triptychs
I am watching a film that echoes the feeling of my father blowing in my ear to help me fall asleep or my grandmother's delicate but strong hands easing out the knots in my back. It's a feeling akin to having a thread pulled from the inside of your belly button, down into your stomach, and up through your spine. It's not exactly a chill. It's an immense feeling of comfort.
This film happened to be recommended to me in the bleach-white San Franciscan apartment of my first bout of that numbness called chemical - laid out in front of me by a mid-to-late thirty, forty, year-old man who's nickname was Dancer Dan and who bartended with the woman I was falling for. She brought him home after a shift and left him there. Said he needed sleep. This was 8 in the morning.
I was watching a film. I want to say it was Mary Poppins or the Labyrinth or maybe Brother From Another Planet. I don't remember what it was. I remember how the time seemed to ellipse into infinity as I went on with the thing that would become a ritual. I didn't want him there but I wanted what he brought there.
So we watched the film. Tree of the Wooden Clogs, had I seen it, he asked, because I’d like it, he said. So I put it on my Netflix three years ago, four floors up in the tenderloin. And it came yesterday and I began to watch it and he was right (I hate that fact and love it simultaneously). That man I fucked in a haze. Who begged me to have patience with his drugged-out unresponsive appendages. Whose skin repulsed me in the light of mornings turned to noons turned to my eager outings onto the street out of that room.
He was right. And I adore it (and maybe this means that in my shameful retrospective I am abdicated or absolved and maybe he loved me and knew me when I thought I was a used up conquest, human skin as life-size condom, all spent in variations of his white givings, feeling as if I was divorced from my very soul and disconnected from humanity - these flutters are proof that I was there and he was there and there is enough for me to suture it).
So the film is the antithesis of what we were doing in that single room where I slept with no beds. It is a complete turn back of time - as if I had been on the farm with my grandmother in Poland and lulled to sleep by my great-grandparents singing together every night in little piles of hay. Those great-grandparents I've never met. That blood that meets my flesh in every dream I've ever had. And here it is all here like a strange collage or palimpsest with the footprints of urban apartments layering themselves arranged in sheets and broken mattresses and the rapid-fire catholic prayers of all those that came before me.
This film happened to be recommended to me in the bleach-white San Franciscan apartment of my first bout of that numbness called chemical - laid out in front of me by a mid-to-late thirty, forty, year-old man who's nickname was Dancer Dan and who bartended with the woman I was falling for. She brought him home after a shift and left him there. Said he needed sleep. This was 8 in the morning.
I was watching a film. I want to say it was Mary Poppins or the Labyrinth or maybe Brother From Another Planet. I don't remember what it was. I remember how the time seemed to ellipse into infinity as I went on with the thing that would become a ritual. I didn't want him there but I wanted what he brought there.
So we watched the film. Tree of the Wooden Clogs, had I seen it, he asked, because I’d like it, he said. So I put it on my Netflix three years ago, four floors up in the tenderloin. And it came yesterday and I began to watch it and he was right (I hate that fact and love it simultaneously). That man I fucked in a haze. Who begged me to have patience with his drugged-out unresponsive appendages. Whose skin repulsed me in the light of mornings turned to noons turned to my eager outings onto the street out of that room.
He was right. And I adore it (and maybe this means that in my shameful retrospective I am abdicated or absolved and maybe he loved me and knew me when I thought I was a used up conquest, human skin as life-size condom, all spent in variations of his white givings, feeling as if I was divorced from my very soul and disconnected from humanity - these flutters are proof that I was there and he was there and there is enough for me to suture it).
So the film is the antithesis of what we were doing in that single room where I slept with no beds. It is a complete turn back of time - as if I had been on the farm with my grandmother in Poland and lulled to sleep by my great-grandparents singing together every night in little piles of hay. Those great-grandparents I've never met. That blood that meets my flesh in every dream I've ever had. And here it is all here like a strange collage or palimpsest with the footprints of urban apartments layering themselves arranged in sheets and broken mattresses and the rapid-fire catholic prayers of all those that came before me.