Apology

I have been trying to write to you for the past two weeks and can't seem to come up with a single scrap of interesting material.

I'm really sorry.

The older I get, the less I seem to want to share with other people. I can't tell if that is a result of maturation in that I don't feel the need to be heard or sympathized with any more, or if it is a result of depression and self-defeat in that I don't feel like any of my life is worth sharing anymore.

To be honest with you, I'm a little bit scared about the future. I am scared in ways I never thought I would be. I'm afraid that I will sell myself short. I'm afraid that soon everything will be over, and I'm also afraid it will never start. I'm afraid that I will never be satisfied. I'm afraid I'll be alone in my head forever. I'm afraid the opinions of others will be allowed to run my life, and I'm afraid NOT to let them.

I'm afraid of how dumb all this sounds, and how you'll probably get to the end of this post and be like, "God, what a retard."

But I just want you to know that I actually AM really tired of censoring myself for other people so I can control what they think of me. Its so flipping hard sometimes! And I'm doing okay at it right now, but I don't know how long I can hold out. So be prepared. There might be a little explosion on the horizon.

Right now, though, I just seem to be waiting.

Popular Kids Meet the Equalizer

"How is your daughter doing in school this year?" I hadn't had a chance to talk to the girls from Valuations since I'd come back to the office. My return to teaching had become only a hiatus from my desk job. I was back after six months. I'd been placed in the middle of the office floor this time, far away from Valuations, where I used to sit.

Tricia sat diagonally from me then, and I'd heard many a story about her daughter being bullied at school, and many a phone conversation between Tricia and the school principal. Now we sat across the table from each other at a department luncheon in a Mexican resturant.

"She's doing well!" Tricia remarked of her daughter, "I think she's finally worked up the guts to stand up to those mean girls."

"Good!" I said. "Middle school girls are the worst. I'm tellin ya. That's where I just came from, and I think its probably the first time in kids' lives where cliques start to form and you start recognizing popular kids and not-popular kids. They don't really seem to be aware of that in elementary school."
"Yes!" Tricia said. "And you know what they're picking on her about this year? Her clothes! If she doesn't have on Hollister or American Eagle she doesn't even want to show up at school."
"Yeah, uniforms have really changed things like that in Metro schools."
We nodded, as did the other ladies next to us at the table.

I always hate department luncheons with no seating charts. Everyone mingles, but you never know who you're going to sit by. If you get stuck with someone who's your superior, you get nervous. If you get stuck with people you don't know, you get left out. If you get stuck with someone you hate, you get annoyed. Its a total crap shoot.

Megan Cates was sitting next to me, adjacent to Tricia. Megan was fairly new. She was mid-twenties, blonde, a tad chunky, and rumored to have tattooed eye make-up, meaning that her eyeliner was permanent and would never come off. That weirded me out.

"I don't even think we had popular kids when I was in school," she said. "Everybody was pretty nice to each other. There were groups that hung out together, but I don't think any one group was quote unquote cooler." She chuckled, and took a sip of water.
"Did you go to a small school?" Tricia asked.
"Well, it was a small town, yes."
We digested that for a minute, crunching our free chips and salsa.
"You mean you seriously never got picked on?"
"No. I can't remember a single insult." Megan smiled. "I guess kids aren't like that anymore. I wonder what causes that."
"TV," Paula chimed in from the other side of Tricia.
"Probably," I added.
We crunched our chips again in silence, listening to the commotion at the other end of the table.
"Well if I've learned anything from teaching its that your experience in school is totally unique to you. Nobody has the same experiences. I don't remember kids being crazy hooligans and running teachers out of their classrooms, but I went through Honors and Advanced Placement classes where that didn't happen that often. Teaching Standard classes and low performers really made me realize that things haven't changed, but my perspective has."
Megan nodded to me, but I didn't stop there.
"So... maybe there were some other kids who DID feel picked-on at your school."
She paused.
"Well come to think of it, yeah. Actually. I guess there was this one girl who was kind of a bully."
That wasn't what I had asked, but I was interested.
"All of my daughter's bullies are girls!" Tricia added. "People don't really call girls bullies. I guess they think they're too feminine, but they can be just as mean and awful as boys."
"Well, this is actually a pretty funny story," Megan started. "When I was in high school I was active in a lot of clubs and stuff. I was on the yearbook staff, and I dated Jeff, who is now my husband--"
"--Oh! That's so cute!" Paula was still listening too.
"Yeah, so I dated my husband for like two years of highschool before we went to college." She took another sip of water and her grin got all big and loaded like this was a super juicy story. "Well. There was this girl at school who I guess wanted to date Jeff? Anyway, she just got so mad at me for dating him. And she was kind of a weird girl, too. Like she's still weird. I think she's a lesbian now or something, like she seriously does DRAG shows and stuff as a MAN, which is funny, because she was mad at me all Senior year of high school for dating Jeff, who is a man." She laughed, and made this face like 'WEIRD-O!' and continued. "Well, she was on the yearbook staff with me, and before the pages went out to be printed, she got into the lists and deleted my picture and my name out of the yearbook altogether."
"Oh no!" Tricia and Paula across the table gaped.
"Your Senior picture!"
"What did you do?"
"Nothing," Megan said. "I mean, they gave me my money back, but there wasn't really anything we could do. The books had already been printed. And they knew who did it, you know. So they kept her from walking the line at graduation; she got an F in yearbook class. But let me tell you. My friends gave that girl hell about doing that to me. I mean, she probably wished she'd never even met me."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh," Megan mused, "They called her some terrible names, drove to where she worked, slashed her tires. You know, stuff like that."
"Oh my god! That's horrible!" I was taken aback.
"Well she reaps what she sows, huh?" Tricia seemed unsurprised.
"That poor girl." I said.
"Well, I wasn't in on any of it, of course. She tried to press charges against me or something for damaging her property but I wasn't even there, you know. And that whole rest of the year was just hell for her I'm sure. But she probably deserved it." Megan smiled. "Other than that, though, nobody was mean or clique-y in my high school. Everybody pretty much got along."

The waiter came a few minutes later with our food, and cross-table comparisons to lower priced Mexican resturants began. But I couldn't stop thinking about the girl. I couldn't stop thinking that the only reason Megan hadn't experienced any bullying and thought that her school didn't have cliques was because she was in the biggest clique of all.

Everybody probably got along from her perspective because they weren't about to cross her or her friends, and she was probably too self-centered to even notice that people didn't like her. I mean, if the girl really did become a lesbian later she was probably going through some intense times in high school. Megan and her friends probably weren't the only ones who thought she was weird. And who knows! Maybe something actually HAD happened between her and Megan's husband Jeff, to make her really angry. Some of the best people I know had the worst times in high school. In fact, it's all the popular kids who end up never leaving town and making anything of themselves. The weirdos are always more successful.

Isn't it strange when you're years and years beyond high school, but you can still feel the old us-and-them principles creeping in? I suddenly knew for a fact that had I been in high school with Megan I would NOT have been able to be her friend. She wouldn't have glanced twice at me. More than likely I would have made friends with the girl that got terrorized. And yet here we were having lunch together just because we worked in the same building.

Man, adolescence sucks.
When I was teaching middle school kids my favorite kid was a class clown who made jokes to roll the insults off his back. He came from a broken home and was the youngest of four, the only boy, and his mother had recently become pregnant with some random guy's kid even though she didn't take care of the four she already had. I wanted so badly to explain to him how adulthood was an equalizer. That he really could be whatever he wanted to be. That no label would ever stick with him his whole life. That he was brilliant and hilarious and good no matter what people said or how many times he was sent to the principal's office.

But you can't explain those things to someone who hasn't experienced them. His future felt like a white void where he didn't even exist yet. It didn't matter what I said, he was not going to be able to fill in those blanks. His only reality was now. And for all he knew it would be all he'd ever know.

And thats how I imagine that girl that Megan was talking about. I imagine her balling up her fists because the only reality is now and she's trapped; she can't move.
It makes me wish I could teach again, just to talk to her.

I put down my fork and looked at Megan laughing at something Tricia said.
She was a temp just like me.
Adulthood really is the equalizer.

Prelude to My Non-Gothic Life

I heard my cousin say something depressing.

My aunt is supposedly studying theology at a local university. This came to me as a surprise because she is a grandmother, and has already aged beyond the standard "college age group." Additionally, religion is not something that is openly discussed on that side of the family. Thus, I had no idea that theology would be of any deep interest to her, or, for that matter, worth spending thousands of dollars on professional study.

"Why, hell..." My cousin Ben said, after hearing this news. He was wearing a polo shirt and ripped jeans. I could not decide if the jeans were designer or just worn from many nights of drinking and running amuck. He slouched deeper into my grandmothers forty year old couch and worked the wad of dip around in his lower lip. "I'd probably set the place on fire if I set foot in a church. I'd straight up burst into flames."
My uncle and my cousin Gina laughed.
"I have no business being there," Ben said. "No sir."

