2014 is going to be good. I will be good. No more lying. Less tears. More exercise. Less candy. Less cheese, more vegetables. More love. More making out. More fun. More books, less TV. More vodka, less tequila. The same amount of shoes. More art, more music, more writing. Way more writing. More sleep. More coffee. More tea. No depression. More learning. More enjoying. Less bullies. Less mean people. More beautiful people. More money to good causes. Less money on ultimately worthless things. Less waste. Less fat. Less worry. Less anxiety. More pictures. More videos. More documentation. More hats. Hopefully more hair, maybe less. More money? Less worrying about money. More memories. More papers I enjoy writing. Less boredom. Less things. Less pills, less doctors appointments. More friends, better friends. More experiences. More terrible puns. More blog posts. Less celebrity trash. More tears of joy. More fairy lights. More warm sweaters. More beaches. More bikinis. More self-confidence. Less self-hate. No self-hate. More nerdiness. More Doctor Who.  More superheroes. Less panic. Less paranoia. More love. More family. More hugs. Less existential crisis. Less selfishness. Less swallowness. More travel. More me. More me in the world. 2014 will be more than good, 2014 will be AMAZING. And I will make it that way!

2013

A Spoken Word

Frances Stevenson

            2013 was interesting. A mixed bag. I escaped a depression I had been fighting for a while. Quit a job I hated for a year and a half and found love and acceptance in a class of two year olds. Made less money. Got lost in my own head and realized I needed to make a change, got started on the path to self-acceptance. Met a boy, met a less boyish boy who I had known forever, did nothing with either boy. Felt completely alone, fell back into depression and made a vow to stop alienating self. Bought a lot of things I didn’t need. Started working out. Ate more vegetables. Lost some weight. Gained some weight.  Lied, a lot. Drank more water. Got overly upset at a ripped pair of jeans. Bought new jeans. Discovered the incredible power of fairy lights and alcohol. Took more medications. Saw more doctors. Felt sicker, felt healthier. Started flossing, stopped flossing. Enjoyed learning. Enjoyed school. Stopping enjoying school. Met a bully. Tried to ignore bully. Felt smart. Felt stupid at the hands of “friends”. Stopped letting other people define me. Failed. Let my nerdy freak flag fly. Bought A LOT of shoes. Felt bad about throwing things away. Broke things. Was terrible human being. Hated other human beings. Cried. Let a beautiful and cold Sunday pass unencumbered by the outside world. Healed. Drank equal amounts of coffee and tea. Started eating fish again. Tried to stop eating dairy, failed, ate in moderation.  Wrote. Was awkward. Was awkward as hell. Talked to dad more. Felt apart of family, felt nothing like family. Read a lot of books, watched slightly more television.  Joined the growing world of the internet generation, felt less alone. Enjoyed no responsibilities. Waited for 2014.

A little poem I wrote about the hot muggy weather.

What once was freedom

has become its own sort of captivity

holding on to me and dragging me down with it

down and down

as my heart beats faster and my lungs fill with the unnecessary water

in the air

the cloudless sky and shiny sun

burn as I bike, walk, jog to the nearest entrance

to the sweet freedom of air conditioning. 

cozy Saturday mornings

make it hard to wake up

to face the warm light from outside

and leave the warm sheets

the promises of coffee and food

lure

but do not guarantee

feet on cold floors

seasons change

fall, spring, winter

or hot humid summers

but Saturday mornings

hibernate us all 

Cabin Life

            Cabin life is different. One is not obligated, to cook well, or at all, to shower daily, to sleep often, or well.

            Thirty hours without sleep feels like four cups of coffee or a few beers. Saturday mornings mean five am sunrises and instant coffee instead of warm sheets, eggs, bacon.

            Netflix marathons are replaced by cup amplified music and card games only played by the light of a sunset or a flashlight.

            Cabin life is different. Twenty-four hours can feel like a week or a month. New friends like old. Seventeen year olds become eighteen when cute boys smile and jet skis pass by.

            Cabin life means rainbow sunrises over chocolate muffins on rickety docks with pillows and blankets. It means campfires and tummy aches from too much junk food. It means four pm naps in the sun turned into red sunburnt backs, aloe lotion and the promise to use sunscreen tomorrow.

