It's weird when you live through a situation you shouldn't have. I'm 22, and I've lived through two accidents which have resulted in injuries to some pretty serious parts of my body. I couldn't think without my noggin' and couldn't type with out my spinal cord intact anywhere from the thoracic spine and up, so I guess I'm pretty lucky. Well, really lucky. I recently lost a friend to an accident frighteningly similar to my first one. I almost feel like I'm mocking him by saying my first, like I'm putting notches in my belt. Or, I'm in a bar conversation competing with strangers on who's tickled injury and death more.
"Dude, I broke my leg when my raft flipped over."
"Psh. I broke all my ribs AND punctured a lung when my motorcycle slid!"
"I had a massive head injury and broke my pelvis eight years ago when I was hit by a car."
"Oh yea!? Well..."
"I'm not done. Three months ago I broke my neck in one place and my back in two places."
The crowd goes silent.
I should be dead. I've been told time and time again how lucky I am, and how God has been watching over me. These things I don't doubt. However, that doesn't change how surreal it feels. One minute, I'm 14 years old, thinking about orange juice and crossing the street to get to the bus stop. The next, I'm in ICU in a head trauma unit, begging to be able to take a piss and to be taken off the hospital bed.
I have no memory of this. My mom told me later. I was on a lot of pain meds, which probably was a really good all things considered. I was in the hospital for nearly five weeks, and had the whole rigamarole of treatments: physical therapy for the fractured pelvis, occupational therapy for the head injury ("Can you look up this number in a phone book? GOOD! Can you dial it? GREAT! Now, can you ask the person if they have a CD of a band you like in stock? AWESOME!"), vitamin E rubdowns for the road rash, how-to lessons with crutches...
All I wanted was to go home. I was stick of the hospital bed. I was sick of the hospital food. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to see my friends. I had no real understanding of how serious my injuries were, or how lucky I was to be in the hospital and not the morgue. I was 14, I was untouchable. There's something very neanderthalish about teenage thinking--I am teen, I am indestructible. When I look back, I feel very ungrateful. Then again, I think that if I had a little bit of that innocence now, that idea that I could live forever, I wouldn't be so bent out of shape about what it means to be alive. More on that later.
So, eight years pass and I'm as good as can be. No withstanding problems from the injuries, except that I was exempt from all contact sports for PE in high school (YES!), and I had to get a CT scan every six months until the blood clot in my head dissipated. It took a few years, but it eventually said its farewells. I was free to do any sort of head-bonking activity I pleased, as long as it didn't involve cars, I figured I was okay.
Well, I didn't relish any head-bonking activities from 2001-2009, unless you count forgetting to close a kitchen cabinet and standing up into it. Or, having a box of Olive Garden To-Go! soup bowls fall on you in the supply basement. I graduated high school, went on to college, and did my college thing. I studied, I partied, I worked, I tried new things, I tried new people. It was a free for all in life choices, and I picked whatever sounded the most interesting. Throw a superhero party and go as Captain Communist? Why not?! Power hour of Arrogant Bastard with the roommates? I'm down. Fly to Portland and hook up with an internet friend? Sure. Dabble in the drug culture? Sounds like a plan. Fly to New York and explore the City alone? Absolutely. Forrest Gump said, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get." I thought, "Life is like a bag of Jellybeans. You never know what flavor you'll like unless you try it." So, I tried what I could, threw out what I didn't like, and savored the ones I loved.
There's something really gratifying about saying, "Fuck you" to convention and living on the fly. You're always in the moment. You always have a good story to tell your friends. There's never a dull time in your life. However, it lacks stability and longevity. After a long night of whateverthehellIdecidedtodo, I would lie in bed and think, "What's the point? Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? Why am I here?" The nightly Q&A usually rested on an inebriated mind, which led to some interesting answers to say the least. My innocence had left, the idea that I am indestructible, gone. I had no one real to turn to and nothing solid to put my feet on. Fear overwhelmed my life, mostly a fear of sickness and death. Which, now, I think is really ironic. I feared sickness and death, but had no idea what I was living for. Some (even a part of me, admittedly) argue that the moment is enough to live for. Yea, that's fine in whateverIdecidetodo land, but it leaves you lonely and scared at night. There's no rock when the tide changes. What do you hold onto when you're being swept away?
On September 14, 2009. I needed that rock. Something in the physical world to hold onto, to roll around my head while I was still here on solid, albeit wet and soggy, ground. A stamp I'd left somewhere. An impression on someone's mind, perhaps. If I died, I needed a friend who would be forever left uncomforted, a hand who would be left unheld, a heart that would be left broken. I wanted to be important enough to someone that they remembered me forever. In hindsight, it sounds selfish, but I think that's something everyone wants: to be remembered, lovingly, by those who mean the most to you.
...More later. I'm tired.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Domestic Vogue
We are delicate fainting women shrouded
in autumn silk, hiding long black
tentacles that pulverize
the eyes that are so enamored by
the cloth, falling like leaves-- swish,
swish, to the hard wood floor.
You're pulling wings off butterflies
for science and for fun; a sadistic
experiment to scrutinize the naked torsos
as they whither and die-- a pile
of golden yellow and speckled auburn
red, kicked into the corner.
in autumn silk, hiding long black
tentacles that pulverize
the eyes that are so enamored by
the cloth, falling like leaves-- swish,
swish, to the hard wood floor.
