to build a home

My room was shaped like a physical heart and painted bright red with navy blue trim and a blue door. I had a huge British flag on the wall by my bed, a Sweeney Todd poster, and a map of the underground that I'd use to plan my runaways to England when I couldn't sleep at night. When I was about 12 I put a picture of Gerard Butler as The Phantom of the Opera above my bed and that stayed there until I was 23. I found it charming, but none of the boys who came into my room felt the same.

In my bed, I wrote the largest part of my novel. I started this blog and met you beautiful people and fell in love with your words. I did midnight homework assignments and memorized monologue after monologue in high school. In my little twin size bed, I sobbed after reading Looking for Alaska and The Book Thief for the first time when I was fifteen and sixteen. I cried when I reread them, always making sure to finish them in the same bed where they both began. I loved words in that bed.

When Michael broke my heart, I slid down against my wall near the door and sobbed for hours. I laid myself out across the floor and listened to The Killers and let myself scream, keeping the music pounding against the heartbeat walls. I was sitting against my bed trying to get my tears under control when I got a text that my best friend's father died that same day. Suddenly my best friend, who was always the boy I should have kissed, had a broken heart bigger than my own and I didn't know what to do except to sit on my floor in my red room.

When I left for college and found that the new world I was a part of down at that campus was made of pain and burning between my thighs, I came home and barricaded myself in my room, laying on the floor with a pillow under my head and a blanket over both myself and the heating vent. I fell asleep in that little pod of warmth until my friends thought I'd killed myself and knocked against my window to make sure I was still breathing.

I almost kissed that best friend on my front porch. I did kiss the boy who watched the stars and ached for me to wish for him. I kissed him on the driveway and then turned my cheek against his lips when we stood on the front porch after I told him I was going to college and couldn't see myself dating someone who was 16 as I entered college. In that same driveway two years later, I told the boy who'd eaten my heart and then spat it up in my face to never contact me again. Then I burned him off of my skin in my bathtub, sitting in the dark water alone.

R walked me to my back door in the snow and we walked back and forth between my fence and that door five times, trading the final kiss goodnight before I finally went inside. I raced to the front door and watched him sitting in his car in the driveway before he motioned me back out. He pinned me against the garage door and we kissed with the stars watching. That night my red room seemed even darker while my blood thickened in my veins with new romance.

I had sleepovers with Niki and midnight slurpees while we watched shitty movies on Netflix that we both pretended not to like even though we both cried at the end and were clearly invested. We woke up early together and drove away from my house in the misty morning air. After all day play practice, I came home and passed out on the couch with hot chocolate slowly cooling on the coffee table next to long forgotten math homework.

After my parents divorced when I was seven, my mom woke me early one morning to tell me we had a new house to go to. She said it had a playhouse in the backyard, which turned out to be a wasp infested shed. But there was a jetted tub in her master bathroom and I spent hours each night sitting in that tub pretending to be a Mermaid waiting for my prince. Our first night in the new house, I had a coughing fit that is still unexplained that lasted for four hours. Once we got to the doctor's the coughing stopped and they sent us back home, where I crawled right back into that tub. The house was already where my lungs needed to be to feel calm.

I passed from first to sixth grade in what felt like minutes and then had my first day of Junior high. I wore stupid heels and had blisters for weeks after that first day. I promised myself I wouldn't do the same thing for high school and forgot that promise three years later as I reached into my closet for heels I felt made me look ready for high school. There were spots of blood on my carpet from popping blisters.

I stared at my gold graduation robe in the mirror on the morning I'd be graduating High School. My red room was so bright that day. The heels I wore did not leave blisters and I cried thinking I'd only have three more months in that room until I moved away. Then it would only be Christmas breaks and summers. I held out my hands and touched the walls before my dad honked to tell me he was here to take me to graduate.

Once when I was eight, I was so furious at my mother that I left a muddy handprint on the wall. Instead of getting mad at me, I came out the next morning and saw that she had painted flowers around the hand and framed it. Yesterday I had to say goodbye to my childhood home, riddled with my handprints and my memories. I sat in my empty room by myself weeping as I could hear the new owners already beginning the remodel. As I left, they handed me a few more boxes of pictures that had been forgotten. And just like that, I said goodbye to 16 years.

home and abroad

I packed only the essentials,
laid them all out in front of me.
My tiny stuffed kitty, three nickels,
assorted lego pieces for protection,
fruit snacks shaped like sharks and monsters.
My small gummy worm fingers dropped
them into my baby blanket, yellow softness
and drenched in my smell.

I dashed to my dorm and threw

essentials into a plastic bag. 

Underwear, shirts, phone charger, baby blankets

still steeped in my smell, the tiny kitty too.

I had bruises etched into my collar bone

and was still bleeding between my thighs.

He'd had me for three months and no one knew.

The bundle was light and easy to

tie up on the broken stick I'd 

found in the yard. I was 

a 1930s runaway, ready to jump

into a boxcar and head to California.

