Tell Me, Are you a Christian, Child. I said, Ma'am I am Tonight

Be careful with the word deserve, my papa says. Don't throw it around. 

* - * - *

Yesterday, like every June 11th for the last 16 years, I acknowledged the dead. Sacrificed to the fire gods, gods of grief and chaos, to the quiet, to the natural order of life.
 I swallowed down so many 'what if's' and 'I wish' and 'but, why's' to turn my stomach sour. I kept my body still or slow, hands close to my rib cage, and my mouth closed.

* - * - *

Sixteen years ago on June 11th, I woke up to my dad screaming around 3:30 am. There was too much noise, too much smoke, too much tired to comprehend at that moment that my house was burning down. I stood up out of bed and immediately was forced to the ground -- smoke, as they say, is no joke. Confusion and incessant screaming forced me, on my knees, to the living room: rage, hot, orange, loud. Instincts said back door. I saw his legs at the front door. He did not see me. He had a mole on the back of his right leg. I watched those legs walk out to clean air.

They say he went back into the house. They say they found his body in the kitchen. I envision, even still, half a body.

When I was 14, living in the country with a step-dad and post-divorced mom, one of our pigs got out of his pen in the night. I came upon the body in the morning before school, ripped apart and bloodied. Back legs and haunches in tact -- mangled in the middle, but head, heart, face gone This is always how I think of my dad's burnt body abandoned near the pantry.

What happened in those last few minutes? Do I deserve to know?

* - * - *

What if he could say: go on?
Could I?

Heart Beat Runnin' Away

What can I say? I drink beer now. Any beer. I don't even care. I listen to pop hip hop/pop music. I don't care - I've turned into a stereotype that pretentious college-Erica would hate. But I have something that college-Erica doesn't have: first of all, I'm skinny. Take that! I'm skinny AND I'm just getting better looking!!! Second, people are people, you little bitch. Quit being so stark about rules and the rights and wrongs and all the bull shit that you get so wrapped up in, that's what i'd say. I don't even know what I'm saying.

I got a deep tissue massage today and it was all the things: good. bad. healing. sad. But whatever. Please, don't ask me about it.

I, also, researched Shore Birds of Indiana. 44 of them. More than 44 shores. I think.

Seriously, though, MAYBE I've had too much beer, but can you believe life? And, like, everything that goes along with it?
Don't answer that.

Also, do you know when I started liking the Violent Femmes? You don't know this, but let me tell you. 6th grade. Sixth GRADE. I hadn't even started my menses when I knew all the words to Gone Daddy Gone. Jealous? You should be.

Do jelly fish feel pain? No, seriously. Do they? Because, if not, what do I have to do to be a jellyfish? I drink too much Miller Lite. And wine.

I wrote a poem today and it sucked. I can't believe I"m going to poetry school; i guess i can't even believe poetry school is real.
WTF.

untitled: a little like my heart

Once, I read this thing in a newspaper. Seriously. In high school, I would read the newspaper. Anyway, I read this thing in a newspaper that said: "Just because someone doesn't love you the way you think they should, doesn't mean he/she doesn't love you." It's true, I suppose. But I'm selfish enough to look at that statement (that obviously made a huge impression) and say, right to it's eyes: Fuck you.

Fuck you.

I don't want to buy that. I don't want to acknowledge that someone may know how to NOT hurt me, and do it anyway. Doesn't seem fair. I offer everyone I know an advantage - because everything I am and everything I'm about is right out in the open.

My dad used to tell my grandmother that I was too vulnerable for my own good. That exposing my feelings the way I do would eventually be my downfall - that surely, it's a fault.

I'm beginning to agree.

My heart's learned to kill

The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I had a boyfriend named Jon. In August, he went away to the Naval Academy where I visited him twice. It was nice. I was friends with his youngest sister. I called her MixMaster. That summer was slightly stressful - my stepdad had moved away to set up house in Arizona where he accepted a job with a huge pay bump. I had decided to stay in Indiana to finish up my senior year. I was approaching a year without my mother. Anyway, I had this boyfriend, before Arizona, before Annapolis.

He was a nice boy. Smart. He loved to make out in his Caprice Classic, he had a wonderful mother and dad. He liked me a lot. Once, in a moment of vulnerability, he sort of proposed to me. This, however, wasn't *before* Annapolis. This was during. Anyway, I had this boyfriend.

