the glory of the 90s

I'm 19 years old & in New York City.
I sit at the young man's window on 14 E St. listening to jazz records and trying not to watch the clock. I drink tea by the window, looking down into the street below. These long nights I'm up waiting for him like clockwork, not wanting to sleep, looking at the door, expecting him to walk up the stairs and wrap his arms around me at any moment.

The harmony of the stereo swims through out his apartment. Pink neon light falls into the living room from the John's Italian Restaurant sign below the flat. James is working the late shift again. The clock ticks past another hour and I close my eyes. The thick hot summer air ripples over my skin; the warmth reminding me of him.

I open my eyes slowly and focus on the random lights flickering past the building from taxis and cars and bodies moving too swiftly by to make out. Beyond the sign and into the darkness of the street lies a black iron encased window. Inside the apartment is dark green paint thrown on the cold white walls, a small table and a bureau covered with books and headshots, and a looming pile of his half read scripts. The walls are lined from top to bottom with books, and there is a soft old couch and dozens and dozens of jazz and blues CDs. I feel I will always be a stranger here.

The small kitchen in the next room is simple and clean. To the far corner of it lies a dark, dirty window looking out into nothing, painted black and closed for years. Nothing to see in the alley for them, I guess. There is beauty here...but it is more difficult to see now. I still glimpse it, only it hurts now to recognize it, to compare it to the ugly feeling of disconnection growing in my belly when I look at him, and he looks away.

What am I doing here? What am I doing with him? This bright and lively man before me? This actor, this pursuer of dreams, this man that never ceases moving? He is filming a new movie in New York and I wait for him by the window each night to return. He is out in the world, chasing the next film or play in the hot, changeable city...or he is on a plane to Hollywood (but he always returns), giving up everything on a moments notice to act. To be an actor. That's all he wants, on the most fundamental level. He is in love with his work, with the lights on his face as he faces theatre audiences and charms every one in the room.

He is passionate, earthy, driven, and wild. His dark eyes are bright in their blackness. He has the city in his blood and he wouldn’t change a thing about himself. He doesn’t tear himself a part in side like I do. He is brave enough to live in the role not assigned him. He is courageous enough to chase his desires. I stand back in awe every time I look at him. I’ll never stand as tall as him. But I don’t mind his shadow on me. I feel safe in the absence of light. I only ask for more heat while we’re together. I only want to feel him while I still can.

I knew the moment we met on a park bench in Boston in July that he was a force of creation, a muse, and that I was to be his muse, in thought, in word, in his work and in his bed. I've felt nothing but a sense of goodness here with him every time I take the train down to New York. Everything is so certain here in this city.

People walk with confidence, with their sexuality worn on their sleeves, with their emotions buried beneath a sly smile or a malevolent stare.

He sent me on the #6 train to explore the city. He went to an actors workshop of some sort for a rehearsal. I got lost looking for a friend and found myself in Central Park. I walked and walked, watching the people stroll through laughing, talking, yelling, even singing. The world was alive and full of sounds. Five different men approached me. They were all so different, young, middle aged, handsome, ugly, smiling, leering, good natured, strange. Three said, "You are beautiful. I just had to tell you." And they smiled and walked away with a wink. This happened at different times. Then two other men came up to me separately and one asked me to marry him in jest. But he lingered on, following me. He asked me for a drink, I declined and he said "I just want to walk near you for awhile. To follow your wild eyes. What is a beautiful young woman doing alone in New York City?" I wondered that myself. New York is much less inhibited than Boston.

I arrived at an angel fountain in Central Park. I needed a quiet place to center myself. I did not know how to get back to the East Village or to Greenwich Village to meet a girlfriend, Anastasia, from Paris visiting Manhattan for the summer. I felt an array of emotions sitting in front of the large white stone angel. Physically I felt hot, suffocated, confused, afraid. I couldn't move. I had felt good earlier that day when he took me to the Brooklyn Bridge and we took pictures. I described our trip in my journal earlier:

"The bridge is gigantic. Chunks of the city are laid all around us, seen through thick cable wires running up the sides of the bridge. This City, Brooklyn, is a place of elegant rusting bridges and gray sky to match the
buildings encircling us around every corner. There's no escaping manmade structures here. "

