I haven’t spoken to her in five years. I haven’t seen her in six. I try to remember her last phone call, but what I remember instead is lying on the floor of our dorm room with my head in her lap while she strokes my hair. Her fingers carve grooves along my scalp like rivers flowing from my temple to my neck. Her hands are as small as mine, but hers are thin and elegant. She doesn’t bite her nails.
I am waiting for the epiphany. Where I realize that I have moved on. I have to move on. But there is no epiphany, and I can't let go. All I have is this: a love letter to my best friend, which is really a love letter to the two of us at eighteen, alone in the dark on the third floor of Gallagher Hall, two girls in twin beds whispering secrets across the room. Those girls are lost now, grown strange and old. But I will spend the rest of my life trying to find them again.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Post 441
3 years, and 440 posts later, I have decided that I am tired of duplicating my blog. Those of you who read this on flickr, please come see it at blogspot.
Thank you.
Thank you.
oh.
I sleep in a converted attic. It’s the biggest bedroom, but has the lowest ceiling; I am five feet tall, and even I can’t walk from one end of the room to the other without hitting my head. My housemates are both much taller than I am, and didn’t fight me for the room. When I wake up in the middle of the night, the light from my room makes a path down the stairs and into the bathroom. I like the way my light looks from the bottom of the stairs.
I grew up in a single story ranch house with soil-colored shag carpet and soft, lumpy, ceilings. When I slept on the top of my bunk bed, I could reach up and brush off bits of ceiling onto my blankets like dandruff.
The next two houses I lived in had two floors, and when I left my second story bedroom for a third floor dorm, and started writing fiction, I could never conceive of a bedroom that did not begin and end with stairs. One comes down from ones bed. It is simply the way of things.
When my brother tried to kill himself, he was going to jump off the roof from his second floor bedroom. I realize now that this would probably not have killed him, but I'm sure it didn't seem so obvious at the time. I wasn't there. And when I examine my memory of my mother telling me, in the car on my way home from college for the summer, I don't really remember what she said. I don't remember her saying it. And I wonder if I'm wrong, if I’m remembering everything wrong, if my brother tried to kill himself while I was away at college, and I don't even know how he was going to do it.
It all makes sense now. All the scattered things I've been trying to make that I can't finish because I don't know what they're about—the story about Sheila, the story about Caboose, the photos with Chinese restaurants and my father's living room and the lions in front of that movie theater in Keokuk—they're all the same thing. I am filling a shoebox with all of these things, which are connected, and not. It's not about any one thing, it's about all of them.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Week 2, part 4: Therefore, blog.
(I am apparently going to do a lot of make-up work this weekend. Which is fine, I already kind of knew that.)
One of the reasons I'm blogging so steadily about losing weight is because I'm trying to keep it out of my real-time interactions. Losing weight is a constant activity. I'm not just sitting here, typing (when I should be scheduling), I'm sitting here typing and not eating. And that takes effort. Not particularly soul-killing effort, not now, not today, but still, my weight is on my mind. It has to be.
It's also a really big deal for me. I've spent most of my life blaming things in my life on being fat, blaming my fat on me, making tidy little shame spirals to fall into. I have set up in my mind that being fat is the One Thing that keeps me from having the life I want. By losing weight, I gain access to all those things the fat kept me away from. And, rationally, I know this isn't so. But we're not talking about reason here. We're talking about fat. So even though yesterday I accomplished some awesome things at work, what I came home proud of is the number on the scale that morning.
On the other hand, I really don't want this to be What I Talk About. It's repetitive. It's problematic. It's boring. I mean, people use "talking about the weather" as the epitome of the thing you say when there's nothing to say, but at least the weather is something that everyone shares in. (Also, few things affect me as pervasively as the weather does—it colors everything that happens every day—so, yeah, kinda big deal for me.) And unlike my internet dating obsession, losing weight doesn't generate anything I can turn into an amusing anecdote. I have introspection, I have soapboxes galore. And so I have this blog.
One of the reasons I'm blogging so steadily about losing weight is because I'm trying to keep it out of my real-time interactions. Losing weight is a constant activity. I'm not just sitting here, typing (when I should be scheduling), I'm sitting here typing and not eating. And that takes effort. Not particularly soul-killing effort, not now, not today, but still, my weight is on my mind. It has to be.
It's also a really big deal for me. I've spent most of my life blaming things in my life on being fat, blaming my fat on me, making tidy little shame spirals to fall into. I have set up in my mind that being fat is the One Thing that keeps me from having the life I want. By losing weight, I gain access to all those things the fat kept me away from. And, rationally, I know this isn't so. But we're not talking about reason here. We're talking about fat. So even though yesterday I accomplished some awesome things at work, what I came home proud of is the number on the scale that morning.
