possibility

Postcards
Sarah Kay

I had already fallen in love with far too many postage stamps when you appeared in my doorstep wearing nothing but a postcard promise. No, appear is the wrong word. Is there a word for sucker-punching someone in the heart? Is there a word for when you’re sitting at the bottom of a roller coaster and you realize that the climb is coming, that you know what the climb means, that you can already feel the flip in your stomach from the fall, before you’ve even moved. Is there a word for that? There should be.

You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness. It is hard to build a body out of words. I have tried. We have both tried. Instead of lying your head against my chest I tell you about the boy who lives downstairs from me, who stays up all night long practising his drumset. The neighbors have complained, they have busy days tomorrow but he keeps on thumping through the night, convinced, I think, that practice makes perfect. Instead of holding my hand you tell me about the sandwich you made for lunch today, how the pickles fit so perfectly against the lettuce. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Repeat the same mistakes, over and over, and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall, even I know that. Repeat the same mistakes, over and over, and you don’t get any closer. You never get any closer.

Is there a word for the moment you win tug of war, when the weight gives and all that extra rope comes tumbling towards you? How even though you’ve won, you still end up with muddy knees and scratches on your hands? Is there a word for that? I wish there was. I would’ve said it, when we were finally alone together on your couch, neither one of us with anything left to say.

Still now, I send letters into space, hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down, and recognize you from the descriptions in my poems, that he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you, “There is a girl who still writes you. She doesn’t know how not to.”

i have been listening to this again and again for the past couple of days because it’s beautiful. but if i have to be honest with myself, and most of the time i am, i keep listening to it mostly because J hasn’t written to me at all yet this year. there was this one short message on my facebook wall to acknowledge that he received my christmas card but that was the last i heard from him. as for me, there have been two attempts to make contact: a birthday card and an email update mid-may. while i am not heartbroken, i feel a bit saddened about the entire thing.

some pictures popped up on facebook around a month ago that i recognized as from the night when we met. it wasn’t love or even attraction at first sight. but after a night of good conversation over religion, no less, i swear a voice in my head was saying, ‘here is what you’ve been waiting for.‘ i surprised myself when i got home because i ended up praying for him that night. i, who hadn’t been in touch with my spiritual side for years, prayed for a guy i had just met. he was here for two weeks and in that time we got to know each other through texts, chatting, two lunch dates, one group dinner after disc practice and one drinking session that ended with me passing out on his friend’s couch. (yeah, one of those crazy, unplanned things that i swear could only happen to me. haha!) to quote a line that’s been haunting me since reading it in Carrie Ryan’s book The Dead-Tossed Waves, “i could feel the possibility between us.”

i’m sure you’ve been here too.

24.

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.

~ an excerpt from You Are Jeff by Richard Siken

The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

The Thing Is
Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

~

a beautiful reminder that life is what it is and that we will continue to live with it’s ups and downs and sudden twists and turns. 🙂

From A Journal by Louise Gluck

I had a lover once, I had a lover twice, easily three times I loved. And in between my heart reconstructed itself perfectly like a worm. And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.

After a time, I realized I was living a completely idiotic life. Idiotic, wasted. And sometime later, you and I began to correspond, inventing an entirely new form.

Deep intimacy over great distance! Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice.

One cannot invent a new form in an old character. The letters I sent remained immaculately ironic, aloof yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing different letters in my head, some of which became poems.

So much genuine feeling! So many fierce declarations of passionate longing!

I loved once, I loved twice, and suddenly the form collapsed: I was unable to sustain ignorance.

How sad to have lost you, to have lost any chance of actually knowing you or remembering you over time as a real person, as someone I could have grown deeply attached to, maybe the brother I never had.

And how sad to think of dying before finding out anything. And to realize how ignorant we all are most of the time, seeing-things only from the one vantage, like a sniper.

And there were so many things I never got to tell you about myself, things which might have swayed you. And the photo I never sent, taken the night I looked almost splendid.

I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow kept hitting the mirror and coming back. And the letters kept dividing themselves with neither half totally true.

And sadly, you never figured out any of this, though you always wrote back so promptly, always the same elusive letter.

I loved once, I loved twice, and even though in our case things never got off the ground it was a good thing to have tried. And I still have the letters of course. Sometimes I will take a few years’ worth to reread in the garden, with a glass of iced tea.

And I feel, sometimes, part of something very great, wholly profound and sweeping.

I loved once, I loved twice, easily three times I loved.

from The American Poetry Review Jan/Feb 2001

~

so beautiful. ❤

ooops, i did it again…

say hello to my newest tat…

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

yes, i got another tat! 😛 tattoos have become a small obsession for me. i’m fascinated by them: the designs and the reasons people get them. personally, i think tattoos are sexy. it may seem a shallow reason but that’s the main reason why i like them.

it’s always been in my “bucket list” to get a tattoo although i never actually thought i’d get one done. when one of my close friends got one the start of the year i knew i had to get one but i was scared of the pain and contaminated needles. the second fear was repudiated since i went to a reputable tattoo shop to get my tat done. the first fear, however, was a bit harder to dispel. i must admit to holding my breath till that first prick of the needle to which my first reaction was ay! yun lang yun? hahaha!!! whatever the feeling was, it wasn’t pain because i had experienced more painful things like dismenorrhea or a severe migraine which could really cause me to tear up. getting a tat wasn’t even close to that. (yes, i know i got my first tat earlier this year but i never got around to writing a blog entry about it so i’m making up for it here. :P)

for my second tat, i wanted to have words on my skin which lead to me search my favorite poems, song lyrics and movie lines. i had quite a few which i very much liked but a line from i carry your heart by ee cummings won in the end. i actually wanted an image of a heart within a heart with the line outlining the image but my tat artist said it would look too good. so we both decided to have the words on my right side because it’ll be sexy. i wasn’t expecting it to hurt as much as it did though and it really did hurt. instead of gripping by bra and doc’s jacket to my chest, i was gripping the bench i was laying on. after 20 or so minutes of laughing to block out the pain, my tattoo was done! i’m not at the stage where i’m completely in love with my tattoo. ❤ hahaha!

i’m probably going to get a few more tattoos in the next few years. okay, so i’m kinda addicted. 😛