by carolyn m
It was an ugly morning, but every Utah morning is an ugly morning. In the past week we had driven for miles. Escaped. Documented every fraction of light we found worthy with photos lost in later months to dust and excitement. I had cried in motel rooms and kissed pretty Idaho boys with names like E-- G----. I looked out the window and felt old and smart and pensive. I wrote stories on my shoes about hang-gliders and wished that I was thirteen going on sixteen, not thirteen going on fourteen. As he drove he held mum’s hand. I thought I understood it all so well.
That morning my sweater matched my bag and I cringed. There was an ongoing commentary between mum and dad about lakes so acidic your skin burns from its mist. I’m drowning. However all I want is to continue reading my book on Norwegian crack-whores. All I want is to see cityscapes and traffic. All I wanted was for some anonymous person, to think I was beautiful. Boarding the plane I have no razor blades.
It’s Saturday morning in row twenty-four American Airlines flight 236. It’s Saturday morning in Bay Ridge, where a boy named W-- plays the guitar, cell phone on the counter. Mother sings and it kills him. It’s Saturday morning, and three time zones later we’ll shake hands and breathe in to spit out later feelings like nervous and love and anticipation. I’ll fall asleep at one-forty to epilogue tones. The next day would be Sunday; waking up to afternoon and throwing on Chinese slippers (painting rhythms on Brooklyn sidewalks as I run) to drink in coffee breaks with tired eyed boys and take photographs of the Brooklyn bridge which would later win cameras that take pictures of boys named A--- as they cry, and in mid December sketch out teenage drunken nightmares underground in Technicolor. But for now it was Saturday morning and I was still dead.
Airplane chairs are stiff and blue. Through the cracks his breath eats the air. When I sat down he waved and smiled. Places his head in a cavern of plush polyester, cradled, and sleeps fully. He looks like C--- P----, but I don’t know that yet.
Airplanes give you that false sense of security; that time stops when you’re not on the ground. Vacations to Wyoming do the same thing. Passing through the central states just to return home again to stifling stagnant air and perfect views that we don’t watch anyway. It’s sad how mundane New York summers are. I like the winters more. Constant movement, mock pine forests in concrete metropolises and people’s coats. Always people’s coats. The cold days I can walk out on to frozen streets and be anonymous. A drop in temperature had never seemed so drastic until that winter. Short skirts blowing and conversations pending until July, walking to the F train I give in a diffuse. I guess in the end he always wins.
W--- likes to speak a lot about the future and how much his past still hurts him. He likes to walk down crowded city streets and stand so close to you that the backs of your palms create friction and you just can’t help but hold his hand. He likes to smile and make pretty girls laugh. He likes to sit on hot concrete as he watches memories on the pavement and contemplates it all while I take colourless snapshots of him. It’s only the other side of him who ever gets bitter. As he puts it later ‘we had something magical’, but childhood and the teenage years are like all of the lies adults tell to keep sugar coated smiles; eventually you grow out of them and your skin can only stretch so far. I indirectly hurt him as much as he hurt me, so we just pretend like I never said ‘I love you’ or made that phone call to the wrong boy from a pay phone in Maine, one 11:30pm in the summer. Will writes me back e-mails I can’t decipher to this day; I don’t know what his hand writing looks like.
When you leave home, the people always become more intense. Every word that they speak seems to linger and resound once over again until nothing is blatant and an honest conversation becomes a treasure hunt. Can I find you out? If you don’t ‘get’ them from the first few thousand syllables, then you are better off just giving up because you’ll never meet them again and there are no chance meetings in the grocery store or the N train. I’ll never see M--- and his broken nose on the beach at Coney Island.
Not far into July and after his lips in Cyclone Stadium I left W--- and idle summers, as he was falling deeper into what I loved hated; panic. I tend to love beautiful people so much that they weather away and become so self assured that they crack and wrinkle from ugly sentences I formulate in hopes of bringing them upwards; from high pillars they all just fall.
