2001-05-18

I looked in his brown eyes, and I saw what I imagined you saw. His warm skin – the color of coffee with cream – and his eyes, roaring and bouncing gently like waves. I had seen him less than 20 seconds, heard his smooth, decadent voice speaking en Francais for a minute, and heard him say his name for 2 seconds when I realized it was him. It was your lover. Immediately, I panicked. My energy piqued and burned, as I scraped the hot walls around me looking for a way out. My eyes darted – averting his. What have you heard about me? Something a woman told you? I stammered and stuttered. I can’t tell you who, I can’t. He pried me out of my claustrophobic cage, and I stood before him, looking him directly in the eyes. Myriem, it was Myriem, I said. His eyes became troubled – he could no longer meet my eyes. His voice drooped and sagged – his smile lost. Don’t believe everything hear: you understand me? Yes sir, have a good day. He knodded and turned right. I sat back down wondering if it would have an effect on his afternoon: if he would suddenly find himself wallowing in reminisces and guilt trips. I nearly hoped so.

The flame flickered in the wind: tiny tears descending all around me in a symphony of night. I walked out into the streets, alone, watching the cars moan along the streets: there were as few of them as there were pedestrians. And I inhaled shallow drags from my fag, wondering why it was that today I should smoke so many cigarettes. The day had been one large transcendant move towards hesitancy: I fumbled along the sidewalks, silent behind my comrades, my words stuttered in the aisles at the grocery. I must have wandered like a fool with my sack of pears and grapefruits. The rain finally came – she’d been asking for it all day long, wondering when life would rejoin her senses. I felt they’d been there all along.

Words often fail me. So I laugh, I nod my head, I make jokes with myself: underneath it all, foolishly slapping myself for my talk of self. Aren’t there more interesting conversation topics? What about her? She’s got a tumor on her neck. Laura walked in crying. All I wanted was a simple photograph. Always thinking about the human condition and aesthetics. No more movies for me: only reading. Only writing. Only healing. Only work.

I’ve been so afraid of the word. I thought I lost the word. I thought maybe I could no longer claim to be who I was, based on the fact that my thinking and my head is not the same as it used to be: I used to paste arguments together out of memories, memories of notes I took in my head, scraped together from fragments of consciousness. But I no longer collect them like old socks. I let them sift through and wash through me like milk. I watch them come in and out and I don’t try to nemember the words as they come and go, come and go. I thought the word was my lover. I thought we had a relationship: I thought we was steady. But I’ve got to be honest: I’ve been jealous. I’s seen the word walk around the backs of other women – taunting them with her feline hips, her sexy smile. She’s a flirt. She’s gone and found another. Why the use of metaphor? I despise metaphor. The word is gone. The word has fallen asunder. I’ve been lonely and thoughtless these last few days. I know longer feel my head- I feel the surroundings around me: I feel the light of sun, the birds chirping. Everything calms and I forget where I am.

I erase what I have written. I scratch and moan and finger pick my blisters. I look around the room: at the decorations, the tiny bits of dried tape on the steel machine, the notices written by management. I look at them and try to imagine living somewhere without pavement and concrete covering the poor, innocent mud and sod underneath. I wonder about it down there. I imagine my bare feet saying hello to the sand – covered for decades by something it doesn’t understand or care to understand. The cars come and go. They’re beginning to invade my subconscious. I close my eyes as I try to dream, and I see small visions of strange faces I’ve never seen before: people I can’t imagine existing, but no doubt do exist.. I see their faces, coming and going, a flurry of mad hysteria, towards the streets. They give me their ticket and their money. I give them their change and they all look the same.

I have this mental image of the word. It looks like a white rabbit, underneath a fence, struggling towards the garden, in search of carrots and cabbage and peas. I imagine what it must be like to be escaping or moving – either way, in one direction or another. The word is always like that. Isn’t it? it never knows quite where it’s headed, but it’s got a prescription in its hand, it has a place to go.

Somebody once said to me that you have to write 1000 words a day just to get the shit out. Actually, it was jeff, and he’s said it millions of times. I’ve heard him repeat the same old wisdom, so many times, it’s charming his predictability. I wonder about that: I think. Maybe that’s why I’m so unhealthy and messed up: I haven’t gotten the shit out because I’m too scared to start writing. What if I have to write 10000 words a day just to survive. How will I manage that? How will I feel then? Lispector says you must write absent mindedly. I think about Woody Guthrie, mad and drunk, bent over a typewriter, chasing after his emotions, a flurry, a flood of antecdotes and images, and then he tosses them all in the paperbasket when he’s finished. He’s said what he needed to say: everything’s been done now. Now he can go about his business, like a healthy man. Dylan said it was like vomiting. I say I agree with Dylan, but I also think that vomiting is healthy: once you vomit, you feel so much better. You are relieved the poison is no longer inside of you. you can go to sleep feeling healthy and sane again, the room finally no longer spinninng.

I was there last night, contemplating forcing my finger down my throat: for the beer I drank and the marijuana I smoked pushed me into a dizzying escapade: a marathon of spinning. If I closed my eyes, I felt everything. If I opened them, I saw nothing. I kept my eyes open, pleading with myself to be clear and free. No longer wanting to be captive to the fear of closing my eyes.

Oh, my dreams have been strange recently. I do not know what they mean. I do not even remember them when I wake up.

Just when you think you’ve got it, it’s gone. You’ve forgotten it already. You take a shower and everything fades into an abyss of misplaced images. I am somewhere in there throughout the rest of the day: I see the images like clouds in my eyes… I am hiding behind the curtains and looking at you, waiting for you to look up and see me. but you never do. You are so intent on what you are doing: so focused on the memory out of grasp. So I hold it around your nose – I am an apparition. And you never find it because you never see. That’s the way dreams are. They are there, they never leave. But you can’t see them because you’re too busy looking.

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