Sometimes it's good that I have this record. I'm working on a lazy case of the smash-everythings right now, wanting vaguely to break whatever I can get my hands on over my knee and then move to a village outside of Prague with a hermit crab named Claude. But I had the smash-everythings at this time last year, too, having come back from New York to find post-vacation life not moving in the directions or at the speeds that I had anticipated. Something in the air in June seems to make me impatient, but realizing that I am always impatient in June makes it easier to handle, because I know it will pass. It has to have passed, in order to have come around again.

And things are different this time around, too. Last June I reinstated the no-touching rule and currently I am pro touching. Last June I was sad and making bad decisions, and this June I am mostly happy and making no decisions at all.

Last June I had never cooked a duck on my barbecue, and now I have. Clearly, life is always improving.

Seattle is having a hard time heaving itself over the line to summer. Normally I would fully support that--our mother star and I are not on good terms--but in my head it is already time for drinking outside and having barbecues and kissing inappropriate people. I also have a young tomato to worry about, a tomato that's not going to finish ripening without a little less rain and bluster.

I had too-optimistically put away my winter coats and thought through my wardrobe without tights, and in the last week or so I've had to reverse all of that thinking and put my legs back in microfiber. I've had a taste of pitchers of beer on the patio at Linda's and playing catch in the park and long, leisurely walks home, and I can say unequivocally that, though I love the rain, I'm ready for it to take a break.

I am a worrier by nature, and given enough free time I can worry myself sick, into a hysterical apocalyptic frenzy that gives me the vapors. Inside my head is an expert worst case scenario generator.

But that's not healthy, so I've been trying to break the things that worry me into bite-size pieces. I worry about skin cancer, so I keep out of the sun and wear sunscreen and live in a cloudy town and know more about direct vs indirect DNA damage than anyone should. I worried about car accidents so much that I quit driving and started relying on my feet and public transportation. I worry about chemicals and what they're doing to the environment, so I've replaced all of my cleaners and most of my toiletries with ones made of things that occur in nature and come in recyclable containers.

It helps me feel like I have a little bit of control, because the things that really scare me are ones I can't do anything about. I worry about my loved ones constantly, all of the things that can happen to them. I spend an awful lot of time fretting over the end of the world, and what the toxins that have been leaching out of plastics at me my whole life have done to my future children. I could tell you imaginary stories about terrible things for days.

It's the end of the world that I'm working on right now, though. Food shortages scare me, so I'm learning how to grow food on my balcony. I feel guilty about all of the waste I generate, so I'm composting in my worm box. I already don't drive or contribute many chemicals in the water supply, and I eat pretty locally, so that makes me feel better. But I buy too many things and have too many things delivered, and I write letters that are delivered by car. What I could be doing but am not is frequently overwhelming what I am doing, and I have not yet figured out how to break down my bite sized pieces into smaller bites.

So I find myself, lately, panicking again over the old things. Skin cancer. Car wrecks. My crooked nose and muppet head. Worry, worry, worry.

I can feel it sitting, just beneath my breastbone, humming. Waiting. The sun has darkened my freckles and the angry robot is there, powering up, trying to take over and shove those fists into my hands when I'm not looking, like a sneaky child with a bug.

Right now things are going too well for it to be much danger, but in wrong moments it surges, a lunatic at the bars. A wistful late-night walk home makes it throb, a failed conversation, one drink too many combined with not quite enough courage. Sometime here soon I'll make a decision that sounds like fun but, like closing my hand on the flower that conceals a bee, it will turn out to be the angry robot decision.

And then it will drink your whiskey with my throat, and capture all of your secrets in a bag, and kiss the wrong person with my lips. The angry robot leaves casualties wherever it goes, and it won't be satisfied to sit quietly all summer, no matter how pleasant life is around it.

I walked out of the Pantheon and sat down on the side steps, opened my guidebook, and started to read about what I had just been looking at. It's one of my habits while traveling, reviewing what I've just seen, because it gives all of the trivia context. A man walked past and paused, and then asked what time it was. When I told him, he sat down next to me.

His skin was grey and loose, his suit well-tailored, his hair limp and colorless. Instinctively, I scooted a few inches away from him. He started chatting at me, and I reluctantly chatted back, answering his questions about my trip to Rome and the things I had seen so far. I was starting to think that he was harmless, and then he asked, "How many men have you slept with?" It caught me off guard enough that I nearly answered, catching myself at the last moment and closing my mouth. "How many men have you let between your legs?" He thought that I had not understood him the first time, so I frowned and told him that I didn't think that was a very appropriate question.

He nodded, and started talking about how in Rome men have stopped going to prostitutes, how instead they give their money to a student or a housewife for the same services, because that way they both know where their money is going and always have access to the same woman. I still don't see how that's not another form of prostitution, but I waited to hear where he was going with it. "Most women here, they get 35 Euro, for example, for a blowjob. You, I would give 100 Euro." I scooted a little farther away. "You are traveling on a budget, yes? 100 Euro would be very helpful. You could do a little extra shopping, impress your friends with the things you bring back from Rome."

