Overly Obsessed With Minutiae

Doorman

2012-01-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

The skin is stretched thin across his skull, eggshell fragile, warm with heartbeat. A hand on the back of his head could crack, shatter -- fingertips filled with responsibility, with soft whispers.

He asks me, always, the same two questions. We are walking through the small stretch of forest near his apartment building, cold clear brittle glass afternoon, sunlight sharp against our faces, and he looks down, sideways, at me and asks me, How is philosophy doing? And I laugh, and tell him that seems like a question he should ask philosophy directly (and I think of you, and how philosophy is stealing our freedom! and I want to tell that story, but it is too complicated and trying to piece it together in my head makes me feel tired, so I do not). Then, of course, he asks about love. And I smile, say that love is doing very well indeed (and then I wonder what that even really means -- to say that love is going well, does that mean that you are loving very very well, or that you are being loved very very well, or simply that you are able to see it all around you, if you look...or even if you don't) and he says that makes him happy to hear, and he wishes it were the same for him, talks about how his heart is still full of his ex even while he is with his new girlfriend. When I see him two days later, he shows me their pictures, asks my opinion (of what, precisely, I am still not sure); he compares them to each other -- in small ways, or large ones, or all of them --and I interrupt and tell him that is not fair to make comparisons between people like that, that is, finally, unkind. That it is, perhaps, impossible. And he pauses, his eyes focus on me, and he nods his head, agrees (but we do it all the same, every moment, don't we, after all?). He tells me the story about cooking breakfast for a prostitute, right after the last time we saw each other, and later asks me if I am manipulative. And I answer, without even really considering, that of course, I am -- we are all manipulative, in one way or another, occasionally or often or almost never or every single moment.

Not as gentle as you are...or, well, nobody is gentle the way that you are...and I think about this, because I wonder how gentle I really am. Or, I know that I am gentle, sometimes -- maybe even often -- but i don't know if it is by default or only on purpose, and if I am not always hard, then maybe...brittle? (When I am with you, I feel gentle, or gentled -- maybe this last year has made me softer, more permeable, both less and more distinct.)

Waiting for the tram the other night,a stranger approached me -- middle-aged, hair oiled back against his scalp, making me feel greasy just looking -- and started in with the sort of bullshit nonsense that comes out in these situations, often -- oh, you are so beautiful, do you know how very beautiful you are? Which is a ridiculous question to ask anyone, because there is no answer to that. A tight smile and an inward withdrawal, silent, but audible all the same. And suddenly he grabs my head, my face, in his palms and leans over like he is going to kiss my forehead, the top of my head. (And there is a lot that doesn't bother me, and a lot that I will tolerate, but you do not get to just fucking touch me like that without at least asking first.) I am a hypocrite, of course, because every day, constantly, I fight the urge to reach out and embrace complete strangers -- and while I keep myself from doing it, or mostly, the desire is strong and present, and what makes me think that my touch would be somehow any more welcome than this extremely unwelcome one (but of course, I think it anyway). And I almost cross the line into shoving him away, and, louder than I mean to, say Excuse me, no! And he and his friend seem almost offended, like I am the one committing some social faux pas, rude and ungrateful for what is being offered.

We laugh, this time, more than anything else, we laugh -- quiet smiles and loud throat-exposing mirth. I see, finally -- maybe -- the place he holds in my life, the where and what and how, standing quietly beside a hidden door. The cocktail napkins in the bar are printed with pseudo-wise sayings, tweaked into not-terribly funny, really, jokes -- written in English , for whatever reason, and he asks me to translate all of them (his English limited to short bursts of phrase that sound like he is chewing up the words even as he speaks them, crunchy and deliberate -- when he says we invest in people I laugh so hard I lose my breath, beg him to say it one more time) but it is near-impossible , because puns and wordplay do not translate very well; every phrase requires several different explanations, and then even more to fully clarify why, specifically, it happens to be funny (or why it's meant to be), and half the time it is still unclear. (How to explain that two words that sound the same in English, but have two different meanings, and one of those words also has an alternate slang meaning, which that same word in French emphatically does not have, but here is what it would mean, but that has nothing to do with what it translates to, and are we done talking about this cocktail napkin yet because my head is starting to ache...)

I tell him he was the first person I ever loved -- not liked or desired or anything like that, but purely, really loved. He waves away the statement with a careless hand, and I insist. You know, they say -- (and here I think of you, and what you would say) -- that when you love someone, you are never really loving them. They are functioning as something else entirely in that moment. They are opening a door to love inside of you. You never mean "I love you", what you mean to say is "You open up the source of love inside of me". I might not (do not) agree with this entirely, or always, or even often. But there is part of it that sounds, sometimes, a tone of truth. I look at him, and say, You opened up my door. So thank you. And he smiles, eyes gentle like my palm on the back of his head, and leans in to hug me, one-armed, cheek pressed warm against my face.

We are all so, so thin-stretched brittle fragile. So many strings to tear and break and tangle. It would be wise -- or simply good -- to keep that whisper-thought in mind, and make our fingers softly pliant.

Kaleidoscope

2011-07-23T02:25:00.000-07:00

Six months -- six-and-a-half, more like. Half a year, a little more. (And things that seem impossible, improbable...well, what is reality, anyway, really?)

You are a kaleidoscope; we are bits of colored glass and intricacies and glinting mirrors. Things are real and not-real in the same place, same time. Same breath.

I spilled boiling water on my hand, making you coffee, and the pain was exquisite; it was a living thing, it was a door that opened up and sucked me in and shut hard behind me. For a week my hand was like some off-kilter prop, some unreal thing used to frighten children, but then, two weeks later (and I pick at it, even though I shouldn't, but it actually seemed to make things better, faster) it looks like a normal human hand once more. Pinker than it should be, slightly wrong, but something recognizable as part of me. There is a certain resilience, sometimes, in certain situations, places, moments, that surprises, even if it shouldn't.

There are things I have let go, and in doing so, they have let me go, too, and some small part of me wishes -- maybe (but it's hard to tell, sometimes, so maybe not) -- that I missed them, that I wanted...what? But the more solid reality (whatever that might be) is that I don't, I haven't, I don't think I will. And that, too, surprises, although I might not know why it should. (Like this place, which, when it was empty was some kind of halfway-refuge, maybe, and then it got so crowded that I found it hard to breathe at times, but now it is so much closer to empty than filled again, and there is something that tastes almost like relief at that, though it's tied up in all kinds of other things and not as simple as it might sometimes feel, or as it ought to be.)

Three weeks now, jobless, and the next year or more-than-a-year stretching out in front of me, without form or plan or schedule, and if I could never work again I wouldn't, because this might be the first time in years I have consistently felt rested on any given day, time moving at the pace it wants to, and nothing (or very nearly, anyway) being forced. Like this, on a random afternoon when I am coming back from doing some small errand, somewhere, I can walk twelve blocks and end up at your door, curl up against you on your bed in the middle of a noise-bright day, and fall into the feeling of your hands against my skin, and after, fall into that magic sort of mid-day sleep -- heavy-without-weight and mostly dreamless (until I am close to waking, and then the world seeps into my sleeping mind and steers my thoughts, and twists them into something not-real but rooted there, and I wake myself up laughing, and mumble explanations at you, half-awake, and I can feel the smiles in your fingertips before I see your face).

And this is warm and solid, and utterly intangible (open full hands; they are empty), and you are something, or nothing, or a third option without a name. This thing that has words attached but nothing to define it (and it is tiresome, it becomes so full of weary, to have things always defined and needing edges) -- it is here and it is not anywhere, or it is everywhere, or it doesn't matter at all but when I wake up, sometimes, it is from laughter.

You are a smile, hooked in my skin like something sharp, coloring each breath, the tint hiding beneath tears or dreams or who-knows-what-everything; you are the voice in my ear each night -- or very close to it -- before I sleep.

And nothing and no one is simple, and sometimes, it doesn't really matter (or if it does, it still doesn't, really).

And every glowing letter is a kiss, if you can just stop (and close your eyes) and really look.

Stones

2011-03-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

The stone in my pocket is a smooth, flat, not-quite-perfect oval; it fits between my index finger and thumb perfectly, like it came specially-made from the rock factory, just for me, custom order.

I sat in the steam-heavy bathroom and watched the outlines of your body through the glass doors of the shower -- you pressed your face against the glass, your hands, your body; you looked at me and smiled. (My camera's clicking fake-shutter noises loud and incongruous, audible to me above the sound of running water, the beating of my heart. You wipe the fog from the glass, watch me with the camera in my hands, pause. Click. And the glass clouds up again.)

The rock is in my left-hand coat pocket, small and warmed by the constant rubbing of my fingertips; the rock is a minute and solid secret. It could have a heartbeat; it could have mine. It might.

It was sky-bright, sun-blue, but the wind was sharp against our faces, hair tangled, and the waves were foam-white significance. We walked the beach, empty, coat-bundled and wrapped in scarves, looking down, sifting through all the pebbles with our eyes and following with our hands, crouched down, intent. I wanted glass, worn smooth by water and sand and time, and eventually, you found me two tiny bits and pieces -- one brown, one clouded-clear. All the rest was pebbles, rocks -- and at first we were quite discriminating, picking up and just as quickly letting fall, but soon, because the stones and pebbles might as well have been shipped over from some high-end boutique, so many of them ideal and lovely to look at and to hold, soon we collected and collected, our pockets clinking tiny-noised in rhythm with our steps.

The day after, after we came back to Real Life, back to time-moving-forward, irresistible. We came back, and you came upstairs with me, and you were lying on your back, eyes half-closed, and your voice was a soft-edged whisper, Take off your clothes, your face calm impassive (and it is an illusion, but a good one). Later still, we both burst out laughing, long and loud and helpless, while you stand there beside the bed, breathless, and I lay on the bed, the warmth of pleasure turning cold and dripping slowly down my cheeks, along my neck. And we laugh, and laugh, and keep laughing still. The day after, that morning, before I leave to go to work, I pick through my small paper bag, heavy with small stones, and find the one I'm looking for, hold it in my palm for a moment, smiling, before I drop it in the left-hand pocket of my coat and walk out the door.

When I walk down streets, now, around the city, I keep one hand inside my pocket, fingers insistent against the smooth grey surface hiding there. It soaks up nervous chaotic energy like the sun and breathes the warmth back into my skin. (My hands are almost always warm, my fingers. I feel the cold on the backs of my hands, my wrists, but carry my body's heat within my fingertips.) And every thing I see, every breath, each word -- I collect them in my hands like pebbles, and carry them around, hand them to you, one by one by one. How long does it take to count up to infinity?

When you are somewhere else -- across the city, or wandering through sleep, my fingers reach for you. (The only-thought of you, itself, is enough to keep me warm.)

Not Quite

2011-02-19T01:34:00.001-08:00

And where are you, when I am alone in the middle of the night, in the dark, and it is cold and stretched-out empty and my eyes are dull-stinging with pain and the noises escape, strangled, from my throat and I hear them from somewhere far away, from somewhere deep down inside, from somewhere floating out in space; where are you, then? Far away apart, and your arms are not around me, warm, and there is nothing to anchor me to this place, to myself, to anything at all. If you were here, and solid, and keeping me from sinking down or floating up, so far that I could never come back, ever; if you were here, like that, then maybe I could stop. Maybe something small inside could make me, because it leaves me feeling awkward, or stupid, or ugly, or unworthy; if you -- if anyone -- were here, then maybe I could stop myself, stop this. Stop it. But when it's just me, alone in the dark, and the room is cold and the shivering involuntary, and my arms the only ones wrapped around myself, and not even half as tightly as I need them, and the night is long and hollow and my eyes burn with the hot salt hurt of it, and I can't remember how to breathe, and it won't stop, I won't; I cannot. Stop. When it is only me, and no one else, there is nothing that can make it stop, nothing that will slow it down, nothing there at all. And it is hours later, when maybe finally exhaustion can take over and drag me limply into something that is pretending to be sleep, but isn't really, and it will be more than a day before I trust myself to look into a mirror, because there isn't anything inside I want to see. Things are not quite. And more than that, something like a lifetime before I find you and your arms again, somewhere far away (and by that time, it probably won't matter any longer, anyway). But then, why should they be. They never are.

The Memory Of Breathing

2011-02-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

I could tell you that you have all the power, here. I could tell you that, and it wouldn't be a lie. It wouldn't be, even, a half-truth. Here it is, a solid stone pillar: you have all the power. (The people who draw the maps, who delineate the borders -- they hold all the power. The rest of us, we show our passports and try hard to respect the boundaries, and leave when we are turned away at the gates.)

You are haunted by ghosts more solid than the present; they wound you and disturb your rest. They have killed something, perhaps, or very nearly. (Or worse, they have made you wish it dead.) And my ghosts, they are...what? They are things that murmur in the background, and take up space (but there is still this infinity of space, out and out and more outward-reaching, continuous); they flit around the edges of everything, and they make noise, and they make things move faster than they should, and they seem more real than the realest thing, sometimes -- often -- but they are ghosts, and we all have ghosts. And this could shatter me into a million tiny bits, a billion. Shatter me into bits so small they are like glitter, like dust, like nothing at all (but sharp-edged shiny somethings). It could shatter me, ground down into a powder so fine I could never put things back into a single solid again, not ever. Not even halfway. Everything all not-held-together and holes and hollow and not-quite-solid.

People say that things are worth the risk, and they mean that, literally. Worth taking a risk -- but nobody really says that when they think the thing that's risked might actually, or likely, come to pass. Things are often worth risks, and rarely worth consequences; this is how things feel. But this. This is worth the risk, and more than that, it is worth the potentialities, all of them, the worst ones. It is worth the bad end that I can taste like blood and metal on my tongue. It is worth the things that could happen, and the things that most probably (though sometimes there are miracles, sometimes -- and things aren't often what they seem) will happen. It is worth it, this; you are.

(Early-morning hours, and I close my eyes and fall half-asleep between my words. I write you things, eyes half-shut, not really clear, and then lay down and shut my eyes, and fall, immediately, into a dream of you. It was bad, and confused, and everything was loud shouting jarring...and then the phone rang and it woke me, eventually, and I look and it is you, although it shouldn't be, and we both know that.)

I would be different for you, if I could.

There are a hundred versions of you, inside -- a thousand, an infinity. Coming to some singular consensus must be near-impossible; I can imagine how it must be. (I can tear myself apart into a million different directions inside my mind, also, deeply down inside. We are nothing alike at all, completely opposed; we are twins; we are cracked and shining mirrors.) Inference is the only possibility when nothing is explicit; it's either that, or not considering at all (and I think we all know well enough how impossible that is).

I say things, and I do things, because life is short, and complicated, and unexpected, and things you don't do now, might not happen, ever. Not because I think these things I say and do will change anything else. Not because I'm not-so-quietly digging for...something. My compulsions are mine alone, closed-circuits, and although nothing is ever that simple, this one thing really just might be. But how can anyone explain that, and have it mean anything at all?

And when we spend the night together, we are awake until the early-morning hours, when light turns aquatic and exhaustion is a so, so solid thing. When our bodies are tangled up in each other, and everything is fingertips and mouths and warm and wet and sliding into pleasure, floating, jumping off the edge of cliffs, and the landing never comes, because there are no hard places here -- when everything is whispers, and the words aren't important, the words are secondary, the hush is everything.

Things were different, then...and then things changed, and they change and change again, and things are different, always. Sometimes imperceptible and sometimes glaring smack-in-the-face, and sometimes only in your head, and sometimes only in everybody else's. And again and again and again. Things were different, before, and they are different now. And we go to sleep, eventually, and in the morning, when we wake up, it's like everything raw and new and waiting. Things can be whatever you want them to be. Because you are the one creating them, new, with every breath. (You just have to remember how to breathe, and then...keep remembering.)

Egg Farm

2011-01-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

When we met, the first time, and I blurted out that you were so not-tall (as if you might have spent every day moving through the world but somehow failing to notice the moment you took up in space) I didn't tell you -- or at least I do not think I did -- why I really actually like that (as far as it goes, I mean; it is an arbitrary thing and height does not influence my opinions about a person, aesthetically or in the more important, hidden ways, but still). But when we embrace, my head can rest there on your shoulder, or my lips press against your neck, warmly, and my face isn't just smashed somewhere into your chest, there is no feeling of needing stepladders to kiss you. And this is a pleasant thing, this (all of it). When I am in the kitchen -- making tea, or making breakfast (or whatever it is when it is after noon and you have not slept nearly enough and the hours in bed stretch out and distort and drip like slow dark honey to the floor, but when you look, the time has disappeared like some kind of insidious magic trick) -- you come up behind me to wrap your arms around my waist, your palms in conversation with my skin, and you are warm and pressed against me, and you can rest, only-just, into the pause between my thighs, not-here-not-there, and it is almost impossible, to split my brain in two -- slice mushrooms and press back against you, hard -- and if you were taller than you are, it wouldn't be this exactly-same of a moment, here, and I do not think to tell you this, and later my mind is sifting through the polished pebbles and pale sea glass fragments and uncovered treasures that you leave behind you in your wake, and I hold this particular thought in the palm of my mind, and I think how silly, that I didn't tell you then.

When you aren't here, I see things -- anything, all of it -- and I think of you; I want to show you everything I see. I want to collect it all in pretty little boxes, tied with shining ribbons and dusted with glitter, and hand it to you to unwrap and consume at your leisure, in the long quiet hours of late-night or too-early-morning, inside your dreams. I want to give you everything I touch; each thing is really you, against my fingertips (inside my head, beneath my skin, the liquid warmth flowing through my veins).

(And when you tell me, My hands are your hands, in that moment, it is a truth.)

I try to distill the hidden intangibles inside of me into words, to pour those words over your head, shining trails of them running down your body, coating your skin, pooling at your feet. But it is a kind of filter, already -- because words are boxes with sides and tops and bottoms, and infinity doesn't fit inside a box, not properly. So what I tell you...it doesn't really matter, in the end. It is never quite the exact right thing, never quite tastes the way it ought to. (And I know what I am giving you -- or not even what I am, but what I want to -- but...) And my hand against your cheek might possibly be more right, or more true, or more precise (or it might not at all); your fingers paging through the book of my universe, dripping with unanswered questions, dripping with unquestioned response, dripping with the force of pure momentum. Your mouth on mine writes a story without a proper narrative arc; everything is penultimate and the story goes on and on and on without ending or beginning.

When we were sitting there, beside each other, in the dark -- and my hands were in your hands, your fingers tracing patterns against my skin, our bodies warm with proximity. (And all the other moments, also -- when every breath is a kind of love letter, folded up and floated into the air, prayer wheels turning to the rhythm of heartbeats, ceaseless, feeding off their own momentum, off the inner-outer forces of...something...vast and formless.) But, when. We were sitting there, in the dark -- the light from the screen, glowing, carving shadows out across your face -- and your pulse beneath my fingertips, and your palms gentle against me, and I turned to look at you, at your face (lit-up and veiled, both, there, so close to mine) and your eyes widened and then eased into a smile, and that. That is the river, and the bridge that spans it, that spreads out to give a home to the echoes of my footsteps; that is the map and the pathway and the land itself beneath us. (You think, perhaps, that I don't see you, but I can close my eyes just as tightly as anybody, and that's when things start getting interesting.)

If you are a mirror, and I am a mirror, reflecting an endless hall of neverending doorways, keyholes, illuminated -- back and forth and back and back and back and back and (this is where the breath catches). If that is what it is. But there must be something deeper, also -- some light source that glows, hidden internal, and that is the thing we catch in our reflections; a glow, a spark, a metal key, glinting -- the click of locks falling open, falling away. Mirrors can never see into themselves, and so they must never know the things they hide within them -- endless reflections, a deep well of unseen memory, waiting. (And even in the dark, without any light to give them form or function; even then, they still exist.)

The Lesser Is The Greater

2011-01-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

You mix these thoughts together and they become thick and sweet, something to lick from fingertips, from the backs of spoons. And you toss in more words, great handfuls of them -- every taste and shade and nuance, and through some kind of magic transform the whole into something so nourishing and real and the taste that lingers on my tongue, afterward, is like nothing at all describable. I could eat and eat and eat them, these things you bake for me, warm in my hands and electric on my tongue -- more and more, and never sated, always still hungry for another (and another, and still one more).

And this builds itself, one word at a time -- a trickle that becomes a river that becomes a huge world-sized wave, crashing down on everything -- or we build it, bit by bit (or it was there to start with, and with every word and every tick of the clock we are simply erasing more and more of whatever was obscuring it; pull away the veil, and it's been there all along, waiting -- the statue hiding within the cold chunk of stone).

A minute particle of nothing that expands and unfolds until it is filling up the whole of everything, and infinity widens to make room, and nothing stops or slows, and I cannot breathe and it doesn't matter but it begins to taste of panic and waiting three more days to see if fiction can be reality suddenly seems impossible. I need things human-sized, I need something I can hold in the palm of my hand and feel the edges of it, the smooth solid absoluteness; I need to remember the secret to inhale-exhale-heartbeat-quiet. And I ask you to meet me, sooner, now -- and No and Can't dissolve, change shape; there is a hidden alchemy at work, here, that turns things into Yes and Can (it coats everything, here, since the very first thing, turning something solid into something possible, turning possibility into something solid). And when you walk in, from the cold outside, and you are suddenly real and a thing that I can reach out and touch, beside me -- and your arms are wrapped around me, tight, and when I brush my lips against your closed mouth, briefly, I feel a string of bulbs light up, explode, in a neat line down to my feet.

So we sit there, leaning close together, your cold fingers wrapped in my warm ones, and your fingertips grazing my skin, ascertaining where things begin and end, and your eyes and your face and gravity is suddenly just a theory, quaint and wrong-headed, something to laugh about. Everything is tightly-focused close-up, and all the rest just falls away. (Later, walking in the cold wind-rippled night, I push you back against a wall, abrupt, and kissing you is like a huge intake of breath after too-long underwater. It makes me ache, to stop.)

There are things I want to say to you that I cannot; they wriggle just beneath the surface, making me itch. And I want to give you everything, to hand you infinity wrapped up in paper and tied with golden string; whisper secrets into your chest, show you the open doorway into mine. My empty palms, outstretched; I am spelling out proffer with every breath, every moment of my pulse. Waiting for you to take what is there, to take what isn't there, to take it all (waiting for my fingers to close around your own).

Saudade

2011-01-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

Somebody else taught me the word, but it was you who taught me the meaning. And so I look for you -- not constantly, but often enough, more often than I might admit -- in familiar places; I close my eyes and reach out my hands, fingers spread, waiting to feel the subtle shift in time and space and what-is-real. And often it is nothing more than blind-wanderings through empty hallways -- or, not empty, but the things that fill them are less than nothing; it doesn't matter. But, sometimes -- once, twice, perhaps even a third -- I find you. Or I don't find you, but what I find is so much the very same that it is eerie; tell the same story again and again, and you can make it into something almost solid. And it is the same -- tiny details shift and shimmer and the truth is mutable, as it always is, in everything -- but, in a deeply hidden and important way, it is as exactly-same as it could hope to be.

If you have nothing to say, and you are tired and tired and so far beyond tired of walking these tedious pathways to no place in particular; if the same stories (and they are always the same stories, because the storyteller is always the same, and words have the taste of something finite in their infinity) leave you weary. If you stop saying anything at all. If people ask you why you are silent, tell you that you should speak, and this leaves you wanting nothing more than to never speak again -- it is part stubbornness, and part that special blankness that appears when something specific is asked or requested or even mentioned (What are you thinking, right now? And the only thing, once the words have hit the air, is...vast unending empty, nothing at all.) If that, then what?

(And people make you responsible -- this isn't the intent, but it is the result, you being you and things being as they are. You have this weight of responsibility, and it is tiresome, and unasked for, and the warmth and gentleness you might feel -- you do feel -- for any of them, for all of them, is tinged with something heavy; your head aches, vague. And when somebody says You understand me, what they really mean is I feel like I understand you, and you at least know how ridiculous that is, but what can you say to a fragment of your reflection in a shard of mirror?)

So all the tiny moments pile up, one upon another, like pennies; the taste of life, metallic somewhere behind your tongue. There is the happy, frolicksome puppy, the softness of its fur still a warm impression on your fingers weeks afterward. There is a dream of dead birds, and the waking up -- lost and still somewhere else inside your head, tears hot on your cheeks. There is spiced hot chocolate, smooth against the roof of your mouth. There is rain, and the hypnotic umbrella-rhythms wrapped around you, the grey half-light filtered red through your temporary shelter. There is a single, perfect pear. There is silence, and there is time for many words, and finally, finally time for sleep (and the sleep stretches out into a place beyond time). There is an evening in the dark where everything is friction and warm skin and wet welcome and the lines crossed spanned continents -- spanned eras. Reality shifts on its axis. There is midnight beside a fire in the crystalline cold, and strangers who hand you plastic cups full of cold champagne, and when you look up at the far-away sky, you can even see the stars. There are a hundred more, a thousand, a million; full pockets, piles spilling over into everything, taking up space, taking over. But.

When I find you, every time, it ceases to matter what, exactly, I have found; the actual reality -- you, or me, or someone else entirely -- makes no difference. We tell the same stories, again and again; they are a sort of conjure-trick. The facts are not important. And every time, the ending is the same.

(And every time, we wait until the next beginning.)

Quenched

2010-12-10T22:00:00.000-08:00

You say you know the color of my soul (but do you know what it hides, what it contains?); when I tell you that I write about you, sometimes, you laugh and say I must be joking. And perhaps it just wasn't a true enough statement -- maybe everything I write is in some way about you, or to you -- maybe everything for half my life has been shaped in small or larger or invisible ways, by you. And there is always the thought of one last time, one more goodbye, that makes certain things almost impossible. In some ways (I do not tell you this) you save my life over and over again.

First, we meet at the train station -- and I tell you, later, sitting at the table in that cheerful grimy bar, that we always seem to meet at train stations, points of in-between and not-quite-anywhere. We realize, just then, that it has been solidly 15 years, now, that we have known each other, and you half-shout Champagne! (and you even laughingly ask at the bar if they have any, and of course they do not, so we sit and drink tea and swim in the pools of each other's eyes). It is quickly done; you have to go, and I walk through the icy snow-covered streets with my arm in yours, wait with you until your bus pulls up, and touch your cold cheek with my warm fingers as you turn to walk away.

Later, my last day in the city, you call me in the afternoon and ask me to come meet you nearer your eventual evening rehearsal destination. (You never found your lost suitcase full of wooden recorders, $15,000 lost, more or less -- well, less the money, more the flutes themselves, and you have some persistent small-but-irritating injury affecting your left ring finger, that makes playing the violin painful and very difficult. When I ask you, later, what you will do if it gets worse -- or does not get better -- and you can no longer really play, you whisper that you have no idea at all.) So I take the bus to a depressing little almost-suburb of the city and meet you at the depressing little Commercial Center -- grey and harshly-lit, fluorescent -- and the only thing in the whole area, really. We sit in a small pizzeria where I drink coffee and watch you eat an early dinner.

And you think of me as a shaman, a healer, a mystic -- always, still. And either you simply do not know me at all, not even a little, never have...or you see something, here, that I cannot. That, perhaps, I am a different thing -- something better -- than I can imagine. (Or maybe, I am like that when I am near you, and it is just that simple. You are magnetic, drawing the metal shavings of something better, something good, from somewhere deep inside me, pulling them, briefly, to the surface.)

When you finish eating, I take your hand in both of mine, and kiss each knuckle, the joints of every finger. I press my thumb gently against the contours of your hand, your wrist, massage the palm. The places where things come together, pause, and split off apart again. And you smile, eyes closed, and sigh. It is difficult to find the words for things -- or there are things that, to say them, makes them smaller or less true or simply less. I tell you that it is like slowly dying of thirst, a week or more without a drink, and someone comes and offers you three drops of water. Which does nothing, of course -- three drops of water are less than nothing, and you are still dying; you are going to wither away, become dust. It is almost worse than nothing at all. (And these stolen, so-quick hours -- one, two, and then a year goes by -- that is what they are like. Drip. Drip. Drip.) I raise my eyes to your face, and halfway smile (you pointed out to me that usually, when I smile, it is with the right side of my mouth only, except when it is a smile disguising something else, when it changes to the left -- but almost never both sides at once). As far as you are concerned -- or you-and-me -- I have been slowly dying of thirst for years.

You watch my face for a long moment, trail a fingertip against my cheek, and screw up your eyebrows into a question, But, surely not -- with all of your other relationships, your friends and lovers and everythings, surely there are many filling up your glass? And I look at you, and laugh. But nobody else is you, and one person cannot replace another. There are all kinds of water, in the end. And then we are quiet for a long time (or for no time at all).

You have to go, after what seems like an instant, and you say you'll call me when your rehearsal is finished, and we stand in the hallway of this depressing plastic strip mall of a place, and embrace, and I take your face in my hands and your press your forehead against mine, and then you are gone, and the dull and empty ache is something too far inside me to reach or even name; outside, it is coldly raining, and I tilt my face up to the sky and let it mingle with my tears. And the bus ride back into the city feels like years.

Later, though -- nearly 11:00 that night -- you do call; you are nearby, close to the train station. Am I around? So you come to my hotel, up to my room, and we sit next to each other on the bed for several minutes, talking, until I take off my glasses and lie close beside you, my head on your chest, over your heart (but your sweater scratches my skin, and so you take it off so I can rest against the softer shirt you have on underneath). We stay still like that, your hand on my shoulder and mine tracing paths up and down your arm; I feel you slow your breathing down, closer to my own, I listen to the message of your heart. We talk, low-voiced; we fall in and out of sleep or almost-sleep. I trace the details of your face with the tips of my fingers, memorizing and re-sculpting. I tell you, finally, how you are the first person I ever loved -- not something romantic or sexual or anything, but truly loved, something infinite and real. You unlocked something for me, inside of me, you formed a base. After that, I was no longer the same person. You say, quietly, When you were 15? And I make an affirmative sound into your chest. I listen to you breathe. You know, when I first saw your picture, before you came to stay with my parents -- it struck me, deeply. I can't explain it. It was, for me, a sort of archetype -- you were. It's funny. And all of that before I'd even met you. Before I knew... and you trail off, ...before I knew how good you are for the soul. We stay there, in the room, with time kindly stopped around us, wrapped around each other gently. You say several times that you should go, But the more I sort of fall asleep, the more I want to stay and sleep for real. You sit up, and I rub the back of your neck, and you stretch out flat on your stomach and look at me questioningly over your shoulder, so I laugh and sit on top of you, and massage your back and shoulders for a long time. I can feel you dissolving, bit by bit, and you make small sounds in the back of your throat with every breath. Finally, I stop, and lay beside you once more, and you roll over and wrap your arms around me tightly. You have always been a magician of massages (and then, almost to yourself, And of caresses too, of course).

I asked you, when we were in the restaurant, to tell me the name of the artist -- the old man from Lithuania -- who lived near your parents, and your eyes lit up as you said his name (a name that rolls so smoothly off the tongue, how could I have forgotten it?). He died, you know. And I ask when, and you say it was five years ago, or six. I smile gently -- for he was old 15 years ago, already; he smoked and drank like life depended on it. I adored him, so completely -- and you say, the memory dawning suddenly, Oh, we went to his house one afternoon, I had forgotten! And indeed, your parents were away, and the two of us alone for several days, and you took me to his house for coffee one afternoon, abruptly rushing off to a rehearsal, telling me I should stay for dinner so I wouldn't be alone. When I pointed out that I hadn't been invited, you smiled and told me not to worry, that I surely would be. (And so I was, and I ate at that big kitchen table with a dear, dear old man, his paintings looking down on us from all the walls.)

You have always loved how I used to work in a sex shop -- a topic you bring up at least once every time we speak. This time, though, you then ask me if I am still working for a travel agency. And I stare at you blankly for a moment. A travel agency? I've never worked for a travel agency. You make a face, open your mouth to say something, stop, and start again. Are you sure? And I laugh, loudly. Pretty sure. But then, who knows what I am really doing, when I'm not paying close attention. (When you whisper to me that you don't know what you'll do, if you can no longer really play anymore, we are both quiet for a minute, and then I tell you, Well, you can always come work at my travel agency. The pay isn't great, since it doesn't actually exist, but the hours are fantastic. And your laughter wells up from somewhere deep inside.)

In a month you will be 45; you haven't really changed at all. Your age shows a bit in the moments around your eyes, but nothing more. (You say, That isn't so bad, then, is it? And I tell you that it isn't anything, good or bad, but just something that I noticed.) Your eyes, which are the warmest warm thing, through which I would give anything to pass, like mist, like walking through a mirror.

It is nearly 4:00am when you finally pull on your boots and leave, for real. We kiss, gently, and I touch your cheeks, your temples, your lips, your chest. You hold me tightly against you, your hand on the back of my head, and I watch you walk down the hallway before I close the door to my room again. (So much unsaid, here, where words have no place and time flows in strange, uncertain ways.) I hold the touch of your skin inside my fingertips, the rhythm of your heartbeat deep within the center of my chest. I can hold these moments in my cupped palms like something solid (like something more real than any solid thing).

And for the first time in more time than I can possibly remember, I am -- however briefly -- no longer thirsty.

Luck

2010-12-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

In the airport, at baggage claim, I watch my suitcase drop down onto the conveyer belt, and think "I have checked this bag four times in as many weeks, and nothing has been lost or stolen or broken or anything at all. I have not missed a flight or a train; the weather has been just far enough ahead of or behind me to never once seriously impact my transit. How lucky!" I consider stopping at the ATM, but pause and think about the 30 Euros I already have, more than enough to take the train into the city and find my way to my hotel. So I do not stop, I get no cash; I decide to wait. And I buy my ticket and board the train.

There are only two stops before the Central Station, and I do not want to lug my bags up or down any more stairs -- to reach the upper or lower seating areas -- so instead I stand in the wide entry area of the train car, my two bags on the ground beside me, my purse loose hanging off my shoulder, sliding down my arm. I stand there, leaning back against the wall, watching the city lights blur and streak past outside, beyond the windows, my eyes unfocusing, feeling the only-three-hours of sleep I had the night before.

And there is a man standing beside me -- or, a few steps away, really, but off to my side -- and he is talking loudly on a cell phone, in some fast language I do not understand, not Dutch, surely, but something else, something that blurs by like the lights outside the train. As the train approaches the station, its first stop, this man suddenly starts pulling at my sleeve, asking me something in a language I do not speak, repeatedly, that seems to be a question about the station because it seems like he is ending with its name, but I cannot tell for sure and anyway I have no idea what he is saying at all. I tell him, in English, that I am sorry but I do not speak...whatever language he is speaking, and as I start to turn away he yanks more insistently at the sleeve of my coat, asking his fast and incomprehensible question. And once again, and then he says, very loud and slow, the name of the station, and makes a questioning face. And I nod and tell him yes, that is this station. And he smiles and hurries off the train, and the doors close, and the second before the train begins to move again time slows down and stretches out and something clicks into place for me inside my head, and I turn and look down at my other arm, at my purse hanging there near my elbow, and I pull it open and look inside and I already know, before I have even really looked, but I still look, frantically, again and again and again, touching each item individually, as it that will make the truth less true.

But of course, my stolen wallet isn't there, no matter how many times I look again.

Lines

2010-12-03T06:39:00.001-08:00

We go up to your room at the top floor of the small hotel -- the room is not large, not especially remarkable (though you have a tiny and snow-covered balcony outside your window). You've left a bottle of champagne, sitting in a snow-filled bucket on the small round tabletop out on the balcony -- did you know it would be 1:00am, that I would come up here with you? -- and I sit in a slightly-awkward armchair with my glass cold against my fingers; you sit on the bed (eventually stretching out on your back, head propped up against the pillows). There is a long time that passes, and we sit there, sipping fine fizzy liquid and talking too loud, too fast, about a thousand little nothings. Eventually, I take off my glasses, rub my eyelids. Take off my boots -- one, two -- and climb onto the bed beside you, head resting on your chest. (Your hand on my back, my shoulder, and I hear your watch whispering, insistent, in my ear.)

He asked me, when we were sitting there in the small cafe, colored lights twinkling in the windows, music playing in the background, my friend in from out of town -- just for the evening, just to see me, briefly -- beside me, and his sometime-lover beside him...he asked me if coming back here, to Geneva, felt, in some way, like coming home. I could have cried (because of course, the answer was yes, and of course, it is the only real sense of home I have ever had from any place). Later, when we were sitting in your room, drinking champagne and talking about everything and nothing in particular, we spoke about things, and the attachment to them, and how some people perhaps base their identities on things instead of anything less solid and more real, and it struck me that perhaps this is what my attachment to things, to stuff, really is -- that is a place where I can find my home, because I do not ever find it in places. (People, objects, a turn-of-phrase, but never something on a map that I can point to, a building or a city or a place.)

There is a strangeness and a familiarity, with you (only the second time we have been beside each other, present) and the mixture comes together to spell out Safety, for me. And maybe that is something I do not want to throw off-balance, or maybe it is something as simple as too little time, or some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Because crossing lines, that is the thing that I am best at, it is what I do most often. And so often I find it painful, frustrating, that there are any lines at all to start with -- a wish that everything could melt together into shades of grey, blurred -- but, sometimes, there is a feeling that it is better, somehow, to occasionally have someone with whom no lines get crossed at all (or very nearly, as surely we were crossing some, some small ones, anyway, in bed and curled around each other, warm). And your watch continued to whisper secrets in my ear (and I didn't understand a single one).

Untranslated

2010-11-30T14:07:00.000-08:00

It is a somewhat magic thing, when all the words you hear, see, are just so much noise. Everything can wash over you like music and you drift, nothing familiar for your mind to catch and grab on, and it is -- for me -- something soothing and peaceful. When you don't have to find any sort of meaning -- when you couldn't if you tried -- then language becomes something else entirely. Bigger and smaller and infinite, tone and rhythm and inflection, color. I cannot -- with the one exception of stops announced on the Metro, when I know what I am listening for -- tell where one word ends and the next begins, just long endless streams of unbroken conversation, running into each other, gathering force, flowing into a deep and mysterious pool of hidden meanings.

It is dark when I arrive, and cold, and I walk down crumbling and magnificent streets (more magnificent because of it, beautiful and gritty and confused). Sit in a room beneath heavy glittering chandeliers and eat cake, drink sweet coffee. (And the cakes almost always end up surprising -- the texture something unexpected, rich and light and strange and delicious all at once). And I walk, and walk -- thinking, often, just a bit further and then I will go back -- but I keep going, not stopping. Come to the river and watch the lights scattering across the surface, shine out from deep within; cross the bridge (all cold metal, cold concrete, brightest lit-up lamps). It is much later (tired, cold, smiling) when I find my way back to the hotel, into a hot bath, into the wide white bed.

