14 November 2008

59 Stories

In an attempt to separate my blog from the 59 Stories, I've created this: http://www.hollyselph.com/59/ so that the stories can be read in their intended order, backwards.

I have written the first one, but I won't put it up until I write all the ones left in the middle. Hopefully, I'll have 47 up soon.

Also, I'm back.

05 May 2008

The 49th Story

The 49th story was about buttercups and how freely a young girl might hand them out to strangers were buttercups to grow freely in her front yard. It was about how much it cost once they were severed from the grass and let go by the hands of strangers to spoil, like untold secrets, on the sidewalk. Buttercups are metaphorically irrelevant since their arithmetic is both as forward-moving as clock ticks and as cowardly as political strategy. Meaning, their petals are not conducive to counting loves and loves not. All buttercups are good for is making chins glow and divining tastes for butter.

 

This story is no longer about buttercups.

 

This story is about being thirsty, and not even knowing it. It is about someone else knowing it before you do and making a left turn into a gas station with the announcement that he will be buying you a Coca-Cola there. Mostly, it is about him getting as close to the door as he is to the car and then turning around and asking if you’d prefer your Coca-Cola in a bottle or from the fountain.

 

Upon first inspection, this seems like an ordinary moment in the life of someone who has just learned that she is thirsty. But, really, the moment is measured thusly:

 

There is a movement driven by pseudo-scientists who have had their birth certificates legally altered to be born again, having changed their names to honor celestial events and vegetation indigenous to South America. They believe that inside flowers are spirals of cosmic geometry that, if deciphered, could prove that chaos is actually a perfectly ordered series of numbers that correspond to universal events like bangs--big and small, supernovas, and geographical vortices. All they can talk about is their ikebana-like arithmetic, carefully sparse in order to portray authenticity. What they have overlooked is the patterns hidden in plucked moments, how they are measured by the consistency of a metronome, counting both forward and back but leaving an imperceptible pause in between for the elusive, but permanent, present. The present is difficult to observe because by observing it, one is denying its existence, unless you catch a glimpse of it as it comet-tails around the corner and spoils on the sidewalk. One such pause was the mathematical love story in his question. It was an equation of bubbles, a ratio of gases and liquids, an infinite series of bangs--big and small, that make counting flower petals one-by-one a division, and not that thing you want: the right answer given the right question, the solution, the unity of proof when it tangos with an equal sign, the certainty that numbers can be translated into a language that forbids maybe, and perhaps, and has only a thousand multiplications of yes.

24 April 2008

The 50th Story

Yesterday, he sent these words to me:

How are you feeling right now?

I said:

I am a little bored. Why?

He said:

It's really windy here. I wanted to make sure you were OK.


This is because he is the one person who believes that I still control the wind. Or, rather, that I no longer control it. I affect it. This is magical thinking at its most narcissistic, and certainly indicative of a number of things cataloged in the DSM-IV. It's also a mythology that allows me to believe that the space between us is filled with something common, an air that we exchange as if there is a secret tunnel that breathes from Atlanta to Phoenix and back, the hollow of a seashell that holds the tide.

It's this distance that reminds me I've done nothing I said I was going to. I have had moments. But, so far, my life has looked like this:

When I was five we lived near the train station. Atlanta's station is a little brick house, a soda machine, and trains. We drove by at least once a day. On the other side of 25th Street is an ordinary concrete wall. Once I stared at this wall from the window of my mother's car and thought, "I will always remember this moment." There was no reason other than that I insisted upon it. I have memorized many walls since.

Once my best friend and I rode in a car that wasn't a convertible to the shore. I remember it as a convertible because the sunroof was open and the windows were open and it was the first warm day of the year. I will remember driving through Alabama and down into Mississippi into the sliver of Florida where the water lets you in on earth's greatest secret: the ocean is empty.I cried all the way because we jumped in a car with nowhere to stay and drove six hours to the beach with pale skin and no sunscreen, with a car full of cassette tapes and grape sodas and a toothbrush between us. The water was cold, but we jumped in anyway.

