lovelies,
it would seem I have forgotten to formally redirect you.
I can now be found on wordpress at:
(yes, portableviva = the portable victoria. thanks, jon.)
see you in fifteen seconds or so.
xo
victoria
Who holds on to scraps of someone, honestly believing in moments that have a lifespan of flashbulbs - rationalizing that an instant is better than nothing, better than being gone forever? Me. With gaping, bleeding clawmarks. Am I to die, drama-inflicted, back of my hand pressed to my forehead, fainting in a flourish with all the weight of this hopeless romanticism? Maybe. Maybe I'm just a fucking fool for it all. I'm so caught up in singers and typewriters and a million brilliant moments that have shaped my very soul and dictate the course of my everything, with little-to-no logic, and even less common sense. Perhaps this is just my destiny. Everything is laid out end-to-end, without room for debate, clear as day or a bell or the eye chart at the opthamologist when they finally flip the right lenses into place and you can see every letter, all the way down to the smallest ones on the bottom line.
[tonight I'll burn the lyrics \ 'cause every chorus was your name]
I'm faking all these exits. I want to haul my entire world out onto the front lawn and set it on fire, shave my head and throw my hair into the flames, and watch it all get engulfed, finally free to be as crazy as my insides feel, with that look in my eyes that make perfect strangers ask me whether or not I'm alright. Covered head to toe in tattoos that don't even begin to scratch the surface of taking the pain away, the pain of knowing someone was never even there, something I never even had. I'm missing the idea of a non-existence, that I was blinded temporarily by from the light of those very flashbulbs where it all professed to live. And so I find myself here, missing the feigned contact from the layers of a relationship that never was.
It would seem I fell in love with a mirage. And these days, having gotten hold of it somehow, I wind up disappointed with the pieces I that I do end up finding in my warm, tired hands. Hands that are getting older. Hands that know that none of this is even remotely close to the truth. Hands that remind me you can't grab on to the instant of light from that flashbulb.
[I want to sit you down and talk \ I want to pull back the veils and find out what it is we've done wrong \ I want to turn this thing around \ I want to drink with you all night 'til we both fall down]
Were it November tomorrow, knowing everything I know now, I'd ask the same questions and push the same limits and do it all just like I did, all over again. I'd still hold it all up to the light and say no, I am not a string of Polaroids of ex-girlfriends and things you couldn't show up for and yes, I will pull the threads out of the seams of your reservations and throw them here in a pile on the table for us to sort out - I'd still believe her when she said she loved me. I'd still be crying two blocks from her house in my car that one night, thinking that the whole world could end right then and that it would have been easier... sobbing on the telephone, and how anything would have been easier than the reality of that moment.
I'd do it all again.
[and one day when she least expects, she'll know \ and the words you never spoke \ and the tune you never wrote \ won't write itself, or wait forevermore]
I'd still shine through. I'd still speak up. I would. I do. And some day I'll shake those half-dozen perfect moments that I could describe like they're right behind my eyes from fourteen seconds ago. The night where I stood with her publicly, defiantly, each others' girl in a crowd of straight strangers looking on in disbelief; and the way we made out and steamed up the car windows, and how I cringe like I'm bracing myself for a punch every time since that I've driven past. The moment when she played with the key hanging from my rearview mirror and cursed herself for being such a fool. The night she sat on my lap and asked what would happen if we graduated, and how I told her I was actively not doing all of those things she pined for, and how we started to divide right then. The night she sent me a text from two seats away. The look on her face when she found the note I hid in her notes as she prepared to speak on that panel. The morning she kissed me goodbye outside my car, and the smile she had, and the smile I took with me for the rest of the day.
And the first time she called instead of texting after we'd gone on a date, how different her voice sounded -- and how my heart leaps to my throat and my eyes sting with tears at the very thought of it, and how the hallway looked, and how I could barely wait to see her, and how it's all dissolved now. The night she sat drunk in her armchair and said she loved me, and months later when I learned it was just the booze talking. And the night in my car when she had this face, and how we both knew it couldn't ever be, and how I pushed her to say it out loud, and how neither of us said anything, really. That night, or ever.
