your history ablaze

When I think of you now it is as if you are dead…

It catches in my throat and chest, this feeling that all the bereaved complain of; 

I stoop to reach your favorite candy on a lower shelf and there it is: the “oh yes.”

The “oh yes” being a number that if dialled would not be picked up.

The “oh yes” consisting also of a certain Social Distortion song played very faintly amidst the noise of a cafe 400 miles from anywhere you ever were.

The “oh yes” may also be found in a dozen daily instances of word association,

and in that visit to the liquor store where I saw a handle of your favorite whiskey for $16, and my hands were on the bottle before I remembered.

Oh. Yes.

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Rebecca, here is the first part of your Christmas present— fucking finally…

I remember the first time I met Darcy McDane. It was a winter’s night, and it had been snowing hard. As usual, I arrived at the crime scene ten minutes too late. The police had the building surrounded. Lily Frost stood grinning on the steps with her broad arms folded across her chest. God, I hate her.

I lingered there, in the shadows across from the warehouse where Darcy came close to making off with half a million dollars in ransom for a big-city mayor. I don’t think Frost saw me, because I made a point of crouching behind the trunk of an elm tree where I would be hidden by the crosshatch of shadows thrown by the branches. My fists were clenched. My breath came in soft, sharp hisses, and I didn’t realize how rigid and tense I was until I saw the cops leading Darcy out of the building.

Her hands were cuffed behind her head. Even in the half-light of a January midnight, her red hair shone like exposed wire. She was much smaller than I had pictured her— although realistically I must have already known her rough dimensions, having guessed them from footprints and ash marks where she’d put out her cigarettes around shoulder height. But beside the bulky cops and the looming Frost, Darcy looked no bigger than a child.

What I noticed was that she noticed me. The most notorious criminal in America, and yet she spotted something that had escaped America’s greatest detective (the oh-so-victorious Frost). She saw me hidden in the trees, and she caught my eye and smiled. She had a big, laughing smile, as if she were saying “Isn’t this silly?” As if she were a 19-year-old sorority girl caught with a bottle of vodka, who would receive no more punishment than a sharp word and an escort back to her dorm.

It was then that I realized Darcy had a certain sense of fun, and more importantly, that she wanted to have that fun with me.

We are nowhere, and it’s now

Sometimes I wish I’d gone to school in the 60’s 

so that I wouldn’t be the only kid in class who smoked

and we could have our discussions sprawled over chairs in the student lounge with a fog around us

and little tendrils rising into the air from our cigarettes, the way watercolor paint disperses when you dip the brush in water,

except that I hate the taste and sometimes the smell of cigarettes.

I’ve been smoking for almost a month and it still makes me recoil.

Conor Oberst sang, “If you hate the taste of wine, why do you drink it until you’re blind?”

Ah, but I love the taste of wine.

When I can bear it, I love the tableau I create,

huddled behind a loading dock with my too-thin colt’s legs crossed twice, blowing ashy gray ghosts into the bright spring air.

In thirty years, absolutely none of this will be more than a nostalgic pang over a morning cup of coffee and half the time that thought is what gets me through the day.

Most of these hours, the bored hours, the fidgety hours, the frustrated hours, will be forgotten.

The candle that burns down the days is slow, but the one that burns down the years is terribly quick. I get things mixed up sometimes.I can’t figure out which year you would have turned twenty.

The sun is so warm on my back. The wind will wash the smell of ash out of my hair.

The great task of remembering overwhelms me. Every recollection opens the door on another, like a house full of hidden rooms.

Someday I’m going to breathe without interruption. 

Then I’m going to enter that house and open a door and follow it as far as it goes. I’m going to write all these things down. I’m going to make someone fifty years from now wish they’d gone to college back in 2010.

Day 8: Write a scene of your character in grade school or middle school.

AN: I’m exhausted, but my brain hasn’t seen fit to let me sleep. Instead, I’m listening to Elvis Costello and Kate Bush in order to trigger a flashback to the mid-90’s and writing this.

Nothing is stranger to me than memory. You ask me about last weekend, you ask me what we went over in lecture yesterday, and at best you’ll get a loose sketch— some names and general ideas. But there are these other scenes, seemingly selected at random, that are frozen in livid detail in my mind. Like I said, I can’t tell you exactly what I learned my first semester of IB Mathematics. But I can recreate every detail of the first time I saw Mercury Morgan look vulnerable, from the exact color of her hair to the way the light looked filtering in between the drawn shades of the science lab. 

In middle school, I was painfully thin, five foot six and ninety-seven pounds. My limbs had grown into my height, but the rest of my body hadn’t. I believe they call that sort of figure “coltish.” Whatever it was, there was little allure to it, especially combined with my uniform of half shrunken and half baggy clothing (I always managed to shop right on the horizon of a growth spurt). The junior high school I attended had seen my eldest sisters, and more recently Jamie, pass through its halls and leave impressions in the minds of the teachers and in whatever current students had older siblings who’d attended. This is the trouble with being a younger child. I don’t know that I was expected to measure up to my sisters, but I know the comparison was being made, and that bothered me enough.

I only spoke in class, because I found the praise of my teachers rewarding and because I knew for sure that in that arena I outdid Jamie, at least. I had a small knot of friends who clustered around the lunch table with me, all of us bent over separate paperbacks. Mercury Morgan must have been a lot more awkward than I realized—I wouldn’t fancy having to deal with the kind of attentions she did at thirteen— but on the surface, at least, she had poise. Because she was older, we had only one class together, advanced placement biology in the second floor science lab.

