Because You Asked For It

First a note: I'm shutting down my Facebook, so if you use my posts on there to find my blog, you obviously won't be seeing them anymore. You can sign up to get emails when I post, if you want to keep following me, in the box to the right on your screen. Otherwise, let me know and I'll be sure to let you know when I put up new poems/posts. You can email me at emilyymariee@gmail.com if you want to be on that list of emails.

Now for the real stuff...

Listen to The Shins cover The Postal Service's "We Will Become Silhouettes" and hear these words...

How do I know I'm a "writer," and not a writer? I just watched The Simpsons episode "The Book Job" featuring Neil Gaiman and spoofing the Ocean's trilogy, and realized that as Lisa was trying to write the next great teen series, she looked like me.

I've got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water, and pictures of you.

And I'm not coming out until this is all over.

She reorganizes her CD collection. I create a new Pandora station. She goes to a coffee shop, as do I. She watches the entire series of Friday Night Lights, and I'm watching her. We get mad at sellouts, we play with pencils, we kill time, we write next to nothing.

I know, it's stupid that I'm using Lisa Simpson as a metaphor for my life. I get it. And really, I don't even watch The Simpsons. I was just procrastinating... the life of a "writer." (But give me a little slack: Neil Gaiman was in it, so how could I not watch, right?)

So I'm taking my headphones and a notebook out, and I'm going to start writing a story that's not quite fiction, and I don't know where it will go yet. But I've been asked for it, by my stepfather, and an ex, and some boy in some city some where, and by the smiley-est girl in all of Colorado, and by my own need for recognition, and by that feeling in my heart when I believe in greatness because the right song is on and I close my eyes and my hair is curled and I feel light and like flying.

Because you asked for it, I will create, and I will not abandon my own pages this time.

I don't know what it's about yet, but I know I'll know when it's finished. So now just for the start.

You're right, I'm not giving you much here. But I'll tell you this: today's the day I start the next big thing. It's a story of a girl who's almost me, but not me enough to be somebody else so I can make up all the wonderful and awful things that happen to her.

She loves going to the movies alone because she hopes to see some grumpy boy on a date, looking miserable, so she can nickname him Holden. And she's unstable as Esther Greenwood, but she'd never try to kill herself. And she's just realized that she has faith in herself, really, for the first time, and has moments of infinite feeling, like Charlie the wallflower. She's sweet as Scout, and gentle as her "Hey, Boo." She's as adventurous as Sal Paradise, and thinks about the sadness and wonderfulness of life like him too. She's reaching into something bigger than herself and trying, like Nick Carraway, to look like she belongs.

She's a philosopher, a heartbreaker, a beauty, a poet, a lover. She has been let down, and she is ready to surpass her highest highs. She is, quite simply, a real girl.

She isn't me. But I'll tell her story. I'll write her name.

And today's the day I begin.

Had You Followed Me Home

An old poem: for October and November, for quirks, for happy times and timely goodbyes.

Had You Followed Me Home
For all the things that never happened with you,
and all the things that shouldn't have happened to anyone else.

If you had followed me here, we’d be in the breaking leaves
behind my parents’ house—the dying earrings of the cottonwood
litter the grass, the chopped onions from a mower blade in a lawn salad.
Your warm Pacific blood would move slowly and
you’d beg my worn Midwestern hands to assure you—
You’d stand, swirled by yard dusts and flakes,
and I’d touch your knee and smile with my father’s laughter
when we’d meet him for pizza on an October Thursday in Chicago.
We’d see my high school friends and sing our way to the all-night diner
that’s been made-over (purple ceilings and yellow walls) by the
Greeks who’ve owned it for the last five-hundred years or so.
Holding the menu half open, you’d order—no, ask for—chocolate cake and
my friends would taunt and tease you, actions typically reserved for me.
I’d swipe a taste of the frosting and bury myself in the corner of the booth,
green glows for irises at the impossibility of you on the vinyl with me.
Had you followed me home, you’d have seen Chicago play a symphony of who I am:
the Metra hum beats percussion with State Street brass and theater light strings
and my hometown, my mother’s house—its mellow reeds play woodwind tones.
In grass under cotton shade, we—with closed eyes—would float on
the rising of the suburban orchestra and then, with the birth of these thoughts,
you’d tune the masterpiece and call it love.