tout ce qui est petit est mignon.

i woke (if i can loosely term what i did prior to rising, in fact, sleeping) at 3a on the foldout bed on the island with this intense urge to scrub everything. it could be pinto bean's cat hair on the antique furniture or the flowers on the dining room table (i love when a woman has flowers on her dining room table and you just know a man turned up with them after returning home from the grocery store) or it could be the housekeeper that comes here and never cleans but just sorta spies and snoops on me, always showing up on days she is not supposed to, early in the morning, when i am either hungover or still drunk and have house guests half-dressed in party clothes, half-dressed in sleeping clothes, lying around on the couches or all of us flopped in the same enormous bed. or maybe it is the fact that my brain just refuses to quit operating spacially, having ripped my mother's walk-in closet apart (which was my childhood bedroom when i was very small)

and scrubbed and painted it apricot while she recovered from oral surgery and drank the homemade milkshakes i made her. or maybe it is my own little house, which i have also pulled apart, changing it's miniature world into something very clean and stream line, something very 60s southern california boho with antique oak and lots of orange. my own little home is making me terribly happy right now, so i suppose i wanted to make this place make me happy too.

so now it is 630a and i do not feel like sleeping too much because my dreams have become this exhausting and perpetual fantasy, where my psyche keeps me baited just enough so i will not leave, and makes me run into people i try honestly to avoid in the waking world. i am sure my subconscious mind knows more than i do, being run by my ego and massive sensitivity and all, but wow. on sunday morning i woke at 6a to my telephone ringing from nyc and i woke from a dream, which kept in its tiny bubble a space where i could talk to an old friend, someone i have not been able to speak to since he died too many years ago. and he had a scar on his eye and he did not remember dying, but he had wanted to talk to me since he first saw me there too, and i knew we were not in the same place. he understood that too. we were standing in front of a pinball machine and i told him i had been in love with him since i was 14 and he died when i was 19. i asked if he thought his handwriting was the same, because i still have pages and pages of his poems and letters. and he said probably not. he said he is probably very different now. and i said i probably was too. and i did not have the letter or poems there anyway, they are still here, tucked away on the bookshelves in my bedroom.

it would be cruel to say that i have never been so moved. but this dream (compounded with the one of the night before where tidal wave after wave i kept floating atop, and also having such an epic valentine's day, so epic it spanned from thursday to monday) gave me chills. talking and crying and writing and thinking are such separate plays for the body and riding the motorcycle to the temple on sunday morning felt closer to God than anything i can imagine ever could.

and truth, the temple is like disney land on sunday, some jerk even parked his yacht on the dock, and, wallking off his boat, leaving his sinatra blaring for all of us to hear, he said, "i know i blocked your view but feel free to sit on the deck." us common folk. what a dick. only location stopped me from pummeling him but it did not stop me from running my mouth at him. so we left and went to waterfront park instead and hiked through the woods with all the motorcycle garb on us and i kept imagining how i would be ready for any kind of zombie attack (i never told ian this because the moment was very nice, but on monday i strapped an old picnic basket to me danish utility bicycle

and we tell stories when we talk and ride and he always laughs at me and says my mind works wonders-- he also calls me a vindictive little girl, which i find cute because its all stories about people that live in the houses on bayshore and the islands that we ride by).

dreams never end.

lately whenever i go to bed, lately in this little house, when it is in the early ams and i try to fall asleep, and there is a ghost tapping and talking beside me until all hours of the morning, lately when i try to fall asleep the world begins to feel like an abrupt end. the world feels like it is disrupted like something drastic has happened behind me and i cannot turn around far enough to see. i never turn around. never. the other night i am walking on the driveway of my grandmother’s old house, the one with the red front door and the maze of oak trees and azaleas, and there is a chubby-cheeked boy on a red tricycle that looks identical to my little brother. he is pedaling faster and faster, just like Nick would, the two wheels of the back tumble over the front and the face identical to my little brother’s shatters on the concrete. I wake, though i was not fully asleep to dream, I wake to tell the ghost, and it never felt like it ended. the room was still the room, the outer scope of the world of the dream. the peach trees still scratch the skylights and sound like crawling fingers up the walls. lately i dont sleep at all.

i lay on the floor and read gregory corso poems and i type poems on my typewriter that i would never let anyone see. i think of corso’s long hair and my friend’s long hair, the last time i saw him, and how sad it made me. i imagine the sea-shapes of the world around me, the fruit trees and the aging faces of the few people i love and i know that my life has consisted, intricately and deliberately, only of these things. no matter what land lines and connections i try to match point by point, no matter the energy and electricity i think i feel between the pages of people my own age, it is never, in the end, the true parts of my life. most people do not become my ghosts. and being here is like being a dead man on the sea and seeing an island behind me, as a place i once used to lay my head, barren with people i could not get too close to. and maybe that is just how the world works— we are just a layered space of time and energy, just ghosts for centuries passing through one another, with only those few idle moments where we stop long enough to feel the breath on our necks.

a few weeks ago when i was still on the island i had a sad dream about my long-haired friend. we were in this terribly old, ornate hotel— a place where my dreams usually like to go. sometimes to masked parties in the courtyard where the women wear gauzy white gowns and float between the maze of hedges and sometimes in the rooms that are sad and shaky. in this dream my long-haired friend was on the bed and he was not the person he is but the person i always thought he seemed to be. it was bright and the windows were bare and we left and we walked and talked and it felt like i always thought it could feel, in my subconscious imagination, it felt like i pretended it felt in real life for years. we went to my little house and walked into the bright little jewel case, and my brother was standing there and he showed me this way to turn my house into a shadow. suddenly the grey gaze of the world settled on the air of the room and everything looked made of dust, including my friend. standing in this house of shadow, with him shifting into a shadow himself, and then just shrugging softly and disappearing into the walls.

i rode my bike for a while this morning. i went out alone along with ambling cypress and the white light of the sun and i closed my eyes and suddenly and finally felt okay with being a loner and that living as a shadow for a while is the only way to get out and get away from the things you have to leave. and really, for me, ive never thought about how happy i used to be, but instead, and always, about how happy i am going to be. i know my past and i find it dull because of my absolute relation to it and i feel burdened when my emotions outlive my logic and my immediate world becomes this fragile, sinking thing and there is only enough left to carry on my back and keep moving. it never turns out that i make the same decisions someone else would make or that ive followed in the footsteps of anything. lately, most all these old lines have been lost or cut away and just like the two most significant points in my life so far, ive had to walk out of the room alone.