Until the Sun Woke Me

Liz Foster

            Sometimes it baffles me that Hemingway shot himself and Faulkner didn't. Sometimes. The thing is there was nothing extraordinary about Faulkner's death. At age sixty four he fell off a horse and had a heart attack. I always want to believe that Faulkner was a tortured, deep, all knowing, larger than life man that would eventually become fed up with his surroundings and just end it. I guess Old Ernie was a code hero indeed.

            There are certain intricacies that Faulkner was aware of and that I sometimes think about. I could be riding in the backseat of a car or waking up at dawn and seeing the last of the night sky disappear, and my mind turns to Darl Bundren and his midnight ventures to drink the stars with his frosted ladle of truth. When I imagine this I remember how he believed that he was drinking the night sky and saw that piercing cold in the warm nights of June was a miracle. I wish that it was as easy to dip into my memory and pull back my hand to find that clear relief of liquid truth. Even the slightest ripple would be excused if retrieval was that effortless. I would drink those memories back into my present body, my present state of mind. I would know every word to describe those feelings that always spill onto the paper, leaving it a soggy,  warped mess. Every trivial piece of conversation or the way someones hand moved over a counter top would be held inside a beam of light shining on the surface ready for me to take in and make my own. 

             I would know every expression of every face I've seen in the rear view mirror on sunny afternoons. Yet, how on earth to explain that only their mouth was showing, opening up into a smile with soft lines of expression on either side and that somehow that seemed to make all the difference? I would be able to recall those echoic reflections of me in the kitchen window that are frozen with the years but still I'm left to laboriously explain that they weren't windows in my house but in other                        people's. After all, water is water just as blood is blood. It's true we need it to survive but what is it? I know that it is something scientifically, sure, but the overbearing existence of it; oceans, bodies, atmosphere. Just as in the mind  where a whole sea of memories lay, not tepid but roaring to and fro. How does one access such chaos? With a  steady hand and an empty sky over head?

            Faulkner was just like any other man. Not a poem or a novel, not so resistant to death as that. Simply water, moments, blood, matter. Such are memories I suppose.      

            Maybe, if you are able to stay with me, we can go in a kind of spiral motion through my memories and I will try my best to pull the stars out of the water without defacing their appearance with too many ripples and waves. It is all very circular I realize. It is a circle that never fully closes but instead continues upwards, sometimes overlapping on itself, gathering information as it moves and distributing it in and around its path.

            They say that children have no capacity to recollect memories before the age of three. That being said I have no way of knowing if my first memory is true or fabrication sew together by all of the events to follow. I do know for sure that both my mother and my father were in the front seat of the car and since their divorced hovered shortly after my third birthday, psychologists would have a hard time believing me.

            Regardless of dates or seasons I know it was the moon that I saw outside of the car window. I pressed my infantile head against the cool plastic-like surface of the window (and feeling it cold and seeing my breath, it was most likely winter) and my mother cooed “bella luna” from the front seat. I, mesmerized,  repeated her the best I could and continued to fixate on this star that was so much bigger and fuller than the others. It was it's own being and it seemed so close. I had not yet obtained the information instilled in me to know about planets and revolvings; science of any kind. Still, even then I was aware of  it's beauty; the way my mother lightly sang her appreciation and the way that it seemed to follow us no matter how far we drove. More so than my comfort in the moon and how I am sure that it has been a back drop for a lot of occurrences in my life that I deem important, I find comfort in objects or beings that appear to be whole and without lacking. Maybe it's the circular aspect that I mentioned before or just maybe the sheer simplicity.

               Fast forward a couple years ahead from being in my car seat admiring the moon and the newness of it. My parents had since divorced which left me to dawdle around my grandparents house after elementary school and most of the weekends while my mother worked. I would mostly pinball around looking for new discoveries. One day I asked my grandmother what she did when she was my age assuming that she had ever been. That was when she showed me her marble collection. When I could think of nothing else worth doing I would  ask my grandmother to take down the ornate wooden box from the shelf in the living room so that I could look at all of those glass eyes staring back at me. In the summer I would hold handfuls of marbles in each fist and feel the cool smoothness between my fingers. Other times, sitting Indian style on the linoleum kitchen floor, I would roll them back and forth like sea sick ships across the tiles. On days when my grandmother had other things to take care of she would leave me alone with her collection of eyes and I would put them in my mouth and think about how easy I could swallow them.

