092908

facts writing fiction
the ending is a cop-out

---

Everything has just been building up. It’s too much, too much. My mind is racing racing racing and there’s nothing I can do to slow down I’m past the end and I just keep running running running. It’s too built up, too too built up and I can’t sleep, no time for sleep, I can’t relax, there’s no time for that, and I just want to rest but there is just no. Time. To. Stop. I can’t stop.

The first thing on my endless to-do list. I don’t understand why I volunteer to be involved with everything, be a part of everything, help goddamn everyone. I have to make cookies for my mom’s friends tonight but there’s So. Much. Nonstop. Maybe if I get this first thing, this one thing, done maybe the rest will come together on its own and I can stop. Relax. Stop. Relax. Calm down. Stop. I could stop.

The oven clicks at three-fifty.

It feels like everything has come onto me at once. School sports work family friends school sports work friends school work work school family friends work school family. And that’s just the beginning.

Whisking the flour, baking soda, and salt together ensures even leavening. This means that the cookie will rise correctly, that it won’t be lumpy and misshapen. The flour is the base for the cookie’s construction.

Sometimes I don’t think I can even do it anymore. I don’t even get a chance to breathe, some nights. Every Tuesday. Thursday. Wednesday. Sunday. Saturday. Friday. I take one breath Monday night and delve into the week again, never stopping resting sleeping breaking.

Cream the softened butter with the sugars. The creaming, all that mashing and mixing with my trusty rubber spatula, causes the sugar crystals to form air pockets, to make a softer cookie. The fats stop the gluten in the flour from forming. The sugar will melt and spread out the cookie.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a way to stop the madness, the chaos, the disgusting calendar on the wall, drowning in red pen.

If the butter is too soft, if it’s a liquid, the cookies won’t come out right.

If the butter is too hard, the creaming process won’t work out well.

If I don’t have time to breathe, my mind won’t work out well.

If I don’t have time to think, my life won’t work out well.

Add the eggs to the fats and the sugars. The yolks work to emulsify the finished dough for even texture. The whites’ proteins coagulate and contribute to the cookie’s structure.

Structure. I’ve got too much structure. I need less flour in my life.

A dash of vanilla for flavor.

I need more flavor in my life. While it adds a pleasant vanilla taste, vanilla extract itself is ninety-some percent alcohol; it has a terribly foul flavor and doesn’t taste good on its own.

Fold one third of the flour mixture at a time into the sugar mixture. Folding keeps the air in the dough. The egg and the gluten further protect the air pockets, for a fluffier cookie. If you stir the dough too much, the pockets will burst and the dough will become tough. The finished cookie will expose the mistake.

Am I stirring my dough too much?

All my work will be for nothing.

Stir in the chocolate chips. American cookies need to be bursting with carbohydrates, cholesterol, high fructose corn syrup, and chocolaty morsels in every bite.

I need more time to enjoy those morsels, those chocolaty morsels. I don’t think my cookies are even made with love; there’s just no time for love. Flavor and love are not totally interchangeable.

Put the dough onto greased pans in teaspoon-sized balls. Bake for ten to twelve minutes.

Ten to twelve minutes to rest stop relax break. Break. Break. I can’t break. But I can stop. It’s possible to stop, because now there’s nothing to do to the cookies. For ten whole minutes. Ten to twelve long minutes to stop. I’ve stopped and nothing bad has happened. I’m just sitting here, I’m resting, and the walls aren’t crumbling around me. There’s a slim chance I’m beginning to relax, but my mind doesn’t know where to genuinely start when it comes to that. Resting, stopping they come first.

If I can’t breathe,

If I can’t think,

I’m not truly functioning.

Maybe I need to please myself before I try to make everyone else happy.

Maybe it’s not really up to me to make everyone else happy.

Maybe everyone else makes him or herself happy first and I don’t even realize it.

Maybe I should

Cut

Down.

Cool

Down.

Cool down.

Cool down.

Cool down.

The cookies are coming out of the oven.

They need to

Cool down.

