She stared up at the canvas and smiled its blues and oranges. Across the street from the cafe, she stayed vaguely aware of a presence she would soon need to acknowledge. With all of her will, though, she tried to keep present with this moment: its view of a desert painting; its scent of roasted caffeine; its impression of waiting like a solid thing to cling to, with her fingertips or toes; the signature of an artist to symbolize it all. "Tyler Burke," a name she did not know until then, but one her semi-present self still hoped to remember.
And back across the street. Yes, eventually her mind shifts back there. To him, waiting across the street. Her yawns came more frequently when she thought of him there--were they reading the future? Dreading it, or finding more comfort than she was comfortable with? Or better yet: fuck him/it/everything--maybe she was just crashing. Jesus knew she had every excuse to be tired after twelve straight days of fine-tuned, screaming stress levels. And every right to let him wait.
She remembered the confusion especially well. Again, finding it necessary to stop the thoughts comingcomingcoming--to listen and pay mind to her body, in a way she'd once taken for granted. [She wanted to see stars not but for the darkness, but brightly lit of their very own accord. No comparisons; no relief--just boundless gratitude to be there to see.] Ready or not, she told herself futilely consoling--here we go, dearest.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/14/09)
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On trying to get The Secret Life of Bees to play for me...
Loaded up with some coffee and lemon water, feeling nothing like a watered-down dream. I hope for the definition of 'best' to come soon. Feeling good and necessary, writing words like their good lives depended on it, and I know. Mugs so satisfying, painted on with gala apple-likenesses. I realize, if I called my parents right now, chances are that they'd take my call. At least to call me back. What an unseen Blessing, this little thing swears itself to! What if my parents were unknown to me? What if I didn't have any at all? (And never knew the difference?) Still, I go days and weeks at a time, never worrying much myself about it, and daily fail to call...
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/12/09)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/12/09)
"100 telephones shake and ring. One of them's from someone who knew you." -Guillemots
My core muscles are burning out the breath from my lungs, like the flash-pyrotechnic game of pistons. My dog's ace bandaged back leg jumps up before she does every time she tries to arise, cuz she can tell it's wrong, doesn't belong. Hungover from an evening spent with poets--feminine like something sacred, and sharing like their creations don't belong to them at all. Like possession is a thing imagined, barely recalled of an uncomfortable dream from the night before. So that now my night before was a dream best remembered?
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/8/09)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/8/09)
Faretheewell folk...
I heard this tonight: "Worse than being hit, worse than being molested, worse than being lied to, is to not feel credible: when nobody believes you." My stomach tightened when I heard it, and my eyelids began to burn. I listened to the woman that said this to me as hard as I could, trying like hell to take it to heart--trying not to say a word. I had heard her voice crack when she said this to me, and then I heard it solidify again as she proceeded to take her stark revelation and churn it through the structure of her mind. Organizing it in her thoughts. Explaining it away again.
I know that when we say things like this they feel hyper-real through their confession, but that their reality fades and flows with our proximity to their context. But even knowing that she would forget the power her own words had on her, and on me too, I couldn't let them go. I didn't want to. I wanted to hold onto their stinging power as though it were truth, simply. I wanted to take that representative truth along with me, through the colors of my days and nights. I wanted to hold it up to other truths, to look at it again and again through the lenses of separate experiences, and the feelings that are foreign to its understanding of the world. I wanted to compare, organize, and double-check so that I too could be willing and able to explain it back, and keep it at bay.
Cuz you know what? That shouldn't be fucking true, even though it is.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/5/09)
I know that when we say things like this they feel hyper-real through their confession, but that their reality fades and flows with our proximity to their context. But even knowing that she would forget the power her own words had on her, and on me too, I couldn't let them go. I didn't want to. I wanted to hold onto their stinging power as though it were truth, simply. I wanted to take that representative truth along with me, through the colors of my days and nights. I wanted to hold it up to other truths, to look at it again and again through the lenses of separate experiences, and the feelings that are foreign to its understanding of the world. I wanted to compare, organize, and double-check so that I too could be willing and able to explain it back, and keep it at bay.
Cuz you know what? That shouldn't be fucking true, even though it is.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/5/09)
"This was back in '92. She was like, 'Do I look sexy?' And I was like, 'Well yeah, you're fucking hot." -Renegade announcer over megaphone.
If you stop haunting me, I'll stop writing these damn things. But we only ever come close. "It's not optimism," she said, "it's self-preservation." 'Displacement' is the ability to talk about something not currently present. As I'm displaced by you? In honor of Aristotle then!, and On Marvelous Things Heard: tonight we heard some marvelous things indeed. Nothing like a poetry slam in a cramped one-room bar!:
Sincerity comes reluctantly with explanations in it's mouth, in this, the wake of secrecy.
Your hands tend to the unspoken for, their touch, an intrusion upon shame.
With a voice descending the depths of disillusionment,
still your hands return, having never learned the difference.
Such a thing not even read, though it's just as well. Beautiful words, formulated for to break predictions into tiny pieces, move me to the point of an absent smile that lasts the night, which might carry me to sleep in peace. But they run the risk of addiction too--not sleeping when I lay my head down, but bound to the books that come close. "Great Scott!" (But not quite that yet either, hey? And anyway...)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/2/09)
Sincerity comes reluctantly with explanations in it's mouth, in this, the wake of secrecy.