We had walked past an old castle in Brooklyn, dark and ornate, sitting on a towering modern building and I had wondered how it got there. Later we met his friend, some L.A. director and screen writer, at a tea room in SoHo. He was nice, intelligent, a bit older. Honestly, I can't see him as 'a famous actor', a persona, a "character" like one of his portrayals though that could happen one day. To me he is REAL, human, he is himself, separate from this BIGGER BRIGHTER film world...and yet, his soul is so deeply a part of his work. It's something I respect in him, but cannot touch, cannot get close to. I can only watch him from afar. And support him. Love him for the man I know and be happy he is free in what he does, in what he loves, in what he chases and captures.

We walked to his apartment afterwards, going through the streets I am beginning to recognize. I ate lunch listening to Ella Fitzgerald later in the room while he laid on the bed reading the NY Times and Variety. That night we went to the subway at Astor Place and explored Manhattan.


I am confused about him. He is full of life, wonderful and inspiring. He is wildly talented and masculine and poetic and vibrant. I desire him. He calls me at 3am because that is when he gets home. I go to class in the morning...I work till early evening in my mild mannered nanny job. Our lives are connected by affection and temperament but separated by many differences. He is in the jet set life, surrounded by the "beautiful people", he is one of the beautiful people, as down to earth and genuine as he is, and will always be...and I am just a college student, a writer, I sketch abstract pictures at the MFA on quiet weekends or take solitary walks on the Charles River and read Eastern Mysticism and novels. We are worlds apart. But what keeps our bond to close? So strong?

We write the most beautiful, passionate letters to each other. He sent me an obituary of an African American poet because of a reprint of one of her poems reminded him of me. I sent him a postcard of a Hopper painting because he loves his art and because it is so New York, so like himself. He writes there Keruoac-ian rambles about the world; alleyways, doorsteps, flowerpots, the Staten Island ferry, Italian shoe shines, being on the road in his travels. He sends me poetry, his own photographs and sketches. I send him mine. We share journal entries and hot, vivid nights when were in the same city.

He makes me say things I never dreamed of saying - because he makes me feel so much. When he is inside of me it is as though my body were merely an instrument of pleasure. The pleasure is all I am tapped into and I flow on streams or waves of all this pleasure, this heat, this soft, warm, enveloping, crying out, miraculous joy each time he moves into me again. I care for him very much. But there is confusion here. There is a feeling of dissension growing between us.
We kissed in Boston on a rooftop in the Back Bay under the 4th of July fireworks shooting off from the Hatch Shell while the Boston Pops played and the Charles River skyline was lit up. When I met him on the Charles River, early in July, I was living unlike I had ever lived before. A few months of recovery, change, inner gravity, a new solemnity, a cipher of pain and regret evolving into a transformation of self.

MEMORIES of 19-- in New York City. It happened in a flash. A smile, a conversation, a drawing, a number, a dinner, a walk, hands holding, a kiss, a couch, hands running the length of you, poetry whispered in the corner, the lights dimmed, the sound of July 4th fireworks around us, kisses, tangled limbs. Later came the elevators and love letters and your own poetry. The postcards, the museums, the theatre, his movies. How innocent in the afterglow which grew overexposed from too much light too quickly? The door opened half way through developing the only negatives you had together.

Write, create, work, travel. I am still in the world, growing, exploring, and most importantly, writing. I'm nearly twenty and I hope to have much time ahead of me to learn -- and to live -- more.

(1998)
The Boston Green Line Trains - The woman sits huddled in her seat, with her arm resting on the blackened windowsill of the motionless train. In her other arm she holds on her lap three delicate, light pinkish-purple orchids wrapped in faded orange newspapers. She sleeps, half-aware of the wild treasure which lies precariously in her arms - tired from a long day in a long week in the city as Friday closes in on us. There are many thoughts running through my mind, shot through my whole being like arrows. It is a clean feeling day, with large white clouds hanging over us. A little peace in this hellish summer. It has been terribly hot the last few days and I am beginning to see a pattern to the weather this summer: hot, humid and unbearable. Stormy thunder showers and gray skies or hot blaring sun under merciless pale blue skies.

