Thu, 19 May 2005

Re-Rise, an Introduction
I don’t remember much from that time, and what I do remember is probably wrong, but I remember walking, which I did constantly then, and I remember the flood. There were streets which were impassable by foot and sometimes by car; you could stare out from windows and watch the rainwater and the melted snow runoff flow down the streets and sidewalks, the drains flooded and releasing branches and lost toys, and not have to try hard to imagine the street had no solidity, that it was all water. As the town sloped down toward campus, toward the river, you could see trees jutting up from flooded fields, see washed-out parks and abandoned cars, trying to remember where the riverbank once was. I walked set paths throughout my section of the city, cutting across parking lots, stopping off for milk at the grocer, following pathways I never intentionally designed but discovered through months of repetition. One night, blocks north of the clump of yellow pre-fabs where the foreign grad students live, I ran into a girl I was certain I knew from somewhere. She asked me what had happened, where I had been, and I couldn’t understand her question. Class, she said. I hadn’t showed up in two months. Had I dropped out? I was confused, told her I’d been sick, that I was probably not going back to class this semester. I had forgotten, replacing the memory with a low humming dread which found me when I wasn’t walking, when I laid in my bed and readied for sleep. Sometimes I would panic, thrash, wonder what had happened to me, but I couldn’t find anything wrong, any reason. It was like I got on the wrong bus one morning and forgotten I had a home and an academic career and goals and future plans. Having to remember, remember anything, made me feel tired and sick and confused. I tried not to think about such things, to walk, to spend hours in the library staring at books, not reading anything, just feeling as though I had intent and direction and purpose, until the fear was gone. If I can keep on like this, I remember thinking once, just keep going and not thinking and not remembering, then maybe everything will be okay.

The only way to stop remembering is to have all the people in your life leave. Seth, who for years had been my best friend, had left town, presumably forever, in order to join the circus. I had no reason to think I would ever see him again. He had an epiphany of sorts after an accident, a moment of clarity, and he knew enough to know he couldn’t follow it here. My other friends from that time were lost in their own lives now, having either grown up and become responsible and uninterested in their past, or they had reached a point of stillness, the days looped and spiraling in on themselves, content to find a center in the familiar. I never heard from any of them, mostly; whatever we were doing with our youths was now over, and there was no reason to revisit. I had nothing to force memory back on me, and could let it fade or change as its nature dictated, unbound by truth and concensus.

Then I got a call from Ana.

This friend of mine, this girl I used to know, her name is Ana. I havent seen her for a couple years, she went to school and I tried to follow her but I kinda didnt do school so well, things happen, and after I fucked around long enough they threw me out, so I came back home and got a job and stopped fucking around, somewhat. We were close, we were friends, we spend a few miserable parties huddled in corners discussing and flirting and being friendly in the way that two people who know they’re never going to come together sometimes do, clenched in my mind when she (two years my senior) decided o go right into grad school. Around that time I was asked to leave the school, and we tried to stay in touch, and strange nights were spent getting calls from out of the blue about recent traumas or drunken apologies, and for a while that was wonderful.

Through this time, however, my life became strange, and my connection to Ana became important in an unspoken way. Ana did not know, really, what was becoming of me, and because of that our conversations always felt normal, like things normal people did, and that was so important then, to talk to someone who didnt watch each word for suggestions and accusations. Its very hard to explain.

One night she called me, told me about graduation, told me about her most recent fucked-up relationship, and how she had to leave, to get away. I wasnt really thinking when I told her she could stay with me, but she accepted, and later that night I watched her as she slept on my couch, her bags piled in the hall, and I walked clear until morning, sitting at North Playground, watching the Saturday Morning children at play.

