the game of chicken

Thursday there was a text, another observation, tidy and perfunctory, transportive. I stood on that corner once, just recently, so I went back to that day, when I waited for him to pick me up to drive me to the place he didn't want me to wander around, and I tried to remember if it smelled like anything that day.

It was just beginning to rain and the sky had that heavy humid iron smell and the rain drops were bigger and landed with a heavy splat! on my skin and t-shirt. And in my memory that is all I can bring back, is the smell of the rain in the summer, mixed with a thousand beakers of humidity and sucking blood out of a wound in a finger.

And so thoroughly did he move me, inspire me, impress me that there around me the walls began a quick crumble, the rocks began to fall in great heavy clumps, I turned and it was descending, like a building being demolished by bombs, like the building had knees that didn't exist before and it cracked in the middle and fell.

Yet still, I hesitated, still I let the bitterness of what's past swallow me and demand my silence, which I gave without struggle.

Then she intervened and suggested the invitation. I am so thoroughly repelled by them in general and don't consider the random texter a prospect (some loser I had the good sense to delete a while ago, um, yeah, how exciting?); I hadn't considered inviting him. So I did, just to see what the answer would be, to see if I could flush out the clues to end the mystery and I referenced his other half (the guitar he plays so well) so that if it is not the singer that is randomly texting me, they would immediately object this reference to an instrument they do not play.

I got nothing. Not a no, not a yes, not a word for a full day, nothing.

Of course, there is a worry that maybe it is not the singer and some random stranger who I once knew will wander into my home tomorrow night and I will have a choice to make about this person I hadn't considered before and hoped to never see again.

Or no one will show up and the bluff will be called, and then it will be hard to admit to not being the fool.

update: 8/2 no one showed...so, the mystery continues...

a memory flashback

Skinny TMNT?!

the view

Walking along the lakefront with Dan!

home run

I felt the shyness bubble up inside me and then let it burst and asked her some questions and we started talking and it was like we've known each other for a long time already and it confirmed what I have discovered and begun to realize that there's just a certain kind of person who is my type, the genuine, kind, lively, warm and fuzzy person (even though I wouldn't necessarily count myself among their ranks) and she was for me.

There are lots of people who are not for me. But her, with her wild mane of curly hair, which I demanded a detailed description of her regimen from start to finish, she is for me. We had such a quick and easy connection that I was already inviting myself into her world and she was tickled by the invitation. We exchanged promises of Barbeques, margaritas, and art gallery visits.

She had a big deep throaty laugh. She is a smart person. And she likes to read. And she was worried about my wandering off during the movie. I assured her that I was just uncomfortable, as I put it, "I'm a giant person with big limbs and I can't be contained in one small tiny area...!" It's been rare that I meet someone I feel an instant connection with, but lately it makes me happy that it is maybe not as rare as it used to be.

I seem to be going through a new cycle of friendships, where a lot of the friends I've had for the last three years I've outgrown. They were all very good friends and I love them still, but it's obvious and apparent to me that I just need something different in my life than what we had. I've noticed that a lot of the newer friends in my life are people who want to do something, be active, walk around, go somewhere, and that is the opposite of the crowd I've been in for the last three years, good great people who are perfectly happy to pass hours upon hours at a table in a bar talking about nothing (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it's summertime and I just feel this inexplicable urge to go outside, to feel the sun on my skin, to partake in the glories of summer in ways I've never wanted to or cared to before. For instance, on Sunday night I went to Ravinia for the first time with a good friend from school who I don't see often. I received a Ravinia gift certificate as a birthday present three years ago that I never used until Sunday. I wanted to use it, I asked my friends (in my close circle) and they seemed open to it, but we just never got away from that table and that talk about nothing long enough to actually go.

With the park next door to my new apartment being so accessible, I went out yesterday and sat on a bench and read a book and rolled up my sleeves and pant legs so that the sun could hit the pale parts of my skin and I used to laugh at those people and now I am one of them.

And tonight, in a big crowd of people so big it made me hate that I live in a city, I was moody, achy, disinterested and she wiped that all away and made the night worthwhile because she's for me.

Willow

the constant itch

My curiosity got the better of me, and maybe I felt a little guilty too, for ignoring the random texter, so I sent a message Friday morning to him (her? the singer? the know-it-all prospect from forever ago? who is it?). My message was meant to nudge him into correspondence, and encourage him, since I had ignored the two previous messages. I also wanted to show some appreciation for the cleverness and humor of the last message [rats are to cheese as hipsters are to pitchfork].

I didn't expect to hear back for a while, and certainly not relatively quickly, so the response was surprising and fun, we had a couple volleys back and forth before I let it expire, with the hopes that I would hear from him later that night. But nothing came until the next day, and that was an invitation, but I couldn't go, so I gently pushed him away.

