THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG

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Excerpt from This Is Not A Love Song:

37

Pretty Girls Make Graves

July 31, 2004

Dear Chase,

Remember when you were little? When doorknobs were a little too high, candy was the food of the gods, and grown-ups ignored you? When I was little, I was a TV freak. Well, a full blown media freak, really. Movies, TV, radio, videos, records, books, whatever. I absorbed everything. My mom was too lazy to actually raise me so my nanny would put me in front of the tv while she did her nails and painted her boyfriend’s name on her Trapper Keeper. But, Mom was a big Disney fan for some reason, I think she said it had something to do with "family values" (barf) so whenever a Disney movie was on again at the theater, we always went together. I got to spend an hour and a half with my mother. Our "quality time" was in the dark, and I wasn’t allowed to talk, but it was enough for me. I loved that guy named Walt Disney for giving me and Mom a moment together from time to time.

I remember when we saw Snow White. There was one song that really stuck out in my mind. "Some Day My Prince Will Come." I was utterly disgusted. Really. At age six, or however old I was at the time, the whole idea of some wimpy princeling riding in on a horse and taking me away from a beautiful enchanted forest into a dark, damp castle did not excite me. Mom cried and I played cat’s cradle with my shoelace. I had big plans then. Anything could happen.

As I’ve gotten older, the optimism, as well as my fabricated endless possibilities have faded. I am now somehow moved a tiny bit by that obnoxious song. Not because I’m mourning my youth and the lack of princes and such like Mom was. It’s just eerie. The voice is just a little too high, Snow White a little too happy about being alone, (or living with all those dwarves), and I somehow manage to get sad whenever I hear the song. I guess as my life gets smaller, and less full, the options I once scoffed at become more attractive. They’re not so cheesy, maybe. Living happily ever after doesn’t sound so terrible anymore. I don’t exactly live in an enchanted forest anyway. Laugh all you want, but even you aren’t too cool to be happy, are you?

I can’t help but think that I’m settling. Selling out. Maybe you always knew I would, but what choice have I got? And what are your choices now? Hmm? Realistically. Hell, there is nothing even near a prince coming to rescue me and I’m acting like wishing for all of that is settling. That’s what’s wrong with all of us. We’ve been raised to believe that every single whim we possess as awkward, unloved, six-year-old McDonald’s-eating Disney consumers is plausible. So we believe it. Somewhere along the way we stop thinking our parents are better than us, and from there we can’t seem to lose the idea that our lives could always be better than theirs. That we deserve better. Very sad, isn’t it?

Sometimes you acted like you could do better. Not better than me. You just always acted as if you could do better in life. If I didn’t want to put up with your leaving all you had to do was make a threat to cut me off, as if you had all these grand possibilities waiting in the wings and I think you knew I would have acquiesced. It never happened. But I think it was unspoken between the two of us. You subconsciously used my biggest fear, my screwed up abandonment issues that have always been apparent, and you manipulated me into accepting your behavior. No matter how unacceptable it was.

Did I ever tell you that I never believed in Santa Claus? Very true. Never. It wasn’t at all because Mom and Dad didn’t want to lie to me. They were just far too busy lying to each other to bother with me. You would think because of this, I would have had the upper hand with the other kids on the playground, but you know me. I didn’t have the heart to tell them about the Santa sham. I just couldn’t. So, like one of the pack, I pretended to believe. For them. To spare their disappointment at the cruelty of life.

Sometimes, when I am feeling very slighted, I wish I could go back and tell them all. Stand up in the middle of the show and tell and scream, "Santa Claus is a fake! Your Mom and Dad tell you this story about a pathetic fat old man with an eating disorder to make you think that there is such a thing as magic. There isn’t. You will never fly like Superman or have big muscles like Popeye and Santa Claus does not know your name. Nobody cares, boys and girls. Miss Cathy here is being paid to cut out circles and make us peanut butter crackers and wipe our asses. She doesn’t want to. She has to."

But then, sometimes, I wish I had been a believer like them, just for a little while. It might have been a good lesson for me. Maybe if I had seen the outcome of believing in the goodness, the pain involved in such intense unselfishness, I could have spared myself a little hurt. I could have narrowly avoided you. Maybe I’m glad I didn’t completely avoid you, though. It wasn’t all that bad. It was wonderful when you were here with me. I was happy, honestly happy, then, I think. Most of the time when you were gone, I couldn’t tell if I was happy, or just manic and very strung out. A little of both. You have the effect of an over-the-counter cold medication. I felt a little too high, a little too clear headed, as if I could hear better than I ever had before, and it made me very renewed. Until it wore off. Then, I always ended up feeling worse. Like a Nyquil junkie. Like an over-the-counter hypochondriac drug addict. I miss hearing the buzz of the fluorescent light fixtures and having nervous energy. I’m tired. I’ve been coming down off your buzz for months now and I am just so weary.

