Hi. It's me. 5 years later.
I am a different woman from the one who wrote last. I am indeed a woman and certainly a girl no more. For one thing, I am a wife. I am also a mother. I have learned to identify myself as such. Still, lately I have a strange yearning- a wistfulness if you will, to be neither. This is not all of the time, I mostly love my life, my family, and my choices, but a strange thing happened the other day. I listened to some music from my past, and I felt those old feelings. I knew again in an instant what it was to be trapped, powerless, free, lonely, unsure, hopeful, insecure, and young, oh so young. I got this strange pang in my chest. Later, I brushed it away. I swept it up and put it in the garbage. No one saw me go back and pull it out later. Now, here I am. I am wondering about this feeling and what it means. I am wondering what I am supposed to do with it. It makes me want to be me. It talks to me. It whispers strange ideas and questions in my ear. "You are still you. You are not dead yet. Would you like to go live your life? Are you feeling the wanderlust? Can you quelch it with a husband and baby?" I don't know the answer to this. When the baby is asleep, sometimes I feel like the old me again. I feel like I am not just someone's mama, her mama, but a kid at the beginning of it all. I'll be honest. It frightens me a little to know that I have made some of those decisions I once looked at with awe, dread, and anticipation all mixed up together. Sometimes I want my body to be something that is just mine- not an impetus or food source. I just want to feel small and sexy again. Sometimes I want my husband to be my boyfriend, and sometimes I just want to be alone in a white gingerbread cottage with pretty tea things and a typewriter. Is this what made my mother run away from us?

Summer on the Lake

As children
my sisters and I spent summers shucking corn on the faded, wooden steps.
We watched moths box furiously in the porch light and
swam across Damariscotta lake to a secret island,
suspended by musty orange life jackets.
The camp was sanctuary.
The linoleum floor made a sound like sticky tape.
From my bed I imagined a stain on the ceiling was a wolf’s head and hid my face.
We slept chilly nights under warm, woolen blankets of innocence.

My father knocked it down.
In it’s place he built “the new and improved camp,” and
I have almost forgiven the insult.
He has described in detail the handpainted tile, the loft upstairs,
the entertainment center and plasma t.v.
Dad calls it home now; he brought pictures last year.
I poured water on the photos in my mind,
and wiped them away.
He encourages us to visit, he has for seven years now,
but I maintain that as long as I do not see it for myself,
the camp is still standing, old, weathered, a worn blue shoe.

As long as I do not see it for myself
the wooden plaque by the door still says RESCH in chipping paint.
Still standing out back is a double-seater outhouse; I’ve never been inside.
There are giant lobster claws, shells cracked and glued and resting on the window ledges,
remnants of a family that was whole
a table covered in newspaper
buttered salted corn and board games.

There are things we hold on to because we have to.

Watching Sunset from the Smokey Mountains

Shades of yellow, orange, pink, and red
fade like line-dried clothing
into blue, purple, and finally grey.
Some feel closer to God at this altitude.
I feel farther away.
The vantage shows all too clearly
the limitations of mortality.

I have been to the Met;
I stood, a statue, before an auburn haired siren
painted by a man so arthritic
his assistant tied the brushes to his hand.

Jealous of his pain,
I later scratched eyes on a canvas
with a dry brush,
I wrote page upon page with an empty pen,
my own hands tied by inferiority.

I climbed today for inspiration, elevation,
for a song, sung in color.
Instead I am mocked by a mud puddle,
not even the painting itself, but the palette;
I can only descend and imitate.

Soft Shelled

Wading on the sandbar
you turn to look at me,
and I am brimming with love for you,
your funny hat,
your sunburned smile,
your childlike clumsiness.

We have come here hunting crabs,
a primal weekend outing.
We don’t cheat with traps,
instead stalk each individually,
a loud splash,
a triumphant yelp,
for every pair of
brilliant blue claws.

“They too, fall in love you know.
Cradling the female under his body,
the male takes her safely in to the grass.
She sheds her protective shell
one last time,
lays on her back, opening her
triangular underbelly,
a secret entrance.
He carries her again until
she hardens and swims away
to saltier waters.”

You said, “They are just ‘animals’.”
I said, “So are we.”

Avoiding your gaze
Searching for answers,
I look often up and to
the left when I lie.