How sad, I thought. That's probably the BEST place for him. But it would be too weird, too out of the norm to board that train of thought. It would also be too weird and out of the norm for me to suggest I thought so.

That side of the family has layers. They're like onions. There are things you get to see, the "appropriate" parts, and then there are the hidden, unseen things. Motivations for bizarre actions go unquestioned. Its the epitome of the Southern Gothic movement in literature. There is no need to ask why this and why that and whats up with this. One is polite, and cheerful, and nothing is ever wrong. This is not to say that something is always wrong, but occasionally there will be something that it seems everyone talks around. And still occasionally I wonder if I'm the only one who smells the rats.

There are nine cousins, and I am the third oldest. Three of my cousins are married and have children. Two older than me, and one younger. I like watching them. I like to see they way they interact as married people, as families. I hope to myself that they're happy, that they're safe. I wonder if they'll play charades and gestures and pictionary with their emotions. I wonder if there's hope for me. I wonder if all the bad modeling will lead us all to the same highs and lows. I wonder what we'll do when our grandmother passes away, and the house and the glue that presses us together a few times a year will still adhere. I guess one day we'll find out.

Still there are some things I am certain about. I want to make sure I smoke out all the rats in my relationships. I want to shoot down the elephants in the room and transcend awkward levels of communication. As much as I love Southern Gothic literature, I really don't ever want to live in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Or McCullers' Sad Cafe.

And I still wait for the fresh start that will be the prelude to my non-gothic life. So as Ben giggled like a school kid, and my cousin Gina changed the conversation, I stayed polite. I didn't say a word, and I tried to think about something else.

Advice I'd Give My Daughter

Sex is not power. Anyone can have sex, and most guys would have sex with a bar of soap if it looked like it wanted it, so make sure you don't lower yourself to that level. Don't be the soap. Be you.

Even if you don't quite know who you are yet, its good to pretend you're important. People will treat you the same way you treat yourself. Every time. Its like the Golden Rule flipped inside out. So don't mope around thinking you're a piece of crap, and don't put up with anyone who wants to treat you like one. Because the people that do that are only doing it because they feel like pieces of crap themselves. Look for this, and you'll realize its true.

Make sure you look good. If you like the way you look, or at least put effort into it, you'll realize you feel better about yourself. This means that, yes, sometimes shopping therapy is necessary. Because its good to feel fabulous. All the time, if possible.

Accept the fact that no one is going to rescue you. Do not be fooled by romance novels and chick flicks. Do not live your life waiting for something to happen to you that will change everything. In the end, you are the one who brings about all the changes. Don't surrender that right to anybody else.

Be the change you want to see in YOURSELF. Stop thinking of yourself in terms of what other people see, and think of yourself in terms of what you see in yourself.

People can change. But don't expect it out of anybody but you. If you wait for someone to change, you could be waiting your whole life. Realize that sometimes timing just sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't matter how cute he is, if his life is a mess you can't expect him to clean it up just because he met you. The only thing you will ever have control over is yourself. Don't ever forget that.

If you're waiting to do something while no one's watching, you shouldn't do it at all.

Feed the fish in the fish tank, and know you are needed.

Secrets are not beautiful. They won't keep you warm at night, and they trap you in ways you can't even understand right now. Be honest with yourself AND other people. Its beautiful and it will make you feel good.

Religion is not "gay." Despite the hilarity of some televangelists, faith in God is the best possible thing to have in your life. Talk to him. But most importantly, listen to him. If you stop and just listen, he'll always tell you what to do.
Matter of fact, stop right now and make an effort to listen. This time, when you ask a question, don't you strangely feel like you already know the answer? Stop and do this at least once a day. It will change your life.

Don't drink. I know you will, though. Please remember that alcohol is a depressant, it makes you gain weight, and that even when you think you are totally in control, you aren't.

ps- If I catch you drinking I WILL kill you.

Don't get wrapped up in what you think is cool. Remember that your life is short. Time passes quickly. Your youth will fade. You'll be thirty one day. And you'll look back on all the things you did at your age and think... what? Do everything with your future in mind. The present is its best predictor.

Drugs will make you barf. Including herbal drugs. Especially herbal drugs.

Sometimes you have to stop talking to people who allow you to behave unhealthily. If they're holding you back, you don't need them. Don't feel bad letting them go, and don't feel like you have to explain a thing. Change your phone number. Delete your social network. Read a good book. Buy new clothes. Dye your hair. Reinvent yourself.

It is impossible to screw up so badly that you can't ever have a fresh start. The only thing keeping you from the best version of yourself is you.

Be good to your family members. Don't hide things from them. Don't be ashamed of them. They are a part of who you are, and they'll never stop loving you.

And finally,
Eat fruit.
Drink milk.
Don't smoke.
You will thank me later.

What I Know Despite Myself

I am not, I repeat, NOT joining eHarmony. Nor may you expect to see me on Match.com
Those websites are for desperate people looking desperately for someone to fill a desperate little void in their desperately hopeful little lives. And I refuse to be desperate. Whiney and totally obnoxious, maybe. But I intend to have a bit more spunk, a bit more kick, a bit more spice to my attitude, desperate or otherwise. Therefore I am not desperate.
And these are the things I know despite myself:

I know you're out there somewhere. You don't know who I am and I don't know who you are either. But despite myself, despite all the sick, gutwrenching drama of the last couple of months, and all the years leading up to the last couple of months, and all the years that will succeed the last couple of months, I KNOW for a fact that you are out there.

Because I'm sure we haven't met yet.
(Don't get cocky, Michael Buble, I would never use your song title in my far-superior-to-you blog)

Even though we are totally and completely compatible, we haven't met yet. Perhaps we were staring at the same Latin Pop section at Walmart, looking for the same Carlos Baute cd that always freakin flies off the shelves. Or maybe we were both at Melrose and your order was the one that made them forget to make my extra cheesy quesadilla. Or you could have been the one who stole the last purple Norcom comp book at the Office Max so that I had to drive to flippin Cool Springs to look for another one. Or maybe you don't even live here. Maybe I need to move, because you live in Atlanta or New York City or... Spain (Sergio Ramos) I don't know.

All I know right now is that I have to chill. Because when you come along, you're not going to wait for me to get my shizz together. It'll be BOOM, SONIC BLAST, EXPLOSIONS OF LIGHT, SUB ATOMIC PARTICLE SPLIT. It'll be intense. And I don't want to be preoccupied with myself and how crappy my life is and how I'm not really ready for this or perhaps I'm SO ready for it that I throw myself on you and freak you out. I want to be cool, yo. I want to be so cool you can't resist me.

Though. Of course. That's not hard. I'm too cool to resist already. I have to make sure I have a squirt bottle full of unflattering things to say so that I can spray them on unsuspecting suitors at the mall or the Walmart or the... office cafeteria (Mazatlan).

I'm thinking about you the whole time, though. I'm trying to. I wish you would just show up and rock my world already. I'm impatient, and I don't want you to miss me in my prime. Hurry up, okay? I'll keep hanging tight over here, and you keep doing whatever it is you do. But please don't forget about me. Its hard to remember what you're supposed to look like, but I think I'll know you when I see you.

Maybe I won't be surprised at all when we meet. Maybe you'll just walk up and I'll say "Hello, other-half. Where have you been all this time?" And we'll exchange awkward stories of how long its taken us to find each other, and how ridiculous it's all been, what with the boobie traps and dead ends and do-not-pass-go's, do-not-collect-200-dollars's. And we'll hold hands and walk out into the rest of our lives like old friends.

Maybe, anyway.

Soy Tu Duena at the Mapco

I get in my car. Its raining this morning. I'm wearing a pink and teal button up shirt that looks like it was meant for summer. But it's November, and its raining, and I really don't care. It looks good on me, and I did my makeup carefully for once.

I feel my eyelid and realize that the anti-aging serum stuff I bought on 75%-off clearance has worked. My skin is smooth and soft. My eyelids are always getting flaky these days. Probably because I, myself, am also getting flaky.

"I'm running out of time! I'm on a schedule here, people!" I told my dad the previous night on the phone. I laughed when I said it.
"Whats so funny about that?" Again with the deadpan. God, Dad, you're gonna have to lighten up.
"I'M GETTING OLD! That's why its funny!" I laughed again. "I'm like those horrible girls who consider harvesting their eggs! I'm gonna get old and nobody will have ever been able to stand me long enough to procreate with me, much less marry me and doom themselves to forever being my sidekick."

Yes, I think, now driving to work in my car, I am also getting flaky. Sidekick? Seriously?
My windshield wipers make a squeaky noise when they scrape against the window. I really shouldn't have used them to help me defrost the window last year when I lived in that apartment.

I pull into a gas station and get out. I get water in my shoes because of the puddle that has most conveniently placed itself under my car. Again, its November, and I'm wearing grey open-toed shoes. Whatever, I did my nails all cute and french-like.

