Familiar/Strange

Too wet and gusty to do what I had planned for the day, and so I sit and sip cappuccino, eat fancy pastry for breakfast. Dashing, umbrella-covered, from tube station to museum. I love museums in general, and especially when they contain a lot of solid objects -- sculpture, silver relics, jewels. I find myself sometimes painting-weary, but a case filled with tiny bits of shining wonder always fascinates. There is a room filled with tapestries, floor to ceiling, vast. It smells of chemicals and stale air -- climate and acid and everything else controlled, to help with preservation. It is dizzying, staring up at these -- and even when the aesthetics leave something (or even much) to be desired, the thought of all the hours, all the labor, going into this makes each tiny thread a miracle. All afternoon in several museums, and suddenly I am exhausted in a way that falls on me like bricks. But it is too late, now, to return to my hotel and rest -- so I halfway doze on the train, and numbly make my way upstairs to the main station, where someone waits for me.

We go for coffee, nearby -- for in two hours I am meeting someone else for a drink, in this same station -- and sit and talk. So jarringly tall, in person, (and oh, so young!) but otherwise familiar. Yawning extravagantly, and I apologize repeatedly -- two late nights and so much walking and not enough sleep and I am ready to curl into a ball on the floor and never wake up. Laughing and talking, and suddenly it is nearly two hours later and I need to rush off. He walks me back to the station, and we stand around while I wait for the man I'm supposed to be meeting -- and it occurs to me, suddenly, that I am not at all convinced I will recognize him. I am not at all consistently able to translate people-as-they-are-in-photographs into people-as-they-are-standing-before-me. The camera skews, or lacks...something. And indeed, finally a man who had been standing nearby approaches and tentatively says my name. (I wasn't expecting you to be here with anyone, so it took me a few minutes...) Hugs goodbye, pull his cheek down to my lips for a kiss, and off we go, to a nearby pub. He gets a bottle of wine without asking me, and though I tell him I can only have one glass, he keeps pouring and I end up with half the bottle. So when I leave -- already later than I ought to be -- I am also tipsy and giggling. He finds this amusing (and I am the strangest encounter he's had, it seems).

Arrive, still slightly numb and off-center, at the station where I'm supposed to meet you, and realize that there are four -- or even more than that -- possible exits you might be, and I don't know which one you're at and here I am, half-drunk and phone-less. Walk down the block and find a phone box, and when I get you on the phone I try to tell you where I am, exactly. And I'm a bit drunk, too... (For let it never be said I don't know how to make a first impression.) After all this stress and change-of-plans, and all these months, it is a strange relief to meet you. You are -- and this is also a relief -- so easy to be with, in person, in the same space. You take me to dinner, somewhere ridiculously posh, expensive. The food is phenomenal (and I have eaten so well, this trip). And there is more wine. Though when we leave, hours later, I am clear-headed sober. And when I tell you I have unlocked the mystery of your appeal, and what it is, you smile and say I said that once before -- before we ever met -- although you still don't know (and didn't then) to whom I am comparing you. (And maybe that, itself, explains it all.)

Gin & Stolen Spoons

Dim sum for lunch with him, and after almost a year, he is just as much a mystery as when we first met. Plays life like a piano, never lingering for more than an instant on any one note. We walk, for a long time -- bitter wind and too many people crowding the sidewalks. Stopping to read real estate notices in huge picture windows -- and who can live for 5,000 pounds per week? I cannot even wrap my brain around that as a concept.

In the afternoon, I change hotels -- the new one smaller and older and much less impressive, but still cozy in an enveloping sort of way. Phone calls and half of an old movie on televsion; an hour of exhausted sleep -- for every ride I take on the Tube, if I manage to get a seat, I sink into almost-sleep. And I realize, waiting for a train, what I love most about this transit system (aside from it being so easy to navigate that even I can find my way, each time) is the total lack of imposed schedule. No timetables, no Too Late And Wait Another Hour. So you miss a train -- wait five minutes. There is always a second chance. What would it be like, to feel always so completely free from schedules, limits?


We have Indian food, late -- both enamored of our waiter. Tangled discussions explaining the nuances of strange or underused adjectives. (And pungent is not the ideal description to have on a restaurant menu, really.) After, I walk too far in the wrong direction, unable to find a certain bar. I have to, finally, stop into another bar, to ask directions (which I cringe to do, as it seems unbearably gauche...but necessary) and a man standing at the bar, paying for his drink, asks me if I am there with a large group seated within view. I tell him no, that I am trying, actually, to find a nearby place -- and so he half-drunkenly tries to look up directions for me, on his phone. So overtly and not-too-soberly flirting, but in a way that somehow manages to charm. He cannot get his phone to cooperate, so when his friend walks up to us, he asks her to help. It takes her several tries, but finally she pulls up a map, explains very clearly how to get there.


Cold night, and my feet are sore. Down to a small basement room, the music loud -- and I sip gin & tonic, waiting (this is new, this sudden fondness for gin -- years of dislike, and my palate has shifted, pleasing). When he appears at the bottom of the stairs, nine months is minutes. Still so shockingly tall, hands so large. We should not, by any logic, like each other at all. Not really. I am too familiar -- hand to the back of his neck, fingertips tracing the veins on the backs of his (so astoundingly huge) hands. I make you uncomfortable, I know -- in ways you think are, perhaps, good for you (though you will not, I am certain, repeat the night we spent before.) But for now, at least, another drink -- and then wandering through midnight streets, leaning into your arm. We find a small cafe, still open. Sit out in the chill night air, under a sort of heat lamp. Stare at people as they pass. I pocket my coffee spoon, checking so obviously around me to ensure that no one sees that you immediately notice and laugh at me. (This small strange habit I have, but I would make a dreadful thief in real life because I am so incredibly paranoid, neurotic.) Your tweed jacket scratchy against my hand, and I smile big against your shoulder, so solid. Late, very late, and nothing remains open after 2:00am on a Sunday. I find a taxi, and we kiss -- hard and fleeting -- standing in the street. And then I say good night, and you are once more gone (but I hold that kiss tightly, still).

