Still time

Three days with the covers pulled up to my chin, ears and eyes stuffed full of garbage, shutting out the possibility of naming my fear or leaving anything behind, generating limbo, creating quicksand, sinking sinking, floundering, then climbing out and finding a different kind of pause in the plump black shiny bodies of a pair of aubergines on the kitchen counters smiling as they wait for the the warmth of the oven, and before that the sharp pleasure of the knife slicing, and before that the cool stream of water sliding off their waxy skin, and before that the gentle awestruck caress of my hands.

MORNING AFTER

Heading outside and feeling the cool air mix with the warm sun against your cheek, you pause a moment to hear the door close behind you before carrying on. The streetscapes are silent this early on a Saturday—the morning's frosted dew still unstomped on the grass blades. You reach into your pocket and turn up the music in your ears before you walk away from the major arteries and into the residential area. Backroad by backroad, you carve a lightning-shaped path across town. People are just waking in their homes, but cats and dogs and birds mark the otherwise still scenery with sudden movements and with lazy movements. Some trees survive green and needly in this weather, but many are glorified twigs, reaching upward sans fioriture. And then you take a turn down an alley and walk naturally through a backyard whose owner you've never met. And there it is, as it has been every time before: in a small clearing at the border of four homes—homes shaped like they house kind families—there lives a small collection of rosebushes. It's unclear who watches over this patch, but the care is immaculately and invisibly performed. You bend to the flowers in an observant deference to the improbability that something so fragile and so red should survive in weather where your own breath is too foreign to go unchanged. Standing, you feel the second half of a vibration in your pocket and excitedly pluck out your phone, but it's only a message from a friend and you go back to imagining today as a healing experience.

Director’s notes on the airport scene

More urgency. More intensity. More desperation. More more more. This is the best love you’ve ever known, and you haven’t had enough, and you’re scared you’ll lose it. You need him to know that. You need to do something to make him hold the other end of the rope taut. You’re pulling and pulling so the line won’t go slack. Be greedy and ungraceful with your body here. You’re trying to drink him, memorise him, absorb him as if you could store this up for later, when you’re parched. Don’t contain the crying. Get to a point where you can see this might be the end and then let the dam break. Let all your fear and love spill out all at once, so when he says he loves you, don’t pull back and say I love you too in a way that looks anything like the polite exchanging of compliments. Say it like a howl at the moon, and then over and over like a prayer. Like someone trying to manifest a wish or save a life. With absolute fervour. Because you get what this will mean, you already feel the weight of the absence coming down on you, and the weight of the time it will last. You know exactly what is going to happen and how it will feel. So take all that weight of what is coming down the pike and put it onto your heart in that moment and try and use your body and his and those three-four words as a lever to try to hoist it. You’re trying to move a mountain. You’re trying to stop time. You’re trying to beat the facts off with all your might for just a minute longer. And then, in an instant, ricochet off him with all that force and go through the gate.

BEFORE TURNING THIRTY

Before turning thirty, I made sure to become a wino. Cabs were my game—playing the easy red; an often tart ritual at $9 a bottle. Makes you feel heavy, wine does, like your drunk is standing on your shoulders or finding purchase in the pockets under your eyes, controlling you like a lazy eddy tugging on reluctant pond scum. You tilt helically, following weather patterns beyond your slowed perception. I became a wino before I turned thirty and made my bed each night in the eye of a storm.

Before I turn 30

Before I turned 30, I learned to slow time. I did this by doing. From a long stale stiffness, I creaked into motion, oiling my rusty joints with new landscape, new language. I cracked open the vacuum seal and let new air and spores flood in. I rusted and oxidised, fermented, grew mould, weathered. I reimagined the thrills I had dreamed for myself and gifted myself new ones. I put my body in the world and my heart on the line. I gave myself a work out. I ran on empty. I refuelled. I played go fetch with my curiosities. I stopped hiding and played seek. I breathed and bred patience. I trudged, I shrugged. I stopped trying to cohere and made elastic my identity. I had thought I'd have to be my own anchor. I discovered that I was in fact my own sea.

