French Kiss Café

Less blogging because less noticing and feeling. And fewer of other, offline things which also depend on said life processes. But today I listened to Soviet Kitsch, and in the final moments of Somedays, Regina ditches words and instead finishes the song on this perfect little lip trill. At this small move I suddenly found today's self noticing and feeling so sharply that it hurt. So playfully human, that gesture. An innovation, somehow. One of those moments when beauty hits like a truck through the eye of a needle. I hid my weird, involuntary face of anguish from my coworkers while secretly longing to exhibit it, though not to anybody present, really. More so to a past me who worried I'd be insensate and inexpressive forever. And to a few nameable people who reinforced that fear in me, as well as an attendant shame. Maybe to some new, hypothetical individual who could say, yes, that tiny detail makes me feel those huge things too, and let's share in it. And I knew how much words would fail me if I tried to describe the quality of the experience to this cold, blank Tumblr page. I wish I could stay in those moments of sudden aliveness a little longer before being swept up in the impulse to defiantly say to nobody, "look, I can feel; I can cry." A normal, secure haver of feelings wouldn't need to do all that, wouldn't need to bottle their tears just in case they never emote again. Or so I tell myself. Now I'm on the couch, getting sick.

Whenever I spend time with C, I really dread our parting in a way that I haven't felt since I was quite young. In each of our moments together the world so reliably feels sharp and playful. We sit by the reservoir, too close to the distortive lamplight, and we gawk at the correspondences between the lost-looking buildings and our own bent shadows, between time and a puddle and a boot one century ago, between three bickering raccoons and the Spanish melodrama that will leave me in tears on an evening to come. Our ease of attunement scares me, feels like a trick, like something that could prove false if I put my weight on it. So I anxiously shut my eyes and hold them closed as I speak, sacrificing my ability to monitor the quality of the space between us, to note how she is meeting or not meeting my attention. When I finally look again, she's covered in bug bites. "Maybe we should move away from the water," she says. "I was swatting away mosquitoes so they wouldn't disturb your thoughts."

I lost my voice due to various intrinsic and extrinsic stressors, which means I won't be able to talk today. What's funny is that I feel a lot like I did when I lost my phone a few weeks back. Which is to say: kind of relieved. : Kind of forced into a place I had secretly hoped to end up.

Maybe a time will come when I'll have somebody in my life who reminds me to celebrate Bloomsday...but until then I'll just piss away June 16, unawares. Ever it flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

It's funny for me that "visual snow" is the name of the symptom, because I most often become conscious of mine while looking at the sky. I wish those erratic little motes were actually falling from the clouds, rather than from my jumpy cortices.