Down In Me

Why do you love me if I taste like wrought-iron bars through droplets of rain? My kiss of bronze cast in late morning sun shade coats your tongue in gold leaf. I’m woolly sheep hobbling along the fence, determined to get my fluffy white coat caught on the wire. I think about cotton, soft but slightly abrasive if you squash it too tightly and rub it back and forth across your spine.

I think of merging this paragraph with another cotton story (maybe you’ll see that one later) so I can make a longer, story, an über-story, a story with more endurance and determination than I could ever hope to wish for. But it doesn’t go together, I say, it doesn’t go. It doesn’t matter, I reply, it doesn’t really matter to anyone at all. But it does sort of matter, to me in an obsessive-compulsive kind of limit-enforcing sort of way. So instead I’m commenting on myself and the process in my head while I speak to Mr Notepad as I often do in my solitary cell. I realise this doesn’t go with that either, but I’m practicing, right now, just practicing feeling for my boundaries. Yes, they’re there and there and a bit over here, too. They spring back like foam from my fingertip. Everything’s okay, then, everyone’s accounted for, we can continue with the tale.

Why do you love me if I taste of your mother’s sour milk and your father’s sour sperm? My kiss of strawberry jam sticky lips turns mouldy on your chin. A mouldy goatee, I exclaim! A mould goatee. What about that, huh? This is curious and wonder-making and alarming in a grossly sweet way.

Why do you love me if I reek of cigarettes and sometime lush drug-addicted homeless prostitutes and carelessness and wine? Why do you kiss me with your pure child aching mouth of innocent lust for a salty glaze cupcake turned full-on stomachache treat? I will devour the melty gooey chocolate and smack my lips and lick my brown fingertips clean to the bone. My gruesome (yet adorable) table manners will make you wish you’d never asked me out to dinner.

In the end I’m almost overwhelmed with the need to remove the second paragraph so the first, third and fourth can stand united as one and free from bloated self-talk, as maybe they were meant to all along. No, no, I say, that’s just crazy talk, I say, mad loony googoofliploopy cuckoo clock stuff. I feel you’d expect that, you’d expect that from me because I’m neat, so neat and quiet. Who’s right? Me? Or me?

Dear Ex-Boyfriend,

I am writing to respectfully request that you refrain from forwarding junk email to me. I’m touched by your concern, but I assure you that I’m well-versed in the health benefits of water versus Coke. Frankly, this particular email has been making the rounds since 1997 and if you’re getting your health information from forwarded emails of this sort, well, it seems there’s something rather more fundamental amiss.

Also, would you please stop googling Ani+[insert questionable keyword here]? It’s starting to freak me out slightly.

Yours,

Your (digitally vigilant) Ex-Girlfriend

Dear Ex-Lover,

You may notice that I have begun referring to you with the term ‘ex-lover’. As I approach my thirtieth year, I feel this semantic change accurately reflects my season in life as a maturing young woman, as opposed to the scatterbrained Lolita you once knew and/or possibly deflowered. It is true that ’ex-husband’ would seem more appropriate with regards to length and scope, but let’s face it, not with regards to honour.

Acrimoniously yours,

Your Ex-Girlfriend (all growed up now)

Can I ever have one without the other? I want to feel one pure, untainted emotion at a time, instead of having one and looking forward to or dreading another. Why is everything partitioned in blocks of anticipation? Always looking towards, always waiting for. I’d rather just exist if it’s all the same.

I feel sorry for things, people, myself. I feel sorry that we cannot be better, be more. This in itself is a symptom of the condition described above, I think.

I want to smell your house instead of smelling my arm in desperate attempts to remember. Scent lingers, then fades. Everything fades with time, they say. I feel desolate and inconsolable. I refuse to listen to reason, bar the negative variety.

This throat lump, this quick-beating heart, these sweat-slick palms, they’re no good for me. These butterflies are the wrong shape, the wrong color. I swallow hard out of habit, but some things refuse to be repressed on occasion. The physical notes denote a muddled mental state at best. The body and the mind eat each other and wrestle each other and console each other and begin again.

I’m sorry I can’t write for you. I never could, I pretended. There’s too much going on up there, it clouds my view. And even if I could see beyond the mist, what’s to say I could report it accurately? I despair needfully and needlessly and play with words hopelessly to pass the time listlessly when there’s no time. And wait, keep waiting and waiting.

Large, masculine, virile, erect. His shadow cast over me, southeast to northwest. The illusion of musky protection which glides heavy on the wind to blow my hair in every direction. Safe with a stranger. Has it really gotten this bad? Have we really devolved this far we no longer need proof or even to settle for lies?

