Tag: life

breathe


the merits of hating television
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

YEAR ZERO: the new NIN album.

Time is a cruel and whimsical creature. This week I’ve been barely sleeping, too busy with other things, kissing thin shadows and wrenching my system into sudden early mornings so hard I can feel my body protesting when I move, as if even walking is a strained effort for my tired muscles. Yet, oddly, I’m feeling rested for the first time in years. It’s like I’m finally feeding a deficiency I never knew was plaguing me until now.

Stephanie was writing today about how human memory works, how all positive memories are linked together, so when one is activated, they all light up. I’ve been trapped for a long time on the other side of that. After my Year Of Disaster, my positive experiences had little to link to, they felt constantly isolated. “Fleeting” was the word Steph used, and it fits, but now everything’s falling into place. My theatre project is ticking along quietly, just as it should, (though I sincerely need to take some time away from job-hunting to write some copy), my personal life is new, easy and only complicated in highly amusing ways, and rather than be simply ignored by magazines, I’m beginning to get rejection letters.

I think I’ve reached an ideal, the stable place I’ve been wanting from which to shake my life into some semblance of what I’d prefer it to be.

reminders, to love who we can, that fire, and whose feet have walked these streets

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It’s strange cycling in the darkness before dawn. The cars aren’t expecting you. They are tired, they are balancing coffee against the ever-present rain. Everything looks like a sad slow song, a woman singing, her heart broken six months before when she came back to find a note taped to the door, “I don’t love you anymore.” My glasses had covered up with rain and the streets reflect like they were made of water, so it feels a little like blindly flying. Sterring myself onto the dotted line, I let go of the handlebars and thought of death, how so many people believe there’s something after, that it’s a door. My hands up, I tilted my head back and let cars slide by on either side. There are no stars here, no souls to carry me home.

The viaduct I was on curves between our two stadiums then arcs above what used to be Expo 86 but is now just leveled industrial area turned into closed off parking lots awaiting miraculous rebirth as condos in time for the Olympics. From bicycle level, on one side you can see water, on the other, the Sun Yat Sen gardens, the beginnings of our thin Chinatown where they filmed the opening of Global Frequency. Late at night it’s usually empty, you cycle along it and feel like the sole survivor of some strange war, but traffic slowly gathers after six o’clock, gaining a crucial morning momentum. Dangerous. There’s no space for anything but a breath between the cars and the cement side guards. I’d forgotten what hours weren’t safe anymore. It’s been so long since I’ve ridden such a strange quiet time on the highway. Traffic lights are still ignored by taxis but joining them are people speeding and people too slow to remember the gas pedal, how it makes the machine roll forward.

I could have touched the vehicle as they’d passed. The wind lifted my artificial hair and it danced, a perfectly timed stunt-driver minute, as cinegraphic as a pearl. I looked back again, up, and bitterly smiled. The only truth in stars are that they might not be there anymore, the light we see is such a shadow, and that they travel.

I looked down after the cars had passed, wondering if they’d even seen me, and quietly said out loud,

“Some people would think that was lucky.”

It’s a strange mood, feeling invisible, feeling like that woman after she smoothly drops to the floor and leans on the door, note in her hand, hurt too dry to drip from her disbelieving eyes.

(secretly) I turned around (to love you)


tinted vintage by onfinite.com
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Start Again: Blue haired calling. Blue haired, one-eyed. Wisdom like a bitmapped earth, programming the tree to find all the answers. Breaking fast with genius, reminiscent of the night before the night before, lasting impressions of that would be really great, that would be enviable, let’s spread disease through the pommels of guns. DNA discussions, eggs on the plates, grasping for a cure to AIDS. We walk to Broadway with time still left in our pockets. We sit where I sat last Sunday. Half a million dollars at this meeting, I got to go. People walking past, strangers with bags, with different coloured jackets. It’s winter time.

Work is a back-seat exploration into self-pity glad I don’t know how to drive.

Start: Missed rehearsal, missed Sophie. Very simply missed my walk to the bus-stop. Missed a bit of everything. My eyes were closed. Open now, the phone rang. My directer, in a panic. Fluster and worry, flashing to life, spending the night. The telephone, answering questions, reassurances. Exhaustion trying to claim me back but now I’m awake. I’m got left-over chinese food on the stove, I’m going to be a gourmand’s nightmare. Toss it all in one pan, toss it all around with a fork, drip out the grease and call it food. I’ve got creases on my belly where my clothing pressed too tight in my sleep.

Work is a multi-lingual dull burning drive into why am I not done yet with this?

Start a year ago: His hair is tied in a kerchief, nothing imagined, but I like it. This is cotton street. Blue print patterns, every line a perfect curl. Cleaning, I found him in a photograph, behind me. I was so sad, corsetted and dismal. I can feel the black behind her eyes, I am surprised. I’d forgotten the day. How my love would not come to my show. Instead, this one crept behind me.

The door opens, I am blinded.

for goldilocks, an entry of three bears

I was waiting for a grand proclamation, a visitation of word to download some meaning into the withering hardware. I was waiting to want you, to let the barrier blocks fall so that I might stand free of them and that other person. I was waiting to understand the fundamental attachments that I formed in my absence.

I’m beginning to.

Under the main process, there’s wheels spinning, creating thread out of the morass of fluff that passes for thought in my brain. You helped me by being angry at me, upset that my twists have always ended positive, that every fairy tale disaster has been paid off with joy. You echoed years in that voice, a handful of fingers all pointing accusatory. I remembered being younger, shorter, less prone to speech yet talking in a rare moment of surety with someone who used to be my friend. “You just have to wait the right away, there’s a presence of mind and a shut-down. You can’t help me, like I can’t help you right now, but we’ll get there. We’ll find it by walking into it, like we need our eyes closed to walk into a wall.”

You don’t remind me of him, he hurt me later, crossed lines that grown men should not with little girls, but rather of what I said. What I began to try to say again, with as little eloquence as years ago, I’m sure, to you in the kitchen. That there’s ways and then there’s ways. There’s action in inaction and misery as debt. I don’t know how to convey how I know things, and I’m sorry. I want you to know how to survive in joy, but I don’t carry the work with me as you do.