Inking The World

You’re sitting cross-legged in an auditorium folding chair, bolted to the floor. When you get up, approximately seventeen minutes after this snapshot of vulnerability, they will return to their universal uniformity, stiffly upright. But now, currently, this very second, red-faced boys, overheated but happy, share breathing space with a hodgepodge of girls. Some wear jeans, some skirts, some dresses, smooth-skinned girls, rough-skinned girls, no makeup or running makeup or miraculously intact makeup. They slouch, lounge, spread out as much as they can on the eighteen-inch-wide chairs with affixed armrests. Their backpacks and purses are littered around them, holding multitudes of words, some of which have just or will be shared. There’s a list of generic names on a whiteboard, which serves as the back wall of the stage.

But you are not looking at that, are you? No. You’re looking at something, no, someone, else. Who, incidentally, if you were in a bad tween sitcom, would be lit with golden light as the camera panned up and down her body, lingering on smooth calves, thighs, midriff, chest (tween sitcoms usually show a remarkably built bust, though the actors are usually no more than sixteen), and finally they will show her carefully made-up face. 

Or maybe not, if only because something’s getting lost in the computation of the thing. She’s got untamable frizzy hair, falling around her face in kinks and abstract curls and a few tangles. They are spots she must have missed with the comb. Her posture’s not the best, as she stands with her mouth almost obscenely close to the small microphone, one elbow propped on the wood of the podium and head cocked to the side. No one’s told her the proper way of public speaking, explained to her that you should stand straight and don’t shift from side to side. But that doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t dispute, lessen, or cancel out the fact that your arms feel heavy and strangely electric around the shoulders. How the foot hanging in the air is tapping erratically along with the moody rhythm of her voice. The way that you can hear your heart in your ears, and it doesn’t go with the cadence of her fiction. You see the beauty in her canines, sharper than the norm, in her hair and eyes and clean, covered skin, and in the sharpness of her words, the rebellion, the tongue-in-cheek tone she always speaks in.

The director of this whole operation looked uncomfortable with her very existence, as he has done since the first day that all of these people and you and her were pushed together in this high-ceilinged, horrible-acoustics room. Each person was supposed to tell their name and their state, since you were all a melting pot of different statehoods, cultures, dress styles. A great many spoke their homage to North Carolina, where this gathering takes place every day. A few say that they’re from overseas, the Honduras, one from England. The rest scattered across America’s cities. But you still don’t know where she’s from, do you, because on the very first day she stood up and grinned saucily before stating her origin as Hell.

What she’s reading now isn’t too edgy in terms of content, though, which should serve as a relief to the director of the place, whose name rhymes with Bitch, though he’s not one. It’s about her organs twining up, how they can rebel against her, how she believes you can commit suicide without even knowing it, and you think that both she and her words are unfairly and unearthly and unconventionally beautiful. You wish you could tell her this. But you do not think you could find the words for it.

And so you’re watching her, watching her in her amusing t-shirt and good jeans, her small breasts propped in front of her against the podium because she’s too short to truly reign over it. Or maybe these podiums are just oversized. And you’re thinking that she’s gorgeous, and that you’ve never really met anyone like her, and you recall the conversations you’ve had one by one and it hurts a little.

No one else knows. Your friends are around you, along with the girl you fake-married for fun in a feminist-angled writing class, who texts you I love yous that of course don’t mean anything. She really does like girls, tells you about her ex-girlfriends even as you tell her about yours, but you don’t think you and her would really work out.

You don’t think you and this beautiful girl onstage would work out either, but it does not stop you from thinking about it, doing the inescapable human thing where you imagine yourself with someone for the rest of your life, even if you have only known them for a few minutes. It is unbearably human-like, and of course it hurts because a lot of human-like things do. The dull pain doesn’t stop you from thinking about her lavender jeans and her popular-band phone background and her good-movie shirts, blue tee with a rainbow-shitting Pop-Tart cat residing diagonally to her shoulder, and the one skirt she brought with her, a good pencil skirt that fits her curves and thighs.

She’s tiny, sort of. And yet bigger than everyone here, bigger than you, with the power of her words and the way she speaks and the way she tosses her head back when she laughs. And you think that there’s a lot of people who would do well to watch this girl, finishing her reading now (clap, remember, it’s the least you can do to pretend you’re not head over heels for her), taking a ridiculous, flippant curtsy and dismounting the stage with a bounce in her step and a flip-flop momentarily separating from her foot before she recovers it.

