Sometimes|Mostly

He suspected she was the type of girl that fell in love easily....

sometimescelia — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:53:00 -0400

He suspected she was the type of girl that fell in love easily. She wasn’t but she sure liked to pretend that she knew how to be vulnerable. Her life was a rubik’s cube that she couldn’t decipher. She considered herself organized but at the end of each day, she was still a jumbled mess of unsorted thoughts, unrelated emotions, a world without any correlation. She feigned depth in the confusion or maybe she feigned confusion. It was really all pretty damn simple though.

When he met her, he saw her as his equal. This was, of course, quite inaccurate but he was full of self doubt and enjoyed seeing his reflection in it’s harshest light. He distorted his successes into failures and changed his standard of satisfaction if ever he came close to achieving it. He thought they were the same but they were different.

It wasn’t long at all before they had become entwined in a way that felt intrinsic. More than love, it mostly had to do with a certain and particular fear of permanence. Thinking they had found solid footing in one another, they planted themselves, and then rooted themselves in their companionship. She was quicksand that he mistook for concrete. He thought it was the heaviness of being needed but it turns out it’s just hard to breath when your lungs are filled with sand.

He wanted to fit in and his desire to do so made him stick out...

sometimescelia — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:20:00 -0400

He wanted to fit in and his desire to do so made him stick out in ways that were obvious to even the most casual of observers. While they wore their leisure attire, he had shown up in a suit and tie. It was a hot day and though he had wanted to remove his jacket, by the time he and Vivian had said their hellos across the lawn, both his undershirt and his button up were so drenched with perspiration that he thought it better to suffer than to reveal his inhuman soak. He would take being uncomfortable over being mortified any day.

As the other men casually threw a frisbee back and forth, he stood with the women under the shade of the small white tent. The picnic went off without a hitch, the women happy to be out of the sun and have a cocktail in hand, the children eating more hotdogs and drinking more soda than their mothers cared to witness. He watched their small bodies and thought of their vital organs. He thought about their poor livers, groaning and probably assimilating, eventually hardening like the livers of their parents.

He wanted to laugh with the men, to run and to high five at appropriate intervals. He watched as his peers effortlessly demonstrated their effortlessness. He sat with their drunken wives and watched the teeth of their children rot. He looked on with both envy and disdain and then he wrung the sleeves of his sport coat out and thought about going home.

I listened to your message again. I could tell you were smiling...

sometimescelia — Tue, 08 May 2012 22:21:00 -0400

I listened to your message again. I could tell you were smiling when you left it. It was a tone in your voice. Most messages I delete before listening all the way through, probably before even getting the gist. I listen just enough to know who left it, I guess. Your message is over a week old. A week and two days and I’ve listened to it more times than I could say without blushing.

You were on vacation when you left it. You were having a great time. You said you missed me but the more I listen to it, the less likely that sounds. You said the rides were fantastic, that you were getting along with everyone. You said your low expectations had really paid off this time.

You’ve been back for three days. At least I think you’ve been back, anyway. I can’t be totally sure. I am, but I guess I can’t be. We haven’t spoken yet, not officially. That was you that picked up the receiver when I called your house. I’m almost sure of it. That was you that hung up when I said hello too, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

Truth be told they were tired of her. They had wanted to like...

sometimescelia — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:41:00 -0400

Truth be told they were tired of her. They had wanted to like her and actually managed to for quite some time but the tables had undoubtedly turned. They teased her loud enough for her to hear with the intention of just that. They talked about “accidentally” dropping her toothbrush in the toilet. They moved all of her food to the back of the refrigerator one afternoon while she was at work. They dreaded her light on when they came home and retreated to their bedrooms when they heard her footsteps on the porch. Why didn’t she ever use her separate entrance, they wondered. Why did she need to read in the living room? Why couldn’t she just stay in her own damn room?

When no one was home she liked to put her makeup on in the mirror in the front hallway. It had better light than in the bathroom and was much larger than the mirror above her dresser. She would often stop application for long stretches of time to make sexy faces at herself. There was something she was accessing in these gestures that related to ego but beyond that related to her general operations— her ability to go on functioning. She had to retain her high opinion of herself in order to battle the rather austere feedback that was being constantly channelled in her direction.

One day when she had finished her private song and dance she caught their eyes on her. They had been home, they had been watching. She heard the laughter even as they tried to conceal it with their hands over their mouths, into pillows, in another room. She left quickly but they heard her hiccuped sob as she briskly traversed the outside stairs. Their laughter turned to guilt and then later when they were each alone in their separate rooms their guilt to empathy. They began to see their own worst parts in what they had come to hate about her. They started to forgive her and they even started to forgive themselves.

