I feel like I
Just grabbed an electric fence.
That is the effect
of your skin on my hands.
Please return the feeling to my fingertips,
numbness is among my greater fears.
I feel like I
Just went ice fishing.
Sat out in the cold
with no gloves on.
Without the warmth
of your heat on my hands.
Please return the feeling to my fingertips,
so that I can hold on.
I feel like I
Just caught my hand
in the door.
Trying to stop it
from shutting behind you.
My hands are useless
without you to touch.
Don't blame me for
not respecting your departure.
But please,
Please return the feeling to my fingertips.
so that I can, at least,
hold a pen, write to you,
or about you.
Or feel you close again.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Goin' to Carolina in my mind... <3
In the car right now, with cousins Nora, Toby, Page and Charlie. On the way down to Topsail Island, NC. My mother’s family goes to the beach together every year, but this year is special because the Boston cousins are joining us as well, and we are celebrating the would-be centennial of my great-grandmother Rahel’s birth. She’s my namesake (obviously) so I feel like this year might be important for me in some way. I’m oddly attached to all things Grandma Rachel. Anyway, in planning this year’s talent show (the 10th Annual Brish Family Talent Show, thank you very much), I have been moved to look through my showtunes. I had no idea that I was about to accidentally trip down memory lane and smack my face on my pre-sixteen days. I say pre-sixteen because I feel that after my sixteenth birthday, life got a little different. No more hanging out with Tori, a long time without David (which was so depressing I can’t even tell you), Brink had long since drifted away (also depressing), I became absorbed into the world of teenage romance (a la Rob), there was horrible drama in other ways (which I won’t even go INTO), and the next year, my parents moved away and I did not. So really, pre-sixteen was very different than post-sixteen. I was wise to have a huge party to mark the occasion of my bittersweet sixteen
That party was hilarious. I remember there was a small army of soda bottles, an enormous cake with a delicious strawberry filling in the middle and giant polka dots on top, Stephanie taught us some fancy dance moves, Pixie Stix led to much debauchery, “Extreme Horse” in the driveway (involving the hoods of both our dilapidated Explorer and Ricky’s car, a giant shovel, and sometimes carrying Doug around to shoot from a supine position). My brother did that hilarious beat-up-and-insult-Rob thing when we were FINALLY starting to flirt. Then my mom had to, in the midst of my birthday party, explain to Mark why it is physically impossible and generally inadvisable to “suck your momma’s balls!” The photos from that party are some of my favorite ever (thank you, Brianna).
At any rate. Thank you Jonathan Larson and Tick, tick…BOOM! for this little stroll. Those were good times. I didn’t realize that I had already moved so far beyond them. It has gotten to the point that I’d forgotten what my dreams were then. I wanted to write plays, direct them, turn them into screenplays and direct those as well. I wanted to write the lyrics to “songs that people will listen to and remember” (j. Larson) full of send-ups to the 90s music that made us materialistic, the movies that turned us into popcorn addicts, the over-acknowledged emotions that made us Generation X, the violence, the beauty, the hunger, the nonsense, the drama, the therapy, the mountains, the kisses in front of refrigerators covered in to-do lists, the nights we were too chicken to skinny dip in the lake, the ex-boyfriends pissing in the yard because the bathroom is all the way upstairs, the unplanned…oh goodness…toddlers now?...the heart-shaped necklaces, the Ron plays, the Kim dances, grabbing two cheeseburgers each at the drive-thru for five bucks, chicken tender melts after shows and before dances, the leopard-print bedrooms, the piracy, the midnight releases, the Dungeons and Dragons, the Star Trek, the books carried around in plastic bags to keep the covers from getting scratched, reading Beowulf without opening it all the way because he takes such good care of his books, my first pierogi at a varsity football game, crying on the floor of my new bedroom because J.J. got the room with the purple carpet and I had to live in Pennsylvania in all the wrong shades, the awkward fights in the lunchroom, gathering napkins to get away from the drama, the medieval dinner parties dressed as theatre, the first crush that ever killed my appetite, fake British accents to get rid of my first stage fright, Ida Rinegold and Munroe Murgatroyd in love, “I have to ask all new students this”…”well, we’re the only two girls here, I guess we’ll have to be friends”…”I remember you! You should come over after school. Today.”…”I was supposed to tell you I found this on the floor, but it’s from Joe”…”Iwaswonderingifyoumightwanttogooutonadatewithmesometime”…moving to the back of the classroom because I thought you were cute, Lobster, but I don’t remember what we said…Anyway. It would be impossible to say how much I remember of the pre-sixteens. I sometimes suspect that, if I had to, I could remember every moment with all of you. Every moment that counted anyway.
