still not finished

Searching the night for someone
Who wasn’t there
She planted images of herself
Where I wouldn’t find her
Like a puzzle where the pieces
Keep disappearing
As you find the next one
So that you can never finish it
But you know the picture
You just can’t see it clearly
And her
Did she mean it?

Dreaming of New Life

That dream came true. She told me online as I was on the phone and I came back to read the lines after she was gone. The strangest thing was that it happened a month after I dreamed it. That dream was July and it was January when she told me. Why did she tell me then? Maybe because she couldn’t hide it any longer, and was worried other people would tell me first because she found out in November.
Another lover who had moved on to a different stage in their life while I was still in the same, alone. She wasn’t going to get married, but was going to keep living at home with her mother while she continued with school. I couldn’t picture her so young with that belly. Hell she had just turned 22, and the thought of those breasts I had one cupped in my hands asleep at night now swollen in preparation. I wondered why that dream had disturbed me so and stuck with me for weeks afterwards, and now? It all came back again that inescapable feeling, though I wasn’t really a part of it. Maybe that’s what bothered me. I never got over her I guess, but I never was good at letting go, of anything. Childhood still bothered me, and maybe I was just too sensitive for this life. Who knows? Time will tell after I’m gone, though who will be listening?

My First Scar From The Amazon

I have many scars from the Amazon. I was just thinking about them on my last trip there. My very first was when I was 12 years old. I was running up the stairs of an old river boat, and the stairs were wet. 7 stitches later I was back on that river boat again traveling around the Amazon with my father over summer break. It all was so new to me then. That was also the trip were I had my first kiss. She was a 14-year-old Brazilian to my 12. I wasn’t sure what I was doing then, not that I even do now, but what struck me as funny was that my father told me to use a condom if anything were to happen. I was only 12 and had no ideas beyond a kiss, and the kiss was really too much for me the shy boy that I was.
That was also the trip where I got to visit Parintins for the festival of the bull. A group of reporters and coco-cola body guards had rented out the river boat for the world famous festival. I got to tag along with them and sit in the press box. This festival was second only to Carnival, and I wondered around the city using the phrases my grandfather had taught me to buy a t-shirt of whichever side I decided to be on. There are 2 sides representing 2 bulls, and there is a fierce rivalry between the 2, so it was important that I pick the right side. What was my deciding factor? Well at 12 it came down to my favorite color and which side had the cutest girls I saw walking around town. The festival itself was spectacular with the whole year leading up to this competition. But what fascinated me the most was one of the body guards. He towered over me, which was unusual because most Brazilians were on par with my 12-year-old height. He had been in the Brazilian Special Forces, and I used to watch him walking through the crowds as they parted to let him pass looking very much like a giant to me and these people. He gave me a t-shirt of the Brazilian Special Forces which I still have to this day.
It was strange to go back to school after that summer. Most kids just thought of me as the quiet kid who never did anything. They were right about me being quiet, but what else did they know about me?

hmm

I’d drink away the day, but there’s still tomorrow, and the day after. A rest? I don’t know when, and it’s getting to me this perpetual motion, the pendulum that never slows down, and I am running out. Nothing left really. I just keep going, not knowing when I’ll fall down, and if I get up. I don’t think so, but who cares. Another day, and I still don’t care. What’s the use? Damned if I know, and maybe I already am, but still ignorant.

