Tag: relationships

Cloth instead of drug store bought, cloth instead of paintings, cloth instead of a tongue.

Usually I can deal with the unexpected, but lately I’ve not been keeping myself well, (not enough sleep, certainly not enough calories), and my dizzy lack of amino acids is leaving me open to feeling threatened. There were people in my house pretending to be characters in some game and I’m wasn’t comfortable with it. I’ve always had a very stiff Leave Your Dice At The Door policy and it’s always served me well. That felt like a breach of contract between me and my life. I was supposed to go dancing after, but those participating didn’t seem to care much either way if I attended or no, so it seemed wiser to hurt alone rather than inflict my hormonal self on the world. One of them is too important to me still to have to heir his false affections tonight, though bonds are thankfully dissolving in his self obsessions and my glad distractions. It’s my time of month to be lonely, to want particular people to call on me in the middle of the night and crawl warmly into bed with me.

  • Accountant “cashanova” embezzles 1.9 billion Yen for 17 mistresses.
  • Ohio Police Arrest Woman For $1 In Unpaid Taxes.

    Saturday I woke up too early, walked out the door before I was entirely prepared. Today I did the same. Today I didn’t go hiking all over a treasured nature park though, instead I went wisely for breakfast with Ryan, Navi, and Jenn, then went with them to Sunday Tea before work. (I hadn’t been for months. It was nice to sit and harmlessly flirt with Travis. My world needs more remarkably tall intelligent gay pirates in it.). I met up with Lori after, a friend I haven’t seen in something akin to four years, though it may be closer to three. We couldn’t remember.

  • A two year old toddler has shot a three year old in the hip and thigh.
  • Dead women elected as councilors in Pakistan.

    Now I’m up again after lying awake for over an hour brushing off Ryan’s in-sleep cuddles and trying not to let my emotions tackle me down to the ground. I found myself wondering where my loved ones are, and then, how many of them are there anyway all told. I am tiny and my mouth newly empty of teeth. My tongue probes and explores the gaps and depresses me. How am I to tear into the world like this? I feel as if there have been far fewer influences on my life than a regular tally would count. Years from now, I will remember Joseph clearly, though not who came before, then my marriage to Aubrey. Then there was a hiatus, a few artists already fading. One, however, overlapped the others with a fish-hook heart that I’m still recovering from. Shaking that from my system has left me a little peculiar, as it was deeply lodged in my own for so long that I still feel an absence. Wisdom teeth coming in. Growing pains. Matthew discarding what self I still had to give. Every person a lesson in trust, in disbelief, in the eternal ridiculousness of pain, in the undying willingness to try the damned idea out repeatedly. As I’m gathering myself back to my feet, I am knocking others off them. Let’s take this as a good sign, a marker stating the game’s afoot again. Same field, different rules. Maybe this round I’ll get to win something pleasant.

    • With apologies to Max Ehrmann as initially I was only trying to remember the Desiderata

    I don’t know you, but we refuse to go placidly amid the noise, which is good. For once, the haste is ours. I warn you, however, this is familiar; how I bring joy. You’ve crawled into my life smiling with a whimper and the promise of bang, both unexpected, and I find myself bound to your responsibilities because I like you in spite of them. Unexpected is understatement. You steal what I steal and replace it with truth spoken quietly with affection. We avoid the loud and the aggressive, and violence escapes us, vexations to the spirit, except in our hands clutching at each others hair. That knowledge is comforting to me. If you don’t look to force your religious opinions or your political surfeits upon others, than I will keep respect in my heart warm and welcoming and stand with you as far as possible without surrender. As long as those traps remain empty, it is not my business how you continue your life apart from me. As long as there is love there, I need not concern myself. If you choose to adopt a child and raise it, you have my utmost respect. My concerns will remain with myself and I will offer as placid a pool as possible and attempt to rinse myself of my frustrations. If you choose to raise that child into a specific lifestyle, that’s fine, as long as religion is not an excuse for intolerance. You are already braver than I. (When half a million people led by their religious leaders gather in a 21st century city to protest a law that gives opportunity for two people who love each other to raise a child, it gives me pause as to whether this is a world that I would ever want to introduce a child to.)

    I am usually complicit in the world, not comparing myself to others, for there are always be greater persons than myself in my estimation, and I make every effort to know as diverse a group of people as I possibly can. Diversity brings the new, insights and experiences that I would never have discovered had I remained wrapped in my own existence. But fundamentally, I don’t know why you like me. My mien’s been trampled, there are only a fistful of similarities left; we are on good terms with most people, we find good humour in the world, we listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. My skeleton is not made of such fine stuff as yours, it was spun messily and without comfort. I feel outdistanced.

