everybody's makin love or else expecting rain.

things i want to remember about you

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:03:00 -0500

it has been long enough and the fury has subsided and when i think of you I no longer cry out in my head that nothing is as it should be. Nothing is, of course, as it should be but that is something we live with now. We accept things. We rearrange. We pull the couch out a little over the carpet stain and brush our hands off on our khakis and go on about our days like nothing happened.

We go on about our lives like nothing happened.

And what is heartbreak but the refusal to do that? - the worry that accepting it will make it not count anymore. I’ve lived enough now and thought enough about living now that I never want to see the sentences, “it was a mistake,” and “oh well,” within a paragraph of each other again. My official stance is that people my age abuse the idea of voluntary lapses in judgment and if we ever want to move forward we must do things differently; we must not shrug off mistakes but unpack them and map out cognitive patterns for future divergences from the mean.

My answer is always to make a list. I can’t accept things until I’ve seen that I can live with the whole story, until I can live with the truth of someone and still keep them under the carpet:

1. The first thing I wrote down was, “the way we laughed at your phone lit up in your backpocket- and why did we?” You were up ahead and we were all drunk and walking past warehouses, laughing and tripping over each other and we pointed and giggled and I hugged her and yelled out to you and you came over shrugging and shy and they sent us off like it was our honeymoon, our first night together in the same town.

2. is too hard; we’ll come back to it. We’ll end with it.

3. It was unseasonably warm or else that’s how it felt, to finally have him near me after all this time.

Platonic late-summer weather. Sunny with a cool breeze. The kind of weather that made you say, “My god it’s nice out;” made you remember all the times you had this kind of day before and had thought the same thing- “This is perfect. How exactly would you describe perfect weather? Because this is it.”

Those were unfairly beautiful days.

The disparity of expectation between the chooser and the chosen I believe is the idea that someone is giving you a chance; that someone is giving you a break, that you are stepping up to the microphone for the Thanksgiving Day pageant to tell the parents that it falls every third Thursday in November not as a reward for being handsome and articulate but because the teacher wants her play to be a success.

It was kindergarten and you were chosen for being charming, for saying the right thing. You were chosen because you were someone people wanted to listen to, to watch.

So you can’t get on stage and forget your lines. There are consequences. There are understudies. There is sitting alone in a dark room and crying until you lose your voice and your balance and you drag yourself around corners of city blocks crying to your mother because who else is left to listen? Who else really thought this was a good idea to begin with?

It seems that you can’t just stand there and smile back at the audience to thank them for letting you be up there. They won’t let you stay. That wasn’t what this was.

You’ll cry when you realize it, that you weren’t chosen because they loved you, you weren’t chosen because life was about favors and opportunity and luck— you were chosen because you were beautiful and charming and you had something they wanted.

So when you got up there and wanted to sit quietly for a little bit, when you loved him too much and you forgot all your lines and you couldn’t believe you got the part and you overthought it and you worried that the center could not hold, and you cried and you held on tightly,

you choked.

5. I want to remember how I hugged his forearm, how holding his hand wasn’t enough.

how your arm hung so gracefully around my shoulder and mine slinked around your waist and how we felt formidable walking down the street like that together. Formidable. There is no other word.

how I felt like that’s all we did was take on city blocks like that, like they were our to take, how on the last day I untangled myself from you, and oh, I was so worried. We held our coffee— your redeye and cigarettes and my latte, my ‘milkshake’, and I asked you if you would call me, would we still talk?” my voice got tiny and blubbery and of course you said, of course, and you held the back of my neck the way only a man you’re in love with can do the right way- a way that sends shivers up your spine and blankets you in a wave of security at the same time.

2. leaning against a brick wall, flip flops, old jeans, chewing gum, staring up at tall buildings and then down to me as if to say, “You shouldn’t have”

as if I was the entire city, or at least that i held the keys to it. We meant the same thing to you, I think, and when you decided to leave it you decided to leave me. And it is fitting that I was left crying in it, all over it, my city, you done from it, you saying dismissive things about it to me when you couldn’t come out and tell me that I, too, was dismissed.

I never felt the need to defend New York to you; like the moon or the ocean, it either moves you or it doesn’t, but it doesn’t need anybody sticking up for it.

