I just got involved in a project called Splice Today, an online magazine about cool shit. Seriously. That’s what it’s about. Cool shit. I’m probably going to spend a fair of hand ticks over there and less at Twenty Twenty Hindsight. I’ll still be spewing words, but now I’ll be doing it for a larger audience, hopefully. My blog isn’t going anywhere unless the Internet breaks and I’ll still update when I’ve got new shit, but check out Splice. And be happy for me! Now I can tell people I’m a professional blogger, which I plan to begin immediately.

Love,

Katie

The company I keep is equally muddy on such matters. Even though many of my friends were sent to Sunday school and Bible study as children, they have largely blocked out these monotonous and/or terrifying church visits and forgotten what such holidays mean. Our spiritual education comes each Sunday around noon at at the Church of the Bloody Mary. The question of Good Friday, however, has come up a lot recently due to a three beer bet that one of us can figure it out without Wikipedia. My favorite explanation for Good Friday comes from my friend Brandy, who said that Good Friday is the day Jesus rolled back the boulder and saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter!

Even though none of us have come up with a plausible explanation for why we would get the Friday before Easter off if we had office jobs instead of bartending or waiting tables or telemarketing or collecting unemployment, the three beer bet means we’ve had Jesus on the mind. The following is a voice mail I received from a dear, nameless friend on Easter Sunday:

Yo boo, I’m calling to see what’s what and also to tell you about the the crazy motherfucking sex dream I had about our lord and savior Jesus Christ. I think it was in honor of all the Easter talk we’ve been having lately. It was kind of a sexy dream but he was on the cross and I was putting my hands on his face and also into the… what’s it called? The crown of thorns. But it was going into my hands instead of into his head. Hope you’re doing well. See you Tuesday. Happy Easter.

The reason I’m not celebrating Easter with my friends over eggs Florentine and mimosas this year is because I’m in my hometown, a small rural cluster called Cullowhee, North Carolina, with 1300 registered voters and no place to get a bagel. I don’t visit very often, maybe three or four times a year, even though it’s only a five hour drive from Carrboro. I just don’t really like it here. I have no nostalgia for my hometown. No teenage memories of young love or mischief, just a vague memory of high school torment because I didn’t shave my legs. There are things I like about it—it’s beautiful, for instance, and quiet, and my parents have cable and an entire fridge filled with just Perrier and sharp cheddar and good beer. But it’s boring and the good beer means nothing to me because I don’t drink with my parents. It’s not so much because I can’t drink in front of my parents—they certainly drink in front of me—but a glass or two of wine seems awkward considering I called them in a moment of desperation three years ago and told them that I was an alcoholic. I’ve since Indian given that self-diagnosis, but at the time I was distraught because my girlfriend found out the I cheated on her and I needed an explanation for why I had done this terrible thing to someone I loved so much that I would easily have sold several minor and one major organ to take her on a nice vacation. There had to be a reason for my sociopathic behavior and alcohol seemed to be the thread connecting all the lies I told her. It’s better to have a drinking problem than be a bad person, I thought, and so I told this thing to my parents and now I can’t take it back.

The forced sobriety of Cullowhee is good for me. I think of my hometown as a health resort, a sanitarium, a rehab center. It not the effort of adjustment, of changing my lifestyle, but simply mountain air that will renew me. I just need a break, a rest, a reprieve and then I’ll take the peace and the sobriety and the will to change back with me.

When I go to my hometown for more than a day or two, it’s usually because something black mold and speeding ticket has happened in my life. This time is no different. Within the span of one week, I caught my porch on fire and was fired from my job. I lost my keys and my wallet and my phone, three things you need when you have to pay the locksmith you called to get inside your house. It’s not even that I lost a bag containing all three vitals. I lost them separately. The porch and the job weren’t all that surprising, but losing the necessary necessities at three different times made me feel like I was losing pieces of my brain along with my worldly goods, so I left for my hometown and a break from my messy life.

This flight from daily life happens about once a year, always in the spring. I spend one last night at the bar before I pack my bags and kiss my friends goodbye. I tell everyone I’ll be gone for a month, maybe more, because I really believe that I’ll be gone for a month, maybe more. After I get home and unpack my bags and spend my first night eating outside and drinking Perrier and watching a sky that is bigger than the sky I’m used to, I feel regret creeping up. The first few days are always hard. I turn into a teenager. I get resentful that my parents want to have actual conversations instead of leaving me alone with my books and my thoughts, like I’m seventeen and just want to be left alone.

