Hiatus.

Okay, So that is the end of my rough draft for Ivy and Kevin. It is still untitled, but I will let you know when I decide on one. I am going to go through and edit it, perhaps expand it basically run it through the ringer until its perfect. I will be taking this week off to start working on that and also to start plotting my next short. I will return to it Monday, February the Ninth. In the mean time I suggest you read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller because that is what I'm reading.

Love you,

Meg

Choice

I wasn't sure if I had a choice. There was a choice to be made, I just wasn't sure if it was my choice to make. I left her. I took everything. Do I take her back? Does she want me back? Would she take me back? Do I want to go back? Does she have to make everything so poetic? I was going over the questions in my head driving back to the old apartment. If she had been anyone else, I wouldn't have gone back. If she had been a girl that bought ikea furniture and watched television I would have stayed in my white walled apartment and never looked back. But there I was, driving to my parents house in the middle of a freezing cold night because of an ambiguos poem writen on a door. I'm not sure what annoyed me more; the fact she wrote on the door, or the fact that she knew I was coming back. You can only hate someone that you love first. I was walking a fine line between the two. I hated her for assuming I was going to be weak enough to come back, but I loved her because I knew she wouldn't say I told you so when I got there. I didn't know though. I didn't know if we were going to be together, because I had left for a reason. I left because she didn't exsist sometimes, because she wrote on floors and walls, because I wasn't sure if she was going to be alive everday when I got home from work. I left because it felt like she never wanted me to touch her. The aspiring poet in my head was telling me that love conqures all. I hated that guy. I did love her, and it was enough. Now I wasn't so sure she was even going to be there. I could have misread the poem, maybe Ivy was going to wrap herself around a different stronger tree. That would be logical, move on, try again, maybe find a musician this time. Someone to make songs out of her poems. I sat in the drive way so filled with jealousy of a hippie guy that didn't exist, I almost didn't get out. I opened my door and walked to the gate around back, praying my parents were already asleep. Goddamn Ivy trying to make me tell them about things like this. She always thought it was funny that they didn't understand us. I was at the base of the tree and I could hear her breathing. She was there. I was right. But it wasn't going to be this easy. I had to be strong, I had to talk to her about things, tell her that things were going to be different. I couldn't let the fact that I couldn't sleep without her cloud my judgment. I was already so relaxed, just hearing her breathing, just knowing where she was and that she was safe and waiting for me. I climbed the ladder slowly trying to brace myself against her eyes.

She looked at me, exactly like she had the first night I ever set eyes on her, and I asked her what she was doing there in the sternest voice I could muster against her. She blinked slowly and said her name was Ivy, and would I please not tell anyone that she was there. I shook my head and promised her. I was just goddamned helpless against those eyes. Always have been and always will be.

Waiting.

I held the smoke in until I was filled with the white noise of it. I liked the comforting vibration of it in my chest and the heaviness of it in my eyes. I had been waiting in this tree house for hours and I was hoping the smoke would keep me warm. It was a long drive to get there but I didn't know where else to wait for him. So I waited in the place that I was accustomed to waiting for him. It was a vaugely romantic idea, and I hoped that he would think of it, read the clues I wrote on the door. If he did come to this place, if he found me here, ready to start from the begining again, I knew things would be different. I was up and running now. The stitches were removed and I was healing. The scars were still bright, but they would fade just like all the others. In the past, when he would touch or kiss my skin, I would flinch like I could feel the burning of the cigarretts to my legs or the broken glass to my neck. He was not kissing them to make me hurt, he was kissing them so I didn't have to hurt anymore. Funny how the truth applies moment to moment. I didn't have to hide the ugly things from him because he found the beauty in them. I was the person that taught him how to find beauty in strange places. He learned his lesson better than I could have ever imagined. He found it in me. I made a promise to the empty tree house, that if he did come here, that I would let him look at me, fully, without trying to hide. I would let him take my shirt off when we made love, turn the lights on even. I wanted to show him that I wasn't scared anymore; That I didn't mean to hurt him when I shuddered at his touch. I pulled the old CD player out of my bag, and put in the Patsy Cline album that never got returned to his mother. I wondered how long it would be before I saw him again. Not long I thought, I could feel him. He was thinking about me, trying to think like me. I could almost see him smiling in disbelief when he finally figured it out. He would think that I was trying to trap him. Making him explain something to his parents that he never wanted to. I made myself laugh when I tried to imagine the lie he would tell them when he showed up unexpectedly at their house. Maybe he would just jump the fence like I did. I doubt it. Kevin never had to jump a fence in his life, he wouldn't start now. I was feeling giddy picturing seeing him, I would tell him about all the times I walked passed his house on my way to the library when I was a kid, how I always liked the way he played games and the way his house always looked friendly. I was warmed by my optimism. I was fighting the ugly thoughts that he might not come. I fought it, because that was part of the curse, and I didn't believe in curses anymore. I believed the moments of truth now. And in that moment the truth was that Kevin and I were for always. I played the song that he played me that first night. This would be our moment. I heard the leaves shake and a familiar voice say that she better goddamn be here because we have things to talk about. He was frustrated, and nothing was certain, but I was safe. He was here.

