[bleep] psychogenic fugues
waking up without anything to think about is the
closest to heaven i will ever come. sublime absence of
fuzz channel
alarm clock manic deities demanding sacrifice and
penance. i am hungover and wrinkled and freezing with
no blanket
or real pillow dozing on the couch of this girl named
cathy who i love more completely than anything i have
ever
encountered. you see, i love things. and she is the
most spectacularly inexorable gravity well of
adolescent beauty
these eyes have ever lingered on, caressed,
hallucinated in digital detail upon the concrete
embankments of empty
river basins. i dont know what it means to be who i
am. i know that when i see her smile i want her to
look at me with
an unquestionable desire to possess me. i have never
wanted to be owned before. but i desperately want to
be her
most prized possession, favorite toy, cherished pet,
place to curl up and cry and sing sad songs to.
the rooms of the house are full of sleeping children
full of alcohol and dead brain cells lying in
clothing-optional
proximity in beds made by mothers and beneath pictures
of vacations to Orlando and San Francisco. the smell
of
clean linen and potpourri is still strong enough to
douse the eager waft of empty beer bottles and shards
of sticky
wine cooler glass littering the back porch and around
the pool.
long after the others had paired off or decided to be
adventurous and bunch in numbers and stumbled upstairs
or into
back rooms i shut off the pounding gurgles of alien
synthesizers and put on moby’s “slow motion suicide”.
i cleaned
up the remains of the debris and neatly organized the
empty bottles on the counter of the kitchen. the long
draining
descent of purple-faced post-peak slowly eased my
obsessive-compulsion and the gelcap jitters gave way
to the grind
and the vision. i smoked freezer-chilled icebox
menthols by myself until the house started to flood
with pre-dawn blue
water rubbings and bathed the moment in enough quiet
bitter pallette to close my eyelids completely. the
cold air
stung them less than a hour later.
i wander to the back room and peer into her room. her
toes are curled up with goosebumps and painted blue.
she
reminds me of bjork. perfect angel of my memory. her
short black hair matted and scrunched, white tank top
peeking
out from beneath hand-me-down bedspread, and her jeans
draped over the end of the bedpost, adopting the
similar
comfortable embrace she holds with my best friend.
he had noticed me looking at her and decided to look
at her a bit closer. i knew he had an unconscious
desire to shore
up his own insecurities by reminding himself that he
could have whatever it might be that i was longing
for, but i didnt hold it
against him. he didnt know why he did it. and if she
wanted to settle into a ego-reinforcement session with
someone
the other girls talked about then who am i to judge
that. i had been drunk and tripping and destructive,
being cheered
for endurance and an almost inhuman ability to drown
myself in all the drink they could find, all the smoke
they could
muster. in youth self-destruction is a source of
extreme and unforgiving rationalization. with age it
becomes shallow
and meaningless.
she told me she had always wondered why i had always
been so sad. i asked her if she had always
thought i was sad. as long as she had known me, she
said. i had no answer. she was discovering grief. she
missed her
mother and fought tears. i touched her face and
brushed her hair behind her ear. she hugged me and
hesitated inches
from my face. a momentary lapse into a communal
swelling sorrow, some flash of transient explanation
for the
deafening vaccuum she saw swirling behind my eyes, and
reflected in her own. i saw her and realized that i
wasnt
looking for myself in her. the electricity of suddenly
knowing that i loved her with a purity i had believed
only capable
within the recesses of imagination and delusion made
me smile and i wanted to tell her i had been writing
writing
about her since i was six.
he interrupted. she was embarrassed and hurried back
to the sounds of laughter and music. he paused and
grinned at
me. i stared back at him blankly. he stared. that was
the first time i had ever seen a hint of recognition
in his face to the fact that
he didnt know me at all, and that he was no mystery to
me. neither apathy nor self-doubt nor insecurity kept
me from
stopping him. that was a first.
i am slouching in the driver’s seat of my car and
hiding beneath the warmth of my fleece and sunglasses.
i think i’ll listen to “nothing feels good” by the
promise ring on repeat until i can hear it my head
everday. i don’t
know what it means to be who i am, because it only
means something to me. i think that daydreams of
aesthetic
pleasure may be the vocabulary of god. i think god is
my home in the furious dot matrix succession of panic
that
makes me jump when i forget where i am. i think
nothing is meant to be. i don’t think i will ever love
anyone more
than her. i don’t know why it makes me smile to say
that. none of this means anything to anyone but me but
i dont care anymore.
[[mute][-[chris]-][mute]]
[[[[[[[[[[and i dont know anything]]]]]]]]]]]]
[[[[[[and i dont go to college, anymore]]]]]]]
[[[[[[[[[[[[[[i don't know god]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
[[[[[[[[[[and i don't know anyone]]]]]]]]]]]]]
[[[[[[[[[[[and i don't know god]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
[and i don't know if anything'll be all right]