Splish, Splash, Splush

It is spring now and the trees are in blossom; also the young girls wearing their gossamer dresses and running everywhere. On Wednesday we waited for thirty minutes for a bus that did not come and watched at least a hundred people walking almost jauntily to where they needed to go instead. Then we went back home and cancelled the appointment because we were too late to make it anyway. The conversations that take place while waiting for a bus are less awesome than the ones that take place on a long train trip or in a car, but they are better than many others. I of course primarily favor the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other, the plume blown upwards exposing the neck and the stories stories stories exposing the soul, but I'll take a bus stop if that's what's on offer. 

It occurs to me that I do not remember the last time someone wanted to kiss me. Did you read the David Foster Wallace story in the New Yorker about the boy who was kissing himself? I can kiss the inside of my elbow still. The freckles on my knees. Also my fingers though more often I bite them, gnawing off pieces of skin. There is so much I don't need. I may die before my clavicle is ever kissed again; I can't reach it. How to feel about that? I sometimes think if nobody touches me I will collapse into dust. I sometimes think that if someone touched me I would collapse into dust, too. And shock. The truth is we're all going to dust anyway, right, so it's just math and probability at this point. 

Speaking of the New Yorker there was a Stephen Dunn poem that sort of killed me about imaginary people and what they give and take away from real people. Imaginary people are so important, not just the fully imaginary ones but the ones we imagine people we know to be. Way to project, yo. How you thought somebody was that way and then they weren't... because they never were, and because you didn't THINK, you IMAGINED. Dreamed. And how I thought myself so awesome because I stopped stretching the skin of my wishes over the faces of my loves but still. There was a film in my eyes and maybe I didn't see well. Though it is nice that moment when your eyes fill with tears and it's like you have a tiny microscope in there, everything so sharp and bright and pretty. But still not quite true, is it. 

Some days I can't leave the house; other days I flit from one thing to the next and it's a good day that ends with someone holding their sides and laughing and there have thus been many good days. Some days I hold my keys so hard they cut into my palms; other days I stomp around mud puddles with the frank pleasure of a child, splashing. Some days I think I'll never write anything I'll ever want to read and other days it comes out faster than I can transcribe. Some days I miss you, but then some days I don't, or not much.