Secret Tiny Cities by Jess Wright Buha

[secret-tiny-cities]

When I talk to my son about death, I will talk about summer.

I think about taking Miles to the place where my childhood dog is buried, next to the stone steps in the sculpture park--the abandoned 1920s swimming pool. His ashes in with the ivy. Me: I had a dog, and his name was Boots. He was a special dog. He was like our Zelda, but different. I was lonesome in high school, and I would walk in the park with Boots. He was my buddy. Miles: Buddy. Me: Yes, a buddy. You are my buddy. But I will not bury your ashes in the vines. Your light is my light, and with Boots, I stood with my sister and we scattered the white ashes over the leaves, upending the box, shaking the plastic bag so every bit was with the earth. And while I cradled the box on the walk to the site, Angela took it when it was empty. She waited until the last trashcan to throw it away. I will not throw you away, because your light is my light, and if you leave me, I'm leaving too. I  am changing my name. I will move out west with nothing but the social security card with my maiden name on it, and I will work in a laundromat and make everyone call me Jessie or Jen or a name I got from the newspaper. I will be alone. A new person. Miles takes my hand. “Zelda?” He says.

Me: No. Nothing but vines now. He's gone back to the earth now, like all of us, the place of sweetsmelling things, wind coming over the lake, the land of summer. Miles: Lake? Me: Yes. Let's walk to the lake.

[secret-tiny-cities]

Ruminations on Breastfeeding, including a Demonstration of an Electric Breastpump, Anecdotes, and Free Samples

(The Last Abbiefest, August 2016. Jason Weinberg helps me find a chair and a table, and a music stand. I set down my pump bag and the cooler, put my papers on the music stand, and begin.)

Hi, my name is Jessica Buha, and I am going to talk about on breastfeeding. The way the next twenty minutes'll work is I'll give some background, then I'll explain the breastpump, then I'll pump, and then we'll have samples. The samples will be in cups, not straight from the boob. There's a reason why, which I'll explain in a bit.

So breastfeeding. To breastfeed a baby, you first need a breast. Like this one.

(I take the left boob out, and use it as a boob puppet.)

“Hi, I'm a boob!”

When my son was younger, I used to use the boobs as little puppets. “Hi, Miles! I'm a boobie! Drink me!”

(I put away the left boob.)

This might seem weird, the need to make little boob puppets. But the thing is that breastfeeding is very very difficult. Which I feel like is kinda this big weird secret—I certainly didn't know.

When I was pregnant, I was Facebook chatting with a high school friend of mine and she was like, “yah, I didn't breastfeed because it wasn't right for my family,” and I'm like, “oh.” It was as though she was like, My kid sleeps outside with the wolves because it's just not right for our family having her sleep inside.”

That might seem extreme, but I had just taken a breastfeeding class, and they said that you NEED to breastfeed until the baby is one year old—this is according to the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics and basically everyone on Earth, because breastmilk is nature's “perfect food.”

It really is incredibly amazing stuff. It will change and grow with your baby—as the baby grows, the milk changes to be the perfect food for that specific stage of your baby's life. And if you catch a cold, then the baby can get all those lovely antibodies, and he'll get sick less. And when you actually nurse your baby, the milk changes—the first half is thinner and more sugary, and the second half is super-fatty so it puts the baby to sleep.

And the best part is that you will never run out of this magical food. Ever. See, the boobs are like a factory that makes sprockets. And when a baby sucks on your boob, he's not emptying the boob. It's like he's placing an order at the factory. He's triggering the factory to make more sprockets. So the more the baby eats, the more milk you produce.

“Nature's perfect food.” Breatsmilk truly amazing stuff.

If your boobs work, which mine didn't, at first.

See, when your baby is first born, your boobs secrete this thick, yellow substance--

(The audience has an unexpectedly strong reaction.)

--colostrum. No, it's really amazing stuff. It's referred to as “liquid gold.” It's the magical, super-concentrated, even-more-amazing-than-breastmilk super-food that your baby needs when he's first born.

I never produced this. But I wasn't worried.

And then, around two to four days after birth, your milk will come in. And your boobs will get large and heavy with milk—almost painfully full, which to me was infuriating, like your pockets being PAINFULLY full of money.

Because my boobs did not get painfully full. They didn't feel full at all. I wasn't worried about this, either.

Because denial is a deep and intoxicating fog.

So, when you breastfeed a baby, you're supposed to feed him eight times a day. “Eight times a day,” or else your milk will dry up. So you're supposed to keep a log where you write down the times you feed him, so you know if you're feeding him enough.

My husband and I kept a log, so I have the times that we fed him on our first night home from the hospital, when he was juuuust under three days old.

I fed Miles at 8:06 pm for half an hour. Then I fed him again at 10:30 for half an hour, then at 11:20 for half an hour, then at 12:34 and 1:11 and 1:56 and 2:15 and at that point, it was pretty clear that I was completely dry.

Which the books and the classes and everyone said would never happen. You would never go completely dry, because a factory would never run out of sprockets. They're constantly coming off the assembly line. Right? You will always be able to squeeze a little bit of breastmillk out, like this, here, watch—

(I take out the left boob and a glass saucepan lid, hold the lid two feet from my boob, and squeeze some milk onto the saucepan lid.)

But I couldn't. Not a drop.

And the breastfeeding classes and all the books said to throw away all those evil, nasty, formula samples you might have gotten in the mail, so you wouldn't be tempted to use them in the middle of the night.

So my baby was hungry and crying and I didn't have anything to feed him.

So I just rocked him. My husband fed me water with a straw. According to the log, I put him on the boobs again at 3:15, and then he finally fell asleep around four AM.

Then he woke up again at 5:15, screaming and hungry.

So we go to the pediatrician for his three-day-old appointment and she weighs him and frowns and tells us to come back in two days for a “weight check” (where she weighs him and frowns) so we come back aGAIN for the third time in five days and our pediatrician's like, “okay, this experiment isn't working. You need to start offering him formula after every breastfeeding session.”

I guess my factory was one of those artisanal ones that handforged all of their sprockets out of iron that they had personally dug out of the ground.  

I have low milk production. This is a medical thing. But it's not seen as being a medical thing. Everyone thought I was being lazy.

Everyone. Other moms. Friends of mine. The universe. Every single person on this planet thought I didn't care about my son.

Or just me. Mostly me. I thought I was being lazy. And I was so mad at myself.

But you can't be mad at yourself when you're breastfeeding. You can't be anxious or upset, because then your milk won't come out.

That's the cruel little truth about breastfeeding. You have to be calm and confident, or the milk won't flow. And if the milk doesn't flow, then it'll eventually disappear—and not eventually, like, a month. Eventually like two days. The factory will close up shop and then you'll never get that imaginary gold star from the World Health Organization for breastfeeding for a whole year. And then where will you be?

