Conversations Among the Ruins

I bought some expensive
shoes today and

in a sea of shoes
wished I were a person
that knew how to wear

nice girly shoes. My mom,
when we were kids,
on Easter would put us in

those shiny white kid
shoes with frilly
socks.

I cried this morning,
eating good humor

strawberry ice cream
bars in bed because

it is Easter and I
miss my mother. For
my whole life she

would make use
elaborate Easter
baskets, magically

pastel and sweet. We'd
burn a lamb cake and
decorate it with jelly beans,

too much frosting and
cocoanut and we always
made a big production

of dying eggs. I also cried
in Target yesterday, walking
through those isles.

They were sweet and pastel
without my mothers magic,
in it's place

loud, rude, stressed out
parents. Hardly an acceptable
substitute.

So I called my mother and
father today and
smiled for the sun in Chicago.
The walk they took Chunk on,

the jelly beans I know they
feed him. And I went to a
shoe store

to find some fancy shoes.
Because I was a little girl once
whose mother made sure I

had such things. It reminded me
that if I stop and remember

how fortunate I was and
am, that I am also

just as loved, and
capable and not

so far at all.

I"m not sure what it is about them. They came from some club kid I knew, where they lived quietly in his trendy Wicker Park apartment, in a box covered in dust under a table.

Like all times in that house the memory is blurred. That club kid was, for a spell, a central point in my "new city life" One of those cool friends you have that years later you only remember, when you grow into a calmer version where cool gets silly and life is just different. Not superior or less, just different. He played Pink Panther on mute on his TV to the latest Global Underground sets. We all have our quirks but that one of his always stuck out to me. The walls were bright orange and lime green, but painted neatly. They're all either promoters, dj's, or graphic designers, in those sorts of crowds I swear. For a while I had a great time running around with all of that.

I met a famous dj once. He was sitting on my couch and I freaked him out, asking him about his family and what he wants out of life instead of what continent he was playing on next weekend. That moment and finding that box are two memories I drift off to from time to time. Total evidence that I didn't belong nearly as much as I convinced myself I did.

"What is in that box?"

"Elephants" my friend had said. After that
"Do you want them? I feel bad that they just sit there but I have nowhere to put them."
I was shocked he would give them to me, flattered and happy. A few months later they finally made it to my house. He had cleaned them up and told me it was important to take care of them, these stoic wooden elephants. Two very light brown, two very dark brown, and three little white ones.

When really difficult things or really beautiful things in my life take place I tend to hold onto the objects in which were important and regular during that time. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe it's to remember the lesson. Maybe I just like tons of stuff cluttered all around me. Ask my stuffed duck, hippopotamus, piggy banks, TY crab, 500 rocks and minerals, and a gaggle of other characters and they'll tell the stories to me over and over so I don't have to tell them to anybody else.

I didn't know it at the time but the week I was given those elephants was the week I seemingly got onto the indescribable total Go roller coaster of harsh, beautiful, dramatic self metamorphasis of which the past four years has consisted of. At the time I was just a girl with a new set of elephants, too strung out on cool to even possess the simple concept of hope.

The most traumatic part of a break up is taking down a Christmas tree. The second most traumatic part of a break up is sitting back on your ass at your parents house, in a room full of boxes, boxes of YOUR stuff refusing to un pack anything, because it can't possibly be happening. Only it is.

All I took out for a really long time were those elephants and a stuffed hippopatamus named Hippaa because it made me feel as if I belonged where I was. I am not a "duster" as I have forty given objects arranged on any table wherever I live, but I always kept the elephants shining and amongst all of my favorite rocks and bamboo plants . It was as if I was waiting for my life to come back, and when it did, it would see that I cared very much for those times. But that life of mine couldn't hear what I wasn't saying because I didn't know how and eventually, I left, bringing the elephants with me.

There have been a few since that have joined the family. A little white creamer holder that it pours out of the spout. Her name is Masha. I went to an estate sale in this crazy ass hoarders house and found three others, two gray, one orange marble, and a somewhat ostrich like animal that was made from African mud from Nancy, who isn't technically an elephant, but fits in perfectly. (Uh the elephant not NS. I'm proofing this and falling asleep.)

