ramble ramble BAWK!

chickenspeak.

the omnipresent "they" always say that tragedy comes in three, like death.
can it be shared? do we each get one? can we take turns?

kristin says how funny it is, in the middle of what could possibly be every single thing in your life falling apart, you can find your true stability.

i've been remembering my dreams lately. which is strange, unnatural, for me at least. they all center on figures of loss, mythological as some actually may be:
- E gives me a letter, half of which goes blurry, illegiable. i lose the last page, and spend what feels like forever searching for it. his mom is in this huge garden, tending to strangers, and through out the whole thing, he is talking about babies.
-F hangs a banner from the front of an old saloon, across the street from where i've taken a group of children to teach them about wilderness survival. (i'm not sure what my teaching consisted of, but i do recall that at one point, i threw a hunting knife into a log). the banner, reads "we were old and now we're young. you were a friend, you are a peach". at the end of the banner is a bucket, which i pull down and fill with peaches, tie to a rope, and hang it from her window. ever the literal motherfucker, now you have peaches. (even in dreams, i suppose, there are parts of me i cannot surpress).
i am waiting for the dream about zach to come, but i am guessing that one will take some time. ah.
in my waking life, i hide out in bars, with the two still around of the four people in this entire world that i want to talk to, and we are drinking too much, and we are discussing our shared three disasters, and somehow we are laughing, and stronger than ever before. and i avoid the house because it is filthy, and i do not want to clean it anymore, and i do not want to be its mother, and i stopped wanting to be its mother before i even met it, but no one seemed to notice.
and there have been talks of nostalgia, of the past. and there have been encounters, implications, bodies sleeping on the couches that, for all intensive purposes, might as well have been the same couches from years ago.
and what escapes me entirely is everyone trying to put one another back into their imagined piece of an outdated puzzle. forced conversation, where you are trying to remember the answers you're supposed to give, based on that autobiography you wrote at the ripe age of 21.
see, i have to believe that the people i knew before, despite what may have happened between us, were people worth knowing. that, whatever came and went, it was time well spent. and based on that assumption, i have to continue to believe that in the intervening years since we last orbited one another, they have remained people worth knowing, done things worth knowing about, have grown in worthy ways. if i wanted them to be the same, if I wanted MYSELF to be the same, I'd never even see them- I have pictures, and journals, and plenty of irrational poetry, to keep that foggy era alive and well, in the wonderful world of FICTION. if i see these worthy folk now, i'd rather get to know one another's new selves, and know, deep down, that we will still make a modicum of sense together, as nonsenical as it is likely to be, as brief as its likely to be.
perhaps its just zach that's bringing it all out. we were able to pull off the full circle thing exceedingly well, as 20 year old Tori hated him more than pretty much anyone else on earth, yet flash forward, and 25 year old Tori is eating soy ice cream and watching bad kung fu movies with zach and kristin in the impossibly small apartment we three shared, all crammed onto my bed, with the cats and franklin and a haze of cigarette smoke (can i mention how bizarelly awesome it was that my bed somehow also served as our living room?).
as i get closer and closer to solidly deciding to leave seattle, i am left with a need to reconcile with what this city means to me. and the biggest parts of that city are the people within it. im not talking tears, or hair braiding, or recrimination, or friendship rings, or blissfully faked emoting, or slumber parties (well...maybe slumber parties). i'm not really sure yet what it is. and until i do, its not fair to involve myself or anyone else within it. plus, its been depresso hangover-o-rama at camp me, and my vengeful brain is wrecking havoc on me for my indulgent ways, barring any rational thought or decision making until the haze has cleared.