Uploaded by loranger
Month: February 2007
we woke up to an astronaut kidnapping, “how future is that?”
As I hung up the phone, the silence bloomed and spread petals of unease, beautiful enough to be mistaken for a memory. Art film freeze frame on a slow pan scanning the room. I let out a breath, banishing the illusion, in an attempt to force my sharp disappointment to fade. It didn’t work, instead it settled deeper into my belly, as if I had been eating something bitter.
Then Shane called and kicked my sorry ass. The beginning of the end. It was a terrible time to be at the party.
I get out of the cab, familiar in my city, trying not to wish myself elsewhere, trying not to transform the crowd around me into strangers, the cars into rickshaws, the breath in my body into words of goodbye. I turn around, refuse to walk in the opposite direction, but do. I fall into the flow, swing my eyes away and forward. The yellow car is eventually lost in traffic.
Once moving, the ghost of old poets take me and I understand, finally, how a person could walk into the ocean, how they could continue walking, slicing into the waves like a knife, until there is nothing but water.
that valentine thing is just asking for trouble
Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight.
The lovely _griffy_ tagged me for the Five Things People Would Be Unlikely To Know About You meme going around. I’m wretched at these, but she is a dear, so I’m going to acquiesce.
1. I take his hand to mine, press the palms together. “Our hands are almost the same size. I hate that I forget these things,” I frown, “but I do.” Our fingers lace and a concrete feeling of being helpless in the face of wind flows through me. He feel delicate, as if I could collect him effortlessly in the curve of my arms, curled like a black and ivory flower. He glowed at my birthday present and flashed it to everyone, smile like a searchlight, showing me off, my cleverness, my care. I am drowning for affection, but I can tell I’ve been torn down too much. My best efforts to memorize him, the way he danced in his seat, beating a musical tattoo against the table at the restaurant, won’t be enough. I will forget, these moments will fade, lost in the wreckage. Stricken with this thought, it is all I can do to put my eyes elsewhere. My role is that of the cherished escape, the lovely creature that will stay witty and safe and warm. To be otherwise would be to admit defeat. I look down at the table with relief when someone launches into a story about working with the Smothers Brothers and try to genuinely smile at the Bill Cosby anecdotes.
2. Before my accident, I was quietly training to be an aerialist. I loved the feel of the cloth, the clever twists that let me safely drop from the ceiling to hang by one ankle, gently spinning, four feet from the painful ground, the ability it grant me to fly. My fall from grace, I have never forgiven.
3. “I really do love you, you know, with what is left of my heart,” I whispered. Innocent of indecency, those were the words pushing at me through the dark, insisting in spite of the forsaken ache in my chest and the possibility that our intelligent friend in the next bed was only feigning sleep. He said nothing in reply, but held me tighter.
4. I didn’t wear skirts until I was 17. I still don’t wear skirts that hem above my knees unless I’m going dancing.
5. Filling in for my ferret is a small silver pin fashioned to look like one that I wear on my coat lapel. I bought it during the holidays, though I couldn’t strictly afford it, because I’ve been beginning to find myself standing in my dark kitchen at four in the morning, cuddling his tiny frozen body, and something in me is aware that sort of behavior is so generally frowned upon that a substitute must be made. Thirty dollars is worth a more conventional flavour of sanity.
I dyed my hair so you carry me with you when you leave.
Minesh has left, gone back to The Smoke. Sweetheart that he is, I saw him to the airport Wednesday and took a bus back into town. He’s left me a small stack of fascinating seeming books with erudite notes written in the cover pages that I know I’ll never have the cleverness to match. They’re sitting next to my bed, now, waiting for me to pick them up and soil their pristine pages with my fingerprints. When he sent me a note to say he got home safe, which I never doubted he would, I sent him a copy of Maginalia.
As if to gracefully ease absence, the airport then apologetically delivered up Michael Green late Thursday night for the tail end of the PuSH festival. Which means, lovelies, that I am generally unavailable for shenanigans until Tuesday. Call me then and don’t expect me to be home checking my messenger.
Heart of the World news, there isn’t any positive. Monday I sign papers to the effect that if I give them the deposit, they will not pursue any legal action against me. There’s nothing else I can say.
It tears my heart.