To All the Days Without Auras

It is possible that I saw many auras on the highway on my way home. Or the yellow sunspots, traveling like blotches do over the eyes, trapped in serum that lubricates and floats down and away to the left, looked like, or were, the auras.

I believe that all the stuff is real, whether it be phlegm-like or spirited. I believe that my life will start when I can see the aura of each day and stop the searching for it. In my meditation, I am searching for this aura, which might then make it not meditation, but I search on in for it.

It must be what I am searching for in yellowed spot on the photograph of my mother posing in front of the Chevelle holding her Bible before youth group that I believe came from the pee or spit of a small child. It grows like the glow of a halo.

My mother has the face of Brooke Shields and the body of Wonder Woman. She did her aerobics in our living room in a green leotard with matching tights. I do aerobics, because she taught me how to be beautiful. I don't know how I learned anything else. 

I believe sugar cookies will eat away my flesh. Saying that makes me feel I will be skinny one day. I am not afraid of sugar, so it can't kill me.

We make too many dishes.
We take too many days off work.

"Rosemary wore rags," that’s what I thought the song said, I energetically tell George on the drive back.

"Good one."

As I drive I think about dream jobs. Tina Fey reads my email. My idiosyncrasies stands out to her like, like a virtuoso with a birth defect, and she can't get me outta her head. She reads the first three chapters of "Starcy Flenders" and needs me in her life, at her side, on her team. I see the vision. I write for her, on her left. I use my catalogue of names and create endless characters, and they are on all the TVs, and George and I move to NYC, and we live there and are so happy, and I knew Georgie would like it, because he likes big cities, and I think I wouldn’t like it, because I thought I didn’t want to live there and be stuck in a huge space, but if I worked for Tina, I would make money enough for an apartment that made us happy, and we would walk places to eat dinner and laugh and feel lucky and twelve years would pass, and we still wouldn’t be fifty and we would get naked and kiss cars passing through the window pane and write our initials in the foggy part.

My cat is a virtuoso.

So is my dead one.
They are both moving to New York.

I want to say something about drama.

Einstein said nothing happens until something moves. My cats are happening. They are invading the fires devouring everything dead. That which is not moving is nothing. I am criss-crossing my feet and creating my own fire. What of the shark and its constant moving. A puddle of water, with or without shark. The fires we all create. It is happening, and it all is well. It is genius to live in the moment. All the beasts know it. Water, it knows it. Everything yields to them. They do not fret, conjure, make laws and rules and try to regulate. It is all well. It all moves. Pretty sure, these pussies have the best lives. What is their intent? What is their disappointment, depression? They make the fires for purpose, not passion. How does contrary work when their conscience does not know it can disobey?

_________

Started reading Tropic of Cancer today. Funny thing, what is there to know about Henry Miller, except it is a paper newspaper sounding kind of name. Milk bottle kind of name. Anais Nin wrote the preface. George didn’t even know that and he asked me, “Wasn’t Anais Nin him and his wife’s lover?” I said that could make sense since Anais wrote the preface. A paramour's tribute, could be. My tongue trips on my arrogance, as I am often self-shamed. I felt so at sea for not knowing how to correctly pronounce her name, yet Henry's name promotes an immediate catalogue of clip art. But thinking of it now, I know I know a girl named Anais, and this is how I wrote her name in my directory: Ah Knee.

But that is not how you say her name at all.

So, says cunt a lot. A lot about ramming things in the pink cave, including himself. George asks me to tell him when I get to the sexy bits. I am slightly annoyed at his pornographic tendencies. Greatly, more succinct. I read the milk bottle's constant punching with the word; it is not about “sexy” to me. Perhaps, because, to me, literature isn’t a vehicle for arousal. Writing the words is the arousal. Literature is to ponder. Writing is actually post-arousal, a re-visit. As the voyeur, reading detaches. But, perhaps, such is my defect. I suffer beauty like a true Romantic. Live in the wonder, the remembering, the post-. It’s not happening to me, which is why I crave it. What happens to me is the imagining. That's my exposure. Miller's cunts are not for me. They're for anyone. They're for everyone. I'm not after what everyone else can have.