So this is what I did. I knew that the anxiety would stop if I could just produce some milk—if I could just convince the factory that I needed sprockets, and I needed them now, so get off your asses and start making them—

So, in order to sufficiently stimulate my milk production, I took a month where I breastfed for ten hours a day.

This is what I did.

First, I'd attempt to nurse him for half an hour.

I'd get a pillow—just use an everyday pillow you use to sleep on, do NOT use a Boppy pillow, they're too skinny and you spend the whole time trying to make sure your baby doesn't roll off of it—and I'd lay him down and tickle his nose with my nipple—this is what they tell you to do; a lot of the advice is about how to convince your baby to latch onto the boob, which was not a problem with me. Miles loved the boob, when I'd pull it out and say, “Hi, Miles, I'm a boob.” he would let out a small cry of joy. Then he'd suck for a moment, spit it out, and scream. There was no milk.

So I'd try to sing to him while offering him other boob, and so he'd try again and spit it out again and scream again, so I'd offer him the first boob and so on...

And then eventually he'd just give up and start to cry and then we're both crying,

And it was just really... intense.

But I'd offer him the boob for half an hour. I'd time myself.

Then I'd go make some formula and feed it to him in a bottle, which he would gobble down. That took around fifteen minutes.

Then I'd rock him to sleep, put him to bed, get out all my pump stuff, and pump for fifteen minutes. Because the boob is like a factory, remember? The only way it's making more milk is if it thinks the baby needs it.

So my boobs would be Extra-Stimulated to make All of the Milk.

I did this eight times a day. For a month.

And it worked.

But not everyone can spend ten hours a day doing nothing but breastfeeding.  So maybe don't judge people who don't do it.

Was it worth it? I will say this about thing about breastfeeding. Once it's established, it's pretty amazing. It's a built-in time of rest during the day, which you will desperately need at nine-and-a-half months when the baby spends most of the day screaming at you and roaming around the house trying to fuck up as much shit as possible.

SO, let's get into the breast pump.

I will say that breast pump is weird. It's pretty weird. Just going to warn you. Visually odd. But it is so useful. So useful. If I had a sidekick, like in a video game, it'd be my breast pump.

Honestly, I cannot recommend an electric breast pump enough. Do not get a manual one. They are worthless. I have one. They are worthless. I know they are less, like, weird. But just do not even bother.

Get an electric pump. Get one, get one, get one. If you are interested in breastfeeding, get an electric pump and an old sports bra. Your insurance will likely cover the cost of the pump. Mine did not. So my cousin gave me one of hers.

But once you have a breast pump, your whole world opens up. If you have a breast pump, you can go to rehearsal for three hours or go see the new Star Wars movie, and someone else can stay home wth the baby and feed him a bottle. and then you can stand in the bathroom stall and pump for fifteen minutes and you won't lose your milk and everything is glorious.

Here's how it works.

(I take my modified sports bra and all the pump pieces out of my bag and start to assemble the breastpump.)

First, we get all the shit together. Valves go here, the little cup things go here. This screws onto here.

Next, put on the sports bra. THIS IS KEY. Just take any old sports bra and make dots where your nipples are and cut slits in it—and then you might cut the slits a little too big and have to resew it up Frankenstein-style, but that's fine—because then you can check your email or read or drive to rehearsal or do whatever it is you're doing.

So, put the nipples through here—hi, nipples!--then put the flanges through here. Perfect.

(I show the audience the completed breastpump. It is visually odd. The audience is quiet.)

So the reason why you have to sample breastmilk from a cup and not right from the boobie is because it probably wouldn't come out if you tried to suck. Like I said, breastmilk is a finicky thing, and in order for it to flow, you have to be relaxed, and calm, and thinking about your baby. I guess it's kinda like peeing in public? Not a very good example.

And if I can't pump any out because I'm too nervous or  just cause the milk just isn't there—which happens about half the time, even when I'm pumping at home under Optimal Circumstances—if that happens, then I have THIS milk that I pumped last night after an evening of drinking. I can't feed it to Miles because it's too boozy, so here you all go.

But. Let's see if I can pump some out. I have two techniques that I use. One is visualizing water flowing, and one is visualizing my baby. We will try both.

So we turn it on, and there are two dials, one controlling the speed of the suck, and one controlling the force of the suck. When you first start, you want the speed of the suck to be as fast as possible. Then, once the milk starts to come, you can turn it down.

Okay. I'm setting my alarm for ten minutes.

(I set my iphone for ten minutes.)

There might be a shivering thing that happens. That's a good sign. It means the milk's sloooowly started to travel down the pipes towards the nipples. Hopefully that will happen at some point.

All right. Let's think about water.

I think of rushing water, of brooks, of places with bridges where the water swirls and the grass bends with the ripples, curling over the rocks, cold on my feet, the stones tickle the swirls on the pads of my toes. The stream talks to the blood in my veins, I let it wash over and through me, a portion of me getting carried away, the things that need to move on, the dead skin cells, the worries, the loose strands of hair all flowing to another destination. Twisted into a nest by a fish, poking the clear strands around the hole where the fish eggs peek out. Each swimming.  Each tiny dark tail flickering.

I think of Miles sucking, his damp forehead, his fingers on the skin of my breast, latching on, sucking. I think of rocking him, of snuggling, of his head on my shoulder with a quilt wrapped around us.

I think of the top of a mountain in early spring. Everything icy, then the water shooting through. Cracking the ice, flowing, flowing, flowing. Down the rocks, flowing. Making everything wet and green. The water runs over the stones. It is flowing. Flowing.

I believe in my milk. I believe in rivers with silver boats and and soda cans rippling behind the canoe and little boys with gold hair like the sea and eyes like the forest peering into the water, seeing the stones at the bottom. Wanting to swim, wanting to be near me.

When I finally hear the drips of my milk in the bottle, it is rain outside my window when the ground is cracked outside.

In my next life, I'll be a fountain. A house with copper veins and a sturdy roof, stars overhead, grass and trees outside the window. Enough beds for all the children to come home to, and their children's children. I stretch the rooms. I widen my arms to embrace them all.

All right. Let me tell you about my son.

His name is Miles. When he laughs, it sounds like birds. His warm weight in my arms is a wonderful thing. His heart against my heart.

That is what Miles is like when he latches on. A sigh, openmouthed, as he reaches under my shoulderblade with one small hand, and grasps the edge with the other.

When I nurse him, I hold him very close in my arms, and he plays gently with the straps of my tanktop, and he's quiet and beautiful. Rhythmic sucking, the same one-two-one-two as a heartbeat. Life.

It feels gentle. It feels like holding hands.

I have time to look at his hair. My son has hair like the ocean at sunset, curling, golden waves.

I have time to look at his eyes, if he's not asleep, if he's just quietly staring off into space, thinking about the womb. His eyes look like the forest at sunrise. Brown like treetrunks, green like moss, grey like the lightening sky.

