Everything around me light, flaky as skin peeling off a sunburn. Everything in me wanting some ecological change—my hair weightless, strands spread with chemicals, refusing to take a particular shape. I keep messing with it, a free standing structure—roadside, my head a freeway with no passing cars. Using only charm, we set up his blind punk friend with a random blond at the bar. Call her away from sitting by herself and take her home after she tells us she likes old lady drinks much like sherry, leaning forward into the table and giggling during her own descriptions. The blind punk has only her words to focus on, her fat jogger’s palms streaming sweat on his crew cut, the way her body cuts air as it moves to the presentation of his room, the enlarged photo of the back of his patched jacket on the wall. And us, two twigs ready against each other for tickle battle, or fire tricks in the pitch black of the bathroom so we can see the motion of flames more clearly, us on the fringes wearing stripes and sporadic leather can only focus on the same sound of her voice, high pitch muffled from our place on the kitchen floor. She keeps yakking and we keep commenting on her lack of silence, release. Red beer cans at our feet. I sit beside him on the linoleum, our backs against the cream cabinets, legs pointing towards the closed bedroom door. We feel smug with all these whispers in open space. I say so and so should strike out on her own, band constraining her vocals to their cheap chords and he kisses me on the cheek like he can’t help it, right before swiftly rising for the bathroom, but I don’t know that yet—he could be rising for anything. For example: we keep going outside for walks though smoking is allowed inside. Trying to get away from something by walking in a straight line there and back. The blinds in the living room don’t work; we can’t pull them down all the way, we don't like most people. We yank at the dangling white chord at the window in turn and they sprawl at the bottom like a rooster’s tail, words at the tip of the tongue, peels of white asparagus wet from a clean blade, a still frame of a sudden snow storm. Fucking blinds, it should seem like a cruel pun but the blind punk’s in his bedroom, touching breasts no one in this house will see tonight and the sun's already up and I've learned not the think about the size of the couch or how we both fit onto it, too heavy to fall.
Posted by caroline at March 8, 2006 2:46 AM