Love is one of those things that requires effort. Intense, passionate effort. Forgive me, but that is your real problem. Love doesn’t work itself out. You have to make some sort of attempt at it, and you either didn’t care enough to do that, or believed far too much in magic and fate and fictional ideas like that. Chase, there is no Santa Claus.

--Julia

6

Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth

May 30, 2004

dear diary --

so i’m at the doctor and she’s telling me she can give me some more of some of this or something else and i’m nodding because i just want the stuff whatever it is or something else that might be what i’ve been looking for my whole life. escape. so i don’t care what she chooses really out of the myriad of supposed elixirs of life because i doubt any of them will help as i am already the biggest lost cause but it couldn’t hurt to get more drugs. she mentions a few I have already ingested before and maybe they worked for their proper use i dunno because that wasn’t what i wanted them for so i act disinterested in them and say the side effects were grueling and i realize that sometimes i can be a very convincing liar when i want to and i must never tell anyone else about this talent.

when she says the magic word, some designer drug that i heard makes you feel jittery and high like you’re on coke, i stop the ouija board cursor right there and methodically nod my head. yes yes this is the one i want, doc. i need it for whatever it’s supposed to do and i will take it religiously every morning and you can write in your next medical journal how effective it is and you can use me for fame or respect or whatever meaningless rewards people want for their observations and in return i will have something new to try which is honestly why i am here in the first place.

doctors used to make me nervous, because i was always sick or pretending to be sick so i wouldn’t have to tell them that really i was just bored and didn’t want to go to school, i wanted to see my blood and romanticize how someday i might see it draining in or out of me, depending on whether i could get hold of drugs or death first. i so much wanted to be a heroin addict when i was younger i can’t believe i didn’t find any before i did. that’s the only reason i didn’t do it at age fourteen, of course, lack of availability, and all my supposed junkie friends were drug snobs which is hilarious because stealing and snorting your little brother’s ritalin is pretty low on the rung of morality for me but somehow finding a friend who knows a friend who knows this toolbag who might have some h is a bad bad thing to do. good. i like to go against people’s ideas of what’s acceptable anyway. because i hate people, every one of them.

so i get some samples and some scripts from my doc who really seems like a kind person who might just be trying to help me out and i sort of smile in a very sad, lost little girl way as i say goodbye so she will think she is doing her good deed as the savior of medicine and that the day is worthwhile for her. that must be nice to think at some point. satisfaction at a job well done. i wonder what that’s like.

i take one little purplish brownish pill right away, i don’t wait for the nurse to take my money in return for the approved drug deal i just made, i am ripping open the plastic childproof cover and pulling out cotton every which way and gulping the drug down with water and waiting for it to hit me.

i am leaving the doc’s office and it’s in this big hospital with stretchers and the smell of sickness and lysol everywhere and i always love to leave the office and walk around the halls like one of my dear loved ones is in one of the rooms close by and i am suffering like the most graceful family member of a victim, and i even wring my hands sometimes and give sad looks to the people in elevators to see if i can con them too. it’s not for the pity i want at all as much as to see how accomplished i am at deception. i work on it daily now that I have decided i cannot have a white sheet drug free love and roses existence anyway.

i’ve never once gotten roses without having to perform for them. singing for a bunch of people in school through the years i got them, graduating from junior high and having my father, also the recipient of my virginity at age eleven, deciding to take off to l.a. and not show up and instead send a .little something’ i got them, accepting at age seventeen that my boyfriend was probably boning half the free world still and had called me a stupid bitch for not trusting him one too many times and was trying to get his token playmate back i got them. . .whatever.

i want to get just one rose for no reason whatsoever. no actually i don’t really like roses. i want a tiger lily i think. for no reason. just total random occurrence. i don’t want to have to be the people pleaser or the victim of a bad situation to get it. i want something for nothing. just once.

the last time i tried to be good and not play with the minds of people i don’t even know or test the limits of my capabilities i think was when i held old pop’s hand in the casket. i had been so pissed off at him for so many good reasons and we had screamed at one another because i confronted him with the fact that he was a disgusting human being and that he raped me and that was the last time i saw him walking around breathing, before he was stiff and cold and yellowish with little purple dots on the surface of his hard skin from where the disease was oozing out of his pores.

