Missing you is all I do, in faded sheets the twilight restless; an orbit's cycled memories edging towards a deep abyss where your absence emptied into longing. Another journey I'm embarking without you to carry me, though fantasy may find me shivered under blankets unforgiving of my own damned malfeasance, with your aching presence needed. The need may go unheeded but the longing will remain until that time again when your skin might touch my own. Missing you is everything; missing you is all I've known.
Let's screw until blind over cheap fireplace wine and wake up with coffee and strawberries and moments. Let's leave the lights low and the windows open in a high rise hotel. Let's make high drama in a roadside bar and leave everyone wondering who we were. Let's gamble ourselves away in Atlantic City, hold hands in Sao Paulo, trip the lights fantastic in London. Let's love each other big through the new year and beyond.
"The problem with dying," she tells me loudly in my ear, trying to compete with the thunderous music around us, "is there's no afterparty." I wonder how many times she's used this line, and how long she spent crafting it, or if it's just something someone else once used on her. I wonder if it worked. When she removes her lips from my ear to see my reaction, I can only offer a wan smile and another pull from a longneck bottle. If the unfocused distance in her eyes is any reflection of reality, she's too far gone to notice my lack of interest anyway, so I take in the view of this stygian grotto that passes for a club before turning my gaze back to her, to see I was wrong; she's noticed, and the pull at the corners of her eyes announce it louder than the bass of these speakers. Romance isn't found in a dancefloor gilded with leather and lace, I want to tell her, but don't, and we lose each other at one hundred twenty beats per minute.
I hate bad grammar.
I hate the caps lock key.
I hate bad drivers.
I hate bureaucracy.
I hate the whole world
And its stupidity.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
I hate the customers.
I hate the Nanny State.
I hate computers.
I hate watching my weight.
I hate the whole world
And its complacency.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
I hate the Randroids.
I hate the Chomskybots.
I hate Establishment.
I hate my broken thoughts.
I hate the whole world.
It's such a messed up place.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
This isn't about me. This is about the way we two, you and I, tangled half-mad through haze of winter nights. The way our voices stumbled together in the dark. You had your secrets, I had mine, but the distinction melted into unity in those deep evenings of discourse, and we'd remember things together, as though there were anything at all for us to remember. Maybe this is about me after all, but it's also about the way my heart still beats to the syllables of your name.
Night gripped the throat of the sky like a killer's hand, intimidating all starlight to slink back behind the cover of clouds. I downed the last of the scotch and put the glass on the void expanse of the desk between us.
"I might," I told her, "but you'll have to be playing bigger than that." Her legs crossed and uncrossed beneath her desk, or so I imagined, and after four knocked back, I wasn't in the mood to tell the difference; she'd gotten to me that way, and she knew it.
Shadows played along her face and hair as she moved like poetry around the desk and pressed herself against me, with a voice like a steam sauna asking "How much bigger?", ruby pouting lips and hipbones in all the right places. So I did the only thing I could do. Shoved her off me and stood up, grabbed my coat from the wall hanger. Her eyes smoldered as she glared at me from the couch, running her hands down her dress.
"You want this done right," I said, "then it's strictly professional." Keyed the door and let it swing aside. "And if you don't," I continued, turning to step out, "you'll wish you hadn't ever asked."
"That'd make two of us," she said, standing, once again her poise in place. "And I didn't ask."
At that I paused, and made the fatal eye contact she'd been awaiting. "I never ask," she said, "I do. I take."
And sensing that was as good a line on which to leave as any, I stepped out, the door thudding heavy behind me. The elevator to the lobby was quick enough to spare me any thought, but the rainy streets ahead weren't so kind.