Some afternoons I imagine strangers seek out my character as they pass me by in the street. Their eyes linger a second longer on my face than a casual glance. Their eyes search out for a spark, a glint of recognition, an answer to an unasked question that has no answer - and what do I give them back? Do I look open eyed into each face, with all my thoughts, all my feelings bared before them? My anger, peace, joy, anguish or rage? Do I cry in the streets, the tears flowing drops of one loss or another, washing away in the gutters, floating off into the alleyways? No, never.

Some call me negative,
I prefer realistic
Some call me difficult
I prefer challenging
Some call me vulgar
I prefer humorous
Some call me irreligious
I prefer irreverent
Some call me a 'people person'
I call them stupid.

Hello bastard masses,
hello empty faces,
hello filthy streets!
Just another summer day in the city.
Oh, what a lovely treat!


(adiago by albinoni)
Listening to music I think of strange things. I question who I am and what I am made of. I feel passionately; blissful, sensuous, resentful, stifled, angered, energized, enlivened. I write as a pianist would pound out notes; the black and white of words tumbling out as though punched from ebony and ivory piano keys.

This story is like an old sad song I can not remember the words to. Like a famous old composition I do not know the name of. No-one knows how far the thread unravels but I feel tremors of buried grief in the rolling piano notes. I'm suddenly drowning in it. I am suddenly made of porcelain and balanced on a tightrope. I don't care where I fall. I just want the rush of the descent. I want the shake to my bones. The freedom of formlessness, the freedom of letting go. A temporary sin. The rain falls with the notes onto the pavement and grass and wooden porches outside. The dying insects voices rise up. Classical music plays on and gives me that partial suspension of disbelief I experience in theatres.



(2000)
I am waiting outside for him, on a marble railing, outside his work building. I have been waiting here about 20 minutes. The music playing in my ears is exquisite - Mendelssohn, sextet in D major - a confident playing of the piano - the insistent gliding of the violin's bow against string. It transports me to other times, other places--I feel Europe, I feel a classical time in my blood, in my bones...


The day is so gray at this moment-- the dirt flying, the music playing, the music playing for my ears alone...as the stream of people pass by. Cars grunt along the busy streets, buses wheeze and gasp ahead, taxis race by-- My body is cold while my mind follows the notes of the piano--and my heart stretches out on the violin strings. The clock's hands move, the truck's brakes screech and I try to ignore the pain in my back. I watch the long gray-headed man in army fatigues, beg for money with his outstretched hand, he gives the peace sign as people pass him, averting their eyes. He is gone, disappeared around the corner of the sky scraper, and new strangers take his place, filing down the sidewalk. It is growing colder and he is late.

Mendelssohn’s Sonata in E flat is drifting out to me on clear, light notes. He composed this at 15 years of age. Remarkable. It is airy and layered. The wind is powerful now and tearing through my thin white blouse. I can hear the sounds of children playing outside Fanueil Hall. Everything is moving, everything is alive. Even in the dead expressions of the people walking down the street...there is an inner spark that dances just below the surface.


(1999) I AM LEARNING SO MUCH THE LAST COUPLE OF WEEKS BY THE SMALLEST EFFORTS.

After so much stagnation and defeat, my spirit has erupted and my mind is leading my body into action. Who knows where or if this will take me anywhere but it is an interesting journey of the mind. I know so damn little about life.

I LOOK TO THE HEAVENS TO SEE MYSELF, I LOOK TO THE EARTH TO FIND A TOUCHABLE GOD.

SILENT CONTEMPLATION IS THE GIFT OF LIFE.

It is dark gray outside today. The early afternoon is silent beyond the windows in the quiet kitchen I sit in, writing--except for the soft trickle of rain falling to the ground. The sky was clamoring wit thunder earlier.

I HAVE ALWAYS LIKED THE SOUND OF THUNDER. AS A CHILD IT NEVER FRIGHTENED ME, BUT RATHER PRODUCED A CERTAIN INNER SERENITY.

