Tag: relationships

That and he’s beautiful like a jade fire.


Yelena Yemchuk
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

A pleased yet raffish smile deepened the perfectly etched lines around his face, around his closed eyelids. A sigh, and he looked up into my eyes. His own were very light, a sensuous honey infused with the essence of dead cities, empty of orthodox sins, and extremely open in a sense that has nothing to do with age, but with the eternal youth of ancient things. I thought of gods, the old greek imaginings that drove women to madness. I thought of braille and souls.

I could describe him more, but I don’t know if you would recognize him walking down the street. He wears t-shirts and black pants just like everyone else. If he wore his hair unbound, then I might have a chance to let you stop, say hello, and examine him, see him for how beautiful he is under the poorly worn cover of being unexceptional. His hair is an inky explosion caught by a very clever illustrator, someone who fell in love with myths at an early age and let it reflect in every halo they ever drew. It’s exceptional. When his hair is wet, it catches in my throat and fills my lungs with the need to say that I am drowning. Maybe if you saw him in rain, drops caught like cliché jewels in his lashes, there might be a flash of recognition, a glimpse of how divine.

I feel so antique, describing a lover in terms of looks, but I am always transposing feelings, depths of emotion or dialogue, and yet so few ever know who I’m revealing, even when it’s myself. Earlier in the car, when I tugged on Andrew‘s hand and said, “Oh! I have news! Persepolis has fallen.”, he understood what I meant, but Tyler did not. “We talk in shorthand.”, Andrew explained, and it occurred to me that here I write in it. A code of association so baroque that only by reading for any length of time will meaning emerge from the tangle of references. Truthfully, I find myself most comfortable with people who can follow abstract trains of thought without effort, but I’m beginning to question if it’s fair. I’m wondering how often my privacy is misread. (Graham got the impression somehow, in spite of my practically rabid monogamy in the face of people like Dominique and Christopher, that I was promiscuous.) At times, it’s been psychotically useful, but part of why I continue to update almost daily is that I want to explain to my friends and family my keystone ties and transformations.

Matthew hated when I wrote about him but he would never tell me a decisive why. He would spin gluey reasons that would change, but always, (no matter how mutable), they were negative. I think, now, especially near the end, that he was trying to hide his whereabouts and actions from people who might possibly read this. After he came back, he attempted to expressly forbid me from mentioning that I stayed the night, and was upset when I ignored his injunction. (I still don’t know who wasn’t supposed to know this time. Last time it was Sarah. I know his wife used to drop by occasionally to catch up on things, her best friend tried to step in and defend him once from one of his first terrible injunctions against my decency before she understood what my complaint was, and there are other people. Friends, family maybe. I don’t know, they just show up on my counter and leave rare anonymous comments from IP addresses located in Perth or Sydney.) My next closest relationship, they were always delighted when they could find reference to themselves in my entries. It filled their heart, they said. Made them feel exponentially appreciated, like every letter added to their worth. My friend Wilhelm, he complains that he never appears here, that I only write about people I can hyperlink to, but I know that I put his little misdemeanors of complexity here quite often, so how else can I reply except by becoming, if only briefly, a more concise exhibitor?

We used to talk until the sun came up, a confused tangle of how a head will fit into an arm, how the angle of a bent leg will comfortably into the slant of another leg of a different shape. His bed was small enough for both of us, and it was going to eventually be summer. Visits were too rare, for they were addictively pleasant, and I fell very into liking him. His casual strength of thought, his delightful leaps of imagination. Ostensibly, I was living in another part of town, staying on charity at a friends apartment, but as it gradually becoming more intensely uncomfortable to stay there, this small room full with its tiny bed became my home. I would always feel welcome, but an imposition. When I visited, I would stand silent in the street with my terrified heart, trying to collect courage with the pebbles I would find to throw at his window in lieu of a doorbell. Once Loki the cat found me and sat purring at my ankle, almost causing me to cry. I wanted to feel safe, and it was ten feet away, and I couldn’t move. My housemate had pulled a dirty conversation on me earlier, full of tense demands, and I was so nervous of the world that just this little cat being kind to me was enough to unbalance me. When I crept in, quiet as to not wake the baby, I hoped he wouldn’t see my hands shaking.

