.

period.
and every sentence that i dream up with starts with and.
and i want to think of something much much better.
and wednesday night was incredibly beautiful.

all skin and hair and tongues. all warmth and sighs. or, what you will.
but, i am just a womanish-man,

"But such as are able to buy all their own charges, they swim in the excess of these vanities, and will be man-like not only from the head to the waist, but to the very foot, and in every condition. Man in body by attire, man in behavior by rude compliment, man in nature by pursuing revenge, man in wearing weapons, man in using weapons, and in brief, so much man in all things, that they are neither men, not women, but just good for nothing...
To you therefore that are fathers, husbands, or sustainers of these new hermaphrodites, belongs to the cure of this impostume. It is you that give fuel to the flames of their wild indiscretion. You add the oil which makes their stinking lamps defile the whole house with filthy smoke, and your purses purchase their deformities at rates, both dear and unreasonable."

But, no, that's not me.
for i possess breasts and a waist that men still glance toward, supposing i'm in the correct attire.
men that never glanced for more than a moment, i've seen tugging my shirt down with the sinking of their eyelids.

i hate, and love it.

And Antonio, with your high bleached socks, i see your lust. And although i should ignore it, or grind it until you no longer contrive ways in which to face me, i cannot.
because i am selfish.

but maybe that's me. for i'm either too forward, too male, and turn passion into repulsion.. or feed on the innocent.

sexuality is disgusting. and fantastic.
but maybe it's just the vanity that we're all so fond of. we love our bodies, share our bodies, long to see other bodies.

(and i'd give it all up, just to get to know the smell of your skin.)
- another sentence imagined and fondled, waiting to crawl onto a digital page -

i never felt so honest.

Hiding Spaces

When I first met Emily’s mother, she was starting over.
The family moved from Alabama to Tallahassee with two brand new state jobs, four young kids, and a dark two-story house. They had moved in about a year prior, and Nellie had yet to unpack her past life. Large pale wicker chairs sat facing each other in the hallway, crates and boxes were stacked to form monuments in corners, and a fabric chair cradled past-due bills and delinquency notices.
I never knew what to think or say around Nellie. She had a way of taking up an entire room with a story. Her large arms waved around, her faded mu-mu flapping with her, and her eyes bulged to punctuate a funny line. Nellie was almost a fixture in the living room. It seemed like everything in the house slowly crept toward her cracked couch. The burgundy phone sat on the large arm, three crates of home-recorded late night television shows were stacked on one seat, and tiger-tail rested permanently on the top of the tall seat, one cream colored leg pointing down.
I’d never known why, but for whatever reason, Nellie’s junk hadn’t made its way through the sliding glass doors and onto the back porch. Maybe she thought the grey screened walls wouldn’t prevent her incomplete collection of stackable dolls, or her piles of Disney themed plates, from being destroyed. Maybe she even thought they weren’t garbage already. The empty space tucked away behind the house was a place where Emily and I didn’t have to tip-toe past her crazy mother, or crawl under tables that held her baggage.

Nellie had stuck a taped up, unused china cabinet just in front of the sliding glass back doors. Only Emily and I could squeeze our small bodies behind it to get onto the back porch. There, we were free.
Emily had snuck into the kitchen and brought back a small yellowed broom. We spent all day sweeping up clouds of dust and dried up leaves out the rickety back door. Every day that my mother dropped me off at their dirt lawn, I would bring something to our porch; a tiny wooden alligator in my pocket, a deflated beach ball in my backpack, or a small fuchsia mirror with jewels imbedded on the back. I never felt such ownership toward a place before.
My house was so small that I couldn’t even call my room my own. Tip-toeing down the hallway would only lead me into a room full of people. Once I tried hiding in the formal living room, just to see if anyone would notice, but the open doorways left nothing a secret.
Nellie kept to herself inside the dark house, peeling price tags off of wrapped movies with chipped crimson nails. Sometimes Emily and I would lie out on the porch on our backs, watching gusts of wind slowly turn the dusty overhead fan, and make up stories. We pretended we were gypsy children on the run, or detectives outsmarting bad guys. My favorite times out there were when it stormed. The back door of the porch would rattle and slam and the sporadic wind curled around my thick hair. It almost felt like the swirls of wind would hug me by my waist and fly me right out of there.
Everything changed when Nellie lost her job at the school. My mother was making dinner when I asked her what happened. Without turning as she reached for a spice jar she said “it was just too stressful.” I was still too young to understand.
The next time I went over to Emily’s house, the bulky tanned armoire had been moved out to the porch, leaving a clean rectangular stamp where it once sat. There was a gaping hole, revealing our secret hideout. Nellie told us that enough was enough, it was time to unpack. When I went over, Emily and I spent hours moving boxes and crates. Nellie would sit on the faded wicker chair, her fatty lap filling every spot on the seat, and point with a painted nail to where she wanted a plastic crate moved to.
One by one, we moved piles of garbage from the house to the porch. Old mirrors and tall doll houses blocked out the screened walls, broken chairs cluttered the floors. Emily and I would still squeeze out there, crawling over boxes to find a clear spot to sit in, but the junk blocked out the pulsing wind and the blinding light.
Emily’s family moved from that house after a few years. They moved every year until Emily graduated. Always packing and unpacking.
Nellie must have imagined that what was missing from her life was tucked away somewhere. Maybe under an economy size pack of toilet paper, maybe in the back of a cabinet overflowing with papers. If she could just find it then everything would be fixed; no more declarations of bankruptcy, no bills or fits of anger. Emily and I shared a place once, where I felt like I could help her escape the demons of genetics. She always told me that Nellie used to be beautiful; she even tucked away her parent’s wedding photo.
Emily traced the sharp line of her mother’s nose, her face 100 pounds lighter, and repeated “she used to be beautiful.”

