Tuesday, May 27  

Control

Vic is hugely into control. The way a teenager might be into skate punk. With that much devotion and that same strict adherence to every aspect of its style so that it infects her fashion, her speech, her emotions, her dreams and her wants.

control: noun 1. The right and power to command, decide, rule or judge. verb 1. To exercise authority or influence over.

The difficulty with the dictionary definition of control (and indeed the reality of it) is that it relies on the person/emotion/desire being controlled to comply with one’s command, to recognize one’s authority over itself, to agree complicitly to be ruled.

While Vic has enjoyed much success in the control of inanimate objects (her alphabetized cd and book collections, her very clean bathroom), she hasn’t done all that well with people. Herself or others.

The reality is that when it comes to personal relationships, Vic much prefers to be controlled than to be the controller. She assumes the passive position like it’s her birthright.

If someone tries to push her up to the top, she gets stubborn and unhappy. She’ll do it for a time, take charge, make things happen, decide what needs doing, but she won’t enjoy it and she’ll lose all interest in the person who’s put her in that uncomfortable position.

Weakness is a quality much despised by Vic in anyone but herself. But then so is too much strength. Typically, she wants to control the exact level of controlling she’s likely to receive from anyone.

William was awfully weak and it led to Vic having to take care of everything most of the time. Rob had no weakness about him at all and she that would make him perfect until she realized that no weakness at all isn’t very interesting and it’s hard to fall in love with someone who’s cold like a cement barricade.

What she needs, she decides, is diluted mastery. Someone who can lead her into love with a firm grip on the back of her neck.

Sunday, May 25  

Change

Vic is not afraid of change. She's addicted to it. She changes fast and hard into new lives, new versions of herself with the one-fingered ease of a driver who knows the stretch of highway between their lover's house and their own in the dark of any night.

change: verb 1. to alter; to make different; to cause to pass from one state to another 2. to alter by substituting something else 3. to give and take reciprocally; to exchange.

Vic walks home in the dark. She's not afraid of Toronto and it is not afraid of her. They coexist without noticing each other much of the time.

She turns down the alley that leads to her apartment and walks with the ease of a cat, thumbs looped into her pockets, whispering a line of poetry to herself over and over. It came into her head for no reason and it won't go away.

Come live with me and be my love and we shall all the pleasures prove.

She can't remember who wrote it or where she read it or when. But she rolls it over her tongue like it's a new lover's nipple.

The change in her pocket makes quiet time. The sound of change in a pocket always reminds her of her father.

Vic has changed again. She doesn't want William she realizes. She wants his ghost. And that is both more difficult and more easy to live with. Come live with me.

She doesn't wonder why he doesn't call again after their brutal fucking. He floated in and left, quiet like a ghost and he's had as much impact. He's only left a sense of disbelief, a vague longing but nothing she can touch. And be my love.

It's changed her, but for once not left her hollow.

To whom will Vic have to prove her change? To the old women in their back gardens who watch her amble by in the dark? She's just a younger version of themselves to them. To William? He's a small moment already passed by. To herself? She's the most critical audience of all.

Because she's already seen a hundred changes and seen them all change again. She has turned leaves as often as matresses and coats. She walks backward a few steps like a model on a catwalk, turning back again and squinting sexily at her own shadow.

And we shall all the pleasures prove, baby. Just wait.

Wednesday, May 14  

Fate

Vic believes in Fate, though it does worry her somewhat that she hasn’t heard from it yet. It's difficult to keep on believe in a thing when it sullenly lags behind you.

fate: noun 1. That which is inevitably destined. 2. A predestined tragic end.

Seems that by dictionary definition, Fate doesn't swing both ways. Fate is tragic, case closed. But Vic labours under the blind belief that the real tragedy would be for it not to appear at all. She confuses it, perhaps, with destiny.

This revelation aside, Vic holds firm (perhaps out of stubborn, mule-headed optimism, something she’s really never been accused of before) to the idea that there’s something in store for her that has yet to be revealed. Something good, if she dare be that bold.