I strained my ears to the windows and listened with pleasure to the many kinds of rain falling: pouring, dripping, scattering, buckets dropping, trickling, tapping. I wrapped wool sweaters around me as I watched the world outside become blanketed in a gray fog. I had dreams of wandering through miles of mist without getting lost, as though following some instinctual direction. I reveled in the soft rumblings of 'muted' thunder, and ran through the house, trying to catch the source of the great sounds of angry thunder, clapping, and cutting through the sky like a great warrior, yielding a sword through the heavens.

THE SOUND OF THUNDER IS AN INTIMATE SOUND, EVEN IN ITS DISTANCE.

There is something in the way the world turns wild in the midst of a storm that has always brought me a small joy. During the various summer hurricanes in Massachusetts as a child, I would stand outside my house until my mother called me in-- caught up in the clean smelling wind, the wet leaves, the movement of the earth, my long hair flying around my face, everyone else running inside for shelter. I liked the secrecy of rain, burying myself in my raincoat, tipping the umbrella down against the harder rain, as I shielded myself from the cold and wet--and from other people.

I STILL LOVE THE MYSTICAL FEELING OF RAIN ...and the filmy touch of mist immediately following a downpour. The world is cleansed, fresh, anew.


(Late 1990's)

She writes this on the subway after an interesting evening in Boston.

Different people are all around her, staring at their feet or at the wall advertisements, reading paperbacks, sleeping, conversing, the mad, the young, the old, the infirm, the ordinary. Expressionless faces all around her, serious faces with tired eyes. The train is cool and a temporary refuge for them all from the outside they pass by, the faster the better.

It was strange to be in the city at night after all this time. She walked the same streets she once did each evening for so long. How easily memories meeting the present can shatter her illusions of the past. She once knew these streets intimately, it's alleyways and passageways were as close as the valves connected to her heart. She once walked these streets fearlessly and felt at ease slipping in and out between the shadows of the trees and buildings above her. She loved to spy the outlandish characters parading down the street from bar to bar like peacocks, the rich, the poor, the beautiful, the dirty. How the city at night overwhelmed her. The scent of impersonal sexuality hangs heavy in the air...the half stifled rage...the hunger...various desires mingling and clashing in the vulture-like stares of people searching for something they can't quite put their finger on.

Why is it she sees a death of Life here in the streets? Death in the youthful faces, men and women drunk on sexual desire, drunk on ego and drunk on themselves. The city is on an animal pulse now. The philosophers and poets are not wanted here. She maintains her distance from the crowd but they still push on against her, knocking her around on all sides. She falls into a rhythm of night walking: weaving in and out of the swaying, desperate-eyed crowd. It is almost too much to bear, the heavieness of night, the suffocating air, the angry looks, the try me on for size glares...there is talk on the streets but the words are all indiscernable. She is all alone in this. She has felt alone most of her adult life. Her family is a group of loners connected by blood but not bound by it. Life is transitory, can you dig it? On these streets the life has already passed us by...the emptiness of the moment, taken up by warm bodies is not solid enough for her to join them and allow the moment to carry her in. She will never be the Wife, the Mother, the Friend, the Lover, the Daughter, the Worker the same way these people are. There is something which separates them, something subtle and interior. She will never walk on these same streets again with the feeling of a solid place on earth... She only desire the fleeting pleasure of a moment alone in the midst of a crowd moving too quickly for her to follow them, too close for me to escape.



(Late 1990s)

His fingers move across the keys with a feverish pace. I follow his movements to the execution of notes, a relentless pursuit of motion and sound, in which I am the pursuer and he, the one one running away. He holds me here in this room with his music, with his solitary, powerful songs. The keys play intimate notes like his whispers late at night or in the early morning hours of my dreams. This is an interior song, one I cannot let go of. His heat, his life force comes out in these notes, notes that tease me, beckon me to follow him into death, into madness, into a darkness I am not assured a way out of. But how can I relent this call of music, this prodding of mind and flesh and spirit? This music moves me and I feel myself dancing lightly on the airy notes, leaving my body, carressing his hands as they slide over the keys, as the sweat forms on his upper lip, as he closes his eyes in concentration. I need to feel him inside of me.

