grey days and veins

[_fissures]

These days in the morning I'm out of bed before 6am which is when the construction site first begins to cough, rattling its nuts and bolts, and wake. I can hear it across the street as I make my way down the corridor toward the kitchen, knocking against itself, two buildings like two wintered knees against the blanched sky. I'll make coffee and

Comments

[pseudodipteral]

Lola in that song was a transvestite!

[_fissures]

Ha, really? - I only vaguely remembered the lyrics, can't even be sure how it goes. Although one of my friend's did have an alter-ego as a drag-queen once - we called her Mavis. She wore purple a lot and always had glitter on her breasts. A transvestite - that really would be quite something. *laughs*

[girlafraid_]

Oi. I did not wear purple a lot. It was just that once. And maybe the Alaska shirt. But that's it. But I do go around with big black markers to cross out offending apostrophes. *hint*

Quadrant is evil. They had an article on performance poetry. It was bollocks. But it was evidence of research, so I have to say Quadrant helped me.

And seeing it's Christmas Eve: if you want to see something beautiful, head to your nearest Russian Orthodox church tonight for the midnight mass. Unfortunately, I'll be going off to a church with stained glass windows in Parramatta where the incense lodges itself in your throat like a yellow fog.

[_fissures]

Hello Mavis, oh, don't be such an anal grammarwhore. You'll spoil all the fun - one day I'm going to throw some horrid party where I will devise for everyone to use incorrect grammar and blatantly abuse apostrophes before you. Just for you.

Quadrant is not entirely evil - it's intellectually bigoted. And you are freakishly left-wing with your socialist, Labor-flag-waving heart. You're not thinking of becoming a Greens-supporter, are you? I would think the fact that I don't outright hate Windschuttle and support Reynolds doomed me in the Hix exam, where political correctness is loved (still) but you hate him so much, so that can't be. And of course Quadrant would be idiotic about performance poetry; their probably so conservative that they think the insitution of Art and Literature is being daily degraded.

I hoped you enjoyed your marvellous vulgar church (?). I sadly couldn't find a Russian Orthodox Church nearby, but there is always next year!

[idolatrie]

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Le Cirque! Gosh, that was two parts imagination to each part shared psychosis. Remember the plans for a band, the chipped nailpolish, sailing away on a pure white yacht, painting on easels in the middle of the sea, the address books full of the numbers of the prettiest androgynous boys? And of course the older men, the shady Humberts that were not-quite fantasy but somehow appealing in that naive way. The plans for professors, and oh gosh - we're actually going to university soon! Our Sydney, complete with snap-frozen seaspray gothic architecture.

I just subscribed to World Movies because I heard they are showing an adaptation of my beloved Broken

[_fissures]

Always the pretty boys and the long golden curls and too many whiskey bottles taken out to trash. Too much lipstick and hair dye and cigarettes, cuts on your arms and charcoal under my fingernails and huksy voices over the phone and the melodrama and how we created a metaphor for every aspect of life. Le Cirque was much more than a dream, or an extended conceit communicated through long emails in year ten and eleven; it was a lifestyle. ♥

That is right, we are both going to Sydney, next year! It still seems surreal, a fabricated whimsy that for so long, was shrinking and drying and out of reach. Remember, the wild and strange ideas we had about English professors and their blazers of tweed and black-rimmed glasses and erudite conversations, wooden fireplaces and Romantic poetry. Now our dreams of ivy-clawed towers seems a little too imminent, a little too bright, not twilight-lit.

I shall have to get World Movies as well - we have the service in this apartment block. Also, rather excitedly, (peculiarly) I've gotten a subscription to

[_fissures]

This is digging the darkness, but I was reading this again, and my reply and thinking about reality at the same, which never really works. And what happened to our dreams of literary theory and long nights burning slowly by candlelight in the libraries, buried in the refuse of ink from our pens and our words running madly across the page?

But last Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of the lawn when the twilight was almost falling down and those old brick and mortar buildings and that torchlight in the fingers of the wintry trees - and I almost caught the scent of that dream again. I know I should move on, that fifteen is long ago and growing further (tomorrow is the first of my 19th birthdays), but Le Cirque is still the post-adolescent dream I want to live, in the back alleys and garages of the inner-city, with lip-gloss in our pockets, steel in our heels and alcohol and eliot on our breath. Or the world from Donna Tartt's Secret History, that rarified collegiate world. Shall we go to the law ball and quote ancient greek playwrights