Clueless Renoirs

Are there ways to shard, confine, carve out space for long life moments in words? I find myself longing for Berlin, the bent over bated breath, the boldness I unleashed, demanded and then payed heavily for, raw if rickety moments that looked at me longingly, those clueless Renoirs, far less beautiful in front of my eyes.

Being lost is no condition, it is a crevice--often the smallest of spaces, cast-iron quicksand or cordial cages, devoured bread paths home, rickety rabbit holes with worn, wooden shells. In the moments, months of falling, I have sought small handles, hard surfaces and bright benchmarks to elevate. What is crushed, shattered, while remarkable is not remakable and now the marked moments, measured and mounted by me alone, are pungent pieces, a whole horror of hollow dust.

Waitressing was my ammunition or distraction, at least one way away. It was no place for floods or flipping, rather a begging for my brightest persona.

Maybe it is Berlin--so swept up in its own transformation, too lost and torn, too trapped and grappling where I see, find myself. Maybe it is the raw, that while wretched, is all that has rung true. I just want to be sure again, of some large step, sweeping life movement not mime.

Brand New Key

One night, nicked by Europeans who refused to hail a cab, shot by swarms of red wine and meat, the bartender spun up the volume on our joint-life soundtrack and I smiled, grinned, heartily laughed out the world.

I am en-gnarled, tangled, tied up in nostalgia-the most forlorn of forgetting, the ghosts of ghosts. For me, this is not rare but even at a restaurant, the blue one, the one on which I banked my wild waitress dreams.

I want to fold into words the less marginalized of memories, sashey of belted Brazilian music melting my ears, the soft freckles across Alice's nose, bent basement kisses, white waists, novel mentionings of moonlight.

It is the astronomist, with his misty eyes, who has kept me sane. The menagerie of futbol fans who have kept me fed. The washed, turquoise curtains that have blocked the burn of suns. Tin and wooden tables that have kept me strong. Broken stairs that have kept me startled--those stairs that laugh and trip, trickled with footsteps home.

When I close my eyes, I can smell granola and cranberries, almost crisp with dawn. I can taste fat slices of steak, melting cheese, crusted bread, cool arugula and whole curtains of coffee, stunning back my brawn. I can hear the assortment of music, soft blues, gypsy kings, feist and other feisty tunes, feel the blow of the fan, a torrid tickle at best.

It is all that I imagined and more, more, more.

The more is the key. The most. Never mild.

I love and hate waitressing, feel fire in my eyes these days. The repetition, monotony, murders my creativity. The cast of characters far superior to sentimental stories, perfectors of plots.

Back to the Days of Christopher Robin

Sure, I am listening to Kenny Loggins, but I cannot deny turning to this song when I am feeling nostalgic or just kind of sad. I know everyone disappoints but days like today, when I feel warm with Cuban food but afraid to slam the door, when I want to crawl into my room as a whisper, unheard, bring me back to those days (not of Christopher Robin, per se, but Polly Pockets and birthday cakes broken above city sewers, my celebration cakes in shards). I guess I should learn (from myself, as well) that we all disappoint, slip up, slip back, recovery is raw and unreal, always tippable. But now I need to be writing my Truman report and I am sitting here, staring at the tear-shaped map of Orient and my barbie-pink nails, feeling so small. I don't want to write, render the past year in pen. I want to tuck myself into bed with my book and my cat.

The song, now that I think about it and place it in the computer, that really brings me back is Disarm. My sister gave it to me my 5th grade Christmas and I loved this song as I had never before loved a lyric and its melody, those Siamese twins themselves. The Album was called Siamese Twins and there was a floating baby on its cover, soft and smiley.

I shouldn't be complaining but this is my rawest point: a point that reminds me of sledding escapes, so much snow, but mostly broken cakes and broken paint. I wish my sister was here or that I could call Julie, but it is much too late.

Mostly I am lucky, I know, and I cannot wait for my Harry Potter school, and seeing my sister's belly before birth, breathing, full with life.

