je suis une fille qui veut voir

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Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:26 -0400

musicilikeforyou: Breathe.dream.scream - Denitia and...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:26 -0400

Breathe.dream.scream - Denitia and Sene

Genuinely obsessed with this duo. After first hearing their tracks on soundcloud a few months ago, I was absolutely in love. They’ve got that soulful, chill vibe that’s effortlessly beautiful. This is one of their newer tracks, which I imagine may be on their debut album? They’ve got that coming out pretty soon, so I’m hoping that’ll be the time people will see just how great they are. Until then, here I am guiding you to something wonderful!

Alicia

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Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:37 -0400

definitelydope: Geisers . Bolivia (by Shanshet!)

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:00:45 -0400

definitelydope:

Geisers . Bolivia (by Shanshet!)

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Sun, 19 May 2013 12:59:00 -0400

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:00:19 -0400

stored-snapshots: Ocean Beach, SF (by Leslie Gold ۰ (beaut))

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:00:37 -0400

stored-snapshots:

Ocean Beach, SF (by Leslie Gold ۰ (beaut))

nesola: Chungking, Wulong by YOU YI on Flickr.

Sat, 18 May 2013 08:00:27 -0400

nesola:

Chungking, Wulong by YOU YI on Flickr.

limitlessplaylist: Atlas Hands by Benjamin Francis Leftwich I...

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:36 -0400

limitlessplaylist:

Atlas Hands by Benjamin Francis Leftwich

I will remember your face cause I am still in love with that place

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Fri, 17 May 2013 08:00:37 -0400

KASJDF;KAJS;LKDFAJS;FD

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:19:18 -0400

KASJDF;KAJS;LKDFAJS;FD

partytights: Angels - The xx

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:00:26 -0400

partytights:

Angels - The xx

stupido-ragazzo: trickotreat: 15 weeks by krmmnn on...

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:17 -0400

stupido-ragazzo:

trickotreat:

15 weeks by krmmnn on Flickr

Gaaaawwww

commovente: “The North Star,” Shinji Moon Read More

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:00:39 -0400

commovente:

“The North Star,” Shinji Moon

Read More

the cinnamon peeler's wife

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:18 -0400

the cinnamon peeler's wife:

commovente:

“The North Star,” Shinji Moon

I.

“Jim. You said we would stop soon. You said we would find somewhere to go.”

I chose my words carefully, stringing them on a line between the backseat and the driver’s seat until the sentence hung there, pinned in the space between us. Jim looked at me through the rearview mirror and grinned, his teeth like glowing pearls in that almost-dark. He rolled the window down with his free hand, letting August in; and he lit a cigarette, the smoke curling out of him like a ghost.

“But darlin, aren’t you havin’ more fun just driving around like this?”

I laughed a strange, sharp laugh. No, I thought. No I’m not. I wanted to leave. I wanted to scratch him, hurt him, take the wheel from him and run, run so far away that he could never find me. But I couldn’t. Not with Lillian sleeping softly beside me, her small figure a comforting weight on my shoulder. I sat in the backseat with my forehead pressed against the cool of the windowpane, smoothing the night out of her hair. The road was quiet for that time of the evening. No headlights. No streetlights. Nothing that we could mistaken for constellations, no miscellaneous moons. What was left of the North Carolina sun bled like an oil spill into the mountains, and the blue hour seemed surreal — so light against the air in the car that hung like dead weight, heavy on our skin.

“Yes Jim, but …”

“Look kid, you have no one else but me. Count your fucking blessings that I haven’t left you girls yet. Now look at that damn sunset and don’t say another word and have some fucking fun.” My father sat there, driving with his shirt unbuttoned, the white flesh of his middle like another pale moon. In the cup holder there was a cold beer and rolled up twenty-dollar bills. He turned around to look at me, offered me the cigarette in his hand. “Want a smoke?”

I turned away and he laughed.

I said nothing else, only pulled the blanket up to Lillian’s chin and watched as the heavy light draped itself across the shoulders of the mountainscape like a condolence.

