seamonstermonkey

Now this is going to get a little bit narrator-y, as if that weren't already the case, so much is happening that it has to be explained or we will just lose everyone, and if we lose everyone, then the basic principles of solid dramatic form might not be in place, and that would create mistrust and suspicion, when we all know that we really all know exactly what we're doing here.

It's not as complex as it seems, or if it seems simple, then it's much more complex than that.

He's on a raft.  She's on a raft.  They're not the same raft.

What is she doing on the raft?  We're not showing it, because we'll have to find out later, and it might be surprising.  There should be centaurs and pomegranate wine (everyone drinks it here, or eats the seeds, because we've all been resigned to being in between places, stuck between one season and another, stuck between one unsafe place and another.  There are mad faeries and a wake for the recently dead, and the ones who are missing, and it might be too much to mention that she is missing him.  But, oh, she misses him, and sees his words coming up through the waves, and she sees his face in the stars when she is contemplating her place in things.  It's romantic, and very unsure, and probably romantic because it is so unsure.  We all hold onto things that we long for when we don't know where we are, and sometimes that's the best way to find out what we really miss.  Stuck somewhere in between spaces, we realize our heart's desire.

He, meanwhile, is seeing her face in the stars when he is contemplating his place in things, and this is important insofaras what happened to the story before.  In the middle of the ocean, he conjured her, remembered her from the land of the dead, and brought her back to life in his desire to speak with her.

He just wants to talk to her.

And she just wants to talk to him.

But somewhere in that space of dreaming old phantoms back, she began to shift, and it is becoming very apparent to him that she is not that other or another other, but something else entirely, something her entirely, and he doesn't know who she is.  And it would have been something else entirely if he let her live in his realm of projection, but.

This is where everything started to turn.  When he was looking at her face projected in the stars, he saw her projection and began to project all of his desires into that.  And somewhere in there, she started to become real.  While he was distracting himself from the pains of the day, while he was starting to become aware that it was the color in her face that triggered an immediate response, a kind of restless relentless rest, he started to associate her colors with the colors around him, and that was the moment that his time on the raft with the dead men started to turn into color, from various shades of gray.  There's something about an obsession that can bring out the colors in the rest of the waking-dreaming world, because the one who is forlorn is looking for the colors of the one who is not there, and the one who is not there is making the world a place of color, because the world is where he knows he might find her.

His mind is giving himself something to look for, one could say, and that might be reasonable.  But there are very likely other forces at work here that have nothing to do with his mind, except notice that it is become very receptive to projections, and the projections that start to come

Are much too lucid to speak of here, and besides, they are interrupted because the father has just fallen again, and this reminds him that this is, this certainly is, fall.  And even though he is there in his body, and even though this is about the father, no one could possibly expect him to be very focused, just as she is not entirely focused on the centaurs, because that Brass Goddess is very busy making images in the sky to keep them moving forward.  Because even though this is a story about the dead, it is also and always already a love story.

seamonster/gender trouble

He just goes on and talks and goes on talking, even though he is no longer making any sense.

HE: This is all taking a lot longer than I originally suspected.  There are men all around me, and there are dreams behind me, and messages coming through the waves that I don't understand.  Nothing is writing on me in a way that I can still read it by the morning, and every day there is more travel with these old men, going to a place that I don't feel safe, and have every reason to believe does not really want me there.  All the men here are sick and heartbroken, and they talk about the last good thing that happened to them, and they tell me stories about what it was like to lay with a woman they loved, and then lost.  And it feels like the waves are filling up with the songs of these women, and their hearts are lying somewhere between oceans.  And I can't remember what I lost, or what I miss, or what it was that I was trying to get away from, but I know I can't stay here very much longer, because when I stop moving, I stop wanting, and when I stop wanting, I stop knowing the things there are to know.  And tonight I feel like all my ghosts have left me, and I'm left with a napkin covered with the lipstick traces of a woman that I will never understand, and tonight, she is the only thing that I could imagine missing.

Oh, he has been haunted, he has been chanted and cursed and forgotten and broken to pieces and remembered at the edges of an old canal, and if he had his wits about them, he might understand the channels of his own heart, and if he were awake enough to let himself fall into his real dream, then he might start to see the films playing on his heart, and he would see that there is a heartbreaking beauty in his heart, something ready to be born in the world that few men ever get to see and live.

seamonster confessional

Oh my gosh, this has gotten so complicated, or maybe it just seems that way inside his head on this cold night, where all the old lovers have turned into leaves and pages o hojas tal ves of the book of his chambered heart.  He wants to be thinking more about why he's here, this is something about his father, or something about fathers in a larger sense, something like a rescue, but he's not sure who is being rescued here.

