Spiders pull while angels fall

“There are monsters in this world, Ben. And they are real.”

After high school, after Europe and my college diploma I moved. I think my arms wanted to forget what corn silk felt like. Part of me still wanted to hold on to those I feel I affected. A close friend from high school, who now I can no longer find no matter how hard I try, once said to me,

“We live a warrior’s life. Our parents work in factories and for security companies. It’s the new war. And we can’t lose.”

To me, not losing meant going to college; learning. And moving away from a town whose collective mind was comprised of assimilated identities and bigotry. For my friend, not losing meant disappearing.

After I left home, for good, I immediately felt it. The magnet’s pull. I pictured that my town was this spider web; a web that wouldn’t break. As I drove away I pulled a strand with me. Not taut enough to snap me back but enough to lead me home.

And then, like spiders, the emails started. Followed by phone calls. Post letters. People wanting to know how I was doing. They were asking about holiday visits and summer breaks. Tugging at the silk around my waist.

I know why I fought it initially but I don’t know why I resisted for so long. After my first few visits home, I realized how easy it was to leave. Come home and return. Eventually home stopped being home and my longtime friends became part-time friends.

Every town is a web with roots and constellations and its residents are fibers and ancient cartographers.

It was in these interludes that I found my footing, my enjoyment in returning. Not to wax egotistical, but it is nice to return and see people smile a smile they haven’t in months. Their smile for you. It is warming to know that you have the power to affect people. I have those new smiles for other people. I instill that power in others.

Since I have little to no blood-family back in Indiana, I learned to stretch my arms around all of the fringe characters in my life. To some I was a party-boy and to others I was a sage. And to one, I was a protector. A brother. When she walked she fell into my footprints. Made decisions that I made without ever knowing that I had made them before her. She reveled in my stories. I, in turn, delighted in her process of forming an identity. Many found her to be pesky, and I did too. But in that same vein, she was like my sister. Her laugh annoyed me, but brought me comfort. After spending a year away from home I could return and still grit my teeth in reaction to her giggling the same way I did before college.

Within her, though, I thought there was also a kindred spirit. She had loftier goals than most of my friends. Aspersions aside, it is often hard to connect to old friends when what you do and who you know continues to contrast more and more.

Regardless of our paths in lives it is impossible not to be jealous of each other for one aspect or another.

When she switched majors her first semester of college, my college, my heart sank a little. When she dropped out, I was disappointed, but mostly in myself. I have never recommended higher education as a way of life. As someone who is deeper in debt year by year, I can not push tuition and enormous loans onto anyone, especially if there hearts desire doesn’t reside there. I was trying to hold onto my web around her too strongly.

People won’t be pulled in a direction they aren’t inclined to. If you do, you should know it is against their will.

But when I found out she had returned home, lost her job, moved in with her mother and apparently had “taken up with the wrong crowd”, I knew it was time for me to shake the ground. I returned home for the holidays and prepared to face her demons with her.

With over two feet of snow on the ground and a plead from her mother (“Ben, you talk to her. Use what you have. She listens to you.”) I confronted her.

“You’re better than this shit,” I said. “Look at me and tell me you are happy? Look at me and tell me this is what you want.”

She bit her lip and giggled in nervousness. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Well then what are you doing? Look I may not be succeeding but at least I’m floundering somewhere else. Somewhere that has opportunities. Somewhere that people think like me. You used to think like that. Like me. Now you are just too busy trying to think like everyone else.”

I knew my words were hurting her because she could only giggle in agreement.

“I am pissed at you. I am so mad at you, you could not even imagine. How many people? How many people older than you have you seen come back to this town and lie down and die. These people become statues. And you have to be different.”

This is the place where spiders feast and tree roots wrap around to pull you down.

“I will be proud of you as long as you are doing what you want. I am your angel and I will protect you, no matter what. All I ask is that you are always trying and never settling. Do that and you will be safe.”

This is where identity freezes in the winter and rots in the summer. Months and a year pass without so much as a phone call. Impossible promises seem possible because you are never called to duty. You never have to keep your word when things are far away.

