8.28.2008
it coulda killed me.
8.06.2008
out of the mouths of... craig thompson's friends
I'm at work catching up on some blogs I've been out of touch with recently...Just read this post on beloved graphic novelist Craig Thompson's blog with a sketchbook page quoting a conversation with a friend of his. His friend remarks:
"right now, in this world, to love is easy but to let someone else love you is difficult, because you have to show your weaknesses and stop being scared they'll eat you.
Truest.
"right now, in this world, to love is easy but to let someone else love you is difficult, because you have to show your weaknesses and stop being scared they'll eat you.
Truest.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting
6.02.2008
Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Four
Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.
Rissa and Braedyn, from Rissa's flickr
Moms that I know have a lot to live up to, because my mom is a singularly spectacular human being who imbues everyone she meets with her infectious love and kindness, patience, creativity, and awe. I was the luckiest girl in the world and most people can't compare. But I lived with another mom -- and kiddo -- for the past two years, up until a couple months ago, and she has managed to exceed my expectations every single day I have known her. As it turns out, Rissa's son is the luckiest person I know, tied with myself. His mom pours an unreal amount of unselfish love his way and remains beautiful and funny and sharp and smart and interesting in the process, setting the best possible example for adulthood that a boy could have. She's lucky too, because Braedyn is an exceptional small person who is equally excited to talk to anyone who walks into his world about anything from The Karate Kid to scorpions. Watching them together sometimes will make you insufferably jealous because they have a bond that is so far above and beyond what most of us experience in our every day lives. It's complex, sure, but at the same time it isn't. It's the kind of bond that defines the word family -- more broadly than just blood, because they're both in mine. Together, they're an unstoppable example of the beauty of the relationships you don't have to question. Unconditional is the word I'm looking for.
Entry Way Song - Bright Eyes from the Amos House compilation.
Rissa and Braedyn, from Rissa's flickr
Moms that I know have a lot to live up to, because my mom is a singularly spectacular human being who imbues everyone she meets with her infectious love and kindness, patience, creativity, and awe. I was the luckiest girl in the world and most people can't compare. But I lived with another mom -- and kiddo -- for the past two years, up until a couple months ago, and she has managed to exceed my expectations every single day I have known her. As it turns out, Rissa's son is the luckiest person I know, tied with myself. His mom pours an unreal amount of unselfish love his way and remains beautiful and funny and sharp and smart and interesting in the process, setting the best possible example for adulthood that a boy could have. She's lucky too, because Braedyn is an exceptional small person who is equally excited to talk to anyone who walks into his world about anything from The Karate Kid to scorpions. Watching them together sometimes will make you insufferably jealous because they have a bond that is so far above and beyond what most of us experience in our every day lives. It's complex, sure, but at the same time it isn't. It's the kind of bond that defines the word family -- more broadly than just blood, because they're both in mine. Together, they're an unstoppable example of the beauty of the relationships you don't have to question. Unconditional is the word I'm looking for.
Entry Way Song - Bright Eyes from the Amos House compilation.
Labels: love, lovedones, miniaturesoundtracks, music
5.28.2008
I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality
Anais Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller:
"You are right, in one sense, when you speak of honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.
And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain in engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.
This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won't do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like a blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.
What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you to me. I could stuff my ears ad it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.
I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it -- you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.
'Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.'
You keep your promise.
Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel that we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat?
You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry's whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do."
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting
5.27.2008
Naked: I've forgotten.
Persimmons
by Li Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
by Li Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting, poetry
5.26.2008
Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Three
Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.
Matthew, by me. March 15, 2005 (was it that long ago? really?)
There are photos. Rare ones. That capture a second you remember so perfectly that it's time travel to look at them. The smell and the feeling in your heart and the music you listened to that day, the way your cat acted, the way it was at the airport, and later walking across the town lake bridge, and later still playing pool in a dark place. The sun and the gate of the apartment and the tiny sidewalk in front of it. It's even weirder when a person is like that, where just looking at them brings on a wave of senses and feelings and sounds so intense that you feel like you're drowning in it just to see them. It's weirder still when a person does that to you right at first, when you barely know them, when you've ended up at their apartment and you're stepping on their feet dancing to Sigur Ros. Then a week later you're on a bus crying over a Prince song and everything has been rearranged. The world feels like a tetris cube in and after those precious moments. You just turned a corner you didn't know was there. Suddenly, there's a whole side of red! And then, the moment or the week or the person is gone and you flip the cube over and realize the other side isn't matching at all, and you have to start over again.
When those times happen, you lose your sense of time and space but grab on tightly to everything else in the world -- the wooden attic, the shoulders, the way the words sound like 'it's you' even though they're actually in a foreign language, the people outside and the memories wrapped up in them, the tiny pieces of skin you're biting off of the inside of your lower lip. I posed Matt for this picture and it was a time when I knew as I was pressing the shutter that it would be this beautiful, because I knew it was one of those days and Matthew is one of those people. Before the picture was ever developed in a darkroom, it was stamped behind my eyelids forever. Sometimes, still, when the world is dark and cold and scary, I can close my eyes and be right there, right then. And that, my loves, is forever.
Sometimes In Snows In April : Prince from Parade
Matthew, by me. March 15, 2005 (was it that long ago? really?)
There are photos. Rare ones. That capture a second you remember so perfectly that it's time travel to look at them. The smell and the feeling in your heart and the music you listened to that day, the way your cat acted, the way it was at the airport, and later walking across the town lake bridge, and later still playing pool in a dark place. The sun and the gate of the apartment and the tiny sidewalk in front of it. It's even weirder when a person is like that, where just looking at them brings on a wave of senses and feelings and sounds so intense that you feel like you're drowning in it just to see them. It's weirder still when a person does that to you right at first, when you barely know them, when you've ended up at their apartment and you're stepping on their feet dancing to Sigur Ros. Then a week later you're on a bus crying over a Prince song and everything has been rearranged. The world feels like a tetris cube in and after those precious moments. You just turned a corner you didn't know was there. Suddenly, there's a whole side of red! And then, the moment or the week or the person is gone and you flip the cube over and realize the other side isn't matching at all, and you have to start over again.
