I love him like fire. Warmth, light. Temptation drives me farther away, of desire, malicious, feigned, humming electric through my body like waking up to a kiss, welcome in the middle of the night. Chorus end, refrain. My hands flex, the desire to blacken his eyes, break his fingers, as I say to him as he clatters down the stairs next to me, invisible as I refuse to look up, “because that would mean more to you.” The verses repeated, wait, I love you. Funny way of showing it. Every day, a song that sounds the same. Bridge. Sharps, flats. Chorus again, our voices together. Refrain.
Tag: relationships
Protected: locked post (filter: closer) – for my own records
the day I chipped my tooth on his pierced tongue
“I love you like I’ve never loved anyone,” he says. Later I lie awake, unable to follow him to sleep. I sit up a little, just enough for his curly head to shift from my shoulder to my lap. I watch him, silent, until I finally whisper, “I think I feel safe here,” aware he will not hear or know any of this in the morning.
putting the growl back in purr
Electricty conductive body paint.
Falling from the bus, pushed to my knees by a wave of car sick nausea, falling down to find him waiting, two roses in hand, one scarlet, one jade, waiting and in love, curiosity transformed over half a decade into smitten into smote, a slow walk, arms linked, step in step, finally a pair five years later than when we met, when I had taken him home.
We had been dancing at the same place, a night club gone goth for a friend’s industrial night, everyone in black, fishnets, and spikes. Somehow I convinced him to come with me for tea, (yes, actual non-euphimistic tea), curled on my couch, my cripple’s cane leaning against my leg, his sardonic conversation leaning against my heart, as pleasantly dark as his pleated kilt and kinky, curly hair. In the morning, he had gone home, leaving behind only his name, an assemblage memory of a warm, witty smile and an e-mail address to which he only barely replied. After awhile of silence, I chalked it up to one of life’s silly things, counting myself lucky having a hot boy over for tea, and that was that.
Until it wasn’t.
We found each other again through Eliza, her paintings up at Anachrotechnofetishism luring him out and into my orbit again. Soon he was visiting, tangling back into my life, staying on my couch as we went to arts festivals, as I would stay on his on my way through Seattle, the both of us blazing. Eventually, more recently, it was silently decided we would try again where we left off, an arbitrary agreement with no forethought and no warning that coalesced out of air, a relationship wrought without words, twisted together from a few meaningful glances and a deep understanding of what needed to happen next.
“You know I dreamed about you.”
Fast forward, I am pulled from a bus by the fury of my sickness, out and down, and out, having been on a bus for three hours, reading, waiting, wishing I could sleep, the sky on fire with yet another one of those perfect west coast afternoons, beautiful, boring, cliche as a painting, traveling unknown toward a moment for five years, feeling conscripted to the inevitable, as if slotting back into a path I never should have left, the parsed coastal combination of manipulated reasons I can lay out like cards. Curled around my belly, I am struck dumb on the sidewalk, a crumpled ball, but then I look up to see him, poised in sudden terror that I didn’t get off the bus at all, and suddenly everything is okay.
“Tony,” I wave, and he turns, and his face is all I need to know.
My boss just walked by, talking into his cellphone, “They got the flu, hey? How many deaths?”
“Sex. All those complications, all that messiness. It’s like watching a group of enthusiasts really get into a hobby that you don’t share.”
from Sex with Ghosts, by Sarah Kanning
Last weekend I was in Seattle, Tony and I came to a silent understanding that the next time I was to go down there, it would be for A Visit, the capital letter sort, where we spend time holding hands, memorizing the sassy curve of dancing cheek to cheek, tangling our feet under tables, and generally acting like a pair of besotted fools. When I mention this to absolutely anyone who knows him, it’s like I’ve announced that we are getting married, running away to the garden of Eden, and intend to spend the rest of our days enmeshed in each other in paradise. Though I appreciate the encouragement, intimidating though it is, honestly, really very, I can’t help but notice it’s bloody well off the scale. The uncanny levels of jubilation present, a sort of incredible, “WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT BEFORE??!” eureka-congratulations, is bizarre, as if we’ve gone off and invented a new kind of light bulb that runs on wishes. I have no idea what to do with it.
That said, I am thrilled with the shape and depth of our upcoming weekend. Sleeping in and circuses, bruised lips and breakfast. It’s been confirmed, Tony and I are going to Teatro ZinZanni on Saturday, a fabulous blend of European cabaret, circus arts, restaurant, and vaudeville performed in an actual honest-to-mercy Belgian spiegeltent, (a word meaning mirror tent that amuses Tony endlessly to hear me say), and the Portage Bay Cafe for breakfast on Sunday. I’m beyond thrilled, given my relationship with such creations, and delighted and overwhelmed and all flavours of nice things. I have started counting out until I get on a bus, thinking, “less than a day away, remember your birth certificate, his smile, your house-coat, a towel, remember your book, your extra underwear, your toothbrush, hair-brush, pens, paper, and name, exchange your currency, check your camera battery, replace the missing lens cap, pick up a memory card, Robin’s music box, a back-pack, the books that need to return, a ring.” A litany of prepare, of hoping I am ready, of trying too hard not to be nervous as I sit back in the hours and wait.
“the dust has only just begun to form crop circles in the carpet”
The sunlight flares us into creatures made of dark, burned honey. We are tangled, metaphorically, literally. Marry me, he says, eyes on mine, searching past the layered blue stone for a seed, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. This feels like a moment I’ve lived before, somewhere out of reach, as solid as summer, as certain as a dream. Luckily, I reply, I’m already engaged, like a boyscout, always prepared.
Between our lines are novels unwritten, hammered into bone with pens of situational ink. (There is more to it than this, more and enough to break my heart.) He takes my hand, I will cover your fingers in rings, one by one, week by week, until you say yes. His hands gently trace his words in the air. Hang jewels from every part of your body, your fingers, your toes, your ears, your neck, wrists, and hair.
