Royal sessions [10.3.1998]

Her thumb under the shoulder strap she answered his questions as best she could. Questions wouldn’t elicit sex so they were to some degree harmless even if leading. He angled hard like the light triangulated on the floor by the door. He kept pulling his back up from the couch like he was being jolted from some reverie. Every answer she voiced seemed to wake him up a little more, he wasn’t invested in reality like she was. Not when he was with her. She couldn’t understand how you can turn it off and on.

by #katyamills

Royal Sessions [10.5.1998]

Storms carry clouds over Lake Michigan like a doomed zeppelin. They boarded up some of the many vents in the apartment to mitigate the wind and make it through the winter without too high a heat bill. The needles on the tops of the Sears and Hancock towers puncture the clouds and the yellow cabs slide on bald tires across the oily streets. Her oldest kid got a job in a hardware store making keys on weekends. Hands grip hammers and pliers and the sound and smell of metal being cut up into unique patterns, silver and gold slid on to rings with other older keys which makes your world seem bigger but really it's smaller as you leave behind the wide open spaces that most find unbearable as they drive into their garages as the final joints pull the door up and parallel to cement floors. I will survive was declared the best disco tune of all time yesterday and she was feeling it, gosh darn it, she got all her life to live, yes. She fucking hated disco for some reason but the song was great great great. It would be a busy day at work and she was loading up on coffee and getting ready to conquer. There would be no more sitting down at any kitchen table because who has time for that? She was always moving about, taking care of the kids, the pets, and herself if she was lucky. Gone were the evenings of saying prayers before meals and patiently cutting and eating one's food. Gone the breadwinner and patriarch, too. The kids were very little then. Yes she was irritable, anxious, stressed, and not so happy. But when she was happy watch out, you might not be able to handle it, she was really fucking joyful. A contagion of fear and doubt had swept over the land a long time ago. Everyone relied on keys and it was considered ridiculous and stupid to leave your doors unlocked anymore, which gave her son plenty to do at the store. When he came home he helped take care of his brother who spent long hours watching the world through the windows like a cat, the rain beading on the glass and streaming down into the rivers to the street. He wanted them to know where he was, he wanted to show them where he had been and make them guess where he might end up. One day to return to the anonymity of a cloud that learns to cry. He had lost the ability to express it but he wanted them to know. The sun would pull everything together some day.   

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.8.1998]

Someone had broken the lightbulb in the hallway. Someone had been breaking into the mailboxes. Someone kept unscrewing the front door knob. Danger in the air but she didn’t mind. The landlord kept having to change the locks and the landlord’s helper slipping shiny new keys under the tenants doors. She would rather live here than in the wealthy part of town where people were often smug and pretentious and could be so entitled. She had to have another talk with the postal worker and caught him just as he was leaving. Someone’s been breaking in again. Let me show you. She keyed her slot and pulled it open and then gripped the metal with her hand and pulled and the upper metal rim that ran along the tops of all the mailboxes pulled out slightly from the wall. See? Anyone can access anyone else’s mail! Can you get this fixed? He had already lost valuable seconds on his route. Miss, I just deliver the mail. He pushed the row of boxes back into the wall. Please don’t mess with that. Yes! But who do I talk to? If I have a credit or bank card coming, it’s likely to be stolen. The man shrugged. He started to wonder if she was a thief. People were strange like that and would show you something just so they wouldn’t be fingered for a crime. You all have got to talk to one another. Find out what’s going on. Someone probably just lost their mail key, so they’re opening from the top to get into their own mailbox, not yours. But sir, she protested, the box is broken! He shook his head. You all need to communicate. Knock on doors. With that he walked out the front door and on to the adjacent apartment building. But it’s a federal offense! She yelled after him. She put her hands in her hair and sighed. She was worried less about the neighbors and more about shoddy careless government officials. The people here were kind and demure and often just trying to get by. Grounded in reality. She could hang her messed up head of hair out the window on a Sunday morning and scream at god and nobody would care.


In the drug store on the corner a two liter slipped from her hands. An older woman was pulling sugar from the shelves and the bottle was rolling toward her soft shoes. A nagging back ache prevented her from helping physically but she had kind words to speak which in her youth would have remained kind thoughts. Be sure to open that over the sink when you get home, dear … but if you put it back and get another, well, I didn’t see anything! She tried to wink but due to a faulty eyelid she blinked.


