yeah but
neurologically speaking-- it's possible to experience pain in someone else's body

twenty years ago today, i was born
two weeks late, and blue & strangled- but born nonetheless.

from May 2006

It started with one. He felt it pushing from his solar plexus, forcing its way out of his lungs and blood vessels, drawn to the ink in his pen and the white on his paper. Without knowing, without understanding, he found himself writing, filling page after page with messy black script. Everything he had been keeping in the hollow space behind his bellybutton, every secret and ghost and imagining was bubbling up and out of him, and, as soon as it had been remembered, it ended up as garbled vomit across acres and acres of white paper on his desk.

It was late one night, having returned home drunk and confused, that he was first consumed with two burning desires: the first was to write and write and write (this was far more than a desire, it was a need, a thirst and a hunger. It enveloped him in its pin-prickly grasp, forced him to extend his fingers and reach for a pen, even made him impossibly sad that his fingers themselves were not able to draw lines of ink across the page.) The second was the need for searching, scanning eyes. He wanted a God, an undefined being, something- he didn’t know what, just a person, a thing to understand him. This was the desire to be known, and it was crackling there inside of him like a campfire.

Waking up the next morning, hung over and bleary-eyed, Aaron was surprised to find the black ball-point still grasped tightly between his thumb and fore-finger. More than that, however, he was surprised to find that what he had written was both truthful and coherent (not, as one might assume, the drunken ramblings of a seventeen-year-old boy). Things he had always wanted to say to people, bits and pieces from his memories, they were all there, staring up at him, as useless as they had been when they had lain dormant inside his bones. It was only then, examining the pages which had flown from him a few hours before that he realized he was writing letters. The next logical step, in this hungry, crazed delirium, was to take the heavy telephone book from its place high up on the shelf in his father’s study and start from the A’s.

To Cora Ace he sent a short memory of a recent Saturday night:

“She turned to face me, eyes glimmering in the darkness, mouth turned down at the corners in confusion and something else I can’t name. Her skin was warm and damp against my arms, her hair brushed my cheek, I breathed her in before she got up and looked away from me. Just what is it, she asked the room around us, that you’re trying so hard to forget?”

He folded and packaged and mailed off the first memory of the sound a fist makes against a mother’s jaw bone to Johanna Bolivar, pressed into a piece of paper intended for Robert Buchanon the way it feels to fly without leaving the ground. His first experiences with the desire to get between a girl’s thighs, those fear-filled nights having gotten this wish, they were sent away with everything else. Memories of diving for miles under the clearest green ocean in the world just because of the way it felt to have the expanse of water pressing in on his chest, buying rock candy at the beach with his brother as a child- they were all there, they filled the mailboxes and emptied his pockets of change, all his money going towards the never ending need for stamps.

He tasted the envelope and stamp glue everywhere. It was in his cereal at breakfast every morning, in the exhaust of the cars on his walk to school. Sometimes he even discovered it in the mouth of a girl, turning his stomach with that toothache of a reminder - he had to keep writing. It wasn’t that he needed to get his life down on paper, it wasn’t even that he needed to remember those things he found it necessary to transcribe to paper. It was that his life had turned out so differently than he felt it had been meant to. By writing it, he was being given a second chance. No, he wasn’t changing his history, he wasn’t making anything up, not inventing things. He was examining, and perfecting. He needed to hit himself over the head with his stupidity, and to congratulate himself on his triumphs: he was writing his life down more truthfully than it had happened.

It started with one. At home sick one afternoon, eating apples and peanut butter in front of the television, Prudence Zugar heard her favorite noise in the world for the first time in weeks- the subtle ca-chink of the mail slot opening followed quickly after with the sloop of paper land on the welcome mat of her parent’s house. She bounced up and off of the sofa and crossed the living room into the hall. A single envelope, addressed simply to her house but not to anyone in it, lay on the floor in front of the door. Figuring that it must belong to her as much as it belonged to anyone else, she picked it up and carried it to her room, like some precious and valuable object.

She wanted nothing more than to find out what it contained, couldn’t help but pin all her hopes on this one bundle of papers. (Hopes for what? For happiness? For direction and truth and all these made-up images she was keeping in her mind as false and terrifying beacons of reality? How could she have pinned all this on one tiny inanimate object? But can we blame her, really, can we fault her for hoping and believing in this one perfect idol, this unusual God, when we do the same, every day to every thing around us?)

She waited. And as she waited, tensely, anticipating what she would find, what the letter represented to her grew and changed and became at once more and less than what it had been at the start. Finally, on the sixteenth day, eight envelopes, all similar to the first in that they bore only her house address but not her name, appeared on her doorstep. That was when she decided to open it.

