Distance

The world is breathing. I can feel the inhale of change just as well as the exhale of familiarity with every gust of wind that proceeds the last. She shrivels up at the thought of peace and instead prefers the absolute consistency of chaos that can only come from insanity. When I first saw Earth it was from a space so far off that it could only be surrounded by darkness. The kind where nothing is known and nothing is considered. Behind its eyes there was a blank state of contentment that followed on the heels of time, but lagged the persistence of passion. 

Who are you? 

Earth.

And in her name alone she held a sense of self so strange that I could only barely hear her. The colors were magnificent and the swirls of difference came to me at a pace I wasn't ready to accept. Surely she can't be that fast. 

Why do you spin?

I am out of control. There is nothing in infinity that can slow me down and if it tries it will fail time and time again.

But isn't that something consistent?

Failure?

The concept was new to me. What was trying if trying was unhappiness? To move from one state to the next was foreign and in its cotton poly blend of substantial information, I shrunk away, holding fast to the idea of sameness. I will never find peace on a planet that twirls. Yet still she spins with a motion of grace that could only be kept up by a ballerina. One of those little Russian ones with pointed feet, she must tap lightly on absolutely nothing. The clouds are like scarves and they cover only parts of her, the rest I can see and I know that piece by piece I'll be able to see her whole. Just never at one time. 

The concept is lost. 

Minced Words

"Are you Mad?" Joy asks in a voice as loud as her outfit. She has come dressed in impossibly high heels which leaves her overgrown body to teeter and sway in the holiday lights. Her hair is teased to the four corners of the party and her dress is made entirely of little green sequins to match her little green shoes. Her face glows with the intensity of a living room fire. She is soft and warm. 

"Good heavens, no. I'm merely Interested." His voice is distinctly Northern. Two different socks rest below his ankles before his substantially short pants cover the rest. Although he is of average weight, he puffs himself up with a rosy jacket full of feathers. "I hear the steps creaking louder, though. I can only imagine what he's got going on now. "

"Is he always loud?"

"Always. What do you want to talk to him for?" 

"I've got to talk to him."

"Got to is a mean circumstance."

"I had a Misunderstanding with his cousin and ever since then we haven't spoken."

"Ah," Interested says. "What about the Misunderstanding?"

"Oh, he's just annoyed."

Words with Enemies

Lugubrious sits slouched along the windowsill in the corner of the room. His dark shirt and oversized pants make him feel like an invisible child lost in the glow of left over Christmas lights. His face is gaunt with the pale realization of a stark New Years Eve. As if suddenly the night was naked itself, he turns and looks out the window. Would this year be any different? Ordinarily he would have sauntered up to the mini bar and debated this sad fact over another cocktail, except for one thing that held him back. 

Flamboyance was always too stunning to approach. She stands decorated in a red sequined gown that has a high slit up the side and sparkling red shoes to match. Her hair is like a dark ocean carrying out the rest of the party. Flamboyance surely would have made conversation with him. Perhaps she would have asked him how his year had been, and why was it, she had yet to see him at any of the other holiday parties? Instead of throwing his Occupied friend under the bus, he would have to instead look for another scapegoat. One that wasn't rushing around the room talking about how there is never enough time. 

"My goodness it's hard to believe it's already been a year," Maudlin shakes her head at Flamboyance. From afar she looks to be in her forties, but up close her skin is a mosaic of lines and texture. 

"Yes," Lugubrious nods. "I certainly hope the next one has Joy."

the complex

The rain falls sideways hitting the window horizontally. It's as if the wind has turned sideways in all its decision making and what was once a clear cut plan has now gone astray. Big wet drops slam against the glass and I can hear them pounding on the windows opposite this apartment. I'm sitting on the windowsill staring across the small courtyard with the over turned picnic table and the four by four slot of trampled grass. The Mexican children in the apartment next door are running around, soaking their crisp white Sunday shirts. A woman stands in the doorway of her stoop yelling in Spanish at them. I can see her push a strand of dark curly hair out of her eye. 

