I forgot how to write

It's sad to think that you met me when I was experiencing a mid-life crisis. And yet, it is even sadder to think that this is my mid-life. All of this and more makes me profoundly sad. And then I think, what a perfect combination of three letters. The word is small enough to be embroidered on a baseball cap or tattooed across your three favorite knuckles (index, middle, and ring finger). More importantly, the letters serve as the acronym for my favorite mood disorder, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or S.A.D.

Sometimes I feel those three letters swell up in my throat. They clamber up the walls of my esophagus and seem to stumble along the way. When it is time for them to emerge victorious from the trek up my rickety throat, they cower. They peek over the back of my tongue, and they refuse to admit to the world "We are sad! We are here! Deal with it!" If I concentrate really hard, I can usually coax them out of cowardice, and they roll off my tongue and mingle with the tears tickling my face.

Goodnight, Moon.

When I turned off the light so that I might close my eyes, a moonbeam shone across my face.

The moon had never been so bright. We sat in the backyard in the dead of night, and yet I could see the wrinkles in his forehead and the knowing smile on his face. It was the first time I had seen a night sky undisturbed by city fog.

I shifted around in my bed and watched the moonbeams dance across my sheets.

Quarks

What is the only positive thing one can discern from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time? Gravitational metaphors and black hole imagery. So, for those of you who indulge me on a daily basis:

Let's get sucked into a black hole. Once we are there, we will resist the inward pull of our bodies' particles. For what will seem like an infinitely long second, we will be. And yet, you and I will be aware that once this second is over, our bodies will cease along with time and gravity and everything that our seventh grade textbook told us was important. In the second that lasts for days, we will just look at one another. But once our particles are done waiting, the second will end. In the moment that is no longer a moment, our bodies dissipate into an infinitely dense mass of something we don't know yet. Stephen Hawking will observe this in the night sky. He will note that while nothing can escape our black hole, the area surrounding it emits radiation and something he describes as "the infinite possibilities they had."

Only heavy things are allowed in

When my pupils were dilated, everything looked and felt heavy. I kind of liked that feeling. It was as if my eyes weren't for me to use-- they were there to be used. The gaping holes of blank yearned to be filled with a weight that would make them feel complete. The heavy things moved in and the weightless things went out. You are heavy. Since when have optometrists been so whimsical?

I'm blogging at Starbucks, what a cliché

And we were so close I didn't know which heartbeat was mine.

Tomorrow's Schedule

I will wake up to the sound of your alarm. You will go to class, but I will fall back asleep. My body with sense the need for consciousness and will pull me out of a deep slumber, throw me into rain-resistant clothes and force my legs to walk to class. We will sit next to each other and attempt not to laugh at our professor's misuse of religious terminology, ie: the text was translated into arabic, jewish, and latin.

As I scribble notes in varying types of cursive, I will die of boredom. When class ends, you will remove my body from the room and quietly drag it behind a building where no one goes. You will just cover my body with a sheet for now, you have other things to do.

Next, you will go see my mentee. I haven't seen her since last semester so it's really important that you do this. You will get lost because I wrote down the wrong directions to her new school, but don't worry, you will find your way. You will feel uncomfortable sitting in an elementary school cafeteria. The children will be eating meat patties soaked in meat sauce, drinking chocolate milk, and telling you about how their dad got the Jonas brothers' autographs.

After mentoring, you will do nothing. You have until 3:30 to lay in bed and just think. Or don't think at all, it's your choice. At 3:20, you will start walking to class. Make sure you have read The Iliad and understand it fully. Brother George will ask your opinion on the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles. You sympathize with Agamemnon.

Class ends at 4:45. You will return to the place you left my body. Hold a candlelight vigil over my body. Sing songs about mariner's and your ex-lover and when you feel the air around my body has absorbed enough harmony, you will use the candles to set my body on fire.

Throes

"Jen, you need to get yourself a man"

With a breakfast taco in my right hand and a kolache in my left, the promise of a high-cholesterol breakfast sent me bouncing through the cafeteria in elation. I was glad to share this moment of gastronomical bliss when I was stopped by a friendly wave from across the room. I thought about doing the wave-as-you-walk-away-and-smile, but I wanted to share the love. We exchanged how are you?'s and I inquired after his lady friend. After a brief chat, during which time I was made privy to all the woes and throes of love, I said goodbye and made my exit. My back was turned, my feet moving forward, my mouth salivating as the breakfast taco pulsed in my hand, and then I heard him call out after me.

"Jen,yourselfgetman"

Pause. Turn. Give semi-hateful look.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that."

"I said, you need to get yourself a man."

"Oh."

A Note to Adam

To prove my love, I would drink a gallon of fixer

The taste would make me cringe, a feeling I knew when I was not with you

To prove my love, I would expose a roll of perfect film

A crime comparable to murder, something I committed that one time you didn't call me back

To prove my love, I would smash a vintage Leica camera to pieces

The same thing you did to my heart when you cancelled dinner the other night

Just take my picture

Develop our love

Expose your heart

Don't leave me in the darkroom

these words were inspired by my dearest Collin Phillips

Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks

my dreams are made of fear and hope. on nights when you can play connect-the-dots with the stars, hope puts on a play while i sleep. but, i guess hope gets tired after a while and so do the stars. fear takes his turn and the sky isn't so bright.

it's foggy out there, i'll be sleeping with fear tonight.

20

I am.

