Tuesday Times

CLICK: Berliners Get a Crash Course in Glittery Celebrity Culture

Follow the above link for The New York Times article on a recent Berlin exhibit and their understanding of celebrity culture. I am telling you... the best thing I ever did in Berlin was go to the Helmut Newton exhibit.


CLICK: Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.

The above link takes you to a phenomenal article on mirrors - self versus other, self-enhancement and recognition, self-delusional, physical self versus projected self. "recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake"

scents are responsible for memory coming to life.

tonight i pulled down a box from the top of my closet. but before i could empty old frames to store inside the box, i had to pull out the other boxes that were inside the larger one. nestled inside - never used and forgotten - was a wooden box he had given me. i had probably only touched it three times and opened it once, i am not sure why, but if i had to guess it was because i never have enough luggage space to bring back all i would like to from miami to manhattan. without even unlocking it, the signature scent of him permeated the space i was surrounded by. i sighed within, remembering how prior to giving it to me he had promised it had been soaked in his cologne. it had been. and almost a year and half later, it still breathes his presence. inhaling i am immediately reminded of our intimacy. i had forgotten and i become flush even admitting that. his scent, living within this box that is no larger than one index card and a half, evokes me backwards into a time that was beaded by our being together. a scent that smells of all the nights we got made up together, of hotel rooms from coast to coast, of suitcases brought up multiple staircases, of letting myself fall to sleep on his oxford shirts, of waking early - showering alone - and surprising his still sleeping body with my own in wake reflecting the morning glow. a scent that exists to me not solely because of him but because of us. a scent that signifies and signals the many moments and magnitude of minutes of us living on and in each other.

but i wouldn't live forward with the same scent living on. i wouldn't erase memory, nor would i ask that it had not changed and let me, him, us, the surroundings moment by moment become something new.

i remember

what can be said for any of our selves? we have our stories, but is it more our memory that we need? don't we need one to have the other? supposedly it is our experiences that shape our relations. and then, well then, it is our reaction(s) to the experiences that define us. i remember how necessary i use to believe experiences were. i use to think without their evolution, i was not advancing, that i was not growing. i feared that if i did not change, that if i did not transform, i would become less of a person. then three years ago - now almost four - things did change. i began having memories independently of others. my experiences were internalized. how could i possibly prove their significance if it was an affect that took place within the interior? i began learning how little it mattered to prove or share or ultimately, to perform. i went on trips, alone. i felt the trips. i rode buses and sometimes was silent for hours. at times, i found myself speaking intimately with a neighbor passenger - sometimes at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere between boston and manhattan, we would speak as he smoked his cigarette and as i stood, freezing, and having not eaten for hours. once there was a train - there were delays and set backs and there was a conversation with an older and terribly attractive man who spoke profoundly and with clarity. he turned out to be a famous actress' father but i was much more interested in him than her. he gave me his card, telling me to call, assuring me it was what he wanted. but it stayed on my desk and then it went missing and i never called, though i still know i should have. there were boyfriend visits to manhattan, surprise rose petals across the bed and glasses i broke in a drunken fall inspired by nervousness due to our distance. when i pulled away in a taxi, he said "adios" and i knew it would be over, sooner than later. there was a trip to berlin and dragging my suitcase through the middle of poverty. there was a taxi cab honking that he was here to take me to the airport, but it was three in the morning, the hotel was silent - still and sleeping, i dropped the key in a slot at the front desk and then discovered the doors were all locked and no one was there to help me out. i remember deliriously racing through the hotel, trying to pick locks until i was finally free in a courtyard and trying to climb my way out. tired, alone, scared, unable to communicate. i remember having the same taxi cab driver in three different sections of the city, recognizing each other, talking the entire drive and feeling like i was saying hello and goodbye to my best and only friend. i remember taking the t to a bookstore and walking down three stairs, finding my way into a dimly lit shop where three book lovers stood talking and flushed faced and puzzled about where the bret easton ellis reading was, turning and watching a dark haired man walk in with the same question. we were in the wrong place, the newspaper had made a mistake, it was a ways away, we would have to drive. i remember him driving - this man i did not know - a doctor with a bmw. i remember walking up the stairs of the bar and hearing bret read like a madman - the place packed - me just an adorning fan and the doctor handing me a glass of wine. i remember the event ending and staying downstairs drinking and talking off all the days i had not socialized in what was so unnatural for me. i remember him driving me back into boston, his car circling the commons. i remember going to his apartment first - nice, immaculate, dark, a couch, trying to kiss me, trying to finger the fold of my legs. i remember that being the closet i ever came to ever cheating - having no desire to, only the desire to not be so far from the closeness i desire. i remember manhattan in the early morning, waiting in a long line for casting. i remember hours and hours and the answers to their questions - and how ironic it would all be now. i remember the moment coming to the first cut. i had ten seconds to speak, to make something, introduce myself and make it memorable. "hello camera number one, my name is chelsea leigh trescott. i am five foot nine, from miami florida baby, and i can't wait to see you again." i remember being chosen #321. i remember exiting the street, deflecting cameras and interviewers, getting into a cab, turning around and looking out back and thinking that maybe today was the day it began. i remember coming for another round of casting, the finales. enclosed inside of a room, nothing personal was secretive. dramatic stories, beatings, raps, pregnancies, insecurities, stripping, drugs. i remember the casting agents trying to make me into something. but i did not have a cruel story. i was a thinker, provocative in the past. inspiration, intrigue, intensity. i remember being the largest girl at the americas next top model audition. i remember feeling exposed and scarred. i remember having to walk in our bathing suits. can i wear a one piece?, i asked hopefully. "not if you want tyra to think you have something to hide. the answer is no." i remember the girl with the eating disorder - and then several months later, i would be that girl, too thin to deny her health and never able to entirely forget its happening. i remember los angeles in the hills - being alone on my laptop in a big house, feeling like a guest, an intruder, a girl with a day off, jetsetting like a snob. i remember a cab picking me up and how he looked like he was doing anything to become an actor with his white pressed shirt, black tie and ray bans. i remember laughing out the window at how strange this city of supposed dreams was. i remember being in rags on a balcony with my feet dipped in mud and paint. i remember open windows and people trying to catch a view of the man with his 19th century camera and me, the model. i remember lying on the ground and trying to look half alive. and then there were the breaks and smoking his mentale cigarettes and truly feeling half alive. i remember him saying, "what is great about you is that you're not exposing your skeleton. i meet and shoot so many girls with fur arms and spinal backs, but you - your naturalness is beautiful." i remember everyone commenting on my hips. i remember the shoot being over and flipping through his stacks of books and thinking, this is how i want to be, encompassed by art and curiousity. i remember meeting a blue eyed boy and loving our conversation. i remember ending up on a couch with him and him kissing me and gluing his body on top of mine. i remember losing attraction immediately. i remember knowing that it was because it was a white couch - a friend's couch - the couch i had had sex on the night before with the boy i truly wished i was with. i remember claiming i was tired, too tired to go on. i remember not even believing myself. i remember knowing it was the second time i had used the excuse and how unlike me it was. i remember believing that if you are interested in the flesh that sits before you, you never are too tired not to proceed. i remember being so tired for so long and maybe i was only dreaming. i know one day i will wake and i will think "i remember". i remember being there and feeling alone.

