laconic's New Writeups

Very sweet and not at all smooth (idea)

2004-01-31T10:05:30Z

They walk by together and drop their suitcases to the floor with a exhausted thump. Mom slumps down on the bench to decipher their scheduled departure time and gate from ticket stub. They are : coats and scarves layered extra thick. Mom is patient, Daughter is restless. Pacing, prowling. I am given a once over as she walks by, and recieve a smile when I look back and make eye contact. On the return trip to Mom's bench she asks, can she sit down next to me? This is good because I have been watching the clock wishing it would spin faster for the last fifteen minutes.

do you know what time it is
10:00
are you on the bus that leaves gate nine?
ya
Do you know Juliet Roberts?
no, do you?
i dont know her but i wish i did.
do you know if the bus is going to california?
i'm not sure. check the departures list there, the bus number is 6521
.
.
.
you are going to california?…

I can see the tracing blue of your just beneath the surface (idea)

2002-07-14T22:49:14Z

I've got a picture of you I look at sometimes. Pictures tell us certain things depending on what we want to see. They let us reduce infinite complexities to simple truths. There is always more if you look closer, now there is grit, now there is more that was hiding earlier. Details emerge. Distance is good too, it can yield perspective. I do this: I don't want depth usually. I would rather simple looking and taking me back to when it was, what was ours, what we found.

But today I look closer. Dark circles under your eyes, an up all night too tired. There are birds skittering around in the background, all of them together except one off to the side. On its own. All alone. This one can be you, and that one will be me. Close your eyes, tell me what you see. There is more than just ocean back there. The waves come in from two different angles, criss-crossing. Cancelling out or at least calming each other. I was hoping we might do the same.…

Let's tear down build up smashing a new world (idea)

2002-01-10T11:59:27Z

I dreamed fading blue greens, I never really fell asleep. Outside it was still bright daylight under the halogen lamp, a little lonely island of never go to sleep land. Kind of sickly in its late brightness, the shade of over exposed sour worn by graveyard shift employees stumbling through the night on coffee and automata motion under huge banks of fluorescents. Slightly too much grim detail showing, lit unflattering and vicious.

Those sad mis-trimmed bushes and keeling over roses maybe a little like me, listing yet not quite able to collapse. I can never figure out how much of my insomnia is will and how much is beyond my control, it is probably both.

The muted swish of cars rocketing past on the interstate fills as background, a sunken into the ground with cracking ivy-crawled retaining walls never ending road to nowhere in particular but everyplace also. The sort of road that is always there waiting to welcome, even four am…

Later that night: Both of us crying, him sometimes yelling. (idea)

2001-12-15T21:13:14Z

tucks her voice underneath herself and folds her hands,
whispers in your ear "it's all right."

(it's okay again)

winters and summers stand end on end,
digging holes that fill up in the sand.
we won't let go,
not quite yet.

(stars spread out over the land)

the taste of you starts to go bland,
sits down quiet and sometimes stands.
words that wont let go,
not yet certain. never. no.

December 12, 2001 (idea)

2001-12-12T15:42:14Z

The first time I met him I knew he was trouble. He was charming, brilliant, talented, and flagged with a big invisible danger sign over his head. There are some people that just smack of no good if you get too close to them, like touching hot metal they will burn your skin and leave you with hurt and a scar to remind you much later on of the short shared moment. We started dating a short while later.

And of course, he cheated on me. I knew he had well before he decided to tell me by how he began to move a little sheepishly under direct eye contact, and also hard as you might try, when it is two people who share a secret, word is going to get around. And so he finally sat me down one day to unburden himself of his tortured secret. Squirming in his seat trying to spare me, trying to find the most gentle and least incriminating words he let it drip out bit by bit into a little lump of shame on the floor between us. I sat there staring at him, shrugged.

"you…

Could have beens, should have beens (idea)

2001-11-08T09:15:22Z

He kept stealing glances all day. I saw the corner of his eye glances out of the corners of mine while I was supposed to be driving. Sometimes I full looked over to see what the reaction would be, most of the time it was a spreading what are you smiling about smile. I counted the miles. Fifty. Ninety. One hundred thirty. Tried to memorize what it felt like so that there would be more for later, take it all apart and put it back together again. That is how I learn. Patient and slow observing, throwing out little bits to see what happens.

He was jealous when the clerk flirted with me. I was buying batteries and asking directions with a smooth glaze of banter on top, he must have been scrutinizing the face opposite mine more carefully than I had been. Maybe it was just a better vantage point that let him see too much or more than was really there. Gave himself away by trying to joke about it on the way to the car. Echoes in my head.

\ I'm not…