Knowing myself better than I thought I did, I deleted all the texts so I could not write during an idle moment of boredom. The mystery of it is consuming me, like a constant itch, I just want to know, but for some reason I don't want to ask.

For one thing, if it is someone I know, and wanted to talk to, I would have their number programmed into my phone. And if it is a guy that I have met over the last nine months, it's probably not someone who I want to hear from. Unless it is the singer and he's coming to his senses and realizes that I am worth doing the work for.

Also, it's kind of fun sending messages to someone and not knowing who it is. A lot of my conversations via text rely on my referencing information and details that only the other person and I know about. I have a very referential (elbow nudging, wink wink) kind of humor with people.

I feel like there was a time period (maybe after that first text) in which I should have just fibbed about losing my phone and not having the number of this friend of mine programmed in my phone. For some reason, at the time, I just didn't care. I was a little put off by that first text [what's the plan tonight], as if I was just some desperate girl waiting by the phone for him to decide to spend time with me and would jump at the chance to do anything with him given the chance. I was mad at the gall, if it is the singer, that I'd deleted him from my life and he was going to swagger in like nothing had happened.

So maybe it's not the singer. I haven't heard from him in any other medium, and usually we corresponded on facebook, but he's no longer my friend, because I deleted him from my life. It could just be some random girl friend of mine I haven't talked to in a while, but I just can't tell right now. And I suppose the mystery will stay a mystery, for now, because I have to wait for whoever it is to text me again...and I look forward to the surprise of the when.

see you at jonquil

Today, while trying to acclimate the kid to the out of doors (look it's not so bad, okay there's a few bugs, but for the most part it's not so bad, yeah, just ignore those drunk people...) we wandered near the park where I spent the formative years of my adolescence, Jonquil Park on Sheffield and Wrightwood near Lincoln ave.

As young kids, we ran wild through the streets and the park was our tree house, our back yard, our place. In the summers we spent every day there, playing tennis, volleyball, baseball or just playing on the playground. During the school year, we spent the afternoons there, weather permitting or not, until it got too cold. Even when it was cold, we just dragged ourselves to the park to meet up before walking around the neighborhood with shovels to make money shoveling sidewalks.

I get nostalgic every time I wander through that corner, every time I see those bronze birds on its corner (where my brother skate boarded and did stunts on roller blades) and every time I realize that piece by piece, the park and playground are being altered.

I suppose it's all a change for the better, but they got rid of the volleyball court and put in some dumb cement planters. They tore down the putty colored cement tables and chairs (we used to call them Flinstone furniture) that had chess boards carved or painted into them and replaced those with beige plastic tables and square seats with a metal plate of a chess board (the squares were green and blue for some unknown reason) bolted to the table on the corners (it will likely not last long under attack of bored teenagers, unlike the cement furniture which could not be destroyed by idle hands).

The worst offense was the playground, where a sprinkler had been set up (a sprinkler, really?) and it was too near the tire swing so the "safety first" flooring of the playground was slippery underfoot because of water from the sprinkler. And the swings were all wrong, in the wrong place. They used to be set parallel to sheffield and the park was an expanse in front of your feet, green grass, baseball diamond, the big wide open sky. Now they sit perpendicular so the view is big fancy redone homes and old shadowy trees.

Among the obvious delegated areas based on age, there is the playground set of the future! that looked like some science project of k'nex gone bad, with long sticks connected by bulbous rubber circles and weird shapes that required savvy studiousness expected of kids who no longer enjoy the playground because it's full of a bunch of babies. The colors are dark, the structure itself looks like some deconstructed space station, and I would love to see how little kids interact with this thing. Do they ignore it or dig the hell out of it? I bet they try in vain to figure out what the hell those shapes are meant for and fall every time from those weird triangles.

In the end, even though the park has changed, I found I could still enjoy it, I could still see it in my mind as it was, and in my mind it was this huge expanse, even though now it is small and simple and different.

chalk bubbles

Thankfully, where there are playgrounds and sidewalks there is an ample supply of sidewalk chalk ground into images at the playground...

the light of day

I saw him at least half a block before he saw me, I think, and it was odd, to see him, striding on the sidewalk, his work shirt slung over his shoulder, his soccer feet kicking out. He has a little swagger I never noticed before and it made me smile.

When I realized it was him, my feet stopped moving for a second. I resumed my walk and frantically decided (my brain began to go into instant and excessive thinking mode) there was no way to avoid him, so I might as well say hello and be pleasant.

I said hello first and to be honest, his haziness made me wonder if he would have just walked right past me. He seemed out of it, tired, a worn out shell of the man I know. Talking to me was laborious and he was being careful again, because he's worried about me again.

