june 23, 12:25am | 4m | cache
a feeling of wishing i could clear my cache. delete my history. wipe the slate. almost cried during mishima quartet, went to joyce to see the la dance project’s other program, the one i don’t play in. used to listen to that quartet in high school; bought the cd. i think i wore it out, if you can do that to a cd. but i really think i did. another piece i loved but it had me so uncomfortable i thought i might die. that feeling continues now. one of dread and foreboding. guilty. part of me feels insane. heart pounding, stomach in knots. and then, seriously, it occurred to me on the subway, maybe i just had too much coffee.
i can still hear this one dog barking from somewhere here in the west 70s. f and i can’t, for the life of us, figure out where it comes from. we live above a doggie daycare, so i know the sound of dogs in the basement. this sounds different. and what do the neighbors directly next to this dog think? what do they do? how do they live?
on the subway two gentlemen, maybe a couple, stared at me without discretion. they even talked to each other about me, smiling, pointing. i nervously took that evening’s program out my jeans and thumbed through it.
i remember, as a kid, expressing myself through laughing at inopportune times. concerts in which i performed and attended. assemblies. detention. ‘silence’ on the bus when we kids had acted too rowdy. these all presented themselves as opportunities to laugh. tonight, during that emotionally challenging/difficult piece on the program, my eyes and attention went like a heat-seeking missile across the hall to a group of people, beside themselves with giggles. judging and seething, i cursed them, and cursed myself for finding them, as if on a mission to find the least engaged people in the hall (a habit). i decided that they had to make the piece about themselves, lest they actually let the piece in. deflection. but then, how did i deflect the piece? how did i keep from letting it in?
a woman in front of me looked back conspicuously after i yelled bravo, as if equal parts puzzled and incensed that i enjoyed it.
can still hear that dog barking.
