Ciarra

The house across the street is vacant now. (It's viiisible... Gone. Viiisible... Gone as I watch its image fluttering over the roof of my own house, jumping on the oversize trampoline in my back yard. I would expect that it's forlorn enough to be gathered up and scattered by the wind [after all that it had and lost] but it just sits there [all steady-like]. It is an atrocious house [to remain unmoved]. Living in that house, one can come to believe of the leaves to cackle as they fall (the nutcases). I too have surpassed my salvation (the sucker), like pencil marks invisible on skin [felt alone/only felt]. [Like Jesus even, huh? or so poised as this moment...] I've lost my unknowing companion, so that I might remember that it's cold.

[The in between is what I want. I want the darkness.] [Writing the words or the depths? Wondering about truth?]

I was in the car a few days ago and I saw an old man walking, as slow as you like with his hands behind his back, pondering. It hit me then, the beautiful intricacy of this life of ours. The excruciatingly frailty of this web that at times is the last strength in the universe. The only truth: that life will go on. Whether it tears or shatters or snaps. My life seems so complicated but that man, his life is complicated as well. It had consumed him. He needed a change of scenery just to comprehend the one he left behind/came from. It was surreal. Perfect. That's it. Gorgeous, the sheer perfection of all these fumbling attempts as though towards something we already possess. (Like the bus ride snippets...convey the magic of the everyday, if you can.)

Ciarra

"Don't you remember why?" She didn't speak it aloud to anyone, because nobody was there with her. She wrote it down instead.

"What did her reasoning look like? Would she even remember now?" The words kept her awake that night, and not for their lack of an answer.

(Writing is so hard! when you still can't say, 'Fuck the words; I want a story.')

Simmer down, love. And uncoil. It's okay that you're waiting for something that you don't know how to expect. It's okay if it doesn't even come tonight. Loose your patience again, let it linger here. Do you still feel the ache of your arms? The depth of the cold to your feet? You do. They are just momentarily yours, remember?

Your stomach thinks it's hungry most of the time now, and you can hear your dog-heart snoring. When the second-hand ticking...pauses, the rain outside sounds alone, so that it ticks just as often as it does not. Of course its/the whole feeling of company is pretend.

Why do we dwell on loneliness? Why do we delve into it and reach for ghastly immersion? Why can't we tell the difference between loneliness and solitude? And what the fuck is it about approval? Utterly offensive, out of place approval... When will you come back inside and recall the way you always want(ed) to breathe? ... Girl, tell me a story, will you?

Janey & Ciarra

When the smile moved to me it didn't lose (any of/a bit of) its warmth. I realized that this proved she didn't recognize me (after all). No more than I had expected, I had let myself believe--I had left her when she was barely six years old, mind you. She nodded at me, paused in a way that wasn't in wait, then immediately began signing to me, evidently knowing I'd understand: Hi mom.

I'd been wrong. I had misread the smile as though to a stranger, forgetting that's all I was to her--whether or not she'd kept a picture of my former self in her head (all along,) now to draw upon after all these years. Hi daughter. I signed back, bravely testing her emotion by claiming her, having indeed/in fact not/never lost this sleight-of-hand skill of communication.

Ciarra

"Oh my fucking god. Where did it come from?! Why the fuck'd you bring it here?!"
"I found her in the bushes behind the complex! Goddamnit, listen! She's really cold, okay? Fucking--run a bath or something! I can't just let her fucking freeze, you know? Kell(?)... Kell(?), I can't take her home."
"Fuck, Dom!? What do you want me to do about it, huh? Jesus Christ! What if it's dying? What if it's fucking dead already?! A dead fucking baby in my fucking kitchen?!! Oh my god--oh christ..."
"She's not dead, Kell! (Don't worry.) Please. Come on, help me get her into some bathwater. Stay with me here, okay Kell?"
"Fuck. Okay! Okay."

*~*~*

"Ciarra! Girl, where the blazes are you?"

"Shhh," came from beneath the porch that the gray woman was just then standing on. She took the two rickety steps down and onto the pale-colored grass to kneel down breathily.

"Sweetie-pie, what the devil you doin' down there?" she wheezed.

"SHHH. I'm hiding."

This time the woman thought to lower her voice, "Who ya hiding from, Girl?"

"The clouds," the child whispered.

Unprepared for this, she still managed to keep her surprised laugh quiet enough for the girl's sensibilities when the woman responded. "Haha! Hon, the clouds ain't gonna hurt you this time o' year."

Ciarra (the girl) made the face of something scandalized when she looked up at the only other person on the planet. "I know THAT Grandma," she whispered quickly. "We're playing hide 'n' seek!"

Ciarra

There are certain streetlights as yet unwatched by sensors. These change instead with a timer and move with the speed of snow(flakes--freezing, falling, and fading away). On a night that's cold this is seen by gray-anxious eyes, confounded by/disengaged with the contentment they embody as they flick from red to greed and hesitate, before letting in yellow to return them to red once more, and every time.

The shade belonging to the eyes is a light one, a quality when inherent to gray which can be disconcerting to say the least. Both the colorless state of her irises and the intensity thrumming within the prefect stillness in which she holds herself, looking up at the light, impress upon a person something like a disgusted awe: most have felt nothing like her, even stranger though she is, and desire to never again.

This is not her concern.

Besides which, it is much too late in the evening for this city to play her witness. She likes the temporary belief that she could remain the single person still in the grips of wakefulness. As her and her steel-restless companion are the only ones up waiting for god, she is humbled at last.

("How can she look at the world with empty eyes and be right about it--?"
"Well it's not that she's right, she just understands something to it--"
"But even then, I'm not sure if it's possible, I mean, you've got me believing it but still, I suspect I shouldn't...or something--"
"I know, it's like nobody ought to know what she knows--"
"Yeah, exactly--"

At the school for the deaf, she wasn't able to understand her classmates or the bitterness they follow with prideful tenacity; the bitterness they trusted with biting naivety. She felt that for all they thought they were, they should at least believe something greater their own sake/ then themselves. She wondered what it would be like to expect nothing more just because no more could be imagined, and she hoped they were curious about her behavior when it differed from their own. And she still didn't know how to explain this.

But it stayed when she stood here beneath the hum-shouts of the traffic light that knew only of what it did, so that she felt as close to being something other than herself as she yet found to be otherwise possible. The worthlessness struck her with the truth of futility and she forgot even these thoughts with a solid sense of gratitude.

As beauty can never be tolerated for long, she continues her walk. She knew that there would be other streetlights, willing along the lengths of her sidewalk, waiting to keep her company. She was perpetually in between them.

Withholding from herself the lavish privilege of dissatisfaction, she went smiling on. The sky complained a symphonic fiasco to give (the context?) an ambiance to her thoughts, so she only half noticed. Her mind seemed a hosed-down battleground that remembered anyway. Her eyes held the most persuasive argument for sleep as her blinking became slow and halting. Had she been driving it would be time for coffee, but as her slight stumbling became more regular it acquired its own rhythm: She knew the feeling wasn't dangerous in itself, and she allowed herself to enjoy the closing in that it consisted of. Her frame of reference shifting, everything began to shine in the lighted question of just how comfortable it could be to lay down upon.

Small evidences of the fatality within human nature were placed deliberately on the things/ what her eyes could reach to see. The deserted shopping cart by a lake; the refuse scattered in the grass; the swelling jealousy of one another evident in every fenced yard; the compulsive ruination of anything beautiful, no matter how humble.

And all for nothing. For the thrumming desperation pushing these things into reality from imagination is in itself telling of all wonder with its slight intent. Of beauty, still breathing.

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."