16 feb 2010

Cold lonely day

On a cold night I crept up those wiry fire escape stairs that twist and edge around like a troubled spider… I hate that through my window I can’t see the moon and I needed to contemplate the fullness, that perfectly circular light that makes more sense than anything earthly.
There was nothing that could make me feel big, so I delved into things that made me feel small. The treacherous, bubbly warmth of the evening cup of wine in my stomach. The premium rolling papers from distant lands that became smooth from the friction of my fingertips. How small and the same it all was; my fingerprints, the paper, the smoke, the back stairs, the lanky metal lamp, the noise of the neighbor’s leaky faucet, and the telephone. All lonely and self-absorbed, paranoid and expectant, stationary and observant.
The sky was the soup of the uncertain. The soup of big and monumental, of little specks and illusions we could never grope at or handle, really. This me with a cramped back, tense muscles, tired from work and from sailing through the machinery, climbing up and down buses, was weary. Weary of listening to magical melodies and surrounding herself with thoughts and niceties and delicious escapisms and awareness and freedom but remaining the glum forlorn firefly on the windowsill. Occasionally fluttering her wings because she saw an equal she recognized as beautiful.
Memory is a heavy library I drag around, tied with a string to the back of my head, pulling me. In it, everything again, again as things: the same, and lonely. Shoelaces, tears, strings, hair, and cups of coffee –the rest is a drunk state. Uproarious jigs of self-recognition.
The cold is the most notorious feeling, the most contradictory and pleasant (it really tickles the stomach). Pleasant in the least passive way, pleasant in the most painful. I remembered the night was cold –cold doesn’t let you forget. It is unlike anything because deep inside cold lies warmth, cold is consciousness of insufficiency of warmth, it is mourning. It is like the warmth of the womb because it means nothing really, bobbing up down and around, not yet born, inside the visceral tissues of another person, a person you’re a little twig of but who is not you, and will not be you nor with you for the rest of your life. Cold is memories of wafts of your mothers perfume when you fell asleep on her bosom the times she took you to jazz night at the local restaurant. Or the mountains, or the sea… anything big and majestic.
When I was a little child I always colored the sky grey. Perhaps it was a more realistic color, or perhaps it weighed chromatically less heavily on the visual balance of the page. Blue skies are dopamine –vital, exquisite, and miraculous, but I always found grey more honest. Poignancy is present only in the green of leaves and the overbearing intensity of sunlight. The city is a divine wasteland.
I shut my eyes harder than ever, trying desperately not to see, willing the sky to rain. I despised this pathetic self-pity and exposure, predictable and laughable games with nature and inanimate objects that cannot even scoff at my complex egotism, at my contradictory projection towards the outside world that establishes (to later destroy) hungry bonds with everything… I should probably just go to sleep.
This is what happens when the doorman doesn’t meet your eye in the morning, and your mother yells at you because you forgot to pick up the pound cake for the dinner party, and your boss is late again with the payment, and love has become an abstract idea placed strategically in children’s books, and kisses are sloppy and vulgar, an sex gropes harder and harder for something unobtainable, and your feet hurt so much from walking in those sad shoes you just can’t let go of, and you can’t sleep, and the television lulls dulls and depresses you, and you can’t concentrate on a book…
And you end up drifting into numb dry slumber in an awkward position on the sinister stairs, and the neighbor complains the next day.

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