Conversations Among the Ruins

Lately my sleep button is broken.

I sit up in bed at night, talking to ghosts and rocks.

I guess this is the part where I edit what I'm writing so whomever is reading can relate.

So I guess this is the next line where I don't do that.

The Ghost helps me sleep. I don't "see" ghosts, I feel their energy and have conversations based on that. They are all beautiful.

Wore this hoody to work last night that says LISTEN TO DETROIT TECHNO. Somebody fantastic gave that to me a long time ago at a music festivle. This guy I work with said to me "I have so much more respect for you because you have that shirt on." And I just smiled as I set up the patio. Smiled and thanked him politely. That's all I really have for that these days.

Wish I could measure what it took to just shut the fuck about it all. I'd bottle it up and sell it and save the world.

Once upon a time all I ever wanted was for everybody to know how much I knew about music. When at the end of the day, all I was was the DJ's girlfriend.. with delusions of self importance. It's a really fun and equally as painful part of my life to look back on, flashy lights and fancy friends that were probably really incredible people. I, however, didn't even know myself. Let alone anybody around me.

I think about six months ago a lot lately. Where I'd wake up and get into my car and listen to Lady Gaga's Marry the Night and drive to nowhere. I miss Jami and Jason tremendously. Just the intimacy of two of the most incredible people I know that I got to live with.

I should probably stop writing this. I have a meeting with a gallery owner today to hang up my art all the way in the district.

Delta Blues,
HL

The first story I ever sat down with the intent to write as an actual story was a version of cinderella.

Cinderella trapped in a squat with a heroin junkie dope sick on a detox. I brought him a stuffed dragon to keep him company on the half burnt, nearly black mattress. He said thank you and asked me to find every syringe in the house so he could try to break them open because he was sure there had to be a little left.

I haven't ever put heroin into my body. Shocking, I know. I'm a wound tight, fast person. I'd rather peel off my nails and arrange the medicine cabinet for a month straight without stopping than drool on myself. Heroin was different to me. I couldn't deal with how sick people around me would get. That is what I hated the most. The nodding too. And that well. The whole killing people thing is pretty lame too.

When I stopped doing crystal meth I didn't necessairly get "more regular" I just became the wacked out desert weirdo that I always considered myself. I lived a block from a college campus with thousands of students. Kids with dorm rooms and a home away from the place they lived and like. Food programs where they always had food. They were my age and I hated them all for that.

I ate mexican strawberry cookies from the dollar store for dinner in the living room set on the roof of where I lived. I stole the goodwill donations every night to try and add to my dress and I sat in a library reading childrens books because for a long time my eyes couldn't focus on words because of everything I smoked and put up my nose. I hung with the homeless kids. Most were junkies a lot of them weren't. Chicago, the leader, had a lawn chair that he would sit in on any given street corner on any given night. Everybody would pool change for a case of beer or bad pot. I don't remember ever talking with everybody but it was a place I felt like I belonged.

I wore a puffy black ball gown with a pair of adidas pants at all times. My hair was half hot pink and the rest black, I wore giant, fuzzy, hot pink whale slippers and both of my arms had thirty four metal bracelts each.

When Robb went missing I wouldn't change my clothes or take off my bracelets or even put my hair in a pony tail until I found him. I felt like if I looked different at all it would somehow make more "change" and I wouldn't find him. When I finally got that phone call I changed my clothes but kept on the bracelets, and I did that for years.

They represent a binding of my life. I only wear them all on my left arm now and there are only 14 left. Maybe someday I will get to lose them all. Who knows. I love meeting men that tell me my bracelts are "gaudy" and I should "re consider" wearing so many. I giggle to myself and bite my lip.

Anyway this went a bit off topic but I wrote a story about being cinderella, except I was in a vomit stained half burned squat wearing a puffy gown I stole out of a good will dumpster and the junkie on the mattress, not the stroke of midnight turning me into what i really existed as, was scaring me. When I went to run out my dress tripped me. I fell through a third story half collapsed stair case stair and lost my slipper (A neon pink fuzzy whale.)

Cinderella never had to bleed like I did she had to scrub floors and dust. I'da traded her, even though she never got to wear anything neon.

The first story I ever sat down with the intent to write as an actual story was a version of cinderella. That was eight years ago and last night Jami said to me

"You know I have your cinderella story in the file cabinet still."

And I
looked at her and
at my bracelets on my arms and
said

"Just keep it in there
for a while. I'm sure
we'll find a use

for something like
that
someday."

In case you miss me.
And Jami, who will actually KUHHILLL me if she finds out I put this up.

