2 posts tagged “clearwater florida”
& it's memories that I'm stealing, but you're innocent when you dream, when you dream."
During the week days, the mornings are mostly the same. I used to fear the mornings because of “going through the motions,” because of the process, but now I enjoy it. I enjoy the ritual. I do it alone. I set the water to boil and go make the bed, I pour the coffee and while it cools I place myself on the hardwood floor &stretch my limbs in different ways. In a few paragraphs I will tell you everything, I decided to when the water was boiling. If you wanted this to be your business before, then here you go, it can still be your business now.
When I am off the floor I try and write, I have lost a story line, kept my mouth shut &forgot about plot, this morning I remind myself to take note of this again. I used to think simply in narrative, I could have delivered a voice over if you would have put a microphone inside of my brain, it could have been in all of your favorite commercials. I should give up coffee again, I did so well for a while, but now I’m back to it. The only reason I want to give it up is so I can start drinking it again. My roommate has a French press and when classes began this year I started pouring myself a cup. I would drink something, and then feel something. The fact that I could feel the effects of caffeine became a new & astonishing revelation. Caffeine existed after all. Something is actually there. There are things I know but that does not mean I really choose to believe them. Just because something happens to be a fact does not mean that I will happen to feel it.
Isn’t that right Alexander Graham Bell--why won’t you stop phoning me in the middle of the night? Isn’t that right Abigail Folger- - lying bloody on the floor?
My reaction to statements and questions is no longer answered with "I think" or "i know" instead I always say "I believe in that" or "I don't believe in that." My roommate said she was stubborn because three generations of her family are stubborn and I said "I don't believe in that.” I want to know what people believe in not what they think, not what they know tell me how it feeels. Everyone tears up in front of me all the time, so I just don't cry at all.
There are enough people crying around me. These days, I never have to cry for anyone. For years, I had to cry for them all. In all of my dreams there are cars and roads and motions that I cannot control. The roads go up mountains or the air and the world is usually desolate, there are not many people, there are things left over. In the dream I already know what's happened, but when I wake up, I can't figure it out.
You know, when I was in my last Florida relationship, I always drove down to St.Pete. My boyfriend and I both lived off of the same road, about 45 minutes apart. But it was the same road, Belcher Road, our houses were directly lined up on a map. It was a two turn drive. Left out of my parent’s driveway onto Belcher, down Belcher for forty, forty-five minutes, maybe longer maybe shorter, and then a left onto his street, there was his house. We both lived on cul-de-sacs, fake dead end roads. Mine was connected to a trailer park and his linked on to some neighborhood.
The thing was, I always made that drive. It was always me driving, in my car. First I called it the Drive of Shame, they thought I was funny, I made up names for things, I marked landmarks on the road i said "I've just driven over Jurassic Park" and they loved me. There I was, bearing gifts, shelling out hair products and advise and babysitting and it was always me making that drive, two times a day or every night. He didn't make that drive. And now, much later, I am glad he didn’t. I am glad that I don’t process the narrative that way, because then, my god, who would have had the right?
I became ac costumed to his house, his family, his bedroom. I watched his home movies, I went over his grandmother's, I went to softball games and I brought over baked goods. And in retrospect, I did this all for a person who knew so little about me, who really in the end doesn’t know that much about me at all. I never shared the good stuff, I was busy naming the streets.
I think if he was asked what color my eyes are, he wouldn’t remember.
I am absolutely sure he would have no idea what color my eyes are.
And it's funny, because I had no eyes back then. I didn't even have eyes. I covered them up. I made them bright blue, or dark green or hazel. I pushed contact lenses into them so you would never know. No one knew the difference, I could have said my eyes were born hazel and it would have been the same as giving a small child a balloon. And that’s the thing, I had no eyes back then, I had someone else's eyes, someone else's eyes, and someone else's family.
