Je t'aime.

I forgot what it was like when this blog read more like a diary and everything wasn’t quite so veiled. But then again, the truth is uglier than what most people seem to hand out. There’s that not knowing what is okay to share and what is disgustingly obtrusive, and I think this directly correlates with the pain of never understanding where boundaries exist in relationships. I have this tendency to love everyone, no matter how evil or ill, and I can’t help but seek that which is redeemable in them. But then again, when is it okay to break smiles into a caress? When is it okay to kiss them? And are they going to hold you to blame, if you desire to kiss someone else? Is this entitlement fair? Is this entitlement something that makes sense? And ah, even better, why is it that my favorite little star is someone so far away? I mean, is that healthy? Is that wise? Can I help it? Can I really? Would it ruin everything to get analytical?

If you want the real truth though, last night was a bore and I ended up watching dirty videos which led my female parts to bleed white. It was a heavy business of great sorrow, because I had turned mindless, and really didn’t feel loved at all. But then again, that’s the only way I can get off lately. I think it’s because I know, I can’t have what I want. It’s this distant storm that just sort of exists and I let it. And you know, I want the hungry flesh of that, but it’s nothing there for the taking. So I just need to find new ways to get happy. In fact, I’m pretty sure Salinger would associate me with his Franny. An actress that just feels like a phony. A sincere failure all around. Blackened lungs and heart.

But yes, see? Do you see how sour that all sounds? —I’ve often desired to be one of those cute french girls with the ability to write about flowers and large moments of epiphany had in bookstores with sunlight oozing in great amounts, but the modesty in my chest is something false, and that’s not my daily truth at all. There’s nothing felt towards silk dresses unless they breathe of a certain history, and I find no solace in the way lipstick looks, unless I’m playing make believe. My flair is for the eccentric. I break rules and like to scream loud.

In fact, right now I’m thinking about Robert Crumb and that Carmen Maki album I just listened to and the way Miles Davis makes me feel. But that doesn’t fit the part of “cute and proper” and that doesn’t induct me into sharing stories about tea cups and the way winter has an inclination to draw comfort. I tried being that fraud, but it was dull. But maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s what makes it okay to bleed in this fashion. It’s okay I’m a mess, just so long as I don’t abandon my interests and fall back into a thick vapor. I mean, why play dead, when you’re just something so fantastically real? 

In the rain of the bathtub, hands and feet grew larger than the trees and skyscrapers that clouded everything in youth. It was all suffocating and there were demands to buckle down and suck the lanky chord that was bright pink and miserable. The desire to please existed surely too, but everything in the flesh, seemed to clobber the explosions one was supposed to feel. Instead, there was just the mad rush of necessity. In the mind, the wicked gypsy screamed: “This is what lovers do. Even though you want to talk, right now there needs to be heat. So shut up and bend the way you’re supposed to.”

When the white milk spilled out like a cosmic joke, bony hands snatched up skin that hadn’t been touched yet, as a light poured in the direction of the new pond that slid down pearled surfaces covered in rust. In fact, there was a breakfast in the way shampoo formed shapes in the hand, only to disappear into shriveled finger tips and mussed up hair. An anticipation for the chemicals was something that warranted death. The plot outlining the next couple minutes, consisted mostly of just dry ingredients. Silence danced free.

In the dormitory with the room-mate and her cloudy eyes of anchored salutations, there was the desire to be cordial, but still the fear that conversation wouldn’t be had, because of the moaning sounds that had sparked behind closed doors. Remarkably, when the man absorbing all such love had disappeared, a willingness to explore the stilted friendship sitting there laughingly, was always extremely pleasant. “Hello’s” veiled some sort of solace, and really meant, “I think you might be a soul mate.” This was nice.

One night brought the opening of a theater. Inside there were coked out theatricals and dirty girls with a whole lot to say and bodies to show for it too. Old man Muddy had met Liz there, because it was something she had asked him to. She knew she’d need him as a means of surviving. On the stage while people feigned laughter and sincere “coolness”, she drank large bottles of water and tried to layer her vision, so that she might see their flaws. But their only flaws really, were wanting to be liked and to be social. And yeah, well, she couldn’t kill them for that. So what was she supposed to do now?