Moments bleed together -- the Metro employee who smiles and nods me through, although I did not punch my ticket in the machine in front of him, when I point across the metal barrier and say I came in the wrong way, first (and I am sure he did not understand the words, but the meaning was clear enough). Drinking hot spiced wine from a paper cup, unstable, while outside, walking. Sitting in the back of a small ornate and dim-lit church, eyes closed, listening to voices singing words I do not understand (and so -- voices, singing, nothing else). Coffee and cake and coffee and cake, again and again. The sweet woman selling antique jewelry at the enormous flea market outside of town (the farther from the city the bus went, the more snow still covering the ground, turning slowly grey) who spoke no English and loved the pin I wear on the lapel of my coat -- she called over two other ladies, and they all touched it and chattered in smiling, enthusiastic Hungarian, until, after several minutes, she beamed widely straight into mz eyes and worked her mouth around the words (slow, deliberate), VERY. NICE. UNIQUE. And of the four words in Hungarian I could (shakily) say, one of them is Thank You, and my saying it (also slow, deliberate) made her laugh delightedly. She touched the ends of my hair with her fingertips, nodding at me. ALSO. UNIQUE. And we laughed, and then I said goodbye and walked away.

And it is cold, cold, freezing -- my fingers stiff each time I take my hands out of my pockets (I think of you, then -- your always-so-cold hands, my warm skin).

I eat Indian food, spiced to make my nose run, in a dark and smokey dining room, stay at the table long after I have finished, drinking tea, reading a book, and halfway-listening to the tableful of girls somewhere behind me -- the only others in the restaurant -- talk quietly in Italian.

Another evening -- and the public baths are noisy and crowded. Drift for an hour, two, in the warmest of the outdoor pools, the night air colder than cold anytime I stand all the way up and let it touch my shoulders. Sit on the steps, water up to my chin, and watch a knot of laughing old men play chess, standing chest-deep in the pool. (And oh, I want to embrace them all, kiss their faces, run my hands across their broad or bony or hairy backs -- and there is no clear way to explain this constant urge to touch, to hold, not connected to desire or sex or hunger, but just...to touch. Contact, with nothing more behind it or around it. My fingertips tingle with the impulse, still, for hours.)

On the last day, I go across the river to the other side of the city, eat crepes rich with sour cream and salty cheese. Walk up steep hills and too many stairs, the wind cold against my face. Stand in the darkness of churches, all candles and stained glass glow. Wander the stone maze of stairs and archways, like a castle, and go into a coffeeshop to sit and wrap my hands around something warm. Once inside, I realize it is a much nicer place than it appeared from outside -- sparkling chandeliers, heavy with crystal, and white-gloved waiters in tuxedos -- and I sit alone in the empty upstairs dining room with the panoramic view, drinking my cofee, feeling mildly conspicuous. (But, when I am finished and ask for the bill, the handsome man in his tuxedo jacket and pristine white gloves walks me around the whole of the room, to look out all the windows, and lets me out onto the balcony, and I see that it has suddenly begun to snow.) Later -- soon -- the snow falls in earnest; the wind blows it in thick wet stinging kisses against my cheeks. I walk through it, for a time, then duck into a warm and croweded cafe and drink tea, eat chestnut cake, and watch the swirls of white outside the windows. And in the morning, through the windows of the train, the ground is white and expansive, and the glass it cold and smooth against my forehead.

Still Imaginary

2010-11-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

London has become familiar, a place to come back to -- which is strange, perhaps, for a place that remains so largely still unseen, unknown. The fifth time in two years, and I find myself almost back at the beginning -- one block of difference, but otherwise so much the same. I thought he would have poisoned this place for me, like he poisoned my so-much-of-everything-else, but it didn't stick, not to this. I came back, because of him, and then sought out so much strangeness -- also because, in many ways, of him -- and kept coming back because of that, then, and because the city sings to me. And I sought him out, at first, because of you -- and so two years of my life, nearly every single Important Thing, large or small or even smaller, can trace itself, somehow, back to you. And I wait two more days to maybe see you; you are an addiction I just cannot seem to quit. I think about what your face might look like, if I told you that -- I imagine an unclouded mirror, pure perception, something, finally, fully recognized.

It never fails to amaze me, this jarring when someone you have known as something infinite becomes real; you have to fit them into finite packages. Nearly two years of words, of shadows, and suddenly here is a voice in your ear, here are arms around you, here is a warm hello -- and it is a familiar thing, and strange. And every time I know how it will feel (and every time I am surprised). He is, of course, nothing like I imagined -- and nobody ever is, not really -- and that is not a good thing or a not-good thing, but simply how things are. I wonder, now that we have both become realities, if we will be able to continue crossing the lines we do, occasionally (catch me in the right mood and I will cross every line that can be drawn, with everyone there is); I suspect we will, if only because I am so good at separating things like this (and so very, very good at crossing lines -- or perhaps so very, very bad at leaving them uncrossed).

The next morning, the air is heavy with whispered threats of rain; the paths in the cemetery cling to my shoes. Everything sinking to the side, crumbling -- the outer walls covered in scaffolding, being repaired or rebuilt. The rain comes, and I am alone in a washed-out graveyard under a bright conspicuous umbrella, listening to nothing. (The people who like to visit cemeteries understand the pull; everyone else makes confused and crunched up faces at the thought.) I go to meet him at the station, and we walk across the bridge, vast shining hotel lobby, and sit down for proper afternoon tea, everything in miniature and richer than wishes. I'm unsure what we've found to link us for this past year-and-a-half, slightly more. (He says I am the exception -- he never maintains this sort of contact with anyone he doesn't see on any kind of regular basis. And I add, Especially if you aren't fucking them, don't even wish you were, and he smiles and makes a face at me across the table.)

Later, someone else -- the oldest stranger I know, perhaps (but also the youngest, in terms of that). Two years of deliberate not-meeting, and now we've said to hell with it, and I wait on the street by the entrance to a crowded station, and the taste is both familiar and strange when we are suddenly beside each other. Hours later -- after coffee and walking and getting lost and getting found and having dinner, late -- when we say goodbye, we are both unsure if any of this actually happened; perhaps we are both excellently solid fictions, still. (I have this photo of you, though -- that's proof that we were here, tonight! And he laughs and says that anyone can be proved anywhere with some judicious photoshopping -- I might still be imaginary.) He talks the way he types -- his accent carries through his text -- and stutters when he gets tired.

Back at the station, getting off the train, I stop in at the little grocery before heading back down the street to my hotel -- for water, juice, a bit of something sweet. As I approach the entrance, the night security guard smiles widely at me, tells me that he loves the way I walk, how I carry myself; I want to kiss him on the mouth.

When you sent me a message this morning, to cancel our dinner plans this evening, it was unsurprising (though still bitterly disappointing). I didn't tell you that I had a dream about you, the other night, as real as anything we ever lived between us. Like any addiction, you overwhelm and pull me in compelling and helpless directions inside myself; you are a sweet and irresistible and utterly unhealthy craving (and knowing that, I still do not know how to give you up).

Five Days In A Moment

2010-11-20T04:29:00.000-08:00

The apartment is amazing -- cool grey pebble-floored bathroom, with a showerhead like a rainstorm and a tub that lets me sink under the water to my neck (which I do, every evening, for ages). Tiny kitchen -- table, chairs. And, up a narrow and precarious ladder-like flight of steps, a bed flat on the floor, that takes up half a room. Ceiling all inward-pushing A-frame slopes (and I hit my head against them more than once, just in that first hour, opening bags, becoming familiar). An enormous and complicated television, long low sofa, two ornate and arty chairs. There is a lamp, on the floor beside the sofa, the size and shape of a goose -- a goose that has within it a warmly glowing egg of light -- and another, beside the bed, shaped like a duck. When I've changed some of my clothes, brushed my teeth, I walk outside -- winding a scarf several times around my throat, pulling soft fingerless gloves up over my wrists against the cold -- and study the door, the street. Grey stone steps, tall red door. The museum across the street, huge and white. Fix these in my mind, and then go have breakfast.

I think sometimes I only really enjoy being outside, walking for hours, when it is cold enough to make my eyes water. I walk, and walk, with no real objective, not really knowing how, eventually, to get back. There is a small lake, or an enormous pond, almost entirely frozen over. People, coat-bundled, walking across and around it. Two parents on ice skates, pulling a small child behind them on a sled. And the ice nearest the shore -- and the small pocket of unfrozen water there -- is overrun with ducks and swans. They are unphased by people, will walk right up to you to take bits of bread (which I don't have) from your fingers. They wander by, hardly paying any attention, near enough to touch.

There is a fine, almost invisible line, between manageably tired and non-functionally exhausted, which I never see until I've crossed it and turn to look back behind me. I notice, suddenly, that I cannot keep my eyes in focus, but by then of course it's much too late, and now -- in this tiny city with its knotted winding streets crammed full of letters and so many syllables, crunching in my mouth -- I am halfway lost. Keep finding the two main streets I know are within perhaps two blocks of the tall red doors of my apartment building, but cannot make that knowledge -- or my map -- relate to anything I actually see in front of me while I walk. Until, all at once, a bar on a streetcorner looks familiar, and a handful of halfway-dizzy steps later, there I am.

And there is 12 hours of sleep, sleep like something heavy and dense, something unfolding to take up all the space available and then take more. A day lost to haziness, and it doesn't matter; when I finally go out into the cold, the world is still there, waiting. I wander through walls of canvas, and later sit and talk to strangers while drinking coffee, and at night the hot bath melts everything away entirely, and I think...this must be how people feel, always (or very nearly) -- like floating, like something not weighted down and desperate with a huge and nameless thing.

I go and ride a horse -- 17 years since the last time I rode one -- and the day is cold in the damp way that seeps into your bones and stays; two hours and my legs are numb but I don't notice until we're back at the stable and I am once more standing on the frozen ground (and my hands smell of leather and warm soft hair and speed, still, hours later).

The water in the thermal pools is salt-rich and warm, or sometimes hot, and wraps around my skin like arms; it is like floating in a giant sea of tears, but cut away from the sadness of their cause. Washing away the world. And night comes, the sky fades away into the mist, and it is all unfocused drifting in a long warm embrace, everything softened, and the sting of salt on my lips. And on the long bus ride back to town, I fall asleep, thick velvet; everything gentle, gentle, and quiet.

Late And Early

2010-11-14T03:58:00.000-08:00

You pull me onto you, on top of you, and the moment just before my mouth meets yours feels like a deep intake of breath; it is like you have jumped in from some great height, and these kisses crash and break over your head. Like you are drowning, but without the panic and distress. We are both submerged, breathing in water, and our lungs adapt and we can open our eyes and watch the strange undersea world lit up around us.

The word frottage tastes like too-sweet tea, and you are something charged, something almost-too-hot to touch; your body against mine liquifies me, molton-cored, in a way that could coat your fingertips, make them shine, residual. (Sinking, sinking, and the struggle to stay down, deep-sunken, to not float back to the surface, chilled.) And the tiny porcelain feeling of our teeth, when they knock against each other. And this was only unexpected strange, for me, for you, for both of us. (And the lines you cross inside yourself are non-existent on the broad map of my body; my skin is borderless and open, there are no fences here.) The things we talk about are hilarious, absurd, and the contrast makes everything saturated, denser (in a fine and filling way). Moments when desperation is like honey, sweetly coating everything it touches.

I want to steal one of your shirts -- I think about this later, while I´m packing -- and feel you (other times, when everything is confused and distant and somewhere else) close against me. You leave me feeling warm and like something (briefly, perhaps, but still) settled, quiet inside my mind.

I fall asleep, thick and dreamless, for several hours after you leave, and when I wake up -- sudden, blurry -- it is 2:00am, and I get up and stand beneath the shower spray, too-hot and feeling things unravel deep inside me, and I stay up almost all night, after -- packing and re-packing and remembering every little detail that needs remembering before I leave. You tell me that you´re excited for me to have this month that makes the remaining eleven of them bearable, and I hate that this is true (but I cannot deny it, even if I want to).

I´m on a plane, somewhere in-between and nowhere, and the man in the aisle seat (and empty seat between us) is going home to Sweden, and smiles in a way that makes me want to touch him; he seems continually just about to tell me something amazing, something huge and real and true and secret (but he doesn´t, and we simply beam at each other every time our eyes catch, saying nothing, not really talking more at all). In the air, not any place, on my way to gather moments, days, like nuts and fruit and bits of something sweet -- glut myself, and fill my pockets, making stores of something to sustain me through all the long other months ahead.

And when we land, not yet 7:00, early morning, the darkness is something real, like velvet, and when I get outside, waiting for the bus, I look up at the sky and watch my breath hang there, pause, and disappear.

8 1/2 Pounds

2010-11-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

You were on top of me, your face close to mine, when you said that you wanted to read what I would say about this, about you, about us. My legs wrapped around your waist (and you are more substantial than any concept; you are a tree hiding a secret treehouse, shelter from the sky) and you might as well have told me that you'd like it if I would breathe, that you'd like to taste the rise and fall of my chest, that it could tell you something. (And I would pour words into your outstretched hands, over your bare skin; I would simmer them in honey and cook them down to something rich and sweet and feed them to you by the spoonful. I would let you hear me, for a moment.)

But that is later. The beginning is made all of words, also -- different ones, small and green and fleeting. Words and then the clink of ice cubes in a glass and a kiss stolen, standing up. And all the words that followed that would not have happened -- or this is what I imagine, or suspect -- without the kiss to call them out. Words and words and more of them -- when I run out of them to give you, I offer up the words of others (and surely those are more satisfying, anyway -- more than my artificial-sweetener junk food plastic sentences that can fill you up and take up space without ever satisfying, without nourishing; things that sometimes seem good going down but leave you with the taste of false and empty, disappointment burning at the back of your throat, lingering). Can I apologize for the only thing I ever seem to have to give being so stark inadequate? (Though you, I think, do not believe in apologies as such, so perhaps I can't; there is no trade here, for me, in that sort of currency. Can my fingers, trailing, tell you everything you need to know -- or, more important still, can they tell you everything I want you knowing?)

Let's pretend that it is possible.

But before that, or beyond it -- I make you tea, and you unzip my dress. Where is the symmetry in that? (A warm ceramic mug for a warm expanse of skin.) But it is the in-betweens that give anything a name that follows (and the not-quite-anywhere is where I make my home). When we are stretched out in the sand, the small island of the bed an abbreviated stretch of beach, and my fingers follow the tides of your face; when we are laughing (and my talking unspools and tangles and never finds an end or a straight line or anything at all) and you are smiling and I am watching you smile, and feeling it here (with a certain illustrative gesture of my hand -- your hand -- palm up, fingers curled) deep down, then you are beautiful and I am somehow...there is a sanctity in moments, sometimes. Lying beside you, lips and fingers lazy, aimless, could be a hymn in church, the end notes all vibrato and sustained. (And maybe this, right here, is where I keep my virtue, and not in any box.)

When your mouth is on me, there are moments when I can halfway-see the patterns that your tongue is tracing -- actually see them, behind closed eyes, brightly-colored trails flashing intricacies and some secret language of Yes and Please and More -- when pleasure is suddenly not conceptual, but solid and a color and there is an impossible-to-reproduce specific shape to it. You are constructing the labyrinth, and I am lost inside of it, and happy to remain there, wandering, floating (and the maze is unspooling from inside of you, and it is inside of me, and we are both inside of it, also, and time and space are funny things, but these thoughts come later, after me).

And the effect you have on me, your body, your face; I want to devour you entirely, drink you until I'm over-full and falling-down and high. Your hands, and your fingers in my mouth, and the way your skin feels beneath fingertips; the muscles in your thighs and the scent of your chest. All of those things tumble into one another, gathering momentum. (When everything is moving faster than the fastest thing, and stopped still unmoving all at once.) When my lips are wrapped around you, and I am saturated with the taste of you, and time moves faster and slower and not at all, and every pause is to read the pulse of everything through slippery fingers, and to perch quietly inside my head and watch your face. (How would it be, if we could taste somebody's mind, their heart, when we were tasting their pleasure?)

Here is the important part (or perhaps they all are, infinitely splitting into pieces and re-forming and all of it paramount) -- to lie beside you, directionless, and laugh and pass words back and forth like an overflowing bottle (you pull them out of me, and I spill out with too much of everything) is easy, and uncomplicated, and (maybe, somehow, in a small and qualified sort of way) Right. There is a moment of calm, between inhale and exhale, that is the space on your chest where I rest my head; there is a moment of calm inside of which I can (briefly) rest.

Remembrances

2010-11-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

I don't remember the first time we met.

I can recall almost every subsequent time. Two-and-a-half years later, walking down a quiet sidewalk in a quiet neighborhood, light fading to deep and clouded greys, and I passed by a stranger, not paying attention -- a small smile and slight tilting of my head, but all unfocused, no eye-contact -- and, two steps later, I heard my name called out, and turned, and it was him. No reason for him to be on that street, that evening -- and he couldn't remember when I was arriving, and was trying to reach me back in the States to find out exactly; he hadn't been home that afternoon to get my message. (Did you think I would come all this way and just...not call you up to say that I was here? And he smiled, and shook his head, but he'd been excited or happy or something else entirely.) He was on his way somewhere else, but we stopped and sat in a small pizza joint, and drank lemon verbena tisane, and watched each other across the tiny table, and smiled quietly. I remember having lunch with him in the restaurant of an unbearably swank hotel -- him saying, by way of explanation, I feel like eating smoked salmon -- and having the vegetarian plate (I can still recall with total clarity the texture of the spring rolls as I broke into them with the heavy silver fork, the taste of crispness and oil and soy saltiness), and how before we went in and found a table he touched the piano in the lobby -- huge and shining -- and found someone who worked there and asked if he could play it; he sat down and ran his fingertips along the keys, played something short and sweet, and beamed (and several hotel front desk-type people stood and watched him, and watched me watching him, and when he thanked them and stood up one of them told him he was welcome to sit and play a little longer, but he grinned at me and looked at them and said that really, he was not a fine enough pianist to do more than just fool around incompetently on such a beautiful instrument, and anyway we needed to have lunch). I remember, later that week, having coffee in an intimidatingly posh cafe-and-chocolate shop -- we sat beside the windows that led out to the deck, or patio (but it was winter, and closed off) and the every-hair-in-place and perfect waitress looked from him to me and back again with the same look that people almost always gave us, when we were anywhere together -- a sort of suspicious disbelief, an edginess (a dear friend who met him told me, once, that the two of us together projected a kind of energy that was so very Real it left one mildly shaken, disturbed, wondering) and we sipped espresso and ate exquisite chocolates, and what we talked about was nothing, and what we didn't say said everything that was needed.

I might recall the later-in-the-evening of the day we met -- sitting on the floor in the living room, near the enormous endlessly tall glass-windowed doors that led out back to the sort-of-patio behind the house, the light late-summer grey-violet fading, and that candle that I'd brought your parents, lit, upon the table. Watching the wax liquefy, and waiting for the small trinkets buried within to be exposed, burning our fingers on the melted wax to pull them out, or paging through my lovely illustrated copy of the Tao Te Ching (I had another one sent to me, that winter, to give to you for Christmas). I know it was a sun-filled afternoon, mid-summer; I expect that it was on the driveway in front of the house, or in the cool-tiled entryway, but I can't quite fix the moment in my mind. (And later in the evening might have been later in some other evening; so many evenings, similar, and melting together and pristine.)

Have I ever told you that I had never known love before I knew you, that I had never loved at all? (And I mean any sort of love, for anyone at all.) You cracked me open and made things possible; you let me taste potentiality, though I doubt I knew it at the time (I'm sure I didn't, even).

A year after I'd moved here, finally in my own tiny apartment, rid of my previous roommate -- the only year I had my own actual plugged-into-the-wall telephone -- I would call you sometimes, in the middle of my night, and almost always when I was drunk enough to feel capable of talking at any length on the telephone. You were always beyond amused at these calls (I remember how I would call occasionally, or you would, when I was back in the States after that year -- how it would all come flooding back to me, how it never made any sense, how your voice was home and nothing else came close). I don't, however, recall anything I ever said to you, or anything you might have said to me. (Later, 5 years later, nearly, you talked about something I'd written in a letter to you, once, and I had no idea what you were talking about. I still wonder about that, now, today.)

I remember 5 years later, after not-quite-two months in Italy, pretending that my life was different (and perhaps, during that time, it was) and it had been almost as long since we had spoken -- different addresses, different phone numbers, no phones at all, and it's so almost-impossible to find someone you've lost when the distance between you is so vast and inescapable. And I'd been in the city for two days, tracked down emails and phone numbers and different people and finally there was your voice on the machine and the message I left you was...what, I wonder? The next day, at her house, and I borrowed her phone to try calling you again, and you were downtown, at a hotel, after a morning concert and a meeting with someone, and I was 20 minutes away from there and rushed from the house to meet you. Walked in and saw you, sitting at a table by the windows, reading a newspaper, and I walked up behind you and paused, and stared at the back of your neck, your cheek, and reached out my hand to touch your shoulder -- you startled slightly, and stood up, turning to face me (you were wearing a fine wool suit and your tie was in your pocket and your face was split with smiling) and you held me so tightly and for so long that when we finally took a half-step away from each other (my hands still on your arms, your hands against my shoulders) the other people in the lobby were watching us, mildly confused and curious. When we walked down the street and you wanted to have lunch -- I'd already eaten but I said I'd be happy to drink tea and watch you have yours.

Have I ever told you, really told you, what you have meant to me, all these years? How you were, in some ways -- in certain hard-to-grasp and fundamental ways -- the beginning of my story? What, though, could I say -- because I could write volumes to you, and about you, and in the end it's all words but I don't know if any of them say what I would like them to. I don't remember the first time that we met (though the many late-evenings after, sitting quietly in candlelit darkness, the many afternoons drinking tea and laughing, those long moments one day, sitting on that park bench, and you stretched out and laid your head in my lap and closed your eyes to the early-summer sky); I wonder if you do, if I asked you, if you would have a story of your own to tell. Because you are what I measure things against, I think -- even though you aren't what I'm waiting for, not really (except, in certain ways, you are). And we are impossible to figure out, to nail down -- we kiss like lovers, still, because that's a line we can't keep from crossing (the categories are inadequate, we need to write a whole new dictionary, break through the old definitions and create our own) -- but what we are is something different, something beyond that. Something both more and less. I can't remember the first time we met, perhaps, because it seems we've always known each other, and so there wasn't some first, beginning moment.

What I remember, clearly, is walking down the street with you that afternoon. And as we walked, I abruptly grabbed your hand, because (I told you this, then, and you smiled with your eyes and squeezed my hand in return, fingers intertwined) the only way I could believe that you were real -- that this was happening -- was if I touched you, kept touching you, did not let go.

Magic & Reality

2010-11-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

In line at the pharmacy, the woman behind me touches my shoulder and tells me that she loves my hair. I smile, and thank her, and she continues talking, and I continue nodding and smiling (but my head aches, and my face hurts, and my sinuses are pressure-filled and blocked; I'm tired and anxious and not paying any real attention). Behind her, there is a woman in a wheelchair -- her skin is very pale and thin like paper; it looks like, if I touched it, it would be soft (but, if I was less than gentle, might somehow tear) -- and her hair is very short, and would obviously be white, but she has dyed it a sort of pale-yet-neon cotton candy violet. (And she meets my eyes and smiles, in the way that people do -- something I have still not gotten used to, strange and delightful, like we're all members of some secret club.)

Time passes quickly enough, or at least, not slowly. The nurses are hurried, running behind, but they all pause for several minutes in my room to talk to me. I sit, wrapped in a blanket, drinking orange juice, spend the two hours lost somewhere inside a book. (And the nurse who got me started stops in at the end of her shift, and fusses over me, concerned that the infusion will make me sicker, or more quickly, despite the antibiotics I have waiting in my purse. She tells me to bring pictures from my trip, when I come in for my next infusion, and I ask her if she has an email address -- a stupid question, really, as doesn't everybody? -- and she writes it down for me; I promise to send her photos.) Later, when my IV machine beeps out its relentless alert -- FINISHED! FINISHED! -- the nurse who comes in to let me go beams at me, and says it's been so long since she last saw me (which is true). We talk for ten minutes, fifteen; she tells me her particular tricks for avoiding illness when travelling (saline nasal spray every couple of hours in the airplane, preventative Sudafed -- The real stuff, that you have to sign for when you buy it now, not that crappy substitute.) It's dark and halfway-raining when I get outside; I stop to wrap my scarf around my neck, re-button my coat. The city smells like wet grass, and dirt, and fallen leaves; I don't avoid the puddles as I cross the street.

Antibiotics are like magic; after just the first night's dose, I wake up feeling almost unbelievably better, just like that. If I had to get on a plane tomorrow, I would be okay with it. (As it is, I will be getting on plane in one week exactly; none of this seems real to me at all until it's happening, however -- it's all a sort-of-dream until I'm going to the airport, until I've gone through security, found my departure gate.)

Waiting in the small coffeeshop for a hot spiced chai tea, staring at the walls -- a series of weird and captivating paintings, animals and fantastic creatures, a feeling of fairy tales -- and the short-haired girl making coffees (freckles and a quiet smile, delicate wrists) says, to anybody listening, that she has a latte on the counter, free for anyone who wants it. (Made by mistake, or ordered and then forgotten -- I don't know.) Nobody takes it, so when my tea is ready I grab the second cup. Walk out the door and down the block, to the corner I passed on my way over several minutes earlier, and the old man is still standing there, selling the small local newspaper that the city's homeless (not only homeless, but that's what they identify themselves with most) sell. It doesn't ever seem to make much difference, the same people selling papers in the same places for years -- five years, ten. I go up to him, hold out the paper cup, and ask him if he'd like some coffee (and apologize for not having any sugar to offer, but the coffeeshop had sugar only in glass containers, the only packets they had to take away were of artificial sweetener). And he looks at me, a bit confused (this isn't a neighborhood I spend a lot of time in, and I've never seen him before; we've never spoken) and says yes, and thanks me (and says he never takes sugar in his coffee, anyway). He offers me a paper, but I refuse, and wish him a nice rest-of-the-day (though it's wet and grey and cold, and he looks like all of those things) and walk up the street, and behind me he calls out Thank you! again. (Half-turn my head, and smile, and continue walking.)

I spend the afternoon having my hair re-dyed, and cut -- reading a book that takes me to another place, skews my reality whenever I look up from it (when I read this on the bus, I end up stepping off the bus into a different world) and talking with the girl who does my hair. And it's dark, when I leave that small warm room; it's dark and raining cleanly, and it falls in oddly-patterned heartbeats against my umbrella as I walk. The bus home is crowded, and noisy -- a loud group of teenagers sitting near me, halfway-shouting about the small and nothing details of their lives. One girl talks about how it's so hard for her to memorize things -- small things, anythings -- how she doesn't know her own address or phone number; she can't remember things like that with any ease. (It makes me laugh quietly, staring out the window at nothing, at reflections -- too dark and fogged up to see anything but lights flashing past, beyond -- at the same time it makes me vaguely sad.) When I get home, it's not as late as the world outside would make it seem. (I drink tea and talk to strangers.) Later, when I unpin my hair and comb through it, getting out of the shower (pinned up so that I will not get it wet), I look down at my hands and see my fingers all stained blue; I wash them, rub them together over and over, the water running hot (but the color remains, stubborn on my fingers, like a shadow).

Blackout

2010-11-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

Walking into the store, I grab an empty basket, make my way to the other side (there is a certain order one must follow, start at one end and wander through the aisles to the other -- it doesn't matter which side I enter from, or what I need; start at one end, finish at the other) and suddenly, mid-step, everything goes black. Completely. Every single light gone out. There is a sustained and nearly-endless moment of total silence, when something unexpected like that happens, a collective pause, intake of breath. (And then, of course, a lot of chaotic and confused shouting, in a dozen languages that I don't speak.) Everyone stood still, for several beats -- still shouting, or calling out questions and answers and statements (English as an afterthought -- Don't worry, just some sort of power outage, no problems here.) The lights don't come back on after a minute, after a few -- and a store full of people using cell phones as makeshift flashlights (it's a surprisingly bright thing, a cell phone screen, when you are in a large and dark and unfamiliar place). Everyone is shocked into politeness or good behaviour, and moving slowly. I leave my basket near one of the check-out stands, and walk back outside, the way I'd come. The street is dark, outside -- no street lights, traffic lights, not anything -- and looking up the road it is pitch black for at least a few more blocks. Possibly even more than that; it's hard to tell. But a block further on, to the side, glows brightly in the evening -- the main street where all the buses run. And so I walk back over to the next block, and cross the street, and wait for a bus to take me home again, empty-handed.

When you said that I was alright (not once, but several times, repeating it over and over, low-voiced, like a prayer) what you actually meant was that you were alright. Or, perhaps, that you were alright with my not-alrightness. I wanted to ask you, then, how you knew -- how you could be sure. I thought you meant it in some kind of future-tense probability way -- You will be alright; things will be. It wasn't until later that it struck me, what you had really been saying. (I think you are alright -- it seems so, anyway -- and I wonder then what makes you do the other things you do, or not do them.)

I feel my sinuses becoming heavy, pressure-filled, my throat halfway-sore in a way that leaves me feeling anxious; I leave in ten days, and really don't have time to fall ill right now (though, I suppose, better right now than a week from now, but still). I always seem to get spectacularly ill whenever I travel anywhere; I had been thinking about that, lately -- being gone for a whole month seemed like I might be asking for half of that time to be spent sick and miserable, so maybe if I get a low dose of something lousy now, that lingers into the first few days of travelling, then I'll be fine for the remaining weeks. (Or maybe for once things could work out, and this could be just a passing few days of almost-nothing, and then be gone.) I drink juice -- the expensive juice, the kind that coats your throat like silk -- and tea, and honey by the spoonful, dark and golden-sweet. Sleep fitfully and wake up hazy and aching, like I've been run over by something heavy, repeatedly.

I caught a glimpse of you, out at the corner of my vision -- I thought so, anyway. It seemed like the shape of you; I couldn't be certain (but I called out to you, because you-know-exactly-why -- so long, and still that dull ache of not-really-there). And then I knew, was certain, that it was you, because I blinked, looked back...and you were gone.

Archetypes

2010-10-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think we meet the same handful of people -- maybe five, or ten, or even twenty -- over and over, again and again, cyclical and ceaseless (life as a prayer wheel). And like this, perhaps, everything can be infinite, because it keeps coming back around, not stoppable, here were are again at the beginning, and doesn't-this-taste-familar. Perhaps it's all a giant secret test, to see how long we can manage to go on and on through all of this before we finally start to see a little bit of what might result; does it take a lifetime before our tiny little brains can learn to recognize a pattern? Several lifetimes, maybe; a longer-than-eternity.

Here is a truth. Everything will unravel, and the ground will crumble beneath your feet, and you will fall and fall and fall. This is how these things happen. Or, you will slice through the ropes around you, toss everything into disarray and difference, and jump (and fall and fall, and fall). There is, probably, a third option; I cannot put a finger on it, now. The falling is out of your hands; the moments just before (and just after) -- those are yours to mold and twist and re-shape as you wish. And so, it changes nothing while it changes everything.

Two glasses of wine, and I wake at 5:00am, clawing my way out of an endless spiral of disturbed, disordered sleep, bad dreams. Each time I woke, falling back into them, into a deeper hole, so this time I get up -- dull headache at the edges of my thoughts -- drink cold water, sit up and think, wake up entirely. So what I tell you, then, is maybe not enough, or not fully-formed complete. It is early morning darkness words, remaining whispered. It makes me think that we have met before (that you are someone else -- and perhaps you are, even though you aren't). The pieces can, after all, be rearranged to form whatever picture you might desire (except that in the end, you only have so many pieces, and the picture will end up familiar, no matter what you do). The same handful of things, of people, of circumstance, again and again and again. And every time we halfway glimpse it, we fall back in, deeper. After an hour, maybe more, I am awake enough to go to sleep again, and this time I do not dream of anything at all (or if I do, it doesn't touch me).

What I meant to say, was this -- I wish there was a way that I could pluck you from mid-air and ease the fall; I wish that I could catch you.

Moments

2010-10-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

It tore through me like a thunderstorm, lightning-flashed my breath away. And I had been choking on it -- for weeks, for months, for every second of today, for every moment here, in the dark, beside you -- and I would shut it down, swallow it whole, re-teach myself the art of inhale-exhale. Until I couldn't, and it all spilled out from me, violent and ache in my throat and everything moving in all directions all at once, everything in motion and lost.

There was a moment, just before.

Because you were there, and my head was on your chest, my cheek. And your fingers drawing patterns on my hand, my wrist (gentleness so acute it hurts) and my other hand reaching up to rest against your head, your forehead warm. There was a moment. Your hand on my back, my neck (I wonder, then, if this physical nearness can bridge the other, deeper distances, if it can make up for other things that aren't, and it feels like that, sometimes; and being near you, against you, like this is like walking into a fire -- your tenderness burns as it nourishes). And my palm resting against your skull, your forehead (your skin is warm), and my thumb close to your temple, and there was a moment -- I read the rhythm of your pulse beneath the thin warm skin, it echoes through my hand and through my chest and I am lying there, beside you, my head on your chest, but the ground falls away and in that moment (your hands, your heartbeat, the pattern of your pulse jumping through my fingertip) everything rushes up and overflows, breaks, and falls falls falls, unstoppable, there, in that moment.

That kind of crying, all internal violence manifested in choked salt and hollow ringing in the ears -- I want to scream, but instead I tense everything and almost stop breathing, try to contain things that are no longer containable and under my control. And you were silent, holding me tighter, and more tightly still, your palm flat against my back and the sound of your breathing, and it feels like forever but it couldn't have been more than a handful of minutes (hold them between your fingers, watch them fade and disappear). There are knots inside of me, deep and central, that cannot be picked apart with fingernails and determination; after, when the storm has passed and my breathing slows back to something regular and easier -- something I remember how to do -- when my hands unclench and I go almost-limp...I feel them loosened. Not undone or cut apart or disappeared, but less oppressive, not bound as tightly. Staying still against you, my cheek resting on your now-damp shirt, and you holding me (and holding me, tightly, fingers interlaced) and I practice how exhale follows inhale, and on and on, remembering the taste of it on my tongue. The weather is still uncertain, the storm clouds heavy and ominous, and the force of hurricanes still bottled up deep in my chest, in boxes tied fast with heavy twine and too many knots to count. But. One moment leads to others, and later, because of this brief pause of chaos and violence and no control -- later, there is a moment.

And later, in that moment -- when I laugh, I mean it.

Or Maybe Not

2010-10-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

When I wake up in the middle of the night, small hours glowing red in the dark -- in the dark, the air is thick, like something more substantial -- I roll over, stretch onto my back, and listen to the rain blow against the windowpanes. It's good to hear the air, like this; when the weather makes itself known, and the world outside shouts I Am Real, then 3:00am dark silence is like a blanket warmly wrapped around my shoulders instead of something else, heavier or sinister or hollow. (Then, maybe, there is something quiet but present somewhere inside of me that whispers back I Am Real, Too; most of the time, in daylight, I think I might be something less-than, something like a ghost, a whisper. Conceptual. A dream.)

He walked in while I was swearing at my computer screen, and thought that I was directing it at him, that he was too early and the envelope he had come for wasn't ready (but it was, sitting there on the counter, waiting, and I was only half-shouting at things that couldn't hear me anyway). And all the small shining bits of silver in his face could not entirely (could not even a little) distract the attention from his smile, and for a moment my brain melted completely. (But we should start over; I should have started over. To before explaining what I was actually voicing frustration with, to before saying anything at all. Walk through the door, and smile, and let me pause and tell you how intensely beautiful you are; let me reach out and touch your cheek, gentle. And then start time again, and the day can continue as it will; that was enough.)

Sometimes, in public places, when my gaze slides through the eyes of a stranger, I imagine being followed down streets, into an alleyway -- a doorway, a hidden nowhere sort of place -- and strangled, or stabbed, or shot. I think about the infinity of minute tenuous connections we weave our lives into every day (every hour, every inhale exhale pause), and eventually the numbers have to turn. It's nice to think that everyone has good intentions, but it isn't really true. How many strangers have I passed, or touched, or crossed; how many will I? If it's some innate sense, then I'm not tuned in enough to know, and if it's nothing more nor less than luck, or simple numbers...then eventually, they must add up, run out. (Sometimes, I wonder if I would recognize the moment just before, if I'd fight back.)

The problem with stories -- or with the ones I have to tell, or with life in general (I've lost track, anyway, of where one ends and one begins) -- is that there are never any clear beginnings. All of my stories are pure middle, endless in-between, and each time I think I've traced back far enough, I find another layer and have to keep peeling. I am mired in middles, sunk in deep and stuck. (Hardly surprising, then, this always-obsession with endings, with the idea of them. When you said, that one afternoon, that you were forensically aware, my pulse went racing -- anticipation, or relief, or some strange combination of things, but not pause. It is impossible to tell, to make any explanations; it isn't about action or lack of action or anything like that at all, but it's this notion of knowledge that can be cradled in your palm. I crave potentiality in everything; I need it like I need to breathe. And I can imagine your hand closing around my throat, and I can imagine not making any attempt at all to stop you.)

Fingerspelling

2010-10-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

On the bus, and three people get on together -- a man and two women. They sit near each other, but not beside each other, which is strange; watching them through the window, before they boarded, they seemed so obviously together, parts of a whole. Watching them, sitting across aisles apart, it suddenly becomes clear as one of the women begins to flex and shift her fingers in crisp deliberate staccato, hands hovering in the air close to her chest, her face. Fingers painting invisible worlds, fleeting. The other woman glides her fingers through the perhaps now-liquid air, low noises deep in her throat punctuating certain thoughts, gestures. The man, a row farther back, able to see both of them, mostly just observes and remains silent, still.

You call me as you always call me -- not drunk, perhaps, but certainly un-sober -- halfway-maudlin. (And you told me, recently, that I was your last link to reality, and it made me laugh sadly, gently. Because I know what you meant, really -- whether or not you even know it -- and it's that I am the last link you have to the reality you'll never live as real. Somewhere there is a universe of maybe-almost-could-have-been, and in it you're a dentist, or no longer living, or living a silent and monastic life, or something else entirely. And our beginning was not a kind of ending, and the impossible exists without that all-intrusive im.) You said that I'm the only person who has ever said anything truly horrible to you (and rush to add that you deserved it); maybe I'm the only person who has ever said anything truly honest to you. And you pause, and think, and say, You have always been better to me than anyone.

It is a small pleasure, to eavesdrop when there's no hope of comprehension. A scene that is all image, all raw impressions, nothing more. The woman nearest me, on my side of the bus, does most of the communicating; her hands are magical, fingers like needles stitching sentences together in the air, her face elastic. I could watch her talk silently for hours; I would, if it was possible. (But I get off the bus before them, and they are gone.)