(1999)

Sauntering over, sleepy-eyed, half awake, subdued, soft-shoe-d steps, swaying as if to a dream, dancing in shadows, breathing in fog instead of air, you smile and peer through half closed lids at me --and I can not turn away, I can not escape this vision of you without possession, without some sort of infusion of my life into your demi-mort...I can not leave the scene of a crime about to take place. My eyes follow you around the room as you move so slowly, even as the music speeds up, you defy its notes, it's bass insistence, you fly instead, in your own dreams, moving to songs playing in your head and what can I do but be witness to a secret as it is unfolded?

Will we dance too closely tonight? Will I stare too long into your eyes as we pass eachother intimate smiles like cool handshakes? Am I supposed to pretend I don't see the mirror of my desires in your face? As if we did not exist as man and woman but rather as some otherworldly beings. What good is flesh and thought when I cannot feel you near me? Why speak words that do not speak of our feelings, of our yearnings? Your silence is enough to choke the words of love right out of me. There is nothing left to say but I want you, and even those words are not enough to show you all I've ever wanted to...

All time and thought and past seem to dissolve into the thin air of my dreams. There is a weightlessness, a deathlessness in this dreamstate of our unions, a place to commune if only for a few stolen moments, this place between life and nothingness. You are a shapeshifter, a man of many faces and many talents, but I always recognize you by your eyes, the way you look into me instead of at, the way you search my face for your own reflection. Your bag of tricks, your voodoo magick, your smoke and mirrors may elude me in these moments but I am forever on the hot trail behind you, collecting traces of your presence like fading memories...

Why do I insist on playing your games? Even when I think I defy you - when I close my eyes and walk away, when I sleep without dreaming, when I refuse to listen to your teasing in my ears while I listen to music or write a poem...? Yet even when I think I am free of you I feel you more acutely than ever before. You torture me with temporary pleasure, with dreams of going deeper. You make me want to feel dangerous, to make love to strangers, to be violated, to break every taboo...but you never stick around long enough to lead me into all this decadence you wave under my nose. Perhaps I will have to drag it out from you? You bring me a little closer to it each solitary night. I am no longer so afraid...and you are no longer such a stranger.

You make me want to free myself from a tyranny that has no name. Why is it with you I want to escape? I know nothing in this world but how easy it would be to aimlessly follow you into some mystical forest and lose my way, wandering in the mists, happy to be so close to you, listening to your songs like whispered confessionals. I hear the call of something ancient in your voice, I feel the pull of something old and unchanging within me in this image of you placed before me each night with a different face. Why do you always return to me? Are you as imprisoned by your temptation of me as I am of you? Can you never possess what is real? Are you merely a mythical figure, the force that moves the hands beating against the drum, not even the drums, not even the hands, not the music too but the force behind it? Do you reach out to every piece of the world and back again. Is there a little place for you in all of us? Or am I your only token in this world? Am I to expect more from this - or will I spend my life in pursuit of the elusive? Let me rest my weary head and dream awhile... and we'll meet again, I think. I'm counting on it.

(1999)

Stranger, where have you gone? Fickle boy. Liar. Magician. Conjurer of erotic images. Masked lover. Quiet Seducer. Onlooker. Where are your perfect words which tiptoe up my spine, pause at my neck, and whisper sweetly into my ear, 'tell me about your darkness...'? Where is that darkness you possess...so acutely...hiding it behind your back...allowing just a small bit to peak out at me in indifference? What do you possess besides little smiles and private jokes...how many have you entranced this evening, this week, this life? Youth tremors on your lips, it cascades in golden light like water rippling from your mouth as you tell stories...so many stories....there is a soft, red glow about your face....Your expression is a man who holds too many memories to remember the truth...and I wonder if you have ever had to lose anything in this life.

One word and it all melts before me...it warms my hands, my mouth is filled with lead, my body curves to your insistence, your demands, your omissions that I sense in the core of me...sweet hot breath...

What is this Life you are offering me in installments...can't I have all of it...is that all you have to give...is that all I've ever asked for....I do not know the difference between our dreams...I do not recognize myself in your hands...you are the kind I run from.... you are the one I keep returning to. >

So much of my world is caught up in this moment and yet I am alone, alone in my thoughts, in my feelings, in this room. The world is spinning and there is my breath and my voice which cries out into a night filled with such silence my cries cannot be heard, cannot be recognized as a human sound. I am the sound of humanity, the extension of being and yet I am only myself, I see only through my own eyes, I feel only through my body, I hear only through my ears, I taste only with my tongue, I love only with my heart, I die only with my own spirit.

