Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.

The Sixteenth of July.

I’ve got offices to clear out and debts to call back and coffee change to be handed over to the ones who couldn’t for a second know what I mean about any of it (likewise, I can’t really bring myself to do any of it). To spend any more days, yet another day, with my legs at an appropriate 90 ninety degree angle while sitting and my fingers click-clack-clocking the time away on words just like these words and other words that mean even less than these words, it’s all so unbearably nothing sometimes, isn’t it? Nothing’s anything except pictures printed and pasted on my books of paper while on someone else’s dollar, and where are all of my morals now? The guilt hasn’t set in yet here and it’s been years. But oh, how these weeks sometimes fly.

So last night they watched from the step as I made my stumbling stop carrying bags of dryer sheets and cheap wine, and I expect they saw through the untruths that even now I don’t regret telling. Sometimes the change came fast and sometimes the change comes slow but most certainly of all we must, absolutely must at this point know that it’s going to. It’s going to happen to all of us. Unspoken but not unacknowledged, the awkwardness won’t really go away and baby I’m just a fool tearing all my heart out just for you.

The documentarian to it all, I consider that I may only do what I do because I want you to know that this was a time, is a time, when standing on dark July-hot pavement, covering wine-stain smiles and looking in each other’s eyes was all we had and all we needed. Refilling Evian bottles on broken headphone nights, tales of bike accidents and how someone else has ended up coming along for the ride. We need these moments like the sun needs love to shine itself upon in these recent glorious mornings.

So don’t count it out yet, go back to the drawing board and searching for your replacements as I’ve heard you’ve done so many times in your many moves around these streets that are so much smaller than they first appear. Don’t count me out yet, but when there comes a time that it’s the only thing left to do, just know that I’ve saved all of these words for you.

I'm always losing to win.

Aren't you so pleased with yourself, being out every night
with drugs and chalked love on the sidewalks outside
rejecting cabs that pass by?

Do you want to play dress up and mess up my room?
Do you want to lie down but put a line down instead?
Do you want clear skin and clean hair, not an ounce of waste anywhere?
Do you want tiny reminders to remember you were there?
Red and orange paints,
sleep all days,
dead phone calls,
new-old sweaters
fur hats and panic attacks?

What do you want?

All I can give you is
all the same words
on all the same days
stranger than the ones that came before them
and likely no stranger than the ones that await.

Snow White.

Between the pages we've colored of fairy tales (that we've known for a long time are not and never will be true), she asks me if it's the prince who will kiss you when you're already dead that's the one worth waiting for. Dead, in the glass coffin that those who have loved you built, and he'll have enough life in him and love in him to save you both. She knows I don't know the answers either, so all I can offer is "don't build the glass coffin in nights upon nights of convincing yourself that the prince who has no life left in him is worth it. Princes with nothing to give to even themselves...your half-dead self won't be able to save them."

But then, I think another thought and it's down the rabbit hole again, spilling onto the pages as another drink spills soundlessly in the kitchen.

What kind of a prince is the one who wants you when you're dead? You're nothing but doll parts to him, to his kiss, when there's nothing left of you to begin with. And that's exactly why he loved you, didn't you know it all along? When you had no needs, all he needed was you.

So April showers will surely bring something in May, but what? We're not yet sure. For the time being we've got gloomy days of wearing glasses with blurry gazes at smoke stacks, photographs, pockets jingling with change and the change in the weather which has come so soon. We've got empty e-mails that mean more than millions of words. We've got last night's words about beautiful bed frames and driving out of this city in cars that we don't own, with licenses that we don't have. Visa debts, work visas to get, and scuzzy Los Angeleno sunsets playing out of our stereo with daydreams of surfboards and drugs we haven't done yet.

And we've got the sense that maybe neither prince is very good at all.

You never get wise, you only get older.

There's that evil beauty again

in the booths of booze and

slights of hand,

smock dresses and smokers stresses,

party favours through the favours of friends.

Glittering like a speck of sand

hit by the opalescent night.

