Mimicry Redux

I can't sleep no more
In my head, we belong
And I can't be without you
Why can't I find no one like you? 

--"Streets" by Doja Cat

 

Mimicry. A defense mechanism. A mantis hidden among the gnarled twigs. A milk snake masquerading with the colored bands of a venomous coral snake.   

The dress was backless, save two minimalist lines crisscrossing mid-thoracic spine. Inside the nightclub was dark, but the flashes from the stage that briefly illuminated the room revealed the fabric in different hues of yellow---saffron, canary, butter, marigold. His hand ran over his mouth, dumbstruck at the vision.

As she turned around, the colored lights shifted across her face like a kaleidoscope. He had never seen her hair undone from its ponytail or topknot. Black waves tumbled down from a slicked side part, veiling her right eye. She looked up at him, peeking through the luminous hair. He felt a thrill burrow in his chest as she bloomed towards him like a sunflower towards the sun.

Everything he had ever felt for her, tamped down and suppressed under the weight of duty and responsibility, bubbled up like a hot spring.

Mimicry. A predation tactic. The nectar-guide web of a Silver Argiope spider. Female Photuris fireflies luring male Photinus fireflies to their demise. 

Even amidst the dense haze of body heat and sweat in the nightclub, she felt too cold, too aware of every sensation grazing her exposed skin. Her roommates had collectively inhaled when she'd stepped out of the dressing room like the goddess spirit of a yellow ginkgo tree. They'd somehow talked her into buying this dress, so unlike any other clothing she'd ever owned: airy flowing fabric, vibrant color, daringly open back.  Then, back in the hotel room, Nina had convinced her to let her hair down, using her curling iron to give her vintage Hollywood waves. She and Nina ended up skipping dinner as a result, which was a mistake. Two shots and one cranberry vodka later, Elise realized how shite her tolerance had gotten one and a half years into residency.

She felt someone's gaze upon her. When she turned and saw him, the corners of her mouth lifted reflexively in weightless joy, untethered in her tipsy state. 

Mimicry. A reproductive tactic. The Copper Beard orchid, enticing male wasps with the scent of a female to pollinate from orchid to orchid. 

He was buzzed, but nowhere as far gone as her. She spoke slowly, phrases broken into fragments that she fumblingly strung together. He was hyperaware of the negative space between them, as if electricity charged from his fingertips into the dark.

"Can I kiss you?"

He nearly fell over. Head flooded into his face, body thrumming with energy, as he struggled to remember why he shouldn't do this. She was his co-resident. She was sloshed.

Before he could answer, she grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss.

Battle Cry

Money cannot buy 

All the love that's here tonight 

All the love that's here tonight 

It's just you and I 

So lift your hands toward the sky 

Lift your hands toward the sky

I asked you once, Whose song is that? What I meant to ask was who you had written it for. Instead, what I'd asked was a matter of possession, ownership. But the funny thing about songs, I've learned, is that once you release them into the air, they belong to no one and everyone at once. The melodies and harmonies weave into the fabric of life outside of you. It's the song on the radio when a boy learns that his friend was killed on duty, it's the song that the DJ plays when the high school sweethearts share their last dance at the senior prom, it's the song looped on repeat as a woman hits rock bottom, lying in bed and wallowing in self-loathing at how her life has turned out. Your songs, so personal and so vulnerable, become a part of another person's memory, a trigger that can both heal and hurt--depending on the circumstances.

Take the sun and you still grow / Lose the light and you still glow

As I hear those last chords rising in the darkened sky, I close the pages shut on us. The symphony of the night has already started to buzz with static, and I won't be able to hear you for much longer. In time, I will become nothing more than a ghost conjured by an acoustic trigger. I am translucent, and a crystal wind passes through me. I lock these memories in my chest, not because I fear you will lose them, but because from now on, you will write new ones--hundreds and thousands extending beyond the years I never had.

