Une Plume Luminante

I mumble poetry half-dimmed, half-dumb.

Words slip, spilled, sink, and fill the paper; inky,

They are absorbed — though broken, false, undone.

I rush to catch — and fail. Few faceless verses

Lay scattered over tables, mixed with blood.

Why blood, if they are lamblike, ewish, harmless

Scratchy attempts that make a wordy glut?

…I cross a line — words I invented trottle,

To keep the rhythm steady, forward rush,

Helpless, absurd, like flies in a corked bottle:

They will exist forever being such, —

Sewn from ardent or apathetic others,

Rest-craving moths unwinged on a dark cill,

Blots that’d prefer to be unwritten, scratches

A miss of a beat; a kiss, —

Warmth, absence of which you’ll miss, —

A sense of a smile you’ll guess, —

A moth, who has found its light, —

Both socks put on out-inside, —

Each time I want to have a chat with 10 yo Tom Riddle, I remember I can’t adopt him or do anything about who he turned into. He was who he was. He didn’t even exist. When I was 11-12 I thought he’d understand me and we’d be a perfect friendship match. Not because he was cute, but because he was smart up to look hostile and nobody liked him. I have no sense of self-preservation. I like the smart. I’d make him laugh. As a kid, I was dreaming of waking up at his orphanage and “showing them”. Not a thing Bella Lestrange would do, is it?

Not in a way.

I mean. Who cares they don’t exist, if they are people who you know better than you know yourself.

Should ask Lupin out for a coffee tomorrow. I think he’ll be up for it and bring a snack, and we’ll go for a walk and sit on a bench together and everything will be so easy and fun at once, I will be swinging my legs and then — the sunset — and I will —

Ah yes, he doesn’t exist either, you’re saying.

Wait, no, the heck! I am a 16-year-old and… Well, I am a MAN. I smoke — together with two of my best friends, we drink Jack on sleepovers and we gossip. Yeah, we do. A lot. That’s for sure. There are so many things to discuss, from our teachers’ clothes and looks to the last thing that…

Excuse me! I wanted to talk to you exactly. How is it going, reading my thoughts? How about choosing a myself that you prefer to spare me some minutes of struggle? Or, just invent me yourself. I might be a rough sketch because you won’t need it for long anyways. Am I serious, old, young, girl, man, ghost, alien, wolf, bird? Am I friendly? Probably you have decided that I’m not. Well, you may want to rethink this one. I’d like you to.

On the third thought, I’ve got a better idea (I won’t survive having a big potatoish nose, if you invent one for me). Let’s just leave ashore all these useless characteristics that are normally invented, beautified or blackened. We don’t take ourselves into our journey, let’s put them — us — as is — on the white sand. They will be happy to have some rest, — they do need it sometimes. Alright, just carefully step from that you of yours away and look around. Here’s our boat and a couple of paddles. My job is leading the way, and yours’s looking around, so you take both paddles and work with the force of your imagination. Let me show you: when I say there’s a boat, you imagine one as if it was right before you, right here, — on the waves licking the sand under our feet like lazily drinking tigers — tigers, who are either desperate or of water themselves, — the shape, size, material, texture, even the smell. Is it large or small? Wooden? Plastic? Rusty blue metal? Smells of a hunter’s dog or of drunken men that slept in it before we fought violently for it? — Hope you didn’t shoot the one with a wooden leg, he seemed to be a pure soul. By the way, where did you get that pistol from? — That’s how you make these paddles move. You don’t just think «okay, a boat». There’s no use in such reading. In case you need some assistance, I am going to take over, but then it might mean loosing our direction for some time, as when I’m sitting and helping you out, I don’t see well forward.

______

to be continued

sorry, I thought I’d have it finished by now

Although when you are “perfectly anonymous” (*search engine smirking face img*) nobody knows who did what. I mean, what you’ve done is like a piece of puzzle you just throw somewhere in a land where nobody knows what picture it is from, and it just kinda stays there. Idk if it’s beautiful, but I have some places with different parts of me.

Like, how about myself? Where I am, if I am scattered around?

A bridge over some small tunnel exploded because a truck with petrol moving to a gas station nearby got detonated by some kamikaze motorcyclist. Nobody died except for the truck driver and the motorcyclist. A kind of news you’d normally skip with a small sigh, thinking of your own safe car in the parking lot with a sort of stingy but pleasant feeling. That’s not what he did. He — I mean, my friend Misha. He decided to go there and check how the bridge looked.

