nameless things

to have and to hold

2012-01-24T16:53:00.000-05:00

The keepers of precious things are charged with a duty: to rescue, preserve and enshrine the abandoned. We do things like read about Victorian hair jewelry and think about how crazy it is that after you die, your hair looks the same - shiny and vibrant and undead - it will not decompose - not for thousands of years. Lovers give away locks of hair before departure threatens finality - a remembrance - a token - something tangible that feels no different to the touch than when it was attached to the living and breathing (this is mine - a part of me - and I am with you always). I'm not sure why this idea seems more romantic than giving your loved one a jar of toenails, it just does. It was a way of giving someone a part of you that will never change, or dull with time. When you die, every part of your body will begin to register your passage - but not your hair. Because hair is not alive, there is no temperature change upon the moment of death. There are lots of things to think about.

The Hair Table of Over-Preparedness and Endless Possibility

Once, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a man carried the weight of terrible memories in his long hair. One strand of hair wrapped around the murder that took place in a cursed building years ago, waiting for a fire to take it down. Another wrapped tightly around the throat of addiction and forgetting. There was one for fatherhood and one for the word 'goodbye'. There were strands devoted to falling from high-up places, various ways to lose your teeth, and the things that make you laugh a crooked laugh. He'd toyed with the idea of cutting his long hair, but never seemed to get around to it, just like he never seemed to get around to relinquishing the bottle of vodka he hid underneath his bed (odorless, or so they say). I took him to the backyard, sat him in a lawn chair, and shaved his head. You don't know hair can weigh a thousand pounds until you see that weight lifted from the shoulders of the burdened, and then your heart swells to become more capable of loving the broken (all of us, a little broken). What was left of him was a boyish smile and the sort of light that took his eyes when he showed you the woodworking projects he'd been busy with, or took you to the back shed to offer you a newly confiscated animal skull, and that afternoon, I caught him smiling in the medicine cabinet mirror because he finally recognized himself again.

What Maggie Made: Hair Embroidered on Vintage Fabric

Another life ago, when I was 18 years old, I shaved my head; almost everyone thought it was some combination of insanity, cancer, or suddenly becoming a lesbian that brought me to do such a thing. They were entirely wrong. I stood naked in front of a mirror and chopped off my long hair in some combination of bravery, relinquishing vanity, letting go, and starting over. I guess some people would call that crazy. This hair was cut from my head 10 years ago, in June 2002. It grew since the day I shaved my hair off and began again, in various ways.

What I made: Embroidered Hair on Fine Silk

I've been making lists: Things I want to do before I die, Topics to Write About, Things That Break My Heart (like when a new restaurant opens and nobody shows up and the lonely guy standing at the counter looks that certain kind of defeated that can only come when hope has fallen from a high ledge), Art Ideas, Etc. There are a million things I'll never get around to. And when I die, I'm certain to leave behind a whole bunch of crap that nobody will know what to do with, and that most people won't care about. But maybe one of my treasures will make its way into the hands of a keeper of precious things after she comes across an ancient matchbox on a dusty old shelf in a thrift store while she's on a road trip with her best friend, and she has just finished her chocolate milkshake. And she'll open the match box to discover a talisman inside - a protective force woven with careful hands and sharp eyes, that carries the story of a girl who began her life all over again. And she will know just what to do.

The Shrine of Safety and Letting Go

There are amazing ways to fuck shit up; don't forget to love.

2012-01-23T01:31:00.000-05:00

what it was

2012-01-18T14:33:00.001-05:00

time stretched all around us
unruly
cruel
wise
tender like a deep bruise
sensation disoriented
by the disturbance of nostalgia
gone before the leaves could fall,
our phantoms took on human proportions.

we wanted to raise uncalloused
smooth
backhand
to pale unblemished forehead
swoon in sorrow
unleash floral patterned apron
-a 1950s act of contrition-
softly,
to the floor
in dainty display of feminine fall
undone, unmade, unwont

but our guns were cocked
hands worn
eyes too
mind trained
on years of process
(what the fuck was I thinking)
we nurtured you
on fire escape betrayal
benches made of longing
crippling bus ride delivery home
but homeward-bound was not to you
and girls grow woman-fierce
-not your fucking mother-fierce-
our hands hardened from holding on
to nothing so tangible
as a ghost to believe in
and found that faith
demands no grip.

(poem from the archives: Love Letters to the Broken Hearted, 2006)

The Book of Years

2012-01-01T14:21:00.001-05:00

The Book of Years: March 8th, 2008 - December 31st, 2011.

Old Year

The Final Pages

Love Letters to the Broken Hearted

2011-12-02T12:07:00.002-05:00

Everyone lives a thousand lives in any given day. We're pretty lucky. Sometimes, we don't even notice how lucky we are. On any given Thursday, one of my lives can be easily put in the form of a love letter to Batsu (who I just learned spells his name Batsukh, but it's too late now - he'll always be Batsu to me). This is how it goes:

You have lived many lives. One of your lives was in Mongolia with your wife and children. Your son looks exactly like you, and your girls want to come to America. I know this because your cell phone pictures show them wearing t shirts with NY on the front in neon puffy paint, and they obviously don't know how lame Disney World actually is. They are grown now, and you miss them. America has rules put in place to estrange you from your children. In another of your lives, you were an acrobat in the Mongolian Circus and a professional dancer, but you threw out your back. You moved here decades ago and fell in love with a beautiful man. You cooked thousands of dumplings and burgers and chicken wings - pounds of lettuce washed and dried - metric tons of potatoes cut by your hands as you watched your lover fall sick. You stood by his side. (In sickness and in health). I remember when your heart began to break. You started drinking. And the day he died, you looked at me with complete broken openness, said "Ali, he die" and came into my arms. I'll never hold anybody in that same way again. It was a one-off. The kind of moment that only gets to happen once. Of course, this is true of every moment. But most of those moments get lost in the shuffle.

You stood by me through my own broken heart, but you didn't know it. Because I needed some joy in my life through the day-to-day, and my friendship with you gives me that. So when I tell you I love you in a fit of laughter, I mean it. And when you make fun of me for having a crush on the dishwasher who I totally DON'T have a crush on, or you tell me that Bridget is going to have my baby (this is excellent news), or you spell 'veggie burger' wrong, you are creating a whole different world for me. You teach me the Mongolian rules (1. Never whistle after sunset. This will call evil spirits to you. If you do whistle after dark, your mother will die. Note: Singing after sundown is ok.). And you take me away from here, if only for a few moments in the kitchen on a Thursday night.

(caution)

2011-11-30T23:01:00.000-05:00

dear one

2011-11-20T01:03:00.002-05:00

Time drags its heels then picks up the pace like a dirty trick turned at dusk or dawn, neither of which is ever the right time to turn a trick, much less a dirty one. But you know about time in a different way now. You get to observe how people put time in boxes, with small cages trying to hold it in, the bars carefully measured and spaced to prevent out-thinking the system. I haven't been with you for a very long time, but I'm with you now that you've been captured again, and I'm with you now like a woman in a tree with her sweater buttoned up accidentally wrong and I love you.

There are things we could never recover. We counted to 3 and you broke my heart in a patch of berries along the dirt road near your cottage, you ran so hard. I broke in half to see you like that before I broke your heart in return. We were each committed to something no one else could ever understand, and their assumptions were ugly and linear and wrong. We were wrong, too; we just didn't know it yet.

I'm doing cliche things like 'writing about time' so my language center is flashing red lights all over the place, and one of those red lights lit up the word 'remiss' in my mental dictionary, which caused me to define it: re-miss: to miss again; redundant loss; a segment of importance that surfaces twice, without awareness granted; a second chance gone down the drain.

when the pie was opened the birds began to sing

2011-11-20T00:59:00.000-05:00

Everybody knows there are a hundred thousand ways to say goodbye.

2011-11-14T16:07:00.000-05:00

Objects and Appetites

2011-11-10T13:55:00.000-05:00

Now and then and everything in between came down with the fog early this morning and dampened all the clothing on the line. But one day each year, providing conditions are right, the sun comes into my bedroom like this:

(maybe this only gets to happen once)

I never heard June Peace cry until today, when she called me on the phone to apologize for something she hadn't even done to begin with. Her mind is escaping her, and she forgets ordinary things as she clings to the practical details she needs to remember in order to get by; she focuses so hard to ensure the table is set for dinner, but she loses track of her train of thought and you can see it pass over her face with momentary concern, and then confusion. They want to send her to the nursing home, but she's resisting, and besides, everyone around her is slowly losing some faculty or other as they shake their heads in dismayed acknowledgment of each other's disintegration, but remain unaware of their own. The body breaks. The muscles in their tired hands have atrophied over the years, and now the movements of their limbs are slow and graceful in the ordinary way that falls upon old bodies as a new mindfulness is needed to get from one place to another. Its a shaky kind of grace.

There are aesthetic concerns. This type of concern is a relief, because its a problem worth addressing, and it's actually possible to fix this type of imbalance. I can't say this is true of my heart, or yours, or yours. But that was yesterday. And yesterday was spent thinking about an impossible man. I've always loved forbidden things. Like a child to the oven. Like a hairpin to the keyhole. And your mouth has only one aesthetic concern I'd like to address. Okay, maybe more than one.

His letter came when I was in the kitchen, listening to the BBC Newshour while roasting breadcrumbs in bacon fat, sauteing mushrooms in butter and garlic, hollowing out an artichoke to stuff with the least vegetarian and most fattening concoction I could invent. It was a long letter. Everybody knows there are a hundred thousand ways to say goodbye. We chose kindness over bitterness, so we are family now.


"Its a self-affirming artichoke. Think about it like that." (-MM)

Conversations touching on toxicity happen amidst kitchen laughter, but not during the funny parts. Kitchen laughter is number 37 on my list of favourite things.

I know this is broken writing, but I need a place to put these things that occupy my days, and they don't always follow in an orderly fashion. Maybe they never do, or maybe they always do. Everything is true, depending on how you look at it. Everything is also false, depending on that same thing.

Something is wrong with my heart today.

My book is almost full. It's been almost full for a long time; I guess I'm still afraid to put it down. This one can't live in a suitcase because it needs to breathe the air for reassurance.

If you put your ear to it, you can hear the sounds of things that really happened.

Moments & Collateral

2011-11-10T01:34:00.000-05:00

Regard

2011-10-16T15:11:00.000-04:00

love and the drug on your ordinary mind

2011-09-05T14:34:00.001-04:00

The drug was greed and if you partook, it would bind you to the other takers and steal away your ordinary mind. Everyone wanted more, but no one wanted to be alone, and the dynamic caused rifts of alienation that didn't exist, until they did. We would sneak into caves, pretending to be subtle, relinquishing dignity for longing and longing for temporary satisfaction that only existed in anticipation and vanished again upon attainment. An endless cycle crept upon the night, and if you didn't run away in time, you would be trapped like the rest of them, alone together.