When those times happen, you lose your sense of time and space but grab on tightly to everything else in the world -- the wooden attic, the shoulders, the way the words sound like 'it's you' even though they're actually in a foreign language, the people outside and the memories wrapped up in them, the tiny pieces of skin you're biting off of the inside of your lower lip. I posed Matt for this picture and it was a time when I knew as I was pressing the shutter that it would be this beautiful, because I knew it was one of those days and Matthew is one of those people. Before the picture was ever developed in a darkroom, it was stamped behind my eyelids forever. Sometimes, still, when the world is dark and cold and scary, I can close my eyes and be right there, right then. And that, my loves, is forever.
Sometimes In Snows In April : Prince from Parade
Labels: love, lovedones, miniaturesoundtracks, music
5.25.2008
Sorry In Advance
I made this very short, very terrible animated short short as a 'present' for someone last year. I don't see why you shouldn't watch it now and scoff at my (lack of) skillz. To be fair, I completed the project in about two and a half days and drew the frames on 3 x 3 pieces of scrap paper with a black felt tip pen. At least you can't call me a perfectionist!
Oh, life.
Oh, life.
Labels: love, lovedones, youtube
5.24.2008
for you, i'd be happy to repeat myself forever
Poem for the Name Mary
by Mark Cox
Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn't let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees:
the childish, white arms that reach out
through it's eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.
by Mark Cox
Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn't let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees:
the childish, white arms that reach out
through it's eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting, poetry
5.21.2008
Another Short Short Story From The Impossibly Over-Saturated Brain-Heart Of Summer Anne Burton
Beholder:
When I asked David what he saw in me, it wasn’t related to the blindness. I didn’t mean for it to be. I was just fishing for something endearing to hold on to the nights he chose to spend at his apartment, or the weekends he went out of town. Something like “You are a magical girl, Shelly. Your laugh makes my stomach warm,” or “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met and you challenge me in a way that forces me to be a better person,” or “you’re really good with your mouth, it feels like the real thing, it really does.”
But he blinked his white pupils at me when I said it and I immediately clapped my hand over my mouth, not that he could see that. He looked at me, though. He did. It took me awhile to get used to how a blind person can look at you, but trust me – they can. He senses where I am. He never opens his eyes as widely as a normal – I mean, not-blind – person would, but he looks right at me, he does.
He spoke before I could apologize for my wording. “I see in you a fog. I see in you a picture I saw before, of a girl in a book with yellow braids because you told me your hair was long and golden.” At this point I felt a little guilty thinking of my matte, hay-colored curls. It’s easy to exaggerate when a cute blind boy asks you to describe yourself. “I see you surrounded by light but you yourself are always in shadow. I see the outline of you shine so bright that I close my eyes, again, and they never stop closing.”
At this point I really wanted to cut him off because it was starting to feel like a little much and I worried about what he would say next.
“I see you as soft. I see your smell… you smell like cat litter but also like honey and melons, so I see a kitten full of fruit. I see your voice as a kitten too. I see you all the time, whether you’re here or not, because nothing I see ever changes but you are standing behind my eyes, in my head, smiling at me and not-shining all the time. What I see in you, when I look at you – or whatever you want to call it – is a shape that softens every sharp thing.”
And then he asked me what I saw in him and I said, trying to hide the tears in my voice, “I like the way you speak and I like the space between your nose and your mouth and I like your mother,” and by that point I guess it was pretty obvious that I was crying and David had his arms around me. I know he thought I was crying with joy because he had said such nice things to me after I’d said something insensitive, but really I was crying because he had reminded me, once again, as he would every day we were together, that he would never simply say that I was “beautiful.”
When I asked David what he saw in me, it wasn’t related to the blindness. I didn’t mean for it to be. I was just fishing for something endearing to hold on to the nights he chose to spend at his apartment, or the weekends he went out of town. Something like “You are a magical girl, Shelly. Your laugh makes my stomach warm,” or “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met and you challenge me in a way that forces me to be a better person,” or “you’re really good with your mouth, it feels like the real thing, it really does.”
But he blinked his white pupils at me when I said it and I immediately clapped my hand over my mouth, not that he could see that. He looked at me, though. He did. It took me awhile to get used to how a blind person can look at you, but trust me – they can. He senses where I am. He never opens his eyes as widely as a normal – I mean, not-blind – person would, but he looks right at me, he does.
He spoke before I could apologize for my wording. “I see in you a fog. I see in you a picture I saw before, of a girl in a book with yellow braids because you told me your hair was long and golden.” At this point I felt a little guilty thinking of my matte, hay-colored curls. It’s easy to exaggerate when a cute blind boy asks you to describe yourself. “I see you surrounded by light but you yourself are always in shadow. I see the outline of you shine so bright that I close my eyes, again, and they never stop closing.”
At this point I really wanted to cut him off because it was starting to feel like a little much and I worried about what he would say next.
“I see you as soft. I see your smell… you smell like cat litter but also like honey and melons, so I see a kitten full of fruit. I see your voice as a kitten too. I see you all the time, whether you’re here or not, because nothing I see ever changes but you are standing behind my eyes, in my head, smiling at me and not-shining all the time. What I see in you, when I look at you – or whatever you want to call it – is a shape that softens every sharp thing.”
And then he asked me what I saw in him and I said, trying to hide the tears in my voice, “I like the way you speak and I like the space between your nose and your mouth and I like your mother,” and by that point I guess it was pretty obvious that I was crying and David had his arms around me. I know he thought I was crying with joy because he had said such nice things to me after I’d said something insensitive, but really I was crying because he had reminded me, once again, as he would every day we were together, that he would never simply say that I was “beautiful.”
Miniature Soundtracks : Episode One
While I'm in the mood to spend some time with this blog, I'm going to try an experiment in mp3 blogging. A couple times a week, I'll be reflecting an image I like -- probably from my flickr photostream or my flickr favorites -- and choosing a song I think you'll like to match it. Make sense? Let's try.
I was seventeen, Isaac was nineteen. We met at a grocery store where Isaac worked and where I bought strawberry popsicles as a lame excuse to talk to him. It's a movie theater now and sometimes I go there and walk by the counter where I would stall and flirt for months, before Theresa made my first move for me and invited him over for s'mores. After the night of our first kiss, he came over and told me he didn't want to see me romantically anymore and then a thunderstorm blew through and I laid in the front yard of my dad's house getting soaked to the bone. Theresa and Jerry were there and the four of us made tea in the kitchen and waited out the storm. I didn't see Isaac for a couple months after that night. Later, he told me that when we kissed he felt like I was attacking him. Then the night he walked back into my life, he and Rhymi and I stayed up until the middle of the night assaulting eachother with wet white chalk. We were together for more than three years after that. He hated this particular photo, which I kept in a frame by my bed for most of our relationship and a long time afterwards. I love it because he looks so alive that when I stare at it for more than a second, I get the distinct feeling that Isaac's nineteen year old self is going to jump out of the photo, take me by the hand, turn back time, and make everything simple again.
