Clairvoyant

Slip, slide across my mind. It's liquid of course, do you agree? Do you agree with underwater dreams? Of palaces and knights - and homosexual kings and queens? I do. Is that odd? Am I different? Eyes are bright- sure- brighter than mine by measure I believe. I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to. It's a secret how I move, you know. Closely guarded. You wouldn't catch on even if you watched me in an empty space, with just my hair blowing violently across my face. You'd ask some question and I'd be silent. That is all.

My Life Is A Fucking Dolly Parton Song: Part 3

Her and the Car and the Mobile Home

Sometimes I begin to really wonder about my sanity...okay, I always wonder about my sanity...
So I have this friend, right? And we'll call her "Bessy".
Bessy has a boyfriend who works on a smelly boat out in the boondocks right smack dab in the middle of nowhereland. For some odd reason she chose me to be the one gal to assist her in a pseudo Romeo-Juliet campaign. See, her parents are really religious and don't like this guy, so a couple of nights a week she tells them she's going do something with me. I go pick her up in my car, and away we go.
And then--oh, this is the good part-- and THEN i have to watch her and her hillbilly lover suck face on the oil boat while I sit there twiddling my thumbs with nothing better to do.
It wasn't so particular last night, the ritual went as planned. We left the boondocks around midnight in our efforts to get home before anyone got a little antsy. She begins with this insane little tirade about how she's going to eventually marry this guy and they're going to live in a double wide someplace out in the country...
I'm thinking if that floats her boat, so be it. Why not?
It's not like someone can be completely unhappy living in a mobile home in the middle of nowhere, right?
She has the window down and she's completely going a little crazy, screaming at the top of her lungs; the effects of her uncontainable joy (I suppose it was a mild effect of her snogging the oily man back at the boat).
All of a sudden, her phone starts ringing and vibrating in her hand, and what happens then?
Why, she flings the phone out the window!
It wasn't a purposeful sort of gesture, but one of surprise, because at that moment she turns her head to be and shrieks that she just dropped her really expensive cellphone into the ditch along this winding back road, and that we have to get out and find it.
How else is she going to explain to her mother (whom she lives with) that she lost her new phone?
So here we are, skirts hiked up, jeans rolled, hands dirty, searching the muddy ditches on the side of this road looking for her new phone with one little mini flashlight.
It was a pretty sight.
I was pissed to say the least.
When we finally found the damn thing it was threatening not to work..the screen was wet, and it appeared water had gotten inside.
She moaned and groaned until finally it came back to life, and all was well.
For the rest of the ride home she talked about her idealistic little life out in the country, with her beau and her double wide...
The things I do for friendship.

I Think You're Wonderful, Loser.

I think you're amazing, why can't you see that?
It's as if there's something that makes you believe that there is good in every other person on this planet but you... you think of yourself as selfish and afflicted. You think that I'd be better off if I didn't have these feelings for you, but how wrong you are. You don't look in the mirror and see yourself truly, do you? Or often enough?
If you did, and you saw what I see, you'd see someone genuinely worth all of my time and attention.
There's something so playful about the composure of your mouth, and when you smile, you light up the entire room like a glowing sphere of unadulterated joy.
You never complain.
Your eyes are bright--like Plexiglas-- my heart beats when they alight on mine.
How ridiculous that you can't understand it...
That you can't see why I love you.
It's hell, really, it is.
I want you to know and I want you to see it...

It's too bad you're across the ocean,
away from me.

