in the shadows, we were in the shadows. now i realize we were in the shadows, even while i was wearing my punch-dumb heart on my sleeve.
it wasn't always this way.
i remember one new england summer where it rained every time we made love. there was a crisp evergreen in her yard, goats in back, an unseen mother upstairs who i never met. beyond the hours of red-lit sweat and that awful tongue-in-cheek bloodsugarsexmagic album playing on a loop in her room, it was somehow perfect. but beyond, i'd go outside alone under the branches and urinate into a large ground crevice of earth, inhabited by a creature surely no different than me, brothers in arms, while it rained.
then the sun scorched urban dissolution when i left her apartment by the ymca in hollywood, a woman in her late twenties that i'd met at a dive bar the night before. she called in sick for the day, we bought condoms at a nearby rite aid, and it took time for the whiskey and intense loneliness of the situation to break, but then music between us grew and her song was sung in loud face down shouts to a derelict part of town full of them. i always wonder what her name was and whether i ever drift across her memory.
there were all kinds of those experiences while i was young and stupid and blissfully unaware to the other side of the mysterious feeling and circumstance which i knew i craved to selectively share with someone.
a few nights ago on this other side, i couldn't sleep and started counting those women like sheep and it was not self-aggrandizing, only comfortable and sad. there were names and faces i hadn't thought about since we'd moved naked together, her with straight blonde german hair, hands upside down bracing against the wall, whispering a soft, gentle, accent. she was lovely.
still, none of those experiences belong to a tangible part of me, i'm on the other side, like a void chalk-white landscape on a suspended one-dimensional planet, though i myself am standing, witnessing a barely knee-high elementary occurrence of this mostly chalk-white dust swirling inconsequential, rousing itself maybe to start a new atmosphere, optimistically.
knee high, not unlike the black stalkings of her, dressed as a schoolgirl on a halloween night, asian, she wandered into my room without exchanging more than a handful of words, it was a stilted encounter incapable of connecting any energy, and i left into that night with a vague experience of finding a northridge house party where, a girl there was wearing a ninja turtle shell on her back, that's what arrives, the made in china green plastic and the lengths i'd still been going to protect myself.
there were neighborhoods just above rustic canyon, involving varying cars and colors and shades of her, a movement of meaning somehow becoming entwined. it happened and i was vulnerable and it's a beauty, go ahead and read some of the pages of this blog. now i'm on the other side, and if we were to go on talking long enough in person then eventually i'd volunteer what i've been doing of late and with whom and i'd throw in a detail or two, how it's been like those innocent years but with an extra dash of charm.
only, now i'm on the other side, which comes with it's perks and disillusioned reserve. at least i'm not being assaulted or removed, even if sometimes i dream of things that were never said and wake up with a mountain to climb. i have my legs again and i'm in the light.
we're now in the light.
