This room has the worst energy. It reeks of laziness and lack of care. 3months of living hasn't pulled the suitcases off the floor or dragged the clothes out of them. The radiator hisses and clicks like some angry reptile and the world rumbles and shakes to the fourth floor as the thousand subway cars pass underneath.

Life continues on outside in machine forms, horns and motors and generators, busying themselves with routine. If there are birds other than pigeons, they don't sing. But I sit here staring at this pale screen, aching from long walks and the tension of the city.

This place is a cesspool.

There is so little kindness.

I need help finding light here.

A pile of papers several inches thick sits patiently, gathering dust while I ignore them, each and every. They want signatures, answers, type-written hot air and bullshit scribbles to fill their voids. They want to be packed in tight next to cheap parchment and ink stain stuck to the others in a brown package. They want to be sent to the four corners on gasoline driven winds and into the skeptical critical analytical clammy hands and chubby fingers of those who wait to rip it apart.
Those who muse and peruse and huff about it until they come to a decision.
Worthy or not.



Somehow, I don't even care about that. I can't even sit self-conscious and anticipating the rejection or the approval to come. I don't even think I need them as an out anymore, don't need their excuse to leave. I just want to run away, run far and fast and scream from my toes and rip up the roots tangled around my legs.

That's not an unreasonable request.

A Re-occurring Dream

"You're pronouncing it incorrectly," they said, grinning at me in a kind way, but one that made me uneasy. "The emphasis is on the 'U'."

I knew this to be ridiculous. I'd always heard the word 'pendulum' pronounced "PEN-dyoo-lum" and never as these two crones described. They hunched over in dirty vinyl lawnchairs outside of a cart laden with shining, tinkling, fluttering things that (if one had to pick a single, encompassing word) could only be described as "trinkets."

One had wild red hair that seemed to be past the point of washing, and the other wore a peppery-grey updo that had clearly been slept on and ignored for an unfathomably long time. Their clothes were a jazzy compilation of colors and patterns, fading and feathering in delicious dissonance. Their faces were pale leather and their eyes were only dark holes. The sockets did not make me as uneasy as their smiles, sweet and good-natured in the folds of their faces. They were more wise than I would ever be.

I fidgeted, not wanting to continue the argument but unable to shake the need I felt for the object after which I inquired.

The Red one reached in her pocket and pulled out a porcelain ball muttering something about wanting to get a closer look at me. She popped the ball in an empty socket and stared, lidless and artificially in my direction. Her mouth twisted up so that her lips disappeared in the grimace until finally - "Aaaaaaah," she breathed slowly.

She smiled again.

The eye popped out and she handed it to the Pepper companion.
"Have a look-ee," she said in a low voice.
Pepper poked the eye in, twisting it and making adjustments until she could "see" me.
"Hmph." Was her only reply before she pulled the eye back out with an sickening 'pop.'

She turned back to the cart, pulling out a drawer full of little boxes of different colored paper. Feeling about in the drawer, her fingers closed around a tiny green one. Red's laugh burst the silence and she clapped her hands three times. "Perfect!"

Pepper gave what would have been a side glance at Red had they possessed eyes and turned to me.

"You asked for a pendulum," she mocked my pronunciation. "But we know you need more than that...so consider the other things as gifts. You have a very long way to go."

Green box in hand and a few dollars short in my wallet, I left the cart and the women at my back. I don't know what else was in the box, but the pale orange pendulum was warm in my hand.

I'm at home tonight listening to the muted thunder outside my window and wishing it wasn't always so hot in my room. 2 fans and the A/C running and I wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

I have daydreams of a tiny house with the bare minimums, painted a sunny yellow in a kitchen full of wildflowers. Daisies, buttercups, blubonnets, Indian paintbrushes. The kitchen is spring. The den and the hearth are heavy colors dark and warm like harvest foods and soil. The den is winter. The bedroom is inviting and tragically beautiful, old furniture I have given a home and junk made into beautiful things on the walls. A four-poster squats in a corner draped in ochre sheers. The bedroom is autumn. The porch is open and faces west and the sunset and it absorbs the luscious green glow of summer's dusk. The porch is summer.

I also wonder a lot lately about human behaviors. In particular the urge to hold things that hurt us. Not just in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense as well. We seem to have a strange incapacity to move on from things and people and places that bring us that bittersweet melancholy feeling. I don't know why we do this or for what purpose, but I still wonder. And I'd like to stop doing it if I could.

