.How Does it Feel.
by anna-louise
this in the mail from italy very sharp hope you see it too.
As soon as i ring the bell something's not where it belongs.
Enter the room and the house. A nice small clean overbooked
place with a few dim lights on. Kiss the host, blonde sandra,
and her longtime live-in boyfriend antonio, and "the other
one who lives here" toto is on the phone. these ain't exactly
friends but i'm enough well liked to get smiled at and
extend an invitation for dinner to. i never talk a lot in this
house and everyone is nice. oh .As soon as me and sandra get the usual girl cheek kissing
going there it comes the jacket factor. see we both lost one
months ago and we realize sandra's is at my place. Mine
well just popped out - fun miracle - at my angel friend
fred's (the only guy who loves it when i write about matt
damon as a washed up babysitter and stuff). Mom says it
might be a seemingly coincidental manoeuvre from a
guardian spirit. so never be sad again sweetheart. oh again.
A never seen before guy-with-joint calls me over the table.
sandra makes dinner. little conversation. forget his name
as he speaks it. show him a photo stanislavski piece of
journalism ("When Words Fail to Express: the first Fisiognomical
Film Column") with me and a married-with-kid friend making
faces at tearjerkers. he says it's fun. he thinks i'm pretty.
anyone looks better in polaroids.Enter my real friends, the ones who got me here. igor publishes
the genre mag with the photos (proud parental comment: "hey,
you're the only chick who doesn't drop her clothes in here !").
d paints pictures with aliens, ronaldmcdonalds, sharks and
zombies. they're good. two hours ago i got a paid drink from
igor and a formal ban from d's place because he was working.
once i played with the idea of becoming a painter's lover.
prepare the table. finish phone calls. turn playstation off.
open presents. D gives me a tape of humanoids from the deep
(reknowned bad horror flick with half humans half salmons
raping women all over) from a street wholesale. igor gives
me an office stamp in spanish language. i have nothing for
them.have dinner. lit cigarettes. eat slowly and graciously. look
as d and igor start discussing again and again about these
people's careers - they're all painters. Look at igor claiming
that it ain't personal but that man from the art mag is a
jerk. Look at d getting defensive. Look at the others trying
a good natured according. Look at sandra looking beautiful.
three years my senior. talented. warm. feel the guy with
joint looking at me. thinking it's not worth a glance feel
my invisible boyfriend's embrace and think i'd like a real
kiss to drown in. lounge music all over the place. guy with
joint says i look better live than in photo with this new
artificial redhead. thanks it helps when you try to be a
japanimation character. Sometimes feels like flames
and spent matches. colour called "fire". fire please. God, one
year ago i would have lavished a situation like that with
subtle glances just to let you know that i was around. fine.
maybe that means growing up. maybe that means getting
depressed.drinking and not getting drunk. good good good. all sober
here. d searches his pocket and comes out with a small
envelope. Five seconds it could be a kind of speed, then
it's his flu remedy. Oh man, and d was allegedly reported to
do heroin once in a while. All you see is a guy in a neutral
sweater with a bad cold. The hypothesis of an evening
watching someone else do playstation car races is too much.
slowly start thinking about sleeping and reasons why it's so
lovely---carry yourself away with an idea of feeling someone's
skin into space age. like glass. cleansed and rough.
heartstopping. looking all the way through an imperfect body
right to the bones. bones should be perfect repetitive. crystal
day with compact grey sky and water flowing. a small movie
called a river to drown in (picture that) no one has heard of,
supposed to be a study of human emotion & presented by a noir
author. i guess it could look like rain. we all could.sandra is doing shoots with a good digital camera -a present-
and cameras me. as usual, being shot when not in the extroverse
mood swing makes me invisible. i do the kindest smile.
floating back to the surface i feel so calm. natural. stare
at the tv set where igor and d are screwing each other out in
a martial arts fight as their own sweet little hetero problem
solving way. fuck, they are thirty. sneak up on the big bed
they are sitting on the edge of. roll up into a ball & find
something to read. still techno lounge from the stereo from
another room plus a low tone techno core from the game.
silence while reading some graphic novel about deranged
mutants with bad ending. Toto fell asleep a few minutes ago,
and now he's sleeping in the most silent way all over the
table. sandra antonio and the guy are rolling dices. They
write down scores in tiny numbers on a paper cloth, the
same we tried the office stamp on during dinner (while playing
with Mask toys and pulling their heads inside and out).
another comic book, an anthology of surreal pulp stories by
charles burns (hey hey, this one we know who he is). black
and white. beautiful. blunt. guaranteed to give me bad
dreams all night long. all around the house one can touch
the presence of a nonexistent bond within us.still on the bed, i wonder who sleeps in here.
half an hour later the three of us share a taxi home. it takes
nothing to get up the stairs.enter hallway. drop bag and coat. find my mother is still
awake. tell about the jacket matter and look at her wonder about
the lucky star and the lead spirit. girl, you sure have one.
she kisses me goodnight and says the us have bombed baghdad.
first thought, okay saddam will throw atomic all over us i
could die by dawn and this would be the last memory from
planet earth. as i lay myself to sleep (yeah, sure) i try to
evoke a quiet low profile charm just to cool out, like,
don't know, no-talent girl meets gorgeous blind boy and falls
for him (cheesy as it is everyone has its own prozac) but
all that comes out is this incredibly strange painful sensation
as if the chest turned into a paper handkerchief and someone
was making small burnings with a lit cigarette and i could
see the burning hole slowly stretching. still see the burnt
borders. and sure there was the feeling like hey finally i
share some hush obsession with my favourite writer and sure
it was somewhat charming but all in all was too much to be
pleasant.i fell asleep. i can't tell when.
The end of the peel...
... making faces at tearjerkers
