He put his trumpet case down on the bench next to me, sat, and sighed. I looked over and smiled, and he nodded back, inquiring after the bus. My smalltalk exhausted, I leaned back against the bus stop's shelter just as he leaned forward and took a long look at me. "You're a singer, aren't you? A lead singer, I'll bet." "Nope, not a singer. Can't sing at all." I shrugged apologetically, hands spread wide. He had a pair of drumsticks in one pocket and softly greying hair. His shoulders rolled forward and he looked as tired as I felt.

I have fallen into the habit of talking to magical strangers whenever I find them, so we meandered into a conversation about our respective talents. As the discussion lapsed a moment he looked at me sideways and said, "Happy Valentine's Day, by the way. You married?" "Nope." "Good. I think that's good. I was married once. Woman left me up in Alaska. Took my best trumpet and my guitar player with her. He was mean as hell but that cat could play anything with strings." At this point, I started to suspect that he was having me on. I've met many an old jazz man who spoke in the same way, scattered in broken down joints in red dirt states, but in Seattle? On Eastlake? It was just a little bit much. But he looked the part, about sixty and with hands knotted from years of heavy use, and who am I to say where magical jazz men are to be found? I smiled again and patted the aging hand resting on the case between us.

He nodded at me again, flexed his feet, tapped the toe of one of his shoes with a drumstick. "Yep, little girl, I'm getting old. These shoes here, they've got a lot of miles left on them. It's the soles of my feet that are wearing thin."

My brother shot himself in the hand with an arrow. Only my brothers manage to defy the laws of physics in order to injure themselves. (See also: hitting themselves in the face with golf clubs.)

Some of the things I've said in the last week that were immediately followed by, "What? Don't look at me like that!" are: "I'm very fond of the adverb. I think it's probably my favorite part of speech." "Of course I know all the words to this Justin Timberlake song. There are only, like, four of them." "I can see how you might want to have sex with a cantaloupe, which if human would have nice hips that you could really hold on to, but watermelon? Watermelon would talk a good game but, when it came down to it, just lay there and sigh." "And I, for one, welcome our new earthworm overlords."

I was wandering around Pioneer Square this morning, on my way to the bookstore, and the sun seemed to have moved in under everyone's skin. Each person I passed smiled and said hello, absolutely pleased to be out and using whichever of their limbs were still available to them.

When I was younger, my family would deal with my self consciousness by telling me that it didn't matter, whatever I was so worried about, because no one was watching anyway.

But if I learned anything last year it's that people are in fact watching, to the extent that they sometimes feel the need to chase me down the street and go, approximately, "Hey there, little lady. I've been watching you sitting here/walking down the street/through your living room window for the past few hours/days/weeks/months. But, um, in a totally not creepy way. No, really. Say, do you want to go make out?" (The year before last, people were just seeing me and saying hello, which, although it did contain a very illuminating lesson in heartbreak, was slightly easier to handle. I don't know what they're going to do this year, but I hope they don't step on my heels while they're doing it. I hate that.)

The only explanation I have for this phenomenon is my red hair--because of the grey days and dim light in this town boys latch onto it like magpies or something. Anyway, these things certainly never happened when I was mouse-brown and lived in Florida. And the thing about all of this watching is that it makes me very self conscious, and I start thinking about the walking that I'm doing and that you're watching, and then I fall down. Sort of like how you breathe just fine as long as you're not thinking about it, but the second you stop to consider breathing it becomes a chore.

The point of all of this is that I tripped and fell again today--onto the grass, fortunately, saving both my clothes and limbs from some holes for once--and I'm blaming it on you. Rather than, say, my big feet and inefficient equilibrium. You and your watching.

(For those of you that are wondering, I spent Valentine's Day with some clever pretty people watching other pretty people cover Duran Duran songs at the Crocodile. It was excellent. Also, internet, I think you are doing voodoo spells on me in your homes. This week I've gotten email requesting my personality profile [INFJ] and my blood type [A+]. I don't get email from you people for weeks and weeks and now it's all weird shit like this? Is there a full moon? Are you kids on drugs?)

Hey there, spring. I saw you today, up in the high branches of that tree, sending out that first purple flower to test the air and take a look around. I know you'll be here before too long, rummaging around in my skin like a hobo with my goddamned point tied up in your handkerchief, setting my fingerprints on fire and sending me off to wreak havoc with my smile. I'm already baking you a batch of cookies in my head to use for a welcome mat.

I already knew that you'd be showing up soon, since four people that I know have had babies in the last two weeks. And I've still got a few weeks left of scarves and pink gloves before it'll be time to switch to skirts and cardigans. But I can feel your approach in the backs of my knees. It feels like the ten seconds before I wake up from a really good nap, before I open my eyes and remember everything I've forgotten while sleeping.

1.)
His left hand scrabbled through the needles on the table, looking for one still capped, while his right hand cinched the tie-off. It was a dance so often practiced that it had become a reflex, as easy as breathing.

2.)
Driving home from the beach with the windows open, late at night, left foot folded up against the dashboard. A car pulled up next to me at a stoplight and I looked over, surprised to see a heavily deformed face looking back at me. The cheeks bulged, bubbled, the eye sunken in a deep mound of flesh. I blinked in shock and when I looked back over at the car the face had changed, was no longer uneven, was recognizably human. Or perhaps I had changed. A trick of the light, or of my eye, or both.

3.)
We kissed on the hill, near the tracks where during daylight the child-size model train ran. The stars shone the way they only can in the glow surrounding the first boy you ever thought you loved, and as we paused, lips still warm and eyes promising, the sprinklers turned on. We ran for cover, the glistening sky already forgotten, unimportant.

My mother just sent me a flower arrangement made entirely of fruit. She is clearly the best. (My coworkers all came crowding in, yelling, "samantha, is that from a boy?" They were wildly disappointed that it was from my mom. I think that's pretty funny.)

There was a look like an em dash in the bottom right corner of your eyes, a look like the answer to the question of what happens when circular and elliptical orbits overlap.

A scar on the very center of my lower back, almost completely faded now, is left over from an adventure right around this time last year. I forget that it's there, most days. Because of the delicacy of my skin, it's possible to read me like a text, head to toe. These documents are faint but never vanish entirely. Not really.

Today I was caught in a sun shower. Sun showers are what it's like inside my head.

Mixed in with a mostly complimentary email one of you sent me yesterday, trying to explain why I'm so restless and impatient and just generally a pain in the ass, was this little gem: "Your name of samantha also means that you cannot find peace of mind or lasting contentment in anything you do. As soon as a challenge is met, boredom sets in, and you yearn for another experience. This restlessness makes it difficult for you to assume responsibility and to establish stable, progressive conditions in your life."

Ouch, man. Also, all of my pinball tables will always be tilted.

One of my habits when I'm traveling is to buy postcards, write things on them and address them to myself, stamp them, and then put them back in the rack. Often people will find them weeks or months later and toss them in a postbox, and I'll get a nice little reminder of my trip. One from my Boston trip came today, and what it says is, "Today you were walking to Bunker Hill and found a little bouquet sitting on a stone wall. A note underneath it said 'Thank You' in loopy handwriting. You left it there and then met a nice Frenchman on the other side of the bridge."

Somewhere in the last day or so the brighter parts of my philosophy have been routed horse, foot, and artillery by a familiar sinking feeling. Hello, No Reason Sads, I haven't seen you yet this year. Bless your little heart. (I'm cheered, however, by the fact that there are no Incorrect Persons in my vicinity these days. So that still works.)

But there are lots and lots of things happening happening the next few days, with the varied and interesting people I know, and the best way to deal with the No Reasons is to ignore them until they go away. Like stray cats.

Photo courtesy of Jon.

After I've gone, to Gibraltar or the bottom of the ocean or for a nap in a little box, you can consult your file. Five feet tall, it'll say, but almost always wore three inches worth of heels. Would insist that she was not sleeping. Clumsy. Was convinced that your coat pockets were for her hands. In the bottom of the file you'd keep a scrap of gingham and a razor blade. It's how you'd prefer to remember me.

I like to consider what you would think if you found my parts sown across the country like dandelion fluff. If, coming across my left arm up to the elbow nestled under a tree in Montana, you'd think, hated her freckles but, more than that, really hated how everyone else liked them. Wanted you to like her best. Or my collarbones crossed and leaning against a road sign in Georgia, murmuring, enjoyed running but only when no one was looking. Three toes, out of sequence and buried in the sand on the Jersey shore, remembering, loved your hands in her hair. Couldn't remember jokes or names. Always tried a little too hard.

I wonder if you would gather my parts and put them with your file in a box on the top shelf of your closet, or if you would leave them there to speak softly to the next wanderer. Wanted to bite, but didn't, usually. Liked the back of your neck and the hollow of your throat equally. Frequently beset by melancholy, but tried not to let it interfere. Was sleeping.

