So nearly gone, or my real name is Cassandra
The Irish in the lightwell, I'm convinced are waging a passive war against me. This because I have taken to banging on the window when they host their Wednesday night parties - I am only patient past two AM, and then I get my shrew on. They are moving and have taken to leaving the kitchen light on all night long. I shouldn't care, they are nearly gone and so am I, yet my provoked ire simmers, and I have started to fantasize about throwing rocks. Then again, I have an undercurrent of anger and grief coursing through me, and I think I'd like to be armed with skipping rocks to throw, pointedly and accurately and decidedly blindly at things, at things, at ideals and at ideas and at politics and religions and inattentive drivers, at the hills and at the oceans, just because.
The minutae of such a big move are wearing me down, I get fogged in the details, I want to twitch my nose and be gone already. It's not that I don't secretly love the extra attention, and I have been dining out on my departure for weeks, it's not that I am not grateful for that last reconnection, that last validation of neglected friendships (we get, well, life just happens) I have always been a happy wallflower, and to slink quietly away would have been my first choice. I was secretly pleased when P said I was being an ass, I'll throw you a party. I want to be gone, I don't want to leave.
It's been fifteen years this August, that I have been rooted here in this City of my choosing. I could never, ever hate it. There is too much memory and too much of my exaggeratedly misspent youth still trembling on corners and under mouldering bars, there is too much of me in the skyline, what I see is that here is where I will always be. I told a friend that I was taking days to make the journey to Portland when my apartment has been emptied and the movers have gone, that I expected to weep until Mendocino, tread the sands of savage northern beaches until I had sloughed off the last of my California skin. But that will never happen, I'll be an expat and that is that. I've been an expat before, it was a guise that I flourished in. Besides deciding that I really hate my apartment, yet it's my own, my gilded, dusty cage, I really hate the Irish in the lightwell and their damned kitchen light. Could I be projecting, possibly, likely.
Friday is my last day at work, I am glad that I opted for the time and not the money (how can my brother not have any Blur or any Joy Division in his music collection) all the scattershot and careful weeding I have done in drawers and forgotten crevices begins in earnest on Monday after my massage, fifteen years piled into boxes or left on the sidewalk for the life collectors. If you ask me what I'll miss most, I'll tell you it will be my commute from the City to Marin, across the Golden Gate under varied skies, pelicans and light and quiet waters or rough waters, with that old bitch NPR in the background baiting my tears or angry indifference depending on the state of my hormones. I could have worked another week or so, fuck the money, I want the last, asthmathic breaths of summer, turning ideally into the perfect cornsilk softness that is our Indian Summer, I want days of pearl and evenings of sapphire perfumed by skittering leaves and the sumptuous death of a season, for me it's been a long and lovely and painful season, fifteen seasons, to be precise, fraught with loves and little deaths. I am not sure that I remember it all, there was a fair amount of reckless dancing on bars, and a marriage, a deep bucket of pain, a lot of narcotics, a slew of souls forgotten and a few banished forever. I've been banished myself.
It's getting late, it's always late where I am. I could give two shits about showing up for work as I have a severe case of short-termers disease, besides it's only me and the nineteen year old republican intern in the office tomorrow, happy new year for all you chosen ones. The dirty old lady in me would happily fuck his brains out on the trading floor, perhaps some restraint is called for. Or not...
uh yeah, there is that, too. The fast and furious return of my desire to be heartbroken again, which has blossomed into full fledged she-letchory... starting with my take down of the hair dresser, and not ending with my pornographic love dreams, I think it must register on the level of our primordial pheromones, because walking in the park I got all kinds of attention, I don't think it was strictly my new fabulous tits, but as a buffer they will no doubt serve me well, it was something else, I can only say it was two ounces of mojo, and two ounces of not giving a fuck, shaken and served up with a garnish of open road and zero expectations. Somehow that makes me more desirable than all of my blonde curls and the grief and beauty I carry in the blue and green light of my eyes. I've got a lot to learn from the garishness of confidence. Well, that and the right shoe, and a the understatement of proper foundation garments.
