publicly acknowledging the split for the very first time

so I’m sitting in front of an omelet
which is sitting in front of a man
whose got this scrambled fucking heart
and an over easy smile
“I haven’t healed yet”
he tells me
and i’m drenching my eggs
in hot sauce and thinking:
my god, has anyone?
i’m sure people have, you know
when shadows of nostalgia
are dropped suddenly, prematurely
intrusively
like a twenty dollar tab
we will split
down the middle.

Catherine

She calls me as she crawls on two legs down the wide, affluent, excessive isles of a pharmacy. She waked there for no reason other then to escape the deafening, drowning silence of a two story suburban home where the carpet matches the drapes and the drapes match the minds of the ones who pay the mortgage: always, always closed. She passes time by selecting, carefully, items she will never, ever use and throwing them decisively into a red plastic basket, and she carries this unnecessary weight just fine, gracefully even, all the way to the check-out line.
“I’m bored,” she says into the her phone, and through ways I still do not even pretend to understand I hear it through my phone pretty immediately as I drive away from a local mountain I had spent the entire afternoon climbing. “Oh, “ I say, my eyelids droopy and my heart still in recovery. “Wanna hang out?” she asks, and I mostly do, so Greg and I pick her up and take her far away to a small town where there is a thirty-two-year-old RV for sale. We need this RV to charge the states, we need this RV to fight the inescapability of time with windblown hair and carbon emissions.
We are almost to the RV and we are dancing to some random rap song that I am certain she hates. She throws up what she thinks are gang signs; her small hands move in the shadows of a setting sun, the zippers of her leather jacket jingle.
We never even see the RV. We find the road we think leads to it, but this is a small artsy run down town, the kind where where it’s ok to hoard a dozen rusted toilets in your back yard but not ok to consume one measly animal by-product. She begs us to knock on what we think might be the front door and tells us that she never gets to do anything cool like this.
We park and walk up and down the streets. All the businesses are closing for the day, but she doesn’t care because just seeing the closed signs is good enough.
We drive to a little Mexican restaurant and she orders a taco ala cart -plain- and a water.
“Remember when I was a little kid, and cried because I killed a moth?” she asks me out of nowhere.
“Yeah, I do.”
“I was like three or four, and I was outside watering the garden, and I noticed a moth. I didn’t know what a moth was, and I was afraid it was gonna hurt me, so I poured water on it, and it started moving slower, and I didn’t know what it was doing, just that it couldn’t hurt me if I kept doing that, so I poured more water on it. And then Mom came out and she was like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I was like ‘This thing was going to hurt me!’ and she was like ‘No honey, that is a moth. It cannot hurt you. It is harmless and beautiful, look at it.’ So I looked at it and it was, it was like kinda orangeish, and I started to cry. It was, you know, and moving all like, slow and stuff. It was dying because I killed it, but I didn’t know that then. I thought that was just what it did. So Mom helped me put it in a little cage that Derek had for like, bugs, remember that little cage thing? And I loved it so much. The next day I woke up and it wasn’t moving anymore. It was shriveled up kind of, and dried out in the corner and I didn’t know why. So mom told me it had died, and you and Derek helped me have a funeral for it. We put it in a coke bottle lid and put a leaf on top and a rubber-band around it, and we dug a hole in the backyard by the rose bush. You tried to make a cross out of popsicle sticks for it, and we buried it.”
“I forgot about the popsicle sticks.”
“Yeah. And then, like, two or three years later I decided to find out what happened to it, because I always saw the popsicle sticks by the rose bush every time I went to play outside. I dug and found the coke bottle lid and and the rubber band, but the moth was gone. There was only dirt in the lid.”
When we drop her off, I can think only of how much I love her, my little sister, who is not so little anymore, I guess, based upon the brand new red car that sparkles calmly in the driveway.

Greg hates how I write, but we Make Big Plans Anyway.

I sit on a couch in ratty, stretched out gym clothes. The cut is low (as if there's something to see) and the need for flexible, breathable, moveable clothes during today's "workout" is the need for Novocain during the removal of a splinter. My head is full and my stomach is empty; I've been daydreaming about traveling the country in a secondhand fifth-wheel and nightdeaming about the starving, weeping ghost of my dead grandpa. In my dream I hold his crying body and he's curled up like a little tiny baby, he says to me, "Sunshine, I'm already dead, I'm already dead, I'm already dead."