The night is ours with our

skinny legs taking us nowhere

oh so fast

when we're everywhere

with everything for which

we didn't have to ask.

So get back

to watching videos of

destruction

and corruption

and the Power

of Positive Thinking.

Because our pictures are

in the newspaper box

and on the newspaper box

now too.

It's no crime?

Weeknights.

Recounting the drinks consumed, dancing shoes ruined, cab fares home after the separate ways we go. It's a daunting combination of lust, fear, loneliness and too many faces, too many pairs of eyes, too many numbers exchanged, unintelligible names.

Separate ways from our friends, and we all went home with someone in the end.

The laughing hours later about who was seen with who when and what word's been around town since then are so much easier than the long walk home and the carried over daylight from the night before.

But running through parking lots with a windswept umbrella and an empty stomach is harder without company. And once inside I'll listen to her count off the things she got for free. I'll do the same, because it's all just loss and gain. Vacant hearts too scared to be left alone, continuing to count off the minutes that we haven't been home.

We know we'll all go home with someone at some point again, but we lay in our thin-walled rooms tonight, unaware of tomorrow's enemies and friends.

Aftermath

Friday.
Decide to find a new job, become intent upon finding new job. Crash a Von Bondies show across the street from my place, make flirty small talk with a handsome 20 year old boy, kidnap such boy and take him to wherever those L.A. girls are tonight, take him to crowded bathroom stalls, take him to McDonald's, take my time. Sleep, eventually. He can sleep in the kitchen.

Saturday.
Wake up with a 20 year old boy in my house. Wake. Up. Sit in Starbucks alone, run into a friend and open his store with him; listening to the Rolling Stones and eating muffins there, it feels like life is good. Leave the store under the glare of McCaul, and go for a walk. Run into leeching friends, run into the ex and his new, semi-handsome roommate. Go to the bookstore. Get hit on by creepy lecherous dudes hanging out in the Self Help aisle. Run away. Oh yeah, it's Valentine's Day, isn't it? Walk around underground for hours, and think about how fucked up things were on the eve of this day exactly one year ago. Decide a pasta binge is in order. Make pasta, binge, help R move boxes up and down staircases, up and down, up and down. Binge again. Text war with a boy. Binge a little more. Pass out. Blank.

Sunday.
Wake up late, get coffee and snack, wait for R, drink with R, eat pizza, D and C come over, A comes over. Cab ride. Guvernment special treatment, shit DJs, whistling girls who think we're the girlfriends of the shit DJs, dancing, smoking in the back behind a screen of laser light. Peeing with the help of a key shaped like a baby's arm and a dude who's a stranger peeing in the sink while someone supervises so no one looks at one another. Scummy. Hot dogs outside with R after a lot of stolen-from-the-shit-DJ-beers and gold lame leggings dancing through lasers. Cab ride. So-called after hours at some guy's place. Other people sitting on the floor, all boring. Fat girls in McDonald's while the sun's quickly coming up, who work for the company I desperately applied to on Friday. Karma! Fate! My life as a waster has all come together for a reason!
Or not.
Just more BLT bagels outside in the cold, bagels with cheese in toaster ovens like my mom used to make for me, sleeping in a bed with R on the other side while the sun is glaring, warm and hope-filled, through my tiny window. Peace.

Monday.
Wake. R. More bagels. R in aviators and a polo cardigan, me in fat-day leggings and a baggy sweater and shades that aren't mine, hiding my disdain for that sun which I loved that morning. Loved it with all my being. Bagels and sunshine, great ways to end a great night. Stumble over to my mother's house, occupied only with my brother and his drugs and my television. Do something good for my future, that I said I would do over a month ago. Watch five police cars stop everyone and everything that moves under another window. Wonder, is the danger greater now or when they leave? Good question, or paranoia? Decide firmly upon the latter and OH FUCK what about my brother, he left right before they arrived! Could this all be about him? Oh no, oh no, oh no. Motivation to let the paranoia take over and call HE'S FINE. So I'll wait longer. Get home. Get stoned. Fall asleep at a good time for the first time in a while. And don't forget to set the alarm, the shower can wait til tomorrow.

