growing

Leave the Porchlight on for me

Posted on by quatrepetitspois

By firelight we can talk. Sit down in a velvet chair. We’re alone now. How have you been? Have you made spirals and circles on the globe of your intentions, and are you wiser now that your skin has renewed itself over and over and you stand before me as a new being, even though inside you feel the same as before?

The firelight warms my skin peach in the soft otherwise darkness; and the book facedown on its pages, saving your place so you can re enter the portal to that other world at leisure is also caressed by that light half, the other half shrouded in darkness like our recent pasts are to one another.

May I sit too? I am tired. My own globe is frantic with lines I have trod, and I have so much to tell you if only you will listen, If only when you listen you will understand. My words are my shanty’s, the songs from the sea inside me and I sing them to lure you back in where you belong, a page in the heart of the downturned book, if the book is me. Many pages. But not all of them.

Will our homes ever be the same place? I have made bare my longing for a home to call my own, the last one I left being so far in the past that I cannot remember how many stairs to my bed in that place, nor how I made my way up them in the dark with the leisure of knowing it by touch alone.

I look around me now, in this house where I have landed to talk to you one more time and I do not recognise the furnishings although I appreciate their warmth, their colours are just right.

It isn’t my home. But the shape of it is similar to the house we once knew, and the colours all match the ones we once loved. There is a ghost of me in your rooms. But the house is not haunted. They only whisper my name to you sometimes on dark nights when you see the colours for what they were and maybe scorn, maybe smile upon that thought, a tiny Pearl in your mind that no one can peep at.

I saw your light. Did you leave the porch light on for me so I could find my way back? or was it a light to make you feel that the night was not so dark, that the unknown was nothing to fear. That anything approaching your place would be shown, lit up in the dark.

Looking for a porch light to call me in, I stumbled across your hearth. There are me’s and you’s littered across infinity playing out their paths on orbs comparable to ours. Sometimes the light hurts my eyes and I stagger off in the dark still lost and look for a softer light to approach. Others, I know, I find my way and I find a locked door with no one behind it listening for me as I croak “hello?”

Did you leave the porch light on for me so I could find my way, so that your home could be my home as we always planned?

I’m outside again, a shout in the dark

But the emptiness of infinity will carry a shout back to me

And I’ll come home.

Berlin, baby

Posted on by quatrepetitspois

Like a boomerang, I don’t have a heart and sometimes I come back to where I’ve been before. It’s been two years since I was in Berlin but the charms of this risen-from-the-ashes neo-anarchic industrial art installation of a city called me back and back I went.

I have friends in Berlin, arseholes just like me except they fuck one another while making eye contact and genuinely feel better when they recycle.

It’s a weird place and that’s what I like about it. Random patches of the wall still exist, morbid tombstones for a time and a place that really wasn’t that long ago at all. A smattering of old, beautiful buildings do exist but countless classic architecture is in fact rebuilt, reproduced. It’s morbid in some way, like death masks or Victorian photographs of dead children staring at you glassy eyed and vacant. They’ve managed to do something in Berlin that other cities get wrong all the time. The melding of the old and the new is artfully done, with new buildings next to old looking interesting and thought provoking as opposed to garish and sacrilegious.

I arrived late at night, and thumbed my way to the hotel I was staying in (which I did not pay for don’t ask don’t tell) with a pleasant young man whose family was from Azerbaijan, and who was deeply impressed that I had been to his home country as a child. Thanks mother. I was fucking exhausted upon arrival but I couldn’t sleep because my brain was a solid mound of FUCK and my life was hanging out of my arsehole in tatters and the remnants of my murdered children were dribbling out of me in clods of unhealthy maroon that doesn’t wash out of your discount underwear no matter how hard you scrub.

I’m a funny old thing in that I can generally excel in my academic life regardless of what kinds of ridiculous farcical bullshit are pantomiming their way around my life at any given point, and this is as true now as ever it was.

I’m in my last year of my second degree and everything is fine in that respect, as ever.

My personal life? Well, I know I removed a buttload of my posts from this godforsaken blog, but if you’re still reading let me ask you have I ever ever ever written here about my life being a blazing, glorious example of good living?

