ink for ink

That was quite an entrance, how you made her turn her head. Your eyes say it all, I’m sorry I’m stalling. You were lovely about it, how I played with my dress, thinking about her move towards your bed. I’m not that speed, there’s things I won’t try, but wild horses keep passing me by. Good morning, sweet malfunction, with that way you hold me close. There’s an aching in my body where your boredom used to go. Wild horses, that’s what you played me when I found you lost that day. Sweet religion, with its kisses, like a life I used to know. And even still, I find this all a bit daunting to say. I would be sorry that I’m laughing, but your sweetness was too slow. And now I look right at you and I think I see her need. What world could you have given me? Like a life I used to know.

The water’s not receding but he’s talking on the phone, telling her to get it right, to learn to be alone. Good morning, sweet abduction, with that guitar in your hand. There’s an aching in my body for our flooded promised land. Keep it coming, all that water, wild water in the sea. Even guitars sink in water, but I’m laughing at your kisses, at the horses that you sang about when you still sang to me.

I never believed in phantom limb syndrome until it happened to me. It was about two weeks after you left. I woke up and the air was cold and the light was rather gray coming in through the window, the curtain lazily half-drawn across it because I haven’t bothered to touch it in some time. I opened my eyes and had this incredible overwhelming feeling. I could not quite explain it to myself, but I was fairly, almost physically certain that there was the most familiar warmth in the world next to me, captured by the rumpled sheets, splayed out over the whole of the far too tiny bed. I could almost smell you, that earthy, cinnamon scent that was as constant as your green eyes or your breath. I woke up and felt not that it was the past, when you were still here, but that the sensation I had acquired over the past five years had revisited me. I had learned to wake up next to you. The body, I discovered, takes a great deal of time unlearning something as natural and embedded as that.

When I rolled over, I was not disappointed, for I knew that you wouldn’t be there. I have many noteworthy flaws, but a penchant for denial has never been one of them. Even during those first strange days, I was not disillusioned about our situation. Even when I saw you go, I felt the finality of the moment and knew that you were never coming back. But when I rolled over and saw that empty space, everything that was absent cloyed at me, and I almost felt haunted. I had grown so happily accustomed to wild curls of copper hair smoothed against a pronounced collarbone, the sleep-induced twitching of fingers, the rise of breasts against a sheer white shirt illuminated by morning light. Instead, on this morning, I saw the bedside table you always said you hated but I knew you secretly loved, and I saw the god-awful water rings practically lit up like neon because of the early morning glow. You constantly complained about the water rings, and I never really saw them, and what I did see I was hardly bothered by. But now I saw them. They were next to the framed postcard of that painting you love, that one of the redhead with the rose. And next to that was a half-drunk glass of water from some unknown amount of nights ago. I grimaced imaging how warm and flat it must taste now.

Everything is dull without you. Getting out of bed, for instance – I can do the act, I’m not some melodramatic prick, but as I put my feet to the floor, I realize that this is all that will happen. You will not moan and wrap your arms around my waist and murmur sleepily that if I stay in bed, that means you can stay in bed. You did that more mornings than you didn’t. I always kind of mused that you didn’t like the feeling of being left, even in a comfortable bed, even when I was just going to the bathroom eight feet away. Ironic, really. I think if the circumstances were different and you were in my position, you would hate the way I felt that morning. I shuffled around the cold room, rubbing at my arms, searching for my glasses amid all the discarded clothes and useless clutter. It was frightfully normal, all because I sensed that you were behind me, burying your face into the pillow, leaving little trails of mascara along the innocent white pillowcase.

Do you remember what you told me the first time I came to your apartment on Julian Street? I commented on how warm and comfortable you had made such a small space, and you looked around a little nervously and said that after your parents split up, your house turned into a mausoleum. You didn’t say it, but I could see in your eyes that that was such a pronounced fear of yours. Well, now you’re not here, and this house that we loved so much is a fucking mausoleum. Whole parts have been neglected. I walk past things like they’re not even there. I’m always here in the evenings, but I feel like I’ve been avoiding so much of it, like I’m living as little life as possible in my own goddamn house. I don’t like to walk and make the floorboards creek, because that means I’ve invested too much in the step, walked somewhere with too much purpose. I don’t like turning on lights if I don’t absolutely have to. I don’t make the bed or shut drawers or bring my shit in from the dining room where I leave it when I come home from work. The oddest part of it really is that I don’t feel like I’m behaving so differently, even though I know that every day something little changes. Something else in this sad house adapts to your absence, and I just go along with it.

