girlvswhale:

Thompson’s eyelids fluttered at night, if he slept, I mean; if he slept his eyes rolled and fell underneath his skin, like marbles in a thin silk bag. I would watch him, perched on my elbow, hovering over his face, waiting for him to wake up; waiting for him to scream into the darkness at things I could not see; waiting for his right arm to reach out into the air above him and come slamming down on to the mattress with such force it shook the headboard; waiting for him to clutch on to my body and try and shove me to the floor. I would wait all night when he slept, waiting for him to come back from the war, to come back to me.

Every day with him, I felt like his mistress, the person he spent his free time with, the easy moments with, while away from his obligations. At night, he would go back to them; inspect the inside of buildings, force cars to slow down at check stops, laugh out loud, and say things in languages and codes I could barely understand.

Nights back then were like waiting for someone to call my name in the doctor’s office. Every night after I met Thompson felt just like that; the breathless waiting of relief when he woke up; that finally, yes, this was my turn, and finally, yes, I could move on to the next part of our time together even if I was terrified of what was on the other side of the door.

*

He came back with all his limbs.  They were all very relieved.  He came back with everything, except his tongue.  I knew it was there though, I could see it as he chewed, watched it flap around inside of his mouth when he sat around at night playing poker, drinking whiskey, talking with the only men who could understand him, talking half in code. 

I wondered when he would start to talk to me.  I would have lunch with Kate, whose husband had been deployed with Thompson, who I had met the same night Thompson had put his hand on my wrist and asked me my name.

“Jake hasn’t slept in three days,” Kate told me one afternoon while we ate sandwiches on the grass in the middle of Central Park. “I haven’t slept in three days.”

I picked at the edge of my sandwich and nodded. Kate yawned. She had signed up for this job, the job of caretaker. I had fallen into it the way one might fall into a giant pit in the middle of the woods, innocently strolling along and then I was falling, falling, falling; stuck at the bottom knowing that there was really no way out, knowing that unless someone came long to help me I was going to be stuck down there forever.

“Thompson threw me out of bed last night. He’ sleeping though. So, there’s that.” 

“I can’t decide what’s worse anymore. The nights where they sleep or the nights when they can’t.”

I watched a woman push a stroller across the grass, a tiny brown puppy trailing behind them. She unpacked a pink blanket, spread it out on the grass and pulled a squirming baby clad head to toe in pink.  The puppy slumped on to the grass, raising his belly to the sun and the little girl on the blanket screeched with joy and kicked her arms and legs; and the woman raised her shoulders and let them fall back down. I knew that she was sighing with happiness and I wondered, for a moment, what that felt like. 

At some point from the moment I kissed Thompson, I had lost the ability to just enjoy the moments of every day life, and I could tell by the way Kate pressed her sandwich in her palms that I wasn’t alone. Her company never made me feel better about it all, though that was supposed to be the point.

Sometimes I constantly fought the urge to tell her that I just wanted to bolt, afraid that I would make her feel even more lonely, mostly afraid that I would cause her to do the same.

girlvswhale:

I was home alone in California, in the apartment I shared back then with my 27 year old boyfriend who was at work editing Dawson’s Creek or maybe it was porn that day. I never kept track because I didn’t fucking care. I was probably talking to Jack or Richard on the computer, because I had no one else to talk to in real life because how do you even explain to a real person that you’re 18 and your boyfriend is 27 and your mother thinks you’re living with an old friend from High School and you are so alone you think about drowning yourself? How do you talk to anyone and tell them the truth anymore when that is your truth?

That day, bored and the house quiet, I went into our closet looking for a pair of jeans, thinking that putting on real clothes would make me a real person. Instead I found a box of things George had brought with him from Colorado as it fell directly on to my head.

He was a mover. He moved wherever a job would take him. He had no roots really. He blamed it on the fact that his parents had escaped from Hungary when he was a small child and never really settled anywhere until he was 20. He moved so fast and so often that he had few possessions.

