Interests: Music, Dancing, Film, Writing, Taking Risks, Failing Now To Win Later
Favorite Music: Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, Ke$ha
Favorite TV Shows: The Wire, The Sopranos, Rachel Maddow, Inside the Actors Studio, Six Feet Under, True Blood, Twin Peaks
Favorite Movies: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The Virgin Suicides, Fight Club, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Love, Actually, The Devil Wears Prada, Parallax View, Marathon Man, Synecdoche, New York, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream, I love movies.
Favorite Books: Alice in Wonderland, The Zero, The Raw Shark Texts, Lunar Park, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse, A Short History of Women, The World is Flat, Everything is Illuminated, Middlesex, Prep, Kavalier & Klay, Wuthering Heights, Dracula, Frankenstein, House of Leaves, The Glass Castle, A Million Little Pieces (yes, I know it’s fake), many more, but I’m tired of typing.
Favorite Quotations: “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between is the door of perception.” – Aldous Huxley
About Me: I rock except when I don’t.
THE GIRL SHE WANTS YOU TO KNOW
I had a sense of Kirsten from our conversation at Joe’s party, but reading through this list of her favorite things enables me to compile a more complete portrait of who she is – or at least who she wants people reading her Facebook profile to think she is.
While processing this thought and considering how to apply it moving forward, a “pop” sneaks out of the speakers in my phone, alerting me to a new message inside the app’s chat function.
IM CHAT
Kirsten: Mike…………you remember me?
Me: i do, yeah. Hey.
Kirsten: hi!
Me: how’d you find me?
Kirsten: haha it was weird bc I got a friend request from that guy Geppetto you’re friends with and he only had one other friend – you
Me: do you know him?
Kirsten: no! I thought his clothes were rad for an old man……so I accepted
who is he?
Me: have you ever talked to him?
Kirsten: nope
you know him or you don’t either?
Me: i’ve met him
i’m still not really sure what to think
Kirsten: well he reunited us, sooo
[She waits for me to respond. I don’t.]
Kirsten: how are you??
[Not sure what to type, I start and delete several times.]
Me: i’m ok
how’re you?
Kirsten: eh, i’ve been better
relationship stuff with my ex
Me: sorry
something you want to talk about?
Kirsten: ummmm I don’t wanna bug you but thanks
Me: sure
Kirsten: hey where are you right now?
[Why would she ask this? Does she know something?]
Me: in ohio
Kirsten: you visiting?
[I decide to make something up.]
Me: girl i know moved here to go to med school
Geppetto hasn’t said anything to you about her has he?
Kirsten: no
would he?
Me: sorta how he and i met
Kirsten: what do you mean?
Me: he helped unload her moving van, haha
Kirsten: oh haha
guess he was anxious to be your friend
I’m in DC actually
not THAT far away from you
heading back to LA tho
Me: when?
Kirsten: leaving in the morning
gotta escape
when are you going back?
[I don’t know how to answer. She must get impatient or nervous because she IM’s again before I can fabricate a response.]
Kirsten: when you do we should hang out
I want to hear how the writing’s going!
Me: ok cool
[Even though I type this I’m not convinced I mean it. I’m not sure I am going back. I’m not sure I can make it.]
Kirsten: here’s my number 323-XXX-XXXX
call me alright? We’ll go to a show or something (:
I leave the app open after Kirsten signs off. Before the screen dims to black, I copy her number and paste it into my contacts.
I slide my phone back into my left pocket and stare into vacant space. Eventually, I walk out of the rest stop without ordering anything. Pushing through the exit doors, I tweet:
“H-e-l-p”
MY MOM AND DAD
I’ve come to believe I need help. To what extent, I can’t say. But the only people I know I can turn to are my parents. They won’t judge me even if they think I’ve lost my mind.
Approaching the front door of their house, I circumvent the patch of grass where I last saw the pilot’s dead body. The murder in self-defense – be it actual or imagined or something else entirely – haunts me. I’m having an increasingly difficult time conceiving of anything that doesn’t involve some form of pain or suffering.
I ring the doorbell.
No one comes.
I call my dad on his cell. He doesn’t answer. I leave a message saying I’m outside the house. I call my mom’s phone. But hers is pay-as-you-go, and she rarely uses it. In this case, she must have forgotten to re-up the minutes because I can’t even get through to voice mail.
I figure I’ll try the door to the garage, which is often left open in the event someone gets locked out of the house. Sure enough, it opens. Unfortunately, the garage is empty – both of my parents’ cars are gone. They probably ran out somewhere. I retrieve the spare house key from underneath an old, extraneous refrigerator that sounds like it’s broken and use it to enter the house.
Walking into the kitchen, I have never felt more alone. I light up my phone to confirm which day of the week it is… Saturday. Errands day.
I head upstairs and take a shower.