Johns Hopkins is sterilely beautiful. Grass and marble and brick. Skies that turn to blue velvet after hours and we’d muse about it everyday. I thought I’d hate it really, and actually my memories sometimes hold facial snapshots hostage and then I do hate it; it’s like every September. The room that they gave me is small and bare. Two desks, two windows, two chairs; it’s like Noah’s dorm room. I cover bare walls with faces of those I love. Every night we’d grab diet sodas (so as to dissipate quicker) and fled to basement labyrinths, which eternally smelled of laundry, to type half a conversation spread over a life time of friends. It always rains at night, so when I leave messages on his machine my hair is always damp. He writes back in Times New Roman, e-mails about blankets that leave your feet cold, signed B---. Edison New Jersey is constantly on fire.
When I fall asleep at night it’s always the same. I liked to sit on the windowsill to watch the puddles shake from new storms. Night after night I’d watch them escape from closed doors and dance in the grass. It was good to know that kids over twenty could live out the lives that they wanted. It gave me so much hope. S-- - S--, who slept in the other bed, liked to keep the temperature low and I always closed my eyes to the sound of his guitar rifts. It was the same dream and it still is. For the rest of my life, I will eternally be engulfed by anonymous strangers. Once I wrote the entire scenario down on a fast food napkin, but the whole scene made no sense. It just left me unfulfilled and scared. I guess every night is the same allegory; I’ll have to change my life for a new nightmare.
Everyone keeps on asking what exactly it is that I am expecting, as if they have something more planned for me. I am not sure exactly what it is that I am expecting, but it most certainly wasn’t to find him standing where the luggage cases and desk lamps had been a week prior. I’m not expecting for his handshake to leave the imprint of his life in my small palms. It was a simple question I asked him, I wasn’t asking for much more then to prove to pretty Chinese girls that connection is in fact easily made (after spending night, after night teaching them bad words and telling them mundane and yet seemingly fantastic stories of my prior infatuations).
“Hi. My name’s. C--. P----. I’m really sorry. I. Forgot your name. I’m really sorry,” slowly in courtyard lamplight painted moon tones. He wasn’t supposed to wait for me outside of my dorm, but he did.
“Hey, I’m Carolyn. C--?” Tentative, always tentative. I’m soft that night and I want to leech out his secrets.
“Yeah, C--. It was nice meeting you. We should, hangout. Sometime. I’ll. Talk to you soon? Have a, goodnight,” he has dimples when he smiles. Expressions impact him.
“G’night C--,” I mirror his tones, submissive nature sets upon me in shifts. I breathe in night and sigh.
I think that I was conscious of my hypocritical nature from the first few times we devoted our hours to watching the shadows. He was always leaning in and telling me things, and I loved more then anything to digest his words and formulate them back to him in line after line of one word poetry. A field in Massachusetts tends to remind me of a boy I killed. We were inseparable. I clung to his subtle character and soft movements, amplified further only by the words ‘I think, I know that I am in love with you’. He was the type of boy who you know is dying quicker then everyone else around them. He was the type of boy who was deteriorating. His pens seeped blood. Apparently I saved him for a period of two weeks. Just wait until the night I tell him all of the things I thought that he knew.
There are a lot of things about me that I usually prefer not to tell people about. I am ugly. Hideous, as far as I am concerned. My body is a highway map; lines as bright as summer strawberries leading reflected eyes across my hips and chest and legs and wrists. Interlacing lines interconnecting July 14th to August 25th to 26th, day after day of blood to prove I’m not worthy. It’s all selfish really. I have a notion that I make a difference in people’s lives, mean while twenty years from now I will just be another scrap book memory breeding closet lint. It’s like the movie with the beautiful actress and nice cinematography; you tend to skim the surface so as not to be sucked into the true meaning of it all. I don’t understand infatuation or possession. I don’t know why people love me or why Josh Correa calls me beautiful. I’m just a girl who sometimes makes people cry.
