izzy

20 non-essential things I wanted to tell you today:

1. my fingers are little ice sticks –
would you suck on them to keep me warm?

2. the intensity with which some people live their lives makes me want to scream
in a happy, running, jumping kind of way

3. sometimes I want to change my name
but then I think that is just a feeble attempt to let go of all the baggage and privilege and disadvantage
and personhood that goes with it

4. I don’t know if it is ok to want that.

5. ‘sex’ is the most googled word after the phrase
‘the opposite of’
now I really wonder what the opposite of sex is

6. oh. the opposite of sex is a movie
starring Christina Ricci and Phoebe from Friends
and also that guy from the Big Bang is in it

7. I feel

8. there probably isn’t a way to describe the feeling I got when I asked you what you’d do if next time you saw me I never wore bras anymore just Hawaiian shirts and feather earrings and no pants
and you said ‘probably just roll with it’

9. me and Ben talk in brackets on gchat all the time
we get really inventive until we have like 10 different conversations going

10. my least favourite brackets are 2’s as brackets2 but I think the +brackets+ are pretty cool

11. Ben and I discovered that {these brackets} are the ‘sex brackets’
this is how you discreetly interject the conversation with news of nearby love-making noises
without disturbing the original flow

12. I got jealous of your breakfast
I couldn’t wait til morning
I made myself avocado on Ryvita with lemon, salt and tabasco

13. it made me feel like I was home

14. there are a lot of beautiful things I can think of right now
and one of them is the little curve your muscles and tendons make
just above the backs of your elbows

15. I think lemon, salt and some form of chili are my essential flavourings
and fresh herbs – like coriander, how can you not like coriander?

16. I keep wondering about whether I should take down the photo of my friend who died that is on my wall
it’s a weird bunch of photos.

17. there are quite a few photos of me kissing boys I used to date up as well

18. I used to love the time-span and reach of these photo booth photos and that they celebrate things I felt about people that I maybe no longer feel but it’s still comforting and nice to know I did feel once

19. I don’t feel entirely associated with the person in those photos any more

20. I still haven’t put up that photo of my Dad yet.

*

sarah

when I love, I love like a child, dragging
a stuffed toy by the arm, blind to
every stain, mark and suspicious burn,
sleeping with its battered face pressed stickily
against my own, and every time the stuffing
pops, blurts out into the world, I
poke it back in and messily stitch the hole
over and over until you can’t see the fur
for the mending. til one quiet afternoon,
the whole thing collapses into cotton blubber,
strewn across the carpet, and even these
bits of sad detritus, even these, I
gather and press to my nose
and breathe

*