[I'm still trying to forget]
Someday, I'll forget. Wiser people than me say it would behoove me to remember.
I'm not quite sure which one of us is right.
Wow. I was a little miffed there, eh? Sigh.
I seem to have embarked on some kind of involuntary / unplanned physical cleanse post-SXSW. I've been getting shakes from Juice-It (Love. Love. Love.) for the last few mornings in an attempt to regulate my body from some whacked out dehydration / food poisoning bout that left me puking on the floor of a venue bathroom like a drunken seventeen year old this past Saturday, and as a result relegated me to a room in the Omni hotel for the last two days of our trip to Austin. It was a nice hotel and all, but the whole thing really sucked balls.
Anyway -- so as a result of all this, I haven't had coffee for like, five days. First out of sheer fear, and then out of I'm not quite sure what but whatever the case, I'm off the juice.
I wish it was the same for getting over girls. Throw up for thirty-six hours. Detox. Get rest. Drink plenty of fluids. Emerge five days later on the up-and-up. But if it were that easy, we'd all just be sane and like, fine. Which would be boring, I suppose. Or something. I don't know. All I know is that I'm still all emotionally entangled and that I've given myself my birthday (mid-May) as a cutoff for all of this, because at that point I will have invested six months of my life, heart, head, and everything into a situation that's leaving me clutching onto ghosts of what might have happened, like two perfect Polaroids in a garage full of useless clutter. You put the Polaroids in a scrapbook and call for a dumpster, you know? You don't move into the garage.
Most everyone I know has been riding this out with me. Some, not so much. But I'm doing the best I can. My patters are so clear it's disgusting -- it's been suggested to me that maybe it's time for some outside assistance to get down to some root causes. We'll see about that.
So much coming up. Including a possible five-minute jaunt to the east coast to catch a few days of tour. But that's still up in the air. Fingers crossed.
Love, fifteen-passenger vans, and double wheatgrass shots,
*Viva.
really? seriously. fuck this, and fuck you, and fuck all these fucking words and if I never speak or type another god damn thing it'll be too soon. I hate this. I hate all these words and these moments piled up and this shit and those moments burned into my head like fucking scars that I'll never erase before you said too much and I didn't know any better.
fuck you.
fuck the notes I left you thrown away, and fuck you for leaning in. and fuck everyone who says things like "this is a learning experience" and "you'll walk away from this stronger" and "look at all these positive things" and yeah, so much -- So. Much. -- of my world is open now, out on the front lawn, my ability to hide down for the count in the last round... so there's little snapshots and milliseconds of gratitude for that, but the rest of it is like a fucking freight train bearing down in my mind every minute of the day and night. the page fills in by itself like a player piano from the instant I wake. the things you shouldn't have done. the things you shouldn't have said. and how I did what any girl in my shoes would do and fuck you for not owning your half of this. fuck. you.
dear all the girls in the world that I haven't met yet, to the woman with the notebooks on her shelves just like me who will look at me the way I looked at her, while she was too busy looking back: please, if you're going to start a fire, show up for it. either burn with me or hold the water for when I can't stand it anymore, I don't care which. but don't light it up and throw me in and then throw the matches away, one by one, in different trashcans and in rivers and in-between a stranger's car seats and out the windows of distant highways, like they do with clothes after a murder so they won't get caught. I'm more than a shoe in a dumpster and a t-shirt flung off the aurora bridge.
and for the love of whatever the fuck is in charge of the universe, don't make a fucking mix tape for me (or for anyone else) if you're not going to wade in past the rough surf. it's not fair. keep it to yourself. be the most epic of your besties. but don't leave it for me, signed with a heart and the beginnings of a promise.
and imaginary girl, if we make it past that rough surf and l-words and the awkwardness of the holding of hands and we swoon to the bands and lay side by side, night after night, don't expect me to not get caught up in you some. don't start any of this with dirty pans on the back burner that you can't bring yourself to clean. and when we make dinner in your kitchen, and cut vegetables and sing songs, and have all those moments starting to pile up on the corners of everything we touch like polaroids in little haphazard stacks -- if you've got those fucking pans sitting there, don't tell me it's my problem that I wished you'd have cleaned them.
god dammit.
it is my problem.
fuck.
