A Party (Musing)

Sometimes the feeling will return to me, not truly though, not fully. It settles like a craving and appears like a bird overhead, a sudden gift come from where, headed for there. Only I wish that it would let me pet it or feel its soft feathered belly nestle into my cupped palms and its warm heart’s spirited tapping at my now enormous hands. But these are all I wishes I know, ones that make me wish I could still believe in wishes. Then I’d have a new one, for reincarnation, to live again in the fresh awakening of the world at 19 and 20, when I couldn’t bear the awkwardness of myself, not realizing that free to feel so apart from things was the most irreplaceable awesomeness. This must be how the rich feel, the very rich, who will never have to worry about saving for retirement, like children still, and always. As though they could lay their blanket down just about anywhere a little kinder than cool and have a picnic, a party with jokes and treats, like children. I used to picnic in all my waking hours; I didn’t even know that I was at a party.

Bug me (A Prose Piece)

I tried listening to the Beatles because I thought they could change my life. All I’d ever heard, in lieu of an actual album, were people raving about this music that could do something to you. Music in a world where only other people could do something to you. Music that could change your life. Music that would make you a fan; a believer; a follower; a devotee; a preacher; a lover of beetles.

I stripped naked every morning after I got dressed and went to work. I served old women hot tea with my plump jiggling breasts bumping against the saucers. I looked strangers in the eye waiting in the cold at bus stops and offered them rides. I let everyone look at me completely naked and totally unshaped like a model through the frosty shield of my grey on the outside and grey on the inside car.

My CD player broke years ago and I never tried to get it fixed. I started listening to radio stations with other people. I started keeping the music alive that was the synthetic nightmare chasing children down the hallways and scaring them into being cool, self-righteous, apathetic, licorice-tongued teen-agers who see me and everyone else over twenty-five as sexless, money hungry, youth deprived, washed up members of the adult militia.

I ate every last crumb from the corners inside the cobwebs of my kitchen. Then I let the baby spiders crawl all over my body; pinching me; biting me; infecting me with racism, hate, blood-thirst, and a reptilian vengence I’d feared was the devil my whole childhood and one day became the creased skinned woman I saw in the mirror. I took bubble baths with Jacuzzi jets with all of my detractors and hummed a tune for their story sewing. I ate live snails; I bit into them whole and crunched down on the shells until my gums split, my jaw ached, and I could feel her babies wiggling down my throat believing they were coming to life for the first time. Little did they know of the pit of acid; their imminent demise.

I picked flowers from the hands of children and carved my name into a thousand trees. Their wounds spouted blood each time, but I went on, knife in raw hand, in search of a syrup filled trunk. Carrying my paper plate full of pancakes I’d left behind for wolves or squirrels or lonely souls lost in the forest. I looked down and saw that my plate was empty and held tight, because the illusion was heavier than the soft, white and orange discus of dough mounted by siblings and cousins.

I stood at the edge of my mother’s grave and dropped M&M’s and pennies into the full plot because the only dirt around was my whole body and I couldn’t bear to throw myself on top of her like that. I couldn’t bear to make a mockery of her life like that. So, instead, I offered her departed soul candy and money, the only things that had ever interested me in this life. Even in all of my ignominious stupidity I could still smell the smoke coming from the neighbors chimney at night and I could hear the words that sweetness uttered. Love and bliss and treasures like that weren’t of this earth. If you just read the lyrics, there wasn’t anything that special about a Beatles song. It was just something in the music, I suppose, something people needed so badly they collectively decided could exist there wherever the Beatles took their guitars. Instead of in a church or in their grandparents’ backyard. Somewhere better, somewhere for everyone. Somewhere in the music.

Sad Seamstress (A Short Short Story)

I don’t go to that place anymore.  But that doesn’t mean the red phone, the old chair, the hairs aren’t still growing there. Glowing. And ringing.  Waiting for me to be sitting.  Swinging.  And tempting my braiding hands.

