Think Over Stine

I’m about to digest a ten-hour workday, but only ate a meal of three hours sleep. Needless to say, I’m starting the morning running on an imbalanced diet.
Coincidentally, I’m starving, and I curse myself for leaving those fucking granola bars at home. Do people have those snacks bought for on-the-go, that almost exclusively are eaten facing the box, in pajamas, standing still as the fruit ripening in that very same kitchen, that one being stood in?
I have them. I’m people.
I’ve started volunteering at a bookstore down the street from my apartment; doing odds and ends in exchange for second-hand paperbacks and to be homed by the presence of a diabetic-and-charming feline. She knocks down novels to slide over and nuzzle my elbow. It’s fucking adorable.
Yesterday I was shelving kids’ books, being swept into memories of R.L. Stine and Ann M. Martin, and even younger times associated with the Serendipity Books.
It had me thinking; there was a point in my life where it didn’t all that much belong to me personally, where I was mostly someone else’s kid, and that was about the gist of my role on earth.
I believe I arrived at this conclusion mostly out of fully processing an earlier momentum of half-ideas, the afternoon before when I folded laundry and thought about my mom.
One of her main vocalized fears of releasing her daughter to the giant of New York was to avoid Prospect Park, a place she was mugged as a teen. Oddly enough, I’d consider Prospect Park to be one of my favorite places in the entirety of New York.
How strange that a place one person associates with firmly bad, that can be left by 3000 miles of past, could years later be retraced and embraced by said person’s very own genes? Own blood!
I tried to imagine if my kid fell in love with some geographical no-no of my short past, but only a large gap appeared. I can’t really get what it is to feel that kind of entitled ownership over someone outside your own flesh-bag. I can only relate it to that of a possessive lover, which are shoes I’ve found myself walking a few ashamed miles in (the blisters aren’t worth it).
Something about the spines of my childhood favorite reads, my old love as a young, it gave me a snap of understanding. Of curiosity. Only a snap though. I don’t wanna go killing the cat or anything. Her health is already poor.

Love-Me-Threes

Chelsea being delicious.

Saw It

I just saw ‘Prepare To Die’ run into my bathroom. To keep from a combined puke/scream, I started rummaging through old writing at high speed, and found this piece I wrote on my plane ride to Miami, back in September.

I am a plain girl, I am however not a plane girl. I love travel, as in point A and point B, but all that falls between, meaning the flying part, gives the word ‘awful’ its vinegar. But times come when I have to shake off the that weighted uneasy feel and ride the bird, one instance being to get to Miami to surprise my brother, because there is no human way I could let quite possibly my favorite person in this world fly over to my coast and not have an in-person hello.
My window wouldn’t open. What is the point of a window seat if the shade won’t lift? I’d been given a wall seat. The only thing keeping me at a murmured annoyance was the bliss of finding my very first bag of east coast gardettos at the airport. Gardettos used to be neck and neck with milk for top priority on my grocery list.
I sat unsure if the plane was moving because I couldn’t see. No one had even checked my seat belt, and I began to panic, thinking ‘who’s running this winged shack? If this thing takes a nose dive I’ll fall right out like a janky rollercoaster that drops too quick.’
In the midst of these thoughts the pilot fucked his speech up. Ugh.
“I can’t see, I’m screwed,” said the woman next to me, as a passenger stood to tinker with his carry-on luggage, blocking the flight attendant giving a rundown of how to properly man a seat belt.
“If I die, it’s your fault,” she called to him.
The woman, covered in patches of irritated red, held together by warm eyes and bright lipstick, was even more nervous about the plane than I was. She stared at the propellor outside her window, troubled.
“Jesus, I’ll get beheaded if something goes wrong,” she said to then-several over-the-shoulder eye-brow raises.
Our plane was the size of a Manhattan bedroom, so if her head came off, it’d go straight into my lap. My stomach did a half-assed cartwheel.
On this ride, I decided for the first time in nine years, I’d make a flight without feeding myself any sort of motion-sickness drugs. I don’t even think it’s actual motion sickness, rather emotion sickness. My nerves go on red alert, and I envision all the 20/20 specials about our crashed plane. I do it every time.
However, I wanted a clean ride, to see if any barf or clarity would come of it.
Instead of my normal straight-into-fetal-position pass out, my eyes were open, and I saw so much. I found an open window, and outside were thousands of clouds socializing, this huge world of sky I’ve never been awake to see.
Maybe I’m growing up. Or maybe I saw how insane my neighbor Patchy Red seemed, and I realized where I don’t want to be in 20 years.