Where are the rest of the children? There used to be so many shrieking foreign languages that I wondered if this was where the melting pot started. Chinese kids, Indian kids, Spanish kids, Pakistani kids. They all played together with black barbie dolls with kinky hair and second hand bikes that had different parts sometimes glued on. A neon pink seat attached to a dark green body rolled safely down the block. Now these kids were mostly gone. 

Instead tall, dark, men in their twenties stood hunched over, spilling off their stoops and into the sidewalk. They smoked cigarettes and played rap music until three, sometimes four in the morning. Last night I heard a fight. Two guys and a girl were yelling at each other from the courtyard.

"I told you I DON'T have it," A girl protested.

"What you mean you DON'T have it? I gave it to you, right?"

"I know. I lost it."

"What you say you lost it for? You took it."

"I ain't taken shit!"

"Oh yeah? You think it just fell out your pocket? Real smart."

Then another man's voice.

"What the fuck man. I gave it to you and you gave it to this bitch? What'd you think she'd do? Give it back?"

"I'm NOT no bitch."

A piece of glass smashed against the sidewalk and everyone grew quiet. From somewhere off in the distance I heard sirens. They couldn't have gotten there so fast, yet the twenty somethings scattered, never to be heard from again.

The glass is scattered on the far left hand side of the courtyard next to number 14B's apartment. They have the ground floor one and I wonder when they look out the window if all they see is the dark brown glass glistening against the street. Maybe they don't see it at all. Maybe it's become like the rain and somehow the glistening is more like a clinking annoyance of something heading in the wrong direction. 

tinsel

Scintillation. Def: Rapid variation in the light of a celestial body caused by turbulence in Earth's atmosphere; a twinkling.

I've got scintillation on the brain. Perhaps in it as well. 

closeness

"He hit me," I said. I didn't mean to say it. The words just slipped out of my mouth and as soon as they were there, I felt as if they almost became me.

"What?" Sarah stared at the purple bruises on my forehead. Her blond hair hung down in a permanent preppy flip of a pony tail onto her shoulders. Her eyes were like saucers and I could make out each individual eye lash drowned in mascara. 

"He hit me." I repeated. My eyes were solid white which must have seemed strange to her. If Derek was going to hit someone wouldn't he hit them in the eye? Did this look too much like I had fallen down the stairs to band practice? I raised my hand to my eye instinctively. "At least he didn't get my eye."

"What happened??" Sarah instantly pulled up a chair. I hadn't seen her since last years family picnic and she had hardly spoken to me. Instead she was busy talking to aunt Lucy about her grades at B.U. which were of course exclusively A's. I wondered what she would have done if she hadn't gotten the job teaching English at a private school. Her innocent blue eyes would have rolled right into the back of her head.

"We got into a fight," I said. "We were arguing about this guy I know, Jimmy. I guess he doesn't like Jimmy much."

She pushed the few stray strands of her perfect pony tail back into place.  "And he just punched you?"

I shook my head as if I were ashamed. The more I talked about it, the more real it became. Who knew if Derek hit me or not? I hadn't seen my mother in over a year and Sarah was the only sister I had and I rarely talked to her. I remembered the conversations we had over the phone when I had overdosed on Adderal in the 10th grade. She had patiently talked to me about my troubles with Mom and how she knew it would be all okay once I was older. I never knew what that meant for Sarah, but we never talked much about it afterward. I wrote her long letters about school and my first boyfriend, a gamer named Matt. When she never wrote back, I imagined her with her never ending circle of friends, making frozen waffles and watching Melrose Place.

"You know that's really bad, right?" She reached out to touch the bruise but I stepped back.  A few years ago when I broke my arm skiing she had sent me a card with fifty dollars in it telling me to go out and have a good time and fuck having an arm. I laughed and went to see the movie Fargo. It seemed like the kind of film that she would appreciate with her friends once it came out on DVD. 

