tough cookie

I created this digie essay for a class. Look for familiar faces...

Baller of the Week

Read: Oh Christ I just wanted you to fuck me and then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me

...Ladies and....er, Ladies, Tracy Emin.

I just found out about this brilliant artist and am wondering where she has been all my life.

pleasures of the past, part one.

It is late summer and the sun is sad. It hangs in the lower in the sky just as my heart hangs lower in my chest. It’s still warm but not humid like it once was. The earth is gently setting us down from the summer high.

I walked down Loomis Street today. I’ve done it a million times before, although I’ve never almost cried like I did today. I headed to my old house to pick up mail but knew I wasn’t heading home.

My boots kicked dirt on the gray gravel driveway. Bikes crowd the wooden porch where mine used to belong there before it was stolen. I knock on the door where I once held a key. I enter a house where I once lived and breathed and loved. But today I am just picking up misdirected mail.

The approaching fall makes me intensely nostalgic. Nostalgia sneaks up on me just as the reds and the oranges sneak up on the green leaves. I have a longing to feel the past although my horoscope told me I ‘cannot fully embrace the exciting and daunting possibilities that loom ahead of you if you also insist on immersing yourself in the pleasures of the past.’

But today all I want are the pleasures of my past. I want to feel a warm hug from my sister. I want to taste the collective dinners and embrace the collective ideas. I want to wonder when I’ll stop giggling. I want to know that we’ll always be this happy; this young; and this close.

Every time has a season but I could live the pleasures of my past and the happiness of the sad fall forever.

blank walls

she's moved a thousand times and it's always the same: blank walls where her innumerable picture frames used to hang. dusty shelves where books and earrings and stationary used to gather. during each move (always in summer), sadness twists her heart into a knot that will surely burst and salty tears freely flow down her sticky summer-freckled face.

but this time is different. she's not crying. she can't cry. her age has rendered her emotionless or maybe it's her readiness.

still, i don't know why i took all the pictures down. i fucking hate blank walls.

It Wasn't Until Then

By Meredith Rivlin

It wasn't until i left your house that i felt the glass.

It wasn't until i left your house and decided to take the long way home,

past the painted water and mountains, on one of the sunny, earth-scented, spring days that could still be counted on one hand,

with an empty stomach because we didn't know if we should

eat breakfast or lunch

or stay in bed sleeping and fucking until the next morning.

It wasn't until then that i felt the glass.

It was sharper than a pebble in my shoe,

and was certainly not round.

It wasn't irritating like a pebble was, making you kick it

to the front of your shoe and keep going, or yelling

"wait up!" to your friends as they walked ahead.

Instead it was a sharp pain in my heel,

so painful that i walked on the toes of my left foot

until i got to a bench where i sat down and took off my shoe

and carefully peeled off my sock.

It wasn't until then that i saw the glass.

Well, i really saw the blood first,

where the glass had entered,

punctured through the calloused skin of my heel.

i nervously picked at it, desperate to get it out immediately

but thinking the worst:

It was lodged in deep;

it had broken into tiny pieces inside my body

i would need surgery;

sterilization;

this was an omen for more pain to come from you.

it wasn't until then that i wondered what had happened

to cause glass to be on my side of the bed, not your side,

where some of my clothes lay in a bundle,

a piece of glass sneaking its way into my sock.

i tried not to imagine you with someone else where i just

pretended to sleep while i really

looked at the spines on your bookshelf.

i didn't want to picture you with someone else,

having such wild sex that you broke glass and didn't even stop

to clean it up.
(I later learned that your landlord broke a bottle when repairing your refrigerator
and that you must not have swept it all up.)

It wasn't until then that i questioned whether i liked you

because of your hair and vulnerability

or because i was nervous that my number of sexual partners

could now be rounded up.

I grabbed the tiny point that hadn't been impacted

completely in my foot yet.

I scraped the skin around it in desperation,

close to panic.

I looked around to see joggers in spandex,

shaded people walking leashed dogs,

families on vacation.

How can they go on walking

when there is pain and metaphor happening!

It wasn't until i took a deep breath and pulled hard

at what had caused such pain

while Aesop's Fables ran through my head:

lions and mice and thorns,

unexpected friends coming

of stereotypical enemies.

It wasn't until then that i removed the glass.

I pulled out the triangular shard,

now tinted red

and a drop of blood

formed on my once impermeable heel.

But only one drop.

Love [is] the Drug

Walking to work this morning, actually walking to buy coffee from the cute new barista at Speeder and Earl's, I saw/smelled 3 people getting high on their ways to work. Got me thinking about getting numb before work to make it not as awful.
Maybe if you can't feel anything while you're entering data or doing things at your firm that people at firms do, maybe then it doesn't feel like a waste or a severe compromise.

Or maybe you only feel truly creative when you're high and then you can come up with really good names for files and titles for spreadsheets, meanwhile sketching trippy patterns and phrases that you will later transfer to a canvas and your journal. And then maybe you don't feel bound to anything; you feel free and light and part of the earth and the trees from where the paper in your printer came.

Maybe you've been smoking since you were a freshman in high school, or even in 8th grade, and now you can't function without weed; it feels more like you're on drugs when you're off them. You like the way your head feels and the way that music sounds and the culture and the experiences that you can't always remember.

And you forgot your lighter at home because you weren't stoned first, or else you would have remembered, so you pack your swirly-colored, hand-blown glass piece and use the matches you keep in your car for cases like this. And while you're stuck in traffic and listening to talk radio and news headlines, experiencing the truly tragic on your 15 minute ride to work, you strike the match and burn your essential green and inhale and hold the smoke in your lungs long enough to make you cough--that's the really good high--and now you're ready for work. Ready like having done your hair. Ready like having packed a 32 ounce thermos of strong Starbuck's coffee with low-fat half-and-half. Ready like having masturbated in the shower in the morning. Ready like having shaved your face. Ready like having put on lipstick and then having put the tube in your purse for touch-ups during the day. And you're ready to hold this vestige, this secret from coworkers, which would surely have you on the streets with little chance of being hired anywhere if anyone found out. And God knows, you don't want to end up like people like that.

The Senses of a Burlington Spring

(Photo and writing by Meredith Rivlin)

It snows in spring here too
when forsythia recalls foliage
and tulips bloom the rusty red
of fall when we
don't want to dread what comes next
and we sing and believe
when Simon and Garfunkel tell us
the green leaves will turn brown.

It snows in spring here too,
long after we've put away
boots and fleece and
wool and liners;
and long after we can't
remember the cold
digits turned purple from red
to white and back to purple again.

It snows here in spring.
Mid-spring, actually,
when you still need a blanket and
maybe to close the window at night.
But during the day as you ride
your bike uphill--
always up-Goddamn-hill--
a gust will spread the dandelion seeds.

And when it snows here in spring
it's just a flawed simile
because these seeds will replant
themselves in fertile soil and,
new, will soak up sunlight and live
on to have their seeds
blown in a gust of wind
or by someone making a wish or
trying to remember what wet snow smells like
but can't.
But the snow will stop. And start. And melt.
And thaw. And I wonder,
for another four months,
is it really connected?