leave it to dear old dad to be both a pedophile and a heroin addict. i think it was complications from aids that got him. they told me not to squeeze him for safety purposes, because i might get the disease on me and then oh no, be just like him, as if people didn’t assume that was a prophecy come true already anyway, and so i almost did squeeze him just to see what would happen.

tell me not to do something, go ahead, i dare you. because even if it’s something everyone knows is impossible to do and idiotic to attempt and no one has ever done it and it’s self destructive and historically a bad choice i will have it in the bag in fifteen minutes or less. i am the express lane of suckers for a dare. but i didn’t squeeze him because I just kept waiting for his chest to heave a big sigh and then i could punch him in the gut maybe but it didn’t and so i felt like the most horrible human being on the planet for the last communication we had and for not knowing how to feel at all right then.

i talked to him when i knew he was nowhere near there but i do everything too late and i said the words "i forgive you" and that’s hardest when you know he’s not going to respond so i felt rejected and shook so hard i nearly couldn’t get the silver dollars on his forced shut eyes to buy his way into the underworld which is ironic since if dad could he just might have. not that i wouldn’t either. i don’t know. do they have pills in the underworld or just lots of dead people?

i think of all of this as i am driving and waiting for something to change about my expression and thinking maybe i should drink something to encourage the fastest result but then i won’t know if it’s the new drug or the alcohol that’s affecting me, so i light a cigarette and wait some more.

i also read that the drug i just took actually makes sex better sometimes as an extra added bonus side effect which i believe about as much as i believe that those vibrators they sell at brookstone are for tense muscles but i just bought the cadillac of vibrators and i might as well use it for tense muscles for all the sexual pleasure it gives me. i hate being dependent on another breathing body to bring me closer to some sort of exhaling of sexual frustration, and although i am a penetration girl, jamming big hard plastic things in me is not really my cup of tea, and vibrators work on me like never although sometimes it is nice to just hold them in a certain way and relax as if you’re getting a massage like when the guy gets it just right and the flicking combined with the sucking and insertion of the tongue are all in sync and i’m begging for him to move his mouth up towards my face so he can put something better in me and anyway cocks are usually just the right consistency and temperature and they’re connected to torsos and hips and asses that pump dutifully in and out and sometimes get the rhythm just right which all depends on what day it is and what my whims are that day.

as of late it has been this technique where it’s teasing and frustrating but nice, with a half in-half out gesture and then a big hard stab maybe and then more of the same and then the faster than light jabbing for as long as he can possibly muster until his thighs give out and my entire lower portion is numb and of course the obligatory and always old faithful from behind approach that always gets my vote for the right kind of friction when all else fails.

the last time i indulged or things were conducive to indulgence, my lover performed delightfully and effectively, and the shape of his sex was so interesting to me, so anatomically agreeable with my mouth that half the time i just wanted to suck him off for the benefit of the shape, especially the upper portion which i could wrap my lips around in just the right way as to convince me that i was devouring my favorite caramel pudding pop that unfortunately doesn’t exist in the freezer section of stores. and the growl and snarl i got for my efforts when i moved down and began my bottle fed show proved to be the quality assurance my sexual customer service ego needed to make me try to swallow him whole, to force the issue until the tip was jammed against the back of my throat and i was nearly hitting him with teeth simply because there was no room left in my mouth.

i did skim him a bit with an incisor or two at some point once and like a helpful and guiding professor might do was politely reminded not to and i carefully policed myself after this because i am always out of control and rather like being told what to do if it’s in the right context that makes the action more intense and pleasing for all concerned. of course it was a bit hard not to nibble on his sex, as he always encouraged my obsession with chewing anything near my mouth: his fingers, his lips, his tongue, his shoulder, and it is hard to remember sometimes that although one might like a scratch along the inside of the thigh or chest as reward for an equally pleasurable and painful stab, this hypersensitive region is not as open to abuse and experiment.

i do not get a crawling out of my skin feeling from the new drug i was given after all, so i am tempted to take two or smash them all up and snort them but i won’t because maybe just maybe this elixir will give me something new and shiny and under explored if i am more compliant about administering it. who am i kidding? the only pill i take every day religiously is my birth control pill and i wouldn’t forget to take that if my house was on fire because i am too screwed up right now to even dream of lacking responsibility in that arena and suffering the familial consequences and i probably will be for the next long while, which makes me feel good to be settled on one decision in all this confusing hurry up and wait existence i keep trying to escape from. --delia