Loki is gone now, replaced by two cats. One black and one white. The baby is gone and my lover’s switched rooms. His window is an undeniable bitch to hit with a pebble now. I tried the other night, failing, as it turned out, not because of my aim, but because we wasn’t home yet, and I worried with every stone about hitting the neighbors house on the rebound. It didn’t help that my hands were shaking again, my adrenaline screaming at me that I was being an idiot. Years pass and yet I stay the same. He claims it’s brave of me. To do something I’m scared to do because I know it’s the right action, but I’m not so sure. I’m expecting to have to apologise with impeccable courtesy for merely arriving while my heart is craving vindication, some forgiveness for the hour. If I’m scared, then I’m not being brave, am I? Being brave might be writing this down, not knowing what side of the disclosure line he stands on.

reminder: KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE -a party of proportion- #340 – 440 west hastings, Friday, November 25th, 9:00 – onward

(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.

my sweet damaged heart


michael thompson
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.


Lithium Picnic, my desktop.

Escape is four. Walls, edges, connect three and the angles are wrong. Four is compatible with fire. Two places to hold you, for you to hold me. Four. Boundaries make up all the most beautiful things hemming in this screen. // When they speak to you in whispers. It feels so right, but you’re not in the story. Voice falls quiet from fear. // Hush now, cradles rock, it’s picking a fight. I can’t change this. The farther in I see, the less I understand about how I’m pulling. Noticing little things. This is a refuge. I’m not wrong, I’m on this list. I recognize the objects that feel the same from partner to partner. This is where we come to write, all of us, music or language or pieces of memory. Eighteen inches from the computer, everything we need. All our pills. All our letters encased in plastic chunks of communication. We’re so human. It hurts me when I’m lucid. Damn lucky I’m not.

Tom Baker out-takes from recording a voiceover for a commercial. Many thank-you’s Warren.

here we are, like last year backward


gry garness
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I adapted too quickly to my temporary work schedule and came in an hour early today. Doubly disappointing as Nicholas and Esme are still around somewhere in Ray’s truck with him and Dominique. Lovely people for lovely weather, though here the weather is all wrong. Vancouver in November has insistently dull light as if all the particles have been sucked out. It should have been cutting and bright, warm welcome blue sky and golden patches of sun on all our sidewalks that catch the fallen leaves and transform them from crispy edged mush to blazing transports of colour. That’s how it should have been. Toronto fall, lightning storms on College street and fire falling out of the corner of the eye to scrape the street with an audible brushing of texture against texture.

Really, Nikky forgot his bag at Andrew’s and we spent out morning after Breakfast driving back and forth in light rain between Andrew’s house and work, getting keys, using them, then dropping them off, then driving me downtown. Not really what I feel like talking about.

I seem to be talking to an old best friend of mine again. There was a self imposed hiatus while I put myself together enough to be human again. I get enough phonecalls without inflicting damaged personalities on my more precious people. What I have instead today is an abiding weight. An I-didn’t-sleep-last-night-so-invariably-I-thought-of-you. I was a drawn line against the wall, one of three people in my bed. I watched the sun come up and remembered you beside me. Embedded in the palm of my hand is a photograph of pulling your hair. I have the sound of it all attached. Another beautiful moment encoded under every chipped fingernail. I’m clothed in memory, the fabric of it delicate and blind, the pattern a musical scale like the colour of my eyes meeting yours in the dark. It’s all poetical and very very sad, though you make smiling so easy. Too-easy-there-must-be-a-catch. Ah right.

Eventually there will have to be a choice. Someone will have to lay down and die. I can’t explain how much I want to write fiction worthy of this photograph.

this is an oldest story


sarah boyer – freshmeat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I have found my laughter from where it was hiding. This time, for the very first time, it’s allowed out of the closet with tears still in its eyes. When I grew up, I grew up in a strange canadian cultural vacuum. I would stare out the window of the truck at all the houses gliding past and wonder what real people had inside thier houses. What was on the other side of so many doors? I lived in hotel rooms and on some basic level, they’re all the same. Clinical transiency. Fake flowers, soulless bedspreads that match the thick ugly curtains, television remotes that you either find next to the miniature fridge or bolted to the table. Cable is an option, but there’s always an ice machine that clunks in the middle of the night. I used to pad out into hallways and sit against them sometimes, because it was a light I could read by. Anonymous. The trick is that they’re always anonymous. The furniture is not your furniture, the life you live within those walls belongs to no one. I grew up being not real people.

