Varia.

instructions on living.

2012-02-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

1.
you are the part of me that gets that anxious, unnameable flutter. the vapors. the balcony. the black lace veil.
you are the part of me that is insomniac. sound asleep. claustrophobic skydiver.
you are the part of me that is proper. well-behaved.
you are the part of me that is darkness. that is rogue.
you are the part of me that can't hack it. that is famous. loner. social butterfly.
you are the part of me that is quiet. loud. reckless.
you are the part of me that takes the greatest care. that has the best laid plans.
you are the part of me that is sweet. funny. weird. good. selfish. evil.
you are the part of me that hates to fly in airplanes. that wears dresses nearly every day. stockings with rips.
you are the part of me that obsesses. remembers. forgets. is early, always. late.
you are the part of me that wakes up. dreams. has nightmares.
you are the part of me that is untoward. sexy. prudish. adulterous. romantic. wistful. cold-hearted.
you are the part of me that browses anthropologie.com. that burrows in thrift stores.
you are the part of me that cares deeply about art. the part of me that cries at gossip girl.
you are the part of me that is healthy. ill. prone to. resilient.
you are the part of me that is reckless. adventurous. fake. sincere.
you are the part of me that is sure. zen. existential.

2.
i wish there were electric eyes. or maybe eyelashes?
i wish i had one more chance to bury the time capsule. then i would mark it better, wrap it in plastic, have better knowledge of the dirt, how things get lost. it would all be different if i remembered 7th grade. the dares. the nights away from home.
i wish everyone loved dancing.
i wish i could go to barcelona.
i wish i could hear my grandma's voice.
i wish i could touch a porcupine.
i wish i had enough money to buy a kajillion dresses. and $70 underwear of dark blue lace. and some european hillside, scraggly orchard, sprawling something.
i wish i looked like a swimming pool because then i'd be salty or chlorinated and private and 7 feet deep.
i wish i could touch you.

i wish i was the rest of it.
i wish i could go to the hot springs. the 1am kind.
i wish i didn't have to...(i was going to say work, but i'm not sure if that's true).
i wish i could forget the time i thought he was giving me the necklace, but he wasn't. the time i stole his expensive scrapbook, but i didn't mean to. the time she woke me up to say she didn't like me. that i was rude and dull. that she preferred the girls who had threesomes. and water fights. and were boyfriend stealers. i was too tired to tell her i was all those things too, of course.
i'd forgotten about that night under the bridge with them. how the cuter one liked me.
i wish i could give him everything. sometimes in the morning when he hasn't slept well and i put my hand on his chest, over his bicycle crash tshirt, i feel my magician prowess and the heat of him being alive.

3.
things i didn't see today:
-the Mediterranean. though i told the story of being robbed there recently at dinner.
-the long, flat gray of the water or the soft spot where it meets the sky.
-nighttime (it is only morning).
-the universe, its sprawling orbit of show-off stars.
-the authors of any of the books i'm reading; flaubert or henry miller.

i didn't see my dreams, however projected like sizzling little movies thrown from the back of my brain toward my closed eyelids.

4.
others:
divination involving thunder, involving lightning.
one who believes that nothing exists.
a kiss on the hand.
the incorrect pronunciation of a word.
a tightrope walker.
the study of bells.
to wander about deliriously.
soaked with rain.
the miraculous.

the forest!the desert!

so, there was an ill-fated maiden voyage.
also, conspiracy theories.
heaven.
jealousy.
cataclysmic events.
mystical things.
and ballet.
going the wrong way in the too-big world.

5.
i guess i used to say i didn't get jealous. i also used to say that i didn't regret things. that isn't always true. it's placing your palm near flame and stepping back into the air of your real life. what were you thinking? it's the pattern of the stand-off. it's platonic. the first half hour after i wake up. my knees, my legs, the bed, my feet. coffee. water. the kitchen. him. my phone glowing in my hand like a little amulet. facebook. stephen elliott. publisher's lunch, always delete without reading. resolutions! sweater. write. i begin with waking up. pick a skirt, one with layers and a ruffle at the knee. it will be impractical for biking later, which i will do. when it gets dark it will have gotten colder and the wind will pick up and swirl my skirt around as i pedal. and it will be a little agitating, and boys at stop signs will look at me, and i'll take the dark streets, and pedal faster, and it will start to feel amazing, my knees and that cool air, and home close, but not there yet.

the things i have done in my life.
post-yakuza morning.

the thing about me is that i rarely want to keep things secret.

'you are the quietest exhibitionist i've ever seen,' he told me in the church that spring. i was making my bible of packing tape and prayer experiments. he was visiting his friend the murderer. we were all channeling ourselves. what a time it was. i took it as a compliment. i've gotten louder. that was over ten years ago.

only images. (our own image).

a specific, but minor, memory.

a natural event.

specific syllables.

a line of advice or instruction.

to sit opposite to (and other measurements).

2012-01-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

i wish it was possible, unequivocally, to know when i was wrong. it's those sneaking times when i don't want to be. when i'm under the highway on my bike. when i am full of electric needles (literally--not poetically). those times are harder, to say/admit it. to feel my wrongness, the sparks and bits of its mysterious and enigmatic origin and trajectory. and then what?

i want to conduct studies, measure randomly. i could use gmail word searches as a form of divination. first, we will travel to new zealand. other forms of divination include thunder, birds' flight patterns, smoke, ash, and mirrors.

(when is it your turn? they ask. they mean babies. i say, probably never, just to see how it sounds and then what the third thing said will be).

he draws it in pen, how i am a wolf. i see that wolf-like glimmer in the mirror when i lock myself in the bathroom. when i pretend to be captivated by the yard.

i ask the I-Ching blatantly profound and impossible to really answer questions just to see what it will say. it says: union.

i still have sand in my shoes from when we drove out of the city.
on saturday we sat in the alley with our beers and the tin signs on the brick walls and i said, 'tell me something you are thinking about.' and he did.
i crawled into bed and i said, 'tell me a bedtime story.' and he did.

ex. of one possible study (our lapses):

6 min (mine)

33 min (his)

10 min (mine)

9 min (his)

11 min (mine)

6 min (his)

21 min (mine)

11 min (mine)

5 min (mine)

18 min (his)

21 min (his)

6 min (mine)

in looking carefully over this data i wonder what it could possibly mean that i feel as if i am always waiting for him to speak (write).

a search for obsession draws these results (in order):

-i'm kind of obsessed with that song.

-i'm obsessed with those Brontë sisters.

-he's a sex obsessed prick.

-i was never obsessed with that prison break show.

-i'm obsessed with her and i don't even know her.

-i'm obsessed with the desert.

-i was obsessed with being honorable.

-i'm obsessed with my so-called life.

-i am wildly (and i mean wildly) obsessed and in love with him.

-i enjoyed it and i feel borderline obsessed.

-i am obsessed with it in some ways.

-i am OBSESSED.

-i don't know why i am obsessed with this.

-a guy who is obsessed with having sex in graveyards.

-i am obsessed with this for you.

-i am obsessed with my novel.

-i have been obsessed with apocalyptic things.

-i am obsessed with drowning and images of drowning.

-i have been making a list of my obsessions.

january 29th

good thing there is a country between us. oceans (depending on which way you face). continents.

'do you see that?' i ask and point at the map. 'it's a continent.' but i hesitate, and wonder if it really is.
yes, it's a continent. we were born on different ones.

also january 29th

a. and i get a lot for our money. we stand up all night and the lights make our drinks blue and there are no cute boys, except ones that look way too young for us, wearing beanies and leaning pensively, and it's loud. i'm not being coy about my age, i just think i might feel that way for the first time. like, it's been 15 years since i saw a david lynch movie. we took the train all the way into new york, and on the way back everyone asked, 'what does it mean?" now i'm watching twin peaks and it's good and i guess i just think my brain is a bit different now, 15 years later. things aren't serious, but they can be. endometria. the profound mysteries of our bodies. oh, the theories. primrose oil and omega 6 and dandelion. the earth actually offers these things up to us. it's remarkable. 'i'm not, like, thinking this for the very first time,' i often have to disclaim. but, nettles. and red raspberry. it sort of blows my mind if i think about it a certain way. a certain way, for the very first time.

'i mean, he loves you,' she says. 'he had to get really far away from you.' there is a lot...that i sort of don't mind/hope this is true. that there are other things about life besides everyone loving everyone forever. there is france. there is death. there are concerts. there is yoga class. there is coincidence. and luck. there is football. there are presidential elections.

i also just mean girls my age are having babies and i can't even wear the right dress for the wind or the weather or the part of town and three men walk by and say, 'nice legs.' then, 'nice ass.' then, 'are you going to the airport?' thanks, thanks, no. standing up high, above the palm trees, i read henry miller because i'm early, his essay about sea voyages and being outcast. this part of town is gray and expansive, seemingly abandoned, sprinkled with palm trees.

another day: is everything a love note? every gesture, and each taste? probably.

when i think of him i want to buy really expensive nightgowns and wear them in empty rooms that don't have furniture yet. by this i mean dream logic.

anti-love note: i don't begrudge you love. i mean, of course i don't.

january 30th

'are you on e right now?' he texts.

i'm invoking slumber parties.

i'm noticing which trees have been cut down.

which parts of the road are in need of repair.
why wouldn't i be like this?

me: you're not out and about by any chance, are you?
him: i am, doll.
me: i kind of wish it was 2006.
him: i kind of hate being a grown-up.

i found secrets written in early january of my 2011 planner while i was looking for something else. they were marked with post-it notes and they took my breath away.

next, i search for LEAVE, STAY, and RESOLUTION (and sweet/kiss/fuck).

-do it or try to stay strong to my arbitrary vow?

-trying to stay (calm/busy/happy/warm)...these four, alternately.

-we can leave it at that.

-obeying my resolutions.

i have this little pink book from portugal. in it i keep track of excess and moderation. i have written the year (it's 2012) and some hearts on the cover. on certain pages i feel the need to distinguish reality from provocation and vagueness. i will, for example, really have someone look at my teeth (soonsoonsoon). i am making collages of blue cohosh. other things are just the tectonic psychological rumblings. the pitfalls of no matter what. i will make an appointment to get a haircut. i will drink a million cups of tea a day. i will remember my dreams.

a search for story:
-every story is a love story.
-my choice of story is a bit morbid perhaps.
-i need to tell you a story and then you need to tell me i'm crazy.
-new and improved spy story.
-an anecdotal story.
-there is a story always ahead of you.
-the realm of story.
-a failed story.
-the latest story in our minds.
-i know that story.
-my damn demon story.

yesterday:

this boy runs up to me and he says, 'do you know about astrology?'

he is sort of cute so i stop and i say, 'sort of.'

'my girlfriend says she is all fucked up because mercury is in retrograde. have you heard of that? what should i do?'

i look at him and don't really know how to answer. 'yeah, i've heard of it. i think it does fuck people up sometimes.'

on the other side of the street a funeral is letting out.

'she bought crystals. do you know what crystals will do?' he asks.

'um, i guess not really,' i say, though i could guess some obvious things about what crystals might do.

i want to tell him i've been inclined to wear my more hippie-ish earrings lately. that there is something bigger than all of us. that last week a man pressed lavender oil to my forehead with his thumb right hard in the center.

that everything sort of seems totemic and violently important. that he should look up at the sky, right this second, at its splattered patterns and fickle prettiness, that soon it will be february, that this girl he loves can't be serious, that i am a capricorn, but that it also matters where the moon was when you were born, and so that's a whole other thing.

'ok, thanks anyway,' he says and runs away.

even non-fiction.

2012-01-24T23:30:00.000-08:00

1-writing stories is a way to be with someone. it's a way to feel affection. affection is the only word that seems right. affection is what i feel, like i created him. any way that he feels soft or is kind. any way that he loves her. i think it's my doing, after all. just this morning i took away his reservations. i made her lift her dress above her head. this, just after breaking into the empty mansion, the ocean crashing outside the window. i made them do that and in that way i felt him.

(also, i walk by this window display in the morning on my way to work. there is a giant quartz. a red dress. a fur coat. the store never appears to be open. i also walk by a swing someone has strung from a tree branch over the sidewalk. and road construction. and a confusing art gallery. and where the men play dice. and where the cook was shot on his cigarette break. i think about him a lot.)

2-the cab driver sang me a song. he didn't know my name and he sang, "Laura..." he said, 'i hope it isn't serious.' he said, 'how is your love life?' i wish there was a way to track why i remember certain things later. why i remember them crossing fillmore in a part of town i'm only ever in when i go to the doctor. i go inside the store with its white floorboards and i pick up tiny shoes the size of my palm and the woman eyes me and i want to tell her, 'you have no idea. and neither do i.' later when i tell the story, i tell it like he was psychic, and another man i barely know sings my name and laughs, and the sound of it...i don't know. the sound of my name inside these unknown voices, in song. and i hope it isn't anything serious. serious serious serious.

3-'well, you're so young,' she says. and here i thought i was full of dust.

4-even paul newman had an affair somewhere inside that happy 50 year marriage. butch cassidy and the sundance kid is a really good movie. we all do a lot of different things over the course of our years.

5-what a dumb word it is, sadness. what a thing to not foresee. being a widow. or what treachery it will be. the mistake, of course, will be your own.

6-here is the thing about rain. you can be outside in it. you can be inside. 'take those off,' he says. always, i want to feel closer. i wake up inside a video. inside a letter. i thought so hard about writing letters last night that i thought he would have written me one while i slept and it would be waiting. but what i'm forgetting is autonomy. bad-ass-ness. how it feels to dance.

7-this song.

8-these lyrics: and this i remain.

9-i don't know where i am (san francisco. or: at work. walking home, in the movie theatre). what day it is (tuesday). how old i am (33). i feel like i am floating. like i am wearing second hand cashmere. like i am a silly girl. like i am psychic too. trivial. a hermit. an ant. depends when you ask me. one day i am scoffing at gifts, the next i'm admitting what no one else can. what wisdom. 'you can't be serious,' he writes in the margin.

10-'are you psychic?' i ask the cab driver. 'yes,' he says. 'is this the future?' i ask the man who checks me in. 'yes,' he says. i meant to tell him i was kidding. how for five whole fucking minutes i cared so deeply about that video game. the magazine for overweight women. the women around me, far sicker. far more experienced in these things. actually growing life. actually closer to the end, but only technically.

11-an example of my lack of professionalism. 'i appreciate the messages of the universe,' i say. these messages pop up and i respond furiously. these conversations seem vital.

12-what i look up on the internet. 'only work related things,' i say. advice and love notes and witty banter. maybe he's doing it for me. my equilibrium. to remind me that, either way, i am skin and cells and cycles and wholeness. to remind me that, either way, it isn't about us. not mostly. the kind of patience he means is patience so profound and enduring, it's not even close to the kind of patience i have. maybe he means to tell me that what matters has already been said, and that what happened still exists, cannot be taken back, ghosts of a sort. to want anything else is to miss the point, to be seeking punishment. i guess many (most) things are for their own sake entirely. what is it that we really build or wait for? it is the joy, now, of typing these words. it is the walk, this morning, trying to angle my knee over my wobbly ankle, looking at it all again. it is not what will happen or did.

13-my position on pornography.

14-what i borrow and lend.

15-he knows the tone he is setting. he knows the opportunity.

16-i have this czech necklace. i rarely sleep in jewelry, but sometimes i do. i went to see this assassin movie alone, and it had certain interesting qualities. i think i probably won't ever watch another horror movie. i bought junior mints. i don't usually buy junior mints. i rode the bus. i forgot i hate the bus. i often remember the moment we were robbed. someone might just yank something from your hands. it happens all the time. not just near seas and volcanoes, though that has long since stopped being a memory. i've sort of been paying attention to the primaries. i have this tiny planner that barely anything can fit inside. the impracticality of it seems very important to me and i carry it everywhere, to meetings, where i mark down things that i would remember anyway and write numbers into the blank months and feel good that things are happening.

17-'beautiful ass,' he tells me.

'the cervix appears unremarkable,' the report says.

18-being in love is scary. it depends what kind of in love, but most of them are pretty scary. we talk till the candles burn down about our lives, and our husbands, and our writing, and children, and being creative. i say certain things out loud for the first time. though the saying can't alter actual objects or travel through time, it does i think slough off some unnecessary skin.

19-daydream is the wrong word for this morbid shit.

20-and this song.

21-and this is what i mean tonight. i hesitate more these days because i feel what i mean changing and fluctuating so much. it depends on my surroundings, on what music i'm listening to, what i'm wearing, what else has happened. it feels like such a wild impermanence of thought. one day convinced, and the night an anxious rush of, no, not that, and sleeping, and then the morning. it's not unpleasant, just unmoored, directionless, air, softness, a rush, a turned around, like i've been spun, like i have powers or timelessness. like i'm the girl in his song, or the title of the noir movie after the football game. a name that was chosen those years ago. not inside most of the time of this world, and now, such fuss, such talk, such muddle, such wonder.

the weather where you are.

2012-01-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

any story told twice is a fiction.

-grace paley

first, an assignment.

i was reminded of civilization. then the names of roads and months.

there are things i'm trying. revolutionary vs. "supposed to..."

i wanted to tell him it's raining here, where i am, and probably will be for the next week or so. i am aware he must get cold and then warm himself again. i haven't thought about it much beyond that. his weather, i mean. snow, or at least colder than here.

lately i wear socks and turn the heater on.

dreaming in my sleep of our dark house. carpentry. a domestic scene. the concerns one must share. chores, and where the water is getting in. how the door sticks. what we will eat. how the wax gets on the wall or how it is time to go to sleep. the portrait and where it came from. how the mantle might crowd. my line of shoes, diagonal, toes pressed to wall.

i cannot build floors, but i can paint them purple. i cannot find a new voice. i looked up indelible though i already knew it had something to do with permanence (which nothing is, he tells us, as we hang upside down every wednesday night stretching out the place where our hearts should go). there was another word, and my impatience, and three pages later i wonder...was the word inchoate? no. i forgot to look it up. i think of my ribcage like a nest. it's all ego. caring what is held there. caring about its beat, how it might sound to you, thudding there.

i have painted my toenails red. i have written this in five variations of more and less intimate. it keeps not being about what it's about. celebrity divorce. decisions about______. less intimate now.

we must have known that we were young then. that this was the very first time.

and now, when he googles himself, he is dead.

he was sorry for how it went, i think. the t-shirt of his was pale and thin. it rained that whole entire year. i was eighteen and had learned to wear eyeliner right.

rumor has it he owns a sun room, and lets things happen as they may.

we choose the same scenes to photograph. we are both spiders, and though we've fled far, those are still the winter scenes we prefer. i'm not sentimental, but i can see right through him. see the vines in him. perhaps it's not mutual, but i stay far away just in case.

we are talking about mouths. kissing with them. we are talking about beds. the photos underneath them in a shoebox. we are both not talking about the same thing, right? that same thing being each other.

in addition, there is the future.

rivers (which ones? she asks. rush, i say. i'm hesitant. names of rivers are the sort of thing i don't know). i also don't know many of the nuances of the civil war.

near escapes brush by me, a cold wind or bullet glance.

platonic wrists.

first dates.

'come meet me,' i say into the phone, my umbrella blowing inside out.

there was a time.

that's the wrong phrase. five thousandth date. salsa and christmas lights and the rain all glowy through them and bets with the universe and laughing because we already made up our mind.

for example: the dark fifteen minute drive to the quick-e-mart. each thing ached. tree. ditch. fluorescence. me. we drove that way so many times. by ponds, by bridges, by apple orchards, by baptist churches. it was wasted on us, or it wasn't. or we've never let it go. it made us, bit by bit.

for example: he got old enough to live in a house. to have a wife. websites.

'i don't have the kind of passion you do,' he said, but he had no idea. his head would explode.

in his letter he told me that he understood my obsession with the pacific. it was OK, and i should go there and i should swim in it. now i live beside it, a thing neither of us saw coming probably, though we weren't looking very hard. we were daydreaming our church brawls, weren't we? we broke into mansions, but they were empty inside. the gates to the driveways were locked, but the beaches were open, a strange oversight. i remember things that didn't happen.

i didn't put any of this in my diary. 'that's not why i'm here,' i write under the date. i think usually i write the wrong date. i wrote january 20. that was yesterday. i want to have other concerns. not first loves. not revolvers. i leave a pillow on the street for him.

'you decide, and i'll say yes,' i say.

black stockings and crushed velvet.
twin bed.

a borrowed dress, a cardigan in a paler shade.

i had a dream of three love letters. i laid them side by side. one discussed dancing, how our bodies fit together. one had charts and arrows. one was written by a man i couldn't remember.

i do ballet while i wait for things to toast. i'm famished. it's all so obvious. delicious.

'three different people?' he asks and laughs at me.

('this is where we sleep,' she told him and she pointed to the bed. and he knew it was over. seeing someone's bed will do that. their life without you, they are trying to say.)

he said, 'you still cause trouble for me. don't i for you?' i forget if he really said that or if i answered. us so busy wishing for the happiness of the other. that basement floor, the pull-out couches. the marriage proposals, stripteases, and mythologies. even a decade later he wouldn't leave me there with anyone else. did we grow up outside? literally, in the woods, on the roads, climbing in the windows of the mills. at some point before we were born those mills stopped functioning. the polo field. the car crash bridge. the haunted one. the junk yard.

it was march. it was december. i'm fairly certain it was summer--july. it lasted years. he called parties where i was. people came calling my name, with the phone hanging against the wall, back when no one had a cell phone and he just had to tell me. i think that he wasn't coming there, and i shouldn't expect him. i think he was calling to ask, how dare i?

it would take me so long. so, so long. how dare i was a good question.

first, i'm supposed to remember a person i barely knew. this is when we were experimenting with jail. dying. channeling ourselves. writing prophecy. bathtubs. that house is a real estate office now, with the same roof and white shingles, with the same perfect party porch, and a sign with green letters, and the same yard.

he hurled himself from cars. liked it. but what could he do to help me? my subconscious has forsaken him.

even running up the mansion stairs and busting open the secret rooms and unearthing the coffins, there is nothing to discover here.

days are quick and complicated. sometimes it's all you can do. i find myself very far away from it. not indelible after all, and maybe i wished it was. still, i've left things out. getting out of bed in his apartment that never grew familiar to me, the one where he lived when i finally left him. i picked up his paintbrushes and i think i pushed the bristles to my face in the dark. i knew i was on my way out.

and a lot more happened after that.

i grew up on a road called rock mills. then black haw. if i only had six words one of them would be california. i'm working on the other five. a long, "oh," like in the song. light.

i don''t know enough about meteorology. velocity.

i don't know how to say, 'if you go...'

i don't know how to think of it, or if to think of it at all.

stand still.

2012-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

i always have the best intentions of resisting you.
but you show up in my dreams and drug me with something where the dose goes from a needle into my eye. it carves what i see into delicate red lines. you tell me, 'i think i'm going through a phase.' you tell me that in the dream but you must mean it in real life too.
your novel isn't out yet.

i'm fairly certain this dream means i need to write more. put everything else away. or it might be about how we argued about the right angle for a tattoo that is text. i remember the first time i saw your chest with that written across it. we were in a cab and you'd come back. it was november and you were wearing a sweater and i must have seen one of the higher letters. the d maybe.

oh, pre-rain valencia in the morning.
her name. and mine.
hearts hanging from the telephone wires.

just because i think this doesn't mean i wish it. i know about the neck and every tilt of it. and what the tilting means. i know what i'd be willing to give up in an instant.

oh, and there is also everything i know about dying.
it's an interesting side effect though, isn't it? you didn't mean to show how much it meant, or what it might reveal. but it did. it seemed like something little and it peeled back, then peeled back some more.

i think i might be in love with henry miller. imagine you could order the world, he said. what would you really do? respect the privacy of the other person's soul and then you will know how to love them. i like reading his words out loud at midnight before we watch the daily show on my computer.

'listen,' i say to you.
'what do you think it means?' you say.
your head is on my lap and i can picture your private soul like this crackling, burning, circular, magical, wild, and encoded thing. so it means that.

it isn't enough to be happy.
i love indecipherable french movies if i'm in the right mood. chandeliers and dresses with lace backs and murder and gardens where the shadows are cast the wrong way and monologues in french detail the waiting, passion, death.

i took a series of polaroids of the ocean and the sun and you. they all developed into a spectrum of blue before fading to a pale yellow. we walked along the beach, along the graffiti of bison, along the tide coming in like we always do. we face south toward the glittering beauty of all that pollution. everyone has always thought doom was coming. the surfers so far out, but only up to their knees at the sandbar. living in europe between two world wars. either i can get my money back or frame all eight of them, in varying degrees of their faulty development, a thumb print, the shadow of your profile, what should have been the sea.

'what are artifacts?' he asks.
'why did they bury weapons in their graves?'

put everything away for an hour. even my writing. the pursuit that gives me my shape and my meaning. scan my brain for dreams in the morning. cork my sedatives. i pour wine on our house plant. it doesn't get better than this still life: pasta on thrift store plates of sunbursts, wine with a pretty font, my computer with my spy story up on the screen. i'd also made a list to include the 18th floor, and us in our best, and manhattans in candlelight. my skirt is belted high at my waist and gives me posture like my great-great-grandmother might have had. we know a tiny bit, but the more we grasp for it, the further fictional it slides.

i drive highway one in a car that isn't ours.
'it's too fucking beautiful,' we yell at the turns where we come upon the treacherous opening up to the water and down. we listen to thrash and radio shows about capsized ships. it takes a boat an hour to sink. we disagree over the part where she drowns or swims to shore. i'm pretty sure she drowns.

also:
-beer in giant glasses on sunday with the golden globes on silent and the bartender with a broken arm.
-'my wife lost her mittens,' you tell the ticket taker. sometimes i like to hear you say, 'my wife,' and stand near you and just hear the phrase in the air, like in the air of the movie theatre. and i am the wife who lost her mittens in the theatre, and i need to go back in now with my husband to find them. and then we will take the train home and we will talk about our day and we will say, 'i had such a nice day with you.'
-plenty of this is hard...looking for jobs and going to job interviews, having jobs, and counting our money. ezra pound sent henry miller a postcard that asked, 'do you ever think about money?' it would be interesting to be a very poor person who never thought about money.
-or you could look at it this way: today is the only thing. it's like all days in that way. each one of them, in their turn, are the absolute only thing.

beginning at 33.

2012-01-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

she jumps up toward the christmas lights strung from tree branches to apartment eaves.
there are reasons to like winter. the branches, the lights, the night air like it is spring where we are.

we read our fortunes in a self-help book. we are predators. we have to focus. we should only pick our favorites.
we could recreate the moors. we are in party dresses. band photos. we could do those dance moves. we could only leave places by dancing out the door.

walking in the morning my mind rushes and floods. i want to write. i want to write until i understand or until something feels properly kept. i stop at windows. boots and furs and layers of necklaces and the plastic shoulders of the mannequin. a giant bed in the window. flowers woven through the chain link.

beautiful things and the things i need.

we walk home in the middle of the road. in the morning he wraps his arms around me. we laugh so hard. there isn't that much to clean up. there are cupcakes leftover. my dress is on the gold chair. i sit on the floor and he sits on the couch behind me and teases me. i open the window. i understand our record player, our speakers. i bake and listen to garage rock. he remembers the stories i tell him that i forget. about the man who told me he was jesus, our lord and savior. about the woman on the bus with the corn in the cob in her purse.

at one point i just looked in the mirror, at its frame, and the glass as long as my body.

