Crown Point, Monday

Interstate driving is subtraction. It’s whittling yourself down white dash by white dash until you’re finally as simple as you were supposed to be.

It’s meditation. It’s watching white windmills on mile 191 fade into a horizonless winter backdrop. Line after line stretching back into the fields, hypnotic three-blade turn, slender metal arms diving after one another. Wait. There’ll be a moment when they synchronize, when you could line up all those windmills and pass your arm through the space between their blades, press the sun into your palm without touching a single one. Watch. It’ll only be a moment. You can keep your eyes off the road for a second; your hands do all the driving, anyway. The sun’s been setting earlier each day. It’s time you learned by touch.

It’s three hours of fogging up the windshield with singing, pretending your breath is what spins those pinwheel windmills. Wind power, mind power; an m is just a w flipped upside down. It’s finding out you have more to sing than you have to say. Somehow, someone else’s words could tell a stranger more about you than you could. You’d like to say it’s because you’re a work of art, something deeper than a slapdash splash of rotting paint on a genetic canvas, but you know better. It's simpler and more beautiful than that. 

Highway driving is solace. It’s pulling yourself home by that double yellow line on the asphalt, that elongated equal sign you could take as a metaphor for eternity if you let yourself think too much (which you do: roads like rivers feed into each other, everything loops back into itself, everything is everything). It’s passing a car going the opposite way and imagining you both watching the other and thinking, yeah, I’ve been there. 








wind power

Winter makes me want to:

clack peppermint sticks along my teeth like boys dragging sticks against whitewashed fences in film summers that spin and spin on the reel, whirring and flashing like a bicycle wheel

lay my neck on the guillotine edge of a metal sink, cut my spine with tap water and dye my hair rust red from a box (because I am iron just now learning how to breathe)

run a shaving razor up my calves in the shower so my fingers graze the stubble rows, stark and shorn like lines of harvested corn stalks sticking up from a layer of frost; wait for my snow-pale skin to melt, to run away and join the hot water like the daughter I am

tuck my arms into my mother’s red coat, step out onto the patio with bare feet until the blood runs blue and slow; go back inside, shed the coat and curl my toes, feel the burning bee-buzz of my soles’ atoms humming like summer against the carpet 

Thank you

I’m two for two.

This is the second consecutive winter my car—a separate car each time—has decided to break down despite my best efforts to keep it happy. Both times, I managed to end up with the best case for the worst scenario, but, still, it’s starting to get irritating.

Today after lunch, I decided to go to Target to pick up a few things. When I started the engine, everything was fine. The bottom of my windshield and passenger's side windows were layered with a thin film of ice which was easily chipped off with my ice scraper. Yesterday it had snowed magnificently, but by noon today most of it had melted. 

I let the car warm up for a few minutes while I flipped through my CDs and slipped The XX into the player. The volume was reasonable; I’m fairly certain I would have heard horrible coughing or at least a pathetic whine from my engine if something was amiss, especially since I gave it warm-up time in which it could have decided it wanted to die and warned me appropriately.

Keep in mind that my car is a 2004 model, I had it serviced a couple months ago, and I had driven it two days ago without any problems. 

Things were normal. So, I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the Lloyd, a four-lane expressway that cuts through the city. After about two minutes driving on the Lloyd, my car started making a disturbing rattling noise from what seemed to be somewhere under the hood. This was not good.

I decided that, rather than continuing down the Lloyd and possibly subjecting myself to a fiery and angry death if my car decided to give up in the middle of a busy intersection, I should get off the expressway and call someone who could tell me how to soothe the alarming noises my car was intent on making despite my reassurance. I felt like a mom. All I could do was stroke the dashboard and say, "I don't know what you want!" 

I made the next left off, drove down another road, stopped at a stop sign, and stopped.

And stopped.

And stalled.

“Drive” meant nothing to my car anymore. I might as well have torn out the gas pedal and thrown it out the window.

After turning the ignition off and back on again to no avail, I sheepishly opened my door and looked at the black truck behind me.

“Uh, I think my car just died. Please just go around me,” I yelled back to the man driving the truck. 

