Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The Other Side of Silence


"My version of falling in love is borderline psychotic. Should be avoided at all costs. Get obsessed. Can't fall in love and function at the same time. All-consuming. Tunnel vision. Euphoric."

And there's so much you feel and so much you want to say, but where do you begin?

It's all consuming. Tunnel vision. No hope. No help. No nothing. I'm drowning and flying, feet kicking, dirt in the air, trying to shovel through him, trying to move through me.

The difficulty is that he's with me all the time, even when I'm alone. The absence of him is heavier than the presence of most other people. It's never been like this before. It happened, ripping the skin off me, a splinter in my side, breath on my neck that wakes me in the night.

We're even together in my dreams.

And I can't write how I used to. My brain moves slowly, like a synchronised swimmer off-time. No, go left. No, dive deeper. Wait, what now? Turn, move, keep moving. Don't give in. Don't you dare give in.

But I already have. It makes me silent. There's something in this silence, the other side of it, something I don't like and want to go away.

"I like your vulnerability."

"I don't."

I know it's good to show it. I know it's good for him to see. Maybe that's what scares me, that he sees all of it, everything, all the things I don't like. He sees my make-up all over my face in the morning. He sees my hair, matted. He sees the jobs I don't get. He sees that auditions that go badly. He sees the book I'm struggling with, the stories I can't tell, the quiet I don't like.

Intimacy, by definition, is synonymous with familiarity. I don't want him to be familiar with things that I wish didn't exist.

"Do you ever think I'm ugly?"

"No."

"Never? Not even sometimes?"

"No. Never."

Maybe real beauty doesn't exist without real ugly.

Monday, February 21, 2011


Don't look back now.

Monday, February 7, 2011


Are you always looking at something through a lens?

Mirror images are never exact. We never see ourselves, not how we actually are. We'll never be able to. You can walk through films or stick in a photo, frozen, but you'll never have a the luxury of looking at yourself. Not like a third and separate party looks at you.

Are people just shadows of your own thoughts of them? Where does the truth lie when everything's passes through a filter? How does this look from the outside?

I don't know why I'm so interested in objectivity. The premium I place on how things look to other people is higher than anything else and I know that's stupid.

Because when does anyone see anything for what it really is?

Saturday, February 5, 2011


What you see here, what you say here, let it stay here when you leave here.

Thursday, February 3, 2011



He thought she was asking for herself.

In reality, she was asking for him. Old as she was, she still missed her Daddy sometimes. Letting him talk reminded her of a time when things were simpler, when life was easier, when hearts hadn’t been broken. He just didn’t understand, she told herself.

"Did you think it would happen like this?"

He brought his hand up, and almost put it on her shoulder. Frightened by her sudden display of emotion, scared it might inspire the same in himself, he made a fist. It hung in the air, like an ornament on a Christmas tree.

He never could swim the tide.

Playground Love


There is something strange and lonely about beautiful people. Beautiful people that are beautiful without work, without effort. It’s something given.

With him, she could tell it never really felt like his to begin with. In his mind, and in his body, he was still the little boy that talked too much, the little boy that was too smart, the little boy whose brother was his best friend.

She kept seeing him as a teenage boy, sitting in class. He looked the same but fundamentally different, the youngness seeped through every part of him. He'd hidden that youngness now. She saw a giant cloud of silence that he wore like a cape.

Sometimes, when they sat at breakfast, that tremendous silence fell over her like weather. It was a silence she'd never known before. She watched his lips move, his smile, his teeth, the conductor at a noiseless opera scored by the first real thing, ever.

"You're the smartest person I've ever met."

She wasn't stupid, either, just disconnected. The silence had meaning. It mattered. She knew it.

Her life was about to change.

Animal


I see myself in people so they see themselves in me. I get swept up. I am taken by their brooms, lost in their dust and pushed into their corners.

"Take me and push me around. It's okay. I want to. I like the floor."

Before, I never trusted happiness. I was always convinced it would go away, that I couldn't get too comfortable, that it wouldn't be there for me when I needed it. I never lay in what I loved because I wanted it too much. I didn't know that it wanted me, too.

“It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time”

In the darkness, there are pangs of nostalgia for things I thought I had. Once, it mattered, it happened, with great force. Now, it's gone. I can't remember any of it. I don't know where it went. Stuck in a vacuum of what I thought I knew once. Hidden is some place, worn like glasses, vision shifting.

"Dad, do you think the world is better now than before?"

He looked away.

"I think it's coalesced. There's more good and more bad. What's peculiar is that you can't separate the two. It's a gel."

I am surprised not that things changed, but that things became so different and so quickly. I look back at the girl I used to be and I don't know her. My friend Sarah is beautiful, especially lit by candlelight.

"Do you feel like it doesn't matter?" I asked her. "Things are so important in the present, the moment starts disappearing as soon as it ends. You remember less and less, and eventually you're left with nothing. So, nothing really matters, not so much. There's something beautiful and freeing in that."

Memory is deceptive because it's coloured by today's events, Einstein said that.

I guess we all have our time machines. Mine's defective. I can't travel backwards with any confidence. What I remember jumps in front of me, like a child crossing the street too quick, like a sword cutting air, like scissors through hair. It hurts and I don't know why because I don't want to go back.

"For time is the longest distance between two places."