NOTES ON MID-SEPTEMBER

I.
There's a comfort there, in the moment after the summer's din finishes and the autumn's calm begins. There's a comfort there and an open window and a heavy blanket to let it in—a pattering portal and a softed weight on the skin to undo the sun's steady burdens.

II.
The pointed finger of a jilted lover, autumn's wrath comes in hot by day and cold by night with rains—oh man, the rains—and no winter coat nor summer short can prepare you for the muted passions of another year's gradual fade to dark.

III.
Fluttering wings sing with smiles in the low lantern light.

Signs

The next time they met, he was an ecologist. She went with him early one weekend morning to walk slowly through the woods, more a perusal than a hike, his pace like a bookstore patron with all afternoon to spare. She watched him browse, scan, pause, trying to make sense of what he took note of and why. To him it was not all just a fresh flat green. He noticed impossible things. Tiny abnormalities, the slightest disturbances in an invisible design. "I could never do this," she said, admiring, over an apple split in half. "But you do," he said, smiling. "We both read signs."

LATE AUGUST TIMBRE

It's all about the sightlines. Construct as high as materials will allow, but be sure the eyes are tied to the center of the pitch or we'll be left with an audience of leaves, at a point too late to rake them in.

Big questions

The big questions arrived with eerie periodicity, carried by strangers, lonely people in lonely cities, in disconcerting interactions I tried to skid swiftly over or dodge entirely.

A young man with a too-large frame and a too-young face, his manner bright and peering like a high sun, trying to spot something in my demeanour that would reveal me. We walked around, introduced by a friend, I took advantage of his weirdness to get beneath the city's thick skin, trying both to go through him and avoid him as he grew ever warmer, ever more entitled to my thoughts, asking every ten minutes: Qué te llama la atención?

Another young man, in another city, both ambitious and invested heavily in the material, both seemingly indifferent to the terrors in their environment, both accustomed to howling dogs and isolation, to little birds dying without wounds. He is grave and watchful as tries to orient me — a confusing stranger from so far away, another body in his unfinished house, in his solitary life — demanding with a fanatical intensity: Qué esperabas de México?

And a young woman in a bar in a winding, gridless city, bursting with energy, the first to dance, up on stage, pelvis against the guitarist's thigh, a public execution of inhibition, long hair whipping, jeans sneakers sweater backpack, like a lost student of Delhi University, perhaps not even drunk, but fervent, fevered, after something. Taking a pause once she'd got everyone else up, glaring at sitting me, she jabs a finger into my chest and yells over the drums and amps: Qué significa esto para tí?

I know what kind of answer she wants — what kind of answer they all want — and I refuse. To her, the bringer of the biggest question, I am especially obtuse. She rolls her eyes in disgust at my utter lack of life, gets up and goes back on stage to dance. I know that girl. I probably was that girl. So full of feeling, so stuffed with the significance of everything, so convinced she is alone in seeing into the deep.

My answers, unspoken, were these: What I notice is private, what I expected I have forgotten, and what this means, I don't know, we will see.

EAVESDROPPING

Little leaf skittering in the wind, winding its way through the few feet that dare brave the day in these conditions. Elevating voices from a nearby bar philosophically fellating one another with curled lips and aural spurs. Lose an eye following the organic debris from bough to street. Lend an ear to the dreams of the drinking youth, thinking they'll save the day in these dim conditions.

Quicksand

It's not that I am reckless, it's just that I have a talent for identifying soft places and walking straight into them.

ALL THE GRAINS GATHER

All the grains gather neatly toward the center before plummeting to the pile below. Each granule takes its turn: this one water-sliding into the unknown; that one, lazily rolling over its kin; those two finding their way through together.

I took it personally

Every time they shot a man, they shot you, and put a hole in my chest. They choked me, beat me, burned me, hurt me. My body, in pain, desperate for yours, to soothe, to hold, to heal. But your body, elsewhere, seeking refuge in another, painless.

