I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

If something’s bothering me, I should just talk about it, right? I should put it out there and get it off my chest and hopefully be in a better position to move on. Here’s the thing. What is with celebrities our age (25-45, give or take) and their inability or feigned inability to deal with basic technologies like computers and the Internet? Every other day I read a celebrity interview where an actor or actress is all, “I can barely turn my computer on,” or “I hardly know how to use my own cellphone.” Really? I’ve even seen this nonsense from the tween actors and I’m sorry but there are few people of privilege under the age of 18 who know how to function without their telephones/laptops/iDevices. Is this some deeply affected stance the famous people are adopting to seem more “real”? Are they really that techno-ignorant? I have tried to deal with my frustration and confusion about this issue but I honestly can’t handle it anymore. What are these celebrities going on about? What do you mean you don’t know anything about [insert basic Internet tool here]? WHAT DO YOU MEAN? I know you live in the world. Please STFU. You are lying or you are crazy or you are creepy and none of those options is acceptable. Do celebrities live in some bizarre technology free bubble? I know that many celebrities have assistants and handlers and slaves who handle tedious tasks but don’t tell me you don’t know how to check your e-mail. Do not tell me you don’t know how to use your iPod. I have seen you running Runyon Canyon with your earbuds safely tucked into your ears. I had e-mail in 1992 when I started college.

Thank you for listening.

Today I receive one of those sneaky rejections you get when you visit all the submission managers of the magazines where you have had work outstanding for a very long time. I happened upon Willow Springs and the word DECLINED next to my submission, but I never received the rejection e-mail. It was a painful sneak attack. Who knows when it was sent? I do not. I do know that they are not interested in Strange Gods, not even a little. They are so uninterested in the story that the submission manager felt their indifference and didn’t bother to send me the electronic missive notifying me they weren’t interested or that my work isn’t a good fit or that I should, perhaps, consider a different career path. They say go away Roxane Gay. That rhymes which is, I suppose, a small consolation. Last night, I went to a Creperie and met more new colleagues in Champaign. The food was really outstanding save for a terrible, terrible salad covered in a bunch of horrible things. As I ate the salad, I reflected on the badness of it and was quite impressed by how spectacularly a series of innocuous ingredients came together to upset me. There were green peppers, which I loathe, and some stringy green thing resembling a miniature pine tree and dried flakes of buckwheat crepe. I am depressed just remembering the salad. I shall not have it again. I suspect one or three of my new colleagues might read this blog. You are all awesome and amazing individuals. All of none of everything is true. There wasn’t a lot of Top 40 radio back home, up North, so I got used to listening to my iPod all the time and I kept current by following the Billboard charts at Billboard.com. Last night, driving around, I wondered what’s playing on the radio these days so I found a station and realized I have no clue anymore about contemporary music. Everything has this weird sound like T-Pain. I now know this is called auto tune. I looked it up. But seriously, every single song is filtered through that strange sound tunnel and is it just me or have some artists resorted to simply absurd lyrics because they can. I heard one song about a pretty boy doing something in a club or something like that and there was a blatant disregard for even the most basic rules of word usage and sentence construction. The “artist” basically kept saying the words pretty boy followed by a word I didn’t understand. It reminds me of that little Soulja Boy kid but I don’t know that he still makes music. I feel like I’m returning to earth after a long trip to another planet. Or, I am old. I took some notes with bits of lyric so I can search various songs out and then I can download some new music and catch up. Also, I heard a great song that, thanks to Twitter, I know is called Billionaire and is super catchy. My father, when I was a kid, would tell us, “Life isn’t fair,” when we threw a tantrum and accused him of being unfair. I thought of that last night as I threw a tantrum. I’m over it now. I am ready to feel something other than anger, irritation and numbness. I am ready to be mature and move forward. Enough with the angst already. I feel good about that. I bought a headless baby mannequin. I do not know what I will name my headless baby mannequin. I bought it for decorative and inspiration purposes though once in a while I might hold it close. I will keep my headless baby mannequin clean. It was born in California. It is a boy and a girl. I was in a hospital once. Most of it was a blur but I remember how my room smelled empty and antiseptic. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I drifted off, a nurse was there to check my vitals or to check my wound dressing and in the middle of the night, I would say, “Please leave me alone,” but they ignored me. I wanted to be polite but those nurses made it hard. A man slept in a chair. It was covered in pink vinyl and could extend like a recliner but he sat straight up, his boots on the floor.  Sometimes, he told me stories about how when this was over, we would go back to the lake and he would not only reach for the stars, he would reach into them, push them aside so we could have a better view. He’d take the moon into his hands and split it open like ripe, swollen fruit so I would drink the moonlight from his fingers. It was strange to hear something like that from him. He was always at his best when I was at my worst. He brought me food, but I refused, told him I wouldn’t eat. Sometimes, he would disappear and when he returned, he smelled like smoke; he smelled like something on fire. It was in his hair, his hands, everywhere. One of the nurses was such a heavy smoker, I could smell it on her skin. I wanted to lick her arm. I had not had a cigarette for quite some time at that point, had given it up in service of a safe and healthy lifestyle. I was in the hospital. I didn’t need to be safe and healthy anymore but I was too weak to get out of bed and find a cigarette and find somewhere to smoke and so licking that nurse’s arm, grabbing her wrist and dragging my tongue along the taut underside of her arm, that felt like a reasonable alternative. I wanted her to be my only nurse so I could lick her whenever I needed to but she only worked until 7 and then a nurse with a bad perm took over and she was not quiet. I grew so tired it felt like there was a thick dry film covering my eyes. Everything felt heavy and by the third day, I worried I would lose my mind if I didn’t get a few uninterrupted hours of sleep. I could feel everything. The doctor visited me. He was short and balding and he didn’t look like a TV doctor in his scrubs. That felt unfair. The doctor was wrinkled and pale. He didn’t seem competent or caring and he smelled empty and antiseptic too. When he touched me, he pressed too hard, looked too long. He hurt me but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know. After he finished checking my wound, he didn’t bother to lower my pajama shirt. I couldn’t remember putting it on. He told me they had made an incision along my previous scar, the one where they took out my appendix and gallbladder when I was fifteen. I said, “Scars can be recycled?” He didn’t answer my question. He just kept talking and talking and saying things I couldn’t hear. He was, really, a tiny little man with a tiny little voice. He asked if I had any questions but he had already ignored one question so I decided not to waste my time.  The man had questions. He asked them but I didn’t listen to the answers. I said, “I want to go home, I can’t get better here.” The doctor insisted I should stay longer. I sat up, tried to think clearly, sound strong. I said, “I want to go home.” The man cracked his knuckles and gave the doctor a look that scared me. The short balding doctor backed away. “Do what you want,” he said peevishly. An hour later, we were in the man’s truck. I slumped against the door, my cheek against the window, my hand against the thick bandage across my abdomen. It felt warm. I felt everything. Each time we drove over a pothole, I winced and the man would tighten his grip on the steering wheel and he would say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  The cab was dry and smelled like smoke. I asked for a cigarette. He had never quit. I didn’t mind. He didn’t question me, just gave me one. I rolled the cigarette across my lower lip and leaned into the open flame of the lighter in his hand.

