Underwater
a memoir
Tim?
I stand there, waiting for an answer. The crowd is nearing toward the stage, the band’s already geared for their second half. Sort of unusual that they even have a second half, unless this was an encore. But nobody’s chanting and no one looks like they want to leave. I feel awkward as hell.
Tim, is that you? Jesus. I rub my arms. So stupid coming here without a coat, just for the sake of some outfit that will eventually bore me. I press the phone tight against my ear, but it’s not making any sense. Sounds like someone’s voice in waves, like they’re talking underwater. Like a dishwasher garbling.
Tim I’m at the bar, not sure if you’re already here or not, I yell into the receiver. They’re about to play another set. I pause. I’m here. And I wait. So...yeah. There’s still time.
Maybe it’s not the right number. There’s too much noise around me, so much garbling. I need silence, space, an escape. Lots of shouting, glasses clinking, a fishnet full of mustache mullets and smash red lipstick colliding. Surrounded by total strangers, here in the city I first called home. Hipster pricks, gathering with their friends. I feel a tiny spike of jealousy.
I give up. This number he called me from, to confirm this whole fiasco? Delete. I’m too pissed, too cold, and I’ll be too wasted to drive back to my dad’s if I have another.
So I get another whiskey and decide to stick around for a couple more songs. I’ll stand there in the corner and sway around and look clever. I’ll pretend to know all the words and have the best time singing them, all to myself.
**
Middle school. I never saw it coming. I was a 13-year-old plump little goldfish thrown in the shark-infested sea. Without siblings or friends, I had no reef of protection.
With short skirts and high fives on top of pyramids, the priorities fisted their pompoms in the air and shouted stuff for the team. They flipped their hair a lot when they walked, those girls. It was almost methodical. And they could choose anyone they wanted, just by standing at their lockers, popping prohibited gum and looking involved. I was unimportant. I felt both invisible and naked when I passed faces in the halls. I covered my mouth when I ate lunch so no one could see me chew and call me out. A girl’s gotta eat without getting surrounded and devoured. That was one of the tricky parts.
13. What a year of firsts that was, in Austin, the first of many cities I lived in. First blood I longed for then instantly hated, because then I felt disgusting. First death of a family member, first time I really watched rebellious kids with a wistful eye. I wanted to present myself in a more provocative way. 13 meant getting to go to the mall without parents, or hanging at some high school party and accidentally getting drunk, then come Monday morning with a crazy story to tell. I heard these things all around me, but I never got invited. I sought refuge in second violin and the yearbook instead, which avoided the humiliating bus rides home. I squeaked and squeaked on my violin three days a week after school, eager for first chair even if I played second. Even drove Mr. Walters mad once when he told me to just practice another song, please. The other two afternoons were spent with Ms. Richter, a dually patient and intuitive gal (she knew things weren’t easy, she had been there herself I’m sure), working on the yearbook for 1994-95. I took on as many tasks as I could for that book, like designing the cover and taking photos, just to stay busy. Plus it gave me the chance to watch people without getting caught in a stare. Then my mom would come pick me up each day when she got off work at the base.
I started spiking girl boners at 13. I was obsessed with Laurie from Little Women, and Thomas, the good-boy-gone-bad in Swing Kids. My mind constructed intricate, deleted scenes with so much of our skin and flesh touching that there was no room for any real penetration, unless you meant his tongue was in my mouth and I felt completely unglued. I felt delicate in those fantasies, yet super talented that I could sway my hips and bend like hell to “Sing Sing Sing” till he couldn’t keep his hands off. Hands. I was dying to know what it was like to be touched by them. I cut and pasted photos from my Seventeen magazines and stuck them in my girl boner book I later lost one day in the move. As my mind was already kneading and sculpting my new sexual persona, my fingers wandered around and found a pen to write with first, thus delaying (for years!) that most pleasurable first of being by myself.
There was a boy in my math class named Tim and I was curious about him. I didn’t think about him obsessively like I did Christian Bale, but he entered my thoughts sometimes. Quietly. He was tall with dark eyes, and had shiny blonde hair and braces. He was like a silver dollar the average clown might mistaken for a nickel. He required a second glance. It was his knack for quick wit that made Tim shine. He could deliver sarcasm so thick that even feisty Ms. Johnson couldn’t catch it, as she eyeballed us all from the overhead projector. I suppose Tim was into the grunge scene, he seemed to dress the part anyway. Colored flannels dark maroon, light blue jeans. Almost always had some headphones nearby, how easy it was for him to block everything out. He seemed bored of the whole middle school scene in general. I liked that. And he was never mean to me, not once.
On the last day of school, I secretly knew my mom got the job on base in middle Georgia. Meant I’d be leaving all these kids behind as we stood around in the basketball court, hugging each other. I said, have a good summer, come to my birthday! when I knew there’d be no party. Secretly relieved, I clutched my fiddle case and my priceless yearbook of a year I would’ve skipped if I could have. Stay sweet, K.I.T.! Scribble this and that. One boy drew a penis. Don’t ever change!
**
No one warned me about the crests and troughs of being in my 20’s. I was lead to believe it would be the best time of my life.
Well, it did start off feeling that way. I was going to school at a university full-time in south Georgia and was involved in more clubs than I ever was in middle school. I felt useful with my newspaper columns and equally entertaining with a gig on the radio every Tuesday night. I also had a lot more friends. College was ripe for picking and choosing the best kinds of friends. People who were into the same things as me, people as nerdy as me, and also people occasionally slow-on-the-dismount (i.e. procrastinators) but restless to feed and nurture their talents. However, these friends mostly consisted of guys. I enjoyed feeling like the only sister in a household of brotherly love. With these boys I could breach dirty jokes, belch as loud as I wanted and not feel like I was silently being sized up. The first two years of my 20’s was a learning phase of trust, and it was the boys I seemed to trust the most.
I tiptoed around a plausible future at 22, on the verge of graduation before I’d become some highly synchronized personal and professional badass. I imagined myself working as a music video producer, cutting and slicing frames just like I had visualized them in my head. Or I was capturing sounds somewhere and later fumbling with them like jigsaw pieces in a booth during all hours of the night. Hungry to create something vibrant with my palette, I wanted to be bohemian. This image of myself as a twenty-something success story had wings on it, and it danced around in my head at night.
Perhaps my confidence was like the soapy sheath of a bubble, iridescent with idealism and promise. However, just a few months shy of my college graduation, I got jolted really hard with a curve ball and everything collapsed. With no bubble to fill, I stared at myself in the mirror with zero recognition. I barely made it to my graduation ceremony. After it was all over, I moved back in with my mom, waving a flag absent of any color at all.
I slept through the day and stayed up late, missing most of the sunlight that summer, which bled into fall and winter. I also gained a bunch of weight, as though I was hiding in a bag that never felt full. There was no way anyone could’ve wanted to touch me. I wanted to be touched, I did, but not by anyone’s hands. Only when I slept could I manage to subdue those prickly currents of fear and hunger and feel absolutely weightless. I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, but I didn’t dream very much then, unlike what the doctor had warned me about. No nightmares, just numbness. It didn’t help I was no longer a student, as being involved had given me such a clear sense of identity. I didn’t know who I was anymore, other than someone chosen as unlucky. I didn’t know how to convince myself I was now just a number and this was the real world.
