I didn’t touch you for seven years.

Long Beach: On an over-stuffed green couch at 6th and Temple, you told me you were moving out and home because you just couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted to lay my head in your lap and cry. We ate hot dogs and IMed Darren.

Sacramento: On an air mattress in your living room, we lay with inches carefully calculated between us, talking about how good things were with you and Rachel now and how your dining room chairs needed re-upholstering, so could we please go to Jo-Ann Fabrics tomorrow.

Portland: Sandwiched between you and Kyle in a Nissan pickup with 200,000 miles and no radio, I straddled a stick shift and did not, even during a sharp left-turn, let my knee rest against yours.

Nobody’s an angel, angel.

(2) This happened to me:

(1) This happened to me:

After a two day blizzard on the border of Switzerland in the coldest town in all of France, Mouthe, I was handed a pair of aluminum snow shoes and asked to find three missing ponies in the woods at the base of the Jura Mountains.

when i have children, i will never let them beat me.

All I want is a little farm, a lawn full of food. And to be a good mom, the best.

They Are the Girls

They are the girls who play baseball with the boys. They eat sheep milk feta, which they buy in large, briny blocks at the Greek market. They wear strappy sundresses without bras. They know that cream needs to sit in a cold, stainless steel bowl before it is whipped and the meaning of vichyssoise. They say things in e-mails I wish I put in short stories—”the farmer’s market has been carrying potatoes from Stockton. It’s good to eat potatoes from your hometown.” They own pastry cloths. They bike when they can, which is often, and roll their own cigarettes. They know that copper will turn pink hydrangeas cerulean. They properly fold the bottom sheet and drink tequila on the rocks. They are the girls who other girls think I am, but I am not.

Three Things I Wish Had Never Been Said (to me)

1. We are at Chuck E. Cheese celebrating one or both of your grandsons’ October birthdays. I did not want to come because I walk and talk like my father and all of you hate him now, really want to give him a piece of your mind. I came anyway, clenching an olive branch. I have nearly 70 tickets for high Skeeball scores and am chewing my second slice of cardboard pepperoni pizza. You lean in across the table and you, you look crazy. You say, “I never thought he’d do what he did. Not after your own mother cheated on him.” I stare, slack-jawed, my blood boiling. “Oops,” you continue, “I must have said too much.”

2. I ask, in an e-mail, if you think I’d be a good candidate for an MFA program. Your reply is short and in it, I can hear the exact, curt manner with which you punched the keys. You say I am too “overwhelmed by things that do not flow out of you naturally, if not chaotically.” You then wish me the best of luck in all of my endeavors and to please, exclude you from them.

3. “Chelsea sit closer to me. How do you get your skin so soft like that, Chelsea? You have a boyfriend don’t you? I think you could handle the both of us. I bet you’re a good lover, good in the sack. You’re so much better than my regular girl, Chelsea, God your skin, I want to cancel everyone else,” you say with Parkinson’s and your hands down your pants.

If I am not writing here, it’s because I’m writing here:
http://hotchpotsoup.wordpress.com
.

The sound of an apple falling, pump, from my hand into a wooden crate, a flock of geese calling as I shake the earth from a turnip—there are few times in which I’ve felt completely congruous with the world and all of them have been in a garden.