'you're lucky, laura,' he says. 'you have a good life.'

how she sings and sighs her exclamations, how he says impetuous and brave. the matte mirrors on the road, the tired hipster boys sitting on benches with their skinny legs and coconut water. a photo of her great-grandfather with his name on the wall, and hers. a photo of the white walls of greece. a photo of my grandmother, her trench coat and black high heels.

we sit on the couches in the dark. we crowd. we get close. we play games we disagree over. we talk and talk and talk.

chances to be zen are scattered all over these shining hills. my bike flat. my spider bite. ingredients. walking all the way back. waking up to read the book that is his fictionalized real life sea voyage. fiction and our memories are the same, he says. it's ok. he looks sexy wearing the tiny silver gun below his throat. not fighting the man who sits beside me at the table. sitting on the steps to eat food. kale soaked in vinegar and oil. cabbage. tofu. lemonade with ginger floating in it.

magnetic magnetic magnetic.

a sheet pulled up to project the movie, the purple sky beyond. the storm, how it might look from underneath, from storm-height, and even from above.

evoke and evocative.
sensual is sort of a silly word. but, oh, the senses. wet footprints. and kneecaps on tile. and walking at dusk. and hands on tablecloths. and how our ages feel. our height. gray stockings, or black. knuckles. whatever we feel is permanent. ink and our initials and even our pulses buzzing. the california mornings of our birth. the two little girls that just started living today. their beautiful names, the vowels, the sounds, the a, the y.

there is no way to write until i have properly explained it. that things do grow better and better. seven years ago i was twenty-six. seven years from now i will be forty. when she is my age i will be 66. darkness will descend, the book tells us. everyone flings their heads back and laughs so hard. our ice cubes melt. it is 7pm on a sunday. it isn't that we don't believe it. it's loud, it's early, it's too good and all true.

red jacket with pockets and day planner full of birds and bags of empty champagne bottles.
i have to cry at the kitchen table at midnight because i'm grateful. and i have to cry in the morning because people are actually born. can you imagine? one day they don't exist, and the next day they do. there is a lot in the world: like politics and doom and all of us melting. but there is that too. and my dress zips silver along my ribcage. some nights glow red for reasons we can't explain. and we twist. we make it.

someone you hold when they are three days into this world. that sends you zooming down white hallways. remembering, too, where they can go. we are only incandescent.

'it only brings me joy,' she says.
'me too,' i say.
she jumps with her hand outstretched toward the string of lights.
the gray chiffon of my skirt hits my leg.
our jackets.
the sidewalks where we right ourselves.

it's early and impromptu. we meet. the sentences of her lower arms. our stories. the arrests of our neighborhood. the mason jars glued to the ceiling. the tin lanterns hung in the trees. someone climbed there. blueberries and powdered sugar and slices of avocado and turkish delight wrapped in plastic and salsa described as fire and bulbs of garlic.

there is an anticipation always. what about being thirty-four? what about waiting long enough to ask. what will i get. when will she write me back and say YES. when will i act. what will i remember from this time. what stories will he remind me of. what decisions are being made right this second. polaroid film in silver and flashes of color. everyone else but us is asleep. like the nights we slid through the dark, windows down, shouting off the bridge. we are still that way. and older somehow.

a cake is smashed on the sidewalk. even that seems perfect.

'that is the point at which some other part of my life began,' he says.

the truth is in the center of you.

and it is always getting late.

december (ONE through SIX)

2012-01-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

do you anticipate sentiment and poetry and reverie?

do you expect passion and stimulus and melodrama?

-charlotte brontë

ONE: home. west coast.

he leaves for the airport early in the morning.

before we fall asleep he says, 'do you believe in ghosts?'

i hear a clang on our fire escape that i know are the little metal hands of a ghost.
i think of the little boy who lived inside the electricity of my previous home.
i think of the devil i saw in the barn on the hill as a child.
i think of the expensive house on the cliff-edge with the ominous corners. we heard the ocean all night long.

these are some of the important haunted stories of my life. yet in many ways i've never had to question anything.

'yes,' i say, 'i think so.'

but when i think of the people i know who have died they are, in fact, very far away. back when i practiced being a smoker for a week in my early twenties, j. shared his cigarettes with me. we sat close in the cab and on the stairs of the subway. he helped me with my jacket like men do in the movies. when he died he was far older than me and now he is far younger. he said he'd kiss me when he knew me better, but we never knew each other better.

i don't mean him when i think of ghosts. though maybe on the night in the country when i was sewing a hot pink button back onto a hot pink coat and we talked about him in the few weeks closest to his death. when i think of him it is dark blue. it is that night walking. it is his dark hair.

i don't mean a., who i can only picture petulant, hand on hip, beautiful, teaching me dance moves. teaching me self-defense.

i don't mean anyone i've known who was alive once.

'who do you mean then?' he asks.

i think of the 1800s and murder. i don't know who i mean. like so many things, these stories are for the living people.

on the airplane when they bring the oxygen tank for her, i start to cry. her fear bothers me more than my own. i watch the kardashians. and that's weird too. her child sits wide-eyed between his parents. later, he has fallen asleep. i wonder if he will remember this when he is an adult.

at what age is the first time you question heaven. i forget.

the only quality of time is actually timelessness. the slow turn of the ceiling fans in the sun-warmed wooden ceiling. the december corner of mission and 20th that is so beautiful i just have to take a picture of the sky even though i know it won't translate. the plywood painted gunmetal. i need to think that it is beautiful enough to keep. and try.

or his road trips with girls on highways i've not traveled. i can conjure the palettes of them. pure blues blasted with sun. the right details for the time. the muted hues. the confusing life of a spy.

or the photos of my father when he was 16 that i've never seen before. the photos of me i've never seen before. maybe eight years old. hula-hooping on the brick patio in bare feet. that's the thing i was trying to describe all this time. what that felt like. literally bare feet on brick. i guess i wasn't wondering about what happened after we die.

in order to fall asleep i must press my feet between his ankles. this is a habit from before we lived in separate cities for a time. i wrote him a letter on wrapping paper and folded it into his pocket. his wedding ring came in the mail today, on the last day of the year with its burnished silver and secret diamonds. i found that letter recently and it said, the brightest routes.

in order to fall asleep i must turn to my back and put one hand on my heart and the other on my stomach and contemplate...i don't know, everything, i guess. that first slow spark of sleep. my dreams are layers and layers and layers.

the smashed screen of an iPhone. him, a lot. wandering the most incredible architecture, both of buildings and of water. being in the future. episodic things that make perfect and complicated sense.

eight vignettes of a marriage. biting. risotto. sake. the bookstore. tequila bar. the dress that won't let us get out the door. parties on roofs and stairwells that are cement like college and strung with lights like college too and lingered at too late.

TWO: home. east coast.

immediately i don't want to wear my own clothes. i want to wear the soft gray t-shirts i find in my mom's closet, my grandmother's burgundy socks. i want to wear black dresses i find hanging in the shed at the dump, i want to wear izod sweaters a shade of green i would never choose, and 1970's leather over mini-dress nightgowns. i want costume jewelry to laden fingers and wrists and neck. i want to buy new underwear, red lace and black shimmer. i want to not wash my hair and wear red lipstick and listen to haunting music on repeat and photograph myself in fuchsia on tree stumps and in yellow party dresses in the dried grass by the empty wintertime pool. i want to search bookshelves for what i wrote when i was seventeen. sift through antique necklaces. tables piled with mink and lamps and nathanial hawthorne and lace and boxes of nails and juice glasses with the pale red outlines of vintage cartoon characters. i guess i want to find things. but also something else.

to be antique something must be 100 years old.

you can hear the other worlds best at 3am. the ones you hope are there. the ones that must be.

you can seek and leave some of the mystery.

if you are awakened every morning at 4am you have missed it by an hour. but still the fog outside the window might be this odd sort of red, and you might take a moment to hear the echoes of sleep falling away, the dreams lingering to see if you will be returning to them.

i think about:

(i can't say).

the fire fills up the cabin with heat.

one thing i wrote when i was seventeen: he is thunder. i am lightning. i count the seconds in between.

then the global warming warmed up magic hour fills dusk with this perfect light and air.

i fling my feet out from the blankets.

i open the windows.

catherine and heathcliff are wandering the moors. it's getting so good and juicy.

they are promising to haunt each other. promising to fling themselves on the grave of the other.

also, the boys of the wire are getting sneaky.

it rains.

THREE: the city.

i miss having a roof. i have gotten good at this cinematic thing i can do. this secret heart and secret cinema. in the moments where reality leaves off, i can see moments (hours) beyond.

it is how things feel, for one. but also how they look. and how i imagine them. often the world is impossibly beautiful, thick with colors, with things happening.

lush. tilting toward intimacy. shoes taken off.

a little less afraid. but it's hard to say if more or less is at stake.

it is easy to forget ourselves when there is so much to be.

cul-de-sac.

it's 2am and i'm...

FOUR: the country.

so, say i get the dress that someone left hanging there. it has a low-cut back in a v-shape, and small black cloth covered buttons that trail up it. it has a long slit up the thigh and a silk sash around the waist.

i am going to wear this. i wore it on the last night of last year. and i will wear it on some nights in this year when i will be 33 years old. i wore it on the roof and looked out and no one else was there.

i dream i have 1,000 dresses. you can see me in them, right? it is why i am taking the time to describe the best one. this is important.

FIVE: the suburbs.

i am diesel trucks and beaded pearled vintage capes and mantras and 4pm wine and fireplaces and the wind outside.

our private lives. the day-to-day. the up-close. who knows? we all might punch each other in the side of the head. tell love stories. admissions (make them). bite each other's fingers. knock things out of our hands to kiss better in our kitchens. buy the latest translations with blue lace across the cover. but then you can zoom out too and wonder wonder wonder.

wonder at childhood and 30 year marriages and adultery and happiness and the sense of smell or sound. wonder at time and ghosts and landscapes. i joke, but i'm serious too. i'm serious, but i'm joking. the temperature and the fetish. how something might shatter. how you might walk the u-shapes to the spy bridge in the dark, to where the diamonds were left, the secrets sold. there is no way to predict. you can only do your best. have your reasons.

what is essential. what is excess. what is too much to ask. i consider how my diary will be misinterpreted in later centuries. the footnotes no one will flip to. the language that will be outdated. the initials that no one will be able to place.

SIX: new year's resolutions.

now might be the time to talk about resolutions, a thing i like to do (both the making and the talking of them). i think the ritual is important, even for those unkept ones. maybe especially for them.

my grandmother said to travel a lot and take many lovers.

driving 211 often at sunset. you never get any older except in relation to other people, other times of your life. houses that inch closer and closer to the river. each year older i feel differently about getting older. this year i feel that so much is constantly in states of beginning, that so much is exactly as i'd always hoped it would be.

at the restaurant where it was too early for anyone else to be there i imagined i was a victorian woman running away, when it was hard for women to do those sorts of things, when they had to tear through the orchard at night in the rain and catch a cold that killed them and that sort of thing. the male waiters hovered and flitted about and called me, 'ma'm...' and i tipped them a lot and went off back into the night.

imagine piling your kids in the car and taking off. imagine the future as it prepares itself for you, and you predicting it, unwitting, impossible.

for now it is sunset, this hot pink splatter everywhere. it is his hands, his beautiful eyes, the two of us.

two days in, resolve is natural and easy.

no one really knows anything.

i dream i meet his family.

then, that we have a baby.

that i know how to hold her and care for her and that this makes him love me.

we are also trying to escape.

someone jumps from an impossible height.

we are on a ship.

we are in a hospital.

where was i last night?

it is the future again, everything metallic and foreboding.

it means what you want it to mean. fantasy and compensation.

OK, but back to resolutions:

here is what i promise.

what will be more. less.

the attention i will pay. the care i will take. the work i will do.

there are these towns with quiet roads.

there are all these different cities.

there are stretches of suburb with ordinances for beige.

there are rivers with names. hazel. rush.

there is a map that tells us how many thousands of feet we might plummet.

but again it turns out we don't.

there is analogue and sex and neural pathways.

i want him to be happy, but i also to think of me, which is something different from a happiness, though not its opposite. that's not a resolution exactly. looking at less screens. spending more time with my heart over my head. no facebook in the morning while my brain is its softest and most creative, that sort of thing.

i think i might be an urbanite forever. i unpack, piling all my clothes on the floor. thrift store dresses with hot pink flowers or gray stripes. we meet for brunch. we laugh so hard my hands go numb. we stand outside in the half-rain saying goodbye for a long time, making plans, talking about our days. we are glad to be together again. later we will text about our week, what parts of it are free. we will get dressed up and go out. we will stay in.

these days are our life. and the end of our year.

courting a car crash.

2011-12-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

Part One. Before.

coming upon it was like a dream. the body glistening black like it was wet almost. the accident had happened hours before. the wheels were not spinning, though i remember them that way. the car was upside down in the middle of the road. whatever had happened already having happened a long time ago. and us, coming from somewhere. i take the alley to not see. it's more than quiet. the inside of things usually glows blue. other people's homes at night glow blue. people are kind, let you pass. people speed. i guess it happens for all reasons: fault and chance alike.

anywhere can be a performance. a place with white walls or off-white walls. a place where bloodied shirts crumple where they are thrown. a place where people take their clothes off. a woman wrapped in cloth is walking the hill. i am not new to driving but i don't do it often. i prefer back roads or long stretches of highway. at the top of the peak we can see clearly for miles, the swell of traffic off the bridge, even the cities across the bay wavering gold there. it's incredible to be alive. girls in a limo screech and howl into the night. they are saying the same thing i think. i can put myself right behind where he is standing and he keeps me warm and i turn my head to rest on the back of his neck, and across his shoulders. and i breathe in and i just think, thank you for this second. holy shit, thank you.

in 1977 my grandfather wrote: each day is like a portrait of my whole entire life in miniature.

people are either getting better or getting worse. going out of my way just the smallest bit is so strange. the other side of the street. an earlier part of the day. lemonade with cayenne piled at the bottom. just a little bit of a highly addictive thing. these pleasures of ours can be turned inside out. satellite images of a city i hardly know at all. even constants like south or north are arbitrary. the underneath part of highways. the yards and cement of the rough parts of town. walking the wrong direction toward the beautiful water. i use the bridge to orient myself. i pretend i don't see him looking back at me.

anomie.
or the smoke and holy water of a blessed place.
the sound of my shoes on church-floor.
i like the idea of kneeling.
of sacredness.
of walking out into the cold to hear his voice, my arms bare.
of her photo, pale yellow. and the mystery of each person behind the camera too.

the simplicity of it: his hand on the run in my stockings. or in my hair.
the simplicity of it: we are born and we will die.
i think i didn't really believe it was truly possible. but she is gone from this earth.

Part Two. After.

riding backwards on the train, the one i think my dad hopped illegally back when it was possible to do such things. the childhood homes of my parents swelling with additions and modern roofs, cleaned of ivy. we sneak away to drink irish whiskey. the street is narrow. along the sides of it are dark branches wrapped with white lights. i am surprised both by what i remember and what i forget. it is when we are sleeping that our brains decide what is important. laying the penny on the track. being early. clues, i guess. artifacts. what part of me can i turn toward what part of you? what choreography of closeness.

i write letters on the plane and then give them to the flight attendants. i love people's initials. i love foreshadowing. far below me the lights of the earth are scattered out in pin-pricks. for the first time i feel like i believe in flight. i learned that a city can build and dismantle itself all in one day. the lines of life can soften and embolden simultaneously. your hands can grow weak. light, gold, turquoise, a warm pink, chain link, the opaque of factory smoke against the sky over the highway. purple glass.

do what you want with your life, she says. the man beside me on the plane is doing algebra problems for six hours. there is something quite beautiful about algebra problems if you aren't trying to solve them. for 48 hours after she says that i just think...yesyesyesyesyesyes. i will.

i don't ever want to feel finished.

i am in a wine cellar.
a cemetery.
a catholic church.
a subway.
a bar with the heat turned high and football on. and no music.
an airport.
a mexican restaurant with christmas lights in the window.
a road outside the city.
back inside my own tiny and perfect home.
"this doesn't look like oakland," i say. i feel dreamy and strange.
"it's san francisco," he tells me. "you live here."
i fall into my life.
it has rained and the streets are damp.
there are pale purple flowers on the table in my favorite vase that once i thought i'd lost and i lay on the kitchen floor until i remembered where it was.
a margarita stirred and the edges of the glass laced with salt.
a half-gesture they call it, when you reach your palm up toward someone. it means they are meant to take it, press theirs down on top. and he does.

i fell asleep every night in that strange bed with my phone breathing beside me. the pale chandeliers floated underneath me. we stole wine. we walked through the cold. we sat at the feet of the virgin mary in the grotto. we all share blood and belong to each other.
and her spirit is in us.

the thing about every single second is that you can feel each one. each step evocative. even hurtling through the air, feverish, anxious, mourning, besotted, disoriented, unsure. you can. they pass and pass and pass, but you can feel them.

muse.

2011-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

i forgot how good the bell jar is.
i wonder where that cowboy is now, the one she met in the bar. or her friend in the white dress.
the thing about happiness is that it has nothing to do with what you might think.

the salem witch trials. or sassy magazine. rihanna. joseph cornell's L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode.
how do all things exist in one world?

twice described as graceful.
maybe that's what's happening to me now.
fall asleep visualizing cloudy water full of dirt.
it's him and other things and it settles. you have to picture it settling and it does.

he said to try saying your own name inside your head.

Laura.

this lurid in-between. not day, not night...but...
i don't know. here, my heart pushes forward once with more force. but quickly, and is absorbed again back into my regular heart. the one that is calm, trusting, steady. that one.

i wear black stockings. i love the feeling of stockings on linoleum.
i water our rosemary plant. it can't dry out even once. we are totally going to kill it.
i see my reflection and i open the window and i water it and i look out at the roofs and yard and fire escape.
once, at night, the alarms go off next door. the rooms are bathed in these blue/silver flashes.

it doesn't matter if you really hear me (this) or if i just imagine you hearing.
being warm is one way.
dancing on the median is one way. the lights behind our heads like halos.
it is about death. everything is.
i buy this giant necklace at the thrift store. stones the color of champagne. a golden elephant tiny at the clasp.
dancing on the corner on my way to work. looking down the street. a man is standing beside me looking through binoculars.

how do we own anything? or what does it mean, i guess?
how our hands reach greedily into each other's jackets.

how i waited for you to tell me anything at all.
how both our arms fit in one sleeve.

telling each other things.

we should never be that far from each other. whether it is with words or mouths. i mean there ought to be a certain closeness no matter what.

'are you OK?' he asks, when i want to look at his face for a very long time.

morning is one way. night another.

imagine this silent decade. though it's been eleven years.
i'll age.
my table covered in candles and candlesticks. and i take my rings off to roll pizza dough. and i go to the store for wine with a beige label and maroon letters. cheap wine is weeknight wine now the signs say.

this is best done in-person.
what will i describe?
i used to be so scared to fly. i see now that a plane crash is just one thing. ironic or about timing. disastrous. other things are illnesses. long lives where other things are lost.
what will i describe?
my box of chinese herbs arrives.
my tinctures line the shelf.
the warm rush of wind is eerie. some misplaced tropical air in our temperate winter city.
he leaves the doors open. then pulls thick turquoise curtains over them.
behind them is a garden in the dark.

she writes me out a prescription: hold a rock.
surprisingly we have brought back rocks from many places: mendocino, monteray, big bend, encinitas.
he gives me one that is the right shape.

he knows me very well.
i dream about him though he is right beside me.
i dream we are in the bed we are sleeping in.
i dream about the rosemary.

always with the floods and oceans and oceans flooding, though they can't really do that.
always with the houses that sprawl and build themselves and move their rooms around.
always with us trying to find some spot.
one thought after waking.

also anticipation. even for summer.

while i brush my teeth i stand first on one leg and then on the other. it's the subtleties i'm interested in. the light has burnt out. my golden jar of eyeshadow has lasted a year and a month. one of my feet is weird.
in high school i had a video camera.
we used the emergency flashers as our mood lighting.

the river was usually shallow by the turn.

i get distracted by this game on my phone with a dolphin that dodges jellyfish and eats coins and rides inky squids up into the air. i am on my seventh mission.

'you look different,' he says.

people are saying that a lot lately. our bodies are universes. literally, biologically so.

'you look nice.'

situational. verbal.
deliriously crass. serious.

it all basically feels like a dream. our furniture pushed to the walls. up until 3am, or maybe later. sitting in the dark and sleeping in it. if i had it to do again. i don't have it to do again, thankfully.

close your eyes and think your own name. it's strange.
i find a comfort in the acknowledgment of the vastness. leaning back a little bit into it. how the desert seeps orange around the edges. how it is about cool, calm. what good does it do to list figurative language in the form of a multiple choice test. long ago you might have been flung in the river if anyone suspected you.

and here's how i'm faring.

for starters.

2011-11-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

here: i'm grateful for my teeth that i got to bury in stone.

for bare feet on brick patio. for copper. violet.

i'm grateful for the back roads that take a long time. for the skyscrapered night we rise up into, our skin warm, feathers in our hair, our alcohol poured into blue glass, the stars splattered against dark.

i'm grateful you were brave enough to tell me, albeit in a dream. i've been meaning to tell you the things i've learned lately about love. we are less brave awake. but that's OK. i'm grateful for waking and sleeping.

i'm grateful for arms. knuckles. ink. gold.

there are ways to remember. with touch and smell. with shining gray pearl. with a letter opener, though i receive very few letters. i'm grateful for letters. for secrets. for telling and hearing them. for people's elbows. for walking near them. i'm grateful for nearness.

i'm grateful for the part of the water that is measured in miles deep. for how lighthouses persuaded boats not to fling themselves ashore.

for him.

i'm grateful for concave. for curve. i mean, literally, for bones. like the sternum. the clavicle. the hip. the arch.

for how we heal. this often happens invisibly, or inside. but it can also happen visibly, a measurement like a bruise, or stitches. these things are beautiful. how parts of us might snarl. hot pink. wake us in the night. return us.

i'm grateful for nerve endings and taste buds. for rain. i'm grateful for the traditions of my parents. for their art, and the things they grow. i'm grateful for what i know the names of, for what mystifies.

i'm grateful for my sister. to be a girl with a sister. i'm grateful for the wonderful man she married. i'm grateful for irreverence.

for coral colors. for my bed, soft and gray and enveloping. for san soloman spring and purple tinted silver feet. i'm grateful for history, awe, slight of hand. i'm grateful for how late it gets. for science. botany. astronomy. i'm grateful for my psychic powers. for what a serious little girl i once was. i'm grateful for my past selves, what she studied and the men she chose, her tiny tattoos at pulse points, the objects she collected and kept for me.

i'm grateful for the desert. for how the road looks there. for the names of towns. i'm grateful for adventure and for comfort. for being out in it. for staying in.

i'm grateful for wine. and dusk. i'm grateful for jane eyre and houdini. i'm grateful for all this sweetness. for tumult. for those moments you want to grasp and force for one more breath than itself. i'm grateful for breath. for that kind of laughing that is head thrown back, hands hurting.

i'm grateful for the shoreline.

for my beautiful grandmother.

i'm grateful for soviet-era globes. for long brunches. for luxury. for hills. i'm grateful for more. less. learning. for french. for headstands. i'm grateful for making up.

i'm grateful for what love feels like, the haze and blur of it. the shiver. the care. the uncertainty.

i'm grateful for today.

for text messages.

for the world when it is quiet and when it is noisy.

i'm grateful for airplanes. all unlikely things. for my tiny golden apartment with its ceramic figs and wrought iron.

i'm grateful for stories. the language to tell them. punctuation. i'm grateful for planets. for vastness and the smallest space. i'm grateful for sidewalks and earth. i'm grateful for clues. for purple lace. fog. i'm grateful for the first books i read. curtains on windows. what i can't remember.

i'm grateful for dresses. nails when they shimmer.

i'm grateful for obsessions and repetitions. for forgetting.

i'm grateful for virgina. for the sky, everywhere.

i'm grateful for static and for transformation. for so much. for attempts via list. i'm grateful for wanting. for desire. for pale blue. for texture. i'm grateful for basil and for simmering. guilty pleasures and the profound ones. for geometry. games. excess.

i'm grateful for dancing.

i'm grateful for confines and not knowing.

for the past and for promises. for the home i grew up in that i'll never see again. i'm grateful for the line of the ocean against the bay. i'm grateful for the dunes where i was born. for faults. for how funny and kind my friends are. for all the nights we spend. and mornings. i'm grateful for kindness.

i'm grateful for totems. for television. for mystery lights. for ghosts. for highway one. i'm grateful for how it feels to look out at all this. seasick, mistaking, and compelled.

orison.

2011-11-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

virginia margaret merschel~1920-2011

we walked around the deserted streets of nighttime oakland not really hoping to find the entrance. the engineers would have to be called in to turn the heat down if that's what we wanted. so the windows opened up to the night. you could pay for tchaikovsky on the television set that hung mid-air. yellow letters on gray screen, letting us know how to pay and how to hear it. i'm not sure i know what music she liked. we had apples in a plastic bag. blankets, though we didn't need to spend the night. those two hours were slower and faster than regular time. mostly slower. there is a theory on time travel. that we must actually go very slowly in order to get to the future. something about circling the black holes, how close we get, and what time does then.

i'm writing all this first because when i started at memory (how it is so quickly lost to us, or no, something else) i sat for hours, for days, with nothing and too much to say. or love. god, what can i say about love? before it was our memory it was instead those vital, and sparking actual components of our life. a memory is the words or stillness of that wild present. afterward distilled, slightly inaccurate, flawed. it's not the photograph of the afternoon, but the actual afternoon, in her dress in front of the house with him. on the east coast, in black and white, sixty years ago. it's eight children on a step, my mom's face familiar there because it is so much like my own. it's today too. four days after she died. then five.

we are all looking for her.

once she said i didn't need to bother having babies, and that some roses are tacky (yellow maybe?), and that it is even worse to cut flowers because then they don't last. i usually brought her flowers anyway though and i think she liked them. purple flutter wrapped in brown paper and string.

i can remember her voice. it helps if i close my eyes. if i look at a photo of her, i can hear it. i can ask her questions and hear her answer. i don't know if i will always be able to do that. every day i try (and i can) and i feel a desperate sense that this ability is a gift to be revoked.

i sleep in her earrings. they pinch against the pillowcase. they are far more elegant than what i usually wear. people say when she jaywalked across the busy highway men from buildings across the street ran to be of assistance. no one honked or ran her over.

people toast to her and laugh in this warm room while they tell these stories. there are phrases and moments that are described as a comfort, and that are meant to be one, but i don't think that is the right word at all. yes, ninety-one years is a very long time, i guess. i am a little surprised to find that the facts--that people cannot live forever, that sometimes the peaceful way we leave this world is the most to ever wish for--don't make a dent in the sheer and selfish truth that our love is greedy, and never satisfied.

what story would i tell? i think first of the walk to the gardens. through the halls and patios along the hallway with her hand on my arm. that isn't a story really. it's something better than a story. i loved walking with her places, with her hand on my arm and she would say, 'stop walking slower for me.' and i would tell her i like to walk slow, which is true.

a story i would tell is that she loved to read and had impeccable and cutting-edge taste in books. she made lists of what she wanted to talk about when i came to visit.

we sit in dark dresses in the corners. it is part of the ritual of it all, i understand. that we should be here together with expensive whiskey on the counter and her photos taped to posterboard. she was beautiful, is a thing that everyone says. the last time i saw her she wore hot pink. i found her brooch on the floor where it had fallen. we kissed more than once, i'm sure "kiss me," she'd say. she had lipstick in her beaded purse. and she was beautiful. "kiss me again," she'd say.

i was only around for a third of her life. my uncle drives us to the train. he says, people only know small pieces of who she was. what if i was a young girl in a cab with her, the same age? i have never been to detroit. all we get is small pieces of each other, really. these sweet, mysterious, frustrating, beautiful pieces.

at the wake people tell my aunt, there are a lot of people walking around here that sort of look like you. i feel a very unscientific pulsing of genetic truth push itself around inside me. the very significant part of me that is her. that i exist because of her. that it is quite literally nothing smaller or less than that. that i had my hand somewhere on her when she took her last breath. i don't remember where i stood. was it her knee? her shoulder? i felt i could be less gentle with her knee, i guess. it had healed.

she made me sneak her cookies when she wasn't supposed to have them. we couldn't go outside the sliding glass door to the patio where it was sunny. i didn't really mind, and neither did she, though she had wanted to. i left her my lip gloss. she slept and told me stories. she said, 'i keep thinking i will see my ex-boyfriends somewhere.' she said, 'it is the smaller, stranger things that i regret.' she said, 'i go to sleep wondering what i will forget.' i stayed for five hours. i'm so glad i didn't leave a moment sooner.

i don't want to list the ingrained things i've spoken of before: the newspaper at the end of the driveway in blue plastic, the carriage house, the bedrooms upstairs where i threw tantrums, the dark hallways, and the dark blue sheets on twin beds. the basket with the tv guide and the pale nail polish bottles, the statues of men and women in love, or the beach, or winter in virginia or winter in pennsylvania and the chimney fire. i don't know, a million things. as if a list could build some other sense of meaning. remind me of the time or assure me that enough time was spent, was given. it wasn't, of course, but it never could have been. there is no such thing as enough.

there are the memories you can describe, stories with an arc, those that rise and fall like fiction or reporting. there are others that lodge some inscrutable place in my bones. the afternoons with my sister on our grandmother's balcony. the bedroom where i read 'gone with the wind' and pressed my feet to the pale walls and touched the curtains and listened to the grown-ups talk about things i cannot remember now even a little. cocktail hour, vodka in glasses, cheese and triscuits. if anyone left, they returned with an "s." the chronology and interpretation of family mythologies, this family we are all a part of. the afternoon i took the train from new york out. what did we do? i remember driving. the delicate, beautiful details of her apartment. white wine with lunch.

i have his love letters to her. the menu from the restaurant where they must have eaten while celebrating something important. if it was kept, i guess, and all the countless menus that were not kept. the telegrams saying he would arrive by train. darling, they said. they went dancing. she lived a very long time without him. "who was i going to marry after that?" she asked me. "one of my friend's widowed husbands? no thanks." there was something deeply pragmatic about her, something assured and matter-of-fact. but it was all mixed up with something else, with bravery and a seemingly endless well of love. 'she was a pill,' people say, a phrase she would use, tart and old-fashioned and not really an insult. after all, would anyone wish to be anything softer or quieter than what those sharp edges mean? who wouldn't want to have left this world and then later, in a warm and lit-up kitchen, everyone a little drunk, have people say, 'she was a pill...but, oh we loved her.' we loved her.

she had this whole entire life.

