Ordinary Art

I am not the type of woman who wallows in rainy days and sad songs played on repeat. I believe in action. I do research. I make lists. I do not believe that sadness is impenetrable, until suddenly it is.

Red lights stop me. I am reminded. I see my son. He sits awash in sunlight in the backseat of our car. He wears a Burger King crown and a crooked smile. He is so beautiful. The love I have for him is physical. It is like being kicked repeatedly in the chest. Love like the crushing of my ribcage. I struggle to breathe.

I bargain with the universe. Does every family need to endure a set quota of heartbreak? What is ours?

Doctor’s visits and diagnosis. I want to scream.

Take me. Take my legs. Amputate my hands. Rob me of my eye sight. Disfigure me. Make it impossible for me to piss without a bag attached to my hip. Fill my body with cancer. At the next intersection, let some drunken teenager driving his mother’s Mercedes smash into my driver’s side. Slam my brain repeatedly against the blacktop. Tear me up. Break my bones. Bloody my body.

Strip me of my words. Rob me of everything but, just take your goddamn fucking hands off my beautiful boy. Leave him to his sunshine and his lopsided crown.

This morning, I caught my reflection in the door of a giant SUV. I was distorted like a fun-house mirror. I was, at once, this split existence, tall and straight in a flowered skirt and chocolate riding boots, melting against metal like Salvador Dali.

I reminded myself of Schrodinger’s cat, the famous experiment where a cat was placed in a sealed box with an atom of nuclear waste. The nuclear waste was set to decay in small amounts. Those small amounts might or might not be enough to kill the cat over a period of an hour.

Schrodinger wanted to answer the question, When does a quantum system stop existing as a mixture of states, and become one or the other? If we do not know if the cat is dead or alive, until we open the box to witness, does this mean that the cat exists as both dead and alive simultaneously? How important is the observer?

Isn’t it cruel to put a cat in a sealed box? Why isn’t anyone asking that question?

I am entirely bored by the woman in the flowered skirt and the chocolate riding boots. I do not have much faith in her distorted reflection.  I am, however, fascinated by the empty space that is the distance between these two things existing.

This empty space is where I want to search for words. Words as strange as quantum mechanics.

I am just an ordinary woman. This is enough.

Someone asked me, on Fromspring, What makes you feel? It is a curious question. Here are some accumulated moments that shape my days.

I sit in my car in the supermarket and watch an elderly couple loading groceries into their Chevrolet. The man opens the door. The woman pulls back her hair. He lifts a bag. She reaches out her hand to grab the eggs and the jam. They move like choreography. She walks the cart back up to the front of the store. He fishes in his pocket for the keys. Ordinary things are so beautiful.

***

My son slams a tool into my face. My head is an explosion of pain. My brain rains stars. There is blood all over my face. In the distance, I hear a sound that is not human. A primordial howl. This sound is coming from my child’s mouth. Did you know that terror makes an echo? I stare into the mirror and watch my bruises bloom. Pain flowers.

***

I drive to work. I am black and blue. I happen upon wreckage. The body of cars are twisted like Edvard Munch’s Scream. There is the smell of burnt rubber. Flashing lights. The cars in front of me slow down. We are moving like a funeral procession. At the collision site, there is a direct impact between what I imagine and what exists on the slick street. I crane my neck to see across the highway divider. I face death on a rainy Tuesday morning. I drive away.

***

Sex is the only power we really have. A friend writes this in an e-mail. It feels like deep breathing. I remember sitting in a therapist’s office, talking about the shame surrounding one-night stands. My therapist listens and says, Do you ever think you are using these men just as much as they are using you? I was afraid to let go of victim-hood long enough to really hear her. 15 years later, I listen to my friend. She reminds me of forgiveness.

***

What makes me feel? I think I answered the Formspring question by saying, Everything. I wish I had written a quote from Perks of Being A Wallflower, instead. I think it answers the question perfectly.

So, this is my life. I am both happy and sad. Really, I am just trying to figure out how those things can exist simultaneously.
-Charlie

***
If you are reading this post in a reader, you need to click on through. I have a new header. It is a picture of street graffiti that was taken by my dear friend Tara. If my words don’t make you feel, this photo certainly will.

The curious girl with the father of dirty fingers and calloused thumbs leaned against the frozen wall of the supermarket. She ate a peach. She took sloppy bites and let the juice drip from her chin onto the collar of her shirt.  She liked to watch people enter and exit the supermarket. She would examine their carts filled with vegetables and laundry detergents. She would peer into their bags, try and imagine what color they painted their kitchens. She liked to imagine what they might be making for dinner that very night. The curious girl was a spy.

In the parking lot, a foreign couple walked hand and hand. Their heads were bent in a conspiracy. The wind picked up. It bit down on the shoulders of the girl’s thin blouse. The wind reached out its hand and snatched the woman’s scarf. The scarf rose into the air like quotations surrounding unspoken words. It swelled against the sky like heartbreak. The girl watched the scarf. She ached.