A year ago at this time I was writing "Elephants" under the list headline of NOT SHIPPING - CAR. There were only about five other things written without question on that list. Packing up my little family within my own consciousness was the very last thing I packed when I left Illinois, because that was the beginning of me losing my shit on a regular basis because of the immesurable fear I felt as a result of huge, abrupt change, and it was is I needed that reminder that some things, no matter what, kept standing. In my life most change has been brought on by some and if not that ended in catastrophe, and I did it anyway, and I can say that I am in a place in my life where I am satisfied, less paranoid, and even, happy. But packing the elephants still feels like stabbing myself in the head.

I remember it, in trucker sunglasses and Joe's baseball cap, sobbing tears onto the silk scarves I wrapped each one of them in last July. Because once the elephants are packed I'm not going back. I can dip into that still, how terrified I was to leave the only home and people I'd ever really known. Now it's just a gut sort of homesickness, where I wonder if I have made people sad, and I hope not, because I just want them to know that I am pretty good at life now and they should be proud. I could have never robbed myself of that decision.

I've moved twice since moving to this twisted little town and each time I am only at peace when my rocks, plants and elephants are in a presentable, favorable spot where I spend my time.

At Christmas I went home. It was a beautiful holiday and my favorite gift, by far, from my mother. I unwrapped the giant box and six yards of tissue paper, just staring up at her in awestruck - in my eyes, tears. She had given me three brand knew elephants. I hadn't ever told her or anybody really about any of the other ones and she had noticed anyway. Without a further word we cried for a minute. Now I have a family within my own consciousness that represents that my mother pays attention to what is important to me, even if it doesn't seem like something that should be. I don't think many people get that.

Also, the wallies, the root elephant that my counter tail painted for me. Yep. I carried an elephant through O'Hare security during the holidays, and the begining of it all, the "Anything is Possible" painting of a flying elephant from DEMF 06. So I've flown with more elephants than most. Speaking of my life as a circus..

Currently, mostly everything I own is in storage. I'm basically a gypsy. Be careful what you pretend to be until the day you become it. I never realized the significance of the elephants until I tried to put them into storage and fought with myself over it for days.

I've been training at a new job, moving, dealing with my current job, cleaning up the place I"m leaving, figuring out the place I'm going to, volunteering in an art gallery (where I am such a fucking awkward dork), trying to consistently write and make my own art, stay on top of my recovery, speaking on panels which means looking and sounding presentable (You all know how I hate washing my hair) and attempting to sleep a few hours a night at the same time. It's been busy, and none of the boxes have moved. I've been angsty and argumentative and pissy and exhausted. Eating like shit and feeling pale in the blistering sun.

Today my giant diet coke and I decided to tackle the room, and seriously, my whole head shut up as I unwrapped each elephant and found a tenderness of which I didn't think I was capable of any more. I arranged each and for a minute, felt like I was home.

My boyfriend says to me often "You have a charmed chaarrrrrmmmeeeeddddd life rocks." I say "yes" followed by "sh don't let them hear" and we laugh. Within those stoic wooden figures the best charms of all come out. The love I had and lost and appreciate to this day regardless of the frigid Chicago winter, the odd African clay duckling from a day my mentor and I sat under a giant tree as spring turned to Summer, the silent acknowledgement of what is within my heart by my mother, and the outpouring of creativity to canvas from one of my most parallel points in the universe, Corrine.

So I guess it took me a few thousand words to portray what it is about them. I'm going to sleep forever or 7a.m. Whichever comes first. The odds of that bet are, I assure you, total shit, and I get to have that today. X/

I know a lot more about
wearing a hot pink
sequined cowboy hat

to a white sox game
then I know about
love.

What are you
afraid of and
where aren't you
going?

Zip line stuck
zipper. I've got
a purple zebra

tape measure
if you need to be
sure.