Flying & Dancing Elephants

The city is grimy, it leaves me feeling coated, constantly, by a layer of grit. Blow my nose like ashes, soot. (And yet this does not bother me, it isn't so terribly unpleasant -- or at least, not as unpleasant as it ought to be.)

Crammed between two strangers, and nine hours -- ten -- becomes forever.

Finally arriving -- pale and wrung-out -- in Amsterdam, rushing to catch the next flight, and surprisingly although there was no time at all, there was plenty of time. Wedged between two more strangers, but this time the man on my left is totally compelling in a quiet way. Staring at his tie, and I ask him if it is tiny frogs all over it, which makes him laugh at me -- No, panthers! But I have never seen such amphibious-looking panthers. We talk, and then he dozes and I read, relaxing into my head and the warmth of his thigh pressed up against my own. There are strange and public moments of intimacy, sometimes, between people with no connections at all; in the right moment, the right internal space, I savor them like sips of wine.

Several trains into the city, up to my obscenely nice hotel room. Tea, shower, collapse into unconsciousness for several hours. Then dressed again, and wrapped in my coat and scarf -- outside the streets are shining in the dark beneath light rain, falling down like sparks. The trains are over-full, over-hot -- I feel surrounded by every single person in the city. Walking down shadow-wet streets, up stone stairs, into the cathedral -- candle glow and echoes of a thousand footsteps. Sitting in the back, in the corner -- eyes closed, muscles still. Floating in the web of voices, lifted. And maybe I don't connect to anything they are singing to, or for, or of -- but I believe in the overwhelming pause they bring to me. And for today, right now, that is enough.

I meet you on a crowded sidewalk in the rain -- happy planned coincidence finds you here while I am here, both sometime-strangers in this place (though I will be there, in your city -- my sometime home -- next week, as well). You lead me through a maze of twists and corners until I stop paying any attention at all to where we're heading or ending up. The tiny vegan cafe is noise-filled, people-filled, filled with warmth and light. We share a table with random people, talk low-voiced and in a language no one else around us probably speaks, anyway. The first thing I have eaten since the lousy airplane food, and it restores me to myself immediately. We walk into the night, sit on cushions in a dim and incensed Moroccan place -- drink sweet mint tea and eat small, honey-soaked bites of pastry. We talk for hours -- back to mostly English, now, and this lets my brain unspool.

You see things others miss, and when I sit here, palm resting on your wrist, eyes smiling into yours, I feel drunk with gratitude -- and all these years of drifting in and out, losing and finding ourselves again...but here we are, quietly laughing in a lovely room. (And you make my small blue elephant belly dance to the music playing in the background, and this alone was worth the trip.)

Stop To Think

I let things happen, sometimes (or more often than I even realize), without thinking -- reckless, heedlessly. It is an extreme I wildly swing towards and rest suspended, briefly -- before falling dizzy back to my usual place of too-much thinking every little thing. It's funny, actually, that someone who spends so much time locked into thought-spirals, neurotic, obsessing...funny how I let these things unfold, eyes shut, no planning through.

But then, at times, I all at once stop and start to think, again -- and then I have these massive Oh Shit moments engulf me like a lit match to gasoline. It's the pausing, the interlude of rest, that does it. When there is momentum built -- when it is all just eyes closed, running into nowhere, forward, ignoring the potential step-tripping anything and sailing off the edge of here -- there isn't time to think, or second-guess, or wonder. All smooth-sailing and reflexive motion and not even the idea of soft landings, later on -- no landings at all, just glide and float and never touch the ground again. (And in cartoons, when someone walks right off a cliff and doesn't realize, it isn't until that split-second pause of dawning comprehension -- eyes wide, look down, and light bulb over head -- that they fall, stone-heavy and once more slaves to silly things like gravity and logic.)


This time two days from now I will be flying far away from here (too short a time, but still at least some time not here or now). I think of him, and long moments spent pressed up against his chest, quiet -- warm city street embraces. (I dread, already, parting once again.) It hits me that I'll miss you, while I'm gone (and this leaves me feeling something not quite quantifiable). And now, today, some things that had been set in motion -- without any pesky thinking getting in the way -- have shifted, changed. And this not-enormous deviation was just enough to slow me down inside my head, just slightly...gave my thoughts time to eat away at any calm assurances I had established, tenuous. Sometimes it feels impossible to trust in things or people or anything at all (and I'll slice my self open for a stranger, but I still can't put my plans in someone else's hands). But once you look down and you're aware that you could fall (that you will, that not falling is impossibility) it's too late and there is no going back. And after that, it's all stress rushing to make other plans, last-minute changes -- things that leave me twisted up in knots and tensed; what was excitement turns to hollow sick anxiety (he asks me, every time I see him, Where is your fear? but I find it often is intangible, unnamable -- hiding somewhere deep inside, insidious -- not able to be grasped).

Sitting, staring out the windows -- dull pewter water, grey cotton skies (remind myself to breathe, deliberate.) And everything will work itself out, in the end (I will say this even if I don't believe it). Imagining your hand, palm resting warm against the middle of my back (breathe out, slow) and maybe possibilities seem possible (your warmth an open doorway in the locked room of my mind).

Shimmery

Sometimes, to talk about something can only make it smaller, diminished, nothing much at all; sometimes there is so much overflowing that the words just spill out, heedlessly. (If I were a cat, right now, I would stretch, languorous, and never stop purring.) Though you are the feline one, of the two of us -- lithe and sinewed and muscles shifting beneath the surface. I could drink your kisses dry, and still be thirsty, craving more -- and at the same time, even one single kiss leaves me replete. Strange, to feel both warm and satisfied and still desire-filled and grasping. To be with you, like this -- darkness and bare flesh and so-warm candlelight embraces, fingertip and palm and mouth and skin as soft as shadows -- it is like floating, suspended, in warm milk (it is like having embers glowing in my chest).

