life is perfect, never better

Topic 41 - Grief

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 22:53:53 GMT

I never went to see my adoptive father in the last year of his life. It's someone I don't talk about, but it's not any sort of secret either. I actually feel guilty about it, as if my presence would have really moved him in any way.

Instead, I sunbathed in Greece, felt my skin warm and burn - later peel like I was being born into another skin, a darker skin - and pretended that I had never been in love. But I saw a man a year older than me named Leon (or Leone, which he refused to go by) for seven months. And what I later learned was the night my father went into cardiac arrest and passed - died, he fucking died. Passed being a pathetically weak word - we made love on the beach, morsels of sand clinging to my wet thighs.

It wasn't unusual or even my first time, but I distinctly remember looking past Leon's sweat drenched shoulder, moonlight reflected in his sweat, and the waves rhythmically moving in and out across the sand like he moved within me. My eyelashes wet and clumping together with dampness, my lips against his neck, I arched back my hips and body to the sky and never saw him again after he came inside of me.

A month later they were burying him too. His mother wailing, tearing at her hair and her chest harsh and sharp, towards the moon like the Greeks do, crying it all out like I couldn't.

Muse: Dakota Lisbon
Fandom: Original Character/Veronica Mars
Word Count: 286

Topic 37 - Weakness

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:48:11 GMT

Every day, from age six on, for two years Dakota dreamed about choking. She would wake up each night gasping for breath despite an inhaler and a humidifier in the room - and she would think that a bottle cap was lodged in her throat or that she was swallowing her tongue. Clinging to Mr. Mistoffelees - a mystical orange and white stuffed animal in the shape of a cat - there would be hot tears drying on her cheeks night after night as she tried to find the place where her breath escaped and went to.

This was something she could never find until her father and mother were by her side, rubbing her back until the breath - the air - eased back into her lungs.

She asked about babies being born. How she came to be. And only then did she truly understand that they couldn't know - neither of them could answer her in the way she needed to be.

Her parents thought the asthmatic breathing - panic attack - had stopped two years later and really it had only slowed down when they didn't hear her upheaval and slept right through. Or maybe it had been the babysitter who was there one night her parents weren't. Either way, she stopped talking about it. She stopped making noise or crying. They stopped running at her call and she stopped.

She just lied - chest rising and falling without ease - as she tried to discover the place where it came from.

Muse: Dakota Lisbon
Fandom: Original Character/Veronica Mars
Word Count: 281

Topic 10 - thank you for this bitter knowledge, guardian angels who left me stranded

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:09:49 GMT

I toured Japan at sixteen. I'm not sure if that means anything at all, but it's this integral part of me that I can't deny. I wanted to visit Italy or England or even - God - Russia, but my father (an agent by trade) insisted that I had a gift that could only flourish in Japan's growing industry. Osaka, mostly, even though I ended up traveling to all the places I wanted to by being a body - a face.

Really, instead of a gift, I think my father wanted me out of the way for a messy divorce that lasted five years for my parents arguing for custody, money and who would get the house. By parents, they're not my biological ones and the point of thinking of them through a child's eyes has finished. I looked at my adoptive father (Benjamin Lisbon) as a hero and I looked at my adoptive mother (Margene Lisbon) as a saint.

Don't get me wrong. I loved them. I love them. I am grateful for them and I needed everything that they have given me in life - a home, stuffed animals, comfort that no one else could fill. When they divorced, everything crumbled. None of it existed anymore. My dad was cold, consumed with his work (something I believe eventually led to his death), and my mother disappeared off the face of the earth with all the dimes and pennies she squeezed out of his pockets. Occasionally, I get phone calls and messages from her detailing where she is now, sending her love. She'll send a birthday card or a sticky note and I suppose I should be grateful for that too.

Osaka was a test drive to being on my own. I wouldn't have gotten so far as I have if I didn't have that behind me, always pressuring me to do more and more for myself - truthfully, who else is going to do that?

I suppose I'm bitter to an extent, but I believe people now just call it realism. Acceptance, maybe.

Being a model, you learn to take things at more than face value. You do something for someone, you expect someone to do something for you - and vice versa. Everyone owes someone something. It's a barter economy more than we realize and often we don't use that enough to our advantage.

Do I wonder who gave birth to me twenty-three years ago? Yes. Without a doubt. Everyone has a vague curiosity of where they came from. I never fit in. Not once. Not with the people who loved me. Not with those who brought me up and helped shape the person I am today. I fight the urge to use a nature versus nurture example because truthfully I don't know what my nature is. My adoption records are sealed. I was Jane Doe. Born in Neptune, California.

And even now I'm lost.

But I don't intend to be forever. If there was anything anyone could say about me it would be about the fact that I possess determination. I follow through and I always, always, get what I want.

I'm Dakota Lisbon. And I'll find out who my parents are, even if it's the last thing I do.

God, that sounds cliche.

OOC: Dakota is the daughter of Celeste and Jake Kane. A love child and/or mistake they had made while too young to know better. Please refer to "My Mother, The Fiend" (2x09) :

PATTY: That spiteful little shrew that he dated over the summer told him that she was pregnant.
VERONICA: Jake Kane got somebody pregnant twenty-five years ago?
PATTY: Well, your mom didn't think so. She was sure that Celeste was lying.

Her age is adjusted to the current time period. P.S. The Kanes should eventually learn the real use of rubbers. One day, after they discover the many other children they've conceived.

Muse: Dakota Lisbon
Fandom: Original Character/Veronica Mars
Word Count: 639