Treehouse pt. 1

(Was trying to pull off a sort of Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas deal where serious philosophy comes across smoothly in some broken-sage character's dialogue, but it turns out I'm not really Tom Robbins, and this came out a little heavy-handed. Still, I'm proud of the narrative voice. It's a longer piece, so part 2 will come next week.)

Two months after my tenth birthday, my older brother Max was in a car accident. He was driving, but everyone said it wasn’t his fault. His best friend Eli died. Max didn’t. Instead, he climbed a tree and never came down. He took with him a case of Gatorade, his pocketknife, his sleeping bag, and a carton of Ramen noodles.

That night we ate dinner without him. I called him inside, but he wouldn’t come down. My father said he just needed some time. My mother sent me out with a plate of food for Max. He didn’t want it. I was glad because the rope ladder is hard enough to climb without balancing a plate. It’s just a long rope with big knots that my dad tied in it. He glued the leftover rope to a sign for the treehouse that says “Max and Duncan’s Tree.” There was no more rope to make it say “treehouse.” Mom said she’d call a counselor in the morning.

The next morning was a Saturday. Mom didn’t call a counselor. She slept late. I watched cartoons until lunchtime because Max wasn’t around to kick me off the TV to play his video games. In the treehouse he was still sleeping in his blue sleeping bag we take on camping trips. In the middle of the night I switched rooms and slept in his bed to see what it felt like.

Mom wanted Max to come down for church the next day, but he didn’t. She took me instead, and we prayed for him. All the time we were in church I wished I was up in the tree with Max, pretending to be a monkey, but when we got home, she wouldn’t let me go up there. I promised I’d come back, but she put in a movie and told me to watch it instead. For dinner Mom made Max’s favorite. Dad climbed the ladder with the plate that time and left it on the platform.

When I woke up the day after that there was a policeman in our backyard. He was talking to Max, but the ladder was pulled up so nobody could get into the tree. “You have to go to school,” the officer said. “It’s the law.” Max looked mad and he didn’t come down. I wanted to stay home with Max and the policeman, but when the bus came I had to go to school.

When I came home Max was still in the treehouse and the policeman had left. I went outside and asked Max if it was really against the law to be in a tree instead of at school. “You know what else is against the law?” Max said. “Drunk driving.” He was right.

One night at dinner Dad said not to bring out any more food, because by then Max should have come down and we weren’t doing him any favors by letting his behavior continue. “He needs to eat,” Mom said. “All he has is Ramen, but no way to heat water. What is he going to do?” I knew, because Max taught me how to make Ramen without water by mashing up the noodles before opening the bag and shaking in the powder. Mom said she’d call a counselor again. Dad said he didn’t think they made house calls. After that nobody said anything, and nobody climbed the rope with food.

Max kept eating Ramen and not coming down. More policemen came to the house but they didn’t do anything except talk to Max, or talk to Mom and Dad. None of them talked to me. “He’ll run out sometime,” my dad said, “and when he comes down, we’ll get him help.” Max wasn’t going to run out, though, because he was already getting help. When I got up to get a drink of water at night I saw him in the pantry taking more stuff.

I never told on him, but they figured it out. Dad wanted to change the locks, but Mom said we were not locking our son out of his own house. Dad said the tree was Max’s house now. We didn’t get new locks, but Dad got a new room. He started sleeping in Max’s bed.

The next time we ate dinner, Mom said we might as well take him a hot meal as long as he was going to keep taking food and staying up there. She made him a plate, only Dad wouldn’t take it and she can’t climb the ladder. “Go outside to your brother,” she told me, “and tell him to come down and get his dinner.”

He wouldn’t let the ladder down, so I brought it back inside. “I never should have built the boys that damn treehouse,” my father said.

Mom threw his dinner out, saying, “I never should have cooked this.”

I didn’t have anything I made to blame Max’s leaving on, so I said, “Max never should have been in that crash.” This made my mother cry.

Sometimes, when Dad was gone, Mom would leave clean clothes, or more ramen, or toothpaste, or other things that moms bring, at the bottom of the rope. I put some of my comic books, but they didn’t disappear overnight like some of the other stuff. I took them back, except for one that had gotten mud on it. That one I left outside so he could remember me. His room was missing some of his big chapter books, though, and blank notebooks that were supposed to be for school. I didn’t know what he was writing in them because he wasn’t going to school anymore.

Wax

(This is a poem. I am not very good at poetry. I will be performing at my school's next poetry slam, and after that, I'll put up the slam poems. But not before.)

She was in his hands

But she was not putty

She was not clay.

Instead, melted wax

Dripping, burning

Sticking, flaking

Malleable for moments

Edges quick to harden

And as she cooled

She held the mark

Of every touch

A reshaped recording

Of every ridged fingerprint.

The Opposite Of True Love Is As Follows: REALITY!

(Title taken from "We Are All Accelerated Readers" by Los Campesinos. We were making chocolate-covered Ritz cookies. My brother spilled some peppermint extract on the table, it smelled incredibly strong, and I thought I'd do a character-sketch of a girl who wears some sort of extract instead of perfume. I think Elea is the type of girl who would pose for a Vice photo shoot.)