And if he's asleep, I can look at his eyelashes, which are very long and beautiful.

It's really lovely.

(I check the timer. If there is still time, I read the below piece.)

I wrote this piece when I was breastfeeding him the other day.

“When I hold him I say I love you I love you over and over again so he’ll remember when he’s old

I love my son.  We are sitting in the nursery, he’s on the green pillow across my lap, nose against the skin of my breast, eyes closed, breathing, the gentle tug tug tug that shows he’s not asleep.

I wish we were in England in the twenties in a little cottage in a garden, me always always always striking a match on the black hob of the stove, him drinking tea and swinging his scuffed leather shoes. The rain coming down outside. Us taking a walk the next morning, the world sparkling with sunlight and full of water. The air moist and warm like the womb. Turning over leaves to look for caterpillars. Holding his soft, tiny hand, which now clutches mine, now shakes it free to run over the bright grass. Shoes turning a deep brown from the dew. Eyes wide, fern-like, blooming. His polished-copper hair in the sunlight. My angel man.

Then the war, of course. You forget about the war. You have to.

I would never have let him go. I would make plans to take him to Canada and coal stoves and frozen fingertips in June and a vast wide loneliness. He would have left the night before, throwing his knapsack over the garden wall and crawling after it, note folded on that same scrubbed kitchen table in his longhand. Dispatch papers in his breastpocket. Walking quickly over the cobblestones under the grey stars, past the roses of his childhood, nodding in the black wind before dawn. To the recruitment office, to the bunker, to the submarine humming with electricity and pulsing lights. Laying on his creaking mattress, hearing the snores all around him, thinking of the songs I sang to him in the womb.

When it was just him and me together.  Safe.”

(I check the timer. If there is still time, I read the below piece.)

I wrote this piece when I was pumping the other day.

“I am thinking of my son and how he looks in the morning when everyone is asleep but us, and how his hand curls around my finger and he sighs and sucks with closed eyes. How he sighs like a man coming home from a business trip, setting down his bags in the white foyer of his house, the grass outside new and shining with morning dew, the cab driver's engine growing distant. He hears his sleeping family upstairs, his wife, his children. And he sets down his bags softly and sighs.

He goes into the kitchen. Everything there, the milk in glass bottles, the calendar with pictures of cows. In the backyard, the trees grow. The flowers grow. The clothesline hangs bare. Everything in its place. Everything waiting for him.

He goes upstairs and stands in the doorway of his children's bedrooms and puts his ear to the crack. He doesn't hear anything, and has a flash of panic—but then he remembers that it's always that way. He listens longer, and hears the rush and release of those precious lungs. Growing like flowers. “

(I turn the timer off and unscrew the bottles of milk.)

Okay, let's see what we got.

(I was able to pump half an ounce, which I was pretty pleased by—I will occasionally only pump a few milliliters. I poured the freshly-pumped milk and the boozy-pumped milk into shot glasses, and invited the audience to come up to taste it. Six or so people came up onstage to try some. “It's really sugary!” said one.)

[secret-tiny-cities]

When I hold him I say I love you I love you over and over again so he’ll remember when he’s old

I love my son.  We are sitting in the nursery, he's on the green pillow across my lap, nose against the skin of my breast, eyes closed, breathing, the gentle tug tug tug that shows he's not asleep.

I wish we were in England in the twenties in a little cottage in a garden, me always always always striking a match on the black hob of the stove, him drinking tea and swinging his scuffed leather shoes. The rain coming down outside. Us taking a walk the next morning, the world sparkling with sunlight and full of water. The air moist and warm like the womb. Turning over leaves to look for caterpillars. Holding his soft, tiny hand, which now clutches mine, now shakes it free to run over the bright grass. Shoes turning a deep brown from the dews. Eyes wide, fern-like, blooming. His polished-copper hair in the sunlight. My angel man.

Then the war, of course. You forget about the war. You have to.

I would never have let him go. I would make plans to take him to Canada and coal stoves and frozen fingertips in June and a vast wide loneliness. He would have left the night before, throwing his knapsack over the garden wall and crawling after it, note folded on that same scrubbed kitchen table in his longhand. Dispatch papers in his breastpocket. Walking quickly over the cobblestones under the grey stars, past the roses of his childhood, nodding in the black wind before dawn. To the recruitment office, to the bunker, to the submarine humming with electricity and pulsing lights. Laying on his creaking mattress, hearing the snores all around him, thinking of the songs I sang to him in the womb.

When it was just him and me together. Safe.

[secret-tiny-cities]

First Week Thoughts

10/26/15

I think my favorite part of having severe preeclampsia was the sudden old-timey flavor it gave the birthing process. And the part where the doctors were like, do you know what eclampsia is? And I was like, I do! Thanks, Downton Abbey! And the fact that the blood pressure machine in triage played a happy song after measuring a safe blood pressure, and a sad song when the numbers were high. So it was like I got to play an increasingly frightening video game every five minutes, which was exciting.

Also, the pushing part was the hardest. At least in my experience. Confined to bed with the magnesium IV and the epidural, which stopped working just as I needed it the most. But the more I said I can't, I can't, the more voices I heard encouraging me. 

(I suppose a birth is always exciting to watch, and draws more onlookers as the main event draws near. But in my dreams, someone stuck their head into the break room. “Someone needs our help.”  And the nurses and residents and interns all put down their sandwiches and coffee and rose as one to go to my room, to stand over my bed and chant words of encouragement--their voices rising, their calm, strong words louder than my despair.)

And at the end, after a last scream and a waterfall of fire, a last sensation of water and slipping, I opened my eyes to see that I was surrounded by women. And my husband. And my son.  Miles mutters to himself and sings strange one-day-old songs quietly when he's supposed to be sleeping. He has a distinctive shriek, and is very kind to Mike and I.

-

10/28/15 

Miles is sleeping in his crib for the first time, four days old and eyes like the lake, he looks around frantic, the whites of his eyes flashing, thrusting his neck, desperate to see, to see, to see. 

I remember how he looked in his glass bassinet next to my hospital bed in the blue and pink striped blanket, a ball with an olive face and eyes closed, still, sometimes chirping softly to himself, the ancient baby songs they teach you in the womb. The sky turning pink over the lake outside the window. Mike with half a sheet over him, still wearing his jeans and sweater, dark hair against his pillow the same color as the baby’s. In the silence of the morning, it was lovely to hear Mike’s soft snores, Miles’ soft breaths, his sighs, his tiny baby songs, the strange notes rising and falling with the movement of his perfect lips. 

-

10/29/15 

The rhythms of my life have changed, because I hear my son in every one. I hear him in the sound of the bathroom faucet, the water pitch matching the scream he makes before clamping, silent and content, on the breast, eyes suddenly calm. The movements of the mop against the floor are in the same 1-2-3 count as his sucks. The wind reminds me of his sighs. Musical notes that meant nothing when strung together on the radio now remind me of him and the songs he sings in his sleep, ancient, sighing, the happiness and troubles of the world woven into a few clear notes as he yawns and turns his head. 