             It was something more than that though. It was old and dying, that box. Maybe just the way it smelled, like an antique store or an old woman's aged fur coat. Sitting on top of the marbles delicately was a tattered, black and white photograph. I could tell it was not of my time because it was oddly square, not like a standard size photo; glossy and fresh. In it was a childlike version of my grandmother surrounded by other children of equal age, boys in high school jackets and girls in dresses. It wasn't until years later that I found out that the photo was taken in Yonkers where my grandmother grew up. It was a picture of children growing up in the city. I was interested in the history of the marbles and of the people in the photo. I wanted to know what memories lay inside those circular drops of glass.

            I've often found myself perplexed by the objects that we have used and lived with and will still remain here after we are dead and buried in the ground. I start to slightly understand why so many people hold their material possessions so dear to them. The palpable material objects in our everyday lives, even some that we take for granted, offer us a certain sense of stability. A painting, a drinking glass, a door handle, and marble collection. These things do not get diseased. Death does not haunt them. They hold an ever constant presence for human beings in general.

              I would repeatedly ask my grandmother where she got the marble with the gray tiger iris in the middle or why the green-yellow marble had so many nicks and chips in it. She always told me that when she was a girl they would play to win other kid's marbles by shooting them out of a drawn circle on the sidewalk. Sometimes I would wonder if those kids in the photo were old too now and maybe some of them were dead. If the kids that my grandma played with as a girl were dead, the marbles were still here anyway but they had touched them like I touched them and somehow that made them all the more interesting.

            The most intriguing marble in all of my grandmother's collection was a deep ocean blue shooter, the owl eye of my childhood, bigger than all the rest and heavier so when you held it in your hands you knew that you were holding something. It felt so full and complete. I held it up to my eye like a monocle and saw the light of the room from underwater. I always wished, when my grandmother helped me put the marbles back in their box, that I could keep the blue shooter in my pocket and take it back to my room to hide somewhere. It was a precious jewel to me that I wanted to keep safe for the mere thrill of having something important. The idea of stealing the marble rolled around in my head like the glass shooter itself.

            So I took the ocean blue shooter and hid it inside my bed post. Every night I would lift up the wooden post and inside I would see my little circular ocean unaware of it's location. I never thought that my grandmother would ever notice it's disappearance since a marble is a marble and although it was important to me it surely would not be missed by a fifty some year old woman. So when she asked me where her big blue marble was I suddenly knew what it would feel like to swallow one of them. Of course the first reaction is complete denial of ever hearing of such a marble. Marble? What marble? You've never even shown me any marbles, let alone any blue ones.

             She knew. Of course she knew. Right away you can always tell when a six year old is lying even if you aren't a wise old lady. Part of me knew that the marble had no right to be held by my hands. Dead people had held that marble and they had died before I was even born. I told my grandmother where I hid the marble and went to retrieve it from it's denizen of my own sneakiness.

            Now I realize that this act was a way for me to say: I  want something of my own.

            I wanted a perfect moon that held storms of lightning and thunder in it. I wanted an ocean that  would cool my palm and never make waves that I didn't command. I know now that nothing that perfect exists. Even your own storms will strike you for the fact that you've contained them.

            My parents divorce led me to be shuffled around like a deck of cards with no idea of the game. Another memory, another star comes to mind when I think about how my ideas of family were formed in this mess. Each person in my life became more vibrant, a brighter color than they would have normally I think. My father's mother, Carol, is very much a snapshot to me now. A photo of a thin woman sitting with her legs crossed on a wooden bench with hair not too dull or too bright for flowers. Smiling.

            Being eight years old seems like such a solid age. When I write down the lines, When I was eight years old....I think about the number eight and how whole and infinite the number is. Two Delicious peaches sitting on top of one another. Two planets intertwining.

            When I was eight, my grandmother would pick me and my cousin up from school every Wednesday. My cousin's name is Christie, but I called her Chris because it aggravated her. For some reason I thought that was a satisfying thing to do.  My grandmother was very tall and very thin. Her fingers, long and frail, yet resolute, seemed to always be holding a cigarette, who's smoke played upon her many rings, and seemed to coil and curl through the ruby stones like a ribbon through a child's hair. When I was eight, I didn't know yet that the first thing that I would think of when she died would be that subdued glow at the end of her cigarette, that in it's own way was like a little red warning sign for all that was to come. How I later thought about this when smoking my first cigarette I will later delve into.

