3 petit pieces : a response to MB

allison in london 2011 by lina scheynius



i. the furies

it got noisy. sometime post-youth this was. felt like wind, someone had left a window open in my head and the buzz of it ... couldn't hear a damn thing. so i sat in quiet spaces and listened to it, like deciphering the rain (which is also possible with enough time and skills in cartography). they were murmurs. little snippets of voices. ostinato words that i didn't quite, couldn't quite want to make out. home home home. that's an example. words that had no meaning. the ghosts of words. memories i wasn't ready to dispense with. phantoms of myself. buzzing and humming.
___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

and just like that (again), i'd hear it. distant at first. Sartre's flies. a hum. micro-conversations i've had/hadn't had/couldn't have/didn't want to have/wouldn't have had if i'd known/didn't know not to have had/ bleeps and blurps and mixed up with images of skinny girls' wrists and single high heels on my floor i'd kick on my way to the bathroom in the dark at night ; houses i'd lived in, rooms with no windows, Haifa's geraniums, yellow couches we kissed on, the whiteness of breasts in the moonlight, like bones or clouds made of dead gossamer ... and all the words it takes to say those things scrambled and mashed, here it comes now, like waves waves waves upon a shore, or knowing you're about to fall down some stairs .:: the buzz grows , fractal geometries ..::: closer now ;: dispense with formalities, when it hits i'll sink into a corner and stare off into nothing like a junkie or a tulip in a coma till


___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

(these are not the kind you see. except to see them coming)


ii. by the river i sat down and wept

he hands me an empty bottle and asks me to comment, i tell him i cannot, which does not please him. but the party rages on. all around me. youth, or some similar tragedy with a rhyming nickname. and i follow my shoes around and try not to notice all the things i notice which make me feel a gajillion miles away in another galaxy somewhere where all of this makes as little sense to everyone as it does to me.
a girl approaches me, a little tipsy and fingernails painted what colour are your nails?
- that's a lame question to start off with.
- that's a shame, i was hoping you'd say 'tangerine dream'.
- what?
- your nails. 'tangerine dream'. or maybe 'psychedelic ruby'.
- that might work, psychedelic ruby.
- you're a psychedelic ruby.
- you're weird.
- better that than the alternative.
- which is what?
- unsmoochable.
- are you hitting on me? why do i feel like you're hitting on me?
- i want to smooch you, and then ask you questions.
- why not ask first?
- if you give unsatisfactory answers then your smoochfulness may vanish

(after i get lost between the magic of her long neck and red hair and her breathy alcohol breath that rises and falls here and there ; people walk past us, and i'm a little sweaty and i'm uncomfortable with my pants still on with the sudden lack of space in my pants - so i pull off, and say hey space cadet, she looks up waiting for the next question ... are you happy?
(these being words that have made her sad) (which i don't understand because this is the germ cell of every question anyeveryone's ever asked anysomeone else. if not that then what else? by now she's repacked herself into herself and gone to blahblahblah.
my sweat subsides and i can move in my pants again. my shoes move and i follow, and about a zillion miles away the true me is sitting reading something interesting in the quiet and i am saved from myself and all this.
___hey q, you leaving? i'm asked by the front door; but how can i comment on that effectively? empty and empty i respond ; which makes no sense to him, but which means quite simply: but i was never here.


iii. run. rabbit.

having stated the facts in clear chronological order, i suspected i would receive suitable advice. but he just sat there and stared at me. i indicated that the future is wordless by not saying anything. but representing it in silence. i stared back in other words. (and in other words i stare back all the time.) (that's what i do when i write. stare back. summon forth to me little damsels i have saved in the cozy bits of 2002 for my own personal remembrance)

the stage is set, but if it rains the whole thing will be wasted. i see a mime with a white painted face and he walks up to me and says if it rains we're all f&cked back to new caledonia. i ask him if there's not some way around it , couldn't you just pretend it wasn't raining? and he tells me he'll think it over in the restroom. ___(a few minutes later he returns). ___no he says. ___the performance is slipping up he says. i'm not sure what he means. he could very well mean the performance is the act of slipping up. he sees i'm evaluating the two options. he indicates he meant the whole thing, the whole show, the spectacle of the scaffold he says (by which i imagine he meant Friday 3:04am when i write this) is coming apart. he continues:

at the limbs is where you can see it most. severance. time starts to drift off. space (you get fearful of large spaces for a while. other times, the closet is suddenly not good enough. and age is age, and you bounce from birthday to birthday and realise somewhere between 26 and 28 you lost another hub cap and your mom calls everyday to see if you've found a job yet and you pop your pills like breath freshners and paint your happy face and walk out into monday mornings and thursday afternoons and eat burgers and sweet talk sweet looking girls into going to the movies with you and sooner or later you just realise being what the everyones are calling 'well' is a freaking mountain obstacle mission impossible to climb).

he'd keep on going but then we hear a deep rumble. thunder. well then he says, at last the time has come. sooner or later, the sky was always going to fall. i'm not sure if i agree with him on this point but he cuts off my thoughts :: heed well my advice young man. what follows is another round on the merry-go-round. you know where you are, you know the rest, you know all of everything. i disagree with this too, and i say but i know nothing.

he's walked away. he's moving briskly so he's far along already. he turns his head over his shoulder and shouts back: fine, try that one out then.

i'm not sure if i'd gone out looking for advice. but as it starts to rain, i'm pleased not to feel to cold about it all.