Conversations Among the Ruins

The sublime fact
that I guess I missed

is that once you deal
with your own insanity,

you are left to have the
sort of decision regarding
weather or not or how much

or how little
I will deal with the insanity
of others.

You can draw a line
in the sand with a

pinkie finger or a
blow torch. The sand

sifts

just the same.

I am not fascinated and
I don't want much to do

with anyone. But I call him,
to say hello to him, and

tell him that I love him
very much.

His dad got off of his
prison sentence and
I tell him about the

gallery walls, price tags,
and the puppy I want that I
can't for the life of me

find.

"I live in a house with a
green couch, zebra rug,
and a man that I love. He

taught me
how to be treated
and more importantly

how to treat the people
that love me."

"I had one of those."

He says, at work in
Los Angeles with a sunny
laugh.

He asks of my rocks and
what I'm writing.

"A script. I'm
terrified. And I hate
everybody right now."

He is the only person
in my life that was that
in my life of whom I still

speak with. Sometimes I
think it's because he was
the last one to see me

jump off the cliff and
on a day once, on a
gray ice drizzling highway

during some of the worst
times of my life

He held my hand and
said to me that someday
we would meet again

under the sun in
California.

I don't ask if he's spun
today. I don't want to know.

I just laugh at how
he says it's a miracle we
never had children,

that they'd be
far too beautiful and
even farther too

insane.

I hang up the phone
on our green couch
with my

zebra rug.

I love that I can be
in love and love

others.

There is nobody
in my life quite
like him.

We used to
beat each other
unconscious -

in trailer parks
at night and
in the morning we'd

split a stick of
chewing gum -
watching the sun.

We gave each other
the middle finger
for sweetest day,

cracked out in a
car on some drive
where the trees
patterned. I pushed

that man to the
brink of death.
Literal death,

and years after
he would sit in my
apartment on
Lake Shore Drive

and give me
water.

I'm not sure why,
ten years later

he is the spirit
that I recognize
the most. I feel

his pain and confusion,
and his favorite,
the "fuck you"

to the world
because of the life
he made for himself.

We know
where we're
from - and we're

grateful for the
twists of life
that turned to
the now, so far

from there.

"I left the number
for the guy for
the tickets you want

in my office, of which
I left for the day. But
I'll call him tomorrow."

"Heather I love
your boyfriend
because he knows

how to love you."

"And I love those
palm trees, because
they know

how to love you."

I trip on him not
taking care of
himself, I want the

very best for him -
and I love him in the
only way I know how,

over the phone with
occasional visits, as a
friend that has his

absolute back. When
I don't call back
for weeks he thinks

I've died.
"You were always
supposed to die.
Death chased you,

and I well."

He doesn't say it.

"I want your life to
be like it is and
better."

Hanging up I
smile at the order
of life.

Rio, Las Vegas.

My murder sunglasses and cork wedges glide though the casino. I find them, drunk and squabbling. Well Squabbling where she tells him she loves him, he says I love you too, as a best friend, lets change the subject.

Wordlessly I watch their conversation, interrupting occasionally to ask her to talk to me in French. She does, we laugh.

I point to him.

"You are fucking selfish."

I point to her

"And you allow it."

"So that's the sense. One of you make a decision and be done with it. You actually need to leave him. Let him sleep with the thousands of women he still has to sleep with and figure it out. By that time, you'll be over it and into somebody that isn't such a sociopath, and he'll have syphillis, two hundred pairs of shoes, and a great lawyer. Likely sleeping with him also. He isn't healthy. He doesn't want to be healthy, and you're either going to wake up or go down with him."

I smile at him sweetly. He makes a face.

My murder sunglasses and cork wedges have been panicking since I put them on, because I've been in a panic all day and they are now inclined as "me. "So I left the house to say hello because the walls were closing in. She turns to me.

"He said it was you that made him that way."

"I don't think I"m deserving of a decade of those credits, but ok."

And there I am so tall with my eyes shifting. My father calls me at 1:19 on a Monday and I almost lose it with anxiety. I haven't felt this kind of anxiety in years and I'm about to implode.

I have been stuttering in jammed syllables to Justin since they got here that I am not in a position to go out anywhere.