Kiss : Scout Niblett from This Fool Can Die Now
I was seventeen, Isaac was nineteen. We met at a grocery store where Isaac worked and where I bought strawberry popsicles as a lame excuse to talk to him. It's a movie theater now and sometimes I go there and walk by the counter where I would stall and flirt for months, before Theresa made my first move for me and invited him over for s'mores. After the night of our first kiss, he came over and told me he didn't want to see me romantically anymore and then a thunderstorm blew through and I laid in the front yard of my dad's house getting soaked to the bone. Theresa and Jerry were there and the four of us made tea in the kitchen and waited out the storm. I didn't see Isaac for a couple months after that night. Later, he told me that when we kissed he felt like I was attacking him. Then the night he walked back into my life, he and Rhymi and I stayed up until the middle of the night assaulting eachother with wet white chalk. We were together for more than three years after that. He hated this particular photo, which I kept in a frame by my bed for most of our relationship and a long time afterwards. I love it because he looks so alive that when I stare at it for more than a second, I get the distinct feeling that Isaac's nineteen year old self is going to jump out of the photo, take me by the hand, turn back time, and make everything simple again.
Kiss : Scout Niblett from This Fool Can Die Now
Labels: love, lovedones, miniaturesoundtracks, music
12.07.2007
short.
Experimenting with flash fiction...
I decided to shut-up. Every morning I pressed glue to my mouth, made the lipstick face and held it there for forty seconds. Every morning. At my job I wore my headphones and sent emails instead of calling. My boss thought I was working harder and he gave me a raise. I nodded at him, my mouth frozen.
I forgot why I’d done it, it seemed like such a great idea anyway. After awhile people stopped trying to talk to me, they got so used to me having nothing to say. My parents called and I sent them letters in response; my mom called it charming.
Then one day I saw you on the street and I felt it again. I ripped open my mouth and my lips bled. I touched your shoulders and said “I love you” close to your ear. Your shirt was marked with my blood. You just looked away.
I decided to shut-up. Every morning I pressed glue to my mouth, made the lipstick face and held it there for forty seconds. Every morning. At my job I wore my headphones and sent emails instead of calling. My boss thought I was working harder and he gave me a raise. I nodded at him, my mouth frozen.
I forgot why I’d done it, it seemed like such a great idea anyway. After awhile people stopped trying to talk to me, they got so used to me having nothing to say. My parents called and I sent them letters in response; my mom called it charming.
Then one day I saw you on the street and I felt it again. I ripped open my mouth and my lips bled. I touched your shoulders and said “I love you” close to your ear. Your shirt was marked with my blood. You just looked away.
11.07.2007
WinterCrush!
I made this mix. I'll make copies for most of the folks I see regularly. It's a 'sequel' to a 'SummerCrush' mix I made a couple years ago. Sweater weather!
1. Winter Wooksie - Belle & Sebastian
All that snow makes it hard to see her, but did she wave to me?
2. Everything Disappears When You Come Around - Of Montreal
Birds have no heads when you come around. Everything loses it's legs when you come around.
3. You Trip Me Up - The Jesus And Mary Chain
Love's like the mighty ocean, when it's frozen, that is your heart.
4. Turn Me On - Nina Simone
My hi-fi is waiting for a new tune, my glass is waiting for some fresh ice cubes. I'm just sitting here waiting for you to come on home and turn me on.
5. Baby I'm In The Mood For You - Bob Dylan
But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said oh babe, I'm in the mood for you.
6. Just Can't Get Enough - Nouvelle Vague
We walk together, we're walking down the street. I just can't get enough, I just can't get enough.
7. You Are Something - Love
But you do something to me, you’re driving me straight through the floor. Even if it should snow, still I want you to know -- love love, come on, come on and love!
8. Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
Hey, Llloyd, I'm ready to be heartbroken. Cause I can't see further than my own nose at this moment.
9. When My Boy Walks Down The Street - The Magnetic Fields
There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat.
10. Angel, Won't You Call Me? - The Decemberists
Though I am a lost cause, Angel won't you call me?
11. The Cold Swedish Winter - Jens Lekman
The cold Swedish winter is right outside, and I just want somebody to hold me through tonight.
12. Somebody's On My Mind - Billie Holiday
To dream my dream could be my mistake, but I'd rather be wrong and sleep right along than wait.
13. Poison Cup - M. Ward
If love is a poison cup, than drink it up.
14. Give You My Lovin' - Mazzy Star
When I see you, I want to kiss you. But I know that ain't right so I ask if I can hold you. Oh, babe, I need you so bad. Oh babe, I only want to make you glad.
15. I Touch Myself - Scala Choir
I love myself, I want you to love me. when I feel down I want you above me.
16. Hock It - The Blow
Your mean tricks, like the wetness of your lips when you say 'just put your heart here in my hand.' And though I know you might hock it, I can't keep it in my pocket. I've tried, but I can't. Oh man.
17. Gumboots - Paul Simon
I said 'hey Senorita that's astute' I said 'why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute?'
18. Gingernsaps - Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham
You can cut my hair, you can fill my cup, you can tell me lies, you can make it up. We're gonna make it after all.
19. Steady Boyfriend - April Young
We will party with your swinging crowd, when you're mine all mine I will be so proud.
20. Who's Your Boyfriend? - Adam Green
I joke around, but I don't look down because you could break my heart.
21. I Wanna Be Your Dog - Uncle Tupelo
So messed up, I want you here. In my room, I want you here.
22. Baby That's Me - The Cake
She always tells me just how nice you are, and how you kiss goodnight in your car. But maybe someday you will see all the things I want to be.
23. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight - Whiskeytown
This situation keeps me drinking every goddamn day and night. This situation don't seem so right. So excuse me if I break my own heart tonight.
24. Share Your Love With Me - Aretha Franklin
Oh, how lonesome, how lonesome, how lonesome you must be. I tell you it would be a shame, a shame if you don't share your love with me.