I declined his offer and started wondering if he'd follow if I tried to run away. He lobbed a few more intimate questions at me, all of which I refused to answer, until I gathered up my things and looked exaggeratedly at my watch, stammering that I needed to meet some people for dinner. "Are you sure, no to 100 Euro? Well, I will give you 10 Euro for this conversation. It will...help me later." Thoroughly grossed out I leaned over to pick up the book that had fallen out of my lap, and just then he stuffed a 10 Euro note down the back of my pants.

I leaped to my feet and said quickly that I really needed to go, that I was meeting a bunch of guys from my hostel, big ones. Australian. The look in his eye told me exactly what he was thinking about that, but I didn't much care, and he leaned forward and whispered, "Your skin is so warm!"

At that, I took off, turning down streets at random until I was sure he wasn't following, slumping against a wall, breathing deeply. Later, I would fish the 10 Euros out of my jeans and use them to get my fortune told on the Piazza Navona by an old lady wearing a fur coat, who would tell me that I will marry once and have two children.

At his birthday party on Sunday, my friend Buster made a video asking some of the party guests what their first memory is, and having this picture taken is mine. (My big muppet head and rad giant sunglasses from Venice show up at about four and a half minutes in.)

For a long time I thought that it was just a vividly remembered dream--the feel of the wicker on my back and through my dress, the weight of the parasol, the instructions on how to turn and where to look. It's not unusual for me to remember dreams for years after they happen, but one day years ago I came across this photo in a box full of pictures and realized that it wasn't just a recalled dream. It was my first memory. And what I've always remembered most completely about it is the anxiety, the concern that I wasn't posing in the way they wanted me to--that I was going to screw it up and disappoint everyone. Feeling irrationally guilty and terrified of disappointing people is something that I struggle with still today, so it was with a mixture of amusement and total frustration that I pulled this photo out of the box and realized that I've been at it my whole life.

For as long, quite literally, as I can remember.

Seattle and I are still wildly in love, having and going to barbecues and movies and bars, eating cake and swilling champagne, kissing, making new friends, dancing, and falling down. And laughing. At bad jokes and good jokes, faulty tables and hammers, really good stories. Laughing so that my face hurts. Something that I broke is slowly being fixed, straight men are pausing on the street to talk about my shoes, and I ran into a boy that I like and managed to not look like a dope. Much. My friends, who are always very nice people, have been extraordinarily kind and complimentary lately. Some stars somewhere are in a samantha sort of alignment.

And the sad fact is that I badly needed all of this. I needed a breather, a little bit of time where I could stop fighting to be ok because I actually am ok. To feel less like a natural disaster in a dress, damaging whole populations of people with my fingertips. I'm still waiting for fifty-four rugs to be pulled out from under my feet, still wary of everything in the world and touching things infrequently and softly, but the very very important part is that I am happy. Uncomplicatedly and thoroughly, for as long as all of this good fortune decides to stick around.

It's spring, and Seattle is being suspiciously nice to me. It probably says something that I get all worried when things start to go well, waiting for three dozen other shoes to drop, but it has been pretty great. People are giving complicated thumbs up and buying drinks and giving friendly waves. I had my first drink sent to me from across the room. The other day a man crossed the street just to say something complimentary and then went back to what he was doing. All of my drawbridges are up right now but the activity on the other side of the moat is making me excited for this summer.

And things are blooming on my balcony, and it could certainly be a lot worse to be me. Keep it up, please, Seattle. I'll try not to let the attention go to my head.

When I was a kid I had this big tub of silica gel crystals, left over from a science fair experiment, that I would bury flowers in. I liked the feeling of clutching a blossom in my palm and searching with my fingers through the tub for the right place to let it go. And sometimes I would go excavating, digging up all of those now-dried flowers, often tearing off their petals in my excitement to pull them out and look at what happened to them when all of the moisture goes away. They were the ghosts of something that had been beautiful, and I kept them in a vat of desiccant and took away their colors so that they would last forever.

A few years later, in my "gifted" class in seventh grade, we mummified a chicken while studying the Egyptians, and left it in a cardboard sarcophagus, buried, for the next year's class to find. Somehow it was much less romantic to be covering poultry with bags of salt to produce a sad, wizened carcass than it was to plunge a handful of flowers into those fine white crystals.

In a light breeze I stood and blew wishes for you off a handful of dandelions, hundreds of wishes all given to the wind to scatter and root themselves and bear fruit. Or at least, I tried to, but just as I closed my eyes the wind shifted and tossed all of those wishes for you back towards me, to get tangled in my hair and clothes and eyelashes, to fall behind. To turn out to be wishes for someone else, perhaps. I've been searching for them ever since, behind the wishes of other people, under their rocks, flowering below their seeds.