There was a time in my life, during the floods, after Seth came back from the hospital but before he joined the circus, and this time was dead space, endless. I spent my days asleep and my nights working out at the burial ponds on the edge of town. I did not sleep, and I tried not to think. I found myself staring at people when I walked around outside, watching their bones shift and fracture beneath their skin. There was a voice pasted to the back of my skull and it droned out anything interesting in me and filled my days with a hum that scares to the bone, even now. This time is lost to me; I cannot remember my thoughts or the contents of those days. I reach for them but they are beyond me. I quit the burial ponds and went to work out at the rest stop, which was a marginal improvement but was my first step in moving my career arc away from the dead, of of weeks worth of forgotten days and dreams. All I do rememb er is Seth being around and then gone, and that there was something wrong with me, and that in those days I remember the trees being filled with children.

There was a young girl at this playground where I sat and tried to think through, to remember, and she had self-drawn upside-down clouds on her dress. She would spin around and around until her legs gave and she fell, in a heap, on the ground. She instantly got back up and began spinning again. I remember this, the secret purpose of spinning; the girl is trying to rise up off the ground and ascend into the sky. She will spin and spin until her body cannot stand the motion, until her brain blocks her from the attempt, until she spends unquiet nights awake so many years later wondering what terrible things must haunt her dreams to keep her awake at night. She is waiting for the aliens, the angels, waiting for the lights, as all children do, the hidden intentions behind their games, the words they use, the making real of reams. The pushing of bones through the tips of the fingers and set in a pile and mixed as the children close their eyes, pick up bones, and push them back into their skin. This was how we made friends as children. The bones in my hands are still, to this day, not my own. There is something calming about this, something which tells me I am not alone, though that feeling was something I had lost for a time. When I was seven I got married to a girl I kindasorta knew from the neighborhood, we had a ceremony towards the far end of the playground, flowers and everything, it was forever. The last I heard this girl was going to school somewhere in Wisconsin. She still has the ring I gave her, and I still have the ring she gave me. Sometimes, like now, I find myself wearing it and people occasionally look at me strange, the purple plastic band attracting some attention, but I dont explain. Someday Ill bump into her, and well both be wearing my rings, and well be together forever. Near-asleep, I will feed her on opiated milk-sugar and she will feed me on scotch and black honey, and we will make a home in the caves beneath the surface of the burial pond. Asleep, our teacher taught us in whispers how to form symbols and shapes from snow. At night, the wind was so fierce it would pull you from the ground if you didnt put rocks in your shoes. Wee slept on dishtowels and were hung by the laces of those shoes on hooks behind the blackboard, set there by our teacher. There was a boy named Jimmy whose mother made him wear galoshes and a raincoat no matter the weather, just in case, and he was elected to be the class historian, and we sealed up his mouth and eyes and buried him a couple feet from the flagpole so 25 years later the schoolchildren could dig him up and he would tell them what life was like for us. I remember throwing up a lot that year. There was a graveyard across the street from our school and at night we went there and tried to speak to the dead, lying spread-eagled across the mounds. You could see the devil if you stared long enough into mirrors. We all got free combs on picture day. For a long time I remember being afraid of certain furniture in my house, that the plumbing was trying to suck me inside and down, that the chairs wanted to eat me alive. The birds must have been diseased that summer because the world was filled with feathers; we ran from yard to yard collecting them, comparing them at recess. Later in the fall we began to wear them, tucked behind our ears, sewn to our jackets by our mothers. Out on the lake, where no less than a year earlier we were building boats of balsa wood and paper and sinking them with rocks, we now floated naked under the moon, letting the psychosis of the cranes seep into our small heads. We were just beginning to see shapes in clouds. I remember being afraid of the cranes, because the cranes were crazy. I remember all these things, down to the details, how the angels never heard us, how the aliens never called on us, and eventually our bodies failed us and we had not choice but to grow up.

The spinning girl spun and spun and finally gave up, staring up into the sky, gasping. I walked back to the apartment and watched Ana sleep a bit longer and finally went to my room and stared up into the ceiling, wondering if it is normal enough now, if maybe the past was past, if she wouldnt notice that there was still something wrong with me. Finally I contented myself with my abilities, and if I still had my difficulties, I was certainly normal, and could handle any strangeness to arise from this situation.

It is probably for the best that it was only the next day that I learned Seth was returning to town.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #