For one of my musician characters cause the one I originally picked, in addition to being a bit long to roll off someone's tongue, is a bit too much like a band in one of my favorite books.
just in case I publish it, Derek plays for Lost Dutchman's Mind, now.
it should be easier to share about love, than, like, vomit, Simon-style gritty details aside. Sometimes I think I still compare myself to some image of a take-charge Crippled Lady in a work blazer that always knows what the right call is--this isn't that, which still makes me shy, but not as if I did something *wrong*, like, I don't know, give someone a big kiss so my brother could stick his hand in the guy's wallet(as if my brother and I cooperate that much, ha) For the Get Your Words Out "love" challenge:
Most people my age don’t keep such a record of a weekend’s worth of kisses. Usually, there’d be so many memories like that from which to choose, my current task might well be editing the unseemly ones to make a better example for a curious daughter or niece. In our family, we are fraught breeders and never have gotten down to it, there isn’t much to scrub, and the love that jump-started that weekend of kisses has outlasted more than a few marriages, just because it’s been so damned long since we shared it. Maybe it’s easier that way. Maybe he doesn’t have to see how much I hate to start the day, or I don’t have to know that, despite his mastery of advanced math, his virtual checkbook is fucking hopeless. (I don’t even know this, but it wouldn’t surprise me somehow, Capitalism is not very kind to either of us, although it’s more that it never knew me than that it turned on me, as with my beloved.)Maybe that makes it easier to keep hope alive: the fact that we have to close the door on other things to make room for the virtual sweet talk.
It's probably strange that the same person can make it possible for me to type such a spectrum of words, both “fucking’ and “beloved” being outside my lexicon at one time, not really the same time, but weird or not, it’s kind of true. One thing I found online, without even truly searching, was my perfect audience. Which, of course, in Movie World, would make us everything to each other in ways that would blow a hurricane through our present lives.. As the one with less to lose, sometimes I’m sorry we don’t live in Movie World, once in a while., but of course, I’ll live in this one. And if Eros is holding out on finding partners for me because I once imagined, with a tiny streak of girlie sadism, bumping into him after somebody else has left me all glowing and shit, he or they can stop, as these days he means too much to me to imagine rubbing his face in anything but, maybe, my cleavage.
She thought that if this was all that would happen for the rest of her life, she would be safe, but sad, wheelchair rooted to the spot, growing vines and shedding operating systems. She knows a lot about the habits of gratitude, though it was forced on her only slightly more lightly than Christ upon most of her ancestors, she was happier when she practiced it diligently. She wonders if she has been really happy since she got on the people-mover, which, at some point, stopped moving for her, and she doesn’t know what to do besides sit, and sometimes take out a notebook to jot snarky things about the young and pretty people who reach their destinations. It’s not enough, but nobody but Erika expected that she’d make it here, just like when she was the third-grader who read like the sixth grader, only it’s hard to skip ahead in the twenty-seventh grade.
Her friend, in another state and state of mind, looking back over a life to which she may not fully return, as if at a happy childhood or at heaven. What would that be like? To yearn so fiercely for what you already have? Maybe she wanted to stay in third grade that much, but there were no vows exchanged. Only really crazy people said that watching Erika in third grade gave them hope so that was a natural, unnatural motion. Like standing on the people-mover at O’Hare Airport, except with time to fight with her brother and get clothes and haircuts only slightly behind the style, like all knock-offs.
Who would be hurt if they both got what they needed? Maybe there’s no catching up, but some filling out? Maybe the wolf could leave her friend’s door, find some rabbit whose name she didn’t know.
This week, after a sloppy round of the dozens—I’m still learning, it’s kind of a funny story, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel right about posting it. Anyway, this guy started to, well, tell on me. He wanted to get me in trouble with my sort-of boss and make me lose my sort-of job because “My personal and professional boundaries are messed up.”(Honestly? I’m the only person on Earth who could get cancelled and come out ahead financially. Because it’s a volunteer job with a lot of donations, and I posted stuff about Bernie’s whereabouts over Christmas Eve last year, because without a patriarch around, we don’t have much need to stand on ceremony at times like that.) But they love me there because the former social media director said “I can go on vacation and know I don’t have to worry about the pages.”
Thinking about it over days, though. He had a point. Not that my joke about this mope’s mom’s
Linked-in profile wasn’t a funny addition to an urban tradition—I’ll stand by
that, as it were, although in situations that matter more? I should watch out
for my current tendency to show off and get the laugh no matter what, even if
it does seem like a personal step up from the pleaser stuff I would do in my
grade-grubbing days. (That girl is not coming back, even if I do end up, this
late in the game, in a situation where I’m Ms. J and have to button up and all
that. Life does not give out A+’s and it took me way too long to let that sink
in.)
Rather than *bad* professional boundaries, though, it’s more like *what* professional boundaries? I’ve mostly been in situations where the strongest asset I bring to any table is my personal story and my ability to convey it in terms that are relatable to people that don’t share it. Making people feel those things is something that I’m fairly good at, though I tried not to be, and not only cause it’s hell on…whatever’s the public relations/journalistic version of “Clinical detachment”.(objectivity, perhaps…not sure) I didn’t want to be good at it though for the same reason I wanted to think my body looked different when I sat in an ordinary chair. My body is often part of my job, which I do just feet from where I toss and turn in frustration some nights…not a lot of places for the Sorkin walk-and-talks, or let’s face it, at the level I’d end up in, clashes with Milton cause I borrowed his swingline stapler.
I’d tell his mother on him, too, but really? I think she’s suffered enough.