What we are doing here, now, after all this time -- all of these words. This is nothing, or not much more than that. If I could see you, now, I would stay silent (leave all the words unspoken, talk with just my hands and fingers).

Permission

2010-10-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

There are benefits to being a passenger, beyond the obvious -- apart from the getting from one place to another place, getting where you want to go, or at least where you need to. Apart from spending small slivers of time nowhere, in-between (there is no Here I can sink into more than Nowhere). Sitting in the back of a taxi gives you permission to watch, to stare. (I don't really need permission, but it's nice, sometimes, to have it anyway.) His hands are elegant, long-fingered; his wrists. The tendons, stark, velvet-shifting beneath the skin; I want to drag the pads of my fingers over the low smooth ridges of them, follow with my tongue. A momentary flash of unfocused thirst, crave -- here, now gone; I blinked. (What would happen, if every fleeting impulse could be acted out? Press your lips, briefly, against the skin of a stranger without a word, fingertips like whispers. Every stranger, every second, a maybe single-serving slice of something sweet and oddly satisfying and intimate, in tightly qualified and time-restricted ways.) It's a short ride, and his voice is soft and kind when he uses my name to wish me a pleasant evening, and I never actually entirely see his face (and I never actually entirely need to).

Being Still

2010-10-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

The woman at the desk when I check in remembers me, halfway remembers my name, even though I haven't checked in with her for months, for probably six months, perhaps even more than that. (She has new glasses, or new since the last time I remember seeing her; her hair is longer. I've never known her name.) I wonder how many hundreds of people she sees each week, and how many of them she sees more than once, and how many of them she can recognize on sight; I expect the cartoon hair helps (though she used to comment on my old hair, too, nearly every time I happened to check in with her). In the MRI building, the lab tech who once massacred my arm when placing an IV is there (though now she is one of the most consistent at hitting my veins of anybody at the hospital -- I tell her this, when she is prepping the small moment of skin just inside the bend of my elbow, and we laugh together) but the other woman, the one who's always seemed to be somehow in charge of things, perhaps, is not -- and this is a shame, because I like her, really, quite a lot. She exudes a certain sense of everything-under-control -- her voice, her flat metallic-grey short hair, the way she holds her shoulders. She gets the tube into my arm without a problem, takes the small amount of blood they need to make sure my kidneys are functional and I won't end up...however one ends up if one cannot flush the contrast solution from one's body, later. But when she tries to flush the line with saline, it doesn't work; nothing happens. She wiggles things around a bit, and tries to force the issue, slightly -- manages to get a small amount of saline in, and her fingers pressing gently on my arm, just above the place where the tiny plastic tube disappears inside -- Does that hurt? And it doesn't, not at all, and I'm not just saying that to be agreeable. It feels a little odd, perhaps -- the barest trace of something-weird -- but it isn't painful or uncomfortable. She forces it a little more, and now we can both see the small lump forming beneath the skin, saline seeping out into the surrounding tissues, not inside the vein. But...it really doesn't hurt. That's so strange. Usually it hurts a lot, when that happens. And she nods, says it's supposed to. But we can both see that it isn't actually working, and my veins are trying to forcibly eject the plastic IV tube, so she takes it out (and it doesn't bleed at all) and spends long moments tracing her fingertips against my skin -- now here, now slightly lower; back of my hand, side of my wrist -- trying to find another, better place. But she can't find anything she really likes the feel of, and doesn't want to do this a third time, if it doesn't work, so I let her switch to my left (my dominant, and I hate having IVs placed there because it makes me feel mildly bound, restricted) arm, and she finds a spot immediately and this time it all works like a dream.

I am very good at lying still. I can count out my breathing, slow to ten, each time -- inhale, exhale. I cannot ever make my mind be calm and motionless like this, but it is nothing to do it to my body. I stay so motionless I might be carved from stone, or some other something -- more solid, or stronger, or less real. (When I tell him I feel helpless, he laughs and says I come across about as helpless as a wolverine. When things are quiet, in the dark, I think about what it must be like to feel oneself understood; I cannot begin to imagine it.) I can stay impossibly still, because everything else -- the things that matter more, the things that are more real, less solid -- is never still at all.

The rest of the day blurs in and out of focus -- stumble across the street, down the block, to get a cup of tea, and check the time, rush back to the other building, upstairs, wait to see my doctor. And she talks to me, and tells me things that are meant to gently reassure, but what it all comes down to, falling down around me like shards, is a capital-lettered We Don't Really Know. Because things can be as good as they can be today, and at any point become, suddenly, Not. (And We Don't Really Know, and there isn't much concrete solid anything that we can do, and it's all indefinite waiting and try not to think about it very much too hard -- the simplest thing being the most impossible.) Then rush back -- downstairs, across skybridge, through a brief maze of corridors, and down even further -- to the Infusion Center. I am in a large and windowed room this time, after months of always ending up in the tiny, windowless rooms in the hidden interior hallways. The chair is larger, too, and not the same weird seasick green that all the other chairs seem to be; it makes me feel like I'm in a cartoon, or a funhouse, shrunk down and sitting in a piece of giants' furniture -- and in the back of my mind I remember, distantly, one of the nurses talking about getting new chairs for all the rooms at some point, and I wonder if this is one of them, if it is new, if that is why, the difference. The clock on the wall -- high up, and facing the chair, staring straight at me -- is loud, absurdly so; the regular ceaseless tick-tick-ticking of it hurts my head, and overwhelms all other background anything. The IV tubing is still in my arm from the MRI, and so everything is quickly and easily done, set up in no time at all, as fast as the wait for the pharmacy to get my bag of liquid drugs prepared and sent down. I read until I can no longer focus, until the words all start to bleed together on the page, and then I curl myself into a knotted and objectively uncomfortable-looking knot -- pillow against my chest and shoulder, chin turned to rest against the pillow, knees tucked up -- and drift to sleep, my heartbeat aligning with the ticking of the clock up on the wall.

If

2010-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

If we're walking together, hand in hand, and you run or are torn away or disappear; if I am alone in the woods, and lost, and wandering blindly in the dark. If you're gone, and I'm lost, and I am searching for you, frantic; if I cry out your name trying to find you (trying to find my way, trying to find something missing). If I call out to you because I'm alone, because I'm afraid; if I'm afraid of the vast empty night, or how it is filled with danger, with evil, with wicked trees that reach and grasp and things that mean only harm. Afraid of how all the empty spaces are filled up with more empty spaces, and solitary misunderstanding and not understanding -- not understanding anything at all, and everything a different language, the wrong one, and it's all so noisy it drops into only silence anyway, and it crushes in our eardrums with the hollow of it all. If we're walking together, in the woods, in the dark, and now I am walking in the woods alone and the night is heavy and blank and the silence overwhelming waits to sink its teeth into my skin; I can feel it waiting, crouched, red-glow eyes, smell it sense it. Waiting. And you aren't there; you are just exactly nowhere (and I am nowhere, because I don't know where I am, or where we were, or how we got here). If I scream your name until all that's left is raw, and exposed edges, until I lose my voice (because I have lost myself, because I am lost and you are lost and we are here which is nowhere which is nothing, and it's all raw edges and the taste of bleeding). If this is what happens -- here is the book, and it has fallen open to this page, to this story, and now that's all there is, and it has to slowly too-fast rush forward to the end (which is blank, because this is nothing, and nowhere, and it erases itself before our eyes). If space is vacuum (we cannot breathe, it suffocates, and you cannot hear me screaming) then what is time? Dust, crumbling. Gone. Everywhere.

If you hear me calling for you, desperate, broken; if you see me lost, blind-running through the woods, branches catching in my hair, at my clothes, and the night is long and cold and the day is longer and colder and if I close my eyes maybe I will finally see something real. If you hear me -- if it's possible, from where you are, from no place, from not existing except in a memory or a dream or old letters never written -- if you hear me calling, and you whisper back, echoing through my head, silent, that I am not lost. That there are no woods, the trees aren't wicked because the trees aren't there at all; that I am wrong and it is a day that makes your eyes squint bright, and none of this was ever anything. If you say that, and nothing else (help me, I'm lost -- take my hand, draw me a map, be a guide; no, you aren't lost because you aren't anywhere, certainly not where you think you are, and there is no map for there is no here, so just be quiet and stop imagining places where there is only empty space and vacancy). If you do. That changes nothing, offers no help. You can't un-make a world by simply saying No, there isn't. It isn't. You aren't. You can't say No, this isn't, and offer no alternatives; reality is real until there is something realer to swallow it up, replace it. The story's end stays ended if you just stop writing.

If you reached out to take my hand; if you painted me a different picture. If you showed me that trees weren't waiting to attack, to harm, but were solid and benign and filled with singing birds and friendly squirrels and owls staring down at us, watchful. If you broke through the seal of vacuum endless empty with a quiet assurance, with a better story, with an end that hadn't ended yet, that wouldn't stop here, that wouldn't stop. If the trees weren't trees at all, and the woods weren't woods, and where we were or where we are is somewhere more than nowhere, and doesn't just fall off the world to nothing, infinite. If you planted a seed that grew into a world that expanded to a universe entire, or spoke slow warm honey into my ears; if you could point at us on a map, in the sky, under the moon. If the silence wasn't waiting, pulsing, in the dark, because the darkness wasn't, because every word you wrote was fireflies, and every sound that passed your lips lit them up like beacons, shining. If things were different, then things wouldn't be the same, and maybe everything could change. If you weren't, if I wasn't; if we were.

Fire & Water

2010-09-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

Sleep comes in waves, crashing -- long breathless deep-sunk hours, and then sudden surfacing, heavy intake of breath (and down down down again while eyes are still half-open). Dreams gather and condense, solid and more solid (and grains of sand turn into boulders, but not the other way around). They disappear into nothing, no traces, washed away.

Passing words back and forth like an open bottle, and they trail warmth on the way down, pure and undiluted. Lick a careless drop from your wrist, faint stains left on your lips (and your mouth tingles, breath velvet-rich).

You've been away for five days; you've been gone for months. (You'll be gone always, maybe, or longer than that, whatever unnamed distance or scope of time that is -- something inconceivable and terrible and realer than the realest thing.)

She tells me that when I stop getting up to my usual mischiefs, that's when she'd start to worry about me. (It's like the whole world is somehow missing eyes.) I eat crystallised ginger, big chunks of it, straight from the bag. I like the sweet burn of it against my tongue, and slowly down my throat; I like the way it lingers. (She thinks ginger tastes of soap, and that has always made me wonder how much soap she's tasted, in her lifetime. I'd imagine none, and so it can't be a very fair comparison after all.)

I read things, sometimes (often) that make me think of you. It's like a background humming in my head; the things are always there, but it takes vibrating at the proper frequency before the tuning in is possible (things you never notice until you have a reason to, until the universe taps you on the shoulder, shakes you, shouts at you to Pay Attention, Stupid -- or a constant and insidious whisper, and that makes it more dangerous).

There's a moment, emerging out of sleep -- or the halfway moment just before -- when the residue of dreams still clings to you, when the more solid Real of life can't quite wrap its hands around your throat, gentle and threatening (and it can smile, and smile, and look you straight in the eyes, because there's nowhere you can run to, and you both know it; when one has all the power, there's no need for any show of force). There's a moment when you might know things, secret hidden things, or you might know nothing at all, blank and empty and waiting to be filled up; it's gone before it even registers.

I woke myself up laughing; I have no idea what could have been so funny.

Totems

2010-09-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

There is a regular, daily game I play, lately; I cannot stop. I fall asleep exhausted much earlier than I really want to, unplanned. Face unwashed, half-dressed, a light still on, or candles burning, or the television humming in the background, or a book that ends up crushed beneath me. I sleep in odd and crunched up positions, and my whole body aches and pulls later, during the day, remembering. For several hours it is like this, heavy and deep and blank, and then it starts -- a halfway-awakening, but my head is still mostly somewhere far away, and my eyes don't want to open entirely, and I turn over, squint at the clock, and tell myself that I will get up, scrub my face and brush my teeth, undress, turn off anything that might be still turned on, check that my alarm is set for the morning, go back to bed for real. I tell myself that I will do these things...but first I'll close my eyes for just another minute. And then, perhaps 30 minutes later, perhaps an hour, I do it all again. And again, and again, until it is suddenly morning, and I never slept with any true intention, so my mind can trick my body into thinking that none of the sleep truly counted as anything at all. It's a vicious little pattern, and on the weekends I try to break free of it, which sometimes works, but this time it doesn't and I don't. On a Saturday night, when the day turned long and filled with too many things, what I mean to do is wash my hair -- because three days between washings is no problem, but edge into the fourth, and it's disastrous. What I do, instead, is fall asleep, and wake up more than once, and don't get up, and suddenly it's after 2:00am. But it isn't like I have to be up early for any reason on a Sunday morning, and there's no one here but me, so why not take a long hot shower in the middle of the night? And it's nice, to sit in bed with wet hair, after, the room so entirely dark and still in that 3:00am particular kind of way, a hush of rain outside beyond the windows.

I meet him for coffee, in the morning -- the last whispers of the morning before it stretches into noon and therefore solidly daytime -- he is going away for another five week trip, and wants to give me the bag of funny animals to keep while he's away. The years we were together, I developed my own personal pantheon of funny animals -- when people know you like something, they tend to offer it to you, rather a lot, the end result being a huge collection of various funny little animals, some wearing clothes, and some without, that makes me seem crazy, if one thought that I had gone out and acquired them all myself. Some came from him, in fact -- and though he never would have admitted it in public, he loved my weird collection at least as much as I did. My very favorite was a gift from him, the second Christmas we were together -- an elephant, who when I got him was wearing purple pajamas and little bunny slippers (and who has since amassed a whole cardboard box full of costumes and outfits and random accessories). He would make Elephant do funny little dance routines for me, along the arms of the couch, and cut out construction paper bandit masks for him to wear on Halloween. Being together for as long as we were, people also gave him funny animals on occasion -- gifts through association, I suspect. A monkey, and a polar bear that had been meant for me but ended up as his (because Monkey needed a friend, and my animals were already such a tightly-knit little clique). And he had, from years ago, a tiny white bunny -- with big staring red eyes, and a total lack of cotton tail. It had been gathering dust in a box on a bookshelf when I moved in, and was uncovered one day, and very quickly Creepy Bunny became our totem animal. When I moved out, and we split up, Creepy Bunny stayed with him (it had been his, after all, to start with). But now, when he goes away on trips for any length of time, he gives me the bag of animals -- Monkey and Polar Bear and Creepy Bunny (and the tiny plastic chimp who is his pal) -- so that they aren't neglected.

The library had one of its twice-yearly book sales this weekend -- every hardcover book a dollar, paperbacks only fifty cents. And the last thing I really need is any more books, and I am running out of space for any more books...so of course, I went way the hell out to the huge warehouse of a building in a far part of town, to buy more books. Limited myself to only what I could fit into my largest tote bag, so I could get them home with me on the bus. If the library charged by the pound instead of by the book, they'd make more money. I got an enormous dictionary, hardbound and delicate-paged, old and emphatically out-of-date. It's soothing, in the middle of the night, when sleep is elusive, or bad dreams chase me, to sit in bed by the light of the muffled bedside lamp and page through the dictionary; I've done this since I was very small (but I haven't had a good dictionary -- and what I really mean by that, I guess, is a large one, an old one, a heavy one -- in what feels like an extremely too-long time). I like how, after hours of sifting through tables and boxes and shelves of old, used books, you emerge feeling dry and grimy and covered in ghosts and echoes. I like the way the smell of paper and dust and words lingers.

And there are a lot of reasons why we were not suited to be together...but then, there are things like this, and it might not make any sense to anybody else, but these are big huge reasons why things worked between us, why they were mostly good, for as long as they were (and even in the end, when I left, it wasn't that anything was bad, it was just that it was not Right, and I no longer had the energy or the desire to pretend otherwise). But we sit and drink coffee and tea, in the corner of a coffeeshop, in chairs that look like they came from some point in the not-so-distant future (but are shockingly comfortable, and I have the fleeting thought that maybe nobody would notice if I quietly scooted this ugly chair out the door with me when I left, so I could sink into it at home, all the time); we talk for solidly two hours, perhaps longer, and it is soothing to be with someone who knows me so extremely well in some ways (though not at all in others) and spill out endless words, and laugh. It is, I guess, like paging through the dictionary in the dark -- I know the words already, and there is no plot with twists to be surprised by, but it's like swallowing warm milk, or floating in it; it soothes and settles, the offhand familiarity. And when we say goodbye and go off in opposite directions down the street, it makes me smile to think that nobody passing by me has any clue that the paper bag I'm carrying contains a small furry polar bear, and a monkey wearing a hat, and a tiny red-eyed creepy bunny.

Percentages

2010-09-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

When my doctor calls to give me the results of my blood test, what she has to tell me is no surprise. It could not have been negative, really; that would make things easier, which would be ridiculous, because things, it seems, are never easier.

I want the details, the ugly things that no one will talk about. It isn't enough to know that 12 people out of 60 ended up dead; I want to know how. I want to know how long it took, how much it hurt, how much of themselves they lost before it all finally slipped away. I want to know what happened to the 48 people who didn't die, but were left with less than what they started with -- and I want to know how long it took to lose, and what they were left with in the end (and how much it hurt). These are the things nobody is talking about; they are impossible to find.

There's a man who works at the produce stand where I buy all of my fruits and vegetables each weekend -- or, at least, there was. He was older than I thought he was, his voice heavy with decades of cigarettes. He was crass, and rude, and inappropriate, and he hugged me sincerely every time I saw him, and called me sweetheart, honey (but always remembered my name). It had been awhile -- two months, perhaps -- since I last saw him (but I am not down there at the same time all the time, and he doesn't always work the days I am), but, last weekend, while talking to one of the other guys who works there, while he was picking out plums for me, and putting them gently in a paper bag, I asked where this gruff old man was, why I never saw him around on weekends anymore. It was a shock to hear he'd died. We talked about him, for awhile, and I said that he had been such a sweetheart, and he laughed -- He was an asshole! And we both laughed, and I admitted that perhaps one had to be a younger woman who was terribly fond, as a rule, of curmudgeonly old men -- that maybe that is what it took to find him sweet. After all, I said, why do you think I like you? He gave a little yell -- God, yes. And he was just like me, wasn't he...but times a hundred! He gives me a handful of the sweetest grapes I've ever tasted, and a kiss on the cheek, and I walk away half-smiling, and half sad in a formless kind of way. People disappear, and it's nothing at all.

You aren't dead, but that hardly seems to matter; it feels, at times (or often, or always) like you have died (and perhaps that's how it seems to you, as well, but you give next to nothing away, so anything I might imagine would be merely speculation, nothing solid).

I ask her what this means, and -- of course -- she has to tell me that nobody is really sure enough to come to any kind of consensus. (How comforting, to have an illness where everyone seems to be playing one giant guessing game of Wait & See.) We just have to continue to pay attention (to pay more attention); we can try to space out my infusions by an extra week, or even two, to try to lower risks. Really, the odds don't matter -- you can come down on the good side of them or not, regardless. And of course, that's true, and my mind has never worked in numbers anyway -- but that doesn't matter, and right now I want the numbers, the percentages; I want to know the odds and hold them in my hands. Because it's hard to just close your eyes and believe in simply falling on the right side of luck. (Though if I truly believed in odds, it wouldn't matter anyway -- I shouldn't be sick in the first place, it shouldn't have happened when it did, the drugs that didn't work should not have failed to work, the ones that made me ill should not have done; I'm already in the minority group of more than one minority group, so why would I ever naturally jump to any conclusion that places me in a majority?) And things have gone too well; these drugs have worked too well. So of course what I am waiting for is everything to crumble down around me. Because that is what things do (and people, and everything eventually) -- crumble, disappear (and it happens whether you bother to prepare for it or not).

Reflections

2010-09-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

We are having a conversation; we are playing a game of mirrors -- I am a mirror, and you are a mirror, and we are catching the light in our cupped palms and reflecting fragments of ourselves back at each other. This is why things seem so familiar (this is the game that we all play, all the time, tirelessly, and this is why it's so almost-impossible to ever break through and see what's actually inside; any animal with eyes will let itself be hypnotized by its reflection).

The man who works nights at the tiny neighborhood grocery across the street from my apartment building is moving to Hawaii after Christmas. He is one of those strange and random neighborhood acquaintances, the sort that one ends up with if one spends enough time living in the downtown area of a city, in close proximity with all the other downtown-city people all the time, and the law of averages dictates that at least some of these other strangers must become habitual encounters, and sometimes that one thing can lead to something else. He's a wacky kind of guy; he talks too loudly, always. He's older than he looks but more curmudgeonly than even his actual age might lead one to expect. In passing, he might give the impression of being somewhat rigidly uptight and distant, but in fact he's something of an aging hippie, grew up gay in a repressed Southern childhood, and has been around the world and then some. I've always liked him, and I bring him some of anything I happen to bake, dashing across the street at night with a bowl of warm fruit crumble in my hands, a stack of cookies wrapped in paper towels, a chunk of cake. He took me to dinner -- the second time we've gone out and shared a meal together -- to a tiny Ethiopian place I'd wanted to try but hadn't gone to yet, and we took the unfamiliar bus ride to a part of town we'd never been to, either of us. And the evening smells of autumn, yellow-golden leaves piled thick across the sidewalks, beneath the crowded curbside trees, crunching beneath our shoes, and it's a somewhat lousy part of town, but at dusk, on a cool translucent evening, everything is gentler than it might be, and pristine in its imperfection. The room is tiny, and uncrowded, and the food is beautiful, and cheap, and hot and possibly the best meal out I've had in I don't even know how long, and the glass of honey wine is soft-edged and mellow, like the place or the evening or the situation, or perhaps like everything for just a fleeting moment (gone once you exhale, but almost-real for the intake of breath before). We walk a mile or more, through the now-dark streets, past dark store windows, under trees, until we get to a part of town that has more bus options, and in fact a bus pulls up less than a minute after we reach the bus stop.

I know that things -- the way things are, now -- are not your fault; this means I can't be angry with you (and I'm not sure if being angry would be better or worse than how I feel anyway, or somehow a small relief, or not at all, but it doesn't matter because I can't be, not at you). I can turn the anger that might otherwise be inward, though (and of course, I do, helplessly); I cry for you as hard as I mourn the loss of you (or maybe even more, it's hard to say -- can grief be held in the palm of a hand, measurable and solid?). I want to float in the ocean of your pulse, and remember how it feels to breathe; I want to wrap your pain in something gentler.

When we get to my stop, we both get off the bus, and he walks back to my apartment building with me; I let him come upstairs so I can cut him a big chunk of recently-baked fruit and ginger cake to take home with him, making him promise to ignore the chaotic mess of my apartment while I do so. I hand him the foil-wrapped package, and walk him back down the hall, to the door leading to the back stairs, give him an awkward fleeting hug -- he is not a man given to touch, really, to blatant physical affection (or at least, I've never seen him so inclined, and he does not react to small passing, glancing contact in a way that suggests it is something that comes naturally). He's an odd man, and a very strange, random, and surface-level acquaintance. And I know that I will miss him, in a certain extremely qualified way, when he is gone. I'm glad that I could give him sweets, and listen to him talk too loudly.

What we're doing, all of us, is playing an endless game of mirrors, but it's easy to forget (and easy to never even realize); we're playing a game without clear rules, that never ends. This is why it's so very simple, quickly done, to recognize yourself in the face of a stranger -- or a word, or the tilt of a chin, the whisper of a wrist. (The difference is, I can love a stranger without a second thought; mirrors distort and soften just enough to make it easy.)

Silver Medals

2010-09-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

The sleeping itself is easy. Exhaustion falls over me like heavy rain, wells up from somewhere near my center, and so it is nothing to crumple up into sleep seemingly moments after getting home. An hour, or more likely two, and then the waking world can seep back in, slowly. No energy to cook, and so dinner ends up half-hearted and weirdly cobbled together, and it doesn't matter because it's really just a gesture, a placeholder, until the real sleeping can begin. Dreams are too vivid, too full of movement and confusion, too exhausting; they linger too much after they should be disappeared evaporated. I wake up, still, more times than I keep track of -- sometimes for hours. But the sleeping itself, that is easy. In the Sleep Olympics, I would surely win at least a silver medal -- for quantity, at least, if not for quality.

I am someone else, but half inside her head and half observing, in that cinematic way that is like reading the story (or writing the story, perhaps) while watching the movie, all at once. I'm in danger, and in an apartment with a group of people -- or a hotel room, a large one -- and they are meant to protect me and I am not allowed to be alone and it is making me insane. One of them has bought me tweezers, because I couldn't bring any with me, or I've lost mine, and they are the kind that come to needle-sharp points, and I complain loudly about this to everyone, because I hate those kinds of tweezers (and indeed, I do hate those kinds of tweezers); I go into the bathroom and don't close the door entirely, because someone might somehow sneak in and hurt me and then nobody would hear. Then I am standing at a sink, a counter, in a large and open room, beside a woman who tells me I could have gotten up 20 minutes later, and would still have had plenty of time. I am tired of her, and her advice, and tell her so. I throw a palmful of water in her face from the sink. She splashes me back. I am holding a piece of paper in my right hand while trying to brush my teeth with my left; it's a drawing, or a painting. I can't see it clearly; it shifts and melts and changes. Some water gets on it, and I stand and wave it back and forth, in the air, trying to dry it. I need it for a contest, or a meeting, or something I am trying very hard to be on time for. I'm in my old elementary school, except it isn't, searching for a particular classroom. I can't find it, and the hallways multiply, and I don't remember what I'm looking for. The building keeps turning into other buildings. There's a room I find, enormous, and it is full of people waiting in a line, and sitting in chairs, also waiting, and I get into the line with a group of people I am with whose faces are not clear or fixed. You are sitting in a chair, suddenly, and I leave the line to stand beside you, and you smile in a small exasperated way and gesture to your chest -- looking at the people I was with, in case they didn't see me walk over to wait with you. You put one hand around my waist, palm resting gently against my hip, and even then -- in a dream, where it shouldn't matter and I should be able to do whatever I want, and there shouldn't be rules and constraints -- I'm conscious of not doing anything in public that would upset you, that would broadcast any truth. I don't lean against you, don't touch you, and apart from your palm warm against my hip, you don't touch me. We are in a hospital, in line for something, and I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand, and I want to sit on your lap and wrap myself around you but I don't, because there are so many people around us and I am so careful of you, when I see you in public places (even if you don't believe it). You ask me if I'm nervous, and I tell you I sucked ribbons of wine through my teeth, just before I left, to uncoil things inside myself. So that I wouldn't be impatient, waiting. So that I wouldn't be afraid. A woman -- a nurse, or some random woman in the hospital -- takes me home with her. Her house is enormous and shiny and screams out money. We walk through the rooms, and I'm afraid to touch anything. We go into the kitchen, and she offers to make me dinner, and the kitchen is enormous and gleaming and pristine, and I think This is nothing like my mother's kitchen, all mismatched crockery and signs of wear, (and I am someone else, because this is not my thought, and not a thought that I would ever have, and it isn't true besides). I am wearing a silk dressing gown and so is she, and we are standing in her bedroom and I have tried to seduce her, or she me, and one of us is nervous and unsure, and it's the next morning and she is leaving for the airport, and I am not leaving for anywhere yet, and she gives me her keys, tells me how to lock up behind myself when I leave, and I think how weird and lovely it is, for a total stranger to trust you with their life, their house, their everything. Now I am someone else again, and she is a man -- her husband, perhaps -- and he has just brought me home, and we walk out of the house and through the city, looking for a restaurant to have dinner, or a drink, or just a place to sit and talk. I say awful things to him, and he doesn't care until suddenly he does, and he asks me why I think I can get away with being so horrible, and I smile (I am someone else) and tell him that until he leaves for the airport in the morning, I am all his -- he chose this, after all, and wouldn't want his wife to know -- and he will have to put up with whatever I choose to give him. We are back in his house, and undressed for bed, and he wants me to lie beside him and I do not want to; I want to lie beside him and he doesn't want me to. I drop a book on the floor, and start laughing and tell him it's just like this book, and I name the author, and he doesn't know what I'm talking about, and I tell him that I've mentioned this before. How he used to work with me, and then he left, and one of his clients was in independent publishing and, to supplement his payment for a job, published 75 copies of each of his books. He never gave me a copy of a single one, but here, now, there is one in my hands. He still cannot recall me ever saying anything like this to him before, and I am irritated. In the morning, he shows me a safe beside the bed, in the bedside table, where I should leave the keys when I leave, and he is gone and I'm finally alone and I walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower and then I am awake.

I wake too early and too entirely and cannot get back to sleep. I lay quietly in bed beneath the covers, in the dark, and think about how I cannot truly touch you, even in my dreams. After that, the rest of the day will taste like sadness.

Fluttering Wildly

2010-09-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

Small beautiful moments that you hold in your hands like smooth stones from a river, clack against themselves in your pockets; you worry them in between your fingers, a string of shining wishes, silent. She thinks I can manifest people, things -- invisible magnets hidden in my chest. It isn't true (or only sometimes, but if I can draw things to me, I cannot keep them there for long). But I tell the story of him -- of him and me and not-quite-us, condensed like milk; syrup-thick but not as sweet -- and the next day he sends me words, calls me in the evening and his voice melts me, the way it always has. He is something hot, too hot to touch with any safety; any creature with a spine would jerk itself away (yet I have always curled up against him, closer).

I don't feel safe splitting myself open -- always widely, but now even the narrowest of openings tastes like danger -- for you anymore. What we say -- when we say anything at all (and that isn't very often, now) -- is nothing. Surfaces and insignificance and gone. So I avoid you, because I think it's simpler, because I think it's what you want. Because this feeling of unsafe, or unclose, of nothing and numbness; this feeling (and the lack of feeling, that too) makes me ill. It's been months, now, and it feels like forever, like this is what the truth will always be, infinite and aching.

I'm on the bus, sitting beside a large hulking bear of a man, and everything about him, the way he looks, the way he seems, screams something not-quite-completely-right. He starts to talk to me, suddenly, in a way that suggests we had been in the middle of a much longer conversation, and paused for just a moment, and now he's simply continuing where he left off. He talks, and stares at me intently, and I give him no more than 3/4 profile and small smiles and try to avoid encouragement, but every time I think he's finally finished, he takes a breath -- and then another -- and begins again, with a new -- equally disconnected, random, and extremely involved -- topic of conversation. When I get up, as the bus approaches my stop, and walk to the front of the bus, he continues talking at me, voice raised -- finally trailing off as I cast one last half-smile over my shoulder and hurry down the steps onto the sidewalk.

There was a moth, last night, sitting quiet on my curtains, near the edge, up high -- just resting there, wings spread out and staying still. I am, in general, terrified of moths. People find this funny, think I'm kidding; I am not. Partly due to a story I read as a child, that haunts me still. Partly because, in flight, they're crazy. Unpredictable. Veering all over the place, and dizzy with confusion and purpose. Evil and chaotic. The noise their heavy little bodies make, thumping against windowpanes, against the sides of lampshades, against anything as solid as themselves. I feel it in the back of my throat, and it tastes like panic. But, this moth is just sitting there, not moving, not twisting turning fluttering out of control. It never moves, and I sit in bed and watch it, and after awhile my habit of anthropomorphizing everything wins out over my general dislike-mistrust of moths; after awhile, I look up, occasionally, at the moth with a certain trace of expectation, affection. I fall asleep with the moth sleeping up there on the curtain, just above my bed, and each time I wake up in the middle of the night I switch on the bedside lamp and squint up through my myopic midnight vision to find the dark blur of sleeping moth. In the morning, when I wake up for real, the moth is still there, in the same place, wings spread, unmoving. Still there when I go out in the early-afternoon (and I catch myself saying a soft goodbye to the moth -- which I've named, quietly, inside my head -- just before I walk out the door).

I bring you a cup of tea, because it's the only thing I can give you that I know you'll take from me. Because nothing else means anything, and at least this is something solid that we can hold in our hands, warm and real. You were such a one real thing, a solid that all of my internal spaces could lean on, something reliable and true. And now, I don't know what you are, but it isn't anything like that, and there is nothing between us but distance and occasional cups of tea and too much left unsaid. Every word is a goodbye, and I can't wrap my mind around the implications, and the one person I should be talking to about this is the only person I suddenly can't say anything to at all.

Early evening, I get home. Take off my shoes, put the kettle on for tea. When I sit down on the bed and look up at the curtains, the moth is gone.

Mental Image

2010-09-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I've taken a flight that doesn't span time zones and continents; I get to the airport too early.

They're running late at the hospital, my doctor, the infusion center, everyone. It should have been clear, when I made the appointments, that we were cutting things too close, but my doctor's admin promised me that I'd get out of there on time, and short of calling him a liar, outright, the only thing to do was to accept his overly-optimistic word and let that be that. But everyone is running late, and when the nurse finally comes in (sitting alone in the room for 15 minutes, 20, waiting for someone to walk by) -- one of my favorite nurses, sweet and lovely with her warm and soft-edged accented speech -- I am tense with waiting, with the fear of ultimately missing my flight. I tell her that I have to be able to leave by 3:15, no later, because I'm going to the airport. And she considers, checks her watch, and tells me not to worry, that she'll break the rules and let me go 40 minutes early, not keeping me there for the full hour of observation after my medication is all dripped out into my veins. Just don't do anything rash tonight, like...drinking a bottle of vodka and bungee jumping or something. Because if anything went wrong, they'd probably trace it back to this and blame me. I laugh, and promise to wait until at least the next day for drunken bungee jumping. She hits my vein on the first try (it seems so easy, and painless, though later the spot forms a lump of ache and spreads into a pale blue bruise that, two days later, is even deeper purple brown and spilled out beyond its edges). I don't sleep, though the room is freezing and my eyes are heavy, itching with wanting to close. I force myself to stay awake; I read. And they do let me go early, and I rush home, grab my bag, catch the shuttle to the airport. And realize, upon arriving, that I probably could have left 30 minutes later without much of a problem. The flight is crowded, and I sleep stiffly, my head against the cool of the window, for perhaps an hour -- somewhere in the middle, high up in the slowly dimming sky. It is light out when we leave, and red violet sunset when I wake after my brief and unrestful sleep, and then, suddenly, night. The lights of the city below us, as we prepare to land, are ghostly beautiful, traffic moving like a weird glowing river through the dark concrete streets. When I get off the plane, I become suddenly aware of the dull throbbing ache of my head, and in the taxi from airport to hotel I can't stop yawning, trying to break the tension behind my jaw.

I am so often alone, but so rarely lonely. It always comes as a quiet shock, when it occasionally washes over me. (After you leave, I am lonely.)

You get to the hotel an hour, more than that, after I do, and I come down to meet you in the lobby, and I am struck, suddenly, by your height. The afternoon we spent together, in December (which seems so long ago; it seems like yesterday) left me with an overwhelming impression of ease, of the ease of being in your company. I recall the sound of your voice, the particular bite of your accent. The sense of your hand touching mine. A hundred other small things. But I don't have a mental image of you that I hold in my mind, or at least I didn't. We fall onto the vast white cotton island of bed, and I curl against you, your arms around me, hands tracing the lines and curves of my back and arms, my shoulders and the place where my neck meets my skull. And things are rarely as one might have imagined them, and this is no exception. There are things I would change, and at the same time, it is still so easy to be with you, that they almost fall away and don't really matter at all. I feel dreadful that night, my head still throbbing and exhausted, wrung-out and feeling drugged and foggy. I sleep poorly, beside you -- and you fall asleep instantly, and do not stir all night, except to cover my hand with yours if I drape my arm across your chest, or to press more closely against me when I've edged away. In the morning, we are awake too early, and spend hours in bed being quiet and laughing, lips and fingertips and the warmth of skin. We go out and have breakfast, rich coffee and runny-yolked eggs, too hot and bright outside, but to walk beside you is sweet. You have to work in the afternoon, which gives me time alone, to breathe, to wander the cool of a museum, to fall into heavy sleep. When you return, it's still light out, but by the time we slide off the bed, it's dark. We go out for dinner, and then wander the streets for awhile, walking off some of the food stupor, and get back to the hotel, peel off half our clothes and collapse against the pillows. We talk, without direction, and I intend to take a bath, but then I wake up two hours later (and you are happy that I slept beside you, even though I feel badly for being no fun, asleep and boring). I get up to wash my face, brush my teeth, take off the rest of my clothes. And you almost fall asleep, then jerk awake, and you are lost inside the dizzy gathering speed inside your head, and there is little to say and nothing to do; finally, you press your back against me, and I hold you tight, our fingers interlaced, and your breathing slows and evens and you sink into sleep (and, later still, so do I, and I sleep beautifully for the rest of the night). And in the morning, once we finally drag ourselves out of bed, after a long while of not sleeping, there is walking and laughter and breakfast -- I steal a spoon, and you threaten to tell, smiling. And a few more hours alone together, in our room, and then you have to go back to work, and there is work in the evening and early the next morning, so you have to go for good. My last night there is spent alone, without you. (And when you leave, I am lonely.)

It's too hot, and too late in the afternoon, to do any of the things I thought of doing. I take a walk, and sit, sipping coffee, reading a book (who else brings three books on a trip lasting three days, and three old unread copies of the New Yorker -- by the time I get home, all three copies have been read and left in airplane seat-backs, and one of the books is fully digested); I go somewhere else and have ice cream for dinner, like a naughty child. Back in the hotel room (quiet, empty) I wash my hair, and soak in the bathtub for what feels like ages. Stretch out in the center of the (now almost too) enormous bed, and watch bad television -- cartoons, formulaic detective dramas, comedies that are only rarely funny. Re-pack my suitcase. Drink tea. Finally fall asleep much too late, middle of the night; I remain deliberately in the middle of the bed, though curled up tightly, taking up as little space as possible. In the morning, at the airport, the line for security is long and moving slowly; the woman who checks my boarding pass and ID looks at me briefly, then again, for longer, more intently -- The lights in here are so strange, they make your hair look almost blue or purple. And I laugh much louder than I should, and tell her that, in fact, it is blue or almost-purple. It takes a moment to register, and then her confusion clears and she grins and tells me that in any case, it looks lovely. I buy coffee, and water, and when I get to the gate, the plane is already boarding and I walk right on without any wait at all. It's over-crowded, and filled with small children and screaming babies, and the flight is longer than it really is, and I feel drained and heavy when we finally land. But outside, the skies are grey and watercolor-cloudy, and the air is cool and smells of rain (the rain begins to fall when I'm on the bus, halfway home).

I hate the summer, and I'm tired of so much brightness. I want the air to stay like this forever, and the rain to fall without pause, washing everything away (nothing left behind but the scent and shadow of the memory of its passing).

Things That Stay Beneath The Surface

2010-08-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

You came to my office, brought me a gift, in a box too large for the paper you wrapped it in. It is something you made for me, formed by your hands (and later, I sit and run my fingers across its smooth surfaces, eyes closed, imagining your skin -- this is how I miss you, splinters in my thoughts and in my chest).

