a shard of white plastic

I work in an organic grocery store now. One of the big box ones, you know, mass-market and corporate. We have staff meetings and talk about projections for the month and weekly sales and our store manager is vaguely threatening and overly affable and an ex-d.j., because while it's a business it's still organic.

Downstairs, away from my headphones and my laptop and my open window, a bitter alcoholic weeps in my kitchen. His wife kicked him out, finally, ten years too late for all of us. My mother says things like, "I've told you how my father was a lot like you," with a wobbling voice and tears in her eyes. Occasionally the beats on my podcast projected music sound like footsteps on the staircase and I am irrationally afraid that they will walk upstairs to hug me again and I will stand there, desperately focussing on something else, feeling the bones in his shoulders or the heat radiating from my mothers skin.

Supermarkets are the perfect place to exercize your OCD. Perfectly arranged everything, right angles, hand sanatizer at every till, bags for everything. We had eccentric customers who bought produce only from the back, brought bags from home, ran their own groceries through to prevent contamination. Bills must face the same way, or the bank charges you extra: thus all bills are carefully stacked in even piles, germy piles, piles that demand pounds of sanitizer. So too do certain customers: the man with the grease-caked hands who buys a few dollars worth of fruit and obviously works close by, the elderly customers who talk softly and have what looks like open sores on their faces.

We have regulars, and I give them nicknames. I made a list too, while bored one day and exhausted of reading my book under the till: Mr. Tightass, Psychic Smiles, GST, French Personal Chef, Bertram Real Estate, Toothless Vegan. I'm pretty sure Toothless Vegan is homeless; I saw him in stoner park downtown, and he always has someone else with him who purchases his groceries.

We have gnarled baby-boomers, the earliest of the bunch, who've given up. They buy soup cans and small, $0.25 chocolate pieces, throw hissy fits over how you pack their groceries because they don't have anything else to complain about or focus on. If the door is open poplar fluff blows in, drifting across the linoleum and snagging in our hair and nametags, sliding across where contrite new-age yuppies have dropped overpriced bottles of salad dressing. We have customers who make me get that physically ill "I hope that's never me!" feeling. Like when you see an SUV with a roofrack, scouting bumper sticker, Canadian version of the Support Our Troops decal, and a "Soccer Mom and Proud!" bumper sticker. Or "Brandi with an i" and a fussy toddler, diamante stud earrings, plain fingernails and gold card. Or (possibly well meaning) people who say, "You'll regret that tattoo! What will your husband think?" until you almost scream, "I'm not Brandi with an i! My future husband won't expect me to be!"

my tattoo is shifting continents of colour, raised red peaks and sunken blue valleys flaking off onto my white, white sheets, mapping out a locked up heart and broken dreams.

I can hear: His life is over! The walkout appartment is really quite nice, really. We love you too! How will I go on?

I have 60-something days left in this town, left in this room and this job and this slow, stifling summer pace. My mother returned from vacation yesterday and in the car I thought, "I hate this I hate this I hate this" because I am vibrating out of my skin, I am shaking out and slowly moving away and towards my future, grim as it may be despite my accpetance to a prestigious worldy renouned university, with scholarships and residence, because I am always doomed and always will be and it has been made obvious again and again. But I will get to go, they've trained me to balloon out and out until they are satisfied I won't starve and I will go and I will only slowly implode, slowly, and on my own. My own, which is the best of it, the most important part, the only part that makes me able to wait another 60-something days instead of going now and sleeping in my car and drinking too much and eating too little until it is time for school to begin.

I went to Europe, like an infinite loop of melodramatic songs. Tourist poses and tourist photos, bus trips to the mountains, races in the rain. We snuck out after curfew and sat in bars, smoked pipes and drank until my head spun and spun and spun. I have vomited on two continents and in the air over the sea: I have shoplifted on two continents, within a week.

