A Dreadful Hoax, They Made You Miss Everything
July 9, 2009
Posted by Olga at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The Story Of The Key
My wonderful dear friend Allan Amato took this photograph of me a couple of months ago. I put it online today, and someone said, "I know the story of the key."
I'd forgotten what she meant: I'd shown her a private story, years ago, that I'd written. It probably doesn't need to be private anymore. Sometimes privacy has an expiration date.
Here it is, written in September 2005.
---
i.
The earth was damp, and dark. My hands sunk into the dirt, fingers deep in the soil like roots. My skin felt cool there, and clean, though my arms were stained black from the ground.
When you grow up, you forget things like that. The way that dirt can make you feel clean.
I was eleven, and my backyard may as well have been a forest. An acre stretch, the yard was covered with green, and climbing trees, and patches of dry mysterious earth where nothing grew, and rabbits, and turtles, and flowers. It was mystical. I would spend hours exploring the tiny world of the fraction of land. I remember a whole day dedicated to watering a patch of ground, digging, and scraping the dirt into mounds and valleys, just to see how the river cut across the brown.
I had already discovered boys, and sex. A silver box was hidden under my bed, filled with cigarettes, and condoms, and Halloween candy. I had not had sex yet, but I knew condoms were necessary, and the cigarettes made me feel more grown-up. I loved inhaling the smell of unlit cigarettes, the taste of the tobacco in my mouth. I never lit them.
Although I was prepared to have sex for the first time at any moment, I still played with dolls. I believed firmly that my dolls were alive, but in a secret doll pact could not reveal this to me. I was sure they moved about the room while I was away, and often tried to sneak into my bedroom to catch them in the act.
I never did.
But I believed. As strongly as I believed there was magic in the earth behind my house, that Halloween candy should be rationed for months to savor the occasion, and that I would be deflowered before my twelfth birthday.
On a day that was warm and wet, I sat on the ground, fingers scraping against the soil. My nails would catch bits of hard clay, and rock, and eventually struck an unfamiliar shape. I dug around the shape, wiping the crusted earth from its surface.
It was a key.
An old skeleton key, rust-brown and small, fitting just inside my hand. I held it with wonder, and knew that it was magic.
I walked into the front yard, and climbed the tree that sprawled and leaned against the side of the garage. Up in the bough of the tree, a giant padlock was fixed around one of the branches. It was a modern padlock, and the skeleton key, falling short of it's name, did not fit. The tree branch had swollen and grown into the metal, the padlock constricting the wood. I stared for a long time at the key and padlock, and thought that something important had happened, although I couldn't figure out what.
Years passed, and I kept the tiny key in a plastic pink jewelry box. I reached high school. I met a boy and fell in love, and I gave him tiny tokens of my affection. One day I reached in the back of my plastic pink jewelry box and removed the key, giving it to him as a gift. He tied a black silk cord to it and wore it around his neck.
One day he gave me a present: a tiny rust skeleton key found in an old antique shop. It was different than mine, slightly bigger, but they were nearly twins. He gave it to me on a cord, and I wore it around my neck.
There were no locks between us, only keys.
ii.
At twenty I worked full time from home doing various graphic design projects for a firm in Los Angeles.
I had taken up smoking, and decided I hated condoms. I had lost the little key that I had worn around my neck for so long.
He was leaving me.
I spent too much time alone, and wondered if I was brave enough to leave him, or leave the world. I was tired, and had lost most of my magic. I wrote when I wasn't crying, I cried when I couldn't write anymore.
She was thinner, and smaller and more beautiful than me. She made him shine.
I needed to scrape together some magic to get through this. I reached back into my childhood, and made a decision. The next day a tall man tattooed a key between my breasts, where the key he gave me used to hang.
I wouldn't ever lose it again.
iii.
Now. I am in the dark with a stranger, and he is kissing my chest slowly, his hands soft on my rib cage. He stops and looks at the key inked on my skin, tracing it with his fingers. He is memorizing it with his gaze, and I can tell he is wondering what it means.
"I open things." I tell him.
He nods, solemn, unquestioning. Of course I open things. I opened him.
He leans forward silently, pressing his lips to my key.
I am three thousand miles from my first love, and the key that he carries to remind him of me is no longer around his neck. I meet men shaped like locks and fall in love with the way they open.
I fall in love with them.
I push through my life like doors and everything slides out of the way, clicks undone and gives way under my hands.
When I was a little girl, I found my key, and when I became older my first love taught me what it was for.
Posted by Olga at 6:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Fourth Of July
July 8, 2009
It was early Saturday morning. The three of us has just climbed onto a sandbar at the edge of the river, trailing our inner tubes behind us. "Can you see a way up?" I asked.They shook their heads, and Tom went off in one direction, and Allan in another. I watched Allan as he gripped the giant boulder with his hands and hoisted himself up the ten or so feet to the top. "I can't see the road from here," he called down, "but it looks like we could climb it pretty easily."
We had just floated down the Feather River on a makeshift raft, two inner tubes tied together with bungee cords. I straddled the center and they sat on either side, taking in some of the most ridiculously beautiful scenery I've ever seen. The current stole us down through a cathedral of trees, and mountains, and perfect sky.
And now we were here. We'd gone too far down the river and passed our campsite, but we figured we could always find the main road back-- the road went parallel to the river, after all. We'd left behind an entire festival of tents covered in twinkly lights, stages draped in lanterns and colored cloth, and hundreds of excited people all gathered together to celebrate the summer.
But we wanted to go hiking.