"Seis noventa y nueve." The cashier is an overweight white girl with bleached blonde hair. She is speaking Spanish to the All-Pro Lawncare workers who have entered the Mapco to buy coffee that they doctor with too much sugar. America has been bad to them, I muse, giving them all sweet tooths when it comes to a product that is most likely grown and harvested in their own native countries.

One of them cocks an eyebrow at me as I head for the energy drinks. I'm a sucker for energy drinks. One day my heart may explode. And it won't even be a man's fault. It certainly won't be your fault, I think to myself, side stepping around Pedro and his paint covered pals. Apparently there is more than one vanload of Latin men in the Mapco today.

I grab the drink and wait in line behind a guy with tattoos, peeking around his shoulder at the bleach-blonde cashier. She's really speaking Spanish! Like fluently. And its funny, because I look at her, and she does NOT look like a person who went to college, or a person who graduated top of their class, or a person who could even interview for a desk job, and yet she has learned another language to the point where she is completely fluent! And here I am, Miss 13th-out-of-three-hundred-twenty-five, Miss college graduate, Miss 7th grade teacher, and I can't do that. I mean, I could. I almost did.

But when I think about it, the bleach blonde cashier lady has probably married some Latino dude and now has two kids named Julio and Renber, and her last name is probably Pineda, and she probably goes home to her crappy apartment and drinks Tampico while watching Soy Tu Duena on Telemundo.
I don't live in that environment. Now, I think, if I did, I might end up being able to facilitate cash transactions in a gas station while speaking two languages. Hm.

She rings up my can o' energy and tells me to have a good day in perfect English, and I think to myself on the way out the door that we both have okay lives.

I kind of hate Tampico anyway, and the girls on Soy Tu Duena make me feel like a fat cow just looking at them. Which, by the way, is very un-stereotypical of Spanish tv. Usually those girls have crazy curves. Like me. But whatever, the point is that I think it would be cool to speak another language. And the fact that bleached-blondie with the GED has been able to do it gives me hope.

Besides. Instead of learning Spanish while popping out half-illegal children, drinking a juice-flavored fruit drink, and working at a gas station, maybe I should just move to Spain.

I slam the door to my car and my mouth waters just long enough thinking about a Spanish rendezvous with Sergio Ramos before I pop the top on my energy drink and wash it all down.

I turn out of the Mapco parking lot and merge back into the stream of traffic funneling its way toward the heart of the city.

Sour and Soot and Rot (Fictional Short Part II)

It was the size of a marble, a black spot on the fuzzy looking screen. It looked like radar, Brynn thought. Like underwater radar on a boat. Like a torpedo should be in there making little echo noises, headed straight for her insides.
"Do you want to keep the printout?" The nurse was all smiles, drawing little lines through the black circle on her computer screen.
"...No. That's okay."
"You're not even five weeks along, you know."
Brynn was staring at her feet, swinging them back against the post of the examining table. "You probably conceived three-ish weeks ago."
"What does that mean? Like. Whats in that black bubble?"
"Blood." The nurse ripped the picture prints out of the machine and tore one off. "Its just blood, really. It's like a yolk sack. Everything will happen inside that bubble. Just give it a few weeks, and you'll really be able to see stuff."
Just give it a few weeks, huh. Brynn thought.
"You sure you don't want the print out?" She held out the picture with the little black bubble.
"No." Did she? It would just be something else she'd have to hide. "I don't want it."


How deep are the secrets that lurk beneath the surface.
How dark is the human heart.
With what hope do we crush all the things we won't say,
And smash them and tear them apart.
I am perfect, the lamb says, though lamb he is not.
I am faulty, the wolf says, truth teller, forgot.
And all of us swirl in the Land of the Not,
Swallow sour and soot and rot.


"They asked you if you wanted a picture of it?" Leo was driving her back to work.
"Yeah. She kept asking me all these questions. She said it probably happened three weeks ago. But you know, they count back from the first day of your last cycle. I thought it was further along than that."
"I wanted to come back in the room with you, you know. I just wasn't sure. Was it scary?"
"No... it was okay. This whole thing is scary."
"I told you, though. I'm here for you."
They were stopped at a redlight, and Brynn leaned forward, her head between her hands. There were little bits of dirt in the floor board of Leo's Honda. They were dancing along the side panel, where the door connected.
"You're here NOW, though. How do I know you'll be here later?"
"You think I would leave you?"
"But just because of this, or because of me? We can't predict the future, Leo. If we could this never would have happened."
"What are you saying, that you think I'll end up leaving you?"
"This is you and me in here, you know? Nobody can change that. No matter what happens for the rest of our lives. This happened. Its a fact, and its always going to be there. No one else will ever take this from us. And I don't want... I just... I don't think I'm strong enough without you anymore. I don't want to ever be without you. Not now, and not a year from now. Not ever."
He looked over at her and gripped her hand. She squeezed it between her palms on her lap.
"I will never do that to you. I will never hurt you. This is it. Okay? You and me."

Irony (A Fictional Short)

Whatever, she thought. I'll just take it and get the suspense over with. There is no use in worrying about something that isn't even happening. She pulled one of the cylindrical foil wrappers out of the box and stuck it in the waist band of her pajama bottoms. Sleepily, she padded to the bathroom and shut the door.

*******

Three minutes later, the boxes lit up with vertical blue lines, little minus signs, and Brynn breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Geez, I'm such a dumbass, she thought, stepping into the shower. I'm never letting this happen again. Lesson learned.

Steam filled the room. But... she thought. It's a little sad to think that I acted THIS stupid and I still didn't get pregnant. Maybe I'm incapable of getting pregnant. Maybe I'm barren. I mean, it only happened those two times, but the timing! She started freaking herself out, thinking about it. What if she married Leo, like she wanted to someday, and then she couldn't have children. She'd be devastated. Adoption just wouldn't be the same. She wanted the whole shebang. The whole experience. She wanted it to be a part of her and Leo, swimming around inside her gut like nature intended to create it. Getting out of the shower, she stared at herself in the mirror and touched her stomach, just once. Its just you and me, you dusty ole uterus. We're all alone.

She dried her reddish hair, thinking about what she would wear to work. She'd had to move home to her father's house after a breakin at her apartment complex conventiently coincided with the bottoming out of her bank account. She had blamed it on the breakin.

She straightened her hair, put on makeup, and just before she walked out the bathroom door, she picked up the test stick off the counter. It was still laying face up, looking at her, no blue plus sign in sight. She held it up and noticed that she couldn't even see where the other line to complete the plus was, down in there. It was just two lines. Two little minus signs.

“Thank god,” Brynn mumbled, and she tucked it inside her wet towel, walked back down the hall and shut the door to her room. Her feet made little moisture impressions on the hardwood floor.

*******

The only thing she could reach for was her phone. Her hands were shaking and it took her three tries to dial the number. It rang once, twice, three times, four times, voice mail. She tried again. She was shaking all over, pure shock. The phone pressed to her ear, she stepped out into the hall then realized she wasn’t dressed and stepped back into her room. She put the phone on the bed, threw on a blue dress from her closet, and picked the phone back up.
“Hello?” But it was still ringing.

“Are you okay in there?” Her father was knocking on the door. She glanced at the clock. She needed to keep getting ready or something would look wrong.
“Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’m just—I have a… problem. Everything’s fine!”
“Well, I’m leaving for work, okay? I’ll see you this afternoon.”
She could hear her father’s shoes on the linoleum, headed for the back door, and she felt this sudden pang of homesickness like when she rode the bus to school for the first time in fourth grade and cried the whole way.
“Have a good day at work, honey!” And she heard the door shut.

Brynn walked into the hallway and stared down the length of the house at the back door her father had just left through.
What the hell was she going to do?

*******

“What the hell am I going to do?” She was laying on the bed, fifteen minutes until she should leave for work. Leo had finally answered.
“I don’t know… I don’t know.”
“I mean, congrats, you know. Your junk works. And so does mine. Who knew.”
“Brynn, you’ve gotta calm down. Everything will be okay.”
“Leo, everything will not be okay.”
“How could you have misread the test?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was supposed to make a plus sign.” She picked up the box and read the side panel for the tenth time. One line, not pregnant. Two lines, pregnant. “The outside of the box is very explicit, Leo, it’s got little two line tests all over it. It’s obviously geared toward women who are praying for this to happen. It’s desensitizing, it’s romantic, it’s SICK.”
“Brynn…” Leo sighed on his end of the phone. “I just knew that’s what it was.” He chuckled, suddenly. “I just knew you were going to call and say you were pregnant. I woke up and realized you’d been calling three times in a row and I knew, right then.”
“You woke up real fast, huh.”
“Yeah.”
Brynn was looking around the room, at her kid-sized room for a twenty-three-year-old. The stuffed animals on shelves, the Little Mermaid comic books still stacked on the top of her bookcase. And that’s when it hit her. She couldn’t do this any more than those girls on MTV. She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t financially stable. Her parents hadn’t even met Leo. She was as good as sixteen years old.
“Oh, God, Leo… I can’t do this.” She realized she was crying. “I can’t do this to them. I can’t do this at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t… this can’t… I can’t do this. I can’t take care of this. We made a freakin baby, and I can’t do this. I can’t do this to my family, because they’d be the ones--”
“--Brynn…”
She wished he was there. She wanted someone to hold her and let her cry it all out for the sheer tragedy of crying into the shoulder of someone who could now be called the father of her child.
“Brynn, I’m here, okay. I’m here no matter what you do.”

