| He is coming together like a mosaic before her eyes, pieces fitting into place, light filtering in, color igniting against color. She can see his face moving backward in time. Here he is in Berkeley. Two weeks ago he was working at Whole Foods in La Jolla, slamming a Kombucha a day. A year ago he was in rehab in Baton Rouge. I had to get away, he said, so I got in the car and started driving, and that’s where I ended up.
As a boy he prays every night. Dear God, let me be straight. His parents try to make him normal with baseball, soccer, after-school programs. All he wants to do is sit home and play video games. At thirteen he tries drugs, drug after drug after drug. The rest is a blur. His father the surgeon gives him Aderall, which he stockpiles for occasional speed binges, until he comes to his father crying and shaking, Please take these away from me, they are making me crazy. At seventeen he gets sent to rehab, plots his escape for weeks, kicks a door down in the middle of the night and runs like hell, a hundred-pound bag on his back. He runs and runs, through downtown Los Angeles with only a bus pass and a five-dollar gift certificate to Starbucks. He takes a bus to Santa Monica, sleeps on the beach for two nights, gets chased by police for vagrancy. He calls Nick and Ben to pick him up, stays on a friend’s couch for months, starts going to raves. In one night he does seven hits of acid, three hits of E, a line of Ketamine, two lines of meth, bowl after bowl of weed, and pounds beers in the morning to come down. Every once in a while it shows on his face, all of the self-abuse, the strife, the seven days without sleep. He looks, by turns, like a twelve-year-old kid and a sixty-year-old man. He asks Nick, Why do you think none of us were interested in girls, like normal guys? All five of them hellions, philosophers, aliens. Living always on the edge of abnormal reality. Even now Josh has no girlfriends. I think there was sexual tension between all of us, Nick says, and we didn’t want to accept it. But why am I the only one who turned out gay then?
She watches him talk, tries to imagine what he thinks about before he falls asleep. She can tell something happened to him, long ago, something he doesn’t want to surface. He will talk about other things—the time a jock beat the shit out of him outside a party, the older man who cornered him in a bathroom and masturbated himself. She thinks how often these things must happen, how unrecorded these incidents are, this underground world of predator and prey, the last and ultimate taboo straitjacketing you into silence. She imagines having to always be on guard, always conscious of how you speak and stand and gesture.
He wants to be a science teacher. He wants to meet a nice blond boy who wants more than sex. He wants to have a child. She wants to unwrinkle all the lines of his face, smooth them out like new sheets smelling of spring. She wants to tell him he is safe, that she’s seen the future and it’s not murder.
She can hear him in the next room. His lips are soft as a child’s. His breath is labored. | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment   |
| I have a secret. Come close. Closer.
I have grown up.
I used to be so reckless, so voracious, so willing to offer myself up like a platter of petit fours, everything anyone wanted, plucked like a plum from a low branch. I was always special, I was always selective, but I bristle now at the thought of rushed familiarity, feigned intimacy - physical or emotional. People are such unusual creatures, and communication can be clumsy, error-prone, one step forward two steps back. I feel so calm and removed, more like a catalyst for action than a player in the scene. It is perhaps what writing feels like for me. I am not so charged as I once was, because I am not hungry. I don't look for salvation. I don't realize how safe and cozy and natural my program is until I have a guest star. It is then I marvel at how immutably, how illimitably I am connected to Nick, how easy it is to exist, how foreign life feels without him. It is sometimes a frightening feeling. To realize how not alone you are is to realize how alone you would be otherwise. That fear has little place in my life, but it is real.
This was hastily thrown together, but these thoughts are still half-formed and there is a light pressing at my eyelids that wants to get in. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I've got bags under my eyes, a pile of unfinished reading, and a pot hangover.
Why does talking to you till 3:30 in the morning have to feel so...yummy? | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| The man in the passenger seat rests his hand out the window and I see fingernails caked with dirt and grime, palms and knuckles permanently stained gray, and all I can think is that some woman somewhere has had those grubby fingers inside of her and that sweaty body smelling of grease and cigarettes on top of her and I can’t eat for the rest of the day.
I wonder about these women. They are not woman I know, but I know I see them. The men they kiss have bushy mustaches and jaundiced teeth, alcohol-tainted morning breath, hangnails and knife scars. They are men who need dominion, who say aqui solo mis chicharrones truenan—“here only my pork rinds crunch”—and fantasize about virgin blood.
I am growing more frightened with age. I see lines around my eyes and squint babyface smiles into the mirror to see the future. I feel a writhing hatred for men, it snakes bitter blood through my veins and sends me fantasies of weapons and penetration. I am not those women but somehow it has all happened to me. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| Tonight I am alone. I am eating Trader Joe's cookies and drinking chai with REAL MILK, which tastes like creeeeeeeaaaammm. And gearing up to write my paper. Right? Right.
