There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

When I was a sophomore in high school, I hated my English class. My teacher was young and cool and didn't wear those sad black clogs that so many of the others did, but I still hated it. Each week we would have quizzes on different Latin roots, and very rarely was I valiant or victorious, and I certainly didn't greet those "beneficial" words with benevolence. And what's worse, we had to read Romeo and Juliet from old yellow textbooks that smelled of wilted cabbage and glue. It wasn't very romantic.

And then one day we got to the poetry section of our textbooks. And to be relevant to our class, my teacher made the astute observation that music is like poetry, and that for our first assignment, we were to take one of our favorite songs and analyze it for the class.

I had to do this once before in the eighth grade for my humanities class; it didn't go over well. "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes was apparently a bit inaccessible; all my teacher could say at the end was "Wow, that bass part is like a mantra." She was a lesbian and enjoyed eastern philosophy and fair trade coffee. No one else knew what that meant. But I also choreographed a dance to Pink Floyd's "Money," so I don't know why my classmates were so surprised at my musical selection.

Anyway, I wanted this one to be better. But, given my 15 year old status, my musical repertoire certainly was limited. I raced home and poured through my CD collection. The Beatles were too typical, Led Zeppelin were too sexy, and Green Day were too stupid. I tried to listen to the radio for help, but wasn't fond of anything there, either. It was all about "fucked" in all of its forms: getting, being (+ "up").

And then, for whatever reason, I picked up The Smiths. I'd never particularly cared for them; Morrissey always seemed a bit self-absorbed for my tastes. And anyway, he was just another annoying vegetarian. But then I started to listen to some of the lyrics, and things began to make sense.



It was my turn to go next. Katie had just finished presenting Shania Twain's simultaneously empowering and demeaning hit, "I Feel Like a Woman," and it went really well with the class. My teacher liked how Katie used poetic devices in her explanation of the song, but told her that just because Shania said she felt "like" a woman doesn't mean that it is a simile. But she clapped anyway and drew a red check plus next to her name. "Savannah," she said, "you're up."

My hands were shaking as I smoothed my pants and retied my pale yellow ribbon belt. I adjusted my pearls. "Hello," I said (why did I say that?), "I will be playing The Smiths' 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.'"

And I played all four minutes and five seconds of it. Images began to swirl about in my mind as Morrissey's voice entered my ears, and I remembered my first date when a boy, an older boy, came to my house in his car (and not just any car, but a yellow Xterra), and took me with him to see a comedy show. I remembered how I laughed at things I didn't think were funny, just because from the corner of my eye, I could see his teeth glittering like jewels as the comedian told jokes about penises. And it worked; after it was over he hugged my shoulder, the "C" his hand made fit my shoulder perfectly. He said it looked like I had a good time, we should do it again soon.

(We should do it again soon!)

And then on the next date, we went to eat and then to his older friend's house in his car, and I squinted my eyes so all of the street lights would become soft and fuzzy and round like when you look into a kaleidoscope. And I smiled brightly because I felt like I was in a dream. He was a boy who was smart and funny attractive and older than me and he liked me! Me, the girl who, after he came over to the house for the first time, had to blow dry the forest green pit stains out from her lime green shirt. And besides, he was playing Radiohead in the car. I felt like a woman.

"Driving in your car, I never never want to go home"

We got to the house before everyone else did, and all was dark in the car. We sat in an anxious silence; my heartbeat was faster than that of a jackhammer and I knew he had to hear it. But then he turned on "Farmhouse" by Phish. I couldn't move, I couldn't speak, so I just breathed his scent. He smoked cloves and I thought that was exotic. And I looked at his eyes; they reminded me of the green traffic lights I saw when I squinted. And more than anything, I wanted to "Go!" but I couldn't.

"Oh God, my chance has come at last (but then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask)"

The guitar solo was halfway finished; I knew I had to move soon. But all of a sudden, two headlights illuminated us, and they never went out. His friends were here. And I looked down to my hands in disappointment, and saw his resting nervously atop mine. I didn't feel their weight until now. Scared, and growing brighter and brighter by the minute, I withdrew them. "I guess we'd better go now," I said.

The song was over.

