Closure letters to no one

I once loved a man who contemplated his reflection on graduation day, mortarboard perched on his wavy brown hair, letting his eyes well up with pride as he wrapped his arms around my complacent midsection. A healthy observer may have been touched by our closeness on such a momentous morning, but when my gaze searched our spotty reflection for some small, shared warmth, I felt a twinge when the only eyes that locked were his own green irises. 

Several curling iron burns and subdued panic attacks later, I am folded into a sea of anxious, alcohol-reeking, sweaty, bellowing classmates. A dark part of me wonders if holding his hand in the midst of the fray will forever color my recollections of this overblown occasion. When our indulgent graduation speaker quoted the encouraging lines of a pop song to inflate our already-bloated senses of worth, I notice how he chuckles sincerely in all of the right places. The chirping words of our student body president send detectable strains of emotion through his features, and I conclude that he reassures his own predictability with the swells of a heroic orchestra in his head. 

No matter that these are the prejudiced observations of a girl recently jilted. Are each of us not guilty of being the main players in the tragic, Shakespearean screenplays of our lives?

Life carried on. Boxes were packed, goodbyes were said to friends and family. I parked my ass at the least threatening city on the golden coast, using vague adjacency to declare my commitment to words intimately spoken. I walked the marble-lined hallways of the ostentatious, beautiful beacon of wealth that was his childhood home with a wistfulness that I wish I could yank from memory. 

Alas, my walk-on role was cut short. Killed off. Written out of the script. This resulted in his screenplay taking a turn for the existential while my own became pitchy and irritatingly melancholic. The ideologies of a starry-eyed, art student coupling could only last as long as the euphemisms of art school critiques rang true.

I will miss your sweet optimism. 

San Francisco Blues

My friends and I find a pocket of love in the Castro district of San Francisco. We share an affinity with gay men because, like them, we openly wear the wounded mien of those afflicted by aggressive masculinity. Bubbles down my throat, and I disappear happily into the glitter of sweaty, bronzed skin and embellished costumery. 

(I am that wonderful person you want nothing to do with.)

And on the third mile of your drunken trudge through an unfamiliar city in your cheap, designer knockoff shoes, you start to feel the night hanging from the folds of your skirt, the ends of your hair, the corners of your eyes. It cackles at you and snatches at your ankles as you wander through hordes of men without faces. Late night grease sits in your stomach like a small, swaddled Christ, and you can't help but fear the quarrel that is blossoming between your companions. Swish, vomit, pout. 

Kindness made the cut so clean.

In my present life, there is 3 of me. The girl with things, the girl with people, and the girl in the air. 

The girl with things sits in the exact chair I type from now, creating a ruckus with innumerable charms and beads that hang from strings around her neck. The rest of her, however, is silent. She attempts to fulfill quests for meaning by way of scavenges through tangled piles of clothes and jewels in thrift store bins, scrawling sentiments to far away friends on postcards with carefully-selected quirk and deeply imprinted letterpress, and by buying the most colorful and oddly shaped vegetables at the farmer's market for meals that she'll never cook and dinner guests she'll never have.  

The girl with people is excessively wordy, sympathetic, and uses intellect to compartmentalize every deeply troublesome topic of her life when catching up. There is no "the breakup was mutual," there is only time for an explanation of her progress since that fateful phone call. Her friends are very supportive of her every move, and why wouldn't they be? In the interest of time and energy, they've each been provided with a case study of every tribulation, and if they're lucky, she'll even reference a distant relationship or allow the twinkle of a brimming tear. She is the only one of the three who feels grounded and sure of her place in the world. 

Girl in the air exists only for a few hours at a time, suspended in time and space between her two heavily-defined counterparts. She stares out of the airplane window and admires those strangely-passing solar systems of cities, admiring them as if they were jewels in a case, contemplating her existence and feeling smaller and less permanent than the cubes of ice in that cheap, plastic cup.

"How strange it is to be anything at all."

Detail of "Vicissitudes," underwater sculpture by Jason de Caires Taylor

I still lament the fact that my disposition is light years away from ballerina grace. I will buy pale pink flats, carelessly off-the-shoulder blouses, and tie my hair up into glossy buns, but my limbs refuse to act accordingly. My body often feels like a bumbling, bulky thing pinned to my soul... an easy figure to blame for all of the broken vases at home, fixtures at work, and unfinished drinks long since steeped into my jeans. During yoga class, a task itself that seems foolish in attending each week, I am forever the eyesore. "Sun salutations" are a series of poses that, when executed correctly, are supposed to resemble and feel like the an ocean wave lapping at the shore. While the willowy backs of my peers  elongate, muscles rippling underneath like tiny fish, my knees lock up and occasionally send me tumbling back to my mat with a conspicuous thump. While they extend their ankles above their heads, supported only by limber wrists, I am forced to endure the white noise of my self-defeat while I sit and touch my forehead to the ground. 

