I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven’t been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I’ve made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light’s been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.
The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that’s how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn’t have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.
Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It’s like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don’t think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.
On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of “swept off my feet”. The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don’t armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I’m skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I’ll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can’t and close instead.
It’s like I should take up a hobby, but I’m already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don’t work well without a modicum of input.
Speaking of hobbies, I’m finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri‘s freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I’m glad there’s two, as I’m certain that I’ll botch the first skeleton somehow. I’m considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don’t want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.
Once I find how mink are to work with, I’m likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I’ve been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.