Heyyyyy.....

Hi Long time no see

Hi Everyone,

I know it’s been a while but thank you for waiting. I’ve been working a lot on my book and by that I mean I’ve been passively writing when I feel inspired which usually only lasts about 10 minutes. This week though, I’ve been finally able to motivate myself to write consistently and I’ve decided rather than struggle to come up with something about myself to post here, I’m going to share the “characters I’m meeting along the way.” It’s basically the people I write during the warm ups I do every day, who are entirely unrelated to the book. Sometimes they’re freaks, but that’s okay I think… right?? Also, since it is a warm up most of them won’t really be fully fleshed out or very thought-provoking or have any conclusion at all: just scenes of people existing. It’s just something I want to share to hold myself accountable as I try to finish this damn book that’s taken 100 years. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, then you will be very happy, but if it’s not, DON’T TELL ME I’LL CRY MYSELF TO SLEEP.

I’ll try to post these a couple times a week. I’ll start with the one from today, Jo and Mary, and then one weirdo from the other day, Stacy. Love you all and thanks for reading:

Jo and Mary

There aren’t a lot of people in the Urgent Care waiting room. Actually, there are just two, Mary and Jo, or actually three if you include the receptionist but she’s behind the desk and doing something on the computer and isn’t paying any mind to Mary or Jo having already completed the task of checking them in. Mary and Jo, however, don’t know each other. They’re just two people who happen to be in the same place at the same time in a tiny waiting room where they can both feel each other’s presence because they’re sitting across from each other but they don’t have anything to talk about.

Jo keeps looking at Mary. She’s trying not to stare but Mary has a designer purse, the kind with the pattern that Jo can’t remember the name of ever. She also thinks it’s silly for patterns to have names. She always thought people could just call it a different variation of plaid every time and differentiate them by colors and what is the difference plaid and gingham anyway and why can’t they have names that make more sense. Like weird spirals or silly lines or crazy spots.

Jo came into the doctor’s office for a finger she thinks is infected. She’s never had an infected finger before or an infected cut for that matter but she has a womanly intuition that the finger is infected. The same way women get those horrible feelings they can’t explain that get them out of stepping into an elevator with Ted Bundy. One time, she felt like she had a yeast infection and she did. This morning, she woke up and looked at her cut from the night before and she felt like she had an infected finger, so here she is. 

And there is Mary, but Jo doesn’t know her name yet. Right now, in her head Jo’s referring to her as Gingham. Even though the purse is really just checkered. She’s also calling her Celine because that’s the one designer Jo does know because her sister begged her mom for months for real Celine glasses– the knock off pair that she bought for $20 were a little crooked and the C on the side of it wasn’t quite right and the more she wore them in the sun, the more they started turning from black to brown and if they were real they wouldn’t be doing that, so her mom bought her sister the new ones that this woman, Gingham/Celine is wearing now. 

Gingham/Celine has a tissue shoved up her nose and the top part of it is covered with blood. She must have broken her nose or maybe she’s bleeding out through her nostril, but those issues are one in the same and Jo starts to get the ick for Mary because of the way that the tissue is jammed up into her nose. Something about it is so human. Something about it just screams “I’m helpless.” 

Jo feels bad for being so judgmental toward this woman. She’s realized, since she’s come out, that a lot of her bitter jealousy is rooted in attraction and she thinks that she just wants to fuck Gingham/Celine, her long legs glisten in the Urgent Care’s sterile light because of the tiny blonde hairs on them and her long blonde hair is effortlessly pushed out of her eyes with the Celine glasses as a headband. Now, on top of already being beautiful, she gets a new nose. Every time Jo plays baseball with her work team she hopes one clocks her right in her nose. Her yiayia tells her she should be happy, that so many greek people would die for a nose as small as hers. She tells her yiayia it’s still a greek nose and she remembers her mom holding up a finger to the edge of her nose saying, if that bump on top of it gets any bigger than I can pay for your nose job. Regardless, Jo is jealous of Gingham/Celine.

