introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Song for Elisabeth around 3am - second of april, 2001--still smiling. i want my hour back, you bastards. right. moving on, then. "you've got such a pretty smile. its a shame the things you hide behind it. let 'em go, give it up for awhile."~his Jude. after work, i walked home for the first sunday night in some time. the heroes weren't there to take me back to my house from uptown on their trusty steeds, so walking it was. i don't mind walking of course. but, the weather was so nice and comfortable that i forgot my jacket when i left earlier. by the time i came out long after the superearly sunset (that was really just grey getting greyer) it was raining and hailing a little. i couldn't stop shaking and i couldn't stop comparing the feeling of sleet driving into my ever shrinking in the cold skin to what it might feel like to have plastic flatware (more specifically sporks) driven into my flesh. i was glad to get home. my dog is an escape artist. i don't know how she got out of that cage. i am gonna have to look up some houdini tricks and see if she can get herself out of those. i will not drown my dog, of course...so don't anyone start emailing me about that. she is one ballsy mammojamma, tho. he was around when i got in. i'm always so glad to come home to him. i sometimes feel like he's really here. he is always quick to ask me how my day was; always quick with the hello hugs. what more could a girl ask for? for him to help cook dinner, thats what. :) but really....i might be getting out of control with adoration here....i am certainly pushing the limits for the term "crush", maybe. this is where the voice of reason needs to be doing the whole bells and whistles and tickertape parade, but i think she is totally sleeping through it. i don't know. what i do know is that i can't sleep so soundly without the pictures of him in my head these days. well,i could probably sleep...but i dont' WANT to sleep. no other thoughts could possibly make me happier. i drift off smiling. i wonder if i smile in my sleep. my dreams have included him....or at least his dialogue. i could get so used to this. i've felt my beloved diary take a turn for love letters rather than rants, lately. *shrug* i like that, sorta. my imagination is always working overtime....and i worry for the girl that will have to come back from tennessee on her own when she falls so completely for the southern boy with the impeccable taste and the sweet affirming character. ah, carole....let it go on its own. things like this work themselves out. i hate that sometimes, my mind does this thing with text logs of conversations i've had with mark and brian. not text logs like internet...but my head works in text sometimes...uh. i recall conversations. thats what i'm getting at. i hate how i do that, sometimes. i remember snippets of advice. "if you forget about it now, he doesn't have the chance to hurt you." ...which totally contradicts with "you're not the kind of person that ends up alone." ...which doesn't mesh so well with "carole. have you thought this out at all?" i think that i love you boys, but its about time your girl took an all out risk and felt something nice for a change. and if i get another broken heart, you can tell me you told me so. its allowed. anyway, i was on the phone with this woman tonight. she was so obviously drunk. she agreed, for some ungodly reason, to do the survey with me. its over an hour long, this study. the only reason i like it is because it makes me think of T in that its about movies. anyway. she was so intoxicated. she'd go from yelling at me, to not understanding the completely clear questions, to crying. i was distraught. finally, about halfway through, she said that her dog had just gotten away and that she had to go and find it and that she just couldn't do the survey anymore tonight. i thanked her for my time. she plauged my head for the rest of the shift. so....elisabeth in the central time zone, i know you have no computer cuz its in your demographics. i know you have no internet access. you told me that, too. i know you've had too much to drink: it was on your voice. i know there is more to the story than i know. this is for you. ~song for elisabeth~ its a half moon sunday afternoon. the town is mostly silent; the clouds hang heavy silver and elisabeth looks out the window. its a run down sort of place but if you squint in the dull grey afternoon light, you can see a whispery charcoal shadow of the way things used to be; if you can catch it as it flashes, there's sometimes a reflection of a face in the cracked storm window, a vauge mirror image of a past that used to be. its a half moon april sunday afternoon. the town is mostly quiet but for the telling echo of the click of the single traffic light: yellow. click. red. click. green. click. yellow. the town is mostly quiet but for the occasional bark of a dog escaped from the house while elisabeth was pouring southern comfort into an old sagging glass tumbler, chipped on the edge from being stacked too many times in too many too high piles of dishes left dirty. and that dog is running-running across a yard that is long overgrown, bounding over long dead appliances that somehow stopped working shortly after he stopped coming home at night. the dog is running-running, remembering the feel of the earth and outdoors, rememebering a time when there were flowers instead of trash, when there were crocus to dig, remembering a time when elisabeth was always wanting to be outside: she never takes walks anymore. its a half moon sunday april afternoon and she's tossing back release like she used to take her sunday tea: slow and sweet and all afternoon. these days, she doesn't read her paper-- that stopped coming years ago and today she pours over an old photo album with yellowing fading squares mounted on sticky pages beneath the crackling plastic. and she sips a bit of comfort and she catches her reflection and for a moment, she sees a ghost inside those eyes, the faint essence of the elisabeth she used to be. and she looks up and answers her ringing phone, half hoping he's coming home and i dont blame her for her disappointment or the slur in her sunday voice when she realizes its just a market research study... cuz on a half moon drunken sunday april afternoon, elisabeth has things she'd rather be doing then talking to me. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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