I met her a day in November
Since then, she rises and falls
With the tide
And flaunts her gravity
Every time I fall
I open my mouth to write
Yet
My notebook is as empty
As the girl
Not of content
But of substance
While
The scratches on her come and go
With the tide
And flaunt their brevity
Every time she falls
What a terrible mistake
To let go of something only
Because I like it more than I want to
Yet
The galaxies separate
From one
Another
Why shouldn’t
We
I just wrote and posted. I also promised myself I’d keep it up daily, but I haven’t written since.
O.K.¹
¹Your writing is best when it’s not about her. That night you made a bonfire in her car, you kissed her unlike you’ve been wanting to forever. You could taste the Schrödinger under her tongue. I think she kept you there. You opened your eyes just in time to catch hers closing. I remember the many times you hid from her behind your beard. Your craven refusal to speak up. Picking pieces of lint off her shirt like picking off caveats. Both of you laughing at her jokes only in a Penrose-sided rendezvous. Laughter with overlapping tangents of nothing that go on too long. You may think you don’t understand it, but you do, when she disappears for a week’s stay with her soft skin sheets and her dinosaurs and her tiaras. When she shuffles past and the world goes away, the touch is nowhere near as rough as your skin remembers. There are still scars on you, none of them at all by any sort of accident. She needs you there as little and as much as she shows. She tells you every day in all the ways she knows how. You walked away. The night of the bonfire, you kissed her, and then you walked away. God, I need scotch. And her lips. Her lips. Her lips. Her lips.²
²Her lips. Her lips. Her lips. Her lips. Her lips.
There she was, eyes and lips and hair and holding a good book¹.
¹A row of books.
A young woman’s hand caresses the multicolored spines, as if to let her fingers decide. She chooses one and takes it away. We linger on the empty² space for a moment.
She sets the book back into place, spine side in.
²I need to choose a version of this script and just shoot it. It’s been way too long. This picture is from the first time I auditioned anyone for The Post-it Girl, and that was over two years ago.
What are you thinking?¹
¹It’s a tricky thing to ponder. I always disliked it when she² asked that question. It’s illusory to pretend that we can bridge the gap between her private thoughts and mine, even when if they’re one and the same. Maybe they’re not; this coming from the optimist. For her, it’s a dangerous game we play when attempting to decipher the actions of others. I think the innermost thoughts of others are star-like in their distance. Every person is like a distant planet and two distant planets will never be anything except the faint light they reflect toward one another. At the same time, I think that we’re closer than that, that we can, maybe not decipher, but at least have a pretty good idea of what we’re thinking based on our actions. I’d rather think of people as subatomic multiverses of bubbles, because when they touch, they inadvertently merge into one another and inevitably affect each other. One person’s consistently experienced, historical universe is another person’s hypothetical one. I don’t know. Maybe what I really dislike is that, really, she never asks what I’m thinking. That she doesn’t care or that imaginarily she knows. Either/or. What I know is that those moments in which we’re lost in thought, her in hers and me in hers mine, happen an incalculable number of simultaneous times and, in at least one, our thoughts coincide perfectly, creating a respite from space. That’s just my Fermi estimate; this coming from the realist. But I know what she means. It’s a dangerous game we play when attempting to decipher the actions of others. As far as I can tell, two distant planets will never be anything except the faint light they reflect toward one another.
²The she in question is not the she in this picture.³
³Have you ever looked at one thing and seen another? Interesting photographs make for interesting thoughts.
I kiss all the girls just to forget one. It’s been nine months since I said here that I wanted to publish something without going over it first. I wanted to use this as a journal. But I’m as ingenuous at writing as I am at talking to girls. Not that they’d know the difference. I seem to fake it well. That, or I just referred to all of them as girls instead of women to not use the word ingénues. All of them except one. I like this and I don’t like this. I’m not really myself with any of them, and I’m least myself with her. I hate this and I don’t hate this.
What if¹ the closest I get to the moon is now?
¹I really should start drawing more. This is the last thing I’ve done and it was, what, eight months ago²?
²Feb 26, 2012.
She’s working on the superunification¹ of art and science.
¹In every entropy equation, in every Feynman diagram, you’re the one variable that I can do anything with and still get rational answers² for.
²Funny thing about answers is, having them isn’t as satisfying as building the courage to ask for them.
