Writing of the Creative Kind

He was succulent in every word and every way. In fact, he was more so the farther away he aimlessly strolled with his hands clasped loosely behind his back and his feet dragging contemptuously in the dirt. His tracks overlapped and obliterated his predecessors. He pulled at threads constantly: loosely unraveling the interwoven shreds of his mind– his childhood, his love of monarch butterflies, his crimson ‘67 Ford Falcon, the black monotony of his wardrobe, the tarnished silver of his father’s wedding ring, his sister’s collection of Marilyn Monroe anti-epics, the confusion that is the phenomenon of picture within a picture, the self-contained euphoria in a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, his apathetic hatred of all things vegetable, his preference for the pictures that came with store bought picture frames instead of his own, his love of music that is uncorrupted by lyrics, his mission to erradicate the nation of all gyms but especially the ones entirely surrounded by windows, his mother’s vain attempts to tame the cowlicks at the foremost center of his hairline when he was smaller, the way his handwriting changed everytime and refused to repeat itself, his pathological admiration of maps of all sizes and hues, the way chalk from a rosin bag smelled after it combined with his sweat and his blood, and what else, well, the depths are too damp to fully explore. He attracted and released his women at a rate that would alarm some and amuse others. His dark dark sweaters were pilled with the memory of movements that had come before and stayed with him despite his best attempts to evade them. He prefered to fidget and indulge his oral fixation in any way available to him. He was a cardigan sweater man, through and through.

She was an omniverous literature snob and she wore watches that no longer kept the time. She played the piano indiscriminately on any surface she could find. She was the kind of girl who could never find the time for a manicure but routinely cleaned her nail beds with the unevenly filed nails of the opposing hand. She followed her feet and earnestly believed she had no control over their choices. She had been a sickly child in her otherwise athletic youth and marveled at every day of health that adulthood had graced her with. She was never without a pen, the compulsive clicks of which droned on incessantly throughout the night when inspiration struck her. The nubile laugh lines around her mouth betrayed her ability to find humor in its subtlest incarnations. She had given herself to love at one time only to watch it crumble at her feet. Once, she lost her way in the Japanese Tea Garden so she sat down on a bench and imagined herself in Japan and had her own private Lost in Translation only she replaced Bill Murray with a faceless man. She liked to do that, imagine herself in movies, and that’s why she cherished her IPOD so: she was forever rearranging the soundtrack of her life. She found peace in the unmitigated movements of puppies but wasn’t responsible enough to own one. She spent most of her waking hours ordering the files of her life neatly in her head but was completely incapable of transposing that order onto her reality. The way she dressed, the way she walked, the way she highlighted her hair all combined to emit the wrong impression of her pith but she felt no need to correct the majority of those who had gotten her wrong: she saved her energy for those she deemed worthy. She went to bed each night not knowing whether or not she would awake to fits of depression or fits of expression but she woke up every day nonetheless.

Her neurosis were bountiful but fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. He was dextrous and gentle if not a little impulsive at times and in his embrace she felt exonnerated of her past indiscretions. His carefully constructed persona was obliterated by his love of her flimsy shoes, her silly little shoes that she rarely paid over $20 for. He knew about wars and she knew what caused them. And every time they thought they had perfectly defined one another they found they were wrong, much to their delight. His home was unfriendly but in her eyes he would build himself a new one. At times she shivered uncontrollably and he just left her to it, which always amazed her because that was exactly what she wanted, and she marveled at how he knew that. The undertow of their connection was erratic and fierce and neither of them were brave enough to be swept out to sea just yet. He would frequently tell her about his plans for the future and include bits of the untrue he knew would not agree with her so he could see her wrinkle and twitch her nose in defiance. He could never get enough of that unconscious homage to the television of her youth.

He said, “I can’t” and walked out, leaving her on the floor, a humbled heap of dehumanized matter. She stayed there for some time, too. She let the wetness streaming down her cheeks exhaust itself while her eyes folded oragami nothingness in the waves of empty air that surrounded her. The stillness was monotonous and oppressive and she prayed for noise but it went unanswered because all her prayers did. She made crop circles in the carpet with the tips of her manicured fingers to distract herself and effect change in an apartment that was stoically dismissive of her choices, mockingly trite and silently screaming “YOU’VE ALWAYS KEPT AN UNTIDY HOUSE.”

She was ashen and bare and wanted to get up but knew not where to go. So what was the point of movement? “This isn’t right, this can’t be right,” she thought. “I made plans and passed up opportunities. I gave blood and refused the orange juice afterwards.” That was a bad sign. She wasn’t thinking in realities anymore, she was thinking in metaphorical scenarios- her mind had drifted to a realm of her own construction and she had curled into the fetal position of imagined spatial plains. The architecture of her world was gone, her engineer had left and what remained was swiftly being eaten by Fraggles.

Maybe if she sat long enough her limbs would frost over with paralysis and her exterior could match the interior. She imagined the pain from her shredded heart traveling down the Aorta Interstate and she thought she felt a collision as it merged onto Highway Nervous System. “That makes sense,” she thought, “that Highway’s been closed since the Berkeley Earthquake of 1998.” Her nerves had been in disrepair for some time and it didn’t look like they’d be fixed anytime soon- there were funding issues and time constraints. 

She heard her phone vibrate years away on the hastily built table across the room. The vultures were circling already. She’d let them consume themselves with other carrion right now. She knew she was safe for a while at least because they thought she was on the table, but she wasn’t, she was still on the floor. “Okay,” she thought, “ten more minutes of self flaggelation and then its time to straighten your legs and lift.” She nodded to herself in resolution. 

But she spent the night there on the floor. Half way through the night, though, she slumped over and unconsciously spasmed from time to time. At least there was movement.

It’s his distance that pains me and the sheer implications of his silence that frighten me. I’ve drowned in a silence like his before.
It’s his impatience with the little and his patience with the large that fascinates me. I’ve fumbled with impatience like his before.
It’s his complete disregard for what I need that confuses me. I’ve seen the rolling tenderness that defines his eyes but never experienced it.
It’s his adoration of solitude that denies me, turns me into a whimpering automatron of desire and loneliness. I’ve faced these insecurities before. 
It’s the intention of his melodies that concern me. I’ve known for sometime they weren’t meant for my ears.
It’s the warmth of his future that he cannot see. I’ve no way of showing it to him.
It’s the pleasantries of his present that he’s missing. I’ve worn my skin raw on the pavement of his now.
It’s the undeniable truth of his agony that eliminates me. I’ve no hope of finding space there.
It’s his shattered sight that fragments his world and forces him to wince and blink. I’ve no idea how to make him see me.

It’s the possibility of an implied, wonderously jagged beauty that keeps me sitting in his path, mesmerized by the agression of his watch. And if he’d only check his watch and see the whisper of my reflection on its face, it would be time.

It’s the peace that accompanies sheer movement, the contentment that coincides with the pale flutter of the tiny invisible hairs on my neck when I turn my head to avert my vision. Without it I’m a blur, the only grey in a neon sound system.

But I’m sitting now, not pacing not smudging lines… just slowly coding. Choice is absent, this is paralysis pure and true. 

And it’s you, my friend, you who is able to lay your inexplicable smudges on top of my own and form decipherable shapes- not answers, just shapes. The haze of your necessity is inflating your hesitance, your uncertainty and you’ve rolled eons past my ground- you are only picking up speed.

If I stop, if I breathe, if I start to think for even a moment that concave roar that lives at the base of my ear drums becomes immutable and unrelenting. I’m only a bead of moisture on this cold midsummer afternoon and the swift drops of mist that emanate from the waterfall of your whispers only adds to the size of my puddled roar. Please, please don’t splash because the dispersion will never right itself, that puddle will never reform. 

But oh how this monsoon season never fails to dissapoint.

She drove across the highwayed expanse that stretched between her and home with one mostly steady hand tightly gripping the lower half of that steel grey steering wheel and her other arm resting on the ledge of the car window, the back of her index and middle fingers tapping phantom rhythms on her softly pinked pursed lips. With her eyes methodically chasing the unknown car ahead and mindlessly marking the painted yellow dividers, she thought of her beloved eccentricities and their impact on her past and present- they were all that she was and they were why she was alone if not surrounded. The tender green glow from her dash gave her an extraterrestrial jaundiced complexion that suited a traveler who had nothing to eat except cool ranch dorritos and Arizona plum tea with ginseng and honey. “We all talk of metaphoric crossroads,” she thought, “but I want to experience ther real McCoy with my own four wheels.” This, however, was not the trip for that- she had traced this asphalt so many times before that her car practically steered itself to the coastal haunts of her childhood. “Another time, another time behind this wheel I’ll find those crossroads.”

I can’t tell my left from my right most nights, but I do know my center with all its tides and frailties. But it’s hard to run a marathon when your direction is muddled, regardless of preparation. So I turn on faith. Faith in an optimistic hue. Faith in an unrelenting goodness that has to exist somewhere in this stark world. Faith in the fairness of a finite array of jumbled pathways. Faith in the sustainability of family, even at its highest level of desecration. Faith that, every once in a while, I will make a right turn by chance and it will obliterate anything that came before with ecstasy. Faith that occasional anxieties will keep me safe and sane. Faith that these bambi legs will at least keep me walking on. Faith that my books and the knowledge they impart will gloriously break down the stereotypes others insist on enveloping me in. Faith in the fearful grace of the unknown and its power to make me see the luminous shades of my shadows. Faith in the necessity for superfluous motion. Faith in the hands that I hold, the hands that hold me. Faith that the unfinished canvas of my Grandfather will soothe my terminal aches. Faith that most wounds are merely superficial. Faith that the color pink suits my complexion only, not my pith. Faith in the merits of exhaustion. Faith in durability and loss prevention. Faith in the unsocial elements of my world- in their purity, in their depth, in their truth. Faith in the music of my mind. Faith in the undeposited. Faith in my own even breath sounds and even more faith in the uneven.

So far it’s been a pale blue of a September and man oh man is it a Russian River of a day. And that back-lit symbolism hasn’t shown itself ’round these parts in some time, despotism has been kept at bay albeit ever lurking in the humming twilight of this city’s alleys of decay. 

There are those of us who keep walking these deserted rails: we are testaments to the inconclusive arms of our shadows, our ever present armored pasts. We walk these streets that coil about the skeletal remains of tinderbox luxury, facades of ornamental optimism and we know, yes we KNOW, that we’re all an opium flash away from our muse our divinity our legacy. Legacies in print and in paint in clay and bar-room clashes. We are urban explorers of peaceful and passionate means, plodding these streets to the rhythms of hymnals not yet composed in our airways, not yet adorned with our fears. We are the spices we are the treads we are the alternative fuels. We are the architects of apathy where our parents were the builders of momentum. We are the colt .45s in the hands of a hung jury. We emerged from the womb seasoned veterans of derision, masters of our inherited sarcastic whips with an embryonic blood lust and a taste for continuity that has not the longevity for display.

She grew in size behind a filter of neoslavery, adding inches in a cage. So she paced, craned her neck to the corners for the slightest sliver of the moon- to see it dance and jostle the flow of its cousin constellations. She cauterized the edges of her customs so they wouldn’t know her ways, her singular allied mannerisms she so gently pulsed with. Her lines were rigid so she bent them and she loved deeply so she sought innoculation against whatever well inside her produced that. When they asked her questions she was careful not to blink, she dreaded betraying who she was. But her size just couldn’t help her there, in that web of steel and steam that locked in her world and delineated her vision.

And her reluctance to leave made her all the more uneasy. She thought maybe it was the known that kept her rooted- a foe that presents itself in kind with colors extended, omnipotent though they seemed, would be much easier to swallow than one with shapes obscured. Or maybe it was the familiar stench of her captors anticipation she had grown to be amused by. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because her legs had simply atrophied. Whatever the cause, she merely stared at open doors- all that she was faced with, all that she endured.

You see, the thing about captivity you have to understand is the insatiable and ferocious fear of space, simple space either filled or unencumbered. Although her routes were small, the paths that she tread in her cubicle of a world were ones she knew she could walk, but the ones beyond her sphere were unimaginably rare and unreadable. 

And the girl could read- it was really her only skill. She could read the spectral images that would corral the swabs of dust that migrated past her view. She could read the unknown tremors of the pencils of her captors. She could read the slightest whiff of reticent apathy and delve into its rife implications. She could read hybrids and respected them immensely. She could read the celestial power of socratic thought in the movements of ants, bees, nature in its infinite divinity at large. But she checked this power with feigned illiteracy because if what was expected of her remained at low enough levels she would never be agressively prodded, never be held beyond her means.

Her quartered thoughts were quite an accumulation in themselves, a tome of forgiveness tinged with evangelical denial. How was she not herself, how could she step outside her own creation? If we are all blank nothingness when we apparate onto this plane, who do we have to blame when we don’t know who we are? Who do we tell when we feel nearer to our unobsolvable answers- who do we barter with to flush out our accuracy? She didn’t know- she could never step far enough outside her autotextual haze to frame her appeals. And even if she could she’d be staring into the face of an unadulterated puppet master, waiting eagerly sharpened number two pencil in hand and clipboard at the ready, anxious to trace and examine her movements in order to come to conclusions that have nothing to do with her, really.

So she bent herself into the fetal position and tried to extract warmth from her own limbs in the perforated corner of her loathsome cage and prayed, to a power she very much doubted could exist, for sleep which would not come.