'what do you see for your life?' she asked me a few times. i think about this a lot of different ways, like she trusted me to be psychic, amazing, prepared. i think i answered that what i saw was what was already happening. a whole entire life is something that no one will ever be able to really commemorate or describe. it happens and is remembered...it's vastness and smallness side by side. two blue planets, the orbit and the crash. it's so many of the ways we are not good at all. we are wrong. we don't learn. it's every second of who she was.

i knew her and i didn't, of course. there was the predetermined knowledge that we would love each other from the very first moment, a grandmother and a granddaughter. that is unfair almost. i don't even remember being the little girl with the purple winter coat and the teddy bear in its bonnet, my grandmother and mother and sister and aunt beside me in the snow. but that little girl loved her.

she flirted with the handsome italian waiter at the restaurant, and said that all men on horseback were good looking, at least momentarily. she told my sister and i that she hated the word nice. that nice didn't really mean anything at all. that she was going to stop using it.

she said, 'i'd think you were beautiful even if you weren't mine.' we walked against the light and no one hit us.

she had her coat and purse on the chair. but she got up and walked outside without them. 'she walked so peacefully right out of her life,' my aunt said. if we are talking about comfort, there is something in that image i hold close. her getting ready, her walking out the door, her not returning. it seems purposeful, the way she was. it seems bold, intentional, quiet.

one breath in this life and one breath out. the car is locked in the parking garage. the streets are cold and empty. i sleep heavier. i don't dream. the things i want to say about our fragile lives are fragile things. on sundays we might go to the movies. one day we might be in our early twenties on the subway. one day we might be a little bit older. one day we will have granddaughters. and all this time in between. it isn't sad. but i intermittently have trouble breathing when i remember this. then i do dream. i dream she is still alive, that we can talk to her on the phone. 'let me talk to her,' i keep saying, but everyone else does first. once i get on the line i forget what i say, but i do say something. i hear a heart monitor. my own heart is racing. for some seconds our hearts contain much more than words could.

we are all looking for her. she said she would let us know. but what do we want to know? i imagine her diving toward the sea. i imagine the world turning upside down and the sky catching her. i don't mean heaven. or maybe i do. thank you for your faith, he said to her. maybe she could hear him. maybe she could feel us. those are things we hope for ourselves though, right? that she can hear us. i don't know. we hope it is peaceful to leave because one day we will leave too. that's the faith we have in this beautiful, harsh, briefly inhabitable world.

i don't know how to begin or end. partly because there is neither of these things really, it seems. all day on that rainy friday i might have treasured and slowed down how it felt to mourn her. each day's sensation is different. i shouldn't wish for when it will feel more manageable because now is the time i get to feel her this way, feel all the ways i am attached to her, feel it in waves how incomprehensible it is for her to be gone. or even thursday night, still beside her. one breath in this world and one breath out. we are all lucky, and unlucky, with these lives of ours. look how easy, and how terribly difficult it is to walk right out the door of them and not return.

shark attack!

2011-11-08T08:21:00.000-08:00

me and all the other seasick girls.

she is seasick beside me. she has a golden turtle nose ring.

it's true the horizon is steady. the water smashes real turquoise along the rocks of the farallons. turquoise like i've never seen. we bob on swells beside it, just half an hour post-shark attack. everyone sighs with disappointment. not me, exactly. there is blood in the water, they say. there is bird activity.

i'm trying to remember what it feels like to look at such beautiful things. i look so quickly. i'm collecting all my selves. one or two are still rogue. it's not that i wish i was a biologist. but the water here is thousands of feet deep. we are floating over mountain ridges. it's not that i wish i married a lighthouse keeper and sewed my name in red embroidery and was the type of woman who... no, it's not that.

he is this dark shape against the water. the golden fox-head cane of his grandfather and the light at dawn. trying to remember why they went to mardi gras. why does anyone fill up their life the way they do? this day was cold and spectacular, uncomfortable and long. it ended in rain. then this amazing warmth. these are the ways.

when he leans back into the steam and i see the cursive written across him and we are somewhere strange and luxurious together...well.

'this is your dream, isn't it?' he asks.

'yeah, it is.'

the dark wall of redwoods, evergreens. the wooden lighthouse with the red light on top.
there are things i need to give up. i need to not know.

birds dart slow enough to be identified. not by me. i see the underside of their wings. i see their pictures in books. the girl with the nose ring gives me dramamine. all day i float like this, even back on land. i bob into dreaming. our bed is the color of the ocean too. the minute you are somewhere unfamiliar. or that something you knew shifts that little bit. lets you fall. we find secret places under the floor.

i don't need to understand this bubbling of envy or protectiveness. i just need to stop.
then there is the fear that i am psychic. a fortune teller. a girl in a black lace mask. or hot pink glitter. or waiting on the stairs.

there are these variety of dissonances--how she is a housewife draped in orange. how she is a bride in long-sleeves. how he brings his wife with him. how they live in open, luminous space. brick and slow motion blur. how he has not found his true life yet, and so has also not found his unhappiness. how neither that unhappiness nor it's opposite is me.

'except you,' he says.

except me, except me, except me. that's the only thing i want.

it's the future we must concern ourselves with.

my favorite part about getting over something is that it happens when you least expect it. like on a tuesday.

she held fireworks in her hands. it was her livelihood.

and this will be 30 years ago someday in 30 years.

the taxi rides in the rain.

'my wife and i,' he says. he means me. i am his wife.

some people's secret first marriages.

it's only in retrospect that we can do math.

i do mean my family. i draw a volcano.

twin peaks, where we drove so i might forgive him.

and what about me? long wooded hillsides splattered with gold. cars broken down.

'it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful,' we say.

much of the earth will be used up soon. i consider my knees. my relative youth. how we are tied to nothing. how no one is. how it will be our one chance on that side of the world.

sometimes i am so ensconced inside my own life i will literally stop somewhere, amazed at how deeply inside this thing of my own making i find myself. i mean this in all ways--the mystifying and profound, the scary and endless. all these crashing water views. these northern coasts of california. no one is looking for or waiting for me. the person i would tell this to is with me. that, too, is my doing.

i've been miles and miles out into the ocean now.

'the green flash,' he says. he means some atmospheric specificity of the sunsets of this place. a cowboy is fishing. the meadow is golden to the cliff-edge. us taking photos before we look. i press my feet to rocks. the lighthouse is closed today. 'i've been a lot of places in the world,' he says. what he means is that this one is the best.

he is a last dark flicker.

two miles into town on horseback.

a family portrait on the bluffs.

it can still be a thing i will miss. that, too, is part of it...going deeper into something true also means going further away from something else.

tiny white votive candles on the pale blue tile around the jacuzzi. the foul-mouthed fishermen up early and misunderstanding daylight savings. our four post bed soaked in white. a new book to read. the air perfect and ocean cooled. our waitress is about ready for something new, not this town. i guess i haven't felt that way in a long time. you spend so long planning your departure that it's something else to find yourself where you might stay.

the shipwrecks of the olden days. people sewed their money and jewels inside their clothes and it hastened their drowning. vats of mercury and a carefully documented log of all the places where the ships crashed ashore. he made it safely out of one danger to sail into another. he returned but found himself unable to survive in the end.

this is what is happening, after all. a type of survival, our delicate, inevitable movement forward, watching the sky for the upheaval that reflects the danger in the water below.

an assignment on the sun.

2011-11-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

i want to think quickly. most things are languorous. i've been wanting to use the word languor.

the sun, she says.

when i was a little girl i must have had a garden. there is proof. sometimes i want the rain. i've been waiting for it, but i wouldn't tell anyone else that. the white marble stairs down to the street. i'm sure i'll change my mind. someone always gets taken away in an ambulance.

there's no such thing as sexuality, he says. he is glowing.
no such thing as conceding.
no such thing as long-distance.
no such thing as bedtime.
no such thing as temperature.
as hypnotism.
as stealing.

we always know who we like more.
i never feel quite done with anything.

they have made headbands of flowers and i'm wearing one in the dark. outside, on the hill, i wonder if it makes me look vulnerable. i have always walked slowly. when i've seen myself on video i am shocked. it's a wonder i get anywhere. like to the river. to work. north. west.

plasma interwoven with magnetic fields.

'why are you looking up the sun?' he asks.
'sometimes i want to know things,' i say. and pause, 'sometimes i want to know things about things.' this is technically true.

it is this way when anyone touches you. ribs, i mean. purple.

'you are complicit in possession,' he says.
'what?' i ask. 'i love that.' or am i being insulted? i don't know. sometimes the simplest things. speaking, or tilting my head, or getting four blocks. sometimes those things are the most miraculous. i remember coming into my dark home.

yeah, i had a good time.
hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron.
what if we knew for certain where everything had ended up?
even what we learned and then forgot?

we are literally skeletons.
it isn't symbolic at all.
the inside is not directly observable. but we already knew that from trying to look. from seeing each other.
kinetic energy is my favorite. for example, you could encounter a hill. the sun might drop down toward the water. distances might obscure themselves. what seems far is not, and what seems close.

for s.

2011-11-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

we found ways to be alone together. under the guise of cheap beers on my bed and country dive bars and basketball games on television and buying computer printers at giant chain stores and parking garages and swing sets when everyone else was at the party. did it matter where we were? or how long it took?

your neck smelled differently then. i wore that red coat which, years later, shrunk in the washer. my dress had different zippers sewn inside. in those first weeks i walked to meet you wearing a black dress with strings tied at the shoulders. i had this strange sensation that i was walking inside a dream or a videogame. a beautiful one, semi-dangerous in places. it was august and hot.

all accidents are split seconds. and here we are, saying we will love each other forever. in any darkness. in any light. what a thing to say to someone. to mean. what if we already had everything we needed? one hand holding air, the other holding gold. i dream three teeth fall out. they put my teeth back in. they re-set my knee. i feel the sensation of bone fitting back into bone. of bone against skin. there is a swimming pool with golden water. a child kidnapped. everyone grown taller. i must be dreaming about you getting hurt. all of our friends dive under that golden water.

even further back. before we knew each other. sixteen years old in a bedroom where the walls didn't show for the magazine collages. before i liked hip-hop. when L. and i drew our future boyfriends on dry erase boards, their beanies and curly hair, their fingerless gloves and apartments in portland. how did we even know there was portland? but we did. in the mountains where we were from, where we were growing up. we were psychic in certain ways. i like to think about where you were. i think about you crossing a lawn somewhere, or in parking lots, or under bridges, places spies lived and were caught. you can say whatever you want about that, but i loved you then too. sometimes, in winter, we go back there.

'you two fight like lovers,' she said of us, before we were. and i was glad.you pulled yourself up on the scaffolding over and over. we were on narrow streets that were new to us, inside the very beginnings of our grown-up lives. when you wonder about what you've accomplished, there's this, after all. your palm rested near my back. my most vivid memory of my own spine. your fingers sparking there.

we fought in blizzards. do you remember why? i drove hours through it.
we threw everything we owned out the kitchen windows. granted, it wasn't much. we'd barely accumulated anything yet.
i said we could live in a railroad apartment, share a room, share everything, be brave together. we took turns being right, and that was mine.

or there were nights on the back roads, the only kind, in the above-ground pool upside down. i remember our hammock, how the nails didn't kill the trees. i remember the front porch, but not the back one. i remember upstairs. i remember hearing you fall and laugh and curse. a rat got in the olive oil and drowned. sometimes you left for days and i slid the glass door and you kept bees and our bedroom was pale blue.

there were things we didn't know yet. things we hadn't done. avocado trees and halloween 2005 and your first night back in town.

you vied for me.
i stole you. sort of.
i went to that shitty, ghetto grocery store where all the fruit was the same pale colors and you put flour on the counter. i think i turned 23 years old and no man had ever cooked me something from scratch. you carried trees on the subway. i carried our love note divorce papers under my sweater. we went to the warehouse on the water. to the chainlinked lake.

every day you are at the door with keys, and ankles, your bike, your eyes. every day is poverty-stricken, gloriously rowdy, dumb-struck, greedy and besotted. a list of our life might include: your beautiful face and its fading bruises, the chandelier-lit halls of san francisco hotel rooms, back yards, and views of the water, costumes, and sundays. i'm missing most things here, of course. missing the lanterns that lifted into the sky. the walks through the hills where i was born. the days we drove into the desert. the spring of water 25 feet deep.

i can't believe we had the nerve to do it.

tell me something that counts.

2011-10-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

sometimes something i wrote a long time ago doesn't make sense to me anymore.

i forget where it came from or what i meant.
sometimes i throw things away that i wish i'd kept.
sometimes late at night when he comes into the living room brushing his teeth i tackle him and say, 'look at our beautiful life. it's happening right now.'
sometimes when i'm cooking i burn things. sometimes when i clean things they are still dirty afterward.
sometimes the earthquake comes right when i am standing in the doorway.
sometimes for three days i silently name things and travel and make lists and count.
sometimes i can't decide what to wear and i pull dress after dress out and i think that everything i own is crap.
sometimes i wear brown fishnets and sometimes blue.
sometimes i wait with baited breath.
sometimes i waste time. sometimes i work really hard.
sometimes i try and try to change it and then it is changed.
it's OK i threw it away--i remember what it said.
sometimes cast iron things arrive in the mail.
sometimes people have their own separate relationships.

sometimes things have nothing to do with me.
sometimes he talks about the skin of our hearts as if they are made of chainmail.

some days my balance is off. i can't stay still in any of the poses. everything trembles.
sometimes i feel weird and i can't really explain it. like when i dreamt i was a clone and the real me got all the things i wanted.
sometimes i think my stories have replaced my memories. or at least certain kinds of memories.
sometimes i think my exaggerations are truer years later.
sometimes i make up tests, stand-offs, and measurements to live by.
sometimes i read the news out loud and i can't believe it.
sometimes i don't know anything that is going on. i forget the names of countries. i forget dictators. i forget wars.
sometimes i want to actually fistfight people who get in my way.
sometimes i am the only one who says namaste back and i totally mean it.
sometimes i wish i was one of the girls who left you. they are pale sunlight in cornfields. i don't know what i am.
sometimes i can't believe how long it's been. that we were all ever in one place together.
sometimes we live on coasts, and get on with our lives.
this time i'm not going unless i'm invited.
sometimes i think it's anything i want it to be.
sometimes i know that isn't true at all.
sometimes my anxiousness lasts months on end.
sometimes it literally dissolves in light.
sometimes the only thing that makes me feel better.

sometimes we were just getting to know what was wrong.

sometimes i draw maps. of prisons, volcanos, water slides, twin peaks, the go-carts in north carolina, the black sand of the beach bonfires, how we got lost in the fog but it still meant something. how he was going to collect me ocean water, i think, and keep it in some small bottle.

sometimes one lily opens at a time. first he is awake when i'm not, then i'm awake when he isn't.

sometimes i pull his notes out of my jewelry box. the more recent ones and the ones from long ago.

one is typed on cigarette paper. the other is in his handwriting.

sometimes the night isn't over yet.

sometimes it is the vows.

sometimes the many, many years.

sometimes something else that can never be taken away.

some of what i forgot.

2011-10-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

boys in lawn chairs sit on the sidewalk outside the church.

can we pray for your soul? their sign asks.

i want to yell YES. i say hi instead. they smile at me. i think maybe they are kidding? my soul suddenly puffs up with light and propels me forward. i want to yell at them, i believe in my soul. but i think they would misunderstand it as me telling them there is something to be prayed for.

i am L A T E. being late feels good. it feels like being disorganized feels. like anesthesia.

shiva, he says. transformation. honor the choices you can make. the transformation in you.
remember how you were different before? he asks.

at the stoplight i mistake a stranger for my husband. we are both on bikes at opposing intersections.
"come here," i yell to him.
"ok," he says and turns around.

she buys a skeleton without arms from a man on the street. she is going to paint him blue and attach wings where the arms should be. my biography reads that i am a firefighter. a wanderer of some parisian alley buying barrettes.

33 things to do before i'm 33.
34 things to do before i'm 34.
like, recipes.
dancing.
my tattoo.

a man is at the open window and the cops are yelling up to him. at first i think he is trying to kill himself, threatening to jump. but then i see the signs somehow strung all along the top of the building. capitalism is death, and things like that.

a man walking toward me looks from side to side then takes his sweater off and throws it in the trashcan. it's all i can do to not pick it back out and see.

i have visions of:
how her parents got here illegally in crowded, fast-moving cars, and secret warehouses. and how brave and strange and sad and unknown everything is. and up late at my bedroom window sometimes the night is dark black and sometimes this soft gray. it has nothing to do with the neighbors' lights. maybe it has to do with the moon. or with how right now it is the windy season. with how our brains might tell us things that aren't always true.

in bed with wine and a book that better get more fucked up fast. i hear him mixing his album. his recorded voice alone and then the music. it's dreamy as hell. it's everything.

sometimes when i'm tired in a certain way i start to wonder why i'm not some nice well-adjusted man that wears ironed shirts to work and gets the job done. or i wonder why i didn't study something like global marketing in school. i wonder why i don't get the poem either.

on sunday we are ensconced in this green color. everything juicy and alive and prosperous. the empty field and us. all the nice botanical arrangements labeled and growing. the mulched path i walk on in stockinged feet. the champagne spilled on most things. dresses and blankets and phones. a pale blue victorian couch. a cab ride over the hill. a table that is a backgammon board. us sinking in the corner taking red-tinted pictures.

i've never had to hold the mic before. the lamps glowing over my head. the long narrow room bathed in in it. the stories i have to tell. and their percentages. my pink dress. the palm trees against glass. life is good if it looks like this. looks like how it is, all awash. the pinks, the closeness of us all. our skin and hair and melting ice cubes and chairs at tables.

everything i want to tell you i will write it here.
the funny thing is i want to desperately and then the days go by. a day, a day, a day.
it's like i'm talking to myself. finding a way to make it a story.
fiction is healing because then your life is a story, he says.
i could be an old man on a stage. i could be wise. or i could be a silly little girl.
a man on the street has this gash in his foot.
bright red and horrible and open like something fell on it maybe.
all the way up the stairs i remember it, it bleats like a siren.
then just the difficulty of getting in the door makes me forget it.

when i am forgetful.
when i don't dream.
when all i want to know is who emailed me overnight.
when it is morning.
daylight.

underwater.

2011-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

-witchcraft.
-parallel universe(s).
-the berlin wall.
-the vietnam war.
-moths. (free in corners huddled, pinned under glass and framed).
-the country. the things about the country that snarl in me unknown. i might have lived there forever, never been told it was time to go home.
-love.
-satanism.

-secret missions. like, assassinations.

-what do you name your children after that?
-salt. made from ocean water.
-sandpaper diamond saws that cut rock.
-lincoln's assassination dream.
-wasteland.
-you don't eat the head of the rattlesnake.

-short skirt.

-i see you adjusting your skirt all day, she says.

-here is the thing: when i am really poor i buy boots. i mean, they are second-hand, but i buy them. and actual blue suede shoes. "i'd ruin them in the rain," the salesgirl says. "i will too," i tell her. i shazam songs in the dressing room. things fit.

-boys in bands who want to sleep with girls who aren't their girlfriends. boys in bands who grab their girlfriends boobs in bars. their girlfriends wear dark stockings and/or high waisted jeans. i lean my ear closer to the stories i'm hearing. i spend a lot of time trying to listen. thinking about listening.

-silver tinsel hanging from the ceiling.

-he dresses like a principal.

-he dresses like boys i went to high school with. camo and wool beanies.

-i am the kind of grown-up i am going to be, more or less, forever.

-'when we have nice things,' he says. 'we aren't going to have nice things,' i tell him. 'we are going to have a beautiful home full of old shit.'

-yelling secrets and stories underneath heavy metal music.

-heavy metal.

-how boys show they like you.

-men at bars. whether or not they are hitting on you.

-love affairs with people a decade younger than you? i can see it. there are always exceptions.

-cults.

-research.

-ice cream in the rain.

-gym+grocery store+used clothing store+laundry.

-online dating.

-snooping and what you find. learning your lesson about snooping. or the lesson being that there is something to find. always.

-her underwear match the ornaments in her hair.

-sometimes we will be on rooftops. maybe just from here on out. indefinitely, at various times. rooftops.

-picnics.

-karaoke. either you participate or you don't.

-hobbies. like drinking bottomless mimosas.

-a shelf where everything is white. a shelf with baking powder, a pepper mill, kali.

-eavesdropping. "no, no, no, no."

-small talk.
-we live in the same neighborhood. i go by.
-there are places where we are invisible.

-i dream first of deserts, then shipwrecks, then whirlpools. i have a recurring dream of seeing the ocean but not being able to get to the shore. last night my phone was full of water while i tried to text you my location.

-the way rich boys who are trying to not seem rich might dress.

-the artifacts you might pick up from other places of the world.

-how when you get older you just don't get younger again.

-mirrors at the gym. television at the gym.

-vampires. the 60's. men wrongly imprisoned. men who play football. socialites. getaway drivers.

-what my next book will be about.

-if i could sing.

-i didn't even realize what an impression it made. real impressions, i guess that is always the case with them.

-wing woman.

-old lady.

-meme.

-80's hot pink cursive.

-what kind of music do you like?

-you can live like that. never cashing a check. never writing a check.

-i have never been arrested.

-i think there are things i may have read into. things i may have told myself because i wanted them to be true.

-we all knew there was SOMETHING, she writes. (her caps).

-there was something. s o m e t h i n g.

-convention. tradition. experimentation. it's all within a certain confine.

-stephen elliot on twitter.

-brunch.

-the heat of the garage door on my bare back.

-an heirloom tomato slice the size of my face.
-there are two things i wanted to tell you but i can't determine the right venue for relaying the information.

-'a chance to be zen,' i say walking in the rain with heavy grocery bags. i sing on the sidewalk. construction.

-you have to live years before you have another book to write.

-they lived over a year kept captive by pirates. they never had children.

-some people have half a million dollars lying around.

-she puts the needle through my skin and back out. she pushes it around searching for the nerve.

-i feel this strange tenderness towards what is starting to go wrong, what is growing weaker.

-'oh, that is one of my favorite words,' i say over and over.

-paroxysm.

-she says, elderberry syrup is really safe in your first trimester.
-sometimes i can see the ways i am becoming.

-we have these jokes. 'i met this girl seventeen years ago and she made quite an impression on me,' he says. he means me. when i had black hair.

-somehow i am supposed to give advice.

-i love escalators in movie theatres. i love my kitchen.

-my shadow self. even her darkest ways are something i sort of approve of.

-i can think of it after years. how i hope his mom doesn't die. how he might have loved me. how his divorce is treating him. how we don't all leave the people who knock us out. how there is a fine line between most things.

-she learned her father was the man who killed her real father.

-accidentally political.

-sunset in the park. the cops strolling about giving warnings.

-what should we have for dinner?

-our neighbors on the stairs. everyone's life. there are so many of us having lives, believing them to matter greatly.

-it's his fault. he was the one who lied.

-sorry i don't want to be your friend.

-famous photographs.

-i'd find you years later too. so much isn't our fault to begin with, but turns out to be our fault in the end.

-feminist theory.

-up late being goth. lace blindfolds.

-he is reading my novel. it's bound like a real book and it is open and there is his cup of tea in a blue mug beside it on the table and he sighs and underlines and says, 'they would have kissed earlier.' 'not necessarily,' i say. 'yeah,' he says. 'they would have.'

-walking home in the rain i think, i have knees and tired arms, i can carry my bags. i have a pink dress to wear. it is pink and cotton and has pockets. i can walk. i can cross the street. i live here. i am alive.

a list of decisions.

2011-10-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

we watched the birds eat. their giant beaks and the tiny skeletons of what they were eating gnawed clean. fur and tarantula legs. one dove for me. it was the thing i feared the most that was the most still though. green scales resting under the surface of the water, an optical illusion, his golden head turning my way like a slow motion arrow. if you believe in evil. if we mean instinct and adaptation, biology and reaction. that is what we mean. how you pump your legs to make the swing go higher. how looking at someone feels.

i keep thinking of the jenny holzer line: the urge to reproduce is a death wish. i think it like this mean little whisper. or cesar vallejo saying, i will die in paris on a rainy day, some day i can already remember.

you can only compare yourself to yourself. you can only believe in this world, the one with sleepy lions in glass cages and famous rock stars composing operas and childhood and tragedy and many, many nights like all the others. some not. some warm and still by the ocean water. some late at the bar at the top of the hill with the white tablecloths. walking up the hill alone you think, 'will i always want to do this?' but that, like most, is the wrong question. also, the answer is not his hands. how warm they are when you reach across. the answer is not this perfect night, sunday and quiet and the sprinklers watering the medians. or wait-it is the answer, the only one.

you can think it every night before you fall asleep, rub the bottom of your feet on his legs, say, i love you and mean it till it hurts almost. it is not pragmatic to think of it constantly. that someday you will be someone's dying mother.

i keep thinking of lace the color of our skin and lilies that open. how i would do it. the same, of course, and differently. pros and cons. it's hilarious to make lists of pros and cons. in the photo it is 1985. some children are born. live months at least. or live all the way through, and then what? let's talk about grown-up things. solving problems. how we can stay out as late as we want. have adulterous affairs. write algerian short stories. take lovers. investigate murders. be swept by floods and trapped by beams. some things might make you sad. how the river and the wind goes. how life is once. we attended a concert that swelled like a heartbeat. we did unmentionable things. we learned these over the years. we read magazines. we listened to our friends. we tried it.

some of us are reptiles. we are moth girls with rubberband wings. we are pressed between glass and pins pressed through our wings. some of us are dancing to move the poison. so it will move and dissipate. the cold gets in our blood. i'll take this, how we touch each other every other moment. now and now. it's a good choice, this love, this attention. i'll take the birds with the hot pink knees. if i knew how to do it differently, i would. maybe this is it. this is my chance. he is giving me my freedom. my different life.

keeping his gorgeous and endless blue eyes to himself.

looking at me with them.

using our time wisely.

oh we are, baby, we are. 12:34am down hillsides. sigh.

in the morning early. or later if i want. the very last paragraph is mine to write. the night is mine.

the dad watches his phone and his tu-tu'd daughters twirl away from him in ever more dangerous distances while he does not watch them. the stairs are far too dangerous now, they are cordoned off and then fall into the water. where the baths and towers burnt away until the ocean edge. it's hard to describe the sky this washed with gold. it's hard to explain any of it. we learn sounds. we learn quiet. we learn what we want. who we are. we decide. who am i?

we start out with nothing. we learn all this dirty, neurotic bullshit. we start out as little girls wearing dark cloaks in the woods. we end up the insane men wandering in from the streets to ask. to look or scavenge.

the moments to protect most fiercely.

we were six once and our parents told us to stop it. or fought over the mess we made. it was us. is it my life of leisure. is it how he just threw himself into the pacific while i tried to capture it other ways. like the sunset on my face. the chill. does it even matter? the memoirist who burnt her diaries from age 14-40. her divorce and her two sons in just under the wire. karen o and her opera about virgins. even me, perpetually 13. it isn't selfishness, or it is. it is a desperate sort of selfishness in fact. about my hair, my dress, my boots, my bookshelf, my headstands, my voice, my man, my life, my wednesdays. even my ambivalent city with its million undiscovered parts. it isn't that i even want to discover them. the cave mouth. the space of our bed. the slides and hills and hills. is this less important? his death metal photographs. our teenage years on back roads. is this less important? how we magnetize. teach ourselves to play the drums. ride our bikes through the rain.

that is north. that is the third cliff house. or the fourth. just falling into the sea and being rebuilt in the same brilliant spot. i want to see 'drive.' i want to say, 'fuck.' at the end you will discover you are still an atheist. and, death wish or not, you knew all along what it was you were going to regret about your beautiful life.

desert relay fever dream.