She sits alone, kneeling on a richly stained oak floor. She is facing a mirror, large and round with scalloped and curving details. The mirror hangs in the air silently floating, small threads of glittering tendrils wrapping around it and in every crevice.

Brushing the surface of the floor with her right hand, she pulls a large knife from it. The blade is razor sharp and from within it, a humming metallic buzz whispers. Without ever taking her eyes off her reflection, she grabs a handful of dry and tangled red hair in her left hand. Slowly she raises the knife to the hair and sends it slicing through each strand as if it were made of water. No resistance. She relishes every infinitesimal snap as the follicles of every handful are severed, never taking her eyes from those in her reflection.

When she is through, she is surrounded by the remnants of her hair. A circle of red. She holds up her right hand and where there once was a knife, there now sits a flat circular rock. She breaks her gaze with the mirror to look at the stone. She has a memory of choosing it for a purpose. She remembers the first time she saw it, underneath the small corpse of a bird with yellow and grey feathers. No eyes. She remembered that he'd had no eyes. She had taken the piece of earth from beneath him and thanked him, though she didn't know why. It seemed appropriate at the time.

Shifting from her memory into the present, her eyes return to her reflection. Her shoddy hair, unruly and uneven, and the eyes that stared back into hers so diligently in spite of their dark and heavy lids. A moment or two passes and her eyes begin to lose focus staring through the mirror, seeing but not seeing.

A sharp and unwelcome music pierces the silence and rips its way into my dream.

Jason Reeves 'just wants to write me in a song' at 5:45 AM.

And then I woke up.

The clock is counting down the fifteen minutes until a production meeting for the year's first show. I'm assistant costume designing with another girl. Calling her Hellen would be apropos.

I should be excited about the beginning of my senior year in college, but I'm not. At some point, maybe I was. Maybe I wanted to come back to this obnoxious blue and green room, but a thousand reasons discourage me.

I've been dreaming of blue and yellow flags, long, and forked like the tongues of snakes. They rise on steel flagpoles from a shallow pool of the brightest aquamarine in the middle of a barren and dying pasture under a cold sky. I watch them from a very tall wooden house, an aging structure with whispers of the Tudor fashion in the remaining details. I am perched on the unstable railing of the balcony and the wood bends and groans under the pressure. I'm not afraid of falling.

A fumbled and messy ritual, a long and peaceful silence, the vibration of a phone, the slam of a door and lumbering footsteps across the floor. This is not where I want to be.

I sit with one hand on my keyboard, the other holding a drink I can't really stomach. But I sip at it anyway, taking as much of it at a time as I can, hoping that at some point I will have it all. This liquid burns my tongue and throat as it goes down, wanting to be consumed but punishing me for wanting it so badly. I can't help it. I want it not for the taste or the appearance, but for the result. If I can persevere to the bottom of the glass, it won't burn anymore and there'll be no rumble of protest from my stomach. It will go to my head and warm the backs of my eyelids, steady my breathing, envelope my limbs like a blanket. It will raise the volume of my voice and peel away a few inhibitions, or it would if I wanted to speak or mingle. Or at least that is what I hope. It could turn out like most others of its kind and disappoint, either by not being strong or to little of a good thing. It could want to free itself from me, no, I'm sure it does. This one is different, one I'm afraid I won't finish. Or it could be one that is worth the struggle to the last drop.

I've resigned myself to reading and pretending I'm not waiting for a call that I suspect won't come.

TEN:
10. You're creepy. Creepier to me than I think you are in reality.
9. I think about you a lot.
8. I feel like you're fighting the urge to leave more than this town when you go.
7. I totally understand how you feel, but even if I'd known that we felt the same way a long time ago, I still wouldn't have approached you, you're annoying.
6. You guys fucked me over a lot this year and if it happens again next year, I will use any opportunity I have to let you know, contrary to my character.
5. You made me this way and not a day goes by that I wouldn't love to berate you for it.
4. Please make me feel like I matter to you. You don't realize how little it takes for you to show me that I'm not wasting my time on you.
3. I'm fucking terrified of the next few years. Mostly because I don't know what's going to happen to us.
2. Get better social skills.
1. You don't know me at all.