Write You’re Wrong

I used to publish a zine. Think of it like a social media post, pages long, you can hold, turn the pages, way more than 280 characters. (I had to look up how many characters Twitter allowed.) In a hunt inside my external hard drive for the songs of an old mix I made (Spotify is missing so many songs I love), I shuffled in and out of long forgotten folders, the rooms to the home to my electronic history. And I found this lost piece of writing. It’s puerile, but it made me tear up. Because I used to love writing. Used to need to write. Used to love what it felt like when I hit the nail on the head, describing something exactly as I felt it. I think I wrote this in 2006 and it may have made it to one of my published zines (emP, my favorite archivist, may confirm its being familiar or not). I love the character I created. The me in the pieces. The not-me in the pieces. It’s fiction. Realistic fiction, my favorite genre. When I die, please make a book of my ridiculous writing and put a huge sculpted angel at my gravesite… and an epitaph like Walk Away, Renée.

Things had started to surface, as if stored under melting snow; flattened rubbish that had surrendered its dimensions to trampling feet and two coats of scattered flurries.  Somehow when his words hit the open air they denatured into an onslaught of B-ballers, sneakers screeching on  the hardwood, dribbling to my side of the court.  They’d snort out like the grayish puffs of disorientated rhinos or bulls in the cartoons.  Like sneezes, with closed eyes, they’d coat and infect. To follow was what recalls now as a mix tape dubbed over with a new set of tracks, moaning from the underneaths and in-betweens.  I had been detoxed from his system.  He had emitted me in a sweaty fit during the night to the thirsty threads of his pillowcase.  I watched his thumbprint mutate and erase my influence – the corners I had planted Cattleya orchards, cultivated beauty, life & sweet fragrance.  Words, expressions, borrowed sweaters, shared meals: purged, and like soft serve spiraling, until it was only him. Unrecognizable, ugly, dim without my light reflecting back.  I am backing away, off of the bed, onto the floor, in my mind.  The bare walls framing him till he was just a snapshot for me to store away & forget.   But I was still there; the blankets unkempt nappy blue dreadlock affixing me like Velcro.   The heavier walkways and paths of the room are visible; their white-yarned graphing revealed a granite path.  I pondered this very space’s history through the 30 years or so the Netherland had been open – ribbon cut, its belt buckle shaped sign off the main road’s carved image of a Victorian home- the kind you sit aside in a sundress with a gentleman strumming a banjo, a two-tier wrap-around porch; the whole town, population 1,420, helped paint it come spring- the banjo playing gentleman now clad in paint splattered overalls.  But the Netherland was a rectangle next to 2 blocks of the same – boxed interruptions of the sky.  I am in those 30 years. Their domestic upheaval, their old strands of DNA scurrying like silverfish through this bed were tiny cilia tickling my insides.  I, too, can leave my mark.  If not by now then by morning when the heavy hen that sat upon my shell will allow me to crack.  With morning control had shimmied her mass through the closing screen door and, in the triumph of her freedom, met an untimely doom by way of the heavy traffic a constant around the industrial park perimetering the Netherland.  I knew she was not in it for the long haul.  Without her white twist ties, my limbs were willed to follow the beaten path out of his bedroom, to the hall & out the door of his refurbished janitors quarters on the basement level meeting the morning 152 pounds lighter. A stock market crash, the slots, OTB – I chocked it all up to a gambling loss – hitting at 17, eating Taco Bell: these kinds of decisions are made by different parts of the brain – the kind that laughed at South Park, sometimes.  A slightly grayer gray matter blunt and stale like a refrigerated block of cheddar.   These instigators operate independently and with unknown agendas, frequently blacklisted from behind the velvet rope into the centers of utilitarian thinking.  And so he drifted out as he had drifted in: dreamlike, my eyes covered in a layer of gauze.  I had lulled my mind to sleep for the walk towards the circular driveway of the main gate.  The security booth was much like the hair on Phil Collins head or the state of Florida, a peninsula of gray asphalt.  The guard had been in his lifeguard chair since the blacktop tide had fallen to an even lapping.  He nodded to me as I shuffled past.  A well-hidden energy source of practicality dialed up a friend for a ride while the rest of me slumped onto the curb, which welcomed my form like Tempur-pedic.  I ached for a cigarette, though it had been years.  Newport boasts “alive with pleasure” and Marlboro the lost lifestyle of the cowboy, and others, the distinction and sophistication of their signature on your speckled brown nub.  But this was nicotine’s finest market; the ill-lucked lovelorn on curbs at dawn awaiting faithful friends flicking ‘hello’ with their lighters.  Those coated in a thin layer of dirt who wanted their insides just the same.  

Fascinating to me. Myself, that is. And here’s me in 2006 in the same dress from Bookmarks in Time.