guilty of romance

Prologue:

"Lie down with me, show me no wrong. "


Scene One:

All of life is crying out for attachment to something real. The reason we look for lovers and the reason we look for religion. | Justine, life is only on earth. And all life on earth is calling out for something to connect to. See how beautiful planets are when they align. | It is said that a sentimental person hopes that things will last whereas a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Me. You. Earth. Our place in the sum of things. When I think about it that way I guess I'm guilty of romance.

architecture

Cities are the most beautiful works of art. Every other form is constrained within its medium to some extent. Painting is often abstract, its beauty relies too much on the beholder and writing is too contextual. Cities on the other hand pull you in. The notion of the sublime, every street its own art form, every corner a different stroke and stanza. It's overt in its great and towering designs while the cobbled sidewalks and chipped marble lend so much subtlety to it. Art explodes from within - stage productions, sidewalk painters, poets, sculptors all meshing together to create something abundant with life and beauty. The unsaid, which sticks in your throat and sleeps in your brain. Raw and unrefined on every corner of every street, its luminescence visible even from space.

-

And there it is, why privilege grief when beauty is so abundant in this world? From the cracks in architecture to the ink in books, beauty - unabashed, unconfined, uncontrollable beauty in the smallest of everything. You just have to look harder to find it. So my place in this world. Life is only on earth. What strain of beauty can I leave on a universe that will outlive me by a billion years? Maybe when time loops back upon itself we'll all have a second shot to fulfill the dreams we built. I have so much to express, it exudes from every atom in my body and yet I am fraught with self doubt and this sense of lacking. There is a romantic and a cynic fighting for control of my head. But perhaps it takes both to find the measure of a person.

this is a promise with a catch

Last night I lived for years. In the hours I found so many lifetimes, all competing to be privileged. In the morning I woke up older, but everyone is older in the morning. I grew up. Leave the windows open, leave the doors unlatched. I am coming back after all this time away. Though you may seem unfamiliar at first, forgive me for my mind has come unstuck in time.So don't be callous, I'm sure it'll be fine. So many territories, so ready to be sold, so many forests, so many forests. In the middle of the garden there was a cement tomb. Children danced barefoot on top of it, singing songs of love and hate not knowing what their loves would make. There were lovers dressed in flowers and my friends all painted me black and blue. The shoes on my feet sank deep into the river, I couldn't retrieve them without dragging you along. Then when winter rolled in the river got frozen and the babies turned blue. All friends and lovers they melt in a rosy tinted hue.

-

brief lovers make quick beds
but good friends stay long in your head

darlings

       


   So I'm sitting here struggling with something I don't need to get out. But perhaps we kid ourselves when we say that we're able to deal to deal with the situation. Surface verisimilitude is dependent on detail and detail can always mask some form of muted substance underneath. We tell ourselves to be strong and we resist opening up because the world is formed in shards and the glass from which it was cut is sharp and unforgiving. That is why we fill our surfaces with detail and sometimes neglect the person underneath. I feel I am almost losing track of the innate which supposedly resides inside of me. I resist thinking and succumb to my cognitive misery only because it provides a brief respite. But this respite is only temporary, I'm still looking for something. Something I will never fully understand until I find it.

-

softly and wavery:


all the blue roads lead home 
i can't accept that my lover has passed 
i can't accept that my lover came last

charlotte forever

city drowned itself heard like sirens from the shore,

i don't feel it, i don't feel it anymore.

and canyon started getting dark / to trudge back where your car was parked

barefoot intheshallowcreek, i waited for you to speak to me

i can't stay away when everyone i meet they all seem to be asleep,

in the valley where your soul was harked, lined with trees you stripped of bark

only i still hung around, only i still called you mine.

beginners

You forget that the only constant in this life is you.
You forget that you will never need anyone else.

-

There is a beautiful place in Copenhagen called the Tivoli Gardens. I will arise and go now, away from the fucked up hopes and dreams of this world.

