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.

Dots

I guess I should keep blogging since someone still has my blog at the top of a very short list on the side bar of her's. And I keep reminding myself that I used to be a writer and that Ira Glass said you just have to power through the drudgery of creating a body of work and so it follows that I should just ignore how shitty my writing has gotten lately, maybe.

I guess I'm still an okay writer since I edited that last sentence to have more effective adjectives and nouns, and I've got a twitch in the corners of my mouth about using blog three times in the first sentence.

Blog, blog, blog.

Life's gotten weird the last few months and I've stopped most things I enjoy doing for so long that I've kind of forgotten what those things are, and subsequently who the person was that enjoyed doing those things. According to my new life as a squatter in Alexandria, Virginia, I enjoy playing turn-based strategy games, cooking (the bastion of sanity and identity grounding pre-move me and post-move me), and neurotically documenting hygiene and mood control efforts on a tiny calendar with a code of colored dots.

Did you brush your teeth twice? Dot.
Did you start your period? Dot.
Did you take your (possibly fake helpful, possibly placebo-helpful) homeopathic drugs to keep you (at least thinking you're) sane(ish)? Dot.
Did you take a bath (also mood-altering)? Double dot. (Single dot for shower, less helpful in terms of keeping my muscles from controlling my ability to take criticism).

Things that I supposedly do not like anymore: sunlight, telephonic contact with friends, achievement.

The dots are the only thing telling me anything about myself anymore that I trust. Indisputable, factual records. How can I trust anything else, when I constantly hear conflicting reports about my level of skill, who I truly am, what I can achieve and what I'm worth. My liberal arts degrees have granted me skills and intellectual prowess that are competitive with educations from fancier colleges that cost far more, says my state school, but why do I feel like my brain is at least three years spoiled? What am I really good at? What can I securely put a dot next to to remind myself of what I am and what I've achieved?

The Wire

For a party recently, I shoved my digital recorder into my bra and recorded 3 hours of audio.

I always thought my deliberate, slow speech was full of impact; actually, what it is is that
I sound like Drunky McDrunkerson.

But, I'm very polite.

More than one way to skin a cat

So I made an impromptu visit to my parents this weekend strictly because I felt like I shouldn't stay home alone while my boyfriend went to visit friends in Boston. Reasons for this feeling include: still being afraid of being raped in my own bedroom, thanks to an irresponsible jewish landlady; various unfounded anxieties that my boyfriend will die the moment he leaves my sight, be it from an incredibly premature heart attack or a commercial jet crash; and just generally knowing I'd probably just sit at home alone and watch episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix streaming all weekend and wait for Greg to get back so I can switch back to watching episodes of Sailor Moon and 12 oz. Mouse.

All visits to see my parents make me nervous because relations with my mother have been elevated to threat level red ever since she told me she'd not acknowledge any romantic partner of mine who couldn't put a baby in me (eventually).

This was the nine-eleven of our relationship; I will never forget. As such, much like the U.S., I will leave no opportunity to call her out unturned, completely unrelated or not. If she screws up once, I am there with my verbal artillery at the ready. Or, in this case, a pair of wire-cutting scissors.

Over the past year, my mom has been busy working on the house she and my dad are building a lot down from where they are now. To put this in perspective, my mom has made a jump from a lifestyle of jeopardy watching, solitaire playing, and pork chop microwaving to a full time, year-long, heavily-detailed project. She flips through catalogues of door-hinges, for god's sake. For someone who barely seemed to have a hold on the basic functions of family life, this seems pretty ambitious. Unsurprisingly, certain things have fallen into neglect.

So I get home, put my stuff down, and immediately go upstairs to visit my cats, who hang out in an empty bedroom with wood floors so that Alzheimers doesn't strike and they forget that my dad's shirt isn't the catbox and they saturate the whole house with cat pee, I don't know. And I'm petting K.C., my superfriendly maine-coon barn cat, and it feels like his body is riddled with tumors. And I think, well, it took them a long time to tell me that Felicia, my other cat, had a stroke, so I figure they either haven't noticed or just didn't bring it up.

Except, it's not tumors. It's just huge mats of hair all over his body so tightly wound and close to the skin that it just feels like tumors.

Not a relief, though. Tumors on a 15-year-old cat, you can't blame anybody. A cat covered in mats of hair, however, means he hasn't been brushed in weeks, and someone is at fault. I grit my teeth in silent glee as I tally up more grudge points against my mom. But, I stay silent, mostly because I can hear the arguments about being busy already.