"You are so incredibly sane and beautiful anyway." He says. I sit at a listless slot machine. Standing up I blurt out

"I have to go. Like right now. I have to leave right now. It's too Vegas in here. I'm sorry I can't stay I have to leave. I'm fucking cracking up literally. Like the shell face on nickelodean. I am not sane, I am not rational, and I don't have it together. This is a grand illusion and I'm sorry for everything that ever happened. I don't know if my payroll sent for my entire company and my car insurance is due two days before yesterday and I don't know why my dad just called me and I don't have a dollar to tip the valet and i can't write a book, a book proposal, or show up to anywhere i need to go. When I see people I see two of them. Two. The one they want me to see and the one I feel. Nobody matches up. I can't finish any of the paintings I start and three weeks ago I was in love with somebody. I mean total stupid rainbow like love and it wasn't real. I can't stop picking at my face or washing my hair and look at my cuiticles. I'm fucking losing it man and I'm not going to do it in a casino or in front of you."

The tears run down my face as I put my sunglasses on. For five minutes he hugs me, saying over and over

"You are not what or who you were, and you never will be again. Fuck the details. Nothing can be as bad as it already has been."

"That isn't the STANDARD. I'm crying at RIO."

For five more minutes I cry in the middle of the casino. He cups the back of my head with his hands, before we break apart and I say

"Hold Tight"

before I turn and walk out of the building.

Two minutes later I call back my dad, happily asking what's up. He saw somebody wearing my massive pink boots today and had to call me to tell me. Ninety pounds comes off of my chest. I drive to Jami's and lay on the couch as she watches Oprah and cuts up peppers for dinner.

Later my mentor and I have a long discussion as I layer endless paint, drink stale coffee, and chain smoke marlboros.

"Everything looks like fucking fruity pebbles that I"m painting right now. That about defines my chakra situation. I started six pieces. All I can do is get the foundation of each and I'm afraid to do anything of structure over it."

"You're emotionally cluttered."

"Do you know what the word clutter means to me? I have a high threshold."

"You are an emotional hoarder. You hoard away everything you feel and arrange it. You're running out of room. Do you even want to be in recovery any more?"

" Yes. But I want to stop meeting people in recovery and just recover. I trust like five people in those rooms and maybe that sounds a little fucked up, but it's true. I want nothing to do with most of them. I've never wanted to take a hit of glass with a drink in my hand so badly sober in my life as I did last night, and I want to know where the fuck that all came from. I"m like right back where I started. I can't check out of anything any more. The paintings don't finish, the poems don't add up, and don't even ask me about the book. I"m pissed at Robb for all of those years that I looked back on him as a wonderful person, and I"m pissed that I have the sense to never ask "Why" about anything.

Because I asked "Why" for years, and I never got an answer. Why is redundant. But I want to ask it anyway. It's a rhetorical question anyway. I never wished for this kind of evoloution, not on this Earth, not after I walked through the places that required me to forget when I did ask. But I found out why. If anything, I know why, and why isn't the cure. There is no cure.

There is no cure. There is not a cure, only more work and the knowledge to stop asking questions of which contain answers I cannot accept.

I love this vanilla coffee by the way. That's something."

We continue to talk for hours. I think I am finally tired enough to sleep. I hope.

"So what
are you so
afraid of?"

She asked me
last week.

I opened my mouth in protest but nothing came out. I haven't slept yet nope not tonight. I've been up searching literary agents, producing botched attempts at query letters. Hating myself because I need to be writing the book I need to be writing, but I can't.

I sit here, dumb with writers blockage, trying to re tell the story once again. The sun came into the windows at some point. I've been staring at versions of this screen. I'm out of cigarettes. Every address for every place is dotted with "New York, New York."

"You belong in Malibu. You're a neo beach hippy with a sexy deep Chicago voice. The places are cheap, you'd be surprised." Her face has a pointed simplicity to it as her crimson lips light a cigarette.

"Malibu isn't impossible. You said you loved the PCH. What the fuck are you waiting for anyway? An Earthquake here to see the Luxor crack in half? Is that what it would take? You appear perfectly capable of publishing novels in any place you just aren't letting yourself. You could always move to New York with us. We'd be poor but we'd have fun."

New York, New York

over and over under every agents name. With each letter of that double named city and place under "address" I falter.

I couldn't even live rationally in Chicago. I got to be young and wasted every night and stressed out. But I was young and wasted every night and stressed out, the sort where projectile vomiting absinthe on Dearborn & Hubbard after my lunch shift. Now I just sit in this condo and paint and try to remember to breathe. I swear I'm in some current state of panic and all I have to do is sit down and write out what I need to write out. If I couldn't even live the right way in that city how am I supposed to write to people that hold successful jobs in a place like New York?"

