How To Sell Your Plasma- A Beginner's Guide

First, find a plasma center. This shouldn’t be hard in any reasonably urban area. Check the most economically depressed neighborhoods.

At the clinic, you will be asked to show your ID, your Social Security card, and a postmarked piece of mail with your name on it and an address that is not known to the clinic to be a transient address, such as a halfway house.

Then you wait for a long time, in a hard plastic chair. In a nice clinic, there will be a television and maybe even wi-fi. It’s your turn! You fill out a few forms, and get your picture taken in front of a green wall that gives everyone a sickly pallor. Then you wait some more.

It’s your turn! The tech will ask for your first and last name, and the last four digits of your Social Security number. Then you need to put your hand under a special light to make sure you haven’t been donating at any other clinics. (Each clinic marks a particular finger with a special pen.) Then it’s time to get your vitals checked. Weight, temperature, blood pressure, and a finger prick to check your iron and protein levels.

Then you wait some more.

It’s your turn! First, last, last four digits of SSN. Pee test! What do they check for? I don’t know, but I can assure you that it’s not marijuana.

Now it’s time for the test. A friendly but bored tech will recite the information—you are at increased risk for HIV if you have had sex with a man since 1977 who has had sex with other men. You are at increased risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease if you have received medical care in Europe since 1986. There is a short quiz, which I found ridiculously easy, but the tech assures me that many people struggle with it.

Finally, you are approved! Now you wait, this time where you can see and hear the plasmapheresis machines. The air is filled with soft beeping, and reclining everywhere are bored-looking people hooked up to machines that are sucking up their blood and spitting it back in. They lie in blue vinyl chairs with tubes snaking out their arms and spiraling up and out. You wait on the hard plastic chair, watching the movie which is muted and subtitled so that the techs can hear the machines.

Finally, it’s your turn! First, last, last four digits of SSN. You are lead to your very own blue reclining chair. Allergic to iodine? It is poured over your arm, thick and muddy orange. Rubber band, pump it up, the needle slides in with a quick, sharp pain. If you’re lucky, your veins are nice and big, and the tech won’t have any trouble getting it in. If you’re unlucky, and have small veins, this step will involve two or three techs taking turns wiggling the needle in your arm.

It is done, the needle is in your vein. The tubing is attached to the machine, and off you go, pumping your fist to make the blood flow. Pump, pump, pump. You can watch the movie while you do this, or many people read or listen to music. There is a little bank of lights on the machine that tells you when to pump and when to rest. You can see the whole process playing out in the machine, trace the journey of your blood from vein to tube to separator, plasma in the collecting bottle, blood back into your arm. The plasma is a nauseating pale orange, but it may save a life.

There are several cycles—pump, rest. In, out. There is no pain, only tedium. Pump, rest. Pump, rest.

Eventually, it is over. A gurgling series of beeps come from the plasmapheresis machine. The tech comes over, slides the needle out, and disconnects the tubes. You are free.

Now you go to another hard plastic chair. Here you wait for your turn at the pay window. Your name is called. You are handed a few bills.

Four hours after the process began, you are $30 dollars richer. It works out to about minimum wage. If you return within a week, you will receive $40 for your next donation. It’s not enough to live on, but it will buy you cigarettes, a six-pack, maybe a pizza for the kids.

Every penny counts these days.

Safety- A Fragmentary Exploration

My boyfriend is puttering around the apartment. Unencumbered by the signifiers of clothing, he could be anyone. He has an impressive black eye, and it makes him a dangerous stranger. Bruises do not tell stories, they only hint at them. Maybe it was a bar fight. Maybe it was a car crash. Maybe I got mad and decked him. I can see my fist clearly, arcing through the air. He could be anyone. Anything could have happened.

We are drinking coffee, hot and strong. I am remembering a bone I used to have. It was a chicken bone, a discarded drumstick that I found at the beach. My bone was polished by the waves and sand until the surface was creamy and glistening, I carried it in my pocket, running my fingers over its curves for comfort. One day, I lost it. Every time I go to the beach, I look for it, but it is never there.

I look at him, this dangerous stranger. Bristly dark hair, muddy green eyes, worry lines creasing his forehead. It is a face I know well, transformed by a wide swath of purple, like that applied by a myopic drag queen. He has transformed my life, this stranger.