HL

I was laying in my bed this afternoon, taking my 3:00 nap after work, in a daze looking at all of the canvas stacked in my room. A fantastic older man at my work, Jerry, seems to genuinely enjoy going to yard sales specifically to find me old canvas to paint on.
"This is Las Fucking Vegas. The whole towns for sale" he says all the time.

This is great news for me because I paint the frames of the art like it's the canvas. One canvas, just canvas without a frame, is an old faded green color with a horse painted onto it. The detail is beautiful.

I was laying in my bed today watching that horse, considering the amount of work the artist put into giving it such life. First I was lost in thought about what base I would cover the canvas for texture. After that I contemplated color patterns.

I never actually debate any of my paintings. If I do in the end I just get pissed when it doesn't turn into what i wanted it to turn into. The only thing I ever sat down to paint and actually created was my Black Madonna. I had a dream last night that that piece was stolen from me. Considering the archetype it is based off of I guess it was a positive dream. The rest of my paintings, they just turn into a mess that if you look closely enough you might see the message.

It became sad to me, watching that horse watching me as I debated the texture of disaster I would cover it with. I thought to myself "People that call themselves painters can paint a horse and I don't have the slightest clue how." I was sad for the real world, for all of those landscaping paintings, animal paintings, portraits.

Why can't I make anything normal? More so, why do I insist on covering all simple beauty with what looks like a combustion of glittery confusion? It's like I never do anything with any focused skill because I never learned discipline.

So I watched that horse for a very long time and decided that maybe someday I would be ok with something so simple and regular in my presence. That I'll get to a day where I won't have to cover it up and write it a story.

A few hours later I'm sitting on the couch eating twizzlers next to Jami, who is watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I'm reading the tribune on my phone and not paying attention when she says to me

"When you have millions and millions of dollars can I be your stylist?"

Slowly I look over at her.

"What?"

"Can I pick out your clothes when you're rich?"

"You can pick out my clothes now."

"I'm just saying. I don't want to be one of the people you're calling on the phone to tell all about your life when it becomes something they only put on tv or in magazines. I want to be there with you, I want to be a part of it."

I laugh.

"A part of what?"

"You are going to be very famous and you are going to have everything you could ever want or need."

"Are you tripping or listening in on my phone calls or both?"

She sits up straight. Points her finger at me.

"I read what you write and I see what you paint and you are not from here."

"Nobody is from here."

"But you are different and you know it. If you know it you know what you will do with it. You are going to have everything, and you are going to be happy, and you are going to make a difference in a lot of peoples lives, and I want to be there with you."

I put down the twizzlers, watching the wall for a while before turning back to her.

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes. Without a doubt. And I want to pick out your clothes."

I chew another twizzler.

"Alright, but tomorrow is casual Friday and I can wear jeans."

She laughs.

"Just don't ever change yourself to be like anybody else or it'll never happen. I know you're in hell half the time trying to figure it all out, but you will, and it will pay off" she says as I

drop my jaw and choke on a half eaten

twizzler.

"Sit down and tell me the story of how you met him."
Evenly I watch her.
"Maybe not today."
"Today."

"We met on the same day I met you; the night before actually in a hotel room on the outskirts of Detroit. Hippy flipping out of our minds and having vegan chili mac and muffin fights. He didn't look at me and it had bothered me; in fact, he just kept telling me to shut up. So I did what anybody like me at that point would do."

"Which was?"

"I went to the other room and put on a better wig, did my makeup and an outfit that didn't look like I passed out on the sidewalk at Hart Plaza all day. After that I went back into the room and he looked at me like I wanted him to look at me and proceeded to banter for hours about how I was going to take him out to dinner someday, and he'd fall in love with me. I told him that we were connected, and he scoffed at me and I, in an acid daze, twirled my index finger at him and told him that he would see. It got to a point where it was only me him and Phil in the room and I couldn't stop hysterically laughing, for hours. He had a pillow over his face and said he was going to suffocate himself if I didn't shut the fuck up. I'd finally get quiet, Phil would snort, and it would start all over again. Until well past sunrise."

She laughs her deep laugh.

"So. I have to tell you. It was mine and Missa's brilliant idea to steal all of the hotel blankets and take them to the river, where the whole Chicago crew sat all day, where I met you and Jason and Clay. We talked for a long time but his ego was no match for mine. Right before he left he asked me for my phone number. I rolled my eyes at him. Derek Missa and I stayed until the party closed, went to an after party and I drove from Chicago to Detroit at around six am. I hadn't slept in weeks but I was still all glitched out so when I finally did get home I cleaned out my car for a few hours. Right as I was about to pass out he called me and asked what I was doing. I said oohhhh nothing. He asked me to go to dinner.

