cut open my sternum and pull

I'm no stranger to pain

There's this odd little game that we play sometimes.

A game that seems simultaneously a universal dance for two but also utterly ours

The game is usually set in motion after some sort of catastrophe either viewed on TV or through hearsay

We'll look at each other, happy and safe in the couch/on the bed, but briefly imagine the other in that situation

The fear grips us at a safe distance- the knowing of us currently being safe but the knowledge of possibly losing the precious object a faint but threatening reality

Joel and Clementine flirted with this dance too

She would pretend to smother him with a pillow and he faked dead

until she pestered him enough that he awoke 

like a modern day Lazarus

This play is all fun and games until the play becomes reality

At the thought of actually losing him, my chest seizes and I lose my breath

As long as death is a distant specter, the game remains fun

Mitigating the fake pain of a fake passing

exitstrategy

1. Run away to Brooklyn. Rent an apartment with a claw footed bathtub. Commute to Manhattan during the week and put in hours at a menial publishing job. Drive home to New Jersey on weekends to swim in the pool and cry to your mother. Smoke Gauloises on the fire escape. Let yellowing issues of Rolling Stone and Vogue pile into a protective fortress around your bed. Listen to Cat Power. Fall asleep mostly naked beneath the duvet watching Sportscenter and drinking earl grey. Date a Yankees fan and kiss his hands on the 4 Train into the Bronx.

2. Run away to Barcelona. Eat milk chocolate magnum bars and drink cheap champagne. Burst into charming fits of laughter whenever you get embarrassed about butchering the Catalan language. Wear denim cutoffs, Dr. Pepper chapstick, and very little else. Go dancing at 3 a.m. Whiten your teeth. Tan your shoulders. Braid feathers into your hair. Perpetually wake up with sand caught in the thin cotton sheets of your tiny bed. Listen to the Rolling Stones and kiss all the longhaired boys you can get your hands on without ever having to apologize.

3. Run away to Los Angeles. Sublet a studio in Venice three blocks from the beach. Listen to top 40 radio. Go to Chateau Marmont and charge drinks you can’t afford to a long-dormant credit card. Sleep with a television actor who lives in the valley. Sleep with a musician who lives in Bel Air. Break things off with both of them when gas prices begin to rise. Find Gilda Radner’s star on the Walk Of Fame and swallow a sob when you see the filthy cement around her name is cracked. Walk through the Venice Canals until the sun sets and you forget your own name. Call your mother crying from the parking lot of a 24-hour Ralph’s supermarket. Tell her you want to come home.

4. Run away to Paris. Gaze at the pink and pistachio glow of macarons in the window on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Listen to Joni Mitchell. Meet an Argentinean man in the Latin Quarter for drinks. Melt into his accent and kiss him goodnight, but return to your apartment alone because his face doesn’t look enough like the man’s you are trying to forget. Get lost in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, admiring Napoleon’s fine red damask. Walk alone along the Seine in an old dress, ten-dollar shoes, and an Hermes scarf. Fumble with the locks on the fence overlooking the river. They all have lovers’ names etched into them and the girl who left the red heart-shaped lock has the same name as you.

5. Run away to Martha’s Vineyard. Write heartbroken stories during the day in front of a large fan that blows curls of humid hair across your tired face. Take a waitress job at The Black Dog at night and try hard not to drop too many trays. Learn to ride a moped. Pretend you’re a Kennedy. Listen to Carly Simon. Eat hand-churned ice cream out of waffle cones. Visit the flying horses and consider how many girls just like you have sat on the same horse clutching for the same brass ring. Get stoned and dance barefoot down the length of the eroded Jaws beach. Date a Red Sox fan. Yell at each other during baseball games, and then kiss and make up between tangled sheets.

thestoryofourlives

You want to know why I love TV?

We're always trying to look for ways to validate our existence- whether it be through

religion, power, drug use, whatever it is that allows us to connect with something

higher- something intangible that makes us feel more connected, less alone, the truth of the triviality of our lives forgotten for that moment

And here we are, a species that has created a whole other medium

a world that we can escape to for an hour or a half hour

where every action a character has generally affects the other

the effect of the action giving that action meaning and depth

TV allows us to perpetuate the notion that each of our lives has a narrative

We aren't alone. Our lives have meaning.

The cruel joke is that TV isn't reality- it's a construct of our fantasies and fears

The genius of the human race is that language and storytelling allow us to communicate our experiences to make us feel less alone and engender the idea that our lives have direction and meaning

The tragedy is that it's a lie.

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.