I’m trying not to leave amidst hardship. I witness myself. I hear the rhythm of my body even if no one else hears it—I believe in it, and that’s enough. I alternate between deciding I deserve the world and deciding I deserve nothing. There is no moderation in this day and age: it’s life or death, it’s mask or reveal, it’s absolute truth or all lies. I pinned myself to the wall until I became desperation in its purest form. I must speak first, so that you know why I’m here, why I speak at all. If I don’t get what I want, I’ll die. If I get what I want, I’ll die. Either way, I lived.
Halfway Out the Door
I return to memories of the people who taught me something, even accidentally. I love them, not for who they are but for the ways in which they altered me. In this way, my love for them becomes a love for my own deterioration.
* * *
The only thing worse than hearing your voice at its most desperate is recognizing it.
* * *
Whenever I remember that dogs began as wolves, my hope for my own domestication returns.
* * *
By the time I reached the living room, the front door was already open, and he was standing there with his keys in one hand, his phone in the other. I knew my mascara had stained my cheeks, but it was clear I didn’t have time to wash it off—he wanted to take me home now. I zipped my dress up slowly; I couldn’t quite get the metal through the holes on my shoes’ ankle straps, I was taking forever. It’s not that I thought we’d love each other, but I was so sad to have my answer in the doorway, to know for sure. I’d lived so long with the uncertainty that I began to mourn it like a little death, and I’m still mourning it, now, here, a thousand miles away.
* * *
My friend, after running into his ex-girlfriend on the street: It was really good. I felt really bad.
* * *
I’m unrecognizable behind the stories I tell, but I include just enough detail so everyone can see what I see: a hypothetical storage space in the hypothetical town where all my real lives go.
* * *
No one acted afraid of me. That’s how I knew I should become fearless.
* * *
Everything I do is an effort to answer a question, even if the question is, How selfish can I be?
* * *
In third grade, I had a friend who once let me sleep on her top bunk. That night, we watched television until her father came in and used his crutch to press the Off button. He was usually in Hawaii, studying geology, but this week he’d returned from the hospital with steel reinforcements protruding from his shin, keeping it intact. Earlier that night, he let us trace the metal with our fingers and he said, I went to look at the volcano, but then it came to look at me, and we laughed, and we imagined the world.
* * *
I thought I wanted love all to myself, but as soon as I had it, I wanted everyone to know what I’d found, to know that I’d given it a new name.
* * *
I can be convinced of any version of justice, if the wronged speak eloquently enough for long enough.
* * *
My friend’s mother had a car with a makeshift backseat that faced the wrong way, and we spent our rides home waving at the people driving behind us. They could either wave back or pass us, but both actions were forms of confrontation, and this was not beyond our young minds. We made people choose. That was our one power.
* * *
It’s almost kinder to keep the secret, I say to the secret person. He agrees. Almost.
* * *
He slept with his back to me, which made me jealous of his dreams. Hey. Hey. Wake up.
* * *
On a school trip to Washington, DC, my friend and I were allowed an unchaperoned hotel room. We went to sleep on time, too afraid of Room 118, where the boys from North Dakota told us to go. On the bus, they said their favorite thing to do was cow tipping. We steal my dad’s beer and go up to the barn and you pretty much just have to breathe on them. That night I walked to the bathroom in my sleep and brought an empty plastic cup to my sleeping friend. The next morning, she told me, You just kept saying it wasn’t the right water. But then I kept bringing you water and you kept drinking it.
* * *
Being wrong feels better than being right because that means there’s still somewhere left to go.
* * *
A man I loved once referred to my disbelief regarding romance as a running theme.
* * *
We kissed with the lights on, drank whiskey out of old bottles of ginger ale, went to sleep listening to the sounds of his roommates playing video games in the living room. I tried to remember what I’d liked about him at first. His last name translates to moon, I remembered. His last name means the moon.
* * *
I waste so much time that I’m grateful when the world does it for me. Once a year, I get to write my favorite sentence: We lost an hour in the night.
* * *
I’ve never witnessed either of my parents in an act of self-sabotage, but I must have learned it from somewhere.
* * *
On the Internet, everyone’s getting an award, everyone’s buying new shoes, everyone’s swimming at the beach, everyone’s eating a wonderful meal. Here we are. Everyone’s in love.
* * *
These are hands that have never played an instrument, the man said in bed, holding my fingers with his. I play guitar, actually, I said, and he said, No, you don’t.
* * *
Each time the day ends, darkness appears as a mystery to my artist friend—wasn’t today the day she would finally be recognized? She sees the world as behind her somehow, about to catch up. Soon she won’t have to make anything.
* * *
I could tell my boyfriend’s new songs were about his ex-girlfriend—the one who looked like me, the one with the same middle name as me, the one who left. I accepted my position as her replacement, sometimes I even reveled in it. I knew who those songs were about and I liked hearing him sing them.
* * *
I have nothing but fondness and affection for you, I said, halfway out the door.
* * *
Like any tool, heartbreak dulls.
