The other week, I went up to Duluth for a
Great Big Dreams show and wandered the halls of the school for the first time in over a year. During the three+ years I was a student there, I stalked those hallways nightly like some pale zombie. Even when I didn’t live on campus anymore, I’d drive there on late nights and get coffee and read in the blue student lounge or walk slow laps around the school, just getting my head together. In the afternoons, I’d eat my lunch in a far corner of the Kirby Cafe, carefully hiding, or, if feeling extra intruded upon, I’d take a tray up to the Rafters, and sit by the fireplace with my back to the door. I did a lot of hiding my last year at UMD, which was easy considering the millions of dark little corners and alcoves stashed in each hallway.
Nothing’s the same there anymore, and not just in the metaphorical since. When I graduated high school, the county demolished the building that summer and slapped up a fancy new one for the incoming students. That felt strange, but fitting since the old school I knew would never be the same once I left it, anyway.
But UMD — well. The hallways are new and green and white and bright. The Cafe in which I spent so many lonely and quiet afternoons, hunched over my notebooks, is a Multi-Cultural Center. The Rafters is clean and the tables and the fireplace and the TV nook are gone. The Bullpub, where so many firsts happened for me — kisses, fights, jazz shows — is a hallway now. A hallway! It leads to a huge, elaborate dining center and coffee shop and I walked through all of this with what amounted to a large cartoon question mark hovering above my head. How did this happen? How dare they destroy my memories? The demolished high school building was one thing; this, however, was like your down-to-earth best friend going off to Cancun for a summer and coming back with a fake tan and long pink nails. I didn’t recognize anything.
My body and mind are full of places that don’t exist: my corner in the Cafe, the spot in the Rafters (the night we stretched out on the floor at midnight and he put his hand on my stomach). The Ballroom remains, but the nostalgia will kill me, anyway. The fact that I can’t go back to these places spins my brain into oblivion. Give me books on the philosophy of spacetime. Even good memories hurt — because I have times when I remember and then times when I remember, deep in my bones, to the roots of my hair.
Seasons bring this on for me. My senses are extra-bright. Spring is his button-up shirts, the smell of Griggs Beach, the first and last people I didn’t feel strange around — all connected to this now non-existent school. The group of people I met there, now dispersed, haven’t been replaced in any form; here, even with good people, I feel a little off, a little strange. We knew what we had then, my friends and I. We didn’t waste it. We wrestled it by the neck, flayed it in the sun, burned the hide. We held so hard we exploded.
I still remember my Goldfine room at 4 PM, the sunlight striping the bed — the afternoons I’d flop down before rehearsal, waiting for my boyfriend to come home and waiting for my friends to knock on the door and and so excited to be waiting at all.
I don’t think this goes away. I can’t figure out the evolution of space and time. I’ve written about it a thousand different ways. We used to love each other in the shabby walls of that school — all of us, running up the still-snowy March hill before sunrise, knowing exactly what was happening and how wobbly it was. The sadness comes because I can’t beat that — young, pretty, 19, in a pile of my best friends, mouth open for the sun on the lake, falling in love with everything, stretching my arms over Lake Superior. That was it for me — my moment. The rest is the wistful aftermath, someone else’s story.
So, as usual, I’ll just tell you the things I’m not going to talk about. Topics include: mail-order brides, pseudo-marriages, robberies, car crashes and oversexed Swiss jewelers. These phrases describe my past week and half, but, eh, who wants to hear about all those things?
Last Saturday, I was in Pizza Luce, sitting on an amp that Chris rolled into the middle of the restaurant, eating pizza with Mary and Chris. I stepped outside for a moment to call my high school boyfriend to tell him about some old classmates I saw, and his number didn’t work. It had been changed. We’ve kept in and out of contact since our break-up (six years ago), but we’ve always had each other’s e-mail and phone numbers. I have neither of those, and no way to contact him. It was a strange feeling, knowing he was basically lost to me.
I was very very drunk at the time and surprisingly unemotional for it, so I shoved my phone back in my pocket and finished my pizza. But it’s been nagging at me, a little, in the back of my brain. I’ve never been good at letting go of people. They usually let go of me first, but I manage to keep vague tabs on them. Nothing stalkerish — just a Rolodex in my head of the basic area of the country they’re in, or how to contact them if need be. But, here we are. I have no idea where my first love is, and I guess that’s okay? There are still some things, I know, that only he would understand the humor in. It’ll be hard to keep those jokes to myself.
I think I’m going to try a little experiment here. As most of you know, I have a Livejournal. That sentence is voodoo evil in certain circles, but, really, there are hundreds of well-written and fascinating people on Livejournal, people that don’t write in numerics or dot their “Is” with hearts. (I used to dot my “Is” with a spiky little devil face until my Vacation Bible School teacher told me I was summoning sin. Summoning sin! This is the same person who told a 10-year-girl that her sister, who’d recently committed suicide, was going straight to hell. Thank you, Jesus!)
Anyway, I write a lot on my Livejournal because I feel I can be more candid there and less worried about my actual writing style or language or sterling reputation. This means I neglect this site, however, and there are many many many of you read this who don’t have a Livejournal. So! For the next week, I’m going to try write here instead. Much of what I write on the other site isn’t confidential or damning; I just had always had a certain “image” in mind for here, namely “ooh, I’m a writer, a serious writer.” But all the “serious” writing I do lately doesn’t go anywhere except in the trash, so that’s defeating the purpose anyway. So, for the next week, I’m just going to write here, whatever comes to mind, as I usually do with Livejournal.
