4.17

Somehow, Susan hears me through the closed office door and pokes her head in while I'm talking on the phone. She has the sort of eyebrows you might find on a caricature chalk drawing at Disneyland, somewhere between a faux-Bavarian brat wagon and an equally fake waterfall over polystyrene rocks. Susan, my word, what could you possibly want? Is it that you heard me in an important conversation with the boss and you don't trust that I have the company's best wishes at heart? Oh, no, that was February and now the intrigue of the month is a constant suspicion that I'm for some reason pocketing office supplies to take home for what--my four-hundred square foot apartment? How many post-its do you think it would take to cover the walls, anyway? Thanks, Susan, for interrupting this solitary moment in which I might have been happy, this single moment in which my employer calls me not for a status update or a change in schedule that totally destroys the work of the last week, please, Susan, come on in and make yourself at home, ruin the five minute interval between last project and next project in which the boss calls (not visits, mind you, but calls) to tell me what a pleasant surprise it is that the work I've been slaving over for months is actually somehow adequate and possibly even good, yes. Yes, Susan, my favorite face to see. Just squeak your way into the office I've worked so hard to get, set your crocked feet down on one side of the couch and your yoga-pantsed junk on the other and just breathe the rarified air of the only walled office on the third floor. Please, Susan. I couldn't think of anything better to do than look at your four-month old roots while I struggle to hear the seven or eight positive words of feedback that are my only payment for my every waking minute since November.
Susan doesn't sit down. She leans in and mimes a plate and fork and arches one perfectly-manicured eyebrow up for a half second or so. I blink like an idiot and then nod. She smiles and I hate how white her teeth are in the brief interval before she carefully closes my door and the boss says "--and that's why we pay you the big bucks," solidly ruining the carefully-manicured sense of self-righteous indignation I was manufacturing and instead soaking me with sudden guilt-shivers. Somehow I managed to just as effectively ruin my phone call reward as Susan ever could. God, when I'm forty five, give me the confidence and bravado of Susan, because who else can so effortlessly be sweet to everyone and wear crocks to work?
I hang up and grab my coat. It's lunchtime.

4.16

Something strange is seeping from your pocket, a smell perhaps of the last ancient sour patch kid you put there to save for later. It has eaten through your pocket and adhered to your skin and I swear you've never taken these pants off in your life. Why do you do this?
--Me, to ten-year-old Philip

Good luck. It gets better.

4.14

Somewhere downhill, there's a vast noise, and you can't quite make out what it is. Maybe it's an angry crowd, or an enormous machine with grasping claws, or perhaps a thousand thousand insects eating. You're not sure what it is, but it gives your stomach a turn. This is the end. You can't stay here any longer.

4.12

Abrogate
Beneficent
Coruscate
Debride
Entropic
Frottage
Grandiloquent
Hesperian
Indolent
Juvenal
Kundalini
Liminal
Megalomaniacal
Numismatist
Ophthalmoscope
Pisiform
Quintessence
Ribald
Soricine
Triumvirate
Uric
Vapid
Wyvern
Xian
Ytterbium
Zzyzx

4.11

Abecedarian was in the thesaurus, but love was not. Asperge was in the dictionary, but bind was not. You were in my house, but I was not. What kind of a world is it that we live in, anyhow, where life can be so contradictory and unlikeable even at the selfsame moment that it shakes you by the shoulders and screams in your ear "Love me!" in a voice that echoes, reminiscent of your late mother, God bless her soul, who once told you to not let the perfect get in the way of the perfectly good, advice that you perceived yourself as having followed perfectly, that is, until you met me? And now look what we've done.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.25

One Man Can Change the World
Big Sean (featuring Kanye West and John Legend)

Why have I been struggling to fit
I have planed down my edges until I'm slippery smooth
What is this continuing bad trip
I thought the effort would be worthwhile at the end
Just where have I been trying to get
This opening in the universe wasn't designed for me
Is it over? Is this it?
I'm on this side of the membranous veil of heaven
I'm stuck.

Lyrics
What is this song? I have trouble keeping up with the perspective shifts. I've needed to read it twice, and I feel like I'm only just grasping the edges of the words. It's big and valuable and not my story.

