all of this

"Just like old times, right? Been a long time. Rachel and I, we used to be close."

We were in a bar on the coast. His voice was slurred and he yelled over the music to my friends.

Used to be, being the key words.

He put his arm around my shoulder for emphasis. He was too heavy and I shrunk out from underneath him. Immediately I felt sorry for him.

Later he found me waiting for my coat at the door.

"You really hate me, don't you Rachel?"

"I don't feel a whole lot of anything about you."

"What is it? Why do you hate me?"

I just looked at him. I could feel the bubbles in my chest, rising, threatening.

The coat check girl handed me my coat.

"Nice seeing you Patrick."

I turned to leave.

He stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. Too much touching.

"I know - it's because of that day, isn't it...with me and Jeremy."

I freeze. He said it. It had faded so far into the background. What else could I do with that? Over time it had taken on an unreal quality. I told myself that it was nothing to them, like a joke I didn't get. He wouldn't even remember. But he did. Years later.

I was sweet sixteen. Now, 15 years later, my adult mind sees that he knew it all along - knew it was a terrible thing.

My hands were pinned down. I had nothing free for my defense. They laughed. How I remember their laughing faces. Pulling at my shirt. I got a hand lose, connected with a face. Patrick hit me back. My face stung. My hand pinned again. I spit in their faces. It was all that was left. I was an animal. My shirt was pulled up over my head. Hands pushed down the front of my pants. I was a trapped animal, backed into a corner, and I had to fight to flight. I spit, I kicked, I hit, and then I ran as fast as my legs would carry me. The daylight sun surprised me. My lungs burned. My tears stung. I could still feel handprints on my face. My run slowed down to a fast walk and feeling started to come back. My heart pounded. People on the street shopped and talked and drank coffee on patios. I noticed my finger was scraped and bleeding - It was the only visible mark I had that told me it had really happened.

* * *

When I was five, my next door neighbor told me his sixteen year old brother wanted to show me something in their garage. He was waiting in the back room among his father's tools. One light hung from the ceiling. I feel like the lightbulb was swinging on a string, casting shifting light around the dark room, but maybe I saw that in a movie. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust having come inside from a sunny summer day. He was holding something below his belt. After a moment I knew what it was. I wanted to leave. He asked me to touch it. I ran away - straight to my father who was mowing the lawn. He was still living with us then. I don't remember what I told him, but it was one of the only memories I have of my father truly being a father. He dropped the handle of the lawn mower and left it running where it was, storming toward the neighbor's garage. I had never seen his face so red. I was worried he would explode like in cartoons.

* * *

"Wow. I don't know what to say. I guess I never thought you'd bring that up."

"Well, I feel really bad about it...me and Jeremy, you know... we were fucked up. Smoked too much...drank too much - I know it's no excuse, but we weren't ourselves."

can'tbreathcan'tmove

"Look, I'm sorry for it - I really am." Quieter he added, "I always have been."

He looked old and sad. A new wave a sympathy rushed in, but with it came air. More than I realized I needed.

"Thanks Patrick. I appreciate that."

I took my coat and walked out into a crisp and clear night. Sky so black and stars so bright, as far as the eye can see.

* * *

The invisible marks were plenty. What was I doing there? What was I thinking going there alone? Who smokes up and drinks in the middle of the afternoon? Didn't I know better? It was those questions that would be the most devastating as they still ring in my ears. That is how a walk home becomes a walk of shame. A passenger standing close on a packed subway? Lascivious. Being open? Slutty. We really only see what we know. I see it everywhere. The menacing in the most mundane: a hand gripping a pole on a streetcar, salad dressing drizzling from plastic orifices, glib nazi analogies, pregnant pauses. All of this between the skin and bone.

no broken bones there

"I can't believe this! I chipped my tooth last night on my fork. I thought it felt a little rough, but I just realized when I looked in your mirror, I actually chipped it!"

The urgency made me think it was bad. I wondered how I might have missed it.

"Let me see."

I see a tiny surface chip on his front tooth.

"It doesn't look bad at all. You may not even have to do anything about it."

"These teeth were expensive. I can't believe I did this."

"Do you want me to kiss it better?"

"I'm upset."

"Do you want me to kiss it better?"

"My tooth?"

"Yeah."

"Ok"

I kiss his tooth.

"I never hurt myself. Never! Never even broken a bone".

The root of behavior is not always convoluted. It is often so literal it is difficult to see.

