Journal Entries (Abridged): whiterabbit.doc

April 8^th, 2008

I’m giving myself 15 minutes for today:

My first memory is of being in the bathtub with whitney. We must have been 5 and 3, and she was licking and sucking on my feet to make me squirm, I remember the bathtub was only about a quarter or less of the way full, because the rest of the tub was filled to the top with bubbles. We had used herbal essences rose shampoo, the family favorite, to achieve this effect. Whitney kept saying she was just trying to clean my feet for me, but really she was sucking on them for no apparent reason. And I remember my dad coming in to yell at us for overfilling the bathtub; we neither of us had the courage to tell him that it wasn’t even half filled, that we’d deceived him with bubbles.

...It’s like I’ve been stuck in a still life in this family, and getting out means breaking down all the invisible borders and setting up some reasonable boundaries for what is certainly not a very reasonable family. I think I’m smarter than the rest of them, or at least I see more of the truth and acknowledge its existence. Whereas my father sees like a bull, reacting to the red-color of anything that sets him off (not as much anymore as when he was a younger man) and my mother somehow keeps herself apart from seeing her own emotional deformity, with which she has so aptly infected me. I fear life, even when I know I shouldn’t. But its to the point where I see everyone else I know growing up and balancing who they are and what they want and learning and they are becoming people in their own right. And I’m convinced that it starts with boys and middle school identity forming—something I was largely held apart from as the incredibly weird one...

Time is up, and this is cathartic crap.

Postscript: I want to write a novel filled with vignettes about all of the emotionally scarring formative moments in my childhood and adolescence, and at the end, write “but I grew up despite everything. Everything was alright and Alice recovered to become the women she was meant to be.”

5-09-08

I have become the archetype of our new generation

Terrified to grow up

Sexually underdeveloped and betroubled with massive daddy issues

They squeeze so tight to keep me young and cannot realize of their own intentions

As the fingers tighten to make my smile brighten

This is self-indulgence, but I know its high time I did a little something for myself

Outside of our own demented family

So aware of its own obliviousness that it can only live in denial

To keep going

Like Thomas the choochoo train

Like my grandmother as she watches my favorite man in the whole world shutting down

I’m sick of my perverse lack of self-interest

And I know she helps it happen

I’ve become so afraid of everything, and listening to her advice is what’s worst of all

When I forgot to speak it happened all at once and in the smallest of increments

A stutter that emerged just after everything had started to go my way

And then my voice got higher, as I grew aware of how anxiety plays a crucial role in tonality, what does that mean to me?

I only exist in a world of words, where nothing real ever seems to happen

Linguistics leaving me in lethal limbo

While my body calls out for savagery, hedonism

To make up for all the life I’ve limited myself away from,

My greatest fear and wish is to achieve invisibility

And it has finally started working

But now my body can’t seem to stop breaking itself down

I’ve gown asunder      

My father has bright red skin, freckled and brownish red hair

His eyes are brown with blue outlines, the result of too much time spent looking at computer screens

He loves me, but I don’t think that I’ve ever felt that love

Because he’s the person I’ve always been silently seeking the approval of

He was full of anger when we were little

And he loved to tickle me, as uncomfortable as that made me.

I was always very desparate for his approval, but I think that he always wanted sons and never realized

Maybe his own failures with women were the cause

I don’t know, and it definitely doesn’t matter anymore.

Topics:

Describe a relative

My favorite place

Vacations

Stars

Museums

[undated] 

The stars were never brighter than at our farm, or in the prairie wildernesses of Jim Vances' ranch in West Texas

We watched them hypnotized, always swaddled in blankets to keep to keep out the bugs 

The racket of noise was always unrelenting in those cicada summers,

The misquitos would flock to me, the wasps towards Whitney went

Yet our eyes were always firmly fixed on heavens’ bounty

Poem: 12 Steps to Home // Synastry

1.
Reckless children standing upright,

attuned to the racing whooshing of another night.

Embracing a chaos of echoes inside of the cool, earthy air

Like the wind is theirs, our own phantasmagoria.

2.

Or perhaps our boundless crematoria.

(Your hand, steadying itself against my waist, is like a specter.)

But then the whole night sky is a nebula, birthing out so many stars!

And the Moon is glorious and bright, though she pays her requite, always,

Of nectar kisses planted on the impact craters of Mars—as though she has none of her own cracks to tend    

3.  

Mars is this young one’s war-driven father, and I am sorry for his scars,

For the craters that kisses from paler planets cannot cover anew.

But everything is beauty now and it’s all at this one place in time, so let’s not falter over quarreling Mars and our proof of how feuded-over moments can cause caldera.

4.

This is the wickedness of youth,

For we are fearless, jolt-addicted and

Blind, even to truth, as wantonly, we chase away the dawn.

With endless grace.

5.

As Time hunts us with bizarre exuberance.

A dark road takes us out, and on, to a paradise—the world beyond our grey-stoned city,

For which we have hungered.

Like lions in an endless winter.

6.

You were then a magnet to me, now you are jumping on my trampoline,

First fuel to my hate-filled fight to escape this concrete town

Which you have come back to now and I am coming. I am making my way.

I. am. coming. To love. Again.

7.

But I find it inside myself,

Wherein my two minds, which were once in splinter-shaped constellations,

Have sprung apart and placed themselves again into starry assortments that have begun to demand:

I want the wind as it is inside the city,

I want the lit road back as it is taking me to you,

I want the echoes as they hasten by my ears,

to be rooted in the rushing race of nights anew

8

Yes, we are bright young things

Living in dreams, we who romance the night.

But we need more than a blue moon of reverie.

I need the way he made me feel, rushing through the woods

Brush bruises interspersed with sweet kisses, in every clearing.

But it’s not the boy this lion misses.

9.

It’s the passing of an hour, at the brink of night, within the secret spaces in my stony city.

In a sea of blissfulness, on a trampoline that gets us so high.

We are above that murky sky, which is a purple infinite hole in time and space.

And as the warm air diffuses the earthiness, a siren’s lulling song

We hold time a bit longer

By the grace of mind.

There’s no such thing as synastry.

10.

And then the dawn:

Brighter, Rooted in rock,

Brought back under lock and key. (But is your body next to me?)

11.

Looking ahead,

Remembering primitive times;

Cicadas now, instead of Stars.

Some trades are simple swaps.

Her cracks, and his scars,

But have you ever been the balm to someone’s grief?

12.

The relief, to have been in and out of touch,

To know his warmth and learn to live without

And to find again

If I die now,

I will have lived.