He looked at me and asked me what I was doing here. I said my name is Ivy, and would he please not tell anyone that he found me here. He shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he promised he wouldn't tell anyone.

Sleep

I was starting to wonder if life without her would ever feel right. How are you supposed to move on from your own life? It was like being an amputee. I could still feel her. I still looked for her. I wondered what she would think of my new apartment. I thought about where she would put the green rug and how she would be mad that I didn't burn sage before I moved in. I could hear her instructions on where to hang pictures and her complaints about the white walls. She would have hated this place. I hated this goddamn place. Nothing felt like home anymore. All of these things didn't belong here without her. They belonged in a place with music and a girl that liked things with history. I belonged in that place too. Before her, I might have had a chance at liking this apartment. I could just be a financial analyst with a contemporary apartment, going out with a woman in my office every Friday night. This woman would have a degree, but she wouldn't know anything. She wouldn't know what song would make me smile if it had been raining too long. She would think it was odd that even at twenty-five, I still had an affinity for climbing trees. No one has a chance anymore. Ivy was the person that understood me. She loved me even though I was uptight, a little too square. She took joy in showing me things I never would have looked at twice. But it wasn't all one sided, people always assumed that I was the only one learning. I could show her things as well. I taught her little lessons out of some of my old college books. She enjoyed our class time, she loved that I had things to teach. I lost so much losing her. More than I expected. I lost a way of life. Right now, I had an imitation at best. I got up, went to the office, ate meals, tried to sleep. It wasn't working. There was no sleeping without her. Even at thirteen, it made me anxious on the nights she didn't turn up. I worried that she wasn't coming back, or worse, that she was holding someone elses hand. All through college I wondered where she was sleeping, I wondered why I wasn't sleeping. I needed to touch her hair, to kiss her forehead. I just needed to feel her warm body close before I could shut my eyes. The night I graduated college was the first goodnights sleep I had gotten in four years. And now I'm back to insomnia. I tried music, but I hated everything new because she taught me better, and I hated everything old because it made me feel like there was a hole in my chest. I spent my nights looking through all of the things from the old apartment. Looking for her words scribbled on the strangest things. When she did it, it annoyed me. Now they were like a life raft. The only beauty I had left. I started thinking about why I left her. My parents thought she was just trying to change me, but they never understood her like I did. Sometimes it just felt like she wasn't there. Like I loved a girl that didn't exist. I didn't know how to handle it. I gave up. And then she gave up. By the time I realized it, it was almost too late. Her demons caught up with her and I just let them have her. In the hospital, I found out about her mom, and the man that they lived with. She couldn't look me in the eye anymore. She was ashamed and I didn't know what she wanted me to say.

Things fell apart. I should have asked her what she needed. But my parents taught me never to ask painful questions. I wanted to feel her in bed next to me and tell her nothing in the past mattered to me. I wanted her to know that I was sorry for giving her up to the demons. I wanted poetry, I wanted music, I wanted to get some goddamn sleep.

