Certainty

The house was shining with the bright light of a brand new day. The cream colored curtains floated like sails beneath the golden light of the incoming sun and yet the room was ringing with crisp cold air. The thick Persian rugs did little to deflect the chill of polished wooden floors and pale-green walls. A TV was on. A young girl sat on an overstuffed couch, absorbing the sounds of barnyard cartoon characters while she slowly ate her breakfast of fried rice and a single peeled banana.

“What!!??”

I looked at the girl on the couch. I saw her little white hands with palms facing upwards, the same way my grandmother held her hands when she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her young body was already formed and aged, all in secret. It had acquired the same basic shape it would have years from now, when this would all be a memory to be replicated and reorganized.
The world of her parents, the clear delineation between right and wrong, black and white, it all lived in her young face. She already thought she knew it all. The world had already been clearly defined and she already knew her place within it.

“How can they say that??!!”
She suddenly looked at me with a smile of disbelief on her face, with a shade of mockery. She shouldn't have looked at me. She wasn't supposed to. I was the one doing the looking.

I used to know it all. I used to know it all before I lost my certainty.

I want to use the word hollow.

I see a female standing at the edge of cliff while fluttering bats shake the night through her hair. I feel the coldness of the house, the artificial sounds of the TV…something is strange.
It is my perception. It is me standing at the side of the slate rock cliff. It is me looking down at the collection of me that is the bottom.
I am the little girl. I am the woman at the edge of the cliff.
The thing that I fear, the thing that keeps me staring in wide-mouthed awe is the subconscious motivations I have just glimpsed. It is that, pulling back the blankets, opening the eyelids and discovering a naked creature that moves without thought, that moves as though pulled by levers and strings.

This moment of discovery is truly shocking, like a zap to the core that laughs in my face as I discover the true intentions behind my own behavior. The behavior I have spent a lifetime justifying, spinning webs and circles around it with my mouth.

It’s not that I lied. A lie requires some sort of consciousness. This is beyond a lie. These are the lies that I believe as truth. The things I call ideas, philosophies, thoughts, life choices. These are the things I call “me.” And I both want to laugh and cry as I look into the abyss of my machine and glimpse the habit behind the impulse.

A girl so young and already she knows everything. She lies that she knows. I know now that she lies.

We all sat in an artificially warmed room. From the shifting light of a glowing electronic box, we watched others like us self-destruct. Through this new form of entertainment, through the captured pain of another girl who walked and talked like Jennifer Lopez in a movie wrought with conflicting personalities and alcohol… through this, I saw myself.

“I started cutting myself when I was thirteen,” the girl admitted to the video camera. “That’s why I like tattoos, it’s a way of doing it without anyone knowing.”

A couple seconds of silence. The sort of time that stops and quiets down even a large TV and two speakers. There was something, something moving, shifting on the currents of artificial warm air, moving through the layers of my body and the soft fabric of the chamber. I felt my body, laying curled up between two pillows. I felt myself still, hardly breathing. A couple minutes before, I had just admitted that I had thought about cutting myself.

I remembered laying in bed, in a heap of hysteria. I had imagined myself walking to the bathroom. Parallel to that vision, I had the thought that perhaps cutting myself would feel good.
That night I didn’t get up, I didn’t walk into the bathroom, I drifted to sleep under a cloud of sadness and awoke nine hours later with anxiety ridden dreams grasping at my heels.

As we watched this girl on TV, I remembered that I had thought about it too. I had never done it, but I had thought about it. Now, as she admitted that her tattoos were part of the same habit, another manifestation of the same impulse, I realized that I too had a body covered in blue and green ink.
The show was paused.

“Did she just say something about you?” I heard my friend ask.

Another second held still in the well of time.
I could think of at least three tattoos that were spawned from a feeling of anxiety that rattled inside me like a soot covered wind I could not shake.
The time my old boyfriend was in jail and I was lonely and scared and felt like the entire world was just too strong and corrupt. That brought the lute-playing mermaid tattooed to my belly.
There was the unfinished doodle on my inner left ankle. It was me, that night alone in my apartment, while my boyfriend went out to score some heroin, me that had picked up the tattoo gun on the coffee table and plunged the needle into my own white flesh. I picked it up out of terror, terror he would not come back, terror that he would. That dark night, I was overwhelmed with his burden and disease, his recurrent need for money that weighed on my young shoulders.
The word “warrior” on my left thigh, the permanent black letters that appeared only a few hours after discovering that another girl was visiting my boyfriend in jail, another layer of his lies revealed. I drove straight to a tattoo shop singing and crying.
The tattoo artist looked up from his hunched position over my leg and asked me “what’s up with this word?” The explanation was crooked and an attempt at ego preservation, a self conscious attempt to hide my own addictive fixation on one diseased person. The man nodded while looking straight through my eyes, sensing the pain that my facial lines and puffy eyes had already outed. Maybe he was already used to this, maybe he had seen it a thousand times, maybe he could have told me so much, maybe I could have heard him. But he didn't say anything. Instead, he nodded and kept working.
That night, as I walked through Bookshop Santa Cruz with a bandaged leg that stung with every step, I held my head higher and noticed that people seemed to be looking at me differently, as though they could see that the orgasmic pain had lifted a dark cloud.

