Therapy, return

News of my grandmother’s apparently pre-existing medical condition as well as the loss of not one but two very important personal friendships has driven me into a kind of emotional shiva. To make matters that much worse I have run out of cigarettes and the ghosts have begun to return. In an attempt to set myself back on some kind of proper mental course that I may eventually return from this Land of Sorrow with which I am so miserably familiar, I have gone on a search for my once ubiquitous but ever-mysterious guru and personal therapist, Gary. 

My new residence in Logan Square has been chosen specifically to place myself in closer proximity to Gary, as well as to my rather ambivalent brother Matthew, my on-again/off-again lover/arch-nemesis, and my favorite ghost. I had been looking for him for at least a week in all of the places I knew Gary to inhabit. I have searched the strip clubs of the west side, even the back rooms, even the bathrooms. I have searched the worst of the worst dive bars, the most disgusting and piss-rivered of alleys. It was on the last day of my search, when I had abandoned all hope to myself and taken simply to stumbling slightly drunk and on the verge of tears through the streets of Logan Square to avoid the prospect of my cavernous new apartment that I found him. He was sitting exactly where I should have found him, perched above the boulevard on top of an abandoned railroad overpass, his legs swinging over the side in a pair of dark brown trousers. I did not waste time wondering how he had gotten up there, what he was doing or where he had been. I found the nearest foothold I could and scuttled up the side and sat beside him, swinging my legs over also, while hipsters on bikes and policemen strolling the beat looked up curiously but did not tell us to come down. 

We sat in silence for a while. He picked at the knee of his trousers. I waited for an explanation but he offered none. I tried a few of the old “how are you? what are you up to?” lines but Gary has never been one for anything but business and he just pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders loosely in reply. Finally, I let out with it. I told him everything, like how I don’t know what I want, who I want, what I’m supposed to be getting out of any of the relationships I’ve put a lot of work into, why my friendships are so new and yet so much more important to me than the time-honored ones, why I’m such a shitty daughter/sister/granddaughter/cousin/niece/etc., why I never call, why I can’t get as drunk as I used to even when my tolerance seems to have gone down, why sometimes the sky scares me, why I keep seeing people from my old lives when they have no logical reason to be there, in those places, why after I rescued that little boy from getting hit by a CTA bus I was so mortified that I had nightmares of children getting hit everywhere when I wasn’t looking even though the kid and his mother as far as I know are still very much okay and why goddamn it nothing seems to be working. He took it all in, nodding his head gently or seeming to, maybe it was the wind. When I finished, I burst into tears, asked if he had a cigarette and he gave me one wordlessly. I wept a while alone alone alone, and it dropped through my curiously swinging legs onto the pavement below, onto pedestrians’ heads, and they yelled “hey!” but did not press further, they continued on. 

“Damn it, Gary, say something!” I demanded, wanting to shake him, not knowing what to do. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said evenly, quietly. “But I’m not exactly sure who you are or what you’re doing here. I don’t really know what you want me to say.”

He turned back to the front and stared off casually. I sat beside there for a while, swinging my legs. It took me a long time to climb down.

Far away from home on the somethingth anniversary of a brother’s death

On the Red Line. Rainy as fuck and I’m pretty sure I smell weird– spending too much time in the subway will do that to you and I’m pretty sure ten minutes is too much. Ran into a teacher, my teacher, my former teacher, who after a few minutes of “how are you?” gave me a raised eyebrow like he expected me to ask for some money. I wondered if he’d heard anything, decided he had but probably not the worst of it, just maybe that my ways are mysterious these days, and I am fine with that. I am fine with mystery. I write a letter to a man I loved once and it says in part “I am no goddamn saint.” I want a cigarette badly though I’ve had bad bronchitis all week and I’d spent all week lying in bed listening to myself breathe and imagining that I have emphysema, all the while swearing, I will never smoke again. I had one today, will probably have another one later. The letter says, “I fucking make mistakes.” The coughing all week has made everything sore.

