And so it goes

I didn’t ask for this life.

No one ever thinks of themselves not succeeding. It isn’t that I haven’t had any type of success at all in life. I just feel that I have not allowed myself to truly have any real success. My acceptable level of poverty and mediocrity has been on the decline since I gave up being happy. I thought it was for the best.

 

Now I find myself in a mind numbing existence making small talk with people I wouldn’t ordinarily even want to be around on a daily basis. Who makes friends at work? Is that a thing? I guess it was once when I was younger and had less desire to escape. Ah to be young and stupid.

 

I didn’t ask for this life. I don’t remember what it felt like to aspire to anything more that what I am.

When I lost my business I gave up dreaming. I began to survive. There is very little joy in this kind of living. I burrowed in, I drank it up and I ignored everything outside of my own stunted ability to see further than my own nose. I gave up joy. I gave up.

 

Somewhere along that time, my husband began to stray. He found solace in my best friend, and my best friend obliged him her time. She was single and she was always drunk so it would be easy to blame it on something else. He drank too. I watched it happen in front of my own eyes and I just kept drinking to ignore it. He didn’t mistreat me. In fact he treated me better than I had ever been treated in my life. I was happy for a while. I felt loved. I felt complete. He was getting the best of me and of my best friend.

So you know he was happy.

 

When do you stop protecting yourself? When you give up being happy? When you give your life up to something or someone else? How can we be expected to stay with someone for the rest of your life?

I don’t want to die alone. Not after I gave 20 years to him. He should be there for me when I need him. I plan on dying pretty soon. I’ve been chronic since I was in my early 20s and I’ve been cheating time since then. Now, I don’t have much to live for now that the only stability I have had in my life has just been pulled out from under me. I don’t want to stay with him, but I cannot afford to leave. DO I love him? Yes. But I think that is not always enough. Maybe no one ever really belongs to another. Maybe we are just on lend until the inevitable pain comes. It will come. They will deceive you and they will hurt you. You will yell and scream and cry. You will hit them and you will throw things against the wall. You will think about them fucking your best friends, you will think about them thinking about fucking your best friends.  You will look at your poor tired old body and wonder how anyone could ever love you after he did this to you. After you gave him your youngest best years. You look at him and you don’t want him anymore. You look at him and you wonder what you ever saw in him. Hes just like all the rest. He’s just like your fucking father.

Day ?

Uhg. I say uhg because I've got so much to catch up on. How many days can you spend thinking about things that have already passed? What's it like to not have a vivid imagination? I can't even go there. Spotify is my new best friend. Spotify is my new best enemy. It's all time suckage and head in the clouds. I've got to find better shoes my soul hurts. His face is four times less its normal size but is in complete proportion with the rest of our story. An abandoned Sonic Drive Thru. Cattails in the field between our houses. Pleasant Run Ave. Wood paneling and bathrooms with wall gas heaters that leaked that sweet sour smell. If I would have known then what I know now we could have played Sylvia Plath with our heads on the wood floor, nose pointed to the glowing ceramic grates.

When he comes in swaggering in belted trousers and clean slick hair the women are agog. Long gone have the days of grunge, side shaven head, long hair pulled back in messy mélange of bird nest fodder, ice blue hair gel and wheat fields. One can only think of the shrinkage of some things and the hopeful growth of others. I didn’t wear a chest bearing neckline for nothing. But still, when his hug became longer and the stubble on his face grazed upon my neck, and his warm breath made its whispered advances, my knees lost the gentle grace of gravity momentarily as his hand on my ass made sure I didn’t fall.

How many days can you spend thinking about things that have already passed you by?

My teenage crush made a pass at me.

**************************************

Our teenage monarchy was ruled by a queen. Her black widow lipstick and waterfall onyx hair over her left eye, wrists punched thru t-shirts to made them large and worn thin. Black leggings on thick Latina thighs with knee high boots laced tightly still race through my mind. You don’t understand, but everyone loved Valentina. Her name could leave a left a watermark on your heart if her half hidden smile didn’t.

Hey, I said its all right.. you know I won’t forget all the time I waited patiently for you..

