Hearts of Darkness: An Online Journal

09.22.09

The Boy and His Mother

She blinked in the white sunlight, her eyelids rising and falling like a slow shutter. One arm thrown over her forehead, the other resting on a paperback lying open, pinning down the towel, its pages rustling in the breeze. A comforting sound, she thought, like walking on gravel.

Her mind vacant but for the light and the sounds of the Jersey Shore. She could feel her body browning, thought of silly words like "holga" and "buttermilk" for no reason at all but the mind adrift and the poetry of the sun and wind and water and the way we know things without knowing them, things older than life itself, awake within us and utterly meaningless.

The boy looked on, still as the sand. He studied her brown form, the texture of her skin. He tried to imagine her thoughts, but couldn't. He wondered how much she loved him, thought of waking her to ask. Instead, he inched towards her towel on his belly and kissed her ankle again and agian and again, making odd shapes with his mouth and murmuring his childhood incantation, a worldless, thoughtless, senseless prayer, wondering how high he could count and how long is forever.

8.01.09

The One That Got Away

I imagine him following me off the subway. He catches my arm, looks down into my face, and professes his love in a voice both husky and low. The people on the platform flow past us as we stand there, his hand brushing my hair from my face, our eyes locked, seeing only each other.

I imagine Edward Field's poet-hero, falling to his knees before his lady. I imagine my grandmother in her bathing cap swimming out to the navy ship, calling out to the men on the boat something coy and old-fashioned like "yoohoo, boys!" My grandfather, the young pollock, his life in that moment changed forever.

The man leads me to his apartment -- it is our apartment now. We sleep in and speak softly. He holds me like his wife, he holds me like his mistress. Together we shop for dinner, watch sports, attend shows. We dine out in elegance, plant a garden on the roof. We paint the baby room a soft, velvety color and make love on a tarp in the middle of the floor. Dust particles dance in a beam of light that falls across our bodies in squares, and we giggle at our boldness, at the need for curtains. I imagine the room with a baby in it and wonder if our child will love dinosaurs or spaceships, tigers or monkeys or mummies or whales.

I imagine us growing old together and wonder who will go first. Will it be a phone call in the night, or waking up to a body gone cold? Will a life support system be shut off, the warmth draining from the corpse's hand as it did with my grandfather the day his daughters made the hardest decision of their lives?

I wonder if he wonders about me too. If we'll recognize each other when we meet. If he'll take the train that morning. If we'll know it in an instant. If we'll be introduced by friends. If his voice will sound right. If we'll be thinking of other people. If he'll be too shy to approach me. If it will end in disappointment. If he'll love me forever. If I'll believe him when he tells me that he loves me, just me, that I am all that he will ever want.

6.15.09

Even without street numbers, there was no mistaking the party, what with the twenty some odd German noise jockeys clustered around the entrance to the loft, their hair plastered like wet kittens, smoking in grey hoodies, blazers and jeans. She paid the fare and we spun our long legs out of the cab, breezed in laughing, dark red lipstick, short black dresses, looking neither right nor left. We knew this breed, thirtyish and adolescent.

The party was on the roof. It was hot and raining, but dark enough to let our mascara run. We refused the umbrella and stood around, drinking the alcohol they gave us, meeting people, swaying to beats, watching the dj bounce at his laptop, his face ghoulish, lit from below by the screen.

There was noone there as interesting as she and I were to one another, so we kept our own company and talked about many things. We smoked cigarettes and were brought more drinks by dull, good looking men. The view from the roof was mediocre and the people we met were hip and dull, made weird by drugs, looking warily around, forgetting why they first began to come to these things. The DJs were passing around drink tickets, hoping to meet girls, occassionally succeeding.

She told me a story about her breasts. I told her a story about my younger sister. We were joined by a man wearing a backbpack and drinking Sparks who told us a story about a lost umbrella. We were joined by a second good looking, dull man. He'd performed earlier, but we missed the set. He didn't have much to say and I didn't either, so I pulled him onto the dance floor and we danced, and the dancing felt good and right, like the music was coming from within my own body, and suddenly it was a warm summer night and I was young and free, and we danced knowing that if everyone in the world could dance to this song there would be nothing to be sad about, because we didn't even touch and we were dancing with our eyes closed and I forgot his name and we didn't say a word but we danced and knew that no one is ever alone when they are dancing, yes, we danced and danced and danced.

6.3.09

Mash up at the salon

The thing about the salon was that almost nobody talked about the poetry. That was the idea after all. But poetry is scary stuff. Much easier to discuss the view from the roof.

He named the buildings on the skyline. She could only name two. This made her think about how much she loved to consume the view, like a glass of water, no, like piano music. She was thinking about this when he pointed out that her inability to name things was her greatest defect.

