01.18.01 - 10:04:07

i don't even know what to say, but i suppose this is the only place to say it, yeah? there's that avoidance of conflict thing that makes me want to run and hide beneath something. close my eyes and no one will hate me anymore. shut them so tight that the world is gone and i can create it all from inside, like a diamond crushed from mere carbon into the hardest substance in the world.

maybe i don't have a sense of proportion. maybe i should not have had those three cosmopolitans tonight. maybe i should just learn to shatter whatever it is that makes me. maybe i should sing around people, and smile, maybe nothing should ever hurt me.

we have a case. a will dispute. forty million dollars at stake. all based on the interpretation of a semicolon, and the definitions of dependent and independent clauses.

i think i'm a dependent clause.

and someone asked me tonight why the possessive form of it does not have an apostrophe. like, the reason its dog doesn't have an apostrophe, because she wanted to tell the writer whose work she was editing for the lit mag why and wherefore she made those changes.

and there's no reason. there's no logical reason, or there is, but i couldn't articulate it, whatever it is. my analogies fell flat. and there are millions of people who believe that the

you think there's a heaven where some screams have gone? years go by will i still be waiting for somebody else to understand? years go by when i'm stripped of my beauty and the orange glass waiting in my hand? years go by and i choke on my tears until finally there's nothing left.

i wish there was someplace else to go, here. we skipped chi-chi's because of that diet bet, and the fried foods, but the alcohol never really entered the equation. so dinner was more expensive than we dreamed and i ended up putting it on my credit card and even now i'm paying interest on it.

silent all these years, except i don't even know what to say?

and my secretary had a stack of filing but she was sitting there surfing the net. i mean a stack, an enormous stack, and she was looking up a 40,000 truck her boyfriend (Dave, let's remember his name) said she should have.

so i can stare at an aquarium or a sky and be transported and still be hurting. and the sky is so close but i cannot ever touch it. it's just another trope, another indication of what i cannot really ever have, or maybe an illusion i cherish as fine and sweet as any other dream i don't create or make or force.

and i want to be more than i am. i want to be brave and sweet and strong. i want someone, somewhere, to remember my smile and have it give them strength, as if it were a star hot and high and untouchable in the sky, shorthand for what we can be.

but i'm not. not like anyone else. just like everyone else.

i'm going to ireland next fall, to sing. and there should be more to land than land, but i don't really know if i'll go. i wish and i hate that i wish. i say and i hate that i say.

smile and think of england. that was victorian sex advice. but england wasn't anything. england was killing people and some colonialist manifest destiny. but people believed in it, somehow. i'm not even sure, right now, what they believed. if they knew the possibility of flight.

but of course they did, maybe. there's nothing new under the sun, is there? and i have a healthy sense of irony, self-deprecatory sense of the world passing away from me even as i try to grab it. or maybe it's (it is, mind you. not possessive, a contraction, and therefore a different case from the possessive) unhealthy. someone said if i don't say anything, i deserve what i get. but maybe it's (contraction again. shorthand, because i don't want to type out the whole thing, because i think verbally and not literally) not.

someone says this. someone says that. and i'm locked inside this world view and i cannot leave, except when some fire catches me unaware. and leaves me breathless but still breathing, and i wonder at the hands and the breath and the fall of hair over someone's eyes, and how i'm illimitably different, and how i'm only merely the same. and how everything folds so neatly.

and how sometimes i want to curl up in someone's arms and show them everything.

but i'm afraid of what they'll see.