On love

I'm currently a little hungover from watching people pretend to be Irish last night, so if this post is a little dumber than most of them, well... blame the green beer.

I've been thinking about love.  To be more precise, I've been thinking about the different kinds of love.  The love you feel for a friend, for an ex, for your (ADORABLE) 4-year old cousin.  I've been thinking about how powerful love is, and how it makes us do stupid things, and crazy things.  I've had a lot of conversations as of late about love, and how it's not all that matters, but it's like 90% of what we think about.

I'm having problems putting what I want to say into words, for two reasons.  One, I can't really get too detailed about the things I've been seeing and hearing and thinking, because this is the internet and I don't want to put people on the spot.  But mostly I'm having trouble because anything I could say about love sounds trite as shit.  I've typed out and deleted so many paragraphs, because I say something that was really heartfelt and honest and then I realize it's the lyrics to a fucking 80's song.  Love really DOES stink.

Here's my stance.  Everyone in your life, and I mean every single person, will fuck you over eventually.  It is an inevitability.  The only questions are when they will do it, and how badly they will do it.  Once you come to this realization, everything gets a lot easier.  You get less crushed when people you love hurt you, because it was bound to happen.  You remove the illusion of perfection that we as a culture have seemed to drape over every relationship due to romantic movies and Disney princesses.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you should never love, or never trust.  I'm just saying that loving and trusting are a lot easier to do when you come to terms with this simple fact.  Forgiveness becomes not a long painful process, but a reasonable logical evaluation.  And once you get past the betrayal, you can move on as closer friends/lovers, knowing that that part is over.  Unless they turn out to be one of those jackasses that continue to betray your trust and love and respect, and then you stab them in their sleep.

I wrote these next few short pieces as mini-love letters.  Granted, I think the first one I wrote was about my car, but a girl has certain priorities.  These were all just little dorky things I penned out on a napkin at 3 am, or a sticky note at work.  Re-reading them, it blows my mind that I never wrote one for an actual boyfriend.  I'm going to change the names to protect the innocent, but darlin, ain't none of my friends innocent.

Elementary

She sighs, and exhales a thin stream of gray-blue smoke while she clutches her gin and tonic to her breast; it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.  Calm, cool, collected, she is my voice of sanity in an insane world.  Why she giggles, only I know, and why she hugs herself in times of need.  A warm red-purple gemstone is only a symbol, an icon of my deep intense love.  Her long legs peek out from under a short dress that flaps in the breeze of her joy of life.  I crave her company as I crave air.  My fiance, my confidant, my lady-in-waiting of a better life.  You make me breathe, in this smog of a new city.  You are my shining light.

Giles

I grip you tightly with my small hands as you drive me faster and faster until we are both flying. I run my fingers all over you, your smooth curves, your rough edges. I melt. It makes me unconsciously smile every time I see you shining under the hot summer sun. It was love at first sight, I wanted you. You are everything I've ever wanted and from the moment I first laid eyes on you, I knew you had to be mine. I know I've been in a dark place for a while and I've neglected your needs more than I should have, but you never failed to fulfill mine. When I am with you I am warm, comfortable, safe. You ARE my perfect drug.

Pickle

Your bubbly effervescence radiates out of you in clouds from your springy curls down to your perfectly painted toenails, and lifts my heart. The glow of your smile, the bounce in your step, the random songs that burst out of you, they all are precious to me. You are a warm blanket in a cold and desolate town, the cool breeze rolling across this lonely desert life. You are the Marian to my Lucivar, the Fred to my Wesley, the Jenn to my Abe. I would go to the ends of the earth for you, you make me happy to be alive. You are my sister, my mother, my daughter, my best friend, my other half.
Thank you.

5 by 5

Sitting in my lap, she giggles and leans over to whisper softly in my ear. As her chocolate brown waves fall over our faces I see through her drunken milky eyes that she loves me. My tiny hero. She finds me when I'm lost, and helps me dance until all the pain and sadness fall away like our clothing after a long night. She is four feet of power, and packs a punch that finds it's way directly to your soul. My normally adequate sense of language fails to describe the way she has her claws in my heart, the way her tinkling laughter makes me feel, the pull I feel when I'm away. I want to hold her until I die.

Evolution

More dream talk.  Skip this next paragraph is you totally hate that and don't care.