HOW TO CAUSE A TORNADO

How do you cause a tornado? How do you create turbulent winds that cut through towns and make a witch of the old Gypsy? Is it when our laughter meets for the first time? Is it when our sweat and hot breath meet for the first time? Is it when we yell or we cry or we stand silent, noses inches apart? Is it when I leave the hospital and drive home with whisky on my breath?

Attachment

What happens to a memory when you discard the object that held it?

FOSSA OVALIS

Each of us is born with a cave in our heart. It's left over from the constructing you and your mother did to you. By the age of two, most people have sealed up their fossa ovalis, making their right heart whole. There are some, however, who spend their lives trying to find something to fit into that small, but important depression. And then there are those, even fewer yet, who realize the void to be a gift, and choose there to disappear completely when they find someone worth disappearing with.

Sad girl

Sad girl music doesn't help. I cannot make a poetry of dregs, no longer sharp, now flat and stale, a chore. I listen to women who sound like their mouths are full of blood from gnashing their teeth in rage and pretend I will smash my car into the back of a truck.

NAPKIN #613

Let your gaze drift out the window while waves crash upon the shore and freighting barges narrowly avoid collision, and imagine the moment on the bench in the bar when the bones of our hips hit and you made a smile through the moment of sharp pain.

Prayer beads

I'm alone again, my own again. A crabby, twisting organism, impetuous and impulse-prone again. I love things and live things by myself again. A bee without a drone again. I don't care about being someone's cool again. I'm my own bottomline again. I'm brown again. I'm blue again. I'm seeing green green green again. I like trees and cities more than people again. I'll be a wild strange body again, open up to new touch again. I'm recovering and discovering and covering myself in mud again. I'm bored with tepid love again. I'm deep again and raw again and healing like a wound again. I'm mad again and glad again. I'm listening to that old gal again. I'm defiant, on the move again. I love myself instead again.

TRAVELLING THE STATES

This is a travel song inaugurated with mad friends, and documented on a marijuana whim.

Sun, and moon, and hills, and, flats, and corn, and soy, and water, and murky water, and women with six names, and men in their mom's millionaire apartment complex overseeing the shore of Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago, and raced a stone turtle in the streets of suburban Baltimore at three in the morning until our laughter became loud enough that we ran three blocks over so we wouldn't get our friend who was putting us up in trouble, and road with waving false puddles, and trees, and shaved paths through the trees, and crowded dance halls where the Colombian girl tried to take you home and you were too drunk to say no but too drunk to act natural when you arrived so you came back at sunrise with a fat grin and no stories, and pissing on rooftops in Polish New York, and stealing a kiss from Hannah's friend when we all slept together in a big heap on the mattress we'd pulled out into the livingroom, and the thunderstorms making a Tesla coil of the midwest skies, and the solemn man who gave us a ride, and the excited man who gave us a ride, and the young woman and her younger sister who picked us up outside of Kansas City and drove us all the way to Denver, and the JUMP FOR JESUS Evangelical daredevil in the middle of the mosquito-ridden campsite in North Platte, and that umbrella that had a packet of cocaine(?) in it, and the withered old woman who punched you in the butt on the sidewalk and said something about cute kids walking around in the summer heat, and slowly spreading smolders in the grasses by the side of the freeway started when a Greyhound driver failed to notice he'd run over a mattress until it caught the bus on fire, and the Japanese lady who used my pencil and Moleskin to excitedly tell me about her time in California, and sunsets over the immediate Rockies as we slept in sleeping bags in a park in what constituted downtown Ogden after we failed to find anyone to put us up for the night, and when we played pool at four in the morning with some dready with a thick accent who called me White Jesus all night, and when we found out your dad was eating pills, and when Katie's mom was dying of cancer, and when drink put me in an angry stupor in Denver and I mumbled shit I couldn't even remember but had to apologize for, and when you got so mad about not being able to sleep on the train for 26hrs straight that you didn't talk to anyone the whole time we were in LA, and when shots of overpriced mezcal led to me sleeping with an old friend's old friend, and when we ate marijuana that the old man handed to us on the train and it didn't kick in until after your dad put me behind the wheel of a rental car, and when we found the empty chamber hall in the Chicago Cultural Center and filmed ourselves doing the shuffle, and when we ate Adderall and went for a long walk in Pittsburgh and you took pictures and then we went back to our friend's home and fucked so hard that I came over your head and into the closet and we just shut it and laughed, and when we laid ourselves down in the San Francisco sun in a park and a man came over and offered us beers because he was heading off and later a couple offered us leftovers from their wedding reception and we felt like the world could be magical, and when I saw my first firefly in New York, and the grandiosity of the Philadelphia train station, and the solemn silence of the Redwoods, and the unimaginable vastness of the Grand Canyon, and the long roads to nowhere, and the cushioned smash of the plane's tires on the tarmac, and the hiss of the bus' hydraulic lift, and unattended animals, and parking lots on roofs, and friends excited to see you return, and the same sun, and the same moon.