Peeling away the layers, cloth filled with holes and worn soft, like skin -- there is a joy in this that leaves me, at one point, choking with laughter, breathless. (And only stupid people like cute things, most often -- or so you try explaining -- caught up in a tangle of That-isn't-what-I-meant and circular hilarious reworkings.) Unusual, me -- with my owls and bunnies, elephant watching over everything, wrap the world in shiny paper and ribbon and give it away to itself to open later. (Where is my explanation for this? Perhaps that I was not good -- but not at all -- at being a child when I was one, and so now, as an adult, I am simply making up for things that weren't.)

You let me want and want and want you without needing; you let me love you without obligation. There are infinite gratitudes I would pour over you like water, annoint you with them -- a soft touch here, and once more there. But they overwhelm me before I can even really begin, and so I'm left with words, inadequate. Drops of honey melting on my tongue.


Middle of the night, and I fall asleep heavy and entire in too-warm blanketed silence -- waking hours later, first bird-calls and dark blue light seeping through windowpanes, to wash my face and brush my teeth, and then get back in bed (and stretch, and purr), close my eyes, and wrap my thoughts around you like arms.

(Un)Covered

Walking home from the hospital, I find myself directly behind a pair of women, deep in conversation. I watch them, free to stare without apology -- one of them is instantly forgettable, made even more so because my focus is so consumed by the other. There are certain people, who might be extremely attractive, in passing, or perhaps completely average and only halfway-there, hardly a blip on your radar -- but, upon second glance, it is immediately apparent that they possess their true power, total magnetism, when naked. It is a quiet shock, always, to encounter someone like this -- for me, it happens rarely. I prefer, in general, people wearing clothes -- some clothes. Half-dressed, perhaps -- or even largely undressed -- but still partially, vaguely, hidden. This is, in large part, because I am so easily visually overwhelmed, my focus quickly shattered by too much all at once. I need to have smaller and discrete moments to concentrate on; to take in the whole big picture all in one swallow becomes too much. But looking at this woman, it seemed an immediate and complete shame that she was covered by anything at all -- I walked just steps behind her, for blocks, studying the curves of her legs and hips, the lines of her back and shoulders. The way she held her head, her neck. I imagined her, unclothed and splendid, for the rest of my walk home, after turning down a different street and walking away from her. I hold the image, still, inside my head.


It's a backwards kind of day -- it starts out dark as evening, heavy grey-black clouds and wind and then, mid-day, the sky clears and the water calms. It's cold, though, still -- it smells like the promise of winter, already (and last year at this time I wasn't even wearing a coat outside, just a worn and thick-knit sweater, scarves wound many times around my neck) -- it will be, I think, a long and very cold season, and the thought does not displease me in the least.


Now that I don't take seizure meds each day, I no longer carry my plastic day-of-the-week pill container around; when I get to the hospital, I realize I have no panic pills with me, and it leaves me tense. The Infusion Center waiting room is packed, and I sit for over half an hour, restless, drinking tea. So crowded that, for the first time in a long while, I share a room with someone else -- a woman on the other side of a half-drawn curtain, watching loud obnoxious talk shows on the television across the room. I have the male nurse who takes himself too seriously, I don't have any pills to calm me down, the lights are over-bright and the television too loud -- I sense, with every passing second, this other woman sharing space with me, and I sit, uncomfortable, unable to relax. At least, he hits my vein on the first try, slides in the IV with no problem, gets his vials of blood in moments. My bruise today is small; it makes me think of sunsets. One of the lights above me, in the ceiling on my half of the room, is nearly dead -- it flickers off and on in a just-random-enough pattern to be completely distracting irritating. Keyed up and disjointed, I try to read (my concentration, lately, is almost nonexistent). The other woman finishes her treatment, leaves -- but then my nurse decides he wants to use the room to do his charts and paperwork, and so he sits at the computer in the center of the room, typing, occasionally talking in my direction. But I am trying so hard to ignore the fact of anyone else at all that I can't respond with more than vague short one-word answers. Eventually (finally) he leaves...but then a different nurse -- she's very sweet, and knows me, and I am glad to see her (and not just because anyone else but him would have been a relief) -- brings in another patient to occupy the now-empty chair on the other side of the room. This woman has a strange and nasal voice -- too high-pitched and drone-y for her face -- and talks, ceaselessly, to the nurse as she gets her prepped and set up with whatever drugs she is there to receive. Impossible to tune her out, her words cut through my ears like tiny blades. Time passes slowly -- I cannot concentrate; I cannot sleep. I am not settled, properly, inside my head, and I feel weird and disconnected from my body, like I am halfway floating and halfway deeply sunk inside myself. Unpleasant.


The sweet young nurse lets me go early, even though I still have 15 minutes left of saline drip -- it's late, they've been so busy, she wants to clear us out of there, I think (and I am grateful for it). The grey latex gloves she wears are much too large. I comment, as I watch her fingers undoing the IV -- pulling the tube out of my arm, applying bandages -- that either her hands are tiny tiny things, or else her gloves are absurdly large. She laughs, light and musical, and says the gloves are just too big -- If I was putting the IV in, I would go and get the proper size, but to take it out it isn't so important. Many nurses, there, tear the tip off the index finger of their gloves, so they can adequately feel your veins -- the hidden pulse beneath your skin -- when taking blood, inserting IV tubes. It seems, to me, to defeat the purpose, rather. I asked someone about this, once -- she said it was most definitely against the rules (but everybody does it). They aren't so worried, in this context, about blood-contact. Other places in the hospital -- the ER, for one -- they must be more uptight (or, at least, I think I would be).