As An Amazonian

So you want to know about the Amazon? Well my experiences are different since I work here, but when I’m not working, I love being here. The working here is the hard part. People expect you to work miracles where there is hardly even god. But that is not the part worth telling.
If you can imagine a slow pace of life, think of that caught by a slow motion camera. You don’t wear a watch or worry about the time. You know there is light enough in the day and you know when it is night. What other great distinctions in the day are there?
Everywhere there is green with a little color here and there, but not like people expect. People expect there to be flowers everywhere, but the flowers are hidden. You have to find them. The animals are elusive too many only coming out at night. Only the monkeys break this pattern. You will hear a troop noisily passing by, and when you look up at them, several are also looking down at you as curious about you as you are about them.
In the middle of it all is the river, but not as most people think of a river. This river looks to many more like a lake than a river, but that is its size(and I am only speaking of the Rio Negro the largest tributary of the Amazon not the Amazon itself), and true to its size its impact on the region is great. When the river floods during the rainy season, the way of life changes. Fishermen become hunters, trees spend 4months underwater, and everything swims because there is no way around it. When the waters recede the men fish again and the animals have a wider territory to roam. The Portuguese underestimated the river and suffered when they made their capital so far up the river during the years of the rubber trade. 6 months out of the year they could get their ships up it, but when the river dropped, they were stranded. Life here is centered around the river and knowing it. Even travel is dependent on the river, unless you can afford travel by plane, which few here can. True to the pace of life is travel by river. A trip that takes 1 hour flying takes 36 hours by river, but I can think of no better way of seeing the river than by 36 hours on the top deck of a river boat with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other just watching the trees go by, to see the differences and pass among the islands of the floating grasses. Stress doesn’t exist because there is nothing to cause it. There is enough food for the day and nowhere to be at any particular time. Only if you try and bring work here does stress exist trying to plan things out and be on time. If you try and schedule things, they will most likely be late because being late isn’t even a consideration. Simplicity is the best description of life here, until you get to the city that is.

Don't Fall Down

There is no loneliness like working in the middle of the Amazon, a loneliness that kills solitude. Your head tells you what you already feel and keeps telling you until you’re too sick to stand it, but there is no escaping, no leaving. Work is all you know, and sleep is a bad memory taunting you with what you can’t have like the women that used to occupy that empty space beside you. The people that surround you want something from you, and to that end they pretend to like you, but you know. You see it in the change when you can’t give them what they want, even though your waking hours are spent in getting them what they want, though you can’t get it all, and they despise you for it.
You are surrounded by beauty, but you only see it in the periphery in passing. Nothing is more painful than such beauty without a moment to savor the sight, and you lie down for a few scant hours unable to sleep finally passing out of this realm with the hope that tomorrow won’t come, but it’s already here, another day where you don’t find the strength, you just keep moving so you don’t fall down. One day at a time is too much.

an old story

What is it about a woman’s back that is so sensual? The hair falling over the shoulders, the curve of the white shoulder blades, the knots of the spine leaving a disappearing trail. It was only a painting, no one I knew, but it was also all the women I’d known, the ambiguity of those shoulders, the dimples just above the jeans. And here I sat alone at a bar in daylight thinking about a painting that reminded me about all the girls but none in particular.

But she had invited me to a party she knew I couldn’t attend. But why invite me? Was it to remind me she was there in that far off city, and I was here… alone?
Suddenly I felt old. 28 is only a number, but years can be weights attached to memories, and when that’s all you have, you wonder, was it worth it? Doesn’t matter now. You can’t take it back redo what has been done. I never loved any of them, and they never loved me. They were company, and I was an escape, though I’m sitting here now alone not going anywhere especially not there not again. The last time was enough, and I’d not return until she is gone.

Storms in Chicago meant delays all day and my ride had gone leaving me at the airport trying to get on a plane, any plane, instead of waiting on my own. I ended up sitting at a wine bar not talking to the people next to me occasionally checking to see that my flight wasn’t going anywhere. Tempranillo was what I had too much of and I bought another bottle to take to her. A couple more glasses of something red on the plane, and I was drunk on the brown line trying to figure out where to go.
Finally she answered her phone, told me where to get off, and I rolled my suitcase to a stool where the ride and the wait were sobering me up, but I ordered a whiskey to fix that.
Hair stuck to her face because of the rain and she came up behind me thinking I hadn’t seen her tussling my hair saying how long it was before she sat next to me. Looking at my glass she began to ask me what I was drinking but stopped herself knowing it’d always be the same.
She ordered a cosmopolitan and leaned in close to me. But what was this? I didn’t know, so I leaned back in my chair away from her.