The man took long exaggerated strides across the parking lot in a vaudevillian attempt to halt the flight of his lover’s silk scarf. The woman laughed. She threw back her head.  She offered her throat, exposed and vulnerable.

When the man caught the scarf, he cheered. He raced it back to his lover. The woman greeted him in a thick embrace. He kissed her like desire. The curious girl watched as the lover wound the length of the cobalt scarf around the arched tender of the woman’s milky neck. The woman sighed sweetly.

With her lips still sticky and wet from the juice of a peach, the curious girl heard this sigh and it unhinged her. She watched the man winding the scarf around the woman’s neck. She felt it like a noose tightening.

I’m really not that interesting. I just find the idea of people asking each other anonymous questions, stupidly fascinating.

http://formspring.me/ordinaryart

Ask me anything.

I want to live my life like romance. I want the red bloom of lips, the moment a lover enters my body, rain glistening on the back of train cars, sobbing violins. I want poetry spoken in a whisper against the curve of my spine. I want a hand on the meat of my thigh underneath the table. I want hungry fingers fumbling against stiff zippers. I want teeth to bite down and break the skin. I want an exaltation of moans and sighs in darkened bedrooms. I want to forget that I exist.

I want to forgive.

Theme and moral are not the same thing. Moral is pre-determined and functions on the idea that right and wrong, good and evil, are fixed concepts. I think all of us live somewhere in between. We are abstractions. Theme is what happens when you put a bunch of abstractions into one place. Sit back. Watch them collide.

Sometimes collisions are necessary. Sometimes crashing is a beautiful thing. My son craves movement. He spins. He slides. He leaps from things as if the air has given him a triple dog dare. He has to answer the challenge.  My son is crashing just so he can feel. It is his means to know the world. Doctors call this Sensory Integration Disorder. I wonder, sometimes, if the whole world has Autism.

I want to write like wreckage. In Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson deconstructs the concepts of love and gender. A man, who might be a woman, loves a woman, who might be a man, who has a husband that is not love anymore. Winterson purposely withholds identity because she knows it does not matter. There is a fine line between a protagonist and an antagonist. Sometimes, there is no line at all.

I admire the way Winterson makes lust beautiful. I would like to do what she does. I want my words to press themselves together, like that moment in sex when you are a tangle of elbows and thighs. You do not contemplate possession. You simply are possessed. Without arbitrary divides, bodies crash into bodies. Everyone hot, wet, and weightless. Writing, like sex, should be this beautiful ambiguity.

I want to write the way I live. Things get messy.

I hate the idea that blog readers are searching for moral. I am not moral or brave because I admit my own failings. I am not immoral just because I can write about the tenderness I have for my children in the same paragraph I detail liking to fuck. I am much more complicated than a childhood fable. I am not porn.

Everyone is always pontificating about the decay of blogging, bloggers. I do not understand that. Blogging is a genre that allows us to penetrate myths. Others. Our own. Blogging is a beautiful abstraction. It is like racing down the road at 100 miles an hour with all the windows rolled down. You can not orchestrate a collision. You simply have to let go of the wheel.

Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  YOU are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not NEED you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust ME. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not NEED you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. You disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Fuck you. I hate you. YOU disgust me. Do not talk to me. Do not look at me. I am better than you. I do not need you. I despise you. I detest you. You make me sick. You are vile.  You are filthy. You are a waste. Pay attention to me. See me. Want me. Need.

Who am I writing to? Why am I writing this? Is this good writing? Do you see yourself in this? Where? What part? Are you shocked? Surprised? Moved to tears or rage? Are you completely indifferent? Do you love me? Do you hate me? Do you care? Just tell me. Won’t ya?

When I tell people that my son has been diagnosed on the Autistic spectrum, they look at me with pity. They say, I’m so sorry, with the sadness we reserve for the dead. Conversations take on the tone of funeral dirges. I do not fault people. I am familiar with grief.

Will my son have a best friend, go to prom, obtain a college degree, live on his own, love his job, get married, become a dad?

I do not have these answers. Do any of us? I think that there are better questions.

Will my son laugh? Will he be happy? Does he love?

I love you, Momma. I love you like a volcano. You are beautiful, Momma. Your hair smells like love and sunshine. Sissy is my best friend. I want to be a pirate. Let’s be pirates, Momma? We will sail the angry seas. Yo, Ho! Yo, Ho! Can we go outside and play? I want to run. See how high I can jump? Let’s play tag, Momma? You’re it. I’m hiding. Come find me. Pick me up. Want to hear me sing my ABC’s? Spin me around, Momma. I’m gonna hug on you. I am going to wish on the stars for chocolate cake. I want to eat chocolate cake all the time. Eat cake with me, Momma. Let’s eat cake.

My son. He is. He does.