If You Blink, We Go Back to the Start

by | May 9, 2019 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

All Premium Themes And WEBSITE Utilities Tools You Ever Need! Greatest 100% Free Bonuses With Any Purchase.

Greatest CYBER MONDAY SALES with Bonuses are offered to following date: Get Started For Free!
Purchase Any Product Today! Premium Bonuses More Than $10,997 Will Be Emailed To You To Keep Even Just For Trying It Out.
Click Here To See Greatest Bonuses

and Try Out Any Today!

Here’s the deal.. if you buy any product(s) Linked from this sitewww.Knowledge-Easy.com including Clickbank products, as long as not Google’s product ads, I am gonna Send ALL to you absolutely FREE!. That’s right, you WILL OWN ALL THE PRODUCTS, for Now, just follow these instructions:

1. Order the product(s) you want by click here and select the Top Product, Top Skill you like on this site ..

2. Automatically send you bonuses or simply send me your receipt to consultingadvantages@yahoo.com Or just Enter name and your email in the form at the Bonus Details.

3. I will validate your purchases. AND Send Themes, ALL 50 Greatests Plus The Ultimate Marketing Weapon & “WEBMASTER’S SURVIVAL KIT” to you include ALL Others are YOURS to keep even you return your purchase. No Questions Asked! High Classic Guaranteed for you! Download All Items At One Place.

That’s it !

*Also Unconditionally, NO RISK WHAT SO EVER with Any Product you buy this website,

60 Days Money Back Guarantee,

IF NOT HAPPY FOR ANY REASON, FUL REFUND, No Questions Asked!

Download Instantly in Hands Top Rated today!

Remember, you really have nothing to lose if the item you purchased is not right for you! Keep All The Bonuses.

Super Premium Bonuses Are Limited Time Only!

Day(s)

:

Hour(s)

:

Minute(s)

:

Second(s)

Get Paid To Use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
Online Social Media Jobs Pay $25 - $50/Hour.
No Experience Required. Work At Home, $316/day!
View 1000s of companies hiring writers now!

Order Now!

MOST POPULAR

*****
Customer Support Chat Job: $25/hr
Chat On Twitter Job - $25/hr
Get Paid to chat with customers on
a business’s Twitter account.

Try Free Now!

Get Paid To Review Apps On Phone
Want to get paid $810 per week online?
Get Paid To Review Perfect Apps Weekly.

Order Now
!
Look For REAL Online Job?
Get Paid To Write Articles $200/day
View 1000s of companies hiring writers now!

Try-Out Free Now!

How To Develop Your Skill For Great Success And Happiness Including Become CPA? | Additional special tips From Admin

Skill level Expansion is usually the number 1 necessary and major aspect of realizing a fact financial success in all of the vocations as one discovered in each of our population along with in All over the world. So fortuitous to look at with you in the soon after about what precisely thriving Competency Progression is; the simplest way or what tactics we deliver the results to enjoy desires and subsequently one will probably perform with what individual prefers to can each working day just for a total daily life. Is it so great if you are confident enough to grow quickly and see being successful in whatever you dreamed, steered for, self-displined and previously worked very hard every last daytime and most certainly you grown to be a CPA, Attorney, an manager of a large manufacturer or even a physician who can certainly hugely chip in great guidance and principles to other people, who many, any modern society and city definitely esteemed and respected. I can's imagine I can benefit others to be main competent level who will bring about important products and remedy values to society and communities now. How happy are you if you end up one just like so with your own name on the label? I get arrived at SUCCESS and conquer virtually all the tricky locations which is passing the CPA examinations to be CPA. What is more, we will also include what are the downfalls, or some other matters that may just be on the approach and the correct way I have in person experienced all of them and is going to indicate you methods to get over them. | From Admin and Read More at Cont'.

If You Blink, We Go Back to the Start

You tested your mettle of doe’s skin and petals
While kissing the lipless
Who bleed all the sweetness away

In the dream I’m kissing a faceless void. My mouth touches nothing but emptiness. I am 14 and no one has kissed me, so I dream of it, yet my mouth has no memory. But I’m 14, and I’m horny, and I want so much to be kissed. I want to know what another mouth tastes like. My jaw works in a sloppy approximation of kissing toward this void, this empty face. When I’m alone in my room I sometimes rub my lips and tongue against the back of my hand, imagining the taste of someone else’s skin.

My friends have kissed others. The summer before eighth grade, Julie three-way called Renee and me and breathed heavy and quiet into the phone. She sounded bashful, excited, different.

“Jason and I had sex.”

She couldn’t help but giggle. It was bright outside; June in Florida. Everyone had turned 13 but me. I sat in the office chair upstairs at the computer, staring out the window. My knowledge of the mechanics of sex was limited to penis-goes-in-vagina. Everything else seemed optional, like add-ons to a salad.

I had so many questions but I didn’t want to sound inept. I wanted to ask, Did he hump you? I imagined them on the futon in her dad’s office, or on her green-sheeted bed with the Devendra Banhart poster on the wall above it. Her violin keeping watch from its stand in the corner of her bedroom. The Chinese candy she’d brought back from visiting her family tossed in a dish on the nightstand. Did he climb on top of her? He must have, I thought. And then what? It’s not like I (or they, probably) had any concept of foreplay. I wondered if they kissed while they did it. Did he just stick it in her? And then what? I imagined slight movements at the pelvis, a gentle rocking. I imagined dogs, sniffing and mounting and humping.

The question was overwhelming. Did he hump you? Renee and Julie talked about nothing while I sat in silence, wondering how sex worked. Did he cum? What was it like when someone came in you, or in a condom, or into your hand? What did a dick look like up close, what did it smell like when it was in your mouth? What did his face look like when he entered you, what does breathing sound like between two quiet virgins on a Wednesday afternoon in June? What does a mouth taste like?

