under the red hot moon

has it really been since february?  really?  yeah, Melissa, it has.  you are a bad, bad person.

so maybe I am, but at least one of you missed me. there's no excuses really, just my same old song and dance about being "busy".  sure I have been busy, but mostly I've been feeling a little too old or something, too mature maybe, to blather on about myself to a bunch of strangers and a few friends.  but not today!

so those staples in my belly are gone, now I just have a big cool scar.  my thesis, thank the lord, is finally finished and turned in.  my graduation requirements are squared away and as of may 15th I'll be walking away with a B.A. in English and one in Sociology.

which leads me to this, xangaland, the question of graduate school.  I have decided it is my calling (for now) to make sure that a few more high school kids get to college with the ability to write a kick-ass paper and the love of literature.  thus I am going to be a high school teacher at least until I get my own business off the ground.  I am considering only three graduate schools as of now, each with pros and cons.  and maybe I need a little advice, so tell me what you think.

UCLA: in the top 10 for secondary education.  relatively inexpensive.  chris could be closer to his family and closer to his old friends and the import scene he loves so much.  getting a transfer through my current job is pretty much a sure thing.  however, getting into their program is not as easy as some schools I've looked at.  I would have to do my resident teaching at an LA school.  furthermore, I do not, do NOT want to live in LA.  freeways scare me.  I'd have to make more than I do now just to live. and I just plain don't want to live in California.  if I went there it would mainly be for chris.

Northewestern: it's pricey, its exclusive, I'm not sure I could live in Chicago, though I do have a friend or two there .  but it's frickin' Northwestern!  how proud of myself would I be if I got my Master's there.  the program is excellent and I hear financial aid is rather generous.  but would I even get in?  my grades are summa cum laude, but my thesis may not be, and UNM is not highly thought of for humanities education...

UW, Milwaulkee or Madison, possibly Alverno:  this is really where I'm leaning toward.  I know it sound's crazy to want to move to the midwest, but I have my reasons.  yes, one of them is that my best friend is going to Alverno in Milwaulkee.  and maybe I like the idea of a huge rockabilly scene and a big city that's not so...city-ish.  Madison is number two in the nation for secondary ed, not sure on Milwaulkee.  there are several places mine and Chris's jobs could transfer to, and I know I could afford even the out of state tuition.  plus, wisconsin's standards for teacher certification are very high,ensuring I would have excellent credentials when I hit the job market.  but my big concerns--can I get in, can I live somewhere totally different than here with no reference, and most of all, can I drive in the snow? 

so that's what's going through my mind on that concern, any new ideas would be appreciated.  everything else is just going one day at a time.  wedding stuff, job stuff, figuring out what I will do for the summer.  all stuff I can write about another time, if I ever drag my butt to the computer anymore. 

if there's anyone still out there, thanks for sticking around, sorry to be xanga's worst hermit.  another reason it maybe have been hard to get in touch with me is I've changed a lot of my contact information.  my email is now roxieaugust@hotmail.com  my AIM name is roxieaugust,  and yahoo is still boyshmoys.  I'd love to chat with anyone if you can catch me on, I'm so socially disconnected!

you can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't control the weather...

things good.  had my surgery, and now I've got 11 more piercings (staples) than I used to, which is pretty cool.  and the wedding's getting underway...it's been official for awhile and all the plans are being made and all kinds of deposits paid.  Chris and I are getting married in September, as long as I survive my last semester of college and finish up my thesis and all that hoo-hah.  out of respect for many of my old and ailing relatives the wedding will be in my hometown of Carlsbad, New Mexico, small, with a small reception.  hoping to keep it under 100 guests but considering how many people my parents know, I kind of doubt it.

having the wedding in Carlsbad means leaving out a lot of people we love out of the ceremony, but as compensation we're going to rent out a local bar or something and have a big reception.  I desperately wanted to make our Albuquerque party Billy Idol "White Wedding" themed, but Chris vetoed that.  probably for the best...

so, in my last post I briefly alluded to the fact that the boy from before, though now long gone from my town, is never completely out of my life.  I will tell you why this is so, and, strangely enough, what this has to do with my wedding plans.

I've never been much good at making girl friends, always gotten along better with the boys.  But at the end of last fall semester I'd noticed a marked deficiency of estrogen in my friend pool, what with Kat moved back to Chicago and me moved out of my old roommates' place.  It was time to meet some chicks.

So this girl comes into my work with her toddler in a stroller and she's wearing a t-shirt of a band I like and we chat.  Turns out she has seen me at school before and when she leaves the store she promises to say hello next time she sees me.  A few days later she gets on the bus at the same time as me and we ride together and then walk to our classes which happen to be in the same building. 

