the sons and daughters of hungry ghosts

He said he was in love with me, but he’s already forgetting all that taught him, falling back on what’s easy and available rather than what’s worth fighting for. It is like we never existed. I see it before he tells me while part of me dies inside, a confession of old bad habits over a dinner that I am too silently upset to eat. I push my fork around, pretending conversation. I have no magic words, no way to explain that would remind him. Inside I wonder if he will one day understand “meaningful” or, worse, if in some future, he’ll say these things and I will no longer care, no longer certain of his worth.

There is no public face.

What’s this scar, I ask, a finger touching his body somewhere the skin is pale and slightly warped, maybe damp, warm from a shower. A crowbar, he says, or a computer case. Something fell, a knife slipped, there is a different explanation for every twisted mark. The disfiguring slice that runs up his thumb, the white curl that runs around the top of his right foot. I am collecting each story, building a narrative, assembling a picture of his body through history. Actions, reactions. Attacked, sleeping somewhere he shouldn’t. Carving a fall through the air, a parachute failure from fourty stories up.

“What would you do if I cut my hair?” “Could I have it?” “That’s not at all what I asked.”

He looks through me like a strange mirror, the reflection off by a fraction. In the deepest center of things, the beginning of a spark. We map territory almost the same, drawing conclusions at an almost cellular level, uncanny and intimately familiar, a dance I’ve never had a partner for, though I long ago conquered the steps. Even as I dig for bones, there is a return archeology, a chemical reaction that burns through skin down to the raw, bloody, hard and honest, that knack of knowing without necessarily knowing why, the same way that when we’re asleep, we unconsciously hold hands in the dark.

I have always been this fragile.

…But That Was [Yesterday]

Song on repeat, fingers frigid from typing, everything around me perfectly still. We’re talking about dying, about family in the hospital, about relationships that never were, chances that perished almost as quickly as they had become. I think about fire, about how much tragedy stains my heart, how much sorrow clogs my breath. The boyfriend who committed suicide, the woman who was almost my mother, dragged to death, pregnant, under a truck. Family wrapped in white sheets, counting minutes. A different parent, one of many, confused, waiting to die. There was a phone-call. Later, at some unknown time, there will be another, and perhaps the person on the line and I will cry together.

I’m helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.
Helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.

Outside is cold, the rain has half frozen, but I expect colder still. Clothed in frost, in the shirt of someone I used to love, winter is crawling through the windows, offering loneliness in place of flowers, memories of years when I still had a future. They play out like beads on a string of days, tallied in small bursts, bright but too long ago. How is it that days are so long, while years are so short? Fractions of lifetime stretched out over bone. Cells replicating. I used to believe that one day would be easier. Soon I will be too old for it. I will be done, the last page written. The book closed. Somewhere out there, past the glass, there is snow.

Well I’d wait ten thousand picks for just one more chance, just one more chance to see your face again.

The people around me do not know how to cure this sorrow. Tender, they insist on holding me or pet my hair, as if rocking silently is enough. Shivering, I require more, to engage, to pull my intelligence out from my pain. Perspective as everything. (Not everything broken can be repaired.) On the east coast is a grandfather, lungs filling with fluid, and a boy near the phone. We write back and forth, filling the void with comforting words, distractions, poetry, and rough jokes. We write back and forth and I do not know if I am helping. I do not know if I am like my friends, heartfelt yet inadequate, offering solace that would comfort me, but not them.

Well I’d pull, teeter away, at the earth with my teeth, the earth with my teeth to touch your face alive.

The piano kicks in, quiet, insistent, with a sound like birds. I am collapsing, fracturing, splintering, shivering into pieces. If someone were to touch me, I would explode, shrapnel embedded in every wall, with a sound like a wounded animal, terrified and very, very young.

You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.
You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.

My stress betrays me. Inside of my belly, chemicals misfire, hormones fail. I do not release an egg. “Progesterone secretion is prolonged because estrogen levels are low”. My womb is lost, continues singing for fertility, even with the map misplaced. The walls thicken, then slough. Bleeding seven days, eight, now thirty. A flood. I grow pale. The red spills like an endless creek, enough to fill a pail. I am a tributary, coloured scarlet. Chunks of flesh escape me as big as the palm of my hand. My breath vanishes, the world glitters, and suddenly exhaustion, fatigue. It is too much effort to ask my heart to beat. I cannot move. My body is a heavy as lead, my veins filled with gold.

