How's that for subtleties

I share the bare thanksgiving streets with a man rustling through the garbage cans in the alley behind charleston. He pulls out a half eaten loaf of bread. I'm invisible to him, which i find comforting. We both wanted the streets to ourselves. Past the brick exterior of apartments and townhouses i see lights glowing, some from TVs, others from laughter. I'm The Pedestrian, but even worse, nobody seems to care. I'm free to wander, so i take a sharp right through the gates of the bucktown park. My shoes weren't meant for this weather. They never are, they weather wherever i go. Water spills in through the hole in the back of my left boot - i mutter obscenities as if i didn't create it in the first place. The swings look lonely, so i go to sit down. It's too cold to use them for their real purpose, swinging that is. Instead i just sit and stare at my half-soaked shoe. It would be a pity-swing anyway, just to keep them company.

The church bells here go off every hour starting at 8 am. 8 am is an awful time to be aware of if you ask me. But they ring 8 very noticeable times. Each individual bell toll makes my teeth hurt, my eyes roll, my legs numb, my fists clench. And then again at 9. The toes of my shoes submerse themselves in woodchips and the chains of the swing take off. I grab hastily at them like the cord on a city bus, but they ignore my signals. The church bells go off, the freezing chains creak in discord - they hate that fucking church as much as i do.

10 tolls, i should head back. I pick myself up by my slightly worn bootstraps, hearing the smack of my shoes on the pavement. I stop, one step, smack, one step, smack. It resonates down the streets and back again, a boomerang of sound. I laugh, it hits me, one step, smack. My pace increases, my muscles tighten, the sound is trailing behind me, shaking windows knocking down bricks, shattering televisions and laughter that encase the glow. Hey, you: i'm thankful for our music and our beds, and our lack of beds, and, well, our heavy fucking memories.

cup 13, long night

The cafeteria cups are simply not large enough to hold all the expectations i have in my morning brew. I know this. I know this i know this i know this, i repeat to myself as i grab for the ceramic mug. And i look at the mug and it looks back at me, and we know that we will never be what the other one needs. Ok, so i'll go for seconds, or thirds, or twelfths, and in each sip i will get bits and pieces of my future day pumping through my veins and waking my nerves. But it never works as smoothly as i predict. Some of my day inevitably spill onto my pants, that is, only when i'm wearing pants i enjoy. if they are zach's pants, well coffee just dances around them, making sure that the irony only permeates into my belongings, not anybody elses. i have so much to say, all. the. mother. fucking. time. And now with the means to say it, in a 9-10 page paper, i'm at a blank. thirteenths. some sloshes onto the floor and into my bag. i over research, as a general statement. and while this is a positive attribute in most cases, it is rare that my research ever affects my decisions or writing. I have found that it is much easier to say what i mean than to mean what i say. And i think i mean that, i really do.

I can understand a cold wind, one that moves through every part of your body causing your muscles to contract in a rapid harmonic wave. Bone-chilling, it pushes its way past the protection of your skin and continues to swirl, tossing your blood up in a tumult within your veins. But the still cold, that is truly unnerving. It's a looming threat, settling on top of your thoughts and encapsulating them in a timeless sphere. I try not to breathe, for hope that my breath will keep body working, but it's desperate to get out. With the wind each exhale disperses quickly, joining the rest of the freezing air as if it never came from me to begin with. Today there is not movement, and with no movement comes no sound. My breath seeps out and hangs for a moment in a warm cloud before the cold sets in. I watch it solidify before my eyes, and with its new chilling weight clamour to the ground before shattering into thousands of pieces. It's the breath of cities, stationary, waiting to be inhaled again. 4 am is the best time to be awake. Your eyelids have grown accustomed to their heaviness and find their way to the middle of your eyes. Things become more apparent, the rise and fall of your chest, the flicker of the courtyard light, the burning paper from your cigarette. No one moves, no one is out, my footsteps echo for ages down four flights of stairs, but the moment the noise reaches the open door, the echo is stifled by the motionless cold. In your exhaustion, you miss the ground, and step out onto air. It's the perfect time to fly, who would know, who would care. You've forgotten what the etching sound of pen on paper is like, it has been a while since your thoughts could flow like this.

dedicated to hanna

We've established a general way to communicate with each other, mostly relying on language to convey any message, both reasonable and totally obscure, to another person. This makes sense, and works out especially well for me since i generally bank on my words as a way to communicate anything and everything. To much touching tends to make me uncomfortable, eye contact was out of the question for a long while, and g-d knows that i'm not well versed on the complexity of body language. Feelings, which even in typing makes me feel nauseatingly feminine, become so deeply immersed in my defensive humor and random streams of consciousness that they are essentially waterlogged and lose all real meaning. So i default to hoping that my ramblings help convey some form of sensitivity that is buried within my language. But this concept, that i can say something and someone else will understand me, has affected my general pattern of thinking. Now not only do i believe that i can communicate everything i want to through our shoddy english language that has been infiltrated by latin and german and french (which is surprising since we're supposed to hate the french right?), but i have taken that a step further, believing that everything i do and think and hope is what an outsider would do and think and hope as well as long as i say it right. P.S. that's not how the system works.

This is where you come in Hanna, the only person i know who actually reads my blog (why you do this is still a mystery, nevertheless a pleasant one, to me). So apparently i'm secretive. Hidden. Withdrawn. Which is bizarre because i feel like i do the friendship equivalent of prostitute myself out to anyone who so much as smiles at me. But maybe this is why people think i'm not the open book i've defined myself to be. I guess i've heard this from other people before, but it seemed so absolutely ridiculous to me that i dusted it off my shoulder like a real pimp would do. Don't you ever forget that ladies is pimps too. Maybe i give a lot of nothing to a wide population. My words, that mask what i actually do, or think, or hope, or dare i say it feel, are something i am more than comfortable sharing, but language doesn't transcend all that is important. Over the past couple of days i have been hit by a slow-moving yet shockingly powerful wave of realization that not everyone, in fact very few people, think in the exact same way that i do. Not only am i totally soaked from head to toe, but this tsunami has left a bitter, salty taste lingering in my mouth. Oh yes, it's the taste of foreboding responsibility. Oh yes, it may even be the taste of an oncoming (but most likely long-winded) change. And this wave will keep pushing me back until i realize that i need to stop relying on this falsehood that i have turned to fact: I am everybody else, and they are me. So now the dish i've scooped onto my plate is dripping over the edges and spilling onto my clothes. Plus this is marni's shirt, so i feel twice as guilty about staining it with my unappealing duty. I could dump it into a trashcan, but in this current day and age we can't afford to waste realizations when other people in third-world countries are starving for this shit. I guess it's time to give in and let myself binge, no matter how full or disgusted i am, and deal with things i've been putting off.