"I know." I nodded enthusiastically. "It's just that he loves me so much."

"But don't you know that lots of people love you so much?" Her eyes were so wide I could feel the lids splitting in half as they tried to meet her eye brows. They would never cross paths. Each one in their own way would be too exaggerated to ever meet the other.

"Thanks," I smiled. And for a minute I forgot that Derek was a made up name in a made up story.  

At the least

"Oh my God, girl! I haven't seen you in soooo long," she swings her gigantic brown tribal designed purse down onto the seat beside the girl in blue.  She could be carrying the entire world in that purse. Bulges with corners sticking straight out mash with curves of soft leather. Her cell phone is in her hand, so I know there has to be more room for jewelry, extra clothes, vegan health bars, and cosmo magazines stuffed in the sides.

"I know! I can't believe Kelly's getting married," she whispers the last part. I wish they would whisper the whole conversation, but no such luck.

The two girls could be sisters they look so much alike. They are both tall, average weight with mousy brown hair that hangs past their shoulders. They wear bulky scarves that look like 30 dollars at Urban Outfitters. They are definitely in their late twenties, early thirties.

"So do you like Charles?" Blue girl looks at Miss Enthusiastic with dead eyes.
"Honestly?"
"Of course."
Miss Enthusiastic turns sullen. She sticks her entire arm into the tribal purse and pretends to be looking for something unobtainable. "He's..."
"Horrid." The girl in blue finishes for her.
"Why are they getting married?"
"I don't know."
"Did she get pregnant?" Miss Enthusiastic pulls her arm out of the purse. Empty handed.
"I don't think so, but now that you mention it she has been wearing a lot of baby doll shirts."
"We should have kept better in touch with her."
"I think she's working at the mall," Blue girl says. "But you know, in that fancy boutiquey place. What's it called?"
Enthusiastic girl nods without answering. "Boutiques are so cute. I got this amazing little gypsy dress at one just the other day. Actually it might still be in my purse," she instinctively grabs the leather strap.
"Yeah. Only... I wouldn't want to work there."
"Oh I know." There's a giant silence as all of us watch a large woman in her sixties waddle into the coffee shop wearing a shawl with little gray and red roses sewn onto it. The dress goes all the way up to her collar bone.
"I mean, at least she's getting married." Blue girl leans across the table.
"Yeah," Enthusiastic girl is stuck staring at the little cotton roses. "And really? Who cares if he doesn't like her going out without him?"
"There's nowhere to go anyway."
"Exactly." Miss enthusiastic swings the purse over her shoulder and stares out the window.  "God I'm so glad I don't live here anymore."

rough draft memoir paxil

If May 8th, 2002  had never happened my life would be totally different. I would most likely be a highly successful business woman in NYC living out of a high-rise eating donuts on a china plate. Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out that way. I say May 8th was the turning point not because it sounds more mysterious but because nobody wanted to talk about what really happened. After 'the incident' happened it was always known as May 8th.   This was the night I had sobbed into the portable phone to my best friend Anna while listening to Alison Krauss on my bedroom stereo, trying to end my life. Perhaps I wasn't sobbing - perhaps I was eating a sandwich. Perhaps I was a million miles away.

 This was where I seemed to be most of the time since starting the medication Paxil three months prior. I was in the 9th grade and school wasn't so bad. It was gym class that killed me. The changing in front of girls, the humiliation of my learning disability in full view of every bounced ball off my head, the fact I hated running; all of these played major factors.  I began growing anxious of everything and couldn't stop thinking about the class and my eventual doom. When I told my Dad of the terrors of entering the cafeteria and experiencing eyes all on me (what I then thought was surely unique just to me) he immediately leaned onto the edge of the sofa and asked in his calm and understanding tone 'tell me more.'

"Well you see there's all these tables and everyone at different tables belongs to different cliques and they all have these social rankings," I did my best to detail him in on the complexities of high school life which were really quite a lot better than junior high. With his keen attention I felt important and empowered to talk more about my nightmarish experiences through the public school social ranking system.  

