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Notes: 1 / 2 months ago
part 1.
The frailty of a whisper; of a cigarette. Funny how both can kill you. So he whispered and he smoked, filling the air with decadent poison and forming the same poisonous words on his lips. They were children of the night; insomnia had seeped through their veins better than any amphetamine. Their vision blurred to grey around the edges and a strange loss over what constitutes day and night had conquered them. She was caught in the twilight of her overactive mind and tired eyes, so together they fought off complacency, capitalism, and commitment. Society had set them adrift and they had gladly spat in her eye. What nine to fivers accepted as reality they were content to fight tooth and nail. They bent it with chemicals, lost it with music, and now they could battle it better than ever in each other. They thoroughly enjoyed their lack of functionality and happily estranged themselves from all things functional. He fancied himself a victim of the modern world; she began to hate his nervous laugh and the way he was too polite to take off her clothes. She sat in the dimming grey light and drained the storm in her teacup; the tea could liken itself to her in its bitterness. He had achieved nothing, if not for that. It was borne of the extremities of passion, of their love glutting itself. Now they were simply refugees of it. She adored and admired him with all her broken art; she wanted to consume him, breathe him in, feel his thoughts, share his breath. She wanted his soul in a jar, but it was jarred already - owned by his self-absorption and ideologies. He kept it like a wine collector, with the same purist’s streak; his great unforgettable witticisms like the splash of cheap red wine on her favorite blouse.
“Don’t waste a gulp of air on saying my name,” or, “The world is best seen through eyes rolling back in your head.” Each touch of nihilism stung like the smoke of his Gauloises in her eyes. Each word she punched in angrily at her typewriter, trying desperately, almost vacantly, to make art out of decay, out of hopelessness. But her romanticism would not allow it. Her romanticism would not allow him. No longer could she abide his blackened sleepless eyes, his hollow cheeks, how his hot breath was forever sweet with excess of wine and his lips reddened with it. His mind was as stained as his nicotine-yellow fingers, ones that crept up her thigh. He grew untouchable but ever polite, always asking before he tried, always fearing her reproach. Always self-contained, delicately asking her why she lacked a revolutionary spirit. The coherency possessed in her mind fell flat and stuck to the roof of her mouth; thoughts laced themselves around her molars. She tried to force the intellectual (the Marxist theories) and the accusatory (“I don’t see you fighting in the streets.”) past her lips. They couldn’t survive in the haze of smoke and the flinty poignancy of his eyes. So she stammers and stutters and draws haphazard circles around her speech, flapping a hand emphatically as if swatting away the terror of being mocked. He laughs and gives her a kiss. She watches him step over the scattered debris of their secluded lives, the dirty clothes, the wrappers, the empty boxes of cereal, the filth they are entrenched in.
“I’m going out,” she tells him, teeth still gritted, prison bars for her real thoughts.
“But it’s raining,” he replies, eyes narrowed. She crosses to the slim window, so like a prison window, and looks down; sideways rain pelts the muted grey world, forming quasi-lakes in the crooked street below.
She releases a breath, glances over at him, and says, “I’ll brave it.” He blanches.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” he asks.
“No need,” she answers shortly; she finds her purple raincoat, made of the same cheap vinyl that they sell in sex shops, and owns no practical shoes; this is a part of her creed. She steals his Docs and pulls up her hood; systematically rifles in her pockets for some spare bills. He collapses into the couch and watches her.
“I’ll watch a film,” he sighs, flicking ash around rudely. She has always hated that. She stands in the doorway in her ridiculous purple raincoat and boots that dwarf her feet, falling so knowingly for the bait.
“What film?” she asks, and feigns indifference.