I dreamt there was a horse living in my fish tank. A small horse, but still, an actual horse. I think of this constantly, all day -- stare at the clear glass of the aquarium and imagine this little horse, swim-galloping through the water, licking the insides of the tank with its long soft tongue. In my dream, I wonder how it breathes, beneath the water; I can't remember when I got this horse, and it bothers me, my dream-self, that I've seemingly forgotten something so important. All day I stare unfocused at the tank, and imagine tiny swimming horses.

I'm in a taxi, and it's not-quite-almost dark outside -- deeply purple grey and out of focus -- and while staring out the window at the passing blur of streets and lights and cars and strange faces, I become aware of a low background vibrating sound, mellow and rich. I listen, pay attention, and realize it's the driver -- he is chanting something, meditative mantras, or something similar. Low-voiced and deliberate, ceaselessly, in a language I do not understand. And I close my eyes and melt back into the seat, floating in the barely-heard rumble of his voice. (That is the last calm moment of the evening; I tip him a lot, but as soon as he drives away, I wish I'd given him even more.)

In the bar, I sit beside him and have two drinks, which feels like ten drinks. (The bartender obviously pouring out desire and subtext, in addition to the alcohol, and surely wondering why I was there with him.) When we leave, and walk outside, my arm through his, he looks at me and says I think he fancied you, and I laugh from deep in my throat and agree. He was terribly cute, you know -- those dimples! Which might bother some men, but it doesn't bother him -- and surely even less, when we are in his car, on the way to my apartment, my hand in his lap, idly tracing patterns through his jeans. Later still, before my drink-fogged brain lapses into too much drowsiness to do anything but make him leave so I can sleep for real, he pauses, lips hovering just above my skin, and says that every man I meet must want to be in this position, constantly. And this makes me laugh again -- loud and long and heartfelt -- and I can see he does not believe me when I tell him how very untrue that is. (But no, of course -- if you want something, it's almost impossible to fathom how anyone might feel any differently.) In truth (and he smiles and shakes his head as I say it) I'm always surprised when someone does want me, when someone finds me appealing in any way at all. This has less to do with what one might imagine; I don't even know. (I told someone recently, I wouldn't want to date me! And though I say it with a smile, it's also a truth.)

Something I adore about him is how extraordinarily specific and internally-webbed he is about his desires, the things that run deep and hidden just below the surface. I almost envy that, because so much of what appeals, for me, has been acquired or only realized as an adult. I wonder what it must be, to have this long-standing deep-seated need and want and thirst. There is one specific thing, or situation -- one scenario that I have deep-down within me, from childhood. (Because I figured out the deliberateness of obtaining pleasure from myself when I was much too young to make any real connections other than knowing that I liked the way it felt.) And so, it is entirely non-sexual in nature, this one specific thing. It doesn't really get me going, not in a way I could explain, and yet it very definitely flips some switch inside me; it's what I come back to, again and again, inside my head, when I'm using pleasure as a self-soothing mechanism, or something to release the tension, but not when I'm actually hungry with desire (and there is a huge difference, too, in how I touch myself, depending on the motivation and the mental script behind it). I've never shared this thing with anyone, this well-worn mental groove -- and not for the reasons one might imagine. Not out of any sense of shame or embarassment or...anything. More simply because it isn't something I actually find exciting; it isn't something I think about when there is someone else beside me (it isn't something I think about when there is nobody beside me but I maybe wish there was). The ways my fingers move, then, are so entirely different from how I actually enjoy being touched, when anyone else is involved (or even how I actually enjoy it, when nobody is involved, but enjoyment is what I want to get from it).

Dreams, since the night of the small swimming horse, are frantic and confused. I wake up sudden, unsettled; I wake up halfway sobbing. The wars I fight within myself seem to work up real momentum when the rest of me is sleeping. I almost never let people stay the night, because it means I will not sleep (and I wonder if that will be somehow different, this weekend -- perhaps the strange place, strange room, strange larger bed will pull me down and down and lower into something quiet). A thing that can be held, solid, in the hands is no substitute for your heartbeat, the gentle sound of breathing. (When I looked for you and you weren't there, I poured the cup of steaming tea out in the street, and walked away heavier than when I started.)

The Only Direction Being Forward

2010-08-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

There are, down at the stall where I buy most of my produce, some locally grown figs -- they won't have them for very long, one of the guys tells me as he slices a chunk of one for me to taste. Bright green skin, bursting with ripe and sweet and a perfect pink-brown interior, and I have never had a fig this good before (and had no idea that one could grow them locally anywhere around this area). We're talking, a couple of the guys and I, and the subject of my soon-to-be birthday comes up; when I'm done building up my pile of fruit and vegetables, they toss in a couple of carefully brown paper towel-wrapped figs for free, and undercharge me by at least a third for everything else, wishing me a happy birthday as I leave.

It seems to be a developing pattern, this lack of care and total disconnect around my birthday -- last year, now. (And it strikes me, suddenly, that you were also somewhat involved in my internal disarray last year, around this time. I don't know what that should mean, though, really.) I still carry the words written out all tiny and precise that you placed within the small box you gave me last year, keep them in my wallet, always close. Not that it matters.

But I spend time with people in the dark, low-voiced talking about nothing, and laughter, and caresses long and urgent -- so much easier to fall into the taste of someone's skin than to think, or listen to the noise inside your head. Last weekend, sitting in the chair while she tended to my hair, I ask her how her mother has been doing -- ill for the past year, at least, waves of seriousness coming and going. And she paused, with her hands on my head, then said that she had died, more than two months ago. A week or more after the last time I was in, and she hadn't said anything about the gravity of the situation at the time, waiting. And I met her eyes in the mirror for a moment, reached up to touch her wrist with the tips of my fingers, softly. And after a beat or two of silence, we started talking about sex -- her lover, some of mine, the subject in general as unrelated to either one of us. Because...it's so much simpler. And I have known her for more than nine years now -- through boyfriends and girlfriends, wife, and innumerable lovers -- and we have always had extremely inappropriate discussions, while I am in the chair and she is behind me with scissors, or shampoo, or chemicals.

The less I do something, the less I want to do it (the less I even think of it); and this applies to almost everything -- sex, social engagement, eating, writing, the list is infinite. So explain, then, why it somehow doesn't when it comes to you -- talking to you, or seeing you, or thoughts or dreams or anything at all. (And this isn't only you, I guess -- there are more than several Yous for whom this is a truth -- but tonight you are the only You residing in my mind, so that's the only truth there is.) And for you a few days, four, a week -- it's nothing, easy, less than that. If you knew how much of my internal everything was wrapped up in staying quiet for a day (and every hour after that is measured, counted, noticed -- slow and acute) it might make you laugh, or cry (or more than likely, nothing much at all). I want to grab your shoulders, shake you, scream until you understand; pour the understanding down your throat until you choke (until I finally stop choking on the things behind it).

I had a dream of someone else last night, and it was all confusion, poor timing, the taste of frustration -- so, very much like it might have been, had I been awake. It left me itchy and unbearable inside my head when I awoke. Do you remember me as someone else, someone better? I wonder. (Maybe there's no difference, and that might as well be just a dream, or something even more unreal; this, right now, could be how it's always been. It feels like that; I could believe it.) There are sore spots on my elbows, bruises -- invisible, but present -- on the backs of my calves. I've no idea where they came from, just that they're there, now. A thousand tiny hurts we do ourselves, constantly, without knowledge or consent or care, without anything. The problem, perhaps, is how it's all big and beautiful and ripe resounding-sweet (until a moment passes and it rots when you aren't looking); the problem is how there's no way back from that.

The Way Things Taste

2010-08-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

Love tastes like crying in train stations, in airports (sometimes halfway-almost on the bus, early-evening, when the light is filtering through just so and the air smells like the echo of a memory that's just out of reach, and it comes out of nowhere and catches your breath in your throat). This seems wrong, and like it should be more like laughter and kisses in the rain, and filled, not hollow, and not all absence and distance and shadows at the edge of thought (but things so often simply are how they are, and almost never how they ought to be, or how you'd wish them).

I think about how the secret of appeal seems to lie more in being willing to express desire, and less about...anything else at all, maybe. Or perhaps this is simply how it works for women (or perhaps this is simply how it works for me). You suggest as much, while I'm pressed up against you in my bed, toying with the small silver rings that decorate your nipples (and when you mention, offhandedly, that almost no amount of tugging on them causes any pain, I start to pull on one, slowly, harder and harder and harder, stretching the skin -- and still you say it's not uncomfortable at all -- until I have to stop myself because I'm terrified of injuring you, and you agree that it's probably more prudent not to continue the experiment, but I still find it fascinating); you say that men are clueless, that they don't pick up on subtlety (that you don't). Women need to be direct, overt, ridiculously clear. So maybe that explains everything, because I've never been so good at subtle, but this sort of too-directness -- here is my desire, lit up in blinking neon, loudly -- flows naturally and much too easily. And you're so concavely skinny, a pale smooth wire of a man; early in the evening, when I am standing at the kitchen sink, assembling parts of dinner, you walk in and stand behind me, wrapping your limbs around me, hands grasping, and this easy tactile expression delights me. (And the way you eat your salad with your fingers, oil clinging to your fingers.) I like the way you smell of smoke and spice, and how you touch me, and the muscle-deep way your teeth sink into the back of my neck, my shoulders. And later, when your fingers are sliding into me, and you lean down, breath warm against my skin.

That night, exhausted with desire and pleasant aches, and finally a small moment of internal quiet, my dreams are all sex and hunger and endless craving. Surprisingly, I dream of fucking him -- and this is strange, because that one night between us was beautiful in all kinds of difficult-to-articulate ways, but the actual physicality, the satisfaction aspect of it, was purely mediocre. A superlative sexual experience while at the same time not involving such terribly great sex, which sounds like nonsense, but I have no better explanation. And there are a lot of details I don't recall, so it wasn't like a memory dream, but more like a conjuring of want -- and this is what makes it so surprising, because that isn't really what I want with him at all. And the things that stand out for me about that night are so small and pristine and unrelated -- when he looked at me, after stroking me gently with the tips of his fingers for what felt like time-stopped ages, and smiled and said that it was sweet. Cooked pasta for us, scraping the toppings from half of a leftover pizza into the bowl of noodles, with olive oil and shredded cheese. When I sat curled on the floor beside his chair while he watched tennis on television (and this made me laugh, and does still, because it was so strange and unexpected). The first time we fucked that night -- the first of...five times, six? -- and I was on top of him, back arched and spine stretched out, my palms placed flat high up against the wall behind his head, and I remember clearly tilting my head back as far as it would go and hating for a moment how short my hair was at the time, and how no matter how far back I leaned, I couldn't feel my hair brushing against my skin. In the morning, wandering to the bathroom for a shower, and he went to fetch me a clean towel, and then said that I could use his toothbrush if I wanted -- and the idea of sharing a toothbrush with anyone squicks me out entirely (and did then, and still does)...but I brushed my teeth anyway, and didn't feel as uncomfortable about it as I would have under any other circumstances, or with anybody else.

It only takes a day for the quiet in my head to wear away, fade into noise and things-too-fast again. The taste of someone's skin, and kisses drunk like wine -- it's a temporary fix for a shaking addict. It doesn't last long enough (and maybe nothing would be long enough, but a day of stillness is like holding inadequacy in my hands, and crumbling it between my fingers.)

It's been a long, long, longer than I can recall time since I could feel not quite right, inside my body, and write it off as just a passing bit of nothing. (And the last time I had such a pervasive sense of things being just somewhat off, in ways impossible to clearly articulate -- that sense of impending doom, and the feeling that things are shifting, imperceptible -- that was when I first started having seizures, and ended up in the hospital for a solid week, and then diagnosed with an illness to last me the rest of forever. So it isn't something I can comfortably ignore, not now.) Several days of sudden moments of...something. Dizzy is the wrong word, not fully accurate. Light-headedness, more like. A feeling that my entire self is slowly collapsing inwardly, that if I don't do something to make it stop, I might pass out, or stop breathing, or melt away to nothing. Yesterday the world shifted with me every time I moved my head, unsteady. Dull background headache, there for days. This morning, sitting at my desk, I suddenly felt everything tilt and start to slip away, and I stood up, shaky, walked down the hallway to the kitchen, thinking I will walk by at least six people, and if I fall down unconscious, someone will see and they can help me. It passed, after five minutes, ten, and the cloud of panic lifted, slightly. My head hurt the other night, before I went to bed, and my ears felt uncomfortable and strange. When I woke up in the morning, I had lost some large amount of hearing in one ear, and it made the whole world strange, and halfway painful, and took hours before everything suddenly clicked back into place. In another time, another life, these things would be just so much nothing. Mildly not-quite ill, coming down with something vaguely viral, possibly. Or just unrested, or tense, or sinus-blocked in ways I don't feel otherwise, or nothing at all beyond some little fluke occurence. But in this time, in this life, it becomes all panic and doom, immediately. Because there are things it could be, and none of them are good (though, admittedly, some of them are worse than others -- but still, all of them are Not Good). It makes me over-conscious of other little moments of my body, makes me analyze the way they feel (And do they always feel like this? Are they somehow worse, or more-than, or...different? My hands just slightly more numb than they should be, just that much weaker.) and...it's just so easy to feel everything come apart when you stop to think about it. My doctor says all the right things, when I call her (and I feel idiotic, calling, but I don't know what else to do, and anyway they say to let them know immediately when there are any changes at all, anything suspicious) and I will watch myself all weekend, and talk to her on Monday. I think about the irony, if this is Something and not Nothing, and it almost (not quite, but very nearly) makes me laugh.

In two weeks -- just slightly more than that -- you will be in a city that is only a short nothing of a flight from here, far but nearer than the halfway-across-the-world distance that is usually between us. In two weeks (just slightly more than that) I will get on a plane, and fly for a few hours, and melt into your skin, stolen hours in your hotel room when you aren't busy working. A weekend, nothing more -- and part of me wants it (this grand experiment, with nothing to base it on but words, really) to not click into place, because...of reasons too complex to have a name. And either way, it will end with an ache, with quiet tears in the middle of a too-busy airport, and perhaps another almost-year before there's any chance of anything again. (But it's a bittersweetness that I long to drink until there's nothing left but the memory of the not-really-so-unpleasant taste burned into my tongue.)

The Things I Do (Not)

2010-08-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

I do not tell the truth, or not anything resembling the whole of it (this terribleness of honesty). Or when I do manage these partial truths, they stick in my throat and taste of slow poison (and whether they do me more harm than you is impossible to tell).

The more we talk, sometimes, the more far away you seem, less real. (And you tell me that words bring closeness to you, and they used to do the same for me, but I'm unmoored and nothing means much more than nothing; how does one find something that maybe never existed to begin with?)

I do, though, talk myself farther and farther away from you -- intention is nothing; the end result is all that matters. Watch you smear and fade and slowly disappear entirely; you taste like hollow, loss, regret. (And still I want to taste you. I do not know what I say to you, anymore; perhaps I don't say anything at all, or more realistically I shouldn't. I can't make myself turn away from this, although I think I ought to; it would be easier than watching you go, or that is what I tell myself in the middle of the night when things are quiet.)

I do not cry while sitting at my desk, crowded office and too much background noise (and this isn't entirely true, either, like everything, because the hot salt-sting wells up and spills over, slightly, only just; I turn to face the window and feign yawning, or sneezing, or anything at all). And my eyes ache, and my head, my jaw (so much deliberate tension) -- unyielding knots inhabiting my shoulders, and somewhere deep inside my chest. And I do not cry; halfway-miraculous, so much of oneself poured into the simple act of not doing something.

At the hospital, there is no appointment; I am not in the computers, not like that, unscheduled. And the enormous stupidity, the oversight, hits me all at once, and trying to explain the whats and hows of what amounts to now, this moment, just tangle around themselves and leave everyone confused. Nobody who would be able to fix this is available -- gone, in meetings, not reachable -- and a strange woman makes a dozen phone calls, futile. But I have to stay, I need the meds today and not next week, not a week too late and another half-day of missing work, and I try to breathe, and do not cry. (I do not, do not.) A half-hour, or maybe more, and it is magically sorted -- they can take me in 40 minutes, and the blood test nonsense that was the cause of this entire mess to start with can be dealt with next month (the way it was supposed to be dealt with this month, or the month before).

While I sit in the waiting room, I try to shut everything off inside myself, inside my head. I watch the water run down the strange sort-of-but-not-really-fountain in the wall, and it takes me several minutes before I realize my eyes are looking through the wall completely, unfocused (and I wonder if something as impossible as seeing through a solid could be done by simply letting it happen, letting go). Later, in the large-enough-to-be-shared room that I have to myself, sitting in the farthest corner, making myself small and compact in the big chair. When the nurse strokes my forearm, gentle, looking for a place to stick me, I do not let myself melt into that gentleness; I do not dissolve inside it (I do not cry; I do not). They ask if I have a low-grade fever, and I explain that I was drinking hot tea, but that was at least 15 minutes ago, and I thought my mouth would have cooled by now (No, it takes at least 30 minutes. Often longer. But you aren't a nursing student, so why would you know that?) I wish I had a fever, that it was so simple, so easily pointed to, so quickly healed. I could crawl inside the small hurt of the needle sliding into me, and some quiet part of me hopes it takes another try (another ten, another hundred) so I can remain still and frozen inside that little wound for as long as possible, as long as it took to remember how to breathe; some fragmented piece of me craves bruises, pinpoints of discomfort. So perhaps I make it happen, but that first try does nothing, and eventually she admits defeat and turns my arm this way and that, settles on a spot high up the back of my forearm, near the beginning of the curve down to elbow. She sticks me here, and though she cannot get blood from it at all, she injects saline with no problems, and just decides to leave it. Calls a lab tech up to draw vials of blood from my other arm. I'm already not really there; I took two pills, one in the taxi and one just after arriving and finding out I had no appointment -- I'm somewhere else, somewhere gentle and muffled and not-quite. The woman from the lab is quick, efficient -- sticks the needle in, the vials fill like magic, and then she's gone, smiling.

I hate that you're so far away, hate that I cannot touch you. (It doesn't matter what you say; my words are nothing. And I'm so internally collapsed I fear I would crumble against you, weeping, too long between breaths. I have nothing to give you but I hate that you're not nearer, and maybe I hate how much I hate that). These things, I do tell you (what can I keep from you; how can I remain safe?) but nothing is fair and I am afraid of leaving you more broken than you are. We are together in our lack of understanding, and perhaps that, and the confusion of hunger and desire, is everything; perhaps it is enough.

And you are just as far -- farther, even, with all your closeness, and I can see the potential endings spreading out before us, and it leaves me sick. But now I don't think there is anything at all that I can say to you, because I'm not speaking the right language any longer, and what there is between us is vast empty space and a thousand words that aren't the right words, incomprehensible truths or just so much not-even-halfway reality. If missing you is like this, when you're right here, then what happens when you disappear entirely (you the rabbit, and the world itself no more than a frayed silk hat).

My legs don't work, after my stiff-necked unrestful sleep; every step is like walking uphill, and jelly-kneed half-collapse. I remember when every step -- every single one, all the time, every day, for months and months -- was like this, but more so. It's frightening to know what your body holds inside itself, remembering. Things wait, they hide and sleep and look for opportunities. I call a taxi, because every step is too unsteady, because I'm drug-foggy and exhausted, because I'm still not crying, and it's a constant mantra in my head, boring into my skull. Home, and I lie on my back and feel the vibrations in my head (thoughts, or the rhythm of my pulse, or simple disquiet made into something more than what it was); if I suddenly was gone, tomorrow, just so, a perfect magic trick well-executed -- nobody would know about it. Nobody would notice and it wouldn't matter anyway. This is meant to give one pause, I think, but to me it smells like some small relief much more than anything. In three weeks it's my birthday, and people seem to think that it's some kind of big-ish deal. There's no way to explain -- not in any way that makes any kind of sense, at any rate -- the whys (for me) of how it really isn't. There just isn't anything left to say, and so I don't. (But late, alone and in the dark -- with no way to avoid it -- I do cry. I cry until there's nothing left but limp exhaustion; I cry until I can remember, once again, what it is to breathe.)

Washed Away

2010-07-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting quietly on the bus, in the evening, after a shit day towards the end of a shit week, in a dark place, and I've picked and picked at the skin around my thumbnails, left them raw and red and stinging. A woman gets on the bus, sits in the seat across the aisle from my, and slightly ahead. I am aware of her only as a fragment out of the corner of my vision -- warm brown skin and soft-looking tight-curled hair. She leans in my direction, says Excuse me? And I half-turn, slide my eyes over to meet hers, give a quiet smile and murmur a response. She asks (low-voiced, charmingly accented) if I have change for a five-dollar bill -- holding it out, gently, between her fingers, wallet open on her lap. I tell her that I don't, because I know it's true, but I open my wallet, to see if I have anything at all. I have two singles, a handful of very small change. I hold the two dollars out in her direction -- I don't have change for a $5, but I have two dollars. I'll give that to you, if all you need is money for the bus. And she looks at me, confused, then shakes her head, No, no, I can't take that! I smile, much more sincerely this time, deeper, It's fine. Really. Go ahead, please; take it. So she takes the money from my outstretched hand, and thanks me profusely, says something else I don't quite catch, but I hear the feeling behind it so I don't ask her to repeat herself. And for the rest of the trip, until I get off the bus (before she does, and I do not seek out her eyes through the bus window as I walk down the street and it pulls away beside me) the air feels slightly lighter, and breathing comes more easily.

You tell me Your words are strong, and they mean an awful lot. To me, though, they still feel like nothing, and the more I say to you, the less it seems to mean. There is so little I really want to tell you; I want you here beside me. I want hands touching skin and warm breath against my ear, and more than that.

Walking to work in the morning, I pass a man -- unkempt, grimy, smelling (even from several feet away) of stale cigarette beer exhaustion -- sitting, slumped against the side of a small bus stop shelter enclosure. As I approach him, he leans forward, smiles big, and says I like the color of your hair. And I'm preoccupied, and rushing, with a heavy bag full of printed documents I had to pick up on my way, and two cups of coffee -- for two other people in the office, but not for me -- in my hands, and so I don't slow down, but I smile back, and turn to watch him as I walk past, and thank him, gently.

You tell me you dream about a year with me, and every day another photograph -- of me, of you, of us. Naked or clothed, provocative or hidden, dreamy. And every night, each photograph washed away, dissolved, by the salt and waves of the sea. And in the end, you would be left with a whole year of photographs in your mind, memories, permanently stained. (I consider making you the beneficiary of my life insurance and whatever else goes along with that, in all the legal easily-not-thought-about nonsense I have in my benefits package at work. A ridiculous notion, but...I want to be sure that you will know it, if I die. And this seems as good a way as any -- and better than most, in fact.)

When we were in bed, last week, his head between my so-white thighs, one of my hands beneath the pillow my head was resting on, and the fingers of my other hand curled loosely around the fingers of one of his hands (and time, in these places, can stretch and slow and melt and maybe these are the only times my mind is truly quiet, or as quiet as it gets). He looked up at me, at some point, for a long moment, and I smiled at him, and his other hand skimmed up over my body, and I traced his wet fingers with my cool dry ones, and said that I often wished I could be someone else -- anyone, some outside party -- so I would know exactly how I tasted. Because, I can suck on my own wet exhausted fingers any time (and often do) but it's too close, too familiar; it tastes like the taste inside my mouth when I'm busy not tasting much of anything at all. I am simply me, and there's no way for it to be surprising, novel, positive or negative or anything at all except how it is. It isn't only in this context, of course, that I would like to be some other someone -- someone Other (though I don't talk about this with him, because I don't want to talk about it with him). But, I wonder if I would be kinder with myself -- more patient, or understanding, or simply open and forgiving and full of love -- if I was more distanced. If I was a stranger, encountering me by chance. Could I find something worth looking harder at, were that the case? (I would both like and not like the answer to be Yes. And here, for me, is where it starts becoming complicated.)

It All Remains The Same

2010-07-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

I can trance out for ridiculous periods of time on my ceiling fan, staring up at it, watching it spin in cartoonish blur. If I shift my eyes even a little, sudden discrete fan blades jump into focus, and it makes me think about the weird magic of vision, and our brains doing all this filling in of blank spaces before our eyes catch on to the trick. I think about the fan coming loose, falling down, slicing my back open while I sleep -- I think about this a lot, in a fleeting unserious way (except it actually feels possible, but the possibility doesn't truly concern me, which is strange and not usually how my mind works at all).

You like the way I talk about certain things, about sex -- straightforward and uncensored and full of eye-contact. (And this is not the first time someone has said this to me, lately, but it's just such a small thing to talk about, it's easy. Not important -- or maybe that's the wrong word entirely -- but not difficult to find words for, to grasp what wants to be said.) And I like that you will answer intrusive questions like they're nothing (and ask them like they're just as offhand), and you will laugh at yourself, at anything (and make me laugh, also) so we sit close to each other and talk about extremely private things in public. Later, we laugh -- a lot -- in private, and the next morning I find toothmark-bruises on the insides of my thighs, and smile, remembering. (I feel the mild ache of them throughout the day, my heart beating to the new black and purple patterns; I can tell already it will take them much too long to fade and disappear.)

Old, long-distant disappeared people trickle back into my life -- and often the timing is strange, or abrupt, but it is always a pleasant strangeness, and feels comfortable, somehow. And other people fade out to indistinct, to nowhere (and one wonders if this is some kind of balancing out, but I have never liked to think of things as being constructed in that sort of way, so it's a question I can't answer) and it tastes like loss, even when it also feels wrapped in the inevitable (which has never done much to offset that pervasive too-strong flavor, at least not for me). But new things, new minds, new hearts, filter in as quickly as I can breathe their presence in -- nothing here and then sudden someone standing in the empty space before me (or so it seems) -- and at times it's all too much, but I don't know what too means anymore (or ever) so perhaps it really isn't.

It's cool enough, evenings, now, that the fan is unnecessary. I don't sleep as well without the background noise above me, humming (I don't sleep well enough at all, regardless). The things I do not want are much more concrete and easily seen, tangible, than the things I do want -- they hover just off the edge of vision, blurry not-quite-real things, hazy aching hunger, indistinct. I should be remembering exactly the taste of your skin, of some small noise deep in the back of your throat, softly. (I should not have to remember any of it at all, because it is happening now, this moment, and still.) I get reckless and impulsive to keep the spaces between high and low bigger, longer, indefinite. Though the most reckless, the most (and least) impulsive things I think of doing...I talk myself out of, again and again (constant silent argument inside my head).

(And I just realized that a year ago, almost to the day, I was thinking about my ceiling fan, also. Enough to feel a need to scrape the thoughts out of my head. The fact that everything changes while nothing does, at all, leaves me feeling so overwhelming weary that I feel like I will never sleep again.)

Independence

2010-07-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

I don't like July 4th. Loud noises jar me, leave me internally shaken. Noise that vibrates within my chest, that I can feel inside my throat -- it makes me want to vomit, it has since I was very, very small. And the waste, the stupid useless waste -- the money thrown away on brief pretty lights exploding in the sky. The whole thing leaves me conflicted. But you invite me to spend the day down by your aunt's boat, like we did every year we were together, and it has been two years since I last did that, and you say you'll come and pick me up on your way, that afternoon, and it's nice to have you back in my life, like this, lacking tension, so I say yes.

Someone shows up, early evening -- I didn't expect to see him here. We were never really close. Casual acquaintances, in contact only because of mutual friends, relationships, we had in common. Running into each other at gatherings, holidays, events -- and I always liked you, and thought you sweet and goofy, and we would talk about nothing in particular, and it was pleasant, but it never went much deeper than that, and I never thought about it, really. You moved, I knew, a year-and-a-half ago, perhaps -- I'd heard that, at some point, I remember. So when I saw you walking up the path, towards me, it caught me by surprise, and made me smile; I hurried over to you, hugged you. A peripheral figure, in the vaguest of ways, but a pleasant one -- a feeling of quiet laughter attached to nothing much. We sat and talked, later, for a very long time -- talked more honestly, about things more real, than we surely ever had in all the years we halfway-knew each other. And my internal filters were switched off -- an afternoon-into-the-evening of low-level drinking, not enough to approach any level of being drunk, but enough to leave me verbally loose, apt to say whatever I am thinking (or more than I usually might, which is already a lot) -- and your apparent innocence leaves me craving naughtiness, corruption. Later still, side by side in folding chairs on the deck of the boat, shivering, huddled beneath a huge shared blanket, the converstional pauses are loaded with subtext. After the fireworks are over, I have to rush off, because we are trying to beat the traffic, and I lean down to kiss you, quickly, and you hold the brief pressure of my lips, turn it into something longer, more drawn-out, and much more substantial. And I am speechless, and honestly surprised -- sometimes things we never would have considered suddenly seem obvious -- and I touch your cheek and toss a Goodbye over my shoulder. Even later still, we spend a long time on the telephone, and realize that there are a lot of things we never realized. And that next time you're in town, they are things we really should consider.

Someone asks me how I attract all of these men, and I don't know how to answer, because in actual fact I don't think I do, or not most of the time. But lately, there has been something -- some combination of manic restless deliberate willingness to give in to impulse, to recklessness, and something else, perhaps. Some visible hunger, or unlocked hidden thing, or something else entirely -- apparent, obvious, but not on purpose.

There is a man I used to see every year, like this, on July 4th. A friend of your cousin. I was immediately infatuated with him, and we would spend the whole day, each year, talking and laughing, about everything and nothing in particular. Three years ago, we said -- all offhanded casual -- how stupid it was to only speak like this, once a year, with nothing else between. Exchanged phone numbers. Months later, that winter, we met for drinks, and dinner. He drove me home, and kissed me in his car, outside my building (I had moved out, alone, already, but not yet ended things). Came over once after that, and we lay in bed against each other, watched movies, and spent an evening kissing. It was a strange and unexpected situation, and there were a lot of reasons for it not to happen. (He's much too old for me, for one -- not so much in my head, but I know it gave him pause.) We stopped talking -- or, rather, he gradually stopped talking to me -- and it's been two years, or nearly, since I've seen him. And he was there, and smiled guiltily at me as he embraced me. We spent a long time talking, quiet in the kitchen, out of sight of everyone. I think I might have made things too complicated inside my head, before. And that was dumb, because I never asked you what you were thinking, and now I see I really ought to have done. He asks me if I'm angry, and I laugh -- How could I be angry? You didn't owe me anything, and anyway there were plenty of good reasons not to continue, really, weren't there? And he smiles, and sighs, and says that he was probably very, very stupid. I touch his shoulder with my fingers, softly, and hold his gaze -- Well, you're not dead yet, are you? There's always time. We whisper wicked thoughts over our drinks, and smile. And much later, when I lean down to say goodnight, he holds my arm to keep me there, and kisses me, long and slow and sweet. And then once more. And I pause, collect my thoughts, and say I'll call him soon. And then I'm gone.

And it is becoming clear, in ways that aren't ignorable, how none of this restlessness, these short-lived (or sometimes longer, even, but never truly sustained) bursts of high, of want (and the wanting is often less about wanting and more about wanting to give something), of motion and words and kisses and laughter -- how none of it stains permanently enough, hard enough, long enough. As soon as things can settle, internally, as soon as my mind can quiet, pause, it's all the same chaotic swirl of unsettledness and unease and I am tired of melancholy and hollow; I am tired.

Riding in your car has always been a pleasure -- I don't really give a damn about cars, but something about enormous boxy old boat-like cars always thrills me. It's a small thing, but something I miss, going places in your creaky old car. (And how often did I just fall asleep, head resting against the window, on long trips to or from your parents' house, or anywhere more than a short short drive away? I'm such a horrible passenger, not entertaining, lulled to drowsy sleep too easily by any moving vehicle.) When we finally get through all the post-fireworks traffic -- 30 minutes, maybe more, to go less than a mile -- the rest of the trip back downtown takes no time at all. When you pull up in front of my building, I can't stop myself from blurting out -- my hand on the door handle -- that one of my biggest relationship regrets, with you, was the fact that we never fucked in this old car. And you hold my gaze for the briefest of moments, and then quietly say, Mine, too. It's a moment that touches me, sweetly. And then I lean over and kiss you gently on the cheek, and say goodnight, walk to my door while digging out my keys, and do not watch you drive away.

Two Years

2010-07-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

I am late getting to the hospital; the nurses, when I get to the room they've assigned me to, say they thought maybe I wasn't coming. But I was only late, and on a Friday afternoon, they don't really care. I'll be one of the last to leave, anyway. 20 minutes here or there makes little difference, I suppose.

The taxi driver was the man who remembers me, every time, who talks to me about my fish, and his. He tells me that he got rid of the fish recently. The tank had (it sounds like this, from his description) some kind of persistent algae bloom problem. No matter how often he cleaned it, changed the filter, it would be murky and unpleasant the next morning. I've had this happen, too -- there is little to do but use anti-algae drops and keep it from direct sunlight and wait. Eventually, things balance themselves out (but it looks ugly and smells vaguely of mildew while you wait for it to happen). He smiles, but looks embarrassed when, appalled, I ask him, But...they were still alive? You just got rid of them? Flushed them away alive? He makes apologetic noises. I had them for two years, that was long enough. I'd had enough. I suppose a lot of people feel this way (but what is two years, really?), could do this sort of thing without a second thought. I do not understand these people at all. (I want to dislike this man, this almost-stranger, now, but I cannot. He is still a dear and charming man, even though I hate the fact that he just got tired of his pets, and probably killed them -- though I suppose they could have survived. Unlikely, sure, but possible.) He holds my gaze, for a long moment, as I am getting out of the taxi at the hospital, apologizes once more for telling me about his fish. And he just looks so...worried, and so sincere; I laugh, quietly, and tell him to try not to kill any more small animals between now and the next time I see him. And he laughs deeply, and we exchange goodbyes -- he drives away as I walk into the crowded hospital lobby.

And I am late, and then later still after waiting in the slowest-moving line imaginable to check in. I go up to the second floor, and the women behind the counter give me my paperwork -- lab slips, or something like that, I don't know -- and a laminated card with the number of the room I've been assigned. Number 38, on the Short Stay side (sometimes I'm over there, deep in the back of the Infusion Center's maze of rooms, and sometimes simply in regular Outpatient -- I haven't figured out the system yet, though I assume it has everything to do with how simply crowded or not they are on any given day) and it is only two doors down from the entrance to the hallway, the room that faces the nurses' station. And they thought I maybe wasn't coming, but here I am, and they are low-key and smiling and my lateness doesn't matter to them. My nurse is young, and pretty, and I have maybe seen her before, but I don't know her at all. She skips over taking my vitals, doesn't bother asking the list of questions to which my answers never change (and, looking at my chart, she says Two years! to the other nurse, the one who is entering data into the computer at the desk outside my room -- This is your 24th infusion! -- and I smile and say that I should get some kind of medal). She gets the IV in, first try, and -- though it takes the vials an extraordinarily long time to fill, my blood running so slowly -- everything is in place and working properly; there aren't any problems this time. (She points to a faded purple mark in the center of my forearm, asks, Is that where they got you last time? and I laugh and point out two more marks, so small and faint you wouldn't notice if you weren't searching, and say There and there, as well. And two more places. Things were somewhat difficult, last month. And she makes a soft noise low in her throat, Poor thing. I say that I think it was probably worse for them than it was for me, and she pauses and then nods, agreeing.)

The other nurse talks to me from behind the desk -- she's moving, soon; it's her last month here. She isn't terribly enthusiastic about the move, but her husband got a job, or a better job, or something like that. She's filling in my chart, on the computer -- she asks me where her co-worker placed the IV, using a term (the name of the specific vein, I suppose, or something similar) I was unfamiliar with. She clarifies, Is it in the bend of your elbow, or just below? And I study my arm, bend it several times. I cannot tell; I have no idea where the clear delineation is, between the actual crook of my elbow and the moment just below it. I give her the most vague, unhelpful response possible, and my confusion makes her laugh. I read for awhile, and halfway-eavesdrop on interaction between the nurses and a patient in a nearby room. I don't see him come in, but his voice makes me imagine a tall and smiling older man. They're removing a port, or placing one. He sounds relentlessly cheerful about the entire thing. I'm struck, almost overwhelmingly -- and this happens almost every time I'm at the hospital -- with the desire to go room to room, get close to every single patient there, and embrace them, press my lips against their hands or cheeks or foreheads. Sometimes I want to wrap the entire world up in my arms and not let go.

I sleep, awkwardly and abruptly, at some point; I don't remember falling asleep, although I took my glasses off first, so I must have felt it approaching. Time speeds up and flips through itself like pages, and when the IV beeps me awake, it feels like only moments have gone by. I stay still, quiet and pliant, while I'm unhooked from the tubing and bandaged up (it's such an oddly comforting thing, to just go semi-limp and submit yourself entirely to someone else's care -- here is my arm, my skin, my heartbeat, take them and do with them what you will, and I can close my eyes and let it happen and trust that I will leave intact; sometimes the intimacy I feel with the nurses at the hospital is more purely and intensely solid than even the best possible sex, or anything like that, and strangely more satisfying, in some small and tightly qualified way). I stand at the desk, talking to the nurse who's moving soon -- her speech is slightly crowded by her braces, and she is kind and warm and very...Midwestern wholesome. She's very much a mom, straight out of Central Casting. We talk about living in other places, and about the flawed healthcare system (but how, despite its flaws, I couldn't really do any better anywhere else, at least for now) and a few other little nothings, and I want to hug her, but I stop myself (I really don't know why; I'm sure she would not have minded) and then it's too late because I'm already down the hall and waiting for the elevator; time passes (and sometimes what that really means is, time passes you by).

A Tattoo Of A Daisy

2010-06-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

You are late, like you were the first time we met, five months ago (or half a lifetime -- time has ceased to mean much for me, lately). Everyone who works at this bar knows me, now, which is strange because I do not go there so very often, a couple of times a month, maybe. But the bartender and waitstaff know my name, and the bartender remembers the few special cocktails she has created for me in the past, that I almost always order, and they will always find a table for me if I want one. It is a nice thing, sometimes, to be known in small-scale ways like this. Like the world pausing for a moment to acknowledge your existence, and smile. And I get there before you, and order a drink, and I sit at a table facing the door, tracing patterns in the condensation on the outside of my cold cocktail glass, watching the sinewy woman with the shaved head who is sitting in the armchair beside the door. She has a perfect skull, and I want nothing more than to rest my palms against it, briefly. She stands up to greet her friend when he arrives, and I watch her shoulderblades, the upper part of her back, exposed by the thin-strapped cotton dress she's wearing, and her body screams yoga and dance and quiet inner coils of strength; she is definitively lovely. And then you walk in, see me and make your way towards the table -- you pause to lean over the low metal railing separating the narrow aisle of walking space from this area full of tables, and we kiss, long and warm and slow, and I can feel something in the center of me dissolve entirely.