*******

She left for work in a fog. She and Leo would meet on their lunch breaks. She’d have to hold it in until then. She was surprised how fast she could compose herself. And she drove to work like nothing was wrong. She made the right turn, the left, the right, and the radio played the same songs. And the traffic was just as bad as always. And a tiny part of her and Leo was still swimming around in her gut like nature intended to create it.

No Mas on the Salsa Club

Heels clicking across the wet pavement, I made my way around the side of the strip mall containing what I considered at the time to be the only non-scummy Salsa club in Nashville. It was late, and a large crowd of people were also leaving at the same time as me. They clicked their heels or shuffled their too-pointy-to-be-masculine shoes across the parking lot to their cars.

I found myself right behind a couple of younger guys. One was Dominican, and was ushering his friend quickly around the length of the building. His friend, the other guy, looked white, complete with blonde hair and blue eyes, but was actually Cuban. His Cuban-ness was hard to miss, especially from my close proximity, because he he kept babbling on and on about how he was "Cubano, Loco! Estoy Cubano! No preoccupes, Loco! Estoy Cubano, Loco!"

Everyone around us was looking at them, and it was hard not to. The Cubano continued babbling angrily, like he was about to bust a cap in somebody or something.

Still. Something about me has never assumed the worst about people. Especially Latin people. I look at him thinking about his family somewhere, whether it be here or in Cuba. About his little sister and his mama who probably saw him as protector though he clearly had a problem with alcohol that could potentially escalate if he didn't put it down within the next couple of years. Thinking about his crap job and the crap apartment he shared with friends. Thinking about how he was young and homesick, but knew he had a job to do.

We rounded the corner, and then Cubano, most obviously drunk at this point, was near flailing with the intensity of his rambling. The Dominican turned around to me, almost for help, like "I can't do anything with this guy..." So I stepped up on a whim.

"Hey. Are you okay?" Cubano turned to me and barely looked at me. He pushed the Dominican, who spoke to him in English.
"You're not gonna fight anybody tonight, man. This is the wrong time, wrong place."
"--Yeah, you don't wanna get yourself arrested." I added.
The blonde Cuban was still pacing, almost rocking back and forth, as we had reached the end of the building and it was then a bit darker without the overhanging lights.
"No me importa! I don't care, man. Estoy Cubano, Loco, I do what I want."
"Chill out, dude." I touched him on the arm. For no reason, really. Because I think women sometimes help put things into perspective. We're supposed to be soft, right? "You sound like Scarface right before he gets shot, man. Be careful, okay."

He laughed at that, and then stepped off the sidewalk. The Dominican smiled at me, and I started to walk in the direction of my car. But I stopped short.

On the other side of the corner, there were five guys waiting for Cubano and his Dominican friend.
"Mira, mira!!!! I told you, man!"

The five guys were moving forward in a half circle around the two friends, and the last thing I saw was the seven of them bobbing around at each other like giant chickens. "Posturing," my mind blurted, as I remembered a zero-tolerance rule from the alternative school where I'd taught. But in the time it took my mind to pop with the word, Cubano was reeling backward with his whole body weight thrown into his right fist, ready to land on somebody.
I turned and ran, click click click, toward my car. Punching the unlock button on my keys before dodging into it.
"Fine, kids, get your dumbass selves arrested! I don't care! I'm legal! I freakin live here!"

And that was the last time I ever went to the salsa club. I'm never going back. And its not necessarily because I feel unsafe there. Its just that I realized suddenly that I am a terrible judge of character and that I should probably not put myself in a position to get shot by people who may or may not be able to dance well.

The Waiting

Its like when the power goes out during the championship
game.

Its like falling and falling and falling off the swingset, and
bracing for a violent impact before jerking awake only to
realize it was a dream.

Its like someone who doesn't complete their conversations.
"So I saw Tina yesterday."
"Oh my god, what did she say?"
"Nothing. I just saw her."

Its like somebody who doesn't complete their sentences.
"Saw tina yesterday."
"What? Wait-- Who saw Tina yesterday?"

It's like when Katie Couric goes and interrupts a brand new
episode of your favorite show with Breaking News.

It's like when a hot guy reaches out for his receipt and you're
standing behind a bunch of tall people, craning your neck to
see if he's got a ring on his left hand.

Its like trying to hit those stupid moles with the padded
hammer at the arcade.

Its like waiting to catch a ball that's never thrown.

Its like temping at a company for three years, waiting for
them to declare they're transitioning you to a permanent
position.

Its like a climax that doesn't seem to resolve itself.

Its the end of the movie Lost in Translation.

Its the end of the book The Giver.

Its where you go through a huge maze of Indiana Jones
puzzles and boobie traps only to find out that the holy grail is a piece-of-crap tumbler from McDonalds.

Its that part of the fight where your muscles tense because
you know, any second, Brock Lesner really should be able to
beat the junk out of that Mexican guy.

Its going to the mail box every day for two months, looking
for your college acceptance letter.

Its the waiting.
Thats what I can't stand.
The waiting.
With my muscles tensed.
Staring at the blank, black screen.
Waiting impatiently for it to light up with your name.

"Like the Deserts Miss the Rain"

When I was in the fourth grade I had a huge crush on a popular boy in my class who already had a girlfriend.

We were nine.

Still, his girlfriend's name was Rose. She was a lot taller than me, and in a different class. She came by my table at lunch one day so she could talk to some of the other girls. I sat with some girly girls who all talked about boys and clothes and what movies they were going to see. My mom wouldn't let me watch half of the stuff they always talked about. And she still laid out my clothes sometimes.

"Hey Rose, aren't you going to say Hi to Danny?" "Yeah, isn't he your boyfriend?" Rose ran one hand through her perfectly poufy hair and let out an upward breath so that her equally poufy bangs danced in the air before coming to rest, perfectly, yet again, against her forehead.
"He IS my boyfriend," Rose said, smiling. "I'll say Hi later, after school." And she walked off, back to her own class's cafeteria table.

Ooooh, I hated her so much right then. She had two little moles on the side of her face, and I stared at them from across the room and imagined burning them off, and what she would look like without them. I stared at Danny, too. He was drinking two cartons of milk and belching the ABC's with his buddies to see how far they could go without almost puking.

When the lunch lady waved my table toward the clean-up station, I made sure I took an extra long time throwing my paper bag lunch away. I threw away the plastic fork, the empty jello cup, the wrapper from my fudge round, and the sandwich bag, all separately. By the time I was finished, the boys would end up right behind me in the line. I stood close to Danny and listened to his voice. I watched the way his mouth crinkled in the corners of his smiles. I watched his eyes light up at funny jokes, all warm and brown.

By the end of the year, Danny was my imaginary boyfriend. I hated Rose, but she wasn't around that much. Our class was together all the time, and Rose wasn't in it. I reasoned with myself that I was actually with Danny for a significantly longer time than Rose EVER was. Even if she knew him from before, or from church or something. And Danny was my imaginary boyfriend. When my mom took me grocery shopping with her, I walked around with my right hand in a fist. I did this because I was holding Danny's hand. When we sat down for story time at the end of the day, sometimes, I pictured his arm around me, and I tilted my head to the side. It was resting on his shoulder.

"Mom, Dad, I want to go to a magnet school." It was May, and Danny had raised his hand when Ms. Moore asked us if anyone wanted a Magnet School packet so they could be put in the lottery for admissions.
"I want to go here." I handed over the packet I'd picked up thirty seconds after Danny raised his hand.

But I didn't go to magnet school. I don't really remember why. I think it was too far away, or maybe the reasons I gave weren't convincing. I didn't care about going to a magnet school anymore than I cared about who won the mid-term elections. I cared about Danny. He was the first person I'd ever loved.

A song came out the next year, when I was in fifth grade. It was called Miss You, and I can't remember who sang it. But the chorus repeated "Like the deserts miss the rain," over and over. Sometimes at night, when I was laying in bed, listening to my clock radio I'd gotten for my eighth birthday, I would stick my hands in the air, above me, and stretch them out toward the popcorn ceiling. It's actually kinda funny when I think about it now, but I'd stick them up so they looked like the were touching the ceiling, and I'd sing the song with my radio and think of Danny. And I pretended I could push the ceiling away, and he'd be right there, waiting for me somewhere. Like if I could just conquer something, whatever it was, I could have him the way I wanted him.

Sometimes to this day, I'm like that. Like I just need to get past something, and everything I want will be staring me in the face again.

"Come back." I would plead to my bedroom ceiling. "Come back. Oh, please, come back."