When I’d moved to California he had no mattress. He bought the mattress for me, he said and I felt loved. I was barely 18, I didn’t know what that really meant because I’d never felt it before. A mattress? I guess that was love. For someone to purchase something that they had never really “needed” before just to make me comfortable, that was love right? I rationalized it every night I let him straddle me on top of it.

In that box of things he’d moved from Colorado was a journal he kept when he’d met me.

We’d met in a bookstore in New York, The Strand. He was visiting from Colorado where he lived in his parents extra house. I’d lied to him about my age. I lied to everyone about my age back then.

When he was back in Colorado he found out I was just turning 17, he stopped speaking to me for a week, but then told me that the age difference didn’t matter.  I flew out to Colorado under the guise that I was visiting colleges. My mother thought I was staying with my ex boyfriend Brandon who had moved out there to go to Boulder. My mother trusted me far too much as a child, but I’d barely done anything wrong back then that she knew of. I had great grades. I was in the Honor Society. I was President of the French Club. Lying to her wasn’t something she thought I ever did.

In Colorado, George and I had sex. He was not my first, but he made me feel as if I didn’t know what I was doing. “Put your hands here.” he would order, pointing to his hips. Then he would readjust my mouth on his cock or my hips with the kind of breath that meant, “You’re so bad at this.” I wanted him to teach me how to be better so I let myself think we were in love and when he moved to California, I dropped out of NYU and moved to be with him.

I remember standing in the walk in closet in California a year from those moments in Colorado, willing myself to open the journal. I knew there was something inside of it that I needed to see. It was black, the leather on the cover barely bent. It looked as if it had been barely used. I flipped open the cover and on the inside were sketches of Star Trek insignia and the Enterprise. I remember laughing. A few pages were filled with calculations for bills, notes on football games, lists for groceries.

Then finally on the last written page there was a note:

“K comes to Colorado in a few days. Fresh 17 year old pussy for me to fuck. I’ve never had pussy this young. So naive, but that’s all an act I’m sure. She’s probably a slut. If not, I’ll make her one.”

It’s strange how all of these years later I still remember what he wrote. There are few things that are burned into my brain deeper than those words.

She’s probably a slut. She’s probably a slut. She’s probably a slut. Fresh 17 year old pussy. She’s probably a slut. So naive. She’s probably a slut. I’ve never had pussy this young. She’s probably a slut. If not, I’ll make her one.

I read those words over and over all day. I read them until I started to believe them.

That night, begrudgingly naked on top of him, I bent down to his ear and said, “I’m such a slut, aren’t I?”

George’s face twisted in the center. He threw me off of him and scrambled to climb back on top,  pressing my knees to my chest as he entered me. “Now you are, you fucking whore.”

He slapped me across the face and I felt the length of my body light up. I hated him for how much I liked it and how much he made me think liking it was wrong. Mostly, I hated that I believed him and above all I hated that I felt bad for how much everything he did to me, and everything I enjoyed, made me feel.

I kept the journal when I left. Stuck it into my suitcase at the last minute, I doubt he noticed it was gone. I wonder sometimes if he ever even really noticed the loss of me, how in my year in L.A. I faded from one person into another, a ghost of who I really was.

Mostly, I wonder if that was really the plan, not to turn me into a slut, but to extract from me every inch of life I had until I was just a thin piece of paper tumbling toward nothing in the Santa Ana wind that was him.

girlvswhale:

California: George and Jack and the prostitute that got shot in front of me;

the day I found out my grandmother’s nurses were stealing from her, leaving her in dirty diapers all day, barely moving her from her bed for so long she grew bed sores the size of serving platters and how it took us, me, so long to notice;

the early morning(s) I had to choose between my life and a bundle of cells planted in the lining of my uterus;

the sensation of removing my engagement ring for the first time;

the look on my mother’s face when I told her I didn’t believe in God anymore;

the force of a man’s anger against the side of my face, in the center of my back, in the back of my thighs and the knowledge that I didn’t leave the moment it happened;

the summer night I got sucked into the Atlantic Ocean, certain that I was too tired to kick anymore, certain that I didn’t want to keep trying;

when I didn’t get a letter back;

climbing the subway steps that day and seeing the smoke billowing out from the floor of WTC 1 where I knew he was and the long walk back to Brooklyn alone and how the city seemed terrifying for the first time in my life and how I held out hope I would see him again, the only thing that kept my feet moving that night;

the moments my heart cracked from the weight of losing you.

Another scar and another.

girlvswhale:

The raised horizontal ridges across both knees that rise and fall like stock prices;

the nightmares filled with dark hallways and the eerie presence of danger looming in from all sides and then the flash of a familiar angry face and a flicker in my stomach that wakes me from a dead sleep;

the wide, flat one running vertical just below my knee that when I press my fingers into it I can feel the bone I am certain the thick cut exposed;

the day my Grandmother forgot who I was, her gray blue eyes blinking blankly at me while she searched my face and whispered the name of her third youngest sister;

the tiny sliver of white across the base of my left big toe that I am mostly sure came from my dropping a knife through it  on purpose but to this day no one in my family can corroborate the memory;

his hands in her mouth, pressing in so far I thought he was trying to pull out her tonsils. So far I expected him to start pulling out clown scarves by the pile; and how white her face was and how pink it was in her casket the next week as if she had never been dead at all.

Dear anyone who started following The Chicken Coops:

You’re beautiful and I want to kiss all of your faces.

Sadly, Tumblr makes it so that you can’t follow anyone from anything but your “direct” account. The Chicken Coops is a secondary blog that I have on tumblr and so it won’t let The Chicken Coops follow you.

This makes me sad because I want to follow all of you.

SO.. I will do that from my regular old “random” blog here. So, if some weird blog starts following you.. it’s just me, but in a different shape. Feel free to follow that tumblr also if you want. I post less “serious” things there and writing I am not 100% certain about (but let’s be honest, I’m never 100% certain about anything).

girlvswhale:

I think about Andy when I write, when I talk to Dan, when I think about being back in Sag Harbor and being the kind of girl who isn’t just a visitor and mostly I think of how he was the first person I ever knew who died. We all knew it was coming, but it still felt like we had the rug pulled out from under us and even when we graduated high school we all still talked about him, never able to get our feet back under us completely. The teachers in school tried to brace us for what was going to happen, but you can’t really prepare a group of 4th grade kids who have known each other their whole lives for the death of one of their own.

I remember we knew he had finally gone when one night Andy’s bedroom light went off. He slept with the light on, because he was afraid of the dark and his parents didn’t want the last days, weeks, months of his life to be filled with fear they could eliminate. He lived right behind my grandmother and for weeks after he was gone, I would peak out the patio door and across the great green span of the backyard to see if somehow the light was turned on, still able to hope that we lived in a world where little kids like me didn’t die and if they did they came back eventually.

Every time I saw his small window dark, my heart would break again, and I was so young that every time it happened it felt like the first time until one day I stopped looking and a whole new pain replaced the old one; the pain of reality clouding over, rolling into me with the force of a hurricane powered wave.

girlvswhale:

I would be the last they pulled from my mother, number four at thirty-five, her first eighteen years before; both of us two mistakes on each end of the seesaw that was my mother’s life.

When they extracted me, my skin ghostly, my chest still and small. The young doctor’s hands trembled as he clamped off the umbilical chord, did the honors my father was, by his choice, too far away to do.

My mother flailed in her stirrups, stitches sinking into the skin of the parts I had torn with my exit. Her long brown hair clung to her face like thin brown snakes as she begged someone to make me cry. A man with a mask rubbed my chest with a rubber gloved hand. He said, “Wake up little girl. Wake up for us.” Only his voice and my mother’s echoed in the delivery room, fighting for me to pull myself to the surface of this new reality I was so hesitant to enter from the moment sperm met egg.