Months earlier, the boy that had her pinned to the city, had mentioned art galleries and concerts that shined of something silver. These elements of excitability never materialized though, and she wasn’t meant to experience them until later. One day she went to the Natural History Museum and took a picture of two strangers, standing next to an exhibit. Looking at the photograph afterwards, she related the two shadows, to that of herself and the boy that had prodded her into a pit of fire. It only seemed natural. They were animals.

I feel like he knew I’d screen-cap this. I mean, look at that big and impressionable type font, and the way he signed off as ‘duckbeater’! 

In fact, this will be catalogued and flashed in his face ten years later.

I guess I’m just not very modest.

—Oh, but hey yeah, I love him.

An excerpt from the Summer Journals — small, but cute:

Alex takes pictures of himself in the hostel and narrows his eyebrows, as if in a deepened state of gloom. “I want to capture how I feel about the London Riots”, he says pathetically. About an hour before, he discovered an email granting him admittance to a Patrick Wolf concert. He had won tickets, but the concert had been moved to the 22nd due to the mob conflicts. 

“That’s what I get, I guess. God, I have awful luck.”

Click here if you want the following read to you:

The apartment was an art gallery of crazy adolescence that Liz had gone so long to avoid. And even though it was all something read about in books and hinted at by her best friend that lived in the mountains, she had started to believe it was merely a fragment of the imagination that others aspired towards. What she didn’t realize is that people were capable of the wild failure of being reckless. She hadn’t known it to be any fun, and she didn’t understand those that got lost at the bottom of a wine bottle or wasted away their last pennies on concerts and strange articles of clothing that came pre-made with holes already strategized well and prayed over, so that they might continue to deteriorate in a way that was desirable. This was all new, this was all enlightening. At the bottom of the tunnel she had been swimming for and had been pulled down under, she was collecting stories of those that strongly believed “they couldn’t”, and she grew determined to spark the plug within, that made them believe “they could”. It was all a new thing of theater for her and it reminded her vaguely of Ornette Coleman’s Chronology and the epileptic seizures that her aunt had when she was only that of a small child.

What penetrated most, was the smell of dog urine that seeped through the atmospheric and left a sort of splinter in the way she went on believing she was the only one to exist substantially. It wasn’t really the aroma, but rather the way it left puddles of clear liquid that only ever looked like water. The sticky aftermath was something messed over, by that man with the long neck. Some bitter lemon soap was trailed down in a brilliant white bath of suds, and it was left there only for a few seconds time, before a white napkin was drained across and off the wood floor, bringing to light a yellow stain that looked more like an ink blot, one would be asked to read after attempting suicide by sticking their head in the oven. In fact, the lingering illness of afflicted pain, became something of a joke, and all her crying would be nodded off as something normal, something cute, something unimportant. When someone whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay”, she wanted to shake them and scream that it wasn’t, that she had a storm eating her flesh, that she was something close to death, and that she wanted to get wild and seek the fruit of the mind that called her crazy.

The river of inner turmoil left no mark on the sheets of the bed she slept in, and the only detriment of the waterfalls, was that horrid place she had drawn.  It was this same kingdom of demons that kept her locked up in the cement castle, what with three rooms and a toilet that left Henry Miller sobbing, of his many credentials insisting that there be genuine art in the room where you took a monumental piss. Her revenge came in form of the painted oils of the daily mask she’d use to rid the skin of red vampires, and she’d leave long strands of hair in the sink, so that she might prove she had passed through and got naked freely, only to never be touched in ways she would have liked.

These subtleties were her own way of rebellion, and so when she was offered weed on the streets, she smiled and said yes, because she felt like it would be something nice to try. This all of course came to crash with the automobile that killed her baby sister. That one night when the giraffe of a boy didn’t come home and instead remained in East Village, she let fireworks drain out the fingers and had better sex than if he was there. The next afternoon when he showed up with a face that lied and screamed of obstruction and denial, she just pulled him in for a kiss, because she knew that’d hurt more than if she just disappeared. Her love is what suffocated the light in his chest. She was blind.

