Lost and Found

The soulutions have been found.. then lost.
Dirty secrets tucked away
now safe in cardboard boxes best hidden
quite carefully in the darkest corners of
your tattered, patchwork soul..

Blindly you rifle through the darkness
but still the answers dodge your nimble consciousness
the words once so clear..
now gossamer phrases.. strands of cobwebs that drift away
expelled on the very breath drawn in to utter them..

Your exile continues..
in utter emotional isolation your heart does languish..
locked away so neatly within this cell-
your most perfect creation.
Cold steel walls - bare, but for the same six words
scrawled childlike upon them.. black crayon in a shaking hand..
repeatedly proclaims the pitfall of your design..
No way in..
No way out..
No way in..
No way out..
No way in.. No way out..

Question: Kristin, what the fuck have you been writing lately? Answer: But this one is fun.

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I am thinking I should have resolved something this morning, made an addressed attempt to be non-neutral about something. A little less indecisive, a little more impassioned. But 5 AM is a strange time for things like that. Have to start writing again, at least as part of the healing process, at least to have something to place on Ms. Miller's desk to say, "This is what I think of where I used to be and these are the parallels between what I am and what I used to be." Not who, because a person is just an object with an ego. I could say a lot of things right now, a shitload of things, but last time I tried to talk to you that way, it just turned into "Directory" and then I couldn't say it to you because I figured you'd read it that way anyway and more people would read it, so it'd be a letter to everybody. I may write this to everybody in the end. Who the fuck knows? And maybe you'll read and you'll wonder who it was I was writing to. Because, no, you're not the only one I spoke to at 4:30 this morning and no, you're not the only one I tell about my shrink. Because wouldn't it be great if we could play this game forever? This game of "who could it be?". And there's this one girl, I don't think you know her, but she's been saying how she wants to carve her name in her uterus and I'm thinking that wouldn't be so bad, it would hurt, see, but it'd be an amiable scar. See, this one guy did that once, listen to me as I say, "this one guy," like I met him on a corner, stuck my phone number in his breast pocket, played phone tag, suddenly wandered into his apartment one evening, twelve dollars in my pocket, doormat key between my fingers, just saying I'm lonely like an emo song and baby, let's fuck in this yellow chair, the bed's too gritty for my tender skin. But this one guy wasn't one of those guys because this one guy lived with me and he had me in the shower one day with a steak knife. It wasn't rusty, which is good, because lockjaw kills. He knew what he was doing, like maybe he'd done it before, other scared teens with dopenoses and razorburn. I found out later that he had. I don't know what happened to their scars, but mine are gone, thanks to insurance and trauma and lovely laserbeams and bloody dreams. And now I'm thinking I definitely shouldn't let you read this alone because maybe it's too much and maybe all the melodrama will run like a black creek into a clear river and where will we be then? We will be the awkward, apologetic arms of an electric chair and maybe you wouldn't mind because then, yes, then we'd share the same current.

Sometimes I think you'd like to live me, make a slight incision between my collarbone and my breast, crawl inside, one-fourth your size. You would quietly wander through the chambers of my heart, gazing on cardiac tissue like it's a gallery of Monets, thinking what bloody flowers a body contains. You would be thrust into my pulmonary artery, cascades of iron and rust falling around you, twisting you around like a felled surfer caught in a wave six feet from the jetty. Me, oblivious, I would continue this involuntary action of shoving you through arteries, yanking you into heavy limbs. You, the tourist, would take advantage of the scenery, studying my unique anatomy, comparing it to a dusty old biologytext sketch of the average strange female body. And you, not knowing exactly what to think of this, would draw vulgar and exact representations into the margins of your biotext. And I, hating you and your rude and unintentional interruption of common bodily procedure, would expel you by way of dropping a single thirsty leech to the nape of my neck where you would soon arrive, made dizzy by the leech's numbing saliva, and be bled out into another body. You would regain consciousness and wonder at your new surroundings. Finally you would decide that you'd floated into another strange organ, and you would find it a nice place to live, work, raise a family. You would erect a small picketfence around the leech and then you would fall in love with me.

And I would think, "This wasn't so bad."

Image

It's easy to grow into a rock star complex. You can be honest with everyone, you can tell the truth, wear a single face and claim it as your own, or you can do what I did. I was the tomboy and then I was the violent femme and then I was the slut and the victim and the tough girl. The ditz, the best friend or the fuck buddy, the wannabe prude. A million names, none of them yours, just pseudonyms you borrow for a few hours at a time. But isn't everybody like that? Am I the only liar? Who the fuck are you? I said that to a mirror once. "Who the fuck are you?" My magic mirror merely waited for the answer. I had none.

Who are you? If you've ever asked that question, here's the answer. You're a coin rolling into a gutter or a lock with a lost combination. The end of an unfinished novel. You are where the dead go when they leave us and you are the sun's core and you are the unexplained shadow on the moon's bright side. The face on a thousand-year-old shroud. You are the oblivious bones of the missing link and you are a fallen log in an empty forest and the reason God wrote the Bible. The longest word in a dead language. You're an Armageddon that never erupted, the second coming of a man who never lived, the unseen flaws of a calendar. You are the reason the Druids erected Stonehenge.

