Dissolution

I began shrinking on Easter Sunday. My husband noticed it first. "Your pants are looking long there," he said, looking over the top of his glasses. I shrugged. My shrinking began in such incremental increases, just a few millimeters each day, that I hardly noticed. I began to see the undersides of chins, noses. Soon, I could no longer reach the top shelf. I started marking my height each morning on the doorjamb to the bathroom, the reversal of a growing child. Even my doctor, despite my panic, examined me and declared me perfectly healthy, albeit four inches shorter than I had been six months ago.

The shrinking is coming faster now. I am two foot tall and perfectly proportionate - like a child's doll. As I got smaller, I started creeping into the tiny spaces that would hold me. The breadbox, the dryer, the bathroom cupboard. I curl into a tiny fetal position and lay on the towels. My husband tells everyone that I have left him, although he sees me walk about. Sometimes, I say hello to him. He pretends not to see me, his pale eyes staring straight ahead. On Saturday, he packed all of my things away and cleaned. He sleeps alone, and I come over and nestle into the corner between his chin and clavicle. "I love you," I say. Sometimes, he wakes up. He says nothing.

I am getting smaller yet. Someday I will disappear.

slide

I have stopped watching television.

It wasn’t intentional, although I cannot said I mind the repercussions. Instead, the concept of turning on the vast black box next to me has grown further and further comprehensible, less a part of the visceral reality I inhabit. I have lost the remote in the laundry. I don’t look to find it. Certainly, however, it has disappeared down some wormhole into a vaporous and shifting future. Not my reality.

I am okay.

Jörmungandr

aishiteru

Who are you, the ghost in my mirror asks, and I really have nothing to tell her. I am the infinite and the obtuse, I respond, but it means little.

The thing about falling in love is that it's like leaving a door askew. Wind rushes in, the ice and the snow, unbearable heat, and there is no screen, no barrier to stop it. My heart is laid bare and naked. I love you and all I want to do is to raise my arms up over my chest to protect myself. I want to step away from you, to come up for air, but I am entangled by your pale eyes and the way you hold my hair back as I throw up tonight's alcohol overindulgence. I want to throw myself into you, to cleave into your skin and become a part of you. I want to mark you with my very sharp teeth, to leave dental indentations a coroner could identify.

I haven't ever loved so nakedly, know that. I rest my elbows on the table and I think you understand. I am always one step ahead from the broken heart, always willing to pull the plug to protect my mercenary soul. She shattered me and I built my walls higher than those of Acre, higher than those of Jericho. It's been a long time gone and I'm leaving the front gate open for you. It's not easy. You know that.

You and I are cut from the same cloth, the same mail. You fascinate me, with your sarcasm and vitriol, your hesitancy, your gentle touch and rough palms. I know you from some mirrored response in my own skin and sinew. Our synapses fire on similar stimulai. Our brains nestle together in the same relapse. You look as cautious as I feel. As idealistic. As beautiful.

I made you a mix tape. It's settled in the back of this collective, dually something I think you might enjoy and something I've created to explain myself to you and what you've done to me.

I love you. There's no other way to say that.

all watched over by machines of loving grace

Rudy.

january literary recap

David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
Borrowed from Rudy, still sitting precariously atop my knitting basket. I've been avoiding reading much Sedaris for several years now, although I'm not entirely sure why. This is a collection of interwoven essays and short stories, affording a biographical view of the author. Some were every shade of hilarious, namely the ones featuring his actress sister, Amy, whereas a few of the later ones dealing only with the author felt a little self-congratulatory.

Pamela Nagimi - The Woman With A Worm In Her Head and Other True Stories of Infectious Disease
A collection of an Infectious Disease Specialist's stories and encounters over the past twenty years of her work in the field. Her descriptions of the illnesses and the progression thereof are brilliant and clinical. Sometimes, she gets a little overbearing in trying to afford something spiritual to the medical cases (i.e. A scene in her residency involving a fetus's hand and seeing 'the work of God', not exactly my bag.) I will never eat salad in a foreign country. Gah.

Terry Pratchett - Making Money
The newest installment in the Discworld series, this time centering on Moist von Lipwig and his newest profession (prison?) of being Deputy Chairman of the Bank in Ankh-Morpork. I ripped through this one, finding it one of the more humorous and lucid of the books in the series, with a particularly hilarious and apt commentary on economics. Seems like Moist is being primed to be head Tax Collector in the next one, which will be awesome.

Susanna Kaysen - Girl, Interrupted
I picked this up on a break at work. A short, succinct portrayal of the life of a mental institution patient circa 1967. It's told in a series of brief essays and memoirs, interspersed by papers from the author's own hospitalization. Kaysen captures the caged and blanched feeling prevalent within whitewashed walls and what madness is - and stigma. A quick, interesting read.

Alex Robinson - Box Office Poison
Rudy picked this up from work for me and brought it whilst I was sick in bed with a fever. This is a genius graphic novel, very fluidly illustrated and centering around the entangling lives of about six to eight protagonists. The art is decent but the particular brilliance is in the humanity of the characters and one's recognition of their own self within. I really enjoyed seeing nontradtional female characters in there - such as Jane Pekar, who isn't dumpy or busty but is cute, draws, enjoys sex, and I bet could give me a run for my money in Soulcaliber.

Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles
One I suspect I will need to reread every few years. The Street of Crocodiles is a dreamlike foray into Schulz's childhood in Poland in the early twentieth century. Betraying his roots as an artist, the book reads like a painting, dripping with carnelian red and naples yellow, August sunlights slinking into parlors and dusty ornithological droppings. The haunting aspect is intensified by the entirely descriptive way the book is approached (there is little to no dialogue) and the eerie, heartbreaking rendition of the author's father, who sinks slowly into madness and is ignored - the way a sweater would unravel or a spot be sunbleached. His father sets about creating a bird menagerie atop the roof, a treatise on the proper way to treat tailor's dummies, and his slow and eventual metamorphosis into a reviled cockroach. Like a dream, the book hovers somewhere between fantasy and reality, one is never sure where ground he is setting foot.

snapshot

The snow hovers between at the freezing point, slush soaking through my sneakers, my socks. I'm working forty hours a week, sleeping off the excess. We play video games and I bring Rudy pizza while he battles his way through Karazhan. I make tea in the mornings, I sleep through most mornings. We smoke cigarettes off his back porch and I try to memorize the stars. I've had my heart broken, he says, and I nod. I know, I say, I have too. He knows. He asks what her name was. I tell him yours and none of the story, keeping it locked away in my heart. I tell Rudy my secrets, the perverse sexual fantasies I kept hidden from everyone else. I tell him I want to go away and study. Come with me, I say. He nods. I feel I can trust you. I can start healing now.

What's wrong? he asks. It's the five year anniversary of my suicide attempt," I tell him. He nods. We say nothing more, he puts his head on my shoulder.

I love you. And that's what I really needed to hear.