The Irish in the lightwell, I'm convinced are waging a passive war against me. This because I have taken to banging on the window when they host their Wednesday night parties - I am only patient past two AM, and then I get my shrew on. They are moving and have taken to leaving the kitchen light on all night long. I shouldn't care, they are nearly gone and so am I, yet my provoked ire simmers, and I have started to fantasize about throwing rocks. Then again, I have an undercurrent of anger and grief coursing through me, and I think I'd like to be armed with skipping rocks to throw, pointedly and accurately and decidedly blindly at things, at things, at ideals and at ideas and at politics and religions and inattentive drivers, at the hills and at the oceans, just because.
The minutae of such a big move are wearing me down, I get fogged in the details, I want to twitch my nose and be gone already. It's not that I don't secretly love the extra attention, and I have been dining out on my departure for weeks, it's not that I am not grateful for that last reconnection, that last validation of neglected friendships (we get, well, life just happens) I have always been a happy wallflower, and to slink quietly away would have been my first choice. I was secretly pleased when P said I was being an ass, I'll throw you a party. I want to be gone, I don't want to leave.
It's been fifteen years this August, that I have been rooted here in this City of my choosing. I could never, ever hate it. There is too much memory and too much of my exaggeratedly misspent youth still trembling on corners and under mouldering bars, there is too much of me in the skyline, what I see is that here is where I will always be. I told a friend that I was taking days to make the journey to Portland when my apartment has been emptied and the movers have gone, that I expected to weep until Mendocino, tread the sands of savage northern beaches until I had sloughed off the last of my California skin. But that will never happen, I'll be an expat and that is that. I've been an expat before, it was a guise that I flourished in. Besides deciding that I really hate my apartment, yet it's my own, my gilded, dusty cage, I really hate the Irish in the lightwell and their damned kitchen light. Could I be projecting, possibly, likely.
Friday is my last day at work, I am glad that I opted for the time and not the money (how can my brother not have any Blur or any Joy Division in his music collection) all the scattershot and careful weeding I have done in drawers and forgotten crevices begins in earnest on Monday after my massage, fifteen years piled into boxes or left on the sidewalk for the life collectors. If you ask me what I'll miss most, I'll tell you it will be my commute from the City to Marin, across the Golden Gate under varied skies, pelicans and light and quiet waters or rough waters, with that old bitch NPR in the background baiting my tears or angry indifference depending on the state of my hormones. I could have worked another week or so, fuck the money, I want the last, asthmathic breaths of summer, turning ideally into the perfect cornsilk softness that is our Indian Summer, I want days of pearl and evenings of sapphire perfumed by skittering leaves and the sumptuous death of a season, for me it's been a long and lovely and painful season, fifteen seasons, to be precise, fraught with loves and little deaths. I am not sure that I remember it all, there was a fair amount of reckless dancing on bars, and a marriage, a deep bucket of pain, a lot of narcotics, a slew of souls forgotten and a few banished forever. I've been banished myself.
It's getting late, it's always late where I am. I could give two shits about showing up for work as I have a severe case of short-termers disease, besides it's only me and the nineteen year old republican intern in the office tomorrow, happy new year for all you chosen ones. The dirty old lady in me would happily fuck his brains out on the trading floor, perhaps some restraint is called for. Or not...
uh yeah, there is that, too. The fast and furious return of my desire to be heartbroken again, which has blossomed into full fledged she-letchory... starting with my take down of the hair dresser, and not ending with my pornographic love dreams, I think it must register on the level of our primordial pheromones, because walking in the park I got all kinds of attention, I don't think it was strictly my new fabulous tits, but as a buffer they will no doubt serve me well, it was something else, I can only say it was two ounces of mojo, and two ounces of not giving a fuck, shaken and served up with a garnish of open road and zero expectations. Somehow that makes me more desirable than all of my blonde curls and the grief and beauty I carry in the blue and green light of my eyes. I've got a lot to learn from the garishness of confidence. Well, that and the right shoe, and a the understatement of proper foundation garments.
posted by emma at
10:34 PM
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