He asked me if I had a phone or could call anyone; I answered yes. After a few other questions, he offered to help me push my car just across the street to the D-Patrick body repair shop. Luckily, the little two-way road was much less crowded than the Lloyd, and we easily got it across.

I thanked Steve—I’d learned his name—and he went on his way.

The D-Patrick folks were incredibly nice and friendly. Since my car was a Dodge and didn’t need body repair, they themselves couldn’t do anything for me, but they called their tow truck and referred me to a Dodge dealership where I could get help. One of the guys, Darryl, even called the dealership and warned one of his buddies down there to take care of me. 

Steve called D-Patrick later to make sure I was all right. I wish I'd thought to ask his last name so I could have sent him a thank-you note, at least. 

I spent the next two hours in the small D-Patrick office waiting for the tow truck (first snow makes for careless drivers and busy tow truck workers) and talking with the receptionist, Christy. She spoke clearly, but softly; if the office and street outside had been louder, I definitely would have had trouble hearing her. But we heard each other and got along well. I learned she worked two jobs and had a master’s in accounting, but she was still looking for a full-time job. We ended up talking about college, Kentucky, dialects, and the holidays, among other things, before the tow truck arrived. 

Justin towed me to Expressway Dodge, where I talked to Darryl’s buddy Ron and got things worked out with my car. As it was near closing time, they wouldn’t be able to get to it until tomorrow morning, but they’d call me as soon as they did. My roommate picked me up and took me home, where I ate a hot plate of spaghetti. 

Today could have been much worse than it was.

I like people.  

8:00 shower

Thirty minutes’ worth of water polishes me like a stone; soon all my edges will be smoothed. I am a wonder of wishes and physics. You could pick me up, kiss and skip me across water.

But I am allowed to slow down. I am allowed to dance and spin and take the time to breathe, angle my body and scan my reflection in the water before I break the surface tension.

The experts know. It’s a simple twenty degrees—not a difference of speed—between sinking and skipping. 

Stone Skipping Gets Scientific

This production

This happened weeks ago.

Being near to winter, everything was already darkening by the time I walked over to the theater to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even with the sun down, it was warm for November. My friends ______ and ___ were waiting inside the lobby when I stepped in. Since we already had our tickets, we headed past the double doors and toward the ushers.

Taped on the outside of the doors was a sign:

 Caution: There will be fog machines, black lights, and flying in this production.

I didn’t think anything of that until much later after the show, after we’d sat and watched the painted fairies swing gracefully from their fly-lines and the hapless Athenians stumble through forest gel-shadows. Theatre productions always aggravate that jealous, “what-if” cluster of neurons that seems to exist solely to project reel after reel of past high school shows inside my head, reminding me of the time when I’d wanted nothing more than to cake my face with base every night and set my rhythms to stage direction. That is long gone and isn't. I've always excelled at rationalizations. I’d given up theatre partly because at the time I’d just started rebuilding who I was; I didn’t want to make a career of pretending to be other people. 

I realize, now, how unavoidable that is, no matter which direction I would have taken.

The worst part of living is killing what could have been. Logically, I realize I cannot know everything, but I can’t stand not knowing. Who would I have been if I’d gone to art school? medical school? if I’d majored in neuroscience instead of English? I wish there was a book--a Facebook, even, given this day and age--that I could read to discover the life of each person I could have become. Not to change who I am now, but just to know. 

All I can do is think back to the strange girl who, just months ago, ran with _____ in the rain at one in the morning because it was thundering and spring was coming. Or the girl from weeks ago who'd sat in a hospital waiting room. Those girls are divided like time zones; I'm hours away. 

If that often-quoted line of Shakespeare’s is true and "all the world's a stage," then this sign should be taped to its doors:

Caution: There will be fog machines, black lights, and flying in this production.

(You will lose yourself.  

There will be times when you can feel the cool carcass of a cloud dissolving on your cheek but cannot see your living hands in front of you; you will worry that the sky might have limits after all since here you are, wrapped up in and walking through it. You will wonder if it is better to wait or run through. You will wonder which one will smother you. 

