Thu, 19 May 2005

I Hate How Obvious I Have Been (version)
The only thing I remember from being in school was having to blow my nose, sitting in class, without any tissue, and I’d have to get up, but I couldn’t get up, I was mortified of getting up for some reason, maybe the teacher was talking, and I’m trying to think of a way to wipe my nose on my hand, or my sleeve, without anybody looking, but there’s always somebody looking at me, because that’s what school is all about. I told her this once and she told me that someone who was always watching me in school was her. I didn’t know what to say to that.

She said she was going to go looking for her brother, who she last heard from up in Vancouver, working for the city, unless he was lying, stirring her coffee with her left ring finger. She kept saying she missed him, missed him so much, but mostly I think she just wanted an excuse to drop out of school. She told me I had to take care of myself, because nobody else would take care of me, and she laughed when she said it, and then retracted it, and started to apologize, and then turned, and tried to lose herself in some other conversation. The police walked from table to table while the other patrons pulled back their scalps, having replaced their brains with a nest of high-tension wires, so that their actions and stations could be decided by the tones broadcast over the speakers in the marketplace, all the bad days and sadness gone instantly through a hum of some peppy tune, all arguments sifted out and away by harmonic sympathies of skull-chambers brought close enough together. I still had pieces of my brain at this time, and thus did not have to display the inside of my head, making sure no one had cats-cradled themselves into antisocial genius. She always kept her brain. She was like that.

I’d been keeping a log all year of all the things people told me, or else said about me when I wasn’t around, heard secondhand, totally misconstrued, and I wrote down everything she said, everything I could remember, as soon as I finished talking to her, but even in the minutes it took me to get off the phone or out into the hallway it’d slip away from me, so that to look back is a crooked line of throwaway lines ghosting the things I wanted to remember, all the talk of the boy she was in love with who I used to imagine was me. Everything she said. Nothing I could hold against her. Every edge blurred. Safety of specifics, certain environments, unbound over time, coming apart in my hands. Give-lines, the hairline cracks in each argument, each statement, incomprehensible an soon as she left my sight. What did she mean? What did I say? She must have gone through millions of words with me, but the only one I remember, the only one I can still hear when I listen for it, was “don’t”.

I feel a little bad.

Last I heard she’d been showing everyone her coffin when they stop by the cape, asking cousins and the half-famous to rest in it, see what the world looks like through the small blue window she had carved in the lid. I heard her brother had another seizure at the grocer while she screamed at him, told him to get up, told him to just keep walking, but he never really listened to her even when she was beautiful, and that’s been such a long time ago. I heard she was still claiming other people’s miseries as her own, selecting angles from them the way she once ransacked other people’s beliefs to provide shimmering accessories for her new personality, so as to raise her secondhand agonies up from the everyday to the mythic, but nobody can even hear her anymore, washed away in a constant white hum of mumbling pity. I heard she was promising blessings and indulgences to anyone who could produce gold from her bones. I heard she was counting down the days until her buffer of spoiled privilege wore thin, her wrist-scars all on display.

As the police arrived, as the ambulance was called, we watched for the miracle we were promised, but that miracle never came.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #