92.
92.
95.
91.
90.
90.
90.
89. (Anxiety)
89.
89.
89.
91.
92.
95.
95.
Her eyes had changed. Instead of the steely blue I was so used to, they were glazed; clearer. She said, "Rebecca, you should write a book called 'Looking at Numbers'." Or, rather, she wrote it. In that slanted, spidery hand I'd recognize anywhere. She wasn't talking anymore at that point. She smiled, slow and reassuring. I laughed because I knew she wanted me to, and also because it was funny, I reminded myself. To my own ears, it sounded hollow and exhausted. Those goddamn numbers. I couldn't seem to tear my eyes off them. It's weird, I thought to myself. I hate numbers. They make me feel bored and stupid. And yet, here I am in this drab room, watching my life swing from stability to panic mode, based on fluorescent numbers on a screen. It was strange; ironic even. But mainly it was just hard.
There were flowers; tulips I think. Purple and a bloody orange. I traced my fingers along the lines of her hand. They were long and loose and thin. I thought, this is crazy. How are we sitting here, now, like this? Last month we'd sat in a cafe in the dying afternoon sun, having lunch and sneaking a midday glass of wine. It felt easy; illicit even. Like we shared this great, defiant secret.
I looked down at my white hands with their chipped gray nailpolish against her still and darker ones. She wore no rings. As I leaned into her to adjust the sheet that had begun slipping off her shoulder, her wedding band banged against my bare chest underneath my shirt--a reminder. I wore it sometimes on a thin gold chain against my skin. It's slight weight comforted me now. I pulled it out for a second; memorized its contours for the thousandth time. Gold with three diamonds. Collateral from a marriage that had ended, sort of.
We took turns. Different faces; bodies spinning in and out of that room, a foreign space yet one we'd all become all too familiar with the past two days. Two fucking days. I wanted to scream, cry, punch something until I felt the searing of real physical pain. My throat was dry and I could feel the darkness under my eyes. Someone brought sandwiches, but the sight of them made me ready to vomit. Later there was coffee--that was better. It hit my empty stomach like a scorching shock to the system. The numbers flickered and we continued to watch like we were drugged. At times it seemed like she slept, but we started to realize that she was just closing her eyes for periods of time. Sometimes she would smile; lock eye contact; write her part of conversation out on paper, but mostly it was just quiet.
When the doctor came around, her heels clicked. The sound of them grounded me; it was concrete and brought me out of a haze of watery blue eyes, the rise and fall of breath after breath, and those goddamn fucking numbers. She was young and kind and conscious and in control. It felt easy to trust her. She spoke lots of separate times with our grandma and we all felt a cool relief in the calmness of her voice.
We listened to Leonard Cohen and she loved it. Her Leonard. That voice like gravel; like butter.
"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin/Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in."
"And the light came from her body/And the night went through her grace/All summer long she touched me/I knew her, I knew her/Face to face."
"Come healing of the body/Come healing of the mind...Come healing of the spirit/Come healing of the limb...Come healing of the reason/Come healing of the heart...Come healing of the altar/Come healing of the name."
It was like a salve. Coffee cold, skin hot, mind blank, heart cracked.
That face without the mask, finally. So beautiful; so serene. Those blue, blue, hazy, clear, clean blue piercing blue eyes as they traced the dingy room. Trailing over every face; accounting for each person. That soft, slow smile. Such calm. That breath, finally her own. Even as it failed her. Low, shallow, slow. Again and over. The longest hour. Those numbers finally gone, thank god.
The sky that morning was like burnt pearl--the palest gray. Iridescent. It rained. I was glad. It saved me, I think. As that hour of breaths spun its way out, it sounds insane but so did the sun. By the time she left us, light was blazing through the shitty, narrow window in that room. The screen where the numbers had glared and fluctuated for what felt like a year's worth of hours was blank. I felt relief fall through my body like liquid. My dad's hands on my shoulders were the softest touch I'd ever felt but also they were the heaviest lead. I wanted to scream til my lungs shattered. I wished I was dead. I felt high on the purest drug I'd ever tasted. I didn't remember how to move my feet; open my mouth.
