a volatile combination

Lately I want to write sensuous things, words that fill the mind with feelings of the earth and of the flesh. Not sexual things necessarily, not smut, not porn, not erotica (so many words for it!), but things full of sensory images, pieces laden with physicality. The way these are forming in my mind is no doubt highly influenced by my too-great intake of sexblogsmut over the past few days, but nonetheless they are still elsewhere from that. But I can’t get the word-pictures to come out right, it seems, or I haven’t been able to. Maybe I can now.

I wanted to make you feel the warm mud between your toes, then the grass, brushing wet and cool over your skin and washing the dirt away with its damp, dewy freshness. I wanted to talk about the hard, smooth cement sidewalks, and the rough black asphalt driveways. The wet patches on the drives steamed in the post-rain heat, and even the cement had that wet-then-warm smell. The air shimmered with mist and sun and the soft, lingering scent of raindrops. I slipped, once, my foot skidding into the soft, slick silt, leaving a mark like a baseball player sliding into home. The mark ruined the curvy lines of the washed-up dirt but I liked it, the straight tail from five round toeprints. The people who live at the top of that street don’t bother to groom their trees too much, and pine needles hold water well: in beautiful, sparkling droplets. I walked through them and as the branches brushed my shoulders and hair, I was showered with cold beads of wetness. It was lovely, the little spots of water all over my bare arms, warm from the sun.

Today, too, I had things I wanted to write, but more than just write: wanted to– to feel, but in the opposite way, turned inside out: to force the feeling upon you, to make it so that reading becomes knowing, to make it so you can remember something you weren’t there to see, like Homer, to make it poetry. I don’t think I can but I always try, I suppose that’s my strength. Anne of Green Gables, the queen of strengths and weaknesses, once said that her one virtue is that she never makes the same mistake twice, and since she makes so many mistakes, she’s certain to run out eventually. I’m not like that but maybe if I try everything, constantly, I’ll hit success.

Today I read too much smut (and yesterday, and possibly the day before…). I’m bored, with too much time and a computer with internet access and hormones running around screaming in my body. It’s becoming a hobby, just for the sake of sampling all the different writers of sexblogs across the tubes.

Peeling warm bell peppers after reading smut is not a good idea. Peeling  warm bell peppers with your mother after reading smut is a worse idea.

Do you know how you peel a bell pepper? In this recipe at least, you char them. Cut them into flat pieces, and grill them till the skin is a nice, even black. Then let them cool in a plastic bag, so they stay moist. As soon as they’re cool enough to touch, you peel them with your fingers. So today I took a slab of warm, yellow bell pepper, and I started to peel it. All it took was a gentle smush and the skin moved away immediately. Black pieces of skin, thin and dry and crisp like paper, began to pile up, leaving behind a smooth, slick yellow slab. The pepper’s flesh was warm and wet, sleek and smooth and velvet-soft.

To a girl with a very dirty state of mind, the words “warm, wet and soft” connote one thing and one thing only. This is absolutely not acceptable when peeling peppers with your mother. Nor is bursting out into giggles because of that thought. I wonder what my mother thinks is wrong with me. More importantly, I wonder what she thought of the peppers.

sing from the sparkle at the center

Haruki Murakami and Zora Neale Hurston like to go back to the mud, the warm brown mud of our origins. The Greeks, maybe, said the gods made the humans from clay, or maybe that was the Mesopotamians, or the Chinese…regardless, people come from the earth itself. Just like plants, we come from the sweet water and the nourishing soil. When we go back to it, we are home.

Yesterday I went for a walk, after a warm summer rain. My flipflops quickly got just wet enough to chafe but not wet enough to slip around and squeak, and there was just enough damp grass on my feet to itch. I crossed into the field and took off my shoes and walked barefoot through the soft green grass. Every time I hit a muddy patch, I’d smoosh it with my feet, play with its wet, wonderful texture, and I realize that I don’t think I ever enjoyed it this much, not even as a little girl. I sampled all kinds of mud. I am now a mud connoisseur. There’s sun-warmed wet earth, and then there’s the soft ground beneath tree branches. There’s the kind of mud that accumulates on one segment of sidewalk because the next slab is just a fraction of an inch higher, leaving a ridge that catches all the dirt as the rainwater flows on by. That’s the silt that’s soft like velvet, so suddenly squishy and unexpectedly slippery. There’s the grainy, soft dark mud found in the shade, in the patchy grass, that’s cool and malleable underfoot. When that patchy grass happens to be in the sunshine, and the soil there is laden with clay, the mud becomes simply a red-brown impressionable surface. Just next to that, at the bottom of a puddle, there is the thick gloppy muck that sticks in odd, pointy lumps to the crevices between toenails and toes. This is the mud of mud masks and war paint and mud fights, and as you just squish it between your toes you can hear the squealing laughter of children.

