Mission drive is actually to say a lot of pretty things and set them free, perhaps not to see them again.
The best is when they return. I do not recognize them at first, but nonetheless know them as mine. This is how my mother said she recognized us when we were born, though we did not look right to her at all. I think she thought I would have darker hair. And gradually, I did.
I cough up butterflies: you love it when I lie to you. This is not a thing I am able to confirm, because everyone is silent. Or everybody except me is having a picnic on the moon, or lonely, or running around in brilliant reveries they do not want to share. That's all right, but.
My particular villain is loneliness. The thing I have learned about villains is after you learn their names, you must say them as often as possible. It silences them. So I will say lonely, lonely, lonely, partly because I'm especially fond of the letter L and partly because the sound of my voice will fill the room, perhaps null the whole arrangement, leaving my bed closet stairwell darkened hallway free and clear for nighttime exploration.
Maybe this would be one of them. I hate darkened rooms where you can just see the glint of the mirror; it is all I can do not to say, Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary; I don't, because that still works on me.
Here's another. A series, actually, of things that made me laugh tonight. The words butler and bitch, and a series of gruesome haiku. Thanks; you know your blame.
Also, the night I heard Roger died I started to hate him, and here is why. 1. Stupid metaphor: a bottle of painkillers to end it forever. A weak joke we both could have lived without.
2. All night I lay in bed listening to the sounds of trains: the whistle, the horn, the rattle of the track regularly sang me to sleep in those days, which now I rarely hear. When I stood by the tracks I was stirred to total waking. Who would want to die, I thought, in a world that hummed with sounds and flashed with the sights of trains. I was not kidding.
I was 15 years old, and the last one he called.
I got the hiccups.
Here's something that woke me up last year in the dead of a winter night: I had thought of most of the right words, if I had not been exactly tactful. After all. I had not been responsible. I had not fucked up. Believe it or not.
I do not want to save your life, I think I said, and I didn't. I wanted him to save it himself, and he didn't. So it goes.
It's only love: at the end of the day there are still thunderstorms and sunsets. At present, I live in a land of long, uneventful rain and early, uneventful darkness. I barely hear the trains, and they run too slow to excite me. But I still have plenty of reasons.
In no particular order: fake fur on my jacket; real fur on living cats and dogs; my deodorant, which B. says smells like a grandpa; words and songs; earned silences.
A secret I like to repeat about butterflies who look alike, but whose dicks won't fit the right vaginas which qualifies them all as different species. About how Nabokov collected mounted butterfly dicks for this reason, how he'd leave rooms saying gleefully, "I am off to play with my genitals," further sullying his questionable reputation.
(Sex also belongs on this list, which is of course incomplete and subject to change. At best it is exactly like this story, grotesquely funny and also wondrous.)
I cough up butterflies. I can't spit enough to make an ocean. I have some bright words, some scary words, and some so hopelessly one-note and sad I wonder why I bring them out all. I map my scars but I don't draw arrows. I don't know where to go from here. I don't say the right thing, even though I might know the right thing to say.
I have no conclusions, only trifles. If I have to take another call like that I will plead. Trifles. Butterflies. I hope that you find them adequate. |
