keep your body still

sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. sin gives more chances to desire. —luis buñuel

hollow

I'm convinced that we are all living a movie of our own lives.

Character traits used to be something that you gleaned from social interaction.

That delicate touch and go where you test their humor with a joke

ask questions and quietly await their time to share

the battle of determining pecking order that occurs within a handshake

The time that a friendship takes to unfold- the ebb and flow of contact is half the beauty of it 

You begin to treasure those that have withstood the test and trial of time

keeping the count of them like rings on a tree stump

Nowadays you have thousand half friendships

little seedlings that you tend to here and there 

with a birthday post or a direct Tweet.

You have the modes of connection but nothing really happens

Internal reflection has ceased to exist

There are now multiple modes, including this very blog, where you can blast your thoughts

into the wide nothingness that is the web

hoping to catch some attention with your verbal bait

And through these half thoughts we construct the screenplay of our lives

Yes it's nice to look back at that wistful nostalgia at my written and recorded thoughts and desires

when I was sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-one

but I find that those memories are elusive and hard to catch

the culprits either being too many nights of willful drinking 

or some unnamed syndrome where once  you write it down

you allow your brain to not to have to remember

It doesn't take much to get a sense of who I am

I've carefully chosen the bands, TV shows, movies, and activities that indicate the person I am

or at least how I want to be seen

No one needs to know about my childhood love of Animorphs books

or that I bite my cuticles raw

it's not cool to know these things

What you should see is the tastemakers indicating 

that I am a white, young, relatively intelligent female with psuedo-serious taste

We are our own publicists-figuring out our brand and sticking desperately to it

fearful of being found out

And so we walk

bobbing around each other carefully as to not make physical contact

iPod headphones in, oblivious to passersby and the world around

listening to the soundtrack to the film that scores our life story

you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness

Now there's enough distance so it feels like that happened to someone else.

In all these cases, the damage was done before you knew you were damaged. 
The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions.

I never expected for it to all come back when I cracked the cover.

A friend had given me a cautionary disclaimer: "I had to put it down because it reminded me of my past relationship- it made me cry"- which rather than steering me away piqued my interest. The apple just hovered there and I simply had to taste it.

 As I read, what always happens when we read happened.
In stories of love and loss, we always look for the parallels to our own life narrative, the characters that we read into being mirrors of ourselves, the relationships that end up spanning chapters or are reduced to a footnote.
 Reading it, reflecting on the relationship that I had and lost, losing that safety of separation that time gives, hurts but it's a kind of numb pain.
Like when novocaine starts to kick in
but you can vaguely understand that what they are doing is painful
so you remain in this paralyzed state
 the knowledge of the pain that you should feel but strangely don't, hurting you more than a physical reaction

Her story parallels my own in ways I can never admit aloud
the intoxication of knowing that you are pivotal force standing
between life and despair for another
it's the way heroin might feel if it were a conscious being
And you know as you've known all along the more that you are consumed-
the stronger the addiction
That's what that relationship was
not love but an devouring force

 The truth was that we both were- on either ends of spectrum- addicted
Him to me the object against loneliness
and me to being the object
Objectification feels attractive when you slip it on once in awhile

But the cold hard unvarnished truth
is that I didn't have enough strength to leave
The deeper he took me into the forest- the more closely I followed
He took me to place that that the preening sorority girls
Who found absolution in the bottom of a bottle
couldn't even comprehend
but at the end he pulled himself out and left
I became a person that you could leave.

We haven't spoken in two years.
I've fallen in love again.
I am happy.
I won.

  You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her make you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you know who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences.

sartorial concerns

I never used to get it...not really.

 I could appreciate the benefits of being sartorially-proficient the conversation starter that a new pair of shoes can bring etc. but despite trying to look nice, I had always suspected and covertly bought into the notion that to be obsessed with fashion was to be preoccupied with the surface and concerning oneself with fabrics, patterns, and foot coverings belied an individual who had nothing of substance to say-as surface as his or her preoccupations

I haven't entirely changed my view

I still think that the fixation on the changing trends and the in ness and outness of certain silhouettes, patterns, looks, etc. are time wasted.

I get food- that's my thing.

Food makes sense to me- provides nourishment, brings communities and people together, reflects traditions, culture...

But now I get the artistry
I get the preoccupation
Whether you claim or care or not, there is a level of consciousness one has to have about their appearance
Even when you are "not giving a fuck" in your sweats and dirty tee-shirt
The choice to wear those things is the choice of how you want to be perceived
This paradox emerges- not caring but you care about not caring
Despite this
I don't know if this is girly, or silly, or superficial for me to say
But I can't help liking the way a new pair of shoes, dress, or piece of jewelry makes me feel.

separate togetherness

There's something quite zen about an afternoon to while away, a glass of wine, a book, and a bar.

Safe solitude amongst the masses. The clink of silverware against plates. The orchestral banging of pots and pans in the kitchen. The high tones of women's voices offset by the low murmurs of their male companions with the occasional monkey howl of an infant whose parents thought they were ready for the decorum of a public place. They all harmonize together into a comforting chaos and I fall into it, both apart and not a part of the scene. When my engrossment falters, I like to look around me and wonder what brought the patrons to this place. Sunday, this barfly perched next to me on his stool in between intervals to the bathroom, sniffed vigorously, jerking his head to look around, and muttering to himself under his breath- having a one-sided conversation with his own demons. I wonder what happened to him- what the steps were from the babe born to the coked up old man with glass straps downing beer after beer. I have always depended on the company of strangers.

the eternal damnation of the human condition

It's the same thing from the time before that. Like the time before that. And the time before that. You have it in your hands. The sweet succulent taste of satisfaction, of victory felt, of time spent and rewarded, of the moment that you had fantasized about so much that you can taste it. But it's never enough, is it. Really. When you all boil it down, achievement is a fucking orgasm. Brief, ecstatic, life-affirming, a respite from the minutiae of everyday life. Then just like that, it's over and done with and you're on to the next one. I get it you know. I understand that if we were every truly satisfied, boredom would set in and the anxiety and unsettling feeling would creep in. Dissatisfaction motivates us, keeps us going, striving, nothing is ever enough or better. We are eternally Sisyphus- pushing up whatever boulder rests upon our shoulders only for it to roll down and we begin our toil once again. My parents bought their house in 1988. They've remolded one aspect of it at least every couple of years. A counter here, a garden there, nothing is ever...right. Finally when everything is...there- that room just right, the side table works just so, they decide that they want to sell the house and start again. But why must this be so? Why can't things just...be. When will we realize that the greenest of the grass is on both sides of the hill?

the fade out

I hate looking at old pictures. It reminds me of what I dislike the most about myself.

Looking at the faces of friends long gone, teachers that I learned from then discarded from my life like a used tissue. I'm terrible at keeping up with those that aren't in my immediate periphery. It's too easy to let them drift away- time preserves them as "that person that I was close to when I was [still singing/16/at camp].

I've always been jealous of people who are good at keeping in touch. That prideful, almost arrogant way they say "My friend/mentor of [numerous] years...I've known them since I was [blank years old]". What they're saying is giving that person context in the story of their lives. What I hear is "Keeping people close for years on end is a priority to me- it signifies that I can be friends with people for years on end without the relationship fading away into obscurity. I have stronger values than you do". Clearly what I hear is a projection of my insecurity but I end up berating myself in the end anyways.

With the exception of a select few, my friendships are like chapters in a book. The rush of the beginning, the climactic moment, then the gradual end where we pass by each other through our respective lives like ghosts in the night.