Winter word jam session.
Alana is one of my favorite people to bounce ideas off of when I’ve got writers block. We talked a bit about why everyone seems to get the impression that Bastian is a necrophiliac. [He isn't, I assure you.] The thing I love about Bastian is he was a victim of horrible, unimaginable physical and sexual abuse his whole life, and now he constantly craves control. So we decided that somnophilia isn’t out of the question for him; I think that’s one fetish that is arguably more about control than even sadism. Then again, necrophilia is about control too, isn’t it? Anyway. Bottom line: Bastian likes his girls with a pulse.
Yeah, Layla does have a pulse. That was the next thing we talked about. I don’t think she’s by any means the walking dead. She’s a living being, completely human biologically, but she is immortal; it’s not that she isn’t physically capable of dying, it’s that Sarasvati won’t let her die.
Alana asked me why I think Bastian is going to be so easily persuaded by Shaun to turn dark side. I honestly don’t have an answer yet. I don’t think he’s a bad person… I think maybe he’s always envied Layla her immortality and finally starts to realize that he really is drinking himself to death, that he’s already done so much irreparable damage to his body, and sees this as an easy way out. He’s probably too naive to see the repercussions, like she was when she was human and made the same offer. I don’t know which god/dess is going to, you know, “sponsor” Bastian. I’m definitely not going to limit myself to Hindi gods and goddesses. I’ll pick someone good…
Oh no.
I’m stuck in bed rest for today and tomorrow, so I decided to put a little work into Ebony… Twenty minutes later, I’m one sentence further than I was when I began. It seems like I end up rewriting more than adding to this chapter. I already overshot the deadline by a month but things like this take time.
CNN confuses me.
Blame it on the pregnancy hormones, but I’ve recently read some things on CNN.com that confused and upset me.
Article One basically rambles on about why you shouldn’t move in with your romantic partner. Really? I moved in with my boyfriend when we’d been serious for all of a month, and things are amazing. I know I’m not the exception to the rule. We’ve had two real fights- both, mind you, right around the time I first conceived- and a handful of quickly resolved disagreements. Maybe we just put more effort into making it work than normal people do… but I think if you want to live with someone, the half-formed thoughts of some idiot man-child online shouldn’t influence it.
Article two consists of some dumb broad moaning about how hard her love life is because she’s tall. Really? Really? I’m five-foot-nothing. Do you have any idea how incredibly difficult it is to find an adult male even close to my height, let alone one who is even moderately attractive? It took me twenty years to find one. Stop bitching and buy a pair of flats, for Christ’s sake. The article reads more as, “Men don’t approach me because tall women are goddesses, blahblahfuckingblah” than anything even remotely interesting to read. It’s vanity, not dating advice.
I can sort of relate to article three. Dude has an American first name and a Spanish last name that no one can pronounce; I have a Spanish first name that no one can pronounce and an American last name. I work in a call center and answer the phones with my legal name, and people are always hearing it as “Fiona” or “Shawna” or some crazy shit. I learn to just go with it:
“Did you say Deon?”
“Yes, ma’am, how can I help?”
Another thing I like about Mr. Rudy Ruiz is he doesn’t look overtly Hispanic. As someone who’s pretty racially ambiguous myself, I dig that. Some people don’t realize that Latin blood comes in all different shades, so if you’re bit pale people tend to want to butcher your name into an Anglo-friendly form. Even my boyfriend- a Latino himself, god bless him- does it to me. You accept it. It’s part of the small assimilation that’s necessary when living in this country. There are aspects of your cultural that you give up, but there are also aspects that you refuse to ever let go of. Like, lisping on certain words and a fondness for green olives and garlic.
An old one, but one of my favorites.
This one hasn’t seen the light of day in a while. It’s an extremely short story I wrote years ago while on vacation in Asia. I went through this Elton John-esque phase where if I couldn’t finish something in ten minutes, I gave up on it completely; the results were concise, compact little tales that left room for expansion. I favored plot development over character development. Some turned out terrible, some- like this one- I remain rather fond of.