She smiled and picked up the bottle at the older woman’s feet. What, and let someone else buy it and get blasted by soda? That had happened to her before. She took it home herself and loosened the cap a little over the sink to let the pressure out. Then poured herself a glass over ice and lit a candle for company. Her face could breathe. She was tired of people and sick of being on television. Her life was a nightmare of giant human-operated cameras staring her down. She only had tonight and she would make every second count. Tomorrow it would start all over again. She would shower, make tea, dress, lock up, wait for the bus, take an elevator up the high rise, greet everyone, small talk, get made up, compose herself, become all business, sit up straight in her seat, deal with any and all last minute adjustments of lighting getting situated, check the clock, the teleprompter, look into the lights. This life was not the one she had imagined for herself but it paid the bills. At the end of every day she went home alone and, despite everyone and their mother prying into her love life or wondering why in her late twenties she wasn’t yet married with kids, it was her choice and this was how she liked it.   

by  #katyamills

Royal sessions [10.11.1998]

Like boiled water feels tea. Like rhythm it could not be seen only felt. Like empathy pervades a room of liquid bodies in cotton polyester and leather. Giving made it all run. Giving your all for nothing in return. Oils and canvas looked into the sun of a thousand thoughtful inspired faces and the artist long since deceased. Outsiders were not insiders though no one was actually excluded. The meaning seekers often ran with false narratives they claimed to be true. You can make money but you cannot actually exploit it because it could not be exploited. Yes, the newsprint in plastic at the dewy morning doorstep brought it to peaks and valleys of world eye watching, falling under scrutiny and misunderstanding to an unceremonious public death. It had a difficult sincerity about it. A paragraph in one of history’s tomes would do it no justice at all whatsoever. But this would not matter because it did not need justice or publicity or anything else. When the course of the earth was navigating too close to the sun, basements and attics would be frantically searched for it, so to bring the world back to some fantasized forgotten condition, it would not resist being rediscovered, mourned and celebrated all at once. Not at all.

by #katyamills

Royal Typewritten 10.12.1998

As a child she was one of those angels. People who did not even believe in angels called her one. She flew into rooms with her singular dance, fingers stretching not for want but for joy, her arms wrapping around her father’s muscular neck, and she liked to lay on his shoulder while he read in his armchair. She gave herself freely to anyone she did not fear. In adolescence he passed away, her father, after an injury he sustained in a fall at work, and sadness of thoughts of him dominated her mind over anything like boys or hairstyles or makeup, or the girl who pushed her and called her a pig, an aggravation that quickly passed without meaning like any infomercial. She escaped into books like her father had before her. She became feverishly intimate with the written word, rubbed the many many ears and cracked bindings to the point where titles were no longer legible and pages fell randomly out. She kept them about, on her night table, under her bed, lost among the clothes lying around on the floor. She was known to bring single delicate slices out with her wherever she went and read them to friends. She did not tell anyone that her books were more important. She promised she would not forget them. She was quite learned by the time she dropped out of school which had been rendered useless. By this time there were men in her life who she met walking home past the factory where her father had worked. She must have turned down a hundred propositions before she did not. She found it strange that one liked to suck on her toes. He was otherwise a perfect gentleman in her eyes. Another found her tonsils with his tongue. She had sudden experiences with men who made her laugh and men who made her cry. It was unusual but there were second chances for those who were persistent enough in tracking her down, romantic enough with a flower between their teeth. She discovered if she had trouble breathing, this was a telltale sign that the relationship had run its course and she ended it, usually without complications. Factory men tended to be too tired and worked too hard to be difficult. There were one or two she had to shout down and run from. She gave herself freely to anyone she did not fear. The day she realized she was searching for her father in a man was the very same day she stopped caring, changed her number, packed a bag with a few cherished manuscripts she could not live without, took a bus took a train, and moved away.

by #katyamills

Day One. 2024

Day One. 2024. Don't let this be just another day. Let it be an opportunity for you! I want to make some changes to my routine, starting tomorrow. Water before coffee. Yoga before writing. Writing before going anywhere near social media. Water. Yoga. Shower. Coffee. Writing. Then ideally a short walk before I start my work day. I think I can do it. I already get up at 4:00 am every morning and I do everything now except the yoga (currently 2x week). The key is to have a realistic plan!  #katyamills

Typewritten on my Royal (2.26.98)

2.26.1998

A fifth of liquor followed four days of anger and then I was done. Done drinking, done being angry. I uncurled my toes like a good boy and sat patiently. I did not look up until she was standing above me. She was awfully still which meant she had made a decision. Well? I asked, what is it? I prayed she might surprise me but my prayers went unanswered. Now I had to take her spoken words seriously and bring myself to believe, though I could not be moved by them, by anything.  I had next to nothing left after a hundred hours of basic misery, watching tv until tv was essentially watching me, locked in my house, seated in the center of a room, dangerously safe, talking to myself, lost in a language full of images only I could decipher…Wrap the dutiful land with sky and milk, the clouds round and full with the dimmest hope, waiting to be sucked. The side of my face presses into an interminable chain link fence. Blood dripping like a leaky faucet. The pastures turn green. Sweat off the iron palms. My fingers wrap around the links and my body goes limp. Inseparable against the sky. Do not care if we live or die. The ghosts within me began to wail, long slow and rising from the caps of my knees to the pupils of my eyes. I woke from semi-consciousness to the aching of my calves and feet in Japanese position. My arms were somehow upraised with a power I had not bestowed. I remembered her and what she told me, before she even told me. And after she gave me her decision I was unable to be moved, I was speechless. I was sorry but I could not apologize. The good news was that the air began circulating again and the oil began lubricating my pores and I was no longer suffocating, and I could bring water to my lips and the chain link fence was gone. God had carved our lifelines and the sky was still with us.  

by #katyamills