I can imagine that if someone says to me they want to ram a Chevelle, a milk bottle, a genie lamp up my cunt, and I want them to do so, in my panties a waterfall. But I do not know if I want to be the girl who could cut off men’s cocks, leave them to bloom inside her, watching their armatures collapse like crumbling masts. Imagery illicit enough though. A naughty t.s. elliot poem for the defected mind. J. Alfred on the beach, detached penis in hand, even the foggy surf repelling him.

Georgie will not like that I start to call him Georgie.
He will not like that I milk bottle myself after he goes to work.

__________________

Again, I bought a cookie and sat down to write. I have my kitty and my headphones and some real epic indie music. This is becoming a recipe. I want to write my dream from earlier today, but I forgot it. I thought I wouldn’t. It seemed unimaginable that I could. It seemed like a part of my face, a second mouth behind my mouth, and all I needed to do was roll my eyes back to see it.

Writing is for schmucks.
I'm going for a milkshake.

I put on my new red dress at home. And it is snappy! I will know how many other spear carriers there are out there when I wear it, because of it, they will look at me. That is the magic in my new snappy dress. Think of all the spear carriers I could meet in Vietnam. Did you know? That’s where we’re going. I decided after buying this dress today.

Greta, one of the other intellects from grad school, who I thought was mutually refusing to recognize me, had to greet me once we were finally face to face, opposites sandwiching the counter, no longer capable of waltzing around the store not-so-convincingly turning past each other's profiles in our peripheries, playing dodger’s delight. This song sounds like disco. This dress is disco. So disco. She seems positive, but looks so sad. When I first recognized her from the side, the green dots tattooed in a triangle on her cheek could have only been tears. Never saw them that way before.

Being in a town of acquaintances is hard, but in a town of quasi-intimates, it's confusing. We know so much about each other via the most private reserves of ourselves. We are – aren’t we – insecure, sensitive, thoughtful, insensitive, selfish, wimpish, cruel to ourselves, hard on language, heavy in spirit, but, sure, we are, free, now. That is the lift in us, isn’t it. Free from what we never belonged to which includes each other. There is a large part of this universe we are excused from by living deep inside, yet how responsible are we for the freedom of not having to live in the other. Creates distance.

She did not ask, “How’s the writing?” But I can feel it there. It is always there. When one writes, they are free of the burdening question. The burden when you are not writing is that maybe you are caught in the wrong world.  Which is sadness. Pesticides and facelifts and leather seats and expensive salad spinners all start to look valid. But they are heavy. We think more fills the void. That is the message. We will never be stuck in the deep if we have shit to climb up on. But we go the wrong way. We need to move deeper in, backwards. Re-do our hair, un-do that look (or is it a lock?), reach out and touch my elbow, turn me to meet you, lift me, you, around, up, out of here. Because this thought will change, can, does at the very writing and uttering and making change of it. We have a certificate. It allows us, asks us, to change the thoughts that hang like lanterns in every corner and non-corner of our ethereal rooms; take this image into words and everything we feel is cat, summer roof, a violin, milk bottle, a necklace with a bridge charm on it is charming in this town if you're that type, carrot that is penis (carrot-penis), where we last met, fireworks in eyeballs, eyeballs in fireworks, lipstick red snap front dress, a year in China, three years ago:  I do not think you would like China. No, China might not be the right place for you. That's what Greta tells me, and I believe her, because she might know something specific about me I don't know about myself.

That is how Vietnam came to be.

