Captured

Photo walk. We walked around every undiscovered corner of our little neighborhood until the fading Hebrew awnings blended into one another and the graffiti on the walls collapsed into a heap of paint at our feet, and we imprisoned every moment into our phones, refusing to let them out of our retinas. In number 18, a woman boards a bicycle, donning her printed windbreaker with a sigh. In number 24, a man and his son fall off their skateboards, breaking their fall with one arm and clutching their yarmolkes with the other. In number 27, my own father pierces the lens, surrounded by a spectrum of spray paint over a dirty garage door a few blocks over. These are the pieces of our world.

And he, my own father, agreed to trek across the railroad tracks and through the superstore in search of the fragmented reality I haven't found in my bed watching Netflix. He agreed to sift through my inspiration, even in the face of insanity and, let's admit it, 10% colorblindness to his 4. He even managed to keep our dialogue blank and bubbly, like the expensive champagne brands that make everyone seem to laugh. We only argued once, about the appropriate distance to scurry into a six-lane avenue in search of a late bus. And twice, about the photograph emblazoned with a single word printed onto a sheet of old card stock: WOW! (That was the one I liked, and he found too ordinary. Strange. Usually I'm the one who can't see I've already squeezed enough magic out of my wizardly father to paint my name across the side of a building, in memorial of a mystical day.)

Sky With Diamonds

J's hair is an array of camouflage against the urban extravagance, the electricity of autumn bustle; specifically, the tips of her ebony hair went from black to white to blue and ended up every color of the mirror reflected in the shadows of her clothes. The contours of her black sweatshirt, black tights, combat boots look somehow straighter, as though she has sacrificed the youth of costume jewelry with its round edges in favor of a princess cut diamond, chopped away to remove the princess part. She is every bit the modern, artsy city girl. (In the car, she began to sing in Japanese to the skids of drunk drivers on every side of the intersection.)

She should be sunken! Recently, J condemned herself to my old school until college, refusing to accept the cards dealt to her as a brilliant young woman, refusing to take a test that threatened her safety net. After all, if she got into a specialized school, she is convinced she'd crack in a few seconds. If she didn't get in, it would only take one. She should be sunken! The layers of soft feathers cushioning her from her fear are as warm and deceiving as ever, even as the temperature melts into freezing. As Marianne Williamson once said, "Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." There's something trapped inside my best friend, perhaps in a strangled binary, that is clawing at her uvula and gasping for light. There's something inside her that could destroy or save the world with a single chord of her electric guitar, with a single sweep of her charcoal pencil, with a single flip of her feet up and away over her head. She should be sunken! Because if she was sunken, she'd be driven to release those perfect demons and change everything.

Southern Oil

Slice a verdantly green tomato into slices just thick enough to keep the sopping juice off the scarred white of the cutting board. Douse them in flour from a Ziploc bag in an empty drawer, egg wash the color of an Easter bunny, and bread crumbs crunchy like the dust of traditional bones. Toss them in fragrant deli oil and watch the pops of fire escape the wok like birds whamming into glass before bouncing back into their stride. Salt; pepper; devour.

These morsels of contradictions are familiar to Southern tongues accustomed to warmth, butter, and colorblindness on the table, but strangers to city children with cravings for tartare and filet mignon and experimental casarece served thrice-priced. We know only the front, the show, the facade of extravagance over a blank reality. What else could be lost along with an accent?

My father fried them up and laid them on a beautifully pretentious platter. I had five, the brown of dirt but the taste of the earth swallowing my mouth into a cultural void. So sure, I couldn't stand the endless sun, the political foolishness, the religious expectations. I can, however, certainly stand the content reality of those who don't know what they are missing; blessed are the clueless.

