You're the first, the last and the 'right now'.

and she is utterly convinced that everything she touches turns into dust

we talked about you, we doubled the dosage.

carries a lot of suitcases but all of them are empty because she's expecting to completely fill them with life by the end of this trip & then she'll come home & sort everything out & do it all again

storypeople

How many people can you love before it's too much? she said & I said I didn't think there was any real limit as long as you didn't care if they loved you back.

storypeople

lift yourself up

It is heartbreaking to listen to a child crying over the phone for an hour. Instead of feeling sad and helpless about it, what could have been done? What is the best that can come out of a situation as such? It is always about the doing, the stuff you got to strut, there is no feeling. The blues are bad. If it is negative energy, it must be swept under the rug.
Even this is a feeling that should be deleted.

We were poor, struggling. Climbing walls that fall, stirring buckets of paint with chopsticks. Surely we will someday see that we were having the time of our lives, and all the ladders we had, had only taken us higher.

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'

It is strange. The unreality of it seems to enter one's real life, penetrate into the bones, and make the very heartbeats pulsate illusions through the arteries. One's will becomes the slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone. A strange state, a trying experience, a kind of fiery trial of untruthfulness. And one goes through it with an exaltation as false as all the rest of it. One goes through it, -- and there's nothing to show at the end. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

-- Joseph Conrad, "To E. L. Sanderson" ( 1899 )²

午夜的兩點半
我走不進夢鄉
時間在逃亡
悲傷還在原地方

If you turn up tonight, my life will not change.
If you don't turn up tonight, my life will not change.

this is for my soul sister.

For now I think I've ran out of affinity with this occasionally heartbreaking city.
Or patience, to be less romantic.

Proust says, the only possible paradises are those we have lost.

I did not roll my film properly.

And if the snow buries my,
my neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying
then I'll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my window to yours.

You climb out the chimney and meet me in the middle,
the middle of the town.
And since there's no one else around,
we let our hair grow long
and forget all we used to know,
then our skin gets thicker
from living out in the snow.

You change all the lead
sleeping in my head,
as the day grows dim I hear you sing a golden hymn.

Then we tried to name our babies
but we forgot all the names that,
the names we used to know.

But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
and our parents' bedrooms,
and the bedrooms of our friends.

-Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by Arcade Fire

fffound

'There is no use trying,' said Alice, 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the queen, 'When I was your age, I always did it for a half hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

-Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

+source

if we're back to sixteen.

In our younger days, we named some boys in school after different parts of a house.
I liked Attic, because he had floppy rooftop hair.

"What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs."
-Matthew 10:27

Flawed is her vision, her awkwardness. Her face has blemished, she hardly brushes her hair. She is not conventionally pretty, although to me she is beautiful.
-The Crow and the Crab

My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

half-focus

i am giving you homework to do
rub a red bean over your lips

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

-Jack Kerouac

The Horse Hospital

Umfeld- A walking rainbow, Magnum photographers, "let's knit a pony!", cobbled streets, five stacked hats, teacakes, the drifter and the gypsy, a teapot with knitwear, paper-boat hat, ladder with lights, the Norwegian woods, clowns and portraits, "because i like it".

+source

I see monsters

studded

So much, yet so little.

It is as impossible as needless to set down the innumerable crowd of thoughts that whirled through that great thoroughfare of the brain, the memory, in this night's time.

-Robinson Crusoe, Defoe

notes to mark my days:

a. my days are a train through a tunnel
b. as long as we are in the same city
c. my love for strangers because they can amount to anything yet nothing
d. the perfect fantasy game
e. may you go with the sweetest dreams
f. downstairs light turns into upstairs light, playground lover it is bedtime
g. for we are only just too mortal
h. we were once, we-were-onces
i. life is too short, y is yes and n is no
j. balloons clouding my ceiling, the sky is here
k. this giant seashell on my living-room ceiling
l. when i touch your denim knee spot, our souls meet
m. smashed stained glass at the bottom of my mirror, it has been a month
n. heart it races
o. exquisite disaster
p. golden spot on my finger joint
q. i hear my heartbeat when i cover my ears
r. this man with three yellow balloons, let go and they will let you fly
s. courage, she said. courage, she repeated.
t. we are greater than we know
u. do not look at me with love, its placeable gestures
v. i eat sugar before bedtime so i can taste something saccharine sweet in my sleep
w. camisoles and garlic toast
x. yelling through the collapsing roof-- i know i know and i roll back to my dreams
y. rain slicked roads
z. stirring my tea, a spoon in the sink

"If dreams and images in our head make up a human, I think he/she will come out to say thank you, for making me as real as can be."

