Life is a freak show.

Living in New York City is hard. When you come alone, and the only thing you have to your name is a smile that can set the world ablaze, you find yourself in fascinating situations that leave you feeling empty afterward and wondering how you got there in the first place. I'm always trying to capture spontaneity in little bottles, so later, when I'm lonely and trying to feel how I felt the night before, I can drink a little bit of it in. The problem is, I drink too much.

How music infiltrates every part of my consciousness.

Dear Mystery Man,

Remember when we lay on my bed listening to a scratched up Bruce Springsteen record, drinking but not getting drunk, and talking about nothing? Somewhere between Born in the USA and Thunder Road (I had to flip the record) our mouths stopped moving and our fingers started wandering. The record bottomed out like a car scrapping a speed bump long before climax. Records should be longer.

Every time I'm with you, it feels like a honeymoon. Our lives are so compartmentalized. While I feel like I know you so well because you've wandered my house in the nude while I kept your underwear hostage in the bathroom while applying my make up, I know nothing of who you are outside of who you are with me. Are you charming with Sinatra crooning in the background? Do you really like "Foggy London Town" or do you just like it when I sing it while impersonating the WB frog? Are you awkward? Are you loud? Do you constantly crack jokes to appease your own self-consciousness or are you full of bravado and slamming your fist down upon a bar made entirely out of ceder and pleased with yourself for beating, yet again, your fellow barmates in American Bandstand Triva?


Who are you?


Do you wonder about me? When I sit locked in my bedroom listening to the local classic rock station, sneaking my roommates Miller High Life (they're nothing like champagne) and reading the same page of a Henry Miller book over and over and out loud, is this how you picture your lover? Do you know I wash my sheets a few days before you come over but sleep on a bare mattress during the in between period so as to preserve their fresh scent? Do you know that I chain smoke in my bedroom while I'm by myself? When you come over, I act like having a cigarette inside is a big deal, but I just burn a ton of incense so my room doesn't smell like Liza Minelli's dressing room.

I listen to Heart though I loathe them and I find radio commercials and hourly weather and traffic reports comforting background noise even though I scoff publicly about my roommates reality television binges. I love the 1-877-Kars-4-Kids jingle. Do you know that I wish I lived in a world without television at all? I wish we could go to the picture show and it still be a dime. We'd live large and splurge on popcorn and sneak in spirits.

As I write, a campy version of Puff the Magic Dragon just ended and the Village People just started up with their infamous hint. I'll let you guess which one. I don't have time to tell you. I must dance and reminisce upon the days of roller disco.

Love,

Your Mysterious Lover

Now and then @ 59 degrees.

I'm the girl who sits on her fire escape, alone, listening to YES and Jimmi Hendrix, chain smoking, and drinking wine, while watching her neighbors put on their finest backwards baseball hats, and throw a backyard party. They snap their overly-posed group photos which they'll post on their facebook later on the same evening, and this little thing called loneliness will try and eat away at me from somewhere deep inside of my gut.

I crawl back through the window I came out of and change the radio station. I wonder why all the stations play commercials at the same time. I change the music to the least offensive song, which happens to be "Fire" by the Ohio Players, and I dance around in my living room like I'm on stage with a full audience and a full band backing me up. My hair is flying around the way hair only flies around in a Pat Benetar video and the smile that appears on my face is the only real one that's seeped through this facetious mask I wear all day. In this moment, I feel happy, beautiful, and free. I don't remember, not even for a second, that just an hour earlier I was crying into my hands for reasons unbeknownst to me, thinking of jumping off that fire escape, but too afraid that the pain I was feeling would then be inflicted upon those I love. This is now. Where are the people I love?

The beginning

Dry spaghetti flew out of the box and all over the floor. It cracked and splintered and fell into the cracks and splinters of the badly finished wood floor beneath my feet. Cackles escaped the mouths of me and my best friend of the moment, Ashli Kanzler. My roommate came running into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about and just scoffed when he saw the scene.

We were stoned and making pasta. Simple joys like this made up my entire life at the time. I was enrolled in college and making easy A's. I was living off student loans with a part-time job that Ashli got me as a waitress at a mediocre tex-mex restaurant. I was learning to play the guitar and living in a beautiful garden apartment with a bonfire pit, a comfortable front porch, and a host of friends that I almost always found myself laughing with. It was a time when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The water was boiling and I can't remember much else except that I was getting tired. So after dinner I turned in to my little mother-in-law apartment behind the Florida-cracker style house that was my home. Ashli was going to be staying in my room that evening but wasn't quite ready to retire herself.