When we are together, life is charmed. His apartment is comfortable, complete with adoring cat. The neighborhood is gentrified to an almost unbearable cuteness. We take our meals out. Life is quietly splendid, and sheltered like a terrarium in its glass bubble. I am loved, cared for, catered to.

Then he leaves. I lurch, click back into place. My real life. A squalid room, books and food wrappers littering the floor. I watch my food stamp balance carefully. I sleep too much, dreaming of bones growing from blooming flowers. I have just lost my job, and bills are due. I am alone. Bruises bloom on my arms, wide swaths of purple, from selling my plasma.

Money is not the only gulf that divides us, this beloved stranger and me. He went to famous schools. I flunked out of junior college. He has a job I barely understand. I just got fired from a job putting makeup on eight year olds. I live on the margins of society, and he is The Man.

What I’m trying to get at here is the idea of safety. It’s a concept I have a hard time with, being a naturally anxious person. My first memory is of my father putting me in the bathtub with my socks still on. Most babies, I have to think, would be delighted by their world gone topsy-turvy. Instead, I was afraid.

Even as I attempt to write about safety, anecdote tells of its absence in my life. How can I write about what I barely know?

For a long time, the only safety I knew, I found in smoking weed. The heat in my belly, lightness in my chest and swimmyness in my head chased away the chattering monkeys of self-doubt away. A big, fat bowl has long been my first recourse in times of stress. I’ve tried alcohol, but the hangovers are too awful. Binge eating, I still resort to now and then. Purging, never. I haven’t got the knack.

Again, I wander. Safety—this is what I know of it:

Weed. Lovely, but expensive and inconvenient.

My boyfriend. Excellent so far, but really haven’t known him that long. Also, goes out of town all the time.

Stuff. Things do not hurt you. Things sooth you, calm you, with smooth surfaces, textures and curves.

I long to be smooth and white, bleached and pared like a bone. I am pale, so much so that it is hard to find makeup. Too self-conscious to leave the house without it, for years I paid a premium price for custom blended foundation. The makeup artist held out a bottle of palest beige for my approval. “Isn’t that a reassuring color?” she said. It was.

The black eye has faded now. He is once more an unremarkable, mild-mannered, middle-aged man.

I have not historically been much concerned with my personal safety. I have waited for the bus in Oldtown at two in the morning, drunk off my ass in fishnets and heels. I have bought crack from strangers. I have gone home with many, many strangers. I regularly walk home in the middle of the night with my headphones on. I get tired of feeling that I need to be afraid because I am a woman. There isn’t much I fear.

The Halfway Hotel

Carolina and I moved into the Royal Palm at the same time. I was struck, the first time we met, at her resemblance to a certain Julia Margaret Cameron model—the same bold cheekbones and haunted eyes. I told her that she had wonderful bone structure and that I wanted to photograph her. I think she fell a little bit in love with me then.

The Royal Palm was once a grand hotel, but its lush carpets were replaced with linoleum and all the walls and woodwork painted industrial green. Its residents were the dregs of society, the no hopers living out the rest of their Social Security and Thorazine sentences.

I had just gotten out of the psych ward. Years of depression had let slowly, grimly, inexorably to a near-fatal overdose—a suicide attempt. I needed a place to live, and I needed to be watched over. The Palm filled both those needs.

* * *

A line from a song a friend wrote keeps echoing through my head: “There’s doom all around us. There’s doom hanging over us.”

This particular doom worrying me now is that the hospital bills have started to roll in. So far I owe $2686.12, and that’s just for the emergency room. I hate to think how much a week’s stay at the psych ward will run.

I’m scared. I’m really scared that the bills won’t go away, and I’ll have no way to pay them.

* * *

We moved into the dorm. We lived, our lives reduced to a twin bed and a Rubbermaid bin each, with eight other women in one room. The nights were filled with screaming and moaning, snoring and farting, the sounds of masturbating and hallucinating.

I lay on my twin bed, wrapped in a faded red blanket, a vestige of my former life. I dreamed of being somewhere, anywhere else. I used to be a real person, with a job, a husband, a child, a mortgage. Now I was no one and had nothing.

