12.1

1. I shouldn't talk to her. She's basically unapproachable. I only stammer or choke or sweat when I'm around her. I wish I had his suavity, his courage, his strength. Then maybe she'd love me.

2. Why does she want that guy instead of me? We laugh and have inside jokes and understand each other so perfectly. Yet she wants that guy who can't talk to her because he's so nervous (trapped inside his own head).

3. I want someone who's nice, you see. Sure, he's ok and all. We're good friends, but . . . well, you know. There's this guy. He's so sweet and innocent and cute and I think he likes me, but he can't say it. It's adorable.

11.30a

Ok stretch groan yawn scratch under chin. Flip off blanket. Roll. Flip blanket back on.

Wake up.

What was with that dream?
I don't remember much of it--it seemed like hours and hours, and all I can remember are the last ten minutes. I climbed a wall. All my friends were sitting on top of it. There was only one ladder, so those who went up first were farthest away from the ladder, and couldn't get down without clambering down the edifice of the building, scrabbling on windows and bricks, fearing of falling. Those closest to the ladder had all the power they wanted. They could climb up or down at their leisure.

She was, of course, at the top of the ladder.

She would be, you know, at the top of the ladder, holding all the power, preventing everyone else's happiness, controlling, protecting herself. I don't know if it was symbolic, but it sure felt typical to me.

I edged my way past her and had to climb down the wall on the other side. (No ladder). I had to hook my legs through windows and drive my fingers into cracks.

When I got to the bottom, there was nothing there. Why did I climb down? I could look back up and see all my friends' legs, waving down at me. Symbolic? No. Just perspective. I was down, they were up. Easy to explain; I climbed down. I'm not worse than any of my friends, am I?

I turned around. She was there, suddenly, vibrant and alive. I hate her.

I wandered away and play with Andy Griffith. I calmed down.

Now awake. Do I still hate her? Probably not.

Here's a good question: does my brain believe what I tell myself?

11.27

[not Catherine. Sometimes I feel like I have no idea why or what is happening in that story. I have no idea how to pace a novel]

I just laughed with him. Not five minutes ago. I can prove it; people took pictures. It was a big to-do. It's not every day someone gets engaged. Of course.
See, she didn't know about it. Most people didn't. He invited all of his and her closest friends to a party. He didn't bother saying what for, just that nobody would want to miss it for any reason. But it was supposed to be a surprise for her, or else she might get suspicious. And when she's suspicious, that's basically the worst (she doesn't let go of a thing once she's gotten curious about it). All he said was that it was a surprise, so we didn't tell a living soul.
We all trucked it down to her park. Not hers, strictly speaking, but the park where, if you walk to the right spot on the cliff, you can hold hands with your woman and watch the sun go down in the valley until the last fingers of twilight are the only things illuminating your mad dash back to the car, and this all with laughing about the jokes you told and the things you saw and the kiss you're waiting for at the door of the car (the parking lot is fully black now; you've planned it exactly, and no one can see you as she pulls you against her and you back her against the car and you kiss so log and do sweet that when you break free, you wish you could repeat it, but of course night has settled at that exact moment and heaved its heavy sigh and folded its blackness down across the world. Forgive my indiscretion. All you need to know is that it had been her favorite park since she realized that she could have them, and preferences weren't limited to others.
She must have arrived more than a half and hour ago. Of course, we'd all arrived early--that's me, Cindy and Sherri, Dan, Elena, Tristan and Desiree, and, of course, Marcel. So we all stood around, kind of, waiting. It was a good kind of waiting: the kind where time doesn't seem to pass, but when everybody quiets down again, you realize that it's time to go again and all the waiting you've done has paid off and you can just continue on with your life. It's a good kind of waiting: the kind people wait their entire lives to have to do. Pleasant waiting. It's a novel concept.
She arrived, and when she came through the woods down the path, she had exactly that radiance which poets try so hard to capture but never can quite, and now I'm tempted to make a run at it just to see if I can explain how the sunlight filtered through the dying woods cut all the darkness from the light and left only golden, reddish glory to slash down to her face and gather there in her golden curls. She smiled and it made her cheeks blush the red of the sugar maples behind her. Her hair swayed with every step and flashed the gold of the oaks above. She was not a part of the woods; she was the woods, and when I realized it it tore a tiny hole in me that's been leaking ever since.
Strictly speaking, we didn't know what was going on, but we figured it out sooner than she did. And even so, people closest to the hurricane are least likely to see the size of it. So it's not like she's stupid.
Marcel pulled out his guitar and sang a song to her that another man wrote.
He used the words of a better man, an artist from a different age who had to search his soul for his words, who reached for his guitar when things were bad and when things were good and when things were just okay. He took the words of a man who had no advantages (no Internet, no predecessors, no collaborators) and used them to succinctly summarize his own feelings. It felt like uprooting and moving a sequoia to show New Yorkers how important the trees are. It felt like stealing money from a man to buy gifts for his wife. It felt like stabbing a man so you could do a good deed by driving him to the hospital. It felt like giving her another man's heart. But nobody else saw it, and if they saw it, they didn't care, and if they cared, they new better than to feel. I was the fool and felt. And it felt horrible.
I cried. It helped that everyone else was crying too, if for different reasons. I could at least imagine they all felt the same pain I did.
Marcel got down on one knee and asked her "D, will you marry me?"
She didn't even pause to consider her options.