It waits for me in pictures, a faint strain of a song half remembered, a touch of fabric under sorry fingers. A memory that settles like dust on a wallowing sparrow.

I should speak to you with my lips pressed to the underside of your chin, so that whatever I have to say might pass through your tongue to rattle in your head. After a day sitting quietly in the rain my fingers feel as though they're rusting, smelling of old magazines and creaking like a rocking chair. I'm storing up the quiet in my bones so that come springtime there will be a solid place from which to sprout flowers.

Hey hey, New York City, I'm coming to your house in May. We haven't seen each other in almost six years; let's go to museums and stay up late telling ghost stories.

(Utah, I'm coming to your house in April, but I don't have any tickets yet.)

Dear everyone,

In case you missed it somehow, today is the last day of January and 2007 is off like racehorses and prom dresses and other things that move to other places with alacrity. (Never having gone to a prom I can’t be strictly sure about the accuracy of that second one, but you’re not here for accuracy anyway.) I have spent the month in the following ways: making new friends and then drinking with them, stammering, canoodling, pacing, scratching behind the ears of friendly dogs, proposing to inanimate objects (see also: my red colander, new couch, and the new Busdriver album), shaking my ass, cooking, drinking with old friends, watching documentaries about under the water, and trying to bribe the telephone to ring. Also, lying on the floor, idly conspiring with the ceiling to run away to the very tip of Gibraltar in order to commune with the wee monkeys and set up a network of tin-cans-and-strings telephones to North Africa.

In all I’m pretty satisfied with January. I spent what felt like most of the last few months prior to this one arguing, and feeling by turns annoyed and ignored, and putting a firm end to that was the smartest possible start to my year. (You may have noticed that I did not write to you in November or December, and that was because most of what I had to talk about was strictly off-the-record sort of stuff.) I don't take care of myself as well as I ought, which is not at all good since this is the only self that I have.

The trouble with me is that I am by default kinder than is strictly necessary, so I am constantly stabbing myself in all of my softer places. I am honestly trying to improve myself, and part of that needs to be finding a balance between what is best for you and what is best for me. With any luck, the two won't often be so distant anyway.

And man, am I incredibly rich in friends, I've realized again lately; more friends than any one very flawed little girl really deserves. All these people who accept all of my eccentricities, not just the cute ones. It's a profoundly shocking thing, and one that I hope to never grow used to.

As it stands today I am at home and content in this keyhole. As though on the inside of my skin, written in ribbon, were the words, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”

love,
me

I was reading today about a sort of parasite called Sacculina that takes over crabs. What it does, this little barnacle, is wander over a crab until it finds a joint, at which point it injects itself into the creature. It then wraps itself around the crab's eyestalks and legs and grows until part of it peeks out from under the little guy's shell.
At this point, the Sacculina takes over completely, steering the crab around and occasionally making a boy crab look like a girl crab.

I just thought you should know.

Yesterday I met a very nice old dog with an equally nice old man walking it. We had a brief conversation that seemed to speak directly to another discussion I had had only moments before, and talking to TMS tonight he wondered how it is that I keep getting the answers I need from the world around me. I told him just what I've said before, that we have made ourselves a world of metaphors which are always revealing themselves if we pay close enough attention. That it's all a matter of looking, and looking is what I do. It's not a secret. I've been lost in this driveway before.

When I woke up this morning, my whole skin hurt. Not badly, just lightly bruised all over, like after a long afternoon rolling down unforgiving hills. From the top of my silly haircut to the tips of my cold little toes. I lay there in my warm comfortable bed for a few minutes, considering. I haven't fallen down lately, and I wasn't drinking last night in order to have fallen down and forgotten it. Didn't feel sick; probably not the flu. So I did what any sensible person would do in such a situation: demanded sympathy.
Tobes answered the phone quietly--it was about 11:00 on the East coast and he was at work making widgets or whatever he does now. "Captain Toby," I wailed, "my skin hurts all over and I think I might be melting! Feel sorry for me right now, please!" I could here him click something on his computer and then draw a breath. "Poor mouse," he answered, "should I call you a whaaaambulance?"
In retaliation I called his girlfriend and told her I needed her to short sheet their bed for me tonight. Jerk.

So by tonight my skin still hurts and I think I'm going to take a very long bath. I'm probably just very tired, after Wednesday's lengthy girlparty and last night's show. Inside my head is all rungohide, so everything is normal there, and I'm just playing "When Sunny Gets Blue" over and over again until I feel differently about things. (There are many reasons that that song is my favorite in the whole history of songs, but the big one is that for the entire length of it I feel exactly perfect.) I find it incredibly amusing that I've got you all fooled into seeing Confident and Well Put Together when, if you were to put a buttercup under my chin, you would really see Vulnerable and Easily Broken all stained yellow. But I picked these shoes, and now I'll have to just brazen out the rest of the walk.

Be nice to me, or I will short sheet your bed.

Oh man, Seattle, you are all up in my dance space. Every time I turn around, there you are, trying to climb into my shopping cart and hide underneath the apples. Doesn't seem to matter that I've already looked at you sternly, that my shopping cart is already filled with things I put there myself.

We can hang out and listen to records, Seattle, but you are not coming home with me.

You know what I love? I love that in a few months it'll be light until 10:30, and that when it's happening it'll really irritate the heck out of me but that right now a sunset just before bed sounds like the best thing going.

The tip of my nose has had a twitch for days. I don't know what that means, but it's provided me with a valid excuse to walk up to many people and go, "Hey, can you see my nose twitching? You know, like a bunny? No? Are you sure? Look right here. Because it certainly feels like it's twitching." Please do not make any references to Bewitched or you will be fired immediately.

I have a bottle of Land Before Time chewable vitamins on my desk at work, because I cannot be expected to swallow those great big horse pill multivitamins, especially not before coffee, but since my diet consists almost exclusively of pizza, beer, and sushi I need some sort of supplement. My problem currently is that everything ever flavored like grape is gross, and now all that is left in the bottle is a thick layer of purple dinosaurs. I don't want to throw them away because that would be wasteful, but I'm absolutely not going to eat them. I'm seriously considering turning them into magnets.

I am tired of wearing pants. I really enjoyed the snow and all, but now I'd like it to warm up just enough that my legs don't freeze off in a skirt, please. Actually, could we just fast forward to spring? Thanks.

You know, one of these days here soon we are going to go on an adventure. I haven't felt much like adventuring lately, oscillating unreasonably between refusing to leave my apartment and staying out much, much too late; all of which is a kind of adventure, certainly, but not the right kind.

So my plan for us is this: we are going to build a clown car out of popsicle sticks and chewing gum and drive around the block twelve times listening to the Stereo Total song "I Am Naked" the whole time. I can guarantee that I'll be giggling uncontrollably for the entire experience because I think that song is the funniest shit going, and by the time we've finished round twelve and pulled back up in front of your apartment you'll be ready for pretending we're unicorns or bank robbing or boxing or whatever ridiculous thing I've decided is next. And that, there, will be our adventure. Or anyway, part of it.

Because you know what e e cummings meant when he said, "You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included." Back before I wrote your name on my games of MASH and rigged it so you always won you perhaps wondered if it was even possible to build a clown car out of anything but cartoons. And clearly, the answer to that is yes.

But the more important answer is that the next rest stop might be inhabited by a lost princess with cornflower blue eyes, and we could be her only way to safety. And three towns over could be the shortbread recipe of my dreams. On the other side of this very city there just might be one last lamp with one last genie with one last wish, and I could totally waste that wish on a lifetime supply of gravy.

And that, there, might be another part of the adventure.

I waited at the bus stop today with the old man. It had been a few weeks since I'd seen him and I was starting to worry, and my relief was clearly plain to him when he sat down and patted my leg. We didn't say much, he slumped at the shoulders and my eyelids sandy with lack of sleep. I've been dreaming the last few nights of dead girls; no one I can recognize awake, but all certainly no longer alive. I spend all of these dreams trying to save, fix, or understand, and they're exhausting.

He smiled thinly at me, looking older than he ever has before, skin stretched tight over his temples. I watched his hands, lightly clasped on his lap and trembling slightly, and wondered where he goes when he gets off the bus.

Later, on the way home, a man sat with a thick picture frame propped on his knees, unconsciously commuting in disguise as a masterpiece.

Tonight, internet, was a night of first things.

The most important of these first things is that I was, strangely, recognized as the muppet-headed personality behind this very website. Now, I've been at this for a few years, and although there are many of you out there that I don't know, none of you have ever wandered up at girls night (or, for that matter, anywhere else) and said hello.

I, honestly, had absolutely no idea what to say, having accepted the fact of existing in near-total obscurity. But, seriously? Second coolest thing that's happened to me so far this year.

