if i ventured in the slipstream

every day i see a rich man in a poor man's disguise
he's counting on the future while the past plays on his mind
once when he's had diamonds replaced in his eyes
he couldn't see so well, but ooh how they shined
'cause when they pull the shutters down and throw up in the dark
they'll find that all the dogs outside bite much worse than they bark

here we are living in paradise, living in luxury
oh, the thrill is here, but it won't last long
you better have your fun before it moves along
and you're already looking for another fool like me

well place your hand upon your heart and tell me you won't lie
are you holding out for guarantees before you go to die?
'cause meanwhile up in heaven they are waiting at the gate saying,
"we'd always knew you'd make it, didn't think you'd come this late"
and now it's much too dangerous to stop what you've begun
when everyone in paradise carries a gun

here we are living in paradise, living in luxury
oh, the thrill is here, but it won't last long
you better have your fun before it moves along
and you're already looking for another fool like me

looking down upon the earth you still can't understand
how i can't argue with the man whose got the money in his hand
you talk as if you had no choice, you took all you could grab
but it looks just like a hit, but it feels just like a slap
you don't have to worry and you don't have to try
just lay down your body, it's a lullaby

here we are living in paradise, living in luxury
oh, the thrill is here, but it won't last long
you better have your fun before it moves along
and you're already looking for another fool like me

I’m sitting around with a needle in my arm - well, not a needle, a tube - and thinking there’s something I should be doing.  Not in general.  Not with my life.  Something I should be doing right now.  Some errand I could be running, some important decision I could be making.  I’m already doing homework while being checked in to medical daycare for the next four hours; what more do I want from myself?  The answer of course is as much as I could possibly give.  I want myself to give and give and give, and I want nothing to hinder that generosity ever, not even a tube in my arm or the slight flicker of my eyelids as I sit for yet another hour under fluorescent lights with barely anything to eat.  What brought me here is not my fault and I don’t believe in God, but every once in a while, mostly at moments like this, I succumb to feelings of victimhood.  Clearly, the fact that I’m only twenty-four years old and I need to go for monthly intravenous drug treatments means that I’m being punished for a crime I did not commit.  Clearly, because what else could it mean?  The other options are too scary, so I tend to go the religious route, at least for a couple of minutes per month, which is the maximum amount of “Why me?” bullshit my brain can handle.  Still, here it is again.  And now that I’m actively acknowledging its presence, it’s gone. 

I know I’m not being punished.  I’m here because I have a chronic illness of unknown origin, and this is how we’re dealing with it (“we” in this case being myself and my gastroenterologist) -- monthly infusions of a drug called Remicaid, believed to block inflammation before it has the chance to cause any problems.  And so far, it appears to be working.  It is problematic to sit around for this long without much to do, though.  Especially when the setting is a hospital.  It breeds thoughts of life and death and God and God knows what else; it can’t help it.  For me, the very smell of a hospital sends me back to the night I looked into the mirror and saw myself as a skeleton staring back at me, moving as I moved, wondering why I hadn’t noticed when a large part of me slipped out the door.  It wasn’t just that.  It was the way the light hit my face.  It was foreign but familiar.  Even as I was living in that moment, it seemed like I had already been there, and I was simply remembering what had happened.  I wondered if I’d already died and this was what death was, a series of memories of what it had been like to be alive; in my case, what it had been like on the way to death, the moment when I first realized where I was headed, that I could die and would die and there was nothing I could do about it.  Except I wasn’t dead.  I kept thinking new thoughts, wondering if I still had anything left in me, and it was in that wondering that I realized that I did.  What was left of me was standing right here and would now head back to the hospital bed, get some rest, and in the morning, start searching for where things went wrong.  The smell of a hospital is always the same, a too-clean smell.  A smell of white walls, if white walls could have a specific smell. A smell of loss.  Of goodbyes and hellos.  Of latex and disinfectant and detergent and bland food.  My eyelids flicker. 

I have more reading to do.

I lost my love down by the water where you carried me that night I lay awake, afloat in my dreaming, in your singsong singalong snoring.  I could never look at you like that, so powerless, so lifelike as if to say you were.  You know.  But we both knew you weren’t, and your eyes were dark when open but asleep you were so white, almost sickly.  I knew that I couldn’t have you and didn’t know if I wanted you anyway, the way you smoked your sighs into the receiver.  I never answered when I sensed it was you and it always was.  Your voice over the phone was the voice of someone I once loved and never knew, far away, a voice of a man but you were not a man, you were an infant.  I loved you as such.  I hated you, too.  The way you fawned over me and adored me and thought I was so perfect, so perfectly imperfect.  The way you crawled to me in song but never in conversation.  You avoided anything worth saying and everything that did come out of your mouth was overly earnest and utterly forgettable: you spoke of bodies but never of water, of thrusting bodies but never of love, and I was sure you didn’t know that you weren’t.  Your eyes were dark when open but you were still asleep, snoring.  I turned over.  There was something I had wanted to say but I knew you could not answer.

