Pink Smog

I've found love, and her name is Weetzie Bat.

Usually prequals worry me a little, especially ones written a long time after the first book was released, because I'm afraid they might change the way I fell about characters I love so dearly.Change is good, but it also frightens me. Alot
However, I had so much faith in Francesca's ability as a writer, and I knew to stay true to the spirit of Weetzie, so I was very, very excited to read this book. What I didn't expect, and nor was I prepared for Francesca to make me love Weetize even more (if that was even possible). I can't wait to pick up Dangerous Angels again, now that I know so much more about how she became the slinkster cool punk pixie that made me want to start writing again.
"No matter how things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive".

Letters From South America #4

La Paz

A few blocks into the heart of the market square, the witches market is established precariously close to the San Franciscan church; it is the ever-present sense of duality, two shadows of persisting beliefs for a generation who has shallow roots in both. Here you can buy talismans for wealth, travel, luck and love, great stone owl totems and effigies  to Pachamama, gnarled skeletons of llama lambs still growing their wool, hung next to the small skulls of birds, and the bright bottled happiness that sparkles with glitter and sunlight, if that is what will make you happy. All of this is sold by the wise old crones with collapsing withered apple faces and their granddaughters, who attend church with these talismans nestled in between their breasts.

In a hotel room eight floors above the city, we pretend to be rocks stars and order champagne  that bursts in my head, tiny balloons of air making it even harder to breath in the view of the city lit up blue and gold. I want to dive into the fluorescent green park below, I want to indulge in my precarious youth that disappears from my lips with each breath of cigarette smoke. I dance until my legs seem independent of my body, belonging to another species of animal; the muscles begin to bunch and ache as if I have walked from here to Macchu Pichu. In this city that overflows with so many people, bodies pressed together in the streets as they are in the clubs, it is so easy to feel lonely.

There is a pigeon lying dead in a puddle on the street, its little body so still yet the downy feathers on its breast move ever so slightly in the breeze. Meters away, a man lays face down on the concrete, and the people walk past and over him like that dead bird. I do not know if he is asleep or passed out, yet I cannot stop to help him. It is too dangerous, even for a showing of human compassion.

At the height of my rebellion, I became involved with a Wiccan. I say involved because our relationship was not exclusively sexual; I also got involved with his religion. He said that he could fix my gnarled skeleton with herbs and spells, which would have made me immediately skeptical if it came from the mouth of anyone else, but he carried all of his beliefs in his eyes, so passionately that they seemed to burn with the unnatural hue of gold leaves. He made me undress in the woods on the outskirts of town, and he would massage my whole body in a thick, black red paste that smelled like sage and almonds, chanting over me in a language that resembled but I did not recognise as Latin.
I hated learning Latin in school, Latin is the plague of my life. No, not the whole damned language, just one derivative in particular. Scoliosis. Doesn’t sound very dangerous, does it? I’m sure you’ve known a couple of girls at your school who have it, you know, the ones who had to wear a back brace and had school bags that they dragged behind them on wheels. You might have even been a little bit jealous that they always got to sit down in the school photograph, and were frequently given passes out of class; their illusions of suffering extracted them from the monochromatic backdrop of students and made them interesting. Well, I sure was jealous of those girls, I’ll admit that, but for a completely different reason. Sever or advanced scoliosis is the rotation of the spine beyond seventy degrees.  This can place pressure on the lungs, restrict the breathing and reduce oxygen levels. The distortions may also cause changes in the heart. I cannot run without pain or shortness of breath, I cannot walk in a straight line, I cannot even dance for very long, and certainly not all night. And I do suffer from changes of the heart, but that has nothing to do with my condition. 
That day I could not say that I felt any change in the depths of my malformed bones, but I liked the feeling of his hands on me, and the smell of the almonds, and how it made my skin feel smooth like young wood.  “If you surrender yourself to the Goddess, she will take the burdens of your pain upon herself,” he would say, but I couldn’t even think of doing that; it wasn’t fair. These were my pains, and my burdens, I could not expect a deity to take responsibility for my tortured physical and emotional manifestations.  They were what made me who I was, and if I gave them to her, what then? Would she be corrupted, would I have to take her place? No, I could not take on guilt from a goddess as well as my mother.
But I liked his warm, soft hands upon my back, so I let him think that he was helping me, and I wore the cracked rose quartz talisman on a long chain so that it lay tucked in between my breasts; I knew that if there really was a God, he would be able to see it hiding there, but at least the reverend would think it was a rosary.

