Night

He was cocooned by the soft blink of the sky, the stars glinting like the lights behind clenched eyelids.

Imagination

As he skimmed over the panoply of his imagination he folded certain thoughts, underlined particularly tempting dreams, ensuring that he had something to come back to if he ever reached the end. How he hoped he never would.

Sick

As an adult he missed being sick like a kid. He wanted to skip school without consequence, to lie on the couch watching his favourite movies while his mom brought him juice and snacks and seemed to love him more than usual. There is a romanticism to a child's illness. Now, being sick meant having work pile up. It meant taking care of your weak, difficult self. Being sick became being sick. As a kid, it was an unusual and unfamiliar way to experience the day, to see how your parents lived. Carefree, you basked in sympathy. Nostalgia for malady. Times really were tough.

Dreams 4

He reached the nadir of monotony when he started to feel guilty in his dreams. Sleep. The Subsoncious. A place for him to wander into forbidden bedrooms, to visit worlds that didn't exist. No. His dreams stopped before he did anything wrong, before a kiss, sometimes before a handshake. Why should he have to make the right decisions in his sleep? Gone was his only outlet for debauchery free from consequence. He was destined to live in reality all day and all night, waking up each morning quivering with contrition for things that almost happened, things he wanted to happen, but never did.

Opportunity

Every drop a moment. I stand outside until it stops, until the sun dries the skin, until the rain is mine.

Love

No one had fallen asleep on him before. He sat on the couch awake, listening to Cat Power sing about how "when we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky." Her head was on his chest. His arm was sore, but he didn't want to wake her. He let it hurt, for every time he saw her breathe, her lips closed, her chest rise, the pain subsided. He sat as still as his love for her, afraid to wrest it from its place. The album ended, and she continued to sleep. The finished, spinning record sounded like her breaths. He stared into the dark room, thinking he'd never need to care for anything else.

Image 3

Frost on a frozen pane of glass. A tear clouded iris.

Kiss

He thought of a kiss as an intimate word. Something spoken through touch instead of sound. So when his lips met a woman's lips and his tongue slid against hers he felt that they were telling each other some ineffable thing. The breaths, sucks, and soft moans. Inflections of the speech. The wet exchange was something they kept forever, a secret that they could taste and swallow.

Vines

Like a vine she wraps herself around him. An arm around around his neck. A leg pinning his down against the bed. He lies like a rustic house ready to be overcome by a beautiful growth. She runs her fingers along his chest and he thinks of how a vine climbs the walls. Slow and furtive. He thinks of how the plant claims its home, tightening against the frame. And as she moves against him, her hands gripped around his wrists, he lies still. He feels her pulse, her breath, her body soft against his. Her breasts, the flowers of the vine, brush against his face. She wants ever part of him to be touched by her. He lets her. She envelops him.

Dream 3

He awoke sensing that he had been taught something true. What exactly that was, he could not be sure. The details had vanished, leaving only a wraith of feeling hanging in his thoughts like a spider's web. He strained to grasp what stretched farther out of reach. Like a tree at its greatest height he knew there was so much more to know and feel. Endless miles of sky waiting to be touched.

Image 2

Hoar frost on a tangle of branches. Her head on my shoulder.

Cummings

Because he writes about love much better than I can, here's the final stanza to one of my favourite poems:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands - e.e. cummings

His equation of rain to hands is so delicate and beautiful. It makes no sense, and yet it's perfect and I understand what he means. Maybe that says something about love too. You don't understand love; you feel it, and you talk about it and describe it in abstractions and fanciful flights of the imagination.

Image

Her wet hands. Leaves after a light rain.

Workout

He was at the point of exhaustion where lathering shampoo into his hair made his biceps tire and swell. At first this worried him, but being a pragmatic man he saw an opportunity. By being fatigued he could avoid going to the gym, for washing his hair provided all the muscular duress he required. Friends would come for workout advice and he'd say to them with a smirk, "lather, rinse, and repeat. Six sets of five."

