#'i wrote this book because REPRESENTATION also possibly an unresolved crush from high school i am pure LITERATURE'

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

man, you know, I haven’t even talked about that ICE documentary yet? what a wild time.

so anyway, there’s this ICE documentary. It’s called Immigrant Nation. It’s 6 episodes on netflix. I’ve watched three so far. I made it through the deported veterans episode (yes, plural, there’s a few in the episode but there’s hundreds that have been deported) and then just, like. the drudergy and banality of evil + the ADHD inability to focus on visual media for more than 15 mins at a time powerfully combined into...not watching it.

but I have to watch it! it would be so irresponsible not to. I made myself promise that I wouldn’t start The Last Draft until I finished watching the documentary series. so I will. but also, man, like, quelle bummer, you know?

however, what’s hilarious about it is that ICE actually agreed to give the documentary team access, because they apparently thought they would come across as like, rugged and heroic? per the conditions of the contract they got to review the material at the end and then ICE was like ?!?!?! you made us look like the bad guys! and tried to block the release.

and if nothing else, that surprise on their part is very, very funny.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

my current social nightmare scenario is that in a fit of good intentions at 3 am in a sleep deprived manic state, I do in fact find contact info for dude from high school / foundational IRL reluctant necromancer inspo, and I send some kind of gushing message and am boneheaded enough to say ‘I’ve been looking for you since JANUARY! before your birthday, after mine. I’ve even been BLOGGING ABOUT THIS ON TUMBLR. you have a HASHTAG.’

to which most people would inevitably say: can I see it?

(because most of us are insatiably curious about how we are perceived)

and 3 AM high on sleep dep me would possibly say yes, and then the next day I would have to fucking die.

hahahah yes please feel free to wade through a billion thrist posts of random actor man with nipple ring to find my overly confessional tortured artiste navel grazing nonsense posts where i compare us to canyons and cliffs and rivers and quote richard siken poetry. that’s. SUPER NORMAL SO NORMAL THE NORMALEST.

anyway, I think the soft lockdown year is getting to me and also I am desperately avoiding doing anything useful right now.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

maybe I can make it through the last two ICE documentary episodes if I liveblog it on tumblr

i can put it behind a cut and just type “wtf??? WTF. wtf!?” every five minutes.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

So here’s a thing that happened, tumblr.

Many moons ago, I was in the Neuro ICU for a while. I was actually in there twice--for a week at first, then out, then in again for about two weeks. In between: “Nothing’s wrong! It’s resolved!” As you might imagine, given the spoiler there about how I went to the Neuro ICU twice: in fact, Something was wrong, and it was not resolved (then).

(it is resolved now, thank you)

This post is not actually ABOUT that, but we must start there, out of order.

This is a post about art and rivers and boys in cars. But we start in the Neuro ICU.

I don’t like talking about this time in my life. I would have been skittish and mysterious ANYWAY--I was raised like that--but I’m extra skittish and vague about my timeline because I don’t want to talk about it, you know? I survived something I had no business surviving. I had to relearn how to walk. That took months and that was the easy part. Because I am a big tiddy goth girl, and because I was very young then, people love to assume that the problem was drugs, and I did it to myself, as if that somehow makes anything less tragic.

I was 23 years old with a brain bleed due to a congenital defect, and even at the time, I had to defend myself: no, I’m not on drugs, I don’t do drugs, I didn’t do coke, I’ve never done coke.

I am also Colombian, which, I suppose, might play into their calculus about the coke, but WHO KNOWS. I was busy gibbering and almost dying at the time, which left little energy for noticing potential microaggressions.

Is it a microaggression, I guess, when you’re dying? Who knows.

I have never even been drunk, tumblr. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t snort. I never have. This is mostly because I’m a paranoid loon with an off again, on again anorexia, ya know, thing, so occasionally I get really hung up on irrational concepts of bodily purity. People think it’s a flex when I try to explain this, that I’m relishing in some kind of moral superiority. I’m not. I admitting to SEVERAL defects (“quirks”) of personality there. The eating disorder. The deep distrust: I will not be vulnerable in the presence of others, I will not dull my senses, I will not allow myself to be weak. A certain perfectionism. A certain tendency towards slow burn self harm. Grand ideas made of nothing that sometimes take hold.

My point is that this big disruptive thing happened.

I survived, which is AWESOME. And yeah, I had to relearn how to walk, and some other things, but you guys know that I do yoga and aerial silks and lyra and ran off to Thailand to train kickboxing for a summer on fighter street and I STILL do not shut the fuck up about it.

