Stolen Moments
Catching an intimate moment from a distance: from this height in the library I can see the static red boats on the powder blue sea closing in on the horizon with the pale sky. A boy in a blue shirt, and a girl in green lie facing one another on the secluded grass above the walkway. Side by side, his hand moves for her hip and their heads move closer. They break away and laugh. I feel creepy because I don’t think anyone else can see them. Ten minutes later they get up to leave and walk into the shade showing no sign of being together, and no one else could know.
I had a recurring nightmare as a kid. I was standing in a Monet-like field, which was something I must have picked up from the paintings around our house. The flowers reached high above my head and made me feel tiny, but I could still see beyond them, and the field had no limits. There was a black clock tower so huge it looked like it touched the sky. As soon as I noticed it, the field vanished and I was inside the basement of the tower.
It was brick walled and dark. There was a man strapped to a conveyor belt, and I think he was headed for a furnace. He was begging me to save him. I knew that fat black clouds had gathered outside, and there was no more light there, or anywhere. The clock was ticking as the man moved along and I pleaded with some unseen, menacing controller to let him go.
I could never save him, I always ran out of time. I always woke up crying and went in search of my parents.
Always On, ZAZA
The air was weighted with a soft winter mist, and the moon lay in the sun’s shadow looking pale and insignificant. My feelings grew despite the lack of information, with the qualities I projected. The sun stole through the spaces between a flock of thin trees. The effect was spasmodic; my eyes stuck and flickering on the same image over and over. Flecks of dust appeared as little discs on my eyelashes, the colour of a peacock’s feathers. I’ve been feeling less guilt, more longing.
She was a sucker for sunsets and MDMA. She disappeared at 8pm and came back at 2am, knocking on the door a hundred times quietly, slurring, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Then, “I love you,” to her boyfriend who got up to let her in. He waved her words away with his hand in her face, still asleep and said, “It’s okay, hey, shhh, it’s okay.” They got into bed and as his head found the curve left in the pillow, she got up and ran to the bathroom. He fell asleep hoping he would be able to. The neighbour’s radio started with a crackle and fuzz and then a low booming voice at 6am. At least it wasn’t music. He woke up again at 7:14am to the jolt of her body thudding down on the bed and the sound of the toilet flushing. He gave up and went to put the coffee on.
For a minute there, I lost myself
I had a vision of a fire. A cigarette, smoke escaping, catching quickly to the old faded blue carpet. It would be all my fault. Letters from my mother, pictures of my father. There is no good place to store anything. I am forgetful, too lenient. Later, I always say, later.
The train pulls away, and there’s nothing more I can do but let it all burn down. It’s already gone. The winter sky is blue and pink and white, the way it was at the beach. Both late, we got caught in the rain. We saw a rainbow pierce the sea, receding, as the sun set gold.
Staring at the sun for too long, when I break my gaze I can no longer see the words on page. They’re obscured by blotches of purple, ringed with green. I can’t read what to do. I don’t know.
Removing yourself from any place or thing feels like a betrayal at first, and then the wounds close and the guilt only flares up in rainy weather. After I threw a penny into the Fontana di Trevi, I knew I would eventually return to Rome. When I do it will not be returning home or to some ideal of a fixed state; it will be a revisiting of what once flourished and then crumbled. We are better off different than we were yesterday.
- Kara Vanderbijl, from the beautiful Charades
With our hoods up we sang to each other in the cold, huddled, then inside dancing, warm, your face smiling at mine screaming love. My hand led yours through the crowd.
As I was leaving a boy stared me down, and it reminded me of you. I walked over and he said, smiling, “I just like looking at your face.” It was too close, too much. I insulted him without thinking, without meaning to, it was silly. I’d had a lot to drink. When I asked if I should just walk away, he said, “Yes.” I felt terrible outside. I don’t know if I should do the same to you, or if I already have. The snow is late this year, but I feel cold.
Since She Left: And you haunt me in the bodies of those who seem to mimic yours:...
And you haunt me in the bodies of those who seem to mimic yours: pallid cheeks, wine coloured shirts, their hands full of rain.
Yet they know nothing of you. [That I know.] Perhaps you once passed them on the street; perhaps they looked you in the eye. They will never know you as I knew you….
Hey, I wrote this.
When we went out it was for hot coffee and cheap second hand CDs. Walking down the street, our black boots crushed snow into the cracks between the cobbles. We unbuttoned our coats slowly as we moved up the stairs of the arcade, our bodies flush with new heat. The smell of incense would hang dryly in the air, wafting from the shop that sold dream catchers and birth stones and various other things to wish upon.
We dreamt up a strange man in the kitchen, girls with red plaited hair and coke dealers on the corner. The moon glowing on your white sheeted bed where we would collapse, clothed, in the middle of the night. Your place was small, but big enough for us. Those nights tore through our hearts like the subway in the dark. Carried safely in the tiny vessel, with freezing noses, and an earphone each.
My head hitting the pillow, set down with my loneliness, we shouldn’t be alone, wishing you were there.
His beard had grown back a little greyer in places. I’d look up to find him smiling, and he laughed when I caught his eye.
However, I’m ill; only moments before I had nearly fainted. I’m probably a little delirious. So he was probably looking at the wall behind me, or something.
That awkward moment…
- I am incapable of keeping a straight face when I’m walking towards someone I’m meeting. There’s an almost painful waiting period when you can both see each other but are still too far away to say anything, and it always makes me laugh.
- Once, when I was really high and watching Star Wars, I thought I invented the band name “The Magnetic Fields”. No one could corroborate if they were already a band because no one else in the room had heard of them.
- When I say something too quietly, but subconsciously refuse to raise my voice and end up repeating myself at the same volume about three times before the person next to me gives in and says it for me.
A headache which begins as a sharp jolt on the left when I turn my head to the right, and blossoms hours later into a bouquet of pain. Its tendrils curl around the right side of my brain. It feels heavy with a thick liquid. I take painkillers but panic anyway because it doesn’t go away. I writhe and shiver and feel sick if I concentrate on it.
I once knew a man from San Francisco. He came to the east dressed in black and stood quietly under the subway stairs each night. With rambling words and red hair he took me from the cobbled West Village to a bonfire in the middle of the rainforest. I couldn’t say no; even now, I wouldn’t deny him. I think of him with wine and pot, and every time I smoke with my fingernails painted red.
I would stand alone on the promenade, as the sky turned from blue to pink, and watch the city come alive with lights. I thought of it all with possibility. I projected perfection onto his black shirts, and onto every dark space untouched by light. I thought of it all as mine.
And they were, both the boy and the city, mine, as much as anything can really be owned. When you watch life from the edges, you can turn it into what you need. He told me to stay but I couldn’t: it was exactly what I wanted, but it wasn’t real. Not yet. Then the fog rolled in and carried everything away under its wings. I hope they’ll both still be there when it finally clears.
