12:52 - Saturday, Sept. 20, 2003 we've heard that one before
Intuition is extremely awesome.
I believe I am now immune to marijuana for awhile, but when we drove to the party there were people spilling off the front porch and yelling and spitting in the driveway and I'm thinking, 'Wonderful. The entire student body is at Elliot's and I have to socialize with it.' See, I wasn't in the mood. I had (and have) some sort of flu and had just come from seeing a couple of pretty provocative films and eating hot soup, so Camille and I just sat on the ledge wide eyed for awhile and we kept saying to each other, 'let's go, this party is going to get busted.' So eventually we wandered off and took the 204 home to be antisocial and listen to the Pixies, and five minutes after we got there:
:ring!: :ring!:
'Hello?'
'Hannah, it's Lara. Give me Gail's cell phone number.
'But I don't have Gail's cell phone number.'
'But...' :whisperwhisper: 'Okay, give me Robin's. The party just got busted by the cops and we all got separated.'
Score.
Luckily everyone escaped, but I'm glad I didn't have to go through it. I hate running through bushes and down streets just because I happened to be in the presence of people who're drinking... it makes it worse, as it is, because I don't drink.... so explaining that to the police is entirely fruitless: 'Yeah, oh yeah, we've heard THAT one before.'
17:50 - Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003 all he is
as promised: the first short story i wrote for intro to fiction.
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....all he is.
The first time I see him it�s January and 25 degrees. New snow is stacked thick in the tree branches and on the grass, piled cold and solid. He is sitting waist deep in it, cross-legged in a pair of soaked jeans, barefoot and blue. His hands, stark and veined, stand out fluttering in his lap. Students rush in and out of the swinging dorm doors, shivering, wearing polar fleece and glancing sidelong at him on their way to other places. I am still, because I am curious, and I am confounded. In my boots, I wade through the snow over to the half-obscured picnic bench next to him. Halfway there, I glance over and he is peeking up through ice coated eyelashes, these warm secret brown eyes. I close mine, and when I open them again, he is rising, and a week later he is sitting in my room and I know this:
He thinks everything is backwards and upside down. He thinks everything everybody wants to think but is too afraid to have to commit to it.
�Cold is the most fundamental sensation,� he says, looking down at his feet in a bucket of ice water and then over at me. �Our race spent its entire history trying to get away from it. Every invention is just a step further away from being cold. Fire and electricity and blankets.�
I call this view overanalysis, I call it overstepping the boundaries, I even flat-out call it ridiculous sometimes, even to his face, but since he rose out of the snow that day I haven�t been bored for even one minute.
�We get away from it for a reason,� I say back to him, pulling my red fuzzy blanket around me, hoping he�ll have a lapse and ask to share it. �If we don�t, we...�
�And look where we are now,� he interrupts.
I am silent.
A sound escapes his throat, but he swallows it down. He doesn�t even have to open his mouth. I can hear it already. I have heard it already. �If everything disappeared and we were left with the clothes on our backs, we would be gone in less than twenty four hours.�
I know, I know. �I�ve never heard the word �freedom� used correctly. Anyone can do whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter which government they live under. It�s just a matter of being smart enough to dodge the radar�.
Okay. Okay. 'The thing is, I�ve never heard anyone complain that they don�t have the self-reliance to keep themselves alive. I�ve never heard anyone refuse the sustenance the government gives them even as they complain about being repressed.�
I call this semantics. I call this useless dogma. I even call this bullshit, sometimes, even to his face. But ever since he rose out of snow that day........
�Get out of here,� I say, aloud.
�I�m sorry,� he says.
�Please.�
He goes.
Minutes pass, silent minutes in which my head fills up to overflowing.
�No, I�m sorry,� I call down the hall.
I can hear him laughing.
The thing is, he makes me feel like I�m faking my whole life. On the other hand, he fills me with this sense of possibility like I�ve never felt before. I take the bus to class and for a split second all I see is the exhaust, the snow turning brown under the wheels, the incessant growling of the engine. There are girls on purple swirled cell phones staring at me staring at this ruination. A switch can flip in my head as quickly as the split second it takes for me to pull the cord and stumble down the filthy bus stairs into the dirty roadside snow; the freezing air, the adrenaline rush, the (I refuse to think in these terms) cold air revival.