I'm not sure that you were listening, the day that I couldn't sleep because of Mercury. Mercury rotates three times every two orbits around the sun, and since its orbit is very elliptical the sun rises on one side, stops, goes back toward the horizon it came from, stops again, and then moves very quickly over the other horizon. Every day, if we were to count days by the passage of the sun rather than the rotation of the planet. The sun must be exhausted by its own indecision, not sure if it wants to rise or set and where, because Mercury is so close that the usual rules don't apply when it comes to orbits, elliptical or circular or otherwise. And all the while, Mercury continues to spin so, so fast.

It wasn't only because of Mercury that I couldn't sleep.

Temperatures are starting to creep up here in Seattle, which means my convection oven of an apartment will be getting unbearably warm, and that means that we're entering prime samantha stalking season. I'm pretty easy to stalk (although I prefer high fives), what with the red hair and outdoor drinking and the frequent crowd of very funny people, but if you want to be really good at it, please remember the following things:

1. I talk to things. Inanimate objects, worms, friendly dogs. Strangers, sometimes. I emailed this picture to a friend and his immediate reply was, "You were talking to a bug, weren't you?" And I was. It was a neat great big black beetle. I don't expect them to answer, so quit looking at me like that.

2. I rarely touch people with my palms unless it's completely unavoidable. Palms are personal and vulnerable and even if we're hugging my fingers are probably curled under.

3. If you touch my ears and I'm not prepared, I'll probably cry. I may also kick you in the shins or cut you or react violently in another way. Seriously. Leave my ears alone, or you are fired as a stalker. And a person.

4. I love enthusiasm even more than I love cookies with raisins in or puppies or the lean in. Actually, scratch that--I probably love puppies because of their enthusiasm. Enthusiasm about really ridiculous things is the best kind. Enthusiasm is like the secret handshake for people I really want to hang out with.

5. My friend just gave me a rad new baseball glove, and I fully intend to carry it around in my purse all summer and try to bully people into playing catch with me. People who want to play catch with me while talking about cephalopods are probably people that I want to make out with.

In Venice, I walked into a restaurant and studied the menu board hanging above a small bar. I had only been standing there for a moment when I sensed a person next to me and, turning around, found the waiter. "I have a problem," he said, and I raised an eyebrow. "I only have tables here for two people. You could come back later?" Italy had seemed confused about the fact that I was alone, and it was finally taking action.

So I left. Tired, cold, and feeling suddenly visible from space, I walked into a restaurant a few doors down. They sat me immediately, and the waiter walked over a few minutes later, an old man with wild white hair. "You are waiting for someone? Should I bring bread while you wait?" I denied that I was waiting for someone but accepted the bread, and he knit his fuzzy eyebrows. "Your travel friends have all left you alone for the evening, hey? At your hotel, drinking wine? Venice, it tires some out." A little impatiently, I denied that too. I was alone in Venice, in Italy alone, just me everywhere.

He spread his hands and made a tragic face. "I hate to see a beautiful woman eat alone. Why you come to Italy without company?" I told him that I was there to think, and that seemed to confuse him completely. He thought hard and then leaned over, very close to the table, and said, "You come to Venice, most romantic city in the world, alone? To think?" I considered that for a bit. Venice, the most romantic city in the world? I thought about Venice's beautiful decay, how it is rotting richly from the inside and acting as though that is the only reasonable way for a city to be. Yes, that certainly slotted perfectly into where I was on romance, so I nodded, and he wrinkled his forehead and then walked away.

When he returned a few minutes later it was with a small bottle of Prosecco in hand. He looked very seriously at me and said, "You are a very stupid girl, and I think you know nothing. Here is some Prosecco from me. Maybe it will help you think."

I am filled with nervous energy these days, cooking and organizing and rearranging, avoiding thinking about something that I've been waiting for. Something which doesn't seem to be coming.

On Saturday night I went dancing with some friends, walking a mile to meet my ladies in a new dress and high boots. Uphill and face first into the wind. Into the wind is one of my favorite ways to walk--fighting the breeze takes up all the space inside my head that I usually save for worrying about what I can't control. The stronger the wind, the better.
Hours later I walked home, the backs of my thighs burning, a line of sweat still drying down my back. Happy and limping slightly, from a slow to heal and much abused bone bruise on the bottom of my foot.
I am slow to heal in all ways. Easily broken. Fractures splintered all along all of my old fault lines.

When the phone rang a little after 1:30, I turned left instead of right inside my head, and let it ring. Many of my momentums are bad ones.

I try to keep remembering, try to hold behind my eyes a file of everything that was ever important. I was reading, recently, about the chemicals in our brains that let us unlearn fears. We stay away from stoves until careful, experimental touching teaches us that it's only the burners that hurt, and we unravel the parts of our fear of stoves that don't have to do with burners.
You would think that, with all of this touching, I'd be less afraid.
In any case, I've been thinking about how maybe those same chemicals let us re-learn our memories, amending them, sorting through boxes and filing cabinets and card catalogs of hazy impressions of moments and scents and songs. Adding a note in pencil at the bottom of them, unraveling the parts that we thought we remembered and filtering the rest through what we know now.
Maybe it's those chemicals that make me forget to step back from all of these ledges, no matter how many times I fall off of them.

