Chapter 1 Page 1 Paragraph 1

On the outside we may look light, dripping of sugar and saccharine--we may even be corn-fed. But in our hearts we're dark and cynical and dangerous. We want others to humor us and tell us we're Anna Magnani and Grace Kelly--to tell us anything but the truth. We want to do different things and be better people but we're going to keep on doing the same old things. We're going to be the same old people clinging to our destructive and mutilating habits because our emotional tie to them is so goddamn strong. This is all we have; this is what we long for.


If only life could be more like the movies, where we fall in love in the hands of characters who are hell-bent on pity and survival, suicide and love. In Closer, Larry loves everything about Alice that hurts, because without forgiveness, we're savages. We're drowning and the punk stage before us is collapsing and eventually we realize that everything is a version of something else. We're phenomenal; we're clever; we're deceiving but we're exquisite. And we're in for a long wait.
In Meet Joe Black, love is passion and obsession and something we can't live without. We learn to forget our heads, to listen to our hearts, to make the journey and fall deeply in love. We learn to love making love to someone much more than peanut butter, and better dressed in a black suit. In Vanilla Sky we learn the pleasure of Sofia Serrano and that every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around. And even in another life when we're all cats, the saddest girl to ever hold a martini will eventually open her eyes to only realize that the sweet is never sweet without the sour. She knows the sour. We know the sour. I know the sour. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open you...


We're wasted and we taste it, our broad nipple is burning but it feels good. It tastes so good. And eventually we all return to the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses, with the same great expectations and cruel intentions. Eventually we realize the only way we can declare our autonomy is to be bad, because bad is where it's at. Bad is such a good thing. Because eventually we do change, but we do it ever so lightly. So don't fucking move.


Don't look at me that way.

Glycerine

I get paralyzed sometimes. My body submerges in forty feet of isolation and sixty feet of water, but never drowning, never even fearing drowning, but only floating in deep history. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Catherine and Heathcliff felt this intense folie  à deux too. Maybe amongst the playpen, the crossing paths at Crembebe', the egg hunts in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember meeting one another. Maybe at the Parthenon, maybe we remember meeting at the Parthenon. Or maybe we're just a bunch of people falling down a place from where we can't be retrieved. Maybe we're stuck here for good.

I listen to the sounds of the Gypsy Kings and the Volare and the Bamboleo, reminiscing the man who has spent majority of his life searching for his long lost La Maga, rummaging the streets of Montevideo and Artigas and into a country that lends itself to the incubus and paranoias of fiction because love and life and death is everywhere. It's everywhere.

Because we're all lost aren't we? We can't choose what stays and what fades and we can't even predict the revelation and the revolution, and it's not even a conversation we want to think about really. But there has to be someone looking, someone searching for us. Maybe we can find ourselves a nice antique rocking chair to rock in or maybe one of those days when we're unshowered and unadorned and sleeping in a tent built of duvets and pillows to hide in, the one person we've been longing for will wake us. Someone, somewhere, is longing for our crazy ideas and graniloquent needs and the paralysis of lying with us in that perfect insane asylum of a tent and under those perfect, white crisp sheets.  Someone could walk into that very room and say our life was on fire and we would remain motionless, still waiting.

The time has made us so damn warm, hasn't it? But it feels good. The good shit hurts, but it hurts so good because someone, somewhere, someday is starving for our copy. Someone has sniffed us out and sensed our emotional rawness and saw us across that crowded room and found us because some things are just meant to be. Someone has craved for that dirty sip of our martini and for that single opporutunity to suck on our green olive. Someone has made us the very thing that sedates them into happiness and into a victory march filled with cold love and a broken hallelujah. 

Because F. Scott will always recognize his Zelda. F. Scott will always find his Zelda somewhere, even with no poems, no prose, no words.

Fragment One

Fulcrum

I want a futon. One with a thick crimson-colored bedspread where I could make love endless nights through sleepy mornings, with a man who plays hackysack and the guitar and me. A perfect stranger who reads Wilde and Faulkner in my living room filled with crisp daffodils spread across hardwood floors, as he touches my splintered heart and traces my soft skin. I want to feel the sensation as he cracks my head open and gently scratches my cortex and the warmth when he realizes what he's really looking for is the best goddamn green he's ever seen. My iris.

I want to be Ali McGraw in Love Story and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and anybody else in anything else really, dancing in ominous rain and plie-ing over puddles of mud and rolling herself into deep earth. I want to never be afraid and to stop running every time I unfurl myself from fetal position right before I stick my feet in wet sand of the undertow. I want to drown in the harmonious sound of young folks building sand castles and collecting seashells, of infuriated gentlemen unable to reboot my sanity and delete me from their history. (I want to browse her too.)

And I want the black wave of mind games to evaporate and to fold over right in front of the dimensional sand, with just enough water to keep it thirsty. And I want whomever is inside to let me in, to let me sit on their world as I watch them build a playground for my neuroses, with enough diligence and grace to slide the wind against my face. And I want to feel. I want to feel the senselessness and the dance of the salsa in Barcelona and the guitar strings wrapped around my tongue and the taste of Ankur pressed against my liver and the outline of  lips against mine and the darkness of light right before I fade into distraction.

I want to be lost in vertigo and in penny loafers m o v i n g a c r o s s the rubbish and the fogworld and through revolving doors. I want to be in love and incoherent and I want to know it, to feel it, to never let it subside even for a minute or two. I want a perfect weirdo and I want to be wrapped in each other the way dried, harried flowers stick together after a week in a vase. And I want him on a styrofoam plate and in a cliff note on top of my dresser and in my mind because a mind in love is such a terrible thing to waste.

I want to be wasted all the time.