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I'm getting to that point where I don't know if time makes a difference. 3:37 p.m. and the light is already starting to change. I can feel the fall's teeth chatter when it swallows the humidity. The fall. As if the very phrase itself is a precursor of what's to come. An exhilerating, thrilling trip down the stairs and into winter. I can't wait for the cold. The layers of clothing wrapped around my mouth, hair, hands, and legs as I inhale frozen smoke. I like it when it gets dark early and I can sit inside without feeling guilty. I should be at the store. I should be at the gym. I should be at the tea house. What I need is time to myself. Time to sit and write and think and sing Patsy Cline out the window in hopes that the couple upstairs will notice.

Exhibitionist. The word is one that makes my skin prickle. To want to be seen so desperately, so badly, that the need is more than the want. It makes my heart ache. I watched as he twisted and turned into my pillow. Inhaling quickly, I could feel what he was thinking. Does that mean I like to watch? I can barely hold my chin up when I know I'm being watched. I swallow too hard. My lips feel too full and I have to bite them to keep from popping out, blubbering something, anything. Patsy Cline's voice.

The map of categories that rip and strain throughout the smallest of button hole surprises. I give you my brain because it's eating me and the only way to stop it, is to eat it first. Take it out of my ears, while I listen to what you're saying. Your words will fill up my entire head, pushing it out. Pushing it. Purging it. Perish my thoughts.

It's days like this when I realize who I am. As if I've forgotten. “It's no wonder with all that running around...” No wonder that I forgot. No wonder that I thought I was above one in the afternoon sunshine through the blinds. Half closed. Half open. Sleepy shades with cat eyes that are always watching.

I hate the watching. The watching feels too real to be fake, but it is. There is no one staring. The harshest judge is myself. I just wish I wasn't in a court room.

“You were reckless weren't you? You wanted to joy ride around in a box full of freedom.”

“Who wrote that story? Who exposed herself until she felt this way? Whose fault is it?”

Red lines connecting bad poetry scribbled on the back of a critiqued paper. It's the kind of aphasia that makes connections short circuit. I open my mouth, but can't speak. My ears have become a personality all of their own.

She waits outside with her legs crossed, hiding behind the bushes. Just one more cigarette, she says.

"What am I going to do when you leave here?" From the stoop, I can see the lit up rooms of the apartment building next door.

From this angle I can see where Chad used to live. Floral wall papered second floor. "But everyone's moving out."

She's just taken me to the Rite Aid where I can pick up both plan B and a nail file. She wants the skinny kind - the kind that can really get into those nails deep.

We stare out onto Maple st and I know what she's thinking. If only she had a guy that would follow her to Richmond. If only she could be vulnerable like that - enough to be followed. I would have moved if she asked.

An almost empty glass of 'refreshing white'. Heart pills. A sharpie thrown into a mug of condoms. 'Two become One" - the kind I got at drag bingo night. Aquafina lies half filled on her side. Slutty whore.

Telepopmusik: Breathe. The only song I'll ever need. It's like that old friend that I find when I'm in Transition. That subway terminal between thirteenth and Market st. underneath the city. Underneath all the opportunities that you could pull out on. Stop into. Just for a minute, if you want you can visit it and leave. Disappearing back into the tunnel.

"Spinal electricity". The stuff that flows into your spine that makes you, you. The space in between each vertebrae. That moment before 2:13 when you're almost out of class. Almost out of the building. Almost out of your mind happy to go home, to get out, to be on a bus going somewhere. In Transition.

Today feels like the last several days. Somewhere in between reality and what I want it to be.

It's a dark collaboration of stale incense and smokey tapestries. Only a few feet more before I can leave the condo. Only a few more feet until I can disappear into the night.

I fix my hair into pig tails. Streaming orange hair, botched dye job. I'll fix it when I run out of things to do. When I run out of places to go.

The air is frozen against my face. The fake fur on my jacket stands crisp against my throat – not helping. Its warmth ran out before it even made it to the thrift store.

It's only now that I can forget to think about all the memories that replay in my head during the day. I miss my Mom. In the afternoon it's easy to think about her blueberry muffins with the sugar crusted along the edges. It's easy to think about her theories on life. Her rules for living. Her knowledge of the world.

“Mom?” I remember peering over the kitchen table at age six. My boy short hair cut, jutting out in all different directions. “Will I ever look like Abigail or Alexis?” They were so gorgeous with their tall thin frames and smiling, white teeth.

