Last Night

People come and go. Sitting at this shore at night, with the I-90 bridge lit in a mile-long string of evenly spaced lights. The waves especially violent tonight. A plane roaring overhead before it disappears into fog. Pepper spray in my pocket from Easton, the night sky heavy and dull rather than hot with heat and sunset, me swimming with skinny boy that was my first Seattle best friend. No lover eating ice cream beside me, freezing in a thin rainshell. (Me, plucking at that jacket as I try to break up with him in Cal Anderson). The cool metal of the railing of this chair as I sit above the waves, Bellevue lit in golden towers over the lake, flickering red gems. Clouds low, my head nearly in them, slight breeze.
Mum, home, in bed, in her red checkered night gown, trying to fall asleep. Me, viscous with myself for not being there, for not being able to live in New Jersey.
My gloves smell like old climbing shoes and chalk. Faintly of cat piss.

It's comforting.

The slow span of car headlights breaking the night--flash of fear I'll be seen.

End.

this is gross. don't read it.

[Phone ringing. A girl is biking. It's the nice part of her ride -- the quiet neighborhood under Union Street where trees overhang single-lane roads. The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue.]

J: Fuck. Not now. Fuck, fuck, fuck. [Pauses a long moment after receiving the call. Labored breathing from the ride, or from the call.] Hey.
N: Hey! How are you?
J: Fine.
N: Cool. I'm at my house now. Sorry I missed your note about meeting up earlier, but is there any chance you're still in the area?
J: No...I'm headed north, past the U. District.
N: To Magnuson Park?
J: What? How did you know?
N: Because I'm  behind you.

[She has a desperate moment were she wishes this is true. She's biking around a curve, up a slight incline, her phone to her ear -- but still, she looks back for him. There's just a patch of trees, dead with winter.]

N: When do you want to meet instead?
J: [Still out of breath.] Tuesday?

[He takes a long time to decide if this works for him, going back and forth between, "Yeah...I guess...wait, maybe, let me think...no, Tuesday should work, yeah.]

N: How are you, by the way? How was your trip to the east coast? How's your mom?
J: [Short. Begrudging.] She's fine.
N: Is now a bad time?
J: Yeah, I'm actually biking.

[The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue. He laughs, and her front wheel jerks violently as she over corrects and almost falls.]

N: Okay, Jess. [Still laughing, a smile in his voice.] See ya.

[Scene's colors speed up until the green and blue are overtaken by black.]

Ceylon

I stopped trying to edit. I stopped trying to cut out the anxiety, the bills, the rejection letter from my last interview, my mother listening to records alone and two months out of the mental hospital, my rent, the anxiety. Stop, breathe, drink tea.

My job isn't terrible. I don't have to wear a uniform. We have no manager and no real rules. Mostly, I price merchandise and place orders for cups with cats on them. But a tea house is still food service, which means I also heat up blueberry scones and place them on trays with Early Grey. I wash a lot teapots.

Sometimes these teapots chip, and that's when I claim them. I dress them pretty in a box, and I take that box on a bus ride. Forty-two minutes later, the chipped teapot's home, sitting on my kitchen table.

I'm a little chipped too, a bit beat up and over-steeped. I'm trying to roughen my edges as I age instead of sanding them down--give myself a few snarls, wait for the people who want to take me home despite the cracks.

A lot of my co-workers at the tea shop are under twenty, while I'm almost a quarter of a century. I'm probably too old to be working at a tea shop, but I like it. Especially when I meet new faces around Seattle, America's next Silicon Valley. I like saying to the busy bees of Amazon, tech start-ups, and and the elegantly aging Microsoft: "I work at a tea shop."

This isn't very profane. I don't need to be smart to do this job, nor do I need to be motivated, creative, or giving. Rainy mornings find me rinsing Ceylon leaves out of teapots. I sweep a lot of toilet paper bits off the floor of the women's bathroom. Mitra, a Buddhist monk, is always at the third table translating old Sanskrit texts into English--which really means that he has conversations with Cody and Indryani about meditation and ways of higher being. The walls are yellow like a wash of flowers, and instrumental music plays from the speakers.

Software developers are generally one of two types: soft, kind in the face, living alone in a townhouse. This type is generally identified by their beards. The second type of software developer is "bro," meaning he wears button-downs, is clean-shaven, and drinks too much beer. Those with mustaches are a second, worse, subcategory. I've yet to meet a female techie.

And so we'll often meet--me, the ignorant, lazy, uncreative, and selfish tea shop employee, and he, the bearded loner or chiseled white man in a button-down, and we'll have this conversation:

"What do you do?" [Me, already guessing.]

"I develop software for Amazon." [Him, almost abashedly.]

"And what do you do?" [Him, a little excited now.]

