thoughts (fragments) at 2:33am

untitled by meyrem


maybe 2:33am is an okay time to start watching a scary movie. if someone were here i'd ask them for their opinion on this.


___*___*___*

i shave sporadically so that every time i (inadvertently) touch my face i'm surprised by what i feel.


___*___*___*

i worked for 12 hours today. when i left the gates were locked i couldn't get my bike. i walked through my front door i was sure i'd collapse irreparably. that was 5 hours ago. seems the day's not quite ready to fizzle out. this i can live with, i am all patience when it comes to letting the evening play out its fermata.


___*___*___*

she's hinted at it several times now. like i can show you that place, we can get coffee?. or have you heard about the XYZ movie?, looks interesting. i think it's playing at the ABC. i respond each time: sure, sounds great. but don't proceed beyond those three words.


___*___*___*

still alive? That's all the email says: still alive? i think about it a while. it's a relative question i decide. it's a trick question i decide. it's a loaded question i decide. then i undecide everything.


___*___*___*

three obnoxious jokes about the siege of sarajevo into lunch i realise i'm sitting besides someone from sarajevo who once told me the siege was my highschool. i know what he meant, that he was in high-school during the siege years, but the double meaning is too rich. sometimes i wonder if words don't pick us, reward our sincerest feelings with a perfect phrase that catches everything, all of it.


___*___*___*

loving you made me feel young.


___*___*___*

i still don't have a phone. at first it was a matter of finding the time to go and organize one. it's not that anymore. there's something delicious about knowing you can't be reached, that your time is your time and cannot be penetrated. i make plans when i want them, otherwise i'm cut off from the pace of... of... all externalities.


___*___*___*

a winter is slowly reclining around us. when i wake in the mornings it is soo dark.


___*___*___*

every now and then i remember that i'm working at a UN war crimes tribunal. (and i feel proud of my last few years in the purest way). (and i'm confirmed in the only lesson i've managed to extract from my life thus far: striving for excellence makes things happen. i don't know why, or how, but strange things exist in that space where you expend yourself fully for the sake of achieving something greater than you're capable of).


___*___*___*

for the first time since i was a child i'm not consciously terrified of the future.


___*___*___*

it's a feeling i've had a few times now, not so much a feeling as a realization. a little click 'it's time q'. it's time to maybe settle the relationship status definitively. it scares me, it's not a thought i've ever had before - in fact, it goes against everything i'm sure i believe(d) in: that that is something that can't be coaxed or willed. that it just grows from the ground up, twirls around you like ivy. one morning you look up and you're wrapped in a garden made of someone else's life and spirit. that's how i thought of it: as an organic amalgamation of lives and souls. not notnot something that's decided and pursued and ticked off a list.


___*___*___*

loving you gave me gravity - it kept the world in place so it wouldn't all float away from me


___*___*___*

almost every morning i stop at the bakery. i rest my bicycle against a wall and take off my gloves. the same girl serves me but slowly. everything in this country is too slow so i'm always a little flustered. it's early so the croissants are warm, the smell is a lip-kiss from heaven. i put the paper package in my bicycle bag and continue on my way to work, where i stop by the machine and get a 50c latte. that's my name for it - the 1/2 a euro coffee from the machine: i call it a 50c latte. it tastes better than the proper coffee from the cafe i don't know why. i return to my desk and make a mess that's impossible to clean up. crumbs everywhere - desk, clothes, carpet, computer keyboard - everywhere.

when the others arrive i don't stop i smile without removing the pastry from my lips.

i love loving my little rituals. happiness is too hard a thing to strive for, i've given up on it. but these little moments, bricks of happiness, i can build great things with them. (and things that aren't so large and ambitious that they fall on me in the end)


___*___*___*

she walks and brushes up against me occasionally, and i'm in a flirty mood so i take her arm and wrap it around mine, say there you go like i did her a favour. she seems pleased with the situation, we walk on. me kicking the conversation along for her sake, though i'd rather walk on in silence into silence (thinking about this feeling of having someone's arm in mine. this familiar sensation. dull echos.