But what I’m trying to remember, what I’m trying to accept, is that when you got here I flitted around the room and squeaked and jumped and ran to the elevator and swayed nervously, bounced on my heels and leaped through the lobby, i really did, i really did do all of those things, I worried I’d be so nervous I would hesistate, but I bounded, really, out the door.

And there you were, a quick sharp turn around the doorway. I saw you first and I smacked you in your side with the back of my hand and before you looked down I hugged my head to your chest and you put your arms around me and I was shaking and nervous— i think we both were, and then I reached up and kissed you on the mouth and squeezed you to me again and then we pulled away and I just remember that twitch on my mouth, that half smile I kept trying to keep down but couldn’t contain, so that I kept laughing every few seconds for no reason, kept making jokes so that it was appropriate to laugh and to smile and to gesticulate wildly with my arms outstretched and to laugh and yell and defy everything that has ever happened to either of us, ever.

What is it about life that makes us, that makes me, feel like something or someone will come along and say, here. That someone will come and wave their hands around and you will know why everything has ever happened to you and you will feel grateful for all of the pain and suddenly be the person encouraging your friends to open their hearts to love because, look, it happened to me.

And you were here and you were here with me and my hands shook as I moved my hair out of my eyes and we said little and we said nothing and we looked around at the street and then back at each other and then laughed and smiled and then I squeezed you to me again and come to think of it, that is most of what we did the whole time we were together.

I think of you now and I still cry out that I love you; sometimes it’s gone but sometimes it’s all I can do but whisper it over and over like a mantra. When we talk now those are the words that scroll behind all of my thoughts, i love you i love you i love you i love you, i want to inject them into you, to punch you in the face with them, to show up at your door and scream them at you while you walk away because, really, why did I come here?

And I debate the truth, the worthiness of that compulsion- the compulsion to love, no sterner stuff- near-daily. I watch my feet as I walk to the train and I weigh my options. Do I love you or do I love everyone? Do I love the right parts of you? All of you? The worst of you? Did I fight hard enough? Do I come back to you because you are familiar and you are a blank, faraway slate that I can talk to and yearn for? “Is it real?” is the ridiculous question you cursed me with and something I think about late at night, still to this day, as part of me is glad to be free from the insanity and to have regained perspective and to be independent of your whims and your bullshit and the pressure I felt to convince you to care about me, and then part of me hears your voice and wants to be your companion, wants to come home to you, wants to hit you with the back of my hand into old age. Part of me thinks we are for each other and part of me thinks I am pathetic, a fool, too proud, too faithless, to let go.

Instead of mapping out new cognitive territory I made an old emotional list.

It was a mistake.

(Oh well).

nightmarebrunette: TetheredTo It occurs to me that I turn to...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:25:10 -0400

nightmarebrunette: TetheredTo

It occurs to me that I turn to soup amid affection, that i’ll feel nothing but disdain for a man until he reaches out and brushes my hair away from my face, until he cups the back of my head with his hand and traces the spaces between my fingers with his. the moment i kiss him it’s over, squirming into him under hotel sheets, useless, wordless, but still restless, only little squeaks and hums and “whaa-at’s”, i’ll put your hand between my legs if i’m feeling daring and it’s dark out. is this why they concede to me so briefly, in that love soup, fall a little in love with my hands and my mouth and my laugh and then slowly, tomorrow, squinting into traffic with the radio on, they slink away, as quietly as they came; as unintentionally as they came, our hands still holding onto each other over the emergency brake.

I had arrived with my tote bag slipping off my shoulder into the crook of my elbow, my feet not...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:59:00 -0400

I had arrived with my tote bag slipping off my shoulder into the crook of my elbow, my feet not catching up to me yet; my breath not yet caught.

I laugh when you open the door and everything topples. When you look at me I’m not sure you think I’m even pretty, which I can’t help but take note of as I tell you that I love the walls of your stairwell, which are a green that looks much harsher on the way out but right then seemed perfect.

