RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

Sunday. Not even 6pm and I have already had dinner. Days go by so fast it's scary. Wake up, go to breakfast, go to lunch, go to dinner... and it's dark and you can't focus on studies and don't have the energy to go anywhere... so you go take a bath or watch a movie or sleep... Weeks go by and soon it will be November and I don't know how that happened.
I seem to be better these days. More aware. More lively and vital. But I know it is not going to last. I try to enjoy while it's here.
I am overwhelmed with work and study and plans and the future. I have to take the GRE test prior to December 8... and half of the GRE (a huge massive cruel examination to enter Graduate School) is about Math... which I haven't touched for 6 years. I took a practice test today and it was not good. So I have to study, and do it on my own, cos I'm not willing to pay $700 for a month of classes twice a week.
Also, I have to submit 5 poems before November 11 to English department. All of my old poems are in Spain (I cleaned my computer memory) and I have written only one poem since I have arrived, cos I have been so focused on the memoir.
That too... I have to edit my memoir. I thought it was not bad... but now I feel it's crap and worthless and who cares that I have problems anyway. I saw "Running with Scissors" last night and it was great and disturbing and based on a memoir and my text is so silly and pointless compared to it. Dammit. I want to apply for a joint program, an MFA in Creative Writing and PhD in English, and also apply to the Breadloaf Writer's Conference and to a couple of writing colonies... But am I for real? Am I good? Can I be a serious writer? I don't aspire to earn my living with writing, I am satisfied with being a professor and writing on the side, but can I do even that?
November is National Novel Writing Month in the US. I wanted really badly to try and write a novel. The project was incredible... But I can't I can't. I have to polish my memoir and write poems and write something to submit with my applications. And I have all these stupid essays for my classes and I need to spend more time writing them, cos I feel that I am letting mediocruty take possesion of me.
And I have to decide where I want to study and how and what. And I really want to travel, visit my friends, explore the US. And I have to make plans for Thanksgiving...
Our GRE Test Adviser told us to end every sentence from now on and until the exam with Dammit. So, I am going to drown in worry, Dammit. I don't have a clue about how I'm supposed to finish all I've started, Dammit. I am too ambitious, Dammit. I don't know if I'm worth anything artistically or intellectualy, Dammit. I feel like banging my head against the screen, Dammit... Actually, the Adviser was right, Dammit... it is kinda helpful and reassuring to say Dammit, Dammit!!

#9 IS THIS THE END, MY FINAL WORDS TO YOU?

*
Who am I?

The time of squirrels is up. We stand alone in the shadow of a lonely light and it's almost midnight, almost beautiful. We cry. You say you are bad and you only hurt people and can only harm me. I turn to smile because those are my words, my very own words. I hold a wood structure and my legs give way as butterflies. My hair is pacing the ground. You kneel and are above me and kiss my head and try to wake me up. I am nowhere. I am nowhere. Are you saying goodbye?
You say Happy Birthday. You are the first, except for those who where mistaken and congratulated me a day too early. I laugh or I cry because my last five minutes of possibility have disappeared. The time is up. I would have done it too, if you hadn't been here, if you hadn't taken me out and then helped me to get back. The magical year is over. I had to die.

We haven't seen each other for a while... You've been missing appointments... Tell me about your week... I have been in contact with your therapist from home and we feel that it would be a good thing for you to attend group therapy meetings. They are specialized in the treatment of BDP... they have many resources... they meet often... the difficulty is that they're in another town... How do you feel about it? ... You could still come here... You are crying, what is going through your mind?
My mind... How many therapists does a crazy person need to be cured? How many to understand that there is no cure, that this is the rest of your life, that you really are really mad? You people keep sending me forth and back and I have to relive my life and every time is harder and harder and I have to tell it all over again, to feel it all over again... I am already miserable as it is, why are you forcing me to suffer more? Am I not a good patient? What did I do wrong? You are as everyone else, rejecting me and sending me away.
I cry. I cry. Outside, the birds, a tractor, voices. Do I really hear them? The voices are inside.

