But I don’t wake up in imagined arms. I wake up alone. I wake up alone even in my dreams, waiting for something to happen.

In the South there are still a few places you can smoke in. These are the ones we frequent. Waffle House is where we have wasted many calories and cigarettes bullshitting until three in the morning, possibly hung over, sometimes on the way to inebriation.

In the South we sneak into the bars our parents work in to shoot free pool on 30-cent wing night. We wander around shopping malls and Walmarts, all of which end up feeling the same. When we aren’t starving, we eat dollar-fifty chili cheeseburgers, or fried chicken from the KFC our friends work at.

In the South, “good weed” is “too good to be true weed.” All we get is reggie, or mids.  Instead we drink. A lot. Cheap whiskey. Then we drive. We know someone growing mushrooms in old chlorine buckets out of their Southside apartment. We know of a block party on Halloween on a street made entirely of bars. We know of people in Tuscaloosa, the college town, whose couches we can crash on, whose friends we can use to buy us more booze. We know of a head shop that sells metal one-hitters and custom hookahs.

By the way, in the South, “southside” doesn’t necessarily denote an enormous ghetto. Our ghettos are empty. The ones that are populated are sometimes safer. You can walk from the ghetto, past the big Catholic hospital and the McDonalds, to the rich bitch downtown houses, jutting out of the Red Mountain.

In the South we have the following tourist attractions: a big fuck-off indoor mall called The Galleria, where I spent two grueling years slinging overpriced ice cream at bratty  kids and bitchy shoppers; the Civil Rights institute, because we feel guilty; the McWane science center, which is probably the coolest fucking place if you’re under 10, otherwise it’s a wallet deathtrap; the Botanical Gardens, which every pothead I know has frequented; Sloss Furnace, because ironworking used to be our main industry—now it’s foreign doctors; the Museum of Art, which I visited about six times during high school; Visionland, which has had exactly seven rollercoaster fatalities, and is now mostly overrun with noisy, obnoxious green people; and the worthwhile US Space and Rocket Center, located in Huntsville, not Birmingham, and where I spent a happy summer at space camp.

In the South I go to an art school and make friends with rich kids and go to their parties and pass out on their back decks and smoke surprisingly good weed with a guy I barely know. I make friends with the stereotypes I will laugh at in college, but once home I will hug them and pretend to like their new facial hair. Some of us from the ASFA class of ’07 went as far as California; the other half stayed in Birmingham or Tuscaloosa to rot. Not all of them will rot, but some have already dropped out of college, and committed their lives to being delivery drivers; these are people I knew with more talent in their toenails than I thought I’d ever have.

The South sucks you in smart and spits you out stupid. My ex from Britain never spoke with a direct accent—just words every now and then that would make me think TALLY HO—but now the South has invaded his speech like mold, and his twang is almost painful. When I go home I have no car, so I hitch rides with friends, and thus get stranded, and thus call acquaintances I barely know to take me twenty miles to home. In the South I am heartless and take advantage of the constantly forgiving. I am a nomad. I don’t sleep on the same mattress or couch twice. I feel as useless as a mouse in a world of horses, with no car to call my own, with my apartment and all my stuff 600 miles away in a real big city. In the South I lie big time. My grandparents want to read my stories and I tell them nothing is finished, which is partially true, but mostly because I am too busy writing about sex in squirrel costumes and retarded children and taking a lot of acid to be honest with them.

The seat situated right behind the rear exit door—the one I would have normally sat in—is already occupied by a white couple, neither of whom looked over thirty. They are both hunched over, heads buried into one another. The girl’s legs spill into the aisle without obstructing the path. The guy wears a black baseball cap that conceals his face. But the girl’s face I can see—freckles mixed with ghostly pimples, full lips, wearing black glasses. She glances around nervously when I walk by, but her eyes land on everything but me. She reminds me of the single kid left behind to be the lookout, while the other boys set ants on fire with magnifying glasses. As I walk by, I catch a glimpse through the tunnel created by their bodies and the girl’s long, honey hair at what the guy is holding. Just a cigarette.

I sit down across the aisle, but a row behind them, so I can watch them undetected. A wheeled backpack rests on the floor between them, the reason the girl has no legroom. My eyes roam up her thick thigh, which connects to the portion of her ass hanging off the seat, all of which advertises her curviness. But I wouldn’t call her fat because I find our body masses similar.