Pulling Off Crazy-Love

"Hey, ya'll just sit down on the couch over there."
She was racing around the apartment wearing a tight red shirt dress. It was extremely short. Her hair was bleached. She had no make-up on. She waved us over to the lumpy brown sofa sectional.
"Nice apartment," Mordred said. It was one of those things he said that I knew he didn't mean. He might claim he meant it, but deep down he was making some backwards joke about how crappy the place was.
"Thanks, man, thanks." TJ sauntered toward us. He was wearing an oversized shirt with a felt jacket and baggy jeans. The K-Swiss shoes underneath reminded me of 7th grade. All the "bad" kids wore K-Swiss shoes back then. But that was ten years ago.
"Yeah, things done changed since we had the baby and all."
"--Oh my god, TJ, I can't find my shoes!" Crystal looked mortified, before turning to us and saying, "I'm sorry, y'all, things are such a mess over here."
"It's okay--"
"--yeah, we're fine!" Mordred and I said. The couch felt like it was about to eat us both.

Mordred had only come to TJ's apartment so he could give TJ a Consumer Guide to Car Buying he'd picked up at the Krogers. I had never met TJ or his girlfriend Crystal, but I knew that the real reason we were there probably involved Mordred picking something up for himself, instead. TJ wanted to be a rap artist. His white girlfriend, Crystal, was living with him in a two bedroom apartment outside Murfreesboro that probably rented for 450 a month. It wasn't a fabulous neighborhood. Mordred and I were on our way to dinner, and were dressed up. We called it our anniversary, when it wasn't really the anniversary of anything at all. Our relationship had been strained from day one.

"Me and Crystal been livin out here for like 4 months, right."
TJ sat and leaned back in the recliner adjacent us. We nodded at him.
"Okay, so we been here 4 months, and had the baby one month before that."
"--He's 5 months old!" Crystal shouted from the kitchen. Why she was looking for her shoes in the kitchen was beyond me.
"What's his name?" I asked, looking at the family photo framed awkwardly on the wall. The kid had to have been weeks old when it was taken.
"Justin," TJ said. An odd choice, I thought.
"Here, look." Crystal ran in the room, no shoes still, and thrust a picture in my face. It was post-birth, but not by much. "He hurt like hell," she added. Then, "I really like that shirt, girl."
"Thanks." I looked down at my dress.
"Yeah, its a pretty big mess up in here. We're doin pretty good though. It just sucks I can't get blown with you guys or anything." Crystal left me holding the gorey photo, and
Mordred laughed. "TJ, you know she's tired of takin care of that little guy. You need to take her out, man!"
"Nah, man, we don't get out that much anymore. Gotta do tha family thing, ya know." He leaned back and held the Car Buying Guide in front of him. "See, that's what I want right there! A Buick Park Avenue."
I stifled a laugh, and put the birth pic on the coffee table. Face down. "My dad used to have a Buick Park Avenue," I said. "We called it Ole Stinky. It drove like a tank."
TJ wasn't listening. "Put those big rims on it. Killer sound system. Thats tight right there. Thats tight!" He was still staring at the paper. "Man, thanks for bringin this over. I'm gonna call this guy tomorrow."
"Yeah, no problem."
Crystal, red flats now firmly on her feet, came and slumped down on the couch next to me like she was my best friend.
"Have you guys been together long? TJ said you guys were having an anniversary."
"Well..." I looked to Mordred, who was walking toward the bedrooms with TJ. He was seriously going to leave me alone with this girl I didn't know? "Mordred and I don't really have an anniversary date. We just sort of eased into our relationship over time, so we're calling this our anniversary dinner, but its really just a nice dinner out."
"I wish TJ would take me out like that," Crystal said. Her bleach blonde hair was a little stringy. "We're so broke with Justin and all, we can't do shit." She picked the picture up off the coffee table and walked it over to a big book with plastic looking pages next to the tv. She picked it up and carted it back to me on the couch. "This is our family photo album," she said, smiling. "I made it myself."
She pushed it over to me so it was sitting across both our laps, and started pointing things out.
"You look so much younger in all these pictures."
"Yeah, like a year ago, though. Can you believe me and TJ were only together like a month and a half before I found out I was pregnant?"
I looked at her, but didn't say anything. Her eyes were glued to the pages, and things were flickering across her face. She flipped a page.
"See that? Thats me and TJ like two weeks before Justin was born."
They had on goofy faces, and were standing in the snow outside the very apartment Mordred and I had stepped into. TJ had a big puffy downfilled jacket on, with his hands in his pockets. Crystal stood in front, pressing into him and the coat. It covered the both of them, except that her stomach stuck out the front. They were laughing with these big genuine smiles, their mouths wide open, grinning. Crystal's hair was a lot darker in the picture. She had braces on.
"You had braces then?" I asked.
"Yeah. Thats like the last thing my mom ever paid for." Crystal laughed this short, humorless laugh.
"You guys look really happy," I said.
"We were. We are." She flipped the page again. "Isn't he just precious?"
A wrinkly baby stared up at me from an enlarged black and white picture. Its eyes were closed like it was concentrating, and it looked pretty uncomfortable.
"He'd, like, just come out right there. They wrapped him up and gave him to me like that. He's so freakin cute." She stroked the picture with her finger before looking up at me. "Don't you just want one? I mean, I didn't, I thought. But here I am. He's our life. You and Mordred would have pretty kids I think."
I laughed, starting to feel uneasy. "Tell that to Mordred."

Crystal continued on, with an odd light in her eyes. Her clingy red shirt came up to high and she was sitting so close to me that her bare leg touched my knee. She kept smoothing the hair behind her ear with one hand, and pointing to pictures with the other with she talked. And I started to feel something strange. This girl seemed so sweet and sad. She had to have been only 20 years old. Still, I felt like she and TJ, despite pretty much being textbook stoners who occasionally got drunk and probably fought a lot out of immaturity, were on another level that I couldn't touch. I felt like they shared something huge. I felt like their relationship was probably all wrong, but all right at the same time. They had a baby. They lived together. They loved each other.
Mordred and I were going to the freakin Macaroni Grill and would probably come home to lay on his disgusting couch and listen to each other gripe about the lives we wished we were living. We'd lay there knowing full well that one day we wouldn't be together any more. One day we'd be somewhere else with someone else doing something completely different.
And thats what it was, for us, really. We were just waiting around for that somewhere, that someone, that something. We weren't doing anything at all. We were wasting our own precious time.
Crystal and TJ, I thought, may not have been doing the right things, but they were in the middle of a somewhere, with a someone, working their asses off for a something that was bigger than they'd ever thought it would be. I admired that about them. Even if TJ was in the back selling things to Mordred, I still admired them for that.

"Okay, lets bounce." Mordred appeared from the hallway. "We've got dinner plans, you know." He grabbed my hand, grinning like a school kid (he might have gotten high, but who knew) and dragged me up from the couch. Crystal had to grab the photo album fast to keep it from slipping off my lap.
"Well, it was really nice to meet y'all." She stood up and almost looked like she wanted to hug me, but she reached down and tugged on the hem of her shirtdress.
"It was nice to meet you, too." I smiled at her. She seemed sweet. Even if she didn't look like the classiest person ever, she was really friendly.
TJ and Mordred exchanged faux-thug handshakes and we crept our way to the door.
"Come back some time, and maybe we can have dinner together! Double date!" Crystal was calling out the door.
"Bye!" We called to them.

We never had dinner or double dated. In fact, I never thought even thought about Crystal and TJ afterward until just a few days ago. There was a bi-racial couple in the grocery store the other day, and they seemed so happy and innocent. Their curly headed little girl sat in the grocery cart screaming her lungs out, and the couple was still laughing about something they'd said. It made me wonder where TJ and Crystal are now. Justin would be three years old. I want to pretend they're okay and they're happy and safe like the couple in the grocery store. I want to believe that they are still in love, that they work long hours and pay for daycare, but they still go out to eat with the kid occasionally. I want to believe Crystal still talks to her mom. I want to believe they go to Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families. That the photo album has gotten bigger.

I want to know its possible to pull off crazy-love, no matter what the cost.

To Whom It May Concern:

"Love grows in me like a tumor
parasite bent on devouring its host
im developing my sense of humor
til i can laugh at my face beneath your feet
til i can laugh at my heart between your teeth.
Skillet on the stove, its such a temptation
maybe ill be the lucky one that doesnt get burned...
What the f*** was i thinking
what the f*** was i thinking.
Love plows through me like a dozer.
Ive got more give than a bale of hay
and theres always a big mess left over.
With a what did you do
and a what did you say
What did you do? And
What did you say?
Skillet on the stove its such a temptation
maybe ill be the special one that doesnt get burned...
What the f*** was i thinking?
What the f*** was i thinking.
Oh its so embarassing.
Im in this awkward and uncomfortable thing
and im running out of places to hide it.
Im running out of places to hide it.
You know that ive got what you want.
You know that ive got what you want."

