Curiosities

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Fanté is leaving.

I got him the spring before last, just as the windflowers had jutted through the last of the dirty March snow.  Just as the birds began to sing about the world finally allowing them to return to their real homes.  Home is where the heart is, home is where you make it.  Home revolves around the people whom you love.

Fanté, when he was barely the size of my two fists together, slept in my homecoming crown beneath the stool where my green-glazed potted roses climbed the wall, framing the Degas.  One day I found the roses scattered on the ground, the pot missing, and a little cat peering up at the gossamer dancers and their gnarled knotted instructor.  He looked to me, expectant, and scampered across the unkept bed.

I could tell he’d bathed in the dappled sunlight all day, his fur the smell of feral clean, his whiskers still growing.  When the world had abandoned me to its own aims, its own confusion, its own pointless entropy, Fanté waited for me patiently.  When I’d scraped my knees and barked my shins on rock bottom one July night, he slept curled up on my writhing chest, his cheek to mine.  He purred, I remember, the sonic waves of kitten contentment to remind me: All things are possible, given time, effort, and strength.

We can only do our best and pray for deliverance, for purpose, for enough love to salvage what we are from what must come.

Fanté will enjoy the woods, I think.  Perhaps he will remember me as kindly as I will him.

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

I used to think I grew a beard for the naturalism.  The woodsy, outdoorsman look that goes perfectly with wide-patterned flannel and a cold PBR.  I was wrong; it’s to hide my face.  Too much self-divulgence, and you become desperate to keep a bit of yourself to yourself, no matter how superficial and inane and fleeting, no matter how you feel about it in the first place.

They like to say to shoot for the stars, always forgetting that most will burn up in the atmosphere.  Anyways, why stars?  They’re fucking balls of burning gas.

A pretty girl wanted to fool around with me last night.  I was suitably flattered; it’s easy to forget that no one ever sees you how you see yourself.

I’m sick and tired of being confused.  Of introspection, words, and writing.  Especially of empathy; it’s almost unfair how strongly I feel the trials and tribulations of others.  I don’t really feel like being sincere anymore, because I’ve found that whole practice, when mixed with volatile amounts of truth, to be emotionally draining and entirely preoccupying.

I had an epiphany the other night, and I found it particularly embarrassing and unpleasant.  One of those things that you knew was there but didn’t see because you refused to look at it, forgetting that it’s the unwatched flower that grows fastest.  I was reminded of middle school.

There was a girl who used to follow me around like a lost puppy.  She had a sweet disposition, and was pretty in a unique way, and beautiful when she smiled, but, most of all, she was glaringly obvious in her adoration.

By itself, that’s not a bad thing.  For whatever reason, though, something about her didn’t strike me as quite right.  You know, that wretched sixth sense we uphold as the epitome of human nature, as if that were a good thing.  The problem was this: I couldn’t stand up to it.  I don’t have the capacity to hurt feelings, no matter how warranted and/or necessary.  I avoided it like the plague, hoping the whole thing would just go away.  It didn’t.  That girl, not knowing precisely what was going on, an initiate in the convoluted ways men and women interact, wouldn’t let it lie.  It started making me fairly uncomfortable.  So I started making sure I was never where she was at the same time, and that’s how the whole issue was put to bed.

The epiphany: I need to shut the fuck up.

Quite frankly, I’m tired of all of my melodrama.

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Goddammit.

Someone, please, call a zookeeper.  Fuck it, a man with a gun and a social conscience.  He exists, right?  He’s out there, right?

Infatuation is a weed, really.  It grows where you didn’t plant it.  It flourishes in the clay or in sable acid soil.  Sometimes you cannot kill it, cannot excise it to save the plants around it.  Sometimes, though, the weed flowers, and you start to wonder why you wanted to kill it in the first place.  What made me so timid?  I am a gardener, true, but I have always felt ambivalent about how to treat weeds, and one so capable of so many flowers.  I didn’t plant it there, true; but what could be wrong about keeping it around?

I think you know.  I know you know.

So look through these words and see the confusion and possibilities beneath.

Look through these words.