the road goes ever on and on

i'm living more in the present than in my head these days. i'm told it's a good thing, i'm halfway there. 


so this blog is going private. it's going to be different, i'd imagine, i can't say how. but let me know if you still want to read. 

one day we'll have this all straightened out

why can't everything just be somebody else's fault, just once?

if i could really believe it maybe i could've had the appropriate comeback, said all those things thought of later, and not withered into an apologizing pathetic mess. 


as it is don't think i'm worth nothing. i've left a note stapled to his palm tree saying:

Kindly post a sign if you'd prefer our dogs not pee on your lawn. 

We understand that you are not an animal person, but surely you're aware that, like yourself, dogs have to go.

How are we to know that you will wait until after the pee to speak up, when, helpless, all we can do is shout apologies over your insults? How do you propose we rectify the situation now?

We do not appreciate being yelled at simply because we did not know. 

anonymous, of course. i'm eagerly awaiting the retaliation. this should be good. 

again

i feel dead. 

each time as if the first time. that thrill of excitement coupled with a vague familiarity. has this happened before? what happens next? 


now that i'm dead, what can i accomplish?

please

no whisperings nor scurryings in the brain, just some quiet before the confusion takes over, please, just that, please

whiplash

and so drink wine in the dead of night because your back hurts, chain-smoke as if it kills the pain rather than occupying endless hours. wear your grandmother's old silk robe that smells of lavender and tobacco, don't bother about tying the sash. when rouge-stained cigarettes and ash coat the floor take a valium, take whatever they've given you, pass out right there until your spine wakes you screaming. 


and for heaven's sake don't show the girl who loves you how useless you are, clean up the wine before she wakes, brush your teeth, don't tell her how you're dead sure somewhere down by your gut that this will go on forever and she ought to leave you before you slip away into a cripple, a wino, a waif.

it's always about time, isn't it?

what is there to say? i'm blissfully happy, and to write is to think and to think brings fear. 


i'm starting to realise that quantitative priorities may not, indeed, be priorities at all, and here i am left adjusting to what other people call living. it's a terribly strange process. i feel upside down, with that same giddiness and my head about to burst. the first inclination is of course to keep track of all of this, write it and analyse it and let it slip me back into a familiar melancholy.


i suppose i shouldn't want to. 


yes, it's all rather mixed up these days. 

and so: she and i, we're dashing off to see the redwoods this weekend, the first road trip, it's going to be magnificent, yes! and quite intense if you're one of those still fumbling about with living. but hey, trees and wine and cigarettes and weed and the california coast, and maybe i'll just lose myself in the woods for a time, come back when something makes sense, or nothing at all.

i won't let you go

but i'm just so afraid of not being alone

this is called bravery

what is there to say? i'm avoiding those black welling pits inside me because i'm just so fucking happy. but they're boring through me, i smoke too much, i'm afraid to sleep, sporadic moments of panic spread hairline cracks and i feel so fragile.


i have to deal with them. i am scared of nothing else on this earth. but i have to. 

terrors in the night

take pills to sleep and instead dream of dismembered body parts, dragging my own legs through the grass. late-night friends' cigarette smoke wafts in through the window and is it hot or just me that's soaked in sweat? reach to call 911 because my mother is threatening to kill me. i don't know what's dream anymore, what's waking, i'm turned upside down, i can't stop chain smoking because that's the most i do anymore. i've become so benign, so happy, so frightened. 

this is the unknown, the shady area no one talks about. what do i do in the interim, when things are better but not yet whole? 

i'm not east coast anymore, you know

why must i always be in airports, eating terrible things? i'm gone now, no more mother with her questions and secret covetous glances, no more cousins no more bug bites no more beautiful green land and ancient trees, no more crickets, no more cottage being slowly overtaken by the earth.


i found i could touch everything again, on the wooden swing with the wind on my face at sunset. isn't it always thus? it's terribly cliche but it's so, you can't always love the things you loved as a child, and i spent the remaining days on the roof and writing and staring out into the trees, trying to imagine how to make my own sanctuary like this in the west.

my mother said so i hear you're seeing someone and TELL ME ABOUT HER and i blushed and turned up the water so i could feign not hearing her because the key is navigating these situations so they occur in the right time and place. or maybe i am just a coward. it is easier to assume she will not approve, one more black mark, one more reason to not go home.


and now. will all her piercing looks and stabs in the gut come gushing forth in tears and sick and blood this week? will she have gotten in and felled me to my knees? stay tuned i guess. i'm feeling ambivalent.

lake house

i don't own this place anymore. i've lost the ability to frolic. too many people are watching, the dynamic has changed, the blueberries won't ripen until late july and i have forgotten how to lose myself. 

i'm not all here, i'm drunk on too much wine in a family that doesn't drink, i'm throwing up in the woods behind the house in the dark, i'm in the cottage listening to the rain fall on the roof and it's lovely here but i'm numb, i'm as if underwater, in a dream, i can't quite touch.

i'm just waiting. i just want to go home to the girl i can't tell anyone about.

purgatorio

first time forever in an airport and not hungover and wanting to die. i have a bubble-wrap of joy around me, a lovely hummingbird waiting for me at home. 


so. five days with my family, the very nexus of my distress. is this just anticipatory numbness, or am i really feeling all right? yes, go on, give me your third-degree. don't expect my affection because i won't do it anymore, i can't, you're a black hole, you're sucking my insides out. i am still strong yet. i will not let you leech my joy. i will not be your charcoaled remains.

it's sunny outside, and hot and dry, did you know? not for long. i'm sitting here in limbo, in no-place, the spaces between worlds, a confluence of ten thousand anonymous people in rows of space-age chairs, bad carpeting, useless knickknacks for sale, just waiting. i, for one, am waiting to be judged. 