To Catch Them in the Rye

There were chickens in the background. I could hear a rooster crowing.
"Hello?... Who is this?"
It was sushi boy.
"Hi..."
"Oh, wow, How are you doing? I thought we weren't talking any more?"
"I'm in Mexico."
Now the chickens and roosters made sense. He sure was in Mexico. Rural-as-hell, Mexico.
"You're calling me from Mexico? Why are you there?"
"My Mom got sick."
"Oh my god, is she okay?" I suddenly remembered little details about him. I remembered the awkward way he darted his eyes away from me when I looked at him. I remembered the way he flinched when I picked a leaf off of his shoulder. And I remembered he had told me he was the ninth of fifteen children, all born to his same father and mother.
"She's okay," he said. "I think she just wanted to see me."
I laughed, and a rooster crowed again in the background.
"Well how are you supposed to get back?" He didn't respond right away, and I remembered his limited English. "How can you come back? It must be difficult to go there, and back, from here."
"No. I flew. Its not hard."
"Oh..." I smiled, "You have a visa. I forgot!"
"Maybe I'll see you in... one month?"
"I thought we weren't going to see each other any more."
"So what are you doing? Are you working now?" Clearly he didn't understand me. Or maybe he had selective hearing.
"Yes. I'm working. Are you sure you're okay down there? How's your family?"
"I'm okay. Well, everybody here--"
And the line went dead. I knew what it was. It had this little click to it, and I knew it meant his minutes had run out. I put down my phone and stared at the weird looking number flashing on the screen.

"Do you like kids?"
He had asked me, halfway through his taquitos, three months prior.
"Yes. I think I woud like kids. After I'm married, you know."
"You should have one." He grinned sheepishly, like he was embarassed, and looked down at his plate.
"Oh," I said, one eyebrow cocked. "So you mean I should have one with you."
He grinned wider, his eyes flickering up at me, and nodded.

He seemed so pure, so innocent, with such a simple outlook on the world. Thats how I had seen Daniel long ago. It was the same innocence that made me think I could shake all the things I didn't like about myself. Sushi-boy and Daniel didn't see the same grit, the same heartbreak to the reality of life. They weren't hardened, they were open and soft and maleable. Easily broken, I thought. And with them I felt so much like Holden Caufield, wanting so badly, with such intensity, to Catch them in the Rye. To save them.

And I still don't know what that is. I mean, I'd probably call it a waste of my time, now. But living the fantasy, while its happening, living that simple love-filled life, is just so sweet. God, I think I'm going to cry.

Secret

"No one will ever know but us."
And so, we hold
it deep inside ourselves
like awkward weight,
tying us together with strings
we couldn't sever if we tried.
We have watched each other cry
and promised never to forget,
never to doubt,
never to lose sight of
what happened,
what will happen,
what we know.
"Do you realize that in the same month and year that your life changed forever, so did mine? God sent you to me, then. You felt like you were running away from something, but you were running toward something else. You were sent to find me. It took you a long time, but here we are. And thank God. Thank you, God, for that."
"What would have happened if I didn't wave you over. What would I be to you? Nothing. And I would still be lost. We would have been in the same room and never known."
Deep beyond the surface, all the mess,
We have faith, and we trust that this is bigger
This is stronger.
This is better than every other time we wanted these things because
this
SECRET
binds us tight.

Ew.

Remy on the other side of the office keeps hacking up a lung. It is really nasty when you can actually hear someone's lung rattling around in their throat.

And I'm not one of those people whose gag reflex is super strong. I hawk stuff up all the time. So when I hear Remy's lungs crackling through her coughing fits, I just want to hawk them up for her! What color will they be? How big?

Unfortunately, I think Remy is just a smoker. And she needs to stop.

I, on the other hand, recently cleaned out my car and vaccumed it. I even put another Little Tree on the mirror to make it nice and fresh. I threw out all trash, and practically rubbed my face into the apholstery, it was so clean. I do not want to go back to a smelly ride. I am considering it a fresh start.

And I certainly don't want to sound like Remy.

Ew.

A Real Wedding

He stared back out at me, with his arms wrapped around this other girl all dressed in white.
She'd picked a strapless dress. It was perfectly complimented by a sheer veil with lace trim. A bouquet of pink roses were bunched in her left hand, her right was pressed to his chest.
I hadn't even met her. Though I'm sure it would have been perfectly inappropriate if I had.

I hate pink. I will never do a wedding in pink. Brandon Cole's wife had chosen a pink wedding. And I mean it was PINK. It looked like a Barbie doll had thrown up all over everything.
I don't think I even want a wedding. Every time I go to one, I get so freaked out I can hardly breathe. I mean, I've performed in front of hundreds of people and done the news in live television broadcasts, but the idea of walking down an aisle and having everybody ooooh and aaaah in approval, frankly, disgusts me.

Its so damn cliche! If I know I love someone and they know they love me, who cares if everybody backs me up by showing up at a wedding where I pledge my undying love in front of them just so they can nod and say NOW they're official. NOW its real. They did this BIG thing by getting MARRIED and NOW its final.

I just don't think weddings mean anything these days. They're all for show. They're just something the brides have been dreaming about since they played with their sickeningly pink Barbies and dressed their Kens up in tuxes for the "big day." Weddings are the result of two people settling on the outcome of their young lives. Weddings are negociations. Weddings are promises for the forseeable future. Weddings say, "YOU GUYS SAW US DO THIS, SO WE ARE NOW HELD ACCOUNTABLE." Weddings make me freak out.
I could just never be that hokey.

Russ Walker kept laughing it up with his wholesome, skinny, brunette on my screen. They held hands and laughed into each others faces. They cut the cake, which must have also been HILARIOUS.

I could still remember going to his sister's wedding when I was nineteen. The wedding had been tiny. It was held in an enormous church, and the groom's parents had disapproved of the bride's religion. They showed up, though. No one cried. Everyone drank non-alcoholic punch and watched the two of them dance awkwardly surrounded by parents, aunts, uncles, and other related old folks.
Terror had ripped its way through my gut throughout the entire ceremony. It felt wrong! How could some ceremony that everybody has done over and over and over like a patterned tradition really prove anything about the way you loved someone? Who was the ceremony for? Was it for the bride and groom? Was it for their parents? Was it for the government, so they could recognize the union? What was the purpose of the whole thing? Was it really supposed to feel like the Cinderella stories from the Disney movies I'd watched? Was it supposed to be lovely and right and like the heavens opened up and the stars were aligned and all that? I just didn't feel any magic. I felt a little... sad.

The only other wedding I'd been to was my aunt's when I was thirteen years old. She'd married a business owner, and she was supposed to be set for life. I watched her tearfully walk towards him down the aisle. He smiled back at her, not awkwardly at all. The place was full. It was beautiful. We blew bubbles at them as they ran outside toward a black limousine.

It was three years later before he turned out to be a crook and did jailtime. Needless to say, they divorced. Russ's sister toughed it out for five years and two children before she divorced her mama's-boy of a husband.

Since those two weddings, I've witnessed my former best friend's wedding, Brandon Cole's, and most recently a friend of a friend's. The last three haven't ended in divorce or anything, but I never feel all butterflies-and-rainbows when I see a bride walk down an aisle anymore. I feel scared. I feel scared because I don't know what it means anymore.

I mean, I know what I want out of a marriage for myself anyway. I want trust. I want so much trust that an ocean of crazy-bad couldn't separate us. I want love. I want the kind of love that doesn't get lost when the money runs out or when somebody gets a bad haircut or eats onion soup before going in for the kiss. I want faith that we are both working toward the same points in our lives, simultaneously. I don't want a debbie downer, I want the faith that says we can get there. No matter how long it takes, or how many times we have to go to plan B, I want to know that we both have faith in getting there. I want someone to talk to, who will talk to me, too. I want a romantic. I don't know if I'll find all these things. But it seems like its possible.

Still, if I do, I'm not sure I'll be rushing out to share it with everybody else when it happens. I don't think I want or need anyone's approval. Its a bond between God, and me, and whoever I marry. I don't need a whole church full of judgemental people nodding their heads because of our happy tears and PDA.

I always said I'd cry when Russ got married. I said it would break my heart. See, for four years I'd thought that stupid skinny girl was gonna be me. But now I realize that seven years has passed since those four ended, and I don't even know who Russ is any more. We are two completely different people now.
Still. I can't stop looking at that girl in that dress with that hideous bouquet and thinking to myself that I could have been right there. I could have been so different.

But. Obviously. I'm glad I'm not. I want more than Russ was. And I don't even want a real wedding.

The Shredder

Amid extreme cramping at work, I looked up from my knees to see the document-shredder people emptying the to-be-shredded bins.

It was just two guys wearing uniforms, emptying an overloaded blue sack into a large gray rolling bin that always makes a lot of noise every time its pushed. One of them was red headed, and had an odd looking tuft of beard. His hair line was greatly receding, leaving his forehead oversized. He looked all wrong.

