Mouth To Mouth (taking it on the chin)

At work I am fearless. But when something splits, my heart quakes, there are more ends than lengths of tangible ways out; my initial response is to stop eating. This by itself is the most frightening characteristic I own. But to own it, to possess it, instead of it enveloping me, this is how I remind myself of how healed I must be. You can see it in my hips, or in my face, there is a strength in my heaviness that I never really thought was possible. 

Regardless, sitting on my bedroom floor with my chest contracting, last weekend where words would not form and eloquence was dead to me, the be all and end all, the answer to everything was to be running on empty.

Except running on empty could also apply to emotions. I have let something go. This is more pleasing than all the plates I turned away, sick at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. I did think nothing could define me more than an illness, and then sadness, and then you.

Stretching my sturdy limbs this evening, quite alone and burying my face in my hair, I remember you grinning and telling me how much you like this song. But it’s me dancing behind the bar and splitting the crotch of my jeans that will make me reminisce more in two years time.  

Small Things I Said With You In Mind (They Make No Sense At All)

The things I would like to do are huge. They are beasts.

You and I have stopped catching the eyes of other people, I am twisting your hair into tight little spirals instead. But the things we share are awful. Your sheets are filthy, the 3am half-dressed relationship we have is without kisses and I leave later to sleep alone, because it’s better or easier that way. 
If you were to measure my waist you’d say I am full of you and I can see the whole of me only in one of your forearms. All bones and muted skin, you are, I couldn’t even connect the freckles to create a semblance of my initials. 
We don’t get sick because we don’t leave the house. 
What does all of this remind me of.

(Don’t talk about it, though. Don’t name names. Don’t expose how exhausted your pride is.)

4:40am I watch the numbers on my alarm clock roll over. 4:46am is when I look next, I get up because sleep isn’t coming. Neither is he. He turned my face halfway through and asked if I was O.K because there was silence instead of bruised sighs and undulating moans like there are satin fingers pressing at the inside of your throat, and I said something hurt and he was concerned. And he apologised. 
And he lay flat on top of me with his cheek against my chest and everything smelled of him.
And it is terrible but also wonderful that I was lost in the thought of what she would say if she knew. 

And so I didn’t know how to tie a tie and I still don’t. For all the internet tutorials available, my harmless fingers are about as useful as thumb-tacks. When I press them to the walls after a late night, when I’m at home, I feel less than connected to anything, though. And the walls, they stay smooth and ambivalent to whatever I say out-loud.

I didn’t go with you to buy jeans because I loved your face and hair, then. 
Washed my sheets on a Tuesday, even my duvet, the weather just blinked at me. Sunny, bleak, startling, bland. Running my fingers across the odd hexagonal pattern of my mattress, while the machine spun out the smell of you. Knitting my limbs together. God I wish you were here.

If a pretty face could get you anywhere I would aim for the space between your sheets when the light outsight tells whatever time but your body against the cotton tells you this: You have all the time in the world to just enjoy yourself. All the time in the world. As if every watch on every wrist, with every person’s minutes to spare collects and gathers. And you are naked in a bed with your skin singing and a blind person’s smile, just like everybody else’s.

But you would be there with me, of course. How is time spent at all if not with you. 

Toneless Or Uninflected.

I use Facebook mainly to let others know that I am still alive, to reassure my mother with photographs that flash their teeth like placards that read I’m-So-Fucking-Drunk. She is reassured by that. My youth is wearing youth and drinking youth and being youth and that youth is normal. Lately though my sister has been commenting on my photos saying:
You Look So Happy.
As if to remind me that yes, yes this does happen occasionally. Or when you were younger. Or whatever.  But she lives half a country away and it feels like miles of thumbtacks I have to cross during each conversation we have.
You know, when family becomes not the length of your hand but your palm against someone else’s and theirs against another’s till there’s four degrees of separation between you and this person you once told you loved (in the heat of the moment, regardless). 
And at whatever end there is, what are they anyway? But sutures that disintegrate or fall to nothing.  
Well that’s morbid.