The other first thing is that I was tricked into agreeing to karaoke for the first time ever, and, bolstered by whiskey, made my debut with "Hit Me With Your Best Shot." I have really got to stop agreeing to do things in the name of adventure, but the benefit of doing such things at a girl party is that the ladies said lots of nice things about my performance afterwards. They were totally lying (stage presence?!) but I appreciated the vote of confidence. It's too bad that, singing, I sound suspiciously like Scuttle from The Little Mermaid, but fortunately the whole thing eventually degenerated into a dance party in front of the stage while people better equipped handled the microphone.

The trouble is...the trouble is that not all rectangles are squares.

I have a decidedly unpleasant habit of turning anything resembling a molehill into a mountain of card houses, and because I've had all this unmotivated free time lately everything that might invoke dwelling has had food shoved at it. That way when my brain makes attention-grabbing jabs at my soft bits and starts with the, "Hey, why isn't..." I can just tell it, "No, no time for that now. Making cookies, you see. And then this casserole and some muffins. And...pasta! That, there, that you want to think about will just have to be thought about at some other time."

Having a great time, though. Flour-smudges-on-the-nose-and-solo-underpants-dancing kind of fun.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself, "Self, why not change your name to Lorraine? Why not wear your hair in pincurls and learn hypnosis and go on the road with a three-legged dog?" And self answers back, "Sugar, why not just calm your shit down and breathe?"

And what I really want to know is this: if one is playing Trivial Pursuit with someone famous, does that person get a pie if the answer is themselves?

Late tonight, all cooked out and completely derailed by a lingering trace of unexpected vanilla, quiet and pecking softly back at myself on the little blue typewriter. Smiling.

On the bus today I found myself distracted not by the snow, which was quietly re-covering everything that had been made clear since Wednesday, but by the open circles under the evergreens. At the base of each lay a swath as wide as its branches of clear ground, places where the leaves had proven too thick for the light snow to filter its way down.

The grass in those clear spaces looked wildly vulnerable, bordered as they were by the uniform white of the fresh snowfall. As though I had caught it in the middle of revealing something it hadn't quite meant to say.

If you were me, you would like:

Curls, on other people
The way that babies heads smell
Drinking champagne from the bottle
Argyle
The flashes of cameras from the Space Needle at dusk
The gloaming
Being petted
Kissing
Elderly couples holding hands
Unexpectedly long phone calls

If you were me, you would not like:

Lettuce
Nosebleeds
Meanness
Late buses
Cockroaches

Snow is a pretty good trade-off for sadly foiled dinner plans, thick slushy flakes lightly trailing down cheeks reddened from the cold, tangling damply in eyelashes. And so for hours I wander through the empty, muffled streets, walking and walking, feeling at the same time both invisible and covered in photophores, pinpointable from space. Charmed and untouchable.

Later, pushing open the door to a warm apartment, prepared to sit in the dark for hours watching the snowfall. Realizing that it's not so much that everything will get better but that it already is.

SNOW!!

Meet me at the corner between there and here. I'll be holding my hands cupped together as though hidden in the soft folds of my palm is a secret, something small and bright and only to be shared just then. Like grains of sand that could be talked into giving up a wealth of smoke signals and soft touches, whatever I have concealed in my hands could change everything.

And.

I am always awkward and that particular corner makes my heart pound and my mouth run. But for the duration of this fantasy we will pretend that that is not so, that I am capable of completing sentences in sequence and do not need a haircut and five really deep breaths. That I do not put too much stake in plans I have yet to formulate. Pretend that this is a costume party and I am only playing the part of the fool.

Only I'm thinking in terms of adventure, now, in terms of gathering up all of the pieces that are more lost than others and turning them into a new skin. Thinking of folding opportunity up and keeping it in my back pocket in case I need it.

Bonus! 2006 in pictures and favorite shows. Madness! Scandal! Intrigue! ...blurriness!

(heart)
me

Hello, handsome, where've you been all my life?

The new couch is here, and seriously, if it were legal to elope with a piece of furniture the couch and I would be on our way to Vegas by now. It is comfy and gigantic and my living room looks a little bit silly with this big piece of furniture in it, but I'll do some rearranging today and hopefully the people that want the old couch will come and get it this afternoon. And then I'm never leaving the new couch again. It's a good thing I went out last night to a dinner party at the French/Harrison residence (and played a lot of Pictionary, too, because that is how I roll), because from now on if you want to see me I'll be holding court on the new couch. Bring snacks.

Whenever Alex would misbehave as a child his parents--who had never wanted kids and didn't like him very much once they got him--would lock him in a closet. The closet was full of his mother's spare clothes, and there was a little chair for him in there right next to a pile of battered formal shoes. They'd leave him in there for hours, sometimes, forgetting all about him, until he was forced by hunger or thirst or excretory options to bang on the door until they remembered him again. He eventually grew fond of the closet and would act out in order to be sent there, and by the time I met him when he was about eighteen he claimed to do his best thinking in small, dark, confined spaces.

This explains much about my friend, and he would often disappear for a day or so when things got bad. If we needed him, we could find him in the closet. Everyone regarded this as a harmless eccentricity and never really talked about it, but on the day that he and Jacinda fell in love with an audible thump I mentioned that he might want to warn her about his occasional disappearing act. Alex, fathoms deep in love already, claimed that he wouldn't ever need the closet again because now he had 'Cinda. Which was very romantic and all but certainly a lie, and sure enough after they'd been married for a while he vanished. She called looking for him and I told her to check the closet, and there he was, sitting cross-legged on the floor and thinking. He still does this today, only now his small daughter thinks it's a very good game of hide-and-seek and continually destroys his secret quiet time, and I've started to hope that he'll soon stop hiding in closets.

I have been sick, sick, sick this week, something about staying out much later than I should be while it's been cold. I'm mostly better now but I can't hear a thing, and though I have claimed grandly to be dying of Legionnaire's Disease it's probably just a bad cold.

After a long and friendly conversation with my insurance (who seem to believe that just paying for a refill is the same thing as getting it, although to my knowledge money has not yet proven to be effective birth control, and the last thing this poor world needs right now is miniature samanthas running about, quoting poems and demanding dance-offs and losing at thumb wrestling) I tottered off to the corner store. My neighborhood homeless guy was there, a man who on his better--or, arguably, worse--days tends to remember me. Today was one of those days, and he greeted me with a wave and asked if he could tell me a story. I said sure, because memory doesn't care where it lives and even old homeless guys should be able to tell their stories. I missed most of what he had to say, something about troubles getting his medication, because I found myself hypnotized by the ridges and cakes of dirt on his hands.

I'm pretty sure I didn't need to listen, because those hands told me all I needed to know. I smiled and he smiled and we understood each other anyway. We usually do.

I have recently become possessed of a desire to learn how to make meatloaf. I haven't actually eaten meatloaf since I was eight and my mother, who is an awful chef, decided that uncooked rice would be a great thing to add to the mix. None of our teeth broke but our appetite for meatloaf did, and I can only believe that this desire means that my domestic habits are spiraling rapidly out of control. Soon I'll be doing things like making reindeer out of clothespins and macrame and coming home before midnight.

Today, in case y'all missed it, is the perihelion, which means that it's time for gossiping with the sun. You only get to do this once a year, so make it good.

Dear 2007,

Hello and welcome! My name is samantha, and I am very glad to meet you.

When you arrived last night I was drinking champagne with my favorite Josh and the charming Maarten. I had been a little wary of the party, because I don't do well with rooms full of strangers, but it turned out that after enough drinking and general tomfoolery I ended up having a really good time. Many different types of things were imbibed, trips to the photo booth were made, and we eventually made our way to the 5 Point at an indecent hour for things that were fried. I haven't stayed out until almost dawn in a very long time and now I've done it twice in one weekend.

2007, I find you very interesting so far.

Your predecessor, 2006, was for me a year of distancing, of healing from 2005 and all the years before. And though parts of it were bad--the deaths of Jeremy and John, for example, and the troubles with my failing grandmothers--I feel more and more myself, more confident in my own skin. I'm not so scared anymore, and I hope that once I stop being scared I can start being brave. So I really spent most of 2006 talking myself out of corners and trying to hurt as few feelings as possible. And I got what I wanted out of the year: new friends and old ones, monkeys, flowers, adventures, miracles, epiphanies and heartbreaks. I had my wisdom teeth out, went to Nashville and hung out with Ryan, visited Boston. I was sad and restless and inexplicably popular. And I wrote it all down, even if sometimes in code, and while it is sometimes embarrassing to have a detailed record of my behavior I feel like it would be worse not to.

What I want from you, 2007, is more of the same. I'm learning how not to take things so tragically but I could use a little help on your end. I'd like more monkeys and flowers and adventures and recipes, enough rain for effective frog rain boot usage, smiles to bottle up and save for later. I want six epiphanies, at least thirteen perfect moments, and one sunburn to keep me grumpy.