Once I'm outside everything is quiet except for the music on my walkman. It plays the same casette over and over again. Something with a lot of beat so that when I walk it's as if I'm walking on musical notes. Stepping on chords and stomping on sound. It propells me forward to the cab that awaits out in the front parking lot.

“Well,” I remember Mom lighting up her cigarette. It was theory time. “Did I ever tell you about 'the year of beauty'?”

From inside the cab it smells like air freshener and I instantly know that the driver has been smoking. I wish I had cigarettes. I wish I were old enough to buy them. Someone at the party will have them – I keep thinking to myself. I know the address well and when I recite it to the driver, he asks me if it's the same place as last week. I've had him before and I wonder what kind of person I told him I was the last time I was sitting in his back seat.

Every cab ride is an opportunity to be someone else for the span of fifteen minutes. Everyone gets a chance to be whoever they want to be. I was usually in my thirties (the golden years) and going to a fancy cocktail party. Working late at the office was just too much to handle on those nights.

“What's the year of beauty?” My six year old self straightened up in the chair and looked at her.

“Okay, I'll tell you. But you have to listen carefully.” She blows smoke out the window of her kitchen. Leaning forward she says, “when you're beautiful, the world is your oyster. You can do anything when you're beautiful. You can be successful, admired, and influence anyone that comes close to you. You can travel the world, you can live for free, you can be the president of a company. Anything you want, you can do when you're beautiful. But there's just one draw back. You're only at your most beautiful point, for one year. And that's your year of beauty.”

The house party is off a darkly lit street just a few miles from downtown. The house is lit up entirely with red and blue light bulbs. I half wonder if Dad knows where I am. If he can sense that I've crept out of his condo and am now riding in a cab all the way past downtown. Once I get to the party I know I'll feel at home. I like the way boys look at me and when they put their arms around me it's like they care. Like they can feel me warming up to them.

“Because that's just the way it is. The thing you have to remember though, Rebecca, is that you will never know which year is your year of beauty until it's over. That's why you have to live every year like it's your year of beauty.”

I pay the driver ten dollars and step outside. It's starting to snow and from the bottom of the drive way it looks icy and unsafe. I wonder what Mom would do if she knew I was here. I wonder what her theory would be if we still talked to one another. Would she still let me go home? I'm sixteen and walking slowly up to the party, bracing myself for a lost night when a man steps out of his car and starts toward me.

“You need a hand, beautiful?” He offers me his arm and together we walk into my home away from home.

The sentence will never go away. When I said it, I was seven years old on the school bus with my friend. I was shocked. It was the phrase I had heard almost every night from Dad. Relating my emotions to his patients. Although he could not connect to me like a person, with empathy, as a child, family bonds with intimacy and vulnerability, he could do what he was taught to do. Psychoanalyze. It was his way of showing that he cared even if he couldn't relate.

Gracie, the other girl with short hair, sat next to me on the bus every morning. She didn't understand why her mother wore a white bra with a white shirt. You could see it through her clothing as she stood at the doorway, waving to Gracie from the steps.

"Parents don't always know everything," I tried remembering all the things Dad said after dinner in bed. He would tell me the secrets of the world. If I remembered what he said, I'd be a genius by twelve. He promised.

And then the phrase popped out. It escaped. Leaving me just as disconnected from my friend as Dad was from his family. The distance was almost physical.

Bent over back side. I'm a plastic container they keep filling up. Bright lights and dead eyes. Six o clock craving. Seven o clock waiting. Is it eight o clock yet? I keep seeing those metal chair legs so sturdy and unmoving. Thick and silver I see my reflection in their shape, but I can't look. My eyes are below the table. My mind is above the ceiling. So far out. So high up that a piece of me will never come down. It's the distance that makes life safe.

The smoke from my cigarette doesn't turn blue until night. It's as gray as the afternoon at one p.m. As gray as the choices that my neighbor makes. I watch as she talks with the boy across the way. He has been going over there for about two months, every evening, every night. I watch as she massages his shoulders and rubs her foot against his leg.

He brings her cookies. He brings her his hopes. He sits on her antique wooden chair in the kitchen and watches as she makes jello. Ice cubes in a plastic bowl. Jello in the fridge. She reads him his astrological sign and compares it with hers. Careful to read all the negatives first. All the potential problems lined up with the stars as if it's more than science. More than love.