"I eat my lunch with my friends, but I can't help but getting nervous whenever I walk through there to meet them. I have to walk all the way through the cafeteria just to get to there and it's a long walk."

"Would you say your heart beats rapidly?" He clasped his hands in front of his knee.

"Definitely."

"Do you get sweaty palms?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you feel like you're going to die?"

"Oh yeah," I nod enthusiastically. School was dreadful.

"Well, Al," he slapped his knee, "you've got all the classic signs of social anxiety disorder."

"What's that?" I asked.

"That can be a very serious illness. But…" he looked far out the glass slider to the hill that our apartment stretched over. "I might know someone who can help."

Two weeks after the conversation in my Dad's living room, I was sitting across from someone who worked for my Dad. He was a nice, mousy looking man with a receding hairline and pants that rode up too high, exposing his socks. He sat cross legged and pressed his hands together inside his thighs. I thought this was disgusting. 

He asked me the same questions Dad had asked and within a half hour he prescribed me a drug called Paxil for anxiety. I was overjoyed. My teenage angst would disappear with just one little pill a day. Immediately I called Anna to tell her the news. She seemed skeptical at first, but I reassured her that it was for the best and that really my anxiety was far worse than most. She just didn't understand the complications of my brain. 

After a week of taking it, Dad would ask me questions about the medicine. Was I feeling it yet? Did I have any side effects? What was it like? With someone else as enthusiastic as I was, I felt that I had a partner in this endeavor.  While my mother was also skeptical, I didn't pay as much attention to her worry as I did my father's interest. With his undivided attention, I knew nothing bad could happen.

After three weeks of taking it, I noticed that I didn't care as much. I didn't care as much about the cafeteria or gym class or what people thought of me. But I also didn't care what anyone thought of me. During one conversation that a friend had about her boyfriend, I got up and left, not having any attachment whatsoever to my friend or the conversation.  Anna noticed me dipping out of conversations more and more and chased me down.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

I looked at her, but she was a million miles away. She lived on a different platform of life and I was so far beyond everything, I felt as if they were in a bubble and I was in space. I smiled and said sure and then walked to my locker where I stayed for two hours, not caring that I cut class or that I had nowhere to go.

After a few months of Paxil I was completely gone. My friends seemed like a distant reminder of a life I once had and my family had become part of the bubble as well. Except for Dad. He kept asking me if my anxiety was down and I said that yes - it was. The pill was a success.

It was a success until May 8th.  I left a note on my desk for my mother, what it said I can't remember. Something horribly dramatic I'm sure. And with that I took a large quantity of Ibuprofen and called Anna. When I refused to let her talk to my Mom, she said goodbye and we hung up. I got ready for bed and fell asleep shortly after. Anna called back however, and my Mom answered.  Completely confused, Mom rushed into my bedroom and woke me up saying we were going to the hospital.

kroger

Dingy light skirts the grocery aisles with a darting hesitance. She flickers. Climbing out from the long poles of white ceiling structure, light skitters. Bags of Tender Tiny Peas, Tasty Kakes, rye bread, and prepackaged sushi swirl around in an identical mass. None of them are any less illuminated and together they stand, separate but equal. She fingers each crack of the bag of Tiny Tenders until the shadows are no more than thinly observed lines. Its contagious glow is stark by nature. Blinding, but fleeting and in an instant its tiny flickers will become one long feeling of dark freezer aisle isolation. The winter section.

The Funeral

You can't always tell what kind of funeral it's going to be by the cars people drive. There could be a million Volvos and Audi's but undoubtably there's always the few clunkers that park off street.  The real way you can tell is by the clothing and the funeral home. If it's in a Catholic church, I dress up - shawl included. If it's one of those places off the side of the highway, I choose a tasteful, dark, pant suit or a dark blue dress. This service is in a home I'm not familiar with in a location that is near the country club, but not far away from the fishing docks either. I dressed in my black conservative dress with minimal jewelry. 