Fast forward
again desk
collapse where
am I going

again? I

threw away every
paper in every
drawer today and

six empty packs
of M&M's. Where
did the time go?

Where did the
M&M's go?

(Inside of)

Nice pens
botched manicure
hiding tattoos under

sweater sleeves
during day long
meetings.

"Comb your
hair."

Tangerine fresh
I'm covered in
mud putty and
cheap

foundation with a

potty mouth for
these pyramid
eyes, putting

the self I put
into this life
to paper.

Dates, times,
numbers and
in between

watching the
walls.. wondering

deeply why
I get so pissed
when people try to

help me.

Can I get a
show of hands,

of the one
thousand six
hundred and

sixty seven
hits this blog
got yesterday?

Since I just destroyed
this poem with

tech talk, to
continue I

just talked with
my mother/ we
were on skype

I was digging
endlessly for first
an address and

after that
my tax forms. I
couldn't let it
go to stop

and talk.

"This is what
the progression
of checking out
of my life and into

a job that I cannot
handle has done
to me. I am off

the clock and
just on
another clock."

She laughed and
it sounded so nice
that I stopped

digging and
laughed
with her.

In a pile of stress
and papers and
wrecked hair,

I smile and
return.

I feel like Rapunzel sometimes, up in the tower I live in, either too caught up in my own isolated madness on a good day or laziness on a less than good day to leave. There wasn't a witch that cast a spell for me to stay up here like this, these walls are simply my own prison where I need to be, created wholly by myself. Making coffee, smoking cigarettes, trying to make art relevant to my own reflection of my current life experience and failing, because I don't understand my current life experience to a substantially massive degree.

As always I'm staring at this "write" screen, not coming up with much of anything. The screen starts ringing, my fathers name pops up on the Skype call. I'm hardly in the mood for conversation but answer anyway, because when you're a good daughter that's what you do, answer even when it's the last thing you feel like doing.

My mom fills the screen. Petite and blonde with giant crystal blue eyes, she looks less exhausted than normal. My mom loves Christmas. More so shopping for Christmas. Giving people things is how she expresses herself, always has been that way. On a good day I just tune it out and send her lists of stuff, and on a less than good day I have a hard time with that fact. For quite a while she rattles off what she's bought for people for the holiday, with the love of my life, Chunk, a Daschound, on her lap (though he is so fat he's about to fall off)

I have a daughter that I gave birth to, her name is Olivia Hope. I was a pretty messed up kid at that point and I didn't tell my parents I was pregnant or that I had a baby for a while after she was born. I had simply tuned my mother and father out of my life, told them I was leaving, left, and came back four months later, "un pregnant."

They said to me "You have lost weight" and I laughed it off. But it got to a point that I was so strung out and paranoid nine months later that I sat them down and quickly said "I had a baby. I gave her up for adoption. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but I was scared."

They didn't get mad. They didn't yell. They didn't say much of anything except for "Oh" and after that we didn't talk about if for years, mostly because I left again. For years. I left them. And they let me.

I wasn't ever what you would call bitter, on the surface at least. I wasn't anything. I was "oh" because I didn't know how to deal with it. I never knew how to ask them why it had to be that way. I felt I was the one that made it that way anyway. I kept in sporadic contact with Carrie and Scott, Olivia's mother and father and two of the most important, sacred people in my life, but I never saw her. My parents simply never asked me anything and I never told them anything. That is just the way it was. On a good day I understand that. On a less than good day I simply cannot stomach it.

In 2005 I went to the Zoo with Carrie Scott and Olivia. I was not ready to do that. All my father saw was me coming home from somewhere and crying for a week straight. I didn't understand why I cried so much, it was all confusion. I still don't.

My parents have always done their best for me. I say that with an honest edge if snapping truth. By 2005 I had gone back home and built a relationship with my parents. Based upon silence about where the hell I was for so long but at least it was something. I called it "Becky Connor Syndrome" Where in the show Roseanne, Becky leaves for two seasons and comes back a totally different actress and nobody ever says anything.