She is thinking about fate tonight because she dreamed the face of her soulmate last night. In a kind of lucid dream, she met someone her sleep self acknowledged as her truest love (and she thinks truest as opposed to true since she does feel there can be levels of truth even in this very exact science of predestination). She grimaces slightly at the girlishness of her own subconscious, but what can you do?

In this dream, Vic swims in a pitch dark pool of water. She holds a flashlight in her right hand as she turns and twists like a dolphin, admiring the shape of her legs in the dim underwater glow. When she surfaces, she finds that she is in an underground cave. The pool of water she floats in is surrounded by smooth rocks. There are steps to ease her way out.

She climbs out of the water, goosebumps rising on her naked skin. At the top of the steps, there is an opening in the cave wall. She follows the path out and finds herself on a catwalk that is washed over and over by large, unsteadying waves. At the top of the metal catwalk, there is a door. She opens it.

Inside, the walls are the colour of non-dairy creamer. Flat beige. This is a clinic of some kind. A place of healing. She isn’t there to be healed. She is there to meet someone who works there.

When she looks into his eyes, in her dream, she recognizes immediately that he is… he is. She doesn’t know the words for what he is. He's not William, that's certain. He is dark haired with glints of gray, but he's still young. He is wearing a wine coloured shirt. He is fair skinned. He is arms around her and lips on hers. He is the one she didn’t realize she was looking for underwater. Just knowing he's been waiting here in a flat beige room heals her right up even though she wasn't sick.

She touches his face and tries to remember him, hard. She says "I want to remember your face tomorrow when I wake up. I want to remember that you’re who I’m looking for so I can stop messing about."

The next morning, this morning, Vic can’t remember his face quite exactly, only his hair and his smell and her limbs numb with fate. It’s nearly painful.

Is it a signal, she wonders idly, or just some patch-work of images and smells and tastes of the day before.

Vic believes in fate. Though she is worried she has just heard from it and its language isn’t one she knows.

Comments:

Hi Blogger it never ceases to amaze me how creative people are, especailly the young ones, gives me hope for the future. Anyway I was looking for information on dream dictionary and landed on your page. I was looking more for dream dictionary so Fate wasn't an exact match but I enjoyed reading your posts. Take Care. I'll bookmark your blog for future.

# posted by  Anonymous : 9:24 PM

 

Greetings from Down Under, no not Australia, NZ the real downunder! Hi Blogger I was surfing blogs (as you do) looking for dream dictionary information when I came across your site. While Fate wasn't an exact match I enjoyed reading your posts. Thanks for the read, I'll visit again some time. take care.

# posted by  Anonymous : 8:58 AM

 

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Sunday, May 11  

Silent

Everything’s gone jarringly silent.

silent: adjective 1. Making no sound or noise. 2. Temporarily unable or unwilling to speak, as from shock or fear. 3. Not voiced or expressed.

Vic doesn’t know what to make of the cotton batting that seems to have swaddled everything noisy in her life.

She keeps her phone beside her no matter what part of her apartment she happens to be sitting in. Looks at it frequently, marveling at its mute glow. She even picks it up a few times and gives it a weak shake.

Vics greatest fear as a child (besides spiders) was that the world could easily forget about her. That she would be in her room so long, so quiet, so silent, that everyone and everything would finally stop minding her. Which, at first, she might enjoy. Until the panic sets in. It isn’t nice to be forgotten about.

The few times Vic has taken drugs or had far too much to drink, she has always felt fine until she started hearing the silences between sounds or got caught alone in the expanse of thumping silence in her bed. That’s what always makes her sick at the end. Take, for example, the time she took E with her girlfriend.

She and Belle had been out for supper one night. Vic was feeling quiet. Uncommunicative. In frustration, Belle suggested that they take some E together because, she said, it would help them connect. (Vic always had a hard time connecting emotionally with the women she slept with). Vic agreed because she wanted to try it. Just a little bit of it. And Belle knew someone who could get it for them.