25. I Want You - Tom Waits
Give you all my love, if only you would say 'I want you, you, you.'
26. Angel In The Snow - Elliott Smith
I'd say you make a perfect angel in the snow. All crushed out on the way you are, better stop before it goes too far.
27. Your Name - Tricky
If you like-a-me, like I like-a-you, and we like-a-both the same, I'd like-a say, this very day, I'd like-a-change your name.
28. Winte Weather - The Squirrel Nut Zippers
There's nothing sweeter, finer, when there's ice and snow. Don't you know I'll hold you tightly to me? And I will get that love that is due me.
1. Winter Wooksie - Belle & Sebastian
All that snow makes it hard to see her, but did she wave to me?
2. Everything Disappears When You Come Around - Of Montreal
Birds have no heads when you come around. Everything loses it's legs when you come around.
3. You Trip Me Up - The Jesus And Mary Chain
Love's like the mighty ocean, when it's frozen, that is your heart.
4. Turn Me On - Nina Simone
My hi-fi is waiting for a new tune, my glass is waiting for some fresh ice cubes. I'm just sitting here waiting for you to come on home and turn me on.
5. Baby I'm In The Mood For You - Bob Dylan
But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said oh babe, I'm in the mood for you.
6. Just Can't Get Enough - Nouvelle Vague
We walk together, we're walking down the street. I just can't get enough, I just can't get enough.
7. You Are Something - Love
But you do something to me, you’re driving me straight through the floor. Even if it should snow, still I want you to know -- love love, come on, come on and love!
8. Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
Hey, Llloyd, I'm ready to be heartbroken. Cause I can't see further than my own nose at this moment.
9. When My Boy Walks Down The Street - The Magnetic Fields
There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat.
10. Angel, Won't You Call Me? - The Decemberists
Though I am a lost cause, Angel won't you call me?
11. The Cold Swedish Winter - Jens Lekman
The cold Swedish winter is right outside, and I just want somebody to hold me through tonight.
12. Somebody's On My Mind - Billie Holiday
To dream my dream could be my mistake, but I'd rather be wrong and sleep right along than wait.
13. Poison Cup - M. Ward
If love is a poison cup, than drink it up.
14. Give You My Lovin' - Mazzy Star
When I see you, I want to kiss you. But I know that ain't right so I ask if I can hold you. Oh, babe, I need you so bad. Oh babe, I only want to make you glad.
15. I Touch Myself - Scala Choir
I love myself, I want you to love me. when I feel down I want you above me.
16. Hock It - The Blow
Your mean tricks, like the wetness of your lips when you say 'just put your heart here in my hand.' And though I know you might hock it, I can't keep it in my pocket. I've tried, but I can't. Oh man.
17. Gumboots - Paul Simon
I said 'hey Senorita that's astute' I said 'why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute?'
18. Gingernsaps - Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham
You can cut my hair, you can fill my cup, you can tell me lies, you can make it up. We're gonna make it after all.
19. Steady Boyfriend - April Young
We will party with your swinging crowd, when you're mine all mine I will be so proud.
20. Who's Your Boyfriend? - Adam Green
I joke around, but I don't look down because you could break my heart.
21. I Wanna Be Your Dog - Uncle Tupelo
So messed up, I want you here. In my room, I want you here.
22. Baby That's Me - The Cake
She always tells me just how nice you are, and how you kiss goodnight in your car. But maybe someday you will see all the things I want to be.
23. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight - Whiskeytown
This situation keeps me drinking every goddamn day and night. This situation don't seem so right. So excuse me if I break my own heart tonight.
24. Share Your Love With Me - Aretha Franklin
Oh, how lonesome, how lonesome, how lonesome you must be. I tell you it would be a shame, a shame if you don't share your love with me.
25. I Want You - Tom Waits
Give you all my love, if only you would say 'I want you, you, you.'
26. Angel In The Snow - Elliott Smith
I'd say you make a perfect angel in the snow. All crushed out on the way you are, better stop before it goes too far.
27. Your Name - Tricky
If you like-a-me, like I like-a-you, and we like-a-both the same, I'd like-a say, this very day, I'd like-a-change your name.
28. Winte Weather - The Squirrel Nut Zippers
There's nothing sweeter, finer, when there's ice and snow. Don't you know I'll hold you tightly to me? And I will get that love that is due me.
11.06.2007
Another short piece from the book...
Yes y'all.
This part is a short story that one of the character's writes and submits to her college's literary journal, inspired by some recent events in another's character's love life:
--
Ballad of the Bird Girl
By Najla Aziz
Miranda was twelve when the feathers started growing. At first, the downy grey that started to cover her lower belly seemed like just another mysterious product of adolescence. She wore high-waisted skirts and dresses and hoped they would go away. Eventually, one night she snook into her family’s kitchen, fill a plastic cup with ice, and took it back to her room. She filled a blue towel with as many pieces of ice as she could wrap up and applied the makeshift cold pack to her stomach until the skin around the feathers was pink and numb. Then she grabbed a hold of one of the feathers and began plucking.
Miranda kept all of her discarded feathers in a tin on the windowsill above her bed, until it was full and she started keeping them in plastic bags, tied at the top and stored on the top shelf of her closet. She imagined that eventually she would have enough to start sewing pillows or downy blankets.
When she entered high school and made friends with some of the girls in her classes, she joined into conversations about the awkwardness and hilarity of first periods and stretch marks. One day, she asked, “what about feathers?” The other girls stared at her, and then dissolved in laughter. “Miranda is so funny! Miranda is so RANDOM! I love you Miranda!”
It wasn’t until Miranda was all grown up and out of school that she found the courage brought up the feathers to anyone again, this time a boy she had been kissing for a few weeks. When she told him, he laughed, but this time she remained firm. “No, seriously. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She found the tin, and the bags full of feathers, now filling two large plastic tubs in the corner of her apartment.
“Look.”
The boy looked at her incredulously, and started asking her how many birds she had to kill for this sick prank. When she began crying, he left her apartment, sure that she was certifiably insane.
Miranda felt desperately lonely when she considered the option of keeping the feathers a secret forever. She had resented them, sure, but they seemed like an essential part of her being, and she knew that if she ever loved anyone she wouldn’t feel truly loved in return until she convinced him the feathers were real.
