to run away from everything all at once.
I want to disappear and never need to think of some things again.
I want to mourn a loss with someone who is unreachable.

This is the kind of thing that makes the guilt and regret crop up…the time of year when perhaps it is appropriate to examine all motives, past actions, intentions and outcomes. So then the issue here is weather or not to do anything about the items of contemplation. Perhaps these items have come to be contemplated because you are bored, or lonely, or out of your element. It could be something like that, or it could be an actual crises.
I am really tired of having a mind that is rich with verbosity and thought at most moments and then when there is space on which to write, it all becomes insipid hoo-ha. That is quite the conundrum.
Now maybe I should just list the items of so-called “contemplation” (all of this could perhaps be amusing)
1. What, after the fact, is necessary to reveal to someone?
2. If you feel that you have regrets, should you reveal that fact to said person?
3. What are your motivations/;goals/methods etc?
4. IS it worthwhile to tell someone what you are thinking, or should it be swept under the proverbial rug?
5. How much should patience should one have with something that seems, at alternating times, to make no sense and then perfect sense. The dichotomy is vertigo-inducing to the max I tell you.
6. How is it to become a hermit; someone completely and utterly inoculated against all outsiders?
7. How will I make the undying and heart-breaking beauty that I imagine?
8. How can companionship be gentle and buoyant without inhaling one’s pur[pose and poignancy?

raindrop straight between naked scapulae
lips never touch there
body parts and architecture
5, 5, 5, 5, 12
down the corridor, hide in the precipice
walls on both sides, then a vertical drop, suspension
flanks stuck to the coping
sheer fabric clings to thighs
grenades on the acropolis
xiphoid process heavy and knotted
you in the ambulatory, I have my own sheathing
mastoid stuck to the eaves
acromion seen through oriel
clavicle lays along yoke
my ribs are my barbican