So sing with me your battle cry
Sing with me your battle cry

 --"Battle Cry" by Angel Haze ft. Sia

Twice

Was it the blue night

Gone fragile

Was it about the men

In wonder steady gone under

Was it the light ways

So frightening

Was it a two wills

One mirror holding us dearer now

-- "Twice" by Little Dragon

Two hours after I'd risen, a vague feeling tugged at me, like when a sliver of lyrics splinters into your brain and, for the love of god, you can't remember a thing about the song it belongs to. I remembered nothing about what I had dreamed in the night--only that these melancholy bones respond to you like how the aching of arthritic joints portends rain. I could peer into the ocean depths and see nothing in that canvas of rippling darkness, but a sonar device would tell me what I already knew. Miles and miles below the water's surface, you lurk in the crevasses of my brain, a grotesque nightmarish thing that will never see the light of day. I do not need to see you to know you are still here.

Last Train Home

But we sing if we're going nowhere
Yeah we sing if it's not enough
And we sing
Sing without a reason to ever fall in love

-- "Last Train Home" by Lostprophets

The ground was still wet this morning. The slick black asphalt, wrung out by cars huddled in their morning commute, hissed with the spray of rainwater. The flowering trees had already shed their petals before the storm; I never did figure out if the blossoms were pear or cherry or plum. I tried not to step on the writhing earthworms, though they covered nearly every inch of the concrete sidewalk--some with half their bodies squashed flat by the fresh imprint of a shoe, others doomed prey to the robins or the rising sun. Fiddling with my headphones, I shuddered as I caught sight of a flattened frog, limbs splayed out beside the pinkish translucent worms that looked almost like intestines. Forty paces further, I saw black feathered wings shrouded in a funeral veil of crinkled brown leaves. The little bird looked so peaceful, lying on its side in that bed of brush with eyes closed shut, that it took me a moment to realize that it was dead.

I killed two crickets today. It wasn't on purpose, I swear. I was in the bathroom and about to take a piss, when I saw the two huddling in the corner by the bathtub. I didn't want to kill them. Not like my roommate, who took a wild swing at one that appeared above her bed last Sunday. I had grabbed the first container I found in the kitchen and swept them in before closing the lid. I didn't think they would die in the unwashed container, still slick with chili oil, did I? Find a cricket in the house and good luck has come. Kill the cricket in your house and bad luck will befall. They came to bring you good luck and you killed them the first instant you saw them? she teased when I called. Superstition had always been just a plaything. I had read those Feng-Shui books for fun as a child until she confiscated them. She didn't want my mind warped with such things. She didn't want me to observe death all around and wonder if something were about to happen.

december nightmare

the black widow spider could not be pried from my tongue. the red hourglass gleamed from the mirror's reflection, the mark of bloodied time skulking in a cavernous mouth. they prodded with metal instruments until finally half of the body was excised, while the other half remained stubbornly affixed--a blackened lump with thin protruding legs, shuddering as if they were crawling upon my tongue. i felt the venom swell in my tongue, lips, my throat as i sank to the floor, listening to the air whistle through my narrowing windpipe as i watched you delivered a wordless speech at the front of the classroom. you showed no notice of the dying animal before you, just stood there with your glazed eyes staring straight at nothing at all as your mouth emitted empty puffs of carbon dioxide. breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, bre

Dandelion

Cinderella boy

You've lost your shoe 

Cinderella boy 

Your coach awaits 

A sun makes shadows 

All over your face 

As you sit 

Naked and blue 

Into me 

-- “Blue” by R.E.M. featuring Patti Smith

Lunar incantations dissolve into the concrete sidewalk. His fragile words bloom in the cold air, vaporous dandelions carried off into the December night. The winged seeds tangle into her long dark hair, seeking fertile ground to penetrate its roots through her scalp. The truth is, the weeds have already burrowed into her core, strangling everything else that once vied for her attention. He has consumed her, a brain parasite altering her behavior and accelerating her demise. There is no conscious thought in her head as she leans into him, brushing her lips against the dewy frost of his cheek. The electricity is immediate. She jolts, a heated flush prickling her skin, and meets his gaze with a stillborn breath. They are two storm-battered ships, drawn towards each other by the promise of refuge, a beacon of rosy light in the tumultuous darkness. She closes her eyes as the negative space disappears. With a fiery crackle, they melt into one.