beck - gamma ray

in general

sitting at dinner, i could see them - without turning my face to look - watching me as i spoke elsewhere. i had noticed them doing it the day earlier, as i sat around the circle table trying to play host. it wasn't some paranoia of others possibly observing or simply listening to me, but it was a wonder if they were observing something new, perhaps someone different. and then she leaned over to me on the right - i was sitting at the head of the table. "i feel we are seeing a different you." my face froze, i lost all ability to act smoothly or at all. it was her certain way of framing the comment - as if not to say, we feel you have changed but we feel you have personas, and this is one we had not known. yes i fear i am a bit more shy, i responded. she continued, "it was always just so wonderful to see you with him. you were so comfortable, natural. it was such an understanding relationship." i knew this had been what she was thinking. i knew and silently feared whether i had (in an obvious way) grown different now separated from the relationship. in terms of days, it is so distant from this present moment and yet, i get reminded and questioned about it at random. i only have one response and it is the same one i told her, there is a playfulness i have when i am within a relationship. i don't miss him. i miss that part of myself. the playfulness that keeps me young.

i'm turning 21 tomorrow. i hate birthdays. it is like valentines day or new years eve - this pressurized expectation to be happier than you have been. and with birthdays comes the supposed dedication to yourself an involvement around you, which i am also uncomfortable about. however, if there is one wish i can make and one way i can hope to see myself within the year, it is to focus my mind within the moment, let the outside drop away and to be looser, to feel myself come free.

an awakening i had when i was in my writing program last month was when writing/speaking to not assume that others desire things so different from myself. in other words, generalizations. assumptions that make myself sound arrogant. it is difficult. it is difficult "saying it as it is" and at the same time being sensitive. the line in my in-the-making-novel was: claudelean and llurence were possessed by a desire to communicate ideas and experiences. they did not disguise their thoughts and were not insecure with the exposure of their feelings. they did not talk about people, unless they were discussing themselves.

he circled the passage with a note, "wait. doesn't everyone want this." it was true. these two characters were not superior to anyone else. their desire was basic and yet, i was using it to make them important. i have so much to learn. he also said in discussion that he believed these two characters would have the most successful relationship only with each other. they were sensitive, mysterious, passionate, intellectual, relatable yet their love worked best when it was used on each other.

i wanted to laugh, but it may have been fake or just forced. it is often agreed that an author's first novel is the most autobiographical.

listen to: neil halstead - paint a face.

is it that at times there are such things you want to say, but can not mindfully agree on the way to say them, and so you don't? the moment passes right beneath the inactivity of your tongue and yet, the thought remains (changing its perspective ever so slightly and with that there is also the chipping away of its intensity). you loose the time (or perhaps the time looses you?), the situation and perhaps the will to ever reveal what was kept enclosed. in terms of the immediacy of the physical presence, would it have made a difference had you shared and spoken? i think most people are fearful of exposing an active change - and so, if you had spoken, they still could have appear unaffected - but internally, who knows. behind the veil they could be experiencing an alteration of the nerves. why do we all make it so difficult to be awake to the moment? why are thoughts dream glasses altering the images that compose life? i wish the delicacy of impressions could be made known. i wish other's feelings were not protected and made forbidden. i wish we could easily say it as it is and not worry about the self being unveiled. i choose vulnerability (in other words, risking the chance of being affected) over ego. i am sure i may appear unconcerned, but if one would only ask - if only i wore my thoughts across my face - the scenario would be so different. perhaps dramatically? there has been a handful of times when i have walked unknowingly/unprepared into a room enclosed by mirrors -- it has usually been a bathroom, or even a rearview mirror and i have not known who it is i see. yet i am alone and that image is me. and she often appears tough. but appearance and reality is so far from the same being.

this vs. that

thought keeping.

yesterday, he mailed me a letter i wrote him. he said he saved it and had just reread it. it truly touched me and this was because when i had originally sent it to him, i had not gotten much of a response and had worried he had taken offense to it. it goes to show you, you never know when, where or why you may effect someone and you never know at what corner of their heart they may be keeping you or your words.

april 16, 2008, the letter was this:

thank you for always making it special. there is a quote, "i feel i could never possibly love anyone wasn't distinguished." and although it can be at first recognized as sounding pretentious, i do believe it - you are very special and i love you and your personality. regardless of any feelings that "could have been burt" at that italian restaurant we went for lunch, i enjoyed listening to you - and believed every word you said. i really see that your best interest is in making everyone happy, and that having to make the decisions, too, is bound to make someone -anyone- feel short changed. there was an article in the new york times last week about two very successful but criticized fashion designers. the reporter explained, "but, in a business of illusions and self-denials, it is interesting and even brave that they are willing to put themselves out there and invite the judgmental people to make judgments." such is life - even the very few closest to us will make judgments, but if you continue to have good intentions, it will never be at the expense of your success. you have the best intentions and it will always bring about success.

cheena.


i remember the day the letter was reflecting on. it was lunch at an italian restaurant in the italian section by soho, manhattan. italian is my least favorite food, the restaurant seemed depressing before we even sat down and we laughed in prediction that this wasn't going to go over well. it hadn't. i remember the tension and having to avoid the self-consciousness of any other families or couples looking at our table and how broken we seemed. i remember sealing back the tears and removing myself to the restroom. i remember coming back and listening to him speak as he buttered his bread, repetitively in nervousness. i remember knowing that i was listening -entirely and with complete interest- for the first time. i remember the sincerity of emotions his words induced. i remember hearing his strength become him. i remember watching his strength. i spoke up really for the first time and sided with him. we left and walked through the maze of manhattan, hoping to get lost, hoping to find ourselves. but we avoided everything and it made me uncomfortable and so i left - not wanting to cry, not wanting to face the secrets that were being revealed. he left and a few days later i sat in class reading the newspaper, secluded, isolated in my mind but entirely aware of specific surroundings (this is something i can't avoid, though i wish i could). the article moved me, despite it being about the fashion business and designers i thought were -in terms of celebritism- selling their pride. the next night i sat on my bed with a pile of clippings substituting a bedspread. i wrote him that message, needing him to know that i was listening to him and that my "thoughtfulness" was not only for personal things within my interior but were the displays of my exterior environment, as well. i wished so badly that i could explain to anyone and everyone, but him mainly, that i have grown quiet, shyer and perhaps more self-aware than i have ever been. i wanted the explanation to be an apology for no longer being as willing to speak and reflect on just anything. but i knew that this change had been my decision - and even though i was not entirely comfortable with it, i was consistently becoming more specifically that way. i never provided an explanation. instead i provided a quote and the truth is i have a book of quotes i have been keeping - and may have a quote for each fitting mood - and it is when i share and send a quote to another that i wish them to know they are often within my thoughts when i am reading the words of a mind and most moved (but i so rarely send quotes because there are just a few i think so constantly of).

the moment i understand her in my mind, i embrace her fully married life, a film.

dream by the day

What does it matter if sleep takes advantage of us? The falsity matters, perhaps because, we will learn to believe it, expect it, favour it—favour the dream world, favour when our eyes are closed. 

