Once upon a time a season changed perceptibly from the hot passionate roller coaster of summer to the sober, pensive, emotionally raw fall. The people walking under the trees felt the leaves begin to die, though nothing let go yet. Nothing withered visibly. It was merely a change in the air, a death of such smallness, nobody actually registered what it was. Only they began stuffing sweatshirts and cardigans into the backseats of their cars next to balled up beach towels and sandy sticky grocery bags.
The ice cream truck circles the playground, a great white shark, and the music tinkles eerily, but the children cling to their mother's legs, and the toys in their hands tremble a little, but then they turn back to the game and the chalked out pavement, and the man behind the wheel knows his dominion is coming to an end.
It is this grand switchover that is my favorite time of year.
I love what power the wind begins to threaten.
It gets so strong and mischevious, pulling dogs down alleyways, birds like paper trash flapping and darting between branches and cars.
Couples stroll down the brick walkways, the heat no longer separating them with a layer of disgust, they let their bodies drift a little closer. She lets the breeze coil her hair around her and in his eyes. He lets the jacket whip around him, and thrill his arms with an idea of how much wings could weigh. They lean toward each other, wrap around like garments, button limb to limb and something in the air makes the other smell like promise and excitement and fear and plummeting and before the stomach can drop much further the kiss is already happening. Stunning. It's still out there. It's still making everyone crazy. It's just different. Falling in love in autumn is like nothing else in the world.
I miss maine at this time more than anything else.
Ah...such a good time to listen to the cure and daydream.
For now...i take it. The first shiver. And welcome it like the return of an old friend.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Bread Muse
Strange things happening as this summer begins to saunter more sedately down serious paths and treads with a step slightly wiser than may or june.
Beautiful...the way a moon in august is more like a pearl earring softly resting against the hollow of a smooth neck. Less sensual like the rotund bead of sweat moon from early july, not searing and dangerous like the red moons of october.
Running.
Running becoming part of me.
I like it. I like how strong it makes me feel, how capable. I like that I feel my body working for me, with me, and under me. My command and it falls like tree limbs, or roots i suppose, maybe not a tree at all but the wind in the tree. Nonsense. It's okay though. It's late, and my dreams are not a place I wish to return tonight.
The bakery.
I prop the door open during my late night shift. After Sara, the other night girl leaves, it's just me, the oven and the radio.
At ten, I take a breather. The last of the sour doughs is loaded. I have ten minutes before I should really finish mixing my starters and begin cleaning the place. The rocky soundtrack comes on the radio, and I take a hot, soft olive roll from the cooling rack, tear it into steaming halves and dip one in the reserved oil from this afternoon's garlic roasting pot. Sara left half a blood red tomato on the counter and I smash it between the hunks of warm bread, a clumsy pinch of salt, and I eat my dinner leaning against the open door watching clouds dart across the moon. My nails thick with paste, skin heavy under a mantle of sweat and oil and flour, clothes dusted white, legs aching, and this moment of solitude is perfect.
The first timer on the bread goes off.
I take a deep breath.
Jam the rest of the sandwich in my mouth, and on the way back to the oven I hear eye of the tiger begin. This is when my job feels like a fucking event. I jump up, grab the huge peel from the top of the oven, and crank open the top deck. The blast of heat whacks me in the face with the dry, slightly sour smell of the bread. Yeah bitches, it's plebian, it's a dirty job, it's hard and it makes me as energetic as a bowl of oatmeal when I get home, but at the end of the night, when I push the cooling racks out into the hallway and lock the door, I saw the genesis of something all the way through, and I can go home and sleep and battle the fucking mental chess pieces with a giant wooden peel.
Beautiful...the way a moon in august is more like a pearl earring softly resting against the hollow of a smooth neck. Less sensual like the rotund bead of sweat moon from early july, not searing and dangerous like the red moons of october.
Running.
Running becoming part of me.
I like it. I like how strong it makes me feel, how capable. I like that I feel my body working for me, with me, and under me. My command and it falls like tree limbs, or roots i suppose, maybe not a tree at all but the wind in the tree. Nonsense. It's okay though. It's late, and my dreams are not a place I wish to return tonight.