It's hard to know, becoming charmed by a phantom in the world of the living and being drawn to connect to the blood in his family bones in the land of the dead, both of these have the potential for rescue, and perhaps we all get to rescue each other in some way when the sun sets and another day goes to bed forever.

And oh my gosh this is too much text, no one will ever read it.  (Please signal if you have by knocking three times on something pretty when you see me).  And oh my gosh this is suddenly the start of something else entirely.

From where he was sitting on the raft, he could not see the water, but when he moves, he sees into the water, and there's a message there.

HOW RU N HOW DID IT GO U OK N WOTNOT

And he's thinking that this is probably something from her.  And for him.  And that makes everything so very exciting because no one else will know they are talking to each other through the water like this.  He writes back.

I M OK SO HUNGRY I M ALL HUNGR 2DAY THISE DAIS

He writes again.

THESE DAYS

She writes back.

:)

And you can probably imagine, this, how long can this go on?  And you can probably answer, this, this can go on for a very, very long time.

His face is hot, his head is hot, he can't tell if he is like this because he just doesn't eat very much lately, he understands this is an adventure, this is an important adventure, and maybe much more important than he'd intended, when he set off to get away from all the phantom limbs that were pulling him and yearning for him in the middle of the night.  He understands something important is happening, and he hopes certain things and he is worried about certain things, and it's hard to keep anything really straight.  Straight, of course, is radically over-rated and we need to reconsider how language invests values that we don't notice until it's written in our bones, and that's a hard tattoo to remove.  But there's this.  His head.  Hot.  Something like a swoony hunger is come over him, something very much like a fever, something very much like a very swoony hungry fever, and if he could write more than a few characters at a time in the water, he might say this:

I see you hiding in the cupboards in the kitchen in my head, your eyes are always peeking out from behind the coffee cups when I'm on the verge of waking up, telling myself this is something too much like a dream.  I can't keep track of my hands, they run all over everything I see, and I can't see the things that are there, because you're distracting me.  I'm not complaining.  I'm not complaining.  I'm a hundred versions of myself at once, and the one that speaks might not be the one you see when you're walking on wood planks in the dark.  I'm looking into white light tunnels, and not even close to dead, just dreaming, and I suspect you're out there somewhere in the dark, and everyone I can't see looks exactly like someone who could be you, so I'm trying to be on my best behavior.  But this is not me complaining, this is not how I complain.  And when I'm trying to find my keys again, I keep getting interrupted because you've written on the walls by the door to my room, and I can't quite make out what you said, but I know you said it to me, and that's probably just enough right now, you become becomingly, a ghost in this world of everyday objects, hinting at something less everyday just below the surface of everything that I'm trying to touch, a touch I'm losing, all the touch I'm losing, I've lost touch and this is not a complaint this is how I am at the beginning of something that I dreamed about and forgot, and you reminded me that I was waiting for you.

And that's probably more than enough for right now thank you very much that's just plenty thank you very much he just said way too much thank you very very much I assure you and adore you.

seamonsters/half

On the way to the underworld, he gets a note from her that explains everything, in sixteen different versions, and everything that would have made sense no longer does.  But the sense that things were making was not necessarily good sense, or anything like reasonable sense, which isn't always a bad thing.  So.  He tries very hard to talk to the dead about his dreams, but they make no sense to the dead, because the dead have already dreamed those dreams themselves, and worked it out for themselves so that when they dream, they dream about us, in a boat, somewhere in the middle of an ocean, where it's safe.

Nothing with the dead is really safe, though, because look at where there best thinking got them?  It's not safe.  He's trying to explain art movements from their century, and they're upset with him.  They're upset with him because he's trying to tell them in reasonable discourse.  And that's the absolute worst language with which to speak to the dead.  Because they already get it.  And if he were paying attention, the one on the side of the living, she already gets it, too.  But it's complicated because he has things that he could say in reasonable language, things and reasons he thinks that he's ill.  His head is a mess, a hot mess, and he's thinking about how he hasn't been a hot mess for so long that it's almost like he got used to being distracted by much less interesting things.  But this is all so terribly interesting, these fissures and hair cracks that come at 1 in the afternoon at ten in the evening that last til it's morning and make sense to someone who's already dead, who's already dead, they make sense to someone who's already dead.

