Zelda

I want Rattawut Lapcharoensap to write my biography.

I want him to come to my apartment when my boyfriend’s

not home. I want to make him coffee. I know that he

will want to tape record all of our sessions, and

after I die I want these tapes catalogued and archived

in the temperature controlled basement of an ivy league

university library. Additionally, I would like

my biography to have a neon purple dust jacket and

I would like Nancy Milford to grant us permission

to call the book Zelda even though there is already

a book called Zelda because it is about the life of Zelda

Fitzgerald. Maybe because it is just one word and

that word is a name we won’t need permission; I’m

not a lawyer. Also: I would like Martin Scorsese to direct

the movie based on the book based on my real life.

I don’t know if any of you have seen The Departed yet, but

I just saw it last night and my life is almost exactly like that

except instead of Boston I grew up in Chicago, and instead

of going to police academy I toured with Cirque du Soleil.

If Rattawut could just get a hold of a copy of the screenplay

and make Matt Damon a female trapeze artist

who was born to Prussian immigrant parents in 1984,

I’m sure he’d have a good three, four chapters right there, easy.

Have any of you ever tried to think of all the different ways

you could disappoint your parents and then done them?

I chose the calliope over the violin; I ran with gypsies;

I dated a boy three years younger than me just because

he had an apartment and I didn’t want to live

with my parents anymore. I want Rattawut to tell me

he likes my blue sweater. Maybe I’ll sit next to him

while I show him old photographs and wait to see

if he puts his hand on my leg. I don’t know what will happen

to me after I turn 23, but when my biography comes out

I will have to avoid the reviews and the interviews

and any website that gives away the ending.

I will probably have to spend a few weeks in a cabin

in Minnesota. By then, I will have broken up

with my boyfriend in order to marry Rattawut

beneath a chuppah in the western suburbs of Chicago

because even though I’m not technically Jewish,

my father is, and any tradition is better than none.

When Rattawut gives me my autographed copy,

I’ll stay inside my childhood, making daisy chains,

enrolled in summer programs for the gifted and talented.

I’ll concentrate on the photos of myself holding prize ribbons,

playing leapfrog, dressed up like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

I won’t read the chapters about my future addiction

to pain medication, my lepidopterophobia,

my failed marriages, my miscarriages, the fire

that will destroy all my manuscripts, my fall

down the stairs. I won’t ever read the last chapter,

the one that describes in vivid detail the flames

that will erupt from my fatal motorcycle accident

somewhere in the Badlands, how it will take weeks

for them to discover my body. I am only 22 years old.

I want to fake my death on Facebook. I want a pony.

Source: Dispatch from the Future (Melville House, 2012)