After it all ended, after he cheats on me and causes a scene like a toddler and I am exiled off the block, pulling at my own hair, I realize how some things are just for nothing. If I show up with a shampoo I don’t really have to share a part of myself, I just have to tell you what it does to the follicles of your hair. No one sincerely believes me when I explain how much I liked working at K-Mart or the mall when I was younger, but I did. I liked it because it had so little to do with me. I believed in. I believe in hair conditioner, I don’t believe in retinas.
One day in the kitchen, after I decided I would just move to New York, I told my mother "I gave them everything and now they don't even know me at all." Because he never knew my family, he never saw my home movies, he has touched my body one million times and he still if he saw me today would ask where I got that scar. And every time I told him a different story. He never caught on, he never remembered.. He never will. I could tell him
“I fell out of a tree,” “I burned to death in a fire,” “I fell down the stairs,” “I was bit by a mouse,” “I was born this way,” and each time he nodded his head, not piecing anything together. That was my fault. That was me playing the role of George, looking at Lennie deep in his eyes, he asks me where I got that scar and I tell him if he can just stay out of trouble, I'll let him tend to the rabbits.
"Oh will you? Will you let me tend to the rabbits, George?"
But that is what I Wanted love to be like. I wanted it to be easy, I wanted to be in control. And when the ball dropped, I lost it. I wanted to settle for something simple. My father would scoff in the beginning "stop referring to your boyfriend as simple, it makes him sound stupid." But he was both. He ate when he was hungry and he slept when he was tired.
There are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that eat when they are hungry and the kind that sleep when they are tired, and those that cannot manage to do either.
It figures, I have acted out all of my best scenes for a blind audience, I have given the best speeches to deaf ears.
And now I don't really love anyone, there is never anyone new. At some point I decided I would just never tell any of these stories. I would believe in: stories, feelings, hardwood floors.
I don't want to have to tell any of these stories, you know, even though that’s what I am doing right now. I wish I could hand over a transcript, some survey like the ones we used to fill out on the internet--- do you remember? First we would send them to each other in e-mails, then later on we would copy &paste them into our blogs?
That could just answer the questions for me. Name, Age, Place of Birth, Parents, Every school I've ever gone to, Everyone I ever made love to, Who my best friends are, What my parents do, What countries I have been to, What states. .
They could study it and get back to me and when I tried to kiss their mouths I'd realize that they had no lips.
They have no lips, my god, they have no tongues. It's all teeth, my god. I'ts all bone. It was all bone.
After I started having serious relationships at the age of thirteen, I kind of discovered that the pain would go away. Even if I was hurting, even if we were acting out the biggest scene, I gained some perspective that when I was older it really wouldn’t matter anymore. Yes, there are certain people that I will probably never stop loving, but then there are those who I never really loved at all. I could never be the victim in this story, just because I was stabbed in the front does not mean I didn’t bring it up on myself. I just wanted to be stabbed in the face instead of the back. It’s not like I picked my ex-boyfriend out of the crowd for his brain, it was more the fact that I liked the way he looked in pictures; I liked the fact that he had nothing to say and if I stuck to it my life would have no possibilities.
And I have blogged all of my serious relationships, it was just at some point that I stopped blogging the break ups, I didn’t write the bad parts down because then I would have been a failure. My perception became so skewed that I didn’t know what photographs I’d be able to accumulate for you. Back then, the mornings were never the same, I woke up at different times and did different things, there was no ritual it was just the mundane. You see, there were signs that said DEAD END ROAD but I thought because I knew the shortcuts, the side entrances, the best way to make a three-point turn that I could get to wherever I was going. And I don’t know if this will surprise you or not, but all the dead end roads were dead.
There was always something comforting in this idea that maybe I would never have to live up to any expectations, that I could have just been barefoot and pregnant on some shitty tile floor without a thought in my head. And then it’s over and you realize that maybe all the things you went through really weren’t that much, I want to say simple sentences like “get your idiot body away from mine,” or “don’t you ever tell me to get over anything in my life,” I will start singing to strangers: if you don’t know me by now, you won’t never ever ever ever know meeee, oooooooooo.