I ate a bowl of lentil soup in a villa in Chichen Itza, Mexico. Outside there was a pool where a man was carefully pulling leaves from the water which was thick with algae.

There are these things: the smell of pumpkin guts, and the smell of the seeds baking in salt. My grandmother's hands. Running down the sand, my arms outstretched, my head tilted toward the sky. A meteor shower there, sitting in a hole in the sand staring into the eyes of someone I spent too many years waiting for. My mother's voice, off-key, singing 60s antiwar songs as lullabies. My father's soft voice reciting, "fern hill" and "chansons innocentes."

There is Lake Sequoyah where I never caught a catfish.

There is a porch, a circle of chairs, the floor littered with packs of Marlboro cigarettes, and a time when nothing but friendship mattered.

I was married on the coldest night in the year two-thousand. When we left for our hotel, there were men in the street fighting, one pulled out a knife. The other reached deep into a pocket, and our driver reversed and ran through a red light, the tires screeching on Peachtree Road at midnight.

In my early twenties, I was doing
lines of cocaine on makeup mirrors in the bathrooms of clubs while my husband's band was on stage. I drank vodka with cranberry juice. I had two dogs, two cats, and a turtle. I was still working on finishing my degree, but had changed majors four times and settled for the one that guaranteed no career. We sang Sonny & Cher karaoke at a dive bar on Saturday nights. I didn't own a couch.  We had a bathtub that wouldn't drain for two months, so after each shower I filled buckets with cloudy water and dumped them out the window until the tub was empty. There was always a little puddle of water that clung to the drain. I caught a stingray off a dock on the salt marshes of South Carolina. I gave myself a black eye.

It's all been an exercise in almost doing something. I almost moved to Olympia, Washington. I almost moved to Colorado. I wanted nothing more than to move to New York City to write a novel that would win a Pulitzer Prize. I almost was a violinist. I almost loved someone enough to be miserable. I almost died, and I almost lived.

So, the fiftieth story is this:

Three days ago, I agreed to pack up nothing but my clothes and only the books I will need for one year and move to Arizona. Two days ago, I quit my job. Yesterday, I drove through my city while the sun was still rising, and I missed it already. It would be good time to control the wind, but even if I could, I'd probably still be commanding the wind to blow and then running underground to safety, adjusting a radio antennae for warnings in between the static. I am not sure if it was faith I had then, the certainty that I decided when and where the wind moved, or if real faith is what I have now: tossing my life to the wind and watching it land, scattered like tiny flecks of gold, none of which is worth a dime nor builds a road.

21 April 2008

The 51st Story

When you read fairy tales upside down, they go like this: the princesses all had days when they didn't shave their legs, and the princes preferred to be single anyway. White horses ran through mud. Rapunzel's hair broke off halfway up. Snow White shared an apple pie with the dwarfs, and they all are still sleeping. The princess still felt the pea. Alice fell down the rabbit hole and was beheaded by the Jack of Hearts. Hansel and Gretel were eaten in a pie with carrots and potatoes, and Cinderella missed the coach and rolled home on a pumpkin.

The new shoes were a half size too small, and they won't match anything I own, but in every other way they fit. I wore them that night to a place where girls rode away on a mechanical bull while boys cheered them on, knowing that they weren't going anywhere near the sunset. I wore them the next day when we sat in the sun for the last time together before I had an appointment with a seat, in coach, on an airplane that was scheduled to take off just before midnight.

He kept telling me that we were late, and I turned up the music. I ordered another glass of wine. I tried to make green lights go red. I had work the next morning. I had no other way home. I had a cat at home with only two bowls of food. But these shoes fit in a way fairy tales don't explain. They transformed me from a girl who used to be so poor that she ate wishes into one who throws her slippers away and whose ride home left without her. It's upside down, but it bought me more time, which is the currency of space, the promise of happy endings, the pretend of everything. There is always more of it. There is never enough.

