thursday

i am reading indian stories, have disney songs stuck in my head. it makes me want to talk about the simple things that make up my day.

uneventful for the most part, except for a few shivers of thrill at a particularly well turned sentence. the dead baby bird i haven't had the heart to kick off my porch has been laying there for over a week, nothing but skin and beak, too young even for feathers. it finally catches the cat's interest, so i hiss at him, kick a chair out of the way and push it over the edge of a balcony with a month old paper coffee cup.

i feel more remorse over the bird's unceremonious ending than i do about the cup, which is wedged underneath the railing looking dejected. its been sitting on the wooden floorboards for something like five weeks, missing the feel of a certain man's lips as distinctly as i am wondering if that particular knowledge of taste, flesh, movement would be worth the trouble.

there isn't even a flicker in my girl parts. he doesn't have a scent i can name, not like the man whose scent lingered on me even after a shower the last time we spent a day together.

if inanimate objects had feelings, you know, this paper cup would be mourning the end of its life. usefulness gone thanks to the carelessness of myself and another, it's been reduced to mortuary duty and will likely rot in its current position until i move. i feel heartless.

it is thursday. i am reading indian stories and the caribbean voice in my head is insisting, over and over again, that i must "kiss de girl." there is no irony, but the simple command is wasted on me. the author whose short stories are getting me through the morning i once saw give a reading in a dark auditorium on darling harbor. he said, "we are puritan and repressed and we work out our frustration by dropping bombs on brown people."

i get that. i have nothing, really, to offer today. five hours of serving coffee with unncessary italian names and a softball game this evening if it doesn't rain.

but here, let me whet your appetite. maybe you'll understand this feeling that has wound its way around my bones and settled in my belly for the duration.

"i am jealous of what you have," she told me, pointing at the parts of my body and telling me what they do.

its sherman alexie. something about the man makes me want to romanticize every thing, as if i needed help with that. i take stock of all the ways i've molded imagined places to be appealing, and it takes my breath away. i think moving south will make me more attractive. i think i'd enjoy being poor with someone. i like to smoke cigarettes during meaningful moment.

he's measured out all the details and found the ones that matter. i can't seem to find what is worth picking out of this thursday morning - my lactose induced bellyache, my black cat shaking his head and glaring at me, spraying drops of liquid antibiotic over the floor, the smell of my shampoo or the feeling of my freshly shaved legs against my bare mattress since i haven't been bothered to put the sheets back on since laundry day.

i remember watches. they measured time in seconds, minutes, hours. they measured time exactly, coldly. i measure time with my breath, the sound of my hands across my own skin.

i make mistakes.

mostly i am waiting another hour so i can leave for work and trying to make this day feel a little less wasted. i haven't created anything beautiful for a while, and i don't know why that is. it has yet to bother me.

i lingered in the shower this morning, smelling myself over the burning sulfur smell of water in this apartment's old pipes. walked dripping aimlessly across the creakiest of the floorboards, making music in my head.