So yes, I laughed with him. I smiled and laughed and clapped and cried, not five minutes ago, as my best friend asked my ex-girlfriend to marry him.

I'll tell you when it stops hurting.

Don't expect a call from me anytime soon.

11.26

I didn't quite pass out, of course. That would be silly. I didn't allow myself that luxury.
Ok, self.
Self.
Ok. Breathe, me. I can see me not breathing. Self, I have to make me breathe.
Gasp.
Good job, me. Again.
Hey, self. Am I going to get my skin eaten by Marco Who Speaks In Class? Is that my fate, me? Answer myself.

11.24

Black black black he takes his coffee black. I don't know why, but this strikes me as the manliest thing anybody has ever done.

11.23

[catherine tomorrow? If I can read what I've written, then yes.]
I didn't see her, really. What I saw was a tangled mix of messages to my brain. I saw the way her forearms tensed when she moved, the way her fingers slipped through the air, the way her hair curled down over her forehead, the way her shirt stretched over her breasts, the way her ear slipped out behind her hair, the way her body settled as she walked, the way she didn't look around but looked straight ahead, and the way her waist trimmed in like the feel of the first icicle I break off and hold in my hands and it's cold and real and yet I can see right through it to the center and beyond and it's my icicle mine from the eaves and it's fragile and precious and if I drop it it will break. But I can't see her, she's not mine, and though she feels like my icicle, I can't see through her and she's not mine. I can't see the trouble with her passive aggressive manager or the recent death of her grandfather or the man who keeps calling her in the middle of the night just to remind her that she isn't safe anymore and he's the reason why she carries the knife with her like the knife is going to do her any good at all but at least it's something it's something to let her keep living and not hide forever in her house it's a way to step outside and face the day knowing that at any time that knife is right there on her belt in easy reach just there next to her icicle fragile waist and below the shirt that ripples just there and the icy cold smile that doesn't look around and just looks ahead.

So what do I really value? The way her ear (coy) sneaks out from behind the single scattered curl, or the woman struggling to finish what she started (life) and make it to the other side?

I guess what I'm really asking is for forgiveness.

11.18

[This has been a week to end all weeks. I'll get back to Catherine. It won't take me a month, but I will finish. This I vow.]

It's not a lie, really. Just a half truth. Just exactly what you want to hear. It's not mean-spirited, or hurtful, or hateful. And yet you reacted so very badly.

