okay, so you’re a rocket scientist
happy virgo season; i’m sweating a lot. i was on the floor in my underwear for three hours tonight but it didn’t feel like any time really. I don’t know. I saw so many bees at the botanical garden yesterday and I made myself embarrassed with how I wanted suddenly to rip my knees open to get down on the pavement to write poems about them. I didn’t, but. It was the Smith effect, I said. Sylvia sees. I suppose that ostensibly there is nothing wrong with writing but certainly there is nothing right about Writing and I don’t know that I remember how to do the former, lowercase dubble-yoo writing, or if I ever knew. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to capitalize my Is or not, or if I want anybody to look at me ever again, or if maybe I won’t just up and die if someone doesn’t right away. I wanted to write about the bees but just because the way they sounded when they were buzzing all together like that, expect not together, at all, just in the same place making their slovenly survival sounds, indifferent, intimate. I mimed liking for a very long while once a boy with a bad temper and broken front bottom tooth because he made the most heartbreaking grinding sound in his chest for just a moment right after you kissed him. It was almost mechanical and made me want to keep my face close by and watch, maybe forever, to spot the glitch again. I guess you think that the hum of pollination felt to me like life, and all of us out here sucking what we can from the earth while our scared song fills the ear, distinct demons with indistinguishable mouths, but actually I just meant that my head has been ringing badly lately because my teeth grinding is worse than ever and it was like that. I’ve never liked August much.
Sometimes I think that someday I would like to be somebody’s mother. There is this odd animal certainty in me that if I were to grow a human inside of me and name it something probably fucking dumb and buy it baby Nikes and paint stars on its ceiling and take it to see only terrible movies in theater w a full array of snacks and blow up its ego and be constantly handing water bottles and pay for all its ugly teenage haircuts until hopefully it grows up and becomes a nurse, well. I’d like that a lot. I tell friends about this in whispers. Other times I stand in front of the open refrigerator door, feeling the dew behind my knees change texture in the cool air, and hold out my index finger, awaiting the application of a line of yellow mustard, which I will then bring my mouth to and lick off.
When I was a toddler I would tell my mother I was going to grow up to be lawyer and a writer and have three adopted children and dog named Sue. Not quite two decades later, but nearly, she claimed to be surprised when I came out formally. Assigned a bedtime for the first and only time in the whole of my life while sharing my cousin’s bed in North Carolina — when we stayed there for a long while and I created elaborate narratives in the play kitchen that took up an entire room and missed the novelty of my aunt ordering Big Macs without the meat at the drive thru, because the meat made her sick during chemo, more than I could know to miss my aunt — I would explain while being tucked in that I would live in Brooklyn someday, which had to have been a notion I picked up on television, somewhere, because I had never been there and didn’t even know anybody, probably, who had. When I was five my favorite show was ER, which I watched in bed with my mother at 10pm on Thursday nights, but that was set in Chicago. I had many baby doll style pajama sets then, sleeveless tops with miniature flower prints and tiny matching shorts that peaked out only barely underneath, that I’d picked out for myself at K Mart. They reminded me of The Brady Bunch.
