My therapist had me write this as a starting point for deciding whether getting rid of my OCD, or at least the main obsession that is both my safety net and kryptonite, is worth it. I haven't decided. Anyway, here's what I came up with. Read at your own risk. It's uncensored and feels very vulnerable. I'll be honest, I'm a little scared to post it, but here it is.
My life without Emi... what would it look like?
I pulled back the blankets, looked outside at the beautiful falling rain, and shuffled out of bed, ready to start the new day. It was going to be a hell of a long day, but with a good breakfast and an early start, we’d make good time and be well on our way to sunny Southern California.
After a hot shower, a hotter cup of coffee, and two bowls of cereal – with soymilk, thank you – I hucked all the bags into the Jeep and we were on our way. I was glad Adam was driving, and that we were taking his Jeep; that way I could read the new mystery novel series I’d been dying to sink my teeth into, and I’d have plenty of room to stretch out my long legs en route.
“Hey baby,” said Adam, planting a kiss on my mouth before he shut the car door. “Did you get the little cooler from the fridge?”
“The one with all the Mikes?” I asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Got it, it’s in the trunk with all the duffels. You ready to hit the road?”
“Ready to hit the road,” said Adam. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand!”
I hopped into the backseat next to Deirdre and leaned my seat back to dive into the book. It was a tasty hell of a book, packed with action and humor, and babes to boot. I could just imagine them making a movie of it, staring Kate Beckinsale, or maybe Keira Knightley. I hardly noticed the first five hours flying by, and I only looked up long enough to switch to the second book in the series.
“Good book, I take it,” said Deirdre.
“The best,” I said. “It’s getting me so pumped for all the roller coasters. Oh hey Deirdre. Hand me one of those Snickers bars.”
I popped it in my mouth and opened volume two, which kept me well occupied until somewhere around Eugene, where we made an emergency stop for Laura to puke her brains out, despite her honored place in the front seat.
“That’s a bitch,” I commented, looking up briefly from a steamy sex scene.
Deirdre shook her head. “Saw that coming 400 miles ago.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked, taking a sip of my soda and turning back to Jamie and Nicholson getting it on. “I guess we’ll be here a few, huh?” I stretched out, taking in the juicy details, making note for later that night, where hopefully Adam and I would have a hotel room to ourselves.
Presently, Laura re-entered the jeep, looking peaky but relieved.
“Hey hun,” I said. “You want some ginger ale or anything?”
“No,” she said, “let’s just go.”
“Alrighty.” I shrugged at Deirdre and turned back to my book.
****
I drove past Lake Union and felt nothing… nothing but joy for being in Seattle. The seaplanes weren’t a symbol; they were part of the scenery.
I read a novel about a girl with bulimia, and I only read the vomiting scenes once, thinking nothing significant of them when the novel was over.
I wrote a story about fast cars and rich food, and nobody threw up. I wrote a whole novel and felt no need to focus obsessively on it. No characters with frail health, no unnecessary hangovers… just a perfectly understandable one here and there, and I didn’t dwell on their digestive misery, just remarked on it and carried on.
My friend got carsick on the way to the mall, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I didn’t want to join her. It just was, and then we got to the mall and everything was fine, and we had fun shopping.
I watched Ten Things I Hate About You, and nobody stared at me when Kat lost all the tequila. And I felt nothing. No adrenaline. No fear about the awkward looks. Just an admiration for Julia Stiles’ and Heath Ledger’s amazing acting talents.
I took an anatomy class, and there was nothing outstanding about the digestive system. It was just another part of the human body.
I got food poisoning, and it sucked. Physically, and only physically. I threw up and then I felt so much better, and then my day was fine. And so was the next week, and the next month, and a year later, I had no idea as to the date on which it had happened.
I moved on with my life.
****
But was I ready? Emi was the horizontal threads of my fabric, the Id, one might say. Lauren, the Ego, was only the vertical thread.
Take Emi away, and all you see is a pile of very colorful thread. One dimensional and uncomplicated.
When Lauren couldn’t take it alone, when she was scared and stuck somewhere unfamiliar, she wanted Emi to hold her hand, blind her to reality.
