Strain of Consciousness

-The letters H and M have become important they both have something to do with something a psychic told me. Well, not really a psychic but a seer of some sort. She read my coffee. Not the coffee of the soul, but I’m sure there’s some correlation between the two. It was a shot of espresso, dark and not very flavorful, but in order for her to read my coffee I needed to drink her “Turkish coffee”, is what she called it. Since then these letters have a special significance as she said they would. I find myself thinking of […]

-I’ve been preparing myself for today. Not in the way that people prepare for a special occasion, by making invitations and planning the cordialities of a night, but in a different way than most. And I do expect to receive several congratulatory phone calls, but even now, I remind myself not to count them. The secret is, in simply seeing it as what it is, one more day gone by.

-There are days filled with other peoples’ faces, people you haven’t seen in years. It’s that small apparatus in your mind that responds to a certain scent in the air, to the afterglow of a day present in the fading horizon or simply to the numbers that mark the passage of time. Today, she’s the one that floods my mind. It’s June first today and in some parallel dimension, the one in which we remained friends, we’d be celebrating her birthday. But in this one, I simply think of the fact, that like me soon, she’s a year older. One […]

-The smoke idles, caressed and molded by the wind as it takes on mystical shapes above my head and then dissipates into nothing, like the many ghost that surround us but are nothing of the Ten Thousand Things. And perhaps that is the connection, the communion that binds us, the one that I have been unable to break. Perhaps when I was younger, it wasn’t an excuse but in fact a moment of calirvoyance, when I would respond that the impetus to smoke was a desire toward the secret fellowship with death. It must be still, even now, the driving […]

-I’m deserted in time and space. I feel a disconnection from the reality that created each of my perceptions and each of my insecurities. At the moment, I’m lying with my eyes closed but my thoughts find themselves here. I can’t sleep. When the sun’s left the sky vacant and the shadows disappear, I can’t sleep. I close my eyes and pretend but the thoughts parade across my mind, the images flashing through with different colored light, like some avant-garde experimental film strip, shot by a man who as a child always mixed his peas and carrots. And I ly […]

-There’s a warmth I feel as I crawl back into myself and lose grip of consciousness. Somewhere in there, between the sober reality and my sonambulistic subjectivity, I know I’ve lived this day twice and still have no memory of the day itself. There are these vague images, like sketch art, forming this montage in my head. A terminal, people, suitcases and cars, but in my state, now, as I ly inert it makes no sense. It was the sleep of leaving that cradled me from six thousand miles away, and now, it’s the fatigue of the momentary lapse between […]

-The cold chill wind, the vacant dark of night and the sweat running along the length of my nose, each drop falling to the leather jacket I have on. I’m wearing layers and it’s not even snowing. The truth is, it’s not that cold, but I’m leaving. I’ve learned, when you leave from one place to another, you wear many layers. It gets hot, but if you’re going for comfort then you leave things behind. I’m lugging my life around in two suitcases, a camera bag and a back pack. It’s amazing how twenty four years fit in a finite […]

-Everything smells either of kimchi or seaweed, they say there isn’t a difference and that the smell really emanates because of the kimchi. It’s kind of a funny thing to think about; a whole city that smells like one of it’s favorite side dishes. I keep thinking Mexico, smelling like refried beans or salsa. This maze of kimchi smell, sometimes I think it’s seaweed. It gets crazier. Sometimes I’ll be watching a downloaded movie in the apartment or we’ll have a Soprano’s watching and I’ll forget where I am. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with my […]