salt box stories
25 December 2005 02:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amulI usually hate writing this style (the poetry at the bottom, not this strange gushing prose up top here), and it's completely a first draft, anyway. No idea why I even bothered writing it out.
Still, salt box stories. I had quite forgotten those. Summer camp, my junior year, one of the most horrifically demanding seasons of my student life. "Yet, somehow, at three AM, long after my Alaskan Dream had fallen asleep, I had found Annie, whom I didn't even remember until I read her notes.
We sat on these wooden boxes that littered one section of the campus, and I'd amaze her with tales and adventures and the most meaningless diatribes. Even then, I was a talker, and she adored me for it. One night, driven by my own words to fresh heights of curiosity, I finally gave in to the temptation to rip open one of those boxes and find out what was inside: rock salt. You know, for winter.
But winter was a dream-song of another era, when you're seventeen in the summer, when you're just beginning to have some idea of what women are good for besides reaching out for their trust. Rock salt in summer is a kind of foresight that was utterly foreign to this young, cocky, expectantly romantic boy who never knew the length of his shirt. That summer was when I first realized that you could do more with a pretty young lass, then puzzle out her defenses and earn her trust. Earning trust had become a game to me, by then, a thing I practiced at with other girls for the Real Show, for Angel.
Poor Annie, she was no match for me. I unlaced the corset of her defenses as quickly as Angel can undo a man's belt.
Poor Annie, for the first time, I had some idea what I might do with that trust. And with the kind of unthinking simplicity which comes to unthinking boys, I tested those ideas out on her. Yes, quite nice. I shall have to try this with my love.
Sweet Annie, I had quite forgotten you. You tried to pry a few more moments out of me, with your words, but I had long ago learned to shield myself from the kinds of petty attacks you had made. You wrote me a letter every day, after that night, when I finally showed you what might still my tongue.
Ha! That's poetic license. I don't even remember what happened between us, but she writes of a single kiss.
Poor, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you, but all your words are still locked up in my desk drawer at my parents' house. The picture you gave me is still here, too, though no matter how long I look at it, I do not recognize you.
Is it a comfort, to know that your words, all that vast array of special stationary, they made it back across the states to my home? Is it a comfort to know that I carefully ordered and numbered them, kept even the envelopes they came in? I labeled and organized all your desperate pleas for me to love you back.
And then I put you in a drawer.
Thirteen years later, you snuck out past the giant pile of letters from Alaskan Dream, and slid out of order and out of your envelope, just far enough for me to read these words:
Sing Me a Salt Box Story.
Oh, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you.
Stationary, stationary
Heart-cut pink papers
With which the little girls say
"I love you, I need you, I want you to stay away."
Do you remember the dream-fires they fuel in you?
Sweet Janel, always so excited
Renae who lived across the ocean
Stationary, stationary
Sit still and you can hear them sing
Old stories, yearning echoes
They danced around your footsteps, ever so bold
Little Annie, you'd quite forgotten
The first heart you ever broke
This one's addressed to the boy you were
This one, to the man you wanted to be
Another, never sent at all, so how is it in your hand?
Are they as old as you've fallen, oh aging hipster?
Did they lose their carefree smiles?
Colleen, who wrote to you on the back of canvas board
Cheryl, scrawled notes in paint-pen on kitchen tile like postcards
No, that one you never forgot
Sweet Preeti, the only Desi you ever pursued
Sent you love poems wrapped in college rejection forms
and quoted Kipling in the margins
Ah, strange postal foresight, a date stamped on nearly every one.
Debbie wrote on the back of festival maps
Two years running, always the same words
"I love when you look at me."
Dear Cara, sinful (for a sweet-sixteen virgin) prose from the loony bin
Andrea, who mailed you stones when she broke your heart
Louise called you Caredd, but never said why
Stationary
Stationary
If you sit still
If you sit still
You might even drown
In the boy you were
Still, salt box stories. I had quite forgotten those. Summer camp, my junior year, one of the most horrifically demanding seasons of my student life. "Yet, somehow, at three AM, long after my Alaskan Dream had fallen asleep, I had found Annie, whom I didn't even remember until I read her notes.
We sat on these wooden boxes that littered one section of the campus, and I'd amaze her with tales and adventures and the most meaningless diatribes. Even then, I was a talker, and she adored me for it. One night, driven by my own words to fresh heights of curiosity, I finally gave in to the temptation to rip open one of those boxes and find out what was inside: rock salt. You know, for winter.
But winter was a dream-song of another era, when you're seventeen in the summer, when you're just beginning to have some idea of what women are good for besides reaching out for their trust. Rock salt in summer is a kind of foresight that was utterly foreign to this young, cocky, expectantly romantic boy who never knew the length of his shirt. That summer was when I first realized that you could do more with a pretty young lass, then puzzle out her defenses and earn her trust. Earning trust had become a game to me, by then, a thing I practiced at with other girls for the Real Show, for Angel.
Poor Annie, she was no match for me. I unlaced the corset of her defenses as quickly as Angel can undo a man's belt.
Poor Annie, for the first time, I had some idea what I might do with that trust. And with the kind of unthinking simplicity which comes to unthinking boys, I tested those ideas out on her. Yes, quite nice. I shall have to try this with my love.
Sweet Annie, I had quite forgotten you. You tried to pry a few more moments out of me, with your words, but I had long ago learned to shield myself from the kinds of petty attacks you had made. You wrote me a letter every day, after that night, when I finally showed you what might still my tongue.
Ha! That's poetic license. I don't even remember what happened between us, but she writes of a single kiss.
Poor, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you, but all your words are still locked up in my desk drawer at my parents' house. The picture you gave me is still here, too, though no matter how long I look at it, I do not recognize you.
Is it a comfort, to know that your words, all that vast array of special stationary, they made it back across the states to my home? Is it a comfort to know that I carefully ordered and numbered them, kept even the envelopes they came in? I labeled and organized all your desperate pleas for me to love you back.
And then I put you in a drawer.
Thirteen years later, you snuck out past the giant pile of letters from Alaskan Dream, and slid out of order and out of your envelope, just far enough for me to read these words:
Sing Me a Salt Box Story.
Oh, sweet Annie. I had quite forgotten you.
Stationary, stationary
Heart-cut pink papers
With which the little girls say
"I love you, I need you, I want you to stay away."
Do you remember the dream-fires they fuel in you?
Sweet Janel, always so excited
Renae who lived across the ocean
Stationary, stationary
Sit still and you can hear them sing
Old stories, yearning echoes
They danced around your footsteps, ever so bold
Little Annie, you'd quite forgotten
The first heart you ever broke
This one's addressed to the boy you were
This one, to the man you wanted to be
Another, never sent at all, so how is it in your hand?
Are they as old as you've fallen, oh aging hipster?
Did they lose their carefree smiles?
Colleen, who wrote to you on the back of canvas board
Cheryl, scrawled notes in paint-pen on kitchen tile like postcards
No, that one you never forgot
Sweet Preeti, the only Desi you ever pursued
Sent you love poems wrapped in college rejection forms
and quoted Kipling in the margins
Ah, strange postal foresight, a date stamped on nearly every one.
Debbie wrote on the back of festival maps
Two years running, always the same words
"I love when you look at me."
Dear Cara, sinful (for a sweet-sixteen virgin) prose from the loony bin
Andrea, who mailed you stones when she broke your heart
Louise called you Caredd, but never said why
Stationary
Stationary
If you sit still
If you sit still
You might even drown
In the boy you were