The young doctor cut the chord too long, terrified at the sight of my lifeless body in his hand. Through the holes in the incubator I lived in for so long—where I would stop breathing four more times for increasingly longer periods until one day I gave in to my new plane of existence—my mother would flick the leftover stem of our connection with a tiny giggle as a way to pass her time in the NICU alone.

Once, as a child, I would ask my mother what the hole in the middle of my torso existed for, what was its purpose I wondered, and she would hold her palm over it and say, “That is where I sent you all the love I could for as long as I could.” I would forever feel the presence of her in the center of me, echoing back against my spine and bouncing forward into the hollow of where we had once been one.

girlvswhale:

We sat close together on a bench, his body faced toward mine. I sat with my hip pressed against his knee, legs spread out away from me, from him. I can’t tell you the color of his eyes, even though I stared into them for most of the night, but all I can think now when I try to recall is steel-hard and cold and strong. We talked about painting and MFA programs and Israel and the Jewish expectations of our families. We mocked the guy in a leather jacket and girl beard who pumped his fist at at Gigi Allin song. He yawned. I yawned. He stuck his finger in my open mouth as my jaw gasped for air and he smirked. There was one beer than two. His knee pressed harder into my thigh. It was late.  I had to resist the urge to touch his beard. He took off his sweater, the bar too warm for him. I held back the need to run my fingers over the lines etched in his skin. I gasped down my beer and stood up. Outside there was a hug, a parting. Then that was it. A failure sinking in me as I hopped in a cab. I hate the ones who aren’t easy to read. They remind me of the sound of waves crashing and how thunderous it is but how it could be so many other sounds. How without context it just a roaring in your ear that drowns out everyone and everything until all you can hear is the sound of your own heartbeat.

This story was originally published somewhere else. Hopefully that doesn’t matter in the age of the internet and since it’s my stupid story. 

 

Mom wraps her fingers around my ponytail. My body burns from my eyebrows, down my spine, all the way to my heels. My feet appear from underneath her bed as she tightens her grip around my hair, dragging me.

“I—told—you,” she grunts. “Not—to—touch—my—things.”

I screech, reach my arms back, clawing at her hands.  I am only five but my hair is brown and thick, the trunk of a baby tree, and it is long, the ends catching underneath my butt and tangled in Mom’s bare feet as she drags me toward the bedroom door.

“That—money—was—for—groceries.”

I grab the door jam. My nails are too short, my hands too small to hold on. My ankle catches the splintered wood where the bedroom becomes the living room. I yelp, like a injured dog.

“I’m sorry!” I scream.

Yesterday, I stole four dollars from Mom’s jewelry box to get a Slurpee and a hot dog from the 7-11 down the street. I am not sorry. I enjoyed every minute of it.

When I am five years old, this is the first thing I learn about money: taking four dollars from your mother is enough to make her hurt you; enough to make her pull you across your apartment by your hair when she has never hit you before.

I claw at the couch as she pulls me past it, my legs dragging through the ancient brown carpet. I flail, desperate for the burning in my head to stop, kicking the coffee table with my right foot. My leg tingles from my ankle to my hip. I knock over a plastic cup of water, a jumbo set of crayons explodes to the floor. 

“We are poor.” Mom yells, so loud that it makes my ears ring. “Don’t you get that?”

The second thing I learn about money: being poor means no new toys, only one TV channel that waves like a flag in the wind, and especially no Slurpees and hot dogs smothered with chili and cheese.

Our apartment is tiny, we’ve only traveled a few feet, but it feels like 100 miles. Mom finally lets go, tossing me against the living room chair next to the front door.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, feeling the tears well up in my eyes, my head throbs.