Who cares if my best friend raped my sister? I can ignore it and write stories where everyone is sick. That’s familiar, safe, I know how to deal with that, I’ve done it for years…
What heart problem? It can be covered up with an obsession just like anything else.
I CAN’T HANDLE HOW EVERYONE IS HURTING MORE THAN I AM. I know. I can pretend. I’ll tell Emi all about it, and we’ll obsess together. It’ll be fun, and she’ll tell me how to feel like them. I can experience it all, everything but the bile sliding up my throat… yes, I can understand… I can come so close…
But never close enough, and in the end, I’m angry at Emi. To bring me so close to Understanding and leave me on the outside, how could she?
It’s not her fault. She can’t change my physical body, only my mind.
But is changing my mind worth it when it leaves me “Miss Halfway,” tearing me further apart in the end?
But to be one direction of threads with no weave is torn apart too.
How, exactly, am I supposed to be whole?
Monday, February 18, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Apocolyptic Short Story
Too Late
It was a bright, sunny day in Southern California, and I had a beautiful, new car parked in my driveway. The glimmering August sunshine glinted off the shiny paint, making it look like the car was alive.
It was alive, in a way. It was a life-giving force, one to solve all the air-pollution problems in my town – once a haven of the American Dream, now a hell of smog. It ran so clean I could drive it through my grandma’s living room, if only there were enough room, and it ran so fast I could outrun my little sister’s stuck up prom date in his fancy-schmancy (albeit fossil-fuel-guzzling) penis extension. It was pretty hot, too, I thought as I watched the dazzling sunrays reflecting in the windows of my house.
It was a modest house, for Southern California at least. I loved it, though. We had a host of solar panels on the roof, a small vegetable garden in the backyard, and best of all, a rope swing dangling from the tallest tree, where my sisters and I would twirl around until we couldn’t see the palm trees swaying in the sunset.
It was also the last day I’d ever see that house, but I didn’t know that when I buckled my seatbelt and revved up the 137 horsepower dead sexy electric engine.
It was too late. Too late for me, too late for California, too late for my country.
It was too late for my planet, actually.
It was 2:20 when I sped out of the driveway for my best friend Chelsea’s house. I parked the new machine in her driveway, and her whole family came out to oogle over it.
It was a graduation gift from my grandparents. My parents could never have afforded it, but here it was all the same, the EV1, with my hands gripping the wheel. Chelsea climbed into the passenger seat, grinning, and fastened her seatbelt. I asked her if she was ready for the cleanest, sweetest, fastest ride this side of the Mississippi, and she said Fuck Yes. I started it up again, and headed for the longest, straightest, clearest stretch of road I could find. Zero to sixty in less than three seconds.
It was glorious. The palm trees rushed by in a blur of green, the clear blue sky sang a halleluiah for my act of environmental benediction, and the soft wsssshhhh of the engine tingled beneath my body, vibrating to the tune of a new day.
It was over all too quickly. I rounded the only corner on the stretch of road, and a ringing sound comparable to the sound left after the explosion of a nuclear weapon assaulted my ears. Chelsea screamed, What The Fuck Was That? It wasn’t the car; I didn’t know what the hell it was.
It was a shadow. Several shadows, actually. I saw the faces of people I had seen at school floating around me, but that was impossible. Kyle Bradley, he had died of smoke inhalation last year. Tanya Redding, she had died of a fatal asthma attack a month ago. Mrs. Greenly, she had died of lung lesions in my sophomore year. And there were more faces, some I recognized, some I didn’t, but the only ones I knew were people I knew to be dead. They didn’t seem to want to harm me, but they were rushing around, sometimes in shadow, sometimes clearly visible. One by one, they threw their bodies in the sidewalks and the road, where they became fixed shadows, sucked into the pavement and staining it black with a shrieking volume of the dreadful ringing. Chelsea screamed again, and started choking. CHELSEA! I screamed, looking away from the road for a split second. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG? Chelsea didn’t say anything; she just turned white, then black, and then her body was whipped out of the window, where she joined the masses of swirling faces, and threw her body down in front of me, flat – black – ringing – and the car moved on.
