adore.

2011-09-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

I remember when everything was a bowl of cherries. When everything was honey-this and glitter-that, and sugar sweet saccharine peachy-keen words dripped through sentences making a pretty mess everywhere, sliding around the curves of an S, collecting like a rockpool in the hole of an O. The pavements melted in the Summer heat, lemonade was served, magic was something that would fill your lungs with each breath, circle your spine, run through your veins, and in your fingertips electricity would pulse like tiny heartbeats.

And I remember how the glow faded and on everyone's bitten bubblegum lips the same words lived, and I realised that we were all just photocopies in greyscale of something saturated with the brightest of the rainbow colours that we would forever imitate and never be. And why would we want to, and how can we change?

And so I cleared up the glitter and the honey and the stars and trees and dreams. I replaced it with cold hard concrete and ash and the feeling you get when you take off your badge of honour that you were awarded for sadness, and oh how pretty that sadness was but it's time to leave it behind. Now I think that all of your stars, all of that light and the lanterns and the glowing glowing glorious glowing is too bright, it burns, it stings. It is harsh and artificial, I prefer the daylight, the natural light and the shadows that come with it, the shades the shapes the colours the lines. I prefer the natural darkness, all that lies in between the two. I am tired of finding the loveliness in all things lovely.

The rotten, the dusty, the broken, the ruins, the cracking and coughing and banality of everyday existence, this is where I will find the beauty. It is honest and raw. It has good and bad permeating every atom of it's delapidated being. The days will rust and crumble into night, and I will feel it in my bones, it will consume me, with every facet of it's tattered charms.

2011-09-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

Darker nights spill ink across the sky and through gaps in the fences in the backyards of our houses. Darker nights spill ink that flows through the windows and blooms like flowers over all of the walls before falling like dying petals through the cracks in the floorboards to tell the basement a story about the summer that we lost and the winter that will come. Darker and darker still.

2011-09-21T12:00:00.002-07:00

Everyday starts with mist now, which then evolves into gloom which tiptoes around the edges of darkness for a while until falling from the flat side of the earth into night. These are strange days indeed.

2011-09-21T12:00:00.001-07:00

I want to crawl into your boots, crawl into your skin, crawl into your dreams and see things the way that you do. I want to see your thoughts before they make their way out in jumble of words or pictures or actions. Before they get lost in translation. I want to see things in the language of you. Sometimes I feel like I am turning myself inside out just to try and show you the things I want you to see that are inside of me. Before the air hits them, before they turn cold. Maybe. But maybe it doesn't really matter as much as I think, so I'll just go outside and whisper them in the backyard and let the sunlight turn them to gold while the sky sets the trees on fire.

2011-09-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

We are lighting the candles now, celebrating the end of the day. Closing the windows and drawing the curtains. Maybe if we knew there was a full moon perhaps we would have left them open, inviting him in to join us, maybe we would have howled at him like wolves, but we didn't. We never pay attention to the outside world anymore, the seasons are a passing fascination. We never take the roads that stretch infinitely in every direction away from our cocoon. We couldn't leave without flopping aimlessly up and down the pavements, like fish out of water, unable to breathe. Unable to breathe without the close humidity of so many other bodies in such small rooms, and all of the ghosts that cling to them.
So many thoughts, so many words, the spaces become jumbled with static. The air alive, electrifying us all.

We are lighting the candles now in the last sunlight of the day and passing around the drinks that will burn our throats and make our noses numb. We wear the flickering shadows like masks, silently recreating forgotten parties from old photographs. Masquerade balls, costumes, cobwebs.

We dance in secret, we dine in solitude. We light the candles and we laugh and laugh and laugh until the night devours everything and all that is left is an echo of something that once was.

2011-09-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

It is nothing more or less than everything I was ever afraid of, divided into two. All the notes we ever wrote each other, and the paper we wrote them on, the ink permanently telling the world "I love you", slipped into a pocket, kept like a promise. Your hand in mine, our skin and bones tying us together.

