down in me

I feel like I want to know something about you, to know what is about you, your limbs, but it’s really more subtle than that, this something. To know what it’s like you in me. Perhaps because you’re the first to show me some kindness, some kind of. And me, I am very compassionate. I see those things, behind your face, I talk and when I say things, I try to make them real things, and I don’t think about them too much, I spill them from my gut, lay them before you and think you’re smart enough to pick through.

I like it when to see you watching me, the things I do, the odd things and normal things, but in my way I do them and to know that you notice, you see that I see. But it’s so much more subtle than that, even all this description gives it more weight than usually it has. In truth, it’s not a spellbinding, or lightning or love, or a hundred other fifty carefully selected words. In truth, it’s nothing, less than nothing, a minute of someone’s forty-two minutes, a minutiae, a dead pet, a lost friend, a split-end, etc. Something everybody has, sort of knows, but doesn’t pay its due attention. Maybe love is just extended curiosity, desire just a question, a need to know. But what happens when the questions are answered is that the reason for divorce.

Hi,

I have been going through a thing. But my god I miss you. I think about everything we don’t share and I feel crazy happy. Or neutral. I am remiss. It is easy to back and forth all day with nothing to show for it at night. I wanted to tell you that True Blood made me homesick. I recall my hatred and it feels like love of a sort. Always was an escape artist.

I meant to do these things more: travel, write, write, travel, blow bubbles. I did the last one again yesterday (thank-you Jereme). I go through cycles where I forget to play, to be a kid, to masturbate with a strange hand; skip to my own lou. I don’t know what a lou is, but I think I need one. A man sat to my right and sang a song. I loved him more in fifteen seconds than I’ve loved myself in twenty-nine years. I’m thirty-one.

Thing is, I don’t remember which arc of the circle I’m on, I just continue, round and round. I fear the judgement often gets to me and gets me to stop what I want. Even where I felt most free. I now feel like wasting time, like losing fights, but not hopeless. After all that looking over my shoulder and freaking out I’m just calm or numb, something uninspiring. Like the quiet after a hurricane: fresh and battered. Ramshackle torn. Salty. Immobile. This isn’t justification, though. Just a thing to go through. Like everything.

I must wrap up for now. I must tend to more mundanity.

Love,
 Ani

Lights are off save screen glow and the room is five below optimum. There’s a baggie of musty moist greenery on the coffee table like richly soiled fresh-cut clove grass times 50 billion. It makes my tongue curl and water. Also water bottles, fresh and cool and a bowl of rock candy on fancy sticks of bamboo and the most comfortable chair ever. The most comfortable chair ever facing an old Nintendo game system, the chair’s arms snaking controls round mine to show me button combos and pistol aim to pixelate our eyes. Well, my eyes because you’re a comfortable chair and chairs have no eyes. Comfortable chair, fetch me my bobby socks and pull them over my cold toes, you rock. You make whirlpool feelings good in my belly and ears. You make glow in the dark trails appear to follow everything.

I put the dinars in your mouth and we go off down the boardwalk.

How can we justify each other’s nightmares if we’re both too proud to throw them out to watch them flail in the open water. I put more pesos in your mouth. Third-world hungry currency for your world-weary country throat. You never did like to travel but you sure went far. We exchanged time and excuses and a little side of care, but not too much.

My meter’s very regular unlike my period, but I’m not supposed to talk about that either.

My voice inside my head it sounds like an old hep cat, it sounds male, weathered and torn, a crappy photocopy, like a long ago tree rustle; sounds like a man reading out loud from a hidden book. It sounds like anything but.

I’m out of cash.

Do you think this American time telling machine accepts universal rebel currency?

I think I’m going to need a calling card.

The pitch. You know, the pitch. The pitch for the book man, the pitch the PITCH.

Fuck.

What are you doing? I don’t know. Exchanging a momentary thrill for a lifetime of office christmas parties and crackers. Not sleeping. Eating poorly. Drinking in moderation. Where are you going with all of this, you had it in your mind, had it so crystal there once. Everything you would say, how you would say it and when and with what emphasis on which word - and the right words. My god the right words. Words clean and true and unmistakably genuine. Felt. Understandable. But also open to positive interpretations and with rooms for discussion in houses of concern.

The fucking pitch, man. You can’t talk.

Okay, listen. I’m just a girl so I don’t know much about these things, right. But it seems to me - because I have been doing some thinking - I know crazy, right? - funny fuck - it just seems to me that the way we are going about this is all wrong.

You can talk, all right? You can talk now. Toucan sam, three bottles of aspirin, that bicycle you let them run into the lake, the video camera he took while you were out getting him breakfast with that video of you trying to show your friends how to be cool on acid. Your mother’s reprehensible face melting distorted. The time you threatened your stepfather with a glass bottle and how you would have killed him if he hadn’t backed the fuck up.

God, you would have killed.