I saw her smile once in visions introspectively; the type of smile made me abandon reason and reality, willingly, in favor of fantasy and whimsy, well aware that sensuality was desiring futility and responsiblity would be acceptance of such a strange normality but then again, how could my own desire take me higher than scintillating words wrought over wire as she's blessed me in time of yearning always burning, vacant need she'll hear no more, turning blindly to the hope I offer crumbled on the floor. Still her fire I admire and I promise an empire she and I could build together if only wishes were fulfilled; beneath a sky of steel I ask the Moirae to reveal in their wheel a thread between us I can grasp and hold forever longing fast to wishes not so far-flung cast becoming somewhat less surreal. If such prayers are ever known to those who watch and hear my song perhaps with mercy they will find me next to her whom I belong.
She was there, and we all knew it, moving like poetry. Those delicate glances, chin down and eyes up with an awkward grin directed mostly at the floor. In another frame of mind I'd call it coy, but that depends on a certain realisation of allure, a realisation she denies herself. Two deft fingers point at a beer, the bartop, and as if by magic, her drink appears before her, expertly. Cropped blonde hair parting for her fingers as she takes a drink, all eyes on the aching geometry of her profile. All eyes but mine, fixated instead on pale curves that form the back of her neck, revealed by the ministrations of her fingertips aginst her locks, splaying cloud-pale flesh ready for lips and teeth. And somehow she senses my gaze, or so I think, boring scalding ever needing into taut pretty tendons, so she turns, and I avert my eyes, pretending to study the fixtures of the ceiling with nails digging into my palms.
If my shadow is the only one who will walk with me, then yesterday's sky, gunmetal heavy clouds intimidating the sun into hiding, doesn't bode well. Nor today's cold hard rain, nor tomorrow's lurking fog. Looking up into it, eyes set harsh against interminable mist, I might be as empty as that sky. That's the easy answer: blame the medium, critique the instrumentation, all bleak perfection and completely oblivious. The words in that milieu are the important pieces, the empathy behind them drawing the line between toying and sincerity, like a camera shutter closes and irrevocably separates there from here. But there you remain, adrift in your pretty little there, so from from here. The forecast calls for rain; no shadow walks beside me.
Recently at work I had to install three different operating systems on three identical laptops. I am forever bitching about how obnoxious Windows is, especially when compared to modern Linux distros like Ubuntu, but it's been hard to qualify my statements until now.
This post contains a lot of griping about computers. If you don't care, move along.
Twelve city blocks through rain, heavy night sticking to me, stalking miles of asphalt to salvation from a savior never held, voice only heard, a presence that cares nothing for such a trifling plight. Headlights, brakelights, heartache, reality, the temptation to embrace flitting away from all I know is right. And in the harsh lighting of halogen and vapor, where's the angelic whisper which I've come to know so well? She is haunting the lives of those misguided like me, revelling in her freedom to break another devoted mind, and she'll never stop, and another is down, another broken. With arms to the sky, I meant the rain to cleanse me, purify, to wash away her song, and for one smiling moment I believed myself saved. Yet the grasp she has around me never wavers, never loosens, and my laughter in the darkness fades. Left once more in the shivering evening, I may seek refuge in dawn's foreign hills, there secretly to pledge to her yet another oath of all I have to give.
An indifferent voice, cold, mechanical, announces one message saved, archived; a little secret of mine stored for those times I need the sound of you in my ear. It's rarely accessed, to be sure; some distant touch of fear preventing me from listening too often, like I'd be caught in the midst of some deception. But in those moments of weakness, a few sure keystrokes brings those breathy vocals back, and for a brief time as I listen I am there, unearthing all the things locked away I have in response. Remembering things that may be, may have never been, sometimes so hard to tell: your lips opening to warmth in the chilled night of Midtown Square, arms wrapping around each other against the hum of evening traffic. And you step back, recede into distance, despite my plea, as the recording ends with a harsh reminder of how artificial I feel. To delete this message, and I miss you now, press one. To save this message, press one.
One.
