the guy thought i forgot my jacket

she wouldn't tell me her last name and i don't remember her first. we met at a mezcal bar in chelsea. i could barely breathe she was so beautiful.

i couldn't remember my ex girlfriend's mother's name.

i couldn't for the life of me. i had to track down her name on the internet. i'd been wrong about my guess at her name. i felt a satisfaction in the throes of this loss.

setting it up. this life. clean bill of health. for what. hey, don't think like that it's for something. remember--

enough with the memories.

how about now. how do you feel now.

before she left me to work with teenagers full time, my therapist said she learned from me: resilience.

open toed sandals becoming more and more frequent. crossing then uncrossing of the legs. dimming of the fluorescent lights. then darkness. in the darkness where the shadows appear, in comparison, to be lights.

i sunk like a stone.

i sunk like a stone.

i dreamt of my sick father. we ate a big greasy meal together but he was already all wasted away - like he was at the end.

and in my dream i was concerned he ate all of it cuz he was so skinny and weak like he was toward the end.

and in my dream he surprised me cuz he followed me into another room and stood there with me while i tended to my task.

and in my dream i turned to him and i said--

dad we don't know when you're gonna go but when you do, i'm gonna miss you. and then i woke up with him gone missing him.

after i woke up--

i told the story to trav over breakfast early that morning and just as i did he pointed out a green hummingbird flittering above red flowers.

and i forgot to mention about waking from that dream:

that that morning after i awoke from that dream but before we met for breakfast, i had stared at my bedroom blinds with tears in my eyes and i had asked my dad for another sign.

and then the hummingbird again. like the one that flew into his house minutes after he'd died.

watching my dad lose himself was an intimate experience. slow. so slow. the way the disease deconstructed his body, pound by pound, appetite by appetite. the way the painkillers commandeered his mind.

i haven't gotten over it. i haven't gotten over it. who knows if life will give me time. i just read about an indonesian man who is 145 years old. maybe by then, i won't need to get over it, cuz i'll just want to die. 

but not right now. now i am alive. even if it's just a night with my memories. what a treasure. there it is-- that old famous: resilience.

don't think. don't think. 

just remember the way she looked across the train platform. and the things you texted to each other before she got onto hers and you then realized you were standing on the wrong one.

but it wasn't the wrong one you were on at all

that time her alcoholic father beat me at ping pong

i was in the midwest for fourth of july with a girl and her family. i thought she was the best.

we slept in the basement of their lake home. her mom had to buy a dehumidifier cuz we were breathing in a lot of condensation the first couple nights.

i would wake up at five am still drunk and go upstairs and write a screenplay that i still want to produce to this day. i would write it in a room next to a covered indoor jacuzzi. but there was also a window that looked out to verdant green forest.

i knocked out an entire draft while we were there too. it was a productive time even though it was the beginning of our end.

she read it on the dock by the lake with her legs curled up on a wooden chair.

the lake was little and still and mind altering and i loved it.
 i found some pictures her and i took in the forest together on one of those days, i was strong and muscular and my head was shaved. she was slender and her eyes were battling her enemies while simultaneously serenading her mysteries.

i was so strong and muscular that one night her dad did something insulting to her and i insisted he apologize. and then she took his side and apologized for him.

i was so strong that the next morning i walked 8 miles into town along a forest path. ate a pizza, then walked 8 miles back. i remember being chased by an angry horse fly that just wouldn't leave me alone.

you undecorated and you unbecoming

in a towel. no, a cavern. i woke you up. i shook your feathers. lice crawled out onto the floor.

on a rock. a distant shore. you ate me up. i was something smaller and you ate me up.

with terrible pause. i sat in your circle. you said don't leave this circle or you'd kill yourself. and it wasn't fair.

in a barrel. niagara falls. i was part of your stunt. i didn't want to be part of your stunt.

i was raised in a cabinet with fire ants. i was raised in a shoe above the pacific ocean. we slept on trampolines. we started up faulty machines. we tilled soil. battered down fences. built crooked things.

on schrader blvd in hollywood a few buildings from the ywca i was 22. she was older. a secretary or something. she had all this pop art decorating her apartment that she made but didn't believe in like she needed to. she told me she had been hooking up with a guy who was a real ladies man. she had tan lines where her bikini once was, shading beige to outline pale white. her hair was curly. earlier that night i approached her and said i believed she was the female version of me. then hours later i couldn't get my dick hard for awhile. i was nervous or drunk or something. finally i did in the morning but after a terrible night of nervous limp sleep. and when i did finally get it hard she said something like finally. something like that's what i'm fucking talking about. and then she sang opera beneath me for the neighbors. and then i finally left and walking into summer and along hollywood blvd it must've been like 136 degrees fahrenheit outside.

do you remember it that way. how the past was blazing and showing no evidence of hope. but how we hoped anyway. or how i hoped anyway. i'm talking to myself

sophie strindberg

They had/have two different stories. They were/are conflicting. It shouldn't be surprising.

My mother left my father as a young woman of 26. She changed her name and moved to New York City. She left him in the San Fernando Valley.

And she changed her name and moved to New York City. She says she auditioned for a play.

He says she called him crying begging to come home. He says he wired her money via Western Union.

She says he begged her to come back. That she didn't want to but that she was young and weak for support.

