She started having cold sores and unsightly rashes.

Mommy didn't protect Anita. Couldn't wouldn't. Turned the old blind eye. Anita's eyes changed from velvet brown to black lakes.
Bottomless lakes where dirty secrets sank through to the sludgy end. She started having cold sores and unsightly rashes. She would wake up in the middle of the night screaming so the nice china in the kitchen cabinet almost shattered. Mommy just rolled over and reached for the ear plugs. Sometimes Anita wet her  bed. That made mommy furious. Because she hated going to the laundromat. She would say to Anita: You're not a child anymore.

Anita was twelve when it started.

Later Anita started smoking cigarettes and hanging out with boys who drove stolen cars and drank beer and sniffed glue.

Mommy liked to watch TV. Mommy liked to drink white wine with an ice cube in. She liked mail-order catalogs. She liked her boyfriend. Or she liked the fact that she had one. That made her feel lucky, she said. But if she really would have thought about it, about him, maybe she would have come to the conclusion that he really didn't contribute anything but troubles.

Sometimes he would pick Anita up from school. That was the one good thing he did. So why the hell did Anita complain about it? Especially since he would buy her ice cream and soda?

She had just turned sixteen when she finally called the police. In mommy's boyfriend's computer there were many videos that he had made when he raped her in stairwells in public buildings. When he had brought friends along. When he forced her to perform oral sex on him on a polluted beach, behind some shrubs, under a cloud bursting with rain.

I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

It was all carefully orchestrated. That's what I tell myself when I sit in my apartment, crying into a beer and heating up fish sticks in the toaster.

I am but a puppet in someone's master plan.

So it's OK that I smeared an inch-thick layer of cream cheese frosting on my vegan carrot cake and ate until I had a belly-ache. And it's OK that I said Fuck You Asshole to the Vodafone-guy who refused to help me sign up for DSL in English.
I have one more wall to paint in the livingroom and I've called in sick to do it. I decided to have a crush on the girl at the café. Just because the weather was so lovely and I had been shopping and drinking and felt so alive I didn't know what to do with myself. Carbonation in my bloodstream. Shoes made out of marshmallows.

And then. Disaster. Failure. Rejection. Mega-rejection. We rode our bikes to Treptow Park. They have this really cool Russian monument there. A giant bronze guy stabbing a Swastika with a sword. Then, as we sat in a beer garden, she started lecturing me. Said I was so American. That I always should ask if someone speaks English, before I just order a beer in American or ask for directions in American.

Sure, I said. I should. But as soon as I do that person looks at me like I had insulted them. Because everyone speaks English here. Except for the Vodafone-guy.
Then she said that by asking her out on a date I was acting no better than a dude. I was making her an object. I was copying fucked-up heterosexual behaviors.


Maybe that's how you do in the States, she said, this gorgeous café latte-skinned girl with dreadlocks and a pierced septum. But that's not the way it's done here. The world is big, you know.

I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

Then she got up and left me with the bill. Just like a fucking girl.

Now Volcanic ash is clouding the air. The temperature has dropped and the skies are gray, gray, gray.

But there's still a light that never goes out. I will eventually wipe my tears, blow my nose, band-aid my wounds.

call it by its real name

There's a fox on the run. She has a bushy tail dipped in white. A small shy face.
She's on the run along the canals. I can't tell what she's looking for, if anything. Love? Food? Just a distraction? A nice way to kill some time. The moon is but a sliver, but through a rift, on the outskirts of the horizons, there's some navy blue spilling out, as a premonition. The fox cuts across Greifswalder Strasse and starts following the street car tracks.
You've got to keep moving, right?

(He doesn't speak, he screams, when he's on the phone)

She sometimes talks to me as if I was an idiot. I guess I am when it comes to certain things. I am at a remedial level when it comes to faking a smile. And it's nearly impossible for me carrying more than two soup bowls without scalding myself, or leaving a trail of carrot-ginger splashes on the tiled floor. I hate that tone in her voice, that look on her face. Hate it. But then again, other times she's very sweet. Tells me how much she likes me, and says I am a good worker. A good worker?
I know she drinks too much red wine upstairs and that she makes expensive phone calls to her Psychic friend. That witch tells her that soon she'll meet a tall, handsome man and she won't be lonely or confused anymore. That love really is a miracle, and that her personal one is just waiting in the wings. The dollars go tick-tick-tick.
She's a fool because she allows herself to dream and to hope.

(He thinks I am unfair. I think he's unfair. He says I'm selfish. I say the same thing about him)

I stopped and watched the fox disappear down the soft slope leaning towards Alexanderplatz. I suddenly ached to be in a forest, and to see her there, threading confidently over roots that beckon for a human stumble. But not a fox one. I dreamed, for a short moment, of those dense pine tree fairytale forests that I think could only exist in Scandinavia. Where distant snow-covered mountains poke star-hung skies, and elves flow-dance on misty meadows.