“Sorry won’t work this time, kid.” Mom’s face is tight in the middle, thin lines of tears curling around her cheeks. She shakes, stares at her hands, at me, then out the living room window next to her.

The third thing I learn about money: losing four dollars is enough to make your mother cry. Watching your mother cry is enough to almost make that Slurpee and chili-cheese hot dog taste like the worst thing you ever put in your mouth.

Mom grabs my arm. She lifts me up and slaps me down on to the chair. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my brother, Sean, standing behind the coffee table. He opens his mouth to say something. My heart jumps. My brother, my protector – who holds my hand voluntarily while crossing the street—is going to save me. Mom’s face shuts him up. 

“You stay out of this. Understand?”

Sean nods. He collects his crayons, avoiding my eyes. He gathers his drawings—which are mostly of his cartoon-self riding dinosaurs and lions through green fields—into a messy pile and escapes to the kitchen.

The fourth thing I learn about money: stealing it, and making your mother cry, is enough to make your usually over-protective nine-year old brother, abandon you for the first time in your tiny, little life. 

*

Two days later, I sit half naked in the middle of my bedroom. I slice Mom’s scissors back and forth, watching hair tumble from my head, like leaves off a tree.  Sean finds me first, dropping his box of crayons and backing quickly out of the room.

Mom rushes into the room a few seconds later, snatching the scissors out of my hand. She looks at the hair covering my naked chest and the rug like a second skin. She starts to cry.

She kneels down. She picks pieces of hair off my face. “Why did you do this?”

I shrug. I lift hair strands off my body.  I let them float off my fingers, twirling in the breeze of the open window, amazed at how light they are when no longer attached to my body.

girlvswhale:

I laughed into the phone, pulled on a clean shirt and 2 am jeans, tight in the thigh; the ones that hold in my heart, a lonely bleeding pump. Trip down the stairs into a cab and go fifteen traffic lights away to a corner of the city that smells like cold salt water and reminds me of winter nights on the beach on Long Island. A passport held out as I say, “I let my license expire. Silly me.” Then there is a conversation about my glasses that I don’t hear, because it’s vapid like me. I never hear anything because the world circles my fucking head so fast it pushes away everyone and everything.

On the farthest side of the bar, arms press into me, mouths hover near my ear and it feels as if they are propping me up and I am just a puppet for awhile. An arm around my neck, a hand on my hip and I shake new hands and watch new mouths move and they know who I am and they liked that story in that one place, the one I have never read again because it makes me cringe at its existence. Someone asks if I write poetry so loudly that everyone snaps to see what my answer is and all I can say is, “I did once, but I don’t get it anymore.”

There are lips against my ear, my temples; fingers through my hair, against the back of my neck, near the small of my back. There are bodies against bodies, a mass of people tight into each other, pressed together by the music into one bundle of nerves that move like waves in the ocean.

All I can think about in the heat of them is the cold water; the way winter ocean water against your skin makes you feel as if every moment before it ever touched you, you were dead, sleep walking through life.

At a hot dog stand, someone offers me a hot dog with mustard only and I think, “This is why this isn’t my kind of town.” and I get jeers and sneers as I put the ketchup on and then some drunk bats it out of my hand and it flies across the sidewalk and into the road and it’s everything I can do to keep from smacking him in the face and I am so glad that my jeans are holding in my heart and with it all my anger and my sadness and my loneliness because if they weren’t, I’d be punching it straight into the boney ribcage of this guy I don’t know who thinks life is nothing but fun and games.

Someone offers me another hot dog but I wave it off. The guy I know who thinks he gets to come home with me tonight, tries to hold me back at the curb but I hail a cab, get in alone, go fifteen more stoplights with my phone in my hand, this throbbing silent thing. I climb the stairs, fall into bed, read an anonymous message from someone, probably a man, that makes me laugh.

