Sitting on the roof smoking a cigarette and waiting. Didn't really matter what I was waiting for. Maybe for an earthquake. To pass the time, I started writing a little story. Liked the word "aquatic." Used it twice. Tore up the paper and stuffed it into my pocket anyway. Decided I didn't like it very much after all, and would stuff it down the garbage disposal with the rest of the leftovers. I have no business writing about things I don't understand.
Stood and looked at the bay for a few minutes. Understood that I have made a huge mistake. Understood that there's no way I can undo it, and that there simply weren't, and aren't, any reasonable alternatives.
It would have been utterly absurd to jump off the rooftop. Imagine the two kids down the hall finding my body, and saying to themselves, "what the fuck? Just a little while ago, she was in the dumpster with me trying to rescue a big wooden TV..." I'm not unhappy, anyway. It was just a little bit of vertigo. I like the word "vertigo" too. Ver-ti-go. Where to go?
Took this two-hour-long test a few weeks ago as a prerequisite for getting an interview for a mail clerk position with the City. Got my scores in the mail: 80% on the customer service part (which was more of a personality test than anything else...), 100% on the proofreading section, and 96% on the spelling section. It was kind of a blow to look at those scores. Evergreen doesn't give grades on anything; they give students personalized evaluations at the end of each quarter. The evaluations are almost as standardized as grades -- "Johnny was a pleasure to have in class..." type things -- but at least they're not numerical GRADES. Stupid as it is, that 96% just killed me. How could I get a SPELLING word wrong? Granted, I AM lousy at customer service, and so the 80% didn't bother me; it's still a high enough score to get an interview. Mine is today at 1.45.
If I'd done things differently, I could presently have a job almost identical to this one, only easier. It would be a salaried job: enough to live on without worrying, ever. I could also have my BA degree by now. I could be preparing for grad school right NOW.
I wake up and I don't know where I am, ever. There are so many lives I could have had. I wake up and I don't know which one I do have. I wish I had a lot of lives to just throw around: go back, fix mistakes.
I don't play cards much. I never know when to walk away. That is, I always walk away too soon. I keep making these plans: someday, I'll write a book; someday, I'll learn to speak French; someday, I'll teach kids how to write without using sentences such as "U R Kewl." Someday maybe I'll have a family, and kids, and a dog: a big dog with big, warm paws. I've been walking away from the book for five years. I still can't speak a complete sentence in ANY language without sounding like a jackassed American. It's going to take me two more years to get a degree. Why can't I just stick to SOMETHING? I always make my life so dispensible: I can ALWAYS run away, I can ALWAYS change the subject. I'm terrified now because I have a nine-month lease -- six and a half more months I have to live in the same apartment. How fucking weak!
How can I have a dog if I keep moving around all the time?
How can I have a family someday if I can't stay faithful to a lover for more than a week?
How can I ever be REALLY happy if I'm always evaluating everything ELSE to see if it would make me happier?
I make myself so sick when I look at everything I could have had through my life, and how I've always run away. When the going gets tough, I alienate everybody I know and start living in another state. You call that tough? I call it weak. I call it abandonning ship.
My personal belief-system doesn't leave much room for the idea of ghosts: restless spirits who come back to "haunt." I cannot really manage to reconcile "ghosts" with the rest of my beliefs. However, due to a couple of bizarre experiences I've had, it would be utterly foolish to deny that ghosts are possible. For example: the malevolent spook at my dad's place who took pleasure in opening locked bathroom doors, and making appearances (and VERY sudden disappearances) in long flowing black robes in the backyard. For example: "Beverly," the ghost at the Lake Quinault Lodge, who made the lamp flicker (despite the lamp being OFF) and blew on the back of my neck. For example: the ouija board spirit who declared that Aaron and I should assist in organizing and performing an attack on U.S. soil, a few weeks before September 11th.
Naturally, I cannot deny these things, despite my reservations.
I think, too, that I have a sort of guardian ghost, a woman, who has been taking care of little things for me. It struck me last week as so obvious that many of my reservations about ghosts have fallen away. Many cultures believe in "spirit guides" and so forth, don't they? The ancestors protecting future generations from harm? Guardian angels, even?
Why attribute all of the marvelous coincidences of the world to God, or Goddess, when mortal humans construct so many of them ourselves? And if we orchestrate synchronistic happenings in life, why not in death? At this moment, I'm sitting in a place where, assuredly, a now-deceased person once sat. People who are now dead have stood outside and looked up at the two Douglass Firs out there that look like they're hugging. Everywhere I go, now-dead people have been there. Everything I see has been seen by now-dead people. Certainly, people have died in my apartment building; it used to be a hospital. So many people deceased. Where do they go? Do some of them manage to retain some sort of consciousness, and adopt a living person or two, and push them around in little ways? Déjà vu? Little random thoughts that seem sort of alien to one's own head? Subliminal messages?
Right now, I believe that is entirely possible.
I feel that there is someone manipulating me into doing certain things from behind the scenes. There are certain things I would NEVER do, and NEVER see, mistakes I would NEVER make, on my own. Things with an unlikeliness-factor equivelent to finding a hundred-dollar bill on the floor in the mall during Christmastime with no one else around to see it first. What about those insistant little stabs of necessity that one doesn't understand -- "I MUST step inside this store RIGHT NOW" -- until one hears a certain song playing on the radio that seems to have a private message for one. What about the urges to take a left rather than a right, despite the fact that one doesn't know where the lefthand turn will lead? What about rummaging through someone's old thrown-away romance novels, only, out of all of them, the one that falls down and hits one on the head is the only one that isn't a romance novel, and the only one with the capability to make one understand certain necessary truths...? What about dreaming of someplace one has never seen, and then finding a postcard of JUST that place, and then, accidentally finding oneself THERE, and understanding the dream at last? What about the loved one who inexplicably rents "Rosemary's Baby" the same night as one, a zillion miles away?
Freaky shit.
I attribute some of these happenings to my ghost.
If she's really there, I think she's trying to tell me something.
Something to the effect of, "it'll all be okay, so fucking chill out and don't do anything stupid, like break a nine-month lease just because you're chickenshit of staying in one place for nine months..." Something like, "I'm with you; you'll be okay." Something like, "make yourself some tuna casserole, sit down, eat your dinner, and enjoy everything; I'll take care of as many of the hard parts as I can..." Something calming. Calming, but insistent, like a mom trying to get me to finish some vegetables that are allegedly good for me by assuring me that they taste better with cheese on them. Something like: "Just do your homework and I'll fix the mess you made, and when we're each done we can have some ice cream."
I feel like someone is making sure I don't step into a manhole by accident.
Or jump off my roof because I've fucked up.
I need to go now. My interview is in about an hour and I'm wearing jeans and a ratty old t'shirt.
~Me*