thanksgiving

one for the books. thanksgiving to remember. i feel like it started two days ago and is still going at five o’clock friday morning. i think everyone learned something tonight. alex said to me, “rush to do good.” and i thought that was beautiful. i sat and thought about so many things, and talked about so many things with people. i wish i could remember it all. i think everyone has a conundrum. everyone seems to be at some sort of impasse. we all have choices to make and none of them are easy. i am going to lose something, either way i choose. sometimes you don’t even know what. thanks.

so…

what happens afterward…?

ready

your body on the ground, stabbed- i sat with my feet hanging off the edge of a cliff – sat next to your body on the ground- stabbed-

i heard a song today, and i saw a picture today, and they spoke to me the same thing.

it was self-defense; you were killing me. i was walking alone over a bridge today where traffic snaked and twinkled and reminded me of christmas. i always have to stop in the middle- -of what i’m doing because i have forgotten why i am doing it. i have to concentrate very hard so as not to forget why i have killed you inside me. its like waking up in a panic from a dream and not being able to move-

except i am fine.

i am ready i am ready i am…

there’s a part of me to resurrect, i trust. it just has to be found- buried in the ashes of you where i have burned your body. after i shed this skin

i am folding and unfolding and unfolding, i am…

when i looked again it was my body on the ground, and i have burned myself, and am looking for myself in the ashes, and i am leaving, and i am fine, and i love you like my flesh. i’m still a tongue-tied little girl about you. you are quietly haunting me moving on. you threaten to love me over and over, and i have to strike back with knives again. i need a moment to breathe slowly and look at you dead – – before starting over again – there’s a road that goes north.

okay.

i am ready i am ready i am ready i am…

all i can do

i have a plan and a way to implement the plan. i have a life direction and its pointing north and its pointing at certain people and not at others and i know i created it for myself but now that i have thoroughly confused myself i feel like i’m being swept along in a current i can’t control. i feel as though i’m just. watching. all. this. happen…

i feel the gasping, suffocating distance and a rising panic when i think of it, but all i can do is trust anyways. especially now that i can’t remember the reasons for these choices and now i’m left with them and wondering if they’re right. can’t i just stay? can’t i just wait for you? can’t we just be together when we’re together and when we’re not i’ll preoccupy myself with wishing we were?

no. you can’t stay anywhere for anyone.

i could. for you.

no. you’ll kill yourself with whiskey and restlessness.

this is all i can do now. all i can do is keep going in the direction that i’ve chosen. its hard because now you’re feeling all the things i was feeling and i’m feeling all the things you were feeling and its all i can do to try to remember why i am doing any of these things at all.

big picture, little picture

the lights were dimmed and our senses were on high alert. mushrooms made everything feel more and think less – the world in relation to me. the world consisting of my darkened room and him and me and we sat smoking in the dark where there was mist outside my window and as i touched his legs he said, “keep interacting with me.” i said “that’s the idea” and slid toward him.

i asked him [lying on my bed now] and he said, “what i honestly want is to get as stoned as possible and have you touch me everywhere. my legs, my feet, my kneecaps, my arms, my stomach, my chest, my shoulders – i got lots of stuff.”

“this isn’t going to mess things up, right? in the big picture? i’m going on tour, you’re moving to san francosco…” he asked a bit later. i heard myself say this: “i don’t think every little picture has to be part of the big picture.” this is a polaroid photograph of a secret being whispered… 

“we’re missing a piece,” he said. “oh. it s not far,” i said. “there’s one in my bag,” he said, “you put it there.” “i’m a genius,” i said. yeah. off the charts.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

“…probably not the most awesomely intelligent idea to continue this sort of thing. for all parties concerned,” i was saying the next day. “right, right,” he said, “agreed. you know, big picture, little picture.”

right. one last ditch effort to climb inside of you and stay there forever. i miss you in a way that i can’t even comprehend.

HA!

its just a seed stirring, a little smile turning up the corners of my mouth. its great to see you smile in the dark. nothing beats the intoxicating potential that is coming into existence between us. its great to find something new; its hopeful.

parallel lines

Its like 4 in the morning or something. I have to work at 6:30. I don’t know why I’m awake. I think I’m happy. Its a go also, I think. I put in my 30-day and I have a place to stay and Rory got his car yesterday. Tonight we were trying to get Aryn to go with us. I think we all think too much about things a lot. I know I do. I think thinking is what has been standing in Aryn’s way of getting out of here for a long time. Mine too. Thinking and feeling. Fuck that. My first shift with Rory I said “I’m moving to San Francisco.” He said, “Me too.” And then it all started. No thinking required.

The only thing that worries me now is hurting you. I don’t know why I keep addressing these entries to you. I shouldn’t. I’m okay now. Like I said, I think I’m happy. Its only when I start to think long and hard about you that I get sad and feel pain. Today I think I just decided I was tired of feeling sad about you. We were so beautiful. We still are. I have to let go of you. I have to let go of everything to make room for something new.

In Motorcycle Diaries he said, “This is the story of two lives running parallel for a while.” That’s all it is. I think that’s all it ever is. We all must answer only to ourselves in the end. We have wild, restless souls. We love the road. I think many people are this restless, but not a great many. I am. You are. Out of everyone, I think you and I truly are. Its a great way to be, but its hard to lose over and over, especially each other. I bought your birthday present today. Three books, just like you got me for mine. Only these ones are blank. “A glass to put your thoughts inside,” to quote you.