In hazy nights and digital screens, she knows she has control; in this environment, in this reality. I can almost taste her longing, her courage, her mentality. The mindset of something pure, something twisted, confessions spilled out in lonely hotel rooms in the night. Through darkened soulless days, she fills her head with travels, and fantasies I never could ignite. That heart I want to feel, lost to freedom, caught once in a photograph of my own imagination. A single image, frozen still, of beauty unrelenting, of mirthful hestitation. Reaching endless in despair when there were none left, my own fears needing to be saved. In the gloom she appeared; through the chill and through the fire, she turned, and smiled and waved.
Before the mirror, clad only in a towel, she brushes her hair with sure, decisive strokes, each one seemingly calculated to an end I can't quite fathom, torquing the brush with each pass. There's a rhythm to the movement, and the sound of those long red strands unparting crackles like static. My own hair is horribly disordered from the sins of the our wine-dark night as I watch from the edge of the bed, head ablaze, tracing her outline with my eyes. And when she catches my darkened eyes in the mirror and turns to ask What's wrong?, I tell her, Nothing, just watching. I don't tell her how disappointed I am that she isn't you.
Rain lashes against asphalt and sheet metal. Unnatural and inert, I take it all in, lying in bed where your scent never was. Times like these happen all too often, when I reach for you with insensate certainty, there to find nothing, fingers straining into emptiness, clutching dust of dreamlogic. Here next to me you were never, nor never may be, and all the voices I've known have told me to forget you. All the voices but one: yours, the most sonorous of the chorus, lilting and insistent. It's that voice to which I devote myself, and remember. That singular voice which drowns out all others, scrapes through my mind, and leaves me addled, fearful, and completely secure.
Early morning brings a thin light spread across the sky, cold and gray and distant, seeping through windowblinds to keep me awake. How I miss you now.
Someday in this digital Hell it might all fade away in alpha transparency to leave nothing but the purest of our electric fantasies. We could be like silicon wraiths writhing into each other, whirlwinds of passion stirring up fractal debris, echoing the way you soared over my defenses.
And you were fast that way, fast. Working your way sinuous into everything that held potential, erasing everything behind, leaving me your blank canvas, smooth and perfect, yours to to shape and sculpt. Relays and switches are cold, mechanical, and form an infernal midnight flecked with static, the kind that fills my eyes.
But my eyes don't gaze upward, each saturnine evening emptying without you. My eyes don't gaze upward to trace the profile of your shadow. My eyes don't gaze upward hoping you'll spin me into your promises once more. My eyes don't gaze upward.
What hurt the most, in the end, was being so close. Secrets, kept and shared, your cutting questions cleaving them both, distilling them down, haunting me through fever even as I run from medicinal fantasy, shivering beneath blankets of all the pushers promising escape from this: the way you built your life, took in the shape of it all, turned away from me, and vanished. Fate willing, I'll someday be as strong as you. Fate willing, I'll someday be as perfect as my dreams of you, dreams running like machines, leaving me dizzy.
There is another force at work here. Something I dare not mention. Something I dare not mention, which compelled me here far earlier than I myself would have chosen. Something I dare not mention, which compelled me here far earlier than I myself would have chosen, and which now rests, sedate. Something I dare not mention, which compelled me here far earlier than I myself would have chosen, and which now rests, sedate; a force feminine speaking words irresistiable. Something I dare not mention, which compelled me here far earlier than I myself would have chosen, and which now rests, sedate; a force feminine speaking words irresistiable into which I can finally repose, but quickens me to stand, take arms, be bold, speak truth, and defend love.
Just doesn't seem half fair, I tell her in reply to her question, a question to which she already knew the answer. Known it for a long time, I think, but she'd asked anyway, perhaps just to see what I'd do. We could be beautiful, I offer by way of explanation. But she only looks at me expectantly, eyes six fathoms deep, the moment dizzy with potential. If I could make you understand, I finish, as her gaze washes over me with what may be sympathy, and might be disdain. Everything happens for a reason, she says, which is sometimes hard for us to see, and her fingers brush my cheek, my forehead, tracing herself into me. Could have been beautiful, I amend, knowing the moment has passed, and maybe understanding it for what it was.