So, the bird girl decided to let herself be, and she stopped pulling her feathers. They grew in more quickly than she imagined they would, and they began sprouting in other places too – her shoulder blades, between her legs, on the tops of her feet. She kept to her apartment – it was too hot to cover her body thoroughly enough to hide the feathers and she didn’t want any questions from strangers at the store.
One day, the bird girl heard music playing outside her home. She pulled on an oversized sweater and opened her door. Outside, she found a group of musicians. Mesmerized, she sat cross-legged in front of them and listened. In the middle of the group, a boy sang songs that Miranda felt were being shot straight into her heart. When they finished playing, she began clapping and was soon joined by all of the other strangers who had joined her, sitting on the grass and admiring the musicians. She suddenly felt sad, realizing that the songs weren’t for her at all, and she started to go back inside when she felt a hand on her back. No one had touched her for months, and she was immediately paranoid that the hand would feel her feathers through the fabric of her sweater and recoil. It stayed, and she turned around to face her singer.
The singer and Miranda soon began spending time together. Mostly, she would invite him up to her apartment, where they would drink wine and he would play songs for her. He’d written hundreds of songs, but staring at Miranda made him feel that he needed to write a hundred more, just for her.
He wanted desperately to touch her, kiss her, lift her heavy clothes off of her head and start to map every inch of her body. But every time he moved towards her, she moved away, blushing and laughing.
One night, a thunderstorm broke holes in the sky and the singer and the bird girl were stranded at her apartment. As the hours ticked by and the rain never ceased, she sat nervously on the corner of her bed, drunk on most of a bottle of wine. The singer sat next to her and took her hand.
“I want to stay with you.”
The bird girl sighed and told him she had something to explain. She squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek, and invited him to lift off her sweatshirt.
The singer felt strange – such a forward invitation was not the way he had imagined this moment would happen, but he was desperate to see more of her, and he reached towards her, pulling the shirt off of her head and kissing her, hard on the mouth, before looking down.
By now, Miranda the bird girl was mostly covered in feathers – grey and white down sprinkled over her stomach, yellow and brown streaking her shoulders and her upper back. Around her chest, neck, and lower back, there was skin, but it was thin and pink, not quite human. He gasped, and Miranda sighed, feeling the sting of saltwater behind her eyes.
“What are you?” he asked quietly, not moving away.
“I don’t know,” Miranda responded, reaching for her shirt, ready for the singer to stand at any moment.
“Stop,” and he reached over her, staying her hand.
The singer kissed the bird girl’s chest and he could feel her heart beating twice as fast as his own. “I think you’re magic,” he spoke quietly, and laid her down on her bed, stroking the feathers on her stomach, aching to explore every part of the beautiful creature he felt lucky to see.
Secretly, the singer wondered if he had made her up, if she had materialized from one of his strange dreams. But when he made love to her, losing himself in the endless softness, when he slept beside her and woke up next to her the next day, a few stray feathers floating up from the bed like down escaping from a pillow, he knew she was, somehow, as real as anything else.
They had real problems, too. The bird girl was sensitive and often scared, she would repeatedly ask him when he was going to leave her, whether he wanted her to take care of “her problem,” whether he thought this “normal girl” or another was prettier than her. It took him months to convince her to leave the house with him, and when she finally did, she always bundled up in jackets and scarves and long pants, wanting to assure that her secret would remain her’s and the singer’s alone.
The singer’s friends and band mates didn’t understand what he saw in the bird girl, thought that she seemed childish and empty. He tried to explain what it was like between them when they were alone, sometimes even felt tempted to shout that she was a magical creature that was created just for him, delivered to him, for him to take care of and keep safe.
And this, in the end, was the biggest problem between the singer and the bird girl. He thought of her as his own, and for the most part didn’t consider that his own actions would ever affect their relationship. Although he did think that her feathers were beautiful, he also took comfort in knowing that she thought of herself as strange, unlovable, an oddity. The knowledge of her neuroses kept him secure, knowing that he was the only one who could ever really understand her.
After years of sleeping next to one another; after one particularly rough night where Miranda, inspired by whiskey, decided to try to fly off of her third floor balcony and fell hard on the porch below; after the singer tended to her wounds and kissed every feather; after she made a pillow of the down that she had collected in her teenage years and embroidered it with a bird perched on top of a music note; after all of this, Miranda started to gain an extraordinary amount of confidence in herself. She knew she had the singer to thank, but his possessiveness started to feel like a cage. She began to venture outside without him, often, making new friends and coming home late. Usually, especially after she drank, she would end calling him after the bars closed, begging him to come over and sleep next to her. He always agreed.
Eventually the bird girl started wearing fewer clothes when she went out, and inevitably, her new friends noticed something peeking out from under a tank top one night. She was drunk, and she just shrugged as one of her friends pulled down the top, peeking down at Miranda’s shoulders full of long, dappled feathers.
When the bird girl told the singer that a few of her friends had discovered her secret, he was horrified. He felt ready to comfort her, to reassure her that she wasn’t a freak. When she told him that they had loved it, found it extraordinary, even taken pictures, he was even more upset. He didn’t know how to explain to the bird girl how it made him feel that she had let someone else in on her secret. The singer waited for her to fall asleep before he began to cry.
It was soon after her friends discovered the feathers that Miranda met a boy who looked familiar. He reminded her of the birds she watched from her window – flighty, nervous, and beautiful. Miranda fought hard against the urge to ask him to see her again, but when she ran into him a few weeks later, the fated feeling of it all was too much. They made plans for the very next day, when she knew the singer would be busy.
The next day, when the bird girl kissed the bird boy, she didn’t think of the singer, or of her strange affliction, or of her friends, or of flying. She thought just of him -- the feeling of his mouth pressed to hers and the back of his front teeth on the tip of her tongue. She imagined the past life she was sure they had lived together, as sparrows or owls or seagulls dipping into the ocean. Her heart pressed against her skin and felt as if it was going to fall right out of her chest.
When they finally stopped kissing and stared at each other, the boy looked startled. He told her that he wasn’t sure how he felt or what he wanted from her. She rushed to explain, in a river of sentences that ran together, what he made her feel and what she was. When she tried to lift up her shirt to show him her feathers, he immediately flinched and looked away, asking her to keep her clothes on. The bird girl blushed, recalled her first kiss and the shame of the years that followed. Her heart slowed and receded. And when the bird girl began to cry, the boy stood up and walked away. He assumed that she was thinking of the singer, assuaged with guilt.
