thanksgiving.
in the bathroom at my mother’s house the mirrors on the medicine cabinet fold in so you can see yourself reflected twice in profile, unreversed, the way other people see you. i am pointier from this angle. i feel manly.
last night my mother asked me what guys do to show they are interested in a girl, because she is trying to figure it out and she tells me i have more experience dating than she does. i tell her i don’t know. i was hoping that to women, it was obvious.
it’s cold this morning in a room in which i’ve never really been comfortable. outside there is a thin coating of snow on the ground and soon i will start wearing two pairs of pants and socks every day because at home i have no heat, but it is home. somewhere in these winters which always arrive unexpectedly, those paneled walls, low ceilings, that particular arrangement of plants and household appliances, my bed, which is made out of sleep, that network of tree named streets, parks, pawnshops, and junkies has become home in a way that the chair in which i’m sitting never was.
i am always surprised by the changing of seasons. i look too thin to withstand this weather, but i am only cold when i am indoors. i have a warm hat and a beard. i see my reflection in the window of the starbucks i pass almost every day, walking like someone who is tall. i feel adult.
yesterday, my mother gave me a cellphone for my birthday (which was a month and a half ago), but if you call, it will most likely be turned off. when i see the word cellphone i think of cellophane, cookies or cakes wrapped in green, baked from scratch by my grandmother, still warm and waiting to be eaten on holidays after the meal has been digested. i do not entirely belong in the 21st century.
when we were small, my sister and i would spend most days with my grandmother while our parents were at work. she had a purple notebook in which she would transcribe the stories we told her. one of my earliest went something like this; “once upon a time there was a ramp. the ramp couldn’t move. the end.” she also used to play monopoly with me even though she hated it, and always lost because she saved all her money like it was real life. she says she doesn’t have a sense of humor, but she has the best kind. her eyes are always smiling, and i have never thanked her enough for this.
it is thanksgiving and among other things, i am thankful for absorbing the writing style of whatever i have most recently read. this morning i read, for the second time, a book which is very good as a reading material, i feel. my father pronounces thanksgiving with the emphasis on ‘thanks’ instead of ‘giving.’ i would think that maybe this is symbolic of his personality somehow except that he does the same thing with ‘green bay’ and ‘t.v.’ and i don’t think he has a special preference for green t’s over bay v’s the way he does for thanks over giving. he also pronounces the “qua” in quarter instead of just saying ‘koorter’ like everyone else. he was valedictorian of his highschool class and he has never lived it down. nor have i. he has a bumper sticker that says “yes, actually, i am a rocket scientist” although technically, he isn’t. i go to art school and want to be a musician, and did not go to school to study chemistry, although i almost did, and i was very good at it. we get along better than we used to now that he can offer me a beer on visits. i was always good at balancing equations, even if this one is still a bit lopsided, i am no longer afraid that it will explode, or fizzle out into potassium permanganate, which stains your fingers brown, though it is bright purple.
it is six in the morning and i have not slept much because my bed here is made of springs instead of sleep like my bed at home. it is the same bed i slept on my entire childhood and there are memories tangled up with the springs that poke along when i lie here at night in unusual quiet and darkness. this is the bed that i stained with my own blood when i skinned my knees and hid because i didn’t want to get in trouble. the bed where i used to lie and turn the shadow of my curtains cast by a nightlight into darth vader. i vanquished him regularly with my lightsaber, which was a bright green fisher price screwdriver. it is the same bed in which i read robinson crusoe, swiss family robinson, and the three musketeers when i was sick with bronchitis in first grade. unabridged. it is the bed in which i first tried to kill myself, also in first grade, by trying to fall asleep with a pillow on my face because i was afraid i was going to get in trouble for making fun of a girl at school. it’s the same bed on which i used to lie with my radio up so loud you could hear it across the block, singing along to music that wasn’t always good, but was it pissed off, boy. i wore a lot of black and shopped at hot topic. it is the same bed in which i first fantasized about naked girls and where i had my first orgasm. on it, i received my first blowjob, the day before i got into my first car accident, and my girlfriend came over with a band-aid to put on the mangled hood of my car, and blew me again. it is the same bed under which i still store my baseball cards and drawings from highschool art class. it is stiff, my feet stick over the edge, and the springs poke me while i sleep.
my bed at home is a futon, and it is low, warm, and soft. it is wide enough for me to sleep diagonally or to share comfortably with someone else, or to roll around while having sex. i have never folded it into a couch, but i could, man, i could. you can feel the wall behind it sucking out your warmth because there is no insulation, just bricks and paneling and i am paranoid about my shelves falling on my head, but it is warm because i have many blankets, and on the nightstand nearby there are many plants including an orchid named ophelia, because she constantly falls over and spills my cup of water. the shelf that i’m afraid will fall on my head holds a hanging file of old snapshots and love notes, pay stubs, grocery receipts, bank statements, and product manuals, but also a plant named porthos, who sends his creepers toward the window and has been spun off as a second plant on my desk in my studio, who hasn’t been given a name yet.
i’ve spent the morning playing with my mom’s six month old golden retriever puppy, jasper. the last time i saw him he was just a generic puppy, but now he’s got personality. he’s an individual and he likes to sit on the arms and backs of furniture. he reminds me eerily of our old dog, merlin, who we had to put to sleep after my freshman year. he was only five years old, but he had liver failure. merlin, i believe, was the embodiment of pure, absolute love. for everything.
merlin and i, we had an understanding.