You smell edible; I can smell you from across the table (not because you're wearing overwhelming amounts of scent, but because I have an attuned nose, and occasionally the flow of breeze or something in the bar is just right and I catch a hint of you in the air) and when I say that you smell fantastic, you look at me, surprised, and ask me how I could possibly tell what you smell like from where I'm sitting. We linger over drinks -- you drink dark red wine, I take forever to finish my fizzy cool gin cucumber and floral concoction -- and talk, and laugh. And laugh. Touch hands across the tabletop, fingers tracing lines against wrist and palm. There is an ease in this, a comfort -- you are so easy to be near, to exchange words with, to look straight in the eye and smile. You have a second glass of wine, and I order another gin-based something (two drinks in as many hours, and when we leave I'm slightly giddy and feel light and disconnected from gravity in that lovely just-enough way) and I stare at your chest, and at your hands. I have a container of soap bubbles in my purse, and we try blowing bubbles across the bar, but it's been overly-shaken, perhaps, or something has gone slightly wrong, and it's almost impossible to get a decent bubble from the small plastic wand, and eventually I close the bottle and put it back into my bag, disappointed.

You parked somewhere that will require you to pay again or move your car in an hour or two, and so we walk to your car so you can park it somewhere nearer to my apartment building. You stop beside the passenger door, tell me I'll have to wait a second while you move the pile of stuff -- large, unwieldy things -- that are taking up the whole of the passenger seat. And I grab your shoulders and pull you down to me, stretch up on tiptoe, kiss you hard. And you pull away slightly, with a smile, and say, But right now, we're kissing. And I smile and agree that yes, right now, instead, we're kissing. And we stand there, in this crowded vacant parking lot, pressed against each other, pressed against your car, and kiss like nothing else exists (and I could melt into you, sweet and liquid, seeping through your pores). You clear out the front of the car, and we drive the few blocks up to my street, find a space on the street that is free until the morning, and walk down the block, go up to my apartment.

The rest of the night is like a series of slow-motion close-up saturated moments. My face buried in your chest, the space between your neck and shoulder, drunk on your scent. The way you flinch, violently, every time my teeth insist, sharply. Your mouth warm and gentle against mine, or hard and hungry. Your hands against my skin, your fingertips, searching. Your sad and smiling eyes -- sometimes, it's impossible to tell what you are thinking, if you are trying to somehow see inside my mind. And everything about your body makes my hands cry out to touch it; you are real, and warm, and splendid. I tangle my fingers in your hair and pull your face close to mine, again and again, and still once more. Low laughter and winding story pathways and it is too simple to be close to you, like this, the evening gone still and candlelit. Your head aches, and I sit astride your thighs and rub your back, dig my thumbs, my knuckles, into the knotted muscles, feel the countours of your spine, your shoulderblades. And then you lie with your head in my lap, and I press on your skull with my palms, caress your temples and smooth out the rhythm of your pulse. And I curl up close against you; you gesture to the space between your shoulder and your chest, tell me I can sleep there, if I want to, breathing you in and my cheek against your skin. Later, I turn over on my side, away from you, and you tuck yourself up against my back, your knees folded into the space behind my own, your arm draped across me, hand holding mine. You sleep, deeply and well; I do not sleep, or hardly at all. I drift, occasionally, and wake dozens of times, sleep never taking hold (I almost never sleep worth anything at all when someone strange is there next to me in bed). But this is fine, and the sleeping (or lack of it) is not really so important. And even less important when you wake up in the early morning, and we kiss (and kiss, and kiss) and wrap our limbs around each other. When you have to go, to make the long drive home, you stand in the middle of the room in your pants and shoes, casting your eyes around the floor -- Didn't I have a shirt? And I laugh and say of course you did, but I've been wearing it since last night. You smile, and say that I'll have to give it back eventually -- there is sentimental value to this particular shirt. So I go into the bathroom and get half-dressed, put on one of my own shirts, and come out and toss your shirt over your head. And you look slightly confused, tell me smiling that you didn't mean Right Now; I just had to give it back eventually, the next time we see each other. This makes me laugh; I ask if you were planning to just walk back to your car bare-chested, drive home without a shirt. And you shrug, like it's a silly question. Why not?

You asked me, when we were sitting there with our drinks, why I liked you. Can you really not see how it would be impossible for me to feel any other way? You borrow a book, and I give you a small plastic bottle of soap bubbles to take with you, and I am smiling to myself for hours after you've gone. Later, in the early afternoon, I fall asleep hard, for nearly two solid hours. I dream of flight -- of gliding through the air, on my back, beneath a canopy of turning autumn trees, the leaves gold and sparkling, falling on my upturned face. It feels like freedom, and I can taste the joy after I wake. I fall back asleep again immediately, and dream I'm riding in your car, and see something strange and beautiful amazing from the window, grab your arm and shake you, Did you see that? Eventually, you do, and we drive on and reach a clearing and both look back, out the back window of the car, watching this improbable astounding thing. And when I wake -- slowly climbing back into my head, into the world around me -- the sheets and pillows still hold echoes of your scent (and if I close my eyes, I almost feel the warmth and weight of you against me). And I smile, quietly, and keep my eyes closed for just another moment.

Fleetingly Embossed

2010-06-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

You tell me there is no such thing as random, for no reason. Let's posit an endless network of strings, and another and another -- infinity and infinity, inside and outside and every other where. Puzzle out the action and the reaction, and what-exactly-do-I-think-about-this, and it's the most words you've ever said to me, all at one time, which stops me short. (How do I get wrapped up with these breathtakingly logical sorts, these horrifically reason-based thinkers? It amuses and interests and vexes beyond all imagining; my mind doesn't fit inside those patterns at all, cannot even see them clearly, only blurs and confused color, form, but nothing.)

There is a woman who lives in an apartment building I walk past every evening on my way home from work, or if I decide to catch the bus; the stop is maybe 10 feet away from her front door. She has a dog -- a small and so-adorable-it-melts-my-brain Muppet of a dog -- and often, when I walk by, she is coming towards me, returning from an early-evening walk out with her dog. And I smile my face to pieces at her, and at her dog, and we exchange Hellos, and she unlocks her door and disappears inside. The other day, though, I was waiting for the bus and she came out, beginning her dog-walking ritual. She walked close to where I stood, and as I smiled hello I blurted out, I am so in love with your dog! And she laughed, said she was too. She stopped, and I crouched down and scratched behind his ears, ran my fingers down his furry back. And he smiled his pink-tongued doggy smile at me, and jumped up to try to get his paws against my chest, wriggled all excited. We chatted, while I petted her dog, and he started trying to get my hand inside his mouth -- not biting, but just a constant attempt to hold my hand there, gently between his teeth. This is an impulse I can understand; sometimes there is nothing I want more than to close my mouth -- gentle and warm -- around the body of someone who delights me in a given moment. Wanting to lick, and taste, and bite down softly.

There is a man in a jagged, broken place, and though he seems nothing but awkward and uncomfortable, tense in my company, he calls me charming and wants the evening to continue. He is like a robot -- a sweet, dear, robot -- and he makes me feel twitchy, feeling him so tightly-wound-up-twitchy near me. And then we kiss, and he is pliant and softened and I would like to pour warmth into him like glue, mend things. But the problem of knowing the kind of person who will end up falling, falling hard, for you, is how it leaves no possibility of claiming plausible deniability later on. I think I cannot get involved with him any further than I have already, and this leaves me quietly sad. Or wistful, maybe, more like. Because there are things he needs right now that I could give him -- that I would be happier than happy to offer -- but ultimately I would only disappoint. I would be unable, or unwilling -- or some combination of the two -- to provide what would surely end up being what was wanted, what was deep-down-secret needed. (And someone tells me, Don't break hearts. And it wouldn't be me, but in the end it wouldn't matter even if it wasn't.)

I am wearing an antique brass letterpress piece on a chain around my neck, and I spend a long and wearying day twisting it between my fingers. A few moments of pressure against the soft pads of my fingertips and they are left fleetingly embossed -- tiny ampersand fingerprints. I pause this afternoon to breathe words across the city at you (lungs full of text, and my veins run with ink, but I still have nothing to say). You're so not-quite-anywhere, and I cannot put a name on what I find so appealing (but I want to press my lips against your skin). Like most things, two sides to every coin. (We know nothing about anything, and it's fine, because none of it has anything to do with us at all.) Not counting the edge.

Dwarves, Handkerchiefs, & The Number 8

2010-06-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

You don't know, I think, just how much you let me put myself back together -- how much just being near you makes everything slower, settled, gentler. And I can't explain it -- the exactly why or how -- and possibly it shouldn't even be, except it is. (I realized after you left that not only had I failed to feed you, but I hadn't even offered tea or water or...anything at all. A lousy hostess, truly.)

The evening unfolds like a cryptic note creased into ever-smaller, complicated shapes. You come upstairs, and we sit beside each other, talking -- you give me back a book you'd borrowed (or, more accurately, a book that I thrust upon you, more-or-less ordering you to read it, eventually). And then you lay back, hands behind your head, staring at the blue-lit patterns on the ceiling, or at the moons orbiting the ceiling fan, or at nothing at all. And I curl against you, head resting on that spot between your shoulder and your chest, my hand against your cheek, fingers tracing the lines and hollows. And we talk, and talk -- and what we say is not important -- and the knots that have been wrapping ever-tighter deep inside of me start to loosen and relax. You take both of my hands in your own, holding my fingers tightly (knots slowly coming more undone) and we lie there, quiet. You stroke my forearm, my wrist, with the tips of your fingers -- a thing I have always loved, more than almost any form of touch -- and I want to cry, but I don't. Because, maybe, it has felt so much like you just don't get how I feel about things -- or you do, but it doesn't matter, or you don't care -- and now, beside, against, you, I can feel the greater truth of things sinking warmly through my skin (and this is why, I think, I so needed to see you) and the relief of it is almost overwhelming.

You say something -- I cannot remember what -- that makes me laugh and laugh, loud and long. And then, quiet again, I cradle your head against my palm, and your hands run down my body, and back up again -- up beneath my skirt, bare thigh -- and your touch becomes more focused and then we are kissing, and it takes on its own momentum. There is some kind of qualified violence being played out between us -- internal turmoil turned physical, or some sort of mad intensity, or simply the fact of so long without remembering our lips and teeth and skin together (for me, it is some combination of all those things -- for you, it could be anything or nothing; I don't know and it doesn't really matter). And it is a wave that never crests -- on and on and over and under and how tightly can I wrap myself around you -- until you do something strange with your hands against my face, like trying to mold my features out of clay, and it makes me burst out laughing helplessly. And then we both stop, and breathe, and we roll over and you collapse heavy against my chest and I hold you and feel you close, and it is a sweet and tender thing. We talk, more -- gently -- and some of the things you say leave me wordless and I hope my hand against your face, against your skull, is adequate (and I don't know if it is at all).

I think, perhaps, that whether you really understand me or not is irrelevant, because even if you don't at all, I can feel -- in your breathing and your fingertips and in between your words -- something more important than simple understanding, and I had forgotten that feeling, but now I see that my forgetting it doesn't turn it into nonexistence, and that's a good thing to remember. (I was getting up, to feed you, finally, before you had to go -- but then you stretched your arms out wide, reaching over your back, to lay your hands against me, I'm touching you. And so I lay against your back, my leg draped across your hip -- your palm cupping my foot, intentional. By then, it was too late for noodles.)

And the numbers you come up with, when tallying up your past and sometimes-present -- it is hilarious; it charms, impossibly. But it leaves me, more than anything, just so inexpressibly grateful -- and if there's nothing else inside my mind that you can hold, real and solid, in your hands, I hope, at least, you can hold that.

If You Were Sentences...

2010-06-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

I am losing my belief in words, my faith in their power, and it leaves me on shaky internal ground, unsure. In danger of falling (drop a stone, and never hear it hit the bottom). Another friend of yours died, on Sunday -- a close friend of the one who died in January (except, you said, this was expected, or less unexpected -- cancer -- and then you apologize for the dryness, the cynicism, and it completely breaks my heart). And words are nothing, here. Empty, without meaning. What can I say to you, when everything is loss and ache; there isn't...there's nothing. Oh, I say things, of course, anyway -- I always say things. If you were here (if I was there) there would still be nothing I could do that would make life be different than it is, that would do anything about the vast and depthless terrible, the impeccable unfairness of the universe (when it isn't busy being small-scale lovely and sublime). But I could hold you, your head against my chest -- and maybe it would be like floating in a deep warm bath; the feelings that I have but have no words for soaked up through your skin. Maybe you could somehow taste my heart.

It rained most of the night, last night, and I had fallen heavy asleep at 9:00, or just before, a book open, resting on my chest. So when I woke, half-past twelve -- leaning back in the dark, bedside lamp shining small and intimate -- I felt full of the hush of rain, but entirely and quietly awake. Still, beneath the blankets, reading and listening to the raindrops on the pavement, inhaling the drift of damp night (darkness half-solidified, seeping through the open windows).

I feel un-close to you -- and that's the only way I know to say this. It feels like drifting, perhaps irretrievably, and there seems no way to fix this, and I am sitting here, watching it happen, aghast and helpless. On the phone with you this afternoon, and the warm laughter, the easy silliness, does little to bridge the gap (and once more, it feels like words are nothing, and I'm not speaking a language that maybe either of us understands, in the end). And between you and him and other things, it feels like slowly losing a religion. What would I be left with, if I could no longer see words as a solid base on which to stand? (I'm left with thoughts of nothing, empty. It disconcerts, unpleasantly.)

I told two different people within as many days how often I consider scrapping this whole long out-loud-to-myself talking. I didn't realize how true this is -- how often I actually have the thought -- until it was out of my mouth, out of my fingers, tangible. And things unsaid do not become somehow less true, really (or at least that's how it seems) so the more I think about it, the less it seems to matter, really. Sometimes the thought of wiping the whole slate clean and shutting up (or shutting down) feels almost unbearably comfort-filled.

I ask you (not because I want a response, but because I feel the question overwhelming me) if telling you I love you means anything at all, if it manages in even the smallest way to contain the feeling behind the words. (And I suspect it really doesn't, but of course I say it, anyway.) I'm tired of words, and it's a kind of tired that leaves me feeling lost. Tonight, I simply want to touch you; I want quiet and heavy darkness and my palm against your skin to do the talking, and let all the rest fall silent. (I'm tired of words, but they are all I have to offer you, and so I continue speaking.)

37-Down

2010-06-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

He is tall, tall, tall, and his hair is brightly-colored and his eyes are smiling. And one could not have designed a more incompatible personality-type for me if one had tried -- or at least, he would rank way up in the Top Ten, perhaps, of incompatible personalities. It's laughable; I want to laugh helplessly until my head aches with it. And there are certain people who bring out my contrary wicked streak, and he is one of them; everything he says compels me to disagree -- not just to disagree, but to insist upon my small disagreements. Weave my way, tangled, through various levels of precision and explanation. (With so many people I could maybe just let these little nothings go, or gently guide the conversation somewhere else, or find our tiny differing approaches charming. But with him, it's like there's someone else in charge of my thoughts, my mouth -- I want to pick at the thinnest of threads, unravel things.) In spite of this, dinner is quite pleasant, actually -- because he's a nice guy, genuinely. Because I think it's obvious I'm not attacking. Because we're both glaringly aware of our mutual incompatibility. This combination of raging positivity, optimism, and over-socialability (How could I really successfully be even friends with someone who never eats alone -- not ever, not at all -- who goes out almost every night, because they want or need so much to be with other people. Someone who has never, ever, lived alone. It sounds so horrifying I cannot even wrap my mind around it.) confuses me, and not in a pleasant softly smiling way. It just leaves me thinking...why, why on earth, why? Throws into stark relief my cynicism, my fundamental need for solitude and silence.

The bus home, later, is crowded, and I sit beside an older woman who is intently working on the daily crossword puzzle (in pencil, though, which I can never do because it feels so unsatisfying). Without meaning to I cast my eyes sideways and skim the clues, the still-empty squares, over her arm. She needs two more letters in the answer to the clue she's studying -- easy to tell she's hung herself up on this one thing in particular, as the tip of her pencil hovers over it, and I can see her running through the many possibilities inside her head. Eventually, I lean my head down towards her a bit and quietly say, I think it's most likely toted. She smiles abstractedly at me, and asks me...What? Which one? I clarify, 37-down, right there. I think the answer is probably toted. And she fills it in, and sees it fits, and looks up at me, confused, and says Some of these answers just don't make any sense to me at all! And I smile at her, and then she tells me to wait, hang on, she has another one for me. Do you know...this one? -- and tilts the paper towards me, gesturing at a clue with the tip of her (surprisingly sharply-pointed) pencil -- I never know the names of actors. And by some lucky stroke, I do, and tell her the name she needs. She fills it in, smiling, and runs her finger down the list of clues -- How about this? I have been stuck on it for ages. And that one I don't know, but when I look at the empty spaces, I say the first word that comes to mind, the only thing that seems like it would fit, and she writes it in and sure enough, it works with one of the intersecting answers she fills in next. And then my stop approaches, and I stand up and wish her good luck, a pleasant evening. And she smiles at me, big and warm, and thanks me for my help. And I am smiling as I walk to the front of the bus, step off onto the curb.

We agree that it's a day of clichés, or of recognizing their sometimes-truth, and so I tell you how entirely I long for you. (Knowing it's ridiculous -- though when I say that, you ask me why I think so; you tell me, You are not the only one, you know, I long for you much more often than I mention.) It feels insane (though beautifully so, pristine) only because...well, what are we to each other, really? (And perhaps it doesn't really matter at all, because there is truth even without reason.) I read poetry by Simic and think of you, so palpably that you might suddenly materialize beside me, just so -- if I close my eyes and hold my breath (and these sorts of thoughts are silly and ridiculous, and you said that the air was comprised primarily of silliness, lately, and I know you have these same thoughts, and how is it that, in thinking these things together, at once, we cannot make something subtle shift inside the Universe and make them real?). It's after midnight, now, and you are most likely still asleep, or drinking coffee, or half-awake and feeling the residue of dreams on you like hands or wings or kisses. And I sit cross-legged on my bed and hold you in my mind, my thoughts running into endless comma-ed run-on mumbling nowhere-much-at-alls (running towards you); I long for you, I do.

I met a woman, this evening, and in the course of perhaps ten minutes -- maybe slightly more -- of casual conversation, wanted to be her best friend for always. Because she could finish my sentences -- not only that, she completely "got" where I was going with my thoughts (about silly, trivial nothing things, but still). Somehow Hello, Kitty came up, and I said that she had always freaked me out, because (and she interrupted me) ...she doesn't have a mouth! I have said this exact thing to dozens of people over at least the past 15 years, probably longer, and every single time the person I am talking to pauses, and gives me the blankest look that one can give another human being, and maybe laughs a bit, but flatly, and tells me that it's crazy. This is the first time someone else has known exactly what I meant -- not just that, but thought so herself, also. This is nothing, it is stupid, it is pointless. (But if something so small can happen, so easily and from-nowhere, just like that...then why not something larger, too?)

Wondering

2010-06-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

On the bus, and a mirrored-sunglassed tank topped semi-drugged-seeming guy gets on, wanders all the way to the almost-back, where I am sitting, and sits across the aisle from me. Leans way over, touching the far edge of my seat, getting into my personal space, and demands Why are you wearing all black? What kind of a question is that? I look up from my book, make not-quite-eye contact with his sunglasses, and have no idea what to say. I don't know, why not; why are you wearing a ratty tank top? And I turn back to my book, but he is smiling and undeterred. No, I mean, black is the most beautiful color (since when?) -- it's great. Why are you wearing only black, though? Sighing, trying to ignore him, but he keeps insisting, removing his sunglasses, as if that show of earnestness will be impressive, and practically climbs into my seat with me. So I finally turn and stare right into his slightly-unfocused eyes, and say, I am going to start ignoring you and continue reading my book now, thanks. And he gets up, and exits the bus at the next stop.

Sometimes I wonder...

There's a man I haven't met, and though his emails left me undecided, a single conversation on the telephone convinced me that I was quite happy to go on never meeting him. He has my number, though, and of course my email address, and continues sending small erratic messages my way. And I sit here trying to ignore the things that are ignorable, and give him the necessary social cues to get him to stop making overtures -- but without being as rudely direct as to say Please stop trying to talk to me; I don't like you very much. (I should have just been rude.) Last night, he sends me a message -- I've had a rough night. Can I come lie beside you, nothing more? In what universe would someone you've never met, who has avoided even meeting you for coffee, invite you into her home, into her bed -- even if it wasn't for sex? I'm baffled, open-mouthed. I say as much, and there is a long extended pause, and then I'm informed that "empathy is not my virtue". (And he thought that I was "different", and I want to ask if he means different from all the other women in this city who are more-or-less complete strangers to him, who also are not inviting him to curl up beside them in their beds. But instead, I remain silent, and let him bask in his apparent disillusion.)

...what is wrong with people?

But then, I spent a night in a hotel room in a foreign city with someone I had never met in Real Life before, let him buy me a new plane ticket so I could extend my stay by a day-and-a-half. (Of course, that situation fell apart before the plane took off, but the fact remains -- I did it.) I let two total strangers -- they had come into the place I worked, ten years ago, or thereabouts, with a story that left them stranded in the city for a day and a night, and strapped for cash and trying to find somewhere to crash -- stay the night in my tiny apartment. Tapped out my meager bank account and bought groceries, and we ate grilled cheese and salad and ice cream, drank wine. They smoked out my window, and one slept beside me in the bed, innocently, while the other curled into a nest of blankets on the floor. And the next morning they did the dishes and went out to fetch coffee, and they gave me a sweet note and a wire-wrapped river stone turned into a keychain when they left. Went back to a stranger's apartment, in London -- we had barely known each other before meeting, and spent only a few hours in each other's company -- and you aren't supposed to go home with people you meet under those circumstances. But we sat in his living room at midnight, drank jasmine tea and played jazz cds, and piano sonatas, and talked about nothing particular for hours, and then he found me a taxi and I went back to my hotel and fell profoundly asleep. Spent a night in a hotel with a stranger I met in a taxi the day before. So it isn't, I suppose, unthinkable that a bus ride query or a texted request would be accepted, approved of. (But they didn't know that, and it's still absurd to expect it.)

Sometimes I wonder how I've managed all this time with nothing going horribly, horribly wrong -- because it seems like I act without thinking more often that I realize, like I'm simply silently begging for disaster. So either I'm just shockingly lucky, or part of me knows something that the rest of me can only guess at. (Or maybe it's as simple as most people being wonderful, most of the time -- which is something I think I can believe...just not nearly as often as I would like to.)

Turkish Delight

2010-06-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

You came back from a month, five weeks, away -- told me you'd picked up a few things for me, at the big spice bazaar. That I should stop by and get them "while they are still fresh". (This left me wondering, for two full days, what exactly you could have gotten back through Customs, that would have any sort of freshness limitation.) I call you, after I've walked back downtown, in the rain; when I'm standing just outside your building. You come down and let me in, and I thought you were just going to hand me something, give me an awkward hug, but you step back, gesturing me inside. We go upstairs, and this is only the second time since ending things with you that I have been inside your apartment. It's strange, after having spent almost 6 1/2 years living there, to be there as a visitor. The hallways in the building smell the same, and the apartment still smells of cedar, from the incense you burn inside the closets -- ostensibly to help prevent the moths from chewing through your clothes, although I know that really you just always liked the scent. After a year-and-a-half, or slightly more, of being apart, I am unspeakably grateful to have this finally very real sort of friendship with you (slightly tentative, perhaps, but still undeniable). I was so very tired of things, of you -- of us -- for the longest time before I finally ended them. It felt impossible and stifling and I didn't know what to do; I couldn't live within that framework, within those narrow definitions anymore. It didn't leave me any air to breathe. I could, I think, easily have stopped loving you entirely, had I not finally managed to get out. I know you most likely still don't understand why I had to do it -- and I couldn't be completely honest with you about it, really, because it would have only hurt you. And I never wanted that. And if you knew the whole entire truth, it's probable we wouldn't have this friendship now; it's a lie that I am comfortable with. I think it serves us both, in the end. Sometimes the price of total honesty just isn't really worth it, not for anyone involved.

I saw your aunt today, this afternoon -- at a strange little gallery event she invited me to, filled with art I didn't like, and a few stunning pieces that I wish I could have taken home. We talked about you wanting to leave town (Because you told me, the other day, that you are tired of living here -- you told me that you hadn't realized how tired, really, until you took this trip. That the whole time you were gone, the most words you received from anyone came from me. That there isn't much for you, here, and it's only just now hit you. You want to move overseas, and I tell you that you should -- I mean, I would leave this city, leave behind this country, in a heartbeat if I could.) and she asked me -- completely seriously -- if I would consider moving with you, if you left the country. And I was speechless, and then crumpled up with laughter. I wonder if your family will ever really grasp the fact that we won't ever end up back together, in that together-y sort of sense. (She introduced me to everyone she knew there as her "almost niece", and the resulting over-long explanation each time left people amusingly confused-looking. Like when we were together, and your cousin -- with whom I share a name -- would introduce me to acquaintances as her "almost-cousin-in-law", something that always made me smile quietly.)

I stood in your living room for an hour, maybe longer, and you told me stories, and I laughed myself sick. You gave me pistachio-rich halvah and pomegranate Turkish Delight, a small magnet in the shape of a turtle. (You showed me the silver rings you bought for yourself, from the same guy you bought rings from for me, eight years ago, or is it nine? And I laughed at you, and the many new thin silver rings shining on your fingers.) And there is a lot you never knew about me, but at the same time there is a lot that one absorbs, I think, simply by being in close proximity with someone else, for any significant length of time. So you know me, even if there are a lot of things you don't know, and that makes talking to you comfortable -- the well-worn grooves of conversation we can lean into, knowing how they feel beneath our feet. (But I don't tell you anything important, all the same. We gently discuss the light, and let the heavy sink silent to the bottom, unseen, unspoken. And sometimes that is better than enough.)

23 Months

2010-06-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

The majority of the nursing staff in the Infusion Center knows me by name, on sight, without having to glance at my chart. At times I find this surprising -- I mean, whenever I go in for my monthly appointment, there are dozens of other patients there. And hundreds -- more than that -- there every week, every month. It seems unlikely, strange. Today, the nurse's aide who checked me in looked at my chart and remarked that next month would be my 24th infusion of this medication. So I've been coming here, each month, for basically two years now. It doesn't seem like so long, really (but it does help explain why everybody knows me).

For months, now, my veins have been so incredibly cooperative. I thought -- I really thought -- that perhaps my overactive fight-or-flight reflexes had finally given up. I haven't slept properly in weeks -- in longer than weeks, in so long I cannot remember when my sleeping was not so horrendously disordered. I can feel the waves of exhaustion constantly gathering force inside my head; it feels like being filled with so much empty. And this past week has found me hardly asleep at all. At work, every day this week, people keep asking me if I'm ill, or allergic to something -- my eyes glassy and red-rimmed and shadowed. I don't take any panic pills at all upon arriving at the hospital, and still my blood pressure is low, my pulse rate makes me look like I'm in some deep internal meditation. I have a very slightly elevated temperature -- only 99.4, but it's enough to draw a comment (and as far as I know I'm not coming down with anything, though I don't get into how I've been otherwise, and say that I'm simply over-tired, and it's not enough of a fever for anyone to give it further thought). The nurse comes in, and she's one of the few I do not know well, though she remembers me. She asks me how my veins are doing, and I tell her -- smiling -- that they have been so well-behaved this last little while. First try, no problems, every time. And she peers at my right arm, runs her fingers gently up and down against my skin, and agrees that they look perfect. But when she tries to insert the IV needle, she has to dig around and re-position and long moments of pinching hot pain finally leave her apologizing profusely, telling me she'll have to try again. I tell her I don't know what the problem is -- I've been so good, lately. And she smiles, pretty, and says it's not a huge problem. We'll try again; this time it will work. She picks another spot, slightly farther up my arm, and this time the pain is immediate and I suddenly -- for perhaps the first time ever, in this situation -- have to look away from her hands, busy working at my flesh, because I feel lightheaded and full of grey jumbled static. She gets it in, and pulls the metal needle part out, but the tube won't give her any blood, and she pulls it out and tries to work it around, push it farther in (pulls it nearly out entirely and tries again). No blood. She is getting horribly apologetic, and I can't stop laughing -- too-loud, frantic nervous laughter -- and finally she gives up. Tells me she is going to call someone else in, but that we'll probably have to use my other arm. I say the names of the two nurses who, historically, have always managed to coax my veins into submission when they were being difficult, and she says that one of them is right down the hall. She leaves to go and fetch her, and I sit with a heat pack wrapped around my left forearm.

The other nurse comes in -- the serious-looking Ukrainian woman who laughs like music and smiles warm and improbably, always. She looks at the two gauze-covered wounds on my right arm (they didn't really even bleed, though -- how is it that I can get a paper cut and bleed for half an hour, but someone can stick a piece of metal directly into one of my veins and nothing comes of it at all?) and at my left arm, wrapped in heat. Her eyes move up to the crook of my right elbow -- Did you want to use your left arm? Because that spot right here (and she reaches out and softly brushes the small moment on the almost-inside of my elbow with her fingertip) looks great. I always have good luck with that spot, you know -- isn't that right? I tell her that I would actually prefer it if she didn't use my left -- my dominant -- arm, and she smiles to herself and lays out everything she needs, wraps the elastic tie around my upper arm. We'll get this, no problem. And the needle slides in like I'm made of something less than solid, and for a moment everything seems perfect. But then my body begins to push the small thin plastic tube back out, and she fusses with it, adjusts, tries to thread it back further in. She does this several times, and each time, like some kind of magic trick, my vein immediately rejects the tube. No blood is flowing at all. She looks at me; I look at her. I close my eyes. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. And we both start to laugh, and she tells me that was exactly what she was about to say, too. She tries a saline flush -- because it's possible the IV is in there well enough to drip meds in, even if they can't get any blood out -- but it is instantly dull achey, and she trips over her apologies, and sighs and says we'll have to try my other arm after all. She cleans up her first attempt, and sits beside me, intently stroking my left forearm with the flats of her fingers -- up and down, pressing and feeling. She decides to try a spot right in the middle of my arm -- Your veins look so good, I don't know why we should be having any problems at all -- and sticks the needle in. This one, I feel going through every layer, every cell, of skin (or so it seems). And she makes a small exasperated noise deep in her throat, and moves things back and forth, this way and that. I don't think I'm even in the vein! God, I'm so sorry; I don't know what is going wrong! I can feel her counting the unsuccessful wounds on my arms -- four, now -- and she looks like she's about to cry, and I want to wrap my arms around her and whisper reassurance. The other nurse comes back, and sees that all is not going quite well, and they discuss things. They don't want to stick me again, a fifth time; they debate calling the head nurse on duty, or just calling one of the IV specialist guys from down in the lab. They decide to call the head nurse in -- place heat back on my arm, in preparation, murmuring about another spot that looks promising, but not daring to touch it themselves. A minute later, another nurse walks in -- I know her, though I never realized she was in any way in charge of anything. I like her; I like her a lot, in fact. She's warm and funny and utterly direct. If this was some kind of television medical drama, she would make a perfect character. I haven't seen her in a long time, in months and months -- and as she walks into my room, and sees me, she laughs and says I should have known it was you! Your veins being difficult again? I smile faintly and tell her that really, I haven't had any problems at all in ages -- it sounds untrue, of course, given the current situation. A few minutes of discussion, explanation, and then the two women leave -- to tend to other patients, to get my medication from the pharmacy -- and the head nurse and I are left alone. She touches my arm, small exploratory touches (I wish that everyone in the entire world would touch each other like this, constantly, all the time -- friends and strangers and all of everybody in between) and then quickly gets everything together, sticks the needle in. And just like that, everything clicks into place. My blood is flowing, the tubes are in completely, and she grins and says, Don't let them know that it was so easy. Let them think we struggled a little; they feel so badly already. I blink at her, innocently, I have no idea what you're talking about. It took forever to get that in just now. And I feel suddenly calm, and we laugh quietly together, and talk about small nothings until one nurse comes back with my meds, and gets everything hooked up and going. I had taken my boots off already, earlier, and now while she tidied things up in the room, checked the IV drip, I am curling up in the chair, keeping my arm careful and straight. Glasses off. She asks me if I want the lights turned off, and I tell her yes, please. And I'm halfway floating in nowhere before she's even shut the door; it takes no time at all for sleep to erase me, clean, like chalk. I do not dream (or if I do, it never seeps deep enough into my mind for it to register); I barely half-wake up when an hour has passed and the IV machine starts beeping. The soft-voiced Scottish nurse comes in, then, to switch the drip to saline, but I can barely keep my heavy eyes open to greet her. I'm vaguely aware of her fussing with the IV set-up, I hear her -- from very far away, it seems -- as she leaves the room, talking to one of the other nurses about the last bit of the meds not being quite dispensed, and needing to come back in 10 or 15 minutes. She must have done, but I slept right through it. I don't surface again for another hour, until the machine starts beeping insistently once more. She comes back, unhooks me, tapes gauze in place across the spot where my arm had just been connected to something foreign -- it's a weird thought, that -- being tied so intimately to something so completely Other, for any length of time.

When I leave, it's so late the main entrance to the hospital has already been closed; I have to exit through the strange and hidden side-door, down at the end of a hallway that feels like it goes nowhere. It's cool and dark and raining when I step outside. Perfect rain -- hard enough to make a satisfying hush-filled noise, but light enough so that it doesn't sting. No wind, no disturbance -- just soft cool rain, straight down from the sky. The sound of it hitting my umbrella is soothing. I walk back downtown as slow and carefully as possible, feeling the lingering aching in my arms, feeling the scent of rain and deep grey skies. Feeling full and empty, bone-deep blood-deep tired, off-balance. I wonder what, exactly, is taking up the space inside my veins where all my blood is meant to be. (I wonder, if I kissed you, would you taste like rain. And what, then, could that wash away?)

Sticky Like Mango Juice

2010-06-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Words are not the same as life. But now I wish we could have just been smarter -- or more cautious, or less full of impulsive desire, or something -- and left things written down but never lived. Because when it's all just worlds of words, it's so much more than enough; it's everything, and wonderful. But when the living doesn't work (because of stupid, stupid things -- and it all just spells out so much waste, to me, just stupidity and waste) and all you have left is the fading echoes of old words...it's never even close to being anything near enough at all. Then it's just nothing and nowhere and...over. (Stupidity and waste and such a fucking shame.)

And there could have been so many more words, but now there's nothing, and -- perhaps this is what it is, my biggest fear with you. Because everything ends up like this -- with only shadows and old echoes of nothing, words running through my cupped palms like sand, like tears, like the ashes of something not-quite-remembered; the residue on your skin, sticky like mango juice (but long since lacking sweetness). And if that's what you become, some broken memory and nothing else...my head already aches from crying all afternoon, and my eyes are salt-stung and swollen, and now that thought just leaves me wanting to go throw up; it makes me retch and suddenly forget how breathing works, exactly.

(This has no right to touch me much at all, so I'm unsure what, precisely, I am crying over anyway.) I think my whole life is made up of ghosts and disappearances, and I'm not sure I know quite how to manage them anymore -- or if I ever really knew how to in the first place. Moments cool and sweet as they are swallowed (later leave you wrung-out dry, more desperate thirsty than when you started).

One-Sided Half-Truths

2010-06-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

I say that I don't need anything back from you -- that these one-sided nothing conversations are enough. And it's true when I say it, or I want it to be. Because how much have you given me, this last year (and how little have I had to offer you)?

But it is a lie. A lie I don't intend, something not on-purpose -- but I can sit here now and turn it over in my mind, and the stark untruthfulness of it burns, makes me yank my thoughts away reflexively.

(Perhaps it's better as a lie, though, in the end -- since there is no good way to bring the truth into words, and how can we talk about something as substantial as truths, anyway, when we aren't talking about anything at all. You're all shadow and negative space, now, absence and silence, and it leaves me feeling hollow, and even if I shouted that from a rooftop -- cast my sadness over the city -- it wouldn't matter.)

My neighbors -- below me, or down the hallway, or somewhere in between (impossible to gauge where sound is coming from, inside this building) -- are having loud and painful-sounding sex, and I sit here listening to them; it makes me smile. (It makes me, strangely, wish you were here right now beside me -- to laugh quietly at the absurdity of everything, to drown out the world and fill my ears with your low-throated moans.)

It isn't this; it isn't you. (I mean, it is, of course -- but it isn't only that.) My feelings are my own, and don't concern you (shouldn't, anyway) and mostly when I'm sad and sinking down and down (and down) it's something else, or nothing, or simply How Things Are. But...I miss you, in ways I don't have shades enough to paint, and so it becomes a vast grey blur that unfolds itself into all the empty spaces (and there are a lot of empty spaces, today -- and lately -- and maybe always) and I don't know how to say this without it being awful, so I can't say anything at all. Because, I guess, I'm not a thing that needs nothing, although I'd much prefer to be. Because you're right here near me, in this city -- but it feels like you're a universe away. Because it overwhelms and chokes me, and...trails off into loud resounding silence.

10:52

2010-05-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Writing is not the same as living.

Sometimes it is better, and sometimes worse -- and sometimes neither one at all -- but it is always, always different. They aren't paths that easily intersect, but endless parallel lines stretching into always, and this makes it difficult -- the longer one wanders along one pathway, the harder it is to make the leap over to the other side (similar, but different, always different).

And you are a writer, spinning words into worlds, and I am a reader, a consumer, a drinker of concepts (it's like alcoholism, but the warm soft-edged haze never lifts, or else it's just one long constant sick hangover).

My mind can never make the proper connections between someone seen two-dimensionally, in a photograph, and that same person in one dimension more, walking and talking and breathing and heart beating vivid. (I would not have recognized you, had you not been late and I not known that the next lone tall man to walk through the door would be you; I think you find that difficult to believe, but it's absolutely true.) My brain holds impressions, certain details, but a person as a portrait is maybe never the most important thing, and so it falls through the cracks like sand, scattered and confused. And there was not the immediate magnetic physical pull -- or at least, there was not for me -- but your words were flowing through my veins like something molten, and that sometimes is all I need (sometimes all I really want). So we sit, and sip cool drinks, and laugh; I touch your face, your hands, across the table. Lean forward, eyes lowered, and smile into my palms. When we walk down the street, later -- the rain has paused, and everything is cool and damp and shiny pavement -- we stop, lean back against a wall and kiss, slow and soft.