Bowling ball

I had been observing her my entire life, and a shadow of incompleteness sometimes hovered behind her. A dense shadow, three dimensional, thickening around a core of mystery. The mystery vanished when she mentioned casually a dream she had abandoned decades ago, pretending it meant nothing even as it dropped through the conversation like a bowling ball through old floorboards, letting loose a shaft of light. I could see something I hadn't before.

NORTH STAR

The story had lost everyone's interest a couple of sentences ago, so I glanced at a woman standing against a street sign outside. She was watching me intently through the glass. When I met her gaze, she waved to me by holding up her left hand and letting her long fingers collapse down into their palm. The mocking pout she affixed to her face convinced me to noiselessly stand up, leave the table, and walk outside.

Her Persian blood made itself evident in her nose and her skin and her hair; but her tongue and her hands were American. She spoke nervously of seeing me look bored among my friends and told a story about a time she wished she'd been saved. All the while, she clutched her phone in her right hand. Even when she used sharp or elaborate gestures to aid her speech, it waved along.

Last night

Last night your hands were in my hair. I don't know where the rest of you was, or the rest of me. But my head was in your hands, my hair around your wrists, your knuckles pressing into my scalp, the pads of your little fingers leading the way.

MOURNING HEART

It's four in the morning and I'm reading about defibrillators. "Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias." She's downstairs with her phone off—been asleep for hours, I'm sure. A break from the glowing screen to the admirable consistency of her flawed handwriting in a Valentine card on my nightstand calms me.

Now I'm reading about circadian rhythms. "A circadian rhythm is a roughly 24 hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings." Before I even wake up, she'll have ridden to work, showered, readied herself, smiling with the anticipation of helping the world move forward a bit.

I search "siw," expecting pictures of Self-Inflicted Wounds.  It surprises me to see the abbreviation now stands for Strong Independent Woman, so I search "mixing diphenhydramine alcohol."

Vertigo

I want to forget and forgive at the same time, like wanting amnesia and nostalgia all at once.

GUTTERBOUND

Bowling ball by the side of the street. Whose patterned green fluorescence is gutterbound tonight?

Shit or piss

The government has decreed that no person may shit or piss outside of the toilets they are yet to build, so the people sit, squatting, by the roadside, to be picked up or struck down, waiting for relief.

FEBRUARY MOON

for Stephanie

Wind rushes in a vortex around the courtyard outside your bedroom. Needles cling to their boughs as air currents make their turns and rattle the rickety windows of the old apartment building. And there you are, in bed, limbs wrapped in currents of warm blankets and a stuffed dog, the room silvered with the chill of the bright February moon; your face in the state of still that sleep brings.

Strange delights

The moon is hanging low in the sky like a warm, heavy ball of dough tonight. Last week I laughed at a song because it flirted with me. It's been 25 years, and I have only now thought to ask whether you like to dance.

SNOW DAYS

Snow acts as a damper for sounds, but it makes footsteps crunchier. How much shit is hiding in the frozen pack? How many sounds were trapped there?