Website update: 19 photographs added to color

Is it pretending or is it hope?

website updates:
links section
nine new color photos
three old black and white photos
five poems which you may or may not have read

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website is back up.


( naomi shihab nye )

January, 2004. Greentree, Pennsylvania.

The first time Andy and I came to New Mexico, we stayed at a hotel on Cerrillos just off of I-25, probably a Best Western or Holiday Inn or something. We had been driving for five days--Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. It was February, cold as balls, et cetera, but the hotel had a hot tub so we went and sat in it and looked at the stars through the steam and it was one of those moments where I thought to myself 'this is something you should remember' so I reminded myself of it over and over. Soft star light and poor sleep, Soft starlight and poor sleep, Soft Starlight And Poor Sleep, like a mantra. Incarnation. Untravellable road.

We only stayed in Santa Fe for a day--two years ago now--slept the next night in the back of Ferdinand and left in the morning for Chris and New Orleans.

See what I mean about the sentiment.

Last night there was a pretty good snow, so Andy and I went for a walk. I talked to him about how I don't have much desire to live. Andy talked about how he felt static, stuck. I'm not sure that either of us is really okay. We looked at photography monographs for a while then walked to IHOP and shared one of those never ending stacks of pancakes, turned around and went home. I think about silly things. Valentine's Day. Andy's birthday. Shallow parties, playing mirror mirror. What the past means. Dress up games.

I want to wear fedoras and glass beaded dresses. Smoke sweet cigarettes. Kiss until my whole body hurts.

Things are okay. Nich was here and then he left. Andy is still here and so am I. A lot of the time, staring blankly through the blue dust everywhere, the giant bleating sun bleeding in through the glass. My hands smell like pennies and stomach acid and rancid things, and they have grown weak and lack desire to grasp anymore at the strings. I hold the bowl Nich gave to me in my hands, make it sing until it sings in my bones.

Yesterday I dug through what was left in a dead woman's house. Yearbook from A&M university. 1929. Reminds me that I like dead things. Louis T. Lumi. You know. Death like light bleeding in through glass, and stones, and singing things, and living histories and ghosts. For fun, I memorize the placements of objects and bodies; the particular way things sit in their grooves, the way Andy folds one leg over the other, rests his one arm this way until his body resembles a system of pulleys. Get the feeling that I will remember when the things die, where they lived. Like their eyes forever hovering in that air, in my memory, in that air.



If it's coming to a city near you, y'all should go support the sex workers' art show

( recipes )

I touch my skin. I pretend that there is no motion in the universe. I am covered in darkness and silence. Light and sound have dropped and disappeared. There is no longer gravity, or speed, no constant or variable. The walls are still, and the mice in them are still. The wallpaper is still. Then my eyes are closed, and all of the walls bend in to kiss me. I want to make love alone. I pretend that I could hang a photograph on the wall and then just walk into it. Like that riddle about a room with no doors or windows only a ladder and a mirror. I want to climb into the mirror, into an other world like a world of lies where trusting nothing makes sense. Where I could feel safe constantly looking myself in the eye, trying to climb through to some imaginary dirt road, through that sky, through the sun bleeding into the clouds. That silver lining like the edge of a blade.

Last night driving home from Jimmy's I began to wonder how we learn what 'I love you' means. Is it just trial and error?

When I was in middle school, I would hear a lot of people in my age group say that people said 'I love you' too much, it became like saying 'I have a toothache'. I never thought to myself 'when someone says that they love me, I want it to mean the world'. I never thought that, but I think that that is what being told that I am loved has come to be. What I want now is not to have to hear the words. I want language to become unnecessary, to begin to speak in a language without words, a universal language. Maybe we could create a language that is like death over and over, like death being desperately and inextricably connected to connection, to desire, like Duras' language. May be we can learn to speak in a language of the body that is not always about beauty that is sometimes about leaking fluids and mortality and just touching and being touched and simplicity, fading into backgrounds, things being lost without having to lose the things, without cut off's. Losing things on a gradual incline. An asymptote of loss.