II.

This wasn’t the first time we were leaving.

It was all such a familiar routine. A finger on a map point. Figuring out the slowest routes, the most meandering back roads. But after a certain point, even state lines blur. Motels are all the same. Continental breakfasts are similar no matter where we end up: blueberry muffins, bland coffee in white mugs, suspicious eggs.

But that’s why Jim liked it — there was a familiarity in disappearing.

It was safe to him, belonging to nothing, loving no one, never being comfortable enough to stay for long.

III.

            He always told me that I was so much like her.

The same sad brown eyes. The same way we talked with our hands. Our lithe bodies, the pointed chin, the way we walked out the front door like we were never going to come back. After she died, after Lillian found her body in the bathtub and when Mom’s vacant body wouldn’t move, she screamed — making the last sound that we ever truly heard from her.

            Afterwards, Jim did nothing but sit at the edge of the porch, his eyes endless, smoking cigarettes and watching day cycle into night, night recycle into day. Moths flew into the flame of the porch light, their little bodies burning and falling, burning and falling. “Your mother…” He took a drag of his smoke. “Your mother was the only direction I ever had in this life.” He lit a match and dropped it in front of him. He did it once more, twice more.

            “God dammit, Joanna.”

He stood up and kicked the edge of the stairs, paint chipping underneath his boot. “God fucking dammit.”

IV.

The night we left, we all knew that it would be for good.

He opened the door to Lillian and my bedroom, a bag slung over his shoulders. Quietly, I felt him brush the hair off of my forehead, his breath the aftertaste of whiskey. He folded his arms beneath Lillian’s small frame, gave me a nudge on the arm, and lifted her up — the heavy weight of her sleep magnified by the familiarity of his warmth. She had been sleeping in my room since Mom passed. I told her that she was just on a trip, that she had become a mermaid and we had to give her to the sea for a while. And Lillian believed it. She was young then, barely four — not yet too old for fairytales.

We left that night, all of us with a backpack each full of things we couldn’t afford to forget. Me with a locket that my mother had worn, a curl of Lillian’s hair looped into it. A deck of cards. A small notebook. Lillian took her blanket. And Jim, he left with only a change of clothes, the money from the safe, and us — his two children.

The last thing I remember of our home was the grandfather clock in the corner with its large arm swinging lazily; the photograph of my mother when she was younger, sitting at a table drinking a glass of wine with a man next to her that she said was her brother, smiling so wide with her eyes so warm that you knew the photographer was a young Jim; and last, Lillian’s blanket, trailing out the front door behind her like a shadow.

At that point, leaving was a good thing.

I remember how the house looked pale and saggy as we drove away; how even with the distance growing between us, I still felt its weight — still felt the heaviness that we thought we could leave behind. We left so that we no longer had to mourn, no longer had to walk around our days like we were at a funeral. It was a certain freedom, for a while. It felt like we were going somewhere instead of running from something, running from each other, running from our own reflections.

V.

We slept for a couple of days in the backseat of the car — Lillian and I curled up beside each other, Jim smoking cigarettes with the driver’s seat reclined, his feet propped up on the dashboard. We would lay in the quiet, listening to him singing his old Elvis blues, until our consciousness slipped past us. Our warm bodies folded into each other.

            And I couldn’t tell you when it happened, when the air shifted — when Jim stopped playing the radio, and instead drove us silently across state lines, his eyes two abysses that we couldn’t fall into.

VI.

            A loud knock on the door of our second motel, somewhere on the outskirts of Kentucky. I got out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, combing the bed out of my hair. I opened it and Jim fell in, his eyes like darts pointed in my direction. “Elise… Now what the hell are you doing up, princess!” He tried to reach in for a hug, but I pulled away, flattening my body against the wall. He stumbled forward.

“Jim? You’re drunk… Go to sleep, okay?”

