Dreaming Athena

Athena blinks, half awake, and blurring dim, streaming moonlight with teary eyes. There is a dream, gauzy and wandering, left in the remnants of her memory. It spills around her like a shattered flute of wine, blood red and jagged with twinkling bits of glass. She breathes deep and her back arches. Blankets fall from her, unspooling from her body onto the floor. There is sweat on her forehead, dark blond hair matted to her face. She still hears the whispered words, ghostly and unwanted: "I love you, I love you, I love you." There is an illusory cooling kiss, fresh on her cheek, and she unconsciously bats at it, trying to shoo it away like it were a fly or a gnat. The world is swirling, lush and unwieldy above her. She struggles for her bearings, digs long fingers into the sheets and mattress and fights against another wave of slumber. She tries to open her eyes wider, to breathe and come to, but the force of her exhaustion is too much to overcome. The weight of it pulls down her eyelids, drags her back into the folds of her bed. She pushes back.

She fails.

The darkness drapes over her as mind slips the boundaries of rationality. The voice returns, calling out its affection as she spirals into another fit of sleep. Still slightly aware, she sings back at it, louder than it, hoping to drown it out. But it meets her, note for note, decibel for decibel, drilling inside her dreaming skull and filling it with a cacophony of affection. Even here, even in the wilds of her subconscious, she won't accept it. She can't accept it. There's a guilt that shrouds her, a painful unwillingness to allow any measure of abandon. Her will is stronger than her want, and so she pushes and pushes and pushes the voice aside. But she feels so strangled by it. She feels so unearthly and sad. Sleep finally settles back in, and she wades with trepidation into greater depths, afraid that she will be unable to maintain her defense. As sleep takes hold she takes form and a new pair of eyes takes over. She is seeing things that aren't really there.

She recognizes the room, but she can't say from where. It is an amalgam, a conglomerate of places... a window from an old apartment, her childhood bed, posters from her dormitory, a sleeping cat that's been dead for years. The walls shift in color and size. It's disorienting and a little scary. So she sits, and she floats... the floor is electric blue liquid. She is aloft, hovering above it, cross-legged and dressed in a gossamer nightgown. She knows she is dreaming. It's all too unreal, too fluid to exist anywhere else. She takes in a deep breath and it smells like wasp and butter. She holds the air in her lungs, closes her dream-eyes, and lets the world go black. But it never does. On the backs of her false eyelids are cinema screens, and film rolls through some projector in the back of her brain. Light flickers inside of her, and a scratchy soundtrack hiccups and spurts. Floating in this unreal room, her unreal eyes shut tight, she sees herself in luscious black and white, beautiful and calm and pale, standing in a field of colossal honeysuckle. The dreaming Athena is envious of her celluloid counterpart. She has never felt as serene as she looks in that field. And behind her, on film, a shadow gathers up and extends whispering tendrils around her middle. And the tendrils congeal into arms, and the smoke fills itself in, slowly, like a time lapsed paint by number kit, and there is a boy, then, vague and simple and reaching his lips to her ear. He gently bites, and she practically melts.

In the unreal room she throws open her eyes and disrupts the movie. She is flustered. She falls from her floating position onto the electric ground below. And when she does, there is a thunder clap and the ground is hardwood and the room is static and dull. She's lost it, that brief hint of dreaming magic. As she stands up, dusts herself off, and redresses herself in something heavier, something more substantial, she tries to shake the image of the boy. The lines of her world become thicker, heavier, greasepaint black and stark. She tries to drain herself of color, of worry, of thought. But the image remains. It sticks with her, and as she tries to avert her mind from thinking on it, it just grows inside of her. She can feel the thought of him glowing somewhere deep in her heart and she growls. She hates this. She hates it more than she could describe. With every slow motion blink of her eyes, the boy appears, animated like in an old kinetoscope.

And so she slumps herself down into the heavy drawn world, somehow, now, on an abandoned sidewalk in a crumbling gray block in an anonymous city. The lamp posts are sketched in, messy, curlicued and French. The sky is crackled paint. The buildings are cut from monochrome wallpaper samples. She lays on the concrete and looks up at a flock of wind-up crows skittering by, sending flakes of the heavens down on her like lead-based rain. Pieces of it get stuck on her eyelashes. She blinks them out and tries to clear her mind. From the ground, asphalt arms wrap around her again. They are warm, suddenly flesh, and she's embraced again. She wants to not want it. She wants it to not be so comforting. She wants it to not be so inviting. But it is. She tries to hold fast, to fight it. But she doesn't want to.