    My employment leaves much to be desired, but I do my best when I am present, however much I would wish to be elsewhere. When I leave, I wish to leave a positive impression and a place where I remain accepted. The world is a frequently hostile place, I want to have as little negative impact as possible. If I am to raise my voice, it should be to combat intolerance and promote distinctiveness. It is my own blindness to virtue that gives me discomfort where I’m positioned, not a lack in the striving industry of local friends. I want that as clear as the happiness in your eyes when you see me smiling back at you, granting without cynicism that you are not enough for me to stay as much as I am not enough for you to leave. In my adoration is hard knowledge sharpened on ‘I should have known better’ that states with great clarity that there can always be another human being to capture me, that there are enough souls alive to capture you as well, that we can’t find ourselves alone unless we choose to be, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. I was not raised to be a child, though I had a right to be, instead I was raised to be strong in spirit. It may yet save me, but not from you. You are a piece of the universe unfolding the same way I am. It would be a gift to let go of everything I hold so tightly, but I don’t know how.

    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful.
    Strive to be happy.

    I refuse consequence.

    Sunday : working 2 – 5pm ->> 5:30 Lori, broadway stn.
    Monday : working 5 – 8pm, Korean movie night
    Tuesday :
    Wednesday: cowboy bebop 12 – 5pm, rehearsal 6:30
    Thursday : working 2 – 9pm
    Friday : working 3 – 9pm
    Saturday : working 2 – 8pm

    “The morning mists had risen long ago, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting me.”

    The body as a home. Every nail, chewed maybe, I do not know, is still a protection, a fine metaphor for weapon tipped fingers. Promises about an intent to future. We are our own checks and balances, our own inner ear and voice. Time will burn ripe without my having to think about it. This is a call to soft arms. My wrists, they crack under the weight of history, one hand a bracelet around bones, crack. This is a slight battle with having to go home. The foundations are iron but rusty. My attic is crawling with what nice people do and the traps I’ve laid down for them. One trick is to turn around in time to see the other person walk away without being caught. Otherwise sadness closes in, reminiscent of airports and long drawn out sighs on the street, as if everything should have changed while you were away for that last ten minutes. The best part is that trick is a lie, but an accepted one, like going home to comfort and safety. Stability deters the basic creature from improvisation, from evolving. Looking back only leaves part of your gaze behind you to drag like a sucking wake behind the sails of your coat and breaks the illusion of independence that pacing away like duelists kindly offers.

    I want to visit Iceland. It appears to me as beautiful beyond measure, as if the music born there were merely a representation of the stones and soil.

    a contract signed with a kiss like the x of an illiterate pirate


    powerbooklounging
    Originally uploaded by pinkbelt.
  • Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’. (original study here).
  • A proposed bill hopes to make criminals out of unmarried women in Indiana who conceive
    “by means other than sexual intercourse.”

    • I hesitated at the front of the walk, a flitting bit of pained imagination painting another woman in his bed, but I walked forward anyway. This is my place to do so, I thought, this is my entreaty, my voice, my bloody pain. I am allowed whatever I say I am. Nervously, I tapped on his window and went to the porch. I watched his confusion melt into welcome as he opened the door. “Were you knocking? Come in, please.” I settled in like I was home. The house knows who I am, it tells me hello. The other moving pieces, the western world, they like me.

    We stayed up late. Appleseed on screen and our legs eventually tangled on the couch. My knife edged feeling of assumption dulls when I see that he’s as aware of the placement of my hands as I am of his. His breathing is a give-away, a prize win understatement of I’m the right number of customers. Coughing confetti, coughing something I’m used to. I hold my hand on his chest and don’t flinch anymore. He is going to die, just like we will, but maybe quicker. In the bed he coughs too, my body holding itself rigid in sympathy, letting his body subside before relaxing back into a doll-like pool of blood and closed glass eyes, but we sleep. Our first real sleep in months.

    The morning was an adventure in boundary lines, roommates, that one’s in a housecoat yet I’m in my underwear, where’s the coffee? Fine details lined under eyes, the newsprint, oh we missed it. There’s a good write-up in here somewhere. Lean over and read. My hand sprouts a silver spoon, nothing I was born with and neither were they. The comments are complimentary, which is gentlemanly, and comfortable. Breakfast cuts itself in half to soothe the hungry hearts that exhausted themselves in the previous night while errands start to thicken out of gossiping fog. Head of the house, heed the commands. It’s too late. I’m already lying in the sun on the porch, one arm around a dismembered leg and a forbidden book page one hundred thirty-two. The neighbors look then look away and I haven’t had a chance at the internet yet.