I was with him the night my dad died. He left about 3 hours before it happened. We didn't really talk that night, we did a lot of kissing on that green couch. Well, anyway, he was the 4th or 5th person to stand next to me the morning after my childhood home burned down. He was the one who waited on me while I told the firemen "exactly what happened as [I] remember[ed] it". He let me lose my shit.

He moved away weeks later. He accidentally proposed months later. And I cheated on him. Lots. I was a vacant human being. I know now I should have been nicer - fuck, I knew it then. But I couldn't.

Let's be honest: I couldn't do anything. School, and grief, and school, and grief, and blowjobs, and movie theaters and lots of Fazolis, and the loneliest, scariest nights of my life. That's what I had to hold on.

And the distinct memory of watching that green couch in flames as I escaped the house without my dad.

He died 13 years ago today. I was the last person to see him, the last person to talk to him. He didn't really like my boyfriend.

i hope we hold on til the last exit

The swing on my grandparent's porch is moving with the wind. Their dishwasher just gave up on dinner plates and me? I'm up past midnight writing and drinking. There are a handful of things I want to describe in detail, I have nearly 7 poems started (fragments and broken sentences floating around, dying to escape and live and breathe) but alas, words fail the occasion.

Today, I woke up $800 poorer. Someone somewhere landed my identity and paid lots of money for make up and pajamas and shoes. If that bitch only knew what it was like in my identity, she'd apologize. She'd probably say, "oh, you poor, sad girl. Your grandma is broken? And you're deathly alone? And you feel panic everywhere? I'm sorry," she'd say. She might hug me and say that she's had a rough year, too.

But, it's just another thing in this world.

This world.

I Think I'm Cured

It's been a long time. And I'm not going to sugar coat anything, so, be prepared for facts that slice through human bodies easily and without remorse.

Let's start with the basics: life can fuck you up. That seems circular, I know, but go with it. Truths are vague and ever changing and unfair. Existence is hard, because it is, and also because, if we go in and out of it, is it really existing. Okay. Basics covered.

Now, on to the hard-stuff: Remember my grandma who had the health scare? Well, it wasn't over. As it is with life, things only got worse.

She was finally diagnosed with Giant Cell Arteritis. The devastation is, though, she was diagnosed too late by her back-woods physicians. She has lost complete vision in her right eye and approximately 80% in the other. No peripheral. She'll close her good eye and cry about the "gray mud" she sees. "Gray mud" she'll cry - that's all I see. Now, the 20% she has retained is dim. She calls life the "Dark City" - and it wouldn't be so beautiful if it wasn't so shattering. She'll smile and shake her head and cry and convince me that she'll be fine living in the Dark City.

Yesterday morning she woke up and everything was a little dimmer. She began shaking and crying and we admitted her into the hospital again. This time in Indy. (We'll never go back to Ball Memorial in Muncie. Fuck those guys).

Blindness, guys. We are battling an auto-immune disorder that attacks blood flow to the brain- it's already killed one optic nerve and it's trying so hard to slaughter the other.

We're sad. My papa cries and cries when she's not around. She cries and cries when he's not around. We're all dying in the Dark City.

But I suppose we all are.

I will write more about this somewhere, sometime.

i can offer you a warm embrace

There are lots of different reasons to be sad. I'm experiencing about half of them -- all together. Topping the list, I just really miss my dad. I think that's okay to say nearly 12 years after his death. I didn't know him, but I bet he would really *get* me. I would wager that he might be close to the only one who could - but what am I to do? I wonder if he would wonder at 48, "could I have been more?" But he doesn't get that luxury. Well, fuck, let's call it like it is: I don't get that luxury. I don't get the luxury of being stable or being happy for longer than 4 days in a row.. I just can't get over the idea that maybe it's his fault. There, I said it. Getting mad after 12 years? Probably not normal.

Lots of people don't have dads. Lots of people borderline hate their jobs. Lots of people feel empty and relentlessly void. I am not unique in my trials and burdens. The unhinging of my life is ancient. Survival, really. Survival really gets me down. Understanding how it's done escapes me daily. Mostly, I feel like I'm not a real human. The things I do are tiny and dumb. I have a body that fails and a mind that fails and a heart that does, too.

I'm a mess, really. But when I really shake it down and label what it really is, I feel trite and like tomorrow's biggest idiot. I'm sad about a decade dead dad and about my job. What the hell?

When did life get dumb and hard?