hello sinister. i moved this past weekend. i've always hated cleaning and packing everything away into boxes and bags, zipping and taping and sweeping and throwing out, being forced to decide what's worth keeping and what isn't. i put all the tasks off to the very last minute, giving myself about a day and a half to compress everything i own into four big boxes and about eight bags of varying sizes. i got boozed when i was done on a bit too much wine, and then i started thinking. saturday morning dawned bright and sunny, which was a welcome relief after the rain of friday. my parents and sister came down to lincoln, and as they carried my things outside, i listened to the sound of my life as i had known it pick up and leave. i sat in the middle of the floor in my then empty room, and looked up and around. i remembered everything that had happened there, in between those four walls. i wondered how it had all happened, and i started to feel lost. and out of it all, an entire year in a place, one boy remained in the paint, stuck in the cracks between the wooden floorboards. one boy was breathing along with me, and i thought for the first time that i loved him, and that the moon on his shoulder may as well have been a parrot. *** i questioned, for the next few days, and probably still, when, exactly, memories gain weight. and once they do, once they have been assigned a place and number of importance, when do they fall in the rankings? do they? and what happens when you fall in love with a memory? what happens when the weight and significance of something increase merely because it is beautiful for that single memory to be beautiful? these things trouble me, and i don't think i have any of the easy answers. i wrote in a poem that is as yet unfinished that i am fond of questions without answers. and perhaps i am. but my fondnesses always get me into another hole, somewhere, and each one is getting progressively deeper. *** i drove to omaha last night, wearing a brownie girl scout blouse and the pink chucks for a bright eyes show. it was to be the first time i saw them, and i was nervous, chewing gum to calm my nerves and thinking that everything would be ok. i would be ok, listening to my favorite band. i didn't have to talk to people who might or might not be there. it wasn't like i hadn't seen him before the after part. i had. i went to the show alone. i had never done that before, shown up at a venue sans little crowd of support. it was a night of firsts, apparently, but when i got there, i saw some kids i knew. and they hugged me, gave me high fives, liked my shoes and my hair and my glasses. perhaps they liked me. they let me stand with them, at any rate. the friend i had called in desparation showed up, and i stood with him, and he told me everything would be ok. and it was great. the show. and then. conor sang a song to pass the time. and i remembered an afternoon in my old apartment, a chair, the sun filtering through the blinds, running like water across the floor and spilling over my feet and the ball of yarn tucked between them. i remembered the rainbow-colored coasters i made for another boy i had kissed before and after waiting for another to come home. keeping my fingers busy. passing the time. and then, the boy was there. that one. he parked himself in front of me and had an animated conversation with a kid i didn't know. but the boy waved his hands through the air, and i watched conor through the crook of his arm until i noticed that the hand waving in front of my eyes was wearing something of mine, still. the bracelets of mine that i had looped together and put on his wrist the night i met him. we had been standing in the middle of my old room, and i gave them to him. he smiled, and kissed me, and then we danced. we danced, that night, with no music, just his soft counting and loose movements. and so it was decided i would wait, and he would remember every moment every day, when he looked at his hands. i danced last night during loose leaves. and during a song to pass the time, i gulped air, trying to supress vomit and tears and everything else that said i should take his hand again and break the fingers with my broken own. 'come spend the night, we can jump on my bed. you can unwrap me like a birthday present, i will, i will be easy.' *** i am in love with something, again, and perhaps it is not a boy, after all, but an idea and a song, notes written and sung. and so i have moved, and am left reeling in attempts to find something pretty in the movement, a grasp among displaced boxes of shifted yesterdays. i wish someone would teach me how to differentiate between real memories and imagined ones. i wish someone would teach me how to write. i wish someone would teach me how to sing. i wish someone would i wish someone could and so she tapes the picture up again on the stand beside her bed, and turns, waiting for her head to stop splitting in two. love, lou xxx _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. 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