For weeks, this idea in my head. Big strong guy, light features, white shirt; he leans over a girl, a brunette. Places a large hand on the crook of her neck and it nearly covers her shoulder to ear. Soft he pulls her to him, she willing. They kiss. Surprised and pleased by her ready compliance, his hand releases her mid-kiss and lingers there, in the air next to her ear. Like a magician, savouring a magic trick, an internal ta-da. This idea - this scene - in my head for weeks, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen, which movie, what video, whose website burrowed so deep. Twisting and turning I then remembered, oh, yes. The girl was me. And the kiss was that kiss. That same one. Revealing different facets of that same kiss, like a buzzard circling a brilliant cut diamond, turning it over and over in my mind.

Hi,

Thank you for writing me. Sometimes, when I’m reading your words, I press on my laptop screen to make the light ripple and pretend I can dive into the electric sea and reach you. I have to stay content with listening to our favourite bands and reading about your misadventures in the Pacific Northwest. I drink cocoa and smoke continental cigarettes. You know what problems I have with contentment.

I have been thinking a lot, you’ll be surprised to learn, and I think I have figured out why so many women of our generation are seemingly bisexual. It’s not sexual attraction, it’s jealousy that craves empowerment. I think this is true for a fair few and unfortunately, it means our dreams of an androgynous, open-sexed utopia will never be fulfilled thanks to our own nature. We’ll have to dream up alternate fantasies again one day soon.

I have also come to the conclusion that men would be better if they had snouts. Like bears. And maybe big paws, too, though I am not as sure about that as I am about the snouts. I have thought about snouts a lot and it makes very much sense to me. The word snout makes me think of Russian army generals in a sea of white snow with their mink fur hats. Add a snout and you’ll see what I mean. For some reason I imagine the snouts of bears are more beautiful, more pure and clean, than those of dogs, but you know how it feels when you’re lying on the floor and the dog sniffs your hair and neck and behind your ears?

I love you truly. Please don’t leave it so long before writing me again.

Yours,
 Ani

We navigate through the wild life in each other’s gardens, like a symphony that’s missing certain, essential instruments. We touch a wild flower here and dodge an ornery bee there, but we don’t get the aerial view, nor do we show it. Where once there was green grass, now sits a hardened slab of concrete, entrenched. Some nooks in the garden shine with glorious brightness, while others are drenched in shadow. In some well fertilised patches, all kinds of strange flora grow; others are barren or worse. But we won’t talk about those. Not now. Not yet.

Because you have, your own means, your own way, all your own. I don’t know you or I do to some extent or no extent, but I appreciate you, wholly and without reservation, for one reason or another or a combination thereof.

You are the most quite tender soft beauty girl alive! Well, the fifth most, anyway. I give you a dildo called Christian Bale and you tell me it’s a mathematical equation of fact.

I know, but like, who cares, right?

I’m glad the temporal association to this particular aural sensation is a downturn statement of superbly low intensity. What I mean is that it’s intensely low. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t mean that at all.

But their description of her shaped my idea of beauty; an idea that would endure in me for the next 30 years. They were fuckers, they were. But that’s another time, for another time, to be forgiven and relegated to the box of abstract ideas remembered fondly and vaguely forever.

I suspect I’m not seeing the right colours. There have been clues, but how to know for certain.

I was created solar, seafaring, sanguineous. Carved from embattled men, rallying cries and rape. The product of colonial tiles set in the sun baked bones of a well-structured terrace. My salty tears were used to water the crops, raise the tides of the dusty river and pound the white linens clean. My earthly nature robbed; the moist black earth ripped from my lush, fertile grip. I’m rainforest flights of red blue-green, large-beaked and feathered. I decorate decay with lashings of emeralds and gold.

On a breezy night, on the veranda of a cabin perched on the side of a mountain, I lounged on a multicoloured hammock while an olive boy kissed me. He pretended to be shy and pressed his lips to mine, gently concealing his eagerness. His baby skin chin, baby smell, babyish. My baby fat cheeks, pale-plump squashed against his lean face. I inhaled coffee grass, baby hair, muddy mountain goats and slept with my hand in his.

I tried to recreate my hammock lain dreams some time later. I lay like the dead, fingers tightly interlocked over my breathing corpse stomach. Turkey vultures circled crying overhead like horny men. Within minutes, an intrepid sparrow took a shit on the side of my face. I ran into the house hollering. They wanted my body, swinging warm in the colourful threads, flanked by pines and common garden snakes.The next day I took the hammock down forever and recoiled from a beetle on my way back inside. I’m western concrete, earth-devouring and misspent youth.

Once there was and once there was not, plenty of time in which to co-exist and extinguish the various flames while looking into eyes streaming with sincerity. Scattered showers cleansed the forests and motorcycles made love to popsicle sticks that glow. Droplets of sparkle-clean mountains made us laugh. Anguish and austerity, we barely glimpsed through glass globes.

I am blank ashes and soft, weathered focus and torrential outpours of sludge; ice in the furnaces of my history set alight through a blazing dim. And in the din of my fool-proof home, I want fairy lights for dinner. While in their soft calm, mechanical beasts swish glide down city streets. I take a crack at stabbing candor. I point and shoot, and miss them all running. I’m tattered pieces of cloud. You’re humid prayers for rain.

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.