I saw that fucking pan from day one, congealed with the remains of a dinner for the girl who came before me, that last dinner of love and hope having you by the fucking throat -- and I pretended it wasn't there. I believed you. you probably even believed yourself. and a smarter girl than me with colder blood in her veins would have seen through those grazings of fingertips and eyes that watched me cross the room and stepped back and said what I wanted to say from the first fucking night -- that you weren't alright and that I should go home. and you wore my shirt and sent pictures and talked about summertime in november and europe and your whole face softened sometimes even when you weren't drunk and you fucking knew. you knew you couldn't do this. and I did too. and at anyone else's house, that dirty pan would have sent me running for the hills, or to help with the cleaning, depending on the context.
somewhere, in some of the literature of alcoholics anonymous, it talks about trusting our instincts -- and (paraphrase, obvs) it gets to like going to the gym, from timid and tepid to a force that is strengthened and relied upon.
I just answered the door. the ups driver asked me how I was doing. I asked him if he really wanted to know. he did. I told him. girls are crazy, and apparently I'm too pretty to be all sad-ed up in a basement apartment on a friday night.
time to change the laundry.
me
and I'll write books on the backs of envelopes and credit card statements
about your face that day
and everything you said about graduating
and how it lit your eyes up, like a child at a ticker-tape parade
and how I wanted to be inside your everything for forever right then
and how I chased that instant for the rest of my life
and never quite got free.
see this? this is your trip. this is me actively not writing you notes, or hiding epic mixes in your messenger bag, or tucking sparkly little nothings into the pockets of your pants. this is me actively not buying you flowers, and actively not missing you. this is me not planning for your return. this is me knowing I'd mean every minute of every song I'd lay out end-to-end for you -- so instead, this is me with my headphones, on my back, on your carpet, volume up. sad for all the ways she might come back. sad for all the ways you haven't left me yet.
this is me asking every time I take your arm, because I need you to tell me you want me to. and this is me caging my heart like a crackpot art project when you say you're falling in love with me, because you aren't all the way here and we both know it. this is me actively not taking your face in my hands when you sit on my lap and ask about how it would be if we graduated. this is me texting a boy the first morning I left your apartment because I thought that there might be something here worth seeing clearly. this is me actively not crying on your bathroom floor because I think you might be someone I could try on for a while.
this is how no one ever looked at me like you \ before you did.
this is me pulling the threads out of the seams of your reservations and throwing them in a pile on the kitchen table to look at. this is not a series of your old reel-to-reels, of polaroids of your past and all the ex-girl collections. this is me. all neckties and wrists and faces and chairs; all movies and train windows and epic chord changes. this is where I make quite sure it hurts, on purpose, so that it all stays real. this is how I've changed \ by not changing at all.
and this, here... sigh. this is you. all big-eyed, gorgeous you. this is your impeccable taste in music, this is your wit and your character and your bravery and your bliss. this is your skin made up of pages upon pages out of notebooks, sorting your life out in black ink at the haymarket. this is all chandeliers, and wintertime, and the sight of you. this is all your busted-up pieces making you whole. this is me writing again.
this is me bearing my once-bloody, gaff-taped heart. wrapped in guitar strings, laden with scars, framed by a fixed lens. this is you making sense to me, and me making sense to you. and so then all of this, all this right now -- this is my truth. and until I tell you,and show you, and sing for you, this is me holding my cards to my chest. but this is still my truth.
editor's note: this is messy. and haphazard. and I might delete it and put something better up tomorrow or something. but at least it's a start.