2011-09-21T11:54:00.001-07:00

If Autumn is dust, then Spring is a fever. It melted all of the icicles that pinned us to the ground, pinned us down and chilled us. And we fell asleep where we were, on buses or in roads, in secret dens made of bedsheets and glowing with lamplight, a beacon in the dark, the North Star. I think if we all built a den and lit a lamp we could make constellations here on Earth, a reflection of the sky, Cassiopeia in Oxford, Pegasus in Paris. If we map everything out we can never be lost.

We awoke at dawn with sleep in our eyes and the colours had changed, as if the melting snow had washed away the blues and whites of Winter, the colours of the old season running down the roads like paint.

2011-09-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

In the places that things should have been, in the places where cars park and buses drive and people invisibly weave their footsteps from here to there, in those places, there is the snow. The snow that came in the night and chilled us all. Now people's footsteps are no longer invisible, they cry out, "This is where I'm going, this is where I've been", like secrets exposed.

And this is the snow that fills the hollows. The hollows in the gardens and trees and the spaces where thoughts should be, it starts slowly, in silence more snowflakes drift and cling to the others like inseparable fragments of a whole.

The sky is falling, the streets aren't empty anymore.

2011-09-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I want to run away like Igby Slocumb. Not from family and friends or military school like he does, not from anything really at all, unless you can count myself and everything I am afraid of. I want to run to something, or in fact just have a something to run to in the first place. Misfits and bohemians and people with mattresses on their floors, vague job descriptions and vaguer plans. People who party, people who don't. People who love libraries as much as I do, who love coffee and and drink it all the time without feeling sick. People who will take anyone in just to have some company and create a miscellany of vagrants and artists that make joyful cacophonous noise with instruments they can't really play, but try anyway because the sound makes them feel less lonely. People who like bare floorboards and empty cupboards because it makes them think of simpler times, or maybe just because they like to have real reasons to feel sad and emptiness can be a real reason as much as any. Empty houses, empty hearts, empty thoughts.

A place where it's okay to sit all alone in the dark thinking about nothing, where the television is broken and sometimes the only light comes from lit cigarettes and stars. It's okay to write on the walls too. Write your lists, your words, your quotes, your thankyou notes.

"Thankyou for the sleep and the smiles, for the smokes and the cereals, the milk was off but the heat was on. In short, misery loves company and it thanks you for your time." In eyeliner, on the west facing wall, under the fairy lights.

2011-09-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

An open letter to you, to me, to the ghosts hiding in the bathroom. A letter in barely legible handwriting.

These are the things I know. I know that Autumn is coming and I will feel like an animal that needs to curl up warmly and sleep until everything is light and living again. I know that nights will get darker and people will shout and scream in the street. I know that things have beginnings and middles and ends, everything does and always will whether you perceive them or not. I cannot write a beginning, a middle and an end for anything. There are stories that I will never write because there are pieces missing, just like in jigsaws or broken glass.

I know that if you go outside in that short space of time between day and night and look at the sky it will feel so heavy that you won't be able to breathe, you could almost drown in it.
I know that singing in the dark leads to cracked broken voices and so whisperers will be born.
I know that dreams are for dreamers (and dreamers often lie).
I know things that shake me to my bones.

2011-09-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Summer is slipping away now, slipping through the cracks like dust. Gold dust in the afternoon, moondust at night. It is pulling away like the tides.

I listen to my heartbeat sometimes. I wonder if it should beat as fast as it does or hurt like it does when I think of the things and the people and the places I've lost. Little things matter the most. Trampolines, bike riding, cigarette smoke, eyelash curling. Sitting on cars, sitting in cars listening to the radio while sticking to the seats in traffic jams. On buses, walking, running, laying in the grass, bare feet, bare hands, bare souls.

Nostalgia fades faster than polaroids. I want costume parties in forests, lights in the sky, guitars in the grass after midnight, chlorine in my hair, glitter on my cheeks, making memories, making heartbeats, changing tides.

2011-09-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

It rained for days. The mist hung low over the backyards so much that we breathed it in and out like smoke and we walked around like a passion burned inside of us, but really the gloominess of mid-july enveloped us all in it's sticky grey arms and held us tight, fogging our minds. Apathy installed a lull that no amount of dancing could shake. Days of strawberry lollies with no heat to melt them and midday light with no shadows.