After the first few days, however, after a few days of being sober and smoke free, I start to calm down. I remember the good things about living in a non-town in the mountains. I wake up early and ride my bike along the river. I go hiking in the afternoons and mow my parents’ lawn and wash their cars. I eat ice cream before bed and don’t feel guilty about it because you deserve ice cream when you’ve gone running and cleaned the attic and remembered how to tell your parents that you love them. The people here are charming and nice. You can be a complete bitch in a town like this as long as you say bless her heart before calling someone a fucking piece of shit cunt. Bless her heart, I just wish that bitch would die a slow and painful death at the hands of a rapist with bad breath.

But it’s difficult for me to be here for long. When I spend enough time without the distractions of friend dates and date dates and happy hour and dance parties, I start to think about the past. And, inevitably, about my ex-girlfriend, the one from years ago, the one I lied to over and over and over. The clarity that comes with sobriety and time to think makes me remember her and remember that I miss her and remember all the things we felt and did. I remember putting photobooth stickers of ourselves happy and in love all over our house for each other to find in books or cds or underneath the wine glasses in the cabinet or frozen into a piece of ice in the freezer. I remember that she was braver than me, that she drove the tall and winding copper-colored roads of Yellowstone while I sat in the passenger seat with my head between my legs, terrified to look over the edge. I remember how she walked, slowly and purposefully, her hips low. I remember the names we called each other when we were happy and the names we called each other when we were angry. I remember the Easters we spent together, trying to poach eggs and make bloody Mary mix in our kitchen, stickers of ourselves on the fridge and in the pantry. She would have known what Good Friday is.

The more time I have to think, the shorter the peace lasts. I tire of thinking about her and tire of thinking about myself. Even though it’s barely been a week, much less a month, I want to go back to a place where she doesn’t exist, where the memories are all my own.

Good Friday might not be the day Jesus saw his shadow and Easter might not be the day my friend pulled thorns from his crown, but when I go back this afternoon, these are the things I will discuss about over bloody Marys and eggs Florentine. I won’t think of her and I won’t wonder what went wrong. I will sit on my porch and win three beer bets and wonder who our savior is. And when it’s next spring and the one after that, when I’ve destroyed another house and lost another job, I can always go back to the safety and the quiet of my first home, go back and try to do it again.

Just fifteen minutes or an hour ago, I was craving yellow mustard and saltines. I am too broke to splurge on such delicacies but I decided to walk the half mile to the co-op anyway, to feel the season and show off the tattoos that I think make me look tough despite the fact that one is a portrait of an eight-year-old Ramona Quimby. As I was walking down Main Street, I found ten dollars on the sidewalk. What luck! Maybe I’ll even get an apple! When I was standing at the cash register with my hands full of treats, I reached in my pocket and found that my found money was gone. That’s what happens when you are equal parts lucky and unlucky: you find ten dollars and then you lose it minutes later. I put my purchases back on the shelves and sat in the grass outside, still hungry but with really tough tattoos.

Two weeks or two years ago, my bike was stolen, a bike that was not just two wheels and a seat and my way around town but was also a gift from the person who used to be my person, a person who called me pooky and who I called bam bam and who I thought I would grow ugly with. We don’t talk anymore and may not talk ever again, but I had this bike that she had given me and I loved it for that reason, not just because it was two wheels and a seat and my way around town. When I found this precious keepsake missing from a rack outside the gym, I cried not just because I would have to take the bus home but because it was her’s and then it was mine and then it was gone. And I didn’t get over it even though I had two other bikes at home, not that day or even that week. But ten days later I was walking from the taco truck to the bingo hall and there is was, leaning against a telephone poll, not even locked up. I rode it home and oiled the chain and kissed the seat and sighed with good luck.

Four days ago, I smoked a cigarette on my balcony and tossed it close to but not into the ashtray and went inside to watch Rescue Me, a television show about the New York City Fire Department, which is full of drunks and heroes. I sat on my couch and watched Dennis Leary fight fires and I stayed there for almost and entire episode, forty full minutes, and then received a nonsensical but charming text message from my favorite dirty bisexual. I got off my couch and took a beer from my fridge and walked to my balcony to compose a response in the clear air, but when I opened the door, I saw a fire climbing the wall beside my unused ashtray.