Run

Without him, I didn't know what do do with my hands anymore. They seemed to forget how to do mundane things. How to write, how to brush my hair how to pick myself up off the ground. They were there at the ends of my arms just as lost as the rest of me. I didn't have anyone anymore. Not even The Rolling Stones or the ever faithful Patsy. He silenced them. I know now, I know why he took his record player. He was never tired of them, he loved them because they were part of me. He wanted me to see how quiet they got when I needed them most. He knew I would turn to them like I always had before. What was I when they weren't telling me how to live? Was I the girl with dirty hair and nothing to live for? Was I going to reopen old wounds because I knew it would work this time? When I was young I had a survival instinct. My mother's strange small voice telling me to run. Not Kevin's voice, not a voice I heard on my records, my mother's voice. She had me when she was fifteen, my father was her teacher. She quit school and the teacher never knew about me. The man that took my mother and me in was a mechanic. He owned his shop. That was the man that my mother kept me away from. I was never his daughter. I was never anyone's daughter. Mother taught me how to run and let me go. Sometimes I wasn't fast enough, and I would take the punishment and listen to my her beg him to let me go. Where did her voice go? Why could I not hear her screaming for me to get out, waking me up to warn me before he got home? I could feel her now, hands on my shoulders shaking me. Are you going to lay here and take this? Are you going to surrender to the ugly things around you? You are beautiful and cursed. Out run it Ivy! Never stop! Run and don't stop until you find a safe place to sleep. Her voice was in my head now, shaking me awake. I let her down. I stopped running. The night Kevin found me, I had given up. I stood still enough for the curse to catch me. But he was there. Kevin was always there. I never told him thank you for saving my life because I was scared of what that meant. I had worked so hard to keep the ugly away from him; to keep him seperated from my curse. My mother did it for me. She took herself out of the picture so I could find my safe place to sleep. I was wrong about myself. Kevin didn't ask questions, Kevin loved me inspite of the scars from old cigarette burns on my inner thighs, he loved me because my body belonged to him only,because I knew about books and art, because he didn't believe in curses. He left because I hated what he loved. I was wide awake now. My hands touched the floor and lifted me up. My mother was telling me to hold on, the wounds would heal, I would just have to be faster next time. I took a shower for the first time in weeks, pulled a brush through my tangled hair, and made myself eat. I had found my safe place to sleep, but you were wrong mother, you never stop. My hands were tingling with new energy.

I scribbled down a poem on the door before I left, the first one since he had gone.

Grow little Ivy
take over the garden
wrap your self around the strongest tree
it keeps you safe
Caution!
never wrap yourself too tight
Remember!
the tree is no stronger than you

Always

I'm not sure if it was wrong to ask for so much from someone so young. I was young too I suppose, but in most ways I was much older. His mother made him lunches and helped him with his homework. I wasn't even enrolled in school. No one ever came looking for me. My mother taught me how to read and how to count. After that, I was on my own. I spent most days hiding in the library reading everything. I didn't feel like I was missing out. It was the night after my thirteenth birthday that my mother started telling me to run away. Not every night, just when my father would bring his friends home. She was protecting me from something I didn't understand. Kevin's father taught him how to throw punches to protect himself. I had never spent anytime with someone my own age when he found me in the tree house. I rarely had any human contact at all. This boy seemed afraid of me, but I was never scared of him. He had a nice voice and a funny way of raising his eyebrows when he spoke. He didn't ask questions, I liked that. He brought me his sleeping bag and introduced me to Patsy Cline. He played a song that went,

"Days may not be fair, always.
That's when I'll be there, always.
Not for just an hour,
Not for just a day,
Not for just a year.
But always."

