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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

“I checked under your pillow for you already.”

In the car I told your boyfriend I thought everything would be fine, none of my business, but he had a face animated by traces of you. I wasn’t trying to be kind or falsely reassuring, I’m not saying it won’t be difficult, the worst is yet to be if ever it should come. But I think you two are going to be together for a long while yet. You have something special. 

 

It still sounds to me like complacency, resignation, when someone asks me, especially with regard to P-Andrew, “Isn’t it enough that you met someone special? Why didn’t you stay with him?” With regard to Specificboy, “He was special, hold on to him/ He wasn’t that special, you’ll meet someone better.”

 

I’d like to clarify it further. It’s not the specialness of the person in and of themselves, because then we’d be looking at the beloved’s trophy value, a self-contained beauty frozen in the context of the showcase. More critically, it’s the specialness of their effect on you. Without any sound I sit up, starving with the need to better myself, not for him, but in his settling dust, the wake of his jittery ambition. Without irritation I find myself silent where previously I’d have complained. After him, I am entirely fearful but also valiant. He’s a fine thing to look at, unique unto himself, beautiful down to the ridges of his scars. But his value is not in how admirable or rare he is. It’s the effect he’s had on me, so that I’m buying a ticket, merchandise, and setting up my own act to rival his.

 

And I don’t care to own him, perhaps he will never kiss me again. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been compelled to move from here to a worthy future, and that is the holy grail I’m chasing, whose nomadic and turbulent map he marked upon me. And this feat, you silly boy, is quite profound and quite profound indeed is the extent of my affection for you.

in every frame i imagined your silence beside me

Katong Fugue showed tonight, which you don’t know about.

 

I want to love you with a savage singularity, one that is blind to the other pulses, knowing only hunger and motion. Would you let me, if I bury it for now and present it to you still salty with earth when my hair has grown long and my bank balance poorly; if I make it from here to another back-breaking bed with you?

 

This is the me you did not meet but it is true as every sinew and capillary urgently recovering while you sleep, truer than the girl who paused before you touched her, to gather for you what was uncontaminated and alas, clumsy, raw, so fearful, the distrustful girl who looked out your car window and remembered the man who rolled away too fast. Which me would you have wanted? Too bad you don’t get to choose, it’s a package deal. I would, though, impose a baggage limit.

 

You have no idea. You might think of yourself as another obsolete phone number, maybe you did an estimate of the average time I take to flit from one hope to the next.

 

I am probably a receipt in your wallet. But till I am crowded out, I am also a legitimate memory. Recipient of your long steady gaze, promising nothing but not denying either, 5 seconds in a moment you never had before.