Tell My Heart to Wait it Out

I’m hurting, aching, burning, yearning and crying out for something. I am a yin without a yang, a hole that needs a patch, music lacking melody, an amputee. These days I am a hollow, scooped out melon, heavy and yet empty, looking normal on the outside while desire resounds inside. It’s not so much sadness as a subterranean, weary discontent. I’m exhausted by all the wanting and not getting, the struggling to be satisfied with what I have but knowing that I’m not complete. Sometimes it’s nice to be lulled into thinking that the odds must be with me, that bad things can only happen for so long. That is wrong. That is a naïve remnant from childhood, the belief in the inevitably of your dreams if you beg enough. This stubborn hope, romanticized as it is, hurts us more than the despair ever could because it makes acceptance impossible. I have learned that no amount of wanting will make anything happen. Letting go makes things happen, but of course the irony then is that you only get what you need once you feel you don’t need it anymore. Kind of like manna falling from heaven after you’ve starved to death. There are indeed two kinds of waiting: the patient, voluntary sort and the type that bristles under the oppression of time. I am always at the mercy of the latter. I have no choice but to endure, to continue wishing and hoping and thinking and praying.

Letting Her Hair Down

This is from a character sketch I wrote for my journalism class:

“Aw hell, we'll give you reality,” promises Laura Fortune-Wanamaker, “Artistic Hair Designer and Cosmetologist” according to her business card. Laura is a walking paradox: a raucous wild child who goes on motorcycle runs down the coast and drunkenly dances with paraplegics, and a single mother who spent five grueling years in Milwaukee training to become a stylist.
Laura’s room is at the back of Strandz Salon, next door to G & L salon, in a shoddy plaza with cracked adobe walls, turquoise awnings and a dinky fountain. She shares her room with Nicole, a small girl riddled with tattoos and sporting a rockabilly ’do. The black mats, mirror frames, chairs, tiles and fan are brightened by a pink blow dryer, family photos and a leopard print broom against the wall. Light filters in through a dirty, cracked skylight and a long window looking out on the street.
It’s ten A.M. and Laura’s waiting for her first client. She sits in the chair, sips a cheap coffee, fiddles with her cell phone and peeks out the window. In her mid-thirties, Laura is youthful but not hip. She’s slightly pudgy, dressed in all black with an unfashionable haircut. Her contagious energy though, apparent in her boisterous voice and colorful stories, is what people remember about her. When she spies Jasmine, a twenty-something blond, she rushes out to the reception desk.
“Hey girl!” Laura cries. “How you doin?” Jasmine is seated and offered coffee, water, a magazine, even tequila (with a wink), all declined.
“You’re the one with the Virgo birthday, right?” Laura asks, feeling Jasmine’s hair.
“No, Sagittarius,” Jasmine answers.
“Are you dating now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re all, ‘Stop asking me questions!’” Laura says grinning.
Comfortable silence ensues as Laura comes in and out of the room, concocting Jasmine’s new chocolate hue. She snaps on black gloves and starts applying the color. As the opening notes of “Step by Step” by New Kids on the Block waft through the room, Laura starts dancing and Jasmine brightens.
“O my god, this takes me back!”
“The eighties were a rough time for me,” Laura says. “O wait, this was the nineties, huh.”
The conversation wanders from boy bands to Hugh Hefner to the inexplicable motherlessness of Disney heroines. Laura weaves yarns about her phone’s tragic demise by minivan despite her heroic efforts, a stranger she greeted in Vegas who threatened to slit her throat and the time she once befriended a homeless surfer and tried to fix him up with her mother. Finally they discuss men. Laura’s giddy about her new fiancé, Harley, a biker she met six months ago.
“I don’t like pretty guys, I like manly men,” she says. “If he’s looking at himself more than me, if he’s using my damn hair flattener, there’s gonna be a problem.” When asked about her ideal guy, she pauses a minute and admits her attraction to Handy Manny, a character from one of her two-year-old son’s favorite shows.
“What does that say about me?” she muses.
“At least he’s nice. I mean he talks to his tools, but hey,” teases Jasmine.
Laura deftly paints in highlights, makes sure the color is even and goes to rinse out the dye. She selects a lavender mint shampoo and her strong hands go to work massaging Jasmine’s scalp. Laura wants to include hand and scalp massages as one of her services. “That’s what people appreciate, the above and beyond,” she says. “Time is money, but I’d rather give each client their time.”
Next is the haircut. “We’re going from a graduated bob, right? But you want to grow it out to here?” Laura frowns in concentration, mouth slightly open as she measures, calculates, snips and arranges. She periodically stops to clarify Jasmine’s wishes and explain what she’s doing.
Laura’s expertise was borne from five lonely winters in Wisconsin. She endured forty hour work weeks on top of technical training, begging people on the street to be her models and suffering under a crazy teacher who would throw combs across the room and scream “this isn’t rocket science dammit!” But she accepts it as part of the process. “You have to hustle in this business” she maintains, “or you end up working at Fantastic Sams.”
Jasmine’s hair is done at one o’clock. The total is one hundred and twenty dollars, but she doesn’t have cash or a check. Laura lets her drive to the ATM down the street to retrieve the money.
“I have a pretty kickback job,” she admits. “Have you heard the riddle about the good hairstylist?”
She lays down the premise: there are two hairdressers. One has spectacular hair, but the other looks atrocious. Who do you choose to do your own hair?
“The one with the bad hair, of course,” Laura says, “because she did the other one’s hair! Or something like that.” She laughs.
“I’m a bad story teller,” Laura claims, settling back into her chair, “but I have fun. And I do damn good hair.”

