Sinister: but i think love should come with madness

[lindsey baker]

hello sinister.

this post has been a few days in the making, and is now in its second, much
expanded, draft as my computer lost the first post i wrote an hour ago.

it began as what was going to be a bitter diatribe echoing stacey dahling's
anti-sentiments on sinister crushing (again), with a dabbling of my own
anti-sentiments on real, live crushing with touching and giggling and the
whole damn shebang thrown in for free.

but then, i slept a night, and woke up to a thick gray nebraska mist, the
kind that fills your mouth with the taste of fog whether you want it to or
not. the kind that makes my hair wilty and me sad. and i thought maybe
bitterness wasn't best, and maybe i'd fill the lines between my words with
the heavy, damp sorrow that ushers in winter and frames the sky between dead
tree branches.

the birds had started to fly out, finally, that day, and their formations
were sloppy. instead of strict, militant v's, they were loose, convex
curves, pushing against the wind. you could see how hard they were working,
wings waving up and down with a dogged determination to get out.

then i slept again, and woke again, and thought maybe i wouldn't post at
all.

when bad things happen, i think we think we must escape, by overanalyizing
or overapologizing or wishing for something that could have been or never
will be, by rationalizing things that are and were with estimations of
impossibilities, by adopting apathy as a substitute for choice or courage,
and sleeping to wait out the mandatory wait for whatever is to come next.

we pick whatever escape fits the time and is least rocky for our lagged
running feet, and head out and never get off. i guess we hope for a fork or
a branch to take us somewhere lese, and when we realize the runaway path is
a straight shot, it's too late to turn around.

so today, i am posting with no real idea (even now, after writing it once)
of what the post is to be or will be, but only with the intention of getting
out of my escape early, so i can get back to whatever misty area i was lost
in before i started running.

the list has talked much lately of love and lack of love and banes of love
and the thing that seems to encompass all of those, also known as sinister
crushing. and i think i have thrown in my two cents both officially in a
past post and to other people here, but now i am to throw out again
observances thanks to recent, unfortunate enlightenment.

there is a problem with democratic loving. there is a problem with casting
votes for the bestest boy or girl. there is a problem with timing and
anonymity, rushing to get the vote to your beloved before someone else does.
and so there is a problem with my utopia, as though through the casting of
choice some of the equal people become more equal than others.

i have, in my sinister day, officially cast one sinister crush vote to one
narrow wizard, upon his return to the sinister fold. his brilliant inclusion
of william carlos williams at the end of his post earned him a coveted miss
lou crush vote. (david, take notes) and stating this to the whole of
sinister does not embarass me, nor should it owen, for he is lovely and i
meant it merely as a welcoming and complimentary gesture. to make his day,
like a few fresh flowers or an unexpected mix-tape really -- i didn't get
out the halloween wedding dress, give it a good shake and start choosing
cake toppers.
(though, now, upon reflection, i am blushing a bit and would delete if i
hadn't already typed that. oops.)

yes, owen is lovely.

so. i thought maybe crushing wasn't so bad, and thought i would perhaps,
very carefully, dip my toes in the pool a little more, a little longer, and
i readied to do the deed again. 

but. for more. than just. a figurative mix-tape.

and so i told some people about it, and eventually told the object of
affections, as i supposed i should anyway. 

the vote was never cast.
 
and the fog settled over everything the next day.

the people said he was a bastard, that i was better. they said all the
things people are supposed to say, and they finished it all out by telling
me to do the one thing i do best, the one thing everyone always knew i'd do
in the end: write. they told me to write phrases with ends of arrows, and
once the arrows struck, i was to twist both clockwise and counterclockwise
to blissfully emphasize the full scope of pain inflicted.

because he is a bastard. they said.

i have complained about not being more popular on sinister, or #sinister,
for that matter. but now. i think. i am. perhaps. more popular. than i.
thought. because now there is gossip, and my name in conjuction with a boy's
name. traded for rumors. and i can't stop that, i guess, by obligingly being
public. and i also can't stop the true fact that in the end, i guess the boy
and i are only friends.

love, i said to someone today, is a disease. and i feel i can say this,
being a person with a qualified, medically proven, full-fledged disease. and
love. well. love exacerbates my symptoms, and i fall more often and get
tired more easily. love infects me more than the degeneration of my nerve
coating, and i have fallen today.

the bruises ring my legs from the waist down, and kneeling no longer feels
like salvation.

in utopia, girls shouldn't fight over boys, and the pairings off should be
untainted and final. everyone should get their first choice. but instead, we
get soft around the edges here, rotten. 

none of them are bastards, really, though when one sits on my floor and
tells me i am so wonderful he had to go sleep with another girl to prove it
to us both, i question that. but. they're all fucked up, girls, and so are
we. we all get scared, standing on the edge of some great uncharted
precipice, looking down over the terrible edge into this swirling black mass
our parents like to call the real world but we know as purgatory. and we all
want a hand to hold onto as we step off to fall, but we don't need one -- if
we needed any more than our own two hands, we would have been given them at
birth.

he is not a bastard. i said. i say.

but we are not in a world comprised of one body of water and pangea. we are,
instead, separated and cloistered, huddled together for warmth and touch and
something else we will never find. and we are divided externally by oceans
and internally by floods of saltwater that breaks through tearduct dams only
when love is caught and actualized. when isolation is complete and
indestructible.

and so is love and the world and the way.

and so utopia falls with me, in my hands, and we are only i, and i am alone
after all.

lindsey 

*we are verses out of rhythm, couplets out of rhyme, in syncopated time*





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