the habit of being

“Too many words and a fishbowl” is an odd equation for a life, especially my own. I see the world in red and wish I could be seductive (it is actually a new aspect of an old feeling, only things don’t have to be so pretty anymore), but perhaps it’s a symptom like the fatigue and the constant headache and the throbbing behind my eyes.

I envy the plant that only loves the sun. I envy the cell. I envy my body, which is not me.

All little girls go from wearing pink to wearing black to wearing pink again. A funny realization.

K’s Political Statement of the Year: TOUCH ME

Waves crash one by one and I’d like to take a specimen of every creature in the sea, line them up one by one, see if the end product is blue and flowing. It’s so doubtful. Maybe if I took a picture. In a picture everything is different, the meaning is backwards, the colors are not the same. The childish question of whether the colors I see are not the same as the ones everyone else sees still plagues me. There is no way to know. Maybe you just aren’t as beautiful to everyone else. I am so lucky.

I fear I am spending all these seconds waiting for you to leave me, to really leave for good and never look back, because it seems ridiculous to hold onto the silly dream that this will not eventually transpire: your walking off wearing your green laurel wreath while I, sleepwalking behind, find a single point on your body to focus on, as it gets farther and farther away, smaller and smaller (you were never as greedy with the air you stole, and for that I will always envy you most). I tell myself it won’t happen because I know that it is inevitable, almost needed. Two Glass Sisters Forgive Catharsis is the lovely vignette I will write (to be eventually expanded into the novella that shall make me famous) after failing for the fiftieth time the rudimentary course How To Write a Love Letter to Someone You’ve Hurt 101.

At times like this I long for the old Russia. For all my abhorrent patriotism, I know I should have been born Communist. It’s as pretty on paper as any other failed idealism, and glorification of the proletariat has this certain ring to it.

(Interjection and I am … reading Camus, and the way things are going I begin to think he could actually be right. God help me. And still, still, there is the fact that I can only want to be touched.)

I can hardly handle it, sitting around writing papers about Tolstoi and Buddhism, of all the ridiculous connections, as if I could think - THINK they say, the onlookers and the pimps. (”She has an almost uncanny understanding of literature and its underlying absorption with the human condition. She easily perceives the complexities of interpretation availed by the classics and displays an instinctive grasp of the authors’ purposes, as well as a deep appreciation for the individual characteristics that distinguish the styles of individual writers. She is herself the finest student writer I have ever known.”) As if thinking were something one could just cue out of nowhere. Ignorance is bliss is the cruelest lie inflicted to make us doubt our secondary reason for living (First is love, second is knowledge, innocence is not a factor.) Or maybe the beauty is that one can’t learn innocence like everything else - there is no equation, it is unlike logarithmic differentiation, unlike the concept of evolution in EVERY SINGLE CELL… if it happens, if it can be refuted.

The foundry had a chill, despite the artsy kids’ breaths, white in the air, the doors were not closed. Faces were insane and thieving. I stood carving with some bizarre metal version of an Oriental hair piece a woman out of proportion, nude, lacking detail, and bent to fit the square. Later the pot of hot aluminum glowed orange, bizarre men (well, they were graduate students) suited up in full protective armor lifted it and poured. It went from cherry to silver, silver, silver to black soot only to be brushed away, leaving my lady (Matisse-like, said another) cold as I was.

One (other) day: Comic relief. Over there are six music stands all in a line and a box on the wall talks, shouting orders in a Southern church lady’s voice. And the people come and go, talking of disputed politics, as if any of it mattered with all the factors identical and exact. Still the robots wonder and wander around all dogmatic and all afire. (Killing children?! Saving face!) This is, all combined, a scene, a still. Still life, no life. All life is no life, but Meursault may have a thing or two to say about that. All life with frightening music pounding the air, breaking through, shattering nebula after nebula, hammering us down all days in all ways and we will give every fantasy, our very air, as we are indeed noble breathers.

In a city much like your own small inconsequential town, a quiet boy (or “young man,” as your grandfather might say of his being oh - seventeen? or is it eighteen? these details tend to matter more and more these present times - silliness) is given an assignment by his art instructor (a man, supposedly - once married, fathered a now obese little girl, divorced, and dating a past co-worker, English teacher, for years and years - but to look at his penmanship, prettier than my own, questions emerge) to take two images (from the mangled pile of old magazines, excised of all unlikely introns - the pretty pictures, my dear, I suppose, though how many could there be in the latest edition of Popular Mechanics?) which are not usually found together (what is it about TOGETHER these days?) and to include them in the same composition. Not a hard task, and most students will not think of it at length, instead grabbing (greedy, sticky, “young adult” hands, where have you been?) at once two scenes they find cute, appealing (the boy who plays football will pick out a picture of an NFL team, there’s no shortage, and the girls whose eccentric grandmother courts stray cats for pillows may snag some unsuspecting Persian from her wine glass of top-quality cat food for elitists with a few swift snips (alright, that was a bit, much, I admit). No one contemplates paradox really, there’s no time wasted on concocting a meaningful juxtaposition or creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts (they all know that if they simply do what they’ve been told they will make A’s if they are careful and B’s if they are not - schools are not allowed to grade on creativity, artistry, or any such subjectivities)….. Ah yes, our young man (the one in our collective mind at this moment), he has chosen a picture of some factories and a picture of a man holding a hoe. He will paint with cheap tempera, elongate, and his piece will be chosen for a state art show, where a snooty lady will tell him and a room of listeners what it means and how important it is, only so another can step up and enlighten the group about the finer points of mixing colors and how animals jostle for space in her abstract compositions. You tell me what the moral is.

A lovely and oh so meaningfully cryptic lyric about a charlatan and a harlot (or perhaps a harlequin named charlotte) would do for today, this week, this month. This month is crazy.

Made of swollen tonsils and stinging lips (yes, they actually throb), I am all a flurry of heat and unknowing. Thinking thinking thinking too much and worrying and my head hurts and my back hurts and I radiate but don’t work. There is excess fluid in my ears. (Can I still hear you? Did I never hear you at all? When things go right everything melts?) Pretty grey socks, soft. I remember a grey kitten that died within hours of its birth, it had a pink nose like mine and fur like my socks. (Schrodinger’s kitten? Inside out? I walked in from the cold this morning and everyone said “aww look at her nose,” and I said “I am sick.”)

Part of me has fallen in lust with an out of shape bald man, and what’s more- he’s short and he voted for George W. Bush. Yes, there are fantasies, and yes, it is sad. I can’t help it; he’s smarter than I am. (Don’t tell anyone ego turns me on. They might say I am sick.)

My right breast itches.

There are so many striking things about June, but lately the most isolated and poignant memory I have… we are playing Scrabble with my mother and little brother, but for some reason they have both left the room. We sit across from one another at the card table. You lean in and tell me I am beautiful. I say thank you.