And the loser is

http://colleen-art.com 

The scab on my right cheek, directly below my eye, is my reason for flying home. It's small, but rough, and makes my face appear overly flushed; in the past few months I've been speculatively diagnosed with: rosatia, lupus, and shame. None of these are correct. What we have here, my friends, is an Actinic Keratosis, a precancerous spot that is the result of chronic sun exposure. A gift from the Rotarua, New Zealand, under whose ozone-free skies I basked, sunscreen free, for three scorching months when I was 16.

I can identify the actinic keratosis because this is not my first. Happily, they're easy (if not pleasant) to get rid of.  They burn off with a little liquid nitrogen, it takes ten seconds. I could do it myself with dry ice, if I had the balls.

But, thanks to the way of the health insurance world, I have to fly back to Vermont for the 'procedure'.

It's alright. I love it there.



I wake up at 7am Eastern time, which is 4am Seattle time, which is The Wrong Time To Be Alive in Melina time. An hour later I'm at the health center in Woodstock, coughing into my sleeve in the waiting room, trying to make myself unrecognizable so I don't have to acknowledge the presence of my high school history teacher who is sitting four chairs away. I have two appointments set up.

First thing in the morning and they're running forty minutes behind. It's alright. When they call my name I sit by the window in a red-upholstered chair, resting my face in my hands. My doctor ticks away at the list on the computer screen, writes the scripts for another round of migraine medicine, a second kind of migraine medicine, migraine preventatives, anxiety pills, sleeping pills. Warheads, licorice bits, anise drops, root beer barrels, peppermints.

To pass the time between appointments, I take a walk into the village of Woodstock. My beautiful, idyllic town is wintered in- dark and sparse and ice-brittle. The coffee shop I loved so much, the one owned by Mary Urban, my high school classmate, is gone. The Manhattan landlord jacked up the rent and sent the little business toppling, and now the space sits vacant. Now nobody is getting anything out of the space. Allechante, the one other coffee shop in the town, left after Christmas, nobody is quite sure why. A new place has taken over, and from the instant I walk in I know it's not going to last through the summer. Not in this town. It's got clunky furniture and mismatched decor, but it falls short of the country charm it's aiming for. I order coffee but my stomach turns rudely at the sight of it. I go outside, hold onto a granite hitching post and cough my brains out. I tell myself it's just the dry air.

"I'm sorry I'm late," says the dermatologist as he opens the door to the room where I've been sitting, heals banging against the metal table, for forty five minutes.
"It's alright," I tell him.
"No," he says, looking me in the eye. "It's not." He can't be more than 29 years old and he sighs like an old man. Cutting the small talk, he pulls out a metal spray gun. "Liquid nitrogen. -197 degrees Fahrenheit." He says this like I should be impressed. Which I am, sort of. The gun is aimed a half inch below my eye.  "This will sting." He pulls the trigger.

He's blasted me twice when a voice comes over the intercom. "Would the owner of a blue Subaru outback please come to the front desk."

That's my car. Of course it's my car. The dermatologist man tells me we're not done, but he'll wait. He's quite nice, actually.

My right eye is starting to swell as I walk to the front of the clinic, where I find an older woman talking to the receptionist, visibly agitated, ringing her hands like a stage actress.

"Is that your car?" She asks, gesturing towards the parking lot. "I just hit it. I just backed right up into your car."
"Oh," I say, peering outside. "It's alright. It's probably just this weather. Slippery."
"Nope," says the lady. "I really wasn't looking."
She takes me outside, shows me the damage. It's barely anything. The frozen air gnaws at the burned spot on my skin.
"It's alright." I say again.
"What can I give you?"
"Nothing."
"I want to give you a hug."
"That's alright."

Back at the room, the dermatologist is staring out the window, still holding the blast gun. "If you don't mind," he says as I walk in, "I'd like to blast you one last time."

Bronchitis is unfurling like a fiddle-head in my lungs as I walk from the clinic back into town. For the past few weeks it has lived deep in my lungs, curled up asleep but still present. Now it's coming awake again, stretching and rattling around the ribcage. I bend at the waist and cough. At the pharmacy, I buy bottles of ruby cough syrup and ask for my prescriptions. The lady hands me one orange bottle of pills and begins to ring me up.

"I'm sorry but- I should have a few more than this."

"Hmm...let's see..." This woman has worked at the pharmacy since before time. She knows everything I've ever been on. "I see your Imitrex, Celexa, your...Sorry but, your insurance won't let you fill these for another thirty days.

"But-" I stutter, "I haven't refilled those for months-" I stop. It's a losing battle.

