9th grade history class, the news radio on, the nervous laughter. I don’t even believe in God but I remember praying. The halls of this public school are howling. I have long said I hate New York but I love New Yorkers and oh god Mike and Joe work on that block. The shine of the hallway floor because how can you look at anyone. 75 miles out and the phones don’t work. We walk the halls. I don’t remember getting home.

Standing in my childhood bedroom at the window. The light is slanting through curtains, blue, striped. My uncle’s voice is on the phone and I have never heard him so quiet. We don’t talk about it much, mostly I just need the telephone as proof that he has not turned into broken cinderblocks, ash, smoking shards of steel. We hang up.

In my memory there is a keening sound, a shrieking absence, a teenaged sobbing. Oh god what a child I was and oh god how time passes. So much of it. But still the wound aches. I smoked a joint by the river near the rubble that is no longer rubble with an anarchist named Myke with a y, slept on a blanket on the ground in his arms in its sight. I can never seem to remember where it is. Time goes on. Today is a Tuesday, the start of my second week of grad school, the day an album comes out, a day I don’t have rehearsal, a day I will try not to text someone I like a little too much, a day I will think about mopping the floors but probably won’t. But this day and that hang in the air, always and already and complete, humming at their certain frequency forever. Our lives like light, passing through the prism of the time before. 

I didn’t mean to write about this today, but I woke up bolt upright before 5am this morning in a panic. I don’t know why. Perhaps memory didn’t want me to sleep.

I have pissed in your wine. I have broken your boards. I have burned down your house. A Balkan brass band is playing at your funeral. O Earth, I am a clumsy seductress. This brie is melting down my chin and my cunt is in the ocean, at the bottom of the sea. The names of bright-eyed men, and lord, the women too, are the shimmering rocks.

I want to burn you in my memory, give you the keys to my house of fear. My tongue in your mouth is a catechism, and I would let you baptize me in spit and tar. Let’s climb all the trees in the city. Let’s climb the stairs from the gravel to your room. Let’s, let’s.

I came across this while looking up the lyrics to “The Living Room”, which I was listening to on repeat: a blog post by Amanda Palmer, written in 2006 about the death of her friend Ben. 

It made me weep kind of hysterically. Thinking about all the beautiful and anxious young men that I have shared strange connections with, only to get too busy and distracted to call. Every single one of them one day will die, and some of them I will not see again. Everything’s enough to make your heart break.

thegood-nightladies:

A few snaps from VAGINA.

Photography by INKA Photography

Oh look, I’ve got ribbons.

a visual explanation by Franklin Veaux of the distinctions between certain kinds of non-monogamous relationship structures and behaviors.

not necessarily the most accessible to people with no prior knowledge on the topic, and certainly a little tongue in cheek (see: unicorns), and I’m sure there are plenty of relationships that would prove this inaccurate, but I think it does a pretty good job of giving a clear visual description on a topic that is often confusing and semantically sloppy. 

of course, it’s those expanses of unlabeled color that are often most difficult. navigating where exactly you and your partners’ needs lie on a vast and complex spectrum can be a challenge, duh. 

thegood-nightladies:

The Ladies of VAGINA! 

Photo by ishootrockstars

check it outttttttt. bad ass bitches. I’m the one on the far right (I had just been hanging upside-down).

“The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ‘12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.”

Pardon me while I grossly weep over a stranger’s death. Sometimes clichés are such because we need to keep hearing it, that despite the endless repetition we still can’t always get these things into our heads. Sometimes it takes the horror of dramatic irony, the howling voice of Rilke’s youthful dead to make me hear a thing.

more unfinished thoughts.

-

Sometimes names are changed to spare the innocent

but we are as guilty as your sheets, Alexei

with your name like a poem and your eyes like wet lips.

 I saw a razorblade fall from your pocket like an eyelash

your body shedding skin.

Everyone’s in love with you:

the girl whose cheek is wet with my spit, 

the immigrant whose belt I split in two.

We cannot catch you. You are a ghost

and so we rub our tragic mouths together.

The night before you left, you took my picture.

I will never see the print.

“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

—

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via fitzgeraldquotes)

I really love this book. I also inextricably associate Fitzgerald with a super intense but very short-lived affair I had with a young man whose favorite author is Fitzgerald. He had beautiful eyes and good southern manners and too much to drink, and the way he looked at me out a window on the street made my whole body shake. In the dawn light of his bedroom I could see the regret on his face even before he stood and walked to the window. I could taste the damnation between us. We knew it wouldn’t last, our bodies were turning to dust around us, and in the darkness of a theater our hands touched in passing.

I wrote you a poem in my head and my nose started bleeding

Now open up your legs, because it’s time for a feeding

Inside my orchard the dirt’s going to shit

The birds are all silent but the rocks eloquent

I built you a house out of vomit and sticks

I paid all our bills with painkillers and tricks.

We wanted some solace from the noise of the world

But now I can’t remember if I’m that kind of girl

I’ll bring you a twinkie on a tray on my knees

While you whistle along to a theme on tv

I have no shampoo and my skull’s falling off

I begged you to choke me to the border of shock

But while you remind me what it’s like to die

Please spare time for a wink at the camera’s eye.