These are things that have recently happened, just some little stories. A few miles away from the St. Louis airport there was a gas station where I stopped to get gas. I had just fetched my mother from the airport after sitting in the Cell Phone lot for an hour, burning beneath the intense and inescapable heat of the Missouri sun. While in that lot, there was a man who was doing speedwalking laps around the Cell Phone lot. He was shirtless and wearing flip flops but he was quite serious about his routine. I marvel at the many ways people let their unique qualities shine. After six laps, he was picked up by a person in a gold Plymouth and the moment felt pretty perfect and I felt thrilled to have witnessed it.

So while I was filling my car up and my mom was standing a few feet away from me sipping her smoothie, this guy walked up to me in a wifebeater and some dirty jeans. He had driven up moments earlier in a beat up pick up truck blasting slow jams but not the ones we might be familiar with. They sounded like off brand slow jams made by artists who never succeeded beyond selling their homemade CDs out of their trunks and at beauty salons and barbershops with synthesized loops you could make on a Casio and suggestive lyrics that were more sad than salacious. He was what can best be termed as a black redneck. He whistled and said, “Damn you’re thick,” and I didn’t know what to say to that at ALL so I focused very intently on the gas pumping, willing it to hurry which it did not. He said, “You gotta man?” I said the first thing that popped into my head: that’s my mother standing right there, as if she were a man repellant I could spray myself with and he would POOF be gone. I was right! But first he had to express his surprise. “She don’t look like your mother. Damn!” And then he put his toothpick back in his mouth and ambled back to his truck and my mother said something funny. Her smoothie was tart but delicious.

I took my mom to her hotel. She doesn’t believe in staying with adult children. She has lots of little rules and maxims. She has been killing my brother, sister in law and I with the SCIENCE she has dropped over the past four days. Her theories are simply divine and yesterday while we were out, I turned to my SIL and said, “we should just be recording her all the time.” She agreed. Once my mom checked in, she promptly began to disinfect the room with wipes. “Any surface someone else may have touched!”

She brought my nephew and I vuvuzelas from South Africa. Yeah. Awesome. I also got some wooden bowls. Anyway, my nephew had the vuvuzela taken away, that’s how much he blew that horn. However annoying you think that sound is, you’re right but it’s probably worse still. I wanted to stuff him inside that little horn at one point. The highlight was when he took an airhorn and blew it inside the vuvuzela.

I’m staying at my brother’s house and he and my sister in law are in a flurry of preparing for a baby who is due in less than a month. My niece’s name is going to be the name of a European city but not Paris, thank god. My vote was for Roxane, obvi but sadly, I was completely ignored in this matter. Rude. I have seen the nursery. It is a dream nursery. There is a mural in her bathroom with little ducks. The walls are pink. There’s a lovely crib and changing table and she has enough clothes, at this point, to never wear the same outfit twice and we keep contributing to this problem because baby clothes are irresistible.  While my sister-in-law was showing us the adorbs baby clothes she has gotten, and we removed tags and prepared to launder, her neighbor stopped by with her baby, and they talked about how their daughters are going to be best friends, doing that hopeful planning thing friends do when they have kids close in age. Very sweet. You know how at the beginning of the movie, they play that clip where different sounds get louder and louder and more complicated. I felt like that. I smiled but inside I was screaming and punching a wall and I don’t know why. I’m the oldest but I’m the least settled. It’s frustrating. I stepped out for a moment and sat in my car and called J and I couldn’t say anything. He understood, so I listened to him talk and he listened to me not talk until my nephew knocked on the window and I had to go. I need to get better about telling people what’s really going on with me. I don’t. I’m vague and annoying instead. Yesterday we went shopping for curtains for the nursery and succeeded in finding curtains that are just a dream. We also went to a charming baby store and bought clothes and browsed. We were there for what seemed like an eternity. When one of the employees offered us Capri Suns, I was so happy because it was hot and the store was full of kids and pregnant ladies and their mothers.  It was bitter sweet. No. I was a little bitter and the store was sweet but I participated enthusiastically. I am excited to meet my niece. I am. She’s going to be bad ass. I can feel it.

My brother needed some cheap champagne for a dish he was preparing last night. We bought some but as we unloaded the groceries it fell on the driveway and broke. I had to go to Walgreens and get another bottle. As I pulled up, I saw this bizarre creature jumping around and banging on that car. Shortly after, a woman walked out of Walgreens looking sort of confused and drug addled. She was followed by an employee who said, gently, “Do you know where you’re going, Ma’am?” She said, “I always know where I’m going.” I don’t know what happened to her.

See what I mean about people and their unique qualities? Life is so strange.

My brother, this is the middle child, is an excellent cook and an all around bad ass. I keep telling him to go on Top Chef. He is self-taught and loves cooking and loves narrating like he is on TV while he is cooking. He offers little tips and tells you about all the ingredients going in to each dish and the family is generally all, whatevs but he is undeterred. He tried to teach me how to properly hold a knife to chop fast but I wasn’t even remotely interested. I humored him as best I could. Last night he made, from scratch, a tomato bisque, salmon in a champagne sauce, chicken in some kind of roux for me because I can’t eat salmon, sauteed chanterelle mushrooms he picked himself from the woods behind his neighborhood, and potato croquettes. My mouth is pretty psyched to live close to him. That sounds wrong but you know what I mean.

Here he is showing off:

And here is the delicious meal. Please note that he plated everyone’s food and arranged the potatoes in a little fan and then sprinkled some green herb on everything before setting it on the table. Hilarious.

I kept it classy with my diet pepsi which paired very nicely with the meal. After dinner, we celebrated my nephew’s fifteenth birthday which is in early August. There was cake and it was delicious. You will have to take my word on his cuteness.

