I don't usually do things like this,

... but this time, I will. Here are my reasons for it:

1. I love Avy's blog, and I've followed it for years, both out of loyalty and out of sheer curiosity and fascination. Reading about her life is like watching a gritty yet beautiful film, like stepping into a world that in no way mirrors your own, yet somehow you feel as if you've always been a part of it. She's a beautiful writer and has the ability to make reality look like a shade of gray that you've never seen before.

2. It's freezing cold, and I have no substantial jacket. There is no indoor heat here. My hands are chapped.

3. I'm sitting here in a fairly lonesome room at 4 in the afternoon (one of the worst times of day, if you ask me), it's a gloomy day, and I know exactly how it feels to uncover an object you had forgotten about for a long time. An object with which there is such a powerful memory attached that you want to both simultaneously burn it immediately and also keep it close to you for just a little while longer.

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A very, very long time ago, I wrote a post about how much I loved thrift stores. They are havens for unknown secrets, reservoirs of stories waiting to be discovered or imagined.
There's a sort of thrill that can be derived from owning something that once meant a lot to someone else.

I want to own this part of Avy's story, to wear it, to guard it, to use it for solace and warmth from the other side of the world on days like today when it's cold and rainy and optimism levels are running on empty. Maybe this is just yet another way that we can connect with people, to be there for strangers that we love.

After all, isn't that why we blog to begin with?

chapitre deux

I can't put a finger on the feel of this yet, but I know it will be different.

Different good, different bad? Maybe different in that I am calmer and I feel more a part my skin, and my thoughts are reins in my hands. 

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;	25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Maybe there will be enough time, though if there is, it's wrapped in discrete packaging and buried at the bottom of my lost luggage. 

Emails to write and resumes to tweak and errands to run and the drudgery of academia to attend to, and now and again, I wonder what exactly Prufrock was talking about and when I'll stop using indecipherable foreign films as means of escapism.

Gray skies are blankets over my eyes.

âme sœur

Ah, monsieur parfait. But if only it were that way,
I wouldn't have to try to get used to staring from an overhead ledge
Or trying to make year-old velcro stick on wet sandals.

Peas and potatoes, salt and garlic, spoon and knife, peanut butter and marmalade,
and now and again, the sun in the sky is a little too bright,
and the jeans on our bodies are a little too tight.
But no matter,

forks are only needed for three-course meals
— you'd never have that anyways
and sometimes, marmalade really does taste better.

We'll wear our jeans until we grow out of them and wait for rain to
to clear disguise     to drown out lies      douse the skies.

Le moulin.

Grins as polished as the linoleum on the floor, sweaters purchased by mothers as Christmas presents, they eat dinner promptly at six in the evening.

What have you to gripe about, you animals, prancing across grounds with shiny feet, rolling dice on clean tables? Is perfection, to you, not so perfect?

White, sheltered suburbia sings you songs of home. My ears bleed.

I tread lightly, silently, through mowed lawns, through waxed cars, through hardwood houses, careful not to leave footprints in the folds of your brain, to track dirt in the foyer.

The winter wind doesn’t stay in trees for too long.

Round pegs, square holes.

I’m coated in dust, and you have no vacant rooms.

Withdrawals.

I try not to dwell on it.
Choking back melancholy painfully on marble stairs, your echoing footsteps to sing of that ache, beating unexpectedly, knocking the wind from my chest. I wasn't supposed to be vulnerable. Neither were you. You weren't supposed to see.

"Come here..."

Gripping arms promise nothing, but hope — tentatively, of course — for more. Or so I'd like to think.

My subconscious runs its fingers through your hair guiltily late at night when I sleep.
It knows it shouldn't. I can do nothing about it.

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Was I like the young girl from Sadec, the bus that took me up the mountain like the boat that took her down the Mekong River for the last time,
her tears as startling to her as mine were to me?

The universality of human experience, of human emotion. For many things, there are no separations of time or space.


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Are we bound, then, to the roads we are able to tread?

Are we bound to find love where we walk? bound to extract life's darkest, most profound secrets from only the few people we are able to meet, the few places we are able to go? bound to find meaning amid the confines of circumstance?

Yes, of course.
What do you expect? A just God?
Fool.


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You wear on my mind, but I'm no longer sure it's you.
Sometimes, I think it's me.
Sometimes, I think you weren't even there at all.

In the Mood for Love.

I think this story was real. I think I was her that one night, sitting across from you. A table for two. Words to mask premonitions. Chatter for pain, talking heavily about the past. But it wasn't really all that heavy, at least, not from my lips.


We are twins, same race, same place. Parallel lives, just a few decades apart from each other.
It doesn't matter. Some things are timeless, anyhow...

Things like this. Emotion, confusion, isolation raw and on fire, searing the bones on my body, the bones in my head. Hoping that in another, we'd both find some footing. But just for the night.

Tomorrow, I will climb a mountain to the very top. Take my secrets and whisper them in a hole and cover it with dirt. No one but the wind will know of my struggle.

Regurgitation.

These days, I feel swallowed.
Masticated, ground up ruthlessly, spit back out, my standards held as steady as my grip on my mind.
I crawl out doorways in clothes I've worn for the past two days. I don't even notice, until
a sidelong glance and a casual comment, "You look like you just woke up."

Woke up from what?
I haven't slept in years. Not that I'd expect you to know anything about me. Or my habits. Or the plague of a whimpering mind, the slow grind of the blade on steel, not to sharpen, but to dull.
That slow grind, how it seeps into your skin.

Fires turn to flickers, passions turn wan.

I burn candles by the window to remind me.