Caffeine

The door to McNulty's Teas and Coffees opened. The distinct smell of mold, musty tea, and coffee beans hit the mix of fresh air flowing in from behind me. I looked around at the boxes and boxes of teas and large glass containers with labels reading LAPSONG OOLONG and GREEN GUNPOWDER in old typeset. Diced, dried fruit in a large glass canister, and saw the strange reflection in red of a tea box behind it. Minutes passed. Lots of minutes as I stared at that glass with its colour. The strange manipulation of the light and the colour made me realize how much love made me miss out.

Because

I'm still in love with you.


Harvest Moon by Cassandra Wilson

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleepin
We could dream this night away.

But theres a full moon risin
Lets go dancin in the light
We know where the musics playin
Lets go out and feel the night.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now its gettin late
And the moon is climbin high
I want to celebrate
See it shinin in your eye.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

I laid awake on the small, cramped couch, my feet sticking out of the three blankets I piled on top of my shaking figure, almost kicking the fake Christmas tree. I watched the digital numbers click steadily onward and as the weather threw Christmas rain drops at the windows. Face halfway between my pillow and a couch cushion. Each time I blocked out the semi-dark with the permanent black of my eyelids, there they were: having mountain-men sex in my head, all over the pine needle covered forest, all pumping to songs that I loved and have scribbled everywhere in my notebooks, on top of my favorite blanket. It was blasphemous and beautiful, crude and it is everything that I and he ever wanted except it was here it was them, naked, not: me.

Most confusing thing about my heartbreak,

really, is that it isn’t like anyone else’s I’ve seen. It doesn’t come in waves and it sure plays an obvious game of hide and seek. There he is right in front of me. All photographed, smiling and happy, lips upturned in his permanent smile, his early crows feet locked in his hopeful squint. My head took that still shot, its still up there developing behind my forehead. Only life has taken the largest pair of scissors created and meticulously cut out his shape. Only his dim outline, the lake, and his canoe exist beyond the metal cutting away at his memory. His lack of a presence now becoming a dull throbbing just under my eighth layer of skin cells. All at once I want to write him a thousand letters explaining other people aren’t meant for each other, but we! We were crafted from the same tree, you see, carved with the same knife, and sewn with the same thread. I am the bristly bark, he is the soft chamber of collected rings. And there is the genius of the thing: you think we are nothing alike, but really, we are just different sides of the same sapling. Then I want to take those same letters all made of our tree and burn them all, so I could keep them from being true.
Because they aren’t true.
Just as you and I are not two sides of the same coin, missing you and wanting to forget you at the same time, is.

December, Something

The snow engulfed the street ahead. Lynn and I walked in silence, both too tired. Things weren't going our way and things wouldn't be going our way for a while yet. Not until this blizzard outside my window is a memory. Not until the sparkle and shine fade down New York City street drains. Until the streets reduce to slush.But right then, our feet were a foot deep in snow. The white covered everything we didn't want to see. All the ugly parts. The flowing white kept everything quiet, kept our feet numb, and the miles forever stretching, even if the West Side Highway kept from letting us from cross rivers. The wind mixed with our hair and the snow and icicles hung from our faces. We trudged on, laughing at the fact that our only job was to dirty the snow before us with our feet.
“Let’s make snow angels,” Lynn said.
“Right there?” I pointed at untouched snow. It must have covered a sidewalk and part of the street.
“Okay. You have to let me know if cars come too close.”
“You’re fine. Plenty of space,” I said.

She pulled the faux fur hood over her head, snow sticking to her eyelashes. Difficulties with blinking. She slumped into the snow, her head just below tire marks left by cabs and trucks. It was silent. I took out my camera, the quiet click documenting her print, her wings. A truck rushed through a stop sign and plowed through the foot or so of snow. A few inches were left between her head and the tires.

“You should probably get up," I said.

She stood up and looked at the tracks.
“It definitely would have changed the course of the evening if I got run over by a truck,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s walk around and just lay on things.”
“Okay.”

We found a good spot under some Christmas trees on a brownstone stoop. I lay in the snow thinking about my size and shape as Lynn snapped photos. I thought about St. John’s church and how I liked it, but didn’t know where exactly it was in Harlem, or where exactly God is. I thought about myself as the church: large and all masonry. My corners reaching across quiet avenues: an empty cathedral, hoping for piety. No religion of her own to fill all her guts. Only some lonesome noise echoing around in my cavern. If I could be that church, maybe some sort of ancestral, guiding songs could with some strange metaphysical being and could comfort me buried under my dusting of snow.

