Merchants in Venice
I cannot say how beautiful it will be in terms of aesthetic composition, but it'll be done and you can't say I never did nothin' for ya. You. Whatever.
Life is now a giant, jowling lion's mouth in front of which I have flipped back my tuxedo tails, pulled out my flimsy bamboo chair and my snappy whip, and inserted my head. The lion's only been fed posies and melba toast so the saltwater taffy of my brain matter looks damn appetizing.
My to-do list is utterly masochistic, but because I'm not enforcing any of it, it's more nuisance than torture. I'm only up on the racks of vain impossibility than I am beneath the Chinese water dropper of exhaustion. I don't know if you understand. Do you?
Live is a great band, yo.
I suppose the main thing to talk about, though there are others, but they're not so literary and romantic and anguished as this is that I am in a bizarre situation where I know that if I am good, if I am patient and work hard, I can put myself in a better situation next semester to work out this whole unrequited relationship thing. I can not be in such a state of self-loathing. The recurring phrase is "My self-hatred is a star." And I keep saying it over and over again and I can't stop. I don't even quite know what it means, I woke up one morning with that on my brain and suddenly my mind has made it my mantra. Why is that? I don't really, though I hate the situations my self is currently in. I hate the fact that I have to abstain until I'm appropriate.
Meanwhile, around him I am gasping for speech, strangled for it. It's like there's nothing that I can get out that is even salvageable by further conversation. My vocal cords emit sawdust and crumbled, erratic spats bookended by nods and furious blushing. The cluttered and casual mind that dances tangoes and climbs Everests here is a fishbowl with a bit of melted gelatin swirling around its base. I become Amelie without the shoes and stones in my pocket. I couldn't throw light through a prism, much less a wicked barb.
I think it's because I sense possibility. I sense his kindness, his searching and I feel as if I allowed myself to fit that mold, I could be in that kind of relationship that isn't so one-ended. I feel as though if I could arrange the playing field, stack the deck, I could get at him. At whatever part is receptive and Sagittarian and chivalric.
And that is so terribly frightening. So frightening that all the pixies and the wolves draw back behind the trees, the moonvines close their delicate heads. A bonded sinner dragged through the boulevards of Amor and made to run with the dogs of desire gaining on my heels into the great unknown. Past Love and into the place where the wheat is pulled from the chaff. Where all young girls with duality in their minds are processed and given the sentences that will jail them for the rest of their lives.
The Law of the Word or the Law of the Flesh, The Stone or the Heart, by The Will or the Ego. The Red or the White.
We all know what Emily Dickinson chose. Wasn't that the right choice?
And I'm not even ready for the red. I've only ever been ready for the white. I've had my Christening gown ready since my first baptism by literature. I've had my masonic faith beat into me, washed the feet of solitude, drew peace inside, into the wreckage. The body failed for this, the body, that Spartan temple of health and communion with sweat and blood and the red of the born and toiling world.
I was ready for beatification, for the garret, for the cold nights, for the press, for the inked hands, for the graceful ascension into the snowy landscape of the untouched.
And this, this red is the red of my cheeks, my blouse, my tongue, gums, the eye sockets, the body's red is this. It is candy, it is distraction, in is menstruation, it is up against the fence, it is the last seduction, it is callous, and driving and has the weight of Atlas and his globe. All battening this alabaster coffin.
Sometimes I sit for long moments and think about touching. I think about mutual revulsion, I think about the expectations of this moment. How I should be ready by virtue of being here, of having gone so long in this world. I think I need it like I need water, that I'm made of it. That love and passion and touch are fluids that keep us from turning desiccant and yellow. Red fluids that keep us in the pink. Keep us in right shade of color to express love and passion and touch. A vicious cycle I cannot gnaw my way into, a dance I can't cut into, a thing I cannot buy for all my disposable income.
I think about using this summer to make myself feel better about myself as a person who could do this. To not feel so stranded in a unwantable self. To be healthier and on a right path and have the car thing tweaked.
So, I don't go to the place to see him, just to hear him talk the way I want to. To hear that register of deep, mellow, calm tones curl around my inner ear. I don't want to appear as if I want him at this state when I could be better. I don't want to say I want him at all. Not when I think so much could change. He could love anyone right now, be loving her right now as I type this and thinking about his possibilities with her and her loveliness and nothing about her impossibility. He could be making equations in his head, adding up the future with her while I make these idle, crackpot predictions about he and I and later on (which is all the future I can go). And I can't see him and be a wallflower and I can't see him and continually single myself out as someone who has nothing to say around him, whose eyes change color at his appearance, at his mention, at the possibility of either. It's becoming so I think I'm wearing it on my lapel. And I'm not ready to say anything. I'm not ready when my self-hatred is the star I chart my life by.
"I was knee-deep in a sick love."