They each bit down on their tiny white pills, crumbing half into their mouths and swallowing with water. They waited. Everything was normal. Vic kissed Belle right there in the crowded club because she felt it was important to set the stage for a positive experience. She said "I'm so happy that we're going to experience this together."

They waited longer. Everything still normal. Belle suggested they take the other half. Vic agreed. Two minutes later, the first half must have arrived, because Vic's head suddenly iced over, cracked open and blue flowers, pretty as god, tumbled out. She smiled at Bella who smiled at her back.

It was nice.

Until it wasn't nice anymore.

Soon Vic was getting weirded out by the strange cool trickling of sweat between her breasts. She does not like to be out of control. The music in the club seemed to get louder. Sharper. The lights greener, more intense. Vic felt like she was in a spotlight. But that nobody was watching. She felt very, ultimately alone.

Bella reached over and pulled Vic in close. She said "I think we were meant to meet. I believe you're meant for me. Do you think so too?"

Vic couldn't speak. She couldn't make her mouth move. She didn't want to hear what her voice might sound like. So instead, she murmered something, nothing really, and closed her eyes. She stayed there in Bella's throat for the next 5 hours, excepting drinks of water and one disastrous trip to the washroom. The music began shattering into bits. Where it started out on a continuous fluid beat, it began to break apart into separate notes. Thump. .... swing .... beat. ... trill.

The silences between the notes were agonizing. They felt like minute, private wells of loss to Vic and she shuddered everytime she fell into one.

Long digression aside, the point is that Vic hates silence. She hates having time to think too much. She requires control and interaction or she begins to worry that she doesn't actually exist.

Today, 2 days after William rushed off, Vic's apartment feels hollow. She is full of silent longing to hear the warble of her telephone just to assure her that she is still here.

Friday, May 9  

Easy

People call women who sleep with men under loose circumstances “easy”. What they mean is that the man hasn’t worked hard enough to get it, hasn’t a) spent enough money b) given enough up or c) made any commitments to their interest in ever getting it again. Therefore, the woman herself is “easy”. You never hear “too easy”. Just “easy” like amenability in itself is worthy of contempt.

Strange that the opposite of “difficult” still manages to be a pretty harsh condemnation in the lexicon of femininity. Either way, Vic’s always thought it was a bullshit insult. It's actually quite nice to be easy.

easy: adjective Requiring or indicating little effort, thought, or reflection.

When it comes down to it, Vic’s easy. She’s easy going, easy to get to know, definitely easy to convince.

So when William is still in her apartment when she gets home from work, it doesn’t take long before they get down to the sort of thing people get down to when they’ve been in love and are still grasping at some of that old warmth.

They do it hard. Which isn’t their usual style. William bites Vic’s shoulder as he pushes her onto the bed. Vic shoves him back, but opens her legs. He puts the strength of his hands onto her hips as he holds her down, pulling up on her ass as he forces himself into her.

She forgets for 15 minutes that she doesn’t want to get hurt by William again. But when it’s over, she remembers.

Directly afterward, as it always is during these reacquainting sessions of theirs, William leaps up from the bed and starts dressing. He has to go, busy day tomorrow, something, something. Vic doesn’t mind that he’s leaving. She wouldn’t like him to stay. But his speed juxtaposes itself against their past in technicolour and she can’t help but watch the old slowmotion movies that flick past her eyes...

She remembers the time William (just 21 and still golden) stood up in front of their bed, her juices still on him and waggled his cock from side to side. He turned his hips quickly so it swatted his hip bones. And he laughed like he was 5 years old. She laughed too. She looked at him standing there nude and said “You’re fucking crazy. I can’t get enough of you.” He cocked his eyebrow, came back to the bed and said “I’ll never stop giving it to you.”

He had nowhere to go except to her. Nowhere he’d wanted to go. And she was the same. Easy.