The voice is there again. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

And she almost says it back, but the alarm clock wakes her right up.

20 Songs I Dig Right Now

1. Cinderella - Aqualung: If you're ever looking to start an awesome mix cd, you could do worse than this song. It has an explosively beautiful opening and it maintains a pretty otherworldly feel throughout. It's got that sort of U2-esque transcendentalism feeling without Bono yelling at you.

2. Stuck On You - Failure: This is, for all intents and purposes, a generic alternative rock song from the mid-nineties. Lately, though, it's gotten under my skin. It might nostalgia or the spacemen on the album's cover. Either way, it's a great time capsule song and deserves to be dredged up. If you listen to it, you'll probably be all like, "Oh yeah... I sort of remember this one."

3. Creeper - Islands: I found this song instantly catchy... like from the first few notes on. That always impresses me. Add in lyrics about being stabbed in the heart, and you can't lose.

4. You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb - Spoon: Spoon's Britt Daniel describes their music solely as "rock and roll," and that's very fitting, especially on the songs from "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga." "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb," is my current favorite track from that record, although I've vacillated between it, "The Underdog," "Rhthm & Soul," and "Don't You Evah."

5. Once A Glimpse - Maximo Park: A nice, strong propulsive song with a singalong chorus that never lets up for a second. It's all anxiety and nervous energy.

6. The Female Of The Species - Space: More 90's alterna-rock, this one from fairly obscure band Space. This one has xylophones, though. It's kind of like Edwyn Collins' "A Girl Like You," although I can't adequately explain why. It's more fun, though. On account of the xylophones.

7. She Got Dressed - Fleet Foxes: I could pretty much put an Fleet Foxes song on here and it'd be ok. This one has struck me lately. This one reminds me of the best possible outcome of a Brian Wilson/Stereolab collaboration.

8. The Good That Won't Come Out - Rilo Kiley: This one's a little bit older, but I sort of rediscovered it recently. It's one of those indie rock songs that starts out mopey and muted and eventually explodes with rage and anxiety. And it's got one of my favorite couplets: "I do this thing where I think I'm real sick, but I won't go to the doctor to find out about it."

9. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case: Neko Case's songs barely have song structures anymore... it's a pretty big departure from her alternative country stuff with Her Boyfriends. Somewhere along the way, she just shifted into a sultry, almost unnerving film noir songstress. There's a very haunting quality to her music, now, and it sort of sticks to you even after it's done playing.

10. Disintegration - Jimmy Eat World: This song is nearly eight minutes, but it doesn't get tiresome. It's a fairly miserable affair, one of the darkest songs from a unusually optimistic band. It's hard not to picture your worst relationship with this in the background... The slow build to its big crescendo almost catches you off guard the first time 'round.

11. Crown Of Thorns - Mother Love Bone: This is epic pre-grunge... I don't know if Mother Love Bone were ever embraced by the mainstream. I never heard them on the radio, but I graduated to modern rock after Andrew Wood was already dead. I absolutely love this song, though... it's the type of music that led me away from classic rock and forced me to stop dismissing 90's bands as retreads of great 70's artists. Not that they aren't, but when they made music this cool, what's the difference?

12. Plasticities - Andrew Bird: From Bird's "Armchair Apocrypha," "Plasticities" mixes tempos and moods in a lovely, pleasantly jarring way. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, but it seems very important and very stirring. It also makes a great streetlight song... the type of music you want on while driving down a lit, empty city street at, like, 3 am.

13. At The Wake - The Format: I think this song should be in every indie film ever, because it perfectly captures the feeling of suburban isolation, loneliness, powerlessness and restlessness. I might be reading too much into it.

14. Samson - Regina Spektor: This song just breaks my heart. I don't even understand how that works.

15. Move Away & Shine - The Polyphonic Spree: from the "Thumbsucker" soundtrack, this is just a typical freakishly inspirational, hook-laden Polyphonic Spree song. I don't know how they manage to actually capture so much uplift, but it's so bizarrely powerful. It's probably the happiest thing I like.

16. The Perptual Self Or What Would Saul Alinsky Do - Sufjan Stevens: There's not much that really gets me on board with the whole... uh... God thing, but Sufjan Stevens does. His faith is infectious, not obnoxious, and it makes me really want to believe in something that I do really want to believe in even if I can't really (usually) believe in.

17. Who Is It - Bjork: I prefer the Bell Choir mix from the single to the version on Medulla, but either way it's wonderful. There's something very affecting about this song, something ineffably gut wrenching. The bell choir version is especially urgent sounding... like one of the hymns in church I actually look forward to singing.

