Echo

the earthy part of water brings reality into dreams and dreams into reality. for the first time, the princess of cups.

last night i dreamed i was somewhere between australia and atlantis and the guide i was with wanted to see something underwater. so i went down to the sandy bottom and noticed the people with me were wearing diving gear and i was only wearing a mask. but i started breathing and it was the most natural thing in the world. i saw a world at the bottom of the ocean that looked like a child’s idea of what’s under the sea. yet it was very real. i was mildly afraid of the small red octopus, but i stayed out of his way and he didn’t notice me. i was sitting on the sand at the bottom, understanding that this was both a dream and a training exercise, but still utterly amazed.

this just reminded me of the dream the night before, where i was at a house with a bunch of random people (both people i knew and strangers). i was inside the house with my best friend, a guy with dark hair, when someone evil set loose a killer robot alligator and a killer wolf outside. i saw him setting them loose, and they’d tried getting into the house but i’d locked all the doors in time, getting people nearby inside as well. but then i realized my dad was outside by the pond, so i ran out to save him. ended up finding all kinds of people still out there and telling them to get in the house. couldn’t find my dad but ended up having to battle the alligator, which was scary, but in the back of my mind i knew it was a dream so i was able to neutralize the alligator by remembering i can do anything i want with it. so i fought it off, but didn’t give it too much attention. i even managed to psychically gain the trust of the wolf and neutralize him. he became loyal to me. i woke up as i was helping people over the fence into the house.

oh, i see. i believe the focus of the next story needs to be how to heal my mom.

In the year 2000, nothing happened. Just 12 days of rain amidst infinite personality-less sunshine. I came, saw what it did to people, the way it muddled the minds of everyone who couldn’t lay flat in the roads and play possum, and decided the desert was no place to plan a fake suicide. Guns, mirrors and death–the hallmark of a college filmmaker. Every night, the streets slick and black, showing promise. I can’t breathe here. I can’t breathe when I can’t see two feet in front of me. I can’t breathe when I can feel you watching me and I don’t know where you are, why you won’t say anything. How can you be so far away, and I can’t stop myself from this waiting. Like a 5-minute hallway that gets longer the darker the night gets. In heaven, he was an angel. On earth, he is something else. The lines are drawn only when you believe in lines. And then, who is there to believe in you? They can’t hear you anymore when they disappear down the tunnel. Do you believe that? There never was a rabbit. They just wanted to fall in a hole, and searched until one appeared. When our paths meet again in April, will we each be the same person? Does it matter? Everyone is born of a mother and father. And yet… Yet? Yet. Some are also something else. Angels and demons. Sometimes there’s very little difference. A good person is not necessarily good for you. A bad person is not necessarily bad for you. It depends on what you need, what you’re looking for, whether your eyes are filled with darkness or light. My grandfather gambled away his life and his family’s security. And amidst his addiction, when the sickness filled his eyes, he needed to balance it, fill the world around him with the bleeding inside him. When it had him in its grips, that sickness, he wanted to destroy anything that was good, so one night, his pockets less than empty, he took my mother’s kitten, just big enough to fit in a young girl’s cupped hands, and hurled it onto the ground. It lay on the floor, sputtering and broken, but the girl showed no emotion, her face a mask with burning eyes. She’ll never tell you if it lived or died, only that she swore she would never again let the world touch anything inside her and make her feel this way again. She would never own pets, not even fish. She would dream for the next decades of dead kittens floating in fishbowls. She would never be able to trust that love didn’t come with a serrated edge.

Dirt. Some kids eat it. They’re either not very smart, or bad little fuckers trying to prove a point. If you ask them, they’ll never tell you what that point is, only that when they look you in the eyes, you’d better look away. I’ll never hit another woman, she said. But I have no qualms about hitting a guy. Sometimes it’s in that space between, what someone is running from, where someone is running to, that you discover what is human. The color orange? Goes well with black. Sometimes. Never paint your bedroom yellow, she said. It’s a hostile color. But then again, who ever listened to her? Orange is no better of an alternative. Unless you’re poor and it’s on sale. Then you live with it. And you deal with it. Because life is sure to give you bigger problems than an orange bedroom. Where were you when the call came in? Were you standing up? Were you fully clothed or in whatever you wore to bed the night before? Were there birds singing outside your window? Or did you, like the rest of the universe, already know that your first born was dead? It takes more than 4 minutes to save the world. Sometimes it takes 5. sometimes it takes 5 minutes just to walk to the end of a hallway when the rest of your life is an echo. Numbers tell their own stories in their own literal and sometimes not so literal way. I will ride the number 29 all the way to the moon. Questions are sometimes harder to hear than answers. Just like a father who only drinks when he’s secretly thinking about killing himself. You can wish on a star, a plane or a satellite. Or you can just wait until the world gives you something worth wishing for. I am missing someone who won’t talk to me, yet every night, he disrupts my dreams. I wonder if I disrupt his. Maybe everyone everywhere is visiting someone else while their bodies stay in the same place. Maybe that’s the way it was meant to be. I can not keep a glass of water on my bedstand because inevitably, I will spill it. There is a place in San Diego where you can pay to throw things and break them. They’ll sell you dishes, etc and you throw them at a wall and you’re allowed to scream anything you want. They market to people going through a break up. You can even bring your own objects, like that porcelain pig he gave you that at first you thought was adorable, but later was a symbol of how much you secretly hated your body. Ask the Germans what they think of memory. Maybe they’ll tell you the truth, maybe they’ll give you a circle of rhetoric. But one thing they’ll tell you…a knee or an elbow is made up of other parts that meet. But in truth, it doesn’t even exist except as something that symbolizes the combination of other things that are real. So then, what is reality, but the meeting places of things that are real? In truth, it’s just space…nothing you can see or touch. Just floating around us, waiting for interpretation, waiting for things to come about and give it a meaning that’s real. Like neighbors. If the only thing that brings you together is geography, then really, what are you to each other? It’s sure as hell not the secrets you keep.

some nights, the only way i can fall asleep is to imagine laying my head on your chest, listening to you breathing, letting the rhythm of your heart lull me to sleep. sometimes, you feel so close, so real, that i can almost smell your skin.

there are some nights the missing and the silence hurt so much it brings my insides to its knees, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. and i can’t tell anyone about it because i know it won’t make sense to them either.

tonight is one of those nights. all i have is music to ease the ache, get me through, hope tomorrow features more forgetting than today.

and then somewhere between the two, a new well of strength emerges out of the crevice.