Sometimes logic gets so coiled that I can hardly even see him. We�re free-climbing up the side of a cliff, him in bare feet, me in climbing boots, and when we reach a resting place we see a distant figure standing atop the Grand Teton, waving its tiny stick arms and shouting in a tiny stick voice... shouting something unintelligible and elated.
I turn and pull him the rest of the way up. �I want to be standing on the tip of the Grand Teton,� I whisper into the wind.
�What would you do if you were?� he asks, but mildly, not belittling.
�I would wave my stick arms and shout my elation in a tiny stick voice,� I say, laughing. �What would you do?�
�If I were on the top of the Grand Teton I would jump,� he says, stone-faced.
What?
�I would jump,� he says again, looking at me steadily.
The scenery starts curling and fuzzing before my eyes. I put my hand out and find a tree branch, wipe my eyes with the other hand and peer at him through the purple fuzz of my glove. All of him is just this undulating blur.
�You wouldn�t jump,� I say.
�.........,� he says.
Why would he say that?
He smiles sadly and his eyes swirl like hot coffee.
Some nights I�m paralyzed with futility at my computer screen or at the piano keyboard, or I�m curled up in bed, teeth knocking together, trying to read, and he�ll open my door quietly and perch on the opposite bed, strumming guitar chords until I am able to fall asleep. He has never touched me and I am afraid to touch him; what must hands feel like that can sculpt snow as if it�s clay? They, like the rest of him, are bone-ivory and sharp.
�Come on, let�s go for a walk,� he says. It is 3 a.m.
�Okay,� I say.
�There�s a cave underneath the creek bed and I�m going to show it you,� he says.
And why shouldn�t we go see a creek cave at 3 a.m? School, sleep, cold, danger, says my mind. �Okay,� says my mouth.
The cave underneath the creek bed is made of ice. I wasn�t expecting this, but when I think about it, what was I expecting? It�s hardly big enough for both of us. The ice floods with blue and silver patterns from bugs skating across its surface, and when he sits down next to me, the surface films over from the heat of him. After all this, he is still warmer than me. His bare feet curl on the shell of frost.
I wonder, in passing, why I don�t find him sinister.
�Before you say anything,� I tell him, voice echoing around the cavern, �I want you to know that this is as real as anything else, and anything else is as real as this.�
�One day you�ll come up empty,� he says.
A wonderful song runs through my head, a most improbable time for it to do so. �One day the wind will come up,� I sing, �and you�ll come up empty again....�
�Everyone comes up empty eventually,� I tell him.
�I�m already empty,� he responds.
I am silent like hitting a brick wall. I am afraid he is right. I have never seen one morsel of food pass his lips.
�That�s not what I mean,� he says.
I know. I�m being funny.
�It is pretty funny,� he says. �Just because even if I wanted to I couldn�t lose anything,�
That�s not what I mean.
�I know,� he says. He covers my trembling right hand with both of his; warm, steady.
For his birthday, I take him out to dinner, to the most earth-friendly place I can possibly think of. Still, in order to get him there, I have to blindfold him. We walk two miles like this; me creating the path, holding his skinny shoulders, him laughing his rare shuddering laugh and stumbling along in my wake. He thinks we�re going sledding. He thinks we�re going skating. He has this odd winter wonderland fantasy about him today that lights up his entire face, and when we finally stop outside of the Blind Faith Cafe, I gently untie the blindfold and untangle it from his curly black hair. His pupils dilate and recover from the sudden light, and when he sees where we are, he drops down into the snow directly where he stands. He refuses to go inside.
�Come on,� I say, lightly at first. �I�m paying. Happy Birthday. Come on.�
�No,� he says.
�Aren�t you hungry?� I ask.
�It doesn�t matter whether I�m hungry,� he says. He closes his eyes.
