Beautiful Empty Things

The street at which I waited at the bus stop at 5:30am on a summer morning, watching the mercurial sunrise. It was empty and I felt like I was suddenly living in an Old West town where I could see the neat parallel lines of the roads stretching infinitely in both directions.

The cemetery with the elevated rows that seemed almost like a football stadium, it looked beautiful, like an empty auditorium where you could only see hundreds of identical seats, but no thrill-seeking revelers.

Each town looks the same to me
The movies and the factories
And every stranger’s face I see
Reminds me that I long to be
Homeward bound

All my words come back to me
In shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony
I need someone to comfort me

 

Things I used to believe

• I believed in the tooth fairy. My first lost tooth was exhilarating. It was the bottom center left incisor. I sealed it in an envelope and slipped it gently under my pillow. Two mornings later, the unthinkable, the magical, the incredible had happened. Gone was my tooth and left in its place was my present, a small calculator.
• As a child, I tried to deconstruct the building blocks of vocal performance. After watching The Little Mermaid for the thirtieth time, I asked my twin, “If I hum and you say the words to ‘Part of Your World’ at the same time, will it sound like someone is singing?” We tried this seemingly promising combination, but it fell short of my expectations.
• I used to believe that, when you got an eyelash or piece of dust stuck in your eye, the acids from your eyeball fluid would slowly dissolve the obstruction away, and that was why you could eventually stop rubbing your eye. I thought this solution was logical, so I put it to the test: If I get a giant rock, as big as my own body, weigh it first, and then press my eyeball up against it for a few hours, and then weigh it again, will the rock be a little bit lighter than before because the fluid in my eye burned off some of the rock?

The Rescued

On a Postsecret postcard in the early-mid 2000s
“Every time a car drives by
I hope it’s you
And you’ve come to save me
From killing myself
In this stupid town.”

In a tiger sanctuary in Florida
Zabu looks at her pretty white coat
And remembers those years of torture
She knows she never could survive
Out in the wild.

So they brought her here.
And thus she has been saved.

Her memories persist
Of all that awful quiet
Of not knowing.

In a dark empty room with a flickering bulb
A grotesque fairy cricket en pointe
Swims through the viscous air

She will not dare to
Hasten that need to fall apart
She does not believe
In reincarnation.

She only believes in the Falun Dafa
And yet she has never really suffered
Never been forced to flee from home
Never been awoken in the night
To such an urgent scream

When in the past it seemed impossible
To escape your caste in life
To rework your character
Before the curtain came up
There was little hope.

But after all the threads
Of your shallow tapestry
Become so tangled
You need not the infamy nor the shame

You have, in some ways, escaped.

Lanterns

As I would later learn:
Drunk promises
Are not lies.
They are wishes.

A closer thought reveals what is true.
The surreal truths are eventually mine
But only in dreams
And when she was drunk.

And what you take as sarcastic remarks
Are really my highest truths
Without pretense
We can talk about it
Most things we say are not jokes
But quite serious.

So I didn’t take it lightly
When she whispered in my ear
And the notes pounded
Into the ladders of our ribcages
Rythmic and heavy on our hearts.

Stepping on a cloud
Felt like a fluid draining swiftly
From my shameful body.

And all the strangers I talked to at the bar
Flashed their mediocre smiles
In the orange light
And wished me a happy Lunar New Year
As if they could ever compare
To her sunshine.

See your Gypsy.

Lightning strikes,
Maybe once, maybe twice
But it all comes down to you. 

Realize that nothing ever changed:
Clear a spot
In front of the attic mirror
Remember those innocuous summer days
Bursting with optical illusions
And MENSA IQ testbooks
Remember that a childhood home is comfort
And an arsenal of bittersweet

Ride a bike with your three closest friends
Make your way to a neighboring town
And rifle through the library archives
Looking for documentation of the accident.

Keep all her old letters,
Thought you might not know what to do with them
Keep it all together in your closet
And hope that you never grow old

And, wouldn’t you know,
They’re still there.
Those wild drawings in red pen
Bleeding through grey envelopes
Piled high in a padlocked box

Read them every summer
When you come home to clean your room

Think of an old friend who has died
When you stumble across her birthday card
Remember the way she used to sing.

Tugging on long sleeves,
You find more than meaning.

You see your gypsy.