You’re scratching at your unshaven face and it’s itching, it hasn’t stopped since you watched the last bit of dirt fall and be smoothed over, the painful reminder that there was nothing more you could have done.

You can’t resist picking up the trash bag at your feet, opening it up in front of this dumpster that smells like moldy hot dog buns and unidentifiable slime. You can’t resist staring down at this motley collection for the very last time.

There’s the violin, oh, the violin that you remember buying for her on her fourth Christmas; she’d shown interest in playing it and she was already proficient at the piano. You did not quite know what to do with a little girl so interested in music so very early but you tried your best to do all you could. Your girlfriend who you broke up with two days after the funeral had advised you to sell it, sell that little violin, but you couldn’t do that. Tried to post the internet ad and then just couldn’t do it.

So you laid it in this trash bag, right at the top, this half-full trash bag. Papers litter the bottom; her sheet music. A mix of piano and violin, able to be told apart only because of the number of clefs on the page. All dumped unceremoniously to be dumped in a Dumpster, driven and dumped in a dump and God, there’s nothing you can do about it but look down at a child’s simplified version of a Mozart sonata and choke a little on your own bile.

There’s her duvet and sheet set, both pink and flowered, furled and curled and crumpled up, cushioning the cardboard boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch that she’d gotten too sick to eat eventually, so they’d sat in the pantry for two months, never opened, but never moved. It might have been silly, but before you tossed them in this bag you brushed the dust off of them with a dishtowel and made sure they looked like you had just picked them up from the Aldi’s down the road that sometimes the two of you would walk to. Before all of it. Before alone.

the clock of life; the pig of death the reason, the tart, the endorsements never made

the earth standing still a dire strait that shakes the soup these ardors of our lovers of the party the trembling champagne in the hand of a girl the nuances of travel anew

divide the port of boys’ chants…

NSFW under the cut. 

You’re walking down a deserted, pumpkin-orange-streetlamp lit street when you meet an angel.

You’re twenty-one and you’ve had two beers and you are bored, and she claims the last flashing months of appearing nineteen when you talk to her, really talk to her, because you’re twenty-one and bored and her wings are askew and she’s really very pretty in the dimly twining light around the both of you.

Her voice is high and light, effervescent in the way you and your friends used to pretend when you were imitating obnoxious girls in your high school class. But there’s something mystical about hers, something in the tone that enchants you instead of makes you think she’s a ditzy blonde, though she is in fact blonde. Her hair tumbles in flaxen, abstract waves and kinks around thin shoulders. It could use a brushing, but you can tell it was beautiful once. She smiles at you sweetly as you please, though the image is made somewhat more disturbing by the dirt on her thin, knobby knees and the wings on her back, the elastic kind that go over your shoulder, falling to the side. She tells you she’s an angel with a slight giggle you don’t know what do to with in your mind, and you ask her if she has a place to stay for the night. Not because you’re turned on by her (though if you really admit to yourself, you are), but because there’s something in her eye that looks hopeless, like the end of something.

You’re walking down a deserted, pumpkin-orange-streetlamp lit street when you meet an angel.

You’re twenty-one and you’ve had two beers and you are bored, and she claims the last flashing months of appearing nineteen when you talk to her, really talk to her, because you’re twenty-one and bored and her wings are askew and she’s really very pretty in the dimly twining light around the both of you.

Her voice is high and light, effervescent in the way you and your friends used to pretend when you were imitating obnoxious girls in your high school class. But there’s something mystical about hers, something in the tone that enchants you instead of makes you think she’s a ditzy blonde, though she is in fact blonde. Her hair tumbles in flaxen, abstract waves and kinks around thin shoulders. It could use a brushing, but you can tell it was beautiful once. She smiles at you sweetly as you please, though the image is made somewhat more disturbing by the dirt on her thin, knobby knees and the wings on her back, the elastic kind that go over your shoulder, falling to the side. She tells you she’s an angel with a slight giggle you don’t know what do to with in your mind, and you ask her if she has a place to stay for the night. Not because you’re turned on by her (though if you really admit to yourself, you are), but because there’s something in her eye that looks hopeless, like the end of something.

She hesitates answering by saying simply “oh” and then “wow,” and then she takes your hand in hers, like a little girl might hold on to a mother. “I don’t think I do,” she says, and feeling that this is the strangest night of your life, you lead her cautiously to your apartment.