The sum of the problems is always constant.

Satan if you're there, please touch my shoulder

I didn't remember any of it until recently. Or, I guess I just stopped thinking about it.
But my cousin Claire was a truly wicked one. And then she jumped off a hotel roof in New Orleans. To pay for the life she took. Or at least that's what the note in her pocket read.

Her mom (my aunt) started dating this beautiful black guy from New Orleans. He had chocolate skin and sexy teddy bear eyes. His legs seemed to go on for miles and miles. He was an artist. So was Claire's mom Kate, although she'd only ever shown her work in local coffee shops. But she was definitely a social genius who knew everybody in Sacramento. When she had parties and Claire happened to be there with her braces and bad posture, guests would sometimes ask her: So, how do you know Kate?
Claire resented her mother, because she had more friends and more lovers than her. And she was beautiful in all the ways Claire wasn't. And Claire wasn't very fun to be around, even I, who was six years younger thought her games were childish and that she always smelled like milk gone bad. Maybe that was the wickedness leaking from her pores?

Around the time that Kate started dating Derek, the guy from New Orleans, Claire changed. Almost overnight. Suddenly the braces where gone, and her skin was pimple-free. And suddenly she had breasts that she accentuated with lacy push-up bras. She plucked her eyebrows into delicate arches that framed her green eyes in a way that now you suddenly noticed them. And there was a pretty power in them that hadn't been there before. The same boys that up until then had treated her like stale air started to twist their necks too far when she strutted by.
And she definitely didn't want to play with dolls anymore. Now she wanted to put on make-up, smoke pick-pocketed cigarettes in the upstairs bathroom and talk about the birds and the bees. She said she was no longer a virgin, because she had penetrated her hymen with an eyeliner. There was one gooey drop of blood.

Kate told Claire that it was serious this time. She said that she and Derek were really in love, and that she wanted to marry him. And that she wanted to have his child. And that child would have the most luscious cappuccino skin tone.

One night Derek came over for dinner. Claire wore her shortest skirt and her most effective push-up bra. She kept hitting the champagne pretty hard, especially since Kate was pretty relaxed about underage drinking. The tiny potent bubbles went to Claire's head. She kept on pretending to accidentally brush up on Derek, and she tried playing footsie with him under the table that was set with the nicest cutlery and lit with candles. But he tried to dodge her sock-feet attacks by moving those long legs out of the way.
After about the fifth glass of champagne the dining room was spinning out of control for Claire, the wallpaper became a kaleidoscope and she was trapped inside of it.
I am going to get sick, she said and grabbed Derek's wrist and asked him to help her. Or at least to hold her hand. In the bathroom, after she'd thrown up, she sat on the tiled floor with her legs spread and her panties on display. She took Derek's hand and placed it on her milky thigh and asked him if he liked her.
He patted her thigh in what he thought would seem a fatherly way, and said: Of course I like you, Claire. You are a sweet girl. Let me help you off this floor.

But Claire wasn't sweet. She wasn't a good girl. Because a couple of months earlier she had been in that windowless upstairs bathroom. The one with the linoleum floor that mold grew under, where we used to get dizzy on from stolen menthol cigarettes.
She had switched the lights off and she had said out loud: Satan if you're there, please touch my shoulder. She waited. And waited. Then she said it again. And she felt a chill between her shoulder blades, like a block of ice was held an inch away from her skin. She wanted to bolt out of there, into the safety of the rest of the house drenched in the remains of the day. But she clenched her teeth and whispered through them: I'll sell my soul to you, do whatever you will with it. But in exchange I want some beauty and some action.

She begun pursuing Derek. He wasn't interested at first. I mean she was a child. And he was in love with Kate. But there was a pull in Claire's gaze and a heat to her touch. He found himself swayed. God help me, he thought. Because his parents were good southern baptists.

One day Claire took the city bus to the industrial area where Derek had his studio. She chugged a wine cooler on the bus. She wore a dress than clung to her body – that was becoming more voluptuous by the minute – like saran wrap. He didn't expect her, didn't want her. Well, only a little. Only in the unlit, filthiest corners of his brain where dust bunnies celebrated two-digit birthdays.
She found the building. She found his door. She pounded on it with a fist made of lead. When Derek opened Claire threw himself at him. She hung her arms like a chain around his neck. Squeezed her thighs around his hips like a fox trap. Derek stumbled backwards and pulled her down with him on the Jackson Pollock-splattered floor, And that's where they did it. And they did it again. Kate called several times during. They both heard her lovesick voice on the answering machine: Honey, sweetie, where are you? I miss you, I need you.

