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.

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.

If you ever loved a vagina, yours or another person’s, you should click here. Then, you should tweet, Facebook, and tell everyone you know to do the same.

No. Really. A woman I love and admire just put up a panel idea for a room of your own at the Blogher conference being held in New York City. It is an amazing idea. It is about women owning and sharing their own stories, their memories, their bodies, themselves.

Knowing my friend, it will be funny, moving, and a room you will not want to leave even when the session is over. I would hate this idea to get beat out because my friend, like me, has a smaller blog audience. Her panel deserves your vote.

So, do me a favor. Click now. Sign on up over at Blogher’s site. It’s free. You don’t even have to go to the conference to give your support. I promise.

If you do not do this, you run the risk of pissing off your vagina, or the vagina of someone else. You will most certainly cause my vagina to cry, and there is nothing more frightening than a weepy vagina.

Now go. Vote. And, convince all your friends to do the same. Sometimes peer pressure is for their own good.

Marriage is hard. That is such a simple statement. A true statement. Sometimes marriage is too hard and a couple realizes that they need to walk away. I think that is incredibly brave. I can not imagine how hard it would be. I wonder how many of you have ever wondered if that couple might be you? Maybe you thought it in your head when disappointment built, or aloud in arguments where you strike out to hurt. If so, you are not alone.

I met my husband while in college. We started talking at a dorm room party. We have not stopped talking since that night. We moved in together within six months. We were young and relatively poor college kids, rolling up quarters to buy gas and the cigarettes we smoked back then. We laid on the rooftop. I use to ask him, What if?

What if a genie said he would grant you every wish you had, but it would mean that I had to lose a leg or be horribly disfigured? Would you do it?

Inside a silly game, we both knew what I was asking. There were things that made me afraid. What if you hurt me? What if you lie? What if you break my heart? What if I break yours? I wanted protection against the inevitable.

This year, my husband and I will be married for 10 years, together for over 14. In this space of time, I have broken my husband’s heart in ways both small and large.

Some would say that I am not an easy woman to love. I have thrown around the word divorce as a weapon. I have let my anxiety get in the way of my logic. I have pushed away my husband’s need for the simple intimacy of having me, his partner, look him square in the eyes. I have spent hours on the internet engaging with others when I should have been engaging with my husband. I have even wondered, in the very darkest of moments, if Dave was truly the one. If you knew my husband, what we have together, you would know that this is the most egregious fault. I am not proud.

14 years together. We are not poor. The roof is over our heads. The ground is under our feet. We construct and deconstruct our daily boundaries. We ask questions. We no longer play, outright, the game of, What if? Instead, we live it.

What can we do to make sure our children grow up healthy? If we buy the new house will it be something to make us happy, or a burden we can not afford? What are all the ways we can ask forgiveness for how we hurt each other? If we evolve separately, let us promise to remember that we love under the exact same stars?

I think that what and If might be what constitute a marriage. My marriage has been a series of what and if. It has also been about, Why? I used to constantly ask why does my husband stay with such a difficult woman? Why does he continue to love me so faithfully when I have made so many mistakes? Knowing Dave, he will answer for himself. He will come here and he will say sweet things because he is good and kind and whole in ways that I admire. I am lucky that way.

I do not know if we can ever truly explain, why. Sometimes we just are.

When my husband and I first met, I was unsure and insecure. For a long time, I thought that David saved me from myself, my loneliness, my pain. I have learned that another person can not fix the cracks, the fissures of self. I can take credit for that all on my own, even if I am still a work in progress.

There was a time when I could not see past all that David did for me, to realize that I do for him too. I note with pleasure the absence of space when my hand reaches out to find his. I am a really good listener. I fill our house with goofy laughter. I burn toast with grace. I mother with love and good intent, always, his two children. I am a devoted wife.

I am also a reflective enough wife to know that i have been selfish. Finding myself should not be about dismissing the person that I love. This is what I hope to be forgiven for.

