The Letting Go (a project of sorts):

LOVE COMES TO ME
---
Without any words, you hand me a leaf. It is brittle enough to splinter immediately at my touch. I avert my eyes down to the cracked sidewalk beneath us, and you lick your lips. They are very dry. You ask me what I am doing tonight and I say "nothing", and then we are sitting by the river and we share a cigarette and I find myself thinking that you are sort of interesting.

STRANGE FORM OF LIFE
---
If the night air reeked of anything, it was possibility. There was no sign of anybody at all nearby, but I felt a strange stirring in my bones. The only sound that tore through the stillness was my own ragged breath, but I sensed that the hour was charged with something rare. All I could smell was deadened rain and it made me feel wickedly drunk.

WAI
---
In Catholic church, we used to reach out our skinny fingers during communion and trace them over the heavy fur coats of women passing by. These women were going forward to receive tiny pieces of stale white bread, along with a shot of stiff red wine. They always seemed to us, crouched back in the rigid pews of wood, impossibly old and even more boring. Instead of being gifted this food and drink, we dragged our feet forward to be blessed instead; a rough hand brushing our foreheads and the barely suppressed laughter shared between us. Week after week after month after a slice of childhood.

CURSED SLEEP
---
The only aspect of my beautiful new apartment that I hated was the fact that I found sleep terrifying. It was continually fitful; drenched with the grime of ghosts (I realize it sounds laughable, but they were absolutely ghosts) that laid their tongues and their fingers of discontent all over me. They held elaborate dinner parties in my dining room, hung like hovering birds over me in the darkness of my bedroom, ran their spiky fingers all over the walls, and generally just fucked my head up. For some reason, they were always female, always long and dishevel-haired, and always tireless.

NO BAD NEWS
---
I regretted only the placement of my body at that point. I was twisted over a haggard park bench, evergreen trees draping on all sides, and a tile of grass beneath me. There was not even so much as a stick within reach, never mind the possibility of anything sharper. Where was the knife; the gun; the rope? I thought that I might throw up, and then I did. When I peel myself back up off the ground wet with my devastation, the supply of potential weapons is looking no better. I call my mother and dissolve into tears.

COLD AND WET
---
The champagne shrieks open and into glasses that are anorexically thin. Voices lift and fall, twining from room to separate room. The crackling liquid snakes its way down my throat with startling ease. I feel my tired limbs shiver and then loosen. We wander down the Crescent, happy and stupid and far beyond the stage of caring about anything. The scent of Fall creeping into the last lingering stretch of August mixes with the lightness of what we are drinking, and all I can taste is release.

BIG FRIDAY
---
It is late, very late, and we sit curled in the corner of an after-hours Thai restaurant. Save for a pair of elderly men arguing over the crossword and two girlishly young waitresses whispering behind the bar, we are alone. We shovel curry slowly between our lips and you ask me if I have ever thought that love is not real. I say that I have, all the time actually. This causes us both to lock eyes and relax into laughter. You hand me a shoddily-wrapped gift (it is my birthday, after all) and it is a book of poetry. All of the poems are about love and most of them are also accompanied by whimsical little drawings. A fresh wave of laughter pulls me into itself and I kiss you across the table.

LAY AND LOVE
---
We stretch out on the living room floor, three bodies untouching yet close enough to still exchange breath. We throw this old record on, and I don't quite know why, but all the lights are completely off. The music seeps over us like a humid wind, catching us vulnerable. Nobody speaks for a very long time, and I am glad.

THE SEEDLING
---
Under a heap of scarves and sweaters stashed in the crevices of your closet (I was cold and looking for a blanket one gray afternoon) I come across a graveyard of photos. They are from a different time, and your happiness in them makes me gasp. I knew I would find these somewhere, at some point, but regardless--their existence, right here in my hands right now, knives me like ice through the heart. I sift through them all, of course, and my head starts to ache and then I throw them back, further than they were before, under the pile of clothing. I swallow the feeling of blood crawling up in my throat, wrap an afghan over my shaky shoulders, and walk back into the living room with a smile curving. I collapse my frame back against yours on the couch, and you pull me more tightly into you as you unpause the movie. I feel an eerie sense of calm.

THEN THE LETTING GO
---
As soon as I lay eyes on the Arctic Ocean, I know that this separation is real. We are on our own individual planets. You take a slender piece of gold from the pocket of your cardigan, turn in over in your fingers a few times with a troubled look flecking your eyes. Without warning (you seem to even catch yourself off guard), you fling the shit out of the small object way, way into the tossing water. I steal a glance as you press your hands against your face for a long, despairing moment, then turn as if ripping yourself away from the scene of what you have just done (just ended) and walk away, a little too quickly, so that i know you are willing yourself not to cry. As I watch you tread away from me against moss and rock, I know that I should care but I don't. This gesture was meant to bring us towards one another, but instead all I want to do is set off running in the opposite direction you have gone.