Commuters

There is, for every city commuter aboard an exhausted mean of public transport coated in urine and coffee, a person who you've seen every day for as long as you can remember, eavesdropped on with dim ears as they chattered away to their actual buddies while you wish you had something better to waste time at. You could spout out steam about their favorite colors, favorite shirts, romantic lives, best friends, opinions on the mayor... anything, really, is encapsulated or imposed open our fragrant glimpses of their wafting souls. My such fellow is a young boy at my school: purple, his plaid button-down, not applicable, none yet, and independent. Sometimes, I want to fling myself across the car and latch onto his shoulders, guide him through the station and out onto the streets, through exams and intricate essays, confusing maps and catastrophic pop quizzes; I want to make sure he doesn't end up looking at those oblique tracks as an escape for the stress.

I spotted him this afternoon, inadvertently dozing on the graffiti-smothered window a few seconds before our stop. Staring at his forehead, I mouthed fiercely, "Wake up kid, it's gonna be okay. I know those days when you're like a working ant and your brain shrinks and shrinks as your sleeping time shrivels up in the early sun, but it gets better. Stay awake. Stay awake." Suddenly, he popped forward and shook his head out, as if trying to jostle my words out of his head in defiance. But he woke up, and went home.

Creamed

Award-winning caramel ice cream studded with bits of butter cookie that melt in your mouth like ice in hot chamomile tea is the perfect thing to lift your spirits after one of those days when the tears keep dripping from between your lashes but you don't know why or what color of clear they are. (Gold for the heroic tears between skintight suits posing around bulging muscles? Black for the despair-ridden tears of people who've had their souls scooped out, like that ice cream, and devoured by the void? Pink for the pathetic tears of a ditz who can't take the strains that come with applying exactly three coats of eyeliner every morning?) The tears from the sweet cold dessert, dramatic though it may sound, were perfectly colorless, joyful and true.

The suspended test scores dangling just a few finger-stretches out of reach, the high notes of a sea shanty I'm supposed to lead with pounding gusto, and the empty space that dances around me as I move through my space devoid of communication all gushed out of me and I was filled with a profound contentment. Suddenly, it was pointless to drown in anxiety when falling in was only a choice.

Footprints

There were thunder gray taps of soot lining the bathtub like a winter coat, and there were whispery white taps of dust dotting the third floor like snowflakes. It's clear the filthiest versions of my kitten morsels, formerly colored burnt orange and ivory but now a deafening charcoal shade, have invades the pristinely renovated house and laid siege to the cleanliness as much brute/cute force as they can muster. We thought it was coming from a leaky dye on an old futon cover, we thought in was coming from the inside of the floor where inconveniences go to die, and then we thought it was a crevice behind the basement furnace as dirty as J3's jokes. Now, we aren't sure.

There's so much left to learn about this cavernous space, hollow in the absence of bookshelves and our electric piano. There are so many tiny nooks and secrets to wedge between. If we are lucky, before long every hardwood masterpiece, mirrored closet and painted mistake with be snuggled under a coat of fresh footprints, and we'll get sooty and dusty and deafening just to feel the sure exhilaration of using the brand new showerhead.

Mismatch

The pajama drawer of everyone's mirrored bureau, antique wooden chest, and/or plastic Ikea dressër is a hodgepodge of various baggy shirts, college sweatpants, and flannel mistakes. It's the spot where left socks go to hide, and it houses all of the lost thoughts that felt claustrophobic inside your cluttered head. I know I'm not alone in that exasperated feeling that sweeps my body of any remaining stamina when I fling it open only to find that the 1992 tee is moth-eaten and the fleece polka-pants are covered in the omnipresent orange cat fluff. After fifteen tedious hours of frantic character development, exhaustive readings on an Indian emperor no one with a life has time to analyze, and quick meals between musky subway rides along a rickety track, the least karma could do is present me with something halfway decent.

The nightmares of ambiguity always escape from the pajama drawer and haunt with sleep with ALMOST-softs and MAYBE-nonflammables, so close to the pinnacle of comfortwear and yet so far from the catalog images reserved for rich, suburban wives who know how to mix a mimosa. Sometimes I like to fade into the haze, and release the tense obsession with always looking right. And then again, I like to sleep. Good night, everyone. Better blog tomorrow.

