"i have to start getting up earlier to cry with you," he said.
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@secretsacredthings-blog
"i have to start getting up earlier to cry with you," he said.
last night i dreamt that you asked me to marry you. you gave me a ring while we were together in a large, white room. i was almost expecting it, the moment before you simply reached out your hand with it there on your palm. it was thin and silver, the band not flat on the inside to sit against the skin but instead flat the other way round, so it stood away from the finger. there were two diamonds: one where it might normally be found and the other a small chip opposite that, placed on the inside of the band to press into the flesh at the fold of my finger. in my dream i could feel it there, its insistent reminder of you. i didn’t need to say yes for you to know.
i woke to cold, solitary sheets. your heart in a pain you never quite understand. sometimes i think that i, that my love, has helped and yet the pain is transferred to another place in you. maybe it is like you say, inevitably your nature, but the nature of me is to hope harder against it. it wears on me, when i am raw and sensitive, overstressed, waking in the increasing dark of fall mornings alone. it digs into the soft folds of my hope.
tell me something worth it and attainable because the values i uphold as most important in life feel continuously denied to me.
lately my dreams push their way to the forefront of my mind, insisting they be remembered. i wake to the beep and crash of nearby construction vehicles, my sheets twisted violently out of place.
work is difficult enough that i simply shut my brain off once i leave for home, food and recreation secondary, nodding out with all the lights on.
birthday prayer
found today, unearthed from the depths of my typewriter, a wish no less applicable and potent now than whenever i wrote it however many birthdays ago:
i have lived through this year and if i have to live through another, as it seems i will, let me live it with intention: with wild spirit and raucous energy, radical kindness and deepest love, passion, fire, ambition, solemnity, with the attention that it so deserves.
my dad never called to wish me a happy birthday
the one thing that most keeps me from killing myself:
death goes on forever. at least pain's got breaks.
the city
i am likely foolish, to think i will ever escape. she has been there my whole life, waiting, always in my periphery, a question. the only question, really. collapsing spiral, and i fall closer, never realizing i didn't really had a choice. she'd set her trap from the very beginning.
animal allure: bright, voluptuous sex, yet still cultural; no one as intellectual, as artistic, as effortlessly cool as she will forever remain.
i fear her, rightfully. she will poison me, my poor introverted person lost to her: a shell of my former self. at my lowest and most desperate i succumb to her, only to fall deeper than i have ever known before.
drought
she inspects herself anew, all these unfamiliar mirrors reflecting back an image that...well somehow she thought she used to understand. but every day in these new places, under the harsh contrast of this fluorescent lighting; a guest. in bedrooms and hotels and airports, maybe her reflection lightly flickers now, acid-induced drift. thicker around the middle. ruddy in the face and the body. so pale as to be almost green. dark circles under her eyes. so self-reflective, yet so unaware. how pitiful she looks there.
she is driving in a car not her own. a sunset route through the mountains she'd never quite conceived of properly before, the light thrown starkly against the dusty hillsides, the dry orange ground visible through bleached skeletal underbrush. on all sides she is surrounded by others, encased in their individual metal boxes, signaling out to each other, flashing their rhythmic lights like fireflies in the dusk. tick, tick, tick. they school down the valley road. moving in the same direction, yet entirely alone.
this city is a place for the perpetually lonely. the chronically single. here, the ranks of online daters, never moving beyond chatting over coffee. maybe they once believed that love exists, in some form, but they're so far removed from it now that they're no longer sure they would recognize what it looked like.
nobody ever moves here expecting to stay. it feels like a safe waypoint, somewhere between academia and some expectant real life to come. poor college-educated creatives who come for the culture and cheap warehouse space. and yet it sinks its teeth into you like a pit bull; one day in the spring when the tree-lined streets are newly green you wake up and think, "you know i kinda like it here." or worse, you realize maybe this city has just ruined you for anywhere else. not so big as to feel alienating, not so small as to feel boring.