And then I realized why I thought he looked all wrong. It was because I knew what he looked like ten years ago. Ten years ago, we were in tenth grade together. Ten years ago we shared a PE class.

I forgot about my cramps momentarily and focused on what the red headed shredder should have looked like. He was a wannabe thug in high school, I suddenly remembered. His pants were always sagging. Boxers peeking out the back, but you'd only see them if he bent over, due to his affinity for oversized shirts. All of his clothing looked like it could have come out of a Big and Tall catalogue, which unfortunately were two adjectives he was not. He had the same red hair then, though it had been longer and constantly looked greasy, like he needed to wash it. He was pale, just like now. His lips were always too red. It might have been from drinking too much fruit drink out of the school vending machines. Just thinking about those machines I can smell the stink of the vending room. I can remember those little shrimp baskets and chicken baskets filled with food that always seemed to taste like paper and plastic. I can remember the pizza, delivered from Papa Johns every day, that somehow also started to taste nasty, and the evil lunch lady who always pulled you the slice that was smaller than the one you wanted. I remembered sweaty Bob Johnston walking me to the caffeteria from his earlier PE class, so we could eat together before I went to mine. I remember holding his class ring for him while he dressed out, and then just holding it all the time. I remembered giving it back one day, too. I remember Shaniqua Curtis sitting with her friends at a table across the lunch room from us, in a folding chair, because she was too pregnant to sit at one of the little stools. I remember the screams that erupted, three months prior, in the room across the hall from my science class on the day they announced that over fall break Shaniqua's boyfriend had been shot and killed. I remember the taste of cherry vanilla coke. I remember when they hiked the price of bottled drinks by 50 cents at the vending machines. I remember when the principal announced he was leaving. I remember Nazi-saluting his replacement the next year. I remembered Chris Foster calling me on my home phone to tell me we should go out. I remember telling him I had a boyfriend. I remembered wanting with every shred of my being to win a state championship speech trophy.

I remember it all like it was simple. And clean. And I don't even think it really was, but it was for me. Because I was. When did things change so much?

And I looked back up at that shredder-guy and I thought, this is what we become. We're adults now. We're not grand. We didn't get famous. You're not a rapper and I'm not a poet laureat. Rebel or not, straight-A student or C-average, we're doing work in the same building right now.
I print documents, and you shred them. Its as simple as that.

Too Much

Can't write now.

Too.

Much.

Drama.

What the Hell This Blog is About

OK.

Apparently there is some confusion about WHAT THE HELL this blog is about.

JUST SO YOU KNOW: This blog is what is known as BLOG FICTION. BLOG FICTION, friends, is a blog written by a fictional person or individual. BLOG FICTION means that the author is actually a fictional character.

Now, you might be thinking, Ms. Edna! If that IS your real name, Ms. Edna, doesn't a whole lot of what you write come from the author's author's life? The creator of Ms. Edna who in turn created Lesser Known Works?

Well, friends, yes, authors' lives often do make it into their writing. How would Twain have known to write about the South? How would Dickinson have know to write about death? How would Romance novelists know to write about Romance? But PLEEEEAAAASE, people. Does that mean that Nabokov actually molested children? Does that mean that Harlequin novelists have fallen in love thousands of times and been happily married to bare chested Native Americans? NO! Does it mean that Poe ever actually killed anyone because of their milky colored eye? Certainly not. It just means we have good imaginations, and we have the freedom to embellish.

So PLEASE. Seriously. Do not think that this is real. If you happen to know the author's author, please just acknowledge that some things were meant to be escapes, not rants. Not memories of actual events. Not truth. Fiction. Isn't that what BLOG FICTION is all about?

Honestly, I'm impressed if you're getting freaked out. It means I'm doing my job. To you, reading it, it's real.

Score one for the author's author.

Oh yea.

The Serpent (Excerpt 3)

"You don't trust me." He was doing that thing again. That thing where he looked directly into my eyes and I felt like he was touching me. He was! It felt so strange. No one had ever done that to me before, and I'm not even kidding.
"Its so early. Do I have to trust you with everything?"
"I just..." I could feel him pull back from me a bit. But he didn't move. It was all in his eyes. They drove me insane. "I want to know you love me as much as I love you."
"But I do love you." His face was pained, just a slight little bit.
"You just said, though..."
"There are different levels of love," I said.
"Well what level am I on?"
"Look," I started, "Don't rush this. What we have found is not meant to be rushed."
"And yet I've lived all my life without you. I have so much time to make up for."
YOU DON'T KNOW WHO I AM! My head shouted. I shook it off.
"Then we have all our lives to do that. Don't. Rush it," I said. He clearly wasn't accepting this. I could see it in his face. "Haven't you been hurt before?" He nodded slowly.
"Yes, I've been hurt."
"Well I was hurt a LOT. Okay. I was hurt a lot, and I don't rush in with my eyes closed any more. I told you my parents divorced, right? Well thats NOT going to be me. I won't let you rob me of determining what is best for myself." No matter what forces of good or evil were propelling him toward me, toward my freaking soul, apparently, if it were up to those probing eyes, I could not let myself be washed away in it. I had lost too much of myself too many times before. In fact, what did I even have to give him?
And if he really was what I had been looking for all this time, why would he rush me to make a declaration that meant nothing because it was clearly impossible to make.
That thread, though. That thread that ran from his eyes deep down into me, drew me back away from my mind.
"I do love you," I said. "And I will love you more, later. Be patient with me."
"Yes..."
He leaned in closer. His face was inches from mine.
"Please be patient with me."
"I will."
"Please don't hurt me."
"No..."
It occurred to me, as I got out of the car, that he could really be a serpent in disguise. His eyes and his voice and the set of his gaze all making my skin hum and pushing my consciousness into a near coma. It kinda scared me, just thinking about it. I wrapped my sweater tighter around me before running inside.

American Family

I forgot my Dad's sixtieth birthday last week.

"I was surprised when you guys didn't call me last Thursday."
Doh! I mentally slapped myself on the head. I had even told Nestor I didn't need to forget that my Dad's birthday was coming up. I clutched the phone tighter to my ear and looked away from the tv.
"Oh... yeah..." I gave one of those nervous laughs I do, "because it was... your birthday?"
"What's so funny."
My dad, as always, was deadpan. It suddenly dawned on me that this was the purpose of his call. To remind me that I had forgotten his birthday. His 60th birthday.
"Nothing, I just-- um... I'm sorry, Dad." What do you say when somebody calls to say that? "You know, we just don't talk to you that much, and we don't see you... I don't know. You know?"

When I was in grade school, I can remember being so excited to go on what we called Father-Daughter days. My Dad would take me to the science museum, or the park, or for ice cream, and we'd just hang out together. I liked Father-Daughter days. I loved having his attention on me, and only me. Not on my brother, or my mom, or his radios, or the tv. Only on me.

"Dad, guess what!" I was sitting in bed, reading some science book from the Antioch library. The house was dark and everybody was asleep but me and my dad. I wanted to be a scientist. It may have been the last time medicine interested me. Blood weirds me out too much now.
"What?"
"I found the cure for cancer!" I pointed to a passage in the book I was reading. It was much too big for a normal ten-year-old to be interested in. That's why I was so interested in it.
"You did?" He laughed, and I was a little insulted.
"Its right here. I found it. It says 'large amounts of calcium and potassium can counteract some effects of cancer and have previously been suspected to reduce or eliminate its spread.'" I looked up at him, after following with my finger. "I found the cure for cancer!"
"Well, you know, its in that book, right?"
"...right." He was going to disprove me. He had that 'you're so sweet and innocent' tone of voice.
"Who wrote that book, do you think?"
"Scientists."
"So... scientists found something that they think could cure cancer in some cases, maybe, and they put it in that book for you to read."
"So... I know. I didn't find the cure, really. But. I found it in the book!"

I can remember in surprisingly sharp detail all the things that meant my family was falling apart.

We were standing at the foot of the stairs and my mom and my brother and I were calling up towards my parents bedroom,
"Dad! Get up! Its time for church!"
We called and called.
"Come on! Lets go!"
We were fully dressed. We were waiting by the door to the garage.
"Dad, its time to go!"
But he wouldn't come. I remember that as the day he stopped coming with us.
Church itself isn't that important to me now, and it wasn't necessarily important to me then. It was just a pattern in my eight-year-old life that got broken. It was something I expected to be there, and then suddenly wasn't.

At fifteen, I didn't know why my parents had moved their bedroom into the laundry room. I didn't know why my mom dressed herself out of the hall closet. I didn't know why the master bedroom had been turned into a man-cave. And I had no idea why my Dad always seemed so distant. Why my mom always seemed so frazzled. Why my brother became a brooding or emotionless shell. I didn't connect any of this to my outbursts years later. I had goals and aspirations. I had speech and debate. I had a boyfriend. I focused all my energy on those things.

The official move happened on my mom's birthday. A moving truck was hired and some random guys took all of the man-cave essentials out of our living room (which was doubling as man-cave) and drove them to my great grandmother's old house an hour away. She had died about one month earlier. Three months after that, I "left" Lavery.

