Music to My Soul

But that is how lives go, I suppose, in full circle, in spires that whirl around each other, like those propeller leaves that helicopter to the earth spinning on silent notes. I suppose I see my life in refrains and chords, improvised at times, jumping off the scale, cleft curling into a question mark. Where is the little girl who sings with her father? Belting into the air uninhibited by untamed notes, out of tune. A girl, I think, a woman becomes untamed that way through inhibitions and best friends, singing with her father and then her best friend, driving on the highway to nowhere, where the windows are open and she sounds and smells beautiful like humid air after it rains and damp flower petals, where confidence looks, tastes, and smells the same, like setting sun and rain and leftover perfume, where her best friend and father have the same effect on her, where music spins back on itself and has made her emerge from a cocoon of girlhood to womanhood or somewhere in between…she thinks…and sings.

The road streams by in streaks of color, as if my fingertips out the window, sailing on the high def air are painting the greens and aquas on a canvas of atmosphere. The weather is on the brink of perfect, sun peeking behind clouds, then emerging to cover my bare feet resting on the dashboard. Becca snaps her fingers with a lose shoulder roll to the beat of the music that surrounds us in an aura of rhythm. Nothing matters, the campus is far behind the exhaust we’ve left in our wake and the open road greets our voices and gyrations on leather interior.

“What is this?! I love it!

“Girltalk. They are coming next month, the big concert.”

“Holy shit. They are amazing. And this” she points to the radio “this is our song for sure.”

Girltalk’s song Bounce That blares through the speakers with its familiar melodies that blear together, songs of other artists mixed into a sound garden of rap, R&B and pop. Every beat is different and a bit off but perfect for our style, our newfound “filthy gorgeous, I don’t give a shit” confidence that we could always taste on the tips of our tounges but never indulge in until now.

Becca makes me think of my father, the way she sits with her collarbone raised, chin slightly up, mouthing words to the songs we know, itching to remove herself from the confines of the car cab when the music becomes particularly body moving, an air of confidence that is intoxicating. But that is what music does. That is what a best friend does. That is what the open road, open windows, the smell of exhaust and a hint of sweat all do. And when it all becomes aligned like planets in the sky, you feel as if the music you dance to, you sing to, you live to, has all been written with you in mind.

*

You go back, Jack, do it again

Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again…

My father’s 1997 black Porsche Carrera cut through the atmosphere like wire through clay. The salty aroma of new leather was ever present each time I slid into the curved passenger seat, as if the car had been bought newly furbished the day before. The sound of the leather creaking and cinching as my father adjusted his body behind the wheel, hugging the arc of his slightly reclined body. He babied the metal creature as if it were his second child. The black finish had an iridescent tone that shone like a peacock feather in the sun, where the body curved like the tattoo of silhouette of woman’s body on a man’s muscular bicep, streamlined with every maneuver. Glossed like fresh sweat I always hesitated in reaching for the door handle, afraid the color would rub off on my skin. But one inside and accelerating through the atmosphere, my father and I squinted through the wind that left our faced stinging and pink.

“Dad, play the song!” My voice straining over the accelerating engine. My father was not a man who was unbridled. The muscles in his face always clenches around his jaw, temples and neck, straining, bracing for the next source of anxiety or stressor. But when he sang, something melted away from him, his muscles softening like wax of a lit candle. I never remember singing with him. I knew the words, saw them if I closed my eyes, glowing like neon lights. But I just wanted to watch my father and hear his voice, melodic instead of stern. The music seemed to un-thaw a section of him that had rusted over from neglect. Signing rubbed the tarnish away. And now when I hear him sing the tension in my chest that sometimes comes without warning in his presence, releases like stretching fabric.

“Times are hard

You’re afraid to pay the fee

So you find yourself somebody

Who can do the job for free

When you need a bit of lovin'

Cause your man is out of town

That’s the time you get me runnin'

And you know Ill be around.”