Yes, you're right, little girl. We're here. Why don't you die?
But I don't want to die. Go away! You are not real. I want it to stop.
Oh, but it can't stop. We are part of you. We won't shut up.
We won't shut up.
You eat too much.
Nobody loves you, nobody remembers your face. Even your imaginary friends and your invented little brother know that you are the real lie.
You should have died.
You are alone. Forever forever forever. Growing old alone and fat.
You are very silent... What is going through your mind?
What? I look at my therapist. She is really there. She studies my face and waits. Crap. She wants me to speak, talk, have a voice. Which voice? Which one? Speak, voices, speak. I'm letting you speak out loud. You speak to the nut-doctor and I will think how to make this stop.
I have to find the monster. I have to surprise the monster and kill her before she eats me up.
I'll go to her while she's taking her bath. Alone, alone. I'll wait outside the curtain, filing my nails, cutting them sharp until they become razor blades.
I wait outside the curtain, listening to the monster splash in the water. When she comes out, I'll jump on her, attack her, make all this stop.
What is going through your mind?
Who are you? Why didn't you die?

CAN SATIRES SAVE THE WORLD???

What makes me feel this way? Dense scholarly books on early 17th century poets (John Donne); a whole weekend of everyone's family and friends... except that I spent it studying and I still don't know if anyone is coming to visit me anytime soon; bad bad American coffee; not knowing who is my friend and who isn't; thinking about grad school and how on Earth I'm going to pay for it or the continent/country where the school should be and how that is going to affect the rest of my life; lack of time and energy to really focus on writing, writing which at last seems to be getting somewhere and is being praised by fellow students and teachers. And my relaxation techniques are not working all that great, cuz how many baths can you take in one day if you don't have time to write a poem? (actually, I end up writing while I'm in the bathtub, to save up time). And redecorating my room every other day is actually tiring. And I don't think there's space left for more postcards. And planning my outfit for the next day only takes me five to ten minutes. And daydreaming ends up frustrating me even more because it's daydreaming and if I stop for a second I realize that all the things that frustrate me are REAL... and if I don't stop daydreaming no-one understands me, which is kind of problematic if I want to be a good teacher and a good student.
So... pleeeeeaaaasssseeee come visit!!! or write or call... I appreciate any interruption. I don't want to go back to John Donne and his stupid satires and the pedantic nonsense that scholars write about it. H-E-L-P

#8 I WRITE SINS NOT TRAGEDIES

*
Why didn't you die?

They all laugh, and my Love lays his head on my lap, just like the first time I wanted to say I love you, before the trouble. He falls asleep easily while I comb his hair with my fingers. My body aches and someone has taken away my eyes. The shadows get inside my shoes. My Friend also sleeps and I caress her hair lovingly. Suddenly, I am a mother with two babies and I feel utter despair.
My Love's Friends play music, drive, try to decipher the map and laugh at the sleepers. It's a long road to the beach. It is warm. I have to take off my long-sleeved jacket and go on just with my blue dress and my scars. My Friend knows them, but she sleeps. My Love knows some of them and I wonder, did he see the others last night? But he sleeps too. And his Friends don't sleep and they talk to me and they watch and will they ask?
We stop for breakfast. I put the jacket back on and watch my shadows float and dance and get inside a square building and stand on one toe and then on another and then on the one toe again, because everybody is walking around instead of focusing on breakfast and if they don't I don't and will they have a croissant or a muffin or should I have only a cappuccino? Fuck. I know I should have only coffee, that is, I should eat, I should have food and be healthy and that's what they'd like, good girl. But I'd like no food, only I crave muffins, and everyone is still just wandering not looking at the coffee sign. My shadows are getting sick and wild.

We get back inside the car and I don't let my Love or my Friend lie on my lap or even rest their heads on my shoulders. It's all bone anyway. I press my face against my Love's face, I rub like cats do. Then I rest my head on my Friend's legs and I grip her knees furiously, scratching deeper and deeper as I begin to cry.

Who do I love and is my love real and am I real and will this ever stop. The tears, they never stop. I'm sorry, Mother. You lied again. Even in this one good memory of you being honest with me, you lied. The tears never stop, they never dry up, I never run out of tears.
I let some moments pass. I have to laugh at my own innocence. How did I not predict this? I, who read hands and the Tarot and the stars and the insides of a teddy bear if they had ever asked me to do something so original, but they never ask. How could I not foretell that they would betray me and fall in love and treat me as their child and refuse to understand and stare at me with pitying eyes? My Friend, my Love. But then I did not foretell that my Love would be my Love again after the months and the scars and the boys and the girls and everything that is not quite buried because it stopped only a week ago. I did not foretell, did I? But again I have my Love, but do I?
Please stop me
Please stop me from thinking like this. Please stop me from being like this. Please stop me from being the monster the creature the panic the blood. Please stop me from looking at them. Please stop me from doing them harm. Please take me away make me disappear burn me with the sun and the sand. Please kill me. Please stop me.
I am the monster and I have come to eat you all alive.