I wonder if it’s wrong to reject someone if you don’t find them funny. One consistent judgement I have towards others is weather or not their sense of humor matches mine, especially if they seem underwhelmed by the inane and often lewd, sometimes non sequitur instances and thoughts I am dazzled by. I have been really digging life lately, feeling remarkably well-adjusted and capable in every way. I feel physically strong, I feel mentally flexible and emotional independent. On of the effects of this seems to be that I am able to more rationally evaluate friendship, relationships and situations for what they are and ponder them rather pragmatically. So, it led me to wonder if it was wrong of me to partially denounce someone who did not find one of my lewd insanities funny. Really, it just means that they are not as humorous as I thought them to be.
I have been doing lots of thinking this week about openness. That is one of the reasons I enjoy writing in a blog. It’s kind of like a journal but I find that I can write in a more crystallized and concise fashion if there is the slightest chance that someone will read it. And I think it’s kind of cool that I can attempt to be open about my thoughts. I think it is exponentially more exciting to have an actual conversation with a real person, but I am enamoured by written words and I like it when I have a place to practice writing and sometimes receive feedback.
I have been working on a couple of new projects. One of them involves what happens when I go running. My mind becomes very clear and whereas in a normal train of thought the individual items seem rather layered, when I am running everything is separate and specific. While I am running, I try and run for a few minutes, then recall my train of thought, then run for a few minutes, then once again recall my train of thought adding the thoughts on as I go. It’s somewhat like an additive choreography or music score. My run on Friday night went something like this:
Running though the west side of Dolores park around early dusk;
“Wow, I love this city. The view of the city is beautiful and I wish that it was feasible to stay here. I am free of Michael and independent. (I have never felt so independent in my adult life).”
Down the hill passing a man in his 30’s and viewing him as I approach his back and then pass a college-co-ed-type girl;
“Release his pecs, do active tricep release, and activate his serratus anterior and his infraspinatus. Tha’d fix him right up.” This was the point when I realized how ridiculously much I have been working lately.
Turning left and going across Church Street on 18th;
“Wow, that big truck is coming suspiciously close to me. I might get hit but that’s alright cause life is good and I have lived it well. It’s amazing how scared I am of cars when I am in one and how I don’t mind skirting death and injury when I opnly have my own little body to maneuver around.”
Up 18th;
“That’s a cute Australian Sheppard puppy. There’s the tea lounge where I took Mom and Okito. There’s Hazel’s old house.” (followed by random thoughts about going to her birthday party after the tech rehearsal in May for Pavlova and what Michael said about seeing the performance of Pavlova where I started out naked on the floor in the big concert hall)
Going south on Castro St;
Thoughts about the fancy stores, people out and dressed dumb on a Friday night, a shoe store called “De la sole”. That’s stupid.
Continuing up Castro;
“Wow, there is an inordinate number of bald shiny-headed males who have very tense necks and jaws.” (Random thoughts about jaw release in regards to fellatio and how to keep necks and jaws happy for oral sex in general.)
Running east on 19th St I pass two bald shiny-headed men holding hands. I smile at them and they don’t even pretend to return my greeting. I wonder if it’s because their jaws are too tense and painful. That can definitely make it more difficult to smile. Directly after that I pass a girl wearing uncomfortable-looking fancy clothes and high-heels. She is walking down a hill and the high heels make her look (in my humble opinion) stupid. I think about what high heels do to the feet/legs and the deep-back line of the body (a reference to connective tissues and how they affect one another).
I run down the other side of the hill and notice that I feel my serratus anterior engage as my arms swing. That is exciting to me. Continuing down the hill back towards Church St., I think about how I did the most romantic things possible and they were thrown away (last year). I wonder if that’s why I shy away from being romantic now, even though I want to. Then across Church and back into the park, I am running along the MUNI train tracks I wonder if I am being held at arms length for a reason? Then I notice the two girls on a bench who were sitting and drinking beer when I ran by before. I am at the top of the park now, the part with the best view and the sky is purple-pink and wispy over the city. A few feet down I see 3 men collecting their blanket and other picnic items. They are all mid-20’s, carefully groomed so as to look casual (but it’s obvious that they spend too much time worrying about weather or not they look like that fantastic j-crew ad, and possibly about their penis size and about weather or not they are masculine enough to make the ladies swoon. I run by in a tank top and knee-length tight stripped pants (which are something I would not normally run in but were the only thing I had with me today) and they lasciviously look my flushed, sweaty body up and down. They smile at me and I politely smile back. I probably made all of the assumptions about their appearances and insecurities as they checked me out.
I turn right and run up the west side of Dolores. As I run up the hill, I think “just keep going up” and it makes me progress more efficiently. Then I imagine that my spine is being in traction and it makes me feel longer and more effectively aligned.
I turn left and cross Dolores to run east on 20th. I am caressed by a warm wind that is quite pleasing. I see the building in the distance some 5 blocks down that has “Bethany” written all down the side in enormous letters. I like having my name down the side of a building because I like my name. I used to live very near that building. (Random thoughts and sadness about that apartment). Then I turn right a block later to run south on Guerrero st. I am running downhill and think of looking into a pair of blue eyes attached to a head of curly hair. Then I see a man standing on the sidewalk next to many plastic shopping bags. One of them proclaims by it’s lettering that it came from “El Corte Ingles” El Corte Ingles is a chain department/grocery store in Spain. I went there a few days before my 25th birthday and then 2 days after my 25th birthday when I was still hung over (worst hang over I’ve ever weathered.) The first time I went to El Corte Ingles I bought a randon assortment of groceries; cheese, bread, cucumbers carrots and tomatoes, goat’s-milk-kefir, honey, musli etc. The second time I bought a jump rope. After musing about Spanish shopping expeditions I get annoyed with the fucking song that comes on and change the music back to Opeth/Isis/Manowar…a veritable plethora of auditory pleasures.

On saturday I slept next to the ocean. The waves pounded on my brain as I fell asleep and gave me the kind of calm and understanding that is ultimately elusive. I understood right then. I understood that I had been dishonest, that I had held my deepest, most essential desires inside. And I knew that the seclusion and dishonesty about my needs and feelings was the detrimental element that killed things. And I knew that it had been a reaction to how closed off he had been. At the time, it made so much sense and I finally felt okay and slept without difficulty and without the assault of nightmares.
Now it makes no sense again. I live with a constant stream of film-quality images from our years together playing in my head. It feels like a emptying of my mind. It has come to a lull a bit lately, but only if I fiercely distract myself which is what I’ve taken to doing as much as possible. Part of me thinks it is necessary and good. I understand that there was a huge delay in this feeling of loss and that it didn’t really come until all was lost. That could partially account for the intensity of the images. I think that I was numb for many years and it took one particularly verisimilar event to bring my feelings back into perspective.
I have developed some survival tactics which involve:
1. playing music as much as possible
2. writing this down so that I don’t go numb
3. Going for idiotically fast runs around the Mission most mornings while listening to hardcore things like Manowar, Bad Religion, Slayer, the Melvins, Gwar.
4. making a show (involves dancing and choreographing)
5. moving into a place where I will save ridiculous amounts of money so that I can go travel.