At home, I turn the light on -- briefly, so you can clearly see exactly where you are (but then I switch it off again, so that I can recognize my surroundings properly -- blue and white strings of lights, and half a dozen candles flickering). The words come easily, and our lips follow them -- fingers tracing, endlessly. And there are a thousand reasons why this entire thing is utterly insane, and when it comes down to it -- to us, here, naked and entangled -- some of those reasons echo loudly in your mind. You consider leaving, going home -- but it is far past midnight, and the idea of another time seems distant and unlikely. So I wash my face and brush my teeth, put on your soft button-down shirt. Give you a spare, unused toothbrush from my travel kit, and tell you to just come to bed and stay beside me in the dark. And we spend the night like that, draped across each other like a secret. (I don't sleep at all, or only for minutes a time, waking constantly -- I almost never sleep well with anyone in bed with me. But you are warm and solid, and my head against your chest is -- for me, in this suspended moment -- sweeter than any sleep.)

You leave in the morning, with a few hours you can call your own in which to wring magic out of words (I offer you tea in bed, but you are not a drinker of tea -- so instead we talk quietly, and kiss, and you stroke me gently as a whisper). Your gentleness is overwhelming, consuming; it makes me ache (me, who needs things so soft they are almost imperceptible, or so hard they leave unfading marks).

When I tried to explain to you, the other day, where my head is at most of the time -- how feelings, for me, are infinite, but people and relationships...those are always finite. And I'm not sure if you agreed or even fully understood. This insanity between us, now -- this is the most qualified and finite kind of thing. A something that cannot go much of anywhere, and will not last over-long in the place where it is now. I think we both know this. But, for one night at least -- and maybe that is all there is, or maybe not -- we were wrapped up in infinity (and that infinity was a warm and gentle place, which makes it something solid, even if it's really nothing much at all).

Some Kinda Mastiff

2010-05-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the dark in the middle of the day always leaves me sleepy and disoriented when I walk back out into the sunlight and noise, the motion of a for-real and many-dimensioned world. A collection of short films, and the theatre was half-empty and some of them were good and a few were amazing and one was not very good at all. One of the amazing ones had a sudden and surreal plot twist, which, when it happened, caused the girl seated directly behind me to loudly half-shout What?! which was almost as entertaining as the film itself. Things that make people forget themselves, their situations, entirely, are sometimes the best kinds of things there are.

I saw you the other day, and it feels like some indefinite, over-long period of time, since the last time I saw you. (In reality, not so very long at all -- though you have not really been here, not been entirely present, for awhile, and maybe that explains it. Or perhaps it's just that it has been a long, long more-than-a-month since I have had you alone with me, here in the dark, your lips against my skin.) Sometimes, I cannot fully breathe, during these endless suspended moments in-between. And I wish there was something -- anything -- that I had to offer you (and I wish that you were here, and luminous, and twined around me in a knot).

I bought flowers, that afternoon, after holding you tightly against me for not nearly long enough at all -- iris and poppies and peonies. And the poppies are like fire turned into paper, or silk, or a heartbeat -- one in a small, short vase that used to be a bottle of balsamic vinegar, and one cut shorter than short, and propped in a stemless wine glass. The peonies are unfolding larger and more improbable by the hour, or so it seems (and I love the way they smell -- clean and sweet and only-just, the shadow of something, but not quite completely there).

Riding the bus this evening, the driver opens the door while stopped at a red light and shouts -- loud and sudden -- at a passing girl with a large dog on a leash, Hey! Hey! Is that some kinda Mastiff? The girl looks over at the bus, calls back to him, Oh, yes. It's a Bull Mastiff. And then repeats herself again, when he doesn't hear her. He closes the door, and I can feel the quiet satisfaction in his voice as he says, Yeah. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. It makes me smile, big and helpless, for the rest of the ride. (And I want to hand you that moment like a foil-wrapped candy, let it dissolve in your mouth, the sweetness filtering through your entire body, cancelling everything else out. Letting you forget yourself.) Later, I get on a bus back home, and the driver is wearing (oddly, disconcertingly) one of those white surgical please-don't-let-me-catch-the-plague masks. His eyes, though, smile at me as I walk up the two steps, and he asks (muffled, from behind his mask) So...is that your natural hair color? And I laugh, because I can't stop myself, and drily tell him that yes, of course, it is. From birth.

It is an effort, when I see you, not to let my heart flash like a neon blinking sign across my face (or maybe it does, and everybody knows it, and perhaps they all politely look away and pretend they didn't see, because it's just too much). I look at you and feel it almost possible to touch you with my gaze; I want to peel you layer by layer and slide inside of you and rest there. I want to touch the center of everything. It kills me that I have nothing to offer you, that there is nothing I can do. (But I hold my arms outstretched to you -- open, empty palms. Whatever you can see within them, is yours to keep. Perhaps it's something more than nothing, after all.)

Maps

2010-05-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

I ask you for a catalogue of the sexual services you have on offer, and amend that to a catalogue in the style of the line drawings of the little cartoon person in the booklets that accompany IKEA furniture, showing you how to assemble things (even though, in terms of putting furniture together, those drawings are more useless than the most useless thing). And then I think that this is the sort of thing that must already exist, somewhere; someone had to have thought of this and done it already, because -- brilliant idea. But we both try to look this up, on our respective computers -- still connected by telephone, still thousands and thousands of miles apart, but you are closer to me than anything right at that moment -- and there is nothing. Which means, I tell you, that you really have to come up with something like that for me, since nobody else has done it before.

And you have been so far away for so long, now -- not just far away in miles and time and space, with oceans between us and nine hours of sunlight moonlight day or night or everything time all at once -- but far away inside your head (and you have been just as far away from yourself as you have from me, all this time, I think). To have you back, even for just an evening, for a few short hours, is like a gift, all shiny paper-wrapped and tied with ribbons and beckoning.

(How small a statement is I have missed you, and how vast are the feelings I can put inside it?)

I talk about renting a cottage by the water for a few days this summer, near my birthday -- I had thought about long walks to nowhere and reading for hours outside in the shade, long afternoon naps and midnight soaks in the bathtub and not talking to anyone at all for the longest long weekend. Except...you should come here, and stay with me, and it would be all solitude and quiet and nobody else around, with the two of us wandering and tea and champagne and ice cream and naps in the afternoon that stretch into the twilight, making up for the long nights in bed not sleeping at all, and you should come (you should come). I say this, and know how crazy it is, and you know how crazy it is (we both know exactly how insane we are, most of the time) and you tell me you'll consider it carefully and if there is any way at all that you can make it happen, you will be here. And small things sometimes work out (or sometimes become much larger, more unexpected things).

I was supposed to be tangled up with someone else last night. We should have been sitting, facing each other, a small tabletop between us, bridging the gap with our eyes and absently dragging our fingers down the condensation on the sides of our cocktail glasses. We should have been huddled in a doorway, out of the rain, kissing ourselves into oblivion. (We should have been together on the small island of my bed, marking the maps of our bodies with lips and teeth and fingers -- something to indicate that I have been here, that here is treasure, that here be dragons.) But something came up, and we had to postpone, and so instead I was able to be here with you, and while we talk, I am purely and entirely happy to have you near me (so far away) for those moments. Afterward, when we have said good night (good morning) and everything is quiet again, I am aching and hollow with desire and wishing him here beside me in bed, like we had imagined it, like we had planned.

People don't understand how I can split myself up between so many different someones, how there is room for any of it. But it is possible, it is a strange and lovely thing, how wanting begets wanting, how opening up your heart to someone leaves an improbable amount of room for someone else (and someone else, and someone else again). There is space inside of me for everyone, for all of you. Look at us, here -- with all of this air and sky and these vast oceans and so much land. Trace pathways across our personal atlases. (Throw away the maps and close our eyes and just get lost inside forever.)

4:14

2010-05-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

Part of what made you attractive was the fact that we are equally unavailable -- though, to be sure, for very different reasons. It seemed ideal -- you are very occupied with your life, with all of the details and complications and day-to-day chaos that it involves; I do not have the energy or the patience or, deep down, the desire to spend too much of my day-to-day time with anyone (not just you, but anyone -- I love people; it drains me to be with people for too long, in a day, or a week, or at all -- and this is the constant battle in my head that pulls me apart each day).

I love people; I want to wrap myself around the world (but I want to be alone). I want to go swimming in the ocean without getting wet; I want the impossible.

You know where to touch me, inside my mind -- just so. A word here, a small suggestion there, and I would turn myself inside-out for you, let you reach down to my core and squeeze. You tell me a story, and your words stroke me like hands, and I am left with raw and tingling nerves, electric -- wet and warm and open, the longing aching and acute. And all I want to do is drink you, huge greedy gulps of you, without stopping; I want to breathe you in, for you to seep slowly through my skin, into my blood.

And this is crazy, and stupid, and ridiculous, this nameless thing. This thing that defies all expectation, and every sort of label. (Is this what gives it this power, this lack of name? Or having a name, but not one we have figured out, and if we ever do, the whole thing collapses -- like Ra and Isis. Words are power; words contain every kind of magic there is.)

Beyond my windows, the wind is blowing and the smell of rain hitting the pavement is in the air. And these things are all more real, and more substantial, than you -- than this word-filled/wordless thing expanding between us, filling all the spaces, breathing when we breathe (when I inhale, I drink your heartbeat). But right now none of it is anything at all, and you are the one solid thing, holding up the center (and words are not skin, or blood, or bone, but your words are kisses and -- for today, at least, for tomorrow and the next day and one more day after that -- they leave me drugged and dizzy and elated, and that, I think, is much more than enough).

Stories

2010-05-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

He smiles at her, a stranger, and it is like pouring his story into outstretched, open palms (except there is no story, and no waiting hands, and she never saw him smiling because she was staring at the ground in front of her, deliberately shutting everything else out entirely).

These things are nothing, and float away like ashes, like wishes, like a leaf on the surface of a swiftly rushing stream.

So he smiles at her, and she sees nothing but her own feet, and his smile hangs suspended in the air for one long endless moment (the whole world holds its breath, waiting) and shatters to the pavement, a million billion infinity of tiny shining little shards, smile glitter covering the ground (but it will cut your fingertips if you reach down to touch it, to try to put it back together into something whole and warm again). Maybe every random nameless wound I somehow end up with -- minute cuts and bruises and things I don't remember ever happening at all -- is the result of someone's lost and broken smile, a dropped glance across a crowded room, longing made heavy, solid, a stone to stumble over, falling.

What if every pebble -- every rock, every speck of dust -- was a feeling, an un-cried teardrop, a moment? (And we are all sneezing, coughing, choking on forgotten feelings, on never-was or will-not or impossible-to-recall.)

We should go back to the beginning. He smiles, and it hangs in the air like soap bubbles, like lazy drifting birds, like something lighter than the heavy thing a smile sometimes becomes; she doesn't notice. Time stops. But if a hand reached in from outside the frame, made some small adjustment -- a tilt of the head, just so. A slight repositioning of feet. Well-timed sidewalk cracks or traffic lights or a too-chaotic crowd taking up space. And then start again, where we left off. But this time, that one small change (when they talk about the butterfly, beating its wings high above the earth, a million miles away, this is what they mean -- which is to say, beautiful impossibility) and the smile, instead of crashing to the ground in an explosion of glittery glass confetti, hits the intended target. And she swallows it, breathes it in, feels it work through her skin into her blood, that smile hooking itself into her flesh with a thousand tiny barbs -- there's a feeling that comes from that, but it isn't pain.

This is not the end of the story (or the beginning, or even somewhere in between). This is a blind finger pointed to a random line in the middle of a random page in a book that's bigger than anything imagined. (Two strangers exchange a smile. And then something else happens, or nothing else happens, or we all stop reading and walk away.) This is the only story in existence. This is the one true thing that matters. This is nothing at all.

A Book About Panic

2010-05-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

It seems like every older man working the various check-in desks at the hospital has a moustache. There are at least three of them, that I see often. There could be more -- I imagine a closet, somewhere, some hidden-away storage room, filled with smiling moustached older men. He stops typing for a long moment, in the middle of looking me up in the system, and stares at me, with a half-smile playing around the corners of his mouth and eyes; a long, long pause and then he finally tells me that he loves my hair, and inside my head I melt into a puddle, completely disarmed.

In the waiting room in the Infusion Center, one of the nurses aides walks by and stops, calls out my name with a huge smile. She points across the room, to a teenaged girl sitting beside the front desk, says, That's my daughter! And she waves at her daughter, pointing at me, and her daughter waves at me (how many people has her daughter been proudly pointed out to today -- probably every single person who walked past, and that makes me smile) and I laugh and wave at her, and we all three laugh and grin at each other for a moment. The room they take me to is way back hidden in the farthest end of the maze of tiny treatment rooms and dead-end hallways. A nurse's aide I don't fully recognize takes my vitals, finds me a pillow (for there was no pillow sitting on the chair inside this room) and moments later the sweet tiny pocket-sized little nurse -- the one who used to work in pediatrics -- comes in. She isn't actually my nurse for the afternoon, but she saw me from halfway down the hall and wanted to come say hello. She hadn't seen me since I changed my hair, and she cannot stop exclaiming over how much she really loves it. She goes out into the hallway and brings in two other nurses, to show them my hair and tell them how much she likes it. It's darling and adorable; it makes me want to wrap her in my arms. Then my nurse for the day comes in -- she is a favorite of mine -- one of the very youngest. (Though actually, she's 35, as I discover in the course of our random conversation when she says that she bets everyone working there would love to be able to say they had my birthdate -- birth year -- and I laugh at her for feeling herself So Very Old, and she grins and says Well, I'm definitely not getting any younger, though, that's for sure!) I will never be anything other than confused by people's attitudes towards age and aging; I just don't understand it.

My veins continue their streak of Unexpected Cooperativeness (maybe my body has finally given up its reflexive desire to run and hide whenever I come here for medication) and it takes no time at all to insert the IV, take blood, hook up the bag of saline. She leaves to get the medication, and a few minutes later my favorite nurse comes in -- my razor-clam nurse -- carrying the IV bag of meds. She almost doesn't recognize me, does a comic movie-doubletake. You changed your hair! (I am so generally unaware of what my hair is like, now, until someone else mentions it, and all of this enthusiastic attention both amuses me and makes me more-than-a-little self-conscious.) We talk for a bit; I haven't seen her, not really, for quite some time. And then she has everything all set and half-closes the door and leaves me alone with my book.

What I wanted to say was this -- I want to melt into your arms and stay there; I want to taste your breath when I exhale, like smoke. What I wanted was to want you -- and I do. So. Want you. Everything, and nothing, and something in between; your kisses scar, and I've always bruised so easily. Stretched out on my back, flat on the yoga mat rolled out along my floor, and your heartbeat is the only universe I regulate my breathing to.

Curled into the big ugly armchair in the treatment room, reading poetry until the words begin to melt together on the page, and I put down the book. Take off my glasses and lean back, chin resting on the corner of the pillow I'm holding against my chest -- lay there with the sunlight streaming through the window, pooling on my face. And I am not sleeping -- eyes closed, and my mind drifting through words, breathing the memories of this poetry -- and then suddenly I'm asleep, and dreaming it. Paper and ink dreams, tangled -- this book is about panic, though the word is never named -- but my dreams do not disturb me. After perhaps 45 minutes (and I didn't realize I had fallen so deeply asleep, or even really fallen into sleep at all) the IV machine beeps, twice, quietly, and I turn my head and half-open my eyes. My nurse is there, changing the empty medication bag to the bag of saline, fiddling with the buttons on the machine. She smiles at me, and whispers Sorry for the noise, and I think I smile back, but I am not entirely in control of what my face is doing. I halfway realize that she must have been in the room for a few minutes, at least, before the beeping woke me up, and I think I had no idea I was so completely sunken into sleep. And then my eyes are closed again, and sleep erases me like chalk. An hour later, the machine's insistent beeping wakes me up once more, and it is an effort to swim through the layers of sleep and unconscious thought and break through the surface into wakefulness. It's nearly impossible to keep my vision focused (and I try to respond to what the nurse is saying as she disconnects me from the machine, takes the tubes out of my arm) and I stumble down the endless hallways, stop in the bathroom and run cold water over my wrists, staring at my face inside the mirror -- if I can keep my eyes in focus for just a few seconds, then I can leave. Walking back downtown is like wading through cement with lead bricks tied to both ankles (and I think very carefully about every step I take, and breathe). The things our bodies do, all the time, without any conscious thought, no concentration -- until, of course, they don't -- it leaves me breathless, amazed. And when I finally get home, I close my eyes and drift, and dream (but do not sleep).

The Moment Just Before

2010-05-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

When I don't hear from you for too long -- days that link themselves to other days that stretch themselves out, languorous, and it all adds up to so much time and so much absence -- I start to worry. Because I know how things have been, for you. Because I know the places that I go to, inside my head, and I think you know some of those same places too. Because you could disappear forever and I would never know (except by knowing your absence, completely). But I still send you words, every time I think of something I might want to tell you, or stumble across something I think you might want to see. Because you told me, once -- after I'd asked if this made things better for you, or worse -- you told me that it made things better, briefly (as quickly gone as it would come -- don't blink). And so I send you words, and drink your silence in return (and that is fine, but I still worry). But then you send me a small message, early in the morning; it wakes me up. You've been hiding from everything, and you are going to remain hidden for some while longer, still. But you are breathing, and you are there, and things will be okay -- or, if not okay, exactly, then something near-acceptable, at least. And then, I hope there are enough gentle eyes and lips in your life. (Does the word enough have any meaning, when it comes to anything like that?) There are, of course, both eyes and lips -- soft or hard or piercing or gentler than the theory of a breeze -- but none of them are yours.

I do things, sometimes, I shouldn't do -- and I know it while I'm doing them (a quiet voice inside my head whispering, telling me not to) but I do them anyway. He is sweet, and gentle, and his chin is ever-so-slightly off-kilter, in a way that charms; his heart is ever-so-slightly off-kilter, in a way that sings out narrow escapes from tragedy. He is sweet, and the talking is easy, and before he leaves he leans down to my face, and I stretch up onto my toes (that small voice -- You really shouldn't do this) and we kiss. And we kiss. And, if I were considering this logically, it isn't that I truly want to kiss him (but he is sweet, and his voice is soft) but enough doesn't mean anything at all, and deep down I want to touch everything I see, kiss the world full on the mouth. So we kiss, for long extended moments. (But I really should not have done it.)

Being careless with myself does not give me the right to be so careless with others. (It never seems like being careless -- it isn't about a lack of warmth, or of that fleeting momentary desire -- but really, that is the truth of it, distilled.) Five minutes and the memory of cigarettes on my tongue, and then he's gone and my thoughts are somewhere else entirely. The pull within me real enough, for that small bite of time -- but would I do it again? Do I want to even consider the word again, at all, with him, like that? And the answer is so not-starkly Yes that it must be No (Maybe, or I Don't Know, are only place-fillers, for things like this -- taking up mental space until a No becomes available; this might not be true at all, but still it seems so). And maybe this is not okay -- maybe this makes me much less-than, as a person -- because kisses are possibly meant to carry with them the promise of more kisses, or at least to hint at that potential. To signify a want, or something more than that. And sometimes that is true, of course. But so often, that want -- that something-not-entirely-clear-or-named -- lasts from the moment just before until the moment immediately following, fading as quickly as the kisses fade on your lips, melting sugar dissolving on the tongue, now gone.

The truth is not so very clear (or else it's much too clear to see without a hand up to shade against the glare). If I am not left wanting (travelling through time or space or simply the fact that life is over-complicated) then it feels like not being entirely capable of it. Want feeds want -- so how much better would things have been, between us, if I could have wanted you every day but only had you for brief periods with long pauses in between them, instead of having you constantly, all the time, but slowly wishing you weren't there and I could be alone? Enough is meaningless in terms of gentle eyes and lips, in terms of love, desire, or simply sitting side-by-side in silence in the dark (but it comes quickly and much too well-defined in terms of time).

(Non) Fiction

2010-05-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

When people ask that horribly cliché question about who would you invite to a dinner party, if you could invite anyone -- living or dead -- the first names my mind jumps to are neither. Not living or dead, and never have been; I always think of fictional characters, in books and films. Secretly, I somewhere deep-down believe that someday I might walk into a room, or turn a corner, or be waiting in line somewhere for coffee, and come face-to-face with some familiar character from off a page. Stories existing like gods, made real and solid through nothing more than focused collective belief, a desire for something to be true that eclipses all the less-powerful (and much more dull) realities.

At the bus stop, standing just a bit too close (well, really, I could have been halfway down the block and it would still have been too close) to a completely blank-faced man who noisily spits huge wet brown globs of (what I sincerely hope was) chewing tobacco on the sidewalk. Flecks of sticky brown saliva clinging to the edges of his lips, and I cannot look away but it makes everything faintly seasick inside my head, and so I force my attention elsewhere (but I can feel his empty expressionless face and brown-tinged mouth there, beside me, still). He gets on the same bus I do, and sits in front, and I sit in the very back, and concentrate on slowly disappearing.

A few seats up from me there is a couple with a very small child; the man holds the sleeping toddler against his chest. The woman, at one point, takes a napkin from her pocket and tries to wipe the sleeping child's nose -- when that doesn't have the desired effect, she gently attempts to maneuver the tip of her finger around to pick his nose. This makes me laugh and wince all at once (and the kid sleeps through it all, serene). Through the window, I watch a girl cling to a boy -- dragging his shoulders down with the entire weight of her body, pulling and leaning and filled with need -- as they laugh and walk slowly up the hill. Behind me, in the very very back of the bus, I hear a woman's voice ask, Is that what I do to you, when we're out walking? Hang on you like that? (Because sometimes everyone notices the same little things all at the same time, and that is beautiful.) And a male voice mumbles something affirmative, and she shouts out a note of laughter, denies it. (Except, the fact of the asking means she must recognize some small truth inside the answer.)

Walking down the street, hands deep in my pockets, and the wind whipping my skirt around my legs, tangled. Sipping heavily-spiced tea, and feeling the air against my face (this headache that won't fully go away still pressing at the border of my skull, hidden behind my eyes) and my thoughts drift miles away -- across land and sea and time and space -- to you. So many people I never intended to meet at all, and you were just another name on that list but now you're something else entirely, although I really have no idea what (and that's just fine). We could hide from the world, in bed, for days -- and talk, and sleep, and drink tea, and memorize the idea of skin beneath fingertips. Or we could kiss frantically in a doorway, kiss with enough determination that time would stop and the world would stand still for a long extended moment (how long can you sustain a deep intake of breath; how long can the entire world inhale with you?). Or sit in a quiet corner of some small cafe, and not talk and not touch anything more than fingers against the backs of hands, and everything silent and understood (or not understood at all, but in ways that are just as satisfactory). Or a million other somethings, or something else entirely -- some million-and-one-th thing that neither one of us could ever possibly imagine ahead of time.

Perhaps it is that you are are a beautiful fiction who walked off the page and into my Reality, but -- most of the time -- that doesn't actually make you any more real or solid, not at all. (Though it does make it impossible to close the book, to turn the pages of my thoughts to something else. You are a story I read again and again, but never know the ending.)

Behind The Scenes

2010-04-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

If her life was made into some candy-colored romantic comedy, it would open like this. Her -- a wholesomely lovely blonde girl -- sitting in an aisle seat on an airplane, tensely holding a clear plastic bag -- filled with water and a single Betta fish -- on her lap, flying from one coast to the other. (Now, of course, that wouldn't be possible, as one needs more than three ounces of water to sustain a fish for a cross-country flight, which would make someone's pet fish a potential bomb. So what do people with fishes and attachment issues do, now, I wonder.)

You tell me that magic is everywhere, all around us, and I know where that is coming from (and sometimes I believe it, myself) but in the moment it sounds trite and small. (You tell me I would hear about it, if anything happened to you -- after I dream you nearly-dead, and wake up empty hysterical -- and again, while I believe the impulse and the feeling behind the thought, I find it hard to have any belief at all in the concrete reality itself. For one thing, how would one even find me, and for another...well, that doesn't really matter anyway.)

We speak different languages, at times, and it is frustrating like a knot that won't be pried apart by fingernails, but you cannot take a pair of scissors to it because -- because. (Or maybe there aren't any scissors anyway.) Sometimes it seems like there is nothing between us; sometimes there is more than everything -- and which is better depends on whether we are discussing matter or distance, empty space (I'm not sure there is a difference, always).

The story about the cross-country flights multiple times each year is what first made me adore her. If her life became a silly movie, there would be a scene involving the guy in her dorm -- she thought he stole her underwear after they spent an awkward night together, and word spread through her group of friends like raindrops in a river. Until the day she was packing up her room, and found them -- wedged between the mattress and the bed frame. A close-up shot of her horrified open-mouthed expression, before she ran down the hall into her best friend's room, waving the long-lost underwear in front of her and laughing helplessly. (We sit, drinking gin, and plot her life comedy, scene by scene by scene -- too-loud laughter and fits of hiccups.)

Rain and hail rattling the windows, pounding the pavement outside, and sitting inside, in the dark -- listening -- is the best sort of afternoon (but when I go outside and walk to the store the sun is shining and it's a blue-skied day from nowhere). Come home and make strong espresso on the stovetop -- coffee and sweets and a few long minutes of quiet. Downstairs the laundry room is still deserted, and I can take up both dryers without feeling guilty (because, as silly as it seems, when someone else is doing laundry, I try to leave them one of the machines -- partly out of trying-to-be-kind, and partly to lessen the chances that a stranger will end up touching all my nice clean clothes).

If every random thought in every being's head was constantly transcribed into some enormous neverending book somewhere -- the heart of the universe an infinity of clean white pages, waiting, and every living thing endlessly bleeding ink -- then we could spend our lives wrapped in paper, drinking words. (And you would see -- at night while I am sleeping and you are having your first cup of coffee in the morning -- the fleeting soon-forgotten moments when you inhabit my dreams.) And every kiss a tattoo stark against the skin, unfading.

Hallway Ninja

2010-04-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

If one more person says, Well, at least you didn't end up stuck somewhere in Europe! I think I might scream, or punch them, or something else equally as drastic. Because in what reality plane, exactly, would that have been the less preferable option? Oh, I get that for Europeans who ended up stuck for days in the wrong country, unable to get home -- or for business-weary travellers who were stranded after their trips should have been long over, or people who needed to get home to children or spouses or other obligations -- I get how that would have been inconvenient, less than pleasant. But for me -- when going away like this is all about getting the hell away from this place, being somewhere else -- I would have traded a lot to end up "stuck" in Europe, whether it was in a city or a country I had intended to visit or not.

I asked you if you ever feel, when you are biting gently (or not quite so gently) on someone's skin (and you had three of my fingers held between your teeth, then -- not biting hard, not changing pressure, but holding them there, mildly sharp and with intention) as if your jaw might suddenly take on a will of its own; if you ever think about what it might be like, to bite harder and harder still, teeth sinking through flesh and muscle, your face and mouth and jaw possessed by something other than yourself, by some strange unstoppable momentum. You laughed, perhaps slightly uncomfortable, and said that no, you had never had a thought like that at all. But I think about that often -- not that I've ever done it, nor would I ever want to do it. But it seems possible -- remotely so, but still some blip on the Possibility Radar -- like the small back-of-the-mind itch when walking across a bridge to just rush to the edge and fling yourself off into the chaos below. Not something you would ever do, or something you would ever want to do, but still some weird moment of potential. There was someone, once -- he was a strange man, and, in the end, rather laughably unkind -- but he was an unbelievably excellent kisser, and we would spend hours entangled on the cigarette-scented couch in his living room. He bit me harder than anyone I've ever known, before or since -- maybe the only person to ever consistently bite down as hard as I really deep-down want, sometimes. One night he bit so harsh and sharp and skin-not-muscle-deep that he drew blood. Not so very much, but it shocked him when he realized what he'd done. I was surprised, but not truly upset by it -- not that the idea of it was exciting in the least, but simply more that I wasn't really horrified. He was appalled, and turned soft and gentle for the remainder of the evening, though the next time I was over he was back to leaving tooth-shaped bruises on my skin, which left me melted in a pool of sharp inhalations and long, drawn-out moans. (And I've never enjoyed inflicting pain on others, but one small reason why I cannot even pretend to indulge this whim for anyone I'm with is because I'm afraid that, once begun, I would lose all sense of time and space and hit harder and harder until some point-of-no-return was reached and passed and left behind.)

When I was thinking about this trip, originally -- before I had started booking tickets or hotel rooms or even fully deciding where, exactly, I would be going -- my thoughts were weighted, coming from dark places. And even as those initial background murmurs faded, became softer, indistinct...perhaps those undertones lingered, somehow. Clung to everything around and about the entire plan, contaminating all of it. How else to explain so many little things beginning to go wrong -- things that started small and singular and quickly snowballed into huge and overwhelming themes. (Sometimes -- most of the time -- things just happen; there are no reasons.) And then the volcano, and five days later the entire trip is broken beyond all salvaging, and everything is cancelled. (So maybe sometimes even huge ridiculous and unlikely things just happen; there are no reasons. We do not make the universe entire, even if it seems so.)

I told you, this afternoon, about some of the things I do when I think myself alone in the often-empty corridor between my office and the bathroom -- that long and dimly-lit stretch of hallway compels me into random acts of strangeness. You sounded exhausted, sitting on a plane, waiting for them to make you turn your phone off, to start the journey home. And so I told you about my Hallway Karate Poses, my aborted Hallway Cartwheel Attempt. (I told you about the building where I used to work, with my long long elevator rides up and down each day -- how one of the things I loved to do was yell, as loudly as I possibly could, Tarzan-style, when I found myself alone in an elevator -- and how one day I realized that actually, anyone could hear me, from floors away, and that seriously impacted my daily elevator enjoyment.) Sometimes, I get caught doing these bizarre little things, in the empty hallway -- someone comes around the corner at the opposite end of the hall, out of nowhere. Worse, it is almost always a woman from one of the other offices, also on her way to the bathroom, and we end up awkwardly standing beside each other at the row of sinks -- me trying not to laugh, and her unwilling to make any kind of comment at all on my behaviour. (You'd think I would stop doing these things, then; you would be wrong.) And the resulting messages you send, later -- after your plane has landed; before your next flight takes off -- leave me wanting nothing more than to press you up against the wall in a deserted quiet hallway, and kiss you into oblivion.

Either way, it doesn't really matter; I am going nowhere at all until November. And it will be a long -- a nearly-monthlong -- trip, but seven months is like a lifetime to be stuck here, through seemingly endless long hot stagnant summer, too much daylight. (I should have been on a plane to London tomorrow...)

I took the wrong bus after work this evening -- the numbers are easily misread, too similar, and anyway I was not paying attention at all -- but once I realized we were not exactly where we were supposed to be, it was too late to do anything about it, other than get off and wait for the same bus, going back to where I started. But then I remembered -- or thought I did -- that the same little grocery store I meant to go to had another location mid-way through this (wrong, mistaken) bus route. And so I didn't have to turn around and start over after all. Because sometimes -- not often, or even mostly, but sometimes -- things just work out, for no reason at all. (And sometimes, they really really don't.)

Overheard

2010-04-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

Taking the trash downstairs, to leave it in the alley behind my building, and I come back inside, through the basement, because the outside stairs are narrow concrete treacherous. Walk down the basement hallway, past the laundry room, and stop -- because, from behind one of the closed apartment doors, I hear a woman. Moaning, gasping -- loud and high-pitched yelps of pleasure, spiraling upward and then falling gently back down upon themselves. I stand there, in the hallway, still and quiet, and listen. For perhaps five long, solid minutes, I stand in the middle of the empty hallway, listening to this stranger's pleasure. I wonder if she knows how thin the walls are, how easily heard by anyone nearby. (I am definitely aware of this; in bed in my apartment, beside the open windows, I bite down hard on my knuckles in a halfway attempt to keep all of my neighbors from hearing me -- teethmarks in my skin for hours afterward, making me smile quietly to myself.) Part of me (most of me) hopes she has no idea at all -- because that is much more appealing, in my mind, than any kind of exhibitionism, intended or not-quite-so. And it isn't that I find it exciting, or not in that way (I cannot make myself turn and continue walking down the hallway, but not because of arousal or anything like that, not really) -- it's just this stumbling upon someone when they are exposed and unaware, and not engaged in self-protection, being hidden. It is the same way I love to watch people in public places when they have no idea I am paying any attention to them at all; there is a certain small but overwhelming energy that comes from studying someone's profile across a room, when their focus is somewhere else entirely -- on something else, or someone, or just entirely internal -- that is never equalled, not even by the longest most intense unbroken eye-contact. I do not know who lives behind that closed door, down in the cool, dark basement hallway; I hope I never actually find out. This disembodied, naked voice is interesting, compelling, in ways that light up all the oblique pleasure-centers in my brain. A face, a physical reality -- less so. (The conceptual will almost always be more real than any Reality; perhaps that is the problem, though it seems often enough, also, to be a sort of strange unasked-for gift.)

Volcanic Ash

2010-04-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

There are certain, specific things I do every time I take a flight from this airport. Small habits that are as comforting and necessary as the first cup of tea in the morning. I get to the airport and check in at one of the little automated check-in machines; I scan my passport a minimum of three times (often more like five or six or seven) before the machine will read it. This happens every single time, with every one of these machines I use. I haven't figured out if I am too slow, or not quite forceful enough, or simply bad-lucked in this regard. (Or maybe everybody has to scan and re-scan their passports every time, and I just don't know it.) I check my suitcase. I always check my suitcase. It is small enough to be a carry-on, but I can't be bothered to ensure that face creams and toothpaste and whatever else is in a smaller-than-3 ounce container. And I hate having a cumbersome bag if I'm rushed and hurrying through vast airport spaces, and I like to know, coming back, that I can put half of my clothing into a tote bag and carry that on, and fill my suitcase with things purchased while away, and still only have that one bag to check. Also, I suppose, I have a deep and abiding faith that my suitcase will end up in the same place that I end up (and so far I have not been wrong).

I go through security -- which in this city, in this airport, seems always to be full of crowds of people for whom the very concept of Airport Security Check is foreign and not-quite-comprehensible. It always takes, because of this, much longer than it should. I take the little airport tram to the terminal -- and it is always the same terminal, every time -- and figure out where my departure gate is. I go to the newsstand and buy three magazines -- always three -- something with articles worth reading, and two that are mostly glossy, pretty pictures, or short articles that make me feel more organized while reading them (even though I know that I will never implement any of the organizational suggestions they are offering). I stop at the coffee place, and buy a cup of tea -- sugar and milk, warm and sweet. And then, I curl into a chair, and wait. When it comes to this sort of thing -- a flight, a bus, the line at the bank -- I am very good at waiting. I sip my milky tea, and page through a magazine; I watch the strangers walking by me, and I think. These places in-between -- airports, train stations, planes and trains and buses, any kind of waiting area at all -- are very good for thinking; they are made for retreating into the internal middle-distance, becoming still, floating to the very edges of mental possibility. These moments of transit, of not here-not there, are like a sort of church, for me -- this blank slate of pure Potential. It pleases me -- and maybe comforts me, in some obscure and nameless way -- when life is wet clay, blank empty paper. Formless, wordless, a thing in-progress but nothing yet determined.

But this time, I get to the airport, and my brain is already switched on autopilot; I am already sinking deeper into my own head, already considering the purchase of magazines, of tea. I check in at the little automated check-in machine (and it takes me at least seven tries before it reads my passport, this time), and stand in the short line for baggage check. A few minutes pass, and then I walk up to the counter, hand over passport and newly-printed boarding pass. The woman looks at it, and types something into her computer, then hands it back to me and says, expressionlessly, Oh, your flight is cancelled. For a moment, I stand there open-mouthed, searching for words. She elaborates, slightly, All the flights are cancelled. And I stand there wondering what I could possibly have missed between turning off the radio this morning once I got out of bed, and getting to the airport -- did something get blown up, has there been yet another giant earthquake somewhere, what? She says, by way of explanation, That volcano in Iceland, you know. (Except I don't, not then.) The ash is making it impossible for planes to get through to Europe. Everything is cancelled. This is not a very good explanation, and doesn't even begin to cover it -- it isn't until I get home, an hour later, maybe more, that I truly grasp the enormity of the situation.

But there at the airport, then, it isn't so very clear. I find a payphone and call the 800 number I was given, am told that the soonest they could possibly get me to Budapest is three days from now, possibly four or more. The voice at the other end of the line is cold and almost deliberately unhelpful. I walk through the main terminal, concentrating on each breath and trying not to cry. I make two more phone calls from a different pay phone (and breathe in, breathe out -- just keep breathing) and after hanging up from the second call, walk to the far end of the terminal, buy a ticket for the shuttle back downtown. Sit in the very back, as far from everyone else as possible (half an empty bus between me and them) and lean my forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane. Feel myself begin to fall apart, internally crumble (and I do not handle change and Big Surprises all that well under the best of circumstances, when they are positive; something not positive like this is exponentially worse for unyielding unadaptable me). Sit there, eyes closed, for the endless bus ride back home -- trying very hard to get out of my head, and just stop thinking.

Frayed

2010-04-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

Too many people around you are dying, and your house is no longer inhabitable (sir, your house is fucking collapsing) so you are in a sort of physical limbo, to go along with the internal limbo into which you are slowly sinking, down and down through molasses time and space. The world turns grey, and your brain won't process -- you say that outwardly, when this happens, you simply seem more dull than you normally might. Inside, though, it just...hurts. Time for meds, perhaps. Hospital time. A lot. And almost nobody knows this about you, but you tell me -- and here, from thousands of miles away, there is nothing I can do. (If I was there, or you were here, there would also be nothing I could do. But at least I could wrap myself around you -- hold you gentle and quiet, for minutes or hours or days and nights -- while doing so, while doing nothing.)

So much time, thinking about you -- a person, a concept, a something else entirely, defying all classification -- about curling up beside you and dissolving into your skin, falling against you, mouth warm. About whispering to you in the dark, or fucking you -- slow and gentle or hard and abrupt, or neither or both or who knows what -- or simply touching your hand with my fingertip across a small table in a crowded coffee shop. I imagine all the things I tell you, but there is so much more alive inside my head that I never put words to, and it is all just as real and just as nonexistent. You cannot, probably, make it to the airport, and this leaves me aching and emptier than I could have predicted or would admit -- and then, I worry about you, and there is nothing to be done. Everything unravels, and so what?

He is unreliable, and that has always been his name -- but knowing this, I still allowed myself to be convinced that this time, this one small thing, this discrete moment, could be different. This speaks to my stupidity more than his carelessness -- and outcomes might not be carved in stone, but perhaps they might as well be. The edges all fray, and the fabric turns to more empty space than anything; hands clutching air and the idea of solid and nothing else.

You are sick, and it has been so long since I have felt your mouth on mine that I've lost track. Time stretches out and bends, and warps, and then I was sick and then you were gone and now you're here but you aren't, not really, and anyway you're sick -- and I leave in less than a week, so it all adds up to Nothing anyway. We joke about cancer, you and I, because it's funny and ridiculous, but every separate little thing suddenly seems diseased and rotting and coming apart and not just at the seams -- sometimes the center rips itself wide open and the whole thing inverts itself into chaos and silent noise, inside-out and layers of hollow peeled down to reveal a more concentrated hollow at the core (everything built on nothing and so eventually the entire structure fucking collapsing).