Breathe Me

On the magazine cover left on table 4, there is a bikini clad woman made out of carrots, all shards, all pieces. The man next door sits on the corner table outside, clad in plaid (per usual), rejoicing in the bark of his Dalmation, exchanging flan and flogging with his true New York speech. We shuffle back and forth, having lost all curiosity but still true to the art. The nights end prematurely, Europeans declining the signs that the restaurant has laid its head to rest. With mint tea and cappucinos, bendable bikes, they charge into the night, soft vocals that not only penetrate but disquiet my memory. At 11, my coworkers are dancing, 1980s song steaming the radio, their aprons around their ankles, fat with exhaustion and the exhaust of the streets. The chefs are drinking coca-colas on the street corner. And I, with my guarana and this strange magazine of edible women, am trying not to close my eyes, trying not to exit the euphoria of sitting, waiting, sipping, Breathe Me playing in the background of this small world. I am happy in these moments, though tired--warm inside,.

Berlin is what draws me out, encouraged by conversations, the music, the men seated under our silocone sky. I am lost in the overwhelming emotions I had there--even the thought of them quicken my heart. What love.

The cafe, civil and stern below my apartment; the grand garden where I witnessed the reign of the old east; the familiar ride to work, the small French crossoints prepared by a small, French lady; Spanish cinema; devlish department store bakeries; crusty rolls; quick steps; sleepless nights; virtuality; broken plants, unpotted, uprooted by my toes; sheep rugs; raw sunrise wrecking the path to Prague.

This is the most vivid, heart-wrenching and yet beautiful of my memories. There was nothing, nothing but a pure, if purposeless feeling. I fell victim to my own lake of yearning, wall-less, swordless--no way to protect the very heart of it all.

I am not lost today, as I was then. Do not attempt to lose myself in urbanity, forgetting or fretting or fawning independence. This city, just as Berlin, has a way of bringing me back, swinging me (with real possibility of falling) into a past, fat as our ankles at midnight, of both goblins and grace.

There are women at the restaurant dressed all in green, or tickled in turquioise gems that match the walls. A middle aged woman with a cat-eye shirt, where the two green gawkers cover her nipples. Between iced lattes and other simple concoctions, I manage to shrug of exhaustion, manage to beat back my thoughts. Now this is the most honest of love-hate relationships of my life: this cool. cubed restaurant and I, full of friends and temptation, pallatal sensation and severe windows, misshaped and sharded, into the lives of others.

Which brings me back to Berlin. Bent subway tracks and three-legged dogs. Symphonies and Turkish restaurants, leafy tea. That belly of history, pushed to the forfront, frantic if full in monument. Stalinist homes side by side with the small, quaint canal abodes. How I could have been home there, if only I could have quieted the lake inside, a pool of underwater creatures that have no name.

If I could go anywhere in the world, it would be Berlin, both a reality and a memory of heat and longing, hurt, regret, love. Because, if I could breathe, unveil, re-create the most essential me, she would be intensely sensitive, touched by each moment to laughter or tears, slayer of iciness, acutely responsive to the racket inside, and unable to say goodbye. Uninhibited if not refined. Cognizant of bird songs, broken day breaks, hollowed hearts. Inescapably empathetic, perhaps, but always present, always home.

No Room for Angels Here

The big apple is bitten open in the hottest months, forgotten by the city’s young and rejected by the richest of mice, rats and men. The galas, the garden parties, the select instances that make up for no real pleasure in the sun are something expected: events, eventual(s) that fill up kitchen-wall calendars and the hand-held horrors that have replaced real life. Instances, as a young middle-class New Yorker are my own: I bloody my hands on their small pleasures, soft purrs un-kitten-like in my throat.

The first I attend, at the hand of my father’s strange connections, is a celebration of life of a man hatful and hated, a small cocktail party with fat shrimp and glasses slippery with champagne. Performing my waitress skills, I slip my fingers out from under the glass bodices, practicing roulette on their round bottoms, crystal and crystalline as the too-blue pool where I learned to float. The men are older, of course, than their companions, an aggrieved given, their golden statues far less than lovely. Their women are pulled tight not only in outfits, but also in the skin that once crowded their eyes: the most empty of crows faces, on simple stilts as wonderful as pressed, dried, flower stems, shorted worth. I search for other empty stares, avoiding companion and am approached by a fat, too stout woman with the bluest of eyes. Her husband follows, wrinkled, wrought with age, his ears curled at the bottoms like subpar conch shells (pulsing, pink, a sea inside), his face a polka canvas invented by sun. He is filled with stories that light him, only slightly, like a quarter moon, and leave me agitated, breathless, burnt by this undead man.