I want to learn to be brave enough to be bold, to be a girl that people can be proud of. To be worth all of the attention that I get.

So lets strike a compromise, 2007. I'll try to go easy on you, to spend you doing worthwhile things, if you agree to do the same for me. Deal?

Love,

me

My cab driver home tonight was new, which always involves a lot of Abbot-and-Costelloing about just which street named -lake I actually live on.

A friend of mine has been out of town for three months, and as she has low-key plans for tomorrow she wanted a night out tonight. What she got was something else entirely, although at least we were out. A whole impromptu comedy routine about her drink at the bar? Check. Mid-nineties alternative favorites with sushi? Also check. (Seriously, I haven't heard a Filter song in forever.) If nothing else, I guess she remembered what she'd been missing.

Happy new year, internet! I spent most of 2006 going to see about nine million bands and dating boys who were mostly not nearly nice enough to me. Next year I intend to do more of the former and less of the latter.

During the last few months of Mark's life the hospital staff relaxed their rules on visiting hours, allowing us to come and go as we pleased. His body had stopped responding to the drug cocktail a couple of months before that and his skin had started to break down, opening small wounds that wept softly into a crazy quilt of bandages. I'd skip school to spend afternoons in the narrow room, listening to his sandpaper breathing scored by all of the beeping machines. When he was awake I would push aside all the tubes and wires and climb into the bed with him, and we'd whisper stories about the people we knew. I was nearly as thin as he was then, worn transparent with the weight of my own secrets, and unprepared to deal with the heaviness of both mourning and carrying on with life. Often, leaving the room, I'd meet his boyfriend Paul huddled in the hallway, trying to work up the courage to enter.

I have recently realized that I'm now about the same age that Mark was when he was wasting away and fighting to get his T cell count back up. It hadn't ever occurred to me before, both because at the time those seven or eight years that he had on me seemed to be vast expanses of experience and because in my head he has always been older than me. And here I am at the end of this year that has been a struggle each step of the way, but still the easiest yet of all the years he's been absent for, and all of a sudden I miss my friend. He would have loved to have been here for this endeavor.

Not a lot has been going on over here the last couple of days, and to fill the time I've been cooking. The best part about all the culinary adventures is leaving my apartment for a few minutes and coming back inside--inside is warm and smells like tomato sauce and balsamic vinegar and rosemary and thick creamy soup. Getting the dishwasher fixed was one of the smartest things I've done lately.

The rest of the time has been spent curled up between lines of Fitzgerald or camped out on the couch with Catherine Deneuve. It's been the next best thing to a vacation, honestly.

It is disconcerting to mount an expedition in search of trolls only to find under each bridge little but a collection of clapped-out mattresses and carburetors. Except you have heard that there are trolls and so even though there's a small voice behind your left eye that keeps pointing out trashcan fires in the place of ogres, you look. You look under each damp tissue and through the eye of every broken needle and though you never do find the trolls you were looking for--the big hairy ones with the oversized hands and fewer teeth than they have spaces--you find something. And that's always the moment when you remember that something was really all you needed.

If I were a smarter girl I'd take off for a while to someplace with a lot of windy coastline and the sort of people that can pass a whole day talking about their labradors.

Merry Christmas, boys and girls.

I'll be headed over to Steph and Ryan's tonight to eat ham, play games, watch movies, get drunk, and open presents. Once we've dealt with our hangovers tomorrow afternoon we're probably going to meet up with a friend of mine for a movie and fried macaroni and cheese wedges at the 5 Point. (Since Steph and Ryan are both funnier and more even tempered than my actual family, we're going to call this one a win for me.)

I never did get around to doing any baking this Christmas, and for that I apologize. I've been feeling a little too much like a Mark Ryden painting for the past few weeks to get into the spirit, but the fact remains that for the first time in about thirteen years I didn't make my traditional fudge and Christmas cookies, and I feel like a slacker. So those of you that have been perhaps waiting for packages of deliciousness to come to you in the mail should, um, stop.

I hope your Christmases are as much fun as mine is going to be, because I think you deserve all the happiness you can get.

I waited for the bus last night, reading in the dim glow from the streetlights. The power lines above me collected flecks of the misty rain and then loosed their supply of drops onto my book or the too-long sleeves of my soft pink sweater. As I stood there a man walked past, bald and with no hat, in a suit and a red striped tie. A few feet past me he stopped and turned back, said, "Excuse me..." and then pulled a quarter out of my ear. He handed the quarter to me and continued down the street, and I dropped the quarter in the shrubbery. Ear quarters, even conceptual ear quarters, kind of freak me out.

A little while ago I was rifling through a book, trying to find that Baudelaire poem where he compares a lady to roadkill (which, you know, needles and haystacks and all, but my copy of Les Fleurs is entirely in French and I'm just not that patient) and I came across lines from a Beckian Fritz Goldberg poem scribbled on part of a sheet of graph paper: "Each time we fall out of love we/ say it wasn't really love at all as if/ landing, a plane would say no, not/ actual sky."
So then there's that.

I've still never managed to conjure up a concrete memory of Christmas from before the boys were born, which makes a certain amount of sense because Christmas has never been my holiday and the boys were always the best part of it. It's a little sad to miss them this year, now that they're both old enough that they're becoming actual people.

I can feel the look from across the room, but I am afraid that if I look up and catch those eyes that I might burst into flames. So instead I feel the glance like a thumb along the line of my stubborn jaw, like the moment when lips part and you realize that you have just been kissed.

And there are certain places that I simply cannot visit because they are dark and full of monsters. Those are the stairs where I stop halfway down and sit until the desire to explore goes away. In the evenings I walk home from work, dawdling through the blueblack streets, enjoying how every window is a perfect vignette.

Downtown was very, very cold today, and I huddled under the bus stop with a whole bunch of people that were heavily laden with packages. I refused to see the cold wind as a nuisance; in fact, I currently refuse to see everything as anything but charmed. I'm pretty lucky to be me sometimes.

I'm starting to tally my accounts for the year, to figure out how many steps I've gone backward for each one I've gone forward. The year is almost over and I don't know if I've accomplished much, but I have had an awfully good time.

You just watch out for me, because when you're not looking I'm going to throw an impromptu dance party in your parking space. I'm looking for fireflies in your backyard, Seattle, and I'm not going to stop until I find them.

Man, I have been all over the damn place lately. I've been at the Crocodile watching cute boys play miscellaneous instruments. I've been out drinking with the Metbloggers. Last night I got all dressed up to have fancy drinks and see goofy musical theatre with my lady friends. Today I went to space and tomorrow I'll be at Steph's. I am tired.

Sometime this week I fully intend to not answer my telephone and instead camp out on the couch with Humphrey Bogart. All of this being social goes against my nature and I have to make myself leave my cozy apartment and my books most of the time, but there's so much interesting stuff happening.

You know, I really should have bought a flashlight before this whole windstorm thing started.

For the first half of my (quick) trip to Boston in the spring I was alone, wandering. Everyone there looked familiar and so instead of feeling lonesome in a new city it was all a lot more like hanging out with a friend I have known long enough that speaking isn't necessary. It was all very comfortable, and were I less tired of running I would perhaps have moved there, changed my name, and bought a hermit crab named Fritz.

I grew up at band practice, the child of very young musicians, and part of the reason I go to see so many bands is because I am comfortable at shows.

What I am is tired, tired of wanting to go somewhere else and start something new. I took a clipping off one of my plants at the office and have been watching it slowly grow roots over the past couple of weeks, and I have found myself jealous of the biological imperative that forces plants to either grow roots or die. And jealous of plants is no way to be, so maybe next I'll work on roots myself.

I have been all scrunched up like a samantha-in-the-box lately, just completely incapable of normal human interaction. This cough that I picked up somewhere simply won't go away, so my voice has tended to cut out in the middle of a word or become high and reedy midsentence. Like I'm actually a samantha hologram and the real samantha is phoning it in from someplace better.

What I'm trying to say is that if I have recently looked at you as though you were made of lettuce and were requesting that I eat you, well, what was really happening is that I was trying to remember how to string together the letters to make the words to reply to you, only my brain was busy contemplating its navel. It's not you, it's me. Honest. (I find lettuce to be one of the most abhorrent substances on the planet, to clarify, and yes my brain does have a navel. Don't judge.)

But on the way home today my iPod spontaneously decided to play the wonderful Tragically Hip song "Scared" twice in a row, and I have decided to take this as a sign of better things to come. You know, eventually.

Is there anything better than an evening of free ballet and delicious tapas with the French/Harrison household? (I volunteer for the PNB sometimes, which means I get to see the shows for free.)

No, I don't think that there is.

Dear internet,

I don't know if you noticed, but today is the third birthday of this website.

