From the monthly archives: July 2007
I want to believe that I am important to you and I seek indirect ways of ascertaining this. Often with much failure. Failure because my criteria exist only internally: involve counted paces, poems, quixotic declarations, movie-script endings. They ask a verbal response from a tacit inquiry. They’re rooted within a fertile mind and heart who’s impressed with its own capacity for growth, who loves because she does it well. Her finest art.
Like most adolescent girls, my transition into womanhood, in all its tumult, is well-documented in journals, early zines and within the violent cross-hatch of hardbound sketchbooks. I took my writing very seriously as I did each individual emotion born of the marked confusion of this epoch. My 14 year-old mind, revelling in its new independence, gave distinctive intensity to all of my experiences. And out they poured from my pen: egocentric, alienated and naive. Like most adolescent girls.
Despite this universality, adolescense was a private humiliation for me. Peers somehow alienated me further. My thoughts were secrets; really, really, really deep secrets. 15 years or so later, those secrets made perfect material for Cringe Night, a monthly reading series in Brooklyn where vaults of adolescent poesy find new function: to entertain strangers.
Despite the therapuedic release and leap from my comfort zone involved in publically sharing my teen agnst, I got a mention on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
New York City is making me hostile.
Given the close quarters and large population, I am forced into knowing, in many cases intimately, 8 million people a bit more that I want to. I am within their conversations, their breath. The elbow pokes on my ribcage, graze of arm hair, the volume of a hundred iPod’s invade aggressively. We’re dulled in a continuum of superficial stimulation.
In retaliation, I keep to myself. If there’s something to do there are too many doing it. All the entertainment and culture the city offers is blemished by it being divided by too great a number. I alternate between fighting to maintain my personal space, obsessively and aggressively, to withdrawing. Both outcomes far from what my natural reaction would be in a more natural state. Those natural reactions have grown sedentary while a more hostile version dominates my tasks. Stress from stress. It is a cycle.
I find it hard to enjoy, thoroughly, in general, many people’s company. Yet I indirectly interact with the thousands I see daily residing and working here. Many boisterous and ambitious, fueling the rat race. Others unseasoned and inappropriate, lame and green who disgrace her with their hometown mind frames. Others histrionic, performing on their cellular phones or for the captive audience of a subway car, their conversational companion a backboard to their jump shots. But others still– interesting, attractive, vibrant, savvy, clever, dapper– mixed in the mediocre. Oh, but the collective jerk New York can be.
Is the varied vegan cuisine, immediate gratification of resources, your glorious backdrop and thumping pulse worth this trouble? Worth this rent? Can I ever get a head of your cost of living to leave? New York, I blow you kisses at the westbound BQE/LIE intersection. From the Kosciuszko Bridge, admire your sharp edges and points rather than the road. You make me 15 again, exploring eagerly, consumed and sustained by your energy. Skipping my classes to escape within your grid. Useless, ineffectual and anonymous again. I’m getting too old for this.
I am used to being treated so
not having to don the awkward
weight of a jewel-crusted crown
convey to you my color
cut
clarity
succinctly
directing your eyes to mine
violently grasping, ocular assail
you cross off my name in M.A.S.H.
push me to a hidden place
where i die, resurrect, die
wrapped tightly in gauze
flattening my protrusions, my real parts
mend to the parameters of your sarcophagus
affixing my ableness, your molded mummy
who rises and says goodbye
and means it thoroughly.
no thanks.
Vegan Reporting By Location
