Where were you when we were getting high?

Nathan and I were discussing poetry today. I was writing my paper for Afterlife and I asked him to read it outloud for me. He asked me if I liked it and I said not really, the jumping in time really messes
me up. He said it was bullshit that I had to write a paper on a poem I didn't like. I got a little upset, although I don't like the format I enjoyed the content of the poem. Nathan said he didn't like angy feminist poetry and that poetry is no place for vagina. It made me really very sad.

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I am wasted. Fat guys hit on me, it pisses me off. I learned "I" statments today. Narthan won't let me drink anymore. I am crashing, literally, whatever the fuck thar means.

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-huff- You suck. Good night.

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Afterlife
I’m older than my father when he turned
bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver

in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain. I don’t

believe in the afterlife, don’t know where he is

now his flesh has finished rotting from his long

bones in the Jewish Cemetery––he could be the only

convert under those rows and rows of headstones.

Once, washing dishes in a narrow kitchen

I heard him whistling behind me. My nape froze.

Nothing like this has happened since. But this morning

we were on a plane to Virginia together. I was 17,

pregnant and scared. Abortion was waiting,

my aunt’s guest bed soaked with blood, my mother

screaming––and he was saying Kids get into trouble––

I’m getting it now: this was forgiveness.

I think if he’d lived he’d have changed and grown

but what would he have made of my flood of words

after he’d said in a low voice as the plane

descended to Richmond in clean daylight

and the stewardess walked between the rows

in her neat skirt and tucked-in blouse

Don’t ever tell this to anyone.

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Tell me what this poem says to you. I get tied up somewhere in the middle.

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Nathan just went home. We had in and out and watched the lakers game in my room. In my little bed we cuddled until we both fell asleep. I felt bad for having to wake him up, but my parents wouldn't have liked it if he spent the night, regardless of what they already know goes on between us.

I am heartbroken, but I don't know how to tell him. He's going to cheat on me. He met a woman last year in Mexico, and he's planning to see her again, I read the facebook messages. I feel bad for having done that.

What does he feel? He spends so much time with me, he now knows my family and is comfortable around them, there's even talk of him possibly moving with me up north when I go to school. So what does he feel?

I want to be the one he feels for and I want to believe that sex is just sex. That somehow he can go away, fool around, and then just come back and save his heart if not his body for me.

He's my best friend, or rather the closest thing I have to one these days. I wish I could tell him everything I am thinking, maybe this is the only safe place for that.

I need your help. I have a poem I don't quite understand, mind giving it a look and telling me what you think?

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We celebrated Edgar’s birthday yesterday. It was a big family affair at a pizza parlor. The guy is turning 27 and we celebrated with pizza, cake, and beer, it was oddly beautiful. Edgar and I ended up playing “bust a move” in the little arcade they had in there. He played a bunch of levels with just one quarter; I must have used at least five dollars worth. It reminded me of when we were growing up…I use to love watching him play Mario Brothers or whatever that game is called. Even if I didn’t get to play, I loved sitting on the bed while he sat on the floor and played. He never liked me playing because he said I cheated. I use to press all the buttons without ever knowing what it would do, so my style of playing was chaotic…and he said that was cheating.

It makes me smile just remembering it all.

I still don’t think Jan is the right girl for him. During the birthday party my brother kept moving around to sit with everyone of his guests for at least a while, not to mention the super bowl was going on too so he kept disappearing outside of the reserved party room to watch the game on the big screen. At one point when he came around to hug Jan I hear her say in the meanest snappiest tone I’ve heard in a long time, “Are you EVER going to sit next to me?” It’s like she just had to make him feel bad on his birthday…she just had to make HIS day about her. It bothers me that this is the woman Edgar plans to marry and have children with. It makes me even sadder to think I may not even be allowed to truly enjoy his children because of her.

I spent most of the night recopying my Italian notes from last semester. Funny that a whole semester could get cut down to just a few pages worth of notes…all the main rules, the stuff I know will be on tests. I am not sure how I ended up with an A in the class…but I did, and I can’t even remember the damn content of it now. I am growing more and more disappointed with the school system. Why was I given an A when I clearly have no grasp of this language?

I haven’t heard from Nate. I want to not care about it but I don’t know how. My feelings are hurt. I know I have no right to be upset about this…I know I a doing the exact same thing he’s doing to me, to two or three other boys…completely ignoring their calls, not being honest that I am not interested but still just making them suffer while they wonder or hope that maybe I am. I am doing this, without meaning to or thinking about it…Maybe I have to fix what I am doing wrong to fix my karma or something.

I miss him a lot.

What bothers me the most is knowing that eventually he will call or e-mail me, and he’ll ask to do something…and I know that I have the choice to either accept that sort of relationship…this friendship we have and spending time with him only when he has time to spare…OR not accepting it and moving on. What do I do? The rational thing is to be patient, to wait until he feels like talking to me…but it hurts, I can’t help but feel…like I am being an idiot.

I just finished doing something that surprised me. I pulled down all the cards that I’ve accumulated since last year. Never before had I received mail, actual, true, hard, mail. Justin was the first to send me something, or so I thought until I went through the barrel of letters my parents collected while they were having their long distance relationship. My father was in the United States and my mother was back in Guatemala, raising me and my brother. My father sent me a letter, which was my first piece of mail. I stole it from my parent’s barrel and have brought it back here. After reading it tonight and realizing that I haven’t received that much mail in my entire life I can’t help but feel a little sad. Justin’s letters, hanging on my little post it board, made me feel good. I only read them once, when I received them, and then I put them up and refused to reopen them.