"And do you think you can get away with that?" So say you.
"You haven't defined your antecedent." So say I.
I'm angry too. You aren't the only one allowed to be angry, anyway. Stop being angry.
"You said you wanted to be friends, and this isn't what friendship looks like." You.
"Friendship is a two-way street, I'll have you know." I.
"Easy for you to say. You haven't even tried to be my friend." You.
That's stupid and you know it. I'm here talking to you right now, aren't I? That's something friends do.
"That's not fair--" I, and yet you cut me off with a giant humph.
"I'm afraid of being friends on your terms. I don't know what it means." You? That doesn't sound like you. That sounds like anger and fear. You don't sound like that.

My terms? My terms are simple. Love me forever, but never tell me about it. Hold me in the highest regard, but never approach me. Always be there when I call, but don't expect anything of me. Be a perfect memory of my triumph in forgetting.
Oh! And never, ever, hurt me again.
Simple.

11.14

[I am super way behind. Nearly ten thousand words. Not tonight, I think. Unless the mood hits me. I had a pleasant evening, but I need to write a paper tomorrow and it's going to be a beast.]

What's a pleasant way to say this? How do I go about this casually? How can I point this out without being offensive and rude?
Excuse me, ma'am. I can see down your shirt. Either I'm too tall or you're too short, or God has gifted you unnecessarily.
Now.
What are we going to do about it?

11.10b

On the day of the final, professor musicpants mixed the class and put on a calm classical cd and passed out a stack of tests and then probably danced a little happy jig in his little happy heart because he just enjoyed causing so much pain and horror in his students.

11.10

In the last few days of Listening To Music, I knew I would never see Marco and never get to rely on him to Speak In Class again (or at least, I wouldn't be able to rely on him to secure the class a participation grade anymore). So I studied his ways and wiles. This was my only motivation. Don't believe the hype. I didn't like him, I just wanted to know how he could talk about so many things in class. And now, I have denied that I liked him too vehemently and you will assume I liked him anyway. Go ahead. Do what you like. I know the truth.

11.9

[again, not Catherine]

I am
a man.
I can prove it. See my chromosomes? One X, one Y. Crucial. There's more. Broad shoulders, facial hair, deep voice, height, love of well-cooked pies. It's all genetic.
There's more. Just one thing more, but it's there. I love her.
It makes me a man.
Not that it defines me, you understand, but it's what makes me feel most strongly as a man. You don't get it. That's fine. Let me use terms you understand.

When I hold her, my heart
     races.
When I touch her, my fingers
     tingle.
When she laughs, my laughter
     flies.
When I see her, my eyes
     smile.
When we talk, my words
     dance.
When I hear her, my mind
     churns.
When I miss her, my soul
     creaks.
When she loves me, my joy
     bursts.
When we kiss, my world
     stops.

And that makes me a man. I can feel it, right deep down in my soul and I never need to question because she's there and she knows and that's alright with me.
The only thing that I don't understand
is
I haven't found her yet.

If you see her, tell her to call me. I've missed her while she was gone.

11.8b

I like the taste of citrus. Limes, especially, are very good because they taste so good and clean and exotic and new and fresh and not at all like what you'd expect from a pitted green football shape that grows on a tree. They're almost perfect. Lemons are good too, because you can turn them into all sorts of things. Lemonade and lemon meringue and zest and lemon wedges for contests to see who can strip the enamel from their teeth the fastest. And grapefruit (so excellent as breakfast food or basically anytime food) because there's so much citrus in a grapefruit I don't have to work so hard to eat it. And oranges make me happy (especially navels, I mean who can turn down a fruit with a belly button) because they're sweet and tangy all at once and oranges are just so excellent as juice. And the segments? Segmented fruit? Whoever invented that should be taken to a dream castle where their every wish comes true. It is the best idea ever in the whole world, and it is so perfect that I can always tell when I am exactly halfway done with a fruit. Apples can't do that. Yeah, that's right. I compared apples to oranges, and oranges won.

11.8

[This is not Catherine. I can't believe I am at a point in my life where I must specify. I do so like short stories.]