"Justine"

-

I was teased by your blouse, spit out by your mouth.

obstacle one

I enter the room and take in the players as well as their positions on the stage.

-

Mise-en-scène:

Cole Porter in playing softly in the background. Men and women move deliberately, interwoven in permutations rehearsed and fluid. The edges of the frame blur, the soft glow of chandeliers illuminate faces and cast diametrical shadows upon the marble floor.

-

Obstacle One:

I drift unnoticed into the heart of the room. The music plays for a few more minutes before stopping and everyone in the room freezes as if someone broke a window and winter seeped in. Delicate cheeks rest on dinner jackets, hands gently cover the small of backs, faces stare into one another with warm hints of recognition. The players remain statuesque in their places, I am the only one walking through them. Champagne suspends in mid-air from tilted bottles. Light is frozen in rays, disturbed only when I glide my hand through it. Holden Caulfield and Hamilton Leithauser sit at the bar, their conversation put on indefinite hold. Very slowly the scene rewinds and all the beautiful players dance in reverse, the convergence of limbs fascinates when not in chronological order. The scene rewinds till coats fly off stands and back onto shoulders. Everything resets and the malleability of time is made apparent as the players start their dance again. They will never leave this room. I feel the sharp pang of discomfort before reassuring myself. Why should I feel sad for them when all they will ever know is music and dancing and laughter? I exit the room and leave them to their unfinishable rituals.

-

Nostalgia is the cruel denial of the present.

dream story

All the railways and paths in my dreams lead to the same long winding corridor. The sum of my thoughts and feelings have brought me here to the Dream Hotel. And what ecstasy this brings, to search but never find. To be lost but never found. And all my dreams and all my thoughts waltz deliberately with each other, smudging the line where one ends and the other begins. This corridor is familiar. You only know it because it was taught to you. These walls are smooth as I run my fingers along them(yourskinissmoothasirunmyfingersoveryou), these lights remind me of someone I once knew(theselightsremindmeofyou). I must stop here, for dreams like memories can be confused with reality and I get melancholic when both my worlds begin to blur. The corridor starts to fade but I no longer worry. I have been back many times to the Dream Hotel and it won't be long before my return.

stella was a diver and she was always down

sex and syntax

-

photos by Aaron Feaver

-

elizabeth had much rather not/ fill your mouth with/ on your skin like little bruises/ oh no now our love turns sour/ you come at the right time/ you come too fast/ you were a fever/ darcy draped in lace/ what she puts in my head/ what i put in her mouth/ i'll still be up by four/ say you'll do me my way/ you were a kindness/ not too rough touching touching/ pull you in close/the braids that you came in tonight/ fix me up in the bedroom we'll go a long way/

love is coming coming coming/ coming coming coming our way.

thursday

brief lovers make quick beds

so

paint me in mahogany

show me where fingers have strayed

your fingers trace blood red

-

the only way to love. is to love with abandon.

all my great designs

i        am my       beloved's       and my beloved          is mine , he grazes         among the      lilies       .

-

Words have a wonderfully restrictive nature.

People.

The word is recognized and an image begins to form: You're in a strange dream, walking through the streets of some strange city you can't remember the name of. You're walking because, well, cars aren't allowed into this city. You can drive to a certain point but you have to stop there and continue your journey on foot. You're walking through a crowd of people, their faces as foreign to you as yours is to them. You walk into the center of the city. You stand up straight at the foot of your love and lift your shirt up. You wake up. The dream is good.

Person.

