Be Careful What You Wish For

When I was younger I wished for a lot of things. I wished and I dreamt all the time. The lines of reality blur themselves when you can’t separate your dreams from your life. That ability to see things somewhat distorted may be a trait of the woman in my family; who to say the least are a tad eccentric. When I was a girl my nanny would tell me ghost stories from Yugoslavia, with gypsies, love, murder, curses, and revenge. She’d talk about how you should never live in a house with odd number addresses. She’d watch me rub my fingers over ivory carved earring with pictures of sailors and speak of the man that hung him self in the barn of their upstate New York home. I’d dig through trunks full of antiques and old photos…always stopping to read the names and dates on the back. My favorite activity consisted of standing outside under a full moon with a pocket book open and the moon light shining on lotto tickets. Yes my Nanny believed that the moon light was going to give her and those tickets the luck to win big. There was a house she had always dreamed of living in…in some rural town in Ohio. A mansion with a guest house, stables, and a long driveway where depression era black Fords came and went carrying some rich family dressed in beautiful clothes. People who got more than one pair of shoes a year and didn’t have to share a bed with 3 sisters. I don’t believe she’s ever won more than a few hundred dollars in her lifetime of lotto playing. I also doubt she’ll ever be a part of the home she dreamed of. But it didn’t stop her. Not all miracles happen over night. And not all luck is the kind you expect. Even as I grew into a young adult I continued my wishing; sometimes for the material…and sometimes for the magical. For my twentieth birthday my biggest wish was for the restoration of my hope in PC. A royal fuck up he had been for me recently. We fought more like the married couple (who should have waited) than friends. A few weeks before my birthday things took a turn for the worse. He suddenly stopped calling…and more saddening for me is when he stopped answering. I became increasingly worried that something was wrong. I’ll admit I pried. I questioned. And I damn near begged for answers. “What’s wrong? Where have you been lately? You look different. You look at me different. No you’re not fine. You’re hiding something. Why can’t you look me in the eye and say that? Who are you right now? I’m Sharon remember? I’m your best friend. If it wasn’t for me right now you’d have no friends. Oh you don’t need anyone, that’s right. You’re a wall. You’re a fortress built of glass and I see right through everything you pretend to be. God damn, out of everyone in the universe to confide in you can trust me. Fine then. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. But remember when you said you wouldn’t throw me away like everyone has. Remember when I told you I couldn’t stand to be disposable. I did everything I could do to care for you and be the most positive light in your life and all I asked in return for was the truth. You’re a fucking coward and I hate you for doing this. I hate who you’re being. And I miss who you were.” We didn’t talk for a while. I tried my best to stay out of his way. But it was a story that was always at the tip of my tongue. I was angry and I felt jilted for reasons not explained to me. So a typical feeling for me to have was guilt. I somehow blamed myself. I had done something but I didn’t know what it was that pushed him away. It was a quiet sadness that took up my life. And it was around the time I stopped being able to look any male in the eyes for more than a few seconds. I couldn’t hold my focus. I couldn’t control my emotions. And I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was that caused this tragedy in what had been such a beautiful summer thus far.

oh ocean

when you are young people throw the girl scout philosophy at you that you can be anything you want to be

but this is not always true

you can't be born in a particular place or to different people

you can try and steer your future in a general direction but inevitably it will go where it wants to take you

you can also not change your form

as hard as you may wish you will always be human...no matter how inhumane some people grow to be

so it one of those restless evening that i sit atop the sand in my home town and stare off into a dark endless ocean in sheer jealousy at it's depths

i grasp deep fists into the sand close my eyes so tightly that the corners wrinkle like they’ve been sliced in with swords

wish as hard as i can that i might be a part of it

that my body will dissolve into the sand

that when the ocean wanes forward i am picked up with it and dispersed

somehow becoming omnipotent

when the waves rise and crash against someone’s skin i can feel it

to know the movement of every creature amongst a vast sea

to bob back and forth with a school of fish
a many that becomes a whole

to feel lovers slowly trace their prints across my shores and hear the words they speak

to know an innocent love

to feel eternal

to be shoveled up into a pale and built up into a castle

then to be knocked back down again hours later

to see every side of the moon’s lights and the shadows cast by it

sunburns and family outings

picnics and surf lessons

and a power that i will never know

winds so ferocious you couldn’t tell me they didn’t feel emotions

picking my waters up and slamming them against the jetty

tearing down sea walls and ripping the sea oats out like the hairs on the head of a nervous and troubled woman

unpredictable unknowable strength

lightening bolts that reach deep down within me but can do me no harm

and clouds ridden by grey ghosts that lay heavy upon my body

to be as fickle as i dare

for amongst the peak of my rage i would drop my winds and throw the clouds off me like a winter coat

and all would be calm again

a mirror for the ages

uncorrupt but not for lack of trying

so only my human tears seep into this sand for it is all that i can do to release myself upon it

hope that my tears travel in the midst of the ocean and spreads themselves to the places i will never see

i can not be the sea

and i can not know the sea

i can only wish selfishly and whimsically for what i want within a dream and in my dreams i will have you

oh ocean with sand and waters

with moon and wind

with clouds and lightening

with life and death

and everything that light and air can and cannot touch

for infinite depths

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person.

