The story shouldn't have a beginning, but it has to happen in time. When it's three in the morning and every ghost is finding their strands of hair in the bones in the sheets, it always seems like time is an enemy, and by the morning it always seems as though there was always just enough time. These things start where they have to start and end somewhere in a place where everything is broken.
So this could start easily enough in Berlin, and maybe it should, and it should continue somewhere south of Tijuana, and it might decide to end somewhere between two cities that don't make many histories in the list of important events of the centuries. It doesn't mean they don't write on skin, however, and they might even write in deeper layers of skin. History is always written in the skin, and the ones who get inscribed are usually the ones who hurt the most, because they sense that these events might be forgotten.
It's a peculiar narcissism to think this needs to unravel before I turn another year older, but it's a gift to myself so that I can see these lines making connections to the multiple lines of flight these loves have taken. It's a gift to remember and to be remembered, even though I'm not in a position to give anyone anything worth having these days. But you marked me so deeply, that the nights are getting longer, even though I sleep with a clear conscience. I still itch, the lines cause me to scratch myself in my sleep, again, hoping that the skin might flake off in enough frozen forms to make a form that I can speak to.
It's an uneasy incantation, because there are certain hopes and desires buried here that would be difficult to navigate if they ever came back. And even though I might know some things about magic, charms and spells that can make energies shift in one direction or another, the truth is that I'm still very new to this, and I don't really understand why it works when it does work. More often than not, lately, it works exactly the way that I ask it to, which is to say, I'm discovering that getting what I want means getting things that I don't need or can't really have. It's a delicate balance that I might know better when I'm a little older, but not a year from now, or five years from now, certainly not a week from yesterday.
So I want to invoke you, but I don't want to wake you, because I remember how you get when you're interrupted in the middle of things. For what it's worth, I'm infinitely interruptible, at least when it comes to you, and I would drop everything to taste a cappuccino from San Jose.
I remember some impossible nights in sheets that didn't belong to us, and the way we had to figure out how to use a pre-war washing machine. You understood it much better than I did, because I almost broke screws trying to open the lid with a coin, and it was much, much simpler than that, and its mechanics were not hard to grasp, if I could grasp the mechanics of anything. But I think I would give most anything to hear the stories about your Polish side, meetings in France, and the inevitability of love that crosses over borders. France and Poland would come back later, and they probably always will, and they had a place before I met you.
But it wasn't until we were like Sara and Bob, walking along by the old canal, talking about form, and something in your eyes made my heart start to skip, and I thought it might be the perfect moment to kiss you for the first time. We knew where the night would end, because we were orphans without any other place to go, but maybe we didn't know how, until we followed the designs that were laid out at our feet. Berlin streets wrote us before we wrote on them with our bodies.
Kisses in a flat in Kreuzberg, and an ending at a metro station, in between with Santeria chicken scratchings and a thousand impossible art projects, it was easy because the ending was already put in place, and for the middle, all we had to do was connect the dots. It flutters beneath the sheets of my bed like a rooster from a Russian truck driver. You didn't trust my magic, and so I didn't use it, and if I knew what I was doing I could conjure you up with a circle of white chalk and a little cigar smoke, but you're somewhere on the other side of the camera, marking moments that I'm trying to inscribe, because I'm arrogant like that, and sometimes you could see fire in that arrogance. Your humble designs and colors on canvas and cotton betray a fire in you, and that's the fire that woke me up to remembering that I remember how to do this. I am a fan of elegant endings, because my own are always so sloppy, and more paint is spilled on the edges than actually makes it to the spaces inside the frame.
So this could start easily enough in Berlin, and maybe it should, and it should continue somewhere south of Tijuana, and it might decide to end somewhere between two cities that don't make many histories in the list of important events of the centuries. It doesn't mean they don't write on skin, however, and they might even write in deeper layers of skin. History is always written in the skin, and the ones who get inscribed are usually the ones who hurt the most, because they sense that these events might be forgotten.
It's a peculiar narcissism to think this needs to unravel before I turn another year older, but it's a gift to myself so that I can see these lines making connections to the multiple lines of flight these loves have taken. It's a gift to remember and to be remembered, even though I'm not in a position to give anyone anything worth having these days. But you marked me so deeply, that the nights are getting longer, even though I sleep with a clear conscience. I still itch, the lines cause me to scratch myself in my sleep, again, hoping that the skin might flake off in enough frozen forms to make a form that I can speak to.
It's an uneasy incantation, because there are certain hopes and desires buried here that would be difficult to navigate if they ever came back. And even though I might know some things about magic, charms and spells that can make energies shift in one direction or another, the truth is that I'm still very new to this, and I don't really understand why it works when it does work. More often than not, lately, it works exactly the way that I ask it to, which is to say, I'm discovering that getting what I want means getting things that I don't need or can't really have. It's a delicate balance that I might know better when I'm a little older, but not a year from now, or five years from now, certainly not a week from yesterday.
So I want to invoke you, but I don't want to wake you, because I remember how you get when you're interrupted in the middle of things. For what it's worth, I'm infinitely interruptible, at least when it comes to you, and I would drop everything to taste a cappuccino from San Jose.
I remember some impossible nights in sheets that didn't belong to us, and the way we had to figure out how to use a pre-war washing machine. You understood it much better than I did, because I almost broke screws trying to open the lid with a coin, and it was much, much simpler than that, and its mechanics were not hard to grasp, if I could grasp the mechanics of anything. But I think I would give most anything to hear the stories about your Polish side, meetings in France, and the inevitability of love that crosses over borders. France and Poland would come back later, and they probably always will, and they had a place before I met you.
But it wasn't until we were like Sara and Bob, walking along by the old canal, talking about form, and something in your eyes made my heart start to skip, and I thought it might be the perfect moment to kiss you for the first time. We knew where the night would end, because we were orphans without any other place to go, but maybe we didn't know how, until we followed the designs that were laid out at our feet. Berlin streets wrote us before we wrote on them with our bodies.
Kisses in a flat in Kreuzberg, and an ending at a metro station, in between with Santeria chicken scratchings and a thousand impossible art projects, it was easy because the ending was already put in place, and for the middle, all we had to do was connect the dots. It flutters beneath the sheets of my bed like a rooster from a Russian truck driver. You didn't trust my magic, and so I didn't use it, and if I knew what I was doing I could conjure you up with a circle of white chalk and a little cigar smoke, but you're somewhere on the other side of the camera, marking moments that I'm trying to inscribe, because I'm arrogant like that, and sometimes you could see fire in that arrogance. Your humble designs and colors on canvas and cotton betray a fire in you, and that's the fire that woke me up to remembering that I remember how to do this. I am a fan of elegant endings, because my own are always so sloppy, and more paint is spilled on the edges than actually makes it to the spaces inside the frame.
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