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.

Percussive Abuse

I want to rip into your skin, set fire to your lungs.
I want to tear your heart to shreds, like you've done mine.

New song, folks. Deeper, darker, drearier than the usually peppy me. Hope you enjoy it.

I like don't like want to change to remain the same.

I am charming,

let me sing you to sleep with a soft, sweet, floating vox
I will paint the day away until no color remains in the sky
My daily yin and yang is a half-eaten New York style cheesecake on a black plate
all in our bellies adding more and more and more as we laugh and laugh and laugh...

I am not charming,

I play emotional chicken with myself, daring daring to rush headlong into mistakes
ending up scattered in pieces of insanity along the axons
I read between lines until they blur inexplicably
I toss the mess into a burning fire which resonates, originates from within.

Encircle Me While I Float Across the Sky

I want to meet (a) musicians who I can meld with seamlessly. I want their musical sonance and virulent cloudbursts of audial technicolor to wrap around my simple melodic strains like an enfolding embrace. It would look like this:

Except maybe not quite so amateurish. 

Tunnelvision

Strange decision...

 I often play around with covers, and taking this song from psychedelic trance-y sonata to unfinished backyard serenade was interesting. Instruments used: banjo, guitar, viola.

Here We Go Magic

Worship at their feet, they have more talent in their little split ends than most people do in their entire bodies.

Only Pieces, live show... beauty incarnate.

It's Casual... not heart-breaking.

Kina Beana

I love her. She is so pristine, so clear, so lovely, so honest, so talented. Listen, she will change your life. Or at least change your radio station. Which, as we all know, is a life-style change. So I was right to begin with.

http://www.kinagrannis.com/home/

love note

I want to be with you, brush up against you occasionally while making dinner together, laugh belly laughs with you about something inane... I want to fight with you, I want to have make-up sex with you... I want to wake up in the morning and have you there next to me, breathing deeply and exuding warmth like a sleeping volcano. I want to be there for you when you feel like things are shitty, I want to be your safety net, your shoulder, your comfort, your home... whenever you need arms to wrap around you I want to be the person those arms are attached to. I want to make life happen with you... I want to see your face every day for the rest of our lives, see the age lines draw themselves on the skin-canvas like Japanese water color... I even want to make more of you, another you, another me, just combined into someone more lovely than the sum of their parts... we could make life great. You make me happy. I want to make you happy, too.

Land of Goshen

Holy crackers!!! It has been a long time since I posted last...

Waves

She is a stunningly attractive woman, tall, blond, built like an Amazon. She gives off a surfer chick hippie vibe, her hair bleached white in places from spending so much time in the coastal Australian sun. She has her principles. She disdains major corporations, rails against corrupt politicians, stomps for the underdog. She is vulnerable.

She lounges confidently in the rolling waves, legs astride, hands resting lightly on the buoyant, brightly painted fiberglass short board. She waits for the perfect wave, that elusive curl of ocean water that will take her all the way in on an emotionally charged adrenaline high. Not that she isn't on one now. Her easy posture belies her true cognition, churning, blazing pathways through her mind, round and round, a tilt-a-whirl of thought. Her heart has made a choice her head cannot agree with; reconciling these two vital parts of her will take all she has of time and emotional energy. She is already prune-y from the saltwater. A few more hours in the sun, wind, water will not strip too many more layers of her darkened skin; she won't miss them anyway. Her body is strong, inviolate, impenetrable... she takes pride in her strength and physical ability. It is her psycho-senses that tend toward defenselessness. She waits.

She forgot something. She cannot quite define it, but she knows where it is without doubt. Spain. Adventurous, she is, and a back-packing trip through Spain sounded perfect for her at the time. Before it happened. She shies away from that avenue of reflection, but like rising tides, it follows her in, creeping up slowly, deliberately, an inevitable, sluggish drowning. There are no rocks to shelter upon to escape the briny ocean water... her memory is vivid.