We went to a party once on the beach. Everyone was dressed in black and white. There all of them from my high school I never talked to spun around us like drunken winds. Yes and you were there and you were there but oh Auntie Em you were not. But he was there, and I was there, and then so was she. She being the prettiest ugly step sister that no one should ever have. The best friend and the most wounded of birds I should ever have the displeasure of caring for. But at the time I had no idea she would become as toxic to me as she would become. It was your typical Florida summer night beach culture party. I was unfortunately too sober because I remember how hot and humid it was. You can never feel as cute and desirable as you wish to appear when the weather is against you. Teenage hopefully romantic terror is realized when you hair flattens and your eyeliner begins to melt. We sat outside on the deck as the party buzzed on for hours. It was a black and white sideshow. There was your inside bar with a looking to get laid college dropout pretending to be a bar tender. There was your posse of under dressed (nearly naked) 18 year old something or others dancing on tables. There was the odd party host walking about with a snake around his neck. He later for some reason ends up on the roof. How he got up there and how he gets down I never found out. And then there’s the drunken stranger wandering in the parking lot next to the house. We watch this man for nearly an hour stumble around the cars. He’d fiddle with the locked handles of several cars only to be defeated and then rest upon their hoods for several moments in a near comatose state. I thought the highlight of the evening was watching this man piss all over parking lot. We laughed endlessly as he tried to scale the deck. He’d tug at the bricks and try and pull himself up but would repeatedly fall back down. Eventually someone pulled the stranger up to our level. Well of course he decided to sit right down…into my lap. I immediately leapt up to get away from the drunken stranger who had just urinated in the parking lot and not washed his hands. But he grabbed me and pulled me back at him. So I began to struggle with him and scream. I thrashed back and forth but he was unbelievable strong. Well wouldn’t you know that at that moment PC jumped up and did something almost heroic. He pulled the drunkard off me and started fighting with him. The couch we were sitting on went flying off the back of the porch. And poor PC was trapped in a huge headlock. It’s silly I know. A headlock of all things isn’t so noble. But it was knightly enough for me. Eventually the two were separated and the drunkard wandered off. I was still terribly shaken up…well because I am dramatic. After disappearing to go smoke my evil stepsister let’s call her M.E.S.S. (My Evil Step Sister) finds myself and PC terribly frazzled, but doesn’t have the capacity to care much at all. So PC insists on driving me home and then says he’ll go back and pick up M.E.S.S. when she’s done drinking herself into a coma. Oh I think I’ve forgotten to mention something important. PC has a secret. For weeks he teased me with it. He’d say there was something important he wanted to tell me but then would never have the courage to say it. Well obviously the not knowing was killing me. I detest secrets. So as he’s driving me home I’m drilling him about what he could possibly be hiding from me, but he managed to deflect my questioning with charming comments as always. I never knew which way was up when he talked. I found myself lost amongst the lies most evenings with him. It wouldn’t be until my birthday party that he would finally tell me what he couldn’t manage to say all that time. I can recall driving home alone that night after he dropped me off at my car at M.E.S.S.’s house. He said something witty and closed my car door for me. The moon was huge and there was water puddled in the streets from the afternoon rains. I called a friend who had moved away nearly a year before. The friend you always call when things don’t make any sense. You don’t call to complain or for them to fix your problems. You just call to listen. Because the sound of their voice makes you forget how upset you were. They’re the friend you put up on a pedestal as being greatly intelligent and intuitive. And they’re the friend you wish you could be more like. I did feel better after we talked like always. But that didn’t stop me from sitting in my driveway for an hour. I cried a lot that summer, more than any before and hopefully more than any to come. I cried because I couldn’t understand my situation. I wondered what PC wasn’t telling me. And most of all I cried because I was lonely. I wanted him to love me so that I could understand love. I wanted him to realize that he needed me. How deeply I needed to be needed would lead to my own destruction.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

Sometimes it’s so hard to speak about the past when you’re seeing it from such a new angle. What was once so innocent now makes you cringe with regret. The nights I once spent laughing with friends and running through the sand seem more like dreams now. I will try and explain the events of that summer as I saw it then but I must speak slowly because every moment I force myself to retell become so painful. I think that this last year was a scab that I wouldn’t let heal. I kept picking at it and watching it bleed. I spoke so often of what happened that I couldn’t move on with my life. And all though I can still see the scar I believe that even that is beginning to fade. So hopefully this will be the last time I tell this story. I don’t want to forget any of it regardless of how sad it can make me, because I have learned so many lessons. I’ve grown so much with my mistakes and it has made me who I am now. Yes I am somewhat bitter, but so much wiser. And best of all free from all of it.

