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I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

I want to see flowers. I want to feel warm water. I want to feel waves crashing against my back. I feel stupid. I feel smart. Do I feel smart because I’m so stupid? Feelings are supposed to be shown, not told, when writing. I want to feel happy. I want to eat. I want to know. I want my hair to not fall out. I need a break. I need a brain. I want a break that lasts me the rest of my life and beyond.

I don’t want to remember being eight years old with my gymnastic teacher’s hands in my pants. I’ve been working for something since I could walk to school by myself. I want my hair back. I want my life back. I want a sandwich. I want ice-cream. I want to eat with love. With people I love. And who love me. I want to sleep. Forever. I want to live happily. Indefinitely. I want to hold my newborn son, every one of these days. I want to be in love and mean it. I want to hide in a lake. I want to hide with fish. I want to write about people who exist, and who are good. Instead I’m swimming fiercely in rocky, murky water. My drumsticks are wet wood, shattering on the wet, sharp rocks. I taste blood. I remember the metallic, plastic, blasting–the sound of my typewriter smashing cement after I threw it over my second-floor balcony. Little brown buttons with letters in a dark courier font splattered the ground. H and I, two stated.

Whenever I find myself in the hospital room, standing next to the bed on which is resting my dead mother, which is many, many times in indecipherable spans of time, I am looking at the window. It is June 14, which means I am nearly exactly 17.5 years old. I am staring at the white blinds, which are slanted open so, and I look through countless strips of plastic, I am looking at the sky. The sky is blue. Above the top of the concrete roof of the fifth floor of the other wing of The Hospital, the sky is blue. It’s that clear, clear, clear, clean, lightish blue. The kind of blue that only happens for a little bit of time, on days with a slight breeze, and little pollution. Danny and I–Danny Lee Clark Junior (he’s dead now, too) and I–had left the trailer in San Jose, after the call came, around 7:30 a.m. Now, it was around 9:30. It wasn’t yet 10:00. The light would be less clear at 10:00. It would start to look hot. And it was, after all, June. June 14th. 1990. I look at my mother. I look at her. She looks peaceful. I’d never seen her look so peaceful. Ever. The bandage wrapped around the top of her head was neat, and clean, and white. It only covered the top of her eyebrows.  I would not–did not–think about the bloody wound hiding beneath the clean, white dressing. It was all dead. She was dead. 

Standing on my balcony, in Reno, I watched the explosion. When the typewriter hit the concrete, the black ribbon spool still pressed against paper. After the ancient typing machine crashed onto the ground, I remember brown leaves drifting around my brown typewriter, like ballerinas, floating in the blasted air. Today, now, I want to see the brown leaves drifting across the scuffled concr ete of my patio. I want to look between the brown patio steps and see the ground. I want to hear the shuffling sound of shoes as people walk on the other side of the fence, unaware of what they’re missing over here.

What I want to be is home.

I want to be cooking paella on my stove, in our house, that I toured with Jay with a real estate agent. I want to be standing in our kitchen, in front of the counter, chopping vegetables on the countertop that I designed. I want to boil water on the stove that I, after much research, had installed. Our 5-year-old son watches something silly on the tv with J., who is sitting on the long sofa, a shot-glass of to-be-sipped-slowly tequila in his hand. They watch the green Bang & Olufsen television. I want to be there, at home, where I was–where I thought I was–safe. 

The Eating Tree

I keep eating things-things-handfuls of gravel and dirt. I’m walking over gravel and rocks and sticks. Leaves. I keep eating and walking walking walking up up up–until it all comes back. It all comes out. I think so anyway. It doesn’t matter. I turn around and start beat beat beating to home, or wherever.

Along the way I eat pebbles and peoples and wildflowers. When my drumsticks start walking on flat ground I go behind a tree and push 2 fingers into my mouth, and slide them into the constricted part of my throat. I shove and shove and and poke and slide. I keep fucking my face with my fingers and then I feel the wildflowers, pebbles, leaves move up and hit my fingers.

I look at the pile of dirty puke. I stare at the Mc Donalds French fries and Big Macs and chocolate shakes. I look at the regurgitated pizza. It’s just there. It’s all there in the ocean-sized puddle with my life drowning in the gross fucking mess.

Best of Days.

Here is what is this about. I don’t know what I’m about. Most people ignore me now and I’m not sure why, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know why, and even if I knew why, I wouldn’t remember anyway. 

I’m a handful on my best of days. My best of days happened decades ago. I can hardly live with myself. And I’m not. Nobody is. Time is something that speeds by on a billion schedules, pattering its way around the world in an infinitely interactive lacy web. Life billows. I get tired easily and right now I’m busy imagining the reality of slitting my wrists. 

I’m scared. I’m tired. I show don’t tell. Also, my brain has stopped functioning, which is exhausting. For once, this isn’t on purpose. I haven’t killed the soldiers in my mind, I haven’t shot them with bullets of xanax and bombs of vodka. My heart-my heart my heart my h-heart hear-t beats to its own fucking drum. I haven’t made it to the store yet, Jerry. I haven’t made it anywhere at all. I have a past. I have a history. I have a story. Stories. I have things. Somewhere. I have a son. I have a heart. Full of Iron. I feel the iron. Non-melodiously, I feel it in my erratically beating heart.