Lucid

This is cinema, I suddenly think, neck snapping up. I can almost see myself shrinking in a frame, sitting in the window of a cafe in Mexico City, till I realise it's not a film but a dream.

INSIDE

Cold air creeps in through a poorly insulated window. It moves slowly, infecting things with cold as it rolls along. No summer breeze with its radiative warmth—the cold is a bad song to which no one can remember the words, that song that plays over and over in your mind, affecting your thoughts and dulling your actions.

Archive

What worries me is not that we will not be forever, or that this is ending, or even, really, that you will not be nostalgic; what worries me is that I can't tell what or how much I will remember. I don't know what got saved, and what erased. I have shot a roll on film, and what worries me is that I will disappointed with the results. What worries me is that I will not contain this time once it's done. But also, if I'm honest, I'm worried you won't contain me.

ROAD TRIP

I decided that, in order to be a good driver, I must never go more than five over the speed limit. I decided that, in order to be a good driver, I must always pull into the rightmost lane to allow faster traffic to pass. I decided that, in order to be a good driver, I must only take even-numbered exits. I decided that, in order to be a good driver, I must only pass cars if their license plate is different than mine. I decided that, in order to be a good driver, I must only run the windshield wipers for five wipes in a row. Then we began to argue about why it mattered how many times the wipers wiped. Then you began to tell me that it didn't matter where the license plates were from. Then I let you out of the car because you wanted to take Exit 71.

A case for proximity

The most dangerous feeling is comfort. The palm of a foot wrapping around a calf or a hair caught in beard or the whistle of the tea kettle halfway out of sleep. Headache from too much closeness, breathless from too much contact, restless with cabin fever. You don't know how to hold yourself upright anymore, your body just wants to lean. A sick feeling, like sleeping till one in winter, or halloween candy. A druggish sluggishness. Thick blood, slow moves. I'm going to stay in bed again today to be with you.

A CASE FOR DISTANCE

for Sheena

We started a fire that burned so fiercely so quickly that we hadn't readied the firepit for the wind and the rain. When we grew quiet with cold, we realized that the fire had died and we tried adding wood, but it was too late; and now the embers sit covered in ash—too cold to keep us warm, too hot to let us clean up the mess.

BRANCHES

The thin, long shadows reach through my window and across my bedspread. They remind me that though, long after the sun has taken its rest, the moon stands sentry from above, its gaze gives life to otherwise innocuous figures in an altogether deranged manner. Where once the branch of a tree might wave haplessly from above, it now looms treacherously. Its sharp corners mean to graze the arm of the silent sneakerby. I pull the blanket to my chin and remind myself of the difference between real and imagined sensations only to become acutely aware of the many different forms that pain can take when left to the resting mind.

Thursday evening

Leaping across the crosswalk, I could be an archer, though this thing strapped to my back is in fact a yoga mat. Downward facing dog, cat cow, thump thump, breathe in, breathe out. I could pull an arrow out and send it straight into the warm brown eye of the scruffy man bussing dishes, or I could run a palm along his jaw like a feather duster. I could be brought to tears on a stoop with a brisk breeze and a brittle book. I could be in any city. I could be in any body. But the body is in fact mine and tonight it is lithe and alive and invulnerable. I bring myself here and it is somehow easier to see my self and value the living shit out of it. Thank you.

HOT WATER CYCLE

Unspeakables

I walk into the train and graze eyes with a young man who looks slightly afraid. I want to tell him: "You can look. It's fine. Don't worry. I will mean nothing to you."

I lean back in my chair, fazed by his earnestness. I want to ask him: "How can you know you want me when you don't even know what the steam will smell like after I shower?"

I turn to leave after I've released him softly into his comfortable life. I want to remind him: "You were adventurous once, and ravenous."

But I don't.

HAIKU, C MAJOR

for Shannon

Some mornings I write haiku on scraps of paper. When I have five or so that I don't detest, I put them into an envelope and send them to a pianist in Boston who makes little songs that are seventeen notes long.

A sea creature

I spent many hours last night not being a person, but instead a sea creature; a crustacean perhaps, or a kind of lichen. An anemone maybe. I had little awareness and a very strong grip and I lay awake as the night swam past me, not really affected by the cycle, just holding tight and blinking blankly.

