new jeans

valentine's day, reinvention, and a lifetime of baths

Holidays come to me without regard for time or place. On what’s recognized as Valentine’s Day, I wake up from a dream where I was a leper and find myself, with a grim sort of good cheer, to be intact and firm-fleshed. The sun hadn’t risen yet. When I was a little girl and still learning how to climb trees, some benevolent adult told me that if I fell, I should slowly move each limb to make sure that none of them broke. I disprove myself of dream-leprosy in the same manner— the center of the mattress is soft with years of sleeping in the same spot, and I press my spine into it and begin wiggling my fingers. When I check the clock, it’s 7:16 a.m.

What piece I have of a routine begins here. I get up, look out the window— a small amount of snow had fallen last night, and left the ground paint-splattered with patchy flecks of white— put on my cleanest pair of jeans, and start placing things into the bag on the floor. Halfway through the last step, I remember to be awake. Most of the items I threw into my bag were unrealistic and unnecessary, and so I take them out, fold them, and put them away in a rare display of tidiness. Sometimes I believe that the mess I’ve created is corroding my soul, and sometimes I really, truly believe that the mess I’ve made is corroding my soul.

My mother had decided to take me over to the east side of the state again for about a week. We were there before the weekend, too, but she had a massage scheduled for Saturday and my sibling was coming down to see us Sunday, so we drove back over the pass on Friday. On the night of the 13th, my mother told me to get packed because we were leaving at 8 a.m. on the dot. We’re not— we never do. I have until at least 8:30 to be completely packed, but I’ll be ready by 8 anyways. This is how it is. This is how it’s always been.

I go back to sleep in my head, curling my consciousness under layers of fatty tissue and letting its eyes close, kissing it on the forehead. Goodnight, I say, but it’s already asleep. Muscle memory takes over from here. Hoodie, socks, wallet in pocket, medication in bag. Zip. Bags in the car, body in the car, letters dropped off in the mailbox at the top of the hill, the highway, the highway, the highway. My mother starts playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. I start playing a game of metaphors— the taillights on the bridge are cigarette cherries, the gnarled pines along the road are grandparents, my mother squinting at the horizon is a cowboy at the end of the movie, so on, so forth. The sun is out in full force, hot enough to make steam rise off the asphalt in an unfurling mirage of silver. It can all be magic if I want it to be. Do you understand? Inside the mini cooler sitting in the backseat, three oranges become a meteor shower. How could I ever live without this type of romance, the love you can only dream about? How could I?

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A highway, if you know how to tie it right, becomes a shoelace. It’s a type of glue. A binding. The highway exists as a separate entity from the places it passes through, purely by going through so many eyelets that it becomes irrelevant as anything other than the bones of a country. That’s how it works, to my understanding. First comes the highway, then people, then a town, then a city. It’s different with ports, like the ones I grew up around, but I guess the water is a sort of highway. Tilt your head and squint at it. I’m only right if you want me to be.

The port city I live in goes through my fingers like butter while my mother ties the shoelace. It was one of the first things I taught myself, you know— after reading and whistling came tying my shoes. Joe, now dead but an ex-sailor and real fond of smoking his pipe by the campfire, taught me all sorts of knots when I was willing to learn. It became a fashion with all the other kids in the group. We all had our signatures. I tied my Salvation Army boot laces into a surgeon’s knot and used the excess for figure 8s, Lars had his hanging off the top eyelets in looping nooses, and Jess, who loved horses, had hers tied in chain sinnets and could therefore untie hers the fastest. It was identity, at that point, or as close to identity as a bunch of kids who weren’t from anywhere could get. When you don’t have a hometown or collect trading cards or go to summer camps, you get creative.

These days, I tie my boots so I can take them off in about three seconds. Take that, Jess.

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It’s only a four hour car ride, nothing like the 16 hour epics of my childhood. Halfway through hour two, when the album has switched to Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain, my mother pulls over for gas. Feet on the sun-warm dashboard, I watch the people in a truck across the parking lot. They’ve got a baby, a tiny and infantile creature, fresh from the womb. It stares at the woman holding it with unending eyes, and she stares right back at it. Children have always been able to see things clearer than any of us. I wonder if it sees God in her face. I wonder if she sees God reflected back in its eyes.

There’s at least three other people besides them in the truck— small headed children in the backseat and a man in the driver’s seat, brow furrowed and partially turned towards the back to scold the kids. After a bit, he faces the front and stares out the windshield, unmoving as the silhouettes of unseen children shift in the backseat like a constant puppet show. In the passenger seat, the woman and the infant continue their staring contest, eyes like pools in twin moon faces, as rigid as stones in a river.