My father, in an attempt to protect me because he didn't like to see me crying, told me I should probably never speak to them again if that was what it was going to do to me. I was a very sick person, lost in a maze of active addiction and silence, and I couldn't deal with getting a parking ticket, let alone meeting my daughter.

But I started to get better through a lot of honest self work and Olivia started to be grown up enough to ask questions and want to see me. And by the Grace of God I was starting to be grown up enough to answer those questions and to see her. For all of those years I was terrified that she would just see what a fuck up I was, or that I would be a disappointment to her, or that she wouldn't like me. Not forming a relationship with an exceptionally special, unique little girl that I gave birth to as a direct result of my own self centeredness? Check mark.

My parents have always been very careful in bringing Olivia up to me, because chances are they say the wrong thing and I get very angry. Silently angry, because I have always felt that I am not their parents and I shouldn't have to be the one to Goddamn figure it out for them.

I invited Carrie, Olivia and Scott to my house when I was home for Thanksgiving. In short, my mother gave me a brain anurysm when she casually mentioned she'd be going out of town. Theres a scar on my hand from the desk top I tried putting my fist through when this situation was casually mentioned to me. Up until recently I lived in a giant three bedroom house alone. I paced that house about a thousand times, but I never brought it up to her.

I didn't say "How could you just leave?" "How could you just forget?" "What the fuck am I going to tell Olivia?" because I am simply aware that I can handle my life a lot better than she can handle my life, and I didn't want her to feel badly, because the fact is is that most parents don't have kids that say "Hey I had a baby and I didn't tell you." I carry a lot of guilt I guess. So I shut up and pouted until my dad cut somebody off in traffic and I went fucking ballistic. (I do this well. Ask anyone)

We really haven't talked much since I came back to LV. I resent that I have changed so much in the past year and my parents not only do not recognize that, they continue to stay the same. My dad met Olivia. She said "Can I call you Grandpa?" And he stared down at the table and said "Of course." He was so nervous and I had very little sympathy, but he baked her a cake and he did the best he could, and it was not only good enough, it meant the world to me (even though I didn't show it)

Every time I see Olivia she makes sure to know exactly when she will see me next. I love this about her, how calculated and exact she is (she did not get this from me) and that I live a life where I am organized enough to at least be able to tell her when I will again be on the same side of the United States as she is. So we decided for Christmas we would meet up. She will be able to meet my mom, my sister, brother in law and their daughter, eight month old Grace. Carrie and Scott are the type of people that, the more people that love their daughter and want her to be a part of their life, the better. Both Olivia and I are extraordinarily blessed for that.

So I've been here, thousands of miles away, festering resentment towards my mom because it's easier than actually having a conversation with her about it. Right before she hung up with me on Skype she said "Oh oh oh!!!!!"

She pulled out two stockings, one pastel with a duck on it and another one. "Look what I got for Grace!" I laugh because that baby loves ducks. "She'll love it and we can all say DUCK to her over and over since it's her favorite word." I'm still giggling as I take a sip of my coffee and she pulls out another stocking. It says "Olivia" on it.

And whoever is reading this, I just want to express the stoppage of time that took place before I dropped my coffee cup. I just stared into the screen at my mother as my eyes filled with tears for a full minute. I just stared at that fucking stocking because I couldn't look at my mother.

"You. Got that for Olivia?"

And she says to me carefully "Well if I got Grace one why wouldn't I get Olivia one?"

So what do I do I swivel my chair so my face is in the opposite direction so she doesn't see how hard I am crying. I finally turn back to the computer and her eyes are filled with tears.

"Do you think she will like it?"

I catch a grip, nod, and say "Yes. I think she will. Thank you for that. Just. Thank you Mom."

If I know my mother (who takes three hours to pick out a birthday card) I know she was in that stocking isle all afternoon. I can't imagine what was going through her head and I don't have to. She is going to buy me a ridiculous amount of stuff for Christmas this year. I hope I can, and sometime soon, express to her that she just gave me

everything I never knew how to ask for. Because

I don't have near the amount of hair as Rapunzel or a Prince on a unicorn, but I am capable of writing stories

that are actually a lot more magic than any salvation fairy tale story. There is no snow here, the lights burn year round, and it's sixty five degrees. But it sure as hell feels like Christmas to me.

