Thursday

1:04 am

Inside my sudoku box, I am safe.

My sister is making background noise. She is looking at me with anger and confusion, and she has been making this noise for a while. I don’t know it by looking, her flaccid disappointment, her waning love for me, already, before the moon is even out, I know it because I sense it. When she is pissed at me, my pancreas curl, and my chest is tight.

I stay in my sudoku box where it is safe. I am trying to learn a new thing, which is not making excuses.

You’re wondering where my sister came from, since I mentioned in my last entry that I am isolating. I am, in a theoretical sense. I mean, there is the silent chaos of people always around me, my sister has a room in my flat, and sometimes her boyfriend comes over, makes strange demands, like watching a reality show together, or having dinner on the table instead of on the floor like monks.

I don’t get him, and when he’s around, I need to smoke double.

I am isolating psychologically. I am learning to become impenetrable. 

I tow two quiet threes to the bottom boxes and lay them to rest there. My work here is complete, I say, like a just avenged bride in a Tarantino tale. 

I look up, to find my sister is no longer there. I feel embarrassed for not noticing when she left. I call her name, once, twice, when she does not return her typical noise, I allow fading. 

***

It feels good to suffer for somebody else’s sins. It’s addictive, almost. To have somebody to dedicate my rage shame jealousy my loneliness my loveliness my dark nights and my oblivions. 

I don’t have a somebody to dump all my gluttony on, though.

It’s because I can’t allow myself to indulge in this particular sin, rather than a lack of a figure to devote it to. Overeating isn’t the solution to my grief. It runs long, and getting fat doesn’t help your chronic perception. I need to at least be reasonably fit if I’m going to be all sad and lonely. 

I don’t eat much, only high protein meals, after annihilating my quivering muscles at the gym. Honing them into neat, plump white strings. I imagine them making better music, nestled against layers, not knowing where a specific type ends or begins. Inside, in my tissues, I am all continuity.

It is only near the cerebellum I think, the split. I imagine cracks like in a badly opened walnut. That is the size of your brain, I say to my sister in my head, thinking of a tiny, starched up, moist one.

Then I think of her alone in her room putrefying into her screen, not thinking about the apocalypse or her bad memories or how many girls her boyfriend might find pretty other than her on a daily basis, and how many actually linger in his mind for longer than they’re in front of him. Not thinking about daddy or mom and how their extended teenage love affair comically blasted two tender lives. Not thinking about how dolphins sleep with one eye open which means they will never be Buddhists, they will never know complete surrender to the possibility of absolute destruction.

She is melting into her screen, smelling of soap and sweat and milky female pheromones, smiling once in a while, thinking of her lover’s pointy, wicked face, and thinking, oh, how different he is, from everybody else. And a little part of her knows that it’s not the true but the part that is willing to lie is bigger. And for as long as you can push against the part that knows the truth, with this wretched, pathetic, delusional chunk, you can stay in love.

I mean, that’s what the whole drama is about, isn’t it?

It’s not finding love, because everyone in a passing lyric has come upon a familiar face that felt like it belonged to a stranger, and everybody gets to have a taste of that weird feeling, like twisting knives and soaring dragonflies, rising up, over the swamps and meadows stretched out whorish under a docile skyline- but you think you had nothing to do with it, so you keep waiting, not being careful with it, not knowing how to stick your feed in the mud, that to stay in that trippy spot, you have to pin yourself in place- and just like that, it’s gone.  

It’s not finding love, everybody does, it’s staying inside it that makes it all feel so long, so faraway. How could I ? 

My thousand troubled minds. In the day it’s fine and I’ll pretend this ice cream and fajitas date under the uncomfortable July sun justifies all those unsaid desires burning under the hot melt of my skull and my princess diaries type royal romance dreams crumbling into a unified, anchored, possible fantasy, and the twelve Barbie’s with their worn dancing shoes and their handsome boyfriends putting on a lovely show, swirling in my head, I can’t help but think of what happens when the party is over. 

They can’t tell in the movie of course that when the dance is over and the boat has gone to the other side what the boys do, they get into their beds and turn off the lights and think of some other girl than their own, one of the twelve, sometimes two. The really naughty ones make bigger mental groupies. 

How can I look my prince in the face and pretend I don’t know? 

***