This little suburb is the land of desperate housewives, designer strollers, high heels, tight jeans and make up to pick up kids from football practice and blunt haircuts that are vaguely reminiscent of the Jennifer Aniston haircut (which I do so love). It’s all terribly intriguing.

When I’m at a café and they ask me for my name, I want to become someone else, offer a different name—something exotic and interesting but I never have any cash so I have to use my real name. When I call a customer service phone number, I want to speak in an accent, English perhaps, or French but when it comes time to speak, I get nervous and use my dull Midwestern drawl. I am fascinated by the idea of bloodletting, of cutting open the skin, finding a large vein, purging bad humors, all to cure something vicious but unseen. Sometimes, writing feels like bloodletting but not in a creepy way. The body is a mystery. It cannot be controlled though we do try. It is hard, I think, to accept that, to accept that there are certain things beyond our control, to accept that sometimes our bodies don’t function the way we want them to.  I think about mutes, how they must feel, to want to speak and to be unable to do so; to want to hear and be heard only to be confronted by silence. As a child, I always enjoyed confession, stepping into the dark confessional and kneeling on the velvet padded bench, listening to the priest on the other side asking for my sins before I could truly know what they were. I asked questions, treated confession like a conversation. I once asked a priest, “Will you ever tell anyone what I confess?” I was very concerned with the sanctity of the matter. He was very handsome, tall with dark hair—a good priest, not one of those deviants who make the news in the wake of their perversions. He had a comforting and deep voice. I hated having to attend mass with all that standing and kneeling and walking around and shaking hands with strangers but he was interesting to look at. He answered, “Only God.” I confessed something once, but it wasn’t my sin. The priest offered no penance but he told me something I will never forget.  I exited the confessional and knelt at a pew anyway and said three rosaries. It felt like the right thing to do. When I’m with them, I want to be prettier, patient, more successful so that at a glance, I might look like I belong.

Another personal rejection from Uncanny Valley. The piece I sent was perhaps too short and didn’t quite hit the spot. I’m a little frustrated because last time they said send light and playful. I sent playful and this time they said they want something intense and playful or sentence driven but narrative oriented. I love feedback, I really respect the editors of Uncanny Valley, and I don’t mind that I haven’t found the sweet spot yet but goddamn. I’m going to have to meditate further on this. Please know that I know I am a pretty successful small time writer who is very blessed but I am in a slump. Let me be in a slump. Let me sulk and have my bad teen angst (ahem) on my blog. I also received a form, please go away bad writer rejection from anderbo. What more is there to say about that? Nothing, which is exactly what they had to say about my story. I consider these daily rejections part of my constitutional now.

One of my favorite stories I’ve written, if not the favorite, is up now at Rick Magazine (formerly The Mississippi Review Online). It is called Baby Arm. It is a love letter.It is a violent, beautiful mess of a love letter.  There are other incredible writers in the debut issue of Rick Magazine like TC Boyle, Ann Beattie, Gary Percesepe, Sara Lippman and much much more. The entire issue was edited by Vallie Lynn Watson who found me through Fictionaut. I am grateful to her. This was one of those, “I can stop writing now,” magazines and I’m honored to be included. I shall not stop writing.

Let’s talk about my shower. It’s huge. Two people can fit in there. I don’t like group showering but I’m saying, two people can fit in there and this has been tested. There are little seats on each side of the shower so you could also take a sit and have a chat though when two people are in the shower, I do not think chatting is their number one priority. Or so I hear. I am innocent in the ways of the world. Anyway, my shower seemed to have one temperature setting–scald the skin from your body. I coped with this by directing the water against the wall of the shower and sort of thrusting the body parts I wanted to get clean into the stream of water. I had experimented with changing the temperature but moving the dial only changed the water pressure so I concluded that this shower was a home torture chamber meant to cleanse me of my sins each day. I have committed so many lately that it felt appropriate. When J came I said, if you could, please get manly on that shower and find us another temperature. He tried and had the same results and this bruised his manly ego a bit but I made that all better. This morning, I got in the shower and started to endure the scalding when looking closely at the shower control I noticed that there was a secondary knob on the handle. I turned it to the right a few degrees and the water cooled considerably. Next time you think I’m smart, reflect on this truly embarrassing story. Today was the first normal shower I’ve had since I moved in. My skin is grateful though I will now have to find other ways to repent.

Another day, another rejection. This time, I was rejected, again, by The Nashville Review. They liked my story but don’t have a place for it in their next issue–a form personal rejection. They want me to send more.  They want something better. The want better than my best. That’s what we all want, I suppose, when it comes down to it–something better than the best things we hold on to. We have grand lives but beneath the surface lingers a nagging sensation that spreads and grows and deepens. We are not satisfied, we are not complete, we want more. We want. We want. We want. My backyard, so to speak is a large, green field, quite beautiful. Tonight, that expanse is awash in moonlight. The sky is different here, still clear, but I can’t see nearly as many stars. Back home, that place I never thought I would call home, it felt like we were so close to the sky that if we jumped high enough, we would enter the atmosphere. Many nights, we drove to a cabin on a lake and we lay on an open sleeping bag near the water’s edge and nothing else would matter, nothing at all. There was no wanting anything but what we had lying close, breathing clean, cold air. He would say, “Look.” He would reach his arm toward the starlit sky his fingers outstretched and from where we lay, it looked like his fingertips were dancing along the edges of a constellation. He liked to rest his head on my stomach. He would press an ear to my body and try to understand the mysteries beneath my skin and when he heard or felt something like a gurgle or a kick, he would laugh the deepest, purest laugh and I would run my fingers through his hair and we would talk about how the number two sometimes becomes the number three and what a marvel it all was. He likes to build things, especially out of wood. He has some kind of relationship with trees I can never understand, doesn’t feel at peace unless he is surrounded by a thick canopy of green leaves and sap soaked bark. On Saturday or Sunday afternoons, we would sometimes go to the lumberyards of small logging outfits so he could buy materials for this project or that. He always got a discount and liked to talk about wood matters. He is known for what he does, for his love of trees and everywhere we went, he was received with a wide smile and a hearty pat on the back. The air in these places was always thick with the smell of sawdust and sweat and motor oil. I would watch as he leaned in real close to a cord of wood, and inhaled deep, how he would slide his calloused hand along a plank of wood and know, just by touching, if that wood was what he needed. That’s how he touches everything, trying to understand the world through his skin. His father, he once told me when we started telling each other things that mattered,  built the crib he and his brother slept in when they were babies. It’s stored in the basement of his parent’s home. His mother, in a rare moment of sentimentality, couldn’t bear to part with it. She keeps the crib beneath a tarp, and every few months dusts it to a bright shine. That’s the only thing she’s ever done that leads me to believe she is human. I saw the crib once–simple but beautiful, made with loving hands and clean lines. He said he would build a crib for his child and he did, in his father’s workshop. I sat on a stool and read, sometimes aloud, while he cut and hammered and glued and stained and made a pile of wood into something that would safely hold a fat little thing with his big chin and my cheeks. He carved a name into the headboard. It was made with loving hands and clean lines. Later, when his beautiful crib was not needed, he would tell me he took that crib out in front of his trailer, and broke it into a million pieces with a dull axe and then burned those million pieces. I was somewhere else, unconscious, unaware. He said he didn’t want me to wake up and see the crib. He said he didn’t want to see it anymore. That was the last thing he said about that unless he was drinking and then he had a whole lot to say and I listened and waited for him to pass out so I could say all the things I needed to say while his warm, boozy breath fell on my neck. He burned lots of things–plastic toys, cloth diapers, pink sheets, a velveteen rabbit. He would come home and smell like smoke. I would sit behind him on our bed, pulling his work shirt off. I would kiss his strong back and taste fire along his spine, feel the heat of his anger against my lips. I told him he had to stop setting fires. I said you can’t burn everything. He said he would try. He said he was doing it for me and a part of me loved that. Sometimes, after he burned those million pieces and tried to burn the whole world down, we would stop by his trailer to pick up a pair of Carhartt’s or feed the cats, and I would see the neat circle of blackened earth left behind. While he was inside, I would kneel and run my fingers through the char and ash, coat my hand with it, and suck my fingers clean, enduring that bitter, burnt taste, hoping to choke on it. He watched me, I felt him standing in the doorway, one hand against the doorjamb, the other at his side. He never rushed me and at some point, I would feel his hand on my shoulder, the warmth of him, how he touches everything and I wouldn’t look back but I would circle my fingers around his wrist, breathe slowly, feel the beautiful throb of his pulse against my thumb.

