The Hitchhiker by Christina Osborn

My brother told me once you take DMT you can taste it and smell it in everything. I'm not sure what that means, because I've never taken DMT, the drug that your brain supposedly produces just before death, expanding the horizons of your consciousness until the whole world is swallowed in the singularity that is your life. It is supposed to make you look in and in and in until you are looking back at yourself and it's just the two of you facing each other through whatever perfect metaphor your brain has constructed for the occasion and you believe it and identify with it because the one you are seeing looks, talks, feels and acts just like you. And you can feel her emotions as you watch her, your perspective fluttering between first person and third person, watching yourself watching yourself watching you. I believe there is a sliver of something caught inside each one of us golden strangers hitchhiking through the valley of shadows, a tiny slice of the fruit of life riding along in the hollow between the lungs and above the stomach, that spot that sends out a beam of light when it's too dark to see the streetlights.  That pulse is beating with my footsteps, seeing with my vision, hijacking my nervous system from time to time so it can get where it's going. And I don't mind, because it doesn't ride for free. For the smell of sage it trades an insight about the interconnectedness of every concept I've ever learned in school or on the streets. For the warmth of my lover's arm around me as he drifts off to sleep it trades a heart swelling so tight it might burst through my sternum and swallow both of us, happily drowning in our handiwork. For the play of sunshine on the river it trades a song, sung small in the awful elegance of a slot canyon, small but echoing off the rippling walls until my voice is sixty feet taller than i am, ringing up to the endless blue in an attempt to pay back that hitcher for lodging itself in my life. For the taste of a quesadilla layered in jalapeno cheese and cucumbers and peppers, slathered in guacamole we just made together, half naked in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables and trying to find something we disagree on, for the taste of these things my hitchhiker trades the spaces in between pleasure and pain, the distance between the depths and the heights, the weight between joy and sorrow. For my five senses the hitchhiker trades one sense as deep and sprawling as the night sky inverted, opening in instead of out, each point of light composed of trillions of other points of light, galaxies within galaxies. And when two galaxies collide, stars explode, gravity collapses in on itself and a singularity is formed, spaghetifying time and taste and truth and skin cells until the stars are not just touching, now they occupy the same physical space and time together because those words no longer mean anything rational. When you held me in the kitchen and i started to cry it was because i realized at that precise moment in time I may as well have been holding myself. That moment will never come again, not in that way, but I will savor it in everything I put my lips to because my taste buds are still singing a wordless love song to that little golden hitchhiker, who doesn't ride for free. and you know, I don't know about DMT being an ultimate ingredient in everything, not unless it has a much more common name, a name often used recklessly, vaguely, dishonestly, a name used as a weapon, as a cage, as a slave, as a curse and also as a caress on our weary muscles and a soothing hand to ravaged skin. The name of this ingredient is love and I smell it everywhere, I see it in the grasses and the cattle and the sedimentary sandstone and the waves of the rock. I see it in smile lines and glittering glassy eyes and the do in balls of the trees we planted and in your sister's skin and in the kitchen sink and under the open sky. I feel it running in my blood when you look at me, I feel it in my bones holding my back straight, and I hear it in my hitchhiker's song.  We trade love for love and sense for sense and we may not ride for free but the price is too sweet not to pay.

December...Fuck You By Christina Osborn

Not only are you the month upon which the entire retail industry of western civilization feasts each year, you snake your icy fingers around the cock of commercialism, driving the worms further indoors to breed on stale carols and the scent of pine needles in a treeless boneyard of red and white plastic. Like an aging parasite you suck the last fetid tendrils off the corpse of a corporate giant that has been rotting on the rooftops of cities for millennia, a corpse that is kept alive by a chain reaction of electro-shock shopping sprees and the ovens into which American consumers shovel their hours, cuddled up in greenback government issue coveralls. Not only are you the end and the beginning of an imaginary cycle based on the groaning of the planets as they struggle to escape an inescapable magnetism, you are not even numerically correct. Not only are you persistent, you aren’t consistent. How do you explain the way snow doesn’t fall in the Utah desert but it piles up in Trinity county on pine trees and trailers and the stockade the boss built to keep his trigger hippies safe and medicated in his outdoor hospital.  We waited to feel your breath on our necks as we bent over piles of uncut marijuana with frozen fingers and uncashed checks. You are the cage in which I woke to the song of sugar in my veins after drinking all that whipped cream vodka and taking those pills. I called my friend who’s an ex-junkie and he told me sorry the half life on suboxin is eighteen hours, you’ll have to ride that wave. That was the morning when john texted me and said he didn’t want to talk to me anymore and all I had to hold onto was a bowl full of puke and a brand new fishman soloist that I was too sick to set up and all I could think of was the night he told me we were both the same, but we’re not. we were so different i guess being tangled up in buffalo skins and smoke and sweat didn’t mean a connection it just mean a brief parallel, two broken railroads running alongside each other over a thin brace of land but then redividing as soon as the land widened like my eyes to pull in as much firelight as possible so I could see every shadow play across the roll of his skin, so like the skin of a warm fruit plucked so many Decembers before and left to ripen in the Mojave sunlight as he raced his dirtbike up crybaby hill, the same hill i climbed to remember him after remembering is the only way I could touch him, remembering his rough hand and the way it tipped up a whiskey bottle in the November moonlight, never knowing he would be rotting in a box one month later, three days after the biggest commercial holiday in history, he did it on my sister’s birthday and December I haven’t forgiven you yet, I feel this sense of dread as you draw closer, like your cold hands are coming for my throat, like everything bad that will happen will happen in December. My skeletons are buried in your basement but they walk again, they walk in December.

