Living Breath - Experimental Autobiography

Mar 30, 2008 - 20:02 PM PST

What's the first thing you say when someone asks you to talk about yourself? The city you were born in, maybe. Your age, okay. Favorite color. Hobbies. Is that really who you are, a collection of facts to be listed in no particular order? Where do you start when you sit down to write out the story of your life? The beginning, right. I guess. Because that's where things started, you say.

But no. Not really. Your life doesn't always start at the beginning, that moment when you take your first breath. Life starts there, yes. But your life, that's different. Few people, if any, are actually living their life when they take their first breath. There's the first breath, then there's the first living breath.

Are you getting this down? Am I speaking too quickly, are my words too heavy already? Good. Fast and hard. We won't start at the beginning, because I'm not sure when or where mine occurred, and the end won't really be an ending, because I'm not ready to give up on this just yet.


First there are a few things I have to clear up. You probably wouldn't notice if I didn't mention it, because you can't tell when you look at me, when you read my words or hear my voice, but there are things happening underneath my skin that you must know about. The truth is always underneath. I can't explain it, I can't stop it, but there it is. And so this is me. My Truth. You'll need to know that there is more than one "me". There is more than one way for me to explain myself and write out the story of my life. My "you", my "I", my "he", "she", "we", or "it" – they are all, in some way, a part of me. Selfish, self-righteous, call it what you will, but this is my story, so when you meet each one and hear their different voices, please don't forget that they all still belong to the same person, and there's a reason each one was included in this story. I assure you, there is nothing random about any of this. This is the story of my life. There are questions, there are thoughts, there are pieces of me scattered between these lines. Consider it a letter I've written to myself in the late hours of the night, to remind myself when I wake up, of what it was like to be me in the moment I took my first real breath. Dear Self.

*****

You told me something one night. Do you remember? It was late. You said that you once overheard someone say that writers are terrified of the real world, so they spend all of their time on the outside, trying to tame that which they don't understand.
You spent hours trying to decide if that applied to you. It made you think of the lion tamers at the circus, made you wonder which one you were…the lion or the lion tamer…even though I know that some days you think you aren't strong or brave enough to be either. Some days you see yourself as the shadow backstage, standing still on the sidelines as the show goes on without you.

You want to be the lion so desperately, I can see it. And some days you are. These are the days you feel strong, the days you want to do everything and go and be everywhere all at once, so you can flash your lion eyes at the world and watch as it surrenders to your every desire. You'd like to be the lion tamer, too, that's true, because it involves power and control, and everybody wants that, but I know that if you were given the choice, nine times out of ten you'd choose to be the lion. It's the passion. The savage fierceness of an animal, that's what you want for yourself. For your life.

You have the eyes of a lion. So revealing, people say. Fierce with every thought and emotion. Your eyes, they show everything. Especially on your weak days. Hazel. A mix of green and brown. More brown than green, except when you cry. That's when the green comes out. Not many people know that, because not many people see you cry, but it's true. Maybe that's the animal in you, the speckles of green in your eyes. That's the color of the perfectionist within, the ferocity that builds up inside of you each day, drives you mad and leaves you pacing at night, until you wake up one morning, head heavy on your pillow and body tangled in your sheets, to find that you don't think you're strong enough anymore.

You're backstage. You're wishing with every bone inside of you that you could move into the spotlight, but you just stand there, still in the shadows. You don't move because you're scared and it would just take too much energy. Too much strength you've got to save.

You've got to learn that no one has the strength to be a lion everyday, not even you. You can't be courageous and in control all of the time. Think about when you were little. Think back to a time when you weren't afraid to be afraid, and you didn't care if people saw you cry.

See that little blonde girl? Sitting in the corner underneath a desk in her mother's busy office, legs crossed, pulled in front and wrapped or twisted together, like a pretzel. See her? Head bent. Lips pursed in concentration over the blank face of a crisp 8 ½ by 11. She's drawing her favorite picture. The palm tree picture. A small island, some waves in the distance, a sun setting on the horizon. We'll call it a seascape, that's more poetic. But, actually, what we call it doesn't really matter. All I want you to remember is that, back then, you were never afraid to draw the same picture twice.