I weigh the probability that anything will ever happen as we walk nervously around your apartment. I pick things up and ask you about them and we share things and dismiss each other and I put my hands in the back pocket of my jeans hoping you don’t look at me and wondering how I will finally leave and if I will ever, ever kiss you. I stare at your bookshelf like a painting at the Met, my head appropriately cocked. You come over and make me nervous and I can’t concentrate on the titles and authors anymore I just stare straight ahead and read the same words again and again. We had both probably anticipated this moment, the evaluation of the bookshelf, an act so familiar by now it becomes a joke but one that cannot be skipped because even as a joke it hasn’t lost its value.

“Do you like Roth or do you hate him for being a misogynist?” you ask as if you’d been waiting to. I think of being home from college for the summer, up in my old room, with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and laughing to myself and running downstairs to read bits of it out loud to my mother. But then I worry if that’s not the right answer and I pull my hands out of my pockets and pick up a book and shrug and tell you I don’t look into it that far, just enjoy it, which feels irresponsible and like a huge lie considering the way things were unfolding. But I have said it aloud and so I can’t take it back, only mumble about something else very quickly. You step forward next to me and make a reference to your transparent sentimentalism with Ian McEwan and god knows what and I groan to make you laugh and we do and you are cute again but I don’t know what to do and you lead me into your bedroom to look at more books and we laugh about that, too, but you still worry me, I still wonder how I will leave, what we will say to get there. I want to lie on your bed and face the wall and be near you, anyone.

But not doing that feels like a good choice for both of us. It seems like the right thing, like a decision we will individually look back on and congratulate ourselves about— you with your therapist, maybe; me with my girl friends— I’ll tell the story and feel very mature and new. Maybe things will work out and you’ll think, Oh yes, everything changed when I didn’t kiss that girl that night in my apartment. And I’ll say the same thing but wonder if it was really good decision making or simply fear or simply that you didn’t like me, that you thought I was silly and young and couldn’t look you in the eye.

“Do you drink bourbon?” you had asked me. I had been looking at it on top of your fridge while I talked to you and regretted that no, I did not. I wondered what a braver girl would have said; would have done by now.

“No, do you?” I said.

You smiled and lit up a little and gestured up towards the near-empty bottle and stood up and walked around and said you were starting to think this was a bad idea.

I walked around after you and pointed at two yellow chairs that sat against the wall, facing your piano. I said I liked them and you said they were from France and the 60s and so we sat down in them, as if we were waiting for the dental hygienist to come out and call one of our names.

I felt ugly and we talked about life and I asked you stupid questions while I looked at your cd rack; considered making fun of you for it because what else could I do now? The chairs were metal and vinyl, the kind you would find in an office break room in France in the 60s and we were separated by the bathroom door, and when things went well we both leaned our heads back on the respective sides of the door jam, facing each other a little. I asked you if you were scared, if you were ever afraid or paralyzed; that your greatest enemy must be yourself. You said that yes, sometimes there was fear, and I loved you for saying that. I would like to sit with a man and repeat back and forth to each other how afraid we are and how okay that is. I’m afraid. Don’t be, but so am I. Or something more closely resembling that I have yet to discover. It was then that I really wished I felt pretty around you, when I looked at the light blonde stubble under your lips. I leaned my head against the door jam, tired. My Keds were pigeon-toed and barely reaching the floor and I felt very young and wondered if maybe we would ever kiss each other some time in the future, since now it seemed we wouldn’t be making any mistakes this time.

I crawled around on your seeming Platonic ideal of a rug and thumbed through books under your chair, leaned on you for a minute and then made a joke about it; sat at your feet and made a joke about that and then laid on my stomach and stared up at your piano, searching for something to bring up, which ended up working out quite well because I asked you what the lights were for and you told me that that little green one in the middle lit up when you had to water it. “You water your piano,” I repeated back. We both laughed and I rolled around on the carpet and there we were, unfolding these narrative details to each other like a game of show and tell, here is something I think you’ll appreciate.

Everything is requisite and self-aware and careful and everything is done with the sense that we could ruin each other. That maybe we already know all of that and we are both very tired and are trying to be better and unsure of what is left?

I listen to the song you told me you thought I’d like a lot now. I do some worrying for you, some thinking about you. And I still have no idea.

"Sleeping Piece I Write all the things you want to do. Ask others to do them and sleep until they..."