bacon

there's moments in which there's too much going on to allow my brain to relax enough to sleep.
it's as if there's a limit to madness. sometimes i feel like my crazy is always bogo. i wonder if i'm happy with where i am right now, if i'm getting enough out of all this shit.

when i listen to a certain lit major talk, i decide that my parents are right, that grabowski's just aren't college material. that education breeds bullshit. i have a love-hate relationship with pretension. or not. i'm probably just full of shit.
at the same time, i love that bullshit. i just hope i'll never be a chronic intellectual masturbator.

and, fuck, i hate being female about 90% of the time. part of me wants to abandon gender and societal norms, or maybe just ignore them, and part of me wants a fucking normal, bullshit, magazine-reading life. i'm aware of the inaneness of it all, but jesus it's still magnetic sometimes.

how typical of me.

and i can't help but wonder if i'm missing out on something by being tied down. but i've always fucking felt like i've been missing out on something. when i've been single, i told myself i wanted an intimate friend. there's always something that i push all of my resentments toward. if this were different, life would be perfect. it's bullshit. i don't know what i want anymore, but i cannot lie and say i'm not just a little bored.

lie.

i doubt i'll ever be satisfied. there's this image in my head of the perfect situation.. only problem is that it changes every fucking month.

now, similarly to the entirety of my life, i'm under the illusion that if i was a skinny bitch, i'd be the best and most happy bitch in the world. same bullshit i've been telling myself since 6th fucking grade.

what the fuck.

and i haven't had such a documented moment of self-importance in a while. probably since i was an angsty high schooler. as if anything has changed. i love pouting, no joke.

feels good though. i'll never be satisfied.
just try and satiate me, bitches. i love that word.

(')

"He had already become accustomed to the dangerous experiment of resisting his own inward convictions; and this new impulse to ambition, combined with the strong temptation of variety in love, met the ardent young man weakened in moral principle, and unfettered by laws of the land. The change wrought upon him was soon noticed by Clotel."

...

and there's a racist girl in my class. she says
"you're telling me that no one in this class has seen a black person look like this?"
see FIG 179.

...

and in 8th grade, when i was misplaced, that girl said to me,
"i'm popular even though i'm fat. at first, i wasn't cool, but now i'm the funny girl. You gotta find something"

...

and my head tells me
"you can't be in two places at once, girl."

Walkin' on Eggshells

I’ve been silent the majority of my life. It started at a young age. Every now and then I’d test the waters and let my thoughts spill out. Usually they were greeted with a shrug of my father’s heavy shoulders. Mostly though, he would pause, interrupted, his mouth parted like a cracked walnut, then his head would snap back to the exact point it was in, resuming conversation. Who has the time to listen to the fanciful whims of some girl?
We used to visit a Chinese take-out restaurant every Friday. A small copper bell rang once every time we walked in to be greeted by smells of grease, bleached linoleum, and old glue. The owner’s granddaughter was always there, so short you couldn’t see her behind the counter. As we waited for our food, I would go behind the sticky counter and draw caterpillars with the small dark girl. I think what I liked best about her was that she didn’t speak English. That way, it was impossible for me to embarrass myself.
Thinking back, I realize that my brother never seemed like he was walking on eggshells, avoiding being sighed at by our father, like I always was. I think the reason my fascinations were overlooked was my gender. One Christmas I asked for a soccer ball. I liked the way they seemed to glide over the grass, the noise the grass made when the ball skimmed over it, how when an expert kicked one, it seemed to float. I was disappointed Christmas morning, when no packages were awkwardly rounded. Instead, my parents got me a paint set, because I so enjoyed drawing with the Chinese girl.
What my father didn’t understand was that I wasn’t as interested in drawing, as I was in a playmate that wouldn’t judge me. If she had happened to be into arm wrestling, I would have accepted gladly. She just happened to enjoy doodling in that dank room, waiting for her grandparents to take her home. My father explained to me how to clean the coarse brushes while my small fingers ran over the tiny plastic tubes of paint, how to set out newspaper so that the paint wouldn’t leak, what rooms in the house were forbidden to paint in. All I really wanted to know was how to make smooth soccer balls float through the air, what side of my foot to kick with.
Last Christmas, I overheard my father and brother reminiscing about the first project they built together. Paul, my brother, was about nine or ten years old when my father showed him how to use his heavy measuring tape. I can imagine them in his dusty warehouse, Paul being taught how to properly cut a two by four, and the best way to stain cherry wood. They joked about how my father had forced him to work with him, and how funny it was that now Paul is installing cabinetry with him.
The only time I got to experience building something with my father was in third grade. I had an assignment where I had to build a replica of a typical dwelling for an Indian tribe. My father took me out into the backyard to clip off palm fronds to make up the roof of my miniature home. His wide hands seemed so strong, and he easily clipped off large forked branches. We assembled the whole thing at his warehouse. By then I had memorized his patterns. As soon as we got inside, I was to unlatch the bay door and yank on the large chains to make the door curl into itself. While I did that, he would lean over the band saw and draw out plans with a rectangular pencil.
After following my father’s hands while they helped me cut, glued and screwed wood, we had my finished project. On the drive home from the warehouse, I held the home in my lap, tracing my finger over the sanded holes for doors and windows. Only now can I realize how heartbroken I am that this was the only time my father shared a building experience with me. There’s really nothing so calming as working silently next to his massive body. He never took his round eyes from his work, but he always explained everything he did. For some reason it never seemed like he was actually talking to me.
.

Walkin