My husband and I are beautifully bound. We fail in a million different ways on a daily basis. But add us up to sum, and we make it work in all the ways that count.

David, I love you. Then. Now. Always.

Last night, I read a post from a well-known male blogger* that made me confused. He wrote about being in high school, having a crush on a girl, being denied her affection. As I first read, I could relate. Who hasn’t wanted someone or some thing so badly they experienced anger when denied? I have. What happens, however, when anger spills over into action?

This particular blogger wrote about thrusting his hand between a young girl’s legs when he and she were both in high school. A girl he described as wearing a silk blouse and no bra. A girl that he desired. A girl that did not want him. While pushing himself unprovoked and uninvited between her most private space, he demanded, “Is this what you wanted?” The story ends with the girl in tears in the backseat of a car, and the blogger admitting his own actions were scary.

I wrote a private e-mail to this blogger and asked him why he shared the piece online. I wanted to know what his motivation was for publishing it. He replied by telling me he wrote the piece because it was true. This made me furious. Does truth automatically make something acceptable? If we write our dirty, hateful, secrets are we immediately made brave just by the telling? What sort of community are we if we heap an author with praise just because he or she sits down and writes about his or her own repulsive act? What sort of society are we when another blogger comments that the young scared girl in that car was not even a victim?

My head spun. I tasted bile in my mouth. I physically shook. I needed to step away, from that blogger, from Twitter, from my own head. I went to sleep. Upon waking up this morning, I realized something. I thought my anger came from wishing this blogger had written the piece with more remorse. Not true. It was not really about that blogger. What I really want is retribution for all women. I want every single man who has ever hurt a woman in a sexual way to spontaneously burst into flames right….about….NOW!

Am I angry? You bet I am. I think the question is why isn’t every person angry that violence still happens in small ways like the backseat of that car? What good is sorry, really? If the two men that took advantage of me, while I stumbled like a sloppy drunk in the snow, apologized for the bloody raw ache they left inside of me, would it make it better. Fuck! No!

This post is not about re-hashing my old wounds or stories. I’ve claimed my own status as a survivor. I do not need to go backwards even when there are posts and people that trigger the memories that propel me down the rabbit hole of my own history. I just need to make sense of why this particular post from this particular blogger had me so enraged. There has to be more than just the telling, his and mine. Simply writing it down is not enough. What do we learn from it?

Some of you who’ve been reading me for awhile might remember a story I told you about when I was younger. There was this cocky kid named Tommy who corned me on a deserted stairwell. He thrust his fingers uninvited and unwanted up my skirt. I was this shy, awkward, girl who had never been looked at much less touched by a boy. It was not what I wanted. It made me scared and confused. What I left out, when I previously told the story, was that three days after the stairwell incident happened Tommy asked me out. I said yes. Yes? It felt strange and scary but good to be wanted, even when the wanting part was done all wrong. Just writing those words brings back all the confusion I felt when holding the phone to my ear and saying yes to dating a boy who previously violated me. I never told Tommy that what he did that day on the stairs felt dirty, frightening, and wrong. I never spoke up when he broke up with me and spread untrue rumors about my body to the entire class. I never said a word. Silence is a weapon young girls and women are taught to use against themselves.

When I first read the post of that popular male bloggers, I felt the same type of conflict that I felt as the scared confused girl I once was. This post was written by a blogger I knew and generally liked. Someone I saw as gentle, dorky, kind. I never would have imagined that story being attached to his history. After reading the post, I could not help but question every thing I knew about him, start to read deeper and more sinisterly into what I thought were previously funny and harmless tweets. It made me wonder how much I could really trust any online “friendship.”

Knowing the blog world like I do, I knew the commendations for his “bravery” were coming. This is where the real tension was for me. I started to doubt myself. Who was I to be angry? Who was I to speak out in dissent? In fact, I wrote a tame first comment on the post where I danced around the issue of my own discomfort. That is what “good” girls are trained to do. Aren’t we? We don’t rock the damn proverbial boat. We never speak out. We maintain the shame in silence.