Your hands tend to the unspoken for, their touch, an intrusion upon shame.
With a voice descending the depths of disillusionment,
still your hands return, having never learned the difference.
Such a thing not even read, though it's just as well. Beautiful words, formulated for to break predictions into tiny pieces, move me to the point of an absent smile that lasts the night, which might carry me to sleep in peace. But they run the risk of addiction too--not sleeping when I lay my head down, but bound to the books that come close. "Great Scott!" (But not quite that yet either, hey? And anyway...)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/2/09)
"Blue would still be blue."
Such a mess! I'm not even sure all what, just that it's all bad. Just got my LSAT score back today and guess what happened--it indicates that I'm just exactly as average as I would have thought. Such a bummer. I was aiming low too! I was like, "Okay, see here universe, let me have at least a score of *blank*, and I'll be satisfied. I don't need to be no superstar, but seriously, at least a fucking *blank*, k?" Well shucks, just about missed that there target by 10 freakin' points! And on a sliding scale of 120 to 180, there's a whole lot of room for disappointment from one to ten.
But what? What's such a mess as all that? Come on now, girlfriend, even before you took the ridiculous test, you'd all but convinced yourself it was pointless. Not because you had such an unrealistically low estimation of yourself, but because you knew you couldn't choose to go through law school anyway, if it meant turning down the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. So where's really the issue? Well, the fucking issue is that so far I don't know if I'll get into either program, so to have it be such a suddenly fat chance that I'll get into the one, less preferable option, means that I'm riding way heavy on the hope of the other. God, I hate that feeling. The one of insecure expectation, where you know you're more invested than you ever meant to let yourself be...
And then there's the mean time. Right now. Sitting cross-legged on an upside down painted-metal trash can, finally writing something other than excuses for why I'm barely writing at all these days. When it comes right down to it, right now, while listening to Guillemots' Sao Paulo without having any idea how the song is suddenly almost over, I want to be able to believe in the fail-safes I've built up throughout this process of subscribing myself wholly to an abstract and finite amount of possible futures for myself. I have no idea what all the fuck is going to happen in my lifetime. And honestly, at some point I learned how not to take issue with this fact in the slightest. What throws me off is when I put some stupid specific expectation out there on the real world--somewhere out there outside of myself, where I have little to no say on how things are unfolding. So really, I should just quit guessing my way into cheap misery--or at the very least, get back to guessing myself out of it.
Whatever. Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/27/09)
But what? What's such a mess as all that? Come on now, girlfriend, even before you took the ridiculous test, you'd all but convinced yourself it was pointless. Not because you had such an unrealistically low estimation of yourself, but because you knew you couldn't choose to go through law school anyway, if it meant turning down the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. So where's really the issue? Well, the fucking issue is that so far I don't know if I'll get into either program, so to have it be such a suddenly fat chance that I'll get into the one, less preferable option, means that I'm riding way heavy on the hope of the other. God, I hate that feeling. The one of insecure expectation, where you know you're more invested than you ever meant to let yourself be...
And then there's the mean time. Right now. Sitting cross-legged on an upside down painted-metal trash can, finally writing something other than excuses for why I'm barely writing at all these days. When it comes right down to it, right now, while listening to Guillemots' Sao Paulo without having any idea how the song is suddenly almost over, I want to be able to believe in the fail-safes I've built up throughout this process of subscribing myself wholly to an abstract and finite amount of possible futures for myself. I have no idea what all the fuck is going to happen in my lifetime. And honestly, at some point I learned how not to take issue with this fact in the slightest. What throws me off is when I put some stupid specific expectation out there on the real world--somewhere out there outside of myself, where I have little to no say on how things are unfolding. So really, I should just quit guessing my way into cheap misery--or at the very least, get back to guessing myself out of it.
Whatever. Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/27/09)
"And he would go to picture galleries they said and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not." -Woolf
What is this? "Promises kept" that are our lives perhaps--unduly given? [Think of the steps in between...how we take them the same, as is our existence this equivalent.] "Narrowing" like guarded eyes, but with breath ever thinning down to our given finitude. Unawaiting any acknowledgment.
[How the fuck do you express a tree?! Happiness like a concrete picket fence?]
Walking past a house today & I saw that the front door was open. From the street the TV was in view. It was showing a commercial for the truck that was parked in the driveway.
"I make my kids read the Declaration of Independence every night." [Weed-ridden footpaths and bike trail unbeaten, tease out parallels unrealized alone.]
Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/19/09)
[How the fuck do you express a tree?! Happiness like a concrete picket fence?]
Walking past a house today & I saw that the front door was open. From the street the TV was in view. It was showing a commercial for the truck that was parked in the driveway.
"I make my kids read the Declaration of Independence every night." [Weed-ridden footpaths and bike trail unbeaten, tease out parallels unrealized alone.]
Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/19/09)
For when the gu zheng rings a holy sound...
The state of this space rings with content. Rain falls light and clangy. Jasmine invading the apricot tree, symbiotic and welcome in the winds of this season. Days later, only a moment has passed. To look out, the sky as dark; the wind as howling; the black striped yellow streets wet. For a small time only, the sounds make no difference. They sound like sleep-preparations. They sound like timelessness, every night pretending itself the same as each come before, each following after. Innocent like silky curtains, fluttering in the wintry glow of a companion. Almost quite forgotten; the float of anticipation, not promising tomorrow.
Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/15/09)
Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (2/15/09)
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