I went to see a naturopath yesterday. As time goes on I get more and more neurotic about chemicals and what they're doing to the fish, not to mention what they're doing to my brain, so I generally don't want to swallow them. Brains and fish are delicate things, after all. (Except for that fish that eats wood. That one's probably not so delicate.) At the same time, I'm really bored of being tired all the time, no matter how much I sleep, and I'm also pretty bored of recovering for the aftermath of the last two months.
So I went to the naturopath and she gave me some things to swallow, but she also told me that one of my legs is quite a bit longer than the other. (Relatively speaking.) And this, I think, is my new favorite excuse for being so clumsy--because my left side is made for a person a bit bigger than my right side. I think this also accounts for my overly large left foot. I think perhaps one of my legs was switched at birth. I should look into this.

A friend is coming up from LA this weekend for the post-wedding bachelorette celebration, which means that I'll be roaming Seattle for the next few days with the same people I went to Vegas with. As that trip resulted in mass hilarity and a bunch of nice Swedish boys getting kicked out of their hotel room because the hot tub overflowed a lot, I have to say that I am really looking forward to this weekend.

Hair and Shoulders have been spending a lot of time together lately, whispering, and Hair and Shoulders together are a nostalgia machine second only to visiting the parking lot where you lost your virginity. Just above coming across a group of giggling thirteen-year-old girls, all shiny hair and flavored waxy lip gloss. Hair and Shoulders don't see much of each other, these past few years, and when they get together it's hard to see anything through this soft haze of wistful and delicate blue. They have a lot to talk about, I suppose, as a lot of air has rushed between them since the last time they met. A lot of molecules have quietly passed by.

I want to apologize, both for what has gone before and what is yet to come.

(PS, Internet, my connection to you at home has been hosed for the better part of the week and will maybe continue to be, you know, missing, for the next few days...so if I'm not answering your emails as quickly as I should be, that's why. Or, if you send them this weekend, it might be because of the post-wedding bachelorette party brokedown extravaganza I'll be attending. And then recovering from.)

Hey there, spring.

Don't think that I haven't noticed you there, rooting around under my skin like a raccoon in a trash heap. I've noticed you in the times when I have to take off my coat walking home, the times when I realize I probably don't need two sweaters over my dress, the times where I wouldn't be able to help but whistle cheerfully if I knew how to whistle. All of the bulbs are making flowers right now, the robins are all hopping around excitedly eating my friends the earthworms, but I am mostly ignoring all of it. I'm not ready for you quite yet, spring.

But I'm getting there. I had planned, after all, to spend this half of the winter breaking out of some of my more destructive patterns. And while this isn't perhaps the method I would have chosen, I am finally close to hollowed out and nearly prepared to spend the spring charming everyone with my frantic talk of the noble rhinoceros and the adorable pangolin. (You don't even know how many documentaries I am capable of watching and regurgitating, but: it is a lot.) We're going to have dance parties for months, spring, drink bottles of champagne, collect collective nouns, stay up much too late, and kiss in dark corners. It's all in my plans. Only right now my fingernails are all shredded and their beds torn apart and bleeding, and I haven't smiled at a cute stranger in weeks.

So maybe I need a little bit more time, spring. Some of those bulbs that are making flowers now need a hard freeze in order to bloom, a period of dormancy in order to motivate root growth and subsequent blooming. Maybe I do too.

I finally broke down and talked to a counselor the other day, after one inexplicable meltdown too many. She told me that I should just keep doing what I'm doing, that there's no timeline for recovering from these things, and for goodness' sake to stop thinking that I'm underachieving in a non-existent personal repair competition. Which is good news, I guess, because I'm always sort of afraid that I'm crazying up, that I've gone too far down certain crystalline paths inside my head, that I might not make it back.

But on the other hand, I think I was hoping for instructions. I'm not very good at just waiting for something to happen, and I think that I wanted her to say something like, "Ok, what you need to do is, during the new moon, turn in three clockwise circles and one counter-clockwise, wearing a jester hat, and then pour out a shot of scotch. And you'll be cured!" And that, I could have done. But there are many things I am not and one of them is patient. (Other things I am not include: a smurf, the treasure of the sierra madre, smaller than a breadbox, and green.)

In the meantime, given a lack of other options, I guess I'll be waiting. Impatiently.

I've been dreaming lately of pop-up books.

It's a little thing, but it's been happening consistently for weeks now, I've realized. Each time I turn a corner and fine a book sitting on a table, and when I pause to open it something amazing bursts into being. What it is I can't seem to remember, and cursory research provides no interpretation.

Still, I think that those pop-up books are the point of something, something out of sight and yet only just around the corner.

Late nights and early mornings I am distracted by the weight of my skull, trying to fit my thumbs under the edge of it, to lift and give the stack of polaroids inside some breathing room. If I ever donate my brain to science, you will be able to recognize it by the twin thumbprints on either side of the nape of my neck.

There are bats that have learned to snatch spiders right from the center of their webs without getting stuck on the sticky fibers, leaving behind only tattered threads of silk.

In a drizzle, while the rest of the neighborhood was sleeping, I gathered most of your remnants and put them in a box. Down at the dock I sat them next to me and told them everything I never managed to say, and then I sent them gently in the water. I think that's where they belong.
Some of them, but not all. Some things I kept, hidden. When I am better again, I will want to remember what was best.

Dear everyone,

Happy leap day! I've been wishing for weeks that I knew someone with a birthday today, because a leap birthday party sounds like a lot of fun. When you only get one everyone four years, you pretty much have to do it up properly.

A friend and I actually declared it February a week early, attempting to leave January well behind, but February was in a lot of ways harder. I hit bottom this month, but only in my own head, because I've felt guilty abusing the friendliness of the people I know. It's one of my worst habits, and I've been exhausted.

But as a result I've also been very busy, almost over scheduled, and it's left me little time to dwell. And today when I left the office I walked out into rain and bluster, and it felt like breathing again. The cold sunny days we've been having are pretty, but I need a few months of wind and rain to clean out what's sitting like marbles under my skin, and there just hasn't been enough of it lately.

Still, I have spent much too much time already this year crying in cabs and doubting myself, and I'm bored of it. I'm ready for a change. In just over a month I'll be off on my trip, and in the meantime I need to shore up my self-confidence and fondness for adventure. I need to pull my skin back around all of my holes.

Lucky for me, that's one of the things I do best.

love,
me

A few sunny afternoons ago I took a walk down to my favorite dock, intending to watch the city's reflection in the lake and read a book, and found the old man who also hangs out there on sunny afternoons sitting on a bench. He looks homeless but he doesn't smell homeless, and we get along in the effortless way I can only ever manage with relative strangers.

"Hello, little girl, how are you?"
"I'm lousy!" It felt good to announce it without needing to explain.
"Me too!" He grinned at me, reached into a pocket in his shirt, and pulled out a colorful pack of cards. "Want to play Go Fish?"
It turned out that I wanted nothing more than to play Go Fish. We've done this a few times now, and each time he chatters away, unconcerned with whether or not I'm listening, and this is always satisfying.

For a while I wasn't really listening to him, focused on the call and response of the game, but eventually I realize that he's telling a story about a friend who fell asleep on a steep hill overlooking the freeway. In his sleep his friend rolled over and kept rolling all the way down to the freeway, where he slid feet first on to the street and in front of a passing car, which ran over his legs and kept going.

He smiled pleasantly the whole time he told the story, and whether it is true or not is hard to say. I lost that game, though. We played two more rounds of Go Fish before I left to read on my balcony, wondering about the fate of the man with no legs.

Under your bed I found a box full of bottles stuffed with genies, and I smashed them. Those wishes were past their expiration date anyway.

The space between you and me has been like the last page at the end of a chapter. But that may soon change. In the winter I went and planted my name in flower seeds in your yard, and now that spring is nearly knocking on my front door like a suitor in a tuxedo shiny at the elbows, well, I'll be coming up in colors outside your window any day now.

Sometimes the lesson is that there is no lesson at all.

Sometimes I find myself digging through a closet looking for my bell, book, or candle, and somehow rummage out whole reams of things that should be left on shelves. Tea parties and old shoes and scary, scary monsters. Rummaging frequently gets me in trouble. I don't think that when I'm not around people describe me by saying, "She spends a lot of her time looking for writing on blank pages and forgetting first names," but it wouldn't be inaccurate if they did.

Still, when I leave here, I'll miss this.

Carved into the bottom of my walking shoes will be, "Wanted to throw her wrenches at you, but forgot. Is frequently distracted by unnoticeable things. If lost, hold up a buttercup and look for what is stained yellow."
It'll be stamped into all of the dirt and pavement and superheated air that I cross. I'll leave easy trails to follow.

I think that your pockets are full of magic. Mine are too, I suppose, but the magic in your pockets is something different and shiny. And I've only got a handful of all this this magic left.