I never wear cologne. I also don't understand why it must be called cologne. It's just perfume for men. I wear deodorant, but I don't go around smelling my pits. Normally, I just smell air, and that's it. Sometimes I'll smell my breath and freak out looking for a toothbrush, but normally just air.
That's why the smell of her is so overpoweringly important. I never smell anything but food and bathrooms. That's why the smell of her is so incredibly vital. If you never smell anything in your whole life unless you're going to eat it or clean it, you lose the part of you that recognizes the emotional power of smell.

Until I smelled her, I forgot the emotional power of smell. That's why the smell of her is so crippling. And when another woman sat down across from me and wafted over the smell of her, I wanted to stand up and leave the room and run to my car and drive to her.
Instead, I just thought about waffles and urinal cakes.

That's why the smell of her is a terrifying wound.

11.7b

Interesting fact about me: I can't bring myself to hate celebrities. Try as I might, I just cannot. I think it is a virtue to hate people freely and without restraint, because it shows some measure of mental cohesion and fortitude to make the choice to actually concentrate all the desires and fears of the mind into a single package of pure, unadulterated hatred.
I was never blessed with this gift. Instead, I was given the ability to see someone else's side in every argument ever. I can see the point that Brittany is just a tortured soul, Mr. Crocker. Or is it Ms? I can't tell anymore. The point is hardly whether or not Chris Crocker has chosen xer gender or whether xe will just fade into oblivion when all the people who have seen xer videos are dead. The point is that I feel both sides of every argument, and it hardly helps me sleep at night.

11.7

I realized at about November that I would have to learn to coexist with EnriqueRosalyn if I was going to continue without blowing up much longer. So I
"Hey, Rosalyn?"
"What's up?"
"I don't know--you wanna hang out on Sunday with a bunch of people? I know about this art exhibit the art department is doing and I thought--"
"You what now? You want to hang out with people? Catherine, are you ill?"
"No, I'm fine! I just don't want to go alone!"
Ros withered me a bit with her glare.
"And! I think it would be a great opportunity for me to get to know Enrique if he's going to hang around for much longer."
Rosalyn didn't swallow my lie, but she took the truth like the proverbial fish: hooklinesinker.
"Oh! That's great! I'll ask him if he's free on Sunday, and then where is this place? I bet we can get there by foot, right?"
She ran around the room trying to figure out where she was for a minute and then turned abruptly and grabbed me in a hug.
"Thanks, Cath, for trying. I know dealing with me is weird for you sometimes."
She had sad in her voice, so I just held onto her. There wasn't anything else to do.

11.6b

[I feel the need to write something not in the novel. But I can't.]

Her hair curls there over her ear. Her fingers work deftly, just so. Her lips pull up into a slight honey sweet smile.
She's not mine.

11.6

The funny part of rooming with Rosalyn is that she has fits of clean. Most of the time, her side of the room is trashed (she is spread mostly everywhere [and not just clothing, sometimes it's actual garbage. She ate the remains of three pizzas one day (she must have gotten them from a friend) and left the boxes on the ground] and I try to contain it to one side [not mine]). Every once in a while, though, the piles mysteriously disappear like a magical cleaning genie visited the room and granted Ros one wish: a floor to walk on. The fits of clean mysteriously coincided with the sporadic dates with Enrique. They weren't every week, so I couldn't guarantee any kind of regularity, but once in a while he would call and the room would be clean when I got back after lunch and I would know to text before I came back to the room. If I got a reply, it was an all-clear. No reply meant no entry.
I started carrying a heavy coat on days when the room was clean. I stuffed big knit mittens down in the pockets and when I felt the urge strike me, I wandered outside into the night.