The only thing I really craved was distraction. The Internet and cigarettes worked great for that. Coincidentally, I had started using both at 15. I was one of the first kids at my high school to use the web, but by the time I was 23 it was a norm to have an email address. It was less common among friends I knew in person to use Instant Messenger programs, but I kept steady correspondence with friends I never met that way. Sometimes I confided in them more than my own mother. That summer of 2004, just as I had returned home from school, those of us in the know had started using social networking. MySpace dot com, it was the place for old friendsters. It was so easy that the hours just flew along.
9-2-1-0-2. Those were five numbers I did find to be lucky.
I had randomly plugged them in on the MySpace browse page, under zip code, for the sake of wandering curiosity. A tile of thumbnail photos appeared. The very first was of a boy with sulking chocolate brown eyes, staring right at me. I grinned and clicked his face. He had a penchant for Jeff Buckley, who crooned and made me ache, since I wanted to be the girl “So Real” was about. The boy was also 23, with cheeks golden brown like he lived in the sun. He did, right next to his photo read San Diego, California. Was San Diego near San Francisco, who knows? I’d never been that far west before. Who cares! He was sun-kissed perfection.
Soon, we started sending each other private messages on MySpace, leading to much longer chats on AIM, then eventually we started talking on the phone. Thank goodness for cell phones with free long distance, otherwise those long and wispy late night calls to California would’ve been hell to pay when the phone bill arrived. Then cell phones came out with little cameras. Those became a must! I knew how to hold mine just right and click and hide the ugly parts. They made it so much easier to offer an enhanced version of myself. First he told me I was cute, then later I became beautiful. The first text message I ever sent was to him, during a trip to Seattle. O’Hare airport sucks more than a whore. I pressed each number the correct amount of times, for capitalization and that. how would u know how much a whore sucks? was my first text back. Much to my parents’ horror, I impulsively jumped on a Greyhound bus and rode 29 hours from Seattle to San Diego so we could meet face-to-face. Delicious butterflies were in my stomach when I stepped off the bus and he greeted me. They followed us to the beach, where he first leaned down to kiss me. Leave it all behind you and go west, they were buttery sweet like fortune cookies. So six months later I did, in hopes a beach with big waves and a shiny new boyfriend might do the trick.
**
I moved to San Diego just in time to celebrate my 24th birthday.
At first I did all right. I found a sublet room near the shore, from this website called craigslist.com. Then I got a gig as a cocktail waitress in the touristy downtown district. A place to rest my head and a place to earn it, it was a value gained. When my boyfriend wasn’t around, I cushioned my ass in the sand until it went numb, staring. I did a lot of that, out at the sea. I liked to walk out onto the pier alone in Ocean Beach and watch the eager pelicans stab their beaks in the waves, choose their fish and pluck them out. I wanted to smell the west coast salt and listen to the sound of the constant and impermanent waves, so vast and infinite like the space inside.
I did the best I could at becoming someone’s girlfriend. Online it was easy. We were in a relationship. I didn't go overboard by posting any nauseating photos like most couples did, but I wanted the people I left back home to see and believe I was happy, that I had finally found my rock to hold things down while I dusted myself off from a little fall. Alone in his room we laughed a lot. I twisted the fur on his arms and beard. He felt good inside and I finally quit smoking. He was so tall that I never lost him when we swam in the sea together.
But his family was snotty. I wanted them to think less of me as that nut from Georgia and more like the all-American girl. It didn’t really work. I could never relax, and folks like his just couldn’t adjust to the whole concept of their son dating a girl he met from the Internet. For them, MySpace was a place for psychos, junkies... not for traditional, perky, well-to-do girls from the area. So eventually, on the nights he wasn't around, I started to feel reckless, imploding with drink and whatever else to distract me. I probably squeezed the life out of him when he was around, unless I was sneaking an undercover cigarette and didn't want to get caught.
We broke up the following summer in 2006, weeks before my 25th birthday. I didn’t spend a lot of time grieving over it, to be honest. It wasn’t the first time I’d been let down or forced to give something up, so I wasn’t afraid of it. I had other things to grieve about, but couldn’t figure out where they had been stashed.
Grief is weird. It wanders off like it’s gone for good just as quickly as it can appear, nipping at my heels. I couldn’t tell if I was chasing it or it was chasing me. So I kept my hands full by tugging at cigarettes, chewing my nails, and typing keys to raft through this peculiar world of cyberspace. MySpace was still so easy to tune into, it didn’t matter what was happening during that lonely period in San Diego.
One afternoon, I already had my apron on, ready to take off for the evening shift. 7-8-7-4-9, how I loved to procrastinate. I wanted to go back to Austin, to 13, and find those old faces from middle school. Dozens of thumbnail photos appeared on the screen, some achingly familiar. Did they take their own advice and never change?
Robyn was the meanest and the only girl I ever kicked with my actual foot. Found her! She was now a lesbian. Eric, my first relationship of forty-nine seconds (which I had proudly ended), is that really Eric? He got really fat, and already had kids. 25, and the idea of being pregnant? Pass. Brandon, that tall blonde boy who always wore a Chicago Bulls Starter jacket and was also my neighbor, the boy who used to lead harrowing chorus lines about me and my weight on the bus, that fucking Brandon? I remember when his best friend told me Brandon had secretly liked me but social code wouldn’t allow us to date. That’s why he’d get the younger and more eager kids on the bus to chime in and shower me with a little extra negative attention. What if he had just pursued me instead of tormenting and branding me with a body complex? I had secretly loved him, and I hated that I did. Did he know any better, at 25? Hmm, said he was a gym trainer and a nutritionist. How absolutely fucking fitting.
Meanwhile Tim, the silver dollar in math class, said he was looking for coffee and donuts in Santa Cruz.
On MySpace, everyone was either gay, straight or bi, but somehow, Tim had managed to program gay as fuck as his orientation. His body type was grotesquely obese, and his religion was not yours. How did he do all that, and how was his status content? Everyone else was either single, in a relationship, or god forbid, married. His occupation was prostitute, bitch and his picture left me with no doubts it was definitely Tim, there was that expression of his. Even when we were 13, I remembered how he would look at me with the most undivided attention. I remembered the crystalline texture in his eyes, and how his thick, dark pupils could penetrate me. He had the same effect with the camera. Judging by that look and his short and sweet sense of delivery, MySpace Tim was an amplified version of the boy I remembered, who could draw outside the lines in math class and fool Ms. Johnson. The only obvious difference was his black-rimmed glasses. There were dark blue lines drawn digitally in the background of his photo, more signs this boy was probably pretty sharp with modern computers.
My knee was twitching like crazy while I tapped nervously at the keyboard. I knew I was going to be late for work. I was spending entirely too much time trying to construct the perfect message like no time was spent on it at all. Dear Tim. No, why would I put dear, this wasn’t pen-pal season and we weren’t in middle school anymore. Hey, Tim! It’s me, Tara sounded as though he was still standing in the basketball court, waiting to hear how my summer went. Hi Tim. You might not remember me. I stuck with that and kept typing.
To my relief, Tim did remember who I was. It surprised me how quickly he responded to my message, in just under a day. No questions were asked about why I had just picked up and left Austin without saying goodbye twelve years ago, on the last day of school. So I went ahead and offered the information anyway, in case he was privately wondering but was too hesitant to ask.
