a future blue



1.

I met a girl with long black hair who was really drunk, 
and she told me that she couldn’t see the color blue
anymore and that it was really sad. 
All of her friends could still see blue, 
so they were trying to kiss other people. 
But she didn’t want to kiss people if she couldn’t see
blue, and I think that makes a lot of sense. 
I told her that I didn’t want to kiss people either, 
and she asked if I couldn’t see blue. 
And then she wondered out loud if we felt the same. 
And then I wondered inside if we felt the same. 
I put my arm around her and sang her a song from the CD
that I’ve had in my car too long, but she didn’t hear me
because the party music was too loud.
She saw my lips moving and she smiled and kind of giggled. 
She told me to stop singing and then she held my hand. 
I still wonder sometimes when I hear the loud party music
what it would be like to be a girl with long black hair who
is really drunk and couldn’t see the color blue. 
She was really pale and threw up on the blanket I gave her. 
I went home and mowed my lawn the next morning. 

I forgot to mow the area by the porch. 

2.

I wish I could describe myself, 
or better yet, be myself entirely. 
I wish I owned loafers and had button 
up shirts that were difficult to put on. 
I wish I had a cough in my throat, 
so that maybe I could enjoy the taste of cherry cough drops. 
I wish I wasn’t in a research lab, typing away, 
while the girl in front of me rubs her hoarse, cotton
covered ankles against the side of the chair. 
I wish I had warm oatmeal and didn’t care so much. 
I think I wish that most of all. 

3. 

     Do you ever start to lose yourself when someone speaks long enough? When you watch a documentary about them when they’re famous, or when you’ve had a little to drink and you sort of sit back within yourself and put the curtains up. You let them sort of rinse out the whole spirit of what you’ve been working on, and you didn’t spit up or wipe your mouth, you just sort of lie there with a napkin tucked into the collar of your worn out shirt, and let them feed you smashed peas or squash. And you start to get some momentum with who they are, and who you are now, because with every quirk that they have, like how they like to drink lukewarm milk in the middle of the night, and they keep it at their bedside, and you start to wonder if that makes them genius, because we’ve all sort of sought out those quirks like a movie; some generation unafraid of being different because we’ve learned it’s a bit more successful in this day n’ age. And you pick up their quirks and you start to assemble not the real and translucent version of them, but this sculpted sort of modge podge of character, and you don’t even fizzle or crack at the thought of who you are or why those things feel like ground zero; but they are ground zero, you feel them as if they are the foreword, and this person for a brief glimpse of glibly spirit-arrest has sort of won you over, without even pitching the idea, and they’ve written the foreword to who you are, and that’s all you’ve got to go off of, and maybe if they’re too different of a person, and you’re sort of squeeming as they feed you peas with a fork, which is wrong, and they don’t answer the need for spoons, which is ultimately an unbearable frustration. And so you get worried maybe. You get nervous. You start thinking, ‘is this the person I really have to be, this one right here?’ and you feel stuck and blue at the thought of being this new person named Tom, who cares too much about having a nice watch—it doesn’t say as much as he thinks it does, but does it? Does that now matter to me? Am I stuck liking watches? Then somewhere, in a very urbane way, you come out of the whole escapade of being lost in another person, because you fall into people like that, and its horribly enriching and hurtful all at once—you’ve got the experience now, so that’s good—and that’s why when you come up for air, and you’re not stuck liking watches, you begin, as always, for the first revolutionary time—begin to see yourself as a buildable experience, a work of choices, and you’ll be delighted to know, that you are invariably yourself all over again.

Fucking watches.

4. 

     Leaning against the washing machine, as its shaking power fights my sighing hip. I look up, out, and through, the opaque plastic panels of windows, which are surrounded on all sides by antiquated yellow paint.
     I feel like I'm on a factory machine line, and while I don't move anywhere really, I stare out the windows too longingly, and the pushing of the white, trembling machine is entrancing enough that I feel myself being pulled viciously into the light. 
And the machine kicks short and reads "unbalance" in French. And so I stick my hand into the machine to move the wet clothes into a civilised circle again, and it becomes so intimate and vulnerable. I'm sort of tossed about the light of the opaqueness, and the smalling room, and I start to feel quite sensual as I move my hands about the machine. And the clothes are finally sorted properly. 
Then someone comes in the room. "Bonjour" she says. 
And I look at her. 

5. 

     I have almost been driven entirely around Nova Scotia today, in the pursuit of memoir, in the aim to recreate the livelihood of Lesley Feist. The car has been playing her delicate, funky voice for over two hours now. I'm starving for some long awaited lobster, but I can't help but pay great attention to the admiration at work. 
     If you were to ask me, "Why might you be an optimist?" I'd come to remember today's drive, and how a dear friend of mine drove through an entire providence just to attain some intangible connection to a musician he loves so much. 
At one point, a man spent hours at his desk, rummaging through letters from his lover, trying to recall her favourite flower--simply to buy them and make impression. There are several believable accounts as such.
     To keep in mind, there is a remarkable amount of admiration, profound and unknown. And if I tell you about my dear friend driving through Nova Scotia, or about a man rummaging through countless letters for a flower name---it's quite believable. Here is the mighty, conditional limit; in which, you have forgotten yourself to have a favourite flower and delicate, funky voice: which is undoubtably an enamouring thing to suppose.
     We often expect no great effort made, and perhaps, it isn't often. But remember yourself a book read, a life thought out, and that you are collectful and bound up in some lovable suit. There has been a great effort made to remember you, to keep you alive in some separate way from you. And if you were to doubt it, or by curiosity’s sake come to know it, it wouldn't be sincere. It wouldn't be a quiet mess of feelings: illogically shaping the spent time of others, on finding you some more. 
Perhaps someone who loves you too, will end up driving through Halifax. 

6. 

     This morning I sat at a table eating breakfast and watching a woman in a silver car bite her nails, while she waited for the light to change. I took a bite into a honeydew donut, wondering how different the taste between my donut and her fingernail was. I think the honeydew made me remember her hair a superbly, bright blonde; it's powerful, honeydew. 
The honeydew girl is my favourite type of person: one who never leaves the jagged edges of their very fingers. One, who if not shouted at, will go about their day without reason to perplex themselves. Gordon Parks once used a small 35 mm camera to take a photograph of a couple that caught his eye, because he didn't want them to notice him. 

     I think I spend most of my life like that. I think I approach many persons, possible lovers, and linger unnoticeable at the wayside. I have come to understand that the human interaction has aching potential; and with that, comes the responsibility to realise what shaping it can do. 
I feel like Im starting to make less sense to most people, as most people start to make more sense to me: As I do little more than a hanging curtain, standing at the edge of stranger’s lives, noticing finger nail habits, or how they step around the room when they don't think anyone is listening. 
We find it creepy or scary when people break into homes in the middle of the night, or when they look into our eyes too often on the train. When a stranger has intentionally studied you in any array, it becomes a nervous thing for most of us. 
     But there are many instances of ourselves that we let out quite unconsciously. Things that would be appalling if either side were to notice openly. I think we leave ourselves far more open to being understood than we would like to believe. We are not so secret.
Which is why when someone chews their nails for minutes on end, and doesn't see me eating a donut, and they begin to get stressed the longer they're kept waiting at the light--that I feel such a need to keep my space. I have come to realise how much most people can be understood, and with that, I've come to stand a little farther away, come to carry smaller cameras, come to write notes about their noses while facing a different direction. 

     I have been briefly allowed into the full instances of things. 


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