Mellotron Sounds

Cold Coffee and a Window

So I’m sitting here listening to Regina Spektor for the first time to expand my horizons, a cup of now-cold coffee at my side and a window with the blinds open, right there. I’m at my parents house and I remember when it used to be my house too. But now it’s theirs. I just live here.

It’s funny when I look around at this makeshift desk I have set up. It’s a foldout. There’s a mousepad, mouse, a stereo in the corner with an iPod docked. I have an external harddrive attached and this journal where I keep a log of all the movies I watch, complete with notes and ratings, lying beside it. There are wires hanging and dangling and flowing from the backs of all of these machines, machines that count the minutes of my day for me so I don’t have to. They count the minutes, collect them and keep them for me. So I don’t have to. This is the chronicle of my early twenties, they tell me. This is my timeline. This is what happens after college is over.

It’s funny. I got my first ticket the other day. It came in the mail with photos and website links attached where I can go and see myself speeding, turning right on a red light at 10:30 on a Friday night without stopping first. The ticket tells me that when I rolled through, I offended the state $125 worth. And they need that money back. It’s the legal, camera-on-top-of-stoplight equivalent of saying a couple Hail Marys and an Our Father. All I have to do is pay and my record will be clean again. Amen.

Regina’s done and now I’m listening to Bon Iver for the first time. I guess this is my indie phase. Outside the sky is getting darker. The numbers on my alarm clock are blue and big and shaped into 1s and 2s. It’s the afternoon. And at night my fantasy team will play. A-Rod seems to be getting hot, too. I have four pitchers starting.

In the car that night, the night I ran the red light, I saw the camera flash loud behind me. It painted my interior in light for just a second, mirrored and richocheted off of glass and metal like when my brother and I used to flip on and off the bedroom lamp as fast as we could when we were small, pretending it was lightning. It was as if the bulbburst caught me, the headlights that freeze the deer mid-street. It reminded me of when I drove to the city for work once during my last semester of school. It was raining then. The streets were slick and grey. I turned a bend too hard and lost control of my car. It fishtailed, slipped, my braked-tires glided, and I remember not being scared. My hands on the wheel, trying to straighten out and get control again, I remember thinking: “Hm, this is bad,” the same way you would on the go-kart track when an uncle bumps you to get ahead and your wheel steers itself into the tires stacked on the shoulder. Except this time I knew I could die. The car could turn over or flip, I could hit the side-rails, rear-end the stopped traffic ahead of me and bash my forehead into the dashboard. There would be blood in my hair. I’d miss work.

But my heart didn’t sink or speed up. I didn’t sweat or get tense. Wasn’t it normal to?

On the other side of my window there’s a lake. During the day, when the sun’s at the right angle, the water looks black. At sunset, the light bends over its ripples like the inside of a glass pyramid. It’s a funhouse mirror, a sanded-down reflection of the world, one without hard angles, without edges or endings. If you dive in and hold your breath, I sometimes wonder, where would it take you? What does the world look like on the other side of softer reflections?

My mother’s making lamb tonight. She’ll marinate and season it and I’ll grill it. My dad will probably eat a frozen dinner, one of those red boxes with a Styrofoam tray inside that you microwave. And tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll wonder when my life will start, when I’ll stop being jaded, stop thinking, find a job, stop remembering. I’ll pick up my mail-in ticket and follow it to a website with an open hand held out, the other one available to slap me on the wrist. Then I’ll pay. This is me learning my lesson.

I moved the last of my stuff out of my apartment a few days ago, packed it to bring it back to my parents’ house where I lived when I was young, back to the same room whose walls are now drenched in so many years of forgotten words and smiles and silence, hardened drips of them still visible under all this blue paint. I imagine most of what’s gone was probably so important then. Cleaning out drawers and closets, I came across papers from the past few years of school, notes and essays and jotted-down ideas. Some had dates, others didn’t. Leafing through them was like watching homemovies on an old and tired TV, sifting through the static to see yourself, squinting through the snow and grain to hear the way you used to talk.

There was this writing exercise, I did it in one of my first workshops. The idea was to think of a body of water, a color, a fruit, a month, a job and something you’re afraid of. Then you had to incorporate those things into a short story passage.

We were given 10 minutes to turn word salad into poetry, to comb through our memories and draw something new, color outside the lines of structure and sense. Capture that one particular moment in time, that specific “one of those days,” and hope that it says something real. Maybe years from then we’d find the exercise, dig it out of a notebook or backpack and read it. Maybe it would contain some kind of subconscious truth or wisdom, a time-capsule with a toy you’ve forgotten about locked inside, a frayed old photo or a yellowed love letter.

Or maybe it would still just be word salad.

It isn’t March. I think it’s May. The summer. The summer night is black and dark blue with mounds of dirt stacked to make clouds in the sky. God, the undertaker, must have gotten sloppy when he was digging a grave to bury day. I’m nervous, too nervous. It’s a little ridiculous. It’s like the Nile turned white-water and is surging through my stomach. I want to kiss her but my body’s stiff. I want to feel those soft lips moist like the inside of peaches pressed on mine, dry and chapped and decaying like zombies. Zombies aren’t good kissers. They lunge and plant awkwardly. Then they die. I don’t die, and I’m not a zombie, but I kiss like one. We both laugh when it’s over, and I smile now. I wonder if zombies have good memories...

Picture “Haarlem, Netherlands ” courtesy of hans solcer on Flickr

Posted in: creative nonfiction

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.