His fingerprints are warm on my collarbone, even after he’s taken his gesture away.
I only have one ear pierced, I laugh. Something I can fix, he smiles.
Anyone watching would think we’re in love. That we live together reigning as the pale sun and moon. Instead we are a melody heard over the rushing river sound of a freeway, a missed connection trying to find somewhere to stand on origami folded sand. Impossible. Improbable. All signs point to doomed.
How many weeks would that be? We are laughing again, our serious moment passed, submerged, allayed, alloyed. At least twenty-five. My toes curl into the grass of the park, pretending to glitter. Half a year of months. Our conversation launches itself into the sky. Who could wait that long? I would die. My head would explode, fall right off. I think of dandelions, ‘mama had a baby and her head popped off’, destruction, thumbs smaller than dimes.
(you’re only as sick as your secrets)
“..the sound of children crying in their beds in the night because something is wrong with them that they can never fix and so they must be braver, better, stronger, fiercer.”
– Hal Duncan, INK
There are lessons in this world that I should have learned by now: when to assess and turn away, when to see fire for flame. Clockwise consequences with no interpretation flux. (As piano kicks in as quiet and soft as what’s trapped beneath my skin.) I can’t help but feel I’ve been here before, as the edges of me shatter, as I prove myself again a wire too twisted not to break. Breathing in, a taste, I lose myself, caught in sincerity, a line, netted in the sweet, staring colour of maybe this time will be okay, no matter that I know better, no matter that this story is old, older than any one of us can see or even read in hard fossil beds, and I know all the endings, hungry, bruised, have been all the endings, myself a creature that doesn’t remember what being in love feels like, and have hated them. Breathing out, the pressure drops, leaving only anger screaming at myself, you ruin me, (us against the world, heart-breaking, and only for children too young to question myths), and I splinter, a massacre holding in what I can, as the pieces scatter, as sharp as my hopeless tongue, as defensive as a mirror, as iron unhappy as silence between friends. I think of my heart as being pierced, the truth that drove the boy Kay to run away with the Snow Queen, as the cold wraps me up, as my throat closes thick and my eyes sting shut, hollowing me clean, draining my blood corrosive of everything I need.
Gam Zu Letovah (this too is for the best).
via mshades: From Portuguese – Saudade According to Wikipedia:
“…a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.”
Bones and silk, flesh, diamonds, and suede – the sound of our relationship sifted through breathing, through waiting, through stumbling to a slow, crumbling end. Finally our slow unraveling, thread by thread, has dissolved us. It is no longer us together, us against the world. Our ship has capsized, not by a sudden disaster, but by the slow leaking of quiet depression, silent and heavy and too much to bear.
(I realized during my time away that I am done, that I can no longer hold myself static, that I need change. Even something as small as a declaration of stepping away, to feel that I am no longer against the wall, no longer holding my breath forever.)
He, of course, has been hit harder than I have, as I’ve been adjusting towards this since December, slipping away, unable to survive as an equal in a relationship without communication, as my increasing demands that he simply talk to me were set aside, excused, and our stone connections patiently eroded into sand. He began confessing only recently, began speaking in spurts and dribbles late at night, trying to explain, but it was, as many things, too little too late. Poor little words, stalling, halting, too worn out to dance. Yet, already, between the worst moments, we seem to be relaxing, finding space. He’s begun writing, I no longer feel pressured. I have hope for us now, when before I was beginning to have none.
tough to prod into romance
365: 06.02.09
I see you walking in my dreams, splinters of invincible movement from the corner of my eye, fiction and blood drowning together, the colours thicker than in photographs of your eyes. Winter shifting out of December, reaching forward to pull Spring out of the calloused clouds, (the random smell of flowers dripping in the wind), wondering what waiting will bring. Dreams of airports and shredded letters, structures built of running faster, learning the contours of your hands. I think of the chambers of the heart and name them in order, atria and ventricles, the left and right of each. I think of tracing patterns, explaining the history of the word skin, from the German word scinten or schinden, to flay, as I peel back electric layers of myself and still discover you there.
“I scrub the sharp edge off my appetite.”
Go forward and forward by Ryohei Hase
Perhaps I should be ashamed, says the back of my brain, as I reach out for reciprocity. Perhaps I should fall down, check myself in to the lost and found, say there peacefully until claimed. Kick my heels, properly tagged, next to a small box of forgotten apples, two overdue library books, a rain ruined Klimpt print, and wait.
This part of my brain is obviously insane.
Instead, when I am nervous, I want them to be nervous too. I wish us to match like a pair of jittery, colourful addictions, ready to dribble words the way a cork pops from bottle of something bubbly, ballistic and driven, dangerous in the wrong hands. I want us to assume and feel unsafe doing so, to tinker, to rewrite boundaries like history and we’re the last ones standing. I want to be saturated in it, that understanding, that shared, halting drive, the cartilage landscape of unknown territory. Feel the certainty of it swelling in my chest, devouring my entrenched dragons of well trained doubt, dispelling the honeymoon aura of dread, and trust where I stand enough to take root in the sediment we’ve accrued, tall as a birch, as practically imperishable as the same.
It’s primitive how I find the discovery of shared fear to be soothing. It triggers something deeper than sleep, more important than the shape of bones under skin, like being able to see the basic geometry of need, the invisible pillars upon which we build our waking dreams. I am reassured instantly as somewhere in my genes a fatal desire to know is fed. Such moments are a gift for which I do not know how to say thank you. They remind me of fire escapes in the same way they represent a way down from a burning building to solid ground. Effective, quaint, and incredible.
Uninterrupted chain by Ryohei Hase