I have to wait for them to cool before I can write them off. Declare them finished. It feels so unusual to have time to think relax stop.

Have I broken?

No, the cookies aren’t cool yet.

All my activities responsibilities, they’re not for me. They’re all for someone else.

Like these cookies.

I need to quit. This isn’t for me. It’s tearing me apart.

School work friends family sports.

I hate sports. My mom said I needed scholarships. My dad said he’d be proud.

Take one batch out, put another batch in.

My sister was such a good student. I don’t want to let anyone down.

The oven is still radiating heat.

I hate my job. My friends work and my parents always complained about how they started working when they were years younger than I was.

I can’t take the heat, but I can’t get out of the kitchen.

No.

I’m starting over. I’m getting out of the kitchen.

The cookies are wrapped and ready to go.

My priorities are wrapped up and ready to go. I’ve got new priorities, ones where my wants and needs and concerns are important, too. I will do things for myself now.

Less hours at an easier job.

I can sleep.

One sport that I actually enjoy.

I can breathe.

Spending time with my friends and family when I want to.

I can stop.

I can run and jump and play and relax.

No more shit I can’t take I can’t handle I can’t stand. First thing tomorrow, I’m dropping out of all the superfluous, exhausting activities that I’ve grown to hate. I’ll tie up any loose ends, finishing up my remaining commitments. After that, I’m through.

I quit.

I break.

I’m done.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

093008

when I was with the beardy redhead

---

One two three four. Two two three four. Three two three four.

Your heart doesn’t skip a beat.

Your stomach is smooth and soft, thick with whatever food we ate for dinner. Sad I already forgot what it was. It’s not important.

I’ve felt the hair leading down down down hundreds of times before, but my hands never grow tired of it. It matches your bushy eyebrows, and not the fire on your head, or in your pants.

100208

I wrote this a little over two years ago, but I don't remember ever writing this.

---

Her eyes bulged out of her head, like she was running on amphetamines.

I envied her.

Before tonight, I never took Carly for a drive, other than for her visits to the veterinarian. Though short, the car rides in the tacky, teal and lavender crate made her nervous. I understand her fear of the car, being enclosed in a small space with bars and few openings, crashing around with every bump in the road without warning. Arriving to a small, sterile room in a building, noisy with restless canines, where giants with cold hands remove your private bits; that’s a bit unsettling, too.

This time would be different. No rocky, plastic prison, no powder blue walls meeting wall-to-wall white tiles tonight. I want her to enjoy the ride and really see her surroundings.

Being a house cat doesn’t sound like much fun in the long run. You don’t really get out much. Make that “never.”

My baby deserves to see the world she lives in.

She was completely taken aback when the car started, lurching as I shifted into D, the car’s first movements in staccato from years of abuse from my older brother. Without front claws (a result of the antiseptic facility she had grown to dread), it’s her hind claws’ responsibility to keep her upright in the passenger seat. After a few minutes, she found herself struggling less to stay upright and began to explore the interior of her mechanical bull.

At night, the streets are transformed. What was once a little sidewalk alongside a sea of little shops and little houses inhabited by little people is now made bigger, bigger than life, aglow with the light of the towering street lamps dotting the roads. In the daytime, a tree may have been mistaken for something ordinary, but in the dark of the night, it is bestialized: the wind through the branches sways them violently, like the thin arms of some rare, angry demon.

I never really thought about it before, the complete awesomeness of the roads at night, even in my own neighborhood. It was something I experienced everyday, nothing of interest or anything worth a second glance, a second thought. Not anymore. But to Carly, this was all brand new, something she had not seen before. She was making a revolutionary journey through something she had never experienced, not in her eleven long years on the inside.

It’s been a while since I’ve sought out and experienced something completely new that captivated me in this way. Maybe I haven’t had time, or maybe I’m just not interested. I can’t even begin to imagine what Carly sees and feels and smells and tastes as she jumps around the inside of the car, anxiously taking in all she can from the passenger seat, passenger floor, back seat, floor mats, and under my feet, dangerously close to the pedals.

