Echo

for however long, you just have to believe it’s real.

i’m probably just feeling lonelier than usual because i’m at my parents house so i’m not in my own domain, it’s the holidays, and all these people who are interested in me that i’m meeting are interesting, but they just don’t feel like anything i feel strongly about as being what i’m meant to be pursuing. like distractions, you know? i feel like i could chase them, but really, i should know better. so that just makes me more restless and aware that i’m still waiting.

i’m so aware that i’m either incredibly faithful to some unknown that i haven’t seen but completely believe, or incredibly stupid for wasting my life away. only time will tell.

the guy who likes me is this massive, muscle-bound el-salvadorian guy (i’d thought he was cuban) with dragons tattoed on his arms who i’m always overhearing on the sidelines talking about how tough and strong i am with this gleam in his eye. the whole gym knows he’s a fan of mine. i sense he suspects i’m a monster in bed. he told me today that he likes me because i’m beautiful, strong, funny, play sports and like to cook, but the fact that i can come out and play with guys and not be intimidated is amazing. he asked me what kind of guy i like.

i looked over at the guy i’ve been trying to work up the nerve to ask if he’s single, and i know this guy who epitomizes raw physical masculinity will laugh at me if i tell him, “that guy” because he imagines that a girl like me will want a virile tank of man, an emblem of male sexuality. like him. the guy i like is pretty average–a software guy, but i love how much heart he has, how he doesn’t give up on plays. he’s gotta be in his mid-30’s, somewhere between skinny and wiry, low-key, intelligent eyes, warm smile. just an average, nice guy. not someone who walks into a crowd and commands attention, but that’s my type–i don’t care for trophies. i don’t like flair; i like substance, like quiet evenings where it’s about safety, comfort and compatibility rather than public flaunting.

i like guys who are smart, nice and stable. because i’m not consistent, i need someone who is. someone able to verbally bounce with me and enjoy it. accountants or engineers or worker bees by day, partners and family guys by night. privately romantic, creative, amazing, like me. guys with easy laughs who adore me, and i in turn adore them because i can feel comfortable around them. someone who supports my imagination’s adventures without actually expecting me to leave home and climb mountains (i don’t do that). i have a strong masculine side but i need a guy who’s comfortable with his feminine side to let me back down and be feminine, just like i will let him step up and be masculine. i don’t need a man’s man who thinks of me as something wild to be conquered and owned, because there’s a side of me that’s docile, sweet and maternal, and i need someone who can appreciate and honor that side as well. i need someone sweet and warm to be by my side and share secret jokes and pleasures with. someone who will be my home when i come home.

i made up my mind last night that i was going to ask this guy if he’s married after wanting to know for weeks now. but i showed up today and just didn’t have the guts to ask. this other guy asked me if i was married though. i know he’s interested, because he’s attentive and always talking to the other guys about me. a part of me thinks, if a guy is really interested and up for the challenge, he’ll approach me, the way this guy has. a woman should never have to chase or fight for that opening. you should be open but you shouldn’t have to help a man approach you. because men don’t appreciate things unless they earn them in the first place, so it’s important to let a man be a man, if he is indeed a man. it’s the only way to tell, it’s the only way to get what you want. you go out of your way to make it easy for a guy at the beginning, you will be helping him, and holding his hand and accommodating his fragile ego for the rest of the relationship, if it ever goes anywhere. so i have to keep reminding myself that if that guy hasn’t approached, he probably isn’t interested or available. so then the best i can do, is steer my insides away from him even if they get fixated on him whenever i see him.

there are billions of men in this world. i can’t act like there’s only one who’s ever going to love me. especially when he’s made no advances.

i was weak in the past. my mom wasn’t all wrong. but i’ve gotten a lot stronger, more stable. i make my life less about making excuses now and more about getting craftier and more resolute in looking for openings.

buckle down. here comes mercury in retrograde. watch what the tide bring in since this one’s crossing years. the past becomes present. voices and people from the past. memories. the present becomes fragmented. careful with your electronics and communications. take what you can learn and whatever you’re asked to look at, see if there areas you can build a better foundation. be strong moving forward into 2010.

my heart was a rock i sunk long ago in an ocean, but kept attached with a rope to my wrist.

first give me a reason to pull it up. then help me figure out how. if we can set it free, it’s yours.

by way of vertical horizon

california.

it is everything you want
it is everything you need
it is everything inside of you that
you wish you could be.
it is all the right things at exactly the right time
but it means nothing to you and you don’t know why.