Mimicry

"Whispering 

Morning, keep the streets empty for me 

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls 

We were hungry before we were born"

 -- "Keep the Streets Empty For Me" by Fever Ray

--

"Mimicry," he says. "A defense mechanism. A mantis hidden among the gnarled twigs. A milk snake masquerading with the colored bands of a venomous coral snake.

"This is what you are. You cloak yourself in frost. Metal and ice, you want to be untouchable." The last word hisses from his tongue like hot steam. "In reality, you're nothing of the sort. A good girl in the guise of a bad girl. You're a sheep wearing the skin of a wolf."

 She chuckles, tracing the jawline before marking a line across his throat.

"Mimicry," she says. "A predation tactic. The nectar-guide web of a Silver Argiope spider. Female Photuris fireflies luring male Photinus fireflies to their demise.

"This is what I am. I wear you upon me--the same jaded scowl, the leather and chains, the frost on my demeanor. How do you think the sheep captures the wolf?" The question lingers in the air--a breath between them. "They say lovers become more alike with time. I took it one step further. I thought, if I became like you--perhaps then, you would become mine."

 As he descends upon her, she laughs. "Silly boy. Who did you think was the prey--you or I?"

Cola

That feeling--

when the stars seem to have aligned and your airy daydreams have materialized in solid form before you, and just as you are about to sink into this cloud of content bliss, the alarm rings and you're jolted back into another cold November morning where the dreams are as ephemeral as puffs of breath condensing in the frosty air--

I loathe it with a passion.

Morning Dribble

it was last night that i realized how much you remind me of that ghost of my past. 

"the smoke emerges from your lips, spindly grey arachnid legs prying their way out of your chiseled jaw, and all i can wonder is if you kissed me then if i'd find my own tongue covered in nicotine cobwebs."  

a tall lithe frame, a penchant for danger, the dumb naive thought that somehow i can reach within and touch the core of purity hibernating deep inside.

"You want what everybody wants. You want a love that consumes you. You want passion and adventure, and even a little danger..." 

i have suppressed everything again--this time not for my sake, but for hers. and yet, Pandora's box opened a fraction of an inch in my subconscious, and when i awoke this morning i realized just how easy it would be for me to fall to hell. i picture last night, the way your glance pierced through me in that haze of smoke, and all i could think of was how this has already happened to me once and one time too many.

because i've already learned, when you seek the heart of gold in the bad boy, your own will deform in the process.

cryogenic freeze

"The longer I stand here
The louder the silence
I know that you're gone but sometimes I swear that I hear
Your voice when the wind blows
So I talk to the shadows
Hoping you might be listening 'cause I want you to know"

-- "Words" by Skylar Grey

i woke up this morning, and it was as if autumn had eloped with summer and left winter to fend for itself. the landscape had turned to black and white overnight. the only things were left from summer were the photographs, digitized pixels that could be wiped from existence in an instant. i can't remember the last time i watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but all i can think of is whether or not i would erase you the way Clementine erased Joel. i picture myself removing my internal organs one by one, and when the heart comes out in a wet gushing noise, i remember that one line from Closer. it really does look like fist wrapped in blood, but what the heart is clenching so tightly, i cannot tell. if i cryogenically freeze my insides, maybe then i won't need to feel anymore. i'll walk through life as a shell of flesh and bones, waiting until we meet again. we are Joel and Clementine of the Pacific, two strangers on a train. meet me in california -- she says. melt me. make me feel again. his head clears the way the clouds in a cup of coffee dissipate, and for a second the pixels realign in a flash, and he sees the last memory of her, waving goodbye in the pouring rain.

maybe then you will stop haunting me.

