Help held hostage
by my storaged, albeit latent sex drive that
only awakens when the moon is positioned in just a way that
the wolves howl and a group of long, black haired Norwegians scream
about burning churches
or
Trent Reznor, fingering on the tv to something sad,
dark, doomy, dreamy
weary and frustrated,
knives to skin, fire, spanking, ropes and choking.
I don’t really know.
In my waking dreams, I avoid Summer. Summer doesn’t exist – it goes SpringFallWinter, repeating.
How do I always end up back here, this place I don’t like? Always halfway between let it be and cut it all off, always half out the door one foot in one foot out. Are there really people that live differently? I know there are. They stay put, sentient, in the same house they grew up in, their children now run around indifferently in the backyard, unaware of the mountains of half melted army soldiers their father buried there so many years ago. He used to kick at the cat, a secret he keeps hidden still, since so many articles written about serial killers indicate early onset animal abuse, but he reasons that he never made contact, and that the troubling, dark thoughts about stuffing everyone into a very large pillow case and tossing them into the river are just remnants of a bad dream.
Fucking Summer, man. It’s gone now, except for one day this week, right in the middle, where it’s supposed to be 93. My sister will be here with her baby and husband. My brother will meet him for the first time, probably hold him at arms length and ask “who’s is it?” He lifted me up at Rammstein so I could see the fire cannon above the heads of the very tall white people standing in my way. It reminded me that we were once very good friends who made mud pies on a frisbee, even adding in those helicopter seeds for good measure, or ones that ran to the carwash to get a pop, and sometimes even snuck out through the woods to run to TasteeFreeze for giant Pixiestix and Ring Pops.
“Today I fucked up by walking behind an attractive woman and her dog.” These are the news titles I want to read. Wouldn’t it be fun if everything varied between backlit and sepia-toned, depending on the mood? I wanted to dye my hair so black it was blue but the hairdresser said no, so we settled on purple. I think there was a time when I loved Summer, but I think that was back when I didn’t dislike California so much.
Theoretically, certain things do happen when you suddenly find and talk incessantly to the crush from eighth grade, who suddenly vanished overnight in ninth to rumors of a loosely veiled cult somewhere in Missouri. You had wondered about them, it didn’t seem fair to lose someone who played bass so well, and had such long hair. You told your father one night while watching Joan of Arcadia that you would have to find them, ask them questions about God, because no one else you knew was even remotely interested. Anyway, those certain things. You’ll find them desperate, married, 3 children, awake all night with the newest, lawyering during the day. You’ll find they were in love with you, not Kaelie, and that they didn’t know you hid in the closet, clutching the landline to your cheek for so long while they spoke that it left a hot, red imprint for days. That they actually didn’t like that you dated all of their friends except them. You’ll find you listen to each other like it was still 2001, and that perhaps both of you haven’t been listened to since then. (Maybe you’re engaged to a real piece of work who’s only ambitions include shooting and killing a bear, jiu jitsu, and commercial carpentry, who won’t marry you in November because it’s hunting season, but will marry you in the freezing rains of February in a converted movie theater where you can put your names in lights for only $500 more). Maybe lines will blur, maybe your Prius will get stuck in a blizzardous snow drift outside of a nice enough hotel, where they come into your room, but you don’t let them much past the threshold, where they hold you with their body against the wall, but you don’t touch. You’ll become the catalyst for a divorce that has been surreptitiously finding its way higher and higher on their white board calendar of activities and things to do. You won’t want this, obviously, and you will protest. You’ll make them sign a blood oath that it’s not for you, because they are not for you. (By this time, your open relationship scam of an engagement will become ever increasingly nauseating, and you’ll meet Brian in a suite reserved for the wealthiest people in Minneapolis, where, sitting in a bathtub large enough for 142 inches of human body, you’ll admit (out loud) for the first and last time that you don’t love the hunter, that you never did, that it was safe, “what you do”, Midwestern. You’ll pull all your courage and leave them the following week). Probably the obvious spoiler alert is that you do end up fucking your crush from eighth grade while Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York plays mellifluously in the background, and even more obvious is that you do not end up with them like people in books, but you do stay friends. Best friends, even, if you ignore the ever present undercurrent of dissatisfaction and expectancy on their end.
Theoretically.
Looking back is hard, foreign, feels like reading a book about a fictional character that never was, and less like remembering that at one time you had feelings. A lot of them! They are gone now. Dormant! For years.
Is it zee diagnosis, or is it the complete shuttering off, sheltering, harboring, then eventual killing of anything that brings back the feeling of no control. Everything is controlled now, even when seeking otherwise, control.
I look back with envy, nostalgia, embarrassment. Try to summon something, but it is only unlocked after hours that I rarely participate in now. Nothing makes sense, nothing looks the way it was ever pictured, everything is weird, not much is “bad”.
Concerning, though.
Maybe “this will go away, you know it will” echo-y warnings prevent even a beginning of Something. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m hesitant to cross lines, boundaries, and when a glimpse of Something comes, it never actually materializes. The ones who Drive You Crazy, are not the ones, so they say.
I'm Getting By 