A March of Marys, day six

Like, no one else knows or can see unless I show them. Enabling a reaction. Everything is manufactured.

It is Day 6 of A March of Marys. Have you been keeping up with my serialization of this novel? What do you think?

I’m splitting up this chapter into two parts, so you’ll be able to read the second part tomorrow. It’s kind of a long one and I have a pretty short attention span and you might also? And doesn’t everyone love a cliffhanger. Hahah.

I know I don’t usually post this often so I hope your inbox is not feeling overwhelmed. I am taking a chance and doing a thing and I thank you for doing it with me. Check out the previous posts in this serialization here.

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Going with a yellowish tint on this one to emulate the incoming tobacco stains.

▲

It’s always the ones with the haircuts. 

Their hand combed coifs. With what looks like just a touch of product. But who can really tell until you run your fingers through it. 

Like you know they spend an extra twenty minutes in the bathroom before they leave the house. You can imagine yourself laying in his bed watching Arthur or Lamb Chop’s Play Along or some other television program for grade-schoolers, waiting and listening to intermittent blow dryer noises, second guessing yourself and adjusting your scrunchie because it only took you ten minutes to get dressed and ready to leave and is that even enough. Maybe you should try harder.

I could always try harder. I would try harder if I knew what I wanted. Or if I knew what I was even doing presently.

*

I’m not sure if I am here right now. Like maybe this is metafiction and the only way I can tell I’m not dreaming or just watching some dull melodrama is by actualizing lust. Perverting love into something tangible. Feelable. Maybe it’s not the only way, but it feels like the most straightforward and instantaneous. The most sure. 

I have experimented with stealing armfuls of books from chain stores at the mall, carrying a stack into the bookstore cafe and sitting for a while, flipping through the pages for sensors, and walking out. I have used an old boxcutter I took from the produce department at work to make small incisions at my ankles and watch the blood bead and run. But when I do that kind of shit I feel like it’s totally inconsequential. Like, no one else knows or can see unless I show them. Enabling a reaction. Everything is manufactured. 

Am I really here, did I really do this.

Like the time I ate a way too potent firecracker and ran out of my dorm room and into the next room where inexplicably a slumber party was happening and I kept asking the girls there to slap my face because I wasn’t convinced that I was alive. I kept asking them if they could see me.

They let me sleep on the bed and later I woke up in the communal bathroom on the floor of a stall. I remembered going in there and locking the door to pee. I got up and went back to my room and slept an entire day.

Am I really here. Did I really do this. It’s easiest for me to know with beardburn on my chin and a sweating breathing sprouting thing underneath me.

*

Validation as existence. No, but external validation as proof of existence. 

*

Joan moved into this dirty three story rowhouse on 12th street. I went with her to check it out. It came with a cat and three boy housemates, people we both knew from school. With the beat-up couches and open floor space, it seemed like a great place to have parties. A month later, another room in the house opened up. The guy renting it previously didn’t live in the room but was using it as a place to stash drugs. The guys at the house were okay with it at first but then thought that was weird. They didn’t even know what kind of drugs. 

It took two days to pack. I moved out of my parents’ place with Joan’s help and moved into the stash room.

*

Even if this only happened in the only way I can recognize and understand. At least I felt something. At least I felt like I knew I was alive. Like another person can say it really happened.

*

I am wearing jeans two sizes bigger than I would normally wear. I am living in a filthy house. 

*

Joan started working in a Belgian waffle shop. Some pricey place uptown in the theater district, next door to a cupcake and hot chocolate shop popular with opera-goers for late night desserts. Almost every night, whenever she closed the shop, Joan came home with a large brown bag of the day’s leftover pastries. 

Waste not want not.

The grocery store where I was a cashier used to let us take home the unsold prepared food at the end of the day. The display cases always had to be full and fresh, but the bosses, conservative fucks, accused the employees of taking advantage. I have no idea how, they never really explained, ‘it’s a health concern’ they gave as a lame excuse, and made it mandatory for the prepared food department to throw out all the unsold wraps and hoagies at the end of each day. We couldn’t even donate them anywhere. Dozens of sandwiches in the dumpster to rot, locked up to keep the dumpster divers away. A total waste.

Joan’s pastries were salvation. I was afraid to keep food in the house because of the roach problem. I thought they could get into the refrigerator somehow. The only food items on my side of the shelf were cans of tomato soup and a container of Kool-Aid that I bought for a party to make jungle juice and didn’t use. 

When it was dark and cold out and only 5 pm, I would roll a blunt and Joan and I would sit on her bed watching music videos on youtube and eating perfectly fine discarded croissants and danishes and oopswaffles, taking turns lifting the blanket over the electric heater to warm our feet. 

