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.