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| it's 6:17 a.m. dawn pales the sky. above me a woman gets ready for her day. i imagine her wearing a heeled shoe. there's a quality to how her weight strikes the floor, and each hollow stair on her way to slamming the front door that tells me it's a heeled shoe. now she is gone. right now she is moving through the light of dawn that grows brighter like a cymbal that crashes down between stories and stories of cymbals, growing exponentially until it's demise in night. occasionally i have these "days". times in which i cannot fall asleep, times that bridge night or day, times i fill the void with whatever i can find.
these treks have carried me through poetry, the history of countries i will never visit, pornography, trying to play music, pale howlings at the moon, drinking. there is a darkness a person can visit only to be greeted by dawn; a fickle vine your mind can work itself into only to be calmed and forgotten.
i live with a woman now. she is good for me. so far, i'm only visited by these insomniac spells when she's away.
the apartment grows tan, and pink, and ochre. the sun comes up. the woman in heels boards a bus and goes to work. the doors of my apartment become a sickly green; they grow tall and i want to shut them. they are the color of rain boots.
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| there's so much light and space and air in my apartment i really don't know how to handle it.
the quality of light at six a.m. in this new place is comparable to high noon at my old apartment. light is good. it makes painting easier. but it's winding my circadian rhythm into a death spiral. it's kind of nice waking up at 5:45 thinking it's really ten but not when you went to bed only a few hours earlier. also there's a bird that is perfectly triangulated between what i'm guessing is a very bright light and my bedroom window. birds make very specific noises when they think it's dawn and this bird seems to think it's dawn from about midnight to five a.m. my natural response to this sound is to get up, make some eggs and tea, and get ready for the day.
being awake for twenty hours does have its up side though. i've finished some paintings and have rediscovered the desire to do a painting a day. i've organized my books into piles of what i've read, what needs started or finished, what i'll probably never read, and art books. i just feel better.
there is free internet here that is faster than what i was paying for. this will save me twenty bucks a month which will either go towards buying my klopfstein easle or a bottle of burbon.
well, i have work to do.
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| i am about to take one precarious step into the murky waters of living with a girlfriend. that's right xangaland! it's been ages since i've posted any rumblings of my life and the need has overtaken me.
now that i've worked the long teeth of winter from my hide, i've found myself in the company of someone that likes me. we've spent so much time together that my apartment has fallen into an even more dilapadated state than is usual. it's long stretches of time that my personal effects have to endure between my visits. dishes aren't washed, laundry remains soiled. i live out of a bag and small pile of clothes at her place. there's a constant sheen of day old sweat on me and my hair is always fucked up. the only logical thing is to join these halves in a new, bright, big apartment.
it's in logan square. there's a painting room. really, i'm so excited about the whole thing i can't make my hands type. but also, there's a little fish at the bottom of my stomach and it's found a little string. it's working this string loose with it's jaws. it's tugging it out and defining a new fear in its work.
the fear is not me and danny. it's not my new found sojurn to work. the strings in the teeth of the fish run all the way up to places like alaska and grad schools that i can't name. they're being unraveled from the neighborhoods of chicago. there is and has been a continental drift between me and those i care quite deeply for yawning over the past months.
i've had calving friendships throughout my life. well, i guess we all have. and it's not that i think i have to chose between girlfriend + apartment, or all my bohemian friends, but really, i mean fuck, where have they been? i live in chicago for chrissake but i've never felt more off the map.
i don't place value in facebook, clever comments on pictures, joining groups or any of that paralife nonsense. can we please have a dinner party? how i miss wine and candle light. how i miss gently sweating in a room full of people listening to a new poem. i miss talking drunkenly at two in the morning about a half finished painting that embarasses me. and this isn't nostalgia. this isn't a bitter twenty six year old reminicing about college years. this is someone that knew they were part of something unique and good. someone that's been distracted by solitude and cheap whisky. i've had my head down for two years and now i'm looking up, bleary eyed, but no one's in the room.
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| i've been reading and sleeping and drinking a lot. i've kept my mind whirling like a dervish to block out thoughts of josh. honestly, his death has lost a lot of its intensity, but it still hangs over my head at night.
the first meeting of my new job is tomorrow. i'm very excited. still, i'm looking for something to replace the farthings.
i am very happy with my girlfriend. we spend a lot of time together and haven't seem to tired of one anothers presence.
i am poor but things are good.
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| sheol: a city first built with mud and ladders; then, at the second suicide, scaffolds of bone and fire. and now, now that a third friend has killed himself sheol has become a metropolis rooted at my core. it is a chest of ghosts that will never vanish. look, look how i turn the key. look how they buckle and break. look as they twist down on themselves, smaller and smaller, to burst out again, and spin back down down down as an extant memory.
like the distance of a star that needs triangulation i have had one two three friends that have pointed me in the direction of utter despair. the first used a car and garage, the second a pack of pills. the third the third the third......
tonight, walking home, i came upon two sidewinding children carrying coats. it was breezy and warm. they talked to their nanny about their popsicles about anything. suicide makes everything tremendous. the waft of cheap cigarettes reminded me of decks and useless drunken rabble. of god conversations and risk games. of barbecues in the rain, burst pipes, snowflakes on stairs, god in a closet.. and i thought no matter your spiritual belief josh is now dead and he will never see beauty again. he will never see children carrying popsicles and balloons at the beginning of spring ever again.
(and now, at this moment, a neighbor is beating a dryer below my apartment senseless [it ate her quarters]. he will never experience this again.)
and of course guilt kicks in, flowering a tree only whisky cuts.
once, joshua leavelle and i rolled back an old couch from a wall that was to be painted yellow. he made the first big strokes. shirtless, we contemplated or color decision. after, in a golden lit five o'clock, we saw...
hope? a future? the house was rubble and soggy carpet. like our color choice, moving there was questionable at best, but i think a good decision in the end. the floor of the world was like the floor in our house: it could break at any moment.
he could be moody and sad. he said fuck a lot. but there was a generosity of spirit that was unquenchable. i can't imagine who he became in those last days.
so now is when i pick up the pieces of josh and mold them into a little doppelganger, now there is a heavy turn of a key, now i place him gently in a small golden lit room, the only bright room in sheol, now the door shuts and the key is turned back, now my eyes drop to the floor, voice drops to a whisper, now my shoulders slump all under the weight of my new citizen.
in suicide there is no silver lining. there is no rationalisation. there is a bird in a cage that doesn't understand the bars. there is despair. there is endless night.
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