Take me.  Take me she says, like a whisper.  Like a dirty rope I need to climb.

I was a mop without the stick lying on that corner.  Crying, like a mad woman.  He spun the car back, his headlights into my eyes, and parked—haphazardly.  Shattered and quivering, he pulled me up, led me into our apartment.  I still don’t know.  It was me or that city.  Or he and I as just one shape why my heart raced my brain to blindness.   To just pain.  The sky wasn’t even so dark yet.

Just didn’t know—then—that I didn’t have to collapse.  Beginning at the center, into reality until I raised the very hairs.  Giving out what it’s like to give up. 

But it is bearable.  Anything is.  Except for silence. 

Lies, like nails working into me.  Splitting biceps, puncturing buttocks, birthing into my back.  

You can’t just give half, or part, or some—or I can’t. 

Cries of a sad seamstress weaving raw weeds with steely strands.

He should have choked me, I thought.  So many times.

 

 

Funny Disguise (A Short Story)

I could have found myself at the bottom of a pile of dead, wreaking of rotting cunt,disassembling bodies and retained the arousal to find my lover’s cock somewhere on the other side of fifteen hundred pounds of anonymous human mildew. I wondered what a cop might say if he pulled me over; my fluorescent wig, my trench coat, my sopping, sheer panties, my clank-ety metal belt, my open container of caffeine and the barking scent of coffee on my breath. That cop might have thought I was a hooker I told my boyfriend after we’d attempted to make use of my surprising apparel.

I can’t remember how it all seemed to register with him when he opened the door to his apartment building and saw me standing there in high heels, a false bubble gum bob, sun-glasses, and khaki jacket with the cloth belt knotted tightly around my waist, like some vixen with mediocre gun handling skills in a Sci Fi flick. I might have wanted him to fuck me wildly, to look up from my tanned, toned, flesh where flesh should be, breasts bulging over my push up bra, from inside the synthetic wings of my purple wig and register for myself the pleasure of being a live action Playboy model for the sole audience, an older man, my lover. I suspect what I wanted was to live out a fantasy that dropped and hunkered down inside my stomach like an anchor when I first began seeing flashes of sex and mis-communicated truths via sexual advances, suggestions, and lingering jazzy notes with pronounced lingering quality revealed from the TV in my parents’ house when my mother forgot to change the channel to something more appropriate and I became very curious about this pleasure box; this house for feelings and ideas we didn’t discuss or witness on my block; a world out there, but in there; a taboo voodoo land of everything I never saw at home and had my mouth washed out with soap for mentioning.

Someone watching this night inside of a TV would think that I was in the mood for sex. But I wasn’t, I was in the mood for TV. I was in the mood to see who would win for his admiring, inspired, salacious, fuck-hungry stare: Me or the TV. I had stories and long thigh bones, advertisements for things nobody needs, laugh tracks to simulate different types of audiences, religious programming, talking animals, and remote control. Once he’d locked the door and returned to his shaded dent on the couch cover he hesitated to resume viewing the TV. It remained on as I paced slowly back and forth between him and the pleasure box, while his eyes zigzagged to capture me and the glowing images, how a football receiver dodges tackles while racing towards the end zone. As I draped my trench coat across the couch I felt I had him, nothing could compete with this amount of young human flesh, except hate. Eventually, I tired of prowling at the edge of my tiny cage, waiting for him to rise and unlock the gate and release me from this chest puffing saunter. It wasn’t the feeding hour. I had no intention to lazily gnaw at a torso sized hunk of red meat. I wanted out, to kill, to hunt, to choose my prey at least.

He asked me into the bedroom after I’d already taken my wig off and stood scratching my itching head while studying my body in his bathroom mirror. He wanted me to put the wig back on. I crouched beside the bed at his request and sucked on his penis for a moment. The wig had become irritatingly itchy, painful. I don’t even remember if we fucked after that, but I can remember the sound of the TV in the other room and the people inside of it laughing.

