Ciarra: Dear.

With an unreliable pace a girl walks steadily straight. Her hands are in her pockets, as evidenced by the occasional bulge of balled fists under denim. The ground beneath her feet is broken and not by her, but she likes to stamp as she charges along as if she were to blame. The cause rather than effect. She occupies her body in ways like this one and leaves it for her thoughts to hold her afloat. They sometimes look like this:

"It is ridiculous and relentless, the voice of their truth! How can it be that they can be believed? Where is the touch so soft on skin? Where, the breath, wholeheartedly inhaled? Why not? And why not admit content to imploring hands and eyes, when making believe in a search of any kind? How precious that each of us are here! We need no acknowledgment at all, nor must we always even consider one another. There is no such call for precaution! We're here anyway, all the time. And every step is mine, like the lines I refuse to walk--and trace--and say--and cross. This is true too, I'd like to say to them."

Mitch: "Surely i don't give a shit." (Err--on a bout of superfluous curses just recently...)

There's a house at the top of the ridge beyond my balcony that I find hard to believe in.‭ ‬It sits in a field of fawning grasses in gold,‭ ‬precisely the shade of its walls,‭ ‬and it is flanked on three sides by sentinel evergreens leaving only the view that I have.‭ ‬It is a self-congratulating house.

Besides that, I'm good. My life follows sequential rules and I like/appreciate expecting some kind of control in its course. I am male, and my favorite food is dried pears (my mouth waters and everything!). The size of my ears appears to be too large to passers-by, (perhaps too round, so near my face?) but in fact they are proportionately correct. I suspect that the regularity of this mistake points to the downfall of the brunt theory of evolution, grossly failing as it does to account for the faulty connection of human sight and its tendency to encourage false beliefs in our own inherent abilities, such as basic mechanical reasoning. I believe that my own excessive exaggeration is funny as fuck, falsely no doubt. My name is Mitch, and I do not surf.

For the past year I have dreamed about you every night. I haven't the foggiest sense of why this is. I'm beginning to miss my previous wet dreams of the dewy-eyed sprite that ignores me with lustful desperation during mid-shift at the bar; it is no longer her in the extravagantly-thrown, shabby galas of my sub-conscious, but you.

Actually, I don't mind as much as is reasonable. My eyes accidentally close at some point and the rest of the night is yours. Like the way my dog doesn't register eye contact when it is made through a mirror. You're here, always walking somewhere--hurrying? And it's as if I know you completely, with your thoughts running off in our head. I don't believe that I have a say in what happens to us, I'm stowed-away somehow, a voyeuristic paraplegic. It's uncanny--and it doesn't only sound creepy, rest assured. I wonder if you know that I'm there with you?

I fell out of bed this morning.‭ (“‬Ouch‭!...G‬od forsaken.‭”) ‬Again.‭ ‬It's a mad thing,‭ ‬this bewildered occupancy you've taken up in my head.‭ ‬What if you knew me‭? ‬What would your opinion look like‭?

Mitch: "Satnam, have a great day." -D.C.

The woman before me is tremendous. Her tremulous eyes are playing up her lips in a tasteful show of extravagance, complete with #4 ran-mascara trailing an outline around her face, looking like a picture frame that exclaims art more honestly than its captive.

‭ "Look at me, Mitch! Can you blame him? I'm not young anymore, I'm not thin, I'm not happy--I've made her look so fucking good. You know I didn't want to marry him? He fucking begged me. Did I tell you that? Fucking begged me!" She laughed horribly.

‭ Her name is Lilith with one 'l'. She can talk to me like this because I'm kinder than I am cute, and because she thinks I'm paid to listen. I'm not, of course, which is why I can.

‭ "You know what? You know what marriage is good for, Mitch? Kids. That's it. One and all, its only worthwhile excuse. I never wanted kids. I got a tubal ligation before I ever met him. You know I never told him that...the funny thing is that he wouldn't have married me at all if he'd known. He always wanted kids. I shoulda said, 'Fuck marriage.' You know what I mean, Mitch?"

‭ I knew the man she was talking about, her husband. She and he were regulars of mine--loyal from the start. Kenny was always quieter than his wife, and he drank less. Presumably so that she could drink more, which she always did. His all-purpose expression was a bit of a smile that used to brighten a bit more when directed at Lilth, though she was usually looking another way.

‭ I wondered if he hadn't found out about the surgery somehow, and I wondered if I'd see him in here again. Probably, no. This was her place more than his; he was along for the ride. Leaving her was another woman's idea, I thought. But you never know what goes on between two people.

‭ "Sometimes I wish I could've had a kid for him, you know?" Her eyes were black with mascara. She looked like she'd just lost a bar fight. "He never would have left me then."

Indie: Is self-deprecation a rejection of self-importance? Or merely an odder form of the same?

This existence playing out for one person, a moment at a time--and also occupied by an awareness of the existence of another. So that every step is like a thought given to those steps of this other, whose heart is beating as surely as your own.

But the other is always wholly absent. His existence like a breath barely noticed, but subtly audible when due attention is spared. And for some reason it is, more often than before... before what?

Existence is not a necessary thing--we are blessed to have it. Do you see this? Can you give me a reason for why you do anything!? I wouldn't accept it anyway.

This other person--illustrative; identical; entirely possible. He is a blanket thrown over the presence of cold in a place that it belongs. Gratification is at odds with appreciation. Why the constant looking around? Is life a decision we can't remember making? [But if existence is defined thus, ought our lives be too?]

