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[03 Feb 2030|08:28pm] |
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| like a crying baby at the bottom of a well |
[31 Jul 2010|11:35am] |
You are a punk ass bitch. She was dead serious, rolled the words like candy. From her it was a compliment. There was approval in the way one corner of her mouth quirked up as she shifted around. The chair could theoretically contain her easily. Only in theory. Altogether small but built along elegant swan neck lines, she had too much length and sprawl for it. Human cat's cradle. The position she ended up in looked vaguely like a spider. She always does that, freeze frames awkwardly in real life. I was on the floor. Closer than the couch. Easier to pass the joint back and forth. I was flat on my back, staring up at the striations of light her lamps threw at the ceiling. She was a poorly defined blur in the corner of my eye. There was a shadow that looked like a motionless ship. There was no breeze to move it. I wondered if I had begun to melt into the floor like disappearing was a foregone conclusion. She laughed like brass. Could well have been at nothing. Maybe I said something out loud about shadows. I love a few things unabashedly if not well. We have that in common, she and I. We're both grown up enough to cherish. This probably means we're both still painfully young yet. There's this boy, she said. Well, man really I suppose. There's always a man or the idea of a man. A man-shaped absence was on the couch, too far away to share the smoke. Oh, they're all boys. We're all boys, even the girls. We try to be careful and we break things. That laugh belled again. Break hearts, break heads. Noses. Dishes. A moment of silence. I had The Eagles stuck in my head, something about innocence and ends. It wasn't appropriate, not for the way we want ourselves to be. If I was born jaded then she was a cynical zygote. But despite the ideal we want things, helpless and easy as breathing. I wonder what he looks like when he's just woken up. I wonder what he wants. I wonder if he ever, whatever. I wonder what he'd do if I just, you know. A monologue in two voices or a one-person dialogue. The room rocked gently. The floor was comfortable. I spent the night. She slept in her chair. How much of the conversation was a dream? Does it matter?
In the morning I made breakfast. She fed the cat and bitched about the crick in her neck (and on my way out her door we warned each other about falling and love).
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| for the soul without a king |
[09 Jun 2010|09:51pm] |
Jamie, he said, are you even listening? Something brittle under his voice split the air into shards. Like he was so full of tension he was exhaling it. The first thing in the room to move was going to get cut. I hadn't realized that he was still speaking. Busy listening to my own breathing. There was an internal mental roar manifesting as physical white noise. My cigarette was almost down to the filter. I was weighing possibilities. If it burnt out I wasn't going to have anything to do with my hands. If I moved toward my jeans and the nicotine stashed therein I might not be able to stop moving until I was in the jeans, out the door. Never moving again sounded appealing. The set of his shoulders in the corner of my eye made it plain that wasn't an option. There's always that insidious voice saying force the issue. There's always that instinct to devolve. Conversations are for people who are afraid of fights or some macho shit like that. I'm a direct sort of bastard. If there's something wrong, I want to kill it or chase it away. Hate that something's hovering feeling. Too much of a blunt object for it. That isn't it (maybe if I was quiet long enough he'd think his voice had stopped working, reach out and touch me). I didn't want to fight. Too exhausted to be bothered. Too fucking tired of pushing against everything else about him to pay attention to the person. It would have been so much effort, sharp words or wheeling fists. Sleep sounded better, or the bottle of whisky waiting back at my place. Nah, man. Almost got my fight then. His hands came up like grabbing me by the shoulders was the only option. There could have been angry words, angrier sex. But I wasn't the only one going against the current. His hands dropped. I tipped my head back. Exhaled my last mouthful of smoke.
You ever just get tired of being tired?
Yeah. Yeah, I know.
End scene. Haven't seen him in years. Every now and again I wonder what it was he was saying that was so damn important
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