Late at night I drop my purse onto the floor and hop up onto the counter. Legs dangling by the cabinets.

“How was he?” I ask. He's just left. It's the only time I get to talk about him. Glimpses of his eyes in the evening from my porch. Glimpses of him with his shirt off while she takes pictures of him. Capturing him. Shutting him into a drawer.

“He says he wants more. I don't know why.” She pulls out two glasses drowning in ice cubes. “The gin is behind you.”

I remember the way she looked taking photographs of him standing in her yard. Squinting into the light as if looking for the negatives. Scrutinizing them just like the glasses with ice cubes and the gin flowing on top. Is it enough? When the ice clinks against the glass I feel that tingling feeling that makes me thirsty. I know what it's like to want more. I know what it's like when the smoke turns blue.

I captured space just three weeks ago. The smell was something like butter - faint and unassuming as I inhaled. It slipped through my fingers until it grew in between my ears. Like cotton candy, it bunched up and swirled against the darker corners. The space was my light.

Long scrolling windows with dark shades of tinted eye lashes cover the city bus. Blue flourescent light pales crinkled faces. Like paper bags I can see every line jagging and jutting out from droopy eyes. Half closed and dragging they cast their vision out the window as if forever letting it go Pupils scrape upon red stop signs and monster buildings that never look you in the eye.

The check cashing store. Cash loans today. The fried chicken joint hanging out on the corner. When you stare at them you can only see yourself ten times over.

I felt most comfortable in my mothers kitchen back on cobblestone lane. Even when my parents lived together it was still mom’s kitchen. Enormous with space seeping out behind every corner. The trash compactor. The island counter top. Oriental rugs on the hard wood floors. My little orientals. An occasional smoky kiss on the cheek.

Mom left the sliding glass door open sometimes even in winter as she blew out her cigarette smoke. The white shell ash tray sat just to the left of her coffee mug. Here we would talk ethics.

What did we think were the three major things that made people happy? Was it more important to be happy or right? When did personality start to bloom into character?

“It’s not like he’s bad… it’s more that the’s just so… good on the inside.” She leans back in the hard metal of her coffee shop seat. The seven o clock light of the last days of summer hit her face hard. “He’s like… the kind of guy who has a really good heart.” She can’t decide if she’s trying to convince her best friend over the phone that he’s dateworthy or herself.

The mud House has a group of people just like her sitting on a patio. One or two people take up entire individual tables while they bend their neck, staring at the phones in their lap They light up with them. The girl is decidedly nineteen and when her best friend got engaged she promptly started wearing orange stretch pants. Not quite the orange linen her mother wore at the annual garden party, but definitely not jeans. She thought they went well with the UVA crowd. When she added her charm necklace (spent to help a charity of course) she felt complete in that cold metallic way that runs right up your spine.

We were all milling around at one of the cocktail parties. It was one of Dad's obligatory parties that a fellow physician had thrown out in Ivy. The host was a man in a red polo and khakis who had his arm around a thin bird like woman. (wife?) She was tense and smiled without turning her mouth upward.

"What do you say we blow this joint," Dad whispers in my ear and I'm two steps ahead of him. Bolting. Running.

Something lives inside the hollow space pressed in between the keys of a piano. The tiniest of cracks dig under into a hungry dwelling of wood and string. Carefully orchestrated space between measures of plump pitted notes turn to silence. And in it I rest hardly. Like a bed full of flour sacks it molds, but not well enough to sleep. Eyes open. Mouth closed. Legs stretching. Noise nosed.

"Um, sure." I try and think of another subject. Cats comes to mind but that screams all too obvious. Clothes? Too short lived. The paper "Hey what's going on with Bob Mcdonald?"

"I don't think it's going to last you all week." She is not fooled. Cats They are furry, they catch things, they like catnip.

"You just don't understand. One cartridge of nicotine isn't going to last you for more than a day? Then what are you going to do?"

"Rebecca, are you listening to me? Look, if you're not serious about these e cigarettes then what are you going to do?"

"No, no, no. Where are you going to buy more from? Now I know there's the kind that i use for sixty dollars but if you really want the ones that have the nice filters - you're going to have to pay more."

My first apartment was down on fifth street next to the police station. It used to be Gamer Jesse's apartment where everyone would smoke pot and play techno music that sounded like the jingle from tetris. When Jesse got kicked out, I took over.

