Gradient to Jack: Butterflies

Mari,

I was in the gutters of North Hollywood and I had gotten thin, so much thinner than the well eating man I am in the last year. It seem like every time somebody had a party, I was on the guest list, so I went.

Two things were true of that time, of every single party. I leave with a new piece of clothing and I fuck somebody I never met before. I never said it out loud but that was all I saw of my life that I would later call “a series of poor decisions.” But my mind was as thin as my stomach, verdad? I get to thinking now about a lot of shit I didn’t have the space in my thin mind to think way back in the day and I get flooded with dreams into my waking hours. I taste the foundation makeup and I can smell something burning. It gets sweet like that, like a memory, and then I remember.

The clothes of my nameless lovers was making my wardrobe something fabulous like something I thought Elton John must have going on in his vacation house. I was skinny enough to be running around in girl’s cardigans with no shirt or their stockings as a scarf. If I forgot to regret throwing away the world like I was, my friends would remind me, roasting my shit when the little fashion experiments got out of hand.

I left the party early, mierda esos imbéciles. I went home to cook up some pupusas and put out the cats. My apartment was so cheap, you drop a cigarette and the whole place go up, so I was a little paranoid. Not paranoid enough to double check the damn this is off. Por tanto tiempo, I ate so little I forget how to use the stove. 

Y así, when I run out from the house, I was wearing little else than pearls and a bathrobe. Running around like that, your Mariposo find a shop down on the corner lit up too bright like your room, looking like the end of the tunnel everybody said there was. My English broke off in the air when I try to tell the shopgirl what happened to me. I must have run from the fire with them not remembering but I had your sunglasses in my hand, the ones you left in the last place you touched me.

Take the light out. Just take it out and we can be together again, mi amor. Just because you come to the light of that place don’t mean you gotta marry it. You get me a stool and I’ll do it for you, si?

To be in a place means you let it choke you or chase you out of your own skin and to let it make bruises your thoughts that swell with the nourishment of time. I know you do it, you come to a place and you be the most inside it outta anybody. I remember. My room now is a hungry drunk man who stumbles down the alley with all the back doors of the discotheques opened up for you. The bricks got a wet smell like if some chalk got dropped in the toilet at school. It waits to pop the seams hugging you. Light bulbs can be too expensive anyways.

Maro