Chaos is nothing compared to blankness, silence, enormous silence. This is the real-er half of life; you walk through the camera frames of your day terrified that a stray laugh or a pair of friends strolling in step will shatter you completely. There are many, many sets of strong arms holding me up; I don't know, anymore, if my knees can stand under my own weight. And yet, I am weightless. And yet, I am tired. There have been too many goodbyes in this run-on sentence and I fear I am only on the first page of 2008.

As I always have I want she who is the chaotic, reckless, disastrous half of me. So tell me, where is disaster when you need it

On Safewalk duty tonight. The Pirates have a big game that's playing on virtually every TV set on campus, the bruises on my elbows/butt from Seven Springs Expedition #2 are satisfyingly sore and I'm still wondering, where are you Kim? Spring Semester '08 has started with two huge gaps in my consciousness, one permanent, one - ?

Where are you, Kim? This is bizarre.

Some small articles of 'liveliness' give the illusion of life when its antithesis has long left its mark.

Multiple literacies afforded by the Net, handphones, the entire virtual sub-universes they conjure - they play a part in this painfully convincing trick. I have in my possession keys, one set to an immaculate Downtown apartment and one to a carefully maintained wagon; passwords, one to a cruelly familiar Facebook account, one to an email inbox full of "Welcome to Spring Semester of Sophomore Year!" and "Miscellaneous Matters of Spring '08 Semester" which seem to mock me, sting the proverbial wound. What does one do with this evidence of lived life in the event of its passing? We are told not to perform our grief by affixing it on an external being. What of internalizing it? I have a mad, irrational urge to become he whom I have lost. I wrestled with my few functioning logical faculties today to prevent myself from replying to "Re: Waitlist for Sophomore Economics".

Unconnectedly - Kim, where are you? 

Unconnectedly, sleeping in Shaun's lounging sweater that smells like Double Apple/Melon Mint and Bala's lucky left sock helps me visit Grovovia in my dreams. Often enough to know that you all are not keeping up with the shisha/trippiness in a fashion that duly honors me. That, and that Bert is still stealing cookies from the cookie jar past his suppertime. 

Unconnectedly, Diego Marchi says In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. I'm curious if he is anything to say on the count that all four of these converge in a single occurence.

Connectedly to Article 1, Kim, where are you?

25 hours and 12 minutes, since.

We all say we know what pain feels like, but we don't. Until we do.

We are empty; we are full. Of plans and hopes stopped in a plastic breathing tube.

And we wait. 

 

Rest & Recuperation 101

I went to the place of origin, where it all began. It paid dividends of the most provoking kind.

Now I see, Purple Violets must be the dried flowers that were an overrun from the plain greenery and occasional lily or daisy that graced the windowsill. Redundancy, this is not. Purple is defined as any color in the space between red and blue, whereas violet is a spectral color with its own wavelength. Have you ever thought about the science of color? I suppose there could really be a science of anything.

Perhaps this is the only way, that delivering leftover emotions/words can preserve the very essence of that halfway carelessness, hidden piercing precision and always startling nonchalance that is She. I don't think you meant the film roll to be accompanied by its real life namesake, of your doing. Naturally. On the way home I bought violets. They are on my windowsill. And for good measure, I made a loop, a free loop, and deposited a matching cluster. 

Today, I found an old friend.

Do you know the power of that line? I lay claim to this particular conformation of words, because those were my hands on the typewriter, I punched in a line that I left to be finished, an echo through years, indefinite, open-ended. Kudos to find an emulation of what I meant in a sea of cinematography, encapsulated in a medium far more eloquent than mine. Panache, as always.

"Today, I met an old friend. Finding implies a loss of some sort. I suppose I could begin this story by detailing the many, myriad losses she and I had and have inflicted on each other and then, in the inescapable boomeranging of fate, what it had inflicted upon us by all the new friends we had made since we became unfamiliar and infinitely more alluring to each other. Such detailing," et cetera.

You are, so much more than a friend.

You are; so much time we spent.

You are, so much that you send shivers up my spine.

There is no shame in acknowledging dysfunctionality, open-endedness. It is how we are built.

Bert, you recharge. Trippy Trooper #3. We split convoys tonight! Spread the damage. Mini plus Kwok-mobile plus Cayenne (this is me caving, you savor it while it lasts). Pseudo bangkok balcony trips will get better, but what of taking it indoors to the Bert Den? You & Shaun need to innovate. New levels, I say. 

xx, xx.

Concurrent concussion -

YOUR DISCO LOVES YOU, enough to keep a private baseline pumping in our heads through the daylight hours;

I think we are building a nice little crescendo, because in the incoherence that follows the new year, there is never such a thing as too much x)

We cham it up, break it down, take it home (i.e. Bert's), smoke it up, and ride that wave all night 

and, repeat.

Who's counting the days til this technicolor trip's over?

It's afternoon, let the recoup of losses - in consciousness, sensibility, brain cells - begin. 

The only question is, do we Butter it up tonight, or smooth it down on some Velvet? 

Only because being fabulous, reckless, shameless & irresponsible is the birthright of being the young&wild,

We make no apologies, let the prosaic folks talk.

Of flying off balconies and synchronized trips;

Bert & Shaun and the rest of my Trippy Troopers, the question is, are you ready to lock & load?

xxx