He enters the café all alight with something too bright to keep your eyes on and scours the room for something unknown, some great mystery we never knew was there.  The stench of him overwhelmed the smells of freshly-brewed coffee and sugary pastries.  He entered your nose in a way that felt dirty, like his existence were there to violate you.  Even his hands were tarred black -- another mystery.  He threw down his skateboard, this boy of forty or forty-five years, and finally appeared to notice that he was in a business establishment.  His eyes met mine.  I've never been able to look into red eyes without mine blushing, too, and I felt like he'd think I was afraid of him.  I was more afraid of this than afraid of him, so I stood up a little straighter, spoke louder than I meant to.

"Hey, what can I get for you?" I shouted politely.

He looked accosted.  I went too far.

"Uh, you got Pepsi?"

"No, sorry," I said, staring straight back at him and trying to ignore the tiny bloodstains on his grungy yellowed shirt.  "We don't sell soda."

"Oh," he said.  Just Oh.  But he didn't leave.  He stood leaning against the counter, not looking at me or anything else, as if searching for an answer.  As if his standing there with purpose would surely yield a Pepsi.  Not knowing where to look or how to breathe, I left him there.  I cleaned things that didn't need cleaning, made back-ups of well-stocked drinks, and tried like hell not to cry.  I didn't know at the time why this man affected me so, but I cleaned inside the refrigerators and underneath the ice machine until, finally, another customer came in.  A regular.  At this moment, I guess he figured our business was done, and without a word he grabbed his skateboard and left.  He also left this cloud by the register, and Steve the Roofer walked right into it.  It was palpable, this strange intensity in the air, even then.  Me with my red eyes, my quickened heart, everything too clean and that unusual lingering odor.

"Are you alright?" Steve asked.

"Yeah," I said hesitantly.  "I am now."  And I poured his coffee without another word.

your plague echoes
the hymns of mysteries long forgotten
not-mysteries, certainties of body
unified with spirit
girl flower weeping singing
lost to you are the words on his tongue
the endless night is not endless
the lonely morning is unspoken
a throw of blankets, thick with sweat
a tone repeating through hastened heartbeats
and breaths steady as death
ape arms and glassy eyes
solutions housed in mason jars
a throw of blankets, a jolt of air
the lonely morning is unbroken
lost to you are the worlds on your tongue
wrapped heavy heavy in the gloom of day
peering in your undersized window
at your oversized bed
your legs a mess, your sleeping cat rest-
full and thick with love deep as the low hum of a lover
in the palpable fog of dawn
leaving kisses on your head when you're overbreathing
and yearning without yearning
for guidance to somewhere hearts beat 70x per minute
and waking feels like waking
even when alone

keep it together keep it together keep it together

rebuilding oneself is tricky business. i should consider myself lucky, having avoiding most symptoms of my illness for just over four years, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. i lie in bed unable to sleep, to breathe, to find peace of mind. my weight is slipping faster than i can maintain it. it's just... i know i should expect this to some degree. i mean, i know what the problem is. it's an illness, it's chronic, it will come back, and yet. i just wasn't prepared. i am barely keeping up with my work, but the key word here is barely. i haven't missed an assignment, and i've only missed each of my classes once. i was almost admitted into the hospital this weekend, but my doctor decided that my treatments could be given to me intravenously on an outpatient basis. all that madness begins thursday. the new medication is supposed to have less severe side-effects, so i'm trying to keep my hopes up.

i just feel so lethargic, so lost in time, so foreign to myself, it's hard to remember that i have anything to lose.

i walked down to the water. i don't know why. it carried me there, the slow breeze in the sky, the pounding in my throat. i couldn't keep count of the beats but i knew there were too many. the water was still, almost too still. time was moving, everywhere people were moving, but i had stopped. it was on my honor. time hadn't stopped. a restlessness woke me, a feeling that something was supposed to happen. photographs in the water of a girl lying on a wooden floor, of a girl leaning against a dimly lit wall in an old white house, that old white house. an eruption. the still water. a girl drops down in front of me to read and suddenly i remember. the bag on my shoulders weighs me down and i remember. i need to get inside. my steps are too swift and inaccurate. i barely make it to the building before it hazes over. i stop and close my eyes. the pounding doesn't slow. i open my eyes and it's still there. i have opened my eyes but cannot shift my attention. i don't know what to focus on anymore now that i've lost myself.