QUE RICO BOOGALOO

Let us go then, you and I, look at ourselves in the mirror. I am a gorl, although I have scars in my knees for climbing trees and fighting boys, a little girl with yellow skin and orange hair and you're my best buddy and no-one knows you're there.
You're there when I go to sleep and you're there when I look at us in the mirror and I see a furry warm body, all small and quiet, trembling quick in my eyes, and that's you. The others can't see you and they say I imagine things and I'm a liar. I say I will run away. So one day I look in the mirror and you are in one eye and in the other eye we have a boat, a pretty boat made of wood and painted white, and we get inside and we don't have to hurry or go anywhere, just float.
In the boat we hear music. You say it's a violin and I agree. It's sad. I think the violin is sick and dying, but it never dies. The same old note is being played, but it always changes and never ends and I thinks it comes from us. We find candy in the boat and eat it 'till it makes us drowsy, drowsy and faint, drowsy and tired, drowsy and asleep...
And we sleep and we dream and we are young but no longer little and there's only me and a crowd and a face in the crowd and the face is dark and kind and it has a dark kind hand and the hand is reaching out for me and I reach out towards the hand. I wonder if the dark kind face would like to become my best buddy and stand with me in front of the mirror and protect me during the night.

[another Creative Memoir thingy]

#7 YOU'RE EITHER DIPPING YOUR TOE OR YOU'RE DROWNING

*
Who is she?

All the pretty ladies in the plane are nice to me and give me crayons and paper to draw. But they don't give me candy like to the small girls who cry, and maybe I should cry, or maybe it's because all my mouth is rotten and the dentist took out two teeth and transformed the rest in silver.
This is the great escape that Grandad Arcadi planned for me. Before he died and everything really began. So next to me is my Grandparents' Friend. She's not Mom's friend. She snores and holds my jacket on her lap. I go to her house every week to play the guitar and play with her granddaughter. I haven't taken off my cap.
I didn't say goodbye to my friends, or to my cat. Mom said she'd bring him next week to winter camp, but I won't be in winter camp. What will she do then? I am sure she will find out... trouble... trouble... I paint the little girl blue, her eyes black. I go out the lines. The pretty ladies smile.
My mind goes over all the bad names Mom taught me, and I say Shhh, but my mind won't shut up. Mom says the other side of the family, the one I haven't met, the one I'll meet now, is evil. Mom invents evil names for them all, including my father whom I have never met except one time with a very red pie, and my other Grandmother. My Mother says the evil names, although I don't think she's supposed to be evil, and then makes me repeat them again and again until they're stuck on my tongue and she's calm. And when my other Grandmother comes Mom smiles for five minutes, gets something and when Granmother turns around she whispers the evil name to me and makes me repeat it again.
Grandaddy Arcadi would never send me to an evil place.

After picking up our bags, I hide behind my Grandparent's Friend. I don't recognize anyone. A group of people are talking to me and maybe I am talking back, maybe not. They hug me and kiss me and cry. They are strangers. Except my other Grandmother and a man who was in my dream with the sad long-haired woman. He's my uncle. The sad long-haired woman is not my aunt.
I also have baby cousins who stare at me and are beautiful without being scared. And I have a second Grandfather, who maybe saved my life with big pink pills once when I was in the hospital and I couldn't breathe and my heart couldn't beat and I couldn't speak although I knew everyone's name and they were going to make a hole in my throat but I didn't want them to and along came my Grandfather with these gigantic pink pills he made me swallow and I was alive again although I didn't know his name and the doctors said that if ever I had pneumonia again I would die and didn't want to send me home.
And then there is my Father. He is not talking to me. I am supposed to know him, but I don't remember. Mom doesn't keep pictures of him and only speaks bad. Here it is only Grandmother and her Friend who talk. Then we get into two cars, and when they stop we have arrived somewhere and we all get out.

It is my new Grandparents' appartment. It is small and crowded with Christmas decorations, big presents wrapped in shiny new wrapping paper smiling on the sofas, and food food food, food in the fridge and food on the tables and food in the kitchen, as if it didn't matter, as if it were nothing. And among all this food, plenty of sweets and chocolate.
It takes me a while to understand that my new Grandparents are no longer married, but they still live together. But now that's not important. now I'm important, they say, and everybody cries because it's Christmas although Christmas was a couple of days ago, but now that I'm here it's really Christmas and it's late but Grandmother had prepared wonderful food and everyone has presents and my new Father takes pictures of me with each present. A bear I call Misha. A gray and red jacket. Boots. A monkey whose name I don't know.
They ask if I want to take a bath, is it because they like me or is it because I disgust them? I get into the bath, while Grandmother looks. The bath is full of nice smelling bubbles. I've never had bubbles before. Grandmother rubs and we find out that my skin is a different color. She also tries to comb my hair, but I scream and sink in the bath. The others come and say goodbye. They are nice, but I'm not sorry to see them go.

