All the Birds of This Day

ashmae: kate, it is saturday night, we are snuggled in this oversized chair, and reuben the cat is only half pretending to care that we exist. love is so dramatic. we're both infp's, so we understand that. dramatic in only the best of ways, even if it hurts us sometimes. i wish i could walk over to the piano and play one of those chopin etudes with a little more vigor, so as to add to the general ambience in this green living room, not to mention the bitter cold and little snowflakes that we don't care are falling.

Kate: someone told me earlier tonight that it was snowing before it snowed. the sky was dark; i was driving my car without the lights. he didn't tell me that i hadn't turned the gear to turn on the light, to illuminate the road ahead of us. the light in this room ashley mae, the room where we lie under a white blanket, the light is too harsh. there are too many bulbs. and the fixture itself? it is ugly. every lamp in this room has earned my disdain on different occasions, but most of all the one hovering above us with the fan attached. love is dramatic. this week alone i have said that love is analysis. i have wondered if i was in a pragmatic love situation. i wondered if i could feel loved. i remembered a man telling me that he didn't want to be loved. then i wondered if i was exactly like him. if me not wanting to be loved put me in a car without lights, on a night with snow.

ashmae: I wonder if this is a form a dadaistic blogging, is there such a thing? i don't care. we are talking, and about things that we care about. or rather, we are not talking, cat power is the only one making any noise, we are sitting here in this room with that fixture that yes, i agree, is ugly, and yes, I agree these lights are too harsh, but i also know that neither of us is going to get up and turn off that damn overhead light to put on something nicer, because let's be honest, we are perfectly content to be sitting here writing and not moving and not fixing things that perhaps should be changed. that's what we do. and perhaps, that space in between, where nothing is fixed, or for certain, where the past is still a beautiful way to remember things and the future is still like that road with no lights. John and i used to drive all the way to the cabin with no lights on. we loved it. we sometimes would reach over and hold hands, just to know we were alive and the moon above was actually all we needed. man, i wish davey would call.

Kate: a few things. one, i think it is uncanny how much time in our lives we spend waiting. waiting for the phone to ring or for the right thing to be said or for the wrong thing to end or for them to stop loving us or to start loving us... two, i have thought how interesting it is that touching people makes us feel alive. i read my class a flash fiction piece by dave eggers and he's riffing on the whole crash theme (from the movie crash) and how it just felt good to be jolted into someone's world, to feel their presence. i almost cried reading it. they didn't get it. that was so disappointing i love how making a new friend is like making a new world. suddenly there's a new history, new possibilities that never existed before. i have spent a long time trying to figure out what all of that handholding in dark cars really means. i have tried to figure out what it is have tried to say... ashley, today i realized for about the millioneth time that i make boys think very hard about kissing me. they know it means something. they want it to mean everything or nothing. i want them to want that.

ashmae: Do you think I could legally change my name to that? would people accept it? or feel totally awkward about the whole thing? waiting. waiting wasn't something i really understood or felt so much until after my mission. it's one of the things i dislike most about myself, my capacity to make myself sad in waiting...like you said, waiting for all sorts of things. it's the journey, not the arrival. blah blah blah. i know. i remember once this boy in el salvador, (no, not mario) a boy that had been in a gang and was now recovering in a school where i worked, we were sitting on a little cement ledge one day, I didn't speak spanish at the time and he didn't speak english. he took a red and white braided bracelet off his own wrist and tied it on to mine. human touch was important to me then. it meant everything. his fingers barely brushed my arm, and i'm not writing this romantically. no way. but it meant everything. i wore the bracelet for two years, until my mission president made a new rule about looking professional. i taped it in my journal. as for the whole boy thing, kissing. i don't know. i've dated a lot of gay boys. what does it mean then? it means a whole lot. that's what scares me. and makes me anxious in waiting.

kate: i don't know what it is about ashleys wanting to change their name. i like calling you ashley mae, but i would respect your decision if you changed to ash mae. i would miss the "ley" in ashley. you're also not just a plain ash. you need your mae. i kept a piece of string on my wrist from december 2005 to may of 2006. it meant waiting. it meant keeping a question close to my pulse that didn't have an answer. i remember tearing it off even though i didn't have an answer. i was tired of not having an answer. even more, i was tired of feeling connected to something to tenuous, so ambiguous. did you know that frieda kahlo's "two friedas" is my favorite painting? it is for that reason...the two hearts connected, cut asunder... the tying is also about cutting. the string links and it severs.

ashmae: do you think anyone will read this? i don't blame them if they don't. who is "them" anwyay. I just remembered that i only have like 5 friends on this blog, and maybe only 2 of them who actually read it. i did not know that you loved that frida painting, mario once said that he wanted to name one of his daughters frida, we were in a jungle at the top of guatemala, it was at that point that i questioned our future. i do however love the beauty that comes out conflict, when we happen to sneak up on the sublime. not because we've created something so full of beauty, but rather because we've invested ourselves and done something enough times, that the sublime cannot help but exist. i love you lots kate. you are sleeping on my shoulder, but i must go because my back hurts and it's getting colder outside.