A little girl sat hunched over a pattern of fallen dominos. She couldn't figure out how to get them back up and do it again. Then she thought about falling, and how you can't unfall when you're on your way down, or even after you've hit the pavement, or the grass, or the hardwood floor. She wished she could watch her sister's blood pour back into her chin, the split skin joining back to its usual colour, her face rising from the sidewalk along with her body as she careened backwards over the handlebars and onto her bike seat as the tricycle flew backwards up the hill and onto the part of the driveway where the garage lived. It was the same garage that trapped a sparrow the little girls had nursed back to health, only to fly aimlessly and scattered, still somehow broken, to its hungry cat doom. She wished she could unfall that, too.

The woman sat far from sleep. When she turned her key in the door of the darkened bar, she thought: people just want to belong. And when she walked a few paces to turn another key in the lock of her bike, she thought: yellow is a good colour to look at every day. She wanted to write about love. But instead, everything she put to electronic paper sounded cryptic, and it became clear that patterns become themselves, long after you've stopped being sad as a general driving principle. Behaviour takes time to catch up with the inside ways of a person. Her old lady friends can't believe how tall she's growing. They must think she's 15 years old, though they know she's 33 and choose to ignore it. Which is okay because she thinks they're little girls too, even though their version of 'getting up in age' involves surpassing 90.

The addiction was connection at a distance. A person you clearly decided not to get emotionally involved with baited the hook before he sank you. The pattern was so obvious, it was embarrassing to be a part of it at all. You wondered if the singularity of your own effort in contrast to his selfishness was worth the fix of sporadic temporary affection with mad chemistry in the mix, but you only ever wondered this on your way home. Years went by, and the man had many names. You thought if you refused to feel used or ashamed, it would prevent the falter of something akin to self respect. But you also thought you were capable of refusing to feel anything at all, and that turned out to be wrong. Over time, you discover that you're a magnet for other people's stories. They gather little glimpses of your own concerns. And one day, when you arrive to lock your bike to the pole outside the rowhouse, you stop dead in your tracks. Your bicycle's identical twin is locked to the pole already. The keys still hang from the lock on their pink carabeener, and you recognize your house key in the orange street light - lots of people have given you keys to their homes, and those hang there too. You suddenly know a trap has been set. Something sick twists inside of you with the simple realization: you have already arrived. There are crossroads in life and this is one of them. You know if you walk through that door and up to your bedroom, you will see yourself standing there naked, waiting, and you're not sure what to say. Maybe the other you will know, since she got there first. But something is wrong. There is no mystic grace to this greeting: this is the confrontation of everything you've always done wrong, again and again. So you get back on your yellow bike, and you ride through the night as fast as you can, making up words to a song no one else can hear, because its dark outside. You're on your way to meet your other self - the graceful one who never makes mistakes. When you find her, she's sitting under a tree with a beer in her hand, small children in her eyes, and a love that never hurts anyone else's feelings - not ever.

(photo credit: Maggie Manzer)

Bird of Passage

2011-07-23T01:33:00.000-04:00

This week wore me like a dress with the tag still on.

It seems that everyone around me is arguing God against Science, as if there's any argument at all. We only have our words distilling fat thoughts that have all been thought before, or maybe never. Which do you prefer, loneliness or company? Its not a fair polarity. I don't know what is.

You put your hands where you put your hands and you said, "Please _________, ____ __ ______ __ ____". You'd said it all before, but this time you meant it in a different way. Maybe your luck would improve. Or maybe you'd just get another dumb generic Yogi Tea fortune about the center being within or some such facebook-update-worthy tripe. The truth is, Thursday morning you were trying not to cry but by afternoon, you wanted to strangle somebody. You notice 'strangle' is one letter removed from 'stranger'. You still don't know what BDSM stands for exactly, but you know what it means.

The time to catch up in written word has come and gone a thousand times, and although it appears laziness is the prevention point, there is something lurking underneath, pulling at the dark bedsheets over its head, quietly. This is where I live; this is how I love. So you could chalk it up to laziness or sly depression, but you're the one who noticed when the world took a breath and held it. Something was about to happen. And you were fucking right.

24 Hours in Fragmented Form

2011-06-25T12:07:00.000-04:00

Springtime in Philadelphia

2011-06-17T15:08:00.001-04:00

new place

old friends

the body breaks to come back again

this guy loves the easter bunny

everything

the old longing lifts away

new work

those who fall go to the next place

it will be okay. stretch out your arms.

2011-04-27T00:35:00.000-04:00

courage (whole-hearted)

2011-04-13T15:32:00.000-04:00

courage: c.1300, from O.Fr. corage (12c., Mod.Fr. courage) "heart, innermost feelings; temper," from V.L. *coraticum (cf. It. coraggio, Sp. coraje), from L. cor "heart," which remains a common metaphor for inner strength. In M.E., used broadly for "what is in one's mind or thoughts," hence "bravery," but also "wrath, pride, confidence, lustiness," or any sort of inclination. Replaced O.E. ellen, which also meant "zeal, strength."; goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

lapses in longing

2011-04-11T12:55:00.000-04:00

~~strange dreams lapses in longing~~

~~context over time inside an angel built of tin~~
~~we grew each other up~~
~~and i've never been one to run away at airports~~

The Book of Years / The Book of Weeks

2011-03-29T13:32:00.000-04:00

The Book of Years (March 8th, 2008 - Present) // The Book of Weeks (March 2011 - Present)

I lost my words for a time - was beginning to grow concerned that they wouldn't come back, that my outlet had become wholly visual, that I'd lost more than a big devoted part of my heart on a spell with a promise to try and love me right (how did I not hear that message for what it was?). I've come to terms now, feeling deep gratitude for years alongside a beautiful other who became a brother and I won't say any final goodbye, but give it space to change into a true and good friendship. Another brother told me to 'embrace the space' and I listened. Language returned to me one afternoon this week in my studio on a long sheet of butcher paper scrolled through my typewriter - words I no longer recall signed sealed and mailed off to another wanderer who i came to know beyond words. Seems as soon as words stopped trying to be everything, subsided for a while, allowed me to be present in the moment without constant documentation, they came back as a gift -- not a distraction this time around.

take heed

2011-03-23T00:52:00.000-04:00

Listening does not imply obedience.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Remember to breathe; look outward; turn away your demons (this culture is a deathtrap).

Never kiss the lips of a man who won't offer you his eyes.

words without a sound

2011-03-23T00:40:00.000-04:00

Only during a supermoon

(namelessly, namelessly, namelessly)

Surrender

2011-02-28T17:43:00.001-05:00

Kevin found his way into my life during odd rites of passage. Once while floating on a thousand islands he swept in (fishingrods, a rabbit and a lion, secret stories) and addressed the problem of my first loose tooth by advising my little sister to punch me in the face; in a striking moment of obedience, while sitting in the grass beneath a large tree some hours later, my sister socked me in the mouth, a flash of anger quickly replaced with pride when I looked down on bent blue jeans to find my little bottom tooth. He told me about first kisses and fooling around in the treehouse while I prepared to kiss a boy for the first time -- a real kiss -- not just the slow-motion spin-the-bottle freckled cheek kiss in the parking lot after Chynell Booth's birthday party kinda kiss -- more like the kiss Danica and I practiced by hollowing out an apple and taking turns french kissing it while offering feedback on technique and visual confirmation that we were, in fact, doing it right. When I got lost in the woods as a teenager, tangled up in a patch of wicked thorny vines, he found me lying there immobilized and explained the concept of surrender. He made me promise not to die. We were on the same collision course a million miles away but we understood the demons and the angels all around us. Kevin and Natalie always treated me like a grown-up, always loved me like a partner in crime, told me I was beautiful in my ugliest moments. After Nana died he took me for coffee in a diner - just me and him - and we talked about heartbreak and the ending of my marriage and he taught me the lesson of balancing honesty and compassion in the sideways glance of light through the blinds. He was always really terrible at goodbyes. When he took me to the airport after a month of staying with him and Natalie and baby Kelly (always open-eyed/full of life/playful/gorgeous with a free-spirit and a sweet heart), he picked my bags out of the car, hugged me quick, burst into tears and ran away. Not everyone is saddled with the weight of feeling everything so strongly to the bone. We are blessed/wretched/blessed/wretched but this you well know. I put you in this box because you taught me not to cry and run away. Instead, I've decided to keep you here, in gratitude that I knew the best of you, and in torment that I never got to say goodbye.

unhinged

2011-02-27T13:10:00.002-05:00

The  device has changed.  The telephone rings and you suddenly remember  paralysis.  There were bars on the windows to keep safe the outside  world (shh).  The device has changed, the mechanics unhinged.   Permission here is granted when unraveling shakes you down.  Insanity,  like suicide, offers recourse to the sensitive (unbearably, scathingly,  hauntingly) - a cop-out for the capable unfurled exposed and maybe  brilliant.  The device has changed the mechanics unhinged scattered  loose metallic components sterile linoleum floor.  

You can almost hear the ghost of echo if you care to listen; minimal coverage torn from a knot in the throat.

They wanted specificity; you told them to fuck off.

You rode a decade cross-legged, floor paper scissors self expression  masturbation ego-coaxing (help me, please) aware this self-absorption  bears no disclaimer (only: artist).  Only, somewhere likely blatantly obvious in this collection of  melodrama, healing, scraps and scraps of process, wordswordswords,  repetition (bears repeating), poetry, men, (oh fuck), is the anecdote to  the incredulous amount of digestion and exploration necessary for  procedure.  Dare you think you're good enough to face (insert definite  article here), excuse his tone of voice, unwind the harshness looking,  looking, somewhere something tender, please.  I'll never be enough for  you, even when I'm everything.  And sorry escapes me in all the wrong  places.  The device has changed, the mechanics unhinged; you can almost  hear the ghost of echo if you care to listen.

The Night Was Long

2011-02-15T04:01:00.000-05:00

Moments when you find yourself thinking: I don't want to feel this way anymore. To make the best of. To be approached by a beautiful woman at the bar who knows when to walk away. To participate in. To abstain. To play the waiting game. To put yourself out there. To go out on a limb. To pursue a direction you know to be wrong. To do it anyway.

