(can you) LIKE this

When I was a junior in high school, I liked a boy called G. I was too shy to ask him if he liked me the way I liked him, so I gave him my Enya CD before class one day, because I had overheard him saying he liked her music.

Photo by Ryo Josephs

He smiled and took it, but never really said if he liked me or even the album and I have a scar on my right forearm from the day I drove to that park somewhere between where I lived and didn’t and cut my skin until I felt touched by something.

Grade ten in high school and I am told by my best friend that while he was in the gym locker room, a bunch of other boys were making fun of me. They said they wished I had just killed myself already and I began to wonder why my friend was relaying this to me. He said, “I defended you,” because he liked me, even though no one else did. Four more scars were born soon after.

First grade. A boy called D passes a note to me via three other people and asks me if I like him back. He gives me a choice: Circle YES or NO or MAYBE. I circle all three; even then, I had a difficult time making up my mind.

Nowadays, we are LIKED at least once a day, sometimes ten or thirty depending upon how often we ask through typed-up messages and photographs. We unravel our scars, dig them out like time capsules and put them up onto our computer screens, so that someone will press a button and deliver validation we’ve grown to thirst for

Nowadays, we walk around with instant validation. All one has to do is post words and wait.

LIKE.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Two minutes pass and you’ve acquired three and then two more and suddenly your lack of employment or depleted bank account or untreated-but-diagnosed depression does not matter.

You. Are LIKE’d. Simply because you posted words above a button making it very easy for others to press it.

You tell people you have grown sick or gone to hospital or stopped eating or what you are eating or how you sit or how you lean or the delicate drip of your nose or who you are dating.

You tell people about what you just did or what you are about to do or what you plan to do next week.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Nineteen years of age, I am swallowing a boy’s body part that does not feel safe or comfortable in my mouth. He did not ask me if I LIKED this.

Year twenty-seven of living and I leave a place that I never recorded after my body is broken into once again and there is no button, but if there were I would not press it.

Seven years later and I try it out. I gather up some words like a bouquet of flowers stolen out of someone’s front yard. I take these words and thrown them onto a computer screen. And I wait. And I hold my breath until the first….

LIKE.

It feels good. Adrenaline of acceptance rushes through me and suddenly it does not matter how much I meant what I wrote. It doesn’t matter that I never spell-checked or fact- checked. All that matters is someone LIKE’d it, which means someone LIKE’d me.

And all my scars began to faint away or I pretended they had and it did not matter I was alone or lonely or hungry or still depressed. Someone pressed that button for me.

LIKE.

I take all these LIKEs and crush them up. I press down firmly to smooth out the hard bits. Like gristle. Suddenly, I’ve got a fine powder of LIKEs. I lean toward them as though about to whisper something worthy of a click to them. I get so close, I almost blow some of the LIKEs away. Then, I glide this dust toward my nose and snort them up like the drug it really is. I inhale. My chest beckons. My ribs climb themselves. I inhale every last drip of LIKE that exists and revel in the aftertaste of anticlimactic emptiness.

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OUT NOW: Aimee Herman –

meant to wake up feeling

(great weather for MEDIA, 2014)

Aimee Herman website

*Photo of Aimee Herman by Ryo Josephs

what it is to have (not)

A kaleidoscope of musings by Aimee Herman inspired by various texts, conversations, and observations. 

As I write this, I stare at less than $200 in my checking account. I do not announce this as some sort of Kickstarter-ploy-for-pity, rather as a reminder to myself of what it is to have or have not.  

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, there were never empty shelves. Before each school year began, my mom would take my sister and I to Kmart or its equivalent and get us folders and notebooks. If shoes started breaking, we’d get a new pair. Holes in the knees of jeans? We’d head to the local mall for their replacement. We had.

As I got older, I fell in love with other people’s things. I spent my weekends, going to garage sales. My dad and I would hoard our treasures, hiding them from my mom who disapproved of the dusty discards. My body would be wrapped inside various shades of polyester, purchased from the local flea market, sometimes for less than $1. I loved wearing other people’s stories against my skin.

