Royal sessions [9.13.1998]

The top of the back stairs looks over the string factory and the windows filter out all the sun’s colors excepting the blue and can barely be seen through. On a Saturday night the workers are wishing they found another calling trapped in this ball of yarn. The potatoes are ready to come out of foil after I go down three flights to give the dryer my washed and spun clothes. There’s a heavy Mexican in the apartment below stirring beans on the stove, door open, television singing over the baby’s cries. I can see the tomato cans lined up in the pantry. The canned goods they don’t embrace change, either, you have to shake and hit the tin with your palm, they don’t want to come out, it’s better in there than being dropped into a pot and cooked into another life and consumed. My cactus keeps dying and coming back to life. Same with my guitar. It’s my fault. I keep playing favorites and the typewriter always wins. I have to turn down my stereo to hear my phone ring. Lenny Kravitz is a romantic. I am paying attention and it doesn’t cost much. If your phone never rings you distrust people. If you keep your phone off or off the hook, you cannot trust yourself. A candle that is melting without a burning wick tells of summer in Chicago. A single word in any book is less trivial than any single image on all of television. Which is a demonstration of seeing the world through my values. The secret to happiness is acceptance of suffering. People living in a hard part of town are more decent and less frightened. Reality is scarier than fiction, but not as scary as not being real. This paper is thin legal. This is the best typewriter paper around.

by #katyamills

Royal sessions [8.30.1998] part 2

 8.30.1998 (part 2)

There’s always one you say I love you to but you cannot love because they make you suffer, and the more you love them the more you suffer. And you know you’re not easy to love by any means. The red sky and screwdrivers settled the tension in my head. Can you blame the vodka for the first kiss that started it all? Spin the rack and pick your poison. Early autumn air tickles the throat and we share a hot shower on a winter night, candlelight. Here I am again. How? Why? Cea Cita sits by the bathroom door in cobra watching the curtain ripple, jabbed by elbows, and the auburn dye is bleeding off my head and into the drain as you hit me with the sponge. Tonight you will leave the party with an old acquaintance of mine and I will have to wonder why, of all the people in the world I had to run into randomly, that fateful night in Wicker Park, when I was so wonderfully disciplined in avoidance, it was you. I could not resist the euphoria. The dangerous way our blood spiked in contact. It surprised me as much as you. Your eyes were so wide. What was I to do, say hello and goodbye? In the intoxication of a Chicago night in July? Maybe it’s time to change the locks. Take the silver key you gave me put it in an envelope and slide it under your door.

 

by #katyamills