i am everything you want
i am everything you need
i am everything inside of you that
you wish you could be.
i say all the right things at exactly the right time
but i mean nothing to you and you don’t know why.

lots of staring from both men and women. so it’s not just seattle, it’s definitely something about me that’s new. it’s not just normal looking, but they’re looking in a way that seems like they’re completely not aware of themselves. sometimes they’re walking by and they actually swerve or angle towards me. and the particular thing about it is how much i don’t think they’re aware, which would help me understand why it’s happening.

then i got two fake recognitions today. i walked into a restaurant to pick up a salad while michael and my mom were getting christmas lights next door. a woman got up from her table and rushed over, then stopped and apologized, saying she thought i was someone else. i told her even if i’m not her friend, we can say hi to each other anyway. then the owner asked if i was mr. ni’s wife. i said, no, but my uncle’s last name is ni. after some back and forth, we realized she thought i was my uncle’s wife. i’m flattered because my aunt is a very beautiful woman, but we have a 25 year age difference. but most interesting of all, was to be mistaken for someone i actually knew.

only 2 other minor anomalies.

1. friday night, my brother invited his 27 year-old trainer to the warriors game with us. he’s worked at the gym that raised me since he was a teenager, so i’ve seen him around for a long time, though i don’t know him at all. just that he was very kind once when michael got mad at me for increasing his treadmill speed and threw a tantrum. he’d taken over training michael after andrew (the 22 year-old who had the crush on me last year) left for berkeley. i’d never had a conversation with him, thinking he was one of the stuck-up types that work there (like my lust-hate relationship with the sales guy), so one day when he came up and had a 15 minute conversation with me about michael, i was really weirded out and kept shifting around nervously. since then, i’ve accepted that i’d judged him without knowing him, and he’s a nice person. so he met up at our house and we all rode together. at the game, usually i sit in the other section with my dad, but he was mad at me, so my mom sat with him and i sat with michael and his trainer. he and i ended up talking the whole game. he’s a serious guy, but since i know nothing about him, we had plenty to talk about. i learned he’s finishing his certification as an emt and wants to become a firefighter. that he has two half-sisters and is the oldest. that his dad lives with his youngest sister in reno, and he lives with his stepfather. he spent months in ireland, finding work in a bar for cash under the table, then in belgium doing the same. he ran track in oregon, then went to northridge on an athletic scholarship. we went to the same high school and know some of the same people, the same teachers. he’s a libra. and we’ve co-existed for a long time.

he went home after the game, and i had wanted to go to the cowboy bar with my mom and michael, but it didn’t feel right so we just stayed home and watched dvd’s. later, my mom asked me why i don’t date someone younger than me. it made me wonder if the night had been a set-up, either on his part, her part, or neither, consciously. i can’t think about things like that though. the secret is that i’m too scared to acknowledge his potential interest to take him seriously. my first contact and humiliation with a boy was with someone who wore the same uniform as him, in this city. i realized a ghost i’m being given the opportunity to put away.

so today, i went to the toy store to pick up presents for edison and jonathan (robots that require assembly, of course. they will be trained as i was trained). i was checking out with a gift certificate, but for some reason, their computer kept crashing and they couldn’t process it. so i’d already been waiting for 20 minutes and was just watching the mayhem of the store against the rainstorm outside, when i saw the trainer walk by. in his uniform. i called his name and he came over. he was buying a present for his niece, a spiderman toy. he said he wants to reinforce the tomgirl in her. i laughed and said that i loved spiderman as a kid. my very first halloween costume was spiderman.

i started getting nervous and shy talking to him, but he kept the conversation going. he was asking if we’d ended up going to the cowboy bar, and about nightlife around the area. he told me that michael had told him i was still in bed when they saw each other the morning after the game, so he thought i’d stayed out. i don’t really know what we were talking about. i was mostly trying to act normal and not give up that i was very uncomfortable. much of my stress also involved whether i’m expected to shake his hand, give him a gym slap, or give him a hug at the end of this conversation. we do kind of a gym slap hand shake, and his hand is hot and damp. mine is cool. most of my blood had been in my head, trying to keep myself from ejecting from the situation.

2. was going to message andrew so he was on my mind, and lo and behold, i run into him tonight. it’s been half a year. he was excited to see me, and i hugged his lower back/abdomen, which is my favorite part of him to hug (his favorite to show off). you should have seen how quickly he ushered me away when his girlfriend showed up. haha! someone was feeling guilty.

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.