This really is a sad house, and even a few months ago, when our problems started becoming bigger and less easy to ignore, I could not fathom ever thinking that about this place. This is our house. We made our whole lives here. We moved out of the city to be in this funny little place, to be together and make messes and have sex and dance deliriously until three in the morning. We were brave here together, and now I move from room to room like I’m walking through the sad remains of someone else’s life. The air never seems to get warmer. I have a feeling that even in the springtime, this house will still be cold. The floors will be uninviting. The sheets will be uncomfortable. That’s the sort of thing that happens when magic runs out.

Sometimes, when I’m really feeling it, how you aren’t here and how I have totally and completely lost you – you, who made up the bulk of my existence – I think of all the things we planned, our stupid little dreams that we set free at night, lying next to each other in the dark. I think of how much we wanted to see what our baby would look like. It was something you loved to wonder about, so frothily going on and on like a little girl, so when you suddenly got quiet, I knew that you were imagining the sound of the baby crying in the next room. I could feel your hands clench and I knew that you were thinking about how it would feel to hold him in your arms, knowing he was yours, was ours. I sit alone now and think, what the hell was I so scared of? Why didn’t I just do it? Why didn’t I have a baby with you and give you everything you ever wanted? Some people worry so much that something like that will ruin everything, but I could never use that excuse because I knew that with us, our lives would only become more enriched. We always wanted to make everything so full, and usually we did. And now I live in an empty house.

Right before I go to sleep, I always think of the same image. At first it was a conscious thing, but now it slips in right before I’m gone, no matter what I was thinking about beforehand. I see you walking across the lawn, your back to me, your bare legs striding angrily away from the house. I’m watching from kitchen window like I’m seeing a stranger leave another stranger. I see you at this defining moment in both of our lives, and I have this sobering moment of clarity that allows me to understand how incredibly brave you are. You didn’t have to leave. You could have made the most of something that, despite your best efforts, was not making anyone happy. You could have even made me leave and kept the house for yourself. Instead, you marched off, heartbroken, confused, scared, hurt. You proved in that terrible moment why I love you as heart wrenchingly much as I do. You certainly did not know what was going to happen next, but you walked off ahead of the storm of destruction that was coming for the beautiful, delicate life we had constructed together. You didn’t even look back.

You are my silhouette, my far regret, that taste that breaks with tang and tart, and every morning there you are, a smile like a piece of sun, and there you are, a foolish choice for days to come. You wake me just to say it’s fine, I’m gonna let you down this time, so here’s the dust and rust and babe, I’m gonna let you down today, so go to sleep and think me good, a gentleman, a Robin Hood. You take a step, you jump across, and every time I watch you go, and every time I breathe you know, so no more church and no more steeple, a whistle from a train is singing, and the longer that I watch these people, the more I am convinced this rush won’t slow. It’s not something I wore around or slipped beneath my covers, but I feel it like fever how it’s coming on like thunder, and I tried to tell the others, but it seems that that’s a song they’ll never know. And I’m walking, maybe waiting – I never got that straight – just keeping pounding on the pavement until your skin starts separating. Night is calling, but it bores me, so I’ll walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, but it’s oh so devastating to see the planets in your lashes and then willingly let go.

One more promise, one more wrestle, more than restlessness tonight, but I swallow and I feel it, how no one has ever done this. You can call it calculation, but me I’ll call it special, oh so special, more than ever, it’s the thing I should have done before I ever really knew how mindlessly I’d search the waves for you.

When I woke up this morning, there was a steadiness that flowed out of me and touched ever so sweetly everything I saw. But by nightfall, I had become disenchanted. I suppose that that is because we are all pretty little illusions, and illusions give themselves hell each and every day.

