The Last Weekend

I keep thinking about what else I can do.
I keep making lists and crossing off tasks
like that's the answer
like that will alleviate the anxious waiting

My futile need for control.

I keep thinking about her body
a skeleton with a skin draped over it
gravity at its worst
bloodless, bones in a genetic bag

Her face is my face.

I keep thinking about the incense
rising in slow motion
wafting over her casket
holding my mother's hand and laughing

Standing alone and crying.

I keep thinking about what it means to be free
What it means to be a woman
This life, a raw and empty plain
I am a lamb, prepared for sacrifice

He says, you're crazy, but I'm only trying to plan. So the sickness in my gut will go away, so the tightness in my chest will abate, so I can finally get some decent sleep around here! Normally, I would get away, sitting in a window of white light I'd let it cleanse me. But I want to be here, in the nitty grit of this life. There is no escape, for now, I am trapped in the bag of bones that holds my consciousness. But I won't be forever.
We're all thinking the same thing, and I'm wondering, what will mine be like?
This unfamiliar cultish ritual isn't quite the way I'd like to go into the ground.
She's smiling.
She's crying, a strange cough caught in her throat, a white, quivering hand covering her mouth. Can this be the end? She's thinking

My blood
The half of me
She loved and didn't always do it right
Are we
the sum of our life
or the way we died?

It's open, and then they close it. Speaking in soft voices and we're laughing, and I don't feel close to her at all. In fact I feel very far away and removed from this. A part of me wants to go home, and they other wants to stop time, walk in the stillness and touch the face that bore me into this world, feel her coldness and find some forgiveness in all of this...

Lover, you should have come over

He pouts. And shuffles around on my step. I don't want to go, he says. His cap is perched at an odd angle on top of his head, he's a walking ad for some beer company I've never heard of but I think he looks sad, and cute, and scruffy and handsome like he always has. But I tell him he looks homeless.
I let him hold the cat. It's interesting how we humans are so quick to say I love you to animals, but to other people, we hold back as long as we can. At least I know I do. I have almost as many problems saying it as I do hearing it. He pets the cat and the wind blows spray from the icy drizzle and it hits my face, and cuts through this coat and I am cold, and barefoot. I realize then that it's four in the morning and I'm outside in the rain in December. The things you do for the ones...well, you know.

He wants to come in. I tell him I don't trust him, but he smiles and says you don't trust yourself and he's so right. I don't trust myself. So he stands there, and I make him tell me he misses me. That's an easy thing to say. I'm not sure why we always want other people to tell us the things we already know. He should be thankful that with me, he never has to say a word. I remember that it got old. More than that. It tore me up. Why was I was so happy? and yet, I feel that absence and I'm really not sure why...because things are really good. Maybe I do need to be needed.

Somehow we're back in the same conversation we've had for months. Because its not harmless, I say. I know, he says. It's not for me either. We can't be lovers and we can't be friends, and we're not enemies, its grey area but I don't mind. It's smoke, its there in the air we breathe. And I can't get it out of my head, the way he looked at me. Like sometimes I wore him down, with honesty and he says he's being shitty and wants a place to land and I tell him to go find some bar maid to warm his bed. But it's like he's trying to see through me. I know he knocks on this door for a reason. Same old story I guess. He comes to hear what I always tell him. Like going home, like having your mum tell you how special you are, even when you get lost and become an adult and suddenly realize its not really true, you're actually sort of evil and sometimes you really suck.

And it dawns on me that we'll never be safe here. I think that's part of why I have to go. I have to leave some of this behind, like I always do. I always move somewhere else and hope I can become a different person. I've been told it doesn't work like that though. Always me, lost in a memory.

I look around, hazy window with the world ripping by. I think I'm leaving a little bit of my soul behind, in a trail like fireflies that burn bright through the dark until they snuff out. It's a buzz and you always show up and its so easy, to stop fighting sometimes and just live. Maybe its the beer but I let go. I just let my resolve fall, and maybe you like that, its good because I fight you, but you win sometimes too. I climb on your back and you walk me all the way home. And it's familiar; and its good. 

Sometimes a man must awake to find really, he has no one.

It's never over.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Giu0vGllUE

Memory, Insomnia

I remember those times
We'd be breaking up
You'd be breaking my heart
And in the middle of my tears
You'd make a crazy face
Like a mother
Playing peekaboo with her baby
And everything was supposed to be alright
If only it was so easy
We'd say.
I'd forgotten things like that
But lately
They keep me up at night
Rising up from the depths of me
I imagine
The kind of man
You would've been
And you say I should call
Sometimes
When its late
I want to but
It still breaks my heart.

Abandon pace, she said, This is the rest, she said, this is what's left.

It's hard to believe it's her.