“I hear you are a traveler,” he says, meeting my eyes with his own. “I too like to travel. My first honeymoon, with my first wife was in Mayorca. As circumstance had it, I ended up with another woman and was making my way back to the hotel one night. I never realized the truth alive in the New York statement, the city that never sleeps. Everything was closed, even the front of my hotel, sleeping. So I thought I would make my way down to where our suite was—on the bottom of a mountain-side—slipping into the room to find my wife. But, I realized on the way down, just how steep it was, and found myself understanding that if I didn’t jump, falling would rip out my insides. So I took the plunge and ended up at the bottom, passed out, with broken teeth. Somehow, I managed to drag myself to the hotel, where I passed out again. Luckily, there was a hotel doctor.”

Maybe my eyes do not do justice to my thoughts. At that moment, lacking an understanding for his story’s point, thoroughly disgusted at this uncertain creature, I find myself fixated again on the champagne, small bubbles that resemble a child’s bated, underwater breath, small moments of life at effort to escape glass and the gummy smiles of the wealthy. His wife takes his hand, holding tight to the disappointing child inside of him, as I balance a cup on my thumb almost hoping for a shattering, at, on, within this man. Thinking of him toothless makes me smile wide, a man gurgling cherry red at the bottom of a mountain that taught him his time is torrid, soft storms always await.

The second I attend is milder but more beautiful. It is situated in the Pierre, atop a winding staircase that serves Upper Class weddings and debutant balls. There is no room for angels here. The men and women, simple, single, slighted by each other, suck soft water from tall wine glasses, like wide-mouthed bass afraid of a drowning. Amazing Grace is sung from these gurgling throats in a church-choir unison and again, the men resemble babes, bald, broken, tears spilling down their faces in giant, dramatic outpours, united mourning. They are celebrating recovery, but not recovered. They are celebrating over-coming mountains far taller than Mayorcan cliffs, finding the right footing or being forced into treatment centers with literally nutty names (such as Hazelton, the cool companion of even famous singers and their yelping young). They speak of “group” as an inside story, the certain circles where they beat out their demons, embracing drought. They are engaged only in an awesome overcoming, aided but never aged, ogled and ornate in their costume both inside and out.

These are the people who have crossed over, not in the Ghost Whisperer sense of touching death, not by seeing lights, blurred at night or true at sunrise. These are people who have hit rock bottom at best, belleyed hell.

Molasses Past

What of my tangerine ties? My memorabilia built like leggos in my mind. My molasses past, thick as quick sand, civily stormy at best. I look at the orange seats on the subway, fold my legs underneath in a reassurance of youth, tuck my notebook under my arm and allow the stale air to bring me back, sever the now, sidle along a present that I refuted, refused and another present, both empty and bold (a bitten cafe au lait, sucking back at the wind).

Sometimes, I allow myself to go back, though it will later ache, I let loose the reigns on my thoughts, galloping towards warm snow, hollow hotels, strawberries and cream, empty cans, framed photographs, choreographed dances, dirt roads. The roads have been paved, I am told, the brick house painted a lime green (what does green mean? life, again, perhaps, or the semi-sweet of mint, the bittersweet of survivil). Sometimes, I allow myself to wallow in a world that is no longer my own, to drag my feet through that molasses past, what will always be a warmer place.

But warmth, in all of its glory, could not provide the steam, the heat. It was comfortable, rather than thrilling, constant rather than a scalding cold. Is it wrong to miss so fiercely? Sometimes, some days, some moments, I feel like I am violating, I am betraying if only in my scattered mind. But my loyalties, split apart, severed, siamese at best, question mark these thoughts. I am told by a friend, when curled around my pillow, that I myself look like a question mark: I am following the form of my heart.

Waitressing is wearing me out. I want to begin the next stage of my life, release myself from this in-between where I cuddle with my past, wonder at my present, wish on everything (not just stars but also street signs, full moons and red wine, fleshy arms, flashing storms). I am looking for the dawn. My dawn. Doe-eyed, distant, gated.