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Today. Today did not bother to pretty itself up in the mirror with its usual promises of adequacy, contentment, peace, balance, future - no. Today was stripped of all redeeming possibilities and remorselessly blunt. Today had not even the courtesy to mutter a lie and instead used stillness as a setup and desolation as its punchline. Somewhere far off a crowd yells in unison “it feels great to give in!”

Today you smiled into my shadow of a face and I felt not comfort but insurmountable taunting instead, so I maintained my stare, left my disposition unchanged in hopes that your facade would crumble and alas, it did not. But it will soon. The world has bypassed foreplay entirely and chosen to force its entry amidst the dryness. Tired, I become, of this vast charade entrenched in mediocrity. All the thoughts spin around pointlessly with no use of plucking a good one to admire, because even the good ones that come to mind have no intention other than to taunt. My capacity for amusement has worn thin and I once I fell in love in a tower but where is that tower now? Lost within all the other sprawling concrete vertical structures where people go to earn a living. All these places have merged into the other and become identically dull and devoid of excitement. I once met a girl named after a state she isn’t from and found that funny. I wonder if she’s been there yet or if that too has become indistinguishable from this clusterfuck of places coated in the promise that things will be “different” and lost itself within this ever-stagnant relentlessly colorless mass. It’s all the same. It’s just a matter of which veil the dysphoria will wear today in order to entice you into a dance which you of course don’t know the moves to but try to go along with. And you stumble through it, the pretty, petty little speck you are, ego the furthest thing from in-tact, a vessel for persuasion, thoughtless and swiveling, swooning at the falsely endearing words strangers say to get you close as you listen intently, giving them your full trust because you were never that good at reading people, were you? Dance onward, little darling. Dance onward.

#interior #colors #shapes #lines #nature

#35mm #interiors #light leaks #blur #filmisnotdead

#film photography #analog #35mm film #summer #aesthetic

#35mm #film #analog #colors #interiors

Once I met you, my curiosity for everything ceased and I got a feeling as though I had found the thing I never realized I needed, and no longer did I have to go searching. Then I was fortunate enough (as is not the case for most folks) to catch on to what it all was. A pretty little illusion. You didn’t complete anything but you held its place. My flames were in motion and goddammit I could have burnt the whole forest down (and now I very well might) but you tamed them and I didn’t ask for that. Kept them going, sure.

Just long enough that they’d run out, become yours, and leave me with no flicker meaning I‘d have to return to you for the spark. But I let you stand there alone, taunting the empty outdoors with an antique lantern as if to welcome me home from the creek and I was nowhere to be found. That’s how everything was for a while - so still it was painful. Me and my thoughts, no one - no things to induce feeling and if I had a word for more numb than numb I’d jot it here but I don’t so we’ll sum it up with the term “numbness”. Aside from one night when I found a couple live-performed Neil Young songs that felt honest and induced tears finally. Honesty is the most beautiful thing in life.

[i.e. Man Needs A Maid BBC Live & Hey Hey, My My Farm Aid 1985]

That was a year or so ago and I sit here now in this pristine lobby of a hotel I’m not staying at (I had to duck in because it’s so blisteringly cold out). It’s winter’s final triumph and at this point I’ve been good, so good, for a long long time and this cannot be redacted which is something to smile about. Leave a man alone with his thoughts long enough and he’ll find out how to be alone without being lonely. He’ll find his flint and steel, get it all going and would you look at that, a lovely roaring inferno that will never be halted by any force. I mosey back to home which is a town of so many more strangers and down here the strangers are the most beautiful to the point where I love about 3 of them and they don’t even know my name. But they’re pretty in the rarest way and make me think of coming home from the creek to a lantern with the most charming face behind it. The face of a stranger who is no longer strange but loved. She emanates warmth and I’ll tell her about the creek shortly but for now I holler with excitement as she watches me walk up the drive, a stringer full of fish in my hand.

#writing #short fiction #lit #spilled ink #spilled love

You brim with elegance and if you could talk in cursive you would. Forgive me for my subtle judgements Madam. Just trying to figure out what I can and can’t say in order to keep you around or rather, what I can or can’t say around you. You’re calm and cool but the furthest thing from collected, try as you might to conceal it. Which gets old quick. I tire of walls. What good are they? You deny your darkness and I’d rather you harness it. Life in the open. You resurrect the past to use as a shield and you’re looking sharp as a dagger but these things cancel themselves out, don’t they? Stagnant. Perpetual. Resurfacing a friendship is one thing and I’m all for it, but you’re not looking for friendship are you? Your calls go unanswered and I’d love nothing more than to discuss the headlines and the ongoings and so forth. But that’s not what you need to address, now is it? Maybe you want to, sure. If only it wasn’t for that wall.

You don’t know why you do some things but I know exactly why. I guess that means I complete you doesn’t it? Just an inference, some light speculation from the person who, once in a while you inquire of my life only to tell me how you’re doing all the while avoiding what really needs to be addressed. You’re not in love. You’re lying to yourself because you can’t bare the weight of a life alone so you hold on to what’s easy - in this case, who you’re “dating”. Which isn’t fair to him.

He should be enough.

But he isn’t is he?

This is most unfortunate. However, it holds the most truth at the core of it all.

Your fragile, fragile core. I could be your balance and you know that. I could give you truth and you know that. We could both laugh and we know that. I like you, i do not like this facade. I know the difference and that’s why you dial and type. Why pull light from the day to hide behind in the night? Never have I seen someone so scared of her own shadow. You almost embraced it there for a second in the mirror, just long enough that I’d take note from afar and then quickly you returned to being the coward that you are.

Friendship? Friendship is fickle until you’ve made the drive down here and every thread composing your outfit is worn by my bedroom floor. The only thing that will be worn is shame as you offer carnal apologies on a loop until we’re both disgusted with ourselves amidst a montage of primal depravity, graceless lust, absolute sodomy and the shattering of glass to which your particular repressed curiosities lie. All privacy will diminish along with any lines of boundary, the wind will grow heavy upon the tossing of all your precautions to it and you won’t do so much as go to the bathroom alone without insisting I watch you. Relentless debauchery until we’re burnt into each other’s minds. What once was shame will then transform into normality, all you’ve hidden will become embedded in your demeanor and appear as a smile, finally genuine, and in each other’s arms a sense of balance cools you and it’s not fickle at all.

It’s new yet familiar. It’s honest.

It’s friendship.

So where are you?