It was essential that he never hurt himself because his brother did. Plain and simple. I saw it everywhere. I called it selfish when I was mad, but I could just as easily call it self-preservation. It doesn't make it any more palatable, but it does make sense.

dry run

I should have known the day Ben looked at his watch. I did know. My friends would have confirmed it if I had admitted it to them, but my ego is delicate. Somehow I feel like it's my fault. Maybe it is.

I talked about it here. "Be wise", I was warned. "It's the little things that trickle out after a bit of time. Watch and heed the signs."

I made allowances. I knew he liked my body and all of the things that he could do with it. I liked all of the things I found I could do with my body in his presence. It was never about him. He was a medium. A place to be. Outside of that there was emptiness. I tried to fill it in for both of us. I imagined him a personality that didn't exist because I am ready and because I can. I can live for everyone if I have to - one of my many talents. I swallowed him until now, a large and bitter pill, another talent.

I am past the point of pretending. I can no longer conjure up a believable image. That stopped when he began to feel too comfortable. Presumption early on confuses my insecurities. Part of me wonders if I should feel lucky - like maybe the size of the liberties taken are a measure of my likeability. When he absently slipped his fingers into the front of my underwear while he watched television I didn't pull away, but I had to remember to breath. Later, walking home alone, it occurred to me that I could be murdered right there in the dark and he would have never known. Nothing converges those two lines for me: intimacy and distance. I would make a terrible prostitute.

I'm not hurt, just dissapointed that I didn't fall in love with someone. It has nothing to do with Ben. Thank G-D I am not one of those people who wants it so badly they pretend they found it. I might have pretended a little in the beginning, but that was just a lubricant to get things going - to get those things that hadn't moved in a while moving.

Tonight I got them moving in a whole other way. I sweated them out at the gym. I ran fast and lifted heavy weights (ok 5 pound hand weights, but who's counting). I listened to my girl Gwen Stefani, "workin' so hard every night and day and I'm gonna get the payback...", and I watched the Raptors winning - that gym/tv combination is a good thing. Now I am eating the sweetest, juiciest honeydew. Josh, Lana and I had a conference call to talk about plans for tomorrow. We laughed the way we used to when we all lived together and it reminded me that I am a lucky girl.

are we crazy

I remember how we sat in his basement, the way he would push up his sleeve and thrust his arm toward me like a little kid. I can still see that pale freckled arm and feel the skin as I ran the tips of my fingers up and down, from the inside of his elbow to his wrist, his eyes closed like a happy cat.

I remember he would sit me on his bed. He would slide the red milk crate full of records toward us, across the hardwood floor. He would flip through them, presenting them for me one at a time, like a museum guide. He was animated, sometimes reciting lyrics, keeping time with his head and a hand on his leg.

"Cause they're the me generation
They're the assholes of the 80s
They're the me generation
They'll be lonely old men and ladies
They're the me generation
Are we old or are we crazy
Are we crazy
Are we crazy
Are we crazy
Are we crazy
Are we cray-ay-ay-ay-ayzy"

I remember he would walk me home, the snow crunching under his combat boots. He would hug me tightly and kiss me goodbye with an innocent brush of our lips. I can still feel the flannel of his jacket pressed against my cheek.

Later, they sent him to a far away land with hopes that getting him out of there would change something - would be enough to save him. Back then I don't even think they knew what they were saving him from. Humans are efficient self-protectors. They probably fretted that he would never graduate from high school, or worried that he would end up working at a gas station for the rest of his life. If only that was as bad as it would be.

Soon after he came back I bumped into him at Tim Horton's. I will never forget. He was wearing a pair of middle eastern pants made of a thin cotton. They reminded me of something a genie would wear. It was a cold December afternoon, grey and snowing lightly. He seemed buoyant, exuberant almost. Partway through recounting his trip he stopped to do a magic trick for a child who was at a table next to us. The mother looked afraid and I was embarassed for him. He didn't seem to notice, but turned his attention back to us. He stared at me for a long moment, like he was really taking me in. He told me I looked beautiful. He turned to my friend and asked her,

"Don't you think she looks beautiful?"

He never got to go to so many places. I think about him often. Lately I keep thinking I spot him in my peripheral vision in a crowd. I used to make that mistake a lot, but it hasn't happened for a long time. Maybe I think of him now because of Ben - thinking back to how much warmth and love there can be in the smallest of actions, in the face of the most daunting walls. Maybe whenever I go to do something where I am most alive, all of the people that I carry around with me feel heavier. The fuller my life, the easier it is to see the empty spaces. I bet if you traced those spaces with a pencil on tissue paper, you would find a perfect outline of my people. I have to do it for them, and I don't think this is it.

may old aquaintance be forgot

There has got to be a sign in here somewhere. Is it good or bad that I have lost a whole level of sentimentality?