* * *
My best friend started doing meth, lost weight, bounced her leg all through algebra class. I watched her move as if her body was math, and it was—reducing each day. I felt like her remainder, left over from childhood. I spoke to her, but she couldn’t hear me. I was on our old frequency.
* * *
Being underestimated is a form of power.
* * *
The high school badminton team was one way to wait for softball season to start, so we spent our afternoons with a coach who despised us. Toward the end of the season, we began regarding his rage with a kind of admiration—how fierce it was! We’d never felt so hated in all our lives. Whenever we lost, he’d speak with his back to us, as if we were so insignificant we didn’t even deserve his voice. Whenever we won, he said, That’s more like it.
* * *
I long to be hung out to dry, to wave in the wind, to be made good. If religion was like that, I’d sit my flag body in the pews every Sunday. I’d confess, I’d make up for lost time, lost faith, lost wind, lost keys to the new world. Born bad but grew up to be a flag, marking all good ships.
* * *
When I watched him cry so hard he could barely drive, I had just one thought: This is the pain to make up for the pleasure, this is the pain to make up for the pleasure, this is the pain to make up for the pleasure.
* * *
When the astronaut spent a year in space, he grew two inches taller, just because he could.
* * *
Specificity is a commodity and I’m saving up, up, up.
* * *
His brutality reminded me of my own, but his was superior—I ached to keep up. In my spare time, I compiled harsh insults to unleash next time, but then he’d do something like punch a hole in the wall. We were bound by cruelty, whic
h was sharper than love. He taught me that.
* * *
I wrote so many poems about what might happen that I wasn’t surprised when one of them came true. I tamed my outcomes, I built them—a train on its tracks.
* * *
Suppose I fell in love with someone else, thought I could handle it, that I could manage it like an employee, as if my love worked for me. Suppose he said, You’re the one, and I didn’t say it back, couldn’t, because I thought of other ones. Suppose love was a kind of focusing and refocusing. Suppose I could see.
* * *
Greek chorus, come with me. Balcony set, stay here. I am the role of a lifetime and I let myself be played poorly. I believe in the potential of my terrible actor. I love my life; I also want it dead. That’s the only honest thing I ever said.
* * *
I’m not explaining it right, I said. I’m leaving out the best parts. I’d just begun, but then it was time to leave.
Second Row
Joey was the tallest person I’d ever seen, even without the added height of the stage where I first saw him. I was seventeen; he was college-aged, but not in college, he was the singer of a band I never got tired of. He played guitar, too, but that was secondary to his voice, which was a kind of summoning.
The first time I entered Modified, the punk venue in the middle of the worst part of downtown Phoenix, I felt as if I’d finally found one good place. Everything was a strip mall or about to be a strip mall, and worse, there was some law about exterior paint resembling the mountains, so every building was painted beige. Phoenix looked terrible; the heat was terrible; my parents were terribly worried about me going downtown by myself every week, but they let me go anyway, and that’s where Joey sang one night.
He did this thing with his legs—a spastic motion that didn’t align with the drums, that seemed to come from another song inside of him. He closed his eyes when he sang, and I was glad for that, because then I didn’t have to worry about him seeing the way I looked at him. It was embarrassing the way I kept going to Modified, paying five bucks at the door and milling around, waiting for someone to talk to me. Eventually, Anna did. She was like an older, cooler version of me, and we looked so alike that people asked if we were sisters. She liked that I was a few years younger than her—she wanted to be idolized, and I perpetuated that, made it real for her. It felt as if the entire city was asleep except for the fifty or so people inside Modified, and it was up to us to make something beautiful inside the ugliest city in the world. I didn’t dare talk to Joey, but one night, he talked to me.
Come to this party on Fifth and Hardy, he said, holding my hand. You can remember that ’cause it rhymes. The house with a big saguaro in front. He was drunk, and I think he must have invited everyone and held everyone’s hands, but I felt as if this was it—tonight our lives would merge. He got in the passenger side of his friend’s car and waved goodbye to me, or maybe the guy next to me, and I jumped in my dad’s car, a boxy 1987 Isuzu Trooper my friends called the Safari Mobile. I put the key into the ignition, and the stereo clock lit up: 11:15. The party was twenty minutes away, and my curfew was midnight, so I floored it down the I-10, thinking any punishment my parents imposed later would be worth it.
When I got there, I didn’t see anything except dark houses—the worlds I’d correctly assumed were sleeping while everyone at Modified stayed up, falling in love. Where is it? I muttered to myself, determined to find that stupid cactus in the yard. I drove down every related side street, thinking maybe I was just early; the house must be right around here. But I drove and drove for a half hour, until I gave up and went home, and my parents didn’t wake up when I unlocked the door ten minutes late, and that was the night Joey fell in love with Anna.