I would like to build you a spaceship out of cotton candy and compliments, set it off from the corner between there and here. Inside, I think there would probably be cages full of paper birds and the astringent smell of too-ripe citrus.

I'll meet you at that corner, hands cupped around secrets, magic pockets full of all keys, a bathtub full of gin and flower stems.

Hey look, internet, I done went and made myself a dress. It's not a perfectly made dress, by any means, but it's not too shabby considering half of the pattern instructions sounded like gibberish.

I have to say, I find this sewing thing very satisfying. It has long been really frustrating for me that the country is getting fat much faster than I am, and so as a result vanity sizing is taking away a lot of the clothes that once would have fit. I doubt that I'll ever make all of my clothes, but having the option to make what I can't find is pretty excellent. It's also ultimately cheaper--materials for this dress ran around $25--and I know for sure that it wasn't constructed by small Indonesian children, being that I'm from Florida and all.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with myself, internet.

This year I spent Valentine's Day with a gift sampler of very funny girls and gay boys eating pizza and Lil' Smokies, drinking champagne, and watching dance movies. Eventually we ended up at 80's night in my second favorite gay bar, drenched in sweat and breaking out our best old school moves. There really aren't many ways that a Thursday night can be better, and it was so much healthier for me than, say, that time a few years ago that I accidentally got blackout drunk on Jaegermeister on Valentine's Day and nearly went home for a threesome with two gay boys. (I'll be forever grateful to Chris for putting a stop to that.)

Honestly, Valentine's Day has never been a thing for me. I've been in relationships on the day before--I had the best college boyfriend a girl could ask for, and this guy once sent me on the world's greatest Valentine's scavenger hunt around the city--but more often than not, I'm single for it. Right now that's especially for the best, because I'm still in a really really bad place in my head and attempting to keep a safety distance from any nice single guys, lest they end up broken too. But, as I've said before, I am a lucky and well-loved girl, and I can't see the point in being sad over something like Valentine's Day. Someday, maybe, but not yet. Not when there is champagne to drink and dance movies to watch and people to hug whenever I need them.

I write about a lot of bands for Metblogs, and I have this secret fantasy that there's a band out there paying attention. One day I'm going to walk into a show to find a charming, enthusiastic, and well-dressed band with one member in a costume, and they are going to have a trumpet and a lot of extra drums for the other band members to play and whistling in three of their songs. They'll open the set with a cover of the Tragically Hip's "Scared" and close with a cover of Nat King Cole's "When Sunny Gets Blue" that involves all the members of the other bands on stage with them.

If this ever happens, it will be time for me to retire in style from the show-going business, I think.

Fighting my cold is a lot easier than fighting myself, and so I have been out. Sitting in dim rooms, mostly, wheedling people into one more drink. Sometimes even angrily cajoling people into one more drink so I don't have to go home and deal with myself. I am unreasonably angry lately, mostly at all of the things I can't control, so I've been trying to control everything within arm's reach. These fists start at my elbows.

There's only a photon's worth of difference between filtered and unfiltered samantha lately, and I've been having difficulty keeping inside my head the sort of thoughts that make you back away with raised eyebrows. Just the other day I let slip an enthusiastic ramble about the epic story in my head about the pangolin and the star-nosed mole that go on adventures together. On angry days I hate the curious look that people give me when they get a look at the synesthetic road maps underneath my skin. The truth is risky, and if I could I would snatch my words back before they made it all the way to your ears, like a dollar bill on a string.

Still, there is something soothing in the company and smiles of strangers, something familiar in the heart-thump I get when my favorite tall-dark-and-handsome walks up with a grin because he already knows what I want to order. Outside of my insides is a cool towel on the back of my angry neck. I'm letting my thunder clouds fight all of my battles.

In the 4th grade, I campaigned for president of the United States on a platform that consisted almost entirely of my promise to "basicly [sic] be very helpful and encouraging" and to increase the number of school days so that we could catch up to the Chinese. Shockingly, I lost. I think my classmates voted the kid who promised free pizza in the cafeteria into office.

Last night I woke to someone scrabbling at my front door. Drunk neighbor or overly friendly raccoon, I can't say for sure, but I stumbled to the door half-asleep and piled a bunch of things in front of it. Like the burglar alarm made of tin cans that I'd set up every night by my window and bedroom door during the years where I spent too much time reading R. L. Stein books.

I've had a hard time working up the enthusiasm to do much lately beyond taking very long walks or sitting--in bars and on my couch, mostly. My living room is covered with a scrim of movies and half-read Italy travel books and science magazines, and I am ignoring the pile of pink vintage-lampshade-inspired fabric that is sitting by my sewing machine waiting to be made into a dress. All of my metaphorical windows are covered in tin foil.

Earlier I was standing in my bedroom measuring myself in order to make pattern adjustments, noting the distance between neck and shoulder or belly button and thigh. I've been thinking lately about the day that art met math and everyone finally figured out how to make the third dimension one that you could see rather than just one you could experience. I've been wondering just how many levels are left to go.

Oh, earthworms. This winter's staunch refusal to give us a few consecutive days of clouds and rain is working out even worse for you than it is for me. I've still got this angry robot humming away in the back of my throat, speaking with my tongue and trying to punch with my hands, but I keep coming across your powdery dried-out form strung across the sidewalks when I walk home through these discomfittingly bright evenings, and that's even worse. Your habit of crossing the sidewalk to get to the other side is always mildly distressing, and my habit of moving you off of the sidewalk and out of squishing range is why I'm late to work more often than not. But there are all of those hours when I'm not walking past, and those are the hours that find you stranded on the pavement. When it is raining you stand a chance of moving yourself out of reach of an uncompromising shoe, but lately you have been out of luck.

I'm doing my best to help, earthworms, but I think you would stand a better chance of making it through this winter intact if you got a little bit of the weather you are healthiest in. I think that I would too.

So! Things I have in my house!

One of the ways I have been occupying myself in these not-so-hot times is by buying stuff. Dresses, new sheets, airplane tickets to Italy, and, of course, vintage aftershave bottles shaped like Lincoln, Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Benjamin Franklin. (I don't know why he's included...maybe because he was president of Pennsylvania?)



When TMS came over the other night and saw them on my floor, he wondered if I had perhaps sustained brain damage when I hit myself in the head with my front door last week, but no. They are still full of their aftershave, which smells just like four old dead guys should smell.

I realize that I am well on my way to becoming one of those old ladies who dies in a tiny apartment full of peculiar artifacts and stacks of books, and while people are looking for my body in my labyrinth of junk they'll mumble to themselves things like, "I wonder whose skull that is" and "was that really FDR's bathtub?" I'm pretty fine with that, honestly. And I don't really like cats, so at least when they locate my withered form crushed beneath a pile of Russian novels and still clutching a bottle of scotch, nothing will have eaten half of my face. Hopefully.

On Thursday night TMS showed up at my front door with a slumber party in a bag--ice cream, potato chips and dip, fashion magazines, High School Musical. And then we had a pillow fight. TMS, clearly, believes that we are twelve year old girls. Before we went to sleep he spritzed himself with an extra shot of cologne, to make sure that my pillows smelled of someone friendly.

Last night I went to a birthday party for a teacup poodle. For months we've been talking about pitting two sets of cute brothers that we know against each other in a cute brother-off, and last night both sets of brothers wrote a song about Charlie for his birthday. Having a brother-off was the most brilliant idea anyone has had in months, and I think I actually pulled something laughing. When you add in the dogs wandering all over the party, I think it's pretty safe to say that one of the best parties of the year has already happened. And that life, inevitably, incrementally, gets better.

Dear Dream,

It's been a month since you killed yourself, and I am still so mad at you.

I'm mad that you could do this to your friends and your family, that you had such a low opinion of them that you just left them. That one more time you refused to compromise for anyone, that you refused to meet anyone halfway, that you were even more selfish than I had ever given you credit for. I don't believe that living only on your own terms is worth being so cruel. I have a hard time believing that it's true some days, and several times I have almost called you to tell you that you have taken this experiment too far yet again, only to realize that if I did call no one would answer. Because it is true.

And I'm mad at you for me, of course, because I feel broken and poisonous, and no matter how much people try to convince me otherwise, I can't shake it. Because I've always found it hard to trust people with too much of myself, and I'm afraid that this has made it even harder. Because I am a girl who breaks things, and this thing can't be fixed. Because you wrote those songs about me and I only got to hear them after you were dead. Because I still wake up every morning with guilt crouched on my chest like a gargoyle, and it takes everything I have to push it off and get out of bed.

I'm mad at myself too, though, because when it mattered most I failed at the one thing I've always tried to be. And regardless of whether I could or could not have done anything, the fact still remains that I didn't try. That I was selfish and hurt and exasperated, and that I let all of that get in the way of being kind.