~

I try to remember us. Anything of us. Is it difficult or am I not trying? I will try. I will try to get us back. I remember an aloofness on both parts. Distant, removed, discrete, ultimately shy and masked because of an unbefitting nervous inspired by expectation. We both carried titles. Titles that tried to divulge our persona but provided no help in explaining our interior character.

framed.

I get a phone call from Chase, an old friend that moved to Manhattan on a whim last winter. It was nothing he dreamed about. He said he came by accident. He invites me to a social gathering. I tell him I will arrive fresh and pressed by eight. Thirty minutes after my intended arrival, I walk through the doors. Appetizers were placed like a centerpiece that everyone hungered for but did not touch. The room danced with life, color and laughter brought upon by lubrication. Women sat in chairs and their dresses made them look like they were poking through a flower in bloom around their waist. Men could be heard purring to their partners.

I showed up at with a frame around my neck. I figured Manhattan was the city of character, so it was the least I could do to fit in properly. But when baffled guests asked me what called for such peculiar behavior, I could only smile with my eyes, and them alone, pause as if waiting for silence to speak for me, and finally say if one were to take part in a spectacle, he better look spectacularly. And then—as if ready to finally clarify myself and give excuse for my appearance—I only expounded upon the former. Oh, stop speculating and let us experience the extravagance!

I never teased, although everyone felt they were silently being mocked. I got the sense women opposed me for no reason that laid claim to who I was, but rather how I made them feel. And if one knows even the slightest about a female’s interior, it can be guaranteed that this was the worst way to affect another woman. Essentially, to be capable of making a woman feel was proof that one mattered. And this was a power that, in turn, made them feel powerless, which was a vulnerability they would never admit governed them.

A nameless female with her back to my face, turned and displayed the constellation of freckles sparkling across the landscape of her skin. Her wish was to speak with me. She spoke, “I heard the words you used to talk and I think you are arrogant.” I thank her for the shallowness of her thoughts. Women disliked me for my courage. It was an awareness that ironically gave the impression that I was removed from critiquing my sense of self and they disliked me because it was a quality they knew, not admittedly, they would love to have.

Men observed, trying to compare me to other women and finding it impossible agreed I was motivated by confidence. Framed in sight, I could tell they found my poise fascinating and my assurance refreshing. But it is my intensity, which always intimidates them—a consciousness of my mind in sync with the physical, that makes them insecure that they know nothing of their own—my elusiveness which creates a challenge. And it was because of this—and this alone—that their admiration always stayed at an elementary level and never matured to become real.

03.05.08

03.05.08
Oh, I, I love you still. Your brown hair that dangles with an air of being unkempt but is secretively stylized. Your lips that look swollen. Your deep-set eyes that pull one in, instead of cast one toward the outside world. Your room of mirrors, where you spend more time observing yourself than even I, the female. Your towering canvas of art, where I can find my name mingled between the heavy prose. Did you really write me inside the art of your life? Are we, together, a purpose of and in art? I still love your bedroom and the stairs that led us up into seclusion. There were no windows, no light to tells us when. Lovers don’t consider time. We were left all alone, avoiding everything but the bodies of ourselves. Your bookshelves heavy with praise and you translating to me in English. The meaning felt different. Your single bed, fallen flat on the floor. You said you were embarrassed. I wondered how you could be. And then you thanked me for being in your space, inside your world, for spending the night, for falling for a while. Our bodies tangled and posing, I could still see the spine of the poetry volume you read from. I will never forget hearing, seeing and knowing to remember his name, Saul Williams. There are lines that I still tie back to you. They are nothing tangible without you. They mean nothing without our memories. You slept and I was kept up to the sound of your snores and the unbelievable reality that I am here—there—sharing space and invited to sleep beside you, watching with one woken eye, taking mental notes to remember this by.

~

I remember writing the above. It was a spring afternoon in Chelsea, Manhattan. My sister and I had been running around for art direction finds. I was in a warehouse with two stories devoted to props new—mainly old—for films. We wandered off separately, her with her list and me with my camera. Letting our eye’s curiosity take us in different directions. Then, I sat on the pink stairwell and wrote the above, knowing at the time how silly it is and thinking how trite it was. But now reading it, I still know how silly it is, yet that is the reason to love it, for it’s innocence, imperfections, candidness. But it was not trite—those moments all proved to be important and engraining, they were unique for me—personal in their own right—and the memory still feels fresh, ever changing but continually surprising. I wish I could remember more of everything. But I am always left with gaps, dips in time, questions and it is then that my imagination—my hopes and fears of character—fill the moment’s factuality.

07.08.08

I feel contained—self enforced. I feel I won’t release the tension that consumes me, that closes me in. I have digressed. I feel I have. I speak less. Sometimes—most times—I just do not know what it is we are talking about, or rather why it is we are taking about such a thing. I know it is because our time together is more limited, so there is a mixture of expectation, intensity, plea for depth, bond and relief. But I feel inside my self when I am supposed to be outside. We talk and then we end on a disagreement and all I have to say afterwards is that we were talking just to talk, discussing just to discuss and it was a disagreement because we never cared to actually involve ourselves in the discussion.

I am just anxious to finally get to Miami. I have a strange idea that once I am there I will be able to gain control over myself. Have clarity, feel less pressure, breathe better. But who knows. I need to be proactive if I want the change to occur. A month and a half ago, I had a breakdown and thought Miami was an immediate answer. I talked about even signing up for a program while I was there to talk about weight and my never ending fight against it and myself. I want to be better so I can live freely and so I am better to be around. I have been feeling so not engaging. My sister and I have been fighting for the last ten days. That is another story, but it doesn’t help. The separation will be good and that is another large reason I am coming to Miami. I need time to regain my esteem, my self-belief and a healthier mind so I can continue my dreams, my production, my activity and find a balanced lifestyle in Manhattan. I don’t want to just live there, I want to be living there.

darkness in the middle of the world.

“Let’s go out and sit in the middle of the world. Come, why don’t you be with me for tonight, just until the plug is pulled on the stars and the night’s skin turns black? It shouldn’t be long, but if you want, it can feel otherwise. Come, it will be up to you.”