* * *

The bedbugs came back last night. I don’t know how it happened, when my mattress and box spring are both covered in plastic. The only possibility I can think of is that they came from someone else’s bed.

It’s also alternating raining and snowing outside, on a day when I have two appointments to get to and from on the bus. The snow’s not sticking yet, but with my luck, it’ll be icy.

But that’s not as bad as the bedbugs. Very little is as bad as the bedbugs. The only thing I didn’t wash was my earplugs. Now I have a horrible vision of bedbug eggs hatching in my earplugs, which would mean they’d been in my ears!

* * *

Morning began with breakfast. Always the same—your choice of cornflakes, raisin bran, or cheerios. There was no coffee provided, so we all hoarded our own jars of instant. I soon learned that there was a thriving in-house economy based on coffee and cigarettes.

After breakfast came the first of many cigarettes. That’s what the homeless and the mentally ill do more than anything—smoke cigarettes. I think it might be required by law. The first of the day is the most delicious, the smoke burning down your throat, the slight dizziness as your body relaxes, saying This, yes, this is what I wanted.

Cigarette gone, it was time to plan the day. There were groups I could attend to talk about my feelings, paint about my feelings, collage about my feelings, and cook, mercifully not about my feelings. I usually attended painting group, writing group, and women’s group.

* * *

If I belonged here, I would wake up happy. I would be happy to have free cereal, all I can eat. I would be happy to have a hot shower, as long as I want. If I belonged here, I'd be happy to have so many people know my name. If I belonged here, I'd eat meat and look forward to Sloppy Joe night. If I belonged here, I'd want to talk to staff all the time. If I belonged here, that would be the end of wanting more.

I feel guilty for feeling like I don't belong here. But if I felt like I belonged here, it would be all over. I need to feel like I don't belong here for my personal survival. I need to hate it here, like a normal person would.

And if I ever get out, I'm never coming back.

The bathrooms here, oh my God. I can’t use the showers, because sewage is backing up into the stalls. At last count, only one bathroom didn’t have the toilet clogged, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

I want to cry, but there’s nowhere to do it. I can’t take up the only working bathroom. I can cry in my social worker’s office, but not for hours.

I’m so scared that things will never get better. I’m scared that I’ll never find a job, never have a real life again.

I just want out of this life.

* * *

Done with groups and feelings, it was time for another cigarette. We sat outside and smoked in silence. Carolina had dyed her dark hair a violent blue, and it shone in the weak sun.

A fad started. Soon everyone was coming to Carolina to get their hair done, and pink and green heads popped up like Easter eggs. Anything to make the place a little more festive.

* * *

It looks like we’ll be getting a new girl in the dorm soon. She’s young and doesn’t look crazy. Maybe she’ll be someone I can be friends with, but that’s too much to hope for. If I think about it too much, I’ll start crying.

I’m so lonely in this place full of people.

* * *

Lunchtime at the Palm was nothing to look forward to. The food was way beyond hospital gross, delivered by an outside catering company and heated to lukewarm in the Palm kitchen. Oily meatloaf, rubbery carrots, granulated chocolate mousse. Thank God for food stamps.

There was not a grocery store within walking distance of the Palm. We had bodegas. They sold junk food, ready to eat right out of the package. We needed this, because we had no facilities for preparing food. I ate trail mix and milk and all the cookies I wanted, but I could go weeks without seeing a vegetable. This is why the poor are fat.

* * *

This is the worst part of the day when I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’m planning on seeing my kid today, but he doesn’t get home from school for three more hours.

Usually on these days I go visit Carolina and smoke a bowl, but Carolina’s not answering her phone or her door. She’s off somewhere, and I’m stuck here.

It makes me feel so hopeless, having nowhere to be but here in the Palm. I’ve read all the books I have, and it’s no use trying to do art here—it always comes out wrong.

In ten minutes I can eat a really bad lunch, and that will take about fifteen minutes. Then I wait some more for it to be time to leave. It’s awful.