I had painted large artistic circles around the reasons for a body covered in mermaids and foliage, explanations to justify the act, lies to hide the utter lack of certainty.

Now I had glimpsed the energetic contortion, the habit and reaction I could no longer hide. And now here it was, explained in raw simplicity by a brown-skinned girl that still had a mark on her arm and streaks of tears across her cheeks.

The house seemed strange around me, but it was me, not the dwelling that reeked of strangeness. This raw truth, this evidence had opened before me like a gutted pig. How strange to be fooled by myself. How strange to talk and ruminate and make complicated explanations for a behavior that went deeper than skin, deeper than bone, deeper than the existence of this machine.

I am ruled by these habits, these things that I cannot even see. The nature of lies goes so deep that I can't touch it, I can't wrap my fingers around its shape. The nature of self delusion goes even deeper. We have pulled a small layer back and looked inside, a small bit of the subconscious is revealed, naked in the light of day. It is shocking to get a glimpse. So shocking to realize the extent of circular lies and grand explanations.

I see a girl dancing. There are two walls made of bricks. They are miles apart, but they are so tall that their sheer height makes them always known. The pretty girl is in the field, among the gently sloping grass of yellow and green. Her skirt of layered gray chiffon moves like clouds tethered to her waist. She moves around trees and skips over sleeping foxes. She can't know anything. There is nothing to be known.

“How can they say that??!!”

I just shrugged my shoulders and she looked away. She knew too much for me to say anything. She knew too much to wonder who I was or why I was there.

Looking Into The Nameless

I knew then, through whispers and side-glances, as I know now, that I am different. That the compulsion to jump from fences stirred me even then, and I would run from the sofa, through a house full of cool tile, to the lush garden that awaited with green arms and promises I could never describe. And I would leap, throwing my body into trust I hadn’t the name for, into chambers I had yet to recognize. And I would land, spinning, on my head, smiling with the impact, alive with the hurt and dizzying reality of matter, and something else, something I have yet to place in a box and seal with a kiss.
I have used thousands of words, I have run around it in circles and created colorful stories that hint at its splendor, but I refuse to stare at it directly. I refuse to look it right in the eye and mark it forever with letters and obvious description. It is respect, colored by the sheer knowledge that I know nothing, that any word would fall a thousand miles short and cause bruising that could never heal. I have seen it spinning in blackness. I have poked the edges with a sharp stick and my prying mind and curious eyes that seek the details of all forms.
There is flesh, round and soft with pointed ends. There is darkness lit only by stars and the dreams of the dreaming. And I have walked through the tunnels of my mind and I have taken ships that led me to forgotten caves painted with orange and red.
I have looked, with my head bowed, and my body calm as a steady sea. I have looked. Into mirrors, into eyes that seem to look back with the same curious stare, my eyes, brown and almond shaped, alive with flecks of green I might soon forget.
It is all there, and as I know now, as I knew then, that this is different. Leaping from fences and rooftops, scouring the inner caves of ink and stinking rot, this is different. And I pull on thick boots and walk with my head bent, my arms open for others that might come running naked from the mouths of other caves.
And if they do, we will walk, through tunnels of brown and sooty black, and we will walk, through tunnels I have yet to touch and refuse to name.

