Lately I spend my free time isolated, buried in papers or scurrying in the dark doing something or other just to recharge, because I work with so many people on a daily basis...
People, nice as they may be, and being indoors take away something from me... I probably need to learn how to separate energies in my mind, but for now, this is what works.
Though, I must say, it has been a really nice last couple of days, and I do really enjoy my work.

However, I don't see my friends anymore, barely ever.
But this is beside the point (though very closely beside).

This is a photo post.

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon with my friend Krisia, who does all kinds of amazing art.
(Please see her tumblr as well.)

She proposed to take some photos of me out in the wilderness. It turned out my old house was the most convenient location, and I was thrilled, because I love any opportunity to go back there.

We weren't there for long, but it was a perfect few hours.
She walked down to the river with me with her super camera barefoot, almost ruining her less than conventional pedicure (she has little pointed claws on her toes!).
I ruined my kitty boots because I fell into the water (now they kind of smell).
But all in all, we had an awesome time because she enjoys getting lost in the woods as much as I do.
And I saw my pookie, which I miss every day.

I need days like that more often, or I will, quite literally, lose my mind.





( + )

what exactly,

hanging over
clouding over
deafening
overwhelming
consuming
nearly suffocating

?

...blowing over,
blowing UP.

cracking open
sharp and loud
up and up,
beyond the clouds

glitter trailing,
soft and slow
feathers floating,
falling low

I stole a silken strip of light
and threw it back into the sky.
What's it look like from up there,
what's it like to fly?

I thought I knew, I think I know,
how feathers flow to wind from wing,
from dream to waking memory,
from cloud to leaf, and sing.

Hot like vapor, cold as ice,
dry as pages, wet like ink.
I never thought that we'd escape,
I never stopped to think.

This is how it comes together,
this is all it ever was,
this is all that mattered, ever,
no plans, no ends, no cause.

This is how we carry on,
this is how we float on wings:
a promise of eternity
that unties all the strings.

The only projection is "maybe."
The only direction is "lost."
The only negation is "finite."
The only confusion is "what."

What was the word for the something,
that utters instructions for flight?
Blossoming, blooming and hunting,
destruction, its function and blight.

Wonderment, struckment and this is just how
another once told twice the elements set.
All of the words corresponded to sounds,
each was aflight and alight, yet, and yet...



//photo: unrelated

Wasn't it always...
was it ever?
Both and neither
stuck together.

This is where it all begins
this is where it ends.
How to travel back in time:
remember, and pretend.


//photo: unrelated

Thank you, anonymous!

This used to be the view outside my bedroom window.

Now, the view outside the window in my head when I sit at the computer and pretend I'm home.



I get the feeling it will always be.

Maybe some of you know, since livejournal isn't where I post my news anymore, that little Patti died too young a little earlier this month.
I don't even want to talk about it.

Tonight, as it happens sometimes, I felt her scratching her little paws against the door.
I haven't stopped talking to her, and I know it's all in my head... the sounds, the feelings...
I still talk to her, as a reflex, as if she were there. It helps me cope.
I have one of her chewed up, dry bones in my room that makes me feel all warm and happy every time I pick it up. I remember her tossing it and bouncing it with her paws with what appeared to be a fuzzy muzzle smile.
I miss her, and I know sometimes I act like a crazy person as I'm dealing with it.

So when I heard the scratches, fully aware as a grown woman that she could not possibly be haunting me, I had a childish regression that put me right back in the 80s, when I was about four years old.

I wished so hard she'd come back as a little white ghost.

Do you know what that feels like? To experience an emotion as if you were a child at a certain, specific moment?

So I kept thinking about this, where this silly wishful thinking came from, because it felt so familiar, and I felt so little...

I remembered the very first time I lost a pet.
My mom's TzyTzy (pronounced SEE-TSEE) a little, black mixed breed that travelled half way around the world with her and with which I grew up with as a baby, had 2, tiny black puppies once upon a time.
Of course I wanted to keep them.
I named one Tofudi and the other one Ferdy. (Bear with me, I was three).
We had to give Ferdy away, but we kept Tofudi, which I adored, because he was mine.
TzyTzy, though only a tiny little dog, was kind of a motherly figure to me (she would actually look after and scold me), and Tofudi was more like a furry little brother.

Not even a year later, Tofudi was ripped apart by a neighbor's German Shepheard and bled to death in my arms.

I don't really remember the event as it happened, only flashes, the whole idea now is just a memory of a memory that I hadn't visited in 25 years.