The Beginning of a Long Distance (Incomplete Musings)

I walked into that corridor counting the hairs on his head. “Four-thousand-seventy-seven, Four-thousand-seventy-eight, Four-thousand-seventy-nine—Where is he?—Who am I now?—What could this be if—if?—if?—if?” The airport waiting lounge, with its baggage claim conveyers—slithering slowly then stopping, ruckus-ing, then releasing, returning what a life was to its pretender—appearing behind electronic banners for airlines and dotting off in either direction, boasted a height capable of containing an entire airplane standing on its tippy toes, nose to the ceiling. That chivalrous space, cascading panes—blue sky swarming at their backsides—like great puddles, gave way to a breakage in the eternity of separation by objects, bore a sanctuary to mimic the seemingly too grand and limitless core of a human existing while collapsing into a particle of dust that awakened in my deepest heart. And it began to itch.

There were men everywhere. Clusters of soon to be grandfathers in undone collars and worn, gold bands away on business leading their unwise, proud chest-ed, toothy rumble of tanned, still thick haired incarnations sporting fashionable pink ties, concealing beer breath and condom lined wallets that would be torn open and wedged quickly inside a girl who would mistake a one night stand for a marriage proposal, grunged ramblers with the militant pursuit of mission directed towards their not ceasing, not attaching longer than to learn a girl’s name and departing the moment it seems possible to guess at its meaning [an action such as this might cause the yin to turn back on the yang (And what if there was no yin to counter? Or not enough? Or not what the yin would have you believe its consistency really felt like? Or not what the yin itself would have decided was so yin about it?), and one kind-eyed, dark skinned dreamer full of filthy romanticism, pushing a mop on wheels, and mindlessly humming a tune.

I protested the natural inclination to look in their eyes. Somehow I knew I couldn’t bear or casually process any extraneous human contact, even in the form of a pupil kiss divided by thirty feet and sealed with total anonymity. It occurred to me on an unconscious level that such an arbitrary connection might cause my kettle to steam and I’d go rushing out of the airport, denying my visitor the opportunity to witness my timeliness and respectful anticipation for his arrival. From the moment I gently rested my bum and back against the soft faux grey leather of the socialist seat wedded to a row of four beside and five behind that faced the other direction, the itch cropped up, like a caterpillar existing at the bottom of a great dark cavern by the pure spontaneity of someone having imagined it being there. I couldn’t at first put my finger on the itch, not only because it had been so long since I’d felt something like it, but because I had not summoned it, or even summoned summoning it, and yet, there it was, bug eyed, many legged, and irritatingly real. And only because, for me, it suddenly was.

He dropped into sight like a boy I dreamt about from a magazine; someone quick, accidentally handsome enough, purposeful, and un-purposefully odd. I bulked at the possibility that this character rambling curiously below airline markers made unidentifiable by the distance between the pilot and a flight attendant fastened in for landing at the back of the plane was my guest. My tickled itching heart sprouted vine-ish tentacles, sent searching with such carnal, timeless marrow so true as to feel charmed by the bright air of the afternoon, by the calendar date in June, by the ray of sun and chemical reaction that sends a bud splitting open into a radiant splash of life. I clasped my phone and continued a call with a friend about borrowing his bicycle perhaps for my guest while the boy tore off from the luggage advertisement and charged into my better view until he was standing over me swarmed by my willful vines. I cased my lungs in tin foil, impromptu perfected a coy expression for cover, and merged into solidarity with the grey socialist seat, desperately floundering, rooting through my stored supplies of emergency rationale to de-claw the lover in me and forbid me from treating my guest a human scratching post laced with catnip.

