dwindle
��������� �����disappointment seems to be something that we all face as though it were a standard movie formula:"i'm worried that this won't happen." fully expecting that since you are admitting to the problem, it won't happen. that sort of negative thought that, all of us as children repeated wishfully (to bring down stars!) to ward off any evil-eyes of concern ... and how many times did it actually work?
soundtrack. jason mraz, zero percent interest ... similarly introspective, sad strummed guitar songs while overhead the harvest moon .. is the harvest moon.
disappointment in our lives, a strange force like erosion, constantly wearying, constantly shoving us back and forth like mannequins in a darkened department store. it is now past midnight while i am sitting here. josie's conversations like some sort of reverse epidural, a frenzied lashing of nostalgic melancholy.
"COUNT ON TOPH FOR A DISCUSSION OF PURE MELANCHOLY." (because i am pure, distilled melancholy. like the newest element on the periodic table. 200-something, Melancholium. volatile when exposed to other people)
"What's with all this Toph shit?"
"it's not shit."
"Toph like the second half of your name?"
"mmhm."
"Good. I like it. It's time you grew up. Adopting a more individualized name is part of that ... I don't mean to sound preachy. Sorry."
and then stumbling on - while updating the outdated html of unheimlich, the poem i'd written so long ago in response to her .. doing ... something. a bedtime story. and that familiar gut-drop, like riding a rollercoaster to the denouement, occurred. i took a second to remember it, and then rode the opening floodgates for a minute. the conversation had opened with her, drunk, asking what i thought she was. and ended with me saying how i didn't think any of us were actually real. masks held up to big swirling voids of nothingness. that maybe humanity was the entropy destroying the universe and we just haven't figured it out yet.
darkman. swathed in angst & shifting sorrow, but nothing so soaking that i can't just traipse to the shower (how i hate the way i walk, as if the world were pressing around me, quick steps and stumblejohn!) and wash it all off. sluice it.
"what losers we are," corey remarks half-amusedly as he goes to bed. "it's saturday night and we're both here."
"oh, i know," i responded. not looking away from the screen. sometimes i think i should just be connected to a computer and live that way forever. melodramatic, but horribly true. maybe, it being 2am already, i'll sit and just wait for the slow blue horror of the dawn;
in & out. tara came back from plymouth for a day. i visited SKS, just to hang out. ended up saying very little, found myself awkward without the glue of jason to hold the scenario together. dan, amanda, tara and i. the silence stagnated, for me, and i lapsed into just watching tara rifle through her mementos from france, and amanda cook the food. the grease from the bacon leapt out viciously, like bees, and stung the girls' arms. dan sat on the counter and swung his legs idly. oscar, an ugly white cat, scuffled here and there.
i feel as though my heart is getting smaller, somehow, and the skeletal, reaching claws of my rib cage just keep getting bigger. intimidated, it shrinks back, and finding nowhere to go, simply shrinks. my mouth dries up, shrivels, and my skin is left ineffectual. meditations on mortality.
and i'm only a quarter of the way through. anthony's convinced he won't live to see thirty. i'm convinced of the same. it seems as though i've had my brief spark, and now it's burning out. spread thin, away from those whom i thought i'd spending my .. well, life with. erin & nate & jill & jason had planned a "friends-only" night tonight, i guess. they went out. i happened to be following them as they pulled into the applebees' parking lot. the little red saab, vanishing with a turnsignal.
casey calls me the other day, on her way down to newjersey for a wedding. she's about to pass my exit, she exclaims. "oh, so you should be seeing ashford lake and the ashford motel sign?" i asked.
"i'm looking at it right now!" she said. "there it is!"
and i was there, for a minute, and we were laughing, and it was slipped-a-cog back in the groove .. and the silence after laughter flees descended. awkward conversation like cracking knuckles hit me. like a punch to the gut. "so i just wanted to call to .. " etc. etc.
i've pale ghosted, slid slipstream according to string theory, and laid down dog-day style to fit beneath the crack of a door that's always been closed to me.
enough's enough for now. squeeze eyes closed, try to pull focus. a big green bottle of mountain dew and a jangle of keys. the sounds of wicked crickets congregating secretively four floors down. straight out of our windows is black space. could be anything. a giant black bat rushing towards us. the sound of passing cars that can't be seen.