To compose the entirity of 'On the Road' on a single scroll of butcher paper. To identify. To drink up nearing last call alone at a table by the window of the Black Sheep on 17th btwn Locust & Spruce on Valentines Day knowing this is the right place to be. To forget where you're going or where you've been. To avert the gaze. To resign one's hope. To feel it burn. Go on walks in the cold, something in the wind signifying that spring will come. To notice. Willingly ignore. Maintain awareness of. Untie the knot in your chest. To go on an adventure. Exert your anger. Berate your indecision. Condone your own transgressions. To wonder what the fuck you think you're doing all the while placing that fuck you think you're doing in someone else's hands. To consume too much alcohol. Want too much craving. Spend too much longing. To get annoyed at women who exaggerate idiocy. To judge. To get turned on by good music. To have a decent jukebox. To remember running drunken hand-in-hand with John Francis away from a Rittenhouse cocaine & beerpong party to the Black Sheep 4 years ago (I thought we were running from the lame party, but we were really running for last call). To find comfort in solitude.

To condemn the need to share in order to build love. To exhaust. To not want to know. To blend in. To disappear. To remember. To sit tight, little bird. Some people try too hard. To construct forgetting. To reinvent. To get turned on by Patricia Arquette's teeth circa True Romance. To feel alive again.

to the broken hearted

2011-02-07T04:31:00.002-05:00

sigh and collapse

2011-02-05T01:29:00.000-05:00

You were mine. I was wrong. Sadness feels like a death this morning; blameless, endless, gone. I met our unborn son once in a dream. He was a sacred combination of none of the things we could reconcile, and he was beautiful.

we walked until it rained.

2011-01-21T03:48:00.001-05:00

(shhh)

2010-12-10T20:57:00.000-05:00

~~sleepless nights~~

~~found objects~~

~~in a place where small incentives hold their breath to bide the time~~

bobby

2010-08-08T10:58:00.002-04:00

8/8/2009

when are we going to hang out? can we do art sometime? miss you guys too. and love you of course. the love is always there. i feel it from you guys. i can feel it so keenly these days. it's weird.

b.

love is all there is. that reason to be here.
so i'm glad you feel it keenly. means you're really alive.
love you,
a

Manual Pounce

2010-07-19T14:11:00.002-04:00

Dear Hoot,
Everything is different the morning after.
Today, you came over for coffee, a blue bowl of yellow plums and deep red cherries on the table. There is no such thing as time and space.
Love,
Annie

Written Under Observation

2010-07-11T12:12:00.004-04:00

It took a long time to learn the rules. Like a child scolded for grass stains, unaware of ‘trespass’, the law set forth by grown-ups, unable to predict the abstract and movable boundaries that fluctuate from one adult to another. Moral judgement suits the dynamic of Irish Catholic guilt and harsh self-reprimand; it holds you in the position of ‘child’ (subservient, submissive, unworthy). To embrace this position of perpetual ‘child’ is to cling to the comfort of some predetermined boundary, a system of ethics established by the other. Obedience is comfortable when fear prevents decision.

There are moments of collision, forcing the past and present onto common ground. The tension is nearly unbearable, not because of experiential digestion, not because of stories told or withheld, but because this confrontation challenges recognition. Face, arms, stance, gait, smell, voice once so familiar becomes foreign and strange, as in a dream. Who are you really/ what happened to you/ what turned you so worn/ what gathered you up/ I don’t know you anymore/ and you can’t see what I’ve become. But also, the confrontation of past and present self can not negotiate body language. Because as long as it took to learn the rules, it sure as hell took a lot less energy to unlearn every last one of them. And I’m not so sure I recognize the way you continue to see me. It can’t be easy for you - the role of power and judgment is a difficult one to relinquish. But I don’t really give a shit.

By which I mean: I really give a shit. Because if in the moment of collision, there is no recognition of the present self, but only the ghost formed by memory and the whisper that is left of its echo shouted from the past, the disparity equals loss - no such loss as simple and straightforward as death; there is no ritual to celebrate the partial loss of someone else's heart. Perhaps these echos can operate in reverse. This is why I'm writing this, speaking every word aloud, as it should be read: to warn our past selves. Consider this a leap of faith, shouted from a mountain of words unspoken: Be careful how you treat each other. Beware the walls you build, secured by the delusion that you can take them down as a matter of decision. Know that your words and actions cannot be undone, so commit them with awareness. Remember love. Time may not exist, but timing is everything.

We have established the rules of limited engagement. And this is why we can't grow up the rest of the way -- there are no trespassing signs all over the place, written in braille so that you don't understand you've encroached upon a boundary until you feel it with your fingers. This is how people lose each other. A hole opens up in the fabric of time and the next thing you know, you're standing at opposite ends of a chasm, unable to discern the features on a face you knew so well.

to turn the page

2010-07-10T15:44:00.008-04:00

It is important to try.
You make observations that are failed by words. You no longer have patience for denial, nor the ability to turn the other way from uncomfortable truths. Its too late to kill yourself because you behold the beauty in everything, and you've really gone and done your defense mechanisms in by the way you've begun living. If you weren't you, you would love yourself.

But everything is as it always was back when you looked the other way. Depression and loneliness echo off the walls of a thousands tiny memories that felt insignificant at the time, but accumulate to reveal an ugly portrait, at once stunning. You linger in sadness a little too long. The joy you take in other people is impossible to comprehend; you love so strongly, that when its returned, the feeling is staggered and blessed.

You don't know what you're doing with your life, other than living it, and its no wonder you can be so difficult to be around; you live so fully, sometimes it takes up too much space for the people around you. But this is also the reason you're wonderful to be around. The difference is, when you stop being defensive and try consciously living in the moment, you experience all the joy and sadness and fear and longing that you always did, but without anxiety.

the mind falls into traps (these things are important to remember)

2010-06-21T16:49:00.012-04:00

define contrivance.
its ok to look lame your 2nd stab at spontaneity.
this is the crux of not trusting yourself
a lack of faith
or maybe just a slight tendency toward trepidation.

i suddenly find myself surrounded by people who turn me on artistically.
the timing is crucial, because there is a constraint. discomfort cries for repetition. ask questions of it. be brave. sharpen your vision. you may be important to someone.

one day when everything comes unraveled, i will find myself surrounded by evidence manufactured by my own hand before my mind could take in the details. you are no more alone than the next guy. we clatter in our headspace, turning stories out of self-absorption, spinning tales to tell the ego: you are the most important. why are they ignoring you? seek ATTENTION! (the mind falls into traps.)

but growth requires volition. it is a strange thing to forgive yourself after all these years, transgressions mounted into a secret pile right there, beside the lighter fluid. no one knows your story. it simply can't be told, but only lived. this is true of everyone you love and hate. this is true of those who try to reveal too much in seeking some communion with the other. this is true of the introverted isolationist propelling understanding through a deeply internal thought process that reminds of the mechanics in an old reliable grandfather clock. this is true of the lonely, the fulfilled, the broken hearted, the complicated, the simple gestured. this is true of you.

for anastasia: lest we forget

2010-06-21T13:21:00.003-04:00

(for anastasia: lest we forget) from alison dilworth on Vimeo.

keepers of time and memory

2010-06-19T11:39:00.009-04:00

If I was killed on my way home, or suddenly died of a long-concealed illness, and had the ability to hover over afterward, the most annoying thing would be listening to inflated versions of me by relative strangers, laying claim to how they knew me because it bolsters their image as tragic. Stories like this contribute to the distortion of what really was. People flee the scene upon the smell of illness, the process of dying, the fear of confronting images to imply their own mortality. But once the death has occurred, people have free-reign to exaggerate their inventions of whatever chosen moment they wish to exploit. This is the invention of a ghost belonging to no one who ever existed.

I am no fool to think my life will turn out as expected. The way I pray is no different from the way I prayed as a child. For the past 5 years, I've felt the need to build a shrine. Now I'm having trouble distinguishing my shrines from anything else I make because the need to enshrine is the need to make tangible. I want to remember the mundane. The things I miss most about the people I love. The way the corners of his mouth pulled slowly up into smile, my nana's smell combined of perfume and cigarettes and something else that took up the whole house and all of her clothes, the way the lazyboy bounced and settled under his weight, eyes that smile without the rest of the face, the tremble of her hands, mischievous glance proceeding contagious laughter, that she called me little toe girl, the games we played, looking through catalogues in search of future Christmas and birthday presents circling what we liked best, the way he loved me like no one else could ever love me, scalding words that sit in monumental books because when they were delivered, some part of me knew they were true.

I know how to write backwards. I know how to trace time with my fingertips.
(1st photograph: m dilworth)

judgmental letter to a specific drunk girl

2010-06-12T11:13:00.003-04:00

someday you will look back upon your one night stands & barside drunken escapades & you will romanticize these vague memories. you will build the love affairs that never would have happened in sobriety into a neat stack of seductive nostalgia, wrapped tight in your ideas of freedom & longing & idealized charm to look back upon later, when your life is more boring. you think the drunk guy pretending to listen to you is giving you his undivided attention because you're interesting, but everything you say is an immature cliche and he's just biding his time while he buys you another drink too many. he wants to get in your pants and he will. but ask the bartender what went down before the eyes of sober witness: how you came unraveled mumbling half-baked revelations of your need for attention, whether your first kiss with a stranger was hot or sad -- pathetic in the way only desperation would allow. the reality of your encounters is not the sort of thing you'd ever want to pack into your memory.

musicbox

2010-06-09T16:26:00.003-04:00

I began making musicboxes this year. Here is a video I made of one.

matchbox

2010-05-05T13:31:00.004-04:00

from the series Letters from the Broken Hearted. Watch it big.

to find the simple sentence

2010-05-05T10:12:00.004-04:00

It could all be like a fragment of a strange dream. I damned near melted the coffee pot on the stove for all my focus out and onward, trying to remember which day it is. I think I have it backwards.

Yesterday the sun was out and after hours of fixedly learning how to use technology in the form of imovie (only made bearable in combination with tiny hand-cut things to put into the world), I took my novel and a Mexican blanket to Fort Greene Park and lay reading on my belly. Cormac McCarthy is a real man, isn't he. His novels make me want to spit and fuck and grit my boots into the earth and know how to ride a horse and shoot my kill. I'm not a book spoiler, so if you're about to read The Crossing or you're less than 1/3 of the way through, skip over the rest of this paragraph. The story involves a 16 year old boy and the pregnant wolf he trapped, harnessed and sought to return to the mountains. She is wild, and very gradually comes to know the routine: lie on side to drink water the boy offers through her muzzle, come near fire for warmth, eat what someone else hunted, et cetera. The boy is not taming the wolf; the 2 begin to form a relationship which is simply that: the beginning of 2 different animals relating to each other. That she is about to give birth to pups makes her situation more vulnerable, along with her injured hind leg. I think about this wolf a lot. I even began thinking of my cat as a small feline wolf this week. And so, lying on a Mexican blanket in the sun, I read with my heart in my stomach as the wolf is confiscated, paraded into the ring, and set to fight countless dogs in teams of 2 while the boy restates his case to no avail: this wolf does not belong to me, she was entrusted to my care. And after the escalation of the fighting and the blood and the savage crowd looking on, the wolf is shot and killed. Bang. Dead. Just then, the wind picked up in the park, and the sun disappeared. A wall of dark grey clouds pushed forward and distant thunder shuddered through the sky. My skirt and shawl picked up around me where I sat, unable to believe in this death. I read with frustrated detachment as the boy gathered up the limp body of the tattered wolf, heavy with child. I did not want the story to go this way.