I turned 13 that summer and it felt so important. “My little teenager,” my grandma called me, joyfully, knowingly. I had my first boyfriend. He was my best friend who sat across from me at the lab table in science class. We were each other’s number-ones on our MySpace Top 8s. My MySpace song was “She’s in Parties” by Bauhaus. I think his was a Beatles song. I used to wait all afternoon for him to log on to AIM. I copied and pasted our conversations and saved them in Word files. I had his screen name in my AIM profile. He asked me out via instant message and I said yes. But as soon as we were dating I was struck with a profound shyness and forgot how to talk to him. One afternoon on the way home from school, a girl I barely knew remarked upon our heights. I was 5’2″ on a good day. He had shot up to 6 feet or more.

“He’s so much taller than you. How are you going to kiss?” she asked me.

Well, fuck if I knew.

I wrote a note, its contents lost to time. Written in pencil and intricately folded, it found its way to him at the end of science class. I was breaking up with him, two days after we started dating. A friend came up to me at lunch on the patio, where we sat in exclusionary, clique-y circles and surreptitiously chewed wintergreen gum. If ever there was a currency of Florida middle schools in the mid-2000s, it was chewing gum. Open the tiny fake Louis Vuitton clutched beneath any eighth grader’s armpit in 2005 and you would find a veritable treasure trove of gum and mints. We weren’t allowed to chew gum in school, so we mastered the tiny jaw movements required to masticate a stick of spearmint without anyone noticing. All of us pretending we had something on our breath we wanted to hide. All of us ready at a moment’s notice for — what? A kiss? I was offered a piece of gum, and she popped one in her mouth. We chewed in silence for a second or two.

“So, you and Nick broke up.”

I swallowed minty spit and straightened out my neck, holding my head up higher. “I just didn’t think it was going to work. I felt, like, trapped, you know?”

“He’s like, really sad about it. Cameron said he looked really sad in P.E.”

I imagined Nick sitting on the bleachers in his navy blue uniform gym shorts. We all wore ours too big and never took them home to be washed. The locker rooms smelled sweetly of pubescent sweat and dollar-store body spray. There were showers installed that we never used. Self-conscious bodies, costumed in Victoria’s Secret push-up bras handed down from older sisters, changed out of one uniform and into another. Shooting furtive looks at the bodies of others.

For some reason it was in fashion for us to wear our too-big gym shorts with the elastic waist rolled over at least three times so they’d be shorter and flare out at our hips. We’d wear them like that for the rest of the day and get in trouble for it. The boys all wore their shirts too long and their shorts pulled down just enough to show the tops of their boxers if they bent over. We would do the same with the tops of our thongs, if our moms let us wear them. Low-rise jeans were in fashion, but my mom bought me high-waisted bikini underwear, so I had to shove my panties down into my jeans so no one would see. Folding our socks into our tennis shoes to show off our ankles and badly shaved legs. My mom wouldn’t let me shave above the knee, but I started doing it anyway after the other girls noticed. I would spend 45 minutes or more in the tub shaving every bit of hair on my legs, my pubes, even my arms at one point. To look like a hairless virgin to prove someone would want to fuck me.

So I imagined Nick and his gym shorts and the smell of boy sweat, which was different from perfumed girl sweat because it was tangier and muskier and smelled like animals. I imagined him holding the note in both hands, tracing my loopy cursive with a fingertip, looking morose. Tucking the note into his waistband if someone asked about it. A toss of his floppy hair. I have no idea what excuse I came up with to end our relationship. I know what I was thinking. You’re six feet tall and I’m five feet tall and we both have braces so why don’t you tell me how we’re supposed to kiss? But I did desperately want to kiss. I wanted to feel his face next to mine, our hot spearmint breath circulating in the closeness of our mouths. I wanted to feel his tongue wherever tongues went when kissing happened. When I thought about it, I usually imagined that I was standing on a chair, the heavy plastic and metal ones we sat on in orchestra. Our mouths would get so close and — then what?

Then what.

Nick and I stayed friends into high school. He went on to date one of my best friends, and I often suggested to her that they fuck while he wore his Boy Scout uniform. So, you know, normal stuff.

I’m 13 and I’m starting high school and I’m having these dreams. Kissing some face like a chasm: tongueless, toothless, lipless. Sometimes I wake up cumming. I never told anyone about one dream. Like every other 13-year-old girl in 2005, I watched Grey’s Anatomy, and I was horny for Patrick Dempsey. Once I dreamed I was sucking his dick, but his dick was like this giant buttered noodle. And these dreams are relentless and there’s no one to kiss me and all my friends are kissing or fucking and I’ve got nothing to contribute to the conversation but these dreams, these gaps and voids, my mouth trying for skin and catching only air.

I sealed my fate with a pencil mark while sitting in math class at the end of eighth grade. The room was dark, the only light coming from the overhead projector at the front of the class. I sat near the back, by the filing cabinets and extra textbooks. We were signing up for the classes we wanted to take in ninth grade. I was stuck between two classes for my elective choice: musical theater or acting. Our English teacher had started an informal drama club, so of course I joined. The eighth grade plays had been abridged versions of The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth. Drama club was all girls, and I don’t think we got through either play on the night of the performance. Our production values were lights up for Shrew, lights dim for Macbeth. I can still smell the cafeteria, like spoiled milk and something else sharp and rotten. The smell of 100 or more sweaty kids and their chicken-tender lunches.