she is assaulted one night after work, while walking to meet some friends for dinner in her neighborhood. mid-november, the night gaining ground upon the days. she is carrying a piece of paper in her hands, and in retrospect will blame herself for this, for her distraction, for walking in between two young boys instead of steering around them, instead of maybe crossing the street. one of the boys says hello to her, so that the other one can slug her right eye.
if they had stolen her bag she might have understood better. but they are off and running just as she comprehends what has happened, hand over her eye, the shock of the jarring pressure of the blow giving way to tears. there is little she can do but continue on to the restaurant, two blocks away. her friends there call the police, but what can she say? two twelve year old boys, wearing a white shirt and a navy track jacket. the officer writing the report simply takes it all down. he does not understand what a track jacket looks like.
the restaurant takes pity on her and donates takeout. her friends escort her back to her empty apartment. they watch a feelgood movie of her choice and she cries some more.
for the next three days she leaves the apartment only once: going to work to show her boss how bad the eye looks, swollen entirely shut, bruised deep purple and jaundice yellow. she knows she ought to document how bad it looks, but she cannot even bring herself to take a photo of it until that third day, the bruise having lightened considerably.
she know loads of people who have taken worse. jumped by roving groups of teens, held up at gun- or knife- point, attacked while on their bicycles. sometimes they want your cellphone or your wallet, sometimes they don't. the city is taut with violence. those with little taking what they can from those with little more.
toughen up
the days get shorter, cooler at night. i feel my body adjusting. the warmth at midday sweaty and oppressive. no longer the bony chill on exiting a shower. somehow this sparks a note of pride in me; maybe i can do this once again.
what is this? is life forever going to be this string of ex-somethings and didn't-work-outs? only ever the spaces between; that wide gap between momentary slivers of wholeness? a nostalgic desire for things to have been different than the way that they went?
maybe it's your fault. you were never manipulative enough to manage to really keep someone around. too nice. never hook them with that gut-felt need. and by the end they see you as empty and vapid, in that happiness you work so hard to put on. so easy to leave you then. hard only in retrospect, in understanding then how much you had to offer.
maybe there is something in the timbre of a shower's hiss, a disturbed puddle, a crashing wave, that speaks to the very structure and composition of water itself.
internal construction
begun again the always-important work. a nesting of sorts, but more an emotional fortification. a ramshackle structure of paper and words and hope-for-the-bests. the people in this city grow tiresome. so loud, i am drowned amongst them. i sleep, cook food, read. where are those who understood my inside worlds? they were always few and only ever seem fewer.
somewhere when my back was turned, fall crept up and tapped me on the shoulder, then turned and ran laughing, hand in hand with my thick summer heat. in his wake and absence eddy the cool night breezes he left behind.
addiction to the physical
as soon as my body stole another 12 hours of deep, dreamless sleep.
as soon as i was able to think while also putting one foot in front of the other.
as soon as there was no more rhythm to carry me.
i missed you.
desire; for proximity to your body, to sense the workings under the skin of your arm, fingers against you, a quiet meal, dancing together, talking. just together.
cohabitation and the opposite of that
i watch myself study their behavior like lab animals. heads in each other's laps. board games on weeknights. maybe they split a bottle of wine. have a picnic. go out to the theatre, or watch their shows. i never hear them having sex.
and yet, the allure remains. i remember what kind of person i was when last a cohabitant (could i go so far as dull, even?) i know the safety of it insulates a person from play, from chaos bad and good. but i am a different person now. i know better. i think i could meet that challenge.
i have my excitement, wild nights (if i wanted them), but i still feel heartsick. how long has it been since someone reached out for my hand (and not the other way around)? i despair to let go of what i do have, seeking love out is so tricksome. maybe i just need to remember that what i'm looking for is greater. because i'm close to having to take that leap.
edit: grumpy, sick again, feeling alone. i don't even give a shit about my own banter. look at it. just the same whining, all over again, in cycles, like always. just...i just wish somebody would hold my hand and pat it and say, "shh, now.."