In the frame house with wooden floors the walls were filled with gold rimmed picture frames with cardboard backing. They were the kind you would buy at the dime store to put your school portraits with crossed eyes and missing teeth and seriously bad hair in. These pictures were taken at various times of life ranging for the sickeningly sweet age of 5 or 6 to the zit riddled awkwardness of early pre teen, to the cap and gown with fake bookshelves behind you. All three girls had their own spot on various walls. It felt like home even though you were only a visitor. It was where you‘d raid the fridge, watch the tube, sneak cigarettes in the back yard and get holy water thrown on you periodically by the mother who shook her head and begged God to bless these creatures that had taken over her daughter’s life with Mohawks, safety pins, black hair dye and music that sounded like the opening of old tombs in the graveyard. It was only later when I got older and had my own beautiful daughter that I understood the gesture of the holy water as benign. There was nothing better than having a house full of teenagers eating my food and filling the bedrooms with laughter long into the stretching fall evenings of suburbia.

I’m not sure how I fit in these days. I was a girl, but my budding had yet to really blossom. I was rallying around the ugly duckling story for almost 16 years and nothing ever became of that happy ending. I tried in vain to follow her cues, bought the same looking clothes, but couldn’t help that the tshirts didn’t fall as gracefull off my chest and that the leggings hugged my dimpling fat and would roll over the mound of my stomach filled with yoohoo and tiny chocolate donuts. My constant struggle made me tug  She had unknowingly made every nuance of femininity follow her.   It clung to her hips and sparkled in her one unhidden eye. He hands like bird wings ever scribbling in her secret notebooks filled with poetry and lust, when they weren’t pushing away her shock of bangs away from her face. I have to say I felt like a 2X4 standing next to her, but I was totally in love with every strange and charming thing she ever said and did. If I would have been older and could have seen the eyes of every person I called my friend light up when she walked in the room I could have been president of her fan club and the membership would be forever growing in numbers.

On this one particular afternoon we stood shirtless in her bedroom carefully tearing, cutting and safety pinning our tshirts to make them more acceptable. Her best stretch was when she would take her knee and shove it into the arm pit of the poor pitiful rag and pull, teeth gritting with all her might, hearing the satisfying crackle of seams splitting, causing unraveling black threads to slowly domino out of their carefully sewn rows.

Day 3 1753

It can’t start from the beginning. As hard as I try to call forth the fuzzy memories of the daily doldrums of life it only gives me flashes of what made me. It wasn’t until I began to walk down the halls pounding my fists into the textured wall as I made my way to the last room on the left that the world called me to write.

The reason I bring up the house, the woods and the parents is because that always seems to be the first things I ever remember. In fact my earliest memories are of two things. Both involve my father. The first is being left in the baby tub in the bedroom and him turning off the lights on me. I must have been only around 2 or three years old at that time. When I tried to recall this memory to my mother she told me that could have never happened. The second was a memory of waking up in front of the TV playing Wizard of Oz and walking thru the house only to find that no one was home. There. Any armchair psychologist can figure what is wrong with me at this point. I’m not going to bore you.

When you are an only child your best friend becomes you imagination. Your second best friend becomes books. Your third and maybe just your first really may become food.  I have spent hours in therapy and easily thousands on self help manuals that tell me this, and why it happens and how to let it all go. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I will get over all of it someday. I am 42 years old and at least 4 or five times a year I succumb to a binge, worthy of self flagellation., and at least 4 or 5 times a day I wonder if it would just be easier to put on the sweat pants, quit my job and eat myself to death with my weights worth of tiny chocolate donuts. As they say, the struggle is real.

The only thing that ever made me feel whole and fulfilled before I became a parent, (and that took a while) was writing. Long languid lines I would write in unlined journals for my own secret joy. Self satisfaction is a drug. You work hard on something that is all your own and when it is done it is a real celebration.  My love affair with the lifestyle came in the guise of a boy, which is why I bring up T.

The physicality of a relationship when you are 14 is limited, at least in my day it was. We didn’t get as far as second base (at that time) but because we shared our first kiss, in the rain, his brace teeth crushing against mine in a cringe worthy meld that quickly turned into a blissful short time stopping moment that will live forever in the middle of Bluegrove Rd under a canopy of trees, while being drenched in the rain.  How is that for a run on sentence. But I digress.

