Blue Angel Winks at Ginny
The city houses so many people, so many people that are more than they seem...
on the surface. An icon asks a friend to pierce her ear in the toilets and they do without hesitation, albeit some dismay. The skin
is reopened, a wound of a time
from before — maybe outside of Paris in the outskirts, in a chalet or chateau, every maison is a mansion in my eyes, or in Islington less masonic and mysterious but still equally foreign. She tells me she dry cleaned her dress for the first time in forty years. The city houses so many icons that don’t know they’re icons, or perhaps they do but only a few memories
remain. People of now, knowing who is who is
why they’re who they are. That flash, the bandwidth of time, is territorial and seductive. It makes us yearn for that which we cannot have. Someday, sooner or later, it will take everything just because it can. I discover
this wound, staring into his eyes as
he speaks not Martine Rousset but Martine Rose and in that moment there’s a shared understanding. A slippage into the rabbit’s hole. I never know if I am filtered through the anxieties of others or my own. The flesh of its insistence tarred and grey from time ticking by, ticketing everyone into their post. Hold it for a second. It may pass. It
may not. In that instance there is something of note. I write it down quickly, jolting myself into a place that is not mine. That, too, is familiar I seek I
seek I seek but never hunt that is too territorial. There’s room for us all. I could tell she didn’t want me there but was nice because kindness is in her genes, even if she wears honesty on her face which could be misconstrued as discomfort or a sense of ‘get the fuck out of here’ but I had to find a jumping off point I made jokes to acknowledge that fact, to let her know that yes I would go I would sort myself out as soon as I wasn’t
totally alone but you have to go through that first and foremost to empty
yourself of the anxieties of existing. It’s awkward and convoluted and somewhat terrifying and yet, it’s also reassuring. A heart beats beneath this flesh. You must trust that you are here and that what you are is nothing more and nothing less than what you should be. So
I inhale a deep breath as I go on
my mental tirade. I say to myself with a deep and reassuring voice that everything is as it should be and that people do seem to like you in this place, in this country where everyone is fighting for room to breathe. Pushing against one another for even a little bit more. No one is playing pretend as they do back where you’re from, god holds no cards, it’s refreshing but also unfamiliar. In ways you do not know how to explain in text. The images, though,
do not flow. I am the byproduct of this
allure, of this incessant snagging catch, caught against others who, too, feel shifted by the tectonics of time and memory. By our unclear place in it all. I am all I am. Always corroding. I am a door knob that is worn at the
handle by the hand of another, of all others, by the hand of
those willing to hold.