    Sitting in the back of the minivan feels like the television expected childhood I never had. We buy chain and rope and try to find shelves, daughter to my lover, daughter to the inevitable opposite, and sister to my rockabilly friend. We let the parents bicker over music and pretend to dance, letting conversation drift. Leaves on a stream, coloured and dropped from only modern trees. The beat comes from Bollywood, the lyrics hate our guts. I buy wings at the second hand clothing store. Black ones, feathered, they scratch the air when I put them on like a record skipping sound behind me.

    The angel was unexpected. Not a dream, not entirely solid. She pulled his hair. “This was supposed to be prose, what are you doing here? Get out.” From his throat poured heterodyne modulations of voice and information static. “This paragraph can’t start with you here. I need you off my page.” His hands tore from the paper, shredding metaphor, leaving behind crumpled, stained ideas. Frustrated, she kicked them. “These are broken now. Look at the point of view! Ruined.”

    on and on until I disappear in a breathing flash of light


    disconnected
    Originally uploaded by Agnieszka.

    At the end of a tunnel, there is a violent expulsion of air from the lungs. It’s my wish, escaping.

    Alone tonight, my place in front of the computer feels both familiar and strange. The people I used to contact right now, in this sort of moment, they’re sort of inaccessible now. Relationships have shifted, contacts have changed. The reliable returned to the garden to breed some more, and my seeds are still waiting for the summer that I didn’t get to happen. Any minute now, I’ll be speeding toward a time of year the door opens and I answer the phone without feeling distracted by particles of over bit-mapped romance, but that minute is sixty seconds away and a week and a month and tomorrow. We all know that tomorrow is a trick question to a six year old, why should I be any different? My life playing on a theme, obviously I haven’t learned all there is to learn of this configuration. With all balance, there is flow. Especially flown in for me, an entire year.

    In my head, I see a girl with her hair wild above her, like fire crackling. Her eyes are barely open. Her hands are flat in her lap and the ominous piano wires from the ceiling are only connected to the very base of each of the legs of the wooden chair she sits in, not to her bones. Her feet are crossed, her toes are pointed, as if she’s remembering the crucifix. Her clear plastic skin reminds me of candy, cloudy and violet, they used to taste like flowers, but they don’t sell them anymore here. When her eyelids finally slide open, you can smell smoke. Smoke like on the edge of an ocean, late at night and haunting guitar, he used to love me, that boy, what went wrong, his name is written in the song that’s playing closer to the fire, the gold of her hair is glinting off the body of the machine.

    When I use the word “ex” as a label, I, too, think of marriages, and don’t apply it to four in the morning when my tongue speaks a language I didn’t think I knew and he rolls over and touches me, warm hands sweeping my hair out of my eyes, telling me that I’m just as important to him as I ever thought I was, but right now is separation. When morning comes, we will be comfortable, but we won’t wear that ring anymore. Instead our story will be that of something akin to lovers but not quite. A salty breeze of underneath my thighs and in between my hating what he did to me, hating myself for continuing to let him mean something to me. A thickly spoken need he coats our every solitary moment with, a dream of pretending that I didn’t break at his ethical funeral. When I use the word “ex”, I mean to describe the man who never went a week without wearing the colour red, the man who made me scream out gouts of velvet cloth in bed, who I held hands with for a stretch of time that looks like three years, that looks like a tiny piece of history that made me who I am. We stripped naked once and took pictures in the kiddy pool on our porch, the amused expression on my face is one I haven’t seen since. I still think the neighbors didn’t see. Consequence of fortitude, the man with cello hair and I don’t have anything like that. We never had a marriage, only an impending debt that has yet to be paid. Instead I refer to him as on probation, as unfinished business, as lifting my eyebrows to say he’s yet to keep up with my spit when I want twenty white knuckles.

