Fact&/orFiction

Hey remember that time when your favorite colors were orange and green? You had a deep tan, bushy eyebrows and a gold ring with the image of a swan on it. You thought Shel Silverstein was the cleverest poet alive and you independently studied the advertising industry and Walt Disney for a year in Advanced Ed classes. You wrote a really terrible play about it. Then there was the school play. You auditioned for the part of Mary Magdalene and didn't get it, so you auditioned for Jesus the next day. They let you have the part because you'd already memorized the lines. You had a crush on Paul Hernanez. You made up stories about how his mom made him perm his hair. You tried to change your name to L.J., even though there was already another kid by that name. A boy. He later moved to florida. The popular kids let you hang out with them (most of the time). Kids used to make fun of you for wearing bell-bottoms. They would yell "save the whales man, bomb vietnam!" And you were pretty sure that the hippies were against bombing vietnam. But you didn't say anything.

Like a desert, warm and vast, I bake. Dawn arrives with a deep thirst. Somebody needs to dig for water. There is life below.

Henceforth I defer to the superior worldview of my subconscious mind. A world of romance and fairies, mazelike city streets and riding in cars with boys. Labrynth rummage shops. Vulcan mind melds, books about puppies. A safe, warm, butterfly feeling when I bury my face in your neck.

In your proximity the cells of my body purr. The curve of your mouth and the rumble of your voice are dizzying. I could curl up and live in the idea of you. In the lines of your eyes. Seduced. Reduced to a shred rationality, swirling inward, fading into that deep sensation.

And if all goes according to plan you will never, ever know.

Third date. A moderately priced lounge, specializing in champagne cocktails named after film icons. He’s already picked up tickets to a nine o’clock show. They are posed neatly near the edge of the table; he wants me to notice. He has spent the afternoon thinking about me, planning our evening. Under a demure silk shift, I am arranged some of the tartiest underwear I have dared to purchase. He smiles. I smoulder. I have concocted a few plans of my own.

Five past eight. My Monroe arrives: a fifteen dollar Shirley temple. His Bogart has been sitting, untouched, since I arrived.

“Any activity around the condo?” His eyebrows lift brightly.

Opening topic: real estate. Really? I formulate smile.

“Not yet. But I have high expectations,” I flirt. I dip my pinkie into my drink and suck absently. Frothy tangerine ruffles pinch where hip meets leg. He shares his thoughts on the housing market while I sip and nod. I try to recall some of his personal details, hoping to change the subject. Nothing comes to mind.

In the diaphanous past there is a moment of transparency. You are deep in a crowd, looking through a glassless window, calling my name. I fake deafness, embarrassed at the sound of your voice, the hope in it.

Fast forward ten years. Reverse that image.

Shit.

Somehow you have a powerful foothold in my subconscious. I suppose it wouldn't be a stretch to say that I think about you almost daily. But there are others I think of daily, hourly, even see constantly; none of them show up in my dream life. Yet you do.

The dreams are always different. Once I was tasting new and extravagant flavors of ice cream and somehow you were there. Last night I was sorting through bric-a-brac in a garage sale for the Lethbridge mafia, and there you were. These two dreams I remember distinctly; one being recent, the other I wrote down. There have been countless others, never the same. The quality that strings them together is your presence.

I am sometimes angry with you, but only a little (a vague and familiar feeling that comes in the daytime as well). I try and put some space between us. I'll even act like you're not there, move to another room, avert my eyes. But there is gravity in these dreams. Eventually our bodies align and what follows is the same every time: We hug. Yeah, we just hug it out.

I don't get it.

Maybe I've missed you so much over the last four years that missing you has turned into a dull, vague weight on my personality. Not the deep wrenching ache that it once was, but still a real, visceral part of my day-to-day. Your absence was, for the longest time, more real than anything else. And then every day after a little less. A little less. How long can you decrease until you're simply not there anymore, inside of me?

This sounds more romantic than I intended. It's more disturbing than anything, really. I don't think of you as mine anymore, as my anything. Truly. But no embrace in my waking life has ever felt as good.