* * *

Carolina got her own room, and we sat in it in the afternoons, smoking weed and endless cigarettes. Socks the cat writhing at our ankles, smoke drifting through the air in the little room. We gossiped about which of our fellow residents was back on crack, or picked up for prostitution or shit their pants in the second floor hallway. We talked of our children, who did not live with us. We often talked of the past, but never of the future. We couldn’t imagine it.

* * *

Tonight was karaoke night at the Halfway Hotel. I left halfway through, but not before witnessing two remarkable performances.

The first was Madonna's "Vogue" as done by a young man in full makeup with almost-convincing falsies, backed up by a former stripper who has a marked resemblance to Lady Elaine Fairchilde. Their elaborate choreography and enthusiasm made it more funny and less ridiculous than it sounds.

The other performance left me feeling sad. Catalina, one of the women I'm closer to, with heavy PTSD and a heavier fantasy novel addiction, had her sister come to deliver some things that Catalina had been storing with her.

Catalina insisted that she wanted to sing for her sister, and she sang (some song I don't know) about being the only one who can feel the rain on your skin. She belted it out with gestures and all the emotion she could muster.

The whole time, her sister was busy with bagging the stuff for storage and talking to staff.

It made me sad to see Catalina being invisible.

I don't mean to say that I don't see the sister's side too. She was probably running late, everything needed to be bagged against bedbugs and carried down, and her fool sister Catalina was singing instead of helping.

I don't know if Catalina's sister was complicit in any of the family drama that left Catalina so damaged. I'd like to think she wasn't, and she's just worn out with the aftermath. But watching her ignore her sister pouring her heart out was pretty damn poignant from this side of the visibility divide.

* * *

Evenings at the Palm were slow and leaden, when we didn’t have karaoke or bingo to liven it up. Endless games of Spades, endless breaks for cigarettes. Dinner, much like lunch. Every day the same, the same, always the same.

* * *

I will try to never again complain about being bored in the Halfway Hotel. I did that last night, and almost immediately David lost two teeth eating Smarties. He must have had some suspicions about those particular teeth, because he just spit them out and went back to playing Bingo.

But that was just the lead-in. The main event started when Carolina went up to Doreen's room to see if she was ready for dinner and found that Doreen had been cutting herself. Carolina came back downstairs as white as a sheet and said "I need to talk to staff right now." Then we all had to clear out of the common area, carrying the three course, made from scratch, dinner that Doreen's boyfriend Jack had made.

Carolina was so upset by what Doreen had done. She and her boyfriend Dan and I kept ducking out for cigarettes in the pouring rain. Eventually Doreen came outside, terrified that we were all angry at her. This is where I finally got to be useful-- as a former cutter I was able to say that I knew what it was like and why she did it. Eventually everyone calmed down, and I went to bed.

I woke up at three in the morning feeling freaked out as hell. I couldn't stop thinking about back when I was cutting and the soul-sucking, crazy-making relationship I was in at the time. I cried as quietly as I could for a while, and then recited Jabberwocky about 15 times until I calmed down.

Note to self- memorize more poems.

* * *

Carolina is almost thirty. Her teeth are broken and gapped like an old picket fence. She doesn’t look old, but she does look worn. She is wary, having spent her life in the system. She is stoic, waiting calmly for the next blow.

We have been here for months, seen fire, death, sickness, and violence. We have recalibrated our notions of normal. Our days have a rhythm—breakfast, smoke, groups, smoke, lunch, smoke, weed, smoke, dinner, smoke, bed. Any incident, and there are many, is a welcome break from the monotony.

* * *

I'm thinking this week about families. Specifically the kind that spring up in places like this.

Yesterday Mike, who I really only know to say "hi" to, told me he's being kicked out of the Halfway Hotel for smoking in his room while drunk. He said "I don't want to leave here. This is my family."

I am both touched and horrified that he feels that way. I can't imagine, can't let myself imagine myself staying long enough to feel that way. But it's only been three months. I could easily be here another year. How will I feel then?

None of us at the Halfway Hotel have good relationships with our biological families. That's one of the most insidious things about mental illness-- sometimes you're yourself, and sometimes you're just not. And when you're not, you hurt other people. You may not remember it later, but they do. Normal people have trouble distinguishing between the person and the disease. The other loonies are much more likely to forgive you when you're not yourself.

It seems sad to me that people call people they barely know family, but everyone needs something and I guess it's better than nothing.

