Feathers of deep black and cool green.

Sunday morning. Stop. Can't leave sheets. Stop. Laughter, my roommate's, drifting from the bedroom down the hall. Sigh, stop. I've chosen this, but I wish it wasn't mine; this starkness. Stop. Sleep, but fitfully. In my state of half-wake, half-dream with an injection of self-pity, my mind wanders wildly. Green, pale, eye contact, water, damp salty hair, incomprehensible words (this is not my language), catching one train then another, rearranging cutlery, tracing the bony line of your back and not knowing why but it feels like perfection. Stop.

The black material against my skin is soft; worn. I don't know where it came from and I don't at all care. It feels like smooth hands and that is all that really matters. I make too much coffee, watch absently while it brews and once a cup coiling heat finds its way into my hands, I wander my apartment, immersed in thought (yet thinking nothing in particular). Sometimes, rather than reflecting or sorting out or analyzing, I find myself identifying emotions. Like, here I am leaning against the side of my hallway that is covered with art: sadness. I trail fingers along the wall, deep red and cool to the touch, and by the time I've transitioned into the living room in one fluid motion, there is also regret. They layer against one another, companions that lend comfort and also unrest. I twist myself into a corner of the couch, the sun-streaked one, drain the last of the black liquid warming my innards, and all I can hear is the softness of my own breath. There it is...confusion. It settles in like an old friend; a ratty t-shirt that you put on and remember its exact folds; how it falls and feels against your body.

My insides bleat for another coffee, and so I peel myself off the couch and slip into the dining room. That is where the fear resides, or at least where it preys on me. My steps falter for a moment; wondering, recognizing. I don't even need to look that one in the eyes to name it and know it. Being afraid is a sensation as familiar as exhaustion or hunger. It's there and I know it. I stand, wordless, as it joins the sadness, regret and confusion. They are an intimidating force, and it seems that they are a united front today. Bastards.

In the kitchen though, there is hope. As I drape the remains of the coffee pot into my mug, I feel it. Compared to the daunting gang of negativity, it is weak, but it is there. It beats like a baby sparrow heart, frail but determined. It strips a layer of the weight off me, and the lightness is a significant change, if only to myself.

It is there, and I know that it is not going anywhere. If anything, it has yet to fully flower and show itself. When it reaches the surface, I am confident that I will know it and embrace with a vengeance.

Until then, bisous.

Dream exorcism, and other endeavours...

The other day I stood in a bus shack listening to Charlotte Gainsbourg and feeling okay. Limber arms and cold breath made for a wait that I didn't at all mind; observation and motionlessness. A little girl with eyes--glassy, large--hovered next to me on the bus, chirping an endless string of questions into my ear, and I loved her for it. I didn't know her name but I pretended that it was Iris. She looked as if it would be.

It seems that lately a blazing topic of inquisition (directed my way) has been children and whether they are in my plan of action. It's strange because up until now, the odd question would snake itself my way, but it seemed cool and manageable, given the long stretches between. For some reason though, these days the mother interrogation ("Do you want to be one?") chases after me like a loaded gun. I don't necessarily mind it, but its frequency is becoming startling. I always feel as if I answer awkwardly and vaguely, which is not what popular demand seems to be looking for. To burn the spotlight on this issue by choice for once, my position is that yes, I think that I do. Want little beans of my own, that is. It just all seems so far off and not really at all relevant to my focus, and the rhythm of my days in the now. The thing is that, unlike a lot of people I trade words over this with, I can envision my life edging in either direction--that is, sans babies or with. When I leap ahead in my mind to the years that have yet to play themselves out, I don't necessarily see a sharp image. I don't see anything all that concrete; recognizable; detailed. I see, rather, warmth and meaning and balance and joy. I see taking pride in what I do, whether it is baby-holding or writing or office-inhabiting, or any other number of motions. If I am living intentionally and with a smile against my lips more often than not, then that is all I really care about.