At one point, she stops to peer out the back window, wide-eyed and animated. What was my first car ride like? There’s no way that I could have been so aware, so keyed-in on my surroundings. I envied her then, in that her age gave her more insight, more understanding in what was going on around her.

I envied her for more than that. I can’t even remember the last time I felt so exhilarated with a new experience. When was the last time my eyes bulged out of my head like I was on amphetamines? I’ve grown up feeling accustomed to everything. Even when I was very young, and I was still doing things for the first time, I was too young to appreciate the moment. As we grow older, everything is done out of habit, something we learned to do back before we can remember. We can’t remember how we learned to do this or that or what it was like the first time we did … whatever. The human brain remembers things best when an emotional connection is made, and if we can’t remember, we must not have had an emotional experience that first time, and we’ve got no chance after that. If we weren’t emotionally stimulated when we were very young, is it just human nature to be unaffected by new things?

I’ll jump on the bandwagon and blame society.

We live in the MTV generation, completely jaded and immune to any genuine feelings relating to the real world, the world beyond our television and computer screens.

Carly has never been much for television. She can’t stand it if anyone in the family spends too much time in front of the computer, processing our seemingly-important businesses, when we could be showering her, a living, breathing being, with love and attention.

I was so completely captivated by Carly’s enthusiasm that I found myself having difficult keeping my eyes on the road. Suddenly, I became more aware of the interior of my car than I had ever before. The leather seats were light and smooth to the touch. The blue, pine tree-shaped air freshener, long since lost its “new car” smell, seemed to emanate its cool fragrance once more, not that it had ever actually smelled like “new car.” Even though I had just cleaned out the car a few weeks before, tattered leaves lay scattered across and under the floor mats once again and I made a mental note to vacuum again soon.

Carly’s zealous obsession for the city outside the lightly tinted windows influenced me to roll down her window a few inches. I stopped it at halfway; I wouldn’t want her to get too curious and jump out to explore more. I just can’t risk losing the one who’s always there for me, the one who really matters to me. I’m pathetic, but I love her. She’s my outlet for affection.

Getting close to home, I turned off onto our street and the bright lights of High Street faded behind us as I drove twenty-two to a stop sign. Carly, unprepared for the slow but sudden stop, pitched forward and fell to the front edge of her seat, looking obviously annoyed.

Just like that, the captivating feeling was gone. Her interest in the car ride disappeared just as quickly as it had come.

In an attempt to persuade myself that she could still enjoy life in a way I never again could, I took her for another ride two days later. Carly acted as if that magnificent evening had never happened, but not in the way I would have liked. She was on edge and panicky for the entirety of the short ride to and from the library. Carly has never been a lap cat, so it came as surprise to have her crouched on my thigh, clutching it as if her life depended on it. With every little bounce of the car, her sharp nails bit into me angrily, which only added to the frustration of turning, as her chunky body blocked my arms from the wheel.

I wish there was some way we could better emotionally invest ourselves in new events and encounters so that they become unforgettable. The night I drove the streets with my baby girl was beautiful, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that, like everything else in my life, I’ll never be able to go through with such excitement again.

What a let down.

tell me about your proudest moment! as in, the moment in which you were most proud of yourself.

That's a good one! If you haven't answered already, I am totally asking back, haha.

I really don't know. I was an EPP kid in elementary school so people always told me how smart I was so I've never been particularly proud of grades, for example, just arrogant to people (which I am not proud of). I was pretty proud of myself for moving back to Seattle alone, but maybe equally ashamed and embarrassed when I came back here.

Ask me, tell me anything.

021510

I wasn't happy there and I'm not happy here so I'm looking for somewhere else to go. Oh, of course, of course that means I'm running from something. As if, if I could only identify the unidentifiable plague then I would suddenly grab that happiness that has eluded me for so long. Like that search is so easy, like I could just click on my happiness any time I wanted and that I'm just choosing to be lonely and miserable. If I'd just give up the fight to find some place to make me happy, if I'd just settle for whatever's convenient, settle for less, yeah, then I'd be happy. Yeah, obviously that's how life works, it's just and fair and perfect. Maybe it is and I just can't see it, but it's not.