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:01:04 -0400

“Sleeping Piece I
Write all the things you want to do.
Ask others to do them and sleep
until they finish doing them.
Sleep as long as you can.
-
Sleep Piece II
Write all the things you intend to do.
Show that to somebody.
Get him to sleep for you until you
finish doing them.
Do for as long as you can.”

- Yoko Ono (via nightmare brunette)

I saw your best friend on the street- we were both walking home from work and I was just thinking,...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:24:00 -0400

I saw your best friend on the street- we were both walking home from work and I was just thinking, god I can’t believe I’m getting home so early, it isn’t even 8 yet when I saw him and waved to him and he said, this is the first time i’m leaving work at a decent hour in weeks and i said, me too! and we said how are you and how is work and we said it as sincerely as we could and we nodded, oh we nodded so much it was silly and there was a van parallel parking and honking and a man yelling but we didn’t move out of the way we just kept asking how work was and saying, Great, oh that’s great and I wondered how much he knew, wondered if he thought you were crazy or I was and I wanted to stop and yell, to cry to him but instead we are proud and we lie to each other and we nod so much and it seems so funny that we ignored your very existence, even though when I met him you were all we talked about— we held hands all day long and he stood with us and talked to me while I trailed along, hungover and in shock and scared and wondering what you were thinking but he tried and it was touching and terrifying and I worried he would hate me and I felt 12 years old and second guessed everything I said and wished you would just pretend I didn’t exist, the way we did to you tonight.

You don’t exist anymore and his company got funded but you won’t move here like you told me you would and his face looks very kind, he is the kind of person I could get drunk with and tell everything I’m afraid of to and he would nod sternly and offer little back but I would trust he understood. I’d tell him I’m afraid you don’t exist and I’m afraid I know I’m a fool and I’m afraid everyone hates me behind my back and you- what if everyone lets me down like you did?

Do you remember the woman on the street, the day we walked down this street that I stood on tonight with him, and how she had that baby that kept craning its head to look at us, how he almost flopped out of his little baby blanket as he reached for us- we were holding hands and beaming and terrified and the mom said, What are you looking at? Why are you looking at them? What do they have that you want?” I’ll never forget that sentence, it shot through me just the way your words always did, late at night, filled with good intentions- and she said it again and I was silent but beaming and our hands were sweating but we didn’t let go, we didn’t ever let go, I loved you through that hand all day, it was all I could do was hope you knew how much I loved you that way. And the mom turned around finally and said- Oh, they are smiling! They are happy, that’s why you are looking at them!

All of New York and I can’t stop running into your friends on sidewalks. What a joke.

by jeffrey gold.

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:33:27 -0400

by jeffrey gold.

He stopped and put his hand on my shoulder and said that we both knew I could pull any ass I wanted...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:51:00 -0400

He stopped and put his hand on my shoulder and said that we both knew I could pull any ass I wanted to and that didn’t all men love me and I rolled my eyes and nodded my head to the side as if to say, haven’t we been over this, and he said, “Your ass,” and I said, “Yes,” and then, “I’ve looked, okay,” he says, “We’ve all looked,” he really starts to get flashy now; rhetorical. “Every man and woman has looked at your ass. We all know it. Every boss. Every friend.” Another friend of mine was there, too cheering and yelling in agreement and laughed and wondered how I accomplished this, knowing I had to have created most of it myself because isn’t that where all the mythology is born anyway? We went outside to smoke a cigarette and I was glad to be wearing a loose-fitting skirt.

Minutes later we came back in and he told me he wanted to do a project with me. Why me I said, and told him I never finish things or do things, only talk about them, so he should choose someone else.

“Look,” he said very gravely, as if he was about to tell me a big secret, “You’re the smartest girl I know.”

I sat up straight and laughed. It felt like such a concession. “But not the smartest person!” He looked at me as if I should know better, and I pressed, “Why do you need a girl, anyway?” and he looked at me again and he said, “Don’t make me say it,” and I said what and he said, “Don’t make me say it!” “Say what?” I said and,

“You are better than all of them,” he said, “And you know it.”

I waved my hand away and drank from my beer and shook my head.

He looked at me in the eyes and I still haven’t pinned down what flows between us. “Hell, you’re better than me!” he yelled through the noise. I sat quietly, hunched close to him in chairs facing each other and stared into the knees of the people standing all around us. “Come on,” he said, “you know that. You have to know that.”

