going without

i feel better going without you, like a small acorn nymph. i am curled inside a little warm world, eating stories and red currants when i am hungry, thinking of you only when the mists are too busy drifting off the wheat fields to talk to me.

yesterday i lilted from leaf to leaf of a beech tree, making raindrops fall onto the forest floor, and suddenly! you were there, writing in a notebook whose pages were wrinkled like they were left in the rain. i skipped down onto your shoulder (and you noticed me as much as usual), and read over your shoulder:

mon amour a des ailes,
j'ai les chaussures sales
je suis dans la mosquée
je suis froid d'aller sans elle

i sat down on your left shoulder, content to think you couldn't feel me through your corduroy. i twisted a bit of oak twig i carried with me into your hair. you looked away and i made three smudged footprints in your ink, and then i flew away.

going without you is almost my favorite.

Ch.2-Under the Latent Heat of Dreams and the Ridiculous Pressure of Minds

At times, all you can think of is some ugly grey scribble across the plate glass of your sanity. At night, all you can dream of is the simultaneous existence of the colored craving things under the plate glass of your sanity. At night, in my corner room on the third floor, I can hardly sleep for dreaming.

Last I remember, I came here for something. For myself, I think, but I can't remember why. Last night, I could hardly sleep around this dream of my sister face-to-face with a lion I prefer to forget. He told her that I was on the verge of a fall (and the word was so pretty and dark-green that I only half-minded). She cried for me. He said he would send someone to me.

Donald, he is mine and I would half-prefer to fall. Sanity is like a little polite cough-- ineffectual, defeated. I can feel the broken lines in the glass, and all the colored craving things within stroke the surface of the glass and press a little harder against it. The escape is on the verge.

His claims are not so ineffectual as I like to pretend. I only half-mind; I only half-sleep.

Ch. 1: Something I Don't Want To Lose

I'm planning on spending the next several blogs on one story- a story about Susan Penvensie, just around the time of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, just around the time when she was lost. It's largely centered around a dream I had and a quote I read when The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe came out on film about how C.S. Lewis "punished Susan for discovering her sexuality". I'm not making any effort to imitate C.S. Lewis's wonderful voice or style, I'm just writing in my own style from Susan's head.

--

The cream spills on the table, salted by her eyes, stirred in with breadcrumbs. I can half imagine it will come to life. If it came to life, it would be a cat, a pale, rough-tongued creature. It would weave around my shoulder and turn grey. Grow wings. Deform. Thrall me. My own loneliness burns a rough tongue along the raw flesh inside my chest. I am not sorry she is crying. I do not tell her I'll miss her. Can you count the tears I poured into the ocean like cream? Hell, but I'm lonely. The weight of responsibility, even the weight of sanity, has been dropped onto me.

The ocean liner contains me like a sardine or like tinned ham, and they say I've got a brilliant career ahead of me. A brilliant career like a firecracker into the silt and slag of life. I can hardly wait. I can hardly wait to be over these waters, not so tossed by thoughts that I can't sleep at night. Sometimes I'm not even sure they think I'm worth convincing anymore. I like to remember Narnia, when it was real. I like to wish. But they must not think I'm worth convincing anymore; they won't even talk to me about it. Hell, but I'm glad to be going. I didn't cry.

Or to come ashore in America and find Mrs. Walton waiting for me, effusive and stylish, and the way she calls me 'darling' and promises me the most lovely time I've ever imagined distracts or comforts me. Or the way you can almost see money dripping around her ankles and heels if you're not too busy being delighted and charming and sophisticated, and exchanging sparring glances with her son Donald. Which I am.

He enfolds me even more thoroughly than Mrs. Walton; I am sophisticated and I am delighted to be here, eluding Donald for amusement. Letting him fold me up under his chin while we dance, letting him whisper that he loves the smell of my hair, and then disappearing into some other man's arms before he can think past that. Letting him take me masterfully by the arm and walk with me under the green new leaves along the streets, buy me ices, pay me compliments, and spending the whole time being just faintly amused by something he can't put his finger on. Playing little games of tag in the sitting rooms and parlors where we spend our time: moving to the piano just after he catches me on a sofa, feeling a sudden need for conversation with someone across the room just as he's cornered me with someone else. Getting tired just when there's no other escape for me and leaving him to go to bed, and yet letting him kiss my hand when I come down for breakfast, and not taking my hand back until necessity requires it. Maybe he'll end up lonelier than I.