When I look in the mirror, I see him first. His eyes are my eyes, and it’s startling, because my reflection was once private, but now I share it with a little boy named Miles. 

[secret-tiny-cities]

“Midnight Snacks with a Pregnant Lady,” performed at 2:15 am on 8/16/15 as a part of AbbieFest 27

(At the beginning of the performance, I set out spoons, bowls, milk, a box of Lucky Charms, and a box of Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs. I then invited the audience to help themselves to cereal. I made myself a bowl of Lucky Charms and sat down in front of a music stand. Once everyone was settled with their cereal, I began.)

There is a time, super late at night, when the house is quiet, where you have a chance to just sit by yourself, eat a bowl of cereal and think. I haven't done that in a while—I've been really tired lately, and I don't want to stress the baby out by staying up til the wee hours. I remember I had a script deadline a few months ago and I was up til three typing, typing, and I gradually felt the baby's movements change from whale-in-the-sea, gently turning to something a little more frantic. A little more spastic—little more “why aren't we asleep yet? It's three in the morning and I'm getting really crabby.” But I like staying up late. I like midnight bowls of cereal.

-

The baby couldn't sleep last night. He had the hiccups—it feels like a rhythmic tapping from the inside of your uterus. Tap. Tap. Tap. It's supposed to help with the development of breathing—I don't know. But the hiccups usually don't bother him too much—he just squirms after a bit and they go away. But no amount of squirming was getting rid of these hiccups, and I could feel his frustration as his movements got jerkier. I rubbed my belly like, “hey, it's okay.” But it didn't help. Eventually the hiccups stopped on their own, and the baby stopped tossing and turning and fell asleep. To dream of... I don't know what. [Dogs barking. Stomach gurgling. Muffled singing. A rosy light.]

-

This is how you know you're pregnant. Your breasts hurt—like, ache. Like pulled-muscle ache. Like someone punched you right in the boob. And you start to smell different—well, really your vagina starts to smell different. Instead of smelling like nothing, your vagina starts to smell like the ocean. Salty, briney—like pre-historic, pre-Cambrian, life-making, cell-dividing water.

Because your body is doing something different, now. It's consumed with a task that has nothing to do with Netflix or script deadlines or day job nonsense. And it's the strangest thing when your body is involved—deeply involved—in something that doesn't really concern you at all.

It's like your best friend went off to war. It's like your older brother who'd always been there, knocking secrets to you at night on the other side of your bedroom wall, lifting you onto tree branches, solemnly turning over rocks and pointing out the creatures beneath, splashing with you through creeks, holding your hand so you won't trip and drown—it's like suddenly he's called away, deployment papers arrived one ordinary day in the mailbox and suddenly he's gone. And you're left on the couch, stomach in knots, bile creeping up your throat, left wondering “since when do I have acid reflux? Since when do all sweet things taste awful? Since when do I throw up in public, in a toilet in the basement of the Chopin? In a trashcan at Wabansia and Ashland? On the sidewalk on Belmont? What happened to some sense to stability? I'm bursting into tears at random times, I don't feel like writing. I don't feel like myself. Part of me is gone.

But then, a few months later, something new appears. You feel him fluttering his soft feet, gentle tickles that at first are kinda frightening, kinda disconcerting—the first few times I felt the baby move, it made me nauseous, like ughhh there is something alive near my stomach and it's squirming and it's freaking me out.

But, of course, the baby's thinking the same thing. I remember once I was lying down, four months pregnant, waiting to see if I could feel a movement, and I coughed suddenly, sharply, and I felt this sudden jerk of surprise from my abdomen. I'd startled him. I'd made HIM go “what the fuck?” We were both in this together—just two strangers squeezed together on a train a rush hour, trying to ignore the other one's jostling elbows.

Around the same time as those first fetal movements, my moods started to calm down, and I started liking sweets again, and I stopped feeling queasy every waking moment. I started to like having a little friend—started to like having the baby around. And I think he likes having me around, too. Sure, the first time I rubbed my belly to say hello to him, “Hello, baby,” he kinda freaked out, but now I think he likes it. Or at least he's used to it.

But I still don't feel like myself. I miss those midnight bowls of cereal. I haven't had a bowl of midnight cereal in seven months. Because first I got pregnant and the thought of sweet things made me want to vomit and THEN I felt better so there was this one glorious month when I ate cereal again—sure, I still wasn't staying up late, but at least I had my Lucky Charms and my Reese's Puffs.

But then I had my sixth month doctor's appointment, when my doctor told me I'd gained too much weight—twenty pounds in four weeks—so she put me on a diet. Really just a no junk food diet, but with a list of three things that were absolutely off-limits. Only three things: ALL fruit juice, concentrated sweets, and dry cereal. No dry cereal. And so I've been on this diet for six weeks. I mean, “diet.” It's basically just eat as many whole fruits, whole vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins as you can. But I don't want to eat whole fruits and whole grains and lean proteins. All I want to do is eat cereal because I love cereal. I've always loved cereal, I've eaten three bowls of it a day for the last fifteen YEARS and now I can't eat it because it's FORBIDDEN and I— I just want to do things I want to do.

-

This morning, I wanted to run away. I woke up, and I did the dishes—because, like every morning for the last six weeks, I had to make myself eggs and oatmeal and yogurt and all of those things take, like, a million clean pots and pans and that's just breakfast—but I only got as far as making the oatmeal before I realized that I just couldn't eat it.

So I decided to go to the Burrito House for breakfast instead. A place that would not conform to my diet, a place where even thinking the name made a voice in my head go, “Are you sure?” But I didn't care. So I got dressed, went outside, got in my car, and once you're in a car, you can go anywhere. And I thought, what if I just left.

But I felt a tap inside me. It was the baby, gently, saying, “Hey. I'm hungry. Let's eat, maybe?” And then a gentle squirming.

And I said, “All right, my little darling. Let's not run away. Let's get some food.” And we did.

-

I can't wait to eat cereal with my son at midnight, when the world is quiet. Just us and the crickets and the moon. And Lucky Charms.

Soon.

But soon is not now, and I'm still on that diet, so someone needs to take these boxes of cereal off my hands so I don't eat them.

(“But seriously,” I said. “Someone honestly needs to take these boxes of cereal, because I can't bring them home with me.”)

[secret-tiny-cities]

Everything in its Place

Today I bought a whole chicken from the store, sliced the plastic over the kitchen sink to let the watery blood drain out and I reached into the cold, rubbery cavity and took out its severed heart and severed intestine (curled like a sliver of the moon) and severed liver but when I checked the internet to see just how many things I had to pull out of the inside of a dead, processed, American chicken, they listed FOUR. So I kept hunting, fingernails scratching the inside of its ribcage, until I found the gizzard.