“Ben, you gotta call me. Tonight. Things are…things are. God I hate this place.”

This is the place you distance yourself from and you name it failure.
This is the town where returning to live means picking out a coffin.
Where people have to work to die peacefully, digging their own graves while raising kids and embalming themselves while paying taxes.

“I’m sorry I keep missing you. I hate playing phone tag. I hope everything is okay. Call me.”

It is towns like this where the monsters breed and rise because they are tired of catacombs.
They pull their webs, cast them over others, because part of them hates the fact that they live in a graveyard.

“I was at party. On a lake.”

Where things can only hit close to home because that is all that it is comprised of, homes. A birds eye view reveals rows and rows of white houses, painting cemeteries on the horizon. Graves that look like suburbs.

“I had told him no.”

Knight’s armor rusts and zombies stroll naked to remind us we are human.

“I had a concussion. And no one heard a thing.”

And now you have been so many places and escaped so many times that your spider silk has tangled, twisted around trees and street sign, Christmas-light-bulbed together. Pulling it only tightens the knot making release impossible.

“It’s okay. I’m not pregnant. And another girl has stepped forward. I might have a case.”

And I tell her she is a fighter. I tell her she will be alright. I tell her she doesn’t deserve this. I tell her she isn’t worthless and I tell her that it is okay if she woke up crying and pissed in her bed.

All the while she is giggling. Nervous I guess.

This is a town where victims are born. Not made.

I knew him. He had been in my English class. We used to eat lunch in the cafeteria. Someone you knew but did not influence and likewise.

***

We keep our demons at bay because it is easier to sequester than admit that angels live with devils. And they breed and intentions mix and one day we will all be messes. Graveyards spring up in any town and every metropolis is a mausoleum for someone. We are pulled toward what feels like home when are securities are diminished.

I used to say people are so complex they are beautiful. But sometimes they are so complex that they are awful. Devils. Sometimes people do things that make you wish you didn’t believe in a god. People do things that force you to break promises you could never really keep in the first place. Beautiful messes.

And there are those things that I cannot help but think. If she had stayed in college. If she had moved to Chicago. If she had listened to her mother.

But I have seen the gun barrel and I know it does not matter. And if I was an angel I would wish that my wings were soft enough for her to sleep and my tears salty enough to heal her wounds. But I am not.

For the moment, I can only believe that if I had gone home to die, to dig my grave, then I would have saved her.

Politics or Dancefloor

With fists and a beat, we scream it:
This is it
This is the distance that many million motherfuckers cross
every time they leave for college/life/peace corps/home;
punching the air

“in holes” and “out holes”
comprised of irons and ores
such as salt and sweet
sweet and pubic hair
cum on cum on bellies
and a freeze dried film on bed sheets
(that’s what freaks them out anyway)

first dicks are like
first cigarettes
you inhale them or you choke
either way that first puff is a moment
that moment you begin to sojourn towards Halsted and Irving Park
with that inkling in your stomach as a sign
the other boys will own the 2.5 statistic while you’re learning how
to dance
dance with them
you dance with a fist of a different pallor
connecting
along jawlines and gut
pony-tailed bitches pom-poming, fingers closed, into the air-
cheering-
“Gimme an eff!”
“Gimme an ay!”
“Gimme a double gee!”
“Gimme an oh!”
The steal the “tee” from your wounded pride and the shiver in your eye

so we dance with fists
and that’s alright but why not move on-
with fists?
rise up with fists?
hit back with fists?
change laws with fists?

bruises would fade into
yesterday’s news
yet we shuffle feet/bob our heads/side-step
still frozen from the headline
that forced us to learn to be scared/scarred in the first place

“Wyoming Teen Found Tied to a-“ yaddayaddayaddafaggot

So we stand for it
Wait for it
Brace for it

When we should be
unh-tss
unh-tss
unh-tss
Fists pumping, punching-
Shit kicking from guilt
Showing the rest how we
unh-tss
unh-tss
unh-tss
Love
when we should be
unh-tss
unh-tss
unh-tss
dancing.

