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When I was 15, I started an online portfolio on a new website called DeviantArt.  A few friends and I joined; one friend liked to sketch, his angry black scribbles barley forming identifiable objects (here is a leg, that one must be a bird, maybe that’s his mother).  Another took photographs of ordinary things, but used Photoshop to contrast the colors so much that the images all blurred together, again, a barely recognizable outline of what they once were.  

Of course, when Judd inevitably joined he became instantly popular – his drawings were those of someone who spent years tirelessly studying figures and shapes and how they all came together to form a perfect replica of any photograph, not a community college dropout who spent his days sleeping, and his nights hunched over his notepad in a booth at Perkins, chain smoking Marlboro Reds, drinking black coffee, and inciting rumors that he had dated a stripper last year (a real shocker of an accusation in small town Iowa).  His specialty was drawing the girls he had a crush on, and I admit, it did seem to work in his favor periodically. 

 Anyway.  I joined to have a place to store the writings I did – writings that some nights literally kept me alive.  Of course, I logged in the other month and physically recoiled in embarrassment over my teenage feelings (so many feelings), but I’m glad they are there permanently, or at least until the site closes one day. 

One notable and life-changing event that came from joining DeviantArt, aside from the first true feeling of artistic/alternative community I had ever felt in my life – Newton boasted “15,000 smiling faces”, but I promise you they were not smiling at me – was meeting my first ever online friend, Ryan Miller (ceremoniously dubbed Ra Ra Salamander after we decided that our names were too plain for our liking; he calls me Dusty).  Ra Ra was like, is like, a modern-day beatnik if a beatnik had a mail route and an infinity for feet.  

We found each other by accident.  One of his poems showed up on the homepage of dA, and I was instantly enthralled with his writing style.  I devoured all of his work right away, then revisited it again and again, savoring it like a sweet treat in a hidden drawer.  I had never seen anyone use a typewriter like that before.  I pictured the person sitting behind it like they were sitting behind a piano, the keys being stroked effortlessly, sometimes literally cascading down the page.  He used combinations of words I didn’t recognize.  He made stream of consciousness even harder to decipher by throwing in a few lines of blatant coherence, presenting a stark and definitive idea that had nothing to do with what I thought I was reading.  I was enraptured by the confusion, by the dripping honey of his words, the way he brought the City of Shoes alive to the point it was almost visceral.  So I finally got up the nerve to comment on one of his poem’s, my favorite poem still to this date.  I don’t remember what I said, but I remember writing it over and over in my head, even though I knew he would not respond.  He did.  

The pen pal letters we decided to write each other turned very quickly into pen pal packages, often including mixed cd’s (mine with grossly underproduced acoustic songs, his a mixture of folk tunes and spoken word, both of us remembering to include a Beach House track), a small, black notebook we filled with magazine clipping collages, and whatever random trinkets we found that reminded us of each other.  

Most importantly were the pages upon pages of letters that often accumulated to an amount that required them to be bound together by a hole puncher and dental floss.  I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a new letter so close to the tip of my tongue I swear I was writing them in my sleep.  All of the pain, loss and torment of my move to California was consolidated, put into a letter, and then compartmentalized.  The relief from the “real world”, the way my heart would pound each day I checked the mail, the elation of seeing a large, thick manilla mailer covered in chicken scrawl, more magazine clippings, scraps of paper clearly shoved haphazardly into a typewriter, and about ten stamps brought me a particular kind of joy I have yet to be able to recreate.

I had a renewed interest in my own life.  My inner voice was now reserved for narrating the most trivial, everyday tasks in my head, thinking of ways I could spin them into something less banal.  Suddenly the aching hole in my soon-to-be-removed wisdom tooth became a dilapidated clock – its twanging wires sticking out at various angles, the rusted gear turning slowly into my gums.  Shooing a coyote away from my Pitbull at 5am was a valiant act of heroism, with us narrowly escaping death, ending in my unsuccessful attempt at later locating the coyote and bringing him home to be domesticated.  (This is still a wish of mine).

He would write about walking to the pier by his house in a way that made me ache to walk down a pier; I could taste the salt in my mouth, see him diving from the old, weather-worn stakes of log that rose from the water every 3 feet.  When he wrote about taking the train to work on days he couldn’t ride his bicycle, I drove immediately to the closest Coaster station, using the strange people I observed as more writing fuel for my next letter to him.

*The summary and conclusion have been redacted to protect the author’s desire to protect the author.

I

In the bath, the tv blares in the background, Chinese people speak fluently with no sign of a translation. An Australian woman summarizes something at the end and now it’s a house hunting show.

Steam does rise from the water, but I don’t think it’s hot. I want to boil, tumble around like the potatoes in a thick soup of potatoes. A copy of Tender is the Night balances precariously on the white tub edge, it’s pages brown and yellowed, mold splotches on every page. Nathan told me to read it, with a promise of alcoholism and depression, love lost and yearning, but he likes the kind of professionally prescribed, upper education required reading literature I just don’t get into, so I guess we’ll see.

The water isn’t deep enough to cover my breasts, and the tub isn’t long enough to stretch out my legs, so while my knees, thighs and calves form a tent outside of the water, my breasts spill to the side and kind of languish in the water, like the part of the ocean where the rows of pebbles just stop, and your feet sink slightly into the sand, before it all turns to water, water, more water.

My cheeks are hot, I know they’re as red as they turn whenever anyone I don’t know well talks to me – one of my more annoying tells. (I want to be cool, collected, like a poker player, wearing dark and reflective sunglasses). Ollie just pushed the door open with a flourish, I almost drop the phone, he checks that I’m okay with a great sniff of his nose and he takes off again, out the door with his strong tail pointing up, satisfied that I am still in working form.

Now I want soup.