I thought about which songs to sing; I thought about April and tying everything together. It’s been a year since I considered the house with pictures of crying children in the cellar, the Narnia street lamp outside of the kitchen window: since I sat, facing the sun, sharing my cigarettes with other girls, with other worries. I thought about which songs to sing; I still sing the same ones.

There’s seagulls, and crows, and I am somewhere else, and next time, I’ll be somewhere else again.

You’re nine years old, and you start to understand about the rules that aren’t written down anywhere and no one will tell you about.

This cousin of yours, she was the closest thing you had to a hero. The last time she called, you didn’t even answer, the last time she invited you to spend time, you rejected, because you had other things to do- or maybe you didn’t. She’s not your hero anymore. A couple of years ago she married, before that she traded education for a job as a maid, and before that she had a violent boyfriend. But when you were seven, she taught you about Michael Jackson and hairspray. When you were ten, she told you Kurt Cobain was dead, and when you asked who that was, why she had the name written on the back of her hand, she played Nevermind to you, from one end of summer to the other. You built a treehouse together and used it to store both the romance magazines you didn’t want your fathers to see, and the magazines you didn’t want your fathers to know you had stolen from them.

You’ll remember that summer, reading strange words about skin and looking at strange skin pictures, you’ll remember it as though it was briefer than the time you sat waiting at a café table somewhere on the Canary Islands, covering for your fourteen year-old cousin who was meeting a man somewhere else. (She was sorry about the t-shirt, it had widened when he put his head under it.)

On the way home that night, your cousin and the blonde friend spoke in English, because it was cool, they smoked secret cigarettes while you paced two steps behind. You felt angry and alone, and you frowned at them when they laughed over brightly coloured drinks offered to them by other men, and you didn’t know that it wouldn’t be very long before you would discover these rules, too, the rules that one night got your cousin cornered in a deserted street by two very large men. That summer, after the birthdays, your cousin acquired a new wardrobe of tight fabric and a straps, and you didn’t see one another so much anymore. You were on your own when you discovered these rules.

The first time you broke one of the old rules, the written rules, you were a couple of years older and running away from home. You think it was the longest summer in your life. It was, as you recall, the last summer you would say no to the beer bottles offered to you outside of festival tents. The first time you’d watch a sunrise sharing a thermo-cup of tea with someone who enticed you more than the people you knew in school; the first time you would go through several days without sleep. You slept in a man’s bed, but didn’t anticipate it when he tried to kiss you. (You hadn’t been kissed before.) When you got home, you bought new clothes, considered yourself in a mirror, and watched Fight Club because someone had made you think you should. You tucked away your new secrets in a diary, together with reports on changes in appearance and a long-lasting, ever present, goodbye to the old rules.

The last time you saw your old classmates, at the graduation party by the beach, you had to decide who to sit with; the ones who thought you were one of them for lack of choice, or the ones who said you were one of them because you were cool. This girl with a lazy eye generously offered you beer, and you said yes. Later in the evening she bit your thigh and kissed another girl; you laughed as much as they did, and for a moment you belonged, and you knew how the world worked. She taught you how to smoke your first cigarette, and later on you made someone older buy you your first Lucky Strikes. (You would learn to get creative in order to convince shop clerks you were old enough for your bad habits. Once, you’d develop a whole fake identity as a psychology student.)

Your old treehouse was torn down, years ago. You don’t know what happened to the pictures, the magazines, the flashlight mounted on the wall. Your lip is pierced; it was raining that day, and your friend had a needle driven through her tongue, and you shrugged and thought about Michael Jackson and hairspray. Most of the sunrises are spent in solitude. Over the years, you have had many homes; full ashtrays, brightly coloured drinks. If anyone asks, you’ll boldly state that you make the rules now, but you don’t eat in front of people you don’t know very well, and you like to avoid conversation about wars and the world, because you’ve found it so difficult to believe in anything.

You’re still not sure you understand about your cousin’s plastic bag and the grocery shop and the myriad of rules people make up, skipping over the cracks in the paved streets, chasing the four-leaf clover; but you don’t frown so much anymore. You wait until you understand. Summer is just around the corner. You’re not nine years old; you’re just old enough to know you don’t know everything yet.

Though, of course, most of the time, there are many. They come from interest without trust; empathy without devotion. Conducting your social maneuvres: say nothing you will not be able to answer for the day someone attempts to judge you for it. Always know your reasons. Keep several faces, if you wish, but don’t let a single one of your tongues tell a lie. No one is watching over your shoulder but you; and if you can’t stand proud under your own scrutiny, how could you ever stand upright at all?

