i am near to the centre of the revolving room
��������� �����kenna's 'hell bent' - [and i can't find myself, or my way out - ]a day full of half-thoughts and general catharsis. some disappointments, others not. it gets unbelievably humid in this room when the nighttime comes. with tara and josie and corey in the room, we watched "cube" - sufficiently frightening. then josie& corey left, and tara and i talked. it felt good. even though later her and mark ridiculed the concept of online diaries, and i felt rather uncomfortable, she noticed the look in my eye and pointed it out to me later even in the elevator. on the way down. a light shuddered and blinked ferociously at me.
we watched "the ring" with mark and kristin m. and andrea. in the aftermath of that blue-green-gray drippy world, the inconstancy of fingerprint oil sliding from glass, the warped faces in photographs. a solitary burning tree. a completion in incompletion. that was a horrible sentence.
in the midst of this weird melt - this dali-dream - i find an email from kaylen, titled 'in the key of dr. livingston's letters' - i feel adrift in this random landscape of half-love, passable neediness. just realizing i have a note from claudia. 'it's all over,' she says. in the key of odd desperation, a cold sort of sadness. 'i hope i'll see you again in some next life,' she says. and i realize that some people slip by the wayside, in a solipsist way, sliding through the sidewalk cracks. ladders falling silently from great heights, landing with muffled thuds. fingernails.
adrift in a landscape of queer half-love, sitting and motioning to myself. a ghost precedes me, pointing to the next blocked step i will take. shifting arm movements and steps. i end up in tara's lap. a mutual sort of flirtatious friendship evolved. she catches a wandering eye and laughs about it. up on the bed, pizza boxes and empty mountain dew bottles. a wasteland of junk food and collegelife. she is graduating soon. this indifferent sort of odd tone.
the letter from kaylen.
'you know. i'm terrified sometimes, that you're going to transition into someone who's just...normal. and in the process, dissolve from this side of the mirror, and re-appear on the other. so there'll be this drift, and lack of comprehension, lumped with lack of communication...inabilities.'
into this horrible landscape enter a cloud. slide it along the sky with a gray-painted thumb. where it goes leaving a trail of green slime behind. i stare at the letters until they reconfigure themselves into her desperate silent tone. the odd silences that i focus on while on the phone with her. the breathing and the soft giddy laughing. i think of all the rushed sententia she'd uttered - 'sometimes i think you could be the greatest lover of our generation / you're the martin luther king jr. of the emotional minority' -
slip through the mirror like lake-water. luke-warm lake water. gap cap. jeans. shirts that fit, a freedom that sunshine brings. a glow. ruddy skin. the idea that maybe i am not rotting on the inside. so much fruit. bursting - it doesn't take so long to go to death, and i can control the fermentation a little.
we all of us are indestructible. (carcrash on the side of the highway in the night, terror slipping over the wreckage like a silver ghost, shoddy and malformed, just evading the whirlwind of police lights. the tangle of darkness and neon. a mangled body falling from the metal mouth, masticated and saliva-sticky) we all of us will never die...
'i can't put a finger on
what i'm so afraid of, other than it has to do with them dying.' receiving a letter from her is like from the Back of Beyond - an adventurer on the turf of reality. i don't respond usually. i don't think it's because she called me when i was trying to killmyself and i didn't say anything. silence. akin to discovery. letters from the wasteland. i see her perusing a dali-esque landscape fraught with marble juttings and melting pianos. a tattoo on the land shifts. a rose blooms. the eye in the centre opens. the sky unfolds and folds again. the men trod by on ridiculous stilts. in quicksand.
'so there'll be this drift...'
continental, tectonic. cloudscape, landscape.
empty mountain dew bottles and a sticky, dry feeling in the mouth. my heart begins to pound.