i don't even know how to update anymore. i am a terrible livejournalist. it's true. i never thought this would happen, but it officially has. here are some things, again, in list form:


x. tomorrow is my twenty-fourth birthday. coincidentally, it is also my first day of classes at mount holyoke. as mount holyoke has decided to designate tomorrow as a wednesday, my schedule is slightly intimidating. three classes. one of them happens to be three hours long.

x. at six, my long lost mother is taking jared and i out to dinner for my birthday. we are probably going to big mamou's in springfield, but if the city is wreaked with madness due to michael jordan's arrival (for those who don't know: basketball was invented in my hometown, where i currently live, and the basketball hall of fame is located downtown. michael jordan is being inducted tomorrow, marking one of the biggest events to occur in springfield in quite some time), we just might have to dine elsewhere.

x. even though my only experiences with mount holyoke thus far center around rushed orientation events, i actually feel comfortable there, which is saying a lot considering how strongly i hate formalities and shmoozing with strangers, regardless of how pretty some of them may be.

x. i read franny and zooey after avoiding it for years, and i loved it so much, i almost feel silly. why didn't i read this earlier? it felt like a wes anderson film.

x. jared got a full-time temp-to-hire job assembling stuff at a place in chicopee that makes medical equipment. it's hard to fathom that he'll be getting paid soon after having been out of work for over a year. it's so relieving.

x. that being said, we will obviously be seeing a lot less of each other, as our schedules are fuller and not entirely cooperative. he's been having to go to bed at around 10pm to wake up in time to ride his bike to work for 6:30, and i've been going to bed around midnight since i should be waking up around 8am for school. sigh. not to mention the fact that i'm also working three shifts a week, meaning that on mondays and fridays we only have a whopping three and a half hours of awake-time together, much of which will likely be spent cooking, eating, and doing homework. oh well. enough whining for now. i have some sleep to get.

my grandma's in the hospital again. this time, it was a severe shortage of blood. the doctors haven't figured out why yet, but the important thing is that she's currently getting a transfusion, and they will do all sorts of tests until they figure out why her body isn't producing enough red blood cells. it's so scary now. it used to be that, if she were sick, she was just sick. but now, i don't know. she's eighty-two years old; she has worsening respiratory problems; she doesn't get around as well as she used to. it's starting to feel, for the first time since she was a heavy drinker, like i'm really going to lose her. and i'm not ready to lose the woman who raised me.

because i don't feel like organizing my thoughts.


x. megan and jason's wedding was beautiful. we were super busy in the morning, but it was a positive busy. there was a happy energy in the air, and though we were running a bit late, everything came together perfectly (or nearly so). after the ceremony, megan's dad thanked me for writing a personalized (for megan and jason) poem for the occasion, saying that the ceremony wouldn't have been what it was without it, which was really sweet and unexpected.

x. last week, we visited caroline at her new apartment in somerville. i'd never been to somerville before, and i actually liked it a lot. it had both a small-town and urban feel, and her apartment was super nice. we took the way too clean subway to harvard square and did lots of walking around and catching up. hopefully, i'll be able to go back sometime soonish -- maybe on a weekend during school.

x. monday, after work, we're visiting julie at her new apartment in worcester, which is right near clark campus. i really miss julie because we've only seen her a few times this summer, since she was in europe for nearly two months, and school is starting up again soon. luckily, we will have some quality sleepover time this upcoming week. it's been way too long.

x. my aunt jean's wedding is the day after my birthday, which, coincidentally, is the day after my first full day of classes at mount holyoke (which, coincidentally, also happens to be my twenty-fourth birthday). it'll be a hectic week, to say the least. orientation from sunday to wednesday (plus, working a shift at the café on tuesday), work thursday, classes from 10 to 4 on friday, wedding on saturday, and work on sunday. craziness. and i'll have to find time to do my homework somewhere in there. i'm a tad stressed out, but at least it's all good stuff... just sort of tightly scheduled. but anyway, jean's wedding coming up means that i will be seeing my mother next month. she'll be staying with her brother chris in southampton. while she's here, we're going to go to the wedding together; she's going to visit the manhan (that'll be a hoot); and she's going to take jared and i out to dinner for my late-birthday.

x. um, i'm starting at my dream school soon. dudes, this is getting strange.