Once Removed

There is a cliche - you can never go home; which I think means you can never return to that complete utter innocence of home and childhood folded together. Now physically removed from home, having set myself facing another direction I wonder which thing about home is more resonant with me. Was home my mom and dad's house? Was it my ex-boyfriend? My old job? Sunny afternoons on the porch with beer and Jason? I have long felt that the uncomfortable and feeble severing of my friendship with Jason was the last snip of the apron string. Now home is a place again, just a city, but one that no longer has an emotional pull. My friends have scattered and my loves have all died away.
Why is puppy love and friendship so bound up in comfort? I think of the anger and fear that welled up inside of me between leaving Rich and Jason and I severing contact, and I realize that was the pivotal moment of growth. I was actually becoming - nothing Deleuzian here, more Oprah - (an adult). I was responsible for me and was painfully certain I wouldn't return to the bosom of home, where I knew as well as anyone, there was no one waiting. And even if there was, it would be bookended with misery, not a fete for the returning heroine.
There's that song - Prodigal Daughter - "look here comes the prodigal son, fetch him a tall drink of water, but there's none in the cup, cause he drank it all up, left for the prodigal daughter". I think both my sister and I have ejected ourselves - we know there is nothing waiting for us when we return, so we keep going. She astounds me with her steam, her perseverance. I feel on the other hand that mine has only picked up since that fateful winter. Now I have that perseverance, I have abandoned fear, but also feel a bit of an urge to taunt fate. Isn't it time to go again? If you can never go home, why turn a temporary sojourn into one?
What puzzles me now is the emotional, physical feeling of home. A peace that envelopes a person when in the presence of another. Is this a deja vu or just pattern behavior? You are like my sister, so I feel 'home' when I sit beside you. But at my age, how many personalities must feel familiar now? Are they still only ones reminiscent of mom and dad? I'm certain when I sat a few weeks ago on C's back patio drinking beer in the evening sun and talking nonsense with his landlord that it didn't feel like home because he or his friends bare any resemblance to my family. Instead it is frame. I have somewhere remembered an experience that was pleasurable - was it my age? my company? the air that night? - that has been encoded as 'perfection'. Perfection = peace = 'home'. So you can 'go home again', when you find those isolated moments of perfection: the perfect light, air, conversation.
My sense is that I could reexperience this emotion over and over, if everyone in the picture was unknowingly complicit. I remember very clearly what was pleasurable as a child: sitting on the back balcony on late summer nights with my parents. I had been allowed to stay up late, it was 11 o'clock. The patio lanterns are lit and I'm playing with some toys on the green plastic carpet and my parents are drinking beer. The air is warm and mosquitoes buzz around and I feel complete. This is conditioning: now whenever I sit at dusk or in darkness on a deck and drink a beer in the warm summer air I feel the same pleasure. An inner satisfaction that is essential: to relive the sensation of staying up late for the first time again and again. The sensation of seeing the part of the world that had so long been off limits. This is going home.

The object that waits.

Shouldering. The mutual moment of supporting another with a balance of pressure. The impossible structure that has moved away from the scaffolding, the armature and the framework and assembled itself in the middle with balletic grace. This composite moment is magical, delicate, simple.

Last night I dreamt that you took me out to the middle of an endless, flat field and held me, enveloped me in your arms and your body, covering me in a woolen coat. The sky was dark and moody and I complained that we were in the open, that people could see us out here, but you kissed me and told me that the crowd couldn't see. They were moving the other direction.

It was true. When I looked their way, they were dissipating and I would soon be alone out here with you in a cold and vast flat tundra seated on the ground. I woke up. I couldn't tell if there was dread or complacency in my heart when I discovered that the one that was going hold me was also the one who could hurt me; that far from any enclosure there is a precarious feeling of freedom and fear.

We are here in the middle now. We've toed the marker and are waiting for the cue. But the cue never comes, and the action remains poised. You remain with your hand on my face - unclear whether you will slap or caress my cheek. The choreography goes unwitnessed without a dance, the stage directions are frozen and poise is intention. This assemblage of parts could spring to life or fall to pieces; spraying the air or the ground with its life. But there is none, just a taxidermied gesture that waits and balances, as the crowd backs away and the moment persists.
Peek over your shoulder: it is still there.

Perfect Lies

The story-shaped self - at least this decade's or this generation's version of authenticity, has required us to define ourselves by the words we use to frame our lives. The words we use over dinner, over beers, on a date, in school, on our blogs. We want to tell our lives, and have it unfold as we've seen lives unfold on television. My mind plays a few tricks as I imagine - prior to TV and movies, how did people conceive of their lives unfolding? Stories were anecdotal and meant to teach lessons, or just so morals, and not intended so much, as they were passed down, to illustrate a perfect start and finish. It was under these morals we fashioned selves that met socialized, religiously sanctioned lives, authentic or not - they were the lives lived. This isn't to say that books and their fiction didn't have an effect on one's determination of their being - influence their 'authenticity' somewhat, but a book unfolds slowly, where as the passive act of watching feeds you. You are taught by what entertains you, especially as communication methods become more savvy and fold in the psychology of Gestalt, and what we passively watch trains us.

