Russian Girl

I finished reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. Paul lent it to me and it's the first book I've managed to finish reading in month.

Yesterday I went out for pie with Drew and some of his friends. He was running late, I beat him there, tearing into the parking lot blasting Black Flag's Damaged, windows rolled down. Waiting for him to arrive was awkward and uncomfortable. I felt unhappy and out of place.

I am obsessed with everything that I loved when I was in high school. The live version of "Davey" on Yo Yo A Go Go: Another Live Compilation, photos of Tobi Vail, the International Pop Underground, Beatrix Potter illustrations. I think a lot about tattoos that I want to get, but I am afraid.

About a week ago I had a crying fit. When I was 15 or 16 I memorized a piece called "Boy" from a Bikini Kill zine. About a week ago I cried in bed, alone, murmuring it to myself over and over even though I hadn't thought of it in years. It is a long thing to memorize -- longer than the preamble of the Constitution or someone's phone number. I sat in bed crying and whispering to myself, "I will never be what the world wants me to be or have sex right," hiccuping, "I will still bear the brunt of it."

Everything is very, very disjointed even though every day is basically the same.

Attitude

My room is littered: piles of zines awaiting donation to the Denver Zine Library (soon, soon), old copies of the New York Times Book Review, unread library books, receipts, the perforated edges torn from notebook paper.

I don't write anymore. Not unless you count self-indulgent journal entries and that same, awful quasi-meta short story I've been working on for the past couple of months. (When it's fan fiction you call it a Mary Sue, when it's non-genre you call it "meta.")

I did manage to publish two zines, but the writing is so bad and empty that I'm ashamed of them. I only made 25 copies of each and still haven't managed to sell them all. The days of my zines selling upwards of 500 copies are long, long gone.

Last night I couldn't seem to sleep -- felt hot and uncomfortable, my hair damp on the back of my neck. Ended up sitting on the floor of the bathroom, crying, but at least it was quiet in there -- the tile cool on my thighs. On nights like last night, I can't help but feel that there is something terribly, awfully wrong with me and that I am broken in some incomprehensible way. I can't seem to relax, can't seem to calm down. I feel as though I'm constantly navigating some gaping disconnect, that it is impossible for me to be "normal", to communicate my needs with ease and patience and confidence. I am convinced that there is an easier, better way to live and that I will never figure it out.

I feel like I am a permanent downer. Paul says that smart girls should be able to get over it, but lately I feel like I will never, ever get over it, and I am deeply ashamed of how self-centered this makes me.

"A self who is out of reach and unknowable. I read those words many times before the two of us meet, trying to understand them, her. Is she stating a human truth that applies to all of us, being philosophical in suggesting that no one can ever know him- or herself completely? Or is she acknowledging something peculiar to herself and, by extension, others who have experienced violence, trauma? Are people like us left with parts of our own psyches walled off, removed from our ability to access them? And are those parts alive? Or are thet dead? Are they aspects of ourselves that were destroyed by the shock, whatever it was, and interred within us?" -- Kathryn Harrison, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family

I first read While They Slept in January of this year, took less than a day to finish it, swallowed it whole reading in between moments of teaching, hiding from students and co-workers. Found myself morbidly fascinated with what I read, disturbed by Harrison's precise writing, her uncanny ability to describe the sectioning off of the self.

I told Brittany that I wanted to write a zine about teaching: about the interconnections between teaching and performance, how ownership of the body is tentatively negotiated between the teacher and the student. I feel like my possession of my own body has been tenuous at best -- I suppose this makes it easy to give myself up as an object.

I wish that I could be more articulate, more outspoken. I feel as though I'm always swallowing my words.

I don't know nothing

This afternoon I got a text message from Jenny Holzer that read, "THE MUNDANE IS TO BE CHERISHED." I am doing my best to follow her advice.

This afternoon I focused on small things: reading my students' poetry, David saying, "We don't want that guy to teach us, we want you," the sound of favorite songs, the taste of a Milk Chocolate Creme Brulee Truffle Bar, the feel of sunshine on my face as I made the hour-long drive from my field placement to my university for the last time.

Foxfire

One thing I've learned, transcribing these CONFESSIONS has taught me, we all knew a lot more at young ages than we remember knowing, later. Some kind of peculiar amnesia must set in. Some kind of reinvention of ourselves. Maybe because much of what we knew we didn't like knowing and worked to forget so if you haven't been keeping a diary or such (and nobody does, these days) you'll succeed in forgetting what's mysterious, upsetting. -- Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

I cannot remember how old I was the first time I read Foxfire, my grandmother's copy, her shaky cursive on the inside cover: You are never helpless. I know only that I took to it too quickly, too truly. Was able to too wholly identify with Legs and Maddy and their outrage. Their childish, violent anger and their crippling, girlish self-doubt. I know only that I read it over and over, fantasizing about taking my own revenge and feeling immobilized not by my gender, but by my social inadequacy. I know that I read the book through the lens of my own experiences as well as through the lens of my grandmother's experiences, trying to imagine how she might feel as she read. Wondering if she also dreamed of redemption, absolution through pointed violent retaliation.

I remember the summer I first read it, the feeling of near-molten blacktop on my bare feet, the taste of homemade mango sorbet, and the sound of boys playing soccer in the church yard across the street while I lay on my bed, windows open to let in near-night air. I remember writing in my journal, "FOXFIRE BURNS AND BURNS," reminding myself of a fire that cannot be extinguished, of experiences that will never fade entirely from my own memory.

"So FOXFIRE is a code for the other and the other is a code for us.

Sitting in the dining hall, Will says, "Joyce Carol Oates only writes one book," and sometimes I feel that is more or less true. She writes one book. A book about a Smart Girl who is made to suffer Something Terrible. A book about the cognitive dissonance that arrives when you believe you Know Better or Don't Deserve something.

I remember reading We Were the Mulvaneys and I'll Take You There and The Tattooed Girl and Black Girl/White Girl and I remember reading Foxfire and I remember feeling less alone.

"Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we're living now, and the connection must be there? -- like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth simultaneously."

There are times now where i feel very much alone. More than I did in middle or high school, more than I did on long, desperate nights.