45 posts tagged “memories”

I remember the 1982 gray Dodge Ram Van, splattered with rust spots and fingerprints.  I remember my butterball legs climbing the mountain step and reigning over the backseat in my special throne.  I could barely see the outside.  I could barely see through the dashboard, but I could see him; in the driver's seat, window down, Black Irish forearm tapping rhythm into the front door.  His thick chocolate hair dancing in the hot summer air.  The August exhale that curled and teased through the only window that went down.  Of course his window was the one that worked.  So it goes, Vonnegut. 
There was Off the Wall, New York, and Excitable Boy.  There were tape cassettes and maybe a few eight-tracks left.   He still smoked then.  Marlboro Reds.  Chain smoked, actually.  One lit butt after the next.  Inhale, exhale, flick, light again. 
Once in awhile, I would catch his ice blue eyes in the rear view mirror.  When they were angry, I looked away. I hid.  I was quiet. 
When they were laughter and love, he would ask me, "What's next?".
My sisters would sigh.
My mother would laugh.
And he always let me choose, though they all knew what I would say.
"River song, Daddy. Play me the River song."
And he did.
No matter how many times we had already heard it.  No matter how much my family wished I would find a new favorite.
And I would scream delight in every word.  Every lyric.  Every sound.
He loved me then.

So it goes, Dad.  So it goes.

"You got that light behind your eyes again."

I'm in the bathroom getting dressed, for work. Three-inch raven stilettos.  High waist, ink dress pants. Midnight push-up bra stretched around my chest.  Black on black against bare skin.  Delicately leaned over a cosmetic covered sink.  My white button down is tossed neatly over the back of the toilet. 
I like this outfit, but I always think it's my in case of a funeral  attire. 

I had been laughing to the face in the glass.  Blushing and giggling and teasing myself.
Flirting with the coffee and eyeliner.
Smirking.
Last night's dreams still foggy in this reality.

"What?"

"The light is there. It's nice to see it back."

"Thanks....." I whisper.

And realize he's right.

I respond,

"It's good to see you're still in the bar"

He pats the next few beats into the wrinkled pillows.

We laugh, contagious explosions of excitement in the gray, pre-rain morning.

I finally got that shift I needed.

That Change in Energy.
 

I wish I could forget how I loved you.  I wish I didn't remember why.  I want to erase all the memories of gazes and touching and whispered promises.  When we believed there would be no more lonely Christmases.  When I romanticized struggling and a two room apartment.  When you weren't my first love, but the one I wanted.

I wish I could only remember the anger and hate.  I wish I only had memories of how you hurt me.  And recall the taste of vomit, stomach acid, when I felt like nothing more than a used body.  When I found your deceit, covered in cum and bathroom tissue.  That moment that made me doubt everything.

My most recent heartbleed.

I collected my stuff in a race to beat death.  Lifted the full dresser onto the wobbly hand cart, by myself. Covered cosmetics and books with dirty laundry, scanned the cluttered apartment, and decided anything left behind was not worth having.
Anything.
You.
I balanced the tower with two arms and one leg. Hopped through the elevator, my head full of shit. All the shit you've done and lied about.  All the firework pain exploded by a sociopath.
No one would help me, though I asked.
So I gathered my strength and found its magnitude impressive.
I can do this.
I tossed bag after bag, filling the front seats. My books hit the rear view and broke it to pieces.
"Fuck", I thought, "What else could be happening"
But two miles down the road, I realized, I could not look back.
I could not see behind me.
The dashboard was wide open.

My Future, sprawled ahead of me.

The lyrics keep sliding from my tongue and splashing in the stale air between us.  They perfume the lingering Camels and the night of sex and sweat and beer that sticks to our skin like survival.   You fall in and out of sleep.  Your eyes relax behind tinted glasses and your head rolls to the left; towards my mumbled words and the white noise laced with emotion and secrets.  Your eyes are tattooed behind my lids and I keep hearing your confession, "I love you".  Honest.  Sincere.  And I agree. We have the most romantic story yet to be written. 
The next song shuffles into play. 
You wake to smoke another cigarette.
My lips mimic the microphone man's: Through a phone is no way to love you, but you don't seem to mind.
And at this moment, neither do I.

