Magdalena O!

“Let me just lay on your bed for a bit. I feel tired.” She hops to the other room. The comfort has never left her. Laying on her side, to make sure her tennis skirt doesn’t reveal too much, not now. The navy bed sheets are crumpled and the mattress peeks out from underneath. She grabs a hold of one of the pillows squeezing it underneath her collar, looking up but then quickly buries her head into the bed.
“It still smells exactly the same. You haven’t washed this in a while have you?”
The music is still blaring and she whines to turn it off, making a counter-clockwise gesture with her fingers. They talk about his sister and her plans on making it in Paris. She giggles with envy. Their conversations appear as deep discussions but they both know it’s just small talk.
“I should go.” She says hesitantly, looking around his room, trying to take it all in. The plants hover over his desk and his computer, winding around the makeshift shelf that could fall any moment. The blinds are grayed with dust and cigarette smoke. Records stacked up on the floor, some in milk crates, some edged along his bed. Old hip-hop records she wishes she could just ask him for hiding underneath his clothes. He catches her scanning.
“I was going to do laundry today but then I just couldn’t stop donwloading all this raggae.” He sighs as if he really is bothered by his negelect.
“I really should go.”
“Ok.”
She doesn’t get up and instead lays horizontally on the bed with her eyes closed and dangles her feet off the side spreading her arms out. He’s torn and she knows it.

And the day came
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took to
Blossom.

-Anais Nin

when learning to fly, man started by falling, literally, off cliffs, to catch the speed to ascend.

I got drunk today while going to pick up a cheque at the restaurant. “Jager on ice” my boss asks me as I walk in and I nod. He knows where my love goes. My eyes are pissed off and want rest but Bukowski’s words keep teasing me.

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Yours words dig at me, even though I know you don’t mean them that way.Your words, so few and full they feel like poetry.They read like poetry.I want to be the poet to save you, but my love is embarrassing so insteadI scatter poetry around you hoping that my worry will seep out of them, onto you.If you feel like living death, than I feel like I’m allowing your existence to be posthumous.Were you trying to say yes, ok, take on some of that responsibility?I believe.How selfish of me to think that maybe I can convince you to happiness?To Life? But I’m selfish.Selfish in regard to you,Selfish in wanting your happiness,your eyes on mine,for all of us together,music.Shambles.Shambles is a condition or scene of great devastation.Everywhere.Everyday.I remember when you told me,If this was a game of chess I’d be losing all my pieces.Even then your words were poetry.Your poetry made me selfish,Made me believe I was a part of it.I can’t be a part of death,Not with you.Come live with me.

I regret now that my preoccupations with always thinking i’m too old have cost me years of experience, and now when I am much older I think I am ok but behind it all. I musn’t think that. I am here, I am able.

My preoccupations always cost me observations. I fell asleep shortly after getting home from work. I stayed up until 2am the night before baking banana bread, of which I’ve had almost the whole thing by now. I gave myself to work today, it was so strange to put effort into my job because I am so good at totally dissasociating myself from any task. I decided today would be different, I thought it would help me feel connected. I’d tell my boss how excited I am about the new menu project or the staff exhibition, but I am just lying. I am trying to convince myself to feel something but I feel nothing at all. If I’m going to stay with something, then I should give myself to it, but it’s so trying to do so. I don’t want it to be difficult, I want to be sincere. The disconnection drains me. I always imagined it helping me, making sure that I was still ‘me’, I wasn’t in any way my job, but instead my lack towards it stops all creativity.

How do you reach out? Is the sincerest reaching out only fulfilled when you let go of worrying about vulnerability? Why do some people put you at ease, while others you want to so badly to reach out to, make you clam up? Can I ever let go completely with everyone I want to? I want to listen to Tipper and be in a country I’ve never been to before and just lay on the grass, a thick bed of grass like in Egmont Park, Brussels, without my cell phone, my lap top, without anyone but have the music permeate me. Did my grandfather reach out? Is he dead because he didn’t want to reach out? Did we just not hear him? Why did he die five days before I was supposed to go see him? I’m on the phone with him, he seems well. He is faking it. I don’t want to believe it. I am too busy making websites, I am too busy living to admit, to observe someone I love dying in front of me. I use my work as an excuse only in part, because I don’t want the responsibility, I don’t want to give into knowing he needs me so much, he is depending on me. I want those close to me to know they can depend on me, I want to feel needed, I want to give myself to help. My eyelids are heavy with dread.

Erica Jong writes about Anne Sexton:

…Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: “Don’t dwell on the book’s reception. The point is to get on with it–you have a life’s work ahead of you–no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly–that’s the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn’t one poem being written by any of us–or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem–a community effort if you will. It’s all the same poem. It doesn’t belong to any one writer–it’s God’s poem perhaps. Or God’s people’s poem. You have the gift– and with it comes responsibility–you mustn’t neglect or be mean to that gift–you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.” But the ego must be fed so the gift can do its work…

How can I be a writer? A close friend of mine in high school who I only became close to after she admitted to cutting herself to me after reading my website and my stories, used to tell me, “People may think you are a bitch, but your striking honesty captivates me, please don’t ever change.” And here I am, still thought of as a bitch, but more of a bitch because my honesty has now become snootiness and not full of youthful perception.

How do you start stripping? How can I wash the soot off my heart and unclog the tar in my thoughts? So much hiding. So much actions and reactions and experiences written up vaguely, erasing the mannerisms of love but keeping… keeping what? Lies? I detest that word. It’s not lies I bear with me but enablers of memory loss, enablers of emotive dissasociation. How can I be truthful in my writing when I am so fucking scared to really, really get to the core of myself? Of my lover, of my parents? Will I be able to face my mother someday and tell her how I feel, or maybe even ask her sincerely what she really wants? My therapist says I think of too much all at once, making it all turn into one mess and that I’ll never be able to untangle my core this way. I’ll become so little and my “singular” problem so huge, I’ll become the pea under the princess’ bed. My anger will turn into rue, and then the princess. All my life will be the hundred mattresses all stacked on top of me, and me as the bothersome pea, me as the blockage to life. Me as the discomfort to happiness and peace.