One week into August I collapse. There is pressure compacting me, pushing me; seeing how much I can handle. I can’t handle anything. It’s one week into August and I’m in Maine. C-- watches the light from windows where old ladies sleep through all of the day’s hours. He tells his mother he loves a girl and walks barefoot in corn fields. B--- writes me a song and calls me ‘lover’, adding in lines about blankets I’ve never seen. It’s one week into August and Dave climbs steps to the second floor of the log cabin we’re all sleeping in for the night. It’s the first day of our month long backpacking trip and I’m digging with all my might flowing ravines into the thighs Ernie had loved to hold. There’s something wrong with my pigmentation so scars stay longer then they should, especially in winter when I am pale. I suppose it’s my form of punishment. Two weeks later I bleed daily once they’ve forgotten to watch. I tell a beautiful girl and she cries in the back of a dank van. She holds my wrists with two hands as we sleep. It does no good. I run miles in the dark to hear C---’s voice. When my tones leave the wrong indentations he writes me letters stating that he can’t handle another person’s pain.
On the car ride home I read sad poetry to my parent’s backs. We stop in a trucker gas station and they let me walk barefoot. I cover scars with band aids and excuses I never thought they would buy. I want to talk for hours, until they stop loving me and slap me. I want to be abused until I’m warm. That’s never going to happen. Mother makes comments on the phone calls I’ve missed and the night New York City went dark. I lie and say that I feel so alive. It takes C---’s last words to finally cause deterioration; under it all, he was a hypocrite like me. Under it all; I bleed red like him.
On August 25th it takes the N train forty minutes to get to 57th street. It’s warm and the prior night I cut one long vertical line, waiting by the train station I lean against a lamp post for support. Heat from the pavement sinks through the soles of my feet. I don’t notice B--- when he hugs me, but I fall into his embrace anyway. He takes me around his childhood; through the park, to the dock, past the ocean breezes and between writhing traffic. He weaves for me stories about girls with big hips and straight hair. He holds my hand as we walk. He doesn’t ask for anything from me. I tell him about C--- as we watch a woman on her lunch break. He brings me back to his apartment and to his bed. An open window breeches humidity and our imprints look like handwriting to a later memory. He takes my hand and I collapse into him; I sleep fully and we don’t kiss.
When I leave home in the morning I have a pack of Tylenol in my front zipper pocket. I running down the subway steps ten small pills leave echoes of melodies. Waiting for the two train I’m afraid that the world above me will collapse and I’ll suffocate in the debris of my home; but I can’t die. The lines, bands on my wrists, bracelets in mock fashion, are puffy with my excessive tearing. I can’t let go. I chose the wrong day for a new life, which gives me enough time to prevent it. If I take the W train all the way, I should end up in Coney Island. I give sand and sea a chance.
I finger the flip lidded bottle as I write poems about Idaho and B--- and C--- and shadows. I write poems about crying girls and boys who fall asleep on the steps of churches. I write poems about sunrises and smog, graffittied touches and a lack of presence. I write to tell him that I’m going to miss him once he’s gone. I write to document my life incase my plan follows through. Charley, a middle aged Puerto Rican man, sits next to me and hits me as he talks about my small handwriting and long legs. He hits me and with each point of contact I loose more and more faith in the fact that what I am dong is wrong. He leaves two stops before me and I regret the fact that I didn’t kiss him, so that maybe he would have raped me and left me in a ditch bleeding more then words and amphetamines. The subway track passes over Cyclone stadium and past the Bay Ridge towers where B--- sleeps alone. I dig and dig and dig but it does no use. I’m falling and running; sitting still on plastic orange subway chairs I’ve never moved quite so much before.
It takes me a long time to find exactly the spot. Coney Island beach stretches far past Danny’s Wonder Wheel and the cotton candy dreams. Coney Island holds more secrets then the freak show and leaves more room for thought then just simply the murky public bath room mirrors. It’s the 26th of August and the day after I’m supposed to start high school. It’s the 26th of August and a beautiful boy loves me. It’s the 26th of August and I’m standing knee deep in Atlantic Ocean mist searching for a reason to say no. I can’t find it so I inhale chalky pills and lay back on the sand to watch a perfect sky melt under the wrong impression.
This season muted me so hard.
(c)carolyn m. 2003/04
[watching the shadows.]