18. Take Care Of All Of My Children - Tom Waits: Speaking of hymns, this Tom Waits' song plays out like an antique spiritual, complete with warbling trumpet and old vinyl hiss. One of my favorite things about Tom Waits is his ability to make music that sounds like it could have originated at any point in time... there's no indication of its origin. It's like an artifact, something unearthed and discovered. This song is on his "Orphans" collection.

19. Dust Of Ages - Eels: Continuing a hymn-like theme, this little tune from "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" has a church song simplicity... it reminds me of something that would have been in an early 70's Christian Claymation show... except for the vulgarity.

20. Last Flowers - Radiohead: This is from the bonus disc of "In Rainbows" material. I think it's the best song from both discs, which is a pretty big feat. This song has been floating around since "OK Computer" days, when it was called "Last Flowers Till The Hospital" (I like that version of the title better). It's very pretty, very unsettling and it should have been on the main release.

Lester & Mister James

Lester, apparently, made his entire living by buying used media in the city and selling it for a slightly higher price in more remote areas, where people had less accessibility to second hand stores. His dingy white van was full of crates of CD's, cassettes, vinyl LP's and VHS tapes. This was at the dawn of DVD technology, so those were pretty rare, but he managed to snag a few every now and then. How he could sustain an entire life on such a meager margin was beyond me, but he seemed to do all right. He had a circuit, basically, that he made around the state, which meant we would we would see him at our used CD store in roughly three week intervals. He was always a welcome sight, not just because his voracious purchases ensured a decent day of profits, but also because a visit from Lester also meant a visit from Mister James.

The exact relationship between Lester and Mister James was never quite clear. They were roughly the same age, older than fifty, probably less than sixty, and the had similar haircuts and beards. They were both graying and a little paunchy, but Lester always seemed far more put together than Mister James. Where Lester always had his longish coif neatly combed, and always seemed to be dressed in relatively neat, clean clothes, Mister James couldn't have been more unkempt. In a strange way, he looked like a wild version of Lester, like Lester had been left to fend for himself a while in the woods and came out looking like Mister James. Mister James' hair was a tangled shock and he always seemed to be wearing the same, stained pink and white striped shirt every time I saw him. He looked, actually, to be a little bit crazy... and I think he legitimately was.

The prevailing theory was that Mister James was Lester's brother, although I found it odd that Lester would refer to his brother as "Mister James." It may have been a nickname from childhood, I suppose, or a more current term of affection, but I never got the feeling that the two of them were related at all. They definitely shared a bond, and Lester was certainly protective of Mister James, but I don't know that their relationship was familial. Mister James, I think, was Lester's friend, and I think there was a time when he wasn't crazy at all.

Now, that craziness wasn't wholly apparent from a brief conversation with the man. At first blush, he may have come across as slightly eccentric. My first encounter with him consisted of him traipsing toward the front counter, happily slamming his hand near the register and saying, loudly, "Shuggie! Shuggie Otis!" I didn't know what this meant, but he seemed genial and excited, so I pressed for more information. He explained, to me, that Shuggie Otis was an unfairly obscure soul-rock touchstone, a genius on par with Jimi Hendrix that had somehow become lost to time. Mister James demanded, there and then, that I promise that at first opportunity, I buy a Shuggie Otis album and give it a good listen. He guaranteed me that I wouldn't be disappointed. This was Mister James at his most benign. Subsequent conversations included grotesquely detailed accounts of his doctoral visits, dissertations on the cruelty of nuns, theories on the creatures living in his lungs and nearly incomprehensible screeds that were surely racist in origin, but so utterly nonsensical that it was hard to be offended. What became clear in a vast majority of his monologues, however, was a very real feeling of persecution, both from sources real and imagined. I am no psychologist, but I think the man may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

Lester was an ace at calming Mister James down. He had it down to a science. When Mister James would begin to become agitated, often signaled by an increased frequency of vulgarity, Lester would stop his browsing, and quietly sidle up to Mister James, grab the man's arm, and somehow drain the anger, fear or excitement right out of him. It was practically magic. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than exerting a presence. It almost always worked straight away. I couldn't imagine what a boon this was for Mister James... without Lester, I think his delusions and his fears would have easily overtaken him. Nearly anything could set the man off, and once he began a rant, it seemed to spawn a new angry worry with every word. Without whatever medicine Lester practiced, it didn't seem unreasonable to think of Mister James spiraling wildly out of control. Somehow, something Lester offered allowed Mister James at least a semblance of a normal life. I wondered if Mister James even recognized that.

