big nostalgic lump

This town is littered with poetic moments and good cases of the giggles and classic costumes and cinematic moments. How does anyone live somewhere their entire life? How do they escape what they cannot forget? Even as I coat my favorite places with new memories, I constantly refresh the creases and folds of the old ones. Summers like these make me introspective as I pass the year in review and acquire enough distance to judge and sort and case and file.

Every now and then I look worse in this light; of late more often than not. It seems my best isn't enough, and in spite of my best efforts, I still manage to drama monger. I don't intend to; I don't want to. I don't know how not to -- by offering support and succor and solace I seem to draw these problematics towards me. I don't have any regrets about my efforts to start always telling the truth, no matter how poorly it frames me. This is reading more like an LJ post than a blog entry -- I suppose old habits die hard. This is what happens when I have no internet first thing in the morning with my coffee.

I wish I had the courage to join you tonight; I don't want to feel like an outsider sneaking in on something that I am no longer a part of, something I perhaps imagined I was a part of. It felt so cozy there, something snuggly and safe [though it proved not to be] but now these sensations feel phantom and fleeting. This ghost life is a struggle day and night to define who I am. My harsh outlines, usually delineated in hard black ink, have been rewritten in smudgy charcoals and now I feel lost without a definition of myself or a plan for my future.

I wish that when you spoke to me your voice wasn't filled with so much glass; it's partly my fault that there are shards there, but it takes two. I want to talk, but I'm afraid of what you will say, where it will hurt me. I feel so fragile, barely functionally together, and I can't afford to fall apart again this month; there's too much left to do. I trusted you as that one person who wouldn't judge me for my sins, but apparently I've figured one out severe enough to upset you [and who would have thought it would be that?]. In fact, I'm not entirely sure how I have sinned against you; that makes it all the worse. I'm doing penance for crimes I didn't know I was committing, crimes of which I have no recollection.

You did know that by abandoning me [again] when he decided he wanted you back, I would have to seek support from someone, somewhere. If you're not happy with how I did that, maybe you shouldn't leave me that alone. For that, I do blame you. With some luck, and a bit of chance, one day soon I'll be able to tell you :
"It hurts everytime you leave me for him; especially since you keep coming back and back when he leaves you, I expect you every time. I miss you when you're gone and wish you were still here with me; I wish there were balance in this swinging, spinning disaster-cycle. One week or month or set of days I see you all the time; we make plans and do everything together. Then, all of a sudden, it's like that never existed; you're never home, I can't make coffee for you in the morning, and there's no one after work to sit and have tea with."

big nostalgic lump

This town is littered with poetic moments and good cases of the giggles and classic costumes and cinematic moments. How does anyone live somewhere their entire life? How do they escape what they cannot forget? Even as I coat my favorite places with new memories, I constantly refresh the creases and folds of the old ones. Summers like these make me introspective as I pass the year in review and acquire enough distance to judge and sort and case and file.

Every now and then I look worse in this light; of late more often than not. It seems my best isn't enough, and in spite of my best efforts, I still manage to drama monger. I don't intend to; I don't want to. I don't know how not to -- by offering support and succor and solace I seem to draw these problematics towards me. I don't have any regrets about my efforts to start always telling the truth, no matter how poorly it frames me. This is reading more like an LJ post than a blog entry -- I suppose old habits die hard. This is what happens when I have no internet first thing in the morning with my coffee.

I wish I had the courage to join you tonight; I don't want to feel like an outsider sneaking in on something that I am no longer a part of, something I perhaps imagined I was a part of. It felt so cozy there, something snuggly and safe [though it proved not to be] but now these sensations feel phantom and fleeting. This ghost life is a struggle day and night to define who I am. My harsh outlines, usually delineated in hard black ink, have been rewritten in smudgy charcoals and now I feel lost without a definition of myself or a plan for my future.

I wish that when you spoke to me your voice wasn't filled with so much glass; it's partly my fault that there are shards there, but it takes two. I want to talk, but I'm afraid of what you will say, where it will hurt me. I feel so fragile, barely functionally together, and I can't afford to fall apart again this month; there's too much left to do. I trusted you as that one person who wouldn't judge me for my sins, but apparently I've figured one out severe enough to upset you [and who would have thought it would be that?]. In fact, I'm not entirely sure how I have sinned against you; that makes it all the worse. I'm doing penance for crimes I didn't know I was committing, crimes of which I have no recollection.

You did know that by abandoning me [again] when he decided he wanted you back, I would have to seek support from someone, somewhere. If you're not happy with how I did that, maybe you shouldn't leave me that alone. For that, I do blame you. With some luck, and a bit of chance, one day soon I'll be able to tell you :
"It hurts everytime you leave me for him; especially since you keep coming back and back when he leaves you, I expect you every time. I miss you when you're gone and wish you were still here with me; I wish there were balance in this swinging, spinning disaster-cycle. One week or month or set of days I see you all the time; we make plans and do everything together. Then, all of a sudden, it's like that never existed; you're never home, I can't make coffee for you in the morning, and there's no one after work to sit and have tea with."

I don't like to talk about you anymore...

...for it fills me with dread that knots my stomach and tightens my muscles. I was so happy, living with you. Now it is only a memory: tainted nostalgia, a heart that aches.

Your tolerance, years long, of all of my bad habits. Your chastising tone. Your critical voice. It resonates within me. I cannot but listen. I have failed you, in more ways than I can count, in more ways than I could know. I deleted you from my contacts list so that I would not call you on mornings like this. I can still dial the number of 2230 from memory. My fingers betray me and will not forget it. I want to drink tea and sit on the back porch as you lounge in the hammock. Homemade limeade.