Facing forward, we sit in the field. Behind us is the cabin casting sheen into the open air where the windows are drawn to the night’s moans. My hands stay buried beneath the earth, grass flowering where my separate fingers create cracks, while I turn the side of my face so my eye catches our behind. It looks like a lemon is floating in mid-darkness or perhaps it is more like a sunset saturating a corner of the night. Either way, each color is contained perfectly, making sure not to fuse or bleed into the blackness. Blackness: this color our bodies have been drenched in.

The night’s texture feels thick—heavy air that pushes on your chest and makes your eyes blink back tears. But I, I feel weightless. We are saying nothing, but it sounds like voices are being stretched between, before and beyond us. Possibly people of the past trying to be heard a final time, trying to sigh the sounds of an orgasm that they’ll never forget, trying to tell us to just live.

“It’s all happening,” he says. “There is no use resisting it any longer. What will be will be. What is is something special, regardless of the specifics. I am here to make moments memorable, as memorable as they can possibly be. And what did I make sure to do tonight?”

To come sit beneath a sky you cannot reach and look at stars you cannot touch.

“No, no no. If I close my eyes, things can happen differently. I can reach the sky and I can hold the star I choose. Distanced from the world, I could feel closest to my self and the reality that is real. Close your eyes now, too. Are they closed? You promise? Okay, I made sure you came out and sat beneath this all-encompassing sky with me. I wanted you to see why it feels safe here with the sky stretched out before you—with the wish that as you fall for sleep, the sky will embrace you and hold you in. Claudelean, if you could have one wish would it be?”

My response is spontaneous, unplanned and therefore closest to my mind’s immediate truth. I would wish to live in the present moment.

I fall back on the ground, the bed of the night. He does after me. Both of us lie looking into the sky, like a mirror we stare through it, intrigued. The air sounds soothing, nothing is here, nothing is around us, just trees bending in the distance and animals kept awake. I wonder who is more artificial, nature or us, but I keep this resonating in my interior and do not question it aloud. “Everything is unreal when you see through eyes of love,” he says.

He seems to be purposefully vague and allusive, as if he has been laying out clues that I am oblivious to. I finally ask, What are you thinking about?

“Not thinking, just seeing.”

Well then, what are you seeing?

“The night’s hair is full of dandruff. Which means the day has probably not been washed away. Maybe waking dreams are unforgettable. What are you thinking?”

I feel my feelings as I think them.

“What are you feeling?”

Well, I am just not sure whether I have come along way or still have more to go. Looking around, I see there is no walls and I think how everything is escapable and how I should just run, shaking myself sober from dreams. But at the same time, I think I am sitting in the middle of the world and seeing there are no walls. I feel like the night must not be tangible or attainable and I wonder whether I am just the same. See, it is night out, my hand drops down in front of my face, and although I can feel it, I only see blackness. I feel I should fear I don’t exist.

Just as I am finishing speaking, he kisses me. His lips push into the budding of my mouth. His hands finger my body’s stem. The sky’s color palate trickles into a plush pattern, streaming tears like ribbons across the sky. And for a moment or more everything seems made certain.

I guess I exist, I say with assurance.

“Yes, but you will always seem unreal. The reality is it is within your very being to escape me. That is why I asked to have you for tonight in the middle of the world with no one else. The night whispering its falling, your hand appearing like it is holding an arrow, your ever present taste, but it is your eyes that give me all the light I shall ever need to have to know we both exist now in the middle of here. And if I always have this moment held within my memory, we can both exist in the middle of here forever."

is it more so, a writing of the mind or the soul?

the road whistles, coils and fabricates the journey home. daddy drives and mamma counts down the descending degrees in temperature. i sit staring out the window, looking beyond myself and back at you. time moves and the car is carried with it, as i shed layers of ourselves in memory. with eyes closed to consciousness, i feel your fingers woven inside the pocket of my palm. tightly holding each other, we make our own stamp of being. our skins sweat as the night's skin turns dark. dreams preserve the history of our affairs - we feel each other now and then. if you saw me now, you may say i look most natural, but really i just feel common. i am rather ordinary when i am out of love.

-i have tried to write you out of myself. still trying.

a fragment of: Solitude in the Heart of Manhattan

I walk all day and forget that my depression, too, is what has exhausted me. The night arrives again to occupy the city, so the streets leave and become busy elsewhere. I come back to my bed and Chase is gone. The sheets are straightened and it looks as if we were never there, but I can feel us. A note sits where my head had been lying and it reads, “I don’t understand. You disappeared and I waited.” I do not care that he has gone. He was not the dream I came to the city for. He was not the skin, I dreamed of dreaming upon. I do not care that he has gone. I do not care. Liquid washes over my eyes and I cannot see where I am. I find my phone, place my ear to it and wait for a reassuring voice.

Llurenence answers, “Claudelean, my Chelsea girl.”

I am not living in Chelsea. I live in the East Village just behind the park.

“That sounds nice. Well, good night my Manhattan girl.”

No, the night has not been good. My dream is not what I imagined it would be.

“I want to go to sleep, Claudelean.”

Please, stay, speaking. I plead.

“It is hard to talk to you. I want to but do not believe I am able. Your leaving me has left me with exposed wounds. I am inoperable.”

I didn’t decide to leave you though. I didn’t plan to go away with the idea that if I returned I would not see you.

“I was not prepared for Manhattan to steal my love from me. I never thought I would have to compete with a city; a city that I haven’t ever even been to, but which took you from me.”

It is not how it seems, Llurence, believe me. You do not know how much I miss it all.

“What specifically?” he asks.

Well, for one, the sight that sets in Miami. Living in Manhattan, you forget what else exists—you forget what else is real. But being here now, I see what I have grown to miss: the Miami horizon where the sea and sky come to kiss. But that is just a metaphor for a time when the two touched and fell beneath each other once the night curtained the city.

“Come back to us then.”

I can’t. I dreamed I would stay.

“I don’t believe you,” he cried.

I want to go to sleep inside Manhattan. I want to wake and see frozen framed windows and watch snow fall from the sky.

“Wake up, Claudelean. This is all unreal.”

Manhattan is a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having.

pulpy flesh, feather lashes.

Q.
What is the history of one’s love? He composes a letter, licks the folds, seals his voice shut and inside the pressed envelope he has recapitulated a dream, a dream of her. Is that love, or perhaps, the origin of romanticism? The way the woman mends the sweater that warms her. How does it feel to be touched? The woven fabrics stretched like skin across flesh. Does love start at the birth of every person mending figures into their skin?

