Monday, December 24, 2012

andy

I knew she loved him when I heard her call him Andy. Not Drew, like everybody else called him, or Andrew, which is the name his parents gave him, but Andy. I wondered if she was in love with his off-beat walk or his insistence on the glory of oil-based pastels, or maybe she was enamored with his blatant wholesomeness, his stark naiveté which glistened off of every wispy hair on his body. "He's so good," she said to me once. "You love him," I whispered back. She thought about what I had said quietly, and then answered, "That's why I call him Andy."

The only problem was that Andy loved me.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

mone y

Her voice is full of money, he said. I didn't think so. When I met her I thought her voice was like the way the lamp in our small living room flickers on and off again, or how I feel when I put my hands through my long dark hair and immediately wish I could cut it. Her voice was an in-between place, it was a yes and a no, it was sharp and velvety and irresponsible and saturated with something raw like bloody meat or a bar of glycerin soap all at once. Her voice isn't full of money, I finally told him on a day when it was raining intermittently and so I felt courageous. He stared at me for a while like he was flirting with the idea that I could be right, and then he said easily, flatly, perhaps not. But yours is.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

word play

I just want to talk to everyone. I just want to talk and ask why, when, and how, who made you that way and what does it feel like and do you like shortbread cookies or cinnamon ones, spring or fall, Pluto or Jupiter, men or women. Do you think Lolita is a sick, twisted account of a deranged old man or is it the greatest love story of all time? Do you want to travel to Peru and stay there for awhile and will you eat the lomo saltado or will you look at the waiter's weathered face and stammer out in squeaky English that you just don't understand. Do you understand?

I just want to talk to everyone. I want to know when their parents were married, and what her dress looked like, and why there were only seven people there. I want to know why my grandfather has clocks hidden all over his house, and I want to suggest on an afternoon that I should have bathed but didn't that perhaps he is afraid of time. I want to ask the bus driver how long she has been silent like that, and find out why my landlord won't look me in the eye. I want to tell the woman in front of me who shrugs away the two handles of vodka on the conveyor belt by saying, times are hard if you know what I mean, that I know what she means. Do you know what I mean?

I just want to talk to everyone, and tell them that I think spilled milk is funny, that I think everything is either funny or hopelessly tragic and that there is no in-between, that I believe in change and catastrophe but that chipped paint bothers me in a way that it shouldn't. I want to tell them that Hemingway is the worst and Tolstoy is the best, that nobody likes philosophy or bourbon or a run-on sentence even though I write that way.

I just want to talk to everyone because I write that way.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

the big shining golden sea

The ocean is so mesmerizing, always. But as early evening leads a warm summer day to bed, something extraordinary happens. The now yawning sunlight dances across slick, calm waters, illuminating the many folds and layers of the sea and making each ripple, each velvety movement, appear as though it has a heartbeat and is very alive and at any moment could reach out and ever so delicately take you away from everything you ever knew to be true. Footprints in the sand look like they have just been formed in melted copper, like they will stay that way forever, just like the movie stars handprints somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, somewhere off in Hollywood. I hold onto these solitary moments by the water because they are radiant with life, but also because just then it's only me and the big shining golden sea. 

Monday, June 11, 2012

8:27pm


It's that time in the sky when there is no sun and yet it is not completely dark. This is an in-between place where the clouds are a pale pink smeared against the gray blue sky, where the world seems very, very still and the metallic outline of the trees sway gently in the placid summer breeze. There is no sunshine to inhale and no sunset to ponder, just an in-between place of a kind of glowing darkness. In a minute, everything will grow black and the neighbor's car alarm will sound and the radio by the lemons in the kitchen just below me will hum again, but right now, in this moment, the in-between sky with its uncertain hues and uncompromising colors is the perfect, beautiful backdrop to my life.