Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

elise

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Driving can seem exotic to me sometimes, especially out on highways that i don’t frequent. Cars aren’t something that are especially typical of my Philadelphia routine, other than various friends and acquaintances saving my ass from the winter chill by driving me back from the theatre at night. I got us to my house okay, but after that i was blind as to where we were or how we got there … just desperately trying to align myself via the river and signs pointing North to New York.

My romantic life being what it is, my mother has never had a girlfriend of mine to meet, and so we stopped by my house on Reed street on our way to New Jersey to see if she was around. She was, albeit barely in her underwear when i first opened the door unannounced, but mom was not about the give up the chance to meet an in-the-flesh significant other of mine who drives her own car and is bringing me home with her for the day.

I played chameleon as best i could in blue jeans and grey shirt against the hood of her car as my mom engaged us in idle chatter, trying to understand how she must come off the first time you meet her without my nervously cracking jokes to get in the way. My mother and i live on our torment of each other, mocking back and forth as we breathlessly converse, and to other people we seem too entangled in this strange familial subculture to be penetrated or understood. Idle chatter it was, about the rain that seemed to be on the way and where we were going. We finally ran out of steam (left without too many of our typical sarcastic remarks; on our best behaviour), and my mother gave me a kiss and a hug and, before i could turn around to walk back to the passenger side of the car, my mother gave her a kiss and a hug too. Hope to see you again, or something. That’s what she said.

Back in the car i was just madly grinning and fiddling with my seatbelt until my mother was safely across the street and back into our row home before i turned around and said “Well, that wasn’t so bad afterall.”

And, all of that was before New Jersey.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75004495/

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I cried twice in a single twelve hour period, and in retrospect i’m not really too bothered by either. People are meant to cry; it releases the pressure that builds behind your eyelids — builds from sideways glances and offhand comments. And sometimes it is like a broken dam, and sometimes it is the trickle of a leaking faucet.


It is practically spring, and i will definitely ride with the windows down if she lets me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75002372/

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It is awkward walking down the hall of a dormitory now, in socked feet — it offers flashes back to freshmen year. I have always walked heavily… the kind of walk where your heel makes a bass impact with the floor that you can feel subtly through the walls. It’s imitative, i think, of my mother, and the way her footfalls would telegraph her movement throughout our old house. I would know when to flinch or feign sleep from the way her heels fell on our creaking wooden stairs, and from how the opaque glass pane in my window softly shook in its frame.

Socks on the carpeted-over tile of the dorm is different… there is no reverberation, no rattles, no hints of anyone else’s movement. It is strangely silent.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/10273120/

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I cannot decide if i have nothing to say, something i don’t want to say, or something to say with no way to say it.

Kissing her is like falling forward without putting out my hands to catch myself, either because i do not intend to ever touch the ground or because i do not mind it at all.

That’s all, i guess. Good morning.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/02/10147140/

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I never expect winter to play this nicely, even when it is waning on us and giving way to another spring. Kat and Elise were stalking around the Penn Museum courtyard, one posing and the other one snapping away with her 35mm. I was lying splayed out on the grass, half in sun and half in shadow.


“Do you need me to move?”

“No, you’re fine. Are you bored?”

“No, i’m fine.”

I am usually not the most visual person, but i was lying there pressed as close to the earth as i possibly could and i almost asked Elise for her camera so i could capture the air in a single frame. People tell me they want to read about my life, and at that moment my life was blades of grass too close to my face to be in focus, and slanty red brick sidewalks, and green algae in the water.

I was pressing closer and closer to the ground, thinking that maybe if i could get close enough i would understand something about it — something about my relative significance as a speck on a tiny square of grass.


And, no, i wasn’t bored at all.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/02/10077292/