Read my red lips, so she says.
It’s almost 4:00 pm, and I can’t keep avoiding Skylar. She’s been in the psychiatrist office waiting room almost four hours now.
But first I’ll sneak down the side door way and staircase and smoke a cigarette. I’ll need one before seeing her. Things have gotten out of control. I race out the back door and leave Skylar waiting a bit longer, I have to have some free time to think of what to say, or maybe I shouldn’t say anything. Always nice that way. I laugh to myself.
I’m pacing back and forth, sucking down a cigarette, I know a doctor, stupid, right? Anyway I spot Skylar walking out looking fumed. I try to dodge below the parking garage, but she sees me. She doesn’t even look at me, just darts her eyes at me and then skirts them towards the front door of her boyfriend’s hummer. He’s the one who I owed and got me into this whole mess with Skylar.
I must admit the sex is mind-blowing though.
“What are the advantages of living in a glass house?” He asks me.
When the sun is shining, I can always feel it, I can see what’s going on around me, and I’m as close to being part of nature as you can get.
“I assume you ask because as a teenager I wanted to live in a glass house in the middle of the ocean…?” I say to him.
“That’s correct.” He responds back as if he’s analyzing me and my past like a doctor.
All I remember is this, a scene from my young mind. It was me lying in bed with a man. I was in love. We were in a glass house in the middle of the ocean. I put my hands on his chest and looked up at him, but I can’t remember his face or I can’t see it. I was happy and content.
Reason enough?
“Well it’s not convincing to me, but go ahead, post it!” he says and laughs a nervous and wild laugh.
I read it all back to him.
“I’m not stupid.” He says this as if anyone has implied he is. Then he laughs again. He then says something about a magnifying glass.
I know the feeling I write. It’s like living in a glass house under the sea.
The interesting part is ‘escape.’ I wanted to escape, so I dreamt of a place with true love floating in the sea. My innocent mind missed the terror of being watched through glass. However, life has taught me the real disadvantages of living in a glass house over the years.
I was a beautiful and naive girl who trusted when I awoke in a glass house at bay.
Shattered dreams is the answer. Nothing more, nothing less.
Chrome and Rebecca live in a large house with money stuffed under Rebecca’s side of the mattress. She is involved in dirty money, but she didn’t know how badly it would come to haunt her and her seemingly perfect life with Chrome.
Side drives a motorcycle and lives a different life than Chrome, the investment banker for Swiss bank accounts. He lives on a different edge, hanging dirty laundry in the air we all think is clean.
Side smiles. Chrome looks with unease as he sees Rebecca change.
Rebecca stands from the stairs, “you don’t know me, Chrome.” She says. Then she goes and dyes her hair blond from dark brunette. Being Latino this is drastic. She comes down the stairs in a black suite smoking a slim cigarette, a Capri, “ciao Chrome,” she says as she walks out the door.
A young lad from G.B. waits patiently on his chair, waiting to hear from Veronica. He grows impatient and intense. Soon he calls his friends. A war now has begun between him, his friends and Veronica. But who is she?
Chrome meets Veronica. He spots her at the bank one day. He rolls down his window, and gives it his life. She takes it, and they run off together into the jungle. They make passionate love under a waterfall; Veronica’s innocence was stripped away, at that moment, from men full of hating.
Veronica passed Rebecca on the streets of Manhattan, and they look at each other. They each envy the other.
The interesting fact is they were each other, they were one in a twisted world where pounding on a mirror was normal, and backwards.
I was racing like mad. We had set a time, and I wanted to look fab. and not be late. It had been years since I had seen him, and well, I always had a crush hanging for a different time.
We met at the hole and the wall joint. I spotted his sculpted arms. Yum. Okay mine for the night. I zipped around the bar and kissed him on the cheek. How French of me. Wei Wei. I reached around him and ordered a drink, a Heineken.
“No please, it’s on me.” He says grabbing my bare arm.
“Wei thanks!” I chatter.
I wonder off to the pool sticks. I pick a few up a weigh them in my hand.
Jeans is here and notices me. He nods his head at me and smiles. I lift up my black thigh high boots, and look back up at him. I nod and smile, glancing at my Glacier. The now younger man once old. Or to Jeans, older man, but I don’t give a fuck.
Glacier and I play and isn’t long before Jeans walks up to talk to me. He looks at my ring, inspects it, then pushes my hand away.
“How have you been? I haven’t seen you around here for a while. I want you.” He whispers.
“I haven’t been around. I miss you too. I want you too. But I’m busy tonight, cowboy.” I say and smirk.
Of course it’s only a fantasy.