The interstate highway system in the United States is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. It is named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are two points and between them, the distance between you and me. These two points are connected in ways we will never fully understand but they are connected. You are there and I am here. We are red stars on maps protected beneath hard plastic in highway rest areas that tired travelers touch as they try to make sense of where they are. I have counted the miles, yards, feet and inches between our two points. There are too many. When I was a child, my father, like most fathers, had an atlas. It was bound in leather that was worn and felt good beneath my fingers. I liked to study the atlas in my bedroom. I would trace the tiny lines with my fingers and say the names of cities like Waukesha and Cody and Easton and Amarillo and wonder what it would be like to live in those places. I once had a canopy bed which I received as a surprise after I spent the summer in Haiti. While I was away, my parents redecorated my bedroom because they knew something was going on with me but they didn’t know what and they didn’t know how to help and they thought a change of scenery at home might be nice. When I returned to the States, I walked into the most perfect room for an introverted daydreamer like me. The wallpaper was white and blue and covered in little cornflowers. There was thick blue carpet and a canopy bed with matching dresser and a full length mirror and a little desk and on that desk, a typewriter because I liked to write little stories and they wanted me to be able to do that. On the bed was a Cabbage Patch Kid who I named Matthew. He was a bald, black baby and very cute. My brothers, I will have you know, loved to hold  Matthew by the feet and beat his head against the basement walls because they were, obviously, deviants. Whenever I rescued Matthew, I would tenderly wash his scuffed black baby head and try to hide him from those sociopaths. The canopy was covered in a gauzy material that draped perfectly and my parents said I didn’t have to allow my brothers into my new room. That was the greatest gift of all even though the boys breached my sanctuary when I was at CCD or an after school activity. I was completely surprised by my bedroom and I’m certain I didn’t demonstrate nearly enough appreciation because I was kind of a mess. My new bedroom didn’t make everything better but it was something. It was a reminder that I was loved not because of the material things but because of the gesture. It was a reminder that when I was with them, at least, I was safe. When my parents call for the eleventh time on a given day to ask me about their printer I’ve never seen or used, or how to record something on the DVR, or how to check their voicemail on their iPhones, I remember that August day and the bedroom I came back to. I think about the look on their faces as they stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me run my hands over each piece of new furniture. They could call a hundred times and I would always answer, patiently. I loved to lie beneath the canopy and stare into it and I loved to stand in the doorway taunting my younger brothers and their loser bedrooms. Whenever we went on vacation, my father would take his atlas, a Rand McNally, and study it to try to find his way across America. My brothers and I would sit in the back of our 1974 Grand Prix, our bare legs sticking to the leather seat, hot and irritable, often bickering, forced to participate in my father’s endless exploration of how far he could go. He would often say the United States is a great country because with enough persistence, with enough patience, a man can travel from one end to the other. He said he never wanted to take for granted that he could not be kept from any place he wanted to be. Every morning, when I wake up, I think your name. It appears behind my eyes but I see it anyway. When I think about you throughout my day which is often, I think, “Marry me,” over and over and over. It shocks me, each and every time, the clarity of those words and the intensity and depth of feeling behind them and how the emotions behind those words defy logic and reality and possibility. I do not say the words, “I love you,” often, not to anyone. I have no idea why, but perhaps it is because as I’m sure you believe, those words mean something. They shouldn’t be used carelessly. In a photo album in my parent’s house, there is a faded Polaroid picture of my dad and my middle brother and I at the Grand Canyon before the third child came along. We are wearing hopelessly late seventies grab. We are all painfully young, the four of us. I have no recollection of this trip. My mother, I imagine, is holding the camera. Behind us, is our car and on the roof of the car is the atlas. My father is standing with one leg on a rock and my brother and I are hugging his other leg and holding hands and my father is smiling. My father is not a man who smiles easily not because he is unhappy but because there is a gravity to him. When he says something, he means it. When he does something, he does so with purpose and sincerity. I have spent the past several years trying to become the kind of person who acts and speaks with purpose and sincerity so that when I say “I love you,” you can know I mean it. My father is a civil engineer. He is always concerned about infrastructure and the strength of the things holding the world together. All my life, he has filled my head with information about highways and tunnels and concrete and I’ve retained very little of it. The ingratitude of children is staggering. I do know this, however, and I take comfort in it: if nothing else were in the way, we would always be able to reach each other. We would close the distance between our two points. We could point to a place on a map and say, we are here.

