framed in light and filled with noise

tomorrow i leave and i hate planes. i hate sitting in the moldy seats and breathing the dry air and forcing my mind into place for hours and hours so as not to get upset. no more addovan for me so i must learn to control my anxiety.
but i'm excited to walk a new city, take the train somewhere else. i make up new lives at every turn, some much better, some much worse.

for instance, i've imagined i have a husband and two children and live in boston. my husband is a cop so of course be beats me occasionally and i bear it, looking gorgeously oppressed and humbled, a toddler on my hip. i learn how to talk to him, as degrading as it is, in hushed tones, framing everything as a question.
one night i leave him, quietly, sadly, and rush off to a brother, or a father, who is also a cop and isn't sure how to help me. i wait tables for awhile, watch as the ends fall further and further apart and decide that this is no way to live. so, i start stripping on weekends. no drugs or anything, i just take my clothes off on stage and make triple what i could have made in three over-night shifts at a diner. i realize that humility and opression translate well on this stage and i'm loved because i don't wear the same sort of expression that the other strippers do. i've learned how to appear raw and indifferent, which drives the patrons wild.
eventually i begin sleeping with the female bartender, just to get off with someone else. she moves in to help with the kids, who're doing alright, excluding that they're becoming savvy to their mother's occupation. maybe not the youngest but she's too in tune with her my body not feel all that oggling, the film of greasey eyes and hair pointed in my direction. she's taken to repetitively wiping my shoulders while i hold her to help in any way she can. i barely notice.

different scenerios pop up, sometimes i'm weak and sometimes i'm the most powerful. sometimes i'm famous and hate it, sometimes i'm famous and i eat it up. sometimes i'm fancy and sometimes i'm plain. sometimes i die an unaccounted death and sometimes i kill fourteen people in a dirty drug war. an imagination is a terrible thing to waste.

i remember being ten and on a vacation with my parents in key west and having this journal that was covered in denim from the limited too (ltd ii), and writing a story about three girls who made a fourtune while opening up a rehabilitation center on the ocean. i think a cousin had just been sent back to re-hab so it was a subject that held a lot of weight at the time. at my rehabilitation center the clients were allowed to drink, as it were, if they proved they could do it responsibly. for some reason i found the idea of not being allowed to drink very depressing and mean, like being grounded forever. i had very grand ideas about what it was like to be drunk, considering everyone seemed to like it so much.
the clients were all sad and disillusioned until they met me and i showed them ways to be healthy. i had three dogs named peace, hope, and serenity, which i think was pretty damn clever for a ten year old. the dogs were apparently white and our main security system. the two other women and myself ended up being rebuked for our open-minded treatments and driven off the island. i think i ended up somewhere in the east, reading a bit of poetry off one of those long scrolls with trees and birds and the stanza i read directly spoke to my way of helping others through addiction. i thought that really brought the piece full circle.

my brothers found my journal and read it one night. sam is twelve years older than i am and casey is seven. when i heard them laughing, i knew they'd found it and i was embarassed to the point where it physically hurt. i was so upset i didn't want to leave the bathroom or something the next day so i got in trouble for being annoying and weird. i was always scaring my mother and making my siblings mad. but i always stuck to my imagination, stuck in it. i've loved nothing more than evaporating away into someone else and it's always clear to me that what i write might be silly or ridiculous to some. it might not be worth reading, if someone else were to read it, but it's still feelings that catch up on other people's faces and clothes and movements that i think i've understood and then get to explain again and again and if nothing else, it helps me figure out how things work.