It's living inside of your head--and in this way intuiting correctly the extent of the world as limit-unrelated. This is strangely like pointing at things, saying "Look! You see!?" with gratitude & frankness, and a threat behind grinning teeth and eyes--disallowance of pity in the slightest, so inappropriate; misplaced with obscene certainty.

A line does not dictate motion. Rather, it assures us of a beginning or an end. While a circle gives potential to eternity? [People are doing things! All the time, they're doing things!!] Quit pretending that you know what's going on, please.

Ugh. Or maybe not. (Who do we perform for!?) Mediocrity is so depressing.

Stop fucking around. This is it: yours. When were you ever mistaken until now? (But this is just the framework, fancied up.)

It's when shoving through the ocean during winter sounds like a good idea that you know you might be getting somewhere, but charging through the rain with a pit bull gets you noticed. It's when you fill your head with the most cunning self-deprecation imaginable for to disappear the irrational smile that still stays. It's how the things you do have to have never been done exactly before so that you can disregard anyone else's silly glance. It's sitting in a computer lab at 2am with your hood pulled over your face to keep your grin your own, and you know your eyes would show at least that they're holding something back.

But this isn't good enough yet. We've gotta make it into something, maybe magnificently important.

He's walking. Where's he walking to? He's in the forest. Is he with somebody? Alone? Of course he's alone. And he's barefoot. His shoes are in his backpack and his feet hurt, but he's glad of it...

The stones that had settled into dents on the bottom of his feet keep others from their intended invasion. Not that the pain differentiates this for him, he who would have felt either sentence sufficient. Presently, he mumbles to himself.

“It's not true, you know, don't pretend you don't! You know what's real, no matter how much you think you should forget...” He won't let his feet bleed. “Poetry's not good enough this time. There needs to be something more than words, but you have to bear it there beyond them. Just don't forget the taste in your mouth right now.”

I want to pinpoint this. I want to describe everything; it's all very important, if only because it's not that at all. But it's all here: the wrong necklace; the insistent smile; the unlived memory of sex; the smell of polluted sea on skin; the split-ends in honeyed hues; the disregarded fingertips; the dampness. What are we to do with all of it?

“Who else knows what it's like, not to be waited for?” He needs to eat something but he has no desire to subdue his body's complaints. It seems to him obscene, or at least inconsiderate, pausing to satisfy such things: it doesn't matter where he's going—what right has he to stop?

How can it be untrue, and still this real? [This is what you want at all times? Something better than what you have? Keep talking yourself down, love. Solitude is not a disease. If you could watch yourself from afar, you would find yourself suddenly proud. Don't forget that this is so.]

The sweetest candied yams or debilitating depression? Hmm...

[WE HAVE TO GO INTO SLOW MODE--IT'S NECESSARY FOR-TO-WRITE, FOR SOME REASON. COLD FEET AND FINGERS, i THINK, SEEM TO BETTER REALIZE SOMETHING.]

"Counterfeit exhaustion got him there, but the coming fall is all his own. His pulse is strong and slow, which seems odd to him. Under his breath, his own voice mutters to him but he isn't making it out."

[YOU HAVE TO FALL INTO THE VOICE, AND THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IT'S SAYING; YOU SO EASILY WRITE ABOUT BEING this PRESENT THAT IT MUST NATURALLY BE GROUNDED IN ITS POSSIBILITIES. (As endless...? Or else you're reading Heidegger these days.)]

"Instead, he gulps the coffee sitting on the church pew beside him and wishes he could be of service to someone."

[YOU'RE NOT PRESENTLY EXHIBITING THE MARK OF A PROLIFIC WRITER!]

(To what do you owe the promise of poetry? Why must being be constantly translated as doing? Doing what!? Bah. You wanna talk about something like love!? God, no--that's what writing is for. Anyway, what's there to know about two people?; we know nothing about Two People. It's only ever one-wanting-wanting-wanting--(ever something more? (Loser.)--one more...whether for-to look at, or else to sit pretty for. I wish I could say, 'Fuck it,' honestly.)

"She's saying from behind him, 'I never met a man like that before...he's like a kid in a candy store when he's sitting on our counselor's stupid, green couch.'"

[LIKE A STEADY-STREAM OF WORDS IN MONOTONE? OR A POT-SHOT, CHEAPLY THROWN AND LACKING CONVICTION?]

"'I feel like I'm putting you on the spot by asking--you don't have to answer...'"

[THE FLOWERS ARE S0 RED UNDER THIS LIGHT! IT'S TERRIBLY LIKE COMPLETION. LAST-LINE, LAST-LINE, LAST-LINE... Man, what a freakin' waste.]

A most extraordinary title, indeed.

She thinks in terms of existence rather than life, and all existence is equivalent. The ever-motion of opinions as processes is palpable as she glides her way forward and into the range of a glance. She'd like to talk into its silence but she stares instead, chalk-full of potential. As if what could be has any claim on what already is. As if her willingness gives way to her possibility and not, rightly-so, the other way around. With the taste of ice in her mouth there's no such bitter mood that can best her intentions.

Where will she go from here? She feels the possibility of an end getting slim between her thoughts and she doesn't know what to make of this. Every time she begins following a path it seems to diverge endlessly, and this appearance of freedom she knows will bring suffocation as it solidifies her life behind her. Without courage's assurance her hands look like foreigners before her face, like they'll never make it past her arms.

She's looking for something. Not necessarily something she's lost, but perhaps. It's this lack she feels more strongly than anything, and she fails to note the implication of this--that is, that it is this lack which is in her possession most readily, like a fullness before nothing at all. This nothing that's hers already makes it possible for her to partake in a ceaseless/senseless completion with the world apart from her. It is this that must be shown, somehow to encompass all of it within description.