Creative Writing Assignment

My Grandfather died last week. In his honor:
Tell me what you will miss when you die.

When I die, I will miss stepping out onto a street corner and feeling the fullness of my body unroll and stack up straight on the pavement, air against my skin, sunlight in my eyes.
I will miss a good shampoo, raking my fingers over my scalp.
I will miss singing. Feeling my voice vibrate through the thick resonant caverns of my body.
Deep belly laughs that ring out too loud in restaurants and make people turn around and look.
I will miss a good stretch.
Hugs with people who hug back big and tight and fearless.
Songs that make me need to get up and dance, regardless of circumstance (short list, that).
Making coffee: grinding the beans, pouring the water, listening to the water drip through the black grit, the smell the smell the smell

Experiment Update

I'm a blog reader. And in reading blogs, I find there's not much I dislike more than the "sorry I haven't been posting" post.

But guess what kind of a post this is?

For those of you who have been reading since The Experiment, you might chuckle to hear that I've fallen in love. Hit-you-over-the-head, heart-burstingly, life-changingly in love. My poor body is learning to sustain levels of happiness that may or may not be healthy, and the blogging? Has taken a back burner to general skipping-through-fields types of activities.

Who wants to read my sappy love poetry anyway?

Creative Writing Assignment

Creative Writing Assignment: Start with "I am looking at..." Go for 10 minutes. Anytime you get stuck, write the prompt again and go from there.



I am looking at my new pink chair missing an arm.

So I was biking down 6th street a few hours ago, going the wrong way down a one-way street (but I was in the bike lane so it was okay?), and I saw a yard sale. I use the term “yard” loosely – everyone around here who is lucky enough to HAVE a yard has a small one, almost an apology of a yard, postage stamp size. This “yard” sale caught my eye for two reasons:
1. There was an interesting turquoise blue drawer thingy. I like colors.
2. There was a sign that said EVERYTHING FREE
So I filed it away in my mental rolodex of to-do’s and kept on my way (to the CVS for bleach/coffee/detergent, to Eastern Market for fruit). On my way back I properly stopped. Got off the bike, put the kickstand down, and had a look. Couldn’t figure out the turquoise blue drawer thingy; buncha plates and cups; some books – and this chair. Under a black trash sack. Peach fleshy colored velvet with dark brown curved legs. I’ve been half-heartedly looking for a chair for months. I live in a small place and I have a large comfy brown corduroy chair (sitting in its chubby embrace right now), and whenever I have company we usually end up on the floor because no one wants to be The Person Who Takes the Only Chair. Was gonna take my friend Kylie’s pink high back chair, but never got around to it. So when I saw this curvy beat-up number under its pile of trash, my heart skipped a beat.

There was an old woman crouched down going through what looked to be one of those plastic drawer organizers; she was separating things out – earrings, pens, pins – not sure if it was for her or if she was just a sorter by habit.
“Is this your stuff?” I asked.
She looked up and she was pale all around – pale silvery hair, pale skin, pale blue eyes. She had trouble speaking; some sort of stutter?
“It’s – it’s – I’m – he’s the grandson,” she gets out, and gestures toward a man coming out of the basement apartment holding a cardboard box of seemingly unrelated items.
“Nephew,” he corrects, smiles. He looks tired. He is wearing a green canvas baseball cap and thin framed glasses; his eyes are kind.
“Is there a reason this chair is under the trash? Is it okay?”
“Look here,” he says, and takes me around to the other side of it, the side obscured by more clunky black trash bags. “It’s missing an arm.”
And so it is. Orange foam and dark screws poke forth from the delicate velvet, like guts from a sudden-amputee, like C3P0’s circuits after the Sand Men attacked him. I find I like the chair more now.
“No problem, man,” I say (why is it that buying intimate things from people in personal ways makes me drop into “man” and “dude”? I always do this), “I’ll be back with my car in 10 minutes.”

Now the chair is here, in my apartment. After lugging it in the door I set it down in the middle of the floor and backed away, said “Welcome to your new home!” mostly as a joke. Got out the vacuum cleaner and gave it a good suction. All the while, a story about the person whose chair this was is forming in my head: she died, unexpectedly. She was old and lived alone. She had long black wiry hair (vacuum cleaner and I found this out firsthand). The pale old woman outside her house was a neighbor-friend. She never had children. Her nephew lives in DC and is taking the weekend to dispose of her things. She cooked and read a lot and used to entertain (judging by the sheer amount of flatware in the yard sale). When the arm broke off this chair, she had no one to repair it for her.

I am looking at this chair. I have placed it so the missing arm is not immediately obvious. I love its shabby sweetness, its yellowed edges. Right now it feels like I have a guest in the apartment. I know it will not always feel this way. “Hello,” I say, “Welcome to your new home.”

Got the pic here.

Bad Poetry

The faces of my friends have been blotted out
Like photos in a housefire
burned through
angry-black-bubbled out of existence

You’re permanently obscured.