And we’re back.

So I’ve been going on a lot of dates recently because that’s what twenty-somethings do, right? Is that what happens when you reach a certain age?
People want to take you out to films and pay for your milkshakes or swap books with you or meet their flatmates because you would just love them (‘even though they’re so different to your friends’)? 
And half the time I’m not even meeting these people at parties where we’d end up sharing some fluid secrets or talking about our individual sexual awakenings. Surely in that case I’d probably cast a larger shadow than my personality does by mentioning my flatmate and my bed sharing an association anyway. I met someone in a park while they were walking their dog. I met someone working behind the counter at a coffee shop. I met the flatmate of a friend, I met the friend of someone who looked a lot like someone else I liked a lot once.
And this will be awful, because I create no disguise at being an above-average person: The less you care, the greater urge they seem to feel to want to impress you, or impress upon you how fantastic their love would be and above all: How they would look after you.
Well, fuck me. I’m obviously not recognising the same hapless girl they see when I look in the mirror.  
I’m sitting, bent up, in their lounge while the credits roll and they’ve fallen asleep with their head touching my thigh wanting a cigarette or to go to the supermarket or to wash my sheets.
Such a contrast to the passion I used to feel at the thought of counting moles or  creases, pressing the hollows between ribs. Wheedling out of you where your thoughts of me end and the rest begins.  
And as I’m walking home, always. I Wish You’d Stayed, they say, but I just wish it wasn’t raining so hard. 

I started doing these word-of-the-day things at the beginning of my journal entries but all the words I keep finding are fucking boring.
Like Tyrotoxism. Which literally means to be poisoned by cheese.

I thought of something soul-destroying but I forgot what it was.
 

But What Of The Past.

Kept all of your postcards, they are more like flashcards I’d study, now. Things I strain to remember. From a stretch that seems better owing only to the fact that we were younger. There was a glow, a perceptible shimmer like that from heated streets. Insults were impersonal , yes, we were convinced of misunderstanding. And our parents with their fancy cars and sprawling houses, gave us shitty presents that just made bold that feeling of misapprehension. 
That’s essentially how they read now, in-between the strung out words (you said Alleviation and Fraudulently, Melange and Embroider) that felt adult when I read them in that interval, as fledglings. They sit so pretty but read so faulty and overdone. 
In three years I’ll look back on this and feel the same. I feel the same. Christ what the fuck am I doing. 
(That’s rhetorical.)

Date-That-May-Or-May-Not-Have-Been-A-Date-Date: Fuck this is so confusing I just want to wear my intentions on a placard strung around my neck in huge scrawled letters:
I DON’T KNOW. I DON’T KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.
But I am smiling and covering my jawline with faulty fingers. You buy me coffee and I accept chivalry like it’s something I’ve always done. Which it isn’t.

Speaking of postcards.
In Melbourne, where I was for three days during a summer that was weighty and fairly morose. Quite morose actually. It was essentially just morose. And I hadn’t visited the hospital yet that day, we would reconvene that evening. I was wandering through the bleary streets and all the girls in shorts didn’t catch my eye, nor the boys with grown out locks and striped singlets, not as they usually would. I was actually riding on some flawed brand of hope, I feared recognising it, but it was staining my intent, I guess. Because there were still hours left for Him, my Him, to heal. Whatever. He didn’t. Anyway I remembered something about friends wanting postcards, for no other reason than to receive them I suppose. Because how far away is any place, really? And how different? Maybe they just wanted proof I’d gone, or maybe they felt I needed the proof I’d gone.
Regardless, I stopped in at a post-office that was blowing artificial air all over the pavement outside, pretty much instantly either lacquered onto greedy slick skin or just evaporated as if a cool breeze did not exist at all. And I think what I wrote, in stilted sentences to both, was not something like Wish You Were Here (that would have been undeniably cruel) but something along the lines of:
It is cold in here.

