The most important realizations never seem to stick; they have to be relearned, reiterated, constantly. Today I know; tomorrow I have forgotten. There is even a pleasure in this.
You’ll Never Find Them Here
The next day all I remembered was thinking I’ll never find them here!
I awoke assuming it was probably just a remnant from some dream, and stumbled blearily to the jewelry box. Empty. I wandered around the apartment like a headless ghost searching for its heart.
“I can’t find all of my rings!” I mourned to Janaka. “I may have . . . hidden them from myself.”
“Did you try the bathroom shelves? The living room table? Did you look under the couches?” He looked askance at a slumbering Michael Dracula. “Maybe the kitties got to them.”
Everywhere. The pockets of all the clothing I’d brought. Purses, drawers, ziplock bags for make-up and shampoo. I crawled on the floors and slid my hands into cushions of dust beneath side tables. In the days that followed, I looked underneath every object I picked up, examined every possession as if it were something new: a clue, a code, a breadcrumb to another breadcrumb, a trail. I thought, “if I just see the right thing in the right light, I’ll know.”
Forks jumbled sideways and upside down in the silverware organizer. That painting, slightly askew on the wall. The uplifted corner of the rug. Don’t change anything! I’m trying to remember something.
The clarity of the few seconds preceding my ring set-down have been relived to the point of fiction. Okay, I think. I am pulling each one off my fingers — each ring associated with a different place, a different person, a different memory, each ring a thing I would twist around its finger during times of duress, boredom, the replacement for my “uh”s in speech. This is for high school and the slow, enchanted retail job with the snowy windows. This is for Portland, a mailed birthday present opened in an attic room. This is the stone that symbolically cracked in half. Yes. I am in my pajama pants, wool socks, a long sweatshirt. I take each ring off its finger. I stand there, clinking the rings around in one hand like fated dice, looking deviously around — what room, what room was I in? I’ll never find them here!
“Were . . . you sleepwalking?” Janaka asked. “In your memory, is it dark in the house?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think. “I don’t know,” I said.
It’s been two weeks. Where the rings once were I still twist, shift, clack. I barely even notice their absence any more; this is the new habit, a lot like the old habit. Most days now I forget to look, forget to examine everything, forget that something once so integral to my history is missing. My hands are empty totem poles. The jewelry box contains two barrettes.
Let’s Do This
For a long time I thought I had learned some kind of major life lesson when I realized that job-searching was the exact opposite of dating — that here was an allotment of adult experience where eagerness was encouraged, excitement rewarded. But now I’m thinking maybe it’s counter-productive to ever pretend to be less enthusiastic than you are.
Postcards From Danbury
The Fourth of July is wonderful, because it makes us all feel like children. Children who drink and endanger their lives with fire, but still, a variety of children — and everything is awe-inspiring, and everyone is invincible, and there are only board games and rice krispie bars and a pontoon ride around the lake at night, snuggled under blankets and cooing “oooo. Ahhhhhh.”
Full album from Wisconsin adventures here.
My cousins are currently scattered around the continent (with one representative in Japan: he joined us via Skype), but we decided to have our own family reunion last weekend. Some of them I’d played with endlessly as children; some of them I’d never met, but all of them felt like strangers at first. Even Elizabeth, Rob and Colin — I hadn’t seen them since I was ten or twelve. Who were these strange adults? Why did they somehow look so familiar? Paige and I pulled up to Gate 6 at the MSP airport, and I waved my arms out the window like an octopus.
They all smiled and came running — partly because there had been a security breach and they’d been standing there for hours, but also because it was wonderful to see each other again.
We all crammed in the car, headed North.
Screaming Figures
Back when I first introduced this site, I told you that I had all kinds of lofty ambitions. Flash fiction, I promised! Poetry! . . . “I don’t know”! Oh yeah, and stick figure collections.
The night Brendan and I met, I told some anecdote and he made a casual aside which went something like “yeah, but you’re a crazy bitch.”
“What!” I thought indignantly, “I’m not a — ” and then I remembered that I needed to scan and upload these.
Full album here.