I never thought much about money. As a kid, we always had it.

Once I was old enough, I worked, so I had loose change to purchase non-necessities like cassette tapes, books and (later on) drugs. When I started working, I began saving for larger objects like a CD/record player, TV and then upon moving out after high school, rent.

There were years I fed my nose before I fed my mouth. But I always had. Even as a drug addict, I paid my bills on time. Rent. Credit card. Utilities. All of it. Sometimes there were even some months where I actually had some money left after paying these bills.

My eyes don’t get excited over expensive objects because as an adult, I always knew I could never afford them. I own no jewelry, nor do I care about the designer’s brands. My labels are usually faded by the time I purchase them, so I barely even know what size I am these days

As I write this, with less than $200 in my checking account, I recognize how far $1 can go these days. (Should I build some suspense? Close your eyes. Hold your breath.) Not. Far.

$1 cannot afford my trip on the subway to work. In the 1940’s, a dollar could buy four movie tickets. Now, it doesn’t even cover the cost of a bottle of water from concession.

This is not to say that with less than $200 in my checking account, I do not have.

With less than $200 in my checking account, I wake in a bed every morning in a bedroom I call mine with heat that comes on fairly regularly at no extra cost. This bedroom is inside an apartment that also houses two other wonderful humans who fill it with art, music and laughter. This apartment includes a kitchen with a cupboard full of ingredients. Each morning, I toast rye bread in borrowed toaster and slide peanut butter against its yeast with less than $200 in my checking account. I have the ability to boil water (also free) and drink coffee from beloved French press every morning. In this apartment, there is furniture to sit on. In this apartment, though there are occasional cockroaches (the uninvited pests of living in the city); luckily, there has been no infiltration of mice. With less than $200 in my checking account, I can take a bath any time I want and the water never forgets to flow.

Ten years ago, I was eating nineteen-cent packages of freeze-dried ramen with enough salt in their flavoring packet to cover my allotted sodium intake for close to a week. This was all I could afford. Now, I purchase ramen (price more than doubled) not because I have to but because I want to.

What does it really mean to have? Is it always attached to money, or is there something else to it?

As I write this, I think about the weight of love and how when I have it, I feel like it replaces every haunting presidential face attached to currency that could ever climb into my wallet. I feel like the most affluent human just for having my metaphorical heart wrapped up in a metaphorical heated 1,000-thread count blanket.

I think about the weight of words and how when I have them, I feel like I can purchase meals with my poems. I feel like I could pay my rent with my words. I feel like I could purchase a plane ticket for around the world with a well-crafted independent clause.

With less than $200 in my checking account, I have enough books to build a well-enclosed fort to protect me from the ones I hide from

I have things. I am reminded of this with each move from new state or street. In my head, I am a well-intentioned minimalist. In real life, I am a massive collector of the discarded.

With less than $200 in my checking account, I have enough clothes to last me through two weeks without having to visit the Laundromat (or at least enough underwear). I have boots to protect me from rain or snow and sneakers to slide my feet into for the warmer/dryer months.

I go to work at a community college, teaching students about writing, reading and creative ways to think with less than $200 in my checking account.

With less than $200 in my checking account, I swipe metro card with enough money stored on it to get me to aforementioned workplace and back home with possible stops in between. I notice that as I travel with other strangers underground, this is the one place where all economic classes blur together. It does not matter if you have $20 in your wallet or no wallet at all. There is no exclusive seating on the subway. A hedge fund or 401K account will not guarantee you a seat during rush hour. Everyone is the same.

What is it to have with less than $200 in my checking account? How can one claim to be rich when by society’s standards, they are poor? Is mood measured by bank balance? Would I be happier if I could afford everything on my Amazon wishlist?

