tracing_clouds raze they make no sense together. she wears her happiness on her face where everyone can see it. he looks like his life has been one long disappointment and it isn't even halfway over. they hold hands and walk down one of the streets of his hometown. he doesn't want to be here, but she wanted to see where he came from. he says the one nice thing about this place is the way everyone smiles and says hello but no one really wants to talk to you. they stop at a pier. she looks up at the sky. "look at all the clouds," she says. "i wish i could trace them all." they're right in front of her. they look close enough to touch. little bits of cotton sewn into the blue. she wants to mark them the way she would press pushpins into a map of the world. red pushpins. she moves her hands through the air, conducting the clouds, telling them where to go. they listen. he rents a room in a tall building. it's thin and unfriendly looking, like him, with a red glow that makes it seem like something from another world, some old idea of what a building would look like in the future, a guess that missed by a mile. windows everywhere. the building brings with it a sense of vertigo. it seems to tilt forward and to the right. but that's gone by the time they get to the eighth floor. one of the walls in the living room is a window. she stands there. he watches her from behind, keeping his distance, the way everyone else does in this town. he thinks: i got the apartment on the top floor. the problems here are the same problems i left behind me. i've traded one dismal town for another. she just wants to mark the places where the clouds are. she presses small office magnets against the glass, the cobalt in its iron responding to the charge in each red reminder of the places she'd like to go. 210804 ... unhinged my tendency to cocoon myself in a library book bubble of my own making as a young child worried my mom somehow. in the summer she would say 'at least take your book outside nicole' (she was right; fresh air, outside, contact with nature is important) so i would inevitably be teased by my brother or some neighborhood kid playing with him in the yard about why i had my nose in a book (i was too sensitive to tell others to fuck off when i was a kid; an emotionally abusive relationship with a heroin addict disabused me of that particular sensitivity) so i would inevitably put my book down to save for later and sit with the others. bullied into group participation with younger dumber meaner kids would inevitably lead to daydreams and more often than not i would lay on my back to disconnect from the group staring, watching the clouds change shape as they moved across my sky wishing i was up there changing shape too 210805 ... kerry i also spent my childhood in daydreams and books and wondering how to escape in school when we walked in a line (ABC ORDER) down the hall i always had my nose in a book almost typed a book_in_my_nose sometimes i bumped into people or even a door but for the most part i can read and walk at the same time 210805 ... unhinged i never mastered the art of reading while walking cause i was already a clumsy anxious child with an anxious mother who nipped activities like reading while walking in the bud 210805 what's it to you? who go blather from