Looking up from the bustle of the street, I stop to marvel at a blimp wobbling precariously across the sky, and see her. She's staring out the her window, I can see her from a block over; she's like a beacon shining through the break between buildings. Standing there with her fingertips against the class, she's was breathing mist onto the single pane just a few floors up from this hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean joint, yeah that's right, the kind that's so small you might miss if you don't already know it's there. So as my gaze alights upon her figure, I stop dead in my tracks. Life continues around me, people are walking by, going about their business and heading...wherever. Me, her captive audience...recognition dawning. I turn slowly to face her, suddenly a moth drawn to a flickering light in the dead of night, and I start walking through some empty alleyway, and steam is hissing from vents of grungy basement apartments and it's floating upwards, diffusing in the icy morning air. My shoes shuffle old newspapers as I move towards her, avoiding sagging trash bags, half full of their deflated contents, sullenly laid to rest there and forgotten. But my eyes never leave her. Tunnel vision obscures my own awkwardness, and I move faster and faster, till I burst from that alleyway like a child from the hazy womb that has been my existence ever since she disappeared.

So I stand there, now at the base of this old brick building, connected to some other brick building, connected to every other building ever. I wonder if anything ever stood alone in the city, and I'm looking up because she's still there, drawing pictures in the condensation and smiling to herself. I bet she's laughing too, that little laugh. God, to hear it now.

I scan the ground floor for a door or stairs or something, and this pudgy lady at the Mediterranean place is looking at me with forlorn, basset hound eyes as she unfolds foil wrapping and shovels gyro into her mouth, and its so funny how people look like they got eaten up by fat suits and how sometimes its so obvious they're hiding under there; for some reason I just want to unzip her like Tyra Banks and unleash the tall gorgeous model inside, because I'm in that good of a mood.

What if she's been standing there for years? Has she been waiting for me?

All of a sudden I realize I'm grinning like an idiot and there's newspaper stuck to my shoe, and this lady's probably staring at my disheveled appearance and thinking she's about to be attacked by a maniacal homeless. And there's nothing left to do but laugh, and I don't care, and I'm already gone, moving towards the red door on the left that I hope leads up to some stairs, which will lead up to another set of stairs, which I hope lead to a hallway, and then to a door that exuberantly proclaims "Sam's Apartment!" and just...opens to a girl I pray still finds it in her heart to love me, no tolerate me, as I get on my knees and beg her forgiveness for ever leaving her side.

As I reach for the handle, my heart's beating out of my chest because I've never been this alive, charged and riled up, and all my little cells are screaming all hands on deck! and pushing the blood through my veins and eating little proteins and handing cortisol envelopes to each other and probably calling for maintenance because I am literally breaking apart from the years of tension that's just built up since she's been gone. All I can think of is how, how do I get up there and be next to her.
And what the hell will feel like.
And what does that mean for me now, because clearly my life is over. Things will never, ever, be the same.

Now that I found her.

I barrel through the door, my feet are taking steps up winding stairs while my brain is playing catch up, and I'm not looking where I'm going when I round another corner and BAM! Body meets body. I take a step back into thin air, and in that faltering moment of falling backwards, I see her face. Blurred brunette. 

I must have blacked out for a split second, because I'm on my ass, peeling paint flakes falling like ashes around me, after skidding gracefully to a rest, my back up against the wall. I look up, and she's still on the stairs, holding the banister and looking my way. Focus eyes. Looking concerned. I open my mouth, and muster a weak "Sam..." She cocks her head slightly, sighs out air through pursed lips and it rustles the short hairs around her face...She's wearing red. I'm absorbing her. I'm going in and out. She narrows her eyes, checking me out, and says "...In the flesh." and I pass out.

you might be the best advice I ever took

Today my neighbor and his 3 year old washed my car while I was working on my paper. It was really dirty. I am lucky to be so well loved.

You might be the best advice I ever took. I think too far ahead and you say, for an optimist that's a pretty negative thing to say. Oh, you are so right. And you might be exactly what I need. I think you make me more honest, and you make me love myself because you love me so much. You might be the only person I feel safe with. Are we the way I want to go? You think I'm saving you, but I woke up into the freshness of the autumn morning and I felt whole, and big and happy. So I'm not gonna look down this time. I think you keep me young, and we're going up, babe.

And I don't feel like ever getting well

What makes you think
We get any more than a little while?
All of us
What if things
Only burn fast and bright for you
The rest of us
Left to die by your side?

Into the Woods

 

 

And suddenly, to be was not enough. How I longed for it. Whether it was for something more, or just something else, I could not tell. But I wanted to know it. I wanted to get lost in the woods and never be found. I wanted to fade away as easily as I had been once become, into the softness of a morning rain, into the fragmented light that peered through the needled pines...to disintegrate so that the bits of me would become a part of everything in this place. I had never seen something so beautiful.