Sitting in your black leather office chair now, legs pulled up from the floor, bent at the knee and twisted to cross at the ankles. Head bent down. Lips pursed in concentration, eyes focused on covering up mistakes already made in permanent blue ink; you're trying too hard.

Look down, she's underneath the table. Pretzel legs. Same focused eyes, hazel. Be her again. Draw the same picture twice, if you have to. The mistakes that happen in the middle of the story are the things that make the ending beautiful. If you mess up and can't get the palm tree to stand quite like you want it to, leave it.


And where did that tree come from? When was the first time you drew it, and why did you keep drawing it after that? Trees don't grow up on their own – sprout up from nowhere, simply waking up one day to find themselves alone on a page. Nothing is ever that simple. You know that – you make it that way. You're the one always lost inside of your thoughts, pacing back and forth between the walls of your memory, like you're stuck in some kind of maze of analysis that you wouldn't leave even if you could find your way out. It's what you do – think.

Thinking complicates. That's why they tell people – like skydivers, for example, "don't think, just jump." Thinking can be the father of fear. That's why life scares the shit out of you. You think too much. You've never been skydiving. If you thought about jumping, the plane would be more than a plane, and the harsh reality of the ground below would be more than enough to make you wonder whether you were living your life the way you were meant to.

Look at what you're doing here. You've proven my point for me. You started with a tree, got caught inside of your maze, and now you have yourself jumping out of a plane. That's all thought. This is all analysis. Look at your handwriting. It starts out tightly structured, yes. The tilting, slanted up and down letters start out perfectly formed, because you're thinking about every word you're writing down, you're measuring each one up against the others. It starts like that, but eventually everything loosens up a bit. That's when I know you're not thinking so much anymore – you're writing. You're losing yourself between the lines on the page; I can tell because the words and letters you are forming don't fit within them anymore. Write outside of the lines. Stop crossing things out the way that you do – making sure every syllable is hidden beneath the swirly blue sheet you throw over it. Jump.

It's the tree again. You're wondering how you ended up here, in this rambling maze of thought, when you started with the intention of making some kind of connection between the external world around you and all of the different people, the different versions of you, that live inside of your thoughts. You're wondering what your father might have to do with the fact that you always draw the same picture, what it was in your childhood that made you want to draw a palm tree, and what that might say about you now. You're making it more than it has to be, analyzing how all of your pieces might fit into each other, be the causes of one another. Why a palm tree? Why not?

You've probably envisioned yourself as that tree, blamed your father for making you the way that you are – a tree not quite tall or lean enough and planted here, alone, instead of back in your childhood where you would and would not rather be. I know you and I know you're making this more than it is. Want to talk about Dad? Talk about him. Jump.

*****

"Dad" was the character with the guitar, by the fire pit in the backyard full of freshly planted palm trees and a newly constructed swimming pool, strumming away and belting the words to songs with titles I can never remember now, but always recognize by the feeling they resurrect from the bottom of my soul. Sometimes the guitar wasn't needed; the melody created itself, and improvised words echoed down the hallway and through the walls of an otherwise quiet, orderly, and strictly organized household. That was the voice I loved the most. The one that had time to be unorganized. No matter how I might have denied it through my "too cool" teenage years, that was always that voice of yours that I loved the most, Dad.

Often, when I heard your car pull up after a late night at the office, and I could just barely make out the jingling of your keys in the lock at the front door, I liked to guess, when you walked through that hallway, whether you'd be "Dad" for the rest of the night, or if you'd be the man with whom I associated a biting business tongue and a propensity towards unpredictable reactions. I grew and learned the proper ways to manage and manipulate both, until I could determine the difference between the two of you simply by the way your footsteps echoed off the tiled floors.