My classmates didn't notice that the song had finished. No one said anything. They didn't know the words, and they were completely bored. Paul began to play on his Nokia. And I was offended--they weren't disrespecting me, they were pissing on Morrissey and my memories. I couldn't stand it; my cheeks grew hot and pink with impatience and I thought about my sweaty and paralyzed hands, and how stupid I felt after I tried to get close to him at the Belle & Sebastian concert when they played "Dress Up In You." He thought they were weird; I thought they were delightfully absurd. I thought about how, even after being tossed aside, his eyes were still more vibrant and vivacious than a green light that would never never go out, no matter how badly I wanted them to turn ugly and red. I would always remember Phish, and cloves and the sparkle of his teeth as they danced in a smoky blue haze, and most importantly, for the first time (not necessarily because of him), I felt alive and sexy and free.

"There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out"

My teacher asked if I was OK. Luke was copying his neighbor's Algebra II homework, and Paul had begun to flirt with Julie. Clay asked for the bathroom pass. They all seemed OK. I shook my head.

"I may not know many things, but if after listening to this song and these words, you decide to keep playing 'Snake' on your phone, you're not human."

I stared at Paul. He wasn't listening to me; Julie was massaging his fat shoulders with her small hands. They reminded me of dung beetles feeding on elephant feces.

"You people are all going to be happy, and it's not fair."

Paul closed his simple brown eyes and rolled his head back onto Julie's desk. She kept eating his shit up.

I lost it.

"You don't care about anything; not words, not love, not poetry, so you don't deserve any of it. I'm not going to explain this song to you because you'll never understand."

I didn't receive a check plus.

I took the bathroom pass from Clay, and ran out of the room. Then I took off my pearls. I stopped listening to Radiohead, and started reading real poetry. I also promised myself I would never smoke again. Later that day, I listened to my copy of "Farmhouse" and cried, and then I threw it away. Tried to throw away my memories too, but I couldn't. But why would I want to, anyway?

"There is a light and it never goes out."

the end of ostrich syndrome

In the moment, I'm dancing and
my legs are burning and
my blood is pumping and
I can taste the wind as it enters and exits my mouth like
a soft pink ribbon.
It's slightly sweet and
it lingers for a few moments on my lips.

I'm making it, I cry!
I'm making the wind!

But then I turn with too much vigor and I fall violently to the floor, and I'm hammered with the cold, hardwood fact that I'm just some girl alone in a white bloodless room, dancing pathetically to songs she doesn't even like.
And my lips are stained red; the dry heat of the room made them chapped and raw.

I have no partner, and no rhythm, just thin clumsy feet that trip on my:
knobby knees and
bony ankles that
look like those of an ostrich.

And then I pick myself up off the floor and turn off the noise, just to
bury my head in the sand. And
I feel so fucking stupid for thinking I could ever really dance to begin with.
A tiny red globule falls from my lips and onto my pale and worthless feet, and
I hate them and feel so heavy and so bound.

The word "good bye" exits my body with almost too much ease and
the soft and bloody 'b' evaporates quickly into the ether, punctuated by the gentle click of the white door. It's a pretty sound, and
delicate and
almost
brightly hopeless

and that light final click is the start of a new, more honest song.

work in progress

She gets her thoughts on love from the worn appendix in the back of her chemistry book and her wisdom from a raw throated, frizzy haired woman banging away at minor seventh chords on a dusty piano. In the mornings and regardless of the weather, she wears her mother’s tattered navy moccasins (which are a size too big). They have old red and turquoise beads hanging from them that don’t go with anything in her closet. And each night, she dreams of sweet smelling plantations, shiny ringlets of honey colored hair, and finding her true love in the science fiction section of the local library. The girl should not be trusted.