—

Mary keeps looking up from her book. This woman across the room keeps looking at her. The woman doesn’t even have her phone out or a book or anything really in her hands so she’s just starting at Mary. She wonders who will get called in first, Mary’s nose realignment seems to be impossibly quick and this other woman’s healthy disposition makes her think it must be hiding something much more serious, maybe it’s a yeast infection or STD or something that she can’t see. A weird rash, that’s spreading, all down her legs and so deep that it’s creeping onto her feet and into her shoes and they’re going to have to  perform emergency surgery that will take hours and keep Mary waiting for her nose to get realigned. She concludes that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad– she could be one of those people that walks around with a broken nose but it’s somehow charming. It gives the same vibe as a crooked smile: you can’t help but look and smile and feel jealous of the person who has it even though you spend your entire life craving symmetry. 

When the pot fell and hit her in the face, she of course saw it coming, but didn’t react quite fast enough. She didn’t know why her husband insisted on keeping the pots on a shelf she couldn’t reach when she is the only one who actually does the cooking for their family. But the wine glasses and the extra cleaning products took an unintuitive priority in the lower shelves and the pots and the pans took a space on the highest shelf above the stove. She honestly was lucky she didn’t get knocked out– it was a big pan, a cast iron skillet, fucking heavy and in a precarious location and she moved out of the way quickly so it ended up being okay but still it had hit just her nose. She’s trying to view it as a convenient turn of events– they would realign her nose somewhat easily and she would finally have an excuse to tell her husband that they can’t keep putting the pots on the top shelf. 

The woman with the rash is still looking over, so Mary stares at her also. Her arm tattoos and shag hair cut mark her as at least bisexual if not a fully blown lesbian and Mary thinks that she’s flirting with her. She wants to flash her wedding ring, tell her she’s not available. Mary touches the tissue in her nose, ow. Then she realizes she basically has a target right on her face for someone to rightfully be staring at her. 

“A pot fell on my face,” she says after her and this woman have been staring at each other for a few seconds longer than you would want to stare at someone and not say anything. 

“I have an infected finger,” she replies and Mary worries that this must be some sort of hippa violation and that the doctor will come out of her office and say “shhhH! Talk about something else PLEASE!” but Mary just feels grateful for this woman since she doesn’t have syphilis or a horrible rash. 

“I’m Mary,” she says and is surprised how easy it is to speak considering she has a tissue jammed up her nose. 

“Jo,” Jo says. “Nice to meet you.” 

They smile at each other for a while after and then Mary returns to her book. Now, with their names in the mix, the tension feels incredibly palpable and Mary can’t stop thinking about her and Jo… as friends, of course, driving a convertible down the road that’s next to the ocean or something like that. They’ll have their moment in the sun and it will be absolutely wonderful and maybe they’ll go to a couple events together. Maybe Jo will be the one to stand up to Mary’s husband about the pot situation and hold her hand while she gets her nose realigned and they could go to a concert together and then when Mary renews her vows with her husband, Jo will be her maid of honor or something. Mary loves a meet cute. 

“Joanna,” the nurse says as she steps into the waiting room. Jo waves and stands up. 

“Nice to meet you,” she says to Mary as she follows the nurse and Mary hopes that the infected finger diagnosis is quick because she still needs to go home soon and finish cooking dinner. Maybe she’ll get take out instead. Maybe her and Jo could go to dinner and laugh about meeting at the Urgent Care. Maybe Jo could come cook for Mary so she could relax and put the pots and pans in a new spot. I guess that would be tough with her infected finger. She pictures them together in her house: all banged up and her husband coming home and wondering who the stranger is and wondering why dinner’s not on the table and wondering when when him and Mary will get their vows renewed so that this random woman can be her maid of honor. Mary laughs to herself at this final thought and the receptionist looks up at her. She glances away and back to her book and tells herself she should just keep reading to avoid any other unwanted glances.

Stacy

Stacy goes to the movie theater every Thursday because no one knows her there. You’d think that after a dozen or so Thursdays of being in the same sweatshirt in the same town in the same place, she’d be noticed by at least one of the employees but she doesn’t. She doesn’t and it feels good because after all, Stacy is an introvert. She’s an introvert and she wears her hair gray even though her mother begs her to dye it and she wears a purple sweatshirt (the same sweatshirt mentioned earlier that gets worn every Thursday to the movie theater) even though her favorite color is yellow. It all doesn’t matter though because at the movie theater her favorite color could be purple and she could be Mary or Penelope or Vivian and she could be skinner underneath the sweatshirt and her favorite food could be popcorn, but these are things no one, at least no one here, knows and she’s alright with that.