The word is recognized and an image begins to form: You're in a strange dream, walking through the streets of some strange city you can't remember the name of. You're walking because, well, cars aren't allowed into this city. You can drive to a certain point but you have to stop there and continue your journey on foot. You're walking through a crowd of people, their faces as foreign to you as yours is to them. Amidst this convergence of faces and sounds and lights and scattered thoughts everywhere something stands out. You can only afford this person a fleeting second glance before the crowd comes between the both of you, swallowing any real connection you feel you had. You wander about this city with no name, what was once beautiful and mysterious has turned on its side, the streets are dark and unfamiliar, every lost step you take fills you with dread. You walk into the center of the city. But that one person is nowhere in sight. Nothing is replaced. Everything else, even in its scale and grandeur, seems less. You stand up straight but your love is nowhere in sight. Do you remember? The snow started falling and we were stuck out in your car rubbing both your hands and ain't this just like the present to be showing up like this. You wake up. The dream is bad. The images linger for awhile before they're stored in that place in your brain meant for forgotten dreams and difficult lovers.

-

there                  is a       suggestion at       trauma          . for i am            broken     . i am        not        w                                             h                                                            o                   l                                                                            e               .

diorama

*the guitar riffs kick in!*

Hamilton Leithauser: Come for me, comfort me. Come for me, comfort me. Come for me, comfort me.

-

You see in these parallel universes I'm just a portion of a larger diorama. Only this version of me is feeling lonely. Somewhere else I'm happier, more hopeful and more in love.

-

While it's raining: It's past midnight but why is everything so bright? *comeformecomfortmecomeformecoverme*

-

I've forgotten how good this feels. Its been awhile since this feeling hasn't depended on someone else. *andaftersometimeiknowiwouldgoblind*

-

This is my zen moment. The point between swooning and cynicism. Ah won't you come for me, comfort me.

afternoon

         In these drawers are the compartments of myself I keep hidden. Sealed in envelopes, wrapped up in boxes, buried in thoughts. These are extensions of me, they further my understanding of who I am. I keep these because the past is important, the past is pertinent and the past affects my understanding of things present and things yet to come. The connection is no longer there however. The lines I am reading trigger brief physiological responses from time to time: a skipped heartbeat, labored breaths, a convection of sorts, a transfer of the ink on the page onto my skin. I rub it and it smudges. Just like all this compressed time has smudged. Archived and safe but no longer accurate. I cannot remember anymore. I rub the ink on my skin again and again until it almost disappears.

in dreams / in heads / in beds

Dreams are structures just like buildings. You start from the bottom and slowly build upwards from the ground. If the foundations you build aren't strong enough then you won’t go very far up before parts start falling off. In the same way, if your ambition gets the better of you then you may be prone to irrationality and design elaborate and ambitious plans for your building. Again, it may all come tumbling down because you were too quick to make it perfect before you made it stable enough. The blueprints of how things should be are still in your head even as the building doesn’t quite look the way you imagined it to be. If everything comes crumbling down then you only have poor planning to blame. The architect in your mind is disheartened and confused for none of this was meant to happen. As long as you have the plans though you can still start all over again. The air is cool and light on my skin, the sun hasn’t yet come up fully and there’s a serenity to the proceedings. I need to dispose of these maps and diagrams in my head which attempt to tell me how things should be like and refocus instead on the basic and the simple. If I've realized one thing, it’s that dreams never die or disappear. In dreams everything is exactly the way it should be, intangibly permanent. It is when dreams stop being dreams, the moment they attempt the transition to reality, that they become fallible and cracks appear everywhere.

-

I thought I understood it. But I only grasped the vagueness of it. Only the smudgeness of it.

abel

Well,

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's not right

My mind's gone loose inside its shell

-

Tie me down in a chair, fuck me and make me a drink.

trouble

the blue tide is pulling me away

tomorrow will be easier

because tomorrow you will say,

spanish is the language on her tongue

my afternoons all warmed up

do you feel as blue as your blood?

see my bones all swelling up

my name sounds foreign from your lips

ah, you should know that there's no life

if it's not living by your life

write me letters from all your islands

lick the stamps, spell me out in postcards

red moon, red moon

oh how the dawn breaks half in bloom

see how streetlights all fade out

i'll give you everything but not so soon.

-

And she won't let me go.

jesse in the park with celine

We walk down this cobbled street and take a left at the end into a park:

Memories are impermanent as long as you're still alive. You can revisit memories, tweak them a little here and there or even change them entirely.