I think when women are silent we all become the metaphor of that girl in the backseat of the car with some angry guy trying to shove his fist between our thighs. I’m not going to let that happen to me. I can not worry that what I feel is not the acceptable response of the community at large. I can not worry about my own alienation. I will not be 12 years old again, crying in my childhood bedroom.

I think what that male blogger did to that girl was disgusting and wrong. I think some of his tweets are inappropriate. I hope that people read his post and they are shocked and disgusted too. I thought about linking him, but I do not want my writing to be about calling someone out. Even though, that is what I am essentially doing. This really is more about me trying to deal with the complexity of my own emotions.

I hope his post is read. I hope people actually discuss, disagree, determine their own feelings outside of the context of the group. We can learn from this, from anything, if we are willing to go further than just to write disclosure off as some brave act. I do not think there is anything brave about what this blogger did in writing his past down, even though I too found myself using the word “brave” in his comment section. In fact, I think writing this post was an inherently selfish act because the blogger is the perpetrator and not the victim. What is he really looking for? Absolution or traffic? The answer makes a difference to me. Even if it is absolution, it won’t be found so easily here.

I have learned that women do not always need to be so forgiving. I was at 12, and even at 19, forgiving others and hating myself when waking up bruised and missing my underwear. I will never again let my own silence make me that complicit.

*edited to add the link of the blogger. Go here to read his story. Although, since my post has come out, his initial post has changed. He has “toned” down his story. It was originally written about her not having a bra and him putting his hand between her thighs, not just resting on it. I wonder why a person would edit a post that they wrote because it was “true” then quietly change it when people took issue with it. Interesting.

*New Edit*

I asked Neil why he edited the story after the comments and my post came out. He wrote this, “I edited it because it was too intense and I wasn’t getting the reaction I wanted. I am not a journalist. I am a writer.”

*Final Edit*

Neil changed the original blog post back. He also shared this post. I think it is only fair of me to post it. I also hope we continue to have conversations as a community about all the issues that came about because of all these posts and tweets.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

When I was 10, a neighbor knocked on our door. She sat in my mother’s kitchen all polyester grief. She told my mother about a broken down car that was at the shop. A broke down car is and is not a metaphor. She clearly wanted a ride to the market, but was afraid to ask. I watched the way she moved her mouth like a hint. It made me furious. Why didn’t she just come right out and tell my mother directly what she wanted? I left the room disgusted at how a person could be so weak. A half hour later, I smiled a greedy smile at the slope of my neighbor’s back as she walked down the street to her own home. I crept down the stairs and watched my mother quietly humming, washing out the dirty tea cups in the sink. I thought my mother the most beautiful thing.

My mother used to tell a story about my brother and I growing up at Christmas time. She liked to explain how my brother never asked for anything. Brian always believed in working hard for every thing he got. My mother would extol with obvious pride. I do not fault her in her storytelling. It is true. My brother is this very sort of amazing. Always has been. Enter the foil. Apparently, I was the opposite. I would sit with the Christmas catalogue and circle entire pages. I want this, and this, and this. The other children on the block called me Princess. When I hear my mother tell these stories, I marvel at how I could have been that little girl. Sometimes, I miss her.

All grown up, I once followed a homeless man down a street begging for him to get in my car so I could give him a thermos of hot tea and a blueberry muffin. The more he resisted, the more I was desperate to help him. There was something about his stubborn refusal that had me quite convinced that no one in the world could save him but me. Everyone needs. Some of us just need a lot more than others.

I am constantly trying to pin down my own definitions of self, but self is slippery. I grew up manipulated and angry. I grew up with the enormity of love. I spent my teenage years with an indefeasible loneliness and an inability to speak. I am constantly told that as an adult I talk too much. I am a woman surrounded by people. Sometimes all I do is ache to simply be left alone. All definitions are hazy.

