Dear Flight Attendant...

dear flight attendant who greeted me as i boarded the plan, “Yaaaas, she’s giving cool, comfy and collected realness. I love it.” that is the best compliment i’ve ever received and i hold it in the highest regard. women dress for themselves, for other women and gay men. it’s actually rule of culture #658 “women don’t dress for straight men”.

this is for me, all for me, even when i make poor choices, like flowy shorts at the gym. any kind of stretching on the floor guarantees an appearance of your underwear and i love me some loud underwear. i did a photoshoot for Thunderpants and i frolicked in their studio with other folks like me and somewhere on the internet are photos of my lumpy weird body out there for all the other weird lumpy weird bodies to see, you’re not the only one with a short torso and long femurs and an awkward asymmetrical smile, one eye in a popeye squint and the other like it’s seen a ghost. what is the word that’s like gangly but for short squatty hotties who can’t reach things on the top shelf?

it took me years to grow a heart

i don’t say i love you when we end our phone calls because you don’t know what to do with it so it hangs in the air between us, this unwanted thing.

it’s a wonder how easy it is with everyone else.

m. is waiting for a cancer diagnosis, is easier for you to say.

i know if i say it, i could tell folks i’m healing generational trauma, but it’s easier to think it, to whisper it when you’re not around.

to write, i forgive you, it’s not your fault, this is how i love you and hope it makes its way through the ether and into your bones, your blood, where it feels safe to hold.

i want to stop with concrete answers because stuff is just so murky. life is murky and intangible and unreal and weird, something that hangs in the air for a second and then it’s gone and it’s ok because i knew it happened even if you didn’t see it.

an entrance

it’s hard to write about entrances when i’ve been awake since 5 AM thinking about closing doors.

is everything that needs to be inside in?

is everything i want to keep out on the right side of the door?

i’ve been changed by the last 3 years.

but everything looks the same again.

like it never happened.

like a blip.

and i want to keep sheltering in place, a lifelong hunker downer,

still baking bread and working inside

and wondering if I locked all the doors.

dreams are fucking with me and i watched too much of netflix’s ‘The Circle’

j. and k. wrote a musical called “Sailor Mun” in Minecraft and our blocky bodies and square heads danced awkwardly in sparkly spandex with eye masks to hide our identities, black and white and top hats because we’re fancy. because bleacher seating with broadway light bulbs become dangerous scaffolding to dance on but we manage to do it and i have no idea if this is good, if we are good, but it doesn’t matter. it just matters that we keep moving the show along. all the music sounds like it’s from the Music Man or Oklahoma and some of it is in Japanese and at the 30 minute mark the sparkly spandex becomes itchy before it starts to dissolve and just become part of our skin and i start to disassociate because I want to be somewhere else, my round belly slick with sweat, dancing even though I don’t know how to dance, something else moving my body for me while my brain takes a trip to my house, mentally scanning my room for my lost passport which hasn’t been touched in three years.

i know i went to an official government building in 2017 to get my passport photo for no other reason than i read my renewal instructions incorrectly. my hair is a short wavy bob, contact lenses in and a heather blue nike hoodie i don’t own anymore. and a weird squinty smile. no teeth. never teeth. i didn’t want to be there either. i didn’t want to be anywhere back then. i didn’t know how to do life outside the usual and the usual was both boring and stressful at the same time.

after my unnecessary trip to an office building to have my picture taken, i walked a couple of blocks and bought a $5 latte that made me feel special but tasted just ok. i drank it in a repurposed warehouse with a lot of reclaimed wood surrounded by white people in backpacks. it was fine. i took a lyft home and added a penny to the internal shame bucket, already overflowing with coins, one for each time i flexed a privilege i felt i didn’t deserve. every $5 latte. every lyft ride. every pair of linen pants a girl like me with meaty thighs has no right to wear lest i want to set myself on fire.

it can happen like that, the instant you realize how you have everything you asked for to find out that you didn’t really know what you wanted to begin with.

