Dreams Are Weird
I had a dream that a boy who was supposed to be a golden one
(or the unicorn, as some have said)
He left everything he held dear for me. His family, home, previous love.
He stood before me and professed all this, that we could run away and I would be in his open arms
My initial reaction was "this must be good, what he's doing for me..."
And then I remembered everything that was mine
And everything I had before
And I knew with my whole heart it was wrong
Bah Humbug
Stay the way I wrote you
Be just how I need you
Grow inside me daily
Fill the spaces until I don't notice
Hold to what I told you
You can't be a back up
Don't find me just to break it
I don't want to mess up
I don't want to be hopeless
This can't be listless
I hate dealing with the "oh well"s
If Only We Could See
Cuba stared out the door between her room and veranda, the twilight haze played along her iris's and danced through the threaded colour. Cuba saw monsters outside. Long silver lake monsters, large loping tunnel monsters. The the kind that come out from under bridges and from mountain caves. They were running down the street, past the houses, in white and purple bursts, their shadows pressing against the walls like great passenger trains.
She watched them calmly as they continued their parade, so many of them. Her dark curls fell down her pillow, undisturbed as she, as she watched the monsters go their ways. Every time another one galloped down the road her face was lit by its passing, each of her freckles standing out, one by one. In the flashes of light they began to form constellations, stretching across her mouth, reaching through her eyelids, falling down her nose.
If the monsters hadn't been moving so quickly, sending up sparks and fireworks from the backs of their feet, the would have seen a galaxy quietly revealed in a small doorway on the face of a girl.
If Cuba hadn't been watching the monsters run, she never would have been able to show off her stars.
March 16th
The power is out again and I feel like I'm moving in slow motion. I've put a candle in front of the mirror and the light pours out of the glass, creating soft shapes of yellow and shadow. Mason Jennings is singing "there's something about your love..." and I forgot that he starts by saying "I'm coming home to be with you". I'm in a loose t-shirt and my hair is still tangled and wet, and this whole sound-tracked atmosphere makes me feel like I should be walking into the arms of a man who carries me carefully upstairs.
It doesn't feel like there's a lot I can write these days without being completely frank. Masking feels overdone and story-bookish, which also makes it hard for me to publish anything at all. I'm overusing words like "dark", "Inside-out" and the ambiguous "heart", which aren't original words to overuse in the first place so I've given up on story telling. On the other hand, the nonfiction contains far too much "love" and phrases like "I'm sorry", "I need you and I'm broken" and "where the hell am I?". The themes haven't changed for a while.
The power just came back on, I noticed the kitchen light come on through a hazy window and almost simultaneously the candle by the mirror burst like a dam, hot liquid pouring through the luminous wax walls and onto the tile counter top. This isn't a dry spell, though, I'm convinced, or convincing myself, of that. So I keep the lights off and just plug in the music so I can keep Mason going further into the night, and maybe Mayer and Foreman too. My pen is still moving and a couple wicks are still lit, so I'm sure I can stay here a bit longer.
This Isn't Poetic, Nor Is It Just
When I first moved to Owen Sound, Ontario, we lived in a duplex in town, in the transition between arrival and finding out beautiful country house which we lived in for the next 6 years.
Across the street was an empty stretch of land where no duplex's had been built, and there I played in the mud and built forts out of leftover pieces of wood and cardboard.
Occasionally, the girl who lived behind me (named Jenn) and a boy from a block away (whose name, to this day, I do not know) would play with me, imagining we were builders or bandits or strangers lost in a barren wasteland. I think occasionally this boy was mean to us, but it was two to one, so we were generally safe.
One tragic day, I seemed to be caught off guard or unprotected, and this boy managed to grab my shoulders and kiss me forcefully on the cheek. The only feeling I get when I think about this moment is that I felt I had dirt all over my cheek as a result.
I ran home in tears, and cried and yelled in fury that this boy would do such a thing. I demanded my father go to his house and tell his parents, so that he could get the punishment he deserved. But justice was never served on that day.
Dear Haruki, I like you, like a lot. But I shouldn't try to be you. Sigh.
Cause and effect, memories, I am in love with Haruki Murakami but I need my own style. It's only flattery. I'm only inspired.
I firmly believe everyone deserves one of these, so maybe I'll start working my way through. For every person ever known. Ever. Good or bad. They may not like the things I write, but at least it's something written for them. Something that I recall. Something I will always remember. It will last the ages. Until I die, or until the inter-web internally combusts, they will not be forgotten. Generally those who mean the most to be get the most words, and the least of which I ever really admit, but they're repetitive, and shy. These few gathered words are for long lost strangers. We all have little to fear.
He stood at the door, facing inwards, waiting expectantly for her goodbye.
Lately, her goodbyes had involved his arms around her hips and her lips upon his.
That is, until he had gone away for a short while, and she realized she knew how to fall in love.
Previously, she had deemed love to be a lucky break, a dreamer's reality, anything but a necessity, and not highly likely for her. She tired of all those words everyone else spoke. She felt embarrassed over all those times she had spoken it into existence, and then watched it fade as quickly and painlessly as any other word.
So she gave up and gave in. One evening she met a boy who she quite nearly forgot, but one day he told her he couldn't resist her eyes and he wanted to take her out for expensive meals and treat her to his high taste. What else is a girl to do?
