strange musings of a distracted spunk

The 5 AM shift usually begins with a twitch.

It’s not that you willingly wake up then. It’s just that something happens; your subconscious fades into your conscious. Restful becomes restless. A cat waits outside the door to play, her light eyes barely visible in the dark.

We once drove through the night from New Jersey to Toronto. We were the night shift then, a lone car on a road full of trucks and night shift drivers. We took turns sleeping, waking only for a rest stop and fitfulness. Signs blurred; Harrisburg. Binghamton. Rochester. We made conversation with the rest stop workers, as they made coffee and breakfast for the early-bird drivers.

Have you ever noticed how there’s nothing on during the night shift? You look and search in vain for the tv show or movie that might put you to sleep and instead only find paid programming and porn. You finish the book you had been reading, and feel disappointed that there’s not more.

We stopped when we reached early light, at Niagara Falls. We parked illegally in a hotel lot that had signs proclaiming it was not to be used for Niagara Falls. We jumped fences, meandered, looked for signs to lead the way. When the sun finally appeared, the sky was clear and we were drenched from the mist.

So you lay there. You lay and wait and in those hours, you think of all those things you try not to think about during the day. You think about how you go in circles. You think about how things have changed so drastically in only a month. You think of what it would be like to sleep in someone else’s arms; would you still wake up at 5 AM then?

We climbed back over the fence, just before we got yelled at to move our car. We drove again, the sun rising higher into the sky. It was a new day, and we were ready to meet it, to greet it, to make it ours.

The 5 AM shift is one that blurs consciousness and subconsciousness. It’s one that makes the computer desk look like a polar bear, and you suspicious of a loved one. It’s where questions and fears spill out, dancing over the tangled sheets and blankets until you only want to hide.

Until with another twitch, the 5 AM shift is over.

Maybe it was the balding black guy with yellow teeth screaming in my ear as I walked past, that Jesus would be coming back and what are you doing to repent?

Maybe it was the rush of fashion and comfort, with hello nipples everywhere.

Or maybe, it was just the steamy, arid breath of Manhattan as it forced its way back into my lungs, like a long-lost lover who needs to drink every breath in again.

I walk slower this time, taking in the stained glass art in the walls of the tunnels beneath Times Square. I watch men in suits and briefcases and boys in polos and jeans, flipped and shaded. I listen to the subway announcement, the loud ding of “The doors are now closing” more quixotically poetic than I thought those words ever could be. People rushing to work, to lunch dates, to meetings; this is life in the fast lane again. I once lived like this too.

The RW line has been updated. This is new, I think, as I watch a commercial on the train. I remember the last time I took it was with GDB, on one of our last dates before we left New York. Pangs of nostalgia hit me, for the love we didn’t know we had then, and the love we soon will watch fade away. People still hurry about with ipods clashing discordantly, songs in their ears to ignore the music of New York. The streets are still far too crowded, with pedestrians, SUVs, and the standard yellow taxi. But there’s a rhythm here that congas its way back into my veins.

I wonder, how did I ignore you for so long? And more importantly, how did I ever leave you?

Will I forget your tune, when I too become one of the masses, rushing to work, to class, to the gym? Will I forget to breathe your noxious and intoxicating air in, so consumed with my self-worth and reality? Or will this time spent away remind me to love the drop of water from scaffolding above, unexpectedly plinking the street?

Hello New York. I’m home.

For the last few months, I’ve been walking a precarious tightrope. The thing about tightropes is you know there’s a chance you’re going to fall and break something. But you do it anyway. I walked it because love was on the other side. But love can only take you so far. You can mean it, you can want it, you can live and breathe it; but sometimes, it’s just not enough.

Today, not enough came through. So I took my first step off that tightrope. The ladder may shake and quiver under me, but with each step, I’ll come closer to solid ground. It was nothing to do with him, and everything to do with me. Or perhaps it had everything to do with him and nothing to do with me. Quite simply, I want more.

I want love, the kind where you breathe each other’s name every time you exhale. The kind where hearing the other person’s laugh sends shivers up your spine, like it did the first time, and like it will each and every last time. The kind where life may come and go, but your hand is still there for the taking, no matter what happens.

I want the kind of love where it’s not about who loves who more, but how can you love me any more than you already do? I want the kind of love where his hurt becomes my hurt and my hurt becomes his. I want his heart to become my heart and my heart to become his. I want to experience every elation, every sadness, every quixotic moment in bliss because it is what life is made of.