She carefully slid her finger under the corner on the envelope, tearing its flesh apart to reveal a letter written in smudged black ink. Her eyes drank in every word, sentence, paragraph, she crawled into her bed, trying to bury herself under the weight which suddenly filled her chest and sat like molasses in her bones. She read each page a thousand times, there was a life here, whose was it and where could she find it, listen:

“They moved at each other, fists held high though both knew there would be no blood spilled by knuckle against flesh. I cowered in my place at the top the stairs, the door was wide open I remember thinking the cat would run away. I remember thinking that I wished I could run like a fox out of that open door so I would never have to see whatever it was that was happening. Jacob circled in on father, yelled something I wish I could remember, there were thudding noises as things flew from one side of the kitchen to the other father yelled Look into my eyes, Jacob hollered Look into mine, they had each other by the jaws and I became a fox.”

“Making lightheaded movements towards the bed, we were stumbling, was she as afraid of this as I was? She fell, I caught her, she was dripping with sweat and I wanted to ask her if it would be alright to listen to her heavy heartbeat for a few minutes, maybe an eternity, her salt mixed with mine, we were a chemistry experiment, I did what I did, held her where I held her, only because it was necessary only because of the way her hot breath felt in my ear.”

It was everything, all the things Aaron had set on paper, all the people he had tried to send his life to, they all ended up as piles of snow on Prudence’s bedroom floor, she read him, she knew him, he filled the empty spaces inside of her with the words which forced themselves out of him- together they were the prefect match, the reader and the writer, each giving the other exactly what they needed.

there are actually so many beautiful beautiful things there.

just a few:

"teaching people how to have sex very carefully and slowly
with enough accuracy, and how to activate maximum JOUISSANCE
HAVE FUN AND HAVE A GOOD TIME" (august 10, 2006)

also:

"whoah
are we ready
not too hansty guys
hey guys i want you to line up in order from most honest with yourself to least honest" (march 26, 2006)

(from)

It wasn't ever really my choice.
They each loved me distinctly and without dignity. They each knew the architecture of my spine under the tips of their fingers, but David knew better the curvature of my clavicles, and Christopher the jut of my hipbone under his palm. That my left shoulder could slip out of its socket was David's jurisdiction; Christopher took responsibility for my knuckles, and for the constellations of moles on my back, and for the space where my ear connects to my scalp. David took the nape of my neck. David handled the tendons behind my knee as they flexed. They both had the fold of flesh at my center.

In the dark, I couldn't tell them apart if I tried. And even now, closing my eyes, I can't picture either of their faces. David, dark and curly, and Christopher lean and winding. Yes? No. When I dream, I dream of both them, the two of them occupying the same impossible body. When I remember, I remember them as if I were drunk, double-visioned. They are hidden behind a wall of sleep.

Did David know? Did Christopher? As they laughed and drank and sneaked away to me, did they mention it? Compare notes? Did Christopher avoid the back of my ankle because he knew it was his brother's? Or was that coincidence, that their territories had such even property lines.

They must have. Yes? No.

It wasn't ever really my choice. In the end they made the decision, by both leaving, each with his own specific gait.

(in collaboration with wag scala)

i skipped yesterday's. oops.

Hey baby,

I woke up to the rain this morning. The edge of the bed was wet; open window. You know?
It's cooling off.
Feels good.

Spent the afternoon with Jason, figuring shit out. This is it, baby. No more shit. No more lying. I'm going to shave my head and go swimming. Jason and I are driving up to the Adirondaks next weekend, we're building a boat and we're going swimming out in a lake somewhere. And then I'm coming to get you. I promise.

All my love.
Christopher

photo from here
(in collaboration w/ wag scala)

this was/is going to be a lot harder than i was anticipating. it'll start going better once i get into it, though,
right?

The cigarettes tasted like cocaine in the back of your throat and you thought to yourself, Was that a dream?




And now you're stuck with those pictures of her on your computer. Pictures you'll never delete because they are slick fingers that slip inside the valves of your heart and pinch that nerve. You think about the love letters you saw, slippery and unnecessarily serifed in their Cyrillic. How you attempted to translate them but gave up when you realized they didn't mean anything when run through the algorithms like that.

Matthew and Luke each, separately, made you breakfast in bed, and John sang to you. Mark put his hands on your hipbones and lifted you up onto the kitchen counter, stood between your legs and looked you in the eye. They all made dinner; they all rode the train to see you; they all bit your earlobe. The only one who ever read a word you wrote was Peter, and he hated you for it. You stopped writing. David slipped his hands into your sternum and, with grace, he butterflied you. Afterwards his hands were coated in a shining film of gore, and he wiped them on your inner thighs- no big deal. All he wanted to do watch your heart beat; you didn't have the wherewithal to tell him it was more beautiful when heard across oceans.

I spent a long time thinking about Nora, and her tongue.
And her letters.


Oh, James she starts. James.