absence

today i feel so quiet. 

i've been painting for hours.  simple posters about death and retribution.  maybe that accounts for my melancholic mood?

there are things i want to say but i don't know how to say them.  i'm not even sure if what i want to say is true.  feelings come and feelings go and the memory of a certain night pounds inside my heart.  the sound and the rhythm of things which i feel lucky to have known.  the center of me aches.  the center of me feels cracked and divided.  


i feel like a begging dog.


i am here in my white room so far away.  no music is playing.  my window is open and so is my diary. i listen to the sounds of the street.  

we are without cages but distance creates unexpected urges.  i hold myself still and bend my head once more to my work.  like every other human, i want what i can't have and i fixate on the improbable.  my masochism is a very real thing.

i flip through the book i bought the night of my birthday of Terence Koh's work.  i look at the images and sigh.  the state of longing expressed in his sculptures and performances make me feel as if i have been gutted.  desolation is fertile ground regardless of what it may look like.   but the need to express such a thing is, itself, a hard thing to bare.  it hurts sometimes, this search, this need, this excavation of Self and Place.  

i wish i was back in that bar, drinking greyhounds and flipping through these pages there.  i try to buck up and keep pushing these small puddles of black gouache, try to keep defining the edges of my heartbroken texts.  i spread out and work on the floor.  my shoulder burns from hunching over these big sheets of paper. 

how can i miss you when i don't even know you?