(no subject)
Grateful that the sky is grey (not unbeautiful, just not as animated and unique as they’ve constantly been here in Amsterdam) and that I can take some time inside here to try to wring out a few words from my bulging mindheart.
July 25 came very suddenly again this year. I was asleep when that day snuck in and didn’t notice it before I already lay dozily vulnerable. I should have but couldn’t pretend to remain sleeping and, unprepared, was quickly strangled and looted by it.
“Oh God! July 25th! This is a day I’ll always remember!”
I was unlocking my bike and exhaled loudly under the weight of the words as fell on me.
“What is it? Gabriel, what’s wrong?” Tears were pushing my eyes and I kept fidgeting with the sticky lock, trying to play it off.
“Talk, Gabriel. You’re good at this.”
That’s Rick. One night at this queer squat’s dance party he blurred out the packed room with these blue eyes elevated a head over everyone else. Once I was sure they were for me I popped my eyes back out at him and escaped to the bar for some water and a chance to meet him. I left thisguyDavide and his interest in me and the tired dance I was trying next to him (the DJ that night seemed to be, under bad disguises, churning out the same boring beat all night).
But I still wiggled as I waited for my water and jumped as this giant with blue room-blurring eyes was suddenly next to me.
“Oh-Hi!” and I waved my hand nervously at him, a few inches from his face. “I’m Gabriel. Do you want to have my phone number?” He still laughs about my choice of first words as I tried to bring this giant into my future without hurting anyone’s feelings. But somehow it was okay that I brought him back to where Ben, Ian and Davide were trying their best to keep dancing (JD had gone home with a slender chef named Paul who, today, taught us how to make mayonnaise and who I maybe has been giving JD secret mayonnaise-making lessons almost every night). And when Davide’s bike brought him home, Rick rode on with us, to the boxcar-sized shipping container we were staying in. I didn’t kiss him until the next night when a queer Dutch lady rubbed our necks, pulled our hair and then pushed our faces into each other’s saying it would be beautiful.
And more than a week and one hundred hugs later, another dateless morning, I woke up next to Rick again (who, in bed, I can look at face-to-face) and after we rolled around a little, he asked if I would come with him and help him buy a digital camera. He was inspired by the pixilated tour of my life and loves I was able to give him with myspace and email and Ben’s diary. We rode outside of Amsterdam, all the way to this awful corporate shopping complex. Between the large, fluorescent-lit stores and the elderly tourists and the horses on the way, it was like we’d ridden all the way to Ocala, FL. Over a milkshake in a red and yellow FEBO (Dutch Mcdonald’s) cup outside the red and white MediaMart (Dutch BestBuy), and all the research-proven consumerism of those colors, we explored the features of the camera he bought discounted (at my suggestion) for having been the display model. Using his soft shirt he wiped away all the fingerprints of customers shopping for a moment-eternalizing machine, looking to buy something to keep times and memories available on a smart disk.
“What day is it?” He asked me when his mostly new Nikon asked him, in Dutch, the same question.
I flipped through the phone that I accidently bought off someone in the street. A stolen phone, goddamn it, which some “Mom” phoned shortly after I handed over the cash and was blocked before I could try to find its owner.
I searched the menu and, in triumph over the new machine and the dateless-ness of traveling, didn’t listen to myself when I read aloud it’s answer, “July 25th, 2006” and the camera unfolded it’s menu, with modes for mountains or parties, fireworks or flowers. Rick framed me in the portrait mode and saved me in the extra memory card he bought with it.
As we unlocked the bikes, Rick beamed with our success and the possibilities the new technology promised with a one-year warranty.
“Oh God! July 25th! This is a day I’ll always remember!”
In Gainesville, Florida, where she died, it would be a little past three which, four years ago, would have been right around the time when it happened. Remember, one of my first entries talking about that gold-striped morning that I can’t wake her up out of?
Two years earlier it came as a surprise, also-when I was at Top of the Pops in London and Marylin Manson was singing “Personal Jesus” as I watched from behind the camera until I noticed the show’s agenda print-out’s date and, possibly on British television, found the same tears as now falling out of my eyes.
Rick suggested that we get off our bikes, but I couldn’t imagine a better thing to do than moving my peddles. My words and tears blew off me into fields with flowers and flowering weeds and those stupid horses as he let me tell him the story as I remember it from the foot of her bed of that day. He let me put words to the memory and fictionalize that early morning that we let Jasmine’s pumps quit breathing. The summer before I met most of you.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that this matters (and certainly not saying that it doesn’t). I just thought my job on here was to show you my heart and felt compelled to write a story about how swollen with joy and pain it has felt lately: I had this wonderful person that I made a world with | who isn’t alive anymore, I have all these wonderful memories of her | but one in which I can’t wake her up in. She can’t share it with me | but being alive is so brilliant and I’m having all these amazing adventures and look even now how the sky has become. No, I’m not saying that I’m sad. I’m just making this annual crawl away from the anniversary of that unwaking morning and have a lot to be grateful for.
