jolie laide: January 2011

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

1.10.2011

Your ex-boyfriend has sent you an e-vite. It's for his comedy troupe. They are doing musical improv in some basement theater near NYU.

In the time it takes for the bus to cross the bridge, the last red tongue of the sun has slipped below the lip of the horizon. Out the opposite side windows the bay is grey and flat, a backdrop for the nodding middle-aged men snoozing their way home.

Your friends send you out of the bar to the snack shack to bring back a fleet of three dollar hot plate tacos. The punk rock girl behind the counter is so alluring, maybe because you are drunk and maybe because she controls access to the toaster oven. I so want to go back to the parts of my life that I loved, but I know it will not be the same. Different man, different taco.