Conversations Among the Ruins

Valentines day is always a strange time to me. Likely, I'm working a monster shift, full of extra tables and featured drinks - red colored. It always made me sad in the past that I wasn't a fancy girl in a tight dress eating steak and lobster. This year was no different, as I trudged to work after kissing my love goodbye with a frown.

I went to Starbucks and got my venti four shot iced coffee, 3 pumps raspberry and two inches of cream. It reminds me of a place that's a million years away and besides, it's pink and festive. "Where did you hear of this?" The barista asks.

"I worked in a coffee shop. They had them, they were called coffee coolers. You can do them with any flavored syrup."

Today I am blessed with the ability to just keep it short. It's all a long story, that Thank God I don't have to tell the barista at Starbucks today.

I got clean the day before Valentines day and proceeded to work the worst waitress shift I've ever had. Where I walked in to eight tables that were mine that weren't regularly there, so nobody knew any of the numbers.

A few days after that my friend Heather was murdered. By her husband. We went to the services and everybody was going out for cocktails. I told them I had to just go home and slinked away.

Two years later and I acccept that I will, for the rest of my life, one day at a time, be in the process of learning what it is to "feel" in human life, instead of "get a cocktail" in order not to.

I woke up with my valentine and our littlest valentine (Penelope) yesterday wedged between us. We slept all day. Well I wrote in my notebook and Harmon slept next to me.

"Before I go to work I have to shine my shoes, shave, do my hair, put on my suit in order to be entirely ready."

Entirely ready.

Those words have stuck with me this week. I didn't see pretty women in tight dresses that I'd never be like last night. I saw people beaming they were so happy to be having a nice dinner together with each other. Dudes have long mac if they're taking their ladies out to my work, and I was happy for those women, because they deserve that. Everybody does.

I got home at about one and in the dark on top of my computer was a big russle stover box of chocolates.

So I cuddled Penelope and my love and smiled quietly, they way you do to yourself in the dark.

Life sucks when it's a Sunday and I have to close and my feet hurt and it isn't ever going to end because
nobody will leave and the patio still has to be broken down and the jelly beans have to be wrapped and there is a run

in my tights and I'm fucking exhausted because my boyfriend is out of town and my dog needs me to be home with her but I'm not.

I'm tired it's been like eighty laps around this place today and poor, pretty, privileged me. Poor me and my three hundred dollar shifts a night five to six days a week and my poor starbucks and shoes and crystal balls and my misusse and expensive hair product, mac makeup and God knows whatever else I feel like buying.

She asks me if I will take her to the bus. It's finally forty five past midnight when she asks me and I tell her yes because I work on the East side and fuck that if a girl is walking down that street at that time. She has a pretty face and rarely says much, I haven't talked to her much at all.

I met her Fiance on New Years Eve when we were all still there at midnight watching fireworks. I was slightly taken aback when I met him, but I thanked him for making her so happy, and that it was nice to meet him.

"It's going to take me two and a half hours to get home on the bus." She says as we get into the car. "It's so fucked up by my house. Theres this homeless village, just tents and shopping carts for blocks, and I have to walk through that shit. It scares me."

"Well do you arm yourself?"

"What?"

"Do you have a gun?" I ask her.

She shakes her head no.

"Maybe you should. Tell me where to go I'll take you home." I say, annoyed because I live forty minutes in the other direction.

She starts talking, really fast. As if she doesn't know where the start or end is.

"I used to be a dancer, I made a ton of money and I was really really good at it. I was the top girl. I was taking this medicine and because of it I got Chromes disease, and people at work think I'm lazy, but I have the disease, and I don't have insurance or any medicine and I'm really sick. I can't dance anymore because of the disease I gained fifty pounds. I had to have emergency surgery and they took out most of my intestines and I have this big, awful scar."

She stops talking to take a breath, as the above paragraph was a giant run on sentence.

"I hate my scar." She says as she stares out the window at all of the people in tents (North LV)

"sometimes I think I can go back into the strip club and work and just wear something that covers the scar. I have a kid that I'm trying to support. I'm supposed to get a few million dollars from a settlement because of the medicine I took that gave me the disease but who knows when that is going to happen.

At least I found (my fiance) to help me take care of my daughter. I'm so fucking sick though Heather. So sick and fucking scared."