Music is the reminder I am living...it is the heartbeat I search for in the dark before sleep and waking...it is the pulse under the skin I am afraid of...it speaks for those of us who were born silent and are determined to stay that way. That is why these words are so easy for me to write, for they are the words which are not shouted out, are not read aloud, are not taken into the hearts of strangers. I could not swear allegience to my own words because I do not trust myslef to tell the truth, even to me. Each day I wait for the miracle, as i have since my birth, and each day it does not arrive, and in fact, seems further and further away. Even the light of the sun cannot blind me as easliy as it did before. And the music no longer drowns out the thumping of my own fears in my heart.

Waiting for the moon to fall back behind the clouds and the new day to begin where I stand up before I am forced up and walk on my own two legs in a straight line ahead.

(1999)

One kiss and deliverance. One kiss and then blackness. Everything has gone black, everything is dark. There is no sense, no feeling, no understanding. I cannot grasp the darkness before me. I cannot find the light behind me. There is only one kiss and then silence. And then devastation. I need another kiss to lead me out of this, to move me through to the next breath. One kiss of life, one more taste. Soft lips, full lips, a strangers lips. So pretty, how can a man's lips be pretty? How can they touch me once and then dissolve into nothing but a memory...or an apparition. I have wrestled with you before. You are the elusive conjuring of my own soul, the mirror image reflected backwards, the man to my woman, the yang to my yin, the beginning to my end. One more kiss, some thing, some little touch with reality. You are the dream life I forget about in the morning. You were born in the shadows, you departed through the fog, you speak in whispers which ring within me like shouts. You are the one silently directing every instinct, every reaction, every moment of passion, every slip of desire. You are leading me even now...especially now. One more kiss so I can cop a feel. So I can grasp onto something more than a dream, more than a visage. So I can feel you the way you feel me. What's it like to be you? Always inside, never invaded yourself? Always running when you're spotted. Just a kiss before you've departed. And I am left to be detective, picking up vague clues here and there along the path to my own discovery. I am writing a lot these days, I warn you. Perhaps I am getting closer? I can feel you. One more kiss, muse, before I try and steal you.

-18 years old - I felt innocent as he lay next to me in the dark. I can still feel the mark of his fingers on my skin like invisible pulsation’s of the past. Scarred by something I used to like. His breath like fog before my eyes. And I find myself in his warm embrace even now in memory. It's hard to abandon your past when it lives uneasily inside you. He was the other half of me I didn't want to recognize. I never wanted to know inside myself. He fell into me as easily as he slipped out. All I can recall is the empty want and the flood of desires that drowned all other thoughts out when we touched. It’s the stain of history seeping below the skin I feel now in this 1994 reverie. He is a memory that won't fade, an apparition that wont leave me alone. It's like I'm 18 all over again. It's like I was never set free from this.

(at university)

I used to think: If I am going mad I'd like to be left in silence. It's his good looks I hate the most ... they make me want to kick him when he smiles and flow like warm honey when he insults me in public. Smacking is another way to impress me - cutting, biting, breaking, (not with weapons but words, which always seem to hurt worse) - yes, ingenious boy that he is, he is fine when he is not genuine with me. I crave one thing: that he could shatter me with his judgements. With his dirty jokes, his political incorrectness, his lies, his troubles, his full bodied resentments, his Republican southern upbringing, with his St. Louis drawl. I want to feel some of that anger he holds so precariously between his fist and my face and never strikes... He builds another icy wall until I'm black and blue from bumping into them all afternoon. Remember, today, afterall, it's gone... it's a faded sliver of a stranger's consciousness.




