down in me

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.

No one steals a glance. I don’t.

Spend the day in that woolen haze, where time passes us by, as it forever has; our awareness wading through this thickly muddled murk. Our vanity, idle fancies that fancy themselves.

Woolgathering, comatose, serene, in waiting. Surrounded by tall grass. Feigning alertness while waving away the smoke. Worlds away, flickering the stars, bouncing in the clouds or hovering somewhere just below the leafy canopy. Anywhere but here. Anywhere above. Anywhere beyond. Anywhere away.

Survey my fanciful dreamscape and pluck an idea from within the folds. Cold hands, finger probes; shapely shapes. Misshapen. Everything exits through the door opposite, makes a wrong move and never stops for direction.

That clean and simple touch.

Where are we going? Which way are we headed? Feet shuffles that mirror each other. We reach out to hold before we scurry away to pretend we’re deaf. We couldn’t hear. That sound? It wasn’t us. No. It definitely wasn’t us. It couldn’t have been us, no. We were out at the time. Away.

Home to hug the radiator, all alone where no one can see. Mired in melancholy for those unexplained absences. Many, varied, self-imposed. Your existence breaks my concentration so I think you’d better go. I’m back to the field, then. To gather more wool for my vaporous collection.

Off to hire a convertible again? Your search for the sun amuses me. You know your sensitive skin is unaccustomed to the burn. Why aren’t you satisfied in your own place, your native homeland with your birth mother who tended to you with utmost care?

The city cries out for you today and all you can do is wave her a half-hearted goodbye. You make me sick with your holiday dreams ephemeral and unsubstantial.

Your fair weather lust has taken hold again. We cannot cater to your fanciful desires. We simply can’t keep pace with your tiresome demands. I prefer it here a million, million, a million times over. In the cold, the grey and damp. I prefer the rotten stench of alcoholism, truth and overuse. So go. Go and see what you might find in the clear blue sky. I know everything truly necessary is right below this heavy cloud, tangled in the sour sweet pollution of this mouldy air.

Go. Go then. We won’t wait up but we’ll still be here. We’ll still be right here when you decide you want back in to the fold. Façades may change but our innards remain their broken same. We may fix the broken door eventually, I should think.

Absent-minded, I watch you take off, day after day. My ears full to bursting with the rumble of your roar. The ground grumbling beneath my vibration. Lifting your nose towards the clouds, your glistening wide body glides effortlessly off the strip. Overwhelmed with the need to crawl inside you and feel you hoisting me away, disappearing me into the distance. Is there a flight to nowhere? A place where no one greets you when you land? A new time zone in which to find solace? My bags are packed yet my seat belt remains unfastened. I won’t be going anywhere for now. If only because I can’t stand the scrutinising eyes of your supposed protectors.

I slowly open my eyes again. This near impossible task will be my biggest achievement for the day. But you’re not there to mouth your approval. I head out without breakfast, as usual. No one giggles a command of protein to start the day proper.

Right turn on the wrong street and from the opposite side. Who will set me back on course? Not you. Your sense of direction is slightly off these days. I slip and trip at that uneven spot again. You know the one. The one you’re not there to warn me against, to dust me off from.

Gadgets remain eerily quiet through the day. No tender secret messages or quick breathy calls. No hurry to return home only to be greeted by a silent, wistful cat. Who will chastise me for not looking after the mundane chores and everything beneath me? Another takeout you’ll never again force feed me with fumbling chopsticks.

And in the dreaded night, between fitful spurts of sleep falling, I find no stinging palm to strike my flesh and remind me that I am not purely made of written words. That despite my best efforts to mutilate, I continue to own a body that can still be felt. That my gaping holes can still be glutted to the brim. That I’m not alone in the cold sweat of thought. That I can still touch the beauty in this mortal moment.

Trivialities, all told. In truth, I don’t much care. And you’re not around to insist that I do.