It's cold out, when I leave, and dark -- thin glass-brittle evening cold; look closely and I see my breath when I exhale. I don't feel like I'm truly in my body, as I walk -- I pay attention to my steps, try to relax into my skin, but everything is just a bit off-center. Sometimes everything seems unreal, like endless dollhouse scenes, or movie sets -- back-lit and too-much focused. I'm here but not, like I'm a hologram, projected on a screen. I write letters, in my mind, that I will never send, and pull my scarf up higher on my throat against the chill. Watching the woman walk in front of me, I clear out every other thought and fixate only on the idea of her skin, invisible. As real-unreal as everything, and (like so much else) just out of reach.

Scarred

Walking home from work, and it is already dark -- listening to the rain beat down on my umbrella, and the pavement all puddles of wet glowing neon traffic light mirrors. This is the best walk home, scarf-bundled and coat-wrapped, half-jumping over the biggest puddles, fingers reaching out to touch the cold.

You flit about the edges of things, now, and it makes me ache -- brief messages, wanting to talk, but then...silence. So long without you, and now this halfway almost-but-not-quite rips me to pieces, slowly. I think of you often, and always with a smile -- and what, then, does it mean that when I stop and let myself truly think of you, for more than fleeting moments, it almost always makes me cry?

I pick at things -- I have such repulsive little habits; I shred my cuticles, peel away dry calloused skin from off my feet. I pick at scabs -- I'll pull a scab away ten times before I let small wounds completely heal -- or minute blemishes and irritated spots. This is, I think, simply a way of making inside-my-head and outside-my-head match up; I pick at thoughts the same way, ceaseless and obsessive.

Walking in the dark, in the rain, I can clear my head of so too-many things -- to be a stranger, no one, in the night, umbrella-muffled, is a gift. The city noise recedes into a background hum of ocean, washing over me but not quite touching. Someone asked, the other day, why I so enjoy going down on lovers -- if it is simple oral fixation, or if I find it pleasure in itself, or is it power (but power -- he corrected -- is not the quite-right word). And it is all of those things, I told him -- but power is the wrong word, although it is something very like it. Not power in the sense of In Control, but more like in the sense of Being Responsible. It is an almost-holy thing (or at least, it is for me) to hold somebody's pleasure entirely in your hands. It is a gift, like walking faceless through the nighttime city in the rain.

So maybe you're a wound that never heals, because the itch to open you again, each time you start to stitch yourself up tight, is too seductive overpowering to resist. The lesson here is...what? That you're the one who caused the tear, but I'm the one who leaves the scar.

Storms & Silence

The other night, just before midnight, the sky cracked open and my chest resonated with it -- lightning, thunder. Windswept hail clattering against the windowpanes, and rain so hard it could be heard, even, over the wind. I thought, briefly, about getting dressed, pulling on rainboots and wrapping up and going out to let the rain wash over me -- but the violence of the hail, rattling the windows, gave me pause. And by the time the hail had stopped, and only the wind and rain were left, the moment had passed, the craving to rush out into it was no longer there (or no longer irresistible) and so I curled into the blankets and pillows, in the dark, and listened to the sky fall down around me, just inches away, through a whisper of glass and walls that aren't so solid as we think they are.


I made a ridiculous pot of noodles, early in the week -- ridiculous in size -- and it has taken me all week, until tonight, to eat my way through them, one large bowl each night for dinner. There is, now, just one bowl left -- dinner tomorrow, and then no more. I will make soup this weekend, and then spend the next 5 days -- or more, or less -- dipping into it each evening. I have not yet figured out how to cook reasonably for just me. It's so much easier to cook a lot and then just eat it until it's boring, and then not want it anymore until much later, when I cook it again -- and after so long without, am happy enough to keep eating it for days until...suddenly, I'm not. (And happily, this running out of patience for some dish in particular generally manages to coincide with finally finishing the lot of it.) When I lived with someone else, cooking, anyway, was easier to manage -- one would think that I could just adjust amounts and have a better plan...but really, I'm just lazy, and I don't want to cook something new every night (or even every other night) and so this method (or lack of method) is stupid, but it suits me.


I reach a certain level of tired, sunk deep into cellular-level exhaustion, and I feel it as a dull ache against my temples. Feel it like mildly seasick floating detachment -- far away and way down deep inside. It is pushing and pulling and hot and cold and numb and exquisitely painful, almost on the edge of pleasant -- a weird see-saw between sick-making and sublime. Sometimes I don't want to give into it, but instead just wrap it tight around me, stretch my toes out to it, one by one. Hang there, in between, indefinitely. (But then, suddenly -- always, always -- the almost-pleasure stops and it crumbles into leaden poisonous feelings of contamination, pulls me under. I remember how I used to go for days entirely without sleep, without rest, and I wonder how I survived it.) Sometimes -- last night -- this ends in me waking up at 3:00am, still wearing glasses, television screen glowing nothing but the blank end of a film or book spread open against my chest, fuzzy-edged and confused in the dark.

The rain fell all morning, while I stayed in bed, lights off, listening to the radio and drinking tea. The sky is quiet, now -- just quiet slow-motion city, grey and cold. Perfect. Silent walking through wet pavement, leaf-soaked puddles, and the wind against my chest like bricks. A woman I know, in the vaguest of ways, called me this morning, asked me to stop by her work. She gave me a book and we sat in her office and talked -- her doctor is not helping her, and her medication isn't fixing things, and she doesn't know how to explain to anyone around her how things feel inside her body, trapped. We talk about the kinds of people we feel like punching in the face, and laugh; it's difficult enough to describe strange chronic illness to people who live with it (nearly impossible to qualify for those who don't). I want to fold her up inside my chest and hold her, safe and still, for just a moment. There are times when I can overflow with Give (and these, perhaps, make up for all the times when I feel myself a giant sponge of Need).

Cold wind, raindrops, and the air smells of leaves and wet and grey-tinged perfume and to walk in it is to walk through a thousand ghosts (or have them pass through you) and I stop, breathe in. Fingers twisted in my pockets, key in a lock -- exhaling my way through a doorway, out of the sky, into the warm glow of evening.

