moonlight ahead
the springtime, growing up, and letting go. (april 3rd, 2024)
This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which — no, forget it, it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
— Eric Gamalinda, The Opposite of Nostalgia.
Spring drags me into the light kicking and screaming, most of the time. This year is no exception. I sleep off the winter and wake up straight-faced and hard-headed, ready to spend my day waiting to watch the world bloom. There’s a dozen ways to seek it out, but I’m no bride. I go outside during the daytime. I listen to Van Halen like I’m thirteen again. I grow out my natural hair color. I wear all black, and when the time comes to roll up my sleeves and clean up a mess, I do it without complaining or needing to be asked twice because I’m effective and sensible like that. Competency is in this season — they send models down runways wearing competency like an ill-fitting suit. One day I’ll be able to go to the grocery store again. Right now, I skin my knees wrestling the dog and I don’t flinch when I rip the scabs off. It’s some kind of sentimental, I reckon. Gethsemanean. With clear eyes, I can see that my childhood is beginning to end.
I know I’ve been living in some sort of fantasy world for the majority of my teenage years. I know that I’ve been writing myself into a fairy tale for as long as I’ve had to deal with any sort of Big Bad Wolf. That was about survival. Sometimes there’s nothing else to do but create a narrative; by creating a narrative, it loses power, becoming nothing more than a scary story to tell in the dark. At one point, in the dark of the winter, I split into two — the child in bed and the adult checking the closet for monsters. They’ve been walking the halls hand in hand. They’ve been eating dinner together, sitting side by side like conjoined twins. The girl is tired and the woman is ready to take the reins from her. I have not lost myself in fantasy to the point where I can’t recognize that, so I grit my teeth and start putting things in place because that’s what needs to happen. In some serene miracle of enlightenment, I’ve let go of all my skeletons, my graveyards, my past attachments; all that’s left is to let go of myself.
So I let go. And then I’m really gone.
In a dream I meet a ghost. He comes down from a place I cannot see and opens my bedroom door the way he always does. I am asleep, laying on the floor and sitting on the bed, watching him. He walks with light feet. When he kisses me on the forehead, he falls right through me into the floor.
Funny how even stopped clocks get older. A woman and a man, the same in every way, are sitting in a room. Only one of them is dead. Both of them say that I’m lying.
It’s some kind of sneaking out when I shut the side door with all the gentleness I can bear and flip open the lid of the hot tub. It’s day three of being in the middle of nowhere — I’m always in the middle of nowhere, it seems. The trees claw at the sky just out of eyesight. Who knows what time it is; middle of the night or something. My company for the night is a pack of herbal cigarettes and a bottle of water. I am hoping to get over something. I am hoping to find something, something that I think I lost but I’m not sure. It could be hiding. I hope it’s just hiding.
There was a time when I was fifteen and lying completely still on the floor of the school’s orchestra room until the motion detector lights turned off. There was a time when I was desperate for the quiet of the darkness and the sensation of returning to the light. I keep the porch light on until I’m settled (jacket, towel, lighter) then turn it back off, leaving only the ghost-blue glow of the hot tub to light my way. The water doesn’t feel warm enough and the night air doesn’t feel cold enough. I don’t know what I’m trying to find, or even where to look, but as with all matters of the spirit, it begins with surrender.
Imagine yourself in a great, big ocean. The ocean is dark. The ocean is full of things that want to kill you and eat you and shit out your bones for a smaller creature to eat. Well, that simply won’t do. Now imagine you’re in a grassy field. You are a mouse, and here comes the hawk, diving lower and lower, the wind screaming against its’ feathers, talons outstretched — that also won’t do. The trick to surrendering is to imagine yourself in a place where it feels okay to surrender, so you go back to the floor of the orchestra room and wait for the lights to turn off, because that teacher who called you pet names and made you first chair even though you never practice has left for the day and isn’t going to bother you right now. You wait. The linoleum smells like preteen body sprays and rosin and cafeteria food that came in on the soles of shoes. The instruments hum with silence. Soft sounds reach you from the air vent, where long strips of crepe paper in the school colors whisper against each other. The lights go out. The lights go out. The lights go out.
The lights are out and I can’t quite let go right now. I think I’m already gone. Breathe in, breathe out. I make my hips float up and let the empty sky fuck me. The glassy blue backlights of the hot tub turns my torso into a negative relief, an inversion of a body. It’s late, late enough that the water has turned everything murky, dulling everything but my sharpest breaking points. It’s not enough. I’m seeking absolution — I’m seeking obsoletion. I want to go right back to being the ashes I came from. Somehow, between the infinite loop of interstates and the CDs and the violent pace and passions of my adolescence, I became closer to the earth and further from life.
Listen to me. Listen to my voice when I speak. I know who I am and I am who I am, and who I am is a body inside a body. I don’t want to die. But there is a separation between me and the world — a separation between all of humanity and the world — and it tortures me to no end.