It was my original dream in life once, to be one of them. After that my life happened and it scares me, trying to speak that language, lost in the language of myself as a child being called stupid by a teacher in school because I couldn't divide numbers, which I still can't do. That teacher still works nights at Khols in the suburb I grew up in.

If I think I am so together
and I think I am so progressive, why
the fuck
can I not

do this?

I sit on this blog writing on shit that is simply a distraction. The past, the present, and some fuzzy future, distracting. None of it serves the ultimate purpose. Why am I writing this? Because I can ramble to remind myself I am capable of writing, something, just not the right thing. Why am I making this so difficult?

"So you know, you have "it". The "It" that makes it. But so do millions of others. And you know very well that once you start with an idea, the idea spreads through shared conscious mental capacity. Watch what you write, because if you don't do it, somebody else is going to. And if you think it all of the time and do nothing, that's even worse."

So I search apartment rentals in Malibu and ignore my sick body. I simply have some illness right now where my whole body is tense but limp, I get dizzy and hyper and exhausted, but I can't sleep. I think straight in twenty minute patterns,

And people keep saying to me

"You need to rock your job right now. That is all you can do. Just learn it and be capable. Fuck everything else and just keep going with that. You have to do the best you can. ="

Running an office teaches me to be more organized. Which I'm still fairly bad at. I have two and a half desks in my office and I'm a grown up, so "The mess is mine and I know where everything is." Is not currently acceptable.

Because this mess is still mine, and I have little idea where anything is.

Nobody is going to solve my problems for me. Nobody is going to publish a book for me that I don't have the capacity to write. Nobody is going to love me without sickness if I am this sick, and I'm not going to get a damn thing done if I don't know what done even means or what I'm trying to get.

The maze is simple with an ariel view, isn't it but I wear my wings on my middle finger.

It always turns to that conversation.

That conversation where he looks at me sincerely, stares, and laughs slightly. I wait for it, like a bell on an oven.

He's Las Vegas Strip drunk, exhausted, laying on my living room floor. Paint, canvas, brushes, and more canvas surrounds us. He takes hundreds of pictures of this. I don't ask why.

Angela is in the bathroom, putting on her fire and ice lipstick with a smile, clicking her chic boots, asking if she should wear her skinny jeans or tights out.

The bell dings, he says

"You are alive today. Do you know how amazing that is? Do you know how much it means to me to see you sitting in this mess making things? You made it out and you're functional, responsible, and even nice. Look at where you live. I never imagined such a thing because it was unimaginable. You sitting here like this right now is one of the most important things I have ever seen."

Instead of looking at him I concentrate very hard at throwing paint.

"Melissa is dead. Do you remember her?"

"Yes. Not surprising. She's dead and you're not. I'm sorry to hear that. You cared about her a lot but she took you to a lot of places away from any form of this place ever happening. She was a profound mess, but she loved you, and I know how you felt about her."

"I think about her when I use the color red in my paintings because that wasn't ever her color, but she dyed her hair and tattooed so much of herself in it anyway. The red got all over her, and it didn't ever come out. Whenever I put red on a picture it totally fucks it up."

"Why were you thinking about frosted flakes so much today?"

I stare at him.

"What did you say?"

"I just keep thinking about frosted flakes."

Calmly I place down the paint brush.

"You make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in a career you love. You live in Los Angeles and you love it. You have a beautiful woman that loves you in the other room putting on lipstick to look like she wants to look next to you. So why the fuck are you still wasted on my floor, huh? Talking about how alive I am like it's impossible. It isn't impossible. We're on the same goddamn floor in the same world, from the same world.

You have everything, and you treat it like nothing, and I'm not going to beat your face in with a skol bottle any more, I'm going to tell you that it's painful that I can't say the things to you that you say to me. So if you want to read my head, read my head, if you want to read my written work read my written work, but watch out for what you'll find regarding both of those machines, because

as you know, I get a bit sociopath about things, and you aren't going to like what you hear. It'll eat away at you and you will not want to talk to me any more. He places his wrist over his eyes. Sighs.

"I know."

"I fuckin love you dude, a lot of people do, but your funeral would be really boring. Like nobody trendy would be there at all. The music would be dull, and nobody would let you wear your toe sneakers. No guest list, just mauve flowers."

"I love you too Heather."

I squeeze half of a red tube of paint to the canvas, smearing it with my hand, void of reply.