Take back your words.
Stars are not supposed to come among us
on human feet, toes spread
against the darkness,
lighting on a battered floor.
These things don't happen. Your words
fit so carefully into locked voids,
carved into sinuous shapes
that just happen to nestle, soft as cats,
among the curves of a hope that i'd choked
and laid into its grave.
Don't pull me in. Even curled around a lie
(and so it must be),
your mouth is beautiful.
The knife is unpredictable, and yet always the same: it's always small, and very quick, and lodged between the ribs before i can push it aside, twisted on its edge to separate the bones and let out all the song.
And childishly, i say, I needed that, that's mine, it wasn't done yet, and the answer always comes: And now it's not.
Faceblindness is a funny gift; what it takes away from the essential tool of tribemaking and recognition, what it forces in hesitation and loss, it also gives to the senses: to know someone, i have to know their body language, their shape, their tread, their scent (i love the different ways people smell), and of these, first and easiest: their voices.
I can learn someone's face, over time; it's not a complete void, but it takes a while. Two or three months, most often, if i see them at least weekly, or maybe a shorter time if the experience is intense. In the meantime, even with all these other cues and factors, i still hesitate to greet anyone out of context until they do so first: i need to hear their voice, to be completely certain of who they are.
I get very attached to voices, because of this (writing as well as speaking: it does extend) and they're the thing i miss most when things change and someone is gone. I realized this just today, thinking that while i finally learned my astronomy prof's face (just this week, really), it's not hearing him speak anymore that makes me sad.
Here's an example of voices loved: a podcast author i've been following for a while, Phillipa Ballantine. Sometimes i love her work, sometimes i loathe it, but i never feel dispassionate about it, so there's that. Not relevant here.
But oh, her voice. Rich rolling and growls and purrs, pricked-out vowels like little pinpoints; it's like floating in a sea of blood and ginger ale, warm and viscous and caressed by hot little bubbles of spice. I'd never know her on sight - some people just have that sort of face, without any particular feature for me to hang recognition on and so build a pattern - but let her open her mouth, and i'd follow her anywhere.
As for this man's voice - i hate to use the phrase "honey poured over thunder," but it is. To be specific, raw honey - the kind that is a cream more than a liquid, that tastes not just of sweet and sun but of wax and chitin, pollen and wood, of the whole long season it was made through, white-green bud to red and crackling leaves, and of the droning hive itself: when you warm it, it turns to sand and silk between your fingers.
And this thunder: late, late on a summer evening, when the crickets are so close by that you feel their chirruping in your own throat, and the thunder sounds, both far away and long, crawling closer, silencing the crickets and filling your chest with its slow rolls, as if your ribcage were nothing but a bowl of water to be tilted and spilled.
That honey, laid over that thunder.
I could go on and on, writing paeans to every voice i've known; that would be tedious, at best. But it's in there, that love, for what i know you by: even better than that way you cast your hip, or touch your hair, or draw your last word out, i know this.
Kneeling by the stream - it ran straight and fast here, clear to the center - i reached into the space in my chest (a bloodless cut between the third and fourth ribs) and began drawing forth the cloth.
It was filthy: both damp with slime and crumbling with dry rot, dusty and cracking with old blood and yet hot with fresh. It was pathetic to look on, but it has not always been in this state, and i had carried it in my chest all this time: from the grey-sand beach, over the path, with the pack and after they were gone, through miles and miles of forest. Nothing now but two yards of tatters.
I plunged the knot of it into the water, to dissolve and be carried away. It had to be pulled and torn, at first, but then after spun away like ink, staining the water grey and rust. Released and rising, a white corner caught on my fingers.
It was thin - so thin, wet as it was and almost transparent - but strong, and nearly whole, no bigger than a handkerchief. Spread out across my knees, it held a pattern of ribcages: human and animal, wolf and serpent, rabbit and deer, picked out in faintest grey. A pelvis stood in the center, shaded so delicately in fine silk threads that i thought it must be a sketch.
Folding it carefully, tucking it alongside the wound, i finally stood.
Too long outside of silence but time now. Left to build again a territory, a home.
