Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Dina and Dan Forget, and in the Forgetting

The lights are always so much brighter in the evening, as the color descends and then dissents like a spiral but always in motion, we are becoming bigger and we are becoming brighter. You take out your phone and take a picture of the sky but it never quite comes out the way you expected it to. You put it on the Internet, I watch you, but its all pixelated and weird and kinda wonky and you are disappointed and you are prone to be and I kind of don't care.

We are at a very fancy bar that stays close for the month of Febuary because, even in this big city, they stay money ahead when they close they tell us. We sit and eat truffled frittes and drink some wine I can't pronounce and we are sitting closely, speaking in whispers about movement and action, someone should do something with this godforsaken city.

After the fancy bar: a walk. After a walk: my house, which we've been in exactly 28 times together but you can't ever seem to remember which floor I'm on.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I am startled, as if someone is standing over me. But there is no one there, the window is open and no wind, I can't even pretend it was the horizontal mini-blinds making noise. I feel a presence and you are snoring. I turn on the light and I am scared and I am sitting on the floor, I am freaked out that you are here, like it's high school and I'm waiting for my parents to figure out that I sneaked you in but this is adulthood and its my apartment and its the middle of the night and people are walking incessantly back and forth because it is the basement and we can see out the windows to the street, it is street-level this window, and there are honks and arguments and drunks and clicks of high heels. It never ends. I am freaked out and sitting on the floor now in the dark and I am smoking a cigarette and you shift in the bed to your other side, grab the pillow, don't even realize I'm not there, which is fine. The way it should be.


Saturday, January 5, 2013

Dan, listen to this

The last time I had my period I was with the person I fell in love in a 17th floor hotel room in a city I used to live in and know well. We were discussing all of the red flags they saw that told them they could not love me and that they could not even give me a chance in loving me even though I have been in love with people three times as good looking and have received love back in return, even if for a short while, even if years later.

I am in this hotel room and they fuck me with my tampon inside of me because I am afraid of taking it out and bleeding all over the bed, them, my legs. I do not want to see the blood. I only want to see blood if it is because they caused the blood. I do not want to remember that I am bleeding and have been for a week, a week early, of course. They wrap their fingers around the string of the extra large tampon and begin to jerk it in and out of me, every time a little deeper inside, so I gasp out of pain, mostly. When we are done doing whatever it is we think we are doing, I have to run to the bathroom and struggle to pull it out of me, it is so far inside. I am worried for two seconds I won't be able to get it out. Finally, I do, and it is oversized and full of fluid, heavy, weighty. I throw it on the bathroom floor. I run back out and they are masterbating but with the covers over their body and I ask what are you doing, what are you doing and finally they throw back the covers and say this, is that OK, and yes of course. The next moment I am jerking them off. The next moment it is the middle of the morning and dark, I am watching the fog lift from the city, they are on the edge of this huge King size bed, they never reach for me once, in the morning they leave so quietly I don't hear them.

Dina Remembers Things Maybe Dan Forgot

There is a certain permission we give ourselves to feel however we want to feel because if we don't give ourselves the permission, we'll kill ourselves eventually with all the things we feel buried deep inside, so deep that even we can't feel it for years and years.

You tell me that if you would have met me a few years earlier than when we met, you would not have been able to handle the relationship, it would have been too much, that the intensity could not be matched accordingly when you were 20 but when you were 23 you were so happy to simply be seen by someone that was like you. Peas in a pod, pigs in a sty/blanket.

What does this mean, when I walk down the sidewalk on Christmas Eve and it is snowing and I am alone in this big city. 7-11 is open on the corner, that is all. I am stumbling. I am sitting on my front porch and watching you stumble. When I stand outside of my building, I understand dancing more, why people do it, why people go anywhere at all. I understand why and how you danced with me all those years ago in a shitty club in our hometown small city and I told you danced like a fag and I mean it in the most loving way possible, you are the most beautiful dancer.

Do you remember in that same club to the '80's music we wept and held each other twice. Once before I left for another state for another life and once when I came back after 2 months for a visit because I had fallen in love with a woman that lived 18 blocks away from you. We were standing there watching the dancers and crying, crying, don't go you said to me why did you ever have to go and all I could do is rub the inside of your hand that had been bleeding earlier because, you said, you got into a fight with the guys at the shop and started throwing shrapnel like metal bits at each other off the floor from the machines and this time, this time, what was being thrown at you hit and stuck, inside of the soft perfect palm of your hand. You wince when I rub and I stop. I'm always hurting you and I don't even know it.

I told you once a long time ago that you broke my heart and you didn't understand and I didn't understand why you didn't understand, its really easy, I loved you and you didn't love me and it broke my heart. But, you said, I never had your heart to begin with. I never asked for it. I don't want it. I'm sorry, you said, I'm sorry. But this is ridiculous.

And you are right. It was ridiculous. I was young and in love and not willing to admit it.

It is 4AM and I am dancing by myself in my living room. I had no idea that this is where I would end up at 30 years old. (Almost 30, you remind me, almost 30, you are not 30 yet Dina. Because, when I turn 30, you are only 40 days behind me, 30 here we come, summer babies.) I am dancing by myself and I am remembering your chest and shoulders and how I could probably still hide behind your body if I needed to to avoid people as I did at that club downtown so long ago. You are the perfect human shield.

Friday, January 4, 2013

2013 Dina/Dan

I have lost everything I love, Dan. What happened.

I am in a 17th floor hotel room and I am asked by a person I am in bed with to tell them a story and when I say that I am not very good at stories, they tell me that is what I do, I tell stories, so let's hear it and so I give them this story:

My older brother knocked up my best friend after high school but kind of just on the outskirts of in high school. Our younger sister loves to hotbox ganja. My best friend + my brother's baby contracted a disease where it did not live but yet she had to wait to be induced to get rid of it so she looked very pregnant when in fact the child was not alive. Our younger sister, not that she was insensitive, but more that she had this job at H&M and was very interested in being downtown and in her car and on her phone and smoke a lot of weed around my best friend. One day we were outside smoking a cigarette and this elderly couple came up and lectured my best friend about smoking while pregnant. I learned a good lesson about compassion and mercy that day. After they left, she said she wanted to kill them and the whole time she was listening she was imagining gutting them from jugular to asshole. Because the baby was dead. Why didn't we just tell them that? I don't remember. I remember that we walked into the house and my little sister and her little sister who also worked at H&M downtown were watching Faces of Death, the one were the very diplomat looking professional man goes up to a podium and kills himself with a gun. What the hell. Why would anyone watch that.

I tell this story to the person that I come to find out I am in love with. It is winter and it gets dark early and we are up so high we can see the entire city West, East, North, beautiful. They tell me it is not a good story, not the story they wanted to hear, don't I know any uplifting stories, why is everything so violent, so gloomy.

So I tell them a few fragments of other stories, run-ins with celebrities when I followed jambands across the country and sold drugs, comedians, musicians, not impressive but what they wanted to hear.

Dan, don't you see. The next day they left me. They next week the woman that I love left me. Dan, you have left me. What kind of story do you want to hear? Tell me first so I can get it right the first time.