When I was 10, I played the mom in some made-for-kids show. Before my mom took me to the school that night to perform, I sat in her Jacuzzi bathtub and shaved my legs and armpits for the first time. I had begged her all year to let me shave, because I had pale skin and dark hair and all the other girls were already doing it. She finally gave in, and I was smooth and depilated for my acting debut. I felt so adult, swishing in my little button-up dress. For one scene, I had to go onstage in a bathrobe alongside the boy playing my husband, on whom I had a massive crush. I think he’s a veterinarian now. I wore a lime green fuzzy bathrobe from Limited Too over my dress, plus house slippers. I was embarrassed and pleased to be in front of everyone in essentially my pajamas, with my newly smooth legs, hairspray in my hair, wearing my mom’s makeup. And that was probably what did it. Acting was all I could think about ever again.

I was Lady Macbeth and you’d better believe just about everything from that fucking play was cut but “Out damned spot.” I’m sure there’s a video out there of me, 13 years old in some kind of emo reimagining of a Lady Macbeth costume assembled from my own closet, walking the stage of our cafetorium while everyone’s parents cringe inwardly on the plastic lunchroom chairs. I never want to see it. From what I remember, I was amazing and I do not want to know otherwise. At my death scene I stood in the wings and screamed: a truly disgusting, bloody scream. It sounded great. The other girls would gather around me, excited for me to open up my lungs and cry out. I would crumple to the ground for dramatic effect. The attention felt good. It felt right.

After the show, other kids’ parents told me how good I was, that I should really consider acting as I got older. Those words led my pencil to hover over the acting class bubble and eventually fill it in. I was going to be a very serious actress, and it was going to start now.

I was excited all summer for the acting class, for high school, all of it. When I had entered middle school I had some idea that I was going to give myself a nickname. I did, and it stuck for about a week, and then I forgot to keep writing the name on school papers. But I was older now, and I wanted to just be myself. I dreamed of driving around in cars with friends, going to the mall, going to the beach. Having people to talk to. Having someone to kiss. I invented a boy in my head and named him Charlie. I wanted someone just like him, someone kind of shy who made me mix CDs and read Virginia Woolf (I had not read any Virginia Woolf, but had decided it was a very cool thing to do). Charlie was also the name of our family cat, so make of that what you will.

The summer ended. I don’t remember much of it. My mind goes from the last day of eighth grade to the first day of ninth. I got a perm at some point. I wanted to look like Carrie Bradshaw, but instead there was Little Orphan Annie energy. I had new glasses. One pair: red cat-eye. The other: proto-hipster tortoiseshell. My braces came off and my teeth felt smooth and strange in my mouth, like they might fall out.

On the first day of high school, I got ready while listening to Pet Sounds. It was 2006, so describing my outfit in detail will only bring everyone pain. But I can still see myself: my skin, my bitten-down nails, the placement of every last curl. I took a few selfies in the early morning darkness with a digital camera because I still had a Nokia 3310 with no camera and every text cost 15 cents. I wanted a Sidekick or a Razr, but I was allowed to use the phone only at night and on weekends or to call my parents. I don’t even know if we called them selfies. I took a few moody pictures of myself for MySpace, mouth slightly, suggestively open.

I used to take most of my selfies in the bathroom in my bra so I could see myself in the mirror. I’d listen to Hole on my iPod, pouting along to Live Through This, drawing dark kohl circles around my eyes, smudging red lipstick across my face to be like all the burnt-out punk goddesses I so admired. I had exactly one cute bra that I had bought in seventh grade, when the school orchestra took a field trip to play at the big mall in town for Christmas. It was lacy and red and continued to fit my flat chest well into the start of my sex life. I took pictures in it for my first serious boyfriend at 19. I posed suggestively on the bathroom floor, tousling my hair, trying to look—as we used to say in high school—JBF, which stood for Just Been Fucked. He’d send me videos of him jerking off to the pictures.

He was the first guy I had proper phone sex with: heavy breathing, what are you wearing, what do you want to do to me? We would date and live together for four years and almost never have sex, although early in our relationship he was up for anything and once broke a cutting board on my ass. Another time he wanted to be my slave and shave my legs in the shower. It set something off in me, and I sat down and cried. He had a Reddit account just for porn and I found it and looked through it. He had just found messages on my Facebook in which I’d admitted to cheating on him multiple times with a friend’s husband before we were official. Our relationship was already falling apart, but we held on for another three years. I’m not going to tell you what kind of porn he was looking at because that’s not really the point, but it gave me pause. Reader, I stayed when I shouldn’t have stayed because I wanted so much to be loved.

Midway through that relationship, when the sex had stopped completely and we were using Oxycodone every day, my mom sat me down on her bed and asked why I was with him.

“Are you afraid no one else is going to love you?”

It rained the first morning of high school. I took the bus. Riding to school in the pitch-black mornings I would listen to Cat Power and zone out into my own secret world. Eventually those early mornings would be the only time I had by myself, away from my world melting around me. The only place where I was absolved of the guilt I felt, the heaviness of secrecy and shame.

The moon is not only beautiful
It is so far away
The moon is not only ice cold
It is here to stay
.

When we met, it was so uneventful. We had an uneventful meeting and an uneventful end. Like strangers passing each other on the street. It’s difficult to explain. I’ve been required to at different times in my life, mostly right after everything came to its climax, mostly on papers that went into forgotten files, but I’ve never really told the whole story to anyone. I’m not going to tell the whole story here either. It happened 13 years ago. I had just turned 14. I am now twice as old. I’ve lived that entire lifetime again since everything happened. I am older now than he was then. There are things I don’t remember. There are things too painful to write.

I never know what to call him. For some time afterward, the sound of his name sent me into a panic. It was like sticking my finger into an electrical socket. I’d be struck by lighting and everything around me moved more slowly. I was submerged in water, in the ocean, the silence below it pressed tightly against my ears. I was drowning but I was on fire. My insides like burnt debris, the wreckage of a house fire. A blackened chimney in an empty lot. Mostly I refer to him as “my teacher.” And it takes a long time for me to say it. I have to take a deep breath. I have to form the words soundlessly with my tongue before moving my lips. First I have to control the words, and then I let them go. Give them a stern talking-to, my hand gripping their arm above the elbow. “Behave yourself,” I reprimand, before letting them loose at the party. Unruly children.