I am nothing but condescension and ego. I am nothing but a vagina and a nice pair of tits. I am nothing but two hands, two legs, two feet, two eyes, a robot propped up with two by fours and held together by string and tape and glue. I am just a beating heart, wrapped in skin and fabric, trying not to bleed all over the beauty that is the world.

girlvswhale:

It is 7 am. I feel as if I’ve been awake my entire life. I feel as if someone has pushed their fingers into my face and spread open my skull and all the nerves of my body are being stimulated all at once. When I walk, a pain shoots up from the arch of my right foot into the rest of my body like I am walking on lightning.

I just want a New York egg sandwich and a cup of coffee from Java Nation and a morning talk with Dan about how this stupid town never changes over the crossword in pen where he eventually gives up while I diligently finish and he starts filling in the gaps in the tattoos on the inside of his arms like a child; pen that will smear later against the center of my back or the side of my neck while we take a nap in the cold, yellow, winter light that fills his room like a spotlight.

I want the hope and safety that comes with familiarity; that easy acceptance that for most breeds mediocrity but for me as always produced exceptional things.

I sleep with the lights on these days, falling asleep at odd hours with the lamp next to my bed glowing an eerie white light that makes everything around me look cold and dead. I don’t have the strength to turn it off anymore.

The darkness scares me more these days than any amount of cold dead light ever will.

girlvswhale:

Hour 40 of being awake. Naked in bed with this giant feeling of dread, like I will fall asleep and wake up to a world frozen in time. I worry mostly about my heart. I worry that l will never be good enough to love because of things I can’t control. I want to be beautiful enough and smart enough and funny enough. I want someone to put their hand on the back of my neck and pull my face up to meet theirs and put their other hand on my cheek without me pushing it away. Most moments I am a ball of self esteem, but then there are nights like this when I fall into bed with sweaty hair and epic tired eyes that I wonder if there is ever any part of me that has ever been beautiful.

girlvswhale:

Drinking warm chai laced with vanilla in a coffee mug designated for a Capricorn. 

On the side in typewriter font it says: “Capricorns are conservative and afraid to take risks. You are a wimp. You don’t do much of anything. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Your sex life has slipped into a coma and is now on the critical list. Capricorns should avoid standing still too long as they tend to take root and become trees.”

No one in my house is a Capricorn. None of us has ever dated a Capricorn. As long as I have known Ian, we have had this mug. I have this memory of a story of a girl who, thinking Ian was a Capricorn, bought him this mug.

He was in undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and he used to sleep with girls who wore their pain and insanity like a slip, just letting it peak out the hem of their dresses, waiting underneath their clothes in this sexy undefinable barrier to their real selves. I was never like that. I wonder sometimes if that’s why it didn’t work, and not because he couldn’t seem to throw away an empty soda can if his fucking life, or our relationship, depended on it.

I will leave the mug when I go, because it is not mine, and some girl will come in behind me to drink out of it. She’ll probably not know him, or astrology, well enough to realize he is not a Capricorn and she will go home and compare her astrological sign to his on a website run by two women who wear gypsy scarves in public. It will tell her that her connection with this Capricorn will be fruitful and passionate and she will come back to this place filled with strewn papers and discarded boxer shorts on the living floor like throw rugs and tables lined with soda cans so close to the garbage a breeze could blow them in and she will think that she can be this Capricorn’s savior; she can be his hope.

And I will go off to a man who knows when the electric bill is due or maybe when my birthday is and who sees a hamper and thinks, “I should put my boxers in there now that they are off of my body.” and I will think that maybe it is pathetic to find those qualities important in a person but then I will realize romance isn’t always what you think it will be.

Sometimes it isn’t just long kisses and legs sweaty and tight against each other and the rest of the world fading into nothing around the passion of all that.

Sometimes it is the things before all that, which make the kissing and the nakedness worth it and for everyone that is different and for me it is a clean coffee table and a gas bill I don’t have to worry about that make my knees go week; my lips go soft; makes my tiny aching heart skip beats like a scratched record.