“Die Hard,” he tells her. She fights and loses against a smile, the crushing irony of his lowbrow choice. Then feels suddenly awkward and clumsy in her coat and his boots, so that the door cracks shut behind her. The pavement - the city block encased in monochrome - the rain blurring everything around the edges - all provide some sort of stark relief. Relief from his presence; the great relief of anonymity in a place full of strangers. He was strange to her but no stranger; he had memorized her movements, her mannerisms, her lovemaking, and it killed a small part of her that was yearning to retain some mystery. But her heart was too generous, her soul too romantic, her body too ready made to wilt if not given affection. It wilted yet, wilted under the under the slithering drops of rain that escaped past her raincoat and slid down the top of her head. It wilted under the weight of all these heady words, all his heavy expectations.
She was clumsy as she sullenly tromped through puddles in his boots - clumsiness reflected in her clamor to leave, her clamor for words. She scarcely dared breathe it love, refer to that label, as she crossed the street buried in an abyss of contemplation. Love was what other people did, what they put on Hallmark cards. What they shared she daren’t call any one name; and his sense of cynicism was pleased that she did not demand he use these trite declarations. Citygoers hurried towards their destinations with newspapers and umbrellas held tremblingly overhead. Rain and ink gushed off in furious rivulets as the downpour raged on. She paid it no mind, little girl in a sex-shop coat and lesbian boots. The thought provoked a bitter snort of amusement from her.
She turned and entered the High Street. The perversity of this foreign world; a screaming riot of color and advertisement tempting her with things she could not afford. Even half-abandoned in the midst of a storm, the expensively dressed mannequins seemed to stare her down, glaring through the storefront windows. She felt ever-cheaper, ever more grubby and unworthy; her body wilted ever more under her clothes. She had increasingly taken on resemblance to a floral arrangement; she felt pallid and closed in on herself, frail and fraying on the edges. A knockabout in a whirlwind. She felt certain she must be taking on some floral properties; they took in carbon dioxide, after all, and she breathed in quantities of deadly chemicals from his stupid fucking French cigarettes. The similarities ended there. She sighed and took and good look around, forced now to spend the money in her pockets. She had little desire to, but now he’d be expecting it and would want her to come home with curry or fresh fruit or a book, or anything else he would devour entirely and exclude her from. At least she might get half of an apple. The very thought pushed her mind dizzyingly into the late green summer countryside, far from the cruel, stark greys of the surrounding city. But her boots - his boots - anchored her to the sidewalk. He anchored and docked her in this glimmering, writhing metropolis.
The city was little more than a cancerous growth, a grievous weight on her shoulders - the same, he said, was true of the bourgeoisie. “Springing off the shoulders of the proletariat,” he exclaimed, “like the greedy parasitic fuckers they are.” She only wondered about the identity of the parasite; was it truly the upper echelon? Was it the walled up suffocation of the city? Or was it, perhaps, something else entirely? But she glimpsed his light infused gaze, overbright with passion, his elbows, knees, fingers, interlocking joints, mechanical body parts, please press ENTER, and was desperately enamored. She craved the pervading moisture that made their bodies slick with perspiration, with sticky wetness; it was quite unlike the chilly, fresh raindrops that she flicked off of her hood at present. Rain seemed clean ad these thoughts filthy; but she yearned for filth. Something in her demeanor craved it, the disgusting stickiness of two human bodies in the most animalistic of states. She despised his words but suddenly, crushingly, desired such perverse physicality. Coins jingled in her vinyl raincoat as an altogether different, warm moistness overtook the frigid external one. At this,she turned on her heel and traipsed back up the block.
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2 months ago
part 2.
