We are all sleeping in the same room. You keep a flashlight, big, beside the bed. There are boards over the door. The phone is disconnected. He shifts in his sleep, his arm bothered by the cast. He sleeps with his eyes open. Even as a child, curled up on the couch. He knew it was not safe here. It is not safe here. It is not safe inside. It is not safe, a thousand miles away. Any wall can have words. O, and what words can say. I know you know, and machines can speak, and there is no escape from dreaming in the dark.
You raise your arm and it cracks open. You open your eyes and the room skitters away. The mice in the hall are stealing, slowly, every piece that remains. A gentleman with a shimmering moustache is waiting just outside the door to take you away. The armies raised to protect are all buried in snow. The Christmas lights flash on and off. Your mother is crying, your mother is sorry. There was nothing any of us could have done. How could we have known? How could we have known?
How could I have known, as you sat crying on my bed, that any word I said could have spelled out the difference from disaster? The bullets I always said I’d take for you are scattered on the floor, and where was I with my gun? Sitting drunk on my living room floor, the heat turned up to 80 and my friends all gone.
O, brother, the dye running from your hair down the shower’s drain, tears on your face. The drain is gone, the hair, and where are you? The child I did not know is wrapped around your broken arm, is stitched across your aching head. The stranger in my mother’s house, this stranger is my father’s son. And I, I, I, my family’s daughter when the breeze blows right. Your blood is in my temples too, and it is lapping at our kitchen floor, catching in the tiles laid by our father’s hands. What a pity that I am such a poor protector. Even I can strike down a man, given the right weapons. Even I, even I, but I did not. And these small hands, these hands like our mother’s, they are no match for the panic in our blood, the voices in our ears, the truth and falsehood in the night.
Due to the crazy blizzard in New York, my family’s travel plans got royally effed. So they are staying until Friday. This will mean a total of twelve days of my family staying in my & Griffin’s apartment, which should probably explain the pretty dire lack of updates here.
merry christmas (or whatever you’re into) from this bed is a ship & the whole family here at bright bone city
(semi-regular updates will perhaps resume some time next week when my family is not staying with me for winter feast days)
Stood up for the first time in– that was over a year ago, now wasn’t it? Not counting you, of course. And this time you aren’t here to save me, to scoop me up from another man’s frozen doorway, to heal my ego with your proximity. Let your tongue in my mouth tell me how foolish I’ve been.
My pride takes one on the chin, hard, and falls asleep drunk on the couch next to the telephone. You silly girl. Rearrange the furniture and heat this gin on the stove; your man is coming home. You silly girl; two weeks from today. If this little injury still pains you, keep staring at the calendar, color in the days.
I left town, I got back, I left town, I got back, and now somehow it is Saturday and Monday my family arrives in Chicago for Winter Holiday Festivities. I need to finish the collage in my kitchen! I need to clean my bathtub! I need to buy decaf coffee! I need to hide the drugs/sex toys/embarrassing middle school girl novels! I’ll leave wrapping a Christmas tree in caution tape and Halloween lights for when they get here.
Some thoughts from Flight 746, between a beautiful sunset and a gin & ginger.
Dear family,
I do not know how it happened that I became a woman who is so often unkind. I could lay blame many places: the chemical imbalances and fits of mood that have haunted me since childhood; a thousand small, forgivable traumas; men, women, and ex-best-friends who broke my heart a dozen times; my penchant for melodrama encouraged by my career and its community; my many vices that from time to time bare the ugly teeth of unsatisfied habit; but these are weak claims, petty causes for deeper troubles. Why, then, does this family’s Western outpost house such a biting ambassador? Why, then, am I, at best, a stranger and, at worst, a stone cold bitch to the very people I have loved the longest? I have no satisfactory answer. Give me a crack team of psychologists, psychics, anthropologists, and critical theorists, and I will give a few more thorough remarks. My crippling fear of failure, my tendency to over-compartmentalize to the point of antagonism, my admittedly defensive independent streak–these are certainly factors. But I know that none of you merit my level of abuse. Of course you, like me, are not without your flaws and frustrations–it would be against my character to concede otherwise–but hell, I could stand to show a bit more magnanimity. I’m sorry. I am.
And so, a mid-December new-years-to-come resolution: to be kinder. I will turn this resolve to all of you, and I hope you to me, and I fervently wish that you all will put forth this effort to each other. Because while I am well aware of the catalytic role I often play, I know not all is well in our family’s house, even in the absence of my too-frequent anger. So please, take care of each other, especially when I, through the trials of distance and the caprices of character, fall short.
I love you all, truly, and please trust that you are all extraordinarily important to me in many ways, even when outward expression is sadly lacking. I, like many, am guilty of taking love as a given–affection and appreciation go unspoken, assumed. Of course I love my family, and so of course I only tell them my thoughts when they turn from love to something more critical, more coarse. For years of this behavior, I fear an apology will not suffice. I can only hope that the promise of future years can undo some of the damage wrought. But I do hope–why else would I struggle to articulate all of this, to ask for your understanding?
I love you all, and thank you so much for everything. I’ll see you soon.
- Sid Branca Cook, 12/07/2010
PS: Once again, Happy Birthday, Mom.
oh, dignity can be so hard to maintain, and kindness, and honestly I’ve never liked the grateful dead, no, really, no, I do understand that drugs are fun, sure, but when you say Phil like you know him, I don’t sympathize, and anyway Box of Rain was the only one that ever did it for me, and that the memory of a cassette tape now living out its last in the back of a station wagon in Los Angeles… god help me, when I open my mouth– when a stranger, new or well-seasoned, leans in for the bear hug I don’t want I think
jesus, is this how I sound? or is it the Coors, is it the air out here? I think
oh, to have a moderately and tastefully lit room, a few good books, soft cushions and something stable to lean against, a minimal yet satisfying number of good beers, good cigarettes, vinyl playing quietly, to have you, to have the fear that I am not enough keep pace with your spirit and your intellect, rather than the fear that, if I spoke, no one would hear.
I am too tired, too drunk, too spent from childish boredom to have much to say. but I wish my little could rest on those dear shoulders. you all, my dear friends, have spoiled me for teeming others, for you, turning your cheek to mine, you look, you speak, you listen. and while the wind howls through the space between us, it knows itself, a conduit.
oh tumblr, baby, i’m so glad you’re back. i missed you. those hours in bed were not the same without you.
sorry for the lack of updates, my slacker self felt that my host website being down was a good excuse to do nothing.
what I have been doing: going through a wide variety of objects in my childhood bedroom while visiting my family for the weekend. there are some pictures here.