i am here to live out loud

“How have you been since we last talked?”

Quinn looks at her hands.  They’re balled into fists in her lap.  ”I’m fine,” she says.  She forces herself to meet the therapist’s gaze.  ”I don’t know what you want me to say.  I’m fine.”  Her smile is bright.  It’s beautiful.  She knows it is, knows she looks just like what a happy, pretty girl ought to look like, and she knows, from the way Dr. Baumgarten looks at her, that it is not enough.

*

Here’s the thing:  There are words that get trapped inside of Quinn, silences that fall out of her where confessions ought to be.  She’s not sure where it started.  With Lucy, the self she murdered, the ghost that haunts her.  With Puck and too much wine, with Beth, perfect Beth, too perfect for someone like Quinn.  It could be before that, with her parents and their ideal of who she should be — or even earlier, maybe, something in the way Quinn was formed, her chromosomes put together wrong, her soul delivered to her stretched-out and torn.  That’s how she imagines it.  Her soul is a second-hand dress that doesn’t fit.  It’s not really hers at all.

Quinn watches herself fall apart — but it doesn’t matter, does it?  Quinn, in the long run, is just some second-hand girl who never made one right choice, not once, in her whole stupid life.

*

(more to come)

Sorry for the lack of updates.  Finals week is descending upon me soon, and I am so much farther behind on everything than I realized.  However, I’m going to try to get back to updating this regularly (maybe every other day?) starting tomorrow.  I will break through this case of writer’s laziness, I will, I will.

“Hot cider,” she tells the man behind the counter.  She hands him her debit card.  “And a slice of pumpkin loaf.” 

“Coming right up.”

This is how she celebrates Thanksgiving:  a day early, at a cafe, working on a calculus problem set that’s not due for another week and a half.  Some would call that a little sad, maybe, but the thing about Genni is that she’s never been particularly invested in big holidays — or big families, for that matter.  Her father raised her and her sister alone, and aside from a year or two of adolescent angst, Genni has never really minded.  It’s been better, the small Christmases and Easters over the years, with just one gift and one slice of pie per person.

In the dorms, though, holidays are an event.  When given the option of going big or going home, the school goes big, so a remarkably slim fraction of the students go home this year.  Genni stays because she has to, but that’s not why everyone else is there.  They all want to see the decorations and want to eat the expensive food, to experience these few moments when the university shows some sign of caring about its students.

Genni appreciates the sentiment, but she could do without the turkey cut-outs and pilgrim pageants and the constant smell of something baking, despite the fact that the dining hall is two buildings over.  So she sticks with her solitary celebration in the cafe, and stocks up on hummus and pita chips to tide her over on Turkey Day itself.

A server brings her order to her.  The pumpkin bread slice is thick, grainy, already shedding brown crumbs on the white plate.  Rolls of steam pour off the top of the cider.  It is a beautiful meal, really, just enough — just right.

Except for the empty seat across from her, where her big sister should, would, be sitting, if she weren’t tethered to life support, immobile, all but dead for more than a year now.  And her father, there in the room, always.  Genni wishes she could bring him a pumpkin slice and a hot cider, wishes she could even look at him at all, the man she loves so much, who drove the car that ended her sister’s life.

She is thin.  At certain angles, she disappears altogether:  the bright scarf vanishing up the magician’s sleeve, the origami paper folded so neatly it ceases to exist.  Her ribs are a deep-runged ladder up to her heart, and her heart, they tell her, is too weak.

Touching herself, she feels nothing, not her paper skin and her thinning hair.  Her lover comments that her breasts have shrunk.  She doesn’t care.

This is a disease, this is a religion, this will kill her.  It is not what they describe in books and health classes, not what her well-meaning, condescending friends say they’re seeing.  She isn’t trapped her body, in her funhouse mirror vision of her hips and her stomach and her thighs, in some kind of social system of self-hatred and self-denial (though she hasn’t touched her meals in months); she isn’t just a sad case to be recounted in teen magazines, laid out between reminders to love your body and glamor shots of an actress who wears a size 2 but still gets a digital slimdown.

She isn’t her body — that’s the point.  She isn’t her body, her body isn’t hers.  She is free of it, at last.

This day, of too much wine and almost-happiness, with too many people and too many serious conversations, faces I don’t know, opinions I can’t account for, and all trying to realize that it’s not about me.  It’s not about me at all.

The candles blow themselves out, the song sings itself flat.  Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.

We fall asleep smelling of alcohol, and when I ask the next morning, we all say we dreamed of springtime, the smell of fresh grass.  The smell of the wind passing through the window, a winter chill in disguise, our bodies scattered like crumbs across the bedroom floor.  No one is hung over, but everyone stays for morning tea, watching the steam as it curls across the face of the oldest among us.

And many more.

This moment is for you.  Throw trash on the streets, throw caution to the wind, this world is fucked and the only you in ‘fucked’ is wedged between ‘f’ for funeral and ‘c’ for coroner.  Eat meat, and eat it rare.  Get a little taste of blood before your heart starts to cramp, and the doctor says spinach, broccoli, fish, the doctor says no beef, the doctor says no more cigarettes.  (Smoke a few of those too, after long days spent biting down on all the names you could call that bastard you work with, all those bastards you work with.)  Drink beer on weekends, vodka on special occasions, and only drink wine at weddings because it tastes like piss.  The fewer the weddings you attend the better, especially your own.

Don’t be an asshole.  Don’t cut people off on the highway.  If someone cuts you off, flip them off and, provided there are no kids in the car, call them what they are — dipshits, assholes, dicks — but don’t rear-end them out of spite.  It never feels as satisfying as you think it will.

If you sleep around, use protection, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

Look, kid:  Life is not much more than work and unhappiness and feeling gassy more often than your doctor thinks you should, but this, right now, this is yours, the one time in the world anything’s gonna feel easy and good, and if you screw it up by crying for home or acting like an essay is some kind of curse set down by God himself, then you’re a sorry sack of shit, and I’m not letting you come home for Christmas.

Well, maybe I’ll let you come home, but Lord knows you’ll be the one scooping the sidewalk.  That’s what adulthood means, in the end.  Scooping the goddamn sidewalk.

This is a writing blog.  Updates not-quite daily.