No author could have named him more perfectly if this were all just a story. His name sounds indecent to me now, like a bad joke. Our names have the same number of syllables: first, middle, and last. Two trochees and a single syllable surname. Our last names are both naturally occurring substances, common nouns. Two Os right in the center of the words. When he first called roll he joked about my name. I laughed condescendingly, rolled my eyes. I was used to it. When I look back on it now, I analyze every nanosecond. What exactly did he say? How did he say it? Where was he looking? Who else heard? What did it mean? Why did he say anything?

There’s so much minutiae to the story. But that’s every story. I’ve lost the order of events. It’s not like it’s a mystery, a careful order ensuring we all get to the proper conclusion. All the clues in their proper places at the proper times. All that matters is that it happened.

The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

I don’t remember when it started. Sometimes things just bleed into each other. I don’t need to explain the frog-in-hot-water analogy, do I? Someone put me in the water and slowly turned up the heat. When I look back, I am amazed that everything happened over three months. Three months out of my life, 13 years ago. All right, I’m stalling. I don’t know where to begin because I don’t know where it began.

It was so intimate. It was like we were already lovers.

His name is Michael. I still can’t even think it without feeling a twinge of something somewhere in my heart. Sometimes a little thrill, mostly nausea. I still don’t know if I’d call him that to his face if I ever saw him. But his first name is better than Mr. — , which is how I knew him then. I’ll tell you the way I tell anyone who asks: He was my acting teacher in high school. He was 24. He was married and she was 21. They were something like childhood sweethearts. Yes, I met her a few times. No, they didn’t have children. Yes, they have children now. No, neither of them are girls. Yes, I’m relieved. He was raised Catholic but ended up Episcopalian. Yes, he later went to seminary. Yes, so did she. Yes, they’re still together. Yes, she knows. No, I don’t know what she knows. Yes, I’m fine. It was a long time ago. Another lifetime ago.

It was like we had always Been. Like we were picking up a conversation we’d started in another life. He taught me. He listened to me.

“Acting is not just about waiting for your turn to speak! You need to listen, be in the moment. What are your objectives?”

I don’t think anyone had ever listened to me before. Like, really listened. He read my poetry and it was exciting to him. He read passages of it back to me in awe, in disbelief, in joy. He asked me questions about it. He gave me books. Artaud. Stanislavsky. The Tao Te Ching. I lent him CDs. Regina Spektor. Jeff Buckley. He listened mostly to classical music; I remember he liked Aaron Copland. He left with my copy of Grace. I burned his books. I buried my shoes. Once he wrote me a song. I can still hear some of it in my head, but the words are lost to time, to shame. When he finished playing it, I said, “That was very nice, but maybe it would be good if we were just—friends.” It was September.

The month before, in August, on my 14th birthday, they held auditions for The Glass Menagerie. I wanted to play Amanda. Owing to pure luck, I had ended up at the high school with one of the more competitive and successful theater programs in the district. I would go on to win awards and scholarships for my work there. It took over my life. I was always ready to become someone else, someone without my past. Someone who didn’t remember the things I did. I was one of the only freshmen at the audition. A group of juniors invited me to sit with them. They filled out their audition sheets with all the roles they’d played, joking with each other. I craved their camaraderie. They were so easy with one another, like they’d always Been. I filled in my sheet with my acting experience to date. Mom. Lady Macbeth. I wore a fluttery-sleeved top, silky and low-cut. I was self conscious about my small breasts and wished I’d worn anything else. The other girls were tall, all 17 or 18 years old, and they had tits. I was jealous. I felt so little.

Probably 10 of us girls went up and auditioned. For Amanda, we were assigned the “gentleman callers” monologue. I still have some of it memorized. I pull it out today like a party trick.

“My callers were gentlemen — all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta — planters and sons of planters!”

I, of course, was not speaking from experience. Isn’t the whole point of The Glass Menagerie that maybe Amanda isn’t either? I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Tennessee Williams. The play is memory. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.

Reader, I got the part. I was the first freshman to be cast as a lead in a play in the history of the program. It was a Big Deal. I was popular, immediately. Everyone was curious about who I was. What was my deal, anyway? Where did I come from? Some of the other girls were jealous. Time was closing in on them, graduation not too far away. Some freshman had gotten the part?

What’s strange about this time in my life—other than, I don’t know, everything—is that many of the cast of characters are still the main players today. So when I talk about my best friend from that time, he is still my best friend today. The boy who played Tom Wingfield—one of the first boys who ever asked me out on a date, whom I politely declined because of anxiety—is a bartender at the restaurant where I work. When I went up to New York for school, I ate dolmades in Hell’s Kitchen with the girl who played Laura. The boy who played Jim, the gentleman caller, remained in my social circle for some time after he graduated, but I don’t know what he’s doing now other than drinking. Every now and again his mugshots circulate among group texts, everyone wondering, “Where is he now? Is he okay?”

And of course I’m still here. Don’t have a choice but to play the leading role.

Rehearsals were under way, and I was getting used to my new freedom. We’d stay after school, sometimes until eight or later. We’d go out in Jim’s pickup and drive nowhere all night. We all started smoking weed every now and again. I started doing pretty much whatever I wanted and it was fine. Jim and Tom became my compatriots, along with a larger crew of die-hard theater kids. This is how I learned about Sondheim and Brecht and off-Broadway and Actor’s Equity and Angels in America, and everything was so cool and exciting. Remember hearing the overture to Les Miserables for the first time? The first time you saw Fosse’s Cabaret? The first time you wore a pair of jazz shoes? Everything was new; I was enraptured. We spoke in Williams’ elevated language, we shopped for costumes at Goodwill, we listened to Sweeney Todd on car stereos. And the whole time, my brain was absolutely disintegrating.

