Our Clothes are Softer

Oh, Joey Comeau, I’m in love. I think you’d know what to do about that, would tell me, Sometimes our hearts don’t match our mouths. Would remind me, What ever happened to secret admirers? Are they just stalkers now? Would tell me over and over, I love writing notes to strangers. ”You have the best laugh I have ever heard.” In love with? Everything that moves. Taking oranges to the hospital, and finding lemon peel in our shoes. Zest under my skin, citrus goosebumps. Caress me down, with your Jesus revolver dreams. He never misses a shot.

In love with?
Sleeping naked, entangled with you. Primal desire. Small savory pastries. Basil and salt. Each of these? Un petit mort? Oh, give me many little deaths- it will not stop my kisses. I want to be filled to brimming with mutterings. He said I was breathtaking. Young men with glass-shatter voices, swap cigarettes and hickeys til their lips bruise.

He said I was breathtaking. I said, I don’t know you sir, and got down off the train. I have been chewing holes in my thumbs. Catching up with British Boy, whose friend’s heart just burst open. They watched it stop beating, the suffocating of a watch in cloth. No one believes. He says, Boys don’t cry. If I were there, you could cry into me. “What will the aim of future painting be? To create previously unknown sensations.” I have been perusing Giorgio de Chirico. The sun had a terrible beauty. Everyone wept.

In love with?
Things Victoria finds the Morning After. Rainbow unicorn bandages, Chanel lipstick, glitter polish. Her pockets full of tootsie rolls and vanilla extract. Many packets of cigarettes. A cigar. She says, I feel like a glitter princess; you are the Queen. The sound of a dying street light. Check out my heroin phone and your cigarette sweatshirt. Why are you in a constant state of discontent? The end of the world is not near. “Well…I have come to the realization that the things I miss most are the things I’ve never had. My dream is to fly.”

In love with?
Gardens and symbols. I was in the grocery store yesterday. Found a selection of little seed packets, and picked up a least nine before I knew what I was looking for. I would have packaged one up in brown paper for you, of course. I was thinking, it seems like years since we've spoken. This will not change anything. I was thinking, how beautiful this is. But they had no sunflowers.

In love with?

Ideas! Just the idea of you, and me, and what we will be all be ten years from now. Fifteen! Give me twenty and give me Uncanny and give me liberty or give me death. Oh, prepare your mouth. Make way, my gorgeous darling full of curls. Bonny-eyed beauty. She says, You live fast and love faster. I can’t control my eyes and ears and by some fault, my fingers are connected through intercrossing nerves directly to my heart. “Heartbreak is written all over your skin. You’re like me.” Take care, Carlotta! Your garters are showing! Oh Rose Rose Rose Rose.

For Your Step Following and Damned if I Look Back

March 23 2009.

Listening to Aimee Mann’s 31 Today. What will I do when I’m 31? I hope everything has come in together by the seams. We’re just caught up in our own solipsism, but there is no reason my life should be any different than anyone else’s. Listened to I Dreamed a Dream- the best actresses’ voices break with sadness, and I get too caught up in things that never happened, but happen every day. Landslide, sung by Fleetwood Mac, always makes me cry.

Heading towards an existential crisis. I knew it when I was rooting through my piles of unwashed clothing in my landfill, hoping to turn over two clean socks in my hands. Kept refilling the kettle and slurping down noodles in the early hours, and as I closed my books with a creak, the sun rose.

Mania last weekend in Bruiser’s room. She watched the rocking back and forth with laughter until crying, and when my mouth turned, she said, Oh! And I screeched around corners, and hugged everyone too tightly, and when Bitter Boy came, fell all over him, all too fast and too bright. Or- it’s just my reoccurring trip- Bruiser still sees moving paisley in plain carpet and brick walls, and I have bouts of yearning where I look out of Susan and see the trees and see the sky and everything is still, and it is not enough.

Rose said, Time is moving so quickly, and I spread out my fingers out, pleating the colours of her bedspread between them, and said, Oh. But it’s always moved that fast.

Dad called, asking, Who is Sylvia Plath? I sighed at him until I heard the strain in his voice, and he said, pleadingly, plaintively, her son, her son. How very fragile we are. How I wish I could have saved you.

There is something so delicate in you, that I thought we would break when our lips touched. Is it just because of age? When I was your age, I had scars of my favorite poems, spike gauges and tear drop tattoos, a easy jean zipper, a crown. Tied by my wrists down during the dark nights, tongue wet with lies, apparitions and a separation by a sheet of tissue paper from the world beneath. We all love and lose. I loved a girl and I got onstage to rend my clothes in front of hundreds for her. Forget you said anything? I only forget the truth.

