Little Weirds(6)

I cover my body with a fabric that has been made into a certain shape to help remind you of my butt and vagina, but it does not show the actual butt or vagina that I have. Hello, I am a woman here on this ancient ball that rotates with a collection of other balls around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts. Don’t be immature. I wear this paint and these bags and this butt-vagina fabric-map so that I can be here on the globe and go to places like the Restaurant. At the Restaurant I pay with my money that I earn from pretending to be other women. I get that money so that I can afford all of the face paint and boob-bags that I need to put on so that I can go to the Restaurant and eat the dead burned bird and gargle the purple grape gloop that sometimes makes me fall down or throw up all over this globe. This is the cycle that I rotate through so that I can go to more places on this sphere as it rotates through eternal darkness and endless space.





Daydreams/Tides

A day at the beach was never so dull as it is now.

I recycle the same daydreams over and over—

This man decides that indeed I am the one to love and so he travels to where I live. He travels far, directly to my front door, thinking of me the whole time that he is moving across the country and across the sky. He thinks of me as he puts on his clothes, as he buys coffee in the airport, thinking, “It doesn’t feel normal to buy coffee before something so huge! It feels like I should be buying a cloud or a star. I can’t believe I’m in normal life but also, I hope, about to begin this huge love. Maybe one day I will tell her about this experience.”

He has packed his toothbrush. It feels like pleasure to him but also too urgent, it feels like starving as he thinks about how full he would feel, how filling it would be to stand next to me in his pajamas and me in my pajamas and us both using our toothbrushes, looking at ourselves and each other in the mirror.

He thinks that it is so precious that he knows that it would be a privilege to be allowed in to my evening. He thinks in layers when he thinks about how he loves me.

He travels all the way to my edge of the country. He touches down, speeds forward until he stands at the gate to my house and he sees me doing something dear and useful but also related to my belief in adornment, like watering my geraniums or talking to the dog and saying something to the dog like, “Aren’t you happy about the softness in the air today? That’s what they call balmy.” And he sees as I bend closer to the dog and he sees down my shirt and I touch the dog’s velveteen ear and I say very softly and in a very rich tone, “Balmy.”

Or he sees me pay no mind to anyone but myself as I carry my groceries. He sees me being satisfied and self-sufficient. He sees me as myself when nobody is watching, except that he is watching.

I repeat and repeat the daydream. But now the fantasy person makes no sense, because he is an amalgamation of my different recent loves, who have all been terribly disappointing and irredeemable, which is a big blow to my romantic inclinations, because I do love a comeback.

But they are not allowed to come back because they have been very bad.

Now the man is simply too disappointing to even be in a daydream, because daydreams are many things but most substantially they are flares of faith and for me they are wishes that happen through feelings rather than saying “I wish so and so would be here and love me.”

Now, the man can’t even be wished for. The facts are too firm. The man would have to be someone other than who he is and he is simply and only himself, no matter which one of the men he is.

I have encountered nothing but a flock of flimsy fools, I say, with a bad attitude.

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one.

I have nobody to serve. I have nobody to please me or to please. I can’t even dream my daydreams, to give to myself, because I have always done them this way, with the materials for the daydream being a certain man. Life has been so discouraging that I have forgotten why and how to fantasize, and I feel weak.

The structure of what I wish for and the images that usually come together for me to be happy have to change now. But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given? What am I supposed to do with all of this nothing that I see? Those parts of the heart, they really aren’t for me, they are not for my home or my body or my self-love. They are for you, and wherever you are, you are too unknown to be in my daydream. You are on the fringe of my wish for someone to wish for. You are in another country of the heart. You are on the very outskirts of the edge of where my waves hit. You are on a beach on the other side of another world.

All I can do is believe in the tides, the big drawing in and drawing out that is a type of planet clock. All I can do is let the waves of this whole damn thing flood in and out. If I could remember anything, I would remember my belief that my extra love could just be used on myself. But when I stop feeling pleasure and stop imagining things I also forget my beliefs, the things that float my spirit on this sea.

When my beliefs float my spirit on the sea, I imagine the depths beneath me and all of the options for life in there. I can feel, with relief, the wideness of the sea. I can remember that things from faraway locations wash up right on your private wedge of sand and present themselves as yours right away. But I have had my heart broken once again, and I am exhausted, and I have forgotten that I can still give to myself. And so I sit here with waves crashing and repeating, and all I can do is wait and hope that eventually my sea will cough up some shell with a shape like a swirl of sound and I will look anew and I will listen better.