Had a conversation with some random strangers on the bus today; initiated by the bus driver, actually. All of us U of L grads ('08 Drama, '01 PoliSci, '98 History). All of us working Joe Jobs unrelated to our fields.

A problem I don't know how to solve: I have (irrationally) started to fear spending time with people I care about.

On my upper left arm: a dark nebula of freckles in two undulating strokes.
It often elicits undue sympathy; People ask "what happened?" with concern as if it were fearful or grotesque (something I have never understood). I like to think it resembles a kiss; maybe from a fairy godmother.


Also, further south: a tiny, almost undetectable third nipple. Looks like a tiny purple mole, really. A nice little genetic gift courtesy of Dad.

Sometimes a girl just honestly doesn't know what she wants.

My memory is a candle flickering in a dark room; making love to its shadow.

The god of fear and the god of love are one.

I am feeling so terribly defeated today, for no reason at all.

That deep feeling; that twisting, soaring, sinking sensation; where is it? What does it mean about me, about us, that it cannot be summoned? I cannot heal your ache; was not meant to, never will, nor you mine.

If Romance is neither the means nor the end, then I really don't know what is happening. What have we started here? Who are you?

The poets were wrong. (Most of them. Maybe all.)

"This," she croons, gesturing below her neck and back again, "is the instrument." She freezes, unblinkingly. She is naked. "And these are the things I have learned."

The crowd is unsure and yet unshocked; a noncommittal silence. A young woman in the audience, jaw clenched, dark-lined eyes equally unblinking, shifts the position of her feet. In the row behind her someone inhales through his nostrils, noisily.

After three deeper (but quieter) inhalations, the actress begins a low, dark breath; it lingers, almost a groan, a mere whisper. It builds to a growl, stutters into a roar, peaks in a wail; smoothens, and now a sopranic aria, and soon a shrill, splitting shriek. She stops suddenly. The crowd remains unsure. Silence thickens.

With the marker in her hand, she scribbles pool on her abdomen, and below it INTUITION?. She exhales again, thick with sound, rolling gently toward the floor and back, upon which is written, upside-down, V E R T E B R A E. She pauses halfway, pops up, and embarrased, scribbles sweat (stinks) on her thighs.

Regaining composure, Viola is penned in a vertical line down her windpipe. Blend between the jaw line and the throat. Plant at the top of each foot. "Cankles" :( above that. Too much curving above the belly button, Not enough archingly above the ass crack.

"On the nose means saying exactly what you feel. That is bad." BAD she writes, on her nose.

"Verissimilitude" means the appearance of being true or real. That is good." She shrugs, then scrawls Hey and hey just above each breast.

"A vadge is a vadge is a vadge." She pauses, smiles. Colors in pubic hair with the marker. Scribbles, pros/ cons?.

"And finally, " she produces a pair of briefs and steps into them. They are ill-fitting. With a flourish of sharpie she pens her terminal stroke: a dark, bold moustache on her upper lip.

"Blank slate," she whispers.

I am sick of arguing with you.

I have a confession to make. When you didn't call, I was almost relieved. That's how ridiculous I have become. I felt like you would expect me to say certain things, or to be intelligent or clever or insightful or warm, and I wasn't certain that I was capable of it.

Evidently I have been a student too long. I have very few opinions of my own and precious little imagination. I am afraid of next year. I'm not sure whether I've forgotten who I was or whether I am embarrassed to be her; whether I realized that I never really was that person in the first place. I remember being a great deal more confident; funnier, more intelligent. I remember being witty. I remember being very attractive. It is also possible that I am inventing this history.

The only tangent through which I am able to connect to reality is theory. 'Do' has become a verb for other people. I am incapable of sharing my thoughts without sounding like an utter fucktard. I stutter now--this is new, and embarrasing. I always had so much pride in my own conversational skills.

I don't think it's normal for a person in my position to feel this anchorless.

i have a passion for sauces. he has a penchant for making faces. i'm not saying the problem can't be resolved; i'm just saying somewhere somebody's gotta bend. i'm saying i'm unlikely to change shape or direction. i am igneous. i don't even care if there aren't any volcanoes around.

My hands smell like dishwater because I was washing my roomate's dishes. Again.

I wonder if I will be Joan of Arc.