"I work at a tea shop." [Me, really saying, "I'm a little chipped and broken. I don't have a nice, high-paying job. Sometimes, I take home broken teapots because I can't afford to buy them. I'm carving out a strange life for myself on the opposite side of the country from where I grew up. I'm twenty-three, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I work at a tea shop, and I'm poor and broke and far from home, but I'm glad I don't develop software for Amazon."]

My body wasn't made to be strong. I have fat thighs that make biking up hills a shitty time. My knuckles crack too easily. The bags under my eyes are their own pillows.

In high school, I was the kid who couldn't remember her freshman year. Forget that I started at a new school, rode the bus for the first time, experienced being thirteen with a fresh set of teenagers--literally, forget it all. None of this made an impression on me. I don't even remember the anxiety of my first class. I think I might have been late.

Or perhaps, the changes confused me so much that I retreated into myself, erasing an entire year of my life.

My body wasn't made to be strong.

Now that I'm twenty-three, I try to summit a mountain once a week, or at least make it out to hike. When I bike to work--which is every day--the ride is always uphill. I rock climb so often that my climbing shoes have holes after a month.

I'm making myself stronger, and I do it by tearing myself down. Sometimes I prefer the bodily exhaustion, while other times I revel in my emotional misery. How intensely can I feel something? How much can I struggle?

I have a blog that consists entirely of pictures of my face. After five years, I can now spend hours going through my face in stages. They show world travels. They show nights at home in bed with tea. Some show various states of undress. A lot of them are me at my most miserable, crying, afraid that I'm pregnant, having just failed an exam, suffering from a breakup. They're beautiful portraits of myself, and I study them with unabashed vanity, trying to dissect if I've grown through these broken versions of myself, if I've made my body stronger.

And I think what I'm most afraid of, is that under all this, all these masks of misery and struggle, I'm just a weak person struggling through all of life's different complexities. That at the end of the day, I haven't gotten any stronger. I'm simply miserable and afraid.

But I keep tearing myself down, telling myself my muscles will build back harder, and that the struggle will make me stronger.

It's near noon and there are things to be done.

I'm at that point where I hate everything I write.

The house smells like meat, slightly metallic or like burning fat.

When I was a child, I'd pull my shirt up over my head and run around the house like a stuck pig. I still do that, but only when I'm alone. Sometimes, even when I'm in public, I'll pull the neckline of my shirt up just under my eyes and squint.

I can't escape the smell of burning flesh by pulling my shirt over my head, or even by running out of the room like a stuck pig. I have nowhere else to go, so I feel my cheeks growing red from the blankets tucked around my body. The comforter is hot on my stomach, because I have the hem of my shirt pulled up over my breasts. I'm wearing my nude-colored bra, the kind you're not supposed to wear when you want to have sex the same night.

I'm not worried about having sex tonight.

The edges of my window frame are dark, and the clock reads twenty past eleven, so I know it's night. My bones feel heavy, and there's tension in my left thigh from where I stretched too hard this morning, so I know it's night. I'm alone, so I know it's night.

 The redness in my cheeks has moved up to my ears, somehow starting at the back and wrapping around the soft skin, down the curve, stopping just at the tip of the earlobe. Everything is hot and red, except for the window framed by night.

When I was a child, I'd build forts of pillows behind the couch. The wall back there was cracked with age, the plaster protruding forth in a great bubble of white paint and drywall. I was in one of my smaller forts the day I knocked over the lamp. The light bulb shattered, and I cleaned up the shards one by one.

The room's so hot, and I've gotten rid of my blankets and comforter.

I'm going to tell you straight: this is a story with a happy ending, even if it's a story about a girl who wanted to be a boy. She thought they could run faster, and she knew they were allowed to kiss girls. She had wanted this since she was a child, since she was three and running naked in the mud.

She cried more tears for this than she did for anything else in her life, enough that she could have watered her flowers. But salt water burns instead of nourishes, and she may have burned her skin dry with tears.

She fought everything. She fought her parents; she fought dresses of silk and cotton; she fought the people who told her who she could and couldn't be. One night, she fought breathing.

So she ran away from home when she was eighteen, skipping college and taking the train out west. She saw an old lady hitchhiking in the sun once, halfway between Denver and Santa Fe, with this woman trailed by a cop who couldn't or wouldn't arrest her. She felt sick and stuck to trains.

One place she felt safest was a city on the bay, with lakes breaking up the buildings and a cement troll hiding under one of the stretching bridges. There were bars with expensive drinks, or bars like English pubs, or bars with pinball machines in every corner.

In one where everything was rather average, she met a girl who said, "I don't care what you are. Boy or girl, you are a person. And you are beautiful." And maybe she didn't say it all at once. She took her time, drawing it out slow and true. But the girl heard her words, and thought they were simple, those words saved her. She stopped taking trains, and she stayed in the one place where she felt safest.

Here's the happy ending. There's a lake with the sun setting against the water and a spray of mountains, the scent of campfire smoke mixed with driftwood and salt, and this girl who wanted to be a boy--safe, not fighting--just a person loving another person, in a beautiful place where they were safe.