That night, Miranda did think of the singer. She lay in her bed, staring at all of the tokens and pieces of him that were scattered around her apartment. She realized that the reason she had pursued the bird boy had very little to do with past lives or destiny. It was just that her entire soul felt wrapped up in the love that she had, and she had wanted to feel what it would be like to unwrap it and get a good look at herself. Then she contemplated her life without him, and immediately felt panicked and afraid. She didn’t want to be alone, she told herself. She could work out her identity with him at her side. She would ask him to forgive her
When the bird girl told the singer what had happened, he wanted to understand. He tried to hold her when she began crying, but his hands wouldn’t move from their stilled position at his side. He tried to tell her that it was okay but when he opened his mouth he yelled terrible things.
The singer told Miranda that her heart was as hollow as a bird’s bones. He told her that she couldn’t possibly be real, because no real girl would be so cruel. He told her she was a child caught up in a fantasy she could never have, that believing that some boy was anything like her was a ridiculous and pathetic dream she had to avoid the truth, which was that she was too afraid of real life to hold on to the only person who could ever love her or even look at her without shuddering. He told her that the only reason her so-called friends hung around her was because she was an oddity, an animal.
The singer watched Miranda’s face crumble, and her limbs grow weak and shaky. He watched her start to grab at her feathers and let them fall to her sides. He watched her cry. He watched her as she ripped out huge chunks of grey and brown and yellow from her back and her stomach and between her legs, leaving her skin swollen and bare.
The singer could never forgive himself for the things he had said, but he also couldn’t forgive the Miranda for not loving him enough. When she finally stopped tearing herself apart and started breathing evenly, he left the room where he had first touched her and tried hard not to look back.
The bird girl stood, surrounded by her feathers. She felt completely alone and incredibly free.
--
This part is a short story that one of the character's writes and submits to her college's literary journal, inspired by some recent events in another's character's love life:
--
Ballad of the Bird Girl
By Najla Aziz
Miranda was twelve when the feathers started growing. At first, the downy grey that started to cover her lower belly seemed like just another mysterious product of adolescence. She wore high-waisted skirts and dresses and hoped they would go away. Eventually, one night she snook into her family’s kitchen, fill a plastic cup with ice, and took it back to her room. She filled a blue towel with as many pieces of ice as she could wrap up and applied the makeshift cold pack to her stomach until the skin around the feathers was pink and numb. Then she grabbed a hold of one of the feathers and began plucking.
Miranda kept all of her discarded feathers in a tin on the windowsill above her bed, until it was full and she started keeping them in plastic bags, tied at the top and stored on the top shelf of her closet. She imagined that eventually she would have enough to start sewing pillows or downy blankets.
When she entered high school and made friends with some of the girls in her classes, she joined into conversations about the awkwardness and hilarity of first periods and stretch marks. One day, she asked, “what about feathers?” The other girls stared at her, and then dissolved in laughter. “Miranda is so funny! Miranda is so RANDOM! I love you Miranda!”
It wasn’t until Miranda was all grown up and out of school that she found the courage brought up the feathers to anyone again, this time a boy she had been kissing for a few weeks. When she told him, he laughed, but this time she remained firm. “No, seriously. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She found the tin, and the bags full of feathers, now filling two large plastic tubs in the corner of her apartment.
“Look.”
The boy looked at her incredulously, and started asking her how many birds she had to kill for this sick prank. When she began crying, he left her apartment, sure that she was certifiably insane.
Miranda felt desperately lonely when she considered the option of keeping the feathers a secret forever. She had resented them, sure, but they seemed like an essential part of her being, and she knew that if she ever loved anyone she wouldn’t feel truly loved in return until she convinced him the feathers were real.
So, the bird girl decided to let herself be, and she stopped pulling her feathers. They grew in more quickly than she imagined they would, and they began sprouting in other places too – her shoulder blades, between her legs, on the tops of her feet. She kept to her apartment – it was too hot to cover her body thoroughly enough to hide the feathers and she didn’t want any questions from strangers at the store.
One day, the bird girl heard music playing outside her home. She pulled on an oversized sweater and opened her door. Outside, she found a group of musicians. Mesmerized, she sat cross-legged in front of them and listened. In the middle of the group, a boy sang songs that Miranda felt were being shot straight into her heart. When they finished playing, she began clapping and was soon joined by all of the other strangers who had joined her, sitting on the grass and admiring the musicians. She suddenly felt sad, realizing that the songs weren’t for her at all, and she started to go back inside when she felt a hand on her back. No one had touched her for months, and she was immediately paranoid that the hand would feel her feathers through the fabric of her sweater and recoil. It stayed, and she turned around to face her singer.
The singer and Miranda soon began spending time together. Mostly, she would invite him up to her apartment, where they would drink wine and he would play songs for her. He’d written hundreds of songs, but staring at Miranda made him feel that he needed to write a hundred more, just for her.
He wanted desperately to touch her, kiss her, lift her heavy clothes off of her head and start to map every inch of her body. But every time he moved towards her, she moved away, blushing and laughing.
One night, a thunderstorm broke holes in the sky and the singer and the bird girl were stranded at her apartment. As the hours ticked by and the rain never ceased, she sat nervously on the corner of her bed, drunk on most of a bottle of wine. The singer sat next to her and took her hand.
“I want to stay with you.”
The bird girl sighed and told him she had something to explain. She squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek, and invited him to lift off her sweatshirt.
The singer felt strange – such a forward invitation was not the way he had imagined this moment would happen, but he was desperate to see more of her, and he reached towards her, pulling the shirt off of her head and kissing her, hard on the mouth, before looking down.
By now, Miranda the bird girl was mostly covered in feathers – grey and white down sprinkled over her stomach, yellow and brown streaking her shoulders and her upper back. Around her chest, neck, and lower back, there was skin, but it was thin and pink, not quite human. He gasped, and Miranda sighed, feeling the sting of saltwater behind her eyes.
“What are you?” he asked quietly, not moving away.
“I don’t know,” Miranda responded, reaching for her shirt, ready for the singer to stand at any moment.
“Stop,” and he reached over her, staying her hand.
The singer kissed the bird girl’s chest and he could feel her heart beating twice as fast as his own. “I think you’re magic,” he spoke quietly, and laid her down on her bed, stroking the feathers on her stomach, aching to explore every part of the beautiful creature he felt lucky to see.
