Victorious

The casual acts of your forgetting are so quiet that it seems almost silly to point to them as the epicenter of calamity. 

To think that what happens one summer could ever possibly have a lasting effect is the bright mark of your youthful naivety, the lightheartedness in which you enter into depths beyond what you can know. Everything seems so transient during the height of youth that you never realize your relativity doesn’t dictate the realities of the concrete world.

Someone snaps a photo of you two: your tectonic plates are touching. Your fingertips set off tremors; your smiles unaware, as if you think you can continue your tea party in an earthquake.

My wrath seeks the wrong target, but I do not care about collateral damage – wrath is process, it is nature, it cannot be implored otherwise. No past hardships can protect you, no pleasantries can persuade; not even an equally mighty and righteous force of nature can stand in the path and say “it was my fault.”

To simplify a person, a life full of intricacies, experiences, hidden revelations, dreams bright and beautiful – to take a world and crush it down into one moment and dismiss every other detail is a power so mighty and righteous in its destructive force and yet… so soothing. 

Your erasure is the most violent act I can commit without laying a hand on you. A silence where you once existed, a final settling of dust.

I withdraw all potential. I erase your existence. I will not make eye contact, your name is a dead language.

Victorious.

That feeling you get when your boyfriend turns you down for sex in the bathroom at the Memphis International Airport

A few days ago you asked your boyfriend how fast he could orgasm. “That’s like asking someone ‘how bad of a meal can you cook?’” he quipped.

With some mental and possibly physical preparation: 3-5 minutes.

So here you are in Memphis International Airport on an hour and a half layover. You’re walking down Concourse B when you see not one, but two family-style private bathrooms along a tiny hall.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! “You wouldn’t even have to risk being found out, because no one would ever be standing in line for your specific bathroom, they’d just cycle through the other one. Perfect cover.”

The whole reason you want to have sex in the Memphis International Airport is not because you feel some intense lust that starts quivering in your loins and then rattles your brain into a sex madness powerful enough to yank someone into a private corner and cover them in bodily fluids -  it is because Tennessee is an island surrounded by a sea of states you and your boyfriend have yet to have sex in. It’s to color in another state on a map.

So it’s a little ridiculous that when your boyfriend responds “Ehh, I’m just not feeling that sexy right now,” that you immediately leap to the conclusions that you are no longer sexy enough to demand impromptu sex in moist public bathrooms, and that “maybe if I was someone new you’d go for it.”

And then you realize that you’ve just emotionally blackmailed your boyfriend over a sex game - something that, if the genders were reversed, you’d katana a guy’s dick off over. 

It was that easy to be so wrong.

I'm too vain to admit defeat.

Imago

Sometime between this post and the last, I became an adult. It feels about the way I expected, which is to say that it's even more confusing than I could have ever anticipated.

I still listen to the same music, but now I also listen to people justify poor job performance. I'm still a rabble-rouser, but now I'm a professional rabble-rouser which sullies its purity, and strangers feel justified in calling me a fake even if there's nothing fake about 80/90/100 hours a week. I still am asking the same questions about who I am, but I've also gotten good at answering follow up questions like "When you had that life-changing experience that made you realize all the good and bad in the world, where did you fall between goals and projections? Did you have to develop a team along the way? How many people were involved?" The best writing I do these days can in a couple of minutes secure a candidate a salaried position but then doesn't matter at all.

 The last ten months have made me a much better person, or a person I love more with less unconvinced posturing and fewer post-it notes saying "if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?" I've recovered everything I liked about myself before I was paralyzed with fear and anxiety and puberty, but at the cost of having no time to ever divest myself of Boss Cara and be myself. I have a beautiful little apartment in a cheap but swank part of town that I haven't seen in the daylight for three weeks. There's a cat at the foot of my bed that gnaws on my toes each night that doesn't even have a name even though we've swapped his spit for my blood several times. I work with my potential best friends but I don't have enough time to come up for air to even realize that potential until we're sitting together in packed-up bedrooms or crowded bars saying goodbye as they move onto the next young adult adventure, and the cycle continues.