She never feels quite at home in her house. Her mother likes to use expressions like “Well idn’t that the pits” when she sees something sad on the local evening news, like on Tuesday, when a man choked on an acrylic fingernail in his burger basket, and on Wednesday, when there was a five car pileup on the highway. The girl never knows what the “pit” is, or for that matter, how there could be more than one. Her father, well, he likes to sit in his pea green recliner and read his newspaper and he likes to drink gin and tonics while doing so. He is almost always reading the newspaper. For a while she wondered if he even had a face anymore, for it is always hidden by newsprint and the occasional colored advertisement about discount pantsuits or clearance lampshades. Her brother, Neil, has a girlfriend and wears school jackets with letters on them and smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Velva. Neil is never around. Her dad calls Neil a “cut up” and when he comes home late with red eyes and a dizzy stride, her mom shakes her head disapprovingly and says, “Now, you don’t see that from a galloping horse.” The girl never understood what a horse, let alone a galloping one, had to do with her brother getting home past curfew.

So, the girl spends most of her time in her room. Her room is covered in hand drawn posters of weird, scientific things, like the Krebs cycle, the Periodic Table, the Loch Ness Monster, and then, staring down to her bed, there is a poster of Clark Gable from “Gone With the Wind.” She loves his moustache and the tip of his nose because it reminds her of a happy little mushroom her class studied once in Biology. Her mom always jokes to her friends about the fact that her sixteen-year-old daughter has a poster of Clark Gable hanging above her bed. She says that she doesn’t know why, but he makes her daughter “as happy as a pig in slop.” Her mother prefers Jimmy Smits. The girl doesn’t like being called a pig, and she thinks that Clark is much too classy to ever be referred to as “slop.” She sighs whenever her mother does this. At least she looks at a man who will look at back at her, the girl thinks. That’s more than her mother can say.

In addition to the posters, her room is a veritable jungle of plastic plants that occasionally gather dust if she does not care for them. But they do not die, even if they happen to grow a thick grayish film around every leaf. To the girl, this is excellent news. When she was little she had a traumatic experience with her rose garden: one day, for no apparent reason, they just wilted and shriveled and fell pathetically to the ground. The petals reminded her of dehydrated cat tongues. Since then, all plants have been plastic, and whenever Alvy, her cat, meows, she has to look away.

Each night, while her parents eat dinner on their TV trays, watching the local news and talking about The Pits and The Stocks, the girl takes her plate upstairs to her room and studies chemistry. Textbooks cover her bed, and eventually her hand begins to cramp because she’s been balancing equations for almost an hour. And then she smells her food and is disgusted by the hardened gravy on her mashed potatoes. They look like hardened plaster and are the color of her lab gloves after an experiment involving iodine. Alvy starts licking at the plate with his tongue and she gets upset and throws the plate to the floor, getting gravy gunk on her equations. And then she gets frustrated, because now her homework will smell like her lousy dinner and she can’t stop thinking about her dead rose garden. But then she looks up to Clark, smiling as handsome as can be, and decides to continue adding protons to her potassium atom.

The truth is that she understands most everything about science and mathematics. She can do logarithmic functions, and she can determine the velocity of X given its time T, and she can balance equations, and she can identify every part of the human heart. But, after sixteen years of daily study, she just doesn’t understand the force that attracts her mother and father together, and how covalent bonds can exist among humans, and she doesn’t know what acted as a catalyst to make Neil turn his potential feelings for a girl into kinetic ones, and she doesn’t understand how neither of these things have set times T and set velocities X. That is what she wants to know most. And that, the girl has decided, is the next problem she is going to solve.

In the meantime, she has finished balancing her final equation. She takes the now dull pencil from her thin fingers, sharpens it, and gingerly, purposefully, scribes her name at the top of the page in cursive: Grace.




The next morning as Grace rode the bus to school, she thought more about love, and why she had never experienced it. She started by thinking about Scarlett O’Hara, and how even though she could have had it with Rhett, she was hopelessly stuck on Ashley. Grace never understood that. She could only surmise that Scarlett only ever wanted what she couldn’t have. That didn’t help Grace, because she wanted no one, and no one wanted her. Then she thought about her brother, and his girlfriend, Rachel. Rachel was very pretty and thin, and had strawberry blonde hair that smelled like pineapple. When Rachel twirled her hair, she liked to bite her lip and giggle into her hand, and Grace found that very sexy. So did Neil. Sometimes Grace would try to emulate it in the mirror, but she would always end up licking her hair on accident and coughing.

