Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
in the end I was the mean girl, or somebody's in between girl (now it's the devil I love)
Tired night, dull night, feeling heavy with the full moon coming up or you know, the other stuff I feel actually low about. I have been so unfamiliar to myself lately. While I know that in actuality, responding to disregard or let downs with resignation or apathy instead of confusion and devastation is probably a step in the right direction for me, the change unsettles me. The Star today, but I feel alone and tired, not charming or touched. I put a lot of my energy out. Maybe I have more to learn about what I give to other people, and what I think I need or deserve in return.
*
All I want is to go camping and for people to be nice to me, so maybe I'm not actually that obscure and remote, huh? I pretty much always want that.
*
Every morning lately, the first thing I do before I brush my teeth or look at my phone or get coffee or put on a bra is to go downstairs, and lie down on the couch next to Sven. He rolls over, very sleepy, and I rub his belly.
*
All I want is to go camping and for people to be nice to me, so maybe I'm not actually that obscure and remote, huh? I pretty much always want that.
*
Every morning lately, the first thing I do before I brush my teeth or look at my phone or get coffee or put on a bra is to go downstairs, and lie down on the couch next to Sven. He rolls over, very sleepy, and I rub his belly.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
My brother calls me because he is angry. He wants me to yell at our father.
I know why he has come to me. I know it the way you just know your sibling, even one you barely speak to. This person whose growing mirrored and entwined your own, who is the closest exact living being to you in genetics and upbringing, almost a twin, yet inverted: deliberately different on purpose, different by choice. I'd like to say he came to me because I am his bossy, mean big sister and I have always fixed things for him, or protected him, but that has never exactly been our relationship. I am not much of a fixer, as anyone who knows me can say, and he has never needed my sheltering.
He came to me because I have always been my father's special favorite, while he, the second born, has raged and fought and gone as different from that legacy as a person possibly could. He tends to the damage of our childhood like a bitter garden, while I am magnanimous, forgiving, looking for the relationship that wasn't possible when I was young. As always, I scrabble for whatever I can get. But my brother knows I can talk to my father, and my father may care, listen, or possibly be hurt by my condemnation, and in that way, I am a missile he can launch into him from afar.
As it happens, I have already yelled at my father. Instead, lost without a crusade, my brother and I talk. We don't talk much, even though I know he is still the boy that I snuck out at 4 am with to go lie on the hood of my Maxima and watch the meteor showers before high school. I taught him to drive, but so often now he seems older than me often, and always better than me.
For some reason, tonight, when we are talking about our disappointing father, I tell my brother about how sometimes when people around me are upset and start yelling, I get furious, almost out-of-control angry. Me! Who is never angry. This happens even if I'm not in any way the target of the yelling, even when the situation is in no way directed at anything to do with me, I lose my cool. I tell him about how I don't know why, but always figure this must be some black hole in me, some damage I can't parse, to have such an irrational response in a situation where I should go out of my way to be calm and placating. And maybe my father is the way he is sometimes in the same way: this helpless compulsive tell, this inherent brokenness. All response; no reason.
We talk more about death, the family, what can be done. We arrive at nothing. We make each other feel better about our own small parts. As I am talking to him, I am barefoot, dragging the trashcan up from the backyard to the curb for pickup. I could hear music when we first said hello, but now the other end is silent, and I think he has probably gone outside like he does when he talks on the phone. There is the sound of our breathing. Neither of us like to talk on the phone and we aren't good at it. Finally, he tells me that he does that too--that thing about the anger reaction. He says even when strangers beep at each other in traffic, it happens to him. That weird rage.
We say goodbye. I promise him we'll talk more when the weekend comes and I know what I'm doing. Maybe, I say, I'll send him a text. He says "I love you, Jess," and then I tell him I love him too, and then we say goodbye again, and then he says I love you again, and I tell him I do too.
I know why he has come to me. I know it the way you just know your sibling, even one you barely speak to. This person whose growing mirrored and entwined your own, who is the closest exact living being to you in genetics and upbringing, almost a twin, yet inverted: deliberately different on purpose, different by choice. I'd like to say he came to me because I am his bossy, mean big sister and I have always fixed things for him, or protected him, but that has never exactly been our relationship. I am not much of a fixer, as anyone who knows me can say, and he has never needed my sheltering.
He came to me because I have always been my father's special favorite, while he, the second born, has raged and fought and gone as different from that legacy as a person possibly could. He tends to the damage of our childhood like a bitter garden, while I am magnanimous, forgiving, looking for the relationship that wasn't possible when I was young. As always, I scrabble for whatever I can get. But my brother knows I can talk to my father, and my father may care, listen, or possibly be hurt by my condemnation, and in that way, I am a missile he can launch into him from afar.
As it happens, I have already yelled at my father. Instead, lost without a crusade, my brother and I talk. We don't talk much, even though I know he is still the boy that I snuck out at 4 am with to go lie on the hood of my Maxima and watch the meteor showers before high school. I taught him to drive, but so often now he seems older than me often, and always better than me.
For some reason, tonight, when we are talking about our disappointing father, I tell my brother about how sometimes when people around me are upset and start yelling, I get furious, almost out-of-control angry. Me! Who is never angry. This happens even if I'm not in any way the target of the yelling, even when the situation is in no way directed at anything to do with me, I lose my cool. I tell him about how I don't know why, but always figure this must be some black hole in me, some damage I can't parse, to have such an irrational response in a situation where I should go out of my way to be calm and placating. And maybe my father is the way he is sometimes in the same way: this helpless compulsive tell, this inherent brokenness. All response; no reason.
