Tonight is a night for celebrations, a night to party in
honor of the silver anniversary of this life’s beginning in my current self!
Or, in less flowery terms, Sunday is my birthday and tonight, I’m going out on
the town to soak up the words and sounds and vibes of the drag scene of
Detroit, MI. I don’t know what it is about those special occasions that makes
me think the drag queen scene is an appropriate way to celebrate, but my fair
ginger lover and I are attending Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight for my
birthday and I am quite excited!
So in honor of my birthday, or “hitting the QC” as I put it
recently, since I will be 25, I am going to share with you a comparison of the
writer I began as, and the writer I have evolved into. A “This is Your Life!”
in writing. Please enjoy!
Around age 13, I got into songwriting. Big time. Was the
lead singer of many fledgling bands, most (okay, all) of which did not survive
past the basement door. Around age 13, I got into a LOT of things, actually.
But the one that has had the most positive impact on my life (other than my
fair ginger lover of course) is writing as a catharsis. I had kept journals
since the age of 8, when I was presented with a tiny, lockable diary from my
Grama Barb. I wish I still had that diary. I wrote in it faithfully every
single day, even if just to update it on what we had for dinner. It was my friend
in a time when I didn’t have many of those, and certainly none I could talk to
outside of school. When I moved to live with my mother, I had real friends and
the journals didn’t stop, but they weren’t much more than glorified bookends
while I explored my newfound freedom.
But 13 was a big year for me – the only year I got to be a
teenager. After I discovered pot, but before I figured out how to make babies.
That glorious year of discovery, excitement, drama, and the invincibility. Oh,
how I miss the invincibility.
I felt like a rebel then, and now, I can see why. I can see
why because I still feel the same, pushing on the sides of the box I’m in, daring
it to move so that I may experience something different. Looking for novelty.
Feeling oppressed. Some people are just adolescent at heart, and I fear I may
be one of them. Some call them hipsters, but those are different. Those people
are just weird, with their skinny jeans. You wouldn’t catch me dead in a pair
of skinny jeans.
If you did, it’s because of the jeans.
Looking back at this piece now, I wish I could show this to
a therapist. I think I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just said
these things out loud rather than write them down in my passive-aggressive way
and wish on stars at night that someone would save me from myself.
Please enjoy, and if you must laugh, well, okay. I did, too.
INSIGNIFICANT REBELLION
I’ve got the world in an uproar
I’m runnin’ through my house,
Slammin’ all the doors
I’m smashin’ all the windows
And pulling all the stuffing
outta my pillows
I’m pulling all the carpeting
offa my floor
‘Cause I’m sick of this routine
I don’t wanna do this no more.
If I wanna destroy my socks
It’s okay
You were always the first to tell
me
They were ugly anyway
Let me play with my food
Throw it against the wall
It’s quite all right if I chew
the phone line
Not like anybody’s gonna call
Chorus
Can’t I come home to a different
place
I’m sick of this body, sick of my
face
I’m tired of being forever a
shame
God, just give me a new face and
name
This is wearing me thin
I’m losing my grip, losing my
grip
Don’t take it personal if I hate
you today
It’s just that I keep working without
good pay
This job sucks, being in this
cage
I’d go run away, but dammit, I’m
underage
All I have now is my future to
look for
For now I’m content,
Slammin’ the door
Chorus X2
And I had something written on
the page like, “…and fade…” because of course I was going to hit the stage
someday, even if it were just at my local coffee shop, and I was going to be
discovered singing this amazing song and I was gonna be the next Avril Lavigne,
yessirree Bob!
I wish I could go back to being
that girl, just for a little while. Just to remember what it felt like when I
knew exactly what I wanted from my life. I wanted everything, and back then,
there were no doubts in my mind that I could have them.
I made different choices and
learned my lessons the hardest way I could figure out how. I don’t know why,
maybe just to spite people. I had felt so suffocated for so long, I felt like I
needed to take a breath, tell everyone how I felt, take another breath, and
keep going, and I couldn’t let up from that because I couldn’t give anyone the
opportunity to shush me again. I was tired of being shushed, both literally and
figuratively.
Fourteen, hormones raging, I had my first boyfriend who was
willing to call me his girlfriend in public, who had a CAR (omg he was like so mature!)
and was madly in love with my best friend who was madly in love with my OTHER
best friend! Drama much, right?
