i'm gonna tell it like a come back story

I can’t write today. The irony there. It’s so. So. Something. I’ve had a string of days that are altogether dissimilar to each other yet so the same that they’ve turned to some sort of autumn soup simmered so long the green beans taste just like the peas. It’s the texture that’s different and how do you make sense out of that. I’m not asking. But maybe I am. All I really care about is that it makes the right now trickier than I want it to be. I want words to flow and hate it when they don’t. Yeah. I said hate. I save that word for punch. I usually dislike things. Or don’t prefer them. But this. Not a fan. Clunk clunk clunk.

The pauses between sentences are killing me.

I was all set to wax poetic on him. Let loose my inner John Hughes and shower him in words written in cursive, the i’s dotted with hearts. I was ready to share birthday cake with him sitting on my dining room table, wearing a bridesmaid dress I don’t own. I was ready for someone to cue the OMD. But I didn’t say a word. I would’ve bet money that the world had ended because I just don’t pass up opportunities like that. Heart. Sleeve. Not. Tongue. Hold. But the moment came and went and I was left standing just fine. Dazed by my silence but pleased.

Three boys will read that and think it’s them, one of ‘em will be right.

It’s two weeks to the art show. It’s two weeks to November. I have a painting to finish and a novel to write. And happy hours to attend to. Cigarettes to clumsily inhale. Laundry to do. Verbs to conjugate. Here is me with eyelashes coated in $16 mascara. Here is me in my Hold Steady t-shirt and underwear I wore once already. Here is me kissing the fingers he jams into my mouth. Bring on the bed spins. Bring on the night sweats. Bring on the Rolling Rock. Guess what else. I have an iced americano every single day. And another thing. I make spreadsheets.

Yawn now. Yawn now and move along.

i have to concentrate when we kiss

Two beers to his sixteen, The Hold Steady played last night. I want some story. Something about a boy with glasses and perhaps a drunken kiss or two. Something about a cat fight or maybe a conversation that continued to kick around my head for the whole set. I’d like to say I met the band, man. That they pointed me out as the sweetie for the bouncer to give the back stage pass to, but awww, they don’t do that kind of thing. Instead I was the girl three people back and center stage. I got my hand held. I got my smile returned and Tad the gee-tarist called me “honey.” So I guess I can’t complain.

Oh. To be 33 forever.

do you want it like boy meets girl and the rest is history or do you want it like a murder mystery?

I posted art show things!

wash it in baby blue

Us today, walking to the bus stop, bickering. We act like an old married couple. We can find each other’s buttons in the dark. One hand tied behind our backs. I don’t hear him. He doesn’t hear me. I said something about painting and he thought I meant walls but I meant pictures and I didn’t say one word. Instead, I threw my imaginary hands up in the imaginary air and sighed one of those sassy imaginary sighs. In real life though, all I did was realize that we weren’t listening to each other anymore and oh, he’s said about 4 dozen things and I didn’t catch a single one. There you have it.

The bus came and went with him. I walked home, getting lost in the herd that is a downtown Seattle sidewalk at 6pm. I tried not to think about it and instead planned out my next paintings. Pictures. Not walls. As I weaved through the slower moving people traffic and crossed the imaginary line into my neighborhood. He was like barely there brushstrokes. Under the surface. Messing everything up.

He is my unlikely muse in tennis shoes and a track jacket. The pictures I snap of him are my favorites. The stories I toss up, my most read. My artwork bears witness. Secret messages hidden in little corners that he’ll never find. And I don’t tell. When we talk, we are all ideas. Sometimes saying the same exact thing at the same exact time and other times adding on to barely there notions until they are whole novels with hard covers and dog eared pages.

For all this sameness we are not the same. Easily I am the more sensitive. Sweet. Wavering of the two. He is stone sometimes. He is compartmentalized. Easily, the funnier of the pair. Attached by rubber bands. Or crazy glue. Or nothing real at all. We go from being best friends to not speaking in 15 seconds and then right back again. But it’s just me who brings him orange juice when he’s cranky from the rain. It’s just me. There you have it.

It’s Monday night and in three days I’ll be in the art space, hiding my nerves in a glass of red wine with my art up and lit and people squinting at my pen lines and whispering to their friends. I squandered tonight. I should have painted. Pictures. Not walls. One more piece for Thursday. One more block of color breaking up the white. But after a weekend of acrylic, my creative peanut is fast asleep.

Listen closely. You can hear the zzzzzzz’s.