00:16 - May 24, 2003 inertia
So tonight the sky is purple, seriously purple, a foreboding dark purple at midnight which should mean storm clouds on the horizon, but actually is just a cruel trick because to be foreboding something actually has to happen after it. And nothing is happening. Nothing has happened all summer so far. I am shocked that this house hasn't caved in on itself from all the inactivity, but I suppose the laws of inertia are hard at work again.
23:11 - May 22, 2003 april coherentness
The most coherent boy-related thing I can remember ever having written in any paper diary - possible any diary - 4/25/03 - Boulder.
Would it make it any less if I wrote it down? Any more? After all this, all this, our aims are still completely different and exactly the same. Everything, anything but this. Yet it is still enough.
His voice is a murmur, a murmur in bursts, only slightly audible over the guitar, me plucking 'My Funny Valentine' super slow, accented, understated so he can't tell what it is. Because look at him. He has twisted his hair into curly rags around his face, is still twisting them, throwing sporadic shadows across his face, his achingly beautiful brown eyes. He's sprawled in a corner, as far as he can get from me without perching on the cold windowsill. I twang the guitar, slide my fingers quietly up the fingerboard. I look at my hands and steal small glances at him in between the more difficult chord changes. He is doing the same thing. Probably reading in his head whether I'm thinking he's strange. I am, but I am also thinking how much I love it.
I am mostly fumbling with any words I try to get out so he does most of the talking. Everything I say feels like I'm finally saying what I'm thinking for the first time since I got here. Saying it out loud, I mean, not just passively in writing or accidentally when I'm high having some very true phrases slip out unbidden. With our eyes down we talk about how people both seeming to be full of nothing at all can fall in love and be perfectly happy.
The difference between he and I is that he is lifted in spirits by so much; the tiniest things. The things that float by me completely unnoticed. 'Nick,' I start, 'I don't understand why you would be jealous of the people who don't think. You don't need ignorance to be blissful.'
'Nick,' I start, in my head, 'you are breaking my heart, and I don't know why.'
He is quiet and he stops twisting his hair. What I don't say out loud hangs in the air between us, or maybe just in my throat. 'I'm going to go to sleep,' he says, and stands up. I lay his guitar gently on his bed and tuck the pick between the A and D strings. All I can do as I gather my shoes is thank him for not being stupid. Gratitude like that, much more than that sentence - you make me feel like I'm not alone here - needs a hug to punctuate the meaning, but I don't, I just say it, deadpan. And his laugh rings out and echoes down the 1 a.m. hallway as I close the door behind me.
12:01 - May 21, 2003 salvation
We're all in this dark blue-walled room that's like a gym with a million other people and this mound of clay on a footstool. This doctor-type is moulding a girl out of clay, but when she begins to move each of her limbs in the freedom of the clay, malleable and smooth and humanly impossible, sometimes, with a snap of his fingers on her clay skin he transforms it to plastic with Barbie-joints that only move on a rotary ball, if she's lucky.. but usually just on a straight up and down track. She never gets to be clay for more than three seconds. When she is finished, or when he has finished with her, and her hair is transplanted horsehair gold and down to her waist, when she's the perfect 7' tall 75-12-40 or something real-life figure of a Barbie with blue painted on eyelashes and holes through her fingers from rings, with toes forced pointed, the doctor takes out his machine gun and steps away from the huddle of us around the girl and when she begins to crawl, shoots her in the stomach and she falls not like a Barbie would, but as she would if she were still clay, or human - lithely.
Then to everyone standing there he is the Messiah - he has created life and he has taken it away in the space of a few seconds - and suddenly there is a stage set up in the back of the gym with free holy water to splash on yourself and a basket of lingerie to take your pick from - evidently this is the new clothing for the devout - but the doctor is still in the back of the room with his machine gun, spraying the crowd with bullets. I don't remember the faces of any of the crowd except Aaron's, wearing his green jacket with the Bad Religion patches and screaming and screaming. I have seen it all before in the movies, and I know the bullets will all miss me, so I am quiet. I remember that Nick is upstairs with my mother going through photo albums and telling her his theories on the formation of the Pacific Islands (something to do with large turtles with leopard-like fur) and that Lara is in Amsterdam with Andrew ordering hash at a fancy restaurant, and so I know that the bullets will miss them, too.
When he has finished spraying the crowd and enough dead bodies have disappeared into thin air to suit his fashion, he beckons the living up to receive communion (half-mashed grapes danced on by Greeks; halfway in their journey to becoming wine). Elizabeth is the first one up there, putting her face straight into the bowl of grapes. When she emerges, face purple stained, she looks at me shamefacedly and says, 'I know it's wrong. But these are the people who will go with him, and I want to be among them.' Behind me there is a throng of people who have busted the doors and are leaving the gym, on their way to their next class. Five minute passing period.
15:39 - May 19, 2003 AAAARRRRRHHHHHH
AAAARRHH.
I thought I would be smart and catch Andrew at the Federal Center so I wouldn't have to wait until he called and then waste an hour getting there. I knew his appointment was at 12, so I got there at 12:15, and went up to the eighteenth floor and looked around and looked more and no Andrew. So I stayed in there another fifteen minutes to see if he would show up, and he didn't, so I figured I would sit outside by the exit so I couldn't miss him coming out. A half hour later; still no Andrew. I figure he must be gone, and walk around downtown wondering, 'if I were Andrew, where would I go?' and wandered around in record stores and in the courtyards by the Art Institute, but no Andrew. At this point I know it's pretty hopeless trying to find one person in the middle (literally... 0 N/S, 0 E/W) of downtown Chicago, so I wander aimlessly a little more and finally get on the train home at about 2:45.
When I get home there are two messages, both from him at the Federal Center, one at 12:10 and one at 2:30, wondering where I was.