Train Goes vs. Train Takes

I have really sensitive eyes, so in the winter when that icy wet wind kicks up, my face is constantly streaming unintentional tears, and I walk down the street looking like I just got my heart broken.
On such a day, I ran to catch the F, straight into the train cart, over-flooded with invasive light and few chaired bodies, like the first day of school; like my mom just dropped me off and I was crying over leaving her van.
The woman kitty corner was reading ‘A Time Traveler’s Wife.’ There’s something that has actually made me cry publicly. Not a ton can do that. Mostly books. A couple people, but probably not even enough to fill a hand.
I myself was on a little afternoon date with George Saunders, cozying into his wit, when the doors of the train started acting up, opening and shutting at an erratic pace, like the way a kitchen backdoor flaps wildly with a horror-film kind of wind.
It matched the above-ground mood. The sky was rowdy with wrestling grey patches. The top of the Empire State Building looked piercing, like it was giving the gloomy sky a flu shot.
Everyone’s been under the weather. Sneezes ring like chimes in the avenues.
Come the York stop, the doors opened and three men came through each car door, hats and cowboy boots on, strolling into a saloon at noon. They met in the middle, which was me, and started their aggressive nylon-strung strums and spanish harmonies. It was half-hearted though. We hadn’t even reached East Broadway before they were switching cars.
So I started thinking back to these affective things like the crying wind. Bombardments by an environment. The first to pop up was of course the most recent. The other night I was running into one of the many entrances of the scrambled maze that is the Union Square station, and at the bottom of the stairs there was a tight circle of paramedics, leaning over an open-eyed man laying down with his head pillowed by a circle of his own blood. No movement. I walked as quickly as possible, because I don’t think I could’ve handled verifying if he was alive or dead, the scene too gruesome even as a walk-by. The weirdest thing was, not ten feet away, it was as if everything was completely average. Like no one even had time for death itself, not when there’s a train to catch.
That’s much different than the wind thing. But somehow the two were linking hands, like fingers fully laced, all up in my cranium. I still don’t really know why.
I tried to pick back up with Saunders, again a no-go. There was a yelling man with a handwritten stand. Sounds straight out of a Joni Mitchell song.

What 16 Means

It’s my five month anniversary with New York. My heart’s as blood-rushed red and bright as a peeled beet.

Arcata

I wanna breathe this.

Beach Talk

I spent the dark afternoon with Ben. Over piss-poor Mexican food in my neighborhood, we sat on high stools and talked about his night.
He somehow always gets lost. It’s something very endearing about him, because he makes it into something of an adventure, rather than a frustration equated with that of lost luggage or forgetting your I.D. at home.
He ended up on Brighton Beach, and that fact still hasn’t really been solidified. The whole tale played out on his face, because that’s how a story goes when Ben tells it; it’s like I’m right beside him, or there instead of him. He explained the relief of facing a big, open ocean, of seeing that stars still exist when one removes themselves from fake illumination. He walked the spine of the water, and felt the non-weight of an askless ocean.
There are two kinds of people, and I don’t mean this as a necessary definer for what a person breaks down to, but it’s a definite factor that could only go two ways, hence two kinds. There’s the person who feels the relief that no one can find them, the giddy thrill they’re completely alone, and there’s the person who cries and shakes over this same thought, who longs for hands and hearts.
Myself and Ben fall into the first category, the gypsies delighted by no track marks. But the weather’s changing and it’s dark often, and during this time of year a lot of people trade sides.
After he left, I jumped in the shower, and did one of my favorite activities; I sang at the tile, stringing together words that don’t normally choose to sit near one another, like kindergartners in a fight, and jumped octaves like monkey bars. I basked in no one hearing me.