The bakery.
I prop the door open during my late night shift. After Sara, the other night girl leaves, it's just me, the oven and the radio.
At ten, I take a breather. The last of the sour doughs is loaded. I have ten minutes before I should really finish mixing my starters and begin cleaning the place. The rocky soundtrack comes on the radio, and I take a hot, soft olive roll from the cooling rack, tear it into steaming halves and dip one in the reserved oil from this afternoon's garlic roasting pot. Sara left half a blood red tomato on the counter and I smash it between the hunks of warm bread, a clumsy pinch of salt, and I eat my dinner leaning against the open door watching clouds dart across the moon. My nails thick with paste, skin heavy under a mantle of sweat and oil and flour, clothes dusted white, legs aching, and this moment of solitude is perfect.
The first timer on the bread goes off.
I take a deep breath.
Jam the rest of the sandwich in my mouth, and on the way back to the oven I hear eye of the tiger begin. This is when my job feels like a fucking event. I jump up, grab the huge peel from the top of the oven, and crank open the top deck. The blast of heat whacks me in the face with the dry, slightly sour smell of the bread. Yeah bitches, it's plebian, it's a dirty job, it's hard and it makes me as energetic as a bowl of oatmeal when I get home, but at the end of the night, when I push the cooling racks out into the hallway and lock the door, I saw the genesis of something all the way through, and I can go home and sleep and battle the fucking mental chess pieces with a giant wooden peel.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Vampires too hate sand in their picnic lunches
I'm feeling bret easton ellis withdrawal symptoms.
I have the desperate need to consume cocktails in the afternoon. I never want to take my sunglasses off, even in the midst of afternoon downpours. My lust for new items is beginning to consume me. My social commitments, starting in about a week's time, will exhaust me, and I simply have no host of vapid, soulless trend mongrels to lap up my uber savvy whinge-fests.
With all that being said, it's been a couple of years, BEE, time to dump another mind-bending, culture schlock, pain tome on the slavering masses.
Solitude...
like my daily multivitamin, is beginning to give me a vague sense of nausea, and I'm afraid I'm forgetting what either one is good for anymore.
I feel so removed from all things as they happen. Perhaps this is the preferred state of the author. I should, by all rights and purposes be writing my flour addled brain out. It's not as if I have an abundance of cognitive challenges in my current line of work. In fact, I am at the point where i no longer feel present in the bakery for most of my time there. I measure out the recipes, assess whether my employers are suffering any breakdowns and, provided the air is mostly clear, my conscious mind climbs out of my skull and goes walkabout. In the rare instances it does stick around it gets so bored, I find myself telling long wandering stories (not that I don't do that anyway) but I've begun tossing in full blown lies just to keep myself entertained.
I know how this one ends, I think petulantly, blah blah blah, and he frog walked out of the gymnasium on tiptoe...I might as well toss in a blood spattered pair of sneakers by the locker room, or some missing electrical tape-oh what the hell-"so that's when his crotch hemorrhaged and we had to use a back pack to keep back the fountain of blood nevermind Mr. Brault battling the vultures with an improvised jockstrap slingshot..."
I suppose I'm doing my brain absolutely no good coming home after work and watching Weeds online until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open anymore. Meh.
In other news, Bob and I are watching Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers. It's freaking hilarious. I think we have to find it for owning sometime. How our collection managed to survive this long without it is beyond me. It is a bit unnerving to see Sharon Tate in all her redheaded, 60's glamour, but Polanski himself is actually foil to the Professor Helsingish Vampire hunter in the movie, and he's just so bumbling and adorable and hilarious you can't help being sucked in (oh dear god I didn't see the pun until it was in writing, forgive me).
Life consists of gueurilla pastry gifting...doorknobs beware lest ye bear such strange fruits as scones, croissants and oatmeal cinnamon raisin rolls. I gave my downstairs neighbor a loaf of garlic sourdough, and she told me to swing by the edgewater for a margarita. I guess this means she's not a vampire.