“Well,” I said, and I didn’t normally think like that but if a man is going to ask me if I think I am better than him then I already am. And so, “Yes,” I managed and looked away. I dared myself not to take it back.

One time someone I was sleeping with asked me if I thought of myself as smart first, or cute. Smart, I said immediately and he was surprised. I writhed around his bedroom floor in white lace underwear, flipped over on my stomach with my dress hiked up around my waist. He has not lived with me in this body (only buried himself inside it on occasion).

“What about you?” I asked. “Smart,” he said, “of course.” “Well!” I said, thinking, why shouldn’t I? and he said, “Well, you are pretty damn cute.” I squirmed more for him and was blushing and angry.

Don’t you know, I want to say to them, don’t you know I know these things without you telling me first?

It seems to me that men rank you and pit themselves against you and wonder who is better and declare you the smartest or most beautiful and meanwhile we worry for them and wish revelations upon them and hope they will love us because could they, really, if they knew the truth? That we are smart without them and beautiful without them telling us so, and that deep down, in most cases, we know we are better?

There is nothing I love more than getting lost in a good book knowing there is a man on his way to...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:09:41 -0400

There is nothing I love more than getting lost in a good book knowing there is a man on his way to you; knowing that as soon as you stop fidgeting, stop looking at the door with excitement every time it opens, stop fixing your hair in the reflections of the window, sipping your tea and looking around self-consciously— as soon as you forget all this and wrap yourself up in the story, as soon as you lose your ordinary-ness, he will come up behind you and put his arm on your shoulder and, and, and, and…

I wrote this in the middle of winter, in early March, in a Starbucks, on the back page of a wonderful book I was getting lost in. I wrote it about a man I was trying to get lost in, just starting to fall for. I cried that night, on the way to that Starbucks. I stood outside on the sidewalk in the snow and looked up at the sky and cried, out of disbelief and out of relief- because here it was, another time, I would see him again. He was on his way from the city, from a panel, to meet me and hold my hand while I screeched about the cold. We would tumble through the icy sidewalks together and then take off our shoes when we walked through the door. We would glide across the wood floor in our socks, straight to the couch to smile at each other and shrug a little and creep our way over to each other to find places in each others necks and shoulders to fit into.

And these are only the good parts, only half the story- but I wrote this in a book on the last page and I remember how happy I was to feel this way, how sad I was I had never felt it before- that comfort of a man showing up for you. How it meant so much, maybe too much, but still: he did it again and again. He was an entire man and I was so, so grateful.

chagrin:(via emiliebjork)

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:42:15 -0400

chagrin:(via emiliebjork)

I want to have perspective over this- and I say over it because I would like to look down at it as...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:05:00 -0400

I want to have perspective over this- and I say over it because I would like to look down at it as if from above. I want to be able to put my arms around it mentally, to see it and name it, to consume in its entirety rather that it us; i would like to note the beginning and then, solemnly, to mark the end.

I want to ride over it as if it were a tourist attraction better seen from the sky. i would like to be the helicopter. I would let you take a picture to show your children; give you a discount since it was partly yours. I would like someone to put it in a magnet frame on their fridge, next to the grocery list.

I would like it to be on the grocery list, under the milk but ahead of the toothpaste. (What would we call it, baby, so that we could check it off?)

And I, I would send you a letter after and explain it all to you, having seen it from far away and taken possession of it. You couldn’t tell me I was wrong because there would be no wrong; only truth.

And not the kind you can take back, either.

I would like to do all the things we couldn’t do and still cannot. I would like to do them alone. I’d like to watch you swallow the air, gulp at it sorrowfully. I would maybe cry with my face in the pillow when I saw you do it, but that’s nothing new, now, is it?

So far I only see things in flashes; the important parts climb their way, cumbersomely, to the top of my consciousness, and wait there for me to make sense of them. So far I can only look back at back and bite my lip and apologize.

Why do I see you in my head making my bed, quietly, without comment, while I stood in front of my closet, putting my shoes on and watching you, before I said anything. Why did that hit me harder than anything else? Is it because it was such an everyday thing, and bore with it the hope of that? Did I want you in my life like that, suddenly and immediately? Because here was a thing people did, you did, that we had never spoken of, was that scary, too? You made a bed everyday maybe your whole life and we had never even talked about it?

