hat tricks

There are few things more confusing than the moment right after something unexpected happens. 

You're a four-year-old child. You get dropped off at preschool for the first time. There are twenty other kids in the class. You're scared, and the world before you is a constant surprise. Walking in on your knobby little legs, holding your mother's hand tightly, hoping to God she doesn't leave you. She does, though, and you are alone for a time. Eventually another kid spies you, recognizes you as someone they might like. You've got the same lunch bag after all. You introduce yourselves by playing together as if you've never not done that.

You're driving your car, and suddenly you're sideswiped. It's surprising and scary. But the car that hit you doesn't stop, and you're left in the middle of the road hoping someone saw, noticed you in the middle helpless, unsure of what to do next. There's this huge bit of you that prays for that; for someone to not only have seen you, but to recognize that it's not OK that that just happened, and help you through the aftermath.

You're out with your friends, and suddenly someone asks you for your number. It's surprising, but not quite scary. This has happened before, and it will probably happen again. Because what ends up happening is you end up going out with that person. You like each other for a while, or at least you think you do. You really might. Who knows? But, eventually, people tire of each other. It takes longer for some than for others, but eventually you either need to break it off, or reinvent what that relationship is. That doesn't mean it's any less romantic. It only means that you change, and you do it together. You decide to be someone who sees the other and recognizes them, helps them out, and does it because they love them.

Twenty years later, you're in each others weddings.
A police officer comes and helps you out.
You're married, and you're still happy about it on a daily basis.

But these things happen every day, and the opposite probably happens more often. That kid gets rejected, insurance doesn't come through with that hit-and-run, and you're lucky if you get married then divorced. People just work it out until the end.*


*This wasn't supposed to be sad, but re-reading it, well, it is. Kind of.

hair

Earlier today I drove up to Lake Forest to get a haircut; a trim, really. A trim like the kind you give to a two-year-old. Hair is so odd. It truly is. You wear it every day, and it basically looks the same, but it's different, because you're different. And it keeps growing, long after your body stops.

At 7:36 a.m. my alarm buzzed, then again at 8:04 a.m. Despite it being above 30 degrees outside, I wake up daily with a cold nose. I have a heating pad that I use to warm my sheets if I'm alone in there. If there's another person, a roommate, a guy, a friend, whatever, it's not really necessary, because you're not really thinking about how you’re cold. You're talking about your day with your roommate, you're making out with that guy, and you're not sure what's happening with that friend. Friends are a supremely different beast. If they're girlfriends, then it's a pretty standard, hilarious sleepover because no one wants to sleep in the living room alone. If they're friends that are boys, then you might as well admit that there's some sort of sexual tension. So perhaps get out of that room. Tension bursts always. It just does, even if you're not attracted to each other, but especially if one friend is, while the other isn't. In the end it doesn't matter. None of it does. We're lonely beasts. We all are.

We are men. We are women. And we're allegedly adults. Charged. And. Trialed. We are. But all too often, we don't think of ourselves as such. No mortgages. Few set career tracts. An overwhelming vortex of men-children and women-children. In spite of our hair growing longer and longer every day, it's taking everyone even longer to become the people our parents hoped we would be.

But yeah, sure, I like my new haircut. It's different, but exactly the same.

lawyers

"He must be innocent." John Kilme said it because he needed to. He needed to believe his client didn't run over his own kid on purpose. John's slicked back hair was becoming less slick. Enter Gerald Root:

"He's not innocent, friend. No way. No how." Gerald was a man who wore scarves. He shouldn't have though. They made his neck look fat and caused him to sweat more than an average amount.

"Have you ever seen a man so distraught?" asked John, talking about his client Richard Neuman.

"Have I? I'm lookin' at him." Gerald was staring at John. He was making a joke, and had no sympathy for anyone, especially not for his clients.

"But if Richard was innocent..." John continued. Gerald stopped listening at 'innocent.'

"Sympathy is reserved for those who have done no wrong, but terrible things happen to them anyway," he said, wiping his sweaty, sweaty brow. "I, sir, have done no wrong. Our client. That mess of what used to be a man. He's a mess, a murderous mess."

It wasn't fair for Gerald to call his client a mess, especially since he looked so wet, salty water pouring from his pores. But life's not fair now, is it?

"Cold-blooded?" John's eyes bugged thinking of Richard.

Gerald turned to face the wall near the coat rack, his right hand on his hip, and left pulling at his dumb scarf.

