i fell asleep & didn't like it.
i feel a little wiped-out. i talked to my parents again on the phone, told them what happened with cousin nancy, told my mother not to read the little friend until it is summer, for all its sweltering. "but then it will warm me back up!" she said. (i can't do that, can't split my shivering january skin from my sweltering novelling mississippi-summer brain.)
i know that when jeff comes over, i will lean on him, because today i am frail & tired, & it is a safe bet he is not. i hate that i will do this. i don't want to lean. i want to be the person i was at the soir�e last year: very up & well-dressed, glass in casual hand, knowing all the right words, taking the occasional drag from someone's cigarette, quoting poems, frying yuca for an audience. red shirt, sleeves rolled-up. silver shoes, buckled, zipped. sighing loudly. loving it. wanting to pull everyone to me for a kiss.
i miss detached, aesthetic-only kissing. he is right, i fall in love every day, i am always wanting to kiss strangers & then keep walking, go home & curl up by myself in bed. (yesterday on the bus, this girl who looked like she might have been john cusack's girlfriend in any number of fifteen-years-ago films, down to the eyeliner & the little rip in the jeans, the colored tights you could see peeking through, the shy smile she gave the whole bus of people as she climbed on.)
none of this is what i wanted to say. i wanted to say how at work today l_____ & i were holed up in the spec room together. she told me she dreamt we went to the state fair together, went on a bungee-related ride which broke & sent us hurtling into space. so that we landed on the moon, stayed on the moon a long while, "just us on the moon, watching television with aliens. they were a weird color."
i said, "we should go to the fair with oxygen tanks & ride all the rides, try to go to the moon."
she said, "yeah. we should."