There is no religion, no law, and no dictated moral: There’s only you.

And your lazy limbs, and your hoarse voice humming the old songs, and February, holding your hand.

this is a dream

Some like to experiment with lucidity: I do not. This is my review of the year that has passed: in this time, I have become inconsistent, my handwriting inhabited by at least three different shapes of an a. This is the work of lucidity. And January and its siblings wrapped themselves inside a sensible black coat, the inside lined with polkadots.

This is what the year has been. This is hardly obfuscation at work. This is a dream.

Have some, if only minimal, grasp of the fundamentals of communication. Do not expect me to read minds, and do not sulk because I can’t.

Apologise where apologies are due.

Know the principles and workings of tact and common courtesy.

Do not cause your peers any inconvenience because of your own troubled conscience.

If you have a problem, either be willing and able to let it go, or state it, in plain words.

if you want to smile, smile.

Thank you. Next year, this despicable holiday is canceled, and no one shall gain the opportunity to bother any one with guilt-induced misery; and no one’s heads are to be burdened with anything heavier than hangovers.

I wanted to say something about stories, and about me, and the people I spend time with. And who we think I am and what I think they are and why things are that way.

This is a memory:
A novel arrives in my mailbox, sent anonymously, but I know, without a doubt, who it’s from. And I can never read the tale again, or feel remotely similar to how I felt when I first sat down to read it, without at the same time recalling the words on the attached note, and the face of the one who wrote it.

This is another:
We had very little in common once the beer was gone, you and I, but there was this: ever so often we would rush to town together searching for the same book. Then we took it home with us; battled over who would get to read it first, or maybe if one could read while the other slept, and when I reached the end of the last chapter, I could rely on you: you would know when to light a cigarette for me, or you would roll about and hug me back, for no other reason than the excitement about the story. You understood that, and while I no longer particularly want to hug you, I am a bit sad that there was no one to replace you for those sort of moments.

And I find myself talking to someone new: I talk and talk until, quite suddenly, I do not talk anymore, not even enough to say good night before I disappear. Had I been meaning to tell a story, I would be showing my audience why, but I am not, so I won’t. I forget, most of the time, that people are people, and not stories. I forget, I think, that I am not a story either, but I can’t get rid of the narrator.

Until in a rush of dread and panic I remember: and then there is no story anymore, and that I do not know how to respond to. I retreat to my bookshelves, and do not bestow any good night wishes upon you. I tell the stories of what is and what was: of the things that never were, and others that likely never will be, and a hundred thousand scenes in which I did not play the part of the clown, and I fall asleep.

In the rooms where people wait and wait. Music, music is never the plot, we know this. But it sneaks up on you from previous paragraphs; a cheap storytelling technique, nearly a plot device. Sneaks up on you:

In the rooms where people avoid one another’s glances, the music which tells a story of your past unfolds itself, and you don’t get a warning, and you think if this was visual media you would be unaffected and the effects would merely be there for your audience’s sake, but you are your audience, and you are watching yourself, in the light of the songs that were with you when you learned how to dream.

You wish, even if briefly, that you were less familiar with the storyteller’s tricks and intentions.

Addendum:
Several deletions, category changes, and edits. Just wrapping left to do.

An attempt to explain this would start with the basic dualism: Heart, it suffers a ridiculous inclination towards blindness. Some experience, however, has taught Brain to always carry a flashlight.

Would I prefer a touch of cruelty? No - but I would have known how to navigate around it: Kindness, like yours, is a fog, clouding my vision and blurring the edges, and while it doesn’t hurt me, a flashlight won’t help me through it.

I will respond to your kindness with smiles as long as it is granted to me this way; but I would feel better armed with a map.

(Clowning, in its most basic form, can be described as one form of drama without a fourth wall. In other words, a clown acknowledges his audience.)

Nothing in your mouth is not honest. And everything in your head is huge; every concept a large painting, some full of looming shadow, some with too loose brushstrokes, just a myriad of coloured spots if you get too close.

This is art: Violet tree trunks, butter skies.

Silent man says he talks to the ceiling. And you, you talk to construction sites. Then you talk to other people’s voices, and here’s a different language, and there’s so many words, but give them the right inflection and they all mean the same.

This is art: a large sitting dog made out of 70 000 flowering plants.

The angles and inflections, do they get to trespass on the property of honesty?