01.14.01 - 07:29:50

hestia.

you are witnessing a start.

i won't accept anything that isn't all i want.

.....the love affair with sunsets continues. this one took up half the goddamned horizon, half the fucking sky - some burning rust color at the heart of it, teasing me from a distance and only occasionally visible. and the colors crawled upward in such familiar gradations, a way between light and blue for the sky, and they met and melted with the faintest of greens, elusive as the taste of a tear.

i don't know the last time i really cried, but a tear is like a snowflake. in itself, so small that it might not exist. but there's something. they curl on the tip of your tongue full of everything they mean - whatever that is. sadness is more than a word. and happiness more than a feeling. ache more than a hole in your gut. the rainbow colors of skin in slanting sunlight. or something.

it took up half the sky, it swallowed half the horizon, this disaster of color i could swallow and pretend it was my fear, and exhale it all into a slowing mist. i had the window down, even though it was so cold i was shivering, so i could be closer, so i wouldn't have melted and reformed sand between me and forever. i think best when i'm driving. write best when i'm thinking. now i'm inside my head again, in my head in a room with walls and a ceiling that is keeping me from the stars.

i adore orion. so bright i can see it from the parking lot even with the buzzing safety light on. he's in the middle of the night sky, mid-evening, with his belt and his sword and his bucket of breaking dreams. when i was eight i found a 'constellation' that looked like a milk carton. and to be sure, i can see the shape of a water dipper in the big and little, but where's the poetry in that? i don't see a bear, though now in my mind's eye i can see them, the bears. ursa.

it went on for more than an hour, the slow creep of night, and the interstate follows the high part of a wide valley formed by a prehistoric river so you have this broad vista, a distant wall of low hills, and the last dregs of the sun bleeding over the edges, still trying to escape from the west's confinement. and elsewhere the sun is shining, bright and promising in the southwest. and elsewhere no one knows that you sky is on fire, and there is a war, and a tangible silver-filled dark is winning, and you're breathing frigid air as if you could drink it, get drunk on it, with the windows down, and shivering, with the heater turned up full blast.

i want to go somewhere else, 'never wanna leave when it's all over. never wanna leave when it's time to go' someplace else where i can walk outside and see the world spread out before me like a gift, and everything's more tangible than this.

or something. i want the coast. i want a coastal town. i feel the miles and miles and miles of rock between me and the ocean and i feel claustrophobic, like there are ants crawling over my picnic spread and they crawl and crawl and i can't breathe the wind, because it doesn't come from something empty and vast and full, shining silver-drenched greyed river to a distant shore.

i don't know why i can't talk to anyone. i don't know why i become all self-conscious and disturbed and confused and i should be over all this adolescent angst by now, shouldn't i.

but i know, i guess. even if i don't want to know. so many things i don't want to know.

i'm always afraid that people are patronizing me. i have such odd passions that i feel like apologizing for almost anything that comes outta my mouth and i don't want to apologize for anything, at all, but it's there. some thick goddamned boulder in my throat. i try to be clever and pithy, but the words flee when i try to form them, no matter what.

maybe i'm a platonist. there are some shapes. some ineffable (god, i love that word.) indefinable shapes that reappear and reappear and reappear and we only sometimes recognize the pattern, because we're ants crawling over an elephant. we only know a curve here, a wrinkle there. we don't see the rump and the ass and the trunk and the tusks.

it's true. our biggest client manufactures railroad cars. another one windows. another one rubber. another one molten steel and one 9000 pound superheated ingot took off a man's leg last week. can you imagine some essential, unconsidered part of yourself suddenly gone?

i think some essential, unconsidered part of me is gone, missing, embryonic, neverformed. i only tonight learned when to add liquid fabric softener to a washing machine, and to be honest? i guessed. i think i guessed right, i always used the ball, but i hope i figured it out. i considered asking someone, but considering the looks i got when the dryers misfunctioned.

these men manufacture railroad cars. big things of steel and rivets and welded bits you wouldn't even understand unless you saw the whole process laid out in a tedious black and white movie. and they make 40,000-50,000 dollars/year for welding rivets, but ask them what they do and they cannot tell you, apart from the particulars. it's true.

they don't know.

they're ants crawling over an elephant. so'm i.

when i take off on a plane from here, i'm always staggered by the closeness of the hills, the narrowness of the valleys, the steepness and isolation of it all. we stick to the valleys, here. the arteries and the interstate. in my mind there are little ribbons connecting it all, the rivers and interstates, the two lane roads with which i am familiar.

beyond that everything is a blur. but wider than the sky makes it seem.

i bet no one will ever read all this and know what i'm feeling right now.

but i'm stunned. airport. airplane, and the neat folds of greenery into which we have tucked ourselves. i'm an ant on an elephant too. i don't even know what i'm doing here.

i want more spaces. more than five choices for out-to-dinner. more from me. i don't have the patience, usually, for patterns, but i find them slowly opening, like fascinating, intricate and hidden flowers.

did you know that, when i was a child, i lived a block from here?

someone else sleeps in my room, now, and i don't know whom it could be. i worried about fire (how would i get out?) and nuclear war (on snowdrenched and clouded nights when the city lights and the clouds and the snow reflected back at each other and the nightsky glowed orange).

and the map in my head didn't fit the real map of the world. it didn't. i couldn't get my mind around the fact that south was that way and north the other. i turned them round, but i don't know why. this neighborhood's called the southside. and i still turned them round in my head. but tonight, i felt the map of the world falling over my perception of it like a fine, acurate, floating tissue. a skim of snow upon the earth. there is still snow on some northern slopes. it startled me, returning. i didn't notice it, going. the movement of the milky way is betraying my mind.

i don't know. it feels right now, but i remember when it felt wrong. maybe i just believed that the park should be north, the river south. we had it all turned 'round the wrong way.

if you were here i'd cry in your arms, and tell you about the windows on the porch only on the west side, because the wind comes from the west, and i never understood why it mattered, because we were in the middle of the block, and there were three other houses between us and the wind and the street.

i thought tonight that i let go of something, but i'm the sort of person who buys wine because the bottle would make a nice vase if you soaked the glass in hot water and took off the labels, so i don't think you'd believe me. i don't know to whom i speak. i suspect no one except some idealized me. i don't think anyone else would put up with this ramble, but is that my diffidence?

and i wish it were always sunset.

and i wish the sun was always in my eyes. and i don't like the walls, that keep me from orion, who has suffered enough alone in the sky with a scorpion at his back. one time i saw the whole of the scorpion, not as an astronomer, but as a believer. saw it coiled across the sky and chasing you.

where do we find these poisons? how does my heart beat? how can so much be contained in words that mean something else to anyone who might read this?

because you don't know where i am.

because i am elusive.

because i have drawers full of clean underwear and unused stockings and i feel the patterns exploding in my head like perfect fractals but even with those i'm crawling over them like an ant over an elephant. or an eel. or a tree who is my whole world in a forest that is its whole world beneath a sky that is its whole word bounded by a neverending horizon that is its whole world and there are worlds i'll never touch.

and worlds inside me.

and worlds beyond me. and systems and universes and things i'll never know because even infinite is so fucking limited.

and you know what? with foreign-language films i prefer subtitles to dubbing, so i can hear the actor speak.

and i'm crying now.

but i'm not sad. or maybe i am.

and i tasted my tear. and you'll never know the salt-laden moisture of that tear.

and i want to tell you.

whoever you are.