What I Know About Love

It's the morning after Valentine's Day and I'm drunk on champagne, so let me ramble.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone so desperately--so intensely--that it no longer feels like you are just friends? Ha. Really just acquaintances. What do I know of friendships? No, but someone who you know you could love in the most amicable of ways for years, even decades?

But it's impossible. Not only is this love unrequited, it is impossible, for any dumb old reason: they live two thousand miles away; your sexualities don't align; they don't technically exist; they died; they're locked into a "serious" relationship--fuck, they are married. It's impossible. The kind of unavoidable conclusion whose sureness is only outmatched by the truth that you will die some day and that nothing will come after that.

I don't like that level of impossibility. So I don't let my mind wander on the topic for very long. Or at all. But the dreams. Oh, how I dream. Everything I want that is so very wrong, I get as soon as my consciousness taps out. I don't understand it. I don't understand this. Shouldn't I dream of things that happened to me? Shouldn't I dream of the big stressors in my life?

Or is this just telling me what I've already known? The greatest fear in my life is that I will spend it not alone, but perpetually lonely.

Because there are people--there are these days, there is this person--that I am intractably in love with, and I will never be able to be with them in any shade of reality.

I know I will not feel like this for much longer--I will fall out of love because that is the only option given to me--but it pains me to know that at one time I could see so clearly my own happiness wound so well around another's.

So I will say a short prayer before every bedtime: let me let this feeling go. Let me know that there is no great romance in this life. Or any other. Tell me what I need to do to have you. Let me forget all of this. 

Please. Let me forget.

[future elora, do you remember who you wrote this for? it will be an obscure reference from november 2012. but at this very moment, it troubles you incessantly.]

Thanks Diabetes!

Wake up with a headache. Is it a hangover?  Panic. Dread. Irrational fears of alcoholism.

Check blood sugar. 155? Hyperglycemia! Not a hangover!

Thanks Diabetes!

Blue Moon, Thank You

 

Let's be honest. Most of my blog is written under the influence. Sometimes it's only mild, maybe a drink at dinner an hour ago. Sometimes it's a tad excessive, as in, I just finished two beers and I'm feeling a little queer. But either way, I wouldn't say I need alcohol to be creative, but I never feel more creative than wearing a dress shirt, boxers, a blazer, and one of my many pairs of hipster glasses, listening to Fela Kuti with a fancy drink in my hand. Love.

So here's to Grand Cru. It caught my eye in Wegman's, and I needed to try it. Blue Moon is the only "beer" I enjoy (though to be fair, I like all wheat ales).

In the Belgian tradition, a Grand Cru is brewed for special occasions.

It's a Wednesday. I don't think today is very special. But this beer is delicious, so thanks Blue Moon.

Love for always,

elora

Disney Fucked Up

I wrote this during a ten hour car ride from the suburbs of D.C. to Hilton Head, South Carolina. My seat-mate was telling me about his mother's early childhood--information I had never known. She had been adopted, with her three other siblings. A surprising amount of information was available to them concerning their biological parents. The information was melancholic. I started feeling emotions. Family is one of the, no, family is the most important thing a person can have. Having no family is bad. Losing family is devastating. So I wrote this intermittently on the way down. It epitomizes what a short story should be. Oddly enough, I wrote it a few days before mother's day. It seemed appropriate.

Disney fucked up.

My mom died when I was four. Four and a half. I have really long hair. I can remember sitting next to her on the couch one morning; I had been swimming in our pool, unattended and I had dried off on an oversized plush pink towel with various sized yellow flower outlined on it. I pulled open the glass door and wandered next to my mom, who was sitting down on the beige sofa we still have. I was really tired. I had stayed up really late the night before, I remember, because this was the first time I started forming memories. I started forming memories because my mom was dying.

And it would have been too easy for me to just not remember my mom. I could have pulled a fucking princess Leia and when Luke asks her if she remembers her own mother, she says something like I remember certain things like her voice. Well Leia, what a bitch, is lying, because her mom, as we learn as George Lucas detours with us through Revenge of the Sith, dies almost immediately after she names her.

You lucky cunt.

I sat next to my mom, kind of cold from the air conditioning. I looked at her, I looked at the television, I looked back at her. I cannot guarantee that this is what actually happened. I've thought about this day so many times that it's been over romanticized like whiskey cocktails or Paris, France. Apologies. I hate both of those things. I hate the way Paris is actually a dump with more dog shit than the shittiest place in America. And I hate the way whiskey actually burns. I'll use it to disinfect wounds on the, also romanticized, American western plains. And I'll use it to brush my teeth, spitefully, if I find myself waking up in a whiskey connoisseur's house. But I can't feel emotions for that one-day, so I don’t know, maybe nothing was romanticized. Maybe all of this did happen, just the way I remember it.

It was a news show. It often was. She put her arm around me. "Mommy, I'm tired," I said, or something like that. She didn't look at me. She just kind of said, she had such a pretty voice: "Your hair's getting long." I nodded, looking at her face. She didn't look at me. "You can cut it," I said, slower, tired. She shook her head. "No kid," she put her hand on the top of my head, and her bracelet kind of got stuck in my ringlets. She had to look at me then, fiddling with her right hand to get her diamonds or pearls out of my hair. I still have the bracelet. It's in the bottom drawer of my jewelry box, the one I got for graduating from high school from my second cousin on my father's side who likes woodworking. I wish I could see a strand of brunette or blonde hair—I was a dirty blonde kid—stuck in one of the sterling silver links that ties the bracelet together. But I've stared at it for moments at a time. Weird moments. The hair must have disintegrated.