So, cool, cool cool cool cool.

And I don’t even want to talk about that part, the medical drama, the body horror, the institutional whatever. My neurosurgeon was fantastic and like a week after my discharge I was high as SHIT on prescribed painkillers my caregivers insisted I take and wrote him a gushing effusive letter about how he was MY HERO because I was ALIVE and anyway that basically makes you BATMAN, DOCTOR LEWIS, I FUCKING LOVE BATMAN.

Again: high as fuck, ok.

 My point is: I hate talking about this.

Because once you’re a survivor in people’s minds, that’s all you are. You are reduced to this one event that had very little to do with you. You are defined by this thing that happened to you.

And this isn’t even the weirdest thing that’s happened TO me! But still. Happened TO me. Not something I did. Not my action. Barely even my reaction.

But again, personality flaws. What does it say about me that I look at social norms about comfort and inwardly I snarl that I want no one’s pity?

Except I’m not actually that mean. I don’t snarl.

I just withdraw.

This is a tactic that has served me well in life a BUNCH of times. Is it always the answer? No. Is it often worth a shot? Listen. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Sometimes you flee an abusive home life because that’s the only option, and you don’t want to die. Hypothetically speaking: sometimes all you can do is run.

But sometimes you flee people with mostly good intentions, maybe.

This is all very high minded but what’s prompting me to write this isn’t exactly the upcoming (many year) anniversary of the event. It’s something way more mundane and dumb.

I have not logged into my facebook account since this happened. I never bothered deleting the account(s), either. I presume they still exist. I have no idea HOW to log back onto them, and, more importantly, no desire.

“So what?”

So, okay, back when I had my first stint in the Neuro ICU? Like, totally out of nowhere, I just disappeared from people’s feeds. (you all know I do this) Somehow part of the story got out and SOMEHOW, I have no idea how, a small group of my friends managed to independently track down the hospital I was at. And this is on next to no info, across state lines, like--I have no idea how the fuck they did it.

I also don’t fucking know who they were.

I was told, at the time. I have a vague idea of who two out of (I think) four were, or might have been. I was kind of busy at the time, with the dying.

And when I say I don’t like talking about this time: I don’t like even THINKING about it. I avoid it.

Fleeing. See?

So I don’t have a memory of the names. I don’t have memories of the memory.

“So what?”

So, I know from groups other than this one, groups less dedicated than this one, that people actually get REALLY fucking mad at you for not accepting their get better soon wishes. And like, I get it! You were very worried and I did nothing to reassure you.

I WAS BUSY.

I was busy dying. Almost dying. Not dying. I was busy sleeping 20 hrs a day. I was busy being unable to walk. I was busy re-learning to walk. I was busy relearning how to write with pen and paper and for months I COULD NOT DO IT, do you have any idea how that feels to someone who is and has always been and has always wanted to be a writer? Fuck it. Fuck you.

The initial disappearance. I am not to blame.

But then doing nothing to reach out to anybody for YEARS and YEARS--

Okay, maybe a dick move on my part.

“So what?”

So I think one of the people who managed to track me down in the hospital was my best friend from high school, a terribly sweet Brazilian boy who mostly called me not by my name, but simply: The Devil.

I dig it. Always did.

And it’s high school, right. Everybody is thirsty as fuck for their friends, one way or another. We never dated--we were both always dating or pursuing other people--but we had the typical high school bestie unresolved romantic tension deal going on.

This is important so remember it for later: the problem was not attraction. The problem was not one sided unresolved sexual tension. I had a particular thing for how he looked while driving, shades on, one arm slung over the wheel in that terribly and typically male lounging driving pose that’s probably a safety hazard.

We spent a lot of time in his car.

I didn’t drive, at the time, because my mother didn’t allow me to learn, and I got kicked out of my house and disowned when I was 17. This dude spent a LOT of time driving me places. Boys in cars is practically a genre of erotic poetry, thanks to Richard Siken. This is because boys look Cool driving cars, wearing sunglasses, pretending they’re not paying attention to you while you know they are.

So he was fun.

More importantly, I guess, the fact that he picked my ass up at like 6 AM over and over and over again for a big chunk of my senior year is one of the few reasons I managed to graduate despite being technically homeless.

He was not a morning person. I am not a morning person. He did it anyway.

Why didn’t we date, I wondered, years later, for a fraction of a second, and then I forgot about it.

“SO WHAT?!”