020910.2

Transcribed from my typewriter. There'll be some overlap from the last one.

---

Have you ever cried so hard your teeth hurt?

I can’t believe she’s gone and we didn’t get a real goodbye. I felt sick this morning, taking pictures of her before we went to the vet, because I felt perverted and wrong to acy as if we would never see her again. Maybe I was just thinking about taking final pictures of her with two eyes, but I can’t remember. Maybe somehow I knew this would happen. I think she knew.

She slept right by my pillow all night, purring away like a love-crazed maniac. The happiest cat in the world, I thought. She woke me up exactly one minute before my alarm was supposed to go off to wake up and take her to the vet by rubbing her head against mine. I don’t think she’s ever done that before. And it wasn’t just once either. As I came around, I remember I kept telling her, today’s the day, you’ll be okay, I love you so much, and she kept running her head along the back of my own, meowing cheerfully. Maybe she knew and was just ready to go.

I really wish she could have waited around for us, so I could have hugged her at tight as I could. I don’t know if that would have been any easier than what happened, though. I don’t know if we would have taken that pain any better. Maybe she knew that, too.

My whole body aches for her. I found myself freshly sobbing when I realized I don’t have any reason to leave my door open a crack anymore. I don’t have to look around the floor when I’m walking through the dark hallway upstairs. And this is the worst I’ve got. She was the most wonderful friend I could ever have. She was perfect. I loved how vocal she was and I loved her, dandruff and all. That cat could do no wrong, as far as I was concerned. Icky can get on my nerves any day and when I’m in a bad mood, he only makes things worse. I would come up to my bedroom, find my best buddy, and I would love on her until I felt better. It helped when she loved me back so much.

I truly believe that she loved me just as much as I loved her, if not more. And maybe that’s why she chose to spare me and Kyle of having to stand watch while she died under our hands. I just wish she weren’t so wise, doing what was best for us. Either way, death was what was best for her, and that’s all I ever wanted.

I’m glad she could die happy and in no pain. That much is definite. She had a great life and a loving home and plenty of her favorite Meow Mix and head scratchers.

Fuck, I love that cat more than anything I can think of. I can’t think of a single thing that could come even close to rivaling her. She wasn’t just part of my family, she was the most important part of my family.

She was so cloe to her birthday, too. All we wanted was to give her the best birthday of her life, but instead she’ll have the best birthday of her afterlife and Kyle and I are left below to celebrate without her. When she was born, I was just turning six years old.

She was all I had. What now? I hate feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in spite of this, but goddamn, I missed her earlier when I thought she was for just a few hours. I don’t know how I’m going to handle her being gone everyday for the rest of my life.

I can still feel the residue of her fur against my fingertips from holding her at the vet’s office. Her body was so heavy, as if her soul had a negative weight. She was so limp in my arms and collapsed onto my forearm, as if sitting on the arm of a couch and not a person. If I didn’t look at her face, she looked just like my baby girl that I’ve loved so intensely all these years. I could just pet her and pet her and pet her and I could almost feel her purring beneath my hands, almost see her breathing slowly in her eternal sleep.

The people at our veterinarian are so kind. They made a little plaster imprint of her paw for us to take home. Mom suggested we put it in her garden in spring, but god, I don’t want to do that. I never go out to that garden and I want to be reminded of the cat I loved everyday, reminded how much she loved me, too.

Petting her empty body there in the sterile surgery room, looking down at my hands, all I could see was how red and raw and torn apart they were. It seemed as though every one of my knuckles opened up and started bleeding all at the same time. The letters on my fingers red BIRTHDAY but I wasn’t feeling much like celebrating anymore. I wish I had changed it before she died, to something more like ILOVEHER or THANKYOU or CARLYCAT or anything except fucking BIRTHDAY. The last thing I want to do is reflect on my birthday and celebrate.