I’d like to throw away all of my old things, from old friends. But some of them are so well made, some hand-painted birthday card or early declaration of trust in the form of artwork they’d hardly shown anybody else. 
Keeping them locked in that box to my right is much the same though, I feel. 

It’s half-past eleven. I do hope you are smiling over something else.
 

A Bad Idea.

Another day spent lingering in the paradise I have ownership of.

Met someone at the library who said he liked Kafka and my shirt.
So I said I’d been drinking chili spiked coffee, he said he liked apples and cinnamon.
A spider on his shoulder like a raindrop and he is fearless while I laugh at my hands. We are beautiful ideas with home lives of our own (respectively).

His careful advances made me appear cruel.
If I had a number to give him, it would be the fingers I have placed on the necks of those who have left me eventually.
If I had a name to let slip, it would be the identity of a girl in a story who was not aware of the impression she gave and who closed doors quietly. Don’t disturb anyone, don’t evoke obligation.
So with my blush and stutter, words kicking at their heels and colliding, I said instead: I don’t eat lunch very often.
And he said Oh and bloomed crimson in unison.

Number one is warm and celebratory. An award of sorts, there is only one of you and you came first, still do, always.
Plus my hands are always biting at themselves, there isn’t any room left for the palm of someone else. 

You were more me than I was.

Keeping plastic bottles in the shade for fear of chemicals, cancer. Smoking anyway. I’m a slave to the frivolous girl I was at a time, for a time. Indeterminable, I guess. I am much the same.

At the time, the time that was, He and I were budding, blossoming. Fighting with water inside, making memories on every available surface. Our reflections seeming deep in a blank television screen. His bones and olive limbs, my wan waist and curved shoulders. Dying to dirty our fresh faces and bright futures. Soil our laundry and air it in public: we were doing a lot of drugs, yes, having sex in public places, yes yes I’ll admit to anything! School-less, routine abandoned us for a summer. Us. Such a foreign concept, this extension of I. An odd pair. How could this person who looked so different, hip bones pronounced and caramel coloured, be tied in any way to my mess of soft blurred lines and translucent pelt?

It’s bizarre. How passionately I felt and how inconsolable I was when he stopped coming over, driving me to work. 
And now I just see this immaculate sunny-seasoned aura. Something so lovely to hold and inspect. I see Him (the Him he was, my Him) now and grin not out of spite or obligation. It’s almost as if he bred a particular brand of emotion in me and eventually, without his constant attention (measureless affection), it waned and halted in production.

Now my new sparkly display of a mindset fails to recognise:
We Were Us Once.  

Romance, what a brave beast you are!
Milk-white teeth and glittered corneas,
Ever swathed in exuberance,
And I: ever amazed at how no part of you goes to waste.

But you, the hermit girl with bed-rested curls, do you deserve the prick of arrows and the limp of the lame loved? Possibly not, feeble and fawn-like, your inefficient frame might just be persuaded to the parallel suitable for walking on and over. 
Cupid might just kill you.

You Tell Me (Please)

Me on walking home with too many heavy bags consequently causing one side of my dress to ride up and show half my ass through the rip in my tights as I am walking home: Fuck it. It’s part of me. Not the worst part either (thank you for making me feel ok about that).

Talented people making me morose. With a black-humour brand. You are filching all the talent in all the world and therefore others are left with palms empty, grappling at the air like newborns. Fill a tankard with talent and pass it on. Someone recommended I take dance classes today. This is something I used to be good at. It’s something I am considering. Why you needed to know that I don’t know. It’s not really a need-to-know basis, here. It’s more like a huge pile of odds-and-ends in the middle of someones bedroom floor.  None of you need-to-know me at all. There is something inoffensively intricate in that. 

Sometimes I have irrational but all-consuming thoughts about when I am older. For instance- I like little-boy-types but there really aren’t so many of those at fifty, are there? It really scares me I will not be able to get what I want or I will, but I’ll be fifty, and they’ll be seventeen.

