The New Pen

It began with fresh sheets.
The soft blue cotton smoothed over the shape of us. I had the windows open, and the breeze made the curtains roll like waves. Everything was so pefectly clichéd.

I turned the music up. The Drifters, Solomon Burke, Otis Redding. I couldn't bring myself to listen to anything else. I still can't.

You put the tea cups down on the windowsill and took my hands in yours. Twirling us into the afternoon glow.

Later, laughing, I fell into the closest chair and you handed me a pen. Blue ink, fine tip. Tiny birds scattered along the shaft. Completely tacky, incredibly lovely. I felt an itch to write with it.

To write something. Anything.

So I did.

Your simple gesture was like fixing the washer in the bathroom tap.

Suddenly there's water.

That's the luck of the draw.

We have always been a one-way street.

Red carpeted. Plush.
Just the way you wanted it.
Even so
You would hurl stones through your plate glass windows

leaving me to clean up the mess.
you blamed it on me anyway.

It's getting too hard to take you.
I don't really know how to stand anymore. Propped up against this wall. It's probably asbestos.

but then again, maybe it's you.

I'll bite my tongue. I'll bite my tongue and wait,


that's the luck of the draw right?

The True Lady Luck.

I bear no resemblance to sunrise or starlight,
nor could lamp luster hold to me a candle.
Lightning, lambent embers, a radiant match -
each blaze black unremarkably.

Nothing ever lit up as brightly as I.
You bring that out in me. The shine.
Two years ago, a word from you
lit the day like an oil-bathed wick.
It's a wonder night ever managed to fall.

Nothing has changed.

I ache...

to be able to write again.

I want to let the words spill from every conceivable place.
but they don't. They won't. I ache to know why.

I have to be the kettle today. I have no handle. On any of it.
_____

Dear Diary. Mood: Apathetic.

_____

I just recently read(for the second time) and watched (for the first time) Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.

It made me miss New York, and I've never even been there.
The book is fantastic. I think I could read it and read it and read it and never tire of it.
The movie- was good too. Michael Cera(!!!) and Kat Dennings were the perfect Nick & Norah, but I didn't like what the writers/producers/directors/whoevers did to the screen play.

If they had translated the book to the screen exactly- It would have been creamed-honey-fan-fucking-tastic.

Oh well.
---------
'I shouldn't want the song to end. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a sinle song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.'

--------

Well, that's all folks.
All I have to offer. A wishy-washy non-excuse and some kind of film/book review.


Better luck next time eh?

Shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

I ache for silence; for wet stockings, dripping hair and the joy of catching cold without interruption. I ache for the hungry stomach that goes unchallenged; for sunrise bedtimes that evade comment, and for tapered cigarette smoke out of my kitchen window.

Breeze-whipped ankles and bare feet on footpaths after dark strike me with longing. I ache for solitude; for pajamas rendered useless and for candlelit blackouts at 3am. I ache for the tin rooves that sizzled in summer; for mornings heralded by 100 watt windows that venetians merely decorated, and for concrete stairs that climbed high as my pulse.

I ache for warm evenings that fell like stars; for the plants that withered under my dutiful attention, and for the jubilance of hailing a cab at first light.

I ache for the weekends that passed without words; for unplugged phone lines and for doors locked against the world. I ache for a shower with the light turned off; for hardwood floors on sticky nights, and for eating straight from the pan.

I ache for lights left lit and dripping taps; for too-loud music and silence, silence, silence in spite of the noise.

Reality Bites.

Sometimes it's better not to ask. I laugh as I think it, but the sound is short-lived and hedged with bitterness. There's nothing funny about incapacitation.

Nervously, I slip a fingernail between my teeth. It's snack time for the panicked. I've been thinking. Plotting. Trying to find a way to have things work out for the best - best for me, of course. I know your mind far too well to expect success here. You think me erratic and baleful - too volatile for the pink-tinted world that you work tirelessly to manipulate. You are your own god, and yet you believe in nothing - not even yourself. Certainly not in me.