___*___*___*

at 7pm one of the lawyers walks into the office i share with 5 other interns - they all left hours ago - he leans against the wall and picks up mid-thought: but where it gets tough is how we frame the credibility arguments so that we ... i grab a muesli bar and hand him one which he takes still carrying on right?, because at the end of the day, if we rely on the alternative argument we still need to ...
i feel like an adult. i'm not one of the interns, the interns went home hours ago, i'm one of the grown ups. after 5 it's only the grown ups still working. i'm having a big-kids conversation. By the way, i was thinking today we should file that motion anyway just to get it on the record, doesn't matter what they say, it'll be useful for the appeal i say, he nods true, good point ___it occurs to me, i feel... home - _the farthest most distant version of it i could ever imagine,__ but unmistakable : home.

false alarm.

i blame the future for what it did to us.__ a tuesday, this could only have happened on a tuesday i thought to myself. __i held my breath when i looked up again i was swimming through europe - just keep walking i remember thinking, just keep walking. and after 10 hours of it i remember masturbating just so i'd fall asleep in a strange bed on the 5th floor of a building in the shadow side of town , when i came down for breakfast there were only meth-heads and a family of scarved muslims and an old woman with no teeth who stared at her toast without touching. __just keep walking i prayed with pills and the silence of speaking to no one walled me in so i promised not to think about you but i willed you into every shadow and i leant against the streetlights while i ate my sandwich-and-coffee lunch but really i was just lonely and i imagined it as a hug __and i slept through the bad dreams but didn't know what to do about all the awake hours so i walked __until somewhere in paris __where my feet had bled through my shoes and i couldn't walk anymore every morning i spent an hour bandaging my feet and still i couldn't stop and wait for you to catch up to me , or regret or guilt or whatever other name the Eumenides take __earthquakes like this can only happen on tuesdays.

today was a wednesday. when i woke up i didn't know where i was, why i was dressing the way i was. when i returned home i looked in the mirror and my eyes were soo red it scared me. i received an email are you still alive?. __after considering it: no. ____whatever i am is another thing, __the other thing. __... no i thought after considering it.

but death is such a constant

the sound of the ocean, __or the violins in my neck

gravity, memory, the whole sky is your big blue eye sitting on my shoulder - all these things i cannot escape, even if i wanted to.


___*___*___*

ok. this is all rubbish. i can't write about this all yet. i thought it was there, but it's not.

where the wild things are

untitled by coolhandluke


here the song is played with no instruments. it's windy so i don't hear so well.

what i had known about myself grew up and wished me well and walked away.

i'd have stayed up late, waiting for it if i could.

only i wouldn't have known i was waiting. i wouldn't have known what i was doing,

other than balancing seconds of night on my forehead and measuring gradations of light.

what i knew of sadness was an ocean. a desert. an entire nightsky - a whole universe to float in.

but now just this muffled song i can't make out. like a mild forgetfulness,

or the need to scratch but not knowing where. __(not knowing where was always my problem)

these propositions that follow on from each other: like night and wings , or

lust from out of loneliness , or my current predicament of white upon white upon white.

__my clothes smell funny. all of them, i consider burning all my shirts until i realise maybe

i smell like a roommate of myself. a stranger i don't remember welcoming , a proposition

that followed from something else, like shadow or dreamscape or piano wood.

anyway, maybe it's him and he knows no sadness or happiness, but lives in my tshirts

so that they smell like a blanket-apology of okayness.

__but after the sadness there was love. (if you can even call it that - for a change it was soo kind to me).

if ever there was a couplet of years i'd be happy to be trapped in maybe it was those , huddled

in your chest until you said i thought the girl gets to sleep on the boy's chest? and i mumbled

a dreamsound from a distant contentment even now i can't remember the shape of.

and after the pleasantness of love there's this... this... damned song. this uninteresting thing

i am stuck with. __the mornings are disappointing. maybe that's all there is to say about it.

__granted: it was a sadness that kept getting stuck in my tie. but what i remember of it

it was real. personalized and dedicated just to me. an emotion to call my own that i had on a leash

(that had me on a leash) and together we'd tug and pull across parks and sundays.

but now there is this synthetic cake of pills and forgetfulness and dull memory of geometric forms

and not a word of any of it makes any sense.

__by 2pm i'm five coffees into my day and still closer to sleep than the other thing.

somewhere around here i buried the things i didn't know how to hug anymore. one day,

when they excavate my remains they'll find the diamonds you hid there.

when you laughed i sucked it in and the weight of them and the pressure of them turned my

bones into jewels. __have my femur, i wish i could do something nice for you.

(she wore my ring so proudly).

__all i want are redder eyes and the satisfaction that comes with self-sabotage.

it's winter in europe. when my head gets too heavy it's hard to move. the nights elongate and

memories grow fangs. (yesterday is where i hide my black words).

where i find .

(why does recovery move at the pace of geology?) maybe the trick is to do laundry more often.

wash the you and the chemicals out of my clothes. armed with just myself i'd lose any card game.

i wish i understood it sooner my mother says. it's in your genes, poor you. can't escape it!

a starless night i can't escape or the drone of the fuzzy song.

when i land , when i land , when i land:

if you are my friend, hold my hand so i don't float away again.

__the memory of happiness is a costly sentiment. (maybe i was rich before, but when i land my

pockets will be licked clean). so spare a penny for the old guy so

where i find .

when i land .

w h a t ' s h a p p e n i n g n o w h e r e

untitled by amber ortolano


my body caved in today. gave up. i've been feeling 'odd' for a few days and i couldn't place it. i took a break from gym, made an effort to eat more.


___*___*___*

there's a lot of talking. you hear people in the next office laughing all day. walking in and out of mine. they're confused now that i've stopped looking up from my desk to acknowledge them.
- wow, you work hard.
- always.
- good for you.
- i'm trying to keep up with the genocidists. they work really hard.

(this is a lie. i'm just taking as many random turns as i can hoping to get lost in something).


___*___*___*

when i leave at 7pm my body hurts and i want to throw up.

i can't keep the bicycle steady.

just looking at the weights in the gym makes me pant heavily, and i can't understand my heart rate.


___*___*___*

MECHANISMS I'VE ENTHUSIASTICALLY ADOPTED/ATTEMPTED TO HELP ME DEAL WITH RECENT 'STUFF', A LIST:

- walking without rest from wake up to sleep now in paris
- pills x2, twice a day, without fail, without question
- read --> understand --> confirm --> WORK
- keep working. from 8 till 6:30
- then gym
- not write
- under no circumstances listen to: Hospice by the Antlers, For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver, High Violet by the National, Dark Storm EP by the Jezzebels


___*___*___*

drug overload. work overload.

i'm going to stop both for the weekend and let my body deal with it. (god help me)

i expect spasms of fatigue and sadness. so to offset that i'm planning a shopping expedition in Amsterdam for tomorrow and pjs-and-movie-sunday. i also expect to watch this about 400 times between now and monday.

one,
two,
here goes...

notapoem.

surprise party by pinkyhonor


yesterday's zombie.

i have all the lights on, there's not a shadow amongst them to hold out its hand

__(from my white desk i would watch you sleep , turn my music off at 4am to hear you better ,

your breath: the night's ocean )

and you'd smile at me at 9 when you woke up.

this bike makes an odd noise , the cold wind hurts my neck.

at least i've forgotten about my hands.

someday i'll find this dream again, hug it tenderly , and remember what love is to hold.

there's morning, and afternoon, and then night. __this much i know.

sometimes there's more than that.

__(around me people dance. i'm not sure what i'm supposed to do. one body moving alone
makes little sense. (how these stars burn so far away from each other. (not a shadow amongst them - their hands can't reach

and then night and then a heavierest blanket that comes after ,

i thought maybe a pot-plant but its breaths sound wrong and its skin doesn't glow like yours.

the treadmill and i disagree about a few things and part ways early.

someone's tied strings to my bike pedals so i drag two and a half happy years behind me as i try and get home.

__the bike makes an odd noise , the cold wind hurts my neck.

i haven't forgotten what happiness feels like. _(white light). _(so vulnerable__,
_______________________________________ ___the hush of sunrise could scare it away)

an echo of it is trapped, i hear it bouncing around like warm summertime streets after dark.

someone asks me so, what brings you here? and i say that i was in a dream once but got lost. other than that, i don't know.
__she doesn't understand and i don't explain.

i hesitate to turn the lights off. i let each day linger as long as i can hold it.
when i'm alone with it - with silence and with night -

when i'm alone ...

i'm alone.


i stack my logic back up on the shelf , and measure its corners for right-angles ,

in my underwear dance slowly staring at nothing in the mirror listening to my wake-up alarm,

waiting to be overtaken by the treadmill and restless fridays i hope to drop and see crawl away splintered and sad never to be remembered.

in vietnam, when we were sick, and i was hot and you couldn't eat - only hot water with ginger and honey,

i'm terrified of airplanes now. did you know that?, have you heard?

can't face the departure board without becoming panic stricken. when i pay for my ticket i know i'll pay.

it's a high price to be a man nowadays.

(and who knows if you ever get the genuine thing).

i tell her i got lost in my happiness and ended up here. __she doesn't understand.

the bike leans awkwardly against the stairwell and i stumble up the stairs nauseous.

on wednesdays i'd feel like this and we'd hide in your room till i stopped shaking
and convulsing through the night.