****NOTE: I think this blog post is dumb and insufficiently expresses the things that I have been thinking and feeling. I am going to post it anyway because it is the best I can do at the moment. There was a movie screened in Dolores park last night and I went to hang out with my friends and a bottle of Jameson.
****NOTE: I have been in a hideously venomous mood this week. If any one has felt any of the affects of that venom, I apologize. I should probably be in seclusion right now. Truly, I was a real bitch tuesday, wednesday and thursday.

You are lying on a bare floor. Black floor, black walls, gray ceiling. It is dark and you can only see the slight outlines of shadows. The air is acrid and sticks in your nostrils as you inhale.
your face is looking up into the darkness and you knees are bent. Your legs pour into the floor. THe darkness pulls at your legs, fastens itself to your sinewy, helpless ankles. There is a tight cord tied tightly around your muscled yet bulging waist. It cuts and burns as you struggle and flail. Skin gives way to flesh gives way to bone. Your insides eventually find their way onto the floor to lay in a glittering rubied pile.
I paint my eyes black to cover the red tear-stain-rosettes. Dig deeper with my toes into the floor to brace myself for the next wave.

she’s sitting on the floor with her knees in her hand
lining up glass bottles filled with salt water and sand
she wants to take the blue out of his eyes
use it as charcoal
to paint on the sky

feel your breath as it runs down the line
feel the longing sift down the center of my spine
then it comes back up to settle in my heart
makes it feel like my insides tearing apart

I remember how it feels to sit safely on a lap
the flat of his hand pressed against my stomach and my back

Like Pavlov’s dog, she still jumps, whimpers, and barks whenever she hears the phone ring. She expects that he is coming to pick her up. She expects this after nearly 3 weeks since his disappearance. I wonder as I watch her this morning, fretting for the umpteenth time that her boy has come to get her, if it is conditioning or if she has the ability to hope. Does she sense that he is gone from the deal but keep a sense of hope that he will be able to come back and share in “pack-life” again? Or maybe those are my own sick and deep-seated hopes.
I chewed a hole in my face as a slept. Perhaps I was trying to find a way out of my own head, a method of getting outside of myself. Perhaps like Pavlova I claw at my own flesh. Am I in need of a human-heart replication? If they can make a rat-zombie-heart project, what kind of lab animal can I be?
How can I arrest the blood-bone-sinew-stagnation of heart break? Did I hold it back for so long that it will consume me? I want to rage, I want to run-away. Right now I want to curl up in a ball on this bench and wail. Put my head between my knees and scream. Put my fist through a wall. Scream at the sky.
I have swallowed all of this for so long, pretended that I wouldn’t miss him so because of my stubbornness. Up close his ugliness was so stark that I could feel why we shouldn’t be…friends…lovers….I don’t know. I felt big and now i feel small. I felt numb and now I feel raw. I felt capable and now I feel dysfunctional. I didn’t mourn our Panda and now I feel the loss. By myself. I want to put my head in your hands so that you can carry the weight of it for awhile.
My pinky habitually creeps across my ring finger to gently rub the ring on my finger when I am thinking, sad, nervous. My pointer finger on the other hand habitually points down to push the ring on my thumb down so that it wont fall off. This still happens 3 days after the rings are gone. Every time it happens I am startled that they are not there. I wonder if it would have been better to leave the rings on so that my fingers could keep doing their dance of habit while I remained unaware of it. Or perhaps remove the particular fingers involved in this choreography.
I felt like you were still somehow more mine…I didn’t feel bad making love to you, I feel sad that you couldn’t treasure it, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I know your body, I know your mind. I know how you bite, lick, suck, fuck. So many of your cells are imbued with my DNA, more than I can tabulate here. I am in you, you are in me at all times still, even if you pretend it’s not so. I read that you carry the DNA from all of your ex-lovers.
I walk up the hill. On the top, I find your house and look down upon it. It is the only way I have felt remotely close to you in days and days and it makes me shake. I feel the tether of my heart that pulls towards you and imagine severing it as best I can. I still shake and have to force myself away. I walk around the hill to get down and your house with it’s cars comes closer into focus and makes my spirit feel vaguely appeased by getting closer to you, somehow, anyhow. As I walk down the hill, your house out of sight, the sensation in my body is tangible. I feel like I inhabit my body, my heart, and the sense of sadness and weight that my cells are currently imbued with. I know it is better if I stay inside of it, feel it fully and resist the urge to push myself out of my own body. it’s strange how the body works–that you can push your own self outside of your skin. Sometimes when I allow my heart to take up it’s entitled space in my ribcage, it makes my sternum hurt.