2011-09-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

splatters of fluorescent on the fir trees and redwoods. their own dark splotches against a lighter shade of nighttime.

i'm half everywhere.

where would i go if he left me in san jose? suddenly the water silver and dim against my eyes. men hiss like snakes from their pick-up trucks. many towns are depressing. blue letters on white. sunday things are closed.

safely porch-bound i imagine the two of us hurtling over the cliffs and the car commercial bridges. our hands are warm and our shoulders cold. we have the same knees we started out with.

'it isn't as beautiful here as everyone thinks,' he says and we weave, wander over. the radio was stolen. we are noise and silence.

sometimes i want to be closer to him, and sometimes he to me. our conversations go long. years and years long. we remember different things. and sometimes the same. i look for patterns, and i make them. they are there without me sometimes, but mostly i have built them.

we find the keys, the guest house, the broken oaks, the blankets and pillows. the noises outside are nothing. it's very hard to understand how things connect. our money flies out of our pockets. our years speed up. there is also just the walk down valencia. the warehouse where people actually live. glowing skeletons hung high. stars bursting with light. me turned around.

it turns out he plays the drums. breaks drum sticks. it turns out that he looks right at me and i get nervous as hell. must look away from him. he is right a lot. his eyes splash there is nothing better than being on the other side of a table where he is sitting.

i remember the song he typed on cigarette paper.

baby, and cupcake, he said. hon. every endearment is the most bad ass thing he could utter. he is purple and glowing edges. duets with pretty girls. others floating. their ankles high above our heads.

also, we sit on the stairs.

we walk the long way.

'we have so far to go,' he says.

sometimes i make him laugh, he doubles over with it.

sometimes we yell on the highways, our voices not our own, historical and long buried. unearthed for just a moment to remind us of the night we knocked each other's teeth out and how long we've been in love.

i remind myself that we know how. he explains. he stop places. it rains briefly. we say we're sorry.
there are elopements. there are little girls who have been alive for two months. there are a lot of things to do with our lives. glitter on the sidewalk, in the plastic of the restaurant booths. there are fireplaces, hot pink lights in threes, whiskey, semis around the wooded turns, hash, board games, joy williams stories, dominican boys singing about their hearts, women who are 100 years old, studies conducted and magazine articles written. i should eat seaweed. i should eat more of everything that comes from the sea. not the predators.

there are stories. hours of them, endless.

road signs. iodine. ocean water. vacations. violet.
and the police car followed us.
and i tried to figure myself out for a very long time.
the words abandonment and the suspenseful parts.
the highway and the forest.
it's true that it's very noisy.
and we might go closer to the fog.
we might change our ways. our minds.
texting till our phones die.
wood floors and curry and turquoise painted on the wall and other people's bookshelves.

and him singing.
and that night important as any other.
the sound of him, and him near, and us crowded into places of the world we want to go. these things are as real and as important as any responsibility.
wine poured into glasses at midnight.
heists and us sprawled, entangled, laughing.
whatever it is falling outside.
the spurts of the swimming pool.
and us in a smaller bed.

it can be both scary and a comfort.

he brings me things i don't even ask for. he says, 'you can lean there.'
it happens like light caught in an eyelash, or the optical illusion that looks like an insect wing.
remembering things you can't place.
him dancing in a red coat.
things long forgotten. futura and 6th grade dances in chorus. heartbeat and time. pantomiming. parachutes.
in a year we will remember the good parts and the bad.
in a year we will see the photographs, their pale blues and beiges, the lilies and the marble stairs.

seasickness.

2011-09-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

i want to find appropriate times to say, 'you have my word...'
i want to escape from house parties through the bathroom window even when the stairs are empty.

it's those moments of quiet and calm...they have me scaling down walls into alleys where i might make a run for it.

i worried he might wake to find me spontaneously combusted. that much in love.
our kitchen table, its dark eaves and rolling legs, bidden upon and won.

i dream about what we talk about over dinner. serious things about our life. this very one.

a black and white photograph with scalloped edges, a woman inside.

wednesday night traditions of yoga and then pitchers of margaritas. painted portraits hung up high on the walls. everyone knows us and says hi.
spy shows.
dallas.
dinners of leftovers warmed up, and cucumber slices in gin. and wine. and reading out loud.

researching courtney love. i didn't know she was a stripper so many places.

the teenage part of me wonders if that is how you get famous-by accepting airplane rides from sketchy men to parts of europe you've never even heard of before.
i can appreciate she's sick of answering questions about kurt cobain. imagine having to discuss the person you loved in your early 20's forever.
and memoir.
and jokes about things that are serious and sad. how good it feels to walk down the sidewalk laughing at them. her in black fishnets and me in silver. laughing at how it's over. laughing at why.

unposted and/or deleted blogs.
blogs that are funny, or short, or about lifestyle, or have a collection of appealing images.
blogs entitled with initials.

i thought for a minute i might want winter.
my planets are moving. winter follows summer and other seasonally obvious statements that remind me of the many ways to keep quiet. be charming. not compete. not resist.
it is the interesting and inevitable, the planets remind me. my fitful nerves flare and settle.
once, at a train station on a pay phone.
once, it was the first year of my marriage.
once, i threw heartfelt inscriptions into a trashcan on the street because they no longer applied.

points of gravity shift.

for the first time ever i stood in the lit-up umbrella shapes, i read aloud, my knees solid, my voice slow.

i think it was because i'd written across the top of the paper, this is the last time.

i think because it was. it is always the last time. of this moment and the one before.

i fell asleep composing, thinking...this is perfect, losing it as i fell further and further toward sleep. i knew i would remember and woke up in the morning with my eyes to the white wall.

i'm making rules for myself:

sensation, is one. the small bits of gravel under my feet. the cold bucket of ice with beer. the people i haven't seen in awhile. some give me the title of my book. some hug me for awhile because once they were my boyfriend. some just say hi and that it is good to see me.

later, in darkness under the highway.

you should never list that many accomplishments out loud. accomplishments are strange things. they don't feel how you think they will. neither does getting close. so close you can taste it, for example.

but still, i can tell it is the part right before the accomplishment that matters most.

the monday morning at the kitchen table with my computer.

the sunday afternoon with him that is worth writing about. that very specific, soft spot on his shoulder.

the events and words and moments and feelings and ideas deserving of capture.

we find a booth in the corner.

we set off alarms.

there are a lot of us from a lot of different places, connected in a lot of different ways.

some of us were once not in love, but now we are.

some of us live in houses together.

some of us have known each other a long time. others more briefly.

some of us are each other's rebounds.

some of us got pissed off for the very last time.

some of us are returning to the scene of the crime.

some of us are sorry, and feel we won't do it again.

admissions:

sometimes i think that a body language expert is analyzing us in relation to one another, like how they analyze the rise and fall of a celebrity romance in the magazines. i imagine wherever we are the body language expert can see us and is approving or disapproving. like in the booth with him, how i lean so my chest and face are as close to him as they can be while i listen. my heart literally twisting to face him better. or waiting for a table how we sit on the sidewalk together, my legs curled towards him. or how every time the light is red we embrace as if one of us is departing for a long voyage, not just across the street together, but going somewhere into this scary, vast world, apart. which in some ways we are. some afternoons right at dusk i fly down the hills on my bike into the air getting darker.

other admissions:

i am going to write the truer things elsewhere. in my new journal with the alternating and flowered pages. there is where i will admit the non-poetic intricacies of other sorts of healing. how i discovered a snarling and hot pink wolf/dog that resides in my hipbone, my side. he snarls at any touch, and i can turn him to dust. or how i began to fall through golden swirling shapes and had to stop myself from going that far. how later i walked through the city for blocks and blocks and everything was beautiful and the top of my head was still bone, i guess, but softer. how that same day i walked down a hill into a view that was sun hard and blue/gold on the sides of the buildings rising up ahead and i had to stop mid-story to say, 'oh my god...look.' and how we were going somewhere and we didn't know how it would turn out. and how it turned out fine.

keeps you, lets you go.

2011-09-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

you were kissing me before you even knew her.
she was a girl in a house somewhere.
i'm a girl in a house somewhere. it's a small, perfect house with a beige globe and plants from the street and love notes affixed to the walls and floors that creak.
why does it comfort me to know you know how to fall out of love? am i ready for when you don't?
for example, a mouth behind the knee.
a lifetime, they say.
i wake up knowing.

also, you have seismic theories. how that volatility moves methodically from continent to continent. away from you and towards me. i have this top three memory thing that just gets me. the ache of driving down my driveway with you. i mean the darkness and the ache of it. and the quick-e mart for our contraband. and how you let me go. i tricked you into letting me go. i cited being born and oceans. and you said, 'go...'

i worry about those cute boys on prison break. it's implicit that they can never get away. the minute things are calm i feel this creeping sense of disappointment. a lurch in my heart as it rests. what will keep me up. my house at 4 in the morning. the fire escape has spider legs. i live too close to other people. lately everyone on the street wants to grab me. i will put these things carefully away. a month of days can fit into a very small box.

my ex-boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend are holy. six people in a small house in my stomping grounds. everywhere i've stomped. wintertime in those houses. porches on those houses. i broke into one with sequined shoulders. i composed unsent unsent things inside. i fell down into snow in my red dress. he is teaching someone to walk now. i am healing up. it was only like a minute we were in love. and only sort of.

how long until you stop checking? how long do i have to ignore you? i thought surely twenty years was long enough. but it wasn't. how about another week?
some people disappear entirely. they turn into little alligators and escape. they turn into swamps.
some, you find yourself years later, reaching for them in the exact same way, having made no ground in either direction.
reincarnated, fitful marriages.
the blessing in disguise is that i copyright infringe myself.
burnt orange peel and bitters and dropping everything and walking into doors and throwing my shoes away. wednesday nights are the best.
we levitate and bring ourselves back down.
clean up and then get dirty.
we sink back into the couch and tell each other the dirty things we say to men and laugh and drink our drinks fast. and boys float all around us with their tattooed sleeves and say we are pretty and let us be mean and we pull our hoods up and run away from them.

did we spend a different life together? i feel that sure. we must have. maybe i had layers of skirts you had to reach through. maybe the floor of our house was dirt and i stirred some boiling hot concoction.
you lost your wedding ring inside the piano.
i c a n d o w h a t e v e r i w a n t.
complete disregard for reality. what keeps you, what lets you go.
he does that to kill me. says my name like that. wears a suit like that. talks about love like that. the smallest, sweetest thing. it's been awhile since i've had any dreams. i think my life is looking up.
perhaps i will compose this for months.
then i dreamt i walked forever inside a spiral adobe structure.
i dreamt she called me up and said, 'you won.' but we all want things that badly.
i buy a very expensive plum dress with lace sleeves that the girl wraps in tissue paper. being able to write that sentence is worth the cost alone. the love stories that will be read while wearing it.

12 reasons to wake up in the morning. i don't have winter mornings like that anymore. i'm re-circuited. virginia winter mornings with the ground so hard and blue cold. you know how to be quieter than me. everyone knows how to do that. but, still, congratulations. it's never winter here.

bicycle riding in a polka dot dress. kicking the kick stand with a hot pink shoe. happiness tricks me more than sadness does. historically, smut and fluorescence have been with me forever. i can get to you in four minutes or less. how little things have changed. he holds the copper colored snake around its neck, its tiny little poisonous teeth. he kissed me in a pick-up truck. i dreamt people burst into flames. i really did-last night they ran flaming through the darkness of my head.

exploitation and privacy. he is the same but with a harder and scarier face. this part is for you. and not for him. can you guess what i mean? i hope you can tell me.

the many things that make my head swirl hot pink. or make the top of my head glow, skylight-like, or some mudra straight from the sternum. i guess i was always this way with my lists. i'm empathizing with the serial killers. explaining myths to teenagers.

some people actually pack fruit and eat it for lunch. plums, i guess? i don't know. apples. i have never eaten an apple in my entire life. some people cannot be saved inside a hospital. they die there. even with medicine and surgery, they don't make it. some people actually get eaten by sharks on their honeymoon. this happens. it doesn't mean it will happen to you. he died on the sidewalk where i walk every day. it seems wrong that there would be holidays after that. corner store flowers in a cardboard box. the restaurant just open again and people eating inside it.

when you have everything to say, all the words and feelings of it swarm together into this one giant, illiterate thing. and vapors overtake. steamclouds. and of course the only thing to do is nothing. letting go so deep it happens as a letting go of actual marrow in your bones (something deeper...i am not scientific enough...atoms, or something). like you can feel your wrists and pulse and fingers open and those numb, sleeping hands reach out to dreamless. i wake up without arms. i wake up and twist my hands around and around until my arms come back.

there is a photo of me with short hair and a bronze velvet shirt and my messy room. he painted on my wall with nailpolish. i started this habit early...of not letting go.

and whatever time does, it does it wrong. it confuses me with its slowness or speed. it can be the sweetest wednesday or maybe sunday morning. it can be saturday night cooking things i haven't cooked before, wearing a dress i haven't worn before. and him. it can be monday night out places i wouldn't normally be. in one small block men throw-up on the street, yell at me to say their name, get arrested, tell me no one else would look as good in my dress as i do, tell me about their home countries, their experiences in strip clubs, or adult theatres, or times when they were tough. everything is lanterns. green bamboo glowing against night. orange and green lit up. a straight edge boy in the DJ booth. spying on chemistry. i am not qualified to talk about love this way.

but i have a few ideas.
here is how i'd leave your house.
here is what i'd say.

i don't take cabs as often as i used to. but last night alone in one. a white flower painted on the door handle. some song on the radio. i traced my finger over it. i felt you everywhere.

other places (getting ready for the storm).

2011-08-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

-two drop-fulls of tincture from the dark purple glass bottle.
-soak herbs in a sauce pan for an hour, simmer for another, and then another.
-first, this addresses my dysfunction. stagnation.
-eat rabbits and wolves.
-have bones made of lead.
-have sound waves in all the silent places of myself, like i swallowed a bomb.
-swallow bombs. small yellow flowers.
-no decisions after 3pm.
-buy a cookie and an iced coffee at the cafe. there are two boys at the cash register. they give me back too much change and i keep it. one crisp dollar bill against one soft.
-put cream and sugar in my coffee even though i don't do that anymore, haven't for years. even though i also don't drink coffee after noon. i'm thinking about giving up my lifetime of vegetarianism. i pull pancetta off my english muffin. slide clams off the pizza onto the silver tray. my mouth is weird all night.
-the needle goes right at my pulse. left pulse and right pulse.
-make it so i don't have to be with myself all the time.
-you're mirrors. you're gone.
-sometimes you spend so long wanting, you get it.
-my landscape is clouds of glitter paint and birds in black marker.
-i forget what verbs are.
-i am outside most of the time. a sunset caught in wire.
-television.
-jail.

other preparations:

-dream about a different version of a dress i really have. a blue, layered, silky one. a 4am courtyard one.
-dream he was covered in tattoos and i used it as an excuse to touch him. i analyzed what the words meant.
-in waking life he means nothing.
-in waking life emily dickinson said poetry is like having the top of your head blown off.
- tupac, sure.
-rip tides. hurricanes.
-the wild isn't any better. better. the symmetry of the earthquakes east and west. the point is, you're fucked either way.
-the internet is horrible. try just walking away from it into the street. it makes you feel like you've been run over by a car. like you've lost your sense of direction.
-we went to the desert too, but we didn't die there.
-walk fast enough to get away from myself. but people can fall cliff stories. buildings down. and a week later.

unnecessary preparations:

it would matter very little if i called and made you tell me. i don't have your phone number anymore anyway. you have a gray voice. it's like marrying someone because they like brunch. everyone likes brunch.

you and i would have a sixteen year old daughter right now. we could send her to private school and live in connecticut. we could be missionaries, you know. our daughter would be six. i don't like your town anyway. heavy metal kids on the beaches. certain things impress me. the novelty makes your fingertips silver. sparklers spelling absolute bullshit. love notes about food. receipts for how expensive it all is.

i want you to be really unhappy. i want you to be eaten by wolves. be frozen and preserved as you try to scale mountains. i want the odds to be against you. i want everything to be full and keep you out. i want you to travel to the most beautiful places and feel hollows. echoes. vastness. uncertainty. i want you to feel such a crushing sense of disappointment that you are like a house robbed of all its wires, crumbling inward. i want all of your adventures to be thwarted by the most mundane logistics. i want your predispositions and astrological signs to crush you beneath their weight. i want you to be swept away. fall inside. have her never measure up. things like that. i'm not sorry.

i should never get mad about anything because i have done the very worst things. i remember when i was their age. he gave me this ring with a shining violet stone. i can't even write the things we did. the corners and afternoon windows. the twin beds and shared everythings. halls. and stairs. walking right through glass and finding it amusing. it's like we didn't even possess blood. we had days with nothing to do. days of murder and car wrecks and balcony mishaps. so many of those. i dreamt i wanted to rip my own foot off. you woke up relieved. we stole things we didn't even care about, things we never even used.

i don't have a point. you can measure 90 ounces, drink half your body weight in magic. something can be beautiful as shit. or comforting. one sip in you can say, i have to go. i am deciding. i have to go now. this place is full of incense and purple air and it freaks me out and everyone is young and drunk and short. all week i have been waiting. for your place in the alphabet to light up. for some other long and happy life. what i thought would make me feel better, makes me feel worse. it's important to be out of sync this way. or else we'd never have a chance to say all the things we don't mean. i wanted that table so bad. i wanted to melt onto the sidewalk. i hate this place and i want to leave. an apartment building that looks like LA. tall and flat and beige and glowing like a mouth full of lost teeth, like some sick smile all druggy and swoopy. i want to be a body snatcher, invasion of. i want to make creepy you tube videos with a new face and old footage. i want to be french. i want to be born in the 1960's. hotel heiress, airplane curses, life turnarounds.

the truth is that we all mattered to each other very little, or not at all, or only for a second.

proof:

you kissed my boyfriend when he found you in the garden. black-eyed susans and his no kissing rule. who has that kind of rule?

you moved to my town, to the dangerous parts, with your own plans. walls oxidize.

you got so mad at me for not being enough in love with you on a porch in summer rain. why else would you have taught her to play guitar? or let me fall asleep in your apartment when it was too early to fall asleep? or picked my frozen feet up. or dropped pennies into my hands. or called me to say. or stuck your thumb in my eye? i think you happened because of my brain damage. the hole that burnt there.

you married her and forgot art.

you got some new way of speaking and forgot how you drove us off the road into blue, trying to ensure my religious conversion to your name and my new one. like a chapel in the field.

you didn't even try at all.

you visited him in jail. he was a murderer.

you dyed her hair gray in a foreign country.

you liked her more because she was louder. more fucked up. because everything she wore was real.

you sent me keyboard songs nearly twenty years later. your car overheated and you made me drive it even though i didn't have a license and the trees had dark green mouths and snarled and you slept in crack dens with milk crates and i don't know why i drove all that way.

you asked me if i'm having babies cause you have so many that you don't have anything else to do except watch them scale each surface, like chimney sweeps who sort of have your face.

you kissed her while i was in the same room as you. arms distance away. she was wearing my bra, the pearl one that snapped in the front.

i liked you for no good reason at all. just cause you were a boy half an inch taller than me with a handsome face and a slow way of talking like you meant it. you liked the days more than me.

i went with your girlfriend to a bar with her friends where they discussed fashion blogs and sex.

you thought i was trying to steal him from you, and you didn't even want him. people say you are the same, but you can't be the same. we wore glitter and we were the same as each other then. but you're a housewife now. if i could tell your nineteen year old self that. our nineteen year old selves are somewhere in cars in snow at parties in quarries at restaurants with good looking boys in hallways in costumes in kitchens making things up.

hey housewife, lock yourself in.
hey, stubborn and sinking self.

ways to get ready:

leave your hands where they are. fold them up. eat tongue and figs. omit. study architecture. don't touch him. find a way to be someone else. never amass anything nice. should you find yourself accidentally doing this, you should throw those nice things flaming from the wind warped windows.

that stupid intersection where you stopped and stayed?
you should run from it.
the sky you wanted to sleep under?
let it fall flat.
try this instead: turn to the ceiling, how it blocks you from each constellation. and close your eyes to see whatever glows there in your inexplicable darkness, hot pink and leftover.

so as not to carry.

2011-08-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

a place i used to live. i used to have a bedroom. a broken chair. a bed where i turned like a clock hand, and the same one now, but pink and crowded. at open windows, rumpled and layered and 11am mid-week and us. they are re-tarring the roof. any guilty pleasure. the ghost. the trash trucks. the acrobats and construction workers. the treacherous garden. the rain white stairs. the rust. the dinner parties where that many people could fit and did. the glass table. each of us taking our turn fainting, falling, righting. late at night, the doors are open, but i don't want to go in. we brought football players home with gold watches that they never came back for. then, i've turned misanthrope. zen.

a gold hallway. a rooftop with a pink fountain, lights beyond. the fog coming down hard to the black buildings. blue letters sparking in dark. ephemera. a journal, pre-earthquake and pre-fire. a duel and i can only imagine gunshot wounds, the old fashioned kind, happening right in the lower ribs. and now, just our civilized gold domes. our tourists. the world is open, is everywhere. hot, divided, full of horrors. anywhere high up i tilt towards falling. whatever keeps me. these are the things i know about the city. you might swim a million times in still water and it will never kill you. or you might be ten, and dive, and that will be all. your brain can be eaten. i dream of assassinations. and think of you less. but unfortunately it doesn't go less...and less...and less.

we sneak into, or try, the locked ballrooms. certain doors are just illusions of being locked, a pretense of security. we are the 10% that test this. we sit on blue couches. we see menus behind glass and know things once cost less. when my grandfather took my grandmother out dancing. i have her ankles. they bend in on escalators. department stores make me wild, like some frothing, fanged animal. the fact of the matter, is that we are all only photographs. gilded staircases. hushed, luxurious bathrooms with maids standing by the closet doors. with drunk women in expensive black dresses and exasperated men in shirts and buttons. gold framed mirrors. and me, i can see myself inside out. not just that i can. oh, i'm consumed by it. there are many things besides surgery to believe in. many quieter, more insanely fucking magical things. but my body can take me down. can flatten me. my brain obliges, falls into this entirely fuzzy nothing. an 8th century opiate.

love does this. is the same in these ways. i can hear it in the stories she tells that are my stories too. now you have this idea of a family, yours. you might study oceans. be capable in ways you never knew. pick exactly. choose. in the dark, and quickly, we tell each other every secret. we have the same one, different versions of it. it comes to life and is put aside, simultaneously. it's here where we go dancing. or where we did. in golden and dark dresses. before. it's the men that didn't even try to love us. that wished for the easiest way they might have us. which, of course, is not a way. their gray mouths and red words typeset. we always knew it wouldn't turn out that way, simply because we'd never let it.

i think about stories. books. 31 year old men who got the fellowships i want. the new yorker. the pulitzer. books that are too hard. too long. books that we don't finish. that we do. about algeria. about mermaids. about family. with good titles. and bad. with coordinates. and homesick. a book stuck in my purse. a bookmark from where i traveled and slept. slowly, each page. and even my own stories. the ones that unfurl like subconscious little show-offs. the labored ones too, stubborn at page six, infuriating me on tuesday. tuesday! and what i'll steal. like the girl who keeps the table full of things that aren't hers and are. and apparently i'm opposites too. the opposite of, the opposite of...like a mantra of some sort. a tic. and turquoise. 'how long did it take them to write the book they didn't write?' he asks. 'last time i was here, i danced,' i tell him. colored lights are strung around the indoor water.

my brain, sometimes, is this smudged thing. a rectangle of indoor rain. here is what i've noticed. paid attention to. the crazy man who sings. who puts his arms around my shoulders while i don't react. s. and p. both leap towards him, each in their own specific, stern way. he carries a bat in his shopping cart. i've spent many years underreacting. not moving quickly enough from the men who sing like that. i wonder what it takes. what moment it transfers from inside the brain to out. me too. not wanting to offend, perhaps. or not imagining the worst, as often as i do. i always know what the worst might be.

or cresting the hill and recognizing the hotel from the movie where she pretends to be someone else. i read these articles about how being a mother is the most important thing, a role that takes over the others. i stumble greedily, aging, into those others. the writer. and wife. and friend. and separate self. even as i grow tired of what it is we talk about. i can't debate bands. or books. or maybe anything at all. uprisings. generations. we like what we like, right? we hate what we hate. we feel lukewarm to what doesn't move us. a tiny felted slipper in a window display. but i will talk to him forever about the voices of god that say our names inside our skulls. Laura, it will say. Laura, in some voice that isn't me. flipping through old jazz records in the box outside his garage. my head a swirl of something that wasn't there before. Laura...

i hear it, i say. it tells me to calm down. to step back from the white stucco wall that prevents me from hurtling into the foggy night, cable car tracks, southward, vertigo. it tells me what i should know. what i do. that i am safe, or as safe as i can be so many stories up, a dot moving towards some destination, a glowing omnipotent path that i am on alone. it isn't selfish to say that. or: selfish things can be true.

"what kind of spider are you?" she asks. and the tiny boy walking beside her flings himself upward, arms flailing in answer.

the sidewalk and the lights. everything is this oozy orange. paper umbrellas. the name of your city carved in the sidewalk of mine. for a second on the hill, in the car, at the light. i think, maybe even after all this time, or maybe all along you were. i mean, in love with me. i mean spilling down the private streets. the private clubs, brownstoned and west of the mississippi, unspoken of.

desert series.

2011-08-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

1. COYOTES.

being possessed.
or: standing at the canyon. before, canyon was just a word, but now it is also a sweltering and bronzed place i've stood. a place he balanced on the edge of, and found his way down inside. a dry river bank and also the rio grande. and us, not stuck. crawling into where someone used to stand upright. our knees hot and the ground damp. it's too hard to make decisions. any sort.

how a magician saws a woman in half. i mean, how he does that. the trick of it, and the truth.
having a star stamped gently to my wrist.
pleasure, and the black ink mark it leaves at my pulse, which remains unwashed.
everything is a marker and measurement of closeness.
and walking down the soft red stairs right into the landmines, but knowing where to step and remaining unscathed (mostly).
and us in the mirror. us, our arms touching, and reflected.
collegiate matters. long buried under our marriages. our months of drinking. our years of cities and higher degrees.
if he was one of eight, and i am one of...say (i'm guessing) twenty. or more.

is it that kind of overt and clearly delineated math?

no. mattering is something else entirely. how and why you matter to someone.

girls in satin shirts the color of the sidewalk.boys with feathers around their necks.
us, the same, i think. more or less. or less and less. sometimes you can live for years and not have to explain them at all. you just see each other again and the years are something else that don't need mentioning.
though i pushed warm air into my just washed hair.
sprayed sweet smelling chemicals out of a purple bottle onto my throat.
electricity. place.
a single and catastrophic center. then, only sweetness.

to this day i can conjure the dark mouth of a well in a way as if i stood by one then looking down.

meaning you are never very far away from any very far away feeling.