Steely Dan was my father’s favorite band. Plastic CD cases of their various albums were always stacked in the glove compartment when I released the latched looking for a piece of gum or sunglasses to borrow. There was a kind of life, vivacious energy in the songs Dirty Work and Do It Again that my father embodied when we listened to the music. He became the lyrics curving his mouth over each tone and syllable, became the tempo, the zing of electric guitar, clang of piano, drone and squeal of the trumpet and sax when he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel, sometimes dropping one and to his knee to switch up the beat. I tasted that music on my tongue, bitter, sweet, salty, sour, the notes hit each taste bud, and part of my father fed into me with it.

Don’t Take Me Alive and Deacon Blues fill the space of my RAV 4 when it’s warm enough to drive with my sunroof open. I can smell my father’s cologne even when the melodies float audibly, transforming into a trace of him. The thickness of the harmonies like dark chocolate in my mouth. Other lines are smooth with a bite, like a glass of white wine. Some are dark and earthy, rich, more like a rouge, nearly plumb red. I drink it in until I’m tipsy from the music and I forget the day I might have had. The songs have never changed. I have.

“I have one for you, Dad.” Deacon Blues scrolls across my iPod screen. My father waits for the first chords. When they come he slaps the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and smiles.

Ill learn to work the saxophone

Ill play just what I feel

Drink Scotch whisky all night long

And die behind the wheel

They got a name for the winners in the world

I want a name when I lose

They call Alabama the crimson tide

Call me deacon blues

Anatomy Cont.

Legs

Stature is an illusion. I fool people with my height. They believe I am slightly taller because of a long stretch of lower limbs, but my stature is held in my torso. Sometimes I wish I had longer limbs, to balance out my proportions. But I like how my legs seem to paint the air when I walk, how I slide through space and if I were to turn around I’d find a path of color behind me. The amount of strength they must have. How they support the weight of my whole body on them.

My legs can run for miles through open fields in the rain, they outlast my lungs and keep going even when I can no longer breathe. Synchronized swimming molded the muscles into ellipses. In the water they held me buoyant, spinning like eggbeaters beneath me. I loved to lie on my back in the water and watch my leg stretch straight above me, see the water glide down my calf, drip off my pointed toe in a ballet leg.

Willowy and bowed they are powerful, store their fuel in my hips that I can feel seep down my muscles when I’m dancing, or when I have my thighs locked on either side of his hips.

“God I love it when you do that thing with your legs.”

“What thing?”

“This thing.” He pats sides of my thighs that wrap around his hips and squeezes my calves that cross over one another behind him, trapping him so I can keep him for myself. I grasp his waist with my legs.

“Yeah, watch out they are stronger than you think. Try to get away.” He makes a feeble attempt.

“Nope, Can’t.”

“You didn’t even try.”

“I don’t want to get away.”

*

They grew curled inward before I learned to walk. My father noticed how I sat on the floor with Bunny in my lap, toes pointed into each other, heels out. In my walker my knees butted together as I attempted to stand or shuffle a crossed the floor or grass. He never discussed details but there are photographs of me bound in casts from waist to foot to make my stubborn legs grow outwards. And now, sometimes I find myself standing with my big toes facing each other, knees butting against each other as I fidget. I like the way it feels, my own skin on skin, the nubs of my kneecaps smooth from baby oil and lotion.

But they are unreliable and stubborn, go weak at times I need them to support me, carry me away, hold me erect. They can’t keep balance on slick ice and send me back first slamming into the ground between classes. They aren’t friendly with stairs and instead of carrying my body up them they become confused, miscalculate the distance from on step to the next and I trip up then thump down a flight in front of faculty members.

My legs were never graceful enough to be a ballerina, couldn’t jump high enough for volleyball nor were quick enough for track. Sometimes I would hide them, became self-conscious about the circumference and jiggle of my thighs, the deep lines from skin stretched too far. The skin on my shins and outsides of my thighs is sensitive and supple, bruises easily like a peach or other too ripe fruit.

Torso and Stomach

Two lone freckles placed to the left of my belly button, and another just above it, make a constellation of birthmarks. When I am naked and bare I pivot in all directions in my reflection to scrutinize my torso below my chest, flat and smooth like someone ran their hand over a pile of sand to level it. Blocks and striations of sculpted muscle from years of early workouts make my muscles show through my skin like a piece of meat covered in cellophane when I lie on my back or toss and turn in bed.

