Tuesday, May 26, 2009

But most critically, sweet..



"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better."

— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

Thursday, May 21, 2009

New York (from the sidelines)




"She listened, as if she were an emigrant hearing her homeland's language for a brief while." - Ayn Rand


I am tracing the idea of New York with my index finger. It follows the broken clock and hazy mirror, until it reaches the edge of my bedroom door. The paint is flaking off in all the wrong places, and as I damn my non-responsive real estate agent to hell, I smile at the idea of New York.

New York burns like a lynching. It explodes in my backyard (sepia-coloured, of course). It sets itself off like a warning - a self-indulgent, overly protective burning mass so warm that it melts my winter heart.

It reminds me of a flaming sea, and I sit on the shore, arms around huddled knees, waiting for it to come home.

I know so little about the places I've been. The places I've been only teach me about myself. I read Rimbaud and Kundera and then find torn pieces of paper to write the lines that resonate as loudly as a church bell.

In this place I am Rimbaud and Jonathan Safran Foer and Plato and Kundera and Murakami and Baglione and Plath. In this place I am old shards of paper, covered in treacle-coloured mess and peeling at the edges. In this place I take the detritus of my life and make it magic.

In this place I come to know what I want.

I want to wake up with a glorious red wine induced hangover, fists unclenched, and have "i love you's" scrawled across the alabaster skin of my palm.

I want to drink luke warm, stiff, melanin-coloured coffee, served in stained yellow tea cups and served to me by a woman double my age.

I want hair the colour of "ripe orange rind" (Ayn Rand)

I want to swim in a bowl of molasses, and I want my convictions to be as strong and as binding.