there's a suitcase on my bed again.
I am making preparations to leave singapore, and go back to home, another home, again. i ws saying the other night that i feel like if i live somewhere...doesn't have to be a long time, just a few months, but if I LIVE there, i always miss it. that's my failing as a nomad. instead of having the home be inside me so that i never move, the ideal of the floating nomad life, i find that the world is my home...and there is always somewhere that i miss.
A year ago, august was all heirloom tomatoes and purple twilight. i was listening to vinyl with the windows open and a candle. Now i wonder...where did all the fireflies go?
Full of nervous energy
sleeping in the fold out bed, no furniture, new apartment, waiting for shipment, glossy wood floors and a pilow in front of the tv to watch Law and Order while eating roasted veggies in a wrap and a glass of white wine and later, to be sitting smoking on the porch in my towel...i love the feeling of drying off from a shower in the open air...hair up in a towel knot.
somehow the cigarette smoke was bigger before the furniture, the books...i wanted to let it out the back door.
I spent the days wandering around, and sitting by the pit, reading Bai Xianyong, i think...musicians, stilt walkers, madmen, drunks...i found home on the benches, in a movie of ease and elliott smith, the odd hard drunk. THe days were hot, and everybody said hi, you know, everybody said hi. i had to slow down just to go...take your time, miss. take your time.
When things started, when classes started i was walking through Harvard yard listening to tears for fears with the sun coming light, and a mug of joe from home, the co-op carry cup that i had picked up when i joined one august day after going off to watertown with a jar of homemade muesli for Fish and the Fam. I was listening to Depeche Mode that day..my jeans were rubbing out the tune to Personal Jesus from between my thighs. But, anyway, back to Harvard yard. I stepped through this shoal of people, it was the 80s all of a sudden...clean, bright, slightly vicious.
I was filled with love.and still being filled with love for my ex. I never thought i would speak of him as my ex. i was looking to the cleanliness of the wrought iron chairs, their happy picturesque position. and the T that sounds like elliott smith, the Decemberists, the pogues, the hidden cameras. always.
my grandmother died just as the air was getting colder.
and the speech between me and WIll was getting thinner and thinner, but what there was was boiling like tea on a mountain top. I remember he called me one time when fish was over and i had this sinking feeling as i sat in the red phone chair. my feet beat out a tune on the fridge..the words of the fridge poetry between my toes. "winter". "woman".
i took the plane home for the funeral after a week of being dazed. my grandmother had died in the time it took me to make and eat a bowl of oatmeal. I sat on the park bench in the island at the entrance to my development listening to Morrissey's "Our Frank" knowing that something big was ending. and it was even more than my grandmother's life. it scared me to kiss the smell of rot and shit in the crematorium, to cry so hard when i saw my own empty room where i had made love to will the last time. on the cream carpet floor in the summer lamplight. (you see, i remember. I remember the first time too)
in black i drank a black beer in the pub that was grey and low, surrounded by thick fingers in gold rings and hoarse voices and ploughman's sanwiches, everybody thinking of her great knees up, her G&T and her sense of style. her fuss, her jokes, Her sense of duty that was sharp as her photogenic nose.
I came home to cambridge and morrissey afraid that my last 18 years were being pulled out from underneath me.
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I See Color Bars When I Come
the red sugar crystals on the cake sparkled in the candlelight. I was naked. It was my birthday after all and i was going to eat cake and run around and do my ironing at 3am like the sawn off bitch that i am. But, mate, with a heart of gold.
Halloween i set the fire alarm off and became an unpopular resident. But i went to Rocky Horror anyway in a gothy get up that (reminded me of the good parts of venice, before i woke up smelling like rotting on the inside from the most painful..no i never felt that way again...i washed so hard so long.) and Blue with a gold earring and an old slouch hat walked me home like a gentleman jim.
Sawhain round the table with new friends, a strange mix..a big sweet fairy running around granting chocolate to me and a little girl with dark hair. and my how we drank.
NOSFERATUNOSFERATU NOSFERATU.
i was painting. reading. so excited. so stressed. the snow began. the markets shut..but not without a few trips to buy groceries on fridays in freezing rain...thanksgiving was a haunting of a childhood hotel and thinking that Business Chinese was a drag. it was.
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