26 February 1999 ~ Kiss the rain...

I just finished a two-hour email to Aengus... Gahd he's cool. A little nuts, but aren't we all? Every time I'm pretty sure I understand where he's coming from, what he's been through, where he is in life, he throws me some poetic sentence full of magic that I ponder for days... Hitting the delete button on an email from Aengus is like spitting on holy ground - you may not understand it, you may wonder what in the hell people worship there for, but you know there's something - something amazing in those words, something passionate and real... Something that can't really be held in an email or a computer.

I had this dream one night about a year ago, when Aengus and I were first getting to know each other... No, it's been more than a year now... I dreamed of the two of us standing in my backyard under the full moon. It was raining ever so softly, and clouds rolled breezily across the sky. I dreamed that Aengus was very tall and very warm and very comfortable. I couldn't see his face, but he stood beside me, radiating the personality I see glimmers of in his emails... And I dreamed that I REALLY wanted to kiss him...

My alarm clock went off and I woke up... "Kiss The Rain" was playing on the radio. It's kind of a cheesey song - not my idea of any major artistic value, although it is pretty. But now it is Aengus's song. He is going to Singapore soon -- for a whole month. Tonight, I think he said. I wish I could kiss him goodbye.


I think I'd like to talk about El Paso now...

(Okay, so my transitions SUCK! What are you going to do about it?)

So Mike pretty much didn't talk the entire way to El Paso. I ended up babbling most of the way there. He seemed nervous or pissed off or something - generally not happy about going home. I don't know why and I didn't want to ask. Gahd knows I didn't want to offend him. And who the hell knows how the male mind works when it's grinding away in the silence of a Toyota Camry hurtling through the desert? I didn't really know if I wanted to know.

Mike ignored everyone once we got to El Paso. Me, his family, everything but his new video game system, which is a Japanese import. I offered to take him out to lunch at his favorite place to eat: Chico's Tacos. During lunch, he talked about nothing but getting a Japanese dictionary to translate his new game. On the way back from lunch, he bought the dictionary and spent the rest of the weekend worshipping it like it was some religious text. He had his birthday party among all of his extended family members at his grandmother's house, but instead of introducing me, he sat down in front of the TV, hooked up the video game system, and proceeded to teach his cousins how to use the joystick.

It was a little awkward, to say the least. His grandparents spoke half English and half Spanish, which I caught about 1/27 of. I couldn't keep track of everybody, and it was a little disconcerting being the only one who didn't know the family traditions and all. Mike sure as hell didn't help much.

I felt pretty out of place the whole weekend. Just like last time, one particular song kept running through my head: "Creep" by Radiohead. "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo... What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here... I don't belong here..."


I'm beginning to wonder if I belong anywhere at all. It's not a great feeling - as a matter of fact, that's the only feeling - the only question in my mind - that's ever made me wonder whether or not life is worth living. So where do I belong? Santa Fe? Hell no! El Paso? Yeah - just dye my skin a little darker, teach me Spanish, and find me a nice loving family to stay with who doesn't actually mind a party-animal-ing sometimes-sleazy slightly-offensive bitch-from-hell like me invading their territory... Back in NYS? Hm...... You know, the more I think about it, I think the only place I belong COMPLETELY is here - here in my journal, in my thoughts, in my wrods, in my notebooks and my pen collection... In the dream-world of dialogue and characters and vocabulary and syntax.

When my world crumbles, when I'm alone on a bridge in my hometown, alone in a back room somewhere on the SUNY Cortland campus, crying my eyes out for no understandable reason, feeling like I have no home, nowhere to turn, nothing to live for, no one to love me, that's when a book appears in my thoughts. That's when the chatacters are born. That's the conception, the joining of utter despair with the instinct to survive through someone else's life. That is where "Fiction" (my first play) came from, and that is where my new play came from. And when it's done and I can show it to the world, they'll wonder where I've been all this time while I was writing... I don't know... I WAS the play - I was my words. I stopped being me. I killed me. I DIED. When I write, the only Me left is the one in the words, and those words live, those words renew, and those words bring me back home to myself, breathe life back into me, and give me a good hard emotional thrashing to get me feeling like myself again...

I want to go Home.

Love,
Helena*

"Hello, is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me... Is there anyone home? Come on now, I hear you're feeling down... Well I can ease your pain, get you on your feet again..." --"Comfortably Numb," by Pink Floyd.