Stripped of my humanity, of the respect that could have been given, I stand naked and walk upstage. I slowly ease a slip over my head. An Article of clothing that only gives the pretense of cover. I am stuck in this cubicle, this world of sound, impulse, mechanics, movement.

February to April 16th

so this is what you gave, security and comfort while you please
and grief that brings me to my knees.
For years you held me in trust, acted as humans should; caring for each other and putting aside their selfishness when they are needed. And then when I need you the most you become opaque and only used compassion for yourself. You tried but it was in vain because you stayed wrapped up in your own heart and mind. That’s not compassion, that is selfish greed of protecting your undone deeds. You valiantly guarded your wounded heart, while fighting a battle that pierces my heart…over and over and over again.
so this is how it is, for my next disappearing act I will perform “man lies to lover, the woman who carried and lost his child making her losses even more costly to her heart. As if that is not enough, he will show you the’ knife-twist trick’, pierce the heart and ream it out with the dull point of a blade so that the wound is jagged and sore, heart blasted out like a bullet hole.” This is what I will do and all the while I will bounce from romance to romance worse than a junkie in an alley, sticking the needle of supposed love into my vein over and over and over again to run from myself. And I will take her down, the woman I loved for years and years, the woman who told me our baby was dead through her tears. For my next trick, I will show you all how to be numb: it’s easy you just go out and fuck someone. But to be sure that it works, ensure that you develop an attachment, that you fall in “love” but never stay. Never give your heart away. you just steal the sentience and life-energy of these women’s hearts. You are a vampire of the heart. your heart is numb so you have to constantly drink of the hearts of others. your confusion so great that you have to distract yourself always to the point of destruction.
The lines are blurred, the reason is lost, you dropped the ball, you missed the mark, you smashed her life. And yes, it hurts to be stabbed in the back. And no, you didn’t make the cut for acts of kindness.
so for now, you can burn in hell.
4/26/08 I want to build an effigy to our love, our baby, our life. Simultaneously, I want to throw a brick through your window, burn your clothes and trash your house. I need to somehow express how deeply this hurts, how strongly it cuts to the core.
I keep thinking about how appalled you were when the best-friend-of-10-years-almost-lover acted so hideously towards me. You condemned him and his actions and could not believe that “he could treat someone as sweet and gentle as you like that.” Well, now you should know because the similarities in your actions are striking. The lack of sensitive action you exhibit mirrors his behavior.
And now, just like during the falling away of my friendship with him, you are vividly invading my dream world. Last night, with your family, someone had died. Tiptoeing around each other, talking without speaking, touching without feeling and then I gingerly approached you and finally lay my head on your shoulder in a warm embrace. Everything came into focus at that moment and instead of being vague became vivid. you were wearing your gray Ecuadorian sweater and you leaned down to kiss my head. I woke up confused, and was bewildered that I have lost you to such an extreme. I woke up looking at my wall, confused as to my whereabouts and startled by the loss–a familiar feeling 2 years ago when I lost the one of 10 years. will it go away twice as fast since our love was only 5 years?
4/27/08
today this is the pain: every morning I wake up to remember all over again that you are completely lost to me. That it would be unhealthy for me to try any communication with you. I walk across the street, flannel pants blown around my newly shaven legs like I wanted your caress to be around me. You denied me. New silk slip shifting on my bare -breasts, as I loved your hands to do. A dream of a view on top of a building reminds me of telling the story of how our romance started. It was almost sickening in it’s romanticism. I mean, how many times do you get to start your love on top of a building over looking a lake, a beautiful theater and a city? Not only that, we had climbed the fire escape to get there.