But somewhere in remembering all of the moments that made us what we are, I forgot the dreams that kept me who I was. I forgot to create things. My writing has gone so far downhill it’s not funny. I haven’t written drama in months, and what I did write failed even to entertain me. So here’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that two weeks away from my sooty apartment right by the train tracks, two weeks with people who knew the version of me that isn’t so bittersweet tasting, two weeks of home and family and reconnection, two weeks of being away from buildings and subway noise and laundry in the scary basement…two weeks will have to be enough to bring me back.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed for me?
That party was hilarious. I remember there was a small army of soda bottles, an enormous cake with a delicious strawberry filling in the middle and giant polka dots on top, Stephanie taught us some fancy dance moves, Pixie Stix led to much debauchery, “Extreme Horse” in the driveway (involving the hoods of both our dilapidated Explorer and Ricky’s car, a giant shovel, and sometimes carrying Doug around to shoot from a supine position). My brother did that hilarious beat-up-and-insult-Rob thing when we were FINALLY starting to flirt. Then my mom had to, in the midst of my birthday party, explain to Mark why it is physically impossible and generally inadvisable to “suck your momma’s balls!” The photos from that party are some of my favorite ever (thank you, Brianna).
At any rate. Thank you Jonathan Larson and Tick, tick…BOOM! for this little stroll. Those were good times. I didn’t realize that I had already moved so far beyond them. It has gotten to the point that I’d forgotten what my dreams were then. I wanted to write plays, direct them, turn them into screenplays and direct those as well. I wanted to write the lyrics to “songs that people will listen to and remember” (j. Larson) full of send-ups to the 90s music that made us materialistic, the movies that turned us into popcorn addicts, the over-acknowledged emotions that made us Generation X, the violence, the beauty, the hunger, the nonsense, the drama, the therapy, the mountains, the kisses in front of refrigerators covered in to-do lists, the nights we were too chicken to skinny dip in the lake, the ex-boyfriends pissing in the yard because the bathroom is all the way upstairs, the unplanned…oh goodness…toddlers now?...the heart-shaped necklaces, the Ron plays, the Kim dances, grabbing two cheeseburgers each at the drive-thru for five bucks, chicken tender melts after shows and before dances, the leopard-print bedrooms, the piracy, the midnight releases, the Dungeons and Dragons, the Star Trek, the books carried around in plastic bags to keep the covers from getting scratched, reading Beowulf without opening it all the way because he takes such good care of his books, my first pierogi at a varsity football game, crying on the floor of my new bedroom because J.J. got the room with the purple carpet and I had to live in Pennsylvania in all the wrong shades, the awkward fights in the lunchroom, gathering napkins to get away from the drama, the medieval dinner parties dressed as theatre, the first crush that ever killed my appetite, fake British accents to get rid of my first stage fright, Ida Rinegold and Munroe Murgatroyd in love, “I have to ask all new students this”…”well, we’re the only two girls here, I guess we’ll have to be friends”…”I remember you! You should come over after school. Today.”…”I was supposed to tell you I found this on the floor, but it’s from Joe”…”Iwaswonderingifyoumightwanttogooutonadatewithmesometime”…moving to the back of the classroom because I thought you were cute, Lobster, but I don’t remember what we said…Anyway. It would be impossible to say how much I remember of the pre-sixteens. I sometimes suspect that, if I had to, I could remember every moment with all of you. Every moment that counted anyway.
But somewhere in remembering all of the moments that made us what we are, I forgot the dreams that kept me who I was. I forgot to create things. My writing has gone so far downhill it’s not funny. I haven’t written drama in months, and what I did write failed even to entertain me. So here’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that two weeks away from my sooty apartment right by the train tracks, two weeks with people who knew the version of me that isn’t so bittersweet tasting, two weeks of home and family and reconnection, two weeks of being away from buildings and subway noise and laundry in the scary basement…two weeks will have to be enough to bring me back.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed for me?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Stream of consciousness.
I found you.
Not
the other way
around.
I wonder if you know that.