On the other hand, I really don't want this to be What I Talk About. It's repetitive. It's problematic. It's boring. I mean, people use "talking about the weather" as the epitome of the thing you say when there's nothing to say, but at least the weather is something that everyone shares in. (Also, few things affect me as pervasively as the weather does—it colors everything that happens every day—so, yeah, kinda big deal for me.) And unlike my internet dating obsession, losing weight doesn't generate anything I can turn into an amusing anecdote. I have introspection, I have soapboxes galore. And so I have this blog.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Cross Posting Short Girl(s)
I don't do New Year's Resolutions. I don't do New Years, and I don't do Resolutions. It's two different things, really:
New Year's
I am totally willing to go to a party on New Years. I like parties. I like dancing. I like drinking. I like making noise at midnight because I like making noise. But New Year's doesn't hold any meaning for me besides a night that people have parties and make noise at midnight. If everyone in Iowa City started celebrating Canada Day then I would go to Canada Day parties. (No offense, Canada, but I don't really care about you.) There are days that mark the beginnings and endings of things—the first day it feels like a new season, the first day of vacation or the first day of school—those are days that prompt an evaluation of my life, those are days that something changes. Even my birthday, which might be considered an equally artificial marker, feels like a more significant change than the switch from December 31 to January 1st. There is nothing that I want to do or not do on January 1st that I wouldn't want to do or not do on December 31st. Except, perhaps, sleep off a hangover.
Resolution
A resolution is a promise that I make to myself. And I don't believe in promises, not the way that people seem to use them. I think that a decision is either the best decision one can make given known information, or it isn't. If it is the best decision, then it should be made regardless of promises given or not given. If a promised action is the right action then the promise doesn't make a difference. It only makes a difference when that promised action isn't the best action, because then the promise only serves to enforce the wrong action. We make promises based on our belief in future events. Sometimes we're wrong. Not every goal is attainable, and sometimes we can be harmed by attempting unattainable goals.
It's not that I don't believe in goals. I believe in ever-evolving goals that reflect the best we know at any given time. There are things that I want, that I strive for. Sometimes I reach them. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I decide that I'm better off if I don't try for that goal. And I never decide if a goal is helping or hurting me, or if a decision is a good or bad one, because of a promise I made.
(written as a guest post at www.shortgirlphoto.blogspot.com)
New Year's
I am totally willing to go to a party on New Years. I like parties. I like dancing. I like drinking. I like making noise at midnight because I like making noise. But New Year's doesn't hold any meaning for me besides a night that people have parties and make noise at midnight. If everyone in Iowa City started celebrating Canada Day then I would go to Canada Day parties. (No offense, Canada, but I don't really care about you.) There are days that mark the beginnings and endings of things—the first day it feels like a new season, the first day of vacation or the first day of school—those are days that prompt an evaluation of my life, those are days that something changes. Even my birthday, which might be considered an equally artificial marker, feels like a more significant change than the switch from December 31 to January 1st. There is nothing that I want to do or not do on January 1st that I wouldn't want to do or not do on December 31st. Except, perhaps, sleep off a hangover.
Resolution
A resolution is a promise that I make to myself. And I don't believe in promises, not the way that people seem to use them. I think that a decision is either the best decision one can make given known information, or it isn't. If it is the best decision, then it should be made regardless of promises given or not given. If a promised action is the right action then the promise doesn't make a difference. It only makes a difference when that promised action isn't the best action, because then the promise only serves to enforce the wrong action. We make promises based on our belief in future events. Sometimes we're wrong. Not every goal is attainable, and sometimes we can be harmed by attempting unattainable goals.
It's not that I don't believe in goals. I believe in ever-evolving goals that reflect the best we know at any given time. There are things that I want, that I strive for. Sometimes I reach them. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I decide that I'm better off if I don't try for that goal. And I never decide if a goal is helping or hurting me, or if a decision is a good or bad one, because of a promise I made.
(written as a guest post at www.shortgirlphoto.blogspot.com)
Friday, December 30, 2011
Heat Transfer
Every time the water turns back, past my ankles and into the opening mouth of a coming wave, it pulls away the sand under my heels, digging little depressions for me to sink back into. The longer I stand, the further entrenched I become. It’s as if I am fighting back the pull of water; the longer it pulls, the deeper I plant myself into the sand.
I always come back to this.
It is the day after Christmas, and my father and I are standing ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean and talking about heat transfer and temperature. Did you know that if you stood in a room where the air temperature was 34 degrees, but the walls were 80 degrees, you would feel warm? It takes a specialized temperature control set up, but scientists have tried it and it works. It has to do with radiative versus conductive heat.
I wonder what it would be like to live in perpetual sun again.
The ocean tugs at my ankles; I am aware of the metaphor. It pulls me westward, homeward, California-bound. I am surprised to hear myself say, homeward. I lived here for seventeen years. And then I stopped. But here I am, fifteen years later, and the word comes, unbidden. Home.
I always come back to this.
It is the day after Christmas, and my father and I are standing ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean and talking about heat transfer and temperature. Did you know that if you stood in a room where the air temperature was 34 degrees, but the walls were 80 degrees, you would feel warm? It takes a specialized temperature control set up, but scientists have tried it and it works. It has to do with radiative versus conductive heat.
I wonder what it would be like to live in perpetual sun again.
The ocean tugs at my ankles; I am aware of the metaphor. It pulls me westward, homeward, California-bound. I am surprised to hear myself say, homeward. I lived here for seventeen years. And then I stopped. But here I am, fifteen years later, and the word comes, unbidden. Home.
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