“don’t make things harder for yourself,” he said.

do you know me?

how much therapy will i need to undo this? what does it cost for a hard reset? am i asking myself questions in my head in carrie bradshaw’s voice and does that make me groan with loathing for myself and this reference?

yes. yes i am. yes i have. i apologize in advance for any future unnecessary Sex in the City references. insert green face almost puking emoji here. send.

unstuck

my to do list has another list underneath it. unstuck, written and underlined with a numbered list of foods.

oatmeal

avo toast

yogurt

frozen waffles

it takes a minute to remember these are things to eat so i don’t sit hungry until I’m nauseous.

i describe my food conundrums to aaron and he told me “It sounds like you throw your hands in the air and give up. you pick up your toys and say ‘I don’t want to play anymore’ and go home.”

my whole body fills with that heavy shame full feeling of being called out. i do that. i let myself get so hungry I’m nauseous and I give up and now that I’m lifting weights again my body is mad at me when it ask for a snack and i say no, i want something better but never do anything about it until i’m suffering by my own hand.

i made a vat of soup and took it to a friend’s house. it’s easier to feed other people and let myself be bathed in compliments while i subconsciously decide to wire my own mouth shut.

when i was 14 i saw someone on TV do that to lose weight and i never forgot it.

this is what adults do and i filed it away for future use.

now i make lists of foods because i need to remind myself that the only way to become unstuck is to point at something on the list and decide to start there.

Instructions for Traveling West

inspired by Joy Sullivan

Tell the story of how you got here, even though it is a blur.

Road trips are mostly truck stops, large swaths of nothingness and weird motels.

Hearing ‘Modern Love’ in a grocery store in Tennessee and the deli guy not knowing who David Bowie was

There was the Walmart in Alabama where you saw your first rifle, a wall of guns behind a counter, like cigarettes

Smoking in the summer, the smell forming a sticky layer that clung to your skin in the humidity, the hot blacktop of parking lots.

why was i alway waiting in a parking lot? outside a store or a McDonald’s? i couldn’t name it then but now i realize it’s this unconscious knowing that i am not white and in the south and everyone telling me i look weird for a Mexican.

the relief of reaching California

the despair of reaching LA

the leather pants and velvet shirt our new landlord met us in.

“My name is Vaughn,” he said. “Like the grocery store.”

to a bunch of blank east coast faces that only knew what a shop rite was

the floors of my new bedroom covered in dust, cigarette ashes, looking like the surface of the moon, the distant skylight and no windows and the elevator that never worked when you went grocery shopping.

last night

inspired by “If they chop open my body” by Julia Alter

if they chop open my body, it’s emptiness would be a lie. i was emptied out last night until i was a floppy sad balloon person, covered in sweat but shaking so violently.

if they chop open my body, they should have come last week when all the good stuff was there. the bbg burnt ends. the queso and chips. the hot slice of pizza the movie theater that i let burn my tongue, finished it whole before watching michelle yeoh battle death and taxes and generational trauma with kung fu and all the versions of herself she could have been.

if they chop open my body, on this day, it’s just me, carrying nothing, my belly empty except maybe for a few parasites having an afterparty after the full blown rave in there last night. snuck in under the cover of veiny blue cheese or maybe an old apple. trojan horsed it until they were in the belly of the beast and triumphantly took over, set up camp and had a burning man in my guts.

“it’s either appendicitis… or gas?”

“It’s either kidney failure…or food poisoning.”

my shirt soaked through with sweat. if they chop open my body all that is left are the straggles at the party, the ones who can’t read the room, who don’t get the hint even though the ugly lights are on and the music has been off for hours. the cleaning crew mopping up around their parasitic feet. you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.

i forgive you. i forgive you. you didn’t know better. i forgive you. the morning you went to get a bagel and a coffee without him and he got mad at you that you didn’t wake him up. i forgive you. the night you slipped out of his bed before the sun came up and took the 5 fulton home because you didn’t want to be too much. i forgive you. for shutting yourself down. for deciding to be a different person at home than with your friends. for deciding you needed to be many different people to fulfill their needs and not yours. i forgive you for fracturing yourself because sacrifice is the ultimate goodness. wearing a scapular when you were a child because you heard that if you were wearing one when you die it’s an instant passport to the good place. not asking questions. i have to swallow this. i have to. it’s easier for me to suffer. look how mom suffers and it makes her so good and so holy. i forgive you. you are worthy. you are worthy. you are worthy.

mochi

suddenly i’m noticing everything.

removing the walls of the dog crates to unearth more toys than any dog owner should ever have. 5 years of bark box, 3 toys per box, 1 box a month. i can’t do the math. the toys are everywhere. i step on 1/2 a gumby, tt’s face missing, just 2 legs like green french fries. mochi, the puppy, snuffling through the piles pickinh up a stuffed squirrel dressed like frida kahlo, one eyebrow uneven from the time charlie tried to eat her face, thrown across the room and discarded. mochi picks up a donut, the one with the loudest squeaker and joyfully wedged it in his mouth and he chews and chews, filling the dark pre-dawn with the most comical of duck quacks, the sound cutting through the silence. 6:45AM and i’m whisper yelling, kuma, mochi’s cranky older brother, is barking and that manages to be louder than the donut.

