rinue | coffee and clay

Had coffee today with Annelise - a 22-year-old Belgian farm girl who has never before lived away from home, very sure of her likes and dislikes, one of my favorite people here. She doesn't drink coffee herself - she drinks hot chocolate. She abhors clowns, fairy tales, and movies that are ugly. She loves Gloria Swanson, and the golden age of the studio system. She loves knowledge for the sake of knowledge. She adores romantic stories, but is herself practical, tough, handy with a hammer.

It's hard to be both so happy and so miserable; I am living two lives at once. This is hard to reconcile, and makes me think that one of the lives must be fictional. Most likely, the fictional life is the one with Ciro; it is both less believable and less documented. Nobody here has met Ciro, and I mainly talk to him late at night; I have no record of these conversations.

I have trouble looking in mirrors lately, especially if I am wearing makeup; I don't look like a beautiful person so much as a caricature of a beautiful person, a beautiful person's features painted on to...what? My skin doesn't move like skin, and the bones of my face slide around as I'm watching. Each morning, my eyes are further back in my skull, as though someone presses them down while I sleep.