When the sun burns down, you will ache for ultraviolet, to see all the hidden fluorescent colors; when it happens, you will see the white burn like a sheet of snow in violet winter. You will notice teeth. You will notice fingernails. You will rush to a mirror to see if you glow as white and sharp as your neighbor. You will, and you won't. There will be stains you will no longer be able to ignore--on you and others. It will become too much.

And you will fly, or appear to. You will feel triumph. You will close your eyes and move your body like a bird’s, feel the hollow, musical lightness in your bones like someone’s sucked the marrow from them and hung them on a front porch to sound like windchimes.

You will feel the fly wires tug at your heavy body and pull you back to the ground. There will be nothing like it again until it happens again. 

And it will, but it won't. Not to the same person.

You will lose yourself.)

Here's to the forks in the drawer

Still-green November is startled awake by the preludes of winter; rain clings with sharp, sleety fingers to the bottom of tree branches, frozen notes on staff lines.

I am reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and thinking about canons. I’ve heard it all morning: the brittle crash of freezing rain falling onto the skylight, the cracking rattle of stiff tree branches outside my window. I want to listen to Bach in the rain. I want to wheel his ghost out on a piano, have him improvise with November in the rain until everything just swells and warps with it.

If I weren’t trapped in bedsheets, I would walk outside just to know with my other senses. You can smell the difference in this kind of rain. It’s the ice.

Only yesterday at noon I’d run along the highway; it’s three miles to the woods. My knuckles had been red and cold, overripe as the berries on the tree outside. After running for ten minutes in sixty degree weather wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, my body forgot or couldn’t afford to sweat; my muscles became hard as wax but wouldn’t burn—I could’ve run forever.

I stopped at the swings, though, once I reached the woods. I turned my iPod down but kept my earbuds in; I thought about what Dr. _____, a history professor and friend, and I had talked about the other day. We talked about autonomy and sound, how radios turned into portable stereos turned into Walkmans turned into mp3 players. Sound shrunk from someone’s living room to their hands to finally only their ears. 

So many people have come to equate silence with loneliness. I myself used to turn on television just for the background noise whenever I was by myself in the house. Between cell phones, social networking sites, and a barrage of comforting noise, we are never really alone—so much so that now some people think silence is a void that needs to be filled. People need to be able to be alone. 

Not too long ago, Dr. _____ “almost bought the farm,” as he put it. After he recovered, he couldn’t stand too much sound. He stopped listening to the car radio. No television. Little, ordinary sounds became what he listened for. One of his favorite moments happened while he was emptying the dishwasher one morning: wind gently shaking the trees outside while he dried the dishes; the slow, rolling groan of the cutlery drawer sliding open; the regular hum of the refrigerator in the background; the quiet, metal clink of putting forks in a drawer.

Maybe it’s just having Strange Loops on my mind, but I don’t think Dr. _____’s forks and Bach’s canonical crescendos are all that different; they're different measures from the same music. Everything works in canons; we live through layer upon layer of noise and the clicking and jabbering of isolated society singing against and building on itself until the sound starts flaking away, chipping itself down to the sound of one man putting forks away in a drawer. 

Godel, Escher, Bach

Playing in the park until the sun goes down

It’s too easy to feel old.

Today I drove out to a local park. November wind burnt my cheeks, cauterizing wounds I had left open without noticing; red is only one way to bleed. I held a gate open for a woman and her child. I passed an old woman who was walking in her socks, carrying only one shoe and smiling. My shoes crushed layers of decaying golden-brown leaves, waterlogged and curled at the end like soggy cornflakes.

I realized I hadn’t eaten cornflakes since I was in elementary school, but I could still remember the taste of them and how my mother would serve them from the white box with that green rooster mascot. It was only later in my life that I learned my mother was terrified of roosters. She grew up on a farm, where one of my grandfather’s roosters attacked her from behind, dug into her shoulders with his talons and pecked at her head. It is strange to think that girl and my mother are the same. I have learned so much since I was that little girl who munched on cornflakes and didn’t know even parents could fear the world. Sometimes that girl is a stranger.  

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am nineteen. Too often when I am around my peers I feel disconnected—even here, at college, where most people are newer than they’ve ever been, when we are all scrambling to discover what we need, reaching out for so many separate things with hands that don’t communicate, like split-brain patients. Even with alcohol and astrophysics textbooks in hand, we are all trying to decide which sandbox we are going to sink into after we graduate; we are all hoping that the other kids play nice.

