These nights as they were.

Remember when we used to write ourselves to sleep at night?  And managed somehow not to fall again awake?  How our eyes stayed closed, all night, and we never had to try to remember how feeling so, felt.

It's hard for me to remember now.  Now that you're not here to remind me.  And by 'you', maybe I mean 'me', the way I used to be.

I watched an old YouTube video I'd made of myself, for M., singing to him on his birthday in 2009.  God I looked young.  And happy!  Deliriously so, back before I knew any other way to be -- except vicariously.  Such a bizarre peek into my own once-mind; once-energy; once-unrecognized fate.

Tonight one of your songs came through my headphones.  Although it's always been there, all this time, it suddenly appeared as though lost for ages.  Indeed, it had been, somehow.  Lost amongst and amidst and underneath the many-blanketed boundaries of far less dangerous songs.  And I heard it again.  Tore into me briefly; too easily; still familiar.  Before the numb set in again.

And it was like I realized for the first time how thick that blanket has become; how unavoidable. How indistinguishable.  Only in contrast with a context that used to drench me in my own tears, could I see it as something separate from myself.  Something I've not become, so much as am covered by.  Perhaps shielded.  Perhaps shrouded.  As one would shroud the newly dead, as though not wishing that one to see.  To see its own cessation.

But so as not to leave it there...

-L (9/9/13)

"Counting my losses, wasn't sure if I should count you." -D

"Fear is the opposite of faith." But fuck faith. And fuck fear, too.

Luckily, when you've had your heart torn in a major way, all subsequent disappointments seem insignificant by comparison.

"But I refuse to be concerned with condescending advice, cuz I'm the only motherfucker that can change my life." -I.T.

-L (8/19/13)

"'Would that life were a song!?,' blazed those olive eyes."

(OUCH! God forsaken.) I fell out of bed again this morning. It's a mad thing, this bewildered occupancy you've taken up in my mind.

Indeed, like grinning men in beat-up cars -- wearing glasses and looking straight ahead. Like tiny-tiny girls as cute as this -- muttering with a purpose. Oh! Like skateboarding women, holding on strong with one hand -- tattooed calves painted.

What if you knew me? What would your opinion look like?

I don't understand... I like being so separate. We are arbitrary and irreparable, like the smell of pine on my palm and the utter listlessness of a waning light; like pursed lips in anticipation, waiting to flinch. Is it lyrical, at least, the meaning beyond the words?

"And they've got these long benches, see, and you have to stand up and hunch over to eat so all the chili falls out! It's awesome...it's awesome."

Now I'm feeling more at peace. It dawns on me that within our mind and soul's creativity IS the place to dwell. And that I haven't read my Tarot for quite a long time... So there it is, my conclusion: I always start the Fool, and after the journey, end up the Magician again.

-L (8/5/13)

"When you record the moment, you record the death of the moment." -D.C.

Where am I at? And how do I feel? Such complicated questions, every time. Easier to talk shit on paper/in person than it is to cop to the fact that we'd really rather not know.

But know we do! Can't not. Still, "don't waste your worry on me, I always find what I need. Come and go as I please -- I've got my skeleton key." -D

Stuck in this tight spot between wantingwantingwanting and utterly unwilling to give any more than I'm given. Not sure if I should get over this, or just hone it down keenly into the sharpest of survival skills -- exploited in every sense of the word. Follow myself into the foolish fellowship of the fallen, rather than picking myself up again and moving the fuck on? It's only that I'd like to learn to keep still; to cease with the ceaseless motion that's haunted my movements for years now. Learn to sit with it.

"'I miss being strong,' she told me, and leaned down to give me her lips. We went on, reaching out toward bliss & contrition -- but really, it ended there."

Well, well then. And even so. Every minute of every day has a place to be; a person to see; a date to keep. I look around sometimes in wonder, wondering how I made it here with everywhere I've been before. They say hindsight is 20/20; it all looks like a big freakin' mess back there to me. Deductive reasoning be damned!

"I left through her big oak-black front door, seen only in the brief dark of the evening before, and didn't intend to enter through it again."

-L (7/29/13)

"Swing Lo, Oh Magellan"

Day after my 29th birthday, and despite the fact of having spent it entirely at the beach, not a lick of sunburn on my skinny-skin-skin. Most likely had something to do with the overcast weather, and the sun not even peeping out from behind its cover of clouds -- but I'd like to fancy folks a little charmed on their birthdays, too.