There were wild dogs like Modest Mouse songs that ran and pushed and licked and some had open sores, bleeding sides scraped bare of fur that they would bite and bite and bite. Old men would smile at our pictures; young men too, when we snapped them stealing car parts and running in the rain. When we took pictures of tour-groups at tour sites and smiled to each other, laughed about how European it all was. Everyone smuggled alcohol and cigarettes through customs, one boy a knife too, one girl artefacts, and we all smiled huge and wide and said, "No sir, no under-age drinking at all," like it was all a big joke. Maybe it was. My parents were happy on the phone; they said, "are you taking lots of pictures?" and "oh you won an award!" and then I came home and they said, "you're killing yourself," and "I can't wake up every day thinking about it," and "you're destroying so many lives!"

Or maybe they didn't say destroying. It sounded like it, I guess, when I was wearing my pyjamas but wishing I was still in my tights and shirt, originals and everyone said they looked so good, they said so, and mostly what I wanted was a cup of coffee.

Yesterday I had an intervention. I didn't think of it like that, at the time. I mostly thought: oh, holy fuck. And I traced that out with my fingers on the carpets, h-o-l-y-f-u-c-k in script against cheap 80's orange. I've always hated our carpets. Everyone cried; my father went out of town but he will be back tonight and we will have a Talk. I will plead jet-lag and hide in my room until tomorrow, when I can say, "I'm going out with friends, ok, ok," and just go before I can be stopped.

I can no longer be trusted with money; I can no longer be trusted alone for too long; I can no longer trust that my room will not be gone through, that receipts I carefully shredded will not be pulled out of the garbage while I am breaking rules overseas and pieced together until my life falls apart. I can no longer trust that my parents won't google every possible permutation of my name until they find things that can damn me, because that is what the internet is. It is a trap. Only I am like an addict (ha, ha, ha) and can not stop and they didn't find this, at least.

I said, "So then everyone was crying and my mother keeps feeling my wrists and ankles, every time she talks to me she just reaches out and wraps her hand around like measuring tape," and she said, "so what, was it an intervention?" and I thought, fuck, fuck it was, fuck, and there was no carpet to trace letters out on but I could think back to nails rasping against my back and leaving marks and the edge of hysteria in everyone's voices and the way I have it all down to a fine, calibrated science, quick-quick-quick. All I could think about was what people look like when they cry; it's a lot like vomiting, the way your nose runs and your eyes tear, only maybe less elegant.

No, I'm not even sure of that anymore.

I fucked up, I fucked up. I had a few things going for me and now they're falling apart and I can't keep it together, I would talk to him every night and we were both so miserable about it, his desperate pleas for affection and my keeping with it because I didn't have anything else going for me, and I fucked up. And I knew I was too, even while I did it, typing ever letter with my mind screaming "no no no NO" and I did it anyway.

I don't know. I can't explain. It sounds stupid, typing out the things he said "couldstandtoloseafewpounds" and "bonesaregrossI'mgladyoudon'tlooklikethat" and things I said, "vomitedblood" and "ninthgrade" and I feel like exploding. What's my line? "Collapse into myself like a dying star"?

Maybe. Maybe.

There are huge flakes of snow, the kind that should fall carefully onto fir branches, lodge between the needles and push them down into a tight mummy embrace. Instead there is a tempestuous wind, the last ten leaves on the willow sticking there, all winter, snow between them and between the slats of the fence. The knee of my jeans is wearing out slowly, a few fibres loose and fuzzy. They're worn and soft, need to be washed and possibly retired, sometime. Before they reach the patching stage.

I am tired and my fingers are tired and tomorrow is another day, classes begin, lunch meeting and the awkward hallway moment: locker open, thirty year old metal door pushed against a garbage can, inside days of my lunches, in the locker an empty box from china, cheap tin, two coats, developing chemicals, an absence of passive-aggressive notes. A coffee mug, depending on traffic flow; slow and I drink it at sluggish intervals and red lights, quick and I down it in the hallway, mug pressed against gloved hands.