Ours is an age of vague optimism. The world's questions will be answered, maybe not in our lifetimes, maybe in our grandchildren's. That's not what I think. People fuck up. There is no heaven and there is no hell. There is only you and what you do and what that does to everybody else. This isn't such a bad philosophy. It's gotten me somewhere. Reasons to live? There aren't many, but love has something to do with it. Everything is somebody's fault and it doesn't really matter whose. Karma? No such thing. Cause and effect, that's what's real.

I talk a lot, but I don't know anything. I'm a kid and I have no answers. I'm a big dumb kid who's had a rough life and should have learned something from it. Sure, I have a stereotype, but I'm the only one who fits it perfectly. I talk about myself a lot. That's all I know. I'm getting a little sick of myself. I may have to move on to something else. I need a me that I can believe in.

My mind is elsewhere. I need a new direction, not saying that it wasn't already there. I just never felt the need to share the darker side here. However, Ryuk0 changed my mind. Definitely check his stuff out, and thanks for the name ;)
Lunar Pull

There's a full moon tonight and it casts its light on a silver stripe of water. The black Gulf sways with the moon and I'm glad I'm not driving tonight because I wouldn't be able to keep my eyes on the road, just on that beautiful moon and the stripe of its reverse-shadow.

Seth turns into a gas station on the Seawall and I go inside to pay. I grab a pack of gum and lean my elbows against the counter, watching Seth at pump #3, standing with one hand in his pocket, the other pumping gas. Can't help but smile. "It's a beautiful night," I smile at the cashier without looking at him. He agrees and glances down my shirt as Seth pulls the nozzle out. I give the man his $8.42 and he wishes me a good night.

This is one of those nights where men commit peaceful suicides by walking into the surf at midnight, their cuffs darkening with those black water stains and when they can't touch the bottom anymore, they swim and wait for a current to carry them. Cuba or heaven or hell. Or Cuba. It's when they start fighting the current, that fear that captures them when they realize the shore is now a mile away and the water is deep and they're going to die, and that's when they decide to fight for life. That's when they tire and drown. In the mornings, their bodies wash up on East Beach and the lifeguards say it's another drunk, late-night swimmer, and refuse to address the victim's reason for dressing in funeral attire before taking his swim. I ask Seth if he wants to walk on the beach.

He parks the truck on the beach side of the Seawall and we take a concrete staircase down to the dunes. He wraps an arm around my waist as we walk down a jetty. The waves are gentle and they sing against the rocks in hushed, whispered melodies. The moon is directly in front of us and Seth's face is painted in its colors, but he's not looking at the sky. I tell him I wish I had my camera and his eyes sink into mine as he smiles, "I wish I had mine, too." One wave silently curls past us on its beachward journey and you have to wonder if these aren't just suicidal waves, treading into sand, drowning in a world they don't understand before they have the chance to turn back.

Well, I have been writing. A lot. Just I feel that everything has been way too twisted and fucked up to even bother posting. I figure no one would understand half of it, but then again, who understands most of what is already up here. Anway, it is 2:04 AM on a Sunday, and I find myself out of notebook paper. Hence typing, and posting things here. Here's a bit of prose for now... changed a name.

Midnight Meanderings

Poison man's out tonight, the blunt siren sound of mosquito spray spewing out the back of that giant hose blares down the street and a thousand people shift in their sleep at the same time. You can hear that, this late at night. The soft roar of silence, a blank static of sleeping souls. It's like the sound cars make when they're going past you at 70 mph on a sheet of water. I'm thinking about waking my dog up, just to stop that deafening sound, but she needs her sleep. I consider calling Charles. He'll probably be awake; I think he only sleeps when I do. I imagine him in his boxers on the side of his bed, his big bare feet nestled in the berber carpet, his neck craned over his guitar and his beautiful hands weaving over the strings. I want him to play for me and I want him to apologize to me. I don't want him to say goodbye.

It's stupid and it's terrible; it's dirty, it's wrong. I want him to say sweet things to me and I want to cry and feel pain for him. I want to be worth being used. I miss him with all the rotten things in my soul. You're only worth the energy it takes me to walk over there and kick the shit out of you. Was that how it went? He said that a lot. Not Charles, somebody else. Charles would claim love and heartbreak while he kicked the shit out of you. So what do I miss?

Curbside talks about why the world was so fucked up and whose fault it was. Late-night roads. Cat-eye streetlights. Crashing waves under a blanket of stars. Cheap roses. Three chords and a solo and a dark room. The word love and the first time it was real. But I have to stop. These lists get so long and it's disgusting how you can love a person who makes such a valid attempt to ruin your life. He got so close and left so much of the blame on me.

He worshipped me and he prayed to me and I answered every prayer the way a good goddess should. Just because you love someone doesn't mean they save you. This is that pathetic kind of can't-breathe love where you're left gasping out sobs and feeling sorry for yourself because sometimes love is nothing more than an opiate and the withdrawal won't kill you, but it'll sure as hell try.