18 April 2008

The 52nd Story

Arizona is not brown, but this is the first word that came to mind as my plane descended toward a landscape that looked like the earth had undressed, and I had caught it naked, and by surprise. It's a place with everywhere to run and nowhere to hide. It looks deprived, like an alcoholic's skin or the circumference of a smoker's lips. It has worked too hard for too little, but would never admit it. The mountains are not covered in trees, but by vermicular trails that are a color that is not brown, but a shade which can't distinguish the difference between being somewhere and being nowhere at all.

This is the best reason I can give for throwing away my shoes: they were dirty after a night out, and my feet hurt from standing in heels, and I'd like to think some part of me, after too many beers, knew that the only creatures who can survive the desert are the ones that have several layers of skin and know when it's time to shed them. So, I took of my camel-colored pumps and threw them in a trashcan on the street. I expected him to tell me that I'm crazy and to put them back on, or for him to dig in the trash and carry them back, so that in the morning I could have, along with a headache, the relief of my shoes. Instead, he laughed and took my hand and walked me back, barefoot.

The real reason I threw away my shoes is this: I wanted to see if he would let me. Some boys would carry a girl with no shoes. Some would dig them out of the trash, rolling their eyes at her histrionics. Some boys would just ignore her. But he is the sort of boy who howls at the moon, who drinks from fountains and never from bottles, who will dance with a girl to a song and change the words so that it's about her. He will let her throw away her shoes because freedom is never really owning anything. It's all borrowed, shedding and leaving behind previous incarnations. Sometimes caught naked, sometimes still dancing.

10 March 2008

The 53rd Story

You've had conversations in which you've expressed distrust for those who speak in second person. "It's a means by which people distance themselves from their own experience," you say.

He gives an example: people who are being interviewed on the news after witnessing an explosion. They might say, "I was standing right over here when sparks started flying. You realize if you had just stood a few inches closer, you'd be nothing but ashes."

He can't get stars tattooed on his back because his shoulders are burned by the sun. So, you go back and sit in a chair and offer your palm to a man who says you have "crazy motherfucking eyes," and he tattoos the inside of your wrist because it is empty  now. You keep looking behind you to make sure the boy is still there, that your eyes aren't crazy, just more blue than all the reasons he gives for not saying the magic words.

It's been two weeks since you've seen him, and three to go.He calls you and says that he is about to get the stars on his back. He tells you next he will get a mermaid on his arm. She will have black hair and blue eyes and pink scales. You have black hair and crazymotherfucking blue eyes, but you don't want to act like this might mean something like the people on the news who spend all their time wondering why they are always witnesses to their own lives, so you say, "why not green scales?"

He says, "because you weren't wearing green tights."

And you realize that if you had just picked another color that night, you would have been a witness talking to a reporter in the rain. She would be holding her umbrella over your head because you hate the water. You would be telling her that you almost--but didn't--get to explode with the stars.

04 March 2008

The 54th Story

It was over lobster enchiladas and cucumber mojitos that he said something that made me mad enough to almost tell him that I was in love with him. My arms raised up on either side and in exasperation, I said, "I am in luh--" and his eyes got really wide, and I said quietly, "rescue me." He stared at me for a moment and then laughed and said, "Lexington! You're in Lexington." If this moment were awkward, it would have been remedied by the drag queen show we watched afterwards, but it wasn't awkward. When you're not lost, sometimes that's when you most need directions. So, Lexington became the space between, the geography of a girl and a boy, chips and salsa, and a room full of queens in a restaurant that was at such an angle that glasses could slide right off the table without provocation and by the same force that hit Newton on the head.

It might seem a simple assumption to equate Lexington with love, but it's a place for those who have not yet decided if love is worth the high property taxes, and if the insurance adequately covers the risk. Lexington is a suburb of love. Everyone there has a porch, and nobody uses artificial sweetener. People there believe that music should be played outside, in playing poker, and in having breakfast. It's lovely, but you can't stay there.  Everything slides off the table.