I feel loose. Words are difficult. I've written and deleted more sentences than I've left. I'm restarting the song after I already re-read the lyrics. I feel guilty. This song doesn't entice me. My heart--is that true? I said it. It must be, but how is that possible? Big Sean has reached out to me with his heart in his hands, offered me a story about his grandmother, offered me his pain and his perspective, offered me a door into his life. But I just don't see through into his life. I don't want it to be my privilege. I don't want it to be his disorganized storytelling (I could criticize his lyricism where the words seem  slapdash in places). I don't want it to be the sleep I'm not getting. I want to be sharp as a knife, to cut through to the heart of the song and to peel apart the muscle fibers to see why they work.

I was fascinated by my psychology class in Freshman year. I read books like the Five Love Languages and took the author's confidence for an absolute truth. I thought I understood humanity. But every new person I meet tears down my idiotic, youthful idea that humans can be understood. Certainly, Piaget's phases of development describe the general human arc. Certainly, Freud's theory of mind advances an explanation for internal thought that fits human behavior. Certainly, the old theories of the countless psychologists I've never heard of are all serviceable in their way. But humans are always more complicated than the picture we hold in our mind of them. I have never met a person that couldn't surprise me even after years of acquaintance. My mother still surprises me. My brother is new every time we talk. So why do I have the slightest hubris, thinking I could understand Big Sean's reverie?
After I had learned a touch about how human minds work but before I realized I'm an idiot, I went through a breakup. I still don't understand everything that happened to me when Kayla left, but she dropped every cliche in the book on my head. Did you know it's not me, it's her? Not only that, but she was taking a break from men, and for bonus points, was going to focus on God. Perhaps we could be friends in the future, and so on. Honestly, she did her best in a strange situation. I was not going to handle it well no matter what she said or did. She needed to break up with me and I hadn't made it easy. I thought I knew the correct way to act, the formula that would build our relationship and secure it, the futureproof method. I followed a logical sequence of events that would guarantee the us that still existed, and three days later there was no more us. I struggled for a long time to understand what had happened, and to be quite honest, I'm not sure either of us knew. She couldn't have explained it better if she had wanted to. But looking back, I can tell (at least) what happened to me. I learned that no matter how many spontaneous fruit smoothies you buy for your sweet, no matter how many caring texts you send, no matter how many small moments you carve from your day for your someone special, it won't change anything if you're already 99% broken up, when the only thing standing between you and the lonely road is the word relationship and nothing else. I learned that I don't and can't understand other people, and maybe I shouldn't try.
It goes much deeper than that, but tonight I'm not willing to weep. Big Sean didn't grab my heart, and I'm not going to dig it out for him just because you're reading this.

Stephen
You're right; the story is about family. And even though you're right, and Big Sean is begging me to reevaluate my closest relationships, to place them in a sacred space and remember them every day, I'm not interested in spilling that out, ink-blood running on the digital page, not tonight, not tonight, not now. I have work in the morning and sleep called an hour ago. I have too little to say and too much to lose.
I wish I could have met my grandparents as an adult, but that's not the hand I was dealt. I'm glad I knew them when I did.
I wish I could have been peers with my parents, but there's no knowing if they would have me as a friend.
I wish I could live closer to my siblings, but the things they accomplish are too big to be compact like that.
I wish I could bring you, Stephen, into our family. But you're already here, so what's the use?

So. I'm fifteen from the end. Am I going slowly enough for you?

4.9

[I try to not write about myself. So I won't.]

I can feel the dog's hot breath on my calf. The covers are painfully constricted around my legs, almost bound there by his weight and yours. I have to get up. I have work in an hour, and breakfast, and a shower to take. Your arm is so heavy on my chest, and I'm burning up from the heat of it. I can twist my neck and see the clock. It's six, almost. I've taken too much of the bed again, almost driven you off. You've stolen most of the covers again. They're half laying on the ground, I bet. I blink once or twice and I remember. I'm awake in the smallest room at a week-rate hotel. The dog and you are a thousand miles away, and I still can't purge the memory of what I wish were true. I'll try driving further tomorrow.

[Why are all my stories sad?]

The phone is lying there. It's six. I pop the plug out of the wall on accident, pulling on my phone, and the charger skitters across the floor. I'm distracted. The dream is still in my head, and I'm not sure I read the text right. It's from you. It's a picture of the dog. Things are normal. You must have gotten my letter. Maybe I have enough gas in the car to--yeah. I can be back tonight.