So I just woke up from this odd dream, and I felt like I had to type it out immediately or I'd forget.  I was out to dinner with an old friend, let's call him B for the sake of non-disclosure.  We were at Green Mesquite BBQ, (which in real life is amazing, and not at all full of jerks).  He and I were catching up, and talking about how much we've changed in the past few years, and really grown as people.  We laughed about what terrible assholes we used to be, and consoled each other as we talked about how every time we went back to our home town people could never see that we really had changed.  We still got the same wary glances and people still watched our every move just waiting for us to fuck up again.  Then we started talking about Uchi, an amazing sushi place, and the legal council for Green Mesquite came over and told us we needed to stop talking about other restaurants.  B got pissed off and threatened to walk out, and they told us to just keep our voices down.

Anyway, before the dream got all weird and absurd, it could have been any conversation I've had in the past few years.  I know I'm an evil asshole now, but I used to be a much more evil lady, with even less morals and no real concern for who I hurt in my climb up.  I thought of human emotion as a game, and loved to see just how far it took for me to break a person down entirely.  I smoked too much, I drank too much, I did every drug I could get my little claws into.  I was a compulsive cheater.  And because I was a brutally honest bitch, I was really bad at being a compulsive cheater, and didn't try that hard to be secretive about it.

I wish I could tell you that I had some massive epiphany after some great tragedy that changed my ways.  But honestly, when I moved away from that little town (or as a friend called it once, that "cesspool of drama and filth") none of it seemed right anymore.  I don't mean morally right, I mean... like it just didn't sit well with me, like a pair of shoes that is a little too tight around the toes.  Maybe that is what a conscience feels like.  I don't know, I'm still not perfect.  Anyway, being a totally evil fuck just didn't seem to jive right in Austin, so I quit.  And it's been... maybe 3 or 4 years now, and every time I go back into that cesspool I get the same looks of admonishment and disgust.  It hurts, but I guess I can't really blame them for not seeing that I totally won't fuck their boyfriends anymore.

Tangentially, I was challenged by a friend of mine a while back to write something NOT dark and depressing.  I initially very easily created two characters that were madly in love, and happy.  Like I said in my last post, I didn't give them names because I am HORRIBLE at that, but shaping these two people was easy.  And then I got stuck for a few months.  If I can't write anything dark and twisty, where is the conflict?  I got the advice from someone to "take those people, and rip them apart, and see what they do".  I laid around for another long period of time trying to figure out what I could possibly use to rip them apart, and then I thought, "Write what you know".  And the rest just came flowing out like a little river of words.

So here's my experiment in something NOT dark and twisty.  Or only marginally dark and twisty.

What You Know

She was no beauty.

She was not an elegant exotic gorgeous person, she was simple and pretty.  She was not an orchid of a woman, she was a daisy.  But he loved her.

He loved the way her lips hung open when she concentrated, the way her eyes shone when she thought dirty things, he loved the spot where her neck met her shoulder blade.  The way that most people ache when their loved one is thousands of miles away, he ached when he was lying underneath her, because no matter how tightly he crushed her to him, she was never close enough, and he wanted more.

It all started in late November.  The brisk cold air came down from the north and stung every inch of skin that was not covered, and kissed every strand of hair with its crystalline lips.  They were moving.  As they hauled boxes up the three flights of stairs to their new chic apartment, they would briefly kiss each other every time they passed.  First floor, kiss.  Second floor, kiss.  Third floor, kiss.  And so on.

They stood outside the old dusty moving van and looked at the last box they had left, the last box of his massive book collection, packaged neatly and labeled by her steady hand.  He grinned at her and made a mock look of exhaustion, or, to be more truthful (and what would a tale of love be without a soupcon of truth?), a half mocking look.  They had been working all day, first to get the new apartment clean, then to lay down shelf liner, plan out the furniture arrangements, and finally drive the 30 miles in from their old house in the suburbs.  They had gone through a six pack of cheap beer between the two of them, but neither was drunk, just pleasantly exhausted, and ready to start their new life together in the city.

He reached down to lift the final box, and she spotted a spider in the back of the van.  She screamed.  He tensed when he should have flexed, used his back when he should have used his legs, and fell to the pavement.  She screamed again, and her wail was only superseded by the cries of the ambulance whooping its way to the hospital.  She held his hand in the back and whispered softly in his ear all the way there.

The doctor had used a bunch of big terms that neither of them had understood, despite their education.  He had pulled a muscle in his back, torn something, ripped something else.  Why the short bald man in the ER hadn’t just said that, she couldn’t tell.  She wondered what it was that had made the doctor so bitter, that had made his bedside manner completely disappear over the years.  She was given a prescription for painkillers, and sent home.