The Special Generation by Christina Osborn

I’m not sure what to think about the millions of people in my age bracket because I have never known them. They and I have been estranged since first grade, when I was told I would have to “dumb myself down” in order to interact with “normal” kids. Instead of teaching me social skills my father delivered me from having to learn any. Instead of saying, “I’m not sure how to do that,” he relegated friendship to the bottom of a list of non-essentials. And as the parent-dependant oldest child of a sad poet and a princess I believed him. If hindsight is 20/20 my family is fucked because blindness runs through us, down through my father who was adopted by a woman who introduced him to strangers as her adopted son. He was alienated from the moment of his birth from a group of Indiana rednecks that are probably best left unknown anyway but what does a kid know about that when all he wants is a hand to hold his smaller hand instead of trying to clutch at a balled up fist or ducking a horseshoe ringing through the 80% humidity of the June afternoon that my father decided the day he got his diploma would be the last day he spent in the corner of Hell they call Kalamazoo. His family may be a bunch of cult beasts living in a cage but my family is a bunch of bats living in a cave on a hill with a fantastic view of the valley but no view to the north and I worry that if they get too used to their perch when they have to leave it and go back to the ground they’re going to be disappointed, as disappointed as I was when I found out I was different because I was smarter, different because the other kids didn’t have parents that would teach them how to think things through, emotional robots running on cheap fuel. And I can’t say I wasn’t completely seduced by the idea of being more special than the other kids, of holding my secret flam e a little higher than everyone else’s, even if they didn’t acknowledge me because they were jealous, I could see it in their eyes, their stupid soft doe eyes that had never seen their mother snorting coke off the kitchen counter, never seen a pile of dirty purple dildos the morning after whatever the fuck went on in the basement the night before. Their ears didn’t know what it was like to hear your father say, you are too stupid to think your way out of a wet paper bag. I was so special I got to move to twenty eight different shitholes before I was eighteen, cockroaches in the cupboards and pedophiles in and out of the house. Special doesn’t even begin to cover it. Lucky. Blessed. To bear witness to all the glories of the underbelly of God you have to be so special it hurts. So I ducked my head, rounded my shoulders, and disappeared for twelve years inside of a wardrobe of billowing black t-shirts and cargo pants. I swallowed myself so completely no one could touch me. I was so special I was invisible. I didn’t learn how to walk with my back straight and my shoulders loose and my hips swinging until I was twenty one and the bones had already started to set their course for an eternity of humpbacked solitude and it wasn’t that I was okay with it I had just surrendered to it. There was something especially wrong with me and I couldn’t figure out where the infection was stemming from. Luckily for urchins like me the human body is a resilient machine so as soon as I took mushrooms three times in a month after I graduated, I started to see where the problem lay and it wasn’t in the unbearable weight of the gazes of the thirty three people I walked out of high school with it was in the chorus of demons I had installed in my subconscious and that handful of fungi brought me face to face with my destroyers who had been working with bone saws and poison gas for as long as I’d been special to undermine my specialness, to bring me to my knees, to force me to look not at the piece of glass but through it and back into my own eyes. The ranks had swelled over the years and by then I was helpless in the face of so many of my monsters who wore my face for a mask, and if I’d pulled the mask off it would’ve just been me again, ad infinitum back to the marrow of my misery. So I succumbed screaming to a suicidal cannibalistic orgy of self on self on self until sweating I crawled out of the sleeping bag and begged for the sun to come up and when it did I surrendered to it too because I was too weak to hold myself out of the lake of fire I had fallen into. And staring into the sun I dreamt on my feet that my friends loved me more than I could ever imagine, that the world was beautiful and that I could do whatever I wanted. I dreamt that it was only me sitting on the iron throne and that I could coax my sinister self back to sweetness with souvenirs brought back from a better life. That was the beginning of my resolve to not be so special, to not be so fucking special that I had all different body parts and chemical processes then everyone else. It was the dawn of my understanding the differences between myself and the rest of my generation which isn’t so great that it separates me from them, but is in fact so small that I can measure it with experiences only because everything else is the same. My breath ebbs and flows. My feet stumble and my hands twitch and I have hair in embarrassing places and I have opinions and I am younger than I feel and older than I look and everyone on this earth has been alive just like me, and everyone who comes after will know the pain of love and the beauty of sorrow and the supernova implosion of losing someone you love. I am still getting to know these people in my generation, and I’m trying not to do it as a scientist studies a strange specimen, but as a child learns how to interact with a peer group, because I skipped all that when I was a kid and I’m tired of skipping the important stuff with the excuse that my family’s been doing it that way for generations.