There I Was Waiting To Be Rescued

It was with a pocket full of stardust that I started the last summer in Dirtona. I had someone new to idealize. I had a perfect prince-like figure to place on a golden pedestal (or perhaps a pedestal of golden painted starbucks straws). I felt as if I was always reaching up at the image I thought I needed the most. That there were moments I almost held it. But every time I thought I was making progress what little hope I had dissolved and was blown away with the wind. It was always back and forth. Two shy and carefully executed steps forward and a then the eject button that would always catapult me 10 steps back. One of my favorite memories was when the prince was house-sitting over the summer. But this was no ordinary house. This was the gorgeous river front home of two very wealthy doctors, with many pricey items adorning their home. It wasn’t just me who fell for the smiles and perfect lines…I believe that the prince had be trusted by adults all his life. If I was a doctor with a million dollar house on the river I would think twice before letting a friends son “house sit” for a month. Because in young man terms house sit is merely a synonym for “throw a bunch of parties and try to not break too much”. Over the course of this month PC and I seemed to be playing house. We’d go grocery shopping together and get food for the house. We’d throw parties that always ended badly. They’d start with me dancing like a lunatic to an 80’s mix cd in the living room and the boys playing quarters on the 3,000 dollar wood dinning room table. Sometimes things ended with me drunk and crying on the dock in a little black dress because I knew PC was in a bedroom with a girl who wasn’t me while I waited for him to come to his senses to come find me…but he never did. Sometimes the boys would get too rowdy and stuff would get broken…well actually that happened every time. I’d cook and oh god would I clean! I was there every morning after parties helping him clean up. Telling him he was patching a hole in the wall incorrectly, and occasionally doing the laundry when his friend spilled root beer snaups all over a white blanket. We’d stay up late talking and watching movies. He’d pick out the red gobstoppers for me out of the movie candy. It was for a very short time like I was living my sick urban American dream. It’s a funny thing when you start wanting something you’ve made fun of all your life. It’s like going into the store you hate the most and trying on clothes that you end up loving, but you still pretend to hate them because they stand for everything you don’t. PC and my pretend marriage was an Abercrombie and Fitch polo with matching denim mini and cable knit sweater. It made me sick and cost too much, but fit together perfectly. I was playing the little house wife. But like with most house wives there was no real romance…at least not between us. Get the Prince drunk enough and he’d screw any blonde that landed on him. But not I, I had too much pride to ever try. There was always tension in the air. Words flew throughout the spaces of our lives. And I felt so passionate about him. But it seemed like it would be forever before anything would happen. I waited. I was always waiting. There was one afternoon that we sat for hours playing cards in the living room. It poured all day outside. And I watched the river through the huge windows that wrapped around the house. The gray afternoon kept us safe and tucked into our little house. Those were the best times, when it was just the two of us. When it seemed there was no one else on the planet. I’d never been as content just sitting and doing nothing then I was with him. I’d be reading a book next to him on the couch as he watched TV and neither of us spoke. Not because we were mad or didn’t have anything to say, but just because we didn’t have to. The company was a million words for me. My silence said “I love being here with you and I wished you’d seen what a good thing is staring you in the face.” And his silence said “well I have a secret that’s about to break your heart.” Not exactly what you thought he was going to not say huh? Yeah I didn’t see it coming either.

You may say Im a dreamer, but Im not the only one.