The most attractive thing about him to me was his brain. T was lucky to have had a houseful of older brothers and sisters that left him a rich experience in pop culture and music. He was a walking encyclopedia of all the songs you should be listening to and all the books you should be reading. He was a rebel by the book, he smoked, he grew his hair long, he read the books they told everyone they shouldn’t read, watched the movies that had tasteful nudity and violence that was always appropriate for the subject matter. I just thought he was amazing. There’s the first problem.

"I like being around writers because the make me feel more sane. I can relate to the constant struggle of observe and record, and the noisy brain music that goes along with. But mostly its a game of acting until it becomes second nature. I didn't want one to know that secretly I wasn't slitting my wrists and banging my head on a keyboard at 3am. I was actually just asleep in my cozy bed, 2 painkillers and a beer keeping me there."

It doesn’t take long when you are in a relationship (real or  imagined) till things inevitably have to change. For me it was the wretched summer that tore me away from the place I should have been. Before I left for a summer in exile to the arid skies of south texas, T made me a mixtape. I know this may be beyond most readers but back in the day we made cassette tapes carefully crafted from our own jamboxes and recorded either from the radio (what a past time! The trick was knowing when the song may come on, running across the room to get the very beginning and knowing when to cut out before the d-j came on with his annoying banter. ) This was a very special mix tape. Side one was The Doors album in full, Side two was Strange Days, again by the Doors. The hyper sexual syrup of Jim Morrison threw me in a direction I could barely understand. Somehow I knew that this man was my true love! But I’d had to settle for T.

The long summer days gnawed at me. I couldn’t call him lest I incur the wrath of the telephone bill from my aunt who barely even made local calls. She would actually walk to her friends house down the road than call her. It was that kind of town tho. There was little to offer a teen besides a movie theater, an ice cream shop and a convenience store that carried VHS tapes. That was the summer of horror films for me. Every afternoon we’d grab gramma’s black umbrella to block the tremulous sun and we walked in our cut off shorts and tube tops (still nothing filling that out) to find our next wonderful psycho sexual thrill of a bloodbath that could have no way been know to our parents had become our nightly viewing. I saw more ketchup, dismembered bodies and breasts that summer than I have seen in my adult life (good thing!)

The only thing I could actually do to let my sophisticated cousins (15 and16) know that I was actually ‘going with’ a boy was show them his picture in the yearbook we had received right before we left for summer break. In the excitement of the last day I had failed to even get him to sign his name, much less leave me a detailed love note in the crease of the spine declaring his true and undying love for me. He actually had never even said those words to me, but I KNEW he felt it when I left a hickey the size of Rhode Island on his neck. But alas no promise ring, no phone calls or letters from home.. yet.

“So is he cute?” Rosalinda asked between snapping her gum and twirling the massive umbrella on her tank top strap shoulder “ He’s white ain’t he?”

“Yeah,” I answered hopefully, I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. As for cute, I couldn’t really call him that. He didn’t look like Simon Le Bon or John Taylor. What was I going to say? “oh he’s dreamy and he has braces and thick glasses’ These girls didn’t know anything about brains and wit. They were dating the football hunks and had pictures framed on their walls of their homecoming dance complete with two ton mum pulling the spaghetti straps of their pastel colored gowns.  They’d have them over for dinner they made by themselves. They’d poiur over the back issues of Good Housekeeping and find the recepies headlined ‘HOW TO PLEASE YOUR HUNGRY MAN’ while I was sneaking Cosmos and reading about the different types of orgasms. You pick and choose in this life, ladies.

‘Does he have a nice tush?’ Marilee said poking rosa in the ribs and winking her eye

“You guys are gross”

I walked up ahead of them trying to ignore the chatter.

“It’s too bad you are going steady, Mara’s boyfriend’s cousin is in from Houston and he wanted someone to triple with.”

Wha-what. Houston? He might actually have a brain in his head. How worldly!

“Hey, I don’t know what your Neanderthal boyfriends are like with you, but mine wouldn’t care if I went out to a movie or something. What were you going to do? I said walking backwards in front of them, watching my feet for cracks and rocks on broken asphalt.

“ Ha HA! I knew it!” Mara exclaimed “Well Roger is going to get us some fake IDs and we are we are going to the border to have a little fun. Jose is going to drive. That’s your date”

“He’s sixteen?” I said nonchalantly trying not to give away the fact that it scared me

“ oh no, he’s 18. We figured because you are from the big city it wouldn’t make much difference. Hey we can put some make up on you and you can borrow a dress from Rosa. It will be great.”