I wonder if I let you know,
or if I was more comfortable
com-FORT-able. Fortified.
letting you believe that you found me, first.
I want to get to know you.
Four years after finding you, I want to get to know you.
More importantly
I want to let you know me.
Well, it might be too late now.
Too late for us to have a shot
Too late for me to have a childhood
Rather than need anyone else, I threw both away. I sold them to buy self-sufficiency.
Your shot.
My youth.
For a penny each, tossed into the Nantucket sound.
One for a wish, and one to bring you back.
Could a little wish like that bring you back to me?
If you came back, if you actually made the effort and came to see me…
(for the first time in two years)
Then would I let you get to know me? Would I cry at you like I do or would I let you understand really what makes me so sad. Would I tell you that I’m scared of time. Of how it moves forward, and of how it moves me away from home, from the home I wanted to build with you? Of how my path has changed. Of making the wrong choice, the wrong career, the wrong way. Becoming the wrong person. Would I tell you that, no matter how many times you tell me otherwise, I’m still too scared that you love her more, that she’s who you belong with? That I’m selfish for keeping you from her? I’m scared that you, the only man who ever loved me, will wake up one day and realize you didn’t love me after all. What would I be worth to myself then. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I wouldn’t see myself the same way. Someone loved me once, that’s comfort. That’s validation. So I try and realize I didn’t love you, just in case, so that it won’t hurt as much…but obviously I can’t. In fact, I still love you. I wonder, though, if you understand my doubts. I worry that you are just too scared and lacking in self-esteem and motivation to actually put yourself out there. That I am a safety net for you. You are more than that to me. Fuck, there was a time that all I wanted in life was to have your children and live in the mountains with you. Have dogs and make home movies of our babies crawling on blankets in the lawn, the endless mountains behind them like guardians, shelter. But still you won’t let me any closer than I let you. You are different with our other friends than you are with me. I know this now. They’ve told me you change when I’m around. You behave better. You aren’t as dark. But you know, I sense the darkness. I sense the way you are with everyone else, and, if anything, I crave it. Don’t you know by now that I will love you always. Don’t you think that it is time to relax? I will if you will.
I will if you will.
Not
the other way
around.
I wonder if you know that.
I wonder if I let you know,
or if I was more comfortable
com-FORT-able. Fortified.
letting you believe that you found me, first.
I want to get to know you.
Four years after finding you, I want to get to know you.
More importantly
I want to let you know me.
Well, it might be too late now.
Too late for us to have a shot
Too late for me to have a childhood
Rather than need anyone else, I threw both away. I sold them to buy self-sufficiency.
Your shot.
My youth.
For a penny each, tossed into the Nantucket sound.
One for a wish, and one to bring you back.
Could a little wish like that bring you back to me?
If you came back, if you actually made the effort and came to see me…
(for the first time in two years)
Then would I let you get to know me? Would I cry at you like I do or would I let you understand really what makes me so sad. Would I tell you that I’m scared of time. Of how it moves forward, and of how it moves me away from home, from the home I wanted to build with you? Of how my path has changed. Of making the wrong choice, the wrong career, the wrong way. Becoming the wrong person. Would I tell you that, no matter how many times you tell me otherwise, I’m still too scared that you love her more, that she’s who you belong with? That I’m selfish for keeping you from her? I’m scared that you, the only man who ever loved me, will wake up one day and realize you didn’t love me after all. What would I be worth to myself then. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I wouldn’t see myself the same way. Someone loved me once, that’s comfort. That’s validation. So I try and realize I didn’t love you, just in case, so that it won’t hurt as much…but obviously I can’t. In fact, I still love you. I wonder, though, if you understand my doubts. I worry that you are just too scared and lacking in self-esteem and motivation to actually put yourself out there. That I am a safety net for you. You are more than that to me. Fuck, there was a time that all I wanted in life was to have your children and live in the mountains with you. Have dogs and make home movies of our babies crawling on blankets in the lawn, the endless mountains behind them like guardians, shelter. But still you won’t let me any closer than I let you. You are different with our other friends than you are with me. I know this now. They’ve told me you change when I’m around. You behave better. You aren’t as dark. But you know, I sense the darkness. I sense the way you are with everyone else, and, if anything, I crave it. Don’t you know by now that I will love you always. Don’t you think that it is time to relax? I will if you will.
I will if you will.
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