A few evenings ago, Meg, Kit and myself had a lovely reunion over dinner with our friend Beatrice from Belgium. She is sixty-eight years old and one of the coolest ladies I know. She has skin that is bronzed like pale leather and eyes that radiate light and energy. She has a husband named Raphael, and a slew of dogs, and a gorgeous spread of home in the Belgian coutryside, and a secret garden, and a vocabulary that would make you reel. Her French is smoking and all throughout the evening, she and Meg's Auntie Daryl flipped, smoother than rushing water, from one language to the other. It was amazingly beautiful to listen to. The evening was dominated by the sounds of those two twining languages, but when Lady Bea fround out Kit and I are flinging ourselves onto South American soil in a matter of weeks, she obliged us by layering some boisterous Spanish into the mix. Draped around the dinner table, us five bodies, in the heart of Auntie Daryl's breathtaker of a lanky apartment (I would die to inhabit a space like that at some point in my life, even for the briefest interval), something fell into place. There was a click; a sigh; a distance broached. Two elders and three young, wispy individuals with so much to discover; so much yet to learn...it was like we just relaxed into our respective roles, and it felt right. It felt better than good, actually. We poured over photos from those months spent an ocean across, and we laughed and stories flowed and we all three missed it very much, I think. Long after the warm, delicious arrangement of food was consumed, long after melting wedges of chocolate cake had found its way to our bellies, we lingered there at that table, sipping at the last dregs of red wine and exchanging words. I sincerely hope one day to be with my best girlfriends as these two are, Beatrice and Daryl. They extracted stories of insane love and lust and humour and injustice like plucked blossoms from a source from which I am sure held endless amounts more. These women have had passion and they have had devastation and they have lived abroad and traveled everywhere and cascaded down into despair and been left alone only to be picked up again, whether it be by a kindred spirit or a lover who just knew what to do and how to do it well, or by one another, or most importantly themselves. They inspired me in a unique way that night, and I would want them to know that. Aging gracefully has never taken on such a lighthearted, appealing air as it did for me during those hours, in the presence of those women. I left altered, in a subtle way but also in a permanent way. It was almost as if I was flown back to Europe for a single night, in the company of a lot of wisdom and laughter and good food and it was absolutely perfect.

I passed yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, quietly hidden away in a Bar Italian nook. Both halves of the room were mayhem; apparently the whole of our neighbourhood congregates on the corner of McMillan and Cockburn, in that lovely dingy space, come mid-day Sunday?! It felt somehow nice to be a part of things, yet definably removed. At one point, I glanced over the array of objects littered across my table, and thought to myself, if I were to step away for a few moments, would somebody be able to tell it was me hanging out here just by my belongings? It is an interesting thought. I took inventory my possessions in the present--one coffee (half-drained, second round), one book ("The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" by Michael Chabon, courtesy of Hilary's intimidating book collection), one issue of British Vogue (outdated; October 2008. but still alluring in every way.), one pen, one folder (containing all four glossy issues of G.Love; a portfolio of sorts I guess), one pair of mittens (green, containing rips, stolen from my brother one season ago) and one heavily-laden snakeskin/paisley tote bag. I would like to think that anybody who knows me well would attach me to this paraphernalia. Any takers? Madge? Drewber? Lopez? Etc. etc. etc.

My dreams in the dark have been haunted as of late. I don't like it; they cause me to sleep fitfully and wake feeling angsty and scattered. These days, the content is always similar and it leaves a wretched taste on my lips. Space and time seem all fucked up by the time that I pull myself into wakefulness, and it takes some intention to feel reality out again. I am learning, though. Lessons weathered and perspective gained, right?

I'll find you after dinner, in that place we call summer.
Time to start the day,
RB

Desire and decay...

I read the other day somewhere that "love is a brittle teacher." I think that I agree. It's not negative; just honest in a refreshing way.
---
brit⋅tle   [brit-l]
adjective, -tler, -tlest, noun, verb, -tled, -tling.
–adjective
1. having hardness and rigidity but little tensile strength; breaking readily with a comparatively smooth fracture, as glass.
2. easily damaged or destroyed; fragile; frail: a brittle marriage.
3. lacking warmth, sensitivity, or compassion; aloof; self-centered: a self-possessed, cool, and rather brittle person.
4. having a sharp, tense quality: a brittle tone of voice.
5. unstable or impermanent; evanescent
---

Yesterday evening found me curled, chin on knees, at Meg's kitchen table. We made dinner; translation: I listened to her banter (always intriguing) and watched her cook. This is the usual scenario when the two of us peel ourselves away from our beds/bars/studios/etc. and break bread together. I sip at my glass of wine and hunker down in perching mode, and Madge whips magic together over a stovetop. Bless her. I think that if I am ever a mother, I will force her to teach me her ways. I know that she will be more than game; gleeful even. Bitch. I'll read aloud to you, poetry and fashion literature, while you coo my babies to sleep and sling cakes and casseroles in and out of my oven, okay lover?

