Zoe Ruiz: new blog

This is a retired blog. It was a blog I used for writing exercises and randomness. My current blog www.booksandbreath.wordpress.com

spent

I walked into a bookstore and looked at the person I know who works there. I said, I’m so tired.

He said, Step on something.

I looked at his feet, at his boots.

He said, Come here. He licked the cigarette paper he was rolling.

I said, Can I step on you?

I looked at his boots and he said, You have to step on someone’s head.

He looked tall. I couldn’t possibly step on his head. Then I thought about how no one I knew would lay down on the floor and let me step on their head and how maybe I wasn’t the type of woman to do that anyway. I looked disappointed.

Sorry, he said.

Does that work? Really?

Yes, he said and put the cigarette in his mouth.

I was tired enough to believe him. I walked out the door and over to a place to get a pint. I sat down at the bar, made some calls, read some pages of “The Adderall Diaries.” I thought about how writing a blog is self-indulgent and memoir can be too, if you write it that way.

Someone asked if I wrote. He knew the answered but asked anyway. I said, I write and left it at that. I’m drinking my coffee and writing in this blog and thought I had something to say but guess I don’t.

I have a comedy show to go to at the Center of the Arts in Eagle Rock. I’m going to laugh but mainly I’m going because my friends are going. I thought writing could be foundational but it’s not. So many things come before it. So many people I love. It took me a while to understand …

the last valentine’s day I cared about

I’m writing a personal essay on “Play It As It Lays” and it needs a lot of work. I wrote a short story that’s good, that I never finished. Things got in the way.

I want to continue revising the essay today but I have a hair appointment, chapbook covers to print for work, a potluck I’m hosting at the writing center. It’s not much but it’s enough to interrupt.

Maybe I’ll write late at night. I have a dentist appointment early in the morning and a long day at work. I think it’s OK, I’ll have time to write at some point. I wonder if that’s true.

It took me a while to wake up and the cat where I’m housing sitting, jumped on the bed, curled up next to me and purred. I lay there, drifting in and out of sleep.

* * *

I keep  thinking of a part in “Play It As It Lays.”

“‘If you want to live that way, O.K. There’s not going to be any money and there’s not going to be any eating breakfast together and there’s not going to be any getting married and there’s not going to be any baby makes three. And if you make money, I’ll spend it.’

She said she wanted to live that way.”

I’m wondering about the way I want to live.

* * *

There’s bright red heart shaped balloons outside a bakery. There’s heart shaped sugar cookies with pink icing in a glass jar. There’s chocolate covered strawberries on display. If there weren’t, I wouldn’t realize it was Valentine’s Day. I wonder without much interest if I care and realize I don’t.

* * *

The last Valentine’s Day I cared about was a long time ago.

That year, a few days before Valentine’s Day my boyfriend bought a heart shaped cookie from a cafe in El Cerrito. We sat across from each other and he broke a piece off the heart shaped cookie and looked at me and said, You broke my heart.

He was quoting Elliott Smith at the Henry Fonda show. I knew the line and I smiled and tried not to look at him. He was skinny and gray. He was already gone, unrecognizable, someone else.

I was breaking his heart, he had broken mine.  Later when I thought of us, I thought of the song Elliott Smith’s “Half Right.” I thought of the line “Would you say that the one of your dreams, got in you and ripped out the seams. That’s what I’d say. That’s what I’d say.”

The last Valentine’s Day I cared about was the day I broke up with him. We had breakfast together in Oakland. He had researched breakfast places and found a cute brunch place. We sat near the window where there were yellow curtains. I tried to tell myself that the sunlight streaming through the yellow curtains were making the whites of his eyes seem yellow.

After breakfast I took the 101 South and drove down to Zuma Beach. When I got there I sat on the beach and wrote him a long letter on pink legal sized paper. When I walked back to my car I had a voice mail from him. His brother had taken him to the Emergency Room that afternoon. He had jaundice. The drugs had affected his liver.

When I returned from Los Angeles I handed him the letter. We sat on the old white couch in the living room and he read it.  He said that he thought he deserved a second chance. But I said no.

We sat there, side by side, holding hands. I put my head on his shoulder. We were both crying. I asked him  if I was a bad person and he quoted Kill Bill and said I was his favorite person.