I want to know that I’m the first thing he wants when he wakes up, and the last thing he wants when he goes to bed. I want to know that when he looks at me, he doesn’t see if, he sees when. I want to know that when I finally let him in and am ready for the next step, he will already be waiting for me on the last. I want recklessness, impulsiveness, silliness, because I am worth all of it and more. I want him to buy that damn plane ticket. I want him to want the world for me and the milky way too.

I want him to distract me with laughter when my family hurts me. I want him to brush aside his own work when I need to be handled with care. I want him to yell at me and snap me out of my brain, reminding me to live in this life, here, with him. I want to argue with him, passionately, exquisitely, until we’re out of breath and logic is rendered useless. I want sex, hours of sex and love mingled together, tracing lines on each other’s bodies, finding each freckle and errant hair and the scar from when I fell off a seesaw when I was four.

I want love. The good and the bad, the pain and the joy, the explosion that will occur when I find the one who is meant for me, who will love me with as many atoms as I love him. I apologize in advance if we send the universe out of orbit, but my love is too much for only me.

I want love. I’ve had it before. I’ve seen what it can do and how it makes me feel. I can say it now. Love. Love. I’m ready for you.

I could write about the tan line on my left wrist, of the shadow of my silver and turquoise watch now imprinted on my skin.

I could write about the mosquito bites tracing a trail along the side of my right leg, verbose in its catalog of places I’ve traveled.

I could talk about the elephant’s ear flicking off my left shoe and causing me to jump in my seat, and the boy who tore lemongrass from the ground for me to smell.

Or I could write about wading into the Andaman sea, the water and sand working its way over me, leaving sand and water on my shirt, shorts, everywhere.

I will leave tomorrow, with my right leg and left thumb scraping wounds of a motorbike accident in which I almost got run over by four cars. I will say goodbye to monkeys walking on phone wires and girls in burquas sitting sidesaddle and texting. Somehow, Thailand is a place where technology and tradition meet somewhat incongruously. Seven tier waterfalls with swimming pools so clear, you can see the fish swimming near the surface. Incidentally, these same fish are more than happy to nip at you once you jump in. Green rivers humming with mosquitoes, trees leafy, mindful of the sun, the kind of sun that you go out for ten minutes and come back with a fierce burn. Tuk-tuks chugging along the crowded streets of Bangkok, clamoring for a passenger, lights flashing as though there should be a whistling tune sung along. Have I ever seen such a place?

This is Asia. Or Southeast Asia as Thailand would be quick to correct. Where whitening cream can be found in every 7-11 on every corner. Where ladyboys are quick to interpret for me when a cashier cannot understand my simple request. Where cabs are neon, signs are neon, and the sky is choked and polluted, a clogged artery left untouched. Yet the sunsets here are dazzling, simply because of all the gases in the air. This is where you cannot enter a building without being pushed or harangued or crowded. There’s no concept of personal space here, and indeed, my bubble has been violated many times over. This is where my white white skin and my red hair make me the unintended subject of many stares. When did I become what other people want to be?

I don’t know yet that I will come back. The beaches of Thailand, so much of it altered from the 2004 tsunami seems pristine, as though this is how the world was one thousand years ago, and this is how it will be for a thousand more. The silence on an island, so unlike the deafening crush of this overwhelming city calls my attention, of infinity pools and islands far out at sea. Mangrove trees and houseboats, wild animals everywhere. Who knew they had cows in Thailand?

I never thought I could feel so overwhelmed in a city; I’m from New York damnit! But this city, this area is a whole world in and of itself. The jungle, the bridge over the river Kwai, the elephants and tigers we pet and sat with, the dead gecko lizard in the floor of our hotel room last night; this is not New York. The super malls and the plush movie theater seats with recliners and blankets and pillows, the sexpats and their Thai prostitutes, the glass and the steel, the gold and the Buddhas, and my god, the stray cats and dogs everywhere! I’ve never seen a place where everything fits so perfectly, and clashes so discordantly. I feel as though every time I walk down the street, I am history and future at once, present gone out the window.

This is Thailand. And this is my farewell.

His hands traced circles on my skin, green eyes on mine. First he lined my palms. Then he traced my wrists, marking my skin with his invisible words. His hands nimbly moved up my arms, slowly, carefully, climbing up to my neck where they kneaded and pressed. I’ve never been good at eye contact. But this time, something forced me to match the intensity of his gaze, to focus my eyes on his while his fingers lingered.

His hands were warm on my skin, Wesley offering “As you wish” in the background while I watched his eyes. I couldn’t see my reflection there, in the dim light of a television, but I wondered what he saw. Did he see the unexpected pleasure as he touched me? Did he see the jagged wall, spiked from my most recent entanglements with the past? Or did he simply see iris and pupil, gazing at his own?

