Day Two

Last night I discovered NaPoWriMo, which is the abbreviation for National Poetry Writing Month. This prompt is from their website: Write a poem that incorporates the titles of three books you have in your house.

/Library/
Between L4 and L5, my spine
is slipping. Against gravity I hold
this body up but my seams crack
so I fold each limb in like paper
until I am bound in my own borders.

—–
Uh. It turns out I’m bad at following prompts. Oh well. Also, since it’s been 6 years for your loss, and would have been 6 years of our gain, and it’s been so long…I miss you dear. I hope you’re well.

foolish in april

i’ve always needed a hook. starting, for me, inevitably starts at the beginning. i can spend days working on that first line, the entry, the anecdote that i think will suffice to entice. it goes against everything i’ve learned in writing classes, but i can’t help myself. i always start at the beginning. i choose mondays to begin projects, the first day of the month for new goals, the first day of the year for a new kind of living. i give up on something in the middle of the day and return to it in the morning. while the marking of the beginning of a thing is often as arbitrary as its end, i’m drawn to the newness, the freshness. i am drawn to not being behind, late, out of the know. and so i find myself on the brink of april, with three new things i want for myself. three month long projects that will ostensibly make my life better.

in short order:
i do not want to eat out in april. i may order drinks, and dine with friends and families in their homes, but i do not want to spend money on food anyplace except the grocery store. i haven’t decided how i feel about letting someone buy me food, or eating the food someone else bought while out. primarily i am doing this because i spend WAY too much money on food. but also i think it’s a kind of return to myself, to self care and love in the form of nourishment. i so rarely take time to prepare something just for myself, and while their is a certain self care in allowing myself the convenience of eating out, it’s not the kind i’m interested in–too brief in the indulgence, too careless in the fulfillment.

i want to continue to purge myself of things. i am not one of those people who thinks that any accumulation is bad. i do not believe that i should get rid of things for the sake of ethical questions of consumption, though they are certainly valid. more, i am practical. i have too many things i don’t use. they take up space of things i could use. they are hard to move and i am preparing to do so. i am aiming for a 50% reduction of most categories of things (clothes, jewelry, books, etc). Though, realistically, I know I’ll end up in the 25% range.

finally, april is national poetry month. following the lead of a friend, i will attempt 30 poems in 30 days. i don’t expect they will be good. i don’t expect that i’ll actually write 30. but i do expect that i’ll write sometimes, and that it will remind me that i love writing, that i have considered myself a writer before i conceived of any other real or lasting identity. i’ll try to post the poems here, and perhaps, if pertinent, mail a copy to people i love. and perhaps, in lieu of writing my own, revisit ones that have my heart. onward, then. today i am using a prompt: Think of a place you love. Recall all the details. Write. Is it the corner store near your apt, or a hidden place near a river, or your fam’s kitchen? You choose. Engage as many senses as possible. When someone reads/hears this, they should feel how much you love it through your description and language.

/living alone/
under the blanket
my skin like linen, raveled
in self affection

song of herself

I rescued the bananas. They were so sad, sitting on the top of the garbage in my friends’ kitchen, tossed before their time, to accommodate their purchaser’s week long absence. I didn’t want to take them–I didn’t. Already beginning to turn brown, what could I do for them? Wait for the winter of their life, before resentfully forcing them into some banana muffin scenario. For now they sit coyly on my table, in a bowl I threw for the very purpose of housing fruit. The bananas tricked me, made me accountable and my guilt over their presence is disproportionately huge. I didn’t even buy them. Why should I care?

It’s been four weeks since my return to the States. Everything is my apartment is bananas: the books I bought for school but haven’t read; the rugs in the bathroom I keep forgetting to wash; the MacBook that taunts me with its light-up keyboard, begging to be put to better use than Facebook status updates.  I have sat down to write hundreds of times since coming back. I blink at the screen. I look at my nails. I eat a snack. I eat twenty. But there is no story to be told, and I learned my writing lessons well. What is the narrative arc? Who are the characters? It can’t just be a free-fall of feelings, an avalanche of emotion.

And then I chide myself, because I have *done* things since coming back. Surely I have. I drove 3 hours to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a gay resort. I baked muffins, crumb cakes, pies. I watched Eclipse, Jersey Shore. I clocked hours on my RA position. I caught up with some of the amazing, important women in my life. I mailed packages. I went to a party where five minutes into meeting her, a woman informed me of her support and affection for the IDF. But these things are unrelated, no consistent strand but the overbearing “I” of it all. So I decide to be less like myself, challenge myself to ignore my overly rational tendencies and do the opposite of the thing I think I should do. I go out when I want to stay home, I go to my favorite bar when I should work. I flirt with people who are vulnerable, I have sex with an old friend and enjoy it. I research publishing companies that work with creative non-fiction, and imagine ways to take a year off from graduate school.

And when I convince myself that perhaps I can be less like me, more like someone interesting, someone with a story, someone adventurous and lovable and unpredictable rather than reliable and boring,  I rescue the bananas. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Practical and unemotional, but it’s so like me, I hate it. I hate their stupid curved bodies in my beautiful round bowl, which previously housed Sour Patch kids and the cord for my external hard drive. Now that they are here, I can’t possibly turn away from them, let them rot without some kind of resolution. I owe them my time, attention, as I owe all things: the books, the rugs,  the blog, the friend, the graduate school.

And because in all of this, what I want most is for someone to rescue me, take me home, make me safe and loved and beautiful and wanted, I envy them even as I loathe them. And because I hate that I have wants and needs I can’t fulfill on my own, I will take care of the bananas and books. I will deny the wasteful desire to throw them out, the selfish desire to put off my life and my inevitable boring self for a little longer. I come back to me, indulgent but uninspired, efficient but exacting. Sure, I hate the bananas. But ultimately it’s me I can barely look at.

Suspending Disbelief

When I was a wee lass, my parents took us to Catholic church services every Sunday. On Christmas Eve, we went to the Midnight Mass, held, conveniently, at midnight. This was and is my favorite mass. In fact, it is the only service I attend at all anymore. Every December 24th, I head over to my family’s church, even if my parents have chosen to attend another mass. Every year, I remember why I don’t attend services except for the one time.

I guess when I was little, Midnight Mass was special because we were allowed to open one present when we got home from church. So, while Sundays were trials with no real payoff (except, I suppose, everlasting life), Christmas Mass meant presents. And really, when I was very young, I could even take a little nap during service and my parents still applauded our effort.

When we all got older, and when we were too dignified to chomp at the present bit, our Christmas tradition changed a little. We still went to Midnight Mass, but after, we would head over to the home of my oldest sister, and have breakfast at 2am. Then she would give us her presents, and we would head home, full of bacon and cheer.

Now, my oldest sister doesn’t live in the same country, let alone the same city, and our traditions have shifted yet again. Now, I go to midnight mass, sometimes alone. During services, I bite my tongue at what I hear the priest suggest. I play a game where I change all the pronouns in the reading from male to female. I scope out the pews to see if anyone I know is still attending. Really, it’s almost disrespectful, my presence, but I do it for three moments. Two are incredibly precise: first,  the moment at the beginning of mass where they light the room from the back. The light travels up the aisle as the organ reaches its crescendo and I feel…something. The vibrations in the air? My pupils contract? The spirit of something greater than I can imagine? Maybe it’s just the collective effervescence of so many people in one room, experiencing the subtle and effective metaphor.

The second precise moment is after the Lord’s prayer, when everyone is still holding hands. The priest does a little spiel, and the congregation responds with “For the kingdom, and the power and the glory are Yours, now and forever” as we raise our linked hands slightly higher, at about the level of our hearts. I suppose I never realized how tyrannical that phrase is until I wrote it out just now. It’s almost absurd: I can recite every moment of Mass with frightening clarity; years and years of attendance have made the creeds and the refrains a kind of muscle memory. I only need to be in the proximity of a wooden pew, the smell of incense in the air and it rolls off my tongue like I’m still a believer. Perhaps that too is a kind of grace.

The third thing I go for is less of a moment. I love when people sing together. Lots of people, easy songs. Even if there isn’t a beautiful singer in the bunch, something about all those voices working collectively gets to me. And maybe it was in church that I learned how to lead a call and response at a rally, or get a roomful of people to chant Cunt over and over again.

After mass, I come home to wherever I’m living, and have a quiet evening with my pets. In the morning, I visit my third sister for breakfast and presents. Later, we go to my parents house for dinner, and at around nine, weary from over exposure, I gather my bounty and head home. I get to my quiet apartment, and almost weep with gratitude. There are no children crying. There are no rude brothers in law. There are no awkward uncles, or snooty aunts. There is just me, my cats, my thoughts.

And here’s what I think. I lost something crucial at some point in the last few years. Aside from the obvious, I lost the ability to take my family in whole, to like them unconditionally. I’ve grown more solitary, perhaps more selfish or self involved. I’ve lost the joy in just being together with them. The comfort of my father’s hand on mine at church, the grace of my sisters as the kneel during services. More cynical, more short-tempered; the easy acceptance of a child in exchange for the blithe rejection of adulthood.

Now, when I get home at the end of Christmas day, I find myself nostalgic for a time where we all still liked each other (mostly), a time where I didn’t feel guilty and angry at my parents, disappointed in my siblings, hurt by emotional and physical absences that color all our interactions. And I wonder, sitting here in my lovely quiet apartment, on a real bed and not the couch or air mattress, will I have the opportunity to miss this moment? Or will I simply grow to resent the isolation I crave? I wonder, can I get back to the place we inhabited as children? Can we love each other in those pure generous ways? Do we want to?