"Tom!" I called out. "Allan found a way up!" He grabbed the inner tubes and followed me, as my fingers sunk into the rock, climbing up. Thank God Sam decided he needed to teach me how to rock climb three years ago. This was the first time I'd ever used it in the wild.
I shimmied up, and Tom after me, and the three of us proceeded up towards the plateau we could see a little ways up the mountain, figuring that must be the road. The mountain was a near vertical incline, but it wasn't that far up, we thought. I was kind of proud we'd gotten this far.
Earlier, the morning had found me sitting cross-legged on a rock in the middle of the river, the raging current creating my own personal wake. I'd decided I'd wanted to meditate there, thirty or so feet out, and was sitting near level with the surface of the water. The walk across was slow and careful, thinking all the while of Philippe Petit. If he could tightrope between impossibly tall buildings, I could wade through a mildly angry river. People laughed and smiled and waved when they saw me from the shore. I'd thought I was being pretty brave.
The three of us had talked about near-death misses riding down lazily on the inner tube, far from our campsite, chasing adventure. I'd thought I was being even braver, then.
But then I found myself scrambling up the side of the mountain, which we quickly realized was made of shale: each step dislodged rock, and sand, and meant we nearly slipped and fell. There was little to hold on to, and slipping could mean a twenty foot fall. Or thirty feet. Or forty.
At forty, Tom took a step and made a noise. "What?" I asked, a little panicked.
"Rattlesnake."
"WHAT?"
"I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. It's okay though. It's more scared of me than I am of it," he said, poking at it with a stick. I could see the snake from where I was standing, curled back into itself and hissing. I was suddenly terrified.
"Can you.. stop that?" I asked.
"Why?"
"I'm suddenly scared it's going to run away from you towards me."
Tom stopped, and I slowly, ever more slowly, climbed upwards and away from him, noticing the mountain was getting steeper and steeper. Allan was still fifteen or so feet behind, wrestling with how to climb holding the inner tube around his waist, all the while nursing a bad hip.
I decided not to mention the snake.
Allan got up to where Tom and I were, and we stood on the first patch of almost flat ground since starting the climb. "Do you see the road yet?"
"...No."
"Maybe one of us should go ahead and check, so we can see how much farther we've got left." We had already been hiking upwards for thirty minutes. The river was already distant, and small. Tom decided to go on ahead. Allan and I stood, resting. I told him about the snake.
"It's too bad there's no reception out here. I could be twittering this," I said, laughing.
"...Yeah. I can just imagine," said Allan. "'RATTLESNAKE. LOLZ.'"
"Doesn't look like Tom's finding a road, either. I guess... we could go back down? We'd have to slide down, I guess."
"Yeah, if we can just not get torn up by the shale and manage to avoid the snake while we slide down fifty feet, it'll probably be fine."
Tom came back. He'd been gone fifteen minutes. He hadn't found a road. Allan pointed out something. One the way up, we'd driven through several tunnels that cut through the mountains. It was entirely possible we'd managed to climb up the only spot where there was no road, but a tunnel. We had literally been climbing OVER the road for the last hour.
Fuck.
"Well. I could see the train tracks from up there. We could probably keep climbing up until we got to the tracks and follow them back to the camp."
"...Hike...along the train tracks? On the side of a mountain?"
"Or we could go back down. Your choice."
"Are the tracks close?"
"...No. But I can see them from up there."
"Closer than the river?"
"Yeah, I think so," said Tom.
"I vote train tracks. Might as well keep going up," Allan said.
We're fucked either way, aren't we?" I asked.
"Pretty much."
"Jesus. Okay. Train tracks, I guess. I'm just scared I'm going to fall."
"I'll walk behind you," Tom offered. I took several steps, and slid.
"FUCK."
My hands were losing their grip and I didn't have a toehold. We were seventy feet or so up by now. Out of nowhere, hands came up and cupped my behind, holding me firmly in place.
"Sorry for grabbing your--" Tom started.
"Tom, honey, you could have your fingers knuckle deep in my vagina right now, I could give a damn. Just keep me from falling down this mountain and breaking my neck. God BLESS you. What the hell are you even standing on?"
"I'm a cat," Tom said.
"Damn right you are."
He stood there, patiently, while I slowly stepped up and across, getting a foothold. We managed to get to semi-flat path, about two feet or so across.
"Oh this is good. We're on a cat path now," said Tom.
"What?"
"You know. Wild cats. Mountain lions, that sort of thing."
"Shut. Up."
"No, it's fine. They won't bother us," Tom said. Allan was a good way ahead of us by now. I took another step, and fell. Tom's hands came out of nowhere a second time, steadying me. We made it over to a nearby tree, using it to brace ourselves for a moment. I was getting more and more panicked.
I took a deep breath.
"You know," I said. "I was thinking earlier. There's this line in a Bjork song that never particularly made sense to me until today. 'It takes courage, to enjoy it.' I'm terrified I'm going to fall down this mountain and die or break my leg, but Jesus... it's fucking beautiful up here. Everything is intensely beautiful, and I'm never going to stand here again, and I know it sounds stupid, but I have to literally have courage to enjoy this."
Tom smiled. "It is beautiful up here."
I took another step. And another. And we kept going until we got to the other side of a particularly large boulder and finally saw the train tracks, with Allan waiting on the other side. I slid down the last bit of path, catching burrs on my bikini bottom and scratching up my legs. Tom followed after, and we all grinned hugely. We did not die! This was success!
We walked along the tracks back to camp, laughing about it. We felt like superheroes, suddenly. I picked up a train nail as a souvenir.
The three of us strode back into camp like the end of Independence Day. All that was missing was the cigars.
Posted by Olga at 6:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
