Photo by SliceofNYC[/add_caption_link]


we aren’t all doomed amateur parachute inventors. we aren’t all bits of the tree of the toothpick that killed sherwood anderson. we aren’t cloak-on-draco throwers or wearers of cowboy boots in winter. we aren’t tennessee williams’s tear-flavored water spilling down his choking-on-us throat. i’m seriously concerned you still feel bad about that.

nor are we the water tchaikovsky didn’t boil during a boil-the-water scare somewhere in russia a century ago. that really wasn’t your fault, ok, that was totally his decision, the water was right there, labeled, “DON’T DRINK, KILLER INFECTIOUS DISEASE HAZARD,” and he picked it up and downed the whole thing.

this is a story from trekkies: leonard nimoy had a cold and had to leave a trek convention before he could say his things about acting in that show that time, and those movies- what a terrible disappointment to all of those fans, right? right? they’d traveled so far to see him and all he did was sip a glass of ice water and cough and look pale and so on? well the m.c. got up on the stage and said, “leonard couldn’t stay to speak for us today, he wasn’t feeling well,” or something, and somehow, christ almight knows how they thought to do it, but his glass of ice water got auctioned off for however much a glass of plague went for in those days, and the guy who won it ran- walking would not suffice, no- up to the glass and picked ip and downed the whole thing.

we aren’t dostoevsky’s pen, fallen under his desk. we aren’t pretty and unique snowflakes, holding and fucking each other with our refracted, re-refracted lights, glistening on our still, sad tolstoy’s frozen beard, OK? so you can just get over that.

get over being the nurse who brought chekhov his champagne, her kids before and during and after she told them that story, the vintner, the vintner’s grape pickers, the grapes, the parents of the grapes. get over it, OK? because i am trying so hard. sometimes i come this fucking close to putting the whole column in italics and in swears just to give those gorgeous tart medullas that shiver. you know the shiver.

i almost do these things but don’t. i stop when i remember either what i’m not or what i’m going to be. i have aspirations, yes. i want one day to be the first hole in your jeans, the one on your strong leg. i want to really understand why you use that leg more. i want to be the tiny triangle between your thumb and nail and blood orange, the part that actually does the peeling.

rhythm isn’t the sound of the drums but the space between the sound of the drums.

i want to be the space of forgetting. i want to be the hug all things get when people no longer keep them in mind. where their orange peels went, how much time they have to listen to the song which most reminds them of chidhood before their batteries run out, i don’t mean that metaphorically, i want to carry it all, and all of it unknown, all of it unknowing, until i have it all, and even the act of forgetting itself is forgotten. and then to flip its skin back to the outside and throw it out of the cage in my chest, all squirming and swimming and quiet.

it’s my birthday in a couple of weeks and i still haven’t drafted my list from last year.