He's got pomegranates in his kitchen of his heart's desire, and when the dead are not looking, on the long journey over there, he opens one with his teeth, and eats 16 seeds just for good measure.  This is a place I would like to be caught, he is thinking, here in this kitchen of my heart's desire.  This kitchen is where I go when I want to wander, and now that I'm really at sea, all I want is to wander back and find out how the story goes, but my hands are tied and my tongue is being used by dead men, in order to make prayers by candlelight before the rains come back.

seamonstermonstrosity

They are on a fuckin raft.

HE: I love this raft.  I'm sorry there are so many people here.  We hardly get a chance to talk.

SHE: I would just keep telling you the same stories over and over again, anyway.

HE: I don't really care, I just like the cool way you look at me when you tell me stories.

SHE: This would be a good time to declare your love for me, in a public setting, because it will test your mettle and show me that you're really serious.

HE: You can take my word I'm serious, even though I'm not sure who you are yet.

SHE: I'm not the present, because I never land, so I must be something from your past, or something from your future.

HE: That's perfect, that's exactly what I fall in love with.

SHE: Tell me out loud, but I'm going to be honest.  I'm going to act embarrassed, and then I'll pretend this isn't happening, and then I'll pretend I didn't hear you, and for a week or two I'm going to avoid you altogether, just so you are off kilter just a little bit, hating me and loving me in the same breath.

HE: I think that's dangerous, just because I know of a guy who has that memory disease, and he gets stuck in time, and for the last year he's been stuck in this place where he declared his love for the woman he married, and she was silent like that, so he's been living in that space of being off kilter.  And he's really off kilter, too.  He wears kilts even though he's Mexican.

SHE: I don't think culture is something you can own, anyone can wear a kilt, it's uncanny like in Freud.

HE: You know what that does to me, that Freud talk.  It's really unfair.  I'm unhinged with Freud talk, and it makes me want you, want you, want you.

SHE: But.

HE: But there's all these people.

Another raft floats by, with figures from the land of the dead.

DEAD MAN: We have news about your father, it's an emergency.   You come with us.  Beauty fades, death comes.

HE: Oh, I have to go.

SHE: Just in time.

HE: No, this is the worst timing ever.  Please just tell me about the movie stars I remind you of, so I can work on becoming them the next time we meet.

SHE: Ok.

He gets on the raft of the dead, and they float away.

SHE: I'm carrying cock rings around my neck, to remind me of what I've always considered the ultimate act of desire and submission.  My neck is torn, I cut it in the brambles in between worlds, I was escaping, and all the pomegranate trees tried to capture me.  They can cut me, but they cannot keep me, but I have scars that you can never imagine.  I'm calling up my vicious graveyard spirits tonight, and they'll visit you in your dreams, to remind you of how things could be, and how they ought to be, and on a still October night, they might be the same thing.

wounded warriors/october light

My father has not stopped talking since he fell.
It's half anxiety, and half morphine, and another half (there are always a few worlds involved in any accident) is from that impulse to talk ourselves into being when we are not so sure where we ourselves are.
It's a mistake to think that silence means you don't think about it any more, but I'm in a place where I need words, even if they are half felt.
There are the four firemen, horsemen coming to announce this isn't an apocalypse, but the business of bloody bones, and a fight between the living and the dead.  Nothing resolutely shaking the foundations, but they do bring up old bones that are uncomfortable to live with in a hospital room.
There is the admitting nurse, who was asking him about suicidal thoughts when she shut the door on me, before asking him if I had caused the wounds on his face and arms and legs.  There are lots of old wounds on that old man's body, and it'll take x-ray vision to separate the fresh ones from the old ones.
There are the two young nurses, flirting and talking about steampunk alice in wonderland, getting a vicarious fix from watching him react to the first hits of morphine.  I like to watch, too, but it gets to be a little too heavy when his eyes start to flutter, and his blinking takes him back and forth between the here and the not here.
There are the two x-ray technicians we waited for, and then I hunted for, hiding in a room watching videos on their laptop.  Guardians between the gates of the living and the dead, with no power to heal, only power to see.  Blessed holy seeing power.
And then there is the night nurse, rolling asperging eyes, insisting on a chair, my mother broke her shoulder, and he needs a chair, and I didn't trust her rolling eyes, but not enough to sleep in a ball next to my father's twitching body, and the dance of his twitching feet that lasted until the sun came up.
And then there is the blonde angel, a ridiculous and trite archetype, an envelope of truth hidden in her pocket, and more morphine for the bones that continue to talk, and keep his teeth moving in his jaw even though his throat is too dry to hear the stories about dancing girls and stolen cars, and a thousand taverns in south milwaukee.
And then there is my daughter, come to the room to make things light, lighting up the face of an 88 year old man who accidentally forgets where phoenix is.
These wounded warriors are sharp, their tongues and minds are sharp and exploding.
I remember when my daughter used to pull her arm out of her socket playing, and the visits to the medical places where she screamed one moment and sighed the next, and I remember thinking that I can't imagine anything worse than seeing your own flesh and blood in pain.  Old blood, young blood, it's all part of the bloody business of bones, and I'm walking into the next season that refused to yield for 100 endless nights, this was not my decision.
And then there is the te amo cigar, a cigar named revolucion, this is an old place, and there are old ideas thumping in my veins, somewhere between compassion and grief, there are old ideas pounding in my veins.  