And then the affair spiraled out of control. Derek was hexed. Or so he said. And then one night Claire told Derek that Kate was in San Francisco and that she wouldn't be back until the following day. But in reality she was just having dinner with a girlfriend who she'd neglected due to her infatuation, as one tends to do. But now she wasn't doing so good. She was constantly having bad hair days. She felt that Derek's kisses had started to have less tongue in them. She feared he was falling out of love with her, and that she wasn't going to have a beautiful café au lait baby after all.

After dinner she came home and walked in on Derek fucking her sixteen-year old daughter doggy-style in her bed, on her satin sheets.
There was a terrible racket in the hallway and then Kate ran out of the house and back into the car. A strange ice rain had started to fall from the pitch-black sky.
How it happened we don't know. But Kate drove off the road and the car turned into a pile of scrap metal. Inside it her body was twisted into a shape not even a senior Cirque de Soleil dancer can pull off.

Claire stalked Derek to New Orleans. He stopped making art. He started going to church again and grew a beard and a belly.

Claire eventually went on a booze and coke-bender with a male stripper she had met on Bourbon Street. When that came to an end, like all things come to an end, she jumped from the roof of the Omni Hotel in the French Quarter. The security cameras caught her hesitate for just one frozen split second of eternity.
She had this story written on a napkin folded into her jean pocket and soaked in blood.

serial killers read me bedtime stories sitting at the edge of my princess bed

Sometimes melancholy creeps up on me when everything seems to be going my way. And this just happened. It almost feels chemical. I am not heart-broken. I haven't fought with daddy. I found this great new apartment and have been enjoying going to flea-markets to hunt for furniture. I am going to school and making friends.

But despite the sunshine and the baby-blue Berlin sky. The extremely cheerful birds chirping from their nest outside my kitchen window. And the perfectly moist lemon poppy cake I over-indulged in.

It's like the curtain dropped. And I am choking on musty and dusty red velvet. The air feels sandpaper-y to breathe and I am just too tired to keep my eyelids hoisted. Instead I fall into a half-sleep state where serial killers read me bedtime stories sitting at the edge of my princess bed. And I masturbate myself raw with a spiked dildo. And tear the wings off dragon flies.

I still haven't been able to create sufficient meaning to sustain my pitiful existence in this cold galaxy.

the so-called feminist ones wearing sandals exposing yellow toenails curling around calloused toes in desperate need of a pedicure.

something anise wrote in my comment box made me think.

sometimes i get totally disgusted by men. the macho, homophobe assholes with tufts of monkey hair on their chubby shoulders. the so-called feminist ones wearing sandals exposing yellow toenails curling around calloused toes in desperate need of a pedicure. the hot ones who use girls to massage their inflated egos. the psychopath ones making decisions, in their roles as governors, college professors, bosses, that affect the world in an ugly way.

But more often I feel ashamed to be a woman, when there are so many women giving my gender a bad name. I am talking about women who let men walk all over them, and claim to actually like it. Women who get breast implants because they think they won't get a husband with small titties. Women who act stupid. Women who think that a fat diamond ring will solve all of their problems. Women who complain that their boyfriends treat them like shit, flirt with other girls right in front of them, never cook, never clean –– And then STILL not DUMP their lame fucking asses. In those cases I sympathize with the douchebag dude rather than the bimbo Barbie girl. It's a dog eat dog world.

I want women to be strong, to speak their mind. To kick ass. To lay down the law. To use men as sex toys. To be proud of that extra roll of fat. To not take shit. To kick their lame-ass BFs to the fucking curb.
This, of course, applies mostly to hetero women. Of course there are homo girls that suck too, in a myriad of ways (believe me, I am dealing with a sucky lesbian as I type this) but at least they don't tend to fucking crawl in the gutter for dudes. 

Shit, I got really worked up typing this. But really, today has been a perfect day.

Now I want to know what Y'all think?

Sunshine Award

I also got a Sunshine award from the very clever and sweet Cleo over at Youth Is Wasted On The Young

 

The rules of this blog award are:

1. Post this logo within your blog or post

2. Pass the award onto 5 fellow bloggers

3. Link to the nominees within your post

4. Let the nominees know they have received an award by commenting on their blog

5. Share the love and link the person whom you received this blog award

So I will pass this award onto:

1. My girl Tessa over at Apparellel 

Because she has style galore and is both super hot and super sweet. 

2. Left Hand Cuts The Right 

for an endless supply of awesome images

3. Heather at The Dream Machine 

because she seems to be an extraordinary ordinary girl and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways.