While I am not calm most of the time, I calmly splashed the wall with beer and calmly went inside and calmly picked up the broken plastic cup I keep beside my bed and calmly splashed water on the fire. I then decided that this was a story I should probably tell someone because there are very few things in my life I don’t want an audience for, so I called my favorite dirty bisexual and told her what was happening and said, Hey! Isn’t this crazy! Thank god and good luck that I need fresh air to compose the perfect witty and genuine yet not sentimental text message!

As I was telling her this I saw that the beer and the water had extinguished the flames but not the embers burning in the wall, so I said I’d call her back and walked inside and found the fire extinguisher, which was small and white and not scary like those big red ones. I read the directions blew it on the fire and kept blowing it on the fire and thought about how I would have to clean this powder off the balcony later.

When it was empty and everything was covered in white, the embers were still burning in the wall. I was less calm then and I called 911 and forgot my address and told the dispatcher that I didn’t want to tell him my name because I didn’t want to get in trouble and ran in a circle in my living room and thought about how my just-cleaned bedding would have to be washed again.

The wall was smoking when the firetrucks and police arrived. I ran across the street to wave them to my apartment and ran inside to show them the fire and noted that their boots were getting dirt on my floor and I’d have to clean that too. They told me to wake the neighbors and tell them to leave their homes because it is not a free-standing house but an apartment, one of eight units, but I didn’t need to wake the neighbors because they woke with the sirens.

I called back my favorite dirty bisexual and told her what was happening and said, wait, I have to talk to this cute lady cop, and I told the lady cop that I had been watching a television show about firefighters and how ironic is that? I may or may not have asked the lady cop what her sign is and told her I liked her uniform and asked if she would be my Facebook friend.

They were there a while, the police and the firefighters. They dragged the hose upstairs and across my newly-vacuumed carpet and asked me what started the fire, to which I replied, spontaneous combustion. This did not make them laugh or even smile. After the fire was out, I told the fire chief that I don’t smoke because it’s disgusting, and, besides, even if I did, it’s a non-smoking building and I always follow the rules. A few minutes after that conversation, I walked into my bedroom and the fire chief was looking at a lighter on my bedside table and I thought, shit, I’m going to have to tell him that the light isn’t for smoking cigarettes on my balcony, it’s for smoking weed in my bedroom.

And for the majority of the time I was waiting outside and avoiding my neighbor’s eyes, I was on the phone, talking to my favorite dirty bisexual first and later to Small Fry, telling them what was happening and not panicking at all because I’d seen Denis Leary battle real fires and this was nothing, and, really, it was kind of funny. And it was kind of funny, and would make for a good story tomorrow, and no one got hurt and the damage wasn’t that bad and the cat ran away but then it came back.

When the firefighters were leaving, they shook my hand and congratulated me for not panicking, for using the fire extinguisher, for calling 911. It seemed ridiculous to shake my hand after I’d started a fire and hadn’t noticed it for almost an entire episode of Rescue Me, and I said this, but, no, they said. If you hadn’t acted right then, the fire would have spread to the roof.

I tried to sleep but my sheets smelled like campfire and I kept thinking about my neighbors, about the guy next door who lives with his sister and who told me that he has a thousand dollars worth of miniature cars. And I thought about the neighbors on the other side, who have a wicker pentagram on their front door, like a Christmas wreath for witches, and the neighbor downstairs who thinks my name is Kyle even though I am a girl and I have the same name as her dog. I thought about the dog and I thought about the neighbors a few units down who got engaged last week and have this whole new part of their lives happening and I thought about all the people who would have lost their bikes and their keepsakes and maybe their homes because of me. Three more minutes and the fire would have slid across the roof and taken the hot wheels and the wedding invitations and maybe even the dog whose names is my name. With three more minutes and a little less luck, we would all be people who lost things in a fire. I wouldn’t be lightning bug freed from captivity or the coffee grounds given a second life in a pile of compost. I would be the one who let one lit cigarette, one thoughtless action, become not funny but final.

I could actually apply for the jobs I see on Craigslist instead of staring at the listings until I’m inspired to make a sandwich or take out the recycling, but advertising gay singles over 50 is more fun. You know what would make this even more fun? If you click the links. Every time you do, I’ll make like a third of a cent. So, when sitting at your desk on hold with your podiatrist, click! Over and over! Again!

I’ll spend my winnings on lottery tickets and send you a couple.

You can levitate and breath underwater. You can hold you finger to a hot burner and not feel your skin pucker and blister and peel. You can jump from a tree limb to your second story balcony when you accidentally lock yourself out of the front door. You know that you won’t break your leg because nothing bad ever happens to you because you are special.

