salinger

how can one person feel so much at one time, and feel nothing? i am not in my body just now. dissociated, they tell me. fancy word for momentary brain-deadness, for separation of mind from body or mind from itself. 


it's terribly peaceful and i'm quite frightened. 

i'm wearing that placid face, i can't feel my legs, i want a cigarette but the thought of leaving the house, of existing in the outside world is making me tremble. cocktails of pills are all that's keeping me conscious through these blurring endless days. 


i'm turning into a ghost. i'm excruciatingly bored and what a waste, what a waste, i'm slipping out of sight, out of mind, out of hand. 

hero complex

my dear, is it you who are distancing us or just the semi-gloss of making up with the girl we both know is pulling you down? you can't save her. no one can. i can't save myself either but the difference is i don't let you try. 

not-feeling is a lost art. i have become too triangulated in your relationship, the third party, the convenient one. 


i'd tell you this if you fed me red wine by the bottle, asked me about my sudden retreat. but i'd like to think i'm in the right in my silence, that truth is too rash and acknowledging my existence as such too fanciful.

susurration

i never said yes, i just didn't say anything at all. you didn't ask and i pulled down my sleeve in what i would call a surreptitious gesture. silence speaks for us and that's all that's in my head just now. don't interrupt. it's hot out already, it's still morning, the smoke stalls in a cloud around my face. blocking the sun, i guess. i feel poisoned. 


everything ends up too repetitive after a while, you know? 

you're here but i'm not. not really. my apologies. 

when the rose sun sets over the hollywood hills

and a quiet in my head in direct contradiction with the city, everything embossed with meaning and placement in space, that car to my left, red light means stop as in stop the car not cease all physical movement, my fingers growing tired of holding this cigarette, the bones and muscles working just so for just so long, repetitive movements through space are nearly but not always predictable.


and a warm nostalgia for things having been, the lost circumference of one's thighs, a whole absorption in this one book at this one time in which this particular writer's words spill out of you later on, ingested and chemically altered to become your own, a loss of friends, a loss of joy, a loss of complacency with lazy sunday afternoons.

but still glimpses, yes! early-afternoon brunch, a swept floor, the coolness of indoors and a curtained soft white sun, casual cigarettes and the right book, the right voices wafting in through the screens and it's ok because, you see? fleeting remembrance has so much more depth and the twilight still holds the echoes of the fire of the setting sun, ten minutes past. 

vacuum

ages in the sinkhole. if only i were not mired in something so basic as the human condition.


i just feel so terribly ordinary, you know?

la la land

the meterologists here are great at telling us what the weather is, not what it will be. they lie again and again and i am forced to strip off jackets, sweaters, knee boots in a sudden midday sun. you think they'd learn but this is a city of denial.


the future tense is impossible to comprehend without hope in the equation. that's all we're built on, west of the san andreas. without it we'll slide off into the sea. good riddance. no one would miss us.


they'd miss the movies, though.

partial suicide

let's pretend it was the tequila, a bad reaction to tequila that made me vomit all over my boots for hours, reduced my limbs to dead weight. i don't remember blacking out, but who does? just hands, being carried, the irresistible pull of gravity on my body, the inability to do anything but be swept along. yes, the tequila. 


slumped over my roommate's arm i looked Death in the face and said, all right, i'm ready. 


it was terribly peaceful. 

woke in the morning, surprised that i had. can't shake the disappointment. there was a beautiful finality about the whole evening. 

three days i've been in a daze: what next?