Where’s the girl I walked to classes with, bad bangs growing out, backpack on your back?
Is that still you in there?
Underneath the years
the different names:
strangers calling you mom and honey,
Mrs. so-and-so
underneath the baby growing inside of you

Have you changed?
Or is it just my unwillingness to see you without that backpack that makes you seem different to me?

And when I go that way –
will I disappear under the things I’m called and the people I create?
(will I be able to see myself in there?)

Snapshot

My LA skin is a size (or two) too small. I haven’t worn it in years – it’s been hanging in my closet behind all my dresses, something I absent-mindedly finger whenever I go digging through my clothes and it’s always the same startled feeling: hi, forgot you were there. A few times over the years, if I found myself alone with hours to kill I’d slip it on. Stand in front of the mirror, turn this way and that. Run my hands over it. See if it still felt like me.

The last time I really wore it I was driving up and out of Los Angeles, everything I owned in the back of my dusty Subaru, tears on my face. LA was a smudge of dirty in my rearview. By then, the skin was in bad shape (gritty with sun and salt, thin at the wrists where I caressed my thick blue veins with the box cutter, brown under the eyes, long in the hair), but I didn’t know I could take it off. I hated it but I needed it because it was me.

Now, on the plane, I forget that I should be wearing it almost until we’re descending past the thick band of smog into Los Angeles. My mind has been on a thousand other things. But as the fasten seatbelt light dings on and my tummy lurches, I realize the plane is landing and I am ill-prepared.

On my body, the skin doesn’t sing the devastating-but-seductive siren songs of pain and failure to me the way I expected it to. I am quiet and tentative in it as I walk Sunset Blvd with my friend, arms around each other’s waists, sun at my back. We take a left onto La Cienega in her car, my skin remembering viscerally how to get everywhere. I am astounded at how well I know this city. How can somewhere I haven’t been in years click back on inside, like a light switch in a room at the far back of the house? How can I have so many memories of a place where I felt so anonymous? The thought that keeps ferris-wheeling in my head: “How do I know this? I wasn’t even here!”

I force myself to see this city as objectively as I can: what is this place? All I can come up with is strip malls and car exhaust and vines dripping obscenely with flowers over courtyard walls. It fails to move me. I hold myself so carefully in the skin, expecting at any moment to be hit with the inevitable waves of SOMETHING: loss? longing? But nothing happens. And at the next light, we have to make a right to get to Century City – don’t ask me why I know that, but I do.

In the end, I take the skin off in the airplane bathroom somewhere over Missouri. Exhale. Let my stomach out. Touch my own face in the small mirror under the recessed lighting.

Creative Writing Assignment

Assignment: Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it. What colors are there, sounds, smells? When someone else reads it, she should know what it’s like to be there. She should feel how you love it, not by your saying you love it, but by your handling of the details.

The road there is a 2-lane job hacked smooth into the middle of rain-fat thick-trunked fir trees. It has car commercial curves and you know you’re close when you catch blue through their dumb and gentle bodies and realize it’s not the sky: it’s the Sound.

Suddenly the trees peel away and the road drops down and there it is. My mother grew up in this town. I come here when I need to feel loved.

I am in a relationship with the Inn I stay in. Several years past its prime, it sits at the top of town, behind the fancy waterfront hotels below, red neon letters like the Hollywood sign. She’s the girl who doesn’t know she’s pretty, who’s stopped expecting to be noticed, but I see her, standing in the back, and I say, “Yes, you,” and she blushes red neon at me.

The front counter has a bell. The duvets match the shower curtains. I check into my harbor view room, drop my backpack on the edge of the creaky bed, loosen the plastic latch and slide the glass door right, letting the thin sunlight and salt water and log truck fumes in. I lean against the wrought iron railing, feet on the deck covered in its green astroturf: breathe. Maybe I’ll stand here for a while and look at that huge tanker ship bob in the Port.

The last road before town hits Sound is a logging truck road. I run along it, toes catching in concrete cracks. I pick wild blackberries and raspberries growing along the edges, standing in dead grass ditches with dandelions gone to seed, hiking boots snapping thorns off vines. A truck pounds by, chrome grill and sooty exhaust pipes, pitchy logs fresh from the chainsaw bouncing and swaying in the bed. I run behind it sucking in the wood and salt and gasoline, tonguing the seeds stuck in my teeth, fingers purple.

I am here looking for my mother. I am here because my heart is broken and I want my mother. But not my mother as she is now: I’m hunting this memory of a dream of her, the her that walked wooded trails in dappled sunlight and looked at all the plants, noticing their spines and smells, their fibers. I’ve been broken and I need to put myself in a place where my mother was before she was broken too. I chase her child’s back and fair hair to this place. Hike the woods. Stand at the water’s edge to be blasted by sand and wind and grimy foam. Let the arms of the Port wrap around me in a rocky-salt embrace. Find a quiet in me instead.

I got the photos here and here.

(Vacation) Snapshot (3)

There are a thousand particular, humiliating, comforting ways these people know me. Being with them feels like I am at the oak dinner table and I am 13 in our old house only now I’m 29 and I’m in Cancun and we are all so different and so the same.