I always ask Chris why he and his bandmates, who are four of the funniest people in sixteen universes, why they’re all so stone-faced and serious on stage, and Chris always says, “Well, because that’s the kind of music we play.” I guess I feel the same way about the type of writing I try to put here, but, you know, since I haven’t been writing much for the public eye recently, I might as well give up the direction of this place for a while.
Here, I’ll start us off with a short entry I wrote yesterday:
I backed into a parked car today. I left my information, but I hope whomever I hit doesn’t yell at me. Man, I feel like a five year old, but I’ll probably start crying immediately if the person is even just a little mean.
Are you ready to be bored out of your panties?
Well. As it goes, when I’m doing the most, I write the least. This is unfortunate, too, because with this new streak of actually calling people and leaving the house and wearing non-pajama-like clothing and standing in sweaty crowds of hipsters lighting crooked cigarettes, you would think I would have more to write about. Apparently, I seem only able to write about things a few years after they happen, which is tragic, really, because I’d like to write now, damn it.
Anyway, my one bigger life story will have to come later because it will involve some explaining and more articulation than I have right now. My gums feel like my widsom teeth are breaking through, and that’s causing any creativity I might’ve had to vanish in a cloud of mouth pain. Yeah.
Last Friday, I was leaning over a balcony in a club while a very cool band played very cool songs. And then I wrote the following in a little notebook, so I’m just going to post it here. I fully believe in the blinding shittiness of drunk club notes, but, what else do I have?:
There’s the whiskey and there isn’t one night of no hangovers. I have spent three years detoxifying. I might as well put it all back in. Lemon and lime; the sirens go every time. Oh, look. Rhyming. Genius. We have emotion here, and yet I’m going to lie anyway. This is because I love the story more than I love you. This isn’t something I can write about while I’m in it. Too bad — they say you’re supposed to draw from things seven years in the past, but the things that happened to me seven years ago are dull and reek of Trent Reznor. I’m tired, but I keep pushing. I know somehow the ruining of the body will send my soul to heaven. Maybe I should make movies. Lights are tricky things.
Sometimes I think I cling so hard to people because I know I have to leave them. All the money spent on liquor and music is worth more than the retirement fund I’ll never have. Fuck foresight. I’ve planned forty years ahead my entire life. It must be okay to be a little reckless and invicible, playing up the pretty face.
This all fits perfectly into some equation — the bass vibrating my spine, the pink lights, the ex-boyfriend in the weird green jacket (omnipresent lately; his girlfriend won’t approve).
Man, do I have a lot to tell you.
Notes from the rock show (click for the readable versions):
Tonight I told an old and very dear friend that I was really happy and for the first time in the history of my life as a 22 to 24-year-old, I fucking meant it.
This picture will serve as a placemark to remind me to chill the fuck out. I’m embarassed by this picture, though I’m not sure why since I don’t really get embarassed easily. I suppose I had a cemented code in my head on how I should act at parties, and this isn’t it. In my head, parties always go so smoothly — my hair reflects light and smells like something people want to bury their faces in; my breasts are visible enough to incite stares, but covered enough to keep their mystery; and, of course, my conversation is always low and fucking brilliant. I don’t picture myself with a hot glove on my head and a knife in my mouth, all while making a constipation EHHH face. I did this in front of about ten attractive people, four of whom were decorating me with the kitchen accessories.
. . .
In other news, I spoke with Jason, as mentioned in the previous post and was surprised to find him on the far side of normal, a condition much different than his usual borderline psychoticness. I was almost disappointed to find him so domesticated. Though I’m uncomfortable with most of the memories associated with him, I enjoyed believing he was out there causing chaos and losing his mind. Someone still needs to be doing this. If even the most mentally tangled of my former friends is in netural now, I don’t know what this says about me.
March is my favorite month, and I haven’t slept more than five or six hours a night for the past two and a half weeks. I’ve never experienced this type of sleep deprivation before. It’s making my skin break out in leper-like bumps, to which I keep applying all the natural remedies I can think of: tea tree oil, apple cider vinegar, strawberry and oatmeal scrubs. I don’t necessarily feel tired all the time — in fact, I feel less anxiety than usual. My senses are too dulled to become overwhelmed.
The dreams I have are shady and full of ex-boyfriends. Thanks for that. One involved Jason, a boy who was my best friend in middle school, and then turned into something else. We had almost all (with the one major exception) our firsts together, either at the park in my neighborhood or in the wooded area behind my backyard.
When we were 15 or 16, we started to hate each other. It was a horrible, bitter type of hate. We stopped each other in the hallway specifically to whisper the most hurtful thing we could think of. We passed notes in Spanish, full of terrible insults and dirty names. We knew each other’s buttons and molded new ones and smashed those and built bigger redder spikier ones. We stopped talking when I moved to Minnesota, and then one day we talked again, and immediately the stabs began. There are reasons why we did this to each other, but none I can share. I haven’t spoken with him in two or three years, and I doubt I will. He represents a pinful of ugliness I don’t want to dip into.
Then there’s the more recent ex, but I don’t think of him often anymore. I dreamt of the last time we were in our Duluth house, when he and I were the only ones left, and we were cleaning without speaking. I was mopping the floor in our old bedroom and he was next door, scrubbing the bathroom, trying to get it ready for the new tenants. He was still in his jacket and shoes, and I was barefoot and listening to Nine Inch Nails at high volume so he wouldn’t hear me cry. We were both dating new people then. The last things we said to each other in that house were also nasty — not as soul-ruining as Jason and I — but enough to make me sit in my car after I left that night, flapping my hands back and forth, saying, “Okay okay okay okay okay it’s over now no more.”
I’ll sleep better when Chris comes home.