Steadfast Tin Soldier

He was of tin and steadfast loyalty; she was of paper and ephemeral beauty. Nobody could touch them. Passion had consumed them; fire had swallowed them whole. But nothing burns forever. In the aftermath, she was gone without a trace, save the jewel she once proudly wore, now left behind. He, on the other hand, had been so malleable, so easily deformed by love that when the last embers were finally cooled, all that could be sifted from the ashes was a cold metal heart.

Blind

The Lovers by Rene Magritte (1928)

"So watch as I go back. I just came to say that
you'll never see me again.
This clock is ours now, till morning.
So stay right there in that frame.
This picture is how we speak. You'll never see me again,
'cause I miss you already."

-- "Your Taste is My Attention" by Lydia

Love is blind, says the optimist. Look at the yearning etched in the lines of the cloth, a potency that lies beyond the realm of verbal expression. External appearance is unnecessary. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Love is blind, says the pessimist. The dishonesty of lovers who think they know each other so well, they've masked themselves in a fabric woven of their own conjurations -- "a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination."

Sometimes I wonder if you were even real. Were you ever there -- did we ever meet -- was it just a dream? Your face has begun to blur. Either I am beginning to forget you... or perhaps you were never really there to begin with. A figment of the imagination. If we passed by each other on the streets, you wouldn't know me. We would be strangers, and everything would be okay again.

Summertime Sadness

"Oh, my God, I feel it in the air

Telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare

Honey I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere

Nothing scares me anymore

Kiss me hard before you go
Summertime sadness
I just wanted you to know..."

-- "Summertime Sadness" by Lana del Rey

... that I knew it would end even before the leaves turned to red and gold, before the skies here would be marked with the calls of migratory geese seeking the warmth of paradise.

When I was sixteen and discovered my glorious rocker idol songstress for the first time, there was one thing I didn't understand. When Ren left Nana for Tokyo, why did they let it die without a single word of communication for two years? If their love had been an addiction, one that led her to tattoo his namesake flower on her arm and lock a padlock chain around his neck, why would they quit each other cold turkey? Why did they let it die without a fight?

The truth is that it's easier this way. You will never know how many times I would revise a stupid Facebook message before I would send it to you. You will never know how I would purposely reply to your messages right before I'd go to sleep so that for eight hours I wouldn't have to agonize over your impending response. But you were leaving for Tokyo anyways, decided long before we ever met. I couldn't bear this constant barrage of wavering uncertainty, of not knowing if you had been so friendly to me because it was in your nature or because you felt even a fraction of what I felt for you. And even if I forced the answer out of you, what could I do with it when we were separated by space and time?

That last message I sent to you, I wavered. I could have added one more line. A question. A provoking comment. Anything to continue feeding the fire.

But I didn't. And when you wrote back that casual one-line response, I knew then that I would let the fire die on its own. Ren and Nana were fortuitous to meet again two years after their separation, but I have no delusions that the same will happen to you and me.

Café

"I remember
when you walked through that door
sat down in that chair
the times that we shared
but you ain't here"

-- "Cafe" by BIGBANG

we sat side-by-side at the cafe counter as the typhoon rain poured onto the city streets. you ordered an iced coffee and, ignoring my protests, paid for my black tea. our relationship straddled the line between strangers and acquaintances, but somehow it didn't matter. in the three hours we shared, we talked about our lives in ways that felt as natural as chatter among childhood friends.

fate is a tricky bastard. i knew that i might never see you again. i was leaving for the States the next day, while you were moving to another country by the end of the month. yet our lives had inexplicably collided, not just once but twice. the fact that you lived walking distance away from me in this vast city was almost too much of a coincidence.

it's a pity, perhaps. maybe things would have been different between us if we had met sooner. or perhaps nothing would have changed. all i know is that since we parted ways this evening, the bittersweet taste in my mouth won't go away.

Obscenity

Well, shit.

Do you know how many fucking times I’ve been refreshing my account, trying to see if you’ve responded?

