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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

AT-510A, revised

I open the door and you're there which is surprising and not. There's an awkward moment and I step back to let you in but you reach forward, your thumb along my jaw and it fits like it always did and my head tilts into your warm fingers like it always did; our palms and our mouths and our same-colored eyes are mirrors, and here we are. You say, I realized that I loved you; I realize I still love you. Then I realize something for myself, which is: this is not real. My life is not a fairy tale, because those stories aren't real, not for me, even when I wish super hard that they were.  

I mean, listen: I'm biased. You can unroll the tapestry before me but if I slide my foot into the slippery story and stay we know perfectly well how my part ends. I chop off my heels and toes to try to be what is wanted and when my deception is discovered nobody says, oh the sacrifices you made for me. When the birds spill my secret, the blood pooling in my shoes, you know what happens? The pitch-perfect prince says: hey actually I think I love that other one, your sister; let's turn the carriage around and get her. So I have maybe less than the usual desire to participate. I'm acknowledging that. But if you think I didn't want it, if you think I didn't burn for love the same as everyone else it's because I lied about it, because I knew where it would go and where it would end, my eyes plucked out to punish me for my desires. 

So yes I am predisposed to hating the story, the fairy tale future and the happy ending I can't win, hating all of that out of self-preservation if nothing else. I see that. I used all my power of myth and wore out my dancing shoes, sewed nettles with my bleeding hands, and then ran and escaped across the bridge of one hair instead. I never expected a white horse or your prodigal love. And I took myself out of these stories a long, long time ago. 

*this is a revised version of something I wrote four years ago, so if you've been playing along at home long enough that it seems familiar that's why. It wanted fixing.

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