Three years ago I probably would have laughed at you for suggesting that I'd still be doing this so steadily three years later, because I'd have figured that by now I would have gotten bored and gone off to something else--basket weaving or crime fighting or whatever. That's what I do with everything else, after all. Which just goes to show that we should never underestimate the staying power of narcissism, but the fact is that I have never been very good at writing endings, so I imagine that as long as I'm incapable of creating a conclusion I'll probably just have to keep going.

Sorry about that.

In the past seven hundred and something posts I've cobbled together something over 200,000 words, and I honestly have little to say about that. I read a short essay by Norman Mailer once--all the Mailer I can stand--about a friend of his who would write and rewrite constantly even though the whole act was anguish for him. And when Mailer asked him why he did it, why he continued to write even though it caused him such pain, the friend said, "The only time I know the truth is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen." I have come to realize recently that the purpose the Kissing Booth serves for me is to understand just how I am doing, to resolve and solidify whatever it is that I'm feeling. I can't say for sure whether that is good or bad, whether anything useful has come out of this experience, but I feel that I have been honest. And honesty was, originally, the point.

When I came home tonight a giant urban raccoon and I scared the heck out of each other, and then I walked into my apartment and noticed that something had changed. Eventually I figured out that the trees right off of my balcony that have been ever so slowly obscuring my view for the last few years have been lopped off. I'd gotten so used to squinting at the city through the branches that the unobstructed look at downtown and Queen Anne is astonishing. I had forgotten how the city twinkles. It reminds me how much has changed since I came here, and how much I've changed.

I don't know who most of you are, internet, but thanks for coming along on the adventure with me.

love,

me

I rarely touch anyone with an exposed palm, instinctively closing my fingers and brushing people with the tougher outsides of my knuckles. I don't trust you with any of my softer spots, needing to avoid the way I sometimes hurt, not in my heart but somewhere to the left, and deeper.

And I never manage to line the facts up until after the test is over, going through the major exams on instinct rather than consideration, noting the lighter skin of your forearms but never recognizing their vulnerability. It is how I unconsciously have held you captive, like the man who kept women to torture in a pit he dug in his basement, only to tell the judge when caught that they had come with the house, as though he honestly thought a pit full of women was what his real estate agent had meant by "bonus room."

I notice my curled-under fingers at intervals over the years, remembering the day my father asked why I never hugged him back when he hugged me. I don't think we get to pick the way we protect ourselves, only reacting in whatever way our little brains have decided is the safest.

Not purchased: a hat.

Purchased: a pillow for the new couch, which should arrive in about two weeks. Clearly my fiscal priorities are out of order, although I'm currently refusing to believe that I've made it to a point in my life where I'm using the words "fiscal" and "priorities" in that order and meaning it. Although I did get a Christmas present for the prettiest Steph in town while I was out, so something productive happened.

I think it might be time for me to explore my fondness for textiles with airplanes dropping things other than bombs, as aside from the new pillow I also own a shirt with one dropping cupcakes, and I'm always considering one dropping televisions. I'm also currently very fond of tentacled sea creatures, especially on jewelery and skirts. If I could find a skirt with the giant squid attacking the Nautilus on it, my wardrobe would be momentarily complete. Please keep up, fashion; you're lagging behind.

I'm still a bit sick, so I'm at home tonight drinking tomato soup out of a Yellow Submarine mug, because creamy soups are not for spoons. The dishes are mostly done and I think I'll be watching a movie about a French drag queen here shortly. I need to do something about all of the things that I have--buy them more shelves or set them on fire or something. It's getting kind of cluttered in here.

Postmodern Christmas Tree 2006 is completed. Materials: three storage containers, a cooler, a hatbox, and my fencing foil, as well as the original gasparilla beads and all the usual ornaments.

As always, the music was The Arrogant Worms album "X-mas Turkey", with a little BOAT at the end.

2005, 2004 (with the story), and 2002, the orginal.

My thin Florida blood decided sometime last night that it was tired of all the walking around in the rain and snow and hail, and if I wasn't going to stay home on my own then it was going to make me. So I'm parked on the couch today with a throat like a porcupine and the chills, along with some juice and fashion magazines and potato chips. I guess I should probably buy a hat sometime this winter. A hat that I'll actually wear.

Holy freaking christ, people, do you know how cool it is to be going from someplace to someplace else in the SNOW? (Sleet? Hail? What's the difference?)

It's snowed a wee bit in the three and a half years I've lived here, but it doesn't do it much down in South Lake Union and never during the day. So I commuted home in the...whatever. And it rocked. Completely.

SNOW!!!

(P.S.: I haven't been able to check my email for days, so if you sent me one I haven't gotten it yet.)

Sometimes I am nostalgic for the fear, feeling like I missed my chance to be afraid out loud of things that were tangible. And so now it's easier to be afraid in retrospect, to say, "I was afraid then because he was on smack and wouldn't stop hitting her" rather than, "I am afraid now because in ten years I might turn into the punchline of a joke I'd tell today." In trying to be brave and quiet and not make waves I completely lost the opportunity to admit to feeling something other than fine.

Which isn't to say that I miss the years themselves, miss clutching my birdlike bones together so that no one could hear them clattering against each other, because I don't. There is a comfort in being sad sometimes rather than scared all the time, and the relief that comes from the middle-class blandness of a visiting mild depression is something that few can understand. And it's only when I tell the stories, when I talk about being frightened and hungry and huddled in the closet of a trailer full of shouting that I remember what a luxury the distance is.

But the nostalgia is there, the quick longing for the stark blankness of terror. Being a child is easier than being a grownup, even if it's being a child in the dark corners and dank recesses. It's easier when the bogeymen are real than it is when they're you.

Cooking Thanksgiving dinner is about a six-hour project, mostly because I am way too OCD to let other people into the kitchen to help out. I get all, "No, wait! You're chopping those carrots wrong! Do it with a smoother wrist motion, so it doesn't make so much noise." I'm aspaz , and it's much easier to do it all myself than it is to figure out how to calm down and let go of whatever. It's why I'm so good at living alone, and everyone has to be good at something.

Besides, I honestly love entertaining, spending all day making things for the people that want to come and spend their holiday with me. I find that I'm most comfortable in my skin when I'm worrying about the comfort of other people.

My skin is lined with the softest razor blades but I try to rub everyone the other way, and the thought of your satisfied smile is like a biological highlighter, which is kinda the point. I read somewhere that they keep a pike in the fountains at Versailles to prevent the carp from getting fat and complacent. It keeps them on their toes, theoretically, and if fish had long-term memories they'd remember that and be scared and wary all the time. Only they don't, and that makes me think that the pike are wasted on the fish. So to speak.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope that your turkeys and nonturkey isotopes are delicious and your gatherings are friendly!

You know what the best part about not traveling for the holidays is? The not traveling part. Any other time of year I'll go anywhere gladly and make three new friends in each airport, but this time of year...no. Next year I'll have to spend at least Christmas with my family, but this year is another pseudo-orphan holiday season. Just the way I like them.

I bounced home in the rain tonight, inappropriately dressed for the weather but having a great time. I love all the other people who are walking in the rain, all the other people who won't fight the dark and the cold. (In the mornings I tend to feel differently.)

And the turkey is purchased and the fixings waiting to be fixed, and my apron is hung by the stove with care, and I'm so excited about Thanksgiving. It starts to rain and I get domestic, so it's real convenient for me that Thanksgiving falls after the rains start. I sort of dated a cook earlier this year and he taught me how to cut my round vegetables into rectangles, a skill I was missing for last year's feast. So that part should be interesting. You know, for me.

Anyway, this time of year makes me even more sentimental than usual, and I am tired and feeling worn through, like my skin is showing all of my secrets. I don't promise that I won't greet you with a hug that'll last just a little too long, that I won't forget to finish a thought mid-sentence. It's what happens to me in the fall.

In the middle of the night the bridge was up, and I wondered who the people were, gliding silently on their boats in the dark and the cold and the rain.

In my head I had already leapt onto their boats like Errol Flynn onto a passing carriage or James Bond onto a speedboat, dressed in something high-waisted and pumps without a broken heel.

On the bus my fellow late-night passengers grumbled about the delay, muttering imprecations and looking pointedly at their watches. In front the driver hummed softly, in no hurry to get over the bridge.

My internet connection has been occasionally hosed lately, which accounts, largely, for my general absence and haphazard posting. (It does not, unfortunately, account for all of my typos.) It's not something that I'm technically allowed to complain about, though, since what I really am is a wireless mooch.

Yep, there you have it. That's my dirty secret.

I am the sleepiest girl in King County these days, because sleeping is for suckers and I am no sucker. So I've been out instead, roaming the streets with packs of hungry wolves, drinking in bars, seeing bands, and frequently combining those last two. I need a haircut and a new family of sea monkeys, and possibly also to have a funeral for my plants.