Need is this strange thing, isn’t it? Look around and you see it, here, everywhere. Blogging only magnifies it. Sometimes I feel like we are this human circus. The fat lady charging a buck fifty to let the audience marvel in awe and revulsion at our skin. Some of us just smoke and mirrors, bravery like the man who stares down the open mouth of a lion and dares the crush of teeth on the vulnerability of his own head. Only most times the audience is unaware that the ferocious beast has been drugged into submission. Needs get tamed.

I do not know what I need or if I actually need anything at all. I am no longer the little girl who can turn the slick page of a Sears catalogue and have happiness materialize. I’m not a sullen teenager, either. I’ve been thinking a lot about that long ago neighbor. Why was I so angry with her? I think the answer to what I am asking might be found in the washing of dirty dishes and the broken down car that is and is not a metaphor.

Do you still smell like Christmas?

I ask this to an old friend from high school on Facebook the other day. I used to crush on his curly hair. Back when we worked retail together, I used to marvel at the way he could break down a cardboard box in under a minute flat. I used to make excuses to head back into the storeroom in the hopes we would stumble into conversation. Problem was that back then I was so concerned with saying the correct thing, to make a person like me, that I often said nothing.

I like to talk to people I went to high school with, not because I’m harboring secret lust or holding useless grudges, but simply because it reminds me of who I was. I could not appreciate myself then, but looking backwards, I was so painfully awkward that it was tender.

Last night, I went to a writer’s group. I was all anxious bones clattering clumsy against the table I dropped my laptop on. Fill me up. Break me down. Wreck me like a lover. I wanted to fight and fuck and cry all simultaneously. Mostly, I just wanted someone to tell me that the urges all made sense. Let my need and neurosis bloom like flower. Two of the most banal hours later, I was ready to give up. In this most mundane moment, someone dropped an atom bomb.

Have you ever read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs? Naked Lunch is an explosion. Kerouac described it as, “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Last night, this tall cuban boy with bones that jangled worse then mine, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a stutter in his pants pocket, blew his own face off in prose. I was witness to this death, and it was beautiful.

An 18-year old undiscovered genius drew me a secret map of words. As I read my short story, he was head down immersed in sketch. There were the lines of my body intertwined with every other body. All the words of the world stacked in sacred prayer, in curious orgy. It was everything we are not allowed to be in the routine of never-ending Mondays. He passed it shyly across the table when I was done reading, and all I could do was nod. How exquisite any given place can be when we give ourselves over to it. I wish that you had been there. I know you would have felt it.

Back at home, my children wear my husband’s socks and jump reckless on the bed. They barely register my arrival so caught up in the business of being children. I would stand forever inside of doorways just to watch them.

I want a banana. NOW!

My daughter suddenly explodes, a thundering stallion of need. She stamps her feet. She throws back her head to expose the soft tender of her neck. She is so beautiful. Inside of her desire, my daughter blooms. We do not have any bananas in the house. I tell her this. I offer her an apple. She shrugs her shoulders and walks away. Climbs back on the bed to resume her jumping.
It is not always the object that we desire. Sometimes it is simply the expression. I want. I feel. I need. I write it down and send it to you. In that moment, I recognize who I am.

I am not whole. I am not fractured.

I’ve been losing weight. It is not intentional. I just forget to eat. My husband fills my book bag with cheese sandwiches and cups of chocolate pudding that I misplace somewhere between leaving the house and stumbling into the faculty room. It is like my teeth are too lazy to chew, my hands too busy to forage. I have been subsisting on bottles of diet Pepsi and random snatches of trail mix. I’m getting thin. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to myself in bathroom mirrors fogged with steam. What was once curved and fleshy is now pronounced, hard and definite.

Why hello there hipbones. Haven’t seen you in awhile.

When we were 13, my friends and I invented a game. We would swish, swish, swish our hips parallel to the pavement. The goal was to count how many times the tipping of our adolescent gravity could evoke the honking of car horns racing by on the two-lane road. We were innocent girls let loose across the gravel summoning grown-up danger from the safe concrete of sidewalks and the cut of freshly mowed lawns. We never really wanted or expected the pickup trucks to stop.