It seemed like the world was dreaming, that the tides had pulled us into an endless sleep with infinite skies and hearts that beat the rhythm of the songs that played to our ears alone while slowly the grass grew.

I wish, I wish. But it wasn't like that at all. It was the summer of no sleep. No sleep and no dreams. A summer of 3am sounds and hours of the kind of silence that isn't really silent at all but instead hums, like static and whispers but quieter still. Pages turning under lamplight, papercuts, Elliott singing "drink up baby, look at the stars", thinking. Me and an old radio and the traffic in the night.

2011-09-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

A storm is coming and I'm eating eating eating everything in the house like I imagine I can eat away at it as it curls itself around the very edges of the sky. Swallow it whole and make it go away. And it's Summer so you know the thunder will crack louder than any other time of year (electric light-shows followed by rumbling applause). But everything that comes before is special. It's like a breath held for too long, a pounding headache, all thump thump thump. A pause like no other pause because here I am convinced that time really stops. I mean literally stops, no ticks or tocks, just silence.

The trees and flowers seem to swell and glow green and the sky, the sky is bruised, it looks like the little purple and yellow and green and blue accidents all over my legs, tiny accidents, like falling over. Dizzy skies for dizzy girls. And wondrously sleep will try to steal you away with hazy vagueness of thoughts in the humid heat of the afternoon.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if the storm never came. Would we wait forever? Would we be hypnotized by the bruises and the air that heavily clings to our lungs? Walking sleepers with open eyes and vacant expressions.

But if we waited everytime a storm was coming, would we really ever do anything at all?

2011-09-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

It's six o'clock and I can hear the ice cream van, tinkling nursery rhyme music falling on all ears (If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise...) We used to chase the vans down, plastic jelly sandals clip clopping, stamp stomping on the hot melting pavements. Being careful not to fall over each other in a tangle of limbs, grazing elbows and knees like the time we did on our rollerskates. And then we'd pretend to be drunk on frozen cider lollies, or else get cones that warmed in the last rays of sun sending runny ice cream cascading down our hands and making everything sticky.

Oh for long-lost adventures, bike riding to the ends of the earth, exploring the forests, running too fast down too-steep hills.

And then, when everything was quiet (except for a cricket or two), we would sit in the grass, the grass that was already forming dew-drops, the grass that would give us grass stains on our already grass-stained clothes, and stare at the darkening sky. We were looking for UFOs, heads filled with tales of strange things from watching too much sci fi tv. Or else waiting for the streetlamps to come on and the first stars to appear. Blurry eyed and dizzy, imagining shooting stars and falling stars, willing them to appear. I tried to spy Neptune, but I never had a telescope and perhaps that would have helped.

Then, under half-moon-light we'd hear our parents calling us in, and one by one we would go home. But I clung, I clung fiercely to the night air and sounds. Like a fairground ride that you don't want to end, neon and flashing and sparkling. Like a song that you keep on repeat because you love it, you love it so much it hurts. I cling to it like the humid night air clings to me. Ice cream, strawberries, lawn tennis, pounding heads and pounding hearts, hot hands, cold drinks, magic.

2011-09-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

I wish someone would tell me something incredibly profound. I wish my heart would beat beat beat in time with theirs and things I want to say wouldn't get caught in my throat like my hair gets caught in my fingers and ties itself into knots. I wish the voice in my head didn't say the things it does, because of all the people I can trust in the world I shouldn't be one of them. That's why I listen to music louder than the sounds of the late-night television programs like poker competitions and bad films starring bad actors. And in the middle of the cacophony of sounds the only thoughts I can hear are the singer's, the whisperer's, the poet's, infinitely better and wiser. Wiser even than the stars. I bet they don't trust themselves either. I bet lots of people don't when they've fallen down the rabbit hole and felt a heartbreak or three. Boys didn't break my heart you know, I did. I break it all the time. I'm breaking it right now and I don't even know why.