GOD'S SMALL SONG
---
There was this flimsy nest of sparrows in our back yard in the country. It was this year, this summer. I was (and I am) twenty-five years old. The birds that we found here were hours out of the shell; wet with newness and eyes still painted shut. They screeched soundlessly for food, and I felt this sickening fear because their nest was very very low to the ground; far too low. I stood there watching them in fascination and helplessness for about an hour, or maybe more. When I came back the next morning, the nest was empty. I still think about it sometimes.

I CALLED YOU BACK
---
I licked your hand and it tasted of sweat. I tried my own and it tasted the same.

Good night and good luck,
With love,
RB.

Tan&blue, peach&navy.

...so I woke up and started writing. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until I began to feel like myself again. It took a few hours or more, but it was worth it. I felt myself coming out of the haze gradually, and it tasted of relief. Alone, like really honestly alone for the first time in a long time, I breathed lightly and loosely and without thinking about it too much. Nothing coursed through my veins except blood, clear and untouched. I thought about all the solitary nights that I could make good and real by removing myself from the crowd...the hectic...the endless movement. Laying there in the sunporch with my pen against paper and my head in a space that could be called disarming, something fused together. I began to re-acquaint myself with myself. It was strange and lovely and actually kind of terrifying all at once. And so, there, with naked feet trailing the cool wooden floor, I consciously started thinking forward, and it was scary and interesting. My mind prowled in so many directions like an animal suddenly uncaged. And yet, I knew that it was right. As unnatural as the ground felt under my feet, it also felt like where I needed to be more than anything else. Strong and slender, I felt my confidence swell and then settle. It folded in around me like something fresh but also something very very old.

/

The air is humid--cool; edible. We drink rum out of teacups, and laughter trails through the dimness. We sit cross-legged, limbs (long and coltish) weaving against one another. Bars of pale light twigging through the open window cut our faces into skinny slivers, jutting weirdly in the darkness. Words come scattered, yet with fluidity. My eyes trace the contours of what once was good, but we both know isn't any longer. Somehow and impossibly, this is okay though. We loop Neil Young's "On the Beach", and it is sad, sort of. I make us a nest out of afghans and pillows while you walk down to the corner and buy us some street curry. Just the smell steaming off of it is almost enough to satiate my hunger. We drape ourselves across the mess of blankets and eat slowly, passing the flimsy bowl back and forth between our fingers, savouring it. We try speaking shoddy Spanish for a while, for fun...maybe in a last, loose effort to make some sort of a connection that saves or salvages or something. It doesn't work, obviously. The disjointedness is there and it is very real. So instead of talking about our hearts that don't care anymore, we talk about our hidden talents (you are double-jointed in your arms; I can throw a perfect football spiral. We both make a killer grilled cheese sandwich.), our dream interview (you: yourself in fifty years; me: Leonard Cohen), unassuming pleasures (yours has something to do with Jameson Whiskey and latenight drives to the lake while mine stems more along the lines of canned wine on train bridges--we smile; sans specifics, they are the same), whether we loved studying Shakespeare plays back in high school (me) or hated (you). And so on, and on and on. We exchange words so as to fill the dense, hazy space between us. From time to time, you peel your fingers through my hair, and from time to time I touch your lips, but only with my hands. After a while, you ask if I will stay. I say no, and that I wish you hadn't asked. I sling an old sweater of yours over my shoulders and leave quickly, somehow defeatedly, through the door out of your basement apartment, winding up the stairs and into the now-night. You don't try to follow me, and I am glad. I walk home alone through empty, gritty streets, cigarette dangling from curved mouth. The moon hangs above like ice and I feel fucking alive.

/

Breakfast: avocado drenched in hot sauce. I tear the buttery greenness off in strips, dragging out the process of eating it as slowly as I can between sips of coffee. The sunporch is dripping morning light--the softest kind. I glance down at my legs slung over the dirty chair's arm and wonder why they are so impossibly white. My hair is wet against the tips of my shoulders, and I imagine for a while that it is black again. Something French drifts from the record player, rooms away (Francoise Hardy, maybe?), It is nice morning music, evening and almost soothing in a light and lazy way. I know that within an hour or probably less, I will no longer be curled like a fox in its warm den, but properly clothed and chasing after a bus crammed with bodies too close. And yet...for now, I will linger here--careless; lost in mazes of thought--keeping the day at arm's length.

Tonight will be tea and toast, skin and bone, tawny and still, rooftops and the setting sun.
Until then,
R.

(Sometimes I get this far-off idea that I wish I knew how to take photos, but really I think that if I ever tried, they would likely just end up words anyways.)

***Note (as an aftertaste): Lauren Dukoff is a lady with very cool taste and incredible skill behind a camera. She has, incidentally just published her first book which is named "Family" and I kind of can't wait to let my eyes all over it. I think that her stuff is real, and that is perhaps its most alluring quality.