an archive

and maybe i’m not living in the kind of world i always wanted. maybe more days are spent under the thick ocean of apathy than not, and maybe good days are rarer than i expected, but my god, when the plane dips and the fiery reflection of the sunrise paints the metal of the wing in a brilliant impressionist soup of blues and pinks and oranges, the ember sun a smear across the wavy lavender horizon, i can’t breathe from the beauty of it, fleeting but more real than any feeling i’ve had in years, and i think it might be worth being alive.

when you come to visit i will brew a cup of tea and we will talk of nothing until the sun goes down and i will be content with that.

i often feel as if i’m going through life as a scientist goes through a cleanroom, hidden away behind the condensate my own breath leaves on my visor, my actions made clumsy as my fingers pull at the thick gloves. the barrier between myself and reality is colored in impenetrable yellow light, beautiful only at the beginning, monotonous at the end. when i go home i am caught somewhere between guilt and relief; it is a forest of respite, of books and tchotchkes and safety. it is extradimensional, i think. i know when i wake up i will be bathed in that disgustingly beautiful light, my mind a traveler returning from vacation, desperately longing for the safety of another life. it is just outside of my reach, flickering at the edges of my vision.  i see the world as something dark, now. nothing exists without the tinge of pain, of suffering. even the supermarket seems filled with death. at the fishmonger’s counter i have a sudden, violent impulse to smash the lobster tank, to try and save even just one creature. i push my fingers against the glass. it does not crack. i am so sorry, i whisper. tears well in my eyes. i am so sorry.

it's a steep price to pay for a kiss

when i drive now i feel the impulse to destroy, to speed into the sun, to end my life in a blaze of speed and steel and gasoline, a perfect futurist fantasy.

I am so very afraid, so paradoxical. I crave my youth, fear the tarnish of age, recoil from the thought of my skin blooming with patina, of adding to my collection of scars. I am a bumbling child amidst a sea of children, I think, torn between extremes. The truth of the matter is this: I want perfection, want even the most rotten parts of me to be carved from marble.

I start to see the world through my camera lens, make it bright and exciting and new against the dull fog. Somewhere I am smiling in technicolor,  more than a shade against the shadows, and at night I dream of the forests, of disappearing into the greenery until it grows over me, swallows me whole, Daphne running from Apollo as he crashes through the delicate brush. Instead I stand too close to the bar at the train tracks, let the wind try to take me away as the train bullets past, rushrushrush, off to someplace else, unconcerned with the trouble that waits for me in the ivy by the retaining wall. If I fall by the wayside it will be a blessing and a curse, an unwanted reprieve.

To my once-friend, my deceived, admirer of my carefully-crafted facade: I do not want your thanks, darling. I do not want your too-thin limbs to stretch across my shoulders, a snake unhinging its jaw, swallowing me in a rare moment of genuine affection (it almost consumes me. It is a near thing). The vacancy in your eyes startles me as you try to tell me a story in as few words possible. Hemingway would be ashamed. I flash my palm across your face, the slap I desire that will never connect. There is no one to see it, and so I drift through the fog, leave the murky water that has settled on your tongue, and hover in my grandmother’s condominium. I nod to to her dementia, her hallucinations. They feel so similar, now.  I do not miss you, but I miss my blindness of you, my acceptance of the caricature-cloak you seemed to wear. I do not want to know you as the infant we found where your heart should have been, but the autopsy has been  concluded.

will cast a plague upon the unwanted, the guilty, those who ought to be daunted.

Think of it think of it like this, like Sun dogs and moonshine, like the sound of the word yes, harsh, soft, glistening on taste-buds; There it is, see? The warm chill of springtime gold against flannel backs, full of promise, of visions. I shiver in white, somewhere between little death and anticipation, trying to remember which side moves first. This is not a chess game. Plastic dances and plays a music-box tune; we set it aside for first communion and assign each other the role of God. This is all very far away from me, I think; I water the plants with champagne and they bloom into lilac and wisteria and lavender, flooding the floor. We swallow them up and sigh into the lukewarm wind with flower-kissed breath. We pray to each other this does not rot. Leave me be! I taste of salt and flesh and the tang of iron, I am not worthy yet. I have fractured my roots time and time again, said do not grow into the concrete, darlings, and snapped them up with gardening shears. Teach me to lay still in furrows and fields,  to stop running. Teach me to be worthy, yet.

The vision fades as soon as it’s begun, sometimes, and when it does I go to carry plates and salt and pepper and listen to you complain about that damn cat while the construction dragon that lives across the street bellows; I can feel something waiting for us, out there, just out of sight, colored like tangerines and blue jays and the cherry chapstick I use in place of lip gloss, and so I  press the bridge of my nose into your shoulder and hum, content.

Why didn’t you leave? There are women who’ve divorced their husbands for less.

and watch the low-light echo across your chest, reflecting over the things I swore. 

You bounce your knee up and down, stare out the window, and I tie our fingers together, dreaming of sweeping stairwells and marble columns, thick like trees, arching up into the ribs of some ancient beast, the only heart left in its body the synchronized beat of our own. You take a step further into the belly, stare out of the sockets where eyes would have been, once, and the drag of your step makes it sound like there is life again.  Wings thunder across the apse, arcing, a momentary trapeze, and you laugh at how the winter adds feathers to feathers. I feel the catacombs beneath our feet, feel the tunnels, the miles of marrow and bone, the  discarded entrails.  You rub your thumb over mine, press our heart lines together, and I knock my leg against yours, quiet, as the landscape shakes outside.

Some people have fathers, and some people have wicker men, have something that looks like a man, but is something different, something easily destroyed. Late at night, in the car, when traffic stretches on like a taut rubber band,  ready to snap, my mother tells me about how she’s convinced he’s going to leave her.  You’re the one that asked him to leave, I don’t say, and she tells me he’s sworn he won’t go looking for nooses in the crawlspace under the house.  She doesn’t believe him. The shell of his childhood is stripped bare, couches and crocheted blankets and thick, oily paintings removed from inside, pulled out like  intestines.  We find whisky bottles in the back of the cabinet, and  she cries even though they’re years and years old, covered in dust. We smash them in a trash can and throw the remains away like dirty water, pitch it into  the sea. She says she hates the taste of vermouth, and breaks the martini glasses on the counter. We are standing in a glass house, now, tiptoeing around the shards. I take apart kitschy knickknacks to pass the time, pull the screws out of their backs and straighten the pieces, rub my thumb over the patina and wonder what’s hidden underneath the wicker.

thank you kindly <3

other people might make better use of her eyes, at least, and we could not help but wonder if they would see the world as she had, as a problem she couldn’t fix, and if they’d try to swallow it, too.