It was not stopping. I tried the brakes, and nothing happened. I tried to move the steering wheel, nothing. The sky was gone, and in its place was a dark cloud of smog, raining black upon the top of silver car, staining the windshield and destroying my vision.
It was oil. Oil was raining down, blinding me, choking the swirling clouds of people above. It was getting harder for me to breathe; every breath felt like it made my lungs bleed, and worse yet, the noise was getting only louder. Suddenly the car hurdled around a corner, almost throwing me from my seat, and all at once it stopped. The oil dripped off of my windshield, and I had a cloudy view of my surroundings again. Immediately in front of the hood stood a most stunning creature, blinking at me as if nothing had happened.
It was a caribou. There was a lone tear dripping from its majestic eyes, and when the tear hit the ground, it too became oil. I blinked back at the caribou, wanting to help it, make it stop crying. Around it, there were hundreds of caribou-shadows on the pavement, as flat and dead as Kyles, Tanya’s, Chelsea’s. What’s Wrong? I whispered. What’s Happening?
It Was You, Humans, it said. I wondered for a second what he meant, but before I had a minute to figure it out, I stopped breathing. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, struggling for air, but only smog filled my lungs, and my body felt weak… transparent. I looked down at my fingers, and they had turned entirely white. I felt a tug on my shoulder, and I was sucked out of the car, and my blackened body began encircling the caribou, who watched me with a passive sadness.
It was over. I felt my shadow-body hit the pavement with surprising force for a body of smoke. My soul sifted through the sidewalk, and the ringing reached a fever pitch so that I thought surely what little was left of me would shatter. I watched myself drift earthward, as though my soul’s eyes were far above, and I saw that the shadow, like everything else, had turned to oil, and was slowly dripping towards the core of the earth.
It Was Bound To Happen, the earth whispered. You were all too greedy. You set yourselves up for this. My perception backed up even further, and I saw the planet, surrounded by a black haze, and as the last of the oil drops reached the core, the whole planet exploded, and the corpses of animals and trees rained across the solar system, dripping with the oil that had ended it all.
It was not supposed to end this way.
It was a bright, sunny day in Southern California, and I had a beautiful, new car parked in my driveway. The glimmering August sunshine glinted off the shiny paint, making it look like the car was alive.
It was alive, in a way. It was a life-giving force, one to solve all the air-pollution problems in my town – once a haven of the American Dream, now a hell of smog. It ran so clean I could drive it through my grandma’s living room, if only there were enough room, and it ran so fast I could outrun my little sister’s stuck up prom date in his fancy-schmancy (albeit fossil-fuel-guzzling) penis extension. It was pretty hot, too, I thought as I watched the dazzling sunrays reflecting in the windows of my house.
It was a modest house, for Southern California at least. I loved it, though. We had a host of solar panels on the roof, a small vegetable garden in the backyard, and best of all, a rope swing dangling from the tallest tree, where my sisters and I would twirl around until we couldn’t see the palm trees swaying in the sunset.
It was also the last day I’d ever see that house, but I didn’t know that when I buckled my seatbelt and revved up the 137 horsepower dead sexy electric engine.
It was too late. Too late for me, too late for California, too late for my country.
It was too late for my planet, actually.
It was 2:20 when I sped out of the driveway for my best friend Chelsea’s house. I parked the new machine in her driveway, and her whole family came out to oogle over it.
It was a graduation gift from my grandparents. My parents could never have afforded it, but here it was all the same, the EV1, with my hands gripping the wheel. Chelsea climbed into the passenger seat, grinning, and fastened her seatbelt. I asked her if she was ready for the cleanest, sweetest, fastest ride this side of the Mississippi, and she said Fuck Yes. I started it up again, and headed for the longest, straightest, clearest stretch of road I could find. Zero to sixty in less than three seconds.
It was glorious. The palm trees rushed by in a blur of green, the clear blue sky sang a halleluiah for my act of environmental benediction, and the soft wsssshhhh of the engine tingled beneath my body, vibrating to the tune of a new day.
It was over all too quickly. I rounded the only corner on the stretch of road, and a ringing sound comparable to the sound left after the explosion of a nuclear weapon assaulted my ears. Chelsea screamed, What The Fuck Was That? It wasn’t the car; I didn’t know what the hell it was.