Her name was Eleanor, but she went by Elea, pronounced “Ella,” and she was very patient with anyone who mis-spelled or mis-pronounced it, which was everyone. Instead of perfume she wore a finger pad’s worth of vanilla extract behind each ear. Her underwear never matched – one day, a red satin bra with green and white polka-dotted panties; the next, a brown sports bra with rainbow striped boy-shorts. All of her shirts had sleeves that were too long and she let them scrunch and slouch at her wrists, looking as soft and comfortable as extra puppy-dog skin.

We met in a coffee shop. I was waiting for my decaf-with-room-for-cream and overheard her gently explaining the spelling of her name. It was a routine I would become very familiar with. When her drink came up, the call was “One medium lemonade for El-ee-uh!” and she sighed, smiled, and took her drink. In her hand was a small cup with a scoop of bright orange sherbet, which she dumped into the lemonade. My coffee was already sitting on the counter, steaming away its heat, while I stood mesmerized by her process. Fingers painted with dull chocolate-colored polish held a straw that stirred the ice and lemonade and sherbet, jangling the ice and plastic and mixing the orange and yellow with smearing swirls like baby dragon flames. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank, following with a catlike sound of pleasure I’d never heard outside the bedroom before.

“I think your coffee is ready.”

“Oh! Yeah.” I grabbed my drink and pointed to the name scribbled in marker under the rim. “Dan. Never have to explain that one. I got lucky, I guess.”

She giggled and took another sip of her drink. “I don’t mind spelling for people. People never really ask others to understand them, which I think is sad. We could all know a little more about someone else.”

“Oh.” I had no response, so I gestured over to the condiment bar. “I, uh, need, some cream.”

She followed me and watched me dilute my coffee into something looking less like a beverage and more like a dusty mud puddle. “Well, since we already know each other’s names, I guess we should introduce ourselves another way. I’m Elea, and I love zombie movies and baby javelinas.” She reached out her hand.

“I’m Dan, and I, uh, love Marvel comics and lemon cake.”

We shook hands. Hers was cold from holding her lemonade. “I think you’re forgetting something,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m Dan,” she prompted me, “and I love Marvel comics, lemon cake, and I’d love to take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Oh! Yes – I’m Dan and I love - I’d love to take you out for dinner,” I repeated.

Elea put a hand, covered halfway by a drooping sleeve, into her purse and pulled out a tiny pencil like the ones used to score mini golf games. She wrote her phone number on my cup, right under my name.

That Saturday we went out for Greek food at a little place by my apartment. Three weeks later I showed up at her place with Dawn of the Dead and an orange-sherbet-lemonade. She answered the door in a robe, untied and hanging open to reveal a black lace bra and turquoise panties with a silver bow. Even the robe had too-long sleeves and only her fingertips peeked out. 

I'm not even going to try go after "douchebag"...

The other day I saw a boy on campus drop his phone, watch it bounce off the sidewalk, and exclaim “balls!” It struck me as weird, because if you think about it, he’s saying “I am comparing an unfortunate circumstance to a part of my anatomy!” Most people have issues when a word that they identify with is used as a negative – “gay,” for example. But there’s a large difference in the attitudes regarding such language across the genders, and I’m not sure why. 

Most girls I know bristle at derogatory phrases that use our gender/sex as an insult – to show ineptitude at sports is to “play like a girl,” to be without courage is to “pussy out,” and we can’t forget the (still very offensive) c-word. We don’t like to see our bodies or our identities used against other people, with the implication that to be us is to be inferior. 

Boys, on the other hand, seem entirely comfortable translating masculine nouns into negatives, like “dick” and “prick” and “balls,” none of which elicit the reaction that different words for female anatomy might produce. Why? 

One theory put forward by some male friends is that boys are socially indoctrinated to see themselves as the less sexualized gender – women are beautiful and desired, while men are not constantly pursued the same way females are. Men are more likely to accept negative comparisons to their sexuality because it is already portrayed in other spheres as less attractive and wanted. 

Another theory, more endorsed by the girls I talked to, is that we are more sensitive to hints of oppression because we more sharply experience it daily. We are easily threatened by sexism because we are accustomed to a world in which we tend to come under attack just for being women, and so we are less inclined to allow any sort of unflattering associations with our gender lest they make us more vulnerable than we already are. This may be comparable to how racist terms for black people are highly offensive, while white people don’t usually respond as strongly to slurs for them. 

It could also be that female-centered language is more specific. To say that someone “is acting like a girl” directly attributes whatever bad behavior they are engaging in to all of womanhood. Conversely, to say that same person is being a “dick” does not as strongly link the penis to bad behavior. It’s only semantics, but it does highlight a difference between the two sets of terms.

