Katy's blog

2 years and 4 days on this site, and in 2 years and 4 days I am taller and my hair is longer. I think this boy in my Spanish class, yes his eyes may be more blue now too but who is keeping tabs, really... besides myself.

Because still there are traces of you in On the Ground--that one record always spinning, dizzying this marvelous circus-piano-hand mindset into the lashes of that boy's dark eyes. You told me he sang lullabies to his own perfect ears to put himself to sleep, and you were entirely, wholly enthralled, in love with the idea of it. So was I.

And I’ve had that same conversation so many eternal times, well yes I know the words I know the words I know the words and the way they taste and feel and hurt and last and trip off the ends of tongues and lips and land to listen, sit to stay and return and pretend—we’re all so glassy and finished and pretend. Artificial universes and holes and niches for us to spend our hazy days, overcast Seattle in the autumn earthceiling crying on its people but they don’t notice and they do not care.

You must speak beautifully—always. We are seduced so easily, so fluidly and eagerly, by pretty words. Not really the lengthy statements, the stylish syllables wrought to wound our memoirs and our psyches, but the pretty ones. You understand, you do.

Well my skin is broken and my watches are melting again, of course, and you looked beautiful today with your thoughts untucked and your eyes combed bright. You know that thing they say, you do know, how certain objects/places/people come straight out of a book, the novels with the injured spines--well they say that and I'm not particularly sure who they are, but I agree with them. I picture all your pretty particles and atoms, the little crumbs and grains and blue across your wrists, collecting together to make this holographic image that maybe is true, maybe is not.

We’re all so very talented at misplacing time, at melting clocks and listening to the numbers click-click-clicking away, away. Watching our gentle, kind and weak Augenblicken evaporate as day-moon glow behind and underneath and in between the Cascades' nooks and crests. People once lived there, I assure you. Painted berry streaks to decorate their placid faces and brighten all their pinched and hollow cheeks.

Just had this brilliant cold chill, shaking, trembling alone in my bedroom on this lovely almost-Friday when I will not go to school tomorrow because I do not have school. Yes. I will go to Hartford instead and eat at Panera Bread and listen to Seabear and Damien Rice and Ben Folds for hours and hours and hours and hours in the car and are we all quite lost and misplaced and misguided yet?

you were happy in the summer but
you smiled in the winter, too, with icicle
nose-drips--the ones you see
lynched up, draping, swathing the dull-coloured
house mosaics darting neatly
in the streets above the tracks;
trimming, decking all the home-fedoras
built to keep out rain and snow,
yes, snow, and to hold in
freckled grins and C+ quizzes
and
you?:

and all the best musicians are from
Iceland where you're sure
the icicles are hung as well,
suspended prettily and rattling in beat
to sheet music-voices
in the harbour
in the sea, the same that licks the

I do not know who you wrote those cartas for
and I think it doesn't matter
right?--I think there's a bloody lot
that doesn't matter
but even so I sipped on the anonymity
that laced the letters' bodies, the secret
stolen notes you hid among the
corpses of words we all used to speak

(not corpses though
since they are alive
so alive and breathing even when you
pressed your palms atop their chests and
you whispered I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
and they reminded you of
augustnights and aprilmornings
when you couldn't sleep)

we all used to etch them in hopes

Well that's because I stuffed the pill bottles in my pillowcases. Scripture engraved on them, not for the Bible but certainly not for me either. I read it. It was not in Spanish. I read it in Spanish until the perforations in my skull were filled and sealed in whatever Scottsdale-sunburns you claimed were so intoxicating. Come here.

Have you ever noticed how small they build their scopes? You have the most lovely heartbeat and arms and neck of all these humans, I guarantee. I studied them and you. Mostly you. Then things were so achingly free and melodic. We were permanently high, crimson-rimmed eyes and deep, dark pupils to take it all in--everything, everything blended into this crumpled world we revered and held on to with bleeding fingertips, with happy hands and swollen souls.