The night was eventless and effortless; it was exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed and she knew it; I knew it. One of my most cherished things about this lady (and there are many) is that I don't have to pretend around her; ever. I can cry or rant or make slim to no sense or say absolutely nothing at all, and it is always okay. She is a tirelessly graceful audience for all of the glaring highs and lows I have pulled, and everything in between. We just mesh in a way that I cannot explain and I carry the mystery of that around like something very dear and rare. Je t'aime, Francie. You are one in a trill.

On a complete subject skip--Argentina count: one month, less three days. I feel so so ready for heat-streaked mornings, and fresh cool nights. Drapey dresses and damp hair and sand against skin and Spanish lilting through the air and water. Water, water, water. I want to walk and write and lay and listen and feel and observe and learn and reflect and be.
I am chasing it and it is near, nearer than I think. Somehow our take-wing date seems a lofty distance away still, but it is creeping like an insect and it is moving with haste.
Going going going gone.
Rab Louise.

PS. Apologies, Demetra, if this wasn't the profound collection of words you were hoping for. I owe you one.

The world was wax, hers to mould.

Standing barefoot in my kitchen, tiptoed...for the floor is so cold. There is a pale fur stole draped across my shoulders, for no reason in particular. One hand occupied with a simmering stovetop--eggs for my roommate and I (breakfast at 1:30 pm), the other leafing through a frayed book of old Cohen poetry. Here is the best one so far--

"Beneath My Hands"

Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me a hunter.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.

I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

(Cohen, Leonard)

---

Disarray; how come there is clothing stranded everywhere it doesn't belong, water in rivulets all over the floor, stale coffee standing frigid in cups and why is there this pain behind my eyes? I think that is it nothing, really. Just another Saturday, another day skimmed off the calendar like a tree shedding its leaves. My limbs crave warmth, yet I can't see it happening. Candles ignited in the daylight feel startlingly nice. I always thought that fire was a thing of the night, but in the pearly afternoon sky they are very lovely.

In my mind, I wander the streets of a different city...beat a separate heart...feel a breath altogether not my own. It is part imagination, part game. Part real. My lips speak a language I've never known, and everything is the opposite of parallel. It's funny, and indecipherably sad at the same time. Stepping, stepping. I don't know these feet but it seems they recognize me as their own.

Here is the new black: Stop thinking and start feeling.

I can't think of words any more fitting to part with.
With love,
RB.

Based in simplicity.

Between the hiss of the radiators, I ponder why/why not. Either way would be the clearest, but in different ways. Personal philosophy, snaking out the window--in the edgy cool; in the night? You know what's good for you. If I had a flat piece of copper for every time...

Limbs eyes heart head. I'm starting to think that there's no real way of ever knowing. Every once in a stretch of time, a chance licks at your (my) skin like trickling water and it's so easy, almost effortless, to brush it away like a feathery wind or a loose strand of hair. Such a careless, ingrained reaction. Like breath or like eyelashes fluttering tiredness, or a key in the door, shoes tossed off of feet after the longest of days.

The truth here is hardly profound, it is rather just that I want to stop thinking and start feeling. I am reaching blindly in the darkness when it comes to tomorrow and the day(s) after that, but the sensations of this evening, the dying day--that's what is real. Imperfect, but real. And to that, I say yes and yes again.

In parting, here is a bit of an Emily Haines tribute. Her stems kill me (jealous), as does her voice. She is cool and she should know it.




(likes nature)




(perfectly disheveled mane)




(slays)




(exquisite taste in company)




(babe. end of story.)

Practically asleep,
RB.

I'll take the pictures if you stay in bed...

And I'll take the pictures
If you stay in bed
I'll run down the park
If you put up your head

Don't put up your borderline

Four or five years ago
I wouldn't believe it
I wouldn't receive it
And I'll take the stitches
You put in my head
I'll run down the ark
If you put up your head

Don't put up your borderline
Don't put up your borderline

(genius cred--Sufjan Stevens)

I would nearly venture to say that this is the song of my life. It haunts me and seduces me, smooths me out and stirs me.
It transports me back to Italy...and warmth...and train rides...and a heart on the mend, shard by shard.

