SHELLSHOCKED

Two days ago, on October 10^th, 2010 (10/10/10...), my little sister was killed in a car crash.

Today, right now, I'm sitting on an airplane heading from Costa Rica to LAX—after taking a boat to a bus to this airplane's flight—flying back on our fourth day here to be with my family there. Mike is with me, and he's right when he says, “It comes in waves, baby...”

Katie...dead. Katie. Dead. The words don't make sense together. They're opposites. Enemies. Utterly in conflict. She is so full of life! Capability! Color! She has an infinite number of connections with the world, and the loose ends are innumerable and impossible to tie up in her absence. It's the ultimate Heidegger metaphor: her life makes no sense without her to live it.

It's senseless. All of it. Her condo, her job, her dog... Her family, now without its baby girl. Down one sister—forever out of balance; jagged and uneven to see. My mom had all those boys just to get herself two daughters, she always said. Katie always knew from the beginning that she was the only irreplaceable one of all of us. She always used to tell my mom, “I'm glad you had five kids, because I would have been so sad and lonely without my big brothers and sister!” Katie was sure that she'd been in the womb throughout each of our births, having arrived first but deciding to stay a while. She'd say she kicked each one of us out until she had the whole spacious place to herself again, just so that she could stretch out a bit longer...

I remember her in the womb. She's the only one I remember. Maybe my earliest of memories. I assured my mom she would be a little girl, because I'd heard a high-pitched squeak when I put my ear to her belly. I was sure, even at age four, that my baby sister was finally on her way to me. To us. And there's no preparation possible to accept that she'd be on her way back out so soon.

When I read and saw 'My Sister's Keeper', I sobbed longer and harder than any book or movie had ever made me cry before. And in the last two days, I've shed more tears than all the tears in my life meshed together, flooding my body with still lifes of her: Her hair. Her huge, blue eyes, always framed with black eyeliner, to shrink them for no reason at all. Her heart-shaped smile. Her freckled cheeks and arms and legs, lightly sprinkling their inconstant color. How I used to stare at those little freckles while wishing so hard for her to find a person that would memorize each lovely spot on her body. Who would make her feel as beautiful as she is. Was. Will always be to me.

Oh god, her tattoos!! Her perfect closet of shoes! And to know that with the gift of Katie's body, nine strangers continue to live...but none so beautiful as she.

-L (10/12/10)

Time for a kinda conversation?

Stop fucking around. This is it: yours. When were you ever mistaken until now? (But this is just the framework, fancied up.)

It's when shoving through the ocean during winter sounds like a good idea that you know you might be getting somewhere, but charging through the rain with a pit bull gets you noticed. It's when you fill your head with the most cunning self-deprecation imaginable for to disappear the irrational smile that still stays. It's how the things you do, have to have never been done exactly before, so that you can disregard anyone else's silly glance. It's sitting in a computer lab at 2am with your hood pulled over your face to keep your grin your own--and you know your eyes would show at least that they're holding something back.

How completely is my desire for you, simply mine? How compelling this thought is... But it isn't good enough yet. We've gotta make it into something--something maybe magnificently important.

(He's walking. Where's he walking to? He's in the forest. Is he with someone? Alone? Of course he's alone. And he's barefoot. His shoes are in his backpack and his feet hurt, but he's glad of it...)

The stones that had settled into dents on the bottom of his feet keep others from their intended invasion. Not that the pain differentiates this for him, he who would have felt either sentence sufficient. Presently, he mumbles to himself:

“It's not true, you know, don't pretend you don't. You know what's real, no matter how much you think you should forget...” He won't let his feet bleed. “Poetry's not good enough this time. There needs to be something more than words, but you have to bear it there beyond them. Just don't forget the taste in your mouth right now.”

(I want to pinpoint this. I want to describe everything; it's all very important, if only because it's not that at all. But it's all here: the wrong necklace; the insistent smile; the unlived memory of sex; the smell of polluted sea on skin; the split-ends in honeyed hues; the disregarded fingertips; the dampness. What are we to do with all of it?)

“Who else knows what it's like, not to be waited for?” He needs to eat something but he has no wish to subdue his body's complaints. It seems to him obscene, or at least inconsiderate, pausing to satisfy such things: it doesn't matter where he's going—what right has he to stop?

How can it be untrue, and still this real? What if you knew me? What would your opinion look like?

(How does one write of solitude for someone else to understand? How much is it true!? Can I ask that? A case of compliment, not substitute. Making head-way...? This is called inspiration!? Good riddance.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (From long, long ago...)

The avoidance of Rios v. Daisy...

Get this: he told me we can define time. Manipulate its movements -- slow it down if we don't speed it up. He said it was a matter of focus; he said all we had to do was notice. How the light glances off the tinfoil morning and throws itself into a handful of his hair. How the moment hasn't a chance at courting your memory when one at a time you keep your gaze shifted-internal. And the yawns keep coming despite the fact that all you can feel is the heat on the base of your neck as you look down...no matter how grateful you are that it's there.

The anarchists stretch out like a squirrel sitting up, and all are at your door. Old flames speak in tongues while the one that you love patiently awaits your return. So much seems to hang in this precarious balance... And still the sun blazes on having only just learned how to thaw the frost that chokes on the soil.

Always better in person. The phone line drags my voice a few thousand miles away, and it sounds weary by the time it lands at your doorstep. Still, you let it inside again. Talk this tired taxes, just passing through my lips -- and even my tongue knows itself utterly unlikely whenever it claims anything at all; always it misses the meaning beneath these dangling words' silences. But such things matter only in person.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (5/5/10)

Like pigeons in love.