As I write this, with less than $200 in my checking account, I feel no less sad as the days of the week where my balance is far more corpulent. My disposition has nothing to do with my wallet. In fact, as I settle into this low-income identity, I recognize that what I desire the most are things unattached to price tags: words, love, peace of mind, poetry.

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OUT NOW: Aimee Herman –

meant to wake up feeling

(great weather for MEDIA, 2014)

Aimee Herman website

an authentic dialogue

Welcome to the first of many posts which will arrive twice a month by Aimee Herman. It will be a kaleidoscope of musings inspired by various texts, conversations, and observations. 

**

In “Roland Barthes” by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard), he asks, “Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image…” It can be difficult to see one’s self as a whole. Mirrors are bullies without the childhood backstory. How not to notice that scar and recognize it as that time the boy called you ugly so you felt the need to prove him right. How not to just see it as a development of fibrous connective tissue. Not everything is a metaphor.

I lift wrist attached to palm finalized by fingers when I meet someone. Others call this a shake. Or an affair of hands meeting, vibrating against one another.

Here is a transcript:

Hand 1: Hello.

Hand 2: Hi.

Hand 1: What I mean to say is, where do you come from?

Hand 2: And what I meant was how do you exist? 

Hand 1: It really is winter outside, don’t you think?

(When one introduces words on weather, it reveals discomfort)

Hand 2: I am reminiscent of shivering.

Hand 1: How do you spend your days?

Hand 2: How heavy is your wallet?

Hand 1: There are some parts of me that cannot be touched.

Hand 2: Everything has been triggered by warnings.

Hand 1: Are you love?

Hand 2: I am intimacy issues.

Hand 1: Your word makes me uncomfortable.

Hand 2: Should we exchange info then?

I crash my limbs onto a corner of the city that is without people. I search for the emptiness of doors and buildings and sky and scrapes of initials into sidewalks. Each human I touch spits their genetics into the cracks of my skin and it takes me months of scrubbing to understand what remains.

I am just an image of projected repetitions. We are a barrage of repetitions.

Here is a(nother) transcript:

Selfie.

Dinner.

Cat.

New baby.

Selfie.

Accomplishment.

Reference to break-up.

Selfie.

Reference to hook-up.

Selfie.

Brunch.

Selfie.

Selfie.

Barthes goes on to write, “When I resist analogy, it is actually the imaginary I am resisting: which is to say: the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of signifier and signified, the homeomorphism of images, the Mirror, the captivating bait.

Perhaps there is that need to break through the representation of an idea and just be blatant. However, within that blatancy, there is still so much underlying imagery.

Revised transcript from above:

I want you to tell me I look good.

I am eating food far more expensive than it should be.

This pet is replacing the void in my bones.

See above but replace pet with human.

I want you to tell me I look good.

This is a reminder that I am doing things.

I want you to think I am not hurting.

I want you to tell me I look good.

I want to pretend I am not hurting.

I want you to tell me I look good.

I have friends.

I want you to tell me I look good.

Please tell me I look good.

I lift words and place on tongue, dripping with the sauce of morning. It is early enough that my voice is cracking like the floorboards of pre-war apartment. Beside me, a human dressed only in hair, dry skin, wounds from war-torn childhood and an erection. (I am alone.) There is desperation to speak out the answer to the question I heard last: Don’t you want to be happy?

Instead, I layer questions onto the one first spoken to see if it will get me closer toward understanding:

I say: What is that?

I say: Peaceful?

I say: What is its going rate?

I say: Are there side effects?

I say: No?

I say: What is my other option?

Barthes continues, “Which body? We have several. I have a digestive body, I have a nauseated body, a third body which is migrainous, and so on…”

Maybe there is no one way to be or represent or speak or exist. All these images are truths inside us. They are SOS’s and snapshots and begged breaths of validation and metaphor and metaphor and metaphor.

We place palms together and sway.

****

OUT NOW: Aimee Herman - meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA, 2014)