vanilla tea volume I pink issue
intermittent existential crisis people who stay up late to read poetry, their tired eyes capture light in the morning. sleep is troubled by faded pieces on museum walls and background voices speaking unknown languages while your own face is blurred. who can remember what they look like awake? wholly obsessive desire to be alone on weekends. caffeine overdose. chain-smoking cigarettes because the smoke reminds you of being amongst clouds.
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t.s elliot
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August 14, 1932 Anais: Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you— these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old. Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly —"Some day he'll come!") I still hear you singing in the kitchen—a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you're happy in the kitchen and the meal you're cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to you rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anais, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger
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zones. I don't find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind. To be blind forever! (Now they're singing "Heaven and Ocean" from La Gioconda.) I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo's records. "Parlez moi d amour." The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that, but I can't do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe anymore, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will. All morning I was at my notes, ferreting through my life records, wondering where to begin, how to make a start, seeing not just another book before me but a life of books. But I don't begin. The walls are completely bare—I had taken everything down before going to meet you. It is as though I had made ready to leave for good. The spots on the walls stand out—where our heads rested. While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We're in Seville and then in Fez and then in Capri and then in Havana. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon's soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before— consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience. HVM
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i want to make the world jealous or beautiful.
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A dictionary of imaginary places found on the body The Head There is a small wandering city that is lost inside your head. It is full of a new type of blood pumping trees. The old trees were sick of being old trees so they outgrew photosynthesis and made roots inside your rivers. Now they grow thoughts out of you that brush against the soft walls of your skull. Wish, wish, wish they call against your ears until you stop to listen and call it blood rush. The city is prone to long periods of rainfall, enough to turn it's paths into shaking rivulets, enough to start the tree veins drinking in water instead of blood. You can tell when the lost city is raining inside someone's head when you look into their eyes they are heavy or it's like looking into a room someone's just moved out of, with the outlines of the shapes of paintings still faded in on the wallpaper. The city makes your thoughts turn sodden, they drip from the tree leaves and you end up pressing them from your eyes. Every rain tear is a snowflake of sad words, the trees shudder inside you, you stand shaking in doorways. You say something mean to someone because you're scared of drowning but want to take the words back right after. You lie down under the covers, hiding you think; 'at least the trees still love me.'
The Throat. In one of your favourite pictures the girls two lips look like upturned tulips so you try to grow a garden at the back of your teeth. You take a water can and tip it against your tongue. You play classical records with your mouth open for the new green shoots. There are flowers behind your eyes, your body is a gathering of stems. You touch your tulips to someone else's tulips and your cheeks suddenly bloom.
The Heart There is something like a spool of thread in the shape of the world where your heart should be. It is static telephone wire. Your heart is noise pop. Your heart is reaching away from you and attaching itself to others until there are wires everywhere and it's like walking around in a graveyard of communication lines that isn't a graveyard but a gathering of souls. The Spine It takes a long time to read someone like a book. You need lean your spines together and then the bone patterns get imprinted and press together in invisible molds. That person's bone prints nestle in beside your own bones to form little memory fossils. If
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you run your fingers down someone's back sometimes you can feel them, it's like reading in braille. The Hands The left hand is dense with feathers. When you find yourself uncertain they flutter in agitation. When you're sleeping they brush against your cheeks. The bones are light and they look like reverse footprints of birds through your skin when you clench your fingers. The right hand is made of glass. You do everything thing you can not to break it. You don't touch people who speak with sharp words or people from high places when they look dangerous. Someone holds your hand and feel a mix of happiness and nervousness. Later on you check for hairline cracks with a microscope. The Feet In your feet there is a city of ice. It thinks the ground is the ocean and you haven't the heart or the words to tell a city what to believe in. When you're frightened a shiver thrills down your spine and touches your heels. It results in plummeting temperatures in the city of ice and you are frozen to the floor for days. Your feet turn blue, you try to breath but it covers the windows in slices of Antarctica and you're left scraping the frost from the surfaces.
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please don’t leave us here.
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How to become a ghost and forget what you were before.
i. I am such a small sea, I am such a small sea. ii. There are phantasms and illusions walking around barefoot in the streets. You do not easily recognise yourself in the space around you or in those whose feet are connected firmly to the ground. You read once about atoms and how there is more space than no space. You remember placing your fingertip against your desk and running it's atoms along the surface and realising that you were not touching desk atoms to your atoms, just feeling them vibrate against the space around your scattered electrons. You think this means that you can never technically touch anything, no matter how heavily you walk your feet will never really touch the pavement, no matter how close your skin gets to his skin you will never truly hold him. You wonder whether this is sad or beautiful or happy but discover that there is also too much space between words and feelings. You realise that maybe you always knew this, ever since you were young and learnt about hearing and sound vibrations and if a tree falls in a forest but no one is around to hear it does the tree make a sound? If no one saw him touch you was he really there at all? If 84% of everything is something we can't see does it exist more than we do? Scientists cannot calculate our logic, diagrams of internal organs cannot represent the depths of our self-convulsion. iii. You are hovering above (not touching) the floor. The more you try and reach things the further they become. At the hospital the nurse gives you a silver pin to wear in the crook of your arm and blood is coming out like lace. You're thinking was it red sea or dead sea? And if there are pearls hidden inside you still. You wonder if you can touch the idea of the world more than you can touch the ground. 16
iv. You keep missing him even as he's standing beside you holding your hand. You're thinking it's because some souls shouldn’t be apart and maybe you could stitch yours together if only you could find the beginnings of each other. At night you lay beside him, your skin touching-not touching his skin, trying to hear the sound of thoughts stringing themselves together. You want to dream about what a soul is but you dream about falling off a mountain instead. v. You are partly still that young girl at the party where the boy gave you a silver bottlecap ring and told you "imagine we're married and this is our first dance." Your first kiss was so hard it bruised your lips. In your room later and alone (in the darkness space either becomes infinite or becomes irrelevant) you pressed your knuckles against your lips again and again to keep the bruise blooming in a never-ending blush of plum-red. You think that finding the names of things makes them less frightening. You look up the origin of the word 'blush' and you want it to be a conjunction between the word blood and the word rush because then something would connect, but it comes from an old English word that means to glow. You don't feel like you're glowing at all, just hitting atoms against atoms and waiting for something to ignite. vi. He tells you he's frightened of crowds yet you can't see anything but gaps. All fear is the same fear. You wonder if you can drown without water. You remember the blood running from you in lace ribbons and trying to keep the pearls inside. You're sitting in the middle of the room and you're pressing your own skin with your skin but you can't feel silk spheres underneath. There's no treasure there and you feel panicked so you say something mean to him. He tells you the length of your heart is the width of his back tooth. You both say sorry and the doctors tell you your heart is normal-sized, the size of your fist balled up and turning pale turning ghost, but you can't imagine holding all that blood in even only one of your outstretched palms. He tells you the stereotypical heart shape was always meant to be two hearts fused together and the thought makes you hopeful sometimes, although you can never identify with human organs. You suddenly feel like opening yourself up and seeing them for yourself, how everything is touching, how everything is swimming in the space together and your naked eye can't see the spaces. You find out that they call our gaps 'dark matter' and that giving it a name only makes it more frightening. vii. You're trying to measure how much more you need to be to take everything in. You've calculated the measurements, the scientists were wrong again. You are nothing monumental, you are no big bang. You can't let your heart grow or you'll explode.
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the end cargocollective.com/kelseyipsen
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