So I’m grown up and happy and fulfilled and in a lovely long term relationship (remember! we’re buying a house!), so it’s not about “what if?” It’s that I’m happy and grown up and I write books sometimes.

But there it is.

I write books sometimes.

Artists are constantly stealing ideas from everywhere and this is good. Artists also steal from themselves, grubby little hands on secret parts of our hearts.

So I’m writing this book, right. My Great Work. My Break Out Novel. My SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS book. My “this is the thing I’ve worked the hardest on in my whole entire LIFE” book.

And in this book there is a male love interest. He is a political statement. I’m writing him as sexy and heroic as possible. I want this to be the MOST attractive man I’ve ever written.

Latino. Sexy as fuck. Not a criminal. Overly responsible. Action ready, and terribly nurturing.

Hot Single Dad and Reluctant Necromancer is my masterpiece. A passionate statement and stance against the depiction of Latino men in media. A war cry to examine our own subconscious biases. A weapon raised against an unjust system.

I stole parts of him from Frank Castle. I stole parts of him from Geralt. I stole (MANY) parts of him from this one IRL hot dad former Army Ranger guy, Mexican American with a tattoo on his arm of a jack o lantern one of his kids drew. I stole parts of him from this cute Marine in my DMs who gave me story advice about guns and gear. I stole parts of him from indigenous leaders from centuries ago, from the peoples he is descended from. I stole parts of him from every man I’ve met who worked in dog rescue. I stole parts of him from myself, hiding secret parts of my heart in the male character so that no one will know.

Lovely. All good so far.

I got like two whole drafts in before I was thumbing through some printed out pages, idly thinking: how funny that I don’t have any real life, personal to me models for this guy.

All my prior male love interests, you see, are based on someone. In the werewolf trilogy, they’re BOTH based on someone--different someones. The villain, too, is jokingly referred to as the “evil werewolf ex boyfriend” for a reason.

Everybody is someone.

So how funny, I thought, that necromancer hot dad lacks any references from my own--

OH, wait, fuck--

Overly responsible brown dude with sad dog eyes drives the female lead/occult specialist around while good naturedly complaining that she’s weird as shit.

Oh, damn.

And suddenly a bunch of teensy little backstory details made sense.

Cool.

“So what?”

Bonus round of self realization: my own understanding of this time in my life radically shifted, turning, lurching, sickly rotating on a new axis.

Why didn’t we date?

Somewhere between then and now, post ICU but pre novel writing time--

This one time I overheard somebody talking to somebody else and it had nothing to do with me but sight unseen, on the other side of the stacks in a used bookstore, one dude said to another: “you know that if you were lighter, you’d have a chance with her, right?”

How terrible, I thought, and I forgot about it.

Why didn’t we date?

Because my mother told me, when I was very young, that boys from Brazil were all very wild, and I should avoid them. And she told me this so early and so plainly that I never thought to question it. When I was older she took harder stances that I easily ignored because I knew they were wrong--don’t you dare bring a black boy into this house. You’re dating a Jew? I can’t believe you did this to me. What are you going to do next, kiss a girl?

WELL, Ma, as it turns out, I mean, not til college, but yes.

But the smaller, more mild statement was so much more insidious.

I wonder if he knew. I don’t think he did. I wonder if he figured it out later. I have no idea, because we were friends when we were still essentially children, and now we are grown. Not everybody thinks about this kind of thing, and I don’t blame them.

How much damage did I do?

Does it matter?

Does he know?

I know.

I know, now, that my rallying cry against a system’s unfairness is also a cry wrenched wetly from my own subconscious depths. YOUR biases against? Yes. But more accurately: my biases against.

“So what?”

So this kind of epiphany shit leaves you breathless about it and you wanna scream. You wanna SHARE it. You must infect others with this knowledge.

But you can’t out of nowhere foist this apology on someone. That’s selfish. That’s about redeeming yourself in your own eyes AND asking someone else to confront unpleasant emotions on your behalf, even though they’re the wronged party. Selfish. Tell me I’m not a bad person, baby. Tell me I never hurt you, not even a little. Forgive me if I did. Wade through this pile of astral shit for me just to make me feel better. Reassure me. Hurt yourself for me in the here and now.

So I’m not going to do that, obviously.

“So what?”

But there’s that other part of it, right? Not the apology. The surge of emotion. The realization that all those morning drives back then added up to something deep within me, something so foundational to my concept of care and maybe even the start of something like love--the knowledge that this person gently carved some ideals for you, so long ago, so subtly that you never questioned it, never even realized, because it felt so natural, because something about it is so inherently good and right.

