12.16.00 - 23:20:39

i dreamt that Erica was the weatherman, and she was telling me about the frost, and the way the frost bends the blades of grass. if the wind is from the west, and someone else's breath is upon the curve of it, all the grass bends east, toward Mecca, on just your breath.

on mine. someone is always east of you. someone else is always breathing the breath you exhale like poison, some invisible unusable poison of CO2 molecules moving faster with the stolen heat of your body, your energy drained and bled into the wind.

it is raining right now, but i am listening to beethoven, a piano sonata, but not the one you're thinking of. and so the rain is splattering cold across the pavement and my breath is seeping out beneath the doorjam, where the wood is splintered and broken, where my feet have scrapped and scuffed the linoleum and where my hands, reluctant, have rested on the lintle before i flung myself into the world i dislike. or that dislikes me. or that inspires this sick gouting of stomach-churning fear.

in forty minutes, someone is picking me up. i don't have my dress on yet. i don't want to walk in the rain and poisoned breath and cold skyacid in those shoes, which made me happy when i bought them, but which only hurt my feet. i have too much stuff and not enough dreams, or too many dreams, and not enough realities. i don't know why i can't just live in my head, someplace where we can make the grand and absurd gestures of characters in a novel.

i want to be more than i am, and i don't know how. i don't trust the whys that rattle in my head like bingo balls in a cage, holding a thousand petty dreams around they stained white circumferences.

if i were rich, right now, i would write a check for some fanciful, ridiculous amount and find someone to whom i might give it.

i don't have my dress on, but my skin is sweet and low with the subversive scent of my favorite lotion, which i rarely wear, and i have crystal butterflies for my hair, but i'm still unhappy. i can't touch this and i can't talk to you or anyone and the rain is the curtain of slanting cold light shrouding my eyes. the light goes laser and smeared, like a jackson pollock original, or one of those city at night photographs that have been spun wild until all rude, base distinction is lost to a smear of color.

i want to be able to paint. something, anything, except i lack the patience and dedication for anything. i lack the patience and dedication to keep myself smiling. i would like to believe in god.

does the weatherman believe in god? what a terrible, monotonous, febrile job, to try to entertain by telling everyone what they can see from their windows, should they dare to look out. but you must make them look at you instead, and you must tell them about the rain as if they cannot hear it. you must drown the rain with your vociferous voice with the brittle, aggressive pretense that anything you say matters. does god believe in the weatherman?

if i believed in god, i could pray, and feel confident that someone can hear the quiet interior voice that is mine only, that usually comforts me, amuses me, holds me sane and together but now only makes me lonely, swelling to stick in my throat whenever i look at someone else, that arches and aches for inadequate words. i wonder if anyone will see this, these scribbled sigils born on bits of light and reduced to merely something/nothing across the horrid collection of wires that tangle us until we choke on all those possible words that cannot be said because we have lost them. or never had them.

i am drinking coffee, heavily laced with half and half, which feels round and full upon my tongue, from a mug that is wider at the bottom, and narrows just before opening again. green stoneware, flecked with a midnight blue. the inside is the same blue stoneware as the plates neatly stacked in the cabinets. the wide round bowls i use more than plates. the saucers for the other mugs, on which i put my toast. when i make toast.

my hands are so soft, but my cheeks are burning, and i can only touch myself through my skin, see myself as a frame around the corners of my eyes. i do not even notice the glasses unless i think of them, the metal frames oblong, a sort of burnished bronze. but if i take them off my vision will go fuzzy and hazed, though that is how i truly see the world, without augmentation. and i wonder if that means that that is how the world really looks. should look. is supposed to look.

maybe i can squint into the sun and feel fire on my retinas.

i let things happen. my hands are soft, and there is a faint and subtle perfume upon my skin. and i wish i believed in god, so i could dream that someone can hear inside me. i can see my veins through the skin of my wrist, and the bracelets i wear, with their catseye stones, hide the thin white traceries of scars. once upon a time i pretended i found them romantic. now they just make me ill.

but i don't do anything. that's the lie of it, some illusion of triumph. the victory of platitudes. the myth of fingerprints. and that is why i can say nothing. because no one can hear. and i hate that i find that lovely, too.

i hate the way it makes me seethe with some strange, sadsweet wonder, as the dry air in here wicks the showerwet from my hair, and the strands resolve themselves before my eyes, dark and soft and subtly rainbow, individual and myriad. myriad and alone.