The world feels shaky and uneven beneath my feet, like shifting sand (like living inside an hourglass, running out of time). Listening to a certain piece of music over and over, obsessive-repeatedly -- hitting PLAY again each time the last note, lingering, fades away entirely. It is no longer enjoyable, after awhile, or even fully registered; it is just something that Has To Be Done. Again and again and then once more again. This thoughtless necessary repetition eventually shakes something loose -- vibrating on the same frequency, finally, perhaps, or otherwise synched-up in some strange way -- and suddenly I am crying. Loud, open-throated choking knifeblade sobbing, desperate and breathtaking and absolutely ugly. Thirty minutes later, wrung out and exhausted and limp -- headache and eyes raw with salt -- falling heavy into sleep, brief and intense. Waking after midnight, and standing in the shower with the water too hot until my skin feels like it could shed itself, until everything goes still.

You have promised me a giant cactus when you die, half-joke, half-serious. (What wouldn't I trade for another afternoon with you, or a long neverending night?) The world unravels itself gradually -- sometimes too gradually to really see it happen, though sometimes swift and all at once -- until one day the music stops and you're left standing there, stunned into silence, staring at a tangle of string and a fistful of empty air.

Spectrum

2010-04-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

Awake until well past 3:00am, constantly pressing two fingers against the throat of my wrist, feeling for the pulse hidden beneath the skin. I can't feel my heart beating; my chest is a hollow void, and the air is nonexistent and breathing means nothing. How many times do I come so close to grabbing the phone and calling...who? Nobody, but someone -- because I cannot feel my heartbeat and it feels like almost dying. (And I know that if my heart stopped beating I would not be sitting up in bed, in the dark, pressing my fingertips against my skin, searching. That knowledge is nothing; it isn't any sort of reality at all.) The next day at work, this undercurrent of panic remains, the echoes of it intensified by the deep well of not-enough-sleep. Every 15 minutes, 20, turning to face the window, staring out at unfocused horizon. Fingers pressed against the messages sent in regular blood-soaked rhythms. This comes from nothing, or from something invisible and unreal, or from somewhere else entirely -- I know this thing; I do not know it.

He asks why I live like poetry, where that comes from, and I cannot answer, because I don't know the Whys and Hows of anything. And you apologize for it not being enough, and I don't know what that means, either. Because nothing is enough, or everything is; it's all maybe just a bit too much, always (or else it is fingers dripping honey and wine and clear rain falling and still nothing but bitter, bitter thirst). How many greedy gulping mouthfuls could I have of you before knowing the meaning of satiety (the answer simple, because numbers don't reach that high, higher than the highest high thing, turning the sky inside-out and backwards and disappearing into endless earth-filled tunnels, deeply). Where do I feel these aches for you -- I can point to all the tiny moments of my body where they are coiled and waiting -- here (fingertip to the hollow of my throat) and here (palm pressed against my side, just below the ribcage, warm curve of the beginning of my waist) and here (both hands brushing gentle across my eyelids).

My heart resumed its beating yesterday, just like that -- these daily small mechanical miracles that don't actually exist because the entire picture is ghost images on an imaginary screen somewhere, and the ink bleeds off the page into dripping pools of nowhere. It always confused me, how black was both the absence and the presence of everything, consuming everything or tossing it all back in our faces. Lying there, blanket-tangled, half asleep (half awake), whispered static conversations inside my head; when I wake up enough to turn over, shift positions, it feels like knowledge, like something terribly important (but I cannot remember what, at all). In a room, the darkness dissolves everything into itself, a vast and empty negative; if we lived our lives on paper, though, it might become a blend of Everything, revealing all the things we thought we never knew or had forgotten. (Would we drink it all down, greedy, then, or would we shut the lights off, overwhelmed, before we'd even gotten halfway through?) Today my pulse is painted in my chest; it could be framed an hung up on the wall, stark and amazing. (But at any time it could transform itself once more into prismatic light, and absence.)

Nineteen O'Clock

2010-04-03T23:00:00.000-07:00

Stretched out in the MRI machine, being still -- practicing the idea of slowly sinking down through the table, counting down my breathing. When the music starts seeping through the headphones, it is emphatically not the cd I brought with me; it takes them a couple of long minutes to change it. There is a blue line that runs along the entire inner-ceiling of the tube -- to help ensure your body is properly aligned, perhaps, or something like that. Bright blue, perhaps 1/4-inch thick, directly above my head. And I don't know if it's the angle I am at, or just a very strange and specific sort of almost-hallucination, but every single time I find myself inside the big clattering machine, and I open my eyes to stare up at that line, I cannot make it stick to the off-white surface it is part of. For an embarrassingly long time -- months and months, in fact -- I was under the impression that this line was some sort of...string, or tape, or something...that was suspended along the top of the tube, perhaps a half-inch away from the inner-surface of the tube itself (how stupid, to even have that thought). It was a small revelation, the day I realized it was simply a painted line, nothing remarkable at all. But even though I know that now, it takes me long, long, deliberate moments to make my eyes read it as just a line of color. I always only see it as not-quite-attached, not ever really touching any surfaces at all.

They are only taking pictures of my brain this time, and so after what feels like a very quick 40 minutes, I am walking back out into the cold grey wind-tossed rain. Across the street and into the main building of the hospital -- I buy coffee, and get a cup of cold water. Just over half-an-hour to kill, and so I go upstairs to the eyeglasses shop, and have the glasses I am wearing (and the other pair, which I surprisingly remembered to throw into my purse before I left for the hospital) adjusted. I have very crooked ears, or very crooked features, or something, because they need to skew my frames rather a lot in order to make them sit straight across my face. One pair needs a bit more of this manhandling, the other simply needs some tightening, as it has developed the unfortunate, annoying habit of sliding slowly down my nose throughout the day. The woman who fiddles with my glasses spends a long time exclaiming over the color of my hair; she asks me very detailed questions about the process. So many questions that I picture her going home, and spending her weekend coloring her head like a box of vivid crayons. The idea makes me laugh under my breath.

Walking across the glass-walled skybridge, back to the other building, I stop halfway across and stare out at the dark grey sky, trees bent in the wind, heavy clouds oozing raindrops (not raining hard, but the wind whips them against your skin like cold needles -- weather that is wonderful to watch from a 5th-floor corridor of glass). Up two more floors to see my doctor -- and they put me in a room immediately, and then a woman I have never seen before knocks tentatively, comes in. She is with the research group that, for a time, was taking blood from me almost monthly. They haven't taken any for close to a year -- but there was a request filed by some of the research scientists, for more of my fancy, fancy blood (some genetic marker that all of them went squishy over). She has me sign a new consent form, and we play the usual question-and-answer game, and then she leaves me with a plastic baggie stuffed full of empty vials, and a note of explanation, so when I get down to the Infusion Center, the nurses can take my blood before they start the IV drip.

My doctor comes in, and we sit and look at pictures of my brain on her computer. After not-quite-seven years, and countless MRIs, it is still as fascinating and lovely for me, every single time, to see these melting grey-scale images of the universe inside my skull. She says there are a few spots that look even better than the last scans, and then -- Just for fun, let's compare this to your scans from two years ago, okay? She clicks around a few things on the screen, and then she is flicking through the images from now and then, making pleased noises deep in her throat. (And I am not a doctor, but even I can see the drastic differences between the pictures from May 2008 and the pictures that were taken only hours ago.) This makes me so happy. You know, this is really the best of all possible outcomes, right here. And we are lucky, because you were still so young when we started this treatment; you are still so young. Your body is still capable of amazing healing. I wouldn't be as lucky. And that makes me laugh, hard -- Because you're so old, right? (Because she is maybe 40, though she could pass for 25 without a second thought.) And she smiles, says, No, but I am. In this context, I really am. I tell her that I guess that means this stuff is really worth the $7,000 every month, and we both kind of sigh and roll our eyes. But still, with these results -- the system is still shit, but...what is there to say, really? We talk a bit; I ask her a few small questions, and we just chat a little, and then she walks me out to schedule my next few infusions with the sweet bear of a man who handles her administrative work. He's just shaved his head again, and it is smooth and shiny. I ask him if he is going to paint it like an Easter egg this weekend, and he laughs and says that several other people have suggested that. As I leave, I tell him that if he paints his head, he has to take pictures to show me next time I'm in the office, and he smilingly promises that he will.

For once, not only am I on time at the Infusion Center, but so are they. They bring me back into a tiny room almost immediately, and my nurse is very sweet in a way that immediately makes me think grade-school teacher, or favorite aunt. Retro television sitcom mother. She makes a face when I hand her the baggie full of vials for all the blood the research people want to take, but quickly brightens when I show her the IV line from the morning's MRI, still neatly inserted in the crook of my right elbow. The lab tech did an excellent job, and the nurse is able to fill the dozen vials without a problem, just like that. She leaves to check on another patient, and to stop at the pharmacy to grab my medication, and I pick up one of the vials full of blood. It's warm -- the way that I am warm when I press a finger to my wrist to feel my pulse -- and deeply red. I sit there, tipping it this way and that, rolling it across my palms, halfway hypnotized. Sometimes I wish that we had skin like crystal, that we could watch the beating of our hearts like some pulsing precious jewel. When I hear my sweet sitcom mother of a nurse walking back down the hall, I quickly put the vial of blood back with the others on the countertop. She comes in and hooks up the bag of meds, starts the drip, unfolds a blanket across my lap. I sit and read the book I brought with me -- a book of spare and elegant prose, true personal stories told by a surgeon about the mistakes and complications and surprises that hospitals and operating rooms are filled with; it is a strange book to be reading while in a hospital. My room is facing one of the Nurses' Stations; from where I am in the big chair, I can hear anyone who's out there, but cannot see them. A nurse (not mine, but someone) is on the telephone, and I listen to her scheduling an appointment of some kind for somebody. She keeps talking about trying to have the appointment early enough so that the next one can be at "Nineteen o'clock". I assume the hospital computers have their schedules set to military time, but it is so entirely charming to hear her say it out loud like that. Nineteen o'clock. (And later, during that same conversation, it takes her several fumbling moments to translate nineteen o'clock into more normal, seven o'clock time.) After awhile, the usual leaden exhaustion overcomes me, and I fumble my glasses off and curl myself into a knot. At some point, someone switches off the lights for me, shuts the door. And after an hour or so, the electronic beeping of the IV jars me awake. I spend a few minutes forcing myself into focus while the nurse takes everything out of my arm and tapes down a wad of cotton.

The weather has been so strange this last week -- now clear, now dark and stormy, now grey and somewhere in-between. Outside the hospital, the wind is cold and sharp, but the rain has paused -- until, a few blocks later, it suddenly begins to fall again. (And then, several blocks later, it tapers off again.) This sudden shock of cold is pleasant, welcomed (maybe only by me and no one else) and the air smells of grass and wet earth and heavy skies. When I get home, I make tea -- too sweet, with milk -- and wrap myself in a blanket, curled up in bed, windows half-open, room just a bit too cold (the perfect temperature). Hot mug cradled in my palms, resting against my chest, listening to the windswept rain. Eventually sinking down, down, through layers of cool air and half-grasped thoughts, like gauze, and into sleep.

Baked Eggs & Chocolate Ice Cream

2010-04-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

When I drink water, I count to myself -- silently, inside my head -- how many times I swallow. (It needs to be an odd number, and there are certain specific numbers that I prefer, and I will swallow one mouthful of water in several tiny portions, sometimes, if it will let me hit a total number I particularly like.) This is a deeply-ingrained tic that goes back, way back -- when I was small, in elementary school, I would silently count how many gulps I took from the drinking fountains, every single time. (Three. Seven. Nine.)

There are small shapes, or strange looping arabesques, or nearly-abstract figures, that I draw a dozen times each day (more than a dozen, probably). I have four different sticky note pads beside my keyboard on my desk at work -- all different sizes, different colors. Lined and plain and large and small. I go through so much paper on a weekly basis, in this electronic age, it's ridiculous. Scribbling nonsense tranquilizing nothings everywhere. (For a long time -- years, in fact -- I was obsessed with drawing eyes. Or, rather, one single eye -- always the right one -- with its attendent eyebrow.) I write your name over and over again, the shapes of the letters shifting and changing tempo every time; I like the way it tastes inside my mind, of stillness and liquid ink.

I count the steps when I go up or down a staircase; I count my steps, unconsciously, often, when I am simply walking down the hallway, down the street. Hold out my hand, fingers spread wide, and graze brick or stone walls with my fingertips. Have to follow certain small specific routes when making my way through certain parts of the city, of my neighborhood (and sometimes wait through an extra traffic light in order to cross a street one way before heading across the other way -- and I know that it's insane, but it settles things, in minute ways, inside my mind). My ex would try, occasionally, to drag me down streets I hated walking along, in directions he knew I didn't like, just to wind me up (he simply didn't realize how un-right my immediate little world can be by doing something as small and dumb as turning right a block too soon, or one too late).

There is a part of me that halfway hopes that seeing you again, after two long years, will fail to truly touch me. That it will be just a lukewarm nothing-much-at-all, and anything I feel for you, about you, is merely residue, ill-advised nostalgia. (It is as unlikely as everything else, of course -- which is to say, it means quite exactly nothing.) It has never been convenient, for me to love you. (I told him this, the other day, strings of email conversation filling up an afternoon. And his response, Love...convenience? Fire and water. No...baked eggs and chocolate ice cream. Perfect, perfect. Though both of us later agreeing that chocolate is not anywhere near to being our favorite sort of ice cream. I was just searching for an opposite. Cinnamon -- crazy about cinnamon ice cream. Good cinnamon ice cream. And, as it happens, so am I.)

And so, half of me hopes for this, while the rest of me spins off its moorings, not knowing what it thinks at all. (It thinks about tracing the thin skin stretched tight across the cathedral of your skull with my lips, silently counting every kiss deposited, a rosary of shining kisses sliding through my restless fingers. Three. Seven. Nine. Infinity.)

Impulse

2010-03-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

I get sucked into these extreme manic fits of impulse, of compulsion -- when I might not even really want to do whatever it is I am feeling compelled to do, but I have to do it. There is a certain unstoppable momentum at play, in these moments, that just takes over. And so I find myself spending half my Saturday rearranging all of my furniture, sweeping up the suddenly uncovered dust creatures. Beginning all of the cleaning tedium that goes along with moving things around (and I ought to have done the cleaning part -- or some of it, at any rate -- before the moving part, but that itchy voice in the back of my head was screaming MOVE THINGS NOW! and could not be ignored, delayed, denied). But -- and this is the thing -- I hate moving things around. I hate cleaning (and I am so lax about it, in many and most ways -- my life is all dust and clutter). I hate most kinds of change in general, really. So spending an entire afternoon moving furniture, and cleaning, and basically making all kinds of small changes, was not exactly Fun Times. Sometimes it's like my brain is conspiring against me, in some elaborate effort to make me crazy, leave me tense and irritated and all frowny around the mouth.

Watching cooking shows on Public Television while I make halfhearted attempts at cleaning (if I had cable, I would never get anything done at all, because things like the Food Network pull me in so completely it's ridiculous). I so adore Jacques Pepin; the way he says certain words -- honey, coffee, change. Emphasis always on an odd word in a sentence, or the wrong syllable. I get almost hypnotized, watching him chop things -- shallots, garlic, herbs -- high-speed and minced so fine, never even glancing down at his hands and where they are in relation to his large sharp knife. (It gives me knife-envy; I cook a lot, but my knives are very sub-par, and my knife skills equally so.)

When weeks go by without seeing you, you start to become an unreal sort of concept; you fade in and out of static, caught in the nowhere between stations -- sound blurred, image flickering. And while there are words (there are always words) they slowly lose meaning, or power; they become, gradually (so slowly one might not even notice until suddenly there it is) inadequate. (And to say I miss you ends up feeling like I've not said anything at all, and what does it mean -- what does it really mean -- anyway? So I say nothing -- or rather, I say a lot of things, and all of them add up, eventually, to nothing much at all. Words are tricky; they defy mathematics, defy logic.)

But they are also everything -- for me, there is so little else. I have a list of four books I want to buy before I leave in 18 days. This is one of the very best bits of travel, for me (and this is also one huge blinking neon indicator of Why I Am A Fundamentally Dull Person) -- all the time for reading. There is the time spent in transit (and I never watch movies or any of that on airplanes -- the only thing I look at occasionally is the map with the little airplane icon tracing its dotted-line path across the world) and the time spent in between transit. There are long hours spent sipping coffee and tea, and park bench pauses for rest, and late nights alone in big hotel room beds (though bad television dubbed into foreign languages is often an irresistible distraction for me, late at night in a hotel room in a foreign city). This is how I used to read, all the time, in Real Life -- when I was a child, I would finish a book a day, or at least be in the middle of 4 or 5 at any given time. I find myself lacking patience, or focus, lately -- if I read a book each week that is a lot, and more likely I only manage two or maybe three in any given month. (I do not count the constant poring over previously-read things -- skimming for favorite parts, or attempting to verify a half-remembered turn-of-phrase.) But, away from this place, and this life, for a week, or two, and I can blissfully read 3 or 4 books, all in huge greedy gulps, without pause. (And if I say I miss reading the way I used to read, then what does that actually mean?)

I am facing a different direction, now, when I sleep. It is a small enough change, but one my body's internal compass registers; when I wake in the middle of the night, I have long moments of complete confused disorientation. I turn the wrong way before walking out the door, grab at empty air looking for my keys (which are on top of the dresser, as they always are, but now against a different wall). It is a vivid and amazing thing, the excruciatingly small capacity we have for minute mundane shifts in any kind of regular routine, in anything familiar. I mention I am rearranging everything in my apartment, and he asks me, Do you require a lot of change? I have to think about my answer carefully -- because on the surface, it would seem that I must, that I do. But in reality, almost any kind of change leaves me mildly nauseated, the beginnings of panic pricking at the edges of my mind. I am a horrible decision-maker; making small mundane choices leaves me paralyzed. So perhaps these impulsive/compulsive tendencies save me from a life of utter beige unending sameness. Perhaps I've cultivated my own particular brand of Crazy from some place of deep unspoken necessity. The idea is more than a little comforting, and more than a little terrible, all at once. Because, on the one hand, here is this potentially Useful Thing, even if it isn't presented so very prettily. But on the other hand, who wants to feel themselves responsible for the tangled messy workings of their unconscious minds?

See More Glass

2010-03-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

We had brunch in a sunny room at a huge communal table. There were only a few seats left when we arrived, all down at one end, and so I sat in the mismatched throne-like wooden chair -- the only one with arms -- at the head of the table (or perhaps it was the foot) and felt mildly conspicuous. Melty, smooth brie covered with thin sliced apple, on a hot toasted baguette, lavender-tinged honey soaking into the bread (and small specks of lavender buds visible against the bread's soft white interior). Rich, sweet coffee. And we sit in the sun, there -- the room emptying while we talk -- for a long time. It has been more than two months since the last time we spent any time together at all, and this is a friendship that drifts in and out, always present but often enough not entirely immediate (and this is fine, as it always drifts back in again, eventually).

Walking down a quiet street, later, back towards her part of the neighborhood -- and it is too warm for the season, everyone so pleased with the sudden sunny warmth, but I have gotten no real cold or winter at all this year and so I am only grumpy with this over-warm clear-skied sunshine -- and a man stops us. He is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, fiddling with a cell phone, looking scruffy and hungover. Rumpled suit and beat-up sneakers, sunglasses askew, unshaven. He asks, Hey, how do you spell marriage? And we both spell it out for him, in stereo. He thanks us, laughs a little -- I can't ever remember how to spell that damn word. She tells him, I don't think they'll let you get married if you don't know how to spell it. And he says, Oh, I've been there and done that, don't worry. We continue down the street, and after a dozen steps I half-turn, yell down the block at him -- Do you at least know how to spell divorce? And the sound of his loud laughter chases us down the block.

There is a devastating magic hour, around 4:00am, that finds me nightly wide awake and staring at the ceiling in the dark. The heat cycles on around that time, I think, and perhaps the metallic clanging thumping noise of that pulls me out of sleep (or maybe there's some much more interesting and hidden reason for it that I will never know -- or, more likely, something completely boring and mundane, like internal clocks and blood sugar ebbs and flows or something equally as monotone and dull). I have become intimately familiar with the way the city sounds, through all my open windows, in this still and pre-dawn hour -- gentle traffic noise and sometimes rain, distant trains (always entirely surprising, when I can hear the trains like that, because I am not that near the railroad tracks at all, not really).

The bus, the other evening, almost passed me by completely -- I had to do some sudden, frantic arm-waving at the driver before he stopped. And as I got on, he got all loud and in my face, giving me a little lecture about how you have to make it obvious you want the bus to stop -- You were just standing there; how was I supposed to know you wanted to take this bus? I'm not just going to stop for no reason, now! And I had a long internal moment of word-swallowing -- because what I wanted to tell him was something along the lines of, It isn't like flagging down a taxi; the reason there are designated bus stops is so that people can wait at them with a reasonable expectation of the buses, you know, actually stopping. I think that, as a bus driver, it's sort of your job to err on the side of assuming that anyone waiting at a bus stop might in fact be waiting for your particular bus -- or if not, then maybe they need to ask you a question about whether they ought to be taking your bus. And either way, isn't actually stopping at the fucking bus stops sort of built right into your schedule??? But I could feel myself all white-hot furious -- and I would not have been, I know, had he not gotten all sanctimonious lecture-y with me, about how it was actually my fault he wasn't going to stop. And, rather than end up saying something rude and piercing, I just smiled tightly and walked to the almost-back, sat down. (But then, two stops later, he did the same thing to another woman, and was just as jerk-y to her when she got on, and then I really wished I had said something after all.) She gets off at the same stop I do, and the driver gives her a brief and limp apology -- but it is a gesture, anyway -- and though he says nothing to me, I don't actually care very much at all.

Still light when I get back downtown, walk up the street to my apartment -- and even with all the windows open constantly, it is oppressive, the heat still cycling on throughout the building all day long. I wish only that it was cold enough to merit heat; that it had been cold enough at all this winter to ever merit heat (or I wish that they would turn the heat off in the building completely, finally). Someone told me, recently, that I must have Seasonal Affective Disorder, except in reverse (and that only made me think of the line from "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters" -- I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.) I've always seen a bit (a lot) of Seymour in you -- this brings to mind all kinds of fidgety questions, really, if I consider it. This tendency, since I was very young, of made-up people being at least as real (or, back then, probably much more real) as anyone walking around in actual blood and bone; this seeing you as some kind of halfway mythical literary figure. I suspect that it would make you laugh, a lot, if I mentioned this to you (or possibly just confuse you entirely, because I doubt you've ever read the story). And it's at 5:00 in the morning, quiet, trying to fall back into sleep, when I flip through all my internal stories, always coming back to certain well-worn pages, faded ink and many-folded corners (wrap myself around the thought of you and try to dream).

Background Noise

2010-03-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

It is a rare thing, when all the daily chatter and conversation and surrounding vocal noise can turn into nothing more than a low hum of background music, washing over you, gentle -- sound without meaning. When all the writing that surrounds us always can be simply alphabet -- symbols and patterns and pretty black swirls on a white background, meaningless. Because whenever there is even the smallest hint of language that you might understand or speak, your brain seeks it out, helpless, hungry. Looking for how the pieces fit together. This is one thing I am sincerely looking forward to, next month, in Budapest -- this opportunity for all the words and voices around me to resolve themselves into nonsense, into something that swirls around without ever truly touching me.

I know, of course, that many people speak English -- at least some English -- and that I am the sort of person who will end up drawn into conversation, interaction, in no time flat in any case. (And this isn't always such a bad thing, and often it is even something I enjoy, but there are times when I fantasize about some sort of silent monastic retreat, weeks without speaking to another soul. Solitary and silent. Sometimes I dream of simply disappearing -- going somewhere small and remote, or huge and anonymous, or just place to place and never stopping -- and nobody knowing me at all and days or weeks or months without a conversation. I am, given the right circumstances, excellent at disappearing -- and maybe this is a quality I appreciate and seek out in others, and maybe that explains rather a lot.) It seems like, with eight days of all alone in a strange city, surrounded by what will seem like pure sound and symbol, that I could maybe manage two days of utter silent solitude, at least. I have never been good enough at constructing invisible barriers around myself in public, at perfecting the Neutral Gaze -- to meet people's eyes and have it remain distant or somehow empty -- I make eye-contact and it is like diving in, deep and never-ending, drenched in invisible connection. Perhaps sunglasses are the answer to this small not-quite question (but I am never adequately motivated to get prescription sunglasses, and I am much too myopic to navigate the world without the aid of prescription -- make the world even darker, and I would never know exactly where I was).

Of course the downside to this possibility of foreign sounds and words that have no meaning is the impact on eavesdropping capabilities. Me with my thirsty voyeuristic tendencies, and the watching is not always adequate -- drinking half-heard conversations between strangers in greedy gulps, constant. (And I am always, perhaps, at war with myself, wanting every mutually exclusive thing in the world all at once -- like the only thing that will satisfy me in the end is some huge implosion/explosion when all of these untenable opposing forces finally come together within me and without me.)

I read something, recently, that left me breathless with the impulse to jump up and thrust my fist in the air, shouting YES! -- I want to be alone with the Whole World. And that is it, that is it exactly. Though I am not yet convinced that it is anything but a beautiful impossibility, a nonexistent precious thing, held tightly in the palm of my mind (and upon opening my hand -- gone).

What Happened To Us

2010-03-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

You haven't gotten a single email from me in over a year. You tell me this, not as some kind of accusation, but as a simple stated fact. I miss your email; it's been so long. And I laugh, loud and abrupt, and tell you that I've sent you a half-dozen in just the last month alone. That I occasionally sent you words, before that, while you were nebulous and merely conceptual and absent. But there is, it seems, some strange glitch in the ether; you haven't gotten a single email from me in over a year.

(This actually explains rather a lot. And you don't see why I should be so shocked that you are actually doing something that you said you'd do, and I thought you were simply ignoring messages, and now we're both surprised.)

Today, waiting for the bus after work, a man wearing a long skirt and rather dainty shoes walks towards me, stops to check the bus schedule. His hair is also bright, deep blue -- he smiles at me, says he likes my hair. I smile back and tell him we should start a club. We discuss color maintenance, little tricks to make it last. And then he asks me if I get a lot of comments from little old ladies, and it is such a coincidence, because in Chinatown at the weekend, I got so many compliments from tiny elderly Asian women. He laughs, Yeah, the little old ladies just love this; I haven't quite figured it out yet! And then his bus pulls up, and we smile goodbye. (I suspect the other people waiting at the bus stop think we might actually have some sort of Blue Hair Club; the thought makes me smile quietly.)

The bus ride takes about three times as long as it ought to, because every other person getting off the bus is trying to pull one over on the driver, and he is having none of it. People "forgetting" they have to pay as they exit; people swiping their transit cards -- insufficient funds -- and making a big show of acting shocked, too quick with excuses (I have no idea what the problem is, I put money on it last night!). People simply walking off the bus without even making any kind of pretend gesture to pay. The woman sitting next to me is quietly fuming, and I am trying very hard not to laugh out loud.

You ask me, suddenly, in the middle of a conversation that went on for hours -- two, at least; probably more (and you had to call me back five or maybe six times; your phone kept cutting out, dropping the call) -- you tell me how you miss the dirty messages I would send you in the middle of the day, and then you ask me, What happened to us? A question so absurd -- because the answer is so clearly visible -- that I start to giggle, helplessly.

Middle of your night, after you've had a drink or two (or, more likely, many more) and you become achingly sentimental, in a way that makes me smile. Two nights in an almost painfully nice hotel next month, and you want to talk me into more (but I have other friends to see, and cannot wrap my mind around the thought of travelling thousands of miles and then just not seeing anyone else whose company I enjoy; I haven't seen you in almost two years, now, so how can I make you the center of anything?). You want to take me away for a week, somewhere; you ask me what I think of Rome. Our respective insanities have always melted into each other, smooth; this whole thing -- this, us, whatever happens -- is insane.

You might be the most unreliable person in the world (you might be, though I would trust you with my life), but the thing about you is that when you are present, you are entirely present; there is nothing else at all. I think the people I treasure most in life all have this certain quality -- fleeting and concentrated and completely undistilled. People, moments, drunk straight from the bottle, neat. And I will happily trade something watered-down and always present for something that is now here-now gone, but when it's there it's truly there, complete and solid. So maybe something true and tangible for just a moment is more than something hazy and middle-distance shimmering that lingers all the time (or at least, maybe that is a truth for me, and that is all that matters).

Shredded Wheat

2010-03-10T20:34:00.000-08:00

I don't really want you to come over. It feels like having not quite enough oxygen to breathe (and to share that over-thin air with someone else -- impossible). But you insist a bit, and I don't have the energy to argue, really. Truthfully, it is that here inside this dark place, I am awful and I hate it; I am filled with awfulness and hatred of the awfulness, self-loathing and awfulness and chaos. I don't want you here with me, with that; I don't want you to see it (even though you know it's there).

And you tell me, later, that you know this awful thing -- that it is something you know and see and recognize -- but that you don't view it as so very awful, after all. It is just a thing, a fact, a passing nothing-much-at-all; it doesn't really matter. A tiny facet that is maybe not a reflection of the whole. (Has anyone who ever loved me seen me like this; have I ever given them the opportunity?)

Lying there, curled against you in semi-darkness, my head against your chest -- and your words vibrate against my cheek, your hands skimming the surfaces of my back and arm and shoulder. I feel for the hard knot on your palm, still there. And we cannot really kiss, because my cough is lingering, and I do not want you to get sick -- but your teeth are sharp against my skin, and your fingers dig grooves into my flesh. And so we laugh, and melt into one another -- talk ourselves into strange places, off every map. Make shadow puppets on the wall behind our heads. (Later, I think about the fact that we so often end up sideways on my bed, heads up against the wall and feet falling off the edge; it makes me wish for a larger space, a bigger bed, the sort of Bed-As-Island kind of thing that doesn't care which direction you are facing, because the distances are all the same.) There is something hidden, within me, that starts dissolving at your touch (it isn't that; it isn't only that, but that is part of it, and also something by itself). It is other things, of course -- it is discussions about cereal, and virility, and wagging tails; it is how you tell me that you love me (as if I didn't feel it seeping into me, wordless). It is you looking at me and seeing something entirely different than what I see -- something better, maybe.

And by the time you leave, the air has enriched itself into something once more breathable, and I sleep a night entire for the first time in weeks. This, of course, is only temporary (like most things, like everything) but it is vast and undiminished while it lasts, full and fleeting as a deep breath of cold night air (and just as exactly nowhere).

Blue

2010-03-09T14:30:00.000-08:00

My hair is blue. This is not black-but-in-the-right-light-at-certain-angles-it-sometimes-seems-blue, or oh-for-a-moment-my-eyes-were-playing-tricks-on-me blue. It is Blue! -- with capital letters and exclamatory punctuation, with a slightly raised voice and careless emphatic gesturing. It makes me feel like a cartoon, in the best possible way -- and everything else might be however it is, but my inner 15-year-old is, at least, mildly giddy with pleasure because of the hair.

The drunks and crazies and general neighborhood low-lifes also seem to really appreciate the Blue! -- walking down the street, I keep having these moments of wide smiles and delighted laughter, thumbs-up and Alriiiiiiiiight, girl! (and in a way that is much less loaded with subtext and oily discomfort than the usual Hey, girl... kinds of comments I often receive from these sorts of men in my neighborhood on any given day).

The nurses in the Infusion Center like it, too -- although none of my favorite regulars are there. I have instead the tiny lisp-y woman with braces, and while she is hovering over me, finding a vein, filling vials of blood, I read the back of her dangling hospital ID card, which is turned toward me, resting midway down her chest. It is a list of Things To Do To Make Patients Feel Welcome, or some such thing. It is ridiculous, comprised of items such as "Smile from 15 feet away; spoken greeting from 5 feet away", or "Make good eye contact by discerning the patient's eye color". These are all things that seem, to me, like things that one should not need a checklist in order to accomplish. Being friendly, saying hello, looking someone in the eye when you talk to them -- do we really need a card with step-by-step instructions? She is full of warmth, though -- without the checklist to guide her, I imagine; she holds my forearm with both of her small hands while we chat, touches my shoulder gently when I walk out of the room to make a cup of tea while waiting for the pharmacy to mix my meds (and I couldn't get tea before that, because every time I come in while drinking tea, it looks like I have an enormous scary fever when they take my vitals, and everyone freaks out for just a moment, and I have been ill and am still occasionally wracked with deep coughing fits, so I really don't want to make the nurses think I'm feverish as well).

In the past few months it's like I've exchanged my veins for someone else's, someone calmer and easier, less prone to fight-or-flight. Because the nurses hit them on the first try, every time, and there is hardly any bruising afterward. Perhaps after 20 months of this I'm finally getting used to it in some deeply physical reflexive way (or perhaps it's just coincidence and dumb luck). It is an uneventful few hours -- reading until my eyes no longer wish to focus, and then dizzying heavy sinking sleep for an hour or more. After I've been unhooked from the IV and bandaged up, after the nurse has said goodbye and left me alone to put on my coat and gather up my things...I swipe a handful of gloves from one of the boxes on the wall (because, once it begins to fade with washing, I will have to re-do the blueness of my hair, and without gloves I will end up blue-handed for days...and also because I always want to take some of these gloves -- blue and purple and silver -- whenever I am at the hospital, but I always forget until I'm already gone).

Weeks of disordered sleep, but post-infusion I fall dead away by 9:00pm, waking only briefly shortly after midnight -- long enough to stumble to the bathroom, wash my face and limply brush my teeth -- and then tumble back down into sleep, and dreams. I dream that people are pursuing me -- this long perpetual monotone chase, these familiar strangers who mean to do me harm. And I tell someone, Now they can hire anyone they want to come after me; it doesn't have to be anyone who knows me, or anyone who's even seen my picture. Now all they need to know is that I am a girl with blue hair, and they will always find me. You asked me, when I recounted this, if it was because I regretted this something-of-a-whim surface-level change, but that is not the case at all. Things, I suppose, do not always need to make any sense at all when we're awake (and often don't).

Transparency

2010-03-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

I am tempted, sometimes (often) to erase words by the hundreds -- by the thousands. A simple keystroke, and then another, and -- BANG! -- everything disappears to nowhere and things are much tidier, if not any simpler. This is a thing -- perhaps The Thing -- that keeps me doing this, whatever it is, in this halfway-public sort of way. Because this way, at least, I know that there are witnesses. And even if it that means a handful, less than that -- and even though they are faceless figments thousands of miles apart -- there are still people, somewhere, who would know that it had been. The deleting wouldn't ever be effective, because there would always be someone, somewhere, who had seen. Who could point an accusing finger in my direction and say I know how weak, pathetic, sad and simply stupid you are; how awful you have been. You cannot hide from that. If it was just me, alone inside my thoughts, then I could easily disappear electronic documents, shred paper pages, pretend it all away. And so perhaps this keeps me honest, in ways that otherwise I might not be.

I had a dream about someone who used to work in my office. (And we were not what I would call friends, really; he was too loud, no concept of the Indoor Voice, and we had little in common beyond a certain proximity of age and the fact that we were both employed by the same people. But he was a nice guy, and I tried to be as patient with him as I could; he occasionally did me the kind of small favors that someone who is extremely geeky and technologically-inclined can do for someone who is neither of those things. We didn't know each other well.) But in my dream, we were quite close, and he had disappeared. There was a group of us, trying to find him -- and we tracked him down to a run-down dodgy apartment complex, or hotel. The manager was convinced to let himself into his apartment/hotel room...and, upon opening the door, we were overwhelmed by the immediate scent of death (and I could smell this inside the dream, and it was horrible). He had killed himself, and the rest of the dream was a long and convoluted attempt to reconcile this with myself, and find out why he'd done it, and all the sorts of the dream things that go along with that. It was a horrendous dream, which sticks to me like shadows, still. (Sometimes the workings of my subconscious are so laughably transparent it makes me sick.)

Miles Of Silence

2010-03-01T21:58:00.000-08:00

I call you when I'm at work, mid-afternoon, for me -- lock myself into an empty office with the lights off. The phone only rings twice before you answer; I say your name, gently, and there is a long pause, and then -- I hear the smile spreading through your voice as surely as if I could see it -- you say my name back to me. But...where are you? In the States? And I tell you that I am, that specifically, I am at work. And you laugh, Oh, very good -- this way the company pays for the call!

Speaking French on the telephone has always been exhausting, difficult -- even when I lived it, even when it came effortless in every other moment of my life, the telephone has always been another matter entirely. Especially when there are actually things you want to say, and the words don't come. But...it is okay, it is made okay, because you dwell inside my silences; we sit there for long moments and listen to each other breathe. If I close my eyes, I could reach out and touch your heartbeat with my fingers.

I tell you that I've changed my hair, knowing it will delight you, and it does -- That seems like it would be a thing filled with happiness, like having a big blue sky constantly with you, on your head. (And I love this so-unnatural hair color; it makes me feel like a cartoon.) You consider that you cannot ever really do something like that, to your hair, since now you shave it all; I suggest painting pictures on the thin skin of your skull, painting your thoughts, visible. (My thoughts of you could fill an infinity of canvas.)

I cannot answer so many of the questions that you ask me. These are things I can't even adequately articulate in English, face-to-face -- in another language, across telephone lines, insubstantial...impossible. I have no voice for the melancholy I cannot explain, and I have no way to tell you what lives inside my head. And so I listen to you talk, hypnotic. And when I tell you how good it is, to hear your voice, I feel you smiling as you tell me how good it is to hear my silence (to feel it, to wrap it around you warmly). You ask if other people enjoy this as much as you do -- these silences filled with information; you don't seem to believe me when I say that many people find it uncomfortable, awkward. That maybe I am more silent with you than anyone, simply because -- with you -- I know I can be. (You needn't make me out to be so exceptional, you know -- it isn't like you're trying to talk me into bed. This seduction isn't necessary. And then you laugh, and laugh, and laugh -- beautiful -- and allow that perhaps that is more true for men, this seduction with the aim of sex. That maybe women can seduce with other goals in mind. Or maybe sometimes men want to seduce with no more intent than conversation...but still.)

It's always interested you, my entanglements (far in the past, it seems, now, though often still desired) with other women. My relationships in general, in fact -- you want to know how I do this, how I meet these people. How one can make these things work, like this. You wish your life like this, at times; you wish...that things were different. (And life is complicated and unfair.) I'm not sure how to explain any of it, really. (I could tell you that to live like this is actually a thousand times more difficult, although it should be simpler.)