After Tofudi died, I hoped and hoped for him to haunt me, and was so disappointed he never did. Knowing ghosts weren't real, or so it was according to my mom, who knew everything (and still does).

But back to tonight, I tried making a connection between what I felt and Tofudi, beyond both being unexpected, horrible, early pet deaths.
Ferdy, who is essentially irrelevant in this whole situation (we gave him away to a nice lady and assumed his fate was pleasant), kept coming back into the picture.

And suddenly I remembered.
I named him after a cartoon, I had to google "ferdy dead fox."

It's from Casper.

Watch it. Cry.




This was my favorite episode and possibly my favorite cartoon for a long time. I know I must have watched it a gazzillion times on VHS because none of it surprised me, I had it memorized at some point.
Though I don't remember watching this ever after Tofudi died, however, not until now.
Possibly because it was traumatizing.

And what a strange feeling, to slip in time, right into another age...
It's like running Windows 95 on your current machine just because you can.

I remember too much.
(I can still sing parts of Barbie and the Rockers songs from before I was in preschool, but couldn't remember I had a work meeting this Saturday.)

I'm avoiding writing anything in here (my thoughts are scattered all about) afraid I may vomit up my own heart.

I do, however, post (not so regularly) real life events at a-e, just to fill in space (afraid of the latter as well).

But somewhere along, si6nifi3r (which surprises me has survived for almost 5 years now) became a picture journal, so on with it.

Earlier today my mom and I were doing whatever we felt like in celebration that we had no responsibilities for the day, so I suggested we go to the seashore to take pictures.
With our phones.
So we did.

Fun fact: last time we went to that beach about a year ago, I was wearing the exact same jacket and T-shirt.
Derp.





( +9 )

I took some pictures.
The first I've taken outside my house since I moved, because people staring is kind of annoying.



( +8 )

There is a certain way light creeps into memory
a certain way shadows move and reflect every which way...
simultaneously

obliteration
purification
through fire and flood

seeds and spores travel in the wind
dreams, upon the highest ice clouds

and the stars behind your eyes.


This is the journey home
(it was never anything else),
back to the stars,
back to the highest ice cloud reflecting caramelized afternoon sun,
from the deepest, truest childhood wish that flowed from heart to head and expanded, inflated into a bubble, seeping out of every orifice, forgetting it was contained inside a body and believing itself invisible, intangible, invincible,
impractical, imperfect - because it is perfect.
A dream that believed itself possible.


This is the journey home.
Home, to flickers of shadow and light and the illusion of eternity.
Home, away from slow-crushing binds,
becoming near sighted, needing magnifiers than only close in and focus,
focus growing smaller and smaller,
one
single
insignificant detail taking over the horizon

It was written
it is written
this is this is not this

was meant to be
not meant

I mean,





I mean...





I mean.





I mean:

signification dissolves

Exiled from paradise,
trying to find home in solitude, silence and smoke...



Caribbean summers are killing me.
Every single year, out of breath, half blind, half dormant,
until the winds carry away the dust and days become shorter, less bright, less to bear.

These are not metaphors.

And this habit... it's obviously toxic, obviously... obviously stupid, to poison oneself,
but it somehow became home. Not sure when or how...
Breatheable little tickets to another dimension where the sky is infinite, and so is the future.
Another state of being.
All I've ever wanted. Alternation.

My body is afllicted tonight.
I've been sleeping for the last two weeks, and I wake up short of breath.
Being barely able to breathe is a new discomfort.

My jaws are like magnets, shutting so tight I can hear my teeth grind into one another.
I have constant face cramps that force me to make strange gestures.
Not an entirely new discomfort, but still unfamiliar and ever so bothersome.

Inbetween sleep, when awake, I feel deeply uninterested in absolutely everything.
Including being awake.
In my sleep, I've finished volumes of stories never finished, rhymed for miles and rhymed for hours, layers of words and sounds and colors... visited old friends and old places, realizing I should draw out a dream-map, because there's an entire geography, history and culture in there.
I've looked into old pages and envied my past...

Blamed my past self for not making better decisions.
Knowing I have this tendency to linger on mistakes and indulge in self-punishment for longer than is reasonable (indefinitely until the next big mistake).
It's not reasonable at all.
It's impractical.
It's stupid.

There is a bubble slowly inflating somewhere... that right now, feels like my chest.
I just want it to grow and explode with sharp BANG.
To make room for the air that it's stealing from my lungs.

I find answers in my sleep that I shrug off, ignore upon waking.