I practiced how to tell him to stop. Mornings, in the mirror. Nights, in the shower. On the bus. Between classes. But Reader, I liked the attention. By this time we were having private rehearsals, just Michael and me. He had a small office between the orchestra and band rooms. It was more like a closet. The only window was in the door that led to the hallway. There were two chairs and a desk, a bookshelf, some filing cabinets. When we were in there, I don’t know what we talked about. We were like new lovers, bashful and breathless with excitement to see each other. I was sweaty and nervous and knew I wasn’t supposed to be there the way I was. But I liked that feeling. Until I didn’t. It was disorienting. I was in a perpetual state of shock when I wasn’t with him, sometimes when I was. My friends would eat lunch in the dressing rooms to avoid the madhouse cafeteria. A few of us would skip class. We had become friends in the immediate and intense way teenagers do, and we knew everything about each other. I thought they could smell it on me. Was it written on my face?

He and I spent the mornings together. The bus got us to school maybe 30 or 40 minutes before the first bell. He’d be on the stage, putting the set together. I would sit and watch with my coffee. I hadn’t even started smoking cigarettes yet. Michael had once told me never to start. We’d always be alone. When I think about it now I don’t know why no one was concerned that we were always alone. I want to burst in as the adult I am now, grab myself by the hand. Save her. In subsequent years I would become obsessed with Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

We would go to school football games together. Anything to buy him a little more time. We’d sit in the stands and talk. I never watched a single game. After everything happened, I never went to one again. It’s not that I cared to in the first place. But it was a place we had been Together, and now we were not Together, and so I never went back.

Scattered memories, anecdotes. I guess the real trouble started when he made the secret MySpace. Now we were never apart. I was braver in front of a screen than I was in front of his face. I don’t have the messages anymore. They’re gone. I deleted everything when it was all over. No one could know anything. No one could know how far it went, even though everybody knew the ship had sailed. This is when I told him about the dream.

I’m kissing an inky void. My mouth touches nothing. I’ve never been kissed.

He assured me I would be kissed, one day.

Open your eyes and look at me. No, I don’t think I will kiss you — although you need kissing badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.

We had a scene shop off stage right. It smelled like paint and sawdust and sun. Two-by-fours, the almost clinical, metal scent of power tools. When I think of him, that’s what I remember. We were alone. Always alone. That room to me is sacred, liminal. We stood alone and he held me. I could smell his sweat. His arms tenderly around me. My heart skittish in my chest. I wish I could express to you how long this moment lasted, how I am still held by him today. We didn’t move, didn’t dare. Oh, be careful — if you breathe, it breaks!

“How about cutting the rug a little, Miss Wingfield?” Jim asks Laura. Scene 7 of The Glass Menagerie. They waltz to music drifting in from the dance hall down the alley. Discussing the play in a private rehearsal, Michael turns to me.

“What do the characters want from each other, when they’re dancing? What does the dance stand in for?”

I hesitate. He tells me anyway.

“Sex. It’s always sex.”

They waltz into the table, knocking over Laura’s glass unicorn.

“Is it broken?” Jim asks her. It is. The unicorn has lost its horn.

“Now it is just like all the other horses,” Laura says. “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.”

We didn’t move but we were dancing, indiscernible to the eye. Stillness, too, is a dance. He was smelling my hair. I had never been this close to a boy before. A man. Teachers at the middle school dances didn’t need to carry rulers to distance us. Our awkwardness did the trick alone. Once I had slow-danced; we kept our arms rigid, looked back to our friends and laughed. This was something else entirely. Sawdust in the air, hot afternoon sun. He wanted to kiss me. I don’t know if I knew then.

…we were pressed, and I could feel that he was hard, that muscle and sinew, pressed against me while we danced.

Once he would tell me he was jealous of a boy I wished would ask me to the homecoming dance.

It bothered him when I paid attention to other boys. His jealousy was palpable.

“I just wish I could take you. I would take you to the dance.”

He wished we could do normal things together. Be together.

“Has anyone ever told you that you were pretty?”

When I got home I gathered the clothes I’d been wearing that day, down to my shoes. I took a trowel from the garage and walked into the woods beyond the neighborhood cul-de-sac. I dug a hole and buried them.

And here is where I go back and forth over where to place the blame. Because hadn’t it been me, pasting papier-mâché onto plywood on the stage, who said, “Lolita is my favorite book”? Offhand, casual. I could have said anything. But I didn’t, did I? I sang the siren song of ephebophiles everywhere. I may as well have undressed.

He saw me once, opened the door to the dressing room without knocking. Knowing I’d be there. I was just beginning to disrobe, the back of my dress unzipped. My shoulder was exposed. He stood in the doorway. I met his eyes in the mirror under the hot makeup lights. Neither of us moved. He slowly shut the door and then I was alone. I dropped my head to the counter.

Little stories. Moments. We grasped for moments together, desperate for the thrill. I longed to be near him, but the nearness of him made me sick. I began to feel embarrassed at things he’d say, like an exasperated spouse.

But he was the first man who ever said I was pretty.

I wore glasses then, but I needed contact lenses for the play. When I got them I stared at my face in the mirrored wall upstage. I was shocked at the vast expanse of my skin, exposed for anyone to see. My face felt long, too long, cheeks too wide. There was nothing hiding me. I was embarrassed, frustrated at my awkwardness.

“My face is just so — empty!”

A face like a chasm.

“You look pretty. I think you look pretty.”