For months now, I've been having these dreams, though never written, because they are not linear, nor even cohesive; just building in layers, one on the other. [1]
There is the night-forest, deep and endless, with its back against the dark ocean; the grey-sand path leads between the cliffs and abruptly into trees, forking left and right and almost instantly, gone. The trees themselves, blue- and silver-shifted in the moonlight: the green is in their scent, in the sound of the leaves, in the rustling beneath.
We hunt in pairs, or occasionally in threes, matched; shoulders pressed together to feel the rolling of the joint beneath. We peel apart to follow our own trails, each aware of the others' tread, the feel of the earth beneath, no matter how far it ranges.
On one of the first evenings, there is sweet soft prey; the scent at its neck inflames us, and we chase its promise of life, fast and low. We will eat so carefully around its bones, fitting our teeth into the space between rib and vertebrae with reverence, filling us as mouths fit breath. The prey-who-returns, soft and white, to lie underneath the skin, closer than blood.
On another night, much colder, later in the year, our brother-adversary comes; he who may as easily lift us broken on his horns as give us his heart. In the lean nights, he demands all our strength; he pulls us apart on the long trail, until we are nothing but chase and breath and the anticipation of his step ahead
If he is caught, or escapes, i never know. It is his challenge, the payment made, that makes and unmakes us.
Deep in the winter, deep under snow; we are all tumbled together, and i have a lazy mouthful of his ruff, tugging it absently. He ignored me at first, then subtly leaned and leaned until i was half-squashed, and let go. "He is not my rightful prey," i thought, sharp and sudden, while he thumped once, amused. "His skin is closed to me; i will never swallow his red life. I will only know the shapes of his bones."
The floor seemed to dip, then rise again; the green world settled into a different configuration. I shifted, curled, and slept.
--
[1] needless to say, i was duly horrified by the direwolves. tropes convergent, what can be said.
My brother was dark where i was fair; light-haired where i was black. We stood, shoulder and hip, with our backs to the ocean, feet digging into the gunmetal sand, coarse as salt. His sword was held behind, poised for a sweeping strike; mine crossed before us, in his defense.
We favored each other, but no one else in the family. Our mother had called us visitors, and put me in his bed when my crib had grown too small, tucking us back to back. The soft tick of his pauldron against my shoulder was as familiar as his breath. Our stances intertwined, ready to push off one another, to fly together to the threat.
For years, we had been separated; he had left, a few years after school, and i, too, had gone. We never caught one another in any city, despite (or due to) the occasional message, telling the other where they'd been, where they thought they might be next. When we met, by accident, in his lover's kitchen ten years on, my arms went around his waist, and we said nothing; only looked up at his lover with the same dark eyes.
It approached. I thought of his lover; how his mouth had curved into an O, how carefully he had set down his glass. How little my brother had needed to explain, to either of us. I thought of the home they could make there. I thought of the leather between us, sliding as he shifted one last time.
I turned the sword in my hand. Edge-on, it came.
---
Two days old, this dream, but too much to write until now.
"Trust, Frigg. It is the thing we carry into sleep, on faith that we shall wake again."
sigh, Guilded Age.
Not death itself, but - the suddenness of it, when it comes without warning.
In the past five or six years, we've lost eight people; eleven with the parents of friends. Only two were elderly or expected: the rest were as sudden as a sinkhole. You almost get used to waking up to a cavern in the street, get practiced at scrambling back from an edge, but it comes no easier.
It was only sometime in the last few months or so that i stopped popping awake in the middle of the night, heart hammering, and had to check on all the cats the rabbit, my mother, and G, before i could calm down enough to get back to sleep. (thought this was broken once before, but it came back with a vengeance a few weeks later.) Even now, i have to make the circuit before bed, and if woken up for any reason during the night, just to be sure. So i can know first, start to take care of it, stand between it and anyone else.
I can feel the place where that trust has been carved away, with a small knife, as part of the absence. It may, eventually, return, but i don't know how long that's going to take. Time; that's how long.
----
Not entirely unrelated: i would still like to see a therapist, but also still don't have access to anything except the crisis counselors at school. Hmm. I'm going to try to apply for insurance again next week, so i guess we'll see. Also recently started taking N-acetylcysteine based on the results of a couple of the studies listed at the bottom; if it makes any difference, we'll soon enough find out.
In bed, my back resting against something broad and smooth, something slightly cool, that breathed so slowly: one breath to my six, seven. I shifted and felt the catch of fabric; glanced back and saw the dark scales. His body arced wider than i could have put my arms around, and i saw neither head nor tail; just this dark expanse, immobile, relentlessly present.
