Another lonely night and I feel like a bad rip-off of a well crafted pop song. When does the hurting subside? It’s like I’m going to rhyme. Oh, too late. I’m repressing the urge to swear now in spite of the fact that this is text and I could always go back and edit all that out. Stress talking, stress guiding my fingers over the keys. They’re half worn away on this keyboard, letters and fingers both.
It reminds me of the root of scrupulous, being the Latin for a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus, a scrupulous person was a person so sensitive they’re irritated by the smallest stone in their shoe. It reminds me of the unintentional pacing of our lives with poetry that happens all the time. Bless used to mean to redden with blood as in sacrifice, giving a nice mental picture to the common western response to a sneeze. These are the things that occur to me late at night, when my topic tracking gets shaky, when I can’t pick threads so easily from the loom of my mental perspicacity. Loom, what navigators at sea call the halo of lights.
Which makes me think of celestial navigation, (celestial – residing in the heaven), which translates basically to pretending you know where you are until you’ve proved all your fictions wrong and you actually know where you’re bobbing on the ocean, which leads me to both treacherous waters, (Seattle, that bridge, meeting Eliza), and watching all those shooting-stars shining at Clinton, (just the faintest smudge of finger-painted Northern Lights on the edge of the sky). Two things that bring me back to my sudden ex-relationship.
I think it’s going to prove to be a long night. Counting sheep means tooling about on the internet, digging up articles on the first zero-gravity surgery set to be performed and useless first-world restaurants. I think I want to walk out my door too much, arrive at a house up the road a bit and to the left, (always my joking directions to find the g-spot), knock at the door and see myself reflected in a pair of welcoming eyes. (Seeing that effect, the Roman’s created the word pupil, which comes from little doll). This is my brain pretending to know where it is. This is my heart pretending that I haven’t been breaking down crying every day, the classic sextant based three-star triangle giving me a space the size of a city block, his block. The one with the house that I dangerously dreamed was orange and liked me. Something about driving on the wrong side of the street. I picked out the right paint chip and scared us.
Memories that I need to learn to dull. There is enough about poetry in my head to know that life’s seductive habits can be broken at will. I need to shepherd myself, write a palinode, relocate emotionally back into the damage, out of the alluring panoramic idea that I would get away with being allowed to do otherwise. That’s the worst, knowing I don’t need to love someone, that it’s just bloody nice to have something alive and pure and nice, (from the Latin nescīre, meaning to be ignorant). Needs are air, water. A place to sleep alone, (meaning unwanted, not desired, and dispensable).