It was really 'our' apartment. The small apartment was broken into four different rooms that were separately leased to four different people at $285 dolars a room.

The couple who sold drugs and dyed their hair atomic pink stayed on the pull out in the living room. The couple in room A had their own mini fridge and only came out at night. The couple in B listened to an oddd mix of country rap stars who sang about grills. I couldn't figure out if they meant barbecue grills or braces. The third couple was gay and would constantly try to outsing each other to Mariah Carey. They wore my clothes and brought home trash mags every other week.

My room was tiny. Enough for a mattress, some blankets, a television with a built in VCR and a space heater. My clothes were heaped on the floor. I left my door unlocked so that the couple from C could rummage through whatever they thought was fashionable. Tutus and neon orange goggles to the laundromat? Sure.

This was the first place where I had space. Not the giant rooms in Dad's apartment with white naked walls. Not the kind where I felt tiny compared to a massive dish washer or high ceilings. This was real space.

There were no sticky emotions that banged down doors or creeped through at night. There was no clutter of guilt mixed with the expectation that I had to take care of anybody. This was space at its fullest.

At first I didn't know what to do with it. I spread my arms out - almost touching 2 walls and inhaled the smell of pot from the living room. This was the beginning of my adult life. Away from all things vast open and underdeveloped.

"Do you want some pizza?" The couple from B were outside my room. I had been standing there for over an hour.

The space between conversation used to haunt Jess. For awhile she would start talking about curent events which would inevitably lead to some turning point in history. Her history. One sentence was all it took before she steered clear of too many details. She would invite guests over instead who talked a lot, mostly about themselves. Filling space.

We listened as one poor girl from North East Philly trudged on about her awful family life. The concept of what she was saying lay like a picked over carcass of poorly comprehended chatter. The words lay dead in the center while we prodded individual letters that we could chew over later.

The girl was a teenager, I don't know how Jess found her. She shuffled into our living room in a dirty white wife beater that bared her belly ring. She had dread extensions tied into the nest of hair resting on top of her head. She cain smoked rolled cigarettes that were pre-made out of a black velvet bag. I wondered if she was old enough to smoke.

"Where did you find her?" I demanded once Jess and I were safely in the upstairs bathroom.

I thought this must have been how she found her last four cats. The one with the two different eyes was the smallest and most furry. After several months training her various kittens she would throw them outside and laugh in that chaotic way about her. "Out you go!" She'd sing. The kittnes were never let back in, but they remained forever trotting around our front door just in case she cahnged her mind. Once they got too skinny they would eventually disappear. No one talked about the cats.

"We're not adopting any more animals." I stared out the bathroom window and into the concrete court yard.

When Jess didn't respond I turned on the sink just to make sure no one could hear us. The water rushed out in spurts of brief but full conversation. After the dramatic gush of white, it choked. Leaving an uneasy silence before the next flood.

The thing was, I knew she was just going to stay for a couple days. Almost everything in her life only stayed for a couple of days. Once the carcass of once-interesting stories had ended, there would be nothing but bones.

I thought of the boys who supplied endless designer clothing for her. I thought of the drugs that were almost enough. I thought of our seven hour phone conversations before I moved to Philly.

"Anna. How tragic is that? Who gets pregnant with a name like Anna?" She giggled.

When we went downstairs Anna lay sprawled out on the couch with her eyes half closed and a rolled up cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

I belong to my father's family. Not to say that I don't also fit in with my mother's, but there's a different kind of lifestyle that goes along with the culture that surrounds Dad.

The club is an unfortunate one. Anyone that's part of this culture can spot a member even if no one else sees the difference. It could be the subtlety of dark clothing or even a lot of clothing. Coats that are never taken off or an extra scarf draped a little too protectively. People that hide behind hair or prop their knees up so that they are forever behind something. They might be in the club. Or perhaps it's a voice that is too soft or a scurrying sense of anxiety that just barely scratches the surface.

Sometimes there is no subtlety at all. Sometimes it's the people who talk with lisps or who dance in all night clubs or who move with their hips bouncing from side to side. Sometimes they keep journals and write depressing poems or sometimes they break dishes and leave them on the floor labeling them 'destructive art'.

I can spot these club members a mile away. Without even bringing it up- I know what's happened. "You too?" They're usually shocked to find another member.

I almost got away. Dad almost made enough money. He almost didn't grow up in rural western PA with the mother he had. We wore almost the right clothes and when we balanced on the beam of well adjusted, we almost passed.