He christened my hard drive with mp3s. Sometimes it took an hour to receive a song, but I didn’t mind since he never let me down. He even trusted me with his password to access some private site where I could pick and choose songs from his personal library, plus passed along some cute tricks for MySpace kicks, like how to post a song with a video on my profile. Then came my 20 questions of What happened to...? He told me how Shay did that thing you’re not supposed to do to girls and how Chrissie married some guy in the Army.
He was good at staying up late. He also took the Greyhound the first time to California like I had, except he left overnight without telling his parents and still hadn’t come back to fetch his things. I don’t think he ever left a note either. My mom had been the one who helped me run away, she knew I was wounded. She barely fit in the passenger side of my car, it was so filled with junk. My mom was my number one fan.
Reconnecting with Tim worked out good because we got to skip a lot of those nasty parts of our lives in-between. We were in charge of what information to disclose. There was no doomed presumption, reputation, or rumor to deny. It was obvious we both were wrestling something, but we could still be those kids who talked shit about Ms. Johnson’s haircut without getting caught and breaking some kind of code. I contemplated confiding in Tim, I really did, as he seemed like a mature person who could appreciate my confidence. But there was something so quiet about not having to do so, not having to listen to myself talk about it. I was enjoying this protected identity, seemingly unscathed in my photos, a new girl. And Tim was the kind and intriguing boy whose “About Me” section struck a chord: pots and pans and acoustic guitars. i really need to improve my sleeping habits. the rest is pretty hard to explain. I could find trust in someone like this, I was sure. An anonymous yet comfortably familiar friendship was exactly what I needed, so reconnecting with Tim worked out really, really good.
One night I begged him to sit still and wait for a CocoRosie mp3 to upload onto his hard drive. This song, “Brazilian Sun,” was a special gift from me, well worth the wait I insisted. It was on another night spent alone in San Diego, but I knew he was just a few hours north in Santa Cruz. The mournful, operatic wails in her voice trembled coarse and softly, like an aging woman hunched over something lifeless and special. A bloated courtesan washed up on the shore.
We couldn’t manage to be in the same room listening to records and making out, that’s what you were supposed to do at 25. So we settled for the next best thing, file sharing. I’m glad he liked the song, he said he did. He didn’t seem like the type to lie about music. Reminded me of another 13-year-old quirk, when I wore headphones with Mozart as my dirty little secret and didn’t have a fucking clue about Nirvana.
We kept in touch like that for a couple of years, always with a quick hello in the stillness of night, a charming photo comment here and there, or simply to share another song that made one of us ache. I followed his blog even though he only kept one entry. In it was his own cartoon, a creature standing in the rain and holding an umbrella. He should try holding it over his head. It might serve him better that way, remarked a friend underneath. true, but then his friend would get wet, Tim replied. Made me peer at it closer.
I wanted to meet Tim someday and hang out on the beach together, either in San Diego or Santa Cruz, maybe we could both dive into the sea. I knew some types of sharks out there were harmless, one afternoon I had let them swim around and between my legs in Ocean Beach. I felt calm as it wasn’t me they were choosing to devour. We could’ve been safe in the California sun, if Tim hadn’t decided to return to Austin and me to Atlanta.
**
I woke up on a friend’s couch late in the afternoon on January 1, with no job and fistfuls of cash. 2008 was off to an excellent start.
People love to drink in Atlanta, and New Year’s Eve is no exception. Ten minutes after the horns and bells, I yanked someone’s flute and chugged their champagne, no time for a breath in between massive gulps. I swear those bubbles had boxing gloves on them. Sometimes stuff gets trapped in your center, where you can’t burp or fart. It’s like using gas in the war against yourself.
I celebrated my 26th birthday before that on 07-07-07, alongside my team of loyal girl friends, whom I trusted the most. And I woke the next morning convinced there was no birthday cake. Then my best friend showed me her digital camera. Tara Misu, you were rubbing your chest in it! 2007 hadn’t been the worst year but it was one heck of a bender. Exhausting, but in some respect it felt good to let myself unravel a little more just to see what my limits were in this hedonist wreath. On the flipside, I did manage to set an indestructible limit by giving up sex for one year so I could reclaim my virginity. I decided to do that while I was driving back from San Diego on I-20. I needed to clean myself off, as well as avoid male distraction in order to gain some control over the direction I was going. Other than that, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing when I got to Atlanta in March. So I did what came natural and got a job in a restaurant. Only this time, I was the bartender. Then I helped closed the place down on New Year's Eve.
Hours after the most intense shift of my life, I stared with disbelief at this wad of cash. I counted and recounted. Seven hundred...fifty more...nine hundred...plus the month’s severance check...I felt loaded. I’d never had this much cash in my hands, it felt like Monopoly money. It was a brand new year, so I couldn’t just sit there. Something was tugging inside, like I had been walking with my shoelaces untied and this was my chance to stop and readjust them. I threw some stuff in the trunk of my car, including a blanket and a pointless atlas, considering it was a straight shot where I was going. Many hours were ahead to watch the dashes dance once again on I-20. I left my roommate two months’ worth of rent and took off alone. I put my iPod on shuffle and let it do the talking. I couldn’t do that with my beloved Discman I had taken on the Greyhound four years earlier.
I got two speeding tickets in Texas, and I puked in a Tuscon motel after watching a meat documentary on the cable channel. The next morning I decided to go vegetarian. When I crossed the California state line, again, it didn’t feel the same as it did when my car was loaded to the brim with my mom three years earlier. This time I felt even more liberated in the driver’s seat, free to go wherever I chose. Steady flicks of adrenaline, there was something so satisfying about learning how to trust myself. Whatever happened, I knew I was in good hands.
I spent the night on a friend’s couch in Venice Beach. She had the same name as me except she spelled it differently. We had first met each other at a show in Hollywood. I thought about love before I fell asleep on her plush velvet sofa, wondering if I’d find someone like me one day, and if that would be a good thing. Days later I was sitting on a bar stool with another friend and her brothers many miles north in Seattle, when an old man leaned in to ask us a question. What’s the word for when you’re feeling overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the exact same time? The older brother cleared his throat, that’s anomie. I don’t know if that was the exact definition of the word, but I sure liked the sound of it. I wrote it down in a matchbook.
I drove back down to San Diego, peering at the golden hills passing me by like I had on the Greyhound. There, it was still warm and sunny in January. It had been nearly a year since I had left it for Atlanta. Again, I sat down on the sand in Ocean Beach and stared at it. I knew that I was fearless to venture alone, this wasn’t a problem. But this constant sense of displacement was a problem, and coast-to-coast it had managed to follow me. I didn’t want to pour anyone's drink anymore, either. I needed to stretch further, in hopes I might find a place I wouldn’t want to leave. I bid a final adios to California and turned back again for Atlanta, another city I knew I wouldn’t be in much longer.
But I did plan to stop and visit my dad in Austin on the way.
Hey you. Do you want to go see The Liars with me on Saturday, Feb 16? I saw them in Portland a few weeks ago and they were amazing live! I’ve been on a road trip and I’m gonna be in Austin for a few weeks in February. So... if you don’t have any plans, that’s where I’ll be. Wanna go?? Gimme a shout.
Ciao xoxo
tara
That took me a quarter of the time it used to take. And Tim was good, quick with responses. I liked that.
YES!