She liked the way he named things. His indexical mind. His lists. But more than that she liked his pride, his need to know and recall. If his concern was etymology, hers, she was sure, was poetry, which she defined as the process of finding beauty and horror in everything. 

She kept remembering moments from the poem. The fact that the woman napped in positions her mother had taught her. The clawed feet of the bathtub. The murderer, the milk.

But then she thought about her own life, the impossible mystery of it. From its origins to its end, and everything in between. And suddenly she didn’t care about art, she only cared to sleep and dream, to be rendered inarticulate if only for a night.

5.22.09

Springtime in New York

“New York is the center of loneliness,” she warned me. We were at a wedding, of all places, and I was moving to the city the following week.

“You’re a very real girl, and real people are hard to find in New York. I hope we can stay friends.” This was his way saying he didn’t want to see me anymore.

“You should call him and say something funny," she said. "Like, ‘I’m outside of your apartment right now. Watching you. With binoculars.’”

“You give away your power," insisted a male friend who never goes out with the same girl more than once.

"Things could be worse - you could be dating Mike,” said Mike’s girlfriend, looking on the bright side of my return to single life.

“The problem with dating in New York is that there are so many options. You might think someone’s pretty great. But then you realize there could be someone even MORE great right around the corner," he said.

“We just knew," said a friend who met her fiancé online. He was her very first internet date

4.1.09

Things I Do Besides Sleep

12:22 amme: Hi Reid. I can't sleep. Just thought you should know. In case your IMs register subliminally, I'm going to suggest things for you to dream about:

1. A country song about a mouse that drowns in a giant vat of butter (which is really, somehow, a song about moving to New York. Why? Because it's a dream).

2. Tina Faye, but hot. She's an advocacy lawyer babe, originally from Bogota but raised in Texas. She plays the viola and is loaded. The two of you fall in love and she decides to fund your magazine (that one is supposed to be a wet dream. Never tell me about it).

3. Your book. You dream the whole thing and write it in one sitting. (You are sad to wake up from that one).

4. Kelcey drops by unexpectedly and makes you micholadas. (That one's a nightmare).

3.23.09

Having Decided There Were A Million Worse Things In The World

She had been locked in her apartment for days, stacking and filing all of her very important papers; tax information, receipts, records and other things Not To Be Thrown Away. That night she dreamed that she bought a shredder. In her dream she could shred stacks of paper at a time, then folders and before long even entire file cabinets. Which only made sense in a dream kind of way, not to mention the little trash can never seemed to get full.

Soon her dream-house filled with light, and there in the corner was the old armchair! The one from her childhood, that she hadn't sat in for years, it had been covered for so long with papers, books, a birdcage and, in this dream for some reason, a stuffed elk head, but never mind, there it was by the window in a beam of sunlight filled with spinning dust particles. She climbed into it, and just like that the spirit of her dead cat jumped into her lap and together they looked out the window at the beautiful light and dirt and trees. A ribbon of steam rose from her perfect cup of coffee and she vowed to not look at another piece of paper so long as she lived, wishing desperately to never have to wake up.

2.14.09

Naked

I

She left the bar. She could see that her two companions wished to be left alone together. Attraction, in her experience, was rare and worth nurturing at all costs, especially among friends. She commended herself for her charitable act and just as quickly realized she wished to continue drinking.

II

At the bar down the street she met a handsome man, an Argentinean. After two pints they had discussed all of her favorite subjects and soon they were kissing right there at the bar. Why not? she thought, until later she noticed the wedding band, and he admitted it, yes, he was married. Well, that's why not, and she left, but by then she'd already given him her card. The next morning he bought a collection of her stories online and the warehouse shipped the book that same day.

III

Her sense of shame reminded her of the summer she modeled for a drawing class. A few of the young men would leer at her as they scraped their easels in mock concentration and she could feel their gaze even through the back of her head. But she needed the money, and at least she wasn't stripping like Nicole's friend from school who made twenty times what she did an hour.

1.26.09

A new song for our girl band:

La Derive (The Drift)

In the cold he shivers by the door
Waiting hands in pockets/ She goes looking for her shawl

There isn't much to say as they walk the avenue
Eyes turned downward/ His feet shuffle/ She takes three steps for his two

In the drift we carry on
Every day a sadder song
Wondering will it be long
Our hearts aren't made for this

At the corner stands a man
He lost everything he had
And he's giving them an agonizing gaze

The wind catches in her hair
But her lover doesn't care
He's remembering his youth, those salad days.