I'd run to my aunt, the woman with

the same lips as me, the same

little rosebud smile and auroral eyes.

No one knew how his hand covered

my rosebud lips and stole the

glow from my eyes. No one

could see the Dahlia grin bleeding

its way to the surface of my cheeks

every time he touched me. 

It was time to run.

I slung the stick across my shoulder

and marched to the end of my driveway,

the orange September glow blazing.

Suddenly she called my name.

She started to smile as she walked to me 

but saw my determined brow and faltered.

Oh Emma, I'd never let you leave home, baby.

You'll always have my arms to hold.

I drove into the November chill and

called the woman whose arms 

were always there even

when I pushed away the most.

Three hours and I'm home, mom,

I'll need a hug when I arrive.

Oh Emma, I don't want you home.

I know what you've been doing and

you're not welcome here.

We sat in the family room and ate 

cherries until our fingers smiled red.

She unpacked my bag and

wrapped me in my baby blankets.

He was sitting in the dorm room

when the key jammed its way in the lock.

He sliced my bag from my hands.

He ripped my baby blankets. 

via *

mother

Keep the boys away, Emma Jane,
you must know what you do to them.
My mother's fears of boys
eating up my smiles,
feeling my calve muscles
curve under their touch as
they ease my legs apart,
are borne from her self-loathing.
She's told me I'm unwanted.
She's told me I saved her
from becoming Sylvia Plath.
And yet I mortify her,
I keep her tossing all night long.

She hates knowing they've touched me.
She hates knowing I liked it.
She remembers me in my tiny
underwear, sticky little thighs
glued to the couch with
popsicle juice and messy toddler fingers.
She watched Jurassic Park with me
every day as I helped myself
to sliced hot dogs and macaroni
and she helped herself to slices
of Sam Neill. Imagined him
lowering his aviators and freeing
her from my tyrannosaurus father.
Imagined his dew-drop blue eyes feasting
on her flesh as I ceased
to exist in reality, a virtual
dream like the dinosaurs on the screen.

But I never went away.
My hair grew long like she
liked it and I chopped it off.
She stopped buying my underwear
as they lost their cotton to
make room for the lace. She saw
her doll leaving her, no longer
begging for Jurassic Park. No
more Sam to feed her insecurities
and fantasies, just the rumble
of water in a glass as my father
boomed home at night. Until.
A snowy day. A quiet theater,
solace amid a manic film festival.
She felt her hips fill the seat, cursed
herself for eating for the first time in days.
She touched her hair, cursed the frizz
that never tamed like her daughter's did.
She brushed her nose as she stood,
for fuck's sake why is it so big?!
And then he was there. Just behind my aunt,
dew-drops gleaming, smile wide as ever.
My mother's face flushed,
her thighs ached as they clenched
where she stood. He passed. Continued walking.

My aunt chuckled, swore he was looking at her.
My mother, breathless, swears it was at her.
But her hair is hideous, after all. Her nose enormous.
And those goddamn hips must take up
the entire theater. How could she
let herself out in public, she thinks.
How could she have imagined
his hands on her worthless breasts?
That night she comes home and
throws my training bras away.
She watches my growing hourglass dance
and knows that boys will fuck me.
The Xanax is extra sweet that night.

via *

fossil fuels

I wrote this for my creative writing class to experiment with minimalist fiction. I'm pretty excited for how it turned out. Enjoy, loves.

Fossil Fuels

My father bought me a book to handle the divorce. It was a silly book about dinosaurs divorcing. They said crying was ok. Don’t blame yourself. I thought the dinosaurs were lucky because they were dead. Their moms weren’t crying anymore. The book got heavy in my hands suddenly. That’s when the coughing started.

I hated watching my mother cry. I hate when my father yelled. That made us all cry. I thought the divorce would mean less yelling, which meant less tears. The first night in our new house there was yelling but my father wasn’t there. My mother was yelling at God. She was crying at God. The tears in my throat cried themselves sick. They made me sick. The cough carried on with no explanation.

I lied to you earlier. My father was in the house the whole time because he was everywhere. He was my coughing fit. He was the God my mom was cursing. He was my sister’s loud music shaking our new walls. He didn’t buy me that book, though. But he was the dinosaur my book was about. He was dead but everywhere. He was fossil fuels filling our lungs.

My cough lasted for four hours. My mom couldn’t see well enough to drive. She was crying. My sister drove. She had her permit, I think. When we got to the hospital, I read a different book. The dolls weren’t coping with divorce. They were coping with shots. But I was shot too. Shot with surprise. When the doctor came in the coughing stopped. The doctor was a man. He hugged me. I don’t know why I remember that. I made it up. Nobody hugged me. The books hugged me. The fossil fuels hugged me. My dad didn’t hug me.

When we got home the bathtub flooded and my cough came back. My ribs hugged my lungs. They shot them. I was seven and I was getting a divorce from my own two lungs.

via *