And then she would look into the mirror and feel like a failure. It wasn’t that Grace was ugly, she had shiny medium brown hair that fell to her waist, and pale skin with bright green eyes, but she just felt plain. All the time. Grace never wore makeup; she tried to use an eyelash curler of her mother’s once but pressed so hard that for a week her eyelashes looked like crispy uppercase L’s.

Sometimes, when she got out of the shower, she would stare at her body in the mirror. She saw scrawny little legs that, even when her ankles were together, a quarter could fit easily between her thighs. And she saw ribs that looked like the gills of a fish, and on top of that, two small breasts that reminded her of the Hostess Snowballs that her mother liked to eat in secret. She didn’t see anything special, and she didn’t know why men bothered to buy magazines to see something so plain. Grace would think about the popular girls at school, with their grapefruit chests and rounded butts and how they would wear tight clothes that looked like they were spray-painted on, and how their glittery belt buckles would say “baby” or “angel.” Grace thought it was silly for them to have a belt anyway, as if that light stretch denim would ever fall short of their hip bones.


And then she hit her head on the dirty vinyl seat back in front of her. The bus came to a screeching halt as an old black Oldsmobile skidded past them on the right. From her seat, Grace could see the plate “GLMRUS” fade into the distance. It was only 7:47 and she already had a headache.

details

An obnoxious and overperfumed brunette with a tacky flower barrette pushes past me at the book store. she barely squeezes into a faded black sweater and there is mauve lipstick that slowly seeps into the paperthin lines above her lips like an hourglass in reverse. Some is beginning to stick to her front teeth, which are slightly yellow due to years of smoking virginia slims, or so we must presume. Someone recommends aldous huxley. She chews her gum, lightly spraying "brave new world" with berry mint flavored spittle. She drops the book. thoroughly disenchanted. She looks to the clerk, chewing her gum like a bullfrog does as it relishes its fly. "so where is the romance section?"

and then she is gone, whisked away to exotic Cyprus, where her tan Greek lover doesn't care about the deep red lines that her l'eggs pantyhose with control top leaves on her slightly flabby stomach, and he doesn't ask about the man who she loved when her stomach was flat and her teeth were white, and he certainly doesn't ask about the man who left her while she slept, leaving nothing but an old barrette between the sheets of their bed with a long blonde hair hanging from it like a stubborn loose tooth (she found it the next week when waking; it molded itself overnight to her side as a cold, brittle truth). Her lover only cares about her, and her now, and he loves her crafty flower barrettes and he lives for her berry mint and menthol flavored kisses. And she is happy and safe and loved and warm when she leaves; she feels like that's what good books should do for people. Who is Allen Huxby, anyway, and what does he know about being brave?

...who am i trying to channel?

My mouth wreaks of novocaine. The numbing solution the dentist gave me earlier was a deep shade of pink; it reminded me of a sliver of a large intestine being served to my teeth on a cotton quilted platter. I wanted to gag. The man behind the mask shook his head at me. "Your cavity is pretty deep," he said. For whatever reason, I was offended. How dare he tell me how deep my cavity was, and surely he had seen worse in his illustrious career as a family dentist. Almost immediately I despised him. And I hated that sterile white room in which I was stuck and that dowdy hygienist humming off key to that depressing jingle of a discount furniture retailer. And I loathed the fact that his fat latexed fingers were poking and prodding at my cavity and I wanted to scream but I couldn't. It was my dark pit and my deep decay, and it was something that I had done well enough to conceal for some time now. I remember having a strange and primal instinct to bite his fingers, to pierce through the plastic and into his skin to make him stop, but I couldn't; I simply couldn't feel anything.

It was the strangest sensation when I left. Half of my face had no feeling, and the other was perfectly emotive. I looked in the mirror and was shocked to see how puffy and jowly the left side of my face was; it reminded me of a partially deflated balloon. Prelude to adulthood, perhaps? I tried to force a smile onto my face, but only one corner of my mouth agreed to curl, and my "smile" looked like a "j" knocked helplessly on its side. I then imagined myself as a recovering stroke victim. Would my husband still love me with my partially frozen face? Would my family still recognize me? I thought of all of the people I knew who had suffered from strokes, and how generally after the fact, their outward expressions tend to mirror their frozen facial features. I suppose it is easier to give up than it is to try; and besides, having half a feeling is worse than having no feeling at all. All I know is that I certainly didn't feel like the girl who, while resting quietly on her bed, would later be told how "pretty she looked today" by a boy sitting rather close to her chest.