For two years I stopped writing the truth and instead just blurted out some vague sentences starring: Daniela Scrima! As Loopy Pieces of Metal! But now I don’t see the point in protecting the identities of the innocent, you know, I’ve been telling you this story since the day I was born, may as well not stop now, right? I don’t feel like it will be any fun of it’s all bone. What kind of ritual would I have if I spared your name? If I didn't ask you to tell me all of your dreams about owning this land, before I politely asked you to turn around &face that tree, you know baby, just so I could see the back of your head.
I don't know what made us want to find something like that so badly, but it's all I wanted to do. I had just graduated high school, in a few months I'd be moving away from everyone. We all took trips to the Super Wal*Mart together, and we wandered through the aisles of Target in search of the perfect twin extra long sheets. We did all the things that incoming freshman should do, we just also consistently went looking for ghosts. That summer was about a trip to Dunellon, nights spent in the old slave graveyard and endless drives around the abandoned mental institution. We hit up every website to find out where the ghosts were, checked all of "Haunted Florida," we were even willing to leave Pinellas County.
Looking back, I want to say that this was just what we did because there was nothing else to do. Now, Clearwater is not in the middle of nowhere. In fact- it is a hot bed for tourism, there are gorgeous beaches, and then little miniature golf courses scattered around among shops where you can get your named spelled out in sea shells. On the weekends you can do things like ride a jet ski, or go parasailing or do other things someone would do when they vacationed to the west coast of Florida. But you see, when you live there, you don't really do these things. You may go to the beach, but unlike the tourists, we don't swim in January. There are so many months left in the year with nothing to do, where you drive around and think "there is absolutely nothing to do".
So, wanted to find ghosts, or demons, or anything really. Sometimes we'd steal our father's flashlights, the very strong ones that they saved for the hurricanes (because when this story takes place, Florida is still plagued by storms) and we'd pack bags and look up directions and go and try and find ghosts. It wasnt only that summer - that summer when I swore I'd never go back, it was before then and after then, too. Even now when I visit we make a three hour drive to go to Spook Hill, we ride around in the Circus Town, we stare at the window. But I want to tell you about how desperate I felt when I did it then, how good I felt. It felt like sex for the first time, when you have sex when you're too young. You are in on a big secret that no one else knows about. You feel special and you feel disgusting. We fucked when we were too young and then we looked for ghosts all summer when we turned 18.
And all of the ghosts were supposed to be kept in grave yards. But I left for Ohio, after nights of abandonment and a going away party, I went to my grandmothers house and in many ways, I purged myself of the things that I had done wrong. I had this kind of insanity about me in high school that I don't think I can accurately describe because I just can't feel it anymore. I had some kind of anger, and then I went to Ohio. I spent two months in the summer there before returning to Florida to gather my belongings. I wanted to stay in Ohio because I had lived there until I was 8, and I had no choice about moving to Florida and I felt that it wasnt fair I wanted to give myself something back. And I didn't know that my grandmother would die or that I would fuck up or that I would leave and return to read some broken down eulogy .
But that summer I felt like everything was mine. The ghosts were mine and the house was mine and my freedom would be mine and I'd learn to stop writing, even in letters to men I'd never end up meeting, because I wanted some things to be personal. I go through these phases, like then where I don't want to share anything.
And then sometimes I am just Barbara Walters talking to Oprah Winfrey, I don't want it to be mine, I want to get rid of it. You see, now it's yours. You'll have to go there to Dunellon and see that church and ride in a car while the lights go out. You, you can go drink red wine in my grandmother's backyard and you can kiss the boy across the street. You can drive to the east coast of Florida on drugs with your best friends and decide to legally change your name to Aurora Borealis before the olympics or the floods or the concept of four or five years- now you can do that. There are one million things that I can never say anything about, so just let me tell you these things.
None of the ghosts would look us in the eye, you know, you know what? I don't even know if any of those places were actually haunted. I don't even know if you believe in ghosts at all.