The same is still true. Everywhere I go, there I am. There I am. There I am. And in Berlin, nothing had changed and I caught my face in a nightclub mirror and saw the same ghouls, the same walking dead amalgamation of two lost souls in one face, both parents staring out at me, silently approving of the self destruction and havoc I have caused, but as ever never offering me a word of advice, their lips sealed for all time to me, one through death and the other through absence, and I’m just falling falling falling through life, always.

In a way, it was the perfect city for me to visit, at the perfect time. It has been rebuilt, on the bed of destruction and suffering that was left. It was reborn. I’m using that word a lot lately. I love dying, because I can always come back, fresh and new.

I amused myself in the usual ways. I went to museums, I visited the palace. I trash talked a heartbroken young man until he drank so much alcohol he couldn’t move speak or hear me anymore.

I stood on a bridge, where visitors had started to place padlocks like in Paris, with their initials and hearts and declarations of eternal love. I stood there in the dark, and some drunk locals shouted obscene offers at me, in my dress and chunky boots. I look young for my age, always have. And I’m tiny. And my internal monologue chides them. You don’t even know. You don’t even know who I am. What I’m capable of. I smiled and waved flirtily. Come at me, boys.

People always have these romantic, cutesy ideas about their spirit animals, the animals they identify with the most but I’ve always known mine so well. The roach; the survivor, the bottom feeder. The magpie; the trickster, the thief. I’m like two mirrors facing one another and telling your eyes there are thousands, a corridor of endless frames with shiny, empty, meaningless glass all the way as far as the eye can see.

I’m more than capable of distaste, fury, bile. A warped sense of justice.

Good things? I definitely feel amusement, contentedness, infatuation.

Where it gets blurry are the more sensitive, the more human of the emotions. The love, the sadness, the hope and the innocent joy. There is a quote in a book I love, about how the gaps in someone’s knowledge of another person are obscure, like borders of countries known around countries that one cannot name. These obscure spaces are how I perceive my feelings, the depth of them. They feel superficial and illusory, and yet some days when I cannot get out of bed I can’t help but wonder, am I just incapable of understanding what I am feeling, but feeling it all the same. Does it even matter? The two things produce an identical result, so who cares right?

I tell myself pretty lies often. Things that bring me comfort. Infatuation is a more comfortable word than love, fucking is a more comfortable idea than making love, leaving is better than staying, and pushing is better than pulling and holding and begging and needing and wanting.

I push, I push, I wring people out like wet rags, limp in my hands by the time I’m done, and gone soon after, away from me. I’m some devil by that point in their eyes and it soothes me. I’ve often found comfort in being just that horrible horrible, terrible girl. Stay away from her, she’s toxic. No one digs around in radioactive earth, no one disturbs a fresh plague grave. Stave off the sickness, stay away from the infection. Be clean, be safe, be whole.

That’s the bargain I make with my lovers, my friends. Stay if you wish, at your own risk. I shrug my shoulders. You knew, you knew what I was.

When does that stop being a clever solution, and start being the most tragic thing I’ve ever said about myself?

Before I knew what I was doing that day, I walked into one of those shops full of postcards and Tshirts toting the good Berlin name, and tiny segments of cement that are purportedly pieces of that much maligned wall. I picked up a handful of postcards and asked for stamps at the desk. I sat in a cafe and wrote on the postcard, in my passable German and kissed the cold smooth card with my tasteless purple lipstick, a perfect print of my nasty mouth for a man who ran.

Eventually you have to remember the dead ends you’ve reached before, eventually you have to wonder if it’s time to put a little effort in.

I can’t claim to be perfectly separated from everything and everyone, my wall has huge gaping holes in it too, but mine wasn’t ripped down in a joyful ceremony with music by the hoff.

Just like many other times, I’m picking myself up and dusting myself off. Walking on my blistered, bloody feet again. I always do. But maybe sometime I’ll let myself be carried, or let myself sit a while with someone who wants to give me water to sustain me.

Berlin gets in your head baby. It’s all about the uprising.

The mountains say

Posted on by quatrepetitspois

I was a single cell, I was two cells, I was an orphan and a beloved child. I was a liar, I was a whore, I was a virgin once and a starry eyed adolescent. I was a scientist, and a writer, I was a phonepig and a high flier. I was a wife, I was a mistress, I was a girlfriend and a lover. I’ve been in nearly every continent of the world and I’m still running. I was a dancer, I was sick, I was the picture of health and the picture of death.