Things have happened since we last spoke, few of them interesting. J visited for four days and it was great with only one difficult discussion where nothing was resolved. Awesome. We went shopping in Champaign and I couldn’t find my wallet so I called him Big Daddy for the day and he liked it, I’m pretty sure. I got curtains and groceries and a toaster and a plastic thing to put beneath the dish rack and a lot of beer was purchased. I am not a beer connoisseur or drinker much, but I did want those curtains hung and I know a real man needs beer to do manly things. I just made that up.

I saw a Shake Weight in person and I shook it but it didn’t magically sculpt my arms. In fact, it did not do much of anything at all.

I want one of these very badly. I have a silver one but it wants a pink friend to hold hands with. Everyone wants someone to hold hands with.

We did the grocery shopping at a store called Meier’s that seems to be like Wal-mart only not horrible. Even J had to agree that food is super cheap here. Produce felt basically free. We were pretty giddy just throwing fresh, not rotten produce into the cart. If you lived here, fresh food all the time! I also was able to breathe a sigh of relief. I had struggled to find Diet Cherry Pepsi in my rural hamlet, and I was, honestly, starting to panic because without DCP, I would have no ability to cope. In Meier’s I found my happy place.

It’s also kind of neat that there was a selection of temporary tramp stamps for sale right there. I told J we could apply one to his back and maybe find him a pole. He declined. Sad. Also, do you see how the box says Discover Cherry Goodness?

EXACTLY!

I was confused by this sign. Do you know why?

Isn’t ice cream, by its nature, by the designation of “ice” frozen? Is there unfrozen ice cream? I spent an embarrassing amount of time parsing through this signage. I was told to “let it go.” I get that a lot.

I’m almost all unpacked thanks to my excellent helper. The curtains have been hung. I assisted by sitting on the bed, directing and fetching beers but I did not micromanage and I’m proud of that, even when he was using the end of the drill to pound a plastic screw holder thing into the wall and I thought, “That’s going to break,” and IT DID. I’m super supportive. I said, “That totes happened because you are so strong, baby. Here’s another plastic thing!” He said, “It’s an anchor.”

I thought, “AHA!”

Cute, right?

I take pictures of everything, all the time. It drives J crazy. He often says, “Just be in the moment,” but that is me being in the moment. Also, I respect his hatred of cameras by not posting his picture all over. I respect boundaries. There was a fly, two flies really, and he was tasked with killing them. It took three days but he finally bested one of the flying beasts. And when we inspected the dead fly he said, “Take a picture!”

I said, “AHA!”

It rains a lot here. Today I was driving around and the End Of Times rain began. I frantically looked around for some animals to bring on the ark with me. I did not find any so I worried and then I nearly panicked when I saw a large wooden ship making its way down the main street.

Today I did administrative things like turning in payroll forms and getting my ID card and going to the library for a book I needed and going to the bank and post office. I also got access to my new email account. I felt resourceful and accomplished even though that’s the tip of the iceberg of Stuff I Need to Do This Week Or Else. At every university office, I was faced with incredulity when I said no, I’m not a student, no I’m not a staff member, yes I really, really am a new faculty member. The look on their faces made the years and years of schooling and graduate school stresses totes worth it. I mean is it that hard to believe?

I also checked out yet another gym and this one was scary. I don’t want to name names but its name was the number of hours in a day plus gym not to be confused with the number of hours in a day plus fitness. The outside was like a run down house. The inside was a small, unairconditioned room with large fans blowing stifling bacterial air back and forth. Every single one of my “issues” flared up. There was no one there and there were no lights on and there was a sad little sign in sheet and no employee. It was the kind of place where the probability of being raped was very very high. From now own I am going to call it Rape Gym or Murder By a Crazed Serial Killer Gym. Either feels possible. I took a picture but it really doesn’t evoke the skeevy vibe this place has.

I think most writers go through compulsive phases. For the past year I have been writing the same morbid story over and over again. I mostly don’t show anyone these stories though there are a few out there. As writers I think sometimes we want different endings and so we turn to our stories to rewrite the past, to re-right the past. Last night I was working on the latest story in this vein and I thought, “This is not sane.” I can write all I want and the history I’m exorcising will not change and at some point I’m going to have to find something healthier to write about.  I would like to get to that point soon.

My bff LJ sent me a link about this product. I am glad to be alive when this exists.

I saw some movies and most of them were so excruciatingly bad I hardly know how to talk about them.

Leap Year was an insult to the words romantic and comedy and to Amy Adams and Matthew Goode who are good actors. How does a movie go so terribly wrong? The movie was shockingly incoherent. There was no plot or character development of any kind. The production team took the concepts of plot and character development and punched them in the head until they were dead. The worst part, though, was the schlocky Irish score that would sweep through the movie during important Irish moments. The movie was also an insult to the Irish. It was racist against the Irish. If I were Irish I would go find this movie and punch it in the head.

I followed that horror show with The Accidental Husband, a straight to DVD masterpiece starring Uma Thurman and Denny from Grey’s Anatomy and some other guy. Anyway, Uma is a radio psychologist who gives advice and Denny’s fiancee hears the advice and dumps him or something so he goes to a city clerk and has some kind of paper work stating that he and Uma are married so of course they totes fall in love and she leaves the other guy and I can’t even remember who it was, that’s how unmemorable he and this whole POS movie were. PUNCH PUNCH PUNCH HEAD HEAD HEAD.

Not to be outdone, I saw Tooth Fairy with The Rock who is, let’s face it, hot because he’s huge and that’s appealing but then he has to go and open his mouth and that never ends well. The Rock is a washed up hockey player who’s an asshole and he does one assholish thing too many and has to serve a sentence as the tooth fairy and the divine Julie Andrews is in the movie and it’s one of those surreal things where you wonder, “How on earth did they get here to agree to this.” I also thought that when I saw Ashley Judd who crawled out from that race track where she’s been hanging out to be in this movie. She is exceptional. I love her.  It’s actually a cute idea but this movie was bungled the way most movies are these days. Hollywood doesn’t even give a damn anymore. They keep throwing shit at the wall and it keeps sticking so they think it’s all good.

We watched 2012 five times this weekend. It was ALWAYS on. I saw it so many times I now understand it is the best movie ever. This movie takes the notion that something can be ludicrous, amplifies it one hundred times and does it so convincingly that as a viewer, you’re all, yes, of course they fly to China without maps, radio control towers, or refueling. I truly live for the kind of crazy in 2012. The world is always crumbling whenever John Cusack is driving and yet he lives time and again. The boyfriend conveniently dies so the nuclear family can live happily ever after. Oliver Platt talks about people being selected for their genetic perfection and no one blinks. Really? Awesome. I love Ollie. I am excited for 2013: Earth Strikes Back.