Q.
Stars splinter the violet skies pitched low. The world flips upside down, as you stare up, watching clouds carried across your melon eyes. The soft bedding falls and hangs upon your lashes. In the wind, stillness lingers, and you cry out against it with the hope you will help it be moved. But your very words get pushed back into your throat and are kept there to unravel like a ball of thread, a knot of knowledge.

Q. On Account of Myself/On Behalf of Us Both
I must! For it is time, I say, I introduce another character to speak with me.

Q. Consolation of Writing
The comfort comes from observing ourselves, acting upon our thinking mind, preserving a passing self, seeing that we exist—knowingly.

A. The writer must observer continually.
Q. And what is it the writer observes?
A. The writer observes himself when he is not writing and when he is writing.

Writing moves us into a perspective of ourselves, that forces us further than just simply thinking.

Q. The discourse between the mind and her eye
I am captured, captivated, by this never attaining demand to know it all. The child in me is back on the scene of my more adult life. Demanding growth through knowledge. I am astounded by how much my work has aged, matured, strengthened in one year from merely using my eyes to read, my mind to store.

Q. For we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints.

The body of the written subject takes form of its own life—wanting to control its own conscious and decide it own actions. Struggling to disengage itself from the wrappings of the sentences, the bindings of the text.

09 18 07

September 18 2007

Sitting in Washington Square Park, finishing a snack of tofu and fish before my next class begins. It is a Fall day in mid-September. Summer has just passed, but it feels like the seasons have forgotten the Fall because it is already chilly (reminding me of Miami's Winter). New Yorkers wear coats and curl up in the arms of those they tell they love. As Summer leaves, couples appear again, reminding the independent hearts of what it is like to be alone.

I am in "The Nanny Section". Silly thinking that in the nanny section, I sit here consumed with diaring. I have places I am suppose to run off to, but it is nice to actually sit calmly and smell the changing of the seasons - the instrumentalist's rhythm radiating the park. I watch, delicately, a nanny banter with a baby as she watches me. It is as if she is performing for me. As if telling me to write these words, "She is good to this child, perhaps better than the child's actual mother."

I find the situation almost sad: her being black, the child she cares for being white. It reminds me of our world and how no one will ever compliment her on her baby. These are the moments though, these moments in the park. And I am sure the baby will remember them and hopefully the way the nanny cared, really cared for the white little being.

letters for you

I liked your words. I liked you in your words. I love the words you thought to choose. I think that matters most. Perhaps it will prove to mean everything. I wish I could word this less ambiguously. But life is ambiguous and I can’t find a reason why my words should be any different. I hope you can try at the very least to read through anything I have made purposefully difficult. See through anything I appear as—most of it is a mask to cover up my unbefitting nervousness inspired by expectation. But if one thing can be for certain, I read your words and they made me like you.

skin on skin

Last night I dreamed words. I read them as the dream advanced like a scroll of typeface, large enough to read through the veil of consciousness and sleep. Paper flying off the typewriter, scenes of dreams flipped through with the fervor of devouring literature you feel is changing your life. In my dream, I was aware and focused on the ideas motivating the sentences. I figured my Adderrall had not worn off and now I was trying to be productive even in my dream. I am a madman, I thought. I am a workaholic. I cannot put down my pen. I cannot lay down my mind. I wanted to wake. I woke. Still covered in sleep, I tried to move to write down the ideas I had in my dream. I had been writing my novel. These were perfect metaphors. This is what I had been searching for in waking life. I could not unclothe myself from the sheets of dreams though, so I fell back asleep, convinced the ideas were too substantial to forget. I forgot them. I have lost the words. The sensational has passed. I should have written it down. I cannot remember what it was.

Staring into a colorless space in the night, my last thought was that I wish I were sleeping skin on skin. Skin on skin, I said. My sheets had the texture of petals, and with my cheek pressed against its warmth, the bed swallowed me like a rose that closed up. In the flower was an unreal reality of dreams. It seemed like my eye was pealed open against a window of glass, highly designed like a mosaic. You could not see through the window, all you received was the impression of pattern, a kaleidoscope of colorful shapes—this may have been a better gift. I do not know. I do not know what laid behind or beyond that window in the landscape. Maybe even nothing.

These dreams felt weird. They were imbedded with a thematic like an oeuvre of writing. My work seeps in whenever and wherever. I cannot reject its permission. Do I sound passive? Maybe. I probably would sound different aloud. A guy in my program said I had a high voice. No not in tone, he said, but in class. When you speak, I feel like I should have to kiss your hand. You have a royal voice. I do not recognize my voice if I hear it. It sounds unfamiliar. I picture a delicate female speaking. Is that really me?

There were three assortments of dreams. The first I was entirely intoxicated and I had no memory. I slept with this blonde swimmer who went to my high school. It was like a pause in a party scene. I carried on quickly after, disregarding the act and waking in the morning unworried. Days went by and I discovered that he had been begging to talk to me. Did I take the morning after pill? He kept promising that he had told me we had no been safe, that it had all gone wrong. He said this and I faintly remembered, but I had not cared. I had been drunk and without memory. I would probably be pregnant, except there was less probability and more definitive truth.

The dream lapsed into another. There was a social gathering. An ex-boyfriend was there. This was the first I had seen him since being in town. He had a girlfriend. He tried to have sex with me. He did. I did not want him to. Something slipped into my mind that maybe I was pregnant. It felt good. I said, this is why I miss sex. We were interrupted by someone else in the room. I looked at my ex-boyfriend and thought he was an asshole. He had no idea what he was doing with himself, so he was with me physically and according to a title with someone else. But mentally, I had no idea who he was with.

I woke up at 7:30 am, took a few bites out of an “insomniac brownie” that had been delivered last night and fell back asleep. Then my dream went into another dream. Supposedly this guy, who has been contacting me for months trying to tempt me into cheating, was “bucking” alone on a table. The girl who told me was laughing and saying it was the biggest spectacle. My alarm went off and I could not believe how my nighttime had turned absurd. Then I realized that once again I was more responsible than not for my dreams. Before sleeping, my last thought had been a wish for skin on skin. It was a dream that became a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having. I woke and wrote the below. Once again avoiding writing my Manhattan piece due tomorrow. There is no doubt that I be home by 8:30 pm and be too exhausted to think. Thursday morning I will probably end up gluing together something to be turned in. I want to name it, but more significantly reflect, Solitude in the Heart of Manhattan. The professor it is for keeps reading my weekly reflections to the class. Her voice reading my words makes me sound like the most sentimental soul. But who knows, what I really am, because a girl in class got up from her chair yesterday and turned around to me and said she thought I was arrogant. I wish I had thanked her for her thought and told her there was a gold star waiting for her at the front of the class that she could place next to my name.

