It's summer.
I am busy in a love affair with my own brain; I won't be distracted, though this campus is teeming and brewing and burning and wafting and screaming with
anasthetics. I want to bake her brownies and I don't want to bake her brownies. I don't want to have that conversation.
I am already bored with her argument.
I feel summer creeping in and I'm tired of this town again. I want to run away from every single one of my friends some days, open a notebook and make love to my mind, or maybe find another mind to make love to. I am lucky, lucky, lucky to have a brain at all, to have so many sober, saddening, giddy-making hallucinations as I sleep and when I wake. I am lucky to have thoughts and feelings I can trust; this is why I had to leave, though I'm not even sure you noticed.
There's scant satisfaction in saying, "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it" long after the fact, but didn't I? I knew it. You knew it too, maybe the way you know to look both ways or not take candy from strangers; from John Walsh drilling, you saw it coming. It was easy and obvious and visible in his black staring eyes and his wandering hands, but I knew it the other way. Like a punch in the stomach, like a memory, a smell; I felt it.
Two nights ago the sky was streaked with genuine silver. You wanted to watch it through a hallucinatory veil, one you purchased, as if it were not beautiful or not enough. I could not help but walk. The wind felt like fingers, tickling. I must have looked like a whore, walking into the club alone, with fishnet stockings and hair out of Flight of the Navigator and a soft, wrong grin and the knowledge that the moon and the stars were on my side, that I was right, that everything was right, for once, for once.
You, planet Earth, are my food, my junk, my gasoline. I will suck no other air. My toenail polish is fading and my sense of you is fading and the sky is expanding and my heart is contracting. I'm waiting for something to die and I will be born, again and again, on this mean planet of mine. I am not afraid, and I'm mean enough to lord my courage over you.