Is there even a point to me telling you this story? Probably.

***

I told myself that I would stop blogging. On Halloween, I took my children trick or treating and then quietly crept up into my parent’s bathroom and sobbed. My son is struggling. I sit here worrying constantly about words like evaluation and denial. I finished two pieces of writing for publication this week. All I can think is what good is pride when your three-year old son trembles in the backseat of his grandmother’s car before pre-school, and once there becomes anger personified?

I do not have any answers.

I was going to stop blogging. Many of you wrote that I should not leave. You said you would hate to see me go. For a long time, I was convinced that didn’t matter. I constantly surprise myself.

I have only just found you, a few of you wrote in comments and private e-mails. You make me feel a little less alone.

There is such kindness in your words. I like to picture you, a woman in a nightgown that replaces her three-piece business suit. You nurse a bottle of beer or a tepid cup of tea in front of a computer screen that holds my words.  Are you a man with a casual sweater who is tired of constantly straightening his own tie? Here. Let me loosen it for you.

When I sat down to blog this post, I thought I would ask you stupid questions.
When you look at me, what is it that you see?
Please do not answer.

I worry that you will read this and imagine me quite sad. I am sometimes. Mostly. I am not. Really.
My life is full of mortgage and marriage, defeating scary monsters hiding in the closets of my children, and the mirror on my bathroom wall.

Sure. I am losing weight. But, it is not intentional. I simply forget to eat. Every couple of days I have to reintroduce myself to brand new kneecaps and the wings of newly drawn shoulder blades, the former curve of me now pronounced and sharp. The terrain of my body is a constant discovery.

This blog is another body. One of words.
I think it would be nice for it to remain soft and fleshy, undefined.

At least for awhile. If that would be okay with all of you.

Kate from Sweet/Salty has written a beautiful book. I will be buying multiple copies of this book to give as Christmas gifts to all of the children in my life. She is graciously offering a free copy to a randomly drawn winner who completes the meme I’ve completed below. I would suggest you go check it out for yourself. Well….What are you waiting for?

*****

1) You are facing an epic journey. You may choose one companion, one tool and one vehicle from any book or film to accompany you. Or just one of the three. It’s up to you. What do you choose?

I would take Siddhartha as my companion. We would carry nothing on our backs. We would travel by foot.

2) You can escape to the insides of any book. Where do you go, and why?

There is a book about the Armenian genocide called, Three Apples Fell From Heaven. It is heartbreaking and tragically beautiful. There is a scene where a mother must abandon her child, give him over to death under a rotting apple tree. The scene is told from the perspective of the infant, who looks skyward to search for the face of comfort in a godless sky. The pain of this moment has always wrecked me. I would escape into this book to hold that child to my chest for as long as time would let me.

3) You can bring one literary character into your current life. Who do you choose, and why?

I would bring back Holden Caufield from The Catcher in The Rye. I would hook him up with social networking. I think if Holden had a blog, he wouldn’t have felt so alone.

4) The Cave by Jose Saramago is my go-to book. I could read that book fifty-seven times in a row without a break for food or a pee and not be remotely bored. In fact, I’ve already done that but it wasn’t fifty-seven times. It was sixty-four.

5) Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most enviable?
Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. Who would not want to grow up under the guiding hand of the most honorable man in all of literature, Atticus Finch?

6) Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most frightening?
Gollum, and his lust.

7) Every time I read Art and Lies by Jeannette Winterson, I see something in it that I haven’t seen before.

It is imperative that The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy be made into a movie. Now. I am already picketing an independent film producer for this—but if he or she casts Frieda Pinto as Ammu, I will not be happy. I will, however, be appeased if he or she casts Shohreh Aghdashloo.

9) The Beach by Alex Garland is a book that should have never been made into a film. Even the heat that is generated by watching Leonardo DiCaprio for two hours on screen could not save the abysmal adaptation that was that film.