It was a shadow. Several shadows, actually. I saw the faces of people I had seen at school floating around me, but that was impossible. Kyle Bradley, he had died of smoke inhalation last year. Tanya Redding, she had died of a fatal asthma attack a month ago. Mrs. Greenly, she had died of lung lesions in my sophomore year. And there were more faces, some I recognized, some I didn’t, but the only ones I knew were people I knew to be dead. They didn’t seem to want to harm me, but they were rushing around, sometimes in shadow, sometimes clearly visible. One by one, they threw their bodies in the sidewalks and the road, where they became fixed shadows, sucked into the pavement and staining it black with a shrieking volume of the dreadful ringing. Chelsea screamed again, and started choking. CHELSEA! I screamed, looking away from the road for a split second. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG? Chelsea didn’t say anything; she just turned white, then black, and then her body was whipped out of the window, where she joined the masses of swirling faces, and threw her body down in front of me, flat – black – ringing – and the car moved on.
It was not stopping. I tried the brakes, and nothing happened. I tried to move the steering wheel, nothing. The sky was gone, and in its place was a dark cloud of smog, raining black upon the top of silver car, staining the windshield and destroying my vision.
It was oil. Oil was raining down, blinding me, choking the swirling clouds of people above. It was getting harder for me to breathe; every breath felt like it made my lungs bleed, and worse yet, the noise was getting only louder. Suddenly the car hurdled around a corner, almost throwing me from my seat, and all at once it stopped. The oil dripped off of my windshield, and I had a cloudy view of my surroundings again. Immediately in front of the hood stood a most stunning creature, blinking at me as if nothing had happened.
It was a caribou. There was a lone tear dripping from its majestic eyes, and when the tear hit the ground, it too became oil. I blinked back at the caribou, wanting to help it, make it stop crying. Around it, there were hundreds of caribou-shadows on the pavement, as flat and dead as Kyles, Tanya’s, Chelsea’s. What’s Wrong? I whispered. What’s Happening?
It Was You, Humans, it said. I wondered for a second what he meant, but before I had a minute to figure it out, I stopped breathing. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, struggling for air, but only smog filled my lungs, and my body felt weak… transparent. I looked down at my fingers, and they had turned entirely white. I felt a tug on my shoulder, and I was sucked out of the car, and my blackened body began encircling the caribou, who watched me with a passive sadness.
It was over. I felt my shadow-body hit the pavement with surprising force for a body of smoke. My soul sifted through the sidewalk, and the ringing reached a fever pitch so that I thought surely what little was left of me would shatter. I watched myself drift earthward, as though my soul’s eyes were far above, and I saw that the shadow, like everything else, had turned to oil, and was slowly dripping towards the core of the earth.
It Was Bound To Happen, the earth whispered. You were all too greedy. You set yourselves up for this. My perception backed up even further, and I saw the planet, surrounded by a black haze, and as the last of the oil drops reached the core, the whole planet exploded, and the corpses of animals and trees rained across the solar system, dripping with the oil that had ended it all.
It was not supposed to end this way.
Barefoot in February
I've discovered that the best way to get through Valentine's day is to pretend like I like it. It worked well enough last year, so I thought I'd give it another shot today. It's led to some amusing consequences, though!
First, I painted my nails pink over top of the green-tipped French-ish manicure I did a week ago that is now chipped, so my nails looked okay from a (very long) distance, but redonkulous and fragmented up close. Hah!
Also, last night, I tried to fix this pair of pink platform sandals that I got from a thrift store a couple years ago. The shoes are perfectly good except for this one little detail: the part of the sandal where your foot goes, on the left shoe, keeps ripping off of the sole, thus leaving the giant two-and-a-half inch platform dangling, which is mighty hard to walk in. So I glued the shoe back together, for probably the third time, using superglue. All was well until about a third of the way to school, when the shoe ripped apart again. Oh well, I thought I could handle walking the rest of the way with one normal shoe and one flip-floppy shoe.
