Resolutions

My resolutions for the new year are fewer than usual, but also of higher quality.

I have three.

•  Write one poem a day.  I figure this will get me thinking more poetically more frequently, and that if I have 365 poems, at least a few have to be good.
• Fix my skin.  I have mild acne, but it looks a lot worse because I have a tendency to pick at my face in vain efforts to get rid of zits and blackheads.  I know this does not work and in fact worsens the situation.  I have know this for years and have never been able to stop.  I’m convinced I have OCD in this area, because I know I’m making my face look like a mine-field, I’m creating permanent scars, and I yet can’t stop.  My goal is to stop picking, cold turkey.  I was going to buy some $$ Proactiv, but decided instead to treat the problem, not the symptom, and so am going on a two week pore-clearing diet and avoiding dairy and sugar hence forth.  I’m excited about this one, I think I can do it.
• Run every day.  I know this sounds a bit crazy, but it really is doable.  It’s all about prioritizing.  To count it, a run must be at least one mile.  This means either getting up earlier or doing it before bed, but I will do it.  I won’t be too hard on myself, though, if I miss a day for being sick or something.

Then there are the usual goals: lose 15 lbs, finish my thesis, maybe finally get a 4.0 (not likely), but these are things I need to do anyway, so they don’t really count.

Hooray for New Years!  I love fresh starts.

Fits of Sanity

Sometimes it all seems so clear. I understand what is going on, and what I need to do.

Now is, in fact, one of those rare and precious moments.

I see that I need to live my own life. I see that I am whole on my own. I see that I cannot completely understand other people, and that the only thing I can do to not be miserable is accept these things and live each day as it is and not wish it were either fundamentally different or a day in the past. And live it to the best – which, today, means a run in the rain, a hot shower, tea, Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which I am thoroughly enjoying because, as my mother pointed out, “it has lots of pictures” – but for other reasons, also! and coffee with an old friend.

We Did All We Could Do

I told my former boyfriend that I wasn’t okay after all and that he needed to explain everything to me, to help me understand. I wrote, “I need to wake up from this nightmare,” and this poem was born. He’s in med-school, in case you’re wondering about the numerous medical references. He met the Other Girl there. She’s Hindu you see, as per references to Hinduism. Not that I analyse my own poetry or anything…

Cut open my own sternum to show you my doubts.
You turned off and turned away, are you feeling feint?
Blindly took another, you “weren’t looking.”
(Can’t you look? Feeling feint?).
I toss and turn in restless, waking bouts
of perception. (Shows signs of normalcy
with interludes of spastic tendencies.)
When I think: I’m waking up, nirvana must be near!
I see you, hear your voice, and cringe in fear.
I can read the numbers on the digital clock;
I can pinch my arms and not wake up;
I don’t recall that sudden jolt of sleep;
but in the ‘mare of samsara I keep
trodding through this microcosmic hell,
misunderstanding all the shit you say,
not in your vision long enough to tell
the truth, the Truth.

You, who brought my soul to life with deft prowess,
stifles my hope, my love –
smothers my love, my soul –
my hyperventilating lungs collapse
in a heap of despair.
The trauma seems too much to bear.
“Just leave me here,” (I tell your turned back)
to sutcher my own flesh, to stitch my heart
To sleep with maggots
in the colden dark.

Readership, T-minus 10, 9, 8…

No one reads my little blog, and this saddens me. What is the point of writing it if no one reads it? I don’t need it to write, I write in MS Word and in beaucoup de notebooks. Sometimes I post something here I wrote somewhere else, but mostly I want to write for people to read. I want to enter into some kind of blogging dialogue…

I think the problem is that I don’t have a target audience. I suppose my audience could be other college students and young adults like myself, but I don’t know any who keep interesting blogs. I haven’t found them yet anyway.

Also I don’t have a theme, really. I don’t do anything, so I can’t write about what I do. I’m not funny or clever or particularly creative… I’m just sort of, here.

I don’t really have any proposed solution for this problem… I’m just stating that it exists. If anyone who so very greatly against the odds stumbles upon this has any words of advice, pray do tell.

Rocky Raccoon’s Pre-departure Vignette

This morning I awoke still drunk from the night before.  7.30 am.  I stumbled to my water bottle then back to bed for a few spinning minutes.  I got up; showered; spent hours burning CDs to listen to in the car for my pending drive to Bedlam to meet Jack.  Because of the CD burning I arrived an hour late – and the CDs wouldn’t even play in the fucking car CD player.  Fucking iTunes.  I gave them to Jack – the two I made for him and all the others. 

We walked around the mall, content and happy.  We had lunch and I held his arm as he held my umbrella over us.  We went to Barnes and Noble to sit and talk.  He took a book on string theory from the place he’d left it earlier in the day, when I was an hour late, two science mags and a news mag with Barack and Hillary on the cover asking, “Is America Ready?”  Ready for what? we asked.  For a black president?  A female president, or, as we both think the real issue is, a Democrat who might actually get things done?  Stupid media and their stupid fucking agenda.  Stop trying to confuse America about what the real issues are.  It isn’t sex.  It isn’t race.  Race doesn’t even fucking exist; Italians used to be Colored not so long ago. 

I say, “So, what’s on your mind?” with sarcastic but empty nonchalance. 

“Come on, Rock,” he says, tilting his head sympathetically, “you’ve gotta give me more than that.”  I look down at the magazine and watch three tears dot the table around it.  I think of myself looking like a cartoon when cartoons cry.  The tears fall with the same incredible, inhuman ease. 

I can’t remember what I said next.  I asked something to the effect of, “Is this it?  Are we over?  Are we really over?”  I had planned that question on the drive over. 

“Rocky, I’m dating Mina.”  I think about asking for a definition of “dating.” 