(This stupid little girl was immediately self conscious because of her makeup, her clothing, and even her own heartbeat. She felt like they distracted from who she really was, and painted a portrait of someone who she was not. Unable to speak, this little girl tossed a pillow into his face and rolled to her side. And then he fucked her, and she didn't feel pretty at all. She didn't feel anything. All she could see were gloved fingers, sanitary solution, and large intestines as he grunted. She looked to the ceiling for relief, but the pocks rearranged themselves to form molars and bicuspids and incisors. Ninety seconds passed, and he pathetically whispered "Oh, shit. Wow." She was hoping the novocaine would find its way into his mouth, sparing both of them from saying things they did not mean. "That was, great," he panted. She was covered in pools of his sweat. They reminded her of oil slicks that race cars leave after a drag race. His breath smelled like an ash tray. She smiled faintly, like a pale crescent moon does before it dissolves quietly into the sky, and kissed him. Thank god she couldn't feel that either.)

Later that day I went to my grandmother's. As I was waiting for her to answer the door, I couldn't help but notice how similar my hands were to her old oak tree: dry and spindly and made stiffer and weaker by time. She greeted me with open arms, "Well, don't you look pretty," she said. I wanted to cry.

She ushered me inside. We discussed Christmas, presents, and her meals until she finally showed me what she wanted to discuss. She pulled out a flyer from some womens magazine. It was some concoction that was supposed to boost your immune system, tastes like berries! Keeps you healthy! I eyed it listlessly as it fell slowly atop her crossword puzzles and prescriptions. I've grown annoyed of this. My mother pushes iron supplements and protein on me. She thinks I am either anemic, have mono, or am dieting. She notices that I have "pain pills" in my purse, but gets sore with me when I sigh and say that it is just aspirin. She doesn't believe me. They are a new variety, I say. My mother shakes her head and I recall the time she burst into my room when I was in high school, demanding that I give her my drugs. I wasn't on any at the time; she scoured and scoured and didn't find any and then finally apologized, and asked if I was just sad. I hate the word "sad." She doesn't like that I wear the color black and am tired often. She hates the fact that I don't indulge in mayonnaise based spreads, and don't eat peanut butter cookies. She asks me if I am sad, if I am trying to lose weight, if I want to order a pizza, and if I need to see a doctor. To all of these I say "No." I always want to add "...but what kind?" but I don't. My mother also enjoys talking to the television about charming men in cinema while licking artichoke dip off of her fingertips. Occasionally she gets some stuck between her teeth but she doesn't notice. I don't say anything, either. I nod my head to this, and smile blankly back at the cold screen. A stupid little girl is about to get fucked by a hawk nosed man in a suit.

I then look at my own fingertips, and am surprised to see a lone, longish nail. I almost never see the whites of them; I always bite them off before they have the chance to grow. But I do regularly see the color white on them. I always thought those little white specks on the pinks of my nails were just bruises (when I was younger I likened them to my very own stars), but as my mother quickly pointed out, it is a sign of nutrient deficiency. The nail reminds me of a white marble tombstone in a crooked cemetery. Instinctively, I bite the nail off and let it linger a bit on the tip of my tongue as some sort of ivory prize, but I still can't feel it. Or maybe I can, I don't know. Besides, that prize has no weight, no texture, no color, no taste, no odor, and no sound. I wonder to myself, sometimes, is there a difference between paralysis and weightlessness? And then I think about those sad stroke victims. I get frustrated with myself, because maybe they aren't really sad, maybe they don't even realize they're numb at all, maybe they never really loved their spouses and family before the stroke, and maybe they were bloodless all along. I hope I am not smiling while I think of these things, but how will I ever know?

I sometimes worry that I am beginning to grow accustomed to this lack of taste in my mouth.

Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums"

"Oh, I don't have any time for that!" said Iris. She was about to plant her Spring perennials.