It begs for fingers to prod at it when it is flexed, begs to have those same fingers trail down the length of my stomach in some near future bedroom encounter, his callused grip around my waist maneuvers me where he wants to blow a trail of breath down the curved and lines of my torso and into my bellybutton.

But I wont let him venture further because I hate the sack flesh that lies across my hips. I hate the mound that lies just below my belly button so when I sit down my arms automatically hug that space in case someone were to see it peeking over the waist of my jeans. It is impossible to get rid of even with 2 AM sit-ups when I can’t sleep. Something about it makes me pray his eyes are closed even if he says, “A little pudge is cute.”

Feet and Toes

Men find excuses to rub their thumbs across the permanent black silhouette. They ask me why, why there, what does it mean? I think I may enjoy their touch more than their interest. They are touching a part of me I’ve tried to hide. It is their touch that cultivates my acceptance to my ugly feet.

But I hate them, convinced they are abnormal and deformed, knotted and twisted, with toes shaped like suction cups, like I’m an amphibian. I burry them under sheets, pillows, blankets when others are in the room. I’ve meticulously shaped and paint my toenails cherry chocolate at an attempt to make my feet more attractive, but I fail and pick at my toenails when I’m nervous, so much that I am missing a few on each foot. My second toe is longer than my big toe, which has been pointed out to me numerous times, and I curl them into the sole of my foot to hide them.

I wish I could be the woman with beautiful feet who can wear silver bands around their her third toe. But the shape of my foot is blocky and rigid, as if I’m looking at an outline I may have traced of it. They are weak, flat and sore from an inherited arch defect. My classmates made fun of the plastic orthotics I had to wear in my shoes when I was first starting school. Even with the apparatus long since lost or stored away, my feet are no better.

The shades are pulled up in the room he leads me into. I can see out into the main room. The man behind the counter is peering into the cubbyhole. There are stars on his cheeks. My feet are ticklish. I forgot about that until he is rubbing my foot with liquid disinfectant the color of urine. I twitch and giggle. He looks at me and smiles, the mint colored snakes stretching on his neck. “Ticklish?”

Two Hearts One Soul

've toyed with the idea of managing two blogs. One to do with my life as a newfound adult in a new city with a job.

But this is more person(al). A look into work I began as a senior in college not too many months ago. It is raw. It is me. Try it out for size.

*

Anatomy

“Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.”

–Frank Gillette Burgess

Hands

“I really wish I knew who you inherited your hands from. They look nothing like anyone’s hands from my side of the family.” My father slides his own hand, palm down, so my fingers lay a crossed his knuckles, but has nothing else to say.

Adolescence brings puberty and awareness into the body. Mine echoed, reverberated off the sides of my skull, sinking into my brain before I could make any sense of it. Others’ fingers, people I knew, were not long and slender like mine, did not have the lithe, bone thin curves. “ET fingers” my mother used to call them. Fingers that rings slipped off of or held loosely, fingers that I loved to hold palm to palm with boys.

“See? My hands are bigger than yours!”

“Nah, you just have super freaky, long digits, girl.” His hand would drop away from mine and my palm would be instantly cooled without his callused skin on mine. Sweaty palms of pre-teens, glistening where the lines curves and twisted on young skin, lines that gypsies read and would us where life would fail us.

*

It is still a mystery who I have inherited my hands from. They do not resemble my mother’s or fathers nor their parents. But I hope they age the way my grandmother’s hands have. I spent my childhood memorizing every part of them, the surface of her palms and the lines that undulate and swerve across her joints.

Hers are muted and pearly in the light, holding tranquility in her palms, weathered and worn.

Mine showing the beginnings of calluses from erosion on flesh from helping my father in the kitchen, kneading, scrubbing, dicing, the rub of kitchen tools on thin skin.

Her flesh with its balmy folds and puckers seems as if it has just been laid across her bones like paper mache.

Mine are like blown glass, Christmas ornaments, appear delicate and weak but are derived from heat, withstood oven burns, paper cuts and chapped winter air.

My grandmother’s palms trap scents of basil and mint from cooking supper or pulling weeds from her herb garden.

