Thank you. Thank you everyone who has come to Broken Nerves for the past six years. You all can’t begin to understand how much it means to me.

The time has comes though for me to close it’s doors.

There are various reasons for this and without getting bogged down in them, I’d just like to say this space doesn’t feel like Me anymore and I want to be able to create in a place that feels like me.

But never fear! Someone like me can’t stay away from the internet for very long and I’m not leaving. Instead, I am moving spaces and building a new house somewhere else:

Please, follow me to The Pocket House!

So, if you can, update your links, your rss feed, your internet subscriptions, alert your friends, neighbors and everyone else who will listen. And I hope I’ll see you all there. I can’t wait to get started entertaining.

With all my love,
Melissa Dominic
2012

You don’t have to say you’re sorry.

Today would have been his birthday, if I remember correctly. I’m unsure how old he would be. We don’t talk about him too much. I think twenty-four years later the wounds are still fresh. I still get too close to tears. It is the one thing I still have not managed to deal with. I brought it up once, to my mom, in a letter I wrote here where I explained I was in love with another woman. Somewhere lost in the strange maze of feelings and emotions I wrote, we don’t talk about Dad. I don’t talk about Dad because I don’t want to hurt your feelings.  Since then, it has gotten a little easier, through funny photos we find around the house or anecdotes someone might bring up. Easier but not perfect. We still don’t talk about him much.

My father died of something he was born with and found out about too late. There was no way to stop it.

My life has been one long, steady stream of dealing with other people’s illnesses. I think about it this week because I have just returned from the vaguely tense circuit of emergency room visits with my Abuela: my Sunday spent staring into the tiny television hung above her bed and trying hard not to listen to the conversation of people around me. There was a boy with broken teeth crying about how his girlfriend will never love him again, another whose mother was trying to scare him out of a drug haze and a woman who was told she could be stitched up, but there was nothing else they could do there.

The worst words, I think, when you expect a place to fix you up, send you home clean and new.

My whole life has been punctuated by the heartbreak of losing people, of watching their bodies fail them, of watching them struggle to fight back, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. Each one a click against me, in time. I wonder if I will break early too, if I’ll be someone else’s loss too soon. I’m not scared for me, most times. I’ve only ever taken being ill in very quiet nods and forward movements. I’ve been told I had brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, heart issues, only to end up alright, knocking on wood, thanking the universe, smiling softly to myself and all that. I don’t worry about me, I’ll fight when I have to, when the time comes, because when you grow up seeing it, you now it’s not an if but a when it’ll happen. When you see your mom battle breast cancer, see your grandmother have her leg amputated, see your Abuelo get infected from the inside out, you know life is what happens around the series of hospital visits that eventually you’ll have to have, have to make.

My life has always been this way.

That’s why you don’t have to say you’re sorry. It’s okay. Maybe it’s a little awful that I’m used to it. But, I like to think it just means I value the moments spent living just a little bit more.

Pyramids by Frank Ocean
Getting excited for tomorrow’s Supercoppa Italiana today (Forza Napoli!)
The fact that soccer season is about to start up again
Hazelnut creamer
I can’t be there with you, but I can dream
Accepted lateness to work
The Olympics
Gabby friggin’ Douglas
Colored Index Card Plotting Method
The community bus
Kieron Gillen writing Iron Man
Watermelon
Amazon Prime and the fact I just ordered Wild Children to be here very soon
The tennis rackets in my closet and that teenager I see playing tennis in the retirement community courts every evening
Visits from my family two days in a row
Payday

 

Great.

When the conversation turns back to questions about how long you’ve plugged away at the internet, I have a tendency to smirk. I’ve managed to lose track of the years. I  begged my Mom for the internet only because I wanted to start a website. I always had a strange need to give it my everything. Other people? They fall into blogs,  journaling services, microupdating sites. I came to the internet with a mission: I would learn design, I would share myself, I would make a website about me. I only ever wanted to talk about me.

And for years, sometime after 1998, I think, I did. I did it the right way: I started on a free site and spent all my time putting together webpages that had just enough of my poetry, just enough information about me (teenager, growing up in a town that treated itself like the inner city), and just enough outgoing links that I soon got myself picked up on a friend’s hosted site. I had my own subdomain (and eventually a second one when I decided to move). It was the crowning glory of my achievement. It felt like I had finally gotten somewhere. I kept trying to figure out how to spin the information about myself in the perfect way. Every single month, every single site redesign, every single comment in the guestbook proved to me how right it was at the time.