Did you ever see the counterfeit summers: the faux ones dressed and dolled up in fits of toothy, serrated edges and lips of coastlines, the bright-eyed ones with wicker basket-bikes on boulevard sun-sleepings, sultry breaks in the air around to show what is ocean-breath and what is landlocked? I do not think they exist.

in the smallest, thinnest pages
of the journalmemoirchronicle wrote his hand
in desperate curves and
lurches of finger-tilts
the reeling ink of
songs he heard, songs he knew:
stanzalyrics crooned by throats
of pretty persons and their
wounded wants which wind their way
to supple speakers on that
daunting day

(said he)
we all worry,
panic for the moment,
minute and instant when
the world decides we are
too heavy and too restless
to hold and hug and own,
and it will caress our braids
and stroke our damaged wrists,
apologise for all our hurt

So when did you lose yourself, exactly? I don’t remember this. I don’t even know what it means to be wholly lost. I think you only wished for someone to find you. And they looked, oh they looked in every beautiful, broken bruise, in every postcard you scrawled, every footstep and fingertip outline and every word you spoke, every lie you sighed and every truth you choked. I’m not sure what they discovered. They found your scars, after all, your Polaroids and frailties and unraveled, threadbare jeans with the storylines and acid holes.

I've missed you guys and your words.

I just have this big heart and nothing to fill it with. That’s what makes me feel so empty: knowing that I have all these gaps and this room and hollow space. Knowing that I can love but that I don’t.

I don't want to contemplate all these cryptic lessons that perhaps I'm supposed to learn, perhaps I'm supposed to disregard. Perhaps they have no purpose in the end, especially if when the conclusion finally appears all elusive, even with such finality and certainty, if I just sit here and watch Donnie Darko again and again and cry and hope to God that every living creature does not die alone.

I don’t know. I guess it’s strange because when I read it months ago people were all: you will cry; you have to cry, and so I read it and I did not cry and I sort of thought that meant I didn’t or couldn’t feel. At least not in the same way. And then I read it again and I still did not cry but I felt weird, different and maybe that was something. I wrote down quotes in my notebook and I clutched it to my chest and hid it and it had other writings, too, because I write and for the most part people know that. Probably I understand them now. Probably I can feel now.

It's this weird thing I do, like sometimes I sit here and know that I'm really, truly meant to just lie on my burgundy rug and listen to Andrew McMahon and that--that may quite possibly be the most humbling, most honest center of the universe. And I'll close my eyes and open them and close them again and again, and soon I'm too dizzy to stand straight, but when I collect my senses back into my palm once more, like flowers, and think it through I realise I'm not standing, no, I'm only soaking up the earth faster than you can stop me.

Do you understand that while you spin
around your room, your arms tucked tightly
in to your sides
as you slice harrowing crescent moon paths
into the pastel green carpeting,
that as your pulse climbs higher and higher
and soon its ascent is more noble, a feat to
break, break like
we wish to break everything else,
that as your head braids itself into
cylindrical musings and messes of dizzy fatigue
the world maintains its speed
and its pace
and you are still spinning
alone in your bedroom
with no influence and no purpose but to
panic all your sober thoughts and become

Humans are all frauds. We choke out contradictory, nonsensical ramblings that sound pretty because we crafted them for hours in our minds, foundation after foundation of letter and noise that maybe we mean, maybe we do not, maybe we think that is what the person seated next to us wants to hear. Maybe that is all that matters. This is no less significant than the pretension we pseudo-revel in, humming that shooting star just changed my life and the forest is unbelievably peaceful out of obligation, out of habit.

Look at them pulling at
the branches as
if they were their own,
tugging at the
bloodied October leaves,
strumming on tree trunks and
wringing, pinching compositions out
of riverbeds
with their piano hands—

still they left sheet music
tousled and matted in the soil,
suffocated in too many
displaced Fridays
in a forest room,
crazed and bright-eyed
but not unwise
with paisley-printed stockings
and singeing, charring words.