His dark eyes sparkled like the surface of a lake at night—one that’s pulled the luminescent moon to many small pieces, relishing each bit of perfection—and lured me through the trees to gaze upon his hidden, un-named shape trapped on an unknown stretch far from the gas stations, banks, and sandwich shops. This bird that had once fallen, as an egg—as had I—from the very nest upon our symmetrical shelled release into this forest, drew out his wings, and I resounded in feather-same fashion to give and bear the span and character of my tool-ish toys. I was naked woman dismissing the safe guard and garb of the spindly woodlands her rounded form offset, cooling herself, diving into the embrace of a black pool hairy with shards of heaven. I was an adult animal (or perhaps a toddler capturing for the first time her own reflection) glancing the form of its species armored with cock rather than clitoris, with corner rather than curve. I surfaced and withdrew from the safe manufactured seats and dove my arms about his neck, my breasts puffing and gathering warmth into his chest, my hands clasping his shoulder blades, as my chin led soaring lips into his swooping mouth. And in this embrace a dance began, one long ago choreographed by distant, un-named lights.

Whatever goodness had been trapped in me by the accident of my own existence, time, and the dice roll of good breeding fled into his warm, vaporous mouth—that still tasted of milk as it had years ago, cupped around several loose particles of sweet curiosity and swam back into my breath, flooding my taste buds with a familiar reminder. A door you always forget to shut completely, that looks closed, but isn’t ever. His hands were searching my back and hips and arms and shoulders for a place to land or checking for the heart beat which can be found at any inch of the body or continuing on in effort to resist the squeezing of flesh without permission. We hadn’t meant to say the words that had always been obvious and therefore easy to say, and because of this lacking in drama we were inclined to remind ourselves and one another over and over again a thousand times a day in case the other hadn’t heard since we chose to speak these highly confidential words in a whisper. I love you. I love you too. Oh I love you too. I love you too darling. So forth and onwards forever and for always. Perhaps only birds of a feather know each other are dying for the reassurance one desires and how to affirm for another one's devotion.

The Hungry (A Short Story)

I closed the window and there over the picture of a mountain range was a photograph of an emaciated African girl. The Pop Up read, “Have you fed anyone lately? YOU CAN SAVE THE HUNGRY! Click HERE to find out how!” A representative from the Special Olympics had called our house asking for a donation and just last week my husband and I put a check in the mail for twenty-five dollars; I never liked doing the payments over the phone. I felt very sorry for any starving child, but my instinct told me that the little girl in that photo was dead already because the picture had been taken fifteen years ago (at least!). Then I hated the makers of that Pop Up a little, because I all I’d done since 9:30 was imagine different ways of being killed in common circumstances. Getting hit by a gorgeous modell and flipped into the air on my lunch break. An elevator cable snaps; crunch. The entire building catches on fire and I’d choke on the fumes like everyone else.

I started to feel bad about not appreciating my life. I put an away message up on instant messenger and headed for the restroom. The two other offices on our floor were full of women. Consequently, the ladies room rarely provided the kind of sanctuary some of us need and expect. Typically, the space was bustling with whispers and laughter and a twenty-year old smoking a menthol cigarette in the handicapped stall. I peeked in and a stale gust of cigarette stench snuck out. I kept going, rounded the corner, and exited into the stairwell.

Thankfully, there were only three women working on the entire 11th floor. I slipped out of the stairwell and sped like a dart down the empty hall. I unlocked the knob with my key. The ladies room greeted me with a safe odorless silence. I closed the stall door, pulled a sanitary square of tissue paper from the dispenser, and placed it on the seat. I sat and dragged my panties to my calves, closed my eyes, and felt my palms burry into my sockets. I exhaled and my skirt cinched around my waist. A wave of pain twisted through my abdominals; I arched to make it stop. My chest began to rattle like a lawnmower. I let out a whimper and a river of hot pee shot into the toilet.

I stayed there and cried for five minutes. I released control of my mind and it steered my heart through a lifetime’s encyclopedia of hurts. My 3rd grade teacher singling me out, a bully on the bus sneering at me, a woman behind the make-up counter tisk-tisking at my complexion, the blissful mother in the Hamburger Helper commercial, my ex boyfriend dropping me off three blocks from my apartment and rolling down the window to say he’d been cheating on me, my husband waiting at home in front of the TV, my three beautiful nieces and my perfect sister, the little African girl crying on a rock, a group of elated retarded children breaking the ribbon at the end of a run, the pretty young receptionist chatting with my boss, and the stack of To Do lists pushed inside my purse.
One of my gal pals in the office popped me up on AIM when I got back.