And there are these bats that live in New Zealand, bats that certainly flew there, bats that sometimes still fly. But they do all of their hunting on the ground, wings tucked along their sides, marching about in the leaf litter on their little wrists. They're evolving backwards, or maybe they've gone around in a full circle. These bats, though, they're living in a completely different way than every other kind of bat, because that's what circumstances told them to do.

Sometimes I think that it is one hundred fifty years ago, and I have been carving all of this into your cornfields, waiting for someone to invent the airplane.

The kid who has a tail doesn't know that he has a tail until someone tells him it's there. A kid with a tail could go any amount of time thinking that a tail wasn't a tail, that it was the same thing as an arm or a toe or an ear; thinking that everyone else had a tail, too. Not thinking of his tail at all. It's only when it's pointed out that his tail takes on its own life, becomes just one more thing to think about.

I think that we have to drop monsters carefully, because they might shatter on impact, and a whole mess of little crawling monsters might just be less trustworthy than one big one. A troop of little monsters might eat all of the paper birds and chase off that unicorn standing quietly in the corner. Little monsters bite at toes instead of ears, but they slam all of the same doors.

Seattle, today is our five-year anniversary. I plan to celebrate by talking about a book with some hilarious girls and then having some drinks with some other people at a bar where another friend is dj-ing. I love that this is my life now. Thanks for all of the flowers. I think you're real pretty.

I was talking with someone I used to know recently, because it is spring and so 'someone I used to know' is a frequently recurring revolving cast of characters, and as a result I have come up with a new plan, called Operation: More Adventurous. (Theme song: Life is a Highway.) I've been thinking lately that there is handedness in decision-making in the same way that there's handedness in writing and throwing and high-fiving. When I walk into rooms I almost always veer to the right in the same way that I always write with the same hand. And I think I do the same thing with decisions. So for May, I'm supposed to turn left inside my head when normally I would turn right. Yes instead of no. Sometimes. You get the picture. (I'm hoping this turns out better than January's Operation: Brute Force Good Mood.) It's spring time, and that means it's time to air out my momentums to make sure they're the right ones.

And hey, gentlemen of the internet, here's a discussion I've been having with various dudes all weekend: If you were to meet a girl at a party and she wasn't wearing pants (as this was the theme of the party), would you be more or less inclined to call her?

Oh man, universe, you're not pulling any punches these days, are you? Are you trying to test the strength of my recovery? Is it just that it's spring, and everything interesting picks back up in the spring? Am I living in the Bermuda Triangle? Running into this guy the other day was bad enough, but then last night happened.

Yesterday was national No Pants Day and I let myself be bullied into changing for the party from my dress into bloomers and a shirt. This required a gallon or two of champagne, for courage, and I wasn't sure I wasn't drunkenly hallucinating a little when at the end of the night there was a familiar crooked smile peering down at me. I couldn't believe it--I still can't--since it's been years since I've seen him. And I was torn between kicking him in the knees and having a bit of a panic attack. It's not easy to maintain your equilibrium when confronted with a boy who broke your heart when you're not wearing any pants, and I think, universe, that maybe you should ease up a little. Just for a little while.

Like nearly everyone I've ever loved, I remember the first time I saw him.

I was standing by the bar that separated the all-ages floor from the drunks, idly scanning the room for the cutest boy, and he snaked pasat the crowd and through the doorway in the back. When stars are born the winds that they create sometimes form dusty funnel clouds in space, and it was a little bit of that that I felt thumping around in my chest as I took in his glasses and style and thought, Hey, that one's cute. I dug my hands into the pockets of my jeans--I wore jeans almost every day back then--and he walked onstage, and I said out loud, "Well, that makes sense." And my friends looked at me with their eyebrows raised because I was talking to myself in public. Again.

After forty-five minutes he walked offstage and put his arm around a girl, and I said to myself, Well, that's the end of that. Only, of course, it turned out that it wasn't the end. Of anything. Not yet, anyway.

Dear everyone,

Oh, April.

After December's bad break-up and his subsequent suicide I fell to more pieces than I'm even made up of, and in January I reflexively followed through on a little poem I'd had in my head for a while. I bought tickets for a solo trip to Italy. I knew in my fingertips that I needed room to breath. Remember that part in The Secret Garden where Mary finally gets inside and sees all of the little plants choking in the weeds? Without knowing quite what she's doing she gets down in the dirt and clears some space for them. It was like that. Somewhere in between all of my bones I knew that I needed a line to something else, a carrot on a string, a way to keep myself from being pulled under by the tide of my own self-loathing.

I've spent the last few months flashing a lot of jazz hands at a lot of people, pulling a lot of rabbits out of a lot of hats, and inside my head going very slowly and terrifyingly mad. All this time, April has been the point. I knew that I was expending all of my energy trying to make people not worry about me, and that if I could just make it to long silent train rides and heart-stoppingly beautiful vistas I could reset what had been broken. In private. I needed to be wrung out like a dirty sponge.