New York Summer

Missed.

.

A Quick Foot Note

My feet are on the verge of killing me. Not ‘walk into trouble, curious cat’ kind of naïve fatality, killing me as in continuously stinging pain at my moving base. At my middle man between myself and everything I want to move toward.
I just did such an old lady thing from my seat. I yelled over to someone asking for directions. I had to give my two cents on the right way. The girl didn’t even look grateful, more bombarded. She also still chose to still take the wrong stop. I indeed rolled my eyes.
I don’t know why I chose to give out directions anyway, It’s the C line, which is a seldom ride for me, which requires more attention to stops, like driving to an acquaintance’s house for that first barbecue or get together. Not like a familiar train, the one that gives the feel of driving to school with your eyes closed, like you made the road on a sketchpad.

A Case Of Space (Or Shit)

Early in the morning, before a majority of New York had a chance to get their day in full, bustling motion, I was walking to work on University Pl. I was guessing at what music might be playing when I entered, and my mind kept bouncing between popular alternative ballads that give the same faux energy as caffeine, and visions of Mingus’ jazz frantically scribbling the air waves, like overexposure in a picture. As I wondered, I out-loud in the walls of my own head declared ‘I can walk into a lot of shit and be ok with it.’ And literally at that moment, simultaneously my eyes made contact with a small dog beginning it’s morning sidewalk shit. Odd timing.
On the walk exiting work, I happened to bump into a friend, which happens far more often than I would imagine. New York is the size of a monster, but somehow the same tiny atoms always seem to cross paths on their mission to help the larger beast function. Anywho, the bump of atoms led to nuclear bond, and the new ionic concoction walked uptown. We rambled up the roads, talking through topics at the rate of passed streetlights. We ran errands.
One led us into a Russian bookstore. I felt like I was in a dream, that kind of vague familiarity with the scene, but a complete inability to pick out a solid detail. I was in a sea of books, and quite literally couldn’t read a single word. My morning statement echoed in my head.
As the afternoon slid into night, which it’s doing faster and faster these approaching-winter days, I walked home, and an all-black squirrel ran in front of me, across the sidewalk into the tangles of a dilapidated fence. With the knowledge of a black cat crossing as bad luck, and myself being a little overly superstitious and a reluctant sucker for probably fake omens, I tried to read the squirrel’s appearance.
That night I went to bed, and I dreamed that someone, the face familiar at the time but left in R.E.M., told me they’d shaved my legs while I was asleep. They did that apology face, the upside-down toothy grin, like they just used the last of the milk or something. I said it was fine, because as I’d proclaimed to myself before, I believe in myself when it comes to being nonchalant about the whacky; the shit, if you will. While I reflected on this, penning it in my purple-tipped modern quill, a pigeon appeared close to my shoe.
There’s some shit I can’t handle. That’s where the line prominently shines for me. I don’t like space invasion. However, it’s an odd scale I weigh it on. For instance, while on a train during rush hour, when bodies must curve to one another in the most non-sexual but space-efficient manner, I don’t find it invasive whatsoever if a leg or arm is touching mine, but I would be bothered by someone talking loudly in the cart, be it on the phone, to a friend, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hear it.
Here’s another form of space invasion I don’t like. There’s been a beeping noise that’s averaged about every 17 seconds for the last 24 hours in my building. High pitched and quick, like basketball sneakers scraping the court. I don’t do well with noises I’m not asking for. The noise persisted as I tried to sleep, like the tell-tale heart, and I finally hunted it down to the downstairs neighbor’s fire alarm. So I dragged my ladder down a flight of stairs and ripped it off the wall, like a giant weed from a garden. My home felt flowery again.