In England now, in Oxford. Going to school here. Reading in the Bodleian. Feeling sloppy and crass compared to the British. Stumbling some, wandering some.

I think, world, you are larger than anticipated.

Every choice made feels more pronounced. The time is short for all the 'opportunites'. And now is the time that certain uncertainties and sadnesses have chosen to surface...? They would pick now, wouldn't they?

Sadly happy. A happy sad? A bit embarrassed about those words. Like I'm trying to catch my breath. All the time.

This is the view from my window: They are filming a movie outside; the road is blocked off. An actor stumbles out of a blue door across me and hails Hitler, a lilting, fake drunk buried in wool and bathed in projector light. They are here because it's beautiful and old. Old streets with old oils of palms pressed deep into the sidewalls. The actor can make history here because there have been many to sink and stain the concrete. He can be a hundred if he wants to and still young and drunk and political.

You live in a city and begin to find nature strange, even when it's manicured. I am looking out of a bay window and finding it strange to be three stories above the scene. Will I look across my steet from a screen someday, and believe him as he leans his body back with the bottle? Will I be convinced, in my memory, that I felt more belonging here? Will I feel more belonging here? Looking inward. He's come out the door again now, and this time, his hand stays longer in the light.

I shouldn't be feeling melancholy, but I am. I know what I've pulled down around myself, like a blanket, and I can see it isn't the right comfort for me, but I'm holding onto it anyway.

Camus says there are only two or three true loves in a century, and that everything else is vanity and boredom. Does it make these wrong? I feel that they are essentially wasteful, these lovers we don't have to love, but we might need them anyway. Boredom and vanity come from that same vast emptiness and hunger. Does any semblance of love flesh us into our bodies more fully or make us exempt from living, in the spaces that we're adoring? Love's a joint being passed around. Seriously.

I think we have our moments, though. I do. I went to an undergraduate poetry reading at my university and there was a girl, Jillian. She's a wonderful poet. She has dark hair and blue eyes, her face has a wry, passive quality. But her words are so idealistic and clean, kisses, she said, like red-purple grape leaves.

I know why I'm melancholy. It's this blanket I pulled around myself because of what feels like a battery in my stomach, like a lover I don't have to love. But how when we are young there is such an excess in our skin, it binds itself to whatever it touches.

There are these cataracts in our eyes. A dividing roughness that slips up from ground like it's a gift we resent and hunger. I hunger you. I don't understand the theorem, my own workings. The train or the bed sheet fabric. I don't understand the music but I have forgotten its rifts so completely into smell, into bumps at the base of my spine. They will later break free and spill their liquid onto a dinner plate, making everything inedible. I'm supposed to. I showed up.

(I'm thinking of being on the hood of a car during a drive in movie, drinking whisky. I'm thinking of being drunk and holding hands. A leaving plane, how we're nobody but two heavy depths of oil--the smoothing and pinching of an elbow in our side--then disparate, then over, a kiss tastes like moist bread or wood, maybe. Or smells like moist wood. It stays like pockets of air in the base of your spine. One day they will make everything inedible.

Live in the light, you said. Put it in your mouth, I replied.

It's 5am, which is beginning to be the typical wind-down from a day of scampering: class, people, work, expectations, angst, vertigo, and hummus. Too much hummus, really, at the wildly seedy bohemian night job of "hookah barista" (I have taken the liberty of creating a euphemism from the regular expletive included in the title) or "coal ninja" as I have liberally self-dubbed.

Pita Jungle: a place for the Arab community, underaged smokers, college drunkards, male ex-strippers, gyro-lovers, and me, apparently. Today, there was an actual riot outside. I was standing in the restaurant section and three guys push me out of the way, scrambling for the door. They went outside and started throwing patio furniture at each other. About fifteen other Arab men filtered rapidly after them.
It's awful and funny right now. I don't know why, but it shook me up. I couldn't get Ben Lerner's lines "real blood on the stage, fake blood in the snow" out of my head, just shocked at the almost farsical reality of actual violence where I have lived a life exposed to only its holograms and shadows.

Then "Z" read my fortune out of turkish coffee cup. One husband, he said, pointing to a long line of dried grains; one child, he said, pointing at the single branch extending out of it. He told me that when I was younger, I read a lot. In the present, I was moving so quickly that I never slowed down: "I tink itz like you skiing." I blink and reply, "but I don't ski." He sets the cup down. "Itz metaphor." He leaves.

I feel a little ill. I don't know why. Insert emotional honesty here.

Nick Urata guzzles the rest of his merlot on stage and bangs the head of his guitar into the souzaphone.



This is how Devotchka's music makes me feel:



Reduced to that mulled electric, again. A sort of red-colored comatose. (Lovely, lying wasted on the bed, slave-caught, invasively wired, warmed) Cider, pine, tinder, kerosene, hickory, dust: steeped and drafting up, evasive in origin, heady in consequence. (Heard and drunk and wondering)

"Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late,
and no one could sleep
the horses running until they forget they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on the policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed
there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the window pain.
That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it."

-Richard Siken

For lunch I am eating canned peas. The rim of this particular brand is substantially beaten, because until today I didn't have a can opener. Picture this: me hammering the generic sweet-pea tin with my African bush knife, unsuccessfully.

I've been thinking about all the trouble I go through for definition. If I really am part of a whole, why do I Need to set myself apart? Above my laptop (Mac, of course) is a line of old books. Each title, Dumas, Tennyson, Keats, cummings, Dostoyevsky...chosen for their 19th century spines and relevance to Me. My movie collection: Gladiator (I appreciate a good epic), Amelie (key words: fate, feel-good), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (universal appeal, pretty colors), Family Guy (I can appreciate college humor! I'm more than just the books!), Meet Joe Black (fine acting. fine actors.). Everything is egocentric. The sepia globe, the Indonesian fan, the Dahli postcards, the shelf of tea, the guitar in the corner. Music: indie and artsy. Wine stashed in the fridge. Vanilla perfumes. The room in resume fragments.

Can you perceive the unsullied, undecorated portion of a person, beyond shelves and words and mannerisms? Would you want to find the elusive middle that may not offer you anything? No cleverness, no invitation, no finely steeped mystery. Every morning, dressing in shams that find their way to my bedroom floor. Are you the same? Making us strange comrades in the egoism smoothed like a cityscape between my Self and your Self. Eventually, the only thing we can understand is our winter clothes, never put back in the closet.

And when Adam bit the fruit, opening another white gap against the skin, did it happen then? We became ashamed of our natures, and covered them up? Perhaps that's why we love art, the ghostly familiarity, "I know this place" bringing us back to the River Lethe. On canvas and metal and ink we find humanity, blindly reaching into the sack of our unconscious and pulling something moving out. It moves you, because it's in you?


"Who can see a stranger's wrist and not have regrets?"

"What child hasn't practiced dying under the water / listening to the waves against the bathtub's smooth sides"

"we trace our own suppleness and try to forget"

-Malinda Markham

I am staying up late because for the first time in a long time I am unsure of my ability to be alone. (confession 1) This is because I've realized that love must be out of my hands to be love, and I have done little else but handle it (2:and handle you)


I don't fear this vulnerability because in the melancholy I am not ended, only staring at the spaces
that mean only: I cannot control any Good that will come of me,
to me.
And Good seems to come only when it can unbuild the things it patterns in me with a wave of hand, gives and takes away in sigh purposefully reverently that exposes . The Buddhists were right that we are not Selves but Empties, filling out corners in a soft sort-of maybe. < In our finer moments there is so much space >
after the exertion and wonder winnows us out


unstrange? that Love seems to love me and its sighs move over my? space to lead me towards light(3)