I put the headless thing with no feet and arms folded at its side in a pot, and I boiled it with some carrots and bay leaves, and I thought of the old ones doing the same over a fire, sucking the bones, drawing rags over the surface to catch the yellow fat, twisting a corner and letting the baby suck it while you bounced her and thought about the war. Saw your son playing with stones in the dirt by the lane. You pushed the wool curtains aside and watched him throwing stones and thought of his pale face, eyes looking up. The dirt red beneath his chest while a king rode by in a carriage, nodding solemnly, proudly, curtly at his sacrifice. Everything in its place.

While a man patiently pressed out five hundred thousand purple hearts and set each one in a velvet box. Everything in its place, each stacked neatly, waiting to be shipped to the mothers of the boys who waded onto that rocky shore, clutching their guns, dazed, already dead. The water smelling like the summer of 1929 when they were all just boys throwing stones at frogs. Aiming, but a secret relief whenever he missed, because a hit meant blood. Meant a sudden, strange floating, all the limbs suddenly splayed and floating, just like the angels painted in gentle pinks and blues on the church ceiling back home. A hit meant blank and silent eyes, like stone angels over a grave, like mothers dressed in black

[secret-tiny-cities]

Transformation

I thought I saw a fly in the office theother day, a tiny one, gnat really, may have just been an amoeba floating around in my eyeball, but ack—a gnat in the apartment!

My husband's out of town for ten days, and the apartment has been slowly, gently relaxing into chaos, dirty clothes stacked neatly on top of the dresser now falling to the floor like unruly vines, dog hair in the living room like snowdrifts, dirty plates in the office, the porcelain circles like sprawling white cities over the desk and the floor.

Transformation means permanent change, means remembering not to leave clothes everywhere, it means picking up after yourself and not eating spoonfuls of peanut butter dipped in chocolate chips for dinner. Which is what I had for lunch today, but I blamed it on being crampy and grumpy.

I remember when I had my first period—twelve at summer camp, one of those sprawling girl scout camps with the changing room for the pool all whitewashed walls and wasps nests made of mud in the corners. My mom worked at the camp as a counselor of a group of cabins far from mine—by an unspoken rule, I never saw her in the two weeks of camp, but THIS was an exception, now—the whole mess was treated very solemnly by my mother and by all the adults, like the initiation to a secret club, a secret society of bloated women drinking choco-tinis. I got a phone call from my Dad later that day on the camp phone, a very rare occasion I don't remember happening ever, and I remember hearing my dad's voice in the receiver, “I heard you became a woman today,” and I just died of embarrassment in a way I hadn't ever felt before.

Maybe that was really the transformative moment, not suddenly rethinking a pair of white shorts but that hot, silent embarrassment that only happens when you're a teenager—only happens when everyone else knows more about your body and the gravity of a few red-brown spots in your underwear than you do.

I remember the next day coming back in from the pool to the thick white walls of the changing room, and a shriek coming up from a corner, “LOOK this underwear has a PAD on it, someone's on her period!” And the shrieks rise from the other girls as well, shrieks of disgust, of unclean. I join in as well, wondering who would be so disgusting to be twelve and on her period.

As the crowd cleared, my sister Angela came up to me, her face red with embarrassment but brave, but hardened with a resolve of loyalty to her twin sister. “Um, there's a pair of underwear with a pad on them. It's right there,” and she pointed to where the girls had thrown it, and I fetched it from the corner, my feet padding echoes in the empty changing room, feeling safe, somehow, feeling the bond of sisterhood, of womanhood, for the first time.

[secret-tiny-cities]

For my Aunt on her Birthday

When I think of Aunt Joanne, I see the walls of her Santa Barbara house: smooth 1930s wood stained a deep, warm brown. I see the red tile roofs of the city stretching out below the hill and to the ocean (the view sliced with a thin, black powerline). I think of weaving up cracked roads in her silver, boxy Izusu with no cup holders, I think of stepping away from her kitchen table to eat an Oreo, then wiping off my hands and coming back to look at the black and silver photographs of our ancestors. I think of every drawer being full of strange and beautiful things. I think of warmth, of desert warmth, of warm hugs accompanied by tinkling gold earrings and a warm smile. And I remember how her hands looked as they clutched the steering wheel on the white Missouri streets, hands desperate to keep us safe. "I don't want to drive on the ice." I think of cast-iron skillets, of slicing butter not the short way, but lengthwise across the whole stick. "A catering trick." I think of the smell of coffee. Aunt Joanne is birthday cards with elaborate, hand-drawn flowers. Aunt Joanne is warmth radiating through thousands of miles of crackling telephone wires: "Hi, Jessie!!" She is laying dozens of handmade ravioli on white sheets in the bedroom, she is frying zucchini flowers in a kitchen in Italy, she is speaking in strange, musical tones to passerby, to men in a Tuscan field who, nodding and smiling, invite us to take the blossoms. Aunt Joanne is glamorous lipstick on my childhood cheeks. She is miraculously appearing in Millennium Park in Chicago to see a play. Aunt Joanne's garages and shelves and drawers are always full of rescued objects--coat hangers painted a faded green, tin cans with colorful labels, old books with delicate pages. She sees the beauty in these items: in rusted things by the side of the road, in cracked, forgotten flower pots, in the forgotten things that others pass by. She loves them, she makes art with them, she makes them beautiful. I always feel beautiful when I'm with Aunt Joanne. Beautiful and loved and warm, like flowers during a desert sunrise, each turning towards the growing light.

[secret-tiny-cities]

That Time Last Spring That I Hung around Harvard while Mike Was at a Work Conference

(written in front of Mower Hall A, on a bench next to a chapel)

The squat, solemn red brick of the dormitories—the “halls”--didn't seem very inspiring at first, but now I rather like them, gentle and unpretentious.

My Harvard tour guide was great: small, cheerful, mixing up dates every now and again, walking backwards cheerfully, almost running into lampposts and orange safety cones—we'd all yell STOP! and she'd go “ooooup!” and turn around.

She confided in me, after the tour was over and I asked her where to get coffee, that she could only recommend things on the map—for ease of tourists? Or for advertising purposes?—but she confided “Crema Cafe,” where I got a rosemary-bacon scone and a chocolate cupcake with a sugared basil leaf on top.

While on the tour, we visited the statue of John Harvard—the plaza crowded with families pressing the hands of their toddler sons onto the gold toe of the statue, and our tour guide cautioned us not to rub the toe, “unless we wash our hands afterward, due to the unguarded nature of the statue and this being a college campus.”