4.8

I tried to write a metaphor of you, but I failed. I never fail at metaphors. I think it's because you're too big, you're too much. How could I reduce something that touches the stars and sinks into the sea? How could I outline the hunger that has emptied my ribcage and pulled the fibers of the muscles from my bones? How could I possibly propose a timepiece or a mechanism for marking the vast eternity I have spent in the minutes you held me? What feeble idiot am I, to create such a metaphor? And what patient fool are you, to listen so well as I struggle?

This one is me, I think. I cannot know if it is you. Sleep well.

4.7

Solipsism
I've felt guilt about breaking your favorite mug for seven years now. I know perhaps you have forgiven me, Karen, but I just wanted you to know that now I am forgiving myself. It was my fault, I suppose, to not listen to you when you warned me about the coffee's temperature. And though I should have inferred the shock to my mouth and mind, I couldn't have prepared myself for the sudden overwhelming taste of your garbage carob coffee. And honestly, it was very kind of you to offer me your actual favorite mug, a gift from your ex (I guess), I can't understand allowing someone else to use such a thing. Put it in a glass case if it's that important to you. Anyway, Karen, I know you've already stopped reading this in a rage, but I wanted you to know I don't feel bad anymore, as of today. I throw off all guilt. There's no reason for me to get so twisted up over something that doesn't even actually affect me. So, thank you, and you're welcome I guess. Here's six bucks for a new mug.

4.3b

There's a point at which idiocy becomes obvious even to the person whose decisions are idiotic. Sometimes, it's the screamed epithet in the children's bookstore, a panicked mother suddenly blanching as the moment of passion passes and she realizes that what was once an unbearable day has suddenly turned on her and become an unforgettable scar. Sometimes, it's the gravel lining the corner of the road, a man confidently stomping the brake pedal and finding, to his horror, that the tree he thought impossibly out of reach was now wrapping his passenger door in a loving embrace. Sometimes, it's thinking you could drive across the country to see an old flame and discovering in Nebraska that they didn't actually want to see you after all and, to your everlasting mortification, you only misread their last email and "Why not?" didn't mean "yes," because it meant "I'm trying to be polite, trying to leave you space for your dream to breathe without having to dash it to the ground myself." But Charles knew all this and still found himself in Omaha with a stupid look on his face.

4.3

Her head snapped up, suddenly fully awake, fully alert. He was still there, next to her (it wasn't that; she never doubted that anymore) but it was something like it. What's this feeling wrapped around her suddenly wakeful mind? She asked herself a diagnostic set of curiosities to determine what it was that kept her moving with him. First: what is right with the situation? Second: what is wrong? And you'd better hope you find her on a day when the first list supersedes the second.
First:
Love had finally done the hard work of preparing itself for her. The old house of dreams she had built was finally pulled down to the foundations. It was always a house for the before man. Now, someone else had come in and couldn't quite fit the shape of that old log frame. In fact, this new someone was probably never the right shape for her meticulous mind-bending arts. She wasted nearly a year with him, measuring out the edges of what she thought was his shape, only to find that he had edges she didn't—no, couldn't know about. No amount of bending would ever fit him to the dream she had once held. And now, together, they had cut the old logs apart, examined what she once had thought perfect, split her young opinions into eight (nine, [ten!] beautiful wedges. In her mind, they had abandoned the old dream homestead and ranged far into the woods. He pushed her to think new thoughts and old, things she hadn't touched in years, or thought she never would. And each time, for warmth almost seemingly, he would (without thinking, without knowing its value or even that such a thing was possible,) burn another log that used to shade her face from the cut of a young dawn sunbeam, used to hold off the outside wind. He just . . . burned it. No ceremony. No old familiar habits to hold together the strange memories she used to cherish. Finally, she had found something good, even if she knew she would never understand it.
Second: she could smell the smoke of his savage and unintentional deconstruction of the dream house of memories and now-subverted expectations, and the smoke of it was giving her a headache. No, actually. She was far more awake than that. She knew the smell, but couldn't find its source, knew suddenly, chillingly, it wasn't inside her head. This was real. There was smoke fingering its way across the ceiling from the door on the opposite side of the room. She could see it in the dim light from the bathroom, its cold blue nightlight driving a shaft of revealing light across the creeping particles. She sat, watching for a moment, entranced by the momentary beauty of it. Then she touched his shoulder. God, was he warm. He stirred, saw the smoke, and without speaking rushed from the bed. He levered the window open and began chucking clothes from the floor out onto the ground below. She walked to him, so slow and delicate, and when he turned, he found her standing there with a hand outstretched. Neither of them said a word. She backed out of the window, him holding, muscles strained, as she lowered toward the ground a story below. He clambered out, the light from within the room changing temperature, warmer and warmer, illuminating the edges of his skin with blue to yellow to orange light, and he dropped to the ground just as she saw the flames licking the bedroom ceiling beyond. She stepped away from the house and he walked briskly to her. They held hands in the buff, circled by mismatched clothes crumpled in the dew, watching her house burn down. Not the dream building, but the physical world.