She's an  ex-scenester, more than I ever was, but we do know some of the same people and we talk about it.  We joke about the politics of who-slept-with-who and how that gets people kicked out of the punk/skin/billy scene all the time.  We talk about the various ways that we ourselves were kicked out of the scene/let back in/kicked out again.  We talk about who we dated.

She mentions she used to run with the skin crew and I casually drop the name of the skin I used to see (the one I've been writing about for months, people!)  She stops, and, appears quite shocked.  I wonder if perhaps I'm not cute enough to make my statements believable or if she is maybe connected to him too. 

"You know how I had my son with me at the store the other day?" she says.  I nod.  "That's who the father is," she says, referring to that little piece of my past.  And well, my stomach dropped a bit too.

If you recall from earlier posts, he told me right when we got together that it was possible he was a father and that he was bound to that no matter how involved we got.  So I hated the girl that dared to carry his baby.  I imagined she was surly, dirty, unfit, and above all, ugly.  Someone I could look at and say "he'll definitely choose me over her."  Selfish, considering there was a child involved, but I was prepared to be generous, as long as I won the boy in the end.  She knew about me too, probably hated me for complicating the matter.  Probably thought I was dirty and surly and ugly.

But at that moment we stood in front of each other and swallowed our words.  We were nearly the same girl.  She a bit bolder, me a bit more naive.  Both of us the kind of pretty he liked.  Both of us left by him in the end for a third girl who was (as we have agreed) dirty and surly and maybe a bit unattractive. 

If I had ever had cause to hate the mother of his baby, it was rendered invalid by coming to face with the reality of her situation.  Sure, I was hurt and I thought I'd never get over it.  I thought I'd have to think of him every day and regret the mistakes I'd made.  But I got off easy.  She wakes up at six every morning to take care of his baby, she goes to school full time and lives with her parents to make a better life for his son, she is pernamently invested in a child he's seen maybe three times.

And from that time, several months ago, we've gotten to know each other a lot better, neither of us much like the other pictured.  He's a joke between us mostly, we laugh at what an idiot he was (and we were).  There is suprisingly little bitterness or sadness to her jokes, she's ten times tougher than me.  I'm even slowly getting to know her son, a beautiful and brilliant and tempramental little demon of a child who asked me for a hug for the first time a few days ago.

She's been the best friend I've had in a long time, been there for me during my dramas and called me during hers.  We've had enough downtown bar adventures now to write a book (its in the works, ; ).  We've even ended up in the same class this semester where we make wry comments in the margins of our notes about the teacher's perceptions of current music subcultures.  And she was one of the first people to the be truly thrilled when I got engaged.

If you've made it this far in this ridiculously long post, this, xangaland, this is how the mother of the baby fathered by the biggest heartbreak of my life---came to be my bridesmaid.  She definitely earned it.

it's a nice day to start again..it's a nice day for a white wedding

but of all these friends and lovers,
there is no one compares with you,
and these memories lose their meaning
when I think of love as something new

and though I'll never lose affection
for people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them
in my life, I love you more...

     He's standing at the other end of an aisle, and these words are playing as I'm getting closer to him.  There's people on either side, a white dress, flowers, I think.  It's all a little blurry, it's all a halo around--well, around him.  In my life, I've loved him more.

     In the spring of 2002 I sat in my bedroom on a college campus, phone in hand.  There was this person who had come back into my life just the night before.  The one I thought was the one.  Then there was this other person, who lived far away and who believed he himself was the one.   I had no idea anymore what to do.  That morning I'd been given the choice to call the one from far away and reassure him that we were still a possibility, or to let that other person back into my life where he'd been intermitently for 6 months or so.  In the morning when the sheets were still warm where he'd slept and the air so cold where he'd left and the questions still unanswered by the one who lived far away, I was unable to make a choice.  I'd gone out with a friend instead.

     Scott, my best friend for nearly a year knew all about both of the boys.  His advice was immediately to never again speak to the one who'd stayed at my house the night before.  But I expected him to lean that way.  After all, Scott was the one who'd heard me thrill that the boy had asked for my phone number at his band's show, and the one who I'd called on Thanksgiving when that boy told me he just wanted to wait until he was discharged from the air force.  He was the one who told me not to go over to the house where the boy lived a week later, he was the one who picked me up the next morning when I sat on the curb outside.  He'd heard about it every time I'd been picked up again at a concert or had a late-night back porch visit and a following-day heartbreak.  And so Scott was the one cheering for the far-away someone.  The someone all of you know as Chris.