"As cold as his nine-year-old was when his mother found him in the bushes." He stuck his tongue out to lick his lips; they hit the wall. He was very close to it. The wall.

Anyway, that's where Mrs. Neuman found her son, Jimmy Neuman, outside, behind one of those ugly bushes next to the garage. People always have those ugly bushes outside their homes. They block the street-viewers from seeing the foundation of the home. But the foundation is better looking than those bushes. It is.

Jimmy's hair was brown, made a dark red after the 'accident-non-accident,' like the kind after a bad dye job. Pun intended.  John's hair was graying everywhere. It was long and straggly. If it was short it would be sexy, but it was long, so it wasn't.

"There's gotta be something we're missing." John's hair looked terrible. He was pulling it from side to side, and now looked akin to Wolverine.

"Relax, guy," Gerald had begun smoking weed while John freaked out about poor Jimmy.

"Stop that!" John smacked the bud from Gerald's fingers. "You were holding it weird." It, being the dooby.

"Whatever, brother-man." Gerald was getting weird. But not the fun kind of weird, rather the kind that makes people who aren't high feel bored.

"I am so bored." That was Gerald, despite it seeming like John would say it, as he wasn't the high one.

This story took a turn.

"If you're not going to share, then you don't get to enjoy." It was a pretty good rule, a rule John had learned as a child at Kinderhaven, his precursor school to first grade.

Jimmy was a third grader at Jepperson Elementary. John remembered what he had been previously lamenting over.

"Oh, gees. How can we represent a guy we don't believe?"

"We --" Gerald paused for an inordinate amount of time, "don't believe him?"

"I thought we didn't."

"Does it matter?"

John wondered. Did it matter? Huh? He turned to look at the coat rack. His L.L. Bean jacket hung there limply. What sort of grown man wears an L.L. Bean jacket to the office? He wondered that, too. Italics. What sort of grown man wears an L.L. Bean jacket to the office?

"We're lawyers," said Gerald.

John picked up the joint. It had fallen under his classy leather desk chair. That's what he would call it when his secretary would ask where to put his coat in the morning: "The classy leather desk chair." When he picked up Mary Jane he swiped up some dust bunnies with it. They were everywhere, floating. John sneezed, so did Gerald. They were gross man-sneezes. Gerald's nose began to bleed. He thought about Jimmy.

"Yeah, we are."

Blush

"Where did she go?" Elizabeth's mother wails from the laundry room. Shifting shirts and towels from one basket to another. "She just runs off." Maria Keaton always chats to herself about her children. This daughter though, she is the most excitable; the youngest. Youngest children tend to be the cutest. Something about their countenance.

Elizabeth is behind the radiator, maybe four feet from her mother. But she's quiet. So quiet, and in the warmest spot in the whole house. She's seven years old, has brown hair, but that pretty brown, not the mousy kind. When you're a kid your hair is soft and falls gently. Elizabeth's is long, but knotty, never preferring her hair to be combed. Earlier this morning she saw her mother putting on make-up in the bathroom. It consisted of Maria taking her Revlon "Cheeky" lipstick in the green tube, twisting the bottom to bring up the color, pressing it against each side of her face, then rubbing the color in aggressively with that part of ones hand right below the pinky finger, but before the wrist. It's little moments like this that made impressions on Elizabeth. Moments her mother would forget about in the same amount of time it took to create them.

She can see her mother from between the crack of space that separates the radiator from the wall. Maria's Ralph Lauren jeans sit on her hips tightly, but her legs are skinny, so there's just too much fabric there. You wouldn't call them baggy though. Perhaps boot-legged? Elizabeth's gaze takes in her mother completely. From Maria's jet black hair to her bare feet. Her toes are painted a shade of red, probably OPI Damsel in a Dress. Elizabeth makes a note to look in her mothers make-up bag later for the color.

The heat from the radiator gives Elizabeth comfort. Before her parents redid the playroom and made it into a guest bedroom Elizabeth spent hours in the back closet. It was a walk-in. She had collected various comfortable blankets and pillows from around their home, like a robin creating its nest, and made a soft safe place for herself, a place her brothers weren't allowed. One of the blankets was a really unattractive knit blanket. It was black, green, orange, and a yellow color akin to Yoplait custard. Her mother made the blanket while she was pregnant, and the only yarn she had were those colors. Elizabeth's drawings from school littered the walls of her tiny castle. One in particular, a giant whale took over the East wall. Behind it Elizabeth hid notes she wrote but never delivered to the boy down the street, Todd Allen. Various proposals for getting together to play. Her mother knew they were there. Sometimes she would find Elizabeth sleeping in there, and Maria would pick Elizabeth up like a rag doll and snuggle with her on the big chair in the living room until her daughter awoke.