One day when I went to meet him in the forest, he was not alone. A little grey kitten was curled up in his lap, and as he was deep in meditation, I managed to coax the animal out and into my arms. She was so warm and soft, I could feel her little heart beating furiously against the heel of my palm.
“Today,” he said, eyes still closed, “We are going to fix your spine for good.” His voice was not soft and light as it normally was, but crackled like dried leaves, leaves that would have usually been raised by his lofty nature; this filled me with a sense of dangerous foreboding. I looked at him, my eyes narrowed so that the dying sunlight could barely filter in, but it did nothing to illuminate his intentions. “Hand me the kitten,” he said, in a voice that was not his own. Hands trembling slightly, I handed over the little, helpless thing with hesitation. If I had seen the ceremonial knife blade glinting gold in his pocket, I would have run with her still in my arms, but I was anxious, and the fact that I couldn’t pinpoint the cause of this anxiety drew my focus on the kitten and not the blade. That was at least until he drew it out of his pocket and pulled it across the kittens throat. It was only a tiny pink esophagus that, moments before, had been contracting with mews and was now slick with spilt blood. My stomach rolled like an ocean, the horror resting as bile at the base of my throat, and for the first time in my life I tried my best to run; the pain was intense, like a rope of fire curled around my spine, but the sight of that unnaturally bright red against the soft neutral colors of the fur and the forest spurred me on. “Wait, Melissa, wait! This is all for you!” I heard him call after me, and something in my changeable heart snapped. He was not a Wiccan, I knew that Wiccan’s didn’t believe in animal sacrifice; he had either confused his methods of worship, or he was a highly disturbed human being. The bottom line was that he couldn’t help me. None of these people could, they were too busy wrestling with their own demons. Mine appeared to be the most sever, the one that needed the most urgent attention because of its physical manifestation, but the truth was it was not.

Wanting: Enid Blyton's Imagination

Did any of  you lovely people ever read these books as a child? I was obsessed with them, and I'm cetain that I've read them all through ten times at least, and the Magic Faraway Tree another ten on top of that.

The illustrations are just exsquisite, I remember pouring over them for hours, chosing my favourite pages, and always skipping the part where Saucepan Man flings Moonface up through the hole in the clouds and he can't get back down because the land has changed. Clearly I had trouble dealing with conflict from a young age.

Anyway, I really wish my mum hadn't given them away, I would have loved to have passed these books on to my children (this isn't really something you give a cat, is it?).

Letters From South America #3

Arequipa

For a town of such condensed architectural beauty, Arequipa has a lot in common with sacrifice. In the heart of the city square the ghosts of the Santa Catalina Nunnery live within its chambers, where the second daughters of the wealthy colonial families were given over to the nuns and the mercy of God, thus completely cut off from both the pleasure and danger that thrived in their outside world. Their duties were to pray for not only their own souls but the souls of their families, that flitted precariously between the vices of the human condition and guilt ridden restraints of religion, and who all the while were able to take comfort in the fact that they had someone to pray for them when they could not bare to face God themselves. Why must it always be the women who have to repent for the sins of the patriarch who, without the tree of knowledge to sustain their unquenchable  curiosity, would have deteriorated into that which is now deemed uncivilized and thus their duty to conquer and correct?

In Arequipa I sit on the window sill of my hotel room as the city flows below me like an ocean of bodies moving in and out of taxi cabs. I feel suspended above my own life because I am in love in a foreign city; my body is here, but my soul is travelling to her on the back of an albatross across the Pacific ocean.

My father was the next man to leave my life, but his temptation was not disguised as death, but dressed plainly as another woman.  His absence from the house was not immediately noticeable because he spent most of his time at his office anyway; he worked long hours in advertising. He was very good at persuading people, I had to admit. He had persuaded my mother to think that he was faithful to her, hadn’t he?
 Yet soon the emptiness began to spread, sporadic, like a fungus in the corners of the rooms, starting from the study where he used to spend most of his time when he was at home, into the living room where his armchair sat empty, and through the kitchen to his seat at the head of the dining table.  But I think it was not he himself, but the removal of his things from the house that had the most impact on me; the framed photographs of his race horses, his coats in the hallway cupboard, the change on his bedside table. That’s how I knew that he had really left for good. It was the sentimentality of these objects; when removed from your life, it is that sentimentality that remains to remind you of their owner’s absence.

 I knew I wouldn’t be able to bare it if he told me he had been fucking his secretary, simply because it was so cliché. I hated myself a little for having that thought, especially because it turned out that he had left my mother for one of her friends; not a close one, but close enough to give the phrase ‘the wife’ a face and a set of feelings that she should have had the decency to acknowledge before she wrapped her own, perfectly symmetrical legs around my father. She even used to give me her old clothes because we were both a size 6. My mother is a size 10, and looks nothing like me. Our feet are the same, but I can’t wear her shoes.

When he left, my mother was so hell bent on making sure that it wasn’t because of me and my condition that she ended up taking all of the blame upon herself, to the point where she walked stooped with the weight of my disease and my father’s sin. She would move about the house like a ghost, so disheveled and despondent that she was unable to have an impact upon anything, except to fill the house with outbursts of sobbing at erratic intervals during the day; she certainly couldn’t take care of me. It was like we had been travelling on one train for our whole lives without being taught any of the emergency procedures in the event of an impending disaster.
So I tried to take some of the blame off her by letting her know that I wasn’t really a perfect, helpless daughter, and that it wasn’t her fault in the hope that she would stop feeling so guilty. I started smoking cigarettes, and I would leave the butts all around the house for her to find, and I wouldn’t bother taking mints to cover up the smoky scent on my breath when I kissed her goodbye. I stayed out late, way past my curfew, drinking malt liquor with boys I didn’t really know, and I would let them kiss me in the back of their cars.
I did cocaine once at a party, but it interfered with my regular medication and caused me to go into spasms of intense pain, so I never tried it again. I stopped turning up to my doctors appointments, I was rude, surly and mean. I still went to Church though, every Sunday; I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of there being a God that could absolved me of all this sinning later on. But the more I tried to pull her out of the downward spiral of debilitating depression, the further she sank, and the less she noticed me. She swept up the cigarette butts without a word, she stopped checking my room in the mornings to make sure I was there, she rescheduled my doctor’s appointments. She clung to the remains of her routines like a shipwrecked sailor, instead of using the wreckage to build a raft and rescue the both of us. 