She wrested the bracelet from its confines and then she took it off, placing it on the other side of her. She rubbed my head. "I like your hair long. You are my gorgeous little girl," she said it so airily. I wonder if she actually even said it. I fell asleep with my head on her chest, listening to the oxygen flow into and out of her lungs, those fucking lungs that would fail her within six months. Those fucks. And her heart, too. And all the things that made my mom my mom. And she just—leaving me alone and I wonder a lot, though I’ve gotten good at not thinking about it too often, but I still wonder a lot and if people tell you it gets easier, well they must be a lot fucking older than I am now so I just kind of still wonder, why?

And this is why Disney fucked up, because losing my mom didn't make me a better person. It wasn't an experience that I'd learn important lessons from. It wasn't like I would be guided through my teenage years by faeries, or sidekicks, or princesses and princes, only to arrive in my early twenty-something’s an attractive and well-formed individual—competent, strong, married. No. Fuck them. I would live through my teenage years a burden on a father who never knew what to say to me and couldn't live through losing the love of his life. He never even dated again. My dad never cried, but he was always a sad, wretched man after that day in the middle of November. He never moved on, frozen like Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, and he’d never awake. Even if I looked like her, as sometimes he said I did, that recognition only made him despise me, I'm almost certain, as time went on—especially in my teen years. They had met in high school. Don't I look like the girl you first fell in love with, the same girl who just left you for no good reason besides poor genetics? Yes. I'm sure she loved you, but love doesn't mean a fucking thing when all you can really feel are wants and needs.

I loved my mom. I guess. What is love at four and a half? It's attachment. Pathetic. But I needed her to tell me what to do with my hair which always kept growing and which my dad never knew how to cut. I needed her to tell me I was gorgeous when I was five foot five in second grade and all my classmates loved staring at me, questioning the feasibility of my existence, making my height the center of their conversations instead of asking me anything about anything ever so I never knew how to have real conversations with anyone until even today. Stunted. I needed her to tell me not to have sex with boys who hadn’t even asked me out yet, because god knows my dad never would have told me something as simple and pragmatic as that. He couldn’t have. Dads are great. But moms make gorgeous little girls into princesses.

It's Mother's day, I’m twenty-three, and Bambi is fucking impractical.

Mt. Olympus battles Vintner's Red Blend

funnel libations to my mouth,
fuck the floor;
the gods go wanting.
they get no praise,
for making my arms
the perfect length
to cuddle a wine cube,
to support an EZ spout.
the gods will go wanting,
for wanting me to be this way.

THIS IS WHY I IMBIBE: I AM NOT AN ALCOHOLIC PT. 1

you want to kill yourself? I did. But wait! There's alcohol. Alcohol puts everything in perspective. YOU ARE NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE! You are one person. And everything that's happened to you has happened to at least one other person in the history of humanity. So cheer up! Ironic that you thought you were too forward and the two guys you had your sights on now have girlfriends? NO! That has had to have happened before! So cheer up! Because in the ancient times, the woman in your situation ended up with a King. Does that not cheer you up? That down the line there will be a man who is not only attractive (one of those guys), but also strangely similar to you in likes and dislikes (the other of those guys), and you will consummate the most amazing coupling ever witnessed in the area code of "847."

Yes indeed. Alcohol allows you to widen your perspective; to understand that even those things that seem unlikely are, nonetheless possible. If you doubt this: don't. I am drunk in this current moment. Just a few second ago I began to hiccup, and I began to feel bile building in my esophagus. But I never once doubted the wisdom of my words, because alcohol is the all-knowing substance that conquers all. I know people who prefer the equally agreeable cannabis to simple alcohol. Although I have only been "high" once, I must counter that I have never felt so logical and happy as I feel know. Alcohol is truly great, and potentially, the builder of civilization. Agriculture, that promoted civilization, and the creation of population-dense cities, may have been spurred by wo/mankind's need for staple crops that had the potential to create alcohol, such as wheat and barley.

Nevertheless, I digress. Key points: My heart has been broken. I realize now that I will never, in this year, be able to have the people, although there are only two, that I want. My dreams have been crushed, for I realize now that although I have been accepted into the medical school of my choice, I am still worried about what I will achieve in my remaining year at Colgate University, the school that has grown on me tremendously.

Life is a depressing gamble. You set your sights too low and you die accomplishing nothing. Set your sights too high and you die achieving few of your goals. But what is death? Today my pet turtle died, and I screamed and bawled and writhed on my kitchen floor, cursing my ineptitude. But s/he was dead, and there was nothing I could do. Death is but an end point. And as a rather intelligent fellow once told me, although I now hate his guts for leaving... "Life isn't great, but it's all we have", so I must acknowledge that I won't be able to achieve everything I've ever dreamed of.

But God, if you exist, or ELORA! I know you exist, and I know you can be strong when the need arises, PLEASE! Achieve the few goals that you care about. Today, one of your closest friends remarked that you cared primarily of "education" and "public health." Achieve your goals in these and you can forget that some many years ago you were humiliated and crushed when not one, but two individuals who you thought highly of for their attractiveness and similarities in world views decided to get girlfriends because you failed at likely the most important aspect of the three categories that governs Love, proximity: of proximity, similarity, and physical attractiveness.