UNAPPLIANCE

for Katie

A mustache

Some years ago, I met a young man. He was trying to grow a mustache. He was someone's friend. My friend slept with him. He was trying to make some films. I didn't know much about him. I didn't think much about him. Next time he occurred to me, he was married, and in love in a way I wouldn't have expected. He managed to grow that mustache. And a beard. I guess that's just the age we're at.

A MESS

"Something, something, something, letting go is tough," F said, trying hard to keep a stiff neck from lulling under the weight of the drinks. "It's like Holden Caulfield said, how you can fall half in love with someone just by sharing an intimate moment." The bottle slipped through F's grasp and fell to the floor, foaming and spilling as it rolled. K quietly stood up, picked up the bottle, placed it in the sink, and mopped up the mess with a towel. Then K dabbed a wet nose with the back of a soft sleeve and wiped the corners of lightly-teared eyes with worn fingertips.
"I'm leaving you," K said.
"You shouldn't've let it get this bad," F said as K opened the door of the apartment and closed it quietly.

Five scenes in a car

I am standing in the street, somewhere between fury and civility, and a squat middle aged man is sneering out from his balcony and calling me a mad woman. The man in front of me, who rammed into the back of my car half an hour earlier, is smiling in triumph. I am searching for something to make sense of this malice. I can't. And as I ask once more to be heard, my fingertips and toes and the ridges of my ears turn suddenly cold.

*

Fields are passing to my left, and though it is dark, I know they are bright green and ripe with rain. Some image of a sickle slices through the brief calm, and I feel it hook into my pelvis. I am dragged into the field, I don't know where my limbs are, mud in my hair, one foot bare, a grip pinching the skin of my wrist, breath, screams, slaps, footsteps. The chaos is sensory, my horror is absolutely physical. I blink in the car. I grit my teeth, enraged by my fear. Would I feel this way in another country?

*

He approaches with his towels, as usual. It is hot and I am aware my hair is fluttering. The sharp clack of his ring on the window, his tight frown and intense stare. Once, he broke into a smile as I was refusing him, which flattened me. But today his aggression seems heightened. It is hot and I am sure the window is cool. He knocks again and I shake my head again and for a brief moment I will him to punch through the window and grab my throat.

*

I have had more pleasant a time than I really deserve. I have become so brittle and unpleasant that the mere idea of enjoying a slow evening in someone's company feels distant and uneasy. Ease, comfort, laughter, wonder, long absent visitors, their company has saturated me and I feel heavy with them as we come to a halt. You reach into the back seat and hand me something and once I thank you there is an open moment when I am terrified you will lean toward me and I am afraid you won't.

*

I shouldn't have drunk that last whiskey, but something in the way my life is composed is making me reckless. And that courtyard makes me look at my whole life together and fills me with impulses. One hand hanging out of the window, ring gleaming in the rearview, bass drumming in the car doors, pedal pressed all the way down, head back against the rest, face smug with youth and stupidity, ears full of the rush of road and the slick of wet tyres, I am racing. One of these days, I may not make it home. My body already knows what it will feel like as the bonnet folds obediently like an accordion against the back of a truck and my bones crumple into my flesh.

IDYLLIC ROMANCE

There's a place in the corner of the bottom of the glass where the smell of my last drink lingers. I stick my face into the rim, the cool glass indenting a perfect circle around my mouth and nose, and inhale the fumes. No visible remnants exist and the world looks upside down. I breathe in again, the tangy odor bringing back memories of moments before. Pulling the glass away, I look into the bottom once more, searching absentmindedly through my teeth for a hint of the taste that had made me cringe with a frozen promise of happiness.

Sighing, I set it down and, again, pour another. I drop some ice cubes in afterward, skill-lessly spilling drink onto the counter. Another deep breath and I take a long drink.

A thing that happens

There is a thing that happens in my head and heart when I see a particular kind of photograph, by a certain kind of person, of a certain kind of person, with a specific affect I can't describe.

