uncensored

It’s not that sweeping, declarative, whole, beautiful sentences that I wrote last summer are gone. Just disappeared.  It’s that I have less to write sentences about, less sub- and un-conscious desires to ferret out of not just my tangled synapses, but those of a man who became my mutual muse, secret passion, and ultimately, the love of my life.  Love, easy love, is not that conducive to good writing.  Want, now there’s something to write about.  Unrequitedness, desire under tables and through notebook pages.  These things beg for pen to paper, like lips to lips, like hands running illicitly and so strangely innocent over hands.  Now, I have some worry that my shine may have worn off, that he may no longer be quite so charmed(in a morbid way) by my bouts of depression, my fits of rage, my manic mornings of giggling and product.  The ins and outs of me and what I mean to him.  The stringy cosmic stuff that bound us together from even earlier than we knew.  No, not after this long.  Not after this much.  Distance is a terrible sort of numbing useless pain.  Something you can only write about for so long; longing and loneliness for someone who is undoubtedly yours.  Unsympathetic.  Whiny. 

I want to cut large swaths through the teeming crowds of people who live here.  Their fears and loves and losses and triumphs and frustration and release all batter at the thin thin wall of my skullskullskull.  The skull that contains the litany of disappointments and failures, not-quites and not-yets and all of the things that I just couldn’t get my shit together and do.  The show I didn’t write, the poetry I drunkenly recited, the boys I fragrantly fucked and was never, ever loved by.  The embarrassments, the entanglements, the tragedies and the stubbed toes.  The lost nights to whiskey, wine, coke, weed, dick.  The times I woke up on trains, the mornings I woke up in boy-beds, aching and cramped.  The nerves I let hang raw in black-box theaters across Lower Manhattan, expecting to get as much back as I put into it.  The always-present need for money interfering in my everything.  The friends who can’t find the time to read my play.  The unreturned phone-calls and dishonored promises.  The cut-rate headshots, the re-definition of myself, the striving for a commercial “look”, the commercials I never wanted to do.  The auditions I knew I nailed, and never heard from again.  The lack of feedback.  The lack of validation.  The city I came to to search for both of those animals, like unicorns or Yeti.  Something mythical and if photographed, disputable. 

This city is constantly masturbating, is constantly mutilating, constantly throwing itself against the bordering rivers and the heaving, breathing industry that encapsulates it.  There are hundreds of thousands of protesters downtown right now, and they are being beaten.   Shoved.  The city anthropomorphized into batons and uniformed thugs.  I should go down there, but I won’t, probably.  I don’t want get arrested.  I don’t want to get hurt.  I am not brave in that way, not right now.  Not as a nearly 26 year old woman with a future and a little house and a wonderful man waiting for me down South.  I peel the posters, postcards and pictures off the wall.  Smile as I sit on my loft bed, remembering living with Holly.  Remembering the struggles I’ve gone through just to live here, just for the privilege of remaining on this island.  In the middle of it.  Nothing more.  Everything else is struggle, as well.  Leaving the house is akin to jumping into a pit of howling, screaming monkeys and hoping they won’t notice me.  The cold has come back, the wind too.  I yell and hiss at the wind, cursing it for chilling me right down to the middle of my heart.  I’m ready for more moderate weather, and a more moderate life. 

The double-dutch competition that is New York City has finally tired me out, but at least I’m escaping without tangled ropes and burnt ankles.