I don’t think EB knew the turmoil that washed over our...

sometimescelia — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:56:00 -0400

I don’t think EB knew the turmoil that washed over our house after she went to bed. That was typically when I would explode. I accepted that he was at work during the day, that he wouldn’t get home in time to eat dinner with us, might not see his daughter until she was tucked into her bed, asleep. But I couldn’t accept that it wasn’t personal when he did finally get home and couldn’t have a conversation with me without falling asleep in the middle of my sentences. As his lids would dip close I would stop speaking. Sometimes they’d flicker back open and he’d apologize. Sometimes I left him sleeping on the couch.

I wanted to escape it, to force him to escape. To pay attention to us, to look into his eyes, to let his body relax in my arms. I thought we could go up the coast, to a place where the sheets got washed while we were out, I thought he might see me there. He might take his eyes off his work and see his family in front of him. But he never stopped long enough to look up. He only left the hotel for short stints and even then he seemed preoccupied.

Eventually he quit pretending that I would ever get anything else and I started thinking it might be something I would leave him for. No matter where we were, he was in another room on the phone with a client, a partner, an employee. He was in another room by himself. And I was alone too. I had EB but we were both alone too.

I wanted to tell you. But all I could say was we’re better...

sometimescelia — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 23:53:03 -0400

I wanted to tell you. But all I could say was we’re better off friends, better off friends, better off friends. How many times can I say it, try to believe it. Sure, I’d prefer it over nothing. But nothing is not what I have to lose anymore. You see, I want to know you forever. Is nothing worth spoiling it for?

So patience is a virtue but fortune favors the brave. Well it doesn’t matter either way. I’m too scared to tell you the whole truth: I adore you! You’ve cracked me open. I’m opened. And if you told me today that you feel the same way, I would let myself love like that again. I will fall into you. I will be totally lost and totally fine.

We get close and then we keep our distance. And here I am writing a love letter to myself. So we’re better off friends, I said. And you agreed. And then you said I don’t know how to ask for what I want. And I denied it. So today I have patience and one day I’ll be brave. And one day, yes, one day I’ll love you longer than time.

There’s nothing out here but the truth and our trash. We...

sometimescelia — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:26:00 -0400

There’s nothing out here but the truth and our trash. We cannot hide from ourselves. People on the inside think reality malleable, think history mutable, think experience carries no facts, only opinions, collected perceptions, etherial artifacts of existence. We know better and that’s why we do not belong, why we cannot belong.

Out here we’re important to each other. We do not need each other because we do not understand that word: need. But we do know value. Value outside of commerce. Yes, we know the weight of water, of air, of human touch. We know the currency of the sun and would pray down to it if we could arch our cracked backs into such a position.

The sun melts everything down into one golden pathway, undivided desert sand blowing ahead into eternity. The heat reshapes bodies, folds skin, burns through definitions. When we came here, we thought we were young, we thought we were lovers, we thought we were men. We know now we’re as old as this sand, we’re family and we’re strangers, we’re children and we’re dirt. We’re breathless and we will never die.

He was always on the outside. He spoke constantly, never spoke a...

sometimescelia — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:09:00 -0400

He was always on the outside. He spoke constantly, never spoke a sentence with any hesitation but never said much of anything either. He was animated and called everyone by their last names. He thought he was charming but he was more of an irritant. Alice put up with him because she thought no one else would love her. And she was right.

He played guitar. He played piano. He wore Alice’s underwear sometimes when he was alone in the house. He never did the dishes but always made her breakfast. They claimed they were happy. I think they would have meant it if they could have understood the concept. They never raised their voices except when they were talking about money. Alice only really ever talked about money and who was doing the chores.

He wanted to have a child but she was worried about her figure. He wanted to have a family but she didn’t feel maternal. He wanted to have some company but she thought she should be enough. He wanted to have a boy, just like him, but she didn’t want “an audience”. When he was young he wanted to remember everything. As he’s gotten older, he is happier to forget.

He was a friend of my father’s. The son of my...

sometimescelia — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:34:00 -0400

He was a friend of my father’s. The son of my parents’ friends. My grandparents’ neighbor. He was single. He was married. He had two children. He had three. It was outside walking, in our basement, in his bedroom, in mine. There was a party upstairs, no one was home, the car was idling, it was quiet outside.

It only happened once, happened again and again, less times than fingers, more than hours in a day. He told me it was a game. Told me not to tell. Told me it was nothing they would believe, anyway. I kept his hat as a souvenir. I worried about my dirty underwear. I barely remember it now. In my mind it’s still crystal clear.

I thought I might kill him. I was scared I liked it. I knew I’d see him again. I worried I’d fuck little boys when I became a man.

