Tag: love

tough to prod into romance

365: 06.02.09
365: 06.02.09

I see you walking in my dreams, splinters of invincible movement from the corner of my eye, fiction and blood drowning together, the colours thicker than in photographs of your eyes. Winter shifting out of December, reaching forward to pull Spring out of the calloused clouds, (the random smell of flowers dripping in the wind), wondering what waiting will bring. Dreams of airports and shredded letters, structures built of running faster, learning the contours of your hands. I think of the chambers of the heart and name them in order, atria and ventricles, the left and right of each. I think of tracing patterns, explaining the history of the word skin, from the German word scinten or schinden, to flay, as I peel back electric layers of myself and still discover you there.

meme: inport support {now it’s your turn}


Me and Marissa, July 2007, by Lung

The ever groshing Meredith Yayanos (and now Alice and Sara) tagged me in the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” I’m no good at this sort of meme, but I love rock star Mer (and Alice and Sara) with the warmth of six suns, so for her I will try.

1. “Even your voice has changed,” he said, looking at me, hearing the wounded strawberry tears that caught all the way up from my heart to my tongue and out into the air. The freeway was so familiar I felt I could have drawn it in my sleep, divided the roads into lanes with a cunning accuracy I didn’t understand I had. It was like the promised land, green signs marking exits as well as the graves of so many dreams. “I’m not sure what it is, but you sound softer, like you’re an entirely different person here.” “I am,” I replied, “too full of history to burn.”

2. I used to write fortunes, love letters, and wishes in spidery black ink on the dried leaves I found fallen under trees in the fall and let them go in the wind to fly without watching to see where they might land. They weren’t for me, they were for other people to find.

3. Perhaps if I killed him, he would live on as a ghost, feather light and improperly dead. I woke up earlier this week, wishing I could secretly stab him in the heart with rusty kitchen scissors and open him up like he did to me with his fingers. The only thing that keeps me clear is that I don’t think his murder would change anything. You can’t erase memory like a stain. It would just mean a little less money coming in around my birthday.

4. When she speaks on the phone, I know my place is to quietly do nothing more than make encouraging noises in the appropriate gaps and pauses. She is like a colouring book with everything but the eyes filled in with religious illumination, as if someone spent thirty years merely shading in her skin. I love her, so I don’t mind. Maybe someday it will be my turn to talk.

5. There is a pile of books in my room which do not belong to me. They are borrowed books that represent less what I would choose to read and more what people think I should. From top to bottom they are: Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Mistress of the Empire, The Complete Robot, The War of Flowers, How To Not Get Rich, (which I never read), So Far From God, A Little Larger Than The Known Universe, What Colour Is Your Parachute, (which I also never read), His Dark Materials, and Brandjam. Some of these books have been with me for years, yet I refuse to incorporate them in with my own books, believing somehow, tenuously, that they will eventually be given back to their respective owners.

6. I loved him like no one else I had ever met in my life, but recently it eased back and closed over. All it took was sleeping in his bed, knowing it wasn’t mine, then driving away the next day. Now I’m absolutely stone terrified I will never care about anyone like that again.

7. For no particular reason, somewhere in my room is a birthday candle I kept from my third birthday cake.

8. Reading back entries into my journal can be like reliving the relationships I wrote about. When I started this journal, I had no idea what it would be like to have such a static essence of memory waiting at my fingertips. People I can talk blithely about now, or some that I mention not at all, are waiting for me there, frozen in time instead of (decently?) dissolved like jet streams. There is nothing in my life that can compare. My valued moments, they are not trapped in objects, they are there, freely available for the whole world to read. How I felt when that one danced or when that one cheated on me. It’s unreal, the immediacy. Photographs are not the same.

9. Sometimes horrible pop music is just going to happen in my house. Life isn’t all gamelan, mystery, poetry or jazz. Occasionally it is Blackstreet’s No Diggety on repeat for an hour. I’m not sorry.

10. “Will you sleep with me later if I ask you to?” He looks at me, blinks a moment, and grins. (We’ve only just met, though we’ve known each other on-line for years.) For a moment it’s like I’ve kissed him, then he ignores my question as if I never asked it, because it didn’t need to be said, and reaches out his hand. The girl next to him look confused, uncertain if she heard what she thinks she did, my words a spectre in the tiny industrial kitchen.