* * *

I moved to an apartment in Oakland, near Lake Merritt. One afternoon I found myself driving to the house where we had lived. As I drove to the house where we had lived (the house near the train tracks and the empty lot, the house that was always cold), I told myself if it didn’t work out with him, it wouldn’t work out with anyone. I remember thinking that, I remember believing it. I told myself I would never love anyone again. I felt my heart slam shut.

I arrived to the house. I still had the key. I unlocked the front door and walked into our bedroom, which was empty. I looked at where our bed used to be, our dresser, our desk. I looked out the window at the garden. A woman who lived in the back studio kept a beautiful garden with bright flowers. I looked at her garden through the the bedroom window. I had never looked at her garden when we had lived together. We could’ve looked at her garden, we could’ve seen something nice. It could’ve been pretty. I turned around and walked out.

* * *

I go to Cranial Sacral sessions at a yoga studio in Silver Lake. Cranial Sacral Therapy is a form of a energy work that I discovered from Amy Fusselman’s 8, which was the last book I loved.

I’ve been to several sessions for a year or so. I’m hoping to heal. I think things are blocked, I think I’m holding on. I’ve done therapy. I’ve sat on the couch, I want to work with my body now.

She’s told my heart is shut down, I know she’s right. I think of that time I drove on the freeway to the empty house.

I went to a session on Friday. At some point during the session, she bent my legs and pressed them into my chest. She held them there. She asked if I had a memory related to that position and I said yes.

She asked what feeling I could attach to it.

The words that came to mind were terrifying, were trauma.

I said, Scared.

She said, How old are you in this memory.

I said, Nine and twelve.

She said, Do you think your nine or twelve year old self is still stuck there.

I nodded. I said Yes.

What would you tell her if you could?

I thought of telling her she was safe now. Things would be OK. But I didn’t know if those things were true.

I don’t know, I said.

Do you want me to leave?

No.

She pressed my legs into my chest and I kept remembering being in a room and she was not herself but someone else. I thought the body memory was already gone, I thought I had release the memory a while ago. But she found it, it was there, it was alive.

Actually, she said. I have the feeling that you need to tell me to leave.

She was right. I wanted her to stop holding me in that way, I wanted to tell her to leave me alone.

I said nothing.

* * *

A man who wants to be my friend writes me. He tells me his girlfriend and him are hanging by a thread, actually he doesn’t know if the thread is there. He tells me they’re constantly arguing.  I think he’s lucky but don’t tell him so. Some people don’t follow that kind of logic.  But I read his email, thinking of a part in “Play It As It Lays.”

“…There was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ’s hand.

‘Listen to that,’ he said. ‘Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.’

‘It would be very pretty,’ Maria said.”

the right answer to give

He said, I keep forgetting you’re the craziest person I know, and I smiled real big, like it was a complement. It kept getting later and I kept getting drunker and I found myself wanting something different than what was happening.

Why can’t you just let it be what it is? a friend asked me later.

I can, I said because I felt like that was the right answer to give.

But maybe I can’t. Maybe I want what I want. Maybe, at this point, there’s nothing for me to lose because I don’t value what I have.

* * *

Sometimes it’s just nice to keep how you feel about someone to yourself and call it your own. You know?

No, I don’t know.

* * *

I was on my way to Dog Eared Book, looking for someone I hadn’t spoken to in a very long time. I wanted to ask him, Can we be friends again. I had not planned to do this but found myself, after yoga, wanting exactly that.

On my way to his work, he passed right in front of me and I called out his name. He turned around and I said, Can we be friends again.

Yes, he said. I would like that very much. He started to apologize, to say that I was right but I wasn’t. Because it wasn’t about who was right.

A couple of hours later, I sat across from him at Cafe Revolution and he was talking and I was listening and then I stopped listening and just looked at him, on mute, gesturing, telling a story, and I felt so happy to be sitting right beside him. I thought of shouting his name and saying, Do you know how great you are! Do you!

* * *

Can we wait for Britney? my friend asked. Just two more songs, we’ll wait just two more songs. We were at Badlands. I always end up at Badlands when I visit San Francisco.

