(no subject)
Last time I gave La Dispute the spotlight, so now it's EMA's turn.
I'm revisiting a story format that I did once, because I really enjoy it and I feel that the other instance is some of if not the finest writing I've ever done, where I write a series of very short narratives inspired by the songs on a particular album. In this case, Past Life Martyred Saints.
This is very much a first draft, though, and I'm still disappointed in most of them. Except for Coda which is perfect.
The Grey Ship
I imagine myself, riding in a black and chrome carriage, looking out the window, my cheek meeting my palm and wrinkling the black suit. People are looking in, with sadness in their collective eye.
My mom and my aunt are trying to have a conversation, but they’re not really having one. No one stops speaking, though. Everyone is speaking, like they’re proving something by it. Even I’m speaking, as I watch the sparkling cars and dripping faces, and the grass in its defiant vibrancy. This is more than the sum of its parts, and I just want to smile.
I’m going to write instead.
These are stories about dying.
California
Everything has its own come down. You can put them to anything.
Food loses the taste. Sex goes dull. A tape spool runs hot. Inspiration runs dry.
I knew this. I told myself that I would hold it off, my perspective a shield from my natural motions. Or like a drug.
If you went at it the right way, something could stay the same forever. It was a matter of the attitude. The will can exceed the touch. I told myself that I knew this.
What I didn’t tell myself was what I also knew. That I wouldn’t last, and at the end, I wouldn’t want to. I knew, because I’ve been here before.
Anteroom
Feeling “unlimited” was the clearest thing in the world. It put a direct vision in my head, I knew exactly the meaning of the word, connotatively, denotatively, I put it together from each and every and all sides.
What I’m saying was I knew what it meant. To feel unlimited. Just between us, maybe I’ve been there once or twice.
It goes deeper than a feeling, too. That’s what I mean, the nuance of the thing. We can never really end. There’s a bottomless number of tries and we just keep going, until you get it right. Whatever right means. Look, I’m talking about satisfaction. Do whatever you want, all the time. Because you’ve got all the time.
Milkman
He didn’t mean anything to her, but she didn’t know that yet. And she wouldn’t know it for another two months and sixteen days.
But that wasn’t true. He did mean something. It just wasn’t something in him, or of him. He was a representation, he told her something that she needed to know. She could thank him for that, at least, but maybe she never would.
Because it wasn’t her who drove the revelation in. All that crumpled paper worth, he balled it on his own. She wanted to have sympathy, even for a little while after she saw that she couldn’t.
Coda
It’s the same room, with gray light slicing the blinds and spilling in bars onto the open, wide floor.
It’s like Hell when you’re here. And space when you’re not.
Marked
They released a new skin today. Opaque, in frosted glass pane green, teal. You can see the bones in your wrist, your hamstrings, your lungs. A projection of the brain is interfaced over the skull with the flip of a switch. A stock brain, but self scanners are in the works.
It’s a connection.
It reminds us of sepia days with our intimacy to the Land, something they’ve told me about in terms like the ones they use to describe the copulation at its more maudlin phrasings. To pull food and struggle and death from the Land and the Sky, is there anything more sublime?
Breakfast
I am writing this down without stopping.
Reason is the most formal thing in the world, a collection of monochrome rules without deviation. Reason makes everything simple. I think I am the only one who can see this, sometimes.
Here is what I know, that is to say what makes everything easy to understand and, by extension, accomplish. There are things that cannot exist together. Logical opposites, contradictions. In no way, never, ever, can these things exist in the same place at the same time.
Emotions are confusing, but you can make them simple. Hate, and sympathy, it is one or the other. Let no amount of tears convince you otherwise. You have to be immutable. If you ever worry about losing your clarity, there’s always. . . always the light of reason to fall back on.
Just. . .
Butterfly Knife
My grandfather stopped telling me stories when I was little. My parents didn’t think I knew why.
It was too late, though. By the time of intervention, I had already been indoctrinated into that world. My head swam with white haired specters and sounds like thunder pulled from the earth by curious men. My world was incomplete, though. That was what my mother and father did achieve. Until I realized that it didn’t matter.
I could fill it out myself, in crayon winged fish, black wriggling chains, boats that rode lightning bolts, gentlemen hiding behind their hats, walls made of the ocean, towers that spoke to the trees and the bird vipers and the tall musicians. There were mazes in goldfish bowls, with hurricane rapiers sentineling chests of glittered eggs from the starless expanse of sky over the anti-moon. Angel feathered queens of automaton people searching for their cobalt hearts and stomachs, tossed many years before into the rivers by the clever gloved rabbit. Emissaries from the crystal glaciers ever breaking the sky ships, dancing with steam nymphs in the courts of the grand ether gryphon, while the viridian sky cracked around them in brilliant amber apocalypse.
There was everything.
Red Star
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
I’m opening the door. It’s tentative at first, then light floods in as a burst of stars so bright everything is white until it comes into focus. It’s like the whole world is just being formed. Just in this moment.
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
How many steps? I’ve stopped counting. It doesn’t make sense to count them anymore. I’m too occupied anyways, with all of these senses alert and rousing like the month March and all the nature that comes with that.
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
But if you won’t find me, someone will.
And.