Their silence and posture reminds me of the way Dylan and I huddle together on a train home from an intense psychedelic weekend elsewhere. (‘Elsewhere’ is a house in a west Chicago suburb, owned by a fascinating couple who liked Dylan at one point, but have currently banned him from visiting for complicated reasons, which would make for a wonderful story, but not this one.) The couple sitting six feet away from me didn’t look like the hallucinogen types. I sat up straight and saw the girl’s hand resting on her knee, her knuckles covered with scabs. I sat back. I’d seen enough movies and anti-drug billboards—they were either tweakers or junkies.

The bus teeters and sloshes, aggravating the ½ pound of tortilla, meat, and cheese in my stomach. I sipped my drink and stared out the window just as the Picasso appears. The bus stutters to a halt at a stop, and a few people get on, taking their seats toward the front of the bus. Behind the sculpture, the windows of the Daley Center are illuminated pink, green, and blue. They were garish and present, making me realize how dark it was outside. I wasn’t used to such a sudden lack of light at 5:15pm. The bus pulled away and my head swiveled around as I hear the girl speak.

“Baby, it’s almost our stop,” she says, already tugging at her backpack. The guy straightens up robotically, like he’d snapped out of a nap—fooling me into thinking he was merely taking one—and yanks the white cord next to his head. I see that his hat obscures most of his dark hair, and he was sporting a scant beard that looked like weeds trying to grow in a desert. He must have slipped the girl a cigarette, because now they were both holding one. Their backs face me as the girl struggles with her backpack, trying to decided whether to wear it or roll it. But she ignores that dilemma when the driver skips her stop; clenching the yellow pole with one hand, her other arm extends ballerina-like toward the front at the driver. “Hey! Hey!” she calls out. The driver doesn’t acknowledge her verbally, but pulls over after an intersection, and the green lights above the exit door switch on. As the couple steps off they both say, “Thank you,” and I see the guy’s cigarette dangling out of his mouth backwards.

Honestly I wouldn’t have paid them an additional moment of thought had the guy behind me not said: “Oh yeah, they were putting crack in it.”

His audience of friends must have reacted with appalled faces as he continues, “Yeah. Yeah. They got on with reduced fare cards, too, so they have to be on disability. Yeah, they know the system very well.” I wonder how he knew all of this just by looking at them. The man talks like a tour guide after a few tabs of Adderall, except his voice is full of disdain and judgment instead of focused excitement. Out of my peripheral I can see him wearing a black wool jacket and dark pants. One of his female friends reacts with a quiet, “Oh my!” and the conversation dies at that. Suddenly my stop is next, so I stand near the exit door. When I step onto State Street, I am overwhelmed by trees doused in light and Macy’s Christmas decorations: creepy little animatronic elves smirking as they build toys and ghost write for Santa. I felt my dinner creeping into my throat.

On the train ride home my stomach pretty much decides that all movement is verboten, lest I want to throw up. I try to sleep during the forty-minute train ride to the north end of the Red Line. When I can’t sleep, I stare at people sitting on the train. A woman sits diagonal from me, closer to the doors. Casually resting on the seat next to her is a big red purse, out of which pokes the head of a very calm, perhaps drugged-up, feline. I watch the cat for five whole minutes before seeing its face move. The woman sitting next to it has the typical crazy cat lady look going on: home-made leg warmers, frazzled gray hair, mismatching coat, and orthopedic shoes. When I stand up to disembark, I watch in the reflective windows as the woman laughs quietly to herself, staring at nothing. I keep thinking I might yak as I walk down the stairs at Morse and trudge the four blocks home. As I approach my apartment building and remember the three flights of stairs I have to climb, my breath shortens and my throat constricts.

I enter through the back door, which lands me in the kitchen. I hear a casual, “Hey,” from another room. I drop my backpack and burrito on the first chair I pass and follow the source of the voice. Dylan sits on the living room couch, eyes honed in on the laptop screen in front of him. On the coffee table in front of him sits a clear glass of iced Coke and a smaller blue cup of something just as dark. As I plop down next to him, he takes a swig of the blue cup, then chases it with Coke.

“I’ve been drinking pretty much all day,” he says proudly.

I sniff the blue cup. “There’s still box wine left?”

“Oh yeah,” he assures me.

