From: horsestorideon@hotmail.com
Subject: [paying my debts of obligatory stories] 1.1 (-ah,maybe it’ll even arrive)[or, connection troubles in the flat-lands]
Date: October 29, 1998 5:48:15 AM PST
To: mrvisible@worldnet.att.net, houseofthe2palms@hotmail.com, shorning@willamette.edu, sejohnst@midway.uchicago.edu, and 5 more…
the pretties girl i ever loved i met behind me in a social-sciences class when i was fifteen…
she didn’t really plus me then.
she was a year younger… something like that. she was really smart and she tried really hard.. and i respected that and all
but at that age, i was more interested in find every reason i could to hate everyone around me so i needn’t be bothered thinking about what the thought.
we all have our hang-ups, you know.
i left her when i was 17.
we never got on.
i, in fact, was an adversary of her brother
when he wasn’t trying to make friends with me because he was just a down-cast loser
[like
my
self]
i spent sometime away from that place
but had to return less than a year later.
my wonderful re-entry was riddled with beer and solitude.
i’d cast-off my old friends like so much lice or lovers.
i’d decided it was best to return to a space of empty abandon… as i felt that i couldn’t deal at all with the world i’d been given. [more on that later]
she drove my sister to school everyday:
picked her up in the morning and brought her back in the evening, had she any time.
my sister and her sister were good friends.
they hated eachother at times
but i just took it that girls spent their time like that to keep themselves from thinking about cleaning and cookies and cocks…
you know, girls are always trying to keep from thinking about something or other.
but this girl walked down stairs where i was in my underwear and a cloud of guilt and compression…
as if the entire atmosphere i lived in was meant to crush me
like i’d spent my entire time in a pressure cooker and i was just waiting until i became tender and soft and you could pick the meat off the flesh and tell the chef
“oh dear, it MELTS in the mouth”
we went driving.
i showed her how i stole things [all the time] and how you DON’t get caught.
i took her all the places she thought you couldn’t go [so it seems]
i asked her what she wanted to do but would never do
and we did it.
we burned magazines in an underpass decorated by the stress and the tension of my grestest and farthest lover
we spraypainted our confusion and angst on the hoods of the beautiful christian boys who were at an away-football-game
we talked about things she didn’t really think could be talked about
we didn’t have to be a boy or a girl
and we weren’t.
the pretties girl i ever loved was introduced to my greatest and farthest lover in a cloud of pop music, stolen wine and punturing orafices that hadn’t been dealth with.
i was the one who was cold on the floor;
they were under an afghan on the couch.
i loved them both so dearly…
so i decided she was always the one i wanted
so pretty, i thought.
we had a dinner part at my father’s other house
a camp
a cabin
we fought eachother out.
i don’t know, i loved her enough to give her acid and scream at her on the couch about MY world and how maybe she could see it
she sat on the floor enough to make me cry or shake or run
trying to show something i guess i never saw.
he put his hand on her foot
and she let him
and i was on my back…
staring at the ceiling in an effort to figure out why i couldn’t be as simple as a boy and girl…
i left them
as is my style
for a place where i didn’t think love could exist
[and manhattan was a good stomping ground too…]
phone calls and letters
[she sent them to me; i dial her up on her mother’s 888 number]
stuff of the movies
fourteen times over
i loved her and my lover she was getting fucked by.
i came back to them
and scared them all with stuff to put in the needles she supplied
with a foriegn friend
who my lover fucked around
but never got to the point.
i left her
to follow my lover
to a town where i could dry out
and stay drunk in my misery
of seeing postcards
and letters
to him everyday
comming to our mailbox
from her
and her wishes.
i translated her beauty for him
i bit my tongue til it bled.
she still called me when he never returned them. she still wanted me
in the way a person wants another person like they’d want themselves if they had the time.
a mirror, i wanted, i was, i was.
i loved her.
the prettiest girl i ever loved
cried on my bed
with the anger we’d always known.
my friends and my lover
the prettiest girl
…
we’d all been there before
we rooted her on
we secretly smiled.
she found me in her bed in the last mid-western city
she didn’t have time or the patience
as a boy so lazy as me.
a girl like that, so pretty and distant
a girl like that doesn’t need love fome someone who can’t do anything with it but scream and run from town to town.
who needs a bouy you can’t rely on?
who needs a star
you can’t be sure will be there at night?
i’m learning about the prettiest things.
distance is a teacher: stand on a hill and look at your house:
watch the front door open
and the curtains pick up through the breeze…
watch the sun set
and the shadows move
you can’t see that in there
you need a broken perspective
why else would you try to run back to the past
in this present state
when you know what you’ve lost
and you’ve forgotten it’s LOST.
like every real friEND