In the drift we carry on
Every day a different song
Wondering will it be long
Our hearts aren't made for this

They duck into a bar/ Misty writing on the wall
Says to love someone means standing by their side

That night it reaches ten below
The old man passed out in the snow
In the paper twenty words tells how he died

In the drift we carry on
Every day another song
Reminding us it won't be long
Our hearts weren't made for this

1.11.09

I am reading Metamorphosis and Heart of Darkness. I take them with me to the gym to read while I cycle. They also get wedged in my purse with my makeup, wallet, keys, pens, cell phone and whatever else. The book of Kafka stories was new when I bought it a couple of months ago, but it already seems to be much older. The corners have begun to fray and the pages are dog eared and dirty. Heart of Darkness is a 1950's Signet Classic paperback. It was lent to me by my friend Ibby on Thanksgiving while we were visiting her family's vacation home in upstate New York. We found it in a room that seemed to never have visitors - a library of sorts, with floor to ceiling bookshelves full of books that hadn't been touched in more years than I have been alive. The book, like the others, had gone yellow. The glue from the binding was turning to dust faster than I could read it, and by now it is little more that a sheaf of looseleaf pages that I struggle to keep in order as I read the seaman's eternal tale, hungry to know if he ever makes it out of the jungle.

As I read, I wonder about the life cycle of creatures and things. My paperbacks, like my cats, are ill fated. They suffer terrible deaths and tend to have shorter lifespans.

At a video exhibit with Andrew, Metamorphosis and Other Stories slipped out of my purse at some point in the evening. When I went to retrieve it from coat check, a man sitting in a chair by the counter gave me a heavy look and said,

"Oh, you're the one reading the Kafka."

And the phrase, and how he said it, seemed ominous. In that moment I felt certain that he knew something about me that no one else in the word knew, that no one else could, or would ever, know. I thought about it a lot. This morning, I can't even remember the man's face. And of course I have no way of knowing what he meant. He may have meant nothing at all.


12.17.08

I met a man who made me wonder if the capacity to feel emotion is a fundamental component of humanity.

What if a boy was so afraid to feel that he cut his emotional capacity off at the root. What if this boy grew up to be a man who wore his face as a mask, who forgot the sound of his own sob, and lived in a constant state of numbness and cared not.

What if, even were he to feel an emotion, he would not recognize it as such. And were he to recognize it, he wouldn't begin to know how to express it, the articulation of emotion being a tricky thing for anyone, but virtually impossible for someone like him who had never learned the language in the first place.

But what if the most horrible thing of all was that his feelings had been repressed for so long without air that they had long perished without having reproduced and his capacity to feel anything beyond bodily pain and pleasure was, for all practical purposes, extinct within him.

The mere thought of it drove me to tears. I was at the airport terminal waiting for the plane, and was still crying silently as we began to board. I found myself wishing it to be untrue. Wishing that he too was capable of despair and joy, and that he seemed this way only because he didn't love me at all.

The woman in line saw my flushed cheek and sought to comfort me. "Count yourself lucky," she said. "Some people don't feel anything."

11.30.08 (Week in Quotes)

“I can’t believe it’s not Butters!” – Alison on the audacity of a delivery man named Butters sending someone else to drop off the goods

“I had my hubris removed when I was a child” – on my annoying tendency to self-deprecate

“If it’s gassable by the Nazis, it’s good enough for us” – Gideon, a real Jew, in response to my false claim that I was a quarter Jewish

“I’d rather find out I was pregnant than find out I had Guinea Worm” – Jen in a conversation about scary diseases

“Redonkulus” – Alex’s computer (on speech command mode)

11.13.08

Ended up at a bikini bar in Hells Kitchen with Alex, Meg, Zena and Nate.

Good times, bad whisky.

11.10.08

Annuka’s Finnish friend Iris came for a visit. We stood on the roof, and she told me to know my own value. The next weekend, I was saying the same thing to Terra. Sometimes, I think, all women need to hear that from a girlfriend.

When I told Annu that I had a voice like Nico, I was more or less kidding. What I really meant was that I love to sing, but that my voice is quite plain. But her last band, Animals of the Forest, broke up when she left Finland, and now she is starting one in New York. She found a bassist and a drummer, and I found a sixty-dollar Yamaha keyboard with a MIDI connection, so it looks like we’re all set.

And what costume shall the poor girl wear
To all tomorrow's parties

They were an electro-feminist-punk band. I’ve been getting into the spirit of it. My bangs are growing in and I’m letting them lie there, shaggy on my forehead. I bought blue eye shadow to match my blue leg warmers. I feel like the only person in New York who wears bright colors anymore, or at least the only person who takes the E train to Manhattan at 9:30 in the morning. Sometimes, when I plan an outfit, it’s color that is my guiding principle. But more often I dress according to rhythm.

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where
To all tomorrow's parties

I love subway fashion. Girls with rabbit gloves and blue velveteen jackets. Boots, cuffs, Russian scarves. Writers with receding temples and fragile skin. The colors of fingernails and nylon. The intimacy of strangers watching each other sleep. Sometimes, a subway ride is more fun than the party the night before.