I shuffled through the hallway, a lost soul on a pilgrimage, wary of my surroundings, but tired of the jeans I was wearing.  Those jeans had been through breakup conversations, departure cries, security checks and three rounds of airline food: Bloody Mary breakfasts and miniature bottles of dry red at dinner.  They had been clever during cryptic conversations with blond Canadians, comfortable while consuming solo lunches at an Irish pub in London, and exhausted as the worn denim crumbled under the weight of a voluptuous African teenager who occupied the space reserved for me.  They were wet with ink tears that ran from the pages of my diary and wrinkled with the worry of navigating through JFK, Heathrow, and finally Nairobi.  But they were my home and I was taking them with me.  Even as I made my way from the poorly circulated cabin to the confused and confusing airport, those jeans were proudly protecting my dimpled flesh and determined calves. 

The hallway was narrow and never ending.  My vision was foggy and my fears had subsided.  Those nagging insecurities were sleepy from 20 hours of travel and I was grateful  for the quiet peace that directed me to a dark, stuffy room where I awaited my next flight.  I was too tired to feel under dressed, though I should have.  My cell mates, clad in gold and blood red Senegalese-style dresses, seemed oblivious to my prostrate existence, knots and dirt and stained denim.  So I sat there, too exhausted to sleep, too subdued for conversation, in the ebony of Kenya. 

Moments are eternity when you are waiting.  Waiting seems endless when you are anxious.  Lonely is comforting when its crowded.  And Night is onyx in Africa.  The room had windows, so they told me, but nothing was visible.  I sat in a warm plastic bucket seat, staring out blind windows, waiting.  Pulling on the wet edges of the long legs and airing the humidity trapped in GAP fibers, I longed for a shower and a different pair of pants.  I was fixated on the present.

A diamond of sunshine started to sparkle somewhere in the distance.  A flicker of energy filled the crowded room and within seconds the entire sky burst into a fire of noon, at six thirty in the morning.  They were right.  There were windows and outside those windows was an existence violated by humanity, film and literature.  I can depict the rustic landscape, the promising acacias and elephant grass, but even this is insulting.  What I can report is the overwhelming sense of calmness, acceptance, and life that brought me to tears, that still brings me to tears, even in memories.  How worries and travel and existence were burned to nothing in the oven room; justified, roasted, and baked.  My jeans melted into the chair and dripped through the closed windows, feeding the fried grass with mankind.

I recently sat under a Jersey October sky, watching the cyclone fire dance through the clay chimenea and glancing, occasionally, to  the muted  stars.  I felt like crying.  I longed for Africa, to be at home again, in my dirty, tattered jeans.

The year my parents split was more then a little tumultuous. 29 years tossed with a slip of the lips.  Real reasons exist, but blame and excuses were easier tactics.  Then came the shattered messes we swept off dusty kitchen floors. 
To put it quite simply, all hell broke loose.
My Dad moved out and we moved back in. I had just returned from my freshman year of college. Megan stayed in the city, but was close and home often enough.  Kelly moved back from Virginia and Sean was going into his last year of high school.  It was like being 12 all over again, except Dad was missing and Mom threw her hands high over head.
People were in and out all summer.  Tensions were skyscrapers and everyone defensive.  We knew it was just a temporary situation till Kelly and I moved into a rental and the anger melted, before the pain dwindles.  So we made the best of it and laughed, as much as possible.
It was at this time that my mother started smoking pot again.  We were too exhausted to form opinions, plus who were we to pass judgment - we all did it.  Spanning from my 17 year old brother to my 25 year old sister to my 47 year old Mother, we passed joints like gravy on Thanksgiving dinner (or Xanax on Christmas when you know that side of the family is coming over).  We couldn't worry that the last 18 years were spent at church and AA meetings. We were just trying to live.
The air conditioning broke about mid July.  My mother has this thing about living in the Arctic.  She says it's that "change of life" thing, but her life has always been changing, and I've been hearing about it since I arrived through cesarean.  Nonetheless,  the heat  didn't help the volatile situation.
Bobby, Sean's friend, the sweetest kid I have ever met, was going to be our savior.  He was working that summer with his uncle doing heating and cooling.
He was going to save us.
And he did.
The two of them would come over and fix my Mother's air conditioning system.  They also partook in our Thanksgiving dinners. And we all laughed together. 