Every single concious year of my life, I have spent the days and hours leading up to New Years trying to hold the previous year in my mind, to appreciate it, mourn it's loss. Every SINGLE year, when everyone screams, "happy new year", my heart breaks. Like with the couch my parents discarded on the front lawn when I was five, I wait pensively at the window and cry until the garbage truck arrives and a new year begins.

"The couch will be cold and lonely", I pleaded to my father. "Please, bring it back in, it's starting to snow!"

This year there were no tears, no ache to keep things from leaving.

I saw this change somewhere else recently, just as unexpectedly. Usually when I go away, I fully enjoy the first half of the trip but in the second, the joy drains out in a less than slow leak until it is unbearable. I sink lower than I ever was before I left. There is a moment when the change happens - another one of those that are difficult to pin down, yet sudden - and I know exactly what's coming and I wish I could just go home and get it over with.

Neither of these things have happened lately. Last night I felt no saddness when the clock struck midnight - hardly a drop of nostalgia. On this vacation, it almost happened, but then it just never did. I enjoyed virtually every last minute, and was sated when I left for home.

What does all of this mean? Is it bad? Is it that I lost the last scrap of the innocence I vowed I would always hold on to? Will I lose my ability to appreciate life, especially at its deepest ends? Is it that I am jaded? I realize last year I spent New Years at a funeral and last night as a third wheel, but I thought this was more ingrained in my personality than that.

Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe, like with my fear of flying, my inability to feel full-thickness happy has fallen away. Maybe it turns out that the guilt stiches I was put together with were actually the dissolveable kind. Maybe it means one step closer to freedom. Even better, maybe there will be no price to pay.

Good or bad? Which is it?

jet lag

I realized what I was doing was trying to reprogram myself, anticipating the curves ahead with the precision of a car commercial. Anything not to feel what I am supposed to feel, when I am supposed to feel it. Cheating gravity when I am barely off the ground. What's the point?

No matter, for there are still wrinkles in my fabric. The sharp ones left by an iron are especially stubborn. Today I put on oven mitts to wash dishes, typed in my password instead of my mother’s email address. One thing my mistakes have in common is that they were built to protect. Through the fog, the bare scaffolding of my brain is exposed.

Instead tonight, like on the other side of the world, I let myself feel it. It is past three in the morning and I can't sleep. I could have intercepted this with a little pharmacology, but all I would have to show for it is that I could tell my friends how I evaded it, like so many other things.

Not tonight. Let it unfold. Like the way I didn't question the morality of my eager lips. I was somewhere else and he was just right. I didn't even have to think about it.

gestures

It was the night before I left. He came to see me. He brought food. We ate, and I drank wine to unwind. My anxiety fell away in layers with every taste.

Not long after, he was trying to talk me out of bed.

"Come on - you have to finish packing. You have a lot to do." He nudged me, even pulled back the blankets.

I was confused at first, but then I thought his concern was kind of cute. He was acting a bit funny, so I asked if he was ok. He told me he had work to do. Understandable, but what was not cool was how he tried to make it seem like his concern was for me - leaving a naked and willing woman in bed for her own good? How sensitive, I had marveled. How far from ordinary.

"I understand", I told him, and I did. I understood exactly what was going on. I got up, walked across the room, picked up my underwear and slipped them on. Went into the living room and found my t-shirt. He came out of the bedroom as I was pulling on my pants. He walked past me and sat on the couch. Eyes wide, he looked stricken. I looked back at him blankly, every drop of feeling gone.

"Ok then, I'll walk you out?"

"I didn't mean I had to rush out. I just meant I brought my work home. I am not in a big rush."

"Don't worry, I have shit to do anyway. I'm going to walk over to the drugstore now to pick up a few last minute things."

I barely made eye contact with him in the elevator. I knew I couldn't look at him then.

"Let me drive you."

"It's less then a block away. No point, but thanks anyway."

We walked out into the cold.

"Listen, I had a great time."

I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

"Thanks," I said. "It's been fun."

He looked stunned.

