(the waves)
(pg 138)

‘Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.’

to dust & mire & moths & all creeping crawling eating destroying creatures (V. Woolf)

coalition to make sentimentality cool again

streetlights billowed and melted into gold and black and the highway became the sea and I was a little amphibian thing and the breeze through the open window was my grandmother’s veined pink hand warm and soft in my hair

Birds singing in Greek

so delicate, straight-laced, puritanical lately

fantasize about things abstractly, and then in the moment I reel away

spools of hidden memory unwinding and wrapping around my throat

Adrift on the sea of slow bland ruin. Grey. Horizonless. Water blended into ether. No star, no moon, no guiding light. Fog and heavy haze and evil vapors. Everything has been enveloped and confused by it.

- it ticks the small notches and levers of my brain, it brushes at the spindly threads of memory. Corporeal memory. Somatic torpid memory. Now my stomach feels wavey.

Realizing how much my squeamishness is directly correlated - I always knew it was, I just could never pinpoint why or how - the vision of anything violent, bloody, of bodies being harmed

- she had no understanding of real hurt, she only pinned it to her description as an attractive neon sign - "TRAUMA RESOLVED HERE - SHOES SHINED WHILE YOU WAIT" -

(the mirror she used to try and see me through herself, leaving words written in lipstick on its shiny surface, it's almost laughable to me how she wanted to be me for a while - and how I wanted to be her too)

All of her fear, a frightened rabbit at her core. Dashing away from the smell of danger. She's got her senses sharpened like butcher's knives.

As if a hundred thousand inconspicuous quills stood up like soldiers on the back of my neck. A salute towards self-protection.

Horses exhaling impatiently

a gas lamp opening its slow eye into blue fog

I feel the grains of age mottling me. And everyone still tells me I'm so young, I look so young. Apparently.

Thousands of years have already elapsed. I'm nothing more than a nice mirage to stare at through the mercurial heat.

I want to see whale's tails arching out of the sea. I want to have infinite time to read and write. I want to undo the damage of my past. To solder the frayed edges of my nerves. Drink milk again.

Bring me home and spoonfeed me a nourishing bowl of broth, cover me and let me sleep in front of the fire with the window open. Collect fireflies in jars and put them next to my pillow.

I want someone else to run my errands for me. To gather sea shells and bring them to me in plastic bags. Wheel me out into a sunny field and let me sit there, basking in fresh air.

Misfortune germinating, unfurling roots around my solar plexus

Do I dare eat a peach?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
(TS Eliot)

Live and sleep in a small windowless room, watch rabid snowstorms and blizzards roll in, listen to announcements on the intercoms about severe weather. Sit on a snowcliff under the massive moon.

Become a bumblebee ghost streaming through the leaves. Forest doormouse. Monastic. Anchorite, worshiping at the basilica of greenwood and underbrush. Curved into the crook of a bristlecone pine. Small and stony. Spiney hard shell. Or, an impish little seal peeking its head up through ice floes.

Fantasies of once again being, as X once described me, impenetrable. Closed off, sequestered. And subsequently, very safe. Wrapped in the cloaks and shrouds of total renouncement.

I picture her in a smoldering house, sitting placidly amidst some flames licking at her ankles, glazed over and half-lidded

the first thought, the first feeling, the first word

denying myself small pleasures

opening the self to boredom, which is crucial for sensing the world, for creation