Shining like a work of art
Hanging on a wall of stars
Are you what I think you are?

You’re my satellite
You’re riding with me tonight
Passenger side, lighting the sky
Always the first star that I find

You’re my satellite

Maybe you will always be
Just a little out of reach

-guster

as soon as i come home i want to leave. this is not my home anymore. but i know i’m almost there.

Who’s Playing With Wigs?

Here’s a translation.

I walk into the room with an afro wig on.

Mom: Hey. What are you doing? We’re all supposed to be busy packing and you’re playing with wigs.

Me: I’m playing with wigs? Please turn the camera around…who’s playing with wigs?

My mom then goes into a Debbie Harry from Blondie impression.

My mom, brother and I have a great time together.

4th game of the night (my 9th of the day). everyone’s fatigued.

Today I palmed a men’s ball! Next step, bionic knees and another 18 inches on my vertical leap and I’ll be dunking.

re: the games tonight with my dad

i’m probably not blameless. i’m a tenacious (annoying) defender and i did trash talk before the game. (my mom is so cute in this video, telling my dad, “don’t foul!”)

went and played basketball at the open gym reserved through my dad and the company. i was already irritated because he wouldn’t tell me when and where it was, so i had to find out from bohr.

his team was off when my team came on so he was watching from the sidelines. he was silent for most of the game, not a peep if i scored or did anything good, but lord, you should have heard him cheering for the other team when they scored like he’d put money on the game. it’s bad enough he can’t be supportive of me, but tonight he blatantly rooted against me.

no wonder my idea of love is so complicated. this shouldn’t be how someone who loves you acts, but yet…it is.

you keep me honest

i’m saving it. to read at the right time.

chinese moms? with their daughters?

zero boundaries.

for better. for worse.

maybe that’s what people find interesting. how i can live in a fantasy world and still function so well in real life. but i’m also a highly analytical and logical person. so for me to be willing to believe in what others may perceive as fantasy, i’ve clearly found some kind of logic to it that allows me to accept it as real life.

my mom always said, “if you win all the time, people won’t want to play with you and you won’t have any friends.”

yet white moms were telling their kids to go for the win no matter what it took.

it’s always been hard for me to decide whether something my mom is doing or saying is motivated by wanting to protect me, and when it’s out of making sure she can control me, because her default setting is to see me as an extension of herself. like consciously, her intentions are completely pure and she loves me dearly, but she’s got that tricky unconscious side that can’t be trusted. i think that’s why i get so mad sometimes when she gives me advice, even though i always go to her for it. i know she loves me deeply, but sometimes, i think she can be unaware of her own motives. i hate having to triangulate her intentions to decide if advice is for me or for her, and i hate having to do it. i wish i could just trust it.

and that’s the thing. i know i’m writing out a lot of the old family skeletons, but i need to see them and decide how to use them to build a better understanding for future me, how to let go of things i don’t need anymore. i’m not wallowing in bitterness or the past. i’m letting consciousness flow into these places of stagnancy to flush out things that may be blocking me.

my parents have been wonderful parents who, despite their issues and their own childhood experiences of dysfunction, tried their best to make things work and take care of children in a difficult and complex situation (a child with a disability). there’s a lot of love in our family, and a lot of trust when it comes to standing together to face the world outside. but the bone i have to pick is with the unconscious part of them that plays out like a haunting, possessing good, intelligent people. i don’t want to play with that part anymore. i lived with it, i dealt with it, i’ve grown beyond it with an ability to look at it all from a bigger perspective, but now i get to throw it out of my closets so i have room for my own things, things that i like.

can’t remember if i wrote this story.

i was at a warriors game last month, and end of the game, i was walking towards the exits. this guy was standing by the stairs, definitely drunk and kind of swaying. as i walk by, his eyes follow my breasts and then he slurs to them, “all night long i’ve been lookin’ at…titties.”

he was compelled to give my titties his report of time expenditure.

you can never say men aren’t classy.

being in fremont.

is like, being reminded how much it hurts to be close to people who are in some areas, ruled by bad ghosts and determined to defend them to the end. because on one hand, you accept people as they are–for their good qualities, for their limitations. for their immense love and loyalty to you. you accept and you understand. you can’t demand a goat to turn into an elephant. it’s just not possible. you have to love the goat for its goatness, and find an elephant to be your elephant. so the compromise–addition by subtraction–is you accept them as they are, and because of that, you gain more appreciation of the positives.

but if the goat is eating up your garden, you can appreciate its goatness but still really want it to stop eating up your garden.

it’s unfair for the goat to turn around and say, i’m a goat! i can’t help it! this is just what i do, so be a better person and just accept it. you’re taking advantage of my acceptance to excuse bad behavior.

there’s a big difference between accepting people for who they are holistically, and wanting a certain behavior that is detrimentally affecting the relationship to be discussed in a calm and rational manner.