Magnetic Imaging

I love riding the bus at night. In fact, I love taking the bus in general; I've always had a fondness for public transportation -- buses, trains, subways (airplanes being the one major exception to this, as I hate flying with intensity). But the bus at night, when outside it's dark and all the world is glowing neon liquid mirrored reflections -- it is an Other place, an in-between. Magic floating Nowhere. I can sleep, always, in any kind of moving vehicle -- when I used to take the bus to and from work each day I would fall asleep, like clockwork, halfway through each trip, come close to missing my stop nearly every time. I am a terrible car-trip companion, because more than 15 minutes in a moving car and my internal rhythms shift into sleep-mode, eyelids weighted -- there is nothing that can keep me fully conscious when I start to sink into this place, slow and irresistible. Mental, physical quicksand.

Perhaps my sleep at night would be less fractured if my bed -- or my apartment -- was equipped with wheels, a motor. Zooming through the night beneath me while I dream. The idea of a motorhome has always held a strong appeal -- perhaps because of this? It seems like the idea of being stuck inside one place -- the thought of owning a house, being committed to one patch of land indefinitely forever -- is so abhorrent in my waking life, it carries over into sleep without my knowing.

But being nowhere, in-between -- this has always always seemed so preferable to being Somewhere. This rootlessness, detachment -- it comes from somewhere, or it must (but where, I couldn't say).

And yet, I would be an unsuccessful Buddhist -- I love Stuff. And things. They thrill me, please me, make me smile. I get attached to objects in deeply-rooted, central and unshakable ways (I don't see this as a problem, either, if I'm being honest). And people -- I am so attached to certain people, there aren't words enough to tell it. But so much else finds me obscenely detached, distant -- leaves me cold.

Out having dinner, last night, a man suddenly walked into the restaurant and back to a table full of people in the corner -- stood beside them and began to yell at them, swearing, and then stormed out with a final and decisive Fuck you! Everyone stopped and watched them -- they all seemed stunned -- and finally someone leaned over and asked if they knew the man who had done the yelling; they all shook their heads, bewildered. No, he just...kind of showed up and... There seemed to be a lot of that going on, yesterday -- nervous energy crackling through the streets, and people shouting and swearing at themselves, or nobody at all. A general loud unease. While waiting for the bus, in the dark, I stared up at the moon, weird and lovely pearl, caught behind the grasping lace of tree limbs -- and perhaps that was pulling all the crazy to the surface, tidal rushes of screaming internal chaos. As if there is some lunar magnet drawing all our hidden filings of insanity to itself, some sort of senseless magic trick.

The night is all cool wind bared branch moonglow darkness, and the bus speeds through the city, sheltering me safe within Nowhere, not here or there or anywhere at all. My eyes reflected in the window are still and dark, and it allows me to pretend that inside my head I am quiet, still, as well. I am already not here (and not yet there), and everything feels gentler when seen reflected in the dark.

Being Overheard

It's useless to pretend there's no one there, now. And so, I guess -- hello.

When I started this little bit of nonsense, almost a year ago, it was because of somebody specific. Having spent a bit of time exchanging words, sending him big open pieces of myself, the whole thing abruptly and completely shattered, and suddenly there was nobody there to send my words to. But he would tell me, always, that I should really write somewhere -- in some invisible place inside the internet. And the idea made me laugh. But then he was gone, and I was frozen, and so I started this as maybe a sort of open letter to someone who wasn't there. And then it became an endless open letter -- to myself, to people who would never see it, to nobody.

I never wrote for an audience, and now the fact of one tends to leave me perplexed and sometimes disconcerted. One might question why, in that case, I don't just type in Word documents, scribble in a notebook, talk to myself quietly inside my head. It has something to do with things being more Real, somehow, when I know there is a possibility of them being overheard. It is, I think, the difference between feeling badly about something you've done, and telling someone that you're sorry to their face. It is the thing that compels people into little booths in churches, to confess themselves to faceless men -- when really, the same thing could be accomplished with a bit of silent prayer, or one would think. And so, I write out loud, quiet one-sided conversations in the midst of crowded public places -- but I don't direct my words towards anyone, I do not write them with intent, or not in that way. I don't write to be read, is what I mean, I write...to write, I guess. To talk to myself, mostly. There are some people I know who read these words, and some of them can find themselves inside of them (and they mostly know it, or they should). Most, though, of the Yous I write at or about, most of them will never see any of this (and that certain knowledge leaves me free to pour myself out through my fingertips).

For some people, I know, doing things is meaningless unless the things are somehow received, consumed, appreciated. People write so that others will read the things they wrote; artists paint pictures with a view to them hanging on a gallery wall, in someone's home -- but probably not as much so that they can complete the painting and then, I don't know, store it away in a warehouse somewhere, unseen. People want recognition, they want approval, they want praise -- and of course I am a people, too, and so I hunger after all of these same things, in my way -- but that isn't what I look to get out of writing things (and especially not out of the bullshit nonsense kind of writing that I do here -- not that I do any non-bullshit nonsense writing, I mean...all of my writing is some combination of those two things and none of it is so very fine and praise leaves me feeling more perplexed and sometimes even almost angry than it does anything).

You asked me, tonight, if I like writing, and I couldn't give you a proper answer to that very simple question. Because in truth, I don't know. The concept of liking or not liking does not apply to this part of my life -- it isn't an activity that centers around pleasure, or even displeasure. It is a reflexive response, perhaps, to a very specific sort of internal itch. It is a pull, or even a vague kind of need. But it is not a pasttime, or a hobby, or a burden, or a joy. I don't think that is a bad thing (and I don't think it needs to be a good thing, either). And then you ask me, Well, if you stopped doing it, would you miss it...? A question I find useless to the point of being laughable -- as there are a thousand things that I have spent time doing, in my life, that I liked quite well -- but I do not do them anymore (or if I do, it is so rare as to be almost nonexistent), and though they brought me various kinds of pleasure, then, I do not miss them, now. Things, activities -- for me, run absolutely counter to people, in this way -- the less I do a thing, the less I want to do it, or at least, the less I think of it or crave it (whereas, with people, the lack of them does not ever really dull or blur with time -- it's a cruel small trick my mind plays, there).