I sat up and looked at my print in the snow. It looked as if someone had been lying next to me, curled up into my right arm. Something made noises in my chest.

Lynn must have noticed me looking at it. "I think I stepped there before I took your picture," she said.

I stuck my mitten into the spot in agreement, though I saw no footprints.

Skipping Stone by Amos Lee

I don't know if I can do this alone/
Oh after all our sweet love is flown/
I've been a running/
I've been skipping like a stone/
And I don't know if I,/
I can do this all alone/

Men.

Under many different phases of my being, I have looked into the stars and wondered whether the blanket pulled over our existence is a construction sheet with poked holes, or just a whole lot of white we can’t see (all of). I’ve looked at the stars like they are things that haven’t changed or haven’t moved, even while they are out there orbiting, collecting, and changing in size; combusting into life and exploding into death just as we are down here; thinking ourselves birds, or otherwise still humans floating looking down into deepest seas. And even then, we —the stars and I—would look at each other from a great distance and laugh at one another’s perspective.

I wonder if the Milky Way knows we have the same taste in men.

Safety Pins and Nipples

Her bare breasts were too close for comfort, the only thing covering her lower half, a tutu. You guys are the only ones my age, she told us, you can’t leave now. The party has hardly started. Her eyes were most likely attempting to make me flush, turn me on, keep me there. I was too busy staring into the adjacent room, a dark shade of crimson with low music playing and a cluster of twenty or so people all pulling at one another’s bare limbs, pumping and groaning all in a crowd. From what it looked like, there were some twenty year olds, some sixty year olds, everyone in-between. All fucking. People still do this? I said to Azara.
“I was told this was an underwear party,” Azara said.
The bare breasted girl giggled and said where’s the underwear? A sixty year old man, hair greased to the side, pulled out from the crowd of people, sweaty, and fixed the safety pins jammed through his nipples.
“Azara, where did you hear about this party?”
“Uh. The internet," Azara said.
“The internet?”
“The internet.”
“You look for parties on the internet?”
“No.”
“So how did this-”
“Listen-”

The man with safety pins in his nipples walked by in ass-less chaps. I could tell he was trying to tempt my breasts out of my shirt. Azara crossed her arms across her chest and shivered.

“Oh I’m listening,” I said.
“I just thought you could meet some new people…”

Chains rattled against the concrete wall to our left, as screens peeled themselves from the ceiling, unfolding in all of their glory, more naked bodies on display. Every one on the opposite end of the room stopped having sex for a moment and, as a collective, turned to the giant screens. The girl on the screen was bright blonde, the man a dark haired and hairy thing. I looked away before the screaming started. I suddenly noticed a man sitting in a small cubby behind us near the stairs leading into the carnal den, a stout, fat man in a white collared shirt and a thick mustache reading the New York Times under a sign reading, NO PANTS PERMITTED PAST THIS POINT. Behind him, a row of clothing hangers, some with pants, others with underwear, some, empty. I watched him reading the paper. His brow creased a little, taking in what must have been a catastrophic event. I looked back in to the other room and saw everyone doing a slow, naked waltz around one another, wondering if any of them even bothered to ask this man if we wanted to join. It didn’t look as if he was interested. I squinted at the headlines; all in Spanish. I thought about asking him what he was reading, until he looked up and saw me looking back at him and he winced. I would have winced at me too.
"Can we go now?" I said.