Gulp. Great.

 

Walking back home from the video store, a letter was there for me! T had written!!

Dear Mildred,

I keep having conversations with you in my head.  Whenever
I'm walking down the street I imagine you walking
with me.  We talk about anything, nothing.  I see you smile,
the sunbeams glancing off your hair in rivers of molten gold.
Maybe my vision could become a reality.  Maybe you'll read
this and think "eww...creep."  Or maybe you'll think
"oh, that's sweet.  What a poor misguided fool."  In any case,
Here it goes:  Mildred, would you like to walk with me?

T

My heart swelled at the thought. I tore open the envelope. The Actual Letter Read:

 

 

Mil,

I miss you. I haven't had any fun this summer at all. My parents took us camping. Ug!!!! They closed the neighborhood pool cuz of the West Nile. Stupid mosquitoes.  I saw Charlotte there. She got a job washing all the towels the stupid jocks use when they practice for swim team, but they fired her cuz of the mosquitos and stuff. We went out and had a pop  at the Dairy King.  Can you call tonight?

T

 

WTF?

 

Day 2 part 3 647.. Day total 1306

Life after Vegas felt tragic. I had come back into town in the middle of winter and the trees and grass were dead. The sun rarely came out and out my old bedroom window the branches scraped against the panes like skeleton fingers. My father was hell bent on sending me back where I came from, even if it meant being locked up like an animal again. My mother was happy to have me back, but I was beginning to feel like I had taken a giant leap back into the life I was trying to escape. Within days of settling back, I began to see some of my old friends who had stayed in town. I knew this would not be conducive to a new life, but I was lonely. My friends welcomed me back with open arms. One of them was my old boyfriend, T. T was my first real boyfriend, (well as real as a junior high romance can get) He was and is the most intelligent person I have ever known. He was reading and pontificating on literature and political issues years before I even considered picking up a book for fun. He was always passing me things to read that he felt were important things for me to know. Over the years we had been together off and on. He gave me Ayn Rand, Hunter S. Thompson, and Oscar Wilde. I gave him The Little Prince by Antoine St. Exupery and read him poetry by Anne Sexton. He turned me on to The Doors, Mickey's Malt Liquor, and maryjane. I turned him on to oral sex and thrift stores. He turned me on to cigarettes and pool tables. Once when I was in college and we weren't dating, he drove about 100 miles on a Friday night to come see me, with a car load of my friends and almost got killed by a big rig that ran them off the road. That was the first night we fucked. We drank mickey's and I stole his rasta hat and ran down the halls of my dorm laughing. They say you never get over your first love, until you realize that what you had wasn’t really love at all. What we did have together was fun. Oh T in your beat up blue jeans and limbs that went for miles, anglo bone fingers so different than mine. Rice paper skin and when cold turn almost blue. Cigarette smoke breath and long demon hair. What could I do to rid my mind of you still aching for the answer of why I wasn’t good enough for You and your family In my brown middle class skin ‘Here, take this’ he said pulling a bottle from inside his coat pocket ‘ I don’t want that shit. Put it away. Can’t we just sit here for a bit’ ‘you don’t want to sit here, you want more. Otherwise you wouldn’t have snuck out of your house in the middle of the night to be with me. Here, have a drink. It will warm you up’ The wind blows the swing on the dark playground in front of us, a foreboding squeal against the quite country night. The bottle is warm and I pull a swallow between my shivering lips. Its sweet and it is warming. ‘There you go…It isn’t bad is it?’ ‘No, it’s ok’ and arm twine and tangle around my waist and fingers settle under sweater onto my skin of my belly. He smells like cigarettes and I like it. His chin is gruff with stubble and I like it when he rubs it against my face. We sit and drink out of the bottle until we are too cold to continue. The green interior lights his face and reflect in his glasses when he takes them off and places them on the dashboard.