A family of four gets on. Two women, late 20s or full-on 30s, a man, and a baby. The women are probably sisters and the younger one holds the kid in her lap since there’s only room on this train for them to sit in separate single seats. The guy, all shorthaired, blond fuzz with a grumpy face like this guy I know who used to be sort of a streetfighting man before he grew up and started dealing with young boxers, he wears this bad leather bomber jacket, is maybe the father, maybe the husband, maybe neither. He stands with the older of the two women, who holds the empty baby stroller but doesn’t fold it. People have to crawl over it to get through the aisle and she keeps moving it around, negotiating the crowd and the stroller while chuzz gives the passersby a dirty look. Casually gazing, I notice the woman clutching the railing right above me. I notice when her umbrella starts dripping onto my leg. I move it just slightly out of the way of the drip but say nothing and noticing, she fumbles to get the umbrella out of my path. She is the type accustomed to not want trouble. While she’s negotiating her load, I take the glance I wanted to but didn’t feel right taking before. Like her sister, she has this bleached blond hair, kinda short and straight as straw. Her roots are showing but her hair is so like the other woman’s, I wonder for a second if maybe this kind of cheapness is hereditary. Doubtless their mother had the exact same dyejob. She isn’t repulsive, has pretty bad skin like the dude and the sister, which figures, but she’s just plain, and you can kinda tell that even before she got strung out and met up with chuzz and had this kid, she probably never was much of a beauty. Her eyes, like her sister’s, are all washed-out like something that’s been bleached but shouldn’t have been. There’s a cigarette burn on her wrist, and I know that shape instantly. I am no goddamn saint. Part of me wants to see the rest of her arm to see what else I’d find, what she could teach me about mutilation both self-inflicted and otherwise, but it’s cold and rainy today so they’ve all got long sleeves on. I know what I’d find anyway and it’d probably just sicken me. Finally, though I don’t know that I can take it, I look over at the kid. To my surprise, he’s rosy-cheeked, vaguely happy. His eyes are blue like the women but bright and clear, apparently totally unaware of the things that are in store for it. The family gets off at Clybourn, a wicked stop in my opinion, but again, not surprising. The baby shifts hands. The woman fumbles with the empty stroller, and they file out without a word. I sigh and open up my notebook again, take another look at my letter. I cross out the name at the top and finish it, “this is the kinda shit that could scare a woman off of H for a long, long time.” I am no goddamn saint. Not because I can’t be good, either. It’s just that whatever weird quality it takes to die like one… well, I don’t have it.

comfort blanket

I know what you do
when the light at the back of your skull
reaches for a frightening shape.

I have been there mornings,
evenings, even: the wall
that you press your spine against,
the arm that you tug like rope
and toss away again
when it grasps too tightly.

Still, I would not say that I know you,
or that scar tissue and semen
are a comfortable hammock to rest in,
no matter how your tossing and turning
creates a pleasant rhythm
that I don’t mind sharing, for now.

I don’t care if you’re dead, please clean up after yourself

I am being followed by three ghosts:
one is a ghost with a giant beard
who never blinks when I watch him;
another is a ghost with rather large hair
and a large belly that he tries to suck in
but fails;
the other is a ghost
who never says anything–
she can, and she can at length,
but she won’t.
Not while I’m there.

I’ve gotten over the twitching,
and though they sometimes talk to me
I never talk back.
I’m not crazy.
They’re just ghosts

but then, I have one question:
why is there all this ghostbeard
in the sink?
Do ghosts have to shave? Just like you?

Your foreign sadness

Saudade (singular) or saudades (plural) (pronounced [sawˈdadɨ] in European Portuguese, [sawˈdadʒi] or [sawˈdadi] in Brazilian Portuguese and pronounced [sawˈdade] in Galician) is a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. Saudade differs from nostalgia in that whereas nostalgia involves a mixed happy and sad feeling for the lost memories, saudade involves the hope that what is being longed for might return. Saudade has been described as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist,… a turning towards the past or towards the future”.[1] A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing.

(from wikipedia)

Most people accept that the term originated in a period of Portuguese exploration and discovery and was used to describe the sadness felt for those who embarked on journeys and were subsequently lost in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned.

It has since grown to be considered a Portuguese way of life, the almost constant gnaw of absence and lacking, the wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone.

In Brazil, saudade took on a slightly different meaning with the arrival of slaves from Africa and immigrants who both longed for their home countries. It was also felt in the sheer vastness of the country itself, which cultivated a sense of loneliness no matter where one chose to live.