            Back then, her body seemed to have a certain gracefulness to it. Years later, I would think back and remember how beautiful she was with her many gestures. I look at my own hands now and the bones and veins come together with muscle in such a way that only the buttoning of a sweater or the lowering of a blind could be the song of her hands. Being eight years old, I wouldn't know that the tranquil, fluidity with which she moved her body  was only something that could be accomplished by an elegant woman. How, in her world of trees, did she know her place in the forest? When she laughed she seemed to know something amusing that no one else did. It was like she knew a secret that the whole rest of the world was blind to. That laugh which chimed from her delicate neck echoed through her tiny house then, but now continues to echo throughout the approaching years of my life.

            She would take us back home and Chris and I would find all the blankets in the house. We pillaged through cupboards and closets, until we found the biggest, thickest one. We would lay it out flat, tediously making sure that all the corners were straight and all the wrinkles were out. Then, I would role Chris up in the blanket like a human sausage and watch her try to stand up. We would shriek with laughter, pleased at our own made up form of amusement.

             I didn't know that there would be times in the future when I wouldn't see Chris for up to five years at a time. When we finally would see each other, in odd, impersonal places like the super market or a football game, it was like there was a language barrier between us. It was more like a language barrier of the mind. In between the sounds of her phone's text alerts she would  tell me about how particularly hung over she was or who she woke up next to that morning. She had no comprehension or memory of the past it seemed and the friendship that we had once declared was lost in and amongst months of night upon night of drunkenness. Should I have felt relieved or burdened by this remembrance? Perhaps burdened but accepting,  

            Outside, in my grandmother's yard, we took turns cutting the grass with scissors and sharpening pencils to scatter the shavings all over the lawn, and imagined that it was magic dust. We planned to run away to New York City one Wednesday afternoon in May. We decided to decorate an old wagon to take with us. Inside we could hear my grandmother playing the piano. I can still remember how the setting sun would drape it's yellow and gold hues over the keys, like an old, feathered memory woman, draped with a silk veil.

             Chris believed in God only because she was absolutely sure that God lived inside our grandmother's piano. I went along with it. I was afraid to tell her that I didn't for fear that she would be mad at me. Plus, I liked the feeling of knowing more than her. It was another secret of my own; my speculation of God that I kept to myself until key points in my childhood when I could use it as a weapon.. Out on the playground I remember yelling at a girl who told me that she was undoubtedly going to heaven. I told her that god didn't exist and was only something that people made up to scare you into doing the right thing. She reported me to the teacher and a phone call was made to my mother. For the longest time I believed that ideas like that weren't to be announced to the world without conflict. I kept them to myself until I deemed conflict necessary.   

            My grandmother would call us inside and we would eat tapioca pudding and shrimp cocktail, while talking about mostly ourselves and what we deemed important. The conversations that we had then are forever lost, buried somewhere in my mind's alleyways.  

            Later Chris and I made dresses out of tissue paper and danced in them to my grandmother's old records, urging her to watch us and admire our show.

            Two years later when my grandmother died, Chris brought nothing else to the funeral but a box of tissues, as a preparation for the grief that was inevitable. All the rest of us thought that we would be able to save our crying until we were back home. Chris knew better, I guess.

            When it got dark, my grandmother would take us home. Chris and I would savor those last minutes together, trying to scare each other and ourselves with tales of spirits and phantoms, creating pretend scenarios in our minds.

             To me these are the untarnished ones. These are the memories that don't house jealousy or regret. People change and people die, but they exist in a moment that did occur. To think about family as a spiral object that rotates with the years and grows bigger with every change, divorce, death, remarriage, birth, maturation is inaccurate. If anything it diminishes. To describe what keeps us so attached to houses and rooms in which we grew up and discovered life in,  is like spending large amounts of time and energy trying to tell someone what the color red tastes like.  It is not a four walled explanation, but rather interaction after interaction after yet another interaction. When we are children we take in all that the term “family” has to offer. We accept the circle for its security or at least its hopeful promise of the later. Can you really blame any child for that? Why not take advantage of the vague?