Engrained

Why does my devilishly hilarious science teacher, the one who offers Swedish fish on a whim but denies that the orange arrow on the board is in fact orange, have to extend his insanity over the first tests on our permanent high school transcripts? I had to ask him four times before I understood that yes, everything in the textbook was testable even if we didn't go over it in class, and yes, that included the mind-numblingly exhaustive description of the safety precautions taken by most modern skydivers, and yes, each question was worth a minimum of seven points, no partial or extra credit. His smile was vicious and bloodthirsty.

It's enough that the morals and déjà vu have pilfered all the common sense I had left so that I'm always left feeling a bit confused. Now I have to remember the notes I never even took in the first place? It doesn't seem possible that some self-respecting teacher with checked button-downs and glasses - glasses! - would squeeze my dry brain for sustenance while I lie dead from anxiety. It all comes down to the number out of 100, the potential we present for physics in general... Apparently if anyone gets 100 the test was too easy. I guess that would make the end goal for this course chasing our tails until we come just high enough to fall the farthest.

Wiped Clean

Usually, when my computer's battery has trickled to a drought and the screen goes a bright black what hurts your eyes, I plug it into a crusted-over, three prong socket and annihilate the power button with my thumb until the whirring picks up and everything is back, as if revealed form behind a curtain. It doesn't matter. But today, something was missing: My day was completely devoid of pain, sorrow, panic, bright blackness like the dead screen. A nagging feeling enveloped me, and I knew I should just charge the stupid thing, this little silver box that now holds my legacy at school, but there were only a few crackers left on the plate, and they looked lonely against the porcelain. (Then again, to me, crackers always look lonely.) Anyway, as soon as the omnipresent buzz of the motor dimmed and the screen faded away, the familiar catch in my chest and rushing in my head activated. I threw my hands onto the bed, tucked my chin into the folds of my tee, and panted fervently.

The power button seemed colder than usual, and then it took longer than usual to load the start screen. No rainbow wheel, no sliding blue bar along the top of the hinge; just an apple perching in the center of a gray mass. To my horror, after five minutes of processing, the desktop popped up through the center of the virtual nothingness, blank and iconless. The essay I'd worked tirelessly on all day had run away from home. Life as always, then; devastation when I'm left all alone in my pajamas on a Saturday, absolutely devoid.

The Routine

It's always the same color soap in the bathroom when I wash my hands exactly five minutes before our reservation at the closest purveyor of the fancified internal organs that my grandmother craves each day. Then it's always the same confusion about how to get there: The silver car, inherited from Grandma and covered in craters? In the shop. The old, blue padded wheelchair that may or may not have brake broken like bones? In the back. And finally, as always, we decide to escort an 79 year old woman with an entire entourage of Macy's blouses and mid-price crystal and gem necklaces through the city streets on a snazzily red motorized scooter seat.

We arrive at the restaurant and there is tremendous brouhaha over where is the scooter going? Does it fit at the table? Can we park it outside? Where's the key? And I've memorized every answer, encrypted it onto my muscle memory. We slide into old chairs and pore over the same menu that's graced the paper-covered table for at least five years. Me: Beet salad. Smoked gouda macaroni and cheese. Chocolate tart. After the menus go away, the walls come down; pleasantries cower in fear as the traditional politics and awkwardness flood the space. We put up levees and arms in front of our face, but everyone ends up getting yet. But then. like always, we climb back around and into that startling scarlet seat and left the scene of the crime. I love her.

Silver Chain

I have a charm bracelet adorned with figurines of grandeur, one for each production I've partaken in since I discovered that when I step onto a stage, something inside me sparks hot and I melt into my "atman" or essential self. (Thanks for the vocabulary, Mr. P.) There's a dainty silver snowflake for the fifth grade play - I was overwhelmed with the small song I zipped through as "Snow Angel," the coveted number of every blonde, skinny-jean-wearing girl I had become accustomed to, and overtaken for once. There's a cupcake for the failed production I jumped into for a week in North Carolina as we rummaged through my grandmother's disintegrating family portraits and forgotten birthday gifts - I can still recall the way the thrift store's gray cloak felt on my tiny shoulders as I swept through the Southern dust and pretended to live on the city streets. Imagine that.

