funk in deep freeze

I found this old blog post that never got posted. I thought I’d resurrect it and post it now. Oh we were so young and in love back then. This was year two of our relationship, by the way.

“It winds from Chicago to LA, more than 2,000 miles all the way”… yup, Aaron and I took a Route 66 road trip and it was awesome! I flew to Indiana on New Years Eve and then drove w him from there to Oklahoma (where is family lives) and then from Oklahoma back to LA. 

INDIANA (New Years Day!)

After a New Years Eve filled with gunfire in the slums of Indianapolis, Aaron and i drove to see his family farm somewhere along the back roads of Indiana… pictures from the farm…

“now it goes through ST. LOUIS”…
(more…)

I threw out all of his food today.
Salami, Swiss cheese, mayo, chicken burritos, olives…
All in the garbage.
It’s my fridge now.
Cleaned of everything I don’t eat.
He can buy his own shit.

I resent that black bag. Hanging around his neck like an albatross. It will be the death of us. He carries it with him like a life preserver to save him from drowning in commitment. And after a year together it still provides him with a way to escape. For the last month we haven’t spent one night apart and yet he still can’t leave the retainer that he only wears in his sleep at the place that he spends every night! I watch him, morning after morning, make sure to pack it up in his black bag and take it with him to work. I can’t escape that morning ritual. Even when I attempt to sleep through the compulsive packing, I am sharply woken by the sound of his vitamins rattling in their bottle as he throws open the flap, making the bed shake. I lie, sleepy and irritated, forced to witness his belongings, one by one, disappear into that black hole. And then, to make sure I don’t go back to sleep, there’s the harsh sound again when it’s closed. The black bag continues to rattle with every step as he leaves, taking with it every sign of his presence (that I haven’t purchased and placed there) deep in its black folds.

I’d like a flower.

I haven’t gotten one since November. 5 months ago.

That last flower actually sat in a vase on the table next to my bed until recently. It was dead, of course, but it had still retained its shape when it dried. So I kept it.

The color changed after a few weeks from the unique redish-orange (which was what had caught his eye and made him buy it for me in the first place) to a dark red. After a few months it turned the darkest shade of purple I had ever seen. Then nearly black by the time I finally gave it up to the trash bin last Saturday.

I had woken up that morning, disgusted by the state of my apartment, and decided to spend my Saturday morning cleaning. I started in the bedroom, picking up all the trash– tissues, condom wrappers, paper plates and the stack of spent Starbucks cups on my bedside table. Now there was room for the staples of the table, the alarm clock-radio, the Eiffel Tower lamp, telephone-answering machine and framed picture of my family dog, as I repositioned them I noticed the flower. The glass vase it was held in had been pushed aside and hidden by the lamp.

I struggled for a while trying to find the right place for it. But the thing, the single delicate flower in the glass vase which delighted me through out the winter holidays, just didn’t look right on my table. But I still didn’t want to throw it away.

I pulled it out of the yellowed water. It had grown white fluffy mold on its stem. And by then it had turned from a good memory to a painful reminder of things he never does.

The aged, molded, neglected rose did not make me smile as I held it in my hands now. But when he gave it to me, that night, five months ago, it made my whole heart feel warm and I couldn’t erase the smile from my face for the rest of the evening and well into the week.

I’d give anything to smile like that now.

And then slowly my fingers relaxed. The flower began slipping from out of my grasp. For a moment it was suspended over the white trash bag, somewhere between my sentimentality and the floor. But soon gravity won the battle and it fell. With a dried, paper rasp it landed in the trash bag. It was almost too easy.

I looked at it laying there, intermingled with used tissues and scrap papers, fitting into it’s new environment better than it had on my table. And my heart felt oddly relieved. As if a weight had been lifted from off of it. This memory, once so sweet like the rose, had turned ugly and burdensome. And I was glad to be rid of it.

Now the vase remains empty, waiting for another flower

I need RESPECT. I need an equal partner. I need bowls of ice cream. I need flowers for no reason and love letters on Valentines Day. I need a hero. I need AFFECTION. I need hugs when I’m sad and massages with I’m in pain. I need thoughtfulness. I need a good listener. I need HONESTY. I need a kindness. I need to get back what I put in.

He looked to me like a stranger last night.

I looked at him; at his face, at his hands, trying to find something of that boy I loved in high school. Just a glimpse of him. But it wasn’t there. His hair once blonde, now store-bought red. His face had changed, aged a few years. Even his clothes were different. Only the watch was the same.

I remember that watch from high school. Silver with numbers around the outside of the face like the kind that can be turned and wound. But this one couldn’t. It just looked like it could. I remember every day, as a joke, I would grab his wrist and try to turn it, saying one day it would surprise us both when it finaly did turn, just by sheer willing. But it, of course, never turned. And I think I kept doing it just for the physical contact. Today he still wears it, but it’s a different one. That old one broke sometime back when we weren’t really talking and he replaced it with its doppelganger- one that looked exactly like it, but didn’t carry with it all those memories of me. Though it was the mirror image of the old one, this watch looked different now around his strange wrist.

I miss that watch.

I miss him.

I miss his innocent eyes, his baby face, his natural hair, his scrawny frame and his loud unashamed character. I miss the way he looked at me in his shy child’s crush.

When my first love dumped me in high school he taught me to laugh away the pain and helped me heal. He became my shelter from then on. My cure for all wounds. He was magic. But it changed last night. Sitting on opposing couches I watched him as my cure became my assailant; both creating wounds and opening up old ones.

His eyes, once so innocent, were masked with darkness and menacing. His gaze that used to reach the deepest levels of love in my soul now sought out the darkest recesses of my character. They analyzed and cast an unflattering, florescent light on all my flaws. I felt naked and shameful in front of those newly critical eyes. I suddenly had a sense of embarrassment for my very existence as I sat in front of him.

From the mouth that once yipped and yowled for me across campus now spouted out criticisms. The voice that sounded like my favorite song now sounded harsh and painful to my ears. I wished for his words to stop firing at me. I wished for him to take it all back, take everything back. To have never had hurt me like he did in the beginning and like he was doing now.

When his anger had subsided we sat facing each other. I could hear his watch stubbornly ticking away the anxious, silent seconds.

I felt weak and I hated myself for it. I felt vulnerable still and unable to fight or stand up for myself. He had been my support and my strength for so long and now it had turned on me.

Even though he was the one causing me the pain I still couldn’t help but to look to him to ease it. I tried to find the boy who had been my strength, my shelter, my other half- my support. But he wasn’t there. The person sitting on my couch was a stranger to me. The boy hero was gone.

And with every tick of that watch I felt him slipping further and further away.

I remember opening the door to the tiny closet in which my mother hung her dresses. I would part the heavy skirts and crawl through till I hit the back wall, letting the dresses fall closed behind me with a heavy swish. In the dark I would feel around for the small safe box she kept hidden in the back of her closet. Sometimes when she got ready to go out I would watch her pull it out, twist the big clicking knob and open it up, revealing piles of treasure. Pearls, diamonds, gold and platinum all sparkling as if they were soaking up all the light they could get, knowing that soon they would be plunged back into darkness. It’s like they knew this was their moment. Now, with my mother gone out of the house, her safe would be my perch. I would sit on it, curling my knees up underneath my chin, angling my body so that none of the light creeping in under the dress skirts would touched me. And I would be totally hidden by her clothes, smelling her comforting smell, touching the expensive fabrics and feeling protected when she was away. As if the crushed velvet and lace were force fields. That safe grounded me. The feeling of the cold hard metal under my butt reminded me that mom would be back. She’d find me eventually because she would always return her jewels to their home no matter what.

It’s a genius thing really. Like a lava lamp but with bubbles in water instead. It’s timed perfectly so that a bubble starts out blue at the bottom and ends up red at the top. It changes somewhere in the middle. And I know it’s because of the light but something in me still wonders how something as little as a bubble can pull off something as difficult as changing colors. It seems such a violent process, going from a cool turquoise blue into a full vibrant red. How can anything be the same after that?

The Fingerprint
Jung once said you can tell what a society holds most dear by looking at its tallest buildings—World Trade Center in New York, where business and money dominates, chapel steeples in, I don’t know, someplace religious, and where my parents live in South Orange County it’s the Nordstrom’s parking lot.
But I believe you can tell what a person holds dear by what they won’t let you touch.
My father’s a car nut. Every weekend he dragged me down to a car show, at age seven he started teaching me how to tell the difference between a small block and a hemi. Nothing pissed him off more than spotting finger print smudges on his shiny black cars.
My mother was a picture taker. You know the type that makes you smile and say cheese on your first days of preschool to grad school, first time spending the night and the first time voting in a presidential election. Our library at home is not filled with books, rather with photo albums. Every year she makes one for the family and one for each of her three kids. And she would never let us look at the pictures until they were safely behind those clear, protective laminated covers, for fear that we would put our grimy little kid fingerprints all over them.
Maybe, unconsciously, I learned to truly appreciate the things that I wasn’t supposed to touch. Maybe, like the soccer moms of orange county that can’t help but notice and be drawn to the towering parking lot of Nordstrom’s as they take their kids to school day in and day out, I am drawn to the things that became sacred in my house. Maybe that’s the reason that I have become a photographer obsessed with taking pictures of cars.