Sometimes there is breeze in her hair, sometimes it is a field or a forest or a mountaintop or a European street or the back of a southern pick-up truck or a sweaty third-world backdrop. Sometimes a smile half-formed, sometimes a good dress, sometimes a casual sleeve. Sometimes his face is slack, like the photograph is beside the point and he doesn't even see the camera. Sometimes a twinge of self-awareness, sometimes a breathtaking candour. Sometimes a banal moment, an ankle, a wrist, an elbow, a spoon, crumbs on the table and on the plate and the corner of a crumpled something, maybe a napkin, or a newspaper, towel, shirt, or scrap paper. Scrap paper. Let's just call it scrap paper. It may as well be in all the photographs, standing in for creativity and recklessness or whatever else was making the air thick wherever that shutter clicked.

There are doodles behind these photos. Doodles, notes, post-its, plans, blueprints, rough drafts, I know, and I'd like to read them because all of it is worthwhile. There is a before and an after and the debris and preparation for either or both. But there is only ever one frame, one point on a line or a curve or a spine when something lands or hurts or makes you feel THERE. That. This.

I am the problem, or, A bad case of the Hamlets

Something great has happened; I feel terrible. And this makes so little sense to me, I cannot focus on anything else.

*

I am no longer able to tell how wrong I am or how right. Anything could be the case. Disorientation must be the price you pay for possibility.

*

In the middle of the night, worn threadbare, I reach into the refrigerator, and wrapping my palm around a big, smooth mango, I fold down on the floor, shaking with relief.

I NEED SOME TIME TO THINK

Indigestion in the belly of the beast.

INDEPENDENCE DAY NIGHT

From the back of a taxi, the moon a vanilla bean disc behind transparent clouds, music pouring forth from the speakers like a 360° audio simulation of an electronic Niagra—speech and symphony beating like falling waves—I lean my head against the window and pray for a better next destination.

Fallow

All seasons are past. Four names, three languages, two places, one date. Mientras, standing in a windtunnel in new courtyard in an old building in a baked city on a drizzle-cooled evening trying to seem interested in free booze and high culture and good-looking well-dressed people, frowning and swearing and handing out cards like some sort of pretend adult, choosing to go home, softly, in a small silent silver car.

What use is youth without ease?

I found a leaflet in the park. On the front, it said: How to Survive. On the back: Inhale. Don't breathe.

SORRY TO WAKE YOU

Something about 4am gives me the curiosity to say "I don't love you" and see if we can't proceed from there.

Ash

Burn bright, she said, you're young.

I, weak-willed, fresh fool, did.

And now I am soft and grey and scattering like ash.

DISSOLUTION OF A 27-YEAR-OLD

Add youth.
Remove youth.
Repeat.

I WANT A RAISE

I am grease. The purpose I serve is to keep everything running smoothly. Without me, it all works fine for a bit. After time, however, the moving parts burn out and the machine fails. My functions aren't of immediate, physical actionings, but you need them to survive. Like blood, I keep the beast alive. And like blood, and like grease, having me on the outside means imminent demise.

Back seat

City passing by in greyscale. Radiohead makes me miss him.

AFTER HANAMI

The train speeds forward.
People look on; towers pass.
I lean and straighten.

TWO MEN, and one other

Actually, it wasn’t he who presented me with a piece of my past repurposed, so I am beginning with somewhat of an untruth, but really, it was from him, through someone else, that I received that ambiguous gift.

You see, I'd forgotten what a mango tastes like.

You see, I grew up with that shit.

Nusrat is kirtan to me. Scuff or wax on the wood floor on Sunday mornings, the living room a cavern—you were nowhere, friend, there was so much life before you, I deny you your place—a cavern resounding sombre warmth. I swear, if I’d been paying attention, I would have been able to see my parents’ limbs softening in silent supplication.

Of course, la culpa no es suya, he couldn’t have known, he just learnt charm in school and cavalierness at summer camp. I learnt deference—where? I learnt appetite, so I extended my palm and took what was given me because I believed—still do—that nothing is valueless. I drank chai lattes, too.

He was so proud of his ability to go deep. He didn't know I was just shallow.

That pride is profound: it believes it has touched the heart of darkness. That pride is Conrad and Flaubert and the ilk: self-styled travellers, translators, truth-seekers, bringing back tales from the wild. Chasing echoes, they thought—you too—they could see the other side. But what they saw was an old postcard.