“One senior ticket?” the boy manning the ticket station asks. He seems new, Stacy has never seen him before, and he looks like he couldn’t be over 16. It’s the first day of summer break: the kids that normally get on the school bus early in the morning were instead waiting around outside Stacy’s house, playing kickball in the street: she almost ran over the ball while driving to the movies. 

“No, just a normal adult,” she says and laughs. Stacy thought about lying though: saying that she was a senior and confusing this boy whose grandparents are probably still in their seventies and saying to him that she’s actually 65 and she’d spend the extra money on a snack she doesn’t need or really want. She tells herself she doesn’t look as old as she does: she just turned forty last month and has never been mistaken as a senior citizen until today. Maybe she will, after all, think about dying her hair soon. 

The theater is dark and familiar and the air conditioning is turned all the way up. She anticipated this and wore pants and the purple sweatshirt but there’s a man in front of her shivering in his tshirt and shorts that were extremely appropriate for the weather outside.

It’s just the two of them in the theater, so Stacy kicks her feet up onto the back of the chair in front of her and watches the back of his head while the lights are still up: his hair is curly and dark and he looks like someone she could know or wants to know but he’ll probably end up being someone she’ll never know and they’ll leave the theater and stand on the curb trying to hail the same taxi, but avoiding eye contact as though they hadn’t just experienced the epic highs and lows of… of…, fuck, what movie was Stacy at right now. She poked her mobile ticket.

Oh, of course, the new Planet of the Apes.

Of course she knew that and she could remember the last time she watched this series. It was years ago, before her gray hair and she brought a date to the movie. He was brunette with curly hair and he had this mole on his neck where a hickey should go and she thought, if she were to spend a night with him, that she would kiss the mole until it doubled in size and looked like an overgrown nipple on the side of his body. She giggles to herself now and the man with the curly hair in front of her stirs, probably wondering what she finds so funny before the movie even started and Stacy thinks to herself that this man could be her man from all of those years ago but he probably didn’t recognize her with her gray hair. Instead, he probably mistook her as a witch or a grandma in her lumpy purple sweater, but he hadn’t turned around yet so who’s to say that he doesn’t eventually recognize her and they’ll laugh about the last time they were here or they’ll meet for the first time and laugh about that and the whole thing wouldn’t have been very funny to begin with but they’re strangers so everything is awkward and funny. 

The movie begins and the lights go dark and Stacy knows the movie will probably be bad but she pretends to listen from the first minute even though she doesn’t want to. Her time at the movies is mainly spent thinking: it’s a dark, air-conditioned spot in the summer and heated spot in the winter where no one will try to talk to her. That’s why she likes it and she also likes it because the time she came on the date here with the man with the dark curls, he wore the purple sweatshirt and she hadn’t brought a layer: thinking the nerves would make her too hot and sweaty and she would be better off just cooling down in the theater. When she started to shiver, though, he gave her his sweatshirt, pulling it off over his head, messing up all of his curls in the process– they sprung back into place seconds later. 

She kept it, but he hadn’t asked for it back so maybe it was a gift and maybe he did it because he wanted her to have it; a parting gift before he ghosted her. She pretended, though, that it didn’t hurt and that they hadn’t even really hit it off that much and that eventually, she’d find another suitor that would suit her better and it all would be okay in the end.

But now she feels like she’s on the date again. With his doppelganger in the front row and the lights are off and he’s cold. 

“Hey,” she says and doesn’t know why– it’s so dark in here and she feels anonymous. 

“Hey,” she says again. 

The man in the front row turns around and he’s different than the man from her date but he’s still handsome, if not more handsome because he doesn’t have a mole. 

“What?” he says back. 

“Do you want my sweatshirt?” she offers, “you look cold.”

“Do I know you?” he squints through the light of the projector. 

“No,” she says because even if he somehow did she wouldn’t want to acknowledge whatever context it was: if it was from work, if it was from a family reunion, if it was from her grandmother’s nursing home somehow, she didn’t want to know. 

“Do you want it or not,” she says looking at him in the eyes.

“No, it’s alright,” he turns back to the movie. His shoulders seem to be shivering in the dark. 