A brand and A Mark

The first scar I can remember having, although I am sure it was not the first, is a small mark on my forehead, all but absent and faded. At the time, I remember thinking it was a good idea to try and eat with my dog from his food dish. Joey, a normally temperate and dopey dog, lashed out at my intrusion on one of his livelihoods. He bit me right at the space in between where most people’s eyebrows stop. There was a cut and plenty of blood. As it was healing I found myself constantly picking at it. People warned me it would scar but that didn’t stop me. I felt, in a self-deprecating adolescent way, that I deserved the scar for scaring my canine.

We learn most by putting ourselves in danger, whatever that may constitute.

I suppose the next scars came from the various pock marks and divets along my calves and shins from mosquitoes. When people heard I was allergic, most scoffed. When I showed them the scars, they apologized. I’ve grown since then and they’ve faded and stretched and disappeared. But in the summer, when the mosquitoes are breeding, stewing and conquering, I stay in, stay pale, or hide behind a mist of repellant. Vanity still rules the bulk of my actions.

We are our bodies.

The third. In high school an intense friend of mine had a problem with cutting. Long sleeves in the summer. Dark clothes to hide his blood stains. I remember thinking, at the time, that he had to be incredibly, inanely stupid. During a confrontation he asked me if I had ever deliberately cut myself. I could only respond with my usual state of nonplus.

“There is a control there. That you don’t understand. My bullshit, my life, isn’t as painful as what I can inflict on myself. And if it kills on the inside I can at least make my outside match. And then a release. And then a healing.”

He had a father who was willing to pay for college if he would just go, an ex-girlfriend, my best friend, who had decided to make it look like she had moved on. He had money and an ever-present family who, while they pressured him, gave him what he needed. I didn’t see these things as problems worth a scar.

Still, I went home and opened my brother’s old straight razor. He had bought it as part of his need to return to “the old.” Long abandoned. I pressed the blade to my upper left forearm and pressed gently. Nothing, but a slight sting. I inhaled and drew it quickly with pressure. A small cut appeared and a few drops of blood. Not nearly as painful as I imagined. There was a burning and then a relief and then a reminder. A reminder that I was still standing there. I rolled up my pant leg and drew the blade across my shin. The pain was immense and it bled immediately. The cut was superficial and I doctored it immediately; water, soap, a bandage, and Neosporin (which kept it from scarring). I began to clean the blood from the bathroom tile when I noticed more crimson falling to the floor. My arm, being fleshier than my shin, felt less pain but had been cut deeper. Looking at it today, the scar is faint, but also a reminder.

We are not nearly in control of our bodies as we would like to think we are.

At school, the next day, I found him, grabbed him in front of everyone and said, “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand. We all have our ways of running away.”

In college, while trying to make a hamburger, a searing blob of fat and grease splattered and splayed across my right wrist and my left knuckle. The skin on my knuckle slid off and I was no longer hungry. Days later my wrist bubbled large and burst, healing itself into disappearance. But my knuckle remains raised and red.

A lesson, that we are not always as grown up or capable as we think we are.

Here, in Chicago, after a particularly momentous and unrelenting two years, my roommate and I decided to take charge of our own bodies. We bit our lips and prepared for the burn, the tear, the renting and watched as we made our own pain. We designed our scar and it will be with us forever. Each is significant to only us and I suppose we will tire of explaining. But it was important. And after the tattooing, amidst the blood and skin and throb, I couldn’t help but feel a release and tingle in my body.

We grab onto wounds and scars, to slow things down, to prove our standing and, for a moment, to breathe before flinging ourselves back into danger.

We are and we are not our bodies. Scars and flaws, defects and pimples. This is what we are made up of.
Tree rings on a human map. And these scars can be found inside as well. Cut as in half and you could read us, I think.

A cut for the loss of my lady.
A bruise from a friend’s relocation.
A hole from the recent death of him who left long ago.
A crooked bone from your mother really going crazy.
A self-inflicted tear from the stupidest night of my life.

But, I feel, we must look at what is whole, at the rest. What surrounds these craters and crevices. At the tissue that is forming, hardening and piling around them. The rest is experience. The rest is growth. Those scars are life. And they are beautiful.