So many things going down. None of which I ever really get into here, I've noticed. Except peripherally; details at large in the ether. Why is it so much easier to stop writing than it is to stop talking, right when we're in the thick of it? Maybe sounds just carry more easily than fingertips? Maybe my fingers always feel a little on edge. Perched. If not waiting, then what?

The truth of the matter is that I may be developing a soft phobia to honesty. It's bad business, too, cuz how can you start a sentence with, "The truth of the matter is..." and avoid all the skepticism willing to rain down onto you upon earful of a self-professed phobia such as this one? Truth v. Honesty? Maybe they are not as complimentary of commentary as one would think/hope/expect. Maybe instead, one can be truly honest in her outpouring of deceit; or one may be exceptionally truthful without opening even a shred of a doorway, onto whatever she has in her to be honest about.

Ah well. C'est la vie, my dark and stormy love. C'est la vie.

-L (7/22/13)

...

cowgirl-urban punctuated woman,
straw-weaved hat smiling the warmth of the sun.
saunters beside her buttoned-up boyfriend.
pauses when the pit
bends to sniff her boots,
and recalls to memory her scent from before.

beyond another moment, beneath the obvious sky --
between two sets of eyes, seeking.
the brevity of event, curiously concludes.
trail-less, girl walks on
grin-traces fading.
dog circles twice, to lay itself down again.

Red-brick silences.

As a matter of fact, I am tired. And my cat nestles snuggled underneath my pyramid bent knees and blankets. I didn't realize it before, but now I see.

First week full-time at my firm. Utter amazingness, the rate at which everything might suddenly come together. I can hear hawks and parrots and airplanes and AC units and rustled, muffled wild animalsounds -- all from the comfort of my own bedroom.

Tomorrow, I'll need to get out of here early to go see a person later that I hardly know, but would like to know less-hardly. In the mean time, I'd like to learn to say: "You shouldn't have called, you know... If you've already decided to be bored."

But not delicate -- not now, you'll notice. (And so on and so forth, before falling asleep.)

-L (7/8/13)

What is it to be afraid of Nothing? How blind must we be? And to what?

Staying put... it's such a magical thing. (Or some Magi's cheap trick?)

There are words everywhere, and people ever there to say them! This hiking trail sign must see gazillions of eyes upon it each decade or so. It does not stand in for every group's discussion on where next to go, but its presence might represent their voices for us.

I am here & now, every here & now! All there is to me scurries behind mine eyes. So much more than immediate, all my thoughts and experiences and plans. And the congenitally accidental truths to my life are timeless -- not before or after or even now, but present. Solid and intrinsic -- not capable of coming and going, for their definition disallows this.

Do we ever describe instances? Or rather, instant states of eternal being?

What...
.where...
..who...
...when...
....why are you? Here?

-L (7/1/13)

...

wind-wilderness tinted, distinctive gaze.
endless-bound, guileless, ravenous blaze.
joyous life written with an effortless smile,
bright silent butterflies, falling in line.
(my dear, you will not stay defined...)
blues romance distraction, momentarily aside:
tune softly and bravely, sounds intertwine.
fingertips floating, freedom gently enslaved.
grateful breath taken; not shallow, nor saved.

For the day of the missed flight.

"It's all the mornings we missed for sleep, as the sun glides over our apartment..."  So what more can we do, but catch this one?  How amazing!  How mediocre.  How ours to say, this time around.

Maybe I would have felt more in-tuned, more in-awe, had the choice been made for him.  Maybe the miracle would have seemed more divine, than the plain truth of a choice.  Maybe I'm not used to being chosen -- even if only in part -- so as not to be able to recognize the distinct divinity therein.

It's those secrets you share in knowing everything there is to know about one another; the behind the scenes "Action!"; that Frances Ha moment.  It's the clearing of the mystery, out of your before-blurry eyes, just in time to see the magic unfurl.  "Once upon a time..."  I thought I knew the end to that story.  Now I just know better.  Now I know to wonder, what else?

Such a small, beautiful thing, and perhaps moreso in that so few will notice; give it more than a passing and uncertain glance.  But such a thing is, here, mine to behold.  If not to live first-hand, than blessedly, graciously, through the crystalline clear eyes out of which you
..................................................................................................................................glitter.
.....................................................................................................................................radiate.
........................................................................................................................................pulse.
...........................................................................................................................................look.

Suddenly back at me.

-L (6/17/13)

Not big on make-up, shoes, or a-holes -- but you do what you got to.

In the heart of the state, rolling along at toddler speed. The road whispering gravel all the way.