Breaking through the Fourth Wall, like this, makes me edgy and uncomfortable; I do not plan on making it a habit. I tried, even, for a time, to talk to people in the comments section -- but I gave that up, because that -- even that -- felt like too much. I'm trying, though, to sort all of this out, inside my head -- because the knowing someone's there tempts me to stop it all, but there is part of me that doesn't want to stop, and I have not yet reconciled the two (or even figured out where half of that is coming from). So this was just Hello -- a moment of acknowledgement, perhaps (the thing I used to wish for, more than anything -- I still do, I suppose -- was the ability to make eye-contact with strangers on the street, and have it not turn into anything at all -- no pouring out their crazy or life stories or even small-talk onto me, but simply a quiet smile and a moment of mutual acknowledgement of our respective existences and then...we both continue on our way) so this, I think, is my attempt at that. A quiet smile and a brief holy moment. Because it isn't that I don't appreciate your existence, or honor it. (But sometimes it is much easier for me to just pretend that you aren't really there.)

Momentum

Last night, I went to a party -- I hadn't really wanted to go to this party, or any party, but I allowed myself to be talked into it, and so I went after all. It was an odd mix of friends-of-the-friend-who-invited-me (her friends who were hosting the party, and their friends) and quite a few groups of parents-of-various-friends-of-theirs. And I found myself once more in quiet awe of people who are surrounded by relatives, who have their parents and uncles and anyone in their families around, constantly. I got mildly drunk, on gin and then a strange pink punch that had a lot of weird stuff floating in it -- gummi worms and unidentifiable chunks of fruit and...who knows what else -- but was primarily composed of vodka and champagne and some kind of pink juice. Found myself wishing, for awhile, that I'd had the foresight to eat a proper dinner before I'd come (but later, after a couple of cups of water, I felt steady and fine -- when I got home at 2:30am, which was really 3:30am, there was nothing but the mild pine-y gin shadows lingering on my tastebuds to remind me that I had drunk anything at all). I spent all night upstairs, in the kitchen and the adjoining room, talking to the groups of "adults" -- as party-guests go, I was, I'm sure, quite dull -- discussing dreams and philosophy and sine waves with someone's uncle, laughing at his costume, staring at the achingly lovely veins and tendons of his hands and forearms (thinking, more than once, about tracing them with my tongue).

I stare at people's mouths when they talk, watch their lips move, tongues flash in and out of view. I read, once, that to speak French properly, you have to keep the tip of your tongue pressed up against your lower teeth, deliberate. I had never heard that before. And so, the next time I spoke French, I paid attention -- or more attention -- to what my mouth was doing, and was surprise-delighted, in a quick rush, to discover that my mouth was doing exactly that, all by itself. Like my lips and tongue and teeth all knew a secret they weren't telling.

The heat in my apartment building is all fucked up -- I get too much of it, even with the radiator off; I leave windows open all the time to balance things. Apparently, though, I'm one of the only ones getting any heat at all. I ran into the building manager last night, while he stood outside, mildly drunk, smoking on the sidewalk -- he said his place is freezing, that almost nobody is getting enough heat and he (and the heating-fixer people that came to look at things) cannot figure out the problem. I told him he can have as much of mine as he would like -- he knows I hate that it's so hot in here. At night, I open the window nearest the bed; I like to be too cold. I need my arms covered to really sleep, a holdover from childhood -- from the feeling that a thin covering of fabric could protect me from...what? Whatever lurked inside the closet, under the bed, in the dark, invisible. I like to get into bed, shivering, wearing long sleeves, huddled beneath the covers. Wrapped cocooned in the sheets and blankets, feeling my own heat take over the small enclosed space, like being wrapped up inside myself.

Sometimes, when you talk to me, I want to close my eyes and swim in the ocean of your voice, let your words -- a warm liquid stream -- wash over me like light. I want you holding me, your fingers pressed into my skin, pulse beating a rhythm against my chest. Sometimes (all the time) when I'm near you I want to dissolve into you like mist.

I forced myself, at 3:00am, to wash my face, at least -- but this morning I woke up to find my pillows and sheets covered with glitter, from my hair (I know I will be picking tiny shining fragments off my skin for weeks). It's over-warm at home, and I feel shaky and mildly internally polluted -- not hungover, just somewhat off. Sitting quiet, thinking about what he said -- how life is like a sine wave (how I am not the only one who thinks about the concept of momentum, and where it all ends up, when riding public transportation). And almost everyone is almost more real inside your head than they are when standing right in front of you -- so where they end up After isn't such a big concern (inside your head, they never leave at all). I'm turning these thoughts of momentum over and over again in my mind, on the bus in the afternoon -- sitting beside a very quiet and normal-looking middle-aged man, watching him out of the corner of my eye as he stares out the window at the world. And I suddenly look at his hands, in his lap, and see that he is holding a dvd case -- doesn't have it in a bag or in his pocket or anything like that, just holding it there, against his knees -- and I notice the mostly-naked ladies on the cover, trashy little string bikinis, and squint at the title -- "Brawling Babes". And I have a sudden choking laughter coughing fit, turning my head the other way, determined not to meet his gaze because I know if I do I will Never Stop Laughing, Ever. He gets off at the next stop, and for the rest of the journey, I smile quietly to myself and think of nothing else but him.

Missing

If life were fair, then I could crawl beneath your skin (and you slip under mine) and we could rest like that awhile. One long extended pause and breathing in and breathing out, just...so. (Instead I will spend moments with you, five weeks from now -- or so I hope to -- twice in a year, which follows five long years without, and when I think about it I'm so lightheaded-hungry that I hold my breath.)