My body jerked me across my bed when I woke up this morning. An unfamiliar hand had touched me on the shoulder. Left over reflexes I really should work on controlling a little better. I was up late, reading, unable to think about my tomorrow. Too many things. I have a livingroom picnic this afternoon with Brian. We’re putting down a blanket and making sandwiches. If I was a better person, I would suggest we pretend we’re on a beach somewhere, but I’m not. So I won’t. Breakfast today with precious friends led into a pleasant walk up the drive and some actual grocery shopping. It’s like my world spun around. A smile has been affixed to my face. Someone I don’t know stopped me on the street on my way home with my bags, “I see you all the time on the drive, but I’ve never talked to you, but today I felt I had to say something. You’re really pretty when you’re happy”. He was my height, with dark brown hair and a slightly crooked baseball hat. I wouldn’t recognize him again.

sway me now, when andrew said he saw the car, I thought something else


artist unknown
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My mind began kindly to me then slipped into exhaustion. By the time I was in bed, all my thoughts were old. I should have called up Brian and had him fetch me over. It occurred to me, he would have banished my bad percussion nightmares. What’s good for me, I’m barely doing it these days. I hold out my hands to all the people who can’t quite help, and expect the rest of me to simply deal with it, forgetting that my reserves have almost entirely been used up. I think of running through a neighborhood, I think no, that place isn’t mine anymore. I don’t have a place anymore. My second home’s been closed to me.

I ran into Bill on my way to Dominique‘s Ghost Train evening. He still doesn’t know what to do with me. Jacques says after the baby is born, he’ll be able to deal with me as a human being again. I only know I could feel his bones through his coat like he was stuffed with sticks held together with fluid grace and days that stretch too long. Scraping himself thinner. Dominique and I talked about him later. She pinned him down with one word as if he were a particularly large butterfly. Elemental, she said, and I replied, he is a forest. I’m glad she knew him, she understands. In three years, no one else had a chance.

I’m dressed as a witch today, all flowing black and glitter. Work allows me costumes this week, so I’m taking advantage of it by dressing like myself instead of a vague corporate whore approximation. Customers have been asking where to buy my out-fits, which would amuse me if they were perhaps a little more polite about it. It’s full time hours this week, because of Hallowe’en. Long shifts of not having a chance to take away sandwiches from across the street. I want to fall down at the end of it, take my shoes off and walk barefoot in some rain. I want to find myself a warm and willing partner to sip hot chocolate with and look out over our little bit of sea.

Mirrormask is playing here this weekend at TinselTown. I hear of a group trip today at two o’clock, which is when I start my shift. The only weekend showing I can manage is the nine:thirty. Is anyone interested? I’m considering dropping in on it before the Saturday Clubhouse Party. I’d get there unpardonably late, if I could but care.

Before I finally fell asleep, I lie in the dark alone for awhile while Ryan and Eva were in the livingroom, trying to pretend that I had my bed to myself, (excepting the ferret I had lodged in my belly). But for the five days he was at DragonCon, Ryan‘s been with me every day for almost three months. The feeling was alien, as if stretching out was a transgression against the basic nature of the world.

come back to my spiders web of beautiful things

  • the conditions in Iraq for subcontracted workers under Halliburton.

    Doing sixty downtown, she’s going to be late for work, but the view reminds her of other cities.
    How the lights and by-ways of freeways work, how it’s strange now to see them in movies.
    I was there, she thinks, and that place, and that one. She can’t see a street she hasn’t walked on.
    The lights of the car behind them catch her eyes in the mirror and she turns her sight to the driver.

  • 85-year-old Seattle woman recruited by marines.

    A man in an orange hoodie picked up a sodden page of junk mail from the street and lay it across his shoulders like a cape, then rushed us. Dominique cried out, “hey look, there’s superman.” and I smiled, but didn’t feel like laughing. I was too tired, too worn by my day. I should have been home hours before, but the circumspection of social maneouvering left me outside. We had just been at a half-empty nightclub, trying to dance to eighties music. Dominique knew all the words. I didn’t. I barely recognized the music and none of the clientele. The rules of the dancefloor were strange, with not enough people to keep any cohesion to the space. Without warning, one might find themselves suddenly surrounded by the small group of japanese tourists or being threatened by the tiny elbows of the tottering girl in the corset who was trying very hard to be something. What, I couldn’t say. Only with Rick and Dominique was I comfortable. I sat on the side for a little while, watching everyone and feeling slightly too cliche to actually be doing what I was doing. I pulled out my book to write in, but decided instead to pull out my camera and threaten Rick with pictures. I shouldn’t be writing what my brain was trying to think.

  • U.S. Air Force testing new transparent aluminum armor.