I would not be here if it wasn’t for him, I reminded myself as I stared across the dimly lit bar from my table to his. He sat with a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whiskey in the other, pressing the palm of the hand holding the cigarette against his forehead and staring down at the table top. The picture of misery. I had never seen anything more beautiful. His dark curls- you could not tell in this lighting if they were black or brown, but I knew that they were black- fell over even darker eyes, not quite almond shaped but close enough that they looked exotic, making his skin look ghostly pale.
He came here night after night, alone. The first time I had seen him was the day my fiance of one and one half years left me. He walked in just as the bastard left the bar and when I saw him, I realized that I had never been in love. That is not to say that I loved him that very instant… but something in him screamed out to me, told my soul that I had never loved anyone else, had never been meant for anyone else. He could have walked into any other bar in the world that night, but he walked into this one.
I wonder, did he feel it too?
Every night after work, I came here. I ordered a Coke and I took a table against the wall, diagonal from the table he always chose, and watched him. The picture of beauty. A week later, my sister introduced us. We slept together. We have not said a word to eachother since.
I would not be here if it wasn’t for him, I reminded myself, wringing my hands and fighting that primal instinct we all have to fuck things up even worse than they already are. Surpressing to the urge to go to him, grab his shoulders and shake him, scream at him, “Don’t you know what you’ve done to me?”
I came here every night and I watched him, and he did not even know I was there. But he still pulled at my heart, pulled at every fiber of my being, as he sat in miserable beautiful silence across the smoky crowded bar by himself. Screaming at me. He had held me for a few hours and then he had let me go forever. He had dropped me and sent me spiraling downward.
And I fought the urge to scream back at him, fought that primal instinct, forced myself to sit on the bar stool with my hands intwined and pressed firmly into my lap. I could not trust my hands. I could not trust any part of me, not around him. Who knows what I might do?
He lowered his hand to take a drag off his cigarette, wrapping those perfect cupid bow lips around the filter, igniting the tip, and as he lowered he hand his raised his eyes and those shining black orbs met mine. My heart skipped a beat. He could have walked into any other bar in the world tonight, but he walked into this one, and he was staring straight at me now, tearing into my soul.
He looked away.
Baby’s first picture
Our baby at about 8 weeks.
We saw the heartbeat on Monday, and it was absolutely amazing. His heartrate is at 165, which is really good. I’m due June 15th.
Are we gonna let the elevator get us down?
Last May, I was sitting in my dear friend Karlito’s little studio apartment, drinking cheap Colombian coffee- there certainly is such a thing, mind you- and wondering how best to phrase what I was thinking. Never one for subtlety, I just said it: “I’m in love.”
He narrowed his dark eyes at me, setting down his coffee mug and folding his hands in front of him. “That’s a pretty serious allegation,” said Karlito, frowning. “Are you sure that’s the correct word to use?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“Not lust, maybe?” he suggested gently. “Or infatuation?”
I shook my head. “Love.”
He leaned across the table and said, in the stern serious tone that one uses when explaining something simple to a child, “Love isn’t for people like us. You really think you’re gonna marry this guy, have two and a half kids, live in the suburbs?”
He made it sound as though I had just informed him that I was running off to Hogwarts to become a wizard. Karlito was married, but it was quite purely a marriage of convenience: she needed American citizenship, he needed to get laid once in a while. They rarely even spoke; his native language of Catalan was so different from her Portuguese that anything but basic verbal communication was out of the question. He lived on Denver’s notorious Colfax Avenue in an apartment surrounded by bulletproof glass and metal detectors; she was an infrequent guest. Obviously, the question of children had never been raised… As long as immigration wasn’t suspicious, there was no need to even consider it.
Stalling for an answer, I poured myself another cup of coffee. Surely, he knew that his relationship was an unusual one; how pretentious to assume that was what worked for everyone. I wondered what he meant when he said “people like us.” The lower-class? Latinos? Artists? Probably the latter. Karlito was bohemian deep down to his bones. He was a painter, I was a writer, we were little more.
“What do you mean, love isn’t for people like us?” I asked, sitting back down.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Tenemos la pasión.”
