josiane.curtis

fair-weather writer | califoregon photos :: words :: ask :: random :: archive

[nothingnewnews]

[josianecurtis]

LUCY TIVEN // SMALL HANDS /QUARTER 01

[waxenneat]

I mean this very deeply and hope I continue to mean it tomorrow and the next day and the days and years after that.

[sheabutterbitch]

moving away from the ‘success is the best revenge’ ideology as I am realizing that loving myself through my failures is the true way to prove everyone wrong

[olelovold]

Norway, 2016

It was the end of the second day of cycling, about 200 km in. I had just had a large hamburger with fries at a gas station and was making my way up a valley at sunset, when I noticed this white horse standing in a meadow, like something out of a fairy tale. 

[josianecurtis]

Remember on the right night and under the right light any idea can seem like a good one and love love is mostly ill advised but always brave.

Yrsa Daley-Ward

[josianecurtis]

'One day, I watched the sun setting forty-four times,' you told me. And a little later, you added: 'You know... when one is so terribly sad, one loves sunsets...' 'The day you watched those forty-four sunsets, were you that sad?' I asked. But the little prince made no reply. (The Little Prince)

[josianecurtis]

postcard

I'm thinking about you. What else can I say?

The palm trees on the reverse

are a delusion; so is the pink sand.

What we have are the usual

fractured coke bottles and the smell

of backed-up drains, too sweet,

like a mango on the verge

of rot, which we have also.

The air clear sweat, mosquitoes

& their tracks; birds & elusive.

Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there's race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper.

Outside the window they're building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone's crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can't be all bad, but does it? At this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.

Margaret Atwood

[josianecurtis]

How long it will take me to get over this latest heartbreak, I'm not one hundred percent sure. It becomes a lot harder to trust people each time, even though I know it's not them I ever put my faith in, but my own perceptions. I don't want to think that I am incapable of certain things: commitment, prolonged desire, friendship. I think it is more that I don't truly know what they mean until I am absorbed in them. Being conscious makes things so difficult. 

Mark Arturo, Stoplight at This Recording

[josianecurtis]

summer annuals

Was that your stomach or mine? is the best feeling imaginable. Full bellies pressed together like dinner plates, licked clean and stacked on the coffee table. The worst: knowing the post-its in his cookbooks mark recipes I won’t ever make. In my wallet, scribbled instructions for roasted artichokes / hearts I’ll consume in another kitchen.

You can train anything. Animals. Trees, their branches sculpted by wind. Hair can be coaxed to bend a certain way even though it is dead – which feels particularly relevant. Tuck here, curl there. Effort becomes habit becomes involuntary. He was effortless from the start, a story I dreamed up that came true. But if he exists, so does someone else. I will train my body to fit another.

I wanted us to be a tree, but we were marigold, snapdragon, petunia. We were watermelon dripping down the chin. Maybe it is greedy to think anything so sweet could last longer than a season.

I don’t know what his parents almost named him. We wilted before the ancestry test results came back, and I wonder about the origins of his olive skin. There are more important questions- How did those bodies, happily entwined on the couch, become these, not talking through stomachs or lips. My fingers felt at home on the back of his neck driving from Blue Pool, Seattle, sunburnt after Sauvie Island; when did my touch become a burden? Did he think, even for a second, we were evergreen, or did he know all along?

You can train anything. I will train my heart to fit another. Like leather: fold here, soften there. I will forget all the things about him I never knew.

[notchicken]

[waxenneat]

Decorous lines 088 Excerpt

Imagine thinking you were going to have children with someone, imagine picking the place on the map where you were going to raise them, imagine betting whether they’d have light hair like his, or dark hair like yours, imagine discussing dominant traits and baby curls, and then having them tell you that it was ridiculous. The whole thing (his word, not yours) was ridiculous. Imagine dragging yourself out of your bed and your house and re-entering a world where you know you are supposed to trust again, know you are supposed to love again, know you are supposed to understand it, the thing’s, worth has decreased to no currency, when all you want to do is get on a plane and rent a car and drive to that patch of your country so you can get out and spit on it, just like he has.

Imagine that.

Subscribe

[josianecurtis]

[josianecurtis]

Day 16

This is the first date of the rest of your life.

[josianecurtis]

[josianecurtis]

Day 15

“At least you’re writing again,” more than a couple of people have told me. There is a line in a Derrick Brown poem: All former lovers become blurry lessons. I remember reading it, lifetimes ago, before I had former lovers. I was hungry for those lessons. And now, too many to count, and crystal clear. What did I learn? That I can stop writing for two years, if there is something I know in my core but refuse to say out loud.

[josianecurtis]

Day 14

I can find a metaphor in anything. The way the rain comes and goes without warning. Everyone in my office looks up at the skylight, confused, so sudden is the downpour out of a sky whose blue we basked in moments before. I’ve been sleeping better this week, waking up refreshed, grateful maybe, something less than devastated. When a friend touches my arm, says, “How are you?,”  I can answer as if she didn’t just lower her voice to ask, head tilted with concern. Two years from now, we will have broken up two years and two weeks ago.

I can find a metaphor in anything. It’s spring. I’m not going to say something about new beginnings, or the cherry blossoms. Here’s what I will say: everyone I know is having a baby, and the rain comes and goes without warning, but each bout is shorter than the last. Little by little, the blue stretches longer between the grey.

[josianecurtis]

Day 12

It is the right thing. It is the right thing. It is the right thing.

It is for the best. It is for the best. It is for the best.

This break-up has made a broken record out of me.

A few mantras, of many.

Another: You can lead a horse to water…

It’s not the worst thing in the world to give someone you love the benefit of the doubt. It’s also not the safest.

I wish him the best.

No. I want to mean that and I probably will, someday down the road,

but right now that one is less a mantra, more a lie.