nathan > Recent Status Updates

our history has been burnt and burnt again / yet, here we are / again here / we / are / indulging and I want you to / indulge / I want you / to suck / to chew / to slurp / to devour / banquet on me / feast on me / eat me / alive! tell me now / the price of salt? you say, we are the love that dare not speak its name. I say, here we are, burning.

.. because so often I have felt that futurity does not belong to me, that I am bound to the present, unable to imagine a beyond in which I want to live, but here she is, Caragh, becoming my open future. And I feel undone by the chance of it all, by the years made possible by our being together, by my desire to live into tomorrow..

All the ghosts of her make the air of the present thick and hard to swallow. A yearning I had forgotten is, once more, bitter in my throat.

And I already want to follow him, into the forest, wherever he wants to go. I want to wander and meander with him. I want to take time, to be together slowly, because I want this bloom to last forever.

What are you reading? I love the cool silences of the library, hushed voices, whispering, want to get a coffee? Everything is big ideas and bright conversation, picked at and teased apart. Learning, I realise, is a process of untangling.

Because the river of mountain memory is achingly fresh. And my face will be wet with tears, not because I’ve dreamt of her again after all these years, but because in this dream, I am kissing her, and now I’ve woken up.

..being is transgression. A ghost there now, slipping through the plaster and weatherboard. Bleeding on the grass. Seeped into earth. I’ll exist in that house only as an echo of everything before. All my life . . . Here it is. Undone.

..face fattening with frustration.

Acknowledgements: I’d like to remember my Uncle Joe, a submarine cook—world’s coolest job. When I was little, he carved a radish into a rose. It was the most magical thing I’d ever seen, and still is.

A windless rustle, a certain un-sound.

The movement of a cat’s shoulders out of sequence with its forward motion pleases her. The cat slips on its way up the other bank. Her grasp is firm. She pushes a blade into its neck. A pink dawn, flurries beginning. The animal draped like a bride over her legs. Viola sits in the snow and drinks.

The reason the man in the truck, the stuck dress, and the tiger weren’t as wild as the wrong car is because they were acts that happened to us. Getting into the wrong car felt like something my mother and I enacted. Like we’d stumbled onto a mystery. That it turned out to be a simple mistake only made the mystery wider. But it was generated by us. Our conversation. Our love.

What’s more surprising is that you can have a private relationship with time.

“‘A yellow rose means infidelity and disloyalty. A pink carnation is I will never forget you. Be mine is clover. My heart burns is cactus.’”

I sank to the ground with her in my arms. I knew she would die and I was ready to shoulder that blame instead of proceeding. Her body seemed to be comprised of hundreds of independently operating parts. It has to end, anyway, I thought, ready to surrender to the unfairness, which would in some way be a relief. It was late afternoon. The seagulls were screaming. Who was I to deserve relief?

Has my mother’s thought somehow freed this tiger?

“Can a family be two people?”

.. a mother whose love got caught in her throat. I used this phrase because I wanted to continue liking the person, which I guess means I wanted to continue liking the world.

Before I knew you, I had a lover I could not feel. I mean this literally—between Kathleen and me existed an unseen body that moved when we did. Body is the wrong word. The entity was something and nothing, a/n _______. We discovered it the first time we made love, a muted affair. Touching her felt like plunging my hands into water. She said touching me felt like wearing mittens.

Outside is an abbreviated hallway, the same sad sepia as the room. A bright bar shines at the end. I hear the din of talking and glasses. Two doors, marked LADIES and GENTS. A pay phone and framed newspaper clippings.

..two easy hearts in the night.

How interested we are in delaying the inevitable when it has never been anything other than the most patient, caring lover on earth.

Which is why anything can be haunted as long as there is residual memory and a location, and a location can be a seashore, a truck cab, a body, a peach. So I agree with my first statement. It was the last experience Vig and I had together, in the part of a relationship when you agree without consult to avoid opening the door for the thing that will unravel you.

Boo hoo, says the dead girl. An antic, performative sound. Perhaps she’s only heard of human sorrow?

Anything left out in this night will be demoralized by cold and salt.

Thin teenagers glare by the shop, curled like parentheses.

“Thanks, Dad,” she says, to no one. Her voice sounds tried on, two sizes too big.

The mailboxes glow blue in a trick of dusk.

How can she tell him I want you to chew over my shoulder and ask what I’m reading? No one believes you when you’re honest. So she says, “I don’t want a sexual relationship,” and leaves the rest unsaid and he senses a withholding and assumes she’s lying and she feels misunderstood and eventually they get into separate cars and part.

The boy’s penis had been injured in war and replaced with two orchids that needed different kinds of sunlight. The girl doesn’t want a sexual relationship. She wants him to return home from running, mealy, happy, and raw, and accept a forkful of sausage she holds out without looking.