He coughed into his hand and looked at me and said nothing, just pushed past me and laid flat on the bed, laughing harshly — his hands covering his eyes and his mouth a wide half-moon, his teeth unsettlingly white. He lit a cigarette and then dropped it on the floor, and I ran to it, stomping it out with my feet. He passed out almost immediately, and I stared at him for a while, not knowing what to do with him — with this man who had driven us around for six months, who could barely look at us anymore. I carried Lillian out of the bed, pulled a blanket out from underneath Jim, and made her and I a small bed to sleep in on the floor. There was something I no longer trusted about him. He wasn’t the man who used to tuck me into bed every night. He wasn’t the one who made breakfast in the morning, stayed up all night laying on the field with me, teaching me about what it meant to be human.

There was something about him that I no longer understood.

It wasn’t until then, months after we had left — when Jim started to peel away. He drank heavily, started leaving us in the car, in the motel, for hours. He’d come back smelling of whiskey, and I realized that we were what Jim needed to leave.

But how could he?

We haunted him like his own poltergeists. Me, a spitting image of my mother. Her hands. Her eyes. Her face. Lillian, the faint shadow of her ghost. He couldn’t escape our heaviness, the weight of remembering too much, and never being able to forget.

V.

            “Elise, come here.”

            I heard the barely-there whisper from the open car doors and untangled myself from the sheets, laying Lillian’s head gently against the armrest. Jim was sitting on a boulder on the outskirts of a field somewhere in West Virginia, four hundred miles away from where we began, weeks after we left home. His left knee was pulled to his chest, the other swinging over the edge of the stone. I got out of the car with bare feet and sat beside him. The August night was warm, and the stone felt cool on the back of my legs. It was midnight, and the stars hung above us in an endless array of tinsel.

His voice was quiet; kind, even.

            “Remember the big dipper?”

            Cicadas rubbed their thighs together in the background, creating a chorus for us to fall silent against. “Yea, I do.” I pointed it out to him, showed him the little dipper beside it.

            “Now find the north star.”

            I pulled at the handle of the little one, put the star in his palm. He smiled at me.

            “Your mother used to call you that, you know. Her little north star.”

We sat quietly for a while, both of us looking up — our silhouettes making small mountains in the landscape. He rubbed the back of his head and sighed. “Alright kid,” he said. “Go back to bed.” I went back into the car and laid there for what seemed like hours, unable to sleep. Jim sat there on the boulder, looking up and only up, until I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was asleep in the driver’s seat, still smelling like the cool of stone, still smelling vaguely of moonlight.

VIII.

            The sound of a window breaking is deafening.

            Fuck.

I woke up with a start, screaming. Glass fell across my lap, over the soft skin of Lillian. Jim laughed, his voice echoing over the mountainscape around us. We were parked on the side of the road, and from what I could tell we were alone. Jim’s face was pressed in the hole he had made, the silhouette of him darker than what the sky had become. “Come here you bitch,” he said, his hands like ice around my arm. He pulled me towards him and my arm scraped through the window, the glass digging trails in my skin.

            I pulled away frantically, kicking at the window with my foot.

            I locked the doors, a pounding my head — and hurled Lillian behind me, everything, even her eyes trembling. Jim flung his head back and swung a bottle around, his bare skin paler than the belly of the moon. He let out a string of curses, his voice carrying over the hills, over the night, over the sparse clouds —smoothing over grass stains and families, asleep in the distance, until all that was left of him was an echo. He laughed, and the laugh subsided into a shout — the shout into a cry, and the cry into a hollow sort of quiet. He dug his heels into the earth, the dust around him swirling, settling. And he sat there, the moonlight casting long shadows beside him — his body folded into itself so neatly that he looked like a small child, like a boy who had nowhere to go.

VIII.

For days afterwards, he was silent. He didn’t look at me, didn’t apologize to us. He just kept driving. After two days, we stopped at a motel and he booked us a room for the night. He got us a couple of hamburgers and lit a cigarette with a match, sitting at the edge of the bed quietly. “I think,” he said finally, looking down at his hands.