Settled between my shoulderblades, there was no time i had felt more comfortable, more at peace, than against that silent breath.
---
Sleeping on my back on someone else's couch or guest-bed - not my own bed, certainly, not a home - i woke early because of the weight, gentle, but insistent, on my chest. When i opened my eyes, she lifted her head from my throat to regard me; her long body crossed double on the chest, the balance pooled in my belly, filling the space between ribcage and hip-bone, tail wrapped around one knee.
It crossed my mind that i had only seen them outside of the water once before, deep, deep in the earth; even then, they had soon struck out for the dark ocean. I wondered, muzzily, how to slip out from underneath without disturbing her. She did not move, but seemed to grow heavier; heavy enough to push me into the earth.
- texture:halfsleep
There was a little book an artist has made: a beautiful set of illustrations simply called "bird." It was long and narrow and black, with hard covers; few had been made, and it took half a year to receive them.
With my closest friends, we had ordered eight copies, and when they finally arrived, i went to pick them up. While the merchant loaded me with the books and the little bags (only five of those), i realized: i had no idea whom any of them belonged to. All of these friends had stopped speaking to me, months before: all of their faces were gone, all methods of contact winked out. The eight little books lay in my arms like concrete.
One girl walked up just then, beautiful in her black coat, kissed my cheek, and said she'd see me in January. I had known her for so long, spent so many days with her, and now she was a stranger, and happy that way. She casually shopped around me while i awkwardly juggled the bundle, and pulled out the books she and her twin had ordered: i made sure to give them a matched set. She accepted it with a smile, and, transaction concluded, walked away, sure and clicking in her heeled boots.
Six left, then. Five, excepting my own. Five strangers to find, whom once, i had never imagined being separated from; five strangers who were once the bones of my own hand.
I was concerned that my voice had changed in the past year: become deeper or rougher, or otherwise altered in a way that might point to a medical condition, so i asked G about it.
It's not that it's changed: it's that i've stopped using the "polite" tone. The one that makes me seem harmless, normal, feminine. The tone i use to talk to strangers, to talk in class; that one answers the phone with at work, high and clear and sweet. My real voice troubles people; it makes them reassess me as a threat (to their assumptions, their persons, their status quo), it makes them stop if they want to listen, and it's one more thing that wastes time when you're trying to get something accomplished. The real voice - the one at the bottom of the range, the one that growls and thrums and does not carry - has been buried and hidden.
There are always going to be times when it's simply the most expedient thing to do, yes, to be polite, but it seems that more and more often, my give-a-fuck-o-meter is vibrating in the red.
There is something to be said about why it is that beautiful things - things that should bring joy, or desire, or the pure peace of knowing that they've been made - make me sob like the world's been broken in half, and why painful things - even that emotional pain - seems to make the world right again, or at least bring it back into balance.
I think it's because beautiful things uncover the wound. The space in the chest that is between the world-that-is and the world-that-should-be; not necessarily more perfect, or magical, but where.... more is possible. It's easy to become immured to it, or driven crazy by it, or to pretend it isn't there; i think most people end up doing that, and sealing it over, in a rough way. There's nothing wrong with that at all; sometimes you just have to fucking heal and get on with it. Or maybe you never really perceived it in the first place, and there's no good reason on the green and savage earth to change that if that's so.
The intimate knowledge of that difference, though, is powerful; it's a source and a material, but it has no nature except pain, and it's so easily corrupted. Or, more simply, poorly processed, wasted, unused. The wound is a space between opposing forces.
It is an engine.
So i just realized that the real, bottom-of-the-chest reason that i haven't started working with my lathe yet is that i'm terrified of the damn thing.
I'm afraid of doing something wrong, and either injuring myself or breaking something vital on the lathe itself. I'm afraid that i don't have the right tools yet (i do.) or that they're not sharp enough. (they are.) I'm afraid that i won't be very good at it, and it will have all been a wasted exercise.
So fuck that, then.
Tonight, i'll review my books and get everything prepared, and tomorrow, i'll drag the thing out to the back porch and get to work. If any of those thing happen, well. Blood for knowledge.
Too many people, i think, can only conceive of change in terms of loss.
