notepad

Charles Bukowski

So as soon as I arrived to my new desperate city, I made a 3 euro purchase of one small candle and one blue mug of my own to stretch within this new shell.

I left that town swearing I owned it.

And then I looked up to the ceiling of the Roost (bar) and saw it for the first time, and even though below it was love and music and drink and what seemed like my life, the dream was still under a beamed ceiling. There was still a roof. Upon seeing it I was immediately pulled out of it and could not see the life within the same again.

I remember being on the beach that first summer after and hoping with everything that a seashell flung into the waves would throw that house away, too, would move me on. Shells have a way of washing back on shore.

Oh God, Maynooth, my exhale.

In the mornings, if the fog is especially heavy, I can smell the ocean. At night, the whole town smells like burning peat.

When I didn't fall so quickly asleep by counting "please's" instead of sheep. I can't tell if my day dreams allow some needed rest and thought, or if they simply sand at my external self until my exposed jaw bone may be seen, dreamily clenched in an immobile, dead smile.

That I didn't notice the tub draining until I was left naked, airing in an empty basin, knees shivering against my chest, as red burns continued to stripe across my cold-blooded skin.

Where I knew shadows so intimately, so privately, she dragged her heavy spotlight after her there, too. It was hard for someone like me to believe in her shadows when she spilt a neon spotlight above her head. The only shadows I could make out were those cast by herself, on her face.

The way she walks through this place to show all others that they are a bother here, she tells them with her pace that she is closer than they are to this campus, that she has earned an intimacy that they can never know, the knowing of a place by 4 am walks and wine tears and sobering letters and friendships that look like magnolias, watered under that tree there, and there, and under that tree, too, and all of them, and the glossy leaves themselves whisper old insights as the ground rises to her feet to confirm the truth of their private knowing. She never doubted yeast was alive.

they somehow manage to feed on.

When walking alone at night, I don't look at what I can see. I look into the shadows, the brush, the dark, darker, patches, vigil into what I can't see.

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

(Let me be your scent; I want you to smell like me.)