There’s no way we were playing freaking detectives. We’re just absurd folks who like doing some stupid stuff together. Like, you know, why not checking out a disrupted bridge in some God-forsaken village? In case you lack ideas on how to spend your holiday, just look into your local police blotter next time and pick a place!

We arrived there in the middle of the day. He threw an empty packet of juice onto the backseat of his 94’s pigeon blue forerunner, locked the car and we started walking slowly through a landscape with messy, dusty bushes making everything look uneven and preventing us from seeing wide and clear in the distance. You could tell the sun was trying to boil your blood… I mean, the weather was just wonderful.

And then he saw them — three shiny boxy-looking black cars moving towards the bridge couple hundred yards away. We stopped abruptly, watching. They zoomed closer and then pulled up, people in military clothes rushed out, almost unnoticeable, if not for black helmets. They were doing something, probably with a long rope. Softly, Misha put his arm on my back and pushed me down to the land; we started crawling back, as quickly as possible.

…I drag myself into the car, hands wet. A distant roaring — of a motorcycle — becomes not so distant every nanosecond. Misha drops the keys, clenching his jaws grabs them back and finally starts the vehicle. He presses the gas pedal; all of a sudden, there’s a motorcycle, going into our way, and then some others in the distance. That’s when I say it:

— If you die, I’ll die.

It’s quite obvious indeed. Why would they not kill me if they kill him, I mean. Probably stupid, yeah. But… I just felt like saying this. Just to make sure he knows that I have no interest in being here without him. Just so he knows. In case we can’t preserve our memories when we go wherever we go when we die.

It’s not like we’re anything more than friends, by the way.

Well. I do not know particularly what it means to be “more than friends”. I had some men-friends in the past and I had boyfriends, I had all sorts of friends-not-friends relationships, but this one is just an alien case. If such a thing as “more than friends” exists, then, well…

It’s “best friends”. It feels like being a gigantic whole when we meet up for a chat, like finding an orbit. A crossing orbit.

A Platonic orbit. Capital “p”.

Very, very far in the spheres.

…Although it’s not like you can’t have kids being friends like this, given that you’re already a whole, I mean…

…It feels like being “just ourselves” when we part. Nothing wrong: both free and happy, doing our jobs, being perfectly independent. Just knowing there’s going to be another meet-up sooner or later is quite enough. The sooner the better though. For us. Both.

…Whatever.

A military clothed guy with a machine gun crosses our way. The windscreen explodes. Everything goes black.

I wake up.

Who’s Misha?

Moi, je parlais très bien français avant l’examen final de Baccalauréat (Faculté de lettres romaines; une expérience de qualité vraiment exceptionnelle) et j’étais complimentée tout le temps par les profs; quand je suis arrivée pour l’examen, j’avais rhume, j’étais épuisée par l’absence de compréhension mutuelle avec mon prof superviseur et par la nécessité de travail sans aide de sa part sur un sujet très compliqué (l’ancien français, les trouvères, tout ça), je n’ai pas dormi. Je savais que tout le monde dans ma groupe a trouvé les clefs pour la partie de compréhension orale, et moi, je n’avais pas d’énergie même pour ouvrir le document tout préparé par eux. Alors, j’ai bien entendu fait toutes les erreurs que je pouvais dans la partie compréhension orale, tout le jury était choqué par mon papier, normalement impeccable ou presque ça, et leur visages le montraient trop clairement — pendant que je devais accomplir ma réussite par une petite récitation d’un texte au hasard. Je ne pouvais pas comprendre à quoi ça s’adressait, leur façon de me regarder — comme une sorte de bête exotique — et chaque mot que je prononçais se tournait envers moi, comme une petite lance de Grand Doute. Je me suis un peu perdue dans mon texte sur un sujet sociologique stupide. Après avoir fini, ne pouvais pas élever mes yeux, tant je sentais humiliée par leur regards et leur questions qui ne pouvaient pas être plus simples; puis, j’étais trop fatiguée; j’ai essayé finalement de rencontrer des yeux avec ma prof préférée, mais elle avait l’air absent, les yeux attachés fermement sur le papier devant elle, alors j’ai jeté un regard sur les autres profs dans le jury, qui ont eu l’air presque vexé — et quelque chose en moi s’est craquée.

…Mon amie qui faisait un protocole, elle m’a dit en secret que tout le monde était bouleversé par mes résultats de compréhension orale, et qu’on disait que la récitation était bien agréable, on m’a protégé chez mes profs et dit aux membres invités de jury que mes résultats étaient excellents toutes les années en tous les cours de français ou relatifs, et que cela était un cas exceptionnel etc…

On m’a attribué l’ « excellent ».