They did not sit together. Next to, but not together. In the inky darkness they sat sweating in the late night noon, with the moon marking the starting point, directly above them where the line separating them started. An inch apart, maybe less. Maybe it was only the width of a single half truth and the denial of insult that kept her fluorescent leg from his. The poles of their misunderstanding pushed against one another, maintaining that malignant inch.

But they sat, hamburgers in hand, their discontent in the distance being soaked into the hungry bleached wood of a neglected picnic table, and did not waver. She shifted her shoulders to the left, banishing them further into the night air. She suffered this awkward position for the latent hope that it was the proximity that allowed the salt from his summer solstice face to burn the scratches laced across her pride, but not quite to scorch them beyond repair. But a woman's body will not lie and before she could think, before she could turn away the honeyed estrogen which would make her shift to him again, the moon to the earth, her shoulders had realigned themselves with her betraying hips, and closer still, the depth of a breath was between her shoulder and his. Splayed, parenthetical, she was curved toward him and in an unholy half second of negligence their heads might touch and her merry lie would be forfeit.

“Tell me a story.” She said. She would not ask. Every word must be more brazen now than ever, so that she might seem unashamed under the scornful gaze of her rejection. The need must be squelched, and the indignant flame quenched.

“Ok. You have to just believe it though.” He opened his hands like a book, comparing them, and then made a cup of them, the top two joints of his fingertips overlapping. He looked into them as if by will the very lines on his hands would magnify and he could read the story from them; and then he did. His words came out like the echoing of his heartbeat through his larynx quavering it's way through the desert air; the even rhythm of a slow reader trying to learn his favorite story.


His identity was comprised of this story and his creator had raveled it round and round into the circles of his fingerprints so that it could be packed along without hindrance into the very fires of hell. And it seemed as if a gypsy had read his palm, she might have begun as he did, and read it the same from start to finish. The cadence of his voice said that in his tomb his creator would come again, cup his hands as they were now, and read him this last bedtime story scrawled on his own skin.

In the silence that followed, the hours, and years, she dreamed of taking a single cell from his fingers or his tongue and amplifying it with God's own ears, as he does not appear to be listening anyway, and being sung to sleep each night by the humble back-patthing rhythm. And she loved him a little, in a faraway way, because he then spoke a simple truth.


He talked into the air, still reading from the tablet of his cupped hands, but for no one else but her, of a young boy, 16, who mowed the lawn. That was all. Of a moth that was injured and had to be moved from branch to branch so as not to be disturbed, and as it was cupped in those brown hand-tablets etched this magical story in them. Of a moth which had to be helped, in tender, small hands, whom the hunger of a spider had grounded. Of eaten wing tips, which could no longer catch the air.

And she sat letting her spider-eaten cynic heart lament uselessly flapping wings. It was a short story. All of three minutes he spoke, still with that slowness. When he said at the end of his tale that he sat on the steps to his house, with a tiny body flanked by spun smoke strung across the faintest floss in his hands, she froze. She feared so deeply that he would crush it, and put it out of it's misery, because the world is not full of flown away moths and the joyful reconciliation of broken wings and the air which would not carry them brokenly.

But he spoke of sitting. Of watching. Of holding. Simple, small, hopeful, dreamwords which were so far from her own troubled days. And then, she cringed at the ending, almost as much as she might have cringed had he forcibly ended the moth's sorrow.

He sat with her, until he watched her fly away. And in the honest percussion of every word, she felt her whole self tremble with fear at the juxtaposition of so much hope and the tiny breath of a chance that such a hope might be fulfilled.

 And in the story she heard his lie about not wanting her for what it was, she heard the truth of his hope for her chasing behind each clopping word like a child crying after a parade horse, but there was nothing she could do. The breath of similar polarity remained between their shoulders. Her curls did not brush his arms. And still, they could not sit together, despite the magic mothwing happy ending. The lie had been set loose, and it eclipsed the happy truth.

happy friday!

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

I'll be back on monday, with something with a little more me in it.

these messes i'm making

there is pinot noir on my ceiling.

last night, when the corkscrew snapped off the bottle opener, leaving me with both an irremovable cork and screw, I couldn't let things lie.

It's not enough, you see, to throw up my hands and say I tried.

So I shoved the cork back in the other way, 

and Emily and I,
we drank crunchy red wine by the fire.

This is all to say, I'm ready to give it another go.
And I'll be having my wine one way or another.

“There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter”

john steinbeck

I am, at this moment, in that forbidden room.
And for the sake of it, 

for the sake of me,
I'm taking a break from the blog.

A break from the burning desire for validation I lay at it's feet,

a break from trying to lay feelings bare

which are not yet big enough to face this big bad world.

