Day: December 13, 2004

It’s a stencil. The same medium as this one, found outside the London Bridge Tube Station:

Sometimes I think that some people are simply artists, others are just going to die young. (from & ), and that me? I need to sleep and dream of cities. It’s nine in the morning, I’m going out in a few hours, someone tell me how to get rid of head-pigeons. The damned things have taken up residence somewhere by my window, location unknown, but I can hear them.

*coo chortle coo*

They need to be my breakfast.

I’m going to try for sleep. Maybe. Like as not. Go read .

I’m a wicked child in need of comfort. Strangers can see it on me now, the barest breath of need. Skin on skin or flesh under clothing, it doesn’t matter as long as I feel safe. There’s no sleeping anymore. I find it vaguely embarrassing, I flush with it, that I require something so basic and can’t find it. Resisting the urge to hug strangers, to hold hands with passing acquaintances. It’s not about sex, it’s relationships, it’s about being human. My behaviour code changed to exclude outside contact and though the pressures what caused it have faded away, the code stands unmolested with everyone who used to be comfortable. It doesn’t help that I’ve broken people, that most of my friends live in different countries, that I’m either too pretty or not enough to get any healthy attention.

I get on a plane the day of Solstice. Science meeting science meets the end of the year. I imagine singing, high druidic mastermind pilots dressed in blue robes with a captains hat perched in a business-like manner on top of brown haired heads who will fly thundering bullets of technology toward a pale Goddess, the glow of eternal night above fluffy clouds. It’s a pity that I leave in morning. I will look out the window and land in another year, closer to the equator sun cascading down, trickling into my now functioning eyes. Another season shift. A hot weather reason to think in dead languages, to murmur symbols hardly anyone knows that I never found useful, but interesting. I have many. When I was little, I didn’t have any friends. Instead, I voraciously read books and learned from everything. Instant comprehension simultaneous with seeing the text, so many words sinking into me, my eyes merely a conduit, as if I could use my fingers to get the same results. I still read like this, quick, keeping everything. I am a compendium of odd facts and mostly useless knowledge. The result is a conflagration of vocabulary I hardly use, and a list of facts about sperm whales and ancient cultures. I can quote pages of text from a myriad of sources. Antiquities and the waves of the future as thought of by men who died before I was born. I learned how to write in hieroglyphics when I was in grade six, a language I could write notes in that no one else could read. I would pass final exams in the nineties percentile by reading the textbook an hour before class and scribble notes tying my medieval essay to how ships were built by the Vikings, how accuracy was found for trebuchets, and how the crusades were population related as much as anything else. I can tell you the origin of the Knights Templar. I can tell you a thousand and one nights of information, each less meaningful to current life than the last. Drop down stories of connections, like how the majority of the industrial revolution was tied to coal tar and the confusingly tangled web that wove. I don’t have my own history, instead I have the myths of a hundred countries, the tales told by the fire before they were sanitized, and the dream of escaping this horrid little town.

I read about people complaining of snow and I think that I would love to play in some. Barefoot, mirror laughing, I would drink it all down, summer’s coming soon enough with it’s mating rituals and swimsuit cleavage. The last time it seriously snowed here I put on my closest approximation to a little black dress and walked barefoot through three feet of snow carrying a pile of shining presents in fishnet stockings. From 23rd Avenue at Cambie, all the way downtown, where I put on my shoes to avoid unsanitary objects hidden under the pristine white. It took me two hours and I was still faster then traffic. Years pass like months, haven’t you noticed? And months like weeks. One foot tapping to the guitar beat, strumming, keeping time. Soon you’ll be older than you think you are, delivered into age, graceful hands puckering slightly and one day you’ll notice. No longer a youthful focal point of attraction, if you’re unlucky you’ll spend a third of your life looking away and the other two looking back. The eternal wish of “If I knew then” but no one ever tells me.