Dragging through drab and dire reality, looking for spiritual caffeine.
Or contagious inspiration...



Disease is a metaphor.


Doctor, please prescribe cough syrup with codeine next time.
These are the most disagreeable meds ever.
(And that is no metaphor.)

I saw angels in a dream last night... legions.
Or maybe it was this morning.

Thinking of tomorrow and the day after, and yesterday... it only takes a flicker of a feeling to ignite an idea.

Today I went back home, rummaging through what's left in my old room (it still feels like home, though almost empty) and picked up a plastic bag full of little magnetic words.
I cleaned them and stuck most of them onto the refrigerator.
I made little poems that will never exist, like moments that have been and cannot exist again, like single breaths and blinks.

A few moments ago, I thought of tomorrow. And the day after.
And of yesterday...

And my dream, and the angels,
and the solid magnetic words that breathed ghosts of longing, worlds of expectation (that they will become...).

I didn't arrange them into sentences or even phrases.
I just spent about half an hour sticking them from the bag into the fridge.

ing cigarette
es figure
white death ash
her I his we
rain night
electric aesthetic
ly so
though slow

So I thought about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,
and that flicker caught fire,
instantly burned up, consuming itself,
disappeared,
and left but a black stain, and tiny little ashes.

If [this idea I can't really name] fell upon me for an instant, heavy, heavy (I believed it!)
until it lifted... and now I'm trying to configure meaning from a memory of an idea [THAT idea].

Hence:

That what I thought was real was not... that I was stuck in a rut of a nightmare of monotony, and that I would have this nightmare each and every single day,
but it was just a dream, after all.

Because truly,
I see angels and float up into space and breathe underwater and watch worlds grow like flowers blooming from seeds of little magnetic words in plastic bags.

"This" is just a nightmare, and Narco, wake the fuck up soon because "this" is not going your way
and your are doomed if you forget,
you'll be lost if you forget


what you wanted

[everything]


.

For a moment I found home in a patch of moonlight and a soft breeze.



In my dreams these last couple of days, waking life feels like the "other" side of reality, rather than the other way around...
Then again... I don't think it's ever been the other way around, not entirely or even mostly.
At a moment like this I can't decide whether my memories, fluid, are tinted with drops of nostalgia, distorted... hence, liquid. Like dreams.

The other night I stopped breathing in my sleep and couldn't wake up. When I finally did, I was out of breath. My own desperate gasp woke me.
I sometimes wonder if my brain is trying to kill me.
Or just trying to tell me something.

I find myself consistently going home... in my head.



I visit my old, empty room every few days.
The image is infiltrating my dreams now.
I often dream lately that I'm in my old room, not the way it used to be, but the way it is now... only my posters on the wall, black curtains in the windows, a bookshelf with books I've found no place for here yet, and a four-poster bed with no mattress.

But it's odd that every morning when I wake up [too early], between the echoes of dreams and the dullness of morning light, I expect to find myself there... and I do. To the point that it's haunting.

I used to sit at my computer and look right, where I could see outside, day or night, I would see green, green and the sky, or a rising moon and its light and shadows on the clouds, stars and planets sparkling. I would walk out and stare for moments, sometimes hours, and smile. Among... everything, really. Everything.
Because I've always, since I was aware, I've been in love with my home, even as solitary child with animals, trees and clouds as company.
Even since then I was told we would eventually leave,
which made me memorize every secret trail and take in the sky as a personal deity, comforting, loving, consistent, beautiful and giving me the illusion of eternity, always present in my dreams, where I sometimes float up into cold space until I disintegrate into non-being [once a teenage wish].
Behind my eyelids are a clear, endless caribbean sky and luscious green.


I don't think I really knew what daydreaming was like until recently... I thought I did, spacing out and thinking of things and places other than those which surrounded you. But when you don't summon the thought, but the thought takes over you and makes you forget, for long moments, where you actually are. It's so much like a dream...

Maybe it's because I really don't enjoy my work that these hallucinations take over, but it's consistent... not only between calls.

I used to have my private Paradise.
Here I have a little corner where I sit to smoke with a notebook, a book or my iPod.
I miss my old home.
The only reason I post this to begin with... I want to write about it to re-live and remember, as with everything else...

And, when I tip-type away with WinAmp in the background, as I've done here for more than a decade, it feels so much like home.




[These photos were taken around this time of year in 2006. They sum up pretty much what my days were like back home.]