The next day, I decide to take things into my own hands and do something I've done several times before: give K.C. a haircut. Snip off a few clumps of hair, brush out the rest, fix him up. I ask my mom where the scissors are and, in usual my mom form, this launches her into a fifteen minute search for the right pair of scissors,
the pair she bought specifically for this occasion,
so as not to have to use the other pairs of scissors she has
in order to keep them in pristine condition
so as to avoid that dreaded occasion where someone comes over to borrow her scissors
and they're dull or dirty
and she tell everyone in the community, "don't borrow that (mom)'s scisssors, she keeps hers in dreadful order."

I get exasperated incredibly quickly because, of course, it's not about the scissors, it's about
me being queer and the cat being covered in mats of hair and that one time where she dropped me off to get my hair cut and then didn't pick me up for an hour and wouldn't answer her phone because she was deeply in discussion about door hinges and that she hates my best friend for also being sexually incomprehensible and afraid of insects.

So finally I have scissors and I go upstairs and get K.C. and, as usual, K.C. is just happy he has something to rub against that isn't stroked-out Felicia or his own loneliness, so he's purring and squinting his eyes and lolling his head around and I'm holding him still pretty well and snipping off clumps of hair. And these clumps are thick, and so I'm separating them out and clipping them up and everyone's having a great time, and then K.C. turns, and I sort of ruffle his hair, and the kinda pull it back,

And there is a gigantic hole in K.C.'s fur.

And my first thought is - oh my god: fuck you, mom, what is this.

It kinda looked like those craters old people get in their skin from like, i don't know, scratching holes into their skin I guess, or not being able to scab anymore and just falling apart like wet tissue paper. It also looked a lot like the cat I dissected senior year of high school. The dead, skinned cat.

I sat there for a second as my stomach turned over, and then started shouting for help.

K.C. is still purring and lolling his head around, and even though purring is a trauma reaction in cats, it seems like he's still having a pretty good time, even if his shoulder looks more like a saran-wrapped chicken leg than a cat's.

And I'm all wide-eyed and keep saying "why didn't he say anything, why didn't he react" as I hold a clump of hair with a tiny little bit of skin and a few dark red capillaries that look like they've been traced on with the point of a needle. My dad takes a look and tells me I've cut through the subcutaneous level, which is his doctorly way of trying to calm me down, but it doesn't help at all because subcutaneous could mean anything as far as I know. I keep picturing K.C. having a gigantic bald spot for the rest of his life that I have to stare at every Christmas and cry onto, and him not understanding my pain or any pain at all, apparently.

This is, of course, when I decide to start flipping out about the real cause of this: my mother.

My dad drives me and K.C. to the pet emergency room and the whole way there I will not shut up about every single bad thing my mom has done in the past decade which has all led up to there being clumps of hair on my cat and how everything, everything, is always all my fault, especially now, now because I accidentally hurt something trying to help, and how this is always what happens. I am crying in the back seat while trying to comfort my cat as best as a person can limited by a plastic cat carrier with barely finger-sized holes. I am oscillating between explosive hysterics and calm, cold, collected criticisms with sharp, cutting accuracy. At this most opportune moment, I announce that, as long as Greg isn't allergic to him, we will be taking K.C. back with us at fall break. Even though I've just sliced my cat open, I decide that the clumps of hair definitively decides the argument I've had with my parents for four years over whether I can care for my cat at college.

The animal emergency room takes K.C. back and we fill out some forms. I have to tell my dad how old he is and what kind of food he eats, even though I haven't fed him since I left for college. While talking to the doctor, he confuses his pronouns, and the conversation carries on with K.C. as a she, even though I keep correcting both of them. My dad is standing and I'm sitting, so the vet only makes eye contact with him. She jokes and says it's an easy thing to do, slice your cat like a deli meat. "I just did it to my dog recently," she says with the pleasant nonchalance usually reserved for switching to a new shampoo or treating yourself to a manicure. I am thin lipped as they joke, even though she started the conversation telling us that they're kinda backed up and it'll be a few hours until K.C. can be stitched up.

She says 8:30. My dad says we'll be around by 9. He's concerned we'll not have enough time to go out to dinner in the interim. This puts me off food entirely, and we end up having takeout personal pizzas from the grill around the corner.

I am silent all evening, until my dad delivers K.C. into my arms while I'm sitting in bed talking to Greg on the phone about the whole ordeal. K.C.'s shoulder is shaved, with purple stitches criss-crossing a two-inch long cut. Where they gave him an IV at his ankle is also shaved, so he has a little poodle-like puff for a left foot. My dad tells me that while he was sedated they combed out the rest of the knots of hair. K.C. snuggles up against me and rubs his head under my chin, and everything seems okay
until my mom swoops in, scoops him up, and tells me he's not allowed to move around much. I'm left alone in bed with just a tiny fuzzy cat hair tumbleweed.