But maybe it's better for you this way. I think this was a poem you've had in the back of your head for a long time now, that someday you'd go somewhere snowy and finish what you almost started all those years ago. In one of your letters you talked about living in Maine during the winter, about how you kept a pile of clippings about people that had lain down in the snow in those woods and fallen asleep, and never woken up. "Obituary clippings of whom you keep loose in a drawer to remind you that it's not always bad news, and that there is a good way to go. But not today."

I guess your today finally came.

People have been shattered on the rocks of your decision, because you were someone that affected people profoundly. And I guess the only thing to do is gather up our splinters and move on, with one less person around who will drop everything to make us soup when we are sick, with one less person to argue with until we want to scream or break things or both. I'll get better, with luck and help, regain the pounds that I have lost in the last few weeks, stop fighting so hard to stay stuck together in public that I cry until I throw up when I get home. Eventually I'll date someone again. Time is funny like that, and it's lucky for us that that's the case.

I wish that you had had more time with everyone, that everyone had had more time with you because whatever our differences were you were a worthwhile person to have known. But that wish is silly, and selfish again, because more time is not what you wanted. And you were a man who always got what he wanted.

love,
samantha

I have roughed out an itinerary for my trip that includes Rome, Siena, Florence, Venice, Assisi, and Naples, with day trips to Bomarzo (if I can figure out how to get there), Ninfa, and Pompeii. I've booked places to stay in all of those except Assisi, because I am nothing if not a crazy planner. So now! You should tell me what to do in those places. Especially if you can tell me how to get to Bomarzo from Rome.

Planning and thinking about my trip is doing a lot to keep my mind off the deeply blues, my haunted bedroom, and feeling like a poisonous frog.

When I was in China, I was amazed at what turned out to be universal currency: Elvis and UB40, the Backstreet Boys, harmonicas. Some of my favorite parts of that trip were the moments when I stopped being so obviously foreign and was just another person. I'm looking forward to having that feeling again.

All rectangles could be squares, I suppose, folded correctly, looked at from the appropriate angles. Folded appropriately and looked at from the right angles, all rectangles could be cups of hot chocolate or bouquets of earthworms or vast expanses of the universe. That's the thing about rectangles. A rectangle, properly motivated, could escort us to the points where our circular and elliptical orbits overlap, and explain just what we're supposed to be looking at.

I know that I collected smiles for a while, packed them into rectangles, shaved them off in pieces and stuffed them in a jar like watermelon pickle. But it looks like some other squirrel has gotten into them and sent them into space, because I can see them falling in flames through your sky like delicious meteorites. I would reach for them, but I think that they would scorch off the lines of my fingerprints.

Late at night I hold my hand close to a lamp, trying to see through to the other side, and find myself inexplicably sad that the universe just under my own skin is as distant and unknowable as the farthest reaches of space. I think about how the things that are good are also secretly gateways to the things that are bad.

Like that time in Tanzania when a bunch of school children were sent home for laughing too much, and how the laughing became an epidemic spread from child to parent to neighbor. How people had fainting spells and rashes and crying jags in between bouts of uncontrollable laughter for months and months. How they couldn't stop laughing no matter how they tried.
I imagine that very few people were brave enough to tell jokes for a very long time after that.

I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of having and talking about all of these feelings. I hate feelings. (Did you know that my exboyfriend drove up to Snoqualmie and shot himself with the gun I was afraid to ask if he still had? Me neither! I just found out last night sometime after midnight from a girl who had only met him once, with me! I don't know about you, but that makes me want to throw up!)

Instead of feelings, let's talk about Italy. I just bought my airplane tickets, and I'll be going on my trip in April, for two weeks. Have you been? Are there places I should go and things that I ought to be aware of? Shoes that I should make sure to buy? Anything?

In Love is a Mixtape, the author talks about kindness. He says, "You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. [...] People kept showing me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it...I had no idea how to live up to that kindness."

It's a thought that has been coming back to me over and over again this past week. People have been just astonishingly kind. They have called and emailed and left comments and sent text messages and flowers and notes. People I know have told other people I know and they have sent emails and made phone calls. My friends have been amazing, as always, but even strangers have gone out of their way to console and reassure. I'm overwhelmed, my hands and pockets and corners are all overflowing with it.

I'm still feeling fifteen things at once, angry and sad and guilty, having trouble seeing the forest for all of these molehills. I go long stretches where I think I'm doing alright and then something switches back in my brain and I'm broken again. The loss of my long quiet hours has been hard because when I'm alone I think in the same unhealthy circles, and until now I've always loved being alone. And I feel like I'm not living up to all of the kindness I've been given, that I should be healing faster because so many people have been so nice to me. And that might be the most illogical thought of them all.

And really, all I mean to say is thank you, for your emails and positive thoughts, for being just plain nice. It means the world to me.

I returned to my bed on Saturday night, drunk and in pieces. Last night I woke in a room full of ghosts, reaching shallow colored hands across my bed, standing in dark pools in the corners.

So today I left the apartment to buy new sheets. On the sidewalk across the street I skirted around a sparrow laying on the ground. Fallen, attacked, or old, it was hard to say, but as I stepped past it the bird opened and closed its beak weakly, moved its foot.

Though the old sheets have been washed a few times since our breakup they still seemed to exhale some of Dream's smell when I pulled them off. I threw them out, immediately, although my fingers were reluctant to let go of the fabric. The new sheets smell sterile, and hopefully free of ghosts.

I remember walking up to our first date to find you leaning against a bike rack, wearing a typewriter on your shirt and reading a battered Balthazar, and feeling all of my plans for skepticism and distance escaping through a trap door in the back of my skull. Twelve hours later, when we parted, I found all of my trains on new rails and a feel of anticipation hovering in a cloud near my ears.

I remember a night of home made pizza, arts and crafts, looking for and finding the treasure of the Sierra Madre in backyard flashlight beams.

And fighting until I cried, I remember that too, over your snap judgements of the people I love. Trying to make you see that everyone has more to them than you gave them credit for. Until eventually I couldn't stand to have you all in the same place. I remember how you pushed all of my buttons, constantly, because you felt invigorated by the arguments. And how I felt sad and closed up because of them.

Rollerskating and frisbee playing all followed by telling secrets and pulling hair late into the night, getting lost in rows of corn and stepping on disintegrating pumpkin husks in a field. I recall all of that. I remember how you chose movies because you wanted to watch me react to them, how you looked at me like a new species of girl every time I surprised you.

I remember how I loved the smell of your cologne on my pillows.

I would be lying if I said that I was doing well right now. It feels like all of my maps have been turned sideways.

Grief is always a strange experience, and as the news came to me later than it did to most it feels like I'm on some sort of reduced grief timeline. Like there's a very limited window here to get a handle on the sadness and anger and guilt before the point becomes moot. Only so much time to lock in my memories of our better times.

I am lucky to have amazing people around to bolster me up and take me out in public where I'm usually too self-conscious to do any sober public crying, although sometimes my dignity doesn't stop me. Yesterday the dentist lectured me about flossing and I lost control of my strings and collapsed into a sad snotty heap on his chair while he looked on in panic. My favorite waiter remembered my name last night, and it took all of my self control not to jump up and hug him. My feelings swing wildly in many directions, and when I regain control of them I feel extra guilty for making people uncomfortable. I am held together by the thinnest of strings.

And frequently there is a monster that grabs my head and makes me watch a movie over and over in split screen of me leaving one party to go to another while at the same time across town he was killing himself. I've spent the last two nights on my couch because he was the last person to share my bed with me, and it feels made of coals. In the daytime and the bar and in the company of people I can understand logic, understand the futility of assigning or accepting blame, understand that he made a business decision and that it couldn't have been stopped. But the rest of the time the monster is holding logic by the throat in its other hand, and I am overcome with anger and guilt and flat black sucking grief. It feels like you can see the holes in me from space.

In December a boy and I broke up, and I just heard--literally, just hours ago--that he killed himself on New Year's Eve. I don't talk about my love life on the internet, but this, you should know.

Things between us ended poorly, and after they ended they rapidly went downhill; we were both passionate, stubborn people with hurt feelings and different ways of operating. I wanted some space to heal up and forgive a little, and he wanted to talk everything out, and it eventually devolved to a place where the fewer phone calls I answered, the more he made. And the more he made, the fewer I wanted to answer.

We were never well matched, which was a lot of the excitement. He stayed home and played music, I drank and went to bars. He wrote long crazytalk emails and I sent text messages. And we adventured together, trading new experiences, swimming in a lake, going to gallery openings, visiting the pumpkin patch. The spaces between us were large but when our rough patches met they made sparks you could see from space.

He was kind, and smart, and he wanted badly to be the sort of man the he admired. He cared about people, and I very nearly loved him.

He called for the last time on the 30th, and I never responded.

It's a strange feeling, to be finding out so late that this person that I spent so much of my time with, that I had such strong feelings for, is no longer around. I am terribly sad, of course, but I'm also confused and angry. He had so many friends, so many people that loved him, that it seems such a selfish thing to do. He had nearly, as a younger man, attempted suicide before, and was stopped by a kind friend at the right moment who had no idea what was on his mind. Someone who still doesn't know that they once saved his life, and now might never know.