Also running in the morning down by the willows I enjoy the views of Salem's fattest; the yacht club, SUV driving, oversized sunglass camouflaged trash rubbing shoulders with hispanic barbecue parties at ten in the morning with lots of little girls with incredibly long dark hair in many variations of ponytail screeching and running while fast food trash blows by like tumbleweeds amongst the geriatric ocean gazers literally out to pasture while their scrub-clad caretakers smoke and curse by the arcade. I run beside bitchy girls on cell phones slumping off to the filthy beach, beer bellied fathers giggling as their yoohoo bellied sons taunt the seagulls, every variety of soccer mom running faster than me, and the somehow still pure and perfect tiny children toting sand buckets, eating popsicles, digging at their ill-fitting bathing suits and crying while their parents rub gallons of sunscreen into their flesh.
This is summer in massachusetts.
I have the desperate need to consume cocktails in the afternoon. I never want to take my sunglasses off, even in the midst of afternoon downpours. My lust for new items is beginning to consume me. My social commitments, starting in about a week's time, will exhaust me, and I simply have no host of vapid, soulless trend mongrels to lap up my uber savvy whinge-fests.
With all that being said, it's been a couple of years, BEE, time to dump another mind-bending, culture schlock, pain tome on the slavering masses.
Solitude...
like my daily multivitamin, is beginning to give me a vague sense of nausea, and I'm afraid I'm forgetting what either one is good for anymore.
I feel so removed from all things as they happen. Perhaps this is the preferred state of the author. I should, by all rights and purposes be writing my flour addled brain out. It's not as if I have an abundance of cognitive challenges in my current line of work. In fact, I am at the point where i no longer feel present in the bakery for most of my time there. I measure out the recipes, assess whether my employers are suffering any breakdowns and, provided the air is mostly clear, my conscious mind climbs out of my skull and goes walkabout. In the rare instances it does stick around it gets so bored, I find myself telling long wandering stories (not that I don't do that anyway) but I've begun tossing in full blown lies just to keep myself entertained.
I know how this one ends, I think petulantly, blah blah blah, and he frog walked out of the gymnasium on tiptoe...I might as well toss in a blood spattered pair of sneakers by the locker room, or some missing electrical tape-oh what the hell-"so that's when his crotch hemorrhaged and we had to use a back pack to keep back the fountain of blood nevermind Mr. Brault battling the vultures with an improvised jockstrap slingshot..."
I suppose I'm doing my brain absolutely no good coming home after work and watching Weeds online until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open anymore. Meh.
In other news, Bob and I are watching Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers. It's freaking hilarious. I think we have to find it for owning sometime. How our collection managed to survive this long without it is beyond me. It is a bit unnerving to see Sharon Tate in all her redheaded, 60's glamour, but Polanski himself is actually foil to the Professor Helsingish Vampire hunter in the movie, and he's just so bumbling and adorable and hilarious you can't help being sucked in (oh dear god I didn't see the pun until it was in writing, forgive me).
Life consists of gueurilla pastry gifting...doorknobs beware lest ye bear such strange fruits as scones, croissants and oatmeal cinnamon raisin rolls. I gave my downstairs neighbor a loaf of garlic sourdough, and she told me to swing by the edgewater for a margarita. I guess this means she's not a vampire.
Also running in the morning down by the willows I enjoy the views of Salem's fattest; the yacht club, SUV driving, oversized sunglass camouflaged trash rubbing shoulders with hispanic barbecue parties at ten in the morning with lots of little girls with incredibly long dark hair in many variations of ponytail screeching and running while fast food trash blows by like tumbleweeds amongst the geriatric ocean gazers literally out to pasture while their scrub-clad caretakers smoke and curse by the arcade. I run beside bitchy girls on cell phones slumping off to the filthy beach, beer bellied fathers giggling as their yoohoo bellied sons taunt the seagulls, every variety of soccer mom running faster than me, and the somehow still pure and perfect tiny children toting sand buckets, eating popsicles, digging at their ill-fitting bathing suits and crying while their parents rub gallons of sunscreen into their flesh.