             It is only now when I sit down and define actions and emotions and thoughts and conversations; conversations with those whose tongues have taken to the dirt, that the term “family” becomes so much more uncomfortably hard to pin down.

            There was that moment when I thought twice about family. It happened distinctly to me and from then I was free.

            Never since my childhood car ride with my parents; my parents, married for a split winter night second, had the moon been so prominent. Six years had been added since my days of absent shuffling. The six being something possibly whole but trying to lean upwards and connect with other rotations. I was fourteen and my state no longer resembled a shuffling between two or more hands, but rather a scattering. A fifty-two pick up right out of my mother's door.

             I was fourteen and at the time, sure that my mother wished that I was dead.  I grabbed the wheel from her once in the car, trying to get her attention, and she screamed. All I wanted to do was get her to stop crying but she wouldn't and all the time I wondered why she was so afraid of what a car would do. She demanded I apologize. I wasn't sorry at all. I knew I had everything under control.

            She went to her room when we got home and grabbed the phone on her way and I knew that she was going to call him, her husband. I wondered what he was going to do twenty five miles away and understood when she started crying again, dialing. I was fifteen hundred miles away and the only thing between us was a wooden door. I wanted to the door to be opened. It needed to be opened but she had locked it.

            Meghan was a small, intricate girl who loaned her life and her home to me for a while. She was only a couple weeks younger than me but asked questions all the time and never stopped for anything or anyone except maybe to meet someone new that she thought interesting. She intrigued me from the start when she showed up at my door to introduced herself and inquire if I had any flys in my house that the spider in the corner of her bedroom wall could eat. She was carrying a fly swatter and a jar and wearing purple fleece gloves. It was May.

             She lived down the road in the house that her grandfather had built. Their family had moved up from New York City in the sixties All five children grew up in the house that was big enough to comfortably fit three,  along with Meghan's grandparents who had since died. All of the children had moved on to start families of their own except Audrey, Meghan's mother, who got pregnant and decided to live on her own. She always said that she never wanted a man in her life to complicate things as she somehow deemed that it would.

            Audrey's face had that look about it that warned you. With the lines in her face from decades of smoke that suggested something French about her, but really it was all full Irish blood that ran through her veins. Her face was hard and mean but when you got her to smile you saw all of those things that she kept inside surface and the toughness became something dated and antique.

            I lived in that house with them for a whole summer. I still don't know exactly why.  Life has never been as strange and beautiful as it was then. To me it was a time when nothing and everything mattered.

            I moved in with Meghan on a spring night. It was one of those upstate New York nights. The air had a chilly breeze, not unlike those of fall but at the same time it promised warmer summer days. Meghan had come to help me pack up some few things that I thought I needed. She had colored her eyes black and gray. It was a mask that made her bigger in a way. Bigger in the ways that her mother was big, with her eyes.

            Before going inside of the house where I would be spending most of my upcoming days, and in which my memory often does live now, she told me to wait outside behind her house. I sat, waited on an old plank of wood that had probably lay stuck to the ground since Audrey's father had built the house. That night it finally served it's purpose. She came back outside with two cigarettes and handed me one. She showed me how to light it and inhale. She knew that the first drag would make me dizzy and told me so. I looked upwards and saw the moon, a pregnant debutante as it always has been. It spun and danced above me; above us.

            I read Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham that summer. Once when Meghan and I were down by the crick I dropped the book into the water and it made the spine swell and the pages smell like moldy water. Audrey lay the book out flat for me on the iron clothes dryer and it took a couple days to fully dry. I continued to read it even though the pages were wrinkled and ruined. Today I could tell you that the book is about unrequited love and mankind's need to admire, but then it was just another piece of furniture that developed an orange-tinted coating of summer and slaughtered evenings, much like most all of the memory that I have of those days.

            I watched Meghan run through the field behind her house and it was as if time had paused to watch her fly. Her body moved like a vertical ocean, graceful and full. We smoked a joint in the grass and I had to carry her on my back through the rain. We hid in the woods amongst the trees that she had played in as a child. She pulled a thorn from a branch and it was so easy for her to prick her finger with it. She did it for me because I couldn't bare the thought of doing it. We mixed our blood and the moon smiled sideways because it had beat the sun to set. She believed in everything. She believed that pain could only be felt if you allowed it and that sadness was something that you invited into your mind like a guest and that you could kick it out anytime you chose. I didn't believe anything of these things but I kept my mouth shut all the same. 