**
That road trip out west sure did me some good. Sometimes I wish I was still on it. Gave me time to break all my routines. Surely a routine can be made out of that. I’m thirsty to find out, so I’ve just accepted a teaching job in Baoding, China. In two months, I’ll be on my way.
I’ve started using Facebook recently. It’s not that different from MySpace except a lot less people use it. It’s been helpful in making contact with some other American teachers who will be in the same city. We’re all close in age, but at 27 I’ll be the oldest, which is fine. Most people my age are married and make babies, and they’re all on MySpace. Even people’s pets have profiles, and friend requests are usually just spam.
My Chinese visa is finally in the mail. Snail mail, that is. I’m so excited. This is going to be crazy! Will I be able to learn a second language? How the hell do I say my name in Chinese? Maybe I’ll make my students call me Misu. Maybe I’ll meet another jetsetter and we’ll fall in love and backpack the world together in holy matrimony. Or maybe I’ll have more than just one lover, maybe they’ll all be in different places. I could be a lover on-the-go, like my mom when she was 27. Maybe I’ll start another blog and post about my whereabouts, with stories I won’t be afraid to tell. Maybe all the people I leave behind will stumble upon them and wonder if they’re true. Like Brandon from middle school, with his stupid chorus line, or the crowd from my university who imagined I’d be in a mental institution by now. They may have seen me in a bleak transformation, but I feel so far from all that! I feel like I’ve gulped a mouthful of helium.
I dreamt about that guy Tim last night, I will admit, although I don’t remember seeing his actual face. It's been bugging me all day, especially since I haven’t thought about that night in Austin at all. That was four months ago. At first I wouldn’t let myself think about it because I hate feeling dumb. I went to a show, expecting to meet a boy I knew from middle school crouched in the corner somewhere, twisting a toothpick in his drink with his braces off, enjoying his own private joke like he was Ethan Hawke. I wound up searching that dingy dive bar up and down for hours, desperate to find my silver dollar. The jerk stood me up, plain and simple. Clearly I was unnecessary to him so I’ve never sent him any sort of message asking why he didn’t bother coming to the bar because, plain and simple, I do not care. It's not worth getting upset about, I had a worse time at the prom. But still, why didn’t he show up? I’m just...curious. I could take a little peek at his profile, you know, for kicks.
Fine. I’ll get online and go to MySpace. My jaw is clenched. This is probably going to hurt. There’s probably some girl he’s in a relationship with, hence why he didn’t come to the bar that night. I wonder if he’s finally posted any new blog entries lately with some short and sweet social commentary, aching with self-awareness. He always struck me as someone who could acknowledge insecurity in a gentle way. And in turn, it made him more confident. I wish I was good at that but I am learning, in fact just the other day I admitted out loud that I can be a self-centered pain in the ass sometimes. Would it have been so bad, if he had just shown up? I wasn’t still that chunky nerd on the yearbook staff. We could’ve had a blast just staring at each other, seeing what all the years in between had done to our faces, without pixels. And we could’ve stayed up really late and listened to each other speak, in real time, and maybe have gotten around to talking about what made us start running in the first place. There you are, Tim. I’m staring at his thumbnail really hard, my knee is twitching like crazy right now. His name, boy vs. self… I don’t know if I should do this. Oh Tim. I wanted you as my confidante, I even wanted you as my lover. I got neither but I didn’t let you hurt me. Click.
He’s still searching for coffee and donuts in Santa Cruz, with a status content.
Absolutely nothing has changed. He’s still gay as fuck and hiding his face with a pair of shades and a beanie. The porch he’s been sitting on, it’s so very Austin, with its wooden panels and rocky white concrete.
I click on his picture, just to make it bigger. Maybe I can see his face a little better. I know I’m weak, and I know that I’m sad. At least he changed the caption. Under is a cute girl with a black pixie cut. Maybe she’s the one he chose to devour. Maybe she’s really talented at something. You were my favorite person in the galaxy. Her comment is feverish. I click the back button.
Under his porch as big and empty as east to west Texas, his last login number is 2-16-08. The same day the Liars played in Austin, the day we were supposed to meet. I wrap my arms around my body while my teeth clatter. It feels cold in July.
**
When I was 13 I stayed up all night reading Anne Frank too quickly to analyze her thoughts. I was eager to find out what happened in the end, as though her diary had feet on it and followed her to the death camp. The next morning my grandfather returned to Delaware from his visit, but I was too groggy from lack of sleep to mutter goodbye to him. A few months later, cancer took him and I wouldn't let myself cry. I didn't want to make it worse for my mom. I stood quietly in her bedroom doorway, watching her pack a suitcase for his funeral in Arlington. When I was 25 I dreamt Granddaddy and I were sailing on a cruise ship. The sun was dusty and golden. I told him I knew he was dead, and that we should order raw oysters since I had finally acquired the taste. Let’s enjoy them now before I wake up, I exclaimed while the ocean breeze fluttered my pigtails. We squeezed lemons on their soft, gray bodies before they slid down our throats and I woke up bawling in my ex’s bed. Tears long overdue, so salty and delicious. It felt good to finally grieve.
It wasn’t until I was 31 and living in Spain when I finally grieved for Tim. It was exactly five years to the day I had been searching for him in that noisy hipster bar. In my dream we weren’t lounging together on a boat, or swimming with the harmless sharks in California. We were nowhere near the sea. Instead, we were in someone’s bathroom. He was standing there in the tub, fully clothed in dark maroon flannel and blue jeans. His back was turned and he wouldn't let me see his face. Tim, I repeated. I’m still here. They're about to play another set. He was sobbing so soft and coarsely. It garbled against the porcelain tile. Let me in so I can see your face this time, I pleaded. Go away, he murmured, please. Please. He was hunching over himself, instinctively I knew he had a razor blade. A streak of dark blood was drying on the sink counter, who knows how long it had been there. Tim, I begged. Choose me. Choose ME. But I knew he wasn't going to do that, so I gently closed the bathroom door and woke up with empty hands, clutching someone's anguish like it was my own.
**
Hello Cynthia,
My name is Tara. We don't know each other. Please forgive me if sending you this is tacky. It’s about a mutual friend, Tim, and I just found out he died on myspace... I googled his obituary but I still don’t know what happened. I was supposed to see him the night he died and he might have asked me for help but I couldn’t hear him. Was he in an accident? I saw your comment on his page so that’s how I found your profile. I really hope this doesn’t upset you. Can you please tell me what happened? I don’t know how close you guys were. I’m really sorry. Please write me back if you can.
tara
She replied the very same day.
Hi Tara. Thank you for your message and don’t worry, you haven’t upset me. I’m sorry you had to learn of his passing this way, I know it must be hard to imagine.
Tim had a beautiful soul, was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Always looking out for other people. He died of a heroin overdose. He had been trapped for years with that mess. We knew each other through rehab.
I don’t think the situation was too good between him and his parents either. He lived at home, and occasionally he’d say pretty harsh things about them during group sessions. He also talked about saving up a lot of money to buy a stash, large enough to shoot himself up to the stars. He said that after being clean for nearly a year.
I’m sure he did not want you to know about his issues with heroin, it’s an ugly side. I know because I’ve been there. And I’m sure you were special to him, since he did not want you to see him in that state. If you ever need to talk, you can contact me.
Hugs,
Cindy
And alongside was a friend request, on the site we all eventually stopped using.