Such a small slip of paper.  Hard to imagine that such a flimsy little thing could do so much damage.  Of course, it wasn’t that specific slip that really caused the confluence of events to follow.  To be fair to the little slip of paper, it didn’t even know what it was, much less why it had been ripped down from a tree and stamped with ink and tossed around so, and eventually this poor little piece of a prescription pad found its new home in a landfill, rotting until it was no more.  But this story isn’t about the unfair treatment of paper, so you must forgive the author a meandering tangent.

No, it was the fact the papers kept coming.  Or to be more precise, that the little pieces of unfairly treated paper were traded for bottles, and the (most likely) poorly treated bottles were holding in little white pills.  Good things come in small packages, so they say, and these tiny white pills were no different.

At first he could only feel the pain.  The hot searing pain followed by the dull ache, followed by the inextinguishable exhaustion.  But as time went by, as it’s wont to do, the pain lessened, and faded, and went away completely.  But the pills didn’t.

It became habit for him to take a pill before bedtime, so that he could make it through the night.  And of course when he could feel a shadow of the old pain come back.  Or when he had a headache.  And perhaps when he was feeling irritable, because they made him calm.  And since they made him comfortable, he’d take one when he was feeling cold.  And one before he took a shower, because that was just a lovely experience.  And eventually, he would take one when he began to feel a little strange.  Not that he knew that the strange feeling was sobriety creeping back in, he just knew that it was a queer feeling and he didn’t like it, and the pills made it go away.

And all this time, the unlovely but loving girl stayed by him.  It took her awhile to notice the pattern, to notice the problem.  He had left his job due to his severe injury, and hadn’t gone back due to the pain.  So she worked overtime, nights and weekends just to make ends meet.  She would come back from a 12 hour shift to find him sitting in the same spot on the sofa as when she left.  He wouldn’t shower for days at a time.  He didn’t want to have conversations, and when she tried to engage him, he was angry and petulant.  He had never had a temper before, but now he was quick to rage, and while he never actually hit her, he had raised his hand once and sent her crying to their bedroom for hours over a small comment on his teeth.

They were no longer making love.  Shit, she could no longer get him to fuck her, much less anything more meaningful.  He was always too tired, in too much pain, too messed up to even get it started, much less finish.  She could feel the void growing in between them, but was at a loss as to how to fix it.  How to fix him.  How to fix the relationship.

She started going out.  She had never been much of a drinker, but she found herself downtown almost every night.  At first it was just because she didn’t want to go home after work.  She didn’t want to see his pale and skinny body, so different from the body she’d fallen in love with.  She didn’t want to deal with the bickering and the forced apologies that followed.  So she went to bars, and eventually to dance clubs, because when she moved her unlovely body it made her feel alive again.  To stomp her heels to the pounding bass beats and swing her hair around her face, sweating under the lights and the closeness of a hundred other writhing bodies, she felt her heart pulse and could forget.

The first man she went home with was nothing special.  She was sweaty and drunk and lonely and this man was there.  As they rocked back and forth on his dirty futon, she screamed with every bit of breath in her body.  She screamed all the frustrations she’d felt for so long, she screamed for the life she was living, she screamed for the man she had at home, not for the one thrusting inside her.  She screamed so loud that even when a fist was placed inside her mouth to make her quiet, she could still be heard.  She screamed until all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking with her, howling for the pain they could hear in her voice, even if the man on top of her could not.  Only when they were done and she got up to clean herself off did she realize what she had done.

A cheater.  She was a cheater now, she thought.  A whore.  Someone who did… a one night stand?  Is that what she had just done?  Isn’t that what her friends in college had called it?  She quickly grabbed her clothes and went home, stopping on the way to gag out the side of her car.  She took a shower until the hot water ran out, scrubbing her skin until she was raw and red, like her eyes.  That was the last time she screamed to the stars and the heavens, but that was not the last time she went home with a stranger.

It became a habit for her.  Come home after work, make dinner, avoid eye contact with him, get dressed to go out, dance until she was sticky, fuck until she was worse, and come home at three or four in the morning.  It wasn’t that she no longer loved him.  Quite the contrary.  She loved him more than she could bear.  She loved him so much she couldn’t stand to watch him kill himself.  She loved him so much she couldn’t leave him.  But she had this burning need that he could not fill.  It was never about the sex for her.  She needed to feel wanted.  She needed someone to look at her with lust and desire, and not with either blurry confusion or rage.