Baptism by Christina Osborn

Twenty nine black books in a box. Twenty nine black tongues in white teeth holding no particular spot on the books but heavy with the weight of the words I have rained upon ivory pages since I was eight years old and baptized in the white font at the feet of my Michigan relatives and the Utah ones too who had flown all the way across the midlands to see the second oldest of my grandmother’s brood initiated into the family faith. I didn’t really want to get baptized; it seemed liked a lot of paperwork and a ceremony so archaic and fraught with vagueries filled me with a dread born of apathy and ambivalence. I felt the same way when I voted in October (early voter, I’m not an overachiever just a vagabond so I figured if I wanted to get my digs in I’d better act quick or the clerks would be sneering at one less democratic ballot before throwing it on the thin pile that means there’s a tenacious sense of reality in this state full of sheep). I voted this October and I voted in March of 1998 with my toes as they slipped into the warm water where my father waited with his white robes and receding hairline, smiling with the encouragement of one prisoner to another, Don’t worry, Stockholm is pretty in the Spring. Eight years later my father and I left the church together, he with his faith far behind him, dead and bled and half-buried under a cracked bathtub and me with the acid taste of too many ambiguities on my tongue, so when the bishop came to implore me to leave my name on his books I burned through his bullshit with the cool logic of a girl too many times assumed to be a fool. Sitting for the dinner in the golden late afternoon after I’d allowed myself to be tilted backwards and held under the hundred and twenty degree water while my grandmother cried and my father spoke a twenty second burble of dogma that couldn’t quite cut through the ripples of ceiling panels and fluorescent lights, I remembered feeling nothing. I felt nothing as the shadows grew and relatives I barely knew patted my pigtails and I stared straight ahead at the flower settings and the fat black bible with my name crawling across the leather in silver script, the bible that I opened only a handful of times when I was thirteen and looking for something to hold onto and it didn’t turn out to be that book. I dragged that three pound catalogue of human metaphor across the country and through the warren of desperation my mother dragged us through and when I threw it away it was because I was trying to rid myself of dead weight. On that day when I was eight years old, the bible seemed to be the important gift, the one everyone knew would help me so much. Joseph Campbell said the best way to avoid a religious experience is by expecting one but I don’t think my family ever read any Joseph Campbelll. So the journal my father gave me was overlooked by everyone except me, because eight year olds can still see things for the way they are, can still see the hope in someone else’s face, and I saw the hope there in my dad who was my favorite person, my mentor, my comrade. He didn’t enjoy my mother’s company, so he sought me out. He didn’t want to talk to her so he talked to me. He didn’t have any friends, so I was his friend. He didn’t trust anyone so I was the shoulder he cried on. And that is not the cross a child should bear but I bore it  because what else do you do when you are the confidant of not just one but both parents who never grew up and don’t know what to do, so they stay on the phone all night talking it through with a kid cuddled up learning the language of pain at the feet of the two people who should’ve been teaching a language a love, who should’ve found out who they were before filling a cup that cracked before it could be drunk from again. So I have this box full of word and I guess if I get cold and there’s nothing else I could start a fire. Or maybe there’s wisdom still buried in those years that I didn’t see my dad, when my mom was giving me plenty of material for my daily scrawl, when sometimes I would get so angry that I’d write from top to bottom for two hours before I could speak his name again. I didn’t believe in getting angry because it didn’t seem to help, so I wrote it away and held it all down. And not that I’m older and not writing as much, I see why that shit all had to come out and I see why the feeling of anger couldn’t be felt, but only recorded. I have these twenty nine books in a closet and I can’t spend them or grow them or call them by name but they may be the one last physical trace of a past I ignored for almost ten years and now it’s bubbling up out of this black pool inside me that smells like a cold golden afternoon on the lawn of a church three lifetimes away.