gonna come back.
C’mon, I’m gonna come back.
(Sure, sometime, but maybe not to live. And maybe not. I won’t be able to talk to you or see you whenever I want, and maybe you won’t be at our Bible meeting every week anymore, and you won’t sit at the kitchen table while I cook dinner anymore, and maybe B won’t have someone to play Madden with anymore, just like that.)
(K, you won’t be there to tell me to have some tea, to go to sleep, to go put on some sparkly eyeshadow. Maybe no one will tell me what I should say the next time that mean person bothers me, maybe no one will help teach me to take care of myself.)
(We help each other feel more human, all of us.)
(I’m afraid.)

R?
R_grace?
Be here.
Be here, now.

first day

I was like a nervous mommy today. Only mommies don’t make their kids four-egg omelettes…well, maybe their teenagers. Nervous wife…only I’m not nervous, really…my guts are full of butterfly promise. Ben usually makes breakfast for me, but today I stuffed him with an omelette, apologized that I didn’t have time to put vegetables in, only cheese, bugged him about whether he had enough warm clothes, fussed about the long day ahead (he has classes, and then work), asked about books and notebooks. He fell right into step: bleary-eyed fatigue, too tired to be excited right now, looking forward to classes but perhaps not to the 14-hour day ahead, not exactly thinking about the fact that today is the first day of the rest of his life. But at one point I put my hands on each side of his dear face and looked into it, and saw little Ben swimming up out of the years of his life, saw the open hope in the way his eyebrows turn up in the middle, in the way his face is relaxing and opening like a window…

I am so proud to be his wife. I am so proud he is my husband.

What are sisters for

So I had a great trip home, punctuated by a horrible Christmas Eve. I had two arguments with my 19-year-old sister, who I drove to Detroit and then back to Kalamazoo. These days she generally seems so ice queen, why-don’t-you-just-drop-it-Rachel, although if you confront her with any accusation of being uncommunicative or “cold,” she has been known to fly into genuine fits of rage, even tears, however uncharacteristic.

(We grew up sharing a bedroom. I used to come home from middle school torments and cry to her in her bed, charging her to grow up and defend the defenseless, to never pick on anybody, and she would nod solemnly and agree, “Okay, Rachel.” I think I knew even then that she would be better equipped to get through school unpickedon, that she was a likely cantidate. I think I knew that she was going to be cooler than me, in middle school anyway.)

At one point during this last visit, I actually said to her, all bitter and shit, “And about the ride home? You’re welcome. You’re welcome.”

I really did. Ben was there. So was Ev. You can ask them.

She never says thank you to me. It’s awesome that she walks around feeling entitled to her own shit, but she doesn’t have much shit of her own to entitled to just yet; she’s walking around feeling entitled to favors from other people, it seems like. To drive her to and from Kalamazoo without a word of thanks just makes me start to feel like a sucker. Especially after I, albeit in a fucked-up way, told her that it bothered me.

The thing that really sucks about all this is that I adore her. I think she walks on water the rest of the time, and I’m amazed by her strength and resiliency, however untested it might be at this point in her life. I left the house for a while on Christmas Eve., cried an inordinate amount, and drove around aimlessly, talked to -I- for a while, who said, “I don’t know what to tell you, except to say that it won’t always be this way.” He’s right, and he also says that she probably isn’t as indifferent as she seems; she just doesn’t know how to say what she means. But now is the time when I feel like I have the most to offer her, now and when she was a younger teenager. But who am I kidding, really. Those were the hardest years of my life, and probably the easiest of hers. But then, how would I know?

I can tell you now!

Ben told me his news over a payphone, and we got cut off, so I didn’t have a chance to ask him if I could tell EVERYONE that…

Ben got into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And not only that.

He was awarded a $6,000 Merit Scholarship just for being so friggin awesome.

Sorry, folks, no babies just yet. Just paintings. Babies in the artistic sense. Art babies. Paint children.

My husband is going to study art at the Art Institute. And he is also going to study Art Education at the Art Institute.

I am so proud of my baby.

familiar routes

Drove home to Detroit this weekend, separate from benjyman (he drove the truck, and I drove the car, so that we could leave the truck in Michigan with my dad to get sold, where trucks are better loved and not ticketed and taxed more for just existing). The sun dropped amazingly fast. I took my secret route, LSD past all the museums, down to 41, all the way down to Indiana before I got onto the 90. I know I just posted an entry asking for new music suggestions, but fall (fall, fotw, fall) is a time when I cycle through the few things I know by heart, and just let them go back to track 1. “Left and Leaving” by The Weakerthans. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I just found this in-between spot in my voice, kind of an undiscovered vocal cord, where I can yell real high where I couldn’t before like Karen O in that one song, “Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick time you take IT!”

I listened to “Seven’s Travels” by Atmosphere because I thought it would wake me up, and when it didn’t–it never does–I called E instead, deciding that talking on the phone was slightly less dangerous than the risk of falling asleep on the road. And talking is the best way to keep me awake. He was at the LAN center killin’ Nazis, but laid down arms for a li’l bit to talk to me. Being on the road, I ended up talking about getting out of Dodge, about these weird flashes of fantasy I get sometimes of getting in the car, buying a ticket and vanishing, and how in certain moments that idea is so overpoweringly seductive. And how hard I find it to explain that it has nothing to do with wanting to leave B, you see. It’s an impulse that I get from time to time for a split second, and I can’t explain it. It’s just that sometimes a picture flashes in my mind of myself in a foreign marketplace, in some landscape, and that thought liberates and excites me so deeply, and my next thought (like the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare), is noticing that I am alone in that place.

E pointed out to me that the only time I’ve traveled abroad was when I was alone, when I was single. Now I have benjyman, now is the time to make a new picture, a new memory. And he’s right, and I do; I want to see everything, I want to do everything, and I want to do it with B. I have a hard time not feeling guilty for panicking sometimes, for the solitude I crave and call by other names. I felt a lot better. I laughed so much, I laughed so much.

I passed Kalamazoo and wondered if it would feel like it did. It did.

We hung up, and I started to get sleepy again almost immediately. I called C, and silently thanked God that I can talk to Memphis or Chicago or fucking whomever I want while I’m blazing down I-94 in the dark. Can’t wait until B has a phone. He was out at a show. We talked about the entry where I wrote about Jesus and someone like me talking on a back porch. He said he’d wanted to comment, but felt it would have trivialized the subject matter, something like, “I think it’s really cool that Jesus says, ‘dude.’” I told him that would have been the perfect comment, and that that interchange was the seed of the whole piece, and that I realized that I was trying to get at the humanity of Jesus, that Jesus got tired, Jesus got thirsty, Jesus needed time to himself. The part of him that crouched on the beach and cooked fish for his disciples (with nail-scars on his hands) who were pulling their boat up on the shore bewildered and frightened, who didn’t know what to expect after his death, and now here he was alive, and then they sat around the fire and ate together, and that was the first thing they did. The man who was also God, the expressed word of God, this eternal force, who had just been killed and resurrected from the dead, saw eating a meal together with his friends as a priority. This might be my favorite scene ever. If I could be present for any event, it might be this one.

I also told him that the voice and personality of Jesus in this poem was maybe 40% inspired by him, and conversations we’d had during his last visit. He responded, “I saw that, but I didn’t want to presume.”

There was pumpkin pie in the fridge when I got in. When B arrived, I put a bite of pie in his mouth and me in his arms. This man. This man.