Anaïs viii.
I drink tea through pewter straws from cups laced with ampersands. Green tea on Mondays & Fridays, black tea every time else. I’ve never really been much for the herbal variety. Herbal tea tastes like being someone you don’t want to be. My handwriting mimics the tea. On green days it’s full of cursive letters & swirly “y”s & on black days it’s blocky & full & caffeinated.
Prayer flags hang over every doorway in my apartment. Red & yellow & green & blue & purple, they look right there. Not so much as to welcome as to ward off. Keep away the ones that let their gods define everything they do, to the point where they can’t think for themselves anymore.
I wear skirts on Sundays. Sundays are when I go to church. I’m not Catholic, but I attend the 9am mass every morning for the music. I love gospel music. The words & the harmonies & them working together. It almost makes me wish I believed in god (I don’t).
I work in a high school. I wish I were a teacher, but I’m not. I work in the guidance office. Students come to me when they worry their friends are going to kill themselves. Sometimes girls come to me & tell me they’re pregnant. There isn’t all too much I can do about, really. I call the parents, I tell them their options, I give them a hug, I send them back to class. I always wish I could do more.
When I was 15 I had a boyfriend & a girlfriend & I was the face of the Chai tea revolution. I painted pictures in a garage that wasn’t mine & I was listening to bands that didn’t even exist yet. To myself, I was a Janis Joplin meets Joan Jett meets Audrey Hepburn. I was my own person. No one was like me & no one really liked me.
I started to change when I fell in love with a boy that made me look at rainbows & forced me to climb trees. He never caught me when I fell because, according to him “pain is art & beauty & you’re not going to have anything to make art about if you don’t have pain”. So he let me fall. I stopped loving him when I got bruises. He taught me what love isn’t.
I kept changing when I fell in love with a girl who hated herself. Loving someone who hates themselves is an art form. It’s something you learn to perfect over time. Once it’s perfected the person will still hate themselves. Then you have to end it.
She taught me how hard love can be.
I changed even more when I fell in love with a man. He was older & wiser & we always did things that seemed exciting. He introduced me to red wine & cigarettes. We would kiss in parking lots & on rooftops & sometimes even in a bedroom. I turned him into a tea drinker. An afternoon with a pot of blooming tea & 19 teaspoons of sugar did the trick. I still miss him sometimes.
He taught me how to love someone who can't love you back.
I kept changing until I fell in love with someone who didn't know if they wanted to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman, so they just weren't. They were the most beautiful person I had ever met. We would spend hours & hours sitting with a piano & they'd cry to me because their voice was too high or too low & I'd hug them & tell them "I understand" (I never did).
They taught me what two way love felt like.
Learning how to change is a valuable skill. It's not something you can put on resumes or college applications, but it's something that you'll use. It's not biology & it's not trigonometry, it's better. It's more useful & if you have that skill no one can really hurt you.
Mom & Dad gave me an unpopular first name because of our common last name. Dad's Dad's name was "Ryan", so Dad's name was "Ryan", so my name was "Ryan". Mom's Dad's name was "Byrne", but then she married Dad & they're both traditionalists & so she changed her name from "Byrne" to "Ryan". I like "Byrne" more than I like "Ryan". You don't say "Byrne" like, "by-urn". It's "burn". Like, fire, burns. Wood, burns. Gas burns. Burn.
Some people tell me my name is French & some people tell me my name is Hebrew. It's not Hebrew. I'm Irish. Anaïs Ryan. Not "an-eese" or "anna-eese", it's "ah-nay-iss". No one's ever said my name correctly on the first shot.
When I was a little girl I was obsessed with tea parties. I would have one every other day with my mother & my teddy bears. My tea set was porcelain & had little pink roses on it. I don't think my mother ever gave me anything more than Lipton black tea. I was, after all, a little girl. I wouldn't have appreciated Earl Grey or Chai or anything else. After all, I would douse it in sugar until it was practically sugar water & no longer anything that any respectable tea drinker would consider tea. My mother starting waning me off the sugar when I turned 8. When I turned 8 I started adding less & less until I am the way I am now. Other than the tea my mother didn't have much to do with how I turned out. She was a lawyer & she always wore suits & her hair was always straight. She was Canadian, &, as she was constantly telling me "Canadian women are more put-together than American women". She was always right about everything. She died after I went away to college. She didn't have cancer & she didn't die in a car accident & there was nothing very tragic about her death at all. She died in her sleep. I used to tell people that she had gotten sick. People are always nicer to you after you tell them that your mother got sick & died. I don't know why. It's not like you're any different because of it. Unless you are, which would make sense. But my mother was there to raise me & when I didn't need her anymore she was gone. It was never anything I was too upset about.
Yesterday I was at the grocery story & I was standing in the toothpaste aisle. I've always wondered why there are so many kinds of toothpaste. Standing in the toothpaste aisle is overwhelming. I never get the same type of toothpaste twice, because I can never remember what I got, or I can't find it. Yesterday was no exception. I stood there for about a minute, trying to decide what to get. Berry & spearmint & peppermint & cinnamon... I finally settled with some kid's toothpaste. I generally prefer kid's toothpaste. It tastes better. It probably doesn't do everything it needs to do, but I'm okay with that. I picked up some bread, a bottle of wine, & a pack of Oreos. The checkout boy stared for a second. My hair is red. Not naturally, no. It's dyed. There aren't very many people out there with naturally red hair. He rung up my total & I walked back home.
Once upon a time I had a sister. I don't have her anymore. She didn't become gone from getting sick or getting in a car accident, she became gone from being an artist. See, artists are different from the rest of everyone because artists feel everything. Artists feel everything & they're only artists because they need art so that everything doesn't build up & they don't explode. If they stop making art, it's like closing the lid on a soda bottle & shaking it furiously. They explode. My sister didn't learn she was an artist until it was too late. She couldn't get enough art out & by the time she turned 16 she exploded inside. On the outside it was nothing more then a quick drop with a sudden stop. Everyone said it had "accident" written all over it, & maybe it was because I was 12 & generally pretty oblivious, but I didn't see "accident" written anywhere.
People ask me sometimes what happened to my family. I don't have one & that's pretty obvious. Christmas & easter are spent alone & no one ever comes to visit. I want to tell them that we imploded. We were all too much for each other so sissy killed herself & mommy just dropped dead & daddy just picked up & left. I was born into a family of logical people who were so logical that there was no outlet. Mommy & daddy didn't see the point in art & so they ignored it. Daddy was an engineer & mommy was a lawyer. They never had time to create. So when they had two daughters that couldn't stand math, couldn't hold a decent argument, they didn't know what to do, so they didn't do anything. They just kept moving on & on like nothing was abnormal & my sister is sitting there & she doesn't know how to deal with all this because they won't give her paper that doesn't have lines on it so she goes & jumps off a high rise. But, well, I tell them that they live in Florida & we don't really talk anymore.
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