The tips of my fingers and the spaces between them absorb the scent of perfume from hurried spritzes out of the bottle and coffee when I sop up the foam from the bottom of a daily cappuccino. The dull hint of flowers and espresso beans lingers there all day. Sometimes I rest my hand across my mouth, just below my lower lip so I can inhale it.

Her knuckles are like uncultured pearls extracted from fresh oysters, silken with a dull sheen. The skin that stretches over them fades in hue when she makes a fist or curls her fingers around crochet hooks, iridescent in the wash of dull lamp light.

I like how easily my knuckles crack. Using my thumb as leverage, I push each finger into my palm until the joint readjusts with a satisfying pop. This habit makes some cringe and shiver, cover their ears.

“Your gorgeous hands are going to end up ruined and deformed like mine!” my mother shoves her hands under my nose. Her knuckles bulge from the center of her fingers that bend in odd angles. The ovals of her fingernails are misshapen and uneven. My mother’s hands remind me of pieces of shrapnel or knotted roots on an ancient tree. But I think they are beautiful in a way I think driftwood and beach glass is beautiful. Natural and weathered from earth. Imperfect, just like her mothers.

My grandmother’s hands have rivulets of indigo veins that I would squeeze between my small fingertips. I loved how they felt as I pressed them down, cutting off blood flow until I released them, blood filling them plump.

My blood vessels are only visible when I’m cold or vertical. Azure against olive flesh, thin and flowing like raindrop trails on a car window.

My grandmother would encase my hand in hers, enveloping it in a swaddle. I remember her hands always giving off an internal heat that never dulled.

My hands are made like hers, to rub and massage, kneed tense muscles on his torso, roll ovals into the fleshy part of his back with the heels of my palms, scrunch his shoulders with my fingers. I like how his muscles turn into something malleable like dough from the warmth of my hands, like silly putty or clay, allaying under the power of my exertion.

But I hate how they swell in the heat: how the rings that I feel naked without become just snug enough that I have to soap up my hand to slide them off. Typing, writing and cooking are a struggle when my fingers are engorged from summer humidity, refuse to bend, the skin across my knuckles will split open and ooze like blisters, become clumsy, fumble and falter even the most simple tasks like holding a pencil, brushing my teeth, painting my nails. The tool becomes entangled between the spaces of my fingers, falling to the floor or counter where I pick it up only to fumble again. And if I try to make a fist, or spay my fingers across the steering wheel of my car, my flesh stretches across my bones aches more than the joints themselves, like leather or sheep’s skin desiccated on a frame. I hate the hangnails and cracked edges of cuticles that fray near the bed of my nail so that I bite or tear at them until they bleed and well up with blood, until they are sore for days after and I have to rub Vaseline to alleviate and coax them.

Back, Shoulders, Neck:

My collarbone reminds me of the handle on a wooden spoon lying just below the skin that hugs it. I used to envy the wiry girls whose clavicles protrude across the span of their shoulders, holding thin necks straight like pedestals on which their heads balanced. But I’ve grown to like the thickness of my own, how the right side sits somewhat above the left, even when I remember to have good posture. If I crane my neck to either side to loosen tense muscles or glance behind my shoulder, my flesh stretches over the length of the bone that seems to keep my shoulders balanced.

I like the way thin straps from clothing or undergarments lie on the long bone and how the space at the center of my neck where the two clavicles meet is small and delicate. When I am nervous or catch a glance of an intriguing man across the room, I stroke that space with three fingers and let the back of back of my hand slide down the center of my chest.

When I sweat, the outline of my clavicle seems more pronounced where the flesh shines in the places the bone protrudes. This part of my body reminds me of photographs of tribal women in National Geographic, how their bodies are slight but sturdy like a stalk of corn. Survivalist, resilient women who adapt to their environment, become part of the earth.

My shoulder blades draw two diagonal lines that lead to my spine, protruding as if I’m a premature mystical creature with growing wings not yet developed, that they may push or tear through the flesh with a sharp, sudden movement.