You're pulling wings off butterflies
for science and for fun; a sadistic
experiment to scrutinize the naked torsos
as they whither and die-- a pile
of golden yellow and speckled auburn
red, kicked into the corner.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Happy New Year
Raise your glasses brimmed
with the good wine from yesteryear
dark burnt-orange,
that tastes like fire.
It's burning the house down;
plaster spit spats, and the
paint melts and dribbles down the walls
like bile down a bulimic's chin,
puddling on the floor, a rainbow
of designer oil slick.
You retch and retch, throats smoldering,
engulfed in flames; but relishing
its age and class, toasting
Skies the limit! Never
look back! We'll remodel
again, this year.
with the good wine from yesteryear
dark burnt-orange,
that tastes like fire.
It's burning the house down;
plaster spit spats, and the
paint melts and dribbles down the walls
like bile down a bulimic's chin,
puddling on the floor, a rainbow
of designer oil slick.
You retch and retch, throats smoldering,
engulfed in flames; but relishing
its age and class, toasting
Skies the limit! Never
look back! We'll remodel
again, this year.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Merry Christmas
A Life- Sylvia Plath
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Portland
We're digging our names into the basement boards of historic hotels
with revolving doors and etched glass,
and linoleum chrysanthemums, perched on " can i help
you please?" front desks that
the receptionist has left empty and dry like an untreated open
sore,] while she shoos the women and men in too many coats
with too many outstretched hands,
chapped and swollen red like the apples of your cheeks after
crushing snow flakes with your arms and legs, you're
an animated mortar and pestle, smashing beautiful
angels into the backdrop of a gutter squatting winter wonderland.
The moonlight hangs heavily above
but the street lamps guide our way through this
city that brought us together so many times,
zig-zagging though stained sidewalks, pin-up style skirts, and
24-hour donut shops with the strongest, most god-awful coffee
that burnt my tongue, and you made me drink the cold, cold
water out of those water fountains that look like gaudy
18th century replica art, the kind my grandmother promises
to give me when she dies, and I promise you I will never
decorate with when we move into a seventies Victorian on 23rd
street with the teal paneling and too large bay windows that stare
into me like a crystal ball, whispering secrets into my candy-apple ears,
because it's so damn cold here.
But I wonder how the poppies smell and how the heat
waves dance atop the blue and foam slamming
into the golden coast, where iridescent midriffs ripple beneath
our very own celestial body that defines what we call ourselves
when we travel places that don't understand progressive
movements that force the world to think in a direction
it never understood before, while the midriffs desperately grasp
for different shades of brown, smoking neatly rolled mounds of
'tobacco', reading about The Inferno and what it means to be
a sinner, so they drip drop coins to the nickeled-and dimed who piss
behind the Hilton, legs splayed like spindly cartoon frogs,
their hands calloused from steel strings and wrought iron edges
of the boxcars we found when looking for another life.
with revolving doors and etched glass,
and linoleum chrysanthemums, perched on " can i help
you please?" front desks that
the receptionist has left empty and dry like an untreated open
sore,] while she shoos the women and men in too many coats
with too many outstretched hands,
chapped and swollen red like the apples of your cheeks after
crushing snow flakes with your arms and legs, you're
an animated mortar and pestle, smashing beautiful
angels into the backdrop of a gutter squatting winter wonderland.
The moonlight hangs heavily above
but the street lamps guide our way through this
city that brought us together so many times,
zig-zagging though stained sidewalks, pin-up style skirts, and
24-hour donut shops with the strongest, most god-awful coffee
that burnt my tongue, and you made me drink the cold, cold
water out of those water fountains that look like gaudy
18th century replica art, the kind my grandmother promises
to give me when she dies, and I promise you I will never
decorate with when we move into a seventies Victorian on 23rd
street with the teal paneling and too large bay windows that stare
into me like a crystal ball, whispering secrets into my candy-apple ears,
because it's so damn cold here.
But I wonder how the poppies smell and how the heat
waves dance atop the blue and foam slamming
into the golden coast, where iridescent midriffs ripple beneath
our very own celestial body that defines what we call ourselves
when we travel places that don't understand progressive
movements that force the world to think in a direction
it never understood before, while the midriffs desperately grasp
for different shades of brown, smoking neatly rolled mounds of
'tobacco', reading about The Inferno and what it means to be
a sinner, so they drip drop coins to the nickeled-and dimed who piss
behind the Hilton, legs splayed like spindly cartoon frogs,
their hands calloused from steel strings and wrought iron edges
of the boxcars we found when looking for another life.
Monday, December 15, 2008
The Untrustworthy Speaker by Louise Gluck
Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-
I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .
In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.
When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.
If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When I living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.
That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.
I don't see anything objectively.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-
I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .
In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.
When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.
If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When I living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.
That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Green is the new Black
We're forward thinking,
economists of a new millennium,
selling hymns and psalms on
polyester t-shirts, 2-for-1
specials with complimentary
plastic bags, stained
with smiley faced suns
and neon flowers hugging trees.
economists of a new millennium,
selling hymns and psalms on
polyester t-shirts, 2-for-1
specials with complimentary
plastic bags, stained
with smiley faced suns
and neon flowers hugging trees.