Sometimes, things can be different and better, not just different and worse.
The white hand, floating in the grey water.
The fingers were still slim, untasted; so few things lived in the pond, surrounded as it was by bare rock, and so cold in its depths. The arm was pushed by wind, trailing rope and gauzy sleeve; the unmarred white bodice, the swelling neck, and her face: bloating, but flesh intact.
The man chuckled to himself as he pulled her to shore, wetting his black knees. "Oh, she's still fine; very fine." His cuffs and shoes both trail in the water. "She'll do well." Her fingers curl.
She stands like a sleeper awakening; touching her hair, still upswept, and asking softly what had happened. She sees the back of her hand, pale and flabby, and leans; she sees her own drowned face in the water.
She begins to scream, and run. Down the road, a passing farmer recoils from her; the magician's horse shivers in its traces when she passes, and the old woman, whom she has known all her life, throws stones. One of the giants that till the land spots her over a hill, and she prays he will crush her.
Finally, she runs back to the pond. Her magician still stands on the shore. She screams and shakes him. "How could you do this to me! I used to be beautiful: now everyone is afraid of me!" He expected her to be grateful for her new life, to accompany him; instead, she breaks down in tears. She is already losing control of her facial muscles, and the sobs emerge half-formed, echoing in her frozen mouth.
Even from the deepest part of the pond, her fingers buried in its rocky bottom, he can still hear, faintly, her final scream, before her lungs fill with water again.
Who needs a copy? It's yours free for the shipping.
IT IS DONE.
Thirty days after Cuomo signs it, is it done: same-sex marriage is legal in New York State.
I have crash space is you need to come down (or up) and get hitched; it doesn't seem that we have a residency requirement, for either party or the officiant.
It was so worth getting up at the crack of dawn and literally running across town to get to Albany. It was worth the sunstroke and the yelling and the waving a big blue foam hand like a damned idiot and the calls and the calls and the emails and.
Thank you for remembering that we are human. Tomorrow, i'll be furious that it had to be voted on. Tonight, it's simply beautiful.
COME ON DOWN TO THE STREET FAIR
- sound:Mc Frontalot: I Love Fags
What on the green and savage earth am I doing? There's still room on the free buses if you can make it to 42nd by 8:40.
More from the road, one supposes.
For some godforsaken reason, my mother decided that what she really needed out of life was an ice cream maker. One trip to Costco later, we now have one.
You know what this means, don't you?
SEA SALT ICE CREAM. That is correct.
oh my god i need popsicle molds [/nerd]
The lathe, some basic tools, and a few pieces of wood to screw up have all finally been ordered. I am terribly excited, and can't wait to make a mess of things. My initial goal is to make properly scaled bun feet and legs for dolly furniture, and we'll see where it goes from there. Everyone gets an exotic-hardwood pepper mill for the holidays, clearly.
Mom's home; she didn't need a stent, after all, so that's good, but it also means there's no improvement for her right now, which is a shame, but not unexpected.
At least teh heat's just now broken, not without the high drama of a thunderstorm dropping the temperature about ten degrees in ten minutes. It's rather amusing to watch the neighbors shriek and scurry for cover as soon as there's a crack of thunder, i have to say, though. I promise that you will be fine, human, even if a drop of rain should somehow manage to contact your august person.
Drawing class was a bit of a disaster today, finally; i blame mass distraction and tiredness. I would also blame the fire drill that sent us all to stand around outside in the hottest part of the afternoon, but i had already failed in a few spectacular ways by then, alas. At least there's all weekend to make up for it.
So many thing i want to do with the rest of the evening, but the flesh is weak. I've been getting headaches and episodes of low blood pressure pretty reliably around the end of the day for the last couple of weeks, and sporadically ever since i had that slightly scary low-pressure event a couple of months ago. Blood sugar is okay, and i'm asymptomatic otherwise and, if anything, healthier than i've been in years. Puzzling.
- texture:quick grey clouds.
So the semester is finally over, and i passed the damned math final this time. Yey. Not without needing a second go at it, but my teacher was very kind and gave those of us who had just missed the mark a review day and another chance, which was good, because i only fell over on a stupid mistake which i had never actually done before. The point being: i get to move on to big-kid math next semester. Hooray.
