Greetings Valued Customers
Why Writing?
I don't think I could survive without satire, irony, comedy, spite, sarcasm. Really, I'm just dying to tell you about it, but only if you think that I can't.
Writing, because when the sidewalk is just wet from the rain, it helps you see the colors in the sky.
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Photo by Heather Kobasic.
I'm writing in green 'cuz it's my comfort color
I think I might be an addict.
Ya know that smell of the earth around you right before it starts raining? Most people think that’s the rain itself they’re smelling, but my fifth-grade teacher told us that it was actually the moisture in the air that was enhancing the smell of everything else.
My high school calculus teacher had also been my gym teacher when I was in about third grade. I remember he taught us that when you are accepting someone’s apology, you should say “I forgive you” rather than “it’s okay” so they know that they are forgiven, but not to do whatever it is they’re apologizing for again.
I bought my motorcycle when I was 16. I can’t describe the feeling of riding on a warm spring day when the flowers are starting to return to life and the breeze smells like the way serotonin feels when you finally get to see that person your heart’s been missing so badly again. You just have to know it.
It’s a high.
Writing has been a passion of mine since before I had the capacity to understand what passion is. It is one of the things that has never had to be driven out of me by spite. I read the Harry Potter series out of spite when in fourth grade my teacher questioned if I could handle reading that much book. Hell, I joined the Army out of spite.
“Why’d you enlist?”
“It seemed like a fun after-school activity at the time.”
As a bartender, I get a lot of unsavory characters asking me to tell them about my tattoos, so they can ask me about my piercings, so they can lead into asking me about showing them later. When good customer service demands that I smile, laugh, take a joke, I know that my pen and paper would never ask that of me. I can express in all the colors of what I feel inside. Sometimes they’re floral. Sometimes they feel like chalk that’s left on your hands from coloring on the sidewalk that you accidentally got on your dress right before the start of your grandma’s funeral. Sometimes you’re the one in the casket.
I’m in a coffee shop sipping my seven-dollar small coffee and the couple across from me are on a first date.
It’s raining outside, but I haven’t been able to find my umbrella since it started raining at the beginning of last week.
I flipped my friend’s car a couple days ago at 5:30 in the morning on a dirt back road. He wouldn’t let me drive it before because it jerks to the right when you shift through the gears. He grabbed the wheel and jerked it to the right, as a joke.
Neither of us were wearing seatbelts. He had to push me up off of him so I could climb out the driver side window while he crawled out the broken hatch in the back. I remember the smell of the air while he said to me, “Heather get up, get up, you’re okay, you’re okay, get out the window.”
The radio was still playing after we crawled out of the car that laid on its side leaking fluids from under the busted hood, and my head is aching from hitting it on the steering wheel.
Not all change is so fast, but it could be. Writing is safe as much as it is vulnerable. Paradoxical, nearly. I can create, express, love, cry, live, and die through my writing. I’ll never take the earbuds out of my ears because I like drowning in my haven, where I know I can play the same song on repeat for hours without worrying that I’m driving everyone else as crazy as I am. And I know it seems like I’ve derailed this train so far from what you may have thought you were going to be reading right now, but I want you to know that I do that. I’ve never been able to tell a story from point A to point B, and what would be the fun in that anyways. I know that I started that sentence with a conjunction, too- you know the one. I’ve never been the best at following every single little rule, but I never cross the street unless the light at the cross walk tells me I can, honestly.
Gosh my neck is sore. I’m so glad this writing is getting me high right now.
Writing is my freedom from my hometown where I was born and raised, where minds were all the same and my friends and I would sneak grandma’s cigarettes during the fourth of July parade. In my writing, I have value. I have power. I have agency, wisdom, and I get to put the shape of my soul on a page, whether anyone else will ever read it or not, it is expelled from within me and the weight of things I’ve carried gets a little lighter.
Love, from an addict.
Good Thing I Like Rollercoasters
Okay, so there's a lot going on here, and if I told you all of it you might have an aneurism, and I care too much about you to put your health at risk. I'm the grammar-nazi that has learned to chill out for the sake of my dear friends that don't know the difference between "too" and "to". They would get so irritated if I'd correct them to much.
*visible shuddering*.
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Writing has been a constant source of good in my life where there has been a lot of turmoil. This year has had more than its fair share of trials for me, and it's only April. I like routine. I like constants. It's easy, comfortable. I will bend over backwards to keep things as they are in my life so I don't have to deal with starting over again... but life just isn't that clean-cut. New things have to come, and sometimes the old ones have to go. That's how we develop, improve, grow.
I moved out of my parents' house when I was 16 and have been on my own ever since. To say I've learned a lot of things the hard way would be a laughable understatement. It must be one of my favorite hobbies at the rate I've been going, and yet I'm still here "doing the do," as I often say. Perhaps I'm even better for it, but I'll never know otherwise. I've done a lot of starting over, despite my efforts against it. When I'm writing, I can always have that chance to start over, or revise, or make it whatever I want it to be because it doesn't even have to be real. I don't know what other people see when they're writing, but for some reason I often see flowers, or I remember the time I went on a motorcycle ride with my dad one summer day, and how the fields on the back roads looked when the sun shone on them.
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These days my dad is sick. His autoimmune diseases and chronic pain syndrome are degenerative. It's weird to watch your parents struggle. It's weird to be the one sending your parents money to help with their bills, even when they've never done it for you. When I visited my parents' house over spring break, I nearly had a stroke when I walked in and saw pictures covering every wall and desk top. Pictures of my sisters and me, of their wedding, pictures I'd never even seen before. All these photos were a reminder of how things change before you know it. We grew up. My parents got older. And suddenly, they're sentimental, and they're expressing affection and feelings that they've never done before. I think they have realized too, how things will never stop changing, and they want to cherish what's left before it's gone- or before they're gone. My dad takes synthetic morphine to make the pain bearable, but some days it still isn't enough, and he can't do things like he used to.
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I'm scared of the day that I'll never to able to ride my bike on a sunny back road with my dad again.
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My parents live off grid. No running water, no electricity, no wifi. They chop wood and cut it up to heat the house with the wood stove, build their furniture with the saw mill, heat water for a shower in a bucket on the stove. They only have a composting toilet, and they grow their vegetables in a garden and hunt for most of their meat. After my dad couldn't pull back his bow anymore, he was ashamed and worried. He had to swallow his pride and buy a crank to pull back the string on is crossbow.
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When I was a kid, I remember going to check the traps with dad during the winter, and the burning pain in my hands from the cold when I had to gut the rabbits and squirrels before I could go to bed. The blood would coat my hands because if you used gloves you couldn't get a good grip on the entrails to pull them out. The neighborhood kids called us rabbit killers, but I hid my embarrassment because I knew that my normal had never aligned with theirs anyways.
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These days I live in Ann Arbor. My cat is my only roommate, and the only trees I see around are the ones that were planted on the sides of the roads. I only correct my friends' grammar silently in my head and try not to let it distract me too deeply from the message they're giving me to start with.