There were dibs called on a huge cedar chest, drawer at the bottom with junk jewelery, top full of old dresses and older felt blankets. A space where a lock should go, but doesn't, hasn't since before I was born, and when I was young, seven and eight and thirteen, my cousin and I would play dress up, parade down the stairs of the old acreage house looking ridiculous, giant wooden elephant pins and 70's pant suites. At twelve I took a dress from it and wore it for my sixth grade graduation, navy with thin white polka dots, that my grandmother had worn to a party of some sort once, and it was my size then and she had round hips. My cousin and I were both learning to play the flute. Yesterday: there is no staircase in the apartment, and there was no dress up, and the dresses I used to wear were lost somewhere along the way, to goodwill or the new walk in closet my grandmother keeps her clothing in, jewellery in a built in drawer. Her sternum is visible through her sweaters, not seventies style but cotton, Northern Getaway. The navy dress would hang off us like a sack, maybe fit the two of us inside, but the chest is there against the wall by her bed, by the window, but instead of thin sapling trees there is the city, LRT line and out over the river valley, the road I take to school every morning. I skipped out on flute lessons: my cousin is somewhere north, a hundred or two hundred kilometres, runaway-dropout, almost faceless now. My uncles have gone through the apartment and reserved items: this tv, that new desk. I say, the chest, and the picture of her when she looked like Katherine Hepburn, the one that was spent two weeks in a display case on 8th Ave in the 40's as an advertisement for the photographer. But it wasn't used to announce her engagement, because she wasn't smiling in it. The photo of my grandfather has a card against it, Mourners Bill of Rights, and I bury my face in the couch cushions, imagine dorm rooms and single beds and where I will put my head at night.

My life is a countdown, one month Greece two months 18 four months graduation seven months Vancouver. A year: cedar chest.

The last two days I've been thinking about the bracelet. It fell from a shelf on my dresser, landed with one string stuck in the top of a drawer, suspended. It shouldn't have been able to: the knot that was in the drawer wouldn't have acted to stop it unless the drawer was shut with the string already in, and it wasn't. It wasn't. But I thought of it one day, and there it was, hanging. Rainbow colours against the wood, like something happy, like something magical.

It means nothing except failure. Or not even failure. I am not designed to fail except in my own mind, and that is what it means. you will have a miserable life he told me, and I didn't believe him but here I am, and his prediction pulls itself from a shelf and hangs in front of me in the morning.

I had a half thought out robot theory. Like I was some kind of machine to everyone else, missing some crucial part of a base code, something that made me just so far from human that others could notice. A cyborg I guess, one designed to fit perfectly, but someone made a mistake, someone messed up, and I was left as some kind of experiment without motive and without enough skills to blend in. And without the knowledge that I wasn't.

(she said I was missing it, that there was a hole in my personality, and I thought maybe it was a giant gaping blackness, there, ragged edges, maybe, I could see it in my head but really I was seeing my fingers clutching my coffee cup, both hands pressed against the cardboard, the plastic lid, wiping off lipstick stains like that was important)

But cyborgs don't have signs, men aren't inspired into prophetic visions of misery, their hands don't shake and they don't pick at their skin until they bleed, they don't stand still on the cold sidewalk with converses filling with slush, thinking 'I wish I was anywhere but here' and wriggling their toes in mismatched socks, holding a cup of coffee, nails painted dark purple (underneath it says 'thisi sbest', eight fingers two thumbs in sharpie that no one can read), they don't have friends to see the dark holes in their soul, they don't have crushes they realize suddenly they will see in fifteen minutes so they can't cry or wish themselves away too hard because, most of all, they don't care. And I do. So my theory fell apart.

Today I was weighed, in a way against my will, my mother watching over me because she didn't believe me. I twisted on the scale in my slippered feet and it was her who said, "well, it'll be less than that because it's the end of the day and you're wearing clothes," because I've trained myself not to think like that.

I never thought it would get to that. The only time someone gets weighed in front of others is when it's really bad, when they have to be checked on, like in horrible novels and documentaries and songs written by sad singers who've gone through it. But it was me this time. And I guess I keep thinking "But I'm not even skinny," and I'm not, it's just so much pressure and it feels like I'm collapsing into myself all the time. Emotionally I mean.

I'm going back on antidepressants, apparently. I didn't really argue against it.

