dunedain boy swag

all the ladies say i've got yumph

[secrettgai1701]

The problem with a need is it’s never once-filled and it stings like hell to go to the well and have it only wait for me to lose the parts of myself that are dry. It sounds like the sickening crunch of a thrice dead horse four times beaten, but when something is born before you, you fall into the hole it’s punched on its way in, and if you’re made of sedimentary rock, there are few things that keep you in motion while burning their path in you and calling it echo, and fewer that make you dehydrated if you don’t have a try. Knowing you’ve eroded your core as you’ve gone for a dip feels like being seven-tenths water on seven-tenths of the earth and trying to remember why you’re not abiding by the moon. I am like a great big dam in 360 degrees and you’d rather everything I was filled with was yours. You are the singer and I am the acoustics, or – you are Narcissus and I am the creek, burbling and babbling at the praise you give me for sitting so still and showing you so well. And I will. Oh, I will. I cannot change until a new person steps in front of me and shows me what I look like. You are my favorite thing to be, and you are your favorite thing to find in me. 

[secrettgai1701]

I wasn’t killing myself, and I was worrying I wasn’t killing myself, and as I was so busy missing all the pain I find in the things I love, I missed the loving part. I didn’t realize I could stop. And then when it was good, and easy, it was good. And it was easy. Mama, can it be easy? This whole time, could it have been easy? What would it be if it were?  

Maybe there’s something in me that pulls when I've been waiting for it to yank. Maybe I – thought the feeling would snap and burn, and it just stays, rumbling like a train. you forget you’re in motion when you look away from the windows, but it’s catching, fleeting, dragging you along as the footing holds but the ground runs. I feel like I’ve got a needle between my eyes and a monkey on my back, laser focused on the breath at my neck. Laser focused on the entry point and not the end. 

[secrettgai1701]

I like to name my characters after other characters. No, I know, it’s unoriginal, but bear with me. My brother complains of this as well: you’ve got to write your own people. Bring your own people into the world. But I feel this, I feel that — there are no new people. I, myself, I am — an amalgam. Of the things that brought me here. I am this piece of gum, the stick in my hair, I am the brush my fingers take against the skin of my forehead to check my bangs, I am the flecks of mascara fallen on my cheek throughout the day because of course I’m the type of person to be like that. I am not my own people; I build people that are old, together of old pieces, and together they are new. I sew old names into the new names’ linings. I let them take something borrowed with them, something familial, something connected. I let them breathe as they’ve breathed before, even if only they know it on the page. Here is your line, traced out before (and behind) you. And that is what you say. And that is why you say it. 

[secrettgai1701]

It really truly is how it is – not to own anything, as something that’s ours will always be half someone else’s, and something that’s mine alone will never be known by anyone else. And, actually, there, on some other side of the world, is someone caught on the other side of my memories, who knows the notches of the key in the same way I knew the empty spaces of the lock. They’ve got the other end of the string, the cans glued on, and tug tug so gently on it so I don’t catch them biting my bait, so sure I’ll yank them back across the planet, eyelines fitting together like broken pieces, mouth on the bit despite it all; still alive on the taste (I hope, as I am, a tad – in my more embarrassing moments) and still listening for that vrrm vrrm of vibration, a wiggle in the coil, proof we’re attached. It’s an odd thought: you, there, somewhere, unbeknownst to me, dead many years in my mind (alive sometimes like nerve damage or moldy food), hold the other half of a moment in one of your hands, in the back of your head, for the rest of time or until you forget. Trace a scar along darker skin. I see you, there, in the lightness; and I’m sure (hope) when you feel your favorite knife against the tip of your finger, you remember what it was like to dip it in my ink. 

[secrettgai1701]

The train utters one long breathless howl as it runs, I feel its shaking as the buzz in my ears, it reminds me of the endless horrible hum of life, the way I have to remember to breathe as I try to sleep, or hold hunger that feels like suffocation, or feel my eyes float two feet away from my face after a bad coffee high. I like the tickling, though, in my ears. It feels like listening, the vibrations, even though I can’t hear anything: a facsimile of sense, like chewing gum, like watching a good film. I’m here listening to the sound of myself listening. I’m here listening to the sound of myself being alive. And sometimes I stop needing to remember to breathe. 

