Tag: mackenzie

and every time, it’s a surprise. they never used to have gray hair.

Three cats and a programmer, that’s who I’m living with. The house drips with the edges of stories we’re not quite telling. Out for dinner, up in the morning, laptop in the livingroom, random laughter talking alone. Moments I want to remember.

Sigur Ros is filming a documentary.

The Fringe Festival lounge is constantly full of people I used to spend my life with. Now I only see them this once, every year, though I miss them. It makes it a very strange place for me. Everyone is a flamboyant memory of someone I used to be. Words thunder across the room, bringing back burning flashes of the smiles I wore, the names I used to sweetly remember, but my personal mythology doesn’t have an anchor anymore. I adore these people, their theatrical grand gestures and ridiculous, rewarding turns of phrase, so much I forget how we lost each other. We hug close, damp with laughter, talk about how great it was, how great it will be, but sobering, know that we’ll just do it again next year. Wonder where we went as every week passes by at the introspective speed of light, while the days drag on, threatening rain with every mile.

Dan Mangan was playing at the Lounge when I left tonight, another note in an absent chord of friends. I wanted to stay long enough to properly say Hello, but Ray was my ride and falling asleep on his feet, so I badly scribbled the word COFFEE? on one of my cards and left it on the stage where he was singing.

As I went, I promised people I would be back tomorrow. I’m already surprised at how much I’m looking forward to it.

Kristen was at breakfast, a lovely surprise.


Friday night the star-fall was beautiful. Some were so violently bright, it was like we should have been able to hear them shred through the atmosphere. On our backs in a row under the too-cliche starry night, we irreverently cracked jokes about proverbial movie endings, but still gasped every time the sky impossibly ripped open with light.

The language of morning, music, two silk black cats, a matching short kimono, claws hooked into the chain of a pocket watch like an eccentric playful ribbon. Knocking down the mess. Sorting papers, shifting things into drawers, off the floor. Work at three o’clock.

Mechanical heart removed after organ heals itself.

Free of the future, he lives on the same block as my boyfriend who killed himself the night we were going to be together. I can see his bedroom window from the back porch. It’s unsettling. I’m almost breaking down, every word I’m holding on, trying to gain some equilibrium. My friend is telling stories that flow like an archaeological river. He’s been doing it for hours. Acid trips in London, working with Peter O’Toole, where he was when the Berlin Wall fell down. They go well with the house, his implacable gestures. I try to memorize as much as I can, anchor myself, keep the car running. Catching myself in a simple mirror over his shoulder, the naked frame is a prison, I feel like a photograph hung on the wall.

Walking towards breakfast late in the afternoon, one block down, someone has gracefully drawn absolutely perfect hot-rod flames into the dust coating a black vintage pick-up truck. It looks like something my buried love would have done. In my mind, I rock back on my heels into his body and, with a silent smile, I gesture to my friend, stuck on his cell phone, who sees it and smiles back. Suddenly, everything will be alright.