I did cleanse my mental palate, however, with Inception which is about as perfect a movie as can be made. The movie is stunning visually–finally CGI special effects that don’t look like my nephew rendered them on a Commodore 64. The acting is quite good. The plot is interesting. It was one of the few movies this year where I can’t snark too much about it and that’s a real shame but what can you do. Christopher Nolan made an intelligent thriller and that’s no easy task. I hope, sincerely, that this movie receives some Oscar consideration this year. Marion Cotillard is flawless. I love everything about her. Leonardo Douchecaprio was in the movie and the movie was so good that his presence did not upset me as it normally might. I simply cannot handle his indecisive facial hair choices. Beards are not for me and so the half-assed wisps he sports make me crazy. Either grow a beard or clean your face for the love of all that is holy. The hot guy with the accent who said, “You need to dream bigger, darling,” maybe wants to marry me. Okay, I am projecting. Haters can hate but this is by far the best big studio movie that has been released this year. That is, perhaps, not saying much but goddamn, I loved it and will see it again and again even though I thought the ending was kind of weak and bullshitty.

I would like to fold the West Coast toward the Midwest so I can reach.

I am excited for the ABC series Bachelor Pad. IT is the purest expression of everything that is wrong, and therefore right, in this world. As the niners would say, BLESS!

Today, a semi-personal rejection from The Missouri Review, the “send us more,” kind for my story Strange Gods which I’m about ready to give up on because it keeps getting rejected and some stories matter more than others so the rejections feel like a knife through the heart and out through the spine. Right now the story is at two more places and once I hear from them, I have no idea where else to send it. The story is very long and it seems few magazines read stories longer than 5,000 words anymore.  Maybe I will take another look at it, see what I can do to make it stronger. I don’t know. My writing confidence is low.

I have a short thing at Camroc Press Review that began as a meandering on this very blog and then the editor of that fine publication asked if he could publish it and I said, “Yes.” The Internet really is magic.

Sometimes you tell yourself, “I am fine,” over and over and you start to believe it and then there’s a moment, it doesn’t have to be significant, it can be just a moment, and you think, “I am not fine” and for a little while you feel lighter. I am fine. I am just tired. I hate it here. I am certain that soon I won’t hate it here but right now, I hate it here. I know that hatred is irrational and it is borne of fatigue and stress and a million responsibilities and a dissertation hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles.  I know everything is going to be fine. Everything is going to be great but today I want to stay in bed all day and I can’t because  my bedroom is flooded with an unholy light and we need to go get window treatments but I can’t find my wallet and that’s fine I suppose, Big Daddy has money but still, it would be nice to know where it is so I can drive legally and such. I am over the no furniture thing. You don’t realize how useful furniture can be until you have none. The are a few bright spots; one is a man who is leaving tomorrow or Sunday, and I won’t see him for a month and I’m swallowing my bitterness about this and it is lodged in my throat. I want to scream. I’m not good at it. I open my mouth and my vocal cords start to vibrate but nothing comes out.There’s just an empty void of warm, desperate air. The fly has a survival instinct that is uncanny. It flits around somehow knowing when a shoe or rolled magazine is trying to eliminate its existence. For the past day, I have watched J stretching his body and jumping around like a burly ballet dancer trying to kill two flies that are in my apartment and trying to wedge themselves between me and what’s left of my ability to hold it together. These flies are just flies; they are insignificant; and yet, they want to live. They want to persevere when there is no compelling evidence that they should. One of my new colleagues e-mailed me, very kindly, and basically said, I can’t imagine moving here alone in the summer while everyone is gone, reinforcing what I knew, which is that until the semester starts, I’m up a creek. How do I explain this town? It’s one depressing strip mall after another, often abandoned, overgrown with weeds, bearing sad, cheap signs advertising businesses that can’t possibly succeed and around all that, beautiful cornfields beneath the beating sun. The other two of new faculty moved to Champaign but I don’t think driving 45 minutes to work each way every day is something I am interested in doing. I mean, Champaign is nice enough, I’m sure but it’s not like Shangri-la or Chicago. Of course, these things are relative. Maybe in a year I will want to live there too though sitting in a half unpacked apartment moving again doesn’t feel like something I want to do. I would normally be fully unpacked by now but I keep getting distracted by, well, a very worthy distraction. Unpacking can wait. I’ve moved more than 20 times. It’s bizarre that this one is sucking so massively. I told someone a truth that had to be told. It was hard but necessary and went as expected; the heart is a little bruised but it is a muscle. It can heal. I can’t find Diet Cherry Pepsi anywhere. I think that might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, like, I could handle the mountain of shit on my head if I could just have a cold DCP. If I don’t find any in Champaign this afternoon, J is just going to have to go home, get some and come back.  This was all just a story, a brief fiction. I am fine.

PS Next time I’ll write something funny because I’ve been watching movies and you know I have something to say about that.

I received a personal rejection today from Quick Fiction which, in some ways, feels like an acceptance. I love Quick Fiction. It is one of the most wholly satisfying magazines out there from the first story to the last story, in every issue. They said my story was beautifully written but didn’t tell enough of a story. Fair enough. I have a clearer sense of what to send next. And not to be immodest but the story in question is beautifully written and it’s odd and it will find a home. I do, for the record, write stories that tell stories, but most of those stories are very long. The shorter stuff I write, the stuff that has been rejected so often as of late that I worry I will never again see another acceptance, tends to be quirky, offering glimpses or insights or moments. I don’t think everything needs to be a story. I am enjoying, as a writer, even if know one loves it, writing things that stretch how I understand what makes a story. I always want to try to become a better writer, a better person, a better everything.

I read “Do You Have a Place For Me” for the Orange Alert podcast. I was nervous while reading it so I read very quickly. I love this story. The whole podcast is great. You can listen to it here.

While I think Dish TV is run by evil people who are interested in extracting as much money as they can from their customers, I must confess that the picture quality is the best I have ever seen. Their HD and non HD channels alike, make Charter’s picture quality look like the fuzzy transmissions we used to get with the physical antenna on the television in my childhood home. My eyeballs are basically orgasming all the time.