The language barrier between themselves
and the earth had secret,
sacred gaps to slip through
silently, senselessly,

I guess this is my warning. I thought when I stopped eating this spring that was it, but nah, too flashy. I was just confusing myself and everyone. But this, it's not as neon or obvious as I imagined; some things require a little intuition. I have none, but I do have eyes and a heart and mostly they both work; one is blurred and the other is delusional and I'll let you figure the rest out.

I tried to braid you into my life and my world, but I abandoned all attempts when it got too complicated, when I lost track of which thread was meant to go which way, linking up and down in a chaos that I could not handle. I couldn't manage this, so I took heartshots of ordered everything to sing and singe an image, a belief into my mind that I had power, that I had control.

Little crimson hearts in a little
broken Indian ocean,
happy mosaic accents faked
by artificial minds too scared
to be normal,
too scared
to be a speck of dust and death
and humanity on
an earth that spins
too fast
at times,
too accurately
twenty-four;
number number slumber remember
december?--
puts pen to paper
and others put paper
to flame.

I can never give you what you need because I can’t even do that for myself. My body’s always aching from calcium, iron, protein deficiencies, my head buzzing from the three cups of coffee I drank, the four hours of sleep I got last night, the cotton sweaters hiding a crenellated ribcage. When did you start asking so many questions? Why did I stop having answers? I can’t eat animals just like I can’t eat people. My mind rewinds, replays in 90s sitcoms, thoughts riddled out in rhymes and in Holden Caulfield, in Jeannette Walls’s grown-up childhood. Artificial, make-believe? I think not.

except this is the point
in the song when
your head gets light
and your heart gets
heavy,
leaden, laden,
happy hopeless boy
whose obsidian eyes act like
burned-out constellations,
concentration?

hear his lunatic voice,
see his lunatic hands,
passionate fingers that spit ink
and tap as
beat-keeping dress shoes
against the wooden table.

his knuckles rising up,
down, breathing air
or breathing verses
as I imagine they might,
as I imagine the world respires
in music.

You planned to say a plane ticket to Vancouver would be nice, when I was out west and I wore cotton sweaters and all of that mattered. Also I got drunk on lattes every evening to stir my thoughts and to help me fall asleep; you laughed and said absurd and I scoffed and knew you well.

Scottsdale might as well have been on Mars and your handwriting might as well have been in Greek. I researched train routes and then took the metro, but only to get downtown. I had no postage stamps so I didn't bother writing back--you thought that meant I didn't care.

Nothing has changed. The floors are bright-eyed and waxed, and I do not feel the same. I have changed? Sorry I'm not Thoreau, sorry I don't realise these things before my shoulders become too weighed-down for my liking, before my feet drag like the cigarette smoke curling from your pink lips. I knew your mind before I met your face, loved your voice before I heard you speak.

Don't you miss me too?

I will always believe black and white mean more, saturated and flooded with connotation instead of with colour, instead of flashing lurid in a glimmering mess we sometimes call vibrancy. I will always speak in yesterdays, even though the great philosophers of ages I’ve heard only rumors of tell me otherwise, tell me if I keep looking back, dwelling on days already lived, it will hurt my eyes, hurt my heart. And isn’t there enough of that as it is?

wringing out his rain-torn clothes
in a cataract that
tumbles down like curtains
even when the sun that only lives
in southwest pockets
shines blindly,

edging frame-esque in its
egoism to leave its mark,
a fraying,
burning blotch
in the corner of your eye--

he spoke loudly to forget the
absence of summer
even when it sits
so plainly,
derisive in its tone of
'the backdrop looks better
streaked in thunder,
slit with wind.'

he lied and told me
that in phoenix you blister,
fragile and brittle in
the august air,
that he doesn't miss it,
but he never says home and
I never ask why.