     I'd met Chris at the beginning of the year when he wrote me a letter telling me I was beautiful.  He'd walked past a friends computer who just happened to be reading my Xanga and saw me.  Sure, it was sort of a creepy letter, but it was also a kind of nice I hadn't known before.  I wrote back, and we talked.  He told me about his girlfriend and how they were headed for ineveitable break-up.  I told him about my off-and-on parody of a relationship.  Within a month he'd broken up with his girlfriend and made plans to bring a friend and come see me in March, less than a week after the Tiger Army show that brought the other boy back into my life and had me staring at the phone the next morning.

     Chris called me several times that day, but I couldn't bring myself to answer.  I just knew that he knew the boy had stayed over.  I just knew I'd disappointed him.  And I didn't know who I wanted to gamble on.   He called so many times and was so persistent that I was shaking scared by the time I answered the phone, so afraid to hurt his feelings.

     "Melissa," he said when I finally answered.  "I've-I've had an accident."  I've never felt worse in my life.  All the time I'd been not answering the phone thinking it was all about me.

     He'd gotten upset knowing I was out with the other boy.  He'd gone driving on the mountain.  He'd rolled his car.  His window had been down, he managed to pull his arm in just in time not to have it pinched off.  His roof caved in.  But he was okay, thank god he was okay.

      It meant so much to me that he was okay that immediately all thoughts of the boy before became petty.  It was suddenly so clear to me that he meant all the wrong things to me and did all the wrong things to me.  What I really cared about is that Chris was alive. 

      I also knew this meant he wouldn't be coming to see me, something that made my stomach ache.  I told him it was alright that maybe someday we would finally meet.  He told me it didn't make any difference, he was coming anyway.  Not in his car, of course, in his friends, but no matter what, he'd be there in the next two days.

     So I waited for him to come.  I'd planned the whole week of his visit.  The very first thing for me to do was pick him up at his hotel and take him to dinner.  I'd picked out a dress to wear, and wore my hair down the way I thought it looked best.  I hoped to God he wouldn't be disappointed, after all, it would be the first time he'd really seen me and the first time he could decide for himself if those pictures he'd seen had lied to him.  I sat on the bed, phone in hand again, until I got his call.  He was here, he'd survived a mountain roll-over and driven a broken down car over 700 miles to see me.

     His hotel wasn't that far away, but, novel-style, movie-style, cliche-style, it felt like it took hours.  Unsteady steps led me up to his room, a cheesy green door facing the parking lot.  I tugged the hem of my dress down, checked my teeth for lipstick, raised a hand, and knocked.

     The light from inside the room was overbright compared to the darkness outside.  After all the time that had kept us apart, there was one further moment before each of our eyes adjusted and we saw each other.  That was my last moment of question and consideration.  As soon as I saw him, really saw him there, my arms knew right where they should be around his neck and my lips knew they should be on his.  The first thing we did, a moment after meeting, we kissed.

     Of course Chris went back a week later, promising he'd be back for good as soon as possible.  It only took four months, four months of him working two jobs and coming home every night to call me.  Four months of him putting up with me still a little unsure.  Four months in which I occasionally saw him, the one from before.  But when I did it was different necesarilly different.  Oh sure, when I saw him I remembered the good things, the cute things, the aquarium and the movies.  But when I saw him now, it was like I was on the other side of a telescope, with Chris, the most wonderful person I'd ever met refracting my memories of this other boy.  Making me realize my previous relationship was only the stuff that songs were made of.

     Without lyrical parallels, the other boy and I were nothing.  That's why the music was so loud and the absence of music louder.  Maybe they don't write songs about guys like Chris.  Chris who worked his butt off to move to Albuquerque, Chris who came home and went to sleep every night in good faith that he had only to wait for me, Chris who had foresight I didn't.

     Of course the other boy has never left my life completely, and that's a story for another time.  But thankfully, now Chris will never leave my life either.  When those four months were up  and he could afford it, he moved here to Albuquerque.  That was over a year ago and since then I've had the only grown-up, logical, reasonable, ecstatic, and wonderful relationship of my life.  And now there's something to announce officially.  Some of you knew, some of you guessed, sometimes I let it slip.  But for once and for all I want you to know: Chris and I are getting married.

     September we think, after I have that Bachelor's Degree safe in hand.  We're not sure where, I say Vegas, my mom says my hometown.  The only thing I know for sure is that I've never been happier.  Well, I also know for sure I want Johnny Cash playing as I walk down the aisle:

and these memories lose their meaning--in my life, I love you more

Christopher Goodall, yes, I will marry you, and yes I will love you forever.

in my life, I love you more.