#lwrite

[etatisverba-blog]

lilli

we're transforming this to fit more of a personal feel.

so you're feeling doubtful. maybe this is the insignificance of each one of the 7 billion people here with us. maybe this is what it feels like to be a lost cause. i know i've felt that all too often.

sometimes i feel that way too. sometimes the world caves in and there simply isn't the kind of strength to heave it off and uncover myself. sometimes i am unimportant. sometimes i feel that way too, but then i think about what sort of capacities we have to think and to feel, and how amazing it is that we can interact and love and talk and drink tea, or take our cars for illegal joyrides or call our dog and have them understand. to drink until we feel stars and breathe until we feel fresh. we can sleep and cry. we CAN can can can can. all of these things come from little seeds, and everything balances, and so the miracles might not have happened if i hadn't jumped in the air or you hadn't climbed into a tree or he hadn't fallen asleep underneath me or she hadn't won a race or they hadn't touched skies. and souls are important. i concentrate on the few things i still believe solidly, and then i believe a little more than i had at first. i think all of those things that we CAN, those are worth something. they have to be.

we're on a spherical floating thing in nothingness so we can't feel like nothingness because we are something from nothing.

we are lights.

[etatisverba-blog]

lilli

suddenly i was overcome with the feeling that everything needed to be touched, and carefully. everything cried to me for a caress and i moved about my room doing so. dirty clothes were plucked from the floor and the creases smoothed away, only to be placed into the hamper with a certain politeness that one usually would not reserve for musty clothing. my fingers ran along the borders of my shelves, collecting the dust because it all needed to be touched. i sat there face to face with my jewelry box and brushed the tips of my senses down the sides, falling into the chips of paint and the chunks of wood, and for no reason at all i got a good look at this box that does not mean anything at all.

and it was the type of not meaning anything at all that truly does not mean anything at all. it does not even hold anything that means anything at all. it is just a purple box in my room. touching it and reading it and learning it did not make it mean anything at all. a lot of things don't mean anything at all, in the way that they truly just do not mean anything. they are just there, and they don't say words or tell you stories, although they might sit right next to something that does.

this began to confuse me. i looked at a mirror and for once i saw the mirror rather than the reflection. i saw that it too had chips and stains and blemishes, although i seem to be so focused on my own chips and stains and blemishes that the ones on the mirror seem to escape quite often. and this provoked a strange thought; what color is a mirror if all it does is reflect?

my clothes began to seem completely wrong. horrendously wrong. i did not want to wear them but i did not want to tear them off. it seemed i had to peel them off with a softness and let them collect around my ankles. it seemed i had to stand there with starkness in a room of cold air and let my body really truly feel the air. to let my skin truly absorb the cold so it could appreciate coming warmth.

i'm not quite sure what it is about sunday nights that makes everything so colored indigo.

[etatisverba-blog]

lilli

i wish the stars were bright enough to visit with tonight. how i would love to be somewhere so new, perhaps a small town on the rocky shores of the ocean. how i would love to be relishing in the ambiance of being somewhere new, alone, a stranger and a mystery to aged patrons of local coffee shops. the words of new people are so delicate, and we must hang onto them between our fingers before the people who spoke them became as well known as tangled white sheets or front yard trees.

on occasion, i choose to sit in fluffy chairs of cafes with intricate wallpapers and display cases of books or pastries. i like to scrawl letters to other people who happen to stray across the same paths i have and happen to be inquisitive enough to read a folded piece of paper that is not their own. the letters are just thoughts that had captivated me, small fragments of them being shared with other humans. i have tucked them into the backs of plane seats, between pages of books that others will check out, in the cushions of the cafe chairs. i have to wonder who finds them, who reads them, what they've made of them. i have to wonder if i'll ever meet someone who found a piece of me somewhere up in the clouds.

how lovely would that be?