I giggle as the moon touches me. I’m sitting at the bus stop waiting for someone, but I don’t know who. Enzymes were blocked in my hippo-campus which is the memory hub. But I don’t know that.
Suddenly I’m on a bus. Hayden is on the bus. The backseat is open. Hayden gets up and moves to the vacant backseat. I take his seat. My lives are streaming across my eyes. We cross a street. A drunk woman in slow motion is coming towards the bus in her vehicle. I can see her up close.
I am her.
“Stop, please,” my mind screams. I look at the bus driver.
“Drive faster, quick!” my heart yells with everything it has.
The woman slams into the back of the bus. Everything goes black. I open my eyes and everyone is moving off the bus. My heart stops. It knows. I look back at Hayden. His body sits there lifeless in the very back of the bus. The only one touched and killed. The busy is empty now except him and I. I run towards Hayden and kneel down next to him, begging for his life back.
“I was supposed to be sitting there! Hayden, why? Where are you? I hate you, I was supposed to be sitting there! Hayden, NO! I love you! I scream as he sits slouched.
A man steps onto the bus. “He can hear you, keep talking to him.” He says to me. He then exits.
I look at the man, and then back at Hayden. I freeze. Then I see Scott’s smiling face. I think it was out of kindness, but I’m unsure now.
Suddenly I’m back seated on the bus stop bench. I’m waiting for ‘prince charming’ to rescue me from this foreign land. I hear a whisper in the wind, “revealing secrets from the past in your sleep.”
I wonder if he’ll show, and I Imagine his arrival.
Photography by Eleanor Hardwick. Much thanks.
Photography by Matias Troncoso.
Spectacle Woman
I wore glasses without lenses and I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was the fad. So were pastel colors and orange lipstick. I’m all the rage right now as I pose for the Danish cameraman who broke dishes in between takes.
It was tradition. We have large bonfires and burn almost everything old in sight. Five hoses wiggle in the yard, waiting. I close my eyes and make a wish. When I open them I’m in contacts and my face is ivory white.
The colors draw my mind in. And purple warms me. Red burns me. I twirl my locks around my finger. I’m nervous and my turtleneck is suffocating me. I grab the fabric at my neck and yank and stretch, singing the blues.
There’s a rhythm between what’s seen and what’s written. Color coordinated.
Answer Key:
Photography by Astrid Salomon.
It didn’t feel right. Sitting in the car with tall grass surrounding and I’m sinking!
I was woke up driven to solve the riddle of my life. My starved body moves quickly out of bed. I go downstairs and chat like a mad women to my mom on her wrap around deck overlooking a lake.
I grab the science magazines that I bought with the shrimp whose eye my boyfriend, Clutch has, to see special lights, I exclaim. I turn to another page, here is what his face is made of, jelly fish, I saw a piece on the floor the other day.
I run to her car and find an atlas on the floor. The page opens to Dallas, TX. I realize, that’s where I am. In a mock universe in Texas.
Photography by Dmon Prunner. http://bentrovatoblog.com/editorial/photography-by-dmon-prunner/
I run into the house and quickly tell my mother, Don’t you see, I have to get to the other universe, you’ll be there too. It was all this quantum physics I’d been reading. I run up to take a shower. I hear my mom on the phone.
We’ll drop her off at the hospital then. She says and hangs up.
Fuck no! I say.
I have to get to that point on the map. I run downstairs, skipping the shower, and grab her keys to her car. I jump in. She comes running out the house, but I have to go. I peel up and out of her driveway.
I have no clue where I am so I grab the Atlas and turn it to Dallas, TX. I race back and forth, up and down county roads and dirt roads in this small town. I know they’re listening to me, so I rip the chords from her car, any chord I can find.
Photography by David Standish
I decide to follow the wind. Tall grass is everywhere. Then I start to sink. I jump out through the shallow pond I’m stuck in. I watch the car move slowly down further as I look around the farmland area. Nothing in sight. I begin to walk. I find an old train track that runs along a county road and a small boarded up town somewhere in middle America.
I pick up two red stained railroad pins from the broken tracks. I shove them into my back pockets for protection and mass weight, one never knows.
I was a sexually active teenager.
I glanced at the BP magazine’s feature on hypersexuality. I tossed it down. No, I didn’t want sex then, I was lonely for someone to love me and I rejected my family. I was usually high or wasted. I couldn’t feel anything but the tears roll down at 13. It wasn’t sexed raged hormones from having bipolar.
That’s not why I was called a slut for…my gee, entire life. I know it’s not. Partially not at least.