* * *

I lived at the Royal Palm for a year. I will never forget that time, never regret it. I will never stop being grateful for those who took care of me during that time. I will never forget the friends I made, the lives whose paths crossed mine. I will never stop craning my neck as the bus goes by to see who is smoking outside the building.

I moved out of the Royal Palm eight months ago. We’re moving Carolina out today. She is the last friend I have left at the Palm, so I’m probably never coming back. It is the end of an era, and we are jubilant.

The Numbness That Follows Despair

The pills were white and round. I didn’t count them, but there were about 20 of them. They were in a baggie next to Zach’s computer.

It scares me to write about this. It scares me to even think about writing about this. It scares me to sit in the classroom and think about writing anything. It scares me more to write about it than it did while it was happening.

I met Zach at work, at the dental lab. We bonded over teeth and wax and teriyaki. I will never love anyone as much as I loved him. I have never been able to figure out why I loved him the way I did, but he was the god of my idolatry.

I took the pills with a glass of Kahlua. I was so relieved to think that this horrible business of living was almost over. I took the pills and I lay down to die.

Writing makes me nervous now. I’ve changed so much, become an entirely different person. I don’t have the capacity I used to for love or hate or any sort of passion. I worry that my writing will be bland and affectless. I want to run away and never read anything but John Grisham again.

I fell in love with Zach at the bar, lingering over our drinks. I fell in love with him at work, watching him brush his hair out of his eyes. We kissed at the Goth club, and I’d never been so happy in all my life.

I took the pills and put on my ipod with my favorite album, and I lay down to die. I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so relieved in my life. All 35 years leading up to this: 20 white pills and a song about vampires.

I really want to smoke some weed right now. I wonder if it would help me or hurt me in finding my voice if I write the whole thing high. My boyfriend says I talk more when I’m high. I feel more expansive, better at seeing connections.

I left my husband for Zach. I left everything I knew, everything I had. A year later, he stopped loving me and I was left with nothing.

Took the pills, song about vampires, waited to die. Zach was gone, and I didn’t know where. He left me alone with this baggie full of pills. I have never hated myself so much, never before believed that that my son would be better off without me. I left a note, on Zach’s computer. It said “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this anymore.”

I worry a lot that I’m not as creative now that I’m not as crazy. I don’t make as much art, crack as many jokes, talk as much, have as many ideas. This shit used to be like breathing to me, but now I’ve forgotten how. I will never again hurt that much. I will never again love that deeply. I will never again live that fully. I have suffered a sea change, into something less rich and strange.

Zach and I tried to stay friends. We spent long, lazy days together, smoking weed and watching movies. But sooner or later, we’d fight. Always, we would fight. And it all came down to this: Why don’t you love me anymore/

Took the pills, wrote the note, song about vampires, lay down to die. I was never so sad in all my life, never so resigned, never so relieved. I waited and waited to die.

I’ve missed two classes now because it’s just too damn hard to sit in the classroom some days. It takes me right back to those awful weeks when I couldn’t leave the house without an anxiety attack. I couldn’t go to class. I couldn’t do my homework. I flunked out spectacularly. I lost my financial aid, lost my home, lost everything I knew, everything I had.

I didn’t know how to live without Zach. He no longer cared to live with me. I hated myself, hated him, hated the wreck my life had become. I was stuck in a downward spiral.

Took the pills, wrote the note, song about vampires, lay on the bed, waited and waited and waited to die. I heard Zach shout “My God, what have you done?” He dragged me out of bed and fed me gallons of coffee.

I didn’t die.

* * *

I lived, though I didn’t much care to. I spent two weeks in a drugged-out haze while classes and due dates drifted by without me. I flunked out and lost my financial aid. I lost my much-loved room in the beautiful house. After a while, my thoughts turned to suicide again. I checked myself into the hospital.

I emerged a week later as a completely different person. Overhauling my medication meant better living through chemistry, a whole new me. For the first time, I felt happy and hopeful. For the first time, I was glad I hadn’t died. Slowly, I came back to life.

All it took was the addition of one pill. One little pill a day makes the monsters go away. I was no longer scared. I was no longer sad. I no longer wanted to die.