It is strange and familiar, being back in the (real) Midwest. The summers are ungodly hot and humid and I love it. Right now, the sky is dark and the sky is swollen. There is thunder rolling nearby. At any moment, the sky will explode and it will rain hard and heavy and just as quickly, that rain will end and the damp ground will dry and the heat will linger albeit, perhaps, with a slightly kinder quality to it. As I drove to the saddest, most depressing Wal-mart I’ve ever had the displeasure of frequenting last night, I saw lots of teenagers in parking lots hanging out in cars or on cars or near cars and I was reminded of how dull small towns are in the Midwest, and how the young people create their own activities that involve sitting around drinking, flirting, hanging out, fucking. They wear the same clothes as big city kids, though slightly wrong. Their hair styles are a year or two out of date. They have wide eyes, dulled by boredom.

The rain is here now. I can hear it on the roof, see it through the balcony doors, falling at a sharp angle. Rain feels hopeful to me in how it can wash everything clean.

I’m going to freak out about not finding a gym yet in about two days. If I have to go to Snap Fitness I am going to be so goddamned aggravated but I will do it if I must. I had a perfect gym situation. I feel lost without my trainer. I don’t want to undo the progress I’ve made. I can’t… I just can’t. I need to get this off my chest. Believe it or not, I really liked my routine of gym in the morning, gym at night that I had gotten into this past year and for the past three weeks I’ve been, gross and slothful and that makes me panic. So. Universe, work this out for me.  My sanity and fathleticism are at stake here. I realize I sound slightly deranged here but if you understood how hard I’ve worked and how far I’ve come you would get it.

There is a man taking a nap in my bed because he is tired. No, he is exhausted. It’s a long drive from the middle of nowhere to… the middle of nowhere, and then having little sleep, and then having the light of God beaming into the bedroom at the crack of dawn–that’s a lot for someone with a normal sleep schedule. He is snoring and I am not bothered, not that I ever was. In fact, I have left the bedroom door open so I can listen to that snoring. It is a reminder and a comfort. It is a presence. Even when a relationship is not perfect (and really what relationship is?), when you share a complex history, when you are dealing with difficult things together, you have a very strong bond that cannot be dismissed or easily forgotten. You can’t just walk away. You have to unravel yourself and when you look at all the ways you are tied together, the complex, bloody knots holding you together, you start to wonder if it is even possible.  The kitchen is unpacked. I have empty cabinets because there are a lot of cabinets in the kitchen which is strangely narrow. My bedroom is mostly unpacked. I have built in shoe racks in the closet which for me is like, sex on a stick. Also, washer and dryer were delivered today, brand new. Now, I didn’t order these appliances, the landlord did so they’re a weird off brand I’ve never heard of but that is really not the point. I have a washer and dryer under the same roof as me. I’m going to do laundry (J brought his LOL) and I’m going to be joyful all the while.

You should read this. I don’t think there’s a better advice columnist out there. I would like to meet her some day and just have coffee. But she’s more than an advice columnist. She is one of the finest writers I’ve encountered in recent memory. Her writing is elegant and lush and graceful. I want to write a thank you letter of some kind to Sugar because in every column, there is heart and true empathy for the damaged souls who are reaching out to her, hoping she will hear them, hoping she will answer their question, hoping she will hear them say, “I need help,” because sometimes, it is easier to write your sorrows down for a stranger than it is to say to a friend, “This is what’s going on with me.” Anyway. If this week’s column doesn’t shatter you, you have no soul, and that’s fine but I worry for you.

There is a fly in my apartment that persists against all reason. I want this fly dead. I said, “If you do one thing before you leave, kill that fly.” He puffed up his chest and is pleased to have a project tonight. I am going to write tonight because I need to write and he is going to play WoW and we’re going to watch movies and etcetera and it’s going to be like… a normal night and tomorrow we will have a normal night and then I will have to hold on to the memory of those normal nights for a month and then another month and then who knows.

There is a tan line beneath the ring he gave me so now when I am washing my hands or otherwise have the ring off, I see the paler band of my skin and I am reminded that he gave me this thing that means something but not what you think. On the inside, there is a name. I like to run my finger over the engraved letters. I do it when I’m nervous or stressed.

Sometimes I think I do my best writing on this blog because I’m not thinking, I’m just running my virtual mouth. Sometimes I take stuff from here and make it into a story. Those are rarely rejected. There is a lesson in that, I’m sure.

I received a very kind rejection from Uncanny Valley. They enjoyed reading my work and thought it was “good, good stuff,” but, alas the story doesn’t quite fit their needs. They want something a bit more lighthearted and playful. I thought this story was playful in my dark, twisty way which they did indeed acknowledge. I will have to find something lighter and playful-ier. I just made that word. This fitting of needs. It’s a real bitch, isn’t it?

This Mississippi Review thing is kind of bizarre and upsetting. I wish I understood what was going on. I’m sad that whatever’s going on happened after I had a story accepted there. Dream? Shattered, only not so dramatically.

I have a story in the 30th anniversary issue of Mid-American Review called Down to Bone. I’m very very proud of this publication. This is a massive double issue with some amazing writers like Ryan Call, Gabe Durham, Lucas Southworth, and a bunch of other people. You should buy this issue. You will not regret it. Here’s an excerpt from my story:

My father doesn’t fuck me in our house anymore, out of respect for my dead mother’s memory. My father fucks me because she haunts him, because he misses her and still sees her and smells her. I’m only doing what a good daughter does, he says, what a good daughter should. He takes me to the nicest hotel in town, once or twice a week. He pretends he’s a better man than he is. He wears his best suit, carries his briefcase, and checks in alone like he’s in town on business even though we only live a few miles away. Then he calls me on my cell phone, tells me the room number. He tells me to hurry because he needs me now. I open my car door. Some days, I throw up in the parking lot, and then I stare at myself in the side mirror and apply a thick coat of my dead mother’s lipstick. I leave my breath sour. The door to his hotel room is always propped open, and he is sitting on the edge of the bed, his wide Salvation Army tie hanging around his neck. He looks old and used up. He smiles. My breath sours even more. He says, “You look just like your mother,” like he’s paying me a compliment.

***

My mother never laughed but she smiled a lot, pressing her thin lips together, the edges curling up slightly. She had long black hair that she loved more than anything. When I sat next to her, I would braid myself into the thick strands until she shooed me away.  On Saturday mornings, she spent almost an hour in the shower, carefully washing the week away. Afterward, she sat on the bathroom counter, parted her hair into four perfect sections and dried each one before twisting it into a knot and pinning it to her head. On Saturday nights, she and my father went to The Junction, a bar with loud music and cheap drinks at the intersection of two country highways. When she left the house, her hair was always piled in crisp, dark curls, and the air around her was thick with perfume. She would pat me on the shoulder and then walk slow and sexy out the front door. My father would smack her ass with a heavy hand and say, “Look at my lady,” like he was somehow responsible for the impression she made.  She loved me as best she could in a family where no one knew how to play their parts properly.

