starmaps

[starmaps]

Unburnt incense makes the air around my sleep sweet and smooth and heavy and soft, warm honey, but not, but spiced. builds mountains and mist and statues and heavens in a bedroom, cluttered between bookcases and drifts of laundry like snow. I'm putting my rings on the wrong fingers these days, stepping into the shower still wearing underwear, a watch. I'm offbeat, out of time, even in my body's deepest core. Like the first day warm enough to go without tights, something feels off, missing, exposed. I can't remember the last time I saw the moon, so I'm building a cycle from scratch. My body whimpered for it today, tore at itself to get back to what was. I could barely carry it. Against this great hot heavy stone in me I felt flimsy and fluttery, my heart flickering like a dying light, scraps of cloud blocking my mind like the autumn sun. On-off, on-off, I blinked like a lighthouse, but I was strewn on the rocks. I feel dank and sea-weedy and salty. I feel like drips in a clammy cave, like sand in wet clothes. I move gingerly and stiffly. There's not flow to me anymore. Too much has been wrung out of me. I always carry water with me, but I never drink.

#misc

[starmaps]

looked through one of my blogs from a world ago, and this is something I found:

you wake up on the hour and the air is like glass around you. still and brittle, so silent you think you can hear to quiet plinks of dust swirling, tiny flickers in motionless pools of sticky light and cold dark. creep across it all so your shadow is a dancer laughing huge and terrible at you from the wall.

open a door, a window, anything to get you outside.

the wind rolls in to greet you. you are the glass, it is the blower; you feel yourself bending to it, feel it sucking you out. where? outside leaves murmur and even the lagoons of light on the road are cold and white, so different from your yellow inside light that makes the dead look slightly alive and you slightly dead. you've seen the black doll's-eyes it gives you.

do you stay in the dollhouse of stillness, laced thickly with undulating shadows that are both grotesque and enchanting? do you slip outisde into the night, fade into a shadow, get blown away into the wind?

it is the witching hour. the wind tastes of the north. you shut it out and what's left of it falls on the carpet to die slowly in the soft candelight.

i am soft wax; i am half-doll. i might step out into the wind one day, but for now i don't believe enough in fairy tales to be enchanted completely.

#very old #if you have seen this before on a blogspot whose name i prefer not to mention it is me

[starmaps]

"why don't you like it? It lets you forget yourself." Leaning back. Eyes rolling to the skull. White cloud cover and cement and pot plants in plastic. I laughed. You romanticised that laugh. I've learned that even people like you romanticise things. It's not just me, desperately seeking a fairy tale in the gravel and the gutters. Everyone is looking for beauty. You shouldn't have, though. That laugh was not disbelieving. That laugh was not 'I wish'. That laugh was not echoes of nights with waves breaking in my chest and too-much-of-me. I'm sorry, but that laugh was derisive. That laugh was a little world-weary. That laugh was 'I have never known myself, and it keeps me up in hotel corridors at 3:28 a.m.' 'It keeps me loving concierges and people's shadows.' That laugh was 'I have never known myself, and I am fading like the flowers I abducted and secreted in the biggest dictionary in the world.' 'I have never known myself. Why would I ever want to forget?'  

#excerpt

[starmaps]

                                                                  That’s all I want, the shy slow whispertouches, the kiss that blooms in the air around you, slow on rainwet streets glinting in warmcold lamplight. How could that be so bad, why should I keep that to myself and the spaces between my ribs and the wind, the cool northsouth compass caresser that rushes through my veins, consumes me. Even if it’s not him him but a different him and even if it’s a me without an umbrella and head adrift with cobwebs. How can such a thing be anything but beautiful, anything other than necessary? For surely it is up to me, as it is to anyone with a feathered beautiful thing roosting in their bones, to set it free, to balance out the nightmares in the grimy peripherals around us with something so honest. So beautiful. Why am I told to worry?

[starmaps]

Tonight I'm tired. I'm so deeply tired, tired of backing myself into corners to see if I can fight my way into the sun again. I'm tired of puppet strings running from my bones to the darkness, tired of the long needle fingers on my shoulders. I'm tired of beauty. I'm tired of being too big and too small, too everything, all at the same time. I'm tired of knowing. I'm tired of not knowing.

I feel like I'm the one under the spell. I think my world is turning bluer and blacker. The owl is at my shoulder. I'm the one who will disappear. In the nothing-hours, when girls grow wings and the rats sing songs so sweet even the nightjar is silenced.

#who even knows

[starmaps]

why don't you just speak to him?

I have built myself an accidental fortress. Stolen glances and swallowed words congeal over time and are my walls, too tall for me to vault but not tall enough to keep me safe, to take my vulnerability, to stop myself longing free from a distance.

Silence, avoided eyes and a special, almost ethereal brand of aloofness make a moat. A deadly, suffocating cocktail. A seductively lonely sea. You could drown in it. I do every day.

If I make it past the walls the moat will always stop me, so I only watch from my moody citadel while everyone else laughs and loves so easily, so open I wonder how they can stand it. They are whisperclose and beyond reach.

I am alien and need to be quarantined. I am a lighthouse. Loved but lonely, appreciated but avoided. Ever-lovely, ever-melancholy. My light ought to attract; instead I ward others away. Danger. Ruins. Sharp rocks. Shipwrecks.

[starmaps]

I’m still waiting for the day when your name doesn’t taste like gunmetal and wet earth. Last week was our swan song. Maybe we were too in love with death to realise we were dying. I don’t know why it happened this way and I didn’t want it any more than you did, but now it’s here I’m ready for the final bar. We keep each other in a world of guilt and longing; we keep each other in transit. You will always be waiting. I will always be returning. We saw the rocks but we didn’t change course. Can’t complain when we’re torn apart.

[starmaps]

how to fossilise:

crush your words between your ribs, swallow your smiles, watch the seconds flee from empty corners, count on your closeness with ghosts

dry between the pages of books like so many clovers. soon bits of you will break apart and disappear. soon you will forget and be forgotten, lend out your love and let in lonely only to be beautiful for longer.

no one can touch you. their fingers bite tunnels into you like acid, destroy the stories set in your bones. if they touch you, you will disintegrate.

look at the world from above or below, listen to it through a wall or water. never change, even if you are being pulled apart by whole continents receding and meeting. eventually you will break apart. maybe one day someone will find you. maybe they will like you, a relic of nostalgia and grief, enough to put what's left of you back together. maybe they, or a museum, or another shop of old sadness will be interested enough to let you stay.

maybe you will never be found. you will lie in bits and pieces and watch the ages until you are blind, feel the spin of the planet until you are numb, snatch the seconds and hide them away, and count them constantly, until you are a fool for time. you only wanted it to stop. instead, it stopped you.  

[starmaps]

At the end of every day I look out into a darkness and see myself spinning further and further away from what I want, all that I've ever wanted. I've been so close, so exquisitely close. I've come within a whisper of it, this plainly elusive thing, my tangible ghost. I am never allowed to reach it. Like an Earth drifting slowly away from the sun. I am looking through the ship's porthole as my lover drowns. The river carries me to safety as it pushes my child over a cliff.

#misc? #longing

[starmaps]

the roses in your cheeks that bloom in autumn are so much lovelier than anything that could grow from springtime earth.

#love