She accepted his fawning and his midnight kissing. She told her friends about him and they all got jealous. She went along for days of sweet tasting niceties.
(Though there was one moment when he asked if she was afraid, and she despised him for it)
Until he went away. It was only for a short while. A couple weeks at the most. But the moment he left she stopped thinking about him. He left no absence. No hole to fill.
And then it happened. It all was very quiet. Very fast. A few minutes, if that. She learned that love did, in fact, exsist. And, even more interesting, that she herself was capable of posessing it,
experiencing it even. And she knew this because without it, there was a sudden absence. If she did not have it, it would create a hole. She wasn't quite sure she wanted to try and fill it with anything but what created it in the first place.
The boy came home. His hopes were high. He lavished her with gifts and with great expectations. She tried to examine him, holding his shape over the absence, seeing if with some sort of force or turn he could actually fit.
(Though we all know from childhood woodblock puzzles, this never does work)
The more she tried, the more she smiled at things that weren't pleasing, the less she wanted him. And she truly did try.
So she walked him to the door, he faces her with a smile. She smiles at things that aren't pleasing. She gathers up her courage and lets him kiss her one last time. Her brain inputs the sad, unfortunate action of "mouth in close proximity to mouth" instead of a kiss, and she says goodbye.
She's convinced that love would never calculate the difference, even in goodbye.
My heart and brain are devouring and regurgitating these days in a voracious way. I need more and more and then I need to give it all up, like a water measure that pours all its contents at the filling point and then begins again.
"It's rolling around, it's pushing me down
It's keeping the good part of me closed
Can't you see that when I find you, I'll find me
Oh I need you to know today I'll wait for you always"
There must be something here I'm missing, yet I welcome you in. I'm passive, I've met you before. You should have come through the window, you should have crept up the stairs and given me nightmares. Instead we're sitting here sipping tea and talking about last year. You're my 'glass half empty' and people understand you the least. When you live with me I keep everything, but it's tasteless, useless, in my hands.
"Now I'm tired and I'm scared and wide open
to the rest of my life
And I almost had it all
I'm fooling myself by thinking
That a cure will be found"
Cause I can't stop thinking about you
And my dreams are dreaming dreams that only for them can come true. Magnets that keep searching for another who wont push away. When it happens I'm a sucker. I'm long gone. All for it. There's no room for indifference when they find themselves 100 percent stuck.
( His friends
Would just wrap him in plastic
And carry him with them)
After all this, there's a God who deserves more than "I love you but I..."
and "After all this..."
A Fanfare For The Mundane
There are a few times a year when I face the immediately serious problem of an eyelash stuck on some unreachable surface of my eye.
Generally, my initial response is to first try to remove it by force, but often it's hidden under the lid, thus making the removal nearly impossible "blind". I then begin to panic, desperately wiping and clasping my eye and hoping the retina does not get scratched and wondering when the painful irritation will ever ease. I then recall my body's natural defenses, I calm, blinking rapidly as my eyes soon wet and pool and the lash is brought slowly and softly to the front of the eye, which is no longer in distress at the foreign presence, but protected by silky shallows.
Only then, I proceed to the nearest mirror and easily remove the lash, the entire ordeal quickly dissipates with the clearing of my red eyes.
There is one extraneous thought, though, that I have discovered makes an appearance every time I carry out this minute upset of everyday life. It doesn't take any prompting or recalling, it just appears now, as naturally as though it holds the hand of whatever lash should have caused such trouble in the first place.
It is a memory from at least ten years ago, I'm sitting in the backseat of the car belonging to my friend E (or more correctly, her family). She's in the backseat too, and her mom is driving, we're maybe eight or nine.
I can remember exactly where we were at the moment that the bulk of the memory happens. We must have been coming from E's house, because we were going along the main road from the direction I now know was east, instead of from the entrance at the west which my family most normally would have travelled. The road is bordered by trees and quaint military houses.
Her mother comments that she has something in her eye, she is rubbing it and quickly enters the panic stage, saying, "I need to pull over" I laugh a little because of the drastic reaction to one small eyelash, and E turns to me and says angrily, "Don't laugh! She might not have been able to see and could have gotten into a car crash!"
And that's where the memory stops. I don't know how long it took for her mother to finally remove the lash or what else E said or where we ended up...
The only thing that immediately follows this memory is the image of a fact, like a broadcast news flash, that a few years later E's mother has died.
She had been scrubbing a floor
(dark marble in a large empty room, she, right in the middle)
With high grade cleaning products
(white spray bottles, yellow and black labels, a red pail to her front, not blocking her figure which is leaning forwards on hands and knees)
Some of which enters an open cut
(on her knee, as her hands are covered with long yellow gloves)
Leading to a blood clot
(the poison shoots up through her veins, entering straight into the heart with the force and precision of arrows)
Which is the ultimate cause of her unusual death
(she falls to the side, clearly missing the wet surface she has just scrubbed, and in the emptiness of the room she, her face serene, quietly disappears)
And these, the memory and thought, which without fanfare slip in and out of my mind three times a year for the past ten, when a lash makes an unwelcome visit to the white. Perhaps it was a moment that marked an 'ending of childhood' or something of the sort. A distinction, disruption, a sudden misfiring or connection. Maybe it's just the repetition that comes from Pavlovian programming. It could be that my adolescent self suddenly noticed something of the fragility of state, or non-sensical selection, or the futility in panic.
Because, people will always disappear.
