whine like native pablo neruda needles the spine of your eyelashes when your tired lips become the sweater i wear in the dark cold corners the pages familiar like the weight of his hands on wrists when i cut the water the shower ^T madness liquid sunshine seeps cracks for window panes shuddering
We cross paths randomly. Walking to and from the gym. In the 10th street car park. 3 blocks from our house. I raise my arms above my head when I see his orange stocking cap fuzzing without my glasses around the corner. Open and close my fists like a three year old wanting to be picked up. He hugs me breathless until I wriggle free to run around him in circles shouting British men want to make me pregnant over and over again until he stops asking what I mean. My laughter rolling like red rubber recess balls around us. I stand still and look into his face, my left eye closed against the sun shouting over his shoulders and stare. The long mean way I have. Full of eyes and lips I've never quite grown into. Too many teeth. He shakes his smile and kisses me afternoon sunlight. All the way home.
I hope you had a good time in Vegas. The connection wasn't good. Your voice coming through like fist fulls of hair. Intermittently painful. I only wanted to wish you a happy birthday. And when we hung up the line, I didn't wonder when you'd call back for me. Broken lines and promises. I'm not sad anymore when you neglect to ask me who I am. I'm pretty sure, these days, I hardly even know for sure. I used to know that I was one girl who didn't need you. Didn't need anything from anyone. At least there was that. To rely on. Like the weight of pennies on the tongue or the smell of rain at home. That isn't enough. Anymore. There is only just this residual sadness. Like the time you forgot to pick me up from school. Or the way the car doors rattled the same way every time we rode in the car after the time you told me the dog died. All those years I never believed you were real. The way sadness sticks into me as if all of my broken promises and yours were glass. Nothing came back. And I still stand under the porch lamp, nights, waiting for the engine's sound of a car you haven't owned since I was eight. In a memory that probably never existed, if I pushed it hard enough. Can't you see, Poppy, how it all falls apart? How every moment I try to draw you into collapses. And I'm left clutching my chest wondering when it will get easier to breathe. When I won't be so afraid that my eyes are your eyes and my hands get itchy at night, too.
No one is going to figure this out. She thinks. As she slides her pink soles across the cool lawn turning seasons. A glass marble eye. She rolls the world along her smooth surface unending. Breakable. If fishes had wishes. The words like summer air. Mosquito brains. She can't remember the rest of the rhyme. And when she speaks the word into the space just outside herself. She starts at the sound of her own voice. A tongue tricking ice for the first time. Her mouth moves for more. There's a hole, she knows. Just by a tree on the other side of the city. Where she a saw a kitten once. A tangerine peel on a pile of leaves. Where she echoes animal sounds into a place without light. Wild. Without witnesses.
Is anyone getting tired of these yet?
Took a walk and jabbed on the phone to my mother about nothing for an hour. Stopped at the Jewish bakery to find that they didn't have any bread left. Bought a bottle of dry Marsala wine (for cooking, but any bets I drink most of it?) and some Creme de Cacao (to take to a friend's house tonight for mixing with coffee and vodka, but I begged out and instead stayed home to make dinner and beg for sex)(any bets I'll drink most of it?) on the way home and listened to some new music from an old friend on the headphones.
I probably walked about 3 miles, total. Which isn't a lot, and I wasn't really all that determined.
qualifications
me: yeah, but the last time we talked about this i was drunk and laying on the floor of your car
him: you mean tuesday, right?
me: [pause] right
[ . . .]
in the middle of a whole thing about how he can't seem to "figure me out"
me: if i were any more real -- you'd have absolutely no idea what to do with me
him: you really are the strangest person i've ever met
i just smile. in the awkward crooked way i have of saying things without words. sip cold coffee and stare out the window at a city that's never going to be any more familiar. and i always thought that one day i'd grow out of this.
this morning on my sunshine porch. i catch the imagined sound of your voice in my throat. hold the smiles on my lips. sure. like whispered midnight secrets between friends.
Same 30 minute circuit training as Monday (likely with slight rep variation).
without rest
30 minutes, eliptical trainer, 2.5 miles
without rest
30 minutes, stationary bike, 6.5 miles
cool down, 10 minute walk home
When I try to catch the name of you in my head. Pin you down dimensional. Only the pattern pouring sunshine through leaves onto the dark surface of the asphalt below the open windows of my cool morning room. Makes you momentary stick. Until the wind blows. And the trains run on rails. The way your laugh licks my ears like midnight tongues. Designs to make you up like bed sheets. The haunt of this house as I hunt you. Naked toes to metronome floors. To the all-day sounds of the trains running on rails. When you're gone. And I stalk waking hours for ways to name the name of you in my head. Distanced and waning. The way the trains do. All day long.
[I only had about an hour here to work with.]
3 miles, stationary bike, 13 minutes
1 minute for 1 set each.
alternating to 1 minute on the stationary bike between each station.
Tricep Extension -- 15x30
Nautilus Abdominal -- 13x50
Arm Curl -- 18x30
Lateral Raise -- 18x30
Flys -- 15x15
Rowing -- 18x40
Leg Extension -- 18x40
Shoulder Press -- 14x30
Leg Curl -- 18x40
Lateral Pulldown -- 18x30
Leg Press -- 18x80
Chest Press -- 18x30
[Where the heck is Amy?]
