glasses make me feel goofy

So glasses make me feel goofy. When I wear my glasses my perspective is off. I float my fingers over the handrail just in case. I do not walk around in high hells or fish nets or painted red lipstick. I go to blogs that write about hot girls in glasses. I realize I am not one of them.

I tend to forget that anyone can see me so I do not brush my hair. I look mean or at least that’s what I think when I see myself in glasses. I look at other people in glasses and think they all look perfectly normal. I don’t really know what perfectly normal means though.

I am just not a glasses kind of girl. I mean really, I rub my eyes like a girl who forgets girls in glasses can and do wear make up. Under my glasses I have smeared mascara on my cheeks. I don’t look in the mirror because I could care less how I look today so I don't know I've got dirty secrectary face and the fact that no one has mentioned it by the end of the day is reassurance that I am invisible in my glasses.

I do not wear my glasses as a fashion statement. It throws me off when people, who don’t need them, do. I get it but it’s just not on me. I bought my glasses at an online retailer for fewer than thirty bones. Cheap glasses that do the job. My eyes are resting. I’ve worn my contacts for too long so now I have to wear a perfectly functional pair of glasses.

I am comfortable in this insecurity.

a letter about love.

I left my church days and hopelessly droll prayers in a box I brought home from work. I left it on the corner of 40th and Adams. Next to the freeway and the park, on the sidewalk out in front of the house where I lived in what felt like a normal life.

My heart followed at my feet and decided to stay so I promised I would be back when the breaking was fixed. I remember thinking, one day I wouldn’t need to buy the bruised fruit anymore just because it was on sale. I would be back if I could just learn to stop and walk around, instead of through, the destruction I stumbled upon my entire life.

I would be right here though, always.

I ran far enough where the skeleton of my memories rarely visit me and when they do it’s only because I let them in order to dismember, dissect and then sew them back together. I don’t let the sutures dehisce; there are no more flowers, or mysteries or fairytales hidden in my flesh.

One day, I happened to I find you on a corner wearing newly shined shoes and an Eddie Haskell smile. You were drunk and wishing I was the kind of girl who needed something from you. I listened as you made opulent promises and even though I didn’t believe you I let you feed me tangerine slices while we sobered up.

You never stop long enough to be examined. You never stand far enough so that I can see you clearly. You take the air and fill it with perfume. You push and you cower. I am full, taken over, overwhelmed but most importantly I am alive.

The two of us, we couldn’t be more different. I pretend not to notice but I watch you impress the world with your colored wings and your small hollow bones that allow you to fly. My kind bird. I love you and because I love you I worry and the worry makes me rail against the softness that has allowed me to so carelessly care for someone so carefree.

Sometimes it seems as though it is only when your violent knuckles are punching against the leather steering wheel or your angry words are littered into my hair that you are distant enough to understand. I see unmistakably then. You are crying and I sit there sighing and silent and smoking cigarettes. You could never be as cruel as I am the obvious stoic.

I hold on as if letting go would mean you are not good enough or gentle enough or passionate enough. As if our separate history could not keep us apart. I hold on for my place to belong. For the small shelter I am able to provide. A place that is ours for now in a life that takes at any minute.

I am not a girl who questions if I have loved too long, too hard, too much or too little. I do not apologize or offer forgiveness. I do not scream and throw fits or placate and appease you.

I love like a cripple who has survived past the fall. I love like a starving man who has had the last of his bread stolen. I love like a vagabond jumping another train without knowing where its headed.

My kind bird,
you love me back.

You love me back as if this is good enough.

1937

Rose, my lost bird
my wayward girl

all the demons that possessed you
couldn’t keep you here

with the laughter of angels
in the calm of a fight
you were gone to me forever the longest summer night
the air, with fire flies and a southern drawl, can charm or can kill
should it speed or should it stall
years ago, yet I still can’t forget
my sister, my friend, my life in regret.

You'll never hear me say "thank you" with a whisper.

Sometimes we all have those days. It is usually an in between day where a muggy gray sky finally turns to rain. My friend who was a stranger sat down with me held my hand. I didn’t have to explain I am not the easiest person to reach or please forget it I’ll be fine. I was nearly defenseless so I let her sit with me. She sat there with her perfectly made up Latin eyes blanketed by thick long hair. She was beautiful in the way that only she in that moment could ever be.

