SCRIBBLES

I am at the mercy of—prisoner to—my own stormy emotions.

Amid the smell of cigar smoke and cotton candy...

Lamia.

She wasn't beautiful. Not in any two dimensional sense: she wasn't young, she wasn't innocent, she didn't have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman—it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky. Early on, I thought t was a make-up trick. But as we slept together more and more, and I watched her in the mornings—sleep in her eyes, and in the evenings, heavy with fatigue—I soon realized that she wore nothing on her skull but flesh and blood. What transformed her was internal—it was a trick of the will.

She didn't bewitch me—that's a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea, and I had to swim in her. I'd lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of laws and society, and I was tired of it—exhausted. She was liquid, a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her—if she will grant me the chance.

Her body, without sex, became a mystery to her again, and she realized for the first time that physical love had been an exploration of that most intimate and yet most unknown region of her being: her flesh. She had understood herself best embracing someone else—seen her own substance clearly only when another's lips were laid on it, adoring and gentle. She thought of the few times she had been at peace in her life; and, physical love, discharging ambition and vanity, had always preceded those fragile moments. Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts. This was not so. She had found her life full of hurts, but with no way to salve them.

If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the others mind. As I say, for those who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable work, one feels completely with purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness...

Mornings are better, there is no glare and I can see you though the window, at your desk.

She had far-away eyes, while his were heat seeking.

Reading no-verbal cues.

The slurping sound a heart makes when it sinks...

Implication without clarification

Sick of the subtle, muddled

Mind must mumble...

Red Alert—she's a bitch.

Brows knitted—look at me, she’s thinking—insincerely stressed.

Laughing like a malformed bicycle horn.

His face slid to the left—it might have been his haircut.

I stepped into a fog of accumulated breath, fresh-pressed smiles and tightlipped, sleepy faces.

He smelled like banana peels and garbage on a hot afternoon, resembling a large, immaculate lizard, licking his lips—a stand-in for a plague biopic. His teeth were steel-wool polished knobs of bone that protruded in a gross fashion between his thick, pink lips. Elbow deep in grease, he looks up from the grill, a bead of sweat dripping into his eye, and says, "Every night is a Friday night in Hell."

Country music: death by cliché.

Country music: I am a broken hearted, redneck piece of shit that's got a crush on a slender barmaid who doesn't know I exist.

Buy her a DeLorean

Bitch wanna bring up the past

Cannibalism and original sin: what if the forbidden fruit was an Adam's Apple? Perhaps Eve had fangs? Blood sucker.

Is vulnerability for the weak, honesty for the foolish? Perhaps love itself is a fixture of the wounded and the slain—a cozy noose, a warm coffin.

I guess I need an emotional editor.

Disillusionment is a wounded heart and damaged faith, past and present pain and sorrow...

Bang.

An emotional ricochet resounds within the cerebral sadness.