There is the interminable silence of not having what is tangible, but that’s okay because the art is something that lives forever. What kills though, is the non-entity of just being air. You are there, and you are real, but you are never felt by the person you desire most. Instead you are a resting spirit and idea that burns in their imagination. And yes, while that cultivated fruit is something joyous, something fantastic, it can’t be carried in the way a moment can. I mean, is it jealous to want more, when you have so little? Is it this that makes love greedy? Does expectation always have to badger the heart with denial?

I’m ashamed of falling back into this horrid routine of depression and anxiety. There is the admitted guilt of having nothing to offer, and just the same, there is the harp and spoon of trying to transmit a sincere amount of integrity. Somehow the aftermath, is something that crawls up the spine and just coddles. Everything is really very dark and blurred. Storms cast spells.

Nothing about this is being censored and the hands flower as they should. The rocking motion is something I can associate with sex. The euphoria is clear and able and I really do like it. In fact, it is something dirty and gruesome, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. When I write, I get an erection of assuredness. It makes me feel properly alive and human. And that’s fantastic, that’s great. Because I sure as fuck, don’t want to go feeling completely dead.

Liz had puddles of blood between the legs and she wasn’t expecting that. She had just spent the last two days sleeping in her brother’s room, which was cluttered with nothing but football books and strange clothing, that smelled of a peppermint cologne. It reminded her vaguely of the scent one of her past lovers had emitted, but denied. He once claimed trying to prevent any sort of aromatic discharge, but the sour odor that was transmitted, was something of a soft perfume that left her discouraged. It was there and it fucking killed. 

Standing in her parent’s bathroom at two in the morning, she rumpled a soft pillow of toilet paper, and straddled it in between pink flaps of skin, while making sure each limb applied an equal measure of pressure, so that nothing might slip and create an ugly explosion. Her mother laughed when she saw her claw nakedly through the kitchen, rummaging for toiletries that she knew would inevitably be stashed in the pantry. After finding what it is she needed, she then spent the next thirty minutes trying to masturbate in the closet, so that people might not hear the soft giggles that dangled out, when she couldn’t take herself seriously. Likewise, moaning was just a music, and she was able to keep that limited. She explained her animal inclinations to her mother in great detail and inquired over the way fingernails viciously entered the caved mountain of misfortune. Her mother wasn’t in shock, but just nodded off the question and told her that she really must “control” herself better.

She was on her way to the city to see the vulture that had her entranced. He had said something once about embracing those dark corners of herself, and she saw an atmospheric amount of failure in that. In the pain of knowing everything wouldn’t work out though, she also identified the darling fruit of a sincere friendship that promised the transformation of the soul. With his words, she learned more than she had ever hoped to. There was a lesson in the way his insecurities dribbled out, and his silence was one of the best lectures.

On the way to the airport, rain came down hurriedly. Her mother was driving through the obscurities and had fear pouring out the mouth. To intensify things more, her car tanked out, and refused to run smoothly as was typical. Harsh noises quite similar to that of a large horse grunting, seemed to channel well the devilish theme that had started painting the morning just wicked.

Liz was too preoccupied with the end-destination, to bother with crying or work through the chaos. Instead she just laughed and told her mum to re-route to her grandmother’s, due to closeness of proximity. Five minutes later, she was sitting in a second vehicle, with the two generation of ladies that came before her, and the storm was something just as dirty and sincere. Grabbing for her phone, she called the vulture and waited for him to answer.

When there was a received amount of static and heavy breathing that croaked out a subtle “Hello”, she kicked out a surly laugh and whispered, “I don’t think the universe wants me to come see you.” This melted with the next sentence, “But I’m coming pretty boy, I’m coming and I love you.” What was strange, is that nothing was understood by this, and the returned affection was something un-absolute and confusing. A dispersal of emotion and words, faded back into paranoia, and she hung up the phone, only to see the storm disappear.

The lady at the front desk checking her bag for her flight at the airport, was friendly and asked questions regarding the trip she was about to take. In fact, there was a look of worry on her face, when she saw the intended arrival city. “Be careful out there”, she suggested with a smile. Liz returned this joyousness and knew even then, that it was just a grand foreshadowing.