Tag: postsecret

I still think that maybe I should leave, go to the club, try to wake up closer to my own bed

Frank Warren of the cult PostSecret answers 20 Questions: “For me this was a great surprise. How courage can be more important than talent or technique in creating meaningful art.“

When I shut the door behind me and glanced at the photographs lining the wall, it struck me that once I was going to live here. Cream walls, a white picket fence in pencil. He called, “When you’re done, can you come help me with something?” The music was comfortable, perfect. I surprised myself by replying, “You’d better be naked,” as I took the stairs two at a time. His smile at his computer screen made me remember why this was going to be my home, what I gave up when plans changed. Strange to love him still, at a distance. I still want to cut a labyrinth into his short cat-fur hair, but the desire to lean into him is gone. We never kept each other awake enough and I could never bear to hurt him again, not in the slightest thing.

Cold outside, I’m not wearing clothes sensible enough. The plan was to go dancing after the movie, but something else happened. A language was spoken under language, the same that hooked me almost home to that other apartment, the one where I still know where everything is. My mother tongue, it echoes.

Heart of the World seems to have bought an extension. I do not know how long a one yet, I will find out early on Monday morning, luckily before the CBC TV interview.

based on a brick of a pillow and a plank of what it used to be like to be me

She looked all curves and shiny eyes. Posed as woman as a simple cure-all, her body a pill, the waiting chemistry of the word Yes. One word untying every victim of life from the railway tracks. New blood, brooding on the futility of sexual capacity. Those bastards draped in honey-suckle, in ample feeling. Hands with too much strength trapped inside. Drunk on missing lovers, driving to the homes of people they all used to know together, they never had each other biblically, except in her city-block verses and tired dreaming. So she hotly looked at him and thought, I could leave right now. I could walk out that door saying, hey, just don’t call me for awhile, okay?

Shuddering into a more sober awareness, the touch of grass beneath her reminds her of fiction. Stains of umbilical fantasy grabbing at her memories, images of kissing, of improbable situations where she gets to be impressive. Doctors saying, we don’t know how long until she’s leaving, but out of everyone, she’s asking for you. The scream of anniversary panic, not in this life, she thought of carrying him through passageways, his body light as music, until she comes to a door with a red exit light and puts him down as if that was the plan all along. Running from wolves, pulling him from fires. Solid threats she could rescue him from. Gratitude dripping from his smiles, another day blocking the doorway with her body.

She can put an edge on any word, turning it on the lathe of her tongue to remind him of all the things that he hasn’t given her, treating him like a sarcastic stranger. The verdict, hell to pay. Incredibly, they kept going. Independence a death in the family. It was like the stop-gap job she took in college, steady, with no real reason to leave. It had never been meant to last so long, but it paid the bills, and she kept hoarding his voice in her fantasies. She began to smile as if goodbye was one last joke between them, and she saw instantly how easily he could defeat her. All he would have to do is laugh. Laugh and turn to her and all her certainty would vanish, replaced by his universe. How can you leave someone who implies that black velvet threats are the smallest plant in an undistinguished windowsill garden?

This was all part of his plan, a map of telling secrets in her dancing. He knew how to pull her hair, how to find her fingertip sounds. Her limited view gave her this, like dust that persists, in spite of the fact that he’d never touched her. It was a game as sharp as the rays of daylight that sent her to sleep on winter mornings. Tall, she thinks, staring fixedly at the ceiling as if there were nothing blocking her gaze from the mirror of the sky. Did I used to like them tall? She thinks she’s stupid and immature, only able to think in boy with girl relationships, unable to conceive of a place where she understands only friends. Fifty ways to leave your lover – by keeping her adoration a secret, by winking uncertainly at a taxi-driver and paying him all the money she could find, by suddenly playing aloof like she was on t.v. Running out of fingers, counting issues instead, so much baggage it’s a matched set.

as I step across this ocean


postsecret.blogspotcom – void
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

operatic lederhosen boy child

Imogene is fantastic. She came into the shop yesterday with a small gift of grapes and the better gift of her company. I asked her to dinner and we talked about the men in our life and our boring jobs and a million little things that make it easier to get to know someone. I brought her home with me then over to Duncan’s for a mini-quickie-culture night. We melted down truffles and dipped chunks of my publishing pineapple in it. It was more fun than I think I’ve had in awhile. No pressure, no expectations, no having to worry about other people. It was refreshing. A good precursor to a morning that would have left me far more upset without it.

Just a general note to the world, here, I think. Unless you are my partner or we work together, I do not answer to you. Assuming otherwise will result in my gently easing you entirely out of my life, to be spoken at only at other people’s social arrangements or in accidental public encounters.

Speaking of social arrangements. Meat Night is tonight. A group of people is gathering together to buy a Priscilla Platter at the Memphis Street Blues BBQ Grill at 7 o’clock. It’s the size of two Elvis platters, and so therefore likely more meat than you have ever encountered outside of an Albertan wedding. And before you get on my case about over-consumption and all of the other “we live in a first world” politics that may spring to mind over such an outing, please direct them to Bob, as I am mostly along because I am slowly starving to death while waiting for a bank transfer or a paycheque, whichever comes first.

&nbsp cute to make the brain misfire

This weekend was your last chance to conceive if you want your baby to be born on 6/6/6.

I knew I went down with the ship when he turned to me with a radiant smile and said, “I’m happy.”

When his eyes looked at me and the sun caved in like a cathedral.

I wanted to say, “when you let your hair fall down, rapunzel cried.”

Instead I turned and walked away, beginning to choke when his hand touched my arm.

I missed posting on September 11th, which is likely for the best, considering how dour my humour has been today. Now it is September the twelfth, and Ryan’s birthday. I found him a present in my room while I was sorting today. I’m minimizing, paring down my possessions as best I can. I want to be down to one box of miscellany, one of books, a computer, a lava lamp, and my mouse with wings by the next month. The furniture will be dealt with according to piece when the time comes. I want out of here. I’ll post what I find that can be given away. Today I threw out a colouring book from when I was young enough to have a sister still, (I was five, she was four, that story may still end with I never saw her again), and the top half of a musical china clown my father gave me when I entered kindergarten. It used to be that you would wind it and it would play The Lovers Song, sort of an Italian answer to Greensleeves.

My city is burning. It smells a little like every neighbor I have is smoking a very chemically treated marijuana outside my window, and ash is drifting down from the sky. At first we thought it was a chemical accident, a nasty edged flame burning plastics somewhere by the water, but the internet told us otherwise. Burns Bog has caught on fire. The last time, almost ten years ago, Vancouver was blanketed in ash for two days. The methane-rich peat can smoulder underground almost indefinitely. This is especially nasty, as that’s one of our most protected pieces of wild preserve. It’s rather essential to our local environment. For one, it’s where almost all of our crows live. They commute every morning to scatter over the city and gather every evening to fly back in an immense trail of flapping black. They’re beautiful.