I don’t know how I could be so delusional. You know, I really believed it. I really thought you were going to be different from the rest. I don’t even know where this idiocy originated from, but it swallowed me before I could even put up a fight. At dinner that night, I couldn’t stop looking at you. All I could think about was how I wished this moment would never end, because I knew that whatever I was feeling right then and there could be trampled in the next moment. A fragile hope, with the quivering wings of a butterfly newly emerged from the chrysalis. What was the statistical probability that we would be something rather than nothing? There was little doubt that the odds were negative, but in spite of that, I fell for you at the pace of a meteorite. And now here I am, listening to 2NE1 (girl power, man-hatin' and all that jazz) over and over again. Floating in the midst of the lyrical stream of syllables I do not understand, the three words of the title track resound over and over again like an obscenity. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Defective

"Lucid hearts are defective products in this world.
That's why I want you to taint mine."

-- "Bad" by Tablo ft. Jinsil

Their lives crossed once more at a neighborhood gathering during the winter lull between Christmas and New Year's. It had been four years since they had stood within the same ten-foot radius, back when they had sat side-by-side in alphabetical order, soaking in their sweat-drenched graduation gowns in the high school football stadium. In the flurry of flash photography that followed the ceremony's commencement, they had sauntered off in their separate directions without sparing the other a second glance.

The first winter, her wounds were still raw. She had tried to distract herself with the new and fresh offerings of college but found herself picking at her old scabs, too impatient to see the smooth healed skin beneath that she was left instead with an obstinate laceration too grotesque for public viewing.

The second winter, her habit of picking at her old wounds in moments of distress and loneliness had decreased but the scar remained etched in her flesh. A reminder. She had begun to change -- her style had gotten softer and her disarming eye-smile revealed itself more readily -- but she wasn't ready just yet. Her transformation was still incomplete.

The third winter, the scar was there, but its jagged outline had begun to fade. Yet she was still susceptible. Her heart simultaneously raced in anticipation and hardened in defense at the very mention of that name. The neighbors had organized another winter gathering, but she had been bedridden with a sudden onset of fever, left at home in a haze of hallucinations -- each depicting one of the million scenes she had painted in her head of the moment they would meet again.

The fourth winter, she was nearly unrecognizable. Skin that had once been a dewy bronze now crinkled around her bones like paper. But though her body had begun to deteriorate under its own assault, her mind remained clearer than ever. Her body was caged by weakness but her thoughts could wander untethered. Tracing the elevated scarred edges with her fingertips, she remembered. The hot flush of hypersensitivity towards her target, the object of her lazy eye. The memory of euphoria stirred. But then, she forced herself to recall the sting of the blade sinking through unblemished skin, the bubble of blood gasping from her body -- and then she knew, that it still wasn't over for her.

The last winter, she slipped on her red dress and high heels, perfume puffs alighting here and there. The final touch -- concealer to mask the jagged memory she carried, to pretend that nothing had happened that day five years ago. But forgetting about mistakes is not enough to make them disappear.

The neighborhood party had started an hour ago, but that sort of time no longer mattered. Veronica had six months left to live, and now her sole existence boiled down to only one thing. She would make him fall in love with her, poison his thoughts until he could find no refuge from becoming consumed, the way she had suffered for him. Use him to quench her curiosity and famished desire -- and leave him to collect the smashed pieces of a broken heart in the wake of her imminent death.

Room for Happiness

Sometimes I wish I never felt the influence of you
Cause now I feel the disconnect, like an open wound
Where you once were, there is a space that runs as deep as hell
But every morning when I wake I tell myself
Don’t be fooled by your emptiness,
There’s so much more room for happiness
Don’t be fooled by your emptiness,
There’s so much more room for happiness
Yeah, yeah, yeah

"Sometimes it’s worse to have lost than to have never had at all," the voice on the radio whispers. "'Cause it’s a curse to feel loved then to feel it all dissolved."