4. The one and only Anise at sometimes i am made of light because she knows how to string words along to form the most beautiful sentences and express very personal innermost thoughts. 

5. Hope Chella

another great and inspirational photo blog.

XOXO, Kim

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

This is spring as they know it here. It's high time to shed the cloak of darkness, in order to see clearly. To not think sullen thoughts. I am sitting in a café called St.Oberholtz in Mitte, Berlin. Twenty years ago this was part of the GDR. Now it's filled with hipsters and Spanish tourists. And Americans like me, disenchanted and disconnected. Accident prone and curious. Love-sick and occupied with various substitutes for God.

A caravan of sirens just blew through the sunshine on the street below the big panoramic windows.

My love interest has been hitting the crack-pipe. She moved out of her home and into a squat-like, crumbling apartment with vomit-looking murals painted on the walls where black mold grows like a cancer.

She was writing me, she said, when she was high and lonely and confused. She was typing in a trance in between hits on the pipe.
She wrote that she couldn't stop thinking about me, and that she longed to trace the lines criss-crossing my palms. She wrote that she wanted to hold me all day and night. She wrote about my eyes; green like pools in tropical forests. (That's when someone should have slapped me hard. Because my eyes are blue.)
All these sappy love-emails, asking me to come back to Berlin and to be her star-crossed lover.
And I imagined us walking hand in hand through this city, where people don't seem to smile out of courtesy, and where psychic echos of past atrocities can come out of nowhere – like tumbleweeds on a lonesome Texas highway – at any point in time. 


And now she's high all the time. Her skin is ravaged by pimples and weird scratch marks. She smells worse than teenage boy foot sweat. She doesn't want to fuck. I don't want to fuck. I don't even think I like her. I think I just wanted to do something crazy, something that would mythologize me and sound good in my memoirs. Her voice is shrill and she talks with food in her mouth. She owns several Alanis Morrisette CDs, and that is cause enough to end this 'thing' before it even started.
So why is she smoking crack?

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

Is it all about the substitute for god? The hole that can't be filled?

I am filling it now with work, with the apartment I rented and that I will have to furnish. With my new friend, Michael. He works with me at Sandy's place. He's a really good waiter. He's from Georgia via San Francisco and London. He has a really interesting story I will tell you soon.

P.S A lot of my pix come from here: http://ghostwerld.wordpress.com/ awesome photo blog!!!

You will find me making voodoo dolls. You'll find me drinking JD straight outta bottle.

I know you can't run.
But have you ever thought about reinventing yourself? Shedding skin? Coming out shiny and new?

I have become another person. When I come home (read: if I come home) you may not recognize me. And it's not because my hair color changed or because I gained or lost weight.

I get up early. I work as a waitress. I take walks in the park. I don't drive anywhere. I drink Apfelshorle. I signed up for Deutsch classes.

But keeping the darkness at bay is a full-time job even for a cheerful person like me. When I let the guard down an unexplored part of the gray scale blindfolds me. And that black hole makes me a little lopsided. And then the vertigo comes.

You will find me making voodoo dolls. You'll find me drinking JD straight outta bottle. You'll find me stoned and playing scrabble. With myself. Because I am a sore loser. Don't ever take me on a mini-golf date. You'll find me speeding down Mullholland Drive, momentarily intoxicated by the SoCal beauty, but mostly not caring about the outcome. My outcome.

But now I suddenly have a job. As a waitress. I've never done it before. But this American lady, Sandy, hired me for her American-style restaurant.
I like working. It's sort of new to me. 

So there's already trouble in my paradise.

Morning is gray and crisp. The pollution is but a distant unpleasant thought, fading fast from my muscle memory and cells.

I will shall must look on the bright side. I must trust that there's a sun beyond those curtains of death gray. 


The birds are chirping cheerily. Longingly. (If I say lovingly am I guilty of anthropomorphizing?)
The GDR vision of space age; The Fernsehenturm is beaming dull aluminum through the 8 am haze.


I came with a suitcase, the laptop and a guitar. I am a walking, talking cliche. The young American girl taking on Europe. Who doesn't speak the language beyond: Entshuldigung, sprechen sie English, bitte? Far away from home, brave with the visa card from daddy safely tucked away in my fanny pack. Ein beer, bitte!

She is colder than I expected her to be. There's no tongue in our kisses. And they don't aim for the lips either. The embrace is tense and doesn't rub off. She has bags under her eyes. And tales of trouble.It's not you, it's me.

I never learn not to have any expectations. And now I try to look for the signs I missed while being blind-folded by my silly desired to be loved. And I am not even getting fucked.


So there's already trouble in my paradise.

P.S My blogger acts buggy. I hit return and nothing happens. I click the italics button and nothing happens. Advice? Help!