This birthday makes me want to wear high heels. It makes me want to buy a suitcase that doesn't have hello kitty on it and put on mascara. Watching Mad Men, in combination with this birthday, makes me want to smoke a cigarette at a party and seduce Don from across the room as thick smoke is released from my perfectly pouted red lips.

But, when I fall asleep and dream a strange late-night-snack-induced dream about pizza, eighteen-wheelers and baby seals, my mind will be wiped clean. I will wake up having forgotten that I am a year older. I will go on wearing ballet flats and no make-up and bumbling around proudly sporting cartoon themed luggage.

Dear Margo,

Boys are turned off by girls who cannot control their eyelids.

Dear Ben,

I just want you to be depressed again. Your success and happiness are bringing me down.

Bdelygmia

bdelygmia, n.

1. A litany of abuse-- a series of critical epithets, descriptions, or attributes

"From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

-Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

Your pearly white smile broadens and I am reminded of an equine muzzle. I want to stick a carrot in your mouth so that it might match your hair. Those eyes are like vacuums into which souls and intelligence are sucked, never to escape again. But none of this really matters because I don’t know you at all. He, on the other hand, I do know. Or at least I used to. He is blind to your mulish qualities, but rather finds you appealing like a phlegmatic mail-order doll—after all, you share the same purpose. His booming voice dulls the senses of those within earshot; fortunately you were dulled long before his pedestrian existence intertwined with yours. It must be nice for you to have a reason to straighten your hair in the morning and he a reason to pop his teeth back in.

Navy Blue Converse

Her eyes scanned your body as you walked toward her. Those heavily-mascara’ed brown eyes bulged and froze on navy blue converse clad feet.

“What, are you like, Goth now?”

Your early morning smile faded. You felt small and lonely and… Goth? Wait, you thought, what the fuck does she mean? Then you corrected yourself. What the heck does she mean? You are trying not to curse as much. You have had the mouth of a sailor since elementary school, and one time, this same girl and her suburban cronies denied you the opportunity to play dodge ball because, as they said, you had a potty mouth. At the time, you thought, fuck them. Now you are desperate for them to like you. This whole converse thing really throws a kink in your plans.

You want to run back to the front of the school and see if your mom is still in the car-rider line. Maybe she will take you home so you can change shoes, or even better—let you skip school and go eat Mexican food. You quickly realize this is an absurd fantasy. Not too absurd, though, because on a pretty regular basis you do skip school and your mom does take you out for Mexican food. It is suh-weet. The strange part is you don’t really want to run away. You want to tell this little middle-school biotch that she can shove it up her ass. Converse aren’t Goth. You aren’t Goth.

“No, I’m not. And converse aren’t Goth. Goth kids wear combat boots and dog collars and read anime,” you say.

“Oh, okay. I mean, they are just kind of different,” she says.

“Right,” you say.

From that moment on you realize that being a converse-wearing Goth kid would be so much better than being friends with these ass-holes. You stop wanting to be invited to their farms (the term “farm” is applied loosely, it simply refers to a home built outside of a residential neighborhood, though still located thirty-feet from a residential neighborhood and 1 mile from a large suburban sprawl). You stop laughing at their jokes. You stop passing them notes in Algebra. You start thinking about what you like. You start listening to good music, as provided by The O.C. Mix 1 Soundtrack. You start wearing converse.

Dear general malaise and other symptoms,

Please go away.

Sincerely,

Your unwilling host.

Count Our Rings

The Outlet Mall Guru

Teach me to fold the perfect pant and I'll show you how to sell a credit card to a mother of four who makes minimum wage. The mexicans pay in crisp $100 bills, the asians in crumpled coupons, and I pay with my soul.

Thanks, Banana.

Welcome Home

i heard the hills whisper "welcome home"

their voices hung in the air with dragonflies

they swirled around our heads of unkempt hair

sharing with us the songs of man and wind

and we tapped our feet on the same ground

the sun introduced itself to my pale skin

freckles claimed territory on a plot above my heart

for $5 god would leave his handprint on yours

on the porch you sang about the simple things

and i began to notice them

my dress soaked up the river and all the people in it

tightly woven threads trapped the current

so i wrung out the comfort and drove east

i left you standing at the bottom of civilizations slope

locals hung above the water like a barrel of monkeys

away from the boxed merlot and shirtless boys

patriotism shields my eyes from neon signs

but my hair still feels like the river

and my coffee tastes like your cigarettes

so i hug this lamppost hoping it will guide you

it will act as a lighthouse

and i will wait beneath its glow until you arrive

by jennifer robichaux, whose dress is now dry

a spider just crawled across my chest

I am in the bubble now, but until recently I was in a box. The bubble has homemade meals and lazy evenings spent in front of the tube watching crime dramas. Here I don't really have responsibilities (though I am trying to get some) and my room contains no bunk bed or noisy lesbian roommate. I am allowed to poke holes in the wall here and boys can be in my room past midnight. The bubble, round by nature, is able to roll to any desired location. However, by following me-- or rather rolling along with me-- it becomes inescapable and a constant in my life. It could be easily transported to Louisiana where my family plans to vacation this summer, however I would prefer for it to stay in Texas where the suburbs seem to crave its presence. As mentioned above, I have just moved back into the bubble from a box. The box was much more comfortable. It had four solid, distinguishable walls. The floor connected the walls and the top opened up to the usually sunny sky. Picture a cardboard moving box, if you will. Sure, the box kept me contained, but if I really wanted to I could find a way to scale the wall and get to the outside. It took me a while to get used to the idea of living in something with four walls, I was accustomed to more spherical homes. 

Right now, the box is temporarily out of reach.