Linger

I had just finished a line when she stumbled into the room in just her underwear, laughing, saying they had stolen the rest of her clothes after she jumped in the pool. I remember looking at her and thinking she was hot, you know, regular like that. There was a butterfly tattoo on her hip bone, and she wasn’t outrageously skinny. There were curves, which made her pale skin look like ice against the dark walls.
She glanced around the room frantically, as I stared at her with something like confusion and fascination.
“AH!” Inspired, she ran over to the bed behind me, and tore off the white sheet. It was thin enough to fold in half and tie around, and this is precisely what she did. There she was, in her makeshift dress, damp skin, hair disarrayed; she came and sat down next to me on the sofa. The music from the other room was obnoxious, complimented by the sounds of high-pitched laughs and glass bottles being thrown around.
“You like butterflies?” I asked her, wiping my nose. “Sure thing, I love butterflies. Don’t you?” Her voice was the kind I liked, soft and sincere.
“They’re okay.” We sat on the couch in awkward silence; she could see my eyes and the way my hand was twitching a bit. I began to wonder if she cared. I didn’t really know what to make of it until she put her hand on mine, stopping the twitching; her touch like ice, her fingers still clammy from the pool.
“You’re shaking,” She explained. “Here.” She took my other hand, and pressed them together.
She put her own hands over mine, and blew into them, her breath hot. She repeated this three times, and all the while my head was spinning from the effects of the drug. Still, strangely, I remember every detail, in colors so vivid it felt like a dream. She looked up, in my eyes, and smiled.
“I’m Ellie.” She told me.
“Regan.” I replied.
“Like the president?”
“Yeah.”
We looked at our hands, still pressed together.
“I couldn’t get them warmer.” She surveyed our hands, disapprovingly. “You’re still shaking.”
“It’s not from the cold.”
She looked at me again, our eyes met. She smiled, and I forced a grin. Let go of my hands, and brought her own up, to touch the sides of my face. I’m sure she felt my scruff, I hadn’t shaved in days. Her eyes were violet, a wild sort of blue I hadn’t seen before, electric, wide. I could have swam in them. She arched her neck, and brought her lips closer to mine. I wanted to.
I wanted to; but the instant it appeared it would happen- I turned my head away. Her lips gently brushed my lips before she realized her intentions weren’t executed.
“I don’t want to kiss you like this.” I told her, shortly, the words coming out sharp like knives, a bit heartless and unfeeling.
That’s when Mickey came in.
Well, he was pushed in, right through the door, and landed in a heap before us. Groaning and laughing at the same time, he sat up and turned to the two of us, sitting there staring at him.
“What the fuck you’re lookin at?” He chuckled, jumping up, and sitting between us.
“You were just thrown through a door.” She marveled.
“Yeah, and you’re quite the observer.” He chucked her under the chin like a kid, and pulled out a little pouch from the pocket of his jacket.
“Doing one with me, eh?” He asked me, as he began his set up.
I looked at her, and then I looked at him, and shook my head.
“Should’ve known. You’re high as a kite already.” He chuckled, he turned to her.
“You want some?” He asked her.
“No.” She replied shortly.
“Your loss, it’s the good stuff.”
So began a strange friendship.
As Mickey sat there doing a line, Ellie and I exchanged glances, and eventually locked fingers behind his back.
We started hanging out more and more. She was in college nearby, and Mickey and I didn’t know a damn thing about college. She was sober, but thought we were fun. The three of us became somewhat inseparable, like a Bonnie and two Clydes. Her connection with me was different, though. It wasn’t as platonic as I hoped it would be. I liked her too much too soon, I knew it was real, but I didn’t want to fuck it up.
Then, one day, it occurred out of the blue.
The three of us went down to the beach at night on an impulse, and something happened. Mickey was fucking around in the waves, high, and singing something in Russian. Ellie and I stole away behind the lifeguard cabin. We were laughing and the only light above us was the moon. She took off her shirt, and I took off mine. We gripped each other, tight, the heat making our bodies stick together. Her mouth found mine, there, in the darkness.