I pulled my hat on as I walked away. Tears streamed down my face. Even though it was dark out, I was conscious of the people passing me on the sidewalk, but I couldn't stop. I was choking back sobs as a million things ran through my mind. My trip, being alone, feeling tricked.

"Rachel... Rachel!"

I looked over to the right. Ben waived me over to his car. His face reminded me of my little brother when he doesn't know how to handle a situation. Uncomfortable but concerned. I needed to know that he felt both of those things. I needed him to have some balls. I needed to be overpowered in this small way, giving me permission to be just a little bit vulnerable. I turned away for a moment to wipe away tears before he could see them. Then I got into his car.

slippery when wet

The razer thin line is more pronounced now. It is purely circumstantial. A little to one side and I am floating in the warmest salt water, gazing into the mouth of an oyster. Here I can do anything. A little to the other side I am in a thick fog, the blackest night. Trying to keep things in check, anticipate, and conjure up possibility, begins to feel impossible and my hands slip from the monkey bars. I am slipping everywhere. It's like korean barbeque, trying to keep track of the utensils I touched the raw meat with, the ones for cooking, and the ones for eating. These situations are where the most fatal errors can occur. You may laugh, but salmonellla can kill. I'm slipping and only time will tell if I will have to pay the price. I accidentally wrote 'pray' instead of 'pay'. Freud was a genius.

Part of me just wants to hurry all this along - I crave the relief, but that is what I have always done. When the fun begins to pile too high and I know it can't last, my lean changes direction. Maybe this time, I think, the fun can last. Maybe I learned it all wrong.

It is hot, the clouds heavy and dark. We are all awaiting tropical rain.

my whole world is sleeping

I sit here, looking through sliding doors at the 34 degree heat. I am truly alone - I have never been this alone, and it is fine. My whole world is sleeping, and the world is my oyster. I hope things are well there. It most certainly is here. I have done things I never thought I would do in places I never expected to be. I am a happy girl! Just thought I would check in for a minute - the setting is not conducive to much more than that.

Today's 27

I feel like trying my hand at a list - lists and other obsessive-compulsive activities are my attempts at relieving anxiety.

How about a list of my favourite anxiety relieving activities:

1. Cleaning my apartment
2. Searching the internet for 'answers' that don't exist, until things feel 'ok'
3. Eating
4. Not eating
5. Running
6. Forest gumping it (aka walking really far)
7. Coming
8. Peeling my nails
9. Flossing and brushing my teeth
10. Sitting in the bottom of the tub with the shower on pretending I am in the rain forest (ok, shut up)
11. Calling my mother
12. Getting angry at my mother when she fails to make me feel better (the most disappointing thing I have discovered about life so far is that parents are not G-D. When all is said and done, they don't know best. Growing up is one big disappointment and disillusionment.)
13. Planning massive life changes like moving to California or joining the Peace Corps
14. Obsessing over what I could have done by now but didn't
15. Trying to get my head around the concept of infinity
16. On a similar note, trying to fathom the notion that the universe never ends - what does that MEAN??? (#15 and #16 always make things worse)
17. Taking a sleeping pill or an ativan and going to bed as soon as I get home from work
18. Writing - blog posts, random sentences, words, poems, short stories, angry pretend emails
19. Aggressively exfoliating and removing hair
20. Torturing myself with sad movies or music resulting in copious crying (as attractive as it sounds)
21. Buying things
22. Calling Josh and crying (lucky for him it's over the phone therefore sans visual)
23. Reading my fave blogs (I love you guys)
24. Going out for drinks and telling all of my friends how much I love them (at least I'm not a mean drunk)
25. Re-arranging my banking, which always ends in leaving me with no room to breath, which then requires a re-rearrangement and feelings of self-loathing and guilt when I find I am unable to live on nothing (go figure).
26. Re-reading a clinical text, which leads me to see how riddled with gaps my knowledge base is, which brings me to read the more fundamental professional texts, which then leads me to see that what I really need is to go right back to the basics and re-do the hard sciences: bio, chem etc... The next thing I know I wake up in the morning in a bed filled with textbooks (I think we can safely put this one into the #15 & #16 category).
27. Making lists

standby

I want you who washes my back, hot water turning my skin pink, a warm soapy face cloth in slow circular motions. You who rinses the cloth under the tap and wrings it out from the nape of my neck, water trickling down.

I want you, who slides me across the bed, with an arm under my back and a hand on my face, your eyes never leaving mine.

I want to buy you cherries and mandarin oranges from a special market.

Last night was only enough to put my search on standby.