Rest of the classes went well, assuming that the paper i inadvertently turned in late is accepted. :x Hopefully by this time next year, i'll have stopped stressing and have just bloody well gotten on with it, because i'm tired of obsessing over every little detail with school. Swim, little duckling.
Currently, i am thinking about nothing more strenuous than Dragon Age and how to go about setting up a nano aquarium (using
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
windsinger's excellent guide here), and, to that end, getting ready to wander out to what is apparently my local fish store to see what they have on offer; hopefully, they're nice and maintain their stock well, and are not either hobbyjerks or ignorant. It will be awfully nice to sit around for a couple of days, do some sewing, and maybe even look at my dolls for more than a minute jesus.
nezumitoo is sending Direction home sometime this week with a gorgeous faceup/tattoo job, and i expect my Seorin back from Kayke - hmm, probably before the end of June. On the making front: no, i haven't ordered the lathe yet (soon, while they still have cheap shipping!), but everything else is assembled for furniture making. The hardest bit was, of all things, sourcing the thin foam and batting (actually, it's quite easy to find, if only you want a 100-yard roll of it), but all sorted by now.
Oh, and the sculptures. These are not quite done yet (the skull needs to dry out for a month and then go into the kiln, and the plaster bust needs repair work thanks to my nooblet moldmaking), so all there are are cellphone pics, but here's a couple anyway. The full set is here.
The bust also seems HGUE next to the original because i'd just had it soaking in water for a few hours. It is somewhat oversized, though.
Screw it. I'm spending my birthday money, which i have yet to freakin' touch out of a combination of guilt (birthday money at my age?) and indecision on a goddamned lathe.
I've wanted to turn wood ever since i was a wee creature, but lathes are wildly expensive and take no little amount of skill and practice to even begin to use, but i found one that's both small and not too spendy. Of course, i'll probably end up spending all my money on cheap wood, only to destroy it, but it's rather better than pining (oh god) after the very idea for another handful of years.
I have a plan in place to try to get some more things out of the house; hopefully we'll soon have the basement back, so i can have my soap workspace again and G can have a spot that's not the den (and enough room for his papasan), and if we can get enough things out of the dining room, then that's a place for me to sew and draw. And maybe even take doll photos again, perish the thought.
Finals? Not thinking about them. :x Two classes are sewn up: no problem. Math is a perpetual worry, but i might actually be okay this time as long as i get enough practice in these final days. The writing class: ugh. I have no paper-writing mojo whatsoever, and have started and chucked things at least three times in the last two weeks. I -like- the book. She is -not- asking for much. What is the deal there?
Speaking of: class in a few hours.
There had been an Event, and all the humans were gone.
The only things left were a few of the buildings (the one i was in was part a rambling museum, part concert hall, with a tall series of small apartments at one end. It was made mainly of concrete, and had few windows, though some of the galleries had thick skylights. I knew it was night, at least.), some rudimentary communications, and - the dolls.
At first, it was hard to tell that they were not human, and harder to tell that they were not just as intelligent, a fitting replacement; they would have been,m except that they still acted from a short menu of directives that they did when their owners were still extant. Slowly, they were breaking free of these: learning how to repair and use one another, learning how to pool their processing power - but it was still very early days yet. The humans had not been gone long enough.
I climbed the stairs of the apartment building. The hallways tended to be dark, lit only by the lights of the open doors (the dolls had no real need for illumination or security), and i walked into a few of the apartments: in one, a woman was pushed reluctantly into performing a burlesque show (quite literally: she was pushed into a hole leading to the stage that automatically changed her into a costume and stage makeup, and once on stage, she clicked into a routine.)
In another, two women soaked in a whirlpool tub and talked to me, smiling welcome. I disrobed and stepped into the tub, glad for the opportunity to bathe (though surprised to find the water lukewarm), but after a few more minutes of conversation, the women started to ignore me in order to kiss. I rose to rinse off and leave, but inadvertently took too long (the tub would not drain, the shower needed coaxing to work) and they put on their robes, waiting for me to leave, bored and seemingly annoyed. I picked my way past their crowded front room and dressed in the hallway, ashamed.