It took me years to settle on my own domain name and stick to it (I started BrokenNerves in 2006 with tax return money from my first job, a year I finished University and moved back home to live with my family). in 2012, I still  haven’t gotten it right. It’s a hilarious mishmash of myself, hovering on the edge of outdated, full of inconsequential nonsense. Obviously the internet has become something that is far bigger than the glimmer hope of a fifteen year old girl who just wanted to stamp herself in permanent ink everywhere, but at the same time, I miss that.

We worry, and we all worry, too much about what we put down. Now there are employers down our backs, trying to hustle us for our fake names and passworded accounts. The sharing process becomes about things. Things I own. Things I need. Things I want to have. Things I don’t have and things you have that would be better on my shelf if I only had the money, so you should give me the money so I can put it there too. Great. Fabulous. Reviews of books I’ll never read, makeup I can’t be assed to try and shoes that won’t fit in the incredibly tiny closet space this apartment I live in has. Do I  hate it? Of course not. I love it. I love it because I can wander around and look at nothing but photographs of Avengers cast members making stupid faces at the camera all day long, if it is what I wanted to do (and don’t think I haven’t done it). But, I do miss me. I miss me on the fake paper screen, in the tiny inline frame box, next to the stock photography blood stains and I apologize to no one but myself about it.No one told me to stop. I just let it fade out.

Every website I love becomes every website I like less and less because it has no personality, no charm, no human behind it. I am no better than the things I dislike now, it seems. So, I’m trying.  I fail big time, I make mistakes everyday and people seem to come around when I am writing posts about the way I love things, the way I see things and the way I experience things because sometimes I actually get it right when I am putting it into words.

It’s the ultimate selling of yourself and I am not above that. I’m a kid of the personal site era and I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. I don’t think I’ll want to. So everyday I tell myself that it is okay for my blog to be a badly formed memoir, a field journal like it says it is. And it gets hard, always, of course. There is no niche. Just the human existence. My own human existence: late twenties, living in a retirement home, writing stories and watching sporting events on television.

Some day I’ll tell myself that it’s okay and it’s enough and I can talk like that every single day, not just when the random inspiration strikes. Even if it is comes out completely wrong, fucked-up and still raw in the middle. Maybe that day that it’ll be alright will be today. Or maybe it was already yesterday and I didn’t even notice. Maybe it was one paragraph up from here, somewhere lost in the shuffle of what I intended on saying.

I’m not certain yet, you know? But, it’s cool. I’m okay with that too.

I held her hand in the back seat of a taxi cab as we swerved through the streets from my best friend’s Brooklyn apartment to the airport where we’d kiss goodbye. I think of this moment a lot. One of those brief seconds where I caught myself staring out the window, not saying much and listening to the radio. We were listening to Frank Ocean before I knew who Frank Ocean was. It has been stuck in my head forever. New York City knows music better than Miami ever could.

I listen to Frank Ocean a lot. Now, at the least. It has been a nonstop thing. I hum songs to myself while I am sitting around. Let a line or two slip out when I am alone. Practicing my voice which hasn’t sung in a long, long time. Why it’s hit something in me, I’m not too sure. But it has.

Because of this, I often think of my girlfriend and the mental count of days I haven’t seen her. I try not to rope the two of them into one another, but, it works itself out that way. Music is for stories and lately, they’ve just been stories of my own. My own life. As to not let them slip away into clouded over memories. I don’t want to lose everything the way I leave everything I need to bring with me at home.

I am a forgetful child, I don’t want to be, but I am. It is a Brain-Age Memory building game for my life. I have diaries I don’t keep. A sentence written in a notebook as I was trying not to cry. Looking at it does nothing. Sounds keep up everything. I jump from one thing to the next, to the next.

So, I think of her sometimes, when I hear some songs. Not all the time, but, sometimes. The way we put things together like that is funny.

The way everything works out is kind of funny.

It was pretty exciting.

In my not so brief interim of not writing blog posts, I’ve taken up really watching soccer. Watching a lot of soccer. Finding myself undoubtedly wrapped up in the world that is sports fanaticism and soccer obsession and being okay with it.

It’s probably something I’ll have a lot to say about.

