In Happy Valley

 

Looking down, I can see everything that comprises your little town, this sacred place in your formation where you have been born and martyred and raised again. There is the bookstore-coffeeshop where we drink our tea and peer out the window at the feet of the passersby. Across the loathsome football field is the high school where you fell into love and its entailing poverty. Your ex-girlfriend, we speak of her while we attempt locked doors and try to climb through windows. We're looking for a way in. But your hallways are barred to us, so we wander slowly back down the paths that brought us.

On the corner is the skate shop, boys with shaggy curls out front doing tricks. I see you tense. "That one looks like Johnny, I thought he was in Texas. He does jumps just like him, oh, I can't see him! Can I stand behind you, will you block me from his view til he goes back inside."

"Babe, it's not him, there's no way it's him. I just saw his face, and it's not him."

You recover. You tell me about your deaf boy, that he taught you to sign and how he smiled just for you. Sometimes, you say, he'd put his hands over yours to keep you from speaking so he could look at your eyes. Those were the times you were most in love.

You tell me how he brought you up five stories to this same parking garage, the first time you'd been. The mountains. The church steeple. The place where he scratched your initials into the rail.

I watch the clouds pass. I examine your face, which is never far from grinning. I find such impossible beauty wherever I turn.

Goodbye poems

 These are for people I won't see again.

1. This is about a boy who was a dinosaur who I loved with every fiber of my being.

There is a boy, gone from this place, who means a
great deal to me. He was that rare friend who
needed nothing. I remember the hardwood floor,
unyielding and creaky, underneath my back on
those nights (my parents would say "mornings") when
we talked and dreamed and pondered. The way the
line made a scratchy noise in the abyss of my
ear; the way we both prepared for the inevitable
exhaustion of my phone battery. I knew he was
leaving, because it was what people did and I had
learned to expect it. But impending separation brought
us closer. There was nothing to lose that wouldn't be
lost eventually, anyway.

2. This is about a girl who made me laugh so hard, with bangs like pretty late-night magic.

His watery eyes, the veins bursting their blue-blood,
And he doesn't resemble his daughter. Blinking,
Bright-eyed, she bounds to unlatch the gate. Wander in.
Watch as she leads me down stairs I've known. Big
Empty space, fill with our voices as she piles cloth-
Scrap after cloth-scrap into billowing recess of plastic,
Wonder at handsome stubble friend eyeing me from
Corner. Oh, do come out and play, won't you, won't
You, oh lurking friend of beauty? She is still
Yours. Magic sweater can't change some things. I'm
Not in all that I'm pretending, watch me disappear.

3. This is about the last person that I wanted so badly I knew it was already over.

Goodbye to feeling my tongue become cotton in my mouth when I see you.
Goodbye to your red glasses.
Goodbye to the way you said my name so deliberately.
Goodbye to your hair.
Goodbye to baking you cupcakes.
Goodbye to the possibly dirty joke you made.
Goodbye passing windows trying to catch a glimpse of you.
Goodbye to the night with the knife.
Goodbye to four shots.
Goodbye to hopeless fantasy.
Goodbye to your name.
Goodbye to writing about you.
Goodbye, grrl.

4. This one is about my last boyfriend forever, the one I will never share an apartment high above the dirty city with.

you were my perfect love best friend brother
who ate my naked legs
and laughed when i kissed your ear
you were something magic i couldn't do without
when everything was wrong
and i wanted to pretend to be someone else
you were my perfect-est love
with your pale skin and your bony ribs
and i don't want anyone else to be you.

notification

I lost my cell phone.

I'm very unhappy.

A song I can sing

 Current Music: She and Him- You Really Got a Hold on Me

I don't think I've entirely figured LJ out yet. I mostly use it to post (usually) bad poetry, and lists of things I've done/want to do/books I've read. I guess it's supposed to be something like a diary accessible to others, so here goes.

I guess I'm making this entry since I'm in such a good place in my life, and I want to have some sort of memento from it. Everything's just genuinely so chill right now. I've figured out where I want to go next fall: New College of Florida. I think I'm going to send in my deposit sometime in the next few weeks. This morning I woke up, went to school, and talked about India for all of first hour. My ex is spending two months there this summer, which is going to be incredible. Then, I sat on one of the verrry comfy couches and read some more of Brother Karamazov, which is a pretty good book so far. I think, if this isn't too pretentious, that I understand some of the things especially Alyosha is going through. And Fyodor just makes me laugh. My best friend came to pick me up, and I gave her one of my delicious vegan mint chocolate chip cupcakes I baked last night. They are so good! They almost look too pretty to eat, they have green mint frosting and chocolate ganache on top and I love them. (If you're looking for a cookbook, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World is my new fave.) The rest of school was alright, I had a test in Macro that was sort of difficult, but then I spent the rest of the next period just chatting with my Environmental Science teacher, who is easily one of my favorite people ever. She told us about working in a hospital in the seventies while she was in college, which was cool. Then after school, we had a dance meeting and that was fun. I went to Ritual and had delicious tea and some good times with my junior friends. I'm going to miss them. It's always hard when I realize too late that I've squandered the time I could have spent getting to know really amazing kids, but I guess that's life for you. And that was my day.

I haven't written anything creatively for awhile, partly out of boycott against my creative writing sponsor and partly because I haven't had that much to say. I feel like that might be changing soon, though...

::sigh:: Everything's just so beautiful right now. I wouldn't even know how to begin to ask for anything better.

Restaurants

WEST DES MOINES
Gateway Market and Cafe
Fresh Cafe

GRAND
Tandoor

ROOSEVELT
La Mie

DRAKE
Mars Cafe
Frank's Pizza

INGERSOLL
Black Cat
Zanzibar's

LOCUST
Ritual Cafe
Centro

SHERMAN HILL
Gateway Market
A Dong

DOWNTOWN
Funky Pickle

EAST VILLAGE
Noodle Zoo
Taste of Thailand
Gong Fu Tea

A list

 Songs for Senior Recital

-Bach Prelude in E minor
-Bach Prelude in C major
-Chopin Prelude in E minor
-Pachelbel Canon
-Bach Sonata

+ more Chopin ? more from Book IV ?

to be continued...

Books Read in 2009

1. Off the Map by Hibickina and Kika

2. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
3. Red Bird by Mary Oliver
4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
5. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein
6. Valencia by Michelle Tea
7. I Saw You...: Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections by Julia Wertz
8. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach