My Mental Milkcrate » explanations and things left unsaid

Sinking in

Jessica N. Coles — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:41:46 +0000

What a long week it has been. I relax in my own comfy chair next to an open window in the corner of my living room. I watch the tiny movements of the maple leaves and listen to the traffic on Granville and beyond. The chirp that accompanies pedestrian crossings on either end of my block. This feels like the first moment of stillness in months, but we only arrived on Tuesday.

I’m surrounded by boxes after four days of a near empty apartment. We had a miscommunication with the moving company; our stuff was not delivered when we had expected, so we had to make do with what we had crammed in the car and what our new building manager was kind enough to lend us. Sleeping on an air mattress notwithstanding, it was nice to get to know our new living space without our possessions.

The building is old. A little run down, but comfortable. Charming and colourful and compact without feeling cramped. A nice change after the soulless townhouse in Edmonton. Oh, it was a decent place to live for the time we were there, but it had no mystery. This place already feels like it wants to be home.

It has been a week of motion. By car, by bike, on foot. I’ve walked kilometres this week. In sun and shade and cloud. Walked down to surprise tall ships off Kitsilano Beach. To an excellent sushi place. To Granville Island. Up and down the shops near our place. Re-learning my feet.

Tomorrow, I start work. I don’t know if the ordinary style of permanence that a job gives life will tip me into the reality of my situation. Because it still feels like I’m just visiting. Even though everything I own in the world is here. I’m not really here yet. Because if I’m really here, almost everyone I want to share this adventure with is too far away. And I’m not ready for that.

How Open Windows Remind Me

Jessica N. Coles — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:47:26 +0000

I abandoned the fashionable to learn to think of my own heart and soul. To explore empty alleys of my past littered with scraps of half-decayed paper. All these years constructing logic for the illogical. Severing myself from a wellspring to drift on well-aired currents of collective conscious.

I’m not home yet. Wandered half-circle and of course we go only forward. This never-ending loop. Maybe yet I’ll learn humility. Maybe yet I’ll learn to search my own pockets for treasure. Maybe this time, I won’t forget to take you with me. And open windows will remind me to sweep cobwebs from intercostal muscles.

I will be ready when it comes this close

Jessica N. Coles — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:13:08 +0000

If we listen closely, we remember to hear mortality with something other than fear. Not eagerness. Something less than reluctance. The point closer to exhaustion when we simply put down our lives and settle into whatever comes next. Nothing. Eternity. Whatever we believe to be behind our eyes and deep within our ears. Filling our stomachs and tucked beneath our spleens. With something more than scraps of music we’ve forgotten all the words to.

I watch this process. Impartial, impersonal, implacable. March through lives and lives again. I’m not the first to watch this. I’m not watching for the first time. I’m not watching alone. But we’re all staring in different directions and fighting the oblique angles of ourselves.

At the end of all years, I will claim these for my soul: Guitar strings. Wine saturating the tongue with oak and fruit. Leisurely sunrises at the 53rd parallel in mid-winter. My voice, shaded and shaken with too many years. Old stories recovered in threadbare patterns of narrative.

My darling, fetch me a cider

Jessica N. Coles — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:42:40 +0000

While I was breathing the footsteps of a city, the concrete click of hard boots on tile, I was striking perception against a skyline to see if anything would spark. I could only hope that your mind was tinder-dry and splintered, carefully stacked to flare into blaze. A crackle of leaves in the shape of paper soaked with flammable ink. So your pupils would reflect a phrase I should have shared last night, obscured in the haze of scotch and other whiskeys.

The explanations became unreachable. Like the breaking point of your chin. The cliff where tears and sweat plummet to your chest without touching a finger or the heel of a hand. And we became tangled in syllables of sympathy that removed the burden of affection.

Because the truth is, darling, love like this is possible for any mirror image. The inverse of colours folding in reflection. You were smudged lines and smeared edges waiting for my visual cortex to interpret you.

Treating a sugar rush like a solution

Jessica Coles — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:07:20 +0000

In times like these, the weariness is passing into something like resignation, which I keep insisting is acceptance. And you, who know me or don’t know me or find here some circumstance that perhaps coincides with a moment or your lifetime, are not sure how either of us ended here. The plan falls flat like learning to juggle pancakes. Ramble bamble, roil and scramble. These awkward twinings of inside and out. Wander over my skin like vines on a statue in a place where vines can grow on statues. Perhaps all I need is a poem and a pen.

Le coeur

Jessica Coles — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:10:43 +0000

If you were here (or I were there), I would tell you I love you. This profound wave of the unconditional that I can neither explain nor support. I love the fact of your existence and that love becomes a joyful tracing of movement. The way you lean a skateboard back and forth down the sidewalk. I love your mismatched clothes and the jerking movements of your imperfect limbs. I love your tired smile and your tired jokes and your tired isolation. I love you because you do not know I love you. And if I told you, instead of believing that perhaps I leave a trail of barely perceptible affection like the scent of twilight, you wouldn’t accept it. Or you would and I would forget how to offer. The way words forget what it means to love. The unknown with a whole heart.

These neologisms would not catch on

Jessica Coles — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:40:46 +0000

She cannot admit that she misses him. It would perforate her larynx and puncture his inner ear. She is frustrated with the weight of phrases that should be light and uttered often. She wishes there were other words with the shape of this gap and the shade of this affection. Her tongue is ossifying with the unsaid.

Postcards #7 & #8

Jessica Coles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:30:36 +0000

You once asked me about all the things I should say. Everything I wanted to say but wouldn’t. Because the phrases meant nothing or something or anything. I’ll say one thing now: I loved the you that wasn’t really you. My larynx crumbled under the shift of your tectonic tongue.

***

I promised we were done. We were done. Except that I can’t get my skin back. You left a layer of ancient volcanic ash that wouldn’t scrape clean and can’t be excavated. So I keep dropping these postcards in the mailbox. Because it’s better than knowing who you are now.

Postcard #4

Jessica Coles — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:26:21 +0000

I think you would be amused to learn how much hip-hop and rap I listen to now. I don’t wish you were here to find out. I can’t pinpoint. You said we were bottomless in all the wrong ways. I didn’t know any beats sick enough to convince you otherwise.

Postcard #3

Jessica Coles — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:44:05 +0000

It’s late and I have a headache. This shifting barometric pressure has found its way into every fissure and sulcus of my cerebral cortex. I never explained the architecture of the brain. After all the time I spent memorizing the cranial nerves. I have forgotten the taste of your wrist.