11. I dislike religion and ritualistic behavior. It is fine and wonderful and inspiring that people like to make themselves meaningful, that people try to be more than themselves, but to require emblematic props to do it offends me somehow, as if intelligent people should know better, should know they do not require symbols to attain self worth. (Also, I will judge you if you actually believe in astrology of any kind. Quietly, but it will be there. You! The offended one. Half a point. Docked.)

12. The last time I was sick, it was because of him. We had quarelled. I had walked home. It was freezing. Standing within his gravity again was sensory overload. Had it really almost been an entire year? My hands shaking as we said hello. Watching him stand at the podium, I tried to pretend I was a solid being, but my eyes tripped, caught by the enigmatic living miracle of his face. He still had me on a string. I didn’t want even a week to go by without a hello, but after the last time we’d seen each other he wouldn’t even answer the phone when I called. Instead I had to crash his party, all cameras and politicians, as if I was welcome, as if it were planned instead of a lucky accident of bus arrival.

13. If there is a book in the lavatory, it’s because I like to read while I brush my teeth.

14. Though Marissa, (who I later renamed Mishka, which stuck), and I were ten when we met, neither one of us had pierced ears. Mine because my parents thought it was cruel to do to a baby, her because her parents treated it as a coming of age. From this, I couldn’t have cared less while she could not wait for her sixteenth birthday. As it approached, she was practically vibrating with excitement about how she was finally going to get it done, so for her birthday party, I gathered all of our mutual friends together at the mall downtown to get our ears pierced with her in solidarity. (This took some managing, as one of the boys we knew, Charles, had a highly evangelical mother, who thought this was a terrible sin somehow). After an hour of waiting for her and calling her in vain, we finally got a hold of her. She couldn’t make it and had completely forgotten to tell us to call it off. Rolling our eyes, the group of us went through with one ear of the procedure anyway, with the intention to do the other one with her later. About a month after this, she went off with her mother one afternoon and had them done alone at a tattoo parlour, forgetting again about our group effort-in-waiting. As a result, I still only have my left ear pierced. For all I know, so does everyone else involved.

15. “When my husband came back from Iraq,” she said, and it struck me as it has before, completely new again, “I am in a foreign country”. Curled on the bed with my friends, it was easy to forget, the same way it didn’t occur to me later while I was away on my trip. Even when guns were involved. Too much about the USA will always feel implicitly like the word belonging.

16. I will not tag anyone in a meme. It is far too interesting to see who will pick it up for themselves without prompting.*

Where it’s gone from here: Ben Peek, Duncan Shields, Sarah Edwards-Noelle.

everything I accomplish is your fault

sanfran leap

This year marked the first time I’ve ever revisited every place I’ve called home: Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, L.A., and San Francisco. A perfect ten.

In each place was a moment waiting for me, as if from the last time I had been there. A moment of realization, of change.
A moment of sublime connection, of time curling back, of traveling forward, of evolution and social magnetism.

In a strange way, it was like following a low key route of the person I used to be. Nothing was a surprise, except for how much it meant to me.

Thank you for everyone who helped me survive this year, for everyone who was there for me.

I can never thank you enough.

even this feels like it’s not enough

A Young Mad Scientist’s First Alphabet Blocks.

I had just had a terrible break-up, been thrown out of a last chance desperation relationship, a lower-the-bar can’t-take-it-anymore sort of thing after an assault, when I was spending time with A Boy. Someone I’d known for years, though with a gap in the middle, who popped up at a party with my name in his mouth, as if all the space between I was always a reminder, just like he was for me. Curly hair, kind eyes, all the usual suspects.

When we started seeing each other, it was without capital letters, friends spending time with friends, being delighted, being glad. I made him tea, he made me laugh. When I spent the night over, it was platonic, though appreciative, and only sleep, with a walk alone to the bus-stop in the morning. When suddenly I was single, distraught, he was discreet, but gingerly there in a way that he wasn’t before, and when I stayed over, he kissed me. He kissed me and kissed me and kissed me, moving my body cautiously to press against his, surprising me, attentive, his white linen shirt on the floor, mine unbuttoned and left behind. And I was okay with that.