----

Daily framing a new being was your perception. Piece by piece the chipping of time, hour by hour, the evolution of momentary selves stretching into space and shaping someone more specific—(you hope someone more substantial). During evolution your fibers are being threaded tight with substance, pulling you closer to your heart. Listening for the lyrics in the rhythmic gestures is an ear pressed against your chest, hearing how it pumps out the words, “thump thump”. Secrets rise off the surface, dampening the island of your body with a sigh suspended like a cloud in air. It moves delicately, as if not at all, and can be passed as a whisper to a lover through sheets stitched with sultriness. Skin on skin is the dream you dreamed for. Skin on skin became a dripping realism, palpable and tangibly torn at, drawing the scent of blood. Skin on skin was a dream, but not the dream you dreamed of having. You fall asleep with skin on skin, dreaming of the other type of skin you dreamed you would be dreaming upon. A skin intricately woven with affection, not affectation, so it is sensuously layered with a deeper self. Giving the imagination a fleshy fabric it can bring to life. You want to wake with him pressing into the soft cushion of your ass. You want to hover over his sleepy pose and smile at his flesh, imprinted with your naked shoulder. But no, not last night. Pulled down on to the sheets of dreams, you treated this skinned figure like a wax doll, molding his figure as you went deeper into the realm of your night’s other. In the darkness, perception frames new beings, not through sight but by touch. Against the morning light, you wake to see internal relations have deformed his image and so, you tare apart the stitching of skin on skin, threaded loosely with heart.

two dreams in manhattan

Last night I had a dream. There were a few dreams, I am sure, but this one I remember. There were about a handful of us, but most meaningfully there was me and the two of them. They came to Manhattan and were staying at my apartment. I thought it curious that they had come together, but I let it pass without mention, too willing to see him in any sort of way and under any sort of circumstance. It was nighttime. The time when people go out, but I was not. Opening up the bathroom door, I found them with her arms around his waist as they were getting made up. I did not call attention to this either. Instead, I punched him playfully in the stomach. That was the first time we came in contact with each other, since his being there. Immediately, I thought myself not charming. I do not hate many things, but at that moment I knew I hated how my flirtatious tactics were always aggressive with him. They left and exchanged no words with me. I tried to fall asleep in my bed, all the while thinking, this is my bed! why have they been sleeping in my bed? this is my bed! why have I been sleeping on the couch? if I just fall asleep in my bed tonight it will eliminate any chance of them being or becoming anything. I woke and asked my sister if she had seen them at our home. She said yes, they were sleeping on the couch. I told her I was not asking for a fact check, but that I wanted details. She said she had walked in and they had been holding hands in their sleep. I could not believe it, but I had to believe her, at least. She had seen it. I internalized my bitterness: why had they come to my apartment, why could I hear him calling her “baby” through the bedroom walls and why was I alone wandering through my mind to find impossible answers I hoped could conclude things? Then in the dream I thought, because none of us communicate has it been so impossible to understand.

I woke and pressed snooze on the alarm five times, just to see if I could find out whether they ever kiss. I believed that would give everything more clarity. But of course it would not and of course, once I woke, I never would see them again. Instead, I slide into another dream. I was in my same apartment building, but I had moved down the hall. For some reason living at the end of the hall came with another set of setbacks. Homeless people wandered into my living room and when I walked out of my bedroom, I saw college boys finger painting and others with their eyes rolled back. My sister was flushed and droopy eyed, so I asked her what the hell was going on. Passively she answered, they took LSD. I was the only one that did not laugh. I told her she was disgusting, but as the words were coming out of my mouth I remembered that placing attention on the decision to do drugs was the last thing anyone was suppose to do while someone was on drugs. So then, knowing everyone knew this rule, I just turned and told them all they were disgusting. I looked at my sister and told her the boy she kept bringing around was a terrible influence. I want him out. I grabbed my camera and an extra long lens and left them to themselves in their own little lala land. I was in the subway taking pictures, while they were on LSD in Candy Land. I wondered which of us was making better use of our time. I was not convinced whether it was them or myself, so I kept wondering.

My alarm rang through my dream and I decided it was time to come into clearer consciousness, so I did. My first waking thoughts were: I need to do the laundry to make my sister happy, my breath tastes like peanut butter, why did I eat all that peanut butter, I have so much to write for my final week of classes, watch me end up spending more time in the morning writing about my dreams than a fiction piece on Manhattan, I have no willpower to read another bland contemporary novel for this course especially not one on cocaine.

I went downstairs with my hair smashed up around my face and silver shadowed eyes last night. I thought about my first dream and how ridiculous the idea is that dreams are not real. I wondered whether there was any way to prevent daydreams becoming night dreams. I want to escape my ruminating imagination, not live through it longer during the night. My dreams are never far off from my waking thoughts. In fact, my dream scenes usually confirm my day scenes. There is imagination in both and they are also close to reality.

I use to never retain my dreams. I would wake and remember blackness. Soon enough, I found this to be a waste of time, so I rarely slept at all. I thought it normal for me, but was repetitively told it was not normal not to sleep. I received a prescription for Ambien. I told her I could not sleep. She asked me why. I told her I was up thinking. She kept refilling my prescription anyway. My intention was never to use it for sleep, but for its hallucinogenic faculties. I took it and was overcome with its ability to relax me. I believed and still believe it was the only thing that was capable of relaxing me. With no longer smoking for a year now, wine no longer seemed to work its magic as well. As a result, I became less addicted to wine and unrealities and more addicted to awareness and being productive. It exhausted me but I could not sleep.

I felt I lost a boyfriend in his dreams. As he slept, I watched them steal him from me. I was dreamless. I was awake when I saw we were becoming different. He slept through the reality. We left each other: me to a city and him to a dream. I wrote a play in the fall entitled Sleep less Shadows. It dealt with two drugs: Ambien and dreams. There was a philosophical undertone and was compared to Sarte’s No Exits. I wrote it because I wanted to continue a dialogue with my ex-boyfriend. I also wanted to continue living suspended in time within the unreality of relationships. Therefore, I explored the relationship between dream and reality, the unreal and the real and the artist and the muse. It dealt with appearances and persona. One character was a painter and poet. The other was an actress and model. The play did not end on an answer. It was left for the imagination. I did not have an answer. I believed less in realism.

Now all my work deals with dreams. But I define dreams differently than the assumed definition. Simply, dream is synonymous with the ideal being. It is something or someone separate from the sober self. It is something outside of one or someone that is one’s other that is trying to be attained, lived in and proved to be credible. It continues to be a motif of mine because I still do not have an answer, nor am I necessarily interested in finding one. I am interested in taking myself closer to truths.

I feel like I am continuously being asked, why write? The question never makes any sense to me. I think over the question, I stare at it and am left with the thought I started with: this question is about as stupid as why breathe? Lately the comments are: your philosophy has been keeping me up at night (a laugh comes after and I am not sure if it is there to remove the truth) and but really Chelsea, what is the writing for? I never can fathom why it seems people are cornering me. Writing is extremely straining on the self because there is no denial in its exposure. No one repetitively asks why someone paints, writes a song, performs surgery on a heart, reshapes a nose. Less people find those acts mysterious or strange. But somehow with writing, people that don’t do it, that don’t work on it, also do not seem to “get it”. It is a shame and it is no fun feeling like you have to explain yourself as if it was your ploy to prove you are truly without any neurosis.