The people on the inside of this crazy mess of political organizing are all exhausted and the people outside of it don't appreciate the time you invest in them. I'm giving you my most precious possession: four hours on a Tuesday night that cuts deep into my sleep and jeopardizes my thin façade of professionalism as I roll into work in the same green jeans Wednesday morning. I'm calling you on my way home from work, squeezing you into my 20 minutes of alone time each day, only to have you respond that you're feeling too lazy for a "long" chat. I desperately need an escape back into the world where people do more than sleep and work, but no person wants to be an escape, and it's too obvious to everyone involved that that's what my friends have become.

 Last year I had all the time in the world, and I squandered it on being the lamest, most larval version of myself: rolling over in bed to smoke a mid morning cigarette at 5 pm while Civ 4 loaded; spending 16 hours a day making plans until winter turned into summer - I could count the number of things I remember from that one long day on one hand. After an intense transformation, I've emerged a butterfly only to find out the beautiful summer's only 98 hours long, one hour a day at a time. I've come out of my shell, only to remember all butterflies are destined to ever do is migrate back and forth, inherently unable to enjoy themselves.

Unpacking my library

Not everyone seems to have the same relationship with books that I do. After unpacking my library, which has been in storage for four months, I sat in a meditative state surrounded by stacks of my books, my gaze lovingly caressing the exposed spines. There you are, beat up copy of White Oleander from late high school; I haven't even flipped through your pages, Portable Dorothy Parker (I only bought you because I love Penguin Classic Deluxe Editions) but I love you just the same. My body floods with relaxed excitement, potential for both curling up and expanding at the same time, overwhelming and comforting.

I approach the idea of not being able to read every fascinating, well-crafted exploration of the human experience, every clever turn of phrase or twist or piece of witty dialogue, every in-depth analysis of our world, as an anxiety-inducing tragedy. I look up from my trance, panicked, and say to Greg, "What if I don't even finish all of these books?"

This is why I keep neglecting to get a job, lurking LibraryThing instead of LinkedIn. Funny how leaving an institution of higher learning awakens real desire to learn. Four years and thousands of dollars later, where has college left me?

I could have had four years of job experience and 200+ books behind me. Instead, I stare at my library like a lover who's slipped through my fingers, imagining what could have been, what late night conversations and deep connections and afternoons sitting silently in the sun enjoying each other's mere presence we could have had, if only I hadn't spent those four years with a moron who only cared about basketball.

I wish to be left alone with my happiness

I wish to be left alone with my happiness. I feel like this is a small request to make, but in the face of a world that trades in breaking people's willpower and telling everyone how they've failed, even if all they've ever done in life is worked and attempted to succeed, asking to be left alone with one's happiness is really the greatest request of all.

I may not have work nearly as hard as some people in certain fields, but in the field of my own, simple happiness, I think I'm reaching mastery. I enjoy reading, cooking and eating delicious things, talking to friends about their lives, speaking precisely, taking notes and making lists, smiling at people walking tiny dogs, and trying not to make the world a worse place for anyone. Simple things.

But nothing is simple, and the world is not concerned with my or anyone's simple happiness. No one looks anyone in the eyes anymore and says "your intentions are earnest and good." When I wake up in the morning I'm most proud of the fact that I took the time the last couple of weeks to make sure that I learned how to treat myself and others with more respect.

But there's no where on a resume to put that, and therefore it is useless.
This is the best way I can think of to describe my unhappiness. Like a calm pond that no one can resist throwing a rock into, I feel their disruption ripple on and on and on.