George Washington, Pocketed

I worked for eight hours and didn’t think for nine. As soon as I stepped over the threshold onto 7th Avenue, I thought about quitting my job at MarketMarket as I pulled at the seams of my just-received check. The smell of food clung to my hair. I looked down at my paycheck and cried, then seriously considered purchasing cigarettes. I had money, have money. The most money I have ever made. I thought about the dresses I could buy, or the friends I could visit in D.C. What do other people do with their money? With all these tips? A man pushed by me in tight jeans, Bob Dylan sunglasses and the quick stench of cold hard cash. Strip clubs. That’s what people do with their money. If I buy cigarettes with too many singles, I will smell like a strip club. Her strip club.
I chose not to buy them.
My friend Ana always told me her father would drive her places she never wanted to go, but this wasn’t the scrapping of the barrel, she told me. Stripping is only the nails holding the whole disgusting, alcoholic, life digesting concoction together. I visited her with some of my tips spilling out of my back pockets from work last Tuesday. I stood outside, looking into the brick, wondering if I should take up smoking. I asked who I could only assume was a customer of the club if he had a light, and when he said yes, I told him thank you, but I have no cigarette. He talked with me as I looked at the words LATINO LUXURY flashing in pink, pale fluorescent skin. That little phosphorescent woman moved in standing, squatting, spread-eagled position across the windows. I walked in and smelled loss sliding down the throats of every man looking at the gyrating, naked women. I saw her from the doorway, somewhere towards what must have been the back of the place. The dollar bills become aware of their surroundings and made my pocket warm. I pulled my purse back over my shoulder and walked with no grace. Naked breasts stared at me from stage to stage, women slick with Vaseline, not sweat, and men eating sushi staring at their shoes. I reached the end of the curving red faux velvet couches, spots in the seats worn to black. I sat down at one of the tables right in front of her. Music on a distant speaker broke into static. She shook herself around, then saw me. She was wearing a wig. Red brown. I ordered a Jameson on the rocks from a nearby waitress in only an apron and looked up at Ana. She looked back at me and she danced. The speaker was fixed and played 80’s hair rock. We didn’t blink as we looked at each other. I reached into my back pocket and placed a one at her stiletto-ed heels. She danced. Other men noticed and watched me. Steadily they made their way to the edges of the stage and added a one or two. Ana started to dance their way, before I added money and looked at her wig as she turned back to dance towards me. A man placed down a 20 and I put down a 50. She looked at me and I looked at her. A man shouted it wasn’t fair my faggot ass got all the action, this wasn’t some lesbo club, get the fuck out of here. My fingers pulled more bills out of my back pocket and when that place was empty, I reached into my purse and took cash from there.
Finally a waitress came over and motioned to Ana signaling the end of her shift. She blew a kiss to the disappointed men whom I promptly stared at before reaching for my purse to leave. I turned and a man twice my size stared down at me.
"Who you doin' that for, young lady?" he said.
"Me," I said.
He shook his head.
"Nah. I don't believe that."
"I don't either."
I shrugged and pushed by him.

It was a good day.

I consumed only two boxes of Kashi cereal dipped in Nutella rather than three.

Robert E. Lee Went Down/Up in Flames

I could tell the conversation was making him anxious. I knew that from the second I shook his hand next to the tiki bar. His palm was clammy, confused, shaking; his eyes distant and unable to focus. Friend of a friend, he told me, and you could tell. Even now he couldn’t look straight ahead and his left leg kept giving out a little every time someone shook their head in disgust. I looked at him from the doorway of the bar bathroom. The bar we were in was shitty, named something like Tommie B’s Bar, and I kept losing Ana and the other friends I came with in a sea of the scantily clad. Blonde hair and spandex crowded the island bar in the middle of the packed room, the smell of cigarette smoke choked what little perfume I wore. But he didn’t exactly look at everyone else, and I had my eyes fixed on his hands gripping his thin plastic cup of beer. It spilled as he stood unmoving. His name was Sean. Bad music played. I thought about how I’d give anything to be in New York City in a bar with better beer and better music. Less likely there are better people, necessarily. I overheard I don’t get it dude, why date her when you’re about to leave for Mexico?; Dude, you’re such a, like, fucking idiot. Apparently he just told a girl he loved her, not even a week before he decided to leave to Mexico on a Mayan archeological dig. I didn’t think there was anything left to dig up. I paused before leaving the bathroom, used my finger as a swizzle stick in my frothed cup and stepped toward him. He was no better than the rest of the meathead crew the room was bursting with, except that he wore a Bruce Springsteen shirt directly indicating there was a chance that he maybe, occasionally, didn’t gel his hair. I motioned for him to follow me and we stood on the dance floor next to a large speaker. I dig that you’re sticking with her, I yelled over the music.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.”
I shrugged, drank from my cup and hid my face. I swallowed hard, could feel myself making a face that implied something bitter.
“Also you have someone to bring home cheap shit to," I said.
“Cheap shit?”
“How the hell is she gunna know it’s cheap. It’ll still be foreign.”
“You have a point.” He finished his beer, threw the empty cup at the DJ who was busy watching two people hump on the dance floor. Sean stood empty handed.
We stood and watched everyone dance. I thought I knew a song that played. I didn’t. Small white lights flashed across the ceiling, our faces. My eyes. I leaned close to him and said, “I’m a gypsy too.”
“She’s going to be my wife, I think.”
“You hate being in one place, too, right? That’s why you’re going to Mexico. It makes sense. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere and no one can find you.”
“Maybe she’ll visit me while I’m there .”
“I like places that smell like pine trees. I think that’s the next place I’ll go, somewhere with more pine trees. Big ones, like in Washington state--”