I remember a rehearsal where, as a joke, Tom had hidden my shoes. I did the rest of the rehearsal barefoot, trying to hide my feet. I felt naked. I knew he was seeing me.

In rehearsal, we did an acting exercise that Michael supervised. Tom and I sat in front of the room and faced each other, making direct eye contact. Tom was to make a comment about me and I was to repeat it back, then he would repeat it, then I would. It was too vulnerable, too intimate for me, in front of Michael. Tom looked sweetly into my eyes and said, “You have small lips.”

“I have small lips.”

“You have small lips.”

“I have small lips.”

“Could you answer the next series of questions without blinking your eyes? Without fear and hesitation, answer as quickly as you can? Starting now, you are not to blink. If you blink we go back to the start.”

The other kids in class thought he was odd. He was. Passionate, funny, a little too intense. He lacked a filter. He could be hypnotizing or off-putting, often both. My mother called him a Svengali. This was before she knew. This was before anyone knew.

Sitting on the set at the Wingfields’ kitchen table, I complained about my hair, pulling one curly strand in front of my face to straighten it and inspect the split ends. We were trying to figure out how I’d style my hair for the play.

“It’s so damaged!” I whined.

“Everything about you is damaged,” he said to me. “But I like it.”

The words stuck with me. I hear them in my head even now. When I look in a mirror. When I fuck something up. Twelve years later, two days after Christmas, I would stumble from my car and trudge like a zombie into an empty ER.

“Hi, I am thinking about killing myself,” I calmly explained to the woman checking me in. My face was wet with tears, my voice small. I felt like a little kid in the school nurse’s office. My tummy hurts. I want to go home.

“Okay,” the woman said. She breathed in deeply and told me to sit down and wait. I did. I stared at my hands. Everything about you is damaged.

I never went to the homecoming dance. No one asked me.

“Somebody — ought to — kiss you, Laura!”

We are alone. Reader, are you shocked? I lean back against the sink in the dressing room. He sits backward on a chair. The air is stifling. It is September. Maybe it is the beginning of October. Time has no meaning when I look back. These are the things that always were. They have always Been. Nothing can change them; nothing can stop them. We are staring at each other like opponents. Waiting for the other person to break. If you blink we go back to the start.

“I have these dreams,” he says. “I would never want anything to happen to her — but I have these dreams where something happens to my wife. And she dies. And then we can be together.”

A year before I had never so much as held hands with a boy. Now a man dreams of his wife dying to be with me. His lawfully wedded, ’til-death-do-us-part wife. A woman he has romanced, has proposed to, has made love with. Has kissed. And then there is me, at 14, trapped between his legs and the sink. I don’t know what I said. The world gets very, very small. My heart pounds mercilessly in my throat. My mouth goes dry. Oh, I knew about dreams. Wasn’t this what I wanted to hear?

He stands, slowly, like he is approaching an animal he is careful not to scare. I counter his movement, circling around to the chair where he had sat. I climb onto it and sit on my knees. We are facing each other again. His hand goes to my arm. He is very close to me now. We stand like this for a moment, a minute, a lifetime. I don’t know. Sometimes I’m still there in that room. I can’t escape. I can’t save myself. He leans down and touches his lips to my neck. I tilt my head to the side just slightly, giving in to his touch. He kisses me there, gently. Sweetly. His lips open and close on my skin. Then they are still. He is tasting me.

I don’t remember what comes next. I don’t want to talk about it.

When I left the dressing room and gathered my things, my mom was waiting in her car at the front of the school.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?”

I didn’t know.

“You need to be on time. I am sick of waiting for you. You are supposed to be here when I get here, or I’m not going to pick you up anymore. And you won’t be doing this play.”

I stared out the window. Hot tears burned my eyes.

“Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer!”

The night of the play. I meet his wife. I am not, at 14, accustomed to meeting the wives of men who have kissed me. In subsequent years it becomes old hat, something I know like the back of my hand. How many husbands have cornered me when they think we’re alone? How many vows go out the window? I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. In time I learn the pleasantries, the white lies, the double entendres. I’ve had practice.

Backstage, I’m nervous; I can barely speak. Jim leans over and puts a hand on my knee, shakes it a bit.

“Break a leg.” He smiles.

There are so many things I want to go back in time and tell him not to do. He is sweet, handsome, four years away from his first arrest for battery. But the hand on my knee is gentle, and he’s smiling so broadly. How many nights were in our future, stoned and stealing his grandma’s Misty 120s, drinking Mich Ultras and Orangette in his garage? He will crawl on his hands and knees in my parents’ house to catch my dying kitten so we can give him an IV. I will sprain my ankle and he will pick me up like a child and carry me to class. We will mash our faces against his girlfriend’s in a drunken three-way kiss. I will watch his next girlfriend’s mom get blackout drunk and cocaine-sharp, press her foot into his crotch. Watch her kiss him.

But none of that has happened yet. It’s opening night.

The house lights dim. We head purposefully to our spots for the opening act. I have never been more nervous in my life. I am certain that if I open my mouth, I will vomit, ruining the play. The lights come up on the Wingfield family at dinner.

“Tom?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We can’t say grace until you come to the table.”

I never feel as natural as when I am pretending to be someone else, face caked in makeup, hundreds of hot lights beaming down on me. Movements choreographed by others, words written by the long-dead. Living someone else’s life for entertainment.

The final scene. I stand in a gown and heels a size too small.

“The warehouse is where I work,” Tom exclaims. “Not where I know things about people!”

“You don’t know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!”

I am shaking, but I’m not nervous. The audience is onstage with us. The back of the set faces the seats in the house; the audience sits upstage. Michael stands just behind the audience members, in the wings. I am looking directly at him.

“Go to the movies, go!”