[etatisverba-blog]

lilli

what a view it is from the top of the world. i pushed myself, my shoes digging into the sand below the swing set as i prepared for launch. i sat alone on the top of the childhood hill and remembered what it felt like to be on top of the world, on a measly lump of grass that used to seem like the view from a spaceship. i ripped out dry, old, wintery clumps in my scrawny hands and threw them to either side. with my chin tipped up toward the dusty 7 p.m. sky, i watched the stars being imprinted into the night sky, i listened to your favorite singer, and i began to cry. it was a soft and simple kind of crying, the sort that i hadn't let myself do in so long; never anything but a big thundering sob or a stone cold barrier. i began to wonder why i was going these places and doing these things when you weren't there to find the adventure with me anymore, when you were off feeling new things with a new person.

and then what started as a whisper slowly turned into a scream. there i was at a place i had been so many times before you, before a man ever mattered to me, before a boy ever caught my eye, before a friend ever hurt my feelings, before scratches bigger than band-aids. i sat alone on the top of the childhood hill, no one else around, and i clutched my dog and i wracked myself hazy, missing you yet again. i sang the words of our favorite together songs in a watery twang for no one to hear. i hated myself for letting this happen again. it's been so long, i stopped keeping track. i don't even want to ask, because the answer of time seems so irrelevant to how much i love you, still, for reasons i don't even know.

for the first time, the playground seemed small. the trees seemed to have moved. the pond seemed to have settled. old toys had been taken away and new ones had replaced them. i sat alone on the top of the childhood hill and i cursed into the night, one giant "FUCK!" at change, and then i collapsed and tears overtook me. there on top of my childhood hill, i fell asleep underneath blankets of stars and stale grass, until the air became spring-frosty and asked me to go home. but i don't know where home is, because home is not places, it is love. and i've lost all of this.

[etatisverba-blog]

lilli

there i am again, back smooth against the expensive glass three stories above the ground. there i am again, fingers tracing the plush of the luxurious carpet, every intricate pattern of the floor i have walked a thousand and one times. and i'm with my friends and i'm a bit tipsy, and in this handful i've plucked from my favorite people, i should be happy. a gust of wind inside of my mind breaks whatever light was there, and i find it strange and completely wrenching to realize that the last time i was here, you were too, and we were being young and stupid and fun like we used to be together. this gust of wind, when wind, drops to my stomach and i find an excuse to take a break. and there i am, barefooted in a five star hotel, running away behind mazes of tan walls and weaving designs of the carpet, panting and becoming the tears that are tossing themselves wildly across my cheeks and dribbling on the cliff of my jaw.

i don't know where any of this has come from, but all of the sudden i'm sliding back. i'm in a familiar place, a place that had always been mine and no one else's. but this was spoiled when i shared my favorite place in the world with you, and then shortly afterwards, you became my favorite place, right there between your two arms. and now i don't really have a favorite place, i suppose it would have to be ink and a piece of crisp paper. but all of the sudden i'm sliding back, towards that infinite oblivion and i just don't know what to do, i'm being heaved around by soot colored waves, i'm being rained on by captivating drops and i'm longing for the past like i had told myself not to do. i'm drowning in all of the wrong places. 

the most terrifying part is that i can feel my body conforming to all of the wrong places. i can feel myself crash against the wall without reason. i can feel my fingernails scrape the cushion of the window seat. i can feel an oppressed cry for you building in my lungs and i manage to swallow it.

do you play video games on the floor? do you go on walks in the afternoon? do you make silly faces while she takes a picture of you? do you go on dates at the gas station? do you listen to music in a tangled mess? do you make mix cds? do you cheer one another up? do you always laugh? do you have a list of all the places you will go and shenanigans you will accomplish while in those places? do you make promises? 

are you going to keep them?

i fix my makeup, i place strands of my hair where they need to go, and i climb up the stairs. no one needs to know that i'm beginning to have these... memory surges. and they'll never find out.

[etatisverba-blog]

Lilli

i was holding my own hand, delicate, turning it over and over in the other. i was tracing the contours, i was pulling the lengths of my fingers with five separate ones. i was looking at the sides of them. the backs, smooth and taut. the fronts, aging already, a fortune for the day scrawled on the left hand and cuts on the right.

it seems to me that i cannot remember what these hands have held. have they held a heart? have they held another? have they held a rope to swing above the ground? what have these hands held? but more, what have they imprinted?

those are my fingerprints on an old glass picture frame that i should not even have. my fingerprints on the lens of a camera that took a picture that you still seem to like, whether or not you remember it. my fingerprints on countless pens and countless paper wads in the corner of my room. fingerprints on the lamps, on, off, on, off, come, go, come, go. fingerprints all along your heart as it was finally being dusted off and cared for like it never had been before. fingerprints under the neck of your shirt, swirling fingerprints just under cotton and on your bare skin. far far fading fingerprints.

just where did i let your fingerprints fade?