This is my first time writing about these things. About how I almost died, and how almost dying made me a new person. About how scared I am now that this new persona will never be able to achieve the same things that the old me did. This is the first time that I have tried to articulate the difference between the me of then and the me of now.

The old me was always hurt, the new me is numb. The old me was quick to anger, the new me is always calm. The old me was a gifted artist, the new me has artist’s block. The old me loved passionately to the point of pain, the new me is timid in matters of the heart.

And I ask myself, as I struggle with writing this, as I look guiltily at the canvas started and forgotten, as I navigate life with a new lover, I ask is it worth it? Is it worth it to want to live, if I have lost so much of what it meant to live? I am not who I was, for good and for ill. But who would I rather be?

I’d rather be the new me. Rather than sacrifice myself on the alter of my dubious genius, I choose to be tamped down. I would rather fade away than burn out. I am aiming for the adequate, the mediocre, the middle-brow. Anything to be safe.

My new boyfriend never knew the old me. The woman he loves is calm, agreeable, quiet, and gentle. I do not think he can imagine what I used to be: shrieking, crying, brooding. It does not matter to him that I used to be smarter and funnier, that I used to love harder. He is satisfied with what he has.

I am not. I mourn the artist I was. I miss being passionate. I miss going up to 11.

But it is better to live than to die. So I’ll take it.

A Manifesto

I was born with a brain that has unusual strengths and weaknesses. This does not define my worth as a person.

My parents gave me an incomplete toolbox because their own toolboxes were incomplete. Our incomplete toolboxes do not define our worth.

Because of my inborn weaknesses and my inadequate toolbox, I was not able to fully define my own identity. I allowed other people to define me. Although this kept me back in many important ways, it also kept me alive.

With the tools of drugs and therapy, I now have the ability to add new tools to my toolbox.

I must define myself by my own expectations and not the expectations of others.

Just as others cannot define me, I cannot define others.

It is my responsibility to decide who I want to be and act like that person until the act becomes truth.

Other people can only judge me on what they can see. It is my responsibility to show them what I want them to see.

It is my responsibility to remember that no one's toolbox is perfectly equipped, and this does not define their worth. It is also my responsibility to limit the influence that people have over me.

Now that I know what a toll looks like, it is my responsibility to pick them up.

Now that I have tools, it is my responsibility to build. How I rise to this challenge is how I choose to define my worth as a person.

If this manifesto seems ridiculously obvious to you, congratulations on having a good toolbox. If it seems useful to you, please accept these tools with my love.

I'm too old to write poems.

When I die
And the coroner cuts open my chest
There will be gravel embedded in my heart,
Tiny animal bones
Thorns and jagged bits of metal
All for you
Every scar for you.

When you die
Your heart will be opaque and reflective
Smooth and unruffled
Like polished stone
With no sign that I almost
Left a mark.

Hit me, baby, one more time.

I might have to burn this bra. It shouldn't have been the last straw, but it was.

Last night I couldn't get laid to save my life. I called my five regular guys, answered two ads on craigslist, and nothing. I was agitated. I was horny. I was alone.

Finally, I gave up and went to Safeway. A pint of Ben & Jerry's, a bottle of cheap wine, and cat toys. Doesn't get much more lonely single woman than that. The cashier said "I'm supposed to ask you if you're 21." I said, "I look it, don't I?" She chuckled and said "If I look it, you look it." She was at least ten years older than me.

I drank my wine, ate my ice cream, and watched TV until I could sleep.

This morning I was fine. Slept late, made Dessert Burgers with the kid, played with the cats, everything's fine.

No sign of any boy distraction, so I go over to Shane's. We watch a movie, get high, everything's fine. My chances are slim, but in the back of my mind there's a roaring desperation I don't even see, and I try anyway, lifting up my shirt to show him my pretty new bra.

"It looks like a Grandma bra," he says, but hey, you kinda look like a Grandma." My first thought is for my bra, pink and lacy and pin-tucked. My second is I'm thirty-fucking-five, you asshole, and I'm crying.

I lie in bed and I cry. He lies next to me and I cry. He pats the cat, "My Cosmo." He pats me, "my Jane." I know he doesn't mean it, never will.