It is a dangerous thing, to love somebody. The intricacies do boggle the mind and quicken the pulse, complexities which make minds and eyes and hearts ache. She had forever played the romantic; even romantic tragedy had given her volumes of Shakespearean flair to entertain. Her rose-tinted blinders had provided her with the wide-eyed optimism of an innocent; the ability to find the darling in the grotesque. Foreign, rainy cities were the most darling of all. They were poetry to her, or at least they sounded and felt and tasted like poetry when they left her lips. They conjured images of cobblestones and canals and bridges and cafes where bohemians played. Waffle stands on streetcorners, or gelati and wine, or fish and chips, depending on her fancy. This fanciful nature could not be quelled or quieted; she imagined staving artists and poets and leftist revolutionaries who’d fight in the streets for what they believed in. And so romance to her was opium, was wine, was crack, speed, cocaine, and ecstacy, was absinthe and blackjack and sticking a toothbrush down her throat. Romance was the most morbid addiction one might ever suffer; its peril far more insiduous than childhood fairytales would have one assume.
Their love had grown parasitic, essential; lost sight of who played the host and who played the parasite. So she did what she did best; carried on, rosy spectacles intact. Carried on despite the absurdity that marred their very existence. And the city, too, did what it did best – it rained. It was not merely the weather, but the city itself, brick and concrete, conspiring against them. Everything conspired against them, he said – ambition was an insult spat in the faces of the working class, a knife to the throat which tried only to excuse the capitalist crusade. Thus, he too excused himself from this phantom called ambition. He was pleased to keep them impovershed, pleased to shout he would never become one of them. “They who use the propaganda of ambition to justify their greed!”
Her spectacles were fissuring and cracking under such weight. It was the weight of his heavy intellectualism, his insistence upon the responsibilities of the left and his belief he was excused from the rest. His hypocrisy had as good as shackled her; he fought the good fight for the working class when he hadn’t worked a day in his life. Rain bled out the gutters and he bled her dry; turned the pavement into looking glass as her eyes turned glassy. The romanticism was soon knocked flat from her; she had been emptied of her earlier notions, and the more he read to her from his poetry books, the more the poetry was savaged from her soul. She was weary, scraped clean, and bone dry – the same heavy emptiness as the unwed mother feels in the clinic. As she stared blankly into space, the thought settled firmly and took root; aborted was just the word for it. The very notion spoke volumes on all she had lost, surrendered to him with her white flag aloft.
The dregs of her cold coffee floated limply under her dulled eyes; she watched its murky ugliness for several quiet moments. She vaguely contemplated drinking it, but she couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t choke and gag and spit, drenching herself in it; it was this very same reason which kept her from forming any words. Yet again, he had stonewalled her, locked her articulation steadfast in her head and tossed the keys. She would only choke and gag on her words as she would on the repugnant coffee, only stumble in her inferiority. He would undoubtedly laugh it off and give her a verbal parallel to a pat on the head. Her only feeble response would be a hospital bed weak smile, turned up on the corners. He would find it charming and docile; she would recognize the wicked, serrated edges in it. It was a wicked sharpness she yearned for so desperately that she clenched a white knuckled fist in her pocket. He received her smile, and would soon ask politely if he could have her. Always politely, no matter what. He had a strange tendency to be polite when it was least called for, when the only romance or magic left in the world lay in their utter filth. It was not making love, not sex – just pure squalor in its physical incarnation; utter savagery. The beads of sweat forming in the shallows of his collarbone, the light straining in his feral eyes; it was human in a way she scarcely ever saw in him. The language of their twisted, yellowing bedcovers was the only honesty she felt they had truly exchanged. And perhaps within this odd kind of honesty, if only she kept trying, she’d discern something worth knowing.
He was forever clouded in his obscurity; the obscurity of his likings, of his odd detachment, of their very existence in their heaping wreck of a flat. The fact was, the only way she had learned to fight the obscure was with the obscene. So obscenity left her lips; it was the only articulation she could muster. Fanciful notions once again overtook her – slitheringly dark, frighteningly beautiful notions. She entertained notions of diving headfirst, like a perfect Olympic swimmer, into the concrete that waited stories below. She would be wearing a twenties style slip, so that when she came sailing out the window she really would go a-sailing. It would be an almost graceful arch through the still night air. She would be a victim of the modern world and its cruel machinery, with all her lace and poetry smashed to pieces on the pavement like her bones. The notion of tragic suicide seemed to lighten to leaden weight in her stomach; it contained her only salvation, her only hope for the vestiges of the romantic. He could no longer offer it to her. He had made her nauseatingly aware of this, hammering it into her with his Marxist dialogue and his brutal lovemaking. The passion welled up inside her veins like drugs – hardened it into hatred. Her blood had seemed to froth into cyanide, filling her to the marrow with poison. The poison he spewed daily and the poison he blew into her face with his nicotine. But no longer.
