pankmagazine:
At breakfast I can’t eat, so I draw
a topographical map of where
your body was. I look for relief
when you’re not here. Contour lines
down your side of the bed, then up
the refrigerator door, its elevation
suggesting your torso, and inside it
the eggs you’d break on yourself.
Then the dip
in the couch where your body sat
drinking coffee. Dark concentrations
where lines bunch together. Dark
stains on the cushion, spilt thoughts.
I watched Wes Anderson while painting my nails with Chanel, and I thought about how every one of his movies will always be another variant of The Royal Tenenbaums. Then I felt quietly sad, because the movie was about a boy who could not do many things, and among the many things he could not do was love. I’m afraid of the vastness of those who presume to love, but know not how to or simply cannot, and too often worry that I stand among their ranks. I am afraid because this is dangerous.
There was a woman whose husband had died, drowning, and she stayed in a house that was not hers, in a bedroom that was not hers but that of a man when he had been a child — there were model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and a globe next to the bed. She said she was ‘house-sitting’. She had once known how to love, but this too had died with him.
There have been many rapes in the world, recently. All under such diverse circumstances, done by such different men, to such different women; but fundamentally, it is the same thing multiplied infinitely. My mind keeps going back to a novel by Doris Lessing, in which she rewrites creation; and so when men first discover a woman, they rape her repeatedly until she dies. It was not that she was raped but that they raped her. I feel this distinction to be important. I have asked numerous men if they think this to be true, and they tell me yes. This terrifies me too. Men frighten me, and I often wonder how my body could ever be mine.
I feel dirtied by this world, and sometimes wish to wash my hands of it.
oleanderss:
i.
when they told me
to not
make homes out of people
i laughed
because who would be foolish enough
to plant the seeds of themselves
in a skin that wasn’t theirs, or in a smile
they didn’t own
but when i turned to show you
there was only quiet
empty space
and my roots
from around your ribcage
(h.a)
Buddhist Saying (via bbonefish)
Rainbow Cupcakes ft 2011.
I called him at six in the morning with my tears and my faulty heart, and I said nothing except hello and did I wake you up? (I didn’t). And so he talked about his twelve hours of Total War, and told me he’d invaded Japan — I disapproved initially, for I feel strongly against colonialism, neo-colonialism and Western power in general, but he told me that he was Japanese and I said that was alright then. I stopped sobbing, and so I regaled him with a description of all the pillows, bolsters, cushions and stuffed animals on my bed back in Singapore, and he wondered out loud if I was weight-conscious out of pure practicality. I then insisted that I was a cat, and meowed to prove my point;
I’m not certain that we were ever anything more, and maybe that is the saddest of all truths.
I was planning to concoct an elaborate and foolproof story about how he rescued me from oppression under the junta on his travels to my exotic home village in Myanmar, upon which I entered civilised society and formed a pro-democratic resistance movement and will be in contention for the Nobel Peace Prize next year, but I realised that the story has already been told by Michelle Yeoh with a flower in her hair. Also, sometimes the truth is the most beautiful of all fictions.
Still, I want to take off all of my clothes and watch you take out the trash. I want to dirty talk your left elbow. I want to understand your cough. Like: that makes sense, the way your tongue curls, the way your cheeks make me want to eat coconuts. Tonight the air is thick like chalk dust. Tonight I am your pajamas. We are on the couch, the couch is on the carpet, the carpet is below my mouth. You are below my mouth, your knees only slightly above the carpet.