2-PLUM TREES.

the curl of the rattlesnake spine on the wooden bookshelf. these things we aren't allowed to touch. he took the doorknobs off his doors (i totally approve, though this seems it might be a cultivated eccentricity rather than an organic one). we'd all seem strange like that if everyone was paying attention to us, studying which years we did what, and leading tours through the architecture of our lives. my collection of matchbooks. or of lipgloss in ten similar shades of plum. my red vintage shirt with the buttons down the back. my notes taped to the water pipes. horoscopes. drawings passed during class from his fingers to my palm. close calls. the particular words of a rejection, a signature. my desert contraband.

his lines are silver, minimalist, lead to nothing but themselves, and the lines of light through windows. i am overheating. i am fluorescent in the army barracks. i am a line of plum trees to the window. anyone's lifetime of objects, or their bookshelf. not just his. her abraham lincoln rosary. her nephew's letters from jail. his ballet dancer ex-wife. the preserved bedroom's of his children. and us, having driven for thousands of miles through expansive, gorgeous dust and quiet. we broke it laughing. wagers on peyote which i lost. also, you can't do cocaine off the cover of a book, and certain words need dashes, and others don't. and nights in jail. we stand considering the beam of light illuminating the plastic spider. our dreamless desert time. our faces upward. it's fair to say we've never felt this before. this particular night. this hotel insomnia or haunting. this walk back by everything closed.

someday we will not be in this world. this place that feels so good. and inside this skin that feels it. we will be gone.

how many times i think it. i will be gone. in the open-air wooden shower in a texas field. twisted legs in the hammock with him. cotton stripes of orange and pink. the blinking, sharp clarity of a famous constellation. not just what i wrote in my diary, or silently hoped i would remember unwritten. the dry warmth, and the highway nearby, each empty house, each blue thing saturated against beige. my feet turning silver in the water, the ground underneath their silver kicks 25 feet down. love notes scratched there. a place where someone drowned in the movies. i float and float.

3-COPPER WIRE.

you gave los angeles a try. you never wanted it enough, which is the point. not the only point, i guess. but perhaps the main point. maybe not the main point, but the deciding one. now i send you desert light. an hour of my darkest thought. a nervous system of options. by this i mean a branching out of the countless ways. i have counted them. i also mean nothing. light from the center of my chest to the center of yours. and nothing. i see why people come out here. why something hot blows through them. why, for a moment, they are changed. why it dries up their head, their skull rattles around inside and everything starts over empty. light reflects in patterns on the walls. pink seeps into the edges. i wash my hair in the middle of the field. it's night again...those anxious hours to calm. i look for scorpions. for how the lightning turns orange against the sun setting. for what i don't know, which adds up and up. for the road weaving upwards too. the kindness of strangers who save you. for the rules of mountain lions and bats. for bat wings and my own burnt shoulder blades. for moving under the unmoving sky.

4-BANKRUPTCY.

billboards advertise cemetery plots, or remind us that a child can drown in a second, or comfort us about our credit, or entice us to gamble it all away. remind us of copper wire, pulled out from the walls like a loose stitch...doing that is illegal. meth labs will just explode, leaving black and ash and horror movie posters and yoga ads on television. recreate these exploded places, drive the country looking. you can stop anywhere and find something. the one open business. the fan spraying a mist of water out onto the porch. a cup full of ice cubes. the most dangerous city in the world just one highway over. your own fucked up spine. ways of being cured.

in the desert we find a woman's grave, the original rock points up in rough grays and purples with her name engraved on the ground in front of it. a newer grave, the smooth white i recognize from cemeteries, placed directly in front of the old. preserved, they must think. people have left pennies. the font of her original name is far better, not the smooth cursive of its successor. perhaps the first is written in her husband's handwriting, then deemed more likely to disintegrate back into the earth. though isn't that the point?

there was a time when there were cottonwood trees here. so much has changed, he said, i don't see why people don't think it can change that much again. he's right of course. driving along the border it actually makes me cry. the age of the sun, for example, which even in middle age has long to go, but not forever, but far further than him or i. or the books people write. science. what collects in the air of outer space and the lifetimes people spend trying to see it.

the world does not know our names. who we are. our desert graves. all the perfect, uncurated crosses, wood nailed together to form them, artifacts, our jewelry, and scrapbooks. our collages of famous movie stars. our estate sales after our death. our ghost towns and mines. our historical sites. a car flipped over in the middle of the highway, a helicopter hovering on the median. sun on the white hills, black trees burnt to the edges. a town called las cruces. a ghost town, too, like an amusement park. the piles of adobe. you can make it as entertaining as you want, but the haunting can still be there. the swirl of swamp lights at the horizon that appear 40 times a year.

everything on the radio is about how and why the end is near. and do we have the imagination to admit that? to picture it? he does. like white cave walls. or 5,000 years in the space between your thumb and pointer finger. why else? why anything?

of all the things i want to touch and can't, it is the curved spiral of the rattlesnake skeleton i want to touch the most.

on the deck as the sun goes down into the shadow of mountains. and the storm appears out in the desert, columns of gray moving towards each other, meeting somewhere miles out into the heat.

fingerprints become etched in the bronze if not wiped off within 24 hours. the bronze pieces sit on the cement floor like giant thimbles or bone. i like the idea, of course, of this permanent ruin. etching sounds like such a beautiful thing anyway. how fingerprints would wear it down over time. and why the urge to reach out and touch this unblemished thing, anyway? why not keep my hands at my sides? red typewriter ink. and if he did or didn't push his wife out the window. and if he didn't. it's the same as any second before any horrible thing. how they stood in his studio fighting. how she fell or was pushed. how she flew.

i ask him about the spy that was caught in the creekbed where he played as a child.
about the playground collaged in pornography.
how much we still don't know about each other. how long into the night we can talk. how far we can drive.
this layered, layered endlessness, the beauty of it burning everywhere around us...both older and longer lasting than we will ever be.

cutthroat//cosmological//compendium

2011-07-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

just in case you ever happen to read this:

yesterday we went to the russian river.
(don't bother carrying her letter around in your pocket--she only wrote it because she had something to say).

we drove and drove through and then away from the city fog until it was blue above us. but what would this be if we didn't have our glaring white peninsula to compare it to? and our lives.

amy winehouse died. amy winehouse reminds me of grad school. of taking baths (i don't have a bathtub anymore). and drinking ginger infused vodka that my sister made. it isn't that i really listened to amy winehouse then. or much at all. but when i heard she died, i thought of camden. a place, one of many, where i haven't been. and being 27. and how her ex-husband is in jail. and sound, and voices. in grad school the classrooms were nondescript. in one workshop there was a line of windows. in another, there were none. there is a sweetness to certain regrets, in that they aren't regrets exactly, because you are glad to keep them, but also, vaguely, wish you hadn't, but mostly know exactly why you did.

if i win $10,000 i will go to paris. belize. i guess i will probably come back. what scares me away? what keeps me? the minute i think it: we will never be apart again. you can be famous and still not know.

contrary impulses exist.

there is street construction. tar and smoke in the air. men working without masks. it seems totally fucked up, all that thick black air they have to breathe. or we might not have streets. what then? right now, i don't have a car and i guess i don't care a lot about streets. though i understand we need them. we do, right? i wonder if i will ever be brave enough to buy a car (even city car share scares me). i don't understand insurance. i crashed a car once. when i ride in a car, like through tunnels, or over bridges, i always feel these brushes with escape. and, simultaneously, a dream of owning a sailboat. and, more times than not, i wonder if i should work in a jail. but i'm most likely kidding myself.

1. i drive to target. love/hate.
2. i drive to the ocean. the mist is low. he is dark blue against it. the birds fly in a direct line, as if from the center of his skull, outward.
3. i drive on the highway. on the hill straight up to the fog and sun.

one of my students has written a paper about how holden caulfield is his favorite fictional character of all time. jesus, it warms my heart. it's fun to know things. i feel like i am practicing sounding like i know things. even math problems are beautiful. exponents? we talk about holden for awhile. i once debated a girl that it would be fun to date holden in real life. i stand by that. i mean, the part where the prostitute's dress makes him sad? 'why do you think it made him sad?' i ask my student, and he knows the answer. when i was my student's age i often daydreamed of what i imagined was j.d. salinger's hermit abode, surrounded by giant blue stone. did i make that up or read it somewhere? i can still picture it.

pete and susana saved an old lady from drowning in the slow-moving current. and we drifted in inner tubes on the green water in our black bikinis. and no one seemed concerned about their children. their children doing handstands on the underwater gravel surface of the river while their friends counted loudly above their submerged heads. or leaving in boats towards the dam. or fake surfing. crashing into the tangle on the other side of the water. even falling from the boat as a joke. that is the way to be raised.

i circle: AN ALCHEMICAL FACT THAT AFTER A SMALL STILLNESS THERE IS A SMALL STIR AFTER A GREAT STILLNESS A GREAT STIR. (not my caps)
and: there she stood a person with particular traits, a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
(both anne carson)

it seems a million parts of me are malfunctioning in tiny ways. an uncontrollable splintering out. unrelated, but somehow, they must be connected in their splintering. the darkest, inside parts of me. not the part that floats. not the part in the blue dress. it's weird, but it makes my love go even deeper. he radiates something from his ankles, the magic of their rotation and sharp edge. oh, these short lives of ours that we have the good fortune of being within. so many millions of years where we won't be. it's OK, then, these small ways in which we begin to unravel from ourselves. it has to be OK. and his comfort is partly in knowing that this sensation of love is the absolute farthest i can get inside myself, the closest to the wordless wild calming spark.

some days are sunday. some at 5pm. some on the alleys off the main streets. some inside as the noise quiets. some outside, being loud. less and less so, the latter. what we are admitting is the passage of time. it is less of a joke, and more of...i don't know. days like marbles. exposed lightbulbs. window displays. i said tar already, right? the heat of the newly made road pulses up through my shoes. the actual heat of the urban earth. no tequila shots. no one night stands. i never had those to begin with. i got as far as names. occupations. some men are bankers. some tango. some drink gimlets in dive bars. some were shorter than me. a few taller. some look like men i knew from somewhere else and that can be a good thing or a bad thing.

i think, i just want to be OK. i want to be with him, and be OK. and i won't ask for anything else. like being 10 and making deals with the devil. and i promise my wanting will be a delicate, perfect thing. savored, fluttering out and capturing what it should. i imagine it like a lace tablecloth. a darkness tinged with gray. like, ease. how softness opens up. because wanting, especially mine, has not always been like that.

miranda july is not miranda july's real name.

i want a stage name. laura bell, maybe. my feminism ebbs and flows. reflections in the windows of public transportation. accidents. leopard print. i'm definitely aware of the problems with pornography. there is so much art i don't know about. even brutal forms of ballet. miranda july doesn't have a favorite movie. i freak out when i remember breathless. is it just because of how they are in bed together? or is it this?

miranda july married mike mills and they don't have babies. but they did this.

i read the newspaper front to back. i formed opinions to run by him. about serial killers. and religious fundamentalism. are those easy things to form opinions on? surprisingly, they aren't. i want to take this opportunity to say that i'm over it (you/this). and that finding meaning and holding on are silly things for younger girls (n o t f o r m e).

and we all were weird and brilliant children. with our assassination theatre. our literary pursuits. our knowledge of cosmology and hiawatha.

my old diary holds two lines of writing within the space of each one line. i'm pleased to see i forget why i wrote any of it.
i talked about me and you talked about you. so we aren't going to miss each other one bit, cause we can both keep doing that. the cure is a pinprick, or countless ones of them, silver darts into my skin. do i believe in the energy that supposedly is blocked here? why not believe in it, as i believe in countless things i cannot see. how i don't want to tell you anyway. the very seriousness of this dire matter. or, it isn't dire. the temporary thing about it all. we'd have a child for it to die. and yet at the same time. the world rustles up gently against the windows, the punctuation of ambulance sirens, reminder of autumns, age 9 or 11, or even 14. we'd be giving her that too.

i think i've made up my mind. the sky is dotted with fish. it's only interesting if there is something residual. a tension. a tautness. what's become of me? i am writing in the margins of my book of poetry. i am buying ashtrays though i don't smoke. i am falling apart, wearing clothes that mimic. finding that accidental luxury. how does one person get power? the poem asks. yes, how? i talk like i don't have it. i talk like i do now.

maybe she is just in love him.

all this time and all this talking. all this revision. and, of course, that's what it is.

it's a danger. a thing you allow. a story, a story, a story.

radiology.

2011-07-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

inspired by 'bluets' by maggie nelson

1. mercurial: changeable, volatile, fickle, flighty.

mercurial is one of those words i always forget the meaning of. he said it again, mercurial, the sleeves of his shirt blue. i wanted, god damn it, to be as smart as him. it is interesting how the obsessions of others can blend into your own. like, with blue. blue is a color i never really thought much of. hi, poverty. sky or ocean. what i think of first is my bare nails. my black vintage shirt that hung in the doorway of the overcrowded vintage shop. room after room of everything i could ever want. the clouded glass and the golden cursive name of my hometown, a country away. yes, that's one thing i want. also, that he would dance with me. but he is not a man to show up at dances. and who am i lingering at the strobe lit outskirts of one, anyway. the blood just a thin layer over top his brain. who could dance that way? jarred like that. taking the world in that way.

2. we are all responsible for the situations we are in. would you leave/stay? why? if i told you this story, how long would you sit there and listen? i'm responsible for the wrong number, then for finding the right one, then for trying, three times, to tell you something i knew i shouldn't tell you. the truth is not clear. but i can be clear. a bug flew up my dress and stung me. the whole tiered room sprung outward and i knew you were right to be so cold. i held the letters of your words in my hand on a glowy screen and the glow went to ice. the only things i want to tell you are maddening, coy, braggy things about myself. or is that a type of love too? wanting to brag like that, yearning to impress and thereby becoming bolder. my brain isn't blood, but liquid. it doesn't fire that way. take, for example, the radiology lobby. the dark clock over the door timed exactly to my breaths, that for fifteen minutes, i felt sure i was in complete command of. i could even turn that into a type of story for you.

3. privacy+exclusion. you lean against others to take what is theirs that reminds you of what you want to say. maybe they say it better. more succinct. like: i wrote because i had something to tell you. like: everything about you i adore, except the way you speak french. like: longing, and yearning and gray. i am not a totem. my geode ring is hot pink, hot glue gunned, double fingers, even the girl in the expensive store compliments it though she knows i am only pretending to consider the price tags. i hold the handwritten black numbers and consider them as if i would ever spend that much, and drop the paper back towards the lovely, soft material, whatever it is. a bird dish on the wall. a necklace in a tangle of chain and rock.

4. the things that haunt you.

5. multiple dismantling events. "do you have children?" she asks. she introduces me to her 13 year old. his face in his hands. he is tired from running. the sun hits the side of the apricot colored apartment building. "no," i say. but i could. a week ago i sat at a bar with a glass full of ice, like on the afternoon of the nuclear meltdown, like on the afternoon of the rain. the night he followed me home and i dumped my purse on the sidewalk. the minute he says they never plant trees, i see the disturbed soil everywhere. the minute i think of rivers, one separates the town. and i am by the ocean again. i walk downhill to where we are supposed to meet, around the corner of this bluff, at the bottom of stone staircases that lead up to a plateau and nothing else. cities at this vantage look similar, though the one i'm from rises and falls differently. we escape into the darkness and walk up the fragrant sidewalks and talk about when we were in college and how it would be nice to live in a free-standing house like this. a girl is on the steps sitting cross-legged on her cell phone. two girls, us, walk by. later, we discuss many things: baptism, or divorce, or the names of our children, as if we were in high school writing them in a notebook. i have mine chosen. but maybe that is more an aesthetic thing, rather than biological.

6. be willing to explore your personal obsessions, she says.

7. this act can be an act of betrayal.

8. proximity. i like what it means. i think of closeness, but proximity can be distance, of course. it can just be the x in the middle of the word that i like. this one guy knows everything. he has read the great gatsby a bunch, he conflates things. i had to look conflate up in the dictionary before i could even think of conflating anything. he knows about the ottoman empire, and the heroes of film noir. but he doesn't want his picture taken. i knew a guy who didn't want to get his picture taken. in one where i forced him, his eyes are squinted closed hard, my lips are somewhere between red and pink. that was when i wore shirts i stole from marshall's. tube tops of polyester, fabrics that felt like welcome mats, that smelled like mountains, like pennsylvania. more recently, at the river, i wrapped a towel around my shoulders. i think photos are beginning to show my age, how one eye gets smaller than the other when i laugh.

9. conflate: to fuse into one entity.

10. all i want is new experience. we do not work on mondays, tuesdays, or thursdays. we take the bus to california street. this is the part of town i used to live in. it's colder here. we go to the movies. i forget it is tuesday and think it's sunday and wonder where everyone is. the theatre is empty except for very old people and us. we eat southern indian food by a giant window overlooking the intersection, and the goodwill, where earlier, i found the perfect sweater, and left it. the perfect pair of boots. and left them. a blue dress with silver thread. it was more about my ribcage. my closet. my over-crowded life. the loose stitching. in the movie everyone was very complicated. computer graphics illustrated both the beginning and end of time. i stretched my legs out, my broken zippered boot, my knees. sometimes his sweetness reminds me of our deaths. sometimes sundays when they are sweet. or tuesdays when everyone else is working. airplane sky noises. and sometimes it is just the taste of something, of pepper in a sweet drink, or popcorn in a paper bag, or green beans that he cuts the ends off of and steams.

11. don't overly respect real life. the black and white fuzz of another inside space of me. i tilt the corners of my eyes to try to see. but only sort of. i see the edge of the screen and i ask her, 'how can you tell?' but she and i are in much different fields. her the science of bodies, knowing where each invisible thing is located. what a word: ovary. it's sort of beautiful, really, the o and the y. i am meditating. i am trying not to move. when i must hold very still is when i am most aware of the shortcomings of my legs, my throat, every part of me that twitches and aches and moves. like i want to bite my dentist's fingers. more than that, i feel i must. then i am reading about the fanciest restaurants in san francisco. i am waiting ten minutes. i am saying my husband is the one to call. he is my husband and i don't know his phone number. and we don't have insurance. and we somehow found each other. i am drinking the required amount of water from a pickle jar. i am wandering the glowing, hypnotic isles of the grocery store. i am thinking of how to describe a new place. a town without hills. a cabin that's a steal. we would live there, but where would we work? we wouldn't be able to round the corner and buy blackberries overflowing from their carton. i just can't bring myself to be professional. for so long i tried not to be, and now i am unable. i can't care about the graffiti. except to notice it matches the shade of the wall and to bemoan there is even more slang that i don't know. how iridescent the heart is.

12. don't be gentle. we walk 20 blocks. then we sit at the bar and it goes to dusk, then dark outside. alligator skin high heels. pale blue marble floor. matchbooks. outdoor benches. boys with tattoos on their wrists counting my garments. suddenly all i want to do is dress like a hippie. wear tye-dyed nightgowns and dresses adorned in mirrors. drinking a beer with my friend's boyfriend. he studies underneath the water. later, engineers try to explain airplanes to me as if i don't know. i am getting a soft spot for poetry again. poetry would comfort me in regard to airplanes more than engineering. more than facts about moving parts. poems about bakersfield in the 70's. poems that have boy's names in the titles, or the cities of these boy's residences. someday i will be an old woman and i will read a poem with only the name of his city, and perhaps the year. i will be forthcoming and vivid about the sex, but leave his name to nothing. i will read it in an outdoor amphitheater and people will clap and later ask me to sign the book. and the boy without the name will be somewhere unknown to me, like in a camper in the wilderness. or in a city like los angeles.

13. it could be. i want to read isabelle eberhardt's book. she dressed like a man and travelled in northern africa in the late 1800s and died in a flash flood in the desert. she wrote a book called 'the oblivion seekers.' i also want to write a story about marfa, texas. i didn't know that marfa is named after one of many marfas who appear in a number of dostoyevsky's novels, but probably the marfa in the brothers karamazov. i don't know if it is just that s. is compelled to go there, to make work about it, and if his compulsions have intertwined with mine and now i'm compelled. when i lean over his shoulder i can barely understand what he is reading, graphs of fluorescent lines going up and down. or i hear his recorded voice in the kitchen. or he misses me while i'm up there. feet on glowing blue over the river every morning. the ducks with their heads entirely under. on the last morning a chair thrown from somewhere floats in the middle of the water, fully submerged, revealing how clear the brown water actually is, and the chair glowing up like bones.

14. we experience the world through one flawed mind.

15. make a list of what she can't have. she can't have: the last word. the necklace that matches her earrings (real diamonds embedded in wood). her twin. her jailhouse wedding. a green mug without a handle (why not?). art commissions. the chance to explain. her baby. answers. her childhood tombstone. a phd. a time machine. a job? why is this list so short? should life be harder for her? she can't have it both ways. she can't find all the buried treasure. cartography. she can't come up with a title. like: a map of the brightest routes.

16. remember how good it feels to let go and how necessary it was to hold on for a time.

17. mixed feelings about everything. in the french movie they say: things take on meaning when the story ends. there is a black and white part and a color part. the black and white part is probably better. i don't really follow the plot. the subtitles are sporadic. s. puts strawberries in a bowl. our neighbors talk so loud and long. when you eavesdrop people are usually retelling a different conversation they had, recounting their side of it. "what?" they say. in the movie they say: i don't know how memory can help us reclaim our lives. though i don't follow the plot, that does make sense to me. at what point, though the invisible surgery of it made you, do you decide to go on unencumbered? in the morning i remember the movie like a dream, the beach a radiated red.

18. a provoking thing. like, a murder. like, an affair. affairs are dull. we will figure out how to not have affairs today, she says and laughs. outside it rains and is sunny, alternately. she is 70 and starting her novel. i am trying to write at my desk again. i forgot how uncomfortable my chair is. if you are underemployed you better at least be making art. you can take a break at 3pm to sit in the sun and watch whoever else is out too.

19. trance state. what sort of person would say that? as the sun goes down, a bat flies from her hair. she leaves her sunglasses on. she got a bad review in the new york times. she has gin and tonic in at least every book. speechless, i forgot to tell her anything. even my name. he remembered the L part of it. we met under a tree. his girlfriend is beautiful, wears oversized shirts, and says, the mystery. yes, i agree. are we all just trying to explain that mystery to each other? these are the specific details of my mystery. like, lately when i fall asleep i always wake up in a different place. it is weird to sleep alone for a week in a narrow, blue bed. twelve years ago we all found ways to fit in those beds together.

20. menaced by something. a garland of red paper stars. a pincushion. a marriage proposal. an autograph. an acceptance. a rejection. a photo of red shoes. a magazine article says men are always attracted to women wearing red. or 30% more attracted. or something. when i pulled her in a wagon. when we lived in a place with a driveway. when it rained on the lake with the paper birds. when he bought me presents, claiming not to care one way or the other. a block of wood with gold stickers, a turquoise mandala. st. tula, patron saint of film. it's possible to miss anyone if you try. just think of them and the missing will follow. it's important that they not be there. if they are beside you, what you should do instead is listen. or trace the outline of their hand curled against the fabric of where they are sitting. the famous filmmaker who died recently. my friend and i. we were in the clear, or so we thought. the truth may turn out to be sad. that is just a translation of what is likely much more lovely sounding in french.

21. it turns out i know very little about noir.

22. why does this story have to be told? because i want to tell it?

23. psychologically crude. not everything is about the math problem between when they were born and now vs. when i was born and now. 1973, see? she had six more years than me. i claim to not want to capture it, to not need anything more than it happening. so, it happened. maybe it isn't more or less his fault. or more or less mine. it is a small decision really, to put your mouth on someone's mouth. it could be like him reaching his hand out to mine. there is no situation in life. we just decided mouths are important. it could be anything. knuckles. though, god, what if i had put my mouth to those? or if we'd just had a fist fight instead? history comes in. her mother woke me up to say i didn't say thank you the right way, or fast enough, or well-timed enough. every time i walk through a door i worry i should have let someone else go ahead of me. every time i'm in a parking garage i feel like we ought to attack each other. remember, when we weren't supposed to? everywhere we went was fraught with that. the parts of D.C. under the highways that went from dangerous to nice sometime between when i was sixteen and now. we stood in front of small containers of color. children's games with rust, behind glass. one person can be obsessed with ballerinas. another with wings. i want something to collect.

24. do you realize your obligation?

25. no commas, no clauses. just me and the priest and the river. there aren't alligators in portland, oregon. stand in a line to say what? talking comes so easy sometimes. other times it seems so ridiculous: to use words to explain words. to explain anything.

26. i can't go back and explain. even if i could, it wouldn't be the right explanation. first, it was how you stood in the center of the room slouching, unconcerned about not having anyone to speak to. i would never do that. second, it was this childhood memory i have of him getting out of jail. i remember peering through the banisters of the staircase. did we have a garden there? we must have. but i don't remember where it was. he never showed up, but maybe he wasn't even supposed to? i thought he must have escaped. my shirt was yellow with red writing. i live in that same body now. just 28 years later. third, was it the dream? the mythology we've created is that it was the drive to florida. how you let me wear your coat. how you told me we had far still to go. what did i sense in you? some willingness to listen and reciprocate? you wanted to climb up on the roof. you laughed when i pretended to be sylvia plath. commiserated when i told the story about being crass in the nice restaurant just to piss him off. like, you were willing to be in it together. or if i was crass in a nice restaurant you would throw your head back and laugh.

27. the limitations of delight. i dreamt about our road trip last night. that we drove a pick-up truck. that others were with us. that we took beautiful photos, primarily of white buildings and white landscapes. that we stopped in a small, dark restaurant where everyone spoke another language.

28. sitting and waiting.

29. the most vivid moments of the past are undocumented. the seductiveness of involuntary memory. the real complications at any attempt.

30. someday this will matter to you.

31. you have your own set of desires. i know. believe me, i wish there were books written about them. books with green covers, a leg bent and propped on a table. chapters with titles. a mountain edge. a girl i would never wish for you. though all of us are much more fucked up than even our blandest exteriors would hint at. we might swallow fire. we might have the sweetest facebook photos ever. pull a string of scarves from our mouth. swing out fast, trusting anyone else to catch our upturned arms. this isn't earnest. it is a darkest wish. besides, am i brave enough to wish for you the thing that would be the best? whatever that is. the thing that would make you happiest? i'm not yet. but i will be.

32. all the things that seem secret. seem, i mean. they aren't.

33. to spill our difficulties is not to undo them. we can be intricately self-aware and yet instruments in our own destruction. getting to the essential obsessions. which i'm trying to do, but i'm distracted by the fact that nothing will be undone, even upon that success. though, i must admit, that was never my objective in the first place.

34. disclosure does not remain static. which is a relief, i suppose. and an obligation. an endless fancy. a thing to return to and attempt, again and again.

36. listen hard enough to the ache.

we had some moments left before we were done.