One night after a mediocre evening with a tall Norwegian, she came home to find him sitting on the steps outside their apartment.  He had the cold calm look in his eyes that as of late always betrayed something horrifying beneath the surface.  He had a lazy smile and took a long drag off of his cigarette.

“You’ve been busy I see,” he stated with a drawl, and blew his smoke up into the night sky.

“I went… out.”

“Shh…, I don’t need your explanations, and I don’t want your lies.  I know where you’ve been, and I know what you’ve been doing.”  His voice stayed at a calm level, and his eyes shone in the moonlight.  She said nothing.  “What, nothing to say for yourself?  Don’t you want to tell me you’re sorry?  Don’t you want to beg for my forgiveness?”  She stared at the cold little gray pebbles that made up the asphalt, and tried to count them.  She tried to see little faces in the hodgepodge of streaks of dust.  He finally broke his smirking glare and frowned.  “You don’t have anything to say, do you?  My god, this is over isn’t it?”  He put his head in his hands and sobbed.  “If you still loved me, you’d fight for this.  You’d fight with me.  You’d argue your case, and beg and scream.  But you don’t give a shit about me anymore.  You don’t care about us anymore.”  She let a tear fall down her face, and said nothing.

Months passed.  The sheets of the proverbial calendar flew off like an old black and white cartoon.  She got herself an efficiency apartment and a promotion.  She said “I will,” and “You can,” to many more men over the years, but never “I do.”  Eventually she had almost forgotten about him.  Or rather, her brain had almost forgot, but the heart and the body have their own sets of memories, and those are so much brighter and more full of color that they almost never fade completely,.  Until one day she saw him again.

It was on the Metro, of all the silly and unfortunate places to see an exboyfriend.  Tightly packed in a small metal car that stunk of whiskey and body odor, she clung her briefcase to her side like it was the holy grail, and teetered on her sensible heels.  She swept her newly sheared hair behind her ears and smoothed down her navy blue skirt.  A man bumped into her almost knocking her down, and she turned to glare at what was most likely a homeless man that was the source of the stench.  But it was HIM.

His breath caught in his throat, and suddenly his tongue felt too big for his mouth, and his lips felt raw and sticky.  His hands were shaking and there was no way he could speak.  She saw his confusion and disarray and giggled.  She clasped a hand to her mouth, ashamed that she had laughed at him at such a crucial moment.  A grin swept across his face, and he began to chuckle.  Soon they were laughing so hard they thought they would never stop.


An old woman sits in a seat on the Metro, trying to read a newspaper, and wondering who those awful people are that are laughing and kissing behind her.  She wonders if they know how obnoxious they are being, and grimaces.  She decides to get off on the yellow line a stop or two early.  “Ah well,” she thinks, “Let them enjoy it while they can.  It will never last.”

Gold Star

So, remember that dramarama project I was talking about over here?  I finished it, and turned it in.  We did a cold read of it in class, (which kind of upset me because I don't feel like some of the funniest bits can be played out that way) and then the professor held it up and announced, "Pay attention!  It doesn't get any better than this".  So step one of world domination is complete.

I fiddlefaddled around for quite a while trying to figure out what to write about, and then I was way too covered in caramel and had to just think about it instead.  Eventually I had the idea of an educated asshole ruining a nice thing, and thus came everything else.  It's been my first true voyage into the world of dialogue, and I don't think I did too bad considering.  My professor thought it was AMAZING, but, you know.  She thinks Kirk was the better captain, so we won't try to listen to her too much.  I had a hard time trying to come up with character names, which always seems like the worst part of writing anything.  I've got a pretty lengthy story that I will post here eventually wherein I just call the main characters "him" and "her".  I thought about calling these two Wayne and Wanda (obscure reference) and I thought about Jessica and Chester (even more obscure reference) and I thought about calling the girl Eugene before I realized that's a boy's name, and I couldn't call her Eugenie because then she'd have to wear a stupid hat (British wedding reference).  So I kind of compromised.

Then I sent it to Kiki for some finishing touches, some slight dialogue clean-up, and the addition of a joke that ended up being one of my favorite bits in the whole thing.  So I didn't feel right posting it here without acknowledging his input, even though I turned it in and got a grade without doing so.  Raise a glass of champers for that kid, everybody.  Also I changed the format just a smidge so it wouldn't be so annoying to read in a blog.