I was afraid I would love you too much. I was afraid I...

sometimescelia — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:03:00 -0400

I was afraid I would love you too much. I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to live my life after you were born. I already loved your father practically more than I could bear. You were such a surprise. All the things I thought I would adore, I despised. And when I thought I would get bored, I was fascinated. I never knew myself less than when I looked at you. I get sick thinking about what I would give to have some of those moments back.

I never wanted you to be anything. I just wanted to believe that you would live forever, that after I would inevitably go, you’d live on and on and on. You would never know pain, you would never suffer, only feel sadness so you would know joy. I tried to love your sister in the same way I loved you. But oh, sweet boy, you were such a surprise.

I had expectations but they were all wrong, but they were all surpassed. There was no soundtrack, no artifice. Just truth like I’ve never known it. A reality of affection that was never subjective. Your baby skin, your fists and fits, your little blue lips.

If my mother sensed disrespect from her granddaughter it’s...

sometimescelia — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:27:15 -0400

If my mother sensed disrespect from her granddaughter it’s because that’s exactly how I taught Louise to behave. I taught her to speak with condescension to that old woman and to look at her as if her statements were absurd. My mother always said things were better in her time. Her time, her time. We wondered why she had decided that there was a distinct period in her life when she was malleable, open to the world and why she had determined that it was now over.

I never asked “what?” when she’d speak under her breath, just counted myself lucky to be missing out and move right along. I thought that as she got older and further lost her mind my compassion might kick in. What happened instead during our obligatory visits was that we made feeble attempts to hold back our laughter and almost no attempt to hide our disdain.

Maybe she was looking forward to the end as much as we were. Maybe she stopped being able to understand that concept. When she finally passed I felt relief. Louise was just happy to have her Saturday afternoons back.

Have you ever squeezed the skin on your face for over an hour,...

sometimescelia — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:43:00 -0400

Have you ever squeezed the skin on your face for over an hour, trying to get every bit of grime out of the shallows and depths of your pores? Have you ever been lost in space and time while doing this? Just gone from any kind of real consciousness or awareness, out in some fantasy on the other side of your mind. A place that is nearly impossible to access at will.

Have you ever wondered about what it might mean to have integrity? If there is a single person that tells the truth, the whole truth, all the time and to everyone? To everyone including to herself. Have you ever held up a facade only for your benefit and let that little lie run so deep that you stop knowing completely what you’re seeing while looking at your own reflection?

Are we all just a bunch of liars trying to persuade each other that we have honor? Do we keep the trash out of sight, our bodies scented, our banks insured so that we can continue to believe? Oh but we are all corrupted and our purity only masks the filth. Have your ever squeezed your skin to make it clean only to realize you left your dirty fingerprints up and down your cheeks?

We watched as the birds flew over our heads. We watched as their...

sometimescelia — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:30:00 -0400

We watched as the birds flew over our heads. We watched as their bodies made shadows on the asphalt. How had our souls expanded so much over the years? How could our bodies be large enough to hold them still?

It was a long goodbye. Family came from all over the state to grill meat and drink beer. By the end of the day tired children laid out over back seats as their parents drunkenly propped them up and strapped them in before lazily buckling their own belts. We watched as their tail lights came on and the dust rose up from their tires. We watched the dust turn into the birds.

When everyone had cleared out we sat at the bench and stared at each other. How had my baby become a man? Now leaving, moving, growing, up and away from me. The birds kept flying over us as the sun set and it was quiet except for their flapping wings, our beating hearts.

I used to forget my lunch all the time. I used to wear T-shirts...

sometimescelia — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:30:00 -0400

I used to forget my lunch all the time. I used to wear T-shirts to school photos and once I even walked around with gum in my hair for a few days. I used to let Reagan sleep in my bed even though one time I woke up and felt cold poop with my toes. I didn’t even clean it up for a while. I just let it sit in my bed until it had completely hardened. Mom said my room smelled. She told me she was going to put me on punishment if I had wet the bed but then she forgot about it and went back to watching her shows.

I’m not like that anymore. I brush my hair. Today I brushed my hair, put my books in my backpack and locked the dead bolt but I had the distinct feeling of forgetting. It was something important but I was a few too many minutes past The Absolute Final Drop Dead Very Latest Second To Be Out The Door minute to stop and remember.

My hunger pangs started first thing in the morning, right after I knew I’d forgotten it. When they called my homeroom in, I could barely sit still and hardly smiled with any conviction. The photographer made my skin crawl and my tie was too wide when I looked down at it. I couldn’t now remember why I had worn red. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with praying my hair would dry in that way that is perfectly straight without any fanning out at the temples, I wouldn’t have forgotten. I could be opening my symmetrically folded brown bag right now.