Secretly, the singer wondered if he had made her up, if she had materialized from one of his strange dreams. But when he made love to her, losing himself in the endless softness, when he slept beside her and woke up next to her the next day, a few stray feathers floating up from the bed like down escaping from a pillow, he knew she was, somehow, as real as anything else.
They had real problems, too. The bird girl was sensitive and often scared, she would repeatedly ask him when he was going to leave her, whether he wanted her to take care of “her problem,” whether he thought this “normal girl” or another was prettier than her. It took him months to convince her to leave the house with him, and when she finally did, she always bundled up in jackets and scarves and long pants, wanting to assure that her secret would remain her’s and the singer’s alone.
The singer’s friends and band mates didn’t understand what he saw in the bird girl, thought that she seemed childish and empty. He tried to explain what it was like between them when they were alone, sometimes even felt tempted to shout that she was a magical creature that was created just for him, delivered to him, for him to take care of and keep safe.
And this, in the end, was the biggest problem between the singer and the bird girl. He thought of her as his own, and for the most part didn’t consider that his own actions would ever affect their relationship. Although he did think that her feathers were beautiful, he also took comfort in knowing that she thought of herself as strange, unlovable, an oddity. The knowledge of her neuroses kept him secure, knowing that he was the only one who could ever really understand her.
After years of sleeping next to one another; after one particularly rough night where Miranda, inspired by whiskey, decided to try to fly off of her third floor balcony and fell hard on the porch below; after the singer tended to her wounds and kissed every feather; after she made a pillow of the down that she had collected in her teenage years and embroidered it with a bird perched on top of a music note; after all of this, Miranda started to gain an extraordinary amount of confidence in herself. She knew she had the singer to thank, but his possessiveness started to feel like a cage. She began to venture outside without him, often, making new friends and coming home late. Usually, especially after she drank, she would end calling him after the bars closed, begging him to come over and sleep next to her. He always agreed.
Eventually the bird girl started wearing fewer clothes when she went out, and inevitably, her new friends noticed something peeking out from under a tank top one night. She was drunk, and she just shrugged as one of her friends pulled down the top, peeking down at Miranda’s shoulders full of long, dappled feathers.
When the bird girl told the singer that a few of her friends had discovered her secret, he was horrified. He felt ready to comfort her, to reassure her that she wasn’t a freak. When she told him that they had loved it, found it extraordinary, even taken pictures, he was even more upset. He didn’t know how to explain to the bird girl how it made him feel that she had let someone else in on her secret. The singer waited for her to fall asleep before he began to cry.
It was soon after her friends discovered the feathers that Miranda met a boy who looked familiar. He reminded her of the birds she watched from her window – flighty, nervous, and beautiful. Miranda fought hard against the urge to ask him to see her again, but when she ran into him a few weeks later, the fated feeling of it all was too much. They made plans for the very next day, when she knew the singer would be busy.
The next day, when the bird girl kissed the bird boy, she didn’t think of the singer, or of her strange affliction, or of her friends, or of flying. She thought just of him -- the feeling of his mouth pressed to hers and the back of his front teeth on the tip of her tongue. She imagined the past life she was sure they had lived together, as sparrows or owls or seagulls dipping into the ocean. Her heart pressed against her skin and felt as if it was going to fall right out of her chest.
When they finally stopped kissing and stared at each other, the boy looked startled. He told her that he wasn’t sure how he felt or what he wanted from her. She rushed to explain, in a river of sentences that ran together, what he made her feel and what she was. When she tried to lift up her shirt to show him her feathers, he immediately flinched and looked away, asking her to keep her clothes on. The bird girl blushed, recalled her first kiss and the shame of the years that followed. Her heart slowed and receded. And when the bird girl began to cry, the boy stood up and walked away. He assumed that she was thinking of the singer, assuaged with guilt.
That night, Miranda did think of the singer. She lay in her bed, staring at all of the tokens and pieces of him that were scattered around her apartment. She realized that the reason she had pursued the bird boy had very little to do with past lives or destiny. It was just that her entire soul felt wrapped up in the love that she had, and she had wanted to feel what it would be like to unwrap it and get a good look at herself. Then she contemplated her life without him, and immediately felt panicked and afraid. She didn’t want to be alone, she told herself. She could work out her identity with him at her side. She would ask him to forgive her
When the bird girl told the singer what had happened, he wanted to understand. He tried to hold her when she began crying, but his hands wouldn’t move from their stilled position at his side. He tried to tell her that it was okay but when he opened his mouth he yelled terrible things.
The singer told Miranda that her heart was as hollow as a bird’s bones. He told her that she couldn’t possibly be real, because no real girl would be so cruel. He told her she was a child caught up in a fantasy she could never have, that believing that some boy was anything like her was a ridiculous and pathetic dream she had to avoid the truth, which was that she was too afraid of real life to hold on to the only person who could ever love her or even look at her without shuddering. He told her that the only reason her so-called friends hung around her was because she was an oddity, an animal.
The singer watched Miranda’s face crumble, and her limbs grow weak and shaky. He watched her start to grab at her feathers and let them fall to her sides. He watched her cry. He watched her as she ripped out huge chunks of grey and brown and yellow from her back and her stomach and between her legs, leaving her skin swollen and bare.
The singer could never forgive himself for the things he had said, but he also couldn’t forgive the Miranda for not loving him enough. When she finally stopped tearing herself apart and started breathing evenly, he left the room where he had first touched her and tried hard not to look back.
The bird girl stood, surrounded by her feathers. She felt completely alone and incredibly free.
--
6.19.2007
Adventures!
About the top of the BookPeople parking garage:
There are bats! EVERYWHERE! Do you think it would work to get a fishing line and try to catch one?
About the 'name game':
Calling some random person on the street 'Tobin' is probably the funniest thing you could ever think of. Ever.
About 'Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer':
Cheesiest superhero movie since Adam West as Batman. Worse than Daredevil. For real. Also, I really hate Jessica Alba.
About Noah Baumbach's 'Kicking and Screaming':
I know I've talked up this movie to anyone who will listen enough already, but OMG how hilarious is it when Max is doing a voice for some stranger in the bar and he says "I'm thinking about getting 'I hate it' tattooed inside my mouth."? I LOVE THAT SHIT!!
About the jukebox at Austin's pizza:
Turns out that 25 selections is about 20 more than good songs in that thing. Oops.