So I'm taking a break,
a day,
a week,
a month.
I don't know.
But I'll be back.

to burn away my shame
i'd jump from the highest cliffs
leap from the highest towers
into a sky aflame and raging with sea-blue
redemption.
i would soar before my fall,
and fly
too close to the sun.

you would see my
silhouette.
the impression
of a girl that could be,
of a nimble if
a might have been
that navigates the sky
so easily;
she uses the changing clouds
the sagging cotton skies
as beacons marking the way,
using the course of the wind
to lead her home.
you would see the black of me
undisturbed by the light
the darkest parts of me
an underbelly aglow
unbroken by laughter,
and
with no such golden child to compare it to
that shadow of a me
would break your heart
with the purity of it's wrongness.

i would be an angry bruise
against and aging sun
high on the heady fumes
of a million extinguished dreams
drunk to the point of belligerence
from sipping at the steady fountain
of prayers,
constantly running between
the ancient rotting terra firma
and that place called the Promised land.
an endless stream of fermented hope
refined, strained, and steeping,
stewed to an alcoholic tar
aged by the distance
between every human heart and his Creator.

i promise this to you,
sometime between the last instant
of toe on ground stability
between the moment i leapt for my
penance
and the time when
bare foot bleeding
skin peeling
nerves screaming
from the burning off of my pain
and the dissolution of my self-pity;
between the time i take flight,
and that ever unsure landing,
whether a sad last thud,
or at a screeching run
with fists and hair flying,
heart humbled and backbone mended,

Whether into the ground or across it i land,
somewhere, between takeoff and letdown,
i will forgive,
i will have burned within myself,
incinerated in the fires of my sudden
short-lived bravery:
my past,
the memory, the marker of my life,
and will have dropped it's ashes
across the oceans.

and in the hands of another
whether fate
Gravity
or Something greater
will be the verdict,
the passing down of a sentence.
the great decider,
the judge of all things
will spew forth the terms of my indictment,
and i might only pray that it rain down on me
run over and through me,
touching every crack
and dry spot,
and stick fast to me
a baptism in punishing healing hoping stinging honey.
only He will tell,
the angry bellowing Future,
prodding me to take my turn,
He
will say
will weigh my penance
my leap
my tears and my singed face
against all i have done.
and whether i will land, or whether i will crash
I will be the bard that brings forth the tale,
and strumming, humming,
scarred and shivering
I will bear witness to all.

this is a lazy blog. :) an old poem i found, because it's the end of the semester and I'm roommate hunting, life reorganizing, brain straightening, and the world appears to be spinning very fast.

i'm waiting

"The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too."”

salman rushdie

the satanic verses

so maybe not yet. 

maybe today wasn't the day for the wonderful thing.

maybe the wonderful thing is waiting for me to hold up my end.

but one of these days, man

happiness is gonna hit me like a train.

and every morning?

getting out of the bed?
dotting the i's ---crossing the infinite t's?

every day is training.

to make sure i'm ready to take all that annihilating joy

and let it crush all my fear.

that's what i think.

funnier ways to put off writing your philosophy paper (because i still had 10 minutes)

boot) stop using numbers to demarcate sequence, make up your own sequential device and piss on millenia of mathematical progress. boot comes before one. the end.

car) realize that creating your own sequential devise is a perfect demonstration of conceptualism, and that you actually ARE using philosophy and use that to rationalize spending even more time blogging, because you are getting "warmed up for your paper"

nugget) realize that getting warmed up for your paper is a very important process which you have neglected far too often in the past, and suppose that it might greatly improve your writing skills.

pantaloon) attempt to stretch your brain, fingers, and wrist muscles in preparation for this epic writing journey

nerfherder) let wrist stretching lead to body stretching, which leads to side cramp because you ate WAY too many almonds and did not wait an hour before physical exertion.

proctologist) hold your belly and moan lightly while typing a blog about procrastination. realize, while typing blog, that the word wrist is positively absurd, and needs a sixth letter because it looks naked and vulnerable and wrong.

pork) begin to mentally philosophize about nakedness and vulnerability in human beings and the universal need to protect them.

bandoleer) become distraught because you have realized that you are philosophizing, and obviously warmed up and should probably start your paper.

598)  seek counsel from your goldfish about angst, but realize that there is an epic youtube video where some guy freaks out over world of warcraft and realize that staring at other people's problems is wayyyy better than paying attention to your own.



10) realize that can never be your life, stop talking to your goldfish, begin using real numbers again, do not think about naked wrists, and chastely begin your paper, which is due in 12 hours.

zeus help me.