You can’t get inside a postcard.

*

It’s quite a thrill to be an idyll, to look at someone and watch him see in you a romantic apparition. But the thrill slumps quickly into condescension, and soon, you find yourself chivvying some poor boy to go have some of your own life experiences.

You are the murderer of your own mystique.

Really, you were on the point of swooning when he was talking that early summer evening. All necessary textures were present: flagstone, cotton, bluster, rasp, encroaching summer, nostalgia. Finally, that old vengeful dismissal—'be more, you paltry fuck, then I’ll think about giving a shit'—materialising before your eyes.

But the thing is, you’d overshot him, this sweet person with so much of your shiftiness and soft spots. And now you felt you were looking backward, or waiting, or remembering, or reliving a dream. Something long-anticipated is not always fulfilling.

Being discovered, it turns out, is no fun for you.

TWO WOMEN

I.

"This isn't a short story," I said. I set the carton of eggs onto the tiled counter and turned to face her. A grin slowly worked its way across my face, "You can't expect every shadow and passing car and cranky store clerk to have some meaning. Sometimes working at Safeway just sucks and so the cashiers take it out on the people they're helping."

She righted imaginary glasses, raised her chin and said, somewhat more slowly than she normally spoke: "That doesn't take away from the fact that this experience was a bad omen."

I walked over to her, took the bag she was carrying out of her arms, set it on the counter beside the eggs, and wrapped my arms around her such that my fingertips reached my own shoulders. "Was it an omen that spake of grave fortune? Of death by squeezing, perhaps?"

She headbutted me in the neck. "Your deliverance of death is weaker than my bullheadedness."


II.

Her face is a pentagon, the point of which is the valley of her chin. Straight lines mark the corners of her mouth, but gentle slopes make her nose appear as though it were warmed, softened, and placed just so between her wide-set eyes. Her skin is pale, but healthy, with freckles creating indecipherable patterns across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose. Against pure whiteness, the iris of her eyes is a raw, stolid brown: the color of a refreshing meal and a firm hug after a long day of work. And framing the smooth features and structure is a neatly collaborative network of flowing brown hair.

She towered over me, the full weight of herself held in her hips on my hips.


III.

A fly ran itself into the window with little, fleshy tck tck tck sounds. The pillow was stiff, wedged between my arm and my head on the bed. Idly, I touched my penis while she took a piss. The sound of a woman pissing always fascinated me. Blindfolded and far from home, I could pick the sound of my woman pissing out from a lineup of a hundred pissing women. Problem is, this lady isn't my woman. My woman would walk back into the all-too-brightly lit hotel room wearing a long t-shirt and a wide smile. This lady walked back into the room with an unlit cigarette in her mouth and jeans on. Earlier, her breasts had seemed too rigid to be real, but seeing them now, with their polite downward slope, I started to wonder what was the case: did she get implants at such a young age that the added weight has caused a premature surrender to gravity, or are her tits real, but filled with the same grit that got her in bed with me?

"What's a nice lookin' girl like you doing here?" I'd asked.
"You don't look like the kind of guy who's into nice lookin' girls," she'd replied.

And she was right. Which is why I shorted her twenty bucks. Which is why she's got her clothes on but isn't leaving. She's staring at me, watching the fly run into the window.

Buried

My friend, I have buried myself. I speak to you from beneath soil. I have buried myself so I can be like earth, so I can decompose, and then, perhaps, recompose. I have dug deep, gone under, burrowed fiercely, and perhaps it is because I want to surrender as much as possible to the earth before I can presume to leap into the air.

A MEMORY

Turn the knob, light floods into the dim hall. Lazy hand creeps the doorframe and slides down the wall; flip the switch, the bright light ends. Through the blinds, a streetlight longingly casts shadows. You're in bed. Your clothes are on. Your breaths are patterned: long inhale, sharp exhale, pause. I run the tip of my longest finger across the thin gap between your pants and shirt before resting my palm flatly onto your stomach. My other arm works its way under the pillow beneath your head. I lay myself down fully with a long, slow breath. You smell of creme rinse and alcohol drink. I smile into your hairs.