“I can’t really drink anything too hard,” I say, rising to get my own glass of the wretchedly cheap red wine. When we bought it, the bag had been leaking all over the bottom of the box. So we’d stored it in an upside-down cake saver, which was chilling in the fridge under the remnants of some baked ziti I’d made. I grab a wine glass from my cabinet and fill it halfway with the plastic dispenser attached to the bag.

As I pad back into the living room, I kick my shoes off. Dylan has already loaded a hitter just for me, and I take a swift hit from it, holding it in until I start coughing through my nose. After the bronchial fit subsides, I sip my wine and take a less ambitious hit. Then I roll a cigarette, and smoke that. I have work and class the next day. I think about the homework I’m not going to get to until I get to work. I could start on it now, but I know I won’t. I’m going to sit down on the couch next to Dylan, smoke some more weed with him, eat my other burrito, probably eat something else, while we catch up on the TV shows we’ve missed throughout the week, only to fall asleep by 10pm. I know myself enough to not fight it, because even if I started my homework, whatever I got myself into would not be nearly as exciting as whatever Dylan was doing. Drugs or no drugs—sometimes I worried that I might just be addicted to being lazy. Or that lounging around my house on my ass is all I’m used to anymore, so it’s what my body has come to expect. I think of the crack-addict couple from the bus. In a way, I am no better than them.

Police also found several containers of alcohol—reportedly purchased outside of the hotel—a myriad of sex toy, and drug paraphernalia. Langston is being charged with a multitude of offenses, including corruption of minors, abduction, and possession of illicit drugs.

The teenagers, whose names have yet to be released, are pressing most of the charges; they claim to have been “lured” into Langston’s hotel room from the book signing, with promises of autographed merchandise. There, they say Langston offered them hard liquor and certain drugs, asking everyone if they “wanted to party.” The girls tried to leave, but Langston collected their cell phones and barricaded the door with a hotel sofa. They didn’t escape until Langston passed out, presumably from inebriation. It was then the girls retrieved their cell phones and called the cops, pleading for rescue. They were worried that they would rouse Langston if they tried to move the sofa. The police managed to get in with cooperation from the hotel, and the girls were rescued; unharmed, but perhaps only physically unharmed.

Langston’s book series primarily concern itself with “vigilante angels” existing among humans and “walking the line between good and evil.” Her hearing is set to occur this Wednesday, only weeks after her sixth novel hit shelves.

Upon first seeing this quote, I was put off. But then I realized you can’t even compare birds and potatoes. You just can’t. Two different things, in two different spectrums. You can kill two birds with one stone, but you can’t kill a potato until you eat it. Or something like that. I’m not sure where this is going, really. This is me all doped up on DXM and expectorant, trying to kill time, and waiting on something to happen.

Anyway, I started thinking about all the interesting things you can do with potatoes. You can mash ‘em, bake ‘em, fry ‘em, julienne ‘em, scallop ‘em; you can make potato chips, you can make hash browns or  those little seasoned potatoes you get at breakfast buffets, you can make potato soup; hell, just about anything tastes good mixed with potatoes. Then I realized I feel the same way about fiction.

Poetry is, and always has been, this strange gray area, where there aren’t really rules, and you don’t really know if you’re doing it right half the time. It’s not that I don’t “get it”–I can stare at a poem for hours and “figure it out,” but why would I want to read something I have to “figure out” in the first place? Instant turn-off. In fiction we’re taught that we have to keep the reader engaged; we have to make them give a shit or they won’t keep reading. True story. We have to learn how to make exhilarating or eye-catching or alluring first lines or the reader isn’t going to invest anything. We have to balance this line of spoon-feeding the reader information and keeping everything a secret from them. We don’t want to make our reader feel stupid, but we don’t want to assume they’re all scholars, either. (Poetry is guilty of this too.)

I’ve always found poetry way harder to critique (unless it was just god awful–then I have to figure out how to say “show don’t tell” for four paragraphs), because readers will ask questions, and the poet doesn’t even have to answer them. But with fiction, there’s a solidity that’s more like red clay and less like rain water. Questions that come up can always be answered, and the fun part is figuring out how you’re going to answer them on the page.

