I amThisManyFingers

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.

When I thought I would never hear from her again, Lucretia came back, a year to the day she left me. 

Never underestimate the power of names and symbols.  My first memory of Lucretia was a picture, the prostrate girl with a knife in her hand a distant look in her eyes. I think of her often when I find my ideals about humanity compromised.  We share a thread of common experiences in our pasts and we’ve learn to survive grueling circumstances.  However, under the thin veil of pompous intellectualism, she is fiercely shallow and secretly superficial.  And she is scared that the people for whom she caries on this masquerade will discover.

Above all, she was a man-hater. Maybe this should have been my first indication that things wouldn’t last.  I wasn’t sure what she wanted this time (or last), however, it became clear she intended to use me as a nurse-maid for her broken heart— until a hipper model came around.  I am used to this behavior from old lovers, but that doesn’t mean I am willing to play along.

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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From Dionysia to Discordia: August

From Dionysia to Discordia: August

“I am pretty sure I played this song for you. I was trying to woo you subconsciously with it…”

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From Dionysia to Discordia: July

There’s some things baby I just can’t swallow. Mama told me that girls are hollow. Uh-uh…What’s inside a girl? Somethin’s tellin’ me there’s a whole nuther world.

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From Dionysia to Discordia: June

If we should meet again on some darkened street, pack in it all and heed to the call

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