I recognize the absurdity of my 'Neverending Story' pathetic fallacy moment, in which the weather merges with the emotional intensity of the story until the two are inextricable. But this past weekend in the Catskills, there was a howling through the mountains, low and deep and resonant like I've never heard before. And I sat with a man who admired my necklace, then lifted his own from beneath his shirt to show me a large black wolf claw. The relationship between boy and wolf is the dilemma of trusting what can not be indiscriminately trusted. Always the matter of intuition and what to hold at bay, the relationship between the wild and the tame, throwing certainty and the illusion of control to the wind, taking pause in a deep breath, silent and angry, patient and fierce. I am not the woman I imagined myself to be when I was a child. Things were simpler, then.

truck

2010-05-04T13:41:00.002-04:00

Unrequited

2010-05-04T11:48:00.002-04:00

sweet jimmy

2010-04-28T11:29:00.000-04:00

van·dal

2010-04-23T14:19:00.010-04:00

I wish you well. I wish you peace. But my friend, it is unbearable to be with you for all you prevent yourself.

I am reading a book called The Answer Model Theory (by John Montgomery & Todd Ritchey), having just finished Cupid's Poison Arrow by Marnia Robinson; both books examine biochemical addiction to behaviour. That is, simply by repeating specific behaviours (sexual, emotional or physical), the biochemical reactions within your own body can be powerful enough to constitute addiction. Sometimes, wanting is enough to generate powerful levels of dopamine in the brain, despite continually decreasing levels of pleasure over time. With all addicts of any sort, the benefits of attaining a fix of their addiction never come close to the intensity of craving beforehand. van·dal
/ˈvændl/[van-dl]
1. a member of a Germanic people who in the 5th century a.d. ravaged Gaul and Spain, settled in Africa, and in a.d. 455 sacked Rome.
2. a person who willfully or ignorantly destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable.
3. of or pertaining to the Vandals.
4. imbued with or characterized by vandalism.
Origin: 1545–55; < LL Vandalus, Latinized tribal name The concept of biochemical addiction sheds light on why some people continually sabotage their own happiness; if sustained balance is not available, then emotional drama steps in to derive a biochemical payoff (nearly chemically identical to the satisfaction of survival instincts and urges). In essence, human beings have evolved to conflate emotional trauma and reconciliation with survival on an experiential level. Unlimited craving of sex, drugs, sadness, anxiety, depression, anger, and conflict becomes enough to cause a surge in dopamine, in anticipation of insatiable satisfaction which inevitably leads to regret, shame, sadness or disappointment, and thus, the cycle continues. In this way, you can watch someone you loved cease to exist beyond their past. Like a shallow ghost of herself, she continues on in repetition - his behaviour is predictably unpredictable - the moment is ignored, and being truly present is a threat.

undo

2010-04-21T14:34:00.016-04:00

your grandpa used to say be careful what you see. once you lay your eyes upon something, you can't unsee it. ever. just as you learned as a child that you can't unsay your words. never. now that you're grown, you've unleashed some things you can't take back, the damage mounting. what does regret smell like? your mother is coming to visit. you remember the time she came for a visit and you frantically gathered the scraps of your falling apart life and tried to hide them from her. you didn't want to share the burden of your broken parts. but where is the place to hide these things? under the bed is no good, because that space is where you keep all your broken promises, and there's not enough room. your dresser drawers are full of memories and streetfound treasures. the old jewelry box plays a song too sweet and the idea of putting ugly things inside it creeps you out. some things do not belong side by side.
you don't understand why you can't fix everything that's broken, but you can't. for lack of a better place, you decide to sweep up the all your scraps of falling apart life into a pile on the kitchen floor. you urge the rubble into a dust pan, open wide, and pour it into your mouth. this takes time and patience, because there are several scoops to go, and you don't want to aggravate your gag reflex, which is already sensitive from last night's dream. but you manage, over the course of an hour, to swallow every last piece. you get down on your knees and pray: je vous salue marie pleine de grâce le seigneur est avec vous vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes et jésus le fruit de vos entrailles est béni sainte marie, mère de dieu, priez pour nous pécheurs maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort amen.

the problem is, all the stuff you just swallowed has changed the sound of your voice, you have to hold it down so hard. everything you never dealt with swells in your belly like butterflies at first, and then like you're being swung too high by an over-zealous otherkid's uncle. you think the phrase "i'm at a loss" is good because it conflates the inability to summon something and the empty wordless place inside of you. you wish you were at a loss for words, but you're quite the opposite, with strings of sticky sentiments forming sounds you choke back, fearful that if you let these sounds out, they might form words, and if they form words, you will never not ever be able to unsay them. but instead, alone on a kitchen floor, the sounds gather to an itch at the back of your throat. you try to stifle it with the back of your tongue, but that only makes it worse. you forbid yourself to cough, but the feeling is mounting and you finally let loose a small 'ahuugh' and something tumbles from your throat onto the floor and scurries beneath the fridge.

fly to me

2010-04-13T10:49:00.002-04:00

it could go either way

2010-04-12T09:44:00.005-04:00

In my dream I held you like a child, even after I whispered in your ear: I know you're not ready. Be careful what you promise yourself.

After all these years of reaching for something that simply isn't there, my arms went slack. A part of me is gone.

Gracefully, gracefully
my humiliation turned toward grief today. His plain words. My endless ache. Today I will make art. Drink coffee. Not remember. Emily stands at the other end of my styrofoam cup string telephone line. These lines used to connect us. Now we have only air. People who think I'm childish can't see the importance of keeping the line intact.

ephemeral

2010-04-11T13:20:00.004-04:00

flesh and bone

2010-04-07T11:58:00.010-04:00

It didn't occur to me that learning taxidermy would change my perception of life in its tangible form. I have embarked upon a collaboration with Jenn Procacci, who I met in art school; during the years in-between, Jenn worked on a farm in a northern California, and taught herself taxidermy from a book in her free time, collecting fallen birds with numerous stories. (above: crow Jenn found as is; photo from funnelpages.com)
Meanwhile, I was collecting dead birds in a make-shift decomposition chamber in my backyard, cataloging their bones in babyfood jars. I was no surgeon, until I skinned my first pigeon. (first incision; I suspect pigeon is male, though I don't know why) There is something endlessly vulnerable and mysterious about the body. The skin offers a thin veil of protection from the outside world; the organs are tender and small; the colours on the inside are vivid and beautiful, unpaling in death. But there was no illusion of life in this dead bird. When life leaves the body, the body breaks. I wondered where its nest used to be -- where the pigeon liked to fly -- whose feet it scurried away from in which Philadelphia park or curbside. The body carried this life around the city. Now, it is just a body on a hook in my art studio, about to become something new. That night, I dreamed strange uncomfortable dreams now forgotten. I may have come up against the edge of a difficult truth: the fact of our fear is not the inability to comprehend where our soul escapes in death. Fear is in the beating of the heart, traveling impulse to the brain, scattered thoughts and misintentions summon memory to regret, and anxiety stirs the fact of our complete lack of control over life. Evolution depended upon fear for survival; we feel threatened, fear sparks a rush of adrenaline, we fight or take flight. But human consciousness makes everything more complicated than it really is. I realized the fact of my own body, and how completely meaningless and beautiful it is. I could skin myself alive, see the saturated reds and purples of my insides - feel the warmth of my liver, the way my lungs move, the pulsing of my own heart. The thought send a kind of shudder through me, knowing that I could take myself apart without the ability to put myself back together again. Fragility is a hollow-boned bird. But so is the design to fly.

2010-03-31T22:20:00.007-04:00

You came to our door. Everything changes. a·ban·don
/əˈbændən/ [uh-ban-duhn]
–verb (used with object)
1.to leave completely and finally; forsake utterly; desert: to abandon one's farm; to abandon a child; to abandon a sinking ship.
2.to give up; discontinue; withdraw from: to abandon a research project; to abandon hopes for a stage career.
3.to give up the control of: to abandon a city to an enemy army.
4.to yield (oneself) without restraint or moderation; give (oneself) over to natural impulses, usually without self-control: to abandon oneself to grief.
5.Law. to cast away, leave, or desert, as property or a child.
6.Insurance. to relinquish (insured property) to the underwriter in case of partial loss, thus enabling the insured to claim a total loss.
7.Obsolete. to banish.Here we are: there is no distance inbetween. Years pass by, your heels dug deep in my heart although they can scarcely reach the ground.

UNFINISHED THINGS

2010-03-30T23:45:00.003-04:00

On my desk, which is really a windowsill, sits 2 unfinished childrens books, a bag of caran d'ache water soluble crayons, a tomato can filled with micron pens, a lamp given to me as a gift by a woman in her 90s, a typewriter at a nearby table, one large spoon, a pencil, Marice Sendak's work from 1980 to the present, a pair of scissors, tape of various kinds, some cultish biblical tripe handed to me by a strange lady in the subway and the remains of a reader's digest from back in the day. In fact, if you gathered up my entire life in the form of tangible evidence, you would find countless unfinished things: paintings, drawings, children's stories, papermache puppet heads, tiny skeletons from carefully decomposed birds, the frail remains of other peoples' lives collected and catalogued, et cetera. I imagine when I'm an old lady, I'll have accumulated so many unfinished projects and works of art that it could be a grand exhibition of things unfinished, the nature of procrastination, and artistic immobility. Here, ephemera is immortalized in fat and growing scrapbooks. The struggle from the death-grip of stagnation is met in these books, pulling my brain from inertia like scotch tape from a vintage news clipping. I like old discarded things. But there are times I wonder how many of them I will leave behind, this old lady's cave-drawn 'i was here'.

blame

2010-03-30T20:47:00.000-04:00

jealousy - blame = lack of trust

People with hard lives put garbage bags over their pull-carts and ride public transportation in the rain

2010-03-27T13:26:00.000-04:00

Pay attention to price tags. Find pleasure in simple places. Wear your scars and tattered teeth like teardrop cheek tattoos and R.I.P. (insert name here) tags that have become a part of the costume of your life. Makeshift grave sites mark your streets, greyed by time and conditions of the sky. Your children play with neighbourhood kids who aren't read to at night by parents with time and patience, and you don't notice where all that time went until your kid is 11 and spells her name wrong, though she's naturally gifted and brighter than most of those private school kids with all the resources in the world. People are payed to love those kids - caregivers and teachers and educated artists buoy their egos until later in life when they will confront the reality that though they've been reassured their entitlement, they don't know what to do with their lives, and begin to question whether they're so unique and golden afterall. But not your kid - your kid will learn how to fight fist to gravel, with the assertion of survival to contend with. Once defined by race, you are now condemned by class, and the discrepancy between rich and poor is measured in socially awarded entitlements, the condition of your feet, the quality of food in your fridge, the look in your averted eyes. Don't fool yourself into thinking that life is to be judged. Shame is epidemic, and a lie. Beneath it all, grace bides its timeless place. Be still.