Mirrors

There are a thousand mirrors in all directions. The sound of the chainsaw on the hill. The neighbors that can only be heard when bickering for the remote. The birds which compete for scraps of bread. And maybe when I look I can’t see the contour of my face or the glint in my eye, but as I hear that bird chirping like a metronome at 5 in the morning, as I see school children running to the white ice cream truck, the mirror reflects more than the skin. Deeper even than the body, reflected back are the habits I carry from form to form. Quick moving bursts of energy that move in cyclical patterns, shapes that are hard to grasp, but I see their trail. Fallen timber, cyclones of anger, streams of tears. If I look, I can see the path of each invisible impulse, like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber.
Two little girls mirror us so closely I can almost hear their mocking laugher. But they do not know that their shadows stand before them, their selves in twenty years. They cannot step out of the sphere that coats them like a bubble. Only while my skin sticks with the iridescent film of a broken orb can I see my mini reflection. Wrapped in pink clothes and shrill voices. Covered in silky hair and tall-tales. They are sisters on the teeter-totter. If one is happy, the other is sad. A well-meaning present for one means the jealousy of the other. We are older, yet we act just the same, the teeter-totter of emotion that bings and bangs, never achieving a moment of balance. Never riding the hot air balloon together. One of us always chooses to stay on the ground, looking up with tears in her eyes as the balloon takes flight. I look at the little girls, I look at them with objective eyes, clear and unclouded by the spheres of emotion that usually whirl around me like a dust storm. On this sunny afternoon, one little girl is happy, she’s going to the library. The other is hiding somewhere, crumpled in a corner, upset that she’s staying home. They match our black and white, our need to balance in extremes. They mirror our inability to move and think and remember beyond the present moment.
Like dogs, we are two little girls with the bodies of women, two little girls with the maturity of children. I may be able to drive and feed and clothe myself, I might look like any other full-grown human with breasts and hips and painted lips, but I have stayed so small, still completely trapped in the most base of concerns, my web of identification that shifts from one action to the next, from one stimulus to the other. We fight like them, we compete like them. One moment of attention is never enough. They compete for wrapping paper, they compete for food and treats, they compete for attention and praise. They are living mirrors. And as I watch them, they seem so silly, so machine-like in their competition and negative balancing. But in this body, I lose any sense of objectivity. It is my own pain which I feel, my own sense of exclusion, my own need for praise and attention that seems to constantly be stifled by the sister in front of me. How can I keep the mirror propped up? How can I remember to look when it seems so easy to just keep my eyes closed. If I can see it over and over, if I see the reflection staring back at me with wide eyes and shock, maybe I’ll have a chance at remembering the teeter-totter I ride.

A Glimpse of a Stranger

I had just turned the corner, leaving the humid bathroom to billow steam in my wake, and I took another few steps, passing the short wall between the bedroom and kitchen. It was there, on the paneled gray wall of my bedroom, that I first glimpsed the stranger. She was naked and glistening, as through a towel had not fulfilled its duty. Small beads of water clung to the ends of her curling brown hair, they stayed on the tips, threatening to drop, threatening a free fall at any minute and a plunge to the linoleum below, but they never seemed to release their hold. In the long rectangular mirror that affixed itself to the wall like an open window to another realm, I saw a stranger.
I had almost missed her, I had passed by quickly, barely making eye contact, but in those brief, almost incalculable moments, I witnessed a stranger in my home, and I returned to the window. They were eyes I have never seen. Droopy and slightly sad…how long had she been crying? After a momentary glance, I almost remembered a girl like this, where had I seen her? Was it the same skinny, long face? No, it couldn’t be, this one’s much more pale. Isn’t this the girl with a collection of eccentric clothes that spill from her closet like oozing rainbows? No, it can’t be, this girl is too thin, the clothes would hang from her like unkempt rags on a maypole. Maybe it’s the same girl that lives in a converted garage, in the small space that has turned a Korean family into landlords. Maybe she listens to the sounds above, to the ever-present noises of their life…to their booming TV, always in the midst of an action film, to their garage door opening as someone backs the minivan down the driveway, leaving to purchase more of life’s material essentials. Is it her?
If I stretch my mind like an unbaked pretzel, I can almost remember a time when we might have been friends, perhaps even shared the same warm bed and soft lover. But his person… there is nothing familiar in her almond shaped eyes. Her pale lips are nearly invisible among the angles of her face...she looks so sad. Has she always been like this?
Is this stranger always at my side? Driving with me to the supermarket on dark, cloud-filled nights, grabbing a fistful of Kleenex while tears escape like convicts in a jailbreak or laughing with me after a long session of love making…am I this stranger? She is in my home, but could this, in fact, be her home? Who is the stranger? Who is the one thinking? Which one of us is writing? Which one of us is gazing at the stranger…her or me? Could we be the same?
I have her dreams and curse her parents. I know the names of her long-lost friends that never call, memories of working at Baskin Robbins and laughing at a coworker who collected calculators. Why do I think I know this person? I share her memories, but, who is she? Her eyes are slightly wide in alarm, her face betrays her fear. Is she dead, or struggling within a rock? A rock that has all the illusions of life, a life submerged in hard soil and buried beneath a condo complex, but yet, she can look out her window and see rain.
The stranger grabs a lipstick from the bathroom, she puts a thick coating on her lips. She rubs a little pink blush on her face, like an out of focus image whose lines begin to merge into shapes, the stranger begins to fade. Now, she is a little more familiar. But is the stranger gone? Or just buried a little deeper in the soil? Another mask hides the inconvenient truth, another masks hides the pain of reality. Do you want to accept the illusion or face the fact?
You are an illusion. I AM an illusion. I am a stranger. You are a stranger. I coat it with makeup and clothes, with stories and memories and hopes and desires, but I am living within the body of a stranger. Shall I become a part of the circus, forgetting my character, forgetting that I am confined within a rock that keeps a thousand chains around my neck, holding my heart captive? And yet, I think I can drive anywhere. I think the ability to take a plane ride makes me free.
The lipstick is another layer of delusion, a way to comfort the discomfort when confronted by the stranger. A stranger that leaks out of every pore, every open hole, every fleck of brown within the iris. You can see it. That stranger is here, now. Right in front, naked and tattooed, a skeleton with breasts that moves as the earth turns, every second, but does not feel a thing. She does not feel it all shifting, she does not know that it all stays the same. She knows nothing, and she stares at herself, wide eyed and scared.