I would like to watch you do your every day things, to sit by in silence and watch you pack your bags and find your toothbrush and shuffle in and out of your flip flops. I want to see how you type on your computer and plug in your phone to charge at night, to not say anything or ask you any questions but just look at you and love you and ensure, very quietly, that you are human.

I would like to go back and watch you when you looked at me rather than look back. I would like to see how you kissed me, to see how your face looked before and after. To see if you smiled when it happened, the way I seem to remember. I want to hover over us and this one might be hard but I want to- to look at how you held me. I want to see the way you squeezed me as hard as you could and note how we laughed like children and sighed like people who were overwhelmed with the grandeur of existence and then, I might cry, but I want to see how I buried my face in your chest and wrapped my leg around your hip and how you touched me, very slowly, everywhere. I want to, with a pang of regret, remember what that’s like.

I would like to go back and check and make sure you meant it. Because someone has to. Someone had to have been telling the truth.

on writing.

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:20:21 -0400

I am not sure what it means that I want to run here whenever I am despairing, I am unsure if it is really so great a thing to have this at the end of the rainbow, to have it as my great consolation, to be able to tell myself, At least you have that. No matter what happens at least you have that.

fluffed: Jeffery Gold, 2001. Oil on linen.

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:41:24 -0400

fluffed:

Jeffery Gold, 2001. Oil on linen.

Smog, Dress Sexy At My Funeral This song felt lump-throaty, felt...

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:37:00 -0400

Smog, Dress Sexy At My Funeral

This song felt lump-throaty, felt lean your head back against the headrest and look out the windowy. Felt like nervously asking you who it was that was singing and then looking off into the mountains, looking out at all the lights and wondering if you liked me.

I liked you.

It wasn’t exactly that it was right, I just didn’t want you to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay around you and feel a little bit self-conscious and a little bit off, and stick around for moments when I felt something in you that I wanted to crawl into. A funny voice. An “I should take you there.” A “why am I telling you all this?” Don’t all friendships begin with, “Why am I telling you all this?” You sounded right; good; nice; warm. We were awkward and bumbly and we didn’t know each other and we didn’t know if we liked each other but you felt right and good and nice and warm and funny and adorable and I wanted to stumble through conversations and wait for the good parts and I did not want to go.

—

We sat on his porch, on the ledge, cross-legged, facing each other, two beer cans between us. “This is like Sixteen Candles,” he said, “But with beer.”

I had a dress on that was really a shirt and I remember constantly worrying my ass was hanging out, or that my hair was a mess, or my makeup smudged. I don’t think I said much. I was too far in. I was confused. My legs were spiky because I didn’t know if you could bring razors on the plane and my bangs were curling up and looking terrible and did we want to go to this party? We didn’t, really, I don’t think. “Oh, um, we don’t have to? Or do we? Should we?”

i stared off back into the sky which wasn’t as dark as it should have been and we talked about how weird it was there and did I want another beer?

“We don’t really have to go…,”

“I thought we did.”

“Oh. Do we?”

We sat on the couch. I leaned back in a way that was unintentionally intimate. I say unintentionally because I was trying very hard to not reveal how I felt. So I did what i always do in other peoples’ spaces and I picked up all of the books and flipped them over and read the reviews and sat on the couch and he sat next to me quietly and grabbed books from my hand after I spoke about them. I very tangibly switched tones then, perking up, reading last lines of chapters with grandeur.

“Oh, are you going to read to me?” he said.

I believe that was when it was inevitable. “Yes,” I nodded. Maybe this was a scene in a movie we were acting out. I read and laughed and blushed and shook my head and never looked him in the eye. When I gave in he was leaning back in a very intimate way and maybe by now it was intentional. We laughed about things and I wondered how the fuck two people like us would move from Point A to Point B. I said something and he dropped his hand, the back of it, quickly onto mine— bounced it off of it. It felt like high school. This was high school. I cleared my throat, shifted a little, sat up straighter.

“Hold on,” I said and furrowed my brow and made a big to do of flipping through the book and considered the idea that I would have to kiss him first.

