Mysticism, at its finest.

On tuesdays, wednesdays, saturdays, Somedays,

the unspoken words of our unrequited characters crash

into the hard wood.

The speakers scream

mouthfuls of ceramic tiles painted blue and green --

spilling into lagoon at the center of it all.

And when the statue melts into the pediment

of your collared colloquialisms,

I'll mark it on my calendar,

and dance to the sound

of your hair being brushed and

your fingers praying for Magic.

Broad Leaves

In the morning light bittersweet kissed my hair

Shedding slowly like the feathers from the barn owl I used to love
Molting seems too ugly a word to describe the release

We used to play with Stories in the tall grass
Like finding syllables in seed pods, you'd say

How perfect

And and and

This is all I want. Slipping into sleep with the weight of your should on mine until the sun rises and sets again. Soft cells sinking. Ink drying. And praying for something placid.


"I am a strange loop" Arms & Sleepers

Untitled 2

I was happy sick for days when I thought you had told me the tonic. But when we packed it all into boxes I knew that where the cardboard met the puddle it would melt into wasted paper and that would be that. So how dare you look at me with that listerine mouth of yours. I know it stings too. I've folded your self righteous shirts for too long and I need to launder myself now. So learn to iron and lather, rinse, repeat me from your world.

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That morning, just after the kettle screamed the world awake, she tied a ribbon into her hair like a sweet white flame striking in the pulpit of a young flower. The earth spun faster than usual as the sun slid quickly across the kitchen floor playing in the pieces of scattered glass. A collection of misplaced paradigms, he sat in the chair in the corner next to the lamp that has never worked and the old porcelain statue of a fawn, listening to the world. Like the broken chain of a favorite necklace lost between the radiator and the wall, the metals in her face, too expensive to magnetize, waited to be found. So the two sat in silence. Kissed in the quiet. And waited to burn the world down.

Grey White Grey

Tonight, you can wear my skin as your skin

It's tough and worn and impermeable and impossible

with the date stamped even though the queue is long

because it seems all a bit Dali

But on nights like this

when the soft of clouds is scratchy like a sweater on sale

it will fit like a pigeon in a clouded window

or a spiked sill

And the sun will stay set for a while this time

Because he's tired and I'm tired and sleep would come easy

if the curtains weren't drawn and the timing wasn't wrong

And I knew the words that fit easily in your lips and mouth and tongue

And if our beating hearts were proximal like we're taught to understand

and the dirt we breathe could be listed as

holistic and sadistic and scientific

I would tell you the truth

But the worms have lied

and the birds aren't early

so no one gets anything except the feeling of empty

and a shaking hand holding a sallow lantern

But when my hair is tied back with twine

and the Autumn feels sweet and safe again

Things will return to almost as they were

before the fall

On the Morning of My Release

And the wood cracks and cracks and snaps and

when the leaves begin to fall like splinters of themselves

I miss what was

When the green light is new it rises and lifts and applauds

our youth and hair and skin

And in that moment you looked so gold

Truths were told and folded and beholded

when the sky was something grey like a wolf

that only wanted to sleep, not eat

And inside wanted outside with the tag out

but you'd fix it for me

because I'd fix it for you

Where's the Garbage Bin?

Sometimes I write things. And then realize it's complete rubbish.

The aftermath:

A Love Letter

I Miss My Books (or, Dear Miranda July, let's be friends?)

From Miranda July's No One Belong Here More Than You:

Teachers of subjects that this person wasn't even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying "I love you"

The Queen's Arms and a Three Legged Dog

On the first official night in our new city, we took a round about adventure looking for something we never found, but ending somewhere even better. Nestled behind the bright white stoops of South Kensington, there's a little place where quiet conversations over amber drinks nestle comfortably into themselves. The Queen's Arms is humble, dark and deep. Behind me a three legged dog lazed on the floor, content like we were to merely exist in our very own cozy city solacement. Browns bled into grey into shadow and when we'd had enough to drink we kissed cheeks with the locals and released our calm into the cobbled street.