Elizabeth's brothers are all older than her. And none of them could understand why Elizabeth needed her own time, alone from the rest. Her mother understood though, but not enough to not turn the playroom into a guest room, thus making the closet into a real closet unsuitable for nesting in. If Elizabeth is seven, which she is, that makes her four brothers logically age in the range of nine through fourteen. Maria and her husband Nicholas had everyone very close in age intentionally. They wanted their kids to grow up playing together. And the first four did and do. They include Elizabeth too, but in different ways and not all the time. If they were playing war, Elizabeth was more of a prop that stood for things that needed to be rescued. If they played movies, then Elizabeth would be the ticket seller. Soon she would bore of them, and leave to hide from everyone. It was her own game of Hide and Seek that only she was playing.

"Elizabeth?" Her mother again. Maria had left the laundry room for ten minutes. During that time Elizabeth moves from behind the radiator to the kitchen. She walks down the hall, turns right, and walks up five steps to the kitchen. No one sees her, except for the dog, David. He is a Schnauzer who does not bark, if you can believe it.

"Hello, David," she says to him, patting him on his bottom, then takes a seat on the high chair overlooking the island counter-top where her and her brothers ate breakfast an hour ago. Elizabeth thinks it is weird that David's name is David, and he is also a dog. David looks up at her from his puppy bed. One dog eyebrow up, then the other, then his head back down.

Maria moves from the laundry room, down the hall, turns right, and walks up five steps to the kitchen, effectively tracing Elizabeth's footsteps.

"Hi momsy," says Elizabeth.

"Elizabeth, where were you before?"

"Here." Elizabeth loves to tell white lies. Not because of the lying part, but rather because she likes to see if people will believe her simply saying something, over their own memory and knowledge of knowing she was in fact not there before. People generally believe her. She has an ongoing list of these mini tales, so she can inform her family and friends later that she tricked them. It's in her bedroom now under her copy of the book "Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch.

Maria wraps her arms behind Elizabeth, over the chair, embracing both. Her face next to Elizabeth's, their cheeks together, some of her Revlon lipstick blush rubbing on Elizabeth's face, despite the shield of brown and black hair between them.

"I love you," Maria whispers. Her mouth is warm and her words sweet. Elizabeth feels the heat on her left ear. "You," she stares into Elizabeth's brown eyes, "You are mine."

"I know," responds Elizabeth, her voice warbling slightly, like a child's does.

The Night Before & All the Days After

Thank Time that 2012 is over. What a crap year. Between the bookends of being broken, first in February/March and then again in August/September/October, then soul crushed and broken again, and the regular poor decisions you make when shitty things happen to you, the sorts of things that are out of your control which cause you to become someone out of control; then add to it getting rides from police officers not once, but twice due to my family judging me not worthy of remembrance -- well, you can see why that year needed to end. Sure, it had its perks. I went to New York thrice, joined a pretty baller sketch group (long pause), and perhaps know better now what I am capable of emotionally, physically and mentally. These, these are good things. 

I wish I didn't have to learn in the ways I did, but the human spirit knows no bounds, right? And, I know from experience. CS Lewis says this about experience: “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” And that, that is truth in all its glory.

This is a draft buried from back in October. A particularly rough month, one that encapsulates my year in 82 words. Its contents are as follows:

I've only a few times woken up with all my clothes on from the night before.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a new Brigid Marshall trend.

SO dumb.

Everything about the situation I've found myself in is literally the dumbest.

Sometimes dumb is the best.

This is not one of those times.

This is a time where you're wondering where you're going in life. When you lost your maps. And why the iPhone's new app is screwing with your destination so hard.

Now that it's a few months out and away from the apparent clothing (hole) I was trapped in, and I can see slightly more clearly, I see this as sort of humorous. And while, yes, I did wake up in the clothes I wore yesterday this morning, it was for completely different reasons involving my cheap landlord who barely turns on our heat, rather than the tailspin of trying to forget my life by living in excess and pretending I was someone else. Today I feel glorious. It's 2013. And Thank Time for that.

Types.