But why? Would people smear poop on it, or spit on it or masturbate on it—surely not! Except that

a) Remember at Uchicago when that kid smeared poop all over the elevator buttons, cleverly trapping the unsuspecting inside?

b) A tall, thin, beautiful blonde girl, wearing a Harvard Track tank top and saying to her two trailing, glamorous companions as she approached the John Harvard statue, “Oh, GOD. Let's take a picture of them.” “Photobomb!” added her companions as they shoved their way through the crowds of people, haughtily walking in front of carefully poised photographs that the masses had traveled untold miles to take, to rub the shoe and pray to the bronze gods, the red brick and ivy gods that their first born son would get in. Like offerings to heaven, asking for a miracle.

It was interesting, 5.6% acceptance rate aside, that the tour guide brought up the job placement rate—a rather dismal one. She was quite candid, absolutely refreshingly so—she showed us the Science Center (paid for by the Polaroid family), and said that the prestige and difficulty of the classes increased by the floor level, so she wasn't sure what it meant that she had classes in the basement! [laugh track!] But seriously, she assured us, though that joke was in the script, she actually, really and truly, had classes in both the basement and the first floor.

But it is a gentle place, on this, the Saturday where the last exam before summer took place at two (so two hours and forty-one minutes ago), with lanky eighteen-year-olds shuffling past with armfuls of books, flip-flops flapping, people tilting out screens and shouting into the street, “hey, come and help me with this trunk!” to the kids lounging on an abandoned chair in the middle of the sidewalk.

There is something intriguing here, the slow burn of knowledge, the lilacs in bloom in front of Holden Chapel, the black brass and waved glass gaslamps hanging on either side of the doors from which undergrads with bleach-blonde hair and red gym shorts with white piping clomp, holding ten gallon trashbags of books (why doesn't anyone have suitcases?). A girl just passed in a silvery grey dress, white cardigan, and no shoes speaking French with her mom, who carried two dry-cleaning bags of clothes draped over her arms. They couldn't get back into the dorm, Mower Hall A, so the girl asked me, “Do you have Swipe?” in a perfect accent. I told her, rather feebly, “no, not for this one.” A heavily pregnant woman, who I had seen earlier carrying a broken mirror and assumed was homeless, came and unlocked the door for them.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

Rolodex Pages Fluttering like Stiff, Cream-Colored Wings. Dust Moving in Mathematical Patterns, Exponential Curves Spiraling Away from the Spinning Pages.

I've been having strange flashes of sensations from the past. Today, it was the sudden smell of being in fourth grade and dissecting perch. It smelled sour, like chemicals and dead things. The limp, brittleness of death. The stiff flesh around the stomach. The dorsal fin melting into the scales, the proteins beginning to break down.

I remember their inky black blood. The lenses in their eyes, round, clumsily spherical. I remember taking mine and keeping it in the cloth pocket of my jumper. It was clear, jewel-like, the closest I would get to diamonds for many years, having lost a gold crucifix (one fleck of diamond in the center) on the playground after receiving it for my first communion in the second grade.

Last week it was the sensation of being in a roller rink in 1991. The stained carpet with bright, swooping colors. The grease, the uncertainty, the untreated leather of the rented roller skates against my calves. What my toes looked like. Eyes always on the wheels below me.

The week before that, it was something to do with forests.

Every time it happens, I distantly wonder if it means I'm going to die soon. One last spin of the rolodex, one last glance at the faded typewritten names of the past.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

2003, or: back when jeans were comfortable

I have a friend that I haven't seen in ten years—a good friend. He had long black hair and pale skin and a perpetual half-smile and he's fifteen and it's still early 2003 and nothing bad's happened yet.

I went back to St. Louis the other weekend, and I saw my friend Claire, and we talked about him, about driving to his house in Kirkwood, yellow paint, white trim, cozy wood walls with Beach Boys records, shelves upon shelves upon shelves of them, and the basement with the black and white and pink tiles. A happier family should have lived there.

I think about his brother's body in the water, the closed casket, his brother's friends trickling in, dreadlocks, each with unironed shirts and wrinkled khakis and him turning them away. “You have to leave.” His black eyes flashing. I know the exact expression on his face.

Did he sense what the next ten years would be like? Is that why he seemed so afraid, sometimes?

Maybe Claire and I could ride in the '97 grey Camry I drove in high school—well, first we'd go to the junkyard, tap out the dents from the concrete median, polish out the scrapes on the roof from skidding across the highway at seventy miles an hour, upside down, metal screaming, but the occupants silent, dog, boy, girl, silent, waiting for the world to right itself.

But Claire and I would rescue it from the junkyard, and we would drive it back to St. Louis under the darkening sky and we'd get to his house right when the stars were coming out and we'd climb through his bedroom window right onto the roof and lay on the rough shingles and eat strawberry Pocky and talk about all the secret things we couldn't talk about with anyone else.

We wouldn't be afraid of falling. We wouldn't, we wouldn't, we wouldn't worry about our shoes slipping, or what our eyes would look like when they found our bodies on the concrete, upturned, still looking at the revolving stars.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

Middle School Superheroes/I Bet They Do All They Can to Keep it a Secret so They Have Someone to Eat Lunch with

It's interesting to trace your life through choice of superpower. In middle school, everyone chooses invisibility—shy, awkward, uncertain, body parts all shaped wrong—

but honestly, why would anyone choose invisibility over flight? I mean, if that's the goal, to remove yourself from life's painful situations, then FLIGHT is surely the way to go. Swimming through the cold air, perching on treetops, moving the leaves aside, looking at those below. Laughing, spitting on their heads, then pushing away into the night before they look up. Seeing only the reflectors on the back of your tennis shoes.

Unless, of course, the goal is to stay, but to be forgotten. Separate, but lingering. A ghost in the door, overhearing... what? Idle gossip about the run in her tights? Her greasy hair? The long-dead science fiction authors in her backpack? Just words. The truly invisible one wouldn't waste her time so.

Because the invisible one isn't eavesdropping about what the cool kids are saying about her (next to the yellow lockers as they drift in from the cafeteria, soda machines glowing, skirts swishing as they spin their combinations). The invisible girl is going to the forbidden places. The party in the country with bonfires and beer cans. The invisible girl is sneaking in through an open window of an SUV, laying quietly behind the backseat, holding in her sneezes as the cool kids in the front, back, and middle seats switch out scratched mix CDs and smoke pot and spin the steering wheel, avoiding the still and silent deer in the headlights, eyes wide, hooves frozen on the asphalt.

(If you don't move, then they can't see you.)

Though the invisible girl could also visit museums after hours, thin laser beams passing through her ghostly hands, alarms silent as she touches the paint strokes on a Rembrandt or a Matisse—but could she even feel them? Would her fingers pass through the oilpaint, through the canvas?

(No, because then she'd sink through the floor.)

But perhaps she's floating. Truly ghostlike, truly separate from the world around her. Truly alone.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

Flowers raining down from the sky like snow, covering everything: the living, the dead, the lovers, the ones with a great weight on their hearts who walk alone.

