i remember sitting on the groovepharm sofa, facing george’s bedroom door. i wore my sunglasses. it was night. the lighting was yellow and dirty. the walls were manky. i wore my pink lace frou frou dress with the pink disco jumper and the fluffy tutu. i was carving up a mess in my sketchbook. i wanted to talk to you so badly, even though our conversations were always the unbearable can of worms.
i scribbled in the book, “this is exactly the moment i have been waiting for my entire life”.
whatever that superior ache was that grew in my esophagus i was mistaking it for love. i was mistaking it regularly, daily, each time i breathed in. i was a p.i. on the trail of loaded phrases. i was a swarthy striped one eyed pirate with a booty of longing glances. i was everything but right there in that stinky black sofa. i ached for the can of worms.
misty, you surprised me. you climbed into his bed with ease and did not want to think of me outside that door. i finally awoke to the suffering of a lazy loss that began somewhere in my bare feet, feet all jaded from dancing as if it mattered, and ending somewhere way beyond the tips of me toward what i would fondly refer to as my leo moon. my loud needy felicitous lazy lost leo moon. i loved him with a longing of years in the making, but my heart was broken by you.
and today, what of it? the stupid night. there it is, my expectations, all laid out like a last supper for conspiring dirty men, and me, the princess of eat-my-words bent over and awaiting my comeuppance. stupid, stupid night.
i remember the long drive home on 1604, still a kid in an 18 year old desperate pile of of unshaved legs and pudgy hips, songs of loss and late beginnings on the stereo, speeding easily. i would wait in that freezing garage all night for josh, some kind of sick hopefulness gluing the minutes together, and the smell of october burning itself into my head so that i could, tonight, dredge it up this 16 years later so i can recall that idiot night when loss and hope fucked themselves silly in my heart, breeding need.
those moments never fucking leave me and here it is like a black cat on my chest, while i lose and lose again, black flaming loss fanned by the whispers of my stupid stupid hopefulness.
claude. robert. veale.
we both know i am not allowed to say your fucking name. you know what? i am emily dickenson’s fly on the wall, and you are her short sweet death. i am moving through, shaking up the invisible silence, waiting for your remarkable momentous earth shattering last breath. i am waiting for you to declare your prizes, one, two and three, and the mother of them all, as that deep portion of you unassignable. the whole time: me on a wall. me hovering. me hanging on. me hell bent on hoping for the big black spider of ridiculous expectations to just fucking put me out of my misery. big black widow with the bleeding heart.