I remember crying a little. I was overwhelmed by how much I wanted him to hold my hand, I wanted his always. I didn't know then what always meant. I stayed there a few nights a week for five years. I never told him about the ugly things that happened to me if I didn't jump out of my window fast enough. I never wanted him to see the scars. I left him poems. I wanted him to have beauty, to know that I had beauty in me, it was just hidden by black eyes and tears. The night he told me he was going away to college, I felt like I was drowning. He was supposed to be my always. Who would do his homework when he got too busy? Who would hold my hand until I fell asleep? I kissed him. I kissed him for keeping his promise of never telling anyone I was there, for teaching me out of his school books, for bringing me food late at night and giving me music to hold on to. He was gone for four years. I got a job at a mom and pop record store that pretended not to notice that I spent more than a few nights in the stock room. I thought about him all the time. When I managed to save enough money for a car, I decided to go find him. The owners of the store were retiring when I left, they let me take as many records as I could fit into the trunk of my car, and gave me a few hundred dollars. I loved them, they didn't ask questions. I loaded up and went to his parent's house. They opened the door and I told them my name was Ivy, and that I went to high school with their son Kevin, and could they please give me his forwarding address for reunion information. They gave me the address and told me he was graduating in a few days. They said it with so much pride. I tried to picture my parents being proud of me. I couldn't. I drove for two days without stopping for anything but gas. I got to the apartment and there was a party going on. I was scared that he would be different, that his hands would be changed, that he wouldn't remember always. He opened the door and I jumped on him. I made him promise that we would be together always. He told me he would never leave me again.

My always and his never. At the time we didn't notice we had said two different words.

Never

I found her asleep in my tree house the night before my thirteenth birthday. I remember wondering if I should wake her and tell her to get out or bring her a blanket. At thirteen I opted to wake her up and ask her what she was doing in there. She woke with a start and braced for violence. I was confused by that action and scared by it. She seemed to relax when she realized where she was. She looked up at me with the greenest eyes I could imagine anyone having. They were almost glow in the dark. I thought I was strange for noticing something like a girl's eyes; then I realized that I was thirteen now and it was about time I started thinking about things like that. Its been fifteen years since that night and I can still perfectly recall how the knot started in my stomach and worked its way to my chest and then to my throat. It sounds ridiculous, but I knew right then that I loved her. She looked so scared and all I wanted to do was hug her, but I didn't know the rules. She asked me not to tell any one that she was there. I nodded, still unable to talk past that knot. She told me her name was Ivy. Ivy, I swallowed and repeated it. Hi, I said, I won't tell anyone. She smiled at me. I wanted to ask her a million questions. I wanted to know why MY treehouse, where she got that black eye, and why she ran away. I didn't though. My family taught me never to ask too many questions or talk about anything strange. Instead I climbed back into my room through the window and brought her my brand new sleeping bag, my brand new portable CD player, and my flashlight. I didn't know what kind of music girls liked, so I swiped one of my mom's CDs. Patsy Cline, she seemed girl friendly to me then. Ivy smiled at me again when I brought it all back to her. She took my hand and asked me to stay with her until she fell asleep. I put the headphones on her and pressed play. She didn't let go of my hand, even when Patsy said something that made her cry a little. I was sweating; I had barely started talking to girls and I had fast forwarded to letting them using my sleeping bag and holding their hands. She finally fell asleep and I relaxed. I didn't want to let go of her hand, but I had to go back to my room so my Mom wouldn't suspect anything the next morning. Over the next five years, she spent alot of nights in the treehouse. She never told me much on the nights she was there. She wasn't in school, I knew that much, and she was scared to be at home. I held her hand every night she stayed, and she started to bring her own music to sleep to at night. She left me a little poem every morning. I never told anyone about her. She wasn't my girlfriend, and we never made love. I graduated highschool and went away to college. She kissed me the night I told her goodbye and she asked if she could keep the CD player. I gave it to her without a second thought.

I missed her more than any of the classmates that I had spent every day with. I worried about where she was sleeping and hoped she didn't have to go home.She showed up at my apartment the night I graduated college and made me promise I would never leave her again. I promised her and I meant every word. But never can make a liar out of anyone.

Leaving.