I remember so many things these days because although I lost your devotion long ago, we broke up before, but this is the break of our friendship. That makes me more sad (I think) than the loss of our love. It’s strange how the mind works. Once you are far away enough from something painful, you forget and your brain becomes a constant live-feed of every happy memory and thought you’ve ever had about the one you hated/loved and now pine for. I consciously try to dredge up all of the bad parts of the past 8 months just so that I can remember why it wasn’t working. Lying on his couch, morning sick 7-ways from Sunday. So sick I couldn’t crawl the 3 blocks to my own house where someone might have been there to care for me. Waiting for him to wander back two-blocks from a party to bring me some crackers, something, anything to keep the cocktail of baby hormones at bay. He says it will be an hour…..1, 2, 3 hours later I reach him by phone again wondering if he had been mugged an this Saturday night in the Mission. No, he hadn’t. he was just drunk at a party and “lost track of time and didn’t hear his phone.”
Or, worse than that telling him that I was pregnant, that the baby we had always wanted had been created. He said that he still wanted to be with the ex-girlfriend from 7 years ago who he had only recently seen for 1 week. 1 week of passion over the cumulative interaction and love of 4 years.
On my birthday, he wakes and greets me apathetically, eventually, reluctantly lurches out of bed. Apathy, discontent, angry vibes from him as we walk down the street . I try lightheartedness and he remains frozen. In the car, he screams at me about how ungrateful i am. He yells until I hang my head and pull my hat down over my eyes and then he drives. Drives around the mission like a bat out of hell. Narrowly misses pedestrians and takes the corners so fast I feel his unwieldy bronco almost overturn. And he knows that this kind of thing with cars is one of the things I am most afraid of.
There are so many happy memories that are swimming around in my brain and body these days….last year going into the church near Haight street. It was a horribly rainy day. We had breakfast and then went to sit in the church. It was beautiful and we had to leave since we were feeling a little too feisty for religion. We were cold so we went to my house and snuggled down in my bed. It was one of those delicious gray Saturdays where laying in bed with someone you love is perfect. We had plenty of times like this even when we were supposedly “broken up”.
I have scores of sweet things like this I could retell. Especially before the baby. But that’s just it. I have to remember what happened and how he treated me once I was pregnant, was going to have a child, and then lost the baby. He was selfish. He was often apathetic, mean and unsupportive. So although when I try to kiss someone else and it doesn’t work because I have tender memories of staying in Manhattan with him, I need to remember the bad parts or I will be destroyed. The weight of the years could crush me. But so could all of the sadness and hurt.
I want to rage, I want to run-away. Right now I want to curl up in a ball on this bench and wail. Put my head between my knees and scream. Put my fist through a wall. Scream at the sky.
I have swallowed all of this for so long, pretended that I wouldn’t miss him so because of my stubbornness. Up close his ugliness was so stark that I could feel why we shouldn’t be…friends…lovers….I don’t know. I felt big and now i feel small. I felt numb and now I feel raw. I felt capable and now I feel dysfunctional. I didn’t mourn our baby and now I feel the loss. By myself. I want to put my head in your hands so that you can carry the weight of it for awhile.
And I can’t keep up the pretense that I’m okay. i am not okay. I miss you. I finally took of my rings the other day. My pinky habitually creeps across my ring finger to gently rub the ring on my finger when I am thinking, sad, nervous. My pointer finger on the other hand habitually points down to push the ring on my thumb down so that it wont fall off. This still happens 3 days after the rings are gone. Every time it happens I am startled that they are not there just like I am slightly startled every time I want to call you to tell you something I wonder if it would have been better to leave the rings on so that my fingers could keep doing their dance of habit while I remained unaware of it. I think this is longest I’ve gone without speaking to you in the past 5 years.