--
so I kept getting fully and totally bombarded with spam comments to this entry called "I have to write." and so I kept rereading the entry thinking that it was some force of fate or some crap pushing me to see some finite detail and \ or reflect on this portion of my writing \ time in my life \ what have you. and then kristin is all, you know, maybe you have to write, or whatever.
duh. I mean, seriously.
so I haven't been writing. I've been thinking about writing a lot. but not actually writing. it's been a month and a half for both blogs. I can't blame it on the sun. I can't blame it on much. but summer was full and abundant and I didn't want to blog. and then the weather shifted and the busy didn't go away. and now the job that's making me nuts is about to change and fall tour started and then there was a lean-in and whoops! guess it's time to come out of the closet and then every available spare track I was even capable of thinking about having got taken up by six hundred degrees of that.
I suppose I should talk about that a bit. akin to the days when I'd do a full play-by-play of every single show I went to, pages upon pages that today are mere drive-bys. it's a bit anti-climatic, kind of more like a meat thermometer going off. ding! time to take care of this. no drama, no epic discussions with family members. no stickers to buy or forms to fill out or declarations to make. just the simple fact that I've been denying my reality, which has been that I'm attracted to women, and have been for over a decade now, and I've actively done nothing about it. so the day came when it was time to do something about it. actually, to be accurate -- the day came when one of my new-besties was brave enough to lean in. we've been friends since the springtime. I've admired her since we met. kristin was sick one night and a fake-date ensued. and right before everything, she asked me not to laugh.
believe me, there was no laughing. in the good way, I mean.
so cut to like, five weeks out now. there's a Thing. of course, there's a Relationships, since we are all People Relating To Each Other and therefore are all in Relationships With Each Other. but I think... well, it's dating. for sure. it just makes so much sense. she makes so much sense. all of those things I wanted and wrote about and lied to myself to create all those times -- they're actually all present now, and not of my own doing. out of just -- adulthood, and respect, and all of those grown-up things, I'll pull the brake up on the detail front -- but suffice it to say, there's dating and there's Let's See What Happens and it's great. and she's great. the 'we' that's developing, if you can call it that, is great. I'm out. it's awkward. but whatever. it's just time. and when it's time, just like any other facet of growing up or starting something or quitting something -- it's just time. so now it's time. and so that's really all I can say about that right now.
speaking of, I have little to none as far as that goes -- time, I mean. apparently now (as of a half-hour ago) I'm moving my desk on monday. yikes. so here's all these projects I'm not done with coupled with now moving and organizing things and I will likely spend the next 48 hours here getting Ready To Go. monday. days from now. where I was all ready to move on, where I stopped accepting unacceptable behavior and made some tough decisions, and everything fell into place. let go of relationships that aren't working and everything falls into place. now I just have to let go of this raging, incomprehensible level of ADD I've got cracking at work, and let all that fall into place.
and I should probably like, do my dishes or something. my shit's gross. I'm just saying. remember, when I said how kristin said "yeah, I might have a sink full of dishes, but I read a book" or however she put it? on some levels, I'm for sure getting shit done... and it's at the expense of things like dishes. and my floors. and my laundry. but I'm happy, and whole, and full, and prefunking christmas like nobody's business. there will be much cooking and love over at becky & andi's place. and there's parties to throw and shows to get to and beakings to beak and I'm in. I'm yes. I'm all of it, a little bit of everything. exclusive of last night, wherein I somehow managed to miss both jordan catalano In. The. Flesh. and a show that john roderick was doing for a fundraiser. idiot.
good thing I live in the greatest city on earth. there'll be more where all that came from.
till then, no naps, just snacks, and smelly catfood cans in piles on the countertops... ugh.
victoria
I'm not dead yet. I swear.
I don't want to talk about it. but I am going to take a crack at it.
you know. I'm just saying, or whatever.