I rake my fingers through my hair and smudge the black make-up coagulating in my lower lashes. I run my tongue over my teeth. I scratch an itch through the thinning layer of denim that clings to my calve. Everything hangs to me these days, every little word, every choice. Less and less of it, I am finding, is the sweet things, all that perfumes my hours, and more and more is all the awful that I would choose to forget. When you are no longer a child but certainly not an adult, your rudeness just kind of infects you and transforms you into some other gross being that you know, somewhere deep inside, will one day be cured away by the world. But when you are emerging into adulthood, all lopsided and swearing as you go, you discover that your rudeness has solidified somewhere, and you spend half your time trying to rid yourself of it, and the other half using it as easily and thoughtlessly as your lungs.

You watch shadows grow out of objects waiting patiently all around you. Time is passing. You can hear yourself say how precious time is, how it breaks in your hands without it being any fault of your own, but still you cannot make yourself move. You want – almost crave, oddly enough – the sound of music, but you cannot think of a song that will match your mood exactly. It is the kind of mood, after all, that needs perfect noise for company. You wish you were creative enough to harness that elusive little beam of time and use it to make your own music, but you know that even if you possessed that kind of talent, you would not know what to say, how to exactly put the thing.

That, I have noticed, is the true hallmark of slipping from one illusion to a more grown one. You feel more things at once than you ever previously believed was possible, but there is no way that would express it so that your mind would finally be set at ease. You are clumsy and not as eloquent as you think you are. You have seen too many movies, so you have been conditioned to believe that when the moment arrives, you will rise to the occasion, the gods will smile, your peers will approve, and the world will pause to accept you into the awesome rigor of its spinning because you will have finally understood yourself. And that means something.

No. I am disenchanted, and so are you, because we think it means everything.

I’m obsessed with seeing how much of a mess I can make with myself and still say that I care for the beauty of it all. How much dark I can set on fire and masquerade as light. I want everything in me to make sense at the end of the day even though I have wrecked it shamelessly. And when I create an edge for myself and approach it, I wonder what I am doing, and why I am doing it, and what exactly it is going to prove. I think fantastic things and wonder who else thinks them. I feel utterly alone as well as a part of something titanic smothering me in an embrace that is well intended but too tight and too sudden. The world I once thought was mine and still pretend is belongs to someone else who doesn’t know me, who could not pick my face out in a crowd, who would not save me from a fire. Maybe it is because, far too often, I set the fire myself and held still, holding my breath for ransom.

Things these days come like kisses, ones that I give because I want to but I do not feel are quite deserved. They aren’t as good as I imagined. They don’t mean the things they say they do. It’s all in pieces, all this love I meant to give, and everywhere I turn, I find another place to hide only to realize I do not fit there. And so I keep on as if I am whole, though I can feel with each step across the shattered glass that the wholeness I feign is sickening. It is not the person I wish to be, who I believe I am, somewhere underneath the waves inside, crashing and retreating and burying, constantly burying.

There is a sainthood in an abyss you create yourself.

Here is a secret I wish you to hear
Here is the thing that will swim in your ear
And drown all you thought was the good of my heart
Drink it in deep like the last of the summer:

I heard you at morning and followed your call
I found you at noontime and loved what I saw
But there in my web, by the moon, in my bed
I smiled to find we don’t know one another

I can’t remember where it saw it the other day, that bright flash of deep, American red, but one quick look was all it took. Out came the memory, like a forgotten soldier called unexpectedly out from the back formations up to the frontlines. I was overwhelmed by its presence instantly, taken by surprise, maybe even attack, really, if you account for the abrupt barrage of emotions that overtook me. Anguish, excitement, comfort, nervousness, elation. Everything you are supposed to feel when you are young and the look in a handsome man’s eyes brings light into a place you had never noticed until that moment was cloaked in darkness.

I had fussy curls I struggled so intently to pin tight so that, when some stray light hit them, I might look like a movie star. I sucked in my tiny mound of baby fat so my belted blue dress, the softest cotton I had ever gripped between my fingers, would make me look womanly. I had never cared how much I looked like a child before, but now I was obsessed. I ransacked my mother’s bunker of make-up, trying an endless lineup of products that might downplay my freckles. My freckles! How many times had I been told that I looked like a happy little book character, Heidi or Pollyanna, or maybe even Anne of Green Gables? It had always been taken as the sweetest of compliments; now it turned sour, sickening my stomach like an overabundance of sticky candy I was eager to purge myself of. I wanted to emerge from the shadows as Ingrid Bergman, not Pippi Longstocking. My frantic, teenage logic told me that perfume might solve that problem. A dab on the neck, so that he might linger, helplessly caught in a spell – an illusion I boasted proudly until I came downstairs and my father commented, without looking up from his newspaper, that I smelled like I had fallen into a dunk tank full of attic must.