Dear Adam Gopnik, Thank You.

My newest book-I-bring-everywhere, the beautifully written Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, is beginning to emotionally ready me for my quickly approaching move to Europe. Gopink -- a canadian writer living with his wife and young son in Paris and journaling the extraordinary culture shock experience for The New Yorker -- writes with the sense of journeys past: slenderly nostalgic, seriously introspective and entirely honest. Gopnik is caught exploring the mess of grey areas between visiting Paris, living in Paris, and falling in love with Paris.

Here's a taste:

There are two kind of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visiter sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished -- so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at -- his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. My head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them.

It's all making me feel quite safe and in good company. Thank you, Adam.

In Early Summer

Things fall slower at three a.m., of this I am quite certain. When the air is cool and the sky is stuck between getting darker and getting lighter, an aged kitchen chair leaping from a second story window into the street falls gracefully, quietly, slowly -- fracturing and splintering into a million exquisite pieces, each different from the other.

Tucked neatly underneath the the window from whence the chair flew, five sit on the front porch of the house. Stories and sly eyes and smoke between us, we are a collective prime number in the early hours of the city. The street wanderer plays guitar -- a piece of broken pipe sliding through the blues of his Georgia soul. He's not good and it's not beautiful, but that's okay.  

Our ribs and voices melt into one another, colliding and collapsing into something comfortable. The porch is our whole world. Our everything, ourselves. The quiet of the night protects us from the rising sun and saves us from the close-drawing day.

It's time to sleep and find sweet dreams when we get there.  

Yann Tiersen and Elizabeth Fraser "Kala"

{I can't believe I didn't know this duet existed until tonight, but I'm happy it found me.} 

There are nights when the chords hum right, and the light from the building next door falls slanted into my room -- pivoting around a midnight moon as shadows of cars pass on the street. A gentle song swathes me to sleep. And oh how I sleep. Until gravity feels safe again and the city sings softly and I slip into something of myself by morning.  

Noise

I've been working on a series of short memoirs and snippets of stories and poems and lyrics and things - you can find my earlier pieces here. Sometimes weeks go by and I'm wordless. Tonight, I'm happily pouring words like thick water. 

--- --- --- 

The world was silent until she threw her shoe against the wall. Gashing a gash shaped like a wry half smile, it coughed and cried and spilled the sounds that had been waiting between the two by fours. Cutting through the once disruptive silent static, vowels flew into sharp stings and the ground swelled until it nearly burst. And when the noise found in itself a friend, it spread calmly through her world that was never again too quiet. 

Facts

I've been working on a series of short memoirs and snippets of stories - you can find my earlier memoir piece here. Sometimes weeks go by and I'm wordless, and sometimes words pour from me like thick water. Last night was one of those times. 

--- --- ---

"I'm a fact collector," he said. "I understand," she said. 

Earlier that day, when the clouds had slipped between grey and white and sky, he pulled the last blank index card from the box. He wrote on it, "I've collected a life of facts. This is the last." Folding down the top left corner in case he needed to find it again, he filed it in the back of the drawer with the others, and closed the door. 

He would not need to find the fact again. 

One year later, when again the clouds had slipped between grey and white and sky, the wind was interrupted with smoke; dark, as though the earth had finally caught the shadow of itself. Pieces of facts danced over the flames -- flying from the empty skeleton of a house that was.  

Handfuls of words fell into ash that knew everything and meant nothing and could never be found again.

Relativity

I've been working on some mini-memoir pieces. This is the first of many more to come. 

--- --- ---

A man in the corner writes on yellowed pages, reminding me that I slipped my favorite book into my bag before I left the hotel this morning. The tattered pages are printed with words I have already met. A tired scent rises from the binding, reintroducing me to The House on Mango Street. I leaf through, not needing to read the story I already know. I had forgotten that I underlined my favorite passages in red:

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.

These pages always seem to say exactly what I need to hear, making sense of what I cannot. I read, trying to recall how I felt about this book the first time I read it. What did my previous-self find in these words? Surrounded by foreign vowels, I realize that French may be the only language I hear today. But it is okay, really, because I am all right with not understanding—sometimes it’s easier than the clutter of a native tongue.  