I am seething; an anger, a pain cracks me open at my skull. I want him to die. I want to die.

“Don’t let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure! Just go, go, go — to the movies!”

An acting exercise. A student is to count all the seats in the auditorium. It is our objective to stop him. What tactics will we use? We scream, we clown, we run behind him and cover his eyes. He keeps counting. Someone throws their sweater at him. Someone shouts out nonsense numbers to throw him off. He keeps counting.

“We give up! How are we supposed to get him to stop?”

Michael smiles.

“Tyler, there are 350 seats in the auditorium.”

He stops counting.

I hope you die, I hope we both die.

And, you know. Things implode. They unravel. I let something slip to my two best friends. I’m pulled out of class. I’m writing a witness statement. In a cold, impersonal office, I write down the story on an official document.

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

What did I say? A song, a kiss. A slow dance in sawdust. Women dying in dreams. The inventory of an affair.

A year later, a few months before my first hospitalization, the new acting teacher will look down at me from the sound booth above the auditorium.

“She’s the one? God, she looks so young!”

The history books forgot about us 
And the Bible didn’t mention us
Not even once

There are no news stories. He quietly resigns. The last time I see him is the morning of Halloween. I sit and wait to talk to the school psychologist. Michael is leaving the front office; I later learn he is going to pack up his things. He doesn’t look at me. He must have known I was there. I bristle at his presence, but we do not say goodbye.

I think, You owe me one. I could have sold you the fuck out. How much did I omit on official papers? How much did I deflect, lying to the faces of people trying to help?

I had gone home one day to my mom sitting on the couch, waiting for me.

“Did the school call?” I asked.

They hadn’t. I don’t know why she had been waiting. Maybe part of her already knew. How many times over the next few years would she slap me? How many pictures would I tear off the walls and throw in her direction? How many times would she tell me, “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“Well, Mr. — has kind of been flirting. With me.”

How much did I redact? How much did I lie? We never talk about it again. When I am committed for the first time, she picks me up from school and drives me to the crisis center. We are silent, looking out the windows. I tell the story again, in a small room with two cops. Another official paper, further redaction. The psych techs chip paint off the walls and sprinkle it in my hair. At breakfast, I sit with a girl who has cut her stomach so badly she requires bright white bandages wrapped around her torso. We watch How It’s Made. When I get home a week later, I take a bath. Paint my windowsill with nail polish. Carve deep gashes into my thighs and arms. Wrap scarves around my wrists.

I feel no need to forgive, but I might as well
 But let me kiss your lips so I know how it felt

We’re waiting for Jim to pick us up. It’s November; we’re in Carmen’s backyard, and it’s just Jeff and me. Jeff is beautiful and very gay. I don’t know what possesses him to do it. We’re looking up at the stars, which are bright and clear in the dark sky above us. We’re talking low, coy, sly. Slow and warm. The night is perfectly still, and we’re alone, and we’re talking, and then we’re not talking. Jeff leans into me and puts his mouth on mine, kissing me gently. We hold still like that a moment, and then break apart, both of us laughing. I can taste his lip gloss.

“Jeff and I kissed!” I exclaim to Carmen later.

“Oh yeah; he just does that sometimes,” she says.

All the other kisses were voids. Toothpaste-fresh kisses in Spin the Bottle games, beer-sticky mouths in drunken Truth or Dares. I let Angel put his hand between my legs on Jim’s bed when everyone else left on a Blockbuster run. Terry and I smoked salvia out of a toilet paper roll and I took off my shirt. He tied a tie around my naked neck. We would kiss in an empty house on a goose-down comforter. Aaron would ask to blow up a balloon inside my vagina; we got high and fucked on the couch in his mom’s garage. I got my period while we had sex and I ignored him for months.

There was the girl who threw up champagne and whiskey while we skinny-dipped with her boyfriend. He bit my neck and came inside me while she watched. Jensen, who literally fell asleep while eating my ass. Amy played Fiona Apple and made me Cuban coffee in the morning. Matthew eating mushrooms in the Airstream trailer, Matthew in his childhood bedroom, Matthew in the back seat of my car on the top of a parking garage downtown. Don coming down from acid as the sun came up. Andrew on the front porch of a house in which neither of us lived, my legs eaten by mosquitoes.

My callers were gentlemen, all.

“I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”

There are so many things I’ve forgotten. I have a very specific amnesia. There are things I make myself believe so I can keep living. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. I keep running. Take the train to Coney Island in January, walk alone along the boarded-up storefronts. Listen to the fireworks on New Year’s Eve from my hospital bed. Throw myself into one mistake after another. Lie, deflect, omit. Try every single day to learn how to listen. Forget the lessons I learned. Forget all he taught me, forget his touch. Smoke cigarette after cigarette. Drive all night. Try to be someone who isn’t the girl he wanted.

He called me his Beatrice. (“1274, in Florence…”) He wrote me songs. He held me; he kissed me. He dreamed of some great tragedy that would pull us together. I dreamed of a mouth that would swallow me whole. I wanted to die.

Three months, 13 years ago.

Reader, there’s no ending to this story. Isn’t that a cruel little trick? Bring you all this way just to tell you I’m not doing any better? Lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to drink. Oh, I get by just fine. Most days I can even get out of bed. Put the coffee on, wash my face, think about doing yoga but watch TV instead. Go for a walk, always looking over my shoulder. Check my rearview mirror. It’s easy to live when you’re being pursued. Just watch where you’re going. At best, my heart feels like prey.