There’s something about reading words just once and trying to savor them and keep them for as long as you can. Tonight I finally pulled them down and reread them. I couldn’t really get through them…there’s too much doubt now, and a little anger, mostly just self loathing. Would a smarter more realistic person let something like that happen to them? Is what happened really bad at all? I still don’t believe it was. I miss my friend.

Any way, I decided that keeping all these odd little things up. Birthday cards that I got, letters from family members I don’t even remember…everything tiny that made me feel special and loved, I had to get rid of it. I’ve put it all in a box and soon I’ll be closing it and putting it away in my closet. Our family of little stuffed animals, the CD of strange alien sounding music, the ticket stubs for Lakers Games, Jeremy’s chef medal, everything.

I feel live I’ve been lying to myself about the importance I thought I held for these people. I don’t want to be diluted anymore.

Angelina left me a message today, I still don’t know how to react to her, or what to say. It breaks my heart that she’s still trying to talk to me because I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve managed to convince myself so plainly that she threw away our friendship that seeing her try over and over again just makes me feel like a liar. It’s just another thing I don’t want to deal with. So I’ll let this person who I once cared about so much just…suffer, while I try to figure out what it is I want now.

I’ve managed to accumulate two AA degrees without knowing it. I have to get out of City College before I turn into my brother.

For now, nothing more to say.
 

In Guatemala we visited Byron. I was there when they buried him. I remember his wife crying over his coffin and opening it over and over again, as if every “last” look she took of him wasn’t enough. She kissed glass over his face and she tore as much of the lace as she could that was framing the glass. Everything was like a keepsake at that moment. She also was begging him to forgive her; it wasn’t until later that she told me it was because they had been trying to get pregnant. Byron wanted a little boy.

I went with my brother and my little sister this time, about a month after he was buried. I still feel guilty about their deaths. It’s ridiculous, I know, but days before Byron and Douglas were killed I kept wondering what it would feel like to actually lose someone I loved. Instead of just being grateful that I had never been through that sort of thing…I had to sit there and be curious about it.

The way people greave is strange. Byron’s wife stood before the wall where Byron was put to rest. They put him high up, out of reach without a ladder. She was talking to him but I was too far away to hear what she was saying. I was sitting far away. The tears came sort of out of no where. I began to wonder stupid things like, “What’s he look like now? How much of his face has rotted away…or is he still just bloated, filled with gasses…are there bugs in there yet? Are there worms…are they going to die too after there is nothing left to eat?” Edgar, my brother, was like me. He sat far away and cried too, and Alex my sister was somewhere in the middle. I saw Byron’s little girls playing, jumping around, trying not to step on anyone’s grave. When will they start to miss their father? Really miss their father?

The next day we went to visit Douglas. I hadn’t seen where they buried him, but it wasn’t as nice a place as where they put Byron. Byron’s mother refused to burry Byron in the same place as Douglas, which also happened to be the same family plot where his father is buried. I thought that sort of cruel but family feuds and grudges seem to have more control over the hearts of my loved ones than anything else.

We cried there too. I walked away, to see the other graves. It wasn’t anything like where Byron was…There were a few of those wall grave things open, and when I got far enough away I climbed into one of them. I sat there on my back and stared up at the concrete ceiling. I looked at the corners inside of the place where people are meant to lay for the rest of their life. A cockroach ran toward my head and I felt it wiggle between the back of my neck and the floor. I sat up and banged my head and fell right back on my back screaming. When I managed to calm down enough I climbed back out, found blood soaking into m hair from my forehead and realized that no one had heard me. A little disoriented I walked back to the car.

Our body guard (we body guard in Guatemala) saw me and went to buy some water for me to wash my head with. They sell water in little plastic bags, so it’s like little pouches of water. I washed all the blood I could and found that the cut was very tiny. I can’t imagine where so much blood came from. Ramon, the bodyguard, recommended stitches but I’d had my fill of clinics by that point.

I don’t know if it’s easier to write about this so long after it happened. I am waiting for this sadness to become a normal part of the day. Sometimes I don’t even remember about my dead cousins, and my days go by like they would normally. Sometimes I realize I’ve forgotten about them and I feel even worse. It’s scary to think that death can erase someone if you let it.

But it’s happening in more than just this. Why is it easier to forget about the people I care for when I don’t have them anymore? There’s got to be something wrong with that. Something about repressing… It feels cheap admitting there is something wrong with it and not doing anything about it. Sort of like admitting you have a problem but not doing anything about it because you want the attention. I get angry at people like that. I am like that.

I am getting back to that point where the more I see myself, the more I don’t like what I find.

I just looked at my tree for the first time in months. It’s bare. No leafs at all, just this amazing design of thick and thin branches. But not like a normal tree where it’s jagged, straight lines that go straight or curve just a little. No, this tree still looks like it’s caught in the middle of a wind storm, leaning toward the left. Even though its limbs don’t look like limbs at all, I still feel it looks feminine.

It’s just that tree, the wall behind it, and the house behind that. It’s a gray morning; it’s been gray days lately. I like it, but I think the atmosphere has been feeding whatever depression I am feeling right now.

My chest is rattling. I managed to have an asthma attack yesterday, the day before class starts. Rather than go to the ER, my doctor was willing to make a house call. She came in around 1:30 and gave me two shots. One in the hip and one in the arm…there’s no bruise on either but the pain whenever something brushes up against either spot makes me whimper. She also gave me a new inhaler and antibiotics for the infection in my lungs. She said even a little chest congestion is a huge threat to me. While she was doing all of this, I lay there wondering if it would be fair to ever get married. What could I offer a relationship other than weak lungs, and this constant need for medical attention?

If relationships are looked on as a business transaction, I am a liability.

My desire to die young is more powerful than ever.