Stranger on a train, ten paces to the left and we become damsel in distress, tied to the tracks just up ahead. You’ll come to your untimely demise, testing things out the old-fashioned way. Scattered limbs, 100-mile an hour blood. Steaming remains of girls who suckled the lying breast.

The last minute long past, it’s time to board the train, lugging your own damn valise.

You are young
You see life in small segments
You feel there’s no other recourse for you
You birth me
Endanger me
We cuddle and kiss
We say goodnight

You believe there is justice
Justice above you
You believe in the immutable
Soon to be taught different
You birth me
Enslave me
Did I choose you?

I feel clean, sleepy and warm
Gurgly and fresh
Shy and abandoned
I call for you
Crumbly like toast
Soggy from milk
Mourning oranges and melons
For breakfast

In a rare moment of clarity and putting things mildly, I must confess to having spent the last three nights restless in fitful dreams, waking in starts before relaxing slightly to watch the light streaming in through the window and determine the time. Two, three, four, five a.m. I’m adept at this guessing game. Switch the mobile on to corroborate my story (yes, I sleep with the phone next to me on the bed or sometimes clutched in my sweating palm, what of it?) and it turns out my natural time-telling ability is surprisingly accurate. I detest clocks, but I always long for time, so I make excuses for telling it. Don’t ask after the days of the week or month, those artificial constructs, I can only measure time’s passing in bits by studying our daily revolutions.

So I return to that restless half-awake, half-dreaming state and the fanciful flights I’ve heard we all share: making war with the hairy monster of a thousand heads or running from the chimera in the slow-motion, thick honey air, always wearing that pair of cement-block shoes that’s so fashionable in dreams. Later (or earlier, one never knows) I’m communing with snakes and as they slither across my torso, herbivorous dinosaurs sniff my skin with idle curiosity. Clearly, I’m some twisted Snow White, loving all the mind’s creatures she attracts. And surrounded, always surrounded. Surrounded by everyone I’ve ever known or wanted to know or thought I knew or heard of long ago. I’m naked and must urinate desperately, but I’m trapped in this godforsaken primeval garden without proper plumbing (I guess there are still some limits to my love of nature). So it is, more or less, that I’ve spent the last three nights carousing through my own delightfully perverse (I haven’t told you everything) version of a Hieronymus I-can-spell-you-but-could-never-pronounce-you Bosch painting.

Now, normally I’d find all this nonsense of the mind most agreeable to pass the time, dwelling upon and analysing for hours, seeing as I (somewhat pretentiously… oh, alright, completely pretentiously) fancy myself some sort of uneducated surrealist. The thought that I’m meant to be resting, however - escaping for a few hours from the horrors that crowd my mind all the waking day - this thought hangs over the entire dreaming landscape dark-clouding it.

Finally, ten minutes before the alarm clock on my mobile signals the end of this designated ‘restful’ period, I freefall through darkness and wake at the point of impact. The irrevocable loss of these invaluable ten minutes sets me off worse than any alarm bell ever encountered and I rise in the foulest of moods; arguably the perfect way to begin any day. Cross me at that moment and a single sleepy half-look will send you six feet under quick, electrified and turned to dust.

Fortuitous, we find it then, that I don’t usually experience tempestuous nights in the company of others. Not this particular brand, anyway. I’m far too preoccupied with you - or more precisely - what you’ll think of me, to allow certain small aggravations to prevent our enjoyment. One day, when I soak my nightmares through your sheets and I bolt upright awake and spit and curse this wretched body and diseased mind, you might say you know me and together we can balk and sulk at this sudden realisation.

I am deathly ill from ingesting your self-referential masturbatory bullshit really if you’re going to write just fucking write and stop fucking moan worrying about whether and what they will think of you when they think of you if they think of you what they think of you when you think that only you have ever felt or known or worried or prayed or fucked or seen or acted or cried or screamed you’re delusional so stop come off your knees stop begging for forgiveness justification permission retribution validation for your writing and don’t fucking apologise for using the words whatever words however words whichever words whenever words you use when you feel like using them destroying them creating them fondling them mishandling them loving them grammatically disregarding them if they’re in your mind you thought of them gave birth to them puked them shit them expelled them exhaled them they came from somewhere but you thought of them they’re in you now and hopefully out of you soon because this this this most beautiful of fucking languages was made for you given you expressly to use to love understand to connect so fucking use it use the fuck out of it and stop worrying about who will get it and who won’t and stop worrying about who will call you names and who won’t and who thinks you’re full of shit and who sees your head up your own ass and who buys your work is art and who buys your work of art to plaster all over their bellies and who sells your ideas and who steals your ideas and who tickles your nose with their shit and who fondles your breasts with their word hands and who wants head and who wants head fuck and who wants you to stop just stop worrying about what it means to others just stop worrying stop worrying and write stop worrying and write. Stop worrying. And write.