            We used to sleep in the big queen sized bed that had belonged to Audrey's parents. Meghan was terrified to sleep in her own bed because she claimed that both of her grandparents had died in that room. I would crawl in there on nights when I woke up around three or four in the morning, Meghan's elbow jutting into my back, for hopes of getting back to sleep.  Above, a picture of Jesus watched, and I always felt ill at ease when I looked at it. Why let him in on this? Who the hell is he anyway?

            On really hot summer nights we would sit on the porch and smoke, sometimes drink a little. It was such a detachment to be there, talking about politics and religion. We would listen to jazz music from the kitchen radio. We used to talk about America and what we, the great great grandchildren of American had to offer. It seemed all contained in rusty old barns with their roves caved in and vines tightly entwined over them like a net of time. We wondered what it was we hadn't discovered yet. Freedom? America; the place where everyone is lonely, yet so populated and if you smile at someone on the street, you are in need of something.

              Meghan used to say things like, “Some people just die without being remembered for who they really are”, and after that the silence would set in and we would be left to ponder that idea. She had a way of proposing such things and leaving them to hang like my book on a wire, until someone picked it back up.

            “We as a society are constantly greeting each other as strangers”, she continued.

            “I'm not sure how I feel about that”

            On night I watched Meghan sit in the kitchen and cry half the night. She was in a panic trying to explain to me how she felt about life and how she didn't fully understand why people even cared if they were just going to die anyway. The light was dimmed in such a way that half her face was visible and the other darkened. A tear rolled down her cheek on the lighted side and she held her head in the same hand that held her cigarette. I thought to myself: How did I get here?

            She was sure that she was worthless and that nothing mattered. She said she feared death and she feared her mother's death but knew that it was inevitable. I tried to tell her that it was useless to fear something that you don't know. Yet, then, I realized that it was just like her to fear the unknown. Something beyond her properties boundaries, life, the world, death even, would be terrifying for someone that knows only their four walls.

            “Did you know that I remember being inside my mother before I was born”, she said to me that night as I was trying to explain the world to her.

            “Everything was dark and quiet”.

            I realized then, that no matter how many books I'd read or how much smarter I believed myself to be, I would never be able to understand the depth of her innocence. I told her to keep that memory to herself and that someday she would go back to that place where she only lived in dreams.   

            That summer, hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the two televisions in the house remained permanently on the news stations. Walking through the house, you had no choice but be attacked by the sounds of newscasters. In the bathroom, we could hear sounds from both televisions at either end of the house. There was no escaping the banter, the buzzing of electric existence, the world.  The air in the kitchen where we stayed up and made coffee and chain smoked was yellow and heavy with nicotine and cathode rays. We watched the damage from our corner of the world through a little crack in the wall it seemed. Looking through this crack in the wall, I realized that the human race did expand and ideas did become more broad. People did die. We talked about life and the world, the world being something that we were all a part of, life being something not entirely satisfying. The Times they are a Changin' played on the radio at some point and my stomach sank low into my knees. It was just all too obvious then. The news announcer commented on a picture that spread across the television screen of a jumbled mass of tangled garbage and matter. “This appears to be a photo of a man who has shot himself dead due to lack of water and food. Someone has taken the liberty of covering the man's body with an old mattress”. Audrey commented on how awful it was for them to put that on television and that they obviously had no respect for the dead. Meghan just looked on nonchalantly and as her fingers burned with that last drag said, “You know, until now, I didn't realize the world was so nasty.

            I started thinking about the need of change in both the world and myself. I have a feeling that sometime after that, I began to read Of Human Bondage with much more focus. In the exactly copy that I have to this day, this passage is underlined, “...the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.”

            The world had finally broke through.

            I decided to move in with my father rather than go back to my mom. I felt as if I would be starting over with a better knowledge than what I'd had before. I did not want to digress. Once the winter months came and school started up again it was as if something magical had died. The cooler days chilled my desire for comradeship. I felt clean and I felt new. When at times I would go back and visit Meghan, I would feel lonely and sad because I knew that this was all that they had and all that they would ever know.