The next night I was over, his mouth moved from mine to my throat, to the clavicle triangle of my collarbone, to the space between my breasts, and down, purposefully, towards a wonderful idea. I was impressed, ye gods, I was, I’ll never forget it, show me ten men who claim it’s their favorite thing and I’ll show you nine liars, but it was too soon. No, said my hands, no, my knees, my angle and body. I pulled him back up the bed and we stayed there until we fell asleep, nestled together like a carving.

Bolivia’s Witches’ Market: Llama Foetuses and Dried Armadillos

I was terrified of the timing, of the brutal year I’d had bleeding in like poison, of the nightmares I’d still been having of the attack, of why I continued to say no. Eventually, after two weeks more of identical nights, I finally did not call. Sometimes I did not even pick up the phone. The relationship, such as it was, quietly expired. Trapped in myself, we stopped talking, and barely said hello in the street. I felt like I should have had a brand across my forehead, the word ruined in copperplate block letters as if typed there, my blood for black ink.

Years went by, accidentally as they do, the friendship slowly healed in our absence, though never completely, while still I never explained, never sat him down and told him, “Look, I was cagey, but it was a bad year. It was never your fault.” Words well known that don’t generally come out in casual conversation, “I should have told you. I love you. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Please forgive me.”

I can look back with all the grand power of retrospect and think I didn’t too bad considering my age, considering the date and the time and how much the trauma of my reasons was wrecking me. Considering that trip to the doctor, considering that night I spent up too unhappy with my memories to get back to sleep. I can look back and think a fade out is not so bad a way to go, considering, always considering, but I don’t really buy it. My skull can’t shake that I wronged him. Social penicillin in action. I feel like I missed a best friend.

1800s Vampire Killing Kit Nabs $14,850 At Stevens Auction

consider

“When my daughter Alison was born, in the tradition of a new parent, I began to photograph her, initially in a separate and private body of work.”

Every day since the last week of October Dominique pops up on my messenger with the same message, “Still pregnant.” A small thing, but powerful, as every time it reminds me she’s carrying an entire human being curled in her belly. Tiny hands, tiny feet, an entirely separate heart-beat. I’ll be glad when it’s born, though not as glad as her, I’m sure, who complains daily that she wants it out already. “I think it’s staying,” she messages me, despairing, “I’m over-due.” I know I can’t relate, not really, though I try, and feel I understand to a point.

I had a nightmare, once, that I was pregnant. I could see inside my belly, which had distended to translucency, and see that the child had sharp, triangular, razorblade teeth.

When the message doesn’t come, I wonder, “did it happen? Is she at the hospital now?” I’m torn between relief and wonder and disbelief, that she could be doing anything so incredible as I sit at my desk and help people with media software issues, until it is my turn to message her and ask, “Not yet?”, soothing the day back into something mundane. Earlier today she had an appointment with her midwife for a membrane sweep, and I was blaming that for her lack of message, while with a less rational part of my brain, I was crossing my fingers until she returned.

“Still round?” I asked, and eventually she replied, “Home again. Think I’m in labour, though.” “Excited?” “Contractions about every four minutes. Will check again in an hour or so. I am SO READY to be vacated.”

I know her contractions didn’t necessarily mean anything, she’s been having them on and off for over a week, but that was this afternoon and I haven’t heard word back since. That hour later check in never happened. Those fingers are still crossed. Maybe she’s having her child right now. I was hoping for a Hallowe’en baby, but November 12th should do just fine, too.

hold it down

Moonhead, by Andrew Broder:

did you hear the one about the day the moon fell to earth?
it had a crater exactly the size of a human head on it
and it landed on my head and now my head is the moon.
or the one about the day a thousand lives from now

when we return as a team of archeologists
and discover fossils of ourselves in a former life
on the day we spurned our nervous twitch
and found our yearn to hint at winter bliss.
on the day the stars sang the national anthem of sweaty disbelief,
of coelacanth teeth, to scream loud enough
to shatter the roof of a coral reef
and the shrapnel ground up into paint
for robin’s egg colored dream and root beer float,
second hand flavored drool absorbers
and the words “hope” and “home” that sound the same,
smell the same as the day the doe caught a sad snowflake on her
tongue and melted it in an instant
and it tasted like the blackhole’s wild-eyed longing for light,
whether from the starts that radiate
or the planets that reflect it or the eyes that reflect the reflection,
or the eyes looking into those eyes and seeing the reflection of the eyes,
which if all goes according to plan,
will outlast the universe itself.

