Screaming Subtleties

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Wishing her hair was shorter and wishing, at the same time, that the wind would stop, Jane Salstow stood at the corner of a Great Lake and a Great City feeling somewhat out of place in her yellow dress and shocking orange pumps with the heels lost in sand and only pointy tips protruding from the surface. The shoes were fabulous, subtle instruments that knocked wind from the beige people of the Midwest. Too bad, she thought, that they did not have a similar effect on the lake. Maybe the wind would blow the scent of smoke away, maybe it would blow away the gut-kicking smell of liquor and new clothes, leather and everything else. Maybe it would blow her away, like a giant yellow leaf in the fall, a leaf with fabulous orange shoes.
There were no more stars, because they ran out of energy from burning all night and there was no sun because it ran out of energy trying to keep things happy all day, there was just the moon that would never burn out because it, in fact, wasn't burning at all; just reflecting on the day like some do before sleep. Jane removed the orange weapons from her feet and walked towards the water slowly, but it was hard because she went straight into the wind, face first, hair blowing into her mouth and it was dark because the moon is only known for it's light in bad poetry, and she walked and stopped, moving in bold increments until her toes met the icy water of the Great Lake. Just across the dark body, lights of a Great City burned fossils, feeding the walls of bright blue as they towered far into the sky, all around her. She, at the bottom, by the lake, looking upward, had a long way to climb. A yellow speck against a blue background she stood at the edge of the water between day and night, in ambigous hours of time when the sun cannot dictate whether it is morning or not and the moon is useless. But then she decided to go away, and leave while no one was watching. The dawn always has a way of converting good friends into good strangers. She concluded in thoughtful retrospect: everything looks different under sunlight than it does in barlight. Drasticly. So she decided to float away, in one of her orange shoes. She climbed into the shoe and though it was a tight fit and the smell of leather made her sick, she sat in there and with her arms pushed the sharp orange vessel onto the water and floated, quite effortlessly, all the way to Canada where she was disgrutled to find that everything there was still blue.

I love wildly

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Morgan Sharp was an idealist on logistical matters and a realist when it came to matters of emotional consequence. He sat, wrapped in a pungent smoke from the incense, wrapped in a blanket from his reckless travels to Mexico and shivering in the fever that comes with a freshly breaking heart. He felt the tour bus moving, right then, moment for moment, frame by frame, every pebble the wheels ran over jolted the bus in a way that made the edges of the new wound tear slightly. It was harder for him now than it had ever been, because this time he was the one who ended everything; sent pieces of love to the bottom of everything. There was the feeling, at sunrise, the feeling that the world would never stop, no matter what...no matter how many hearts and necks broke in the darkness, it would return each day because it had to. The world would turn, it was only the laws of physics, agonizing in the consistence of their neutrality. Peter's constant tuning of the guitars made his ears hurt. Music hurt his ears. Every sense pained him. He cringed while Kenny killed Hendrix notes on the electric.

"Back before our love got lost you told me, you said, 'my love is constant as the Northern Star'... I said 'constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar'." ~Joni M.

At sunrise he knew she would wake up, he knew exactly how she would look around and laugh at first. Exactly. He looked out of the window and with throbbing eyes beheld the silhouettes of trees as they raced over the glowing sea of sunrise. Eastern light beams blurred into tears and confusion as the awareness of space and time came chopping into his sides. Frame by frame life was converted into memories and memories, conversely, were recoded into life. At some point before sunrise it happened: the very edges, the last strings of his heart, snapped under the constant friction of living and the vital organ separated into two solid pieces sending prickly slivers of pain to every sense he possessed. It was then he started to cry, he cried for hours and days, until the bus was filled with tears, silent and remorseful, they filled the streets over which the bus had passed causing dust to settle and puddles of sadness to spring. The bus moved west, and so did the tears, making a blue trail all the way to California, and there they remained but sparkled this time, in the sun. Then he remembered, somewhat bitterly, the brown girl on the corner four months before, the one whose heart he broke, the only one who could ever lead him to break his own: the one who said it was impossible to drown in one's own tears,that only those of our loved ones had that power. " He rocked back and forth on the dawn, hoping she was safe from his tears, hoping he was not safe from hers.

In Chicago, similar pools formed, but these were louder perhaps and more lamenting. She woke up to the same sun Mr. Sharp had seen from the bus, only the trees weren't racing with her, they stood constant as before. By the same light source they saw into the distance, only he was looking East and she, West. Only trees and space prevented them from seeing one another as they became crippled in the aftermath of a devastating lovestorm.
He left one of the two necklaces, like he said he would, behind the mirror in the living room: he left the cross. The same cross his father had left him the morning he abandoned the infant star at the door of a hospital. She took it, like she said she would, and threw it down from the overpass, watching it land on the railway tracks far below. It was only sanity, then, that held her from following it. She walked up to the edge, were Sanity held her back, firmly, around the waist, and coaxed her off of the ledge. "This is the New Year." It rung in her head.


"So this is the New Year," Morgan Sharp stood singing under the spotlights onstage guitar in hand, people screaming his name...and in the dark crowd he could see no faces but he felt music, note by note, and his mind, altered as it was on stimulants, depressants and narcotics was clear like sheets of water frozen in noonday sun. He felt conscious that someone was watching, one person who's eyes he could never forget, because when they were laid upon him he felt exposed, like a heart wrapped in transparent flesh and cotton. His first live performance broadcasted worldwide with at midnight. Indeed, she was watching, but this time from a secure seat in her new life, and when she saw him onstage she turned to stone, stuck there, a chunk of soft granite, far after they cut him from the screen to show how a domestic woman might use a new age-dustpan. But before that, just before they sold him to the advertising companies, He looked towards the audience as the smoke of the new year swallowed him whole he said, "I love, wildly." Screams almost drowned out his last words: "Because that's the only kind of love there is."

Midnight. So that was the new year, a year that turned him into a memory,one that required intricate recoding. Whether the memory was fond or foul, well, that was irrelevant.


"Everybody get your best suits or dress on.
Let's make believe we are wealthy for just this once.
Lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn
as thirty dialogs bleed into one.
I wish the world was flat like the old days,
and we could travel just by holding a map.
No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways..
there'd be no distance that could hold us back."
~Death Cab for Cutie