Flowers.

Knowing I was feeling down, my best friend sent flowers to my work.

You don't find many people in the world who will go out of their way to do something nice, just to make you smile.  Thank you, Jenna.

I have a fever and I have knots in my stomach and a touch of depression.  "Take these pills, they'll help."  I'd take them but I know better.  I'll swallow the wine instead.  Prickly little pings and pangs of hope on the back of my neck.  Tick tock, the wall with the clock, tick tock.  I sleep with the lights on, now.  Are you bringing the white pills to the next meeting?  Are you bringing the blue ones, too, just in case?  If I go up, I'll need to come down before work.  If I come down, I'll need someone to even me out.

Her note said "I hope this puts a smile on that beautiful face". 

The two spanish guys at the gas station said "Mami, you're beautiful".

Jealousy.

One day we're going to find ourselves in front of a camera and it will be 3 in the morning.
We'll be talking quietly about the hardest part of being in love but we'll have no idea how we got there.
"Jealousy" we'll say.  Almost in union, in the same monotone as each other.
Your hair will be a mess and your head on my shoulder.
I might kiss your forehead and tell you you're predictable. 
"Jealousy" you'll say.
And the camera battery will die.

Crepes.

Tonight we ate apple filled crepes in the center of the mall food court.  I eat the slowest and push the whipped cream to the side because the sugar stings my teeth, but I lick the caramel from the knife before throwing my plate away.  I'm always choosing my sweetness carefully.
We got our ring fingers sized at the jewelry store because that's what girls are supposed to do, and I chatted with the woman behind the counter because she used to work with my father and thinks I've grown into a beautiful woman.  Her sister died in March and she wants me to remember to tell my father that.  She says it three times.  I have the largest size, the fattest fingers.  The fattest. 

There's an opened bottle of wine in my backseat when I'm driving home so I slow down around the curves.  I smoke three cigarettes and wish I had gone with the salad instead of the crepe.  I tell my father about the sister of the woman and he says "oh".

I have problems with tense in my writing.  I'm always in the moment, and then I'm not.

Carrots.

It has become routine to me to cry and then laugh, to eat and then purge, to sleep and then wake.
I take all things for granted, like the steamed carrots on the stove top, the honey in my tea, the warmness of his palms.
I mean it all in a good kind of way, and then I don't.

Omelet.

It's like when you come home and you want to cook an omelet
and you go to the fridge and take out the eggs.
But halfway through chopping peppers you realize you don't know how to make an omelet.
So you go online for a recipe but you get distracted by pictures of women in evening gowns with feathers in their hair.
And four hours later the eggs have gone bad from sitting on the counter for too long.
It's just like that.

Something About Something.

I want to be someone's something, or write a book and be someone's everything. 
You called me last night and hung up after one ring.  I need to learn to silence my phone when I'm writing.  The Sade song playing made me love you again when I was three verses into a poem about letting you go.  This happens all the time.

You sigh and I feel your breath and I love you.
You blink and your lashes spread and I love you.
You're drunk on the bathroom floor of the bar and I shouldn't be in the men's room and I love you.

I want to be something to someone, or everything to everyone.  Not famous, just not unknown. 
I write these words for you, but you're the only one who doesn't take the time to read them.  Maybe when they're printed and your name is on the dedications page you will stop and read and look at me with that look and pretend you understand.

Incomplete.

When I think about you, it is only in incomplete thoughts and when I write, incomplete sentences.
You are all I want, everything I cannot have.  You sing and I sang.  I think of you at all times and you think of me only when I am not thinking of you.

Things I know.

I don't know too much (mostly due to my adoration of fiction and hatred of the textbook) but I do know some things.


I know that Joan Didion did drugs and had a baby girl while she was writing in California and New York.
I know that we all wake up before we want to.
I know that blind people do not see blackness, they simply see nothingness, which has no color at all.
I know how it feels to burn my tongue on hot coffee.

I know that my legs are pale, but I wear dresses anyway.

I know that she was beautiful and I know that I loved her.  I know that I still do love her.  I know that she is gone now.

I know that I will miss Summer in the Winter and in the Winter I will miss the Summer.  I know I will never dress for the seasons.

I know how to fold paper stars.

I know I love him and he knows I do too because when I kiss him, I do it really slowly.

My Funeral

It's been raining and I've been at wakes and funerals and my friend had her baby and there are problems.
It's been rough and I'm tired and I use the word 'and' too much when I write, so throw out every draft and I start over and think about love and about art, but it doesn't help.