God Bless You, elora apantaku. I wish you nothing but the best.

(dear audience, I am royally smashed, so goodnight to y'all).

"If you're ever suicidal,
don't forget to dial,
411 so they can prescribe'
some good vodka in a bottle!"

None of this Never Happened, Not at All, I Swear

"A little thing called Pride"

If I was just a little more feminine I would have cared. I would have felt remorse that I was walking all over him. But, like people making excuses for themselves always say, it's a man's world, and following tenets, I refused to care, because men never care (that's why they can't cry, the damn bastards). Still it was unbearable. The feeling of guilt, equivalent in severity to, I suppose, running over your neighbor's dumb and deaf dog with your SUV at 4 AM on the road outside your house, stayed near my train of thought even when more important things, like my daily half hour of television, should have been taking center stage. I didn't hate myself, though I refused to look at myself in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth. He wanted me to feel bad. But I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he was at all important to me. Because I didn't fucking care.

The number of missed calls my phone reported became more like a casualty report. Two opportunities died the other day at 3:17 in the afternoon. How he endured, I'll never know. I'd only reply in impersonal texts that were short and nondescript, like, "Sure. Sounds fine." Even though his plans for lunch always sounded horrible. Who the fuck like Thai soup? It's all watered down. Canned soup tastes better, but it's probably all thanks to the sodium; 20% of your daily allowance? What the fuck.

But if I could show him in person that I no longer cared, then it was worth the train ride to the edges of Chinatown, even though there weren't any Chinese in the city. It should have been called Asian town, but that would probably sound even more offensive. At least it wasn't Oriental town. Then nobody would visit for fear of being labeled a racist through association.

My yellow trench coat kept catching my attention in the windows of the stores I walked past. I hadn't brushed my hair. I had taken a shower, but only out of common courtesy. If I wasn't trying to send a message, I would have had an eyeliner stripe a centimeter thicker underneath my green eyes. It was January, and my cheeks were flushed red. I should have been in love. Catching the neon Budweiser sign hanging in the Thai restaurant's window, I fully realized that if what he thought this was was love, then there was no God and everything anyone had ever told me about life had been a wishful euphemism.

If I had seen him, I would have probably told him flat out to give up already. I had rehearsed it hundreds of times. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes I cried but tried to cover it up by looking away or wearing sunglasses. Sometimes he shot me in the back of my head when I turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to leave, my blood splattering on his white wooden door, mixed in with a little brain. But he wasn't there. He stood me up. I stood outside the restaurant, feeling cold enough to order a soup anyway, as long as it was still steaming when it was placed before me. After considering whether his actions might have been a more blunt message indicating he was tired of my games, I reminded myself patiently that it didn't matter what he had meant or what he was thinking. I was going to fuck him up.

Delta Wave Dreams in the Morning of a Discovery

"I can't believe he would do something like that." She was, of course, furious. As a captain she was rarely allowed this level of disorganized emotion. She rarely allowed it of herself. Vox, her second in command, was doing her very best not to be harmed in the ongoing internal conflict. "You know what makes me really furious?" The captain reached out with one of her long limbs to connect with one of the stone walls so that she could momentarily balance all of her weight on something other than her overpaced feet. Vox felt that disregarding the terror of being struck across the face, she would have rolled her golden eyes, an expression that she had picked up from the broadcasted dramas. But instead she shrugged. Vox hadn't said a word for the last twenty or so minutes; she had told the Captain of the scandal and was then forced to watch the proceeding intrapersonal argument. Vox could not understand why the Captain had been so upset. Only later would she begin to realize that something was up.

But right now, Vox was terrified. The Captain's onland quarters didn't help her feelings either. The dark stone walls that had been quarried at one of the poles of the planet, had a perpetual look of damp sogginess to them. It reminded her, through some unforeseen cognitive connection, of the "sickness" that her elders were always talking about but which she knew very little about.
The captain slammed the hand that had been residing on her body into the wall, pushing herself off it. "He was one of Nexis's. Goddamn," Vox hated the use of Earth expressions, "He should have known better." Vox agreed with that statement, and analyzing the captain's face closely, she realized that she was no longer angry, and having a perfect understanding of situational exigency, she slowly backed out of the room into the corridor, too aware that she was still very tense, but very glad she had not seen the captain express sadness.

How to Be A Lady

force yourself to laugh when his jokes aren't funny
make sure to show all your teeth
(worth thousands in braces, retainers, and hydrogen peroxide pastes)
don't get upset when he never calls
cry yourself to sleep but don't sob
(remember to wake up with a manufactured smile)
act too weak to pick up objects that need to be moved
never, ever, never mention your six minute mile
(it's not right to cultivate strength)
feign ignorance when he talks about things you already know
show interest even when you think he's pathetic
(if you're wearing shades feel free to look away)
when you have a good idea, don't share it
when you don't want another drink, just take it
(get to the point where you'll stop thinking)

forget about the importance of yourself when you get denied
but it's all your fault that the tests came back positive

remember that you're worthless to everyone but yourself
but only when you cry at night, okay?
so you can wake up the next morning with a smile
when you don't want to, do it anyway

Hideaway

Jackie and I were best friends until I tried to kiss her and she told me she didn't like boys. We were thirteen, I think; the summer before eighth grade, so yea. I had been hanging out with Jackie's family all summer. They had a nice house, and even though it was old, the wooden floors reminded me of what homes should be like. Kind of romantic, right? Everyone's smiling around the dinner table in a well furnished house with paisley window shades and blue wooden sidings.