There are always two types of girls. You've got Peggys. You've got Joans. You've got Mariannes. You've got Chrissies. You've got tomboys. You've got Barbies. It is what it is, what it is.

But what if you just. don't. fit. there? Sitcoms and shows, and HBO, and Cable, and movies have simplified females. They've simplified all of it, but I'm talking lady bits up in here. So, I have a theory, and I welcome you to come in and listen —

"Because we're not ugly, we're hot." Or rather, "Because we're not unattractive, we're thus attractive."

I said this in my head over and over again before typing it out. It sounds pretty douchey and at the least conceited, regardless of its truth or not. If you disagree with the sentence in quotations, first congratulations. I'm glad you have an opinion, more than I can say for a Chrissie. And, second, I said I'd explain. Cool your jets, ya jag.

For women, we're either fuckable or unfuckable. Crass. But, whatever. We're one or the other. You either want it or you don't. There isn't really a one-to-ten scale you can sincerely live by, and one person's opinion can vary from the next. You might call a girl a four, but if there's the possibility of sex, you'll try your damnedest to imagine her as a 10, and you just might succeed. Well done, you. That's just how science works. The thing is sex is just that, and these days for a lot of people who you're having it with is definitely part of it, but not necessarily all of it. I don't know if this argument carries over to lesbians, but maybe it does. As for the other way around, guys get a lot of leeway, which is probably why the phenomenon of the skinny fat abounds and why Kevin James is married to Steffiana de la Cruz in real life, and Leah Remini on King of Queens. I guess art does mimic life for ole Kevin. Woot!

Sure, there are other competing factors. Personality. Intelligence. Long-term Compatibility. Ability to commit to someone. Allergy to dogs. Nail-biter or not. Orders weird at Starbucks. The list goes on.

But, base instincts. This is it.

I've been sitting on this post for months now, and being a single lady in a pool of person, I can tell you right now that this is truth. The challenge is to siphon out and figure out just what it is you want out of life, and whether or not that even includes someone else. It shouldn't really matter whether you're a Taylor Swift or the apparently more attractive girl referred to in Tear Drops on My Guitar.

Procreation, or at least the act of it, is the great equalizer. In the moment anyone can be a ten or a one. And someone's Peggy might be another's Joan.

accentuated features.

We were staring out the windows of my car. Different windows. He was sitting shotgun. I had offered him a ride home from wherever it was I ran into him. We ran into each other. To be nice. Because, I'm nice. Nice enough to spare 10 minutes there and then probably 15 back. Time seems to go slower when you're walking away from something. Especially if you don't know what that something is. Could be nothing.Which is still something. If we're talking things. "Why do people call it shotgun." I kept thinking that. But thinking it like it was a statement not a question. Final. Shotguns are pretty final.

I was driving, so I was staring out the windshield. That's where you stare if you're driving. He was staring out the right window, sometimes straight ahead like me, and then periodically looked to his left where I was, then out the window again. Trees with leaves, new ones, green and tender. Sometimes it seems like people's heads are on a swivel. Like a swivel chair. Distracted. The kind found in offices where people don't like whatever it is they're doing. Which is most people. I'm a person. Like that. That is. Not for forever.

He kept looking at me like he wanted to say something. Or maybe I put that on. I likely put that on. Everyone puts on a different version of themselves depending on who they're with. Puts on the idea of what they should be, failing reality. It's dumb. Because at the end. Down to brass tacks. We're always all going to be ourselves. And if you're an unreal version of yourself then that's just who you are. The kind of person that isn't comfortable being their true self, so then they just become that. That crappier version of their own reality. A caricature. Like the kind drawn for couples at Disney World. Or Navy Pier. Or Battery Park. Big eyes bigger, thin smile thinner, accentuated features. 

But we weren't there or anywhere, and our features were just as they were. Simply sitting in my car at a red light. It had only been about five seconds. The air kicked in. Time passed. Orange: ten, nine, eight, and so on. The song switched, Pandora reminded us of the cost of programming, and the light changed. Looked out the window. Trees glazed in green. Looked behind, and forward again. Caught his glance. And a nice offer of a ride becomes a game because no one can be themselves all the time, further validating how much of yourself you perhaps aren't or are. Who speaks first and what about? The truth is, it didn't matter. And doesn't. And won't. But it'd be nice if it did. If things weren't what you knew they were the whole time. If the caricature of the person to your right wasn't just that -- a caricature. If final wasn't final and we weren't who we were. If.