"Oh, I'm a weak and lonely sort
Though I'm not sailing just for sport
I've come to feel
Out on the sea
These urgent lives
Press against me
I'm just a guest
I'm not a part
With my tender head
With my easy heart
These several years out on the sea
Made me empty, cold, and clear
Pour yourself into me"
--"Girl in Port"-- Okkervil River
I guard the echo of us stubbornly
Like some great and venerable ash heap
Like some root-dead stump that, in a fit of sentimentality
I've refused to convert into kindling
Yet we, long past, are beautiful only in death
For our growth together was galled and ugly,
A chimaera of competing species, forced
Together, an unlovely, alien thing.
But since we are no longer a threat,
We are a curiosity, pondered and prismed in new light
Beautiful for our unprecendented oddity
For the unlikely wonder of existence.
That "us" is then commemorative rather than generative
Means that I can gently care after and shelve the past
Smoothing gently the feathers on its broken neck
Burying it in my garden for the roses to protect.
I don't think it is possible to live in this state until you have truly made peace with the heat and can entertain it in your house like a familiar and gregarious guest. It isn't heat like the Southwest, where you forget it's hot because there is no humidity. Here, heat languishes. It drapes itself across our bodies like Spanish moss; yet, with preternatural heaviness, inundates our blood. Thus, when it departs, you have little defense against the winter chill and, as a result, a kind of seasonal Stockholm syndrome aches in the aftermath.
I think this will be a watershed year for the deconstruction of personal mythology.
"So, what you are telling me, Jesi, is that your third date with him was a colonoscopy?"
I've become that person who hates seeing happy couples because they remind me of everything in life I actually wanted to last.
I ache for someone on whom my words are not wasted. An equal in verbal courtship or just banter. Someone who plays at metaphors and figurative language as I do. Someone who wants to understand what, in the small faultlines and cracks between knowing, they have not fathomed. I want someone who aches too, with curiosity and eagerness. Who tumbles into conversation and contact like large, clumsy puppy and who does not take the hunt so seriously as to forget to have fun along the way. Who lives on ideas and the adventure of being alive.
If you can't be honest with your self, you'll never be honest with anyone else.