"Would you like to speak to the pharmacist?" She asks politely. Through the cut out window, I can see Jim, white haired and mustached, frowning as he counts out rows of pills.

"It's alright." I say. Jim is my neighbor out in Pomfret, as close as neighbors come in Vermont. We like to discuss gardening when I come by in the summer. He's such a nice man. But son, his only child, recently died of a drug overdose, and now I don't know what to say to him.
"It's alright." I pull out my wallet. "I'll just take these."

When I get home, the three dogs are barking and levitating, hoping for a walk. I fall back into bed. Hometeam crawls under the covers with me, collapses her little body against mine. For nine out of the ten days I'm in Vermont, I'm sick. I lie in bed; when I'm not asleep, I study the ceiling. I take the dogs for two walks a day around our property, through deep snow and over hard packed snow mobile tracks. I feel okay during those walks. Relieved, calm, cleaned out by the pure air. The other hours of the day and night, I feel terrible. My mom, home from work for my visit, is visibly heartbroken. But then she gets a migraine. For days. Her migraines make my migraines look like bug bites.

Spring is a long way off. We lie in our beds.

Twenty-Two Hours

On the plane to Boston, the woman on my left keeps punching me. She'll be sleeping soundly one moment, and in the next her body spasms and she throws her arms out to either side, one into the aisle, one into my rib cage. "Night terrors," she explains, chuckling. "Feel free to clock me right back!" I smile, turn deliberately back to my magazine. In some strange show of rebellion against my own common sense, I've bought $20 worth of magazines for the flight.

The woman dozes off again. She's a big lady, wearing clunky sandals over white cotton socks. There are a few moments of peace: she sleeps, I read, until we hit a little bump in the atmosphere and she startles again, punching me in the gut. "Oh, sorry!!" She exclaims, straightening in her seat, smoothing her skirt with her hands. I expect her to close her eyes and return to her terrors, but she doesn't. Instead, she rotates her body, turns her head to the side and studies me like a good natured auntie. Under her plump, matronly gaze, I feel my face redden as I turn the pages of Cosmo's Are You Ready for Kink cover feature.  I wish I was able to just go on reading in the face of her eavesdropping, like some slightly skewed show of 21st century feminism, but I'm not. I close the magazine and shove it into the seat back, trying to seem casual, and reach under the seat to pull out a box of pizza. "Oh, wow!" she says, genuinely impressed. "You just pulled out a pizza box from under your seat! Now I've seen everything!"

The woman to my right, lucky bitch in the blessed window seat, dutifully ignores the both of us.

****

Boston is hard as ice.  Mid-March is a monstrous time to come home to New England, yet year after year I return. In high school and college it was the ill-timed spring break; now it's just out of habit. Spring is still months away in this part of the country, buried under three feet of defiant, black rimmed, gritty snow that will cut you like a razor if you lose your footing.

I've just missed the 4:30 bus back to Vermont and have two hours to wait until the next one. It doesn't bother me; I've just flown across the entire continent in slightly over four hours, which is so ludicrously fast it feels like cheating. I park myself at the bar in Legal sea foods, order a cocktail I really think I want. It arrives syrupy, so sweet it feels like it's burning holes in my esophagus. I send it back for a beer. The bar tender eyes me with obvious annoyance, but he obliges. An older man approaches me, business suit and a Bluetooth, and wants to talk to me about my tattoo. I tell him politely to leave me alone. He shrugs, walks off.

With twenty minutes until the bus (I am fastidiously timely when I travel- only when I travel-) I lope out to the lower level of Logan airport, terminal C, and lower myself on the one portion of a bench that is not covered in spilled, gelatinous coke. I throw my feet over my backpack and open the magazine again, finally, grateful of my anonymity.

Cosmo suggests one watches Lady Gaga's music video Alejandro to gauge one's comfort level with moderate levels of Kink.

The feathery grey twilight slips away, and the cold takes a more definite stance in the air. I look up hopefully with every loud, steaming commuter bus that pulls up in front of me:  Concord, Framingham, Manchester, Cape Cod. One by one, drivers hop out to the curb and call out the destinations with caustic Boston accents. Manchetsta- Con'cud. The people around me climb on board and head off to different corners of New England.

My bus is late- first by twenty minutes, then by an hour, then by two. The Dartmouth Coach has never been late, ever, to my knowledge. I have to go to the bathroom, so badly, it's like being a little kid again. But I can't go. I can't risk being absent during the twenty seconds when the bus arrives. I give up waiting on the bench, it's below freezing now, and snowing. Inside the sliding glass doors, others bound for Vermont wait in silence. Stoic New Englanders, they just stand there, waiting. The bus will get here when it does. Even the kids stand there, hands on tiny wheeled suit cases, faces slack.