“I think it’s time we really do go home. There’s work in the Carolinas for me.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Really? Do you mean it this time? I swear to god, Jim, if you’re messing with us, if you’re lying… I —” And he shook his head again.

“Home. Let’s just go on to some home. Enough of this.”

And I couldn’t help it, I hugged him, all that he had done quickly forgotten. Home. Home. I had forgotten what home was like, what waking up in the morning to the light on the floorboards, to the smell of breakfast cooking, to the soft warmth of lulling myself to sleep in the quiet of a bed was like. It was all I wanted, it was all I could think about. We left the next morning, packed our backpacks for the last time and got into the car. A home.

Could you believe it?

IX.

            “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” he whispered to me in the light of a quiet morning. “Here’s some money.” He pulled a wad of twenties out of his pocket and patted them down onto the passenger’s seat. He pulled a baseball cap over his head and gave me a toothy grin. “Bye, kiddo.” He faltered closing the door, looked at me for a second, but turned away anyways. I thought nothing of it, just turned back in my sleep, folding my arms even tighter around Lillian’s small body.

X.

He’s been gone for six days now. The car left, parked on the side of a diner. I woke up and he was gone, the money in the passenger’s seat like a small apology. For the first day, I thought nothing of it. The second day, I was sure that he was fine. Then I became worried. Then I became scared. Angry. Hurt. The five stages of grief ran its course through me in cycles. It was the sixth day he had been gone, but what could I do about it but make sure Lillian was okay, that she didn’t suspect a thing?

            We fell into a pattern. I would wake up early and wait for Lillian to get up.

When she did, we went to a corner deli, bought a sandwich and split it in fours, eating a quarter each then, licking the mustard off of our fingers on the edge of the sidewalk, the tail of summer rubbing soft against our bare legs. I always saved the other half for later. When the night came, we just held each other with all the windows up except the little slit of the car roof. The moon was bloated in those few days, hanging crooked on the skyline.

It was an early September and the leaves were barely changing.

The days passed quickly, and at first, the both of us almost forgot that he had gone, that he had left us, that he had finally rid himself of his ghosts. Lillian was smiling again, her big toothy grin — her blue eyes like small waves coming towards you when you looked into them. We walked the streets holding hands. Old women would look at us, their eyes every kind of sympathetic. They’d rustle through their purses, looking to give us spare change. Some of them whispered between themselves, looking at us — looking at each other, wondering if we had a home, if we needed one.

A woman in a navy dress-suit, a TransAm symbol pinned onto the lapel of her jacket, came up to us while we sat against a wall one afternoon, playing with a piece of chalk that a neighborhood boy had forgotten. She slipped a twenty dollar bill into Lillian’s palm. “Please,” she said. “You two remind me so much of my own children.” Her fine brown hair was pinned back, and her hands were soft when she touched my cheek.

“No, I’m sorry.” I took the bill from Lillian’s hand, gave it back to the woman with her kind eyes. “We’re not beggars.” Not yet, I thought.

She looked at us for a while, knelt down beside Lillian and touched her cheek gently, too, and reached into her purse, pulling out a sheet of paper. “Here, this is my phone number.” She scribbled seven digits onto it, clicked her pen shut and folded it into my hand. “Please, take it. I don’t know; I, I live just a drives out of town. I have to go now, have to fly to California, but — but you should call the number. My husband, he’ll pick up. He’ll pick up if you tell him I told you to call. Will you call?”

I didn’t know what to say, just nodded, my voice caught like a bone in my throat. The sky was so blue that I began to believe in it again, and I coughed up a “Yes, yes, yeah,” not knowing if I meant it or not.

“Good,” she said, and gave us a long, strange look. She tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “I really hope to hear from you girls. I’m Amira, by the way. Amira.” She looked as if she were about to say something else, and then shook her head, smiled. She walked away, her small body growing smaller and smaller as she walked down the street in her little beige heels, the sound of their clacking reverberating even after I could no longer see her.

