now i will find relief (i grieve)

city lights.
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

I wish he could have seen this, if only one more time.

There are people upon whom we force a mental sense of immortality, people we believe will never die, those for whom death seems so distant a creature that we never think to invite it to the surprise parties.

So many still frames. He laughed. His hands on her belly, smiling at the idea of fatherhood. Focused and intent, worried when the birth was taking too long. Proud, loving. Honest. Young and searching. Earnest.

I keep thinking about going back, but I know that I more than half expect to see him. I could mourn with the others, but that's not my life now, and not what he would want. It makes me think, though, that maybe we were wrong, that maybe we've just been stupid kids all along, grasping at straws and slinging our hopes for the future on blind faith.

The more I have, the more I realize I have on the line. No longer material things, I now collect more lasting elements-- friends, stories, memories, love. And the more of this lasting sort of thing that I have, the more I think that maybe it would be bad karma not to keep it where I could. Maybe I wouldn't deserve it again, I think, if I didn't treat it (and thereby myself) correctly.

I wish I'd loved him more, been more trusting, been kinder. Learned sooner. I wish I weren't hesitant, or stupidly afraid of insignificant things, because it's such a waste of a finite number of hours. Isn't this why I left? Why I came back?

I wish I could reach my hand into the hearts of those around me, extract them, lock them away, keep them from failing. So much boldness lost among faulty machinery.

slippery when wet

slippery when wet
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

I needed to be 2000 miles away from everyone I knew, I say.
This makes sense, she says.
Like you, I want to add, but I don't. Especially you.

I have stacks of letters that I have yet to send, pages upon pages of words that have some meaning, or no meaning, and say all the things that tumble through my head when up late, when sipping coffee. I hate coffee; I never touch the stuff unless I'm immersed in the careful stroke of letter after letter. It's an art form in and of itself, the way we talk to one another, one underpracticed, overappreciated.

me not caring is the best thing happening to you

whitetree
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

In my dreams, I'm in the Netherlands and I'm in love, and it's the awkward kind of love, which is perhaps the only kind that really matters in the long run. There are tall buildings and strange outings and no city has ever loved me the way Amsterdam does, and I feel a bit like Clark Kent, being loved just for being Clark Kent, and not because I have a tendency to pop up at the right time in the right place and do the right thing. No, this is the kind of thing where someone loves you, even when you feel like everything you do is wrong.

they will see us waving from such great heights

blue skies and city heights.
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

The sky is a safer place when crowded with the tops of buildings. Perhaps some part of me feels that it's safer to strive for leaping in large bounds and brushing fingertips against endless blue when there's something there to grab onto on the way down.

I have a chronic love of cities that probably stems in part from an inability to admit when I need help or want company. You're always alone in cities, really, amid throngs of people who don't know you and don't wear your chains, but there's no pretenses. If you're the daring type, you can always find someone for good conversation and perhaps coffee, and afterwards, there's nothing-- no need to actually stress about maintaining a fledgling relationship. Big cities offer us the potential for the one night stands of interpersonal communication, the chance to touch one another's lives briefly and go on with our own, bettered by the experience.

I know my share of firecrackers, and hurricanes, and monuments to humanity, and for it, my eyes perhaps look sadder and my hands somehow look older.

i'm practicing out loud

brun.
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

I'm starting to think that it would be better to retreat to a larger city, find solace in the way that glass buildings project the sun onto grey brick, escape wide open skies or at least be constantly under the lights that can keep them at bay. I think that maybe if I can't see the night sky, I won't worry so much about who I share it with.

I would prefer some place with fog, near an ocean, but I'll settle for a large city in the meantime. All-night bookstores and coffeehouses and small boutiques with birds of paradise and imported candles, because these are the things that make a home. Small cities always leave me feeling as though I'm drowning, flailing for some light without really knowing whether its pursuit will help me breach the surface and breathe again. A foray into the city makes me feel as though I'm alive again.

it may be that things in your life are coming in too clear

window in green.
Originally uploaded by love like blue.

You have to understand that this feels an awful lot like purgatory. I don't know what's perpetually wrong with my lighting, but so much is surrounded in eerie glows disappearing moodily into corners obscured, and this isn't just the way that things come out; it's the way that I always see them.

Maybe my color palette is skewed. Perhaps the secrets that I keep filter out the reds in my world and leave me with this... and while I honestly like the colors my world comes in, I'm tired of keeping secrets.

