Of Sight and Sound in Fragments

 

Sometimes, lists are the only way to communicate. 

A Morse Code of sorts when one is too bogged down or overwhelmed to jewel together words in order to create a beautiful sentence to lay across your collarbone.  

A list as of late would include:

-You with your penchant for the Midwest, your 1950s barbershop hair and wild eyes.

-The spike of a stiletto shattering your classic Christmas bulbs: Solid red, solid green, solid blue - their silver innards spread across a hardwood floor and the satisfying crunch under my shoe.

-My hand upon my mother's chest in my hometown. The waterlogged nugget of sponge I placed into your mouth. The sandpaper grit on which your tongue would stick.  My aim and learned accuracy of getting the morphine exactly and slowly upon those furthest molars: A slow steady short distance down that throat that produced every word I have ever heard you speak.

 

 

(pause)

 

It would also include the observation: It is rare that one hears the sound of a firecracker and hears only a singular pop. 

 

 (pause)

 

 

I have been reading about the art of Sophie Calle (thank you, E.), and thinking about the concept not of "love at first sight", but of the "love at last sight" that Walter Benjamin references in his book Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. 

 

Love at last sight.  

Tell me of the people and times it makes you think of.

be well; be loved,

k.

Burn Brighter (Internal; External)

It's morning, technically. On the cusp of afternoon.  My eyes are burning, slightly, from not wanting to have given up my bed, but, alas, here I am:  Showered and dressed and typing away.  Coffee almost finished; the crumbs of some sweetly made surprise banana crumb muffins at my side.

I've been thinking about friendships lately.

How they arrive in our lives, how the are tended to, how they flourish, dissolve, or become stronger based on conflict-to-deeper-understanding.

What is it that makes our friendships?  Is it shared experience? Convenience of location? Bonding through tragedy?  It can be all and none of these things. 

I was thinking about the at-risk-youth program I was placed in when I was a kid so as to  not be thrown out of high school and how, if I took anything from it, I took the importance of compassion and of building across and within difference. The importance of reaching towards connection with all of the other unwanted-s, castaways, don't-belong-heres, don't haves, and simply, the leftouts.

Because this has never just applied to "at risk youth" (whatever that means, and whatever privileges are involved in even being recognized and labelled as such): It applies to almost everyone at every moment for shifting reasons dictated by a rich, white, cis-gendered, Christian, college-educated, English speaking, citizenship-having, heterosexual, and on and on -supremacist world.



Yesterday, in reading my most recent enjoyable-junk-food detective novel, I came across a sentence that spoke to an aspect of friendship and how they begin and evolve that is so basic and true that it escaped me.  Escaped me even when it resonates down to my bones and their bare, fundamental aches, at times.  The passage is describing three people, so seemingly different and contradicting in their values, and reads:




It's funny how people form alliances around the common denominator of simply needing a friend.






be well; be loved,

k.

(image: Feuerblume by Otto Piene (1966))
(Sentence from Two for the Dough, J. Evanovich)