The water lingering in the grass cleaned my feet, and when I came back to the road I was wet from tree branches and grass droplets and a sun-dappled kind of warm and smiling. Barefoot on the sidewalk, absorbing the warmth that had soaked into the concrete and the asphalt driveways. Once a toad hopped into my path, and I knelt. It didn’t leap away. I reached towards it, then suddenly pulled away, because — it hadn’t moved. I reached towards it again, stroked its fascinatingly lumpy back, and grinned as I stood up. A few minutes later a rabbit crossed the sidewalk. It sat, stock-still and staring, its eyes wide. Its whole body vibrated in that scared, panting, rabbity way. I told it silently, and then not so silently, to go, go, go before my dog caught up. The rabbit went. I got to the corner and put now-dry shoes on now-dry feet, and walked home.

Sometimes summer days feel sweet like a smile. Sometimes things are okay, and by that simple virtue, they are wonderful.

…how did it end up like this?

I finally saw people this weekend, and realized that in what feels like a blink, so much has changed. Four weeks and nothing feels the same. Interactions are different, relationships different, suddenly I am on edge again. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck because I’m uncomfortable; things aren’t what they used to be.

The dressed-in-darkness boy is just the same, I suppose, but it’s been hinted that he wants me and I don’t want to deal. That’s fine. The way we are is easy and quiet and it can stay so long as I don’t have to deal with that.

The punk-rock girl and I, our friendship is strange. We do nothing, or we do something, and it’s never particularly special but it’s always good. Our friendship is a background kind of good, like the cinnamon smell that haunts a house in winter or the comforting hum of the air conditioning. We drank rum in the tree-field and danced and took photographs, laughing as the world lagged behind our eyes, laughing as our bodies spun and dipped with a loss of equilibrium, laughing at the sunshine and the clouds and our teenage-summer buzz. It was nice, even with sour gummi worms and crackers and water and rum sloshing in our stomachs, and aching love for faraway boys in our hearts. We commiserate, we drink, we dance, we sleep. In the morning we ate pancakes and watched MTV and said goodbye. Nothing special but always nice, but this time our friendship seemed even quieter, what with her texts to her boyscout and my waiting for a phone call and then talking for two hours so very early in the morning (or so very late at night).

And then there is the cherry bitch, and she has changed the most. Or I have, or we have – regardless of its cause, there is a change in the way things are now. I told the boy this, so late at night on the phone, and he asked me how. “She doesn’t touch me anymore,” I blurted to him. “She has her boyfriend and she’s so happy which is wonderful but also terrible because she used to write that I needed her but she needed me, too, and now she doesn’t need me but I still need her but that’s just not how it can be.” He said, “Oh.” I am crazy in the night; I ramble and rant and rave, but it’s true. She doesn’t need anymore, and I do, and our frustrated last-resort ridiculousness can’t exist anymore, because of that and the distance and that fact, the one I hate, about things changing with time. It’s an old pair of jeans, that’s all. Nonetheless, seeing her felt odd. Her house now is new and shiny and empty and everything felt oddly sterile, and we acted that way too, and I don’t want our friendship to turn into sitting-around-and-talking-about-boys but that can happen, I guess. We can watch bad tv on the couch, and talk about boys and sex, and listen to music, and be normal. That’s absofuckinglutely fine with me. It really is, because don’t I have to learn anyway to be fine with things I hate?