One day 30+ years later, Britt visited them both. One of them in the morning. One of them in the evening. And she remarked how unbeknownst to either, on that day, both of them were baking chocolate brownies in their own ovens. So many years removed from the other one.

wally wallin

if u havent noticed ahahahah i cant write aymore ahahaha

whats so funny about that

its funny when we confront loss like it wasnt inevitable like we dont deserve it like we werent put on this planet to briefly lose

oh so thats funny then
its kinda sad if ya ask me

sad of course it is sad

i know

yeah what trav said

in slow motion

no one's said that thing to me in awhile. that thing that turns the world on its head. i had it in the car but i left it when i walked into a Starbucks.

The fucking espresso/toaster exhaust in a Starbucks. No one talks about how it's poisoning us. The lack of ventilation.

zuma beach

my friend. he was this beautiful tan blonde blue eyed surfer kid. he knew how to be a teenager better than anyone i'd ever met. he would tell me how to do things to get by as a person in ways before i even knew those things were things. and he looked too long in people's eyes. he stared intently and didn't let up.

as though he was trying to solve a riddle.

i saw him not too long ago all grown up, and he had the look of someone who still hadn't figured it out, the riddle. perhaps it was now even a question that he could no longer even hold or ponder.

she, this girl. i liked her. shit, everyone did. she liked him. she liked him cuz he was the strongest boy in town. and she wanted to create her finest work of terror through his strength.

i remember how she tortured him. and he came off like an asshole to everyone else. and he probably was.

and i loved him. and for a long while as an adult i would dream about him. about how he taught me all these strange little things to get by as a person that he'd barely care to know that i still think about to this day.

rebekka first

she would tell me about a property she owned in nicaragua and how u could build a home in a hole in the earth. how you could scoop out a hole in the earth. that they do that all over the world these days.

it always felt cool, the thought of living in a hole in the earth.

she said she wanted to create a property that was an incubator of ideas, inventions, solutions. i invited myself.

she would go into something like a seizure when she would orgasm. it was frightening the first time. gratifying all the times after the first. i made her bite down on an apple once. she shook harder.

she called me one day months after she had ended it but before she had left for the second time. She told me that sex wasn't the problem, that it was quite the opposite.

how she ended it that one day in her room, crying.

how easily i'd let her go.

i had picked her up while a this american life piece was playing about an endearing teenage boy in love with an undercover cop. and the way i was with her, it resembled nothing of that boy's love.

and we both knew it.

two sensitive people in the world. cruel but sensitive. to feel on such a level that a body can shake and jerk and eyes roll back in pleasure, imagine what pain could do.

it's not supposed to feel like this. i know, i said. you never reached out to me after my dad got sick. i know, she said. i didn't want to be that person for you. i know, i said. two days before we found out about my dad, i had told her i didn't want to be that person for her while she was gone the first time. then she was the first i told and she didn't want my tears. we were both honest and wrong and right.

she called me after that first time on her way home, she was in new york for a week first. she said she was broke. she said a guy she was staying with had hit on her. i didn't tell her i missed her. or i don't remember if i did.

she was hit by a car on her bicycle the day we re-met months later. she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm a couple months before we'd first met months before. when i found her, she was distraught. it was on lincoln blvd near a car wash. she was crying. when i went to hug her, she pushed me away. later that night we kissed outside of a bad thai restaurant on lincoln blvd. it was warm like it was. she slept in my bed that night and i remember asking if she was in love with someone else. she said she wasn't.

i drove her to work. we weren't sweet like the last time. when we'd eat bagels. we weren't sweet like those first weeks when we'd eat bagels. we bought groceries for dinner one night. she was upset i didn't offer to cook it with her. i was upset she thought a guest should. two sensitive people shivering atop her mattress on the floor. it was freezing. i wanted to leave. she insisted i sleep over. sex was better than it should have been, even the way we'd taught ourselves to feel nothing for the other one.

the way she hardly wanted to kiss me the second time. like how our lips were loaded with too many of the things we'd never say, like fruit unpicked, withering on their vines.

then she ended things. after the radio. i remember her crying. i remember walking to my car and seeing a park full of people and purple sky.

months went by. she called me a day before she left and we met. she said i looked happier. we finally got her the right slice of pie, not vegan. i had one bite, my face flushed. i had not eaten sugar in the months since my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. she told me about a man she loved, truly loved. i told her about a woman. we were telling each other about ourselves. we were building metaphors to say what we never would say to each other. she told me about berlin and how much she loved it. she was obsessed with the internet, the threads and seams behind it. the interactivity. the design. we talked all about love. we walked down to the beach, the same one we'd been so many months before hand in hand. we had taken a picture on the pier together that she had never sent me. now it was another golden hour. and we were on the same beach again. the one just below where she had playfully flashed me her panties while leaning against a chain link fence up on main street. the same beach again.

the same beach where talia once told me that it's all beautiful, sitting together in my loyal junky car, she told me it's all beautiful even when people create something that says it isn't, that they know it's all beautiful.

she used an andy gump cuz she was on her period. she told me she was on her period. i felt stupid and felt like asking if she had to take her tampon out to pee. she told me i had to visit her in stockholm. she insisted. i emailed her once months later. she didn't reply.

now that everything had been said in metaphor, i think she was surprised i didn't try to kiss her that afternoon.

i couldn't. i didn't want to kiss anyone at that point in time. i was scared and frightened and terrified of life of death of men of women of god of everything. I was shaken and raw and split apart and my body was strong.

i was an absolute wreck and i had the immense strength to hardly comprehend it.