But, for now, this. This was something special. A charity game put together by one of the best damn soccer players in all the world (Lionel Messi, of course) where he invited not one, not two, not three but four players from one of my top teams (Napoli~) to come and play at a stadium that is about ten minutes from my apartment? This was something made of magic. I punched the ever-living out of Ticketmaster the morning the tickets went on sale, ensuring myself and my mom (who happens to be a Messi-Fangirl, after I’ve thrown her into the downward spiral that is futbol) decent tickets on the upper level with a view of the entire field.

After waiting what felt like forever from buying the tickets, the game happened and it was about two weeks ago. We met up with some friends before the game actually started and had a sort-of tailgate that mostly involved drinking hard cider and kicking a soccer ball around while commenting on how it really seemed like it was going to rain…

We managed to get by unscathed before the match and one of my darling soccer buddies, Danny, dressed himself up as what he called BarcaMan…Which was just him in full-on Barcelona gear, including a cape that was made out of the crest flag.

In fact, we even managed to make it to our seats before it started to rain…

I nearly screamed myself hoarse for Lavezzi and Cavani and Hamsik, who were the top three people I had come to see. It was a strange sensation to see the people I had spent the past few months quickly becoming so attached to through 90 minutes of running back and forth as tiny figures breathing the same air I did. Pretty lucky, really, when I think about it – players from my favourite team making themselves halfway around the world so I could see them?

In fact, I felt so lucky that the rain didn’t even bother me…

Even if it was the absolute most hurricane-esque rainstorm with thunder and lightning and nonstop water poundning my face. I ended up sitting in a small puddle that was up to my ankles and soaking through my shoes, astounded by the one thing I didn’t expect: silence. The game was so quiet. I’m unsure if it was because of the rain or because we were all collectively holding our breaths watching everything pass around us.

In the end, Messi scored a few goals (and I got to see him score them, live. Those are things you’ll tell your future nieces and nephews about, you know) and Cavani got himself a penalty kick and I got to see Hamsik’s glorious in-growing-process mohawk in person (And I got to mutter under my breath to Lavezzi about his move to PSG, even if, you know, he couldn’t hear me…) and it was all pretty much worth the rain storm…

Even if the moment after the game was over, the rain ended..

]]> http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/07/08/adventures-world-soccer-masters-tour-2012/feed/ 20 http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/10/media-inhalation/ http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/10/media-inhalation/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 15:29:00 +0000 Melissa Dominic http://www.brokennerves.net/?p=1653

I painted my eyes in honor of my dear, sweet Steve Rogers this past Sunday (all while wearing my tribute tee shirt and my comic book styled Nikes). I dragged my mother to sit in line with me at the movie theater for about an hour and a half, parked next to some kids (one with a smart phone and the other with a Hulk toy), all of us waiting to get in on a weekend showing of The Avengers. It was worth the company and the wait. All two and a half of sitting there between sips of diet Coke and giggles louder than the dialogue on screen.

The problem with it was the awkward feeling you get after it. The fact you don’t know where to put yourself. You want more, but, there isn’t exactly more of what you want. There’s similar. There’s other versions. There’s histories, alternate universes, endless discussion, fan works, and crying in your bedroom because you don’t have enough spare change to go to the movies again.

(I’m kidding about the crying part. I think.)

It is a strange afterglow when you finish something. When you finish anything, really. When you close the last page of the best book you’ve read in a while, you want to tear out all the pages, sew them together and make a blanket to sleep under. DVDs and Sleep Timers exist for this very reason. There is often a constant drone of Star Trek (2009) in the background when I am doing things.

It is probably the best feeling of loving something. Where it washes over you and you feel like the most awkward child on the planet, refreshing the Internet over and over again.

I feel sorry for the people who never feel like this about things, who don’t understand the pull of an obsessive personality about something. How you’re a little grateful when it shifts to something new because then, at least, you have something to look forward to. I wouldn’t want anything else other this, you know?

But man, that fricken’ Avengers?

So fucking good.

]]> http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/10/media-inhalation/feed/ 4 http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/06/1640/ http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/06/1640/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 03:08:18 +0000 Melissa Dominic http://www.brokennerves.net/?p=1640

 

I often feel I am discussing the exact same thing in about forty-five different ways.

Ten months ago I wrote about what I would fill the time with since my time with my girlfriend, Magen, was gone. It has been a few weeks, but, I finally buckled up the nerve to admit it is harder to figure out what to do with yourself the second time around. It’s been about four weeks since I’ve come home from New York, where we terrorized Brooklyn together and I’ve done nothing constructive since.