I woke up this morning to a sweaty, humid house.  I took a shower and dressed, still wet.  My mother came down for coffee and our morning routine and we both commented on the broken a.c.
We can't call Bobby.  He is no longer at this address. He can't roll one and pass it (though they put weed in his casket).
He can't save us again.
So we scurried through the house and opened all the windows.  We opened all the doors and pulled out old fans.  We turned off all the lights, sat on the couch, and began laughing about old friends.
We cooled everything off, ourselves.

We are our only saviors.

There I was.
Standing at the end of the gravel driveway, reading the stories scribbled in the faded stones.  I was focused on the bottom layers. Searching for the tire marks of cars I sold, the ones I abandoned.  I was testing how far back I could remember.  Allowing myself to go to that pregnable place, where emotion directs memories and past enters proximity.

The sun always melts in August.  It coasts down the face of my house and eases West.  The exhaust lingers in the afternoon heat.  Your car, once idling next to me, has faded into the horizon.  I didn't see the your taillight flame snub out.  I was concentrating on finishing my cigarette.  We weren't in this moment together.  These are the casual memories of late Summer: long, slow, delayed.

I remember the embrace more, after we let go.  How I pressed your body against the dust and dents of the engine drone.  I had to balance against your chest and angle my hips so that one was slightly elevated.  Then I could hook my ankle around your waist, hold you with my thighs, and remember the last boy I kissed goodbye from the end of this driveway.

Does he still remember the way the stones gave to our tangled weight?
I think that is his Camel, buried beneath this gravel cementary.