What is he doing? I wondered. Earlier, he had stretched out, the mock-arm-around-the-shoulders move, before pulling back in and laughing. I had shaken my head at him, grinning all the while. He had tickled me, till we were both breathless and flushed of face, traces of laughter gurgling out. We sat on the futon in his living room, facing each other, as his hands grazed my skin, declaring a tickle truce.

I marked my own words into his skin, asking how I could feel so fundamentally me with someone I had only met twelve hours before. I asked do you like me? before deciding I like you. Not the kind of like that would collapse me into bed with a friend, lazy kisses and fumbled fingers. Not the kind of like that would result in denied chemistry and repeated frustrations. This was me, implicitly, wholeheartedly, convincingly in like. Had I ever experienced this before?

My fingers skimmed over his skin, almost as white as my own, but more carved and sculpted, as I kneaded, pressed, pulled. I wrote the stories of everything and nothing at once, of how I was so utterly in the moment, of how there was no aha moment, he’s going to kiss me realization. I wrote how spontaneity can get lost in the face of basic lust. I told him it didn’t matter if he didn’t kiss me; it was enough to meet someone I felt so utterly comfortable with. I etched lines of my contentment, too cautious to look into his eyes anymore because I was afraid of what I would see. I scribbled and doodled the longitude and latitude of my heart, giving directions the only way I knew how.

He didn’t need them. Without warning his hands wrapped my face, his eyes met mine, and his lips crushed mine; wrenchingly beautiful, soul shattering, and utterly different from anything I had experienced before. I didn’t know then like would become love. I didn’t know then the roads we’d take, full of shortcuts that led to the same place. I didn’t know then how much I’d want him every time I saw him, spoke to him, thought of him, in every possible way and even some impossible. I didn’t know.

Jazz music wafted into the air, slow notes languishing upon one another, dancing on elevation of keys. For the second time in two days, and the second time in the year I’ve been here, I entertained. We sat on my floor, trading stories of doctor horror stories, pending engagement (theirs, not mine) and just enjoying each other’s company, something that hadn’t been done in a long time. For the first time in what feels like years, my ribcage hurt from all the side splitting laughter where there would be that moment of silent comprehension and then as the joke became clear, we would crack up.

The music provided a background to what will definitely be one of my favorite nights in a long time. Why is it that it’s only when one is leaving that the earth conspires to make everything seem beautiful and lovely, after putting one through so much emotional trauma? My apartment glistens with its quirks and charms, and I think of how much I’ll miss the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window, lighting up the bath and making my baths in a clawfoot bathtub ones that I sorely needed. The kitchen with the oven I still have not bothered trying to learn how to use because it’s from the 1940s is a testament to all things old fashioned that I love. Even the construction zone outside my window, where I used to wake up naked and find construction workers leering at me in through the window while I stood in front of my mirror trying to decide what to wear before I noticed them will be missed.

I am ready to say goodbye, to this, to so many things, but I’m not. I want another day. I want a few more days. I want more days of this, of sitting on the floor and laughing, eating grapes, apples, cheesecake, whatever we can find that will help empty out as much as we can before it all gets turned over to McGee. I want more days of sunshine, of meandering down streets with McGee and Skylar Blue and Not Mary and all the other wonderful people I’ve met out here in the past nine months; I got so lucky in being able to meet such amazing people. I want less days of running packages to UPS to be shipped back east, thousands of dollars worth of clothes in a single box. I want more days of actually being able to walk around my room, no longer cluttered by all the furniture that it once held, hiding the narrative that would unravel my story.

It feels empty somehow, and almost too big now with all this space. There are moments when I lay catatonic, unable to do anything because I am so exhausted from the poor sleeping, from the overactive dreams, from the packing, from the lifting, from the moving, from the $400 bill I’m being charged to cancel my cable service, from the medical bills I just received for no reason, for all the money that moving requires, not to think about traveling.

I haven’t even wrapped my mind around the fact that tomorrow’s my last night here, in this apartment, in Berkeley. That Friday morning will see me get on the fourth plane ride in a month, having taken a brief respite this past weekend to stay in one area. That come Friday, my address with the quirky “__24 and a half” will no longer be mine. I’ll be back to a perfect Court, the residence of my parents, where my bills and mail will pile up for a month while the East Coast not-so-eagerly awaits my return.

There won’t be a bar outside my window. There won’t be jazz music wafting into my room, or even marching band music, which was the soundtrack for a conversation I had with GDB several weeks ago over webcam. It’s hard to have a serious conversation when the band outside sounds like it’s about to break into a rousing rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever, made more so by the irony of it being at one of the best places to get beer in town. There won’t even be an odd neon blue phone on my wall anymore - not that it actually works, but I always imagine that one day, it will just start ringing, and on the other end will be the fairy tale life one always imagines one is due.