And where will she go and what shall she do
When midnight comes around

Damion took me to my first Chelsea opening. It was a site specific sculpture – a large steel crescent with a keyhole crevice you could walk through. It was okay. It was no silver-fish-bullet-erupting-in-the-desert like the one I dreamed about in college, but it was no Tom-Robbins-converted-airstream-turkey-sculpture either. It was somewhere in between, like Serra or Neville, but smaller and more awkward. It only took two minutes to take in, I complained – I took a ten minute cab ride for that?

The cab ride, of course, was part of it.

Know your value, she said, and I tried. Life is short said the cabbie, and it is.

She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown
And cry behind the door

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KiU5P4ihIQ

10.22.08

At dinner, she realized she was laughing like Her As A Young Girl. She's been remembering her lately. Or rather, there seems to be more of the girl in her – downcast-eyed, dimpled, looking inward and smiling.

We are all on the same spectrum of childhood, she thinks. Her parents, people on the street, the old ones.

Where is that place she remembers, where they were witches and runaways in-no-need-of-rescue, seeking the expansive freedom of rooftops and trains?

(Please, let it be here. She grows tired of looking.)

No, that is the girl speaking. Looking at the camp across the river, feeling far away, deranged and bewildered.

(Where is the boy with the dinosaur, the mean one that bites her toes, with his sad, sad, very sad song?)

All grown up now, she writes essays about prisoners and superheroes. She is the envy of every feminist, and no man will take her to dinner, not in a million years. Unless, apparently, he is 46 and lives in New Jersey.

So when the young man asks her to dinner, she accepts (shyly). And eats because she is hungry. And laughs, and laughs, and laughs like a girl.

10.15.08

Bourgeois Comfort

I asked the man who sold me the flowers to replace the orange lily because its petal was broken.

There is a yard with a bird feeder five stories below. A flock dances around the feeder to the rhythm of a sheet drying in the wind - they are riding the same current. With a view of Manhattan spread out before me like Mecca, it is lonely on my rooftop. I listen to music, pocket my hands for body heat and remind myself that I am part of it. None of this would exist without me to perceive it. Ah well, feel better already.

Back in the loft, Ingvar moved the lilies from where I placed them on the counter. To him, my tastes are crude and provincial. To me, his tastes are modern and minimalist. Too European.

I have friends that won't even live with roommates at our age. I revel in this, feeling, for a moment like a true bohemian, then loathe myself for the thought.

I am selfish. I live in constant fear that something will happen to one of my precious things. My vintage purse - what if it is snatched? My ipod, my laptop. What if it falls and breaks? My phone! I haven't even thought about Clara, who is 98. I should send her the picture of the two of us together. I should send it to her with a note on a little card. She would read it over and over out loud to her daughter. She loves cards. I should send it to her. But will I? Will I really?

Later that night, over a beer, I complained to Peter that I was feeling bourgeois. "Embrace it," he said.

10.6.08

Things I have passed as I run along the waterfront and around Mc Carren park: 1. Abandoned streets littered with used condoms and other debris. A sort of Polish Gotham - an industrial wasteland reminiscent of the boat cemetery Jeremy and I used to visit out in Flour Bluff. 2. A Hasidic baseball team. 3. Elderly people shopping in their nightgowns. 4. Young people with tight pants, forest animal jewelry, heavy boots and scarves. They are between the ages of 25-35. They are on skateboards, bikes, scooters, benches, coming to, and from, cafes. Sometimes they are sitting on a bench holding a book and looking at everything. 3. A chain of bodegas winding through the neighborhood. If you climb a tall tree at night, they look like a string of christmas lights. 4. A cat that looks like a squirrel and a rat that was unmistakably a rat. Neither was afraid of me, not one bit. 5. A nine year old boy playing electric guitar in front of a psychic shop where an elderly gypsy woman sits in the storefront window, waving me in with a knowing, impish smile. She reminds me of my grandmother, which is enough to make me not want to have my fortune told, not even for five bucks. She's gonna tell me to marry a rich man, and what single girl wants to hear that bullshit. Honestly.

10.2.08

My first night in my new place. A room in a warehouse style loft in Greenpoint, a polish-slash-hipster neighborhood in Brooklyn. I live with two handsome, low key writers from the Midwest (real writers, not assholes. They're super talented, poetry and fiction. Even have day jobs in the non-profit sector. Check out Peter's amazing blog: My Shadow Is A Cat ). Third roommate is an opera-loving Icelandic architect named Ingvar. We all spent the first night having shots of Icelandic Schnapps and discovering a shared love of Mexican Surrealism and ghost stories. There is a cold breeze and the sound of jackhammers drifting in my window. My morning's mission is to find the best cup of coffee in the neighborhood and drink it on the roof, taking in the breathtaking view of Manhattan.