"Well maybe we'll get lucky and we'll both grow old, well I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I hope so..."

Heart, body, mind, soul. Three out of four ain't bad, folks! (And I'll shave my legs when I want someone to touch them, yo.)

When you don't get to have it the way you want it, are you willing to have it the way it is?

-L (6/10/13)

"We'll leave a noooose on the aaattorney's desk..."

[I needed you more on some days than others. But you weren't there either way. And I survived.]

Months and months. "Rolling through the days with the gratitude of steam." Where am I now? Why do I stop writing? I need something new from myself. I need a truth, as of yet unthought of. And I need a story, other than my own -- at least until I can step back in as author once more, rather than playing within and throughout the sweet commitments I've given in to surround me. The emerald-stitch blueroyal, covers my eyes like a dark & weighted sheet, so that I cannot see past my sight. And for now, that's all right.

I went looking for a poet tonight. (Why is it important to record these minutes?!) I didn't know her name, but I knew what her sage voice sounds like -- her experience infiltrating its intoning rhythm. Hmmm... anyway. I'll find her soon, but tonight, with this momentary loss of inspired, I took joy in settling for hot tea in a tall glass, reading a page and a half of my slow, faux-intimate novel. And for a bit, considered gravely a particularly thirsted-for interaction, which was half-flirt, half-fret/fearful, as it left me glad but increasingly anti-climactic -- as though fading into ridiculous clumsiness, accompanying the unfamiliar scorch of my feeling shy.

My ears listened their fill of Margot and the Nucleur So & So's; my feet played cold together, swept beneath the blanket. I missed my sworn enemy, because he used to be my great love. Then, he had warmed my feet with the fleeting-est of lovers' looks. I bit my tongue to beat back the sensation the only way I knew how, because the only thing more distracting than pain is worse pain. Or at least, that which is more immediately painful, and thus inescapably tangible, as memoried musings never are. Only then might self-medication be an option worth faithful exploration, for some suddenly lonely night.

[Besides which, missing him pissed me off. That helped, too.]

-L (6/3/13)

"Children, Broad Ripple is burning..."

Two weeks and I don't know what is worth writing; every beginning feels like it will end. And end in the feeling that blogs like mine are far too self-congratulating; far too anti-social to be suffered even in Texas. And I'm not in Texas.

Even so, I realized that I love making others feel loved, and that with you it's different. It's different because I'm half in love with you -- and because it's the half I don't trust.

The half that loves you, loves you with no rhyme or reason; no track record. No reasonable rate of return. It's a love I can't define or pin down or explain, and I'm probably wise when I try to explain it away. But then there it is still, when I half look: that half of my love that you own, but have never come close to claiming.

So while I do love to make others feel loved, I can't do this for you. Not when with you I only have half my love left; not when you haven't filled that rift with half of yours.

It's dishonest even to try, really -- although I do at times try, and I am in fact dishonest. But at the end of this beginning, I stand by the proposition that dishonesty is a thing generally to be avoided, when one can be so wily. When one cannot, however, one must fall back on her more loyal defenses. Like the white flag of play-dumb friendship. Safety in the scarcity of color.

And the cat, curled up on the lap, gently clawing at the keyboard. Altogether unimpressed.

-L (5/27/13)

The allowance of life, happening to us; never the other way around.

Hmmm...  One big wondering what the hell is going on, most of the time now.  Putting ourselves in situations we haven't allowed for years; interviewing all over the state for the next stage of our lives; pretending to expect meaning to be gleaned from every glance/chance/near-arbitrary decision.  One of the problems, I think, for people who now have trouble with seeing what's the purpose, is that everyone around us who doesn't seems so mystical, all-knowing, seductive in comparison.  This can hardly be an acceptable way to operate.

"But take a minute now, think this through.  Give it a second and a bird's-eye view.  Think of the moments you've got left to lose - like how much time are you really down to do?!"  -D

Themes, themes, themes.  And metaphors.  Maybe all this is just the Theme of Years?  How many left, still yet to be seen.  I wonder whether the sun wishes sometimes for the sweet dismal of darkness?  I wonder whether it gets tired of shining, always oh-so-bright?  I wonder if it hurts its own eyes; keeps itself awake all night?  Even so, the dull moon would be the better companion, though lacking such timeless intensity.  'Least it'd have more than one thing to alwaysalwaysalways be talking about.

"Well I don't, don't need, need, need to know, but there's a set of my keys left under your door, and if you need a place to sleep tonight, well that's what family's for..."  -D

-L (3/10/13)