Today it felt like lead flowed through my veins instead of blood, and everything was slow and heavy, weighted down with tired. I could not pretend, even, to care about accomplishing the smallest thing; six o'clock and all I want to do is sleep, and sleep some more. I fall asleep each night, lately, by nine -- unintentional but not avoidable -- sleep for several hours, and then wake up and linger half the night, tired, but somewhere in-between. Drifting, drifting, never quite arriving. And then I oversleep each morning, without fail.

I dreamt of kissing him, last night, and it is a rare and lovely thing when he pays visits to my dreams (but disconcerting and confusing, dreaming him alive, for when I wake up he is still long dead -- unless somebody out there knows a secret they aren't sharing).


The sky is flatly grey and finally the air is cold enough -- a coat, a scarf, hands deep inside my pockets -- in my mind, perfect. But all I want to do is run away from here, to anywhere, to somewhere far, farther, anywhere-but-here. I could leave and not come back, not ever, and there is precious little I would miss or even think about with much intensity. Or that is how it feels, at any rate. It could be just a trick my mind plays on me (but really, I don't think so). I would miss you, at least -- my skin would ache with it; that much I know.

Sanctity

When I was young (or younger, as I guess I'm still young now, but then this kind of thing is really just all relative, I think) I did theatre, for more than a few years. I spent three years of it doing Shakespeare -- when I was much younger than most people might be before they've even heard of Shakespeare, except perhaps in the most fleeting kind of passing. We held rehearsals in a church -- not in the chapel, but in the buildings attached, surrounding it. Large, old stone walls, and filled with (in my memory) winding, hidden hallways and endless empty rooms, stairways up and down, and creaky floors. We once performed inside the church itself -- there was a stage so old and crumbling that it was necessary to lay pieces of thin carpet down for any scenes involving sitting, laying, kneeling down; without the carpet you'd end up with long, sharp splinters through your clothes, piercing your skin. Broken pews were stored behind the curtains, in the wings. Even then, though gods or God or any kind of faith held no power in my mind (or even any kind of real appeal) I found it a quiet thrill, to be inside that building, low-lit and echoey and still.

At dinner last week, he told me that faith is what I'm lacking, that if I could find a way to believe -- in god or God or something of the sort -- then I would find some measure of internal peace. There is no graceful way to disagree with that (except, ungracefully, I do). It isn't that I fail to see the appeal. And, when it comes down to it, it isn't that I don't believe in anything -- it's much more, I think, that I believe in the potential, perhaps, for everything. But then, fairies and elves living invisibly in your backyard seems just as likely as a dead-then-resurrected god, or an elephant-headed man who rides a mouse, or two ravens feeding off the thoughts through someone's skull, delivering far-flung secrets with their beaks. I can wrap my mind around the potential reality of all of it, which means that none of it is sacred (or all of it, every thing, must be).

You don't believe in god, and yet you're sure you'll go to Hell -- the burden of pain and guilt you carry with you from this life hangs heavy from your neck. You can't -- or won't, or simply don't -- believe that bad actions (many of them though there might be) do not make you a bad person. But I have seen inside of you -- brief, shining moments, half-glimpsed -- and I know there is a part of you, deep at your core, that is pristine, even now. If you could only manage to stretch your potential for belief out far enough to just embrace that, then...what? I worry for you, sometimes (often); it is unlikely (possible, but so improbable) that you will heal completely, or even mostly. Not in this lifetime, anyway (and so, most probably, never at all). I want -- still, after all this time, I still want this -- to reach inside your chest, and warm your heart in my hands like a small and broken bird.

Another time, performing Shakespeare, we used a small-ish auditorium, on the campus of the large nearby University (I can't remember how we managed that -- somebody must have known somebody else, and somehow worked it out). You could go down, into the basement, and through a maze of hallways that took you through the small underground network of studios where they recorded all the University radio shows, broadcasting from these tiny dim and nearly airless spaces. I have a vivid memory of fluorescently-lit white tile floors and darkened closet-rooms. Our director was a psychologist, and looked the part -- he used to lead us through long complex visualizations, going through doorways, down hallways, down to a river, inside ourselves, inside of others. Sometimes I close my eyes and wish for his voice (a balm) in my ear, like teeth; I believe that he -- if anyone, then he -- could whisper me out of myself and through a doorway to a better place. That maybe I could find it, then, even if I couldn't stay.

A glimpse, a shadow, and it would be enough -- just a flash of knowing it was possible (and that, perhaps, could be my something sacred).

Crayola Fun-Pack

I have a halfway fear of you, pushed far into the background of my mind -- a hidden, half-heard, whispered thing (and this has very, very little to do with you, and almost everything to do with me). Because I place myself in the palm of your hand, eyes closed, and you could crush me, drop me, break me. Because life hasn't made me careful enough, yet, and I hope it never does (although I think it really should have, and I question my levels of carefulness at times -- but the idea of More Careful makes me feel mildly ill, even if the alternative ends, often, badly).

I had a dream, the other night -- it was confused and convoluted, and it involved a lot of people I would never think of while awake (and rarely, still, while I'm asleep). But the best thing -- and the thing that stayed with me most vividly upon awakening -- was how I moved inside this dream. It was like skiing, or skating, except in normal shoes and on the street or down hallways, anywhere. Carpet or pavement or in-between. Magic dreamy gliding, and all I had to do was bend -- now more, now slightly less -- at the knee, subtly shift my weight from hip to hip. I could go fast enough without downhill momentum that I could glide uphill as well. A thing that often features in my dreams -- the good ones, anyway (or at least the ones that don't leave me panicked and heart-poundingly or chest-achingly awake) -- is the extreme difference of motion. I have dancing dreams -- huge expansive twirly dancing, leaping across distances -- and flying dreams and floating dreams (though not so often anymore, which is a shame) and running dreams. In sleep, my body finds unlikely capabilities that make me wistful when I wake.

