Because Jenny Said To

I have read constantly, greedily, selfishly, voraciously. Cereal boxes at breakfast. Shampoo bottles in showers. Greeting cards in grocery stores. Airplanes in skies. Bumper stickers, billboards, and the sides of semis on highways. And always, books. Books in waiting rooms. Books in cars. Books on toilets. Books in lines. Books at parties. Books on tape. Books late into the night and books into the early morning, the sun setting and rising between pages.

Every night brushing my teeth, I walk as I have since grade school into the loft attached to the bathroom, and as sudsy white drools down my face, I stare at the bookcases jammed with titles distending shelves. And every night it is the same.

Manic glee. Feral frustration. Immense sadness.

Because at every approach, I feel dynamite strapped beneath my ribcage, timer counting down, reaching zero before my hands reach half the shelves. Fuck physics. I want to read them all. At the same time. Now.

If they were grapes I’d throw them into my mouth, oozy, pulpy handfuls, and when purple shoots from my eyes, I’ll throw the rest on the ground and stomp wildly, mashing ink into wine, sucking the white carpet so dry I won’t leave a stain.

Then inebriated with words swirling through intestines and splintering through veins, constructing libraries among organelles, these books will surround the dynamite, coat it, unable to slow its race but able to welcome the inevitable like New Years— with arms wide, shouting greetings, kissing its cheek, hugging its neck, throwing confetti into the unknown.

Drive

Thursday submit final paper. Undergrad done.

Friday Baccalaureate, Capping.

Saturday Graduation.

Sunday pack, load van, squeeze friends, drive home.

Don’t take long way around campus. Don’t look in rear-view mirror. Don’t glance right on interstate. Veer left. Exit Birmingham, the city no longer mine.

Follow I-65 N, a mindless drive ripping a straight shot home.

Brain blowing thought bubbles, popping before half formed.

Flick on Mumford and Sons, allow them to run the gauntlet of emotions and question marks I will confront soon enough.

Emigrate to right lane, mechanically navigating sculpture of pavement, face settling into bust, mind vanishing into autopilot.

Call friend. Voicemail.

Realize don’t want to talk.
Realize need this solitude.

Tell self am finished with undergrad, am finished writing papers, am finished attending classes, am finished driving this road’s reverse in August.

Don’t comprehend, too tired.

Amscaredlostconfusedterrifiednoideawhatdoingwithlifeworkedassoffincollegeandgraduatedwithnojob.

Want sleep.

Am driving.

Can’t sleep.

Attempt thinking. Mind rejects request. Body reports must pee. Mind rejects request.

Crossing state line, obligatory honking.

Bladder emitting pain signals. Mind scoffs at neediness.

Sun wandering elsewhere, ostentatiously orange.

Switch on headlights.

Hills climbing higher. Bends sharpening. Exits ticking.

Spot mine. What if…? Swerve at last second.

One
Two
Three turns
Sign announcing hometown

Sprawling nearer

Growing larger

And suddenly I'm wailing, howling, pounding the steering wheel, No! No! No! WTF! Noooo!

as I drive forward, a dead end road, college degree sliding in the trunk.

Bright Ones

Haunting those compelled to a life of scripts, rehearsals, designs and illusions persists the adage, “If you can do anything else and be happy, do it.” This imperative stands as a warning, a plea, to chase one’s bliss in a more determinable, more secure elsewhere, because theatre too often takes even hope itself from the hopeful souls pursuing this craft. Yet, this counsel only echoes from those already walking this forewarned path, from those weathered figures chorusing, “Turn back, turn back, bright ones, for this craft burns out such light.” But an underlying message courses quietly, fiercely:

“Unless that light can burn only here.”

Master Lego Builder

Have you ever heard an infant cry?

Tiny torso rapidly and fully concaving and convexing.

For hours.

Pumping one long, unbroken wail. Perfect breath control with the abdominal support and unconstrained throat that public speakers, actors, and singers pay thousands of dollars to relearn what they once did unconsciously.

I try.

Fill the deepest parts of my lungs,

and send out a rising amplitude of vibrations ricocheting off rushing air molecules,

Vocal cords splinter.

The release too spontaneous, too raw, too volitionally purposeless. Ten seconds of abandon and for the next two days, shards scrape against shards, painful and tight, producing harsh speech. Nine years of theatre training could not protect me, could not remind or re-teach me.

I, probably when learning to sleep in darkness and to tinker in dayness, began to manage life. To fracture the continuum of time into decades, years, weeks, milliseconds. To refashion an intact whole into, not a stream of moments, but crystallized building blocks of tiny arrows pointing towards the next Big Life Goal, never a circle complete in itself as though I were the Master Builder of my own Lego world.

Give a Lego to an infant and she’ll put it in her mouth, using the most sensitive part of her body to touch a small piece of this world. A little part, building on top of, beside, underneath, behind and two feet away from other little parts, all assembling this Big World with never space between. Even that is filled with air molecules or radiation or carcinogens or memory or maybe some residue of grace. Then gum to edge, plastic to soft, wet pinkness, she’ll throw it, having tasted it and moved on.

Being decades removed from infanthood, this postulation, like my Lego world, could be nothing but a Romantic construct. For I, just as much as the next person, project ideals onto the places I cannot return. Because then there exists a time when I was good, a time when I could not have done any better than what cannot be undone. And no one can tell me differently. Because they, too, cannot remember. Being so distant and universally forgotten, these ideals repose safe from memory.

Now, when I scream, I break things. In abandon, I break. And there was a time when I didn’t, a time when I could scream, unbroken, for hours. Sometimes, it feels good to taste the wreckage.

An acquaintance once told me that his heart had to break for it to open.

Maybe it’s something like that.

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Contact/ Needy Whores

During sophomore spring exams, I received a free 15-minute massage from my college’s health services. Being touched for those 15 minutes remains the longest contact with a human being I hold in memory. I never received her name.

I’ve read that a human being’s only two instincts are to cry and to suckle. We begin as parasites and then our only two compulsions are to demand attention and to quaff body fluids. Basically, we are born needy whores, screaming for warm boob in our mouths, arms cradling our bodies, and hands wiping shit off our butts.

Then we regulate, learning to do for ourselves. And we learn to do for ourselves and then regulate.

We learn how to hold a bottle, to walk, to control our bowels. Crying becomes a herald for punishment, for a scathing word and a hot hand instead of a soothing in gentle arms. Because you know better. Your emotional discernment has matured past such demonstration. But your instincts haven’t matured. Regulated, they carrying on through asphyxiation.

Perhaps that is why I cannot always remember faces or voices, but I can instantly feel against me the body of every person I’ve ever hugged. Faces and voices require moments to construct with the wariness of fiction’s brush adding a curve to a cheek or a tilt to a laugh. But hugs, so immediate and so tangible that fiction has no time to uncap its pen, envelop me instantly.

I feel their hug. I feel myself in their hug, against my chest, my stomach, my cheek, my shoulders, inside my arms. I feel their warmth, their closeness. Their hair, skin, bones, muscles beneath skin. Palm against back. Chin against collarbone. Breath against fabric. Beating chest against beating chest. Sensations so exact I could peel away their epidermis and still know them by holding their anatomy to mine.

Sometimes I wish I were a dog so I could walk up to people and feel their hands all over my body.

Sometimes I wish I were a masseuse so I could touch people for an unbroken 15 minutes.

Sometimes I wish I were pregnant so I could always be holding someone.

Sometimes my chest feels like it will split open because even air would be more filling than this need for contact. I brace my arms around myself, fingers digging beneath shoulder blades, face buried into elbows.

Tighter.

Tighter.

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