Day 2 part two, 233

There was the time the wasps stung your face. You were poor and they had nothing to give you but baby aspirin and a thick layer of cold mud over the throbbing pain. A cot was made In your mother and fathers bedroom under the window AC, and you slept waking up later in the dark cool room and dried mud crumbling over your pillow. In the summer it was so hot that your mother had to place cold wet washcloths on your head to make you sleep, the windows open to the stagnant air floating off the top of the scum of the trinity. The window screen had patches, and the wooden frames showed signs of rot. The window itself was propped open with a cut off wooden dowel. There was the time you mother asked you to draw a bath for father who was on his way home and everyone forgot and the hallway flooded over the yellow shag carpeting. It smelled like mildew after for months and months. These would be some of the things you’d remember later. But for now the world was becoming larger as your fathers pick- up truck was loaded full of all your things. But not the playhouse and that made you very sad. Don’t cry honey, Daddy will make you a new one. Mama soothed. I don’t want another one, I want my house

day 2 part one 426

It was fall when we first moved into the house on the cul de sac on the edge of the world. Far out passed the junkyard and railroad crossing, past the tiendita where we would walk to buy penny candies and cartons of milk to drink with dinner. Past the center of town where the sewing shop was. Past the preschool where they fed us beets and lima beans and the rugs smelled like pee. Once we hit the sparseness and the fields started to open their cornrow melodies against the beating dirt lined roads as we drove past and the flocks of blackbirds swooped in and around the dusty tires as we road on, I had forgotten about the gritty alleys and the iron bars on our front door and windows. Mother opened up the window and I smelled hay for the first time and sneezed. The rumbling truck came to halt at the end of the circle we turned into with houses of every size and shape, with browning but manicured and well cut lawns. There were bikes in drive ways, some with scattered toys and tire swings. Kids lived here. I began to bounce in my seat as we stopped in our new driveway. Pristine white siding and off white bricks. Crepe myrtles with their last blooms of pink, an oak burnishing its orange and gold turning red leaves in the dull autumn gray. A small strange tree with short trunk and wild limbs turning like arms up to the sky with tiny green leaves that I would come to find out would ever die or turn color, because it was an evergreen. Three steps to the white wood door. A tiny concrete porch and a two car garage. Suburbia at its finest. They had told me that I was a big girl now so I deserved my own room. The walls had been painted a peptol bismol pink for my arrival and in the corner was the most magnificent bed I had ever seen, Pink canopy with frills and soft pillows. Mine? Mine? I began to examine every inch of the house, and my finest discovery was that the previous tenant had left some things in the garage. A cigar box with about twenty assorted miniature ceramic animals. A green flat turtle with magnificent flippers, a white kitten with cartoon face features, a doe with exaggerated eyelashes and come hither smile, a dopey brown dog with large ears hanging past his chin and many more. Why would someone leave their babies alone?