2011-07-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

there is miraculous simplicity. there are things i can't put other places. a collection of what is written down on scraps of paper, edges ripped from magazines. what gets underlined or read right before sleeping, or what gets left behind with sleep when i wake up late and crawl out of bed. it has to be the foot of the bed because the sides are against each wall. i can stick my feet out the window into the sun. i can climb down to their porch. i can go illegally upward towards the splashing sky.

there are small green pieces of paper listing the things i will do better. their shadows are taped to the glass door. some are easy...i will drive in cars to mountaintops or dine under heat lamps by bay water. others are more vague, but equally vital: discipline. ease. or else the dire and specific: the medical tests of my early 30s. the fancy and calm decor of my new doctor's office, who i can mostly afford. i've never seen medical degrees like that, they seem as if they've done the opposite of shrink. i've never been somewhere so soft, with no scary or informative posters anywhere. just art and the new yorker and her giant engagement ring and her kind questions about my life, my children, and, i guess, my death.

heavy breath brings insects. they bite your feet. screen doors and the taste of where it's from and 85 cent books and laughing into his ribcage at 7:15pm on a wednesday.

it's when everything is perfect, and has fallen into place, that you know it is time to move again. we plot our route. turns out i don't know where things are, which isn't a surprise. or even what to expect. there are mystery lights that gather inexplicably over marfa. and the lights of vegas, mysterious too, two hours out of the way. and deserts where they caution you not to die and tell you how. we are going to drive there. he knows every fact i can think to ask: about geography, history, science, even sports. he knows about the bible. i keep misquoting the beginning. but it was dark. and then it wasn't. i know other sorts of things, emotional connections to the world, or whatever. i'm starting to wonder if i even know that. or if it is more just an ability to describe a complication using vocabulary words. a certain laziness that lets the poetry in.

suddenly, i could sleep outside. i could leave. i know which dresses are my favorite and i will take them. my closet swallows things. my biggest problems. things burn and new plans are made. we run to the corner. it's as simple as any decision can be. suddenly, i believe in all of it. in energy and voodoo and maya deren movies and teenage feminism and grown-up desire and even things i thought i knew or thought i'd decided upon, like him, or my last name, or how to celebrate certain holidays, or even basic shit like what is good and what is bad and how to deal. he sends me a song and says, maybe this is how you are feeling. and it is. our names are alliterative, sort of. there are all sorts of compelling reasons: it's almost been a year, is one. i've found my way back in. i've navigated that again and again. each time it is slightly different, one inch here or there, one way about myself slightly altered, and here. and next time only part of it will be familiar, but i will know i've done it before.

it's simple, really, to take to the tunnels, and bridges. to eat on the deck against the bay. i don't know if it has something to do with childhood, how amazing it seems to eat an artichoke. or how it feels to come out into the sunlit courtyard of downtown at an hour when you would normally be asleep. and to know that you are probably fine. for awhile. and the men walk by in their clothes that don't even look like anyone is wearing them. there is a girl who looks like me. she is wearing a dress like i would wear, walking like i would walk. her arms and legs are like mine. the way she wears her belt. how tall she is.

marcel duchamp said this: I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

that gets written down too.

up early. my hand on his back. i dreamed we did it all a different way. that it rained on paper parasols. that i wore wobbly shoes. that the wrong people or too many people were there. that the wrong things were said. that he showed up not to steal me and to tell me so. that it was last minute. that we cut everything but an invisible list. a stephen elliott email. everyone left. then came back. then danced. i think it turned out OK.

i woke up 15 minutes before my alarm that didn't go off. into a cold summer morning. everything matte and mirror. a key inside my mouth. a woman on a chair. it isn't that i don't love you. this is just easier than i thought. i might tell you that i have my reasons. even dramatic. even small. irrational, private, changing reasons. the price. the dresses in the window. the fact that each morning changes everything, especially the ones where your whole life shrinks down to the complicated, irrational mechanisms of your body. and what a silly luxury our hearts and brains are anyway. we might malnourish ourselves to nothing. we might try to cure our sleeplessness only to have our heads explode. we might marry four different men. we might become possessed. we might soften up our fears until they glow and glow and glow. we might not even have to choose, our bodies will just choose for us, choose no, choose failing.

or, i should admit: there might be some surprise there in the outcome.

for those weeks, for that night, when i didn't know how it would turn out, each thing of value crystalized, each sensation overpowered, each object became sacred. of course i know what i need to do, whether i can manage it or not. i need to feel that way all the time. or try.

three things that are the way it will be.

2011-07-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

once i wrapped a gift in paper. but i still haven't been to the desert.

you have inside jokes. i get it. i mean, i don't get them, but i understand. i don't want to be let in on them, exactly, but i note their existence. i press my chin to your shoulder, and though it's soft, i know it isn't me anymore, who will find these things funny.

i don't have a car to get to the river or beach or any other change of scenery. it could make a girl crazy. dreams of free-standing houses without shared walls. i'm not even sure what my opinion of quiet nights is. i think i like them? i don't know. i dream of computer screens. oh, real life...infuriating, and hillsides, and right there. oh real life...no matter what. beer bottles hidden under my skirt. we lean back into this wash of gold. i know you like i know my own sleep. like i know every five minutes of my own life. at midnight i look outside and it isn't even dark. i've been saying i'm sorry a lot. i was totally the glib one in 2006. who spells the word love like that but claims to mean every word they say? it isn't even an abbreviation. reclaiming things? the things you lose, i guess. and i still am.

i kissed him because i knew i would be the first to do so. and him because i'd be the last. and because i wouldn't be. and because it had nothing to do with any of that. one called me maudlin, such a pretty word. also-unstoppable. selfish. another just my name: Laura.

old haunts with rain blue walls.

old haunts are old. old, old, old.
i say it out loud in the kitchen in order to make sure it isn't only just inside my brain. and it sounds terrible out loud. but maybe it's gone then. sound in air is brief, after all. i eat popcorn for dinner. drink gin. change one article of clothing each hour until i am wearing something to sleep in. he texts me from the doorway. i can only read a few pages at a time. women locked in attics. women in self-imposed prisons. pregnancies. and coffins.

i can compare you to what (who) you are similar to. i sat in between the refrigerator and the wall and your sandpaper voice came at me in some way no one's commands have, before or since. i fit there perfectly. i cooked bugs for dinner. i made coffee the color of lemonade and poured it hot straight into a mason jar. it was an ungodly august, hot as shit, and i wore that red halter top everywhere, the one that wasn't mine. i lived with just a mattress, a chandelier, and a gold encrusted twenty foot mirror. i saw many people that summer for the very last time. i sat on the steps and called you on my very first cell phone. that bill was like $500. the sunsets were always pink, sloppy things. i stopped and started doing everything. the natural history museum. the haunted parties of our three stories. everyone who attended had a heart ailment, and i didn't know them. like, they had heart attacks in the middle of their own songs. we danced around the pool table to hip-hop from our high school years. he had a heart attack right on stage.

i took the mace up to the attic and sprayed it into the empty room. the door got kicked in. our baby, or as close as i might have been, anyway. the stairs of your house party. the street where you lived. had it been years? it's always been years. did i lie? to everyone? i think i might have. he was too nice to say how expensive it was for us to forget that ever happened, but my best guess is it was $300. we've all been near those places. the thuggy boy who helped us carry things upstairs. the basketball court where we had the nerve to play. the botanical gardens that seemed so far, but probably weren't. you always had the most perfect, delicate timing. always knew when to leave, not a moment too soon or too late. why can't anyone else do that? decades of that precariousness. it helps to get old. it saves you.

or maybe i just don't remember, that once we both cared very much: that you fought him on the street, that you said it wouldn't work, that you made me promise not to tell.

maybe one day our affection will be that mild.

i pierced my nose and went to the movies alone. i wore that coat that i still have, even though it's too heavy for the weather where i live now, even the winters. we went to that one restaurant, the one entirely open to the street. and it rained. and i wore that dress with the ripped ribcage and the sequins sewn haphazardly along the hem.

our first year of gchats were really sad, and sometimes hilarious. i feel bad for everyone else we dated then. i wonder who found the scarf i made you, wherever it got dropped? i wonder if they wear it. i wonder how she spoke of you, how you confused her, how she tried to make you hers and it didn't work.

it is a long time until december. in august we will drive to the desert as poor as 23 year olds. there is freedom in that recklessness. in july we will go drinking with famous men. in december we will try to be too. we are the right age to be famous, i think. in september, nothing. everyone wants to get out of town. maybe i need to learn about my own disappointments. just let them be, neither something to ignore nor luxuriate within. nothing to hasten. it's nothing spectacular, just the double edge and gunshot. just the park i never walked in. the empty grocery store with the pastel vegetables. we lived where it was noisiest and quietest. some days just bludgeon. there are so many of them, some crowded garden. habits take you places and lead you back away. even wearing my skirt differently, my hair pulled back differently, my bicycling knees, my rings on other fingers, my walk down different blocks, the weather and the shadow. the post office. just giving a different answer. it's funny to be in the days you know you will look back upon with regret. even stranger still to not admit it.

i knew this would happen: the way our lives have moved into the markers of adulthood. our children and ex-wives. but there are other things i didn't know: the dirt paths with the garden trestles that i crave with feverish and untrustworthy intensity being just one.

whatever it is, the answer is no.

2011-06-27T23:23:00.001-07:00

this is a photo of henry darger's room. i love the light+i love the typewriter.

-i've been corresponding with lizz via the regular mail. it has been making me think a lot about writing, and life, and how we talk to each other, and love, and history/posterity, and secrets, and pen ink, and typewriter ribbon, and postage, and the ex-girlfriends of the men i've loved. we have a lot in common. or a few important things in common anyway. lizz and i also have things in common. she looks good in my coat. i love her blog. once we drank margaritas together before she broke her foot. once we went outside together during an earthquake drill? i sat on the living room floor on sunday and wrote lizz a letter on my typewriter. the ribbon is no longer sold anywhere and i have three spools left.

-i'm reading joy williams. it has been making me think about the darkness. and the south. and language. and swamps (always with the swamps). and car accidents. and husbands. and imagination. and fugues. and altered states.

-maybe it turns out i like traditions. maybe not.
-i do often relate to mentally unstable women in novels. especially if they drink gin. and lounge by swimming pools. and wear negligees.

-suzanne and i talked about silence. radio silence. yeah, a discipline i don't have and am punished for, but which i seek in mostly quiet increments and will. we shared food, heaping plates of perfect spaghetti and wine glasses filled to the top. and before that we drank pink and lime drinks in a refurnished bar that used to be a place old latino men hung out and played pool and is now a place where white girls drink pink drinks. there are two chandeliers. hot pink flowers float in whiskey glasses of water.

-lately at night i have been getting this anxious feeling that starts around 11pm. in the morning it is gone, dreamed and slept away. there could be any number of reasons for it. the thing about anxiety is that you just have to stop it.

-we went to the beach and the boys built a fire and the sun set and i felt very lucky to live in california. the sky was gray and so was the water and they both stretched out endless with giant, imaginary ships heavy inside. when it got dark we went to the edge of the water to pee and talked about growing up in the woods. not everyone grew up in the woods. but those of us that did think they are a place, and also the answer to everything.

-most of us are more volatile than we admit. this manifests itself in many obvious and non-obvious ways. i'm not in therapy, exactly. i fall asleep where i should. i mostly drink the right amount. when i get bad news, sometimes i say the right thing. i don't have to be ok with it at all, actually.

-i am half asleep with soviet union trivia. with wildfire trivia. with the undergrowth on fire.
-walking to work in the june rain (june rain doesn't happen here): we should have ruined it sooner, ruined it better. that's the thing with ruin. you can't plan it out. it happens. you let it and you don't. and it sweeps over and through and is done.
-my one heart and my other heart. they're both there.
-gambling and etymology and history and lucky guesses and the only waterfall you know or the only famous arch or the military forces in northern africa or...i don't know, the things you know. you know famous odes. famous evil men. you don't know anything about yourself.
-it isn't you, it isn't non-fiction, it isn't my life. stop looking for where it's true. don't tell me anything.
-we can forget things and never learn them again. never remember. let them go, simply by default. after years of trying and of triumph, realizing we were holding on for nothing. for selfish, tiny reasons, like string woven between fingers, like trampling the flowers, like it might have meant something, but whatever it was doesn't matter now.
-i'll sleep on it. descend into darkness and transform. because no transformation happens from light to light, right?
-i had the perfect dream. two men. one fictional and the other not. one in jail and the other perfect. one saying nothing and the other making me an elaborate book of totems and symbols explaining. while the rain hit the fire escape and the unlikely gray world turned light again. and i woke up with symmetrical bruises on both my knees. and the morning again. and me in it again. and this, just one small part, is gone.

open letter(s).

2011-06-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

most people that later one discovers are significant to their living are met through glimpses and carelessness, though stumbling brush and grope. they expose themselves gradually in serial form.

-joy williams

1.go, you are told or go, you feel.
in some whispered, core part of yourself you receive this instruction.

so who is it that finally makes you want to stay? who is he and why? or is it you that have changed? you were mistaken. you mistook his sunflowers wrapped in newsprint. his ability to purchase the wine on the highest shelf and let you spill it in the bed without comment. you mistook it for what you wanted. his drug problems and record collection.

passion is the wrong word. passion is encompassed by something else. by science and infatuation. by pheromones and fainting. by the weight and measurement of friendship and accumulation and the passage of time and scenery or ruin. by the math of desire and affection. by his edges. by his sullen, perfect way of knowing you, of not just saying yes to you but why. by the melting curve of his spine, the exhale of his insomnia, the pauses in his explanations. by how he knows and forgets you, doesn't need to be told those stories. by your books together on the bookshelf. so, passion. because he knows when you can't. and it isn't the ebb. it's the whispered part of him also quiet now, that made him go until he got to you.

or 2.
here is a thing that cannot be texted. a thing that shouldn't be said via any modern medium or with language of any sort-spoken or written. a sadness. an unsettled something. a request for letting go. i want to tell you. but i won't. i tried quietly, but i don't know how. i can't. besides, you are psychic, right? you feel my thinking just a moment or two after i think it, some wordless, engulfing something, right? and you know it is my thought getting to you. it doesn't travel in miles, it finds you in other ways, erasing our distance. tell me you understand me or i'll be disappointed. tell me i'm not just talking to myself. tell me this hasn't just been a way to hear myself.

i'm bad at it because i'm trying very hard to be. trying to say nothing to you.
how did we decide to give time numbers, and then say what time it is that way. late, for example. it's late. and we are sitting in the window deciding and being wrong and knowing it and feeling better and deciding again.

3.
if he showed up at your door and said, i love you. this meant everything to me, would you know something more than you knew before? no. if he said, i'm an idiot and i fucked up. no. if he moved to alaska. if he wanted to be the one who loved you forever. if he knew he couldn't because that is too hard to do and will take many years and there are many cute girls in this world who wear dresses and write poems and like the things he likes. these are things you already know.alaska is unfamiliar but you understand the rest. you understand descriptions of tundra. you remember lakes.

4.
the bartender is straight. he has red sleeve tattoos. an accent maybe? it's hard to tell because it is loud and crowded. though he does come to you first. you needn't ask for the the lime. he will charge you the right amount each time, his gray eyes locked to yours. there is no one and everyone. swarms of men walk by on the sidewalk and in through the doors.

5.
how can you even go on dates? how can you walk down the hill and into town? how can you have eyes to open and things to see? like, do you see buildings? cars? trees? what do they look like? are there apple trees? peach? lemon. i know there aren't lemon trees. it's the wrong climate. i know about that kind of stuff. i say i don't know how to start fires, but i do. i know how to twist the newspaper. i know how to turn my back.

what questions do you ask in order to get to know her? who are you? is a good one, and what does she say? or do you start smaller and work your way up to that one.

she wrote her friend a letter about how big your dick is. you read it out loud to me for some reason. i wanted to say, i guess it's all relative. i wish i had, though at the time it seemed too mean. but what the hell were you doing? i was distracted by the paper and her penmanship. her intonations.

6.
i'm awake when he gets home. do you remember? i ask. i was nineteen and you were twenty-one. can you imagine?

7.
some people marry doctors. men who want to coach their son's baseball teams. our neighbors are drunk and loud. it isn't zen to say that tomorrow we will be somewhere else. it's just knowing.

8.
it is a great comfort that he came to my door with that song on tape. on tape! and we sat the wrong way on the bed and he played it in my tape deck. and the whole thing was based on nothing. on this flood of our glittering chemicals, the opposite of connection, on the texture of my slip, and the trucks rattling the windows, and his ironic patriotism. on his new england drawl, and his not-allowed-ness. the comfort, i think, is that even when you say exactly what it is...when you admit it, it still doesn't matter if you don't plan on doing anything about it. he couldn't stay away until he could. and then he did. and he married a woman with my middle name and lives in the town where he grew up working for a company with his name in the title. it comforts me to know i bet he rarely thinks of me. and i rarely think of him.

you aren't the only one, i want to tell you. i'm not saying it didn't matter. it's that big and that small. enough so, that it's nothing now. and you can send me postcards of the tundra. you can staple history to them and know other words to call me, other names i've had. in return i might send you this very second. i might wish i knew how to say that for each person who touches us we have different skin. and different lives.

or i might write and say, i'm well. life is good here. nice to hear from you.

state of grace.

2011-06-23T12:08:00.001-07:00

we can start at the invisible beginning. or at the rush.
maybe we will all have children together. live in dangerous places together. see the mist off the river together. pluck words out of each other's mouths.
remember when you knew me well? i admit, i don't. see how fast it happens? i'm experimenting in losing you.
i forgot it all in the 20 minutes it took to get here. it was all going to be addressed to you. i always get mad like five years too late.
how the beginning of the year 2007 started. my phone on the floor of the cab, clamoring towards a ring that wasn't you calling. and the roof. and our voices carried across the country. it does no good to be embarrassed about the poetic emails of your 26th year. a simpler task might have been: fuck you, if you aren't worried.
but i've never been good at those sorts of conclusions.
lamplight and socks. the early morning.
we pass by each other wearing the same beaded earrings, a pair he gave me as a gift in a small plastic bag and said were one-of-a-kind, handmade for me.

he throws his head back to knock the hood off it. he laughs and jumps up from the sidewalk. he is two years old, maybe.
the pool is under construction.
parties are advertised on chalkboards.
a couple fight on the sidewalk. the woman screams, 'do you want to know what i'm sick of?' it seems so weird and horrible to be so sick of something that you want to yell it on the sidewalk at the person you are in love with.
i hurry further from them, and turn back to see them still standing there, still only just the woman yelling.
i look up and a woman is leaning from her window, her dress and shoulders exactly matching the pale yellow of her apartment building. right as i look up at her i remember my dream. i dreamt about a different version of the purse i'm carrying on my crooked elbow while awake, the thick green yarn yawning into a flower. i dreamt a montage of it, like there was something magic there i was meant to notice. the sun bleached my parents' wedding photo to pure white, the leaves stuck to make something else there.

on the night he turns thirty-five he tells me that he likes to walk the opposite way around the park. it makes him feel like the place is more his. we stop at the top of the ridge and sit in the grass. it isn't dusk, it is all nighttime. i am preoccupied with the shortcomings of my camera. my boots and bare knees and the grass. his skin and shirt and the tattoo under it. his being born. my fortune at having found him.

i used to think that too: that love and anger and lips and arms all felt the same. the swarming of what a good view feels like, any variant or palette of sky above it, any wash of water ahead. that isn't true though. some things feel sharp, or blue. like the parking lot of the bar that is no longer in business. the virginia gravel, the sudden step closer, our teeth more sure than our mouths, over a decade ago. and some things feel woozy, like counting down from 10 and going under. you know better, but you don't and then your head dissolves.

i might hold a child between us. i might grow very, very old. you will get over me once i'm 90. i've always known the dress i would wear then. i trust the cars that turn towards me. i trust the men that walk beside me. they only want to know the direction. the dice spiral out from their hands and bounce towards the garden where everyone is wary to sit, but the flowers there are the most luscious piles of purple and pink. the men lose and win all day. i see them on the way home too.

i'm reading this book of hers. it feels religious almost. what is there to think? she asks. and my thoughts leap everywhere looking for connections, invisible embroidery between me and the yelling woman, and the woman in the yellow dress, and stupid 26 year old me, and 90 year old me, and us on the hill, and the lights of our city, and the bridge that spans towards dark blue, trusting towards other land, and you, i guess, and the little boy with his head in the sunshine, and our decade-old parking lot secret kiss, and the purse in my dreams, and the earrings that are two-of-a-kind, and my heart, and the pages of a book from 1973, and my parents' wedding, and the photos of it, and the strange man i pointed in the right direction.

and the invisible middles. or endings. invisible starts again.

getting better.

2011-06-19T01:56:00.000-07:00

it's been a long time since my shoes hurt me so bad. since i took them off coming up the stairs. bare feet on marble at 2am, all the neighbor's doors dark, and my giant pink bed in disarray by the window.

she said, you have to close your eyes, or else you see the end.

she said, i thought i could have done something more to keep them.

bird's nests. and later i notice she is crying.

we pass the whiskey around in a paper bag on the street. the boy at the corner store called us ladies. he meant it flirtatiously, like we were older than him. which we were. and we sneak down the stairs into the glistening dark-wooded room, washboards hanging from the walls, boys with violins and pianos, girls mistaking this san francisco basement for paris. or the 40's. me too. my straw purse from virginia, and perched on the edge. and we pass the whiskey around in a paper bag in the back of the room, and we listen, and it's good. it's buenos aires and the devil. some men are tall but dress badly. there is a gleaming red bathtub in the corner, and a girl falls asleep inside it. some people see her, and others don't.

there is no girl there, he says.

we can't figure out if someone lives here. everything is made of something else. there are piles of old typewriters. things we could steal, but don't.

here is a trick: feel your own happiness as a thing separate from him knowing anything of it. a night like this one, for example. the illegal bar in the corner. the stories of dancing. and the dancing on the sidewalk. and the version of a slumber party, girls talking about shoes and variations on sadness, and their cigarette smoke, and the men they love and how it is difficult sometimes, and other times so easy. i don't smoke but i sit on the steps too. her lighter falls down the stairs into the dark. the neighbors come home and they call us ladies too.

he has been married twice. i have been married once. he has a wife and a girlfriend and someone else. everyone is out tonight. literally, everyone. people spill out of every single doorway and doorways appear. some of them talk to us, or are scary, or both.

it's about a girl and her endeavors. what she is wearing and hearing and how the comfort of it can sink in, find that opening and enter. a girl reads about her grave from her iphone. her dress is cute. we are famous in different ways. i am quiet. my letter from denver sits in my journal with my train ticket stubs, my french pages out of context. sometimes that isn't the way to get to the point of the story.

i'm not ready to let go of this crush, she says.
we're regulars and they know us and they know what we like. we laugh at ourselves. our crushes are fictional. a boy who dresses like someone we would not have a crush on in real life.
it's his face that is the problem, she says, i like it.
yeah, i know what you mean, i tell her.
it sounds dumb, she asks.
no.

there are wedding pictures on the wall. and pictures from photobooths. and miniature liquor bottles. and a case of beer on the floor. and in the morning, everyone wears blue accidentally. we are better. we find shade and don't mind waiting. we pour secret drinks on the steps of someone else's apartment. we find the sun and melt down into the grass and die laughing. sometimes, there is absolutely nothing more to ask for.

wish list.

2011-06-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

i wish i had a turquoise wheelbarrow. a skil saw. that i knew how to use it and spell it. i wish i had the patience to build something for two years. i wish extension chords and dark rooms and blasted open and stepping over. i wish his hands were safe. i wish he was watching. taking my hand and turning it around so it isn't a handshake, but something else. i wish wallflower. i wish favorite. and rite. and passage. i wish hip-hop.

i wish i knew how to think/say/write/do *anything* without having people see. i wish i was a moderately talented professional basketball player. i wish i knew how to play tennis. i wish his wedding ring fit. i wish not as a favor. i wish i'd voraciously consumed card catalogues when i had the chance. actually eaten the paper and typeface, perhaps. i wish i was nancy drew. the secret barn and secret clock and secret oak. i wish breakdancing. and diligence. i wish oh.

i wish we trusted each other. i wish we'd never thrown anything out the window onto the streets of brooklyn (not true, i'm glad we did). i wish i was 27 and knew how to build houses. i wish i could disappear. i wish wilderness. i wish alone and cold by the pacific paying attention to my life. i wish spiral staircases. take-backs. dresses. little ghoul. i wish for zombies doing things you didn't expect. i wish i was 32 posing by the stone wall. i wish i knew the names of trees. i know some. but i also wish i knew what they looked like. i wish granddaughters. eight-wheelers.

i wish facebook would burn down. i wish for wrists of crystal, like my bone turned that way. i wish for patience. the hull of a ship. i wish a ribcage. i wish our letters would be in museums. i wish museums weren't so boring or so many floors. i wish just the postcards, the marble, the yarn. i wish for golden airplanes. my airplane tattoo. i wish you knew what i meant. or that i meant it. i wish when something was perfect it stayed that way or you knew it was. but then it wouldn't be.

i wish friday didn't exist. just thursday then saturday. i wish the summer did. i wish time travel was safe. i wish science was what i wanted it to be. i wish reverse. i wish arrange. i wish the pacific highway. and driving it. i wish he'd write back with the answers to my questions. i wish it was sitting there gleaming and published, with all our hard work paying off. i wish we grew and shrunk accordingly. i wish it wasn't see-through. wasn't obvious. i wish it was uninvented. uninvited. i wish i was underwater. deep-sea. i wish i could reconcile how reckless. i wish there were a million episodes of that show where he saves her from the tornado. i wish that kind of saving happened.

i wish singing voice. sold-out. under construction. portland. i wish for parties in torn up lots with white chairs. i wish one year. and two. i wish ghosts didn't send text messages. i wish i wasn't a snoop. that my snooping turned up the good stuff. i wish small talk. medium. i wish contracts. and come true. i wish autograph. love note. handwriting. i wish i could cook without looking. make perfect salad dressing. i wish i was fast and slow, hot and cold, no heart. i wish i was in 7th grade and marked the spot on the hill better. i wish high school was drunk the whole time. or way sluttier. or i wish law school. i wish gardens and lettuce. i wish high school cars without automatic locks. the clock radio and the ocean.

i wish dresses. white, and purple. i wish dirt underneath the city. there has to be dirt there, but i never thought of it. i wish i knew all words. i wish i knew how to shut-up. actually be old fashioned. that it was just us. i wish choreography. i wish 16mm. making-up. hangovers in front royal. i wish right through the fingers. i wish i left well enough. it's all about restraint. i wish power. luddite. i wish wedding advice. i wish versus this. i wish the right age to be a doctor. i wish appreciation. the cold part where i sneak away. i wish zebras hiding in the rocks. i wish the answer. the ocean birds. i wish i really had said. hadn't. i wish port costa. bonfires. it all just coming together. i wish this too.

i promise this isn't essential. part two.

2011-06-12T11:47:00.001-07:00

no relationship stays the same. no one is safe.

each sentence uttered, each touch, thumb to tattoo, changes it.

each new thing you are allowed to do, each new admission, each time it deepens, lessens, continues.

i say things to throw you off the trace.

i say things about the origin of fiction.

i scribble.

does it make you feel like a madwoman to change it back and forth?

you've given up your desk.

that dress will never be the same.

what you wore underneath it will never be the same.

you can trace progress on your skin, yet again.

when the burn heals.

when the bruise fades.

it isn't like that, you insist.

most of the things we think about ourselves, and each other, are wrong.

you won't leave me...i'll leave you.

it doesn't matter what he remembers.

everything is fleeting, difficult to understand, and doesn't define you entirely.

you sit at the windows again of your real life, looking out into the city you have chosen. it is amber colors, crackheads with moral codes, televisions in laundry carts, stenciled movie posters, cheap sushi in the corner, bartenders with crass t-shirts, your sunlit house, the man who loves you and would do anything. oh, and sunday sunday sunday. you knew this day would come. just like you know september will. and a decade. it's because you are so psychic and flawed. it's the relishing.

i have tasks.

it doesn't matter that i don't know how to do this like a boy would.

i have money to win, perspective to shift, secrets to cultivate, bruises to heal, stories to tell.

there is a place to put everything, there is room for all of it.

he knows exactly where to put things on a shelf. he is gorgeous. he says, you are gorgeous.

this is a different sort of endeavor entirely, this spark.

he says spark, and it rises up between us, this magnetism we've built out of every dark and light part of ourselves.

it is, quite literally and dangerously, impossible to untangle why you feel this way.

do you even know what alchemical means, he asks.

yeah, you say, of course.

you have drifted down from six hours in the sky, your brain soft and dreamy with suppressing daydreams of death using drugs, dreams, meditation.

i am that, it translates into.

i wear a golden airplane around my neck.

i am, i am, i am.

you wake up not knowing how you got back. the white fire escape. breakfast on a beautiful plate. a suitcase full of thrift store finds. him on his bike with his bass on his back. he says something so good you write it on a receipt, but you lose the receipt. it was something about your psyche. a good word. it was something that showed how well he knew you. on the plane you read a fashion magazine article that cautions, don't assume he knows what you mean.

he had a note on the table that held the answer, really. the thing you already knew to be true.

but you are both of those things: the girl he cannot have, the girl he can.

there are songs about leaving, about starting new lives.

here, over and over and over, is your new life.

this dress, you say, lifting it up from the suitcase.

and you can see anything when you close your eyes.

you can feel him and see anything there inside your own darkness.

you can only use cacophony twice.

clamoring.

cold, electric light.

yeah, i have a style. fragments and drama.

fall dreaming back into it.

hi, real life. new life.

he is brave. he wants to do this with me.

we aren't gonna go out like that, he says.

what is a heartbreak, that ache or brittle snap? and what is getting better? how getting better envelopes you with its alchemy.

wake up early, like 3am, to a wild and rustling world, entirely quiet except for the growing storm. flashes of lightning in total darkness.

i promise this isn't essential.

