Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: beautiful

  • illicit flower factory

    Today my boyfriend discovered the illicit dried flower factory I have been running in his apartment. At first glance it looks as though a two-dimensional squirrel has made herself a nest out of private papers and unwanted official letters retrieved from the waste paper bin beside his desk.

    “What’s this?” he said, lifting away the heavy row of comic books along the shelf to reveal my little stack of flattened envelopes and folded paper.

    “Uhm,” I said, “that’s my dried flower factory. I have one at home, as well.”

    The whole city has burst into bloom and the streets are filled with love. On our way down to the post office a man in the street grabs me, both hands clasping my forearm in a grip surprisingly determined and strong. An African man, bearded, handsome, long muscular arms and that’s all I see of him. He is smiling, pleading, manly, he is wooing me in his own language. “Danke,” I keep saying, “Danke, nein, ich muss ~ ” and wrenching my arm away I turn back to the taller man I have come out with, my beloved, who is bristling and who wraps his hand possessively about me at the waist. “What was that?” he asks, “you don’t know that guy?” “No,” I say, “he just really liked me.” “You look confident today. But why would he grab you while you’re kissing me?” he growled, looking over his shoulder in a feint.

    “Well, that’s why,” I say, having understood the man in an instant. Perfect attraction is like that, if it so often only lasts a moment. “He liked it, I think, that I was laughing and teasing and reaching for you. I think maybe he thought, I’d like a woman to look at me that way and to kiss me like she loved me. I’d like that woman.”

    He isn’t really worried, because he knows I love him. Other men casting glances and women looking at him are not new. And I know that he loves me too, he treats me beautifully and his dark sweetness and deep limpid loving heart are my water and my salt in the desert of city sugar and fat. And I know that he understands me, better than the guy who grabbed me in the street and would not let go, his eyes imploring and his smile broad, might ever do.

  • hair now gone to morels

    Today I had my hair cut and lost enough length to stuff a small teddy bear. Afterwards I crouched on the floor in the horseshoe swatch of paler wood worn on the black boards where the hairdresser stands every day in an arc that sweeps back and forth around each customer, and tamped up the soft, drying clumps in my fingertips, and put them in a paper bag they gave me. My hair had spread across a wide area and I gleaned back as much as I could. I feel a bit weird saying, Can you give me a bag, I want to take this stuff home: and even weirder about leaving it there lying on the floor. To get swept up. Mingled in with other people’s hair. Dusted in landfill, with its bad magic.

    I had chosen for this outing a place I felt safe in, in a chic part of town where women carry little dogs in their handbags. All the trees have sprung into service and the old buildings gleam. On my way home feeling lighter and breezier in the fresh afternoon Spring air I pulled the handles of the bag apart and peered in – a soft knot of washed and combed ends and curls lay there in a heap, big as my two fists, coiled on itself on the floor of the bag like some little dog lured from its home.

    I so hate getting my hair cut that it happens only once every year, or two years; for a long time I used to cut it myself, with the scissors on my Swiss army knife. The girl who took my appointment earlier in the day had a blond bob severely asymmetrical but her eyes were soft. “I will put you with Damir,” she decided. “He has an unusual name too.” Damir was very cool, as all hairdressers are cool, and reminded me of my friend M. Same quirked brow, same smooshed beanie on the back of his head; same deft hips. He let my hair out from its elastic and said, Ahh, in a tone of satisfaction. Took his time, handling the masses of it for ten minutes, parting and lifting it, weighing it, judging the curl and its spring and the way the colour grows. Only then did he say, “Let us go wash,” lässt uns waschen gehen. It was a pleasure to close my eyes and let myself be handled. He said, see how it’s much curlier at the back. See how it’s ginger at the ends, I said, and he said: that’s because you wear it up in a knot and that’s where the sun most gets to it. Right, I said, slowly, thinking: oh, riiight. How little one notices oneself.

    Would you like something to read? He went over to a low table by the huge windows and bent over, sifting and separating. In the mirror I watched him choose me out three magazines and order them into a stack. One had a photo in it of the beautiful photojournalist Lee Mitchell, shortly after the death of Adolf Hitler, in his apartment taking a bath in his tub. When Damir offered me a drink and I said I’d like some water he said, Still oder mit. This translates, “Still or with?” Germans ask each other these questions about water, still or sparkling? With or without. “With” means with gas: bubbly. The salon was huge and only one other person was getting their hair cut in it. How much was all this going to cost? “I don’t care,” I said to myself, trying to calculate when it was last cut: more than two years ago. It was peaceful there under his hands within the tent of my own hair. I remembered how I used to go to nightclubs just for the dancing, and would dance alone, all night, all night. When men came up to me I didn’t yet know how to get rid of them so eventually I would take the elastic out of my hair and let it fall across my face like this, making a thorough curtain through which I could see out but no one could see in. I used to smoke and I guess it was eerie to see a woman sitting smoking stolidly through the sheet of her own hair, certainly no one persisted past that curtain and this reminded me of that. I closed my eyes and let sensation scratch at me all round. The fingers brushing the back of my neck. The tugging as he lifted wings of hair up high to trim the ends. The soft feathering as it fell down over my face. The scent of tobacco from his fingertips, that lay on the hairs hanging combed straight over my nose. The faintly tropical, faintly chemical smell of salon shampoo. “You never blowdry it,” he said, and I said, “I don’t even own a blowdryer. Or a comb.” “You can feel it in the hair,” he said, letting it run through his fingers like water in sand.

  • when the snow

    The dog and I went out for a late night walk. The rest of the world is his toilet. It is snowing! It must have been snowing now several hours. The purity general, all over Ireland.

    I walked along the still, dark canal following his trail and we passed not a single person. The unbroken white page of the path, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and now. Walking gingerly, in my ugg boots and pajamas. Snow fell in my hair and lit its tangles, snow fell into the hood of my coat. I scraped a handful an arm-length long of snow, showing the black German soil underneath. I hurled a snowball at a tree, black tree, the world a silent movie.

    On the black water white swans lay like popcorn milling and distinct in the perfect night. The trees overhanging the water were rendered all postcard-immaculate in snow’s quietude, every branch of every tree the chosen branch of the chosen tree. Oh, the perfection of freshly-laid snow. A swan sneezing three hawking gasps under the stone-arch bridge sounded like a car that’s reluctant to start. Swandom: it isn’t all elegance. But they swim silently and sleep in a coil, wreath of snow, and the snow unlike rain falls so quietly. It is a powder and a liquid. You can harvest it, solid one moment then gone, on a night walk where everything’s blessed by the freeing fresh cold and the silent houses stand like mirages. Hold back your head, hold out your hand. After we turned at the corner I lipped up several little swanlings morsels of snow-white snow off the greensteel spikes guarding the soft white stone church. I thought, this snow is heilige snow.

    A Swedish friend had come by earlier in the night and said, lounging back on his chair, your apartment is like a little boat. It has big white windows and outside no lights, you see only the stars. We came in after midnight from the white world without and set sail once more into silence of unending black water, the vast night, the sea of tranquility. Blessed honeyside of the moon. Winter has arrived at last and like the Spring rains in the steaming tropics it brings with it privacy, silences, long dark salty solitudes. I am a dormant seed tucked in my blankets and this tiny ferry still crossing the water, a little, led barge.