I suppose I could have met more people in Italy, but going hours and hours without speaking to anyone was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was like being rinsed out, like the hull of a boat having its barnacles rubbed off by being beached on the sand. I could feel myself becoming transparent, and there wasn't much need to interact with many people. I needed silence and time and distance, and I got them.

As a result, I'm feeling more samantha-colored than I have in ages. Just because my extremities don't feel like natural disasters doesn't mean that they aren't, of course, but I'm a little better prepared to deal with that. I'm not better, but I'm good, and I think that I'm aligned to heal properly. Which is good, because it's spring, and I've got a lot of outdoor drinking to do, a lot of new friends to make. Now that I can breathe a little again.

love,
me

I've always been a little obsessed with bones. I get distracted by the fact that I'm made of bones that I'll probably never see. They're so entirely personal and also so foreign, and it's seductive in a way that all of the blood and connective tissues aren't.

In Italy there are bones everywhere, in reliquaries and on walls, gilded and stuffed in nooks and frequently unidentified. They're just bones, detached from their flesh and their names and their histories. It seems unfair that people have been looking under that skin for so many years, that there's been so much light where light was not meant to go.

I can't decide if I would want my bones to remain on display after I'm gone, if I would want you to see them when I can't.

The last couple of days, everyone has wanted to know about two things: food and men. So, fine. Food and men it is.

The food, of course, was amazing. I love Italian food and would be perfectly happy to move there and eat until I died. There was a memorable round of bruschetta with giant chunks of crab and olive oil running down my arm. In Siena, I had some wild boar in a Chianti sauce that could end wars. If it were legal to marry the seafood risotto in Venice, I would commit my life to it in a heartbeat. And people, Naples invented pizza. Invented it. Pizza. How bad could a town be if it is where pizza comes from?
Most of the people I met on the road were students on a break from their study abroad experiences, and they were all eating on the cheap, which meant a lot of picnics. And that's a terrific idea for lunches and things--oh, the different kinds of meats and cheese I ate--but I am not sorry to have blown my budget on food. The memory of that seafood risotto will stay with me long after the credit card bill is paid.

And, men. I kissed people all over Italy, certainly, but all of the attention eventually made me uncomfortable. Part of it came from being a redhead, because Italy loves a redhead, but it's also just the culture. I got tired of being shouted at after a while.
But the men that I met were very...forward, I guess. Aggressive. Not in a creepy way, although that was tough for me to realize because here you have to suspect men who are that complimentary of being up to something. They're just very demonstrative, and while I like a good Gesture as much as the next girl, I kept thinking nostalgically of being romanced subtly. Curing my hiccups late at night in a bar with acupressure grew increasingly attractive in the face of eloquently empty declarations or refusing to bring me my check so that I'd have to stick around. I started to feel pushed in Italy, and we all know that the best way to make me turn stubborn is to try and make me do anything. By the end of it, all of the attention started to feel vulgar.
Although, the kissing itself was largely worth it.

You know, my trip was pretty magical. For magic, I recommend doing the following:

Rome: Eat gelato in the square outside the Colosseum and think about exactly how many people have been through that space. Then go sit in a church, without reading anything or taking pictures, and figure that religion has kept itself around so long because it creates spaces of peace. Go under the city to see the layers, cities built on cities. Talk politics with a young Italian. Order up some rain and sit under an awning at a sidewalk wine bar, kissing.

Siena: Climb to the top of anything there is to climb, and don't hold in your physical expression of wonder when the view punches you in the chest. Savor dinner by a window listening to Billie Holiday and have a realization about romance. You'll know that this is the right realization when an old man in a tweedy suit falls to his knees in supplication outside the window. Walk through Il Campo in the rain past a group of men sitting outside a bar who shout "Bella Rosa!" and then start singing.

Take a long, winding bus or train ride through the hill country.

Florence: Hike up the hill to the Piazza Michelangelo across the Arno with some gelato and sneak into as many people's pictures as you can. Have a sandwich by the town hall and watch groups of teenage American boys try and pick up Italian teenagers with a "Ciao bella!"

Venice: Go to the market by the Rialto and buy a cup of fresh fruit. Walk through the market eating your fruit and looking at what you'll be eating for dinner. Put on headphones and get lost. When you decide to get found again, take the slow vaporetto down the Grand Canal, looking for the buildings where the water is lapping at the doorstep, and imagine the slowly rotting wallpaper and drapes, chandeliers reflecting themselves on the floors.

Naples: Acquire a newfound appreciation for the life you've been changing by taking a kamikaze motorcycle ride through the city. Celebrate survival by having gelato. Hell, after that, celebrate with two. Go to Pompeii and listen to the total silence of a place that was buried for so long. Go to Sorrento and sit, looking at a view of something pretty. Move to another view and drink limoncello looking at something pretty. Oh, that view over there is nice. Sit there and have some gelato.

I came home this afternoon and took the best shower and nap of my life, did some laundry, and now I am looking forward to putting on some clean clothes and having some whiskey and grilled cheese with my friends.