I was crazy once.

love like blue.

the edges of blue.
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I dance around everything.

I don't know that it's even intentional anymore, this tendency to create a negative space with words and hope that someone can detect the shape of all the things that I don't say. It's a preference most chronic-- it travels over into my taste in artwork, my choice of subjects. I live on minimalism, and I don't know how to deal with things in my life that are bigger than arcs of light or monochrome representations of what I happen to be feeling in a single moment.

There's this play about a girl who falls head over heels for her art professor, and a year or two into their relationship, she never goes out anywhere with him, or meets people, and she rarely expresses much interest in anything other than painting canvases blue. All day, and all night, she paints them blue-- cobalt, cerulean, ultramarine, pthalo blue-- and no one really understands why, even though she tells them that colours mean different things, and the people who theorized about it were all wrong-- red is an angry colour, not a colour of love, and blue-- calming, devoted blue-- was indeed the only colour that could represent such a complex emotion. In the end of the play, he leaves because he feels somehow neglected that she won't talk to him, or go out with him, and when he leaves, she doesn't understand why. She looks down at her canvas, which is the product of years of trying to perfect blue on canvas, and she just says, quietly, "But I was painting this one for you."

I have my own stack of blue canvases-- rooms full, even-- but I pray every day that no one really figures out what they mean, because then it would be something bigger, something not minimal, something I couldn't possibly be ready for.

Nonetheless, it's an awful lot of effort, painting blue onto canvases and hoping all the while that no one really understands.

all that i know is the blue sky.

blue skies
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

Some days, the only thing that gets me through is the knowledge that we're under the same sky, no matter how far apart we might be in locale or how our words constantly fail us, even with one another. On those days, the only place that I want to be is closer, and I'd do most anything for that chance.

Other days, the same sky feels ominous, as though it chains me to you, makes you inescapable, and I wish that weren't the case. I wish that all days were like the first, and that I never had days, weeks, even months where the only place I wanted to be was the furthest place that I could be from you.

I retreat into forests when this knowledge becomes too much, take risks too great in the form of solitude and white water and crucial split second decisions with no way out. When I make the attempt to fight my way out, it's through secret passages in movie theatres and trap doors in coffee houses, where i tuck myself into darkness and drink coffee, but only when I write to you. The letters to you are my only way out of you, the only means of extraction that I know.

It's almost as thought I can dig your claws out of me this way, return them to you bloodied and slowly back away a bit.

i'm a ghost in this house

i'm a ghost in this house
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

There are fragments of me, tucked away somewhere.

I had a dream wherein I broke into pieces which flew off in countless directions. Maybe all I've been doing up to this point is trying to get them back, to collect ghosts of who I was so that I can reassemble a picture, make up for lost time and distant memories.

Most days, I am tired, but I can never sleep.

i can't make my legs move towards you

dancing feet.
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I feel safer in the abstract.

I can hear the collision of light and it is cacophonous, like the grinding of glass on glass or harsh words hitting the floor when they no longer have a home. I should be able to move my feet away from this-- away from the deafening sounds of ambivalence and the unbearable silence that comes from trying to make a life out of what we're given, but they don't move.

To compensate, we light small fires and chart their paths, make detailed notes regarding what will and won't burn. We make music of destruction and hesitation, each step backwards the rest before we repeat it all and hope that the audience doesn't get tired of hearing the same refrain.

waiting for the sky to fall

dying to get in
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I daydream of superheroes as though I too have a secret identity. If I have ever seemed larger than life, it's because I've had my share of sidekicks and that one big love that's kept me alive when thrown off of cliffs and into oceans and where mortal men would have perished. I too have seen my exile from the world and my life, taken a long exodus into the great unknown to reconcile my confusion, only to return to find this thin wire, almost like mesh, lying between myself and everything I know.

We could reach one another, if we reached out, but so daunted are we by thin strips of steel that we never make the attempt to pull one another through. I try to slip you my secrets when no one else is looking, like tucking a file into a cake or perhaps just offering you a deck of cards to pass the time. You have a different life, devoid of me, there on the inside, or the outside-- whichever side you're on, I always seem to be on the opposite, waiting-- and I fault you not at all for this. I cherish your adventures and your stories because you always bring them back to me, always capture soft focus and clips with too much contrast and place them in my hands when there is no one else around to see the exchange. They wouldn't understand it, and we could never explain.

if i don't make it (know that i loved you all along)

tubular
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I have you captured on film in the recesses of my mind, and I play them over whenever the day slows down enough, or I get lonely. I remember where I have been standing and what shoes I was wearing during every word we've ever exchanged.