Last night I feared Katie might actually be a little crazy. She is completely inept at reading social cues. It's very interesting to watch, but wildly uncomfortable. She came into my room, I was in my underwear and Nick & I were about to get cozy and go to bed, and at first it was all fun and good, we were goofing off and she was a little drunk and high on Red Bull, and she was talking about her sexuality and her background - how from the age of 13 she was starved for male attention, yet didn't know what to do with it when she got it. How older men were always sexually attracted to her and how it simultaneously thrilled her and freaked her out. I love witnessing people's self-exploration and reflection and introspection, it is so fascinating and important to me. But. Then she segued into talking philosophy with Nick and sometimes I can't tell whether she is either really really abnormally smart or really really full of shit. I mean, she's definitely smart, that's undeniable. She's smart to the extent that I believe it's made her life harder in many, many ways - especially as a woman. So she's adopted, thanks to her jerkoff dad and aggressively competitive brothers, this very didactic way of speaking that really makes people uncomfortable. I see it all the time. She makes these assertions and talks down to you like she's your teacher, but not just your teacher, more like a teacher slash boss who is imparting critical information to you and if you disagree you're *fucked. Cuz then you just start spiraling, sucked into an argument you never wished to be part of in the first place, and suddenly you're debating an issue you don't even really care about and she's on a roll so that you can't get in a word edgewise anyhow and then...Well, in this case Nick brought up a philosopher she didn't know, so you know what she did? Her face sort of fell and she said, "Oh, I don't know anything about him..." And you could see her mind frantically working. So she changed the subject. You know what she changed it to? Some kind of triangle theory about Asia, Africa and Europe that she learned in physical anthropology that truly had nothing to do with what Nick was saying or what either of them had been conversing about, and Nick kept asking her "How does this relate?" and she'd just define the term again and he'd say, "No, but how does it relate to what we were talking about?" and she pulled something out of her ass to save herself, but really I think she actually has this inventory of knowledge that she pulls from whenever she's in a position where she'd have to actually *learn from another person instead of *teaching them. This makes me sound malicious and I really don't feel that way. I feel so much pure love for Katie - especially when I catch glimpses of her at 13, or 16, this tall over-analytical girl with an insatiable hunger for art and stimulation and knowledge and full of crippling insecurities, and I just want to stroke her head until she calms down. Because she sees herself, she is unforgiving of herself and her faults, and yet she can't pick up on basic cues like me in bed with the covers over my head and Nick reading the computer screen with his back to her after she's been talking for infinity and I've told her we need to go to bed and she just keeps on. Hopefully one of these days I can talk to her about this in a really open and nonthreatening way, because I don't want to hurt her or make her more insecure. But wow.
People are terribly complex and interesting. It's a wonder any of us can communicate efficiently with one another, given the probability of misunderstanding and miscommunication, etc. I see it with Nick sometimes, how frustrated he gets not having the vocabulary and articulation to express what he's thinking and feeling and all of the massive information he's accumulated from reading so many damn books. He became a scholar relatively late in life and now his communication skills need to catch up with his intellect. He's pretty impressive, though, I must say. I notice I get nervous for him whenever he's 'debating' with someone, but then he says something so interesting and smart and I realize I need to have more faith in him and not take for granted how intelligent he really is. Especially since he refuses to follow his professors' directions for ANY paper they assign and my instinct is to tell him to listen to his profs because they're smarter than him, but I need to trust his judgment and support the academic goals he's established for himself.
Now that I've consumed my allotted amount of procrastination time, I suppose I should start working. Wish you were here.
*k | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| | It is my best friend Shannon who makes me feel serene and new as an infant, her hair always smelling like spring and her smile stronger than the Trojans... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I get nauseous when I read on the bus. I start lots of poems in my head that turn contrived and nothing gets written. Last night we drank hot cocoa and Kahlua and I told him about the terror I feel looking into the eyes of the Depraved. (By what other name do we call it?) One night there was a man with a beard and an overcoat, very late on the sidewalk standing over a trash can pummeling himself with his fists and shouting soundlessly at the night. We rolled up our windows and couldn't take our eyes off of him. We didn't speak. Just last night he brought it up and the image seared itself into my brain again, indelible, and my body broke out in goosebumps. Sometimes I fear I am emotionally defective, he told me. He looked straight into my eyes and I willed myself to stay awake, to tether my mind to his and not wander. He said, All I can think about is one day changing the world and every moment is spent educating myself to do that, and when it's not I feel I am wasting time, losing it like fistfuls of hair, irreplaceable, and I must work a thousand times harder, read a thousand more books, stay awake a thousand more hours to make up for it. I can tell when this happens, even a few extra minutes of Katie talking and his open book waiting, pen poised, his foot starts bobbing up and down, ants in his pants, eyes on the clock, heart thudding. For two years he was obsessed with Enlightenment and then something was revealed to him and now he is obsessed with Knowledge - Philosophy, specifically - and this will be a two-year phase as well until the next step is commanded. I don't know if he will ever relax. His ribs are sharp, his hair has poofed into mad scientist caricature, and there is always a spattering of stubble across his well-defined jaw and a lingering hint of coffee on his breath. I'm sorry, he says. I worry you will find someone else, he says. I worry that I am not - cannot? - fulfill your needs. I think he is perfect in too many ways to count. The intellect is what remains at the end but my sex is subdued, the wetfirefleshsimmerscream is sporadic and I mourn its absence like a too-hot summer. It is what the madness brought me, an insatiability that has since died away, and it is the price I paid. I made a choice, I tell him. I was nine years old and I knew that genius equals madness and I made the choice to be happy, to be healthy, to not sacrifice joy for art. I still have art, I still have sorrow, but I will not end up with rocks in my pockets or a barrel in my mouth. It was a choice and I made it and sometimes, strangely, I regret it. I watch the horizon religiously, searching for a wave that will carry me higher, further, longer, deeper, and until then I wait quiet as a cup. This is my supplication. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm up looking at pictures of Jean Seberg and listening to Tori Amos sing Happy Phantom and feeling stoned and sanguine as a cat.
