let’s go back to 2000…

Taking a cue from Ian, my cuz, I think I’m going to start posting some old shit every once in a while, particularly (in my case), old shit that maybe never turned into anything.

This is a draft from round about August 2000. The title is because I thought it would be the first of a series about this period, this moving, but it didn’t pan out that way.

Part 1

I don’t believe that anyone really knows how to pack. I’ve done it dozens of times: home to school, school to home, home to Dublin, Dublin to home, home to St. Petersburg. School to San Diego. It’s never really gotten any easier. Regardless of planning, regardless of items weighed in hand—give, store, or throw away—there are always the crunch hours when life seems impossible if just packing up and moving is this hard. It always descends into throwing and pushing and squashing coffee cups onto old poems, towels wrapped around books, stray bits of makeup and pens scraped together and chucked, afterthought underpants pressed into crevices like mortar. I didn’t know how much this house had taken hold of my shit until I did the last walk-through the sixth and seventh time today, trotted out with my armloads to my car already impossibly full, fuck, fuck, where am I going to put this, biting my lip and flinging through the back window.

The 12X8 trailer that Cullen rented seemed excessive to me until I saw with my own hands how much shit can fit into a space. He’s going through this day the way he does most things: word by word, banging it out, stacking things. He knows every task that needs to be accomplished before he can lock the doors and get in the van. His eyes are very wide and wild, like he’s changing their depth of field by force of muscles, like he’s holding every task inside of his head at once. I am just the opposite: I wash over everything at once again and again, in layers. All of my clumsy and loose-limbed qualities are out in full right at the surface. No object is safe from the brush of my hips and breasts as I pass, no glass is immune to my flying hands. My eyes are hooded and erratic. I take up much more space than usual.

Ian’s not going back to Ireland until October, but today is my last day. He helped us load up the trailer as if it were his life’s work. He left for his job late in the afternoon. He laughed and said that a quick goodbye is best. He didn’t kiss me until I called him back and did it myself, once, the firm fraternal kisses we’d become accustomed to. He pulled out of the driveway and I folded up on the back steps and cried like an exhausted child.

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.