a little exploration of Sparrow. i met this girl... yes. i did.

some of you said you liked Muebla and wanted more, or mum says she likes laughing. be patient, i really am trying to make a go of this one. my mind is also thinking a bit more on Monsiuer and Mafer, who I've decided is religious... sample thought pattern:

"I mean, all it took was one bite. One small chewed and swallowed bite. What happens when you eat one bite of the cake on the windowsill that your mom told you not to touch yet. A slap on the wrist? Off to your bedroom? Maybe if you have an abusive parent, you get beaten. Pero no, one single bite and every particle of the rest of our lives changed. All of us, proof of our one-nature. It just show what each of our actions is worth.

And God, yeah, in reality he's a chickmunk with rabies. He may seem smaller than we think, but when he starts charging, you can't help running."

***
Above me, a spider crawls. It crawls across the ceiling and I whistle an encouragement; I try to get the notes exactly so. Perhaps if I knew the words for it, the trill of the way one note follows another, perhaps if I knew anything except the fact that a spider is crawling over my head and I whistle and raise my hand with a pencil between fingers.

I close one eye, and without dimension I can follow that spider around with my pencil. I can push him from inch to inch, watch his movements shift from random to pushed. And he doesn’t know it even, can’t even feel that pen shoving him around. There’s a ten-foot safety span between him and me, and with my little gentle prods I can urge rather than squish him.

I’ve decided that I need to write self-help books. That’s my calling in life, I think. I will go around, from town to town, gathering little bits of information, ideas on what the answers are. I will be a retired gatekeeper; I will speak in metaphors and dialogues and people will follow me around. I will try to get them to go away, will hold a flower under the sun and tell them they could learn more from photosynthesis than from me.

The reason I’ve decided to become a self-help writer is that I need to figure out self-help. And what better way to learn than to teach. I can start by just jumping in, simply writing and flailing, flailing and writing. And then, as I explain those things to others that I just learned yesturday, I’ll start getting the bigger picture. It’ll start coming to me slowly, maybe with years, but a sense of all the little chinks fitting together… a piece here, and an imagined idea piece there. It will work, I’m sure it will work.

I’ll start by picking a rule, just a simple rule, and running with it. That’s the thing. It never matters what rule you pick, as long as you run with it and make a complete tautology out of it. Consistent errors soon become consistent pattern of syntax, stylistic quirk of brain. I will pick any rule. What rule will I pick?

I ask the spider who climbs along the ceiling in the hostel with stained paint. The hostel attached to a little toliet room with one of those hoses to wash your bottom. I always thought the hose was for the feet, but someone told me my mistake, and now I look resentfully at the hose because it’s my feet that stink, my feet that rot out the innards of my sweat-laden shoes, and not my buttocks, which I wipe carefully and without too much difficulty at this stage in my life. I shove the little spider into the corner of the hostel room, right up next to the window with the criss-cross bars that shape light.

I’m intrigued by the idea of shaping light. Really, when you think about it, light is matter not too unlike us. Just more diffuse really, and there it is floating around, thick enough to be shaped into slants and circles, drifts and screen-print, lacey curtain curls on the stained wall in this hostel where I lie on the floor in my hostel-skirt, feet propped up on the saggy-mattressed bed, looking up around, contemplating light blocks, thoughts, shoving spiders.

I feel so happy on the floor of a stained and musty hostel, silent and watching. The permission, temporarily granted, to be lazy, to lie here and do nothing more than walk my thoughts around the idea of being a self-help writer and what rules I’d pick to give to people. It’s just that first rule.

There was a Russian formalist, a writer, who said that it’s the job of artists to notice the way light sifts through lace, and to re-invent such actions. The action of photons. If I were a self-help writer, that would be my job. Re-invention. I’d re-invent the world, make it exactly as it is, but with one little change, one small one, miniscule.

I need a small microscope, or one of those silly scientific magnifying glasses, so I can look up at the spider and see if he is nodding his head at me, big grin spread across his black lips.

***
I have exactly enough money to be lazy for seven more days. I will probably give in and stop being lazy before that, stop pushing around my spider, stop washing my face with cold water, stop deciding upon the first rule.