I hated that answer. The passion… everyone I knew used it as an excuse for their bad behavior. Maybe Karlito had it, but I certainly didn’t. Maybe I am a passionate person, but not in the ways he referred to now. “La pinchipasión,” I chided. “I’m content. I’m happy. Screw your passions.”
He held his hands up in mock surrender. “Deny it all you want, doll. You’ll figure it out for yourself eventually.”
I figured it out today. God damn you, Karl.
Intense news.
These last few months have been, well… a train wreck. No. Wait. What’s worse than a train wreck? It’s been like the emotional equivalent to Hiroshima.
To top the deaths, the family fighting, and the car troubles, I’ve been sick as fuck. Back hurts, head hurts, neck hurts, can’t eat anything without getting sick, and the weirdest stretching sensation in my stomach. Me, who is unmoved by any amount of blood or carnage, was suddenly feeling very ill at the sight of my boyfriend’s bloody nose. And I’ve been in a horrible, cynical mood which- believe it or not- is not like me in the real world at all.
So I went to the store and bought a pregnancy test, thinking all the while what a waste of $10; I told my mother that short of immaculate conception, there was no way I could have gotten pregnant. The test came back very faintly positive which, according to the instructions, doesn’t matter. If any trace of a line is there, it counts.
I raced back to Walgreens and bought three more tests. More faint positives. What in the hell was going on? I had the flu, not a baby.
So I called up my doctor. Took a test with them, and sat in the exam room for twenty painful, excruciating minutes before he waltzed in and said, “We need to raise your vitamin D levels. You’re at 28, you should be at 35. It’s very rare to have a vitamin D deficiency in America.”
Okay. He was starting to piss me off.
“So?” I asked. “The pregnancy test…?”
“Positive.”
So I made him take another.
Yes. At this point, we are 100% sure that I am, in fact, carrying a little poppy-seed sized embryo. Because of my previous miscarriage, I’ve decided not to tell anyone close to me about it until after my first trimester… so in December. But I’m so excited that I can’t keep news like this to myself. So I figured posting it on here certainly wouldn’t hurt.
But I have a good feeling about this. I think the baby’s going to make it. And, I may be going out on a bit of a limb here, but I think my boyfriend is a little happy about it too. He certainly wasn’t upset. I had made the doctor copy the official test results and had brought all of my positive home tests along with me to show him… but he didn’t ask. And when I told him that if he wanted a paternity test, I would be more than happy and not in the least offended to oblige him, he joked about it. He was more concerned about the video game that I had bought to butter him up before the news than about the news itself.
God help me, I love that man.
More terrible news.
I almost wish that I hadn’t posted that excerpt from Birth of a Monster, because shortly after, Tay’s namesake was killed.
It seems as though I will never be immune to that eerie, sinking feeling when you realize that someone you love is gone forever. We were still mourning Yanni. It was too soon for both of them, and they were both killed in such tragic ways.
Neither was preventable. I can’t blame myself or anyone else for either death. But I do blame myself, because in retrospect I realize that neither Matteo nor Yanni probably had any idea what they meant to me. And I know from personal experience how it feels to not know how important you are to someone, so I deeply regret it if I ever made them feel that way.
Tay was so excited the first time he read Ebony and saw that I had named the beautiful drug-addict-turned-thrill-killer-turned-rapist after him. He saw the good in the character- the spoiled innocence, the naivety- more than he saw the bad. After he read the first chapter, he looked up at me and asked, “Will Tay be okay?” And I promised him that, yes, he would be. Everyone deserves a second chance… He taught me that himself.
No matter what either of us did, we always gave each other a second chance. We had a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to our exploits, because there was no need for an explanation; we always forgave each other without questioning.
And now that he’s dead, I can’t process my own emotions. After all, nights like these when I feel like a great big hole has opened up in the center of my chest, Tay was the first person I would call.
I feel very, very, very much alone tonight.
Sweet Jesus.
K just shot me a note asking me if I’d be interested in two more TVD articles…
[Dear God, isn't anyone sick of hearing about my virginity yet?]
Of course I agreed. I can’t wait to see the prompts.
