Biggest Little City
I used to cry a lot when we lived in Seattle, my face often matching the sky, so my mother moved me to the desert to dry me out. I did grow tougher, but there was still an occasional flash flood, which as everyone knows, can be deadly in the desert because there really isn’t anywhere for the water to go.
My body has always existed across several biomes, splitting itself apart into fractal shapes to maximize surface area, but many of these selves are currently wandering in the Great Basin. We know about the duality/ duplicity of man, but let’s examine now of the multiplicity of women/ this woman, to the extent that a writer is ever anything but ink on a page.
I used to travel between cliques, never fully belonging to any, desiring membership, subscription, purchase in all things, all manners, showing up in the costume of that one for that day, which never completely fit properly due to my awkward chubby and left me more lonely than if I had just stayed home. I remember the exact moment when I realized I was becoming a pantheon of lesser super heroes with very specific and limited powers. Mega-victim collected traumas like passport stamps, skipping her way through them with a deranged laugh. Super-tough got in a lot of fights, some physical, and while fighting was never really her thing, she never backed down and she got pretty good at throwing insults. Poison-slut was good at blow jobs and forgetting things. Toadflax was outstanding at blending in, but only if she was standing in front of one specific wallpaper design that looked like a stone castle which is too specific to be at all useful in the majority of circumstances.
Now I travel everyplace, everyplace but home. I cast them all over my shoulder onto the trail behind me, nestled in little sacks to disguise who and what they were, like donations to the Damnation Army and the Badwill. But when I drove back into town this time, past the Cal-Neva and closed down Little Nugget and boarded up Harrahs, to the loading dock just beyond the parking lot, I could still see the paper bag with a version of me in it, waiting through all manner of weather, all sorts of indignities and minor catastrophes, for me to wander by and pick her up again. There was another one in front of the basement apartment door, where I lived when I was pregnant with my son. That one bought a lot of things on eBay that she did not need, because she her limited superpower was winning auctions at the last minute, and some of those purchases remained stacked there, in front of the wisps of grass that still refuse to coalesce themselves into anything resembling a lawn. There was a third one at that horrible weekly hotel, with a broken watch on her wrist, marking the time she had fallen down the stairs in her haste to get away.
Now that I am back in Reno, for the first time in a decade, it seems cruel not to collect any of these former selves. So far, they are all hitchhikers and they all want rides. Every one of them wants to get the hell out of here. Perhaps later, I will come across one that is more rebellious, who I have to chase down. Likely that one will arouse the suspicions of local law enforcement, who though dim, take a dim view of anything that appears like kidnapping.
What will I do as it gets increasingly crowded in this story? Which one will speak with you? Shall we allow the editor to be the one to mesh the voices together such that we sound like one reasonably coherent individual?
Oh little bird/ birds/ burdens.
Fighting over which one gets to ride shotgun. I allow the one who was friends with the classy girl at school to get in the front seat. She is the most hurt. She reached out even before I got into town, asking if Tiff wanted to see her/ us. Tiff said she did not, despite the fact that there were years of accumulated history since then, several meetings and conversations in which we took great care to be supportive, caring and understanding, so as not to upset Tiff or drive her away. Having Tiff as a friend was a source of validation for us, that said perhaps we were not as big a failure as it seemed. But Tiff is going through another divorce, her second one, so she is very upset about her failures. She says we ruined our friendship with her when we told her we used to have a crush on her 30 years ago. We remember many things, but we do not remember having a crush on her, or telling her we had a crush on her, but we do remember the idiotic and awkward response she had to our coming out as queer. We also remember her sharing her wild relationship with another woman that she had after we came out, and her saying that while it was the best sexual relationship of her entire life, she was not queer and would not be having sex with women anymore. All of this we held with our usual tender attention, despite our innermost thoughts on the matter, until such time as she dumped us as a friend via text message while we shopped for pens and journals the Barnes & Noble. Pens that we then used to write these sentences out, which caused these past selves to rise up and demand to be reintegrated. Like the one that was so concerned about losing her friendship altogether that when Tiff asked her to recopy her physics packet, all 30 pages, in Tiff’s handwriting, which we were easily able to imitate, we agreed. We understood. Tiff lived in an only partially successful ecohome, and so she was often without water or power, which made it difficult for her to complete her own physics homework. Adding to her difficulty was the fact that she had decided our friendship was holding her back from her true popularity potential and she was luxuriating in many more social invites now that she had abandoned our time together in favor of people that she never spoke to again after high school. Geez, this version of me sounds so bitter. Perhaps it’s time for this bitter betty to have a heart-to-heart with the self that had sex with her high school sweetheart, even though I/ we were married to someone else at the time. There is no version of us that is not a cheating heart; we refuse to allow anyone perfect dominion or fidelity over any part of us, and if we have to have sex with other people from time to time to keep that from happening, then that is what we do. We used to feel badly about it, but now we have many friends that think it’s just fine that we are like this, seeing it as perhaps liberated or otherwise evolved. We love both too much and not enough at the same time. There is a part of us that hopes somehow she will see this. There are other parts of us that hope she never ever does.
There are so many other selves to pick up, and here I am, wallowing in having let the same person discard me twice. Why should she not, when I have so readily discarded myself? Some of these selves I am not ready to confront, because they are truly just horrible and even boring, like the one that made a VHS tape of herself smoking meth and discussing cat food and porn movies as if the two things were related. That bitch is so trashy and has really bad skin. We discarded her when we got pregnant, moved into the basement and stopped doing those things. We are not even sure where she is, because we were in the process of being evicted from our above-ground apartment at the time.
I pull over the car. I am emotionally incapable of another run-in with myself and besides, the car is full.
I morosely walk along the Truckee River, which is barely a trickle, because I guess there’s a drought. And just when I lose sight of the car and the bickering inside, along comes another barefoot floozy self, ready to go back to my hotel room and take a nap while soaking my insides with flop sweat. And I think about how to accommodate this one’s particular needs which obviously include a shower and probably a peanut butter sandwich. Maybe some calamine. Most of us are badly mosquito bitten, as it's a part of our essential nature to all have red welts and blacktop bitten feet. I abandon the car and walk her back to my room. There are clearly so many problems here, but at least this is a place where I can hold my own hand and no one thinks it's strange.