And so I also feel terribly, terribly guilty, for thinking too much about my own healing and not about his. We had both broken each other, but I worried only about how he had broken me. Things might not have turned out differently if I had been kinder, but they could have.

My heart goes out to his friends and family.

I haven't seen the old man in a couple of months, and I was distracted today, sitting at the bus stop, so I didn't notice his approach until he sat down next to me and put a hand on my knee. "There you are, Red," he said, patting my leg, "I've been worried about you."

I laughed a little at that, the thought that my accidental prophet might sometimes approach the bench with the same sinking feeling that I do when he's not there. I covered his hand with mine and looked at him, his filmy eyes squinting against a sudden sunbreak, his cheek riddled with broken blood vessels. He looked insubstantial, carved from soap, and I was glad that we sat under the shelter. Just in case.

"What were you thinking about, Red? You had your thinking face on when I got here." He mimicked me, furrowing his brow and pursing his lips, and I smiled. I live in a perpetual fog of metaphors, so it's always likely that I'm thinking about something, and I'm pretty sure the old man understands that. As time goes on I find myself ever more convinced that he and I are cut from the same cloth.

"William Tecumseh Sherman," I answered. He raised his eyebrows at me, made an impatient moue. "He didn't burn down Augusta. When he, you know, marched to the sea. And coincidentally, he loved a girl that lived there. Anyway, today I was looking at the map of the town that he carried during his march, and all it had marked on it were streets and cemeteries and powder mills and things. No sign of why he left it alone. So I was thinking about Sherman, and if his unrequited love saved the homes of that whole town." I punctuated this with a feeble wave. These things always sound worthwhile inside my head. He laughed at me, shook his head. "I think I know what you think the answer is." The corners of his eyes crinkled kindly.

On the bus and down the road, a bunch of boys stopped spray painting tags on a dumpster to turn and paint a swath of leaves on a tall shrub silver. The leaves glinted in the sun, apparently confused by their sudden transformation. A number of blocks further down a big rubber shark sat high in the branches of a tree, mouth open. I was unsurprised, therefore, when I stepped off the bus and into a sun shower.

In fact, I would have been surprised not to.

I enjoy your gaze.

You're not coming home with me, not today, not any time soon. My edges are still feeling a little to sharp for that, my skin too thin. My heart is beating in 3/4 time. I am fragile and painful to be around and slightly shrill, and you can't even dance to me. But in spite of all of that, I do still like to watch you watching me, even when I don't mean to act on it. Especially then.

In all of the time I spend thinking about outer space, I always think around the moon. I imagine that there was a time that the moon was as distant and fascinating as Saturn or the Omega Nebulae or spiral galaxy NGC 3079, but then we took a rocket up there and it turned out to be only dirt, and I can't think about the moon without thinking about all of the people who thought that it would be so much more. So I acknowledge the moon, I pause to think about how pretty and foreign and far away it is, but I stop before I let myself remember that we've had that sand on our hands before.

So you're staying out of my skyline right now, but I'm keeping your glances. I'm folding them up and putting them in my pocket and sleeping with them under my pillow, all of those seconds of opportunity lost, but not entirely gone away.

It is only when it rains that I come home to myself, when your eyes on my skin don't stab like a handful of sand spurs and my own gaze doesn't automatically avert itself to stare down your ear. The sound of the rain dampens the noise of my footfalls and it becomes easier to tiptoe around the sleeping monsters that live outside my door, easier to unlock my small cabinet and crouch inside.

In the sun I would like to think that I could move out of that cabinet someday and go somewhere else, move to Gibraltar and change my name and make butter sculptures and set up tin-cans-and-string phones with the little monkeys, all without waking up those monsters. That I could patch up these cracks with slivers of stained glass and scuttle like a hermit crab into someone else's shell, and the monsters would stay put, throw a goodbye party, wave white handkerchiefs at my boat.

When it rains I remember slowly, like trying to make out the words of a song heard through an open window, like turning out the light only to discover that the stars always glow in the dark.

I've been thinking a lot about Newton lately, and his whole knifing himself in the eye habit. I can understand not seeing the world in enough colors, everything not looking the way it does in that space behind his eyes. He found that by pressing the tip of the knife against the back side of the eyeball he could make circles appear everywhere, growing and shrinking depending on how hard he pressed.

I decided that to counteract December I'm going to force a good mood until it actually happens. Things have been working in my favor on that end. I've spent the weekend wearing a sparkly dress, assembling furniture, drinking mimosas and watching the snow. I walked home from a trip to the fabric store to find that I was genuinely pleased with everyone. It's a season of big crushes and champagne and feeling accomplished, and I've made it through six whole days of brazening out the plan. I've been lost in this driveway before.

Today was the perihelion, so I gathered up my tin cans and string a sent up a rocket to tell secrets to the sun.

I only told the sun the good secrets, though. I told it about taking off my hat halfway through walking home in a rainstorm, the drops all glittering in the streetlights, and feeling my hair curl on my shoulders. I told it about forgiving you too soon and myself not at all, about a hand that felt as reassuring as the cool side of the pillow after a bad dream. How you showed up like Wile E. Coyote with a suitcase full of black holes and put one on my heart big enough to drive a truck through. How I want to head up to Point No Point with a stack of smiles, a bottle of scotch, and my most enthusiastic friends, and let a few miles of windy coastline blow the sunshine out from under my eyelids.

I told the sun about laughing so hard I could see the tops of my cheeks, about a baby on an airplane that lurched into my arms when I said hello to it. I told it that there are always going to be things under the water that no one has ever seen before because nature always wins. I whispered a few not-out-loud things, my voice vibrating softly all along the string and into space.

I gave the sun the best secrets, because it's an awful long way back around to here again.

Dear 2008,

When you showed up last night I was taking turns kissing the cutest people in the room, and if that is how you plan to roll I would like to register my vote in favor right now. The evening eventually degenerated spectacularly into playing bartender, giving drinks for jokes, telling the dirtiest joke I know to a bunch of strangers and winning their hearts, making out, and, of course, falling down. I spent most of today recovering with my friends, eating too many things covered in gravy, laughing, and drinking mimosas.

I can't imagine a better way to start off the new year.

I believe in new years, and in clean slates, and in pretending that buying a new calendar is an excuse for brushing off the past twelve months and starting over again. I believe that amazing things are going to happen this year.

I'm not a big one for resolutions, but there are a few things I want to do. I want to be kissing people in more photo booth pictures. I want to decide if I'm going to go back to school, and take steps to make it happen if I can. I want big adventure and big love, I want it to rain, I want monkeys and flowers and robots and squids and whales and giraffes and dinosaurs. I want to learn how to loosen my grip on the things I can't control.

And as always, I want to learn to be brave enough to be bold, and to deserve all the love and attention that I get.

So, 2008, I think that you are going to be a big big year. I think you are going to be my year.

love,
me

Dear 2007,

Man, 2007, you were the garden of forking paths of years. Every time I try to stop and take stock of you I'm looking at a different year, like cross sections of a rock where all years are possible. Sometimes when I look at you you were the hardest, and sometimes you were the best, and in the places in between you were both in varying doses. I'm all mixed up about how I've felt about you.

December, certainly, has been a very hard month. The way the year is ending couldn't be more different than the way it started. My brain has felt softened this month, and everything has made me go all damp in the eyes. I have felt broken and incomplete and like a deep sea creature that might explode if brought to the surface.

I spent a good part of the year with what I can only describe as a broken heart, and in attempting to distract myself and recover I did a lot of things that surprised even me. And that was the part that was terrible--the surprise of feeling any such thing, since it snuck up on me, and all of the wrenching feeling that went with it. I spent much too much time this year trying to pretend that none of it was happening.

But that isn't the important part. And it's funny, because if things had gone the way I thought they might in January, everything would have been so different. So it's a good thing that life is smarter than me and also in charge, because I had so much fun this year. And that's what's important. There were Tuesday nights and Sunday brunches at Linda's, trips to New York and Vegas, driving fast around corners, rollerskating, drinking in the sun, the speakeasy, my ship in a bottle, drinking champagne and playing in the bubbles in a fountain, kissing lots of boys, falling in love with bands, obsessing about nature documentaries, a hot tub full of Swedish boys, and a ton of nights where I felt completely full of glitter. I think that I was more myself this year than ever before, less afraid. I've spent my time with people who don't look away when my edges are showing, and I'm thankful for it.

The unofficial motto of 2007 was Sleep When I'm Dead, and the results were ridiculous and amazing.

I think that it can be summed up like this: when Giacometti painted a portrait of James Lord he painted and repainted the canvas over eighteen days. In the finished piece Lord's head is detailed and accurate but the background and the rest of his body is merely sketched in. When it was finished he sat it down and walked down the hall to look at it from a distance and said, "Well, we've gone far. We could have gone farther still, but we have gone far. It's only the beginning of what it could be. But that's something, anyway."