Despite everything--despite society, propaganda, colonialism, the prejudice of my upbringing, my own unexamined complicity, ALL of it--

Despite everything, this person taught me something so deeply about love and the shape of it, something so foundational that I built all my art on it and didn’t even see the beams of it until halfway through my most ambitious and soul bearing undertaking.

This is how you care for another, went the lesson, and I wrote pragmatic actions over words romantic male leads all the way down.

This is what love might look like, and in my own life, ever ambitious, I chose a poet talented with words and actions and good fight choreography, because I think that’s sexy and dichotomies are mostly bullshit, or at least things that happen to other people.

But I didn’t learn what love looked like from my childhood home life, obviously. How could I?

Without you, though, without you and your mirror sunglasses at 6 AM and your exasperated teasing, devil, witch, bruja, without any of those, where would I have learned? How long would it take me, to find someone who would teach me a wholesome lesson?

I’m small and cute and predators love a victim with a lack of context. I give myself and my wit some credit, but what’s pattern recognition worth if you never get any good data points?

Deep lessons.

Again: this kind of epiphany makes you wanna scream. Who to infect, with all this new knowledge?

Maybe no one. Probably no one.

But maybe, just a little, you wonder--

How would that conversation even go?

Hey, so I wrote this book--no, it’s my fifth, not my first, but thanks--so I wrote this book, and there’s this character, right, and he’s--well, hahah, I mean, he’s not exactly--I just--funny story, really--no, god, no, you don’t have to read it--it’s just--he’s just--I mean, no, you, you’re just--forget it, actually, just--

Like, what the fuck is there to say?

“I couldn’t have written this without you.”

And

“Did you check on me? When you thought I was dead?”

and

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice, at the time, that I meant anything to you.”

or is it really

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize until now that you meant something to me.”

What to do with all this emotion? Or more accurately--like rivers carve out gorges, here is the shape of something that once was. This shape will always be here. Even without a single drop of water ever again: we see the river.

What to do with the shape of all this emotion?

I consult the great Richard Siken via a feat of bibliomancy. Advise me, O Oracle. The oracle is War of the Foxes (2015), turned over blindly in my hands, opened randomly to The Worm King’s Lullaby, pg 45, verse 1:

The holes in this story are not lamps, they are not wheels. I walked and walked, grew a beard so I could drag it in the dirt, into a forest that wasn’t there. I want to give you more but not everything. You don’t need everything.

This advice is too good. I close the book.

The advice does not tell me what to do, but it’s too good. The verse reaches into my chest and carves out my heart, slices it open. Inside my heart: pomegranate seeds. Tiny jewels, fit for a dragon, snacking on garnets and rubies, and the apple of Eden wasn’t an apple, because it was the desert, wasn’t it? It was a pomegranate. Something with scales, maybe snakes. The serpent, the devil.

What to do with all this love?

I swallow the pomegranate seeds. I buy myself some time. I want to give you more, but not everything. Do you need everything? I don’t know. I don’t have it to give to you, in any case. Does it matter?

Why are you doing this, me?

Because art is messy. Art is cutting yourself open over and over again. You clean up most of the mess, try to bottle the fluids and label them nicely or deliberately misleadingly, fit for someone else’s consumption, but either way, you’re bleeding.

Maybe this urge is bleed with me or maybe it is oh, you already did.

I swallow the seeds. I buy some time.

I’m not done yet. I’m not.

Maybe all this adds up to nothing.

Maybe if I do this right, it adds up to a lot.

Maybe if I do this right it will feel real, maybe what I want is to gift the shape of these rivers to somebody else, all emotionally intimately with strangers. This is a shape that love can be. This is a silhouette you may recognize.

Maybe that’s a tribute, or a tributary.

But it’s not about you, not really, so don’t get too big headed about it. This is about Art and something like Justice. Big things. This is a book about big things, about history and dogs, history and gods, crimes and lies, slaughter and slander.

Right, yeah.

An act of faith, an act of will.

I swallow the pomegranate seeds. I buy myself some time.

It’s not harvest season yet. Not yet, not now, not yet.

If not now, then when?

When it’s ready.

There is no ready. Perfection is an illusion.

Yeah, sure, but page count is REAL.

You’re evading. That’s another word for fleeing. Do you know that?

Yes. I do.

How long will you run?

Just a little bit more. Just a little. I promise.