I just need to be moved. Unfortunately, the six hundred and plus people on my Facebook stream leave me indifferent. This does not speak for or mean much. It is neither good nor bad, just a whole lot more like nothing. A boy told me this was depressing. How is it that at eighteen things seems to have lost their novelty. He was not asking a question. He may not have been musing either. It could have just been him believing he was stating a fact. I told my sister what he said and she disagreed with him. I told her I just want to be riveted and captivated by someone. She used to always tell me that I expect people to be beyond their age. She tells me that less now and just listens. Recently, interrupting me to inform me that I have to take a breath and stop using the word “like”. This can be extremely distracting when I’m in the middle of a thought, so I play music for her instead and I can see she understands what I was trying to say. Everyone wants to be riveted and captivated by someone though. I am not different.

This is the final week of the intensive writing program. One minute it was before me and now it is almost entirely behind me. I know that even when it ends, it will not be over. Yesterday I handed out a bit of mind and half of my soul. Tomorrow I will sit and listen to it being discussed and pulled apart for more than thirty minutes. Those minutes may seem to stretch on forever or they could feel like less than five. On Thursday I will read some of my work aloud in front of many faces. I hope my voice can give the words poetry, as I intended.

Yesterday one writer—the most conventional, knows the rules of writing, the guidelines, etc—said that the professor was trying to shape our writing into a format. He said that she was especially trying to edit out my and another writer’s voice. That it was obvious she was doing this, terrible too and that our voice should not be changed. I took this as the greatest compliment, especially since he said she was doing this to me and this other male writer in the class whose work I admire. Workshops do not inspire me. Philosophy influences the content of my work. There is a big difference and this speaks for the dichotomy I will have to decide for graduate school.

I need to write a Manhattan piece by Thursday. There really is no time, but there is no doubt that it will happen. Manhattan is a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having. Still it has the effects of a dream and the consistency, as well. Each morning you wake up to Manhattan with an imprint of your being there. It has an effect on your mind. You are conscious of it being a dream and become increasingly aware that each experience has minor differences. This leaves you waking each morning with a newly developed impression of it. Manhattan is a dream, but in the morning it is vague.

two dreams and a reality.

I had a dream we were kissing but we did not have lips.

I had a dream that I left my newly filled Adderall prescription in the yard. I wasn’t sure if I left it in the grass or if the dog brought it out. My focus must have been flighty because I left it twice. The third time, I went running into the yard looking for it and saw that the majority of the pills had been crushed into a powdery substance. The only thing I could think was Damn I’m gonna have a lot to snort.

Last night a man asked me for my number and I said thank you.

Q. Has it all turned pathetic.
A. That was not a question.

some story: a sense of scent.

During the day she would stay suspended in her apartment, like a rare bird perched in its cage and locked away from the expanse of the high pitched city, which could be heard but not felt. She rarely slipped out of her pocket of rest to be carried through the veins that pumped the heart of Manhattan full of life. A window was all she believed she needed to admire the colors the city’s shell had been delicately dipped in—dyes of gold, coral and jade—that bled together and dried into a color with no name.

Today her glances from the window drank the juice of the city, but gave her no satisfaction. Only in Manhattan, Claudelean sighed, would there be no horizon where the sea and sky came to kiss. This morning, her eyes were circled with nostalgia. And it was as if, her mind looked through the hole in a door and only saw shapes of her past. The vision burned her eyes and she drew the curtains in self-protection against the world that throbbed liked a wound.

Falling into the palm of her bed, she masked herself with last night’s sheets and contorted her body into a fetal position until she was lulled back to sleep. She swallowed darkness, as if it were a breath of air, and sewed her eyelids into the bedding of her skin to keep her vision centered within the dream and outside reality, which weighed heavy upon her eyes and tried to make contact with her conscience.

Claudelean consumed dreams as if they were drugs given to prisoners of distinction. There was a drug for forgetting and a drug for awareness—and she was reliant on both. She usually controlled her environments so meticulously, assuring she would never become situated in a state that surprised her or she thought she was not ready for. But today she was unsuccessful. She had woken, and before setting down to her writing, memory had splintered her leisure hour and torn right into her flesh—bruising her mood and breaking her mind into fragments of times that she was not prepared to have isolated. She did not want to think yet. She did not want to heal now. And so, she hid beneath her imagination until dreams wore off, and woke her sober to the light and obligated to the real. She knew then there would be something she needed to write—a part of her substance that the page would frame—a splitting of self, she would have to be ready for.

sea sight.

There is a quality the sea carries that makes me want to spread it out across every story I write. My eyes wash over the hundreds of photographs I have taken or have been taken of me. And my favorites are those featuring the landscape of the sea. Is it the surreality of the photographs—fixing two opposing motions at one time—the subjects still, frozen, captured and the sea forever in motion and in pursuit of escape? Or is it because it is ethereal, constantly breathing and airing out, externally calming yet in a constant flux of internal emotion? I know how to experience its essence when writing, but quite contrarily I am not the type of person who takes dips in the water, basks on the sand or in the winter envisions vacations by the sea. Perhaps, if I did not think of South Beach beer bums or having to wear a bikini, it would be otherwise. The irony is that whenever I have spent time at or by the sea, the time has been impressed upon my mind and embedded within my memory. And it is there that my most romantic moments—and by romantic I mean: inspiring, captivating, phantasmagoria, passionate—have been produced. As a result, the sea pervades the story I am writing—which I hope can be read like an extensive simile—and saturates the characters involved. I see how in Manhattan I have grown to miss the horizon where the sea and sky came to kiss. But that is just a metaphor for a time when the two touched, and fell beneath each other once the night curtained the city.