It never snowed. It was supremely annoying. I wanted it to snow if it was going to be cold, because cold without snow is like brainfreeze without ice cream, like a plot without an ending, like nausea without a theme park. Totally not worth it. Since it never snowed, I had no need of snow boots. It was a big disappointment.
I did wander around the campus and learn it at night, however. That was a bonus. I didn't know before that the big clock on the ad building was illuminated from within. It appeared to be a tremendously old lightbulb, the kind that have a big swirly shape on the top because they were blown, not molded, because they were so tremendously old. I could not see the bulb, of course, but I assumed from the acid paper yellow of the light that it must have been incandescent. Every other bulb on campus was energy efficient halogen white. Impersonal. Cosmetic. Clean. Hateful. But that one bulb, way up high on the edifice of the grand old building--now that was home. It was safe. It was warm. If Ros didn't respond to my desperation texts, I sat and stared at that warmth so far away and imagined what it must be like to live in the clock (with the ticking regularity and the measurable pace of time, nothing out of place, nothing unexpected, ten, then eleven, every night as it had been and as it would be and nothing to displace you out of your home with an impromptu makeout session with a boy who certainly wasn't nobody and a girl who exploded too much for her own good and I just don't know why life can't follow the pattern I gave it when I was smaller and when life was easier to control) in the tower of the ad building.

And then I got the text and everything was alright and I could go home again to Ros and we could fall asleep on my bed for no reason other than it was warmer and it reminded us of high school.
"Ros?"
"Cath."
"Have you seen the clock tower in the ad building?"
"Cath, you know I don't like analog clocks."
"Oh, yeah. Good night."
Good night, me. Good night us. Again and again with the disquieting irregularity of broken faucet.

11.5

Time to face the music.
Not figuratively.

11.4b

[Really, it's not the content that's killing me. I could probably go on forever like this. As a matter of fact, I know I could. I could just write and write and write and never finish. It's the PACE that's killing me. I just don't feel like I'll ever really quite catch up. So I'm writing another thousand something right now, just to put myself within striking distance of being caught up. I NEED 8,000 WORDS! I have 5.5! CRAPPPP]

11.4

For a while, I assumed my life would go on without incident, that everything would be the same, and that I would continue to cling to walls and violently invade the shadows and everything would be alright.
I forgot basketball intramurals.

11.3

After classes, I ran back to the room Ros and I shared (in a co-ed [terrifying] dormitory [lame] on campus [helpful] which, as you will be pleased to know, had suite bathrooms [thank God]). I burst in the door, ready to ask Ros all the questions. I opened with
"Enrique--"
She closed with
"He's a boy. He's not the only one I find cute, anyway. I'm not you, Cath. I'm not you."

11.2

I saw Enrique today. Enrique isn't nobody. Enrique Iglesias sang songs when I was really young and gullible and pop music just because. Enrique is the name of the boy who apparently wears plaid shoes when he's not beating Ros at soccer. He stopped me in the hall of the Marianne Vargas building and asked
"Are you the girl?"

11.1c

I like these men. They jump with the music (not for show, but because the music kicks them there in the soft spot in their soul that resonates in time with the bow and the wood and the resin and it kicks them there then they jump). It doesn't matter quite to them what we think of them and their jumping weaving bowing swaying. They're here to make music. The audience doesn't matter at the end of all of it. I like these men.

11.1b

In my all-consuming quest to become the best I can be without ever once standing out or being noticed, I came into the same snag as always: Rosalyn. Ros was dynamic fire, twisting and contorting into every space she could find. Since she had so much energy, she went out for intramural sports. I was very very proud of her but at the same time very very afraid of the games. Ros walked, fearless, into huge sporting events like she was a goddess, trailing a retinue and letting her hair fly free in the breeze. I crept in like a mouse, keeping close to the walls and avoiding eye contact with anyone who smelled like a stadium bathroom. She blew in like the strong west wind and I faltered my way through the stands like an inconsistent spring rain. Our metaphors didn't even align. That's how far apart we were when it came to sports.

Yet, Ros dragged me into the stadium to watch her play nearly every time. "We're freshman! Homework is for upperclassmen!" was her admonition. So she raged across the field in reckless abandon and I waddled through the stands looking for an appropriate place to sit.