But then there is also e e cummings: "Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being....Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."

And somewhere between those two is 2007 and, with luck, more years to come.

love,
me

My trip went well, and it was lovely to see my family, but it doesn't take very long before I start to miss the long quiet walks and empty spaces of my life in Seattle. I have been much too fragile and deeply blue lately to deal gracefully with the game of psychic dodgeball that is spending time with my family, and I'm unaccustomed to the level of noise.

Last night I came home after a couple of very delayed flights. The luggage took forever to arrive, and I stood there with my sweater coming apart at the sleeves and the rest of me fraying at all of my edges, overwhelmed, and considered leaving my suitcase at the airport. I didn't, but I probably should have.

In any case, it is nice to be home.

I'm starting to work on summing up 2007, but in the meantime here's 2007 in pictures. The set itself is here, if you want captions, and this is an alternate version that includes other people's pictures. Variety being what it is and all.

Merry Christmas, internet. I hope all of your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the best ones.

The airport shuttle driver and her GPS argued the whole drive. Whenever the GPS would tell her to turn right she would turn left, and the machine would wait a minute before announcing that it was recalculating the route. By the time we made it to the freeway, the little electronic voice had fallen petulantly silent. It didn't pipe up again until we had been stuck in traffic for a while, when it told us that we were approaching slow vehicles.

In the van we sat frustrated by the stop-and-go traffic and listened to the one-sided conversation of the dispatcher on the radio. "Are you completely lost or is your van not working? Help me out here." A long pause. "You're completely lost? Well can you read a street sign and tell me where you might be?" Pause. "Ok, who wants to go on a rescue mission?" Later, he advised the other drivers to avoid the interstate. "No one's getting anywhere, so good luck if you go that way." At this point the other passenger in the van and I spoke up. "He does know that we can hear him, right?"

After an hour and a half of hardly moving we passed what was left of an awful accident. A crumpled car with the top sheared off was being loaded on to a tow truck on the left side of the road. I felt a little foolish for worrying about missing my flight. It could have been worse, and it frequently is.

I did miss my flight, but a sympathetic ticket agent worked some magic and found another flight that involved running through the airport with my shoes untied. My connection in Charlotte was on the other side of the airport and, sleep deprived and tired of running, I found myself annoyed with the smugness of the airport and its rows of rocking chairs. Charlotte was mocking me and my rushing, the lack of time I had for rocking.

I am slowly planning a trip to Italy in the spring. It'll be my first time there, and, for that matter, my first time in Europe--the only place I've been is China. I'm sort of an obsessive researcher and planner, and at the same time I'm trying to avoid all of those impulses. I had no plan for China, mostly because I was visiting friends, so I just sort of showed up at the Jinan airport and waited for entertainment. So I'm torn between working out a detailed itinerary and just sort of showing up in Rome and going from there. My compromise will probably be a loose sketch of what towns I'm planning to be in and when, so that I can make reservations, but right now it's a big fight inside my head.

More immediately, I'm leaving tomorrow evening for parts East, to watch my brothers argue and to scratch behind the ears of some dogs. They live in the woods, and woods make me nervous, so I imagine I'll spend a lot of time pretending that I don't believe that there are axe murderers hiding behind all of those trees.

We rushed past all of the scenery because it looked like only trees. By the end we had forgotten both the journey and the destination, and we stood, lost, in an expanse of white space like the end of a chapter in a book. One written in a language that we didn't speak.

I wanted you to go away because you made my brain feel like laundry.

In quieter moments, waiting for the neurochemical tide to turn, I wedge myself into nooks and stare fondly at copy errors in my antique books. I love these misplaced letters that have sat quietly in those pages for a hundred years. The person who printed them wrong is likely long dead, but their mistakes have lived all this times on shelves in people's homes.

I like to hope that my mistakes will be so lucky.

Not too long ago someone emailed me suggesting that, if I'm stuck for stuff to say, I should start telling stories about the objects in my apartment--since pictures taken here and put in my Flickr would suggest that I have a lot of things. Which is true enough. I don't believe in clean, modern decorating. I spend a lot of time here, and I like my apartment to feel like home; to have my stories scattered on shelves and walls and everywhere else.

I've been hemming and hawing about it ever since (hemming and hawing are two of my greatest skills), but the thing is that December has been awful and just keeps getting worse, and all I'm good for right now is complaining and drinking. So I thought I'd give it a shot.

And I thought I'd start with this little elephant. My paternal grandmother, my Nan, collects elephant figures. A number of years ago, right around when they first diagnosed her with Parkinson's disease, she requested that I pick one of her elephants to keep. He's maybe 1 1/2" tall and he lives on top of the bookshelf that has all of my reference books, right next to my desk. My grandmothers are important ladies, and it makes me happy to have reminders of them right on hand whenever I need them.

I promise to have actual content for you soon. I've been reeling a bit this week from Anita's death on top of everything else, and it's all left me with little to say.

So! In lieu of all of my whinings, here's one (er, or so...) more thingie(s):

Ellen: "You started in Florida and are now in Seattle but it seems you've been some places in between, and yet you're approximately 12 (okay, 25?). Please make a timeline of the cities/town you have lived in from birth until now."
This is actually the sort of thing I expected more of when I tried this experiment. Anyway, no, only Florida and Seattle. (Yes, 25.) The timeline is:
Jacksonville, Fl, 1982-1985/6ish
Pinellas County, Fl, 1985/6ish-2000. My parents divorced when I was very young, but they always lived within 20 minutes of each other. My whole family lives there, too, pretty much. I lived with my dad every other weekend until my brothers were born, and then it was more like every weekend until I moved in with them completely during my senior year of high school. My dad and stepmom moved around quite a bit when I was growing up, but always in the Largo/Clearwater/Dunedin area, and my mom moved once, right before my sophomore year of high school.
St. Augustine, Fl, 2000-2003 (College.)
Seattle, WA 2003-now
Now my dad and his family live in North Carolina, but they just moved there a few years ago. And my mom intends to move to the woods in Georgia at some point in the near future, but I've never lived anywhere else.

And more! I'm just editing this post instead of making a new one. Just to shake things up.

M: "What size shoe do you wear?"
Usually a 6 or 6 1/2. I have giant feet for only being 5' tall. You'd think my balance would be better.

"And what three things, besides Thanksgiving, make you happy?"
1. The moments when I realize that wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else doing anything else with anyone else.
2. Scratching behind the ears of friendly dogs.
3. Books.

Round two!

Keith: "You mentioned 'pen and paper'. Do you prefer to write with a pen or a computer?"

Depends on what I'm trying to write. I write differently here than I do in my paper journal, just like how my handwritten letters are vastly different than emails. And the typewriter is what I use when I'm too annoyed for pen and paper to be forceful enough. Mostly, I use pen and paper for the sort of things that I don't write about here, when there's too much feeling for me to be comfortable. The paper journal and this one are two completely different ways of thinking, and there are two totally different voices involved. It's a lot like being textually schizophrenic, so the fact that both options are there is good. And I prefer to write my letters personally because it's a slower process, so each letter is a little act of devotion toward the person I'm writing to.

Jake: "Heavy partying is certainly a good reason for not posting more. Does this mean we should hope for depression and a downturn in your social life in order to get more posts?"

Really, what you should hope for is a downturn in my social life and a case of the Delicately Blues, because depression does nothing for me. December has been pretty relentlessly awful, and that's reflected in what I've been posting, which has been uninspired. I'm at my best when I'm just a little bit sad and wistful.

Amon Ra: "Sum up the experience using no more than 3 haikus."

only men question

even though women also read

should form a theory

comments as content

make for a very nice break

A+ for effort

questions full of thought

readers are shockingly kind

like early Christmas

Huh. This game is kind of fun. Alright.

Brandon: "If you were a boy and wanted to impress a girl, what would be the absolute most fantastic question you would ask?"
Um. 'What's your ring size?' Kidding! Kidding. Although someone did ask me that at a bar once, and I was so appalled that I couldn't even collect myself enough to say something mean. I had a dream the other night in which two nice-looking boys were sitting at a bar, and as I walked past one of them stopped me and asked, 'I'm sorry, but could you help us solve this argument? We're talking about the mimic octopus. Do you know how many creatures it can imitate?' I'm a little concerned that I'm dreaming about cephalopods, but I'm also pretty sure that if something like that actually happened, it would be makeout gold.

Ryan: "I've always wanted to know if your vignettes are planned and worked on and edited or if they just kind of tumble out of you in the form they arrive in on your blog. Or, perhaps, a combination of the two?"
I don't edit. I can't edit. What happens when I edit is I go from overwrought straight to stilted. The way this website tends to work is that I get a sentence stuck in my head like a really annoying song, and as soon as I can I type it out and then sort of go with whatever makes sense next. Which actually gives a pretty accurate picture of what it looks like inside my head, because things like this make total sense to me. It's all a lot more like coughing up a hairball and less like, you know, actual writing.