Also my own parents decided that it was time to fight again--I can't remember what this one was about, but it started when I found my mom crying on the red sofa in the dining room with a piece of paper in her hand. It didn't end until after they both had challenged the other to a divorce. But they couldn't do it. Hell of a summer though.

Jackie and I had gotten bored of pretty much everything else to do around town and in her house. No new movies. No new stores. We had biked to the lake nearly every day. TV was almost painful, we'd watched it so much. I had started looking through the cabinets and drawers in her kitchen, staring at the multicolor cooking set and the fine silver with fluted handles tucked away underneath the regular silverware in a kind of hidden compartment. I was that bored.

One of us suggested tag. I laughed because there were only two of us. What about hide and seek? That was Jackie's idea, definitely. I wouldn't tell her I was scared of the dark, but I was especially afraid of the dark when I also happened to be in her basement.

The stairs creeped and as my feet alighted on the concrete floor I instantly realized that this was a horrible idea, to be playing hide and seek in a basement that randomly erupted with noises of plumbing and strained air conditioners. She wanted to hide first, and I agreed. She turned off the light and as I sat down on the stairs, eyes in my palms, counting aloud to twenty or thirty, I tried very hard to hear her. Her summertime bare feet sweeping across the smooth floor. The air circulating around her as she moved carefully through the rooms below her house.

But I could not. And as I walked around after reaching thirty, navigating like a blind man, I tried to humor myself. Maybe get her to laugh so that I could find her and we could both go upstairs and do something less creepy. Like a cross word.

I was big on self deprecating humor back then. Nobody told me they hated it until one day it seemed like everyone was telling me to stop complaining "every goddamn second". Somebody had told me that once, in that exact way. I remember her face was flushed and red and shaking, but I cannot for the life of me remember who it was. But this was seventh grade and I was the only child of a couple that didn't love each other so I had enough reasons to think that I was relatively worthless. Mom crying when I asked her to make me pancakes; letting the griddle slam into the sink and telling me that she couldn't do everything for everyone all the time. But I'm your son? Or Dad walking past me one time as I walked into our front door, waving at him, and he just kept on walking past me, like I didn't exist even at all.

The worst were the grades. This'll sound corny, but whenever I used to get a good grade in elementary school, she'd have to frame it. She used the same frame over and over again, but still, when I got an A I got to see it hanging on the wall next to our kitchen table and I felt like people cared. But sometime in the summer the frame, and my last report of the year, a creative narrative about a dream house, disappeared. Just gone. There was no sign of struggle, but as I sat at the table and munched on my morning cereal, alone, before heading out over to Jackie's house, I felt deeply betrayed.

It occurred to me that this might not have been a localized incident. I didn't bother to clean up after my breakfast as the milk sat in the porcelain bowl. I slowly moved into the empty family room. All the pictures were gone. The dark wooden frame that sat on the coffee table of me in my baseball uniform was no longer there. The huge family portrait, a sixteen by twenty four, was gone too.

No I couldn't even pretend that my home was a happy one. There weren't smiles from long ago to hint at a time when the house had been quiet during dinner time, when my dad hadn't had to sleep in the basement.

So I left the house that day, pretty confident that nobody no longer loved me. I later found out that my mom had hidden all the pictures in the attic. She hadn't burned them like I imagined she had, standing over them in the backyard late at night with a can of gasoline in one hand and the grill lighter in the other, her face glowing orange, twisted up trying to decide whether to laugh or cry; in either case, like a maniac. But the fact that they still existed didn't make me feel better when I found out a few months later.

I think Jackie's parents found out that day that my parents were fighting. I had been going over to her house a lot, but they probably never suspected anything was amiss. We were just kids with nothing to do. We had been in the same pottery class in a neighboring town two years earlier, and since we were the only kids in the class who went to Astor Elementary, we had to become friends. So no, they didn't suspect anything. But that day after biking over and dejectedly knocking on the blue wood of her door, I had no other thought in mind then to cry. I was obsessing over it. That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. I would have done it at my house. I could have done it in my room. But no. There's no way that could have worked because I would have been far removed from the only person who seemed to like me, and her house still seemed so happy. Not like mine. Not like the house where I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells.

Looking back, I feel really bad about what I did. I wasn't embarrassed while I was laying on her corduroy blue coach, sobbing in hysterics while she sat in the oversized leather recliner next to it, just staring at me. She had tried to say things but I couldn't listen. I was so sick and tired of my parents and their faces and why wasn't anyone ever happy anymore. But afterwards, I felt so very odd. I shouldn't have told her all those things; I shouldn't have poured out the intimate details of my family's life. I shouldn't have told her that I didn't think my dad had been cheating but that how the hell should I know because he never talks to me.