That night, laying in bed, my eyes stayed open. All I was conscious of was breath. It was all I heard. I couldn't get away from it. And so I lay there; feeling it. I listened all night. It was cathartic and like torture all at once. In the morning, I drank so many cups of coffee I lost count, and tried to imagine my life without her. I couldn't. Instead, I sat in the early light and thought of those oceany eyes and their calm all morning long.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Friday, February 4, 2011
Icelandic Room.
Against a wall entirely made of windows, the silence is sharp. It is the type of quiet you would feel afraid to shatter. The occasional bleat of a cell phone, clicking of fingers on computer keys, the rustle of fabric (somebody is putting on their coat--bold!), or a pencil gritty atop paper slices through. The silence is intense; intimidating almost. It seems like if you were to drop something or take a bite of an apple or even cough, at least one person would glare at you.
And then there is this woman in heels. She is fifty-something with a smooth white bob. Her heels are leather (navy) and it seems like she is in charge. Not, like, in charge of making sure that everybody stays insanely quiet, but in charge of the books on the shelves, or making sure the plants get the perfect amount of light and water, or something like that. She walks through the room at least once every half hour or so. Her shoes are steely against the wooden floor and it is actually kind of nice because it pulls me out of this smoky writing haze that I am beginning to drown in. A simple reminder that there is an entire world outside of this goddamn project that is dragging me into itself. And so I like her, this woman with the heels.
February is the month of the ice moon. This year, is also the month of my champagne birthday! Yay yayayyyy. I have wanted to be 27 for a long time now, for some weird reason. I don't know why at all, but I have been aware for a few years now that it is going to be a special age for me. Maybe all good, or maybe the opposite?! I hope that it is a happy year.
Click, click click. Here she comes again, the keeper of the Icelandic Room. Light washes through the wall of cool million windows, all dusty luminous white. I sip my coffee, now cold, and reread what I've written for the hundredth fuckin time. It isn't good yet, but it also isn't bad. Okay, for now, is an okay place for it to be.
And then there is this woman in heels. She is fifty-something with a smooth white bob. Her heels are leather (navy) and it seems like she is in charge. Not, like, in charge of making sure that everybody stays insanely quiet, but in charge of the books on the shelves, or making sure the plants get the perfect amount of light and water, or something like that. She walks through the room at least once every half hour or so. Her shoes are steely against the wooden floor and it is actually kind of nice because it pulls me out of this smoky writing haze that I am beginning to drown in. A simple reminder that there is an entire world outside of this goddamn project that is dragging me into itself. And so I like her, this woman with the heels.
February is the month of the ice moon. This year, is also the month of my champagne birthday! Yay yayayyyy. I have wanted to be 27 for a long time now, for some weird reason. I don't know why at all, but I have been aware for a few years now that it is going to be a special age for me. Maybe all good, or maybe the opposite?! I hope that it is a happy year.
Click, click click. Here she comes again, the keeper of the Icelandic Room. Light washes through the wall of cool million windows, all dusty luminous white. I sip my coffee, now cold, and reread what I've written for the hundredth fuckin time. It isn't good yet, but it also isn't bad. Okay, for now, is an okay place for it to be.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Cinnamon hearts.
