Solitude.

Solitude means tilting back and saying anything to the ceiling, means taking inventory of yourself, prodding out the weak spots and mending yourself like a sock, peeling at all those other skins until you’re nothing but bones and stories. Being alone means finding some grain of ambition, some little coal of desire underneath all your ropey necessities and habits, slicing down to the tiny thing that makes you open your eyes in the morning, makes you go into the world despite all the things that scare you, despite that feeling that you will be found out, that those weak spots are bleeding into the water, despite the daily inundation of dread, despite the heaviness of wearing skin thick enough for other to see and feel you, despite having to exist as a series of arbitrary facts and figures that are irrelevant to the boiled down jelly of your essence.

Solitude means answering that ominous knock that comes in the midnight of your unconscious, means listening to the wavering decibels of your own voice; being alone means you don’t have to hold yourself in contrast to the other, to scrutinize the purple flaws of your skin and the achy gaps in your character, to count the lapses of judgment accumulated in your history, which you wear all across your shoulders, tangled in your hair. Instead, being alone means letting all the events of your past, all your loud regrets rest, simply exist in stillness, factual and whole and okay.

How to be.

Here is me being useless and surrendering to the futility of my ant-hill life. I guess we’re all going nowhere, busy in carpeted rooms that smell like popcorn, that sit against our souls in greenish despair — we’re all going nowhere, going to the copy room and running our fingers over hot pages of meaningless text that we’ll press into some other hands and later, come home to our lovers, and have nothing to show. Working up to, working on, and never leaving, spinning in the endless spiral of our old stories, and getting lost in the familiar grooves of our once-upon-a-times, and here we are, clacking away and muttering with sore throats, stapling and shaking hands and trading facts. The fact is that we are sitting very still in all this claustrophobic motion, hoping for a way out. Fuck.

There’s a chance of showers, dust storms, and a welling up in my chest that will make me cry small tears and open and close my hands, wordless with desire and nowhere to put it. I am not enough people, I am only me, bruised shins and freckles, and no idea how the fuck to be. I remember sitting in the temple and wondering if I was comfortable, even in my own head, reverberating with the music of gongs and the sigh and murmur of all the sad fucking people, so sad, so heavy, with the burden of our limited years, all the dying, every day, all the living, all the choosing. And it feels so hard, but it’s the only thing we’ve ever done.

Outside the parking lot is bright, and there’s my car, cracked windshield and cluttered seats, rattling speakers and streaked windows, and a few things that I carry around from here to there, and back, spending long hours sitting and letting the Californian landscape rush past on either side. What the fuck am I even waiting for? More time to elapse behind a window, with all my fears bunching up around my bones until they grow solid and unmovable, imaginary zeros to march away from my bank account, despite my lack of motivation? I am not supposed to be this petrified person with a life behind walls, with boxes and stale letters, am I?

Yesterday.

Good morning, my name is Tressa. This is the first day of the rest of my fucking life. Outside, there are loud chickens, screaming from behind the fence. Mishka is pawing at her bone, trying to pull an elusive treat out of its hollow center, where Casey shoved it before he left to skateboard. There is a wax stain on the tablecloth I sewed. There is a passing ambulance. There are two cinnamon buns growing cold on a baking dish next to the stove. There is warm coffee in the pot, and cold coffee in my mug, the green mug, which I do not like.

Today I am thinking of taking Mishka for a walk. I am thinking about going to the bookstore, or the library, but the thought is also exhausting. I am thinking of going to the art store, or walking, or staying.

I wonder what other people do all day. I wonder if I should cut my fingernails.

Other things I’m considering are: turning the tablecloth to hide the stain, making small books with scrap paper, going back to sleep. I don’t think that’s an option because I’ve had too much coffee, and besides, if I sleep in the middle of the day, I’ll wake up with a headache.

Stop the squirming.

 

Stop that squirming,

with your blackhole anxiety,

transition dreams and pockmarked skin,

there are certain people and then

there are others.

Displacement is not replacement,

personality is a fluctuating element, susceptible

to time and rejection.

Don’t forget to dig up love,

don’t forget that you can’t dance but you do,

don’t forget,

bald bird,

that you are just another indoor cat

before the open door.

Your secret hands are no secret,

self pity is no hot commodity and hot days

make you like this:

sticky, stuck, irritable.

And your lungs, too, may be cloudy

and thick,

but breathe through the gunk.

And your eyes may be cloudy

with distance,

but don’t blink the time away.

And your skin may be cloudy

and lonesome,

but it’s still translucent;

so the only choice is to be the muscles and the blood

the only choice is to be the bones and the sinew

the substance and the soul.

Heave

jangle of anxiety

nameless knot, a’tangle

sudden thirst for the drastic

bared skin and ink, needles, hard rocks, pounding muscles, heaving flesh, yellow bruises, rushing wind, taut vocal chords strumming, hollow echoes, spraying dirt

and here within the dull bluish light

you drone—

foe, fiend, friend

the bland blabbing nonsense, lesbian

interpretations, you reduce inspiration to

some groveling textual paste

sludge to be sorted, reeking dead words

to stack

and separate

and sterilize;

outside the sunshine glimmers in absolute liquid intangibility

outside, beauty is a thing as varied and monstrous and fluctuating as

pungent and sweat-beaded

clawed up and stinging,

scuffed and scarred arching back,

as some pock-marked tooth-sweet neck

            raspberry red, hot with surging blood,

loud and discordant as

jagged breath through swollen, wet lips—

nothing is pure and simple

nothing is clean and true—

life is only worthwhile as some sticky

            half-guilty, heavy-lidded ecstasy

something to be eaten up and ravished

to throw yourself upon

with naked, shameful abandon

to grasp at with greedy fingernails

            hungry, groping limbs

shadows running slantwise all across the bared,  imperfect flesh

traversing goosebumps and pink scabs

            with trembling fingertips

nerves exposed like the dirty rafters in some split-open squat

wide open

and submerged in wet adrenaline

ferocious, determined chance

absolute surrender—

I hope to not live in the stillness of black and white lines and

immense, immaculate care

but to spend myself in some exhausted heave

to drop dead in a morbid tangle of sweet sickly memories

splayed out, vulnerable as birth

and all mixed up in the reverberating echoes

of a million ecstatic, frenzied souls

each intensely devoted to the vibration of their own shadowy selves

intensely devoted to the exploration of their inky abundance

            boundaries

and the limits of this strange, rippling sea

            of possibility and pleasure

            of dark and velvety aching

            of celestial, stinging uncertainty