When it finally arrives, two drivers hop out. "Sorry folks!" one shouts. "This is Chahlie. Chalie's bus broke down, folks. He had to jump on mine. Don't blame me about this, it's not my fault." Then, after a considerable pause- "It's not Chahlie's fault eitha'."

As we drive North, the snowstorm gets heavier. We crawl along in the left lane and I rest my cheek against the cold glass, road vibrations bumping me into a trance. No one is speaking. All that can be heard is the steady sweep sweep sweep of wiper blades against the windshield. The world outside is thick with snowflakes and unrecognizable: somewhere between Boston and Lebanon, New Hampshire. All I know, is that every minute takes me some place closer to home than I was the minute before.

Essay on Everything (3)

[find your bearings. hang up your coat. stay for a little while.]

In your respective city far away from the place you were raised, you are a floating point. A dot amongst thousands of other dots working very hard to grab on and hold on. That's how I've felt lately. Like a little dot. A little point that keeps trying and trying but, like an archaic computer game, keeps getting deflected off of walls.

This is all that they see. A little dot with not enough management experience to take the 90k a year job they hung out before me for three months like a carrot. And after three months of interviews they turned me away with the flick of their wrist.

A little dot who is not pretty enough, or thin enough, is not enough.

After a while it starts to get to you. Each morning you wake up and run your hands up and down your body. I'm sure I have dimensions. I can feel them. But I must be wrong. They know better than I do. Little by little, I lose my dimension and my orientation. The space that I take up begins to diminish. I start to bounce around off of walls.

I'm a total heathen, with very little interest in thinking, researching, even discussing or the idea of God. I'd rather discuss books, or the weather, or anything really, with the exception of sports teams. Such little dialog I've had with 'God' that I know, should by some great trick it turns out he's been there all along, I'll show up at the finish line and he'll be there with his great Book and he'll look at me and say, "And who are you?" And then, after a  pause- "I'm sorry, but I just can't place you."

Despite this, when one is a bouncing little dot, or feels, at any rate, that they have been reduced to this, one does begin to question what the point of it it all is.

***

At first the soft, deep powder of the backyard was bearable on bare feet, a refreshing sting, but the packed-down crust of the driveway was torture. We exploded back in through the door and dashed back to the stove where we hopped back and forth from leg to leg, laughing a sort of crying laugh. Just as the blood was beginning to drain away from our feet, Teal's husband Mark, a solid Bostonian with a heavy New England Accent and tattoos running up his arm, decided to have another lap. The rest of them soon followed. Everyone but me. I have frostbite scars. I'm Chicken Shit. However you want to spell it out.  I stayed put.

 

They returned howling.

  

***

You are so much more than a little point. You are a long ribbon of color and light. You have been here for a while now, and you will keep going like this, unwinding and unwinding. The trick is to be find the people and the occasions who can recognize this. (And get rid of the rest.)

***

Listen, I know what you're thinking. But there is a difference in those who think that life is built for our pleasure and convenience and joy, and those who know that with any sort of joy there is equal parts suffering. Everyone in that beautiful house on that perfect night was familiar, some intimately so, with wrecking tragedy. The kind that saves us from melting into the delusion that everything in life is clean and pretty, or that we are entitled. To anything. The pieces of that tragedy have been lodged inside my body ever since, keeping me wildly alert, hyper-questioning and unwilling to accept anything at face value. 

So when I start to think about it, this is the only conclusion I can draw:

That the whole of life is a mystery. A hard, complicated mystery.

But if nights like this are the height of what the whole world can provide, in my lifetime- if this is all I ever get in terms of answers regarding purpose and intention and fulfillment- then I'll settle for that. I'll settle for that gratefully.

Essay on Everything (2)

[that all sounds like a very good time]


I stepped out of the car onto the driveway, and looked up at the house in disbelief. It was a big, classic Vermont farmhouse, a main house attached to a smaller house. (We used to sing a song in elementary school about such houses that was called "Big house middle house back house barn." I don't remember much about the rest of the lyrics but I'm sure they were equally thrilling.) The house was well lit from the inside and just a few steps away from the road, which in New England means it must have been very old.

During my near-decade of on and off (but mostly on) living in Seattle, I'd been suckered into the thinking that if you dared commit to and make a life out of art or creativity, you'd be committing financial suicide.  If you didn't work 60 hours a week for the holy trilogy of employment- Amazon, Microsoft of Boeing, than you'd better get used to working a host of food service and child care jobs just to pay the rent on your interstate-adjacent grey carpeted apartment.

