Thursday, May 31, 2007
just written so i can get to it from my other compyuter.
next door but one, a little girl in mismatched lingerie sat down to breakfast, eyes bleared with demerara sugar left from long shell-lid kisses at 4am.she did not understand, and neither did god or the boy with steady breathing curled at the foot of her bed, why she had chosen the best china this morning. little wheat "o" mouths of surprise drifted like latex inflatables on a halcyon ghost-bath of pooled hormones. the spoon rested, heavy as an osmium hummingbird round her neck, on the table by her right hand. she considered her bloated under-eyes in the curved mirror-surface (curved like the sweet dipped shape of a girl's back) and suddenly felt cold. this was not peculiar within itself; it was mid-may and early, windswept morning, but this tender, breakable girl often ran naked into snowdrifts to create midnight ice-angels without goose-pimples rupturing her flesh. a tremble shot along her spinal cord. she contemplated dressing; she thought of the too-tight diesel jeans crumpled on her floor, and a soft, comfortable moth-brown sweater to hide her breasts and stomach. she thought of the boy in her bed and him watching her dress, and did not move.*his eyes had become car headlights long before she had become roadkill. hunched over a strawberries-and- crème frappucino in an armchair the colour of "swimming" mac eyeshadow, the colour of the hands of the sandman and the colour of gang rape, she had felt his eyes exploring her. her skeleton was piano keys in his gaze and the murky lighting. her mountain-peak spine bone became a yin yang of shadow and highlight, the edgelines of her nose and chin were achromic contours but her cheekbones were smudged valleys. her false eyelashes unfurled against her cheeks and then her eyebrows in treacle-thick slow motion. she was a dusty, cloying movie still; a coffee shop dream-fragment of ecru skin, lace-bone chin kissing curls and melancholy honey-pout lips.the beautiful illusion girl underneath his eyes did not turn around when he approached her; he surveyed the fluid satin top, the soft rounded breasts and the down on her ivory arms, then finally the eyes on his reflection in the oil-slick window. he couldn't ignore her then, ignore those intense, pearlescent eyes (like planets under her lashes), couldn't walk on past like he'd stopped only to check his watch or answer his mobile. "ever wondered-" and he stopped. waited for her to look up. she did not show him her true face but kept watching. "ever wondered what colour a mirror is when it reflects nothing?"the girl moved. she turned her face from the window, rested her elbows on the table and gazed into her plastic glass. her eyelids were half-moon clouds, were blankets and feathers and chicken wings. "the colour of my heart," she muttered, with an open-bracket sigh and a polluted-cloud voice fracturing between the words. she spoke without cynicism; without acknowledging the clumsy, awkward conversation that was otherwise false as silicone. "i have wondered," she said,but they could both hear within the plastic-surg'ry words the naked fizzing thirst to fall in love; the desperation for each other’s hands, each other’s bodies and lips. and they could both see the other press this deep within their flesh, regardless of it kicking and biting against their walls like butterflies caught in nets. his discomfort at this knowledge was apparent in the choked laugh and the way he apologised; “i’m sorry. that was the-”“most peculiar chat up line ever?” she finished with a wry smile.“i was going to say the weirdest thing i’ve ever said, but close. i was thinking about it, and then i saw you, and i wondered if you were ok, and it just fell out.”“i suppose “hi, are you alright?” is kind of overdone, huh?” she chuckled at this, her eyes still on the tabletop like it was all that was stopping her from losing herself. as though if she looked up she would shatter. “at least you said something. most people would have just walked past.”he thought about that. how if he had not been so intrigued by the raw silk skeleton looking like she might fall to pieces, and had he not seen pluto vivid and spinning inside her skull, his heart might never have stopped in time and her heart may never have shared that silence. they might never have met. “you know how much you look like some tiny lost-soul, sitting there? i had to know you were ok.”“i’m ok.”he placed the edge of his finger on her jaw; his hand was so strong she felt like she had been brought back to reality, like she was stable enough to fall without gravity disappearing from under her and shooting her, whirling and silent, into the solar system or into a new dimension. and at the words, “who are you, little ghost girl?”, she looked up.*i am a girl who has gone wrong many times in her life. i am a moonlit-geisha with starlit cheeks and eyes without starlight. i am a bruised baby with a painted face and sugar lips. i am the worn patches on a pair of jeans. i am a strange alien. i am a bald man who sings with a voice that is scratched and brown. i am a splinter-thin mexican child yearning for a hummingbird boy or girl to fill the empty part of her chest. i am an old woman who is sick and smelly, and who has become a lonely hearts advertisement within herself; “i am old and with skin like a crumpled elephant and i am fat and i am broken like a pot doll and i have nightmares still every night and i am hurting and i am hurting, WON’T ANYBODY LOVE ME, WON’T ANYBODY LOVE ME, WON’T ANYBODY LOVE ME” until she was only a rabid shaking monster-woman by the letterbox waiting for somebody who would say “i will” and hold her until she no longer could shriek. somebody who would never come with roses like used kleenex and a love that was chocolate-sweet enough to fill the gaping black-hole within her body. i am the girl that he kissed.*he moved in drumbeat-pulse slow motion; they were both fluid under each other’s hands – his fingers on her hips and her lifeline at the base of his neck. his fingerprints found her waist and then the edge of her face while she explored his lipcracks and faint brown eyelashes like he would fade within seconds of her blinking (as though she wanted to remember this boy forever).she saw his septum like a record scratch and his forehead like the aura of the stars. his eyes could be the inner cold of iris-petals but she found the tears and the aching locked in uneven eyelid folds (briefly wondering whose empty chest had trapped them there) before sweeping the angles of his jaw and tilted cheekbones. it was then the dim lights locked along his spine and skull and spread, seeping through the old-parchment map of his skin, consuming the edges of his body until he was an angel within her touch - and she nearly ran in fear of that the fibre-thin tea stained pages of the bible had never warned her he’d be as beautiful as a movie star too.when he touched away from her lips, she whispered, “lolita.”my name is lolita, and you will never love me.
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