2011-06-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

do i start six months ago, when i ripped the pages out of my diary? i ripped out the pages where i wrote things i believed to be true at the time. but only some things deserve to be written down, right?

but, they were true. or they once were...the hue watering down into something more dimly lit, something i feel much less now than i did when i was the girl with the pen over that paper four years ago, or five, or six. though i do trust her. she must have known what she was talking about.

i ripped the most out of the diary with the gold cover. he reminds me that maybe no one will ever want to read my diaries. they will languish in the attics of my disinterested grandchildren.

she says we all have this celestial blueprint over our heads. i laugh. i imagine an architectural blueprint, a quilt of stars and sparkling lines. i don't believe her, but i do. this half-wave follows me all around, this net of insistent light between me and something else, creating some grid of upside down anchor, or explanation.

i could mail him each missing page.

we compose letters to our unknowing future selves to whom this will all be clear, and distant. it will not pulse dizzily inside those future people. it will be a story they do not recognize themselves as participants in. she will remember me. she will remember the arch of my foot, which is hers too. she will remember holding the tiny, unripe apple in her palm when the afternoon was 104 degrees.

'i think this is what people feel like when they meditate,' he says.

words are painted on the barn walls and shed doors here. philosophy and angels and honey and outsider art. last wills and testaments are embroidered in codes and multiple languages. old train cars with speckled, flaking paint are pulled into the woods and abandoned. there are cheap antiques not encased in glass. there are necklaces of gold and white. there are books that describe calamity and fire. there are new editions of 'wuthering heights'. emily bronte lived with the cemetery in front of her and the moors behind. she died when she was younger than i am now.

xanax and the sky.
gardens.

'i remember the blue leather jacket you were wearing fifteen years ago,' he says.

do i start even further back? fifteen years ago? hard to believe i can go that far back, but i can. it was the last time i was on a train. the sun pulsed down in actual columns of rose tinted gold. the delays meant nothing. silver balloons were caught in the brush along the tracks.

swimming in:
ponds
rivers
pools on the hill

scared of:
only two things, he insists. only two.

the sprinkler is on in the garden and we talk about:
mental illness
marriage
love
flirtation

these big words are echoes inside echoes. i don't even believe in the outside wall of that echo, but i believe in the smaller orbit further inside. the smaller word. whatever it is. is it the word OK? the word of that agreement? it was hard to say it, so maybe. or need? i need this.

remember how this feels (underlined). remember, i tell myself sternly. OK, i promise. i'll remember how the nape of my neck bruised itself looking up to that non-urban sky, and the hypnotism of my knee-caps, a blueprint of their own, were like moons or fireworks or geography, or whatever you want to use to describe.

i'm not even quite sure what a catalpa tree looks like.

the bar at the train station. girls drinking soda flirt with the bartender. my train is late.

there are many specific feelings:
hopping out of a pick-up truck that is high off the ground and your feet hitting the gravel.

we used to tell secrets in the bathroom. when she whispered one i momentarily felt the sweetness of those nights, how i would curl under the sink. i felt the secret, sad, competitive ways that i'm not anymore. i didn't want to know. we are all important to each other in ways that no one else understands. maybe we threw each other around. maybe we tucked each other in. maybe we lied. maybe we went to sea. maybe we met in stairwells, faked car crashes, got ourselves locked up, missed our chance. we are all young differently. there is no time when life matters less. this is just one part.

whiskey distilleries.

the green falls down from the road and swarms upward generously.

we are wild animals.

this summer i saw three black bears. but no snakes. last summer i saw two snakes. a snapping turtle.

'you evoked me, you didn't invoke me,' he says. 'unless i'm a spirit or an idea.'

the question i never asked you is. the mystery is. it's not a dumb question. we circle the house with bocce balls and fans and southern cocktails.

something far more wordless, alchemical, vital, and meaningless occurs.

sometimes you want to tell secrets when it is daylight out. when the television is loud and blankets your voice. when the wooden inside of the bar leads towards the windows and the daylight.

'sounds vague,' he says.

my encoded codes. i forget the system i used and my own embroidered will is a jumble. who did i want to leave this to? i know i'm lucky. i know about your teeth. i know about love. the pinprick roar of desire, the surprised tangle of history, the ruthless rush of love. i know about what you wish for your life, what you wish to leave behind, and...even though you know you can't...what you wish to keep.

i've got it.

2011-05-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

-the pulitzer.
-the opera.
-snakes and lizards exhibit.
-credit union.
-rarely staged plays.
-oysters.
-cardboard houses in the trees.
-walking meditation.
-stories from a "we" perspective.
-incense.
-fortune.
-boys who look like chuck bass.
-amorous.
-the library.
-five years of novel writing.
-The Ex-Boyfriend Project.
-a new epoch.
-clotheslines.
-totems.
-abandoned train windows.
-hip-hop names.
-artist statement.
-what i'm going to do to you.
-mission+19th.
-pinwheel.
-ships.
-unstitched.
-unravel.
-secret lakes.
-possession.
-elevation.
-the commune.
-the bar.
-iceland.
-hoaxes.
-the kind of happiness that is a secret.
-the point.
-the sea.
-the swamp.
-skype for six hours.
-football melodramas.
-models.
-unseasonable.
-spells. casting and uncasting.
-witch doctors.
-sapodilla.
-water wings.
-items in a bedside table drawer.
-my sister.
-my husband.
-twenty-five year olds.
-macbeth.
-my students.
-vocabulary words. bellicose. clandestine.
-clandestine is one of my favorite words because of what it means and also because of how he said it in that movie that i loved.
-it's also what governments do.
-we sit in the booth.
-he wins. i tell him everyone's secrets. i tell him the secrets of the hipster boy who dances by in his red jeans.
-headstands.
-just being over it, inexplicably. but totally.
-green dress in springtime.
-art store.
-$1 espresso.
-spy show as metaphor.
-first love.
-lame-ass.
-the one you fucked-up.
-i'd interview him if we were still speaking.
-you can not speak for two years. you can not speak forever.
-certain inches of the sidewalk, when you step on them, you know what that means. it means f o r e v e r. you can only really mean that once or twice.
-you are outer space, he says.
-i dissolve into golden particles.
-my heart is upside down. literally.
-twenty more pages.
-last love.
-everything he makes me tastes better than what i make for myself.
-bicycling in the rain.
-untangle, i'm told. funny, i was just thinking the same thing.

crush.

2011-05-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

summer on the east coast. rock mills and rope swings.
one way to measure life is in east coast summers. how long it's been since_________.

i didn't grow up on a commune where we all had the same last name. caves and cave drawings and airplanes and airplane tattoos. and obsessions about mountains. or rivers. or brambly pathed dreams. globes! divination.

i'm thinking about how his ex-girlfriend took her new husband's last name. and how my ex-boyfriend's wife took his. and how i wish i played piano.

i wish i had a bunch of phds...maybe in literature or psychology or astronomy. apparently, i should be a boy who took workshops at iowa. it would up the odds. he was the first one to tell me about farms like that. cornfields. he said they went on forever.

i wish there were still riot grrrls. and that i was one (sometimes).
i wish there were still muses. that i was one, and had one (sometimes).
if i was in a backyard fashion shoot and was asked to list my style icons off the top of my head (and i showed up on the coffee tables of his friends' houses on other continents):

i wish i'd had an internship somewhere cool. or known who was seduce-able. i wish i'd had a flask in high school. that i'd been more serious about french. learned how to use a light meter. gone on that trip to the quarry. i remember mothlight.

i wish i had a hammock, but could also live in the city. i wish i had that violet nightgown. that i could wear it in an empty room. i wish i could think of a way to use the word portent right this second. i wrote his thesis for him, but he did a pretty good artist statement on his own. i didn't know my shirt was see-through.

backyard parties get blustery. the backyard tree is this splash of hot pink. he asks me to dance, and i wish it was for real, not some dancing video game. the windows are dark. we are taking tequila shots from champagne glasses. our dancing is scored, and he wins. we walk all the way home. turquoise silk on the sidewalk. boots. skylights of falling down stairs. the kitchen floor. fishnets. the cologne of some strange t-shirt. conversations with strangers. her boyfriend buys candy bars.

i searched my gmail archives for the words love, hate, sexy, wish, crush. they are all there, hundreds and hundreds of times. i want to write them down in lists, but i don't know what to do with the lists.

he says, i'm glad you don't love him.
you could have a thousand lives. in one you might jet-set. there are trains that go to paris. he plays records. sunday is lost.

restless is one word for it. funerals. time to start writing about other things. it can't be all late-night kitchens and alligators, and copy catting, and war, and trying to be masculine, and flirtatiousness, and 7th grade, and card catalogues of sexiness.

it's all too much responsibility. even having the job of a 23 year old office assistant is way, way too much responsibility.

the future is...well, it's not april, or august. the dark sunset of your deck. on the corner when i say, let's have babies. when we trample the nice lawn and the church is luminous white. when we stop to sit on the steps. synonyms for enraptured. if i don't open my eyes right now, the world will cease to exist, or somehow exist more. bones made of blaring blue light. moth wings taped to 16mm. sneaking cigarettes on the stone steps behind the building i forget the name of. it was like any other night, but it's the one i remember.

what i mean.

2011-05-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

maybe when you are 21 you really, really, really don't think you will die.
maybe life seems vague, relative, or luxurious. maybe it seems small.

i can't shake this feeling of vastness and of tunnels. of finite and infinite.

my grandmother says she keeps thinking she will run into ex-boyfriends somewhere. outside the sliding glass door the patio is engulfed and swarming in sunlight. but i don't, she says.

maybe when you are 43 you have places to drive in your car, and you are in a hurry. any of the ways in which you were kind or you were loved don't factor into other forces. fairness is a word we made up about that.

maybe when you are 21 in the mountains and the mountains just roll on forever you get bored of all that beauty. it isn't really doing anything for you. i associate heroin with the color blue, a slate gray maybe, and early summer, and kung fu. and i don't know why everyone else made it, but they did. heavy metal on the pool edge. a dream of his fiery red hair.

i had this blue velvet shirt i wore in the parking lot of the manassas mall. everyone smoked camel cigarettes in their old volvos. you aren't anything forever. you aren't the same.

even the saddest towns are sparking red, their roofs spanish-tiled, their exits to the highways confusing, treacherous, and inviting.
even girls who were ballet dancers, and rock stars, and beautiful, and did everything right.

what do you see for your life? my grandmother asks me. i have the feeling now is the time to ask questions...about what it is i should do exactly. i have some clues, about bravery and decisions and not being 32 forever, and sunday night at the top of the dark hill, and the edge of the pier in the shadow of the bridges, and piano compositions resounding somewhere in all the invisible places of me. compassion, and happiness. and the kind of love that washes over me with such ferocious tenderness. i would pull the sock back on her foot a million times. i would do anything.

she tells me about ireland, having two names, her father, and how the nuns put hankerchiefs over any skin that the prom dresses inappropriately revealed.

related (sort of): how they found him in a compound somewhere, and killed him, and how it seemed right to rejoice. how do we so totally forget each other? i hear the men yelling on 16th. they are yelling, i think, about fruit. or about how closely one passed by the other, or they wrap their shoulders in flags and their fists churn the air. i want to remind them of what i remind myself...just a simple incantation, someday. and will you be sorry then, whenever that is, that you missed this beautiful day? that you spent it yelling or hurrying? that you worried at all. that you felt so sure.

just remember how your knees bend all on their own, and hold you up. how you can walk through the dark with him, laughing into the shoulder of his jean jacket. how the sun just cracks the day apart into gold and green and dusk. how his words glow through your phone...i so know what you mean.

fiercely.

2011-04-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

there is a room of cats to dissect.
there is a cab driver with the meter off. he knows the etymology of my last name. when he says i can pay him whatever i want, i pay him exactly what the fare would have been. i feel unimaginative, or like i've been tricked.

there is a boy from the dominican republic. he's wearing an off-the-shoulder t-shirt, singing in the green stage lights. i'm your favorite nightmare, he sings, which i guess could be dreamy or arrogant.
i like the difficult ones who get straight F's, the ones who miraculously stay alive. if i was a different kind of girl at a different time.

we are telling stories about our lives. we pick them at random, but they are good. arranged marriages and love parties in the forest. smuggling rings, and morocco.

a dress for every day of the week.
i think of you in dresses, he says.

the new yorker is writing me love letters about merit. tiers and automation and the rejections of springtime.
they are getting my pulse up. i have one new yorker-worthy story, maybe.
n. says he thinks something bad is about to happen. i did that...made that feeling. and he's right, something bad is about to happen.
i never really thought about alaska.
i never went to middle school.

melancholy gets you out of the habit of your body, reminds you that each day is this glint of death, this conflicting gale of beauty.
the 33. the kind of rain. his hoodie. our phones.
maybe you represent the impatience of my desire.
maybe you are my jailhouse vision in your 8th grade graduation tights.
many of us have the same purple bottle of perfume with a flower on the top.

you go places you used to go, and they are OK, but they aren't the same. it isn't cynical or sad. it's even less smokey, it's even rainy. silk and shots.
none of the boys are cute there, but the songs are good.
she says, i have a sweet tooth for eye candy.
it's not a test...or if it was, you fail. if life is that clear...well, clearly, you fail.

i would get a miniature sailboat grafted to the top of my head. i favor print. globes always seem outdated. but like they make good gifts. the yellow ones with the soviet union. my apartment is too small for a globe.

dreams of doorways, or what i wear in them.
here is this unnavigated country, this expanse. maybe a desert, or endless hills. beds.
he could jump from anywhere, the fire could leap or spread.
a widow, a marina, a plagiarizer, a liar, a car accident, a witch doctor.
if you love me, i'm doing something right. i don't know what exactly, so i will keep doing all of it. some exhaustion, some trace. i won't bother with that fall, the crush of it.

remember when you came to visit driving your father's fancy convertible? and you were afraid of the roads on the engine, afraid of the dark, afraid of the fireworks everywhere, afraid of me, afraid of my house and the beds inside it, afraid of the month itself, the season, of summer. fear is warranted, everywhere. i didn't tell you i understood.
i trust him, though i have reasons not to. i say this to a wall of bottles, a mirror, ironic signs, my own reflection. trying to be prophetic does little good, though for certain seconds of the night you can escape time itself, but only briefly.
dizzy into my hands. we all have that, don't want it to stop. we all go to each other's houses and start dance parties.

i was ready to forget high school, but not college too. a decade is shaped like this, causes erosion like this, builds skylines like this, creates transformation like this.
there is a cardboard sign of magic marker taped up above the table at the bar. i guess the people sitting at the table are alumni too, but we don't say anything to them. there is some debate over whether they are much older or much younger or maybe they studied science, a reason i wouldn't have known them.

it was a long time ago, those long sidewalks and cough syrup hallucinations at the end of the dark destinations. lampposts? yes. snowball fights? yes. water fights? yes. motorcycles? yes. grand theft? yes. attics and basements? yes. death metal parties? yes. poetry class? yes. him leaving the car running to go get 40s? yes. we went to the mall to see boogie nights. i have no idea what he was trying to do. ping pong and the garden on the hudson and the library i never studied in.
i have begun to leave all of my schooling out of my bio.
i just sprung forth from the mountains fully formed.

i remember him in the window saying something about snow or anthropology.
i remember that first dark blue night walk with someone i ended up not knowing.
there are a lot of people you end up not knowing.
it is possible to pick the time of your birth. to calculate exactly the position of the sky.
bike down the midnight street.
his beautiful brain in his beautiful skull. his arm around the back of my chair.
we picked this.
these flecks of blue.
these too-late nights.
this empty piece of giant paper like a long shoreline, all our reasons scribbled out, our pros and cons, our deep consideration of what we already know.
these mornings, their ocean drawl.
i'm happy.
i fall from myself, and spin back.

ellis bell.

2011-04-18T14:57:00.001-07:00

it's something more cellular than nostalgia. it's a warehouse. it's viscera.
heathcliff, scarlett, jo, laurie, jane, nancy drew, jordan catalano.
my daydreams of the countryside include that i don't have to work there. i would simply be the owner of porches or decks there. perhaps a place where someone could buy wine in a mason jar if they wanted, and sit in an armchair.
we bike home in the rain and he gets a flat tire cause he's flirting with me instead of watching the road. so we walk through parts of the city that might be dangerous, but aren't. the open bricked squares with fountains, the mysterious after-hours delivery trucks, the corporate and silver art galleries. first, we bike the wrong way on the sidewalks in chinatown.
i buy a white vintage dress in an alley. the label says ms. sugar. i don't try it on, but it fits better than i could've hoped.
j. says, 'we're getting old. but that's not a bad thing.'
his grandmother was in a gang. she has tattoos on her knuckles.
we have fake tattoos on our wrists. mine is a skull and i sort of like it. it's sunday.
i need to be quiet for like a year.

patience, i'm cautioned by some ancient oracular wisdom that is always right.
the teenage shows of my youth make me yearn for the days when no one had a cell phone, when you just had to arrange a place to meet and then be there. when you had to wait for people, wait for boys, sneak in places. how unbelievably lame it would have been if angela could have looked jordon up on facebook. do teenage boys even watch vintage erotica? i doubt it. but who knows?
we wander the blocks of the afternoon amusing ourselves. it's 2pm and it's time to drink beer. in 1994 we tied scarves to our tape decks, and sat sadly in our bedrooms.

things that are no coincidence: ghosts, weddings, moors, rag dolls, the south, dilapidated mansions, mysteries, handsome boys with just a few important things to say, coffins sailing over the cliffs, revenge, ardor, death, sisters, attics, fires, really anything haunted.

a disproportionate amount of people fall from things: balconies, fire escapes, and roofs.
i think too often of the closer sources, not those tucked further away, further than the spine where it flowers up into my gluggy brain. more dormant, but also around longer, like an infusion, some ephemeral something...all just drip drip dripping. paint yourself out of the painting, into some golden column. everything is too weird and cool.

if we had it all to do again we'd make a ton of money. we wouldn't waste our lives in art school. being angsty and dropping out of yearbook. turning down internships and dissing new york city. if we had it all to do again we'd get lap dances from suicide girls. get married on garden decks. cut our mother's beautiful vintage dresses too short and crooked and ruin them forever. lose the golden pins pinned to the collar. leave our parents' trunk on the streets of san francisco. probably. if we had it all to do again we'd spend this perfect sunday. we would toast to how it was the weirdest thing, but life was just fucking perfect. and we'd drink to that. and we'd ride home on the jacked up streets and bust our tires and forget our toasts and fall asleep beside each other, dreaming of some anxiousness that dissipates with the morning into some golden burst of particulates. we'd do it the same, i bet.

deep, dark.

2011-04-08T10:57:00.001-07:00

you need more than you wanted before.

you're gonna eat me alive (i'm never gonna give you up).

or: secrets are things you think. things you do. things you say. i've started to think secrets are anything, in broad daylight, that everyone sees...but maybe the person you are thinking of does not. you say you write stories for him. i understand...sometimes i walk across the street for him, i hear a song for him, even one that i didn't notice at first...rising out of the din of voices. are those secrets? it isn't like the story is dedicated to him, or even about him. or is it all far less romantic? just a mode in which it makes it easier to consider ourselves from a distance, as we hope we are? i don't know, i just thought of that.

i don't think i've ever had mexican beer before, i tell him.
we are also talking about serious things. money and grown-up life. massacres.
there's no one like us, he says. he means our combination of immaturity and maturity.
yes there is, i say. but only because it seems there must be, not because i can think of an example.
we are listing five things. i forget the fifth and include a few points within the third.
figurative language.
gifts to kings.
basketball.
any girl who made a movie of herself in a meadow in a slip dress (me!!).
any boy in a band who throws or breaks things or wears gross outfits or masks.
documentaries about finances.
debates about health care.
the government shutting down.
i wouldn't say i'm obsessed with tragedy. i wouldn't say, each time there is a hint of collapse, i feel a little bit of glee.
ask a question a day.
send a story a week.
no, do more.

i was in this restaurant before, many years ago, under very different circumstances. also, this bar booth.
when he was mad at me he stole my TV on the Radio cd.
he knows things about me...i don't mean facts, or things i don't know about myself. i mean, he knows. it's like some code on the inside of my skin is his second language, or not even words, some echo of him. not a reverberation, but maybe. i can tell, he says.

on some days, don't you feel softer? as if the world is more fragile? as if spontaneous combustion does exist. as if you had a surgery you forget, and things were left inside you. i mean, moth wings.

her favorite memory is one of alligator wrestling.
can mine be the oft repeated trip to the hospital where i saw my heart for the first time?
i got to wear my dad's sunglasses because my pupils were dilated. i remember that, pulling myself up into his pick-up truck and how the sky hurt, but i felt utterly loved and protected. oh, that's what i mean about feeling fragile.

last night i dreamt about a boy i used to know. i recently heard his girlfriend died. in my dream we were at a library without our shoes on. i think i had stolen something. he told me he was trying not to drink as much. he asked me about love, and i think i lied. i had to return to my bike, which was locked somewhere strange. i wanted to talk to him. we were in a line waiting for something, but not books. we saw images from our brains that we hadn't spoken appearing on a screen. at first they seemed to make a lot of sense, but then they didn't. i can't remember if we were disappointed or not.

what a shame it wasn't easy.

2011-04-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

"And [there] will never be more perfection than there is now..." -ww

i'm thinking of surfers, and drowning, and being born.

a famous surfer drowned recently. the ocean is dangerous, it curves along the cliffs, and there are lagoons of green, and currents invisible underneath. it doesn't matter what i know about geography. i know the pacific is the edge and the end. i can see it, after all, a hard line of silver against the sky. we are connected to others, inextricably, and we are also singular.

there are water djins, and regular djins. there are spirits that kidnap children's souls. etymology explains a lot. there are gods with blue arms. there is little red riding hood. there are mermaids. lizards and raccoons. cobras. golden birds, and airplanes. glow in the dark stars. swamps.

the tide is coming in and we take our shoes off to walk along the bottom of the cliffs. i always imagine the most dramatic scenario, being caught somewhere along the shore. but the worst doesn't happen. instead it's this incomprehensible sort of dark blue beach air, and the sunset burning fat through it, dropping like a fluorescent marble. a couple is taking their engagement photos, pretending to run, pretending to just be done kissing.

the first thing i do in the morning should be different each time. remember my dream or look at the white skeleton of the fire escape or press on my knee to see if it still hurts (it does). listen for him in the kitchen. whisper something half-asleep. check my phone in order to know, immediately, if anyone has something they want to say to me. take three breaths and then decide.

my parents lived in this small beach town, on a street no one can remember the name of, in 1979 and before.

at dinner, s. recites all of his former addresses and i hold my breath. some of them have been mine too. 229 dekalb. we talk about people who had swimming pools when we were young.

in 1978 my dad ran into the ocean and it knocked him under. my uncle slept in a van in the parking lot. i was born somewhere back from the beach, on the hills behind the meditation center. 'somewhere up there,' i tell s. and we stand looking in that direction. i feel a pull, like love, like i could have been born here or anywhere because each place is full of the utmost meaning and insane levels of beauty. i think i've already said or thought this...but just because you are born doesn't mean you need to have children. or just because you will die. it's a topic not to talk about when it is late and you are drunk and you are certain that you know what's right. just because your father didn't want children, or just because you love your parents. just because you have a sister. just because being alive so often seems like a tremendous and unlikely gift, then like a useless thing not worth burdening someone else with at all.

everyone can imagine being the age they are and then being really old. but what about everything in between? some of us are going to make a shitload of money and buy vacation homes with decks. some of us are going to be childless. some of us are going to own bars. some of us are going to move away never to be heard from again. some of us are going to get divorces and re-marry. some of us are going to focus on our careers. some of us are going to publish our books. some of us are going to move to portland. baltimore. tulum. berlin. some of us are going to stay. some of us are going to have picnics with our babies in the park, our lunches packed in baskets, our bare feet in the grass. some of us are going to be pushed into our future by fires, by offers we can't pass up, by catalysts and crushes, by default and with ultimate purpose. some of us will look back and wonder why or how or maybe wish for something different.

at the saloon at 3pm we watch basketball. the team wearing the red jerseys is from the town he lived in when we were not together. he was with a girl who kicked him in the head. he was with a girl who had tattoos down her arms. we picked each other, over and over again. and that means something. it means, somehow, we want what the other wants, even if we don't know it. it's true it could have gone other ways...other, more traditional ways with more traditional men. i know exactly why those other ways do not exist.

he says we were magnetic and unavoidable. certain things are like that.

passion is a fickle science. it's a wednesday night in the dim light of pre-summer california. it's dormant, and volatile, and somehow shallow, and endless, and cumulative, and always in its own new context. there are rules, or not. we are young, or old. we know everything, are clueless. brand new, or familiar. there is this place near his clavicle, near his tattoo, around his heart, or something. it makes me remember how hallucinatory time is. i remember where we ate and drank the night he moved back to the city. and the cab ride. and the ensuing years. we get closer under the heat lamp and almost fight, but don't. this all-encompassing spark, like the light flares of too much caffeine or standing up too fast, my blood not knowing where to go. or we do fight, but make up. i imagine him falling from the fire escape, or the roof. things start off one way and end another. they start off again.

the ocean is lit up from behind the waves by the sunset, the sheer green of the water.

there are mysterious lights on the horizon that he studies after dark through the binoculars. i imagine intruders. there is rain on the skylight. i love skylights.

the train's echo fights for attention against the constant roar of the pacific.

we can see a column of rain far out on the water.

we see the rain sweep in and stop.

i have nightmares.

he dreams of recurring landscapes.
my recurring landscapes are usually water, both man-made and natural...sometimes flooding, or sometimes not.
i dream of dark mountain houses, and constant oceans, and men who say, 'let's go...' and give me one of their teeth and in the morning i change my mind about my entire life and at night i change it back.
what's wrong with being selfish? with wanting your life in its entirety, not transferring away your own selfish selfish dreams for yourself? how do you answer questions with time frames? like, the hourglass. the soap opera voices through the wall. his ribcage under his t-shirt. it's true, it's that we're in the middle, unable to see the scope yet. it's there, though, magnetic and unavoidable.

i was born in encinitas.