I like to think this, anyway. I like to think that none of us really know what we’re doing because I am confident only in that I am not sure where I’m going. I love and hate this.

I am slowly teaching myself to welcome uncertainty. Stability is something I simultaneously crave and scorn, just as I am thrilled and terrified by all my uncertain possibilities. I don’t know what I want. Or, rather, I know what I want—but all those wants invariably contradict. I read about a split-brain patient who, when reading a book, would turn a page with one hand, but the other hand would turn it back. He eventually had to sit on one hand so the other one could turn the page uninterrupted. 

One side of me wants to move to a city and fall in love with everything there; the other side wants to never stop running, let all the strings I’ve cut whip behind me, tattered flags of victory and surrender that won’t stop waving long enough to be replaced. But I don't want to sit on my hands. I want to know both. 

I am reminded of a line from “Dive,” a poem by Andrea Gibson:

“Like right now I’m needing nothing more than for you to hug me 

and if you do I’m gonna scream like a caged bird.

Life doesn’t rhyme.

Sometimes love is a vulgar word.”

Sometimes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed—by finances, relationships, degrees, homework, networking, all the conflicting tasks I must accomplish in order to have the most certain uncertain future I can bear.

But sometimes it is enough to go to a park, listen to Broken Bells on my iPod, and play on a swingset, even though my legs are too long anymore and brush the ground with every swing backward. 

October (Broken Bells)

Hello, my name is:

“In the thick air it's like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it's like they hadn't gone away. It's like they had just disappeared into the air and when we moved we would loose them again out of the air around us, sad and comforting.” 

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

A person’s name is supposedly the most important word to him or her. The Convention on the Rights of the Child states that a name is such an important right that every child is guaranteed one by law.

I know the sound of my name.

I know the brutal rhythm of my pen as it crushes and bruises d-a-n-i-etcetera onto the blue-veined paper of a notebook; I know how the shape of my inky electrocardiography records the heartbeats I cannot physically feel, those flickering palpitations that throw shadows on the chamber walls of my heart. My time passes in units called heartbeats: violence, triumph, and birds’ wings all crash together in my chest.

I know the meaning of my name: “God is my judge.”

I know that I was named after my father. Our names match down to the initials. I know that Danielle is derived from Daniel, that Biblical dream interpreter who read an angel’s handwriting on the wall and foretold the fall of a king.

Dreams are chemicals firing in the brain. I do not believe in angels. All kings fall, eventually.

So I know these things, but I know them as a girl who knows every word to her favorite song; she did not write the words. She cannot know what the song means to the singer, only what meaning she herself has shaped those words into.

I’ve read that infant dolphins name themselves by stringing a unique set of high-pitched whistles together. If I could, I would name myself by whistling music or laughing or by pressing my palms against your skin and letting my nerve endings tap out a signal to yours like Morris code.

I could never name myself as we do now. I am made of too many words.

____ says she likes my name—how the DAN strikes down like a sure step while the IELLE hangs in the air like Mona Lisa’s laughing smile. That’s you, ____ says. But I do not feel it belongs to me anymore than a snowflake belongs to the palm in which it slowly melts. Everything melts. Naming something is only an attempt to freeze and solidify something long enough to pretend at immortality. I as a sum am not immortal; only my parts—all those stars and dead planets humming in my skin—will continue on.

Sometimes when the moon pulls me to her, tugging me by my wave-white hands, I know that our feeble syllables—our Atlantics and Pacifics—can never name the water, that sixty percent of our bodies is that same timeless shushing that folds and falls, folds and falls into itself and swallows every footprint, every scrawled SOS on the sand. And sometimes when you call my name, I can feel dolphins butting at my ribs from the inside—reminding me I am not their kind, that although I did not choose my name, it is a thoughtful gift from another, something to be worn thin and weak-necked with love.

Still.

Speak my name, and I will hear it. But move toward me, reach for me, and I will feel it like your hands brushing against a wind chime, stirring the humid music hanging latent in my body.  

...


Dolphins name themselves.
Convention on the Rights of the Child