Enjoy.  Or don't.  And bite me.

Pedantic Love

Place: A church, any college town in America.

Time: June, 2011

Characters:

Evelyn – late 20’s, pretty, highly educated and outspoken

Chester – also late 20’s, getting married to Evelyn, nervous about wedding

Father Wayne – Catholic Priest, mid 30’s, dry sense of humor

Setting: The front of a Catholic church.  Evelyn and Chester stand in front of an altar, Father Wayne stands behind it, officiating the wedding.  We don’t see the wedding attendees, whenever E or C gesture to a family member, they point out to the audience.

FATHER WAYNE

Do you, Chester Stevens, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, until death do you part?

CHESTER

(nervous but smiling)

I do.

FATHER WAYNE

Do you, Evelyn Carter, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, to love, cherish and obey, until death do you part?

EVELYN

(VERY nervous, fidgety hands)

Oh god, I don’t know.  I mean…

CHESTER

(interrupting)

Oh for fuck’s sake, NOW?

EVELYN

I just don’t know about all of this “honor AND obey” business.  Did you notice how he didn’t ask if you would obey me?  It’s just another example of how the patriarchal society continues to oppress women by making them feel as if they need to “obey” the men, like we’re slaves!

CHESTER

Good lord, you’ve gone all HuffPo on me, haven’t you?

(Chester puts his head in his hands)

EVELYN

I’ve gone beyond the Huffington Post, Chess, I’ve gone full-out Jezebel.  And you know it’s extraordinarily demeaning when you act like I don’t have a right to be upset about these things.  You act like the rapes in the Congo aren’t actually happening, or that women aren’t STILL making less at their jobs.  Just because I want to fight for our rights you call me a “Femi-Nazi”.  Because apparently if I want to be able to vote, now I’m like Hitler!

FATHER WAYNE

Godwin’s Law…

EVELYN & CHESTER

(turn to Father Wayne, say in sync)

Oh shut up!

FATHER WAYNE

(looks down)

…sorry…

CHESTER

That’s all fine Evie, but why now?  Are you sure this is the time and place, I mean, my father is a big part of this right-wing white-male thing that you’re always ranting against, and he looks PISSED.  Why are you bringing all of this up NOW?

EVELYN

Baby, I’ve done all of the things your parents wanted me to do.  I got the big white dress that’s supposed to symbolize virginity even though…

(Chester shakes head emphatically)

…and I got the flowers, and we got the big cake even though you KNOW I don’t eat refined sugar, and I’ve done all of this bourgeois filiopietism…

CHESTER

I don’t even know what that means.

EVELYN

Traditional, honey.

CHESTER

Tradititonal?!  Look around you Evie!  If it was traditional we’d have a wedding party, instead of standing up here by ourselves!

EVELYN

It’s absurdly barbarian and old-fashioned and cruel to make two people have to chose amongst their friends…

CHESTER

(interrupting, angry, yelling)

You just say that because you don’t have any friends!

EVELYN

(rage-face)

WHAT?

(pause of silence)

FATHER WAYNE

So if there are no objections…

EVELYN & CHESTER

(turn to Father Wayne, say in sync)

SHUT UP!

CHESTER

Look, all of these pre-made vows don’t really say what I want to say anyway.  I will love and cherish you, and I’ll listen to your nonsensical rants against society, and I’ll do the dishes when you’re too busy writing letters to your congressman to remember that we need forks.  I want to be an old man listening to your tirades.  I’m going to adore every thing you do for the rest of my life, you stupid cow.

FATHER WAYNE

That was almost really sweet.

EVELYN

(grinning, calm)

(to Father Wayne)

Shut the hell up.                                                           

(to Chester)

That was insanely sweet.  I love you too.  I’m sorry, please, let’s continue.

FATHER WAYNE

Thank you, Jesus.

EVELYN

Although the Catholic Church HAS been making gold off of the blood, sweat and tears of the downtrodden for thousands of years, and don’t even get me started on contraception…

(Father Wayne shakes his head)

CHESTER

(interrupting)

Just say I do, honey.

EVELYN

Oh, right.  I do.

FATHER WAYNE

(sigh of relief)

I now pronounce you man and wife.  You may now kiss the bride.

(Chester and Evelyn kiss, while Father Wayne checks his watch and wipes his forehead)