1. Mermaids, being under no social obligation to wear clothes or cut their hair, do neither.


2. Design class is the epitome of academic bullshit. "Here's a formula," he says, "For how to paint. Here's a way to steal the color palette from your favorite water bottle logo."
Or (as a refrain, or a mantra, even): "Everything must be proven."
The lighting is bad, overbearing and florescent, but still too far away. The classroom is a cubical. At break I simply walk outside and stand. The sky has gone dark. He says that after the sun goes down, everything fades but the trees. Maybe this is true, but I find it hard to believe, and besides which, he also said that if you put a coin on a table and look at it for long enough, the coin will disappear.
Anyway, there is nothing green to test the theory on. Here everything fades but the cars, instead.


3. Sometimes it is necessary to put your head all the way underwater, or to run down a long hill without holding back. To be overtaken completely. Other times, purely for curiosity's sake, I want to run until I fall off the edge of this flat earth.


4. I remember things at random: my friends guitars, Christmas, sharing headphones on endless bus rides, drawing the different types of grass in the prairie behind my elementary school, the mottled green arm of one the fairies at 35/80. The singer saying: sing along. Singing.

5. I want to know everything about you, but am afraid that if I ask too many questions you will get suspicious.


6. Sometimes it is helpful to take the panaceas sold on street corners in plague torn villages. Even though the vendor is no more than a scam artist. At least he is an artist. The artistry of his lies is dazzling. The little pink vials of rose water. Two drops applied to the tongue every day. Maybe it really does work. Other times, there's nothing for it but to watch the world crash apart as if it's just the sun going down.

6. I am reminded of a realization I once had skiing: Yeah, fuck, I don't know how to stop, but I can get to the bottom of the hill without needing to.

8. Sometimes I suspect that it is the brief exposure of weakness, rather than any demonstration of strength, that leads one* to fall in love.

9. At night here there are too many mechanical noises. The coo of the elevator, a throaty, desperate sound. A helicopter sweeping by like some great predatory bird. A siren, wild as a loon, choking into abrupt silence when it reaches the hospital across the way. The occasional stutter of the air conditioner. I miss owls, crickets, cicadas, neighbors’ disagreeable dogs.
In the morning the silence is a hotel kind, hinting at the breathing of others, at the shuffling of their limbs on their borrowed beds, at their wanderlusting dreams.

10. Cappuccinos with foam too thick to draw in. Paintings whose gazes I have, when spacy, held for (cumulatively) hours. Unremarkable but enduring wood. More often than not this feels more like home than any other home I could name or invent. I have to switch between two locations just to keep from creeping the barristers out.

11. The young, among other things, fall at a rather faster than gravity dictates.

12. In the dessert, if you go too long with only sand to eat and drink and breath and see, you can go no farther with only sand. So, first, there is water, shimmering with the same erotic, untouchable sheen as the golden circles dangling from the costume of a belly dancer. You can only get just so close-- never closer. Never there. Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet? Now?
Never.
It's like a dance, or a chase scene. (You can't decide.) You take a step forward; the water laps a wave back. In your throat and your gut and your limbs is a feeling that falls somewhere between thirst and lust, and you think that maybe they are always, in the end, the same thing.
You want to cry, but there is not enough water in your body to wet your eyes.
In the dessert, you inevitably lose your mind.

13. I am sick of being lied to.

14. Pay me no mind.

*or me, at the very least.