Straight No Chaser

Tests

four of them, tomorrow, between the two of us. two each. his are in the morning and mine are in the afternoon, so he's study-obsessed but i'm not; still, our collective plans get disrupted. a blessing in disguise, because this room was going to need a tremendous overhaul before it was ready to house our poetry workshop/listening party. he doesn't mind my messes, even less so now that he knows they're not nearly as dire at home, but i (greatly) mind subjecting him, and everyone, to them. nobody should have to live in this tornado of papers and colors. probably not even me. no actual dirt, mind you. treesje used to leave the most horrid piles of dirt and food everywhere, and we had fruit flies, which i found disastrous, and since then i've been careful not to confuse messy with dirty. i am the former; she is the latter. messiness has become integral to my personality. but i clean up, for him.

i'm pissed, not at him but generally pissed, that we've had to cancel two nights in a row. last night would have been perfect, because melony spent the night at april's house. privacy, ahhhh, and finally some fucking space. they dislike each other intensely, for reasons i'm not going to probe. if i care at all, it's only minimally, because they don't have to like each other. if i cared whether my friends liked each other, i wouldn't have any friends, because there is not a single realm in my life wherein my best friends don't inexplicably hate each other. and here, i've already pledged loyalty to marcus, but melony is a good person and a good friend, if short-term, so it's easier not to care that they hate each other than to try to take sides. anyway, though, last night canceling was my fault, because i forgot about the stupid nine o'clock meeting, forgot about it totally, and was prettying up my lips when i remembered, out of the blue. he was presumably already walking over, and he sounded frustrated when i called to apologize.

that's neither here nor there. the quality of our relationship is a function that is contingent primarily on my attitude. if i could, i'd freeze our monday experience, encapsulate it in an amethyst bead and string it on a sixteen-inch silver chain. i'm in the market for a new necklace, anyway, because i was dumb and i put the philadelphia necklace over a turtleneck, forgot it was there and broke it, deshirting. but you don't want to do that, freeze a good thing. you want it to be dynamic and fluid, a gush of euphony, and you want it to well, voluminously.

neither here nor there. the dreams, the dreams have been weird, this week. something in the tofu, i guess. saturday i was standing in a virgin records, pulling cds off the shelves, stacking the cases one on top of the other to build a tower, climbing it to reach, symbolically, an ipod dangling from a ceiling panel. sunday i was with thomas, marcus's dad thomas, and he was showing me how to set up the sprinkler system in their backyard without accidentally spraying the golfers on their way to the second hole. monday i was ripping all my earrings out, through the skin, and using them to pierce other stuff. tuesday was the aaron dream, succeeded by a giant wave of waking shock. then last night was the showering dream, detailed extensively on a sheet of looseleaf paper with the other four, because i refuse to be one of those people who keeps a dream journal.

marcus was common to all the dreams, doing what he usually does in dreams, but a bit more vividly because we've spent a lot of time together this week. when he appears in my dreams, his dialogue is crisp and funny, usually a composite of real-life extracts. text messages, sometimes, because when i read them, i always hear his voice, reading them. his dream-hands are smaller and rougher than the real things. can't say why; i like them better the way they are. in the virgin records dream, he helped me climb the tower, held onto my hips so i didn't fall till i got to the top, gave my stomach a kiss when it was level with his face. felt very much like the real thing.

the disappointing thing about the tuesday dream was that my main question never got answered. did they like each other? couldn't tell you. but aaron looked awfully happy, sailing away with strange afterward. strange, whose first name is, and this gives me chills, sharan. she canceled class yesterday. poked a tiny little hole in my giant, pulsing crush. our second short stories were due; she was supposed to collect them and then lead us through the advanced version of the narrative collage exercise, but didn't because of some emergency somewhere. three guesses where my imagination took that one. anyway, leave it to me to be that outrageously disappointed about a canceled class and a free afternoon. what a nerd.

hey anonymous commenter, i'm not even going to dignify your request, no matter how many smiley faces flank it, or how often. not only did you (and everyone else) totally fail to identify yourself as a reader, when i asked you to, aaron and i have better things to do anyway.

like, hmm.

suggestions, aaron?

call me unamerican, but whenever i see this commercial for pigeon forge (some kind of atlanta-based park designed to preserve area heritage and offer old-fashioned family fun in all vivid shades of red, white and blue), i hear the twangy music and this woman bragging, in a thick georgian accent, about how her children are growing up on the same piece of land where she was raised, and i think, i wouldn't be caught dead at pigeon forge. except maybe swinging from a tree.

but, in the interest of not ending on a racially paranoid note, because that's not who i am, back to the tests.

fuck the tests. i wanted my coltrane kisses tonight.