I’ve read lamentations lately about how dark and depressing “literary fiction” is and writers questioning why this is the case. I am frustrated by these conversations. Yes, there is a tendency in certain writing to exploit dark themes, to write about sadness and death and pain and when these themes are taken up badly, of course it’s a misery to read. When these themes are written about brilliantly though, the world cracks open a little more. I like writing about the things I write about. I will write something more extended about this but I just wanted to say this: I want to crack your world open a little and then a lot.

There is an outstanding issue of PANK up with writing from Rachel Adams, Stace Budzko, Sara Crowley, Alana Dakin, Tim Dicks, Chris Erickson, Jen Gann, Kyle Minor, Ansley Moon, Gena Mohwish, Johnsie Noel, Tia Prouhet, Laura Read, Keith Rosson, Chris Sheehan, Robert Anthony Siegell, Robert Swartwood, Robb Todd, Brandi Wells, and Bill Yarrow. You should, at your leisure, go and read this issue paying close attention to Adams, Budzko, Crowley, Dakin, Gann, Minor, Mohwish, Noel, Prouhet, Read, Rosson, Todd, and Wells which are my extra favorite pieces among twenty favorites.

I went to Chicago. There was traffic and more traffic and then more traffic still and I thought, “How do people live like this?” It took me three hours to drive 18 miles. I said some very foul things. At one point, I looked up and saw this passive aggressive advertisement for public transportation.

I yelled, “Fuck you,” and gave that sign the finger. Then a train zipped by.

I went to a reading that was interesting. I saw my Chicago crew (Rebekah, Tadd, Tim) and met Stephen Dierks, the editor of Pop Serial who was really nice, and Adam Gallari who has an English accent and other people too. This is what Tim wore:

So festive. Afterward, we went out to dinner at Forno in Wicker Park which was crowded and awesome. The dinner was delicious.

Outside of Tim’s apartment, the next day, I found this awesome wireless network:

We went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant in Andersonville called Frida’s. They made fresh tortilla chips. I cannot wait to go back. I had fajitas. Delicious.

Chicago has some great signage.

I went to Target and spent a horrifying amount of money buying things a new apartment needs.

I decamped from the provinces to my new, remote location and stayed in a Holiday Inn Express and had a great five hour phone conversation like I was in high school.

There is a castle on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. See? Fairy tales are real.

I am in the new town now, and I drive around looking for things and I am always lost. I keep wanting to flag down a passerby to ask, “Can you please tell me how to get home?” but I worry that they’ll ask me, “Where’s home?” and all I will be able to say is, “I don’t know.”

My new apartment is large and beautiful and flooded with light and filled with boxes and the detritus of moving your life from one place to another. I am largely without furniture for the next two or three weeks though I did buy a chair from Sofa Mart so I would have somewhere to sit until my IKEA furniture arrives via extortion, I mean, a truck. I have a balcony that looks out onto a field and then a thicket of lush green trees. I have wooden floors that are shiny and slick though I suspect they may be laminate. I am not in love with my kitchen appliances, which are white and that feels tacky to me somehow. I have air-conditioning for the first time in five years. It feels like such a luxury. I am sitting here, freezing my ass off on purpose because I can. I need to clean my bathroom so I can take a shower. I very much need to take a shower because I’ve been working my ass off since yesterday. I am gross and lowly. I will post pictures when my furniture arrives. Right now, though, everything is in disarray, I am overwhelmed, don’t know where to start. My mother is very concerned about my unpacking progress. The movers delivered everything I own in the world yesterday. This morning at 8:30 am my time, she called and asked, “Have you finished unpacking yet?” I said no, grumpily. She said, “You will not be able to think until you finish unpacking. Please hurry.” I told her to come help and I think she might next week. I have spent the morning working, trying to deal with all the things I have not been able to deal with for the past week. I have made progress. I have so much to do I don’t really want to think about it too much of I will make myself crazy. I will take it one thing at a time. It will all get done. It will all be okay. I have excellent friends. That must be said. I thank you. I thank you. I thank you. I bought new sheets and put them on my bed last night and it was such a luxury to slide into a 700 thread count situation. The sheets were slick though so I slid onto the bed and then right off the other side thanks to a remarkable confluence of angle, velocity, mass and momentum. I had to laugh. It was funny. There are no window treatments in my bedroom. This would be more of a cause for concern save that I am looking out onto the aforementioned field.  The problem, though, is that once the sun rises, I am done for. It is like the light of God is beaming onto me, commanding me out of bed before I am ready. And then of course there is the fact that I wouldn’t care if I was looking out onto a vast wasteland where life couldn’t be sustained. I don’t want people seeing me in my bedroom unless they are actually in my bedroom, with me, and the mere thought that such a calamity could occur is too much.  One of the many things I need to do today is work out some kind of window treatment option because I cannot handle that much sunlight in the morning or that kind exposure any time. It’s too much. I need to find a gym. I visited one yesterday that was smelly and sketchy. I miss my workout routine which is difficult but in its own way, satisfying and useful. My pants are falling off. There are two flies flitting about my apartment refusing to die. J is going to get here late tonight for a couple days and I am happy about that, to have someone here, to talk to, and not just someone, but him. I catch myself, sometimes, turning to tell him something and he’s not there. I have become accustomed to having him there in the space next to me. It has not been easy adjusting to the emptiness of everything. I live in my head too much. I want things that are too far away, too out of reach, that cannot be mine. For a few days, I will hold on to the here and now and it will be nice. I will appreciate the moments. I am lucky. Hear me. I cannot deny that there’s a part of me, more than I care to admit, that will think about about sunshine and how much I love it, I really do. I won’t feel even a little bit bad about that. There’s something you should know about sunshine. When my youngest brother was born, he was a surprise but he was adored, by everyone, and most of all by my mother. She called him sunshine because he brought her so much joy, because he brightened our family and made us complete, because she loved him so much she needed a name for him that could encompass her emotions. She chose sunshine because the sun is everywhere and necessary and inescapable, and that’s a lot like love. Soon we all started calling him sunshine. If I call you sunshine, it is like that.