10) After all these years, the rape scene in the book, A Clock Work Orange, still manages to give me the queebs. (Please tell me that “give me the queebs” means to be terrified.)

11) After all these years, the shooting on the beach in the book The Stranger, by Camu, still manages to give me a thrill.

12) If I could corner the author Cormac McCarthy who wrote The Road, here’s what I’d say to him in one minute or less about his book: The line, If he is not the word of God, then God has never spoken, was the most startlingly true statement I have ever read about the way a parent could love their child and ache to protect him or her. You wreck me, Sir.

13) The coolest non-fiction book I’ve ever read is Feminism is for Everyone by Bell Hooks. Every time I flip through it, it makes me want to stop shaving my armpits and burn my bra.

Now, my friends, it is your turn.

I am not the type of woman who is good at remembering birthdays or sending thank you notes on time.  Each day I go to the public library, I owe them another dollar twenty. I wonder what it would be like to live as orderly as a file-o-fax. If I carefully clipped coupons, and always knew just when to purchase the laundry detergent at half off, would my life be any easier? 

Great big balls of dust form on the how to books in our home. The shelf I rest Neruda and Sexton against is always spotless. A woman is nothing without her priorities. I question mine, as the laundry piles up at the base of the basement stairs. I close the door, and pretend I do not see it. I crack the spine of a newly checked out book, inhale deeply.

Let a man go to the bottom of what he is, and believe in that. D. H. Lawrence sends a volt electric and my synapses snap. Go deeper. Go deep. I think. Yes. When all I’m ever really doing is just scratching at the surface.  

Later, a character on the television talks about how fertile her adolescent words. I think of my brother sitting at the kitchen table, laughing at my pre-adolescent attempts at poetry. He used to steal pages from my journal, lock himself in the bathroom, and read me loud in mock baritone. I’m better than I was at 13. Still, I hate the childhood stories some writers tell about the opus they penned at 9, two novels written before they ever sprouted a pimple or had a period. I was too busy playing Barbie dolls as a kid to channel Whitman. When I finally picked up the pen, it was laden with cliched metaphor that would have made Hemingway curse blasphemous from the grave.

 I use to hemorrhage words, the television character says. I look up from the computer screen tickled by the way that sounds.  I use to hemorrhage words. I picture thick black words streaked with red-black blood dangling from between the soft down of white legs. I visualize the crooked letter Z falling to the pavement like a clot.  I see this image in my head and name it proof that I have talent.

I am not hemorrhaging words. I eat them, then shit them out in my very own decomposition. A process this organic must be art, I tell myself. Right?

I want to be an artist. I’m a writer, I claim, then think about the proliferation of coffee houses like Starbucks. Suburban mothers and accountants don somber black berets and sit nursing cold cups of coffee against the hum of their laptops. Art as franchise. The irony of commercialized spaces breeding these fanciful dreams is not lost on me as a blogger. 

I just want to be more than posture, but I’m losing the battle against the dirt under my children’s nails, and the mailbox thick with unopenend letters. The cat hasn’t been fed in days and the dishwasher needs to be emptied. I’m lost among the detritus of this life, claiming artist, when maybe I just need to own up to my own avoidance. Because, how can a person imagine themselves to be a writer when they so rarely write?

Instead, I bake cookies and forget to clean up the crumbs on the kitchen counter. I leave flour fingerprints on the keyboard that I arrive at with the very best of intentions.

I am going to finish the next chapter of my book, I tell myself. Instead, I tumble headfirst and on purpose into the void of Facebook.  When my husband questions why the milk left on the counter has spoiled, I mumble something about suffering for my art.

Really?  The truth of this is not that I have the soul of a poet shaping her life to match romantic. The truth? I’m just a suburban housewife and mother, with a penchant for fucking good literature, wearing a  disguise. I’m sitting here calling my own laziness art, and enjoying how you are all rolling along with me.  Bless you beautiful people for allowing me to live so fully in my own delusion. Bless your giving hearts for pretending this atrophy is not just another way for me to tell a lie.