I read a story the other day about an absentee ballot in Florida that may or may not have been sent in with some very valuable stamps as its postage. But the box that it's in is sealed now for 22 months, and so until then it's a little like Schrodinger's mailbox.

I like to think that the stamp in the box is the real thing, that something worth so much money has been stamped and reduced in value, and then closed up in a box. I like to think that the person who used the stamp had no idea what it was, that they were cleaning out their grandfather's desk and found the postage and though they'd be efficient and use it.

Mostly, I like to think of the people that will wait for it, that will spend the next two years thinking fondly of laying hands and eyes on this rare thing that they've always dreamed of. I hope that they won't be disappointed although I know that they will, because while we never know if our secret boxes hold a scary monster or a brick of gold, we do know that what we make with our hands will never match up with what we make with our brains. And so even if the stamp in the box is what they hope it is, it won't ever give them the satisfaction that they dream it will.

And there's something perfect in that.

Sometime this weekend I will buy a new couch. (This will thrill all the people who are very tired of hearing me talk about doing such a thing.) If you were me--and I know you're not but pay attention anyway because it might be your turn next--then this would be a very big commitment for you. It makes me very anxious, spending all of this money on a piece of furniture that someone'll just spill a glass of wine on anyway. But the other option is being stuck with this ripped brown monstrosity forever, and I just can't take it anymore.

Which is more than you ever wanted to know about my furniture situation, but I can't be cool all the time.

Thanksgiving!! is coming up. I am, as expected, so freaking excited and gearing up to cook way too much food for some currently nebulous number of people. I would make an awesome housewife, especially if I had a functioning dishwasher and a little robot vacuum.

I walked down 2nd last night, hood up, hands jammed in my pockets, leaning stubbornly against the wind. Half a block in front of me strolled a couple cuddled under one green umbrella, his hand striking sparks as it hovered at the level of her waist. Her belt was black and studded just like the red one I was wearing, and the slant of his back said that if he were just a little braver he would hook his thumb over the top of it.

We spent all of the time gathering all of the facts, only to find out, once we had the facts spread out on the kitchen table like a puzzle we had borrowed from someone, that it wasn't the facts that were important. It turned out that it was the harvesting process we were meant to be paying attention to, and that the facts themselves were only a byproduct of the finding out.

Well.

In my head we go to your old cabin to talk about it, a cabin that outside of my head and in the middle of Georgia has long since been reclaimed by the woods. It is always in my head that our conversations work the best because in there you don't always have to be right and I don't always have to be defensive. (In my head we are considerate of each other and slightly British.) And there for the first time we ignore both distance and ire and come to a delicate agreement.

And outside of my head I miss the taste of menthol cigarettes and the creeping smell of vintage bourbon splashed on the upholstery by a careless gesture, both long since reclaimed by the years.

Regarding the ongoing disagreement between myself and gravity, well, I'm afraid I have to say that gravity is winning. This time it was aided by my very low blood pressure, and now I have one very busted up toe.
I will not surrender. Gravity, I will get you yet.

Dear everyone,

Hello and welcome to the end of October. I'm not ready for it to be time for the damnable holidays yet, but since no one asked me I guess the month is going to be over no matter what I say.

I know that you have heard this from me before, but I am tired of all of this wretched sun. It is fall and this is supposed to be my time of year, time for the rain and the dark and the commencement of weather that doesn't glare in your eyes, and I feel cheated. Global warming is really, really messing with my groove.

Happy Halloween to you all. This is not my holiday, because I am a great big baby that hates being scared, but I'm in favor in general of any day that encourages people to dress up. We carved pumpkins last week, and there were too many people in my apartment yet again, regardless of how I tried to cut down the guest list. Now my pumpkin is sitting outside my apartment, slowly rotting away, and I am trying to ignore the fact that it will soon become squishy. Mold, obviously, is yucky.

If was to be perfectly honest I would tell you that my pumpkin is not alone outside my door, and that in point of fact I am writing this from the comfort of someone else's apartment. It has been a ridiculous year, it's true, but thistles may at any point bear figs. And that's all I have to say about that.

I hope that at least one of you was a scary monster for Halloween. I was dressed as a hyacinth girl, but then I am always dressed as a hyacinth girl only no one ever notices. (Does anyone but me even read T. S. Eliot anymore?)

Next month will be Thanksgiving, and you know I get all excited about that. I intend to find a much better recipe for molasses cookies than the one that I already have, and there will be jubilees. I am staying here for the holidays, so if you'll be orphaned too let me know and we will go on walks and pretend to be fireflies and look for shapes in the clouds of each other's breath.

love,
me

If you have kept your skin through all of this time, well, that isn't because of anything that I have done. Because the space between you and me is like a familiar old doorknob that has to be twisted in just the right way to be opened, and I can't reach to the end of my skin often enough to turn it.

And so I sit instead on the porch and listen to the cold approach of fall, waiting for whatever happens on the other side of heartsickness and youth.

I lopped off the top of my pumpkin and then stood to get a drink. The newspapers spread in the cracked linoleum kitchen of that old brown house slid underfoot and I lost my balance, catching myself on the edge of the counter.

When I sat back down you smiled at me with a knife in your hands, and I wondered just which of my organs you were after.

I don't know about you, but when I woke up this morning all I wanted to do was crawl into a warm bathtub with a nice big bottle of scotch, and not get back out until the sad that has taken up residence under all of my furniture returns the toes it's taken from me. I am at least four toes short of walking without a limp, and while I don't think the sad is actively trying to render me useless, I do think that it would be indifferent towards doing so.

I will need hugs until it goes away. More emphatically, I will need hugs until.

I got my first comment spam in all the almost three years of this website yesterday. I feel like I've finally arrived.

When I got to the bus stop yesterday I found the old man sitting there, waiting. His eyes swam a bit as he looked at me, trying to place me, and then came into focus like the slotting of puzzle pieces. "Ah, Red," he said to me, "Come sit down here." (Red is what all old men call me. My hair is my most recognizable feature.) I sat and asked if he had been waiting long, and he patted me lightly on my right leg like we have known each other forever.

We chatted aimiably, clearly pals from way back, and across the street a small lady pushed a cart with one hand, the near wheel smaller than the far wheel and both of them squeaking in rhythm. Her other hand held a cane on which she balanced the majority of her small weight, and I though of a conversation I had just the other day with some friends. They were discussing how they never see the elderly around the city, and I realized that I see them everywhere. I wondered, briefly, if I am continually hallucinating geriatrics. But the man's presence was solid and warm and I knew that he, at least, was real.

He paused, and I brought my attention back to our conversation. He put a hand on my chin and turned my face toward him, and said, "Child, you have the saddest eyes I've ever seen." I shrugged uncomfortably, but since this sort of directness is something he has earned by virtue of his many years, I answered. I told him that most days it doesn't feel like I have any skin at all, that the sound inside my head is like the noise between two strangers dancing, and that I have been here too few years to feel so old. I knew that he was itching to give me advice; it was the reason he started the conversation in the first place, but kindness is hard to find and I will take it wherever I can.

I was right. He took my right hand in his soft left one and chuckled lightly. "Red, it's girls like you I wish I'd chased when I still had the legs for it." He told me that in his experience the people that start out feeling everything too much never stop, but that if they can get through it it'll be worth it in the end.

I had no answer--I never have an answer--and so we sat there quietly, hand in hand, until the bus came.

The dentist was not wearing tracksuit on Thursday, which is probably the best thing that's happened so far this week.

So, tell me a story. Something has to be happening to one or the other of you that I should know about.

Last night outside of a dry cleaners there was an old press, which I would have loved to take home and make into furniture somehow. It was a great big ironing board with a heavy lid, and I think it would be very satisfying to be a dry cleaner and use such a thing. Matt chatted with the dry cleaner through the window, and it turned out that he had gotten his hand caught in it only once, and I imagine that was time enough.

At some point this weekend, I simply must clean my apartment.

My bicycle built for five has been stolen by a suitcase full of rodeo clowns, so I'll be getting to wherever I'm going slowly and with my hands in my pockets. For now. I should have taken the unicycle of the one with the flower-pot hat and headed up to Point No Point on Vancouver Island, but I didn't think quickly enough and he strapped it on the back before I could make a grab.

I honestly do want to go out to Point No Point, which seems like the only place to go after these few weeks of no more dogs and dying plants and general weirdness. They're painting my building in the rain and so everything is covered in green streaked plastic, and it feels a little like a Japanese horror film. I find it likely that the soft rustling of my apartment's new dress will keep me up most of the night, waiting for ghosts to emerge from my closet.

My youngest brother insisted on going to the vet today. There was something there that he had to see, and though he apparently sobbed during the whole thing, with any luck he also found what he needed. I'm not sure I could have done the same had I been there.