2010-03-02T10:41:00.000-05:00

My emotional memory has the duration of a fruit fly. Every time I get stuck in the artist's rut (which heretofore, I'm spelling with two ts because 'rutt' is more descriptive), it feels like the wall of finality has come crashing down -- inner monologue goes, "well, that's it, I guess; you aren't an artist anymore -- it just ended." If I were to think back to the completion of a long term project, I would recall that this rutt is a reoccurring theme in my life. Its the lull between creation and getting motivated. But this is just it: when I was a teenager, melodramatic display sufficed as expression; now, I need to be deliberate about what I'm putting forth and as an adult, cultivation is a lot more complicated and I have no interest in airing my personal inner tantrums, which continue to get written down and read later with a feeling of mild embarrassment concerning the impulsivity of my emotions.

The romantic vision of the artist is a passion-driven singular figure, locked up in 'his' studio, collapsing from fatigue after painting for hours with the intensity of god-given inspiration, waking to gulp down a cup of thick black coffee and plunge back into the work. This is what the ego wants - to expunge all struggle with the stroke of the brush, either creating, or destroying with a singular intensity: I am all that exists in this moment - this is mine - I am all-important, or I am abject and worthy of loneliness and starvation. It is true that we romanticize artists, but we don't want to pay them for their work. And it is true that the artist has an ego just like everybody else, but is also equipped with the means for tangible expression. But the truth is, making art is work. Its labour. The artist struggles again and again to create something new, to find the vehicle for expression of something that cannot otherwise be named.

So here I am, stuck between finally starting the children's book everyone always says they'll someday write, and making a new stop-motion animation, both of which require a story. I'm restless and a little depressed by it all. But this time, I remember that this restless dissatisfaction is the precursor to my artistic process. And its a non-romantic pain in the ass.

castaway

2009-09-29T00:46:00.000-04:00

I thought if I could see her face again, that it would be enough. Just an image, something solid, to let me know that she's still in the world. Its a strange thing to miss someone who isn't dead after much of your time was spent hoping for her recovery. Is this a common longing? To catch just one glimpse of the one you miss like a hole in your heart, only to be confronted by the swelling need for more? I saw her face and looked for more to no avail. This lost love is gone to me now, by her own volition or necessity. There are no reasons.

Today was a mind-numbing reminder of my old obsessions. The adrenaline rush of the cast out hook of communication awaiting response so that it may be eagerly cast out again... carelessly, even. Maybe its the awaiting that keeps us in a state of suspension and anything that wavers from this state feels like depressive craving, or disappointment. The things I used to savour were the unopened letter, the email that stays unread with deliberate restraint to prolong anticipation that actually bears a promise this time, the receipt of something cast away and actually returned, the smell of a man I was forbidden to touch. But what was it that brought this addictive mindset back upon me? Partly, boredom from being sick at home for days, working long nights, then sleeping and spending too much time on the computer. The hunger for something constructive and meaningful in my life that is lacking - a rampant cycle of fervent creativity followed by debilitating pessimism careening toward inertia. The need for direction is getting me down.

Prayer Chicken

2009-06-09T22:25:00.000-04:00

It was designed for a purpose it would never know, and the chicken found its way from Mexico to America, landing in a shop on the east coast owned by a woman who was about to find out that her husband betrayed her. "Move gracefully", it seemed to say when taken up in a woman's hands like a small bird too soon from the nest. She cradled the chicken and took it home before the shop owner's defeat became public. Maybe she knew already, as so many slighted women can only allow themselves to sort-of know. If the chicken had stayed there in her shop, maybe things would have turned out differently. Then again, this would require an intuitive understanding that this was no ordinary chicken. It was neither trinket nor piggy bank, meant simply for decoration. It was made by hands that prayed so hard through life, the power of that prayer slipped through the warm brown skin of those hands to the tiny beads of sweat beneath the Mexican sun, and into the clay. Hence, a prayer chicken was born. One day, it might fall and shatter, prayers carefully written on scraps of paper escaping all over the floor to find a startled moment, an apologetic child, or maybe an accidental cat. But for now, the prayer chicken holds a single prayer inside its belly. It is a selfish prayer, and a selfless prayer all at once. A prayer that maybe, things will be okay after tomorrow.

2009-06-02T23:18:00.000-04:00

if you were alive
you would celebrate 90
we would blow out the candles
on a homemade cherry pie
and eat too much ice cream
you would meet your great grand-
babies and hold them
in your arms
teach them
mother may i
red light green light
but instead, you left these things
with me to carry for you.

2009-05-19T20:31:00.000-04:00

if in the moment of torment

-boys hand themselves
in basements
suburban church yards-

the moment that forces awakening

-doctors give nourishment,
offer awareness years later-

-cinnamon brown sugar
granola bar sacrifice
curled up in the closet
familiar territory:
alonealonealone

hem binds torment to memory
memory to tongue
triangular race from what precisely
lies at the root of our fear
this girl runs circles

the ego is threatened
swollen threatened swollen
tangled mess of self-absorption
vicious thoughts
with base intentions

i don't want to be this way
this is who i am

if in the moment of torment
a premonition of these stories told
stitched together by scraps of context
trapeze attic was no circus
time converges
in the back of the throat
memory shared
through pained expression
flicker of joy absorbing glance

this is how you hold yourself
a nearly broken silenced boy
to show your torment mercy
peel the bruised girl
off the floor
look: see this life
this will happen

it will all become music

2pm and 3am

2009-05-14T15:07:00.001-04:00

A man with a prosthetic arm stands outside the window, texting with his only hand as he waits for his white fluffy poodle to finish peeing on things. The wind is blowing and it smells like spring. The baby cries because he wants to be held back to sleep. I love him more and more, though he isn't mine, with every one day a week I spend with him. This is the meaning of being fully and truly present to another human being. I have always found immediacy of presence with babies and children.

Now it is 3:29am. And I'm reflecting on this very long day - a 19 hour work day. I went and held him. He is such a cuddler - he loves touch and is so easily soothed. Today I noticed how comfortable I am dong this. Caring for a child. I comes easy to me - I almost always know exactly what to do in matters of maternal instinct and I have become a different woman over time with so many children in my care over the last 10 years. This kid hugs like he means it and he's 10 months old.

After babysitting, I went to work at Sassafras. It was a fairly busy night - we made some money. T-bone, who is evidently a well-known former wrestler from Texas and now a restaurant owner and loud personality, came in and invited me to feel his biceps hours later, before leaving. I flexed my own arm in response. At the end of the night, after I did the money and Neill cleaned up, it was me, Neill and Kevin at the bar drinking beer. They recounted their trip to Costa Rica, when Neill watched Kevin die and come back to life, and days later, a rip-tide almost took 5 of them. The sort of story that accelerates exaggeration over time: Kevin becomes the hero, Neill "screamed like a bitch". Stories of near-drowning experiences were shared like scar incidents. Then, I hailed a cab. My driver was Jordanian. He was jolly and enthusiastic and does not like Philadelphia though he has been here for 13 years. We talked about people, and how they are generally good. I told him that I'm a bar tender, and that it is an interesting job because you meet so many people you would never ordinarily hang out with. Conversation is necessary and it is your job to provide comfort and sense when space is needed. He immediately offered me a beer - a miller lite in a condensation-glistening can - said someone gave him 2 and he already drank one. Uh, no thanks. Do you like coffee? I'll buy you a coffee at this place... Dude, I'm going home. But all in good humour, without the accusatory drama I used to feel when cab drivers asked me out. Feels good to be a woman who can hold a baby back to sleep, provide conversation to a lonely man at the bar until he lights up, open enough to engage with the people beside him. It feels good to be here now, uncertain of so many things but sure of the basic, important things like love and peace and growth.

take me to the river

2009-05-06T23:59:00.000-04:00

we were baptized in this river after we clawed our way through the woods like we were searching for something. the first hint of dawn came in the tunnel, and we emerged to a quiet world. he told me when i pushed his hand harder, he didn't know if i wanted him to keep going, or to stop. i lied to him, and said i wanted him to stop. the truth was, i didn't know either. it was our last day of childhood together before 2 of us married and moved to the other end of the world. we loved each other fierce like brothers. we fooled around in tents beside our friends. we drank too much and cried our losses and played glow in the dark frisbee. we drove forever and when we went our separate ways, each of us cried each other goodbye. and it was grand.

Spoon Fork Knife

2009-04-27T19:35:00.002-04:00

Philadelphia was a stranger.

Rochester was a place of uninvited childhood nostalgia - forbidden rusty cars, a wall of rocks that set the stage for the first convincing episode of saving someone's life, a stoned uncle who took his nieces on fast rides and fishing trips and bought them the largest stuffed animals they'd ever seen with money earned in secret. He was the most interesting person she knew. Her grandmother gave secret treats as compensation for the endurance of a tongue lashing, which always left the girl feeling guilty, as though she'd been bought into complicity. A punishment delivered by a grown-up who misunderstood her again, rewarded by a woman she would soon wave goodbye to from the front porch in her Sunday best. Besides Indian food and Abbotts frozen custard, Rochester had no value to her, and was scratched off the list straightaway, though she would keep that opinion to herself until later.

New York was exciting and offered her a free ride at NYU for art school, but there they would be bound by a life in the single room of a dank cockroach infested apartment building with very little money coming in, and there was already too much tension between them for poverty to feel romantic anymore. She had been to the city several times, always with her family; the last time they visited the city, she watched with rage mistaken for shame as her broken parents announced their upcoming divorce to her uncle, aunt and 2 small cousins. She and her sisters were to keep this information private, because their Grandma died within one month of the "family meeting", and the dissolution of an already fractured marriage paled in comparison to the death of a woman everyone loved with a gentle ferocity. Selective openness and partial honesty. Their cousin cried for the break-up while 3 sisters stood motionless, expressionless, unable to function in a world that no longer took rules as guidance. They would learn more of broken rules later - broken decades earlier in another city and held in secret shame mixed with unspeakable desire that would take at least 2 people to their graves. New York had nostalgia too, but beyond any personal narrative, the city breathed its own breath and lived a life of its own. So, maybe, she thought.

Philadelphia was foreign; she had never been there before. She couldn't even locate it on a map. There was no personal narrative attached - not yet, anyway - and what she really wanted was something completely new. Because his career had determined this cross-country move, her decision had some sway. Philadelphia was a stranger.