I keep listening to 'I'm on Fire' over and over. This feels right. To me, there is a desperation beneath the skin of words, a desperation that I cannot get at. It is a desperation like the smell of tears. It is distant to me, and I will never be able speak it. Sometimes, I can hear it in a song, can sing it in singing. But it is elusive and brutal. When I touch it there is the electric relief, like that of a shock, a small lightening bolt. Like friction, the way friction will light a dark room for an instant, the eyes will go numb.

So we're broken up. So that's that. I have two more days in this house; avoidance is impossible and undesirable. We hold each other, we dance together. I dig my fingernails into my shoulders while he strokes my hair. All of my liquids come out at the same time. I am blood and tears and snot and spit, I am the loudness of it all. Last night I cried so hard that today I have a crying hangover. My stomach is sick and my head is throbbing. I am breathless about the walls, the way I cannot keep heat in my body. I keep breaking into tears. Last night I cried into the fur of an unfamiliar dog while Andy drank beer and played cards with his friends. I feel sorry and guilty and horrible. I feel like there should never have been a choice to make, that it was wrong to say 'choose' but there was no other option. I am angry that he has not chosen me that it has been two years and that he chose to lie and that my body feels ripped apart and I just want to scrape out whatever he's left in me, the dead children and the hatred. To be honest none of this comes as a surprise. We will have five days apart and then we will live together again. I don't know how to feel so betrayed and so angry and so unsafe and still to have him be the only real story that has happened in my life. How to say I am the most hurt I have ever been, to still dance in the living room and the kitchen. It seems stupid to think that all things are cut off, to say that because he is no longer my lover I can no longer kiss him but I kissed him for the last time last night. What does that feel like. Feels like I miss you I am going to miss you. The doorways are strangers, liars and thieves. Passing through them feels cruel, visiting feels cruel. In the morning the sunlight stands in them like a father, shaking the cherry from a cigarette admonishingly. All of my monsters are like photographs of themselves. All of my monsters have red eye and terrible posture and beer breath. I need a warm safe place, fires and waking lights.

Things between Andy and I are turning bitter. I trust him very little now, and I realize that I have never really trusted him very much; I am constantly waiting for that big hurt, for that hurt to end them all, the one that will finish me. It does not come of its own volition so I make up little ones along the way. I suppose that these hurts will grow or that they will lead me to their larger friend. I no longer feel the specific hurts, only a small throbbing, which pulls at my skin. To an extent they have taken Andy's place. My hurt and I talk all the time. We speak long into the nights; we fall asleep together and begin talking again in the morning sun, our faces pressed close together. I make the sounds in my head, the sounds of voices. Andy and I only communicate through yips and anger and sex. Occasionally, we cry together like drunkards, embracing at the end of the night, unsure of where we stand or where to go from here. Last night his tears smelled of azaleas. For an instant I began to love him again, but the love turned into something terrible and ugly inside of me. Something like a jealousy. My body has forgotten love and I fear that so has my heart. I wish to die. I do not remember what has urged me to live, what semblance of desire. I wish to disappear, to be forgotten. I try to remember other loves, friends, certain slants of light. I feel too alone. There is no star to act as a ladder, no staircase of braided hands. No shaft of light can reach me, I am buried. These sounds in my head make me a stranger. I do not want to be so lost. I want Andy to find me again, I want us to love like we once loved. I do not know that it is possible. We travel like strangers, like ghosts, revolving around eachother, stuck in the circles. But after so long the orbit has begun to degenerate; we travel in slightly larger circles, form slightly weaker bonds. Every untruth, every slight falsity absolutely ruins me. I wish to die, I wish to die.

The only sounds I make stay inside of me. My mouth is silent; I am cosntantly hungry for what lies beyond it, but do not wish to reach for it. I want to be better but do not want to leave what Andy and I have worked at. I am hungry for happiness but happiness eludes me, the world eludes me. This is how I will die, hungering and unsure. I cannot remember what it was that kept me full, kept me jolly. Perhaps I do not want to remember. I am tired of hope, it gets me no where. I feel that I am constantly shattered.

I am sure that I could make myself live without him, but I do not want to. If we do not belong to one another, where do we belong?

Florida is stupid.  10 days till pittsburgh.  I want to go back home.

I just want to coo over nicholas.

I have been doing a lot of landscapes as of late. By a lot I mean that the last two rolls (24 exp total) have been of earth, sky, sunlight, withered plants, broken highway, dilapidated buildings, etc. I suppose that there are a couple of reasons for this, the first of which is that I feel too much like I am photographing the same thing over and over and the second of which is that I feel like I am photographing the same thing over and over and want to do something about it--namely, reanalyze what images of the earth, as opposed to images of bodies, mean to me. Compare and contrast. Figure out what bodies mean to me in the context of land.

For my final project in photography, I am doing dyptics about how it feels to grow up female in America; photo and text. About how it has felt to think that things were better and then to realize that thinking things are better serves to make them worse, is counter-productive. I want to explore what I did and what was done to me as a child and adolescent, then go on a bit to explore how these things have affected me, the loneliness inherent in intimacy, and so on. The childhood-adolescent exploration will be done mostly in text superimposed over images of human bodies, plant bodies, and spaces. I think I will end up expressing a sense of desolation which may or may not be what I am going for, I can't say yet.

Our fish, Busta, died this morning. His tank was so sad to us that Andy emptied and moved it, replaced it with my typewriter. Tomorrow I am going to write a paper about violence in the meat industry; I want to focus on the use of migrant labor in the meat packing industry, explore race and class both working with animal products and in consumption (who has the luxury of vegetarianism/vegansim, etc) but I only have one very short source related specifically to this path. If anyone (ahem Sherrila mrowr?) has any additional information about this topic, pretty please let me know.

I am tired and my head hurts all the time. I am afraid of losing you as a friend. I am afraid of your hands and my hands, of what our brains do, of the things we don't know about each other. I spend these mornings alone; I watch and listen to you sleep. Sometimes I wish that you were someone else, that I were watching and listening to someone else sleeping. Or I wish that I were someone else, someone who did or felt something, someone who searched, who prodded, who felt motivated, who could sit down and write the paper, the novel, the poem, the letter. I am not anymore, if I ever was, I have changed. Here, I have the urge to apologize. I am sorry that my body does not quiver beneath your touch, does not cry, does not disperse heat, does not warm you. I am sorry that I cannot touch you like an explosion, like a reaction. Touching you has become comfortable and seemingly unnecessary. I cannot tell anymore if I am a human being.

I want just to sit in this room alone. I would begin to talk to myself, attempting to speak from my center, to give my word. Because it feels lonely to me that the only time I can talk to you is through half a bottle of wine and feminist rhetoric. I know that this probably bores you as much as it bores me, and that you are just more patient than I am. I believe that you see something worth your patience. I do not know what it is that you see but I want to see it too, more than I want to see Egypt, I want to see what is in me, what depths you suppose I reach. But I am also sad of thinking of myself through you. So let's say I want to see what is in me, and leave it at that.

I started a letter to Allen last night and the letter began "I do not know where I am coming from"; this is the closest I have come to truth, this place, and I do not know how I have arrived here, but finding out has suddenly become important. I want to escape and I am perhaps looking for excuses. If I were to fall in love with someone else.

If I were to once again fall in love with you. It would be only after a period of forgetting. Because as it stands I take your face for granted. And your voice asks me if I have fed the fish, why there is no coffee, how I am feeling, what I am thinking about. I do not want to presuppose your existence. I do not want to suppose your existence, either. Someday one or the other of us will leave. I know that if you were to leave I would feel a terrible grief. I do not know what I would feel if I were to leave. Probably I would just feel inherently alone; I would not know where to go. I have forgotten how to deal with my heart.

