His skin is lighter than mine where the sun doesn’t touch, though we’re multi-racial enough to get us lynched in certain places, (we know he has problems at the border). I can see in the dark how the outline of my wrist – you know this story. I know this story. I will never get enough of his clever mind, his smile, or his hair, but it slipped from my mouth that the latest death.pool bet says he’ll run off with his employer next. I mistakenly used the word “cheat” before demurring that I know he is only as committed as a cat offered a dish of cream. I know the ending already, the cotton candy clouds blow away in a predictable wind. Last time I bled myself dry and then moved to another part of the country. It didn’t change anything.
Another story – The clock is heaped with minutes that need to be folded and placed into drawers. Fragments of conversation, of laughter like honey in my throat, of shared yearning after mystery. I am made of clay and I can feel in the dark how the shape of my body fits surprisingly into his (as it crumbles into dust). Everywhere are tiny, running wolves disguised as mice. On the blackboard, my name has been erased. I am a self-portrait, stars for eyes, blindfolded. His skin belongs to someone else. The sheets describe pacing, the threads worn where the line was drawn. Thou Shalt, not. The pillow tells quietly of the hollow curve of a braincase. I didn’t belong there any more than I do elsewhere, but at least it felt safe. There was water in a cup on one side of the bed.
I wonder if when I am older, I will place a cup there too, as they do, these men, these ten minute husbands who deprive me of stability. I don’t like their common habits. I want all of their mistakes to be different, they should continue to be separate creatures in as many things as possible.
My New Year hasn’t started yet. I feel, instead, that I was on the set of a film shooting a scene about New Years Eve. How else to explain where I was, who I was with? Surrey? What? I came home today soaked to the cells of my marrow from working many hours in the rain. Work began at five, where I was on gate. Somewhere around midnight, I assumed my way backstage and made myself available. After the count-down and the fireworks, my time was spent hauling about heavy bits of everything. Work was tear down, strike, a rush of blood to the lungs. The skin of my hands has been polished so raw my nerves are misfiring in interesting ways, I might have split my lip and possibly cracked a rib. Sleep was a couple of sheepish hours in a hotel room, too early in the morning to be morning yet. Then we worked again. This time in a gradual and persistent downpour. Tents had to be puzzled down, missing pieces had me to be made to fit into trucks and lamentably weighty slabs of steel needed to be dragged from one end of the complex to the other. Same with sandbags. I cannot explain how much I dislike sandbags, except to say that sometimes being female’s a bit of a bitch.
(It’s always a bit of a toss-up between letting people be nice to me and accepting the easier, indoor “nice” jobs or going out in the crappy weather and attempting to prove myself a little more to a group of strangers who all assume me to be capable anyway. Mostly I took the indoor jobs and didn’t mind when people called me “sweetie”. They can call me “sweetie” as much as they like as long as they follow orders.)
I might sound like I’m complaining, but really I love this stuff. I chose being on crew over any of the parties I was invited to. (Is it just me or was everyone really slap-dash about plans this year?) I appreciate being useful, as well as chances to constructively use basic physics. (What, you think I can heft things twice my weight without the stuff?) The best part is that apparently I’m to be paid for my hours, which is nice, as I would have been out there anyway. Just tattoo geek on my forehead in invisible ink.
