"I admire anyone who wants to smile more, complain less, never take themselves too seriously and believe in beautiful things."
-Edythe Hughes

Chest of Drawers

My grandfather was the most beautiful man. A sailor in uniform. He can't see now, and his whole family lives on the other side of another ocean. His photo lies among louder treasures but feels saddest under my fingertips. Just another thing he doesn't see.

 Gold headpiece down, silver to go. But always the sadness when Christmas is over.

"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again,  I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

The Subdued and the Subliminal

The rain has a funny way of fusing everything together like watercolor. The air is poisoned with the smell of rain. Try picking a patch of oxygen that is untainted. You won't find it. Then there is the melting. It can be likened to the effect of looking through smoke, but instead of the blur that comes with the latter is a melancholic sort of clarity. You see things as they are, a world of personal universes braided limply with the mutual experience of rain.

The rain has a sound, but not every tone is voiced. The iconic patter you hear playing on the glass of your window upon waking is but one dimension, then there is the lament. Rain deposited it in your subconscious while you were busied with its smell, with trying to store it someplace deep, not realizing that this will happen regardless of whether you try. It is this wailing that you hear when you see and smell rain and feel a tinge of sadness whose origin you cannot place.

The third dimension is silence. How can rain have both sound and silence? I can't tell you, but I believe it is there, lurking under the wail and weaving through the rhythmic strikes against the pavement. My conviction in the silence comes from the sense of peace that moves every creature to inertia. But maybe it is just the rhythm that lulls them.

And the pictures, let me explain. 1. I have been obsessing over the need for a bookcase in my life, or room. I don't have much space but I have enough will to make up for my wanting it there. 2. If my hopes do not pan out, will somebody take me to St. Petersburg, or Kiev? I think it would be like entering a fairy-tale, but better because it is real. 3. The tea/cake image needs no explanation. This is my place, after all.

image sources: 1. weheartit.com 2. igougo 3. unknown, from tumblr

I'm not a pair of combat boots

Yes I said I hate it but there are so many things I am falling for again, and like last time I am teetering on the edge of something high. It's high enough to activate my fear of heights, or the fear of where I might fall.

This nostalgia is starting to be like one of those dreams that start out peaceful and then morph into a nightmare and of course that's when you wake up and the bad is the only part you remember. It's been five years yet I'm falling back into the old pattern of thinking, obsessing over what could have been if I had gone to the big city and shown up on a doorstep wearing my vulnerability like business casual, because that's what's required when you give yourself a sticker price, or at least until you've been broken in from being beaten up long enough and you wear your cracks like they look good.

Good Night

Dark and light coexist, and each one sheds truth on the other. There is immense beauty in both.

The rebellious soul thrives on this contrast, and so we haunt the day and frolic in the night.

Twisting and turning

Mine is a quiet rebellion.

Sitting in the little haven I wrought with fairy lights and a glitter lamp from when I was small and saw reindeer weaving through the capsule. Here I spin a web of words. A tangled web with too many words, too thick and not far enough in between. Words with no origin, nor a destiny. But I want to show you how warm it is, this place I hide. Bedroom a mosaic of wood finishes each one deviant from the next; purple velvet hung to dilute daylight, burned out in places so the rays come through in rings, but night rained long ago and extinguished the curtain into surrounding darkness. Treasures, a mass of tangled beads and chains belonging to masks and headpieces and chokers, consume the surface of the black lace table mat on which I arranged them. They speak in glint and moody charm. Only missing are black bed sheets and velvet hung from the walls to catch light that slipped past the curtains. Also, a tapestry rich with texture to settle over the carpet. And a Victorian chandelier. Christmas is near but because no one knows of this wishlist it is up to the imagination to give my room these gems. And yes this language is tangled because I am twisted up but that's okay because I don't deny it. I am safe here because this is my asylum.

Dark Inspiration

There are whispers about taking me to the land I came from to see my roots. Even though I don't believe in roots. That would mean believing I once was tied down, and had to have had a part of me cut off to be where I am now.  But oh how I want to go.

Pandora

Consciousness stripped of ornaments. In the shower a naked conscience. Wish the laptop could materialize in the steam because ideas fall faster than liquid heat. I catch them before they fuse with the precipitation on the bathtub floor. Ocean floor. Studio taught me the more information you put down, the more the drawing grows and develops. Because all art is merely a medium for thought, making ideas interchangeable across disciplines, of course this applies to writing. And looking at a quote and a collection would make the pen fly if computers had not subverted my cursive hand, but keys are deliberate and melodic so no romance is lost on me.

Resisting the temptation to fall into the indentation in the comforter dragged across my bed, sense of urgency defying the urge to slip into old comfort under the sheets, I carry my black box with electric fingertips smoothed by the weight of inspiration. I set it down in the mosaic of wood finishes and dub it a centerpiece to my table of treasures. The shift of atmosphere, the resistance of the chestnut under me will make this time different.

Meanwhile satin sheets and a tapestry rug slip into my wishlist.