I can boil it down to small and easy things, markers for how I understand time. Barcelona loses a Clasico, a Champion’s League semifinal and also La Liga. Their coach leaves. Napoli fights for third place still. United loses to City. I somehow end up at a Cinco de Mayo party. I leave the theater after watching The Avengers stunned. MCA dies and I try to hold back tears in the bathroom at work.

It is a strange series of events.

I begin to think about this place and what it means for me. Broken Nerves, an awkward mouthful of letters, strung together to mean something important since 2006. A phrase that changes meaning every time I look at it. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.

Nerves haven taken on such a meaning to me lately. My grandmother’s jumbled nervous system, left pained by after-shingles neuralgia. My own inability to do so many things because I am nervous. The fears I’ve gotten over because I have fallen in love. My own fear of forever and the way it has diminished. How old nerves bring on new nerves and new nerves overshadow old nerves.

How I still miss the character who had his own nerves broken and couldn’t feel a thing. How it meant so much when he fumbled with his other hand, the one that could feel but was hard to control, just to understand what something felt like, how his body would react to it.

I think of how putting this all together takes forever, takes stitching, takes perseverance, takes repeating yourself over and over again.

Much like you find yourself saying the same thing ten months later. I am just getting by. How do you get by when you find your heart has gone to stay somewhere else, in a place you can’t get to without a pocketful of exact change and time enough to travel.

You fill the space with things. With things. With things.

Exactly like this.

]]> http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/05/06/1640/feed/ 4 http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/04/03/adventures-were-going-to-nyc-baby/ http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/04/03/adventures-were-going-to-nyc-baby/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:59:26 +0000 Melissa Dominic http://www.brokennerves.net/?p=1587

One Week’s Time: We’ll be in NYC.

It has been about nine months since I’ve seen Magen, even if it doesn’t seem like it. An entire lifetime encapsulated in that time. So much has changed since then and nearly as much has stayed the same. I’ve read some, written a little more, grew out my nails, cut off my hair, traded black eyeliner for brown. Simple things. Tiny things. Things we get to learn about one another all over again. It’ll be nice to say I am here, in town, with my girlfriend.

It has been too long.

We’ll be staying in town with one of my greatest best friends, the incomparable artist and tsundere Anna Rose, stealing around town, visiting museums, eating delicious food, shopping for strange items and holding hands on mass transit lines. There are too many old friends to see and ancient haunts to trek to, but, I want to make the time for the important stuff, the important people. My life was spent so long a bus ride away in the alleyways of North Bergen, New Jersey and I haven’t seen it in years.

There is nothing quite like standing outside the house you grew up in, ten years after the fact. I haven’t seen it in more than six or so years. I want to take that deep breath. I want to do it.

There is so much in this trip. Part nostalgia, part best friends, part girlfriends and love. I have a tiny notebook for my purse, new makeup, a collection of old dresses and worn in running shoes that I have for the occasion. I am ready for it. I may have never been so ready for something in my life.

So, in one week’s time there will be kisses at the airport, taxi rides and suitcases filled with presents.

Let’s see what we can get done before then.

]]> http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/04/03/adventures-were-going-to-nyc-baby/feed/ 5 http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/03/30/descriptors-of-excuses/ http://www.brokennerves.net/2012/03/30/descriptors-of-excuses/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:40:07 +0000 Melissa Dominic http://www.brokennerves.net/?p=1554
 

The entire month has been lost. I am not entirely sure where it went, really. It has gone somewhere in a haze of doctor visits, hard decisions, socializing with people I haven’t seen in months, preparing for my vacation to New York City in April and endless streams of soccer games on ESPN.

I feel like I am coming out of it with my eyes fogged up, scratching at them with nails that have grown longer than I anticipated. Something like that man who slept under the tree for a hundred years or however that story goes.

It is hard to describe Broken Nerves in a mouthful and what I am trying to do here, which is likely why I haven’t given it much of a thought in the past few months. In truth, I am trying to deal with a lot of stuff in my own life, hiking over stumbling blocks. I am working the courage up to learn how to drive, I am trying to figure out what I’d like to do with my life, I am helping take care of my Grandmother who has been sick since November and just has not gotten better.

I am trying hard to not sink into the overwhelming prospect of all of this combined. Trying hard to figure out how to put this all in a way. Here. Open, honest and clean.

I’m hoping to be better about things before April. Maybe we will wake up to April 1st with All New Things.

♥

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