“Why.” 

“…I care about her.” 

“Why.” 

“Rock, I can’t…” 

I look at the table.  I look out the window.  That the weather matches my crying isn’t as stupidly soothing as it usually is.  I look at Jack keeping his composure as mine quickly crumbles  Why. Why. “Why?” I finally ask in earnest.

“It isn’t… I can’t… I don’t know…I want to tell you the truth, but want you to be happy.”  I worry that the truth is that he doesn’t care anymore.  That would make me most unhappy.

“Just tell me the truth.  Do you even care about me at all anymore?” 

“Yes.  Yes, Rock.  We spent two years together.”  Poor excuse, I think.  Time doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore.   Not a goddamn thing.  

“Let’s go.  Let’s go to a car.  We’re making a scene.” 

“I don’t think any one’s watching us,” he whispers, implying that I must be so vain to think they are.  I gather my coat, my purse, my umbrella, my scarf that I crocheted last year after giving up on learning how to knit and exit with embarrassment.  His car, my car.  I think, maybe he doesn’t want to go to his car.  Maybe her shit’s in there and I don’t want to see it.  I don’t.  I picture the floor littered with used condoms and wrappers and frilly lingerie that I could never wear.  “Yours is closer,” he says. 

I turn it on but not the engine because I’m running on empty.  Cold air blows out from the vents and the windows fog forming a comforting cocoon.  I slide my seat back and coolly explain how much I hate crying in public.  He begins to cry.

He can’t.  He’s dating Mina, he says, rubbing my hand.  I point to the center of my chest with both hands and barely make out, “I’m first.  I was first,” you’re cheating on me, not her.  We cry.  Like time, dating means nothing to me.  Leave her; it isn’t that difficult.  It doesn’t matter.  You were dating me, and look what good that did.  He rubs my hair and I realize how much I’d missed his touch.  I cry.  “What the fuck, Jack.” I cry.  I burrow my head into him and he holds me, crying.  I touch his face.  I can’t tell if he’s mine.  I’m so confused.  I feel like I shouldn’t be touching him, but that can’t be right. 

“What do you want me to do, Rock?” Be with me.  That’s what I want you to do.  

“You can’t do anything.”

“What would be easiest for you?”

If you came back.  “Nothing is easy.”

I wonder if he’s going to kiss me, but he doesn’t.  I don’t understand why not.  I hate it.  I hate it all so much.  It’s all so unfair.  How couldn’t anything be better than this?  I don’t understand.  I think, selfishly, “How could anyone be better than me?”

He cites over and over how hard the months leading up to my leaving for London were as his defense.  “I’m sorry,” and I am.  But I still loved you. 

“You said… that… you might want to date other people!”

“But I didn’t,” I reply.  It’s no use.  I didn’t date other people.  I didn’t want to date other people.  “I… how did you find someone else?” How could you?

“I didn’t try, Rock.  I wasn’t looking.  It was a long time … I wasn’t happy those months.  I know I closed up and that’s my fault, I know.  But I wasn’t happy.  You asked me before if I was happy now, and I said I am.”The meaning of life is not happiness, simple happiness like “I wasn’t happy for six months.”  Life is suffering and six months is nothing.  I’m not one for Buddhism generally but I agree with them on that point whole-heartedly.  Life isn’t happy.  It isn’t pretty.  I must be on the right path, I joke, but I know that isn’t true either.

But, how can he be happy without me?  How?  How?  How?  I’m dying inside. 

His mother calls.  Twice.  “I have to go,” he says. 

“Stay,” I cry.  I just want to just forget that girl. 

He said, “Remember that day we walked in the park and we decided to just best friends and to just see how things went?”

“Yes,” I say, but I’m not sure which walk in the park he’s talking about and I think first of the one last summer where I drank a cheap vodka and grapefruit juice concoction out of a Fiji water bottle and we talked about God in the rose garden and I was surprised at how faithful he really was, for an agnostic, and that he could still surprise me sometimes.

“That’s how I want things to be again.”  I think: I still loved you then.  And yes, it was nice.  I could go back to that.

“Yeah, but that was without her being in the way,” I say carelessly, recklessly.  I don’t think he gets it.  I still loved you.  I think, there isn’t any room for anyone else, but I also think, you can kiss me and we can pretend everything is back to normal and you don’t have to tell Mina.  I won’t tell her.

It isn’t until much later that I realize that he was saying that just wants to be friends.  Obviously, Rocky.

“Goodbye, Rock,” he says, suddenly opening the door and shutting it behind him before I can respond or even look at him.  I watch the hand print he left on the window slowly fill to match the rain drop-covered glass around it. 

I cry out.  I scream.  I whimper.  I talk to myself.  I go insane.  I don’t care if anyone can hear me.  I look outside for him but I can’t see anything through the fogged windows and the rain. 

“Come back… come back… come back.” 

He doesn’t come.

I nearly die trying to merge into the crush of last minute Christmas shoppers.  On the road I begin to imagine that the whole world is a highway.  We are all alone in our little cars on a dark and rainy highway.  Between my swollen eyes and the rain the whole world glistens and I remind myself over and over that I have to stay in my lane, that the whole world isn’t an infinite plane of pavement.  Dreaming that I’m in a world consisting only of cars on a dark, rainy highway makes the drive home possible, if still not bearable. 

 

Now I think, what if I had ran out after him and grabbed his arm and squeezed him tight right there in the fucking parking lot and kissed him over and over and over – those addicting kisses I miss so much?  I think, it could have been so romantic, kissing in the rain.  I guess I’m glad I didn’t – he would have been mad at me.  I don’t know why.  He is mine, after all.  Is, was.  Maybe he wouldn’t have been mad.  Maybe I could have saved us.