�Come on.�
�You don�t understand.�
�Come on.�
�Be quiet.�
�No, you be quiet,� I shout. His eyes open. I feel like I�m four years old. �Can you just step down off your pedestal and enjoy a nice dinner?�
�This is just getting farther from reality,� he says, taking off his shoes.
�It�s getting so I can�t even see plates and silverware,� he says, slipping out of his shirt.
�You are so full of shit,� I tell him.
�It�s getting so that even if I wanted to I wouldn�t be able to feel warmth,� he says, closing his eyes again.
I kneel down and I grab his shoulders and I shake him. I feel like my heart is strangling; I could swear he rattles. �All it is, is you�re destroying yourself,� I say to him, softly. �All this whole thing IS, is...�
�No, you�re destroying me,� he mumbles. Softer. I reach for his hands and he pulls rustling twigs back. I reach for his waist and my fingers go right around it without making contact. Skin melts into bone melts into air.
�The most fundamental thing isn�t cold, it�s joy,� I�m saying, I�m saying it desperately, because his ear is folded away from me like a sunflower in the shade.
�The most fundamental thing isn�t cold, it�s death,� he says, and every part of him is bone white, indistinguishable from the snow surrounding him. When I reach for him this time my hand plunges deep into a snowdrift.... and that is... all he is.
00:11 - Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003 unusual everything
Today was filled with very unusual everything; the cold/rain combo in Boulder in September, coupled with the impromptu writing workshop in a tiny cafe in late afternoon and having to walk through the freezing quad at 7:30 to talk about Boy Scout policy on homosexuals with a kid named Opie in the library. Also, my short story in fiction was critiqued today. Result: I'm either sophomoric or brilliant, but hardly in between. The class was split. I'll post it at some point, probably at the end of this entry.
After the library it was pouring rain and I was on 20th anyway so I called Nick. I couldn't hear anything for the sound of the buses' roaring engines and slicing rain, so when I faintly heard someone pick up I just yelled into the phone, 'It's Hannah. Are you guys still making pillows? I'm on 20th and Broadway. I'm coming over. Bye,' and hung up. When I got there, both Nick and Patrick were standing at the door, hangers ready for my soaking wet sweatshirt.
Sometimes I just get these wonderful washes of gratitude that I met Nick, because I know no one else that I could sit on the floor and make paper snowflakes with and construction paper happy suns while singing 'Hard Day's Night' haltingly, figuring out chord changes on the way... I know no one else who would get all excited about the 50's Disney version of 'Alice in Wonderland' and download it off the internet for the sole purpose of making me watch it. I marvel at the amount of chance it took for it to happen... or for anything to happen, really. Tiny wrong moves and I wouldn't know any of the same people I know now.
18:41 - Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003 think about this.
Think about having to say 'circumnavigational' in a monotone, in one beat evenly in 4/4 time while conducting in the air with your right hand and thinking about dynamics at 8:15 in the morning while a grad student not much older than you looks on with a sour face and makes notes on a sheet of paper.
Every fourth Thursday, these are approzimating my mornings.
13:04 - September 15, 2003 whoa.
If God were at all like a bumblebee, He would have stung us with the stinger of life and then dropped dead, assless.
21:39 - September 14, 2003 sigh
I was supposed to go hiking today with any number of people, but none of them came through. And I've triple-booked for Tuesday. Hmmm.
On my way down the mountain by myself I was thinking about the differences between relationships that start out as friendships and relationships that begin life as relationships. I would think it would be extremely difficult to make the switch in the former. All of a sudden you're expected to act a different way.. but then, if it's expectations that are the reason for the switch, it wouldn't work anyway. Either way, it would be strange to suddenly have a huge part of the time you were spending together be physical. Strange not outweighing wonderful, though. Definitely not outweighing wonderful...
I wish I had the experience to know for sure, but I don't.
I wore my Canada! t-shirt with the insanely grinning maple leaf up the mountain and I ran into some guy helping his kids down the steep path. 'Are you from Canada?' he yelled.
'No, what makes you think that?' I yelled back.
He didn't get it.
Sigh.