It is officially over.
Summer.
Done, Finished, Finito. See you next year.
Looking back over the past few months I have to admit to leading, what some have called, a pretty charmed existence.  I confess: I have a damn good time and I'm pretty darn successful at entertaining myself (and others for that matter).  Here is a little nostalgia, a little remembrance, a little bit of reaching back through the circles that are still spinning in some universe where everything is always occurring.
May
May was quite the beginning: the start of some things new, the initial endings of some old things, the great inauguration of self. 
And to think it started with a complete emotional breakdown.  The month was still an infant when I found the courage to end that failing relationship.  I was so scared.  I was so nervous that I was playing a doomed game of roulette.  See, I had everything figured out. I had an outline, a game plan, and a farewell speech, but life doesn't go that way. That would have been way too easy. So came the lessons: relationships don't have to be bad to be over, there is a way to depart and still cherish everything you have created, there is a way to remain friends, there is a decent way to break up with someone and it begins with honesty. Honest to him, honest to me.  My plan was to leave in August, when I would be moving and we could blame our separation on the distance: the separate homes, the separate scenes, the physical separation.  Then I got that rejection letter and I knew I had to stop pretending. I knew that I had to stare at the faces in front of me. I had to discard all the excuses.  It called upon all my courage to tell him that it was no longer working, but I did. I did. I did it. And I moved home.
Home, that place that is supposed to travel with me but wound up being that place I travel back to.  I moved 7 years and a three story house into my brother's old bedroom.  But I found room to breathe in the cluttered crowd of a boarding house.  I fell back to the last time I lived here: late nights with myself and my music and my dreams, journals, dancing, family, the beach.  I started to find myself again, like I did when I was 17. Ironic it all occurs in the same place.
We held steady at a short show in the city.  Played pool and did some sexy things. We went to Ocean City.  We went to celebrate and we happen to excel at celebrating.  We laughed and drank and screamed. We cried insecurities and moved a little closer to understanding each other.  We were practicing empathy.
Then I graduated, finally.
And we ended it with Doughty.  My friends always seem to save me. We went exploring and found humanity.
June
Luck, Luck, Luck and my Birthday Month.
Took a successful shower in the humidity.  Honestly, the wedding was progressing perfectly. We ran around Queens,  amazed at how easy everything was coming. The dress fit, which was a huge relief.  I mean it was a tight squeeze, but I managed, and my shoes made up for the belly (note to self: next time, order the dress on time, order the correct size, stop eating...kidding)
I won tickets to see a new show on an old stage. Steveo and I, my perfect date, stranded somewhere in Asbury. We laughed.  Sent the singer a can of Pabst, classy I know, and invited him bowling. (We are out to impress).  Worked a little, wrote a little, sat on the beach. Oh yeah, got suspended for texting. It came at the perfect time, right before I was going to kill somebody for ordering the wrong drink or tipping like a European or asking me anything.  June was when I started counting down the days till I hung up my apron and paid the last busboy.  I love you Restaurant for letting me travel and support my lovely little lifestyle; I hate you Restaurant for everything else.
The Wedding! could not have gone any better.  Laughing and dancing and beautiful people. After parties running into The Party, melting into more after parties.  And my Dad was civil and my Mom was cool and Kelly was present, though not totally social.  We layered two families with sex, drugs, and music.  The weather was perfect: lightening over the East River, sunshine on the bridges, snowstorms in the bathrooms, and absolutely no regrets.
Turned 24 on the 25th and spent the night with some best friends.  Soleil on private sand, followed by lobster and champagne, some late night beers at one of my favorite places.  We made a run to the hospital, but it was only a pick up.  Drove that weekend to a foreign state.  Turned some new friends on to some Steady shows (this may be my highlighted week).  Wore that dress for the first time and wandered through the crowd like I owned those views.  I remembered why we write. I remembered falling in love and being alive and rock and roll and God! I love you Hold Steady.  I thought he was going to kiss me, he thought he was going to kiss me, we are both glad neither one of us kissed (we are saving it for 30). I got rear ended on the drive back, but her insurance covered it and Momma's boy is an auto body man, so I just made $700 bucks for sitting in traffic.
Worked one night then did it all over again, in the rain in Brooklyn, with some different friends.  Heard some songs I had never seen live, said some things I had been keeping inside, and danced, jumped, screamed, loved and hated, cheered, cried, made music.
July
Worked, 6 nights out of 7, doubles on Tuesdays, opened shifts, closed nights, made a shit ton of money I stocked away for those gray months when I'll need to escape to the back bars of some dirty, little clubs.  Took care of a lot of mundane stuff: paperwork, doctors appointments, bills, school. tuition.  Passed that drug test and wore the results like a ribbon.  Bobby died and I got my fill of crying.  Remembered friends who are family and my family who is dieing.
Met him at Doughty show #2, the one with the fireworks and laughing, the night we should have noticed her not smoking (we were all caught up in dancing).  It was fun for awhile, but he couldn't carry a conversation and I was tired of trying.  Closed the month with Bruce and some VIP passes.  Did some sexy things when we thought no one was watching.  I have a tunnel memory of making our entrance: No retreat baby, no surrender.  Laughed and danced and fainted, because I'm classy (or hard core really).
August
I knew the end was coming, but I had to keep pushing.  Steveo and I ventured back into the City to hear Matt Berninger croon messy lullabies.  The puzzle pieces shit the bed, the so so fans shit the bed, the last resorts left us stranded, so we went by ourselves - date night, all over again.  We discussed dieing relationships and expiration dates and when our turn would be to hold passion with sticky fingers and back away licking. 
There was a free show on the river. I invited my friends but went alone (may have been the best decision I made all summer).  I watched the sun set over sailboats, children strum air guitar, and sat with a stranger who smoked fat Cubans.  Met up with Nikki and we hung with the band, laughed like we were high, debated like we knew each other for 30 years: Beatles or Stones is not a fair comparison, Dylan taught us romance, and we followed 12 steps for our Bruce addiction.  We talked about control in broken english.
Won $50 big ones off a scratch off and got my tarot read.  She said it all again: he is going to fight the ending, the new job will bring anxiety, he will pull out again, and disappoint, so be ready for it, but by February decisions will be made and it is always ok in the end, so stop analyzing and get the fuck out of lifes way.
That road trip worked out, when I was certain it wouldn't. It went down exactly like my vision, but my intuition has always been psychic like that.  I barely made it through Mexican, stumbled through green rooms, found freedom in driving.  Guarded honesty with a shooter of flirtation, spent less money then I anticipated, and fell back in love with the music.  Reconnected with women on a tube in the Delaware, drove to the city and spent a night in Brooklyn, came home and discovered patience.  Lets not try to figure out everything at once. I believe in the spark, I'll stop trying to control it....