Currently, the charm bracelet is in a small tupperware with the two newest charms jangling beside it. The box is tucked behind a ruler and an oilcloth in a hodgepodge closet half an hour from here, muffled by the folds of my lost winter jacket, thrown over the whole mess. At some point, my mother will pry apart two links in the chain and slip the memories on. That's when they will cease to be the yesterday and become the once upon a time. Once upon a time, this life will read, there breathed a girl named Chloe. And eventually, she learned how to live.

Eye Baggage

The recommended amount of sleep for adolescents is between ten and eleven hours. Ha. Ha. I'm lucky to nab seven from the clock, hoarding its seconds away in the past like a toddler's old Halloween candy that tastes like rubber. Each morning, a blaring iPiano trill jostles me out of blissful ignorance. I typically set the five minute timer two or three times before hauling my bones from beneath the duvet and stumbling into some jeans and a t-shirt. Still wilting, I wade into the bathroom and attack my hair until it temporarily sits still, and then I produce a purple tube of mascara, a concealer stick, and some waxy lip balm from a box; once my eyelashes are properly extended, teeth brushed, and chapped lips battled to the death, it comes time to cover up the purple circles under my eyes with infinite layers of tan cream until they fade into the already somewhat mystical paleness of my skin.

Haplessly I glide through school, yawning periodically and yearning for the flannel sheets of new home. Occasionally I subtly cover my eyes with my hand to protect the purple from escaping and earning a reputation. And yes, I've heard many a tale of a three a.m. English paper and an all-night search for the perfect image of Haydn, but never noticed anyone else disguising their deficit. In fact, I haven't noticed anyone else's exhaustion at all. Maybe it's all in my head. Or maybe it's all in my dreams.

Devour

On Tuesday nights, when my mother has strapped on dancing shoes and waltzed sweepingly onto a rough-and-tumble gymnasium floor for our favorite weekly spectacle, my father (usually) buys two fillets of summer flounder dusted in breadcrumbs and herbs, a greenly envious zucchini or two and a their savory friends, and on occasion an award-winning brownie spotted with nuts or caramel to tantalize throughout the evening. Today, however, he arrived home with nothing but a heavy bag weighted with folders and files and old newspapers with coffee stains, and quickly prepped a tray of conglomerate cheese, vegetables, and penne. It filled four medium bowls and could have overflowed into a fifth if there hadn't been a bedtime to cut it off.

As I munched my way through the chunks of cauliflower, my health teacher's blonded voice wafted back to me: "At the end of the day, just see if our power nap today helped you feel more rested or not." We were guided through a love meditation focusing on water washing away the tension in our muscles. I was unable to drift into oblivion, eyes pried open by the terror at my audition tomorrow that ventures one whole step too high. But suddenly, my eyelids began to sag like old plastic bags in the hands of an old street woman and all of the pain rushed out of me at once. And they say that my blog is food for thought. Think you've got it backwards there, pal.

Hunger

Since moving into our oversize house that hangs on our shoulders and bags at the seams, our pearly white cat, as pristine as snow before it hits the ground, hit the ground. The ground happened to be suffocated with layers of primordial dust and mysterious blue dye surrounding the tray that holds the potent food I present to him each day. His spirit brother from a camping trip to the attic, our old tom too wide to fit under the dresser without leaving a tail floundering near the floor, remained a lightly toasted golden brown, ooey and gooey and deliciously warm, with one patch of white on his neck. I think our tom is worried about the the little one; he has been disguised as yet another layer of this house, thrown over the original hardwood and forgotten.

They wait at the landing for me as I parade up the stairs bearing ceramic bowls from a discount superstore and metal spoons that melt in my hand, and then they wait at the threshold as I transfer the brown goo from the tin to their mouths. Sharp fangs have nothing to pierce, so they scrape the edge of the bowl, echoing a shriek into my inner ear. As they swallow, they have no reason to think that it is late, for they have slept all day, but I leave the tray and the dye and the cats behind, and I fade into the house, drifting away as though scraped off until translucent. My eyes close and my ears banish the meowing screams to reality as I escape.

