Katy's blog

In Lenders in the Temple Conor goes, "Hello, patterns in my mind now moving slow," and I always just plummet my sorry soul into this ridiculous trail of yes we are all connected, yes these mosaics are beautiful and ruinous and I wonder why we aren't still trapped in them. Later, too: "Smoothing out the edges of the stone," and that is it, that, my dear friends, that is my life and my world and everything and nothing that I've been trying to communicate for forever and for two weeks. We like the edges.

I suppose there are all these spaces and pauses where we, in whatever misplaced mindsets we were lying, never imagined we would end up. Maybe this is one of those. Or at least along those same lines, at least pulling itself, holding itself up in much the same manner and in much the same atmosphere. This boy e-mailed me a link to a newly-announced set of shows for my favourite artist. I think, well perhaps I really do know, that people find their way into our lives and then... and then nothing.

As it's past 12 in the potent east, yesterday was the country's birthday and today is my birthday. I've been given so many pieces of the world and I've had them all taken away; I imagine it's a lesson? Do yourself a lovely little favour and walk down to Battery Park listening to Von and wearing boots. No one by your side. This is getting ridiculous, has been ridiculous. Trying to grow and know and love yourself through someone else's eyes, and this boy with the arms....

Octobers in Cologne. I think if allowed we would spend the rest of our foolish lives drinking vodka in a theatre, cinema -- front row at an orchestra showing with the brights and the lights and the brass of the sound pulling at our knees. We murmured again and again that church music was the best. That it was the most spectacular, the most radiant lattice of hums and hymns that made us roll our lonely heads forward, weep and sigh and hold our touched souls tightly in with folded arms and folded eyes.

And so why do we mend, why do we repair and renew and re-stitch every thread tugged a little here, a little there, a little bit in the direction of that town in which the boy with the grand blue eyes promised he would never stay? And so he left and returned, yes returned -- because don't we always have a lovely lot of chains binding us to some certain ground? Binding us to a particular moment in a nostalgia-wrought year; the same year we stopped eating or fell in love with people we know so well do not exist. Or watched a film in Spanish and understood it all, my God.

I don't know what any of this is. I don't know why the North is so great, why being a Nordic child makes me wrap scarves around my skull. Makes me run through fields and drive downtown, sit on Church Street and drink coffee and pretend I know everyone passing by. This is the most beautiful thing; I mean I think I've truly, finally realised it all. Not all, but some. I am okay. I'm listening to Yo La Tengo, holding pretty, fragile things and hearts in my palm: taking care of myself (better care of myself), staying away from that brick hell of a building that is the Academy.

This is tomorrow and next year and we can be yesterday; we can all be yesterday and anteayer, can be the ticks and tricks on your uncle's clock and cry about the moments we've all lost. Did you map out the next step? Draw it out, ink it, streak it and, God, there are too many things that aren't permanent and even tragically more that are. Your wrists, my God, your wrists and arms and that is all, that is all I have to say. We trip and sit and slit our throats and pasts and lights -- our tomorrows strolling backwards.

i. And I can't quite understand why we don't have all these millions of flawless, uncracked words to describe when we miss something. I mean of course we have nostalgia. And we have homesickness, too. Except you only use that when you're stuck in Germany, hands clasped over your eyes and eyes darting urgently after those firebursts you can never place or pause or see, exactly. Even then it seems strained. Even then it all seems so strained and strict and trite and tired.

So we stopped speaking in metaphors: stopped pretending to be these cryptic phantoms without roots or chains or pretty bindings to hold us, keep us. New songs by artists who are nostalgia in its purest form-- saudade, a word we cannot, will not translate and will repeat inside our chapsticked lips and polished, rearranged teeth until you feel the need to say it as well. We are manipulative beings. Beautiful, intelligent people who are really fools and really scared that the stage after transparency does not exist.

i. I've lost it, lost this brilliant, adamant, terrified traction that used to teach me how to do things. Used to understand when I couldn't. All these strings, marionette-marvels and oracle-lives that kept me tragically linked to the sides of buildings I couldn't write well about. Kept me strung out at French-Canadian festivals with the names and faces that are running away in August. The eighth month of the year. Lose and learn and leave: life's lovely lesson. I heard thinking, speaking, lying in threes is very Zen-esque.

I think I've learned a valuable life lesson in the past week, yes I do believe I've learned some things and unlearned others. I think what it is, I think what has happened is that I've realised, or pretended that I've realised, that my life is boring and that that is okay. Also I'm beginning to understand there are a million trillion other beautiful souls/people/faces/names in my lonely, not-so-lonely, little life. People who care less than I do and care more than I do and are more misplaced, more grounded, people who hate the things I love and love the things I hate.

And someday I want to live way the hell up in the mountains, overlooking a city and overlooking the lives of people I don't know or understand. But I'll live in the mountains. Green ones or white ones or blue ones, it doesn't matter, really, only matters that it will be a tiny little bit harder to breathe; and I'll feel distant and strong and weak. All at the same time. I think maybe you are tired of feeling weak. Tired of acting weak. I am not.

Except that hate and love are essentially the same emotion, essentially the same sentiment, and you looked absurd sitting on that shoreline on your own, all alone with Radiohead and with your thoughts pouring into oceanwater. Mixing. Churning and fusing and muddling up and you claimed "now I am the sea" and we all laughed; God, I'm sorry how we laughed.

i. I'll fall in love with you if I meet you. Really, I will. Just hold my bitter dry hands or look into my goddamn eyes and I'm nearly certain I will marry you there, here, in a riverbed or some sultry desert sand or in your backyard, I suppose, as long we can hide below a charismatic blank picket fence and tell stories and tell futures. I'll grow to despise you, though, I'm sure.

All these hallowed spaces and places that you've lost your direction in, lost the streets whose signs steered you to coastlines and basin-dips, Dresden and Mesa (always those two and you still cannot tell me why)--if nothing is sacred then so shall everything be, too. Beautiful boy, life in your eyes and eyes on the next door photo-fields, hands on the rear of a truck whose tire treads have seen more sights and more backgrounds than you: I'm taken with so many minstrels but you know you looked glorious sketching, tracing, tracking every line and crooked break in the sky.

Currently dying from a cold. If destruction is a form of creation, if all these flashlight-thoughts and pollen groves are just a scenic view of it all, an introduction to a past I am trapped in that does not belong to me, but yet still, yes, one that will let me ride half-heartedly into the future, then I am doing well in this lovely screw-up of a development process. I'm doing well staying relatively conscious and getting A's in things I do not understand.

"Cassadaga, oh yeah; that's where you're gonna find the center of energy, and they've got those in Arizona, too."

Dear Vermont,

And some days it is crazy that everyone has no clue where exactly the sun goes when it goes “down,” when the sky bleeds dark and we hit the lights and cook our dinners. We accept our clocks and watch them blink and blind and shake their necks and let them coax us all to sleep. To the place that they cannot explain and I don’t think I’d like them to, either. Some days the air is so thick with ice that we must stay inside and focus on the braids in our hair and the specks of gold in our eyes—our Icelandic poems sung sweetly to mirror glass and crenellated ribs.

i. So if we’re not the ocean then we can be the soil, right? We can be the little things, pollen crumbs and late August sunshine shards and the thank you, come again in the smoothie shop in the southwest metropolis you’ve never known or seen. We wouldn’t want to be the ocean, anyhow. Much too great of a responsibility—and we can’t even clean our bedrooms or our mindsets or our veins.

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.