Clean and freshly clothed, but too apprehensive to sit or stand in one place, I wander about the house. Neither of my parents has shown up yet. Neither has called. Entering my old bedroom, I’m surprised to discover it has been completely redecorated. Gone are the Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club posters. The walls have been painted burnt orange and brand new, plush grizzly bear brown carpeting is on the floor. Formerly, the walls were white and the carpeting Carolina blue. In my absence, my room has matured.
My eyes fall onto the bed and its mud-colored comforter. A scrap of printer paper is lying on top of it. The Pinterest logo has been shabbily drawn on the paper, and “theredjournal” has been scrawled in thick black marker underneath that.
Thinking this is peculiar, I go to the Pinterest website on my phone and search for a user named “theredjournal.” One comes up. The user’s name is listed as “XXX XXX.” No other information is given. Their profile picture is the default white pin against a red background. The user is only pinning images to one board, also called The Red Journal.
The images on the board are displayed in a grid formation. The first image at the top left of the page depicts a small, red hardcover journal, its front garnished with fanciful golden designs. Something about the journal jogs my memory, but I can’t quite place what. The photograph next to it appears to be of the journal’s inside cover, where the words “Thoughts, Feelings, Meditations” have been written in red ink. The next photo is a page in the journal, presumably the first page, and it is covered with handwritten words.
The handwriting is mine.
To be convinced takes some time, in part because all I do anymore is type, but also because I can’t remember ever writing in a book like this.
Unnerved, I scroll through the rest of the images in the grid, all of which show additional pages in the journal.
My handwriting is on every single one.
Without sitting down, I start to read.
THOUGHTS,
FEELINGS, MEDITATIONS
5.10.98
Here I am. Back Home. If that’s what it is anymore. I guess I wonder sometimes. Like recently. And I just got home. Nothing was working the night before, the day before – I don’t think she likes me; my stomach felt ill; food was consumed in mass quantities (that’s today also); writing wasn’t working; and I felt strange. The last being the most important – ‘home’ makes me weak. I was getting frustrated much too easily, losing control, and I realized it but there didn’t seem to be much for me to do about it. I was restructuring all the things Joseph Campbell taught me, combined with my experience – From darkness comes light – yet maybe what i forgot about was that even though i could always say that from darkness comes light and try to look at my ills as beneficial this doesn’t mean that those ills immediately become non-ills. Realization doesn’t cure anything. I don’t think. So I looked at all of these discomforts as challenges, things to overcome, things to change. Yet true change is always inherently invisible unless you look at yourself in retrospect. You can’t examine change unless it’s already happened and has taken you somewhere new, and you can look at and study who you were versus who you are now. It takes time. And conflict. Like right now things are crumbling – I can’t say the right things and I’m falling asleep. So sleepy, yet so inactive. So tired at only midnite. So full, so disgusting, and so afraid of change, but also wanting it (I wish she liked me, I want to love her) yet it seems to be all around me, but the change that’s around me isn’t the change I want. How am I going to deal without order, with chaos, with uncertainty? And it is this that I’m afraid of and encompassed in. I feel out of control.
5.24.98
it is one day before my 19th birthday so it would seem almost fitting to do some sort of inventory of myself – who have i become in 19 years; who will i be in 19 more. but i’m not interested in that sort of thing because it would be very general, most of it not reflecting anything but the last 6 years, and all of it being a rethinking of many of the things i’ve already thought and rethought. so having said that, i’d like to move onto some other issues which seem to me to be very simple but very difficult to answer. when i got that e-mail from liz where she told me all about her crash and how she almost died I should have been scared – i should have been shaken by the idea that i nearly lost someone who i was growing close with, who i think I might want to fall in love with someday. yet i wasn’t really affected. and this bothers me.
8.2.98
here we go again. i'm warning myself that the way i feel right now i don't think i can function all the way through the hour. why does anything in life matter? i know it's nothing new ... this question has probably been thought of millions of times but for some reason it seems entirely pertinent to me at this moment in time and it is, i think, equally troubling that upon previous wanderings i can't find a reason why anything matters. we often use the phrase 'it doesn't matter' to describe things we seem to think are trite, but why isn't everything in life trite? say someone is thinking of committing a crime; they'll always be asked (in the socially accepted world) whether or not they want to go to jail? surely our life changes, but always life changes. the answer to does anything in life matter must go back to the underlined word, want – desire seems to be the only thing that shapes life into meaning, or rather, importance. that is, the only part of life that matters is getting what you want. it's interesting to note then that life's worth seems to rest on greed, an emotion, and a commonly negatively looked upon one at that. why is it negative then if it seems to be the key to making life matter? i think it has to do with greed's connotations of excess. excess means having more than we need and therefore would apply to the acquisition of things we don't want and yes, that is not desirable because while one desire goes unfulfilled another goes unplenished, and then we don't have what we want, yet, at the same time, it keeps us working - because if we were to desire nothing because we had everything there would not be much worth or importance in life would there? so it seems the human mind is always working to keep us wanting more, to keep us full of desire, but not greed because greed, to us, is worthless, unless it serves to reawaken or starve another desire which, in turn, keeps us kicking, keeps us living. suicide would seem the appropriate option for anyone who has stopped desiring.