The American Family isn't a family anymore.
Define FAMILY, someone says, and you get a thousand different answers.
What are American Values? What is American Family?
Foreign people ask me things all the time about why Americans are the way we are.
Here is the answer:
We are not a RELIGIOUS country. We are not based on RELIGION. Nobody came here and said THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE. Nobody determined the norms and mores. Everybody protected our right to seek answers, and eventually too many of them ended up being thrown in our face. So when you ask a question here, you will always get five thousand different answers. And its confusing. Its like those search-overload commercials, only unfortunately, in our subconscious. Its true. Look at Google. Watch television.
COMMERCE drives us. Ads are everywhere. America is made of money. Why do you think thousands of immigrants come here, illegally, even, and make more money than they do at home? Americans are in it for the money. What makes money is what runs this country.
And I know what you're thinking: its like that everywhere, JLEd. It's not a new thing.
And you're right.
But there's a difference in America. It has to do with entitlement. It has to do with swagger, and arrogance, and the idea that we are "clearly" the best.
Watch Fox News and it will be rammed down your throat that we live in a Christian Nation. That we were founded as a Christian Nation. Guess what? We were founded as a FREE nation. Yet when an entire country of people is basing their values and beliefs and ideals on the principles of individual freedom, all group identities get thrown by the wayside. There is no value in the collective family. Only the individual inside the collective. There is no value in community, only what the community can do for you. Why idenitify with anything unless it gets you somewhere? There is no concrete cultural identity. Aside from commerce, anyway. Americans are muts. We are melting pots of races and backgrounds and religions and we're just so confused!

Who am I? we ask. Why am I here? we muse.

Our families grow further and further apart because we don't think about them. We are individuals. We make ourselves happy. We think about money, and how much of it we can make for ourselves. Halves of families are poor and the other halves are rich. City folks and country folks. They are FAMILY. But they are not really FRIENDS.

"So how are you, Honey? What have you been up to?"
As I heard my Dad say this over the phone to me for probably the seventh time all year, I wondered whose fault it was. Was it his fault? Was it mine? Whose job was it to bridge the gap? How did one even begin to do that? Or was it meant to be this way? Was it my culture to be distant? Was it my culture to answer the phone and be polite, to call once a week out of politeness, as I had once been told I should do. What was broken? Was it broken at all?
"I'm fine, Dad. Nothin much is happening here."

I refuse to allow myself to create this. I am aware that there are no fairy tales. No fooling yourself. But I want the real deal. And I won't settle for sleeping in the laundry room. Whoever-it-is can be sure as hell about that right now.

How I Met Abraham Lincoln

This is how I met Mr. Lincoln.

"Hey get the EFF out of here, man!"
Only he didn't say "eff."

He was charging across the concrete outside the Magic Mart toward some derelict wearing a flannel shirt and a stocking hat. It was August.

"How many times we gotta tell you, man. Take your shit and get outta here!"

I grimaced and raised my eyebrows in surprise. It was as much about the confrontational words as it was about the guy who was saying them.
"Forgive my language, please. But you gotta do what you gotta do, right?"
On his way back into the store he grinned at me and shrugged after apologizing.
"It's okay," I said, grinning back.
He had on a red t-shirt and some nice looking jeans. He wore shoes that made me second guess his job at the gas station. His outfit looked like something a trendy college kid would wear. It just had that look to it. Its hard to pin point what makes a t-shirt and jeans look trendy, but they can. It helped that his hair was gelled into a tiny faux hawk.
"Innnnteresting." I mused to myself, shutting the car door behind me.

It took me four visits to the Magic Mart to actually determine he wasn't hispanic. I thought from day one that he spoke Spanish. Then one day he chased some guy down in the parking lot for walking out with a beer and not showing ID. All this hwa-ha-kha stuff came out of his mouth to the other cashier and I realized he was actually an Arab of some sort.

"Egypt," he told me. "See this right here?" He held out his wrist.
"That X from a club or something?"
"What?" He threw back his head and laughed. He did that alot. He was a generally happy person. "No, no. It means eternal life. Its a good symbol. A symbol of faith."
"Its a tattoo?"
He laughed again. "Yeah! You don't believe me?"
"It's all faded. It really looks like you went to the club yesterday and tried to wash it off in the sink."
"My mom gave this to me when I was nine years old. Its a tattoo. It's just grown with me. Can you believe that?"
"I guess so."
"In my country, we do that sort of thing. Everybody has these things. Kids, too."

In my country, in my country. Everybody has a country. I guess we Americans just never realize it because we never live anywhere else, and when we do nobody asks us about our country. Our country is television.
The only thing I knew about Egypt was that the pyramids were there.

"I NEED SOME HONEY MUSTARD."
"I can't understand you, sir." The clerk was older. He was also Egyptian. But I didn't know that the first day I walked in. I felt sorry for him.
"HONEY. MUSTARD. FOR. MY. CHICKEN."
"Yes, sir, yes, sir."
"THANK YOUUUUUU."
The customers were always the most magical part of the Magic Mart.

That first day I was taken aback by how ugly they were to the two employees. The older Arab man, and this young guy with a perma-grin and a faux hawk.

"That's a nice car you have," he said that day.
"Thank you."
"You wanna trade? I have a Lexus for you."
"Nah, I like my car."
"I'll show it to you right now if you want."
"I bet you will."
"You don't want my car? Fair trade!"
"Not fair trade. If you want my car, its because yours isn't as nice."
That was the first time I saw him tip his head back and laugh like that. The old guy laughed, too.
"You're good!" He said, handed me my receipt, and smiled again.

Two months passed before he told me his name. It was then that I discovered that the laughing Egyptian faux hawk was really Abraham Lincoln. An American forefather. Who knew?!

But I Love Me More

"Five hundred dollars!?"
"Thats actually less than I thought it was going to be."
"Five hundred dollars..."
"For the cracked wheel, and two new tires. We also have no idea about the rotars yet, but we'll check it out when we get in there."
"Five hundred dollars..."

Outside the service station I went digging through my glove compartment. I was trying to find the receipt from when I had my brakes done almost this exact same time last year. I pulled out all sorts of random things. I found a thick receipt from a prescription that was a year old. I found two plastic packages of "new car" scented Little Trees. I found the ipod radio jack I'd been looking for. And I found three photos of Daniel Castillo.

I knew what they were before I touched them. I squeezed my eyes shut for the tiniest second before looking down at them. They were my favorites from the trip to the beach we took. He looked so happy. He looked like a cute little boy who just happened to have abs and caramel colored skin. His hair was shiny from the sea water, and he was looking at me with his hands up, like "I don't know!?" In the next picture he was grinning, looking down, digging something in the sand. His teeth were small and white between his pink lips. I couldn't see it, but I knew there was a freckle right there on his upper lip. In the last one, he was silhouetted against the setting sun, standing in the ocean, a row of vacation houses behind him. I couldn't see his face very well. He had these crazy sunglasses on we had bought at Walgreens one time. They made him look like a rockstar. Like Daddy Yankee. I flipped back to the "I don't know!?" one.
"I was never good enough for you," I said to his picture.
"I don't know!?" he stared back at me, covered in sea water.
"Thats right, you don't know. You never knew. You had no idea who I was." I suddenly wanted to cry. "And I'm so sorry that you never got to meet me. I'm so sorry I couldn't be what you wanted."

I never had to dress up to be with him. I could come out wearing shorts and a t-shirt that was too small and made me look incredibly fat, and he would tell me how beautiful I was.

Why is life so unfair? Why is insecurity so cruel?

I remembered, suddenly, the way back from the beach. I remembered the resturant we went to, and how he told me that I was flirting with the waiter and to never do that in front of him again. I remembered the next couple weeks, during which he found a number in my cell phone that was unnamed, and how he accused me of cheating and talking to other guys, when in reality, the number was one I had called inquiring about an apartment I had seen for rent. Daniel's family had been trying to move and I had wanted to help.

"I don't understand why you say I can't trust you. I trust you!"
"No, Daniel, you don't. If you did you wouldn't be doing this. And if you don't trust me, you don't really love me."
"No! Its not that way! Why are you so mad? Every time! Every time, you doing this!"
"Because it never changes!"
"I think, en realidad, you do not love me. You always making these little problems, and you don't want to fix this."
"There's nothing to fix! I'm not the one that needs fixing!"
"I know now. I know! You no love me!"
"I do love you, Daniel! I love you so much! ... but I love me more... I have to love me more..."

"Yeah its going to be about five hundred dollars. I'm going to have to call you when the wheel comes in, cause we gotta get it shipped up here. It'll probably come tomorrow."
The mechanic was right in my window.
"Here, I found the receipt from the brakes," I said. I handed it to him from behind Daniel's pictures.
"All right. Lets see what we got here." He took the receipt inside the office, and I sat there, looking at the three pictures, my mind blank.

I wanted to throw them away. But I just couldn't.