what happens when you wake up instead

There’s a Christmas tree in the first corner of the third hallway, past the nurses’s office, next to the deadbolt doors. I’m on my sea legs every morning, twenty-five minutes of walk and pivot, pivot and walk. I don’t wear shoes, because shoes are not allowed. The only other person up this early has thirty-eight years, bleary blue eyes and wolverine hair, and I don’t talk to him either. Pivot and walk, pivot and walk. I have been here before.

They thought I was going to die. But I woke up instead.

We are surrounded by smokestacks and steeples. I should know where I am but I am six stories and seventeen days removed. The floors gleam. The curtains shriek. The lab techs snap bands for blood and the nurses rip velcro for pressure. Sterile and secure. I have been here before.

The first night, they thought I was going to die. It took me nine more, but I woke up. I woke up instead.

In Lakewood I can’t stand up without falling. A doctor asks me the year and the incumbent and I say 2010, and George W. Bush. A day and a half goes by and I still can’t walk, but I can hold on to my father’s arm. The elevator pings and we walk around an atrium, a cafe and a chapel. This is a nice hospital, I say. It’s right down the street, he says. I haven’t seen him in two years. But we have been here before.

I thought I wanted to die. But I woke up instead.

on amy kinetics and love

Amy’s death shattered me, and fucking killed me, because I believed in her. And when I first heard her voice it was the same singing as mine was speaking –  guttural and frank and miserable. She was pipes and bones and when she sang live it was like being struck by lightning.

Summer’s so hot it makes you lose your mind. I lose mine to fire and sand, and sinewy tank tops and hoop earrings. A long time ago. The bass and the movement. I remember when life was cheaper.

In six months I’ll be 25 years old. I am starting to learn about survival. I smoke too much but drink less. And I am happy being messy and single and self-centered and selfish. I steal beer from my roommates and I leave clothes on the floor of my room and I don’t fill anything in on the calendar that hangs outdated on my wall.

All I’ve known is kinetics. And all the kinetics I’ve had have brought me here, to a weird sort of tired. I want to go but I don’t want to go anywhere. Emails go unread. I stop driving and talking to my parents. The people I went to school with look for scholarships and I look for rent money. And so it’s kinetically down. It’s been kinetically down.

I start to think about the people I’ve been in love with. And whether or not it’s worth it, the love or the loss or what I’d go through to be there. I wonder if life has a limit, if kinetics are nothing but treading water. The way I felt the first time is gone, and moving vans and parking tickets and month-to-month leases are what I have left. I’m going to pay all of them in cash and then I’m going to start over.

the fighter

Filmed on location in Lowell, Massachusetts, read the credits of the only movie I watched in almost a year. My father went to college in Lowell, Massachusetts but I don’t know if he was born there, I only know that he saw Bob Dylan there in 1965 and he wanted to see him play “Hurricane.” He didn’t see it. He didn’t see “Like a Rolling Stone” either, until about forty-five years later, when we went to see Dylan in Canton Ohio in a civic auditorium with stamped-down dirt floors and high school medals all over the walls, hung from fabric dulled by dust and basketball practice and lives set to four-year moments of never-ending time.

Dylan came onstage in a white suit with silver boleros and I didn’t really believe I was there, hearing him growl off the forty-five years it’d been since my father had last seen him, in a different life, when he was a person and not a father and not yet thirty-two years out of love with my mother and ten years out of love with me.

We sat in the front row of the farthest section back, and we drank real Cokes as we talked around the grit that had settled on our family, and the humaneness that scraped through the shame of a father falling apart in front of his kids. Because incarceration is a strange thing, and his incarceration was on its strange way that night in Canton Ohio. And since he’s been in I’ve wondered about where he came from, about Lowell and the grit.

I am gritting my teeth until seven in the morning and I am forgetting where I came from because where I came from is a strange thing, a not-true thing and a thing rooted in ruin.

violence

I never think about engagement rings but tonight I am thinking about one engagement ring, the one shoved in a red ring box in the wooden jewelry box that sits on my bedroom dresser under piles of unopened mail. And I remember you, leaning against a counter in our kitchen, saying two years. Two years and with your arm hooked around me I couldn’t wait, I would have married him right then.