            Cabin life is s’mores over the coals of a fire lit and forgotten hours ago.

            Cabin life is packing up your stuff forgetting a few things, saying goodbye to the lake and the cabin and driving home for work the next morning. 

A Juxapostion of Lifetimes

My father struggles with the worst storm he ever traveled through. The heavy unforgiving rain beats down and the freezing-cold water makes it hard to breathe. My Dad is late for his shift, fumbling with his rain suit, unwilling to go out in the storm unprotected. The thunder and lightning are dangerous to anyone on the deck but they are moving through a lock and that makes work unavoidable. He pulls his feet to the exterior door pulling on his rain suit, one leg at a time when the whistle blows, loud and angry. He flies out the door half dressed. The rope is tied to a post on the deck, a huge potentially catastrophic mistake. This all-important rope holds the ship to the walls of the lock they are currently moving through and the water level lowers but the boat does not. The heavy tugboat is literally suspended in the air; this will not last for long, the ropes they used were strong but not that strong. My dad curses out the man working before him and quickly unties the rope giving the line some slack, chocking on cold water, his breathe labored. The ship lowers.

I sit in my high school math class staring up at the white bumpy ceiling. The sophmores and juniors around me talking, yelling, playing, the epitome of high schoolers,  as I think about my father’s stories.

Mr. Surver snaps me out of my daze with the start of class. I sit up open up my notebook expecting class to be chaos as usual. Logarithms, awesome. I see Mr. Surver’s blue squiggly handwriting on the Smartboard turn into the blue-green Illinois River as my father stares out at it from the deck of a towboat. I see the tow attached to the barges with ropes and cables pulled as tightly as they can just like my father told me they would be.

I can almost hear the cables snap myself as my father turns around to see all the deckhands curse out the boat that bumped them. The barges push down the river past the tow all on their own.

            “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” says someone, maybe Snake, my father’s roommate. I would kill to know a guy named Snake.

            The cables snapped because another ship bumped into them and the tow had fallen apart. It was a miracle no one had been killed. Cables that thick, moving at that speed, could cut a man in half; it was sheer luck that they were all still alive.

            There was work to be done. All the barges now floating on their own, with no ties to the boat, would have to be caught and reattached. The merchandise in those barges was their paycheck.

            It was only my father’s second trip on the towboat since he had gotten the job in November of ‘82. They were headed towards New Orleans on the Illinois.

In the face of adversity my dad sought out adventure. I think in some ways I looked for adventure in taking extra college classes. To be perfectly honest I’m not really sure why I started. I have the lies I tell other people; college credits, to escape the boredom, to stop being treated like a child. Maybe it was adventure I was looking for.  

           

            “Frances, FRANCES,” Mr. Surver yells, my little trip to dream world suddenly obvious to the entire class. “You want to join us?”

             I sigh, hold up my pen in surrender and wrote down the notes on the board. But a minute later my thoughts slip into the world of daydreams.

            How different my father and I are. I always compared myself to him. I could talk to my mom but I always saw myself as more my father than my mother. But now that I know what he’s been through, what he’s done I can’t help but feel I don’t know him at all. Once again I flashed back to that afternoon when he had told me of his time as a deckhand.

            My father’s job as a deckhand started a year after he graduated college. He had finished his last archelogical dig for the summer and although he had ignored it all summer he knew furthering his education in anthropology would not lead to a job. My great aunt, who lived in St.Louis at the time, suggested deckhand school having connections to the Huffman Towing Company. Coming from an East Coast wealthy family, her idea of towboats was a little romanticized. I think her and the rest of my father’s family were picturing some version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. In reality there was even more profanity and a lot less romance.

            But he needed the job, or rather a place to go and figure out what to do next. So my dad traveled from Ohio to Arkansas to a deckhand school. The test taking part was easy considering most of the deck hands that came through were not college educated. The physical component was a little harder. He learned to fight boat fires, tie complicated knots and throw heavy rope onto bollards, short metal posts on which rope was attached to a dock a ship. Twelve weeks later he was on his way to St. Louis.