Tomorrow I start that internship. The one that has me working like a real American. I'm a little scared and anxious, but I think the schedule will be perfect, or at least what I needed.  I think this fall is going to be splendid.
I think I live a charmed existence.

Sitting on your pilled, hunter couch, our couch, I began to remember what this was like before the three years began.  My legs draped across your lap, without caution or pretension or insecurity, without motives or desire, they just rested comfortably in the familiar cushion of your thighs.  I stared at the bookshelf.  Your books, all your interests in history and politics seemed lonely without my poetry and biochemistry.  They didn't seem so sturdy without the support of my journals and confessions.  The sun melted in through the east window and I remembered being in your apartment when it was fresh and exciting.  I remember waiting for you to come home and sit with me, before the cushions grew accustomed to my weight and positioning, before they realized that I often sit on my feet or how I love the pressure of your body against my breathing.  I was excited then. I remember.

You were always so gentle and I knew from the beginning that you loved me.  I never doubted the awe.  I never doubted the beauty, but we skipped the honeymoon and traveled to Routine.  Routine, that land where we forgot how exciting playing house could be.  That area somewhere between Kansas and Kentucky when acceptance often leads to everyday and everyday leads to eventually and eventually I lost my dreams.  You tried to kiss me, though you knew better, and I didn't try to stop you (I was thinking the same thing). 

Something was still missing.

Not love. I do love you. I will always love you.

I wanted all these emotions to come flooding through my veins.  I wanted the tears and excitement and security.  I prayed. I tried. I conjured images that this was the scene that we all go searching for.  This was the show we waited in line for, bought tickets to though we didn't have the money.  I wanted so badly for this to be my VIP screening, but while I pushed my way toward the stage, you were thinking of cutting out early.  If we skip the encore we'll beat the traffic home. You forgot, the show was my home.

The passion was missing.

I have struggled with these feelings.  Felt guilty and naive.  Felt that I was expecting more then I should, that I was being greedy and selfish.  I had these fears that I was making a mistake, that I made a mistake, but I didn't.  I haven't.

I don't know why relationships have expiration dates.  Maybe we live in this "get happy quick" society.  Maybe we are never satisfied.  I know I'm impatient and eager for everything.  Maybe nothing will be better then this, but I cannot live with maybes.

She talks about sex like a lock and key.  That it used to have more meaning, that is used to symbolize a pairing, a couple, a commitment.  I think its time to start treating it that way.  Every kiss is a promise you'll cherish my insecurities and you'll hold my heart carefully.  And if you get to touch me, you better be ready to accept partial responsibility. 

She assures me that I'm too young to live without passion, but she believes that it is coming, eventually.