"Just leave your door unlocked for me", she said.

It was something we had done countless times before and I felt pretty comfortable with. Little did I know that just a couple hours later I would awaken to a big, hulking man beside me in my bed and Ashli would be no where to be found. I'll spare the gory details of the attack. The event is still as fresh in my mind as it was when it originally happened a year and a half ago. I was able to muster the strength to break free of my bed and get my phone which was on the table on the other side of the room. I spun around to flip on the light just in time to see the man struggling with my blankets which were wrapped around his ankles and slam into the french doors of my suite, leaving a nice, clean palm print on the inside of the glass. My newly acquired kitten escaped with the intruder and I ran after them both, clutching the cat in the darkness as my only protection. Like an idiot, the man ran right into a trap on the side of my apartment. Trying to escape through what looked like an alley way, he was blocked by brush and random garbage stored behind my apartment by the previous tenant. He had no other choice but to turn around and meet me, face to face, just before hopping over the fence in one swift motion. He landed on the other side with a thud. This was the second time splinters of something fell to the floor beneath my feet, but this time it was splinters from the wooden fence planks that broke underneath his weight.

I screamed. I screamed for God. I screamed for Ashli. I screamed into my cell phone as I placed a call to her trying to explain the events of what just occured. She was asleep on the couch in my living room, but in less than ten seconds, she was outside my backdoor with my roommate and his friend in tow. I screamed the name of the man whose face I saw for that split second. I screamed at the 911 operator I wouldn't have been smart enough to call in that state of panic had it not been for my fast-thinking roommate. And I screamed at the hospital, to which I was escorted in a police car, as half a dozen faces stood before my open legs and starred at my vagina.

This was the night my entire life changed and how I ended up sitting here at the window of my New York City apartment. A lot happened between now and then though. You will read my story here.

City Escape.

I'm sitting on my bed, chain smoking out the only window in my tiny New York City apartment into the solid black night - the only lights that shine are those of the Manhattan skyline off in the distant west. I live in Brooklyn. I live in the only four-story building on my block that is not a brownstone across from Walt Whitman's old house. The floors sit on an angle so none of the furniture I have placed against the wall actually touches it and there is a radiator in the middle of the floor that I've awkwardly squeezed between my full-size bed and portable closet.

I'm waiting for the boy of my dreams to come over. It's 9PM and I have a cold and I'm drinking coffee... wishing the time would go faster so I could pop this expensive bottle of red wine I bought for us. I've already drank two Hot Toddys today and I'm wondering whether or not my alcoholism will catch up with me again. I spent a dry eleven months which began in Sarasota, Florida and ended in my living room in Brooklyn listening to old records with the aformentioned boy. He was there when I hit rock bottom and there when I decided to get sober. It's only fair that he should be there when I decide to relapse. I suppose it's only a relapse if you decide to get sober again. AA is not for me. Not for me, right now.

I've only had one embarrassingly bad night since I've began drinking again, where I got on-stage at a high-profile play reading at the Players Club in Gramercy Park to read the numbers on a raffle ticket. I snickered through the whole boring ordeal until intermission where I blasted out of the joint into a blackout, leaving my scarf and sunglasses behind, like some misshapen Hollywood starlet. I came to in a taxi-cab where I was yelling at the driver for ripping me off. All around me horns blew as we waiting to go over the Brooklyn Bridge. I do know that he tried to keep two dollars which he probably deserved for putting up with my bratty attitude, but other than that, I don't know if he purposely put us in traffic or not. Either way, this is New York. I found another cab after fifteen minutes of teetering in my heels on the street and got home swiftly and safely.

I should mention that I was wearing a ridiculously low-cut one-piece bathing suit underneath a long, flowing black skirt with a light sweater that evening, and that is probably why I caught a cold in the first place. I've been out of work for four days and I'm considering just never going back. If only it were that easy. If only I had rich parents who would support my dream that changes every other day.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. I suppose I should start with the rape and how that cataclysmic event sent my life into an entirely different direction and ended me here, sitting at my window, sniffling snot into the night sky, listening to Everclear, and wondering if I should try and eat something substantial before the evening really begins.

I haven't written a thing in well over a year. So. Here it goes.