In three days time, I had made up my mind.
The trio would be sacrificed.
I wanted her. I wanted her for my own selfish reasons. She was clean and she was pure, the type of love she was offering only came around once in a lifetime. I didn’t want to think about the future, it was nothing to me. All that mattered was the now. All that mattered was the taste of her on my lips, the way it felt, and what it meant. I called Mickey.
“Do what you gotta, man.” He said in his thick southern drone. “Just don’t fall in too deep with a girl like her…she’s the kind that wants to fix things.”
Some time came and went, Mickey and I still got together in his apartment, doing lines and talking about things. Ellie became my girlfriend.
Mickey disapproved in the beginning, especially when he found out I’d told her everything about me. The bad childhood, the innumerable exes, the record for criminal activities, the habit. He didn’t like the idea of being ousted, but he knew she wasn’t the sort. As much as she disapproved, we moved in together. It was the best two years of my life. She continued to give, and I continued to take.
In the beginning it was paradise, coming home, being with her. It felt like a marriage. I felt like a man. I felt like things were the way they were supposed to be. She was happy, I was happy. We both had jobs, we both found completion in being together, a sense of assurance.
The most beautiful thing about it: it was a lie.
She was living with a double me. There was the person I became when I was with her, the person I knew I could be, some guy on top of the world with all the answers to life, happiness was a ball on my string. And; the Hyde to my Jekyll, the animal who needed the healing power that only routine could bring to me. The control I felt when I knocked on back doors and slipped cash in the hands of a fellow reprobate.
She was waiting, lingering, for me.
A lover, a best friend; hurting because she couldn’t change me. I refused to change myself, I wasn’t ready. I was leaning on my inhibitions in the form of anything I could get my hands on at the moment. When things got bad, a fight or a thought of the past arose, and when that happened I reverted. Cookie jar money was wasted on my pitiless habits; I became a victim of my own demons.
I never touched her when I was high. I felt like it wouldn’t be love. I felt like I’d hurt her, I’d be fucking her, I’d be abusing her like I was abusing myself. She began to compare me to how she wanted to be treated. She pinned me up again her ideal portrait of us, and left me there on a noose. I’d hang my head; I couldn’t come to terms with it. I disappointed her with expectations, willingly hopeful that she’d find me useless enough to save herself.
The day came, but it took time.
It took time to get her to hate me. She clung to me like the fixer she was. There was this desperation in her, as if she thought she was failing in her efforts if she left me here to die without her. She knew I wouldn’t change this way, like this, ignoring my hang-ups, ignoring all the issues that had accumulated into one huge self-destructive mechanism.
But the day came.
“Get clean, or I leave.” She said to me.
I tried for a day or two, to see for myself if I could really put away my selfishness in order to keep the woman I had come to love sincerely. But I couldn’t, and I lied to her. I was walking around, living a sober story. At night, when she was asleep, I’d sneak outside and have a line. It went on for a few months, but I knew I couldn’t hide it from her for long. She was too smart for me. So, easily, she found me out again, took her stuff and left.
It was that easy.
It was that hard.
I fell deep again, and realized in the end what exactly I had done to her.
Years have passed, me and Mickey got clean. We never talked about Ellie, except for times when we were talking about others and threw her in there collectively for the sake of remembrances.
“I wonder what she’s doing now…” I said to myself as we stood out near the lake one day, talking again about the past. “I bet she’s married now, with kids. Living in the country someplace, in a house with a loft.”
“You know what makes a woman beautiful, man?” He sighed in reflection, looking out into the water and dangling his hand over the edge of the wharf. “It isn’t the size of her breasts or the way she dresses… it’s that smile you get when you tell her she’s yours.”
I never forgot that.