(any minute now i'll land and then i'll work out where i am)

any minute now.

every time i divide i'm left with a remainder that chases me.

yesterday's tulip yesterday's zombie.

at least i've forgotten my hands.

someday i'll find this dream again, hug it tenderly , and remember what love is to hold.

there's morning, and afternoon, and then night. __this much i know.

playlist

+ burial & four tet & thom yorke - mirror
+ how to dress well - just once EP
+ rick ross - i'm not a star
+ holy other - with u EP
+ glass vaults - glass EP
+ jamie xx - FACT 282 podcast mix

can_not con_troll, must_can't_stoppp ... wallowing. [run]

it rains without warning. i'm already shaky on my bike, now my glasses are covered in droplets and i have to tip my head to see anything. i'm soaked in seconds and suddenly the wind as i propel myself forward hurts, stings even. cars spray hello to me with their tires as they pass. it's immediately darker.

i crack open a smile on my face. hello life. i've missed you.


___*___*___*

it's a strange feeling to know, had i not taken my pills this morning, i'd have spent the day in my room measuring the contours of a sadness i couldn't explain, understand or fathom. since i missed my afternoon dose, i can feel it climbing out of its well now. it's such an odd feeling. i can sense my brain's chemicals ebb and flow, a little this way, then back that way. a neuron war.

finally, as i walk into my house (it being too late to take my dose now) i ... actually screw it i'll take half. (i don't like where tonight's going)


___[goes] ___--> ___[returns]


___*___*___*

FEARS I AM TOO TERRIFIED TO SPEAK OUT LOUD, A LIST:

- i am too far gone to be lovable, or loved.

- i am not too far gone to be lovable, or loved - but i will feel like i am and therefore sabotage all opportunities to love and be loved

- i will spend the rest of my life wrestling with my sadnesses that i might as well name since they visit for tea so often

- mediocre. mediocre. mediocre. mediocre.

- i am not growing old. i am old.


___*___*___*

one day we'll all tire of this.


___*___*___*

i'm not allowed to think about you. i decided that was a good mechanism to handle myself. to keep me locked onto the train tracks so i could stay the course.

somewhere inside me there's a room full of origami swans where i've hidden you. and the whole of Vietnam. and two weeks worth of Adelaide. and our first coffee at 2am. and whatever i might think,

your eyes
the sky
half the blood in my heart -

is all the same colour. blue.

and the sky here is perfectly grey, which means every tree-branch and church spire and electric line is the black of your hair.

and my pills eat my loneliness like cookies. insatiable for it. but every now and then, when there's a crack of clarity in the otherwise drugged haze i keep myself in, when warmth creeps into my fingers (the pills make me cold. peripheral-vasoconstriction) ...

i'm not sure what the word is for emotions anymore. for wanting things. i've been excluding myself from those things. from wanting. from emoting. it's... a mechanism. to handle myself. that's why it's difficult to write. to describe. i could never understand, but i used to be able to describe things pretty well. i can't do that anymore either.

foggy glass.
another shadowed sunday,
with wet trees
and when the streetlights come on
everything will be toxic yellow outside my window.

and i'll consider the silence.
count the words i said today, or remember saying.


___*___*___*

one day i'll have to pay for all this.
the skin i've borrowed and the eyes that were loaned to me.
these hours i've amassed or squandered.
i'll return with pockets empty but for lint, a few receipts, chips of paint off a red
heart i've banged up a few times and

who knows what the total'll come to.


___*___*___*

dear god,
remember i have tried to be a man.
and have tried to divine what that means.

but again i have been defeated by sunday. by love. (once every 4 years). by the rain and the colour blue.

by distance and time. and the distance between time(s) which i cannot count.

and by my hair which i cannot save. and my skin which sags now.

next spring they'll come looking for me in my silence, and find me frozen.

remember, dear god.
you can't fail if you didn't try.

nocturne (4:38am)

PEOPLE I AM ADMIRING/LOVING TONIGHT (AND WHY), A LIST:

+ Bill Cunningham --> because he's sweeter than babycakes. just watch Bill Cunningham NY

+ Anselm Keifer --> he was the highlight of another art gallery today. no image will ever convey the depth and size and gravity of his images. he's totally my guy.

+ Adele --> seriously, watch it again. she's so young to be this elegant ,

+ Ryan Gosling --> i listened to Dead Man's Bones today. 'nuff said.


___*___*___*

earlier, in the shower, i tried to remember
what sort of man i wanted to be.

i wonder if i'll ever get there.
moreso if i'll ever remember.


___*___*___*

a beautiful girl smiled at me today.
the first in weeks.
maybe. ___the first i've noticed.

amazing how quickly the ghosts vanish.


___*___*___*

my sister tells me i'll be successful,
my mother says i already am.

i just want my laundry to dry.


___*___*___*

night accommodates me.
hospitable.
shares her blanket with me.

waits for me to feel my falling.
or land.
whichever comes first.