"But it's his birthday."

Impatiently, she dropped her trowel on the table. "Look," she said matter-of-factly, "my hands are already dirty, and by the time I clean everything up I'll already be an hour late. Besides, he doesn't want to see me anyway. You go, I'll stay here with my flowers." She kissed her daughter on the cheek. It was returned with a dry sigh.

"Fine."

Iris very well could have gone if she wanted; her daughter knew that too. But she just preferred her garden. It was always so quiet and beautiful and it was all up to her. She had been gardening for years now; she loved the reciprocity of it all. If she put the work into a pot of peonies, the pot of peonies would give her beautiful blooms. It wasn't like, say, investing emotions into a relationship with a man who would fuck her and then leave, and it certainly was more pleasant than a sour-mouthed daughter who blamed her for her lack of relationship with her father. What was there not to understand about a flower? Plant it with care, water it, and voila: a pink beauty.

She'd made a routine of it, actually. Each morning, Iris would rise with the sun, work in the garden for a few hours, fix lunch (which was usually a salad), watch the soaps, water the garden, make dinner (which also was usually a salad), go to sleep. This pattern continued for years, and she was quite content with it. Life was much more simple this way. The wind would bring about the occasional visitor, but when the dust finally settled, it was Iris and her flowers. It was always Iris and her flowers.

Her daughter left. Iris sighed as the wind from the door's slamming reached her face and slowly raised her pepper colored bangs. She could taste its life. She imagined the wind to be crisp and light, like iceberg lettuce. So, Iris went outside and began digging deep into the earth. Soil was always one of her favorite smells; she loved how her fingers would get dirty and rough and wet as she worked. In her garden, she was independent Iris, a woman of the earth. Sometimes her fingers hurt, but thankfully the pain and visible flaws could be washed away as if they never happened.

The bulbs Iris had ordered for Spring were expensive. They were yellow calendulas, something she had never dealt with prior to this year. She tended to them like she never had before, occasionally sacrificing her routine for them. But it was worth it; she knew. After all, the more work she put into them, the more beautiful they would be.

Spring came, and so did her calendulas. In eager anticipation, Iris would look out of her kitchen window each morning as she was steaming her tea. The way the light hit the garden, the way the birds were chirping, the pleasant briskness of the morning wind causing a fluttering of the ivy; it was auspicious. She opened the door.

Iris went to the garden. In it, there were her bulbs, and from the bulbs she could see her long, slender stems. And from the stems she saw her bright green buds. And all of a sudden, the sun reached down with its long golden arms and the buds began to bloom. Iris watched carefully as the green separated, eyes focused on the emerging blossom, hoping to see a bright yellow calendula. But something terrible happened; they were grey. All of them. Each flower bloomed, revealing not a charming calendula, but a shriveled and withering plant, neck snapped and hanging limply like a dirty mop. One by one and faster and faster the dead flowers punctured through the earth like bullets, and now some blossoms resembled hard skeletal fists. Their petals resembled razorblades, and others looked like bruised fingernails on a cadaver. And they kept reaching and clawing and growing and snapping their grey-petaled teeth at the lone Iris. And it didn't stop, and soon all Iris could see for miles and miles was grey. This couldn't be, she thought. I did everything right, everything. In her disbelief, she cupped her hands to her mouth. She smelled the soil entrenched deep within her fingernails. It smelled like shit. But maybe it always did. And then Iris wilted and fell to the ground, defeated. Crumpled and withered among her garden of dead flowers, she cried:

"But I did everything right,
but I did everything right."

And the wind would bring about the occasional visitor, but when the dust finally settled, it was Iris and her flowers. It was always Iris and her flowers.

Chrysanthemums

I swore I could feel the weight of your chin on my shoulder this morning but it was just a decorative pillow. I was bombarded with chrysanthemums and dahlias and reds and yellows and it fucking hurt. I threw you off of my bed and rolled over, but I still couldn't sleep.

Twin beds can only conceal so much.
You're fucking stuffed and I'm never hungry and
I don't know how to do anything anymore.
I can't even sleep

I don't even miss you is the thing.
A pillow can always be replaced
I just miss the weight and indentations
in my sad white sheets.