I had a beautiful last day in Sorrento, sitting on benches overlooking views and eating gelato and oranges. I'm glad that I decided not to take a bus up Amalfi because, while I imagine it is splendid, I didn't want to spend my last day sitting on a bus. I wanted to spend it drinking limoncello and strolling slowly in the sun, and that's exactly what I did. I'll go back for Amalfi some day.

I couldn't get an earlier flight out of Rome, but decided against going back into town. I didn't want Rome to be my last city in Italy--I wanted to stick with lazy Sorrento and the slow train out of Naples. So I stayed in the airport for hours. It felt like the trip had made me invisible, and it made sense to end it in a nowhere place.

I'm slowly posting the pictures, but I have gotten only as far as Rome.

Napoli is falling apart just like Venice, except differently, too. Venice is decaying grandly, decadently. Venice is like falling into a swimming pool wearing a tuxedo. Napoli is like falling into a pond wearing short shorts and a tube top. Napoli has been rode hard and put away wet.

It makes sense to me that this is where my family is from. I remember little of my grandfather, but what I do remember fits with these people more than anywhere else. I love these people; they sing more than anywhere I've been yet. They grow flowers on balconies and in the cracks of walls.

I took my life in my hands and agreed to go on a motorcycle tour of the city yesterday, which was terrifying. I went to Pompeii today. I am allergic to something that raises angry red bumps on my right hand and I think it may be garlic. Tomorrow I will spend some time in the orange and lemon groves in Sorrento, and then I will make my way home.

My hands feel less like they are made of hurricanes than they have since Thanksgiving.

Italy is just stupidly beautiful. I'm in Venice right now, leaving for Naples tomorrow, although Tuscany nearly killed me with how lovely it was. I keep taking pictures of things even though it feels redundant, going, "Oh, another beautiful scene."

I love Venice, but Venice doesn't seem to love me. It keeps being offended by the fact that I am here alone. It's also unseasonably cold and rainy. On the other hand, I had a risotto last night that had every kind of seafood imaginable in it, and some things I couldn't identify. I would have married it if I could.

I think I'm allergic to something out here--something is giving me a rash on my right hand for days.

Napoli tomorrow, Pompeii and Sorrento, and then home next week. It is disturbingly easy to spend all of this time by myself. I don't really miss the company of others, and it worries me a bit.

My trip out to Bomarzo, the monster garden, was supposed to be a test of my power at navigating the Italian rail system before I left Rome for Siena. When I arrived in Assigliano I left the train station and, having learned nothing from the previous two days of getting lost in Rome, figured that Attigliano was a small enough town that I couldn't help but find signs for Bomarzo. (I'm interested to see when I get back how many miles I walked not knowing where I was going in Rome.) I headed in a vague direction and, sure enough, found the end of Attigliano, but that was not where Bomarzo was to be found. Bomarzo was to be found nowhere. I guess when you're a crazy hunchback decorating your family's garden with mannerist monster sculptures, you do it a ways away from the nearest town.

So I headed back to the train station to ask, figuring that what I would get is the typical Italian waving and pointing. They start out with "Es molto simplico, si? Very simple!" and then keep going at breakneck pace. The only word I ever get is "sinistra," so I'm usually pretty sure that where I'm going is to the left of something or another, if I follow the direction of the pointing. So when I got back to the train station I asked the lady, "Bomarzo?" and she looked at me flatly. "No Bomarzo. No autobus. No taxi."

There isn't a way to argue with that, so I went back to the platform and waited in a strong wind for the train back to Rome. Instead of monsters, I saw San Pietro in Vincoli and an Etruscan temple to Mithras. Wish it had been the monsters, though.

(Just you wait for the next installment, when I get lost in Siena on the bus. So far it's proving hard to get terribly lost in Florence, because it's little, but if anyone can do it it's me.)

You would think that, what with them being giant ancient ruins and all, the Colosseum would be easy to find. That's not true if you're working with my nonexistent infallible sense of direction, and so I ended up looking for them over by the city walls. (Too bad I didn't know yesterday that the cemetery where Keats is is over there.) When I found all of it, located oddly in the middle of the city, I decided against going inside. Traveling alone means not waiting in lines.

More immediately, this afternoon a man offered to give me 100E for a blowjob, and when I declined he stuffed 10E in my pants and ran away. That's probably the better story of the two, but no matter.

Samantha at McLeod by David Choe

A couple of days ago I was talking to a guy I know who returned last week from two solo months in Thailand. We talked for a while about feeling lonely on vacation, and how in our society feeling lonely is just not admitted. But there's a whole population of us solitary people out there who are, I think, more afraid of being lost than of being lonely.
I think it's a good thing to reach all around your edges and figure out just where they are. To be totally alone in an unfamiliar situation only to unexpectedly make friends. I think that if I isolate myself only in the places where I am comfortable, I'll lose a road map inside myself to somewhere important.

In a few hours I'm off to Italy, and I'm nervous to spend these two weeks alone in a place where I don't speak the language. But I'm excited about exactly that.