When you key open the door and usher her in, she looks around almost warily, like she doesn’t know what to do with an actual place with four walls and a ceiling.

You tell her she can use the shower to clean up a bit, since she looks like she could use a hot shower and a little bit of food. It’s past two in the morning at this point and you don’t really even remember why you thought it was a good idea to be out this late, but now you’re tired and hurting a little and you’re listening to the sounds of her running the water in the bathroom, and when you walk by the door on the way to take out your contacts for the night and put on your glasses, you can hear her humming a half-familiar tune, dipping into singing every few notes. Her voice isn’t fantastic, but it’s not bad like yours either.

she sat on an old piano and looked at an old violin and waited for something old to eclipse the newness of the pain seeping between her ribs.

she sat on an old piano and pictured him there; twirling a horse-hair bow between deft fingers meant for caressing and stroking out melodies of unearthly beauty.

she sat on an old piano and wished for the accordion she’d seen at a yard sale when she was six said “daddy, I want it” but a man with wrinkles had already carried it away.

she sat on an old piano and the appassionato gave way to queer silence the melodies in her head ceasing as she watched the drop of a tear fill itself out on the ebony surface.

she sat on an old piano and craned her neck towards the windows in an effort to see the first hints of stars breaking through the too-bright fabric of day and covering her with their easy darkness.

she sat on an old piano and thought that one day she would die and it struck a wrong chord plucked at her ventricles and she wondered when that day would be.

she sat on an old piano and tried not to think at all because when she remembered him laughing it was a knife flung across the room put in the freezer first to hurt all the more.

there’s dew on the grass already though it’s not really morning yet and you’re looking at a bead of moisture and thinking about death.

and she’s beside you with her arm around your shoulders but it’s not comforting, it’s not sweet, it’s sour and you wish the milk would just go bad already so you can break up without feeling guilty.

then you think you’re waiting for something in the petulant silence between you but then you realize you never really waited for anything at all.

She’s kissing me on the cheek, twice, and I think I can’t quite breathe.

She’s just come back from France, enamored with the culture and steeped in buttery foods she’s not used to, so I know that it’s nothing romantic, but my mind hasn’t made that differentiation yet and so I’m still reeling. She’s shorter than I am, much shorter; I’ve shot up to five seven in the last year and she’s barely crossed the threshold from four feet to five, so she’s got to stand on her extreme tiptoes to even reach my jaw, her hands on my shoulders for a better balance and her eyes on mine until she darts first to the left, and then to the right, her lips pressing against the lower portion of my cheek, and I swear I can feel it burn.

I can see her, because though I blink in surprise, I can glimpse her slightly acne-scarred skin, a flash here, a flash there, and her long hair that shines in the light from outside the translucent windows her family has in the door-panes. I can watch the lines of light travel, as if in stop motion, from the crown of her head to a few inches down, from the left to the right as she moves from one cheek to the other. It’s the click of her heels on the floor (she wears them to feel taller, even in the house), the swish of her hair around her shoulders and back, the gentle slide of her too-long jeans across the floor and then she’s kissing me, cheek to cheek, blush spot to blush spot.

She smells good; I won’t know what perfume she uses until we’re upstairs in her room, abusing big corporations, writing poetry about each other, and partaking eagerly of the chocolates she’s brought back from gay Paris. I’ll see the bottle on the nightstand, but I don’t know this yet, and so I merely allow myself to be arrested, breathing in ever so slightly to smell it. It’s one of the scents that fits, one that doesn’t try too hard, one of flowers and tea and gently cooking rice, all mingled together with the dish detergent I know she uses because I saw the garishly orange bottle in the laundry room the last time I was here.

There’s a scientific phenomenon of the mouth; when you’re close to eating something, when you’re drawing a piece of food up to your lips, saliva productions go haywire in participation. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but that’s what’s happening now, when she’s so close, my mouth dry and damp at the same time, my mint toothpaste coating my tongue as it seeps from between my teeth. I brushed my teeth the minute before I got in the car to come here. Just in case.

And I can feel her against me; she’s built well, with curves, and as she presses herself to me ever so slightly as she leans up I can almost identify the shape of her body against mine, almost see how we would fit. Her lips are soft on my cheek, slightly sticky because she’s already dug into the chocolates, and her hands on my shoulders are firm, careful.