About the arcade:
I feel like I'm pretty good at DDR and then I see the sweaty sweatshirted hispanic kid literally moving faster than the speed of light (literally!!!) and I don't really know what to think. I suck at Street Fighter, though. If only I had been Chun Li.
About 'The Last Waltz':
Better than I even remembered. Robbie Robertson's face! Dylan et al! Neil Young is so high! Van Morrison is so gross and awesome! I could kill Neil Diamond! I love Joni even when she's being a hippie! Yes!
About small jeans and very precise guitar playing and the funniest jokes ever and:
A thousand times yes.
There are bats! EVERYWHERE! Do you think it would work to get a fishing line and try to catch one?
About the 'name game':
Calling some random person on the street 'Tobin' is probably the funniest thing you could ever think of. Ever.
About 'Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer':
Cheesiest superhero movie since Adam West as Batman. Worse than Daredevil. For real. Also, I really hate Jessica Alba.
About Noah Baumbach's 'Kicking and Screaming':
I know I've talked up this movie to anyone who will listen enough already, but OMG how hilarious is it when Max is doing a voice for some stranger in the bar and he says "I'm thinking about getting 'I hate it' tattooed inside my mouth."? I LOVE THAT SHIT!!
About the jukebox at Austin's pizza:
Turns out that 25 selections is about 20 more than good songs in that thing. Oops.
About the arcade:
I feel like I'm pretty good at DDR and then I see the sweaty sweatshirted hispanic kid literally moving faster than the speed of light (literally!!!) and I don't really know what to think. I suck at Street Fighter, though. If only I had been Chun Li.
About 'The Last Waltz':
Better than I even remembered. Robbie Robertson's face! Dylan et al! Neil Young is so high! Van Morrison is so gross and awesome! I could kill Neil Diamond! I love Joni even when she's being a hippie! Yes!
About small jeans and very precise guitar playing and the funniest jokes ever and:
A thousand times yes.
Labels: lists, love, lovedones
3.13.2007
Hello.
It is pouring rain for the third day in a row. Sunday night, Patrick and Larissa and I ran down Red River screaming and soaked and it was one of those times where you feel like you're in a movie directed by John Hughes. Now I am just sitting at Cafe Caffeine (stupid name, cute place) and listening to The Weakerthans on my ipod and staring at the rain and trying to decide what I have to say that could possibly interest you.
I have really fond memories of thunderstorms in Austin, and whenever one happens now I get the kind of nostalgia that gives me goosebumps all over my arm. I want to just lay in bed with the covers over my head and listen to the thunder crash straight into my nervous system.
I've had a really weird and difficult and emotional week for a lot of reasons I certainly don't feel like explaining here. But suffice to say my week has included: sleeping way too long for a normal person, crying in the manager's office, and screaming in Patrick's ear at Sidebar. It's been really hard to not cut my hair (my automatic defense mechanism for bad times).
Things I am grateful for when things are rough:
- My house.
- Braedyn and Larissa.
- Patrick.
- Margaret.
- My parents.
- Everyone else.
- Double iced mochas.
- Breakfast tacos.
- Mixtapes filled with sad songs.
Anyone got a mix CD theme for me? Kester, I'm working on your songs like photographs mix, again. It's been difficult to finish; I think I've been overambitious about it. I made a CD for some of our family friends titled "The New Classic" -- it's music made in the last ten years by people of (more or less) my generation that I hope will define 'my' time for my kids and their kids.
Here's the tracklist:
First Day Of My Life - Bright Eyes
Major Leagues - Pavement
There's Too Much Love - Belle & Sebastian
Wake Up - The Arcade Fire
Hey Ya! - Outkast
Rainbows In The Dark - Tilly And The Wall
Jackeyed - Micah P. Hinson
With Arms Outstretched - Rilo Kiley
A Passing Afternoon - Iron & Wine
Come Pick Me Up - Ryan Adams
Waltz # 2 - Elliott Smith
Good Woman - Cat Power
Monument - Mirah
Lost Cause - Beck
The Book of Love - The Magnetic Fields
Red Right Ankle - The Decemberists
War Criminal Rises & Speaks - Okkervil River
She's A Jar - Wilco
I'll Be Yr Bird - M. Ward
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
It is pouring rain for the third day in a row. Sunday night, Patrick and Larissa and I ran down Red River screaming and soaked and it was one of those times where you feel like you're in a movie directed by John Hughes. Now I am just sitting at Cafe Caffeine (stupid name, cute place) and listening to The Weakerthans on my ipod and staring at the rain and trying to decide what I have to say that could possibly interest you.
I have really fond memories of thunderstorms in Austin, and whenever one happens now I get the kind of nostalgia that gives me goosebumps all over my arm. I want to just lay in bed with the covers over my head and listen to the thunder crash straight into my nervous system.
I've had a really weird and difficult and emotional week for a lot of reasons I certainly don't feel like explaining here. But suffice to say my week has included: sleeping way too long for a normal person, crying in the manager's office, and screaming in Patrick's ear at Sidebar. It's been really hard to not cut my hair (my automatic defense mechanism for bad times).
Things I am grateful for when things are rough:
- My house.
- Braedyn and Larissa.
- Patrick.
- Margaret.
- My parents.
- Everyone else.
- Double iced mochas.
- Breakfast tacos.
- Mixtapes filled with sad songs.
Anyone got a mix CD theme for me? Kester, I'm working on your songs like photographs mix, again. It's been difficult to finish; I think I've been overambitious about it. I made a CD for some of our family friends titled "The New Classic" -- it's music made in the last ten years by people of (more or less) my generation that I hope will define 'my' time for my kids and their kids.
Here's the tracklist:
First Day Of My Life - Bright Eyes
Major Leagues - Pavement
There's Too Much Love - Belle & Sebastian
Wake Up - The Arcade Fire
Hey Ya! - Outkast
Rainbows In The Dark - Tilly And The Wall
Jackeyed - Micah P. Hinson
With Arms Outstretched - Rilo Kiley
A Passing Afternoon - Iron & Wine
Come Pick Me Up - Ryan Adams
Waltz # 2 - Elliott Smith
Good Woman - Cat Power
Monument - Mirah
Lost Cause - Beck
The Book of Love - The Magnetic Fields
Red Right Ankle - The Decemberists
War Criminal Rises & Speaks - Okkervil River
She's A Jar - Wilco
I'll Be Yr Bird - M. Ward
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
Labels: lists, love, lovedones, mixtapes
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