"Do you have parents?" I ask her. She's chewing her thumb. "Uh - uh" she says without expression as she chews her thumb for another minute. She takes it out of her mouth

"My ma died of AIDS when I was really little. My dad has been locked up my whole life. It's just always been me and I can't even fuckin hustle anymore because I'm trying to be a better person and shit for my kid."

And we're sitting here in my car and I just take my hand and put it on top of hers. Put it on top of hers and tell her that

she doesn't have to be scared and
that she isn't as alone as sometimes maybe it feels like she is.

I drop her off in an apartment complex and drive through the tented shopping cart community in a quiet daze.

You never know what the fuck somebody else's life is like or what they're going through.

Remember that if you forget to look outside of yourself today,

Try to do something kind to correct it.

I am not the sort
for a glittery dress and
curls in my hair

on a packed floor
somewhere - at an
expensive dinner table

somewhere, with a
drink in my hand
somewhere

for when it turns
midnight again.

I've never been impressed
by cheering or
fireworks, and I actually

don't like noise - especially
when made
by paper products

assembled in a country
I never learned about.

I don't like parties or
crowds as they make me
uncomfortable.

For the new year I
worked
myself

stupid. A five hundred
dollar night, not the best

but not bad.

I saw all sorts of people -
bored people, happy people,
people that couldn't
believe where they were and

who they were with. People that
bitched about tuna and
people that were beautiful and

well dressed and fancy,
with real smiles.

My job is a window
into my very own world.

I cannot stand
New Years Eve. I got

beaten up
pretty badly one year
and so I make sure I work

so that I can forget
about the hope I had
for that night, and about

what really happened.

Like I was just a teenager
in a glittery dress
with curls

in my hair.

This morning my feet
are covered in blisters

just the same
as they would be

if I were that girl
instead. The past is void.

It actually doesn't matter.
None of it matters.

What matters is my inept
ability to feel

the things that got dressed up,
trashed, and high over feeling

for my entire adult life.

(Adult. Had to think about
that for a second.)

My feelings matter,
the past does not, and

sometimes, on a roof top
staring silently at fireworks,

I choose to just be grateful
for my own still silence
in a yelling crowd

that I can feel
at all.

I'm so
fucking
tired that I can't

even write it.

My body hurts.
My whole body and
my feet and the upper

right side of
my head. My fingernails
ache.

There was a rodeo
in Las Vegas and the
people sitting for dinner

were a big deal. I could tell
because nobody
just wears

shoulder pads covered in
sued fringe paired with those
kinds of

diamonds. (The sort
that cover

your whole
wrist.)

They ate and drank
and none of them laughed
or smiled much

as they left.

A crumpled ticket
to the rodeo was left
on the table.

$250
the printed price tag
for the ticket
and a photo

of the woman
I just served

salad and chardonnay
also printed
on the ticket.

They had photoshopped
her eyes
so they'd look more green.

I just sat in that empty
trashed

room for a minute.
In my own world

with the rich
and

printed.

It was worthlessly

perfect.

The first guests I had in my new serving job life sat before me. I'm a waitress again, and thank god for that.

I'm back in the skirt and heels with a crumber in my hand talking with two guests of mine. For a good half hour they told me about their lives in Southern California and asked me what I thought of So Cal. Naturally I shared my story of being nearly eaten to death by a wave at La Jolla, walking Coronado with my baby niece recently, and how really, what I want out of life is simple.

"What is that?" They asked.

"A jeep. A book deal. And a few dogs. In Malibu."

They laughed before asking "What does that even mean?"

"Gentlemen. What it means is that someday I hope to be an old woman with long silver hair, walking down Zuma Beach, wearing very colorful scarves."

The man to my left stares at me with his mouth open a bit before, after a strange pause, saying the following -

"I have two teenagers, and one day we were walking down Zuma Beach, and this old woman in dozens of scarves of every color started just randomly talking with them. I have never seen anybody have their attention like she did. She was talking with them quietly about wisdom and kindness. It blew my mind and is my favorite memory of that beach."

I nodded my head with a smile, asking next about his views on quantum physics.

"What?!" They laughed.

"Parallel Universe, where everything already happened and split off into another form of living, until it all meets back again, and strange connective instances of common ground occur."

My guests glance at each other before he says

"I'm really glad you're here."

And I take a breath, because for the first time in my serving life, it isn't "You don't belong here" It's "I"m glad you're here." And so am I, because

When you end up in the exact same place you have already been, after so much living, it is in fact, completely different.