..::..

Lung is talking about bussing me down to Las Vegas to meet with him and Natasha somewhere near the end of November, and then traveling with them to the Salton Sea, finally to pick up the letter Kyle left there for me sometime last year. As November closes around me and the sun drowns in fallen leaves and crowns itself in flash flood puddles that mirror the endless gray sky, it feels less like a blessing and more like a fairytale already told, like somehow I missed it between one blink and the next, as if these places never really exist, but only hover over pages of books and mimic the careless sheen of photographs, haunting our collective conscious in a waking haze of forgotten days as long as winter dusk.

Out there is the storm, strangely calmed, another twist in the river, another chapter of life. Here is a pool of known days, painting, adjusting, David job hunting, tinkering with very little, watching a movie at home every two days. I’ve said yes. Of course I’ve said yes. I’ve missed Lung, his crackling humour, sharing our puzzle-piece twin set of anger and frustrations. There is no other answer. Now it rests on my workplace, if they will let me leave for a week, to work away for five days. If it all works out, I’ll bus down to Seattle after work on the 21st for Robin’s party on the 22nd, then catch a bus to Vegas from there on the 23rd. My fingers are crossed, my fingers and my heart and my bones and breath. My hope is an elephant living deep inside the cage of my chest, pressing against my skin, forged out of a cello’s long humming strokes of sound, invisible until an answer arrives.

Until then, I won’t know myself. I’ll be a string of notes without direction, as crazy eyed inside as unexpected blood on the hands, a tight rope walker with her lover on the other side and a den full of sharp toothed, hungry lions below.

Meanwhile, Antony and I are e-mailing back and forth, a piano falling from the sky. There’s nothing quite like home. Apparently he arrived in Montreal just over a week after I left, and he’ll be there until half-way through December, far after I would return from the south. Tag, you’re it. Unexpected, how life plays these games of just missed, all the way through, both directions. If he sends me his address, I’m going to try and make sure he gets another palm tree, to keep in touch.

Some times I am lucky and an entire week can go by without missing his laugh. I wonder, occasionally, that I am so changed within since we met. Given all that is fixed, will I ever want to be able to walk away again?

I’m just twisting inside, uncertain how I will ever sleep again

(I’m not giving up. I don’t feel like crying.) My restless heart is awake tonight. The love of my life so far called up from Los Angeles where he lives and works in Hollywood, tonight fixing the green screen behind a mechanized animatronic badger some pool soul created for a Wisconsin lotto campaign, because that’s just how the world is some times. He moved a few months ago, changed apartments, because his roommates were having a baby, and tonight she’s gone into labour. The father was text messaging him the scale of dilation as the news came in as he and his wife prepared in the same room Angelina Jolie gave birth to her baby twins in. Strings to my heart from his, I’m not sure how tonight I will sleep. David lives here like a knock-off imitation of the real thing, flushed with sleep in the bed behind me as I chatter, endlessly, joyfully, down south, a river of miles away. I wake him, briefly, when Antony’s iPhone runs out of batteries, and he’s grumpy with me, annoyed, red-eyed, and I wonder if he feels as displaced as I do. I still think of Tony as my boyfriend, my skinny mad lover too rich and too clever and too handsome for anyone to live up to. He’s a couple of weeks recently only a month begun dating a performance artist, some woman named Michelle, I think, with a mad friend he doesn’t like. He didn’t tell me before for gentle worry it would be cruel to send a note. Deliriously, he is right. (We are declawed, yet holding back our teeth, soft like cats, cinnamon and sweet.) He tells me that she isn’t very attentive, a whole week went by without a call, without contact, and I feel justified, while I laugh with him about fallacy, how we get caught in these dramatic traps like early twenties, just teens, just out into life. Before me, there was no-one for ten years, a decade alone, and all these details, streaming through my blood like jade in my arteries, not jealousy, but something more mundane, a sallow sadness, not very good at expression, that loves him like the sky, oh loves him still, and stronger than I care for anything else in my life, the one here I have been trying so hard to build, so keenly, like he’s a knife I hold in my hand to keep myself safe, the city nothing to me, the distance, the far flung dreams of walking, of taking one step after the other, until I find myself there, waiting at his door, flowers in my hand like a scream.