And for me coming to North Carolina, everyone is worse for wear.

True Love

After two weeks of living in Lawrence, Kansas, my boyfriend still does not know what the KU mascot is called.

Greg Patton is the best story of my life.

Oh, I'll show you "fresh"

Not to do a complete 180 on my audience - wait, yes, because that's exactly how my blogs always go - and go all vagina monologues on your ass, but when the fuck did "fresh" mean code for "YOUR VAGINA SMELLS, HERE LET ME FIX THAT."

I'm fucking serious though. Maybe it's because I'm reading a little book called Cunt and am currently doing my full-on "let's synch with the moon, my body is one with the universe" type bullshit but I am fucking raging over the fact that every single time I buy "sanitary" items I fucking have to learn a new language that involves stylized flowers and ambiguous adjectives written in pink cursive. Why not just explicitly say "perfumed" or "goddamn vaginas are so fucking gross, I wish women looked like Barbies down there."

I take offense that I have to search out the word "unscented" as if I'm some sort of deviant dirty hippie for wanting to stray from the norm of making my vagina smell like fucking grain alcohol, which is exactly what fresh smells like to Always.

Just a question: since my vagina is basically likened to a bloody, festering gash, where's the butterfly-print, perfumed for my pleasure surgical gauze for when I actually have a bloody, festering gash? Oh wait, no, those are fine and permissible. Injuries are accidents, unforeseeable, not my fault. Being a woman is an egregious offense.

In related news, the Women's Studies department thinks I need to have a more communal experience - because all my friends aren't WS majors and I'm not in a goddamn queer campus group - and because of this I probably won't be able to get a little validating piece of paper that says "Cara did far more credits than she even fucking needed to, here's a degree for that."

A Blog of Repeats

I came to Kansas to forget. I walked away from my parents’ car and into my dorm room with its sticky-clean linoleum floors, sat down with Jamie’s friends, and started a new life, a life that I thought would be better than the one I left in a place I never chose for myself. In Kansas, I would make all the choices. I would choose all new friends, people I’d tried to imagine for weeks before school started, blurry faces with cool haircuts, glasses, awkward, gawky, sassy, mixed nuts. I would not make the same mistakes with guys as I did in high school - eventually, I would get rid of them all together. I would pick new places to live, I would decide what’s for dinner, I would set the limits on when my parents saw and heard from me, and not vice versa.

I made all the choices. I alienated myself from my real friends, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I drank and smoked to put a smile on my face the way life never seemed to be able to. My diet’s been inconsistent – I eat chips and salsa for dinner as often as I eat some semblance of a normal meal. I sleep odd hours in places infested with mice, with leaky roofs and doors that don’t shut and lock. I’ve almost ruined my relationship with my parents.

I have a way of throwing away all convention. I want to build everything myself. The way other people have lived their lives is of no matter to me – I will selfishly create my life on my own, my own meanings and understandings, I will forge in the smithy of my soul something something something, yada yada yada.

For the life that I create alone, I will be alone.

For my masterpiece, I will choose the best things with the worst intentions. I will plunge myself into the most challenging situations in life despite not weathering the simplest trials well. I will create a magnum opus of complications so I can say to those around me, look at what a crazy life I live! Think of all the strange tales I will have to tell! This is all fodder for my book. “You live a very Sedaris-y life,” Cay said. It’s a sick pleasure, like taking sugary butterscotch schnapps shots, licking your lips after you gag.

I will paint over the mistakes. I will forgive the people who have hurt me and then not learn from the pain. Instead, I will become them.
I will paint and paint and paint, layer and complicate so much that the past will be unrecoverable and inaccessible. It will be lost in the business of what’s in front of me now. I will repeat. No,

Alone, I will repeat.

Happy Birthday, Antidepressants

I'm so depressed I can't even finish writing a journal entry to myself about my depression, let alone compile the evidence that I will present to whoever I can threaten into seeing me ASAP in order to convince them that I need to be on pills. When it's bad enough that I can put aside my consuming paranoia that antidepressants are just one small step away from sci-fi style social control, it's really bad. When you have a post-it note that lists the things you must focus on in order of importance, and the top two things have to be "eat" and "sleep" because you keep forgetting to do both and really have no desire to even fix those things, maybe it's time to recognize that you are sick in the head.

I literally care about nothing.