A girl who felt the world spinning around her finger felt inclined to test the man’s limit. Whether I had sex or not, it was a game. But on occasion something in me felt, and I cared. Normal? Seems that way, when it comes to casual sex. I might add I don’t indulge in anymore. I can’t handle the next day facing the BF. (Maybe my face in the mirror, but I’m not sure on that one.)
Again I pick up another edition of BP Magazine and I read a few letters from readers all gushing about how relieved they were to find out that hypersexuality is a side effect of bipolar. But not in those words, exactly.
One hit my heart, it was a mother of a daughter who has bipolar and is also sexually active. She felt relieved after reading the feature last edition article like the rest had expressed. I can hear Peter now, the father, Thank god we aren’t, or our daughter isn’t a raging sex hormone singing phallic melody’s loudly in the shower because she’s a slut, she’s just bipolar!
I just don’t know about this one. It’s very complicated. See one has different stages in their life of different types and levels of mania, or at least I did, starting at 13, when lucky bastard popped my damn cherry . My virginity, they whispered in the halls in the 8th grade.
I was out of control but their are so many variables at that age too. Pressure, teenage weirdness, girls hanging out with older guys, maybe drugs and alcohol. Plus I hated the world, what the bloody fuck did I care?
I’m going to wrap this one up and see what others have to say, and revisit.
I was a sexually active teenager, the town slut.
Having hyper sexuality due to being bipolar doesn’t cut the sex with dirty men too young for me. I hate to break it to a torn apart mother, but it’s more heart-wrenching than that.
But of course, hypersexuality and manic phases go hand in hand, I just don’t know how those other young women feel when they’re manic, again mania’s change almost at every episode depending on how severe one’s illness is. I.E. It would be rare for a person to have bipolar young and feel sexual, honestly, because they’re hypersexual. I’ve been there and here.
My wrist watch was awfully perky and awoke me early. Hands were every where declaring me there. Time moved, I stood frozen like a Popsicle, dripping in green. Green was my color the author told me, my aura, it was green. So I sat in the grass and drank an Arnold Palmer.
I used to know an Olive who drank them with a straw. He sent me flowers, always and forever.
Then bookmarks the color marbled in my mind. Everything was distorted. And full of madness, changing forms, bleeding together like syrup of reds and blues. Yellow was the sun’s color, it rises. That’s my point. So what? Phoenix rises. I set in a maze.
A maze is intricate and has unending choices. It’s all about getting lost until you lose your wits when the day comes that I shall may. Leave. Labyrinths are like being in tall green grass, like shrubs or maybe brick or stone. You always have a left entry, as stated. There is one path, no one gets lost. Where am I?
There were secret notes and pool is a professional business. Fireworks are like a cold shower in jail on the fourth of July. Only no one loses an eye. I imagined I was an actress, I played the star role, a spy.
Someone help me the squealing from the seal won’t stop and my ADHD is sensitive to the noise.
What happened? Follow me out through my backwards journey from the maze of horror and well, much anxiety.
Where is the Olive with the roses?
If it’s defined as real, then it’s as real as in it’s consequences. What would a sociologist or psychologist think? Verdict’s in.
“Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
I stood on my knees and yelled to the world, screamed out to anyone who would listen out on the docks in the marina outside my balcony, “just take me, just fucking take me! What is it you want from me, fucking take me you bastards!” Music blared.
I was crying yellow from painting all day. My apartment was splattered in yellow paint and the turpentine fumes were getting to my head. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed a speaker, and to hear the sound of silence, I bashed in my T.V. flat screen. I ripped the framed art from my walls, which I loved, and bashed them. Broken glass turned the apartment into a glass covered Great Lake.
I wasn’t insane. My neighbor sat on his porch, more crouched in the corner near my BF for mercy. I had none. “You work together, don’t you!” I screamed. Then I hurled a photographer’s camera over the balcony to make a statement. The guard below didn’t get it and returned it. I threw it back down onto the pavement. No more pictures. No more.
The sirens blared. They’d read my prescription bottles and hear my diagnosis. No one would ever hear the truth. There was a camera hidden in the bathroom and the neighbor was a spy. But they’d tell you it was all a lie.
I was fucking perky as hell. I got into my old beat up car, a classic really, and raced. With my new engine I hit 120 mph down the dark, deserted highway. I don’t recommend doing. I was a dangerous girl then. A thought blossoms, I thought of how fabulous it would be to mingle with some people. I’d dominate the scene. I’m off to where the people are at this ungodly hour.
I had to be to Argentina in the morning with my husband. I wouldn’t be out too late. I pulled up to the dive bar. It was closing time. Damn. Then I spot him, the guy I met a few weeks ago, Dallas.
