He's starting to see himself in the foreground of a painting or a movie that hasn't been finished yet. It's happening to him, what she wants to happen to her, a radical point of view shift where the world and he are placed in a new kind of relief. It's not exactly a relief to him, and she's wondering why he can't see this is a good thing. She wants to see herself from above, and wants the world to look at itself through a peculiarly subjective lens, something about the gaze, the gaze, the gaze. This would be a relief, where the pressure off the sight would allow for the eyes to breathe. The birds eyes are upon him, but he's the bird and the ground, the subject and the observer. It might be more of a painting than a movie, he's thinking, because he's not moving enough to make it interesting, because what's interesting is not him at all, but the sky.
He sees the sky out of the corner of his eye, like it were the ghost today, and the ghost is dark, and there are storms coming. Something about the sky tells him that it's a good idea to keep all holes covered, to stake things down that need to be secured. There are things that have been rendered insecured by the last storm, the one that took the roof of her home off, so that he could see the map of her body written in the sky.
"You really are from there," he says, staring at a pink dot, that could be star or could be planet, he wasn't sure which.
"That one?" she says. "You think I'm from that one?"
"The pink one," he says, wondering if she remembers.
She does, of course, remember more than she would ever admit to remembering, or perhaps remember remembering. She says his name, the part preceded by an invisible, or inaudible "pink," using the lower registers of her ribs, the place where pain and pleasure originate from.
She says his name, the secret one, and she likes the way it feels in her throat. Its 'a as soft and uncomfortable as a feather, just enough to keep her disturbed, which is how she likes to be because it helps her to stay awake. She is prone to crashing when driving, because she loses her balance when she looks at things.
She wants to talk about this, or about her secret name, and she wants to talk about the feather stuck in her throat. She needs three voices to just begin this moment correctly. Everything she wants to do is impossible, so she does something else instead.
"The dog sees sideways," she says. "He watches the dead ones crawling up and down the wall, and he tries to warn the cat that they are coming for her, but he is always too late. He tries to scream but it comes out as a bark, and when I first noticed that, I thought the room was going to go as dark as the backwards side of my ribs. Instead I took some of the heat from the dog's eye and rubbed it into mine, so I could see what he sees without falling. It doesn't always work. There's something about the dog that's missing for me, maybe saliva, I'm not sure."
He likes to hear her speak like this, because on some evenings, she takes the spaces in between her words and uses the tones for songs, another one of the ways that they were learning to bring the world into being by singing it or screaming it.
He doesn't like the spaces between his own words, because he knows that these spaces are blank and white as death. He's a little crazy in this regard, but not so crazy that it makes him want to hide from the world and become someone else. Not on most days. It's just that silence waits for music, and sometimes that takes too much time. And on days like this, there's not enough sleep to fill the eyes with metaphysical barriers between the self and the real. It is always a raw sensibility that seems to guide days that carry skies like this one.
There's also something very uncanny when a sliver of a moon is out first thing in the morning. The moon seems to like to dress up as the sun every once in awhile, because they are really so close, and they are really so opposite, that disguises make the days and nights a little bit more complex. On this particular morning, however, the moon is already as complex as the sun wants to be. She's dressing like him, and he might dress like her as the day progresses. When the morning starts with the sun and moon switching places, there's room for an infinite variation on the usual themes, and this is close to god.
He sees the sky out of the corner of his eye, like it were the ghost today, and the ghost is dark, and there are storms coming. Something about the sky tells him that it's a good idea to keep all holes covered, to stake things down that need to be secured. There are things that have been rendered insecured by the last storm, the one that took the roof of her home off, so that he could see the map of her body written in the sky.
"You really are from there," he says, staring at a pink dot, that could be star or could be planet, he wasn't sure which.
"That one?" she says. "You think I'm from that one?"
"The pink one," he says, wondering if she remembers.
She does, of course, remember more than she would ever admit to remembering, or perhaps remember remembering. She says his name, the part preceded by an invisible, or inaudible "pink," using the lower registers of her ribs, the place where pain and pleasure originate from.
She says his name, the secret one, and she likes the way it feels in her throat. Its 'a as soft and uncomfortable as a feather, just enough to keep her disturbed, which is how she likes to be because it helps her to stay awake. She is prone to crashing when driving, because she loses her balance when she looks at things.