-

The port city of Malaga wasn't one of her planned stops on her trip, as it was too small and out-of-the-way, off her route to Sevilla, but an ancient, feeble man driving his old farm truck brimming with oranges along the highway had stopped to give her a lift into the nearest town. She was glad she had spontaneously hopped atop the fruits into the rear of the truck, or she would have missed it all. The town was lively, homey yet welcoming. She spent most of the morning wandering the wharf, listening to the docks creaking complainingly, the ships nudging against their moorings, impish colts testing the ropes for weakness, ready to escape out into the bay and on into the Mediterranean. Everything hopes for freedom and release. She was no different... she discovered the public beaches east of the wharf, struggled through the deep sand, and collapsed tiredly, arms and legs akimbo, her backpack a makeshift pillow. She could have been alone, all the beach bums were enjoying the warm surf and the company of others, but she wasn't. He had been swimming, it was obvious. In that familiar way Europeans have, he plopped down next to her, leaning on his hands in the sand, already discoursing in fluently speedy Spanish. Sand particles clung to his deep mahogany skin, intricately spiraling patterns radiating from each part of him touching the earth. She couldn't keep up. Uncharacteristically, she allowed herself to just listen to the rise and fall of his intonations, the rhythm of his speech luring her into somnolence. Suddenly his galloping speech slowed deliberately, three words she was able to make out clearly.

¿Te gusta paella?

Yeah, she liked paella. She had first tried the seafood, vegetable, and rice mix in Valencia, the city credited with the inspiration of the dish. The locals sure were friendly here.

He launched his body fluidly up from the sand dune, turned slightly to keep her in his gaze, and offered her a sable, sun-darkened hand to steady herself with. She looked at his face, noting the heavily forested brows, the aquiline nose, leonine wavy mane cascading over his forehead. His eyes were the color of the Mediterranean, lusciously dark blue and streaked through with indigo lightning bolts. Beautiful man. The other locals literally paled in comparison. She allowed him to lift her to her feet, and followed him off down the beach, across the boardwalk, into the chaotic bustle of the lower markets, and along a side path to his driftwood and thatched-roof hut.

He made a stellar paella. And he was quite amorous in bed.

-

She lets the memory take hold of her, storming the bastions of her defense. Her light short board bobs impatiently in the waves underneath her, but she ignores its bucking and twisting, instead finally breaking under the emotional torrent. Her defiant amber eyes blur, the tears that have waited so long to shed themselves finally making an inconvenient appearance. It's just water, she thinks. Just water... with salt. Like the ocean. Salty sea water.

It hurts less and less. The memory is vivid, the colors unlike any in the world save for human imagination, but it is softer, somehow.

She lifts her eyes to meet those of the man sitting beside her, mirroring her position on his own short board, his viking-blond hair and beginnings of a surprisingly reddish beard standing in stark contrast from the memory now fading in her mind. His sweet, boyish face searches hers intently; he wonders why her eyes suddenly filled with tears, why she hadn't taken the perfect wave that is now passing them by. She smiles tremblingly, cautiously, frightened that she might have revealed something in her face as she relived the reminiscence. His honest, brightly genuine grin explodes across his face, and she knows her walls are up again, stronger than before. A beautiful man, he is. Her heart is large enough to hold two loves, and she is glad for the life she has. Another wave approaches behind them, they simultaneously shoot each other wild, anticipatory looks, and take off after the swell. Here and now, she rides the perfect wave. Life, the perfect wave.

Storm Above the Wind Caves

I make pictures in Paint (the Windows picture editing program) and I recently became incredibly inspired to create another picture, because of this photo.

This is my interpretation of it:

Storm Clouds Gather

(This wasn't supposed to turn out the way it did, but thanks to reading an essay by a friend of mine who is a pretty good writer, it kind of went in a surprising direction. I blame you, and you know who you are!)




She lifts the long, thin, blackened mascara wand to her eyelashes, carefully, slowly. She hasn't worn makeup since... well, it has been a while. At least she is wearing the black, ruched blouse that makes her feel like she could pass for attractive. Shaved legs are nice. Too bad they are peeling from a vicious sunburn she earned by forgetting sunblock and spending an entire day in the early June sunshine. She sighs, letting the breath out in long, quiet jets. Too late now. Turning in the mirror for a look at her profile, she rests her left hand on her hip, sticks her elbow out behind her, and poses. Oy. Well, she isn't a supermodel, but she could stop you in your tracks for a second look.

Nerves. Are. Debilitating. They turn her into a hyped-up version of herself. Slightly too high-strung, a little bit jumpy, a tad too uber-cognitive. Just feel it. Deep breaths through the nose... and exhale. Again. Her toes grip at the bathroom rug under her small feet. She has always had the ability to grasp with her toes, almost like they are fingers, and their grip is strong. Each individual fiber in the rug she can feel... such sensitive skin. She forgot to put aloe on her burns today. No wonder they are peeling more than yesterday. Absently, she scratches at the sunburn, too late remembering why she shouldn't. A simmering fire starts in her calf, where she has touched, and runs the length of her lower leg. Damn. She is forgetful by nature.

With a last look at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she smiles ironically and steps out of the tiny space, slips on her flip flops, heads out the door with her CamelBak under one arm and a sweatshirt under the other. This will be the most interesting date she has ever had. Dinner, and a hike. She loves the idea. Before, dates have always been just a movie, or dinner, or something equally as boring, but she doesn't want to do anything boring anymore. The hike was her suggestion. Perfect.

He stands quietly beside his car, shining and silent. She strolls up to him, and awkwardly whispers the first thought in her head. I'm nervous. That shouldn't have been it, though. She clamps down hard on her tongue, and wishes for a time machine. Get it together. He glances sideways at her, smiles so very faintly, says nothing. He'll forget it in a minute, she will agonize over it the whole car ride to the restaurant. As he turns to open the door for her, she is shattered by the sudden glint of sun rays bouncing off his golden-tanned arms, and the brilliantly bleached, downy-soft hair covering them. Her breath is sucked out of her in a swift vortex... Get. It. Together. She shivers a little in the suffocating afternoon heat. It has been a while.

In his old, distressed sub-compact, the quiet seeps into the cracks in the dashboard and the threads of the carpet... even the a.c. seems subdued, spluttering softly as if to not interrupt the silence. She keeps a running commentary in her head, making lists and counting blocks to calm herself. She steals a glance in his direction. His smile still lingers faintly on his lips, but his nervousness is belied by the faint, repetitive brushing of his knee against the steering wheel. The windows begin to roll slowly down the door, curtains falling on Act One, and the wind picks and prattles at her hair, gently pulling curling tendrils out from behind her ears; they cavort on the breeze like giddy fillies in an emerald green mountain meadow. She lets the vision dissipate. A familiar mantra rolls through her head... "Sun is warm, grass is green." Of course, she stole that well-known line from a blockbuster picture, but it works for most situations.

At the restaurant, they sit opposite each other in an over-sized, over-stuffed, overly red booth with a blowsy, bold Formica table sturdily planted in between. She gets her first look at his eyes. Blue. So blue, and intensely staring at her from deep-set sockets, over-hung by full eyebrows. His stare is measuring. She fiddles with the pockets on her dark brown shorts, crosses her legs, recrosses them, as they talk. Then something changes in his eyes, his expression going from wary to soft in an instant. She relaxes against the crimson Vinyl seat back, and slips into herself again.

The drive through the canyon is again as silent as the first, but then, there is the scenery to distract them. The steep canyon walls soar two thousand feet above the river bottom, ending abruptly in a triumphant display of fierce, craggy rock, piercing the dark azure sky. It is only an hour until twilight, but neither he nor she is unsettled. Night hikes are pleasant. It is quieter at night.

They step out of the car, adjusting and fitting their small day-pack or CamelBak to each respective shoulder alignment, and set off through the waist-high grass and wildflowers growing beside the trail. It is an incredibly steep single-track, with a rating of 'Difficult', not made for easy, side-by-side travel; she contents herself with watching his calves flex with each stride. Man, he is so fast. Quickly, her breathing becomes strained and shallow, but still she presses on. The icy mountain stream they wade through to continue following the path refreshes her somewhat; she is renewed, but not for long.

"Stop. Your pace is killing me."

He halts instantly, but takes his time turning around to face her. His expression is unreadable. She turns around to stare off downhill, and pulls at her CamelBak tube, sucking water in forceful gulps. Too fast, now she cannot breathe for all the water in her mouth... slowly her breathing returns to normal, and he smiles, tentatively. Without words, they both turn back up the trail, this time proceeding markedly slower than the mad rush that characterized the first half of the climb. Again she is captivated by his calves as they swing effortlessly in a steady forward motion. It has been a really long time. She shakes her head to clear the illicit vision forming in her mind. So this is what attraction feels like. Who knew.

After an elevation change of about a thousand feet, they emerge from the scrub and sparse vegetation to plunge into true darkness. Cave. A metal plaque set into a low-lying boulder at the mouth of the grotto marks the entrance, and relates anecdotes on the history of the surrounding area. Soot marks blacken the ceiling and walls, long-dead fires that burned bright for the unknown peoples who started them.

He hardly speaks, she thinks. I don't think I have heard him utter anything more than three words strung together in hours. It is such a break from the babble-fest that dominates most human inter-relations.

They wander through the grotto, their footsteps causing gusts of air and sound to resound against the uneven rock walls. At the back of the cavern is a semi-vertical shaft, dusky sunlight streaming weakly from the top of the natural chimney, half-hidden from her light-blinded eyes. He spots it first.

Do you want to climb up there, he asks. He casts his intense sky blue eyes to meet with her dark chocolate brown ones, and waits for her reply. She ponders.

I am such a klutz, it might not be a good idea, she states lamely. He just continues to stare at her in that unnerving, but strangely reassuring way. She decides to be slightly reckless. Ok, let's climb it.

The climb up the confining shaft is surprisingly un-eventful; the view from the top is disquieting. She feels like she is standing on a topless tower, a spire so high that the clouds tickle at her cheeks and welcome her into their secret sky. They stand near the edge, daring the wind to get aggressive with its caresses and force them to bend under its turbulent will. A storm is gathering, hovering over the south end of the canyon walls and turning the sky a forbidding blue... the clouds, simpering ladies' maids, try on different colors, colors cast off by the fiery setting sun, a wealthy woman's forgotten clothing littering the floor. Neon pink, angry purple, blood red... the sky is crying, bleeding, rending and tearing the atmosphere apart. Murderous shapes appear in the nimbus; a terrorizing many-headed hydra, a burning dragon of thunderheads in turmoil.

She takes out her small, silver digital camera and shoots off several photos... but each picture cannot come close to portraying the perfectly vivid shades of furious colors in the sky. He leans in to observe her futile photographic efforts, she doesn't move; heads close enough for individual strands of their hair to mingle faintly in the electrifying stratosphere. Their movements are slow, deliberate, in sheer contrast to the roiling, unpredictable air around them.

She cannot handle it anymore, cannot stand the charged tension shooting off sparks between them. She jerks her head up and meets his eyes, her gaze stabbing into his without apology or reserve. He stares back... an astonishingly temperate expression in his eyes. He is smiling. It sets her back on her heels, and she loses her equilibrium for a moment. Recovers. Plunges in toward him and like ravenous lions they crash into each other, their bodies melding like hot-forged steel, his lips burning tendrils of fire along her jawline. The tumultuous storm boils over the mountain top.

In the works...

I have a few more things in the works... it seems I am doubly inspired now-a-days for some reason. I love to write. I might get a post up within the next few hours... maybe. Definitely by tomorrow evening. I love writing short, semi-fiction stories. I have a tendency to stretch my imagination as if it were silly puddy, and I might start a story off pretty well non-fictionalized, but it grows and changes like its own living, breathing being, and some turn out un-recognizable from the start. I also enjoy taking pieces and bits from others' stories and warping them to fit with a vision in my head. Give me your strange, silly, interesting, odd stories and let me weave strands of vibrant colors and melodies into their strong, solid cloth. I am always looking for material.

Love it.

Live it.

Be it.

The Sun God

(I wrote this a few years back. I edited it a little bit, and posted it here... it doesn't really reflect my writing style anymore, but I thought it would be interesting to compare how I wrote a few years ago to how I write now.)

She crouches low to the ground, balancing on the balls of her feet, rocking her weight from foot to foot. The halter and lead line drape from her right shoulder, lazily mirroring the swaying motion of her body. Her eyes are soft, taking in every object in her peripheral vision. Mostly though, her focus is on a leggy, slender yearling colt in incandescent gray. The animal ambles cautiously toward the fence, halving the space between them, now only ten yards away.

She leans over to the right, shifting her feet wider apart to regain lost balance. The colt balks, spins off to the left side, then angles his head askance to study the slight figure hunkered down on the other side of the barrier. She smiles, the corners of her mouth lifting ever so gently, drawing her cheeks towards her temples in a look that tells the colt he might need to rethink his own agenda. Confused, and only a little uneasy, he switches his tail quickly over each flank, startling an imaginary horse fly into sporadic flight. His ears swivel rapidly to catch each little disturbance on the afternoon breeze.

“Suspense is a killer, is it not?"

Taken aback by the sudden jolt of human speech, the colt jigs up, then rounds and takes off toward the other end of the enclosure, bucking and bending madly in a futile effort to dislodge the offensive words from his delicate ears.

She attempts to soothe him, speaking in quiet tones as he circles the paddock, down shifting each lap until he stands quivering, his tail clamped firmly between his legs. The refined, classically dished Arabian face stabs straight up into the sky, its over sized nostrils extending and retracting with every measured breath. His eyes, two black pools set far apart on each side of his forehead, are dead-set on the girl, who is now standing a few paces away from him.

She approaches calmly but deliberately, holding her hand out in front of her, palm up. She stops moving when her fingers can just barely brush the velvety nose of the horse in front of her. Gently, she caresses the space between his eyes, which are fixed on her with uncertain defiance. He stands stock still, grudgingly allowing the contact between them, trembling with the effort.

Again, she speaks.

“…Hush, be calm… you’re OK, you’re fine,” she murmurs soothingly, becoming serene again herself.

She begins walking slowly over to the gate, letting her hand rest on the colt’s flank as he shyly walks beside her, the fence long forgotten as any kind of physical barrier between them. As she opens the gate, letting the chain fall against the wooden post, he turns toward her and allows her to slip the halter over his nose, buckling the strap behind his ears.

All hell breaks loose.

Suddenly, he realizes his mistake. He rears, bucks, and rips the lead line from her slack grasp and rockets along the fence line, swinging around behind the barn. She looks down at her hand, feeling the burning sensation spread like fire up her arm. The bases of her three middle fingers are severely blistered, bubbling up red and swollen.

“Damn it,” she swears under her breath, then sheepishly, she jogs off after him.

She watches him disappear behind the other side of the barn, then checks her speed, switches directions, heads back the way she came. Rounding the corner of the barn, she stops and gazes at the colt, backed up against the paddock fence, sandwiched between the white cinder block wall and a scraggly dead tree. The expression on his face causes her to release a short barking laugh. He snorts in reply, a look of utter indignation in his flashing eyes. The rope from his halter is caught in the lower branches of the tree. He resigns to the fact that he is trapped; he allows her to grab up the lead rope. This time, she takes a firm hold of the lead, and watches him intently.

“Carmen? Are you going to need help loading that beast?”

She looks over at the small blue two-horse trailer parked several yards away, then shifts her glance to include the three people standing under the eaves of the barn. Her mother, a look of uncertainty and curiosity showing plainly on her dark oval face, shoots a fleeting peek at the colt.

"I think I can manage. Just be ready in case he flips out again."

She pulls lightly on the rope, causing the colt to lift his forelegs up in a mock rear. Jerking down on the rope, she convinces him to keep all four feet on the frozen ground, but the air of quiet rage still lingers on his expressive face. She returns the look, challenging him, holding his gaze, together locked in each other’s eyes. Impasse.

Loading him onto the trailer isn't as easy. Her patience is tested harshly, and with each attempt at getting the colt to comply with her wishes, her patience slowly wears away until her nerves are on knife’s edge, teetering dangerously over her mental precipice. These emotions overflow onto the horse, causing him to project them tenfold. Finally, exhausted and exasperated, she gives up trying to be patient, and gives the colt a resounding whack on his rump with a braided rope.

Immediately the young horse leaps forward, letting the slack in his lead line, which is wrapped around the main pole at the front of the trailer, drop almost to the straw covered flooring. The man standing next to the pole holding the end of the rope quickly pulls up the slack, causing the shocked colt to be hustled into the gloomy womb of the rusty blue box. The ramp snaps up behind him, the swinging top-flaps shut tight against his indignation.

Unloading the beast takes less effort than before, and he learns quickly the limits of the rope binding him to the girl. He stands tall and majestic in the paddock next to the new barn, angling his head to each side, taking in the new vistas and the myriad of scents. Luring him into the stall opening directly onto the paddock, she closes the half door and un-halters him. She settles gingerly on a cement block in the corner of the stall and watches him sniff around his new dwelling.

He stops his inspection of the space and turns to look at her. Lowering his head, he comes eye to eye with the girl. She reaches out and rests her hand on his nose. He does not flinch. She begins stroking his muzzle tenderly. He nuzzles her cheek, breathing in her distinctly human scent. She kisses the small pale star on his forehead, and leans her face against his. Stillness.