unicorn

yes, i've fallen in love, darlings! 

i never knew it could be this good, that life could be this good, she could be this lovely, i could be this ok. 


and don't tell me it won't last; i won't listen, i'll cover my ears and sing and daydream and skip in the summer sun with my legs bare. i mean, wouldn't you?

reverie

you see, she is stealing all my time, or am i giving it to her? gladly. my heart is on fire and it renders me clumsy and inarticulate. broke my thumb in the car door last week, you can imagine how it is to type, compensating for the space bar with whichever finger is convenient. i don't mind. if only my words would come out with grace, if only i did not have to tell her through my fingers on her skin, in her hair, small kisses in the night, how my chest will burst with this madness that some i suppose call happiness, this strange foreign state i cannot bring myself to believe in.

an inverted world in which sadness is comfort and happiness the unattainable challenge, the unknown fear. well, i'll be the warrior here, the conquerer. fuck cowardice. truth is, she's just as scared as i am, just as inarticulate, and oh how just as brave.


my hair is honey blonde and red now, have i mentioned that yet? a friend said today i was glowing, she said at first she thought it was my hair and hot pink sunglasses but no indeed, i am bursting forth from inside, luminescent. you caused that, love. phosphorescent fungi in the pitch dark, readmitting radiation slowly over time, bright enough to light a path long hours into the night, for days, for weeks, for years. 

i see color again in the world and pick her bouquets of aged flowers, it's never enough, i don't know what to do with all this joy and you know, i'm afraid of it, i'm awkward when it comes to love, i'm afraid to let the fuck go because isn't this somebody else's life i'm supposed to be living?  and what we do in the in-between times when it's just the two of us, is that really for me alone? i find i close my eyes and look away, she shines too brightly and i'm afraid to see this for what it is, that is to say, those words not-yet-to-be-said but which clog my throat and hitch my breath. yes, and i'm falling.

i'm trying not to over-think things, i'm trying to let go. i've passed the point of running now, you're worth it, love, you're worth it ten thousand times over, if only i could tell you so

intensity

a picnic on the beach, blue cheese-stuffed figs wrapped in bacon and a bottle of wine and i'll kiss her in public and i don't care, and all i can think lying curled up with her nights is this is too good to be true, i don't deserve this, she's going to find out what a wreck i am and back away and break my glass heart.

red wine and chain-smoking i say too much or i say not enough; never the right things, anyway. i can't explain to her how my chest is imploding because it's too complicated, how i'm trying to stay present, i'm trying to ignore myself, i'm trying not to tell lies and i'm shit-scared here because happiness is not what i know 


but all i want is to trust 


and she's worth it and oh fuck am i scared

if a beginning is even discernible in the midst of irrelevant events

afternoon sun on the back of my neck, you sit with me while i drink my tea and smoke and then walk me to the corner, you didn't have to, we both know that. i insist you make blueberry muffins and tell you i'll come tomorrow, i swear this time i will. 


we're playing games, aren't we, waltzing around each other in this in-between space where i don't know you and you don't know me yet but there's something charged here. i'll keep the secrets buried and maybe they'll dissipate on their own. i'd forgotten how it was to laugh like this, how my skin sheds, how light i am underneath.

 you can't break my heart because for now i'm just dreaming. in my head it's lovely, the fast-footed dance so captivatingly sweet, when there are still ten thousand outcomes, still elbow room in the world, when possibility is more potent than desire. 


i'll see you tomorrow, i suppose. i won't sleep tonight but i'll never tell you so. 

trying to catch the horses

the earth spins so fast with so many sounds of freeways and fire and ice cream trucks and i can't keep up, the long-lost brief smells of horses and leather and hay. i can't keep up, i'm exhausted, i can't catch hold, or is it me who is skipping about too quickly to keep pace with?


i'm in a time-muddle. i feel afire. 

but aren't they lovely, these early sunny summer days?

Trying to Catch the Horses

When I give up and turn my attention

to the purr of the grass, the clatter of the aspen,

the clouds lifting off Mt. Teewinot,

I become a curious god, a tar baby,

a clump of grass they must graze. 

I reach up and touch the blue with my fingers,

not just the air above my head,

but the sky itself as far as it goes. 

-Dan Gerber

must we have to try so hard to not be dissatisfied with everything?

You need not leave your room, remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
(from grey)

in the interim, shall i watch fellini films, listen to bowie, grow antique roses on the windowsills?




is it so hard to imagine sitting so still, stilling the mind, the body, stilling the heart? what terror is there in this attention to time that we spend so long evading?

new task

my lips are eroding with how much i haven't said. coy smiles and downturned eyes are all that's needed these days, an opportune blush, a placid face, a complacency with awkward silences. nobody cares much for anything beyond themselves. i dreamt last night my fists spoke for me.  if only words could bring forth such blood.


i'm rapidly losing faith in confidentiality, those things i've said blown open over and over in the past week. what need have i for words, anyway?

i'm fifteen years old again, they're taking everything from me, they're reading everything, i've no space left.


i'm trying to burn a hole in my stomach. a secret cavity, sore to the touch. i'll hide secrets in there, they'll cut me up and they'll never know because i'll never tell, innocuous grapefruit juice top shelf in the fridge--oh yes, this is a vice they can't spurn me for. i'll be the rogue but i won't be the child, i'll cheat, oh yes, i've always been a cheat, a liar, a fraud-daughter, too many pejorative adjectives affixed to my name. don't think i can't wield those too.

intermittency

waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

trying to determine who i am without the rebellion.




deny me all you want but i stand by my lies, they're all i've got