I stand there, waiting for an answer. The crowd is nearing toward the stage, the band’s already geared for their second half. Sort of unusual that they even have a second half, unless this was an encore. But nobody’s chanting and no one looks like they want to leave. I feel awkward as hell.
Tim, is that you? Jesus. I rub my arms. So stupid coming here without a coat, just for the sake of some outfit that will eventually bore me. I press the phone tight against my ear, but it’s not making any sense. Sounds like someone’s voice in waves, like they’re talking underwater. Like a dishwasher garbling.
Tim I’m at the bar, not sure if you’re already here or not, I yell into the receiver. They’re about to play another set. I pause. I’m here. And I wait. So...yeah. There’s still time.
Maybe it’s not the right number. There’s too much noise around me, so much garbling. I need silence, space, an escape. Lots of shouting, glasses clinking, a fishnet full of mustache mullets and smash red lipstick colliding. Surrounded by total strangers, here in the city I first called home. Hipster pricks, gathering with their friends. I feel a tiny spike of jealousy.
I give up. This number he called me from, to confirm this whole fiasco? Delete. I’m too pissed, too cold, and I’ll be too wasted to drive back to my dad’s if I have another.
So I get another whiskey and decide to stick around for a couple more songs. I’ll stand there in the corner and sway around and look clever. I’ll pretend to know all the words and have the best time singing them, all to myself.
**
Middle school. I never saw it coming. I was a 13-year-old plump little goldfish thrown in the shark-infested sea. Without siblings or friends, I had no reef of protection.
With short skirts and high fives on top of pyramids, the priorities fisted their pompoms in the air and shouted stuff for the team. They flipped their hair a lot when they walked, those girls. It was almost methodical. And they could choose anyone they wanted, just by standing at their lockers, popping prohibited gum and looking involved. I was unimportant. I felt both invisible and naked when I passed faces in the halls. I covered my mouth when I ate lunch so no one could see me chew and call me out. A girl’s gotta eat without getting surrounded and devoured. That was one of the tricky parts.
13. What a year of firsts that was, in Austin, the first of many cities I lived in. First blood I longed for then instantly hated, because then I felt disgusting. First death of a family member, first time I really watched rebellious kids with a wistful eye. I wanted to present myself in a more provocative way. 13 meant getting to go to the mall without parents, or hanging at some high school party and accidentally getting drunk, then come Monday morning with a crazy story to tell. I heard these things all around me, but I never got invited. I sought refuge in second violin and the yearbook instead, which avoided the humiliating bus rides home. I squeaked and squeaked on my violin three days a week after school, eager for first chair even if I played second. Even drove Mr. Walters mad once when he told me to just practice another song, please. The other two afternoons were spent with Ms. Richter, a dually patient and intuitive gal (she knew things weren’t easy, she had been there herself I’m sure), working on the yearbook for 1994-95. I took on as many tasks as I could for that book, like designing the cover and taking photos, just to stay busy. Plus it gave me the chance to watch people without getting caught in a stare. Then my mom would come pick me up each day when she got off work at the base.
I started spiking girl boners at 13. I was obsessed with Laurie from Little Women, and Thomas, the good-boy-gone-bad in Swing Kids. My mind constructed intricate, deleted scenes with so much of our skin and flesh touching that there was no room for any real penetration, unless you meant his tongue was in my mouth and I felt completely unglued. I felt delicate in those fantasies, yet super talented that I could sway my hips and bend like hell to “Sing Sing Sing” till he couldn’t keep his hands off. Hands. I was dying to know what it was like to be touched by them. I cut and pasted photos from my Seventeen magazines and stuck them in my girl boner book I later lost one day in the move. As my mind was already kneading and sculpting my new sexual persona, my fingers wandered around and found a pen to write with first, thus delaying (for years!) that most pleasurable first of being by myself.
There was a boy in my math class named Tim and I was curious about him. I didn’t think about him obsessively like I did Christian Bale, but he entered my thoughts sometimes. Quietly. He was tall with dark eyes, and had shiny blonde hair and braces. He was like a silver dollar the average clown might mistaken for a nickel. He required a second glance. It was his knack for quick wit that made Tim shine. He could deliver sarcasm so thick that even feisty Ms. Johnson couldn’t catch it, as she eyeballed us all from the overhead projector. I suppose Tim was into the grunge scene, he seemed to dress the part anyway. Colored flannels dark maroon, light blue jeans. Almost always had some headphones nearby, how easy it was for him to block everything out. He seemed bored of the whole middle school scene in general. I liked that. And he was never mean to me, not once.
On the last day of school, I secretly knew my mom got the job on base in middle Georgia. Meant I’d be leaving all these kids behind as we stood around in the basketball court, hugging each other. I said, have a good summer, come to my birthday! when I knew there’d be no party. Secretly relieved, I clutched my fiddle case and my priceless yearbook of a year I would’ve skipped if I could have. Stay sweet, K.I.T.! Scribble this and that. One boy drew a penis. Don’t ever change!
**
No one warned me about the crests and troughs of being in my 20’s. I was lead to believe it would be the best time of my life.
Well, it did start off feeling that way. I was going to school at a university full-time in south Georgia and was involved in more clubs than I ever was in middle school. I felt useful with my newspaper columns and equally entertaining with a gig on the radio every Tuesday night. I also had a lot more friends. College was ripe for picking and choosing the best kinds of friends. People who were into the same things as me, people as nerdy as me, and also people occasionally slow-on-the-dismount (i.e. procrastinators) but restless to feed and nurture their talents. However, these friends mostly consisted of guys. I enjoyed feeling like the only sister in a household of brotherly love. With these boys I could breach dirty jokes, belch as loud as I wanted and not feel like I was silently being sized up. The first two years of my 20’s was a learning phase of trust, and it was the boys I seemed to trust the most.
I tiptoed around a plausible future at 22, on the verge of graduation before I’d become some highly synchronized personal and professional badass. I imagined myself working as a music video producer, cutting and slicing frames just like I had visualized them in my head. Or I was capturing sounds somewhere and later fumbling with them like jigsaw pieces in a booth during all hours of the night. Hungry to create something vibrant with my palette, I wanted to be bohemian. This image of myself as a twenty-something success story had wings on it, and it danced around in my head at night.
Perhaps my confidence was like the soapy sheath of a bubble, iridescent with idealism and promise. However, just a few months shy of my college graduation, I got jolted really hard with a curve ball and everything collapsed. With no bubble to fill, I stared at myself in the mirror with zero recognition. I barely made it to my graduation ceremony. After it was all over, I moved back in with my mom, waving a flag absent of any color at all.
I slept through the day and stayed up late, missing most of the sunlight that summer, which bled into fall and winter. I also gained a bunch of weight, as though I was hiding in a bag that never felt full. There was no way anyone could’ve wanted to touch me. I wanted to be touched, I did, but not by anyone’s hands. Only when I slept could I manage to subdue those prickly currents of fear and hunger and feel absolutely weightless. I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, but I didn’t dream very much then, unlike what the doctor had warned me about. No nightmares, just numbness. It didn’t help I was no longer a student, as being involved had given me such a clear sense of identity. I didn’t know who I was anymore, other than someone chosen as unlucky. I didn’t know how to convince myself I was now just a number and this was the real world.