Maybe I should have seen the signs. She had been using my suitcase to help get onto my bed since I brought it home. Kyle said her eye had been swollen for a couple of weeks before I moved back. I had noticed the other day that her jaw looked lopsided. I had given her wet food last night with her dry food and she hardly ate any of it, a major rarity for her. I don’t know if that means the tumor had started to conflict with her eating or if she just didn’t feel hungry anymore, awaiting the end.

Really, I know I can’t blame myself and I need to stay positive for Kyle so that he doesn’t blame himself either. There was nothing we really could have done. Even if we had gotten the eye out earlier, there was a chance that we’d never have known about the mouth tumor until it was too late for that, too.

I just want to hear her talk to me at night, in the morning, when I come home from class. I just want to be with her always. I don’t know what I can do for her now that we’re on opposite sides of a world.

020910.1

This was supposed to be an English paper but I couldn't think about anything else when I found out she had to be put down. And I was actually in the middle of writing this when she died. If the timeline seems off, it's because it's real time.

My best friend died one day before her 13th birthday.

---

My mom looks at me, her best attempt at sympathy in her eyes, and says “It’s okay to be sad; she’s part of your family.” Hot angry rushed into my head and I wanted to scream at her, tell her “No, she’s the most important part of my family.” That cat means the world to me and now, I have to do the right thing and help her end her own life. Thirteen years of being my best friend, my confidant, my sister, my everything, is all about to swept away by a son of a bitch tumor.

That fucker. We had everything worked out. When the vet found the cancer in her eye last week, my brother and I broke. But that was a problem that half my savings could fix. Carly was to get an ennucluation, her eye surgically removed before the cancerous scoundrel could slip into her brain. Once she was put under anesthetics, the veterinarian found that wicked monster, only too late. It was growing on both sides of her teeth, she called to tell me, and surgery could help with nothing.

Oh, cruel world. Oh, cruel fate. I could bitch and moan about how everything bad happens to me, but it doesn’t. This is happening to her, not to me. I just have to live with it. But no, now we’re straying from the point. The point is, I love this cat more than anything in the world and now, happy as she is, she’s going to die in a few days whether or not she realizes it.

Carly is the best cat I could have ever wanted. People say one of the things they love about dogs is how they’ll come to greet you at the door when you come home, as if cats can’t do that. Carly was one of the most talkative cats I’ve ever known. She could gab for hours, telling me all about the latest gossip of the dust bunnies under my bookshelf or what dumb thing the dog did today. That cat would follow me all over the house, even if I was running up and down stairs. As she grew older, she may not have been right on my tail, but she always managed to catch up for a chat or just to rub her head against my head, purring so hard her whole body shook.

Cats are far more affectionate than the average dog-lover gives them credit for. I could see it in her eyes, how much that cat loved me back. Animal experts say that cats rub their heads on things so that the glands in their cheeks will rub their scent off, to claim something as their own. Carly has claimed me hundreds of thousands of times, meowing and purring up a storm, leaving no survivors in wake of her love. She looks out for me, too, even acting as my alarm clock in the morning or telling me when to go to bed so we can sleep side by side.

Some people think that a good cat has to be a lap cat, but I disagree. A lap cat isn’t necessarily a better cat, and Carly was only a lap cat for me. For anyone else, she would fuss and squirm if they tried to hold her and escape to the floor, darting around the nearest corner. But for me, she would sit for what felt like ages, her thick body weighing down my arms to the point that my arm would shake under her furry mass. I couldn’t take that away from her, though. She would just settle herself in, circling my thigh before dropping down to pulse her tiny, quiet paws against my leg before closing her eyes, purring like a racecar ready to explode from the starting line. As soon as I would go to pet her, she would right herself, immediately alert and anxious for attention, returning to her non-lap cat façade.

