mexico- notes
“You’re all tall.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how attractive you girls are in Mexico?”
“How much?”
“a lot.”
We are not insured to go windsurfing :(
Rach “Parasailing is basically flying”
me “What kind of personality do yo uthink the person on that parachute has?”
R “Fun loving.”
J “Do you think they lead a routine life?”
I think They’re thinking about who they love most.
to get ready I:
1)made my way onto Rach’s “list” because I did not prepare her for the violent realities of my brazilian waxer
“Where are you I’m going to kill you”
“I’m in honest Ed’s… Just you try and find me.”
2)e-mailed my second therapist (robswonderfulworld@gmail.com) inquring the poss of purchasing tres cher prescrips on the cheap
“Jenner I think it was in Guatamala not sure about mexico remember you’re amazing -rob”
Saturday
“I like staring at the bubbles in this beer”
Sunday
Walking through the old part of puerto
we sit by the pool the girls
swing their burnt legs
they are hot to the touch
sucking in all the sun like stones
I take three rounds til I can throw a dart straight
I want my turn
in a breeze my hair smells of allll the oils
I tell those men who have taken us to the only straight bar in the gay district “roxy”
rach holds my hand not to fall in wooden clogs
and their thick tongues ask “are you lovers”
the girls walk out I take the stage and say
“I am distraught because i love her and it’s enough
but she loves me and she loves everyone”
“but you are such a sexy woman, surely you can have any man you want”
“but I want her” and I’m so convincing I am even convincing myself, I can see our throw pillows in our gay loft. The good lie the imagination.
“but i know she’s out there with our friend” my fist slams the tables rattling tecates, cerveza con limon y sel
“I have to see. I can’t trust her”
I run out on them, out on the bill, run into the cab where kate and rach are feeding the driver— ringolos? chips.
assumptions of rogues and rascals
we walk and I am surly until we happen upon, or it happens upon us La Rigadera
Kate and I sing on stage, her launching from atop the chairs, me ripping the microphone chord
Rachel takes photos from the front row. Our stage mom.
9 beers are 650 pesos.
In the bathroom alone in old puerto I am spinnnning a little
Sitting on a massage table I am invited to lay on a couch and drink beer by a beautiful cuban boyfriend
23 year old army veteran already having lived and retired from a career in professional soccer
don’t care if it’s true it sounds good with the accent
he works 80 hours a week
he misses cuba
he talks on and on while i quietly document my moods on the great spreadsheet in the sky
the server at dinner
a song comes from his pocket
it’s his son calling
Our last day we are really somethin
I sit blatantly watching drunk boys when they laugh they kind of are like goats
I left the girls down on the beach so I wouldn’t have to say hold me back
real reason- because the beach vendors were stressing me out
I’ve got a heart race, and maybe will have an exploding rib cage so
I opt to sit on the bar have three beers in the shade while our boyfriend reads out the bingo numbers
there’s a song on r’s playlist- it was playing in the car,a long time ago, with another boyfriend, the morning after we were finally honest
At the airport we are in tact
I feel happy when I look at my rings, I think I’ll get jewelry everywhere I go from now on, I try to draw them but it just looks like a couple vaginas
Notes on avoiding your loved ones
-Something is happening & forces me to keep myself from you.
-I wish it were different.
-You wouldn’t understand.
This is true that I do not like to shower. I suppose I am uncomfortable surrounded by anything at all frenetic. Does it confuse you to listen here, while yelling is loud in the other room? Or do you feel unaffected, perhaps even comforted by constant racket? Myself those overlapping audibles sparring to strain over another. I cannot make a decision because there’s option a) to take the second longest route, or b)…… what was I trying to decide again? Over. And over. And over. I will never get to the second option I will never choose. Until I feel a wrought iron coal kettle inside my own guts and damnit then I scream I have to, I’ve gotta boil over. How else to empty all that fucking sound. It’s not that I’m afraid of water all the time. I feel safe in a bath. Bathwater sits still, it doesn’t scream down around bodies, or shake. It makes no noise unless you will it to. Yes, I like the bath.
The Truth
Were you aware being the skipping of every stone across the brim of a lake is a really difficult and perfect production, orchestrated by a wooly man beneath?
No actually I didn’t know that.
Yes well the really important thing to know is how completely awful the wooly stone skipping man’s eye sight is. He wears glasses thick as sewer grates— twice as heavy— thrice as caked with sewage! His hair; a bright white shock of lamb’s wool atop oval shaped brain-canister. The jaw of a slack, and just enough teeth to get by. And when I say “get by” I mean—
— enough to capitluate the consumption of three corn cobs without incident.
—Obviously, yes. As I was saying, our stone skipping savant endured many moons as a woolen child with bottle cap eyes.
And now?
Now he lives in a small igloo beneath your bodies of water, well cozy one could say. I mean he has all the amenities a person could want.
A foam topper on his mattress?
I don’t think that’s necesary to live—
A zester for his lemons? Cases for pillows?
Well he’s not the Queen of Sheba—
A watercolor painting of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress—
Ok! Ah geeeve up! So, Monsieur Woolé does not leeve avec a thousand counts of threads weetheen his sheets! But it iz not all sheet.
How could living undersea be worth it then.
Because our hero waits patiently (he loves knitting christmas stockings for lazy dogs that have been in the family awhile.) When an aspiring skip approaches his pond, Wooly need not see them approach (not like he could anyway). He carefully rests his knitting atop his mini fridge slash coffee table. He can feel the best intentions. To desire so deeply for a sound— a result— a phenomenon so simple it barely deserves four syllables. Old woolen bottle cap eyes waits. The wind back, the release— each thrower believes they have chosen well; flat, smooth. In the air the stone rockets away from a life land locked. This small smooth earthy attempt propels toward the surface. Just THINK about it. A stone sinks! How could we be so stupid to think otherwise.
Don’t get off track.
Yes well. Dr. Wool extracts the only, and brilliant, tool necesary. An old dented vertical ramp marketed initially for Domino Rally. And in one swift movement, oh the grace of his work could make anyone taking steroids weep like a bear cub. Through the water, like an extension of his own limbs, the long, zigged, zagged, plastic tube pokes at the suspended stone. A poke. The stone skips. Swissssh. Another poke. The stone skips. Swiiisssssh. Poke. The stone skips. Cheers from the unaware skipping enthusiast, mere metres away. Worlds apart from the truth.
The Awakening
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her— the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight — perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lost itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
-Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 1899
This book was so scandalous upon publication, Chopin, was excommunicated from all her familiar social circles, and shunned publicly— quite viciously it seems according to Gilbert’s introduction. Chopin died three years after he publication of The Awakening. She was 53.