There was absolutely nothing remarkable about that afternoon.  We’d just finished a quiz, and the teacher had stepped out to refresh his coffee after exhorting promises of good behavior. The talkative kids immediately swooped down on the center table, and Mercury, who’d been sitting behind it, did not get up to join them but was still engaged in the conversation. This is the picture that froze in my memory:

Mercury leaning forward, saying something quietly, too quietly for her friends to hear. Her face a half-moon against her thick brown hair with its streaks of red. The way her face worked, eyebrows pinching in, when she sat back without repeating herself. I noticed the gesture because I thought it was something only I did. She covered for it immediately, becoming engrossed in her mechanical pencil. I remember also that the room smelled like eraser dust. 

Three years later, when we had our first exchange that didn’t end with me twitching and stuttering and waiting for her to go, it was that image that gave me the courage to speak up. It’s still the primary piece of evidence I draw on in my insistence that actually we’re all alike, all of us.

what i’ve just put up is a bit old

i was planning to work more on the 25 days project, but i’m exhausted and it kept going all wonky. it’s turning out to be more like 25 days spread over 40. ah well.

waking hours (third snippet)

Deserted houses along the coast of stormy Lake Superior are bad news, but they’re a sweet kind of bad news. Many times during that difficult summer I picked my way through the scrubby treeline at the water’s edge to the little red cottage two houses down from mine, with its door boarded up and curtains drawn behind its filmy windows. In the moist air of July and August, when shoots of green and yellow sprang up all around the sagging porch, I drew near and pressed my palm against the cool glass. The house, cut off from both the main road and the shore itself by thick knots of trees, stood quiet.

Me, in my jeans with the holes at the knees and the flannel dusty from puttering around the attic of my own cabin, I would press my hands against the cool glass and shut out the murmurs of the crickets and the rustle of the breeze through the branches and just absorb the utter silence of the cottage. Despite the bliss I felt upon detaching from the outside world, I remained enamored with death. The cottage in its shroud of flaking paint seemed to me a peaceful tomb.

In that overgrown clearing, I never felt quite alone. It seemed impossible that my small figure could impose such a stillness as the one that spread like spilled water from the foundations of the house. I never even saw an insect land on it.

My Spanish teacher, a Costa Rican native, once told me a story about his summers roaming the countryside with his friends. One day, they stopped to take photos in an old cemetery. But the photos came out strange. He and his friends had been alone in the cemetery, yet some of the photos showed people they didn’t recognize; other photos, in which they could have sworn they’d all posed together, showed a vacant cemetery. Most chillingly, there were a handful of photos in which a riderless white horse stood behind them.

“Do you still have the pictures?” I asked.

“I burned them right away,” he said.

I wonder, if someone had taken a photograph of me standing beside the cottage, what sort of things they would see.

fixed the about page (:

also

expect the first post when the clock strikes one

bahaahahaaha

i’m such a nerd

Day 7: FREE DAY! Write any scene you want.

“She said, don’t turn me on again;

I’d probably just go and get myself all gone again.

No, don’t turn me on again.

I’d probably just go and get myself all gone again.

Yeah, Holly was a sexy mess: she looked strung out but experienced

So we all got kinda curious”

— The Hold Steady, How A Resurrection Really Feels

If I have my way in a conversation, everything devolves into endless loops: before I tell you this story, I have to tell you this story. Oh, but before I tell you that one, I have to tell you this one. I’ve got it down to an art, cutting the epics of my life into Spark Notes, until even I can’t remember the full text of those original passages. The worst part is when I realize I’ve edited my life away to suit an audience and I’m not sure what’s true anymore. 

And here I am, doing it again: before I tell you more of the 17-year-old Champion story, I have to tell you a little bit of the 27-year-old Champion story. And now I’m worried again, because what I’m about to describe to you is going to recontextualize everything I tell you in the future. But I think you have to hear it. I think you have to understand that I couldn’t possibly predict anything that was going to happen in the next decade, any more than you can predict what will happen in the next ten years of your life.

Here’s what I am going to describe for you: my ten-year high school reunion, held in the same high-ceilinged dance hall where I had my prom. 65 people out of a class of 200. Most had something to prove. I’d like to tell you that I was the only one who walked into that room out of genuine curiosity, but you and I both know that would be a lie. Not that I was the only person who walked in with that attitude, but that I walked in with that attitude at all. Hell yes, I had something to prove.

All through high school, I’d been the golden girl. My assignments neatly stapled and twice as thick as my classmates’— because I just couldn’t help but include the supplemental material I’d found trolling the internet. Always dressed in baggy jeans and a sweater. Lusting after every girl in my senior class but losing my tongue when I sat across a table from one.

God I’d changed in 10 years. The smoking, for one thing. And the hair. My hair was down to my waist and it all smelled like cigarettes. I’d lost about fifteen pounds since high school, and I was beginning to look unhealthy. My sternum protruded through my pale chest, my veins stretched across it like threads across the little square frame of a dreamcatcher. I wore all black. I never wore black in high school; it made me look like death. Now I felt death suited me. Or suited my image, rather.

I got out of an expensive car— not very expensive, because I was the one driving it. I kept telling myself that I was here for observation purposes and not to be noticed. You can bet I was noticed, though. If people hadn’t read my books, they’d at least heard what I’d done, and they stared. I swaggered out of the driver’s seat with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, but my trembling had nothing to do with a lack of alcohol or a lack of nicotine. I thought that since wanting to kill myself, nothing could scare me more than my own lust for self-destruction. But here I was, afraid again.