Knowledge is poptarts

Sometime in the last decade, having three weeks with a library book went from ludicrously long to just enough time. When I was thirteen, I was making weekly trips to the library to check out foot-tall stacks of books. Scratch that first part, actually - when I was thirteen, I was volunteering for the library on a bi-weekly basis helping run their summer reading program. For my girl scout silver award, I spent forty hours scrubbing the sticky residue from years of old due date stickers off the front covers of reinforced hardback children's books. Just me, the Berenstain Bears. and all the tikes at the tiny kids table huffing paint thinner fumes for hours.

The library near where we're living frustrates me with its glamourous high ceilings and self-checkout lanes. The libraries I grew up with in Dallas - underfunded, musty, squat brown buildings from the late sixties, closed Thursdays (the day that every kid is banging out that end-of-week assignment) - were bastions of safety and security for all things old. Old books that no one would ever see stocked on the shelves of the bright, shiny Borders down the street (itself now an antiquated entity on its slow way out, thanks to the even brighter, shinier internet) and old souls. There was a camaraderie amongst the library-dwellers, slow movers in an accelerated world, disinterested in newfangled forms of entertainment and knowledge acquisition, leaving the tiny island of tan, half-decade old computers untouched in favor of getting a sweet spot next to the windows to examine crisp, yellowing pages closer.

The Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library is internet in solid form. At its core are table after table after table of flat screens. Beeps and clicks are more prevalent than the crackle of plastic-encased dust jackets. Bright florescent light bounce off the perfect white walls, creating a mood more like a supermarket than a cavern of centuries of knowledge. Everything is new, fast, instant, all inclusive - everything a book isn't. A monument to modern age intellect and desire - we invented knowledge, you know.

The most telling part is that the old people don't come there. It's all travel coffee muggers in the armchairs. As I confidently navigate the stacks, people are drawn to me to teach them the archaic skill of finding information by hand. I love the internet - I hang out on fucking Reddit and have a unmanageable blog roll - but I respect books. Reading Jezebel might give you a taste of what it's like for victims of sexual assault - it provides the latest talking points, keeps you abreast of legislative developments - but rereading Alice Sebold's Lucky hit me like an earthquake. Food bloggers are hip in their exploration of forgotten foods, but no one tells you the history of your dinner the way M.F.K. Fisher does, beautifully intertwining history and culinary artistry. Books separate the wheat from the chaff, they work harder, they're more passionate, more complete. They've been tested, seen more eyes and more red pen rewrites. The don't win the race, but when has speed ever been the basis of understanding?

There's a scene from The L Word that's always stuck with me, and not because it's the prelude to one of the hottest trysts in the series. Bette, director of a prestigious visual arts center, hires carpenter Candace (who is the first and only person to make overalls sexy) to complete some renovations on the building. They have this exchange about quality right before Candace is hired:

Candace: Have you ever seen this?

[She hands the notebook back to Bette. On a page, she's drawn a triangle. On each side of the triangle, she's written a word: Fast, Good and Cheap.]

Candace: There are three sides to the triangle, see?

[Candace sits down in a chair in front of Bette's desk.]

Bette: Fast, good, cheap.

Candace: Yeah. You can have any two of the three in combination, but you can never have all three together.

Bette: Of course you can. I mean, if you have enough money - (looks at triangle) Oh. Right, then it wouldn't be cheap. Okay.

Candace: You can have fast and good. But that takes a big crew of skilled, highly-paid workers.

Bette: And I can have fast and cheap, but then the end product would probably look like shit.

Candace: You can have cheap and good.

Bette: (smiling) That's the one I want.

Perhaps the top .00001% of written knowledge has been created via the fast, good, expensive route - but this route also requires something even rarer that brings together the primary three qualities: luck. As the media continues to face financial crisis, and as huge hunks of the population (myself included) fancies themselves deserving of being published, having their voice and analysis heard, the world teems with the ability to create fast and cheap. But fast and cheap is only good for profiters - not those who want to consume knowledge. We deserve better than new, fast, cheap. Fast and cheap is pop tarts. You might feel full, but you're really starving.