“Come on. You can tell me.”

Is there a greater lie than someone can tell you when your heads are close together, sharing the clean space of a pillow?

If I could tell you, I wouldn’t be so anxious. You wouldn’t be asking for the name of the elephant in the room in the first place.

I can’t tell you my darling because of what I know it would do to you. I know what it would do to you for me to tell you that I still think of him. That I think of him everyday. That he accompanies me everywhere that you cannot- work, dreaming, imagining. We have no relationship of desire, this specter and I. We have an understanding. That we have to continue on, bound together, until something.

Did you know that at night when I lay awake, I am not worrying? You stroked my hair last night like you were soothing a colicky child. It was sweet, this little gesture, as many of yours are. But, again, it was the wrong one.

When I lay awake at night, I hear sounds from the day- just certain ones- play over and over in my head. Things lodge there. Little memories that don’t seem like they should mean anything. But the minute I hear them during the day I know they’ll be with me the rest of my life. The way that fantastically exotic actress said the name of Borges. I heard that for almost a week. Bor-ges. Bor-ges. Bor. Ges.

I see images too. I see the way he laughed at one of my jokes too heartily with his lips stained with red wine. In that moment he seemed so vulnerable to me. And I felt I could see his life stretching in front of him as a thing alien to him. Every moment of the future falling upon him like an attacker from the front, wholly unanticipated, a complete miracle or tragedy. This was a man with no foresight.

I see the woman in the front row of the staff meeting, who ducked out of that room of 2900 other people to go to the bathroom. But she didn’t go the bathroom. She returned with a closed left hand. And later I saw her sitting there, closing her thin lips over the fat red strawberry she’d smuggled in. She’d left to sneak a treat from the lunch tables being set up outside. I loved the way she ate it. Lips first, then teeth. In several bites, each time fingering the dry green leaves at the top, readjusting that velvety handle. She lodged in my brain too, and I saw her last night while the woman whispered over and over,

“Borges. Borges. I would be sitting on a beach, reading Borges.”

bits and pieces

I'm not doing much writing these days, though I'm getting the itch again. It's hard for me to stick with this blog, because it represents feelings during a time and in a place that I am so glad to have escaped. I sometimes wish all that had just never been. Even though I know I had to leave school, I feel a twinge of shame and failure over it. I wish I was one of those rare people for whom that life is fitting. But I'm not. Now I work in Wisconsin at a desk job. And may my teenage self and the ghost of Jack Kerouac forgive me, I like it. And I am struggling to forgive myself for that.

And I'm getting married.

And while I love the person I'm marrying, and while I said yes, I can't send my fabric off to have my wedding dress made. Because then I feel like it's really going to happen. And if it's really going to happen, then the wedding becomes incredibly funereal, and I am going to throw all my old dreams and visions of myself onto the fire.

Who will I be afterwards?

It isn't as though I just took off for adventures into the wilds of life while I was dating him. Or while we lived apart for three years. But I guess I could have. And now I really can't. Now we'll start nesting and start to gather the years in around us, like little gaudy treasures. We'll start to drip with time, and we'll be caked with property and commitments. Making a change and turning a new corner will be harder now. He says it will be easier, because we'll have someone else to help. But I think you travel easiest when you travel light. And besides, he's assuming that we'll always be on board with eachother's little flights of fancy. He always assumes that change pushes us into better and better worlds. And no matter how many times life has shown otherwise, he never reconsiders this. It isn't dogged determination to look on the sunny side. It just doesn't occur to him to put all these peices together. Maybe that very ignorance should finally occur to me.