Bullet by bullet

I made some lists.

 

There were important names I couldn’t remember, people and events reduced to condensation on a table, initials, furtive glances at phonebooks.

 

I spent the actual day of my 21st with G.H. in the harsh magenta focus of a billboard laughing as we read print 15 storeys down, so it’s disconcerting that he became a sarcastic text message blasting an opinion I couldn’t decipher (only the punctuation, “?!” at the end of passive-aggressive politeness). 

 

I think you never trusted me because you thought you were another 8 digits I would never dial again. Certainly I don’t think I will. Yet God knows where you stand, at that privileged point reserved for, really now, besides you only Andrew: ask and you shall receive. Ask me to end the list at you. Ask me to take your name off it. Ask me why you’re even on a list at all. You won’t ask. I’m so relieved, don’t ask. More and more I don’t like your accidental hold on me, more and more I want to reject the abortive streak that characterized the person you couldn’t bring yourself to take a good look at. You shook awake something sad, wonderful and necessary in me and I resent and adore you for it. 

 

No one is a replacement for anyone else, but some nights all of you echo one another and I feel like a greying hearth cat watching imaginary faces in the fire. 

 

I had a great weekend, apart from this maddening list I shouldn’t have made. I don’t like lists.

we have no way of knowing how to pass the months

wren, says:

what i really want is a portion of the past to have never ended. but that’s not possible and i dislike sitting around waiting for things to sort themselves out.

wren, says:

in the mind the future is always infinitely better because of its possibilities

wren, says:

but i guess sometimes i forget there’s still a lot of effort between where i am now and an unblemished future

wren, says:

i don’t really know how to describe it

wren, says:

but that’s all it really is. the past was good. the past ended. fine. forget it, move on. meeting new people is apparently not as painless as i hoped. ah well shit happens.

Those of Us Who Think We Know

Stephen Dunn

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues.

 

It’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between the stars are nothing
to worry about,
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.

 

.

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the reading at present

Disapprovingly. “You always think of the consequences. You’ve got 5 different escape routes before you’ve even started. Before getting into anything you’re all, ‘Oh if it goes well it goes well, and if it doesn’t I get hurt, fine I get hurt.’ You don’t let yourself go.”

 

Stunned by the accuracy. “Yes yes… I’m like that. Not that I don’t let go, you could ask Jin, I’m sure he’d tell you that out of our friends I’m quite a risk-taker and do take the plunge in relationships. And consequences, isn’t that good? I mean, I consider what could happen.”

 

“That’s the thing…In some things you can’t think about how it ends. You’ve just got to do it. You’ve got to stop trying to control things, let it go.”

 

So… What now? Force nothing, try nothing, give without thinking? Wake up everyday and think of you only by accident? Really now. I got unsteadily through the door, dropping my bag onto the floor that you’ve only walked once (like all who are seduced instantly by my water bed, your body made one long neat ripple upon it; briefly I got in beside you and for a second you considered the possibilities, which I would have taken you up on if we hadn’t only half an hour to get back down to town) and my first thought was, “Damn! I still miss you. It hasn’t been long, only long enough for the lines on my palm to realise they could be etched wrongly.”

 

You’re the same as me. You think of all the possible NO’s today, everything that could be a YES beyond the blinding light of tomorrow. 

 

I held myself together so I could look purposeful, moving on from you to rest of my life. But really, after your car pulled away from the bus stop any haughtiness disintegrated and I was just another of the dissatisfied figures I’ve never cared to be.

just

When you walked instead of scuttling, you dreamt of love– 

 

You took those photos with affection, so that I looked at her and loved her in the most ordinary of settings, plain grass, no makeup, her unvarnished eyes that regarded your lens as if it were you.

 

Did you dream of maybes or were you respecting what already was, when you looked at me before I lost my shoe and shut the car door?

The lines on my palms worry fathers and all good men

When I said that all things good and bad must end, that everything regresses towards a mean, I forgot to say I hope this mean gets ever higher. Graphically this would look like a slope– oh yes, a steeper climb as the years pile up– but after each hailstorm, each blue eyed sky this I’d want: an ever cosier home to roost in, so that where we bought our first couch 20 years later there are glass figurines, cat hairs, baby food stains, Dylan memorabilia.

 

I forgot to say: though I have problems with possession, wanting neither to cage nor be caged, I too want someone to come home to. Not to have them waiting with soup on the stove and fluffy pyjamas, but to be a well-known shirt tail flopping off the bus in front, recumbent potato so sleepy he didn’t kick his shoes off, tickler of the cat and raiser of my toilet seat, which really I don’t care about as long as he doesn’t pee like a sprinkler.

Hello,

and I’m glad I’ve met you?

 

People know I like the Great Gatsby, it fits my porcelain head like one luminous yellow fish. I want a little energy to read swimmingly but reading is a lonely activity and I’m happy for company in strangers.

 

“It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

 

I don’t want these categories. I want to keep spilling from one best scenario to another. I’ve explained myself so many times it must be true, and I’ll have it true, even if the versions of this are as numerate as dying ideas.

 

Every link I send you is another frame added to the memory, so keep clicking, couple more updates in this truncated log. Two eventualities: this is it, no one else but you; or, this is over, there are other stories to tell. I wonder if you have the time to make it clear to me.