Jack's bum smells terribly. He insists on sitting next to my chair at the computer and releasing gas. I am not British, I just like how British people say "bum" instead of "ass". I am, however, disgusted and may have to leave the room. Jack is my dog, and he is lovable and cute despite the fact that his bum smells like raw sewage. I found him stray right before I bought my house. I was single and lonely, and I thought he would be just the friend I was looking for. Boy, was I ever wrong. Aside from the fact that he has a smelly bum, he has a little pink lipstick that creeps out whenever he is happy, excited, tired, wired, asleep, awake, eating, and sniffing other dog's bums, be they male or female. He also lots of hair, which I knew when I found him, but I didn't realize that I would find it in my shoes, my bed, everything I eat, between my toes, in my mouth, and in my underwear. Since I took him in, he poked out every screen on the front porch with his nose, he has wetted everything I have worn with his nose, and every morning since, he has insisted that I get out of bed...with his nose...touching my nose. I am not very knowledgeable regarding dog anatomy, but I am pretty sure that Jack has springs in his legs because he jumped out the hole he poked in the screen, he jumps over the fence in the back yard whenever I turn my back, he jumped (or fell?) out the window of my car while I was rounding a corner doing 25 miles per hour, and he jumps eye level to me and everyone else that crosses the threshold in to the house. Whenever I try to correct him for jumping, tunneling under the house or eating a perfumed candle he goes absolutely dogpsycho, tucks his bum down, spins in place like a hairly black dreidel and bares his teeth. It is so fucking funny, I can't be mad at him. He wins. Now, disregarding all of his annoying habits, he also requires a lot of care...A LOT of CARE. Okay, so he eats the same food every day without complaint and only drinks water. That's cool, but he is always up my ass...I think if he could crawl up inside and hang out he would. Everywhere I walk, there he is, waiting to be stepped on. Everywhere I go, there he is, waiting at the door to come with. Every night when I lay down to go to bed, he sleeps down on the floor beside and snores, LOUDLY, and runs in place having little doggy fits. Whenever I come home from a place where there is another dog, he sniffs me, he knows, and he is pissed off worse than a jealous boyfriend. His only saving graces are that he can't talk, he is so damn cute, and he makes no attempt to hide the fact that he loves me more than anyone or thing else in the world, excepting only the smell of his own bum. I guess that is good enough for me. I had no idea what I was getting in to. He is not exactly the friend I was looking for, but somehow, the flea ridden, wet nosed, smelly bummed, lipstick showing, tooth baring dreidel found his way in to my heart to become my best friend. So what does that say about me? Perhaps I am not as selective as I thought.

A photo of me.
Acute duality in
Black and full color.

Everyone hates my blue suede shoes but me.

I think I have become the girl I never wanted to be. There is dog hair on everything I own, including my toothbrush, and I actually brush my teeth every night before I go to bed...for way more than two minutes. I floss pretty regularly. I am a closet smoker; I put my cigarette out before I go through my bank's drive through, because I don't want the tellers to know I smoke. When I know my friend Heather is coming over, I hide my cigarettes in the cabinet and chew gum. I am productive on the weekends. I wake up every morning...even when I have an awful hangover. I eat breakfast almost every day...my boyfriend says breakfast is his favorite time to spend with me, not being sweaty and hot in the sack. In fact, he doesn't even know I'm hot in the sack, because we've been dating for two months and we have never had sex. I rarely eat a bag of chips for dinner. Regular meals have made me kind of fat, so I don't wear short shorts or shirts that show my stomach. My back hurts a lot. I always feel the inside of my mouth with my tongue, and my neck with the pads of my fingers. I convince myself that every lump I find is some kind of cancer, and don't just dismiss it as some weird lump, like I did when I was younger. I don't eat fast food. I make my bed. I almost always wear a bra. I don't smoke pot anymore. It doesn't relax me; it winds me up and I end up organizing my closet or alphabetizing my cds until four a.m.. I get upset when I don't take a shit at my regular time of day, and then I am happy to drink prune juice and stay home on a Friday night crapping my brains out and reading. There are no elective courses left for me to take at community college; I have taken every lit course they offer except for one. There are no hot guys for me to moon over in classes anymore, there haven't been for years now. I would feel like a pederast. I have no friends, because I don't like people or their problems; my mom, my dog, and my sisters are my best friends. I only have one birthday left to look forward to, the next one, because my car insurance will decrease. To me, all of these are sure signs of one thing only...that I am getting older. The number one sign that I am aging, is that I can't find time. I can't make time. I have no time. I don't even have time to be writing this; I feel like I should be doing laundry or something...paying bills. Ick. That first sentence wasn't true. It's not that I don't like who I've become, it's that I was so sure like everyone else in the world that I'd be young forever. Isn't it funny that we spend the first twenty or so years of our lives in a hurry to grow up, and whatever else we are blessedwith trying to stay young? Maybe I am being dramatic. In fact, I am most definitely a complete drama queen, always have been. At least that much hasn't changed.
I promised myself on a sunny spring afternoon in Maine when I was sixteen that I would never be too old to lay in a field eating salad out of a large bowl and imagining shapes in the clouds while wearing a large and perhaps unattractive hat. I would do that tomorrow. I will do that tomorrow, if I can find the time.