July 25 came very suddenly again this year. I was asleep when that day snuck in and didn’t notice it before I already lay dozily vulnerable. I should have but couldn’t pretend to remain sleeping and, unprepared, was quickly strangled and looted by it.
“Oh God! July 25th! This is a day I’ll always remember!”
I was unlocking my bike and exhaled loudly under the weight of the words as fell on me.
“What is it? Gabriel, what’s wrong?” Tears were pushing my eyes and I kept fidgeting with the sticky lock, trying to play it off.
“Talk, Gabriel. You’re good at this.”
That’s Rick. One night at this queer squat’s dance party he blurred out the packed room with these blue eyes elevated a head over everyone else. Once I was sure they were for me I popped my eyes back out at him and escaped to the bar for some water and a chance to meet him. I left thisguyDavide and his interest in me and the tired dance I was trying next to him (the DJ that night seemed to be, under bad disguises, churning out the same boring beat all night).
But I still wiggled as I waited for my water and jumped as this giant with blue room-blurring eyes was suddenly next to me.
“Oh-Hi!” and I waved my hand nervously at him, a few inches from his face. “I’m Gabriel. Do you want to have my phone number?” He still laughs about my choice of first words as I tried to bring this giant into my future without hurting anyone’s feelings. But somehow it was okay that I brought him back to where Ben, Ian and Davide were trying their best to keep dancing (JD had gone home with a slender chef named Paul who, today, taught us how to make mayonnaise and who I maybe has been giving JD secret mayonnaise-making lessons almost every night). And when Davide’s bike brought him home, Rick rode on with us, to the boxcar-sized shipping container we were staying in. I didn’t kiss him until the next night when a queer Dutch lady rubbed our necks, pulled our hair and then pushed our faces into each other’s saying it would be beautiful.
And more than a week and one hundred hugs later, another dateless morning, I woke up next to Rick again (who, in bed, I can look at face-to-face) and after we rolled around a little, he asked if I would come with him and help him buy a digital camera. He was inspired by the pixilated tour of my life and loves I was able to give him with myspace and email and Ben’s diary. We rode outside of Amsterdam, all the way to this awful corporate shopping complex. Between the large, fluorescent-lit stores and the elderly tourists and the horses on the way, it was like we’d ridden all the way to Ocala, FL. Over a milkshake in a red and yellow FEBO (Dutch Mcdonald’s) cup outside the red and white MediaMart (Dutch BestBuy), and all the research-proven consumerism of those colors, we explored the features of the camera he bought discounted (at my suggestion) for having been the display model. Using his soft shirt he wiped away all the fingerprints of customers shopping for a moment-eternalizing machine, looking to buy something to keep times and memories available on a smart disk.
“What day is it?” He asked me when his mostly new Nikon asked him, in Dutch, the same question.
I flipped through the phone that I accidently bought off someone in the street. A stolen phone, goddamn it, which some “Mom” phoned shortly after I handed over the cash and was blocked before I could try to find its owner.
I searched the menu and, in triumph over the new machine and the dateless-ness of traveling, didn’t listen to myself when I read aloud it’s answer, “July 25th, 2006” and the camera unfolded it’s menu, with modes for mountains or parties, fireworks or flowers. Rick framed me in the portrait mode and saved me in the extra memory card he bought with it.
As we unlocked the bikes, Rick beamed with our success and the possibilities the new technology promised with a one-year warranty.
“Oh God! July 25th! This is a day I’ll always remember!”
In Gainesville, Florida, where she died, it would be a little past three which, four years ago, would have been right around the time when it happened. Remember, one of my first entries talking about that gold-striped morning that I can’t wake her up out of?
Two years earlier it came as a surprise, also-when I was at Top of the Pops in London and Marylin Manson was singing “Personal Jesus” as I watched from behind the camera until I noticed the show’s agenda print-out’s date and, possibly on British television, found the same tears as now falling out of my eyes.
Rick suggested that we get off our bikes, but I couldn’t imagine a better thing to do than moving my peddles. My words and tears blew off me into fields with flowers and flowering weeds and those stupid horses as he let me tell him the story as I remember it from the foot of her bed of that day. He let me put words to the memory and fictionalize that early morning that we let Jasmine’s pumps quit breathing. The summer before I met most of you.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that this matters (and certainly not saying that it doesn’t). I just thought my job on here was to show you my heart and felt compelled to write a story about how swollen with joy and pain it has felt lately: I had this wonderful person that I made a world with | who isn’t alive anymore, I have all these wonderful memories of her | but one in which I can’t wake her up in. She can’t share it with me | but being alive is so brilliant and I’m having all these amazing adventures and look even now how the sky has become. No, I’m not saying that I’m sad. I’m just making this annual crawl away from the anniversary of that unwaking morning and have a lot to be grateful for.