selective visions
I remember the places where the linoleum had been worn off or peeled up or carried away from the floor in my grandparent’s kitchen and I remember sitting in the craggy grey left behind when I was small enough to fit anywhere. I remember diet cookies in green packages, mossy pistachio cake, honey mustard pretzels and sucking my fingers after. I remember my bike with orange plastic padding at the handle ends and doing on it that slaloming back and forth down the middle of the street which we called something else and I remember the day I leaned too far finally in my grape vine swerves and skidded arm first across the pavement leaving blood behind. Oshkosh B’Gosh glasses. Pastel pillows pinned into the wallpaper over my bed. The Barnes and Noble edition of Pride and Prejudice that I had not read yet at seven, just fingered and noticed and looked at, when my cousin sleeping over leaned out of bed and vomited hot dog and helium everywhere and on the cover. Tonsil surgery. The drawings of paste and scissors and paper hearts with coffee filter trim in the Valentine’s Day Arthur book. A USA gymnastics leotard. The bald spot on my brother’s head where I kicked him by accident climbing in and out of his crib with sneakers on.
Shirley Temples extra cherries sick to my stomach spinning and a man on guitar and a fuzzy microphone says the Black and Tans like lightning ran from the rifles of the I.R.A. We are in Massachusetts. Jack lost at the circus. Shitting my bathing suit a little in Disney World because I couldn’t get the hotel door key to work. Lately, I remember my cousins as my children in games of house and how I’d yell at them with a pillow under my shirt to signify another woe begotten baby coming and say don’t you understand this gruel is all we can afford. White and kelly green Adidas stan smiths. Corduroy overalls. Mary-Kate and Ashley. I remember being sorry that I wasn’t better at basketball but not being able to make myself try harder. I remember being sorry that I wasn’t better at math but reading Babysitter’s Club books when we were getting told how to do our worksheets. I remember being eight and choosing to do face to face confession in an underwater looking room at my first reconciliation because everyone else in the class chose the little privacy closets and I wanted to be the only one brave enough to look at the priest’s face and let him see me say I’d sinned. I told this man I had been mean to my sister which was a lie she was only three and in wanting to have a sin I made one and I felt good at the restaurant dinner after. I remember being ten and making myself throw up a peanut butter sandwich and Doritos in the basement on a whim and going in the bath after and thinking about the movie Anastasia and how they make an orange like that and if I would be beautiful after everything and what was everything and how did Kerry from soccer have such small hands. A wet and stinking birth of something small and secret at first then all over all the time now not at all. But that came later. I remember being fourteen and quitting the basketball team after my parents had already bought me the purple and white sneakers and I remember saying I wasn’t sorry because it was too embarrassing to admit I was sorry when I was already ashamed and for years then I remember feeling sorry yet insisting when pressed that I never wanted the sneakers or to be on the team in the first place which was true but sort of beside the point because I remember regardless that I was sorry underneath all of that. I remember the high school swimming pool and mean words which meant the opposite and craggy knuckles on goosebumps and a Mazda after and a basement and Lil Wayne playing and I always loved to swim and it was different outside of the water and I wanted to get on with it and I remember he hooked two fingers under the still damp crotch of my standard issue suit and I thought finally and I thought it would be a lot of work to wriggle out of this now anyway and it was Pearl Harbor Day and I smiled back in the Mazda again feeling pleased that I had started something and that I was sore.
Splitting a packet of ramen with my best friend at two in the morning while harassing strangers on the official forums for TV shows aired on The CW by saying that most of the family from 7th Heaven should be put in prison or that we wished everyone but Brooke would leave One Tree Hill. Blue leopard print Miley Cyrus for Walmart leggings. Truman Capote In Cold Blood. A disastrous bob. A strange noise in my mother’s car after a day at the beach and pulling into a souvenir and beer and sunblock store and asking if anyone would come and check it out and a man selling skim boards did. Skim boards. Brown leather sandals with a platform and a pair for my sister that matched. Running outside in the cold til it took your air away and the soaring hurt and lifting and ease with lungs like a plastic bag. Wanting something exciting to happen to me until it did. I remember opening my eyes in the wrong place. I remember the pizza throw at Fenway Park in 2007. I remember capri pants. I remember a friend straightening my hair again just absolutely searing it and we watched The OC on DVD and had vodka in orange juice but it wasn’t really orange juice it was like orange juice if you hate yourself it tasted like a crude caricature of orange juice created in a lab by someone born with a penchant for cruelty and violence but wanting to hide it and it was what her mom always bought. Getting just the rolls at Bertuccis. Reading about Zelda Fitzgerald. Painting the wall a near-black purple over a baby blue soccer ball mural from fifth grade. A studied version of myself in Hollister graphic tees. Breathing in and out beer foam from bad keg pours. Standing for the bus, in the blue light of the woods at night, on a scale. The snow back then was different. I remember using it as a pillow. I remember a beach rental. Boxed wine beer pong on painted tables and a crush of sunburnt kids. All that was a long time ago. I remember feeling sorry. Standing by the sea. I was always going away.
Sleeping in my old room all week not alone thinking about cotton baby doll pajamas in white with blue like The Brady Bunch girls and being now much the same as I was when I wore them.
consider: I will probably write something normal and not insanely first thought self-indulgent next week but my brain is soupy from being away where I will still go and do love but am not really suited so there is this for now. Anyway, you should be incredibly jealous that I have already read Private Rites by Julia Armfield and extremely eager to do so yourself. I’m starting it over again today while I try not to work. It’s wonderful. It saved my life on the plane maybe. I barely noticed my folded legs and all the bumping, so busy I was treasuring those horrible sisters and trembling with and at love. ** I’m rooting for Caitlin Clark in the Caitlin Clark Bowl, yeah. ** I had green juice for breakfast which is funny to me but I don’t even really know why. **