With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.
With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.

With my blood, so sleep. I am awake in the dark, endlessly so. My breath solidifies, but my dreams do not. Instead I write, I reply, my back-log of messages attacked, finally, until dawn, the sun a smudge of gray the same tenor as a cough. To a former lover, lost for too long, I write, “Your silver hair makes me think of feathers, of flight, and the purity of light seen through the fractures of a crystal. Perhaps you are, in fact, slowly turning into a dove, one the colour of lightning, a tongue like glass and a brain ripe with electricity.” Our love was a wonderful thing, poetry balanced on edge, the quirky, deprived, and mad meeting together as one. Maybe somewhere is a world where it worked out.

Well, I can make your face brand new.
Well, I can make your face brand new.

We stay up late, my current love and I, an ordinary history of affection warped by misunderstandings, his lack of experience, the way he abandoned us the first time we fought. Where do we go from here? Defining what is wrong is only a first step, almost a year late, too late, almost a year since it all began. My eyes are glued shut with salt, hot and sad. His arm bleeds where it scraped against the side of the bed. My role has been counselor, not partner. Tearing words from his tongue has been almost impossible, the squeezing of blood from a stone. Together we have been teaching him responsibility, and though he is quick, he resists.

La da la da la da da da da da da da da da da

Dawn painting the top of the mountains, the world’s orbit sliding day into place. The urge to shift from bed, to draw on the window, withers against the memory of warmth, of shifting discussions, the lace of conversation drifting over my eyes like something imagined from a far away land.

You are warm, you are warm

There are only four ways for a relationship to end; stuck together or split apart, drowned with misery or flavoured with subtle joy. Duality doubled, basics, building blocks, the future laid out as cabled strings that tie lives together. Abandonment, paperwork, making tomorrow always better than today. I fought for us until he apologized, truth the most harrowing weapon of all, and then my heart burst, as if there was nothing left inside the pain but exhaustion, terrible, cruel, but free. Even so, we are lucky. Now, no matter how it turns out, as a couple or merely friends, we will find peace. We’ll love each other until death do us part.

Come take my hand and I’ll take your hand
And I will bring you out
Come take the line and I’ll take the line
And I will pull you out
In the sun
.

something I don’t know if we share

He stands apart from me, the placement of his body the only visible part of the topography we once created, who kissed who and when. Deer in the headlights, sweet as burned sugar. His gestures are shy, terrified. I wonder, when I remember, if he is happy. (If he still thinks about his decisions.) His hair still smells like heartbreak.

oh airfare

Taxes: On hiatus while out of country. Should be filed by the end of next week.
Employment: Had a successful phone interview yesterday. A follow-up in person interview is being scheduled for next week.
School: Currently taking preparatory practice tests. Acing everything but math, which is not a surprise.
Driving: Pat has offered to pay for Young Drivers of Canada classes, which I will set up once back in Canada.
Giant Mirror: Julie has kindly agreed to trade it for sewing Kyle’s wedding cravat.
Painting: Out of my hands. Being done while out of the country.
Print Sale: Took and sold a number of pictures yesterday, one a commission.

Total Tally: Not too shabby.

My mother is driving down to meet us in Seattle this weekend. As a joint Mother’s Day and birthday present, Tony snagged Kooza Cirque tickets for the three of us for this Sunday. Spangles, tumblers, feats of incredible beauty? I’m dreadfully excited. Our very first date was to Teatro Tzinzanni, a dinner-theater circus in a spiegeltent, and then for every other Saturday that month we went to see Circus Contraption as they performed their very last shows ever. We went again to Teatro on Hallowe’en for our six month anniversary and won Staff-pick Guest of Honour at their costume contest. To go to the circus for my birthday ties it all together so nicely it makes my chest hurt.

