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.