it’s like an alarm and then all dogs are barking, charlie’s tiny bark an orchestra, pre-breakfast. how did jeff manage to feed the and keep them contained while i slept in yesterday? i grab a jar of peanut butter and lead them outside like the pied piper. at least it’s quiet. the puppy is drooling, the donut still in his mouth. it’s grey and the birds are having their water cooler talk in the oak trees. the overgrown lawn, a cemetery of petrified dog turds and soggy dog toys left out overnight. the red one eyed monster, a plastic dog balloon animal missing a tail and 1/2 a rainbow seahorse.

lists

i’m always making a list. i don’t want to forget. sunday it was pasta and pantyliners. yesterday it was muffin, fries and tumeric latte. because food is weird and i miss fancy coffee drinks but my anxiety does not, my gut is punishing me or it’s just time for something else.

next year they say psilocybin will be legalized in oregon and i don’t understand how this place that started as a white only state can be this weirdly forward thinking. 3 years into a pandemic and we’re going to microdose our way into a more compassionate world. i hope. i think. but i know better too.

it’ll be like ayahuasca trips for rich folks. mushroom retreats for burnt out tech founders who can afford to search for god.

i made a list of what i’m moving away from and what i’m moving towards and i never remember what’s on it because it’s all intangible.

i want to be better.

not through yoga or meditation or microdosing or metformin 2x a day or anything that’s a given.

today’s list: find out what season it is for acorns. eat some cheese. nap with dogs.

pretend

i pretend to find solutions. i take apart the cpap machine that’s stopped working, it’s various parts scattered on my desk. “I don’t know what I’m doing?” a question to myself, to my dogs, to anyone who can hear me. both a question and a statement. i can’t fix it and i can’t put it back together again and i’m too old and impatient for youtube tutorials so now i have a collection of parts and nowhere to put them.

like the puzzle we started 2 weeks ago and the only parts left are the solid color blue and the only way to finish is brute force. the tedious work of trying a single piece over and over in all its various permeations, permutations, whatever the right word is. when i was young but still old enough to know better, i used to try and gnaw on puzzle pieces i was sure fit, they just needed a little adjustment. “this isn’t how you do things” my sister said. but this is what i saw adults dod everyday. using force of will to bend reality. to make things fit. it feels very american to force things. or to pretend. fake it. make it. use scissors or your teeth or your bootstrap, whatever that means.

i don’t know how to fix it. the pieces don’t go in the way i thought they would. this didn’t turn out how i wanted. i can change the story to sound like i was dealt a bad hand. swipe all the pieces into a box and put it in the basement and forget about it. that’s what basements are for. i tried. i was wrong and i got tired.

descending

deck by kristi prokopiak

deck by Krist Prokopiak

i was looking for a cutting mat online.

i found one. sometimes it’s called a self healing mat. there are still marks on it, like ghostly reminders but for the most part it’s unscathed. S. asked me if i was a sewer, a maker. i’m not. i just needed a surface to cut the necks out of my shirts because sometime in 2017 i felt like i was suffocating in all my clothes.

i did yin yoga with my sister in england over zoom last march. i made an appointment to see if i could get on anxiety meds. i had a dentist appointment the following week and i was scared of getting shot. or pushed into traffic. or yelled at for existing. i took a lyft to the doctor’s appointment. relieved my driver was asian. he saw me sweating and turned on the a/c.

10 steps from the car to the front door of zoom care.

3 people in the street.

no one in the waiting room.

food people

there was no wild writing last week and i don’t know if this is wild writing but it is, it probably is, except without a pen and without my notebook, the messy one, they’ve all been messy since I stopped thinking about how someone will read my journals when I die.

someone will read my journals and i won’t be around to yell at for all my past choices and mistakes or dumb things i’ve said when i was small and sad and probably freezing outside of a cafe in san francisco or in the sun, smoking a cigarette in LA, like I was wont to do. i’ve lived so much life and then forget about it and then go back and read about it like i was some other person.

