my sketchbook is trés jalouse because i've neglected her, so i drew.

Edward Hopper Study: "Excursion into Philosophy"

Her shirt is pink like strawberry flavored bubblegum and falls

short of covering her naked rump. Lying in bed with her back

to him, she stares at the hairline crack in the wall and wonders

why the much older man won’t stay

a little longer. Why he always insists on getting up right after

to dress himself, starting with the faded briefs and those off-

white socks. She wishes he were a cocker spaniel that she might

cuddle with all afternoon, have him lick her fingers with his wet,

eager tongue. His sigh makes her shiver, or is it the breeze

coming in from the opened window? Next to her, on the edge

of the bed, where the man now sits fully clothed, is the book

he has been reading, splayed out like an afterthought:

Plato’s Symposium. The crease of the spine between the pages

reminds him of the two round cheeks of her buttocks, and he

begins to contemplate those Ideal Spheres, the way the light

lovingly kisses their Divine Form, before willing himself to think

beyond the immediacy of their physical beauty, riding her

curves that seem to stretch across the threadbare sheets like the

hills outside, or the postcard sky above the green-gold grass.

He looks down at his foot, caught in between the dark shadows in

the room and the finite rectangle of sunlight spilled across

the floor. He waits for the exact moment when he hears her breath

grow heavier, and feels the weight of her body slacken. In her

dreams, he will walk slowly out of the house and into the fields

like a boy again, ready for the first hunt.

the girls stick forks in the ground

The girls stick forks in the ground. Recess behind the fence, the girls stick forks stolen from the cafeteria into the ground and water them with chocolate milk as a tribute to the fairies.

The girls in their navy blue pleated jumpers dream of growing breasts and wider hips. The girls hide in an empty classroom after school and play strip rock-paper-scissors with the older, eighth grade boys. One button, two buttons, three buttons undone. They all duck behind the desks as Sister Claire walks by.

The girls stick forks in the ground and read Nancy Drew novels, dog-eared and faded, that they borrow from the library. Over the summer, the girls grow one inch, two inches, three inches taller. They are sent home to their mothers who will let down the hems of the same navy blue jumpers.

Forks in the ground, in the autumn rain and mud, the girls stick metal forks that never grow despite all the chocolate milk and love. The bell rings in the morning, and the girls sit down at their desks in neat little rows, reciting Hail Mary Blessed Mother of God, Fruit of thy Womb pray for us Sinners, Amen, with clenched fists.

One girl sticks the fork deeper into the ground than the rest of the girls. So deep the fork barely shows and she drives it all the way down with the heel of her scuffed, patent leather mary janes. This one shall go to hell first and survive to tell the story:

“Petals on a wet, black bough,” thank you Ezra Pound. Petals on a wet, black bough, the girls stick forks in the ground. One fork, two forks, three forks deep. Metal crocuses buried beneath the snow, burning bright like a spark of love and maybe fairies don’t care too much for chocolate milk, who knows.

Girls who trudge the same mud-splattered mary janes up the stairs and down the blue-gray halls of the school that smell like piss. They imagine what it’s like to be kissed by Scott or James or Kevin in 206, and if it’s anything like kissing the inside of their own arm with a pillow crushed between their legs on a Sunday night, “studying” photo-SYN-thesis.

The girls stick forks in the ground and wear gym shorts underneath their navy blue jumpers. The girls stick forks in the ground behind the yellow school bus. Pick blood red hibiscus flowers from the bush, dance and whoop and lift their skirts, and dare one another to eat the earth.

The Other Sister

The shops on Bedford Avenue glowed in the afternoon sunlight, as the hipsters emerged from the shadows of cafés to smoke their cigarettes in the abiding heat of summer. Business was slow, but we had just opened two weeks ago and were now competing with the myriad of nail salons that seemed to pop up overnight on our street.

As far as I could tell, during my first six months in the country, Asian immigrants dominated three local industries: restaurants, dry cleaners and nail salons. It didn’t matter if you were Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you would inevitably end up at one of these places. I was here with six other girls from the mainland. We were all working under the watchful eye of Mae, a dough-faced, middle-aged woman from Shanghai whose husband owned the business, though she was the one who kept the books and managed the storefront.

Mae had a large black mole on her right eyebrow with hairs growing on it, which she claimed was a sign of prosperity and wealth. I watched her now as she counted the green dollar bills in the cash register, sucking her teeth and inadvertently reaching up now and then to rub that hideous mole of hers, as if it were the fat golden belly of the Buddha making all her money dreams come true.

I looked out the window again to stare at the leggy American girls in their skintight jeans and ripped stockings. They seemed to glide languidly down the sun-drenched avenue, until I lowered my gaze upon their enormous feet. Any illusion of grace and beauty shattered in an instant. Those legs that seemed to stretch on to the heavens were cut off abruptly by the sight of large flip flops, slapping against the pavement like clown shoes or diving flippers. Up close and bare, the feet were even uglier; long and bony with toes that curled under like claws and chipped polish that barely concealed the dirt and grime buried beneath the nails.

A young woman in her early twenties like me walked into the salon. I pointed to the display case of OPI bottles of polish, and then scrutinized her face as she spent a century deciding on a color. In my broken English, I tried to push “Pink-ing of You” on her, but she settled on “Cha-Ching Cherry” – a bright red polish that in my opinion looked cheap and a color only loose women would wear back home. She was Chinese. I could tell by her striking features, though she was one of those wealthy second-generation types who were born in the U.S. and grew up drinking Coca-Cola and watching American sitcoms.

I clipped her toenails and she gave me the smile you give if you’re the type of person who feels embarrassed by the fact that you’re paying a stranger to touch your feet. I asked her if she spoke Mandarin, then watched her face shift from embarrassment to fear to pity, after which she said, “Yes I do, and where are you from?” As if to say, I really do care about my sisters from across the pacific, with a lingering element of we are not the same but I can’t erase you from my consciousness, and I said, I’m from Suzhou and my name is Shirley Wong.

Ode to My Eyebrow Pencil

Almay 02 Brunette: The only brow defining pencil

I can count on. Not too light, not too dark. No red-brown tint

that contradicts my natural coloring. Smudging kept to a minimal

extent (save on hot summer days in the city when the makeup

melts right off your face as you wait to board a crowded train).

Sure it's not sweat proof or water resistant, but what more can a girl

ask for? Perfect brows au natural? Here's to freedom

every morning in front of the bathroom mirror: One tragic sweep

like Edith Piaf, or an arch to-die-for like Liz Taylor's Cleopatra.

Better yet, Pretty Baby Brooke Shields with her thick untamed

brows, cutting across her little doll face like two straight arrows.

No more plucking and tweezing. No more Vaseline, rose oil, or other

"homemade remedies" to PROMOTE OVERNIGHT HAIR

GROWTH by 15%! Just a confident artist's hand brandishing her

toilette. Maybe she's not born with it, but generations of women have

worked with what they got: My Taiwanese grandmother tattooed

a pair of tadpole-shaped brows onto her forehead, the color of the ink

now faded from black to blue, but they frame her aging face

nonetheless. Ladies have pinned it down to a science: How close

can a broad get to the Golden Ratio of 1.618? Placing the pencil

vertically against my nose, I determine the start of the brow,

then draw across and down till "X" marks the spot where all three

corners of mouth, nostril and eye line up like some astrological

sign: By night, I am Da Vinci's Mona Lisa with knowing eyes

that gaze out at the rest of the world from beneath a naked mound,

pale moon brow, temple of worship: Tomorrow is another mood.

new assignment

new assignment: the sketchbook project
assignment guidelines: http://www.arthousecoop.com/sketchbookproject/
assigned theme: coffee & cigarettes (predictable, i know)
assignment progress: two pages (front and back) filled. 100 or more so to go?

this is spread II. who do you think you are, my boss?

The Coat

I.

"That’s a surprising choice for you.” They were out. He was talking about her new coat. This was right before he tipped the table by accident, knocking her lemon drop martini all over her ballet flats and shattering the glass. Her feet were drunk by the end of the night. They kept wanting to runaway.

II.

In the morning light, she couldn’t discern between the stains left by the coat’s former owner and the fresh ones made from the night before. It was a camel vintage Burberry trench – a real find – purchased for $35 at the Arthritis Thrift Shop on the Upper East Side. When she slipped it on for the first time in front of the mirror, she felt like “the girl” from that beloved French novel who put on the man’s fedora and never parted with it again.

III.

First October chill in the air. She pulls the coat tighter around her; a waif. It was cut for someone with a heavier frame. The wind blows and she puffs up like a tent. The old lady’s coat makes her look even younger than before. Last night, while they smoked Marlboro reds under the fluorescent light of the fruit and vegetable stand at the corner of first and seventh, he asked her if she wanted a cucumber to be charming. “No,” she said and kept the rest of the thought private in her head, “I want to steal one.”

IV.

Alone on the train back into the city, all she can think about is taking a long hot bath. She imagines climbing into her shower fully clothed, coat and all. Under the steady stream of water, every sign of ash and grime and grease would simply evaporate, leaving her spotless and wrinkle free.

V.

Walking home from the station, she stops at the grocery store and fills her cart with cans of soup and bags of frozen vegetables to last the week. She looks conspicuous among the regular Sunday shoppers – families with young children, couples who have cohabited long enough to know one another’s preferences in pasta and milk.

VI.

By now her feet have sobered up. They plod sensibly up the stairs of her five floor walk-up and make their peace with the familiar wooden floorboards in her studio. She hangs the coat in her closet and turns on the water in the shower.

2046

les compliqués...

c'est toujours la même histoire.

sometimes it IS what it is

"a list of all the things that the sea does is not what the sea is." - art and lies; jeannette winterson

transcribed carefully into my journal sometime in the summer of 2006 (not yet 19). i thought this quotation was profound at one point. hmph.

what would that girl think of me now? what would i say to her?

1. invest in a sense of humor.
2. not everything has to be metaphor, you know.
3. it's okay if the sea is just the sea. you can ride the waves or choose to be crushed by an overwhelming sense of self-entitlement.
   
4. let's face it - you need a new plan of attack. the only thing that's growing is the size of your ego. that, and the width of your waistband if you don't put those doritos away.
   
5. it could be worse. you could be mixed up in some international drug trafficking scheme that comes back to haunt you ten years later and get thrown into federal prison for 15 months...wait a second.
   

but she's a little bug to be crushed

we are the generation that "likes" the statuses of our exes.

gone are the good old days when you would just “accidentally” spill your drink all over the new girl’s white chiffon dress and call it a day. find another man ASAP, instead of post albums upon albums, invading their mini feed with pictures of yourself performing beautiful-sexy-confident-HAPPY-WITHOUT-HIM and then crying yourself to sleep every night because in actuality you feel kinda-all-by-your-lonesome.

so what if it’s a little cyber lie? and yeah, maybe the new girl’s beautiful, but YOU’RE keeper of his past. she doesn’t know what “peanut butter sandwich without jelly” means – you do.

why is it so impossible to draw the line and stick to it? must you always feel compelled to leave a lipstick stain on his social media existence? spend hours poring over her profile pictures, comparing the size of her nose to yours and the distances between your eyes?

if you were a real person, you’d tell him off without batting an eyelash and MOVE ON with your life. instead, you stare green-eyed and small in front of that computer screen at work, wishing you could delete the little whore off the face of Facebook and then tweet about it to your seven and a half followers:

she’s a slut @newgirl and who needs him anyway, i’m fabulous just the way i am #jealouspatheticex

the human touch

“i thought of…my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it.” – from the dud avocado; elaine dundy


there are scientists building robots. it turns out that of all the five senses, touch is the hardest to replicate in mechanical form.

think of the irresistible urge to run your fingers through his hair each time you see him. every strand and follicle registered by a map of pressure points distributed across your skin. it’s as if you could see texture with your fingertips.

each man felt different in your hands. blindfolded, you could still probably identify who was who according to the invisible sensors embedded under the skin of your fingers. (yes, there is scent, of course – but now you learn that scent can be manufactured and easily replicated.)

the same scientists tried to replicate human skin by creating thin sheets of plastic embedded with layer upon layer of what they called “nanoparticles.” when this film of gold and semiconductors “touches” an object, a small electric current causes some of the nanoparticles to LIGHT UP.

more pressure, more light. less pressure, the lesser it lights up.

right now, they’re still looking for the appropriate “detector” to capture this map of lights and register the image, texture, and feel of the objects being touched. it’s hard to say if robots will be wearing this skin any time soon.

but for now, each time a hand touches the back of someone’s neck, or grazes a naked shoulder – you imagine the entire city lights up in a blink of an eye and goes out just as quickly.

“a knowledge of pleasure, a pleasure that comes of knowing pleasure, a knowledge-pleasure.”

-from foucault's "the history of sexuality," vol. 1

(just some philosophical musings okay?)

I. the discursive power of sex

western man is a “confessing animal.” in the church, in the asylum, in the court of law, and in the microcosm of the household. we claim the Victorians were sexually repressed. counter-argument – they talked about sex ALL THE FREAKING TIME. it was THE secret to exploit.

II. scientia sexualis – the science of sex

why did the Victorians talk about sex so much anyway?

because there was some TRUTH to be told. Truth = the search for knowledge = the fluid structure of power = circulated through discourse. you are what you talk about. and if you talk about sex, you are your sex.

and as long as we’re on the subject of categories: good-healthy-normal-sane-socially-acceptable-sex VERSUS bad-unhealthy-abnormal-insane-socially-taboo-sex.

the Victorian stethoscope was trained ever so attentively on the sexual impulses of children, mad men and women, criminals, homosexuals, perverts, freaks, you name it! pillow talk became science talk.

III. the deployment of sexuality, a.k.a. power over life

if there is a discourse of sex, then there is a reverse discourse of THE OTHER sex.

but first, let’s talk obsessively about sex within the Victorian household in order to NAME that which is forbidden to be named and give the bourgeoisie a SEXUALIZED BODY! and not just any body, but the right kind of body that will then go out into the world and set the standard for all you OTHER BODIES.

before, there was the king and his sword: disobey the king and OFF WITH YOUR HEAD! power came from the command over one’s death sentence.

then things started to shift. the king slept around a bit. he no longer looked at you from above, but all around you and in you. you became a walking security camera trained at your mother, your father, your siblings, your cousins, your next door neighbor, your teachers, your friends, that kind of creepy uncle you always avoided at family reunions, your own body!

this is called “bio-power” where they implant that little interpellation chip in the back of your brain that tells you – HEY, I’m THIS body and not THAT body and WHAT body are you anyway?

we went from OFF WITH HIS HEAD to INTO HIS HEAD; from death sentence to life on parole.

IV. so why are we so obsessed with being UN-repressed now?

because we think it has something to do with our freedom. sexually LIBERATED, right? mm not-so-much. when we realize that the Victorians already did it – talk about sex incessantly, that is – we also find out that the subject just isn’t that black and white.

it’s not so much about emerging from an era of sexual repression, but understanding how we came about to believe that we were ever once “repressed.”

the interview

young thing sitting across the table from you. what are you talking about? you're a young thing too. young enough to not know what you're doing, interviewing a senior from the new school who's applying for an internship in your department.

you giggle something about having just graduated yourself last summer, then squint at her slightly crumpled resume, wishing you had had the balls to major in literary studies with a concentration in creative writing as well. instead, you stuck with safe and respectable english language and literature (like choosing a beige sweater over a plum or chartreuse colored one). whatever, it's all about the strong writing skills, no?

and applying said writing skills to a worthy nonprofit cause. i'm sorry, what's that you said? grant writing? oh yes, of course. in two weeks you'll wonder why you ever entertained the thought of becoming a professional grant writer, holed up in your blue gray cubicle computing sentences like some binary code. you almost betray the fact that you secretly hate your job, but then you notice her face fall apart in slow motion and then immediately switch gears, lying through clenched teeth about how "supportive the team is, really. we're all here for the same reasons, right?" more nervous laughter--this time noticeably louder on your end of the table. you hope your boss can't hear you through the wall. this is a disaster.

all you want to do is put your hands on her shoulders and give her a good shake. say: "WAKE UP, KIDDO. it's spreadsheets from here on out. kiss metaphor and caesura and deconstructionist theory goodbye. boy, what i'd give to be reading some milton right now. even if i still hate milton, except for the pretty parts in paradise lost. what was it again? walking hand in hand...wandering, slow: 'through eden took their solitary way.' you motherfucker motherfuckin' smartass, milton.

ah, and baldwin. god bless baldwin and his giovanni's room. there are two types of madmen he wrote: those who remember and those who forget. i'm of the remembering party; repeat flashbacks of how did he put it? 'the perpetually recurring death of their innocence.' shit, i could LIVE off of that, but i can't. i can't eat, drink or pay rent with those goddamn crazy BEAUTIFUL words. words. WORDS.

i once scribbled post-it notes all over the walls, the wooden floorboards and on my body. i gave birth to THE word. i smoked and drank too much, stayed up till 3.am. weaving word after word into sentences, built bridges out of paragraphs and entire civilizations of close readings on theory, art, literature, film you name it. now, i still smoke and drink alone too much. i put myself to bed by midnight every night (god forbid i turn into a pumpkin) and wake up to ride the city with the angry commuter mob and sit down at my desk where i type meaningless meaningless words for nothing to sell nothing and discover nothing in return, go home and come back just to do it all over again."

you shake her hand and tell her it was a sincere pleasure. it's almost sad how certain you are that you'll be seeing her again in two weeks. and yet, you've already forgotten her face. you try to place the features, but fail. what did she look like? you can't seem to remember anymore.

summertime

oh your daddy's rich
and your ma is good lookin'

so hush little trust fund baby,
don't you cry.

boys don't cry

scientists say that tears have an evolutionary purpose.

only humans shed tears, after all. animals howl - cry out in pain - but tears are the opposable thumb of emotion.

there are theories on this: like anything in evolution, what has stayed with us must have helped in advancing the species.

when in danger, tears signal to your "intimates" (only a few feet away) that you are suffering without betraying your vulnerable state to the predator.

tears built communities, salvaged broken relationships. this is called "theory of mind" or empathy.

tears got someone's attention. the good criers were survivors because they would not be left alone, unattended, go hungry, etc.

when someone is crying, it's difficult to argue with them (or so they say). BACK OFF. I'M ASHAMED. I'M GUILTY. i'm small. don't go.

tears are an evolved mechanism of camouflage (i.e. crocodile tears).

there exists an entire language of tears that we've evolved to perform and interpret simultaneously.

(ah, fascinating what you learn from the radio in the morning before going to work. in the mirror, you smile at the mole under your right eye that superstitious relatives back home had warned you to remove permanently - a sure sign of "a lifetime of tears," they said.

little did they know, you were fortunate enough to be armed with such a predictable fate.)

sunday reading (T magazine)

she's little more than imported wallpaper; the perfect obscure object of desire (what i wish i saw when i look out the back window of my house in manhattan).

this is not unusual for sufferers of dorian gray syndrome, a little-known psychological disorder first identified in 2000 by a cabal of staff shrinks at germany's justus-liebig-university, giessen.

an ethnographic view of fat shows it to be a more fluid construct. the stigmatizing term "obese," from the latin obesus, originally meant "having eaten well" until it was reclassified by 19th-century doctors and health workers, just as "fat" was once a flattering term used by the greeks.

flesh suggests messiness. art, control.

do you love?

i.
word of the day: "le coeur."
not to be confused or mispronounced as "le cul."
though sometimes "le coeur" is not far off from "le cul."
it's a matter of perspective.

ii.
the difference between what you thought love was at 19 and what you have come to think of it as at 23:

"it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now; so he shall never know how i love him: and that, not because he's handsome, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire."
- emily bronte; wuthering heights

"when you fall in love, my sister said / it's like being struck by lightening. / she was speaking hopefully, / to draw the attention of the lightening. / i reminded her that she was repeating exactly / our mother's formula, which she and i / had discussed in childhood, because we both felt / that what we were looking at in the adults, / were not the effects of lightening / but of the electric chair." - louise glück; "prism"

iii.
since you can remember, you've always asked yourself: "do you love?" never, "do you love him?" (m, r, b, etc...fill in said blank), but: "do you love?"
when referencing a feeling, it's best not to use names. names require specificity, hence thinking. generalizing is your safest bet and almost 99% of the time yields an affirmative response: "yes."

no need to REinvent the wheel

"i'm perpetually lonely. i'm lonely when i'm in relationships. it's my condition as an artist....i also think i'm afraid of depleting my energy. i have this weird thing that if i sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina."

- excerpt from an interview w/ lady gaga ("lady gaga's cultural REvolution," lisa robinson; vanity fair - sept. 2010)

REcast genius in another form. what beauty is, is.

this is called "exercising your muscle"

poor poor blistered feet. one on each second toe.
smoking your cowboy cigarettes in your underwear.
nobody cares. only the pigeons frequent your stash
of ash in a metal tin can on the fire escape.
sober up kitten. you got work tomorrow.

Water Works

Surprise. More like a big fuck you. No water in your studio. No water in the building. No water in the entire fucking neighborhood.

You knock on your neighbor’s door for the first time. It’s a little past seven in the morning, but you can hear the T.V. through the walls. He’s up. Why you assume it’s a he, you don’t know. Your landlady said someone was moving into 5C right around the same time you were moving into the building. “Alex living in 5C”: Could go either way.

Well, "Alex living in 5C" is refusing to be sociable or neighborly for that matter. You knock again. Just in case, you give him a second chance to redeem himself. No answer. You bite your bottom lip and then venture downstairs to see if Dan the super is around.

It will turn out he’s not. But in the moment as you make your way down the stairs, you hear this awful noise echoing against the concrete walls, traveling upwards as you descend.

"DON’T YOU DARE CALL ME ANOTHER NAME."

It was the woman’s voice you heard all along. You couldn’t even hear the man before. Not until you walked right past 2A and picked up what sounded like a man’s voice; muffled, as if he was speaking with a sock in his mouth. She was crying. No, more like moaning. More like the whimper of a wounded wild animal.

Why that metaphor? Wild animal. As you push the glass door open and walk into the street, you think: “The hunter is sometimes weaker than the prey.”

At the Midnight Express next door, you order a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas. They’re not serving coffee. This is when you find out that the entire block and not just your building is without running water. You realize you need to pee pretty badly.

The construction workers outside are making a raucous affair out of turning the water back on for a hot second. You watch the water, muddied with sediment, gushing from what appears to be a complex network of massive pipes underground.

The waitress behind the counter sucks the air through her teeth, muttering: “Brown water. This is going to stay brown for days.” You comment on the brown water to be friendly, and she responds with: “Makes me happy to be living in Brooklyn.” Then you explain to her how you just moved from Brooklyn—Williamsburg in fact—to the Upper East Side. You don’t know why you keep talking. The words just come out, and luckily she’s somewhat responsive.

“I’d drink bottled water for at least a week if I were you,” she advises. “And when you get home tonight, run the water. Just let it run for a good minute or two. You’ll have to. It’s going to be dirty for days.”

Later, as you make your way down into the train station to take the 6 to work, you toy with the idea of letting the water run all night. You imagine every tenant in the building doing the same. It would be analogous to performing some kind of surgical procedure on the building: Collective bloodletting if you will, one of those ancient medical practices that probably did more harm than good but felt necessary and somehow logical.

Opening the vein carefully to let the water out and then collecting the liquid in exquisitely wrought bowls of glass: Here is the first harsh word spoken aloud. Followed by the echo of an empty room. Then the name replaced with silence.

quarter life crisis

26'' flat screen t.v. w/ built-in dvd player and CABLE. 20 prepaid rentals at the video room. season 1 and 2 of Seinfeld. beer & cigarettes & annie's mac & cheese.

you want to be cool like that - curled up beside the fire escape, hugging your legs, staring first at the full moon and then the fluorescent-lit window display of the goodwill thrift shop across the street. you force yourself to THINK DEEP THOUGHTS...

when really, you'd prefer to have a Kramer barge into your teeny, new studio, pulling out two pieces of bread from the pockets of his bathrobe and asking, "you got any meat?" you'd make as if you're slightly irritated, then put the kettle on the stove.

he'll comment on your brilliant use of twinkle lights, and you'll tell him about your almost nervous breakdown three hours ago in the nearby food emporium. HOW AM I GOING TO SURVIVE W/OUT INSTANT CURRY??

you both shrug to the symphony of delivery trucks and gypsy cabs tearing down 2nd Ave, and cast amusing shadows on the walls.

RISE & SHINE ladybug!!! tomorrow's another night.

HOME: A SERIES OF DIALOGUES

I.
But are you afraid of flying?
No, it's not flying that I fear. It's crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.
I know what you mean. Once, I was flying alone and the plane had to make an emergency landing. I remember looking out the window and seeing nothing but blackness. I was scared like you. I thought: I'd rather crash and burn in a city full of lights, than go down in the middle of the Pacific and be swallowed immediately by all that cold, anonymous darkness.

II.
I can pack my entire life in two suitcases.
Ah, that's the way to do it.
I've moved sixteen times in the last four years. There's no need for furniture: Just some clothes, a few good books and my music.
You see, that's smart. I always act like I intend to stay longer than I do. I buy cheap furniture at Ikea that I assemble in the apartment. Then, when the time comes to move again, I find out that I can't take my armoire with me because it won't fit through the narrow space between my front door and the outer hall. It's a sign, no? All this unnecessary assembling and disassembling. Next time, I'll just stick with curtains.

III.
Why did you pack your curtains already? You have another six days in this apartment.
You think there's a method to this unnatural process? You're lucky I even packed a box.
Well I'm not sleeping with you in this room, so you can stop trying to unbutton my shirt. Your neighbors are watching.
Oh, I'm sure they've seen me naked at this point. I walk around in my underwear all the time--with or without curtains. And besides, I'm moving in six days.

IV.
Look at this room. Isn't it the saddest room in the world now?
It certainly isn't yours anymore.
The walls look so big and threatening now that they're bare. I can't stand to look at all that whiteness.
Don't look at the walls. Look at me. I'm still here.

V.
Is this what they mean by being young and carefree without a mortgage to pay off?

Soldier

["there's a girl in new york city,
who calls herself the human trampoline." -p.s.]


there now, don't look at yourself in the mirror. when you come straight out of the shower, it's always better to take things slow. for example: eye, nose, mouth...take each feature in separately, methodically, moving from one body part to the next without focusing on the whole picture--at least not just yet.

this is where we'll start to draw the line of the right eyebrow. with a steady hand, recreate that striking arch in the brow that all the women in your family have. pull the pencil across then down, ending at a sharp, clean point at the delicate temple.

then move on to the dark circles beneath the eyes that need to be concealed, the faint wrinkles only you can see, and those stubborn blackheads on the tip of your nose. ah, look at how the eyes open up immediately with two confident strokes of heavy black liner; the lashes coated in thick mascara.

now watch carefully, as the lips emerge from the fog in the bathroom mirror. your mouth is your most prized possession. you paint it dark and edible like a wounded cherry.

part the hair and pull it back into a tight chignon. a dab of perfume behind the ears, the neck and the two bone-thin wrists. perhaps you'll wear your mother's necklace.

voila, you've replicated her image exactly. the black and white portrait of the famous french writer on the cover of your book--you can't miss it. now, you can finally leave your room, this sad little apartment with all of its sad little objects like a cardboard dollhouse. you leave your playthings behind and take to the streets. you are a woman, after all--and this is a woman's face.

tomorrow, perhaps, you will have to move to a different apartment and change your address. it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you have this arsenal of soft, feminine objects to put on and take off as you please. you carry this face of hers with you the way a snail carries its home on its back.