Fierce/Fragile



I made a scene tonight in a fancy restaurant, I didn't mean to. I walked in with a swivel on my hips and a sneer on my lips, I was well padded in ferocity. Right down to my lipstick and my coordinated under garments.



It's been a disconcerting couple of months, the kind of months spent akimbo where time rushes where you thought you were standing still, where every available limb is attached to an inadvertant casting reel and the bounty is categorically overwhelming. Fish and silvery scales flopping everywhere, blood and shiny everywhere. The suffocating fish and the indefatiguable fight for life, wears on the legs and the arms, I am all alone on the skip (is that what they call those little tiny almost rafts) I am alone and there is no one with a net or a cold beer.



Earlier, I pour myself into black, top the supple blackbird pie with the shiny shoes, making their debut at Foreign Cinema, it's bright and lovlely out. Second day of summer, and it actually feels like it might be. Might be endless, might be paradise, might be ephemera.



Earlier, earlier, I asked the engineer to let me be for a good while. And he keeps cropping up in my inbox, wants to know if I am well, wants to know if I am alright. I think he is keeping tabs and more incidiously I think he is keeping score. So I let him have it, I gave him the ole one-two via email (hey, it's the modern world and we all cower behind our monitors) and I allowed myself to get good and pissed off, and went off in the gorgeousness of this second day of summer to get my car waxed. I asked him what the hell he wants from me, and he came back with some pat answer about he likes to know my comings and goings from afar, at which point I spit into my palms and donned my gloves, DO NOT FEED ME SUCH BULLSHIT, YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. I am not a fawn, I am the lady or the tiger, choose wisely frat boy.



Later at dinner, after oysters and gimlets and rose and duck salad but before I finished my constitutional frenet, M says to me, and our relationship is based on mutual recognition and contention says to me, you don't deserve love, you earn love.



And all my fierceness evaporated in the ghosts of projection of that shitty movie the Science of Sleep , though I could sleep for a millenia, and I stood up tall in my shiny shoes and lost my everlovin' shit. How could he say that to me, how could you possibly say that to me, to that stupid girl with her heart perennially on her fucking sleeve, the sleeve she wipes her teary nose on after the eleventyfifth time she's had her sorry heart ripped out. Talk to me motherfucker later, when you have been..... but I wont say that. I'll just stand on the sidewalk and weep harder, for the fact that I was just that fierce when I came in, and leave under a veil of tears, just a brittle leaf from some desiduous tree in latter autumn, nothing extraordinary, no celebrity train wreck, just a sweet ride on an itinerant breeze before the ground strikes that fragile spine to mulch.



I did tell the engineer that I missed him, because it's true.



which is why I think it was unacceptable to leave me a voice mail on Friday evening - sorry mister, I am busy losing my crackers in fancy restaurants, leave a message. I have no doubt that he wants to refute a number of accusations I leveled at him, what he doesn't know, is that is really doesn't matter anymore. It was a good run and I fell in love, and I ached for ages, but I don't anymore.

I still believe in love, but cynically, cynically. I think I fought hard for love when I was in it, which is why I exploded tonight at dinner.

Or maybe I didn't, or maybe it's just too late for love, and maybe I should just give in to the three-quarters of myself that is already betrothed to her rabbit. But do you have any idea what it is like to be rabid for kissing.... To be cognizant of that ever diminishing window for the smart girls. I grow stronger and slowly edge into the slow, slight inferno that I might supposed to be, and further recedes that dawn of love, if need be, if it's conceivable I suppose I might settle for a stable of puppies in portland, I suppose I'd be seduced by eagerness and availability.

I am officially a lecher. It's neither here nor there, it's just a future full of all kinds of promise and no romance. (please, please prove me wrong, and I'll make a happy diet of tofu humble pie, please.)