I act as though the first rule is hard for me, but it really isn’t. It’s just the phrasing of it.

Two days before I left Muebla and Neecie and Fish and all the rest of the people that make yellow come to my eyes—yellow like a blur of sun, the first hit of moment as you walk out a door—I met this boy who was shut tighter than the belly of the earth. I met this boy who sat and listened to me. I spoke more than I usually spoke; in fact, I had a hard time stopping, and just babbled and babbled on. Then I would notice myself babbling and would comment on the babble, and the boy just blushed each time and said he didn’t mind. So I kept going; I rambed until two and then walked with him back to his car, a gentle brush of the lips on his cheek.

I think I was self-helping him, urging him on. I couldn’t help thinking when I saw the black of his eyes how everything hurts more when you don’t have a callous. Everything gets right in to the center. Maybe we fool ourselves that this callous will protect us, but sometimes, our skin just catches in a machine and the callous rips off like mica flaking from stone.

I told the boy about growing up with Muebla and Taro and his nictitating membrane flashed back just a second when I said at the end,

“Sometimes I wonder if the people who fall the hardest just haven’t fallen before. Those of us who have, learn to grow wings.” I’m not sure what I was telling him; maybe just that we survive, we survive it all.

***
I laughed at myself last night when I took my nightly bath, laughed at the silliness of my line. Pulling the water high up over my legs, I laughed and tucked myself in as if to a bed. Next to the bathtub, a glass of wine. Survival. Is that what we are really concerned about, or is that just what we wish we were concerned about? Life is so much easier when we are busy figuring out how to get food in the stomach. All I know is that I can never starve to death. I am 110 pounds, tiny as a breath, and I can never starve to death. Does that make any sense? I have had my body broken and sewn up by the rough hands of my mother, and I my body will never break.

I laughed at myself because when I ran my hands over my body in the bathtub, my hand passed over my thigh. And I realized suddenly that I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel my thigh. Here was this chunk of me, a chunk of this sliver body, and I could touch it, it was so near, but when I touched it, nothing. I think I got so scared I jumped up; it was hard to breathe for a few seconds, maybe just the steam. I grabbed my wine and carried it to the bed under the spider, set it down next to the candle that I had lit dripping in the corner. On the bed, I took several deep breaths, settled back, and ran my hand along my skin again. Just in that one little spot. I looked at it too, all the multitudes of leg-freckles bundled up under light blond furs. It was a little blotchy, a response to the stimuli of wine and bathwater.

This time, when I touched it, I still couldn’t feel anything, but there was something, that slight sensation that comes when you are feeling the idea of being touched rather than the action itself. What is the adequate response to that beside crying? Are we talking about survival? Is this the question? I think maybe a huge hard callous rubbed off last year and now is coming back, here and there, here and there to symbolize the way the lining along my spinal nerve is disintegrating slowly, unpredictably.

I don’t want to talk about it.

Neecie didn’t want me to leave Bville. She wanted me to stay at the old house I bought to keep my mother and family planted.

“Babe,” she said, “Everything in your life is changing. You need support. You need us around you.”

“But what is there to support? These changes will occur.”

I think what I wanted was self-help. I wanted to stop crying in the bathroom of Muebla’s house and pretending that any day soon, just because my family loves me, everything would get better. I wanted to move, to stop wasting each moment that passed untouched under my nose.

“Sparrow,” Neecie said, “there’s nothing wrong with you, with who you are. You keep saying you can’t feel anything, that you want to start feeling again. But Spare, you just feel everything so much you can’t sort it out, or talk it out, and so you call it nothing.”

My Neecie, the sixteen-year old sherpa. A girl so lonely she has to live inside everybody else’s throat.

***
I have seven days to be lazy, and as I push the spider around the cracked and yellow ceiling, I think of every person I carry inside me, inside this body that sings and whistles and steams, all except that patch of skin on my thigh that might be growing, might expand suddenly crazily at night when I’m dreaming that dream about living inside a spider’s eyes. I might just wake up and not be able to move, not be able to feel my leg. But this body can never break.