"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)

"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)

III. He exhaled his brewing anger, trying to let it leave him.

He'd been working on his patience.  He'd been working off his pride.  But he hated her being right about him.

Trying to let it go, he began, "Okay.  The way this conversation just went, I guess we both know by now that we're coming to our end.   You know?  It's just...we've been going different directions lately.  I've decided we should make it official."

"Ha!" she laughed bitterly, now despite herself.  "You've 'decided to make it official'?  You mean, the fact that you're leaving because I'm still grieving, and you're over it?  Rad.  How magnanimous of you, dude.  Well let's then.  'Make it official.'  We can start with you getting the fuck out of my shop.  How's that for official?"

By now her voice had risen in anger.  She was pacing the limited floor space unconsciously as she spoke, and had absent-mindedly turned the lock on the front door entrance to engaged, as well as the sign hanging from it to "Closed."  Locking them both in out of habit, despite what she was saying.  That freezing her from a moment ago he still couldn't handle; this boiling version he could.  Almost blind-folded by now.  Even with his hands tied.

He walked to her then and positioned his body directly in her orbital path.  She nearly ran into his chest before she realized he was standing there, and her instant hesitation was enough for him to infiltrate and redirect her quick-breathed pounding heart by wrapping his arms around her and pulling her tightly against him.  She didn't even struggle this time.  Just tightened for a moment before letting herself fall into him.  Not wrapping her arms back around him, of course, but no longer fighting either.

He wondered how it was possible to know someone so well, and still be able to let that person go.  Love or not, really being beside the point.  He supposed he'd find out before long.  He supposed they both would.

-L (2/5/12)

II. And when he went the wind called him on his game.

The narrow beige leaves fell insistent on his shoulders, called by the persuasive gust.  He nearly turned back.  Maybe he should have.

Too late.  Indie came out of the shop saluted by a jingling bell atop the door.  Her smile was bright; her eyes were guarded.  As  defensive as she always seemed to be, now.  She gave a slight wave of hand inviting him to join her inside, then slipped back in again without waiting for him to respond.  He followed her through the jingling door.

The bookshop gave off the appearance of having just been born, as it always did.  Stacks of books on the ground piled as high as his waist, ranged from classic literature ever-more-real-than-life, to stranger-than-fiction nonfiction.  Indie picked each one by hand, and the endeavor had gradually become her entire existence during the past year-and-a-half.   That's why he was here, really.  Because she was different.

"I know why you're here," Indie announced suddenly, default smile gone.  Her tone already sounded spiteful.  Deadened.  Resentful.  Maybe rightfully so.

"Is that right?" he answered automatically, already feeling defensive.  This is why he had to do it.  He hated it when she challenged him so pointedly like that.  It felt too dramatic.  Almost embarrassing.  And he resented her right back, for doing that to her otherwise lovely voice.

"Yes.  You've been sitting on that park bench across the street, staring at my shop all morning.  You've been steeling yourself.  Why else?"

"You tell me," he replied, annoyed despite himself.  Despite the whole morning he'd spent preparing himself against it, as she noted.

"No.  Let's just call this one your fight, shall we?"

"So we're fighting now, are we?" he shot back.

"Mitch, please.  Just tell me why you're here.  Let's just get this over with.  Please."

-L (2/1/12)

All rise for the vacancy.

The house across the street is vacant now. It's viiisible... Gone. Viiisible... Gone as she watches its image fluttering over the roof of her own house, jumping on the oversize trampoline in the back yard. She expects that it's forlorn enough to be gathered up and scattered by the wind, after all that it had and had lost - but it just sits there, steady as nothing is.

It is an atrocious house, to remain so unmoved.

Living in that house, one can come to believe of the leaves to cackle as they fall. She too has surpassed her salvation - the sucker - like pencil marks invisible on skin but felt nonetheless. Like Jesus, even, or as poised as this moment seems to think it is. She's lost her unknowing companion, so that she might now remember that it's cold.

The in-between is what she wants. Its darkness. Like writing the words for their depths, or wondering about truth.

She sat in her car a few days ago and saw an old man walking, as slow as you like with his hands behind his back as though pondering. It hit her, then, the beautiful intricacy of this life. The excruciating frailty of this web that at times is the last strength in the universe. The only truth: that this life will go on; that hers won't. Whether it tears or shatters or snaps, or is tossed from some traitorous vehicle.