Each time I sat down to try writing about it, the task become more impossible. Fingers grazing against the keyboard--my inability to keep them still only made me more and more frustrated. My eyes flicked everywhere--wandering; bored. The cat watched me silently, sensing my discontent, I guess. I painted my fingernails a pale jade and sipped a glass of ice water slowly; methodically. I arranged all the shoes (both of ours) in perfect symmetry, and then immediately messed them up again because they looked too weird; all orderly like that. I glared at the blank screen, luminous with the whitest white. Still I battled it. My mind was empty. I lit a few candles in the midday light--a dirty, pearly gray. I felt chilled; then way too hot. I slouched in and out of my boyfriend's thinnest plaid as my body temperature dipped all over the fucking spectrum. I fed the cat, then draped her across my chest. She licked my eyebrow and then my jaw. I tried writing one word, but it wouldn't come. I ate half a grapefruit and then made tea (earl gray), scorchingly hot with milk and brown sugar. It was a tawny colour that slid down my throat buttery-smooth. I took a bath in my tub with the bronze claw-feet and dumped a whole bunch of eucalyptus salts into the water so that maybe I could drug myself into some sort of state of relaxation. When I stepped out of the wet heat twenty minutes later, my hair was in a snarl and black mascara had snaked all the way down my face. This discouraged me--I don't know why but it did. I put on a record (some Bob Dylan thing) and glanced over at my computer sitting there on the low table and I felt like I wanted to smash it out the window. Instead, I put on some flip-flops and walked next door (twenty-five steps max) to the convenience store, I think it was called "Young Food Mart" but we called it "Lee Chong's", something that started after one of us re-read Salinger and then it just stuck. So I dipped over to Lee Chong's, through the strange sultry light of Indian summer. I wandered through the two aisles three, four, seven times. Something like that. I don't know; I lost track. By the time I was standing at the counter, the woman slouched behind it cracking her gum and playing Solitaire gave me a skeptical look. I bought diet Coke, black licorice, peppermint gum, tobasco sauce, cat food and a pack of Benson & Hedges Special Lights. I also bought a BlackJack ticket, for zero reason. I walked home slowly, like I was in the depths of a dream. The air was humid--cool; edible. A little boy and his (friend? brother?) blazed past me on BMX bikes that were too big for them, screaming that they are going to go build a fort. Back in the apartment, I poured black rum and some of the diet Coke into a teacup, and wandered through every room in our place once and then over again. My fingers traced the pale walls--kitchen, living room, dining room, bedroom, sunporch, hallway, bathroom. Laughter trailed through the skinny walls from the people living across from us . I sat cross-legged on the bed for a while, watching bars of cool afternoon light jut through the window. After a while, I started feeling drowsy so I got up and watered all the plants. Then I thought, hey maybe if I move the computer to a different place then I will feel some sort of inspiration. So I put it on the kitchen windowsill, but still I felt myself shrinking away and out of sight of it, so that the tightness in my chest would dissipate. I flipped through a magazine, folded the laundry (now cold; it had been sitting there for days), and rearranged the hallway closet. I thought that maybe I was going to cry; angry tears of course. If I couldn't even put down one single stupid word, then how would I be able to turn out a page, and then more strung along after that? Page after page of building this surreal path towards proving why I was good enough; smart enough; skilled and mature enough. I thought that maybe I was going to throw up, or at least kick a wall or something. Instead, I went to the kitchen sink and cupped a few handfuls, one after the other, of icy water and tossed them onto my face. I could feel that goddamn computer, staring at my backbone--down every curve of my spine and into my soul which was leaping with the flames of a thousand nerves. I didn't want to turn around...I thought that maybe I was going to tear that computer in half. I stood there, facing the sink; the eye-level cupboards; the few scattered dishes from breakfast strewn over the countertop. The cat twisted herself around my feet, bony as hell and shrieking for my attention. I picked her up with one hand; carefully and with calculation, so as not to align my body at all towards the computer. As she burrowed into my neck, I thought--this is crazy. This bitch of a computer is making me actually feel crazy. Very very slowly and lightly, I placed the cat down on the floor. I shot the last dregs of my teacup, and walked right over to that windowsill like I was preparing to kill some sort of prey. I stared down at the glossy screen, the pristine keyboard and I wanted nothing more than to walk away. I thought that maybe I was going to give up. Instead, I knelt my bare knees on the floor, and didn't move from the side of that window. I chipped away at the keys in slow-motion pace for the first while. I thought, this is so stupid. It almost physically hurt. I found myself typing a list; who the hell knows why but that is what came out.