I know. It's not Wishville, but it's close. Were I more adept in graphic design, I'd beef this whole thing up to say "Welcome to Capitol Hill" with lots of big gay landmarks and stuff. QFC, table 219, a few tattoo shops... maybe that is season six level stuff. Where our heroine is back in the classroom, entrenched in term papers and thirsty for knowledge, has advanced her photographic prowess, and possibly has a real bedroom.
All that just made me realize that I have undoubtedly passed go, collected my $200.00 (and put it into a spreadsheet) and entered season five. Hi. I'm right here. You can eat now.
I just let out a big, contended sigh. Life's alright. (Suicide attempts a few hundred feet from my building notwithstanding.) I finally made a budget, for reals. Yesterday I was face to face with the prospect of attending three (!!!) Wrens shows in Hoboken during the first week of December, as they "retire" their early catalog and get ready to push forth into the newalbumosphere. And so I could go to the shows -- all of them -- on guest list, and stay with my cousin, and the airfare is only like $200.00 round-trip on the redeye both ways to Newark. Piece of cake, right? Right. I mean, I can find the money in my next paycheck.
Then I did my allocations off of next week's paycheck: bills due, recurring expenses, a start on the emergency fund -- and after it was all parsed out I had $421.00 left over. And I looked at it there, staring at me, and thought about it for a minute. Even if that happened every paycheck, the absolute best possible scenario, let's even round it up to $500.00 for the sake of math -- in the course of a year, that's twelve thousand dollars. That's like, a huge chunk of my debt! Like, close to all of it! And I sat there, and remembered hearing Kristin turn down going to shows, saying that she had other priorities even right now (even though said show would indeed be fully life-altering), and -- I just always wondered how she could put it down so easily. Now I know. I have seen endless, epic Wrens sets. I've been pulled on stage during a two-night stand in Chicago to play piano. I've fully lost my shit, covered in sweat, and experienced entire gear shifts in the mechanics of my existence. It would be great to see them again, but it would be even better to be out of debt and able to go see whomever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
Across the top of my budget spreadsheet it says, If you pay off your bills now, you will be able to pay for whatever you want. And it's true. And then it became easy to sacrifice, and to bite into not taking the trip (taking a trip, not taking a trip...). It also became easier suddenly to see a set of goals and an end point. With $400.00 left over on the next few paychecks, my car will be paid off. Done. Then that $300.00 a month will wipe out the next smallest credit card (especially with the extra $400.00 per check) and so on and so forth.
This all came about because (a) I got tired of being broke, (b) the cash thing is working for Kristin, so I tried it; and (c) the preliminary drive-by of a budget in my notebook one morning at the cafe had me sitting there, aghast, going, there is no fucking way I have $800.00 left over every month after bills, expenses, and even allotting for some miscellaneous stuff -- what in the fuck am I doing with my money?
And so it is. The workbook makes calculations and everything. With everything mapped out, five extra hours of overtime is like hitting the lottery.
Lottery. Sheeshus. I meant to write about being in like with my newfound dude-like emotional capabilities and how much fun it is lately to be having all the sex, but I guess I needed to write about that instead. But really -- it's so much fun to be having all the sex. I'll sit here for just a moment: yesterday, or the day before, I'm at Annie's and she goes, "How's Gary?" And I go, "How the fuck would I know, dude?" And then we both practically pissed ourselves laughing. Season five Victoria is a far cry from every other Victoria that's ever been. It's the little things like that that show me the difference between when I think I've got something figured out, and when I really actually believe something and it just figures out itself.
Oh, and the planets have shifted or whatever, PS. I suddenly got very unstuck, and actually found myself in the bathroom yesterday going, this shit isn't going to break me. Fuck that. over a particularly difficult set of tasks my boss had asked me to do. And I feel like that in a bunch of other subsections of my life too -- perpetually blissy, working hard, dealing with some hard shit but going through it all wrapped in this impermeable golden cellophane that keeps all the yuck out.
Sigh again. It's good to be back, you know, after the writer's strike and all.
xo
Viva.