Rob Lightner: "Does Samantha the character secretly resent the intrusions of Samantha the author? Does Samantha the author want more, or less, or something different, from Samantha the character? This reader has enjoyed his interactions with both, though it's been far too long for the one. Are you a happy couple?"
I actually really hate the whole writing compulsion thing--I always refer to Nietzsche when people ask me this question, and his, 'A: I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a painful and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgust me. B: But why, then, do you write? A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far i have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts.' Samantha the character wishes that samantha the author would just shut the hell up already, because it would be nice to experience something without automatically thinking about how I could describe it, or figure out how I feel about something without writing it out. And I imagine that samantha the author wishes that samantha the character would quit whining.
So, you know, not a very happy couple.

Mike: "What do you look like? Why do you never post pictures of yourself, since this is such a personal blog?"

I look like a Muppet. Specifically, this muppet. And I don't post pictures of myself here because no one needs my giant muppet head on top of all of this general gnashing of teeth. But the internet is chock full of pictures of me--five days old, fourteen, seventeen, this summer, wearing glasses, kissing a girl under an umbrella in a bar, two weeks ago. There are plenty, and those are just from me. One thing the world is not lacking is pictures of me.

Jake: "How come you don't post more often? Some weeks you only have a few posts. I know its probably hard to keep up such a high quality but when you do post daily (as you have recently) its a very cool thing."

It's a complicated algorithm involving free time and inspiration. I'm out four or five nights a week usually, for live music or drinking or dinner or general carousing, and it doesn't leave a lot of spare time. And of course when I'm dating someone, which I was recently, there's even less free time. Plus, when I am home, I'm usually too tired to do much beside lay on the couch.

Sometimes I just have nothing to say. I don't always let that stop me (ok, I don't usually let that stop me), but now and then I feel like I have already used all of the words I know in every possible combination, and there's nothing left. Or maybe I'm working on something for someone else, and that's using up the voice I usually use here. I try to stick to posting at least every other day, but sometimes it doesn't happen.

Dylan: "Why do you write?"

Because, like Norman Mailer's friend said, 'The only time I know the truth is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen.' Because I don't know how not to.

"Are you looking for love in all the wrong places, or are you looking for places in all the wrong loves?"

I'm not really looking for love. I go out with lots of people, because I like kissing, but mostly I'm pretty fond of being single, although I guess if it happened I'd be into it. I just want to get drunk, make out, and talk about books, and probably some day I'll do that with someone and realize I'd like to keep it up for a very long time. There are a lot of different kinds of love to have fun with, and I am surrounded by them. Maybe love is something I'll just trip over like shoelaces.

On the other hand, I am probably looking for places in all the wrong loves.

"How would you describe your relationship with your ten year old self?"

My ten year old self and I are probably on pretty good terms, because at the bottom we're both the exact same scared little girl. I know a lot more about some things than she does, but then, she probably knows a lot more about other things than I do. Of course, she gets made vicious fun of a lot more than I do, but that's only because I have since learned about kicking people.

That was amusing. Anyone else?

Alright, so here's what's been on my mind lately. (I mean, aside from how sick and tired I am of being sick and tired, but how I wouldn't mind keeping this low, kind of sultry voice...) I've been at this for four years now, and in that time I've gathered you, this collection of readers, who are an interesting combination of people I do know and people I do not know. And you are not commenters so much as you are emailers, and as a result I've gotten the most random selection of questions and things emailed to me, but remarkably little of that sort of stuff in the comments.

So in these four years I've been doing all of this for me, without considering who my audience might be or what they might want, because this is an outlet for me like none of the others, and I've found no better way of clearing out all of the sentences that get stuck in my head. And I have no intention of stopping that. But I've been thinking about you, and our relationship, and all of the summing up and considering that go with the end of the year. And I've never done this before, but now that it's on my mind I have to see it through, so: is there anything you want to know that I haven't told you? Maybe after four years, it's time for an "ask me your questions" post.

Someday, I should probably analyze why this makes me so nervous.

Today my acupuncturist put some things in my forehead. I'm sure this is old news for lots of you, but I've never had a needle in my face before. It was a surprisingly itchy experience.

Afterwards, I detoured through the park to spend a few minutes on the swings. I've still got this epic trial of a cold--have had, for about a month now--and my voice is all shot, and I ought to have gone straight home to do my laundry and have soup and whiskey and watch Gregory Peck be the only possible Atticus Finch. But I'm never one to pass up a race on the swings. I am still the champion of swinging the highest.

I've been feeling very deflated and bruised and broken lately.

Yesterday I rode home on the bus through the dark, my spine gathered tight and hollow, my voice beginning to crack from a cold. The bus pulled up to a stoplight and shuddered to a halt and I looked out the window through my reflection. Across the sidewalk and through another window a group of people were gathered decorating a Christmas tree. A little girl put a string of lights around her neck like a stole and struck a pose, and the people all dissolved, laughing. Just then the light changed and the bus slid away and "Handle With Care" came on my headphones, and I snuggled deeper into my scarf and defiant green coat.

Later, I walked through piles of leaves to a cocktail party full of strangers. There were no cars parked along the curb, and piles of shattered window glass glittered in the streetlights. From the looks of it, all the cars in the neighborhood are missing their windows.

Some nights, all of my steps kick up clouds of strained metaphors.

Happy 4th birthday yesterday, website. Let's you and me stay friends for a long while.

I was reading today about a study that some scientists did on Beethoven's hair, which turned out to be full of lead, which was probably what killed him. The lead, not the hair. But what really got me is this talk about the lack of trace-metal patterns that are associated with all manner of things like genius and irritability and malabsorbtion, which just slays me. What metal gives you the genius? And if Beethoven didn't have the metal-genius, what sort of genius did he have?

Also, I find it entertaining that there were all of these people that were sort of crazy and brilliant and history has always been like, "Well, sure, that's because they had syphilis." Only now science is pointing out that sometimes, that's not actually the case. (See: Beethoven.)

The hair that they studied was cut off his head by a young Jewish musician whose family kept it as a keepsake until the Nazi occupation, when they gave it to a Danish woman who helped a whole lot of people escape, and her daughter auctioned it off at Sotheby's.

You know, I do this to people in conversation too, where it's a lot less easy to escape. I just find everything in the world very, very interesting, is all. This sounds like it would be very endearing and cute--I'm a pretty endearing and cute girl, by most accounts--but it really isn't. It might be, if I could work these things into a conversation like a normal person, but instead I remember halfway through talking about something else that I'd been thinking about this neat thing, and I flail around and shout about it right in the middle of whatever is going on. So it's really only amusing for people who already know me. Strangers just think I'm nuts.

Anyway, that made me think about Newton, and about how he (once? often?) stuck a knife behind his eyeball to "induce ocular effects," because plain old drugs just weren't good enough for him. But it could easily have blinded him, and then where would we be? If an apple falls on Newton sitting under a tree, and he's severed his ocular nerve and can't see it, does he discover gravity? These are the things that keep me up at night.

I have this bad habit of weaving when I should be ducking and ducking when I should be weaving--poor emotional reflexes. This last couple of weeks have knocked me off balance, and I am officially discouraged.

A few days ago I was walking home in the dark, and crossing the street I looked the other way where I usually don't. Down the street the docks and their shelters were lit, brilliantly, and I wondered how I've made that same walk all of these years without noticing it.

Yesterday, I went the acupuncturist for the first time. It's a peculiar feeling, having needles in earlobes and ankles, but maybe it'll help shut my angry robot down.

Well, internet, I went and bought a sewing machine today. It makes me laugh that it's a "Project Runway Limited Edition," because I love that there are actually people who would go and buy it just for that reason. I plan on covering that part up with a sticker, to hide my shame.

It was actually a very simple purchase--I walked in and told the man that I needed a sewing machine, he asked what my experience level was and what I planning on doing with it, and then showed me a couple of machines. It was all very pleasant.

So now I'm going to become one of those girls who makes (some of) her own clothes. I'm very excited.

In 2002, I started the Postmodern Christmas Tree project. I did it because I was broke, mostly, but also because a Christmas tree was a symbol to me for something that I was lacking, and it seemed inappropriate to have one. So I decided that until I had a family, I was going to make a tree out of things that I already own--use the objects in my life to fill in that absence.

But the thing of it is that I do have a family here. Not the sort that I had in mind when I made that decision, of course--in fact, this weekend's breakup puts me back at the farthest point from that I can get, which is fine--but a family nonetheless. A really great one. And it makes the sentiment behind the postmodern tree feel a little silly.