I don’t know who I’m meant to be. I’m twenty seven years old and I can’t figure it out. I’ve learned that the idea that you can be anyone, or anything is not just a romantic fallacy, it is the hopeless godforsaken truth and discovering that is the kiss of death to stability, to knowing where you’ll lay yourself down to sleep.

Let me tell you about heartbreak, let me fucking tell you.

Other people tell me they’re heartbroken and though I want to, I feel nothing for them.

There are age old ways of telling up from down, north from south, high from low. On the horizon is all the evidence you could need, all the guidance.

The hardest thing is having every star in your sky sputter out because there is only one left.

I don’t have to follow it. Thousands might tell me not to. I can walk anywhere I like on the ground, or catch a plane and fly through the air. The only thing stopping anyone is the perception that they cannot, or perhaps should not do the thing they want to do, or need to do.

I tried.

I tried to turn my back on that piercing point of light in my night sky. I looked back, long forlorn glances, wondering if I could go back.

But when you follow that light, you aren’t going back. You are moving forward. What was can never be, but the future can be anything. We are not our mistakes, we are not our splintered pieces, we are not the tears we caused or cried. I am not an orphan crying in a house alone at four AM in the french countryside, and I am not a receptionist, I am not a liar, I am not a whore, I am not many things. I was, I was, I was. It doesn’t matter.

And she is not those things either. She is not anything that was, but her soul is the same and my soul is the same, and that’s why we still light up one another’s skies.

Real heartbreak is having your fucking limbs torn away and your guts torn out, and crying all over someone on the street because they said you look sad sweetheart.

Real heartbreak is the time lost, the time we never had.

But love?

Let me tell you about love.

I didn’t see anything except her. She is flowering now, opening like a fresh daisy. But I knew her when her seeds were scattered in the earth hidden. I watered them, I talked to them through the soil, I kissed the dirt that held her. The beautiful, warm dirt that smelled like life.

A pair of eyes hidden behind hair and glasses. Lips that were always pinker than my own. A neck that bends to the side by default, thoughtful and slender. Those hands. Those hands. When they touched me, flocks of birds flew from the ground into the sky, lightning struck the ocean, and rivers fled the land to meet the lightning.

We were spirits and nymphs, a cult, a coven. We were hippies and bandits, and naughty school children.

Looking into each other’s eyes was like crashing on impact and enjoying the flames around you, because you’ve never seen anything so beautiful, never could find anything more beautiful again.

Love is sustaining, survives all, dies never. Love is being scattered to the wind, in opposite directions, broken, ground down like dust on a prairie, flying off, lost and without a home but still colliding again anyway, cataclysmic and fated and magnetised, explosions in the sky.

Love is finding each other, changed but not really, and falling into place, with no effort because your natural state is to be part of that persons life.

Love is the million visions that come into my mind when I think of her. The shoes getting wet as we run through rainy streets to a new place, a better place. Our home. I picture Christmastime. Twinkling ornaments on our tree, and a warm cosy fire we helped one another build. I picture blankets and soft light, and her in my lap, so I can stroke her hair.

A million years ago she showed me a song in my car, about running away.

Years can’t separate, time can’t separate. Distance can’t put it asunder.

I want to run away with her. I picture money in a jar, growing every week. I picture her face, her eyes, the gleeful smirk she used to get when we were leaving to be alone together someplace. The look on her face as she pointed a camera at me, capturing me in her lens forever.

The way she looked to me when it was getting dark and we were outside walking at dusk, talking for hours because the time was never enough.

You can’t imagine the love of it. Fucking Christ, the never ending, heart stopping LOVE of it all.

You can’t imagine the carrion that was left when it was gone. The maggots, the flies and the rot.

I imagine myself rotting and festering and trickling into the ground, a sickly gore, my body and my bones. And her seeds in the ground. Together, we make something new. Our vines and our sinew contort and bind. Our new life. We are not made of anything different than before. Our components are the same. Only our arrangement, our distribution is different.

And we are the greatest love story ever told. My love story. Her love story.

We’ll never be the same.