Her life had seemed so complicated, but that old man...she knew his life must be complicated as well. It would consume him. He had needed a change of scenery just to comprehend the one from which he'd come. It was surreal and perfect. That was it. Astounding, the sheer perfection of all these fumbling attempts to attain something already possessed. Like bus-ride snippets of conversation, conveying the almost-magic of the everyday. Just that there wasn't any to begin with, all along.

-L (1/29/12)

Continuable...

They drove through the silence together, and out of it again when the beach came into view. The waves roared and licked the shore like a pride of lionesses.

"I feel like I'm starting all over again," she told him in a low voice. He felt like he was starting new; they felt the same then, but reacted to the feelings in different ways. "I can't seem to focus wholeheartedly on anything anymore."

"Maybe you don't need to now - maybe you're not supposed to," He told her with an undetectable edge of desperation to his words. He wished he could lend her his acceptance of the way things are, however they happened to be.

She pulled the lumbering beast of a vehicle over, killing the engine the moment the back wheels hit the gravel of the shoulder. The headlights extinguished themselves under her demanding hand even before the truck glided to a stop, and they immediately began to drown together, submerged in the wake of the heavy darkness dimming the cab.

-L (1/27/12)

I. Trying on an old suit, to see if it still fits.

Women walked past him on rubbery legs. Their back-forth sway leaving nothing to be desired; their bodies teeter-tottering down the street. Somewhere in the sky he was sure that wars raged and songs were sung both in victory and defeat, honoring the fickle results. Here at his feet, just the same. An endless battle cry.

Across the street, he knew he had a problem. He could visualize it; taste it thick in the back of his throat; it tingled his third eye. The realization that a proverbial set of cross-roads hung in the balance, four-dimensional-like, held no end to irritation for him. Who the hell asked for mid-life-crisis damage-control at the age of 29? "Not I, said the Frog!" Not while he had no intention of passing himself off as a Princely prick.

But 'change is inevitable,' so the drowsy people say, too stoned to not let it happen to them. Again and again. And again, again. He never asked to evolve, doing so always just seemed to roll into life and back out all at once, without ever giving him a chance to protest. And so it goes, the changing happened; he'd let down his guard and the stones swept in and knocked all his doubts on down. His proverbial barriers disintegrated like the faceless, formless theories they all along remained - not standing and then falling so much as shifting outside existence's own idea of them. And anyway, he can't say he's anymore sober than the next guy. Or gal, for that matter.

In any case, she sat across the street. Behind that front desk; atop that rigid redwooded chair. And behind her, atop the stepping stool the two used to re-shelve books, he was sure stood the other her. The her whose heart he'd have to break, sooner than even he preferred. Or so he thought, hoped, expected, understood would likely be the case. But then, you never know with people, do you? Even those people about whom you know everything else.

Perhaps every heart-break breaks differently, no matter how many times one's heart is broken. For all he knows, she'll learn to use it against him as a way of gaining some inward advantage in the face of her newest new life - the one she'd soon be living without him. Or maybe she'd crumple like a tipsy teenager, all the way into herself, while watching her prom date suck face with the high school whore. Or fade away as already gone as today's front-page headliner, into the void of ever-hungry boredom.

He wondered which form of heartbreak could seduce his own heavy heart back in love with hers. He wondered whether it was worth it. He supposed it didn't much matter, either way. Soon, he'd be going in.

-L (1/25/12)

"Never so alone as when the familiar is haunting."

She was working to remember what more there was to say. She hoped something would come soon.  But the walk home was wet and the memories slipped into each other with finality, dismayed by the plight of hazard lights. By morning all would likely be lost except the urge to try again.

And it always came back to this: this walk. Along the bike path by the levee, following the flow of a premature stream.  The issue as it stood: what ought to happen next?  This phase in her life coming to a gradual end, with an endless slew of options opening up ahead.  Of choices waiting to be made or unmade, or else needing to be made manageable.  The whole lot of 'em were hard-pressed to appear savory since darkness scampered in now so early in the evenings. But when the winter went away, she will have had to make a decision.

The problem was, none looked much better than the next.  A stark similarity had struck all future dealings that claimed to come into her mind, and the overall feeling was gray.  Not good anymore than bad, but then, not much of anything else either.  Hard as it was to admit, she felt at her best when pretending.

"And maybe, somehow, this scam will still save her soul."

But then the night went torrential in the instant next.  Her pathway bled steam in a trickling upward vapor, clearing the way for her feet to rush headlong ahead, meaning to beat the downpour. She began to believe there was none so complete as those at peace with their past.  Still her feet took her all the way home, in just the same way as they always seemed to.

-L (1/21/12)