We spend an afternoon out at the zoo, wandering in the sometimes-rain -- and even though you hate zoos more than you don't hate them, in theory and in practice (and I like them more than I don't like them, in the same way) you wanted anyway to go. With you, I go to parts of the zoo I never go to when I'm by myself, parts that I never really went to all the times that I would visit with my ex. The weather, though, keeps many of the animals inside, having tea and watching movies, reading the paper, hiding from the damp cold. But still, we find an animal I thought had disappeared -- I've looked each time I've gone for the last year, and never seemed to find it until yesterday. And I have new and huge affection, now, for all the creatures with unfortunate descriptors in their names -- Slow and Lesser and the like. There is a lot of laughter, and I am joy-breathless -- it feels like gliding, like in my dream. I wonder, once or twice -- when strangers walking towards us catch my glance in an intentional sort of way and smile -- what people see or think, when they see the two of us together. I run through several possibilities in my head, and each one makes me smile (though I suspect that some of them would leave you disconcerted).

We walk for several hours, and I don't notice it until we're leaving, and suddenly my legs have gone away -- gone to that point-of-no-return, when the constant numbness in my feet travels entirely up through my thighs, and I have to start paying close attention to every step I take, inside my head, unless I want to trip over a line in the sidewalk and fall on my face. This is a small thing -- and really, when a year-and-a-half ago I couldn't even walk a block without huge mental effort, without a palm against a wall, this is an absurdly small and nothing sort of thing -- that grates on me, if I allow myself to dwell on it. I could, I know, once spend all day walking, hours and hours and hours, without a problem, without even getting tired in a noticable kind of way...but this was a long time ago, and now I can barely even remember what that felt like. This frustrates me in ways that I don't like to talk about.

You come home with me, and sit with me by candlelight. (I like seeing you like this -- in darkness, lit from the side. Up close, no glasses, smiling. And I could say the same exact things to you, you know.) Your mouth and your brain seem to disconnect, or cross wires, or something, after a certain point -- your low-voiced sighs and moans turn into quiet nonsense mumbling (I did say "Oregon", once...) and this delights me so much, every time. I feel, intensely pulsing, in all the tiny pieces of my body that come alive inside these moments of desire -- the center of my palms, the inner bend of my elbow, the corners of my eyes, the soles of my feet, the small pause where neck meets skull. After you've gone, these minute pulse points remain lit up, electric -- glowing ache and need.

I try too hard to find the words to tell you what you are to me; sometimes I would prefer a more efficient means of communication. If I could spell things out across your skin with just my fingertips, or whisper all my secrets against your lips without a sound -- if you could drink the thoughts straight from my mind, and taste them, sweet and bitter and all things in-between, going down your throat. Any of these things might end up preferable to me, fumbling around inside my head for words big enough to contain vast spaces (and always, always failing).

Alarm Clock In A Glass

On Thursday the lights came back on, just like that.

I woke up a different person. Things look different, clearer. Everything is more real; I am. And suddenly I am ravenous, craving things. Wanting to eat every piece of candy in the office. I didn't realize how dull and tasteless everything had been, how little appeal any of it held.

I think about grapefruit, and grapefruit juice (I haven't had any yet, and it was all that I could think about when I was getting ready to stop the medication that made me spend six long years grapefruit-less.) This weekend, now, I will purchase some, and drink too much of it. Yesterday I had too much sugar, too much coffee, too much dinner. Too much of everything -- too much air, too much laughter. And still I want more and more and then some more. It feels like weeks without breathing, without water, without light. I want it all, now, overflowing, seeping through my pores.

(I am terrified of falling, now, again. My mind whispers What if? to me, quietly.)

When I think about you, sometimes, the big-ness of my feelings overwhelms me; I can feel it tingling in the center of my palms. You make my blood fizz, you make my fingers itch. You allow me to be still.


The other night I came home and there were three guys slowly lugging something large and heavy up the stairs -- a safe. A large metal safe, heavy enough that it required three strong-looking men to inch it, one step at a time, up a flight of stairs -- dragging the handtruck it was propped on slowly up over each edge, thump-landing on the carpeted step, and then repeat. I waited at the foot of the stairs for them to reach the landing, and wondered why on earth anyone living in this building would need this sort of thing. I asked them, as they paused for breath, if they would drag it up to the rooftop someday and drop it on my head -- not today, not tomorrow. But at some point, maybe years from now. Maybe decades. This has always topped my list of excellent ways to die -- to have a safe or a piano fall on me from a great height, like a cartoon. I didn't ask them what was kept inside it (and I wonder if they would have told me, even if I had).


Yesterday the city smelled like rain and wet leaves and grey, and it was perfect. The people who maintain my office building always pile up fallen leaves right near the entrance, a thick sea of gold and brown and red. Coming back from getting coffee in the afternoon (eyes half-closed, breathing deeply) I scuffle-kick-stomped my way deliberately through all the drifted piles, feeling dry leaves crunch beneath my boots, listening to them whisper on the pavement. I made some small noise of pleasure in the back of my throat, grinning like a fool -- trying to concentrate on not spilling the tray of coffee cups in my hands, and so I didn't notice the man standing near the doorway, smoking a cigarette, and gently laughing at me until I was right next to him. It's kind of them to put the leaves here, like this, don't you think so? And I hurried inside and back upstairs before he had a chance to answer.


This morning we had coffee, spent an hour talking -- maybe more. It bothers me, in a mild background unsettling sort of way, that I don't miss him how I think I should (but then, I was so far gone absent, long before we ever parted, he and I). This time, he let me press my lips, just for a moment, against his cheek (now smooth again, and I was almost used to seeing him so harshly bearded) before I went. I smile inside my chest and walk away, and things are clear and brightly lit (I push the terror of darkness back down into the corner of my mind). For now, the world is sharp and sweet, like grapefruit, and every breath is like a drink.