Stacy gets up out of her seat and walks closer to him. In the dark she is anonymous. 

He looks up at her as she enters his row and sits down close to him. 

“Hey,” she says. 

“Hey,” he says, briefly pulling his eyes off of the screen to look at her. 

“I think we do know each other,” Stacy says and doesn’t know why. 

“From where?” the man asks. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“Okay,” he says and looks back at the screen. 

She puts her arm around him. 

“Hey what are you doing?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. She grabs his peck like a boob and laughs at herself. 

“Could you move somewhere else?” he looks at her with a panic. “I’m going to move unless you do. 

“I’m harmless,” she says. “I’m just an old woman. Don’t you want to watch a movie with me?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

Stacy gets up because if there’s one thing she knows it’s when she is unwanted and she goes back to her chair above his. 

She doesn’t know why she did that. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she imagined the entire thing and the whole thing had been a misunderstanding and he had actually told her to go over to him, calling out in the dark of the movie theater, “hey Stacy, come over here!” and she had because he called her and told her to do it and it made sense for that moment and it made sense the entire time she had done it and the whole thing was the correct thing for her to be doing. 

“Please don’t come over here again,” brow curls says as he looks at the screen. 

Stacy says nothing. Stacy says nothing because this is what she does: she goes places and she ruins things and she goes to the movie theater and she makes someone feels weird and she goes to work and no one wants to go home with her after she gets too drunk at the Christmas party and she does this thing where she misreads signs and she mistakes people and she goes to the fucking movie theater every Thursday to be alone. This man shouldn’t have been here. Doesn’t he know she wants to be alone? Doesn’t he know what happened the last time she was in a place like this? Watching a planet of the Apes movie? Doesn’t he get that sometimes people do things they don’t mean and they wear a purple fucking sweater when their favorite color is yellow? 

She remembers the man from the last time that she was at the movie theater: his favorite color was blue and he said to her was, “I don’t know why I can’t stop wearing this purple sweatshirt, my favorite color is blue,” and she believed him but he could have been lying and he probably thought the date to see the planet of the apes was dumb and Stacy should have just asked him to come over to fuck and told her mom to not be home when she did because now her hair is gray and she looks like an old woman at the movie theaters and she acts out of pocket and she wears a sweatshirt that belongs to a man she never loved. 

When the movie ends the man in the front row claps. Stacy sees it at him waving some sort of white flag to her: a symbol that all things are good between the two of them and that they should do this again, maybe next week. She waits for him to leave and when he finally does, she follows him to the curb. She waves her hand, imitating him, but also trying to hail a taxi and he does the same. She thinks about asking her taxi driver to follow his car so that she would know where he lives, but she’s not a weirdo; she’s a person. She’s a 40 year old. She’s a normal 40 year old woman who enjoys going to the movies alone. 

It starts to rain when the man gets in his taxi. Stacy stands in it. She lets the drops flow over her body, landing on her fingers and finger tips and touching her nose and hair. She feels intimate with the rain as it presses itself across her body. She lifts her chin toward the sky and opens her mouth. It feels good to stand in the rain. It makes her feel young, like maybe with enough rain, she could grow into something else. She would grow into a piece of corn, that would be harvested and popped as movie theater popcorn. She thinks of a flower that could bloom in front of her house. She would go somewhere else, of course, but the flower would be there when her mother got home to make dinner and give her a bath and clean the house. It would make more sense this way. It would give everyone the freedom that they needed. It would give her the freedom that she needed– the space to grow, to blossom into 101 different flowers and vegetables and maybe grow so high she’d touch the moon. 

So she stands in the rain for minutes after the man leaves and she doesn’t chase after him. She doesn’t even know what it is about him that became so endearing to her. Maybe it was the way that she thought he was someone else and thought that he could help her get out of this cycle or encourage her to stop going to the movies or something like that. And she would be happy because he made her happy and he would kiss her eyelashes because it was romantic and he’d smile at her because she was beautiful. But he’s just a stranger and so is she and they’re going to go their separate ways and never speak again and that will be ok because she will be okay and she will be happy regardless of anything that could happen to her. She decides to walk home because she doesn’t want to catch a cold. She also decides, next week she would go to the same movie because she actually wants to watch it this time.