Damn

I want to have someone to come home to, even though I don’t really have a home at the moment. I want someone to miss me every second. I want someone to make cds for, someone to write silly little notes and long, heart-felt letters for. I want someone to waltz with spontaneously under streetlights, someone to sing with, someone to have random adventures with. I want someone to exchange fun little gifts with, someone to take silly pictures with, someone to hold me when I’m happy and when I’m sad. I want someone who will notice how I look and love each tiny, quirky thing I do, even the annoying ones. I want someone to know me inside and out. I want someone who can’t help but kiss me and want to spend forever with me. I want someone who will argue stupid arguments with me, get mad, and then just forget about it. I want someone who is just as hopelessly romantic as me. I want someone who’ll decorate my room for my birthday and Christmas and sometimes on a random Friday in August just because. I want someone who will make me terribly content, someone who would follow me anywhere, someone who would lasso me the moon. I want someone who isn’t afraid to admit he needs me sometimes, who patiently and intently listens to the fragmented stories that only make sense in my head. I want someone to be there when I’m hurting and can’t explain, someone to tuck my hair behind my ears and whisper comforting things and then make me laugh. I want someone who is just as excited about the future as I am, who wants babies and a house and things all our own, who vows to never ever let life together get tedious or routine, who will grow old and stinky and forgetful with me and love (almost) every minute of it.



I want messy, glorious, imperfect, unconditional love.

The Beach at Twilight

First there's the smell. Usually it’s a pleasant earthy odor, like salt and wind and fish, but sometimes at the zenith of lowtide it stinks of stranded seaweed and sewage. Next the textures of the beach catch my eye: dimpled, restless surf against the glassy sheen left by the retreating water; powdery sand and hard packed sand and wet slimy sand; rocks; foam. Babyprints, manprints, flipperprints, pawprints, webbed feet prints, tire treads and random lines make patterns in the sand. Valentines (Yo amo mi amor, R+L=Love 4ever) and other sentiments are etched in time. Sand pipers tread fretfully along the tide, gulls sit puffy and imperious on the rocks or mini sand cliffs, and gulls dive bomb the waves and bob alongside surfers. I pass houses of every color and architecture, my favorite being a little yellow house, humble and sunny amidst the affected mansions. As the sun descends, it turns from white to yellow to orange and swells, reflected like honey in window panes and waves. After melting into the sea, the sun imbues the landscape with its own luminosity. The whole sky aches with subtle light as the earth turns dark. Eventually the light dies and streetlights, stars and airplanes emerge. The water echoes the light, mutating from fire to ash to diamonds as the moon rises.

Epic Fail

        So I let you all down. All zero of you. I apologize and I hope you can forgive me for my month-plus absence.
       Anyway.
       I am irked that I can't copy and paste entries from my old blog onto here so you could experience my literary excellence in the circumstance where I actually have something lofty and well-written to post. Also, so it will seem like I am always writing when in fact I am lazily composing something every other day or so. I will figure it out.
      So I started school approximately 3 weeks ago. My pad rocks. I live at the beach for free and that is possibly the most amazing thing ever. People are very jealous. And yet my friends have yet to take advantage of my good fortune. Parties will ensue. Someday.
     Classes are good. I like my teachers and what they're teaching, which is rare. My Lit J teacher is like Al Pacino mixed with Robert Downey Jr. He's street smart and smarmy and I thought he would hate my writing but hasn't yet. Promising. Linguistics is covering Phonetics/Phonology, my favorites, and the teacher is Italian and lets us take tests open note and book. Awesome. And last but not least, my Social Science class is about political science and psychology and our lecturers are smart ass old dudes who make tasteful sex jokes.
    Gonna be the best quarter. Ever.
    And did I mention I'm in a Harry Potter club? We're having a Yule Ball in December.
    I am so excited.