Everything OK?

Sure, everything’s fine.

Good :)

But nobody really cared. I figured that out. I’d caught my husband on the kitchen phone comparing notes with his mother. If I talked to a co-worker my sad life would be the topic of discussions on lunch break or at happy hour and then again at home with their spouses, roommates, or significant others. I read a poem in high school about how people have to suffer alone. What bothered me about my suffering was that it wasn’t over anything abnormal; I just always felt a little sad. Sure, at times I could forget it, like at birthday parties or admiring jewelry in the mall. Or on Holidays or when the choir harmonized at church, or when Rachel Ray took another bite of one of her savory appetizers without gaining even an ounce. It was the kind of thing nobody talked about. The little African girl was still staring at me. I closed the IM from my gal pal and clicked on her sad little face. The hourglass came up and after a second a webpage with naked girls inserting giant cocks into their mouths took over my screen. I hit the close button before anyone saw it.

The Gofer (A Short Story)

I’m not going back to Los Angeles. Not today, not tomorrow, not any time soon.

I dreamt I was back stage at the Oscars. A friend of mine, an actress living in New York with her tea total boyfriend, was working on a production up for awards and I was there care of her invitation.

The dream ended with close ups of a young woman like myself, riding on the back of a horse, the sexy rugged feminine type I aspire to be. The narrator described the progression of her hair color over the years, from plain brown to super mega ultra red.

Close ups of Nicole Kidman decked out in a pink crepe sheer chiffon, a sweep of webbed pink lace across her face. Boiling eyes, coming down the stage that felt more like a runway. Some electric blue look of knowing. Looking right at me, as though into my eyes. But this seemed strange as I was all around her. I was the dream weaver. Her look, right down to the pupils pointing back at me, was my total creation.

There was a close-up of her hips and crotch moving around inside the dark pink gown, the legs crossing back and forth like gears in a machine, the hips pointing and thrashing like corresponding parts.

Everyone behind stage was running around in the dark. I was to retrieve a woman from the waiting lounge (wherever that was). A young, plump blonde pushed a clip board into my hands and dragged me through a maze of stairs and levels with different lighting fixtures and different sized crowds. Then she pushed me onto an escalator. Between my thoughts I heard her, “Go find the ticket holder.”

As the escalator caused me to rise I realized its design was rather unique. First of all, the further up I we went the less railing there was to hold onto, which scared me. Also, we kept going higher, and, in the initial portion of the ride, looking up, I could not see exactly where this moving step under my feet was leading me. And once we passed so many floors, the railing having disappeared altogether, terrorized, I realized I was set on a frail slab of moving stairs stretching straight through an enormous emptiness that would not stop, but only run alongside the ledge of the foyer, as it continued to loop back down to the bottom floor where it began. It was a moving arch that left it’s surviving passenger off not too many feet from where it started.

I wished I was back at the moment in the dream where I entered a Hollywood press conference late, wearing a fantastic gown that complemented my strong hip bones and softly squared off shoulders. Everyone unabashedly stole glances at me, including some men with thick bobs, wavy—dark, and styled—whose money boosted their collective (and therefore individual) sex appeal. I told myself they were budding directors.

The other young women/aging girls seated beside me at the front of the room weren’t hiding so well that they too were captivated by me. None of them budding directors, all of them girls I know in real life as pioneering homemakers. Capturing the fascination of these females was only thing more valuable to me than the steady hushed attention from the crowd of onlookers presumably involved in this VIP Q & A session. The occasional bulb going out and off like a silent white explosion shouting in the distance. My greatest hope was that the other girls would see that they couldn’t help to steal a look away from me to see if others were staring as well, and they were. Everyone was obsessed.