Born as an only child, my life became a perpetual pattern of threes. Dad, Mom, did you ever ask if I wanted to be a part of your party of three? I don't remember agreeing to anything. I would know if I had signed something, a contract, perhaps, that was written to keep me legally bound and wrapped in your suffocating safety blanket. I never asked for that and I'm sure that I never would have agreed to it. So why always with the three? Our family dinners were an every night event, a "must" within our system, and while some were full of teasing and laughter, there were just as many that were silent, heavy with the clinking of glasses or the cutting of knives and forks against dinner plates.

Then there were the ones with endings that included overemphasized trails of footsteps upstairs and the slamming of doors, sometimes belonging to you or Mom, but most often belonging to me, especially during my early teenaged years.

Few others saw that particular you, the one that came out after an especially long or drawn-out day at the office. They were most familiar with the Dad of the warm summer nights of my childhood, the bubbly and ambassador-like Dad that knew every word to most every Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen song. That was the Dad who would barbeque any number of hamburgers for any number of people at any hour of a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. You would take us, me and the other Seymour Street neighborhood girls, to the park or to the beach, and when we grew older but were still too young to drive, to the mall or the movie theater. You were the dad who wanted to help with math homework, who wanted to fix every problem, math related or not, with a solution that involved a tandem brain-storming session fueled by several scoops piled precariously on a cone from the old school Thifty's ice cream counter. That was you, Dad. At least one version.

Did you know about all of the different versions of me? Didn't you notice, Dad, those days when I no longer was Randi, but instead Randi, the Cantrell's only daughter? Did you want that for me, Mom?

When I was little, we used to watch The Wizard of Oz and eat Jiffy Pop every weekend while Dad was at the office. Remember that, Mom? I couldn't pronounce the title correctly, but when I asked you to watch "Witch", you knew what I meant. I'm not sure how long this tradition lasted, how old I was when it ended, but I never tired of it; I was in love with Glenda and her puffy pink dress, with the Tin Man, the Scarecrow. The Lion. We stopped watching it when I started having nightmares. The Wicked Witch of the West was at our front door. The Wicked Witch was in our living room. In the closet. Under my bed.


A few months ago, I watched Witch again for the first time in years. Curled underneath a mountain of blankets while my room mates were in class or at work, I waited for my old love to come back. Lying there with only my face uncovered, I wondered why, of all the things she could have asked the Wizard for, Dorothy just wanted to find her way back home.

I thought about what I would have asked him.

I fell asleep before she made it home.

Dorothy. Do you wish I was more like her? The perfect daughter, wanting nothing but to be back home in the safety of her parent's arms.

The two of you used to say that God only gave you one child, because he gave you the best he had, the perfect one. Would you have said that, had you known the image it created in my mind and the pressure I broke myself under by trying to live up to it? You put me high on that shelf reserved for untouchables – the delicate, breakable things. Would you have done that if you had imagined that there was a possibility I might, one day, come crashing down?


You don't know because you weren't there. You never lived inside of my head, underneath my skin, between the walls of the maddening maze I constructed for myself. You never heard about that particular me, never met her, because you never saw me sit on a stranger's couch and pay to cry in secret for an hour at a time once a week.

I never told you about these things: the night I drove to Hollywood and back for no reason. One gas tank. No stops, except when I pulled off the freeway because I wanted to hear the echo of my footsteps on Sunset Boulevard at 3AM. The night I couldn't sleep, thought it a good idea to wash down a handful of sleeping pills with a couple of White Russians, and woke up around a day and a half later, tangled in my own skin and shivering beneath a pile of blankets. The world tasted like sleep for days.
Or the time I almost flooded the bathroom in the house on Medford because I couldn't decide how much water I was going to need to drown the noise inside my mind. My "sleep-overs" at a "friend's house" in Point Loma. The time I made out with a complete stranger. These things don't exist. Not to you.


But the street I grew up on, you're familiar with that. The cul-de-sac. The bicycles, the pink or purple ones with the woven baskets attached to the front and the ribbons hanging from the handlebars. You remember those because you bought them for me.

