Girl, I am drunk.
and so are you.
but that's no excuse not to know who I am.
... he loved you so much for such a long time. he crawled through thorns for you, he cried in the street for you, and I cried there too, and everywhere else for him.
have you honestly forgotten? beach parking lots, the beginning of the end. haunted houses, even then your stories were too intense for us. did you notice them drifting away? and have you drifted just that far?
you saw him the other day, I know, this mutual infatuation of ours. I can't help but wonder whose visit had the greater effect, but I do however know the answer.
I looked up to you in high school. Fifteen years old, I saw your fishnets, and I heard your reputation, and I envied you and the boy on your arm in the diner. Since then many things have been gained, and lost. You shattered a beautiful piece of glass, and I was the one to get cut by the pieces.
I'll listen to this same sad song a thousand times to get your voice out of my head. I was even jealous of your accent. but not your fate.
I wish I could make him love me the way he loved you. I wish I could avoid some things you have in common. I should learn the self-restraint not to feel up a gangsta's girlfriend, even if she's loved me for years. On that topic, I came out to someone today. That went well, except I felt stupid for my innocence.
and the first of my friends leaving for school is off in twelve hours. and so it starts, with me unable to go to her going away party.
it's late. early. I have wanderlust.
(this is going to be potentially embarrassing, but cryptic, and more for my own sake than anybody else's.)
it's funny how things go in circles. not quite full ones, I've been through quite a bit and some things have changed, progressed, regressed and mutated. but still, the circles are there. this one is here.
excerpts from the past two years:
My stomach hurts when I think about you. You'll smoke and drink and climb on rooftops, but you won't eat meat. You'll let me sleep in your bed, but you won't kiss me goodnight. You say it's over, but you want to save her. You say it hasn't begun, but it's a little late for that. You know you'll make it to my memoirs.
"So if I molested you, you'd love it?" "Yes."
Give me a blanket for the dirt, give me an arm so they won't see me falter, so they won't know. And we can still pretend that no one knows how much I want you.
Letters from a distant lover... Sorry I forgot you for a while. My head's too full, my heart can't keep track, but I'd like it if you wrote me back. Happy to be remembered, I won't admit to lapses, mine or yours, or his. I love you, see you in a year. I hope you recognize my kisses.
Don't make the mistake of thinking I've moved on... Songs of beloved dead men wash through both our ears, but not the same ones.
I'm not going to bother chasing after a hopeless cause. Sure. Lust is cyclic when denied, and the half-eaten bread of my affections still sits, stale on your plate. But you're still at the table, right?
Walk into a familiar living room and suddenly catch sight of a longed-after image. A quick temptation of a hug, a few words and a goodbye. It's hard to believe I kissed those lips.
It's five in the morning. A glass jar of whiskey rests between his feet, what’s left at the bottom sloshing around when he moves. He’s talking, laughing about something I can’t follow. He’s holding my hand, as if it’s second nature. Slipping back into old habits, calling me by old pet names. He won't remember this anyway. I guess I can say what I please. No confessions from the adorable drunkard resting his head on my shoulder. He kisses me on the cheek, not commenting on the tears there. If something exists only in your mind, your memories, is it real?
Drunk in New York City, again.
You cut your foot open in a river and flowed out into the waves. You looked over at me with hurt eyes and I collapsed into a thousand molecules. I am learning the nuances of the jewelry you never take off.
an excerpt:
I am begging you to consider that I feel myself wise.
I can look back on those previous times and say--
well, my my, I was foolish and I hurt you because I thought--
unimportant. I feel myself wisened, expanded, conformed, more capable of functioning in the aftermath of this learning experience.
if it pleases you, consider this.
keep in mind that I gave you this voyage (intended in fact for her more vocal featured hands)
and so doing
felt i was acting in a practical sense, seizing an opportunity offered.
BUT I SEE NOW THAT I WAS AT FAULT
and my new and better programming can identify such a problem from the start,
down into the tricky stuff like roots and probabilities.
and while calculating these new motives, new directives and lifestyle choices,
I realized that suicide is gradually evolving us to apathy.
and this is what sagacity tastes like!
like the thyme or when those kids sold you some oregano
giraffes get longer necks and we learn to love each other less.
(handwritten while walking down the road)
How do you write yourself a letter when you haven’t spoken plainly in years? You lean against rusty signposts and sigh and get stared at. You walk around begging and sitting on wet sidewalks with transparent clothes. The street becomes sort of like a sea, and I become sort of like a bag lady, drifting my garbage on the waves. I brought someone else’s words for safekeeping, or maybe just in case. Breaking glass and walking out the front door are often the same thing, only I tend to forget when the axe is in my hand.