When it came time to be photographed arbitrarily I watched as the girls nervously, piously stepped onto the white tape X and, in lieu of posing, blushed. I instead was overcome by my dream self’s perception of the spirit of the great Marilyn Monroe. I held the moment, wrapping one arm around the torso, and the other around that one, plumping my cleavage up out of the dress said it was OK to look a lot, as much as you could, because I loved it. I loved them for it.

Standing on the white X, a harmony of cameras calling out to me in white echoes. All around me. My breasts, my arms, my hips. My eyes sought it all in, then closed, and I watched from inside as I pulled open a white, loud smile. I felt the light painted over my eyelids and again. Starting at the neck, I jostled my head from side to side, but beginning at the base of my spine, everything in slow motion. For uh uh moment, the world was in love, with me.

The escalator was getting closer to the top. An Indian woman from India hung over the brass railing. She was pointing a packet of papers resembling two tickets at me, shaking them to get my attention. Petrified, but brought back to my mission to get these tickets to their holders and finally to the seats.

In the dream I’d moved away from Los Angeles. And returned to find that it resembled the place I’d left and was, to my surprise, worse. Is a place just a place? Is it the same to be a beggar as it is to be a doctor? They’re both simply living lives. L. A. was darker, and stranger, the way the things we know take on a different shape or size or character all together and yet we know they’re meant to represent something else, something completely different in real life.

This sense of dream displacement was heightened by the fact that I was crashing with a half Greek guy who in real life desired me (heavily), lived alone (divorced in his mid twenties) in a remodeled garage with his dog, trying to start non-profit. And I last saw him turning back at the top of a hill in Echo Park, running away, as he crouched beside his mutt dog, who was having a mild seizure. It was purple, almost dark. I passed a lesbian couple walking their dogs and asked for directions, deciding to tell them that I was trying to get away from a real creep. I still wonder if they ran into him that night, or ever again, or ever.

Los Angeles was like a dark maze, a landscape of infinite unique characters meant for a role playing video game. So caught up in feeling lost, amazed, and ceaselessly entertained I couldn’t decide whom to trust—neither in the moment nor after the fact. Either no one, or everyone except the homeless. Except that in the end the homeless people were probably the most honest, wearing their intentions on their shabby sleeves.

The half Greek in the dream was the proud owner of this makeshift German WG (a group living community with cheap rent). His tenants were a couple other artists. One of whom was presumably queer and meanly showed me his collection of 80’s gadgets and toys.

I’m starting to understand why some people never leave home. I still haven’t traveled nearly as much of the globe as I plan to in my lifetime, and yet there are already too many impressions to contend with, too many moving ends to mend or sculpt together. Too many times going out to eat alone, paying the check, leaving a nice tip, then going to a bar alone to get drunk, avoid conversation, and ponder life. Studying the people around me, gaining nothing but forgettable impressions while childishly focusing on the impression I’m making: A very sad, strong, strange, lovely, youngish thing who finishes some drinks alone at the bar, leaves, looks for a conversation somewhere, but finds herself waking up in her bed at the time wondering where her next bed will be, what that stay will be like, and will she find a dancing partner one of these lonely days. She really just wants to dance with someone, someone sweet.

This half Greek person was angry with me in the dream. My lover from Los Angeles was almost non-existent. Never mentioned nor considered and never missed caused the dark flavoring of this stranger Los Angeles. Without my lone true angel to hold a lantern to LA into its honest hellish form. Without his love I had come to revisit a place of death.

There was an ominous car ride in the middle of the night whose queerness was so bland I hardly remember. Just dark stretches of emptiness antithetical to the mapping and actual physical makeup of LA, and the occasional blurry ball of light whizzing over our heads. Streetlights were mere accessory in certain Boulevards of LA, ones that weren’t residential, ones where everything was just on. Open. Running. Always waiting for you. They were interrogating me. Alex’s new roommates couldn’t believe I’d left LA. Couldn’t believe I’d come back, since I’d left. Were wondering how long I’d hold out this time, because they knew the truth. I wasn’t holding up in LA, not in a place so impossible. I was holding out. Holding out until something killed me or until I decided I needed my life, and left. Maybe that’s why so many people leave. They thought they’d come to live out their dreams, but decided that LA wasn’t a place for that. No, this was a place you went to die, to be destroyed, or to get raped, over, and over, and over again.