Funk

So I suppose today is just one of those days...
I'm sitting here in my room, lingering over my laptop with nothing better to do at all.
It's hell.
When is my life going to start?
You begin thinking that everything means something, that shit is going in the right direction, and then BAM, you can't get a job and life is suddenly at a stand still. It's really beginning to piss me off.
I've waited so long for my life suddenly become something exciting and eventful. But being stuck in a financial slump is doing absolutely nothing for my mojo.
Ugh.
It's one thing after another. Continuous. I can't stop it.

I move out in July.
I hope it'll be a transition.
A positive one.

Dear Miss California,

I regret that you are now detested by the homosexual majority in your home state.

It must have come as a blow to be booed by people as you stood up on stage and all that, I think i'd have freaked out a bit.

Though I applaud you for voicing your true opinion, I believe you could have stated your point more elegantly.

When asked the question you said "In my country, and in my family we believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman." And you went on to apologize for offending anyone.

1.) You shouldn't have said "in my country". That's clearly a sign that you don't pay attention to detail. The country is peppered with conservatives and liberals alike. If it's your opinion, keep it yours. Don't throw in the rest of the country in there, it makes you look like a biggot.

2.) Apologizing for "offending anyone" makes you look like you don't truly support your own thoughts and actions. If it is your opinion, it's not nessessary to apologize for it. You're an American, and it's your right.

Regardless, you were really pretty.

I'm glad you came in second.

I hope the press stops eating you up, we're human and they should understand that fact.

Sincerely,

Lady Cracker

My Life Is A Fucking Dolly Parton Song: Part 2

Think About Love

I've always seen my mother as some weak and weary individual...a southern belle thrown into the chaotic world of being a wife and mother.

She always tried to love me like she should have loved me, with wide open arms, no inhibitions- but there was always a sort of vulnerable little hesitation about her that I never understood...and so, as it happened, my grandmother became more like my mother, and my mother became more like the annoying older sister that I could never get off my back. My mother was always fine with this arrangement, possibly thinking that living with me in the late afternoon hours and the early mornings before school was enough.

My bond with my grandmother was a iron one.

We couldn't have loved each other more.

She was my rock when I felt the world crowding me, my blessing at bedtime, and the arms I ran to when I needed someone to embrace.

She discovered she had cancer when I was sixteen...and three years later, she lost her battle.

My mother found herself in a thick situation.

See, my mother depended upon my grandmother as much as I did- if not, moreso. My mother's birth father left her, and her two siblings, when they were very young. My mother remained dependent upon my grandmother for emotional support. With my grandmother gone, and us both missing her, it's easy to assume it was a recipe for disaster. It was.

Big time.

My own father, who was always really verbally amusive towards me, was getting especially tough on me since my coming of age. Now that I was in college, he believed that I should have been out of the house, on my own, though I was only nineteen.

One night, my mother and father got into a huge fight...which, wasn't abnormal...

But this time my father, in a drunk rage, points his finger in my mother's face and says menacingly

"And I was still paying for your college tuition when you were married to that other guy."

This sort of startled me.

Other guy?

What other guy?
In a well-written letter the next day (so was my mother's style, she could never just TELL me anything), my mother explains she was married before... briefly... to an unnamed man... when she twenty...

She married my father when she was twenty-six.

Had me at twenty-seven.

I was struck.

I couldn't believe that I had been living this, without ever having really known her or her agenda, for the whole nineteen years of my existance.

I was really angry at first. Not only about that, but about so many things that had built up that had be at odds against her. So many things were running through my mind. So many things about my mother that I never understood and remained enraged about.

I tried to make sense of it, but couldn't.

So I stopped.

I just stopped questioning.

And I tried to understand...

I know how she is, probably better than anyone now.

She has this thing about her, where she's strong and incredibly weak at the same time.

She's strong enough to stand up to my father, but she's weak because she won't leave him.

She was strong enough to leave the man who hurt her first, but she's weak because she still keeps the pain he left her with.

I realized there was nothing I could do, but love her.

Nothing at all, but love her.

It's that simple, and yet, that hard.

I never approached the topic again with my mother. I'm sure she thought I'd be completely destroyed by it... but in theory it explains so much for me. It puts me a bit at ease about how she is the way she is.

There's no way she needs forgiveness from ME for leaving someone who hurt her. I applaud her for it, and in fact, have an entirely new respect for the way she handles things. Though there's still a lot I have left to understand, and unearth, about this woman...

I'm ready.

I just have to see her with open eyes,

and know that I do love her, as her daughter, and I always will.