We both had these colds that didn’t seem to get better. Our noses ran and we coughed all night in our beds. I’d go to sleep fully dressed with my coat and hood on with every blanket I owned wrapped around me like a wooly burrito. We still went to work. We still ate a lot of baked goods.

*

I was feeling like I didn’t need to be validated by anyone. Like I didn’t need a body. I was feeling like a cartoon, existing only when people watched me. I was happy drifting and letting things happen. I thought I felt okay. I didn’t want anything in particular as much as I wanted to immediately feel. I didn’t need to be validated, I let it happen. And I tasted what I wanted to.

*

He has nice hair.

I visit his Myspace page pretty frequently to leave him comments and see who is leaving him comments. He leaves comments on my photos. I don’t know that he has spyspace software installed. He can see who is checking his profile but he can’t change any information on his profile like his about me or who I’d like to meet unless he uninstalls it. He knows I’ve been checking his page. He also knows that my friend Ezra, who is in love with me and tells me repeatedly that he is in love with me despite me telling him repeatedly that I just want to be friends and who I’ve been avoiding calls from for a while even though we have the same taste in music and like making music together, is checking his page too. 

*

All I did was work, go to school, and hang out. And smoke a lot of weed. 

Always another house, or our house. Always on bikes. Occasionally having bikes stolen. 

Making an adventure out of walking with one of Joan’s friends to the bank. 

You can always overhear something cool. A guy rapping a freestyle about laser beams to his girlfriend while waiting in line to check out at the grocery store.

Sneaking into my parents’ house while they’re at work to watch cable and eat their leftovers.

Pack of backwoods. Dime sacks or whatever I could find. Water bottles with vodka and Big Gulp as fashion accessory. Wearing something flavorful. A red scarf with an illustration of a large bird. An oversized dress with puff sleeves and stilettos. Looking like a circus tent on stilts. I always wanted to be doing something. I didn’t sleep much.

*

I had my own place at last, at least away from my parents, but not a dorm room. My own place I paid my own rent for. 

Paying three hundred dollars a month to live in a drafty derelict shell of a home didn’t make me feel like a grownup or accomplished or anything, but it meant I could listen to records while smoking weed in my own bed. 

It meant the freedom to bring home questionable companions from Making Time without worrying about which floorboard not to step on because it groans at night and my mom wakes up if you flick a lightswitch in another room. 

Living with Joan meant doing a lot of nothing together. Like having another sister. 

When we weren’t at work or at school we just wanted to hang out. Going on walks, laptopping together in one of our beds, running errands or meandering to some other neighborhood to look at something new.

Joan started dating Carlo, one of our housemates, a few months after I moved in. He sometimes joined us on our mundane excursions. He didn’t talk much.

Joan always used to come into bed with me and Tarah when we were still dating, scant clothing or pajamas. It was like we were all family, laughing about Axl Rose or rapping Method Man lyrics and eating chocolate covered mushrooms or planning potluck parties. I tried to recreate that era switching places with Joan when she and Carlo were in bed together but I think it weirded Carlo out. At least at first. I think he resented putting on clothes just so I could hang out with Joan in her bedroom. I could never tell what Carlo was thinking or if he hated me. I liked him, but I reflected his energy, thought of him as an intrusion.

*

I stopped thinking about people I didn’t see. Did I ever even know them? Were they ever even real?

I decided that I wanted to view people as what I could get out of them. Doing anything else felt pointless. Too soft, too many vulnerable spots. 

I felt like I wanted capitalist relationships. 

I thought, I can craft a product. I can make something of value. I can market myself. I am a capitalist body. My body is capital. I am a product. I can produce goods. I can craft myself. I can yield to demands.

*

He smokes parliaments. He used to date a girl who is tanned and tiny and friends with Christina. 

I am a little chubby and I have an unfortunate hairdo. I got anxious one night and wanted to purify myself and felt like if I can’t be skinny again right now at least I can have less hair and that will keep me safe so I let my friend getting her beauty school degree cut it all off so I could look like Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and I did for a while but now it is growing in funny.

I don’t feel beautiful compared to this girl who I am comparing myself to because I frequently seem to need to compare myself to someone even though there is no rationality behind it other than a nervous compulsion derived from some leftover childhood feeling of inadequacy. I was always trying to fit in by purposely not fitting in the way I saw it happen on sitcoms. I didn’t want to be like anyone else but I still wanted the other kids to like me. 

I have never been completely rational.

…

To be continued.

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