December 23, 2005

Christmas cards!

My homemade Christmas Cards

Outside:

Inside:

Now I have to pray that Staples will print them correctly.

(BTW...does the image on the front need tweaking? I think it's missing something, but I'm not sure what)

ON EDIT: The inside on the actual cards has both our names, but I removed them for privacy reasons.

Posted by Kat at 03:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 28, 2005

Passionate Indulgence

Indulge me, and let me run with this. The following is a work of fiction, spewed out of a brain saturated with finding itself. I am becoming the fervent intellectual I was in high school, and very glad to have found her again.

This picks up, like all tales, in the middle. The characters are established, the scene set, and it is simply up to me to describe what they do and how they become who they are.

These two are a figment of my imaginings, perhaps based on various personalities I have met, but ultimately, they belong only to themselves. The words are mine and mine alone.

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It was one of those nights. The kind in which neither of us could sleep, and neither could stand to be in the stifling air of their apartment, the kind of oppressive stillness which not even the fans could break. We sat on the steps, he and I, thinking our own thoughts. We lived in different places, he in his head, me in my heart. This is not to say that I was stupid, witless, or that he was cold and unemotional. Quite the opposite. We were both brilliant, passionate people who had their impetus come from different parts of their being.

This was most apparant in the way we sat. I was sprawled out on the landing of our stoop, one leg stretched across the top step, the other bent out to the side with my elbow resting on the knee. I was alternating drags of my half-burned cigarette with long, deep pulls from the lips of the moisture-covered beer bottle swinging from the other hand, bringing it to my lips to allow the smooth, cold liquid slide down the neck and into my throat. It sent the thought through my skull of how much like a blowjob drinking from a bottle was, and maybe that's why people tended to get horny when drunk.

He was sitting, all proper, his ass butting up to the calf I had stretched out, forearms on knees, hands holding an iced tea glass so as to drip on the step, rather than his feet. Plain iced tea for him, no alcohol for this man tonight. The brown liquid had a couple ice cubes melting, weighing down the sprig of mint and the lemon wedge. Everything in perfect order, down to the laced-up shoes and khakis he had on, contrasting my bare feet and animal-print pajama pants.

His face was turned up to the sky, lost in thought amongst the cloud-covered stars. I nudged his tailbone with my ankle, murmuring a soft "hey". His attention caught, his head swung so I could see his profile, the perfect line marred by a childhood broken nose. The slight tilt of his head, like one of the cats would do when asked a question. On my next inhalation, hold, exhalation of the smokey air, his nose crinkled with displeasure. I nudged him again, to show mine.

The droplets of anticipation suspended themselves in the night air, mixing neatly with the droplets of water which were only added to by the people sitting on their stoops, escaping their realities for a night. On other nights, he would have sat here with the guitar, picking out a tuneless melody, with people mingling around, sort of a central gathering place to ease all our minds. Tonight, the instrument sat, lonely, leaning against the cement bricks of the stairs.

This weather had us both spoiling for a fight. Nothing had happened in days, all action spurred to a halt by the solidity of the air around us. Even sex, performed only in the dark, was inaction, our skin recoiling from sensation, even as our lips sought the other out. Love was done with in a heartbeat, as the stagnant, humid air became more so from our moistly overheated bodies. Instead of coming closer together, as we had in past summers, we were moving apart.

He was staring at the sky, watching the flashes of distant lightning as if I had never interrupted, since my thoughts had consumed me once again. He used to tease me that I was the only person he knew who could be distracted by my own thoughts. Then again, I had said the same about him. Were we really that different?

I nudged him again, this time getting an exasperated sigh for my efforts. Without thinking, the exhalation of "what", with all it's edged sharpness, had passed my lips. The fight was spoiling, the tension building up. Neighbors were escaping the emotion, feeling it better to be inside a breezeless apartment rather than out in this roiling aggravation.

We traded barbs about the other's failings, the words themselves unimportant, the emotion behind them the only thing that mattered. Feelings of loneliness, of being left in the dust, two strong, ambitious hearts trying to reach out and express what ran through them daily, amplified by the sultriness and the sun-strengthened turmoil. Finally getting to the heart of the matter. To the isolation we both felt by noticing the differences, when others remarked only on our similarities.

The crash of thunder shocked us both as if a neighbor boy had thrown a firecracker at the curb by our feet. It had snuck up on us, neither one noticing that the disappearing crowds had nothing to do with our disturbance, which was minor in terms of the local dynamics, and everything to do with the encroaching storm. The world was about to be washed clean of its sins, and us with it. The guitar would go inside, but we would dance in the rain, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Once again whole, once again, the similarities outweighing and amplifying the differences.

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So there it is, stream of consciousness. Have at it, and my congratulations if you were able to get through this mental masturbation.

Posted by Kat at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack