When I was little I was desperate for a house with a balcony. A decade and a divorce later, as the dark lies across the sky like carbon dust sprinkled over glass, that’s where I find myself. The car park that sleeps below like a dead zebra is lit by the occasional streetlight. The body of tarmac is still and shadowy in the cool night. Cats steal across it from time to time, and from the underground parking lot of the next building, occasional cars curl through and ooze down the road. Tiny flies and dusty winged moths flock to the promising glare of my computer screen, lured to the slow buzzing warmth and light that it emits.
Some things make me so sad I can’t help but cry. Fran always says that I cry at everything. Old men in old suits, with old glasses standing under the neon glare of a supermarket aisle, for example. Wrinkled faces contorted into expressions of confusion, of sadness, of a deep and irrevocable far away-ness. Sad strawberries in a trolly. Eyes in the past, the eyes of someone so utterly isolated within themselves, that they seem to be existing behind a layer of glass. Perhaps a bell jar. God, it kills me to think about.
And then there’s me. I’m a slot machine with symbols that don’t match, no matter how many times you try me. I’m rigged. I’m wired wrong. I’m in love one minute and sick with disgust the next.
Thursday 8 July 2010
Tuesday 6 July 2010
‘He was so surprised to wake up and find Teresa squeezing his hand tightly. Lying there looking at her, he could not quite understand what had happened. But as he ran through the previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them. From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was the sleep that followed it…While they slept, she held him as on the first night, keeping a firm grip on wrist, finger, or ankle… Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation ( a desire that extents to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to only one woman).’
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I've been meaning to look this passage up for weeks after that Jenny Owen Youngs lyric reminded me 'no better way that I can see to spend all the time while you're asleep than holding your hands inside of mine'
Let’s fall asleep together soon. Let’s become tangled in cotton and dreams that glide and skim on the oceans of our minds like fish making their way in the dark hush before dawn. Let me hold your hand, let me keep you close while we lie in the silence, just two more slowed heartbeats in the town held in the palm of a great warm hush, a collective inhale. Let’s breathe the same air; breathe in each other. Molecules of you would tumble through my lungs, finer than dust, and infinitely more potent. The blood in our veins would make its dull aching journey. The pulse in my thumb would throb slowly where it met your hand; they’d grip each other as they hung off the side of the bed; two mountaineers clinging together above a precipice.
It could be this way, we could lie entwined as the pale dawn fades into the sky, filling the room with blue, submerged in the depths of the inescapable new day. As the wires that hold everything in place make the earth groan towards the sun, we could be there, together, quietly sharing this bemusing existence. The first rays that peer over the horizon like tentative deer would illuminate my hair, weaving it through with golden silk. The hum of the summer night would sharpen into the early morning music of birds as they flex their fragile wings, and surf on the breeze of the rising morning. Dew drops would glisten on the soft purple spikes of grass, tears soon to be forgotten by the kiss of the sun. And slowly, as the sun brings colour back into a world hidden in shadow for what seemed like eternity, we could drift, off the edges of the earth of our minds, and fade into reality again.
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I've been meaning to look this passage up for weeks after that Jenny Owen Youngs lyric reminded me 'no better way that I can see to spend all the time while you're asleep than holding your hands inside of mine'
Let’s fall asleep together soon. Let’s become tangled in cotton and dreams that glide and skim on the oceans of our minds like fish making their way in the dark hush before dawn. Let me hold your hand, let me keep you close while we lie in the silence, just two more slowed heartbeats in the town held in the palm of a great warm hush, a collective inhale. Let’s breathe the same air; breathe in each other. Molecules of you would tumble through my lungs, finer than dust, and infinitely more potent. The blood in our veins would make its dull aching journey. The pulse in my thumb would throb slowly where it met your hand; they’d grip each other as they hung off the side of the bed; two mountaineers clinging together above a precipice.
It could be this way, we could lie entwined as the pale dawn fades into the sky, filling the room with blue, submerged in the depths of the inescapable new day. As the wires that hold everything in place make the earth groan towards the sun, we could be there, together, quietly sharing this bemusing existence. The first rays that peer over the horizon like tentative deer would illuminate my hair, weaving it through with golden silk. The hum of the summer night would sharpen into the early morning music of birds as they flex their fragile wings, and surf on the breeze of the rising morning. Dew drops would glisten on the soft purple spikes of grass, tears soon to be forgotten by the kiss of the sun. And slowly, as the sun brings colour back into a world hidden in shadow for what seemed like eternity, we could drift, off the edges of the earth of our minds, and fade into reality again.
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