long years, even, when I've been obsessed with this screen. Even away visiting friends and family, I'd yearn for the anonymity of placing words here to wrap up all the stupid pivotal crushing moments caught in my head like a faulty lock on the door of an old house. I could come up with theories. Explain the ways we all move in and out of these lives like body maps of the places and experiences we occupy trying in our own desperate measures to pull the edges tighter and to stitch closed the sometimes empty invisible spaces that remain. Checking for email messages from ghosts. Clicking myself into send and receive numbgloriousness. But it's the trick that most people who study any kind of theory can do. Find a proof and write it down. To render yourself and your places and your own invisible threats--attempting to take you down and out--all justified and evidential. Then, the world changed. And I started sitting in front of this screen less often. I started asking for more from this life. And got it. I'm not quitting this space. I'm not changing all that much. I'm just full up tired of tuning in and turning off. I'm going to a place where there is skin and ocean. Laughter. I'm going home. Washed in the realization that as people we rarely do alter ourselves in great measure, but that sometimes when we're really lucky and when we're least expecting it the world suddenly shifts and positions us in an entirely new concept. So that all the powers of our previously held definitions no longer apply. And we must learn to eat and breathe and speak again with new tongues and new names. I've never felt so changed and so the same ever before in my life. And for the next week I'll likely be unplugged. Wrapped up in the blankets of the desire for life and love and the sweet smell of a wood-burning stove.

Peace and love to you all.

Ceaset screams into the dead expanse of his face like the contradiction of vast sunny blue winter skies. Noises filled with the scent of strong coffee and the cries of exotic birds. These are no longer words. She claims. Only guttural throaty interpretations of the way knives feel slicing open the soft bellies of skin. Or wrenching hair from a scalp. Until her sounds stop too much like eyes cried useless and dry. He's gone now. And she can only just write him letters in a book she keeps hidden in the drawer with the take-away menus and chop sticks.

is that i do, now, have to admit to myself that although it's a year early, i really am actually writing my dissertation. and i can't just keep talking about it and thinking about it and telling people about my really great plans and ideas. [panic] i actually have to start writing this thing now. i have to say something. and i'm totally freaked out.

where i've lost touch with the world and i'm going to start spiraling out of control and i probably won't be able to make it stop until it wants to be over because the handwriting in my journal goes from clean and clear to a scrawling incomprehensible mess. i can't even make out some of the things i wrote last night. and on top of it all, i took the pen and frantically struck it all out with huge sweeping non-linear strokes. my hand trying so hard that the impressions show on the next page.

for automatically updating my computer with some kind of security feature last night that restarted my computer without my permission and which now means that all the work i did for this paper* that i'm writing in the file that i left open is now completely gone.

*it's only just work on a fucking dissertation chapter. don't know why i'd be at all sore about it.

Predilection

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Disappointed

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Dissertation

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Sandwich

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red high-heeled boots
tattoo

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I don't have it in me. To say that I wanted you to kiss me when you came home from work. To not ruin everything. Like I do. Always do. But I already did. Like that night at I made everything wild. And slept on the floor the bathroom. Just out of reach of reality. The truth really remains.

for all the fantastic people who have loved me this far around

[re]vision can be a good cathartic thing

and my only regret is that, ever, i wasn't enough of what i always wanted to be of happiness and consistency and the way the word promise never ever falls out of the clutched palm of the hand.

alone is important.
and i need to know it.
like the way the fabric of the skin of love can make it easier to sleep
hard
through the unpredictable movements of the night.

i don't wish i were different.
not yet.
anyway.

She doesn't really like drugs anymore. Not the way she did when she was still a kid and every night around 9:30 when she got off of work she'd drive the 10 minutes to Owen's and they'd blaze. Savor the exhalation of chemicals into their vital organs. Shoot. Quiet the madness living just underneath the surfaces of their skin. Drop. She's tried to forget all the reasons to fuck things up. The smell of rhododendrons and broken bones. Moved by their smoke. Those nights they burned it down to the ground. And most nights, now, she only just drinks too much. Sometimes, smokes cigarettes until she wants to wretch into the flowerbeds next to the front porch. Mostly, life isn't so bad.

Last night she gets really stoned. For old times. Sits on the floor of her living room watching the slow dance pattern of the falling Christmas lights. Her smile full of teeth and memory.

i hate the way you made his voice more important to my drums than jesus

stomach grabbing
eyes crying
there's nothing to sick with
coffee
incidentals in between
the last meal i ate
on monday

upside down
and in pencil

i call my real father at work
can hear the clank and pangs of metal and concrete
the oil underneath all the fingernails
men's voices shouting loudly from a distance
almost clear, the smell of freshly cut wood.
i want to tell him that i can't write about these profound violations of war
and all the mad moments locked up underneath his skin
that make him drink too much beer
to satiate the dead bodies keeping him up through the night
that make him mean, sometimes.

i call my real father at work
which is something rare and slightly violating
and i sob into the skin of my right bicep
and try to pretend everything is okay
i say, i love you and i miss you.
and he acts gruff and unsure and pleased when he calls me his baby, and says he loves me and misses me, too.

i realize tonight, now, here in this office with the cold night sky seeping in through the cracks of my windows and smelling of pine needles--eyes sore with the love i can feel coming through all the motions of adorations surrounding me--that i am one miserable woman. No. that isn't even quite enough. or perhaps it's just simpler than i can allow my desire for words and images and senses to swirl themselves into something that sounds much prettier than:
i have no idea how to be happy.

and i'm completely freaked out.

here are the pieces (mostly excerpts) that, with help, i've decided to read:
I used to not believe in souls and mates
Sophic Cynocephali
[A piece I've never posted]
It all started with that commercial sized jar of peanut butter
Amemiko learned about India ink from Ala and Tenari
"Maybe I'm lucky," she thinks to herself.

thanks to david for his fine words of wisdom and for always knowing where i am

thanks to ted for the constant support and love he provides, even from another world away. [and roosters]

thanks to jeff for listening to me alternately crying about how much of a fool i'm going to make of myself and then reading these pieces over and over again.

i feel like these deserve more revision before reading them to a room full of people who make their lives as creative writers. but, eh. what cha gonna do?

thanks mostly to Jess for providing me with an idea that got some of my ideas out.

wish me luck!