Years ago I thought the scent of jasmine in the warm Florida night was the most beautiful scent in the world. And greeting the scent as I walked barefoot through the deserted streets, or as I opened the car door, the kitchen window, was the most beautiful of all scenes. But I do not know what is beautiful any longer. I posit beauty before me; I expect something of it, for beauty to be intrinsically moving. Once, before I knew you. Once, when I hurt in my thread, in my seam. These same things may have touched me, called me back to my core, called myself out of me. It was in these days that I yearned for the ability to recognize my hurt. Then, I knew that to learn to recognize pain meant to learn to live within it, like a mime. I have an invsible box, an endless rope, a tug-of-war.

The hum of everything is large and frightening. I am sure that it is the music of the world we hold within these walls. I know because. My bones vibrate as easily as strings; plucked and plucked, the strings are just crowds in the streets--the sound, as the faces, becomes expected. When I walk into the world I anticipate what will present itself to me; I do not consider that I am also being presented.



( ... )

I was going to write a big thing about how I probably would not have survived things like molestation and eating disorders in my late adolesence if it were not for Elliott Smith's music even though I only ever listen to that one heatmiser album I have anymore especially the song where he sings about his head up against the bathroom stall, but then I decided that I didn't want to do that. It's not really rational for me to be taking this as hard as I am.

I added five new pictures in the black and white section.

Drove up to the mountain with Ally and co. to see the aspens all golden golden golden. Rockfaces and autumn and moist, dead wood that my foot falls moist, dead through. The mountains smell like heaven, all the junipers and crowing crows.

The women's show last night where girls being ready for love equaled out to being ready to be owned, others dancing sexily to britney spear's slave song. Whatever Whatever.

We take risks with my body.

The Bald Soprano directed by Kelly and the Zoo Story directed by Ben. The small school mentality of god I know everyone here and it's so frightening. I have quickly become the queen of small talk with people I don't really care about. The thing is, I say to Andy, that all meaningful relationships in my life have come very quickly, so I feel that if any of these people were meant to mean something to me, it would've happened already.

I'm thinking about going to see Mikl over winter break. I'm not at all sure that it's a good idea, but I haven't seen him in over two years and don't really have anywhere else to go unless I want to spend a month and a week with my grandmother and aunt in Arizona. While on the topic of people I'm going to see soon, Allen and the six parts seven will be here in two weeks, which isn't long. I'm thinking of inviting my photography teacher and his 1970 chevrolet caprice along just because. I wish that Jay, Sharon and her peach would come visit.

Lately, feeling driven by something wholly unfamiliar.

Just wanna listen to Julie Doiron, fall in and out of sleep, wait for the people I love to wake up, wake me up.

In the photo lab I feel hidden and safe. I listen to the cd's that Allen sent me for my birthday and it's so strange, they have VOICES in them. I feel so lonely not alone. I feel like phone calls after heartbreaks, the cold air of unfamiliar cities. Grasping at strings. Recognition after recollection. Dissidence. Desolation.

I had a sex dream about a boy who lives down the corridor from me, and it was nice. The sex was bad, but it was nice to feel close to someone other than Andy, even in a dream. I'm tired and sad and my body feels hard. Allen will be here at the end of the month, I am scared to show him my face a little bit. I have a feeling I will cry like I have a feeling that I will cry when a teacher pulls me aside after class, or when anyone says something nice about something I've done. It's so deep, I wonder if I dug it there, how it got so far so fast.

Before James was my RA, I remember crying in the annex theatre when he did a monologue about his brother in the war. It was funny and amazing I had really tried to keep myself in line but some things just need crying. Then I couldn't stop and I cried and cried on the way back to my room, and Andy was so surprised and he doesn't understand how I feel things so hard. A few weeks later Andy told James that he had made me cry and it wasn't embarrassing, it was tender. Then this year the first day that we were back in Santa Fe and I was unpacking in my room and James came by just to show his face and it was so wonderful to see him again I mean, I barely even know him but it was such a giant, I hesitate to say, relief. Then last night Andy and I went to see James in RECKLESS which was all about people running away and it was kind of funny like funny terrifying. Afterward Andy and I walked across campus and talked about how James had played the father of the nazi girl in The Giants Have Us In Their Books, which I had forgotten. My family owns over two thousand buttons. We laughed.