in my second session with aaron today i skim over a memory of parents working graveyard and the veritable plate buffet of food on the kitchen table, all covered with paper towels, some starting to get soaked with grease. canned corned beef omelettes, fried fish, white rice (the fresh stuff was in the rice cooker), pandesal, longanisa or tocino, maybe spare ribs. pancit. the faint smell of bogoong, like someone had it out for a bit but put it away, the fermented fish of it all too pungent to keep unlidded. all of it cold. make a plate. put it in the microwave. aunties and uncles would come in and out and do the same. maybe there was sinagang in a pot somewhere. i think about how food is a thing. not just for me but for most of my family. my sister, brother and i get excited about good food, comfort food, family foods. we scope out good restaurants. we know where the good food trucks are. if anything, i’m the picky one because wet condiments aren’t my jam.

no one has ever said to me that being a food person is important and i should never lose that.

when you’re fat, you’re told being a food person is probably the thing that will kill you.

it’s really no wonder that when i joined the discord, i found myself most at home in the snacks channel.

old food stories that i had growing up, instilled by family unknowingly, are still hanging around even though my parents are different people now. i like that my mom is obsessed with the bread sticks at the small pizza hut counter at target. i like that she gets little containers of curly fries or wings at the hot deli. i like that there is this joy she has in having these things. i witness her own self judgement and it makes me sad. sadder than when i judge myself. when i’m her age, I want shame to be a distant memory.

because

because i could, i made coffee, my first this week, even though i know it will ruin me.

because anxiety is a battle between my brain, sertraline and caffeine

because i realize i eat my morning pills like a bunny. how are there so many?

because my sister said fish oil

because my doctor said, ‘don’t you want to get better?’

because the internet said beet root powder and tumeric and chromiium and portlanders need more vitamin d than most folks

because an army of pills holds my bones and body together

because i keep breaking things, first my knees,

the whole leg cast keeping my left leg straight. i slept downstairs for weeks. i gauged how important every shower would be. it had to be worth it if it was going to be this exhausting

because my dogs used my casted leg as a chin rest as they kept guard, like they knew i was fragile

because physical therapy only works if you do the exercises ever day

because it’s a full time job to make sure you don’t break anything else.

because your husband bought tubs of protein powder

because food is hard and time is precious and we both don’t want to die

because who would take our dogs and file our taxes and do the dishes?

the original wound

i'm high functioning for someone who moralizes every day action, categorizes it into good human, bad human. brushing my teeth in the morning, good human, flossing, even better human.

tea, yogurt, fruit, good human.

leftover halloween candy, bad human.

not working, bad human, lazy human.

moving through more than one item on a task list, good human.

i took a shower on mushrooms once and as i shampooed my hair, slopping suds around my crown and i thought "this is what humans do, right? this is what normal people do." jake on the couch watching VH1, wrapped in a blanket. i wanted to go outside but i couldn't leave him alone, convinced he'd start shriveling into nothing, to dust, if i left.

so i showered, good human. cleaned the apartment, good human. who does mushrooms to swiffer and do the dishes? plates crusted with old indian food that resisted being wiped down. i scrubbed harder, better human. better humans try.

green tea, good human, lettuce wrap, good human. daily walks, good human. knee pain, bad human. fat, tired and stoned, bad human. why aren't you more fluent in spanish? it's been two years, slow human.

i made a vat of mashed potatoes, enough for a family of 10, like thanksgiving, like a party, but it's just 2 of us and 2 little perritos, bad human. butter and cream and salt, worse human.

dusty stationary bike, bad human. pile of unfinished crafts, bad human, $4 protein bar for breakfast, does not compute. are protein bars neutral?

***

i didn't mean to write about drugs or my ex or how i thought he'd turn to dust if i left him. we're both very much not dust, something that lived despite all the terrible things we said to one another. i didn't walk away, like a song, an anthem of resilience. it was more like a farting, deflating balloon, a little bit, a lot a bit broken and there was no going back to who i was before.

3 days after we broke up, i transferred the willie nelson tickets to his name, a farewell gift that he railed against, as angry as one can be over text.

when something dies we remember what we love.

i had forgotten myself.

i sat in the video game seat, the on that looks like a car, my friends in the bathroom in the movie theater. i hid, not playing the game, not a quarter to be found, so i couldn't race along a fake malibu beach, a bikini babe in my corvette, the only place for someone like me to be in the moment, a lot a bit broken, a lot relieved.

what is easy

it’s wednesday and I’m trying to think of what is easy. a post it on my desk reading, “If I’m not good, what am I?” i don’t know how to answer that question. nothing about you is one dimensional. notes from therapy. my mother couldn’t fly home for her father’s funeral because she was too pregnant with me and now i hold all her feelings and she has very little in her arsenal. there is very little sad or happy, just functional. different degrees of surviving, 50 shades of ok because anything but middle ground is too much.