-MAV

The little sister we lost, let us set the table for seven, you left too soon, come back oh you will never be.

Georges Seurat.
Gray Weather, La Grande Jatte.
1888. Oil on canvas.

Flash- instant of time or of dream without time; inordinately swollen atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a yet formless, unnameable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet visible and that language necessarily skims over from afar, allusively. Words that are always too distant, too abstract for this underground swarming of seconds, folding in unimaginable spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash on the unnameable, weavings of abstractions to be torn. Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. Word flesh. From one to the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invisible.

-Stabat Mater

Are dreams better dreams when they remain as dreams?

Closure

A Lesson Taken.

One night,

riding pillion on a friend's bike (read: bicycle, not motorbike- snort) I think I almost know what romance is. Disgustingly sweet. Hanging on for your dear life, ambushed with the possibility of crashing and dying together. Cruising through deserted roads, adorned with glowing orange streetlights. A thickened silence when we pass by a row of trees daintily decorated with Christmas lights. The cool metal cutting through my skin and bones. Getting stalled in the middle of the road, surrounded by cars on both sides, going nowhere while the green man’s walking faster and faster. Laughing and shrieking, when he swerves left and right and pretends to almost crash into a wall.

And when it was time to get off, for a second I could not remember how to walk.

Crippling insanity.

Sick sweet roses.

When ten minutes feels like an hour.

Hair

A Walking Slumber

I am walking, I am searching. What I find or do not receive does not matter.

The warm presence that gathered my stray hairs into a ponytail while I’m concentrating on finishing my porridge, the hand that held a sugar doughnut peeping in through the windowsill - everything blends into the air, bound with a fragility that permeates through my being as I stroll past the playground. This, so thin it could possibly break. Kids, making merry in their untucked school uniforms, carelessly carefree.

I remember another day of visiting old ghosts, when I returned to the old church building for the first time in a long time, and when we played basketball together again, after so many years.

The two oil drops in my spoon are wobbling, they must be cold but I will keep my gaze.

This is really touch-and-go, it does not do justice but I have places to go and ticks to make on my list. All these letters I wrote beginning with Dearest, I am sending all my memories and moments tucked inside these fragments of paper, I am counting on someone to help me remember, help me never to forget too much. And someday we will sit together to remember, and never go away.

2:00 A.M., I wake to rain, apartments dark where other travelers sleep.

-li-young lee’s the winged seed

Saxophone

And its soul.

each time you light a cigarette from a candle

a sailor fails to return home from sea.

Photographer: Bruce Davidson

you made my day(:

"I think I had more confidence because you encouraged me."

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities trans. William Weaver

So I cleaned up those chocolate chip cookie crumbs.
Because I was angry looking at them.
I'm sorry.

Image: The Selby

Packing bags and leaving in a huff..

why not do something about the baggage?

Night high.

5 ladies, 1 car and a great deal of laughter and madness. To the extent that I had to do a cockroach laugh.

On a sidenote and for memento's sake, here's also what we picked up at Holland Village;

i. Olive Theory
ii. Love Language Theory
iii. Substitute Theory
iv. Proxy Theory
v. New Carpet Theory

A holiday goes missing if I don't sit by the window and read my maps.

And when i see you

I really see you upside down

But my brain knows better

It picks you up and turns you around

-A Lack of Colour, Death Cab For Cutie

how to make you real

Out of a scrap of paper I chanced upon:

I want

to love you simply,

without fear, without metaphor,

but it is difficult

in English.

It is difficult to imagine how we are

together,

gecko to the other in the permeable

air.

You live in me,

outside me.

- Rindu, by Isabela Banzon

Bon Voyage Johanna!

This sky
Where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love
Love

-Hafiz

"to want, to want and not to have"

toothbrushes all over the country
just one of those lips
it could be something i ate
an abashed affliction
plunging under blanketed limbs

a missing cup
says one cannot touch an epiphany
with words
words alone
shall chase this forest
you are running in
chimney smoke clouds as
i sit and sew your dreams
at the edge of your forest

Image credit: Denise Grunstein