She would write these poems all over the apartment. They were hidden, under rugs, behind pictures, on the backsides of curtains, everywhere on anything. They were good poems, but it bothered me that she wrote them on things we would have to pay for later. The girl didn't believe in later, so these things meant nothing to her. She was always waiting for the bottom to drop, she thought the worst would occur and she wouldn't have to answer for things like writting on walls and stains on floors. I did love her. There was never a single moment of doubt about that. It made it hard to leave when I thought of her sitting on a bare hardwood floor with her knees pulled up to her chest. I almost couldn't breathe when I thought about it. I pushed that picture out of my mind and tried to remember the bad times, the bad times made it possible for me to cut the ropes. Her moods and her tantrums; Her secrets and her whims. Everything was hers. I think thats why I took the things I did. I could prove they were mine. I had receipts and proof that no one could take aways from me. She didn't understand things like that, I could have taken her things too, because she didn't save receipts. She laughed at me for being so practical. I wished for a moment that I had it in me to be so hurtful. I wished that she had hurt me on purpose, so I could have escaped the guilt, so I didn't have to tell her I couldn't take it anymore. I wondered if I would move on and fall in love with someone else, shake the way she taught me to look at things. The problem was, part of me didn't want to move on. What other woman would know about making love on green rugs and the importance of tasting life rather than just looking at it? I liked it when she was strange and excited when I told her she tasted like cigarettes and cherry sours. It wasn't her eccentricities that got in the way. It was her smile. The way she smiled sadly at me while she was bleeding out on our floor. The way she smiled when I got her dressed in the morning and made her eat at lunch. And the smile that almost killed me was the one that she gave to people that didn't have to go home and wash blood off of the floor. She smiled for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and all the others, credited them with saving her life. Maybe they did. I hope they did, because in that moment I knew that I couldn't save her. She couldn't let me in, they were taking up too much space. Just like her record collection took up one whole room. It was her protection. I didn't want to take the record player because she had never owned one.

She had never gotten to listen to her records until she met me. I never owned a record until I met her.I lived with her long enough to know she would see the sybolism there. It was enough to turn me into a god-damned poet.

Gone.

All of the rooms of the apartment were empty. He left with everything that we bought together and everything he had before I existed in his life. I was left rattling loose in a room with nothing but shelves full of a record collection that was my whole world now. I laughed at the walls I couldn't see because I had so many.I was trying to decide who was going to keep me company, Patsy maybe? She knew how I felt. Pasty Cline hit the nail exactly on the head when it came to heartbreak. I wonder if her lover had caressed her cheek and looked into her eyes one last time. If he had looked her in the eye and told her he couldn't take anymore. Maybe he had, or maybe Patsy was a nicer girl, less complicated. Maybe her lover only left her because he was afraid of comittment. I lit a cigarette and decided not to call on Pasty, she was too good. She probably didn't let her fears and emotions rule her life. Her man would probably take her back when he realized her voice held tears without bitterness, and it was okay to love someone forever. I was too jealous of her. I sat in the center of the cold room. There used to be a plush green rug there, but he took that too. We used to make love on that rug while records were spinning and the Beatles assured us that all we would need was love. Funny how truth applies moment to moment. I looked to the section where I had kept our Beatles records, I thought they would be gone. But I found them exactly where they were supposed to be. I didn't want to touch them. Looking at them made my eyes burn, so I was sure if I touched them I would pull back a hand engulfed in flames. He had taken everything except the records. I wondered if he had meant them to comfort me. Wrap their intangible words around me until I could breathe on my own again. Music could cradle me in moments of darkness like he never could. He was jealous maybe. Jealous of my attatchment to people that didn't care if I was alive or dead. All through being comitted I listened to them, pretended they knew where I was and what I was going through. After I got home I told everyone that Music saved my life. I just smiled at the man who helped me get dressed and made sure that I ate everyday. A small smile for the man that paced out side of my hospital room when I lost control. An insignificant nod to the man that rode with me in the ambulance and then had to go home and wash my blood off of our hardwood floor. I was glad in this moment that Bob Dylan didn't know me or that George Harrison didn't care about me, I was a monster. Thats why he left me with the records. He was tired of them. I saw it clearly now. He had asked Bob Dylan if it was okay to leave me, he worried over it, over if I could survive it. Bob told him not to think twice, it's alright. I had told him that it would be alright. Paul Simon had given him fifty ways to leave me, but he didn't use any of them. Instead, he told me he loved me, told me to take care of myself and be strong, and then gave me that last kiss. I loved him unconditionally as he walked away. Funny how truth applies moment to moment.

I hugged my knees to my chest and wondered vaugely if I would ever be able to listen to them again. These records, my walls, my protection. I looked around and realized that he had taken his record player with him.