july/bus stop blues

the only thing in life that i can count on is that bus number 57 will be late. standing on the sidewalk, cars slow to honk as i stare at the clouds and the highway through the line of trees just past the salvation army. for a time i would respond with my middle finger but it lost its power for me, so i just keep staring forward, shifting my weight from foot to foot in the a narrow strip of shade cast by a telephone pole that i have claimed as My Spot. there was once a lot of people on this route, but the call centers it served cut their costs by sending their employees to work from home, so there is no urgency in only collecting the few stragglers left on the road. one day the bus was so late that a spider attached a web to me and i let him, because who am i to stop nature? they say that things will be better when the light rail is finished, but until then, i'll be in my shadow waiting for the bus that never comes.

i was sitting on a draft of this for awhile and forgot about it until Weird Empire requested stories about the bus stops in charlotte.  i'll be back again later with another august post i guess.

july

june/if you dig deep enough, you'll always hit sand

in summer the heat rises off the street to choke me in waves of melting tar and gardenia to make sure i never forget florida.

one year we returned from vacation to find our pool full of frog's eggs. we collected them with our cupped hands and put them in a trash can filled with water but when they all began to sprout legs, they all died en masse. it was beautiful in a way; an amphibious suicide pact that we weren't in on. we dumped the water and their bodies in the grass by the hibiscus bushes at the fence's corner and i have never stopped feeling their presence with me.

my neighbor's brother heard that lizards could grow their tails back, so he cut off their iguana's with a pair of kitchen scissors. it died. pets were always dying in their house; the disposable hamsters would find their way into pool filters again and again, all chlorine bloat and matted fur, as if they knew if they had tails, they would go the same way as iggy. 

when our friend moved to a new development, his house was the first one on what was mostly orange groves. we'd climb the barbed fence and run through the sand and trees collecting shotgun shells. there was a burned through car that was tangled with vines in front of a shack that none of us dared to go past. it was unspoken that we would trespass, but not that much. one day, we heard a shot ring out in the grove and we didn't come back.

the day we left florida, we piled in my mom's white cadillac and headed north. with my face pressed against the glass i thought "i can be anyone now," but it wasn't true. i would always be the snakes that got in the laundry room, the sand under the topsoil, the school hurricane drill, and the section of walmart that is dedicated to disney merchandise. i can't forget that.

june

may

i don't have much to say this month. i've been having a hard time for no real reason. everything is going great. i love my apartment and decorating it and living with my bf again, i love my friends and have been leaving the house a lot more but i can't shake the feeling that something bad is waiting for me. i've started to have awful nightmares again and despite all of my sleeping aids, i wake up over and over and over again, confused and panicked. my hair is turning gray rapidly so i rip them out at the root but they grow back as wiry witch hairs in defiance of me and i rip those out too but they grow back twofold to remind me that maybe the waiting for something bad to happen is the bad thing that's happening and it's happening now.

may

april

i will be 30 next week. i never thought i would make it here, but here i am, alive. more importantly, it is the 10 year anniversary of when i dropped out of college; a move i count as the first choice i ever made for self-preservation. 87, 07, 17: three 7s for luck. i feel strong with the spring wind whipping around me and my 7s crowning my head in a ring of fire.

april

march

i grew up extremely sheltered. i never had friends outside of school and never left my house unless it was to go to school or church or work. i was allowed small amounts of tv here and there and access to the internet when school projects called for it but in large, i learned everything from magazines and books. alienated from any sort of cultural touchstones from modern media and deeply lonely, i began to create mythologies that tangled through my mind and manifested in my writing and art. i would run wild in the woods, dragging old pieces of a wooden bed frame to bridge the creek so i could go further and  plant my journals in the ground where no one would find them. they were spells to protect me. spells to move me forward. spells to get me out.

i was 18 years old when my friend handed me a copy of we have always lived in the castle. "you'll really like this; the main character is exactly like you," he said. and he was right; 12 years later, i have never related more to someone than to merricat. her isolation, her burdensome secrecy, her self made lore-it was all in me and always has been no matter how many journals i have buried.

march

blackwood

february

corin is 6'2" with glasses and gapped teeth and an unlined face. when corin walks, his windbreaker swishes in time like a metronome to warn me he is approaching. corin is a slam poet and a conspiracy theorist and rode the same bus as me until he got fired from his blood bank call center job for telling someone to "eat shit." by some fortune, corin is very in love with me.

it’s easy enough for men fall in love when they think that the reason you are in their train car or bus is fatalistic and they immediately take possession. the same instinct drives them to take pictures of roadkilled possums and birds that have been dislodged from nests: “this existed. i saw it. it was mine and only mine even if just for a minute.”

i don't want to be the roadkill in corin's love story, but i think i'm already laying in the street.

february

best friends forever

the world is truly horrifying and this may be horrifying for some of you (tw: spiders and frogs) but one of the things that is truly uplifting to me is symbiotic relationships between animals (used loosely here):

"In Peru, India, Sri Lanka and perhaps elsewhere [microhylid frogs] have developed close relationships with large spiders. It has been suggested that the spider – well capable of killing and eating a frog of this size – used chemical cues to recognise the frogs. Young spiders have sometimes been observed to grab the frogs, examine them with their mouthparts, and then release them unharmed. Microhylids are probably unpalatable due to their skin toxins, and this might explain how this association arose in the first place
The frog seemed to benefit from living in proximity to the spider by eating the small invertebrates that were attracted to prey remains left by the spider. The frog presumably also benefits by receiving protection: small frogs like this are preyed on by snakes and large arthropods, yet this frog is protected by a formidable spider bodyguard who might gain benefit from the presence of the frog: microhylids specialise on eating ants, and ants are one of the major predators of spider eggs. By eating ants, the microhylids might help protect the spider’s eggs."

It has been observed that this particular frog and spider exist in situations completely independent of each other; they both can benefit from their relationship, but neither are dependent on it to survive. It seems that they consciously make the decision to join up in this mutually profitable pairing and that weird friendship makes things seem a little less horrifying.

source

well here it is

everyone in the office is sick. my soundscape is my boss puking into the garbage can and my office-mate blowing her nose every other second. i know this means i will get sick because i can't stop touching my eyeballs. old habits die hard i guess and that's why i'm BACK blogging again after...five years?

here's a recap of the last five years:

• i am still alive 

that's all i've got. i'll be back again but for now, i will leave you with my monthly playlist which is the #9 joy in my life: january