At the end of the ride, at least my portion, they dropped me off at some nowhere, in the blackness, on the side of the road. No one around, but I was OK to be alone and happy to be rid of them, the questions, the talk, and thoughts.


My actress friend was in from New York. She had a “Great Job” doing important things that required travel and brought her to LA to help organize a community of artists for a film in the Oscars. It didn’t matter except that she had a better job than me. The woman who shoved me onto the elevator was her lackey. I was there by my friend’s invitation and could only travel behind the scenes if I offered my services as a sort of gofer.

As my step had me approaching the Indian woman she began saying her last name at me. I scanned the clipboard. Whatever she was saying didn’t match, and the escalator seemed to be getting narrower. If I fell off this rail-less, slim-fitting person mover I would indeed drop to my death. It wasn’t the pain of hitting that scared me—that never even occurred to me. It was death itself, the unknown, loss, and the possible gain of only God (even if there’s no such being) knows what. I asked not hell.

Shaking my head at her as the escalator, only wide enough to house the width of three human feet, began its ride alongside the foyer floor before angling down for it’s decent. The names didn’t match. She was shocked. If it wasn’t her name, whose was it? After all, it was an Indian name. It must be a mix up. But I was sent to perform this one piece of duty. If I knowingly muffed it up I was a fairly shoddy friend, and I was not a professional. I wanted to be a professional. And yet, the pieces fit. She was, after all, Indian, and looking for—no, demanding—her two tickets. And, as well, she was the only person waiting for me after my lengthy and increasingly tapered escalator ride.

She could tell that I was giving in. She and another Indian larger Indian woman yanked me up over the brass railing. They were determined to get to the bottom of this issue, which was fine by me, because I was grateful be off that escalator and lying on sort of actual ground, and to hopefully finish this transaction by returning to the basement via the wide, carpeted, grand and safe stairway.

The day before our year anniversary was the day of my year anniversary with Los Angeles as well as the day I decided to leave my lover. That night he handed me a little box. The next day I’d be boarding an early morning flight to return home for my sister’s wedding. I opened it. Inside was a little piece of paper cut into the shape of a tiny heart with the words “YEAR ONE” printed on it. Meaning, it’s all about meaning. Year one sounded more like a death sentence than a celebration. More like a game show host saying “This is YEAR ONE of the rest of your life!” He points the microphone at me, the long wire resting on the floor, snaking off stage. I give him a look. A pause. I collect myself, inhale, kiss him on the cheek, turn and step away behind the curtain. Into the darkness, alone.

The doors opened to the great hall. The Oscars. The Indian women were gone like that, forgotten. I was out of my body, a wireless camera floating over the giant black and white rumbling that hardly resembled a grouping of individuals. Beyond the audience, to the stage, Nicole Kidman in pink, coming towards us on the white marble stage. Stunning. She was staring.

Then suddenly, the announcer describing the progression of her hair colors over the years, form plain Jane, natural, sandy brown to this red, red, red red that made her blue contacts Pop like a color scheme in Pop Art. She was a (real?) living beauty.

Back at the ranch the rustic lovely gal with a soul as strong as her horse settled into the saddle as he stamped back and forth in the dusty morning sunshine. Some attendants stood by, preparing her for the ride. But she was ready, a little timid, but that would soon go when the cool air was twisting around inside her top. She wanted that tingle, that fear of racing forward, willful, free, on the back of another free being. She held the reigns loose, but tight. She smiled to herself inside. Beautiful, she thought. And to look at her you’d know it. She was ready to ride.