(and answering possible questions regarding our current FB defaults),
mitocondrias using devART's muro (hence the "Paint" look) by uvita.
:D



lukrezia dead_eifersucht
viktor_exhumed n3cr0phelia
nomada_demartes uvita


Also, unrelated:
I've found that Java Monsters are a good remedy for migraines, but only after it's dark.
And having slept all day.
This presents a conundrum.

What I'm up to and what's going on with my life is barely interesting anymore (to me, at least).

4th month in the nieghborhood... how I would have preferred a different sort of change, perhaps to a continent. Not a couple of miles westward, since now I am a visitor in the desolate kingdom I once ruled and every single time, it feels like home, even so.

Future: uncertain (though secretly plotting, oh so secretly).

The holidays were lovely thanks to my friends. They usually are, anyway.

Closest I've had to a brother and sister are now both off the island and unexpectedly, I feel both hopeful and a teensy bit more alone. All these opposites... that don't cancel each other out, only perhaps when I try to express it.

Haunted head. Dormant heart.
What else is there to say.



( + )

Nov 12 10

Pages and pages... from another galaxy.
I close my eyes and dream I am there instead, where the night seemed infinite, the sky, close.

The way in which we connect, disconnect...
loose ends searching for their mate in a tangle, a mess of live wires...
a process of trial and error, trial, success, error and error.

This is where it stops being easy so that it can become, manifest and be, perhaps... easy again, until the next challenge is saught.
Because routine becomes stiflingly boring, life threatening, unbearably suffocating.

Ghost of my dreams, you built be wings on which I soared
in the wrong
direction.

I mistook you for a burning star, but you are a wayward planet in a stubborn orbit around your own sun,
a sun that's warmed these desert sands and barren shores, back to life.
Now I am a lost satellite... a frail husk of what believed itself to be a star also.

I was your satellite, asteroid,
wounded by what, from a distance, was a shimmering display of lights, but in reality was a cosmic sort of crash.

I'm broken in pieces, navigating emptiness with my own gravity.

Still you shine, still I wander.

The universe is infinite, or it seems that way, our human eyes taking in only as much as they can see.

Stargazers: you are never alone.



Nov 16 10

I dreamed of any icy flood.
We were several people on a wooden craft, afraid.
My dying vision was an embrace... he called me a secret name and held my hand.
I'm seeing old friends in dreams.

I never expected to have become this distant...

Dead stars shine long after they've gone out.



Starshine, my heart is breaking.
I never wanted more than to float up and live in the sky.
But then, I suppose, I would look down in anguish, longing for gravity, for landscapes, seascapes, for the ability to dance...
Perfection is unattainable, but it is my greatest purpose in life to want it, forever.



Nov 18 10

I dreamed of an ocean, tumultuous, ice floating, threatening.
We were a group of strangers on a wooden craft, unsure if we would die.
It didn't even come up, emotions of fear or pity. Not in conversation, only in exchanged glances.

If only words would touch like music... empty signifiers.

Sometimes opportunities fly down, land upon out paths, softly at our feet, and we tread, eyes on the horizon - which is only as far as we can see.
Our eyes point towards infinity and we swear that we have seen it.

I've left a trail of ifs and buts behind me,
if
if
if
if
if not,
if I had instead,
if only, if only, if only, only...
To desire one thing only... the price to pay for it:
to be haunted and tortured by all these ifs...

I wanted to write something beautiful right now and, looking away from the screen, down to my hands, I could only see landscapes in movement. Luscious green, sparkling blue, warm brown and grey roads. These fill my head... the memory of images and exchanges of smiles - the only thing I find really persists when every other thing seems meaningless.

What is meaning?

Signification?

 

Like imagination, the sky is vast and the ocean is vast.
Like our planet in the grand scheme of the universe, in matters of matter, our eyes are small, our heads are small.
Like our perception of the universe, desire is infinite, and is extinguished only in death.

 
As I'm falling asleep I get radical ideas... perhaps in both senses of the word.

In between rhyming nonsense, melodies I rarely am able to recover while fully awake and dream hallucinations, this half-awareness comes over me that perhaps I'm not on the right track.

I've finally gotten around to reading my mom's favorite books. Which are (obviously, if you've added my mom on facebook you know this) the Dune chronicles, which really help set some standards when you compare your own meager existence to a 15 year old superhuman warrior messiah's (humor me) whose humanity is not once taken for granted.

 "Without change, something in a man falls asleep than can never be awakened."

 

This line, though Dune is full of beautiful truisms, is actually from the movie.
Again, humor me.

It's something to keep in mind.
It's easy to become slow and dull when you're comfortable.


By the way - still no internet.