I’m exaggerating everything now. I know I do it, out of frustration and creativity and irritability. The therapist keeps warning me that I’m irritable, to try and cut everyone some slack. Cut my parents some slack, she says. Cut my friends some slack. When she told me this, I said, “nobody’s any good at cutting anyone any slack.”

for the people who are still alive

I wonder if this is what being dead feels like. It’s plausible, after all, that death could simply consist of doing nothing, more or less, which is what I’m doing now. If this is all being dead is, then I suppose I’m not as scared of it as I assumed I was. I suppose I am just indifferent, but with the way things are now I am indifferent to life too, or at least, this kind of life. Right now I’m a little too indifferent. Any moreso and I’m afraid I’ll melt into the molding at the base of the wall.

I am not doing anything, not doing anything at all. I talk to people but I don’t really say very much. My bedroom floor is a sea of clothes and objects, only flung out of duffel bags in order to find something to wear each morning. I took a three-hour showerbath and attempted to shed my skin. I made buttery pancakes for breakfast at 2 pm, just because I wanted one, just because there’s nothing stopping me. I don’t understand how long this can last. Something’s got to give. Hasn’t it?

This evening I fought with my mother, sort of. I screamed “fuck” and ran out of the room, anyways. I realized that I’ve never felt an extreme of love towards my family, only of hate. I know it’s a false hate, but it feels so intense; it’s just like the kind of crush that isn’t really love and you know it isn’t the end of the world but if it weren’t for the fact that you have a brain, you wouldn’t hesitate to throw yourself in front of a truck for that person. It’s like that, so intense and yet false. But I’ve never felt anything close to an equally intense love for my family, and isn’t there something wrong with that?

This summer was the first time I had someone that was crazy attracted to me, enough to deal with my fears and my insanity, the first time that someone was that caring and got so close to me, that we could spend hours making out in chairs, that I got past about a dozen individual fears for him. So many firsts and too many firsts and now that these things have been taken away, the shape of the space where they used to be is clearly defined and painfully empty. Their absence makes me crave: lips and hands, always lips and hands that I want. No idea where to find them now.

Tomorrow I plan to break this emptiness. I will shatter this infinite plane of smooth milky glass that seems to be separating me from the world, from productivity. I will clean my room and heal my body and write a letter and mail Berger cookies and buttercakes. I will look halfheartedly for a job because it was halfheartedly suggested. I will escape my house and absorb the summer sun and like a plant it will help me stay alive.

not-to-forget

He looks a little bit like Kurt Cobain when he air-guitars during Stairway.
I’ve been sitting here for a while now, too sick to sleep, and the sun’s been rising in the window behind me, and I turned around a moment ago and it was light. It’s almost six, I wish he’d call me but know he won’t or can’t or both. I wonder if anyone has told him I am not at camp.
I wonder why I think about him so much, and how I’ll deal since I’m not away, falling hard for pretty artists. I’m here, meeting no one, falling for no one, crushing on no one but him. It is somewhat problematic. I see a book of Forever stamps on my desk, now, and think “forevermore” and of him and the others and god, I want to go back home.

oh no, I’ve said too much; haven’t said enough

I don’t think I know how to write anymore.
I’ve been doing and thinking and feeling so much that I don’t even know what to say or where to start or anything. It’s not overwhelming but if I tilt my head just-so it could be.
I love a lot of faraway people. Love is a spectrum, I’ve decided, because it’s silly to love platonically and then move past platonic and suddenly it isn’t love anymore. That’s nonsense. Also, I have issues telling platonic from romantic, lately. That’s fine. They’re all just people I love. I love this boy and it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and it sucks, drives me crazy, but I do. I also love this girl and there are moments where I want to kiss her but we don’t really want each other that way anymore, so I can’t. And then there are piles of faraway people who I love together but not necessarily individually. Of course there are people to love here, too, and I do. And a certain girl needs to call me soon, since she just flaked out but I want to see her very very soon!

Also I found out that even RHPS can be profound, which is totally bizarre. “I remember… when the black mists would hit me, and the void would be calling…” I suppose noticing this sort of thing can only happen when one is depressed and also sitting in a three-hour rehearsal of Time Warp/Sweet Transvestite lip-sync.

I am not hungry today. I just want to mellow, to sit and look at pictures and listen to music, and sleep. My mother is worried now, and pads all her words. I wish she could get over herself.

I miss people.