[secrettgai1701]

Sometimes it’s as if I’m the thirty-sixth plot, and I’ve said where to look. Here. This is my worried lip to encourage this. Here, this is my glance away to tell you that, here, here – I am structured, I am driven, I am because, because, because, I am in spite of, I am not then. 

And then, sometimes, they take my razors, and my celluloid. I cannot slice the draggy-bits out. The beats, I tell them, the pacing – cut, cut, cut, I beg like a child, I am not here, I – I am here, I am here, I am – here, every minute, of every day, and I will die in it, there, I will die in it, here, and meanwhile, there I am, I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m attached. 

[secrettgai1701]

There is something in - the disconnection of it. Give me a moment, I’m just trying to unpack this character, I’m trying to help myself write by starting in prose and translating to dialogue. He is her, here, and she is… behind a glass wall, or not, but miming one. Ever since she was a child, she was playing the invisible, mime, crash-landed in a world of mere mortals, a genius. She - the other, now, rewritten older, but younger in life - she felt the door, brown, shaky with California earthquakes, and she saw the green-tint of the bedroom floor through the crack between the sound and the hallway. He - or in our case, she - she is noise, and chk-chk-chk ratatatat of a machine gun, warring with herself, true in her imagination. The world grows up around her, bright, and unmeshed - if that’s a word - contrasting younger-older’s genre of melting and easing her way around whatever tone she is. The world builds itself up around her, him, and meets him, her, but the girl - who’s been rewritten as old - she built herself up for the world. Not well, unstable. Aching, creaking, Wild West-house of flat wood panels and square backsides, six buildings down in a line. 

He - her, rather - she lives somewhere bright and banging and immobile-y secure, immobile-y without her, and foundations - well, she sat at the door and waited. She cried - at this point she’s supposed to be older, but this is supposing we follow the first draft - she couldn’t dream like he could - her. She was too easy to come up. He wasn’t up yet because he was down. He - her - she is a genius, and - different. (Art is written better when I’m saying it half-cocked.) She is mercilessly, mercilessly, deservedly, undeservedly, brutally, herself. Written out in her mind and her writing, she is - he explained it once, openly, in the days he cried before a piano lesson, or rejoiced when he’d taken his sister’s favorite seat (a memory treasured like the tug of my lung against my rib), before the lock down and the firm expression, or the eye-talk or the quiet - she is written to be inconsequential in the sense she can not be a consequence, but she exists, unaffected and bright, a jester, written as a jester, to be a jester, and to be alive. Alive, unbuilt, but yet to be, unshakable, but breezy, she is - overspoken, but a rumor. (How do I put this?) The jester is written not to be real. The jester writes herself into an invisible corner. A box you cannot prove exists until you touch it. But you can listen at the box’s edge and hear machine guns and dreaming. 

Her sister - older, now, not thought of initially, she was misread and retyped as a larger part of the story - no, really, not in metaphor. (I had written the outline mistakenly, hard to read, it was misinterpreted.) He thought she was included. Odd. Out of character. Still, the bones are good, and she is down to the bone. Where is she? Find her, find her - she is… watching, within the world, and yet (ideally, now) the only one for whom the box doesn’t knock - that’s the idea, at least. Where was she? Inside you, really. (Now that I think of it.) But she’s not the most important part of the story. She’s monosyllabic, and - crushes moments like bugs between her fingers, she likes the wet of the blood and the sliver of the moon, her leg is broken, look. Good. The cane. (I can’t have her be as mean as she was. She’s a person, and she loves her sister. Because her sister desires only to be loved, and seen - absently.) Her sister is within a cycle of speed-wash martyrdom, and her own hands are clean. Her sister tumbles in the dryer. Her feet sweat. And yet (here’s the dream, now) when her sister takes her out and folds her, she folds. And she’s dry. Stop fighting, stop fighting, a dog bred to think it’s forced to be still, when it was already sitting.