It was just one of those days but I knew she had ached where I had ached.

She didn’t know about the time I ran away when I was nine because it was too much or the day I found my fathers dead body. She didn’t know that when I was 6 I wanted to be a country singer or about the joke I tell too often, “I would sing but I would hate to alienate you as I have a voice of angels” because I can’t sing. She only knew me though passing moments here and there, social interactions but she understood me. She had no reason to befriend me but did it anyway, against the popular vote.

When she sat with me I felt the burden of having to carry myself home lifted. I found a friend who without knowing reminded me to look around open up and give, sometimes the kindness of a friend is all we need to get us through a bad moment.

the world where we hide our loneliness

there are three models that lived upstairs from Mrs. Kuban. She was always yelling about them

around the top of her head in their high heels.
they are good looking but looking
really hungry.

Downstairs, Mrs. Kuban,
an operating-room nurse,
suffered a gash in her head that required stitches and had two broken bones in her foot.

Still for all for Mr. Kuban did he couldn’t find her heart. He lost it years ago.

The day Mrs. Kuban came home from the hospital I watched through the little
hole in my front door
the three girls, the models laughed but later
one went back when she thought no one was looking and brought Ms. Kuban fruit

I was looking.

One day.

When I woke you were sipping on a straw from my spine, drunk and dreaming. In that time I forgot how to sleep so I stayed up and watched your rib cage, hold your lungs, your lungs boast and then cower. I watched you for hours until I couldn’t take it much longer I woke you, I woke you and asked if you knew,
“how many bones are in our bodies”
and then I said
“well, but what I meant was, …I love you.”
(Ignore the questions about the bones; I only wanted to tell you the second part)

That day you assembled me with Rumi and yet, you- not the lover- nor the sage had ever heard of him. That day, I felt a tapping from the inside of my flesh. A Jameson heart covered up with pineapple. You took a straw and drank from my spine. “206 bones” you said were in my body. I pushed my jaw into your collar bone, 412 bones I thought. Now, here, with you I hadn’t expected it.

A deer that had escaped a hunter, caught in the morning that day we first slept in.This is only one small way we are different. You released an irritable sigh. I thought of trains and oceans. I thought I could do something but did nothing besides think. And then I thought about the weekend and how it was mostly beautiful . As you, are- mostly, beautiful. Even when you can’t help but try to unbutton my polished nerves . With your furrowed brow and the dramatics of the season actor. You know, when cornered like this I think we’re competing for sanity and I refuse to loose. When I say these things your only response is to ask if today is the day I am going to take my red shoes and used books home from your house. If today was the day I was leaving you.I always respond with “No” I say, “you’ve assembled me with Rumi and you’ve never even read him”

the lights are pretty.

I was raised on ritual. Each breathe, it seemed a prayer. I still believe in intrinsic human goodness but I think my faith, faith in things uncertain, faith for things bigger than face value in part (a big part) caused my downfall. I always thought, “things have to get better now” until they didn’t and I just needed to step out of that pseudo sanctuary. These days I am so far removed that I smirk thinking about how I barely made it out of that, again. Now, I hold my cards close to my chest not because I live defensively but because most of my honest emotion, my true emotion has been spent and I am only trying to keep what’s left safe. I have changed very much over who I once was- a mental paradigm shift. This time of year I see now how I stand out (or at least feel the goofy paranoia).No, I don’t stand out physically. I am pretty average and as my father would say “count your blessings that you’re average). In a long sleeve shirt I could fit in just about anywhere. Most of the time, I’m impermeable, clear, calm. Logic is uncomplicated and easy for me to follow. I may not be a great leader but I am for certain, a decent follower. But this time a year my speech, my thoughts, my actions are clumsy at best. Underneath the shirt, the skin, the bones I nervously wait for the holidays to fall into the quieter days, the ho-hum months. It like the holidays, the traditions, the rituals have the power to hold me up in a light that I am not comfortable in only to examine me for long enough to tell me Hallmark did not send one addressed to me. Oh woe, oh woe…pity makes me ugly and I hate to ruin perfectly good day so I make it look like I am busy, not just standing around waiting for some great celebration.

I make blueprints of my thoughts and plan for a future similar to my past and search frantically for simplicity.

Maybe one day I will laugh and remember what it is in Turkey that makes you sleepy and bring it up after a holiday dinner.