I owe the world so much. On Never Let Me Go, the book that changed everything: “This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn’t about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It’s about why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.”

I want to gather you all up in my arms. I will rock you and read you to sleep.

Miss Beautiful Something

March 22 2009.

I forgot to read the Postsecrets this morning, I was in such a rush to see you.

Woke several times throughout the night, thinking- purple shirt? Black shirt? Pink skinny jeans? Blue skinny jeans? And in the end, I was so particular, flipping through my map, turning up the daft punk, ringing black rims around my eyes, pout and flicker, that I just had time to pull on my blue bandana and chucks, and holler as I fell down the porch steps.

I asked Bitter Boy if sixteen was Too Young. He said, Only if fourteen is Too Young for me.
I don’t know if you even care about Marx, you probably don’t. But I wish-wish-wish! I want someone I can think so hard with that it hurts. You seem true, your head just so dip-dizzy full of curls, shy eyes ablink. Picnicking on a tombstone. The pull (too soon?) of things inside that yearn for something greater. Thinking of Hannah Arendt and Sontag, and I’m getting great ideals confused for crushing.

Sorry if I’m forward- I resisted for hours (!) watching your fingers curl, wishing I could wrap my fingers round them. I knew when you first pit-pattered through the door, all deep eyes and teeth. I could imagine peacock feathers caught in your hair. And I had just meant to sigh twice in frustration, but the second time I kissed you instead. It was very almost an accident- my startled heart.

You opened the door for me, saying “Chivalry’s not dead,” and I’d just been flipping through books and pages looking for those lines. If I still wrote poetry, I’d write you something strong and sweet. A cup of tea, sugarlumps doused in whiskey. Too much? In my delirium of your lips, I took the wrong train. Tumbled out at a deserted dock in the dark, a boy with mussed hair and sleepy eyes pointed out the time. Time fell away at both sides.

Nietzsche (shall we steal him?) tells us, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”, so let’s walk these streets forever. I keep remembering ends of sentences I wanted to say, wanted to pour into your eyes. All the ‘yes’es and sing-songs got caught between my tongue as a gaze follows the definition of your eyelashes.

It's (kind of, maybe) an exquisite story of several years. Two characters passing in the street, in trains of opposite directions, clutching the same book, but one is married or one is lost or moving far away. But eventually, they hold hands in the park together, and feed birds pieces of bread out of a bag, or chuckle at badly-written newspaper headlines. And the reader finds them, and thinks, Oh! Of course. That’s why their eyes kept catching and holding all this time. (Kind of. Maybe.)

You told me in July you thought you loved me- a joke, I suppose. Also, that I must heavy dreams. I do.

Ethereal- Adj.
1. Light, airy, or tenuous.
2. Extremely delicate or refined.
3. Heavenly or celestial.

Now that I reread it, I think it’s all you. Yes, Rose, You.

That's Not My Name That's Not My Name That's Not My Name

March 16 2009.

Someone with long swinging hair and dark lips and eyes gave me a large bottle and said, why not? I drank until I tasted bitter and we jangled and bangled and ripped up the floor, hands over our heads. The Friends are the cutest! We’re all bopping around, little girls on bigger boy’s shoulders. She’s swaying with a wine bottle. Since the summer ended, my lips have touched lips. I can count to 26! Shall I stop there? My little book only happens to be black.

Later, the keyboardist asked me for a light, and I snapped out a flame. The lead singer said, hey man, why not ask me? The keyboardist said, well you’re not as pretty as ---, and I glowed beside the lights in the dark.

As Bruiser lay on the ground with a boy and gazed upwards with a cigarette dangling from her pointing fingers and said, There’s my pentagon! That’s Cancer’s. No, it belongs to me.

I feel pummeled and profoundly exhausted. Overworked, overdanced, overwhelmed. I want nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep for a hundred years.

Consumed this Weekend:

March 16 2009.

• Hookah. Wine.
• Jugs of water.
• When Morgan arrived after driving up north for half the day, she brought me a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. Delight! How well I'm known.
• 88 cent pineapple bliss and lemon-lime soda. Victoria brought us bendy straws in different colours and a tie-dyed blanket to lounge on. It was The Morning After Picnic, and I wrapped my mother’s shawl around my shoulders and there were three cameras going at once, all clicks and flashes.
• I lost control at the grocery store, wandering those bright aisles with my eyes full of lust. So: a fat, creamy triangle of brie, roasted pepper & tomato bruschetta, foie gras, red pepper hummus, grapes that popped between your teeth. I bought two crusty baguettes. We spent the hours making sandwiches and packed them into the wicker basket Morgan got me.
• Cucumber sandwiches: Very Thin Pepperidge wheat sandwich bread, a thin layer of Irish butter, four slices of translucent cucumber, peeled and cut so thinly. Sprinkle of sea salt. Sliced into two triangles.

