#4

Hotel rooms gross me out. I've never had the opportunity to stay in the really cushy kind of hotels, where they leave you chocolate on your pillow and scent your high-thread-count sheets with expensive linen spray. It's always been Holiday Inns, Ramadas, and---God forbid---a Super 8 or two for us North Dakota middle class people.

I'm sitting in a Hilton Garden Inn at the moment. Don't get me wrong---it's a little bit nicer than most hotels I've stayed in, except the Watergate, but I didn't pay for that one---and a LOT nicer than the last Minneapolis hotel, which was straight-up 1972, down to the faux-wood paneled walls.

But back to my original point. Hotel rooms gross me out. The overpowering chlorine smell in the hallway, the suspicious rings in the water glasses, the dingy bathtubs, the rough towels, the comforters that I force myself to use because my hot-flash-prone mom's turned the air conditioner way, way up. (I'm sitting by it now and shivering.) Ick, ick, ick.

I'm going to college tomorrow.

#3

Isn't it funny how it's still you? I can be entertaining ideas of makeout sessions with boys I probably should not be kissing, sitting in a Jeep looking at the stars from the sunroof, but it's you I think about. It's funny because it was months ago and by now it's ancient history to the both of us, but it's still you creeping up in my thoughts. Maybe because it was so brief, that's why it stays. At the oddest times---something will trigger it and the room is suddenly full of you.

Something tonight, as I sat watching a rerun of Grey's Anatomy the way I do almost every Sunday, made me feel almost wistful in a way I haven't felt for awhile. I miss Trevor, I thought. Maybe it was the perfume I was wearing or the fact that Sunday night was my favorite night with him; Sunday night was our night. And though my feelings for him have gone from an icy contempt to just simple, platonic friendship, I missed him tonight.

But then I think, well, maybe it isn't Trevor exactly. Maybe it's just a male presence, male warmth, having someone to lean on, someone's hair to fiddle with, that quiet contented feeling you get on Sunday nights. I'm hungry for a male presence. I need to be kissed, petted, paraded, flirted with---I am tired of being alone.

#2

I have never seen my father cry. In the eighteen years I've known her, my mother has cried a million times, and that's not stretching it. But my father, I've yet to see him shed a tear. But now he's outside sitting by his bonfire, the dog at his feet, and he's utterly sad.

I don't have a grandfather. Both of my parents' fathers died before I was born, and so I've never known what it feels like to have one. My grandmothers are the delight of my life, especially my next-door neighbor Grandma Ruby, who I love and adore. But I've never had a grandpa, and this leaves me grabbing foster grandfathers where I can get them. I've always been jealous of my friends with grandpas, and of little girls I see in Target holding hands with theirs. But now, one of the closest things I've had to a grandpa is soon to die---it's a fact, it happens when you least expect it, just an ordinary day---and it's had a profound effect on both my parents.

I've always been funny about death---it hasn't struck me closely, knock on wood---but death leaves me feeling awkward. I don't know what to say---I know that cousins of mine are losing their beloved grandpa, that my uncle is losing his father--and that leaves me without those sympathetic words. Miss Wordy herself, and I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to my father, to my mother, to anyone. I pretend it isn't happening. I look away. I'm extremely uncomfortable. I will be heartbroken when my grandma Ruby dies---inconsolable for days, it makes me cry just thinking about it. But there's something about this situation that pushes me away.

My world is full of lovely things---things of utmost loveliness. Leopard print ottomans, silver ballerina flats, perfect perfumes, fat fashion magazines, green grass, a little boy who makes me smile every single day, three dogs. But all my lovely things mean a little less when my daddy's sitting outside with tears in his voice.

#1

And so it begins.