This is summer in massachusetts.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Sometimes you have to be alone with a dog and the moon
Can't sleep for some reason.
I'm tired, and there's a cuddly sweet lump of boy in bed, but I can hear the wonderful, soothing sound of summer rain drumming on the asphalt outside, and every so often a wink of lightening reminds me that no matter how tightly my thighs grip the mechanical bull, I am so not the one pulling the lever from "graze" to "murderlation".
After everybody was gone from work tonight, and I was all by myself peeling north shore sourdough out of the oven, I started singing out loud.
It's been a long time since I listened to my own voice. I realized I've forgotten most of the songs I used to know by heart. It's sad, sort of like, looking down at the ground and thinking about not tripping over tree roots while you walk, then looking up again and realizing you missed the best parts of the walk, and that parakeet in the tree back there, because you were worrying about the little stuff.
Yeah...I don't know what happened to the vast wasteland of depeche mode lyrics I had at my disposal once upon a time. They all rinsed away down the drain of "shit that I need to worry about because I'm obsessive about being a grown up and getting my life together".
I'm really bad about that lately.
I don't want to go see anybody, and I have the biggest trouble making plans when a friend volunteers to see me. I don't feel as though I have anything remotely interesting to contribute. At work, I listen to my stories. I become irritated as my voice seeks to fill all the hollows and cracks of silence. There is such a blanket of weird when nobody's talking in that place. I just go on and on about nothing. Already I've talked too much about my childhood, growing up weirdness, all that bullshit you don't share with people unless there's a solidly decent bottle of wine nearby, and your hair is literally let down, and with one hand you massage your scalp and gesticulate wildly, while the other bobs the glass of shiraz up and down and all around.
Oh my god.
I have no idea when I last had wine...let alone any decent stuff.
I am coming to the realization that the quality of my life is beyond poverty stricken and romantic. I've careened desperately into boring and paralyzed...at least that's my worst fear.
Three in the morning, not a soul to talk to. No idea what I'd say if I had that soul clutched in my gritty, dough-crusted little fists.
I miss people.
I miss the girl I used to be.
I think I brushed by her a couple of nights ago while the moon was full.
Out on the common, walking Cass at midnight. Threads of black cloud wove the darkness unsteadily enough so that I couldn't read the book I was hauling around with me. Suddenly I became aware of soft strains of violin music coming from somewhere nearby. I followed the sound, until i reached one of the many big old houses split into apartments that make up my neighborhood. Standing across the street from it, I could see the windows of the top floor on the right hand side, lit up and the curtains drawn. The glass itself must have been opened, because I could clearly hear somebody practicing on their instrument.
I stood under the unreliable streetlamp in plain view of the musician, vaguely impressed by the proximity of the funeral home and the shadowy-ness of the entire experience. More than anything else though, I wanted to see the person making the music, and he never appeared. It was difficult to believe that I was anything but alone and enjoying a particularly imaginative auditory hallucination.
I don't think I would mind I were.
At any rate. Solitary violin stalking and the compliment bob gave me on Monday morning are the two things keeping me alive this week.
I'm tired, and there's a cuddly sweet lump of boy in bed, but I can hear the wonderful, soothing sound of summer rain drumming on the asphalt outside, and every so often a wink of lightening reminds me that no matter how tightly my thighs grip the mechanical bull, I am so not the one pulling the lever from "graze" to "murderlation".
After everybody was gone from work tonight, and I was all by myself peeling north shore sourdough out of the oven, I started singing out loud.
It's been a long time since I listened to my own voice. I realized I've forgotten most of the songs I used to know by heart. It's sad, sort of like, looking down at the ground and thinking about not tripping over tree roots while you walk, then looking up again and realizing you missed the best parts of the walk, and that parakeet in the tree back there, because you were worrying about the little stuff.
Yeah...I don't know what happened to the vast wasteland of depeche mode lyrics I had at my disposal once upon a time. They all rinsed away down the drain of "shit that I need to worry about because I'm obsessive about being a grown up and getting my life together".
