The Humidity Until Winter Comes.
[22 May 2005 | Sunday]
9:11 PM
I wake with the city's sound behind me, revealing itself like a wind with human layers.
I wake with the scent of unlit candles hovering over my unsweetened breath.
I wake with snapshot hallucinations of a person far away, and I scold myself for it following.
There's aluminum yellow sunlight coloring the leaves through cream and ominous blinds. I can see a patch of brighter white that's been painted over a chunk of the vanilla ceiling, and it reminds me of where I am. I am in my best friend's new house, and it is the perfect example of what one's first house should be. We're but a breath away from a rumbling metropolis, stacked and crammed on a street with other houses like us, colored just as bizarrely as the neighbors have been. This house has an offensive maroon exterior. The shade is cheap like a melted tube of lipstick cast in the dirt years ago to age and darken.
Every inch of the wooden floors feels unclean, creaky with some other story connected to some other life that came and went. Every wall has an irregularity, a scrape or indention that speaks of use. The entire place feels discolored but lovely for being so. It is a perfect example.
The bathroom walls are shaded with the lightest sky blue imaginable (I mistook it for sea green earlier), and that color is covering an embossed design that reminds me of greater things than a fashionable college girl's bathroom. Perhaps improper lace, or the tile of royalty. The bathtub is clawfoot, and its repeatedly painted side looks as though you could easily push a pin through it. And after it struck through to the other side, hazy blue flakes of paint would fall into a tub that's been yellowed and rusted in various spots. Its belly has been scraped and worn. The very feet of it have been brushed over with gold so many times that I can just hear the color, through a dusty voice, screaming to be fit enough for Egyptians.
I met a spider in that bathroom, and his appearance felt so appropriate that I let him stealthily waddle by without question. He belonged there, or so it truly felt. And who am I to dismiss one who's likely an ancestor? He belonged there like the sprinkling of dirt across the once clear white floor, like the awkward turmoil of the toilet water once you flushed it, like the humidity that will surely hang in that room until winter comes.
I envy this. I envy being forced to support oneself. Being forced to weigh what I can do and honestly can't due to income. I envy the privacy, the firm and unattractive adulthood of attempting to earn enough for happiness (though it's really earning enough to survive, and the parents' help isn't yet gone).
For the time being, I am fairly spoiled. However, I am bored with it.
I'd love to spin here in proper lingerie, making jazz erupt through the few rooms for my solitude, my lonely femininity, and my freedom to play it. To fall gracefully down into the slipcover with cheap wine ready for my ingestion. To conjure up pointless, wild poetry before falling asleep, properly intoxicated, atop a cigarette I never meant to light.
I envy that, here at the dark corner, the little shoulder of car theft and multi-laned roads. Why, even now, I'm turning at any noise to peek through the blinds to make sure my little Volkswagen is unscathed. I fear the night of places like this. It's where fear rides on my neck like a sharp feather that won't detach. It's where every cat that moves through a bush somehow alters itself into a much larger shadow, a deeper outline that's a mixture of evil purpose and uncertainty carrying the smallest dab of death on its nose.
I fear day. I fear the traffic I can hear swimming, the ins and outs, the bullies that spit out speed and the others that melt in it, blocking an easy path.
I was unsure if I wanted to wake. I felt the consciousness pushing my head above the water, weary and so unsure of the time that I'd rather sleep late than have to face myself alone for a few hours in bleak morning stillness. After all, my body wriggled for having peace enough in a bed to myself. (I currently share a room and a very large waterbed with my sister.)
My limbs twisted with the room and, for once, I was able to lift up the sheets and look at myself in the dim light. Still there, that body, and the kicking I do in dreams to go with it. My skin feeds off of recent illusions from the night, and I tend to open my eyes wishing I were not so alone.
As much as I love night, it's almost a funny thing to love morning so well. It's a newness that's tied to the events of the past day, an echo of your time that bleeds over into new time. I like the rest, the ability to reach over for a book, to sew oneself to idleness because it's what the mind honestly needs for a few moments. If I had that often... If I could sit up with no real threat of falling asleep again and capture the remnants of the recent past, reflect a bit upon ambition for the coming hours, perhaps everything would smooth over instead of crinkling into frustration or inevitable anxiety.
Morning's a window to me, offering its glass to be cleaned and smudged up again through the remaining hours. It's an opportunity, a fresh birdsong, a footstep, a sheet pulled up over my back again because, Hey, don't go anywhere just yet. You've just begun.
I want to share morning with someone. One who could turn sideways with a brushing reverberation of the sheets and feel a refresh, a comfortable spark with looking into each other's eyes again to reexamine the color, finding a recycled mindset and a newborn look. And soft words. And the comfort of having already been there for the night, beside, atop, any of it. Spent.
I live in a storybook sometimes.
It's a good way to fracture honest hope.
Looking around this room again, I see the holes in the walls, the shut but marvelously romantic dark wooden fireplace, the well-designed but unfinished layout that my best friend's roommate, if you will, has created. I'm an awkward freckle in it all, in someone's lifestyle that took a slight other direction from where it had been.
The lightswitch in the bathroom has a jungle print border, which I immediately dubbed a designer's callous. But it fits. It all fits, almost.
And I do not fit in it.