I don’t think anyone knows, or could ever know, the depth and breadth and width and height of what we shared this summer. I don’t think anyone could. So much of it is unspoken, just understood between us.

So I’ll be gone and you’ll be gone and this city will be all the sadder for it. The greatest thing I ever did here was love you. That may be the greatest thing I’ve ever done. But there are so many people to love (no one, never like I love[d] you, not ever) and I’m ready to give my heart to someone who is capable of giving me theirs. And someone to be with, to travel and explore with. I’m sorry I didn’t get to stay with you. I’m sorry its not you I’ll share these things with. I hope we can meet up again someday, and our lives will run parallel once more. You are indeed my friend but you are so much more it just doesn’t seem to fit (just as any other title never quite fir for us). You are my dear. You are a live thing inside me that makes me know I am alive. But you know all this. We both know it all, already. We are too invincible together, that’s why we have to be split apart. I’ll never be as invincible with anyone as I am with you. I’ll see you, okay?

home

Having one of those increasingly rare days in which everything speaks to me of you. The closer it gets to me leaving, the more torn I feel. What am I leaving behind? What am I walking into? You don’t seem to ever have any regrets or apprehension about losing me the way I do about you. I’m still determined, no matter what I feel, to show you only the love I have for you. I feel as though I’ll always be keeping one eye on you, in some way or another. It’s almost a protective instinct, like I’m supposed to look out for you. I always will. You always do for me. You called me today and said my name over and over and over when I answered the phone. All day all I could hear in my head was your name over and over and over. Are you sorry I’m going? I think its the only way I can move on from you. I try around here, and then always just end up face-to-face with the fact of you. You’re standing in front of me and I can’t look away. I couldn’t ever look away.

empty glass

Inside the glass were the slurred and exaggerated images opposite whoever was looking at it. The blearing lights of the stage that magnified the sweat of the aging, nervous-looking musicians looked obscene inside of it to Gabe, who was already tipsy. There was a bird, chirping next to him. No, she wasn’t chirping, she was laughing. She was a she.

Her name was Jean. She was tiny, like a bird, and bony. Her facial features on her bony head were exaggerated and seemed, therefore, overly expressive. Her eyes bugged like cartoon character’s when she was surprised and her mouth would open like a boa constrictor about to swallow its prey when she had something to say. Her long, witch-like hands fluttered about like two over-sized houseflies. Jean was French, she made sure everyone knew. She’d reiterate the fact (as if her overpowering accent didn’t give it away fast enough) every time another patron got within earshot.

“…and my mother was French,” she was saying now, over the music, over the din. “I wish she’d have given me a really cute French name.”

“Jean’s a really cute French name!,” some enamored idiot said.

“It should have been Coquette!” she exclaimed, giving her gravity-defying hair a dramatic toss. The crowd loved it. She played to the crowd, alright.

Gabe ordered another shot and leaned back against the bar. He tried to pay attention to the band. He winced at the shaky music, and at the twittering beside him. He glanced over to quickly admire her thin body in the slinky fabric that seemed to pour off of her hips in filmy red, the smooth shoulder that had found its way out of a satin strap, poking up like a slick, spy-hopping dolphin. He quickly looked away and pretended the angular little body wasn’t attached to the bird-voice occupying the thick air in the bar and all the space in his head.

Through the glass he watched people milling around a battered pool table. Their heads started out ridiculously tiny and then grew to enormous and split in two. Lights twinkled spastically like frantic flashlight signals, and Gabe downed another shot. Now everything looked like it had through the empty glass, and the bird woman clacked on in her jittery French way. Now the crowd was enthralled and delighted with her dramatic retelling of her mother’s plight as a penniless immigrant nanny who spoke no English in the sixties. The timbre of her voice, its affected lifts and falls, were beginning to give him a headache. In front of him a waitress came by and picked up his looking glass, with its lemon rind and Hefewiezen residue.

Bird woman complementing someone’s lapel pin.

Bird woman turning down a drink from some imbecilic suitor.

Gabe felt his stomach lurch – had he eaten today? – and the lights streaked angrily through around the ceiling whenever he moved his head. He slumped down on his stool, vaguely hoping he wouldn’t fall into a concussion, or have to be dragged out. At least now the noise, even the incessant chirping going on next to him, had slowed to a faraway drone. The colors and shapes, all mixing together and romping around, grew and shrank and split apart. The ground under his feet looked crystalline smooth and not quite flat. How had he gotten inside the glass? He pulled his feet up to avoid stepping in hefewiezen dregs. He reached out to brace himself against the curved wall of the glass, only inches away, he was sure, and tumbled off the stool with his hand outstretched.

A bony hand caught him.

It braced him against a thin, red-shrouded thigh.

Sound? Bird-voice.

“Oh, honey, are you alright? I think we should call it a night, all.” Jean propped him up against her and leaned over to pay the tab. Her attention melted like snow off of her devoted audience and rolled over him like a sudden shower, and her accent took on a child-like lilt.

“Here baby, lean on me,” she said, leading him toward the door. He laid his head on her wet-dolphin shoulder and they stumbled towards home.

thank god for pot

Not the most original or intelligent of statements, but true nonetheless. Strange to be both longing for the past and feeling stifled with it. It is sucking up all the oxygen in the room. In the world, actually. Took a trip to the shores up north. Accomplished nothing. Bought a record. Found a book. Drank some juice. Starting tonight I have to start being a grown-up about this.