[secrettgai1701]

I want to have children.

I think knowing yourself comes with knowing your limits. Things you can’t achieve, no matter how badly you want them. I cannot achieve companionship. I know this about myself. I have learned it, through trial and error. I cannot spend time with another person like that. I cannot be someone’s half because I am already whole; three-quarters, anyway, and no one is half of a half, even if that is all that I need. I drink enough coffee to feel like I might throw up. There is something disconnected, like a loose wire, sitting in my chest. I see the image but I hear no sound, I knock on its side to fix the connection. I don’t know why I only want the vision of someone beside me. I want the idea of a person, the consciousness of an answered text, or an inside joke. I don’t want to stitch a tear or sleep next to anyone. I don’t want to touch them. I always thought I wanted some sort of life partner, a soul mate, a girl to kiss or a boy to look up at. I search and search and take things out to find what I’m looking for and ultimately see nothing. Why can’t I want someone? Why don’t I need someone to want? Why do I want to need someone to want? Why do I want to want to want? Why do I want like I’ve taken my feet off the bicycle’s pedals and I wait for them to slow down? Now, anyway. But now I don’t know what I want anymore. 

It’s exceptionally lonely, knowing you don’t want someone, anyone at all, and you can’t force yourself to. I feel like a piece of my chest has been removed, somewhere deep I don’t know about. It feels like a phantom pain. The blistering of a heel the sock has run down on. Knowing this, taking this hypothesis forward - that I want no one, and unfortunately might never change that - I can assume I cannot marry. I could, if I wanted to. But the wanting is the problem. It seems I want all the wrong things, and don’t want all the things I should. I want to burn high and bright, and I want to be alone. I want to speak to myself out loud in cold sheets, and I don’t want to tell someone I love them. I want to be talented. I want to know I’m talented. I don’t want to be told I’m talented. I don’t want to bandage the same calloused wound with another complement, and another, and another. They build up in me and burn like Greek fire in water. I want to be made of nothing, and I want people to want to fill me. I want to empty out anyway. I want people to want to save me but I don’t want to die. I want people to want to save me but I don’t want to be seen as needing to be saved. I want to vomit. I don’t want to vomit in this coffee shop. I want to have a normal conversation. I don’t want to vomit in this coffee shop. 

I want to have children. What I really want is to raise children, and show them things, and explain things to them: therefore, what I want is to hold someone hostage until I demonstrate all I know and take a long rest after I have proven that I know things. Breaking it down to that is sobering. I want a half-person who is never real, because a real person feels like more than one. I want someone who I don’t see enough to know very well, and I don’t know enough to see through. I want to build someone from the ground up then let them go, because I have enough to build them with, and then maybe I will be empty enough, finally, to see them through. I want to have children, in the abstract. I want to have children, because I want a relationship I control, with people I design, where the rules are made by me and I am all the worse for it. I know I couldn’t have children, though, when I really sit down and think about it, I mean, when I really sit down and think, what could happen here? For another person to grow? They’d need a father, and I am father and mother enough for everyone. But being father and mother enough for everyone isn’t enough for everyone, that is, being enough can sometimes be too much and you have to spread it all out between different people - that’s what I’m getting at, here, that I am too much something in one package, and that to be less than something is to be a perfect person, so you can hold someone else’s something in your one empty hand - what I’m saying here is that I have only so many hands and so, so many somethings. Too many for children, or for lovers, or for best friends. 

My grandmother sat there. She thought, and she waited to die. She lived longer than any relatives I had known before, and I hadn’t known her very well, but I hadn’t known any others, so ostensibly I knew her the best and was the closest with her. I hadn’t known her, and we weren’t close. But I saw in her the same detachment, and the same ice that sank into her bones years ago, holding her still, away. She had children, and she broke them with how much of a person she was. All together. She didn’t have enough hands, and they had to learn to use their own. She sat there until she died, in her chair. Batting around the same fifteen stories over and over again, trapped in an echoing well of her own experiences, doubling, folding, smothering her. She chewed what she had said before over and over again for every meal. I saw my own death in her. I saw my own death: a girl, armored, eating herself to keep from being hungry, forgetting to mourn. Not needing to. Too stuffed. 

