Monday, June 29, 2015

clarity

I dreamed I was moving to live in Hawaii with a man I had just met.  The man was incredibly persuasive about the fact that I ought to leave my life here behind me and move with him to start a new one.  In the end I went with him, not because of him but because I really wanted to live in Hawaii.  Living with someone who was fascinated by every breath I took was a fringe benefit.  In dreams you can amputate pieces of your world painlessly.  In reality, phantom pains tingle just at the thought.  My dreams are not wishes; they are something more difficult to define.


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Friday, June 19, 2015

dead end of a thought.

I think I have changed my mind about what I wanted to say about this.

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Friday, June 12, 2015

disappointing you is getting me down

I grow accustomed to A.  He borrows my keys and does not return them until I chase him.  I find myself unlikely to chase.  Especially unlikely to chase  men like him… thin men, vibrating with caffeine and hunger and good intentions.  I am not enchanted, but I grow accustomed.  And I sense he is accustomed to being chased.  I was like him when I was twenty-four, but I do not think he will be like me when he is my age now.  Time will attach itself to us in different ways.  I study him with interest because he will likely be my new partner.  He will impact my life in a number of ways I cannot yet predict.  Frankly I like him, somewhat against my will, and in spite of various affectations I find irritating.  He will challenge me.

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For some reason it all reminds me of N, who I thought was terribly old when he told me he was thirty.  Now, it is nearly impossible to imagine him with a wife and baby.  Long ago, when K lived here, he caught me with my shirt off in the hallway.  He said, "Now that's a woman who has never had a baby," and I did not know if he was complimenting me or insulting me  - because babies both make us and destroy us.  My body has never been altered by that magic.  Nor my soul.  I wonder which is more apparent.  N referred to many lifetimes of missed opportunities, and there is still a part of me that counts upon another chance to get things right.

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My family is away.  And so I take this as an opporutnity to drink red wine alone.  And then to stumble to the corner store to buy cigarettes.  I do not know what I smoke anymore, because I only smoke what I am given.  It has been a long time, and so I revert back to what I would have bought decades ago… Benson & Hedges, something.  Something in a black package, I tell the girl at the counter, who looks at me like I might be crazy instead of just a bit drunk.  I am disappointed the homeless man who often haunts the cornter store is not there, because I wanted to smoke one cigarette with him and then leave him the rest of the pack.  But he is not there.  So I take the rest of the pack home, smoke on my front porch alone while the cat watches me through the screen, dreaming of freedom, knowing nothing of what this is like, to be alone.  I am drinking white wine now, because I have run out of red.  Terrible, this.  I am not much different in this moment than I was when I was in eighth grade.  And disappointing you is getting me down.


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