At least I was wearing heels. High heels, real woman shoes. They were black and so very shiny, like brand new records. I was not sure if I had ever been more proud of anything I owned. Even if my face retained girlishness, my legs would make me a knock out. I still have great legs. After finally convincing my mother that I positively needed the shoes, that yes, they were sensible enough, I practiced walking with them on every piece of household terrain I could find; I did not want to encounter any surprises. Luckily, our carpets were deep, enough so that by the time Friday evening rolled around, I was certain I could make a Christ-like walk across quicksand and never appear like anything less than Grace Kelly.

I tried to distract myself enough so that I didn’t seem like I was waiting for him. I was suddenly immensely interested in liberation for womankind (not yet wise enough to realize that dolling myself up for a boy was not exactly a proper step in the right direction), so I attempted activities that were neither related to the night’s events nor domesticity. I (half-heartedly) read a paragraph or two of a Jack Kerouac book – I can’t remember which one. I composed a few lines of a poem about church bells. I practiced the latest dance moves I had seen on television, moves that were supposedly in fashion in the big city nightclubs, the kinds where soldiers and lounge singers hung out in dark corners. I did anything to dispel the air of anxiety clouding around me. But the moment I caught a glimpse of that red car cruising to a stop in front of my house, I could feel myself explode into a fireworks display of nervous energy. Yet I couldn’t keep from smiling. I could feel sweat break loose just about everywhere and my stomach church with nausea, but my face was lit like a bulb. A boy was here, to see me. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.

Like all boys back then, he thought he was James Dean. Really, he looked more like a polished-up Jimmy Stewart, with big aloof eyes that he wrangled in and kept lowered, like he perpetually had cigarette smoke blowing through his dark lashes. Like he was a rebel without a cause. During my childhood, when I fleetingly thought of love, marriage, and a baby carriage, I pictured a blond-haired, blue-eyed, yes-sir, no-ma’am, quarterback-turned-astronaut. But this was something real. Art was coming back; everyone said so. Boys like him were like living pieces of art come to life, all angst-ridden and turbulent and moody-eyed. He was hardly deferential towards my father, barely nodded towards my mother, all to keep up the appearance really, but I knew instantly that he would be a gentlemen. Chivalry was in its golden years then. We would feign danger together until he brought me back at a wholesome hour, with enough time to drink my milk and say my prayers.

That boy made something of himself, ran some kind of business after he moved out to California – something I remember he told me on our date that he dreamed of doing – had a wife, a couple kids, but died pretty young. Sick, I think. I honestly do not remember him that well, but I remember the curtain-like flutter of my skin when he smiled at me. Used only half of his mouth – practiced. His dimple – natural, unable to be concealed, like my freckles. I remember how he made me feel on that night, in my heels (which I still have, in the back of my closet) and my blue cotton dress. I felt like I was being led through the wood to the other side by a pioneer. I felt like a pioneer. Back then, on the hot vinyl seat of his car, with a heartbreakingly heartsick Elvis crooning in my ear, I thought, with mixed feelings of arrogance and terror, that I was finally old. But I was young. I was coming through to a kind of wonderland, with a red American classic as my rabbit hole.

To the dear, sweet, stinging heat living in every layer of me:

Good morning.