She felt him looking at her, and not the flames, and turned to him.

"Well?" he said.

"I guess so," she said.

First: what is right with the situation? We're both alive, and we have each other.

Second: what is wrong? Well, the house is on fire.

Today, the first superseded the second, and she was satisfied.

4.2b

She was all out of breath from climbing and she still lost her breath looking at the sunset on the rocks. Her hat was fashionable for the desert and her camera bag was slung around her elbow. She looked like she fit. We were sitting with our backs up to the rock, still warm from the day, but made cold from the wind, and I turned to her as though to say "This sight is big enough for both of us," but all I said was "Hello!"
"Hey," she said. "It's so beautiful. Is this it?"
I could see a man climb up behind her, impatience slapped slip-shod on his face, no true attempt to hide it. "This is Delicate Arch."
"Oh, I know. I mean--is this sunset? When is it?"
I looked down at my watch. 7:35pm. "We've got about five or six more minutes until the sun is really gone. You're welcome to share our vantage point." The pink rocks below were really being blasted now with a violent red light from across the sky, and the arch itself was cutting a thin shadow through the light. I pulled out my phone and took a third picture, a fourth. I put my phone away again. And then, the scene shifted. Everyone was standing just where they had been, the mountains behind were just as they were before. But our little alcove of wind-shorn rocks was suddenly less sharp than it was before, the colors lost where a breath ago they had been brilliant. "Ah!" I said. Then, quieter: "That was it."
Weston turned to me. "What was?"
"Sunset." The scene from our view was losing its luster--the crown of the continent had abandoned us and moved on further West, a thin strip of brilliant sunlight playing across a thousand miles of dying day. Ours was now a dusk beauty of pink-rimmed clouds and foreign desert noises coming awake.
She had her phone up, taking pictures. He touched her shoulder. "I guess, if you say that's it?"
"That's it."
"Well, it's been nice meeting you." He took her elbow and guided her from the unknown arch, the secluded keyhole that pokes through the rock just opposite the most famous uncut stone structure in the world. No one else intruded. Why would they? The view had moved on. Yet we stayed, to look for a time at nothing in particular, to sigh and to wonder just what else we had missed that night.

Every choice leads to but one moment. Every choice is death to infinities more.

4.2a

I cracked a rough, brown egg into a glass bowl this morning. I whisked it hard with plastic forks.
I opened doors up to the sun this morning. I guess I missed going to work.
The apathetic mood I'm forming is a mockery, a sport.
The world is larger than before this morning. If I will finish eating, I should start.

3.26

A hundred feet below me, the wall begins to slope away, a soft red dirt littered with debris from above. Where I am, though, every surface seems to be in a race for heaven, each angle stretching its way upward, no curve out of place. Slickrock. It's not an apt name, to be fair to my fingers. It's sandstone, a ruddy aged iron color that compliments sunsets. Russell is behind me, Weston is behind me. They're negotiating the five-strand cable bolted into the wall, bolted above a four-inch ledge that leans away from the vertical surface above it, leans at an angle I would not describe as friendly. I look down, but not far. My finger has left a spot of blood on a resting boulder, a dot of true red on a pretending surface. I shudder. Russell and Weston are engaged. They don't see me, can't know the sanguine explosion that just ran through me, the premonition of the color of my death on the rocks below. I shut it out. I'm in the crevice now, in the chimney, in the ropes. I pull. They stretch and don't return. I pull the looseness from them. I pull my feet off the ground. They don't snap, but I can see where the cords are rubbing on the rough rock above. These ropes are meant to save my life, the knots in them left by friends I'll never meet who know I need something to pull against. I'm five feet up from the safety of the larger ledge, my hand wedged into the rough grit of the fissure, and I stop. Weston is still calling back to Russell. I don't know how he's doing with the height. Twenty minutes ago, he was having trouble negotiating a ten foot scrabble up a pea-scree slope. Now he's suspended above a fatal fall. I can hear the calm in Russell's voice. He's been up this way before. I'm very glad they can't see me, because I can't move.

