You Can Tell By Her Smile She's a Love Child

February 10 2009.

The first step of Drunken Isphahan-Inspired Cupcakes: In a bowl, mix raspberry wine, rose syrup and dried rose petals. Add a handful of lychees. Soak.

If we lived again, I’d be a plum tree, and you’d be wine. Jivey and loose, you were born to a jazzy tie with spats. Let’s tear up the floor with our heels. You can’t have me without jealousy. A girl had painted her lips silver and bared her breasts in the night air, the nipples swollen and purple as grapes. He was a shape in the garden, full of blood and hormones. Smile. Show some teeth. Cooling boiled clementines in the snow. We are equivalent fractions. I should stay unreal forever. He says when you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.

- It’s just like that with some things- can’t tell your parents, no matter how close you are.
- But I just feel like by not telling them, I miss sharing so much with them. Cute crushes, teasing at the dinner table.
- Yeah, well…illegal things are such a big part of me. Like I scoured Mexico City for those switchblades-I wish I could tell them about it.
- …Not quite the same.

What are the six things you can’t live without? She says, “Whiskey sours, wild blue, wine, baileys, vodka, love.” She swims nude and snaps up baby swordfish out of the water, comes up, nostrils flaring and the fins flapping against her jawbone. In the old world, her name was Scar.

“I remember when I first arrived in London from Budapest and saw these little queens show off their goose-bump skin and they smiled their big smiles, and screamed and jumped around like crazy beans. I remember thinking, NOW I’m in a city.”

They gave me five years to believe it was over. It took me six more to pay for my many adventures. This movie, enclosed in tight spaces and coloured in deep red seems to take place in the veins and arteries of a long, painful dream. This is a picture of Kate Moss without a shirt on, this is a picture of Kate Moss with a shirt on. Reading livefastdresspretty. One thing one must learn is how to confront people that at that particular moment, one cannot bear to meet.

“I don’t drink coffee,” he says. “Oh”, says Liza, surprised. “You look like you would”, I say. “Why”, he says, “because I’m all skinny and jittery?” He skittered like a bird over snow.

Get a job, catch the sun. I’m going crazy and this lady’s singing, bottle caps bottle caps bottle caps. The guy with the green tie says, “How was your fire drill?” Blue tie smirks, “Oh it was great. We were all holding hands, singing kumbayah.” I’m at this little desk, looking at the open box of paperclips and thinking, how many could I fit in my mouth? All the exotic girls with neck tattoos below the Dunkin’ Donuts sign on my break, chattering like Spanish birds. One has a busted lip, and a red ribbon in her hair. I tried to write “city” and wrote “children cry.” I am supposed to file taxes, but the news says, nonchalantly, as of 01/14/09, one thousand Palestinians have died fighting. Took a nap in the bathroom- is this indicative of a problem? There was a bruise the size of an apple on my upper right arm, and when I tripped and fell into hard concrete by the station, the nearby crackheads kept crowing, “Lady, lady, lady, lady fell, lady,” and a stranger in a tweed coat asked if he could help me onto the train, where I sat, my hands and knees bleeding heavily into rolls of rough papertowel. A beautiful fragile girl saying, “He doesn’t love me.” “What? But…” “Well I had sex with him anyway.”

- “How is a criminal made?” I asked the boy with glass eyes.
-“Through daring heartbreak and the unmedicated lust to feel things.”
-“Oh shit.”
-“Yea, you’re in for it. Better run.”

New Years Resolution: No More Heartbreak. I’ve already failed, again and again and again. Liza makes fun of me for crying about the skinned pears, and I want to pick up all those broken children. I sit beside a genius at dinner, all woolen tie and shiny black boots, and feel the fall into his black hole. I can hold your skinny body against mine, or be fucked against the dark cold glass of a third-story window, but I want to hold his hand and touch his hair. Boxes of shiny band-aids and bowls of home-made icecream. Desperately want to spoonfeed and spoon. A tongue against the collarbones. The soft insides of knees and elbows and iliac crests that I can hold. When we finished that picnic in the summer, we gave that bag-lady all those oily paper bags of pasta salad and all my little tea sandwiches, and she opened suspiciously them on the sidewalk in the rain, and smiled and cried. Do you know what this is, he said as we were leaving. This is involuntary empathy.

The Talmud says 930 kinds of death were created in the world. The most difficult is diphtheria, the easiest is a kiss. The kiss is what is called the mise binishike, which is how you kill the 6 people over whom the Angel of Death has no sway- such a person dies by the mouth of God.

“Anyone ever told you you’re a sweet little kid? Honestly, when you first keeked round that door, I wanted to cry and tell you all about my wicked life. And I bet you take a lot of chaps that way?”

No, collective agreement: vixen, tease, heartbreaker. Fox licking up the last of them. Unfurling like a cat. Putting constructions on things, “You are a most dangerous girl. Don’t look at me like that, I’ll fall.” I feel incredibly kissed. I am delirious with lips. Feline in a last life? He asks, eyes the stacks of canned fish. Licking out the last of the tuna, seeing Catherina of Sienna’s head in that glass jar.

Everything became threatened. The pack of the medication packet tells me to avoid alcohol and caffeine, spices and oil. Ingest with milk, it suggests. What? The helplessness of humans. All these hallways smell like beer, and there are bloody footprints in the bathroom. Over the weekend, a fire alarm was pulled and they all stumbled out, drunk and naked, into the snow. Was it you who talked about the whiskey syringe? I killed a spider with my bare hands.

Liza says, “I think I was counting D’s buttons. And he was helping me. But he wasn’t drunk. I was like, I have one button. He was like, I have…he counted them, and then said the number. And then I counted them. And was like, you have *number* more than me.”

I want to give you a raw onion and I want to see you bite into it straight. That would be enough. I would love you. You are crazy because I like you, and I like you because you are crazy.

-What was wrong with her?
- She was insane.
- And in love.
- Insane and in love, the worst combination.

Spent three hours talking a friend down from a roof. I’ll make you lyonnaise potatoes, I said. He shrugged and climbed back inside the window. Chop an onion finely, fry it brown in a tablespoon of butter. Add another tablespoon to the iron spider while frying, until the butter spits and spackles. Slice six entire boiled potatoes, knife into the palm, thickly. Spread them and fry on both sides, tossing to prevent black crackling. Sprinkle sea salt or parsley and bring them to the table very hot.