XI.

After that, I brought Lillian into the bathroom of a gas station and cleaned ourselves off with soap and water. I scrubbed our gangly limbs with hot water until our skin was pink, blushing. I scrubbed my body until I felt clean, until all these years of were taken off of me, until I no longer felt the weight, the heaviness of a mother going, a father leaving — both of them giving up in different ways. I looked at my naked self in the mirror, underneath the cold fluorescence of a gas station somewhere in Alabama. The flat plane of my stomach. My thin frame. Strong arms. All sinews and limbs. I cleaned our bodies with soap, washed our old shirts in the sink while Lillian stood by the door, keeping it closed. We wrung them off and put them back on our bodies — the cool, damp cotton nice against our new skin.

            I looked into the mirror, at my now eighteen years, and combed my hair back with my fingers, pressing my palms into the edge of the sink. My eyes were no longer the “sad brown” of my Mother’s, but warmer, warmer still — somehow, more hopeful, despite it all. I looked at the scars on my wrist from Jim and the broken window, traced how they were healing, how the skin had moved over it — how one day, it would no longer be anything but a little mark, light against my skin. I thought of sitting on the rock with Jim, how he reminded me of what I was once called, Mother’s little north star. I thought of the Big Dipper, its smaller brother, the photograph of my mother smiling — her eyes so full of the world that you couldn’t even tell how she broke herself into smaller and smaller pieces, slowly and quietly — so quietly that none of us knew that the inside of her body was all broken glass — so quietly, that we couldn’t help her become a mosaic.

I looked at Lillian, the little lamb. How quiet she was. How her eyes spoke volumes. She had grown so tall. Her small frame blooming, unfurling in our solitude, in our peace.

I looked into the mirror, combing my hair back once more, letting the thick brown hair fall down soft below my shoulders.

XII.

That night, at the phone booth on the outskirts of a Motel, I pulled the phone number out of my pocket. Slowly, I put a quarter in, heard the clink, and dialed, spinning the cord around my finger nervously. The phone rang once, twice.

And then a man picked up, his voice frantic. “Hello?”

            “Hello. Hi, I um. My name is Elise. Your wife … Amira, gave me this number.”

            “My god. Elise? Christ, I can’t believe it’s you. She told me that you were going to call but fuck, I don’t know if I believed it.” The line was fuzzy but the voice on the other side held a familiar softness, soft peels of music from a childhood that I could barely outline. “It’s your Uncle — Uncle Matt. Do you remember me?” I thought of the photograph of my mother, of the man sitting beside her, the man who I had never known except as a child small enough to be held in laps. “We’ve been looking for you for years. My god, I can’t believe it. Elise. Elise, we found you. You found us. Of all places, you’re here.”

            And I was quiet, for a second, holding the phone against my ear.

A breeze picked up around my ankles, and leaves scattered and skid across the late September. The world seemed clean again. Summers had always lasted too long, and I felt Autumn touch my skin gently. I looked up, the moon a hook in the corner of the sky. I thought of my father, how he left us here — of all places. As if he had known.

Could he have known?
The stars hung above us in an endless array of tinsel. My voice was quiet; kind, even. “Yeah,” I said, laughing shyly, looking up at the north star blushing above us, holding Lillian closer against me, smiling so wide with my eyes so warm. “I guess I did. I’ve always had a knack for finding my way back.”

ev0lution-of-stardust: (By SveBo)

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:00:37 -0400

ev0lution-of-stardust:

(By SveBo)

free-parking: Francis Alÿs, Nightwatch, 2004. Surveillance...

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:00:24 -0400

free-parking:

Francis Alÿs, Nightwatch, 2004.

Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the National Portrait Gallery at night.

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:51 -0400

artpixie: The Explosion of Colors 42/52 (by sprinkle...

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:00:42 -0400

artpixie:

The Explosion of Colors 42/52 (by sprinkle happiness)

Feeling all kinds of awful.

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:05:09 -0400

Feeling all kinds of awful.