film

a shopping center where they are featuring a guest appearance by the moon.  the moon appears to everyone, but he has a reflecting heart, and so does she, and when they are in line, something makes them see the moon in each other's heart and they fall in love with each other.

there's this magician of course who is responsible for them recognizing each other, thru his complicated love spell, and when the magician goes home he plugs himself into his twin double.  in the mornings, they unplug and decide who will be in the world that day.  and of course it's not surprising that the magician couple is the boy & girl from the shopping center, only older versions of themselves.  i'm sorry if it seems too heteronormative.

seamonster/repetition and revolution

He wants to move forward, but he doesn't know what that is.
She wants to swim, but she doesn't know how deep this is.
They want to understand each other just a little better, but they don't know where to start.
It's the hardest work, excavating the world of the dead for some hidden thing that the living are convinced they need to move forward or deeper, when the excavation itself is the movement and the depth anyone needs to come back to life in a darker season.
There's a fear that this next part will be unbearably lonely, but in truth, they couldn't be lonelier.  And there's no cure for that.
He keeps meeting twins, they come out of boxes, they swim past his eyes when he is falling asleep, they make their way into some of his secret sleeping spaces, and ask him questions about the journey ahead, and he asks them questions about the journey behind.  They dress in fancy clothes, and they dress in revealing layers of complicated underwear, and they drink cappuccino and wine with fruit, and they sometimes cover his forehead with their ideas of what a first kiss would feel like.
Whether it's the first kiss or the fifth, he's starting to convince himself that he remembers them all, and the ones that stick in the holes in the teeth the most are the ones that were nothing but frustrating, when things got lost in their mouths on their way through the complex processes of translation, or those pecks where the mouth would not open, like a flower that refused to yield to the bee.
He remembers all the times he felt pretentious and stupid and lazy, and he remembers the times when he felt like he had been sprinkled with fairy dust, something that would protect him on his way from here to there.
The way from here to there is long, and now there's no more here except for this particular here, no memory of origins, the place where you can tell your children, "This is the place and the moment when I first stepped out."  And there's no there, nothing particular, just a vague sense that sometime very soon they are going to be elsewhere, and elsewhere sounds threatening and promising.  But sometime very soon, one of those will win, something between threats and promises will win, and then they'll start, but for now they just sleep, forgetting that they could be sleeping in each others' arms, forgetting that this is about a search for the twin.

seamonster/spellbound

The MAD AND INAPPROPRIATE FAERIE is very excited tonight because so much has happened and there's so much we have to tell you.  For one thing, a spell was cast, and for another, it seemed to be working.  They were on a pirate ship, but now they wake up and realize that it's really just a raft, and oh, they are floating.  Except.  There shouldn't be an except.  One raft is enough for anyone, and all sorts of things can happen on a raft, but look.

This is the problem here.

The raft is really too fucking big.

It holds way too many people, it can and it does, and when they wake up, it should be a brilliant morning, and it might be, except there are dozens of people on the raft with them, and they all have questions.

But he has more than anyone.

HE: I really think I need to start thinking through my own motives about all of this.

SHE: I don't think it's altogether necessary to think through anything, because when you're on a raft at sea, things tend to work themselves out exactly the way they're supposed to work out.

HE: But what are we supposed to do with all of these people?

And here, it's true, all of these people are listening to what she might say to this, and for the first time, being on the raft seems like it might be real, and even more, she is starting to feel like she might be real, like one of those souls that get called back from the dead.  And she is obviously expected to make a speech, and so she does.