I'm sure I'll check back in here sooner rather than later--my family is demanding contact in exactly that way that makes me anxious about disappointing them. (This is the reason I called them all when I had my wisdom teeth out the moment I came out of the anaesthesia. They freak me out.) But in the meantime, if you miss me, I made you a muxtape. Don't spend it all in one place.

My backpack has been mostly packed since Thursday, and I'm honestly incapable of thinking or talking about anything else. I am really, really not a patient girl.

I've been gathering my travel music together, filling up some of the empty space that showed up when I removed the boys I've been involved with from my ipod. I am old fashioned and therefore still listen to everything on cd's at home, so the vast majority of my music collection has not been stuff onto my computer. I got a little carried away this afternoon, gleefully dumping half-remembered songs, and I'm a little concerned about just how much mediocre mid-90's "alternative rock" I'll be listening to in Italy.

I'm taking the same travel journal to Italy that I took to China, and I was paging through it the other day. It starts in complete sentences, in full thoughts, but after a full day of hauling myself back and forth across West Lake, getting lost, and then hauled all over town by an overly-friendly cab driver, everything disintegrated into semi-legible lists.
--Terrible ice cream.
--West Lake fishing frenzy.
--Morning cafe - no iceburge (?). Strawberry milkshake. Dinner: hunk of pork.
--Big ugly bruise.
--Mini towel.

Eventually, the sentences returned, but I forgot how exhausting it is to be in an unfamiliar place. Italy alone in the spring should be a much different experience from China in the summer with a fighting couple, and I'm going to try and write in complete sentences. Or at least legible ones.

If you've been hanging around these parts for a while--or, you poor child, hung out with me outside of here--the chances are good that you've heard about the famous Steph and Ryan. I adopted them a few years ago in that annoying way I have, where I decide that people are going to be my friend sort of where they want to or not. Fortunately, I'm a total genius, and it worked out really well.

In the last couple of years we've taken day trips and had fauxbecues and barbecues and adventures and beer festivals. We spent a lot of time singing along really badly to Bon Jovi, they got married, we've had Christmases and Thanksgivings. Steph has been my emergency contact, Ryan my pretend brother, and they've met every boy I've dated more than twice. They've been my family.

The point of all of this is that while I'm in Italy, they'll be moving back to Pennsylvania. They'll be having a great big adventure beforehand, hiking the Appalachian Trail for a whole mess of miles, and it's good for them. That's where their family and most of their friends are. But I'm going to miss them. Moving sucks. Of course, we will always have Bon Jovi.

Dear everyone,

Right now, there is someone standing in the parking lot under my apartment shouting "Shelley!" over and over again. Someone is always shouting at or for people in my building, which leads me to assume that my neighbors inspire strong feelings in their friends and lovers.

When Dream and I broke up in December I realized that my last few years have followed a pattern, romantically, a pattern that required subverting because it involved making a lot of bad decisions. As a result I have spent all of these last few months actively not dating and kissing almost no one, which is on both sides unusual for me. And aside from all of the vast amounts of damage that came from that whole suicidal ex-boyfriend debacle, it has been pretty refreshing. Last year was full of layers and universes of drama, and it's been nice to spend whole weeks not worrying about hurting anyone's feelings. In a week I'm heading off to Italy with (almost) no entanglements at all, and it's pretty nice. When I come back, I'll reevaluate.

March felt like a breaking point, like maybe it's time for things to change. Various medical professionals have suggested that my terrible illness was a way of cleaning my cells of all of the terrible parts of the last few months, and if that's true then I only wish that my body had thought of a more pleasant way to go about it. I don't remember the last time I was so sick. But if that's what it takes for life to start moving along a little smoother, then it was probably worth it.

And in a week I'm heading off on an adventure that scares me so completely that it can only be worthwhile, and I'll be spending two weeks alone in a country where I don't speak much of the language. In the end, only good things can come of this.

In the end, only good things can come of any of it.

love,
me

When I was graduating from college and preparing to uproot myself and move 3,000 miles to a town where I knew no one, I had this plan that at some point in the nebulous future I was going to open a bookstore/bar. It seemed like a good idea, combining two of my favorite things, and I figured that owning a bar would be a pretty good way to make friends. I had this whole poem in my head that people would sit at the bar and talk about their problems, and I would solve all of them by handing them exactly the right passage in a book. I had absolute faith that the power of other people's words could fix nearly anything.

I was thinking about that bookstore bar today, picking out books to bring with me on my trip. In China I read Kundera and Proust, and every time I re-read "Identity" I find myself right back on a crowded late night train, exhausted and homesick and sweating. In Italy, I'll be reading Carver. I hope he and I are both up for the trip.

Sitting at the bar next to my grandfather was the height of luxury, a tall, cold Shirley Temple in front of me and an extra glass full of extra maraschino cherries next to it. It was time to leave when both glasses were empty, but there are a lot of ways to make a glass full of cherries last forever.

I get stuck in the past when the future gets too big, a needle in the record of a favorite song. These months have been hard, and my upcoming trip makes me breathlessly nervous. After Dream's death I didn't take any time off; couldn't take any time, since the only way to keep myself going was to break up my time into small manageable chunks, and so I'm very tired. In just over a week I'll be off on an adventure, sitting on trains and town squares and thinking, but the anticipation is making me crazy.