Squint

Sitting in the passenger seat. The sun's glare made him lower the visor so he could see. Upon doing this, however, he felt that he saw less. The visor completely obscured his vision of the top right corner of the windshield. Squinting into the sun at least gave him the chance to fight against the shine. He decided then that he would rather struggle to see what hid behind the painful rays than be wide-eyed and comfortable and not see anything at all.

Morrison

I've been thinking lots about film and photography lately. Often pictures are thought of as a souvenir of a particular time. We taken them so we won't forget. Of course, what is shown in a photograph can be deceiving and incomplete. A square or rectangle cannot contain an entire truth, especially considering the subjectivity of perspective. Still, photos and films remain physical proofs of existence in space and time.

Bill Morrison's 2004 film Light is Calling, like his acclaimed feature length film Decasia, depicts the decay of nitrate film stock. Like the flickering and waving of flames the film's images become amorphous shapes, always changing. Staring hard you see a horse drawn carriage emerge from haze of the rotting nitrate. A woman's face fights through as in a dream. Soldiers press forward, trying to tear away the layer of the film's festering flesh. The images in Morrison's film behave as memories. It's a battle to be seen. The scenes never change. The people still smile. The cart still moves. But we cannot see things the same way. We recognize moments, those that push with ever weakening arms against the thickening curtain of forgetfulness.

Watch this film. The score is beautiful too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf9ah8IUVgw

Work

The boys stood on the edge of bank, proud of the work they had done. The twelve hours of hauling mud-caked tarp out of the canal had left them almost translucent. They became part of the land, a colour in the sky. The sun began to fall and the wind rose. Red sweater, flannel shirt. Black hat, woolen toque. They stood there for awhile longer. Alone on the quiet, lonely lake, their limbs aching and mouths parched, they thought about the long walk through the field to the car. It was time to go back home. Back to where artificial lights lit the sky and work never left you sore the next day.

Photo by Kristian Jordan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawntraitor/7151023313/in/photostream/lightbox/

Drive

The drive home was a long stare. Automatic traveling. I think better when I move. Street signs and traffic lights crept by unnoticed. All I saw was you.

Revisiting

There is a photo of me in Grade 10 with a girl whom I had liked off and on since elementary school. She's lying on her stomach on the grass, resting her elbows on a blue duffle bag. I'm sitting beside her, leaning up against the side of her back. My left arm is bridged over her body. There are three other people occupying the frame of the photo. The girl I like, her eyes are closed, and I think she's squinting at the sun. Our closeness is forced. I think I knew that then. But now I know her eyes weren't closed because of the sun. She just didn't want to be there. Her smile is an uncomfortable one, the kind people make when they have nothing to say. Shortly after that photo was taken she left for the summer and her and I never worked out. I can see the end in the photo now.

It's interesting to look back at photographs to see what you missed or misinterpreted. The image never changes, but how you see the image can.

Opportunity

The sun descended in the autumn twilight. A muted glow, like the final ember in a bonfire. Always different. Sometimes he wished he could film each day's sunset so that he would never miss a single smear of colours spread across the sky in myriad combinations. But even if he could save the evenings he knew there would never be time to watch the tapes. There was too much else to see, too much to feel. The days short and the nights shorter. Perhaps if he never slept he could do and see all that he wanted. He was tired of being bound by time and its devouring eyes, stealing so much of the beauty. A great deal left to the periphery, teasing all the time. And so he stayed up one night. He stared out his window and watched the sun's slow dial turn through the hours, and he hoped someone else was awake, seeing the day begin and knowing that it would never be repeated.

Trapped

A photo album; that's where he wanted to live. A place where he could truly be in the moment. He'd flit from picture to picture, an itinerant man of the past. Something just seemed better before, he thought. He liked proof that he was happy, that he was in love. In the present he was never quite sure. Looking out his bedroom window he'd watch the clouds dim the sun and feel that life would always be this way. No moment to count on. Searching through piles of photographs he began to shape his new life. The perfect collage, a bricolage of the best times. A place where he knew his heart would flicker and each day was a day to look forward to.

And so his world was built. A slideshow of seconds. The beginnings of feelings. The hint of movement.