-

The day is fading into evening and leaves crunch under our shoes:

We are young, we have all the time in the world to revisit the feelings found in the people from the places we have been. But time is taken for granted when you're young. You assume that the process of change only applies to you, and that the world will be forever frozen the way you want it to be. But the world doesn't wait for you to grow wiser before slipping back into it.

-

You get really excited when you talk about things you're passionate about, astrology, the universe, our place in the sum of things:

The only permanence lies in these few seconds that make up the present. We are the very sum of our experiences and memories at this very moment. And as time goes on I feel I'm being filled up with all these thoughts and feelings and scenes that I splinter into many multitudes.

-

We've been walking for fifteen minutes. But I remember these fifteen minutes better than I do whole years:

These fragments wander for a little while, bringing me back to events meaningful enough to be retained, like the wonders of a first encounter. Of all wonders that surely has to be somewhere near the top. And then these bits and pieces slowly merge into a more solid and chronological whole, with its own history and story. The thing is, when you pull everything you've stored over your life together again, you suddenly don't remember anymore.

une année sans lumière

Hey, my eyes are shooting sparks,
La nuit, mes yeux t'éclairent,
Ne dis pas à ton pere,
Qu'il porte des œillères.

-

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

tour

The fallacy is this: assuming that everything will eventually form a coherent and understandable whole. The belief that all these distorted and disjointed thoughts and images will somehow, someday merge into something that's quantifiable and tangible. I am many different people. I am multitudes of the same incomplete picture. And I will remain the same for as long as I'm cognitively aware. The boy who's wrapped up in books. But there is little time left for philosophy for time would be more wisely spent living and loving. Or loving and living. Whichever comes first, and whichever exudes an air of equal dependence. I am an empty vessel. Fill me up with everything you know and cherish and hold dear. For you half adore me and half forsake me. Half fill me up but by that same measure leave me half in longing. And the romantics swoon as they exclaim, half of your heart is not enough. But it is unfair! To compress the world into these little moments where we touch and kiss and rub against each other until our skin grows sore. And the bruises fade almost as fast as the memories. So leave little blue scars on my chest and on my back but never on my brain.

because it brings me back you

Are we leaving or have we just arrived?

-

As the air pressure begins to equalize in my ears:

1. I stretch out like a tree and its many beech wood branches whittled down fireplaced in a pile flickering all throughout the night.

2. And all my sketches for all my sweethearts lie unfinished beside sad songs for dirty lovers while the only things you see are black and white and blue.

3. No picture seems to be forming as I'm shaking the polaroid in my hand and the unformed faces plead: let me out because it's hell when you're around.

4. Maybe we should take a trip across Wisconsin with some green-eyed girl and show her that we left our secrets under floorboards and reveries.

5. To live underwater for more than a month:

pomelo

Something that made me smile: Ben on Storytellers telling everyone that he should be allowed at least one love song as a recently married man and proceeding to play Stay Young, Go Dancing.

-

There are symphonies playing in my head when I think of you:

I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain.

Our bones are too heavy to come up, squished into a single cell of wood.

We might kiss, when we are alone, nobody's watching, we might take it home.

She may be young, but she only likes old things.

Lie down with me my dear, lie down under stormy night, tell nobody.

I'm in love with a girl who's in love with the world, and I can't help but follow.

-

doors unlocked and open

dancing

designs with roses all over

tiptoe with soles worn out

children that won't get older

faces

their intricacies won't show

friends and lovers all forgotten

histories lined up in a row

streets

empty with neighbours all sleeping

frozen driveways slick come morning

into our shoes it started seeping

grey

cars and houses and people

from a palette that's gone dry

you hold on to your beautiful beautiful boy

pray

to whom it may concern

mysterious skin half revealing

although you've got no savior to discern

sleep

leave empty beds all neatly made

love or grief? choose one as your reprieve

the other keep, to wear forever on your sleeve

where all hope sank waiting for you

1979 - song played again while walking to hand in the last of my assignments before the study break.