When all the bubbles disappear and the water is no longer hot, my Granparents' Friend forces me to get out and put on new pajamas. We sit in Grandmother's lunch room - because Grandfather and Grandmother have divided the house - and drink tea. I eat cookies and I know it will never be enough. Grandmother touches my hair and I pull away.
When will I go back home?
Do you like it here?
Yes, it's like heaven.
Then you will stay here you will stay here you will stay here you will stay here... but what she really means is that I never can go back and what did I do wrong? Mom will be upset. Mom will be angry with me. This time she'll kill me. She'll find me. She'll find me and she'll kill me and Grandma.
My new Grandmother and her Friend smile as their sip their tea not knowing what's to come.

#6 THEY SAY DYLAN IS A COOL CAT

*
Who are you?

We sit facing each other and he talks without stopping and I keep silent. The fish smell of his jacket reaches me and I'd like to run away, but not yet. He talks about some book, just because he knows I like books, so he has chosen just any book and now is talking and saying words and all I can hear is my own deep low moan.
Stop, stop, I want to go home.
You're not feeling well?
No, no. There's a pang of guilt and pain as I am about to say what I am about to say. It's also something else. Look, I'm not well.
It's fine. I'll take you home and we'll see each other in a couple of days.
No, no. I'm not well. I mean that I can't go on seeing you.
What? Why?
Because... Because I look at this table and instead of marble I see a nightmare, I see a fight, the Armageddon coming to get me and I feel threatened... and it's like that with everything else. You understand?
Yes... no. Why does that matter for us?
Because it matters. It's always like that and it changes everything.
We leave the bar and he takes my hand and tries to kiss me. Don't you realize I am breaking up with you? Then he gets angry and doesn't care anymore that I'm not feeling well. We walk in opposite directions and I feel relieved.
To celebrate, I want a real cut tonight, one to remember that I actually did something instead of waiting. I take out my pieces of broken glass, but they're no good, as I've always known. I go to the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of milk in case Dad wakes up and wonder what I'm doing in the kitchen at such a time.
First I try the knives we use daily. They leave my skin pink and little else. I clean them and leave them where they should be. Then I open the treasure chest where the big bad knives sleep. They look evil and I wonder which one will hurt most. One by one, I try them all, watching hypnotized the motions of the blades through my skin. One by one, I clean them all and put them back. My arm is achy and bloody, but not enough. I haven't found the knife I was looking for.
I take the milk and consider mixing it with some aspirines as I have done already in another occassion, but that only made me sleepy. In the morning, my wrist is double-size and full of scars.

#5 I WISH I WAS A MOTORCYCLE, I WOULD GO REAL FAST

*
Why did you do it?


At last they published the list of textbooks for the year and Dad and I go to a couple of bookstores to do some shopping. Only the French book is missing, which is not so bad. We also buy new notebooks and pens and pencils and rulers and a backpack and a diary and Dad carries two bags with another inside and I carry one bag and it's going to break and I can't breathe.
At home he looks at the bill and I look at the new books and we smell them together. We both love the smell of new books.
I feel guilty because I chose one of the expensive notebooks, just because it was prettier, and because I didn't really need a backpack. Dad goes to the kitchen to smoke and I go to my room and put the old textbooks away to make space for the new ones. I look at the notes I took last year, at the essays I wrote and feel ashamed. They don't belong to me, but to the professors who forced me to write them, I hide them, but do not throw them away.
It's too hot. It's September and too hot. I haven't closed the door, so I kick my shoes and try to get undressed and dressed again in seconds. I hear a door opening and it can only be Dad because there's only Dad. I crawl inside my body, but he's going in the other direction, so I relax and put on a Mexican red dress that belonged to my aunt but then was too small for her.
I lie in bed and go through all the things I will know in a few months. I don't even want to write my name on the first page because then I will ruin the newness of the books, and yet I write my name and I draw pictures and I pick the English workbook and my new favourite blue pen and in the couple of hours before dinner I have completed it.
Dad calls me from the kitchen and I take the English workbook and I show him and I tell him.
And now what are you going to do for the rest of the year? Why did we have to buy it if you were going to do it all in one afternoon?
I leave it on my bed, take my dinner, sit on my chair, eat, look at the news, say nothing. When I grow up I plan on paying my debts.