As a preadolescence I was trying to communicate the things that even adults can't say. I felt relieved when I finally stopped crying and she ran across the wooden floor into the kitchen to get me a glass of lemonade. They always had lemonade. Fresh. Incredible. I was jealous of the strangest things. But when she sat next to me I started to feel uncontrollably embarrassed. Mostly because she wasn't saying much and I had just told her everything that had been in and out of my consciousness during the past month. I didn't say anything else and we just sat on the couch. This is how her mom found us when she came home from work shortly thereafter. Her mom worked a rather posh job in advertising, and she always came back at around eleven thirty. Her mom loved me. She thought it was great that we were both friends because, as she told me sometimes to Jackie's protesting, "It's just so hard for Jackie to find good friends her age." I didn't really know if that was true. But we were both the only children in our respective families, and I guess growing up it's kind of lonely. I never felt lonely, though, always felt like I had my mother with me, until that summer and then well, that's how I learned self deprecation. My eyes were swollen and red. My ankles were crossed as they dangled from the couch and my fingers were wrapped around a lemonade filled glass that I couldn't drag my eyes away from. I couldn't have looked more depressed. Jackie greeted her mom as cheerily as ever, and her mom looked at me, but not too long, before walking up the stairs to her room. I expected that to be that but it wasn't. A few minutes later she came back downstairs. "Gavin honey, are you alright?" I can still remember exactly what she looked like because she looked like an angel. Gray pencil skirt, black dress shirt, white cardigan, green rimmed glasses. That's all I wanted to hear. I wanted an adult to ask me how I was and to actually mean it. "Yea Mrs. Jo. I'm alright."

"Well if you ever need anything, if you ever need to stay here, you know you're always more than welcome." She studied me for a couple of seconds. "What do you guys want for dinner?"

And that was that. But between me and Jackie I was less sure. Maybe nothing changed. Nothing probably changed at all. But I started watching her more. I tried to gauge her reactions to things I said. To things I did. I didn't want her to be over worried or not worried enough. I didn't want her to distance herself from me but I didn't want her to think I was being too much to deal with. Soon thereafter watching television turned into watching Jackie. It was probably around this time that I started to like Jackie in any type of serious way but I didn’t actually know that I knew that then.

Oh, so anyway, we were playing hide and seek, and I must have said something funny or something stupid, either or, regardless, I hear Jackie giggle or something and I carefully move toward the sound I had just heard and start walking carefully. "Jackie, can we please do something else? I don't want to admit this but I am not brave enough to not be afraid of the dark." I didn't hear anything, so I kept trudging my feet flat over the concrete floor. "You know I can always just walk upstairs." I thought the threat would get her out of her hiding spot but it didn't. I tried to hear her again for a moment or two, but that was unsuccessful so I turned around and started walking to the stairs. Or at least to where I thought the stairs should be. But I ran into Jackie. Somehow she had gotten up out of her hiding spot, never did learn where it was, and I stubbed my toe on her heel. I was so scared that I grabbed her and refused to let go. First because I was really scared and then because it was funny.

Smoking and Divorce and Sweden

The aquamarine and fuchsia lights in the dance hall were making me feel erratic. Why anyone would come here far escaped my reasoning skills as a fourteen year old. Worst yet, it smelled like cigarettes. My mom hated cigarettes. I'd seen her do all sorts of evil things to cigarettes that had she done them to humans she might only escape the death penalty by pleading insanity. Whenever she found a pack of dad's, she'd go on a rampage. First the yelling. I thought fucker was a brand of smokes until the sixth grade. Then the torture. Boiled in a metal pot in the kitchen until the skin peeled away and the nicotine and crap dissolved, toxic gaseous steam rising into the vents over the stove while mom just watched, arms crossed, not a smile or a frown. Sometimes she took delight in flushing them down the pastel pink toilet in the first floor bathroom. She'd walk out, slapping her hands together as if she'd just saved the world. Dad never stopped smoking, though. She'd stomp them underneath her white sneakers. She'd toss them into the fireplace. Once, just for the hell of it, she took one of the balloons I'd gotten from grandma after my piano recital, and tied a half empty pack to the plastic string. I saw her do all these things. Dad assumed she threw them out. Hah. He did get better at hiding them though.

In Seven Minutes

Jackie and I were best friends until I tried to kiss her and she told me she didn't like boys. We were thirteen, I think; the summer before eighth grade, so yea. I had been hanging out with Jackie's family all summer. They had a nice house, and even though it was old, the wooden floors reminded me of what homes should be like. Kind of romantic, right? Everyone's smiling around the dinner table in a well furnished house with paisley window shades and blue wooden sidings.
Also my own parents decided that it was time to fight again--I can't remember what this one was about, but it started when I found my mom crying on the red sofa in the dining room with a piece of paper in her hand. It didn't end until after they both had challenged the other to a divorce. But they couldn't do it. Hell of a summer though.

Jackie and I had gotten bored of pretty much everything else to do around town and in her house. No new movies. No new stores. We had biked to the lake nearly every day. TV was almost painful, we'd watched it so much. I had started looking through the cabinets and drawers in her kitchen, staring at the multicolor cooking set and the fine silver with fluted handles tucked away underneath the regular silverware in a kind of hidden compartment. I was that bored.
One of us suggested tag. I laughed because there were only two of us. What about hide and seek? That was Jackie's idea, definitely. I wouldn't tell her I was scared of the dark, but I was especially afraid of the dark when I also happened to be in her basement.
The stairs creeped and as my feet alighted on the concrete floor I instantly realized that this was a horrible idea, to be playing hide and seek in a basement that randomly erupted with noises of plumbing and strained air conditioners. She wanted to hide first, and I agreed. She turned off the light and as I sat down on the stairs, eyes in my palms, counting aloud to twenty or thirty, I tried very hard to hear her. Her summertime bare feet sweeping across the smooth floor. The air circulating around her as she moved carefully through the rooms below her house.
But I could not. And as I walked around after reaching thirty, navigating like a blind man, I tried to humor myself. Maybe get her to laugh so that I could find her and we could both go upstairs and do something less creepy. Like a cross word.