The salmon painted house with the palm trees in the front yard, that's where I lived the first thirteen years of my life. You know everything about those years, because you were there, and we were all still together – the Three. If you came home and I wasn't there, in those days you knew that I'd be next door, inside the white two-story with the teal trim to the left, playing with the three sisters, Ashley, Jenna, and Heather. Or I'd be next door in the house to the right, the cream colored one with smoky gray/blue accents. Katie and Sarah's house. There was a lot of playing on that cul-de-sac, especially in the early years. There were games of Hide and Go Seek, Sardines, Truth or Dare, Beauty Shop. In the summer, the cul-de-sac was a camp ground, tents set up behind any one of the three houses, marshmallows and graham crackers littering the backyard, and bubbly, hitch-pitched laughter echoing late into the warm summer night's air. Those are the things you like to remember, because those are the things I've told you about. The things you saw with your own eyes.

I don't think you ever stopped seeing me as that little girl, Dad. Which is why you've never met the other versions of me. You wouldn't understand each other.

Remember when I dyed my hair? What did you think the night I drove home from my apartment on campus to show you what I had done to your blonde haired, hazel eyed prized only daughter? Do you know what I told Jessica? You've never met Jessica, she's my stylist, she dyes my hair. I want to be dark, I said.


And what did you think, a year later, when I chopped it all off? You loved my long hair. Told me I should wear it down more often, those mornings I kept pulling it back into a bun before I left for school. I knew what you'd say when I came home and there was only half of it left. Half of me left, the me you knew.

Those were the days I decided I wasn't going to fall from your shelf. If I was ever going to come crashing down and break into pieces, I decided it was going to be because I jumped for myself, not because I toppled underneath the weight of your words. Those days, I was learning to breathe.

*****

She doesn't like to talk about those things, this only-child/"perfect"-daughter, but I told her she can't escape them. These things are all a part of you, I said. Your pieces, fitting together and blending good and bad between your bones. You can't pick and choose which bones you use, and which you hide in your closet. You can't forget your fears, your recurring nightmares, your first heartbreak, and first self inflicted wound. It doesn't work that way.

Somewhere along the timeline of her life, she learned that it was better to listen than to speak. To write words down than to say them out loud. She's convinced that there is more power to a word that is printed on a page. It's permanent. It doesn't disappear, mixing with and dissolving into the air after it's spoken – never to be remembered quite as it was in its original form.

The fact that people may never read it, well, that doesn't seem to bother her. Or maybe she hasn't thought about that yet. What am I saying, of course she's thought about that. Like Dad would say to her, "…because you're a thinker, like your father."

You never asked to be like your father. You said that already. Were you Daddy's Little Girl? I remember you wanting to be you, a little girl insisting on the fact that she was no one's girl but her own. I see you now, though. Sometimes I catch you, watching yourself in the mirror, tracing your nose back to him, covering your lips with lipstick because they look too much like his. And what about Mom? You haven't mentioned her that much. She had a part in all of this. You have her eyes – hazel. Her skinny pianist fingers, small and breakable wrists. Some days you have her nerves, tightly wound and delicate.

We all would like our life better if we could take out the deeper stuff, pick and choose which threads we cut, unravel, and remove from our tightly woven stories. The fear would be first to go. The regrets, the unachieved goals, the mistakes and bad decisions. The insecurities, the doubt, the "I" statements. You would be a whole different person if you left those out. You can't deconstruct your body and then put it back together as the one you always wished you had. Your bones are there because they're yours – they fit snug between your joints for a reason. If you leave them out, you won't fit. You'll be an old puzzle that was left unfinished because some of its pieces were lost over the years.

Be whole. Leave in the insecurities, the doubt, the "I" statements that make you who you are. You didn't want to, but you talked about the then. What about the now? Where are you? Who are you now?

*****

I feel small here. In this world, every day I feel small. Today, a Thursday, in between classes, standing in the shadow of a giant concrete bear, I feel smaller than usual. Today, in this grey sky afternoon, I am small.

I feel out of place, too. I suppose I have reason to feel that way. Me, a writer, lying flat on my stomach on the concrete next to some grass, in the center of the engineering department courtyard, at a science and engineering dominated university. Why am I here? I don't think I've ever asked myself that question. I guess I just assumed that if I ended up somewhere, there had to be a good reason I was there. That's not a good answer. Bear, why are we here? It's cold outside today.