So I decided to make myself the
center of attention for pretty much EVER as far as my high school career went,
and instead of doing it the right way, by being super smart and cool and having
a talent like writing or singing or drama club (all of which I was good at) I
got myself knocked up and did the proper penance and kept the baby. Who I love
dearly to this day and she brings me joy with every awkward gangly thud she
makes as she launches her beanpole nine-year-old self around our tiny house. I
martyred myself for the cause that had been drilled into me for years by my
father: take responsibility for your actions. Even if you screw up, stand by
your work.
This is what I wrote the day I
found out I was pregnant with my daughter, at 14.
My heart fell to the bottom of my
chest as my guts flew into my throat. Everything stopped for a moment – my
heartbeat, my brain activity. My pulse. I knew it, I just knew it. I was going
to die.
Twin pink lines stared back at
me, taunting me, screaming in my face, “I told you so!” I was so wrong. It
could happen to me, it did happen to me, it was happening to me. I
was…gulp…pregnant.
Somehow, my voice returned to me
and a ragged scream escaped from a place inside me I never knew existed. It was
a low, guttural cry of, “noo…noo…noo-oo-oo!”
After the world stopped spinning,
I stood up and looked in the mirror. A stranger stared back at me. Who was this
person, this pretty face with a bright future? Who was wearing those sparkling
blue eyes? That girl only three minutes ago had been me. Blinking furiously, I
began to see myself in a new light. My life began to crumble before my eyes.
Minutes later, I stood at the bus
stop, looking like I’d just seen a ghost. I watched blankly as my hands shook
like leaves in the early May breeze. Thoughts at a thousand miles per hour
raced through my mind.
One trumped them all, though, stomping on me like a
steel-toed boot. “I’m scared.”
...
Then there was sweet sixteen,
that wonderful year of first kisses and epic fallouts. It was a dark time in my
writing, full of adult things that I shouldn’t have known about yet, didn’t
understand but thought I had mastered in my short time as a writer. Because
what I was writing, I felt so strongly. As I’m sure every emo girl with wispy
hair and a bruised heart would say.
ALL THE LITTLE PIECES
I leaned down and picked them up.
The sharp edges of each tiny piece slit the skin of my fingertips, but I never
felt the pain. Blood poured from my chest where the hole where my heart used to
be was open and exposed for the whole world to see my anguish. My
freshly-curled hair fell in front of my face, and the tips were quickly
saturated with the pooling mess on the floor. I gathered the pieces in my
shredded hands and gently put them back where they belonged. I put my skin of
fakeness, of bravery, back on and looked at you for the very last time before I
turned and walked away. Little did I realize the shards of my heart would
quickly tear away that shell. Before I took two steps, I turned to look at you
again, but you were too busy ripping out your own heart to see.
...
Funny story – Eight years later,
I married him.
Seventeen brought me a new
romance, a new chapter in my life that, if any of my chapters could be ripped
out and rewritten, it would be this one.
I wrote this just before I
graduated high school, thinking I was really going to get out and do something
with myself. This poem made my Creative Writing teacher cry, and for the first
time in her teaching career, she awarded someone with an A+++++. She told me
so, and I’m proud of it.
TAKE A BREATH
A strong-knitted sweater
With faded blue jeans
Blue eyes staring towards the sky
Grass so green grows beneath
small feet
Feeling soft blades between toes
Long tousled hair blows golden
So small, a mind so deep
Where did Time go?
Friends slip so easily
Like water between fingers
Sliding into ice off the snowy
roof of home
Concealing rooms to hide in,
To hide from.
Windows with autographs of Jack
Frost
Translucent pictures that wonder,
Where did Time go?
Summer’s gone, coppery autumn,
too
The season’s bold colors run like
rain
Under dirty bespeckled city snow
Memories fade, construction paper
in the sun
Those scribbles look so familiar
–
Like they’re from back then,
But they’re not.
The wax is freshly sticking to
the paper
A tiny pink hand with plump
pillows of fat
Grasp crayons of many colors
A rainbow in a box of 96.
Art like Da Vinci,
In first grade form.
So young, so pure.
Where did Time go?
The telephone won’t ring
Hanging silent on the wall
The mailbox stands empty –
No one cares.
Doors, with deadbolts of many
metals
Remain locked so tight
Papers so high in piles so great
“I’ll show you, prove you wrong.”
The fridge, almost empty
The heart, nearly broken.
Confidence, like opportunity,
Runs out the faucets.
Where did Time go?
