Older

Cheeks are sinking in
Imperfect skin around eyes
A frozen frown here.

two chiseled lines inbetween my eyebrows
three long lines zigzagging across my forehead
every year more expensive make-up
every year the youthful glow fades from my face
every year I look more beautiful



Do you remember college parties?
Do you remember my fat cheeks and tight skin?

I always wore some stupid outfit- never quite in sync, yet never quite making my own fashion statement. Just lost in my wardrobe.

We would drink and drink. Now, if I drank that much, I would end up in the E.R.
Relationships were always painful and pointless, but so simple and uncomplicated.
Hangovers couldn't get us fired back then.
Remember random hook-ups? Drunk on the carpet? Alcohol is not performance enhancing.

I remember waking up with two other girls asleep in my double bed, Becky's make-up smeared all over my pillow. I still sleep in the same bed; now I wake up with the cat curled up at my feet, and the alarm reminding me that only God and orthodox Jews get a Sabbath.

I remember junky apartments and wrecked carpets, cheap beer and lost nights of glorious abomination.
I remember Luke Skywalker puking on my kitchen table one Halloween.

Where did that silly girl go- with the damaged red hair, dark roots fading into gnarled locks of fake strawberry blonde? Dancing on a chair with her arms over her head laughing in her boots and bare legs with that jean skirt I've long since shrunk out of when the baby fat fell off and she sallowed into me.

Sometimes I miss her a little. Her goofy drunken escapades- smile so wide her mouth threatened to turn inside out. And that stupid picture with two cigs in her mouth, sunken eyes displaying days of binge drinking when the first boyfriend who stuck around for more than 6 weeks stopped sticking around.

But I love the new wrinkles inbetween my eyebrows. I love the hollow place where the baby fat used to sit on my cheeks. I love being older. I love wanting for things that require the maturity and perseverance of age. I love working, and the solace of my space, my things, my clean linoleum floor, and working professional's apartment with the family below me.

I love the deep, meaningful pain of real loss and the complicated mess of relationships when the word "marriage" can hold real promise, and real terror.

Still, sometimes when I'm heading home at midnight on a Saturday, I think about Sunday mornings drinking a gallon of kool-aid, reading Faulkner in my bathrobe, waiting for the hangover to dissipate in that drafty old house with no insulation.

We were all living in dumpy shitholes drinking shitty beer eating shitty food and having shitty sex.

And now we're older. 

Ode to Food

Food. We need it. We want it. We love it. Sometimes it disgusts us. Sometimes it excites us. It's a a privilege to truly enjoy it. Here are some foods that I've been thinking about this week:

Ode to Cheese: Stay away you evil temptress. Do not tease me with your soft, white form. Do not let me sink my teeth into your flesh, and wet my tongue with your sharp, slightly pungent taste. Do not let me roll you to the back of my mouth and swallow gently. You feel so good going down, but hurt so much. 

Ode to Juice: I want to suck you down all day long. You intoxicate me as I chug gallons and gallons of you. It's puppy love and we're giddy...infatuated, but I don't want to get the taste of you out of my mouth. I love you in any form- to me you are perfect.

Ode to Chocolate: Life partner: I'm sorry I strayed. I cannot live without you. I tried to find comfort in another, but I see the error of my ways. Only you can truly make me happy. I'll make it up to you, I promise I've learned. Already there are two bags of chocolate in the cupboard. Please believe me, I'll never make the same mistake again.

Ode to Meat: I try to leave you, but I can never go. You see, you give so much to me. You fill me up with your substance, in a way nothing else can. I don't want to be with you. You're not kind, and you bring down the world around you to get to the highly processed form I see you in each week. But no one can give me what you give me. No one satisfies my needs quite the same.

Ode to Tomato Red Pepper Soup: You're just the flavor of the week. Thanks for helping me get through a rough patch. It's not you, it's me. I really care for you but I just don't see this working out long term. You just don't have enough substance. Honestly, I need a foodstuff with more calories. But thanks for the Thursday morning cuddling session.Whoever you end up with is a lucky woman.

I Dissolved

Last night I dissolved.

Like an alka seltzer dropped into a glass of water, tiny particles of me came shooting off to fizzle and disperse around the room until all that was left was a thin vapor where I used to be.

I sat far too long on your couch drinking far too much wine . With each glass a part of my mind disappeared into the ceiling. Each hour became darker, and the words escaping my lips became the words of an occupying alien. Time became a dark red shadow in which you were conversing with an intruder while the real me was floating around in the atmosphere with the stars.

I sank like a melting snowbank into your couch where you found me pooled in the cushions at 3:30 am. Nothing left of me, just a skinny drunken form sinking ever lower into the furniture, so wine-logged I was threatening to drop through the floor and into the foundations of the building.

Yellow on my fingers

Yellow on my fingers

Red on my toes

hair in my eyes

a ring in my nose

do you want to watch me dance 

with laughing abandon in my skintight pants?

do you want to feel my teeth bite your lip

and the firm press of me on your hip?

can your ear feel the breath of a chuckle

while Yellow fingers are on your buckle

and Red toes inch between your feet

still blurring with the pounding beat?

does it make you jealous

that we're not in my bed

and that my pulsing Colors are just in your head?

tonight I'm dancing alone in the candlelight

and the Red and the Yellow combine to make Orange

When I shatter, nearly all my tiny glass shards make it back to their origins

Old medical records show a historical link of melancholy and the belief that one is composed entirely or partially of glass.*
 

I am glass. 

My skin is a thin glass layer. Beneath it course the rivers of my existence, small sapphires of blood sliding through the valleys and gullies of my veins.

My face is a stained glass window. If the sun shines on it just right the colors will mix together into a rainbow panoply. Features cut and melded together into a mesh of me. Look closely- can you see yourself reflected in the blue/green glass of my eyes?

My heart is a glass figurine, thrumming and humming in spite of its composition, pumping the life force through me. If it shatters a million tiny sapphires will pool in the river bends and sit, lifeless, lost. It floats in my ribs, dangerously close to the glass of my skin. It should be buried deep, deeper within but instead there it is, the most delicate of my organs, asking to be broken.

 

My legs are fragile glass pedestals. If I put them down with too much force they will shatter, and if I put too much weight upon them they will buckle. I balance precariously upon their bases, fearing with each step that part of my ankles or knees will crack and chip.

My womb is a glass vase, empty. No flowers sit within its lips. It sits, expectant, deserted, purposeless.

I am a glass creature, fragile and delicate. But I am beautiful, transparent; my inner me is not hidden behind opaque walls or shrouded curtains. It is on display, behind the glass case of my countenance. It sits, exposed, for viewers to see. It isn’t hard to shatter my casing and steal the valuables; I’m not protected from the elements within. I am there. I am here. Do you want to reach inside and hold my gentle heart, feel it within your hand, feel how it would only take a rough squeeze to destroy the essence of me.

*http://thirdcoastfestival.org/library/999-re-sound-149-the-piano-show?closed=true