I feel cold inside. These science buildings give me goose bumps. They make me want to hibernate in a cave. Maybe with a bear, in the cave, because caves are cold, too, but bears are warm. I could snuggle next to you for warmth, Bear.

I feel cold all of the time, not just today. My room mates blame me for our skyrocketing SDG+E bill, because I always turn our heater on full blast, especially at night and in the mornings - the loneliest parts of the day for me. Mom says I'm always cold because I'm only skin and bones. I laugh when she says that, partly because I don't know how to respond, but mostly because I don't agree. My laughter hides the fact that I'm actually wondering what that would be like – to be only skin and bones – to be skinny. Bony. Sometimes I move away when Mom tries to hug me, when she tries to warm me up. Change the subject. Distract her. I can tell the difference between a hug, and a pair of worried hands wrapping around me, trying to see if they can still feel my shoulder blades through my jacket. A pair of hands telling me that maybe it's time to go see Loni - pay to sit on her strange couch again.

I can feel my bones against the concrete that I lie on. I'm wearing a black shirt, resting on my stomach, my notebook is in front of my face, and my chin is propped up, using my book bag as a pillow. I can feel my shirt getting dirty against my skin. More dirty with every word I write. Maybe I'll leave the dirt there – evidence of a cold winter's day when I lied on my stomach, in complete surrender, at the feet of a giant bear – and survived.

What holds you together, Bear? Who created you, only to abandon you? To leave you among these strangers – these scientists - who rush by everyday without a word?

I never know what holds me together, how my different pieces fit into each other, or why they work the way that they do. You're much bigger, much taller, much stronger than I am. When I was a child, if someone was taller than I was, I was supposed to believe that they knew more, and that they had all of the answers. So, tell me, what holds me together on this bone-chilling Thursday?

It could be my bones, yes. Or my skin, wrapped tightly around them in such a possessive and overly protective way. Maybe it's my clothes - these jeans, this dusty black t-shirt, green zipped up jacket, and tightly wrapped cashmere scarf, holding me whole here as I sit with this cold concrete earth beneath me. I suppose I'll figure out if that's true when I take them off to wash them, if I ever do.

I bet these scientists and engineers could tell me how my different pieces work together, how they fit, and what exactly it is that keeps them from falling apart on Thursdays. Maybe I'll march right into one of these buildings, one of these cold science buildings, and ask someone. There are plenty to choose from. No shortage here. There has to be someone inside one of them that has all of my answers. After all, innovation happens here. Don't laugh, I didn't make that up. There's a sign, hanging from one of the lamp posts. That's what it says.

Am I an innovator? As a writer, aren't I a scientist of sorts? Am I still a writer if I drop my pen here, leave it on this concrete, and stand up to walk into one of these caves to find warmth?

I'm sorry, Bear. I've been neglecting you, with all of this talk, all of these questions. Let's talk more about you. It's your turn, Bear. I'm sure you have some questions of your own.


Maybe I should give you a name.

*****

Strange thing, a name. Determines who we are, how we are known by the external world. Our life-long label, and yet, it is given to us by someone else.

What would you have named yourself? If you changed your name today, would the world see you differently tomorrow?

But then, do you even wonder how people see you? Looking in a mirror is one thing, but looking at yourself through the eyes of another, well, that's completely different. What would you see, if you could be a stranger for a moment, and watch yourself from the shadows? I always wonder what first impressions I would have when I shook hands with myself for the first time.

Everyday I see strangers pass on the street, in the grocery store, on my way to class. In a moment, a face will look familiar, until it passes and I realize it was only my imagination, me wanting to be connected with some world other than the one I hide within the four walls of my thoughts.

Would I recognize myself as I passed by on the street? Would I know which version of me it was, walking by? And if we bumped into each other, would we stop to make small talk about the weather?

I wonder, if I said "Nice to meet you," whether I would mean it.