Absence of Light//The Knocking//Absentia//Things Undone (part 1)

The sun warmed Zia’s neck like a kiss, stolen in the few moments they had left together. It would miss the way her black hair occasionally caught a breeze off of Monterrey and shimmered blue as it swayed, dancing above her shoulders. She would miss its presence by her bedside table when she rolled through her sheets to strike her alarm at 6:35 every morning; its fingers softly pulling open her delicate eyelids, despite the crust, begging her to start another sun filled day.

Their twenty-seven year tryst was coming to an end. She’d come back, of course, but she wondered if she’d still feel the same towards the giant star in the sky. Three years of constantly whitening skin and eight-hundred international units of vitamin D at every breakfast—melatonin at night.

James said that of all the things he missed, the sun was not on his short list. He had shrugged his thinning shoulders, the lowest part of him she could see on the large communications TV in the shore side station, and thrown her an unbalanced smile through an accumulation of stubble. His teeth would have been whiter in the sun, she thought, but the grin would have been just as uncertain. He had been the first. She would be the second. She imagined one of the blank hallways that interweaved through the station, and a portrait of James, just the way he looked now—blue ribbed sweater, boney jaw, a single dimple—with some inspirational caption underneath. “Deep Sea Explorer.” Then she imagined herself, framed next to him for eternity. What would she look like three years from now? He had left shortly after offering his reassurance that the sun was not necessary. A giant stone slab was behind him, a kaleidoscope of the beige and grays of compressed sand. It held one of the largest tentaculites ever recovered. James was a fossil guy. She admired him for that—for being interested in things long gone. “There’s the knocking again,” he said and looked around as if he could pinpoint it. She wanted to ask him what was causing it—she couldn’t hear anything—but he just shrugged as if there was really nothing he could do about it, and it didn’t seem too bothersome—just bothersome enough for him to wave quickly while leaning forward, reaching with a hand to turn the transmission off.

She had been left alone in the dark Com room; folded her arms and stared at the neon “no signal” in the upper right corner for a few moments. The dim light from the blank screen matched the monochromatic shade of light filtered through the twenty feet of water that separated her from the surface, slipping through the enormous reinforced glass windows. She had sighed.

That had been two weeks ago. James hadn’t been in communication since, and the safety cameras had been thrown off line last may during a storm. Kim had left James a series of more and more frazzled video messages. She was a brittle sixty-four who, like a childless woman, was involved with each of their lives. She had interviewed, along with Hendricks and Kaori, also in their sixties, all the current researchers who operated out of the Monterrey facility. And when James had volunteered to man the observation deck implanted in the coastal shelf a few hundred meters out at sea, by himself, she had wholly supported him—Kim had gone into an abandoned library of yellowed cookbooks in her basement to find a carrot cake recipe for the party she threw for him. Invited his family, too, because she had met them all when James had told her to stop by his sister’s wedding along Davenport beach, an hour and a half north. And when he had broken up with his girlfriend a few days before going down, she had consoled him. “Three years is too long,” she had told James as he paced the reading room. And Kim knew he had always had an eye on Zia anyway. He was upset that he’d be unable to hold a conversation with her, as they sometimes did in the break room after everyone else had gone home, about far fetched but still plausible solutions for global warming that slowly devolved into teasing each other about their dissertations.

Kim was a generation older than these new recruits; she was annoyed that they still seemed so ignorant, but pleased that she could offer advice not limited to the marine sciences. She wanted to be more than just the research director or the funds appropriator. She wanted them to excel. She wanted them to love her.

Zia found Kim that morning leaning her head against the glass window in one of the many hallways. Zia had expected Kim to turn and look at her. Kim continued to look out at the rise and run of rock formations and the kelp tied here and there, gently rocking with the push of the incoming tide.

At first spending half of her day underwater had made Zia uncomfortable. She imagined that minute cracks would bury themselves in the steel and glass until the whole thing shattered.

They were only twenty feet down. Today she’d be committing herself ten times deeper.

There had been a time in her life, sometime during grade school, when her current project would have scared her to immense excitement. She had woken up today tired.

“Kim?” Zia loomed over the woman she considered a mentor.

“Sorry. I’ve called him twelve times since last Tuesday.” It wasn’t an invitation for conversation. Kim, with her eyes sinking into the deepening dark circles on her face, looked up at Zia. She studied the softly slumping shoulders, the almost bushy eyebrows arched over concerned black eyes, the lips that naturally fell into an upturned smile.

Kim could know why James was tentatively in love with her. She prayed he still was.

Everyone else was happy to see Zia when she pushed open the door to the common room, a stoic Kim filling in after her. Their smiles made Zia more sure she would be okay. Miriam, the stick thin African from Australia’s east coast had hugged her nearly three times before she had gotten to the center of the room. Tom, the heavy set Hawaiian had been popping popcorn in the microwave, and now as he sat on the green couch pushed up underneath the mural of a rainstorm painted by somebody’s niece, the room smelled like hydrogenated oil; imitation butter. Someone, probably Keri, had pirated the TV a few weeks ago to get cable, and now the soft yells from a crowd at a college football game spilled into the room, flooding momentarily after a big play. Zeke and Jacen had been watching—they were still young—still connected to civilian culture—still not fully committed to the scientist’s lifestyle. They turned away from the screen and joined in the circle forming around Zia.

