Raymond, Who Presided Over A Kingdom That Was Not His Own

An ugly end it was. Unceremoniously tucked between garbage cans, planks of wood and all manner of discarded household appliance, staring up into the streetlight with those baby blues, the rain pecking at his cheeks. A long way from his lofty living room perch, where he watched a decade of my life come and go. An ugly end. And no dignity to it.

I Look Forward To Remembering This Fondly

Most often, the last time a thing happens comes and goes, and it isn't until after the thing has happened for the last time that you realize it can't be repeated.

Sometimes, you know a thing is happening for the last time just as it happens, and you can enter into it with an appreciation that illuminates the thing. Though, in being illuminated, the thing is changed, and the last time it happened is already behind you.

Cephalopod, Sweetly

There are plenty of things that I love and don't eat. But you're not one of them. You, you're an exception. As if the occasional hankerings were extensions of a divine and deeply rooted affection. As if your taste and texture were as vital to consider as your intelligence and beauty are in assessing your character, and only when weighed all together can one understand your meaning completely. They have everything to do with you as an idea, an object, a thing of beauty, a breathing thing, a skulking alien in a tidepool, an appetizer. As if wanting to swallow you down didn't invalidate my love, but proved it, was a dimension of it. As if not wanting to eat the other things I love were a sad testament to the slightly inferior quality of those other loves.

Bubs

"Everything's upside down," he said in his sweet way, between hummed bars of old Broadway musicals. My grandmother twitched in her seat. And you and I, we looked at each other smiling, nervous but happy.

Bubs drove on.

We Are Smiling And Talking But I Am Sinking

The last time I saw L she looked old. Scrambling across the library quad with a heaping stack of books and folders in her arms, constantly shifting and readjusting herself under their weight, with milky blue eyes around which her face had gracefully crumpled... she was all smiles.

18 years earlier, she had asked me why I never spoke up in class when I clearly looked engaged and thoughtful. I had assured her I was neither. We became friends.

I remember sitting in her office a year or two later watching an old girlfriend's new boyfriend walk by the window while I argued that the pen she was holding might not exist.

And here we were. And she looked old.

I was full of memories and nostalgia and had a hundred little details buzzing in my head. But she only remembered me vaguely, and left me with a faint sadness as she fluttered away into the night.

Travelogue Excerpt: From La Closerie des Lilas, Montparnasse, 2/7/11

"Hemingway and Henry Miller drank here. Neat. I went to the bathroom here a few days ago. A beautiful red room with a golden hook to hang your sweatshirt on."

Memphis, 5:30AM

photo by Kelly Davidson


Affection. Affection. Sociopathic rage.