The only thing I really craved was distraction. The Internet and cigarettes worked great for that. Coincidentally, I had started using both at 15. I was one of the first kids at my high school to use the web, but by the time I was 23 it was a norm to have an email address. It was less common among friends I knew in person to use Instant Messenger programs, but I kept steady correspondence with friends I never met that way. Sometimes I confided in them more than my own mother. That summer of 2004, just as I had returned home from school, those of us in the know had started using social networking. MySpace dot com, it was the place for old friendsters. It was so easy that the hours just flew along.
9-2-1-0-2. Those were five numbers I did find to be lucky.
I had randomly plugged them in on the MySpace browse page, under zip code, for the sake of wandering curiosity. A tile of thumbnail photos appeared. The very first was of a boy with sulking chocolate brown eyes, staring right at me. I grinned and clicked his face. He had a penchant for Jeff Buckley, who crooned and made me ache, since I wanted to be the girl “So Real” was about. The boy was also 23, with cheeks golden brown like he lived in the sun. He did, right next to his photo read San Diego, California. Was San Diego near San Francisco, who knows? I’d never been that far west before. Who cares! He was sun-kissed perfection.
Soon, we started sending each other private messages on MySpace, leading to much longer chats on AIM, then eventually we started talking on the phone. Thank goodness for cell phones with free long distance, otherwise those long and wispy late night calls to California would’ve been hell to pay when the phone bill arrived. Then cell phones came out with little cameras. Those became a must! I knew how to hold mine just right and click and hide the ugly parts. They made it so much easier to offer an enhanced version of myself. First he told me I was cute, then later I became beautiful. The first text message I ever sent was to him, during a trip to Seattle. O’Hare airport sucks more than a whore. I pressed each number the correct amount of times, for capitalization and that. how would u know how much a whore sucks? was my first text back. Much to my parents’ horror, I impulsively jumped on a Greyhound bus and rode 29 hours from Seattle to San Diego so we could meet face-to-face. Delicious butterflies were in my stomach when I stepped off the bus and he greeted me. They followed us to the beach, where he first leaned down to kiss me. Leave it all behind you and go west, they were buttery sweet like fortune cookies. So six months later I did, in hopes a beach with big waves and a shiny new boyfriend might do the trick.
**
I moved to San Diego just in time to celebrate my 24th birthday.
At first I did all right. I found a sublet room near the shore, from this website called craigslist.com. Then I got a gig as a cocktail waitress in the touristy downtown district. A place to rest my head and a place to earn it, it was a value gained. When my boyfriend wasn’t around, I cushioned my ass in the sand until it went numb, staring. I did a lot of that, out at the sea. I liked to walk out onto the pier alone in Ocean Beach and watch the eager pelicans stab their beaks in the waves, choose their fish and pluck them out. I wanted to smell the west coast salt and listen to the sound of the constant and impermanent waves, so vast and infinite like the space inside.
I did the best I could at becoming someone’s girlfriend. Online it was easy. We were in a relationship. I didn't go overboard by posting any nauseating photos like most couples did, but I wanted the people I left back home to see and believe I was happy, that I had finally found my rock to hold things down while I dusted myself off from a little fall. Alone in his room we laughed a lot. I twisted the fur on his arms and beard. He felt good inside and I finally quit smoking. He was so tall that I never lost him when we swam in the sea together.
But his family was snotty. I wanted them to think less of me as that nut from Georgia and more like the all-American girl. It didn’t really work. I could never relax, and folks like his just couldn’t adjust to the whole concept of their son dating a girl he met from the Internet. For them, MySpace was a place for psychos, junkies... not for traditional, perky, well-to-do girls from the area. So eventually, on the nights he wasn't around, I started to feel reckless, imploding with drink and whatever else to distract me. I probably squeezed the life out of him when he was around, unless I was sneaking an undercover cigarette and didn't want to get caught.
We broke up the following summer in 2006, weeks before my 25th birthday. I didn’t spend a lot of time grieving over it, to be honest. It wasn’t the first time I’d been let down or forced to give something up, so I wasn’t afraid of it. I had other things to grieve about, but couldn’t figure out where they had been stashed.
Grief is weird. It wanders off like it’s gone for good just as quickly as it can appear, nipping at my heels. I couldn’t tell if I was chasing it or it was chasing me. So I kept my hands full by tugging at cigarettes, chewing my nails, and typing keys to raft through this peculiar world of cyberspace. MySpace was still so easy to tune into, it didn’t matter what was happening during that lonely period in San Diego.
One afternoon, I already had my apron on, ready to take off for the evening shift. 7-8-7-4-9, how I loved to procrastinate. I wanted to go back to Austin, to 13, and find those old faces from middle school. Dozens of thumbnail photos appeared on the screen, some achingly familiar. Did they take their own advice and never change?
Robyn was the meanest and the only girl I ever kicked with my actual foot. Found her! She was now a lesbian. Eric, my first relationship of forty-nine seconds (which I had proudly ended), is that really Eric? He got really fat, and already had kids. 25, and the idea of being pregnant? Pass. Brandon, that tall blonde boy who always wore a Chicago Bulls Starter jacket and was also my neighbor, the boy who used to lead harrowing chorus lines about me and my weight on the bus, that fucking Brandon? I remember when his best friend told me Brandon had secretly liked me but social code wouldn’t allow us to date. That’s why he’d get the younger and more eager kids on the bus to chime in and shower me with a little extra negative attention. What if he had just pursued me instead of tormenting and branding me with a body complex? I had secretly loved him, and I hated that I did. Did he know any better, at 25? Hmm, said he was a gym trainer and a nutritionist. How absolutely fucking fitting.
Meanwhile Tim, the silver dollar in math class, said he was looking for coffee and donuts in Santa Cruz.
On MySpace, everyone was either gay, straight or bi, but somehow, Tim had managed to program gay as fuck as his orientation. His body type was grotesquely obese, and his religion was not yours. How did he do all that, and how was his status content? Everyone else was either single, in a relationship, or god forbid, married. His occupation was prostitute, bitch and his picture left me with no doubts it was definitely Tim, there was that expression of his. Even when we were 13, I remembered how he would look at me with the most undivided attention. I remembered the crystalline texture in his eyes, and how his thick, dark pupils could penetrate me. He had the same effect with the camera. Judging by that look and his short and sweet sense of delivery, MySpace Tim was an amplified version of the boy I remembered, who could draw outside the lines in math class and fool Ms. Johnson. The only obvious difference was his black-rimmed glasses. There were dark blue lines drawn digitally in the background of his photo, more signs this boy was probably pretty sharp with modern computers.
My knee was twitching like crazy while I tapped nervously at the keyboard. I knew I was going to be late for work. I was spending entirely too much time trying to construct the perfect message like no time was spent on it at all. Dear Tim. No, why would I put dear, this wasn’t pen-pal season and we weren’t in middle school anymore. Hey, Tim! It’s me, Tara sounded as though he was still standing in the basketball court, waiting to hear how my summer went. Hi Tim. You might not remember me. I stuck with that and kept typing.
To my relief, Tim did remember who I was. It surprised me how quickly he responded to my message, in just under a day. No questions were asked about why I had just picked up and left Austin without saying goodbye twelve years ago, on the last day of school. So I went ahead and offered the information anyway, in case he was privately wondering but was too hesitant to ask.