If someone won’t find me, then I will.
Sometimes I feel.
I'm revisiting a story format that I did once, because I really enjoy it and I feel that the other instance is some of if not the finest writing I've ever done, where I write a series of very short narratives inspired by the songs on a particular album. In this case, Past Life Martyred Saints.
This is very much a first draft, though, and I'm still disappointed in most of them. Except for Coda which is perfect.
The Grey Ship
I imagine myself, riding in a black and chrome carriage, looking out the window, my cheek meeting my palm and wrinkling the black suit. People are looking in, with sadness in their collective eye.
My mom and my aunt are trying to have a conversation, but they’re not really having one. No one stops speaking, though. Everyone is speaking, like they’re proving something by it. Even I’m speaking, as I watch the sparkling cars and dripping faces, and the grass in its defiant vibrancy. This is more than the sum of its parts, and I just want to smile.
I’m going to write instead.
These are stories about dying.
California
Everything has its own come down. You can put them to anything.
Food loses the taste. Sex goes dull. A tape spool runs hot. Inspiration runs dry.
I knew this. I told myself that I would hold it off, my perspective a shield from my natural motions. Or like a drug.
If you went at it the right way, something could stay the same forever. It was a matter of the attitude. The will can exceed the touch. I told myself that I knew this.
What I didn’t tell myself was what I also knew. That I wouldn’t last, and at the end, I wouldn’t want to. I knew, because I’ve been here before.
Anteroom
Feeling “unlimited” was the clearest thing in the world. It put a direct vision in my head, I knew exactly the meaning of the word, connotatively, denotatively, I put it together from each and every and all sides.
What I’m saying was I knew what it meant. To feel unlimited. Just between us, maybe I’ve been there once or twice.
It goes deeper than a feeling, too. That’s what I mean, the nuance of the thing. We can never really end. There’s a bottomless number of tries and we just keep going, until you get it right. Whatever right means. Look, I’m talking about satisfaction. Do whatever you want, all the time. Because you’ve got all the time.
Milkman
He didn’t mean anything to her, but she didn’t know that yet. And she wouldn’t know it for another two months and sixteen days.
But that wasn’t true. He did mean something. It just wasn’t something in him, or of him. He was a representation, he told her something that she needed to know. She could thank him for that, at least, but maybe she never would.
Because it wasn’t her who drove the revelation in. All that crumpled paper worth, he balled it on his own. She wanted to have sympathy, even for a little while after she saw that she couldn’t.
Coda
It’s the same room, with gray light slicing the blinds and spilling in bars onto the open, wide floor.
It’s like Hell when you’re here. And space when you’re not.
Marked
They released a new skin today. Opaque, in frosted glass pane green, teal. You can see the bones in your wrist, your hamstrings, your lungs. A projection of the brain is interfaced over the skull with the flip of a switch. A stock brain, but self scanners are in the works.
It’s a connection.
It reminds us of sepia days with our intimacy to the Land, something they’ve told me about in terms like the ones they use to describe the copulation at its more maudlin phrasings. To pull food and struggle and death from the Land and the Sky, is there anything more sublime?
Breakfast
I am writing this down without stopping.
Reason is the most formal thing in the world, a collection of monochrome rules without deviation. Reason makes everything simple. I think I am the only one who can see this, sometimes.
Here is what I know, that is to say what makes everything easy to understand and, by extension, accomplish. There are things that cannot exist together. Logical opposites, contradictions. In no way, never, ever, can these things exist in the same place at the same time.
Emotions are confusing, but you can make them simple. Hate, and sympathy, it is one or the other. Let no amount of tears convince you otherwise. You have to be immutable. If you ever worry about losing your clarity, there’s always. . . always the light of reason to fall back on.
Just. . .
Butterfly Knife
My grandfather stopped telling me stories when I was little. My parents didn’t think I knew why.
It was too late, though. By the time of intervention, I had already been indoctrinated into that world. My head swam with white haired specters and sounds like thunder pulled from the earth by curious men. My world was incomplete, though. That was what my mother and father did achieve. Until I realized that it didn’t matter.
I could fill it out myself, in crayon winged fish, black wriggling chains, boats that rode lightning bolts, gentlemen hiding behind their hats, walls made of the ocean, towers that spoke to the trees and the bird vipers and the tall musicians. There were mazes in goldfish bowls, with hurricane rapiers sentineling chests of glittered eggs from the starless expanse of sky over the anti-moon. Angel feathered queens of automaton people searching for their cobalt hearts and stomachs, tossed many years before into the rivers by the clever gloved rabbit. Emissaries from the crystal glaciers ever breaking the sky ships, dancing with steam nymphs in the courts of the grand ether gryphon, while the viridian sky cracked around them in brilliant amber apocalypse.
There was everything.
Red Star
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
I’m opening the door. It’s tentative at first, then light floods in as a burst of stars so bright everything is white until it comes into focus. It’s like the whole world is just being formed. Just in this moment.
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
How many steps? I’ve stopped counting. It doesn’t make sense to count them anymore. I’m too occupied anyways, with all of these senses alert and rousing like the month March and all the nature that comes with that.
Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
But if you won’t find me, someone will.
And.
If someone won’t find me, then I will.
Sometimes I feel.