apples
kale
yogurt
cinnamon
almonds
bread
granola
gin
dark chocolate
stationary
get new set of keys cut
pay phone bill
wake up earlier
find a new bicycle
read more
remember how lucky we are
don't take yourself too seriously
And on it went. After a list, it was a letter, and after that some sort of a journal entry. Next it became a mashup of memories and at some indistinguishable point, it transformed into what it needed to be. I chain-smoked while writing it. Who knows if it was any good at all; it might be absolute trash. By the time I peeled myself up off that floor, the bare bones of it were all there. I was finished, sort of. The kitchen was dark, like black-dark, and so was the rest of my home. I think that maybe it was well after midnight. I heard a key fumbling in the lock and like that, it was all over. I cared, but not really. A smile traced over my lips and in that instant my harrowing day seemed funny, almost. Only then did I walk away from it. I thought that maybe it didn't even really matter, even though I knew it did.
apples
kale
yogurt
cinnamon
almonds
bread
granola
gin
dark chocolate
stationary
get new set of keys cut
pay phone bill
wake up earlier
find a new bicycle
read more
remember how lucky we are
don't take yourself too seriously
And on it went. After a list, it was a letter, and after that some sort of a journal entry. Next it became a mashup of memories and at some indistinguishable point, it transformed into what it needed to be. I chain-smoked while writing it. Who knows if it was any good at all; it might be absolute trash. By the time I peeled myself up off that floor, the bare bones of it were all there. I was finished, sort of. The kitchen was dark, like black-dark, and so was the rest of my home. I think that maybe it was well after midnight. I heard a key fumbling in the lock and like that, it was all over. I cared, but not really. A smile traced over my lips and in that instant my harrowing day seemed funny, almost. Only then did I walk away from it. I thought that maybe it didn't even really matter, even though I knew it did.
Monday, July 27, 2009
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.
---
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.
Monday, July 6, 2009
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.
/
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.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
This is not a blog about fashion.
However, sometimes someone like MKate looks far too sublime to resist drawing shameless attention to. Here's to being effortlessly cool. Thanks, girl, you put us all to shame.
Prowling photos by the glow of my computer screen is, coincidentally, how I am chipping away at the night. The reality is that I should be working on my piece for the magazine. Instead I am eating Vietnamese with my roommate, drinking lemon tea, researching the steamy past of Fleetwood Mac, and reading a book in bits and pieces.
In addition to hobo-chic at its best, I came across a few other shiver-worthy bites:
(on hearts)
"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love."--Miranda July, excerpt from "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories By Miranda July"
and (courtesy of my current muse of the hour, Truman Capote):
(on writing)
"My life--as an artist, at least--can be charted as precisely as a fever: the highs and lows, the very definite cycles.
I started writing when I was eight--out of the blue, uninspired by any example. I'd never known anyone who wrote; indeed, I knew few people who read. But the fact was, the only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.
But of course I didn't know that. I wrote adventure stories, murder mysteries, comedy skits, tales that had been told me by former slaves and Civil War veterans. It was a lot of fun--at first. It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the the difference between good writing and true art; it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down!
As certain young people practice the piano or the violin four and five hours a day, so I played with my papers and pens. Yet I never discussed my writing with anyone; if someone asked what I was up to all those hours, I told them I was doing my school homework. My literary tasks kept me fully occupied; my apprenticeship at the altar of technique, craft; the devilish intricacies of paragraphing, punctuation, dialogue placement. Not to mention the grand overall design, the great demanding arc of middle-beginning-end. One had to learn so much, and from so many sources: not only from books, but from music, from painting, and just plain everyday observation.
In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbour. Long verbatim accounts of overheard conversations. Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of "seeing" and "hearing" that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then,..."--Truman Capote, excerpt from preface of "Music For Chameleons"
Gone,
RB.
Prowling photos by the glow of my computer screen is, coincidentally, how I am chipping away at the night. The reality is that I should be working on my piece for the magazine. Instead I am eating Vietnamese with my roommate, drinking lemon tea, researching the steamy past of Fleetwood Mac, and reading a book in bits and pieces.