The thought of it - of escaping with you - nothing ever sustained anybody so completely. It is all that has been keeping me going. I dine nightly on my own misery, desperate to make it disappear - but it's bad for the system and always resurfaces in the morning.

Sometimes it's better not to know. I can almost hear your answer now. Only it wouldn't be an answer, really. It would be an amused sort of incredulity, sharp and silver, the final nail in my heavy, wooden sleeping bag. A perpetual resting place. I can picture you shaking your head, just as you did last time...the last idea. The need wasn't nearly so pronounced that time - the straight-faced no, a kick to the gut, it didn't hurt so much. Not as much as this would. Not nearly as much. I caught my breath that time.

No. Sometimes it's better to pretend. If I can keep myself selfishly believing that one day, things will be just as unbearable for you...if I can keep myself clinging to the thought of you, my freshly-painted life-saver, a bright patch bobbing merrily along the surface, maybe then I'll manage to keep myself together.

But the pieces are falling fast. I only have two hands, each as inept as the other at holding onto anything at all. I never could juggle. I have to get away before I drop everything...let go...

A bird in a cage, I can't stand being here. Upon reflection, it was stupid. Coming here, wanting this. I am my own special plague, hungry to conquer; incapable of leaving anything but destruction behind. Things are different with you.

You won't want to. I know it, and I know I'll hate you for it. And I couldn't bear to hate you. So I won't ask. Not yet. Maybe never.

We'll see.

Institutionalised.

Hand in hand. Eyes closed. It's what she wanted all along.

The others had laughed. They were the type for it. Or perhaps they weren't, and that was the problem. Either way, she saw them as straight-road people. The type of road you can see along for miles and miles and miles until the horizon cuts in; a purple faced hopeful who never did manage to print his name on the dance card.

She couldn't bear the thought of it. Of that type of life. Fuzzy, street-cam scenery set on a five year loop, only each time the film is worse...more difficult to decipher. Everybody looks older. In fact, everybody gets older. They have aspirations. Cook, clean, sit and die. It's just a piece of paper. Why complicate life with living?

She wanted it if only for the distraction. Death. A perpetual deadline. It would come for her eventually. Perhaps suddenly, with a bang and a clatter...perhaps not for a while - a sigh on the stalk, ready to volunteer itself as the last in a long, long line. She didn't know - couldn't know anything other than that there was no avoiding it. Experience wouldn't buy her immortality - not the valuable brand of it, anyway - but it would buy her satisfaction. Better yet, it put a few bends in the road; a left turn here and there, and she could duck out of grim sight, even if only for a moment or two.

Hand in hand. Eyes closed. It's what she wanted all along. It's just a piece of paper. She knows it - she barely glanced when they asked her to sign. But it wasn't the paper that mattered - not the paper, the dress...not even the ring.

It was the excitement. The difference. Time is cruel - a year, tedious. One must suffer through 365 days, most very similar to the one before, and so it goes and goes and goes until ring around the rosie, we all fall down. An engagement gave her something to differentiate from simply being. To look forward to.

Besides, it conjured a fantastic sensibility. The happiness was heroin to her - something to be abused until supply ran out, or else, until it damn near killed her. She was hooked - wired by the planning, by the panic. To imagine missing out on it! Gold coins slipping through invisible fingers that grabbed and missed angrily. Eyes closed to falling snow. The absurdity was nauseating!

And at the same time she was terrified. A steady lead-up of nervous flutter and pedantic organisation and it would be done with - over in a brilliant crescendo of white taffeta and violets. She would be back to where she started - searching for another distraction; a career; a baby - anything to magic her world of impermanency and farce into a more durable existence. To make it mean something. She frowned at the thought of it.

But as he smiled at her over the three-tiered cake, she was very suddenly at ease. No. The others, they were wrong. They, the have-alls, were content with being, because it jeopardised nothing. They valued monotony.

Right then, she didn't care that marriage was a cliche. She had gone tree-climbing in purple silk dresses, hooked rod in hand, and the hope in mind that perhaps, if only for a day, her world might spin in a different direction.

She would throw the wedding certificate out. It wasn't important.

Everything else had been.