Greg and I discuss the new plan as we strain martinis into mismatched glasses with a plastic cup and a pot lid. "I hope you know," he says, "that whatever vehicle we get, I'm going to nerd the shit out of it. Like, I'm going to add batteries and solar panels." I look at him blankly, instructing him to add an automatic martini shaker. We establish that there is one already. It's called throwing it into reverse and drive a few times, back and forth, back and forth.

We are attempting to solidify how we are going to pay for this. I suggest massive craigslistage along the way, picking up, like, a fence building gig in Florida and some kind of banquet serving in Nebraska. He suggests a blog and sponsors and photos, and we establish that the planning of big things should be documented with words, seeing as words in minds are cognitive, transparent, illusive, and words on screens will one day dissolve or burn out or become not found, sure, but in a long long time, like how long it takes to cook a burrito in my 1985 microwave or how long I should have spent on the elliptical.

I have deja vu now, pretty hard actually, but the weird part of this deja vu is I am passionately uncertain about what will happen next.

To Establish The Exact Beginning of the End is, like, Impossible

It has come to my attention that I am not entirely sure of what day, exactly, my life started. I was a red, wet little thing crying in the shock of oxygen on the twenty seventh day of September 1986, but there’s no possible way that my life truly started on that day. I would be mad, really, if it all started on a day I can’t even recall.

So maybe my life began in the splashes of my very first memory, a short clip long lost from the reel and lacking both date and dialogue. In it I am wearing a light pink puffy raincoat and sitting on my dad’s shoulders, in the night, in the rain, and he is running down the street. He runs through the puddles and the reflection of the streetlight is so awkwardly beautiful that I, as a 2 year old child, feel the compelling urge to store it somewhere in my undeveloped brain where I can never, ever loose it. And now, twenty one years later, I can almost accept this as the beginning of my life, as it involves both my father and something pink, but I’m not totally committed to this theory. I’m hesitant to call this the beginning of my life because I wasn’t, at the time, even aware that I had a life. I was ignorant to what it means to have one, and naive to the idea that one day it will be taken away from me.

And so maybe, on this basis, I have not yet experienced the first day of my life.

for poppy

"Poppy”, I said, breaking the calm and soothing silence of a fourth floor hospital room. I’d been watching the second hand on the clock move in a familiar and granted circle; it didn’t audibly tick in a loud, jolting way, the way it would in an office or in math class, it just glided calmly around itself smoothly, silently, effortlessly, endlessly. “Poppy, does time go fast or slow?” Poppy looked at me, and looked at the clock, and he watched as it sailed swiftly around and around and around. And through bright blue eyes I could see the fullness of his heart, the passion and pride for his wife and his children, the unparalleled gratitude for laughter and music and a dang good rack of sloppy barbeque ribs. I saw seventy-four fulfilled and brilliant years’ worth of giving, learning, discovering, and building. I saw, just then, all the reasons that this man has maintained a fortressed and irreplaceable place in my heart for twenty four years. “Kiddo”, he said, smiling in a twist of angelic adorability and deviant rascality- in that way only Poppy could smile, in that way we’ve all known and loved our whole lives- “time goes really fast, kiddo, when you think about it.” May we all learn from Poppy to find treasure in every smooth and silent second passed, and to Poppy, a man I miss deeply already, may you rest easy and free forever.

Red Wine Reduction

I've been thinking a lot about red wine reductions, about how the alcohol burns off.

A lot of things that compliment eachother really well are thrown into a pot. They blend. The heat is too much and shit starts boiling, so the intensity is adjusted to a small flame where it sits for a long, long time, and in the process, all the toxins that make it undesireable burn off- they just go away, they evaporate into nothing- and what's left is a fraction of what there used to be, sure, but now it's finer, and more pure, and more crafted.

time management

My boss once sent me to a nine hour conference on "time management". Two hours into it, the speaker noted that minds often wander and instructed us to write down three things we'd been actively thinking about during the duration of his lecture. He gave us five minutes to do this; I was done in eleven seconds. He asked the attendees to share. A chubby voice next to me said "buy new birdcage", a man with no wedding ring said "organize files", and a woman with Moses-parted hair said "I need to refill my stapler." I looked at my paper: "What is the purpose of my life?" phrased 3 different ways.

Maybe this is why I have a blog, and never any freaking staples.