In the book I was reading the narrator graphically described an elderly gangbang, fecal metaphors running rampant. I was eating scalloped potatoes. The cheese coating and what can only be described as a cottage cheese undercoating touched the back of my throat as a decrepit old hand reached behind an ear, carefully smoothing the worn skin. I gagged. I could feel coffee and baklavas and, most immediate, crisped baked cheese rising up against my throat. The stereo was playing Christian folk music, and it took everything I had to close my eyes, swallow, and continue reading.

I read the journals of a man-boy-child who tried to kill himself, maybe, desperate in any case. It didn't cheer me up and I didn't find any hints, which was what I was hoping for. Concrete facts: this is what the diary of a dying boy looks like. It looked about the same as now, maybe a bit worse. Worse than this in any case. But I am good at compartmentalizing and shoving things so deep they don't come out until I make them, destructively. Yesterday I was a wreck of crying horror, car-crash flashes and joke-flashes and I kept seeing an Indian restaurant over and over again, sitting, here is my naan here is their smiles. So I came home with shaking hands and shaking lips and I didn't cry here, did in the classroom with my eyes squished and my fingers pressed where it always, always hurts, the salt burning paths into my skin. Today I am ok and joked and only thought of it when I wasn't distracted enough to do otherwise. The silent moment in the hallway, looking through a door where kids in black with black hair, purple hair, grease hair, looking down at a candle and all I could think was 'fire hazard' as I ignored a picture. If anything I am more reckless driving, rushed corners and more harsh, loud swears, less patience for drivers who are doing what I should. Less patience overall.

My father changed a light bulb and reaching up his shirt stretched over his protruding belly, abdominal scar as thick as my finger going up diagonally. He wears all black, all the time, grey thrown in and sometimes a lighter grey on weekends if he's not leaving the house. I went to throw the bulb out while he screwed the fixture back in. I almost threw it against the stove. It was half because it was one of those new bulbs, the plastic curled up and around for energy efficiency, and I didn't know what it would look like shattered, half a stupid impulse that comes in one of those bursts of energy I have. Instead I put it in the garbage, maybe harder than usual. It didn't break. The stove remained spotless. I put on the electric kettle.

I sat on the top of the stairs for twenty minutes, in case someone came by and I could ask them to record my height. No one did so I didn't and I will remain heightless. Well, lies: I tried but with my own hands I came out shorter than when I was twelve.

I feel like an explosion, but one in a quiet field, like late-night firecrackers in an elementary school field, like running back to an apartment for chlorinated swimming, one lone rocket over our shoulders.

I dreamt I was a reporter, still living here in this hick city so it was definitely a dream, and I had a notebook and a inquisitive mind. The old museum on the outskirts of town was the centre of a decades-old mystery, the body of a girl found curled up mummified in the walls. The curator remembered both her and the discovery, and I was going to get a character sketch, fill out some details, local colour. She had thin smiles and flowing dresses, had been pregnant and they kept the mummified foetus on display. It was a museum; this didn't raise any eyebrows but it should have. I guess she had loved the museum, devoted herself too it although it was out by the old rail tracks and the exhibits were dull, antiquated even in the '70's. I kept imagining her running down the hallway at the top, slow-motion, her flats clicking and her dress behind her, hair too, although it wouldn't have blown that much without wind. The office was at the top of a long, winding staircase, white steps and white walls, doors inset every now and then that led to exhibits. On the way up - he was the murderer. The lights went off, to make it a challenge, and I hid in the inset of a door, terrified, although he was 80 at least, but he was confident enough that the danger I would escape in the dark was worth less than the idea of how scared I would get there. The doors to the exhibit rooms were locked. It was us and the staircase, windows not letting any light in because the city was just far enough away, I crouched in the corner shaking and my pad of paper on the ground, the foetus upstairs in it's cold, glass confines. It made a noise. I had my eyes closed anyway, only knew it was the foetus because it was a dream, but he ran upstairs thinking it was me, that I had moved at all. I crawled to the bottom and hid under the desk with the guest book and called my mother. I told her to bring the state troopers, even though it's Canada, we don't have those and I've always thought they're useless anyway. I got out of the building into the cold night. Cue flashback: in the 20's the curator had been acquitted of derailing a train on the tracks by where the museum now stood. It was his first murder, and it was being acted out in grainy sepia tones just too fast, like the first movies, with the soundtrack of his laughter though. The train was tipping sideways, oversized, and he was smiling wide and open, and I could see the cop cars coming where I actually was.