Article ten
I suppose that the only logical way to wrap up this series is by ending it with the tale of my downfall. How Aya L’Amour lost her innocence, her naivety, her independence, her aversion to the L word and all that comes with it. I know Khrys Rodriguez well enough to assume that he will focus his own article on his own experience, and I know that his was a very painful experience for him. And so, if K must end this series on a serious note, perhaps I can end it on a light one.
Ah, how the roles have reversed. For once, I want to tell you a story with a happy ending.
[I apologize in advance to my boyfriend, who only last night told me that he did not want me writing about him. But he did also say that he does not read my work, and I suppose that what mon beau doesn’t know won’t hurt him. If he should happen upon it, I hope he knows that every word is genuine. I should also apologize to you, dear reader of whichever venue requested this extension of our little diatribe, because I wrote all of this freeform and really had no idea exactly where each article would take us. I am grateful that so many people decided to come along for the ride.]
I was a rather unusual eighteen year old. For two years, I had been out of high school and had studied psychology with a passion that I had never shown for my prior education. Add to that the stress of struggling on a male-dominated “street team” for a little comic book publishing company while trying to just start my own writing career, and the fact that there was a man- but isn’t there always a man?- who seemed intent on driving me as deep into self-destruction as I could get myself. I drank. A lot. Sometimes my roommate and I would wake up and count the empty bottles of alcohol, wondering how we possibly had woken up at all.
It was time to get my life back on track.
Step one: Get rid of the loser boyfriend. Honestly, I was never fond of him to begin with. I did the horrible, unforgivable thing of lying to him about being in love… He did the horrible, unforgivable thing of cheating on me constantly.
I was never caught, but he was, so mission accomplished. I suddenly had the means to cut him out of my life completely, all I lacked was the motivation. Two years I spent with him, as we emotionally and physically abused each other till it seemed utterly normal, and now that I had finally realized what a leech he really was I could not bring myself to be the one to break his heart.
Solution? Breaking hearts is amateur. I smashed his to pieces.
Yeah, yeah. I’m taking responsibility… are you reading this? You were right when you said I left you for him. The ominous, anonymous pronoun.
He was a cashier at Wal-Mart, I went through his checkout lane, and with just one look from those big brown eyes I was his. I had silly thoughts, completely alien to me; I wondered if his lips were as soft as they looked, I wondered if his skin would taste like the caramel it so strongly resembled, I wondered what his hair would feel like between my fingers.
You get it. I was smitten. It was lust at first sight. Surely, no further elaborations or explanations are needed.
Weeks later, he started sending me text messages that made me understand that cliché about girls “melting.” But, still, everything about him frightened me- the way I actually listened to what he said rather than daydream, the way I started getting ready hours before our dates in hopes that he would find me as beautiful as I found him, and above all, the way he made me feel. I was the girl who went through boyfriends like I had never before heard the word “commitment,” not the girl who jumped every time her cell phone rang, hoping it was that certain special someone.
We went on casual dates to movies or restaurants, and never ran out of things to talk about. In fact, seven months later, we still haven’t.
Things went well… Maybe too well, too quickly. I wish I could say that when we slept together for the first time we loved each other, but we didn’t. Sure, I cared about him more than I had cared about anyone I had dated before, and I knew there was something special about him; but at the time, he was just this gorgeous, clever-tongued boy who was as interested in me as I was in him. However if I said that his appearance was the deciding factor in why he finally was the one to break me, I would be lying to both you, dear reader, and to myself.
It was about the way he made me feel. He didn’t try to own me, didn’t give me the impression that he wanted me on his terms or expected anything from me. He made me feel safe and vulnerable at the same time, like I could share parts of myself with him that no one else would ever understand… but he only listened, and never told me how he felt about it. That mix of acceptance and rejection kept me interested, because I didn’t want him on my terms, either. I don’t want someone who’s perfect because I know that I’m not.
I’ve never really been sure what I mean to him… Words are my choice venue of expression, and not his. And, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever said that love comes complete with a safety net. Giving that part of me to him was a huge act of faith; I have never been known for my good faith in humanity, or the male gender in particular. But sometimes you just have to take the jump wondering if they care enough to catch you at the bottom.
