Thirst

I am fully aware of my insanity. Inability to look a person in the eye for more than a second because my brain is heating up and is going to explode if I hold contact for longer. Skin set on fire and attacked from all sides by invisible thousand samurai swords. That feeling is so terrifying, not being able to escape my own skin. This all may be the twisty workings of acute hypochondria, but to me they are real. I cannot find words, simple words, they slip out of my mind and I am holding a sharp object that people are calling a fork and I cannot force my mouth to form the word let alone find it in the lexicon. I feel crazy. I know I sound crazy when I explain this to someone who cannot feel it. You ask, "Are you ok?" And I have no idea how to let that question pass by and move on because, no I am not okay, but there is nothing anyone can do and so I know my face reflects strange emotions chasing each other across the lines and you think I am laughing it off but inside I'm screaming, curdling the cells in my brain.

And I cannot let anyone love me. I cannot let anyone close enough to see these weaknesses. I know my crazy voids any true trusting relations to grow. I am Tantalus, I want it so badly but when I reach for it it sinks slowly away and only when I draw back in sorrow and defeat does it rise greedily to slake itself on my abandoned emotions.

The appearance of things

The girls recline languorously in the large, expensive, mahogany-colored folded futon. Air is leaking out of the speakers, track number eight playing back their favorite tune. They are giddy, but concentrating. The smoke from the hastily-rolled shorty spirals in a lazy arc toward the ceiling, blue-gray against the egg-shell white of the painted walls. The floor-length vertical blinds ripple calmly with the evening currents, chittering and clicking absent-mindedly against their brothers. The basement is permeated with the earthy smells of patchouli and pot. The crickets outside the open doors sing a round, a chorus of ululating chirrups and squeaks that drown out any other night sounds. The girls float along in their bubble of light, sound, and scent. No one else is home.

The girls are dancing with their hands. The younger sways her fingers idly in time with the clear, sweet strains of the electric guitar. The elder is consumed with watching the younger's hands, and futilely tries to emulate the same intricate pattern, earning giggles and snorts from both as a just reward... things are spiraling down into a mellower beat, and the change is confusing, but not altogether unsettling. The two girls snuggle deeper under the light, loose cotton blanket, and begin to talk.

The musical composition that had been playing back over the speakers softly, lingeringly fades away, flowing out the door and following the cracks in the dirt, down the hill to the pond and echoing its last note out beyond the ever-present floating moon. The elder sister's voice slowly slides into the heady rhythm of the forgotten song...

He explained it to me once, and I couldn't fathom, but then he explained again, and I saw it with more clarity, she says. I will do my best to explain it to you, dear sister.

He sat, leaning his muscled lats against the edge of the couch, his seat the rough, carpeted floor, his long, strong, jean-covered legs stretched out and crossed at bare ankles. One arm was flung casually out along the couch cushion, a welcoming invitation to be enfolded in the crook of his elbow. I obliged. In the other hand, resting almost sacredly on his solid thigh, was a pencil and paper laid out over a pocket-sized guitar chord dictionary. He is a talented musician, I believe I told you. His arm burnt a line perpendicular to my spine. I didn't move.

I don't believe in anything, he said. I don't believe in religion, no God, or gods. We don't just end when we die, and we existed before we were born. We always will. I have a reason. I think about things, things I don't know the answer to. I think about them often. It takes time to figure out possible answers, for I am like a bear, slow and methodical in thinking, not quick to come to conclusions. Here is my theory.

He drew three parallel lines, each about four inches long, at the top of the page. He bisected them with a little notch-mark in the middle, and added similar notch-marks to each end of each line. The first, he labeled the left side -10, and the right side, 10. The second, he labeled the left side -100, and the right side, 100. The third, he simply drew one squiggly, sideways figure eight on each end. Pointing at the first line, he began to speak.

Think of this as our immediate lifetime, spanning twenty years. We are here, our awareness is here, in the middle. We are not aware beyond this one fleeting moment. What happens when you faint? Black-out? Do you remember your brain's actions in that time? How about a coma, he says. Does anyone who has ever experienced a comatose state remember anything from that episode? No. When you wake up, your memories are arranged one after the other, with no break to show that what we measure as time has passed. It is the same with death, I believe. You die, your brain stops working, you have no conscious cognition. So, time is endless, infinite, yet this will be but a blip in your memory bank. Essentially, we might very well live "forever", to put it simply.

If you look at this time line, this one here that spans infinite time, you might be daunted. You buy into the feeling and general hysteria that we only exist for a split moment compared to earth or the world or the universe. But bring it down. We are infinite. Life is infinite. So why are we collectively so afraid...?

The girls tug at the frayed corners of the blankets. The eldest loses her train of thought, evident in the sudden, self-conscious snicker she allows to escape her muddled mind. Hey, I tried, she says. We cannot all be clear and concise. The younger sighs dreamily, rolls over, pulling the blanket along with her. A smattering of oily black soot stains the carpet, the center of the blemish a ragged collection of melted and re-hardened rough polyester fibers. A hole in the carpet. The night descends.

Ellipsistor Radio

Ellipsis. Transistor. Radio.

Tunes on repeat this week:

1) Default by Django Django

2) All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem

3) Midnight City by M83

On Vulnerability

I need to feel your warmth, sweet one.  All that came before, the aggravated musings of a self-righteous narcissist, it is all just so mindless. I claim to know myself so well, claiming that certain aspects of my personality show that I am so optimistic and positive and unburdened and not jaded, that is all so much rot. I do not know myself well at all. I am beginning to think I am terribly afraid of being vulnerable and allowing you to see me naked, not just physically, but emotionally, and this scares me so much it renders me unable to function around you sometimes. It all started out so easily, I could use the first few months of being with you as an excuse as to why I refused to let you in. Now those months have passed, and I have built up a wall… I think I am discovering that I always erect walls, with everyone. I feign disinterest and create distance even as I silently scream to hold you closer. No one knows me truly. I don’t know me truly. I want to.

 I want to be able to tell you, with words, that I love you, instead of holding them back so hard that my eyes burn with suffocating, silent tears. They end up streaming down the side of my face, pressed up against your cheek as we make love and I beg you to stay on top of me afterward, your hands tangled in my hair at the base of my neck… it tickles in a dreamy, erotic way, the way your fingers are so long and warm, your chest expanding with your soothing, rhythmic breathing, pressing into me, sinking me further into the folds of the sheets. A little cocoon, you wrap me up. In this moment I have surrendered, barriers stripped away for a moment, but still I cannot speak and say the words, my tongue has become an enemy I cannot shake. The barriers rush to reassemble, colossal ocean reefs teeming with dark recesses, a veritable labyrinth to lose myself in…. running from you even as I lay happily trapped in your embrace. Never let me go. I dread the moment you roll away, even though I tell you to go. I am still reeling in the sudden absence of you…. Then you come back, your arms and chest and hips and lovely smooth skin curling into a cave for me to crawl into. We begin the falling dance of sleep. Your right hand slips under my neck, your fingers intertwine with mine. Your left arm slides over my hip, and I pull it up toward my chin so I can kiss it. I love giving you kisses…. I love it when you…. I love your kisses. All these are just ways for me to indirectly tell you I love you, the cowardly way to say it. I am a coward.

I am afraid it will not be returned, this feeling I have for you. I fear dismissal, I fear abandonment. It is silly, really, for I have only been dropped on my heart a mere handful of times, but like an emotionless scientist I take these isolated events and string them together in a senseless theory of how love works and that I equal someone to be left and disregarded squared times E to the ninth power divided by X.

Love is not a science. I don’t even know if it is possible to define love, but maybe love is when two people push each other to become better, to question our own modus operandi and reflect. Maybe love is tangled up in the uncomfortable moments that come from vulnerability. I know it is intrinsic in the way you weave through people to stand so close to me, hand on my back and brilliant, bright blue eyes snagging mine.  I see it locked in your steel trap of a mind that picks up on the smallest little details surrounding us. I feel it in your endless patience when I cannot finish a sentence or I become all foggy-headed and vacant and you are still there when the confusion lifts. Even if it doesn’t lift, you don’t try to force me back from wherever I have gone. I don’t know where I go when this happens. Those moments are lost to me, little clouds of dense storms, impenetrable.

I am building up the courage to tell you to your lovely face that I have come to love you. I hope that I am able to tell you with a steady voice and confident glow, but most likely the words will end up spilling out of me like burning lava, quick let it out before it burns my lips and I twist the words and cover them in a half-hearted attempt at humor. I am resolved to say the words to you in my head, and allow each version of you inside my mind to answer with all the variations I might expect, so that when I do finally say it aloud I will have experienced all the various answers I might receive and not be surprised by your real response.  

You are teaching me patience, even though I have to relearn the lesson countless times, and will continue to forget it and relearn it, an endless, repetitive action of rolling stones up the hill only to watch them roll down again. You are teaching me to look closer and find the reasons why I do or say certain things. You are teaching me to look at myself and try to see what it is others see, the good and the bad, not the twisted and distorted view I hold of myself. Still an endless battle. But one I am waging because to be stagnant and unchanged is to die.

On Dichotomy

As artists, our perceptions of ourselves are vitally important pieces of the puzzling creative process. Much human thought is dedicated to the slightly narcissistic subject of a self-portrait, as it should be, for without our vociferous little egos we would not be gloriously human. My own self-exploration is a never-ending contest of wills, like so many other dynamic humans who have come before, in which one of me is consumed by the mundane identity of being ordinary, and the other is a flaming riot of extreme rarity guzzling the very air in the immediate vicinity, like loosened wildfire.

            When under the influence of the ordinary half of my personality, the artistic process I employ is a sad, entry-level drone operating at a low level of disconnect, an apathetic form of autopilot. Most often, this state is encouraged by real-world deadlines, disinterest in a certain subject matter, and crippling fear of failure. I think it is prudent to read ‘failure’ as ‘mediocrity’, because I must be as honest as I can be on the subject of myself. I hate to lose. Let me clarify that I am not referring to being in competition with others of my species; I am alluding to the ongoing duel between my dual personalities. It is not a coincidence that the theme of competition with oneself is a cultural axiom; it is a foundation stone in the definition of humanity. From this point of view, I am not unique. Every human on earth has, at some point, had the same fear of failure and mediocrity, the same feeling that we are interchangeable and not as worthy as we would like to believe. This feeling captures me, hangs me up by my toes and leaves me in the maelstrom wailing ineffectually, while I chip away at a piece of art, sculpture or two-dimensional painting, a melody, a piece of myself in tangible form, hoping to uncover an aspect of my own enigmatic soul that isn’t completely superfluous. In this mode of creation, I am searching for something unnamed, and it is nearly impossible for me to genuinely like what I produce. I hardly ever find what it is I am determined to uncover in a timely manner. However, I find that this process almost always leads to my own brand of divine madness, in a meandering, aimless, unpredictable kind of way.

            I have found that I cannot have one without the other, but mediocrity must come before the spark of ingenuity, or I speculate I would not fully appreciate the moment as it should be.  There I am, in my lady cave, underneath the house and chilled by several tons of dirt surrounding the concrete block walls, burdened by the feelings of inadequacy belligerently staring out at me from a blank page or a gesso’ed canvas, when it hits me solidly in the face. In the tiny space between moments, my hands are flying on wild atmospheric thermals, numb with disconnection from my spinning, singing brain, and as I work, parts of me coalesce into a whole I can jive with. It is a firestorm of activity born from a spark of uncommon clarity in a world distilled by doubt and reticence, and soon I am standing back from the piece, be it lyrics for a song scrawled across a page or stiff paper cut and glued and warped into a meaningful shape, that pleases me. This little bit before me, this little reflection of myself is someone I can understand; she may be a bit egotistical, whimsical, forgetful, blunt, but the negatives are harmonized by the genuine, sunny, empathic positives that hold up the other end of this precariously balancing human. I am simultaneously a curving, bellowing piece of sickly green and mad violet glowing against a backdrop of whispering, placid, dull red brick, enveloped by countless others who share the space, each a paradox in their own right.

Skin

I am not feeling particularly beautiful today. The cold has stolen the moisture from my skin and replaced it with cracked, hardened desert clay. Now I am reminded of hemp oil, an oil that is supposedly goddess-sent for the healing of all dry skin, dull hair, and stumbling health of the body my soul inhabits. Must find the nearest health-nut store and pick up a bottle. I am in the process of creating dreadlocks, and it is not a lovely process. Frizzy bits of electrified hair stand out in irregular, lashing patterns all over my confused scalp. Patience. I am determined to stop using shampoo or conditioner, for there is no reason to put that out into the environment when our sweet world is galloping on shaky, broken legs toward destruction, forced on by a mosaic of humanity, a belligerent rider. Hair can take care of itself, anyway. Beauty products are a human invention, only a blip on the long history of the evolution of body hair. I spiked my coffee this morning with Kahlua, since papers due the following day do not write themselves, and a sober writer is an unimaginative one. At least, when the writer is me, that holds true.

Such a jarring juxtaposition from a moment spent cuddling with hour-old goat kids and their benevolent, forgiving mamas late last night; straw needle skewers stabbing my ridiculously sensitive skin as I sat cross-legged on the ground, goat pellets squelching into the fabric of my yoga pants.

Sensory overload: the little kid in my lap, still with his umbilical cord damp and dragging, his white pelt buttery soft and splattered with afterbirth and brown-spotted swirls of contrasting hair, mumbling in his dreams. Mama, hot, tired, and saddened as only a mother who lost two of her triplets in the same hour of their birth can be, her neck muscles slack as the weight of her head drops firmly onto my thigh, under my forearm, my fingers tangled in her thick coat, scratching, rubbing, massaging the hurt from her body as only a human can comfort a beast. I utter awkward epithets of solace into her ears, ears that were beyond hearing because nothing, save time and the benefits of a life lived in the moment, can ease an agony of loss. Your baby is beautiful, mama. You did a good job. His little hoofs are perfectly formed, he breathes with strength you gave him, he smells like earth and life itself. Good mama. Be proud, mama. Mama, or A-23, the hastily scratched pen strokes on a thick, blue plastic ear-tag denote her breeding, her birth year, and birth order of kids born that spring when she first drew her own wobbly baby legs under her and lunged into life. Her skin, under a shaggy winter parka, is flaky with dirt and dead skin cells accumulated over months of living outdoors without artificial interference. My ordered, human mind automatically reaches for a solution, years and years of social conditioning scream at me to grab a brush and a bucket of soapy water and significantly change her skin's chemical make-up temporarily to ease my own feelings of inadequate beauty. But she is already perfect, already lovely and full of beauty, still wet and wild from the chaotic birth, in itself an incredible, improbable occurrence of creation.

We are so lovely, we shutter our eyes from it in order to save ourselves from a blinding beauty. I would rather be rendered blind and fully enlightened than be closeted in a matchstick house of denial. Allow myself to feel beauty, to be changed and influenced by it, to just be.

Introspective

Occasionally, before I even have time to react, I feel my mind suddenly encased in ice. My physical shell hardens to monolithic levels, and within, a hurricane of emotions and thoughts becomes trapped. The supply of oxygen fades, dies. I am frozen. I find myself in constant, harried search for truffles, little timid hiding things snuggled warm and invisible under layers of fall leaves. How long will one satisfy the person opposite, this little gem of organic matter, this temptress of porcine hedonism?  It is like trying to find the words when they are expected of you, when words are considered more meaningful than the emotions and actions behind them. I am running out of words. They are getting lost in the bottleneck of my exhausted throat, there is dreaded disconnect between my thoughts and the audiovox sonance sound of consonants that trickle out of me in lurid, impotent waves. Sound. I love to revel in the simple beauty of fingers thrumming softly against a mounded, rounded collarbone. The shape of yours are fascinating, the sound that echoes out into the air surrounding us in warm folds and then words are no longer something that I can meaningfully string together in a way that you will understand. This misfire is tragic. What do my eyes say that my mouth can say better? I wish to observe, collect information, all the  little bonbons of data that make up your being, myriad as to be infinite in their abundance. Speak to me, and I will absorb it all like an anhydrous sea sponge.

 I feel much. Too much. It seems a fitting parallel between my mind and body that I am afflicted with extremely sensitive skin; the mere brush of even the softest fabric is the rough kiss of a katana slicing the upper layer off in painful strokes.  Sometimes this goes on for hours, reaching a point where even air is my enemy as it moves viciously over my body. I cannot scream. For how could I explain the madness that consumes me in this state? The physical manifestations of pain are obvious; dilated pupils, quickened breath, slight full body tremors almost undetectable by the eye unfettered by human invention. It will subside. Soon.

Movement startles me. Fight or flight, and suddenly soaring on a maelstrom of atmospheric pressure. All you do is appear there in my line of vision without warning of sound or aura, and my mind transcends time as it thrusts back eons and ages to the first forays onto dry land and the black void of desolate, antagonizing landscape. I am rendered in pieces, condensed, just an energetic sphere of humanizing Id. All this in a matter of fractured seconds. 

I am only human, and like all humans beautiful in my imperfections. We need not apply labels to all these imperfections; we seek to define that which we do not understand,  but I feel it is better to accept that we will not understand everything. To define something is to put it in a constrictive, squashed box, to limit it, delineate it, bar it from ever evolving into something that will surprise you, scare the shit out of you, change you. Change. A frightening, dark thing for humans. We get so comfortable in our nests, bordered by reticence and ambivalence, thorns and scraping igneous rocks. I am guilty of this fear, as well. Still, I shed it like snakeskin sloughing away, revel in the freedom of release, and then as a moth tangled in spider silk I am caught in the cycle as it slowly, imperceptibly grows back again. We are ecstatically human.