the habit of being

And as I lay there, my heart beat frantically, three dimensionally, under my skin, as if a thousand little boys with feathers in their hair and scowls across their faces beat drums within me, in my sinuses, along my arms, in the inners of every fold and crease. With each beat the temperature seemed to rise a degree, and I could feel the pink in my feet and the pink in my neck surrounding my body in ribbons. I could not have gotten up or I’d have fallen down from the sudden lack of pressure. Yes, and the walls of my face seemed to cave in on me, but it was a tiny place, such a tiny protective space, my shell had become, and this is what I saw, and this is what I dreamed behind my eyelids, hot, red, thin, illuminated.. much like a hand in the dark with a flashlight shining through.

My lover swims, quite literally, swims, into me. Freestyle, indeed, one hand in front of the other, as if it were the obvious thing to do, as if my body cavity were the safest place to hide. Centimeter by centimeter, the slow advance, membranes penetrated through one by one, whether by diffusion or osmosis you slip between the cracks. My organs are brushed aside as if made of clouds or tulle, and vessels cling like seaweed, strangling those fingers that slink down my sides from the inside, outlining those same figure eights I might have fashioned along someone else’s skin. I imagine the pulsing arteries are fun to poke at, make a yawn in my pounding pulse, still raising the mercury as my temples become moist. I start to fade out into some tropical bliss, as a sun worshipper in California might, with her tiny purple bikini and brown brown stomach. The heat soaks through me from the outside air as I am filled completely from the inside, until the entire body of another stretches out inside my own, and another heart beats there, overlapping systole and diastole and systole and diastole until all is too blurred to differentiate, nothing remains but a constant hum, and the very capillaries become tangled, and our skins make a double grocery bag, and our eyes see in the same direction, in the same shades and tints, the same hues.

And I find I am shaking terribly, involuntarily, as if this were all real, and not just an illusion sleeping between thin sheets.

. . .

Another day: “When are the wings of eggs visible?” and random absurdities.

On a mission to repair a broken VCR (Disillusioned with presenting the same lies day by day? Oh the drama! The drama! Where is Lady Macbeth when we need her? Where is Sylvia Plath with her icy voice?). They say there is a problem, that the pictures, the frames, they repeat endlessly, like songs on the radio, fashion advertisements. Back to my Prada collage, being not really finished after all, and still Uncle Leo (Tolstoy..) would not be proud, as I envy the intelligentsia he so despised, and have to wonder whether color and line (words and sentences, comma splices even) as tools, puzzle pieces, count in the scheme of things. Yes, I say, art is a mess for years and years, but this, but this is organized, somehow, right from the start. “You are very good at this,” they tell me, because it has no meaning beyond the form. Yes, I could make a meaning. It is my treatise on some oxymoron, organized chaos, contained entropy. Am I, could I possibly be saying, implying, hinting, that everything is meaningless? (But not to worry! It will all come right in the end! We’ll all DIE!! Seems less like Buddhism than bad existentialism, though I’m sure there’s something to be quoted, and the exclamation points didn’t help. It does reek of Camus…).

So help me, in all my idealism, I will always been able to see it another way, even the darkest most depressing of ways, and I will constantly doubt my instincts; this is my flaw, why I cannot make an argument, not even for the existence and value of beauty itself.

Let me just tell it how it is, for once, I am tired of the artificial blur. First of all, I know nothing. I do not think (Descartes would have me killed) and I feel through turned-down blinds, light streaming through in only in segments, never illuminating the whole of the emotion. To save myself, preserve my sanity? I don’t know.

I’d like to write honestly of some people I know, some people I once knew. I’d like to revisit some snapshots. I suppose that would just be too real, so instead I will paint my nails that dark dark red, because before there was Tolstoy or Varenka or the cold, there was a nail polish color called “Russia” that I just had to have.