The First Time I Ever Got Asked Out

Jacob always had a funny way of saying Jell-O. She never knew why, but every once in a while he would say it, randomly prompted by a question or by his own thoughts, and she'd think of being surrounded by orange gelatin; of how hard it would be to see the world if she was encased in orange. She knew not why. He was a good foot shorter than she was, even though he was in the same home room as she was. Indeed Jacob was the shortest boy in their grade. He always walked to school--his mom was a nurse or something--and he'd hold onto the straps of his comparatively over sized green back pack so that it dug into his back and so he could stand up straight like his parents were always telling him to whenever he slouched over his plate at dinner.
She didn't like to pay attention to Jacob. Something about his face distressed her. In the seventh grade she would reflect that she felt uncomfortable looking at him at this time because he was just starting to grow a uni-brow and looked like a normal hued Frankenstein. In the seventh grade he began coming to school with small bandages pressed between his eyes. He was much taller by that point and when other students asked what happened, he could tell them confidently without worrying that they'd think poorly of him.
But in the fifth grade, she did not like paying attention to Jacob. This was sometimes incredibly difficult. He sat next to her in math. He would fidget, but not in any organized fashion. He didn't bounce his knee, or rhythmically click the nice pen his mom had stolen from her office at work; he didn't rock back and forth.
He would hit the desk with his flat palm every so often, but she could never tell when it was coming. And every time he disrespectfully slapped the cheap white plastic table, she wanted to scream at his face. She wanted to grab his glasses and throw them at the math teacher she didn't much like because he was old and short and annoying and she hated his sweaters. She would hold her left finger in her left ear so that she couldn't hear the sound as clearly. By the end of math class her hand and her ear would be hot and sweaty and she would be very angry. She would try to count to ten like the counselor with the blonde hair and black tights had suggested when she was in fourth grade and her homeroom teacher had forced her to see someone at the school after she had pushed her best friend into a locker so hard that her best friend had cried.
They were still best friends, strangely enough. But she had started to learn how to control her temper. Sometimes if she couldn't make it to ten, she would rush into the girl's bathroom down the hall not too far, and make angry faces at herself in the mirror until she felt better or someone came in to use the restroom.
Then one day in math, Jacob didn't fidget. He was not obnoxious. He held his hands in his lap the entire class, leaning forward, slouching over the worksheet. Every so often he would reach for the pen he set out in front of himself and start writing, but when he saw her looking at him, he immediately stopped, his hands clasping back together.
She was surprised. But more so when she was putting her notebook back into her back pack and Jacob asked her if she would go out with him. She said, "Maybe," and ran out into the hallway before she had to look at his eyes for any amount of time. She found him incredibly unbearable. Later at lunch, she would tell her friends and they would ask her why she had said maybe. She would tell them that she had no idea. But she needed to think on it.

Mango Market

Mangoes were grainy. Hailey had wandered into an outdoor market of types. It reminded her of the few farmers’ markets she’d gone to after visiting her grandmother who lived in a fairly rural area. They’d drive for about fifteen minutes in their old minivan down older asphalt roads through cornfields, and then her two sisters and her would follow their mom as she walked around with a canvas tote, picking up fruits and vegetables and examining them. Hilary had a fascination with the honey sticks that were set up at one stand. She’d beg for all of the flavors, but she’d only ever be granted access to one. Mom would let little Hope pick out bread, and Hailey would drift in and out of stalls and read all the names of different types of cheese, and try to memorize what brussels sprouts looked like.

This market was similar. But it was more colorful. There was so much more color here. She felt that under this sun she could clearly delineate indigo from purple. Had that ever been possible before? Even on summery days, there was never light like there was here. The scales of the fish lying on their sides, piled on top of each other like individual scales themselves, were more silver than gray. The green of whatever type of salad substrate was lying on that red checkered table cloth wasn’t green, it was verdant. Hailey slowly walked around, carefully examining from afar each individual item. There were a lot of people rushing around her, but they had actual items in mind. She would be satisfied if she found something to snack on. Like a honey stick.

She finally stood unmoving in front of a fruit stand. The colors had interested her interest when she had been several booths away, and now she was struck by how many different shades of warm colors were present in the plastic bins containing stereotypically tropical fruits. There was a woman carrying her child presumably in her hands two steps to the side of Hailey. She was discussing something more than fruit with the woman behind the table. Hailey tried to not pay attention, looking very interested in the range of colors the mangoes were displaying off to the right. Green, orange, red. She imagined her mom standing next to her. How can you know which one is ripe?

Hailey couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a mango, and couldn’t remember if she actually ever had. Star fruits were off to the side, and she knew for a fact she’d never had those before. She always picked around them whenever they presented themselves in nicer fruit bowls. Natural things shouldn’t come in cookie cutter shapes, she had reasoned.