Some of the dolls had been destroyed in the event, too; not just most of the living world. Blocky, featureless ghosts in dark, solid colors walked up and down the halls, trying to execute their scripts: they stopped passerby to ask about the location of such and such a person (often human, sometimes doll) and seemed lost in their own worlds. The one that spoke to me (male, and a dark solid green, with broad pixellated shoulders) asked if i knew when his master would be returning, and fashioned a mustaches on its blank face out of its own substance, asking if i thought she would find it funny when she came back.
Generally, you simply agreed with the ghosts, and spoke comforting words; there was little anyone could do for them.
There were some dolls who were erased by the event, but their bodies were undamaged. These were carefully posed in tableau in the hallways: standing or sitting, with their symbols and favorite objects displayed, they stared into nothing under the lights. The other dolls seemed to hold them in a kind of awe, and were very respectful, straightening their clothes endlessly as they passed, dusting their motionless hands. It seemed beyond their programming, that these other dolls could exist and not exist; that they sat there, solid, some of them blinking and warm, but their scripts could be acted out only in the memory of the operational ones.
I made my way down the stairs. Dolls bustled back and forth on their business; the galleries had the atmosphere of a mall. Many rushed to an impromptu concert: when i looked in briefly, there were two copies of the star on the stage. A surviving human and his replica? Two dolls, downed by fans? I suspected the former, as they did not act in perfect sync, as the same-model dolls tended to do, and was amazed by the idea of another survivor.
Eventually - after i had been there hours or weeks - the dolls started to filter outside. The world was impossibly green and lush; it seemed that the event had destroyed anything that had a heartbeat years ago, and the green world had subsumed almost everything since then. I found the night's silence, beyond the tramp of feet, to be overwhelming, but the dolls didn't seem to notice.
They were all headed for - a strange sort of stone, half-buried in the ground. Was it the source of the event? One of its byproducts? Even as it was - apparently dropped from space - it was still as tall or taller than the Empire State building, and easily ten times as wide, with a second spire half as tall as the first. It had a dark and crystalline surface, seemingly under tension, and the dolls gathered around it at a respectful distance. There were a few, however, in flowing, theatrical robes who seemed to play priests, standing near it on small hills, and a few more gathered in its shadow.
Somehow, i knew that every construct in the world knew what was going on here, through the communications that were left to them, and headed to this plain, their minds pooling together as they ran to venerate the stone. They began a chanting, all these thousands, and a transparent skin began to form on the stone. It solidified and rose, a perfect cast, but empty and clear, hovering in the air. It was the ghost of the thing, its spirit-form, a representation of what it had brought to the world, to the humans and their dolls: emptiness.
They named it Zero Zero, and everywhere, the dolls lit their torches, ready to set it aflame.
The room of Gigas, again. Its is still dark, still unused, but near the entrance (the book Gigas, with its mechanical frame, is at the far end of the room, beyond several high arches)there is something new: sheaves upon sheaves of papers and old, battered journals, shoved into cubbyholes or stacked on one of two desks which now stand, nearly buried, among the makeshift shelves. It is hard to tell if they are the writings of one person, or several: collected over twenty years or two hundred, but they are all notes, observations, of one kind or another. The nearest one, wedged under the door and stopping it from opening further, reads:
"Nature always needs negotiations. Each power is living, and calls itself its own possession. In the city, the magic is nearly free: all you have to do is prove your purpose. If your will is stronger, your outcome better for the city, the energy rises up out of the stone."
The book stands open, as it always seems to, but this time, the page has been turned:
There is a delicate, beautiful painting on one side, of half a dozen people: each sits at their own desk or table, in separate rooms, each in an attitude of silent despair, gazing out their respective windows. Even though some of them should be able to see the others, none of them seem to connect to one another: all are lost in thought.
On the opposite page, in a blocky hand, is the demon Seldom:
"Lord of lost opportunities, god of missed connections. His hands are covered in tiny spines, each with its own hook: to catch and pull and draw out exquisite longing, to tear the threads of potential and time. His seeming is that of a balding man, heavy, his shirt sweat-stained; his slightly drunken jocularity always turning, at last, to needles and ice."
Even in this deep and buried room, lost within the blue towers, there is a window, though also close to the door. Passing by it, i finally notice an absence of sound, elsewhere everpresent; there is no susurrus of feathers.
I stop to open the window. Nothing. Silence. The sound of lichen and moss.
The Powers don't know about this room, this Gigas. Or, if they do, they choose to turn their faces away.