Why is it that life always pushes us into a crossroads before we’re actually ready for one? It’s so hard to pretend to be strong all the time. Part of the reason I look forward to all this traveling is because there’s no time to think; there’s only time to do.

I will miss this place. I will miss the memories I’ve made here, the laughter I’ve had, the friends I’ve hugged and said hello and goodbye, the hills I walked and the streets I tripped over, the laundromat with the homeless people stripping down in front of me, the Tibetan protesters and the tree huggers, the radical Berkeleyan neighborhood, the walks down as the sun sets upon the Golden Gate Bridge, far off into the distance and the bay gleaming below, the crappy drivers and the awful BART, the bubble baths, the huge library, the high schoolers hanging out on every corner when school lets out, the absurdly long lines in Walgreens at all times of day, the amazing French bistro a few blocks down, the random Victorians only a few blocks away, all the little nooks and crannies that you find on Shattuck Avenue, and more. I will miss Berkeley.

But most of all? I’ll miss those quiet nights, with or without laughter, when I could write, jazz music lilting the air around me, instantaneous in its relaxing effects, as though all it took to soothe the uneasy world was a calming balm of saxophones and guitars.

The trouble with being in the middle of a shitstorm in May is usually, no one wants to come close.

When the sun’s shining, flowers are sprouting, and people are walking with smiles and friendly glances, it’s best to stay away from the girl who has the dark cloud of depression hanging over her head.

Once again, the tears won’t come. I might spring a leak here and there, with a droplet that wouldn’t so much as nourish a single leaf, let alone an entire forest of emotion. What I need is a fucking river. I need it to pour out of me and just take me with it, instead of putting on a good face, instead of trying so hard to cling to a semblance of sanity of “I am strong, and I can do this.” I know I’m strong. I know I can do this. But I’m tired of hanging. I’m tired of waiting for the adrenaline to surge and for the energy to come to pull myself back to the brink of normalcy, or as normal as I’ll ever do.

I feel a bit as though I am the lone tree in a desert, ravaged by sand and occasionally leaned upon by a weary traveler looking for their oasis. I am a symbol of all things lasting and living in a place where so much seems dull and insipid. There’s just yellow everywhere, monochromatic in its shades, beautiful when it springs up on you, tiresome when that’s all there is.

So I seek out new colors. I seek out new lands. Where I know that my exhaustion from sightseeing will allow me to crash and burn as I no longer sleep well otherwise. It’s inevitable that I’ll return to the states a weary mess. You can run, but you can’t hide, I believe is the saying. With every little inch of growth, another part gets cut off. I can’t even hug anyone anymore without fearing that I’ll break down. As though the most well-intentioned touch would shatter me into dust.

Where is this river? It can’t have run dry this soon. I feel distant, detached, as though the slowly emptying room I currently occupy is someone else’s and I am just passing through.

I would ask for someone to rescue me, but I don’t think anyone can.

She sat in the plastic waiting room on a Saturday morning, wondering about the heartbeat in her stomach. Did it have a heart yet? Or was it too early?

It was only a week ago that she had started feeling different. That her breasts had begun to feel tender. Aching. Big, when they had never been big. She had called out of work twice this week, unable to tolerate the thought of serving people food without wanting to throw up. As it was, she had dropped pounds overnight. Her already too-big clothes felt even bigger.

At dinner on Thursday night she pushed away the steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup, her stomach doing a strange loop de loop. When she excused herself from dinner, her mother looked at her strangely, unsteady, wondering.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” her mother asked.

“Nah,” she said. “There’s just a stomach bug going around school.”

She had known by Tuesday afternoon what was wrong with her. Forty minutes of driving to guarantee her anonymity. Seven and a half minutes at an unknown pharmacy, searching for the right test. Pink, blue, she just wanted one that would say yes or no without any addition or subtraction necessary.

Her backpack slung over her shoulder, she slipped into the bathroom of the fast food chain next door and unearthed the slim package out from under her AP books. Her homework planner showed a missed tutoring meeting and dance practice later; a graphing calculator determined where x met y; a bunch of delicately folded notes from her friends worn from multiple readings; and four pens; two blue, one green, and one black. Her bag laid down, the package open, she peed and she waited.

It was not an easy feat to get out of the house on that clear, sunny Saturday morning. Her mother demanded to know where she was going. She pleaded; begged her mother to just let her go. Her mother railed against her and finally said what neither of them wanted to acknowledge. They departed in tears, her mother to the master bedroom, and she to her boyfriend’s car.