I'm really bad about that lately.
I don't want to go see anybody, and I have the biggest trouble making plans when a friend volunteers to see me. I don't feel as though I have anything remotely interesting to contribute. At work, I listen to my stories. I become irritated as my voice seeks to fill all the hollows and cracks of silence. There is such a blanket of weird when nobody's talking in that place. I just go on and on about nothing. Already I've talked too much about my childhood, growing up weirdness, all that bullshit you don't share with people unless there's a solidly decent bottle of wine nearby, and your hair is literally let down, and with one hand you massage your scalp and gesticulate wildly, while the other bobs the glass of shiraz up and down and all around.
Oh my god.
I have no idea when I last had wine...let alone any decent stuff.
I am coming to the realization that the quality of my life is beyond poverty stricken and romantic. I've careened desperately into boring and paralyzed...at least that's my worst fear.
Three in the morning, not a soul to talk to. No idea what I'd say if I had that soul clutched in my gritty, dough-crusted little fists.
I miss people.
I miss the girl I used to be.
I think I brushed by her a couple of nights ago while the moon was full.
Out on the common, walking Cass at midnight. Threads of black cloud wove the darkness unsteadily enough so that I couldn't read the book I was hauling around with me. Suddenly I became aware of soft strains of violin music coming from somewhere nearby. I followed the sound, until i reached one of the many big old houses split into apartments that make up my neighborhood. Standing across the street from it, I could see the windows of the top floor on the right hand side, lit up and the curtains drawn. The glass itself must have been opened, because I could clearly hear somebody practicing on their instrument.
I stood under the unreliable streetlamp in plain view of the musician, vaguely impressed by the proximity of the funeral home and the shadowy-ness of the entire experience. More than anything else though, I wanted to see the person making the music, and he never appeared. It was difficult to believe that I was anything but alone and enjoying a particularly imaginative auditory hallucination.
I don't think I would mind I were.
At any rate. Solitary violin stalking and the compliment bob gave me on Monday morning are the two things keeping me alive this week.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Lonelies
Terror has been seeping slowly into my breathing patterns for a while now, this very discombobulating sensation that I am losing losing losing losing pieces and people and places and memories and giant hunks of my own self which drop off as I lumber along barely noticing the itchy spot where I was once complete.
Hi,
my name is terror. I am the bandage you wrap around yourself to keep it all together, and guess what? Now you suffocate.
I sometimes really feel like I no longer breathe. I just anaerobically survive in the placating madness of routine. Somehow, if I just make it through this next hour, I am one hour closer to life being better.
Life being butter?
Forgive the madness...it comes much quicker, much sleeker in the night, in the wee hours, in the lonelies.
Perhaps that's where I should have begun in the first place.
Lonely Mountain
On De Lonely De Mountain,
is a quagmire fountain
a precipice field
and a garden of fleas
Where the quagmire's stucking
the fleas do their sucking
the field unmakes plucking
of the mountains vast seas
So we built it a mansion
a manor of speaking
a house with a voice
and a window that sees
without blinking our fingers
the house made of tinders
is aflame and then cinders
if you only say please
yet no travelers come striding
nor sailers their riding
and the ventured unwinding
their breadcrumb trapeze
so a girl sits unwriting
a song for inviting
and watches all the fleas blighting
under a famine of breeze
come to me someday
and play on the wordplay
i still think of you fondly
and our exchange of disease
goodnight.
Hi,
my name is terror. I am the bandage you wrap around yourself to keep it all together, and guess what? Now you suffocate.
I sometimes really feel like I no longer breathe. I just anaerobically survive in the placating madness of routine. Somehow, if I just make it through this next hour, I am one hour closer to life being better.
Life being butter?
Forgive the madness...it comes much quicker, much sleeker in the night, in the wee hours, in the lonelies.
Perhaps that's where I should have begun in the first place.