We talk more about death, the family, what can be done. We arrive at nothing. We make each other feel better about our own small parts. As I am talking to him, I am barefoot, dragging the trashcan up from the backyard to the curb for pickup. I could hear music when we first said hello, but now the other end is silent, and I think he has probably gone outside like he does when he talks on the phone. There is the sound of our breathing. Neither of us like to talk on the phone and we aren't good at it. Finally, he tells me that he does that too--that thing about the anger reaction. He says even when strangers beep at each other in traffic, it happens to him. That weird rage.
We say goodbye. I promise him we'll talk more when the weekend comes and I know what I'm doing. Maybe, I say, I'll send him a text. He says "I love you, Jess," and then I tell him I love him too, and then we say goodbye again, and then he says I love you again, and I tell him I do too.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
and when I killed her, it was so easy that I wanted to kill her again
In the last month, I started
1. actually taking care of my skin
2. wearing quatz
3. taking selfies with creeks I like. (This one's Buckhall branch.)
*
7 am me: oh, I'm too sick to go into work, I need to stay home and take it really easy.
3pm me: shitposting on my blog in my underwear
*
I've been trying to characterize my energy to myself over the last week. It's not apathy, or anything so cold, it's just... disinterest, or a lack of fight. I actually want to read, instead of doing and participating in my life. A little surrender. A spring haze. I guess I get a little tired of my big, talky heart sometimes too.
I do keep thinking of things I want to write in this blog, though.
Monday, February 19, 2018
But I could never be so mad to shake you by your shoulders screaming: you coward, you hummingbird
Spell to Face Reality with Some Valor
Get your black dog. Run breakneck through the melting snow and close stickwoods. The dog will usually follow; make sure it's at least a moderately good dog. Let the run hurt. Don't stop for anything, and when you scare up turkey together, plummeting like twin meteors straight down a hill, let them explode around you. Feel the violence clatter in their feathers and the displacement of air when their absence rushes in.
Spell for Cures
Late at night, push open the window in your teenage bedroom. (If you no longer have access to your adolescence, any bedroom you've acted like a teenager in will do.) Listen to the rising and dropping voices of the coyotes, their little yips, songs, and silences. Fill up on glory and cold and knowing and fear, and then, exhale.
Spell for Partials
Admit you want it. It takes vulnerability. To ask, to express any kind of want is to invite loss, lack, rejection. You have to say it out loud. You have to talk to it.
Otherwise, a good start is to look at the ground. The earth shows where it has been touched by water.
Spell to Get Salamanders, Transformation
It's easy; this is the part of the world with the largest salamander biodiversity. Turn over dead leaves. It's not as if you haven't lived this day before.
Get your black dog. Run breakneck through the melting snow and close stickwoods. The dog will usually follow; make sure it's at least a moderately good dog. Let the run hurt. Don't stop for anything, and when you scare up turkey together, plummeting like twin meteors straight down a hill, let them explode around you. Feel the violence clatter in their feathers and the displacement of air when their absence rushes in.
Spell for Cures
Late at night, push open the window in your teenage bedroom. (If you no longer have access to your adolescence, any bedroom you've acted like a teenager in will do.) Listen to the rising and dropping voices of the coyotes, their little yips, songs, and silences. Fill up on glory and cold and knowing and fear, and then, exhale.
Spell for Partials
Admit you want it. It takes vulnerability. To ask, to express any kind of want is to invite loss, lack, rejection. You have to say it out loud. You have to talk to it.
Otherwise, a good start is to look at the ground. The earth shows where it has been touched by water.
Spell to Get Salamanders, Transformation
It's easy; this is the part of the world with the largest salamander biodiversity. Turn over dead leaves. It's not as if you haven't lived this day before.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Thursday, February 1, 2018
don't be careless with me yet
I've been thinking all week about those banded water snakes out at Elkhorn. In warm weather, if you're near the water, or especially swimming in it, the place is alive with them: vicious, jewel-eyed little things, diamond-patterned enough to trick for a copperhead. I've seen them swim underwater like eels to hunt baby brook trout. They are nonvenomous, but known for their intense aggression and painful bite, though I've lain beside them without any trouble on more occasions than I can count, and I can't name a Virginia snake I'm afraid to be bitten by. They're perfect creek spirits, as mean and adaptive as those mountain seasonal flows, and in some spots, as numerous as the very stones. Like women, they give birth to live young.
*
I tried hard to be positive this week, but I don't know that it ever really worked out, that I helped anything, or did anything better. Everything I tried to make kept changing, twisting, turning away out of my hands. I hate feeling helpless. Today, the mountains turned from blue, to iron, to smoke as I hiked in them. By nightfall, rain came in on the front and the air seemed to dissolve or congeal into mist.
My stars advised me this week to fixate on blue, particularly the way the color manifests in sunsets: pick out the blue parts. The Cherokee see blue as a cursed color. Deceptive, tricky, low. My eyes aren't actually blue; they're clear as quartz: only appearing blue by a weird byproduct of structure, lack of melanin, and a lack of collagen deposits. It's all dependent on light.
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