    Vast layered conversations spanning six topics at once. She should find partners who speak like her.
    “I swore I wouldn’t do this again, but I think I’ve figured out why I’m going through with it.”
    She’s referring to three people. She’s referring to keeping a secret and possibly telling lies.
    She’s explaining why and who and when without them.
    “I wasn’t raised to believe in anything. I never expected to encounter something sacred.”
    Words, meanings. The resolution of a two puzzles pieces finding conclusion.
    He replies, “Religion was never something I had a use for, but sometimes the vocabulary is right.”
    Confirmation, a deduction of between the lines.
    The same path, but one person facing backward, one person blind.

  • U.S. finally gives up on upgrading missile defense.

    • Plastic, a new proposition. I remember that stuff. It sears.


    Another Japanese Tale
    Originally uploaded by Simon Pais.

    Cold one o’clock in the morning. An idea. I’m sitting on the rim of my bath, suddenly overwhelmed by how tired I am, staring into nothing. This is alone with thoughts, head tilted, leaning forward, hands on knees. This could be a portrait. Controlled tense, muscles for blood flow. It’s chilly. Toes, hands, working inward from the edges. Inside my shoulders, underneath. Hold, two, release, two, next. Madness in the family. The inclination to sell the soul for not enough. I touched teeth like gamelan bars with my tongue. Ping. Tense. The thought. The idea that affection is tied to appreciation. A skill. A factor attached to how our eyes cried. There’s something different, of course I’m allowed to trust this one. That’s the trick. Hands out, fingers stiff, concentration focus, the smaller groups of muscles. The long curve of inside wrists.

    “In the further the tower becomes a favourite place of condemned men and jumpers with a parachute.” The pigeons are awake.

    A place to kiss sixty cycles of vibration remembering your name. That line again. Wrapped in memory, sporadic, thick. Eyes close and grin. The girl response, duck of the chin, eyes and pulse. How long and far and quick and deep and how very little can we ascribe to meaning but this. Question, query, I stand with joints popping, sinews complaining of the temperature, the lack of movement. The culmination of decision. Toes curling, protesting the artic linoleum. The idea. Standing, the mirror lowers into view. This can’t mean as much as crying.

    Hypothesis: It’s all about commitment. Not the theology of the reluctant dutiful, but the soul threshing terrible awe. The trick now might be to build a time machine or a portal to another dimension. One where our shadows have as much substance as life.

    I caught myself purring at work today. I was late, over so, but under by chance. Early, but not as early as I should have been. Another girl reached out from under my skin and stretched, breaking a film that had coated me. Commiseration should have limits. Same denial. If this is breaking apart, it is slow entropy, and better for it. There is a term for this similar to crawling through ashes. Another culture would say it’s a crime.

    This may be the healthiest undertaking since I lived home, a third a continent apart from this.

    I figured what the hell


    snsterkddz_sm
    Originally uploaded by illf0.

    This is going to be a busy time. Likely good, all things considered. I require some distraction, lest I find myself bitter.

    Tonight is Indie Movie Night at Sara’s house.
    Tomorrow night, Antonio & Mimi are having a slumber party.
    Saturday is Jenn’s Hallowe’en Birthday Bash.
    Sunday is Sukkot, which takes me firmly out of the picture.
    Monday is Korean Movie Night.

    So Tuesday then. Is anyone interested in going to see the Wallace & Gromit film, Curse of the Were Rabbit, on Tuesday?

    On an entirely unrelated note. I have a bit of curiosity to throw at you all. You’re an incredibly diverse group of people, and perhaps perfect for this sort of query. My recent sense of wrongdoing has to do with some fairly basic ettiquite, I thought, but he’s claiming that it’s all in my head.

    So, the question posed:
    If you’re in a casual sexual relationship with someone, it’s only right and proper to inform them before you take another partner, no? Otherwise you’re being rude to the point of possiblly endangering them, right? This is my assumption, and the assumption of everyone I know, minus the one, so I want to know, are we just an exceptional group of people or are we an aberration of some kind?

    Secrets are packets of seeds that require fertile ground. I threw his over the bridge he just burned

    I heard the answer before he answered the question. I was right the first time around, when people change, it barely touches their intellect. Where is a notebook to spill into? I don’t have anyone I can call and cry to the sacred with. I don’t have a bastion of whole world at my feet to rely on. That was last year, this is this, the only now I’ve ever had. Too late. I swear into the phone, receiver falling into the cradle, heavier than gravity. His foolish answer, his petty games of justification. Cut. Respect is not a nebulous concept but simple. Unspoken contracts are trust, are the blood and bone of relationships. You don’t bring them with you when you fall, they are there to hold you up.