What do you guys think? Are girls being hypersensitive, and should we ignore anti-female language with the realization that negative masculine terms don’t seem to be hurting men, and that language only means what we allow it to mean? Or, do we have a responsibility to raise the male sexuality up to the standard of ours, to reframe them as beautiful and admired, and thus to eliminate all negatively gendered (male and female) terms from our vocabulary? Or are things okay the way they are now, with anti-male terms socially accepted by both genders, but anti-female ones less so?

Watching

(Not much to say about this one. Some of you may have seen this already, as it's an older piece, but it hasn't made it onto CI yet. Some of the word repetition I don't like, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I don't know how I feel about the main character - sympathetically lonely or terrifyingly narcissistic?) 

Everyone around her started turning on their heaters, but she kept wearing her t-shirts, letting the air bite fresh and sharp all down her arms, the crisp cool swishing between the fabric and her warm skin. She felt most alive this way; exposed, chilled. It intensified the experience of existence, a little tug at the peaceful border between her and the air she moved in. She felt it in her movements, a smooth turn opening a door, a quick hand brushing her hair back. It amped up her beautiful moments – the times she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror under perfect light, her gaze just so – found herself a goddess. The moments she wished someone was following her with a camera or a lustful gaze. Wasted, unseen moments of beauty and grace. 

Sometimes, between the moments, when other people caught her looking her worst, human, she wanted to shout and tell everyone that they just missed the moment; that what they had seen wasn’t really her. She knew they would love her, want her, need her, if only they saw those moments. She wished she had a photo album of those moments recorded. Here’s me stepping out of the shower, here’s my reflection in a bus window, here’s me closing my closet door. She would flip the pages and they would see her, intimately, in her perfection, and they would know her and love her and give her what she deserved, for all those moments. The cold jolted those moments, imbued them with a rapid and anxious power, like caffeine. She was a heroine, a goddess of beauty and of war. She was what every man saw in his magazines and wanted. 

In the cold she could feel those moments inside her – her skin was alive, reminding her. Sometimes in the summer it fell asleep under the warm air and she forgot her moments, forgot her value. But the cold kept the sense alert. She never lost a moment in the cold. So while everyone else stayed wrapped in their air and their skin that slept and grew too lazy to find their moments, she lived among hers. Winter brought a deep longing, then, as she ached for an audience. Every kiss of the cold air brushed her with a realization of her perfection but left behind the frustration of loneliness, like the smell of a lover on the bedsheets. 

He would be so lucky, she knew. One day she would turn around after folding a shirt or taking a drink to see him standing there. I saw that, he would say. I watch your fingers when you turn on a light. I see how your hair glows when headlights go by. I’ve seen your ankle sliding gently into those brown shoes. I hear your voice when it hits that note in your favorite song. He would reach out and hold her waist and she would stand in his arms, admired, worshipped, a museum Venus. His eyes like mirrors, she would stare through them back at herself in his gaze. Watch me, she’d whisper, and he would. 

Donnie Darko, I don't care about your dog

We die alone. It’s a phrase thrown around by teenage nihilists, armchair philosophers, and anything ever that’s tried to be “edgy” or “dark.”  Variations include “we all die alone,” and “you will die alone.” 

When you really think about it, the deep truth to that statement is more of a “duh.” We as humans exist as individual entities and so when we die, we will be the only one going where we are going, the only one in our dying body and mind. We will be finally separate from everyone and everything we have ever known, as none of it will be relevant in death and nothing can save us from our own mortality. So, we die alone. 

It sounds pretty awful until you start to wonder what exactly separates death from anything else we’ll ever experience. The answer is: absolutely nothing. We not only die alone, but we live alone, we love alone, we think alone, and we are even born alone. Each of us is trapped inside of ourselves, locked away from the deep connection that could be seen as the antidote to loneliness. We are not telepathic, nor are we parts of a collective hive-mind. There is no way to directly hook up one human’s subjectivity to another’s. Thoughts and feelings must be processed into and diluted by language in order to be shared. Every one of us is pasting ourselves into a “translate into:” box in an effort to be known by others, and we all know that when something is translated, parts of it change or are lost. 

We die alone because it is an experience that cannot be shared, just like existing. The powerlessness of others to stop or redirect our deaths is similarly reflected in life. While other humans may contribute to our comfort and bring us joy, they have no real control over our lives. Each of us is an autonomous individual, and while another person can attempt to coerce, guide, or intimidate us, we alone control our choices. No one has any power over our life that they do not have over our death. 

The only reason we react so negatively to the concept of a solo death is the connotations we have attached to both the ideas of death and isolation. We fear separation from other human beings in a real sense, as we are able to connect on certain levels, and the absence of that connection is dangerous, painful and unnerving. We must realize, though, that that connection is also available at the moment of death – we can still love and be loved, we can still converse, we can still coexist. But what we cannot achieve in death, we also cannot achieve in life. If people stopped living in denial of our isolation in life, our isolation in death would cease to matter to us at all.  All we can do is strive in life to come as close as we can to complete togetherness, accept that we cannot truly make it there, and understand that no part of our human existence is more limited or demanding than any other part.

Generation Zero

[Piece removed because it was awful]