She could easily relive the experience of falling in love with him. His smell was completely unknown to her, yet felt absolutely familiar. She was hungry to kiss him, but let the tension between them take its course, and the first night he walked her home to her mother's house, they took turns wrapping her new scarf around each other until their faces came closer and closer. It was a cold Canadian winter and their breath met and formed a single cloud before passing off into some other place. She would re-read the letter he wrote her by hand in too-careful print. They marveled at the space between their ages before choosing to disregard such a discrepancy in favor of pursuit. She longed for him, and played over and over again the night before he left when she invited him into her father's vacant apartment for tea that would be there the next morning, contemplated in the silence of the kitchen after he rushed to meet his plane. Her desire was maintained by the suspension of distance. He did not know her distance involved secrets, and she strived to repent in time to be a good girlfriend. Years later, she knew how his body smelled when he became sick, and once, gathered all her strength to carry him down the stairs and into a cab en route to the emergency room. It was love like that. Until it wasn't.

Looking back, they never could isolate the moment of fracture. He pointed to the depressive months on Croxton when their sex life vanished during a string of family visitors. The apartment on Croxton was at least hopeful, despite irrefutable evidence of someone else's cat, more pungent when the sun came in to warm one particular corner of the hardwood floor. They were still in love then. The apartment at 450 28th street was sad from the beginning, 2 homes later, after they'd been evicted and given 30 days to leave. Evacuate. Pack up and go. Korean business owners wanted to flip their new investment, selling the building one month after buying it, with a vacancy that would increase its value. She rolled an egg under the furnace before they locked the door one last time. Sadness changes over time, but not really.

The change came after the wedding, after the move east, when she began to earn her own life. She split wide open for all to see, and men fell in love with her. Paint under her nails, gray drizzly walks across campus, geting caught in a downpour and staying caught in it, walking slow in a long black coat, she fell in love with everything. Even her sadness. Especially her sadness. He was gone every morning before she woke up. She made her coffee before school, poured it into a Nalgene container, wrapped her peanut butter toast in aluminum foil, strapped some paintings to her back and biked to class. She collected scrap metal on Girard street for no reason other than its beauty. She thought about all the ways they had decided to change. And then she stopped thinking about it. He was never home when she returned, and over time, she noticed that she no longer looked forward to seeing him. When he came home, their routine consisted of smoking pot, walking to the grocery store, and watching hours of tv. Her trips to the fire escape became more and more frequent - not because she wanted another cigarette, but because she had begun to spend more and more focused time in her head. She fantasized about other men. Made up conversations in her loneliness. Painted starving sexualized women with pleading, hungry eyes. He hated Philadelphia and forged no friendships. He was jealous of her paintings. He hated his job, though he worked 7 days a week. She didn't know how she'd come to this place, where love had become a distant memory. Where she had once fantasized about the virtue of standing by her husband, nursing him back to health after a devastating accident sentenced him to life as a quadriplegic (or maybe just a paraplegic), she now found herself watching him chew his food, thinking the word mastication over and over again, feeling irritation boil into a venomous rage. Here he was, with all his limbs intact, and she couldn't love him. Her fantasy was in fact a role reversal from their early love, when she was emotionally crippled by depression and he was there to play his role in a co-dependent scheme they'd both signed on for. Now that she'd gained some strength, she was keenly aware of every weakness. There was no initial direction to the thoughts she was haunted by, except that they strayed farther and farther from him. Probably, it all began quite innocently, though she could no longer remember how it began, or if there was a point of origin at all. It didn't matter, anyway. She wondered if doubt had the power to ruin love - if the frailty of her love resided in the doubt that came to overwhelm her. It was during this time that she threw herself wide open to the world. She redefined her boundaries in pursuit of some company and went to the place of regret. He left her notes in different places every morning - on the coffee machine, in the fridge, tucked into her homework, on her easel. She began to resent his sweetest gestures. She bought him flowers and focused on the beautiful things about him that she'd fallen in love with in the beginning. And then one night, they sat on the off-white couch facing each other, feet touching like kids about to challenge each other to a push-off. And he asked her a simple question. A husband to his wife question. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with me. Asked playfully, out of nowhere. Three terrible words:
I don't know.

The sky was grey in Philadelphia on the afternoon that everything changed. She was wandering through the housewares department of Ross Dress for Less with a heavy heart and a mind that wouldn't stay still. She came upon a cutlery set that was heavy-handled, with 2 different sized spoons that were gently shaped. She liked the way the utensils felt in her hand: solid, balanced. Waiting in line, her heart was racing like a shoplifter avoiding detection in the last moment of vulnerability. Like a lover nearly caught in betrayal. She hurried home, and hid the new cutlery set at the very bottom of her closet floor. Her decision had taken its secret, tangible form. Long after she had relinquished all the domestic chores she once enjoyed in the gradual neglect of their relationship, this was hers - spoon, fork, knife he would never eat with. She didn't know how else to leave. And she left like a storm that lingers too long, with no calm before it.

When the storm came, it opened a cage in an apartment on Locust Street she'd never been to and set the baby birds loose, offering up one last moment of tenderness between 2 broken people. It took the paintings off the walls and tore apart the kitchen. It divided all tangible evidence of their previous life together. But the eye of the storm was inside her, and destroyed everything in her path to lead her toward the conclusion that she herself was damaged beyond repair. When they had sex for the last time together, they knew it. They came together like angry animals and then broke into tears. He shook with sobbing in her arms and she felt a broken man. She couldn't breathe because her guilt held its breath all the time. She had gone and got to know a stranger. Which is what she wanted, all along.

2009-04-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

i heart new jersey.

2009-02-21T17:12:00.000-05:00

the reason to leave is not some other place. this house is breaking down. one man is absent, coming early in the morning on occasion to retrieve a pot or pan, to gather up some things. there once was the smell of his southern cooking, all cinnamon, molasses, beets and thyme. the smell of pot and incense in the hall. now, his room is stale and settling toward passive decay. another man comes unravelled night after night, bloated with alcohol and unnaturally anti-depressed. he has become a heavy ghost and a lost brother who still wears cowboy boots to make sure he doesn't forget his own name. the sound is reassuring. a woman who recognizes her sadness as ordinary isn't sure what to want. the seemingly little things she wants are denied to her - request warrants resistance and time settles between her brows. it hurts when that place is touched. she wonders about illusion and perpetual grief and why her mother's emphasis on misery enrages her as her hungover roommate blows his nose like thunder on another floor. she can hear him breathe. another man keeps to himself. he stays inward, where he wants to be - where he is comfortable. she strays toward the limits of discomfort, and this is a problem between them. different vantage points. sometimes, she can't find the answers to her own simple questions, and this morning she realized there is a vast part of herself that remains unknown. yesterday, she understood with certainty that she needs to go on a journey without knowing where to go. this was the darkness. the light would come with spring, blowing clean air through the curtains and making everything new again.

2008-12-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

The song that was playing when I walked down the aisle came on and took me down.

remnants from a better time

2008-11-26T17:24:00.000-05:00

The fire escape looked treacherous in the rain. She decided to postpone smoking a cigarette until she was under the shelter of her broken umbrella; only one of the prongs had gone awry, and if it wasn't too windy, things would be okay. She had a series of things to remember before leaving for work, and had she neglected to write them down, she would have forgotten the majority of her responsibilities. This made her anxious; she could not rely on her memory the way she once did. If a person loses their memory, they lose their history, and she did not want to succumb to impulse and random behaviour. She took out her work clothes and swallowed a pill. It made her sad that she was on birth control because it was the only thing she was in control of, and because she was controlling the prevention of the only thing she'd always wanted. There was really no reason to be on it anyway; she was essentially alone again, and the only people who wanted her were the lonely patrons of the restaurant where she worked long hours as a waitress.

She hurried to ready herself for work, thinking on the Honeymans, whom she'd met in London years ago. As she pulled on the first leg of her pantyhose, she remembered Mrs Honeyman darning Mr. Honeyman's socks by the fire. She had never seen anyone darning socks before, or since, and had she this experience as a child, it would have drastically altered the scope of her vocabulary. She was grown by then, and it was too late for her to properly acquire the manners by which the Honeymans lived. She noticed their observations during dinner time, or did they call it supper? She couldn't escape her class, even before it strayed from middle. As she slid her second leg into the pantyhose, she noticed the run. Maybe if she wore knee socks over top, she could prevent this from becoming noticeable. A problem. When she bought these pantyhose, she did not consider the cost of trifles like socks and panties. She considered style, and fit, and colour; but now was no time for spending money, and clear nail polish left a rancid odor, so she took her chances and pulled on some knee socks. Maybe the wealthy didn't walk around with holes in their socks because they were married to someone who would perform the perfect balance of tenderness and pragmatism upon their hosiery (and if not, they could always replace marriage with a servant for hire, or a whole team of people to meet the needs of convenience).

It wasn't too windy. She lit her cigarette under the cover of her red umbrella, and walked more slowly than usual. Her rain boots were a god-send. The leaves were rained off their branches, falling heavy to the ground. It was that nostalgic time of year, but she had retraced her memories often enough, and there was nothing new to haunt her. She had grown older in rapid pace, like imaginary astronauts who travel at the speed of light and return to instant loss. She wondered if her current situation was penance for misdeeds inflicted on honest people who deserved better. She loved a man who would not love her back, and in return, she loved him more, which made him resentful. He lived down the hall from her, and she did her best to accidentally encounter him as often as possible. They had only dated for 2 months before he shut her out. Breaking up with her would have been an admission of defined togetherness; instead, he performed gradual disinterest, and she performed emotional response. He rebuked her sentimentality, which she threw out like a net to forge communion with a man she could never reach on purpose. She knew what it felt like to be desired, though it was a relatively distant memory when you take light years into account, and she missed it. But she had faith. And she was tired. And most of all, she loved a man who wouldn't love her back. Events had unfolded in the 2 months of their un-togetherness that rendered her unwilling to let go.

There were nights at the diner when wayward glances built into silent mockery. She remembered the story her dad read late at night years ago, about a murderer whose crime haunted him; he hadn't made sure the body was all the way dead, and the murderer's guilt gave ear to the beating heart beneath the floorboards. She double checked the deadbolt on her front door before going to bed. Every night, she thought about her own crime before falling asleep. Even when she was drunk or high, it came to her at night. She felt that there was still some part of it she could undo to right her wrongs, if only she was given the chance, and so she stayed on high alert in case God was forgiving enough to send her a path of recourse.