Day one 1,367

The town sprawled out from itself; flat land surrounded on the outskirts by cotton and hey fields. Its name came from someone who found themselves in the inverted mesa, maybe even a ground zero of an explosion of some kind of past civilizations. Its body of land was intersected by a creeks of ten miles that snaked its way behind some of the biggest and most luxurious homes of the town while also curving into abandoned lots with tree lines blocking off the properties. From the car rides you took daily you know that tree line meant running water, tadpoles in the spring and fat toads in the summertime. The clean clear water which ran from a spring your father took you to see once after a long slosh against the moving water, jeans rolled up over knees and at one point chest deep and arms raised with the glimmering sunlight cutting laser lines between the spaces of the pecan tree leaves above. The spring somehow magically muttering from one small muddy hole up that endless gentle incline, clear, clean and undulating all that time from perhaps years and years ago. The wonder of life is this. How things just exist on their own accord without you knowing about it. That one day you do find out, your world does then become a very magical place. It will begin to become your life’s work to find all these beginnings, to have grace in the notion that all things will come to an end. Summer Breeze by Seals and Croft. You are sitting in the hot back seat of the 1970s model Plymouth in polyester shorts and itchy lime green tube top, nothing actually filling it in. Flat chest of 6 year old, knees perpetually skinned and bruised. Even to this day you are always in such a hurry you bump and scratch on every surface you come in contact with. You are a continuous body and soul in various states of healing processes. Now its late morning and swinging feet in pink plastic flip flops kick the back of the driver’s seat, burgundy vinyl sticks to the sweaty stubs of chubby legs. Mother sewed those shorts, blue with white pattern clusters of flowers that stretch out unrecognizable over the baby fat you still carry. Baby Fat, Baby Fat.. It is very hard for her to find clothes to fit you at this age so she goes to the fabric shops to buy scraps of fabric to sew into basic (very) shorts and pants. This is the fabric store you plunge your short arms into the bins of buttons to feel the cool plastic discs glide between your fingers. You stand and play quietly with the sensation of what wind chimes must feel like when they tingle. The style of the day dictates that everything you wear for the first 10 years of your life is polyester and tight. You have no choice in the matter. Money is tight and you wear what you are given, but what you really want is a T-shirt with the Bee Gees on it, with your name in iron on fuzzy orange letters on the back. Hey look, there she is! How clever for her to have her name on her shirt! I was wondering where that great kid was! I could be famous like little Janet Jackson doing her Mae West impression. I had gumption and cuteness. I had moxie. But I didn’t have the clothes that matched that. Always in the car, always on the move, first you go to the grocery store You hoist a plastic crate with empties into the slot and the lady behind the counter gives you a quarter and dime and a nickel. . A nickel in a box gets you a Brachs candy, coconut chocolate is your favorite. Mom picks ground beef in the family size packs, dried beans, milk, cottage cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato, a glass liter of Coke, marshmallow chocolate cookies, captain crunch (peanut butter flavor), black olives and tins of sardines. Next to the Quesada’s. Baby Ida calls you Anna Lisa and you don’t know why. The Quesada family is girls girls girls, and you don’t know quite how many because you can’t count that high. The back bedroom that they all share is really a TV room, entertainment den with a sunken area and at the back of the continuous room almost a stage where two of the beds are. There are clothes, shoes and bras everywhere. The girls range from maybe 13 to 18, all teenagers and even Baby Ida isn’t a baby and that confuses you as well. Their mom had tough leathery brown almost red skin, pock marked with acne scars. She doesn’t scare you because she is kind and sweeps you up in her thick tortilla slapping hands and meat cutting arms and makes you feel warm. You can remember her from when you were an infant you think. She soaped your baby fat in the kitchen sink and powdered and diapered you as you were her own. You mother worked nights then, your father rarely home from his truck driving job, and when he was he was asleep. Mrs Quesada made your fideos and your beans with extra juice because it was good for your tummy. The trees in the backyard are oak. The leaves always shimmer and glide in the sunlight and wind. There is a tiny playhouse in the back yard, a tiny tudor house painted white with pink trim. It only has two built in seats and a window to look out of. You love this house and beg Baby Ida to let you stay outside alone when she has grown bored of 6 year old imagination play. She leaves you and you begin to make tacos out of oak leaves and grass. Carful on your imagined comal, its hot and you will burn the tips of your fingers like mama does if you are not careful. Look mama, I found a pajarito. In cupped hands I pad into the kitchen with baby bird. I open my hands and the bird breaks free and flies dumbly into the walls. Mother screams and I begin to cry..I want my baby back, why did she go away? Daddy runs into the kitchen and begins to try and shoo away the bird out the open back door. It flies behind the stove and I begin to wail. The bird will burn to death and it’s my fault. Mother picks me up and takes me away from the kitchen..I cry myself till I exhaust to sleep. It’s the ride across the neighborhood back home. Into the yellow kitchen with the yellow phone, yellow and white vinyl seats and formica table. Baloney sandwiches with mustard on white bread. Purple Koolaid and corn chips. Back outside is your own playhouse, on stilts, tudor top covered with shingles that your dad built just for you. Small brown chairs and a menagerie of stuffed animals, a Rangers ball cap, a table with puzzles and a coffee can filled with broken crayons. Your life is food, over abundance and love. Your father works long hours and stays away for days. You are poor but don’t know it because they give you everything you need and you want for nothing. It is their plan to make you feel this security they never had as children, and have already succeeded in preventing you from knowing work at an early age by picking fruit or cotton. They are constant in their battle to make your life better than theirs, and later in the year you will move from this house to a better larger one in a safer neighborhood that will allow you to go to a better school than you would be doomed to living on the other side of those tracks. Everything you have ever known about home and your life will change. You will have your own slice of that creek running behind your own home. You will have an acre of land to dig up rocks in and run through as fast as your chubby little legs will carry you.