An Image with No Fault

The small round table was set with a red table cloth and mismatched pink and tan place mats. There were two white plates of food upon them, cooling hotdogs oozing with mustard and crumpled napkins on the side. Sitting across from each other and bathed in the stinging white light of afternoon, they began their meal in an intimate silence. As he took a sip of his chocolate drink, he asked her,
"Did you bring the lesson notes for today?"
"Ah, no," she replied, looking out the window and vaguely noticing the cars passing by on the wide street outside.
"Why not?" he asked in confused surprise, his usually smooth face wrinkling.
Avoiding his eyes, she said, "ah, I only had a couple minutes to get dressed, and I wasn’t even sure if I would need them…and I didn’t want to carry them around with me all day and…I don’t even know which lessons you’re talking about…"
Stopping her words with a raised hand and a sharper tone, he said, "yes, you do…and you knew we would need them today."
"no, I don’t know which lessons you really mean and some of them are in the computer and I have that with me but I have only been practicing the other lessons for a little while and I wasn’t sure if we would need them because you didn’t tell me to practice them until a couple weeks ago and…."
Tears began streaming down her pale white cheeks. She looked out the window, afraid to speak, afraid to look at him and make the moment worse with her confused and defensive words. Maybe they wouldn’t even have a lesson now, she worried.
"Why didn’t you bring them?" he asked again, in a tone slightly louder than normal but that was still calm. A hint of a smile teased at the corners of his lips and a glimmer of mischievous glitter played in his eyes.
There were tears reddening her eyes and she had a crumpled wet tissue buried in her hand, she said, "I forgot them." Loudly, clearly and looking right at him.
"okay… why didn’t you just say that?" He looked relieved.
Stumped, she said quietly, "I thought I did."
"No," he said laughing, "you said everything but that."
And she saw that she had. She had walked out the door of her small studio in the early afternoon slightly angry and impatient, wondering how she could possibly complete her task within an hour. She had not thought ahead and remembered she needed her lesson notes for later in the evening. She had forgot them. It was simple and true. She had been occupied on half a dozen competing thoughts and shallow emotions and had forgotten the notes.
But admitting this, admitting clearly that it was she who had messed up, she who had forgotten, was admitting that she had been wrong. And to acknowledge this, this simple fact, was to go against a strong current that ran the length of her. To her machine, she is a flawless self, a golden ego which is free from fault and guilt.
When something goes wrong, it happens because of an external situation; it had nothing to do with her carelessness or inattention or unexposed anger. No, it comes from beyond her flesh. It comes towards her, from people, circumstance, words, society…it all comes towards her and it is them that cause her struggle. Problems come from the outside to her, not the other way around. In her carefully crafted image, her forgotten lessons notes arose from hastily given instructions and limited time and unclear plans and difficult requests. Her bouts of depression and anger arise because of unfair circumstances and harsh tones and the harsh ways of the world. Her life would be smooth and lovely, if it were not for those others who work against her and hate her and keep her sad. This idea of a flawless vessel keeps her protected. It is insulation against the strong currents beyond her control, it is the barrier between the reality of her actions and the truth of their consequences.
The faults of others are so easy to see. Watching any reality TV show, the habits of each character are easily identifiable: the man who always wants to win strength challenges and brags with aggressive confidence to the camera, yet each week, time and again, he is the first to lose momentum and give up. And as easy as it is to see the flaws of those around us, from the person across the dinner table and the grocery clerk who never says hello, it is just as hard to see the weaknesses and flaws hiding within oneself. The images are thin as glass, lacking any substance or true emotion, but it is strong as any metal and more than that, it is even harder to shatter because we protect ourselves from its destruction. To destroy it, to expose it as a flawed image is destroy ourselves, what we fervently believe to be ourselves. Our ego, our sense of self, our identity, our IMAGE is really all we know, and we cling to it, like a drowning man to a floating piece of wood, we cling to it because it is all we know. Without it, without our mask, without our image, without our face, what are we?