You talk about a film you saw, recently -- a convoluted story you wind yourself around until you reach the point of telling it -- another planet with inhabitants who attended concerts of silence for entertainment. It made me think of you; it seemed the sort of thing you would enjoy. I think about being anonymous, in the middle of a vast hall filled with strangers, everyone sitting, still and quiet, letting the silence fall down on us, wash over us -- long and endless waves of perfect quiet, filled with loud and crystalline meaning. (I think about being beside you in public, in the midst of noise and chaos, and letting our shared silence radiate outward and seep into everything around us.)

I won't see you next month, and that leaves me...wordless. Silent. Because life is complicated, and unfair, and I understand that, even when I don't. (I used to think that anything truly, entirely important was also cleanly, starkly simple. But it's been years, now, that I no longer see that as an even partial truth.) Maybe silence is the simplest thing we have; maybe that isn't so important, after all.

...Like So Many Words

2010-02-27T21:30:00.000-08:00

It would be clearer if I wanted more conventional things.

If not wanting obligation and commitment and everything that goes along with that somehow also meant a lack of attachment, a lessening of need, in some way.

For how can you reconcile these opposing forces -- this contentment with small slices of time, this wanting nothing more than what there is, with the ache of devastation when you are absent, indefinitely? And maybe this is what makes it over-complicated and impossible -- that I don't want you to myself, and I don't want you to keep...but I want you present in my life. I want words and kisses and long evenings, lingering. And the fact that I want these things with many people -- not just in theory, but in solid reality -- how do you reconcile that? Because you cannot be Everything to someone (you cannot be Everything to me), but you can be Something; you can be Something to many someones. Every one of you Something different -- or perhaps even the same things, but there is still always a difference, and it is these thin invisible variations in shade that color my world.

How to explain that, when my attention is focused on you, it is intense and pure; it is entire. There is nothing else. (And how with others, this small truth exists just as real, just as complete -- it would be simpler if this weren't true, because I feel it like something untranslatable, not wholly universal or accessible to anyone but me, inside my head.) And you are so far away -- perhaps you have always been so very far away. But there were moments when, regardless of inches or miles, there was not even anything as thin and fragile as skin between us. (If you could look inside my chest and read my heart...)

Disintegration

2010-02-24T21:10:00.000-08:00

You call me (and I truly didn't think you would, but you are nothing if not surprising -- that has always been a truth) and all I can do is say your name, several times. Holding the phone with both hands, like it might disappear or fall away at any moment. (You sound the same; you mumble, still, just like you always did.) And when I ask you how you are, your voice is low and rough-edged, and you say, I spend time making things happen, and I think that they are things that will make me happy, and then...well. And sometimes I am going along and I think that everything is fine. But any time I talk to you -- send you a message, or an email, or anything like that -- it's like that all disintegrates. I don't know.

I don't know, either -- and I could tell you that I no longer cry immediately every time I think about you, but I'm not sure if that means much of anything (and sometimes it doesn't feel like much of a truth, in any case).

You want me to yell at you, be angry; you feel you need to offer me apologies, pouring them over my head like warm oil. But I am not angry -- I'm not even upset, anymore, or not upset in that way. I miss you, and I want to see you again -- I want to trace the lines of your skull with my fingertips, gentle, and feel your heartbeat against my skin. I want to feel you smile into a kiss. I don't want anything else -- not apologies or excuses or explanations. Not grand gestures or epic declarations. I want an evening beside you in a crowded city; I want a night alone with you in a dark and quiet room.

You make me laugh, still, like nobody else can -- stories of your shifty whippets, and anonymous photographs in bars that make you think of me. Your strange acquaintances and the strangeness of life, in general. You want these four days with me, four nights; you want to wring all the living there is to be had out of the city and drink champagne and go to the opera; late nights in bars and endless conversations and hours of soft kisses and hard fucking and sleep-filled embraces. A meeting at the airport and unbearably swank hotel rooms -- big plans and pretty thoughts.

I can promise you my company, for that small amount of time, at least -- because what more could I want of this; what more could I give? It is a pretty, pretty thought -- and that is likely all it is; I will not hold my breath (although it leaves me breathless). And your word might be as fleeting as the breath that carries it (but what more could one ask for; what more could you give?) -- but, if nothing else, it offers up these pretty, pretty thoughts. And maybe, in the end, that -- and your voice in my ear, tightly held in both my hands -- can be enough.

Scales

2010-02-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

There are times when the absences far outweigh any possible presences; the negative space opens and unfolds and develops a magnetic power all its own, painting itself over every little bit of positive, of solid, of here and now and present.

Awake in dark, single-digit hours, shadow and quiet -- I send you messages, and cradle your responses to my chest -- and you don't know it, but you allow me to breathe out, to fall asleep, finally, wrapping them around myself like arms. Getting back the next evening -- out to dinner, late, with someone dear I hardly know -- and the words are waiting there for me, glowing. Fancy a chat? But that was an hour ago, or more, and now there is nobody there. (I often think that I will never see you, or even speak with you, ever again; it seems most likely, much of the time. It breaks my heart to contemplate; I hate it.)

A palpable lack of someone else, which now entangles itself with the lack of you. And this spirals into other holes, and other filled-with-empty spaces -- entwining and enveloping and becoming vast and infinite and All.

He writes to me, today, that he would like to be curled against me, close. As long as there are a thousand pillows on the bed, I'll stay with you forever. We had an afternoon, and that was all -- and now there are these sometimes-moments of love between us, and it is absurd and lovely and warm and absolutely fleeting, shifting. But the mild ache of wishing-you-were-here is sweet, almost, or nearly pleasant, because there is the future promise of it being a truth -- a few stolen hours in an airport, a day and night in some foreign city, a few days here in my less-than-thousand-pillowed bed. It is a small reality, and it is enough; it is honey on the tongue. But with you, or him, or them, this is a reality that does not exist; this is a potential that is not. This is the thing that wounds, in the end, the thing that hurts with nothing more than its own lack.

(This cold unfeeling turning-away that I can feel it conjure up inside of me.)

Tigers

2010-02-14T21:17:00.000-08:00

It's one of the dodgier bus stops in the neighborhood -- not that this city has any truly objectionable areas, or at least, certainly not compared to many places. But there are certain small pockets of space where, even if it isn't so very dangerous to be there, it feels always just a little...skewed. A little like there is definite potential for badness, or at least not-so-goodness, even if it never manifests, or almost never. And there is no half-enclosed space to wait when the weather is lousy, and no place to sit, and it is really just a rather bleak and littered expanse of sidewalk and traffic noise.

But there are always birds -- medium-sized groups of small-ish city birds. Not pigeons or crows, but smaller and more nondescript little things. They congregate on the rooftops of the ugly buildings lining each side of the block, and every few minutes, they all at once take off, and fly in loosely choreographed loops high above the street -- one circling wave of silouhetted bodies swooping across the street, and back again, and then they land on the rooftop they came from and go back to doing whatever bird activities normally occupy their time, until the next sudden group flight -- across the street, a gentle turn, and back again. There are two groups of birds -- one on top of the building I am standing beside, and one on top of the building across the street -- and they do this over and over again, one side at a time, until my bus pulls up.

Two seats up from me there is a tall and lovely African woman, with a small boy -- perhaps 4 or 5, it's always hard for me to gauge these things -- and he is facing the window, leaning his forehead up against it, watching the world pass by. His eyelashes are long and dark and beautiful, and I watch him breathing fog onto the windowpane. And then...the tip of his pink tongue pokes out, nearer and nearer the glass, and suddenly he is full-on licking the window -- this grimy public bus window -- and he continues doing this for blocks and blocks and blocks (it feels like a small eternity) and it takes everything I have inside me to not stand up and yell, For fuck's sake, DON'T LICK THE WINDOWS!!! (And I think to myself that it's probably best that his mother isn't noticing this, because it might horrify her as much as it does me -- which is kind of a lot. And then I think that maybe she knows exactly what he's doing, and she just doesn't care, and that thought makes me once more want to stand up and shout, Don't let your fucking little kid LICK THE BUS WINDOWS!!!!! Because...ick. Ick ick ick.) Eventually he grows tired of cleaning the windows (the disgusting grafitti-covered clouded public city bus windows) with his tongue, and soon after that we reach my stop and I get off the bus.

One of my favorite things about Chinatown (except we no longer call it Chinatown, because it encompasses many more Asian countries than just China, but I don't like what we do call it, so I still call it Chinatown) is the many, many shrunken tiny old men and ladies who are always slowly walking through the neighborhood. I have a specific destination in mind, but as I turn the corner to walk up the street, I am suddenly surrounded by many small but terrifyingly loud explosions. And halfway up the block, there are dragons dancing in the street -- three large fringed-eyelash-y dragons, red and orange and gold. Weaving and bobbing up and down, to the beat of several drums (and the occasional chaos of a firecracker cluster). I stand there, in a small crowd, an arm's-length away from the dragon with its back to me, and watch (and wince at the noise and nearness of the firecrackers, when they are lit) and cough on the lingering smoke in the air. After 10 minutes, or perhaps 15, the little parade continues on up the street, and I go into the tiny restaurant a few steps away, sit at a small table facing the front window and order food and tea.

It begins to rain almost as soon as I am seated, and the scent of rain mixes with the echoes of smoke and drifts through the open door of the restaurant, in a very pleasant way. I drink too much green tea -- if caffeine affected me at all, I would be feeling it now (but it doesn't so I simply have the thought in the back of my mind that an entire pot of tea is probably too much, in some vague way). The food is hot and salty and comforting and extremely filling; when I go up to the counter to pay, the bill comes to less than five dollars. It is still raining in earnest outside -- though in that strange way where the sun has broken through half the sky at the same time -- and I hurry across streets and down sidewalks, my hair quickly drenched and drops of water running down my glasses.

The enormous Asian supermarket always leaves me feeling mildly overwhelmed -- this is in part due to its size, and in part due to the fact that the crowded aisles are so extremely packed with incomprehensible items, labels untranslated with pictures that aren't always terribly helpful. There is a certain type of noodle I like best, and I never remember to save the package when I cook with these noodles, and always spend at least 15 minutes wandering the endless Aisle Of Noodles, staring at all the similar-but-not-quite-the-same packages, before finally deciding I have found the package I am looking for. (Perhaps I end up with a slightly different one every time -- how would I know for sure? -- and so, really, I have maybe 5 or 6 favorite noodles, because I never end up with the original, correct, version.) And so I end up with...some noodles, maybe the ones I meant to get, and maybe not -- and sesame oil, and various jars and bottles of condiments. Tofu and a handful of longan fruits; edamame and miso soup. I browse the many tables and shelves of dishes -- and even though the last thing I need is more bowls, I find a lovely bowl that is a perfect size, and end up putting it, and a small plate that matches it, into my basket.

Outside, cool and grey, and the rain has tapered to a halfhearted drizzle; a bus shows up just minutes after I get to the bus stop, and it is stuffy and crowded (but nobody -- that I can see, at any rate -- is licking the windows, which makes it a Good Bus Ride). And when I get off the bus, I stop and stand in the middle of the sidewalk, in the damp late-afternoon, staring up at the building across the way -- stand there for several minutes, until, all at once, the birds appear and swoop over the street, beautifully choreographed shadows high above my head. And then they settle back into their resting places, and there is only a noisy, grimy, dull concrete stretch of pavement, passing traffic. But the idea of the birds remains, invisible. (It is one of the dodgier bus stops in the neighborhood, soaked in the potential for badness; it is a small moment of the city, filled with the potential for flight.)

Probably

2010-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

You say you've never had any luck debating things with me; you aren't sure if it's my indefatiguable insistence on precision, or if I'm simply playing with your mind (and I tell you that your mind is the very nicest sort of playground). So we sit, and talk ourselves in circles, over cocktails, and -- over your shoulder -- I watch the two men at the small table behind us. Staring at them while you are in the bathroom, trying to figure out if they are a couple-sort-of-couple, or just friends (and I am dearly hoping they are a couple, because together they are darling).

Everything inside of me is jumpy and edgy and operating on some basic level of impulse. I go on strange dates with near-strangers; I have intimate discussions with faceless figments who are worlds away. Spend hours browsing plane tickets, hotels -- and still, not yet decided on a final destination. Almost talk myself out of a drastic hair change, and then, the next day, make an appointment to do it anyway, later in the month. (What is the word for when things are going as well as things tend to go, but yet you are not really all that happy, not so internally settled? Perhaps it's something very simple, like Jerk, or Ungrateful Idiot.) And so I spend days, and weeks, and more than that, trying to change every stupid little thing that can possibly be changed, and maybe that will be enough to outweigh the bigger things that can't be.

This time last year I was in New York, and desperately ill -- ominous throat-ticklings and deep coughing beginning on my last day in London, which, by the time I landed in Manhattan, had become a fever-delirium of sinus pain and could-not-breathe, constant messy nose-blowing and a cough that made me wonder if I could break something internally, shatter myself from the inside, rip myself to pieces. I spent the almost-entire time in my hotel room, drifting in achey restless sleep, eyes raw -- or forcing myself into an hour or two of something, somewhere, anywhere, each day (a few blocks of walking in the knife-edged wind leaving me weighted down with tired, and stopping every few steps to blow my nose and cough until tears came to my eyes). The fever broke the night before I left, although the illness persisted for more than a month once I got home (and it took my ears three days to pop, post-flight). Almost immediately upon returning, I encountered you -- and that few days was a glowing, precious unfolding of a thing -- almost exactly a year from then, and maybe that is what causes this deep internal unsettledness (or maybe that is a different thing entirely).

As we walk toward the door, I stop beside the table -- the two men I kept watching, my eyes drawn back to them over and over again, helpless -- and gently touch the shoulder of the man nearest me. Can I ask you a mildly inappropriate and intrusive question? And they look at me, confused, but smiling, and tell me to go ahead. I ask them if they are a coupled-kind-of-couple, or if they are simply friends -- Because you are absolutely beautiful together, if you are together-together. And they look at each other, and back up at me, and there is a long pause -- they laugh, gently -- Well, somewhere in between, I guess...this is just our third date. And the other man smiles widely, and quickly adds, In this last week, though! And I wish them well, and tell them again that they make a terribly darling pair. They laugh, and thank me, several times, and as we walk outside (and you look at me, and shake your head, and tell me I am crazy) I hear one of the men say to the other, That was just so cute! And I smile at you, and touch your arm, and agree that probably, I am.

Nineteen Months

2010-02-06T14:37:00.000-08:00

It is practically springtime outside this week, and everyone is so pleased -- the mildness, the sunshine. Dusk arriving later and later each day. I stare out at the too-bright sun reflecting off the water, and wish for cold. Deep and dark, inward seeping; I need winter, and air that smells of ice and vast expanses of ink-spilled sky.

At the hospital, the woman who takes my blood pressure and temperature -- she is small and soft-voiced, and I see her often, when I go in for my infusions -- is so deliberate and careful with her movements. It is almost slow-motion and balletic; she touches me so gently (and in any other context I could close my eyes and fall into those shadow, whisper touches). She brings me a blanket right away, at the beginning, because she knows I always end up freezing, later. Then my nurse comes in, and she is loud and outward-focused; she takes up space in every sort of way. I've never seen her before, but I don't think she is new. She talks to me about small things, nothing -- tells me I am her fourth patient of the day getting the medication I am there to take. As she says that, she pauses, considers for a moment, Yes, definitely, there have been a few of you already. You're number four. And for some reason that sticks inside my head overwhelmingly, and I immediately laugh and begin to chant, I'm number four! I'm number four! and she laughs loudly with me (she is beautiful in laughter) and says, grinning, Oh, you wouldn't have wanted to be number one today, anyway; we had some issues with the pharmacy and it took forever to get it worked out. Poor man was here half the morning.

I tell her, as she preps my arm for the needle, that my veins are sometimes difficult, and she clicks her tongue at me and says I should never say anything like that to younger, newer nurses (For me, it's fine, because I'm an old-timer, but watch it with the young ones!) because that's just asking to be stuck repeatedly. She says that anyway, my veins look very good. And I tell her that they are, but sometimes they like to hide, regardless. She decides she likes the look of one on the side of my right wrist, and as she sticks me with the needle, exclaims Oh, but your skin is very thick! You have tough skin; maybe that causes people problems. (And now I imagine myself an elephant, or a rhinocerous -- some thick-skinned, armored creature, impervious to harm.) She asks me if I've ever lived in Arizona, because when she worked there she found people with surprisingly thick skin all the time; the sun toughens you up in this way, I suppose. And I look at her, and at my pale white arm, and laugh, and shake my head. God, no -- I hate hot weather, and I am not the sort of person who wants to lay out in the sun and roast. It takes her a very long, extended moment to work the needle into the chosen vein -- it feels as though she is driving it straight into my wrist bone, and I wince a bit and close my eyes, then open them again and watch her twisting and digging into my (not so seemingly thick, really, or not to me) flesh. Finally, she is satisfied with the maneuvering, and my blood runs red into the thin plastic tubing, and she fills the four small vials.

I sit and wait, while she goes to the pharmacy hidden away somewhere in the middle of the hospital to get the IV bag of drugs, and while I am sitting there, deliberately cracking all of my finger joints, one by one, two of my favorite nurses pass by in the hallway, and notice me through the doorway as they pass. They stop and take a step into my room, asking me how I am doing. One of them (the woman with the sweetly lilting accent) starts to say she hasn't seen me since before the holidays, then stops, and thinks, and corrects herself, No, I just saw you last month, didn't I? I was going to ask you how your holidays were. I smile at her, and say that I had in fact seen her a month ago, But, I had a lovely Groundhog Day, thanks. They laugh, and we talk about whether or not he saw his shadow (which he did, but six more weeks of winter means nothing much at all when we haven't had even a week of proper winter yet this year) and then my nurse comes back with the drugs and they say goodbye (telling her to take good care of me) and continue on down the hallway.

I don't sleep, sitting in the big ugly chair, although before I left the office earlier I felt like I could lapse into unconsiousness where I stood, so I expected to be grateful for an opportunity to fall away into weird twilight sleep for an hour or two. But I do not; I read half of a book I just started the evening before, instead, and the time passes with the fast-forward button held firmly down. When she takes the IV out of my wrist, later, it leaves behind a small and hurt-filled lump (a few hours later becoming the shadow of a bruise).

Later, in the evening, I get sucked into heavy, unrestful sleep too early, and then slip in and out of it for much too long, the entire morning spent feeling almost drunk, in bed. It is a clear and light-filled day, today, and it smells of spring outside my windows. While elsewhere, there are blizzards and ice-covered cities (I would rather be there, now, in a frozen winter day). Hot tea and quiet, an entire day with no other people, and no words spoken -- and the silence pools in me, feels like relief. (If you were here beside me now, I could tell you everything with my lips and skin and fingertips, and never make a sound.)

Fragments

2010-02-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

On the bus this evening, after work, I see a man I recognize -- we lock eyes for a long second and I smile and say I know you. I halfway-recall his name, though not exactly, and he knows he knows me also, though we have no context. I seem to remember going out for coffee, once, years ago -- in a way that didn't seem like more than simply coffee, beforehand, but then, while sitting there, it became clear that it was maybe something more than simply coffee. It bothers me that I cannot place him in my life in any more definite and well-explained way; it itches in the back of my mind, still. (She says, later, that these things happen simply because I introduce myself to every single person I encounter -- and this is not even close to being any sort of truth, although I know, for her, it seems so when she says it.)

There is a man in the bar, in a high-tech sort of wheelchair, sitting at a table with several friends. Beside his very robotic-looking chair is the world's most huggable Golden Retriever. This dog looks so sweet, so adorable, so incredibly snuggly -- I want to go over and roll around on the floor with this dog. I go to his table and say hello, and Would I be disturbing any sort of working relationship right now if I petted your dog a little? This makes him laugh -- the question or the way I phrased it, I'm not certain -- and he says that it is fine, that I can pet his dog as much as I would like. His dog (he tells me the dog's name, when I ask, but I do not hear him clearly and all I really take away is that it seems to be something that rhymes with -itus) leans his soft head against my hand, and licks my palm, and is generally as sweet and wonderful as he appeared from across the room. I ask the man his name (and that, I hear completely) and give his dog one last scratch behind the ear, then thank him for the moment and go back to my table.

There is a woman sitting at the table behind ours, small and pixie-like, dark hair and bright red sweater. And the moment my eyes rest upon her face, I know her as the pretty, pretty one I spoke to, last week, at a different bar, with someone else. Later, when I walk by her on my way to the bathroom, I stop and say hell0. I met you the other night, at another bar near here; I told you how pretty I thought you were. And she recalls me instantly (and apologizes for being way beyond drunk that night -- which was apparent, then, though not at all unpleasant). I want to press my lips against her throat; the world is small and strange and sometimes lovely.

My ex stops in to say hello, because I had mentioned I would be at this place tonight, and he is walking past on his way back from some other something. He has a beard, now, once again -- he never did the many years we were together, though he has kept one on and off for the last year, at least. It is surprising to me, every time I see him, how well it suits him. (And he is mostly surprised at all the grey that it contains, and maybe doesn't give it any thought beyond that.) He shows me a photo on his camera; we talk for a brief moment -- about nothing, really. (Small, and strange, and lovely.) And then he walks out into the night, on his way home.

We come in second in the trivia contest at the bar, a mere two points away from the team that ultimately won. You had more than half of a Real Drink (our waitress so extremely patient, and you said only that you wanted a drink that people talk about in books, and you end up with a sticky Manhattan and seem surpried that it doesn't taste very nice at all). She has lovely, lovely eyebrows, our waitress -- in truth, she has a very lovely face, in sum. (Of course I tell her so, and her reaction is so tinged with undertones of "Well, it's about time someone noticed that!" that I want to hug her.)

You walk home with me, after our little almost-victory, and come upstairs. The small gift I have for your impending birthday is in my mailbox, and so I give it to you, even though it isn't wrapped or well-presented. You're wearing things, hidden beneath your many (though not quite as many as on some occasions) layers, that make me smile. And there is a long suspended glowing moment -- stretching out for what could be seconds or hours; time has little meaning here, in any important ways -- of our bodies pressed together, faces that magic 4 1/2 inch distance apart. (Sometimes, with you, I feel myself on the very edge of tears, and not because of any sadness, either.) I love the aimless wandering of our conversations, in these moments; I love the jumps from quiet, serious contemplation to loud and almost painful laughter. (I love your skin and limbs and fingers; I love my teeth sinking into your lower lip.)

You are a very golden, precious thing that I hold tightly in the palm of my mind, warm and solid; you are a heavy metal key. And the world, once opened, is very small. And very strange. (And sometimes, very lovely.)

Locks & Keys

2010-02-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

There is something within me at the moment -- something open and unlocked -- and this thing, I think, by virtue of its sudden undoing of itself, acts as a key to open the locks of others. And so, when I am walking through the city (cool and grey and almost-drizzly, muted and gentler) strangers stop to ask me things, and people I know only vaguely kiss me on the mouth in greeting.

There is a man who makes regular appearances around my part of the city; I have seen him, occasionally, for at least the past few years. He has crutches, though it is unclear whether he actually requires them or whether they are simply a useful accessory to his regular sales pitch. He is low-key; he makes very good eye-contact. As people approach him, on their way in or out of shops and restaurants, or simply walking down the street, he stops them with a low-voiced, Excuse me, but would you please consider making a donation to the U.N.P.F -- the United Negro Pizza Fund? When I encounter him around town, he rarely does anything but smile and wish me a good afternoon -- I gave him $10 one night, perhaps a year ago, or two, and I am not sure if he remembers that, or simply recognizes that he sees me often enough for his clever pitch to be less clever. Today, I passed him on the street, and smiled and said hello -- as I walked by, I heard him make his usual request to a family coming from a nearby restaurant. I'm not sure if they didn't quite hear what he said, or...what, exactly...but, while I waited at the corner for the light to change, I heard the mother say to her small child, in that grating sing-song way that some adults talk to their children, Oh, do you want to take this dollar and make a donation, sweetie? and it choked me with laughter as I crossed the street.

Today I sent you a letter -- for already, I am finding ways to rearrange a trip that isn't even solidly constructed yet, to spend less than an entire day in the same place as you, to spend an evening beside you, quiet -- and now until I know whether you will be there, whether I can make this happen, there will be something tensed and coiled and waiting, hidden deep within. I don't have words to tell you how your so far-away-apart-ness leaves me hollow, even when (like now, this moment) I am filled and open, breathing slow and deep. I can only reach across the miles with my thoughts, enfold you in them warmly, as if they were my arms.

Falling Away

2010-01-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

There are people who -- being with them, or near them, or even having them dwell inside your thoughts for some small amount of time -- cause everything else in the world to fall away, superfluous. Because, perhaps, they fill you completely with impossible, improbable, amounts of great good feelings, warmth. Because you feel overflowing, bursting, about to dissolve or explode like a thousand stars; because they expand, and allow you to expand, and nothing else is there but you, and them, and the exact friction between you that creates this spark, this all-consuming fire.

He is not one of those people, although he is sweet, and charming, and devastatingly nice to look at. He laughs when I admit to him how I have spent the past six years mildly infatuated, how dashing I find him (and he does not know what dashing means, and I cannot translate it exactly, so I fall back to charming and handsome, and he waves my words away with a smile that says he really somehow doesn't know how true it is). I find it difficult to believe that nobody has ever left their number for him before (in the same way, I suppose, that he found it entirely odd and difficult to believe that I had left my number for him, when I did). Life is funny -- and he says this many times throughout the evening, his hands gesturing under some invisible control all of their own, used without any seeming conscious thought on his part.

The room is small and intimate, crowded, and we sit at the bar because there is nowhere else to sit, but it is comfortable in a way that doesn't leave me feeling exposed the way that sitting at bars usually does, and the bartenders are sweet and frighteningly capable. They make up drinks for us based on vague ideas or suggestions of preference; they give me a small glass, to taste, of a liqueur that catches my eye when I say it interests me, that I've never tried it. The woman sitting on my other side is pixie-like, and very pretty; when he leaves for a few moments, going to the bathroom, I turn and study her profile -- her face is interesting and lovely. Touch her shoulder, and she turns toward me, Not to bother you, but you are just so, so pretty. And she blushes, covers her face briefly with her hands, and smiles -- introduces herself to me, and the man she is with, and we speak for a few minutes (and I think about reading the secrets of her face with my fingertips) until he comes back and I turn back to face him, touch his throat gently, looking at the necklace he wears, hidden beneath the collar of his shirt.

He comes home with me, and I make us one more drink. Sitting on the edge of the bed, in low-lit darkness, listening to quiet jazz. And he looks at me and asks, quite seriously, if I am shy. To which my only response is laughter, loud and helpless and prolonged. That is sort of a strange question, don't you think? He seems confused, and says that no, it is a real question -- tries for a few moments to explain himself. But I cannot get over the initial impulse of laughter, and I tell him that it seems to be something he would have already figured out himself, having spent several hours in someone's company -- whether they were shy or not. And he says, Of course, but there is a difference between you and me, out in a bar, talking, other people all around, and you and me here, now, alone. And I tell him, That is true, of course. But, if I were really shy, then probably I wouldn't have invited you back here to my apartment with me in the first place, no? Which makes him laugh. And we sit, and talk, and breathe in the darkness. He asks me -- as he is leaning over, face close -- if he can kiss me, the words leaving his mouth as his mouth meets mine. A long, long moment of kisses, and as we pull away from each other, slightly, I smile at him and answer, Yes.

Later, in bed, I bring things to a halt, slowly. Touch the smooth warm spot of skin between the outer-corner of his eye and the very end of his eyebrow's arch -- tell him, This spot right here -- this is a spot that I adore on people. He laughs at me, far in the back of his throat, part-growl. And here -- fingertip to the very corner of his mouth -- and here (lips brushing softly the hollow of his throat). There are parts of him that are surprising (his eventual response when asked to tell me something he had never told another soul, or almost never); there are moments of his body that surprise equally as much.

But the world never falls away from us, and there is never the flickering thought that time should freeze right now, indefinitely, and keep us wrapped inside itself, endless. I feel it in my body, in my skin (but I do not feel it deeper down, inside my blood, inside my bones -- and so my body cries Yes, touch me, but my mind stays quiet). And this doesn't mean it isn't very fine, because it is. But it is still a thought that registers, that blinks mild neon at me way back in the corner of my mind. I wonder if I am spoiled, somehow, for these more surface-level things, since you are lately settled so deep and fizzy in my blood and bones and deeper -- much more hidden -- spaces (for all the others dwelling in those places are so far away or altogether absent) and the thought gives me slight pause. But still, after he leaves, I fall asleep in the scent of his so-excellent cologne, my lips bruised with the shadows of kisses, the taste of gin and violets lingering in my memory.

Shining Silver Threads

2010-01-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

I'm running errands in the morning, before work -- picking up things for the office -- and because I find myself farther from the office than I normally would be, and because I am already almost an hour later than I should be, I grab a passing taxi as I walk down the street. When I get in and tell the driver where I'm going, he meets my gaze in the rear-view mirror for a long moment, and smiles widely and says, So, you still have a job, hmmm? That's good! And when I tentatively say that yes, I still have a job (thinking what an odd question that seemed to be), he laughs, saying, Good! So your fish still have a home! Nobody is getting rid of your fish! And suddenly I know exactly who he is -- once, perhaps a year ago, I took a taxi to the hospital one afternoon, rushing from my office to an afternoon appointment with my doctor, and somehow spent the entire ride discussing my fish tank (and its inhabitants) with the driver. He had just started keeping fish -- only a few -- and I was giving him advice on what to feed them, and told him how one of the things I dread most about ever leaving my current job is having to break down my 20-gallon tank and transport it and my four fish from there up to my apartment.

I told someone about this yesterday, and his response was a loud electronic groan; he hates having conversations with taxi drivers. I don't understand this at all -- some of my favorite moments in cities (every city I've spent any time in at all, really) have been because of particularly endearing cab drivers.

One day, maybe six months later, I had occasion to take another cab ride -- to work, or from work; I don't remember, really -- and the driver turned around to stare at me when I got in, and said, You're the girl who doesn't want to quit her job because you'll have to move your fish tank! And indeed, I am. And now, six months after that -- or maybe even longer -- and I once more find myself getting a ride from this same smiling, charming man. The thin and shining silver threads that connect us all in life sometimes take my breath away. (Two of his fish died recently, and now he only has two remaining; he said that if they die, he doesn't think he will replace them. He laughed and said that maybe he should give them both to me, and I told him how someone in my office did that, about a year ago -- just came in one day with a lone, tiny little goldfish swimming around in a plastic garbage can, his bowl-mate having died the day before.)

Someone took me to lunch this afternoon -- she deals with people with MS who are looking to change jobs, or having issues with their current ones in terms of benefits or discrimination or any number of things that come up when one has chronic health problems and has to live within the framework of an imperfect system -- and we spent a long time discussing what I might be able to do to change my current situation without completely screwing all the logistical necessities in my life. (No real answers or solutions, but she was very sweet and I was glad to meet her.) We were at a little Thai restaurant that is very near my apartment building. I go there maybe once a month or so, usually to pick something up and bring it home for dinner on those nights when cooking seems like so much hassle and nothing seems appealing anyway -- and I have occasionally ordered large amounts of food for office lunch meetings. So, I am not in there all that often, but the owner of the place always remembers me and knows my name -- one evening I was walking home, and a car pulled up next to me while I stood on the street corner waiting for the light to change, and it was him, a so-ugly-he's-adorable bulldog panting at me from the passenger seat, and he asked me if I was going far, if I needed a ride. (I didn't, but the offer touched me, and I was also surprised he even recognized me like that -- in the dark, in the rain, on the street, out of context.)

After lunch, we stopped at the small cupcake bakery next door -- she had seen it on her way to meet me at the restaurant, and wanted a closer look, and I needed to order several dozen cupcakes for an office birthday lunch next week. We stood at the counter, and while she gave her order to the girl behind the register, one of the men who owns the place peeked out from the kitchen and caught my eye. (The two men who own this bakery are darling, and every time I see them I am struck with the urge to put them in my pocket and take them home and keep them.) He disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared, walking up to the counter holding out a pale pink cupcake. If you can guess what kind this is, I'll give it to you. I scanned the flavors on display behind the glass of the counter, but he shook his head and said it wasn't one of those. I asked him if it was something we had discussed the last time we spoke (for a few weeks ago I was passing by as they were closing, and we talked for maybe 15 minutes about new flavors they were planning on trying soon) and he clicked his tongue at me and told me, No, but it's your favorite so I'm surprised you haven't guessed it yet! And I grinned at him and said, Vanilla Rose! I ordered some of them specially back in August, for the office birthday lunch that included my birthday, and -- loving anything that tastes of flowers or herbs or strange combinations -- went back later that week to tell them they were the best cupcakes I had ever eaten. They only make them for special orders, so they don't have them in the shop usually. But I just made a batch for a wedding tasting, and I was hoping I might run into you today, because I know they are your favorite. The woman I'd had lunch with looked at me and asked, This is why you like living in this neighborhood, isn't it? And I told her that it was, although that wasn't an entirely honest answer. It has less to do with this place, with its location -- I imagine that these sorts of small connections could happen anywhere, really. This little part of town is not really relevant to the question as a whole. But I said yes, because the real answer is too complicated and anyway, that wasn't really what she was asking.

Sometimes there are strangers-who-aren't-really, and mirrored smiles and fat, wrinkled bulldogs and curry and cupcakes like sweet sugared kisses. Sometimes life is beautiful, even when it isn't. (Sometimes it is helpful to remember this.)

Woven

2010-01-23T23:01:00.000-08:00

Through the glass, the water is silver, the sky tarnished and cloud-heavy. Light bleeding through, yellow-orange, on the very edge of the horizon, an exquisite wound. (But this weather -- so mild and nearly-spring -- irritates me. I am greedy for winter, for cold, for things muffled and frozen and dark and still.)

At night, I dream you cold and distant, hard-edged. Gone. (The next night, I dream you dead.) Discomfort lurking in the back of my mind for days, afterward. I think about you, and I worry for you. (I want to warm your deepest, hidden places in my hands, like small and wounded birds.)

We are all of us a window through which God looks at itself. (And that is such a pretty thought, but one I don't know how to embrace.)

Waiting for the bus, today, and a girl comes screeching down the street -- at times I think we really need to teach a course called Indoor Voices 101 (to be used when outdoors, also). She stops beside me, waiting for the bus as well. Continues shriek-talking at her friend, while open-mouthed chomping from a bag of potato chips. And then she makes a phone call on her cell phone -- her father -- and shrieks at him (while continuing her noisy chip-devouring) and the unkind part of me (which is, at times, the largest part) just wanted to yell, Is that really necessary???

There is a woman who has just finished with her haircut, and she gathers some long locks of hair from off the floor. Victorian hair weaving, she explains, I want to try some. The girl who cuts my hair nods in my direction -- She is quite Victorian, too, I think. Aren't you? And I smile and ask her if she really thinks that's true, which makes her pause for just a beat, and then -- I think you are, she says. I say it must be my forehead, or my chin (or my consumption -- and then we all laugh).

Ten months, now, and he is still the almost-only thing I think about inside my fantasies -- his phantom hands, his nowhere lips. A voice that makes no sound. I thought that it might fade, or dull, or pass, but it does not; he does not. Close my eyes and think of cinnamon and smoke, of honey and desire. Strange, acute, and bittersweet -- a moment without end.

If I am a window (transparent, fragile) and God is peering through me, always...then why do I not see it when I look into a mirror?

4 1/2 Inches

2010-01-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

We walk through my front door, and stand there in the dark for a moment, embracing. My hands over your ears, which are freezing. Everything slows, and stills, and breathes deeply when we are alone, here, in the dark -- candles burning, blue lights twinkling. Your eyes soften and time drops away from your face; in this instant, you are ageless and infinite. At some point there is dinner, but that is not important, really. We talk, and talk (I love to listen to your voice vibrating in my ear, my head against your chest) and the words ebb and flow as kisses take up the space in between them, expanding outward, and then slow and let the words trickle back through and fill the silence.

Yesterday I stayed in bed until obscenely late, warm and quiet, wrapped in the blankets. Walked through the city and drank rich milky coffee, bought sweet potatoes and pink-fleshed grapefruit. Soap that smells of incense, and spiced tea. Held in my mind the echoes of your fingers against my skin, and it made me want to kiss the world on the mouth, hard and long and open.

You talk about looking at my face, close-up, and I think of myself broken down into discrete segments, a perfect cubist painting. It is a pleasing thought, and one I've had before. Being with you is smooth and liquid -- warm milk or drizzled honey -- it leaves me melted and dissolved, always. (And I don't sleep well with others, but I think I could, possibly, with you -- seep through the cracks of consciousness and into your breathing, deep and entire.)

Today I was out with someone, and she told me I am very tangible -- which, by itself, is a ridiculous thing to say, but in the context, the inflection, I knew exactly what she meant and it was a warming, gentle statement. Dim sum and endless cups of green tea. Two hours of unplanned and, apparently, quite necessary sleep in the middle of the afternoon -- heavy and deeply sunken, like an opium dream.

The idea of your heartbeat is, sometimes, more real to me than my own pulse. You make my blood smile, quietly, and my veins overflow with gratitude. (There is a word far beyond precious, and that is what I search for, hands empty and fingers outstretched, reaching.)

Just Like A Candle

2010-01-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

I tell you when I was small, I thought it was ceiling wax, not sealing wax, and it confused me so for years. And I had a set of half-used wax sticks, eight or ten brass stamps (a highly stylized mushroom, but I can't recall the rest) -- a novelty found for a bit of nothing at some garage sale, thrift store, somewhere. You ask what I would change about the story, and I tell you, More Dormouse! (I love the Dormouse.) And we discuss the last verse of that song, and how it grates on me, because the Dormouse never said that, never once said anything like it at all.

You are a stranger, nameless. Perhaps you are a dream.

We talk about the looking glass, and how to find one's way through to the other side (and maybe we are on both sides, already, all the time, but we don't know it). It's a trick, like something in pieces without instructions (and once you have them, so quickly assembled that you cannot now imagine it in any other way but how it is). Time without context, and death is like a hallway to forever, stuck; this is what terrifies me.

You want to know what I would have him say or do, if he were a more active participant in the story; you want to know what she would have thought about the whole adventure, looking back. Would she go back, then, knowing what she knows now? (Are we dreamers, or butterflies, or monsters, or nowhere nothing much at all?) You're willing to believe in me if I'll believe in you (I am a Unicorn; I am a little girl). We have to go so fast, in life, to manage staying in one place.

Dreaming, or being dreamt -- sleeping or awake or somewhere in-between. I couldn't say. You are nobody (and I am nobody) and there is nothing between us. (So much nothing, and it spirals out into vast wide somethings, filling up the spaces.) Fast and faster and breathe too hard and suddenly, it all goes out -- BANG!