            The bell rang and everyone made their way out of the classroom and into the noisy hallway. The loud noise of two thousand talking students breaks into my thoughts, I quickly pack up my notebook, tablet, and folder, plug my earbuds into my ears and ignore the look of judgment from Mr. Surver as I shuffle out the door.

            I walk through the hallway and into the busy commons, Mat Kearney blasting in my ears drowning out the sound of happy teenagers on their way to fifth hour. I head to the west entrance, flash a smile at the Para at the desk and walk out of the school.

            The brightness of the sun make my eyes blink and dilate, not used to natural light after four hours of florescent light.

The bright light floods through the circular window and my father groans trying to remember the events of the previous night. Snake groans from across the room.

“Dave what the fuck? Close the shades.”

The memories flood back from last night. Snake had woken him up with a plan to sneak of the boat, a forbidden but luring idea. If they were caught they would be fired but the boredom of the same face, hallways and rooms was getting to him and the rest of the crew. I see them sneak past their supervior’s corriders, a league of trampling men whispering and tiptoeing behind my father and Snake. Up the stairs and into the night air, from there they step off the ship and on to land for the first time in weeks. Most of them stumble when their feet hit solid ground, their centers of gravity missing the rocking of the boat.

They weren’t caught, a miracle to say the least. Most of the men came back drunk, even more buoyant versions of themselves, louder and with fewer inhibitions to get in the way. Each man was returned to his room. The smell of beer would take months to leave the ship mixing with the heat of the summer.

I climb into my stifling hot car. I had forgotten to crack the windows that morning, still adjusting to the nice weather. I plug my iPod in, put my broken shades on, put the car in reverse and escape.

Once I am a comfortable distance from the school I roll down my windows, let my hair out of the tight bun it had been confined to and exhale.

As I stop at a red light I thought about my dad’s stories. Will I have stories like that to have my childern? Not the way my life is going right now. Another year of part time high school, part time community college. Three years of nursing school. Maybe a spring break trip abroad. A job, an apartment, bills, adulthood,  everything moved so fast. I had never been brave enough to try new things, with the one exception of becoming a PSEO student but that just meant more school and more stress. I had always been a planner, an organizer. Would I ever be able to run away to Arkansas and become a deckhand?

The light turned green and I turned onto highway seven.

I see my father’s boat turn as it docks in Mississippi, this time with only one piece of cargo to unload, my father. Maybe he hugs some of his shipmates, maybe he hugs Snake, his roommate for the last year. He waves to the boat as it leaves him behind. A plane picks him up at the airport and he flies home. His time as a deckhand has come to an end, a little bit closer to where he is supposed to be.

Rewriting Fairytales: Cinderella

            Once upon a time there was a young girl whose mother had died and father had remarried. Soon after the marriage the young girl, named Cinderella for better reason except her parents were cruel and they thought it sounded “romantic”, was left alone in a large house in the suburbs with a stepmother and two twin stepbrothers she had known for all of five minutes. Her father was off on a fishing trip with “the boys”. So Cinderella or Cindy to her friends hid up in her room with her laptop watching Netflix and browsing on tumblr. Soon there was a knock on the door. And by soon I mean four hours later, you know how time flies when you’re watching Netflix.

            “Oh Cindy,” the stepmother called. “Won’t you come out and spend time with your family?”

            “Uh sure,” Cindy replied still annoyed at her stepmother’s new found habit of using the nickname usually reserved for people under the age of eighteen.” I don’t know if you really qualify as family,” she muttered.

            “I heard that!”

            “Whoops.”

            The stepmother stormed through the door barely bothering to open it and snapped the pink laptop from her hands.

            “Hey.”

            “If you’re going to talk to your mother like that then you’re not going have this.” She held up the laptop and stormed out her footsteps booming on the linoleum floors.  

            “So, no more family time?” Cindy called after hers.

            She flopped down on her bed, still covered in the horrible floral pink bedspread chosen by the stepmother when she heard she was getting a “daughter”.

            “And you’re not my mother.” She muttered defiantly as she drifted off to sleep.