Liar

2008-11-13T14:46:00.000-05:00

A liar can justify
anything
because dishonest people
justify everything.
The real consequence is not found
in ordinary tales
where the price to pay
comes when no one
believes
the liar's cry for help
but shows its face
over time
when the one who justified
everything
has lost all trust
in everyone else
as if his standards of honour
apply universally
because if I could do it
gradually
with no ill intent
walking with my coat open
hoping the wind will take
his smell off my body
waking in the night
to find that it had not
...or maybe it was only
some buried telltale heart
taken from an ancestor
whose transgressions keep it beating
then surely,
so could you, and you, and you.
When you find that others
live without turning
from their morals,
then you can see
the nature of your crime
was against your own self
and all you've ever wanted
to stand for.

in the dark woods

2008-11-13T14:41:00.000-05:00

And if you had better ears
than most people,
you might hear a quivering
voice from somewhere
in the dark woods.

If you listened very, very carefully
you may hear a snapping sound
the flutter of
listening
quick flashes of light
along the edge of the woods.

The quiver will make you shiver if you don't know what it is.

time moves faster

2008-11-07T13:53:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about how time moves faster as we age. When you're a little kid, there is a lifetime between weekends... every season lingers beyond exhilaration to finger boredom before giving way to the next... the first day of school marks a new endless year of unknowable change before the next first day of school. Instead of thinking of it as time speeding up, a blog Devin wrote made me contemplate categorization. The analogy is this: when you're walking to an unknown destination in unfamiliar terrain, you take in your environment with heightened attention. The way back never lasts as long, though it is the same distance, because the experience has already been generalized into categories determined by previous experience. In this way, we lose sight of the subtleties of our experiences, often looking ahead to the next prediction or task without being present to the actual moment at hand. Children are aware of every moment they experience with the wonder of newness and without the limits of rational restriction - the world is a mystery, and here are some clues.

This morning, I took a 16 month old little girl to Rittenhouse Square and watched her chase squirrels and pigeons. I stood back, observing her delighted shrieks and the 'whooo-whooo-whooo' noise she makes when a dog walks by. She chased busy squirrels from their burial grounds up trees and beneath fences, laughing with arms outstretched. We were only there 15 minutes, but it felt like a life time again.

Be Brave

2008-11-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

I want to love you even if you don't love me the same.

I want to look you in the eye without asking anything of you.

I want to walk all the way to Manayunk with you, watching the leaves change and talking excitedly about the project we're going to collaborate on, and then have dinner and wine upon learning the loss of Obama's Grandmother, and order appetizers last. Then I want to walk all the way home, stopping at a furniture store, talking about everything we've avoided for too long. I want to buy Gatorade and wolf it down on the exhausted way home wearing the earrings you bought me while you carry in your pocket the chimes from Nepal I picked for you and I want to get in bed beside you and climb into your arms and watch the news while you rub my feet. I want to wake up to no food in the fridge and eat Trader Joe's frozen tacos and burritoes and Twix for breakfast.

I want to grow up with you and I want you to grow up with me.

I want you to know that I don't blame you for problems between us, and when it feels like I do, its because I'm afraid I'm not good enough for you to really love me all the way, and I know I need to not be like that, but still, there it is.

I know about how things begin and end and somehow after 2 years, I still feel like we're beginning, and I know it won't be easy, but I also know its worth it and loving you makes me grow and stretch and change and stay true to who I am, all at the same time.

Party Dress

2008-10-31T02:33:00.000-04:00

There was a masquerade in a warehouse tonight. I was excited about it for days ahead. I tried on dresses until I found the right one - a red vintage hand-sewn dress I retrieved months ago from the abandoned house - and I tried on shoes and tights to figure out what went best. I always feel a little embarrassed by the effort of critical vanity - the very ordinary event of trying on clothes and putting on extra make-up and looking in the mirror. I went to some lengths today. And I made the mistake of constructing in my head how the evening would look. There was the invented moment coming out of the elevator with Devin in our masks; I would be pretty, and I would offer him my arm, and he would take it and we would walk in together. People would be clustered in conversation, and the lighting would be lovely. I was aware that my fantasy was romanticized, but it felt good to think that way. I was in a good mood all day, fueled in part by the image I'd constructed, and the energy I was putting into the whole thing. It didn't happen like that.

When I was a little girl, I used to dress up in costumes. I dressed as a witch and scared my sister's friends. I was thrilled that they believed my construct; grown ups reinforced this power by participating in the character I created with feigned emotional response. Whether I was little red riding hood or a dragon or a witch, I believed I became the character I took on in the eyes of the observer, and often delivered a disclaimer that 'its really me, Alison - I'm not a real witch, so don't be scared'. But while I was concerned for the retention of my self while in disguise, I was enthralled by the power of the costume.

It didn't happen like that at all. Circumstances conspired to bring me to the party alone, and have me leave alone at 1am with no word from Devin, just as he was on his way there. I walked home telling myself not to cry, and that I have nothing to feel foolish for. He stayed and had a good time. I lay in bed for 2 hours wondering what happened - if maybe there was symbolic value to the element of disguise, because I picked a mask for myself that revealed more than it concealed, and I laid out a mask for Devin that obscured his whole face. There was no blame to place. Just the feeling of massive disappointment in a party dress.

multitudinal

2008-09-14T03:41:00.000-04:00

There comes a time where you take pause between post-adolescent experimentation and adult reflection. If you're an artist, you turn this reflection into expression. The pause you take is like a breath - the gathering you need to make in order to take action.

There is the need for self-reliance, and on occasion, for a system that won't let you down. America has taught me a thing or two.

I can't help but feel enormously stifled. I live in a place where the poor stay poor and work longer hours than nearly everybody else. You either have health care, or you don't, and the first thing they do in the emergency room is to send you to a bureaucrat and take down your insurance info while you burn with a 104 fever and pneumonia they doubt until the x-rays of your left lung come back; then, realizing you're not faking your pain, they offer you a shot of morphine. You either live your life worrying about it, or you don't. I remember hugging my friend in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Windsor, thinking that I should not have made out with him the year before because he was so much younger than me and because he was so attractive and because he was my therapist's son and I wanted to be her daughter. He had seemed so free and open that night - with all the earnest innocence of youth before heartbreak - so we danced together and then snuck off in the dark to lay in the grass and see how our bodies fit together under a moon that would only look upon us once. I knew it could never go anywhere beyond those moments, and he looked sad when I told him so the following day. I knew it was a transgression of boundaries, but it didn't really matter to me then, because I hadn't taken pause yet, so was free to act on impulse. I was still emerging from a dark time; I'd never been more alone, and it doesn't really matter whether I credit myself with my own undoing. In Canada, my friend was okay and then he wasn't. And when he wasn't, there was a safety net for him to fall to. We all had healthcare. There was a soft place to land when everything came unravelled.

I want to tell everything to you. And it comes out all wrong.

I fucked up a marriage. I took a vow. I said 'I do' and I did, but then I didn't. That fact isn't lost on me. Things solidified the week I got my grad school rejection letters and piled them neatly on top of my divorce papers, one by one from 5 elite schools - only the best rejection letters scattered at the tile floor by the bronze mail slot. I remember excitedly holding the first letter in the elevator, deciding to wait til I got to the top and into my apartment before opening it, and then I couldn't wait, and tore it open before I got to the 4th floor. Sitting at the kitchen table later, head in hands, feeling the accumulated swell of all the things I failed at. I think the skies were grey that day, but I could be mistaken.

The man I love most (other than my father, who is not to be compared) has for some reason not seen my strongest strengths. Its my own fault - or perhaps to have less Irish Catholic guilt about it, its because I crumble into a girl in front of him, while I'm perfectly able to be a woman in other situations. I wonder if its the last resistance to intimacy that I have, until I know the answer to that question. I've played so long at being elusive. You can only play a real seductress while you maintain your distance. Its a luxury to loll about in the prime of your post-adolescence, casting those eyes around, luring in attention and possibility. But its a shame not to grow up. The desirable maintain their distance. Its a rule. And if ever you come to seeing yourself sharply, you no longer have the option of involuntary blindness. This is why people run, and its understandable. They experience a moment of self-awareness and in that instant, illusion falls away and responsibility is compounded and so they run because if they stand still too long, they can't help but see what they already know: they are afraid. And usually, they don't know why. There is no tangible expression to follow that moment of pause. So when I play the little girl, its artificial and we both know it. Habits aren't easily broken, and I'm not proud to admit that I have wavered between seduction with distance, and the neediness of a little girl throughout my relationship history. The pattern I have fallen into has suddenly shattered because I want more, but I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to put the new thing into practice - the new thing being a kind of honest and grounded way of being in the moment, and filtering through emotion before seeing things clearly with my ego put aside. I want to have conversations that don't cascade into emotionally overwhelming confusion. I want to be stronger than that. But this is where I am in my moment of pause. I'm drawn in and waiting as patiently as I'm able. Its difficult to remember that this is a fortunate place to be.

christian street

2008-08-13T14:43:00.000-04:00

I was riding my bike down Christian Street when I closed my eyes for longer than would be advisable. I opened them dreamily, made sure my course was clear, and pedaled with my eyes shut for a little while longer. I remember doing this as a kid, the forced experience of exhiliration and fear conflating urges that aren't supposed to bind.

Love Observed

2008-01-03T22:42:00.000-05:00

I have seen it over and over again: love emerging from depletion. The movement from loneliness content enough in its solitude to ward off depression (coming home after work to put away the groceries, muttering thoughts in quiet words that don't have awareness beyond the moment, curling up with a good book and a pack of cigarettes in the over-sized purple chair donated by owners of an over-zealous kitty cat who left its mark a little less purple, fluff spilling out of wounds spelling innocence and guilt all at once, wondering when to cook that dinner for 1, contemplating the reason stated on your divorce papers and whether it was accurate (descriptively speaking) and whether it should make you a little bit sad to be eating alone. again.) to the initial thrust of what could lead to love is not uncommon. To preface any discourse on love with a statement of redundant observation makes it seem less special. Which is precisely what I'm talking about. It may be 'special', but its about as common as it gets. We all want the love we fall into to be unique, magical, a sure-tale sign of what can't help but endure because of its very special circumstances - what a shame it would be to waste such a good story - I mean, what are the chances that we would meet like this? It must be meant to be... This is the phase of infatuation where hope binds to pleasure, making the most self-aware abandon rational thought and good sense. It is the moment of idealistic pause before the cynic steps in to jab a knee into your gut. Its worth it, really. At least, the elation is simultaneously blinding and revealing enough to return us again and again to the beginnings of recurrent mistakes, or simply, relationships that have no stake in continuity. Or maybe its just a good time that leaves you feeling a little more empty than you would have predicted.

Lets assume a general consensus regarding the rules of attraction:

1. There aren't any.

2. Freudian mommy and daddy issues compel us.

3. Wanting a man or woman who embodies the frustrating/harmful traits of a monumental past partner/relationship with whom you've never dealt in a way that allows you to leave them behind will continue until to take the opportunity to deal with the issues (the keep presenting themselves for a reason).

