t h e m e
a great black wave
 everything in life is luck
lindsey | 21 | texas
drinkyourjuice: Being read to aloud is one of the more sacred rituals I’ve found in this world. I was making the bed alone the other night, which is probably the most simultaneously lonely and accomplished I’ve felt in a long time, and as I was scooting the queen bedframe away from the wall in order to wedge myself in and stretch the fitted sheet into position, I got to thinking about things that aren’t quite the same without another person around. It sounds more sad than it felt, but between the crafting of hospital corners and folds at the pillow line, there was that quiet consideration of times where the performance of a task makes you aware of your singularity. Makes you feel the place where an extra set of hands and feet and eyes used to be. I grew up with two very hardworking parents, and for a long time no siblings, so most of the adult attention I got as a child was relegated to learning-based activities. Bedtime stories and classwork. Every night before sleep my mother would let me into her bed, wrap her arm around me — my head somehow both in her armpit and (probably painfully) on her breast, in what we called the “special spot” — and read a few chapters from a book of my choosing. I remember blowing through the entire Boxcar Children series in particular, how everything in their little impoverished world seemed so perfectly rationed. Berries and milk and glassware and a fun terrier to play with. The Boxcar Children were Anthropologie before Anthropologie was Anthropologie. But more than anything I remember my cheek on her chest and the vibration of her voice, a voice that the older I get I hear more and more of in my own, as she slowly enunciated those twee syllables and tried to drink up these few hours with her kid. I’d sleep in those socks with the grips at the bottom so I wouldn’t slip when I ran on the hard wood and, somehow, I’d always wake up in my own bed. In the second grade we did a reading exercise where, one by one, we went to the back of the classroom with a teacher’s aide and read a book about a bear into a tape recorder. Then the aide played it back to us so we could learn from our own stuttering and slip-ups. I remember loving it, relishing it, and making voices for all the different characters. And when I reached the end without having made a single blunder, the aide smiled and called me a “good reader.” I believed her. In middle school my best friend and I would open a Word document and take turns writing a paragraph at a time. One person typing while the other had her back turned. Then we’d scroll down so only the last line of text was showing, and switch positions. It’d be up to the other girl to pick up where the narrative left off — filling in any blanks there were, throwing in a ton of poop and boobs and tampon strings for good measure. Once we’d filled a few pages, we’d print them out and lie on our backs on the green basement carpet, reading them slowly to each other like religious texts, cackling at our own jokes and snarfing Sprite into the throw pillows. I found a Penthouse Forum in my much-older cousin’s closet when I was in the 7th grade and it was my first encounter with printed porn. I’d been with other, younger kids at the time, who seemed weirded out by the entire notion of sex narrative, but I was riveted. I stole the tiny magazine and brought it back to my beach house — where rotations of my thirty cousins would file in and out over the course of a given summer — and for weeks, packed into a pine-paneled New England bunk-bed style room with four to six other sunburned Irish Catholic children, I’d wait for our parents to go to bed and then pull the Penthouse out from between my cot and the wall. I’d read the stories about chance encounters with nymphos in restaurant bathrooms and inexplicable gym shower orgies to a rapt and slightly disgusted audience of quiet, ceiling-locked eyes, and then drift to sleep wondering what an orgasm was. One night in college the first boy I ever loved and I went out to dinner and got wine drunk (we passed for adults! at the nicest restaurant in town!). I had a reading afterward, and I stood at the podium reciting my words — the words I knew by heart — into the microphone, and just smiling that unabashed 19-and-don’t-know-how-much-this-will-suck-when-it’s-over smile out into the audience at him, and when I got home that night he had lit tea lights all over my piece of shit dorm room and had a box of chocolate cake waiting on my bedside table for me. I remember fat Maine snow hitting the window like moths and being spooned while he snored lightly and I read “Cranford” with a British accent. And now I’m an adult, I guess. Or that ugly pre-adult tadpole with four legs and most of its facial features, but still holding onto the tail somehow. Still just hideous enough to not be ready yet. And when that bed was made the other night — once it was tight and military-grade and I’d climbed inside — I turned on my lamp and read to myself for a while before I set my alarm. Just for that vibration on the pillow. [image via]



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