A song played and Sean knew it. He grabbed my hand and we walked to the middle of the crowd of gyrating people. Placing his hands on my waist, the music made the floor throb and he pulled me close. His hands running all over my back, I looked at his eyes looking through my clothes and then right through me. I could smell the beer on my shirt and I could no longer remember where I had placed all the bobby pins that until recently, were holding up sweaty strands of hair. His body moved with mine. The liquor made my skin numb. He leaned in, softly held his cheek against my own and pressed his hands into mine. His left hand toyed with the ring on my right hand. He pulled it from my finger, placed it on my ring finger, then my middle finger, then back to my ring finger. Songs played. He lay his head, heavy onto mine. She won’t leave you, I whispered loudly into his ear. He held me close and said something meaningful back, just before the rest of the night went black.

The next morning, I woke up on Sean’s couch, my friends strewn across the floor on a blowup mattress. Where they were all night, I didn’t know. Ana had her hand reached up under Sam’s shirt, softly snoring as Sam’s face was in the lower back of Azara and Lynn spooning. I looked at the clock blinking 8:32AM and woke up Ana. I used my foot to poke her.

“Up,” I said.

We gathered our things. I had a bruise on my arm I didn’t remember getting. I peed in the bathroom and wondered why there was toilet paper clinging to the sink. I fixed my hair, then hugged Sean goodbye and good luck. His flight was meant to leave that day but now his flight was switched to Thursday. Something about a family dinner he needed to attend. I told Azara, Sam and Lynn I’d see them back in New York. I waved from Ana’s car as we pulled out of Sean’s driveway. His house was salt washed, beige, with a large boat dumped in the front yard with a trailer attachment underneath. The name ROBERT E. LEE sprawled under the hull. My head throbbed and the car stung my eyes with heat.

“I’m cracking the windows,” I said. She said nothing and turned up the music. I pushed down on the window button and the smell of low tide rushed into the car. We were five minutes away from the beach, passing signs told me. I didn’t once see water. As we drove, small, squat pine trees belonging to the Pinelands National Reserve flew by the windows. I thought about last year and thought maybe if I breathed deep enough, I could smell ripe blueberries, bring out the sun and feel like I was being held. We drove along the turnpike and watched as the grey skies rolled over us, music filling the quiet. For a second I felt warm. The mind plays tricks like that.

I'll Admit It.

If it’s time for me to start being brutally (and I mean, brutally) honest with myself, then honesty comes with a continental lemon, salt and a lofty price. The kind of price higher than any Anthropologie label hand-sewn dress all patch-worked together somewhere in the back of the store under the piano music and above the Indian floor cushions. The kind of price that today made me stare into the beautiful displays of clean white paper and plastic sculptured into a pristine, indoor, oil-heated winter and want only to lay in the display of fake snowballs and never get up again. I did lay in it. I laid in it and wondered why they would put out winter-related displays in August. I laid in it for what felt like hours, which in truth was about the time it took for my mother to purchase an overpriced sweater and the clothing store-bouncer to ask me what did I think I was doing, crushing someone’s artwork? My Mom pulled me up and rolled her eyes at me, motioning for me to follow her out the door. We walked out onto West Broadway and she told me I was being a dumbass. People take internships to create displays like that. I told her it sounds like they’re the dumbass for paying money to play with paper, then thought better because really, that’s what we’re all doing. Also it's Summer, I told her, it's their fault for having the wrong season indoors. You need to go visit your friends or something, she told me. Get out and have fun: I’m sick of you just going places and…laying on things. I texted Ana that night and she told me she was planning on visiting a friend in South Jersey; maybe it would be good for me to get out.

I’m Afraid Of What Might Come Out If I Write.

He Has Something In Common With Computers:

I cut, and then pasted these words into this box. In regards to my him and my life, he did these things backward.

