what desperation felt like...

she kept clacking her ring against the side of the plastic chair. she was a devotee of all things that tapped at the side of her temples. the ever-present tap, tap, tap echoing off the sides of brass door handles and linoleum floors. Sara was a pursuant of it all. she sought sanity when she felt unhinged, and a biting wound when life tasted all thoroughly, numbingly saccharine. she sat in the check in wondering if the ceiling fan tottering over her head would come unhinged on its next revolution.

one.

four.

seven...

nope.

this is what it felt like. what desperation felt like. watching ceiling fans and counting all of a life’s transgressions from one moment to the next as it rotated in its socket. she envisaged what had brought her here. to this moment sitting politely in a doctor’s office the right hand decorously placed on a knee and the left… the left hand with the incessant clacking.

Sara, Sara Elizabeth…?

her eyes panned left then right waiting for someone else to claim namesake, but no such luck. this was her generic moniker, two first names. who has a first name for a last name? it only lead to confusion and derision. she followed the white tuft down a dimly lit hallway illuminated only by lifesaver primary colored doors. the orange room.

Sara hated orange.

she remembered how her father used to roll his own cigarettes. she would watch the orange tip, the burning embers as he inhaled deeply between those self-incriminating mumbles… she wondered what he said out there. through the translucent window to that man's world on a december winter’s night all Sara heard were paper towels rubbing on a clean glass pane.

i can’t stop walking. seriously.

yesterday i started walking to georgetown and i ended up in virginia. i thought i was going in the right direction and then when i realized it had been two hours since i left, i began to have my doubts. then when i saw a sign that said “virginia is for lovers!”, i really started having my doubts. the thing is, i got scared. i realized i only had 2 pennies, a nickel, 1 quarter and a dollar bill folded up like a chinese football in my pocket.

that’s a dollar 32 in case you were keeping track.

i began to wonder if maybe i would starve to death. i went into the lobby of a motel 6 and they still had their continental breakfast out. it smelled like virginia slims… not the breakfast, the lobby.

(i didn’t think you could smoke in hotels?)

i got in line behind a thick man with dimpled thighs.

(i didn’t think men could have cellulite?)

i got an everything bagel with very little everything left on top of it. just a couple of poppy seeds. so really i guess it was just a poppy bagel. a sorry one at that.

maybe i should explain why i found myself in the lobby of a discount motel shoving containers of smuckers grape jelly into the front pocket of my overalls on a monday morning.

you see, i was sitting in psych 101 minding my business, just mindin’ my own damn business. and then i found a squished banana in the bottom of my bag. this always happens. i have very severe problems with squished bananas. seriously. like, nightmares. so then I am trying to discreetly sluge (sluge? yup, sluge.) a brown banana off the side of my macroeconomics textbook and wondering if i will still be able to return it to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

then in walks connor. i know connor because he lives down the hall from me and swears to god he is the only 19 year old male virgin left on the planet, but I told him that he’s not… probably, most definitely not the only one left on the planet.

he was all wide eyed walking to the front of the class, he whispered something in our professor’s ear and then we were told we should all evacuate. like the building? like the DC metropolitan area?

it's october 2001 and it seems like everyone is just waiting for the apocalypse. 

you could tell connor just wanted to yell, “just get the fuck out of here before this shit blows!!!”, but my professor feigned being an adult. we all kinda just looked at each other for a sec wondering if she was serious. “like, now”, she said.

so i guess that explained that.

i should have grabbed a buddy. you know, the buddy system is drastically underrated? it is more important to have a buddy when you’re over the age of 17 than it is to have one when you’re under the age of 9. i should have grabbed gertie saybrook’s arm, the girl that has tourettes and clears her throat all class long and said, “so we in this together, gert?”

but I didn’t.

so anyways, then it was just me fending for myself on the mean streets of alexandria, virginia living off of squished bananas, poppy seed bagels, grape jelly, and virginia slims.

good grief.

i once had a rose named after me and i was very flattered. but i was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

eleanor roosevelt

i would love to look in the mirror and fall in love.

i fall in love with others daily.

walking down the street i find myself admiring a delicate collar bone, tight rolled jeans, the way her hair falls in dark tendrils cutting from one side of the page of her face to the other. i fall in love with all of the intimacies that her presence affords the world.

as in relationships, so in passing.

i fall in love with the details.

i can see that in you and see that in her, and for myself, well, there is this vacancy.

i shirk vanity as i am consumed by it.

you know I cannot blame you, you American women. we beat ourselves up for being too attached to the slight build of delicate youth. the boyish hips, the mere suggestion of form, the slender way a thin one leans into the edges. but what we admire is the suggestion of a body as opposed to our obdurate existence.

i would love to be a mere suggestion, a cursor on a page, merely leaning into reality.