4. That person you want because they possess all the admirable characteristics you respect while you lack them is really difficult to resist, and guaranteed to drive you crazy in more ways than one.

5. Animal attraction (rawr)... it just is.

There certainly is something to be said for the hunt - sexual anticipation is never boring. And the oh-so common combination of a dark bar, limitless alcohol, and prowling eyes makes for an interesting game, if you're up to it. But then, I've seen the very Sex in the City type of women I love turn suddenly sad when the game is no longer what they want. I've seen them grow tired and surrender, looking for something more meaningful. I've seen men I care for fill with fear that they'll never sustain anything real, if ever they land it to begin with. And this observation makes me feel like maybe I'm not such a judgmental prude, after all. There is nothing better about a serial monogamist than a one night stand junkie when all is said and done - people live different lives, get off in different ways, find joy in different moments, seek company as they choose. Both ways of life imply the repetition of goodbye.

People abandon love so easily. I just watched Eyes Wide Shut, and after choking back the rage inspired by Nicole Kidman's alarmingly bad acting, after explaining the difference between real breasts and implants to John Francis when he walked in on me eating cheese and pecan pie under a blanket during a nudie scene, I came to the point. People walk away from real love all the time. Regardless of whether the relationship is good, healthy, sustainable, workable, beautiful, incomplete but with hope, there is a specific kind of poisonous doubt that is dangerous, once entertained. It has to do with living in a culture of failed relationships and instant gratification. The kind of doubt I'm talking about comes to light when the ego overshadows the soul - it is a devilish voice that tells you how hot you are, blames your significant other for the ongoing problems in a shared dynamic, and casts an outward eye upon all those perfect potential partners whose character can be embellished by fabrication. It seeks attention like a starving animal. It feeds off moments that would be shameful if the ego hadn't already built up a system of self congratulatory justification. I remember a time when I was excited to be single again - the whole world was open to me - I could kiss who I wanted, I could stay out with my girls, I was free free free for the first time in a long time. And then, after a few months, I was slammed by the reality that with every failed relationship I left behind, my 'who i am' became more specific, more solidified, more confident, and therefore, a hell of a lot less compatible with most prospective partners. I was not easy to be with or happy-go-lucky. I had been a train wreck, an unrequited love that tried too hard, a poet's daughter, whose father never gave his words away until much later, and it had taken me so long to find my own. I spent too much time waiting on the words of another to define my own experience. I was too young to get married, too hungry for love, too empty, too confused to know what I wanted, and yet after I finally walked away from everything, I was sure that I didn't regret a thing. I was too intense. One night at a party, i felt venomous - like everyone near me suffered my condition by proximity - my eye contact put people on edge, if it didn't pierce right through them with a judgmental vengeance I could not seem to voluntarily reel in. That night, I looked at my friend's cat, and its hair stood on end before it hissed and ran out of the room. I sat down and cried. The same eyes that could engage and invite had become the source of anxiety for people and animals alike. Christ. Where do you go from there?

Simple: you take stock. You realize that love is never hungry, and that love is bigger than a romantic relationship, or the feeling you get between your legs when your crush walks into the room. As soon as you feel fear, realize that it isn't coming from love, and do what you need to find your peace. Stop having conversations in your head if you don't have the balls to say them out loud to the person whose response you're fabricating in that imagination of yours you cling to so desperately. Grow up. Be brave. Stop lying. Its amazing, really, how when you become honest, everything else is so transparent.

I meant to write about that thing that happens next - the way love deepens over time with accumulated moments that can't be counted or even recalled until a memory comes, like a gift, much later to surprise you.

November 2007

Goodbye

2007-09-29T13:17:00.000-04:00

I found myself looking forward to seeing him, thinking about him while waiting for the train, and I began to long for moments of solitude to allow for withdrawal into my imagination.

There are people who come in and change your life in an instant. Everything had gone to shit and suddenly, there he was: a beautiful man with terrible timing. I promised myself that I would not fall in love with him, but the promise was issued the first time I laid eyes on him, and I knew that to be a bad sign. I made him laugh the first time our paths crossed. He made me spill my sandwich the first time we ate lunch together. I made him take up smoking my brand of cigarettes so he'd have an excuse to spend time with me after class. Every time I was with him, I left wanting more because every time we were together, we had to walk away. The whole situation seemed entirely safe because of the absurdity of our growing attraction - it was destined for disaster long before acknowledgment. He was my professor. It was every Freudian's wet dream: the older male professor, the unattainable absent man, right down to the inversion of my father's name. His stories called timelessly into a mutual past neither of us could name; we were both haunted by neighboring ghosts. There were secrets and fairy tales and magic and always sadness. Always distance. Always just enough to keep us holding on. But I was trying not to hold on, or so I said, and the danger of eye contact was growing stronger.

Sensation is intensified by desire; he walks into the room and you wonder if somehow he knows what you were doing with him in your mind while you were locked in the bathroom late last night, the tap turned to muffle the sound of your give-away. This was the first instance of covering your tracks, but there would be more, and shame hadn't settled in yet, so it was all very exciting. You think you can dismiss sexual attraction as a decision and you can, but you're wrong. People fall down all around you and you settle into the pain you've inflicted with your Irish Catholic guilt still intact long after leaving the church. It seems you've left everything behind. Your marriage, your country, your family, your faith. You settle into a divorce that takes too long because you're so afraid to say goodbye and really mean it (if by 'settle' you mean careening drunk on your bicycle while chain-smoking cigarettes at 3am to some place you found on Craigslist that you're supposed to call home). You get stoned all by yourself before heading to the next party so that you'll be more fucked up than everyone else because you don't want your heart to feel so fucked up but it is and so it goes. You say goodbye to the man in his absence again and again and again. You need him to return that goodbye, but he doesn't. His divorce is final. He falls in love again before he's had the chance to grieve his losses. Before he cuts his ties to you. You've never cried the way you cried on his second wedding day, all covered in paint, iron and wine. You love him too hard and you know it, but you don't know how to let go. Its becoming obsessive, bringing out the darkness - qualities you never knew you had. The day you open your eyes to see you have nothing at all, you're standing in the wreckage of everything you need to suffer. And so, you grow up a little more.

You fall in and out of love again on the back of a motorcycle. You go out on first and last dates. You're beginning to fear yourself incapable of sustaining any kind of romantic relationship regardless of how right it is because you don't trust yourself anymore. You still read his star signs. You carry out full-on conversations with him in your head, and he always says just the right thing, and so do you, and you love the way he sees you from your own invented perspective. Somehow, little by little, you begin to let go without his goodbye. You find some peace in moments alone. There are beautiful people in your life, and you can no longer count your blessings. It has been a year. He invites you to have dinner at his house, with his wife, and you suggest meeting somewhere neutral instead. Even though you're deathly curious. Even though a part of you wonders if seeing the home he has built with his new wife will shake him the rest of the way out of your heart. He suggests Sabrina's after coffee sans wife so that the 2 of you can catch up. She'll join you later, at dinner, on the day before your birthday. And when she sits at the table beside him, across from you, she is nervous. You want to love her . She is lovely and scattered. He shouts inside jokes at you through the window of their syringe exchange van while you unlock the front door they've dropped you at. And you find that you're finally free.

Something shifted completely - I accepted their love together with real love; I let go. And then I was left wondering how I let myself love a man in his absence and a ghost in my head.

misery loves company (don't be consumed)

2007-09-12T10:37:00.001-04:00

So why do I feel like I've just taken a huge leap backwards? It could be because I'm reading Tom Wolfe and Charlotte Simmons has just abandoned her integrity via virginity to a frat boy. The over-achiever who condemns the moral degradation of everyone on campus, who believes her entire self is destroyed because of a single euphoric night she didn't see coming while the reader looks on, anticipating the backlash of sacrificing values and beliefs surrounding the illusion of superiority and self-importance for a shot at acceptance. Maybe its my inbox from the past week of email exchanges with men from my past, or the onslaught of myspace messages I've actually responded to since changing my status to single. Or the nervousness that overwhelmed me as I punched those same digits into the phone, took a deep breath and left a message, thus setting myself up for yet another post mortem rejection. Its hard to say.

Positioning the empty hollow feeling of waiting to be disapointed, I have to ask myself why. Set up, braced for a preconceived moment. As if the world can be manipulated. Forced fantasies realized through deliberate accident. What is it I was looking for, all those lonely afternoons, poised like a predator, released like a failure? And what was it this afternoon? I lay in a 4x4x4 foot box covered in mirror, lined with small white lights flashing along the ceiling. Headphones on. Laying on my back, I cried halfway through, but for a moment. I do not like the image of myself that I've created. I am afraid. I could see it in my eyes.

January, 2006

2am resist

2007-09-12T01:21:00.000-04:00

think.
do i need to be alone.
these things do not come easily.
letting go and building up again.
being guarded because
its the only tolerable
way to be.
saying goodbye over and
over til i finally get it right
and i never get it right.
feeling not old, not really, but worn.
leading a question to manipulate the
answer when there is no such thing.
resistance like clockwork and why
i painted the ghost of absence today.
2 figures made 1, engaged in
aggression and submission
like an inverted stain.

2/2006

2007-09-12T00:45:00.000-04:00

Busy busy dream, cluttered and crowded. Architectural models and structures and failures. I think Annette was there. My template failed over time, the cardboard coming unfolded and falling in on itself. But the actual structure I designed stood firm. Simple and attractive with the most important room left out and I looked at it and wondered why. Somewhere else, ticket booth - hurry, hurry - my bag on the table and Jamie was there. tickets, run, we'll miss the train or maybe its a bus we need. People kept putting things in my bag throughout the dreams. 2 big naked hard plastic dolls. Wait, I have my bike. Later it was not so loud and he held my hand as if to acknowledge our losses. I sat there trying not to cry.

9/27/2005 Dream, from my book.

Fireflies

2007-09-11T21:21:00.000-04:00

The weight pulls at you again. You find yourself walking alone,
words stifled choked crammed rendered dead defeated useless.
You're no longer sure what's wrong, how much responsibility you bear for the wounds of others. "Wounds heal" becomes your mantra. But that isn't even true. You don't know what to say, what to defend, what to feel burdened by anymore.

You walk past a gated park and you've never felt comfortable with it - seems too deliberate, too manicured, unnatural. But you walk by on a hunch that there will be fireflies. And there they are. You stop and rest your bag on the ledge and watch. And as you continue walking, you see how many people walk along without noticing. A woman looks worn. As you pass her you say: 'Fireflies.' She is startled by intrusion, by something unexpected, by something outside herself. She does not look toward the confined park. You wonder if she grew up with lightning bugs.

June 2005