Mental Waste Management
'American', Interlude
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The soft guitar intro of Jefferson Airplane’s “Today” lilts, and I am overcome with the sensation of my life flashing, past and future, on each side of my head. I feel love for a thousand people, all the moments of tenderness between strangers, all the intricacies of life on earth that I’ve stopped to observe and decided to keep living for. With you standing here, I could tell the world what it means to love. I have known what it means to love, perhaps so much better than most people ever get to.
I think of intense silences between my friends back home, all of us sitting together in sweltering southern heat, each knowing in our own way that we’ll never get the moment back, each wondering if life will ever be so kind again. I think of my mom and dad, and the way my heart swells too large to feel comfortable within my chest when I am around either of them; I know what it is to love them so dearly that the very beating of my blood through my body overwhelms me as I ache for them to be happy at last.
I think of the man I love, and the depths - which, from where I stand, seem infinite - that I’ve yet to cross to know him. My body prepares itself to see him, leaping internally with joy, and then compressing as though falling from a great height when I find him to be utterly preoccupied. I am crushed by the weight of my own determination, lost in a black hole of my own making.
I think of the fear I feel towards the future; that same fear I’ve always had, that something so beautiful can become something so insidious. I see it only in black and white, as though my life will have lost all meaning if I have failed, somehow, to love.
That’s what it is, really - that’s the baggage I carry. I believe that I can love enough to heal every wound and fortify every bond; that, in doing so, anyone will be able to understand the world as I see it. I want so much to understand how other people see the world that I feel the sincerest sense of failure for not being able to project myself into their brains and see through their eyes. I fail further in my own inability to describe the sensation of living.
The song is long over, so cavernous a feeling in so short a time. Yet it haunts the valleys of my mind and paints my life all at once. Painful, immensely; but remarkable, most of all.
Bobby Darin is singing “Mack the Knife,” and I flashback to a year in college when I was buried in such loneliness that I fell wholeheartedly for a senior-year jazz-singing prick. He was short, and thinner than I’ve ever been. Most of his body weight was nose and ego. His family was sweet - I should know, as I enjoyed just about every holiday with them, although I was never once called his girlfriend. He’s engaged now, after cheating on his first girlfriend and tearing to pieces the hearts of several girls who came after her. He’s got the promise of lifetime love, and I’ve got the promise of nothing more than the breath taken by my own body.
Now Jo Stafford streams, from the other room, as I cover my face with yogurt in the bathroom. Jo is bidding her lover farewell and safe travels and a thrilling life, but making the humble plea of being remembered, deferred to as the primary of all the international lover’s women. Maybe Jo was lucky and there was no other woman to whom her man could belong; or maybe she was singing with an old-fashioned acceptance of a lady’s feelings taking a backseat to the man’s enjoyment. (“Old-fashioned” - as if we don’t do the same thing by another name now. A rose by any other name would smell as putrid as the same burning of the flesh of the heart). Jo is serenading the man she loves, and I am trying to make my face resplendent. That is my exchange; rather than risk being turned down once again and tell a man honestly that, wherever he travels, he is mine, I am telling a man that perhaps I can replace him or perhaps I know he will never betray me, because of how radiant my face is after a healthy nighttime dose of lactic acid.
Actually, my face has never been radiant, not really. It’s been lightly pocked by a minefield of hormones since I hit puberty. Since I first felt those tiny bits of adipose collecting at my chest and cried to my mom that I had breast cancer. Since I first started filling my skirt with toilet paper at school to avoid having to tell my mom that I needed pads, to avoid getting “the talk,” which I had already gotten in so many iterations from my mom and the state curriculum sex-ed. Maybe the disturbances across the surface of my face had all been karmic smiting for the lies I told in those first years of puberty to spare myself the embarrassment that only an adolescent can feel so intensely.
I wish I were home right now, at a home that no longer exists. I wish I were turning twenty and drinking Bacardi out of a watermelon-filled mason jar with my best friends until I could hardly walk; dancing in the arms of my tall and handsome and not-quite-straight best friend across the kitchen floor, listening to his slight southern drawl spilling atop my head and burrowing into my mind to be savored at a later date. We used to sit in the kitchen and mess around with chords and songs for the sake of pretending that we might one day have a successful band - a dream that persists, even now, while I still live here and he still lives there. I sent him that Jefferson Airplane song last week, and he confirmed that he’d play it for me if I come back to visit soon. He happened to confirm this on my birthday, though didn’t wish me a happy birthday, which I take to mean that his subconscious knows my birthday, but his brain is too busy running circles on survival mode to remind him.
It’s resplendent! My face! It feels like butter smoothed across a knuckle. Surely, someone will love me now!* Now that I’ve sat down to type this worthless paragraph of this worthless not-yet-book, I must get up again to moisturize, so that my resplendence can be tarnished tomorrow by the germs on my keyboard hitchhiking from the pads of my fingers to the pores of my face, to start the whole cycle over again. Acne is actually just a conspiracy from Big Yogurt.