transformations // extremes
��������� �����"you're going to so many extremes lately ... " kaylen's soft musing on my state of affairs.leaving in a haze of morning confusion today, from amanda's house. squirrels were madly in the backyard, dodging red plastic cups half-filled with poor beer. sitting shotgun in cody's ford escort. the back strut bouncing, sounding painful. alcohol still wanders fitfully through the network of my bloodstream. every once in awhile, my brain encounters a new landmine of the stuff, and i hiccup, staring out the window at the passingby landscape. cody has to drive three hours north to bangor. but he's going to drop us off at campus first.
rewindbackflash - staggering through amanda's candyladen house, a constant bottle or glass in my hand, mostly molson. five beers and three jello shots. and some other sundry. i was cody. cody was me. and everyone remarked astonishingly how much they thought he WAS me - in certain instances, i would turn my head and there, like a mirror following me, i saw my head with a backward black hat, glasses, and my leather jacket -
funny how clothes can be the defining composition of who you are -
- or what you let yourself be -
"i need to get more drunkerer more fasterer," i said at one point during the night. smoking marlboro lights because that's what cody had. in& out - weaving through people i knew/didn't know/in costume. hours slipped by, shadows flattened against the walls of the house. finally it slammed into me. i crashed, burned, spiralling down to the floor. terror like the waves over the deck of a sinking titanic - "i have to go," i remember saying. lindsey's voice imperiously in my face - "you can't go - there's no room for you in the car. you can't go." // "i have to go" // "you can't" // "i -- "
wandering through the house, exhuming each room, running away from the terrible bright red light of my self-loathing - and finally, tangled suddenly in a horror, unable to move. held by the equal hands of kate and cody (again) and guided to the bed. so many voices in and out like hospital-room scenes, "is he gonna puke // is he gonna be sick // ok ok" and the voices fade to kate's steady hand on my back. i'm just repeating endlessly, endlessly, a busted turntable. -- "what's going on inside of my head // what's going on"
kate left, a red & white fishnet vision that passed jerkily out of my sightlines, through the door and out into the cool-air night. i tried to pass out. willed myself hard into the pillows on amanda's bed - "i'm not a puker" i insist violently to someone who passes by - imagined thunder shivers up & down my spinalcord, and then i sit up. i talk about solipsism with natalya. we talk about belonging. about moving. shifting from place to place. she reminds me of a less amused peter. i wonder if peter would like her. she has no internal monologue.
eventually i think i passed out, through no effect of my own. no dreams. wake up at seven a.m., with the sudden weight of brian walsh encountering the bed - "floor too hard sleep on bed" - and suddenly snoring. natalya and i just look at one another over him.
then cody's waking up from the porch, blearyeyed and as confused as the rest of us, but not as drunk. all of us like pilgrims to a vague canterbury.
all saint's day. when the walls of the world are thin like onionskin paper and halfway through the day you begin to see faint impressions of paper hovering in the air. around seven o'clock a lone bagpiper outside the dorm windows leaned against a tree and piped "scotland the brave" before moving on again. the skyline of portland is like skin with LEDs implanted in it. looks like a giant cyborg is laying down many miles away. and the moon is veiled in an odd, drunk haze - like a glassy, jaundiced eye. the eye of a starving ethiopian peering through the dark, accusing.
"to extremes ... " thinking of friends. thinking of self-absorption. thinking of confusion, indolence, bad tastes in the mouth, pounding headaches like the steady drone of cicadas in deepsummer ... still worried about the winter.
but today was oddly warm, like a rotten apple. soft & malleable. the big old mystical, arcane harmonic convergence is one week away.
cue dramatic music. i missed a party tonight, and i feel as though my skin could give way to a pale ghost.