My favourite still-frame is the one where you shook my grandfather's hand, because while in a hurry to take you far from my parents, I was so very proud of you, and so very proud of him, and the sincerity in your eyes, the near-invisible curves of your toned arm, reaching out-- these are the things that comprise my memories of you, the moments that I cherish.

That's perhaps my favourite of the photographs that live only in my head; my two heroes, smiling and shaking hands. For a moment, it felt like we would all make it through our lives unscathed.

my heart drops and i just stare

rayswinging
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

In so many ways, I'm a solitary creature. I often refrain from speaking, from giving any details, regardless of their significance. I always felt like a different creature entirely than all those around me, so I became accustomed to the idea that I was always going to be completely alone in the world. And for a long time, I was... until one day, I wasn't.

Whenever I see kids playing by themselves, I silently hope the same thing for them-- that one day, out of nowhere, they'll feel that resounding click of things sliding into place and they'll realize that they'll never again be alone.

the fear you won't fall

moose
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

If there are a limited number of pieces, then there are really only so many solutions to any given puzzle, so it's just a matter of being able to discern whether or not someone else sees the same picture at the end of the day that you do.

and the truth shall set you free.

clarkie02
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

Most of the time, I'm okay, really. In fact, I have the inner balance of a yoga master, and sometimes I think that all my happy buddhist ideal can come to something, but I'm not above falling apart over eggrolls and tofu, and that speaks volumes that my words never will.

no fires here.

bucketbrigade
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I wouldn't mind too much if you turned up the contrast on your memories of me, make our blues a little bluer if it means that all your glimpses of the past can show all the little details that make us click in the first place. Perhaps something lies in this, in the camera angles of our memories.

the killer in me is the killer in you

angelsstandingby
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I am always adrift in a wicked maze, teeming with minotaur and torn bits of string; some days the foe is boredom, most often mediocrity. A single synthetic encounter has altered my brainwaves enough that I think almost clearly now, a little more calmly, and I can fill your evening or your life with tales of rabbit holes and trolls and moments when one person turns and walks in two directions at the same time, and you suddenly realize that there were two people there all along, but you couldn't tell them apart when they were close together.

Vision obscured by hair too long, I am probably retreating here. Behind red-blonde blurs and bizarre camera angles and long letters that don't really say anything because I always feel like a child when I write them. I am entangled in this web wherein I don't know whether to hide myself and preserve your image of me and consequently your love or to bleed onto pages and let the small curve of my letters reassure you, promise you that I'll always be there, one of those shadows that you never have to worry about sewing back on.

This is the only way I can ensure that you'll hold me, thrusting blue on white, page after page, into your waiting hands.

your name is the splinter inside me

in memorium
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

I stop and think too much on these things, which might be the direct result of frequenting graveyards, though it's much more likely that I frequent graveyards because I think too much on these things.

I don't know where it starts, really, when we keep things from the people who matter most to us. Maybe it starts with spared feelings, or the desire not to rock the boat and continue on with things the way they are, because they're already wonderful, and who could rightly ask for more? But somewhere along the line, once we've omitted facts once, it just kind of keeps on going as though with a mind of its own, until you wake up one morning and you realize that it might be too late to make things right. At the very least, you realize that if you want to come forward and explain things, you have to account for all of the time that you've said otherwise, and then you have to sit back and wait while someone goes off to reevaluate your personal history and feel things out all over again. So maybe instead, you just take to long walks, get to know your camera better, focus on the music and the words and let that be enough.

It's not like you're ever really unhappy; really, you just think too much.

and you say that i don't have this down

morgan01
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

You ask me randomly if I'm happy, as though that's something that I could even begin to approximate. I don't think that I'll ever be happy like this again, but I shoot for contentment and most days, I can come pretty close. I have no real complaints, save for missing you, but that's one that i'll never voice anyhow.

and i remember russia as well as anyone.

dying to get in.
Originally uploaded by girafe en feu.

For someone so self-sufficient, so strong, so determined never to rely on anyone else for anything, I haven't made a major decision on my own in almost a decade.

When it all comes down, I'm always torn, and as much of a gambler as I am, I can't leave my life up to the flip of a coin, so I do the next best thing, and I place a phone call instead. I never have to call, because it's really just like asking myself, so I always know what the answers are, but I don't suppose that's ever why I pick up the phone.