My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

I want to let you in, to hand you the key to me.

I want you to see all my locked rooms, the lonely places people never see. They’re all dark, dusty, full of hidden things. I want to show you the rooms that keep my secrets, my fears, the dreams too stupid to show anyone else.

I’ve locked so many rooms, guided people away from the things I don’t trust to anyone. The things I didn’t trust to anyone, until you showed up one day.

I want you to see everything, to know everything and maybe stay awhile. I want you to stay, though I want most people to go.

I want to let you in, to hand you the key to me. It’s scary wanting something so much, scary to feel so much trust. You might not take the key, you might not like what you find inside. You might say, “Goodbye, nice try.” So much I don’t know, but I want to let you in.

Last night was my very first open mic night. There’s this little cafe in down-town St. Petersburg, Cafe Bohemia, and every Thursday night is open mic night. They have a stage set up in this really pretty outdoor courtyard for poets and musicians to do their thing under the starry night sky. I found out about it totally by accident, but it was exactly the sort of thing I’d been wanting to find for so long, a place for creative types to just put there stuff out there for a live audience. Applause are different than blog comments. A silent audience says more than a post with no comments at all. So, there was one other writer, Jimmy, and a bunch of musicians, generally really good musicians. I picked out seven pieces of my flash fiction/poetry…

Suicide Party

Golems

Brown eyes, and a kiss

A beautiful fix

For her

The push

A nothing of a prayer

I just needed a voice for my words. Jimmy, being a writer and all, with his own poems to read later, he let me borrow his voice. He read my stuff well, and the audience responded the same. I got decent applause for each. I heard one fellow say of Golems, “That was was haunting.” It felt good to put my stuff right in front of people, scary and exciting, all at once. Some musicians played next, then Jimmy read his stuff, then more musicians played.   The place had such a good vibe, people having a really great time. I showed off some writing. Some friends were there, I talked to them. I met some new people. I stayed to close the place, and went home to nothing but my thoughts.

So, I’m going for my usual fresh trache. I’d like to write something compelling, or beautiful, or both, but I’m tired. If I go down, I’ll go down with things unsaid, unfinished, not done. Odds are, this won’t happen, I’ll come back to write more and do more, so I’m not particularly worried.

Things I have yet to write:

Tattoo #26: Stain

Tattoo #27: At night, wish the hardest

Tattoo #28: A black balloon

Stuff about a girl

An unfinished short story

Lots and lots of other thoughts…

If anything really spectacular comes to mind, I’ll have my computer while I’m waiting to visit the O.R.

He lays down, cold and alone, a thousand thoughts in his head, and nothing to say. How he got there doesn’t matter. He can’t stay awake. He closes his eyes, and hopes to wake somewhere nice.

This blog needs to be better, just like I need to be better.

So, Friday morning a few lines bounced into my head, they felt like the beginning of a short story. I don’t feel like a particularly good fiction writer, and lately not like much of a writer of anything, but I put down eighty-five words Friday afternoon, and they’ve turned into almost two-thousand. It’ll end up the longest fiction I’ve ever written, I’m just not sure when I’ll get to that end. It just keeps going.

I hope it doesn’t suck, but I don’t know. I mean, anything has the potential to suck, but we have to try anyway.

So, Monday evening I drank enough bourbon to kill a small pony, and had to visit the e.r. I’ve done similarly before, and I suppose those other times didn’t particularly affect me. I never really openly talk about these things, but this time is different. ترتيب البوكر Liquor’s been this really fun thing that various people have told me I “can’t” have, which is a lot of why I kept at it, and generally, aside from a few incidents over a few years, I’ve been fine. Still, before Monday I was thinking about giving it up, or really cutting back, or giving it up. I couldn’t decide. I just kept thinking that liquor hasn’t been fun for awhile. I mean, you feel great for two hours, everything’s all perfect, then you come down and feel like shit. I’d been hearing Kurt sing, “My heart is broke, but I have some glue. Help me inhale, mend it with you. We’ll float around, and hang out on clouds, then we’ll come down, and have a hangover…” Every time I drank something. جدول سباق الخيل It fit so perfectly. Drinking, quite often, was something I did  to turn off my head, to mask depression, or boredom, or both. I’d been thinking about that before I did what I did Monday, before I went and drank enough bourbon to kill a small pony.

I blacked out, woke up in the e.r. I woke up and thought, “Oh God, I fucked up.” It hit me just how stupid it was to wake up in that way. I finally thought about who I’d have hurt if I hadn’t managed to wake up. العاب كازينو مجاني I don’t want to hurt those people. I don’t want to hurt a pair of beautiful brown eyes that I love so much. I don’t want to hurt myself. So, I’m done with the drinking, because I genuinely want to be done with it. I tried it for long enough, it’s absolutely no fun anymore. There are definitely better ways to handle boredom and melancholy. I hit the bottom, I didn’t like it.

I wish I could write one Goddamn fucking decent thing, rather than all this Goddamn fucking nothing.

You have your masks, you wear them everyday. Masks cover your walls, you take them down to cover you, so you can be who you need to be. Happy masks, funny masks, masks to cover the sad and the suicide. Masks to cover the empty and the lonely. The masks are heavy, they make you tired. You hate that you need them, or maybe you hate everything they hide. Maybe it’s both, you’re too frayed to know. So many masks you can’t think straight, so many masks you don’t want to wear.

So many Goddamn fucking masks, killing you without killing you.

So, I saw it there on the bar, scribbled in pencil on a scrap of paper, stuck under a dead shot glass. العاب اندرويد The place was dark, filled with smoke and people, people having a better time than me. I’m not really sure how I noticed it, or why I bothered to pick up that glass to read what I read. لعب قمار حقيقي It was just there, someone’s thought, someone’s prayer, stuck under a dead shot glass, written on a dying scrap of paper. Just two lines, just a nothing of a prayer.

I want to be next to you right now, you so close, my hand touching your face. كيف تربح المال من النت I want to kiss you slow, I want to tell you I love you with the voice in my head.

I put it back, left it there. I wonder if it ever ended up where it was supposed to go.