02 March 2008

The 55th Story

I was five years old when I got a Fisher Price record player for Christmas. This introduced a whole world in which I could close my door, put on a record, and be my own imaginary playmate. My music collection was limited to the Mary Poppins soundtrack, Sesame Street, and Frosty the Snowman. It was Frosty who taught me the true nature of impermanence. I would listen again and again, knowing the exact groove on the vinyl that would start the song over again, before he melts, before he promises to come back again someday. As far as I knew, that song had never been written. I would lie on the carpet of my bedroom floor and cry. It was the saddest song in the world.

This is why I first called him the snowman. It was easy for him to march through my town, disappear, and promise to return. I, on the other hand, had established a mythology based on the physics of climate. When things warm up, everything must melt.

It was only hours before he had an appointment with the desert, his home. We had breakfast and then champagne, and then a long walk down a broken sidewalk back to the car to take him to the sky.

It was cold and raining when he arrived and now the sun was out. It was warm, and I held his hand as I walked in my high heels in a direction I didn't want to go. We stopped when we came to a puddle so large that I knew something had to have melted there. He lifted me and carried me to the other side--maybe because I was in heels, or because I pretended I could jump all by myself, or because he knew that I believed that the puddle could resurrect somewhere in the desert into a promise bound by more than an old silk hat, a corn cob pipe, and two rings made out of foil.

29 February 2008

The 56th Story

In Belize, there is a saying: Breeze blows pelican the same place he wants to go. Pelicans, you see, are birds who don’t fight the wind. So, the day after the napkins blew off the table, he took of his watch and left it on my dresser and told me that it would stop keeping time because it winds when he moves (and he moves with the wind.) And then he flew to the same place he wanted to go.

 

When I was a little girl, I believed that I controlled the wind. This was a huge and overwhelming task, but no one had ever trusted me to keep time.  The alternative was to allow time to stop, which was out of the question. We had missed each other too many times. Once he walked by me sleeping on a mattress in a hallway. I was seventeen and wore too much black eyeliner. He had a blue Mohawk.  For three days we shared air, and not once did we feel the breeze.  Nine years later, we shook hands in Denver where the air was thin and the music too loud. Five years after that, I cut off my long hair and sat with him at a table while another girl kissed his face.  It was only now that we were, at the same time, wanting the same place the breeze blows.

 

The watch slid on my arm for twelve days, eleven hours, and thirty-three minutes. I slept with my arm under my pillow so I would not feel its weight. It got tangled in my hair. Sometimes it was upside down, and I would confuse night with day. Mostly, though, I just trusted that it would count numbers until he landed back here. He was only staying for two days, but in two days, two people can become like kites—more things of the wind than strings to the ground.

28 February 2008

The 57th Story

The bloody marys had onions the size of fingertips, pepperoncinis, olives, and cucumbers. He was taking a sip from his when he looked up and let the straw go from his lips and said: I like when the rain starts, but not when it stops.

At any moment before this one, I could have let him go. I could have walked away with only a wound the shape of the keyhole to the room on the 59th floor. When he said this, I understood it intuitively, like the moment you grasp an e e cummings poem. It is gone by the time it arrives, but there is an almost imperceptible shift during which something irreversible occurs. Parenthetical phrases are let out of their ovens and are allowed to burn in the sun and the breaks between the lines are a counter-clockwise code. If things are backwards and down is up and up is down and the world is a Seussian orb, then I knew I was going the right way when I understood that his sentence meant that he, too, would have once had a friend that was a tree and would know that when the rain stops, the oceans land, and we're all right side, growing up and moving forward--the only direction we can't navigate while facing each other, a straw between our lips.

The only other fact about that morning I recall is that there were no clouds in the sky, but the wind blew paper napkins off our table, and they unfolded like white flags in the air.