they've got a wishbone where their backbone should have grown

"Have your coffee and stop your crying," my alarm goes off and I say this to myself like I am a strict mother giving a proper scolding. I've made the bed before I am barely even out of it. "I believe it was just the dreams, I believe it is just the weather."

Yesterday my roommate cried in the kitchen so I gave her a hug and used my fingers to wipe away her tears. I don't like to get like that in front of anyone and it's funny, because I can usually only cry late at night or early in the morning. I feel like it's daylight savings time. It's like I let myself relax enough in my sleep that something goes through the surface.
So this morning, upon rising, I burst into tears. I put my head in my hands and I take my hair down. There is water next to the bed. I drink it slowly as if something has actually happened, as if this is a reaction.
"Make your bed. Get dressed. Get a hold of yourself."

If anyone who loved me, or did not love me, was here they would say "enough with the theatrics, Daniela," they would say "is there a reason to be this dramatic right now?" I do it in front of no one. Wash my own face. I think the last thing I said to him was that I wish I needed nothing just like the story in the book.

I put "Sodom, South Georgia" on the record player because I've learned how to move my finger to the line. all dead white boys say God is good. White tongues hang out. God is good. I want to talk to Jackson but I can't feel where he is these days. You know how sometimes you can tell with a person? You can feel it with them and you can tell? I can't tell. I can't tell and I should have given him (and many other things) up for Lent.

I don't know how this happens to me constantly in New York City, but I don't own an umbrella again. I have the proper boots now. The proper stride. I can look straight ahead, but I don't know what I've done with the umbrellas. The subject line refers to chickens. Once I met a man and he loved penguins. I believe it is evident in a woman's face if she rode horses when she was a girl.

And here we go again we are back to my thoughts that don't come as thinks it is only "I feel" or "I believe" suddenly it is not "I think" or "I know" Suddenly I am telling strangers what I feel about their fingers. I put "Coxcomb Red" on the record player because once, a boy who kissed me in a dorm got me high and then got me into the band Songs: Ohia. I could see the May 4th Memorial from out the bedroom window and at any moment where I could see a massacre, I felt like things were meant to be. He told me the song reminded him me, and because I was eighteen, I did not believe him. Now that is the only compliment. You'd think it be different, that I would have trusted more than. But later on in cars with men and boys listening to the radio or complaining about a tape deck, I learned the reason all music had ever been written.
Just tell me this song is about me. Make it up.

I was talking to my 'intern', who allows me to call her that or puffin or butter cup, and I was telling her that I wish I would have moved to New York when I was 21. It seemed like it would have been this exciting, outrageous thing to arrive here at that age. A sat for a minute with the months and then I remembered that I did. I did move to New York when I was 21.

I did move to New York when I was 21. I did learn how to cry without an audience. In the beginning it was all fancy dinners and social climbers, but then I couldn't keep up. I thought we were really doing it for the arts or we were really doing it for the cause or we were doing it for the charities and then a woman who I admired very much told me to apply fake eyelashes and lose fifteen pounds. And I would have loved to, and maybe I did, maybe that did happen. But I still think if I did it, it was for the right reasons. It was to build the well, not to wear the dress.

People talk to me about regrets, about the news, about the economy. Friends act as if they are phoning to let me in on the real world, as if I have cut myself off from some thing that is actually going on. They begin with "have you heard?" and they ask "so what do you think?" and I watch the old ladies cross the street and I am happy that I can record Democracy Now on DVR because lying on the couch and seeing boring faces is the closest I can get to sitting in a car and waiting for the light to turn green.

The voices on the phones, seldom, rarely, I answer-- I don't listen to what they say. I've learned to tune into the AM radio now. If I am lucky I get a preacher all the way from Tennessee and he promises me salvation. "Get out of bed and drink a cup of coffee." And because no one wants to hear about it, because no one wants to pretend the lines on my face are the lines on records, I wipe them off myself. I feel and I believe and perhaps after I've dressed and washed my hair I too will become enraged about all of these scandals. Oh these scandals! Going on right before my eyes. I too will phone to tell the news; I too will think.