Lonely Mountain
On De Lonely De Mountain,
is a quagmire fountain
a precipice field
and a garden of fleas
Where the quagmire's stucking
the fleas do their sucking
the field unmakes plucking
of the mountains vast seas
So we built it a mansion
a manor of speaking
a house with a voice
and a window that sees
without blinking our fingers
the house made of tinders
is aflame and then cinders
if you only say please
yet no travelers come striding
nor sailers their riding
and the ventured unwinding
their breadcrumb trapeze
so a girl sits unwriting
a song for inviting
and watches all the fleas blighting
under a famine of breeze
come to me someday
and play on the wordplay
i still think of you fondly
and our exchange of disease
goodnight.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
In the literal sense
My free-will astrology horoscope says I should ask a lot of questions this week.
Question #1:
Why did I let Bob talk me into deleting all the music off my laptop, in an effort to prolong its life? Erasure...erasure I miss you!
Question #2:
How could I have overlooked the cure for so long? I've been losing my mind for two years now, and I just dabbled in the auditory wonder that is robert smith. As of the concert last monday, I've simply given up any sense of decency, and tumbled headlong into a mad orgy of cure albums. Lucky for me, bob has been decadently dimples deep in cure albums since forever, so I have plenty of choices. I delve into album after album, era after era, tube after tube of blisteringly red lipstick, and I just can't get enough. Currently, the album Wish, is completing my life.
Question #3:
Ever have one of those moments, a perfect one, and have an odd thought strike you? Okay, that was vague...
I was sitting on a bench in the common today, drinking a gigantic stein of peach iced tea, reading Neverwhere, and enjoying the breeze and the sunshine. A little ways off a group of children were throwing themselves into soccer practice, a man in a black business suit was dragged by his tethered dog through the foreground and high school kids lounged around the gazebo. Sitting there alone, it suddenly popped into my head that someday, forty years from now, I will probably be doing the exact same thing. I will be musing about lost opportunities, grieving losses, thumbing through memories, tripping over people I haven't thought about in years, and then yanked back to the present moment by something very small, a tickle of hair on my ear, a distant giggle, the smell of a flower, sudden strong and beautiful.
What will I think then? I wonder, in that identical perfect moment, forty years from now. How lonely will that bench be really?
Question #4 Speaking of lonely, How long will it be before Bob and I have a day to spend together again?
Almost two weeks.
NOT IMPRESSED.
Our schedules are flagrantly incongruent, and so i must content myself with brief tickle fights in the morning, slow descents into sleep in the crook of his arm while movies natter through the night, notes on phones, dishes left behind, a fucked up razer in the bathtub...I'm living with the ghost of my fiancee half the time it seems. Or maybe I'm just haunting him.
That's it for now...plenty of questions left I'm sure...
Question #1:
Why did I let Bob talk me into deleting all the music off my laptop, in an effort to prolong its life? Erasure...erasure I miss you!
Question #2:
How could I have overlooked the cure for so long? I've been losing my mind for two years now, and I just dabbled in the auditory wonder that is robert smith. As of the concert last monday, I've simply given up any sense of decency, and tumbled headlong into a mad orgy of cure albums. Lucky for me, bob has been decadently dimples deep in cure albums since forever, so I have plenty of choices. I delve into album after album, era after era, tube after tube of blisteringly red lipstick, and I just can't get enough. Currently, the album Wish, is completing my life.
Question #3:
Ever have one of those moments, a perfect one, and have an odd thought strike you? Okay, that was vague...
I was sitting on a bench in the common today, drinking a gigantic stein of peach iced tea, reading Neverwhere, and enjoying the breeze and the sunshine. A little ways off a group of children were throwing themselves into soccer practice, a man in a black business suit was dragged by his tethered dog through the foreground and high school kids lounged around the gazebo. Sitting there alone, it suddenly popped into my head that someday, forty years from now, I will probably be doing the exact same thing. I will be musing about lost opportunities, grieving losses, thumbing through memories, tripping over people I haven't thought about in years, and then yanked back to the present moment by something very small, a tickle of hair on my ear, a distant giggle, the smell of a flower, sudden strong and beautiful.
