novembre

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he wants a nickname. i'm thinking of one.

i didn't know it was like this until i started feeling a rip in my chest cavity: right now we are both out of town in different places, and of course there are so many things i want to tell him. but i know better than to write an overwhelming letter to someone i've just started to know. the ache gathered for days, write a letter write a letter and finally just now i pulled out a steno book
(spiral bound at the top, they're my favorite tablets because they're small and undaunting and easy to scrawl left-handed onto)
and i wrote an unordered list of all the stories i wanted to tell him. i began with the tracy barbie doll i loved above the crappy blond barbies, she was the only one without a blissfully fake expression. she was the "bride doll" -- she came in a pink barbie box with a white lace wedding dress on, and the startled expression on her face is etched into my mind. her large eyes and round lips forming a perfect little 'O'. she was different than the cookie cutter barbies. moving from there to how i'd get teased in middle school by tough mexican gang girls with impossibly high, beautiful bangs and brutal expressions on their flawless faces for having dishwater blond hair, they accused me of dyeing it. to the woodcutting scars on my right hand, pearly white and you have to know where to look, especially for the scar on the meaty pad of the base of my thumb. to muffie. to my grandpa and his kiwi farm, the time i cut my leg really badly at my brother's little league game and had to get stitches, the first time i encountered my mother drunk, jesse and the thinly-veiled marriage interview conversations that set anxiety boiling in my stomach, that quiet summer in portland, experimenting with the notion of home among kittens and cinderblock furniture, jody and how she smelled like baby powder, bitten and bka bkr, james, jakub and kineta and krissy and dennis and greg and fletcher and buck. jet-pack grandma. how my great-uncle bob swaggered up to me and handed me and geoff beers while we waited in line to graduate. the lake house my great-granduncle built in wisconsin, beer steins lining its walls. the entire abandoned neighborhood in kansas city. ABC school and my kids, how i went through this period where i'd squirrel away photographs of my parents when they were young because it used to be so amazing and hard to imagine them as complex, young and confused people--

there's more, but you get the general idea. i'm glad i didn't write him such an overwhelming letter. nowadays i'm afraid i'll get carried away, as is my history, but this isn't doesn't strangely doesn't feel like that. after i finished the list (adding to it as i wrote this entry, things like: mr. carney, erik mohr, zines, mrs. cotsis who never wore slips under her thin floral dresses who kicked me out of AP english) i realized i wanted him to know all of me and that's when my chest seemed to be ripped, but opened wide proudly at the same moment.

all of these things need to be said in person; i understand that now, i understand this with him. i hope i get the chance. there are other things going on. we of our confusions and recent heartbreaks. part of me isn't even sure if we'll get a chance to talk like this again for a long time, to swap the stories that were stuck on the tips of our tongues that morning at mama's, my eyes puffy from lack of sleep and critical casual friends watching from the corners of their eyes, him wanting to buy me breakfast but not realizing the restaurant was cash only. i barely ate and i had only told him a little bit about zines, my mind was on embarrassing vanities like my acne scars and the thick stretch marks webbing my stomach -- growing up fat was also on the list, as was the story about when i went AWOL from fat camp when i was twelve, robert and connie dying, the way hugging my mother during the 1980's was just like hugging layer upon layer of down comforters, losing weight and having to renegotiate identity -- on how he trailed fingertips over my belly and didn't recoil, how soft and timid and sweet and i wanted to pull these same stories out of him, too, only his, all of his, there's so much but i think we can eke stories out of each other in moments.

12:47 am - 01.02.08

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