Cliptropolitan Museum, I'm trying to be so quiet. See, it has come to my attention I am missing so much of the big picture. See here, it is always 4 in the morning with a handful of sleeping pills and a heartache only known by reality t.v. love. In 2003 I met the creator of "The Bachelor". Mike Fleiss, yes cousin to hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss. In 2003 Mike Fleiss gave me an invitation to meet all the bachelor boys at Saddle Ranch on Sunset where I thought I could fall in love. Yes, at Saddle Ranch. Honestly, is that so different from the Downer? Let's move on, yes, with Lanny, 26, Stallion and Breeding Manager, originally from Mt. Vernon, TX, who currently resides in Aubrey, TX. In 2003 in a Sheraton in the valley in the middle of the summer with a fist of nattyice and heart about to endure 6 years of heartache, I looked at Lanny and thought: this could be it...right? Lanny with his thick frame and smooth drawl. Lanny who smelled like the fresh cut green and southern sun. Lanny whose clean blue eyes I wanted to sleep under for years and not ever do anything but cook pies and sneak cigarettes in the basement with my tiny waist in a house dress and manicure. Sometimes I lose myself in lives I won't ever build, in lives I only let exist for one moment for that one time. In retrospect, why do we make it so difficult? It is, for all intents and purposes, ours for the making after all.
7 years later I'm packing all my clothes into the same luggage it arrived in, shoving black stilettos next to miniskirts thin t-shirts and satin panties while Jake, the new Bachelor makes his was through a crowd of women trying to find what he calls love. Love. love. By the third day there is scandal and fighting and tears and infatuation. The show is good, its not that. Its Jake. He is this pilot, this genuine guy, this genuinely confident man and through the rock solid good looks he is brave. He is brave because he is scared and not afraid to show it. He says it over and over. "I am here to find love. I know my wife is in that room amongst all these women." and I want to believe him. I want to believe in love. Do you believe in love?
By episode 6 I believe him. And I am wrapping the cord of my flatiron in a tight knot when i feel it in my stomach and start to think- o shit. do I love someone unattainable? or Is it true then what his AOLchat voice said, that a heart can be made of pureshit? In a pub in Portland Oregon there is a birthday party with beer from the tap and cake from a box. In 2010 there are men and women flirting and talking and joking under pool table lights and near the cheeky vintage pacman not far from duck hunter is a man with a bad translation of Lorca in his back pack, Walt Whitman at home wearing my green checkered scarf I bought at Forever 21 in 2007 with his sister's cellphone buzzing and buzzing in his left valet pant pocket. In Portland Oregon I am called on a cigarette break and miss it while I tend to the tea kettle and run out of excuses as to why Jake won't find love on this show. Why do I do this to myself?
I lay down on a pile of folded clothes and remember in the best detail I can the dreams I have been having, O these wonderous dreams in which I am always inlove.
Last dream, I met this girl undergoing chemo, her head shaved and her eyes winter dull. I loved her. We held hands through hospital corridors and she leads me into a room filled with coma patients. Just a cold room with a long row of single beds suspending these dreaming bodies. I get a kick inside, I look at her and I am every hallucination. Every syllable ever uttered. I look at her and I know that I will always be by her side. She kisses me, against the rythmic sheen of lifesupport, she kisses me this kiss that was to say not even death will take me from your side. I am laying on the floor, I realize I am not there but laying on the floor and I start to cry in an inconsolable cry. My whole body trembling with loss. How can it be I can not return? How can it be that not death but life robs me of these adventures of these loves? I am curled on the floor when I think how is it in this life I let love leave my side?
I get a pink panther phone call from North Carolina and pour it out on line for a good hour. I am laughing, we talk about dogs and cartoons. colds and Best Buy. Sometimes if i don't pay attention I miss it. Sometimes its that phone call when you're laying on a pile of clothes trying to feel closer to something you thought was gone that reminds you that right in front of you not so far at all, there are people right then who are ready to talk about dogs or cartoons until you are laughing. And have forgotten what empty feels like. Until at the end of the conversation I hear, "so giggles, how you feeling now?" At 5 in the morning, at 5 am on Wedensday January 20, 2010 I am grateful for perfect timing friends.
all my hearts
California Nails
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