The best part is, going to therapy has actually made things worse, since my therapist is under the impression that I have some sort of self-awareness problem, as if years of journaling and writing and blogging have not made me obnoxiously absorbed with my own head. I go in and sit down, and she stares at me until I start talking, and for 50 minutes I just fill the air with concerns that I didn't even know existed, that I might just be making up to make sure I get my $15's worth. I leave empty handed. The one time she gave me something constructive and concrete to do - exercise and change my sleep schedule - I almost jumped up and down with glee. The whole point was to go and figure out how to fix things, to get help. But then at the end of our session this week when I asked her what I could do to make things better, she plainly explained to me that I knew how to fix things, I just needed to do it. "I'm not here to tell you what to do, that won't help you. I'm here to listen and try to understand."

To Lena, later that afternoon: "As a patient and an essayist, ideally, she should be paying me to entertain her, if that's what this is going to be."

It doesn't help that my in-training therapist just seems so goddamn therapisty. She wears turtlenecks, glasses, and solid fabric circle headbands that hold back her perfectly rounded mass of short kinky hair. Her voice is smooth. She is generic in a soothing and reassuring way. When she fails to help, I look at myself and say, she's the sane one, she probably knows what she's doing. Way to fail at therapy again, Cara.

My head is sick, it's that simple. At the slightest trigger it vomits up the most insane, anxious, insecure bullshit it can manage. Tonight I went from being playfully made fun of for my Harry Potter love to questioning my intelligence and self worth, my ability to remember "important things" (including late 18th century painters) or even anything, my skills as a conversationalist, as an intellectual, as a decent girlfriend - all of this in a matter of mere handful of minutes. Everything and anything becomes blown epically out of proportion until something like not cleaning my room becomes the lynchpin in my academic success this semester, in college, success in my work life, in the rest of my life - the fear and panic sweeps in so rapidly. It's a rough time for everyone, being so close to graduation and the uncertain future, but while everyone's house occasionally has a small kitchen fire, I'm like a housing development full of cookie cutter homes with faulty wiring, soaked in gasoline. Every day I trigger in a flash and destroy myself and then wake up and do it again.

Besides, I always wanted some Zoloft to match the pharmaceutical swag post-it notes my first therapist gave me.
It's finally time for the real deal.

Fragment

...it is a delicate balance, a hundred spinning plates atop wobbly dowels, and I haven’t been a circus performer for very long, just street shows for passersby, I haven’t tried to impressed crowds or met the demands of loyal fans. I don’t know what it’s like to have a long-term gig, it’s only my first night and my adrenaline’s pumping, my hands are shaking, I’m running back and forth trying to make sure everything whirls and dances beautifully, that nothing wobbles off while my back is turned, while I overconfidently conduct more plates onto their perches. Keep them all afloat, keep the crowds oooing and ahhing rather than gasping and sighing, collecting their coats and bags and leaving me to sit in the solitude of the harsh spotlight with my plates all crashed on the floor.

Ian S. is sitting on my couch trying to convince me - and we are in a state of easily being convinced - that I'm responsible for his women problems, and I'm worrying he's turning more into Woody Allen by the day, or Spencer Pratt if Ian kept up his loud boisterous way of talking and Spencer Pratt did more downers. He's trying to convince me I'm a cheater and a bad person because I didn't transition seamlessly from euro-traveling singleton to whatever I am now and I'm telling him to chill, motherfucker, chill. "Ian, I'm about to lay some hippie shit on you." "You're about to blow my mind! I really wanna here the hippie shit!"

It wasn't that good. The thorough discussion entertaining the possibility of my mother having a crush on me was far more enlightening.

Things are what we want them to be. 6 hours in South Park and Watson Library thoroughly notating The Subterraneans will teach you that. You want Mardou Fox to be crazy, to be a slutty limitless free-fucking dance of deep sea darkness? You want to blame it on race or drugs or women having "the essence"? You make what you want of things, Leo-Jack and Ian.'

I realized that most of what's going on right now doesn't even matter, which isn't quite helping my depression, but numbers have no feelings and they're the best thing to cling to right now, my number line, my security cable. 10 days. 17 days. 43 days. 60 days. End of the year, free fall

Melinda Remora

Once you start living, everyone else want to latch onto you, commensally. Remora, sucker-fish, along for the ride but not steering the ship. Eating whatever scraps they can get from the actors, the king pins, the sharks of the sea - whatever they can get as long as they don’t take (a) life themselves.

Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!

She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.

Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.

She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.

She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.

I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.

(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)

That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.

Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.