I told him I’d wait all night.

We didn’t wait all night. Britney never came on. But we danced and danced and danced until we wanted another drink.

Later we went to the Lexington and Zeitgest but they were closed and we joked that we were sad  San Francisco shut down so early on a Sunday. We went back to his apartment and I felt guilty for drinking with him because I knew he was trying not to drink.

I keep thinking how you said that one out of ten times is really bad, I said.

This is like number eight.

I didn’t want him to have a bad night ever. Because on bad nights, I feel like he’s out there, in the dark, by himself. When I want him somewhere light, somewhere safe. I put my head in his lap and then fell asleep.

from tampa to l.a.

I spent Thanksgiving in Tampa, Florida with my family. I knew I was going to get my period and my period is awful. I usually spend the day in bed, trying not to move, willing myself to fall asleep. I knew drinking wouldn’t help. But my cousin lives in Tampa and he greeted me with a shot of aguadiente. My cousins remember that in Colombia I drank fifteen beers a day and a lot of aguadiente and never got drunk. That’s what they remember.

I stayed for two days and drank margaritas and beer and wine and aguardiente and sangria and early Saturday morning, we came back from the bars at 3 a.m. and I didn’t sleep because I had cramps. I got up at six a.m. to go to the airport and cried in the car.

I waited to board the plane and thought about the last man I loved. I was thinking I loved him while in that much pain. I was thinking how I should’ve given it a chance. I should’ve stayed. I should’ve said, Yes let’s be a couple, when he said, Let’s be a couple.

Hours later, still on my way to Los Angeles, my cramps were gone, I felt better and thought I made the right choice, about leaving, about not being a couple.I was forgetting. Which is true. I was forgetting a lot of it. I guess that’s what happens when I’m alone in an airport at six a.m. and want someone to hold me. What is also true is that I was thinking of him because he was the last person I was crazy about and that was years ago.

cs notes, no. 1

I’ve been doing energy work. Cranial Sacral Therapy. I started doing it because of 8, which was the last book I loved.

Sometimes I think of getting a tattoo of the number 8 because of the book and because of Elliott Smith’s cover and because sometimes I think those things mean something to me.

* * *

I lay on the table and I had the feeling this is exactly where I need to be. In the upstairs room of a yoga studio on Hillhurst Avenue with a woman who says, Zoe, can I touch your heart right now? I open my eyes and say yes. I close them and she puts her hand on my heart and who can say what happens except me.

I could tell you, I could tell you. But here I am writing on a blog, already leaving a lot of what matters out. I leave it out and hope to put it in somewhere better. A chapbook, a story, a memoir in little tiny pieces. A memoir about my body-all the different parts and memories stored in them and how I experience time.

She tells me parts of my body are shut down and I ask her which parts and they all make sense to me except when she says my heart. My heart is shut down. She says it’s like I have armory around my heart. That doesn’t make sense to me.

At night, on the way to a party downtown, I tell my friend and she says that is exactly how she would describe my heart and she is thinking of my romantic relationships.

You think you have a big heart just because you’re nice and like most people, even if X, Y, and Z and you’re understanding, you listen. People say, You’re a little crazy but you’re one of the nicest people they know. Never mind that all the while you maintain your distance, never mind that you don’t let anyone in. You spend time with men and all the time you’re thinking you’re late to leave. You keep lying, you keep wanting to leave, you keep wanting it not to work out. Out of habit.

* * *

On the table, at the end of the session, I felt something start to release and the something was some sort of energy and it was black and it felt like something dead leaving my body. It was strange to close my eyes and feel this death like energy release through my body. It was strange because I have stored that deathlike energy in me without my knowing, for who knows how long. Maybe centuries. Maybe it was passed down from my mother, maybe her mother passed it down to her. This is how the body experiences time.

After the session, she gave me a few moments on the table and I just lay there with my eyes closed and my body started to shake and I cried, a little, which is something I never really do anymore.

An hour or two after the session, I was at work and everything literally seemed brighter. Colors. And I was telling someone at work. She said, Does it feel good? It’s not that it felt good or it felt bad. It felt like a layer of myself was removed and what I felt was vulnerable.

excerpt from a letter i wrote today