Last week I heard film-maker Guy Maddin talk about his work. He told long, beautifully funny stories about being a child and falling in love with sights and sounds of film and radio. He spoke of the media as wrapping him, folding him in, covering him like a blanket. He eroticized his influences, the women of these films out his grasp but tantalizing and desirous, and out of this desire, an adult Maddin emerges - his adult self shaped by these moving memories - at once time based, and then contained. The narrative framework contains, the movie loop contains, and experience contained - a time capsule of desire that can be revisited and refelt again and again within hour allotments, re-experienced and relieved in every film Maddin makes for himself in order to satisfy this desire.
Maddin's stories sped onward - they were rapid and peppery - and filled with, lies. I think they were lies - the kind that leaves the audience whispering afterward - "was that part about the chimp, true??" But they were true lies - to coin a movie - because they were his. His embellishments and his narrative. These were the lies that Maddin shaped his self with, and his art, and because they were his - his creation - they were true. Who cares if the chimp really pistol whipped him (literally), the carnival ride we take hearing it, is worth the same suspension of disbelief. (You likely won't die on the rollercoaster, but you feel like you might be in danger). Thrills are great lies, but when you experience them, they are still true. The thrill is perhaps the perfect definition of the true-lie.
Is it the millenial moment to have to lie to tell the truth? Is this result of the society of the spectacle, that in our speech and in our framing out authentic selves that we lie, but these lies become and are more true than what other plain words might say? The truth of a story is useless, it is illegitimacy which has value. These little lies acting as manifest destiny, that with their retooling and retelling the narrator will get closer to the truth of themselves each time, until their story has completed the full circle. At full circle it might be bare, stripped, naked, without disguise. It may be uncomfortable or may be charming. But the truth must now be very charismatic to compete with the great lies we have been telling all along. These charismatic truths have begun to shape shift and appear like spectacle, confusing and maybe even conspiratorial.

Never kiss a fool and never be fooled by a kiss.

With every lover I reach a stand off where I decide - its me or him, and I delete their numbers, lose their gifts, throw away their letters. I erase them from my mind. Always the girl with a dozen ex-lovers, half who will never speak to me because I threw such caustic words their way.

We've gone in strange semi-circles never crossing paths, to seeing each other everywhere, or if not one another, some reminder of. I can't resist seeing in that some intention by the cosmos that our world's collide - and right now, it feels as though our bumpers grind uncomfortably against one another's. I want you out. I don't want you where I go, which is why, I drunkenly say: asshole. You fucking asshole. Because I don't want to find you in my house, where it suddenly seems that you've stepped, and at the same time, I can't tell why I'm so adament.

It is for one, that I want so much for us to be friends. I want to will you to know me for more than my body, my sex, my silence. I want you to hear me and watch me the way friends see one another. This is my greatest, aching desire that I carry from man to man, for one to love me like a brother would. I want all of our desire to be poured into our conversations, or chance similaritities, our passions. I want our minds to be all that is tantilized, and our hands to only care for the other. I'm jealous that I'm not that girl, because then we'd actually know one another - instead I am the skirt you chase. And chase for years on end. And I put up such a weak fight, as the first flutter of your hand melts my resolve and I must admit.

The first few encounters, I was on autopilot. I wanted something, I wanted you, but kept a thin sheet between us as protection, allowing for total detachment within a matter of hours. The next time I saw you I was able to slip easily into amusing banter, a stand-up act where I entertained you and your friends. I was able to play me, and I think, make myself likeable. Desireable again. Because it seemed, I think to you, that I didn't care. This one last time, this one last time I insisted that I wanted you and boldly placed myself in your way, steadying myself to allow my chest to be unzipped, my soul to pour out, and something to be given away that I couldn't recover. I don't know if you even noticed - as we rolled to face each other and our lips met, hungrier than ever before - I thought I felt our hearts leap in a kind of union that seemed out of place here. Here which is nowhere. Unlocatable. Dislocated. Empty.

I have noticabley become detached from your friends, who thought I was so likable before, they must wonder (or do they know?) why I don't love you like they do. They must think I used you cruelly. But in my ears her sing-song voice says your name "isn't it sexy?" and asks me who my lovers are. I think sometimes she was hunting me there and then for you, when she brought us glasses of gin, grinning. I think she was trying to make me love you, and I wanted to say: I do. You don't understand, I do.

Useless Desire

This hand that covers the distance between my neck and my waist, down my spine, gently, and around my waist. A more gentle touch than this moment deserves, since we are not in love, and have no intention of being so.
My posture twitches between tension and relaxation. This hand that covers my body, reaching my belly, my breast, my insides as it builds the momentum. A conductor of my nerves. My desire an orchestra that is poised for crescendo.

I'm in a car, driving (winding) with him. The land rolls out before us and sky is clear and clean. This is home, I know it. My lips are sealed.