Good parts of bad times

That horrible week my freshman year when somebody completely deceived me and manipulated me in the most unexpected ways. Getting drunk for the first time, my hair flying in the riotous lights, getting walked home by a friendly gay couple and waking up the next morning, on my 19th birthday. Calling her as I stared into the damp patterns on my pillowcase. She offers her honest, gentle concerns and volunteers to come over for some much-needed damage control. She’s such a smart girl, and I ponder while I’m at the grocery store picking up chocolate chip cookies, Why can’t I be more like her?

The first day of high school, when it rained all afternoon and I wore a white t-shirt. Coming home, sitting straight up on the floor against the couch, I stretched and practiced some of my spins. I remembered that I had left a movie unfinished from that morning. It was the ’80s action flick The Last Dragon, featuring Vanity, my precious heroine. I popped it in and continue to stretch, smiling bigger than ever when it got to the part at the end, and he realizes, he can defeat the villain because he’s got the glow inside himself. Implicitly, I also had this glow inside. It meant so much to hear that at the time.

Never let you go

I remember the stupid things,

The mood rings,

The bracelets and the beads

The nickels and dimes

Yours and mine

Did you cash in all your dreams?

Remembering all those times we saved each other and refusing to let go of the feelings, rushed, I wish I had more than tokens of nostalgia to hold on to. I wish I had read more books as a child, like her, so my imagination could have flourished. Hoping that we wouldn’t have to end up in mental institutions like some of our childhood literary heroes, we pondered on with our green lives, and every precocious discovery seemed like a graceful accident.

Picking up bottle caps off the ground, not knowing which drinks were beer and which were soda, I strung them onto pendant necklaces. I liked the purple ones the best and I wanted so much to have some sort of style. My mind was twirling with Twiggy and Swinging London, the Summer of Love ’69 and First Avenue funksters. An empty glass bottle, smashed against the middle school exterior wall, was the ultimate in rebellion. We reveled in the skate park under blazing suns.

Back then it never seemed like we would face adulthood, and it still does not seem quite real now. How have I held on to the token, the memories, the nicknames for so long? We still think that swinging is the #1 funnest activity in the world.

Point Zero (at the Altar)

It feels rather pathetic for us
To have our lives made
By something so small.

A compliment received
Walking down the hallway
Between classes
Staring at you
Since 20 feet away
Shaking in my boots
“You have a tiny waist.”
Splat.

And in a magazine
Women everywhere have high hopes
“My name is Tahyna
Mom read it in the National Geographic
It’s Polynesian for ‘daughter of the wind’.”

Daughters rise in the ranks
And send home gregarious Christmas cards
And even the most independent friend
Waits shamelessly for that man
As if we all had the same father
The same savior
As if we were a cozy cult.

I should realize
There is no special designated time
To think about things like this
Tilting my head because I
“Only wanted one single thing
To lift my hand and bring it
Smashing down on his face.”

Things I figured out too late

A semi-clever answer to an instantaneous and fair question, standing up at the blackboard, covered in dust, looking side to side. Seven seconds of silence and we’re over everybody’s awkwardness threshold. Everybody squirms. 

The fact that most important things need to be asked for months in advance. And even then, you can never be sure you’re going to get it. How to deal with uncertainty and not overcompensate for it (still waiting for that one.)

That people are more important than places.

How to say to her: I love your anger. I love the way you absolutely freaked out at that negligent driver on the highway bridge and yelled curse words for me into the dead of night that summer. I loved your craziness and every single thing that you did. At least I do now. How does it feel, now, to know that you could do literally anything and still have my love? I bet it would feel good if you knew it.

Hazy Days

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On my morning walk there is a raven
Perched upon a skeletal tree
Shrouded in colossal snow tufts

The trees are stick-thin, brittle and broken,
So they remind me of you
Way back when your ribs poked through
And there was nothing within I could quite console

Do you remember the time
We cried together at the library
We hid our hugs between the bookshelves,
And then in the teary haze when we walked home
A commiserative silence

Now I am back by myself
You are in the company of good friends
And my friends only know you from stories

The short walk uphill becomes strenuous
Stepping on bottle caps
And kicking out rubber bands
Without the right winter coat
But it still feels normal
As I have never been in season.

What used to make me feel so thin
The chill of cold air
Passing clear through my body
Is now a harsh reminder
That I still do not have you
Completely

I wish I were a dark bird
Like this dear raven
I would fly alive in a greyish haze
And always be able to find you.