Then I remembered, after getting out of jail on my 24th birthday, a few days ago, I was driving back up to L.A. I got a text. It’s from Dallas. He wants to go running again. Bam! The next thing you know a shitty car hits me on the driver side. The bloke just missed my delicate self. Fuck! My axle has been hit; steering isn’t working. The driver hands me his business card.
He’s a chiropractor, how convenient of him to go around hitting people in blown out civic. I think. I read the card, “Miracles Happen.” I laugh and pound my head on the wheel, still parked from the accident. I toss the card on the passenger seat.
I manage to steer backwards and get the car to a closed auto shop down a dark front street. I leave the keys and rent a car.
Anyway that’s the last I heard from Dallas, the night I was hit by a chiropractor.
There are crowds of people outside the bar.“Get the fuck in,” I yell towards Dallas, manic as fire. I can’t remember his name, but ‘you’ worked. He hopped in. “You’re fucking crazy, Mea! What are you doing?” I laughed and howled into the wind.
We almost make it to his door before he has me pushed up against a wall and is taking advantage of my sexual appetite.
We lie on a cot on a deck that overlooks the ocean under the stars. We decide to have a little house in Texas, and little kids. See, we’re in love. And we don’t even know each other. But what is there to know? That I’m bipolar? That he’s a hijacker of cars and trucks? Fuck it. I sing. Play with me, Dallas, my lover in the night, in the dark, where secrets lurk. Play with me. I dare you.
Psychology behind this wonder?
Why does a man tell a woman, that he’s just met, that he wants her baby?
Is it a primal instinct sort of thing to say while having sex? Even if it’s sex with someone you’ve just met?
Here’s a scenario: You meet a guy a few times and have a sexual relationship, meaning see each other only a few times, total. So not really a relationship, but a lover. And then he says one night while devouring each other, he wants your baby. Why would that be? Male perspective?
It’s just a curious question in life of mine. I’ve heard of ‘girls’ who have heard not once, but twice in a situation like this. Odd? For some reason I don’t think he really does in these cases? Thoughts? Flatter her? Why?
She just wanted to get wet. So she ran to the desert. Agave there, right? Beside the point, it was cold at night and her teeth chattered. One day one tooth fell out. She loved skittles. The next morning a Sweetheart candy, one piece was under her pillow. A note was torn in half, it read the letters, I ve u ver.
She bought a guitar the next week. She taught herself ‘Nothing Else Matters,’ by Metallica. She played it over and over until she could play at Monday night show for artists at a coffee shop. She played with all her heart. And for the lost children.
She met a young handsome man from Cuba. He lived in Miami. She set out to sail with him to Havana for sun, Majito’s, and tango with a man she grew to love. They wanted to press fast forward to see them in 10 years, and when they did, he wasn’t there. She cried for her boys with olive skin, Him, Mr. Cuban lost in her mind and gone from her grasp, and their baby already tapping.
Years past. She found a phone booth and demanded from the operator to find Him, Mr. Cuban. Click. The phone went dead. The wind blew and it started to rain. A piece of green paper fell in the booth, it read the letters, lo yo for, for it was ripped in half. She turned and as the water touched her face, she whispered, “I love you forever.” The world rewound. She didn’t run to the desert.
And so they start again. (The operator found Mr. Cuban, him. As this World turned.)
Have you ever wanted to press fast forward? Or are you then already living in the past not to be forgotten, or changed?
Luke looks at me with those eyes that mean, ‘I’m hungry, and you’re my feast.’
‘No!’ I scream. And I try to run to the other room for safety. But Luke is too strong. I caved in, again. He lifts me up and presses me against the wall in the tiny hallway. I look away. He then tosses me in front of the sliding mirror. He smiles at me. With his muscular arms, he throws my body around every single way. We were both using all of our strength, mine is at its breaking point.
He picks me up again like a rag doll and slams me into the couch. He bites his lip, and smiles at me again. To be some sluts prey is a shrinking feeling. He pushes me onto the ground. I hide beneath the coffee table. He rips me out from my hiding spot. His laughter has grown.
He pins me my arms back. My body is sprawled on the carpet. When he’s not expecting it, I sucker punch him in the chest. He slaps me, but not so hard. It smells of tanning spray as he sweats. Not my finest memory in life. Where’s the new model girlfriend to rage against? I didn’t sign up for this.
Where do violence and sex come from? I know primitively speaking, that’s where, in the animalistic approach to life. Out with the minimalist, animalistic is all the rage this season! Maybe a twisted fantasy?