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3 months ago
from the sick minds of screenwriters,
BLANCHE: So, what do you two do for spare cash, then?MARC: Not a whole lot, really.KARL: I volunteered to be a sperm donor once. That was a strange experience.BLANCHE: What happened?KARL: Well, I went in to this cold doctor's office, wanked in a cup, and that was that.BLANCHE: Don't you make a lot of money off that?MARC: No, but he got a sticker and a lollipop. -
Notes: 1 / 3 months ago
elise.
This is the first excerpt of a short story in the making. Still rough around the edges.
Elise was an inquisitive child - a fanciful and strange creature. One could say she was not unlike a grubby Alice in a cold sort of Wonderland. She was prone not to incandescent loveliness, as in storybooks, but to the definite air of an urchin. She was bony, ratty-haired child that was shy to the touch. What we excuse in boys we do not find as charming in our girls; she was not a rosy little sylph, surely poised to grow into a “beautiful young woman,” as grandmothers clucked and twittered. Instead she was a small, chestnut-eyed ruffian with sharp elbows and knees and dirty fingernails. But children hardly care for this talk, and she was no exception. Little Elise was a starry-eyed thing, forever dreaming of dangerous and thrilling adventures full of all manner of talking beasts, monsters, kings and queens. She grew obsessed with the mysteries of Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster, ghost haunting. She fancied herself a miniature mystery-solver; an occultist detective who had to put quite the effort into reaching the musty shelves in the library where the right books were to be found. She could be envied terribly for her freedom, for there is no greater prison than that of the mind. Elise cared not a whit for the trappings of femininity; the constant effort to look and behave in a pleasing manner. Her mother grew apoplectic with rage, for the little scamp managed to duck under her arms and avoid a hairbrush in the way a stubborn dog avoids a bath. It seems unfathomable as an adult, the complete uncensored carelessness small Elise had, fearing not dirt nor monsters nor broken bones. It was all about pretend dinosaur fossil digs, inventing elaborate worlds in the backyard, pretending there were creatures in the pond and monsters in the shallow ditches her dog would dig to keep cool in the summer. The perplexed canine would watch her suspiciously over his incriminating dirt-caked nose, and Elise would save him again and again from the perilous presence that lurked beneath them. As the child grew, the fantasy changed, but the imagination needed never waned. She was naturally reserved and born absentminded, fiddling with her tiny hands in classrooms and gazing glassy-eyed out the frosted glass windows of her old elementary school. It was a nearly-crumbling, wartime building, haunted by the era’s austerity. On solemn autumn days, when gusts of wind rattled at the imposing oak doorway, there was an almost audible screech of air-raid sirens and the sound of hundreds of little feet dashing for cover. Elise knew nothing of the great world wars; she and her playground friends were busy slinking into blocked off corridors and questioning the ghost of a young boy who had perhaps fallen down the basement stairs. It touches upon morbidity to an adult’s mind, but to children it was a vast and grandiose mystery – a great intrigue. They were so unafraid, so fragile and yet never less in need of protection. It is odd, how adults forever feel the need to protect the young. Children are the hardiest, bravest creatures – the quickest to bounce back. Emotionally they are able to risk anything, without grave fear of being injured forever – physically too, they believe everything immortal, including themselves, so when a goldfish or distant great aunt meets an end, they fail to grasp its gravity. Each bump and scrape and bruise may cause brief tears, but are soon followed by a kind of honorable pride. Every scratch is worn like a badge. “Look what I’ve got!” one says to the other with uncurbed enthusiasm. It was in this grand search for adventure that Elise found herself with more scrapes and bruises than she could ever hope to show off.