I’m not saying I like fiction because it’s “easier.” Poetry is simple to me. So simple, in fact, that I don’t feel challenged writing it. Plus, I’m just not built for it. I enjoy metaphors and pretty words strung together in a fantastic, mind-blowing sentence, but all the poetry that comes out of me is pristine garbage. I tend to not look past the obvious when it comes to poetry. Thus, I never improve. I love reading poetry, don’t get me wrong, and I do appreciate poetic prose once in awhile. But there is always room for improvement in fiction, and you can actually tell when you’re getting better at getting stories across, whether you’re told to “show don’t tell” less, or the questions that come up from your prose are questions that lead you to productive rewrites, as opposed to, “Oh, I should have clarified that my character was dark-skinned” or whatever menial thing you might have forgotten.

I like having boundaries because I can stray away from them and obscure them. Poetry is just a big open field where all you can find tucked away in the grass is litter and random pieces of things that used to exist. Fiction is more like ruins you’re constantly trying to rebuild.

This semester feels strangely invigorating. I’m way overworked than previous semesters, but I’ve also never felt this urge to kick ass and take names. I can write fucking great shit like everyone else. I do have meaningful things to contribute in class. I am an awesome person to know, and I write interesting stuff. Or I’m a narcissist. Either way, I’m still figuring the shit out that I don’t quite have down.

1. Read more. A lot more. I wasted my time this summer. Because now that school has started and I’ll be reading 10+ novels this semester, all these great recommendations are just flooding in. So many afternoons I could have been sipping a sweaty tumbler of lemonade, lounging in my purple papasan, reading that Craig Ferguson novel, or Rant so I can figure out what the fuck everyone is talking about. For some reason I forget to seek out my immediate friends for book recommendations. I just need to start making a list now. There are so many books, and I want to read them ALL. But mostly because CRW so far has been filled with me missing really obvious shit to point out in class or annotate. I’ve always been slow at that, often needing to read things over a few times to really soak everything in. I’ve decided it’s because I’m embarrassingly under-read.
2. Write more. Which so far I’ve been following to an excellent standard. That is, writing when I usually play DS or surf the internet. I usually fill up one-and-a-half composition notebooks in a semester. Let’s see if I can make it to two.
3. Revise more. I’m really taking the “don’t shit out an assignment five hours before class” thing seriously this semester. I’m tired of reading my stuff aloud and having to correct my own typos or shitty syntax or skip over things that just suck. If my process dictates that I have to edit a hard copy of everything with an ink pen, then goddamn it free printing is officially taken advantage of.
4. Make some friends. I will when I turn 21… Actually I’ve been pretty goddamn jovial. I am a face of the fiction lab, after all. Gotta be nice to people. Use that sweet voice; you know, the one you use for calling customer service numbers or your family. Mine goes up a couple octaves and I tend to replace periods with giggles.
5. Expand story horizons. I’m mostly leaning on my two gen-ed classes to educate me in some new direction of plot elements. Forensics and Ancient European History, which I didn’t realize was my favorite until first class last week, since I’m too daft on history to immediately associate “Ancient European” with “Greek, Roman, Egyptian, etc.” Which are some of my favorite periods of time thanks to the mythology from each. Fuck yeah, Zeus. And then forensics will probably give me all these crazy science-y ideas. In addition to that, though, I should figure out some specific thing to immerse myself in every week. Oh wait, wikipedia has a random button…

(the realization is that the balance is what makes me truly happy)

( This is the second dream about a previous classmate, both of them different people. Go to hell, subconscious. )

(fire is spoken as two syllables where I’m from, though.)

Some nights ago I dreamed about working at a crisp white catering place with nice but aloof people, and a long, white-haired boyfriend who met me after work every day to walk me back to my apartment. Completely fictional, but splendid.

At some point I had a nigthmare about a vicious, vampire-like creature stalking around an apartment complex that I seemed to be living in, leaving corpses disembowled from the waist up hanging on my shower door (because in this dream I possess a shower with a door). It never got caught.

And the best one: An ex, his sister, and I are running down an alley, away from some horrible apocalyptic plague that seems to be possessing people in town. We pass a back porch, and I catch this rhythmic thud. I see a dog trying to force its way out of this back porch, unable to get the screen door open. I open the screen door, and the dog darts happily out, sniffing at me inquisitively. I don’t see him as a threat, but I notice something lying on the porch stairs. I bend down to pick it up, and my shirt rides up. I feel the dog licking at the exposed skin. “What are you doing?” I ask the dog rhetorically, to which the dog responds, “Taking a chunk out of your side.” The last thing I feel is his teeth sinking into my hip.

I’m not really sure how I feel about sleeping anymore.