And I am of course all worn thin, a pile of slightly cracked bones that could really use some cookies with raisins in. (This is something I find especially difficult to locate when I really need them.) I stayed home from work today, choosing to do my grieving at home, although when the final phone call came I was in the car, leaving the art store, and so I sobbed into my companion's fortuitously waterproof jacket.

The weekend was lovely, a show on Saturday night and a trip to Volunteer Park and the cemetery yesterday. Tomorrow I'll have dinner with the lovely Manuel, and sometime this week there will be a dentist appointment at which I will be scolded for slacking in my flossing duties. My dentist is a very nice man but he wears track suits, and so I have trouble taking him seriously.

Thirteen and a half years ago, we decided it was time to get a dog just as friends of the family learned that their dog was going to have puppies. We went to their house and from the wriggling pile I picked a black-and-tan baby with a white tip to her tail. My stepmother named her Sadie, and she became part of the family.

She helped Eric learn his body parts, sitting very still while he poked her in the eye and chanted "eye" at her, stood solid next to my Nan when she developed Parkinsons and had trouble walking. She chewed and dug and decapitated Power Rangers, groomed the cat, and slept on the couch when she thought no one was looking. Whenever I would go back to visit, during college and after, she would sleep by my door at night. She has always been my dog.

Yesterday they found out that she has cancer, and they'll be putting her to sleep on Monday. My brothers are understandably devastated, as they can't remember a time without her. I am equally devastated. She's off her diet for the weekend, eating as much pizza and cheese as she wants, and come Monday morning my family will be one member less. We will all be worse off for the loss.

A squirrel and I have been on roughly the same schedule for the last couple of weeks, so most afternoons when I'm walking up the sidewalk to get to my hill it is digging in the loose dirt right next to me. We execute an odd little dance, the squirrel and I, because it clearly does not want me to steal whatever it is digging about for and I don't want to scare it away.

So I will walk a step to my right and it will stand up straight, and I'll turn sideways and raise my hands, palms up, to show that I mean no harm. It'll drop back down and hesitate back a half step, and I'll mince a little farther to the right and up to assure it that I really mean no harm.

Most days, this ends when the squirrel gives up on the whole thing and runs up a tree on the other side of the fence.

I stopped to change my shoes and an old man sat down next to me, the rasp of the near leg of his pants against the far and the rasp of his voice very nearly the same. He said hello and I realized that he was much younger than I had thought, that I had mistaken the knowing in the corners of his eyes for age.

I am sad, and looking at you like you've got microphones curled behind your ears, listening to use this against me when I'm patched back up again. I can't seem to shake the summer time, and what I need is a vacation. I used to take off, to remove all the vowels and toss them in a duffel bag and hit the road, and while I don't need a car to do that very thing I haven't yet found the presence of mind to reinvent my habits.

I have always hated to vacuum, and when I was younger and my stepmother would ask me to vacuum the house while she was out I would invariably turn sullen. You could tell whether or not the job had been done by the wheel marks on the rug, not easily effaced by just a few hours traffic. While she was gone I would pull out the vacuum and run it over the rug without turning it on. I'm sure that felt like a victory at the time.

So when you ask me if I have always been this passive aggressive, I think we can assume that the answer will be yes.

My dad always wanted to play the "let's see who can punch the softest game," which is game you only play willingly once. Whoever went first would punch as softly as they could, not a punch at all, and then the other person would sock the first one as hard as they could on the arm, announcing, "you win!" Even when I went second I never won because my hardest punches are still too soft.

And so you found me, sitting at the bar like a spilled drink and trying my level best to disappear. But just like my punches my level best is never very good and I haven't yet managed to vanish.

You know, I've spent most of this week laying on various couches and slumped sideways in various chairs, not really doing a whole lot. Next week seems to have sucked up all of its normal plans and all of the rest of the month's plans, too. Everything I have to do in October? Happening next week.

When Mark died I lost the person who was best at seeing to the bottom of things, who could look at any situation and know just what was happening. It was a clarity borne of an entirely lack of the capacity for unkindness; Mark was the one person who honestly never though to say something mean. (Mark is also the one who introduced me to thoughtful surprises--he was the first one who ever showed up at my door and said, "Here, I was just thinking about you when I saw this." My early friendship with Mark has been a bane to most boyfriends since.) I miss him most days, but I could really use his calm head and friendly smile right now. Work is a little bit crazy and taking up more of my head than it should be.

But it is a quiet Friday, post happy hour, and I intend to do my dishes and my laundry and fortify myself for next week. I'm glad that it is getting dark earlier because it meant that my walk home from happy hour was made in the dark, and I'm more comfortable in the dark than I am in the daytime.

(P.S.: Manuel is the cutest tech support in Seattle. Yay Manuel! Although seriously, we already knew that.)

Something happened to my plants when I went to Florida in August, and when I came home they were all wilty. They're recovering, slowly, but they're very wan and sad looking, like they've had mono. Unhappy little Dr. Seuss plants.

If was planning to be anything for Halloween, I would be a robot. A robot made out of boxes.

I need new jokes. Tell me jokes, people.

What I need is to borrow a three-or-four year old who will just romp the sad right out of me, because most of lately feels like the morning after a night where you've cried and cried in your sleep and can't remember why. Those are the mornings where you wake up all red-faced and swollen and sticky, and even though you don't remember what was happening in your brain during the night, empirical evidence would suggest that it was not good.

I don't know why I need to break everything, why I make myself go see-through and then try to close your eyes after you've noticed. And when I sift through the boxes that sit between my ears all I can find are roadsides that tell me that the next turn will make me a bad-tempered diner waitress named Verna, and that the one after that is a long straight road to power suits and sneakers, and none of those corners make any sense.

What I am waiting for is whatever is behind a softly lit, rain-speckled glass door, whatever is underneath hot lights on a backwoods bar room stage. And in the meantime the scars on the back of my knee throb like they know the secret and aren't telling.

Dear everyone,

Hi. Wasn't it just, um, May? And now it's very nearly October? How has this year managed to feel so slow and yet have gone by so quickly? I've lost something, somewhere.

A couple of days ago when I was downtown I ran into an acquaintance. The last time I saw him was sometime last year, and his wife had just died. We stood in a drizzle while he told me that he was having trouble dragging his gaze above the sidewalk because everything he saw reminded him of her. I, as usual, had nothing very important to say, and so I hugged him and told him that although it was cold comfort, I have found that nothing very very good or very very bad lasts for very very long.
When we bumped into each other on Thursday he looked me straight in the eye and smiled. He wasn't good yet, he told me, but he was better.

Most of my time this month has been taken up by a very tall distraction, which is so far proving to be fun. I have only tripped and fallen once this month and my knee is nearly healed. October means pumpkin carving and pumpkin beer, and lots of shows. I will be making ribbons out of whatever I have on hand to tie in my hair and if you look out your window that will be me throwing an impromptu dance party in your parking spot.

I'm not good yet, either, but I am better.

Love,
me

I have a cedar hope chest, a gift from my mother during her furniture building phase, a phase that also provided my standing mirror/curio case that I use every morning to check that my stockings are straight and my blacks even. Hope chests, historically, were meant to hold all of the things that a girl would need to be married, but since I am a modern girl and my family's black sheep I was left to fill it myself.

And because I am me and this is my apartment, my hope chest is filled with the past. This is unfortunate because when I am looking for a place to stow a spare blanket that the recent heat has rendered useless, I can't find a space in there.

In one corner I keep certain creeping hot Florida nights with the sarong over my bikini hiked up to mid-thigh, and in another I store the stuffed koala my grandfather kept with him in the hospital, one of the few physical relics of the man. Over here are decorations for the postmodern Christmas tree and here are souvenirs from the prom I didn't go to. At the bottom is a box of letters from the boy who was supposed to be the last one and then wasn't, cushioned by caps and gowns and honor cords.

No room for blankets, or for linens or trousseau for that matter, but there is room for all the small things that keep me grounded.

The two things that I don't actually write about here--work and my love life--are both recently leaving me exhausted and relatively incoherent. Things are busy, y'all. My right eye won't stop twitching.

I bought an external hard drive for backup. Its name is Harvey. It came today and we are getting acquainted.

I am very tired and in need of a cocktail. Also in need of: gloves, things with polka dots, green or blue shoes, and twelve hugs. And, the rain went where? Come back, rain-and-earthworms: I miss you.

Today was supposed to be Oktoberfest day, but Sunday bus schedules suck and my throbbing head and I just could not commit to spending over an hour trying to go just a few miles--and, worse, another hour and a half eventually trying to get back. (My head was throbbing not because of my fondness for The Drink, since The Drink and I have made only passing acquaintance recently, but because of my habit of The Stress. The Stress twists my shoulders until they pinch a nerve that retreats to my head and hurts there. It's a very complicated and difficult to get rid of headache.) Instead, I spent a large chunk of the afternoon napping. As I haven't had a single activity-free day in at least a month, the napping was awesome.