6 - hours passed in a haze of music, laughter, avocado sandwiches and the only company i feel i need right now.

3 - times i've listened to unknown pleasures on repeat. lyric that's stuck in head: tears in their eyes tears in their eyes tears in their eyes.

1 - relatively normal post that has nothing to do with sadness, longing, emptiness, happiness or anythingness in fact.

-

Roy Lichtenstein is pretty amazing:

-

Cinema Reykjavík: Icelanders go to the movies more often per capita than any other country in the world.

a tree as old as me

If I were an astronaut these are some of the things I'd miss upon leaving earth:

People talk a lot about regret but I don't think I have much anymore. After leaving our atmosphere I think all the regret would just evaporate away and a kind form of sadness would remain. I say kind because it's the type you think about but it doesn't play much on your mind anymore.

I would miss the stars as seen from the ground or through my first telescope because I think everything looks more beautiful when seen from afar.

I would miss telling people that I love them. It's kind of sad to think about how much some people can mean to you at that very moment in time and how they don't mean as much now. Things happen in moments and in their own private, personal spheres. Maybe all we're meant to do is genuinely fall deeply in love and then slowly grow out of it before someone else comes along to continue the cycle. But that doesn't mean you haven't loved anyone with everything you have in those brief fleeting moments.

Rain on the window as my mixtape plays. As I scribble away on my notebook and occasionally sip tea from a paper cup because I don't like coffee and because polystyrene is non-biodegradable.

-

There isn't so much to miss as there is to look forward to:

The long silences.

The absence of human touch.

Time to think and reflect and hopefully not regret.

The view would be pretty amazing. I'd play "To Build A Home" while looking down at the planet and perhaps in that very moment I'd feel as if I had fallen in love again.

solaris

palms open

eyes like pools reflecting

thoughts that hinge

on words half formed

half steady

articulate and smooth

waver through a lie

flow, trickle into streams

unmanned trajectories

i am lost

in what i cannot say

hands gather

in a small home

a place in the mind

where everything

can be tucked away

and trembling hands

smoothen out the creases

trace the seams

they gently fold

place in these compartments

the thoughts of you

stored and safe

everything in its right place.

-

One day I'll write a book of longing,

And fill it with love,

And fill it with hate,

But most of all with the things I couldn't fake.

songs of love and hate

cold wood:

for morning comes too soon
the hazy glow of waking light
sparrows sing and jest in open candour
dreams they slip with diminishing splendour

ah soft words that swell and seem similar
a lonely mind that represses the familiar
oh bright morning you dim and dissolve into evening
a dozen more dreams and re-dreams while you were sleeping

against the cold wood i rest my head

half asleep in sweet surrender

from the cold wood i build my bed

small and narrow without room to remember.

-

the boston diaries:

happiness

sadness

happiness

sadness

happiness

sadness

happiness

sadness

happiness

sadness

at the end of the day, the feeling is always replaced.

-

blankets:

Craig and Raina.

"to describe what it feels like to sleep next to someone for the first time."

As they alternate between guilt and passion and love and anger and resentment but perhaps worst of all, regret, Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart plays softly over the stereo until the characters and their stories fade to black.

-

never let me go:

we'd walk side by side while thoughts converge in spaces left behind. perhaps we'll always feel that we never had enough time.

-

padraic my prince:

split me open at the veneer
take everything you see
i’m letting out the emptiness
so come plant your roots and remain

-

oranges:

And if one day you ever wonder about the heart you had to break
Please don’t lose any sleep teething thoughts in your bed
Oh i love you so how could there be any hate?
All that’s left is sadness and only sadness permeates.

-

for a redeemer, saviour, friend:

lover, may i come over?
this world will never really know, i'll be yours until i'm old.

the romantics

winter by the amazing bferry

-

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

(an excerpt from bright star)