the beast that shouted love at the heart of the world

(Have about 23409283orfhsdjfk!!!111 pages of novel to transfer from composition book to computer screen. This will not be pleasant. Also, mulling over a new story; Sandro Botticelli/androgynous!male model. Be warned, ahpookishere is only taking one class over the summer. Ahpookishere currently hates nearly everyone she works with. Lately, ahpookishere has way too much time on her hands.)

Whining over here, because there are less people around to witness it. Must remind myself that Virginia Woolf's personal diaries also read like a log of her mental health. Must also remind myself that Virginia Woolf filled her pockets up with stones and took a walk along the riverbed.

Things happen and before they are over, I find myself judging which details will be important in the retelling. I am nostalgic for places before I leave them. People exist only in the stylized cinematic replays of my memory. See, here, she is beautiful. She pries open a compact, and the ping of light hits my eyes, so I never see her reflection. Still, it's safe enough for me to claim that the face in the mirror looks like Marlene Dietrich, black-and-white, soft focused, high Germanic eyebrows. Or maybe, that it resembles some unbreachable Cubist portrait, because the angles of her mouth and nose are too severe for realism. Does it matter? Who is there that can argue with me?

I am younger and I am taking drugs that make my fingernails grow in translucent and flaky like, talc. We are flying up to the city, and she is nervous, but not afraid of the height. It's the plane itself, and the obligatory closeness, and the other passengers coughing wetly around us, and the Indian man on the other side of her, who keeps knocking her hand off the armrest. I am just bored. I feel like I take up too much space. I pinch the webbing between her fingers to recirculate the fluid in my own joints. She is tolerant to the point of indifference, and I must resort to lies to get her attention.

The stewardess passes out cups of water, and I tell her that if the crew knows the flight is doomed, this is how they silently distribute arsenic. You'd never know it if you drank it, I say, not like cyanide, which tastes like almonds — but it's better than being awake when the plane severs in mid-air. Arsenic does not work this way, but I am not counting on her to know this. The stewardess is wearing teal high-heels and white stockings, and she has a too-pleasant face and too-white teeth; it's the sort of face you'd find on an otherwise exemplary nurse, who takes wonderful care of ninety-nine patients but can't stop herself from clipping the life support of the hundredth. Well, I wasn't thirsty anyway, she tells me. Although, when we hit turbulence, I feel her grab my sleeve, and Yes, I think, Yes.

Would it matter to you, if this had happened any other way?

What about our painting? It was a landscape, but does it matter if our city was towered over by cathedral spires, or the cupolas of Eastern Europe, or the minarets of a mosque? The blue paint on our jeans was only a shade away from denim, and the gold pigments did strange things to our breathing patterns. I couldn't push the old air out of my lungs. She gripped my arm with a kind of masculine eagerness, but nothing about this was physical. As it was, we may as well have been bodiless. This was a statement of something we could not express with only the inadequate bridge of English between us. She was half-smiling. Her breathing was too heavy — a wave expanding across her ribcage, exaggerated, and I was terrified that she could see me for the fraud I was. That I felt nothing of the moment. That I thought in immense, but contextless, generalities. This isn't yet, she seemed to say. This is now.

What about our long car trips, up and down the state? She had a green hatchback that vibrated so much, it was easy to believe we were about to lift off into another space and time. The car only had a cassette player, although nobody owned cassettes anymore, and the stores didn't sell them either. We listened to the only one we had, which was Exile on Main Street, although later I might say it was Sticky Fingers. I always liked that album better, anyway. We talked about Hesse and then Vonnegut. Or maybe, I just thought about Hesse and Vonnegut, and we talked about scrambled eggs with a lot of salt, and pulpy orange juice, and how nice it was to walk barefoot again, in the damp April lawns, with our toes curling up like shrimp. Her breath smelled syrupy, like canned pears, and underneath that, I could still catch the pesticides that had once shone wax-like on their skins. Long enough in Florida, and everything starts to smell like pesticides.

Maybe we were driving near the airport, and this is why I have inserted the vibrating hum of jets from some point overhead. Or maybe this wasn't that time, but the other. The time when we rode the plane together, and I tried to scare her with the story about the poison. Either way, sound effects are important too.