The only time I saw her breathe was when I told her something she didn’t already know: then, she’d sit there, face open, voice lilting, curious. To know more. Then she was a person with a hand free and grasping. Rare. Human. I did not cry when she died. I am still eating parts of her. They’re still coming back up. 

There is a wall as thick as steel but as clear as glass and sometimes I mistake it for air. I fly into it and break my wings. I cannot teach myself yet to learn the difference between window and sky. I’ve only been taught to look up.

[secrettgai1701]

I tussle with the idea of being born not black and blue; something reeks of color and I need to satiate the urge for it. I burnt myself, I did, on a match I lit, because everything feels warm to a thing that’s never felt fire. I prefer pools, to the ocean, you know. Currents scare me; waves, uncontrollable, gaping. I make my own. 

[secrettgai1701]

And I love the taste of blood, although I’ve grown on wine and water. No one taught me the stink of flesh until I smelled it, and no one showed me how to open a paper so you can really read it - straight down the line, black, white, and red all over. These things I’ve learned myself, I’ve caught, like an outfielder or a sticky kid on a school bus. They came to me, and I held my arms open and said yes, these are mine. I’ve never seen them before, but they’re mine. 

[secrettgai1701]

I wash you off my hands with water, not blood. I keep your wound fresh, always. 

I peel back my clothing and let the scabs rise with it: I cannot go bare without showing what you took with you. The scurvy etched in me. I rearranged my weight to balance the flesh you sunk your teeth into; yet I chase it around by the scent, yapping, driven crazy by the smell of meat, mine or otherwise. 

You cannot burn me, when I am also made of fire. 

[secrettgai1701]

I will not have you take the white from the inside of an orange; I learned to taste it all and pick the sweetness to remember. The rind was not meant for eating but the inside will carry scars, it is flesh and juice, I’m biting into it without the expectation of perfect goodness, I know there are seeds, I know there’s room to grow. Keep the tissue there, I’ll know what it took to find it in the first place, I’ll remember how it was built to hold itself together, I’ll appreciate the reveal, you know? I’ll eat every part of it because it built itself to make its way to me. 

I’ll eat every part of it because its blood is sweet, it runs, and I am hungry. 

[secrettgai1701]

I never know myself in dreams. That’s the funny thing, my eyes are different, my body uncontained, my form can shift and flow and ebb, et cetera, I am unbound, in short. Last night I dreamt a man took me by the arm and traced my scars. He learned them all as he read them, and I lied, but they stayed the same. I know my scars better than I know my own body. I know my lines better than I know my skin. That’s the part that pains me the most. 

I know where I hurt more than I know myself.

[secrettgai1701]

There’s a sickening coldness in you, at the moment. It manifests in backpedals and double-steps. It tells you which turn to take in the morning. It keeps you strapped down, shivering, nauseous, angry, thirsty. It keeps you hungry. It keeps you broken. It says, where is everyone? It says, where you left them. The walks were long, but yes, they were worthwhile. It was easier to listen. But perhaps you should’ve spoken. Perhaps you should stop taking the easier option. Perhaps you should try being scared of things that are real, for once. 

[secrettgai1701]

Everything I’ve ever said I’ve first said to the inside of my mouth. Lips closed, gnashing teeth, I carry with me a balance of flesh and scars, what I was born with and what I’ve made. I like the taste of blood. I lick it up. What else could occupy a mouth so naturally built for biting? 

[secrettgai1701]

And after all of it, all the biting, scratching, half-moons and self-made memories, will I ever like myself? Probably not. Probably never ever. 

[secrettgai1701]

A resolution can be a terribly painful thing; living the rest of my life fruitless, so I can be picked.