Driving Down Insouciance

There is a quarter moon low slung and grandiose on the edge of night tonight, and the stars glisten and the air is warm and October is nearly on the morrow.

And night windows are lit by lamplight and a passing silouhette.

Tonight we were celebrating an almost marriage, a mixed group in heels. Wine in shades, food in pomp, too much romesco and I fucking hate cooked carrots in any incarnation, too many flashes and too many photographs and constant reminder of how I hate myself in pictures. All of my imperfections enshrined in pixels and then there is all that weight to be lost.

Once upon a long time ago on a night like tonight when the quarter moon was skimming the headlands I thought that I just might be a little bit beautiful, not thought, believed. Once upon a time when I was twenty I might have foolishly believed that the world was my oyster and I was youthfully carefree enough to string my birthright at my leisure. Ah, life. And all of those saccharine indulgences, when you turn twice and get the shit kicked out of you for your trouble and for good measure have your heart extracted thrice from your chest, still beating and without anesthesia.

And then you sort of movie star wink to an omnicient camera and ten years have passed and you haven't been laid months and you are pooling in directions you thought not possible and laugh without mirth, because, blondie, the joke is one you.

How fast time has begun to race, gone are the days of whiling away the interminable summer days of a bookish girl spying on the boys deep in the forest with their sticks for guns. In these quick days I blink three times and two months have passed along with a season. And I stand reluctant and mouth agape amid the winter coats at Banana Republic gimping hither and thither like a great drunken fool despite my magnificent sobriety in the late afternoon. Tottering on my fragile ankle and giggling between courses from the depths of my evergreen soul.

So we might as well all be sunflowers pacing the sun on his firey sojourn, take a good look at homogenity, we all track the sun. Who was it who said "go west, young man" what do you do when you cant go anymore west than the sea, and when west is all you have ever known, when you have seen dawn rise in Manhattan and seen the sun expand drop and extinguish in the mighty, savage Pacific. I don't know my stars from contellations, but I know all about inky blackness, and I am well acquainted with the absence of love. Not the kind of sustaining love that radiates from the friends and family, the kind that makes your limbs function, I am talking about that kind when limbs disfunction, where joints and muscle are in disaccord, and everything is sugar powdered and volcanic and fraught. But I wouldn't know about that. I told D the other night that I might just sell my soul for a spark, and ember or even an unlit match. Yes, yes, there I've said it, my kingdom for an unlit match, all of the heavens and the contellations for an ounce of love, a tiny bit of respite in the rain of hard candy. Only connect, just like Forester says, if but for a fleeting nanosecond, a hungry moment, transluscent, incandescant candid desire.

I am nobody's fool and I know the odds. How do you think I got so good at being impermiably alone. Then again, everybody has an achilles heel.