Deserts. Like Palm Springs—my aunt always calls it “the desert,” announcing, “We're going to the desert!” as she packs up her Mercedes. A desert with green lawns, water steaming on the blacktop, going up into the cloudless, thirsty sky.

Deserts are primeval, almost. Men drawing on rocks, ponies picking their way across dry creekbeds.

Are there flowers in the desert? Do people live anywhere without flowers? There's even flowers in the permafrost, little white star-shaped things, something to hold when you're married. Things to bind up and throw over the dead.

People need flowers, they won't live without them—huts made of tanned hide standing in the golden, empty Sahara, people standing, looking for the flowers. Hunched figures in furs crunching over the Arctic white, fingers brushing the ice, searching for the flowers, the life, the promise of happiness and marriage and a girl to woo. Permafrost flowers in her hair like stars.

Cities must have been built around flowers—imagine walking through the sand, camels breathing thickly, rope gritty in your palm. Walking, the ladies flowerless, the dead flowerless, lying flowerless under the sand. Birds circling.

And then to see one tiny flower, pink like a kindly moon. A sign of rivers and water.

You halt the camels, and tell your wives not to cry and you dig, your sons working alongside of you—dig with what? No shovels, no sticks, so you dig with your hands until grains of sand are pushed under your fingernails. Always one eye on the flower, trembling with the digging.

Perhaps your son steps on it. Perhaps he crushes the flower—digging too rapidly, blinded by the hope—and you raise your hand to strike him, fingers black with blood-encrusted sand, and you see the earth darken under your feet. You smell the smell of rains, of weddings, of births and deaths, of the dead heavy with flowers, smelling thick and wet and warm.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

Moving, but not without my wedding dress, and my Animorph books, and my dead dogs

It's weird to think that all of my childhood dogs are dead—childhood dog noses in my wet hand, childhood dog legs thumping up the stairs, old dogs collapsing with a sigh into a lie-down position, dogs with grey muzzles watching me raise a tennis ball over my head.

Doggie footprints on the concrete basement floor.

We're selling my childhood house—my parents are, rather. My parents are taking down our kindergarten crayon pictures, carefully framed and matted; my parents are painting over the murals my mom painted on the steps leading to the basement: deep sea divers and bright tropical fish and coral.

I brought my husband Mike down to the basement on that last day—my wedding dress finally taken from under the guestroom bed and put in the trunk of our car, my childhood recorder with my maiden name—Jessica Wright—scratched into the underside with a dremel, my high school graduation tassel. Things previously stuck on high shelves at the back of my closet or underneath dusty beds until needed—

and now I needed them all, needed my childhood Animorph books, the first twenty pages lovingly reinforced with Scotch Tape, bindings likewise. I needed all of those things, I called them out of their dusty corners to buoy me into adulthood. Blank diaries, portable CD players with ironic, shining-glittery stickers: “Normal People Worry Me.” My kindergarten homework, the teacher carefully printing Jessie Wright and my attempts in light pencil below, the J backward, both e's, both s's backwards, over and over again, 2's and 4's and 9's all backwards with red Xs drawn through them. And then the worksheets signed W. eisseJ, carefully printed, the whole thing backwards, was I really so bungled up in the head that I thought it right to print my WHOLE NAME backwards? But the letters were carefully drawn, not shakingly. Bold, not light and uncertain. Was I just being an ass? Told too many times that I was writing backwards? “You're writing backwards, Jessie, “ I'LL SHOW YOU BACKWARDS, bitches!

I saved all of these things, piling the faded parchment atop my already yellowing wedding dress, the paper, the dress, both fading softly. I wanted them to fade with me.

BUT I brought Mike down the basement stairs on that last day, ten minutes before our return to Chicago, two days before the house would finally be listed, to look at Boot's pawprints one last time.

(Boots, the dog who died in January 2005 but whose muddy paw prints were still in a corner of our unfinished basement, a fact Mike pretended to me surprised about—but he know my mom, surely, by now, and he knew she'd never take the time to mop the unfinished basement floor.)

We went down and saw a puddle of water emanating from the hot water heater, large, spreading, going into the rug under my dad's desk, bleeding into my mom's sewing nook, making a damp, spreading circle on the bottom edge of my brothers chalk/pastel drawing from eighth grade, freshly taken off the wall, ready for the move—

Washing away the paw prints at last.  Leaving just our wet footprints leading back up the stairs where my dad, cursing, called a plumber.

[secret-tiny-cities]

Coffin Thoughts, Or: It'll Probably Be Lonely in There with Nothing to Listen to, so You May as Well Toss in My Old DiscMan Just in Case

I think about the apocalypse sometimes. I think about how it would sound: screaming, rushing, breaking. I think about the fear and I am afraid. The fear, crushing, making me immobile—I'd clutch my knees, hearing the windows upstairs breaking, and think of saviors, Jesus in Kodachrome with clouds and rouge on his cheeks. I think about the sounds, and about how long I could live without happiness, without happy sounds, without rain, without dogs crouching, eyes bright, tail up and wagging, going “woooowooooowooowooowoo.” Sounds of kids on the playground swings, singing rustily, happily. Sounds of lightning storms and hurricanes and a dusty church, candle wax and quarters hitting the bottom of metal boxes. Sounds of fireworks, street music, wind chimes in a backyard. I need the sounds of vacations and islands and baseball games and the sound of the change in the till, and ice on the side of a glass, and parades and my mother humming over the spaghetti sauce, high school, lockers slamming, the shaking sound of your car engine, the waves of Lake Michigan, smell of grass, it’s sticking to our shoes as we run through the fields in the night—

The stars. Running with you through the fresh-cut grass. It sticks to our shoes.

I think about how you sound. I try to remember how you sound.

When I die, I want to be laid down softly, in tape unspooled from cassettes. Like floating in the murky water of my childhood, warm sounds crackling, warm, a record player’s warmth, being nailed into the box, pitch-black, bottom-of-a-well-black and lowered into the earth, but with the sounds crinkling and pressing against my cheeks and my ears. My fingers as an amplifier, the tape, the sound running through my fingers and it makes me not afraid to know that people are happy somewhere.

And I'd be with you. Your voice, the sound of your fingers tapping my shoulder, the rustle of your dark hair. You’re there, preserved, like me, memories swaddled in tape, waiting to be woken up.

[secret-tiny-cities]

The Unbearable Loneliness of Flight. Our Lives Boiling Down to a Pinprick of Light

I flew in a plane yesterday, and I spent a good deal of the three-odd travel time wondering how many prayers it would take to keep the plane up, how many recitations of Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee—I picture typewriters clanking, the woman memorizing the line breaks, the ding of the bell sounding solemn, one more line inscribed for heaven.