She wants to talk about this, or about her secret name, and she wants to talk about the feather stuck in her throat. She needs three voices to just begin this moment correctly. Everything she wants to do is impossible, so she does something else instead.
"The dog sees sideways," she says. "He watches the dead ones crawling up and down the wall, and he tries to warn the cat that they are coming for her, but he is always too late. He tries to scream but it comes out as a bark, and when I first noticed that, I thought the room was going to go as dark as the backwards side of my ribs. Instead I took some of the heat from the dog's eye and rubbed it into mine, so I could see what he sees without falling. It doesn't always work. There's something about the dog that's missing for me, maybe saliva, I'm not sure."
He likes to hear her speak like this, because on some evenings, she takes the spaces in between her words and uses the tones for songs, another one of the ways that they were learning to bring the world into being by singing it or screaming it.
He doesn't like the spaces between his own words, because he knows that these spaces are blank and white as death. He's a little crazy in this regard, but not so crazy that it makes him want to hide from the world and become someone else. Not on most days. It's just that silence waits for music, and sometimes that takes too much time. And on days like this, there's not enough sleep to fill the eyes with metaphysical barriers between the self and the real. It is always a raw sensibility that seems to guide days that carry skies like this one.
There's also something very uncanny when a sliver of a moon is out first thing in the morning. The moon seems to like to dress up as the sun every once in awhile, because they are really so close, and they are really so opposite, that disguises make the days and nights a little bit more complex. On this particular morning, however, the moon is already as complex as the sun wants to be. She's dressing like him, and he might dress like her as the day progresses. When the morning starts with the sun and moon switching places, there's room for an infinite variation on the usual themes, and this is close to god.
Divinity seems to run in difference, it seems to find its expression in variation, and finds its home in between one thing and another, or rather both and neither all at once. That might be why it's so striking to be hiding from a sky that is immanently colored with moon, sun, and storm, to be inside the cafe when the lights are still dark. It's too early in the morning, and he doesn't know why he got here, or why there are three men giving him things to eat and drink, as if he needed to be taken care of after something large and important.
He remembers the things that happened, but not exactly the whys, but there are suspicions.
The night before, he and she, or she and he, or various combinations of them, were sitting on a pink mattress. She was thinking about screaming when he was talking about speaking, and this moved into something else, a comfortable dangerous place of storms. He spoke over her while saliva dripped onto her body, and she waited for a chance to hold her breath to keep the screams inside, and saliva dripped from her mouth to the mattress, the way things drip when artists bite the egg of the world. By the time the sunlight came in to paint her face, the mattress was covered with moisture. Like a large pink cake that held them, the way that some cakes can hold people.
That was the moment when her body started to shift, it could have been a trick of the sun, or maybe it was the moon, they are tricky these days, and the water and air in her cells became solid matter. He wondered if this was connected to the screaming, to the need to scream, to the idea that iterations could lead to existence, could make matter. Loud iterations make matter sing and enter into the world, as if the tongue could cut its way through the veil into something that mattered.
He drinks an espresso without milk, and bread without butter, and he is thinking that there's nothing terribly important missing here, and no ingredient that can't be added later. These three men were not called to him, he was called to them, and in the half light of the cafe, they talk about the most important births in the 1990s, and he can think of one that strikes him as exceptional, or at least more profound than he may have suspected.
"You have icing running up and down your chin," says the man who pours the coffee.
This strikes him as slightly pornographic, not the fact of the icing, but the speaking, as if there were some things that are too deep to be spoken out loud. At least not yet, not at this time of day, when things are deciding that they won't be what they seem, but deeper. The pink icing does come as a surprise, it always does, it always speaks of something between birth and death, but neither and both all at once.
He's thinking about the way her body could change, sometimes as thoroughly as her faces, and wonders what might be happening to him. There are words for this, he's remembering times when his heart was changing from a bird to a snake before, and the words are all terribly problematic. This problem causes furrows of concern, and the more he enters into his own shell, the more concerned he feels, and it does seem to resemble something very close to the beginning of a deep love for another human being, if not exactly that exactly.
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