"You're old man had a late start tonight," Dad's eyes are a bright blue and they look even more intesnse when he's in the midst of a story. I look up at him from the opposite side of the dinner table nervously. What's it going to be this time?

"It's okay," I say. The water goblet beside me has been filled twice already. We meet at a fancy restaurant downtown because it's got jazz that he likes and it's in public which I like. I draw little circles around the rim of the goblet with my forefinger. Dad waits expectantly. It's my part to ask him why.

"Well," Dad brushes a strand of thick black hair away from his eyes and I see the glitter that surrounds them. "I don't want to brag but... well there was a little mishap down at the hospital."

For a brief second I wonder what he'd do if I didn't ask him about it. I could just change the subject. Conversation was fluid and like the cold solid ice cubes in my water, it would melt into something else eventually. Right? But it wouldn't. Dad wouldn't do anything until I asked him about it. He would stay frozen with eyes glittering into crystal rocks until I acknowledged his latest triumph.

He leaned his enormous arms against the table and bent forward as if we were conspiring together. I remembered instantly all of the things we'd do together. The plans we had. Our imaginary trips to Hong Kong that we'd talk about for hours. The freshly printed pages of his national geographic told us where we'd go. The only problem was Dad's unmovable substance stopped us. Unlike water, he hung still in a hammock made of intricately woven fantasies. The kind we'd map over at restaurants for weeks.

"And this woman was pregnant." I could tell by the way his eyebrows jumped and his hands shook that he had already lost it. When did it happen? Did he have it together when he left the hospital? Dad worked on the forensic unit at the state hospital - there were no pregnant ladies. Had this been five years ago I might have believed him, but if this was five years ago we wouldn't be meeting in public and Dad wouldn't be so nervous.

"Yup. So here we are - all of us docs - watching as she's about to blow," Dad's hands leap off the table. I grab the glass and quickly move it out of the way.

"I said to Roger - you know Rog," I remembered the man with white hair vaguely. "Look out!"

No - I resist the urge to pick at my hair. He wasn't going to expect me to believe this. He couldn't.

"Well, I won't say I saved the day, but that baby came out as beautiful as a baby boy could. I'll tell you THAT much."

His smile hung in the air - waiting anxiously. It was my turn to congratulate him. I stared for a moment too long. The waiters were busy setting up silverware at the table next to us. The couple at the bar had resumed their conversation and the piano player was fumbling with his music. Until then I was sure Dad didn't realize how loud his voice had gotten.

His shoulder muscle twitched and his entire arm began to move ever so slightly back and forth. Like the slow rumble of a train, I could feel the vibrations of his energy richotcheing off of him. The table moved ever so slightly, making the water in my goblet tremble.

"That's great, Dad," I laugh suddenly. And in a flash the shaking stops. "Jesus, you must have been terrified!" I say.

"Oh God, Beck. If you only knew how scary that kind of situation is." I laugh again. This time from my stomach. And together we are laughing - holding our sides and echoing through the softness of the restaurant.

"You shoulda seen it," he wipes a tear from his eye. "The thing just popped right out!"

"But seriously," he reaches for the rest of my water. "Your old man really knows how to handle a crisis."

My mind is a camera stuck on the images taken button. I replay instances gone by. Sometimes there not even my images. Memories of my sisters in tie dye colored shirts and hair scrunchies the size of balloons. They seem lofty as if they are too grand for just a square screen on a digital camera. The images are larger than my life and when I try to hold on to them they over take me. Snap shots of birthday candles and lost pets and narrow stair cases drift up into the sky, their strings so far from the ground that I'll never get a hold of them.

You are not a heap of clothing. As luxurious as it is to hide inside hoodies and rain jackets you are not the rain jacket. Moping around the rain and grudging through the outside is no way to be. Besides, that's far too invisible.

Neither are you the microwave of your teenage years. You're not easy with a side of unthawed nutrients. As convenient as you might have been, the cheap days are over.

The front door is not you either. You were never loud and most often you're not particularly welcoming with your home. The back door has too many secrets.

You're not a bag of popcorn. Air heads are boring. You're not a vacuum cleaner, you don't suck that much. You're too rigid to be a spoon, but you're not sharp enough to be a knife. Why get steppped all over, you're not the rug.

If you look up from your pad every now and then, you'll start to realize you're not the paper. Nobody can use you and you don't have to be shelved.