ever since the heart attack my dad can no longer poop in peace. he passed out in the downstairs bathroom so every time that door is shut, she knock on it, asking “you ok?” whether he’s the one in there or not. the same bathroom i ate thanksgiving dinner in the year auntie told me i had gained weight. the same bathroom i henna’d joey conroy’s hair red senior year of high school, staining the bath mat a rusty brown orange, the color of old dried blood. the same bathroom crowded with a magazine rack with readers digests from the 80s.

she knocks on the door while i’m in there. “you ok?” she asks. “i’m fine. it’s me.” I say. she doesn’t reply but i feel the confusion in her pause. “it’s jen. dad’s in his chair.” then the shuffling of her house slippers on the time as she putters away to the kitchen.

P.S.

my favorite memory of you was staying up late to watch movies on HBO because I lied and said I couldn’t sleep. because both mom and dad wouldn’t be getting home until the sun came up. because you’d let us have warm milk and if we were out of ovaltine you’d use those instant international coffee powder, the rectangular square tins kept on the high shelves. like it never occurred to you giving children coffee at 10:00PM wasn’t a thing grandmother’s did. like it never occurred to you that a Dolly Parton Musical would have so much nudity. mom coming home early and catching all three of us watching The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the shower scene, lots of naked men doing a coordinated dance to jaunty country music, your face unfazed as so many bare butts spun in union

Facts

Sad Fact: I pointed and said, “Go!” in an encouraging high pitched voice, like I was pointing to Disneyland and giving full permission, like there was a mountain of chicken breasts on the lawn and it was an all you can eat buffet for Bean and Bean alone, like pooping in the wet grass was the most exciting thing in the world. it was still dark our, like midnight dark, like the porch light was too bright for my eyes dark. Bean stood on the driveway shaking on the driveway, not moving towards the yard, his brother happily hopping through the wetness, sniffing for squirrels and peeing on interesting things.

”C’mon,” I said even more high pitched. “Go! Is ok! Is ok!”

It all devolves into baby talk at the end doesn’t it? In a voice you reserve for pets and tiny humans. I pointed again and Bean pancaked his little body to the ground, ears flat, chin down, the universal dog sign for “I don’t know if I’m scared or sad or both.” What if humans flattened like this when they don’t know what to do, pressed our bodies to the earth, shut down, i don’t know what to do, i don’t know what she wants, i need a break.

Sad Fact: At some point in his life someone pointed and said “Go!” and his small dog brain remembered and it wasn’t a good memory.

I walked over to him and picked him up like a poor lumpy sack of potatoes. Jeff says dogs are descended from wolves. Bean is descended from marshmallows.

I walked into the wet grass on unsteady legs. I don’t trust myself in the dark ever since I fell out of bed and down the stairs in Hawaii. Who puts a set of stairs next to the bed? With only one bathroom downstairs? I tumbled like an errant garbage bag down one flight to a small landing where there was a small alcove that was a closet. Strange houses with strange closets. I could hear Jeff in slow motion, “Oh nooooo….”

It took me awhile to realize I was in the closet alcove surrounded by clothes hanging above me like curtains. All limbs in tact, thank god. My face hurt but I was more relieved that nothing solid was broken and I didn’t need to pee anymore.

The next day I was sporting my very first black eye. I don’t remember what hit me or what I hit on the way down but I remember feeling bad the rest of our vacation, like I had to tell ever waiter, every concerned tourist who looked at me, “No, no I’m ok. It’s not what you think.”

I stopped trusting myself in the dark so I reach and follow walls, i grip handrails hard, I step slowly and make sure one foot is firm before lifting the other. I lowered my center of gravity a bit by bending my knees, carrying my baby bean into the muddy yard, fully realizing that if someone turned on the lights or if the sun magically instantly rose, I’d look insane.

I side shuffled like a lumbering gigantic crab with a 20 lb dog in my arms, his shiny black eyes and white fur, who looks like an arctic baby seal when his tiny ears are down. I leaned over and placed him gingerly in a patch of lawn where the grass was the shortest, least likely to touch his belly, my poor creature, he walks funny in the fall because he lates when wet grass touches him. “Are you sure you’re a dog?” we ask him. Charlie rips through the yard muddy and poop-free, paying us no mind as he chases a bird.

Bean took two steps to do his business, tail straight up, face turned towards me, eyes focused. “Don’t leave me,” they say. “Don’t leave me.” Like there are monsters out there. It’s the season for it. Like Bean knows it’s Halloween and we’re living in spookier times.