I remember the dream now! I stole a car. Afterwards, I entered a warehouse through the long raised metal hallway in the back. I climbed down terraced construction stairs. There were un-priced antiques laid about on church basement buffet tables. I touched everything. Picked them all up to search out the sticker price. There was someone with me. She was brunette. I was the blonde. The blonde, me, was Piper from Orange is the New Black. We were confronted about something. I may have stolen something. The car! The group looking for the car was congregating at the top of a hill. I walked up to meet them humbly, and the girl whose car it was, I admitted to her what I’d done. The car was in one piece and needed gas, but I  drove it everywhere through the night, off the bridge and down by the water, in and out of the cemeteries. It was a big old black car with tan interior and a large dash, and it seemed to like the cemeteries very much. I felt a Harold & Maude pride. Everyone seemed only half interested in what I said, scuffling feet, muffled snickers, and then the girl said, “I have only one rule about my car. It’s my car.” There was a silent and un-head-cocked Capiche? from her, but I nodded anyway. Her name was Jen. She was part of the theater group. Her hair was bobbed and only slightly asymmetrical.

________


HA! This is what my therapist tells me today:  Maybe it would be good for you to NOT wear red – as I am sitting in her office in my new red dress. I wore it, because it's an easy piece to pull on, but what a zinger. The conversation earlier with her had been about spiders, and dinner, and  spirit guides, and sea foam, and birth canals, and before she lets me sit in her chair, she says, "Maybe red is not the proper aura for you."

"But I always have a red dress," I tell her.

She goes on to tell me how the color green is the vibrational link straight to the heart, and red is the link to our roots, stationed in our coccyx, our beginning, our very making.

"Not hunger?" I arrogantly chime in.

Am I to believe my red deflects and disperses other potential vibrations, and perhaps why I feel so out of love. Wrong choice on the color wheel? As simple as that. Maybe Vietnam was the right choice. It is a green place. But, no, it is also a red place. The inability to know which it is has caused the indecision so perfectly. Not being able to know drove me and Georgie apart. I was giving him red, asking for more red, but I wanted green this whole time. Looking now, I see my red pillow, my red dish cloth, my red toes, and nothing to love as I wish.

Then she asks us to switch places, and I sit in her leather square seat. We talk about other's who have sat in her chair, which she says have been none. She asks me to ask her a personal question. Why do you go to movies alone? Do you think I don't know where this is going? I've had the dream, I tell her. She says she must have heard me, got the message, and I can do her job. She tells me that no matter what happens or what I do that I am going to have a good life. If I never write a book, if I never teach my favorite works, if I never PhD, or sit and look at myself like I am now looking at her, none of it matters. There is no other way around it. My life is so. SO. So good.

When concluding the session, she says that it's also possible that I redefined red for myself, and made it "HOT!" That is both embarrassing to hear and type. I got the red dress, because I was looking for a milkshake.

My mother always told me I looked terrible in green. Green was the color of her beauty.

What I've Been Doing the Last 5 Years

I haven't seen my therapist in five years, but I think about her almost every day.  I share with others what she shared with me. The rocks in her office I knew the story of. The muscles, lightning, chocolate, a fox. She said it is something I am, something that just is. I can't do anything to change it.

Sometimes I am living in a chasm of disbelief. I don't believe my hair is curly. I don't believe in heaven. I don't believe I should eat bacon for breakfast as one of best things I can do. But I do. My hair isn't curly, but I treat with products for afros.

I always felt it necessary to read into things. Everything happens for a reason. I can get behind that. Like, in a Hallmark way. But then I look for the reason, and it is most likely far from me, as in the reason doesn't care an iota about me. Is there a reason I look for the reason. In the last five years, I have been trying to give that up. I have been trying to give up everything.

My mother has told me that I am beautiful, but she told herself more. My mother's hair is also not curly. But we have very similar hair. Her eyes used to be brown like mine, but now, most days, they are green. Green. Isn't that the color of life. The color that brings it all together? I think my therapist told me that.

I don't know what to think about beauty. I want it. But I also want to not want it. To be insecure at this point in my life feels so archaic, unacademic. To want something brings in shame. Am I alone in this. Feels so. I should have learned myself out of it years ago. I won't even watch tidbits from the debates. I am too impressionable and I am trying to stay away from images that might hurt me.

So, back to the rock. I can see the past. I can see the future sometimes too. I guess that will never change.