From Sept 9 to Today.

I left on a trip, leaving behind a binding of collected works I have written in the past months. I had let my mom read the beginning pages of work—not realizing that she was interested in reading the entirety of what lay between the covers. Of course I do not mind, perhaps that is the melding of my openness and rawness. I never think to edit, to hide, to not permit certain eyes to run across my words and provide no explanation immediately after. I want the reader to situate themselves—to dismiss rationale, facts as they know them. I want the reader to enter a reality that I have designed; a reality that is as true as it is not—a reality that is undecided, yet determined.

Story short, I came home and she approached me about the writing and in particular a certain piece. A piece I had not thought much about from September 9, 2007. She said she could not get the writing, the story, out of her head. That she couldn’t talk to my dad about it, but that she tried to with someone else. She was concerned that it had all been true, that I had lived a life between the walls I talked about that she had not known. She felt responsible.

As a writer, this is what I yearn for. Once you are recognized for your craft, you have the ability to offer off your truth, your reality—you can say anything is so, if you sense it to be. You call the shots, you design the history, you reconstruct the world. Sure, the piece in its entirety is raw—it exposes flesh, it tells of where it bleeds. But I write of those days to immortalize them, to frame them, to capture them in a different time, a time where light can change their appearance and make them shine. I thank my lucky stars for every default that made me slump, made me cry, made me overanalyze and fear the future. One needs to have the colors of the world thrown on to them—you become a new piece, and you decide to become your own master. Have this not happen, and one will remain a sketch. One needs to see colors because once one does they use them to paint their character.

Here are a few lines from the piece that I enjoy:

“Desires that pollinated as the paint was spread against the canvas of adolescence or after the paint had dried? I do not ask.”

“Bursting opiates dull the rationale of common sense, drowsiness inflicted upon my partners! Sleep slides down our lashes, blame it on the walls—dark, dark. I was sleeping then; know not what I did, remember who I think I was.”

“Centipedes become my new neighbors; sneaking beneath the door when the lights hung low—too active to notice their entrance, they peer up at me as I am placed in lewd positions. Even they roll into a ball; hiding their face, a ploy to become an(other).”

“Maybe it was an attempt to document the banality of romance; the give and take, the pervasion of I and the explosion of Him in its purest colors of darks and lights.”

“I spent hours in the bathtub fictionalizing my current existence for a novel I was writing at the time. Everyone thought it was autobiographical; I just thought I existed somewhere in all I created, you just had to find me.”

“Did you know that if you submerge your whole body beneath a steady bath, as if you were drowning, you can hear your heartbeat inside of you? I have never felt so close to myself.”

“Time took forever between those walls.”

“My bunny ran loose, disappearing and then reappearing, suffering from starvation and then obesity; I couldn’t keep track, but then again no one and nothing was really itself between those walls.”

“A friend and I made films where I would crawl on the floor and if anyone were to uncover the footage now they would be impressed by the humanity that had been documented.”

“I took rolls of self portraits—eyes gazing into a lens that I interpreted to be [a] (my)self I was performing for, a self that I was hoping would eventually validate the exposed beauty.

“Eventually I moved out and on. Painted a new room to match the other flower I found myself to be. And the room of violets decayed; hungry and thirsty for a morality only I offered up.”

“Now the walls remind me of waste and if I were to stay long enough, I might just conform, so I close the door and go.”