So today a couple of my best ladies and I went to the tree lot and picked out real live Christmas trees. Once I made it home I turned up the heat and put on my favorite Nat King Cole album (I worked in retail for too many years to listen to Christmas music) and decorated it. My heart hurts a little, having been much used lately, but my tree makes me very happy. Retiring the postmodern Christmas tree was a good decision.

SNOW!!!!!!!

I love snow in Seattle. Snow in Seattle is like meeting a beautiful stranger while on vacation and spending one perfect week with them. You never see snow here long enough to get annoyed that it leaves its socks all around or hates your mother or gets really bad PMS. Snow sticks around long enough to make an entirely new city for a day or two, and then it melts. As a girl who comes from a state with no natural ice, snow is like Christmas only better.

All manner of different things that I care a lot for have gone away or changed recently, and mostly I'm ok with that. After all, things change, or open or close, and there are always new places to love and adventures to have and situations to enjoy. But I am riddled all over with very small holes of not-dealing-very-well, and I think that I might be very slowly turning transparent.

I had a dream last night about ladybugs. Millions and millions of lady bugs, all over me, in my clothes and outside of them and in my mouth and ears, making a terrible crunching noise when I tried to brush them off and steadfastly refusing to move. I usually try to avoid talking about what I've dreamed--honestly, who cares?--but this one is still freaking me out. In fact, I've become more uneasy about it than I was when I woke up this morning.

Three boys I've known in three paragraphs, in honor of dudes who think "my friend has a crush on your friend" is a good line to use in a bar and not in, say, the fourth grade. Boys of Seattle, I think you are so funny, and I want to pinch your cheeks:

1. I asked for a glass of water, so he slid out from under the blankets and pulled on his jeans. We were at my apartment, and he didn't know where the glasses were, opening and closing cabinet doors. I could have yelled out where to find them, but I wasn't quite ready to hear or use inside voices. I waited instead, arms growing chilly, and eventually the sound of running water signaled that he had found what he was looking for. He walked back and stood in the doorway for a moment, debating something, and I noticed that in his hand was a coffee mug and not a water glass. At the moment, it didn't much matter.

2. We sat on his couch, disheveled and breathing heavily. Inevitability crackled in the space between, and with his strange and lovely hand tangled in my hair he paused. I raised an eyebrow and he cleared his throat and said, "I, uh, have to tell you this. That I always say that I, you know, love someone. While I'm, you know...yeah. It's just a, you know, a reflex." He punctuated his stuttering with a hand gesture. I sat there for a moment, considering, and then readjusted my clothes and stood to leave. He walked me to the door, apparently unsurprised.

3. The club was hot and full of attractive gay boys and 80's dance hits, which is why we went there, but the confident straight boys had started to wise up and infiltrate. I knew when he looked at me that he was straight, regardless of the fact that he could dance. He walked up and put a sweaty hand on my sweaty shoulder and I put my hand on his waist, fingertips taking notice of the definition of his abdomen under his damp shirt.

I seldom touch people with my palms, reflexively curling my hands into loose fists and bringing only the back sides of my fingers into contact with people. It just seems like a very personal body part, and I often don't realize that I'm doing it. Still, whenever I feel insecure or out of control or just plain worn thin, the palms of my hands are the first things I try to hide.

Sometimes I surprise even myself.

The rains have yet to stick around for any significant period of time, although I had a damp and freezing walk home in a shower today, strolling in my own fog of damp synthetic fibers and watching the drops surge in the headlights of cars. But I could use a few days straight of it, if only to wash away the sinking feeling. The thirteen little elves who run on my treadmills are all running in different directions lately, and they're all thinking too much about the future.

I don't know about you, but I ate more bacon-wrapped turducken yesterday than is both prudent and ladylike. We had food enough for another half-dozen people, and spent a cozy day watching terrible movies and cuddling with the puppy and drinking mimosas and wine. I love my people, and I love things that are wrapped in bacon. Thanksgiving is the greatest.

This tail that I keep chasing gets away from me every time. But you know, my dog used to chase her tail when she though no one was looking. She caught it once, and I've never seen a dog look so surprised. So maybe the chasing is better, because what comes after it ends?

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow, everyone! I hope your dinners are delicious and your gatherings as much fun as mine is going to be.

I have a whole backlog of melancholy and metaphor and sentiment to get to, but I can't be bothered right now because Thursday is Thanksgiving, and if that doesn't make you so excited that you sort of want to throw up, well, I'm not sure if we can be friends anymore. Thanksgiving is the greatest holiday of the year, because it is centered completely around eating things and being thankful for the nice things in life, and I sure do like eating things and being thankful for how fierce awesome my life has turned out to be.

I won't be hosting this year, since a friend of mine has a lot more space than can be found in my little apartment, and I can't say I'm super sad about it. While there's a certain satisfaction in constructing a full dinner for a dozen people with my bare hands--going out and chasing down a turkey and shooting it with my musket and whatnot--mostly the point of having it here has just been to guarantee that it happened at all. Instead, I'm going to make some stuffed shells and a blueberry cobbler, and go sit around somewhere else and laugh and laugh with most of my very favorite people and the world's cutest teensy dog. And I won't even have to worry about my sink clogging up with turkey bits again this year.

So really, it's all pretty much a big win for me.

And for everyone else, too, as I had planned to wear a bright yellow vintage dress that I just bought. (Nothing says "Happy Thanksgiving!" like a little retinal burn.) But it's very small, even on me, and I'm the smallest person I know that isn't 12 years old, and so their eyes are safe. There's no room in that dress for all the things I plan to eat.

Hey, you know what else I made? I made a worm box, so that I can start composting. My worms came yesterday in the mail, all cute and wriggly, and now with any luck they're busy eating things and turning them into dirt. In order to make it I had to buy a drill, and I must say, drilling is lots of fun. I think everyone should make worm boxes right now. You can borrow my drill.

Internet, I done went and made myself a skirt! It's not technically finished--it needs shortening, since it is long and I am short, and then a hem--but I did not sew my fingers together even once. It turns out that I'm actually not too bad at sewing, which I had honestly expected to take to like a duck to investment banking, not being the sort of girl who is very good with her hands. But sewing seems to be all about paying attention, and if there's one sort of girl I am it's the sort that is good at paying attention. I am excited about the wardrobe possibilities that this will open up.

I've made most of two things now, and I haven't bled even once so far. That's definitely a new record for me.

I apologize for the even lower than usual quality around here lately, but I've been working on something for a friend who is going to be doing a workshop with at-risk kids. It's the first time I've ever attempted to write anything about some of my experiences growing up without resorting to euphemism or talking in circles, and I honestly have no idea what I'm doing. It has really taken a lot out of me. As repayment, here's a little of what has been occupying my time.

Sometimes, late at night during my middle school years, we would all wake up to a pounding at the back door. We rarely ever used that door because it stuck, and so anyone banging their fists on it in the middle of the night was always a sign that life was about to go sour. Good news, I learned early, never comes in the dark.

Every now and again we had warning, and my mom would take me to my grandparent's house to spend the night on their fold-out couch. We never really asked questions, my grandparents and I, because none of us wanted to learn how to handle the answers. Instead, they would make up the sofa bed and we would all spend a restless night, rising blearily in the morning to step gingerly around the subject and avoid each other's eyes.

The knocking was always accompanied by shouting, and our trailer would shake as my stepfather jumped out of bed and ran down the hall. My mother would follow, shrieking at me not to leave my bedroom, that they were not wearing clothes and that everything would be alright.

I can’t imagine that much fazed the sort people that came to our door, but my stepfather wrenching open the back door in the nude probably gave them pause. Whether or not everything was alright was something I never stuck around to find out; it only took a matter of moments to pull on my clothes, raise the window, and pop out the screen. For most of the year the Florida air would be warm enough to require only jeans and a t-shirt, and I would wander the dark streets of our trailer park under broken streetlights until the night felt safe and smooth again. Now and again I’d meet other kids out wandering, fleeing from homes holding much of the same, and we would go to the park and sit on the swings and not talk to each other. It was enough, at the time, to know that we were all part of the same secret club.

I fell asleep during math class most days after these late night jaunts, the desk safe and cool against my forehead.

There was only once that I remember anyone offering an explanation; mostly we all just used the daylight as a screen from our nights. I think that what triggered the frantic chatter on that particular evening was that the person who was threatening us this time was a family friend who had been dealing drugs with my stepfather until something went wrong and they ran afoul of each other. In any case, after a late phone call and a loud argument my mother grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that we had to leave for my grandmother’s because Ken was coming over to kill us all. There was something about dealing heroin, but not doing a very good job of it, that at the time washed over me completely. But it made an impression, as Ken was someone I had always been afraid of, and even if I didn’t understand I quickly gathered my backpack and went to wait in the car. When my mom walked outside her face was shiny and red, and we drove to my grandparent’s in silence.

What transpired in the night is anyone’s guess, as the next day came and no one ever spoke of it again, silently righting picture frames that had been knocked askew and resettling furniture. We saw less and less of Ken and his wife after that, though, and I spent more and more nights roaming the sidewalks, nursing bruises, and hoping that high school would change everything.