I should have slept but I drove from OP to Barrington (two hours) to meet up with him instead. Long story short I threw his drink on him and threw a chair, making a huge scene because of something he had nonchalantly brought up to me. I screamed at him in a Papadaux that he could have just been straight and fucking asked me what he had tried to in so many other words ask me, and he stared at me in total dumb shock and told me he didn't know. That he sincerely didn't know and he took my hand and said to me I know you won't eat any of this anyway lets get out of here.

I took him down Lake Shore Drive to Montrose Beach. We walked around in the dark. I don't remember a single thing we talked about except my family, which I didn't talk about at that point in my life with anybody. I took him back to Phil's and just as he got out of the car he looked at me and asked me

why I made the decision to live my life the way that I did. I almost cried but I came up with a very cocky explanation at the time. As he left I told him he was beautiful, like money, and to use it as best as he could. After that I got out my coke and got high so I could forget him, and I did. For a long time.

Around a year later we started talking on the phone."

"Did you like him?"

"I guess had I felt ways about things I would have, but I appreciated how fascinated he was with my life and kept it at that. Trust me, in the long run that fascination would turn to a fear that will ruin a lot of things but at the time it was cool. He was in Chicago once and came to use my microwave before going to a party. He ripped off my wig when he got into my building, right there in the lobby. Horrified, I tried to punch him and he grabbed my wrist and said to me Squirrel Baby you are so much prettier without all of that hair and makeup and layers of clothing.

He came to Chicago again and I was trying to find him at Union Station for hours and hours. When I finally did I took him to the warehouse. He was so fucked up and out of it (on K)

I took him to the warehouse. Yes, that one, and he just sat there for about twelve hours and marveled at everything. He kept saying Squirrel you live in a novel. This place cannot be real. This is the most incredible place i have ever seen. I need to move here and live here. I told him quietly that living there is scary and he kept interrupting me, so I decided that in a few hours he'd see it all a lot more clear. When the sun started coming up. Paula wanted to kill him instantly. She told me if she caught him sleeping she would cut him up so I kept making sure he didn't fall asleep.

That morning Lee went running off on the West side of Chicago (from the warehouse) in negative zero weather wearing a bra, no shoes, and cut off shorts. I wasn't interested in trying to find her so Robb and I went to Maxwell Street. When we came back Paula and I had a huge fight about her. I don't remember how violent it got I just remember falling down the seventy stairs and walking quickly out of there without a coat. i walked about a block from the warehouse and sat down in the snow to smoke.

A few minutes later he walks up and wraps a mink coat around me. He didn't have anything to say. I watched him sit there on the curb, stunned at everything he had just seen. I didn't feel stunned, I didn't feel anything. He kept asking me over and over

what are you going to do now?

I told him to shut up and he replaced that with Heather please come to Arizona with me right now. Just get on a plane and lets go. He kept saying over and over and over in a dazed mumble

You are going to die here. I no longer had a concept of what that even meant.

We went to Brenden's after that. He asked me how he would get back to Phil's. Listlessly I responded that there are busses and trains and all that shit and he'd find them. He left that house on California & Augusta without a clue how to get the train station. Before he walked out he told me to remember everything he said and somehow, some way, I did.

And it scared the shit out of me.

We talked on the phone every day after that for a month. I don't remember any of it I only remember I was trying to count money most of the time and kept losing count. He disappeared for a few weeks, around the time the drugs in the city were getting cut a lot more and nobody could get a high or keep themselves functional. I tried to quit and went into full phsycosis mode. After that I crash landed in Phoenix and slept for three weeks. I forgot all about him.

But one day in February I went outside and sat on M's massive wrap around balcony. It wasn't cold out and I watched the whole sunset in the mountains and this light went on in my head, that light of him saying slowly over and over

When you get to Phoenix, remember to call me.

So I called him. He said I'll be there in three hours. He walked into that house, took my wrist, and pulled me down all of the stairs out of there.

I never went back.

You know the rest."

She lights a cigarette, laughing out her short laugh.

"I don't think rest is the right word."

"Someday maybe I'll have a better one. Just not today. That was a long time ago and time has worked in my favor at this point. It's a lot to see and a lot to feel, but you know, James,

how high I always keep
those
scales. There is so much

beauty but so much
ugly that now, for
the most part

I only think of the
sunset.