There is a spot situated at the far left end of my left shoulder blade on the outline of the bone. A perfect dark circle as if the tip of a marker dotted my skin. The spot, a freckle maybe, moves when I shrug. I’ve claimed that spot as mine. I can make it move and I like to think no one else has a lone freckle placed in there.

All of my strength is concentrated into a pinpoint of the center of my back, to the left of my vertebrae, a tiny pulsing light inside of my body that grows brighter with the amount of vigor I need. It is the power source that feeds my overlapping muscles, striated patterns of tissue soaking up adrenaline, seeping into my limbs when my feet hit the pavement, when my hips sway, drawing ovals in the air when I dance, when my arms hook under his shoulders and clasp onto his bare back, balmy palms and fingers gripping the curve of his back when he is on top of me in the navy blue of a dark room.

My long torso bows and swells. The fluidity of how my flesh moves on top of muscle and bone reminds me of supple clay on a potter’s wheel, molded by careful hands, clay with an uneven surface of dimples and creases, imperfect and natural. After I emerge from the shower, I wrap a towel around my hips, slung low to sit on the frame of my waist and look over my shoulder in the mirror, the skin of my back slick from baby oil, bronze like a dull penny. I like to watch the light catch water droplets that drip from my cropped hair and onto the contours of my shoulders, watch how the water crawls down my back, slithering at an unsteady pace, drawing trails, squiggles of liquid until it reaches the small of my back and disappears.

Where the water left over from the shower collects is where my waist and hips meet, lower sinuating into a slight arch when I stand, forming a notch where men rest their fingertips, the same arch that becomes more severe when I’m lying on my back. It aches when his palm slides up the inside of my thigh, slow, methodical, purposeful, led by the soft knobs of his knuckles, then retracing the path back down with the arc of his pinky, stopping at my knee until my back is contracting against desire, willpower, onto my elbows so the power source glows red, a film of perspiration illuminating the contours of my muscles in the dim light. The small of my back arches into me to a point where my sides and pelvis ache, restraining the rest of me against what I want from him but know I will regret after our clothes have been retrieved off of the floor.

My spine is just barely outlined right beneath my skin a series of small cusps trailing from my neck to my hips. When I hug my knees, curl into myself at night sometimes I can still feel his fingertips ripple over my vertebrae.

There was red wine on my breath. We shared a bottle, that lie on its side on the floor and there is a small stain where he spilled on my sheets. I knew him through his touch and not much else. Conversing through grasping, pulling, caressing, gripping each other’s skin, the soft part of our bodies that welcomed foreign hands. That night I pretended to be asleep as he ran his index finger across the spread of my shoulders, down the crescent of my spine and over my ribs. His knuckle thumped over the notches and grooves of bone outlined through my skin.

“It’s like the skin on your back is so much thinner than anyone else’s I’ve ever seen, like it should be on the inside of your body, not outside protecting what’s in there.” He reached around and poked my side just below my ribs. He knew I wasn’t asleep. I could feel his hand spread across my back. It rose and fell with my inhales and exhales. “I can feel your bones when you breathe.” I shrugged and kept my back to him, uncurling myself slightly. He removed his hand traced my pronounced muscles with the pad of his thumb. “God, your back is like those sculptures you see in museums, you know the Greek ones made of marble or whatever? I never liked them, so unrealistic you know? But god, your back looks just like the back of one of those sculptures.” This struck me.

“Yeah? That’s new.” I reached around my waist and placed my hand on top of his, guiding it up to my shoulders. He squeezed the tense muscle that slopes down from my neck.

“I’m serious.” I turned over to face him. His fingers slid over my collarbone and down my chest

“Flip over.” His eyes questioned my request but he does it anyway, his back toward me. My knees always fit into the space where his bent in. He slept that way, curled into himself like me. “My grandmother used to draw words on my back and I’d have to guess what she wrote.” I traced squiggled down the center of his back following his spine

“That’s not a word.”

“I know, I’m thinking.” I scratched his back while I thought of a word. He liked that, made a murmured grunt like a dog. When I chose my word I took my pinky and traced the letters E-R-O-S diagonally near his waist. We talked about Greek mythology, the levels of love. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Eros. The lowest rung on the latter, infatuation, mindless physicality. Drives a person insane sometimes.