My car is very small and the ice blue of an early-aughts It Girl’s eyeshadow and the tires don’t seem big enough to be taken seriously or to sustain life and when I speed on the highway I feel my thighs tighten involuntarily, my glutes, my low back, prepared, alternately, to float out into the stratosphere and be free or to careen into the guardrail and up and over and through the windshield, which is the same thing, I guess. But I was speeding today so that I’d be home for Bachelor in Paradise to watch Dean be a fucking goddamn prick to an angel of a Russian orphan in an American flag bikini. And then my sweetie pies, who I do forgive for being from Fairfield Connecticut because they’re our New England team and that’s what counts, advanced in the Little League World Series and suddenly it was eleven pm and time for dinner. That’s what the mustard was about. I had a great salad at lunch that I made and packed and brought and ate, the whole ordeal, so I’m bowled over by my own competence and likely will not assemble another proper meal for days, but I had saltines and sliced cucumber with hot sauce and one spoonful of chunky peanut butter and some watermelon cubes and then I pulled a gatorade from the freezer that I’d left there to chill on my way toward the TV, but too long had passed and it had half-slushed over so that the first grip of the bottle in my hand, even before I’d attempted a sip, reminded me, in this dizzying way, like when you inhale water by mistake while slipping under the surface of a pool and for only a second before your brain knows that this hurts, there’s nothing in the entire world but a bright light cracking open inside you, of an ex-girlfriend who liked to drink frozen gatorade in the morning. I closed my mouth, clicked my top and bottom teeth back together, dry. I was in her bed naked in the first stretches of sun making faces at her in the mirror while she dried her hair, hanging over the edge down to my hips to reach for the bottle and take a long icy sip even though months before that I’d told her it was a weird habit. I am not sure I want all the details I have of that and every other thing that’s ever happened. I’m not sure there’s a point to that card catalog. I only include her on my Snaps like once a month to be nice but I lost my breath about an over-chilled sports drink. It didn’t feel, though, the way I guess I thought that sensation would always feel. Like my insides were being excavated with a food court spork and sautéed in an acid-based marinade. It was just warm and fond and tactile and only sad in the way that, like, Carole King songs and soft serve twist ice cream cones and Christmas trees and baseball and this one octagonal window in my grandparents attic can make me. Ruby with four hoop earrings in each ear told me I was a big fake for pretending to be tough and then put the edge of her sleeve over her lips and nose and if she meant that I ache, mostly contentedly enough, all the time because of some stubborn shithead certainty that every single thing that’s ever happened is inherently missable based solely on the fact that you weren’t able to make it keep happening forever then she had it right.
“You’re Still The One” just started playing. When Clare and I were sitting at a bar inside of a wall at a baseball park a few weeks ago for our second annual Leo season reunion, this year with my left foot injured to make up for the fact that her own has since recovered, we talked about Shania Twain and Faith Hill, two Virgos. We couldn’t decide which one makes it clearer, reigns supreme, but if you search for one on Youtube and leave autoplay on you’ll get the other and there isn’t a bit of any of it that I don’t want. it’s centrifugal motion / it’s perpetual bliss. I keep getting close to saying I’m a Faith girl and then I imagine having to give up “Man I Feel Like A Woman.” I keep saying I’m obsessed with Virgos but it’s really only that my library coworker who wore very thin cashmere sweaters in eighty degree weather with denim shorts and taught me about astrology and allowed me to find out that her rosebud lipbalm tasted as good as it smelled when she’d swirl two fingers in it and touch them to her mouth while maintaining eye contact and talking about proper mircofiche storage, but only in absolute secret, was one and, like, Beyoncé, too. Bella Swan. Niall Horan. Stephen King. Sam Kerr. The best white Chris. The person who Jules really should’ve ended up with in My Best Friend’s Wedding. That cute flop Kevin Love. The two unequivocal best members of The O.C.’s fab four (Rachel Bilson & Ben McKenzie) Both Tegan and Sara, if you can believe. The only living cast member of The Simple Life, queen Nicole Richie. I’ve never hit the end of a summer not more bruised than when it started, or anything less than desperate to start trying something else, and I’m not sure I’m qualified to say what it is that’s starting or what anybody, especially me, is supposed to try, but I have this new thing where I tell myself that I’m less than one commercial break from the very very good part and then I tell myself again and then I tell myself again and I would like to take three to five deep breaths before Labor day, and sleep six consecutive hours one time, and clean the bathroom. In my next place, I want a pullup bar, and a big map of the world, like, from a fourth grade classroom, and til then I am glad to drink bottled water my own mother bought and listen to “Goodbye Earl” (the Dixie Chicks, interestingly, are composed of two libras and a leo, if you’re wondering) and to say whenever necessary, with frost-tongue steeliness over and again, say sing-song like a game, nodding nodding yes that something, anything is coming.
