I read somewhere that you need to enjoy talking together or eating together since lovemaking isn't always going to sustain a couple. I'm pretty sure we are living on it these days. That and Zeke's coffee.
This morning I didn't make the coffee. You did. I prepared it though, cleaning out the little flat ceramic cups from yesterday's coffee. We never did make that evening pot did we? I put raw sugar and a little honey and cream into both cups and you didn't even wait for me to bring it to you. You came over and took it off the counter. Mine was sipped down a little. I can't remember if I was fully dressed. I sometimes just prepare my coffee or do dishes in my underwear. I was thinking of cream of wheat, the cereal, not the kitten, but of how I'd personally not mind eating cream of wheat for breakfast. I'd seen it as I put the honey back on the cabinet shelf. I was thinking how I'd live on little back in my apartment on Bolton st. How I feel like you need meat, and some "meal" and I cater to that. I went over and sat down at the table with you and we talked. You in front of your silver metal Mac. Me looking at 'at the threshold of Alchemy', a book of poems by John Amen, which I had finally brought up from your car last week. You'd explained it was from Jen Michaelski and that you had to write a review for it. It was only yesterday that I finally shook her hand and tried to be a third person in your conversation in the gentlest of manners so she'd stay standing there. The book under that one was Antisocial by David Blaine which Jen had held up saying, "there is a way you can get this book. Come see me to know how."
I flipped open the first book and mentioned the review. Maybe I said. 'I'd like to hear your review.' You said you had to send it today(Sunday) You read your notes. I read some words from the book thinking about publishing again. I had just pretty much downed the cup of coffee. I said 'I liked it when you made the coffee' I was feeling curious about how we'd spend our sunday. I think I said we should have a special breakfast and we were going to get some morningstar sausage links for me, but then we started talking about laundry and other things we needed like toothpaste. Breakfast was a second half cup of coffee. YOu came over and poured it into my cup, the hot glass of the pot warming against my hand which was still grasping the cup. I had drunk water first thing in the morning.
Still. I have been drinking coffee constantly since returning from Egypt. It is as though I have this umbilicus of dopamine eeking from a roastery on Said Zaghloul st. I keep feeding myself from the bean cord. Trying to keep awake in the existance of a past. The food cycle is broken in my life. I eat strangely and not at all. I finally made us Pbjs at 12:30 while we figured out a formula on your MAC spreadsheet software for our budgets. We had separate tables and we had to merge them( TotalmonthlyincomeJoseph,TotalmonthlyincomeEmily. You wrote'EMma' and then erased it saying, "I'm just going to confuse myself." I came back with the sandwiches. Uncut. You aren't a kid. I've been cutting Pbjs into trianges for years. Even mine. But I put yours whole onto a plate. I put some doritos on mine. Damned doritos. I put them back up in the cabinet at first saying something about, "its the doritoes that got me." Something neurotic and self-derogatory and spacy. I felt talkative for talkative's sake.
I spread the jelly.
You figured out something!
I came over and put the upside down jelly spoon in my mouth. It was cool and grape. I was done with jelly.
I put it away thinking. With Casey I always bought the red raspberry.
I thought. I never liked grape.
I bought it for you. I'd buy. APricot, red raspberry, something different everytime. That would be more like me. I put that thought into the fridge and closed it.
When I sat back down you pushed back your chair, waved your hand like 'ya'. Done. I was really into knowing how to do the totals in this software. You were into being done with it. Your satisfaction had turned to irritation. Unexplained. Idiopathic. I felt a static around my chest of tightness. I could either ask or not ask. Talk or not talk. Prod or not prod. I thought about food and emotions. It's kind of reflexive for me now.
I joked with you this time instead of applying the claw hammer.
Score 1 point in soul experience points. I made fun of myself. I rubbed dorito dust all over my face and made you smile. It couldn't really last for long. Who know why. I jammed the crust into my mouth on a hard thought. I walked away and came back with a long old thought about money. You said something like "what is that fear you are trying to inculcate" I said "Shame on me." and cried truthfully. It was a bit of honest tears.
We were ready to go out and buy some things then.
We didn't eat again until the veggie burger and pizza at Maria Ds in Glen Burnie. It was a meal. Our second meal of the day. In the middle between Pbjs and Pizza we'd had a beer at Lof/t. My beer was frothy and cold. I felt like a permanent yin chill of drunkenness seeped into my hands as I held it. I put it down and made finger puppets on the back of Robin's chair as she read poems up at the music stand podium. I think I made Rupert Wondolonski(sp) laugh. Maybe he didn't notice. I had fun letting my eyes glaze over while her words sexually charged the air. I heard fist and pornstar, and snake in bamboo at rivers edge and many other words like 'shaved.' I liked the black shadows of my fingers on the red of the chair. My beer was full of my brown dress and my vertigo from too much feeling and too much drinking and talking yet there was still this unknowing around you. I couldn't quite shake it. Even after our afternoon interlude. Mouthsful of each other. More than ever I didn't need to eat and I wasn't eating anyway. Tension in me had begun to rise again. The laughter, and the hugs and the car ride all had my tension and my yesterday, back to my week of teaching. I talked about my blue wolf paper puppet. I talked. I talked. There was a sense in me of too much. I tried to find the etiology of everything. I needed to know everything. I spoke until speaking dried out my throat and my third eye and sat semi-comatose in the seat opening and closing my sleek black intrique phone staring at its silver hinge and watching the light move across the translucent black hard plastic of its wings. Everything was rushing forward.
There was no meal today. Outside the game store, we agreed we'd have a slice now and cook later. So at Maria's Italien place where we always go after ice skating, I picked the veggie burger I ate poking it with a toothpick talking to Jackson who was in Martha's Vinyard at a wedding. Jackson had found a caterpiller with black horns. I imaged poky snail horns made of black fleshiness. I didn't look up at you as you ate your hawaiian pizza. I just poked the italian sub bread sandwich repetitively and tried to imagine where he was. I said "what are you doing."Jackson said "its dinnertime. actually its more like brunch." I asked if he was eating. he said. "no. I'm talking to you." I laughed. Later at home I ate the multigrain cheerios and soymilk we'd gotten at Target. You didn't eat anything else. You drank water after I rubbed your shoulders with lavender oil and brought you water. Then you left for Cats Eye and I finished the flax seed bar you asked about...and picked pepperonis off of one of the slices you brought home. I ate it, knowing I wasn't really hungry. You're going to eat the other two when you get home...
I feel ambivalent about food. I've had better food days. I've eaten fresher things, drank cleaner liquid, stayed sober, uncaffeinated, taken a bath and felt more even. All my tension could be from this unnourished body...asking for me to rest, to drink water and stretch. I'm so happy you agreed about buying whole oats instead of the boxes of packets....Why didn't I eat? Where's the meal? The meal is last tuesday when I made carrot soup with black beans and salmon with a tomato garlic couli over rice. The tomatoes had been cold and delicious. I cut them thinking of the chambers of the heart because a tomato has four chambers. I ate them off of the cutting board so happy and then sauteed them slowly in garlic and black pepper. I'm almost done with the jar of peppercorns from 2005. That jar is like a spell. Its been causing something tiny and inexplicable to rise and fall in my spirit as grains of causality burble through my inner world. This week I will have to cook something with Gavin's basil.