Andy is going to be a godfather. And an Uncle. I feel passionless, passionless. My birthday turned out fine, thank you for all the wishes.

from the deer bones series

also updated

The last two weeks of my life (in part for Sharon):

We made it to New Mexico in just a little over two days, but got a total of three tickets on the way only one of which was for speeding. New Mexico is beautiful and temperate and the mornings here are the most incredible things ever which makes me happy that I haven't yet adjusted my sleeping schedule to this particular time zone.

Since arriving, Andy and I have broken up twice and gotten back together twice and only gotten drunk once but really severely. Our twenty month anniversary was the twenty-ninth of August and it passed like nothing passing, like some thing we could never bare to acknowledge. We do not have sex as much any more.

I have three classes, one is nine credit hours, one is four, and one is three. They range from tolerable to wonderful. I'm ecstatic to be involved in social sciences and I am ecstatic to once again to have legal access to a photo lab.

I cut eight inches of my hair off on Tuesday. I have not cut my hair in more than three years. It is a little longer than my shoulders now and for the record I do not like it at all. However, I do like that it gives me an excuse to constantly be wearing my hat.

Yesterday I hugged Sam and this made me feel overbearing and overzealous and like I never bothered to establish social boundaries for my self which is really terrible and makes me afraid for the people in my life.

Tonight, Andy and I went to see the city of Santa Fe, et cetera burn old man gloom to nothing but ash and eyes. It was okay except that the groaning made him seem a little too human for me. I am glad that I don't ever have to go again.

Nich is leaving on the eighth and somehow this separation is different than the two years of separation in which our friendship has previously existed.

                  

      My father is giving us a car to drive back to Santa Fe and to keep as long as we promise intermittent visits, every other christmas, summer vacation, et cetera. I can't help but feel that my family has done no thing but every thing they could to make my life as easy and carefree as humanly possible but that this constant generosity has led my subconscious to a belief that every thing would always be handed to me and so far it has held up not only in the outskirts of my family life but every where, with every one. And, despite my best efforts to make my life as controversy-riddled and complicated as possible I can't help but feel completely complacent with my inhibitions, my death wishes, my insistent jealousy, my knowledge of injustices, my distrust, my distance from the human race, and my love.

      On Tuesday we went to see our crazy camera guy so that he could dig some dirt out of the base of the nikon, and ended up in a discussion about wine which led to him giving us a bottle of the best white I have ever had and not charging us for the repair. Drinking it, I admitted to Andy that I some times wish he'd write poems about me like he did about Anna to which he answered some thing along the lines of, but my life is a poem, and so on. It has been bothering me. However, yesterday he gave his permission for me to buy this as our inability to find a 35mm camera that entices me looms and I am very excited about it.

      I miss Nich and I can't wait for him to get over to Asia and come back so that we can live in the same city. I'm realizing more and more that I should be holding as close as possible to the people who bore witness to my ascent in to adultdom which makes me want to see Dan and Jimmy before I leave even though I know that it won't happen. Last night Andy and I made stuffed manicotti using Sherrila's ricotta substitute and Andy said "This is what it will be like when we're grown ups with jobs, we'll come home exhausted and, despite that, make dinner together." We will also probably pass out with out much bodily affection, like last night, as well. Ha-ha.

Every antiquity, every gentility, every sleep is a plea.

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The air smells like a newly opened orange but in a moment the newly opened orange will smell like air. How I say I need you is a plea. I'm close like the darkness dropping, the darkness crouched in the corner where my mouth raises to the scent like tumblers to a cheer. My face seems alive and familiar, but in the silence you will narrowly miss my eyes nine times before you begin to see me. They are green as Cambodian forests, knotted along your body like brass knuckles. My raised mouth will press against a small, scentless leaf. My raised body will press against any other body in order to feel the press against the living spine in yours. Near Camobodia your eyelid sings its self closed with a cicada song; I know. The lamp light seems tender from within the wet socket. I'm close. And in a sleep so thin, the warm squint of a cow in the dewed grass could make us weep or wake us, the tear rising from the body, the fault line a flinching nerve.