I wondered, too, what Lester got out of the deal, and how he had come to care for his slightly mad friend. Lester probably found the company comforting. He spent most of his life on the road, after all, and he probably got quite lonely. I think the pair lived out of that van most of the time... Lester never spoke of a home, although that doesn't preclude the existence of one, I suppose. Still, I knew their Wisconsin sales circuit pretty well, and I can't imagine Lester's income afforded them too many hotel stays along their trip. Under such cramped conditions, a companion might not seem ideal, but three weeks of isolation is an awful lot. Every road trip is better with a partner.

And Mister James, when not rambling incoherently, was a pretty interesting man. He was a virtual encyclopedia of psychedelic rock. He had elaborate explanations for the meanings behind the songs of Cream, the 13th Floor Elevators, ? And The Mysterians and Pink Floyd. He knew the biographies of hundreds of musicians, and how they interconnected to one another. He could expound eloquently on music theory, and who had innovated what and when. I learned a lot from him... I don't know how much of it was true.

Lester and Mister James stopped coming around in the winter... I'm sure that the cold was not conducive to their lifestyle. I don't know what they did from November until April, and I never found out. Our store shut down in February, and I never got to see either of them again.

Remedy

Minutes tick by and Benjamin sits in the dark, listening to the motion on the clock and checking his wrist, every so often, for a pulse. This fear of dying, it's irrational, he knows it, but it's all he's dreamt of, all he's imagined, now (against his will) for so long. It's gutted him. Once that realization of mortality (an honest realization, not the sideways and muted understanding that most people give it, but the very visceral and powerful fact that his life is ebbing away, tick by tick, tock by tock) set in, it wriggled its way into his consciousness, laid parasite eggs and took over. And now he's literally listening to life end. In any moment of concentration, any moment where he is not distracted by hunger or lust or something interesting on the television, he imagines scenario after scenario after scenario and he wonders how his imagination will dovetail with his actual demise. He fears his fear most of all. Second to that, he fears that he will die before he accomplishes anything. Sometimes, that fear is mutated into a palpitation-worthy worry that he will die JUST as he accomplishes something, thusly being robbed of its reward. However, at three in the morning, with work mere hours away and no sleep in sight, it is unlikely that Benjamin will need to worry about the latter case.

His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.

He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.

As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.

In Defense Of My President

So, it's less than a year into the Obama presidency, and where do we stand?

The ultra right-wing, the Republican base, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who believe Sarah Palin is a viable politician (and decent human being) are cowering in their bunkers, hands on their rifles, waiting nervously for the Socialist Elite to come storming into town, steal all their stuff and perform pot-fueled abortions on illegal immigrant lesbians using taxpayer money. It is, they are certain, Armageddon.

The ultra left-wing, meanwhile, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who secretly long to be in the feared Socialist Elite, but only so they can inflict their fuel-efficient cars and organic vegetables onto an unsuspecting public, are becoming more and more outraged by the fact that it's nearly 2010 and the president STILL hasn't hung Dick Cheney for his war crimes. They are becoming disappointed in the man they assumed would steer the right-leaning country into a glorious era of peace, shared prosperity and unparalleled human rights.

In between: everybody else. Mostly, I think, they're feeling a little better about the economy and a little freaked out that the national debt is threatening to suffocate the financial lives of their future grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren.

I think they are hopeful that some big, necessary changes are around the corner to increase their quality of life and their quantity of life, and I think they are scared that those changes will have repercussions that nobody is prepared for. America voted for change. And we're getting it. And change scares the living daylights out of us.

Most people know I stand firmly on the left... especially on social issues, less so on fiscal ones, but generally I align with the Democrats even if I wish they were less wishy-washy. I share in some of the frustration that other liberals feel... worried that we are squandering this time we have in power... worried that we are not changing at as rapid of a clip as we should. I cringe, sometimes, at the compromises being made and the diluting of the message that the president rode to victory.

But when I stand back for a moment and try to look objectively at what's going on, I feel somewhat bolstered and reassured. I find myself standing in staunch defense of the president and his actions. Not because I agree with the outcome, but because I agree with the reasoning.

