I had to comport myself with something approaching dignity, at twenty.
I thought for a moment, searching for a funny reply. What to say? Make him laugh! Make him like me! Oh, please make him like me! Then everything will be fine or thereabouts. But no punch lines came to deliver that body blow that would reignite the blaze of his smile. What a jerk I was. I’ve always been a jerk and always will be. He hates me now and thinks I’m boring and stupid.
So it’s not what you’re given, it’s how you take it.
I knew my name. So I let him know I knew it. ‘Yeah,’ I said in a voice very like mine. Mine but hollow, mine but it didn’t matter because my stomach had swung into action.
Shooting speed for thirteen years can really put a crimp in whatever career you might otherwise be attempting to sustain – ask around.
I make a great memory.
I can’t remember events from yesterday, or earlier tonight when I put my credit cards away for safekeeping. Now for the life of me I don’t know precisely what safekeeping is.
Clothes falling away signals a situation that I’ll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don’t dress it up, don’t expect talk to, either.
I WISH YOU would love me more so that I could love you less.
It was hiding in plain sight. Mocking the suggestion that anything was going on; therefore, it couldn’t be true. A technique I like to use to this day.
I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.
I have filled him in to be unobtainable, disinterested, attractive and bored with my company. My ideal mate. Someone to endure, never to enjoy. I am totally at his mercy. I suffer through the silence, imagining that he is suffering my company. That I am merely an alternative for nothing better to do. I’m frightened of the power I have given him over me and of how he will almost certainly abuse it, merely by not being fully aware he has it.
George says that if you look at the person someone chooses to have “a relationship” with, you’ll see what they think of themselves. So Harrison is what I think of myself. It’s hardly a relationship, but nevertheless he is a choice. I examined all the options and chose the most likely to leave. No emotional investments. Never love for me – only obsession. Someone has to stand still for you to love them – my choices are always on the run.
One not only has to read between the lines, one has to fill him in altogether. Because he’s not there. To make him important in one’s life requires an overactive imagination. Unfortunately, mine never knows when to quit.
Not that I’m a big fan of my face, but still- it is mine, whichever way you tilt it. I didn’t like my face when I should have and now it’s melted, I look back on that face fondly.
One had to look all neat and tidy while involved in the aerobic activity of saving the galaxy.
You pounce on everything you said with a pair of tweezers and pluck it about until you can’t remember exactly what it is you said, what context it was in, if you even said it, and if anyone heard you at all.
A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. Our skin agreed. We pressed our luck – first his, then mine, then ours – until we had smoothed our way into the thick of it, until nothing else was possible except to get through to each other, in and on through each other, until we eased into the other side.
I had so much lip gloss on you might have slid off and broken your own lips if you tried to kiss me.
Who do you want them to think you are? How do you think people see you? Or don’t you let them near enough to see. You make up their minds for them. Do you think that you succeed in convincing people that you are what you seem to be?
But imagine this though. Imagine having a mood system that functions essentially like weather – independently of whatever’s going on in your life. So the facts of your life remain the same, just the emotional fiction that you’re responding to differs. It’s like I’m not properly insulated – so all the bad and the good ways that you and most of the people in adjacent neighborhoods and around the world feel – that pours directly into my system unchecked. It’s so fun.