(Memories of just turned 15)

She remembered flesh bared in the woods, a rush of light between the branches on his skin, the smell of his dark hair mixed with rain. She also remembered the bitter remnants of first love and the sweetness of faded lust which never really left her. She remembered his eyes, somehow foggy a decade later... his strong hands, long limbs, a full sensuous mouth, a deep voice with a thick accent. Scars, tattoos on peach soft arms. Arms which reached out and held tight and then let go just when she was about to lose herself. She remembered the newness of everything, the discoveries, the promises, the storms, the refusal to give up until they just let it slip away. They had so many firsts, they entwined inextricably, and to think she'll never see his boyish face again. But she sees those that remind her of him, a hint of strong brow, or cheekbone, or jaw, dark hair falling into deep set eyes, a languid smile, an athletes' body... she'll have flutters of memories and nostalgiac moments, dreamlike, a little unreal, as though their times were lived by someone else, but it happened - they were together and then they went their separate ways as life, she imagined, intended them to. Has he ever regretted, even for a moment, she wonders. Has he wondered if they had let that life grow would they still know each other? Would they share the wet leaves on the forest floor on tangled nights? Would they stand pressed against buildings in the rain never getting enough, consuming, pushing for more, begging, demanding, scrambling? They once fit like something familiar and newborn all at once. He was the tall dark and much, much too handsome and she, the fallen angel too sweet for words, too ethereal, too wonderful to keep forever. She moved, he moved, they altered somehow. In these spheres it's not possible to know eachother, she thinks with sadness. I don't remember you enough to give you justice. But I think of you now just the same. I loved you once. I had you. You moved inside me and you moved out again until you had your fill. Their love was a broken circle. Another means to an end.

She remembered lips brushing her face, soft nothings whispered, moisture and smiles, tiny tugs of conscience before the final release - and then they had subsided back into themselves. She feels woozy tonight, feels like she felt when she thought she knew him. She feels she has reason to dream of him again. Reason to wonder if he still moves the way she'd expect him to. Is he still tall dark and much, much too handsome? Is he the one in the shadows she overlooked for so long once she threw her feelings out with the bathwater and everything else they possessed? She remembers looking up, up, and him looking in. Could she still wrap him round, round her little fingertips? Would she want to? Perhaps a little more dark hair stuffed in her mouth to stop the screams, perhaps she could slap him around a little bit like old times? They could just dance until midnight and he could race off in his pumpkin. Another golden boy she fell in love with, but he was the first, he was the hero - even from the wrong side of the tracks. He was the blessed one, so beautiful, and she was the Envied, the sorrow girl who had ensnared him somehow. He had glown and grew so large and magnificent, so she stepped back and let him glisten before the masses. Years of loving, years of struggle and finally had to take flight. She had to get out from under the shadow of him. He was the beautiful and she was the damned and after awhile they had forgotten how they had ever fit together in the first place. They had forgotten how much they had once needed to feel each other. They had their rainy days against buildings, their stormy woods, their grave yards, and they had their metro trains and stations, their alleyways. They had the feeling of losing themselves so as to forget the regrets of their families and their own private guilts. So as to forget everything before there was the two of them, him and her, love, forever, and ever and ... perhaps another time she could persuade him to... or perhaps those times are through? History not repeating itself. He wasn't her last one, but he was her first. And she was always the second. She pictures him from underneath, pictures him covered in ashes, sees eyes which cannot focus on her face looking back at her. She sees him running out of the woods, pictures him hungry for some thing, imagines him gulping air and embracing the Holy Ghost through bottled Spirits. She envisions his God as woman, many women, moving through him a thousand times and over again. She sees him as father, husband, son, brother, uncle, lover, enemy of hers, friend. Her brother, her only brother, her only friend once upon a time. The light to her shadow. The smooth line to her crease. They were like brother and sister, husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, oh, especially mother and son... and how she had nursed him. How she had given birth to him a hundred different times and the last time just wasn't enough to recreate the both of them together.

Perhaps beginnings wouldn't be so sweet without the bitter endings? Perhaps she wouldn't wonder on grey days what his breath feels like on the back of her neck. They changed and no longer recognized each other. She refused to remain in the neighborhood and he refused to leave it. It was inevitable, this split. She was only 15, and he was 17 when they first jumped in simulataneously. Three years later they bobbed up for some air and it was already over. The story finished, that chapter anyway. She wouldn't know what to do with that kind of love these days, mind you.