“Um,” he said.

“What?” I looked at him pleadingly, my cheeks on fire by now. I played stupid.

“I,” he was so cute. His voice was so wonderful, so good, so nice.

“Whaat?” I said and hid part of my face in the couch, staring up at him with one eye and my mouth dragging across the fabric.

“I feel like we’re about to make out or something.”

We were.

Make a list.

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:43:00 -0400

I asked you about every girlfriend you’d ever had, my hand in yours as we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge. You never let me tell you about the people I slept with before you, which I was suppose is some classic romantic trope or something but it never suited me and I was dying to. I still hate you for that, and would quite like to send you a list, with footnotes concerning the number of orgasms gleaned from each, maybe how many times I went down on them, or where. You wouldn’t be able to unread it. So there’s always that to look forward to.

But it was dark and the weather was perfect and you didn’t tell me that’s where we were headed and right when I thought, hey! We should walk over the bridge! you turned to me and said, Hey! Do you want to walk over the bridge?

I did!

And you told me about your women and I loved every story you told, stopping to kiss you, reimagining your romantic narrative with me at the end, asking you if you touched her boob, if you saw her naked, if she was a good kisser, if she was as good of a kisser as me.

The wind was blowing and we would stop on the sidewalk and kiss; you’d lift me up in the air and kiss me, and I say this because it astounds me now, that moment before you disappoint each other, when you can stop mid sentence, overwhelmed with this, astonishment, Who are you?

It’s not that we really even want to know yet.

And when we walked home I start to tell you about the first boy I ever saw naked and you got mad and annoyed and I hated it. I want to be confessional, I want to be transcendent, I want to torture each other emotionally and cry and stay.

That night I think you let me tell you about the first boy. About Pete. I told you how I only knew his name when he asked me because I saw a drawing on his fridge, done in crayon and stick figures, addressed to Uncle Pete.

“Did you like it?” you asked. Did I? I don’t think I did, but I don’t think that’s what I was in it for. I liked that I knew, now.

Pete did something boring with money, I told you. He was a federal actuary, I remember that now, but I liked to remind you how boring I think money is, how different and creative I am.

I picked him up in a bar, I tell you, I was very drunk, I tell you, in a way I never am now, I tell you, because I’m afraid you won’t like that about me and I tell you that after I took a poll of the crowd— “Raise your hand if you’re a virgin!” no one raised their hand but me. Which was, of course, the deciding factor.

You told me always that I should set some goals. Make a list. You’d say this to me on the way to things, Tell me about your writing, you’d say, it’s the elephant in the room, you’d say, it’s who you are, and I’d let go of your hand on street corners and shake my head and look away and get very angry. How could I tell you, “It is very private.” “You wouldn’t understand.” “You don’t understand anything about me, and you never will. But we have excellent sex and you hold my hand and I would like to see how complicated we can make this.”

It is not something I can tell you about because I will need it for when you leave me.

So I told you that losing my virginity was simply a goal I had set and the time had come to check it off my to-do list. The sadness of that didn’t hit me until a few months later, in bed with another stranger I had picked up at another bar, an Italian, this one, who asked for my sexual origin story and held me and said that that was not how it should be, that I should have a boyfriend who loved me who I could make love to multiple times a day and who could teach me and help me learn what I liked, and, and, and. I cried in his arms and he ssshed me, kissing my back, telling me it was okay in his Roman accent. It wasn’t right, I thought, but it was true. What could I say? That no one showed up for me, that no one liked me enough, that maybe no one felt that I was worth the risk, so I took my own.

I shrugged to him and he told me I was beautiful and creeped down to the end of the bed and asked, “Can I eat you?” I still laugh when I think of it.

That night with Pete I was wearing these underwear with sparkly fireworks all over them that I got at Wal-Mart in the 7th grade. Really. I considered them my lucky underwear and I guess it held true, in a pile in his living room where Van Morrison was playing on a 6-cd changer and candles were half-lit. What are you doing, I demanded, as he lit them and I stood there alone, behind a loveseat.

It always felt very lonely, is what I wanted to tell you. And it didn’t with you.

syntheticpubes: by Frankie Nazardo

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:14:05 -0400

syntheticpubes: by Frankie Nazardo

The saddest thing about naps is when no one notices that you take them.