Always that unknown. Like trying to recollect; to pay mind to the thoughts that came before, and trying not to lose them. Always that fear that the next won't come so rightly; that all you thought you had can't be had at all. That this time won't be so different.

"DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?!!!" Heard it screamed out in the hall. (Bullshit!) Using a word like 'love' doesn't make him any less filled with hate. Violence creeps through the spaces between his words; between the holes in the letters; on either side of each breath not taken steady. And then he butchers that barely-breathing belief left stranded between them. The crash of the 'could-have-been's being demolished; the hope for regret a stillborn: purple-lipped with skin like fading bruises. Constant & enraged, his fucked-up curses at top of lungs. Tragedy, utterly pointless.

That the pigeons come back each time, dancing their head-ducking dance. They lock beaks in shameless passion: one purple-gray, one iridescent beige. Red eyes not marked with anger; warnings given with rustled feathers & uptilt of chin. Love and quiet war: the language of nature as we understand it. Self-sabotaged and leading everything toward the furtive killing shed, full of our nameless expectation. Letting it get the better of us; denying it to our grave.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (5/2/2010)

(The day of the changing of fates, easily.)

Passive aggressive tendencies. Uncomfortable. Un-fucking-fortunate, really. The writing on the wall was done in invisible ink, and now everyone's paranoia is unnamed but not undone. Undecided, still it wanders in and out of everyone's eyes, searching for something unknown. Finding it. The idea of the day is the thread that strings the stories together, as though there were one. Knotted something awful, unarguably possible, but hidden beneath the transparent surface of people's pretenses. Pretending not to exist, successfully, still cannot fool the seer of these hidden things.

The writer. Feigning fiction. Somewhere in the back of mind, knows there's no such thing. Stringing the stories together, as if they weren't already. We're suddenly in a familiar place, unknown still for its sudden timing. Here now, accidentally almost. As though we believed in accidents. The bike with the missing front tire, tied up two feet away; the sound of the typing echoing unkempt and reminding of how to type, always just one more key; the needed time to be extra, to feel as though on top of expectations, as though not already all bonus; nonsense written down and given voice, filling in the confusion with forced--with forced understanding, somehow now coming naturally. Gray warmth tickling the bottoms of feet, partly calloused, partially tender as ripened plums or palms. Where are the stories if not everywhere?

Think of the names of the folks who'd dare disapprove. Then don't think of them at all anymore, taking their power decisively because they never had any over you at all. Looking around at the stories: nude watercolor painting, whose?  That triumvirate: model; artist; financier.  Who the truer devotee?  Projects left unfinished or awaiting invocation, forming the lines of trellis and...and straggling wooden undreamt of dreams. A claypot, not quite home-made, but made-somewhere nonetheless, we realize in the back of our minds. Dying and hanging plants, making home to flourishing weeds, waiting to be promoted into appreciation. Wind chimes, somewhere other than right here, but near enough to merit explanation, & questionable. My heart not two doors down, downing coffee and water in search of balance in more ways than one. His shoes, having walked him so far and long and hard, they wear holes like a warrior wears battle-scars, presenting them with the glory of not overcoming, but ever defiantly so. Where do they go from here? Not much use for the fate they let befall them, so up in the closeted shelf at best; out in the covered garbage can at worst. Still journeying, just now to a fate chosen for them. No matter, because how is the difference discerned anyway? "There certainly are parallels, aren't there? But then again, all of existence could be one big coincidence..."

That invisible thread again, something stringing along, sometimes pulling us with the weight of every fate found accompanying. Accidental? Turns out not left to interpretation at all, when suddenly meaning definitively departs. Close the door behind, double-lock with the strength of irony and conveniently forget the indifference of flame. Tendencies: passive as faith pretends to pretend; aggressive as we are not. At our best. At our worst. In line with the whim of translation and depending upon the best guess at situation. Never emergency circumstances except when hit with the dullness of moments, succumbing to this halting description. Really, it never stood a chance--anymore than these words did to explain. Something? Whatever the fuck was meant by them. And nope, we never gave a shit anyway. Here now, or so we're thinking--and who could ask for more? ('Not I!,' said the cooling coffee cup; 'nor I!', said the bursting bladder.) "Full as a day is with sun, on a day not so gray as today." As we say.

Faretheewell folks,
-Talthea (4/24/10)

The Book of Undone...

Don't you know half the best stuff your life's memory has to offer will be cut? Your mind might edit it out a week of dingy life later, or even chunk-fashion with a bout of amnesia, lobotomy-style, some time in your early seventies. The trick of time may be to ignore it, then, or to avoid it like the plague. 'Cuz the secret sense of security it plays out to give you now? When it fades it takes the best stuff away with it anyway.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/5/10)

Solitary company living at an arms-length reach.

Keeping watch on the sunset beads, tricking out the minute creep of another evening's horizon (line). The landscape swifts by me, shifting shape and color before our uniformity. Sketch of darkness still unremembered by the lake-front shores beneath Scott's Bookstore, not bound for our Seattle. No underground cities here, no. No mystery save that of a fallen night's moonless sky, shining of its own accord.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/31/10)

Frequent dragon serpents, secreted away on crimson support beams.

Flit frightful underground, fret falling through the floorboards atop the vast (expectation of) below. Stay low and be hollowed of all air when the fire comes a-raging. Feel its gentry wind of breath whisper conspiratorially against the eavesdrop of your neck. (Don't tell me where we're going.)

"Frequenting dragons temper, my light is the light of a door as the wind and rain create stained glass on my heart!" (-M. at the drop of a line, sagely.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/30/10)