SNUGGLE PARTY

Legend: NOAH  \  MIMI

1. Blue paint spilled on the road like butter in a medium saucepan  |  the tumble of a frothy cup of coffee.
   
2. Canceled checks in the abandoned subway car

   seemed wasteful  |  to accent how alone they really were.

3. A spider under the rug is like ants on a log  |  a mole on milk-white skin.
   
4. Graffiti on the abandoned building like finger paintings on your wall  |  the tattooed arms of the men who populated it.
   
5. Nothing was the same, now that it was flaccid placid  |  all floating on an arc somewhere in the Atlantic.
   
6. The dice rolled out of the cup toward Veronica
7. A child indoors  |  pain is like a bitch  | bird in

   heat  |  an electrical fire.

8. His mother’s gaze  |  Her kiss is like muscles stretched taut over bone.
   
9. The fog plumed through gunshot holes in the car windows like whipped cream  |  soft breaths of cigarette smoke in February.
   
10. She held her life in her own hands as if it were a throw-away camera  |  made of paper.
    
11. Lacey poured coffee down her throat as if she needed it  |  it could sustain her.
    
12. If I should wake before I die, lick my wounds bitch  |  I’d like you to read this to me.
    
13. The security guard walks the lobby as if he were paid well  |  the rhythm of his boots was a metronome.
    
14. The library books left in the rain like moldy cat food on a stoop  |  upturned hands.
    
15. Music in the hallway like rain on the hood of a car  |  the beckoning of a dear friend.

    She is a girl who prides herself on the pain she can endure. She does not brag about the past - oh, no. She does not offer the privilege of her wisdom so easily. Instead she seeps it, in glimpses of information entrusted to the delicately chosen few, a little bit at a time. Then she delivers it like a gift - often it presents itself in a hued, knowing glance, or in the privacy of a text message. Then she unhands it freely. She needs only the open ear. Her scars are definite, gilded. She has earned them.

    She will ensure you of her history, and her wisdom. Her age amounts to more than yours, but you’re okay with it, somehow. She has elbowed, waded, and wrestled through this friendship - this love - for years now, and will drag the story along with her just for a chance to remind herself that, “he and I have been through a lot.” She emphasizes that she will do anything for him - anything - and that she has. She will whisper, with horror, that she is “very much in love with him, still.” Her love is the story of the last woman standing.

    When he fucks up, she can resort to the luxury of lecture. She is a martyr for his selfish, destructive love, and the two of them know it. Sure, it hurts her deeply. Deeply, desperately deeply. But she will endure, because she loves him, and she is strong. Her love can outlast anything. 

    She leans against the arms of someone else, the one who looks at her with that familiar smolder,  with a glaze of boredom in her searching eyes. It isn’t his underwhelming, but her own distant mind. He skims the curve of her scalp and drags the hair a little there and she feels…nothing.

Noah Gentile has not, and does not plan to consume methamphetamines. It was a literary hyperbole. 

1. crossing my legs
2. improvisational cooking
3. rolling cigarettes/spliffs
4. taming the wild spirits of animals
5. baked alaska/meringues
6. hosting people
7. semantics/proxemics
8. ballroom spank-killing
9. being a meth head
10. windsurfing/scuba diving
11. storing useless information to share at a later date
12. hearing minute feedback
13. mixing music (in studio)

1. los angeles
2. developmental psychology
3. finding character motivation in literature
4. the assembly of a PA system
5. shading
6. how to determine when to refrain from anything
7. the appreciation of a good cup of tea
8. the smoking of cigarettes
9. THE ROLLING OF SPLIFFS
10. sleeping
11. covert psychoanalysis
12. pipe cleaner sculpture (small scale)

…of things on which you are an expert. 

Due Thursday.