He christened my hard drive with mp3s. Sometimes it took an hour to receive a song, but I didn’t mind since he never let me down. He even trusted me with his password to access some private site where I could pick and choose songs from his personal library, plus passed along some cute tricks for MySpace kicks, like how to post a song with a video on my profile. Then came my 20 questions of What happened to...? He told me how Shay did that thing you’re not supposed to do to girls and how Chrissie married some guy in the Army.
He was good at staying up late. He also took the Greyhound the first time to California like I had, except he left overnight without telling his parents and still hadn’t come back to fetch his things. I don’t think he ever left a note either. My mom had been the one who helped me run away, she knew I was wounded. She barely fit in the passenger side of my car, it was so filled with junk. My mom was my number one fan.
Reconnecting with Tim worked out good because we got to skip a lot of those nasty parts of our lives in-between. We were in charge of what information to disclose. There was no doomed presumption, reputation, or rumor to deny. It was obvious we both were wrestling something, but we could still be those kids who talked shit about Ms. Johnson’s haircut without getting caught and breaking some kind of code. I contemplated confiding in Tim, I really did, as he seemed like a mature person who could appreciate my confidence. But there was something so quiet about not having to do so, not having to listen to myself talk about it. I was enjoying this protected identity, seemingly unscathed in my photos, a new girl. And Tim was the kind and intriguing boy whose “About Me” section struck a chord: pots and pans and acoustic guitars. i really need to improve my sleeping habits. the rest is pretty hard to explain. I could find trust in someone like this, I was sure. An anonymous yet comfortably familiar friendship was exactly what I needed, so reconnecting with Tim worked out really, really good.
One night I begged him to sit still and wait for a CocoRosie mp3 to upload onto his hard drive. This song, “Brazilian Sun,” was a special gift from me, well worth the wait I insisted. It was on another night spent alone in San Diego, but I knew he was just a few hours north in Santa Cruz. The mournful, operatic wails in her voice trembled coarse and softly, like an aging woman hunched over something lifeless and special. A bloated courtesan washed up on the shore.
We couldn’t manage to be in the same room listening to records and making out, that’s what you were supposed to do at 25. So we settled for the next best thing, file sharing. I’m glad he liked the song, he said he did. He didn’t seem like the type to lie about music. Reminded me of another 13-year-old quirk, when I wore headphones with Mozart as my dirty little secret and didn’t have a fucking clue about Nirvana.
We kept in touch like that for a couple of years, always with a quick hello in the stillness of night, a charming photo comment here and there, or simply to share another song that made one of us ache. I followed his blog even though he only kept one entry. In it was his own cartoon, a creature standing in the rain and holding an umbrella. He should try holding it over his head. It might serve him better that way, remarked a friend underneath. true, but then his friend would get wet, Tim replied. Made me peer at it closer.
I wanted to meet Tim someday and hang out on the beach together, either in San Diego or Santa Cruz, maybe we could both dive into the sea. I knew some types of sharks out there were harmless, one afternoon I had let them swim around and between my legs in Ocean Beach. I felt calm as it wasn’t me they were choosing to devour. We could’ve been safe in the California sun, if Tim hadn’t decided to return to Austin and me to Atlanta.
**
I woke up on a friend’s couch late in the afternoon on January 1, with no job and fistfuls of cash. 2008 was off to an excellent start.
People love to drink in Atlanta, and New Year’s Eve is no exception. Ten minutes after the horns and bells, I yanked someone’s flute and chugged their champagne, no time for a breath in between massive gulps. I swear those bubbles had boxing gloves on them. Sometimes stuff gets trapped in your center, where you can’t burp or fart. It’s like using gas in the war against yourself.
I celebrated my 26th birthday before that on 07-07-07, alongside my team of loyal girl friends, whom I trusted the most. And I woke the next morning convinced there was no birthday cake. Then my best friend showed me her digital camera. Tara Misu, you were rubbing your chest in it! 2007 hadn’t been the worst year but it was one heck of a bender. Exhausting, but in some respect it felt good to let myself unravel a little more just to see what my limits were in this hedonist wreath. On the flipside, I did manage to set an indestructible limit by giving up sex for one year so I could reclaim my virginity. I decided to do that while I was driving back from San Diego on I-20. I needed to clean myself off, as well as avoid male distraction in order to gain some control over the direction I was going. Other than that, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing when I got to Atlanta in March. So I did what came natural and got a job in a restaurant. Only this time, I was the bartender. Then I helped closed the place down on New Year's Eve.
Hours after the most intense shift of my life, I stared with disbelief at this wad of cash. I counted and recounted. Seven hundred...fifty more...nine hundred...plus the month’s severance check...I felt loaded. I’d never had this much cash in my hands, it felt like Monopoly money. It was a brand new year, so I couldn’t just sit there. Something was tugging inside, like I had been walking with my shoelaces untied and this was my chance to stop and readjust them. I threw some stuff in the trunk of my car, including a blanket and a pointless atlas, considering it was a straight shot where I was going. Many hours were ahead to watch the dashes dance once again on I-20. I left my roommate two months’ worth of rent and took off alone. I put my iPod on shuffle and let it do the talking. I couldn’t do that with my beloved Discman I had taken on the Greyhound four years earlier.
I got two speeding tickets in Texas, and I puked in a Tuscon motel after watching a meat documentary on the cable channel. The next morning I decided to go vegetarian. When I crossed the California state line, again, it didn’t feel the same as it did when my car was loaded to the brim with my mom three years earlier. This time I felt even more liberated in the driver’s seat, free to go wherever I chose. Steady flicks of adrenaline, there was something so satisfying about learning how to trust myself. Whatever happened, I knew I was in good hands.
I spent the night on a friend’s couch in Venice Beach. She had the same name as me except she spelled it differently. We had first met each other at a show in Hollywood. I thought about love before I fell asleep on her plush velvet sofa, wondering if I’d find someone like me one day, and if that would be a good thing. Days later I was sitting on a bar stool with another friend and her brothers many miles north in Seattle, when an old man leaned in to ask us a question. What’s the word for when you’re feeling overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the exact same time? The older brother cleared his throat, that’s anomie. I don’t know if that was the exact definition of the word, but I sure liked the sound of it. I wrote it down in a matchbook.
I drove back down to San Diego, peering at the golden hills passing me by like I had on the Greyhound. There, it was still warm and sunny in January. It had been nearly a year since I had left it for Atlanta. Again, I sat down on the sand in Ocean Beach and stared at it. I knew that I was fearless to venture alone, this wasn’t a problem. But this constant sense of displacement was a problem, and coast-to-coast it had managed to follow me. I didn’t want to pour anyone's drink anymore, either. I needed to stretch further, in hopes I might find a place I wouldn’t want to leave. I bid a final adios to California and turned back again for Atlanta, another city I knew I wouldn’t be in much longer.
But I did plan to stop and visit my dad in Austin on the way.
Hey you. Do you want to go see The Liars with me on Saturday, Feb 16? I saw them in Portland a few weeks ago and they were amazing live! I’ve been on a road trip and I’m gonna be in Austin for a few weeks in February. So... if you don’t have any plans, that’s where I’ll be. Wanna go?? Gimme a shout.
Ciao xoxo
tara
That took me a quarter of the time it used to take. And Tim was good, quick with responses. I liked that.
YES!
