dissolution

I haven’t posted because everything I write reveals too much of me for the internet or is too scathing or perverted and I don’t want to worry about something like that being out there.

All I know is I watched velvet goldmine two days ago and am reading a breath of life and went to the beach yesterday. h has her cousin’s car that is twenty years old. We couldn’t figure out the hack bluetooth situation so we listened to my cds, most notably tidal and jagged little pill. All I know is I’m back listening to leonard cohen’s I’m your man disk like it’s medicine. All I know is I’m not sleeping. All I know is I’m all feeling and none. By some I’m a stranger to myself. I put my feet up against the wall and push all out until I am an exquisite shell. My stomach churns. I worry that I’ll bleed in the night and wake up a mess that must be cleaned out. Then I’ll be late walking out the door. I’ll be raw and true and rushed. 

            All I know is magic exists in a cd scratched. Disappointment in divine. Who are we to expect such a thing to be perfect. I love fiona apple. I am a criminal called a sullen girl. I wish to paint my toes red but don’t have the patience. Instead I cut every leg hair and sleep with oil in my hair and think about how flammable I am. What Angela is is precious.

    I haven’t been sleeping. I whip back and forth and bend my neck and stuff my head underneath the pillow. My room is windowless. I officially wake at 11. I stay up late cutting my leg hair and thinking about painting my nails. My ideas live in my brain and some slip onto the page, but my pens leak. Too precious are thoughts for pens that leak. Too precious, they said, to be shared. Hold out hope, they say, for a better time and place and more fit format to share your perversions. I am ready to puke. My knees are on the linoleum floor. They are bruised. My elbows hug the toilet bowl. Kick me in the stomach. Make me hurl. Hurl so I can. Return me to my exquisite shell. Someone made a noise. I locked the door. I can’t get up. I am weak and bruised and my stomach churns. I have a book to get back to. Angela is waiting.

            All I know is sometimes I feel impossibly waifish. Weak like the blow of a hairbrush would do me in. I am sitting on a satin couch in the roxy hotel surrounded by old teenagers drinking bottles of vodka served to them by men in three-piece suits. g drapes his arm around me and touches my hair. You have thick hair. I expected it to be thin. I mean that as a compliment. I laugh hard. The burlesque dancer in stockings and a corset serves everyone drinks but me. I pour and pour and pour my own until I exist.

I’ve spoken before about my edges dissolving. Sometimes it feels like I’m floating, other times like a disease that makes me ill. It’s painful, your periphery being disappeared, gnawed at until it is fringe and fraying. I sink into pieces of furniture. In this case a satin couch—the gay jewish boy next to me says he wants to nap and for his friend with bleach blonde hair to pipe down. In others a green chair older than me that belonged to my mother. It frays too. I become it, covered by a wool blanket made of a thousand lambs sheared by my grandfather. I can’t collapse in furniture, only drink and fall asleep. 

    Oh the medicine of dreaming.

            I used to have a dream when I was a kid that a dead man was found at my elementary school. In the playground we all arrived as usual for the first bell to ring. We gathered around the lifeless body of a man, splayed across four square. chalk peppered his exquisite shell. Dirty blond hair, perhaps wounded, perhaps with tracks up and down his arms, I can’t remember. I would pray for him in the dark because my father despised Lords, accosted bless yous and sneered at english accents for they were the king’s. I prayed for the dead man to dream good things, for his shell to be hard and sturdy and not dissolve like mine had the tendency to do.

I keep having awful stress dreams in which I am paralyzed by my mistakes and then go crazy. Bruises are all over me. I can’t stop smoking. My pee is orange. I woke up starving. I slammed my finger in the door and my nail is turning, my finger is swelling. It hurts a lot. The arch that hangs over my cuticle is teal. purple leaks up. I kind of wish little holes would start to form through which streams of blood could gush. One by one these little holes would open until the whole nail would explode and blood would erupt like a fountain. 

Rainy morning. I don’t know what the date is. I dreamt a funeral; I was the only one wearing black. August is sleepy and so am I. Sunday was good. Monday I fell asleep in h’s bed because I was sleepy and more comfortable next to her than on my own. She kicks in her sleep like she’s fighting for her life. 

Yesterday I rode my bike fast up and down the street like a boy. 

Tanned on the roof like a teenage girl. 

Went over to w’s to watch the parent trap. We drank wine and ate pizza in bed and used rags to catch crumbs and wipe our lips. We were impressed by the movie, especially by its cite-specific details—notably the vegetable oil hallie uses to prank annie with at the walden camp for girls, which is very in maine, is Hannaford-brand, a grocery store that is very local to only three states, one of which we grew up in. We went to hannaford a lot for cheese or ice cream.

I’m very unmoved, generally. But laugh and move my shoulders more easily. I don’t want much to do anything, and I really don’t want to see the barbie movie. I want my emotional pull strings manipulated by the greatest or cheapest of masters. But nothing seems up for the challenge. Every reading or gallery or bar I go to is offensively mediocre. August is a bore. I want to erupt. Sometimes I think I'm writing a book.

Oh sweet july. 

I am in my new apartment. It’s 2am. The power is out. I lit candles and tried to finish cooking my dinner with the heat trapped in the oven. I missed the movie I was supposed to see at 9:30. I was late and it sold out. s sat there throughout the movie with an empty seat next to him the whole time. I went to w’s. He laid in bed with z with his head next to a fan and I charged my phone. z and I took turns guessing each other’s moms’ names. I met s after the movie very apologetic and we rode the train home together. I asked him to describe the movie to me which he did and he told me about his crush and I talked about moving and oh the drama. I got home around midnight and started to make dinner out of olive oil, shallots, garlic, a can of tomatoes, eggs, and greek yogurt. It’s now august. I am sweating and smell bad and I have for days. Our power is out because we didn’t pay the bill.