She is Psyche in withdrawal -- aching, hallucinations, skin cold as glazed marble. Try to remember how Love feels. The thought flashes through her core with the darting lick of a flame, only to dissipate as suddenly as it came. There is no oxygen in here. Memories of the skin -- a hand gliding across the back, a kiss fluttering on the collar bone -- cannot recapture heat lost. All that is left are the parts of him still embedded in her soul, stinging with the coldness of the night.

"Room for Happiness" by Kaskade feat. Skylar Grey

fleeting

her allure lies not with her looks or her clothes, but with how the briefest flash of her smile can leave you blinded for hours.

the questions:
how do you trap electricity in a bottle?
how do you catch a smile so that no one else can see it, so that it belongs to no one else but you?

i don't think you're attractive when i see you in photographs. but it's a different story when you're in motion. the beauty that can't be captured -- i think you're the rarest kind of all.

Paralytic

i am rocks, iron lungs, dust bags moving in and out. watch the smog rise out of my mouth, a writhing eel of dust and insect parts rises out to kiss you. my dreams don't come true, you know. but you already knew that. there's the girl covered in ashes but she's not your little cinderella bejeweled and bedazzled -- no, her cinders are the parts of her that keep falling away in crumbling charcoal chunks each time the clock strikes twelve. the fire keeps burning and burning but there's no reprieve, no dash of ice water to wash away the nightmare.

she wonders as the flames lick the core -- does the phoenix possess the knowledge that it will be reborn, or does it relive the agony of dying over and over again?

la pluie violet

"A kiss in the mouth can become a kiss on the mouth. A hand on a shoulder can become a hand on the hips. A laugh on his lips can become a moan on mine. The moments in between these are often difficult to gauge, difficult to partition and subdivide. Time refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be 'lost.' In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars."

-- The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

---

"I only want to see you, only want to see you in the purple rain."

You were standing on the white ceramic tiles of my bathroom floor, your eyes glancing up at the mirror to see my startled reflection staring back. It had been a year since I last saw you. I have dreamt of this moment a million times -- my favorite was the one where I'd make my grand entrance at the annual New Year's Eve party at Rachelle's place and nobody, not even you, would be able to keep their eyes off of me, entranced by how much I'd changed and how beautiful I'd become -- but I'd never imagined that I'd see you standing in my own house, Narcissus before the bathroom mirror with the same wild tangle of hair and look of self-induced lust, a magnetism that could both attract and repel at once.

I didn't want you to look at me. Not yet. My transformation was incomplete; my hair was still only partially tamed, my body still being whittled down, my face still marked with unhealed incisions. I still looked like the same person we both once knew and both wanted to forget.

Mila, I was waiting to hear you say, but you didn't speak.

Time diffused, and this time we were in the same room again, separated by a pane of glass. I could hear the shower water running, feel the steam scurrying up the glass in wispy tail-like curls. The fog shrouded us -- this way, we could see without seeing, look without looking, watch without watching. I could see the haze of your body's movements, unpeeling the layers one by one until the petals of fabric lay at your feet like the withering of the Beast's enchanted rose. But whose death had come? Were you the Beast, or was I?

Everything was purple all around me. Violets, lavender, irises engulfed the room in a cloud of perfume as you walked under the water and let it drench your skin. The scent of the flowers rooted into your nestle of hair, entwining with the rising steam that climbed higher and higher. I could feel your eyes tracing my movements through the fogged glass as I let the petals unfurl, one by one until I was as bare and vulnerable as I had once allowed myself to be before you. The water drummed across my shoulders like fingertips, trailing down my back in a lazy trickle. Bottles and bottles of fragmented body wash stood aligned on the ceramic tiles, glass soldiers each uniformed in a varying shade of purple. I pressed the cool gel against the heat of bare skin, watched the translucent purple effervesce, bubbling and slipping away like a tumble of ephemeral pearls.

For a moment, you had reeled me in again -- without even saying a word, without even a single touch, you had caught me in your fist like a flopping, gasping fish.

And when I woke up from this dream, I hated you all over again.