Eventually I went to have coffee, where I read the Book Review and my companion read the sports pages, of all things. Eventually dinner was had and then I met a very nice dog. It's been a very pleasant weekend.

According to my calendar, summer is finally over, which is ok by me. The earthworms are out in the mornings and I want to gather them up and give them to you in handfuls like bouquets of flowers. ...Squirmy bouquets of flowers.

I'm walking home through the dark, slowly making my way down the chilly two blocks back to my apartment. Halfway there I meet a policeman who is peering at the back of a parked car. He looks up and notices me, nods and asks if I need an escort home. I tell him no, I'm fine, that I'm only going a little farther up. He nods again and I make my way down the sidewalk, arms wrapped tightly around my ribcage.

But twelve steps farther on something smells like rosemary and I am feeling suddenly and desperately alone, wishing that I was not the one making this cold and solitary walk home. It hits me out of nowhere and I instinctively gasp in a breath and jam the heels of my hands onto both of my eyes. When I gather myself and look around the policeman is looking at me, concerned, so I give him the thumbs up and go home.

When I get there I drop my things and turn on the shower, getting ready for bed. I see a little spider on the side of the bathtub and turn the spray away from it, glad for anything else alive in this inconsiderately cold apartment. But I have not moved fast enough and it drops down into the water, not holding its breath long enough for me to fish it out.

I can't bring myself to force it down the drain and so instead I watch it, swirling insensate around my feet.

The rains make me want to be in seventeen different places at once, making soups and reading books and drinking cocoa and cuddling.

I've been reading about chemosynthesis lately, about how things live in places where there is no sunlight. I've read stories about people that have been in submarines and things down near volcanic vents where entire vivid ecosystems live. Near these outpourings of chemicals creatures have not given up their colors, have not gone albino. They live in these places of extreme heat and pressure and not only do they live, but they thrive.

Any other fool would have gone back and started at the beginning.

Last weekend TMS called to tell me that he had walked into his girlfriend's apartment, intending to surprise her with a night out, only to find her in bed with not just someone else but two someone elses--a boy and a girl. He called me from the sidewalk outside her building, pacing, asking me what I thought he should do.
I was speechless; this was beyond me. She ran outside just then, hastily wrapped in someone's button-down shirt, so I recommended tequila and let him listen to her story.

He stopped by tonight just as I was finishing a nap and deciding if the No Reasons were weighing too heavily for me to actually get up. I answered the door and he blustered into my apartment, cranky with me for having encouraged him to Gesture with this one. I pointed out that I'm really the last one he should be taking advice from, and that I'd said that already months ago.

We grabbed a bottle of wine and went for a walk. I'm no solution for either heartbreak or humiliation, but I am always good for a hug and helpful invectives, and we cheerfully called her names for a while. After a while we reached a park and sat down and he said that what really worries him is that each disappointment hurts just a little less, that he's afraid of becoming used to it. He said he's aching around edges he doesn't know how to dull. I smoothed his hair as he wondered whether some tunnels just don't have ends.

I still didn't know what to tell him. I'm good at believing in fairy tales for other people but I don't know how to see them for myself, and that was what he needed just then; he needed to hear that I believe, unilaterally, in happily ever after. So I told him that I am a poor soothsayer and don't have the eyes for ends of tunnels, but that I stand by my advice to Gesture with abandon. I gave him a patented samantha speech all about dragonflies and snails and Magritte and though I don't think he believed a word of it he was at least poking fun at my own romantic failings at the end of it, a sure sign of improvement.

I'm not worried about him. TMS is a romantic too, and will have made the whole event into a funny story to tell his mom the next time she calls and asks when he'll be getting married. But I wonder at you, people, and I wonder at myself, at just how careless we are with each other.

It's too late to be sitting in this bar and yet here I am, halfheartedly wishing that we could still smoke in here so that I could light one up to put out in my eye. It would be quite a charming bar, I guess, if this man sitting next to me wasn't currently involved in weeping into his drink about having cheated on his girlfriend yet again. I don't invite these sorts of confessions, but I get them anyway.

The situation called for gravity, but since all that I had on hand was thinly veiled contempt, that was what I went with. It complimented your own disdain nicely, a disdain that created an echo even though we were nowhere near walls. Somewhere in the shadows cast by your cheekbones there had to be an answer, but if there was I couldn't find it.

Even still I'm not sure where we would have gone had the molten promise in your eyes proven to be an option, but I am sure that we may not have come back.

So...you're all going to laugh at me, but here's the deal. When my old roommate was in town in July he attempted to make my toilet stop running (no, please, no jokes) and instead made the noises worse. I finally convinced them to fix the thing today, after weeks and weeks of infuriating running water noises, and I came home just now to a brand new toilet.

But, uh...I'm a very small girl. And my feet don't reach the ground when I sit on the thing. Which just feels completely ridiculous, because I am a grown up, dammit, and the one time my feet ought to reach the floor is in the bathroom.

(Additionally, today I am [ok, a couple of weeks ago I was] ever so slightly famous, which makes me an inordinate amount of excited. Huzzah for slow afternoons tending store at 826.)

I leave early in the evening, wondering why I didn't stay to be petted softly until I fell asleep. My heels echo on the quiet street and though I'm not paying attention to my face my brain knows that it is lightly painted with a smile.

My free time has been taken up lately in ways that I haven't figured my way around yet, in ways that I am for the moment treating like a butterfly that has landed on my shoulder which might, if I breathe in too quickly, fly away.

But rest assured that I am having fun and sleeping well, and that soon the sun will go away and I will return to my habits of strolling through my city at all hours, grinning madly and whatever crosses my path. And then we will take a net and go hunting for moonbeams and any cloud shaped like a dragon.

When I woke up this morning it felt like rain, and walking outside confirmed it--the rains are back. It makes me want to go shopping for warm fuzzy things to wear and bottles of wine and new gloves with polka dots and stripes. Outside it feels like I've come home.

I took back the no touching rule when I got back from Florida, just like I promised. So far that's turned out to be a good decision, so it looks like I was wrong and TMS was right. Not that I intend to tell him that.

Today waiting for the bus I met an old Czechoslovakian man. He sat down and said, "I think you are eighteen years old," and when I denied it he asked how old I thought he was. I answered, "Twenty-nine," and his lady friend elbowed me and whispered, "He's plenty nine." I figured that was a joke, so I laughed.
The bus was late, and he told me most of his life story. Since he's 81, that story took a while, but the gist was that he was a rich, successful man in his country up until the revolution. He's been here for 27 years and thinks that Maria Cantwell should be president (and that I should be her assistant). He also told me that he's very funny and writes very good poetry, and at the end we all concluded that our wait for the bus was a worthwhile time.

It is a soundtrack made of a softly closing door and reluctantly fading footsteps that plays in my head during these nights that I sit waiting for the rain. And although the reluctance and the footsteps--and, for that matter, the door--have not ever existed, it is the possibility of them that echoes in the back left corner of my skull. That's the place where I keep the chance that anything might still happen, the place where the secret smiles live.

But in the dream that I had we drove down a road strewn with the ribbons from cassette tapes, all melted into the asphalt and with no intention of leaving. And though the reflection of the sun burned the lines into my eyes and all I wanted was to get away, I have not quite stopped wondering what that street would have sounded like if we could only understand how to play it. In my dream the joke that you made was not funny.

And I have tried to describe, scribbled on cocktail napkins and paper placemats and packets of sugar, all the ways that I would dare you to come and find me. Only hide-and-seek was never my game, because though you promise to look under all beds and behind all drapes your fingers could very well be crossed behind your back. So hiding is where I will not be, nor will I be driving down highways crisscrossed with music. I will only be waiting for the rain.

The birthday weekend went well, with lots of Bumbershooting and drinking and tea and phone calls and inappropriate text messages. Today, because evidently the weekend now lasts until Tuesday, I cut off all of my hair and made a disastrous batch of cookies. (So now I look like a boy and my apartment smells like burned. In case you're taking notes.)

Have you noticed that I still have not split town with a houseboy named Enrique? I am doing such a good job of both staying put and not panicking. I deserve three gold stars. I'm so anxious for it to be fall already, for there to be clouds and drizzle and piles of leaves for kicking through. Summer is useless for me. I need spring and fall or nothing at all.

Until then, your job is to work out a secret handshake. I will be here, thumb wresting with the cookie-burning goblins that live in my stove.

I stopped to tie my shoes and somewhere--either while you were moving ahead or while I was falling behind--something broke. I would have caught up and told you, I swear, only I had tied those laces so tightly that I found myself incapable of running. I waited with my hands over my eyes until you came back and told me that it was all fine, but neither one of us believe that any more than we believed in the migratory patterns of butterflies. What we believed, instead, was that whatever was beautiful was also stationary.

What we believed was that we would always find what we were looking for.

Today is my birthday, and I will be nine years old again this year.