“Ai, ai, ai. This is just terrible. How are we to set good models for ours if we have such things going around,” the merchant pointed to the woman’s son who had begun to amuse himself by clapping his small hands together with little success in making a clapping sound at all. The mother whistled. “John says he’s going to talk to the governor, you know, but I don’t know if that will do anything actually. It didn’t do anything the last time West Bay went to him.” They both shook their heads disapprovingly, then the merchant noticed Hailey. “Hello. What’d you like?” The mother went back to picking up fruits and examining them after switching the child to her other arm.
“I’d like to try a mango.” The woman stood there waiting for her to pick one up. But she did not. “How do you know which one is the best?” The woman smiled and bent over the pile of mangoes with her hands clasped behind her back, studying them. Her long pearl necklace fell down, almost colliding with some of them. Hailey tried to look inspective. “Ah,” the woman picked up one that was half green, half orange. She squeezed it with her lightly wrinkled hands. Then she smelled it quickly. “This one is the best, it should be very sweet.” She deposited the mango in Hailey’s hand, while Hailey reached with her other hand into her pocket. She had shoved some Cayman dollars into it after she’d gotten change after buying a diet coke at a gas station along her walk to the market. It was ninety degrees. She regretted the diet coke when she was done with it—she was thirstier than before. Hailey pulled out a blue sheet of cloth paper and gave it to the woman who began pulling out change. She was about to plop the cents into Hailey’s hand when she noticed that Hailey had the mango dangerously close to her opening mouth. “No no no!” Hailey paused, Mango emanating perfume directly under her nose. “Don’t eat the skin, girl.”

Hailey felt disappointed in herself, and shrugged her shoulders, “Sorry.”
“It’s alright” the woman laughed and pulled out a knife, took the mango back from Hailey and quickly peeled it. She gave the wet fruit back to Hailey, “Don’t eat the pit,” she motioned eating and then pointed to the dead center of the mango, as if the girl might have been deaf. Hailey thanked her gratefully and then began walking back to the hotel, slowly gnawing through her treat. It was grainy. But it was also juicy. Orange liquid began accumulating at the sides of her mouth before they poured down to her chin, and she had to wipe it away with the back of her free hand, leaving both her face and her hands sticky when she finally arrived at the Seaside Suites.

The Plot Literally Thickens

It was a full moon, or at least very close to it. Hailey had followed Aidan and May and a few other people surreptitiously out onto the beach. The brightest white spot belonged to Venus and it was clinging to the side of the moon like a fruit fly around a bowl of over ripen bananas. The stars were more numerous than they were at home and they were all visible; not a cloud in the sky to cover them up. The ocean looked as black as oil and it had gotten colder. Hailey would have noticed these details if she hadn't had a cocktail of cocktails and was now only following the sound of May's voice and the looming orange brightness of a bonfire someone at the party had set up an hour ago, smiling the entire time. She was very nearly out of her head, but she managed to walk in a convincingly straight line, and almost tripped on a raise in the uneven sandy surface once. Once May sat down in front of her, she let her legs collapse under her and giggled just a little when her bare legs hit the cold sand. She looked into the fire and was satisfied that she no longer possessed enough consciousness to question.
It soon became apparent, however, that everyone else wasn't as happy as she was. No one said a word. Music was still blasting from the bar, underneath the banners tied around each wooden post set up in each corner of the bar, sanctioning the space from the rest of the island. Hailey could still detect people talking and yelling. But around the fire nobody said anything for the longest time, until Hailey began to grow nervous. She didn't want to die in some strange ritual. In comparison, a plane crashing would be preferable. Across from her three faces were illuminated in orange. One of those faces was Aidan, and even he wasn't smiling. Chilled, adrenaline innervated her enough where she thought it would be reasonable to get up and run back to the bar and catch a cab or run back to her hotel. She straightened up and began to push her weight onto her legs to get up when a man she'd not seen until now said, "It's ready." Hailey turned to look at him. He had just snuck up on them. He was holding a piece of paper the size of an index card and a brass key wrangled in a desolate key ring loosely in his black hands. He sat down next to an unfortunate red head who was maintaining impeccable posture and had her hands clasped respectfully in her lap. The man passed the contents on his palm to May. She read what was on the piece of paper. Hailey tried to read it, but the writing was too small and she couldn't focus on it before May had put it in her pant's pocket.
"Everyone," she announced to the group of about twelve people, "This is Hailey. She's a vacationer, only in for one week." Hailey stopped breathing. Then May turned to her, "Hailey, we need your help." Images of ritualistic wooden swords carving into her innards as her blood was extracted into vials for later consumption appeared before her eyes.
"There's a man on this island who needs to be taken care of. And we need your help to kill him."
"So you're not going to kill me?" A deep laughter from someone around the fire was heard, followed by a serious of less intense giggles.
"We're scaring this poor girl to death," it was a native accent, and it belonged to the man who had just laughed. "I say one of us can do it. Let's not get an innocent involved."
"We've already discussed this Gray, and she'll be fine. If one of us did it, we'd probably die."
"Do what? I don't want to die." Self-fulfilling prophecy, she thought to herself.
"You're not going to die. But we need you because you're not a citizen."
"Aren't you not a citizen? You've only been here five years!"
"I'm a resident."
"I knew something was up. Nobody that's friendly. I knew you were going to use me."
"It's a fool proof plan, you're not going to die." Hailey felt as if there was an however inherently built into that statement. She looked across at Aidan but his face seemed too neutral to read.
"What would I even need to do?" She had turned back at May's face and she felt a strong urge to slap her. But for some reason she was deeply curious. May told her what they had been plotting for the last year while random voices shot out from among them every once in a while to clarify specific details.
Later that night when Hailey was lying in bed, television on because she was too scared to go to sleep without something to distract her besides the night's necessary intoxication, she wondered if she could be a hero. She hadn't been for Jess.