So there was their life, splayed out on five folding tables and...

sometimescelia — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:23:08 -0400

So there was their life, splayed out on five folding tables and a dresser. Opened up for neighbors and Sunday walkers to scavenge, to peruse and to mostly toss aside like the junk it in fact was. There had not been an accident or tragedy, just another couple fallen out of love out of like, fallen away from each other with a bunch of common property to divide, a couple kids and a story that seemed less and less singular between those that told it.

She didn’t want to be there. She had two women friends price everything and then man the lawn. She sat in the upstairs bedroom looking out, afraid to be exposed by her possessions. She had thought herself lucky to have acquired all this at one point. She had often prided herself on her gratitude for it. But now she knew that her accumulation had been a pathetic attempt to tie her life down, to make it heavy and permanent.

From the window she looked at their life as it laid out over the lawn and thought it might all be less familiar to her now than to the strangers picking through it.

“You don’t think I have my own demons?” I...

sometimescelia — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:49:00 -0400

“You don’t think I have my own demons?” I remember asking her. I spent those years with one hand down my throat and the other holding a fork, sniffing out opportunities to behave in one of two ways. While Mike and the boys were roughhousing or doing home repair projects, watching television or yelling at each other I was pretending to take long showers, getting marinara sauce up my nose and bloodying my knuckles. “I loved you all so much”, I told her. I didn’t think anyone would understand me back then and I told her that I barely even understood myself.

She looked at me and smiled and I felt her empathy for the first time. I know I didn’t do a good job for her. But I needed her to realize that I had done my best. She was always on her own, older than the boys and probably smarter than Mike if you got right down to it. Plus she wasn’t his kid and I think that always made a difference to both of them.

I know she still feels like she’s outside of everything. I know it started with our family. With me, with the boys, with Mike. With her damn father, whose presence was never more than a curiosity about the shape of her lips, the color of her eyes.

She’s a bitch but I wait for her anyway. She probably...

sometimescelia — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:02:00 -0400

She’s a bitch but I wait for her anyway. She probably won’t even notice that I just got my haircut. She probably will never be the type of person to notice stuff like that, maybe she’ll just never like me enough to. Today when she demanded that I meet her on her campus I thought for a minute that I wouldn’t. I thought I would surprise her with my sudden apathy towards her. But then this afternoon I forgot all about it and reflexively obeyed.

Maybe I should have started dating her sister. Maybe her sister would treat me like her boyfriend instead of some high school dork she used to sometimes fuck. What she doesn’t know is I’m working on a plan back home. She’s in school but I’m in training.

She thinks I’m a nothing that she has to escape. Like our town where she pretends she isn’t from. But I got a plan and if she lets me, I’ll bring her along and tell her I love her. If she lets me, I’ll kiss her on the neck.

All of us. Rosie, Katherine and me, back when Rosie was married...

sometimescelia — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:20:00 -0400

All of us. Rosie, Katherine and me, back when Rosie was married and before Katherine had Janice. I don’t know how much we liked one another back then now that I think of us. All of us. I loved Janice like she was my own daughter when she was a kid. Thought about her long after she disappeared. Still think about her now sometimes. There was a strange sort of care between the three of us women, we were never necessarily that happy to be with one another, more just not to be alone.

We needed each other during that period in our lives. It was before things became heavy with the weight of gravity. It was before the existence of meaning when we were all just-so important to one another, ignorant of how to operate in a world that didn’t operate around us. I thought I was so beautiful. The most beautiful in fact, because I thought about those things in those terms back then. Although I hated my body. I don’t know how I could have now. But I did desperately. I used to want Rosie’s legs and Katherine’s arms. I wanted Katherine’s charm too. She was always so effortless with herself and I think I secretly envied her ease. She was never concerned with much of anything until Janice was born.

I don’t think she ever became serious about anything after all that either. After all that, she just floated back away.

She wasn’t sure what about him had been so appealing to her all...

sometimescelia — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:17:00 -0400

She wasn’t sure what about him had been so appealing to her all those many years ago. She had loved his longs and leans, although can you love a body enough to marry a man? She had loved the way he used his hands in the kitchen, his grip on a knife, how he maneuvered it across jicama as he created perfectly identical little matchsticks. But again, did she love his chopping enough to marry him? There must have been something else. But that something was now so far beyond her comprehension that she couldn’t even imagine it.

And now, here she was at 4 in the afternoon in her late forties waiting for the music to start. Waiting for the crowd to come, for the beer to take it’s effect, for her belly to pop straight out of her pants and make it official— nothing was the same and no amount of delusion, no matter how he touched the small of her back, no matter, no matter. Nothing would make her as stupid as she was when she was young again. Nothing would allow her to remember why she had loved him so much all those many years ago.

She tried to see his eyes through his sunglasses but couldn’t. She imagined they were closed. She imagined he was walking around with his eyes closed but it didn’t make any difference. He couldn’t see anything, but he didn’t need to.