**
That road trip out west sure did me some good. Sometimes I wish I was still on it. Gave me time to break all my routines. Surely a routine can be made out of that. I’m thirsty to find out, so I’ve just accepted a teaching job in Baoding, China. In two months, I’ll be on my way.
I’ve started using Facebook recently. It’s not that different from MySpace except a lot less people use it. It’s been helpful in making contact with some other American teachers who will be in the same city. We’re all close in age, but at 27 I’ll be the oldest, which is fine. Most people my age are married and make babies, and they’re all on MySpace. Even people’s pets have profiles, and friend requests are usually just spam.
My Chinese visa is finally in the mail. Snail mail, that is. I’m so excited. This is going to be crazy! Will I be able to learn a second language? How the hell do I say my name in Chinese? Maybe I’ll make my students call me Misu. Maybe I’ll meet another jetsetter and we’ll fall in love and backpack the world together in holy matrimony. Or maybe I’ll have more than just one lover, maybe they’ll all be in different places. I could be a lover on-the-go, like my mom when she was 27. Maybe I’ll start another blog and post about my whereabouts, with stories I won’t be afraid to tell. Maybe all the people I leave behind will stumble upon them and wonder if they’re true. Like Brandon from middle school, with his stupid chorus line, or the crowd from my university who imagined I’d be in a mental institution by now. They may have seen me in a bleak transformation, but I feel so far from all that! I feel like I’ve gulped a mouthful of helium.
I dreamt about that guy Tim last night, I will admit, although I don’t remember seeing his actual face. It's been bugging me all day, especially since I haven’t thought about that night in Austin at all. That was four months ago. At first I wouldn’t let myself think about it because I hate feeling dumb. I went to a show, expecting to meet a boy I knew from middle school crouched in the corner somewhere, twisting a toothpick in his drink with his braces off, enjoying his own private joke like he was Ethan Hawke. I wound up searching that dingy dive bar up and down for hours, desperate to find my silver dollar. The jerk stood me up, plain and simple. Clearly I was unnecessary to him so I’ve never sent him any sort of message asking why he didn’t bother coming to the bar because, plain and simple, I do not care. It's not worth getting upset about, I had a worse time at the prom. But still, why didn’t he show up? I’m just...curious. I could take a little peek at his profile, you know, for kicks.
Fine. I’ll get online and go to MySpace. My jaw is clenched. This is probably going to hurt. There’s probably some girl he’s in a relationship with, hence why he didn’t come to the bar that night. I wonder if he’s finally posted any new blog entries lately with some short and sweet social commentary, aching with self-awareness. He always struck me as someone who could acknowledge insecurity in a gentle way. And in turn, it made him more confident. I wish I was good at that but I am learning, in fact just the other day I admitted out loud that I can be a self-centered pain in the ass sometimes. Would it have been so bad, if he had just shown up? I wasn’t still that chunky nerd on the yearbook staff. We could’ve had a blast just staring at each other, seeing what all the years in between had done to our faces, without pixels. And we could’ve stayed up really late and listened to each other speak, in real time, and maybe have gotten around to talking about what made us start running in the first place. There you are, Tim. I’m staring at his thumbnail really hard, my knee is twitching like crazy right now. His name, boy vs. self… I don’t know if I should do this. Oh Tim. I wanted you as my confidante, I even wanted you as my lover. I got neither but I didn’t let you hurt me. Click.
He’s still searching for coffee and donuts in Santa Cruz, with a status content.
Absolutely nothing has changed. He’s still gay as fuck and hiding his face with a pair of shades and a beanie. The porch he’s been sitting on, it’s so very Austin, with its wooden panels and rocky white concrete.
I click on his picture, just to make it bigger. Maybe I can see his face a little better. I know I’m weak, and I know that I’m sad. At least he changed the caption. Under is a cute girl with a black pixie cut. Maybe she’s the one he chose to devour. Maybe she’s really talented at something. You were my favorite person in the galaxy. Her comment is feverish. I click the back button.
Under his porch as big and empty as east to west Texas, his last login number is 2-16-08. The same day the Liars played in Austin, the day we were supposed to meet. I wrap my arms around my body while my teeth clatter. It feels cold in July.
**
When I was 13 I stayed up all night reading Anne Frank too quickly to analyze her thoughts. I was eager to find out what happened in the end, as though her diary had feet on it and followed her to the death camp. The next morning my grandfather returned to Delaware from his visit, but I was too groggy from lack of sleep to mutter goodbye to him. A few months later, cancer took him and I wouldn't let myself cry. I didn't want to make it worse for my mom. I stood quietly in her bedroom doorway, watching her pack a suitcase for his funeral in Arlington. When I was 25 I dreamt Granddaddy and I were sailing on a cruise ship. The sun was dusty and golden. I told him I knew he was dead, and that we should order raw oysters since I had finally acquired the taste. Let’s enjoy them now before I wake up, I exclaimed while the ocean breeze fluttered my pigtails. We squeezed lemons on their soft, gray bodies before they slid down our throats and I woke up bawling in my ex’s bed. Tears long overdue, so salty and delicious. It felt good to finally grieve.
It wasn’t until I was 31 and living in Spain when I finally grieved for Tim. It was exactly five years to the day I had been searching for him in that noisy hipster bar. In my dream we weren’t lounging together on a boat, or swimming with the harmless sharks in California. We were nowhere near the sea. Instead, we were in someone’s bathroom. He was standing there in the tub, fully clothed in dark maroon flannel and blue jeans. His back was turned and he wouldn't let me see his face. Tim, I repeated. I’m still here. They're about to play another set. He was sobbing so soft and coarsely. It garbled against the porcelain tile. Let me in so I can see your face this time, I pleaded. Go away, he murmured, please. Please. He was hunching over himself, instinctively I knew he had a razor blade. A streak of dark blood was drying on the sink counter, who knows how long it had been there. Tim, I begged. Choose me. Choose ME. But I knew he wasn't going to do that, so I gently closed the bathroom door and woke up with empty hands, clutching someone's anguish like it was my own.
**
Hello Cynthia,
My name is Tara. We don't know each other. Please forgive me if sending you this is tacky. It’s about a mutual friend, Tim, and I just found out he died on myspace... I googled his obituary but I still don’t know what happened. I was supposed to see him the night he died and he might have asked me for help but I couldn’t hear him. Was he in an accident? I saw your comment on his page so that’s how I found your profile. I really hope this doesn’t upset you. Can you please tell me what happened? I don’t know how close you guys were. I’m really sorry. Please write me back if you can.
tara
She replied the very same day.
Hi Tara. Thank you for your message and don’t worry, you haven’t upset me. I’m sorry you had to learn of his passing this way, I know it must be hard to imagine.
Tim had a beautiful soul, was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Always looking out for other people. He died of a heroin overdose. He had been trapped for years with that mess. We knew each other through rehab.
I don’t think the situation was too good between him and his parents either. He lived at home, and occasionally he’d say pretty harsh things about them during group sessions. He also talked about saving up a lot of money to buy a stash, large enough to shoot himself up to the stars. He said that after being clean for nearly a year.
I’m sure he did not want you to know about his issues with heroin, it’s an ugly side. I know because I’ve been there. And I’m sure you were special to him, since he did not want you to see him in that state. If you ever need to talk, you can contact me.
Hugs,
Cindy
And alongside was a friend request, on the site we all eventually stopped using.