What’s that smell? Your hands smell funny. I don’t like it. Don’t try to feed me my food. I can feed myself. Don’t touch my food! I’m not hungry anymore.

Will you carry me, please? You smell nice and you are soft. Your fingers smell like bubbles. I like to play with you and the bubbles. Can we play again? Please? I like when you look at me.

I don’t like that doll you gave me. You can have it back. It is ugly, like you. It smells like you. Take it. Neither of us like it. It’s not the one I saw on TV, the one I asked you for and you said you would bring me a lot of days ago.

Why can’t it be just me and you again? We like to sleep late, together, and drink orange juice in bed and watch cartoons. It’s better when we are alone. Let’s stay alone again, okay?

What? Why do we have to go out again? I don’t want to go. Why do I have to wear that dress? It itches! Oh, no, not the little bows in my hair again, please. I know you are making me pretty, but then we can’t play with the bubbles anymore. Well, okay, I guess. If you want to.

Ssshhh. Yes, I’ll be quiet and sit pretty, I promise. I won’t make anyone mad at us. I’ll be good. Just don’t leave me. I’ll keep my dress clean and make sure the little bows don’t come out of my hair. Just don’t leave me alone.

Following is the original, un-fucked with version of this: I wrote something for you but I broke it. I’m sorry. 

No childhood memories. I spent a few years systematically hacking away at what I thought were the bad memories, not realising - okay, not caring - that I was not only wiping the slate clean but wiping away any recall of said slate.

When I emerged from my self-imposed haze, few things were left. Those were kept alive through repetition and reinforcement. Pictures, oft-told stories. I let others choose my remembrance and bend it to their will, perhaps forge it in their own image. Did it really happen that way, I don’t know, but that is the way I recall the telling of it so that is the only possibility within my current reach.

I handpicked the finest recollections of early adolescence for myself, though. Years of raging angst pounded out in earnest on many a pretty face, pre-teen love affairs with nearly post-teen ex-convicts, brainless. Never a questioning glance at all those stumbling fumbles and foibles of a truly well-spent youth. And firsts: first drink, first smoke, first trip, first toke, first cut, first fuck (no not that one, the real one), first fall. Tiny merit badges of honour and courage and youth, for fuck’s sake, YOUTH! on my well-worn lapel. What? What’s wrong with that? Those who escape relatively unscathed tell the stories on which future memories are forged.

I’m afraid, though. I’m afraid that none of that matters and I’ve forgotten a detail of actual importance, something vital to my overall well-being, my survival. Because once I’d stopped purposefully hacking, the hacking didn’t stop. It took on a life of its own and now I can barely bring back what I said yesterday to take back. I’m great with trivialities. Phone numbers I’ve dialed twice, song lyrics I’ve read while singing along. Beyond that, memory is just a wasteland of unfulfilled longing.

Dear Ex-Boyfriend,

I’d like to gently suggest an addition to your no doubt numerous list of New Year’s resolutions: get over me. Only my ego truly appreciates the petting now. My body, along with the rest of me, has moved on to greener pastures, as it were, and following the smashing success of our New Year’s Eve celebrations, we are looking forward to a most fulfilling year.

Your Ex-Girlfriend (turning over a new leaf in ‘08)

The day it was supposed to snow but didn’t began much like any other day: shiver sleep walk, steamy shower, toothpaste gag, rush coat grab and run.

The day it was supposed to snow but didn’t, I peered out the window expecting the unexpected: gleaming white ground cover, like the day it was supposed to snow and did. But this day, the day it was supposed to snow but didn’t, there was only the usual ho-hum misty grey of always.

So the day it was supposed to snow but didn’t was much like any other day: hopeful anticipation turned bitter disappointment as quickly as the “snow flurry” she witnessed through the third-floor windows had melted by the time it reached me on the first.

The day it was supposed to snow but didn’t progressed like any other day, too: with very little progress and very many progressive but ultimately useless swishing thoughts. The day it was supposed to snow but didn’t was spent inside my head where it snows whenever I want like the day it was supposed to snow and did.

The day it was supposed to snow but didn’t ended much like any other day: with dreamy hopes and hopeful dreams that return time and again, regardless of the many times it’s supposed to snow but doesn’t.