I'd write all night if it meant I could see my husband again. I'd fill up composition books, each page, and the covers as well, squishing the words into the white mottled bits. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, let the Lord be with me and this plane, may he not forget about us in the wind, small against the clouds, may he not think ill of our hubris and may He bring me safely back to Earth.

The prayers feel very small. The plane jerks, my seat rattles, the floor threatens to fall from under me. It's not enough.

They've redone the interiors in Southwest planes, and the ceiling now glows with soft blue lighting—making it all seem too futuristic, and I don't want to think of the technology required to keep me thirty thousand feet up, where a whole town is just one single light in the bottomless darkness. Children in the dark yards with buzzing porchlights, gas stations, McDonalds, teenagers checking their iphones in parking lots, headlights—all those lives appear as just one, tiny glow that fades so quickly back into the darkness, like the glint of a single, moonlit fish scale in a tar-black sea.

It is odd how much more frightening flying is to me than driving—I should be soothed by flying! The margin of error is so much greater—I'm surrounded by a cushion of thirty thousand feet of NOTHING. That's five miles of wiggle-room. On the highway, there's barely three feet before the wall gets you.

That's how frightening the unknown is to me, I suppose. The distance is so frightening—all of those familiar places, those gas stations and parking lots and headlights and fading 1960s suburban architecture are so far away—only a light to remind me of what I've lost by being up here in the black abyss—and I don't want to be separated from that world. I don't want to be up here with the stars and the spirits, but down there, in parking lots, poking the oilstains with my toes to make them shimmer into rainbows, waiting to see Mike's headlights swing in from the road to join mine, two swift, unchanging moons, steady and safe.

So how many prayers will it take to keep the plane up? To keep the unknown at bay? To see my husband again?

I imagine cloistered nuns with a typewriter in every room: white-walled, crucifix, metal cot, and a typewriter that the nuns tap every night for hours, spelling out the prayers in a neat, steady rhythm, and once the stack of paper is covered in devotions, once the final bell dings the end of the final line, each sister takes up a pair of sharp, heavy scissors and cuts out the prayers from the thin paper, folding each one with urgent creases, setting each one into a woven basket. Finally rising, each takes up her basket, heavy with a desperate hope, and walks down stone hallways to a metal grille where, with downturned eyes, each passes her basket to a lay women who takes the prayers and ties them with red ribbons to the legs of pigeons, where they flash and fly upward— to get closer to God? But eventually the ribbons grow loose and they fall into the Atlantic where the fish stare with glassy eyes at the fluttering ribbons, blood-like, and the papers with the ink drifting off like a ghost, like the Holy Spirit gone to join with the rest of the electrons, and the fish open and close their lips silently, mouthing the white strips, sucking in, feeling the red ribbons with their lips, puzzled at this odd substance, food and not-food, blood and not-blood.  

[secret-tiny-cities]

Secret Tiny Cities

I would think about running away a lot when I was small. I remember one time after choir practice, I must have been eleven or twelve, my mom was a few minutes late picking me up, and I BOOKED it. I ran down the hill leading to the lower parking lot—freedom! I remember there were trees on the other side of the lot, just a cluster of thin, scraggly ones with the streetlights and neon from fast food places shining through, but to me, it was a deep forest with vast, secret caves to sleep in. My mom wasn’t actually late. She has just been waiting in line with all the other cars, and as I ran down the hill I heard her call my name, once. “Jess?” And I looked back and saw her leaning out the window of that forest-green minivan we used to have, the one with the slanted, elegant looking headlights like a panther. “Jess?” she said again. I went back up the hill and told her that I thought I’d seen her in the lower parking lot. “I thought it was you,” I said. But I didn’t think that. I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere different. To find a secret, perfect place of my own. In the summertime, my sister liked to pretend that she was in a barrel going over Niagara Falls, and my brother and I would help her, we’d get out that big blue plastic bucket we’d store beer and ice in during parties. And we’d set it in the driveway, fetch the hose, and fill the bucket with water, our feet bouncing up and down, the soles burning on the black asphalt. Once the bucket was full, my sister would climb inside, and close her eyes. And then my brother and I would stand on either side, and we’d rock the bucket from side to side, menacingly, the water splashing everywhere, steaming on the asphalt. We’d give a running commentary, my brother and I, about the passing scenery, “I think I hear the rumble of the falls in the distance, you can see the edge now, ooop [BUMP] you’ve hit a rock! Okay, you’re drifting into the middle of the river, uh oh, you’re getting closer, here come the rapids”--at this, we’d shake the sides of the bucket even harder--“there are always the worst rapids right…. before… you go…. over…. the EDGE!” And at this, we’d tip over the bucket, sprawling my sister out over the blacktopped driveway, the surface steaming with water, my sister, soaked and laughing with joy, knees scraped and bloody from her tumble. In the fall, my sister and I would use the September leaves to make a town. We’d spread the leaves in neat rows to form streets--we’d put the leaves in a ragged circle to make our homes, our forts. We’d do the same in winter—we’d dig out paths between the snow homes we’d create, occasionally turning them into snow forts as we’d launch snowballs at each other. But I liked it best when I was alone in our tiny snow city. I would lay on my back, everything quiet --alone in my silent white snow cave, looking up at the snow-ceiling, blue with the fading sunlight. I was always galloping on wooden horses as a child, always talking into hollow, plastic telephones, the blue receiver held to my ear, hearing nothing but the static in my hair. Always kneeling down next to my aunt's Christmas tree, velvet dress rustling, Mary Janes creaking, as I tried to catch a look into the glowing yellow windows of the miniature train whirring by, trying to see what the passengers looked like, where they were going, any clues about the secret, tiny cities that the train was delivering them to. I’ve always been jealous of people who have summer homes—people who own the snug cabins on the shore of Lake Michigan, each one with plaid curtains in the windows and wood-paneled walls in the kitchen. We didn’t have a summer home when we were children, but we would go on these elaborate road trips. My dad would plan them out meticulously with a red felt pen and a Triple A map, our path never repeating itself, never backtracking--every day of every summer someplace new. I remember him driving through the prairies as everyone slept, the car rocking gently from side to side—all the passengers asleep but me. Every star visible in the night sky. My dad usually sang very loudly, boisterously, but as he drove us through the darkness, the prairie bone-white under the full moon, he would sing very softly along with Willie Nelson on the CD player. Sometimes I wonder why I spend The lonely nights dreaming of a song The melody haunts my reverie And I am once again with you… Though I dream in vain In my heart, there always will remain My stardust memories The memory of love’s refrain. It was strange to be in the car, looking out the window at the prairie, imagining the packs of grey wolves running, ghostlike, along with the car, and realizing that my dad was dreaming as well. My dad’s mind was also somewhere else, also searching for those secret, tiny cities full of lost loves. Perhaps we never give up hope that our secret cities are there, that they exist just over the next bend in the road, just on the other side of the white prairie hills. Tiny and perfect, with lights glowing in every window, and love behind every door.