HL

Eating tiny bites of fancy white chocolate somebody in the office left for me my eyes first narrow, then smile at the computer screen.

Prince William is getting married.

My mother was obsessed with Princess Diana and it was around the time she died (1997) that I first started picturing what sensational relationships with men I would someday have. (Basically media was much slower when I was growing up. It was OJ Simpson and Princess Diana. That is all I ever EVER remember bring printed.)

Basially, in my thirteen year old mind, that cute kid mike I wanted to kiss would become the heir to the British throne, we would have a fairy tale wedding in wesmeister, I would be horribly bullimic but the best dressed woman in the world, rich and miserable, and I would eventually leave him, and die a sensational death where millions of people noticed and left me flowers and in the end there would be movies made about how he gave me the whole world but never told me that he loved me.

I would have servants I considered beneath me but I would touch people infected with diesases in third world, because I tricked the world into thinking I was compassionate and treated all equally. Yes. Human compassion on all levels, where everybody is equal, yet the reports read like "third world countries" "People with diseases" Even as a fourteen year old I saw through these transparencies.

As a result of my mother I've probably seen the footage from the wedding of Charles and Di close to hundreds of times. It's always the same, that mile long veil, the hoards of people around them. How she says "I will" and not "I do." I prefected a British accent at a very young age because I wanted to sound like that at my wedding to the future King.

All of that extroverted magic of excess surrounding two people that felt very little towards each other. A perfect example of nineen eighties materialistic pomp and circumstance at its pintical. But for some reason the image of Charles and Di in that cathedral on their wedding day brings me back to my childhoood.

A time where I believed that all of that was real and that someday it would be me too. A time where I believed that they got to be in love with each other while the whole world was in love with them.

I grew up into a reality that Charles and Di never really loved each other, and that the world is a place that just wants a show to somehow be a part of. I grew into a resentment of all Royals because for the rest of my life after 1993 all I ever read about in the magazines was how un perfect if not totally fucked up they were.

The whole world was so captivated by that fairy tale before their eyes that it makes perfect sense the degree of which it was destroyed. The marriage that was created by the media in the first place was totally destroyed by it as well. Just as the Saint-Princess that was created by the media for the media was also literally murdered by the identical component.

There is after all, immortality, and I sit here today thinking of myself as a little girl, laying on the couch with my mom as she told me that someday maybe Prince William will marry me and everybody will take my picture I wonder whatever happend to believing in shit like that, and stop myself, because I don't want to bother with the re hash of how a child loses it's magic.

I'm in my office in wide leg black pants, a black turtle neck and blazer, my feet in a pair of heels. My hair is pulled back and my makeup is done and I am not that little girl in front of a tv screen with my stuffed animals watching a princess any more.

I am eating chocolate in front of a computer screen, searching for my cigarettes and thinking to myself how much of the rain forest is going to be wasted on that pre nup, in the back of my mind wondring where my cuticle oil is, and thinking sadly to myself
that I hope the media doesn't eat these two (William and Cate)alive.

The whole idea of marriage just makes me squirm and lately it makes me sad. As a kid I was so afraid of growing up to be like everybody else. I'll give myself that, as all that has happend, it certainly isn't that. All of these pictures of people at weddings makes me realize that it's all the exact fucking same. White dress, bridal party, good lighting, tears, rings, kisses, family, cake, microphones.

I feel very dressed in all corporate office appropriate black sometimes, drinking black coffee, smoking black cigarettes and smirking at those fairy tales

like somebody
that never
believed in any of it
at all. But I know that
a part of me
has to exist
somewhere because
for sure

I'm having princess bride
costume party
for when this circus
of a wedding

airs on TV and

I'll be dead
before I
ever tell my kid

that if she's lucky
someday that'll be
her. Because
the magic

in the world
shouldn't
ever be sold

that
short.