"I'm not yours. Choking, wiping snot on my shirt, "You don't deserve me."

"I didn't know I had you." Stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

"You've always had me." I cry and cry and cry.

Eventually it comes to a shuddering halt. I grope my way out of bed and pull on my jeans, and head to the garage for a cigarette. Someone on the Art Bell show is talking about using expensive and exotic machinery to map the magnetic resonance of known UFO sites. I stare at the old printer box, with the idealized portrait of three All-American brothers. The younger two look like they could turn into bullies. The oldest, like you might have him for a night, but never more.

O smoke and I think about Shane. I thought he had already hurt me as much as he ever could, but I was wrong. I will leave him, I decide. One last night, holding him as tight as I can, loving him, forgiving him, then walk away for as long as it takes.

I go back to bed. He's up, on the computer. I lie in bed and wait. I think about what he could do to win me back, to make it better. It wouldn't take much. Put your arm around my waist, pull me close, and sigh. That's all it would take.

I wait.

I can't believe how long it's taking. If he cared at all, surely he'd be here. I hear the creaking of the chair, the bubbling of the bong, the long exhale. I know these sounds like my own heartbeat. Surely something will happen soon. I've been waiting so long.

I wait.

My nose is stuffed from crying. My mouth is dry. I can't sleep. I'm too nervous. I can't stand the suspense. I want to leave, but I feel paralyzed.

I can't stand it any more. I get up and go to the kitchen for water. I'm standing at the sink, drinking, when he comes up behind me and says, "Oh, hello." As if nothing had ever been wrong.

"What does that mean?" I say, trying not to let my voice quaver.

"I just thought you were in bed." I set down the glass, and soon I am.

I lie in bed. I wait. He comes in. I forget what we say. It isn't enough. He doesn't care.

He falls asleep, snoring lightly. Tears roll noiselessly out of my eyes. I get up, look at the bus schedule. I just missed the last one. I can't get home.

I go back to bed. I don't know what to do. I didn't think he could hurt me this much again. "Go to sleep," he says.

"I can't."

"Read," he says. I can't understand him. He repeats himself, exasperated.

"I can't," I say. I wait. Finally I say "You're not even going to give me a ride home, are you?" I can't stand it. I hate myself. I want to be home and cry for days.

"Why the fuck should I do that?" He's highly aggrieved. "It's the middle of the night. You live all the way across town. you came to spend the night, so spend the damn night."

I gather my strength. I get up, put on jeans and shoes and the now-hateful bra. I pack my books, steal a notebook. That which does not kill us gives us more shit to write about.

I walk. I get to the bus stop and smoke a cigarette. The bus won't come for another four hours. I walk.

Woodstock to Foster. Foster to Holgate. I want to lie down in the graveyard, soak the graves with my tears, but I'm not that far gone or that goth. I think about a cab, but I don't want to spend the money. I'll walk to the Tik-Tok, drink coffee 'till 5. I notice the cars going by, think about throwing myself in front of one. The thought shocks me. I'm not that bad. I want to live, more than I used to, even though I'm hurt real bad.

Holgate to Powell. It seems so long. I think I see the Tik-Tok, a mirage, then finally real. I sit in the bus shelter outside and smoke a cigarette. Leaving, I surprise a hooker. Or at least she looks like one. I am obscurely pleased that there are still hookers on 82nd.

I go inside. Coffee, water, and a shot of cheap whiskey. I drink. I write. Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" comes on the radio and the tears roll out of my eyes. Fucking Journey, man. Gets me every time.

More coffee. Little cups of creamer. I down another shot of whiskey just after last call. Fucking Tri-Met, stops running before the bars close.

I drink. I write. I wait.

I go out back for a cigarette. starting to feel the booze now. I talk to a black stripper named Raven, and her new guy, Mike. She offers me a ride home, assures me she doesn't bite. Maybe, I say. Maybe.

Somehow I'll be ok.

I go back to my table. I drink coffee and read bout drugs I'm too scared to try. Raven and Mike leave without me, I'm not sure when. Probably better that way. My bus will start running in an hour and a half. I read. I wait.

It's five in the morning. I'm tired. I'm drunk. My heart is broken. I'm going home to sleep. To live through this.