Even at the ripe old age of thirteen, Carly still loves to play. Christmas is her favorite time of year, because her favorite spectator sport is in season: wrapping presents. Carly is the ultimate sucker for curly ribbons and the sweet, crisp crunch the paper makes when crumpled by her unrelenting paws. Wrapping a present becomes a joyous challenge, trying to convince her not to sit on the roll or tear all of the bows off the packages. Under the tree, some gifts have even been opened preemptively, her fervor for the wrapping materials is so great.

This is the part where my writing is interrupted by the faint, distant vibrating of a telephone.

At first, she woke from the anesthesia just fine, the vet tells me. But then her face went blue and, when put on oxygen, she seemed to recover up until the point when her heart abruptly stopped and the doctors couldn’t revive her. She was gone before we could even pick her up to give her the best birthday ever before her euthanasia.

Have you ever cried so hard your teeth hurt?

Maybe this was just another way Carly was the best pet, as if she knew her time was coming to an end and she didn’t want to put me and my brother through the pain of having her die by our hands. The vet told me later, as my family stood around my cat’s limp body in the cold operating room, that she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Carly had been listening to our phone conversation, hearing the sad indecision in the quivering of my voice. She made the tough choice for us, when maybe we wouldn’t have been able to. Stranger things have happened in that hospital, the vet mused.

Fresh tears stung my exhausted face when I realized I no longer had to leave my bedroom door open a crack. I don’t have to walk as carefully in the upstairs hallway at night, trying to avoid kicking my furry roommate. I don’t have to worry anymore about waking her up in the middle of the night with my tossing and turning, but I wish I did.

020410

I've relocated my old schoolwork blogs into new blogs under my same name. Trying to collect some of my scribbles here now. They'll still go to Xanga only I won't do much other journals here. Aside from this, I suppose. Ha. Oh, Xanga.

020210

A likely story. as real as any other lie you or I have ever told each other. exchanging fake secrets in the dark. Even though I knew it wasn't the truth, I still choked it down, let it pass, because you and I both know I don't like confrontation, but neither do you so it goes without saying.

I guess I should have been mature and gotten angry when it made sense to, when we were living in the present instead of looking to the past. How productive, to spend all your time dwelling on nostalgia but not learning a goddamn thing from your mistakes. What purpose does that serve? Do you take comfort in knowing you've fucked up like this before and went through this pain before and survived this bullshit before?

When you know how the story ends, you then have the power to change it, fix it, make it better. We both knew this would only come back to torture us later, but that didn't stop me from saying okay and letting you go to a family party we both knew didn't exist.

012710

I'm sitting in class thinking about how her voice doesn't suit her well. how she isn't sitting correctly, how she doesn't look the way she should. She's not who I had created her to be, born from that flash of creative energy in the side of my brain not devoted to calculations, whichever one that is. I can never keep them straight, the left or right, right or wrong.

Fucking Ray Bradbury syndrome, his characters manifest themselves and talk to him, recount to him their stories of their sci-fi adventures in the future or a past that never existed. The man was a lunatic, literary genius or not, and I like to maintain that I still create my own stories and characters, but there she is.

010610

To add to the things people do that annoy me - self-proclaimed "shopaholics." What the fuck is "shopahol." anyway? These women and overly self-conscious men make me sick, running up ridiculous debts and ruining their families' lives with no restraint. The American dream, to own everything you can see, everything you can get your greasy fast-food hands around. And like I'm so special, so holier than thou, so punk rock to say these words and feel this way. Baby, I'm an anarchist, and my anarchy comes in the form of saving instead of spending, debit instead of credit. I am part of the anti-American dream counterculture, those of us who don't give a goddamn about designer labels and how many paychecks you dropped on a wad of fabric or metal. We shop thrift, we shop thrifty and even then it's usually out of necessity and not some perverted I-gotta-have-it syndrome. Yes, I spend occasionally and yes, I own things I don't need to survive, but you and I don't share your blatant disregard for other people, for maintaining your dignity over your Hollywood-propagated image that makes you so special just like so many millions others of you. You and I will never be the same because I refuse to lower myself to the level of your corporate media-driven mold. I can respect myself without your material bullshit because I don't have shit to prove to anyone.