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Notes: 33 / 6 months ago from unrequitedloves (originally from iamblessed)"He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and we were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger… He’s always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."-
Wuthering Heights (via iamblessed)
(via acrossthelines)
(via betweenthestars) (via unrequitedloves)
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6 months ago
a bit of wasted romance.
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Notes: 88 / 7 months ago from audreyhepburncomplex (originally from movieoftheweek)
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Notes: 1 / 7 months ago
We believed in anarchy. Not the anarchy of politics, of punk, of overthrowing governments.No, our apathy reaches too far for that. Anarchy of the soul, chaos of the spirit. We parade the sidewalks stalking after the Korova Milk Bar. We rattle our keys with our hands, we rattle our lungs with our cigarettes. We roam the university-lite subterranean world with hungry eyes and starving mouths, feeling chemical residue leak down the back of our throats. Tasting the night before; we played charades and you were a mean vacuum. You sucked it clean and I pulled the plug. Electrical shocks made our bodies quiver and our blackening lungs whispered to us. The words were too faint to recall as the sun came up up up and beat us all down. We drink to the death of chivalry, we snort away the semblance of dignity. We giggle & moan & throw fists in the name of hedonism, nihilism, machismo, thrill. We are equal-opportunist fuckers, fighters - flailing with discontent. Rot our livers, rip our hearts into confetti, darkly-circled eyes and bumps and scrapes. Red noses and torn-up throats and cracked lips.
The only things that hold us down are wet spots on the bed, aching Sunday mornings, broken bottles to the head, pulsating nosebleeds, two pink strips on that ominous stick. This is anthemic. This is anarchy. Let’s fuck the system, fuck that girl, fuck ourselves. Fuck brain cells that we can no longer afford to lose.
Let’s just FUCK! -
7 months ago
Dylan howls against the still air, the deep and beautiful sadness of his soul splashed across a million records, old and new. Notebooks are spread across my crisp almost-white bedcovers. The music envelops me in a cocoon; stories of life on the lonely plains and strange characters stumbling along the tracks. It makes me feel like a very small child, gathering around a campfire for a tale to hear. When it’s over, my soul will be churning and my mind restless. This album is the same. It makes me feel perfectly broken and breathlessly alive.
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Notes: 1 / 7 months ago
DECEMBER 14 2008.
I’ve been consorting with vanity for far too long; my doubles and my singularity fade behind leopard-print shoes and shiny lip gloss. I consort, too, with frail beauty, thoughts renewed, concepts lost & found, and for once I have hope that life might edge towards that precipice. I scarcely dare to breathe it, for hopes are the most dangerous things in the world, more dangerous than the sharp edges of your smile and real ultraviolence in the spirit of Alex DeLarge. But I can only hope with all my heart now. If only that was enough, my dearest. We crave and yearn for the simple, lovely details; a bookshelf full of yellow-paged novels, vanilla ice cream with a fat red cherry on top, secondhand dresses, 7” vinyl covered in dust, a soft mattress, endlessly flowing coffee, endlessly flowing love. How these things need to be cradled and protected from the rest of the harsh world, held tight to our chests and tucked under our arms like the breakable things that they are. It’s an uncertain world that I’m about to eject myself into, forcibly yet voluntarily thrown into the blinding lights of the real world, out of the warm cocoon of my parent’s home. I am desperately, nerve-prickingly ready, but I am frightened. I sit heavy-lidded and aching under the blankets, listening to ancient Regina Spektor albums and eating rice pudding out of a styrofoam cup. It is as if I’m eligible for membership in some teenage girls’ lonely hearts club. Maybe I can run the meetings.
Speak: xswitchbladexposse@hotmail.com
Christina Potamousis
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