Blog Things?

I was asked, once, by my roommate why anyone would want a Facebook account, a Twitter or a Blog. I told her everyone wants to know everything about each other, plain and simple. She told me that wasn’t true, not everyone wants to know everything about another person. Especially if they like the person. I thought of the social world outside of computers and realized she was right. I tried to reason with myself and figure a better answer to tell her, that well, maybe everyone just wanted to be able to keep tabs on each other, check up on each other. But even then, the pool of reasoning seemed shallow. I doubted emotions had much to do with anything. Thinking about it now, I wonder if it is less about us each wanting to grab hold of each other’s information and more about us each individually trying to reach out to one another.

That is what I’m doing, isn’t it?

Home.

What if I wanted
to be in the
mountains,
Where all the stars are
connect the dots:
moths chase your
tail lights
and the cold wind
coming in through the
car window smells like
dirt and wet pine?
I’d hope to curl up on
pine needles and call it a
lifetime.
I'd pick chunks from orange fungus-
The spores would spill on the
ground and grow miniature
cities.
I'd live towering over them like their
moon.
Starry eyed, reflecting the
forest light-
Cupping the needles of
tiny sky scrapers in my
palms.
I would harvest all those
tiny cities,like
blueberries,
All those crops I
call mine because
I collect them without being a
part of them,
Too big to know the streets,
Too far to feel at home.

Hm..

I shouldn’t go outside. That said, I didn’t actually make it outside. The second the door clicked open and I saw the blue sky breaking apart brilliant branches of hundreds of trees and the bright sun and the chittering birds in flight I stopped short in the doorway. My feet wouldn’t move. It smelled familiar. Like laundry detergent.

Assemble

I could assemble him as soon as I could disassemble him. There were very specific instructions to do so. He was a build-it-yourself doll. Lily, my twelve year old cousin, gave him to me as a birthday present. She knew, somehow, that I needed someone there and she thought a pseudo-Ken doll would suffice. I looked at the parts: limbs, legs, hair, feet, hands and toyed with the head. I told her I didn’t need a plastic doll. I told her I could make a real live person up out of pine needles, blueberries, trucks, bicycles, punk music and dirt, but she didn’t laugh. She looked at me and said, “That would make a really weird person,” and I told her it did, it did make a weird person. A weird person who’s quick, slippery, greasy; but a sticky substance who slips out of your life when you least expect it, sticking to your heart just the same. She told me I was even weirder for saying that, then threw a foot at my face and my cheek barely flinched. She left the room to go play with her younger sister.

Now I sit at my Aunt’s computer, typing this into the empty white that is the Blog post box. Part of me doesn’t want to write. The same part of me that isn’t recognizing the warmth outside. I don’t know why I chose to come visit my family. I thought I should get out for a little while, but being away from New York City only makes me more anxious. Maybe I should go outside. I’ll go outside.

There Was

the sound of the passing cars, the force of their speed, oncoming; the noise suctioning us against the pulled over truck. The blur of yellow headlights, and oh God, all those crickets. Owen was leaning over me, his one hand pressed into his leaking eyes, the other holding up his guilt-shaken body, using the open truck door for stability. The steady ding-ding-ding signaling the open passenger side door answered in-between the call of what felt like thousands of crickets all asking what was going on. Katydids chirped, another insect moaned. An orchestra of insects enveloped us. I said some heartfelt things and he said something about being sorry. I did something like cry, but all I could hear were all those beautiful, sounding crickets; shaking the passing cars on the highway, shaking Owen’s truck as we leaned, and shaking the ground that, for the moment, I could hardly stand on. At least, that’s what the world felt like, there on the side of the road. A semi sounded its horn, jolting me, making me catch stray hairs in my mouth and choking on my tears and hair and all the things I never told him about myself over the past two years. All the things, that as of five minutes ago, no longer mattered: that tranquil world of confident quiet was being left on the side of that road, this highway, his way out of here and out of my life. I thought about leaving the hair, caught in my teeth; his mouth wouldn’t be coming near mine anymore anyway, and what good were those lies I told now? That day I lied about how many men I slept with and how many joints I smoked. How I secretly hated his friends. Shut up, my mind had suddenly told those crickets. Stop making this everything it isn’t. But it wasn’t the crickets, and it wasn’t him. It was just another break up and everything after is just boring aftermath.