A Place In The Choir

"All God's critters got a place in the choir, some sing lower, some sing higher, some sing out loud on the telephone wire, and some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they got now." - Bill Staines

In Ancient Greece, even great philosophers, men of science, antique nerds with clay tablets instead of smart tablets, thought that music could cure disease. I happen to agree with them. A melody has the illiterate ability to penetrate every wall, break down every cancelled childhood heartache, repair the wounds from a stray alcoholic father or imprisoned mother, and jostle the dregs of inspiration back to the surface. Looking around today, as a few miscellaneous people braved the Sunday blues to sing and eat cookies in our newly-painted living room, I saw the pain drain from each's face in a different medium: years of loneliness spilled onto the floor and evaporated into the cacophonous air, the blood from the stabs of memory shards dripped off skin and disappeared, and our little family's anxiety about the small guest list dissolved at the first note of "Fire and Rain."

The cats chimed in for their part, wailing from the upper floors when we hit a trill or triplet, and bumbling through the forest of unfamiliar feet resting on the rug. The fatter one buried his face in the coffee cake and earned an exile by the window until the last grandparent closed the front door, joyfully an hour and a half behind schedule, to everyone's thrill. But as the people and the voices flowed through the house, the cats lost no pain. The only ones who get to shed their tension are the convoluted humans, the ones who know enough to be completely and totally unaware that anything has changed.

Dreamstate

Some aspirations become pickled with age and end up tasting like someone's grandmother's white socks from the 1980s that have turned a peculiar orange color. So we tuck them away in forgotten drawers that shut into the inner folds of a void, and then we instead buy stockings for our corporate dinner parties that no one wanted to go to. Some aspirations remain fresh and crisp in our refrigerator, but braces or a retainer tell us we can't devour them, much as we crave the sense of purpose they offered up. There is the rare aspiration, often the runt of the litter, that presents itself so many times at the end of the hall taunting us that we have no choice but to play tag according to its rules until we win. There is that rare aspiration that grows up.

For me, type 1: fashion design. Needles take too much blood. Type 2: writing. Surrounded by revolutionaries who always find the right words, the desire has been drained from me, leaving only a thin layer of condensation from over the years. Type 3, today: a band. An honest-to-god, people-will-listen band with a dorky name and too many violins. But, today, inserted into my mom's folk band as percussionist (via the cup song), the dreams were thin and worn and easily torn, disintegrating in my hand as I tried to pull them in. "Now," J5 instructed professionally, "just do that second part a little quieter, so it'll go over the strings. Balance. There ya go." I stared up at my mother, expectantly puckering up to her shining flute. "Twice, then the pickup."

My fingers rested precariously on the edge of the blue plastic cup. The hopes of my foot-tapping and soul-searching and song-singing seemed to become outdated, idiotic. But, with obligation one is a slave to their word, and I methodically began to tap and the surface of the cup. Instantly, the rhythm flowed into my hands as though injected by one of those oh-so-dangerous needles, infiltrating my floodgates and taking over my head, tugging at my bones to rock to and fro, and I felt, ever-so-slightly, the pick-up lift me off my feet and rise. Clutching the hand of my dream with one hand and my cup with the other, the three of us laughed and sung and then we grew up.

Old Nights

There was a tradition locked in a dusty and dank tome, pilfered by ever-changing responsibilities and warped by the immobile pillars of change: a dinner made entirely from prepared foods brought home from a world-famous Mediterranean store a few blocks from my old school. Flaky, burn-your-tongue pockets filled with lush mushrooms and spinach; fresh tear-aways of mozzarella tickled with a thin layer of salt; electric and eclectic pickled garlic to throw next to anything, letting potent flavor seep into the plate itself. These foods were, for me, an icon of indulgence, of release on a Friday evening after tensely being whittled away for five days. They became Pavlov's bell, and the power of association lured me into the trap of trying to fit too many bits of filo dough in my mouth at once whenever my old roommate anxiety began to coil around my neck.