I've climbed unceasingly for an hour and a half now, and I've just crossed the ledge, my left arm wrapped twice around the cable even though I know my footing is sure. I've overbalanced in the wind, tipping toward the endless sloping tumble behind me. But this thirty feet of vertical wall is somehow an impossible task. I press my body into the wall, listening to the shifty sound of the grit against my breathing chest. The wind is flying around the mesa top, carrying my friends' voices just beyond hearing. I look up. I'm not sure I can actually climb this. I look down. Shit. Mistake. Blank. Blank. Blank.

I curse when I'm stressed. I curse more on this wall than on the rest of the mesa. I curse more on the mesa than I have for a year.

I pull on the rope. There's a foothold there, a handhold here, and slowly I'm gaining on the rock. I piece my way up ten feet, fifteen feet, and then I'm at the crux, a pinch in the rock that flutes out smoothly, a round hummock topping the left and a flat shelf uncomfortably high on the right. The shape of things have left my torso and arms nothing to cling to but the ropes, and my legs nowhere to go. My arms are getting tired. I can feel the fatigue I get when the kite pulls too hard for too long, and I let go and it floats lazily to the ground. I don't want to float anywhere. I jam my right leg and hip into the crack as deep as they will go, and I try something stupid. Flipping my left leg out and away, I kick back up towards my butt with my heel. I feel the toe clear the ledge, and I silently praise the wasted hours of bouldering videos for saving me in this moment. My beta is clumsy and terrified. What should take thirty seconds puts me in a panic for four minutes. I am shaking by the time I pull my body up the final foot of rope, scraping against the sandstone, afraid to leave the wall lest I overbalance and tip away, here at the cusp. On my hands and knees, water bottle and binoculars clattering against the clifftop debris, I crawl to where I can see Weston and Russell, just stepping off the tiny ledge, just shaping up the chimney for a climb, and I scream. Catharsis rips the air from my lungs in a wild pitch of high-flying echoes. And then—it occurs to me they might think it was my last sound as I fell from the wall, I follow it:

"I made it!"
I had new holes in my pantslegs, sweat seeping through my shirt, and a heart rate entirely too high, but I made it.

3.23

There is a terrible calmness about his face. I say terrible because why should he be so calm when he causes me such agony.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
I eye the road in front of me, wishing to break and run. "No, officer. I was going the speed limit."
"That's not why. Local ordinance requires the use of a seat belt. Can you step out of the vehicle for me?" He stands up from his stooped posture and hooks his thumbs through his belt loops.
I pause.
"Well?" He's impatient. It's not difficult to tell. There's a small crumb from his lunch caught between his belt and his pants. I can feel a bead of sweat slide down my back.
"No, sir."
"I'm sorry?"
I do one of those cartoon swallows, the exaggerated ones from Popeye, where his Adam's Apple flicks up and down and even so I still can't talk. My mouth is dry and my pits are wet. At a dull rasp, I manage a weak "I said 'No, sir;' I can't stand up."
The officer leans back down again. His face is very close to mine. I can smell the lunch that left the crumb. What is that, an everything bagel? He is extremely patient. Too patient. The muscles in his neck stand in sharp relief as he quietly says "Why. Not." It's not a question, but he wants an answer.
I hold up four empty crazy glue tubes. He blinks quietly. I lean forward and my shirt remains stuck to the seat.
"Pants too?"
I nod, meekly.
He breaks eye contact and stares into the field over top of my car, perhaps considering a career change. After a long, wordless moment, he spins and practically staggers back to his patrol car.
My butt is itchy. He drives away.