SHE: Vinegar and roses.  Scorpions crawling out from under my skirts.  Catholic school uniforms, nun habits, centaur horns, and a very useful balm.  My first methodology, and my first methodological error.  The habits of the sun and the moon.  The way we love in outer space, where there's no gravity and no sound.  Those embarrassing moans that escape me in public, when I'm remembering what I wished for last night.  The worst love letter I ever received.  Too many feathers on my doorstep for me to sleep comfortably.  Am I supposed to be convincing you all of something?  I'm not sure if I can convince anyone of anything, because I don't like it when someone convinces me.  If I already know it, then I usually decide to know something else, and if I don't know it already, I remain unconvinced.  It's not a curse of my age, it's the curse of the age I live in.  Everyone's a liar with rotten teeth, and the sweetest songs always mean that by morning, someone is going to try to steal my jewelry.  I'm not here, I've been gone for a long time, I'm not here, and neither are you.

HE: I don't think so.  You're crying, and that means you've landed back in your body again.  Welcome home.

SHE: I already told you! I cry at the very least little thing, especially where you're concerned.  It doesn't make us real.

A very inquisitive looker-on has a very good question.  The FAERIE acknowledges him.

LOOKER-ON: How do you resurrect the dead, and isn't it always a question of transubstantiation.

HE: I love the idea of transubstantiation, because it means we can be the next thing whenever we need to, and it means that this skin is permeable.

SHE: Oh, my gosh, you never read theory, you just skimmed it!  What a dick.  Skin is always permeable.  You don't need any religious metaphors to know that.  Good gosh, people, what has become of us, we're all just getting stupider.  I need a night light.  I need a thicker blanket.  I need a full-body pillow that's stuffed with the feathers of all the birds I eat over the course of a love affair.

HE: I don't eat chicken, but when I do, it's always followed by a very fine cigar.  Not one of those stogies, and not one of those little prissy panatela goddam jobbers.  I'm talking dark fucking wrapper around a thick fucker, something with a little time on it, a little bit of bloom even, oh my gosh I goddam love cigars.  And when they bloom, it's like spring.  And when they bloom, they taste like you.

SHE: They smell like death.

HE: You smell like death.  That's a compliment, really.

She gets very, very quiet, and it's so uncomfortable and awkward on this raft.  No one wants to say anything, and it's so quiet no one even wants to cough.  But everyone else but her suddenly really needs to cough.  They all try to cough very quietly, and there are some successes, but a lot of failures, too, including ones that are terribly violent and embarrassing.

But it's not what you think at all.  She's not offended.  In fact, she's embarrassed, because she understands that she's been recognized, and that he is not who he pretends to be, but is something much, much less larger than life, and is landed himself in a body that is open to her, and if he understood this, he would not be able to sleep for another 400 nights.

sea monsters/i am haunted

Things do start to take a particularly peculiar turn when you've been out to sea for so long.  The longness becomes longing for the times when you were lonely in the midst of a sea of people you don't recognize any more.  We all go there, we get to that point where we forget how broken we were when we were where we long to be, and we think the way our brokenness feels now cannot be worse, but we forget that time when, just yesterday, we were waiting in the club for the one true love who decided not to come at the last minute.  We've all been in a room in our underwear, and everyone there could see the marks of the last bad thing that happened to us.  Some of us learn to wear these for what they are, warrior marks in a long war.  Some of us just spend the rest of our lives hiding the marks, thinking we would be better off if nobody knew.  Some of us, the most unlucky ones, don't ever realize that we've been scarred.

HE: You remind me of someone.

SHE: We've already covered that by now.

HE: No, not her. I'm not talking about her.  I'm not even thinking about her.

SHE: The one you miss the most.

HE: Right, this is someone else.  You remind me of her, that someone else.  I never told anyone that before.  Because it's never been true before.

SHE: I think it's all entirely perfectly normal that, when you are excavating the bottom of the sea for your favorite ghosts, that you'll deny that the ghost you're resurrecting is the one that you're resurrecting.

HE: Oh, my gosh, you read my mind.  You do that, too?

SHE: All the time.  It's my favorite thing.  I look for the person that I miss the most, and at some point, it's usually sometime around 3 or 4 in the morning, I'll start to see that person very clearly, but the next morning they're always gone.

HE: They're always gone, yes.  How do we make them stay?