Wednesday, May 7  

Age

Vic turned 29 a month ago. Sometimes, when her feet hurt from walking or when she thinks about the distance between then and now, she feels much older. She doesn't feel like she looks 29, whatever 29 is supposed to look like, but she worries that her insides may have aged without her knowledge. That one day, she will wake up and age will have leaked out of her, crept up on her, ontop of her. She cares only because she knows she won't be able to get away with shit anymore when that day comes.

age: noun 1. A particular time notable for its distinctive characteristics 2. A long time verb 1. To grow old 2. To bring or come to full development.

It's been 4 days since she's seen Jon. She is surprised that she doesn't miss him more than she does. But she realizes he was just a pair of hands in the end. That other pairs of hands are still available to her if she doesn't decide to call his back.

But it is on this 4th day of his being gone and her being easy about it (and therefore a very vulnerable day since everyone knows that going without sex after having nearly drowned in it for weeks is not an easy stage), it's on this 4th, dry, libidinously dead day that William calls.

At 2:30 in the morning, her cell phone rings. Twice. The first time, she is barely brought out of sleep. The second time, she reaches over to the bedside table and presses "answer". She hasn't heard William's voice this rough and wet in over a year. He does not use this voice when they pretend to be friends and have lunch together at the restaurant in Little Italy.

"I feel like I need to sleep beside you," he says. And so it begins again. They enter the age of him wanting her back. As opposed to her wanting him back. It comes and goes, like fashion. It's retro chic. And you want it the way you secretly want to wear flared jeans and cord jackets but don't like to admit it.

"Why?" Vic asks carefully. She does not want to have sex. With anyone really except Jon, but most especially not with William because it never ends well.

"Not for sex," he assures her quickly. "I feel lonely for you. I just want to be beside you. I won’t keep you up. I still have the key you gave me for the cats when you went away."

She pauses and then, knowing she shouldn’t, she tells him it’s okay if he wants to let himself in.

An hour later, the outside door opens and William is suddenly there in the dark. He undresses and slips into bed beside her. He whispers to her sleep ear, "I wish we could just have gotten married."

Vic notes that a lot of the men she's met, dated, fucked in the last year have used the word 'marriage'. She wonders why that is. It must be that they’re aging. Her included.

"Where was that offer 2 years ago?" she replies sleepily and drifts back into unconsciousness. She dreams about Jon and wakes up holding Williams hand.

When she lifts herself quietly out of bed to get ready for work, she inspects William's perfect blond hair. His pale, freckled skin. His guitar calloused hands. And she nearly doubles over with the pain it causes her.

She feels her age. She feels it bad.

Tuesday, May 6  

Sensitive

Vic and Jon, the aptly named (considering where their first encounter took place) owner of Vic's dedicated obsession, are in post-coital entanglement when he announces jokingly that he thinks Vic should start going to the gym again. As he says this, he lustily grabs her ass and weighs it in his hand. Vic hasn't gone to the gym since they started their "great affair", electing instead to focus her exercise elsewhere. Namely, in her keigels.

Vic sits up and pulls a sweaty sheet around her admittedly slackened tummy and says "what's that supposed to mean?" in a rather shrill, even to herself, voice.

"It's not supposed to mean anything," Jon says as he reaches for the sheet but Vic clutches it around herself tighter and says "You think I'm fat." This is a regrettable thing to say for any woman since it's the exact thing women are known for saying and nobody wants to be known for what women are known for.

Jon says she's too sensitive.

When he leaves, Vic tells him she'll call him and then doesn't. She's angry. More so than is really called for.

sensitive: adjective 1. capable of being stimulated or excited by external agents (as light, gravity, or contact) 2. highly responsive or susceptible 3. delicately aware of the attitudes and feelings of others 4. excessively or abnormally susceptible.

Vic is perversely sensitive. She hates more than anything else to be criticized. Not because she believes she shouldn't be, but rather because she believes every word of it.

She wants to call Jon but can't seem to find her way around the mental moat that now surrounds her and her tummy. She won't call him again until she feels resolved, lightened, above his reproach.

She's also stubborn.