hothouse flowers

This is a memory.

 

I’m dating a boy who might be a douchebag. He’s got a soft side to him that is kind to animals and grandmothers, of which he will tell me one 3am morning to the point of teariness while we’re keeping the cold out with flavourless white broth. At the next table are two ajummas who hate me– because I’m Asian but cross my chopsticks, because I’m eating with a boy whose Asian blood evades his white, white complexion. Let’s not stray, put the facts as they are. So! He might not be a douchebag, simply insistent and snickety in his interactions, too quick to assume his version is truer, stronger, better, rather enthusiastic about frat boy status. And these might not be dates, they seep away faster than slush on a mat, and at the end of the day, I’m too ruthless and unpredictable to be good for anyone on the dating floor and he becomes another casualty. Maybe the ajummas don’t hate me. They just worry.

 

The memory is not about this boy. 

 

It’s about while I’m waiting for him to don his coat in the dormitory, and you are there, obnoxious thing, looking into my eyes to see if you can push your boyish charm out of its boundaries. You succeed, because you’re adorable and we’re both hungry for ocular proof of connection. It’s funny how the eyes are described as the mirror of the soul. Most of the time they underachieve, stopping short at vanity and desperation. The other boy comes downstairs, regards us briefly and shoves his discontent into coat pockets along with a ledger of women as pain and trouble. Some months later a mishap occurs in the first ten minutes of Memento while we’re temporarily unoccupied by other forces. I’m too soused to remember it, apart from your breathy excitable accent and consideration with the toilet paper. I get angry, rightfully so, but only for awhile, and we become good friends matching each other’s best points to other people. The incident alters for good my outlook on intimacy. Another few months later, I shoot myself in the foot: setting up blunt and limiting dividers around a boy who might have been willing to read into me and be happy. I can’t tell, my dear, when you’re joking, because I’ve been nothing but blunt around you and it’s been my undoing. So I don’t know if it means anything that you still tell me your exhilarations and worries, only when I ask, only when I ask first.   

 

For all the advice I dispense, freely, sternly, chop chop– I don’t take my own. I wonder if I’m going to keep turning down people who could give me quiet nights by the river (like K might have) and promises that don’t need to be said. Looking at myself now, I run headlong into the worst kind of trouble. Boys who pair my name with experiments or rest stops, who don’t leave a seat, who flit out of range, unnamed and untameable.

Thanks for the romance

“What makes you think I won’t fart and ruin everything?”

“Cause you fart nothing but perfectly-formed bacon.”

Seriously,

I can do without your stalking.

 

Thanks.

 

You, I don’t want to talk to you until I can’t help it, and anyway life has started again, so you’re not going to hear from me for a bit. Take care of your finicky lovely self and try sleeping, it actually does a body good. Over breakfast I thought of the way you slouched into my copy of the Sandman, how you plopped out of bed and into the car so you could drive me to Holland V. “What time are you coming home?” you asked, and I was oddly touched again at the unloving, unspecified way you have of caring. I don’t miss you terribly, just acutely, but I miss what hasn’t happened yet, not what happened before, because we were always getting better, getting from frosty to room temperature. Warm even, like the times you spontaneously grab me before remembering your deadlines. The real problem was that time unlike writing runs without punctuation. I don’t want anything more, just the scraps of you lying about for me to sample, nothing signed in blood, just a few months that fade like all months do. 

 

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, have you read it yet, you tardy thing?

 

Last night I was so very tired, tired to the roots of a past life. My first instinct was to call P-Andrew so he could tsk at me, tow me home like he’s so good at, then I remembered I’m not supposed to be lazy or a lemming. P-Andrew is very good at preserving me, I think I don’t thank him enough for it.

 

Eyes like nails, I thought, when I looked at it.

Chemistry and other worthwhile happenings

Be random, it’s good for your life.

 

“The sun came in like a pack of orange spaniels

Through the window

Over the ledge

Under the curtain

On their bellies, creeping and bending”

Parachute

Do you think I don’t remember? Lightning in your window, a seizure of blue and purple, forever still and spreadeagled on the apartment buildings by the will of your lens. From a thousand thousand screens away I pried your sight to my eyes, the way one sups on dripping fruit. I’d found your blog before I’d found you (a sleek boy at the museum, skittery and intense), and loved your way of seeing before ever I had seen you. 

 

I said I had a habit of looking at the view from people’s windows, a routine inspection, ethnography of bedrooms. This was a lie; really I faked the obsession the moment we flounced onto your bed so I wouldn’t hurt you with my eyes, my deer in the headlights, didn’t want your blood on my tires. Still you were the one coaxing me, a little bit of bait as you stroked the patch between heel and calf, rustling the comfortable net as you tickled me into your lap, your palpable heated lips, unknown but so very alive, insistent fingers flicking me open so that I lay prone and obedient on the chopping board of the future. As you loved me I thought of the past like data, overwritten in increments on a navy blue bar, pixelated rubbish leaping into pixelated bin. As you left me he unbuttoned your shirt from my torso, without my permission, and I thought of the time someone knocked water over my painting while I sat in disbelief. Afterwards he said I’m sorry, I knew you didn’t want it, but I said it’s fine it’s what I needed, but into the air came more tears in jerks and hiccups like a car stalling, the young driver in a panic, the instructor pretending there are no such things as urgent stoplights.

 

It sounds like blame but you know I chose every moment of it, and hope that you did too.

i wake up with the thunder of your typewriter

I am easily duped by

vegans,

Adam West Batman episodes,

gurkhas,

mixtapes.

 

Funny how your world fills out with tiny clicks and whirrs, how busy evenings fit a beer or two.

 

Stolen Moments

Kim Addonizio

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in 
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

Yes I still miss you.

There’s a pounding in a distant wall, too insistent to be someone’s late night shenanigan but not violent enough to be a break-in.

 

2.42am, I’ve been typing mountains and molehills but haven’t done the work that’s due in the morning. I can’t sleep, I’m not reading. You’ve become the magazine between drawer and sofa, a box in a cupboard under a pile of clothes, a series of texts in my phone with a number that won’t dial. I could say it, loud in the hall of my mind, clear as a stoplight, truncating your daydreams as you’re slipping, sleepy, ever further down the classroom chair– I miss you– and where you are a wasp murmurs or a car collides. Shoes propped on the head of the passenger seat, or speeding up a wall, or at the front door so your toes are naked with mine, I miss you down to your footprints, terminated within the hour they were made but nevertheless always and forever pounded like fossils into the god of the ground, and here I go doggedly sniffing them out, or at least trying to.

experiment #2

Then I realized that the smallest things, that I took upon for fun, to experiment, to prove a point–

 

These almost always sprawled into importance.

 

Take everybody seriously. Sometimes you don’t know what your silence, your furrows, your truncated smile can do.

 

What am I doing? I know too well, I should remember to do only the things I can live with.

doors

open when you lean on them. Lean lean lean.

 

I have a job thanks to the valued opinions of Jin. :) Not any job either, I must say I fairly tingled hearing what I’d get to do.

 

Highly amused by some of the search terms to this blog:

 

special someone blogurl:wordpress.com

dawnisms you got that right.

chinese tiles mahjong?

hamster – be the death of me is that a song?

of love and other demons mosquitoes

big pen nic when rod, shaft, joystick and other euphemisms fail.

hipster seoul

worst things about seoul you won’t read about them here.

laundry mats in seoul

hymen w4m i feel so virginal!

nisa turtles games 

leo drescher !! stalker alert!

shaved armpits