You woke up one morning a week or a month ago and were already ten minutes late for work so you decided it’d be easier not to show up than to show up late, so you turned over and went back to sleep and dreamed about 1920s architecture and driving in the Hollywood Hills with that blond girl from the Yoplait commercials. Later, you got your best friend to call your place of employment and say that something happened and, no, she cannot disclose any details, and no, you don’t have access to a phone or you would have called yourself. Your boss thinks you were kidnapped by Homeland Security or maybe that your abusive ex-husband is stalking you and you moved into a womens’ shelter or maybe that you are the key witness in a case against the Colombian drug lord Pedro de Blanco.

You make impromptu decisions like this all the time. You start projects—not little ones like bedazzling yarmulkes or growing mangos, but big ones, like going to grad school or quitting grad school or converting to Mormonism before switching to Islam. You start these projects on a whim and quit them on a whim. If you could get pregnant, you’d probably have started and quit a family by now. Your friends and family say that you are too impulsive. They mean that this is a character flaw, but you think being impulsive makes you carefree and precocious, even though you can’t really be precocious once you are old enough to tie your own shoes.

You decide that you will only eat plants. Your friends tell you that you have lost too much weight, to eat a sandwich and a slice of pizza, but you feel tiny and strong and completely sexless and you no longer menstruate. This makes you happy, so you continue to eat only plants.

You construct people in your mind. She is perfect. She is your person. You make them real and then when they make themselves real, you are devastated. You are deeply hurt when your grandmother doesn’t answer your phone calls even though she is too deaf to hear the ring, much less have a conversation. You are as fragile as a newborn tulip.

You don’t understand how you’ve lived like everyone else until today, hitting the appropriate milestones, life on a mostly upward trajectory. Now you can’t pay your rent or keep a job or control your impulse to spend your last paycheck on five gumball machines when you don’t even like gum. You tell your parents that you can’t visit because you have pneumonia. Your illusion of grandeur is seamless.

You take four pills a day. Two to keep your feet from floating above the Earth, two to keep them from sinking into the ground. You look at these tiny little pills resting in your cupped palm and wonder how they can change the chemistry in your head, how they can fix you. When you think about it too much, you convince yourself that they can’t, they are nothing, just sugar and salt—and more, that nothing is wrong with you. You don’t feel like refilling your prescription, so you quit swallowing your morning pills and then your friend stops by because you haven’t answered the phone for a week and you are speed vacuuming and have four pots of bowling water on the stove, four pots of nothing.

There are so many things to apologize for. You want to tell your ex-girlfriend that you are sorry for yelling at her, for saying that she was nothing, nobody, that she could disappear and no one would notice. You want to apologize for later calmly and with absolute conviction telling her that you are important and she is invisible. You also want to tell your boss that you are sorry for saying that your grandmother was sick and you had to go to Idaho to see her when really you spent a week drinking alone and reading the New Yorker on your balcony and calling your friends on the West Coast. I’m sick, you want to say. That is why I did this thing. It’s not my fault. I’m sick. You are afraid they will think you are using this as an excuse because you are.

You want people to understand that these are not simple character flaws. You want them to understand that you can’t just get your shit together, that for you, acting like a grown up, doing what is right, making decisions, is like driving in a country where all the signs are in a different language. Telling someone like you to just get your shit together, is like telling an anorexic to stop not eating and start eating, like fixing the things in our minds is as easy and as simple as taking one bite at a time. But no one understands, especially you. Is this real? Does it even exist? Maybe it is a character flaw. Maybe it’s a disease of failure.

You listen to one song all week. You listen to it when you’re at work and when you’re driving and when you’re corralling feral Labradoodles on neighborhood watch. You’re not sure what the song is about because you have the attention span of an anorexic hummingbird and the concentration required to learn lyrics is beyond your bipedal capacity. The song is called “Hannah,” so you expect it’s about someone named Hannah. You will listen to this song until you hate it and then you will keep listening because you want to love it so badly. You listen to it as you bag your own groceries, which you do because you think bagging your own groceries makes you seem like a kind and generous person. You listen to a song about a girl named Hannanh and wonder what her life is like and if your life would look like hers in this thing inside your head was gone.

You sometimes desire the luxury of relapse, to throw up the pills, cancel the doctor’s appointments, to climb back up to the bar and say two words that never seemed dangerous until now, Fuck it. You hold onto this possibility. You’ll take your pills today but there is always the option of oblivion, of obscurity, of blowing up and fading away and letting this thing become who you are.