I went to the street to get away from the houses, and they went to the houses to get away from the street. But they secluded, I expanded. From this street you can reach all others; from one house, to enter even just one other proves difficult with the crossing of stars. Beer bottles camouflage the landscape, but I blend in well. I know the secret ways of crushed birds in sidewalks and butterflies alighting in the street. Everywhere there is machinery, and everywhere it is known to be unnecessary, and embraced. The breeze over sod-sprayed land is the breeze over the Queen Anne’s Lace of the sidewalk cracks, flowers for the funerals of the broken backs of mothers, and of the single feather divided from the flock.
Start watching for turning faces. I am given electrical guidance. Let them think I am on copious drugs. This electric fencepost pointed me out and I lived in fear of its messages, dubious. The skeptic suffers when birds turn their wings to reveal another color. Maybe hallucinogens were forgotten in their non-quest for truth. Six thousand reasons to be terrified, and all of them assuaged with melting ice cream. In the country where we are always waiting, we order the same flavor six thousand times and anticipate it to be different. Disappointment tastes sweeter than silk.
I walk the public road, through back gates and driveways and the secrets of landscapes. All paths are made of people, although some are of the lonely nights. All paths are meant to be walked on. There will always be chance encounters that are never really chance, and for this we can deem ourselves fortunate. There are mushrooms growing in the old schoolyard, and names are scrawled on rocks in the wall, and everywhere there are giant birds. They are fierce without malice, and they have great black wings. They are not easily startled, but they are easily driven away.
You are always wondering if there are people crossing the street at the sound of your name. They do, but the street carries echos like a soldier after war, ringing and ringing again. I could fill pages and pages with the names of events and of shadows, of curbs I had sat on to think and only felt the sting of grass too long kept captive.
“I’ve been walking,” she said, “and sledding down long asphalt hills with my eyes.” Her audience merely stared, and occasionally laughed, as if their voices had to somehow loose the questions they would not say. A thousand ants gathering on a a paper plate, or a girl wandering in an empty patch of everywhere, longing for the taste of strawberry gum, but only being awarded with the sights of empty wrappers, and of other walkers, and the sound of oncoming cars.
It is probably for the best that I am only partially plugged in. So this is what it’s like to be soaked in sweat without the scent of sex, and with the soft breeze of Outside. Watching people turn around in someone’s driveway, and raise the little flag on the mailbox... I realize there are some facets of existence I will never fully understand through immersion. A beautiful car stuffed with old paper like a pair of stored shoes. I do not know where all of these roads go. The little sparrows do not mind, and the large birds are listening to a splashing far away. I want to climb these trees, but some sense of ownership stops me. As always. As often. As sometimes.
After a certain point you can’t merely turn around and go back. You have to find a different route home, if you get back to that old one at all. Out here it smells like both machines and greenery, and I want to douse myself in the sidewalks. I forgot how to care for numbers, left them untended until they grew wild, and now I fight their long-mutated descendants.
I don’t want to do things merely because I can, but merely because I want to. The dreamers in my family tend to be mistaken when they think bees are dead. Bicycle wheels mark time while I struggle, briefly, before giving up and moving on, to remember the name of a long-forgotten purple flower.
You went down the road you thought you knew, scolding yourself for your lack of adventure, only to prove yourself wrong. You occasionally forget why you wondered what they thought, and wonder if this means you’re running out of steam. So this is the place you saw only at night. During the day domesticated cats stare you down for miles, and sea horses and beer bottles grin at you from behind morose orange fences. You vaguely remember falling in love on one of these roads, and getting drunk on the next to forget it. Styrofoam breaks into little white beads to replace the petals of dead daisies, and new thoughts chip off to replace the gaps in all old memory.
I’ve been walking for a long way, and my steps are bound together with green twine, the sticks caught in the power lines, and the sound of bugs enamored with my earlobes. Saying “things only rhyme when you don’t want them to” is more useful, perhaps, than saying “thing don’t rhyme when you want them to.”
my life has been ridiculous lately.
last night about ten of us walked from the Aloisio's to Shop With Us. at 1 AM. wearing togas. with at least two of us on skateboards.
tonight I walked home clutching a clock shaped like the Eiffel Tower.
I feel a wave of creativity hovering over my head, but it's not broken yet. Me neither.
So much happens and you just feel like an epileptic dragonfly and everything is bright and beautiful and you want to cry, and you wonder if maybe that acid wasn't fake, and then you remember you bailed out because you weren't wanted there and everything goes dark a minute. and then some little child laughs, or you remember the way someone smiled at you once, and you just want to cry again. I think I am a bad person, but I am learning to be happy regardless. This has been a summer of ex-lovers. One has once again become my friend, banjos and all. One has a brother who flirts with me until he recalls my age. One I can never see again. I was supposed to leave this house nine minutes ago.
The reason I opened this window:
There is a rock show at the Aloisio's house in Shoreham on Tuesday. You should be cool kids and go. The corner of South Gate and North Country, probably around 6, and call/email me and tell me if you're going.