Come pet the pussy, would ya? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I feel like such an ass. I just caught up with your entries and...I don't know, I have lost my ability to form words. There is so much in my head and in my heart and mostly I am trying to figure out that formless basin of nebuli that resides in my subconscious and colors so many of my emotions and actions. I am feeling strange a lot of the time. Even breathing feels strange, foreign. Something is going on sexually. I am not getting turned on by him at all. It is too personal to even talk about here, I can't get my head around it. I am confused, I am restless, I am anxious. I don't know why I acted the way I did on the phone, it is always weird on the phone. And I have my own thing, this thing in my head that I can't figure out, this thing in my solar plexus, in my vagina, in my fingertips, in my cerebrum cortex that is plaguing me, and I wondered why you didn't ask me more about me, but then, I don't know, maybe I was just being finicky and -
Yeah. Things are good, they are in order, they are fascinating and sufficient. I need to meet more people, I need to stop fantasizing about everyone I know (or do I?) and I told him let's not see each other for a week or so, let the desire build, get my emotions a little more straight [heh], and it's okay. It is good. It is good the way it is when you realize you are completely alone in the world and instead of rushing out to find company in your aloneness in a mad panic you just sit back and swim through it, let your heart sink into it, feel the aloneness all over your skin and in your mouth and filling up your organs. It is good this way, and it is strange. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Dear You,
The other day I saw a girl in a magazine who had your mouth. I looked for the page number so that I could tell you where to find it but the damn thing didn't have page numbers. I think it was the ginormous Vogue. She had dark hair and Snow White skin like you.
I want to tell you how I haven't been able to get quite as turned on as I did with you, how lying in bed next to you with just our elbows touching was so maddeningly, achingly torturous, so exquisitely torturous...I remember marvelling at how ridiculously wet I was without even a kiss. Has that happened since? God no.
And then there are your fingers! Lord have mercy! Who has such soft, nimble fingers? But this is not flattery. No. You are too prone to flattery. You expect it, non? I don't want to speak to your vanity, I want to speak to your essence, and oh what things I could say and do to your essence!
I am listening to a beautiful soprano sing scales across the way. I am still thinking of your lips. But it's time to go. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Last night I met the girl I'm going to marry.
I wanted to hold onto her, keep some tiny souvenir of her presence, somehow ensure that we'll be intertwined..."Let's be friends," I said as she was getting out of the car. "Like, do stuff together, stuff that friends do." It was dark but I saw a wide beautiful grin that silkscreened itself onto my mind. "It's been a long time since I had one of those," she said.
In bed I curled into him and tried not to talk about her. I wanted to hold her in like a secret, like a precious seed. How could I ever be something special to her, something indispensable...? And yet I think I can. I can Will it into existence. I can Will all kinds of things. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| So I just got really high and masturbated to pictures of Laetitia Casta and stories of being seduced by a roommate.
I fear I'm in trouble.
Halfway through I called Boyfriend into the room, seeing as how it's good to incorporate your significant other into lovemaking and all. And it was good except for the occasional cringing and wishing I had opted for a private session instead. Afterward I sat in the shower for a while. I want to procreate, therefore I am heterosexual. I always thought my mild obsessions with certain girls were merely envy or fascination - not a form of desire or lust. Sure, I fantasized about girls from an extremely early age, but I never acted on it - much. And after acknowledging my bisexuality I still never had a full-fledged relationship with a girl - it just never felt balanced or complete.
But maybe I just never met the right girl? Or maybe I am more fulfilled emotionally by a man but sexually by a woman? Yeah, threesomes are nice and all...but there is a certain bond you share with a woman, an "evolved" woman, a bond of understanding that so transcends relationships to men that sharing a female with another man feels almost like a betrayal, a farce. Like trying to show a man This is What Female Sex Looks Like: except not, because real Female Sex is private, intimate, unwitnessed except by soft lips and silky hands and breathy whispers; not by greedy eyes and groping fingers and an insistent throbbing penis.
Perhaps it is just a temporary disconnection. Yes, I believe that's it. The sexual link between Girl and Boyfriend is temporarily out of service; staticky, at best. Please try your intercourse again later. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
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doilikegirls's journal