So we tried to mutter out sentences and meanings, phrases and words, he mentioned something I was surprised he still recalled so easily, and it pushed the words into my throat and then I let them bubble up, I don't know why I said those two words, they were unnecessary, but I wanted to see if he remembered that too, so I said them.

His eyes narrowed in recognition of the the day it all started, with those words, that invitation. And then he panicked, and I could see his brain flustering and floundering behind his blue blue blue in the daylight eyes (made bluer by the t-shirt he wore) and his mouth jabbered something and his face looked so old and wrinkled and stubbly and worn out.

So I let him go, with words of parting and the relief in his face was like a present to me and I walked away.

Even though I have been avoiding him the world conspires to have us meet in the street like two strangers. When will it be enough to have us never meet again?

termination of lease

So, three weeks after abandoning my apartment, I guess it's safe to say I may have successfully terminated my lease. I am a little cautious still, but worried enough to write about it, I guess. I actually tried not to write about it so as not to jinx it (it would not surprise me one bit if tomorrow I received a letter in the mail informing me that I owe my leasing company twelve hundred dollars, because that is just how things work for me sometimes).

I have to admit, I had valid reasons for terminating my lease, but I didn't exactly go about dealing with the proper "legal" way. I looked online at the tenant's board association and I was supposed to let my leasing company know two weeks before I was going to move out that there were repairs needed and if they weren't done in two weeks time, I could effectively terminate my lease. I sent a letter after I moved out.

It's strange, but I really did love that apartment when I first moved in, and maybe it was just because it was so quiet and it had such a nice view and I could sit at the window and smoke cigarettes and be depressed without feeling like I was a mess (even though I was). Oh, and there wasn't a slimy cheating snake around, that probably had a lot to do with it.

Slowly, its issues began to annoy me. First it was discovering that my kitchen sink leaked. I didn't wash a single dish in that place for ten months. Yeah, urban camping. I had to blowdry my hair at my only available outlet (which was at the opposite end of the apartment) in front of my window. Then the outlet that was in the bathroom (the blow dryer has that big chunky plug with the built in reset buttons and didn't fit) didn't hold any plugs for very long, so when I flat ironed my hair, the plug would fall out without my realizing and I had to start all over and wait for it to heat up again.

Then there was that time I closed my bathroom door and the handle came out of place while I was inside. I panicked, feeling a sense of horrendous and irrational doom. I was running late, I began to sweat, I had my phone so I called Val and she laughed at me in sympathy. Finally I was able to turn the handle against the lock enough to catch the levers to open the door and I could never close the door fully again. Whenever people visited I would forget to tell them and they would find themselves stuck in my bathroom, but only for a moment, because I was there to rescue them.

And the list went on of little things that began to wear down the veneer of my pretense that the apartment was just fine. So I think because I tolerated its limits for so long, I should be able to get it all wrong about leaving it. I hope. We'll see.

week two

Week two

From a distance

and there I was

Lying in the grass, under the willow tree in the park across the street, with my friend and new roommate, but not with her, just lying there, looking up at the branches and leaves and sky and they way they intersected and how the wind moved them, and how birds cut across them and there was a butterfly too. The ground underneath me was at first a slab that felt hard and angry, but I softened into it, or it softened for me and as the time passed, I felt the nuances, my head was cradled by a dip in the earth that was so slight, but it fit the back of my cranium perfectly, as if it was made for me. My hips relaxed, I put my arms at my side and let my ankles roll out. Corpse pose in yoga, they call it. I laid there and just felt it all.

The sounds came in bursts, shouts from the kickball games nearby, people walking the paths, birds chirping, sirens wailing, mixed with the distant hum of constant traffic and the snore of airplanes. Eventually I let them wash over me until all I heard were the birds.

When I got up, my back felt moist, as if the ground and my body had been sweating against each other, and it felt good. I peeled leaves off of my legs and looked back at the grass I had trampled, seeing my figure like a pencil drawing you do as a kid, a traced outline of my body in the ground. Tomorrow it will be gone, the grass recovered, the earth hard again.

As if that wasn't enough, we decided to wander through two patches of prairie grasses and "natural" parts of the park, which have narrow paths worn into them. We pointed out flowers, felt the leaves of plants (one plant felt like velvet on the underside only), and watched bees float around. We guessed at plants and compared growth charts (some sunflowers already had heavy heads hung low, while others had giant leafy stalks with tiny concentric rows of the sunflower's hair huddled in the middle).

I would maybe not do these things on my own, but it is nice to know that I can be easily compelled into such behavior.

The front room and dining room...

Home sweet home.

the weekly baking session begins

Cherry cream cheese muffins