This hand that travels over my skin, it pulls me toward him and I keep my soul out of it. This is about my body only. I will feed myself this once, a guilty pleasure wrapped in guilty pleasure, without ever soiling my hands. This hand that lifts me like a feather to his groin, that searches through the folds of my body, that positions my neck, my back, my legs around him. This hand that seems to hover just inches away from my skin, we never touch, just vibrate like wings. This is a dance and we are performing. Or maybe only rehearse.

In dusty towns there are ice cream stands and junk shops. We don't say much, he and I. We don't know each other, after all these years, we are merely acquaintances that want. We keep the doors shut. Heavy and ornate they are twice my size, guarding against some dark secret that would explain the inexplicable hunger. He cannot want me, he wants everyone.

Spinning in place, we move from ledge to ledge. Gingerly than forcefully, there is a music in my ears that is summer camp, swampy days, sneaking away. All this in a vacuum. We break and reform, me in your lap, sliding down your legs, against the table, your hands firm and larger than life. And as I turn to face you my lips flutter at your ears and eyelids, forehead and neck; your smell burns my nostrils and I miss your lips, place one finger at the tip. I cannot close that arc, I cannot make us lovers.

Before Boys

At a party in 1984 the kids are watching Ghostbusters. I think that’s right. The little birthday girl isn’t too happy about it. She’s invited all these girls to her house, but as usual for 4th graders, there are sides being taken, alliances being formed. Politics at its youngest. They have chosen sides against her (or so she interprets) and its probably because she was caught crying. Well, she didn’t control her public display of emotion. A tactic that she had seen work for other girls, but had worked less often for her.

There is a game of memory where Mom brings out a tray of objects covered in a cloth napkin. Napkin is removed; girls memorize what they see. Thirty seconds pass; tray is removed; girls write down what they remember.
The birthday girl loses.
She loses the next game, and the next; and is then quite fixated on the fact that there must be a conspiracy. How can she not win at her own party? She’s had too much candy, she’s tired and spoiled by the attention and blubbers to one side.

All the parties came to this sooner or later. Blubbering. The bowling party, the ice cream parlor party, the Ghostbusters party. Beyond these three, I have no recollection of any other parties, so I must have been cut off
But regardless, at an early age I couldn’t feel much compassion between us girls. I could feel a lot of competition. I was at once alienated and angry, and at another desperate to make more friends, collect them like porcelain dolls and hope that one day someone would ‘want’ to be my friend, not just have accidently acquired me. I wanted to be desirable. And a winner.

A Dowry

What framed my life as a girl was the lingering impression that my mother was very unhappy. She dropped a lot of hints, so I didn't need much help formulating this theory. Around 9-14 years old I heard a lot about how she should never have married my father, or should have left him years ago (how can she put up with all this traveling? she'd ask); stories of longing about how she'd been a smart girl (skipped a grade even) and was now doing what? Raising two ungrateful daughters. And I was an accident. She'd temper these intimacies, that I'd have been more than happy not to share, with "but I'm so glad I have you, what would I do without you?" which, in light of the older sister's antics, gave me the oppressive feeling that it was now, all down to me. I would be held responsible for saving my mother.
As I grew into my teens she'd often discourage me from boys, I didn't need 'em she'd tell me, I should go to school and get a good job; which, thinking back was excellent advice. She warned me about depending on a husband, told me to take care of myself. Talked about how miserable it is be given an allowance and have no assets of your own. I should've focused on this self-improvement more, but like all young adults I focused on the thing I was warned to stay away from. I turned all my attention towards boys. I became a serial monogamist, a serious offence when your thirties roll around and you've actually lived with 3 different men, been married and divorced once, and in your heart still see yourself as a commitment phobe.

I moved away from my family as a strategy for avoiding my Mom's neediness. It's a complicated kind of neediness that I have given up on describing, because I ultimately come out looking insensitive. Maybe I am, I consider, when other folks tell me that family is very important to them, and they could never leave where they grew up and leave that very family behind. I made some tracks. I wanted the dust cloud to cover up what had turned into a massive failure. My siblings on the westcoast, rarely paying a visit, and me in the home town, expected for dinner only on special holidays. Mom only content communicating with me by phone and email as though I lived on another continent, rather than in another neighbourhood.
But the day I moved away for school was the day Mom wanted grandkids. The day I moved away was the day she thought I should be married and living in the suburbs. She started clipping eligible bachelors from the local paper and sending them to me in the mail. She'd keep an eye on the boys I'd grown up with and give me the running update should I maybe reconsider one of them. Then she'd pull back, angry, and threaten me with: "Well who would want you anyway, no man's going to want to take on your debt". And later, "I think that's why he broke up with you, he didn't want to be responsible for your student loans."
Mom had trotted out the latter statement as an explanation for a break-up I had initiated. Not content, she used it again as an explanation for a painfully failed affair with a best-friend. An affair, which she had hoped, was going to bring me back home.