“Try the cucumber sandwiches.”

“Oh no, I don’t like cucumber.”

“That doesn’t matter. Really. Trust me.”

“Well, okay fine. Just one bite...Oh god, these are delicious."

• Ham & Cheese sandwiches: same bread. A thin layer of butter, layer of alouette garlic cheese spread, small scattering of grated orange cheddar, two pinches of chopped honey ham, smear of Colman’s mustard.
• Victoria brought Edamame and freshly baked cookies. She’d dipped her thumbs into their middles and pressed, filled them up with strawberry and raspberry jams. They melted in our mouths.
• And there were other days and nights. Two packages of Easy Mac. More sandwiches. More Coca-Cola.
• Vanilla Coolatta on a drive back from finding black skinnies and American Apparel-esque suspenders, beaters, open shirts. Some gay pride knee socks that I would wear later, pulled all the way up, in the sunshine. A hot, toasted bagel with too much cream cheese.
• Today was warm. I wore short-shorts and we studied on the south quad with grapes and smoke in our mouths.
• After the sun went down, we finished the last of the tea sandwiches. Then coffee ice-cream. Creamy, thickly churned.
• The Morning After After, I made my childhood breakfast for Bruiser, Morgan, Hannah, and the skitter boy. (I found blue and yellow eggcups and brought them home earlier this week.) I soft-boiled a full carton of eggs, and carefully tapped open each shell with the side of a teaspoon. Each egg was eaten with a couple spoonfuls of yellow Irish butter (that melted right inside), and a sprinkling of salt. With the leftover Thin bread, I made toasted soldiers dipped into yolk, and crispy bacon cooked in a spitting vat of grease. Mugs of hot Chai latte. I’ve mentioned the taste of heaven before- a ways back in entries- and it still rings true. Hannah said,” This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Destination Calabria

March 9 2009.

Favoloso says, "Can I just say our adventure was just like a dream? It's not the first time...Once I was with my British friend in Italy, and we were walking from the outdoor discotecas in the wee hours, in the rain. She decided she wanted some fish for her bedroom, so when we reached the gelateria, which was near my school, she started stabbing at the fountain in front of it, with her Kermit the frog umbrella, trying to get some gold fish.”

Snoozing on the porch in the sunshine. Woke in an empty room. My pockets were turned out, fishnets ripped, eyelids smudged with kohl.
Walking along the long, long stretch of red hook road, sun blazing, sticking our thumbs out to every car. Need to soak my swollen feet.

- Where did these cigarettes come from?
- You bought them.
- What? No I didn’t.
- You did. We bought them an hour ago.
- But I don’t even smoke Marlboros!

Favoloso says, “Calabria is a region in Italy which was highly underdeveloped all throughout the 20th century, but it's where all the badass head hancho mafiosos live. And it's full of rolling hills,
wheat and hay and kids on bikes and lone apple trees. So in my mind, the image of us walking along the side of the road was kinda like that. Except with big suv's, law-abiding citizens, and perfect roads. Oh well, the sun is always the same! It was Italian sun, we were kissed by it.”

Who drove us there? A man in white in a pick-up truck. …maybe that’s why you whispered your order to the waitress. I want a hamburger and fries. Yes, at 8 in the morning. Build me up. And then let’s wave down the shuttle from the middle of the street and ride all the way home.

You're Never Fully Dressed...

March 7 2009.

Yesterday was beautiful. The best, even. Everyone in short sleeves and smiles, sitting around in warm sunlight.

For dinner, I made a big pot of pasta. Sliced and fried a large bag of mushrooms, chopped an enormous white onion. Mixed some leftover alfredo sauce, folded in handfuls of parmesan. Pesto, garlic, and plenty of ground black pepper. This is actually good, says Giampaolo. You could bottle and sell this, says Liza.

Then sing-a-longs, cigarettes, idling in a dark lot, straining to hear smog, in an empty field. Liza on her tiptoes puts her lips close to the cracks of the shed window, says, “Hello? Anyone there?”

Liza cosied up in blankets and I read her to sleep with Peter Pan. Back in my room, putting on the kettle for tea, a flow of happy first years flowed in, chattering and all squeezing onto the bed, pointing and laughing and one girl checks her watch and says, it’s almost life-bonding time.
Tell tell tell.