Tuesday.
New French Girl living here in my house. What the fuck, why is someone else up at the same time as me? Motivation to make coffee, make small talk, drag my ass out of there. Work sucks. Apply to more jobs that will ignore me. Pretend to care about other people's shit and can't manage to be really quite nice to any of them.
Another fucking day in the easy life.
And it's so fucking hard.
But walk home eventually, purposefully, dress hems and meetings with mom in mind. There are voices in my kitchen that don't sound like the usual ones, but I'm sure someone just has friends over, nothing new. Except they're old faces. Chinese lady landlord, father of the bitch upstairs and an old, faded man I've never seen before. Miserable, sad McCaul has kicked us out. She's crazy. She'sabsolutelyandcompletelyinsaneandTRICKSpeopleintothinkingshe'snotbutsheis and Oh My God I Have to Move Again.
I Have No Money.
Oh
God.
The past three months of my life flash before my eyes and I continue to calmly marker my dresses, get a move on. Hang out with my mother, trade insults with my brother, take the streetcar 'home', drop out from thinking about what I'm going to do. My dead grandpa's sweater and favourite plaid are comforts, but not comforts enough. And I don't know where the fuck I'm going to go now. Sleep.

The Very Strange People With Whom I Share A Very Strange Apartment: McCaul

Of the three individuals with whom I co-inhabit, the first is McCaul.

McCaul was the first person I knew in Very Strange Apartment prior to my move-in, and my extremely odd love-hate relationship with her can most easily be understood if you listen to the song 'Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth' by the Dandy Warhols...as I have, indeed, always known that she is insane. From the moment we met one another it's been glaringly evident that I am the reasonable Courtney Taylor-Taylor to her intelligent-but-fucking-crazy Anton Newcombe, and this dynamic has only increased in its scope since I began living in The Very Strange Apartment.

That being said, she's also kind of nice to be around in other ways. For one, McCaul at least knows the difference between there, their and they're, which is more than can be said of the other two, who I'll get on to at a later time. And she's a Cancer-Gemini cusp-er like me (though, as previously stated, her batshit Cancerian side is far more dominant than my own), resulting in us kind of getting each other in some fundamental way that defies the general logical standard of friendship.

To provide some insight into what it is like to live with McCaul: yesterday I found myself in said Strange Apartment with only her, which is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself, as she's usually off somewhere doing whatever it is she does all day that none of us can quite figure out. McCaul, who has recently quite literally kicked out one of our roommates for being a messy individual, made a bunch of noise in the bathroom for about half an hour, all the while audibly scoffing and huffing and puffing and making a general ruckus that led me to believe she was maybe possibly cleaning for the first time ever.

How wrong was I.

Upon her emergence from said washroom I was sitting at the kitchen table having a cigarette, as I tend to, and very politely asked her what she had been doing in the washroom for the past half hour. This was a simple enough question for someone to ask their friend/housemate, no?

God no! Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with McCaul, as my friendly "what were you up to in there?" was met with a four minute rant that went something along the lines of "ohmygod can I not do anything in this house without everyone fucking bothering me?!No one in the world gets me and my untapped genius, etc. etc...I am SO misunderstood by the fucking universe, etc. etc...and please just let me go to my room without bothering me...FUCK!"

...Okay, then.

Keep in mind that there were, as far as I know, absolutely no incidents leading up to this outburst of McCaul's; this is simply the kind of thing one comes to expect from her a few times a week on average. I nonetheless always find myself somewhat dumbfounded when met with her specific brand of crazy, and as such responded with a less-snarky-than-it-sounds-on-paper "I just wanted to know if you cleaned up in there", and proceeded to my own room to finish my cigarette, but not before surreptitiously checking out the state of the washroom (messier than before...how?!)

It's also interesting to note that no more than two hours later she invited me up to her room to have a glass of wine and listen to her talk about her on-again-off-again boyfriend. Which I did. The bathroom incident was never discussed. So I cleaned it myself.