One of the things that made me livid during the eight years of GWB that the nation endured was his assumption that his presidential win, no matter how slight, was some sort of mandate from the masses. It was not. It was a psuedo-victory at best... an acknowledgment that just a smidge over (or under, as was the case in 2000) half of us thought he was the best man for the job. Bush acted as if he were representing all of us, as if he were given the reigns of leadership with our full approval and thumbs up. And he became a dictator. He did not lead with the will of the people in mind. He led with nothing but his own ideas (and Cheney's) to guide him. And he further split the poles of us apart while cementing his place as a terrible leader and a poor representative of democracy. He steamrolled his way through the presidency, and I hated him for it.

Now times have changed, the pendulum has swung enough to give my side the narrow (although impressively larger!) margin of victory and a liberal population held under the thumb of oppressive conservatism for nearly a decade snarled back to life and demanded a massive shift in direction to counteract the spiraling decline of the Bush era. In essence, now that we have the power, we want to do exactly what Bush did, except we want to do it for the right reasons. (Well, what we consider to be the right reasons (they totally are, though).)

But, despite the Democrats' victory, public opinion is not consistently on their side. Despite the fact that most Americans really would be helped by extending a public option for health care they still stand, somewhat unsurely, against it. While homosexual rights are the logical extension of the equality promised in our Declaration of Independence, a big contingent of Americans are still opposed to gay marriage. There is definitely righteous indignation in the voices of the left and I believe in what my ideology stands for... but this is a democracy, and for better or worse, that means public opinion is still supposed to hold sway over our elected, representative leaders. I hated Bush for dismissing the public in his decisions... I admire Obama for taking them into account, even when their views clash with his.

What will be gained by pushing forth an agenda that Americans are not ready for? The results of dictation, here, are never good. When an idea is foisted upon the public before the public is ready for it, it fails... and usually spectacularly. There is usually a violent and unproductive swing back to square one and progressiveness loses out in favor of tradition. When leaders bully their way through the American public, their agendas end up going one step forward and two steps back. Conservatives are feeling that right now. They are seeing the momentum of the last two years of Clinton and the first two years of Bush Jr. dwindled to stagnation punctuated by the loudest and silliest of their membership. All of the work they did making inroads into the public consciousness were lost as Bush elevated his concerns above that of the nation he was leading. He wasn't afraid to make an unpopular decision, but he should have been at least cognizant of WHY those decisions were unpopular.

The fact is, progress is being made, and although it's probably slower than we Dems would like to see, it's, in its way, remarkable. We're talking, on a national scale, about public health care. Everyone in the country is engaged in the debate... some of us are terrified, some of us are thrilled, some of us just think that, by God, we've got to try SOMETHING new. But this is the most viable conversation we've had about health care in my lifetime! And, yes, it's divisive. There's no way it won't be. But we're not dragging most of the country kicking and screaming into some new system... we're dipping our feet in slowly, mostly, trying to warm up, hoping not to have our toes eaten by sharks. If it seems like a small victory, think about where we were on the topic a year ago today. This is a massive undertaking. People won't accept a wholesale change without freaking out. They just won't. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.

So the president is moving slowly. He is making the attempt to sell his ideas to the public! What a novel concept that is. And yes, it drives me batty to see loony tunes folks shrieking at their congresspeople, but most of the town hall meeting attendees are not frightening psychopaths. Most of them just want to know what the hell is going on and how it might impact them. And while seeing the thousand page bill and hearing twice that many interpretations of it might not be altogether reassuring, I think there's a definite feeling of at least feeling connected to the process of legislating that we haven't had in an awfully long time. Listening to people unfortunately means compromise... And it means a watering down of the original potent message. But it also means bridges are built and a nation starts to be reconstituted after years of dissolution.

It's going to be slow and painful... moreso knowing we could just freaking do it because we've got the votes and even Al Franken for God's sake.

But that's a long term recipe for liberal disaster.

So I stand in defense of my president. I may not agree with his every move, but I think his motives are sound and his intelligence is immense. He's a strong enough leader to stand up for as many people as possible, even if that means, sometimes, disappointing his base in the short term. But I, for one, would rather put my trust in a man who doesn't cater to the far reaches of his side, but tries to tug the country, one battle at a time, in the right direction.

That's a foundation for long term success, not just for my party but for our country.

Change

As the darkness of night closed in on Marshall, he sat on his bed, his head in his hands, and a sort of monolithic sorrow crushing his chest. He was certain, now, of his own stupidity, his absolute lack of grace. He had ruined everything and he was sure it was never going to be good again.

The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.

Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.

At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.

As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.

He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...

As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”

He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.

It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.

Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.

But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.

To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.

She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.

At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.

Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.

Facade

What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.

Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.

Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.

Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.

She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.

In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.

What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.

Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.

Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.

Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.

She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.

Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.

Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.