            That winter I would stand in the back alleys behind my father's house and smoke a cigarette, this new comfortable burden that she had left me with. The snow lay thick on the ground with a million suns and stars of the past summer contained inside of it like prisoners. The moon wasn't shining anymore. I realized that everyone missed the little things. The little things that make up the vast amount of space that creates life. I missed the glass stone with the angel in it that sat on a shelf in Meghan's living room. I missed the waterfall that only came for a couple days in the pit of August. I missed the light in the kitchen and how it reflected the tiles of the floor, like rock on sunlight. I wished then that the moon would come down from whatever bigoted throne it stood on, and be something for me only.

            And then it's March and I'm a senior.

            For four years I had been working at the town library. My boss told me later that she hired me because I was willing to work there for no money and that, to her, showed that I would be content with the tedious monotony that working in a library entails. I was content with being surrounded by the books of the writers that I had idolized.

            I was shy at first and didn't particularly enjoy being in so much contact with the general public. After about six months I started to pick my head up and look people in the eye, knowing that I probably knew more about what they wanted then they did. At this time in my life I grew better at observing people. I wondered about them and their lives. I started to, mpre importantly, see different aspects of myself in people that I would never think to compare myself to.

                        When I got off work, I would walk to my friend Sara's apartment and wait until the sun was fully down to go back home when I knew that my father would probably be in bed. One particular evening, I had just finished reading The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley at work since the later summer months were generally a slower time for library traffic. Whether that fact made me more open to ideas about human nature or not, that summer day there seemed to be a buzz in the air around me. I decided to walk downtown, further than Sara's apartment.

                               As I approached the laundromat I saw a woman sitting on the curb. Words like music sounded through my head.  Worn out and past her prime, she sat waiting for something that had already come and gone. Her arms folded in front of her, it was obvious that she held desolation deep inside her heart and it fed off her like a parasite. The smoke from her cigarette danced around her the romantic waltz of corruption. Her eyes searched the streets hoping to grasp some familiarity, looking as though she was expected someone. A friend or a lover out of time was playing their part in the cinema of her memory like ghosts that materialized from the heat of the pavement. It was only for a second that I saw her sitting there, but she caught my attention. In my mind I started to create her story.

            In her eyes could be seen all of those who have ever felt guilt or fear. The whole spirit of her being was like a triumphant love letter to the act of feeling insignificant. Like when you sit around on a June night waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to change, holding your breath and wanting to live for no other moment except now.

            Questions started to manifest in me after I continued my way down the street. What is the woman waiting for? Is she going home to a man she doesn't love? What sicknesses in her body have yet to be discovered? Is there a lump in her left breast, holding the promise of prolonged death? When she wakes up in the morning, does the lifting of her eyelids bring back her past like a shattering wave of the inevitable? What is the last thought in her tattered mind before sleep captures her? Does she hope that the darkness will swallow her whole and keep her like in the days before she was born; still inside her mother's womb?

            In that woman I saw a little piece of all the people I had ever met. Like my grandmothers she was holding something dear to her forever as a reminder of the past and she did know death and it did play around her fingers and the air around her. Like Meghan she did have hope but no words to express it with and she was afraid and she only knew so much. Like my mother she cried maybe for no reason.

            I hoped that the woman had experienced joy at some point in her life. Pure, unadulterated joy. It is the joy in running through the halls when classes are going on. It exists in the pent-up energy that buzzes in the air on a Friday afternoon when school lets out. When older brothers come home and plans are made to get the old gang together for one more night of rowdy innocence spent blinking weary-eyed into the early hours of dawn. The happiness of running through the falling snow at dusk with a boy that you've only just met, feeling alive with every grip of his hand. Riding in your best friend's car with the windows rolled down, the radio adorning the night, feeling infinite. It is times spent idling the dawn, three or two huddled around a kitchen table, discussing life and death and all things in between. Running through the rain with a lover, holding your breath and praying for time to stop and to keep you suspended in that moment, wishing for nothing except now, now, now...

            . I knew that I would never speak to that woman, never have any of my questions answered. Maybe I was entirely wrong in my assumptions. Maybe she was content with her life. Maybe she had experienced joy. Perhaps rather than waiting for something that she cannot have, she was enjoying the act of simply being.

            Noticing things like that were dangerous sometimes. Dangerous to the person noticing, and threatening to the person being noticed.