 You’re all going to be ok. Whatever it is that you are cursing yourself over, you might not make the same errors. You might laugh more and feel comfortable most of the time. Maybe you’ll fall in love or something. Have children. Maybe you’ll meet me and marry me, or one of my friends, or someone I don’t know. Everyone has their own shit going on and it amazes me.

 I feel I am touching others emotions again. Whereas I’m impregnable, in the midst of my reserve I failed to notice what the ‘like’ in ‘I really like you’ meant. Tapping my fingers together. It’s pretty cheap, lust and like and love. It’s mangy and off-colour. Someone is comparing me to a cat or a lion and I’m hugging my own waist, curled up on my side, wishing for simpler things and simpler friendships. All my understanding of myself being the twig, not the fruit, and there’s still someone who finds the dry and scaled tempting. I don’t know, it was dark. It was early. I was drunk. I didn’t want to do anything with anyone and I wasn’t yearning to touch you or flooded with romance or passion. I was unaware and when you asked me if I wanted you to go, how was I supposed to say yes?

No Place

Taking a leaf out of someone else’s book. Someone I don’t know (or maybe I do). Never tell the ones you like you do. Never name them handsome, never muse on their beautiful (the trait they own and wander through). I’m keeping my ever-present affection burned down to an asexual ember. The arms I’d envision around your neck, the public or the private pretty lust, keep them by my sides. A guessing game for fools. Who on earth do I think I am? Noticing no one. If they brush my hand by accident, I’ll keep that flame a lie. I’ll tell them through my teeth - I am solitary and sleeping alone, happy again. 

Romance revokes my rationale. To quell the queries of love means to quit jobs and attempt to live off of petty early-morning compliments. But when the door edges closed and I’m left by myself while they tipple through their days without a thought or me on their mind, I find I cannot survive off myself. 

I was always a sucker for the giddy first-month smiles and touches of skin. Begging for acceptance and wallowing in pleasantries. Keeping those niceties in the hollow of my collarbones like an expensive scent I’d buy when it’s over to cheer me up. I wore your comments about my face and figure, mood and mind, eyes and easy-going eccentricities. I layered them like cheap winter wool. I’ve said it before: You Shouldn’t Need Anybody Else. 

I Don’t Need Anybody Else.

I am not pursuing affection. Stop pursuing me.  

Words & Words & Words

A question mark on all my imaginary papers. I’d like to mention you more. But I’m developing an immunity to affection. My aversion to ardour sets me apart from my skin-fiending friends in neither a positive or negative way. Because the majority of our conversations circle slowly around sex. And sex does not necessarily nestle down next to affection. So I’ll fuck you but not love you(?) And if your idea of pleasant is sleeping entwined like twins, then you can leave when it’s over.

Wow, yeah that probably eluded to some memory of a callous, ugly girl howling at men from the street. BED ME, DON’T REMEMBER MY NAME.
But that’s not quite it. Just don’t think you’ll ever have an opportunity to palm my heart. Don’t you dare assume that since my rounded eyes elicit innocence and some faint hope to capture a little lost girl, that I must be the type to dreamily envisage slow soft mornings and going shopping for tea cups together. Nor do I need some strong, silent type that’s going to look after me.
If my heart were responsible for my emotions not only my life, I’d say it’s pretty well-kept, thanks. It’s decked out in camo with a rifle. So you can get fucked if you even think of reaching a sly finger in there.

But on the You I would like to mention more. You with a plethora of gossamer skin. Our publicly demure dalliance still makes me sussurous. These are some of my favourite words. And they might sound tacky and pretentious lumped together, but that’s possibly how we looked anyway. Or how I look. And I could apply nearly every beautiful word to your body and manner and way of speaking and they would barely cover the suede-smooth frame you are indifferent and often hateful towards. You were the offing. The sea between the horizon and the offshore.

And the one I would only do so reluctantly: Oh god, I’m so sorry.

And for somebody completely different: I can feel you edging closer. I do wonder who you are.

And to myself: You confused etiolate bitch.