---

I tried to choose my favorite sea photographs and realized the extent of the one's I loved:

rosé

today the city blushed and turned our skins rosé.

i fly away in 2 weeks.

half way through, and unsure of any feelings. i want to be selfish about my time but my mind is never on or in the present. it is like an unfulfilled prophecy - caring so deeply about time, while always experiencing that i am absolutely disengaged from it. i recognize the problem, and have plenty excuses, which are - excuses - and nothing more or less. reasons: withdrawn inside my interior and listening to this fragmentation of narration and dialogue that streams through my mind (a persistent effort to take note and notice for written work), impassioned by a bulk of engagements that i find myself in and a constant pressure to be receiving inspiration and pursuit to be captivated. now writing this, i realize it has become such an extreme because last year i was captured, captivated and inspired by my relations always. it is what i need in my life - for happiness, appeasement, sanity. but on the flip, i must admit, i was never entirely within the present then either. it is such a terrible trait. by the end of the month i will have, likely, finished forty pages. what will those pages say? how will i feel about them? how will they be received? and all those questions probably don't matter much. the professor is pushing me for towards clarity and whereas i use to be too stubborn to compromise, i now am allowing myself. as clarity breaks through and abstraction is lessened, my writing is left with lyricism, prose and sensuality. my writing becomes about desire, intimacy and the spaces in between, coldness, passivity, silence, stillness, desperation. i think that being abstract and dense was probably a facade - an effort to make my work not about myself - a hope to not be read as overly feminine and emotional. i didn't want feelings to nag, i didn't want to sound like i cared and even though i was most concerned with the senses, i didn't want to sound and therefore appear affected by my involvements. although i believe my work is highly imaginative, i feel it is only imaginative in its construction of language (thought, word, image) and not in terms of the substance of the story that is thread within it (although i care less about plot and action) which is closely related to truth. it can be read as a construction of the imagination, but that is only because it is a view of a situation from one mind, one heart, one nerve and as a result, the memory that it is based on resides within the imagination (since it has to be located within recollection) of one individual who knows only his truth, not the whole truth. i re-read a book of essays by anais nin today and it just reaffirmed that she is the only author i have ever read or heard who explains what i hope to do and where i wish the novel will go. i read her and am entirely engaged, her importance is undeniable and yet, she confused so many. i will have to provide quotes from her at some point. i did an independent study on her last fall and now as i am trying to penetrate further into fiction, i feel like she is one of the most powerful examples i have that will explain what i am trying to do or rather, what i hope will latch on and readers will become emerged in. what i ended up taking the most to heart (probably because my first efforts in writing could never approach the idea of dialogue) were the positive reactions about my dialogue and that the readers saw how it was not the words that mattered but the meaning they exposed. this is so special to me because i believe individuals have many restraints that restrict clarity and the exposure of exact emotions and therefore, it is not so much what is said rather than it is what is not said or the pressure that can be felt within the spaces of silence (a result of speaking at each other rather than to or with each other - which is so often the case). its like 3am, early morning tomorrow, to the met we goooo, so i must try and fall asleep without an ambien. i will end by saying that what was most on my mind tonight when i got home and again came back to a room of people, was that i only want to speak to someone that i, too, want to be kissing and falling asleep with. then, i realized how exaggerated that sounded, so i edited my thought and made it clearer: i miss having a best friend who was my boyfriend and i miss living alone and i miss sharing my apartment with one guest who was my boyfriend and also my best friend and all i needed intellectually and intimately. my art relies so heavily on the experience of being physically involved with another, that i can't believe i have avoided it for what feels like so long. i feel like i make myself so unavailable in new york but yet, some other part of me that i enjoy comes out when my bed is shared. i use to run off with all these others, and now it seems just the opposite. i kiss and am unmoved and don't persist. but then there are these rare cases where i am impulsively, if not mindlessly, drawn and i want to fall entirely. i can't fake an interest - at least not after the first night, and when i do, i disappear from contact like a flake - i can't fake an interest, even the pure joy of just having someone around. interested or disinterested, never an in between. and in really loose terms, that is what this "extended story" that i am writing is revolving around.

soon it will be seeing.

the process of writing is a double burden, but the product that appears at the finale is a reward that makes the author feel weightless. although i feel like i am always collecting matters that will shape a larger and hopefully, more substantial text. i worry whether it will ever become more real. i suppose that is the great burden - that leaves you avoiding the moment of beginning, but wanting, if not needing, it most desperately. there is the excitement you experience, once text begins streaming across the page, when thoughts position themselves upon the page and can be seen, and not just heard in imagination. a writer holds his breath for the length of his work and even the times between when it is best to rest.

i begun saturday - and wrote through that one day alone. i despise the situation, but the day to night of class leaves me too exhausted and now the apartment heat leaves me in a state of delirium - by no means the tone i am going for in my work.

life is funny though, and perhaps the artist is more so. i never imagined what i am writing would become so romantic, so involved with the language of the nerves, the mind of the heart. moments and mood fall upon you at certain times and i reason this is that time where i am pulling apart this texture that feels thick around me.

the fascinating truth -at least for me- which i become more involved in, is how those we experience, even if only slightly, and even the places we have escaped to, all become subject to material we can use. and the extremity in which we can indulge within these times - how well we can explicate them - will no doubt determine the writer who uses them as words within his voice. a professor said the other day, that we will grow as an author and become less selfish--less occupied--with framing our personal story and in doing so will become truthful to the lives of our characters. i am insecure that i will always write out the same thematic - with different chapters, but with similar desperation - a meta exploration that exposes my voice, my heart, my memory and no one more.

with the story i have begun, i experience the pressure - as i always will, and as most artists do - to not exclude a shade of thought, the many moods that capture but one action, the multitude of attributes that rest within a moment and of course, the comparisons to draw upon that do not distinguish our differences but spotlight, or maybe even give theory, to our similarities.

i know i am young and new at writing, but i can not find comfort in this situation or excuse any truth that can be found within it. the more i write, am read aloud and hear other contemporaries, the less i feel i am a storyteller. and nor have i ever felt like i was or wanted to be. i remember somewhere in some journal writing that i had no interest listening to stories, exchanging everyday gossip, pushing characters to move and act. i just needed them to feel for me, their fewer actions will be replaced by the movement of their thoughts. i am not writing for the stage or screen, why should it be expected of me?

there are so many beautiful books i own, and everyday i want to search out and find. author's whose words i place on notecards and file but which really need to be framed. i am on two poles of language that situate me with different statements. that of the deconstructionists, where i become abstract, where feelings feel less, and the personal is too preoccupied in being redesigned that the self slips out completely. and then there is the lyrical novel - the borderline between poetry and fiction. where sentences carry a musicality - where the richness of words for setting can be tasted. i am told that i am a brilliant intellect in one, and a lovely sensualist in the other.

i just hope i can be proud of anything that falls out of me. this new work surprises me. my memories and where they take me. the portraits of characters i was suppose to create, but really just helped build myself, and who i have known intimately.

it is fun, i see. to begin, immediately bond with the characters, and then not know how anything will become. i laugh in silence now, wondering how if i ever come to a finish will i think of the real characters that inspired the fiction. will i see them differently--intricately, revealed, depth, designed, decided--blah blah blah.

because again it all comes back to the writer who felt she had to write her mind out, so she crossed time, selected scenes, picked characters with such dissimilarities that scents, sense, sensuality will be the leading factors that make the love feel replete or just something other.

i am excited to re-see memory, share characters that would never have been comfortable sharing and I do-do-do want to come stuck and come to the point where i know i have to feel completely in order to continue writing.

what will any of this become?