The anticipation makes me wistful for the lingering taste of sweet cherries.

As a child, my secret burning ambition was to become an underwater archaeologist. I've always been pretty secretive with the things that make me happy, because I'm easily damaged, so I told everyone that I wanted to be a teacher. Or a ballerina. Or, maybe, president. Inside my head, though, I spent years fantasizing about drifting silently along the vast ocean bottom, discovering a gleam of treasure in the sand that would lead to some fantastic forgotten secret. Like panning for gold on a profoundly larger level, I dreamt of trysting in those silent depths with history that I could only barely fathom.

There's a lot down there, in the under the water, cities and forests and old, old boats. Sailors, being a superstitious bunch, rarely learned how to swim, and so they're down there too. It's always snowing at the bottom, a soft fall of organic detritus, but what it's falling on is the larger flakes that have broken off of all these years of civilization. We can't live without the water but we can't live within it, either, and we've paid so much tribute. Chunks of what we are scatter like breadcrumbs, and while it must be nice to discover these trails on the land, in the sun and the noise, it must be an entirely personal event to stumble across those same mementos in the silence and pressure at the bottom of the ocean.

Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, lives too close to the red planet and so is slowly being seduced ever closer by the tidal forces. Some day it will reach a point where it will either come crashing to the surface or, more likely, break into pieces and become a ring around Mars that will spiral excruciatingly down, to settle on the land, and be gone. Another layer of dust on top of the layers of dust already there, which were once also part of some other celestial body.

I think about that dust often, sifting silently through something less than air. It all cuts in parabolas, driven by the excruciating careen of whatever is biggest and closest. Eventually some of everything has to meet, falling invisibly into and through each other's orbit, what was separate becoming altogether something else. In those moments, I think, the past becomes like the second when films falls off of the projector, burnt through by the light, everything suddenly white.

The nurse lifted her flashlight up to my mouth and peered at the back of my throat, which was red and swollen and covered in big white patches like lichen on a moist red log. She gave a wiggle of glee and practically danced back to to the counter to pick up a sealed package, crowing, "I'm gonna have a positive! I'm just going to do a strep test here, so that can cook while you're waiting for the doctor. But that looks pretty bad, so it's probably going to come back good. And not that I want you to be sick or anything, but since you are..." The nurses must be keeping a tally of positive strep tests, since being really sick is totally in this season.

I might have told her that, no, she was working with me, so the most obvious option is never the correct one. That even though it walks like strep throat and quacks like strep throat, it's probably not going to be strep throat. But that whole passageway had swollen shut two days before, making all speaking incredibly painful and muppet-sounding, and anyway she'd find out in a few minutes, so why ruin her anticipation? Instead I just gurgled around a couple of giant cotton swabs rolling around my uvula.

And of course it isn't strep throat, because why have something that can be cured by antibiotics when it's so much easier to get something harder to get rid of. The doctor walked into the room, took one look at my tonsils making lumps on either side of my neck like the bolts on Frankenstein's monster, and an alarmed glance at the inside of my mouth, and prescribed a cocktail of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.

Really, I don't think the trip to that awful strip club was worth getting an epic viral infection in my throat, but that's what I'm blaming it on. Rather than, you know, crowded parties full of strangers, too many late nights, or kissing boys.

I have been extremely sick the last couple of days, laid out by rebellion in my own cells. Moving from couch to couch to bed, cocooned and shivering in layers and layers of blankets, unable to swallow anything other than tea.

I have been sick more this winter than any other since I moved here. Our bodies express themselves at their weakest point, and my immune system is definitely always getting picked last for kickball. This winter has definitely been a trial.

But I'm glad to be getting it all out of the way before I leave the country. A few weeks ago I went through my iPod and removed everything done by boys I've been involved with, resolving to not bring any of that with me. And maybe now the same thing is happening with my insides, a cleansing of my insides before vacation. Starting over in as many ways as I can.

This weekend broke me, but it was completely worthwhile.

On Saturday night I found myself at a house party a few blocks away from my apartment, full of people in sunglasses and black clothes and suits. We didn't know that there was a theme when we followed the party train to this place, and moreover we didn't much care, so we stood out like sore thumbs in spring pastels. A couple of hours and a few beers in the opening strains of a Journey song hit the speakers. Andy shouted that it was too early for Journey but his words were lost in the collective yell of recognition, and suddenly this room full of strangers turned into a single dancing organism, all loudly refusing to stop believing, all planning to hold on to that feeling.

And that, friends, was a Moment. And even though this weekend was pretty much a 48-hour hangover punctuated with brief fits of whiskey and bad ideas, it was made entirely of Moments. Ugly strippers and Whidbey Island iced teas and an island cab also made appearances, as did an adorable deaf hipster, two brunches, an ex boyfriend, and further demands for strangers to tell me jokes. I'd do it all again, given the chance. In fact, I just might do it all again this coming weekend.

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