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In the night a shadow walks the length of the house in the shoes and the dresses of the dead and like liars we call to it.

I am fifteen years old, I take myself by the hand. Convictions
of being young with the advantages of being most affectionate.

I am not fifteen years old. From the past is born
an incomparable silence.

I dream of this fine, this splendid world of pearl and stolen
grasses.

You think I'm upset; I'm not. Don't take me--let me be.

My eyes and fatigue must be the color of my hands. Faith, what
a grimace at the sun, for nothing but rain.
I assure you there are things as clear as this story of love; if I die,
I do not know you anymore.

When we were younger, David and I talked about running away to San Francisco and living in an apartment above a chinese restaurant. Last week David emailed just to let me know that he hates me now. I thought it was hilarious. That morning I'd had the most vivid dream about blue eyes. Pausing behind windows. Paused behind fog.

My lover speaks into my hair.

Yesterday I spent the day at the courthouse waiting with my brother for his case to be heard. The Most Jewish Lawyer Ever made it known that he was humble in the presence of G-d by wearing his small black hat on his red hair. The woman with the happy cats on her shirt cried as the lawyer said, It Could Be Many, Many Years, I don't know what the minimum sentence is, but it could be ten to fifteen years. She excused herself Many, Many times, carrying the scent of her body with her. She could have, for all I know, received her ten to fifteen.

In 2000 the man who lived in the brick house on 69th and Harding cut off his left hand with a chain saw when attempting to remove a large, sour orange tree. We're going to Orlando on Sunday.

I like the smell of unclean hair and the smell of sex and hardwood floors in unclean hair and hardnesses of hearts and the insoluble desire for where we are not. Andy says he likes the way my body glows. What he means is, does your body glow for me? My body is uncold at first touch and steadily grows heftier in temperature. My body is unclean but salvageable.

( this is really important )

      I oftentimes recall the summer that I starved myself as the best summer of my life. In the beginning it was fine. Then I feel the hands in my hair I know they are lies. I watch the bones fall out of their bodies, the bodies of the women in this room. As they begin to laugh, they begin to sleep.

      A boy who plays chess at the cafe with his wife shows me pictures of his baby nephew. The muscles around his heart are swollen. They have a small child; her name is Brandi and his name is Eric. They seem happy and I want to touch her face.

      The boxes in Florida are really boxes. It is an endless cold encounter like a single note on the stave like my fingers are staves like the staves come unhinged in your hair. A single unhurried blue eye presses to the glass. Every hand shaken hard.

      Danny is bald and short and plays the keyboard at the Argentian restaurant next door on Wednesdays. When he sees me he hugs me even though he doesn't remember my name or never knew my name. He asks me if I was here during Andrew and I tell him I was in second grade. He says he was younger too. I do not drive fast through the soundless city.

      In order to remember you I must forget you. The sun opens in the sky nuclear and pushes a thread through my iris and pushes all the way through warm and wet and open and eventually lost.

      Matt dates a girl who works next door named Maggie who kisses my cheek when she sees me. He hates her but she is beautiful and used to date Jared Leto. He says negative things about everything and wore a red shirt with an r.crumb drawing of bukowski on it the first time I met him. I was reading Speedboat.

      I think what I want is just to fade slowly from my life so that no one feels a loss in my absence. Then I cry because I know that it is truly what I want.

      Raha is from Texas and majored in French Medicine as an undergrad. When we talk we have no thing to says so he says, 'New Mexico is so beautiful'. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, is in his second year of med school, and wants to join the peacecorps when he graduates. He is hurt in his life I can feel it when he touches my head.

      I know that I should like the music of John Zorn but I can't tolerate anything that doesn't make me cry or dance it just feels like a waste.