I drink coffee and I smoke and I eat soup without chicken in it.  I sleep all day and take off from work to sleep more.
Drowning.
I watch commercials and the colors are too bright.  I watch films in black and white and the noise is too much.

I don't cry and I ignore my emails. 

Comfort me.

Dollars and Sense.

Even when it is too hot to breathe steadily, I sleep with a heavy blanket over my head.
I spend money I don't have.  The rolled up red yoga mat by the door, the yellow dress hanging on the wall, empty journals, the black Victorian picture frame from the tea house (no picture in it, only the stock photo of an airbrushed blonde), three cans of tomato soup, make up, a box full of Indian tea.

$102.21.  Living "within my means" this week and next.  Two cups of coffee today. $10.

Coffee Dates

It was cold last night and raining and the sky was a mellow mix of yellow and magenta and his car windows kept fogging up.  All of the baristas inside know our names and know our orders and they greet us with smiles.  They're in on the joke and give us nicknames and extra shots of caramel in our lattes.  I eat the whipped cream with my finger and kiss his nose and they watch us.  We eat it up and snack on salty skin for dessert.  Lick lips, repeat. 

We leave and turn the heat on until our blood is boiling up.

I slept for four hours after our coffee date, after our sex.  My neck was sore when I finally woke and it was still raining.

The Sky Was Yellow Tonight

Runaway

I dreamt last night that my father had died.  This is a direct result of the fight we had two weeks ago and the silence that continues to follow it.  I want to do good things and I want to feel good.  I want to drink the wine and smoke the grass of the earth and have sex in $69 hotel rooms.  My Father, he said "he'll never love you."

He'll never love you.

I only try to defend myself when I know that I'm wrong.

My dresses are always a little too short and the only book I've ever written was a series of short stories about the sex I've had.  I smoke cigarettes and I smoke weed and if there's a chance for a shot in the back of a dim bar, you'd better believe I'll be the first one tilting my head back and slamming the glass back on the table.

What if the world were really going to end in 2012?  Would I stop?  Would I go at it even harder?  Would I stop trying to twist his words into something meaningful? 

Would I reconcile with my father?

Would I stay in bed and write poems about all of the Saturday mornings that I'd never get to see?

Smoking Music

There's a broken cinder block just outside the door if you go through the warehouse of the office and at least 5 times during the day I'll go and balance myself on it and smoke cigarettes.  There's a man who works at the company we share the building with, who has long hair and wears sandals and blue jeans.  He sits in the back of his red Ford pickup truck and plays the same twang-y tune on a fiddle every day.  Our timing is nearly perfect - when I'm smoking, he's playing, when he's playing, I'm smoking.  I watch him with some sort of fascination but I look away and blush when I see him turn his head to look in my direction.  I become overwhelmed with guilt, as if I'm watching some private affair, something I shouldn't be gawking at.  It's not that the music is beautiful (or even in tune most days), or that the man himself is attractive, it's more that there's a man in this cold-concrete-corporate parking lot and he's playing the fiddle and wearing brown sandals in the back of a red truck.

We've never spoken and probably never will.  When the winter gets here, just like last winter, I won't see him at all.  And then at the first sign of spring, when the snow finally melts from both the bed of his truck and the top of my cinder block, we'll return to our spots and he'll provide the smoking music and I'll provide the attentive audience.  It's kind of this thing we have.

Inspiration.

As with paper journals, I tend to begin blogs and leave them half finished, loads of blank pages after only a few entries of uninspired thoughts on men and love and glittering parties.  My intentions are always the best - to write each day, sit down and untangle the thoughts from my brainstem, letting them flow onto the screen and against all odds make sense of the hours.  But, my intentions fall like dust and that dust collects on journal after flowery journal and when inspiration strikes again and I sit down to write, I feel the nagging need to begin anew, to start over, a fresh start among all of the other fresh starts.  Each time I place my fingers to the keyboard, I start by telling myself 'this time will be different.  This time I will continue and I will not lose sight and even when a day seems entirely uneventful and there is no new love to speak of, I will write.'

And so now I am here again.  A shiny new blog in front of me, just waiting to be filled with stories and songs and photos and waiting to learn about me, and I say it again.  This time, this time I will write and I will not stop writing and I will find beautiful inspiration in the mundane days at the office, or the nights spent sitting alone watching sitcom reruns.  I will write because I have to write, because I need to write.

Welcome, reader, to Tired Foxes.

Tenderly,
Tired Fox