My ex-boyfriend has a new girlfriend and it’s been a year and a half since I pulled myself out of his bed and left. I found out and I threw up, and then we spent an hour on the phone and I threw up after that too. I have been violently in love with him for three and a half years. But after a violent couple of half-hours I feel more in mourning than what I felt in love, because I remember that counter and how there was nothing you could lean against, no truth to your words, no depth or guts or try. No try, after I tried. Hoarse and in love but hoarse and done.

It is summertime and we are walking, like we always do. I am wearing red and you’re in white, and the hot and damp air has turned my short hair thick and streaked with blonde. We circle Cul-de-sacs until we get to a lake in the middle of a development with streets named for cigarettes. Up Marlboro. Down Newport. There are flowers along the median around the lake and you pick one for me, in red, summer-scented and in bloom.

In the picture I look like a girl in love, in hot and damp air in the summertime with a flower behind her ear and a still hope for salvation. But now that you are gone the person I used to be is gone too, and three and a half years of my life are gone too, and this is what I gave up and this is what you took from me. Rings clatter. Flowers wilt. Salvation lies. And the girl in the picture smiles at nothing, dead and buried in a place that’s no longer there. Til death rings on and on and on, solemn and slow and true.

quarters and George Washingtons

When it happens I am less bewildered than I used to be. In its place I am a little more dead, a little more snuffed out, a little more accepting of the places I’ve been and how they’ve taken me here. I am bartending and there are three boys in front of me, ordering drinks I watched friends drink when I was seventeen, and one of them asks me what else I do besides bartend. No offense, he says, no offense, but. He asks if my journalism degree is from Kent or Ohio U and I say neither. It’s from East 22nd and Payne through East 18th and Cleveland Magazine, through five years of working for a career, a hope, I have spent a year watching die.

And at once I am seventeen again, and not twenty-four, and wide-eyed and kicked-around and not very-well liked. There are a million boys that show up with sly vernacular and 35 percent tips. My worth laid out in quarters and George Washingtons. And I am on display every second of every day and I am sick to death. I am sick to death. I am sick to death.

There is a pain and a weariness in my twenty-four-year-old collarbones, and the breastbone beneath it, and the ribs beneath that. I have waited tables for almost ten years, and poured drinks since I turned drink-pouring age. I have seen desperation in all its greasy-haired, bloodshot-eyed sadness; I have seen marriages dissolve over bourbon; I have seen myself in every girl I never wanted to be, her cashmere and engagement ring versus my instantly-gratified worth, laid out in quarters and George Washingtons and the life and hope and dreams I’ve let die.

savannah

There is a picture and it is from you, of a sunset over a beach too smooth in wake, too flat in current, to be Cleveland.  And I am filled with a dull, dull heartbreaking numbness.  Because I miss you in the daylight and I miss you afterwards, as each blurs into one another, and my life becomes increasingly nothing like I thought.  amen, amen.

I tattooed that phrase on the back of my arm, after a night in Akron.  In a bar I leaned my head against the wall, underneath a wood panel graffiti’ed in black and red.  And as I supported myself I turned a little to the side and saw it: I feel nothing like I thought.  amen, amen.

Coma Heart

Over the front seat of a car. It is twelve past midnight and I am feeling a little bit of feel, but not much. I am thinking about caution and wind, and which is stronger. It’s certainly not caution that is careening our car past the mouth of the Shoreway, but it’s certainly not wind. From over the front seat of the car I see headlights, usually familiar but tonight peripheral and foreign, glowing like orbs, slow as my coma heart.

Forty minutes earlier I am sitting at a bar near West 65th and there are only five of us here. The bartender is wide in the shoulders but wider below, and he’s wearing an orange Browns t-shirt and speaks with a lisp. He talks to us with coke eyes as he pours heavy-handed shots of Jameson to go with our beers. He’s ushered us to the corner of the bar, past the checkered-tablecloth and checkered-floor dining room and the muted TV sets, where he stocks Budweiser and MGD and Coors. We light cigarettes and laugh. There is a man next to me and he is calling me Emma, and asking for a cigarette. There is another man’s arms around my waist, and I barely feel them but I know they don’t feel as crumbling as they could. As they have. And as the night sears past they get higher on my ribs, melting like a little bit like I remember, close to my coma heart.