My alarm rang.

I locked myself in the bathroom with the lights on.

It's cold out, not the kind that leaves breath crystallizing in the lungs, but the kind that makes one's skin ache under a jacket. I shovelled half the walk without gloves, until my hands were numb and could barely move to grasp the shovel handle. A car went down the street backwards; a couple out for a walk in thick parkas and thicker gloves stood by to watch. Inside I grabbed mittens and wrestled with my headphones under my hood. When a car went past, far too fast, beside me on the street I realized that the song playing (there was a car, in the bay, by the boat that swept and swayed ) would have been perfect for a last moment.

When I came back inside my parents were playing jazz. Not the good, old stuff. New and whiny, with high, wailing trumpets and little else. So I came upstairs, after laying my mittens on the heat-register.

If you cry lying on your back, it drips into your ears. More accurately it drips along my face from my eyes, and some of it goes into my ears but some of it goes around them, then down my neck. If I wipe my eyes the skin gets inflamed and sore at the edges, where they form crinkles.

Face up is also worse because sobbing is always easier when you do it into a pillow, especially an expensive soft one with a navy-blue pillow case. It's harder to breathe that way, but that diminishes the sobs (I don't know why, it seems like that should increase their intensity). Lying on my back I just sob louder, although it gets sometimes to the point where I can't breathe at all and there are long gulping silences where I can feel my face muscles clenching, mouth frozen open grotesquely.

-
This is how I have gone to sleep for the third day in a row.

A girl who looked like a basset hound, bags underneath her eyes the size of dollars but permanent and fleshy. She spent the lunch hour harassing a substitute teacher, also fleshy, pumpkin flesh coat and thick rimmed glasses she would have hated in high school. Harassing a boy, quiet and puzzled about whatever the issue was. Spinning awkwardly, as though looking for something, but eventually she was just stuck in the middle of the computer banks, hair tightly curled but greasy, thighs too, librarian like. Not a sexy librarian; there are no internet sites devoted to her. The library assistant at our school is short, 4'11 maybe, thick hairs on her chin (thicker than on her greying head) and she will be that in 20, 40 years.

A boy conversed in Russian, loudly, almost argumentative. The girl beside him was friends with my Russian mobster acquaintance two years ago. I think he dropped out.

My iPod froze and flashed its Apple logo at me for half an hour, off and on. I had been listening to a podcast about Jesus. My cellphone told me it was charging, but it was in my bag so obviously it wasn't in the slightest. It shut down with a vibratory whimper. My keys slid through a hole in the bag lining, underneath the assorted debris of my school days, until I was digging through multicolour pens and pieces of a broken zipper to find them; the wooden elephant ornamentation of my key chain which wasn't lucky at all.

I wore a yellow watch all weekend, sneezed and coughed and pushed my ears closed as though that could fix everything. I stood over the sea and breathed in, snot smog filtered, the leaves below, the ocean. At one point a wolf was outside of the car: my parents were up a mountain or in the bathroom. It was white. I could only stare at it through the window, useless in a different town, my accent and quirks making me incapable of saying wolf in any case ('woof').

I thought of my life within the context of several boxes, judged on weight and pretentiousness, or the appearance thereof. I thought of what I would look like in a panoramic shot, but at the same time it would be a panorama without me. Here is my typewriter, which is too heavy to take with me, which has leaves in the keys that won't come out, decades in a country garage. This is my hundreds of shirts, wrinkled mostly, brightly coloured mostly, small mostly. These are my junky earrings, from across the west coast, junk stores or junk relatives or junk friends. My speaker system, my teddy bear, his head scalded from a night light when I was four, who I brought to school with me when I was 12 and desperate, who lives in a bookcase now and who I haven't talked too since I was sick and miserable and bloodied and tired.