In connection with this entire concept is this childhood memory that I can't seem to escape... A necklace string breaks, tiny baubles hit the ground in fives, a deliciously multiplied pitter-pat on the wooden floor, and my tiny, fleshy fingers grab at them. These beads sat in the miniscule drawer of my childhood jewelry box for years, and unless someone else has since intervened, may still be tucked away in the velvet lined cranny. It feels like the first memory I have of that panicked feeling of loss, frustration with my carelessness, and a complete inability to acknowledge the end of something. 

Why do I continue to pin so much loyalty and trust into things with a terrible return rate? "The prospect of arm wrestling with my only ally in a place full of strangers was just too daunting." And thus, the fucked up dreams commence.

I already forgot how I used to feel about you.

What a curious life.

Something searches in me for nostalgia when my neighbor hangs up strings of colored Christmas bulbs from his gutters, but I come up empty handed... the seasons are changing in a place where I have no memories. When I leave work at 6 am, hollow-eyed and completely mummified in a knit scarf, I stare up at the enormous, sparkling tree that has been erected in the middle of the shopping center and forget what it feels like to be impressed by anything.

I can only be moved by the white noise that permeates my dreams.

cuticle slaughterer, object of child and dog stares, 3 pm cigarette kiss atop a torn couch cushion in Safehouse where I lied about how often I replace my shoes, post-sexist hiss taunt on Congress street, ceiling scurries, pretending I didn't remember your birthday, blaming my slippery, Piscean soul, in the words of Kanye West, am I that douchebag that never takes work off?

Buried Shoebox Love

What is there to a Saturday night in my misty world? For starters, I sit cross legged to keep my toes warm because I don't know how to turn on my apartment's rusted, moderately dangerous looking heater. When I realize the spiders have begun to spin long strands of my hair into their webs, hours are spent defensively scrubbing the darkest corners of my living space (which I strongly suspect may be the most action those baseboards have seen in years). After a good amount of harassed brooding, I realize it's time to concoct an exit plan... as colorful and far-fetched as my mind can possibly make it. Even when my energy levels are at their most threadbare, it's my restless ambition that always seems to hoist me up and into the tangled, unknown fray. That's what brought me out here in the first place, right?

Onward.

Thank God you see me the way you do, strange as you are to me.

October begins, and I start to wander. One night finds me in such a tunnel, I finally work up the courage to dial the number of a spiritual healer I found via search engine some time ago. That's right, a spiritual healer. I found her somewhere in between my research on chakras, homeopathy, and a fascination with nimble wrists weighed down by piles of beads and foreign, tattooed inscriptions. After a brief, breathy conversation on the phone, we agreed to meet upstairs at my favorite yoga studio downtown.


Some people you meet and immediately feel a communion with, and Petra is one of them. She is all motherly smiles, jade jewelry, and precious insight. After unloading what felt like a semi-truck of problems onto her, we decided to balance my chakras. It's a difficult practice to describe, other than to say she cupped my face like a child's, breezed her feather-like fingertips from my inner arms outward, and meditated her thumbs in circular patterns across my skittish upper stomach. After the whole blessed exercise was over, in which I was steeped in a chaotically imaginative series of dreams, me and my nest of hair rolled over and up. She told me that my resistant chakras were located in my root (connection and comfort with the earth/your surroundings), my naval (power over one's choices), throat (ability to communicate), and least surprisingly, in my heart (security, validation, love). After feeling rather hopeless upon receipt of this information, she grins at me and said, "It's not too late to feel good again. For such a young person, you are full of depth, and this will be your greatest gift to yourself and others. Its important to nurture yourself."


Walking outside was like being born. The shift I feel is subtle and subterranean; a feeling I can only describe as tectonic. Restlessness begins to open inside of me like a flower, and I catch my reflection in a mirror, and I can see my face like I haven't in... months? Years? My irises are bolted with brown, absolutely ablaze with an awakening.


Suddenly, I can sense the normal smells of weed and saltwater lacing themselves into the breeze that drifts down State street, and a lackadaisical mentality reflected in the faces of those who amble down the sidewalks. It's a constant rotation of tourist families by day and buttoned up men by night gravitate downtown for beers and a sense of unhurriedness. My feet carry me to Rusty's, a greasy sort of pizza parlor where 13 year old boys flock in territorial droves, their blonde curls askew beneath sun-bleached caps and skateboards buried in the crook of their freckled elbows. They like it here because they can leer at the female cashier when she leans forward to collect change, and because they can use the word "fuck" without retribution. I let myself order a pizza, and after months of organic nosh, it bursts open in my mouth like a sun. I suspect that the amount of water I drank has emptied some rural pond, and when my stomach makes noises, I take pleasure in feeling and place a hand on it lovingly.


When I can see others clearly, it is easier to see myself. A sweet man who sells me a sham set recognizes me with a smile and asks me if I work in the area. I tell him I do, and cry when I leave the shop because someone has noticed me.