*

The first time I realized that you would let me down was cold January, four years ago. I lay feverish and alone in my basement apartment, and I needed you--your fingers like cooling ice on my cheekbones and your scent in the air. You weren't there and I knew in the oblique spaces of my innards that you wouldn't come. That bit like a bonfire through my veins.

Cut/ resist, retain, revive--spring's first streaks of gray, and a faded wooden shack of a cabin. Clear Lake. You and I and the neighbour's dog, walking for coffee in the newborn sunlight down deserted gravel roads. Layers of musty clothing (your grandfather's? your sister's from faded years ago?). We look homeless and we could care less. There is nobody around except for us, as if this humble village of cabins is our own private universe. Back at (our makeshift) home, we brew honey-flavoured tea and shoot it with whiskey. You make dinner, green curry, while I dig myself into a corner of the ragged couch, afghan-clad and book in hands. I break to sift through the tattered collection of records your parents still keep strewn away here--Cohen, Mitchell, Dylan, Young etc. We agree on an old Serge/Jane compilation, and their voices twine around us; twining us together, buttery-smooth. The lazy/sexy sounds melt us into themselves. You lock in with my eyes across the room, this twiggy space between us, and smiles radiate; softness. It is an undeniable exchange, and the heat is like liquid static forming rivulets from me to you and back again.

Once we have devoured our meal of heat and spice, we lay--curry-laden bellies-down--on the chipping slats of the verandah floor. A Scrabble board stretches in the middle of us, filling the gap between our bodies. At first it is serious but then I start inventing words (salinla--a rare type of Balinese worm) and you draw your pipe out from some pocket, somewhere. The sweetened smell of tobacco smoke drifts around us, hanging like a spidery curtain in the dark air...and we have forgotten about our game.

Later, we run down towards the beach, so still and void of sound or movement, you trailing after me. We align ourselves there, in the chilled sand against the water, and then we stop talking. You are in your own thoughts and I in mine. But we are irrevocably joined there, alone in the last dying moments of winter. For the next trailing period of time that we sit there, breathing in the sharp beauty of it all, you only open your lips to say these words--"We should probably never leave here."
"I know," I reply, and lean against the warmth that is the righthand side of your body. It's cold now, and I feel it.

Purple and black in the day, in the night.

If I could scrape your thoughts naked and siphon them back into our mutual jar of light, would I? I am undecided. Today, right now, draped black from tip to toe--I would say no, without hesitation no. It is, rather, when scent or body language or frail-light touch catch me unaware, that I reconsider. I ask my self why/why not, and all that undefinable space that lingers in between. I hardly even remember the tones of your voice anymore, the shape of your breath--the lifting and the falling of both. For this, I am worshipfully relieved. I would rather stow those months and years and millimeters that make up days in some concealed (yet far from forgotten) cache within the layers of myself--a tiny vial, slender and embroidered with a protective web of skin and blood and tissue. There, I can handle it. I can travel back to it when I feel loose enough, or ready. If details blur; the length of a feathery eyelash or the way that you would go through the motions slowly, ever slowly, then I can peer back into that pristine yet shielded oval hollow of memory, and realize--oh yes, those were the words you used to say goodnight, or that was the way you held your fork. Or I could choose not to, which is drizzling into stronger likelihood with each passing day.

The almond tea laced between my fingers burns the white of my skin, but in a way it feels nice. Like heat with a little searing edge of pain. It energizes, almost. The socks pooled at my feet, now bare, are older than I can even trace back...were they my father's or maybe my brother's or a boyfriend's now long melted away? I can't recall, and I don't even care beyond the point of curiosity. The patchwork of everything--not just the material against my body; all of it from then until now--presses in on my silhouette, sometimes sadness shot through with an injection of light...but usually spirited like a wind that cools.

Back and forth; forth, back...forth and back and over again. A bird winging itself northwards, exhaustion setting in amidst the darts of rain lashing down. Rhythm seduces, and something tells me that it always will. No matter the angle, challenge is almost alluring as it is off-putting. Didn't we always know it would be this way?