Suitcase Planters

I love this! I am going ot make these one day, when I have my own balcony, that is hopefully strung with some degree of fairy lights / candles / fruit loop necklaces. Found here at English Muse

Slow Readers Book Club

So I joined the Slow Readers Book Club. It's an online book club started by Diana from Our City Lights back in 2010, and uses facebook, tumblr, and discussion forums to get people involved and excited about reading. Hooray!
The time you have to read the prescribed books is a lot longer than most book clubs I've heard about, which I like because it gives me time to read other books during that time. The last thing I want is for reading to feel like a chore.

Currently we are reading The Virgin Suicides, which I've already read but hey, like I need an excuse to read it again! So if you want to get excited about reading but don't know where to start, or you need someone to talk about books because all your friends just don't share your love of the written word, regardless of how many times you've tried to lend them The Bell Jar, this could be the community you're looking for!
I can't wait to find out what people think of one of my favourite books, and expand my reading horizons for 2012!

Letters From South America #2

Lima

You have to watch yourself in Lima, or you may find that when you leave it, you could be missing not only your wallet but also the skin of your teeth. Yet Lima is not only a den of thieves, theives that watch for you to drop your guard with unblinking eyes, it is also a city that indulges in a self professed necessity for love. In Lover’s Park, the flowers bloom with such vigor they could only have been conjured by Aphrodite herself, as she broods over those who come to share or bask in her pious gifts. The gardens are enclosed by mosaic walls, each exhibiting a unique pattern and arrangement of colours; no piece is the same as any other. Each shard represents a fragment of a love affair, and although they are quite small and insignificant on their own, when brought together they can create more beauty, more colour and more light than one person could comprehend with just their eyes, causing  their hearts explode in a shower of colored glass. This is the nature of love; it can create beauty out of things that were once broken, and bring the most unlikely pieces together to create a work of art. There are so many different types of love for so many different types of people; there are so many different ways to say I love you.

Yet life is all about duality; if you allow your soul to be lost to another in the rip tide of first dates, first kisses, and first ‘I Love You’s’, and do not keep a small fragment for yourself, you might wake up one day to find yourself standing on the edge of Suicide Bridge (built precariously close to Lover’s Park) without knowing how you even got there.

That night at Ormond Hall I stood with my face drawn up from its usual downward gaze to the eyes of that man and his guitar. Most people say that at gigs they lose all sense of self awareness and just melt into the music permeating the atmosphere, but that night I felt almost hyper aware of my body; I could feel the fine hair on the inside of my thighs brush together as I moved each one slowly past the other, in a sort of musically initiated dance that had started in time but soon became independent of the beat. I wondered if I continued it for long enough I could conjure up some fleeting sense of electricity. It was noticing these details that always made me feel abnormal, even more so than my more obvious defects; other people never thought or felt like this, I would think. Is this another genetic defect, or is there something wrong with me on the soul level, too?  I thought about the angles of my legs, the warped, triangular shape they naturally made.  They weren’t the right shape to fit around that man and his guitar, but I still wanted him. Maybe our relationship could begin as a purely platonic one, fueled by conversation and a mutual love of The Beatles, and the angles of limbs would be completely irrelevant. Out of the rich and fertile earth laid down by our intimate soul connection, our love would soon grow like hot house flowers; wild and striking from the depths of an unnatural environment, freakishly beautiful despite an inorganic cultivation. We would not be made of perfect puzzle pieces, we would exist as a mosaic; glued specks of tile and mirror onto his guitar, shards extracted from where they were embedded in his heart, painted ticks burrowing into the wounds to make him scratch at his chest and sing these sad, sad songs. We would glue the pieces of our broken hearts together to make murals, like the ones on his album covers, and if there were any cracks still showing we would paint over them.
But if he were happy, happier with me, with his legs wrapped around my uneven hips, his hand running down the jolting curve of my spine, then where would the songs come from? No one wants to listen to a completely content musician; they cannot relate to him, they will stop buying his records.  I would have to let him beat me, he would have a raging temper, and he would be an alcoholic, or a junkie. I would have to hide my jewelry from him, including my engagement ring, I would steal money from the safe he kept underneath our bed, I would buy a gun. Then we could be together.

But he never even gave us that chance. On April 5, 1994, he died of a self inflicted shotgun wound to the head, leaving his wife, his daughter, and me behind.