Part of the reason I desperately want my print sale to work is so that I can gift him back with something equally as splendid, if not more. He takes care of me in ways that I never even dreamed of, so though there are a few things I could fundraise for, what I have particularly in mind is a weekend trip to see the Funundrum, the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus show celebrating the 200th anniversary of P.T. Barnum’s birthday, playing Jun 17 – Jun 20 in Vegas, as they’re the apex of American circus culture, elephants and all. The show is coming to Seattle as well, but in August, the same dates we plan to be away at Burning Man. Plus, in Vegas we could stay at the Circus Circus, the most appropriate theme-venue possible.

It’s not the hotel rates that slay me, though, or even the circus tickets themselves. It’s the airfare. As far as I can find, the lowest there and back is more than my rent, more than my credit card limit. It is, however, only 25 – 60 prints sold.

trying to put the pin back into the grenade

  • An Animated Description Of Mr Maps
  • Animated x-ray examinations of speech

    It was a rough weekend, tumbled dry, scratchy eyed. I spent a night on the couch, tapping at computer keys, unable to sleep, singing my sorrow to the sky. The next day I packed, putting all of my things into a case, slamming doors while wrapping objects in paper, the better to save the glass. I felt lost, an army of emotion without will to fight.

    We went out, we walked, visited with friends and did not touch. The sun was out, the weather sweet as feathers, but things were not resolved. Returning home, suffering spiraled in again, wanting another twelve hours to be driven out. We do not argue in ritual. It is exceptional, infrequent, strange. Uncomfortable like our struggles are against nature. He is auto-defensive, I am as vulnerable as a weapon. There are cycles. Patterns of past relationships, themes of thrown history, locked doors, and memories of faces.

    In retrospect, we are growing to understand how to rarify the process. Quicken it, speed ourselves to closure, comfort, and need. If, world forbid, it happens again, we will not find pain as sharp an obstacle. This is twice, yet already we are faster. Fourty-eight hours is better than a month of weeks. I am wrung out, exhausted, and I’m sure he feels the same, but we found ways to mend what was broken, as well as affection. I am thankful for our effort, for our love. There is no better victory.

  • More than a couch, less than a rocket ship.

    I pulled back. Wait. With one hand on his chest, I reached down with the other and plucked our favourite caramel from the small, expensive box on the bed. Here, so we’ll always know what our first kiss tastes like. I put it between my teeth and held it there in my mouth, then leaned forward to his, and broke the dark chocolate into gooey citrus caramel just as our lips began to meet.

    The last few days have felt like a wonderful vacation from the various crushing worries that have been become the fabric of my recent life. Instead of worrying about rent or groceries or perpetually postponed photo sessions, I’ve been floating, spending time in Seattle with Tony, celebrating our one year anniversary with whatever pops into our heads. I arrived to find chocolates on the bed from Chocopolis, the place on Capitol Hill where the flavour of our unbelievably delicious first kiss came from. They no longer sell that particular sweet, but Tony bought approximations, and we fed them to each other like little bullets of joyful reminder, coated in smooth, delicious happiness.

    He also presented me with a copy of Taxidermia, so Friday night we stayed in, made supper, and let wonder unfold on the screen. Neither one of us had seen it before, but I’ve been quietly lusting after it for years, since seeing this clip when it was first posted. I warn you now, it’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, but it’s relentless. I’ve been trying to think of a way to recommend it to people for days now, except I want to do so safely, so no one ends up traumatized. Describing it would ruin it. Telling everyone to see it would be a mistake. I mean, it’s heart-stoppingly gorgeous, but there is a man with a flame thrower penis within the first ten minutes. It needs one of those old thriller movie posters that didn’t bother with anything but NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!! in 89 point bright red type. Nothing else would be appropriate. I will say this, though, if you’re a squeamish sort of body, either watch it with someone who will tell you when to look or simply avoid it altogether, excluding the scene I’ve already posted.

    Since then, we’ve wandered downtown, had dinner at the Space Needle, saw lightning, practiced our massage skills with ebony current cream, enjoyed at least one sleep-in of epic proportions, played peek-a-boo with a baby giraffe at the Seattle Zoo, fed popcorn to squirrels, been rained on with some red pandas, were pleasantly defeated by steaks at Morton’s, and fallen asleep in front of Sonny Chiba movies and seriously vintage cartoons. Our love is awesome.

    ps. I also got him a present, but it’s not here yet, so mum’s the word until it arrives. Shh.