No act of God
Nor element of Nature –
Nor man
Can change this rock-hard
demeanor
Baby kisses have the power
To turn a scared teenager into a
warrior.
Work – like payments in rear
Make that teenager an avenger.
A superhero, a real-live adult.
Empty mail and silent phones
bring peace
Who needs to look out windows?
There’s too much time to make up
for early
Too late just comes too soon.
Where did Time go?
Self-critical, overbearing, never
ending
Little girl with too-big dreams
She’s not going to find
Under construction paper pictures
The intimidating piles of “to-do”
And everybody else’s “no you
can’ts”
Where did Time go?
A sweater and blue jeans
Blue eyes staring towards the sky
All is right because I know
Time is in my hands.
Re-reading it now, as I write it
for you, I think that this poem has a lot of different directions it is coming
from, and a lot of places it’s trying to go, but I think that’s why I left it
as it was. It represented a time when I had so many ambitions and so many
opportunities, but I needed to figure out how to handle them all because if I
didn’t, I was going to end up…
Well, let’s not talk about where
I was going to end up. Because I’m doing just fine now. Life works in
mysterious ways.
Eighteen brought me to Central
Michigan University and the most fun I’ve had as a writer so far. Working with
Robert Fanning was such a fantastic opportunity and I am privileged to call him
my friend. (Well, we’re FB friends and I adore everything he produces in
print.)
Some of the best stuff I’ve
written so far was written for his class. It was such an interesting course to
take because I had no idea how complex the world of poetry really was. My
feeble attempts at rhyming some words in some kind of rhythm on a page were
terribly overshadowed by the awesome things I read and heard in that room over
the course of that semester. I learned about new techniques, different formats
and styles. I learned about playing with the spacing and placement. It gives
the poem so much more dimension when you add a few extra spaces and tabs! I
love working with word placement on the page because the best poems are those
that you can see in your mind. Adding movement to that picture adds a dimension
that only improves the full effect. I particularly enjoy this poem because I
feel like it dances on the page, a quick shimmy.
THE LIBERATION OF EDITING
Once upon a moment
My
mood was painted blue
You
held the paintbrush to my soul
As I
Wrapped
in a box with
Four
neat corners
Six sides so perpendicular
And
particular
Makes
me feel peculiar
To write about and feel so great
To
liberate
My
soul, so moldable
A sculpture, unfinished
In
your hands
As you hold in front of me
The
key, piece de resistance
Grand
finale – complete!
The final streak across my
Dirty
canvas life
Make
it light!
After that, I went through some
dark stuff. Darker than the emo girl in me could ever dream of going. It was a
bad place and there was very little written during that time that wasn’t a plea
for help or a rough draft of a suicide note. But during this time, I read some
pieces that really helped me to get through, helped me to see that I wasn’t the
oddball, wasn’t the only person in the whole entire Universe who felt like this
or was strange in these ways. I lost touch with writing because I was in a
place where the writing wasn’t good anymore. It was just quick scrawls of “please”
and “I’m sorry” and “help me.”
When I put my life back together,
I started writing again. First with the journals. When I felt comfortable
talking to paper again, I started getting a little deeper and pulling out the
words that really hurt. The ones that were festering deep inside and screaming
to be let out. When I did, with the help of my very best friend and the keeper
of my heart, my fair ginger lover, this is what I came up with.
FORGIVEN
As were are two of the same,
I am divided, myself.
Two time zones:
Before you,
and After.
The chasing of
Destiny,
Destiny,
the sweetest of
victories.
Everything that ever was,
I don’t have to
succumb
to being part of it.
I don’t have to
continue
to live in vain.
I don’t have to
dream
As if I will die
Alone.
Seeing your face
For the first time,
That moment
Was upon the wing
of a prayer.
If there is a God,
If one can truly be
Vindicated,
I was.
I’m twenty five and I have three
children, a second husband, a luggage rack full of emotional baggage and debt,
no college degree, and no career other than the tables I turn at “Senior
Suburbia Diner” for lack of the desire to get any flack for mentioning my
company’s name. I have not written a book. I have not graduated college – yet.
I have no publications to my name and growing stack of rejection letters.
But as my mother once told me, I
have a 100% track record for getting through bad days, and it is against all
possible odds that I will never, ever see my name in print. So I go out
tonight, and I will celebrate my silver anniversary of life, and I will wake up
tomorrow and write something new. Everyone is a story in the end – make sure yours
is a good one.
xoxo :)
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