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:54:00 -0400

I went into the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I almost forgot to put the bread down. You wrote about watching people in the subway and I remember being in there with you. Looking up at you when you watched someone’s newspaper, when you looked down at me when the train took a turn, hugging me to you so I wouldn’t fall on someone, telling me that, my god, could I at least go to cnn.com once a day so I knew who Bernie Madoff was, and, No, I said, the news changes every day; if I need to know, I’ll hear about it. I had never had any coffee yet so it was always an unfair battle, watching you check your email while we went over the bridge, alternating between ignoring me and trying to kiss me before I made it clear that I didn’t like you to do that, before it got both so bad and so good that I would let you kiss me wherever you wanted to. The shift between always feeling you about to kiss me, coming down over my shoulder and looking at me that sweet way every time you looked at me, when I knew I could look at you a certain way and you’d stop what you were doing and pull me to you, between that and when I would dance around you on the subway platform, this time learning to buy coffee on the way to the train, putting on a show now; putting on my makeup before we left now, none of it mattering too much because I stood below you, close to you, my breasts pressed up against you, not caring who saw, and you looked down on me— to me, but that, too— faked a smile, craned your head to see if the train was coming. I gripped the waistband of your jeans, desperate now, and now, speechless. You looked at me again, raised an eyebrow. “What?” you asked me. It was the worst thing you could have said.

nightmarebrunette: CinemaCowgirl

Sun, 31 May 2009 22:40:38 -0400

nightmarebrunette: CinemaCowgirl

This is the spin.

Sun, 31 May 2009 02:17:00 -0400

You asked me if I really missed you, or just the warmth of someone.

Now, this was unfair because:

1. You just read my blog, where I said that very thing.

2. I cannot separate the two.

3. This was no time for truth.

I don’t want to forget how it felt to take the last kleenex out of the box you made me buy.

I didn’t know it was the last one when I took it.

chagrin: (via melanie rodriguez)

Sat, 16 May 2009 17:34:17 -0400

chagrin:

(via melanie rodriguez)

I was buying groceries today and thought how much I missed cooking for you, although I think I only...

Sat, 16 May 2009 17:28:00 -0400

I was buying groceries today and thought how much I missed cooking for you, although I think I only did it once. But it was the possiblity of it that I missed. The meaning to. When will I wander dreamy-eyed through Key Foods again, turning things over in my hand, wondering if you’d like them?

There is still chunky peanut butter in my cabinet that makes me want to cry when I see it.

I gave you an apple and a jar of peanut butter and we stood in the kitchen and told each other funny stories about baseball from our childhoods. We were loud and silly and gesturing madly, I sliding around the kitchen floor in my socks and my yoga pants and my freshly reapplied makeup and you smelling faintly of sweat and chlorine. I told you that the apple probably wasn’t very good and you said the peanut butter wasn’t very good, either. These were small failings that we could say out loud and condemn each other with and my face will fit perfectly in the gap where you sternum is and I will pull you to me in the light of the kitchen and not want to say much else because it didn’t matter.

I fixed it next time I went shopping, I bought the kind of peanut butter you liked, but I never got to tell you and I never got to show you and you may never really know all the ways I tried to express all the affection I had for you, despite how much it scared me. For all of my complicated feelings and poetry, I could never figure out how to just show you.

That night, just like always, you said things to me that felt very generous and unnecessary. I like being here. This feels nice. I like spending time with you. Things that held no cleverness to hide behind. I began to love those simple sentences, to curl up in them as you whispered into the curve of my shoulder, the nape of my neck, along my spine. Words that became remarkable when you uttered them, that made my face and mind go blank, made me close my eyes in shame, in humility, words whose meager syllables performed a unilateral disarmament on my winding desperation. Words that put me at rest.

And I know that now I must rediscover my consolation alone.

But I go to sleep, my darling man, and I don’t even fluff my pillow. I collapse in my bed with my my shoes still on. My bed is filled with the dirt from my shoes and there isn’t even any reason to change the sheets.

I leave my room to go to work without worrying about who will be here next, because I know there will be no one.

The last time I straightened up I found a condom wrapper in the space between the bed and the wall and I swear I wanted to keep it.