Fuck everyone who has told me that time by myself will be good for me. Being single is the pits. Fuck my best friend for tricking me in to getting in to her car at the Seminole Casino. If I want to drink and gamble away 53+ hours of work I am going to do it, damn it. Fuck every dork who has not had the balls to ask me out, and fuck every dork that has. Fuck men who try to be submissive to me. . . don't show any signs of weakness, don't look me directly in the eye, I will eat you alive. Fuck my faggot ex boyfriend for not haveing the balls to call me, but having the balls to disturb my sleep with "I love you" text messages at three o'clock in the morning, five months after we've broken up. Fuck text messages, they are for pussies. Fuck Florida for having such an abundance of twenty something scholar-boys with thick glasses, thick lines and thin wrists. Fuck Florida for having an abundance of greek muscle-tee-men with shaved arms and figaro chains. Fuck my boss for being a big fat smelly cheap Greek bastard. Fuck me for pursuing scumbags, and playing hard to get with all the nice boys. Fuck me for living in Florida in the first place. Fuck my boss again for farting all of the time behind the take-out counter so's I have to mist his ass with the freesia body spray I keep next to the cash register. Seriously. Fuck you for reading this. Who are you anyway? Fuck me for writing it. What do you want? My other name is Lionel Dobie.

Ojala que mis problemas no son commonplace, pero los son. Mi vida, in fact, is commonplace. Mis suenos, in fact, are commonplace. I am going to be twenty four in doz mezes y I feel like I haven't done shit. I feel like a cog in the wheel. Mi hermana mayor dime " no sabes nada sobre el mundo", Los mexicanos a Tony's pregunta me "Tienes miedo?" y la verdad es YES. I have fear. I am afraid of being boring. I am afraid of spending the rest of my life abburido con mi mente. I am about to buy a house with my sister. I am about to get a dog. These things should be exciting but they really just bore me a little also. Maybe, if I was about to buy an igloo, I could be excitado. Maybe, if my dog was really a Belizian Mountain Cow, I could feed him grasshopper ice cream while we layed on the floor and watched The Big Lebowski on my birthday. I know I am supposed to be excitado sobre looking at paint chips but I am not. It feels phony to me. I feel like I was meant for something besides. I know everyone feels that way, but I am not hablando sobre el fantasia que yo soy jesus en forma feminina. I am simply considering the possibilities. I may never have any dinero. I may never meet my principe azul. I may never really know how to habla espanol. Maybe it is all and wholly necessary to pretend. To invent my own circumstances. Maybe I had some of you gringo maricones going for a moment thinking I was a princesa latina. Now if I could only creo yo mismo.

Everywhere I go I am assaulted by sensationalist bullshit. I turn on the t.v.; some repressed homosexual in a uniform is asking America to be prepared for terrorist attack. What fucking terrorist attack? There has been no major attack on the U.S. since we all know when, and even then, canned goods and bottled water would not have kept anyone alive. I flip to the news; news really doesn't exist anymore. All I see and hear on any news station is some horrific story of a father who killed his own children or a little girl abducted and found dead. This is not national news. This is community news. This is the time for the friends and family of the victims to pull together and support them through hard times. There is nothing I can do for a distraught mother in Texas from my easy chair in Florida. The only thing I can do is voice my disgust at these pseudo "news broadcasts" and hope that others will agree and speak up too. If everyone who has ever vomited or cried over a broadcast that was not really news stops watching, perhaps we can discourage stations from airing this bullshit, and as a matter of course, help keep the video camera out of a greiving parent's face.
I went to the post office to buy stamps today. The sign on the wall adveritsing postage that benefits breast cancer research said "These days even your stamp choice may be a matter of life or death." Fear tactics are even being used to sell shit that you would buy anyway. Maybe it is just for fun. It appears the old and faithful "guilt marketing" method has fallen by the wayside. People have become hardened to the suffering of others by watching all of those fat cow Sally Struthers feed the children commercials. "What can I really do?" They ask themselves as they wave off a derelict begging for a buck fifty.
I'll tell you what you can do, you can not be too stingy to give some smelly, dirty, drug addicted loser your pocket change. O.k., so he is not really gonna use it for a bus ride home. That lie is on his shoulders, not yours. You can not support ridiculous sensationalist television programs or stations. It is true, you really can get all the news you need from the "Daily Show with Jon Stewart", and even really scary world news is relayed in the form of a knock-knock joke. You can not buy shit because you are being frightened into it, instead, stick with tradition and buy something only when you are guilted in to it by pictures of kids with dirty faces and Air Jordan high tops (Those are so ten years ago. Those poor children are not only starved for food, but fashion starved as well).