I amThisManyFingers

We both posses a certain “boyish” charm.  It is as if he more adversity we experience the more child-like we become…

I remember waking to see her nude back beside me; spines pointed like jagged plates intercepting signals, sky-bound transmissions in the shadows.  I don’t know how she got there, I did not let her in.

But I knew she was there at some point, maybe an hour before I woke.  The smell off her gave me the strangest dreams.

I realized on the bus to Philly I was marooned and desperate for something.  I wasn’t sure why or for what, just an intense longing.  For something.  The other thing I knew was in Philly I could do drugs.  Again.  If I wanted. 

My friend said, “We are celebrating.  My book is finished.  Why don’t you revisit twenty-two?”  I haven’t done hard drugs since my early twenties. And usually I decline.  But this time I didn’t. 

I know I shouldn’t say it, I felt a bit better.  Refreshed.  I feel slightly guilty I am not the example of responsibility I should be; “on the wagon for eight years” type of dedication. The drugs reset something.  I woke the next morning refreshed. I still feel longing, however, it is without desperation and urgency. 

Two nights ago I had a dream I was having sex with a girl with two clitorises.  I woke up realizing for what I was longing: something shallow.

I want a casual fling with a girl with skunked bangs, pierced lips and a chest tattoo.  I want her small-breasted and a little overweight— but not too heavy, just a little extra.  I want her to be kind of like the girl I had for a night last summer, but less foolish.  And I want it to mean nothing.

It is true that I chose to love Lucretia then.  Two years later, I am unwilling to free myself from this sentiment.  I think sometimes I’ve wanted to.  At certain times I’ve resented her for something beyond her control, a feeling that was completely my own.  But somehow we’ve made amends and what it took was me telling her that I missed her.  I talk to her once a week (usually.) 

But I still travel more than I know she could reasonably bear.  I am also planning to move almost 400 miles away from her since I have no other choice.  With all that has happen to me in the past two years, I cannot continue to live in the city of my birth.  I don’t know if she would consider joining me where I will be for the next five years, however, knowing the selfishness of this desire prevents me from making any requests of her. 

So I try not to think about it because it is not a possibility.

I should write more about love.

I read the listings for the back page girls in the Philly differently now.  Much more explicit than the Village Voice, I used to find it comical.  Now I only think of you and how you almost went to the boarding house St. Louis.  Given what I has happened, I almost wish you did.  Maybe things would have been better.

I am consistently amazed how there are no unique interiors.  All rooms remind me of other rooms, other places I have been.  I close my eyes for a second and I am convinced I am elsewhere.  It takes a minute for me to recover and realize where I am.  Always bewildered as to why I am not in the place I thought I was, even if that place existed in room in a house where I was seven years ago.  The past is bleeding into my reality like dream.  Although I realize saying it trivializes real veterans, I sometimes feel like I’ve been to war.

I am in the shower in a bathroom in Philadelphia, but it looks exactly like my grandmother’s house.  For a second I feel I am fourteen.  Gabrielle and Chris are waiting for me, they should be here by two. I can see the wall through the curtain.  I know exactly what is in the medicine chest.  I know where to find the towel racks.  I stumble…

But Gabrielle and Chris aren’t coming.  Because I am in the shower in a bathroom in Philadelphia.

Sometimes I remember where I have been so vividly: the bedrooms and living rooms of my childhood, the libraries of my adolescence, the places I have been in the past year.  The colors swirl and collect in muted vibrancy.  Like old pictures tinning. I bring them back in order to see if I can still make sense of the meaning. And I call to them like a boatman drops a sinker to measure the depth of the water.  An exercise from an exorcism. 

After a year, I am back at the Pocahontas Arms. It feels like ten.  Work is causing a perpetual furrow of my brow.  Secretly, I have never been good with multi-tasking, especially not cities.  But I put on an impressive show about it.  I think about last year, in the apartment above this one.  The rats in the alley while I waited on the steps for the girl wrapped in a towel.  I remember aimlessly wandering the noodle houses of Flushing.  “When autumn leaves fall, I just think about you.” I remember being despondent, but for a different reason.

Friday the 13th, the day before my eviction, I thought of the maudlin books that were popular among my peers.  In grade school?   It must have been, I remember the library.  These terrible teen romance novels about falling in love with car crash victims and leukemia patients.  Books about teenagers dying.  I never read them, I thought the concept to be mawkish.

It was there, at the doctor’s office, I thought myself to be too young for cancer yet too old to be Lurlene McDaniel novel.  Heredity, how you cheat me.  They wrote a referral for an ultrasound and I remember how they thought I had leukemia as a baby. 

I read articles on processes and treatments. I wonder how I will be able to work.  My ex lover from ten years prior sends me letters, asking me if I am sleeping/eating well, recommending herbs and new age therapies.  In truth, we are putting the cart before the horse, planning for what is unclear. And I am avoidant.  I use my new found homelessness rationalize my lack of interest in a follow-up appointment.  At this point, after the past five years, I just don’t care what happens next.

It all started back in March, when my good friend’s lover died.  I was close to him also, but not as close to those who knew him longer.  However, I don’t think it matters in this story; as some days I miss his presence with a keen sense palpability which makes me incredulous of the nature of life and death…

I describe what followed next very clinically:

I came home and I was told I no longer had a place to live.  Then I did.  A week later, I was displaced on a whim. 

The next part is a bit of a recent haze; that strange, murky residue that makes it difficult to be objective:

I was put in a position where I felt I had to negotiate. I realized there was a very clear possibility that if I rejected his advances, he would turn against me. Once again, I would be displaced.  And I thought, in the way a bride captured by a benevolent marauder may, that things could work out. Somehow.  Or at least until I could relocate.  But it is never that easy.

And somehow through out it all “what happens next” became an irrelevant concept.

My partners often surprise me in retrospect.  I never think they really knew me.  And then I stumble on a box of mementos and I realize then knew me better than I thought; well enough to judge my taste in music and literature.

My co-conspirator warned me that they would revise history as not to seem in the wrong.  My only crime was I did not play by their rules.  I did not grovel to stay, I would not prostrate myself; succumb to the people who turned me out on a the whim of a selfish narcissist.  They took away what I was promised.  Instead of appealing, begging, pleading; I left.  I cut myself loose and I didn’t come back.  I saw the truth.  I knew I could not exist on their terms.  I acted in fairness, even to my own detriment.  I couldn’t abide with people whose herd mentality was stronger than their senses of justice.

Who could trust some one who gave no reaction and brazenly turned their back on the past ten years of their life?  How could a person whose pride is greater than their need for acceptance not be to blame?

I have nightmares about an ex, but not the one you think it is.

This bar reminds me of Lucretia. I haven’t thought of her recently, except when she haunts my dreams or I wake with the feeling she is asleep beside me.

The irony is the less I am convinced that I like her as a human entity, the less esteem or respect under which I hold her; the more she comes back to remind me of the fate that I so willingly choose. And I cannot be sure I’d change it.

I hear she still grants forgiveness (although I willingly forgot her.)

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(Source: wordsareourmost, via apartmentkeys)

From Dionysia to Discordia: August

I was lost, and the cost, and the cost didn’t matter to me. I was lost, and the cost was to be outside society.

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