I’m glad that I woke up and felt you stirring, kicking your legs, humming your songs, taking up every breath in me quite selfishly. I’m glad, I swear it. You were there when I opened my eyes and forced my limbs out of submission, and after one harmonious moment of weightlessness, you made me so heavy. I sank further into my pillow, still teetering on the edge of sleep, on the very edge of possibility, but I was awake. I was unable to escape you. With your odd, fancy little combination of patience and persistence, you dueled with your every adversary in the world surrounding me. The dull silver numbers emotionlessly reporting the time seduced me. Another minute, another hour, another handful of breaths that are easy and carefree and are dedicated to nothing but the air itself – but no. You began to sing in me then. The time on the clock did not tantalize you as it does me; you were spurred on by sixty seconds of stillness, followed by a sudden little leap. It all continues, it moves, even in the stillness! The blanket capturing my body heat and fitted to me like a second skin was slightly more difficult to battle. You worked your tricks, though, for soon the blanket adhered too well; I was suddenly, painfully aware that two skins are far more restricting than one. Perhaps you convinced the sun to aid you this morning. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

You are relentless in all things, stubborn in your pursuit of me. This has been a constant in our relationship, you pushing and pulling me, your heat building into a fire that consumes me, with flames that burn me, with smoke that blinds my eyes. It is all alien and familiar at once, like being touched by a lover for the first time – though this all so new, so unique, it is embedded with past, with history, with home. In the recession of those moments, our greatest moments together, when I am left exhausted, that is when I wonder when this dance between us began. When did you come to me? When did I become your host? I do not recall, and when I try, I feel as if I am trying to muster someone else’s memories. The conclusion I come to seems so lackluster and devoid of clarity and understanding, but some days it is all I have: when I was born, all those endless years ago, you were born along with me. You’re much more ancient than I, more looming and important and expansive. You have known so many. You have touched recesses of which I could never even dream, illuminated darkness thought so surely to be impregnable. You have lived on, constantly, consistently, rebelliously. Do I sound dreamy and romantic? Like a moon-eyed little lover boy, distracted by simple stars and calling them firelight. The stuff of myth. I sound too eager to drink in and taste magic. Is it all illusion? Maybe, but it certainly feels so very real when my feet touch the floor, gravity becomes overzealous, and you just sing louder and longer.

It is a new day. Create something that did not exist yesterday. Contribute, and in doing so, save yourself. Redeem yourself. Take your stupid little unoriginal faults and failings and make something wonderful. Just make, and you will breathe easier. You will sleep well tonight. You will think less about money and social obligations and the impression you make on total strangers, and instead you will believe you can fly. You will no longer be caged, if only you get out of bed, rub the sleep from your eyes, and create something. You will fly because you can. Because you must.

When I ignore you, I hurt. My fingers feel bloated with laziness. My eyes seem to absorb nothing of value. My ears hear white noise instead of beautiful music. This morning, when you prodded me and woke me, hell bent on victory, I chose to recall this ache and decided I did not want it. I made a decision. I sat down at my desk, took a refreshingly easy breath, and set about like a train on the tracks, too fast and stubborn and monumental to stop. You relished in your victory, sweet heat, effervescing and sparkling and spinning about with giddy madness, uninhibited like a drunk, delirious like a child. You do not like to be idle, of course, because you shine so brightly when used. And it seems that the more I try to no avail, and distain and critique what I have created, the more you become enchanted with me. Your song, bursting through all of that misused fire, simmers to a whisper and you tell me, “I am infinite. I am meant to be used to a point unrecognizable. Take me, tear me apart, give me a new face, a new body, wreck me countless times, if only to make me perfect once.”

I do not know why you do not burn me when I read about the war, or see the numbers of the stock exchange, or smell raw dough waiting to emerge a full, desirable cookie. I don’t know anything about you, really, as often as you come. I give you residence for whenever you like, ask no questions, demand very little and only in times of frustration. All that I do know is that you lead to blazing new realms of opportunity when you are utilized, like beacons cutting through the fog that so easily and stealthily settles in. You lead to satisfaction, fulfillment. You lead to immorality. You lead to glory. But I believe, most importantly, you lead to freedom. Freedom, sweet and full of danger and power. Secrets you did not know you were keeping unlock. The power is raw. It is terrifying. Darkness and light all combusting together until breath seems impossible – freedom! Not fearing knowing yourself because you cannot create, cannot form some sort of artistic extension of yourself, without opening the shutters and letting all the wreckage in. Letting all the heat out.

You will fly because you can. Because you must.

welcome to ink for ink. we’re not fully up & running yet, but i just wanted to let you know that if you could spread the word about our little project, that’d be superb :)

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

- Anais Nin

thanks so much!

-c