            The tail end of my senior year was a month of nights. Every weekend was a different house in some obscure part of the neighborhood where someone was throwing a party for no particular reason. One weekend it would be Ray's house with it's winding staircases and attic rooms where people got high in and took two hours to stumble their way back down to the first floor. Now it's some guy that I hardly know named Josh who is supposedly going into the army soon. Coming to all the parties and seeing my peers outside of a school setting really gave me an understanding of how sad they really were. I used to think that when people at parties were being nice, they were really just happy. Now I know that they were just being trite.

            I'm kneeling over the tile of the small kitchen of a dimly lit trailer, cleaning up spilled beer with paper towels that are much to thin for the job. The beer pong game continues above my head. It's loud. I'm drunk enough but not too drunk. I'm still fully aware of what is going on around me. I give up on the spilled beer. No one's going to notice anyway. I try to remember whose house this is. Someone who graduated before me?

             Looking back on all of these parties makes me wonder, after all the time I've spent loathing the language they speak in under breaths and introverted, huddled anticipation about getting wasted or high, part of me even wonders if it's worth it at all.

            The better half of me says no, but I was there anyway wasn't I?

            I pull the pack of Marlbro reds out from inside my dress and see that I only have about three left. I notice a boy from school standing in front of me with a pack of camels in his hand.

            “Hey, I'm Liz. You don't know me but I'm pretty sure that my ex-boyfriend has told you a fuck story or two about me at some point. Do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

            He shrugs yeah whatever and hands me one.

            My older brother is off at college and I'm sitting around with all of his friends that never got out of town. I know that if anything were to happen to me, they would make sure that I was alright. At least I think they would.

            I hear someone call my name from across the the smoke-filled room. I can't quite figure out who it is and truth be known I probably would have tried to ignore it had it not been yelled again. I look up and I see the boy that used to beat my cousin Chris up. I had never heard it from her lips but I knew that she had dated him for a couple years. People would come up to me and school and ask me if she was still dating him. I heard horror stories from everyone else about how much he beat the shit out of her and now he was looking at me. How did he know my name? Why the hell was I here?

            “Come here”, he said, loud still but more conversational.

             Pissed for some reason and more drunk than I should have been, I heard the words come out of my mouth before I was fully aware of what was happening.

            “What are you going to do? Hit me?”

             The rest is yelling. From him, not me. I'm terrified but I don't show it. 

            I feel a hand on my shoulder. Andy.

            Safety.

            “We have to find Scott”, he tells me.

            “Why?”

            “He's tripping really bad on shrooms and we have to bring him home.”

            I'm trying to understand the spiral of this memory and I realize that all of this may be a little self indulgent but the water is rippled and ugly by now and the stars are merely egg shells on black construction paper.

             I am sitting in the front passenger seat of  Andy's car, driving through a  winter darkness that can only occur in the isolated back roads of upstate New York. All around the air seemed a tar ice void that waited to be penetrated. Scott 's in the back seat. Telling us about how the deer are colors that only he can see. It was the paranoia that made Scott want to leave. Pissed that his stupidity had caused me to venture back into the town that I so resented I asked,

            “Where the hell did you even get that shit?”

            He kind of sneered at me and said,

            “I'm not fucking telling you”

            In his voice I detected something that I had already encountered nine years previous. In my elementary school cafeteria.

             The hushed undertones of drugs and sex and teenage sweat.

            I heard the beginning of the next sentence as it rolled out of his mouth in a slow motion like fashion.

            “We were so high the other day...”, but something made him turn his head and look me directly into my third grade pudgy dough face. All I could feel was my entire body burning with fear. All I could do was stare back into those sad dark eyes.

            “What the fuck are you looking at?”

            Regardless of if he had actually said this, which he did angrily, I would have already sensed what he was going to say. His eyes said everything.

            “Turn the fuck around.”

            Now I know that the drugs and the drink are all a way of scrapping the bottom of the barrel for anything to get them out of their own minds. They don't realize that once your mind goes, you're left with nothing. I turned around but my anger didn't. I realize it was my own fault for putting myself in the situation. I thought of Kerouac and how in his day he would have lived for the experience of people and the love of mankind and American life. It couldn't have been done that way today. All the same I felt the cold metal of the car seat belt and thought about his words,

            “This is the night and what is does to you”.

            I went home and slept until the sun woke me.

            The ladle is replaced. The water is there but it will be undisturbed for now. All the same it will continue to fill.

            The stars are once again set in place. Cold.