MUSIC AND A MOVIE
I refuse to read anymore.
The words transport me back to an earlier stage of my life I can very much recall. However, I can’t remember writing any of them. The entries are dated over ten years ago. Is it conceivable I just completely forgot about this entire journal? I certainly didn’t create this account. Who would have done that? I’ll ask my mom where the scrap of paper came from. I can start there.
I try calling both parents again. I get the same results.
A slippery, unsettling feeling crawls through me. The journal has to either be a break in my memory or a crack in reality. One or the other.
I remind myself I didn’t go through the Door to get here.
With the scrap of paper in tow, I abandon my bedroom for Tim’s old room across the hall. At times, during dark moments, I would come here and gaze out the window, searching for some sign of inspiration or purpose on the street, while digging my fingernails into my triceps and pulling at my skin. I resist the urge to do that now. Instead, I stand in front of the window, dust the scrap of paper against the wall, and watch the cul-de-sac, hoping to see one of my parents’ cars turn the corner.
Waiting, I pace away from the windows, past the bed, and back again. On my angular path, I notice a dusty Bose iPod dock sitting on top of Tim’s desk. An old and bulky iPod, maybe even a first generation one, is connected to the dock. I could use a distraction. Music might work. After checking to make sure the dock is plugged in, I activate the iPod and look for something to listen to. My choice is not hard. Only one album has been loaded onto the device: Here, My Dear by Marvin Gaye.
I’ve never heard the album before, but I know of it. It was birthed out of Marvin’s relationship with his first wife, Anna Gordy, as part of the divorce settlement. He couldn’t afford child support and alimony so the judge ordered him to make an album and give half of the royalties to Anna. Marvin responded by setting out to record a classic, one that was explicitly about the arc of his relationship, from the burst of love at the beginning to the fury of anger at its dissolution.
I press play. Sound crackles out of the speakers, which are apparently in worse condition than they look. The melody of the song is eerie, reminiscent of a string of notes I’ve heard somewhere else. Intuitively, I question whether or not this is the first song on the album – it doesn’t sound like an opening cut. Glancing back at the iPod, I see the interlocking dual arrows indicating the shuffle function is in use. I have to get closer to read the name of the track. Marvin belts out lyrics, and the melody repeats, prodding my memory enough for me to realize where I heard this before – it’s the melody the pilot hummed moments before taking his final breath.
Another four bars of the song pass, and I put the music together with the strange dirge-like phrase the pilot croaked.
“Hurrrrrr, madeeerr”
He was trying to say, “Here, my dear,” the name of the album, and now that I’m close enough to the iPod to see, also the name of this song.
Did he cherish it? Was he engaging in a kind of deathbed salute? Or could he have been revealing an improbable link between Marvin’s opus and Naomi’s disappearance?
A loud, swift noise comes from downstairs – what sounds like a door breaking apart.
I tear out of Tim’s room and head for the first floor, where I fully expect to find my mom or my dad or both in a state of disarray.
I hit the entryway and go towards the kitchen. Was that noise the garage door opening? It sounded too violent. I should see someone in the kitchen or the dining room if they came in through the garage. Maybe the family room…
Not the family room.
Because the family room in this house i
s gone.
It has been replaced by the living room from my parents’ first house, the one they brought me back to after I was born.
A man is standing in the living room. He is facing an old Magnavox television with dials on it. He is rocking back and forth, holding something in his arms.
All of a sudden darkness surrounds us. The TV screen is the only source of light. It is broadcasting a Vietnam War movie, The Deer Hunter. Although I’ve never seen the movie before, I recognize it by the infamous Russian roulette sequence. As the scene plays, the man standing in front of the TV shifts towards me, allowing me to see both the outlines of his face and what he is holding.
The man is my father.
But he is not my dad now, he’s my dad then. A much younger version of the man I last saw this past Christmas, possibly younger than I am now.
He is holding a baby boy.
He looks down at the child, swaying to try and keep him asleep. The baby yawns and stretches, and my dad laughs a little and says, “That’s a big one, Mikey.”
The baby boy is me.
Inconceivably, I am witnessing something that would have happened over twenty years ago if it happened at all. It is disturbing and riveting, and it can’t actually be real. It can’t be. I say this out loud, and my dad ignores me, turning back towards the television and the Russian roulette sequence, as if he wants to show my three or four or five-month-old self how it ends, and that’s when the Vietnamese character in the movie shoots himself in the head.
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