Do you see it? Look at what we’ve done to this place. Look at the way we hurt each other for senseless gain. Look at your phone, then look away, then look back at it because even though you’re sick of it and you hate it, you love it all the same. I will spare you from more of my hopelessness; in short, I am very afraid for the world, and I am afraid because I love it very much. And fear is a fetid little thing, ethylene for the soul — the smallest amount can get the whole thing to rot away into despair — have you ever walked over a grave and felt the grass give way? Not fully, not putting your foot into a coffin, but just that tiny compression that points to an emptiness? — oh, some fear can be a very good thing, a powerful motivator, an uninvited guest you should always listen to, but an excess will drown you. Every single ecosystem is built on the bones of the dead. No amount of knowing this will ever justify the way people are dying or stop it from hurting when they do.
I have lost myself because we have all lost ourselves. In the beginning, someone picked up a sheep’s jawbone and cast themself aside to kill their brother. We have never been able to find what we so carelessly threw away, and we have doomed ourselves because we refuse to try. Now the sky is empty, and the sky fucks me, and I let it because I’m already gone. I’m already gone. And when I go walking during the daytime, over the switchback and through the broken branches, the ground compresses with each step like there’s a rotting corpse beneath my feet.
I don’t want to talk about God because it’s all just devolved into cliches by now. There is no metaphor that hasn’t been wrung dry. And the men I fucked are just the men I fucked. I never, ever had lovers — I just fucked them. The sun is hot and the water is wide. I am stating facts.
I want to speak very plainly here. It’s difficult to take shelter in a poem when you lost your virginity to a man twice your age, or when you’ve sucked a stranger off because he bought you alcohol you couldn’t legally purchase. I don’t want to be beautiful anymore and I don’t want beautiful things because beautiful things are unnecessary, often too much effort, generally nonexistent (beauty is granted solely by how you look at things, not their innate physical qualities), and most importantly, for other people.
Like goodness is something I lost in the dryer with my right sock and earbuds. Like love went out for a smoke and never came back.
If I had a dollar for every time a man asked me, oh yeah? Well, what do you have to prove? I could probably be rich enough to never have to hear a man say that to me ever again. This comment is solicited by several things about me — my lack of makeup, my skill sets, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I refuse to let myself be treated like an idiot. I have a tendency to correct people if they’re getting excessively cocky about something. This doesn’t go over well with men, who seemingly love to spout factually incorrect information to make themselves look good.
If I had a dollar for every time a man called me a bitch, I’d be living alone in the middle of nowhere by now, no men in sight.
It’s been years and years that this exhausted little rage, simmering low and blue, has been building up inside me. Years of being objectified, belittled, talked down to, ignored, discredited. Some of it I brought upon myself, in all honesty — I willingly subjected myself to being arm candy or a muse or the girl in a bikini on the back of a motorcycle or any of the other countless labels applied to women the men don’t care enough about to respect. It was fun and easy and I got free rides and drugs and meals out of it. Whatever. I’m getting older, though. Not that much older, mind you; I’m only 19. But it’s old enough that the lead face paint is starting to rot holes in the facade of turning tricks for treats, and I’m beyond over it. Instead, I learn how to come to terms with the fact that I’m technically an ex-prostitute and that I’ll likely never tell anyone in my offline life, because rehashing it — or God forbid, getting coddled or infantilized due to it — is the last thing I need. I spent my childhood vying for respect that I never got, and then I gave up, but I’m back and hitting the ground running.
So yeah, motherfucker, I got something to prove. Independence. Competence. I’ve done my fair share of getting jerked around and I learned my damn lesson, and none of that is ever gonna happen again. I got something to prove because I have to provide a constant drip feed of evidence that not only am I good at several things, I deserve to be considered an intellectual equal. I got something to prove because you’re forcing me to prove myself to you when I’ve already done it a hundred times over. Listen to me. Why won’t you listen to me?
My first executive rule for myself as an adult is to stop tolerating men’s bullshit. So far, it’s going well. I disappear into the woods for entire days and I don’t think about it. This is survival 2.0. Them’s the digs. And I still can’t admit a hundred things to myself and I still can’t get myself to tell anyone my favorite poem, even though you can’t find it online, but that’s mincemeat in the long run.
Here comes the hawks in an endless swooping parade, then the swallows, then the blackbirds; the rats and voles and scampering little things next. I can climb to the top of the hill, right next to the cell tower, and the whole sky opens into a dome. Here is the church-ground and here is the steeple-tree. The jig is up. I surrender. And I don’t care a lick about immortality or having a legacy or living to 100 years old — I’m going right back to where I came from. When I die, I’ll be this expansive. It’s all I can ask for.
The quiet ratio of land to sky — a sky so pale, so casually blank that it almost seems sardonic — that, finally, you have come to the place that is bigger than loss…
— Lauren Clark, Illinois in Spring
yayyy return of the substack!! i love ur writing soooo so much