Regular programming

If you are dreaming of me, that's okay, I understand. It happens sometimes: I catch the light in a particular way and turn into a sort of romantic black hole into which everything is pulled by the force of curiosity. You didn't know, you weren't prepared; all you could see was the glow of the event horizon, all you felt the tug of a dull hook beneath your sternum. You'll be okay, you'll come out on the other side unscathed, I won't do you permanent damage. You'll coast across on a hot cloud and land softly in indifference. And when you forget me, it'll be fine, I'll understand, I forgive you. I was an unforeseen deviation and I'm grateful for your attention. Please resume regular programming.

(conversation)

How many

You are trying to stay focused. His sentences are long and his opinion is important, but at the other end of the bar a woman with a beer is watching him talk to you. You fixate on her crewneck sweater and her expression: she is aging gracefully and you are not. You have missed his question and fill in the blank with a generous smile. She shifts in the corner of your eye. Her presence is destroying your composure: you become embarrassed of your blouse, your pants, your lipstick, your glasses, your whiskey. She smiles warmly at the bartender as the music changes and when you blink you become her. And now it's you, your mind muted after a long day, two fingers on the neck of a bottle, idly wondering how many bright beautiful young women have pickled in the salty validation of an older man's attention.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DEFEND YOURSELF TO ME

Why am I saying this to you? Because I love you. Because I want you to love me back. Because I've spent the last two years building up this mythos of you and I don't want it to be wrong. Because maybe that's how love works; maybe you're supposed to want to be perfect for this person that you see as perfect for you, even if neither of you ever makes it. Because your opinion matters greatly to me. Because maybe I'm insecure and want your praise, and maybe I thought you were insecure enough that we could thrive on a feedback loop of optimism. Because that's how I think the world works: you can turn any situation into a fulfilling one by finding someone beautiful and smiling with them as the whole moment turns to shit.

A symphony

Let me record, before I forget or it becomes irrelevant, that all these things were happening at once: the street was outside the window looking in, Maria was frowning at the coffee machine, the pastries were basking in the evening light, the football match was in progress, a laugh was on deck in my throat ready to replace the smile on my face, the pink bougainvillea crept up the mustard wall and, shaking your leg, you spooned milk foam up off your coffee and back in, and up and back in, and up and into your mouth like a cat that got the cream. All these things were happening at once, all at once, and not, as they must in my memory, sequentially. I think perhaps they call this a symphony.

ALL THAT'S LEFT

All that's left are the sudden thuds of my fists into the cold memory foam. They sink if I push them a moment longer.

Careless

I have ripped open the bottom of my top lip. The weather is strange and I have been careless. Perhaps it was too dry when it wrapped around the cigarette—the lip, I mean—or was it not dry enough? Anyway, the lip is compromised. Its underbelly has come open like the hold of a plane in a hostage movie spilling escapees in parachutes. My blood is fleeing. And my face, alright just a minute ago, now feels like an overfull balloon with a pinprick in its side. The leak is not self-clotting, nor responding to blotting, so now I'm rooting around in a little drawer in this unfamiliar bathroom searching for a resolution, thinking Could I be poisoned by ointment? Should I sleep in a strange bed with a bandaid emerging from my mouth? Would I stain the sheets? Would I drain silently like an airmattress in the night?

The last time this happened, I was clambering out of an auto and gave away some DNA with a fifty rupee note. Fragments of my body may be all over the city—in wallet creases and pocket lint, perhaps in cash registers and banks, perhaps absorbed by other bodies through finger pads. Of course, I am already all over pipes and drains and garbage dumps, metro railings and poorly washed coffee cups. And now I will be a mysterious discoloration on this delicate little washcloth, and somebody's mother or washerwoman or guest will wonder, vexed, what I am before they elect, wisely, not to smear my blood all over their bodies along with soap. Perhaps there will be more of me in the dump soon, or perhaps I will become a rag and disperse myself over every surface in this house, mingled quietly with phenoyl or Lysol or window cleaner.

I didn't bargain for permanent residence when I entered a few hours ago. To contain the damage, I will slip out early in the morning, stained washcloth in tow, before anybody has the chance to offer me a cup of tea or a kiss or a knowing look and I am compelled to stutter, 'It's silly. I was careless. It's the weather, you know?'