In addition to hobo-chic at its best, I came across a few other shiver-worthy bites:
(on hearts)
"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love."--Miranda July, excerpt from "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories By Miranda July"
and (courtesy of my current muse of the hour, Truman Capote):
(on writing)
"My life--as an artist, at least--can be charted as precisely as a fever: the highs and lows, the very definite cycles.
I started writing when I was eight--out of the blue, uninspired by any example. I'd never known anyone who wrote; indeed, I knew few people who read. But the fact was, the only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.
But of course I didn't know that. I wrote adventure stories, murder mysteries, comedy skits, tales that had been told me by former slaves and Civil War veterans. It was a lot of fun--at first. It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the the difference between good writing and true art; it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down!
As certain young people practice the piano or the violin four and five hours a day, so I played with my papers and pens. Yet I never discussed my writing with anyone; if someone asked what I was up to all those hours, I told them I was doing my school homework. My literary tasks kept me fully occupied; my apprenticeship at the altar of technique, craft; the devilish intricacies of paragraphing, punctuation, dialogue placement. Not to mention the grand overall design, the great demanding arc of middle-beginning-end. One had to learn so much, and from so many sources: not only from books, but from music, from painting, and just plain everyday observation.
In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbour. Long verbatim accounts of overheard conversations. Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of "seeing" and "hearing" that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then,..."--Truman Capote, excerpt from preface of "Music For Chameleons"
Gone,
RB.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Magic hours.
The water in the bathtub sighs heat, reeling me into itself. Limbs ache in a way that I am unacquainted with--subtle; searing. I slink my eyelids shut (ice cubes rest, invisible against lashes) and visualize tawny skin and the smell of a thousand waterfalls. If you asked me to teach you this language, I would say no. You aren't ready for it. Neither am I, for that matter. The house washed stone-gray in that field, somewhere in the far reaches of Argentina, grazes my thoughts. I remember its taste; the way the gnarled floor felt beneath my naked feet, and the wet haze that hung like an unseen gauze in the air, twisting down my throat. I am hungry again for that. This water is the same temperature as my sweat-glazed skin, and it tastes like nothing.
Hours ago, I sat folded into a red red booth across from Meg. Angular black glasses framed her face, and our hands played against wine glasses. I read aloud to her from Truman Capote's book called "Music for Chameleons", and all the while she sketched fitfully; beautifully in her brown journal. We decided together that bravery and taking a few skinny chances makes sense for now. Don't you think?
Then I walked to Paris and back. It was quite nice. I took three delicate bites of an almond croissant, listened for a while to a French couple having an argument in the street, took a metro to Montmarte, had a drag of a cigarette, and then walked home. I considered staying indefinitely, but decided against it. For what reason, I can't now quite remember. Back home in my apartment with the dimmest lighting, the dishes lay undone and my cat cried for her dinner. And so, I took my feet back to the collection of rooms and walls that are my own, at least for this evening. I fumbled with the fireplace, heated some soup and turned the pages of a book, softly and slowly. It was not a bad night.
Hours ago, I sat folded into a red red booth across from Meg. Angular black glasses framed her face, and our hands played against wine glasses. I read aloud to her from Truman Capote's book called "Music for Chameleons", and all the while she sketched fitfully; beautifully in her brown journal. We decided together that bravery and taking a few skinny chances makes sense for now. Don't you think?
Then I walked to Paris and back. It was quite nice. I took three delicate bites of an almond croissant, listened for a while to a French couple having an argument in the street, took a metro to Montmarte, had a drag of a cigarette, and then walked home. I considered staying indefinitely, but decided against it. For what reason, I can't now quite remember. Back home in my apartment with the dimmest lighting, the dishes lay undone and my cat cried for her dinner. And so, I took my feet back to the collection of rooms and walls that are my own, at least for this evening. I fumbled with the fireplace, heated some soup and turned the pages of a book, softly and slowly. It was not a bad night.
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