always
(via babstarr)
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What should have been the day for writing was fading fast. We were sitting in the dimming café, wondering if tomorrow wouldn’t finally be the day, like it always was. I wore a cranberry hooded sweatshirt, stained and stinking from everyday use. I felt dirty and tired, sensations one might expect after a hard day’s work. We swallowed the cold dregs of our coffees and departed, feeling we’d at least accomplished that: the feeling of having worked. Heading for the door, I looked repeatedly, furtively at the dark haired beauty swimming in her laptop screen. A young Marissa Tomei. Longish legs, trim and muscular. I felt her surface, pulled from the depths by me creeping at the periphery. I saw her about to look up, and I could not risk eye contact.
It had rained three times while we were in the café, and been sunny three times in between weather events. Now it was cloudy and colder, the sun skulking away behind the hills and forests.
“Where do you want to eat?” you asked, knowing that I would have no suggestion, and we walked to the squalid Thai restaurant a block down. Each time, I entered expecting the bald owner to recognize me. I don’t think some social reward is too much to ask for loyal patronage. Each time – this night – he was matter-of-fact and impersonal. Maybe that’s how Asian countries are. Maybe I should take the shitty treatment as tourism; tell people in passing I’ve been to Thailand and not elaborate.
“What are you going to order?” you asked, knowing it would be the same as always.
“I’m not sure,” I said. We shared my curried soup. I got quiet, and it was because I was questioning, again, whether I loved you. And whether that’s the type of thing you were supposed to question. And maybe not everyone had to question it, but maybe that was just how I work. Well, we’ll wait and see.
That same old argument.
We ate rice and basil and chicken and thai chilis, drank a dark beer from Mexico and we were exhausted walking home. The act of eating, that old Indian giver.
“Do you want to lay down?” you asked, and you slept, the last vestiges of an impersonal day creeping in from around closed olive drapes. I stared at the back of your head. I held you, then undressed you. You came, again, and when we drifted to sleep I was thinking about the London of Dickens and Doyle, which is basically where I was living in those days.
You smell pretty and your eyes are gorgeous.
Twice, I thought I caught young Marissa Tomei looking at me over her laptop screen.
And London smokes.
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That scampishness one associates with an urban upbringing in the ’20s. The squalid, cackling, doomed, sentient backdrop of Horatio Alger, no longer in evidence in the USA. Where is this? Mumbai? That one slum outside of Mumbai where they make fancy purses and shit, literally, in holes dug from other shit? How terrible, relative to most anywhere, but who could find any trace of terror in this impish swagger? The implied mischief for mischief’s sake? How easy to imagine oneself there, doing sloppy barefoot pirouettes in your new, old red and grey shirt, a pair of Michael Jackson jeans your life’s one true goal. Easy to think life must be easy.
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The recently refurbished toilet floors are not designed to handle your semen.
“That’s nice tile,” said the dean, cocking his head. Something tickled at the periphery of his thoughts. Something important.
He raised one hand to his chin in silent contemplation. After a moment his eyes flashed with understanding and he spoke once more.
“How much semen can it hold?” he asked. His eyes were sad, but stern.
“Couple liters?” offered the salesman, shrugging. “A coat or two at most. Loosens the grout, you know.”
“And how much for the ejaculate-resistant metal tiles?” asked the dean, not wanting to know.
The salesman laughed aloud. Shook his head. “Not likely in your budget, sir. Queen’s got ‘em. Couple of Arabian oil shieks. That’s about it.”
“Damn it all,” whispered the dean.
There was going to be semen, he knew.
Oceans of it.
(Source: jusqualafin)
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The “creeping dawn” they called it, and that sufficed. That far North — or West? (we could never truly orient ourselves) — the light approached with a certain sentience.
“Study the riverbed,” Randall told me early on. “Then study it tomorrow.”
It was a week before I took his meaning. The clock’s insistent uniformity had no bearing on this progression. It was 6:28 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the riverbed was dark and cool, small red beetles still scouring ancient silts between its irrelevant banks. It was 6:28 a.m. on a Friday, and the dead white sands of the bed blinded with fresh-arrived light. It was 6:28 the next Friday, and the dawn was just making its lazy way to the river, crawling along visibly in places, refulgent fingers extending beyond the main mass, wiggling and gestating, twitching like antennae. As if the light were searching.
When you first arrived at Randall’s, you watched it every day, figured you might be the one to find a pattern. I gave up after three weeks, but thought Bela might crack it with her maps and mathematics. She lasted 2 months. There was no pattern, we realized eventually. Just living light making a way where it would, undaunted by the many crags of the horizon, unpersuaded by the easy, dead paths of the watershed.
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