This year I am not vomiting in bags, while driving, the very definition of multitasking. I am not running to the café out of a sense of desperation, but out of a sense of longing for becoming someone I am not. Not smarter, necessarily, but quicker and better and photogenic. Someone seven months from now, thinner and smiling just that much more easily. Someone whose life is already in boxes, in my car, snowboard on top, cds in the front seat, mountains ahead and ocean ahead and me behind.

My parents are out of town. I wake up at noon and shower at two. My teeth get brushed at five thirty, when I start to feel queasy after eating a block of goat cheese. Cinammon and cranberry goatcheese. I read the Sunday comics, a trashy internet fan fiction novella, thirty pages of Grapes of Wrath, the beginning of a book which later became a television show, which mentions a book which later became a movie. I contemplate painting my nails, look over my arm (one bruise from my flute which I pressed into my arm at a recital while I waited to play, two skinned patches from hitting a door frame) and my leg (one cut from assembling a book case, one cut and one bruise from hitting the corner of my desk). At four my toilet, which has flushed itself once an hour for the last year, flushes itself several times at once, flooding and spilling out into the room. The house has settled enough that I can stand on tiptoes at the edges and use a roll of paper towels to blanket the floor. This I coat with bleach, then I read five pages of a textbook on the Russian revolution, gather the mess into a garbage bag, and repeat. Leaving the last time I scrape against the door frame as I step around the corner, carefully avoiding all wet spots. Over the day I drink three cups of coffee, one cappuccino, and one 1/2 cappuccino 1/2 bacardi mix.

Half an hour into Garden State I decide I want to watch Jarhead, goddamnit, Jarhead, nothing else will do, nothing nothing nothing until I realize that I owe Blockbuster money, my debit card is dead, and I am too drunk to drive in any case. My parents bathroom, which I am using until they return and I have no choice but to explain that mine is a toxic wasteland, has an undecipherable chart on the door, a steady collage of numbers which confuse me. Yesterday I read the paper on their bad while my mother packed. There are two days of school left, three tests tomorrow, nothing nothing nothing Tuesday, five finals and then summer will spread out and blend into Italy and Austria and home again and senior year.

I think in the middle of the night I will wake up and vomit, and hopefully I will remember not to kneel on the bathroom floor.

It's summer now, so I spent two hours in a cafe writing out lab assessments. I sat under an air vent and had iced coffee, until I was shivering in the corner and everyone else complained about the heat. A loud woman, inexplicably proud of her camoflauge pants with dragon embroidery, would laugh in excruciatingly loud bursts. I flinched with the baristas when this happened; she made large hand gestures and was pale, thin lines around her eyes and mouth. Her companion was tanned, crocodile skinned, quieter but still shouting to fill the silence. Walking back under the summer sun I took a hot coffee in a thin paper cup. Thompson park has emptied of the winter crowd, the homeless and the dusty stoners who would curl on the benches and glare at the street. It had affluent yuppies now, students on their lunch breaks, Greenpeace representatives with nothing useful to say. The patios are different too; they've gone for the young, the sleek. No less perverted: the popular grounds of the highschool, with short skirts and daisy dukes and curling blonde hair cascading across soft shoulders are still popular. The one eyed man with knife scars across his cheeks and a permanently frostbitten nose is still always to be avoided. The classrooms are still falling apart, the west wing cordoned off, the roof leaking and collapsing. In the basement the radiator pipes shake and shudder, although we learned months ago to tune them out. Another summer sound: across the continent girls grow up ignoring cicadas and their soft summer songs. Here we have shuddering lead pipes pushing against asbestos, against the tunnels from the first war, against the walls covered in pictures of our dead.

We played Risk on a street corner at night, until my hands were cold and my troops were scattered across a continent, almost, thin men standing cowering. It was two in the morning and a strange boy smiled and amused us, entertained our insanity, until I went home and fell asleep on a trundle bed from a farmhouse. From the 1960's. It creaks and sinks and moves to accommodate my hips.

