the habit of being

It’s dim-to-dark, but some orange lingers in the air. I can faintly outline the eel-trees along the path. I sit in a suburb, on a porch, in a swing - with some girl who has a cause. Her eyes are low, I suspect she’s thinking. (What a luxury?) Her hair is long, as mine once was, but without the kinks and loose exclamation. The love children ironed their manes for this. I fumble my attempts to braid it for her, wanting nothing more but to declare each try a failure, undo it, and start again. I use my fingers for a comb to return the lines to straight again, and my fingertips trace down her spine, jumping from bump to bump. I’d draw pictures on her, I think. Something abstract with circles. She says my hands are beautiful, everyone does. They are hands that write and hands that paint and hands that braid hair badly. These hands are not trained and I fear for them.

. . .

I walk down the line of an empty road on my tip-toes and whisper conversations with myself. I’m pretending to be a spy and I’m paranoid that I’ve been found out. Each tree is screaming at me, probably hiding some chic dark-haired assassin only I could conjure up. His name is exotic, his features are sharp, he reads Nietzsche before going to sleep at night. (He’s just that mean.) Me, I’m just trying to look nonchalant. I dart my eyes back and forth and know it is of no use. The fantasy killed will see into my heart with all its fantasy secrets and I’ll die a martyr for the decadent lifestyle I’m not really living. Oh to be intense, to be stark, crisp, focused, on. Or to be romantic, whimsical, dramatic, lush. to be anything but a lost fairytale girl with nowhere to go and too long a road to walk along would be a step up on that ladder of art, artifice, and other related punch lines. So I stop walking, observe the moths and the lamplights, let out a long sigh, and continue.

. . .

I am thin, my bones are hollow - could easily snap in two. We are up, me and the wind. My wind. I can see things but I don’t look. It’s waves, it’s currents, it’s in and out oscillation, but still flat, a plain that I glide on - slick, ceramic tile and I’m not over. I’m over. Above all and not looking at the slow things. Swimming but not swimming in this water that isn’t - I feel the vacuum, my insides are tight. I am light. I am not so finite as they - specks like vanilla beans in gourmet ice cream. If I could open my mouth wide enough I’d suck them all into me - a universe microcosm in my gut, supported by nothing but these hollow bones. I won’t break today. I wont fall today. I’ll go and go and me cover wing to wing in the fantasy of never stopping. I lie on my stomach and slip-n-slide to the horizon and all is so very tiny, so very below, all but me and my floating, my flying - and the wind that is half-ocean - the clouds which are only real from the other world - I see them not in mine - sky, mindscape, movement, ballet, viola air and I am the chirping piccolo. What is beauty but what I am? What is truth but progression into forever? Where will I go from here is irrelevant. I will fly, I will swim, I will slide, I will go go go. These bones, yes, they are fragile, but what isn’t these days?

. . .

Pink shoes are a novelty worth making myself late for, but I worry for appearances entirely too much. I was last to get here and first to sigh at the reality of it all. I’m aesthetically stimulated from all sides and could see myself falling in love with this place quickly, but what of the old insecurities, deep-bedded and unchanging? I’m compelled to draw a circle in the grass and sit in it, unmoving, for hours. (Look up, look out, look inside.) All is new. Which side do I present? Must I present a side at all? I know I can’t just sit and wait. Here is where the trouble starts. I want to photograph the gypsy; I want to know what the shy girl writes in her journals all day. But first, I must say hello.

. . .

I remember seeing the silver-white car through the fence - going west, going east (or is it north and south?). It had to be him, I felt it in my gut, in my soul perhaps. You know what it’s like just before something pivotal takes place - like you’re stuck in the middle of one breath, and everything is still, frozen. When you finally get up the courage to move, say, to walk out onto the street and look for the car down the road, it’s all so bizarrely slow you wonder if it’s really happening at all - step, step, step, but am I getting closer? Is he? In his back and forth car he’s looking for me - maybe he’s stuck too. I make it to the road - nothing, just the lines getting closer together at the end of the street. It’s all about perspective. So I walked back, a bit relieved, a bit disappointed. Maybe it wasn’t him. But as I make it back to the safe haven behind the fence, I see it again, the same car. This is getting ridiculous. I have to make it stop. I walk up to the stone pillars (something to lean on). I try to breathe and I wait for that slow come and go car to show itself again. This is the end of the prelude. He stops and asks how to park. It’s beginning, it’s beginning, it’s started and it plays through. It won’t end. The saga plays in my mind like a CD stuck on repeat all night long. I remember listening to the Requiem that way - over and over and when I awoke all those times that night I thought I’d never slept at all because it still wasn’t over.