Little Weirds(9)

Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won’t let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love. Did the sea captain pick the love, and now he regrets that choice? Is he stuck walking up a staircase for all eternity, stepping with each step on the words that he sent with all his heart, crushing them under his own invisible foot, feeling his real heart break? Did he choose love and it didn’t take, and now is he stuck in the world without the love, forever?

I didn’t fall in love until many years after I left the house. Sometimes I would fall in love and it would fall apart, and I would return to the house to catch my breath, still alive, still alive. I don’t know what makes a ghost a ghost and why they seem to be interned in a weird, repetitive, emotionally fueled prison. I spent so much time in my childhood trying to figure out why the ghost was even in our house, considering that during his life he was probably on a big wooden boat most of the time. Maybe he came to our house one afternoon and they had an affair in our house, in one of the bedrooms where we all slept like normal people.

Maybe he never came to our house, but came there in death, because he followed his letters, essentially following his heart. Maybe he was trying to get his heart back from our house. I get that. I get why he would go back there for his heart. I love the house, and every time I go out into the world and get my heart busted up, I retreat back to the old ghostly house in Milton, hoping to become myself again, and to have one more chance, just one more chance to share my heart, and to share it successfully enough that if I become a ghost one day, there’s at least another ghost right beside me. And I have its heart and it has mine, and we had the world together. This is what I believe can happen to me. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I believe that this can happen to me.





Color-Spirit

I am told that I should try to date online. My reaction to this is that I want to walk away so forcefully that I don’t even pause to open the door, I just go through the wall. I will never ever go into the internet to look for anything that I feel that I really need, except for turtlenecks and sheets and candles, and even then I will do that in a very small circle of places that I know have exactly what I want. But I want to fall in love, so I’ll give it an earnest try. Here are a few bios:

Version 1: Jenny Slate

Human Woman, Los Angeles, USA, Earth

About Me:

Hi!

I know where the confusion starts, because I am a woman and I do look like one but the real truth is that I am a Color-Spirit. And it says on many documents that I come from here but actually I am a citizen of The World of Shapes. That is where I’m from and The World of Shapes is the place where they speak my mother tongue.

All day I do my loving, and all of my feelings are colors and they are shapes and they are shapes of colors, when you get really deep into my experience. I am a creature who is classified in the universal records as a Color-Spirit. I watch the light make tones.

I feel a thing and tell myself what shape it is.

My physical heart feels so exposed, so shallowly planted. It feels like it is in my mouth. I can’t tell if I’m spitting it out or swallowing it. I can’t tell if I’m going to chomp it to bits just by trying to be here. My physical heart seems to be blasting light out of my mouth but also down into my body. I fear that when the light is shining directly out of my face that nobody will want to or even be able to look at me.

I have many beats at once. I have the beats of that bloody, smooth physical heart. I also rock with the beats of colors and shapes. I rumble with the beats of the private language of those two separate hearts, the language that they have created between them. You could understand, then, why it’s so hard for me to keep still, how even when I am still, I am bopping microscopically.

There cannot, there certainly may not, be one more man, not even one more man for a night, not one more who comes in and doesn’t feel in himself what I am about, there cannot be one more person who absentmindedly swats at my little triangles and squares as they swim and bob in the air. There may not be one more man who turns his own face away in fear and ignorance from the colors that make him angry because I can see them and he cannot.

I am the real Color-Spirit.

I love spicy food and pints of beer. I like the beach. I like dogs. I don’t like rock climbing or other sports that seem like you do them in Colorado. I hate it when people judge other people about being athletic. Computers are not good. I like to get joyfully shitfaced with close friends at least once every month. I don’t care much for air-conditioning. A bathrobe is a wonderful present, so is jam, so are flowers.

Who will meet me at once in all of my worlds and pump with all of my hearts? To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened. Hit me up if you feel me!



Version 2: Jenny?

Mammal, Awake, America, Universe

About Me:

Whoops!

I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.

I am a young woman and I am also a spirit of many translucent tones and classic forms of ferns. I am so delicate, so delicate that I am the one the ghosts know not to spook. I don’t need the shock of the apparition of an actual ghost in order to believe in the other worlds. I am in all of them and I know where my deepest home is. It is a dimension populated by plants and all of the colors that you can know, and the gods are called Ferns of Faith and I am very religious about them. I’m from there. How afraid are you of this? Or do you want more?