Ann & Other Things

“But, how will I know? How will I know for sure?”

“You’ll know,” the old man replied. “You’ll know when you’ve had a difficult day — one of those days when the whole world and every living soul in it seemed stacked against you — and you’re tired; not just tired, but exhausted, and empty, and dirty with all the shit you’ve fought through. And, when you see her, she’ll smile, and you’ll feel her smile as a touch — a caress somewhere inside you — and, in that moment, you’ll be healed; washed clean and warmed and comforted without so much as a spoken word, by something so simple and pure as her smile.”

He paused, allowing me to think about what he’d said for a moment, then continued.

“Some people — people who’ve never known love — they would scoff at the thought of getting lost in a smile. But, you’ll know they’re wrong; that it’s possible; that it happens all the time. You’ll know that you can lose yourself in the quiet happiness of her smile as easily as stepping off the edge of the earth. What’s more, you’ll know that you’re not really losing yourself at all — you’re finding yourself. That’s how you’ll know.”

And, as it turns out, he was right.

Whenever anyone talks about cigarettes, they talk about your lungs — two sticky apricot halves, reeking like burned blood and tar, aging quickly under stress. They tell you, stop killing the birds that push your heart into flight, stop strangling your own air supply like your throat is a damn. Then they move on and talk about your heart, the giant fist god pounded inside of you, just the right size to shove your ten-pint blood from your toes to your head. They say, stop poisoning yourself; eat asparagus, eat sweet potatoes, smother your tongue in oatmeal, mason your stomach with whole grains, and for the love of God, put down that cigarette.

Nobody talks about your tongue.  Nobody says that it’ll only miss the roll of smoke for a few weeks. That it’s nothing more than losing a friend you won’t miss, or being homesick, or that your tongue will learn to taste again, that it will sip soft drink through a straw and begin to exhale without shaping a sigh. They do not pay any attention to your teeth. You bite your nails and they hand you sticks of gum. They are surprised at your bleeding cuticles. They do not understand the way you chew grapes and tear at meat. And when your lips are chapped, they do not see your addiction as a pacifier. They suppose maybe you have a cold, you spent the afternoon kissing snowmen or licking pineapples, contracted teenager herpes. And forget about your feet, the swish, the swish, and tap. They do not anticipate your legs becoming their own beasts, the nicotine emancipation, the nervous wild which rushes to the door; when you catch your heels to the floor and hold them there, pull almonds from your pocket, coat your heart and gnash your teeth.

Tell them something they may understand, say, my hands are missing appendages.

She was mute, a year had passed since she cut out her own tongue rather than share her secrets, the ones she swallowed when there was nothing to stop her from breaking because porcelain would fracture at the touch of another’s hand on her skin, covered in deceit staring at the same wall that had been haunting her since childhood imaginations ran wild to find monsters under beds when all she ever had to fear was only two doors down the hall, in tiptoed visits and late night poisoned kisses as her mind drifted with the silence into another room, somewhere safe for her where love wasn’t just a lie that someone told. 

there is nothing more beautiful than having the stillness of your breath being the only sound to count on, it truly is the only constant in our lives. by letting the oxygen pump life in me,  i understand the veins in my wrists are at my mercy. i enjoy, giving this heart a silent beating by repressing all it’s desires and wants.

pretending to plaster that smile across your face, when all you want to do is grab a bottle of wine and chug it until your guts are churning. then charmingly scream “fuck everything”. i feel like a black hole lately. i haven’t turned to the bottle though — which is good. my head is pounding, my heart is raw from the emotional beatings i’ve been giving myself. 

bad things always happen in sequences. it’s never just “oh, hey your cat just died”. your fucking dog has to die too. then, you keep getting lost even with a map of directions to the place you’re going or you lose your favourite Chanel wallet with all your identification, and can’t even go buy a pack of cigarettes because the clerk can’t tell you’re over 19 years old. i am 25, i can strip myself naked and show my battle scars, i wear them like a layer of skin but they swear “you don’t look a day older than 17.”

tragedy and misery follows me wherever i go. it’s like that demon from paranormal activity that goes with the girl no matter where she moves. that’s how misery is for me. i can burn pictures, change my clothes, show my pearly whites to every stranger who looks my way — but with me remains what is haunting me.

bad things happen in sequences — yet somehow i manage to scrape by. that’s how my life has always been — i manage. it’s never, “i got out of it with everything intact” i often need to leave pieces of my spirit behind, the gashes in my soul are invisible. 

This morning I woke up thinking about Bukowski.  It was raining outside and I woke up thinking about Bukowski and I don’t know why, because I haven’t thought about him in a long time.  I used to love him, but that was a long time ago.

I read him the first time when I was twenty and I thought I’d found the one writer I’d been looking for.  My writer, the one who represented me.

But how did Bukowski represent me?  In what ways?  This is what I am thinking about this morning when I wake up and I am making my girlfriend’s breakfast.  I was twenty years old and I liked to drink and Bukowski liked to drink.  I got into a lot of physical altercations in bars and Bukowski claimed to be a great ‘duker’.  My drinking led me to bizarre sexual encounters and Bukowski wrote about these things also.

But that was ten years ago and when I think about Bukowski now, I think I loved him because he made the lifestyle I was living appear acceptable.  If Bukowski lived like this, I can too.  Maybe I thought this, I don’t know, but it’s embarrassing to think I might have.

Maybe I loved other things about him.  Maybe I loved that he wrote about never feeling as though he were part of society and I had always felt on the outside, distanced from the rest of the world.  Or maybe I just loved that he didn’t give up, that he kept writing no matter what and that, in the end, he was successful.

These are just things I am thinking.  I am thinking about how I used to have a framed picture of him on my desk and sometimes I would look at it as I wrote.  Keep going, keep going, he seemed to be saying to me.

***

I am in the shower and I am thinking about Bukowski and now I am also thinking about Raymond Carver.  I started reading Carver before I read Bukowski, but I still read Raymond and I don’t read Charles anymore.

I am thinking that I will always read Raymond Carver and that one of my favourite poems is a poem he wrote about Charles Bukowski.  The story, or at least one version of the story, is that Raymond was teaching at a college and Bukowski was invited to read his poetry and that he made a fool of himself and insulted Carver (who was also drinking heavily at the time).  The poem was Carver’s response to the incident.

The poem is called ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’ and it is a beautiful poem.  Some people have said that Carver has imitated Bukowski’s style as a way of saying ‘anyone can do what you do’.  I am not sure if this is true or not.  Maybe when I die I will run into Raymond and I will have the opportunity to ask him about this poem, but probably I will have other, more pressing, concerns in the afterlife.

***

It is raining outside and I am sitting at my desk and I am watching the rain and I am listening to Richmond Fontaine and I am thinking about why I don’t read Bukowski anymore.  Maybe it is because he represents a time in my life I don’t care for or maybe it is because I sometimes feel that people love him for all the wrong reasons (as I did) and that there are millions of people out there trying to write like Bukowski, but they are not Bukowski, and his style is not as imitable as Carver may have thought (if that was the case).

But probably it is simply that Bukowski wasn’t my writer after all and his words didn’t fit me as I thought they did.  I shed them like dead skin.  I wear other skins now, but I still think about Bukowski from time to time and at odd moments I still think about that old picture I had on my old desk in another home and sometimes I hear him.  Keep going, keep going, he says.

It is a soft voice now, quieter than it used to be, coming from further away.