It started about a month ago when I lost my job as a therapist. It was a cozy private practice with patients that I had known for years. Their problems at times seemed trivial, but I never talked down to them. Instead I had coached them through their relationship problems and work stresses with equal stride. When they politely broached the subject of leaving therapy, I would always smile and say 'If that's what you really want.' They never did. Whether they benefited or not, I was never entirely sure. Although one can always feel helpful, progress is another thing all together. Once the job was gone, I felt the absence of problems run dry and an emptiness lived on past my patients.  Without that special place and time for darker moments, I found the emptiness taking over spaces of my life like an amoeba. It was then that I started seeking comfort elsewhere.

I stepped out of my car into a rain that had been drizzling all morning only to see a group of melancholy guests walking toward the funeral home. A man in a dark rain jacket looked solemnly in my direction before nodding. I nodded back, still unaware of what to say.

"It's around the corner and to the back," a woman in a formal dress and pearls ushered me inside. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

As I walked to the back of the hall, I heard a voice talking in a well-thought-out rhythm about God and the after life. The room in the back was large, but there were no pews available. A few metal folding chairs sat off to the left, but they too were taken up by men in dark, heavy, raincoats. A few teenagers in baggy dark jeans and black slickers stood off to the side. There were only a dozen or so women there and I felt more out of place than usual standing by myself in the back.

"We know that a man as great as Matthew will have no worries where he has gone," the woman in the pulpit rattled on. I looked over my shoulder as the group from outside huddled near me. It was a younger group, but I couldn't make out their exact ages by the way their faces were drawn. They weren't the kind that was used to being solemn and I could see that their faces still had traces of acne scattered about their cheeks and noses. 

"How did you know, Matthew?" The man in the raincoat whispered beside me.

"Through John."

He nodded confidently. This was a satisfactory answer. After a few minutes, the woman ended her speech and stepped into the front aisle. A tall man and older woman came up to the stage and through tears, mumbled through a piece of paper they shared. "Matthew was the best son any parents could have had..." The woman began to tremble.

He must have been very young. A car crash perhaps or maybe a freak boating accident. Perhaps when he was a child he thought he could have been a fisherman like his father, but his temperment was too soft. Being laughed at for gentle hands and a quiet affect must have given him the fuel he needed to start his career by the docks. I could still smell the salty ocean air from inside the home.

The lighting was fluorescent and seemed daunting compared to the room full of darkness. I could recognize their pain as something charged and flowing from person to person. It was as if a magnetic shadow had melted into everyone's face until the only thing left un-touched was the coffin that stood open in the front. If the coffin weren't there, it would just be a room full of grief with nothing tangible to hold on to. It would be a moment of unexplained depression that seeped in where no one expected it, leaving the feelings unrescued and floating. 

It was a short service and after everyone had a chance to talk, two people at a time walked up the casket and placed flowers inside. The mother and father went first and then what I presumed as the rest of the family followed suit. A tall and lanky boy of about sixteen went up to the coffin with a girl of about nine and I wondered if they were too young to see this. Something as gloomy as death should be reserved for those old enough to feel it.

The man in the raincoat took my arm and we walked together up to the casket. His arm was electrifying as I was unaccustomed to people noticing me in these situations. He smelt vaguely of after shave, but I wondered if he was old enough to use it.  The group he had come with stood huddled together in the back, not daring to move. I wondered if perhaps he didn't want them to see his emotions or that maybe he just found more comfort in a stranger. 

I peered into the casket to see a boy of about eighteen wearing a brown suit and brown shoes lying there with his eyes closed. His face was blushed with funeral makeup, making him look fresh out of the womb. I wondered how all these people knew him and what he was like. Was he ambitious or slack? Cute or tough? His presence oddly satisfied me and for a brief moment I didn't have to think about the pain of losing my job. 

"This doesn't even look like him," the man whispered to me.

"No," I stared at the youthful body with rumpled blonde hair. "Certainly not."