This morning is grey and tragic. I run from it with vice, bury myself in another cocktail. It only works for a few short hours. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine you from my mind. Even the golden memories are full of shards.

1817 is changed, repainted, elegant and fake. It lacks a certain home-feel it used to have. I walked around it on wet grass in the late of the night with a new friend, told them how it used to look. The colors it used to be. What parts of it I built. What bits of it I remember, from red shag carpet to hand-made cabinets. I cried alone in the dark, looking through the lighted windows. Picking handfulls of daffodils. They dug out the bulbs. Threw them away. Into that dumpster of my memories.

Wearing your clothes, smudged with oil paints. A permanence that I once wished I could have with you. I wish I could make Hami three dinners again, only to feed him on torn shreds of baguette and imported cheese.

Matt Bradford remembers me with your green hair. "When I last saw you, your hair was green," he said, and I laughed, and said, oh yes, how that was so. M&M skirt. LaRiche in pots. Karma records. Running between raindrops. Driving Little Richie. Towel spread on the bathroom floor. Ammonia burning my eyes as I worked dye through your hair. Belle and Sebastian. Hair stoplight lime green. In pigtails, parted down the middle, tucked into little nubs.

My heart pours bad poetry when I think of you.

Because of this...

I was lying on my back in the grass under a tree, talking to you as the neighbors spun poi, lighting up the night sky.

I was catching fireflies as we walked in the dusk, trapping them between my fingers, watching the phosphorence illuminate the lines of my skin.

I am pouring myself another drink, lighting another smoke, singing along to more music that assauges the sliced and frayed edges of my heart.

I am dicing tomatoes, perfectly square, throwing them into a bowl filled with smashed avocado. I do not add onion; I am out of cumin. Salt, mix, eat.

I am forgetting the feel of your shoulders under my hands. I no longer remember how we used to tangle our legs in sleep. The resonance of your voice when it is thick with hookah smoke is a sound that echoes softly only in the halls of my memory.

I picture how your eyes crinkle at the corners when you are drunk and tired. It makes my heart shatter a little, so I do not think of it often.

vocabulary for you all...

Late afternoon, early evening at the 401-1, on the couches, listening to music, hookah going, screwdriver in the left hand, touchpad in the right. Perusing Feministing, and quoting relevant bits to C.

C: You're such a blogophile
K: Is that a word?

Doing a bit of character building; it seems I am my protagonist.

The city and its bright lights had been all she had hoped it could be. After a life sequestered in suburbuia, living in small towns that were suffocating in their communualness, after attempting time and again to explain to her family what it was about the city that called her, she had finally given up, disobeyed family injuctions, and left. The centrality of her upbringing gave her a stability many who had grown up in proximity to cities lacked. Rather than living in a part of a hub she had always been so far separate that cities merely meant looped interstates surrounded by shopping malls and plazas, with the occasional school sponsored foray into museums and art.
The way that a city breathed and lived, the fact that it existed on concrete as an actual entity with a type of mass-consciousness reflected in its structure and inhabitants, that was what she wanted. Not the dull, sleeping awareness one found in suburbuia, where you didn’t talk to your neighbors and the time you spent mowing your lawn was the only time you spent in sun; that terrified her.
To do as the family asked, to marry, and produce the grandchildren, a respectable number only. To follow up those children with a mortgage to be able to host family thanksgivings and christmases without shame, that ring on her finger, telling them all that she lived life in a proper order: first a long term, at least two to three year dating period, wherein he came to family functions and impressed them all with his job, his connections, his good haircut. Next came a year or two of engagement, with all of the requisite joking and story-telling and wedding preparations. Then a Christian, family-oriented wedding with the white dress, the bridesmaids, the little cousin as a flower-girl, and the whole family present.
To follow, perhaps, a series of apartments with him as they built their fortunes and moved up in companies and changed cities, only to settle neatly into suburbia not far from the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There would be the mortgage, the cubicle, the 9 to 5 with standard-length weekends and monotony. Then, and only then, with stability assured, children, preferably two or three, neatly spaced no less than two years apart. This was what they wanted for her; this was the dream future they imagined for her, the assurance of a humdrum life of boredom dedicated to following cable tv and not rocking the boat.
No one understood how that was death to her; that she would sooner die in flames in a forty car pile up on I-80/94 than live that life. They encouraged her to be happy in her job; told her that it was essential that she enjoyed her work; but then disapproved when she chose subject matter to study in university that they didn’t consider practical or useful. She had choice, oh yes, plenty of choice, as long as she could study a profession – pharmacist, architect, accountant – and marry a man who was white.
It was that crushing sense of expectation, of the need to never fail her family that in the end drove her away. It hurt her too much, it caused her a crushing amount of pain. The constant knowledge that she, in doing what made her happy, had failed her family haunted her days and nights. The fact that she was a disappointment no matter her what achievements because they weren’t achievements her family considered important left her empty.
It is its own type of running away, this youthful migration to cities; the excuses one makes for not attending family functions outside of weddings or funerals, the exorbitant cost of travel these days, the slow severing and weakening of ties. The steady march to a painless end to a relationship doomed to be quashed by distance. That, she had perfected. It was all about anesthesizing the part where the pain would be. She had tricks up her sleeve that she’d been using since she was 16; burned when she was 12 by the loss of friends bitter over her absence, she was much more savy by the time she left again. By her twenties she would merely smile at promises of phone calls and letters and care packages; by knowing that they would never come, or would start full force then trickle off, she deflected the pain. She knew that it was not her, that it was no fault of her own that distance killed affection, that abandonment was the deepest fear.