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There are always certain places that pop up along highways, just because that’s how highways always work. Tourist traps, stores trying to get more business, diners, the like. Dispensers of the highway magic— the metal that surrounds the hole your laces go through. One of those is right outside Ellensburg, a strangely functional combination of open-air fruit stand and antique shop, with fruit on the first floor and almost every imaginable antique on the second and third floors. They don’t have heating but I still wander until my hands are far past numb.

I turned 18 recently. I know this isn’t adulthood, just legal recognition of autonomy. But there are certain places where I become even more of a child, and this is one of them. I find God at age 13 while I’m digging through a dusty stack of jeans. Right now, God looks like a pair of worn-in low rise True Religions. You know, I believe in theological semiotics and in True Religions and in reinvention and I believe, somewhere in me, that I can save myself from rotting. I look up and there’s a mirror in front of me, and I see God in that, too. Right now, God looks a whole lot like me. I run my hands over the denim over and over, the $20 dollar price tag, the used copy of M Train by Patti Smith that I found. There’s a beautiful leather jacket on the rack for $90, and I make myself a silent promise to come back for it, no matter how bad my mother says it’ll fit me. For now, the jeans. I believe that I can build myself a cocoon of silk and be born again— I do. I have to believe that I can.

I buy the jeans. I’m so close.

When I check the clock, it’s 10:37 a.m. on December 31st.

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Later that night, I sit in the bath with my legs hanging over the rim and do nothing. I spent the last two hours of my imaginary New Year’s Eve debating with my mother if I should have basic human rights as a chronically ill person or not, and we ended up having to write out a contract about what autonomy I’m allowed to have.

I would kill for a cigarette right now.

There’s a story my grandmother used to tell about a man who bartered with the Devil for all the knowledge in the world, and ended up with a demon on his back that would whisper secrets in his ear. It was a vivid image, even from a young age. What devil did I pray to? How can I explain away the rot I’ve found myself inside of?

Picture a planet, fine china-blue and streaked with shadows. Name it melancholia. Now, imagine it enveloped in a saran wrap bubble— that’s you. Here I have both you and the planet in the palm of my hand, rolling you around like a marble. Do I trade you? Do I pop you? My sinking ships look so pretty when I’m looking through your eyes. A cowboy in a dream told Patti Smith that the writer is a conductor, and here I am with you and my human sadness in hand, acting as copper wire. I engage with myself though you; I exist to conduct.

I’ve been a conductor to unimaginable places, to sides of life people thought died out in the 1960s. I’ve served the rich as a conductor to the poor, the men a conductor to the women, the children a conductor to the adults. I've lived my entire life as a bridge, and I am exhausted. But as I sit here, doing jack shit, I realize that it’s never occurred to me to refuse to be a bridge. It’s well within my power. It’s well within my rights.

I’ve got new jeans and I’m a whole new girl. Reinvention as a divine act, something bigger than self love— self respect, because I deserve more than to be some rich party-goer’s purse dog. I deserve to decide when and where I go. No more “we’re going out, dress nice” texts, no more people claiming scene legitimacy through me, no more of it all! Fuck those people and fuck myself because I’m gonna be someone new.

I’ll cut myself down to the roots— start with my family and the house in the city and go from there. I imagine myself in a whole new reality. I imagine that I had a normal life, living at home with my parents and sibling and dog, only leaving for sleepovers and occasional camping trips. Some things about me can’t die no matter how hard I try, so I keep the surfing and the Kerouac and the Vanlife, but the rest of it goes. It goes! I want these people and their grabbing hands out of my life, and that’s what’s gonna to happen because that’s what I want to happen. This is not my mess to clean.

I’ll send an email out in the morning. I’m getting the fuck out of here. Maybe one day, I’ll cut the jet black dye from my hair and remember the girl in the bathtub. There has always been a girl in the bathtub, though, hasn’t there? Once upon a time I was floating in the bathwater.

Oh, God. It strikes me like lightning.

Please forgive me, for I have sinned— I have thrown myself away for nothing, for a careless kiss, as means to ward off despair, for every reason but the pleasure so simple in nature it becomes holy. The sins were my own, I know, and I may be naive but I’m no idiot. This is my penance. This is how I save myself, for lack of an interventionist God.

Oh, God. Bless me anyways.

I watch the clock switch from Valentine’s Day to New Year’s Day. The sun set hours ago. My mother has plantar fasciitis and I’ve been taller than her for years, but she still has my baby teeth. Bless me anyways.

It’s an unofficial bathtub baptism with the bathroom lights off. Leaning back, I push myself under the water and hold my breath, feeling my lungs tighten with every passing second. I sink like a stone to the porcelain floor. I used to be little and I used to have an identity before the sand rubbed me smooth, before the acid baths, before the whittling knives. I was a sea urchin that learned to float and now I am smooth and meatless. Bless me anyways.

Bless me. Bless me, for fuck’s sake! Please.

Oh God, oh God, I remember it. God. I remember being small and weightless— I remember buoyancy—