2011-03-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

i have no memory of being a girl without a sister, which i was for three years.
the specificity of my childhood memories is almost beside the point, it is always either a fog or a sharpness of us that makes up my entire life, even when we aren't in the same place.
finding the playboys in the attic, swinging on the willow branches, being teenagers, being adults. the sliding rock, the balcony, the shed, the pine forest, bard college, fulton street. i don't know why i try to summarize, it is something about my cells, which can't be summarized. in upstate new york in the back of the car when she said, we will know each other longer than we know anyone else. there is a sadness and an inevitability about a love like that. it isn't love either, that's a dumb word. it's something essential. driving in the subaru listening to cassettes. making movies at the boarded up church. she was a locksmith, and a girl named pepper. nags head and sweet dream conjurer. i can't even catalog all our languages. we haven't grown out of any of it.

imagine if the earth tilted off its center. like it was something small that could be tossed around. like it was something crumpled up. like civilization was a dollhouse.

imagine if the day you were born the world was poisoned and on fire, uncertain.

i don't understand kilometers. it seems obvious that maps and charts cannot measure this. first, disaster, and then, the potential for something that hasn't happened before. that's the whole point and limitation of measurement, and what measurement tries to quantify.

i remember in college when his girlfriend was in a band named chernobyl and i had only a vague idea of what that really was. they wore fashionable trench coats in the cover photo. i was in love with him and i definitely thought, i will never be a girl in a band named chernobyl. looking it up later, i was glad. but i still wanted to steal him. later he told me they had a friend who was a child nearby when it happened, who had severe lung problems her whole life. if i hadn't given up the violin at age 6, who knows? when i think of lungs i think of moth wings, of lanterns, of silk. delicate, necessary things that shouldn't be fucked with. though that is true of so much.

the lights of tokyo.
the lines at payphones.
our most modern things abandon us first.

i want to know who the 50 men (i assume men for some reason) are who are staying there, and why they are staying. no one is mentioning that. is it like in the movies when one man says, no, i will stay behind? but you know if you stay, you are going to die, either right away or over the course of a long time. it's a death sentence, he says. and i know that. it's hard to comprehend. it's so stupid to say it's hard to comprehend. it's like saying, you are in my prayers because you are trying to say words about something bigger than words. i look at my manicure. i think about the personal, selfish, tiny things that disappoint me. and i think about my sister. about the tropics. about images of the end of the world from religion. about the billboards in spanish all over the city that say, may 11, and are covered in computerized flame. i don't want to go see the alien invasion movie anymore. i don't want to see anything blow up. being awake and upright feels fragile, bruised, homesick.

when things go wrong is when the adventure starts, and adventure can be goodness or misery. the unprecedented cyclones of australia. the fault lines of san francisco too. i don't know...capitalism and communism. famine. the idea that you can out-run a volcano is incorrect. the idea that you can drive through the water that covers the bridge. the idea that you can build a raft, don helmets, and ride through the culverts of your suburban streets. all of those ideas are incorrect.

i remember in class when she said, it's OK to write about 9/11, you should. i wrote about trying to get through to lou, who saw the plane right by his window, and how his useless cell phone just hummed and hummed in my ear without his voice there. even as i saw the black cloud growing bigger and bigger from where i was in brooklyn, all i wanted was him. but they are all very different things...these infinite versions of cataclysm and horror. one-dimensional, numbed reactions, and people stopping to catch the tsunami wave on video, some surreal science fiction. a little girl who will be told a story about her lungs that she can't even remember. it's just us in our little apartment bemoaning our vacation. he was going to do magic tricks. we were going to be somewhere we'd never been before. even one man thought he could stand at the california beach and watch the leftover of that volatility and he was wrong, was swept away.

five people were shot outside a bar on a block i walk all the time. i can't believe it's ever quiet anywhere. architects know some things, and nuclear scientists do too. i'm not sure about government officials, about emperors, or army men in helicopters. but maybe. i don't know anything. i just know it's science and it's invisible, and there are plenty of things i should know a lot more about.

there's the one movie where he floats around tokyo as a ghost. it's pornography and hyper point of view shots made my head hurt. there's the other one about the detective who loses his gun. the final fight scene is in the marshes or somewhere like that. the detective wins.

nothing is too unbelievable to be true. the universe is just glass, just smoke.
the earth will always be here, we'll just be gone, one of my students tells me matter-of-factly, examining her candy-colored nails.
it's both difficult and easy to think about yourself and the world at the same time. the ring of fire.
when my sister lived in san francisco she bought me a necklace with a giant white plastic rose and a drooping chain of emerald colored beads. i wear it on the day i should be flying to visit her. it's a lot of things. it's that i wanted to go and now i don't get to. it's that for the 12 hours i couldn't talk to her i imagined being a girl in the world without a sister, and it wasn't a sadness, it was an obliteration of my own existence. it's that i dream about the radioactive rain in places that i know are safe. or safe, at least, for now.
it's her student, and his brand new twin babies, too close.
it's a boy i've never met, whose name i know, and his grandfather.
it's everyone who has a sister and feels this way about her.
it's what i imagined of the dark-glassed towers, the rickety bars, the gold, and pink, and brick, and steaming water.
it's that we can build any amazing city up to the sky or create any greedy and dangerous invention, or love our families with all our hearts, or make elaborate and well-laid plans, or work really hard, or have dreams for our own lives, or have babies because we have hope for them too, or know a lot about a lot of complicated things, but still...all of that can be less than the desires of the tumultuous and immeasurable universe, it can not matter at all.

i bet you're a little bit like medusa.

2011-03-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

first, you grow snakes from your head, and turn the boys to stone.
it's sort of what he implied, that i could do that. but it was a compliment.
then, you picture your manila envelope of stories glowing golden in the post office. floating up off the counter, levitating towards the center of the country, or to lincoln, nebraska, anyway.
someone will get it. why not you?
i tell him that. he has a blue earring sparkling in his ear.
next, you fall and skin your knee.
these things are connected. penance to the universe for looking at your own reflection, for daydreaming of getting hit by cars, for wanting tales to tell. for wishing. fine, i do wish. i'm besotted.
he says, maybe you'll get there. maybe it will take weeks. or maybe it will just happen some other time.

i just got my heart broken, he says.
when? i ask.
i'm in my yoga clothes at the bar, and the movie is reflecting on me, maroons and golds. people have ash on their foreheads.
five minutes ago, he says.
he's tall, and good looking, and incredulous.
i'm going to go ride into traffic, he says. but he's smiling at me.
women know everything, he says. you can see right inside our hearts, can't you?
yes, i say. but that's only true sort of. and only some of the time.
i'm not that worried about his heart, i bet it's fine. i bet it's like fruit, or jewelry, or smoke.

there are typos between pages 200-300 that i will never, ever catch.
there is this red dress that has been around since i was in high school. i'm wearing it today. the rain was pouring down but i almost couldn't feel it. i knew it was getting my hair and boots wet. i knew i was walking in it, but the air was so warm, the whole city was mirrors.
you might get shot in this part of town in that dress, he says. you're tall.
what was the name of the first band you were in? the first sexy story you wrote? i don't think i've ever had a dream about vampires, or animals. i want to have a dream about foxes. in 5th grade we read sweet valley high out loud at the sexy parts.

the story of icarus is pretty cool. so is the inferno. so is poetry from the year 600. but i still don't like kite runner, no matter what anyone says. the reason i won't get a phd is probably the same reason i didn't get braces. there are certain ways i recognize myself.

i want to stand on my head so bad.
it's hard to do yoga when your knee hurts.
he stands on his forearms, he says it can be scary to be upside down. he talks about the top of my head, the tiny bones of my neck.
diamond ring, and gray nails, and expensive, soft clothes, i am not attached to you. bruised kneecap under the soft fabric, legs up the wall, i am not attached to you.
the perfect sunlight at 8:45am, and the pillows warm. not attached to you.
my sweet friend who puts his knees to mine in the booth, i'm not attached to you.
you've been replaced, he says.
i know. we all rearrange.
there's a game where you have to choose who you'd fuck, kill, or marry. it's an evocation.
if you stay out later than you should, this little pocket of time opens. it's just a few extra hours, but you get them.
'tell me something dark,' she says. he talks about the absence of light.
'not that kind of dark."
the first person you ever love is just different, she says. it's like the first time you get drunk. it makes you cloudy.
he might show up in your dream ten years later and say, i love you, in a way convincing enough for you to think he must mean it in waking life.
yesterday i stood in the middle of the bus like he used to, in the accordion part where there aren't handrails. the space between your thoughts could just be like stones in a river.

my new tales will be these: the things i wanted that i went out and got. the things i wanted that i didn't get at all, ever, and what happened instead. the times i seriously had no idea. the times i didn't even see what sent me flying, knocked me to the ground. the times i walked home through the safest parts of town and the latest parts of the night.

monday bike crash.

2011-03-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

i crashed into his truck and he offered to bandage my finger.
it was windy outside and i was wearing pink tights.
i'm trying to put together a short story collection, and i'm making up book titles. i'm bad at making up titles.
but, the place where i grew up, the name of it translates into river of fast rising water.
we wait for an hour for a place at the bar, and share food, and watch basketball. he remembers everything. tell me a story, i request, when my head hurts and there are dishes to do.

should i trust this feeling...that things are about to happen?
things are about to happen.
like going to japan? he asks.
no, i mean things without itineraries. i will look back and say, that is the windy day when i was 32.

we drink cocktails with burnt ginger and the city is this soft gray sunday and we know the stories we make up about our lives are true. like this story, the one where things are good, where we live here.
the alley with the rain.
the diner floating in the sky.
the rainy walk to the grocery store where we make each other laugh. or bed, where we fall asleep laughing. or after dinner when we walk to the top of the hill and see the wet, blurred, brilliant lights of the city, the bridge, the traffic, the dark water of the bay, the decorations of the nice living rooms of other people.

a bedroom with stickers on the wall.
cat graffiti under the bridge.
the girls of anthropologie and me with my soap dish.
band-aids under my wedding ring.
sitting near the door of the bar with the rain on the glowy sidewalk talking about health care and literary magazines and making up dances and talking about how our bones hurt.
singing at the top of my lungs to music from the 90's, my free wristband, justin and steve, and kids much younger than us who were in 3rd grade perhaps when these songs were on the radio. and heart warmed and weirded out. and late at night. a scarf dyed elderberry. and silk, and rain.
here is a chance to practice what i've been taught. to catch myself on my bad shoulder, to be nice to the man who is being nice to me, to number all 250 pages by hand even without faith that the universe will reward me for my patience and good humor.
to walk with him around the park and up the hill even though i'm tired and it's drizzling and our house is so warm.
to know for certain how much happiness this is-this love story of the dangerous and beautiful world.

forecast.

2011-03-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

if i had my way i'd go to new zealand. hawaii. paris.
i'd ask you to tell me about facts that are fixed in time. not numbers. not things that change.
he says, 'i'll be 18 in two years. maybe i'll take you out to dinner.'
or: 'your book better be four years of good.'
nabokov was a synesthete. but maybe everyone is? i wonder what it was like to be his wife.
new things that are happening: i like the rain. like, walking or biking in it and getting drenched. why not?
if things go according to plan i will be a grown-up for another 40-50 years. today, at least, that sounds like a long time.
sunsets and afternoons from large, dry wooden porches. sometimes i'm less present. i wonder where i am instead.
beds that are too small are dreamless. the heat could be mistaken for a ghost. i will probably never garden.
maybe everyone is a synesthete. golden forks and the feeling of wearing your clothes and not liking minimalist palettes and fetishizing the decades when you weren't alive.
the first movie that had a kiss in it. or the days when women stayed in the caves and drank all day. i can see the appeal of most things, really. a kiss on the lips is outrageous.
a man waits in line wearing fishnets, and a plastic trash bag. i'm being grumpy, but should stop. sometimes it occurs to you why you do things, alerts and alarms.
he spins in his chair and says, let's kill 15 minutes.
certain words have a nice ring. exposition. boorish cad. "let's kill 15 minutes."
i remember the first time i heard the words blow job. i think it was 5th grade and i was on the playground (of course) and the first thing i thought of was storms at sea, and hurricanes, and i thought of the face of the boy saying the words, and his eyelashes and him falling down.
he says you could spend years in psychotherapy, you could have a book on yourself full of content.
if i was a jailhouse vision, the ethereal dresses.
if i was levitating out of my bed this morning.
if i was dreaming of death and churches and performance art.
what we wanted when we were 17 might have changed a little.
but i'd make the same decision about my teeth again.
and about him.
even if every once and awhile, scouring the gray land, this is what i think: i must tip-toe everywhere.
he asks, what's the meaning of life? he really does. he is 16 and he wants to know and he thinks i know. he thinks i'm not telling him.
i don't know...sometimes you can feel your heart in the center of your palms.
sometimes you feel that some tremulous thing is deeply important, only to discover it has disappeared.
in the movie she tells him, i wish i was different sometimes so that i could know you differently.
he picks her up and puts her on the kitchen table. he says, look at me.
i sleep in my clothes and go out in my pajamas.
the only thing i'd do differently is i'd try to get an internship in college.
i try to follow the real news, but i always end up looking up the weird deaths and domestic squabbles, the unlikeliest things, the models throwing themselves from their bedroom windows, the wives getting hypothermia, the famous actresses stealing jewelry.
life is weird, he says.
and i sort of wish we were the same age, and we both thought that at some point soon it would all be clear and easy.
life is weird, i agree.

love letters.

2011-02-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

l. says the best gift you can give someone is a love letter. i think i agree. i have received approximately four love letters that were of the utmost importance. and a scattering of other, uncounted ones, mainly in email and text message format. but those four. one got thrown away. one got deleted. one sits in the pages of an old book. it's mostly too sad to read very often. one is from the man i decided to marry. maybe i'm forgetting some. like those from the schizophrenic boy who liked wu-tang clan, or the song c. wrote that i rewound so many times the tape broke. one got copied and pasted into a word document entitled XXX.

something is going on and all the beer is really cheap. we yell over the crowd. outside the streets seem dark blue or gray in a way only this part of town can pull off. i miss certain inches of my city like they are on other planets, like i lived other lives there. that isn't dramatic. it seems if you talk about things enough you dig and dig and dig and it's fun to hear, and you maybe understand just a tiny bit more. or nothing.

i am reading lolita and new earth at the same time, which is a good way to sum up life. the questions are obvious. is life a giant bowl of plums on a mahogany desk or a blast of compassion that turns you into pure light? on my day off i lie on my back on the wooden floor of one of my favorite places on earth and there is a giant pink ganesha on the wall (remover of obstacles, including for writers) and she tells us this is "skull shining." sometimes i think the most zen shit imaginable. i imagine the water meets the sky and we live right at that horizon light. i turn into the river, the flood, white flutters of nothing, dying, and sound. my skull feels really, really shiny. but other times, well, life seems like the giant bowl of plums and i can't even stand how evocative and insanely fun and sexy it is to be alive, my skull just human bone, my brain sizzling with whatever it's thinking now. my brain falling backwards.

i think it is those sensory things: curry and wine and sitting on the rug and the handsome boys of 'gossip girl.' beer and french fries and talking about the boys we've loved and why and what is wrong with them. bicycling to work with my fingers cold, in my mini-dress with iced coffee in my basket and the bumpy roads of my neighborhood and how it's winter, sort of, and i love how my dress feels and my stockings, and the cold. sitting in the living room at midnight holding the edges of his fingers listening to dave van ronk on the record player, and it sounds really sad, but is actually the opposite. a happiness so deep it gets itself confused with sadness.

i've written love letters too, though i think i forget most of them. i write with more attention to the revision process and perhaps a little less rocketing around in my silly heart. i remember one i sent to atlanta that he couldn't believe i typed. i thought i'd been heartfelt, but it wasn't in my handwriting, like the little one i wrote and folded secretly into his jacket pocket before he moved away. my movie was a love letter, all it's poor exposure and the sequined dresses and turquoise jewelry of senior year of college. but at the screening it made 2 of the 3 boys mad, and i think it made the 3rd feel badly in his own way. i write a love letter and it ceases to exist, like invisible ink. do i write them and send them and imagine them bursting into flames and turning to cinders and no one reading them anyway? are they really to myself? (dear c., if we are going to live without each other, let's begin immediately.)

we forget our age.
we live night after night after night (after night).
candles are lit at her marble feet, dried flowers placed in glass jars.
the streetlamps light up the palm trees in the center of the dark blue road.
sometimes when it takes a long time to get home at night, and the streets are quiet, it's possible to get all those sensations in one. i mean the skull shining and the plums. all of it.

the fourteen martyred saints of ancient rome.

2011-02-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

-the spinal chord.
-the cervix.
-the rain.
-the bus.
-men everywhere walking with flowers wrapped in paper and twine because it's valentine's day.
-men on mission with red balloons adorned in white cursive.
-the wedding band of my cab driver.
-the silver and green lakes of brooklyn.
-be mine.
-the shells of their wedding on the beach.
-the rifles of her brother-in-law.
-wars.
-cults.
-timothy leary.
-olives with pits.
-truffle oil and truffles.
-'you're an asshole,' a girl yells from the crowd to the asshole writer. he seems chagrined, which means maybe he isn't a total asshole.
-a sweater with buttons i can't figure out.
-new books with hard covers.
-the soft wooden floor of the bookstore.
-umbrellas.
-swamps.
-a notion.
-golden bedsheets, and sheets with lace trim.
-bare feet on gold carpet.
-plastic cups.
-the fog deflecting the wireless signals.
-what dies under the ocean.
-things i tried to describe. a vacancy sign in mist. blue light. the spice factory. footprints in the oregano.
-mazzy star playing at the restaurant.
-psychedelia.
-'hey OG,' he says.
-i enjoy other people's excitement about their own preoccupations. monsters, for example.
-exhibitionism and voyeurism.
-a slideshow of nan goldin at the MOMA. i never really go there because it is too expensive. but this one guy pinned photographs to a collage of paper cut-outs like a ransom note, but about dionysus.
-god, there is so much cool shit in the world.
-the inferno, all those circles of hell.
-even robert frost.
-even jack kerouac.
-maybe i'm just in a good mood.
-every single song on the new cut copy album.
-the boys at the coat check and the coffee bar, the smooth cemented floor of the roof-top garden. kids are playing hide and seek with limited places to hide. one of my hometowns is lit up flourescent on the wall, meaning nowhere, with its latitude and longitude. it hisses a startling white.
-the city rises up like this juicy skeleton.
-i like the word rosette, and i want to use it.
-i wish i knew more.
-the day cools.
-there is something amazing about the rain after weeks of beautiful days.
-about being told, 'you're going to be fine.'
-about the dark blossom of the skull, somehow inscrutable and unfurling.

where else? (a collection)

2011-02-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

ananda means bliss. i like that. if you press your knee into your heart and lie on the floor. if he presses your shoulders down and you open your eyes and this light just opens there right where you've looked. it is the opposite of trivial to say that you have an infinite capacity to love.

in other news, baudelaire said this: i prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial...(yum).

also, suzanne said this: I feel like that's proof of something, though I don't know what! How boys can be moody, or compartmentalized, or suffering and yet functional, or just plain mysterious. I guess if you've said what you have to say, there's nothing left, except other things...

and (at the risk of over-quoting him...) charles d'ambrosio said this: it was as if she was determined to revisit, over and over, that moment of strangeness. and yet she continued to need the scrim of familiarity i offered, so that the world would fill more sharply with the unfamiliar.

the night before last s. and i sat on the floor of our kitchen with every love letter open there at our feet. the love letters of 26th birthdays, of new york city, of rural virginia, of making up from fights, of breaking up, of cuba trips, of when i was 23 and could only take polaroids of myself scantily dressed, of collages and cartoons, of serious, and not, of getting back together, of boxing gloves, of rocks wrapped in the ribbons of my dresses.

we looked through them and read some. his spine and his arms under his soft gray shirt. the linoleum on my bare feet.

cyclones+cairo

2011-02-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

-his house is frozen and i might melt it.
-you light things on fire by placing kerosene heaters under floorboards.
-there are places where there were once orchards.
-men write stories about hunting and unhappy marriages and sometimes they are really good stories.
-we are thistles. and feet in the bay.
-i dream about the iphone of my future like it is liquid and i could swim in it.
-i forget how to do things in MLA format all the time but i guess it doesn't really matter.
-i don't wonder if this is what i should be doing.
-i do wonder about the words in his mouth.
-sun on the cliff. unlocking our bikes. riding as fast as the cars.
-making an art scene. street art and plexiglas and short stories and motorcycles.
-only on a few nights is the air in san francisco warm like this. the exact temperature of your sun-warmed body.
-think about this in the scope of your entire life, not just the emotions of this very second.
-the emotions of this very second might flutter outward to your fingertips like spontaneous combustion. not all of you, but each small part of you, one piece of you at a time, bursting into flames. would you want it any different?
-i've been thinking about some things for two weeks. or two days. two seconds. two years.
-it's fun to admit how luxuriously you've sunk.
-sometimes i think cameras are everywhere. or i dream about the contents of my diary. boys i went to college with who are nomads now. ex-pats. well-behaved. some are fathers. some nights i try to dream certain things and my stubborn brain just dreams in silver flares, cement, slate. other nights houses bloom upward. you're there.
-i haven't been to alaska but i went to a temperate rainforest with glacial water. i remember the water was silver. there was also a dark blue lake. the rolling stones song that jane's addiction covered? i don't know. the world was oval loops, sensations of dark, castles of pornography. if i admitted half of it.
-i never went to the ER for myself. i think he overreacted. but something was an emergency. a storm like none ever measured before.
-she is 90.
-generally speaking, it's a waste of time to not kiss people.
-it's the ferry building at night. the clocktower. we think like bike thieves. i say, gray area. he says he doesn't believe in that. there are bridges spanning water. there is a ferry glowing. copy catting. old school. there are ways we are different with each other than we are alone, or with others. there are all these versions of nothing. there are distances halved or doubled.
- it depends, i guess, on how long you think life is. or if you think it might be very short.
-what i would like to know are the real secrets. the things you don't say when you're telling the first level kind of secrets.
-be careful where you stand.

3am-5am

2011-01-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

I don't pretend to dance, I dance whenever there's music. And then I thought I would grow up one day, but last night that seemed like a bad idea. Grow up for what?
-Stephen Elliott

the giant trees have trunks that are at least twice as wide as my shoulder blades. my dress is blue. walking home we take pictures of the lights in entrance-ways at 4:30am.

he says, why waste life? he is 18. you shouldn't, i agree. even if it's disappointing, he says. yeah, even if it's disappointing, i agree.

i ride my bike through the panhandle alone, going as fast as i ever have.

hell house. malaria. orphanages. the bruised bone of his finger. an x-ray of my teeth. the secret kind of healing that makes you dream of glowing houses. hot pink flowers at the center. i'm better, i'm better, i'm better.

college essays. talk about your disappointments. he's better at it then me. looking them right in the eye and shedding them off like used up skin.

cordate.

regret is a semantic argument. the cure is in writing it down. in testing exactly what your bones can do. how they can wring themselves out. you can reach across the kitchen table. you can keep a list. i mean, you can do whatever you want. but either way, you are alive for this collection of days.

it's been a long time since i've daydreamed about a house thawing out. but then i did. it wasn't from kerosene. it wasn't because i don't like being awake. i like being awake. i like the grocery store. i thought i liked writing at a desk, but i think lately i like writing in chairs more, big cushy ones.

a kaleidoscope. either a snowstorm or a saturday afternoon on bernal hill, right on the edge of it. we can see van ness. we can see the porn building. mission creek runs through the basement. it's january and it's almost a little bit hot.

i sit in the sun to write, and the chair is the same color, and i put my feet up. it's happening. owen is meaner, darker. iris is crazier. the mountains have the names of real mountains. the drug problems are real drug problems. the car accidents are real car accidents. i brought him back to life after he died in the river, after i meticulously drowned him down to the second. i gave him a tattoo. made him kiss her when he shouldn't. gave him a motorcycle. gave the motorcycle a road along the river. there is always a road along the river. a truck with a hole in the floor. one of the moments when i am very aware of myself, of my arms and legs and insides of elbows, is when i get into a pick-up truck. it will be done in two months. it will, it will, it will. and i will have to live without them.

'what's it like being married?' they ask. white wine in wednesday night mason jars.

well, i was doing things in 1992. i was being 13. i was buying my fake doc marten's and lollapalooza tickets. i was declining the offer of going up on his shoulders when rage against the machine came on. talk about regret.

'hey, you'll love me when i'm an old lady? i'm just checking..."

'yes.'

'you love me even though the bones in my toe are fucked up?'

'yes.'

he sits on top of me and i think it's because he is leaving and he's saying goodbye. but he just wants to sit on me.

before i go to sleep i read a story about a woman who steals a baby from an amusement park. it's creepy and good. i think about how it's nice that kim gordon and thurston moore still seem like they love each other. they collaborate on art projects like they are in high school. if i could sing, i would totally be in my husband's band. i'd have my outfits all picked out.

at 3am we are in alamo square.

i feel anxious. emotional. there is no source. i miss my bed when i'm not in it. i feel like we've been apart a long time when we are both just at work. but at the same time i feel this overwhelming sensation of happiness. for the millions of joys. and the feeling of being alive.

there's a party in a garage and the house above. boys switch jackets. people break bottles accidentally. swing on the water pipes on purpose. sing mariah carey. have crushes. say funny shit. laugh. get bad news from girls who slept with their ex-boyfriends. fall. drink gin in plastic cups. talk about their plans. about how sometimes you just want to stay in. about how sometimes you want to go out. about how sometimes it's hard to know what to do.

there's a lot to read.
revolutions are happening.

#32.

2011-01-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

i wanted to write a list of each of my years. #1-#32.

#1: the pacific+the desert.
the first line was easy and then i sat stumped. i remembered some archetypal objects of my teenage years. like the tropical bikini, my first, that i wore to sit on the cement patio waiting for him to come over and paint on my eyelids while we listened to dinosaur jr. that sort of thing.

d'ambrosio (via pascal) said something about the momentous infinity of time and how unlikely it is that we are in one of the moments where we actually exist.

today, i exist.
i am 32 years old and it is the softest, quietest, grayest day. last night suzanne and i drank prosecco and honey and fresh ginger.

last night, i went to the dental school and they poked around inside my mouth and said it's OK in there. the dental school scares me. it makes me think about being really, really old more than any other place does. afterwards i sprinted down the hill. i was faster than the bus. my dentist said i seemed young, unprompted. i didn't ask her what she meant. i didn't tell her that in a mere 5 hours i was going to turn *thirty-two.*

golden fox bobby pins.
a white bike with a red bell.
stockings from new york city. including fishnets the color of my skin, and red ones perfect for fancy dinners on tuesday. i can already taste it.

i don't remember the two and a half years when i didn't have a sister. it must have been a strange time.

i remember: wooden staircases, banisters, blue/silver napkins, screens staple gunned to windows, a tree that belonged to me, the violet walls of a bedroom, the black snake on the mantle, the black snake in her tin hair, the strawberry snake that could freeze a person with its eyes.

i remember a stone archway and when i walked through it there was a giant body of water and everything glowing and a stone throne for me to sit on. this was a real place, a place connected to the end of a walk i took with my mom. i haven't written that anywhere, what that felt like. i remember especially what it looked like the moment before i walked into the light, and that glowing center of the forest.

i'm 32.
i remember turning 16, the pink thrift store dresses we wore. my green silk pajamas and beret.
i remember turning 21, lou in his pea coat with a hard boiled egg in his pocket, the heat broken, the snowstorm, not the content of the secrets themselves, but that he told me secrets, late at night in amanda's bed.
i remember turning 12.
i remember turning 29.
i forget turning 13.
i forget turning 8.

i write a new story, combining all the random elements i have tried to fit into separate stories for the last six months (demon possession, lightning strikes, whaling, religion, pesto making, being a man). only twice before has the voice appeared this way. it's a feeling like nothing else. i don't even care if it's good or not. it makes my fingers feel miraculous. i actually look at my fingernails, amazed at the way my brain is somehow connected to them.

dinner is perfect. one green candle in chocolate cake, and free port in a variety of shades and sweetness. a new bar with a record player and cucumbers at the bottom of the gin. an old bar where we get the booth and talk until too late. i think of all the times we've made up. i will remember turning 32. how we walked down valencia. how i fell asleep in my dress. how we talked about artistic drive, and assassins, and our teeth. how i knew exactly what to wish for.

it's raining today.
i biked in it anyway on my new bike because i had to get a basket and rack put on at the warehouse.
i think the bicycling boys that worked there were impressed by my toughness and they told me that now i was in a club, but that also i should be careful to brake early in the rain (advice they probably don't give to real members of the club).
while they worked on my bike they talked about the love notes that they've sent to girls over the years.
it turns out they'd all sent one love letter in particular, and that was the one they described.
i guess we all have one love letter in particular.

and for a moment on my bike at 17th street and something, completely drenched, skirt sticking to my stockings, rain straight in my eyes. well, it was just fucking perfect.