SHE: There are those who say that you only make someone stay by seeing them as they are, but no one really knows how to do that.

HE: Because we're all phantoms.

SHE: Yes, we're all phantoms.  We're all a collection of ghosts, our own inherited ghosts, and we also get to play the role of the ghosts the other person misses the most.

HE: So it's impossible.

SHE: Yes, and those who understand that make the best lovers.  Because they know how to be more than one person at a time, and when you're that many people, there's a chance that one of those will stay, and that's how things stay exciting.  Otherwise, love would just be muscles that resist and respond.

HE: I'm already thinking of what you'll look like when you go, what your face will look like when you don't love me any more.

SHE: Are you a witch?

HE: Of course.  That's why I'm making a secret potion to bring you to me, against your will.  You won't be able to resist, only respond.

SHE: That could be the best news I've heard in a very long time.

(They are floating, and we, we are traveling.  In this space, we are setting out for all the places we wanted to be, the places we didn't know we missed.  And this is a canal before a civilization even lived there and knew how to use it, and this is a civilization that we read about but understand that we'll never understand, and this is a city that we do not recognize, and it's unrecognizable enough that we can probably start to call it home.)

seamonsters/we're on a boat

They're on a boat.

NOT SAFE FOR WORK FAERIE: Everybody wants to be a pirate, but no one wants to go through the trouble of having to figure out how to rip people off, and just make a run for it.  The ripping people off isn't the hard part.  Everyone thinks about how that would work these days, because we're running out of things to buy things with.  The hard part is the making a run for it.  We all have too many things keeping us comfortable at home, and the idea of heading out into some kind of unknown just doesn't ever seem worth the risk.  It helps, though, just a little, when you meet someone you can project onto, and the other person is projecting onto you at the same time, and you realize that if you put these two things together, it might be enough momentum to make things really turn like something crazy and out of control, and when we first set out, because we eventually do, if we're brave, then those first moments are always filled with regret and anxiety, and so we cover it with a false sense of adventure.

HE: I fucking love being on a goddam boat, goddam.

SHE: It's the best fucking goddam boat that ever made its way into boatness.  Being out on the water, on the high sea, we're on the high fucking sea, this is where the rubber meets the road.  Literally.

HE: Not really literally, because there's no road, and no rubber.  We don't know how to steer, and even if we did, there's nothing like a road to show us where we're going.  Oh, no, I'm getting all gloomy.

(HE gets gloomy.)

SHE: There's the stars.  And the moon.

(HE's not gloomy any more.)

HE: Oh, my fucking gosh, I love the fucking moon, this is all we need, I used to dream about the moon, when I was just a little child-thing, I would dream about the moon, and I would wake up and I would think, "Goddam I love the fucking moon."

SHE: It's pretty, and we're like goddesses and gods, a little bit of both in each of us.

HE: This is awesome.

(It's too exciting to even make out, so they don't.  Except suddenly all the stars and the moon go out and it's very dark.)

HE: Wow, I didn't know that even happened.

SHE: That's alarming.

NSFWF: They unwillingly enter into that part of the night when the lights all go out.  It's something every sailor and mermaid knows, that crack in time and space when things go out.  They all need to rest.  But it's not a good time for resting, because they're on a motherfucking boat.  And this adventure just got off to a start, a really good start, except now they have absolutely no stars to guide them, and that feeling of none of this ever happening to anyone ever before sets in keenly, and so they have a long conversation about the first time they ever did everything.

SHE: My father was the clown who drove the car in the circus.  It was a very low to the ground car, and he was very tall, and his bones were always crunched in the wrong directions, and he was a very angry clown, a broken and angry clown.  He would take all kinds of pills to keep his pain bearable, and he would wash these down with a combination of mescal and absinthe.

HE: Wow, you're so exotic.  Where are you from?

SHE: It's a place so far away that no one remembers the name, because of the time difference, and the way sound travels.

HE: You remind me of the first mermaid I ever fell in love with.

SHE: How did that end?

HE: Not very well.  I could never hold her.

SHE: Because she was slippery.

HE: She was slippery.  So, so slippery.  And I was tied to the front of the boat.  When I lost her, I lost her forever.

SHE: No, not forever.

NSFWF: And it went on as you can imagine.  We have no film, and no fotos, there was no light.  And it wasn't until much later that they realized they were not who they thought they were, and that's just how love ends.

HE: I think we're in another sad story.

SHE: Oh, fuck.

(End of scene.)