Plathological

Caged Ladder

I’m cruel that way: I once replaced love with club soda. I remember your swimsuit calendar, all your summer fallouts and the pile of junk in the backyard that wasn’t yours. Being drilled by someone named after a character in a fantasy novel. Being drilled below the photo of some Elle wearing some black mesh swimsuit posed in some depiction of July with an orange glow, the charm of this scene pinned to the wooden panels of the surrounding walls. I judge all of my men on their sexual ability and you were definitely on the bottom of the wrung; so I guess it was my heat exhaustion, my sitting at the white plastic table tilted from the unsteady ground while breathing in the dust layered on the umbrella above that prevented me from climbing to a higher wrung. I remember the Swimsuit Edition date planner that you never made any plans on. It would have been easier to tear the pictures out and tack them in a row around your bed before any of the months had a chance to turn. I spend no time thinking about any of this. The only thing that comes to mind is my father, holding me up to a calendar when I was two. He couldn’t guide my eyes to the photos he was trying to show me, as I kept them on the little words penned in the little squares, leveled my head below the photo-line and pointed to the plan curled inside this date, that one. I told you that story and it should have been a sign. That I hate fantasy novels for no reason other than taste should have been another sign. If sex with you was anything it was deplaning from no assigned seat on a one-way, slinging your baggage on your shoulder and disembarking from the craft. It was flipping through the calendar afterward to see what one could wear with soaked skin, everything but the balls of your feet underwater, in any given month.

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In other news:

1) my current sex-life couldn't be better!
2) I'm flying back to Calgary on December 21st.
3) Will be happy to see you all then!
----even though my sex-life will be put on hold for a week. Which I don't like.
4) Graeme's coming down to Calgary for New Years!
5) Next university term will be my last term. And it looks like my transcript will be good enough for grad school if things keep going the way they're going. So who knows.

sea \ level

I’m entirely moodless. That is – hair up, rent money on my desk, Death in Venice, and without mood entirely. I can hear people beating the snow off the shop eaves and it sounds like muffled gun shots, near misses on the melting ground. Had a dream last night that I’m pretty sure was some kind of visual representation of hell-on-earth: a mountain trail, seen above the water level, a procession of walkers on its winding path – all of them in a line, their bodies on fire. My dream told me they were dead. Though hellfire didn’t register with me until long after I had my juicebox this afternoon. That’s the last time I intently study Dali paintings before going to bed. The underwater skeletons did me in.