What will I think then? I wonder, in that identical perfect moment, forty years from now. How lonely will that bench be really?
Question #4 Speaking of lonely, How long will it be before Bob and I have a day to spend together again?
Almost two weeks.
NOT IMPRESSED.
Our schedules are flagrantly incongruent, and so i must content myself with brief tickle fights in the morning, slow descents into sleep in the crook of his arm while movies natter through the night, notes on phones, dishes left behind, a fucked up razer in the bathtub...I'm living with the ghost of my fiancee half the time it seems. Or maybe I'm just haunting him.
That's it for now...plenty of questions left I'm sure...
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Still here
Okay, sure.
You write a bunch of journal entries about how you hate everything, and it all starts clawing up out of the tar like a big hairy tarantula with thousands after thousands of legs, and it begins putting sticky blackness in your nose and mouth and eyes, and soon you just spew it all out, back and forth, but it keeps coming like the tide filling holes in the sand.
Then something happens.
Something small and insignificant makes you start thinking about the good things, how they used to feel, how the breath in your lungs was once sweet and light and beautiful, and then you start writing about how maybe you can't see it and feel it but you can at least remember what a mouth empty of poison felt like, a mouth that shaped words and sang music and screamed with laughter.
It begins to write itself, and you can press your eyelids up a little further than you could the day before, and suddenly slits of light begin appearing between the blackness, and you start shaping things out of those bars of light, you start pestering yourself to push the skin further apart and let your eyeballs breathe a little deeper, and then one day the universe hurls a chance at you, and maybe you'd given up and thought this was it and nothing would ever come for you, no rope would ever tumble from the clouds, but it does, and you grab it, and it's terrifying, and the rope burns your hands and runs hard and scratches your legs, and you cling to it anyway, and then suddenly spiders are peeling off you like layers of your own filthy skin, and fuck it's blinding, the pain of so much light is unbearable, what is the smell of something coming back to life, and nothing pressing hard against your eyes makes you frightened to pry them apart from your cheeks, but the lashes come unstuck, and breathing gets thinner, easier, more liquid, and you open everything all at once, eyes lips lungs nostrils fingers legs ears and everything is more beautiful than you ever remembered or imagined or dreamed, and you wonder how you ever lived in that half existence, how you ever managed to hang on, but this is real now, this is life, this is hope, and it's all still here, and so are you.
So are you.
You write a bunch of journal entries about how you hate everything, and it all starts clawing up out of the tar like a big hairy tarantula with thousands after thousands of legs, and it begins putting sticky blackness in your nose and mouth and eyes, and soon you just spew it all out, back and forth, but it keeps coming like the tide filling holes in the sand.
Then something happens.
Something small and insignificant makes you start thinking about the good things, how they used to feel, how the breath in your lungs was once sweet and light and beautiful, and then you start writing about how maybe you can't see it and feel it but you can at least remember what a mouth empty of poison felt like, a mouth that shaped words and sang music and screamed with laughter.
It begins to write itself, and you can press your eyelids up a little further than you could the day before, and suddenly slits of light begin appearing between the blackness, and you start shaping things out of those bars of light, you start pestering yourself to push the skin further apart and let your eyeballs breathe a little deeper, and then one day the universe hurls a chance at you, and maybe you'd given up and thought this was it and nothing would ever come for you, no rope would ever tumble from the clouds, but it does, and you grab it, and it's terrifying, and the rope burns your hands and runs hard and scratches your legs, and you cling to it anyway, and then suddenly spiders are peeling off you like layers of your own filthy skin, and fuck it's blinding, the pain of so much light is unbearable, what is the smell of something coming back to life, and nothing pressing hard against your eyes makes you frightened to pry them apart from your cheeks, but the lashes come unstuck, and breathing gets thinner, easier, more liquid, and you open everything all at once, eyes lips lungs nostrils fingers legs ears and everything is more beautiful than you ever remembered or imagined or dreamed, and you wonder how you ever lived in that half existence, how you ever managed to hang on, but this is real now, this is life, this is hope, and it's all still here, and so are you.
So are you.
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