A mother and daughter sit down at a table nearby, reminding me of my family back at the hotel. Three generations of women in a city generations older than we can trace the branches of our own family tree. I think of them asleep, eyes like mine that have cried salty tears. Mouths like mine inhaling the damp air.

I woke up early this morning, anticipating another day to call Paris my own. The cold rain and dark clouds of early morning reminded me of old acquaintances greeting the tourists’ Eiffel Tower and the natives’ Île Saint-Louis. Pigeons melted into the shadows of dark alleys as I walked alone through the narrow streets near my hotel. Following sidewalks lined by empty cars with unfamiliar makes and models, I couldn’t help but feel more at home in Paris, a city with which I had barely spoken, than in my sky-colored room in my house on the corner.

Now I sit in a quiet café, giving my face a break from the cold and my umbrella a break from the rain. As I sip my coffee, memories from high school French class find a familiar face in the conversations lingering in the air. Old friends at a table near me talk quietly about an old house. I wonder why the aged floorboards and clouded windows shape their malleable words with such somber. Who did they love there? Who did they lose there?

This lonely day in Paris makes me unsure of the home that I miss and the family that I crave. I’m not sure what to long for and it’s strange. But I think that I am going to be all right because maybe for now, not knowing what to miss is just a little less painful that missing something real.

Cultural stereotypes prove themselves on the street outside. Framed in the window, elegant men and women cloaked in black grace the humble sidewalks. Lines of schoolgirls in red berets pass, holding hands and holding up traffic. Shopkeepers open shutters, revealing shelves lined with exotic fruits and labels that I cannot read. Although the day has barely started, the glint in each passing pair of eyes makes me feel as if Parisians know something about living life that I do not. As my sister, mother and grandmother sleep in our small hotel room, I am an observer.

Slowly swirling white milk into black coffee, my teaspoon is startled by a conversation whisked in from outdoors. Clashing with the elegant breeze of European perfume, I instantly recognize the voices as American. How obnoxious their tourist cameras and ponchos seem. I can only hope that I don’t sound as they do – violent vowels, unsightly consonants. I run marathons through the vocabulary stored in my memory, finding French verb tenses that can answer their butchered guidebook questions in hopes that just maybe they won’t find out that I am one of them. I want to trick them. I want to make them wonder what it is that makes me so unlike them. I want to convince them that I am exactly who I wish to be—that in this place, this Paris, I am finally happy.

My mother tells everyone that when she looks at baby pictures of my sister and me, she has to look at the names on the back to tell us apart. “Two blonde, blue-eyed babies,” she says, plaguing me with unoriginality. Today I am thankful for Paris, because no one knows that there is a sister who looks just like me asleep under an itchy hotel blanket, or a mother who has been left alone in a quiet house like I have, or a grandmother whose personality changes with the seasons, just as mine does. Today I can be myself, or, perhaps even better, someone else entirely, without the burden of a story to tell.

The old cash register and insistent milk steamer harmonize, and the Americans, despite their broken French and bright colors, take their café au laits and baguettes and leave smiling. They are glowing, and I am both envious and terrified as I realize that a change of place isn’t going to make me happy; a new language isn’t going to sing me content. I am stuck. My breaths shorten with the fear that I am stranded in a life I am not sure I’m living.

I doubt sleep will come easily tonight. Rather, I’ll sit at the window and watch the Parisian dreams that no one else sees play out under the sallow glow of the streetlights. I will wait for each moonlight wanderer, hoping that one will look up from the street with eyes that will promise me that we are the lucky ones; we are the listeners and the secret keepers. We are the unattached, and we are not nearly as alone as we have convinced ourselves.

Above the quiet fall of rain, church bells singing ten a.m. remind me of time. I leave money on the table for my coffee. Before seeping back into the reassuring grey of the street, I take one last look at my book, as it speaks gracefully of things for which I cannot find words:

She looked out her window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window