From the last time I see him to the next time we speak, almost five years pass. He messages me on Facebook. I’m in New York. I’m reeling; I stumble onto Broadway, a Pall Mall between my lips. I’m too high, grinding my teeth and shivering. I’m not wearing a coat. It’s November, maybe December. The streets smell like Christmas trees. We begin a correspondence. Not then; then I am too rattled. I downward-spiral extravagantly. I leave the city. I fall in love, or think I do. I get pregnant. I have an abortion. I wait tables. I sit at a bar and drink dark beer. The bartenders know I’m underage, but I don’t cause a scene and I tip well. One night, drunk, I pull out my phone and type furiously, possessed.

I ask him, in many more words than these: Do you know what you’ve done to me?

He apologizes. Explains: The same thing happened to him.

Lie, deflect, omit. I learned from the best.

He says: I was just a guy with a crush. I guess I’ll always be.

Over the years, conversations slink strangely into the mundane. I tell him about my day, my terrible relationship, my loneliness. He sends me pictures of his son. He bounces around from tech job to tech job. He lives out west, where I’ve never been. He is just a man. He goes to work, he comes home to his son, his pregnant wife. But in my life he is a looming presence of dark matter and pain. So why do I go back? Reader, I do not know. Tell me. Why do I go back?

A few years after we started these new online exchanges, he tells me he is coming to town. Do I want to see him? I’m in a play for the first time in seven years. He wants to come see.

“We should have a torrid affair,” he writes.

I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?

I’m 24. I’m at the very end of a relationship that is draining the very life out of me. My hair falls out in clumps when I shower. I am alone everywhere I go, lonely alone. there are flies everywhere i go. I haven’t been fucked in months.

Lie, deflect, omit. How many times? How many letters do I need to write to end this mess? How many years held by him, held back?

I decline, of course. I don’t see him. There is no affair. My boyfriend will leave me for a 19-year-old and I’ll move back in with my parents. Sometimes we travel in reverse. Time is like that, see. It doesn’t move the way you think it does, measured and clockwise. Time has no memory. Time has no past: time is past. Passed. Passing. Reversing. The future doesn’t exist, it’s just a promise we make to the people we love.

“It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”

Reader, his name sews my eyelids shut. My mouth struggles for sound. All the love I’ve known, the mouths I’ve kissed, the skin I’ve touched: it’s embroidered by the memory of him, dark red threads that slash through the promise of anything good. I try to tear the fabric, cut the cord, push the hands of the clock forward, keep running.

“Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes…”

Keep running. To the movies, to the moon.

“I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between places.”

Keep running into myself at desks, at tables; hundreds of Me, like a house of mirrors; Me on the stage, Me in the dressing room, Me on a bus, Me at the bar. Stationary. I yell at myself but I can’t hear in the past. I can’t save myself. There is no future. I yell:

Keep running.

“Kissing the Lipless” by The Shins
“The Moon” by Cat Power
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), dir. Michel Gondry
Gone With the Wind (1939), dir. Victor Fleming
Three Tall Women by Edward Albee
The Master (2012), dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
“No Children” by The Mountain Goats
“Samson” by Regina Spektor
“Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus
“Wolverine” by Sufjan Stevens
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
“Alone” by Nikki Giovanni

Thank you to Sven, for holding my hand while I wrote this piece, for being the one who spoke up, for defending me and listening to me all these years. Jack, for being an absolute lovebug and letting me stay up until all hours to write and listening to me cry; I love you. Scout, for guiding me when I didn’t know where to go. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1–800–656–4673
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1–800–273–8255

If You Blink, We Go Back to the Start

Research & References of If You Blink, We Go Back to the Start|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source

From Admin and Read More here. A note for you if you pursue CPA licence, KEEP PRACTICE with the MANY WONDER HELPS I showed you. Make sure to check your works after solving simulations. If a Cashflow statement or your consolidation statement is balanced, you know you pass right after sitting for the exams. I hope my information are great and helpful. Implement them. They worked for me. Hey.... turn gray hair to black also guys. Do not forget HEALTH? Competency Development is certainly the number 1 imperative and significant factor of achieving genuine achieving success in all of the procedures as anyone discovered in our modern society as well as in Throughout the world. Which means that fortunate enough to look at together with everyone in the subsequent in regard to exactly what effective Competency Progression is;. precisely how or what approaches we deliver the results to attain aspirations and at some point one definitely will get the job done with what those loves to perform just about every single time of day meant for a comprehensive everyday life. Is it so terrific if you are have the ability to grow effectively and get victory in precisely what you thought, directed for, disciplined and did wonders hard each individual working day and certainly you become a CPA, Attorney, an entrepreneur of a great manufacturer or possibly even a medical doctor who can greatly contribute amazing assistance and values to people, who many, any population and network obviously adored and respected. I can's imagine I can guide others to be leading competent level who will bring about essential treatments and elimination valuations to society and communities in these days. How thrilled are you if you grown to be one just like so with your own name on the headline? I get got there at SUCCESS and rise above all the hard elements which is passing the CPA tests to be CPA. Additionally, we will also handle what are the problems, or many other troubles that will be on your current approach and precisely how I have professionally experienced them and can present you the way to defeat them.

Send your purchase information or ask a question here!

3 + 10 =

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

World Top Business Management Tips For You!

Business Best Sellers

 

Get Paid To Use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
Online Social Media Jobs Pay $25 - $50/Hour.
No Experience Required. Work At Home, $316/day!
View 1000s of companies hiring writers now!
Order Now!

 

MOST POPULAR

*****

Customer Support Chat Job: $25/hr
Chat On Twitter Job - $25/hr
Get Paid to chat with customers on
a business’s Twitter account.
Try Free Now!

 

Get Paid To Review Apps On Phone
Want to get paid $810 per week online?
Get Paid To Review Perfect Apps Weekly.
Order Now!

Look For REAL Online Job?
Get Paid To Write Articles $200/day
View 1000s of companies hiring writers now!
Try-Out Free Now!

 

 

If You Blink, We Go Back to the Start

error: Content is protected !!