But oh no. A little further, it came almost completely apart, leaving the sole hanging on to the footbed by a hair thread, VERY hard to walk in! I was shuffling my left foot on the ground like a retard, and occasionally the shoe would get all skewed, I would trip, and I'd have to re-align the parts again. Finally I got to a bus shelter, where I took the liberty of sitting on the bench, and decided that, since I didn't have time (or patience!) to walk all the way back home and get another pair of shoes, and walking like that was getting totally ridiculous (not to mention painfully slow!) I decided that, despite it being about 40 degrees, my best bet was to just take them off, carry them, and walk the rest of the way barefoot.
So I did. I've gotta say, I looked pretty cool walking to school, barefoot in February, all decked out for Valentine's Day with a pair of broken pink shoes dangling from my icicle-like fingers. Awesome. I went to my Environmental Science class thinking, this school is hippy-infested enough that I could totally get away with this... in the spring. Oh well, nothing else for it. I totally wanted to just swagger in and be like, "What up, I'm barefoot! Wanna fight about it?" I didn't do that, but I did take notes. Hahaha. And then, we watched this video about how Big Oil and the Federal Government etc. killed the electric car. Ohhhh so much corruption. Anyway, it inspired to write a little short story, which I'm going to post right after this.
And then, I walked back home barefoot. Hell yeah I'm cool. Or cold, if you want to get technical.
EDIT: My V-Day adventures continue! Laura and I made an expedition to the student bookstore because I wanted a new water bottle, and while I did wear different shoes, we got aroused... err... distracted, by an ultra-sexy Ducati (have you ever heard the engines on those things?) and in our staring at the sexy motorcycle, I almost ran into a pole. And Laura almost toppled into me as I was almost toppling in the pole, due to the Ducati ooglage. It was fantastic.
First, I painted my nails pink over top of the green-tipped French-ish manicure I did a week ago that is now chipped, so my nails looked okay from a (very long) distance, but redonkulous and fragmented up close. Hah!
Also, last night, I tried to fix this pair of pink platform sandals that I got from a thrift store a couple years ago. The shoes are perfectly good except for this one little detail: the part of the sandal where your foot goes, on the left shoe, keeps ripping off of the sole, thus leaving the giant two-and-a-half inch platform dangling, which is mighty hard to walk in. So I glued the shoe back together, for probably the third time, using superglue. All was well until about a third of the way to school, when the shoe ripped apart again. Oh well, I thought I could handle walking the rest of the way with one normal shoe and one flip-floppy shoe.
But oh no. A little further, it came almost completely apart, leaving the sole hanging on to the footbed by a hair thread, VERY hard to walk in! I was shuffling my left foot on the ground like a retard, and occasionally the shoe would get all skewed, I would trip, and I'd have to re-align the parts again. Finally I got to a bus shelter, where I took the liberty of sitting on the bench, and decided that, since I didn't have time (or patience!) to walk all the way back home and get another pair of shoes, and walking like that was getting totally ridiculous (not to mention painfully slow!) I decided that, despite it being about 40 degrees, my best bet was to just take them off, carry them, and walk the rest of the way barefoot.
So I did. I've gotta say, I looked pretty cool walking to school, barefoot in February, all decked out for Valentine's Day with a pair of broken pink shoes dangling from my icicle-like fingers. Awesome. I went to my Environmental Science class thinking, this school is hippy-infested enough that I could totally get away with this... in the spring. Oh well, nothing else for it. I totally wanted to just swagger in and be like, "What up, I'm barefoot! Wanna fight about it?" I didn't do that, but I did take notes. Hahaha. And then, we watched this video about how Big Oil and the Federal Government etc. killed the electric car. Ohhhh so much corruption. Anyway, it inspired to write a little short story, which I'm going to post right after this.
And then, I walked back home barefoot. Hell yeah I'm cool. Or cold, if you want to get technical.
EDIT: My V-Day adventures continue! Laura and I made an expedition to the student bookstore because I wanted a new water bottle, and while I did wear different shoes, we got aroused... err... distracted, by an ultra-sexy Ducati (have you ever heard the engines on those things?) and in our staring at the sexy motorcycle, I almost ran into a pole. And Laura almost toppled into me as I was almost toppling in the pole, due to the Ducati ooglage. It was fantastic.
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