    For a little while, this place might have read like an S.O.S. call. Deaths piling up together, a one hundred foot calm declaration of pain, until everything from early May was a mass grave, covered over by news of the weird and breakthroughs in pretty science. Glitter thrown into the air, obscuring the disease, blowing away whenever the wind pursed chilly lips to smash me into another devastating reef. I would like to think it’s changing. That natural evolution is swinging me back onto my feet, pouring water into the desiccated personality I became over summer. That recent advances in emotional medicine are evident in the words I spill here and understood to be welcome scabs over the profoundly deep well of misery that laps and erodes at my foundations. I’m beginning to taste how I used to be. The line isn’t drawing as thin between me and living, my spirit is finding a way to return from the misery land of departed teeth.

    What am I going to do with you?

    I’m sitting in china flavoured ivory silk and wondering if any intentions have coalesced into something real or even vaguely legible. There are so many undercurrents to conversations, so many tones of voice possible with which to set a scene. I could stand in my doorway and merely shrug to express how necessary the awkwardness of roommates can be or you could call me at three in the morning and not know what to say, but not need to, because the gesture was enough to remind us both that we love each other. We could dance with the idea of innocuous topics while bringing to the table everything mother told us we shouldn’t take from strangers. We could even smile (or want to) at the mention of a number overheard in passing because six by six was a room once, but none of it helps when the air from the window is cold and I am curious with no immediate answers. No invisible cowgirls swinging their hips can save me, no assumptions of data paper are forthcoming with the tiny musical ting of inkwell spurs, only your voicing of desideratum, digital or otherwise.

    I cried at the party I went to, after the burlesque show. At exactly the wrong moment, that third-of-a-second where my throat was too tight to let anything out but misery, Michael asked how I was, and I dissolved. On the porch I held a twenty minute court, curled in my coat against the dawn and an outpouring of explanation, friends at my feet and holding my hand. Earlier was amusing, a boy in the kitchen drunkenly spinning fancies of admiration and delay while he worried about something entirely different that I pushed him toward, but when it came time to go, they found me as a black cloth lump between the stove and the corner kitchen cupboard. Occupational hazard, I warrant, when I’m not very good at being betrayed. I’m much better now. I began to fix most of everything the very next day, after Nine Inch Nails.

    (Which if you listen to anyone else, was a masterpiece of sound and light and motion, but to me was reminiscent of a high-school dance, with sledgehammer subtle visuals and terrible acoustics. With all the expectation built up, I was amused to find it was a surprise to see the people on stage only half an inch tall. They’re not twice the size of mere mortals! The rest of the concert was peppered with my mind being occupied on how effects are meant to erase that and create an actual feeling of bigger than life. “This is the audience, where all the lights shine out to blind you, and we are the band, who control this glorious blaze of flash and fury with a shake of our magical hands. We all know our roles, now we are bigger, and you are going to put your hands up in unison and punch the air so the people behind you get the right silhouette.” The most beautiful thing was the BIC constellations that flickered into being at every lull. A hundred hands bravely holding shards of fire above their heads to create a mythical web of stars in darkness.)

    I remember when I was beautiful to you

    Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.” “OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!” His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands. Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

    The bottom of the world fell out beneath me when I saw you on the street. My lungs dissipated, my breath sinking out of view. I was in the wrong company to stop, with the wrong people to demand they leave me behind. I’m wide awake, wishing the lights were out, but knowing that it wouldn’t help at all. Sheer certainty makes your name a holy thing, hard in my mouth like stones on a pale horse. In between the click of my teeth against yours, there used to be rare moments of brevity. Now there is a vacuum. I am in no safe hands, there is no warming me. I told Michael the truth, that every night I wake up crying. Court was held on the front porch, a open floor on which to pour my wounded emotions. You looked away and wouldn’t speak. Instead there was a comment about speech, about thought, and then a turning around and away. I feel like I’m a symbol for every woman who stood in the street and cried out, “You don’t know what you’re doing to me.“

    I carried a sword with me to the car. Black and silver, same as my hat. Same as my jacket and pants and eyes. The strap of my bag bit into my shoulder and I winced, hitting my knee when I leaned down to drop it into the back seat. The father sat in front of me, in the drivers seat, and reminded his daughter that her ex-boyfriend is now an age where he can be legally tried as an adult for rape. I saw where his direction of conversation was going five minutes before she did, and so I put a fist to my mouth, smothering bitter laughter and looked solidly out the window where she could not see my face. I wanted to believe in something beautiful again, so I tried to remember standing on the beach in California, but all I got was the memory of feeling incredibly unattractive on the white sand of Santa Monica.