I had my hair cut thin and short, black streaks through the bangs. I let my lipstick wear off, rub off on a sub par salad while I listened to thick southern accents and thick southern stories. I feel thin and soft and cold when they are present; pushed back against cheap seats while I watched matching manicured hands gesticulate wildly. At home my mother and I played a game: 250? No, 270. I think 300, mum, seriously. The car hit bumps that don't exist, a harsh squeal of metal with every passing rut. The car moved up five inches when she gets out. I noticed: the cross around her neck, intricate gold latticework. The freckles on her chest. The second chin, with thin black hairs, the type I pluck from my eyebrows. I notice that she never says her brothers name. I notice he says it all the time.

Four times a week at the gym, until my legs are rubber and I drink water until I no longer want to pass out. I am failing, failure, but I am working working working. 128 maybe? No, 130.

Alright, so I got drunk in the afternoon and on a different day I went shopping, to an art gallery and a subversive bookstore on the lower floor of a tattoo parlour. I learned to pass notes without getting caught and how to dream horrific things without letting on. I learned to smuggle scales into my house and my room and under one dresser, where they won't be seen ever unless I want to be caught out. I learned to be late to class and walk in without feeling guilty, and I learned to be a teenager, mostly.

Not the kind of teenager I want to be, which is to say that I don't rage against things beyond anyone's control and I am not a protige and I am not a shining example of any extreme, good or bad, maladjusted or otherwise, but a teenager none the less. Actually, mostly what I want at the moment is the roadtrip which was casually mentioned in the car last friday, to drink in the afternoon until I fall down and the room spins, and the shitty apartment I know is my due, eventually, when I escape and when my window doesn't show me the same grass and tree and suburban shit I've seen for 17 years.

In my nightmare I curled up on your lap and cried. You had a small apartment, with greyish walls and deep comfortable furniture. Old and shabby, but the kind where the springs had given out just enough that you sank into the cushions and it wrapped around you. Our clothes were scattered on the floor, not because we were romantically linked, but because I was on the run from the law and my past and our one room apartment was too small for cleanliness. You held my head and rubbed the edge of my eye patch (earlier I'd stabbed them out, in guilt, in horror). I was going to get a job, woodworking maybe, or construction. You smiled a lot and we went to your mothers house for muffins.

I guess it meant I miss you. I could have done without the gory murders though.

See, what was supposed to go down was that this would be the best year ever and so I found god and prayed and prayed and prayed and sure, sure, there was some badness but so much less. and then I fell asleep and grandpa was there and I cried, and cried, and couldn't tell him he was dead and I was scared to hug him but I did and he was warm and his wool jacket was scratchy and it was grandpa. and then I woke up, and my grandmother, the only one who was still healthy, has cancer, and her surgery is on my birthday and I've been waiting for this birthday since I was five and decided it was my lucky number, and instead I get to be home alone waiting for the phone call to tell me grandma is ok.

and she won't be, she won't be, because no matter how much I prayed and prayed while we waited for biopsy results, for the biopsy itself, it didn't work, and I gave up stuff for lent and I stuck with it, I'm sticking with it, and all I wanted was my grandparents to live until they were old and happy and asleep, after graduation maybe. no, definitely. after university, and marriage, and everything, when they were 105 and asleep and peaceful and smiling.

and then I don't want to dream about their scratchy wool jackets, or the copper bracelets they used to wear that would turn their wrists green, and I don't want my parents to have panic attacks because their parents are sick, and I just wanted this year to be better. it was supposed to be better. it was better: better grades and better attitudes and better eating habits, and more self esteem, and everything was better so why does everything have to fall to shit.

At night I tried to fall asleep, desperately, and suddenly heard a sound like an amplified heartbeat. I sat up. The house continued its average night noises; those of the eleven o'clock news and the murmurings of the dishwasher. I was convinced that somewhere someone I knew was dead. I sat and listened: nothing. I went to sleep.

Last night in my dream I was God, although not the God, instead the latest in a chain of many people who suddenly woke up to discover they were no longer what they had been. I was confused, unsure of what to do and how to work things now, but the map of the world drawn in ink and spread out before me could be enlarged, so that settlements became tiny dots with cursive descriptors. If you put your hand over a continent you could feel it, and I was afraid to grip Antarctica because of frostbite. I asked how I could feel the universe, and the answer was to merely put my hand over my own chest and feel my heart beating steadily as my fingers fit in the grooves between my ribs.