Both Grace and Evan are professional potters, and very talented ones.  One of the very few things that I brought out with me to the West coast that I still have today is a mug that Grace made, her signature etched into the bottom. She'd given it to me as a graduation present. It's gorgeous and I could only imagine what an additional nine years has done to her work. Still, I was awed that they were able to live, with a six month old baby, in the kind of house that I'd decided was completely unobtainable if I was going to try this writing thing.  (Unless I lived as a kept woman. Which I'll admit right now, I have given some thought to.)

 Nate, Emma, Shane and I stepped inside into a flood of lamplight which bounced into the corners of the spacious front room and illuminated the dark wooden beams of the ceiling.  I greeted Grace and Evan and immediately remarked on the beauty and size of the house. They both raised their eyebrows in bemusement. "We've been working on it nonstop," said Evan. "You should have seen it when we first got it."

I spotted Joanna, Grace's little sister who is one year older than me, standing by the stove in a dress and a long sweater. Joanna and I were best friends through high school. She was my first hiking partner. We used to go up to the White Mountains in wool sweaters and hand-me down long underwear. She went to college for glass blowing and photography and got engaged and I hadn't ever even seen her ring. When I saw her now from across the room, I ran into her full speed, knocked her on the couch with the force of a linebacker. (I like friendship, particularly of the long-lost variety, to be a very physical thing.)

She took me into the  kitchen, in the beginning, plaster and sheets state of renovation, and poured us each a huge glass of white wine. Then she gave me a tour of the house, up the steep,  narrow stair case leading up to Elias's room. A master bedroom with a tall window that we both agreed was a photographer's dream.

The whole place was a photographer's dream, especially with  baby Elias being passed around from person to person like a football. A very good natured football in little courdaroys and a small wool sweater.

Evan fed the stove and more friends arrived in a flurry of activity. I mostly sat on the couch and watched and drank wine. I used to melt into the background like this when I was younger. Because my parents worked outside of Vermont,  my sister and I lived alone together for the majority of each week. That meant that wherever Anna went, I went. She is four years older than me. There was a lot of late night, winter driving, dark sledding hills, warm living rooms just like this only we were all more than a decade younger. And I'd sit there and feel lucky, wide eyed and eager to make idols out of all of them. (I blush to think of myself back then, those early teenage years, flat chested and more than a bit compulsive, taking myself quite seriously. Thankfully, most of these things have settled themselves out with time, including, thank god, the flat chest. By the time the braces came off at, what was it, 15, maybe a bit younger, I can safely say that the elements of irony and humor had began to appear on my periodic table of being. )

We did a lot of theater and performing and touring around New Engalnd. We were all incredibly dramatic. Everything was a production in one way or another.  I've always found that certain things come easier to me than to others. Things involving interacting with people. Social things. Choosing exactly who to be at exactly what time and occaion.)  I can trace it back those years. And having excellent role models. They were such good sports.

 Things started to swirl together as I got lightly drunk very quickly. Next thing I knew I was back in my coat and mittens and running with Nate up a steep driveway, both of us nearly breathless, the rest of the group on our heals. The snow had a dry, grainy quality to it, useless for snowballs or other such weaponry but perfect for speed.  The air was so warm that it had a certain, spring-like viscosity to it;  it felt as if you could tilt back your chin and swim upwards into the millions of stars above.

Using only the thin light of stars and headlamps, we sled down the hill one after another, running back up for another run with the sudden energy of six year olds. We doubled up in sleds and raced each other, usually ending in the ditch, off of the bank or in violent collisions cushioned by down and wool. To start us off, runners put hands on shoulders and ran, pushing us until they couldn't keep up and were face down in the snow.

One by one people got spent and wet and cold until just a few of us remained up on the hill.

Shane dared us to race down the steep bank which was heavily forested and tangled with sharp dead blackberry shrubs. I was lying on a sled on my back and told him that he was just asking to have a "smash-up," as Edith Wharton put it, just like Ethan Frome. But I told him and Nate that I'd race them anyway. They said ONE TWO THREE and took off down the bank into the trees. I continued to lay there on my back, unmoving. I heard a shhhhhsss of plastic picking up speed, then a Thunk! and a shout. I skated down on my stomach to find the two brothers in a pile, twisted up, laughing, Shane bleeding from the mouth. They'd managed to go five whole feet, missing the trees but colliding with each other.

That was the end of the sledding. We limped back to the house and found the others, waiting barefoot around the stove, ready for the traditional new years barefoot run. I'd never heard of such a tradition but I knew that my feet, badly scarred from frostbite, could suffer some heavy damage through direct exposure to snow.
I took off my ridiculously insulated mountaineering boots and the expensive wool socks my parents had kept me supplied with for the past decade since the I got lost, and ran out the door with the rest of them.