    Tomorrow is the Nine Inch Nails concert. I have a floor ticket, currently in the hands of Christopher. I feel like I should be excited, but I can’t seem to muster any enthusiasm. My hips are going to swing, it’s obvious, but there’s no spark yet. When I get there, I’ve been told, it will be inescapable, and I believe them, but that still leaves me wondering what it is that’s currently wrong with me. I am still glad to meet new people, but how burned out can a human be without losing basic functions?

    Vote a 10 for me.
    if only because Topless Jhayne would make a great name for something.

    Then download this.

    as if I knew what to say


    com asas não se abraça
    Originally uploaded by extrapolar.

    Before I looked up, I knew he was there. Oh so casually I waved, as if my skin had not just contracted. Nervous tension, the reverse of the beginning. If I could have an assurance, wear the confidence in all the places it’s not showing. I hate this waiting. My bitter tongued need for some confirmation. If I put my hand to the air and cup it, I can feel the warmth of flesh pooling there, as if my palm were a flotation device keeping me from sinking down through the floor and earth until I hit a molten sky and evaporate into cinder. Ashes, my face is painted on the inside with ashes. Soft and gray and secret, there was a promise once, a whisper, skin.

    what man is there
    who claims worthiness
    (such things)
    yet deflects driven arrows
    aimed straight through his holy heart?

    Midnight of the Equinox trapped me with dimmed lights and you never held my hand.

    My ferret tried to run away last night. We think he fell off the balcony.

    There are days when I want red lipstick. Berry flavour Rita Hayworth silent sex star glimmering red. That perfect moue of a Casablanca kiss red, the disney approximation of vamp that haunts the dreams of old executives who remember the day the princess died. Marylin never wore this red, it’s simply not for blonde’s. This red is for the ghosts of famous prostitutes, it’s for the high heeled goddesses who walk the earth and knock over preconceived perceptions with a slight flick of their tongue. It’s for I’m Leaving You written on that one spectacular mirror that was such a find at the flea market, for that smudge on the collar that tells the other woman that you’re better than them. Deep passionate blood red. The red of fingernails in an 80’s movie, a mixture of the eyes wide shut blowjob of the pretty woman and the betrayal of modern culture burning bras.

    Today isn’t one of those days, but yesterday might have been. I wanted to swim in eyes yesterday. Breathe in that comforting honey warmth that emanates from the sweetest of arsenic hearts and melts all my bones. Instead at home there’s cinnamon. A slender figure of awkward elegance, waiting to find my hand. I worry, but not very much. Lately I’ve been too tired, weary on a starvation level. Not enough calories to keep up with myself. My joints creak and snap when I move, and my head is in continual search for a pillow.

    Sunday : working 2 – 5pm
    Monday : working 5 – 8pm, Korean movie night
    Tuesday :
    Wednesday:
    Thursday : working 2 – 9pm
    Friday : working 3 – 9pm
    Saturday : working 2 – 8pm

    This weekend was your last chance to conceive if you want your baby to be born on 6/6/6.

    I knew I went down with the ship when he turned to me with a radiant smile and said, “I’m happy.”

    When his eyes looked at me and the sun caved in like a cathedral.

    I wanted to say, “when you let your hair fall down, rapunzel cried.”

    Instead I turned and walked away, beginning to choke when his hand touched my arm.

    I missed posting on September 11th, which is likely for the best, considering how dour my humour has been today. Now it is September the twelfth, and Ryan’s birthday. I found him a present in my room while I was sorting today. I’m minimizing, paring down my possessions as best I can. I want to be down to one box of miscellany, one of books, a computer, a lava lamp, and my mouse with wings by the next month. The furniture will be dealt with according to piece when the time comes. I want out of here. I’ll post what I find that can be given away. Today I threw out a colouring book from when I was young enough to have a sister still, (I was five, she was four, that story may still end with I never saw her again), and the top half of a musical china clown my father gave me when I entered kindergarten. It used to be that you would wind it and it would play The Lovers Song, sort of an Italian answer to Greensleeves.

    My city is burning. It smells a little like every neighbor I have is smoking a very chemically treated marijuana outside my window, and ash is drifting down from the sky. At first we thought it was a chemical accident, a nasty edged flame burning plastics somewhere by the water, but the internet told us otherwise. Burns Bog has caught on fire. The last time, almost ten years ago, Vancouver was blanketed in ash for two days. The methane-rich peat can smoulder underground almost indefinitely. This is especially nasty, as that’s one of our most protected pieces of wild preserve. It’s rather essential to our local environment. For one, it’s where almost all of our crows live. They commute every morning to scatter over the city and gather every evening to fly back in an immense trail of flapping black. They’re beautiful.