I nearly died the next week at Modified when I saw him leaning down to say something in her ear. Happy birthday! I said to Anna between bands. Aw, thanks, pal! she said, then asked, You know Joey, right? We smiled at each other, and I said, I don’t think we’ve ever officially met, and then we touched hands for the second time. Joey left to go set up for his band’s set, and I started questioning Anna. She was a little drunk, so she was happy to talk and didn’t think it was weird that I asked questions like Where does he live? and What do you guys do together? She said Joey had a one-bedroom apartment by the railroad tracks, and the train went by once an hour, and the walls shook whenever that happened. She said Joey played folk records for her, and they were the best things she’d ever heard. The next week, I bought those records, and they were the best things I’d ever heard, too. I closed my eyes and thought of them on his mattress on the floor and of the twenty-four trains counting the hours. I thought of my conversations with Anna like research—perhaps one day my life would truly begin, and I’d be ready.
When summer started, Anna cut her hair, I cut mine, and Joey introduced us to his friend. Tyler looked a little like Joey, or maybe they just had similar noses. Tyler was studying creative writing in Seattle, but he was home for summer break. We started dating almost immediately. We stood next to each other at Modified shows, and held hands, and kissed when it was time for me to go home. We took Polaroids together, and I put them on the Internet to make them realer. One night, my parents were out of town, and Tyler rubbed his jeans against my jeans like someone lighting a hundred matches in a row. I closed my eyes and came, and then I asked Tyler if he wanted to go ahead and take my virginity. He said, I’d just feel too bad, and I didn’t ask again. We went into the backyard so he could smoke another cigarette. He took the turquoise pack from his jeans pocket—American Spirits. Isn’t that what Joey smokes? I asked, and he nodded as he lit the cigarette. One day, at Tyler’s parents’ house in Paradise Valley, he played me some folk records, but it was too late—I’d already heard them.
Joey had a friend whose parents owned an Asian-fusion restaurant chain and a mansion, so we all went there one night. It was full of people we didn’t know—blond girls wearing heels and eating chips in the kitchen, guys wearing baseball caps and playing beer pong in the backyard. Anna and Joey had somehow known to wear their swimsuits, and they got in the hot tub. Tyler and I walked around the house, counting the bathrooms (nine), and then encountered a glass door that led to a stairwell to the basement. Don’t! I said, as Tyler reached for the door handle. But he opened it, and a blast of cold air washed over us. We walked down the stairs and into the wine cellar. There must have been five hundred bottles in neat rows, kept at the perfect temperature. Do you want some? Tyler asked me, holding one he’d picked at random. I don’t drink, I said, and he said, Oh, right.
Anna came over to Tyler’s parents’ house one day, and we all lay on the bed, spooning each other, falling asleep in the middle of the day. Where was Joey? He felt so far away, and yet we had touched him once. I want to say Joey ruined us, but that’s not right—he taught us the meaning of longing, which means we didn’t know the difference between loving him and wanting to love him, not yet. In 110-degree heat, it was hard to tell what was what. But if we couldn’t be the songs he sang, at least we could be in the front row, or the second.
One night, Tyler and I sat on my driveway, talking about what would happen when he went back to college. He said he wanted to write a great novel by the time he graduated. When I asked him what he’d written so far, he said he was still in the absorbing phase of his life, and I thought, Maybe I am, too.
Leaving Me
I knew a girl in high school who shared my first name—she lured boys into her bedroom by saying, I want to show you something. She’d be in the passenger seat of some boy’s car, they’d be in her driveway, and she’d say her line, just to see how quickly he’d pull the keys out of the ignition. She was beautiful enough that the boys would have gone into her room even if she didn’t have a line, or if her line was a murder threat, but there each of my friends went, one by one, disappearing into the other Chelsea.
One of my friends lived to tell about her possessions: Nothing to write home about, he called the s
helf of records and crystals and Polaroids, but I doubted it. Nothing’s ever that simple—he was in love with her and couldn’t tell her or something. I’m writing about the shelf now and I’ve never even seen it—that’s what kind of girl she was.
Sharing a name with someone amplifies the element of competition: is the world big enough for two? I went wild with jealousy if I thought about her too much—her perfectly straightened hair, her tan, her ability to talk to boys with the confidence that she would one day have them. Her mother went to jail for a night because Chelsea illegally downloaded a thousand rap songs on her mother’s computer and got caught, but it didn’t matter. Even then, I longed to have her life, though I knew that was impossible. I wanted the unknown, the other, the superior version of myself, and I still do. I long and long—that word almost makes me love English again, makes me think I might be able to say what I mean.
Years later, in Los Angeles, I dreamt of a burning car the night before I saw it for real. The orange and blue flames danced in the middle of a downtown parking lot while I was three stories up in a neighboring building, remembering my dream. But even when it was real, it was fake—a movie set with men hosing it off.
Lady with a Spear is Eugenie Clark’s 1953 memoir about her years as a fish scientist in Micronesia. She begins her book with a memory from age nine: I took several fast deep breaths, adjusted my face mask, checked the safety lock on my speargun, and dived back down into the Red Sea. Clark writes, That may read like science fiction, or a dream. It isn’t fiction, but it is a dream.
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