I think that I should build a tiger pit by my front door, to trap all of those feelings when they step over the threshold, to feed them to something stronger and more ferocious than they are. Because I am soft and tender and they storm through my thickest woods and cut off my toes, and I can't even fight them off because I am too busy figuring how to disguise my limp.

My heart is still crossed, even if your fingers were too, hidden where I couldn't see them.

Some evenings, when the light is right, I can feel your stars shooting through my skies, making blurs and streaks just off to the side of where I can see them. In the false neighborhoods of my memory I remember walking out into the desert and waiting for them to rain down on my head, a thousand little meteorites made of something warm and soft, heating the cold clear air around my shoulders.

You know, up until just a couple of months ago, I still completely believed that some dinosaurs had two brains.

I didn't necessarily believe that the hind brain had its own separate personality, of course, although not for lack of trying--that seems like a fantastic thing to believe, and I certainly spent no small amount of time telling myself stories about a Stegosaurus who constantly got into fights with his tail, which would act out and cause embarrassing situations that his tiny front brain would have to deal with.

The day that I found out, I was wandering sleepily through the Museum of Natural History, a place I hadn't been to in years. We had been at the bar until very late the night before, and I hadn't gotten much sleep and was already suffering from the fright that giant blue whale model always gives me. I had been talking about the dinosaurs for days, because I love dinosaurs, and for a long series of moments I just couldn't process what the sign on the cage was trying to tell me. If I could have called an emergency meeting of the Babysitter's Club I would have, but it was the middle of the day and so everyone would have been at work. Fortunately, just then, Tal called--we had tentative plans to make out in the Planetarium, a dream of mine that is still unfulfilled, and I snatched open my phone. I had to tell someone.

Tal was exactly the sort of boy you want to meet when you're only in town for a week. (He might have been the sort of boy you want to meet in general, but I was only in town for a week, so I can't say. Juliekins, did you ever see any of those people again?) He was cute and smart and funny and nice, and he spoke fluent Hebrew, a fact we learned a few days later when his cousin from Israel came to town and we all went out to drink vodka. Boys like Tal are the ones that you think of fondly in your most wistful moments as ones who maybe got away, the ones you could perhaps have brought home to mom; the ones that you think of calling whenever you're back in town. (It is one of my more useful talents that, given a town and 24 hours, I will usually meet someone worthwhile to smooch. I am often at my most charming when I'm leaving, after all.)

He had finished shooting for the day and was calling to see where I was, but I had no time for any of that because my whole fossilized world was crashing down around my ears. "I am at the museum! And! Dinosaurs didn't have two brains!" He was confused, so I tried to explain further. "They just had an extra cluster of nerves! Which is so not another brain! And...and I'm very disappointed." This made little impression on him--I guess I'm the only one that still believed that--so we made plans to make plans after my nap in Central Park and I hung up the phone and sat down on a bench, dejected.

While I sat there, a little boy walked up, pulling on his mother's hand. He stood there for a minute, mouthing the words, and then his shoulders drooped and he turned and walked away. So maybe I wasn't actually the only one left that still believed in a two-brained dinosaur.

This morning, for the first time since I moved to Seattle four-and-a-half years ago, I fell down my hill.

It has actually been a while since I have fallen all the way down, although I've certainly done a number of remarkably clumsy things in the interim. (The finger that I sprained fighting off a bear with a gun that was holding a number of limbless children hostage only recently finished healing, for example.) I've walked up and down that hill in heels and in flats, in rain and snow, drunk and sober, and have not, until today, left any of myself behind.

I walked out of my apartment this morning in flat shoes and jeans that already have a hole in them from skinning my knees last year. The bass line of a song that I shouldn't even be listening to came through my headphones, and whether I was pushed by the memory or slipped on the rain-slicked leaves is anyone's guess, but down I tumbled. I landed on the same knee--apparently, I catch myself with my left knee, or maybe that one's just bigger than the other one--and slid on the top of my foot downhill until the stairs built into the sidewalk stopped me.

Amazingly, the contents of my purse all stayed put, and I'm not terribly banged up; just a bruised knee and a skinned foot and an aching calf. I'm also not a very quick thinker before my morning caffeine, so rather than going back home and bandaging myself up, I wobbled pathetically off to work, little droplets of blood beading up on my foot and running down into my shoe.

Glad I got that out of the way before the ice and snow show up, really.

Lately I have been thinking a little bit obsessively about my compulsive tendencies.

I think that we all have these things, every single one of us, something that has to be done before life can go on, something that will just grate on our brains if left alone. And some of them I'm improving on. For example, I don't go back and check to make sure the front door is locked at least three times before I can catch the bus anymore. (Walking back up and down the hill got to be more annoying than the possibility leaving my home open to burglers, I guess.) I don't avoid cracked paving stones anymore, either, or hold my breath at red lights.

Most of them are little and cute compulsions. I have to have a stove burner that's just been turned off covered by something, usually the teapot, but that's a safety issue. People get hurt by those things. My mother once put her hand on a burner right after I had turned it off and told her to keep away, that it was hot, and while her hand eventually healed the part of my brain that houses the image of the aftermath has not. All cabinet doors have to be shut immediately after whatever is inside has been fetched, but again, that's safety--my head is on level with the bottom corner of most cabinet doors and I am already likely to bump myself on them when they're closed. Still, if a burner is left uncovered or a cabinet door ajar, it's all that I can think about. And I won't even start in on my need for even numbers, although I'm sure that some members of the studio audience have some things to say about all of that.

And, of course, we've already spoken before about me and elevators.

But none of this is the point, because the one I've really been noticing lately is my deep need to have everything in exactly the right place. This is remarkable because I'm not actually a very tidy person; I am a person who makes piles. But those piles have to be in the right place. Which sometimes moves. Which is just one more reason why it's a good thing that I live alone.

But it goes so, so far beyond that. Are we playing a game with cards? I can't continue if they're not neatly stacked. I'll try and try and try, but eventually the pain will get to me and it'll have to be fixed. My bookshelves and cabinets and surfaces are arranged in a way that makes perfect sense to me, and I simply can't focus on anything else when anything is someplace else. The other morning I walked into the bathroom and the toothpaste was somewhere other than where I usually keep it, and my first thought was how glad I was that I hadn't known about it before going to sleep the night before, because it would have made sleeping impossible.

I hate forcing these things on people, and will sit and fidget and try to keep my crazy in check until it's impossible to do so anymore, because if I don't fix whatever it is that has moved out of place, the world will end. It will. Has the world ended yet? No, and that's because I always give in and put things back where they go, probably just before the universe explodes. You're welcome.

Anyway, for whatever reason, this particular thing has lately been making me feel crazier than a sprayed roach. Trying to suppress it doesn't work, just makes it like an itch that I can't scratch in public because it's impolite. And yet at the same time, I feel like a jerk when I give in and readjust something that someone has just put down. So maybe what I need to do is develop some sort of other, more distracting behavior, something that will move people's attention away from the fact that I've noticed that they've just placed something two inches to the left of where it's supposed to be. Like throwing the contents of my pockets in the air. Or blow an air horn. Or, I guess, letting the universe explode.

The thing that breaks the heart of this ghost the most is the echo of a lifetime of cardboard guitars and paper drums and spun-sugar blanket forts, of forming and disbanding bands called The Zach Morris Jubilee, of opening and closing doors. The reflection of what almost was but wasn't is always brighter than the reflection of what was.
Walking, the ghost turns off the streetlights over my head, leaving me in ambient city light and piles of leaves.

And behind your eyes a parking lot, open and flaring in the in-betweens with the sulfur-yellow that both masks and attracts ghosts.

Halfway down the block walked a man carrying a giant bunch of multi-colored balloons. The strings got caught in the barbed wire of a fence--one of them popped--and by the time he had them untangled I had nearly drawn even. He walked to his car and opened the hatchback, and then stood on the sidewalk looking confusedly back and forth between the inside of his trunk his fistful of balloons. He smiled sheepishly and shrugged as I walked past, and then attempted to wedge the balloons between bits of detritus on the floor of the trunk while struggling to keep the balloons from escaping. A little farther down the block he passed me in his car. One balloon had broken free of the back and was drifting gently toward the back of his head.

On the other side of the crosswalk a girl held a vase full of flowers in the crook of her arm, her other hand clutching the bottom of it. The light changed, and as we walked toward each other I saw her steps falter every few feet, her attention following her nose down to nuzzle the crown of an orange daisy.

Near home, a man stood on the corner waiting for the traffic to part, hoisting a box in his hands. The cars paused for a second and he darted into the intersection, stumbled, and lost his grip on the box which in turn lost its contents; sheets of paper went cascading across the pavement. He paused and considered them for a second, shrugged, and jogged the rest of the way across the street.