Don't Call It a Comeback

Placing a mirror behind a desk is not conducive to working, Charleston Place Hotel, unless my thesis, or rather, this thesis-distraction blog post were on what types of lighting suit the contours of my face, how to tilt my head just right so that my eyes don't look so deep-seated and tired. Cigarettes and and hitting the sheets at seven a.m. are not treating me nicely. I should stop both, but really I'll just cut back - 3 am a night, 2 cigarettes a day. It's settled.

Against Miley Cyrus's incredibly astute advice for America's youth, I'm documenting the shit out of my life lately, and in turn I'm living it more, not less - although I guess playing sports "or something" might do me some good. I'm going out and seeing more of the people that will soon be out of my grasp; I'm getting on planes and crossing the country on a monthly basis; I'm putting miles on my car and I'm never home on the weekends. I've filled paperback moleskin notebooks with musings and scenes, fleeting thoughts and undeveloped projects. Scraps that I'll never do anything with: "luxury is hiring a cab just to sleep in the backseat," "at half-squint, my eyes look like pheasants," "all the women in this paragard brochure are wearing wedding rings - intentional?" I've written reviews of contributors to NPR's voices, talking about Maureen Corrigan's crisp, appley c's; I'm cataloguing podcasts, treating them like advice from well-respected mentors. I'm going out, noticing more, caring less; I'm reevaluating the standards I've evaluated my life by these past, oh, 17 years, and I think(?) that's okay.

But as much as I'm writing, or taking notes, or rambling, or really whatever you call all this incessant journaling, margin-scribbling, and post-it note sticking, nothing beats having something polished and public. Which is why I want to come back to this, even if it's slowly and scarily becoming more public with every person who mentions they've seen it. Even if almost all I can write are transcripts of therapy sessions and barely inconspicuous love letters. Even if I can't seem to ever make this thing cohesive. As good as raw is, complete and concise are nice, too. More polish, more editing, more.

English 334: Kerouac & Ginsberg

Class notes:
Mills. Channels. Whistler. Lowell. Betty Davis. Kerouac memorial. Textile history museum. Palpable locations.
Oral biography. A shower of roses. Rose. When the flood comes. Canonization. Sprawling. Gary Snyder. Schneider? Snyder. Theater. Oscar Wilde. Lecture tour. April 1882. Liberty Hall. Parochial school. Children's books. Dead at the time. Maggie Cassidy. Inch along the ground. Wrinkly tar. Ulysses's soap. Drizzly November day. The Shadow. Silver Tin Can. Self polishing wax. Hypnotic power. Margot Lane. Didn't bother to put in a plot. Balzacian. Rosebud palace. Like asking water to be wet. 12 people. Haunted. Murmur, mummy, elements, moment.

Memories and thoughts and dreams - go back and forth, seamlessly, same place. Like shrooms.

Mesh of memories. Baby in the river bed. Visions. Mythologized. Color.

Parallel Notes:
Hookah. Spelling. Palpable? Sailor Moon. Canadian kids TV. Eighties hair. Redhead, boots. Kevin. Greg. Day desk calendar. Hershey's Hugs. Belgium shells. Au Marche. Downtown. Dad's desk. Dad's library. Red leather desk chair. Creaking. Creak. Summer. High ceilings. Writing. Notebook. The flood. Vagina Monologues. Lauren. Short hair. dream. Helvetica. Paris walk to class. Lower school. Tears. Tears? 2008. 2000 and late. Jane. Lacy. Septum. Essays. Spaghetti. Linguine. Birthdays. The Chateau. Fondant cigarettes. Cigarette cigarettes. Kiss the insides of your thighs. Death, Knowledge, Sex. Chuckle. Bubbly. Evervescent? Effervescent. Spelling, again. Caricature. Stale. Blue and gold checked coat. Ponies. Sleeping in the Parthenon. Kegels. Shell snap necklaces. The cabinet under the phone, under the remotes. Mom - ponytails, bar chair. Nose piercing. Matthew. Marwa. Mesh of memories. Bags in the back seat. Not shutting the car door. Foreheads. Drunk. Paces. Our steps lining up perfectly.

Death

I finally feel alive, which is why all I can think about anymore is dying. I almost didn't leave the house because my postcard of that eerie self-portrait of Edvard Munch fell off the wall and was sitting on my bed, staring at me. I don't want to drive because of that dream one of my exes had about me dying in a horrible car crash, my bracelets melting into my skin, my body twisted and crumpled. I'm beginning to realize how easily a bullet passes through a skull, cracking like an eggshell, gliding through the brain like the electrical jelly that it is. I've finally got so many things to live for: writing and reading and eating banana crepes with my roommates with the sun streaming in through all the windows of our fucking beautiful house, falling asleep to your voice and having it sink into my psyche. Everything's so amazing, why do I have to feel like death is all around me now?