It never occurred to her that it would be so close – but time may have been disguised by her overworked mind. She expected to see picketers when they pulled up – almost wanted to in the absence of faith. Instead, she only saw the gray cinderblock, simple and deceptive in its manner. Once inside, it was just like a regular doctor’s office, but with nervous boyfriends, husbands, and an occasional mother in the awkward room. They were all there for the same reason, but no one said why.

She saw girls, tears streaming down their faces, and looked away.

Finally, her name was called, after an hour of waiting. She felt her boyfriend turn to her, but her path was beyond a gray door, to back rooms of unspoken wonders. To a room where she pulled up her shirt and shivered at the cold jelly on her stomach. The sonogram told her six weeks, too early to know the sex, too soon to feel guilt. It can’t be real if it doesn’t have a gender.

She thought back to six weeks ago, to when she lied to her parents and told them she was sleeping over her best friend’s house. She had anticipated a night full of candlelight, rose petals, love lasting ever after. But really? She only wanted to know what it was like to spend the night in her boyfriend’s arms.

Another room demanded a three hundred and sixty dollar fee to be a seventeen-year old girl again. The price is always higher to become a statistic. Her feet tapped a nervous song as she counted out the cash, grateful she worked for tips.

Once more into another waiting room, this time with only women, who sat in cheap cloth robes hiding what no one wanted. High school girls, crack hos, college co-eds, mothers who said they just couldn’t have another one. One girl said it was her fifth. They chatted about the beautiful weather and their boyfriends and their children while pretending they weren’t silently judging one another. “How did you all get here?” she wondered.

It would be just this once – just to allow her to graduate from high school, follow her deposit to college, live a normal life. When the women became silent, she watched the television in the room, half following Oprah’s conversation, half watching the words float off the screen like bubbles over her head. “When will it be over?” she asked a missing god. The waiting was the worst part.

Her name was called. Finally. Finally.

She jumped up and walked to the side room where a nurse waited, relieved that she no longer had to wait. She sat on the examining table, her feet in cold stirrups, the general anesthesia working its way through her system, the doctor asking, “What’s a nice girl like you doing here?”

She watched herself shrug and smile sheepishly, no longer in her body, floating away on clouds, away from the doctor’s white-gloved hands and sympathetic looks, away to a place where bliss truly was ignorant, aware that this wasn’t the moment she lost her childhood, but the moment when she most certainly said goodbye.

If I were a color, I’d be somewhere between citrus orange and magenta red, puffs of anger enhancing my pigmentation.

If I were a word, I’d be rivers of profanity, starting with fuck fuck fuck, fuck you you fucking motherfucker, and I never curse.

If I were a fruit, I’d be a bruised peach, from the imprints of you on me and the hardness beginning to jade my core.

If I were a grammatical mark, I’d be a comma, for all the run-on sentences due your way; question marks are unnecessary when the answers are pointless.

If I were a car, I’d be leaking fuel near the ignition, a flash yet incendiary, just a blaze still simmering under the hood.

If you were a color, you’d be putrid green, muddled and confused, wanting to jump out when you’re better off mixed in with vomit.

If you were a word, you’d connote the essence of dumbed down intelligence, a fine “huh?” to you too.

If you were a fruit, you’d be a watermelon, indecisive in your patterns, swollen with water and little else in the name of substance.

If you were a grammatical mark, you’d be an ellipses for all the things you assume without digging deeper to find, deceptiveness the key to your reality.

If you were a car, you’d be the runaway offender, uninsured and unready to play the game of truth.

Whose stories can a wash machine hear as the lip of its mouth opens to swallow another load?

Whispering white socks as they tumble amidst bleach, gossipy and truth-mongering about the tangled feet discarding them to tango on cadences of down comforters.

Stained underwear of the young girl who just crossed the archway into womanhood, confused as to why where there was once pee there is now blood.

The blanket of the yellow-tinged irised man, stank and rank with the sweat and shivers of nights spent huddled against the base of a store front.

Grass stained shorts, smelling of cleats lingering in the air with an almost audible crowd screaming in delight.

Sweet, musky scents of jeans pressed against one another, music sparking the night like light as bodies sway, embers of orange organically growing into faded cotton threads.

A crisp white blouse, hinting at the femininity curving beneath it, keyboards clacking and heels tapping, tears falling silently into the cavern between K and L.

Winnie-the-pooh, pasghetti sauce mottled into his golden fur, sticky fingers clutching from fear of the monsters under the bed, the wild thing in the closet, and the loud clamors of divorce.

The faded t-shirt, once his, now hers, familiar in its hugs, snuggled against the armpits, the back, the neck, resting at the hip, a polyester blend armor of love.