I switched schools. We had no need for afternoon excursions downtown. There was no Friday release, instead replaced with a fat social studies textbook that had gorged itself on the bits of my sanity and an orange notebook open to the exact middle. Until, tonight, I arrived home to a suave father smiling as he slid tinfoil boxes into the new fridge for later. I had no problems waiting, so long as I got my fair share.

Familiar Face

There are those in the airtight hallway, filled with students held together by suction and a shared need for the global studies homework, whom are distinct and yet invisible to my eyes, verdant and yet opaque from clarity: there are those in the hallway who have become my hair-color people. This squadron of hodgepodge contemporaries probably have names in the yearbook, but to be they are unlabeled entities that exist within the realm of their unique characteristics - that boy always wearing a dark leather jacket, the girl with the flowing blonde hair and pink backpack. Unlike the people I see out in public, for whom I draw up fantastical possibilities and mathematical probabilities, I leave the stories of my hair-color people unpublished in a desk drawer.

Sometimes I know too much already. Words can dart between so-called private conversations where there is no room to catch them in, and I could tell you exactly what each of my friends thinks of "oh that guy" without thinking thrice. Sometimes the letters are forced in front of my eyes and I involuntarily cast aspersions onto the ones who cannot argue with me about it without being reported to a large man in a blue shirt (occasionally boasting a shiny badge). But it makes me wonder - whose frizzy haired blogging girl am I from day to day? And what do my undefined comrades think of "oh that girl?"

In The Bubble (Makeup for 9/25)

Last year, there was beneath our every plummet-point a loosely woven net to catch us. Though some fell through the gaps, screaming with no precision and all the anguish of young mind in the midst of a war, others clung to each strand of rope and hoisted themselves back onto the solid rock. But also, last year, there was above our every climb a ceiling, a place where the path stopped and the sky went up and there was no in between. You could stand on the very crux of a mountain and reach with both hands, but you would grasp only a bit of stray wind, and perhaps the lone insect. You see, we were provided with make-up work if we were in danger of failing, but the system couldn't contemplate an A+; literally, there were rules preventing it.

And now we are set loose into the wilds of a new walk, on a different island, with different views from every side and no clear compass. We follow the stars, if we can find them, and we look for the sunrise and crane our heads to pinpoint the exact center of the orb on the horizon before it becomes bright and a eyesore. The incline keeps getting steeper, but the road keeps winding up to an untouched place that lures us in with bush berries and praise you can pull right off the vine. The problem is, one step wrong and we will fall to the new net: a variety of angry waves, lapping at the shore and sky and devouring everything they find.

Odd One Young

I understand the ambiguity my dad felt in his footsteps on that first day his second skipped year. A senior at 15; a radical, a genius, a visionary they all called him. He integrated into the excellence washing over him, and as his pencil got shorter, his fingertips grew longer, stretching out into the depths of humanity with only a high standard as armor. My problem is this: I have only a fraction of that time to reach and explode with inches on all sides. I have one period everyday to pry open the souls of a few consistently bored ninth graders baring Spanish to English translation apps and t-shirts they grew into over borrowed summers. Sometimes they do not see me there. Sometimes they say that no sits in the third seat of the third row; they look over my head and call to an unseen comrade out of my league.

Everything was so different last year. I had C2, the vibrantly confident and somewhat tiny fluent Argentinian who surprisingly remembered my name. Even though we hardly conversed in the beginning, he set the precedent for a bright, worthy disciple for our elders to obtain, and they stopped thinking of me as "the frizzy hair seven" and started calling me by name. I had A, and I had A2, and A3, and they blanketed me in experience, advice, and dirty jokes I didn't understand. And now what do I have? I have a too tall cut-up, an underwear-boasting sports fan, and their contemporaries. My fingertips are stunted in their glove.