So once upon a time in a land not so very far away this little dreamer met what she thought was to be a shinning white knight. His arrival was greatly anticipated. Being the first boy we had had in Starbucks in over a year and a half. I felt an instant connection with the would be prince. His smile was absolutely illuminating. And of course he possessed one of my favorite qualities; sarcasm. I felt like I laughed all summer with him. We sparked together, finally I felt galvanized by someone else’s presence. It was hard to believe when the phone was always ringing with someone who wanted to talk to me. Someone who called for no reason at all but to talk about their day and listen about mine. That the line at chickfilla was long on his break and the syrups had changed at our store. I wonder when talking about nothing for hours ever became so interesting. I cared about every minute detail and hung on every word. I was perfectly content lying in the grass in my backyard talking on the phone until my ear nearly bled. I thought at the time I was building a strong friendship that would soon become a budding romance. I built a hundred stories with that boy…memories that rose up like a great wall. A wall that I thought kept us safe and close, but soon I would be looking up at the wall alone; blocked off from him and everything I thought I wanted. He made me question everything I was about. I tried things I said I never would…because god knows as stubborn as I say I am I will always follow the lead of a dough eyed boy who feigns interest. I became so caught up in liking him. It’s a strange thing when you feel yourself falling but don’t try and stop it. I let go whole heartedly. Never before had I been so sure of anything. In my mind it was so set; I liked him and he liked me. And that maybe just for once everything was going to work out ok. But I just kept waiting, and waiting, and then waiting for something to happen. But what happened I could have never fathomed. If you had asked me a year ago the likelihood of me being attacked by polar bears who spoke perfect French or falling for some silly boy, going half crazy, and moving to Orlando I think I would have gone with option A. I’ve sat here at this computer trying to type out an explanation for 9 days. And I feel that the best thing to do to make you understand my involvement with Prince (but he seemed so) Charming is to tell the events of the last year in a series of very detailed stories. And that you may deduct any conclusions yourself. Because how can I ever explain to you in a few short paragraphs what has happened to me. From who I was to who I became. And maybe sometime by the end of this we will all get a better understanding of who I will be. So hopefully through my words you will get a sense of it all. That you may smell my tears, hear my laughter, and feel my heart beating from anticipation to disappointment. Yes I’ve always lived my life as if it was a movie. Those cameras are always rolling. Not that I am in any way an actor playing a role of someone else. Just that I am always playing myself to the fullest. And that I always seem to be getting played.

Beyond the looking glass

So how does one end up in this place? Down the rabbit hole. From one beach side burnt out 80’s tourist town once made famous by MTV spring breaks to the city where all your dreams come true. Yes I left the sound of screaming NASCAR fans and the sands of the world’s most famous beach for the sparkling city of Disney magic and the Orlando magic. Though Shaq left years before I arrived the place was at no loss for stars. It seems like every person I’ve met here has a star like story to tell or at least that movie star attitude. I myself am an admitted drama queen. I was fed up with my life in Dirtona. I was barely ever going to school; aside from the occasional hippie dippy art class I took I wasn’t doing much. Since High school graduation I fell into a 2 year limbo. I didn’t want to think about the future. I didn’t want to grow up or move on because I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. It seems that I had maybe dreamed too big for too long. Maybe someone should have sat me down sooner and told me that it would be pretty difficult to find a college where I could major in being a princess\rock star\ballerina\millionaire\cupcake taster. I had too much pride and I was too scared to take that leap into adulthood, because failure was not something I had faced before. My peter pan complex left me spending my mornings sleeping later than I should just to drag my ass to the beach just to lie around for several more hours. I traveled through my days with ipod buds in my ears and the thoughts of what could but would never be blasting though my head. I spent a lot of time trolling the local thrift store for vintage jewelry and handbags or sweating away my formally very large body in the gym. Many of my evenings were spent with what few friends I still had in town. And we thought we owned that sand bucket. We were legends in our own minds. Just a few silly girls who dressed like they were New York elite and spent 3 nights a week eating at swanky sushi restaurants when we were in actuality still living at home with our middle class working parents. Each of us was grappling with the end of our teenage years in our own way. We’d drive around A1A with our windows down and the speakers blaring, dreaming of when we’d get the hell out of this place. We were living in a salt air dream world. A world I’m now trying to balance with the real one. Oh here now I’ve forgotten to mention my once favorite Dirtona activity; working about 20 hours a week at Target Starbucks. Inside that store I was in charge. I may have not been the officially boss but I oversaw so many aspects of our little coffee world. And I was never as happy as I was when I was in control of things there. It was a sick sort of power trip, but the role of leader I loved playing. It’s funny to think back on things and realize where the changes began. These changes lead to me in a period of two months secretly saving up enough money to escape Dirtona and start a new life here. I would have to say my caffeine kingdom started shaking at the beginning of last summer. I had in my two years of working there been through my fare share of target employed frogs. From every department they came with smiles, jokes, and broken promises. And I fell for every line. Because I am now and will always be the most hopeless and helpless of romantics. Yes their antics caused plenty of heartache and awful teenage poetry but none rival the summer of Prince (But He Seemed So) Charming. I actually think now is a great time to pause for the evening because just thinking of how much explaining I have to do makes me sleepy. Maybe it is best to wait until another entry to introduce the next character in my Fairy Odd Tale. So until we meet again my fare friends and subjects sweet dreams.