Day xxx

A Beautiful Distraction

sketched in the library on weds april 29

the 'paper blouse' is my double tickets to an art opening that I cannot attend

"It's so had to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world"

~Lester Burnham, American Beauty

Day 2 - Toan

4 January 2009
Tereza

"[Tomas] suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost." 
-- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

"I don't learn love," she said, tracing her fingers on the wet tea bag hanging on to the rim of the cup. Too petite for the winter, she wrapped herself up in a brown silk scarf and a black jacket, both made for the winter fashion but too thin to keep anyone warm. There was always a trade off between comfort and style. She always chose style, and always style with dark colors. 

"I have loved, and love has hurt me, but I refuse to love differently. It is the way I am." She was the most stubborn girl I knew. She did not give into her instincts, even on that night when she let me kiss her beautiful breasts and run my hands over the sacred parting between her legs. I could never forget the feeling on my palm that night. Never had a girl emanate such warmth between her thighs without me ever touching her. And never had a girl refuse to kiss me when both her hands were finger-locked to mine, on the intimate space between her hair and my pillow. And thus she had never ceased to be on my mind. 

She knew me more than most women had ever known me. Knowing my dream, she made me a guitar pick that said: "Give peace a chance." Knowing my imagination, she bought me a blank canvas with a letter hand-written on the back. Knowing my taste, she sprayed her perfume on a page in our little shared diary. Never had I shared a diary with a girl, and never had I written as much for a woman. (Well, maybe except for another occasion, or maybe two, but those would be in another story.)

But she was stubborn. She didn't give in. However love usually needs a little bit of giving in, not as much to the other person, but to yourself. You give in by letting yourself fall a little bit. But uncertainty scared her, and I was too hard-headed to notice that. Two stubborn people were probably not meant for each other.

"Remember Tomas, you will always be the special sputnik of my life." 

After dropping her off, (yes, dropping yet another woman off on the second day of this 30 day journey) I taped the picture she gave me  to the wall behind my laptop. It was a photo of her in front of Monet's "Soleil Couchant" (Sun Set) in a Parisian museum. It read: "To Tomas, <3 tereza." 

She would always be the little Tereza, sent to my front door in a bulrush basket, in a river of soleil couchant colors. Soft and warm. And that was enough to make me happy. Time for a new love.

Phan, #2

Day 2 - Nick

3 January 2009

Eat'n Park

---How'r y'all doin' t'day? -- she asked, with a smile, looking me in the eye.

She ushered us to our table and had the coffee ready before we could even open a menu.  She was about forty, her dirty blond hair fell like a mop over her ears.  She glided between the tables, her movements economical.  She carried a pot of decaf and a folksy accent to every booth, wore a pin or two on her apron and a smile on her face.  

Corey and I talked about New York and Chicago, compared New Haven to Evanston, discussed life in Moscow and life in Masury.  Lower registers of English used to bother me.  I tried hard to purify my speech when I was eighteen.  I wanted to heighten my language so that I could write poetry, philosophize, contemplate international politics.  But she spoke so freely and easily.  She looked out for everyone---the old woman sitting by herself in the corner, the couple in the booth to our left, the family with kids behind us.  A man waved for his check.  I finished my hamburger.  Corey needed a napkin.  Slipped under his saucer, plate taken away, a stack placed on the edge of the table --- just in case --- she winked, disappearing into the kitchen.  No, a poet can't write with language alone.  

Kupensky, #2

Day 1 - Phan

The wooden Native American

She took off her jacket, I took off mine. She was wearing the football jersey of her home city. As we made ourselves at home on the comfy couch of a well-designed chocolate shop, I asked what position she would play if she were on the field. "I was a cheerleader!" she said, a smile beamed from her bright green eyes. Not what I had expected, but well, that was at least a position whose function I could understand, as a foreigner. She leaned back. She was at home with herself. I reached my fingers to her thin brown hair, which used to be blond a few months ago, and traced it along the curve of her ears. I loved her earrings. Shiny, and expensive.

"I grew up in a good family," leaning her head on the couch, she let her eyes travel to an unidentified point on the ceiling, "me and my sis, we barely fought. I would sometime punch her in the arm, then run away to my parent's room to hide." Her eyes glimmered. When someone is looking up, she is most likely subconsciously visualizing her words. I could imagine a picture of a little girl from Indiana, all pampered up in a pink birthday skirt, with cream on her cheeks and cake on her fingers, surrounded by her proud parents and cute little sister, boxes and wrapping paper everywhere on the floor.

"I want to have a wedding in my church. I would wear a long white bridal dress, you know?..." she started to daydream. "And there would be music!" she opened her eyes with excitement, "but not a band, you know? Just one man, one guitar, and one voice. And he would sing a medley of all the songs that I love!" She grabbed my arm, "Wouldn't that be a wonderful wedding?", and squeezed it. I saw love in her eyes, somewhere in a distance.

"Hey Toan, don't tell people, but I'm going to see a football game tonight, with a boy! And... I like him...." 

"How is he?" I could aways get a little curious.

"He's very nice. He works at a school for special needs kids..."

When the first word a girl uses to describe a boy is "nice," it always raises my eyebrows. I leaned over to her ears. "Does he excite you?"

"Well..." She paused, thinking for a second, "I must say... um... he doesn't really have that edge..."

Drawing away the thin curtain of her hair with my fingers, I leaned in even closer. I liked to be close to the skin of a woman. Tonight she wore Calvin Klein perfume. That, and Bourbon, always turned me on. But I restrained myself from biting her long and now bare neck. We had made an implicit pledge to be just friends. It was not always easy, I know. Because deep beneath that American jersey, those classy earings, that well-taken care of hair, and that well laid-out career path, there was a naughty little girl, sleeping. A little American girl who wanted to be swept away by fancy foreign forces. But the girl had been sleeping for quite a time now.

"I have presents for you!" She pulled out a bag full of gifts. "I bought them from my trip with mom to Mexico and Puerto Rico. I hope you'll like them, because everything I saw there reminded me of you." 

Dropping her off, I ran home to open the gifts. A mexican cigar. A pipe. A mini Buddha. A pair of maracas. And a wooden toy-man that looked like a native American. I grabbed him by his head, and out of no where a thick wooden stick, with a round and red head came out, protrudingly, from between his lower belly and his upper legs. It looked like a wooden penis. 

"Because everything I saw there reminded me of you."

3 January 2009

Day 1 - Nick

#1 - Phancy

He had tore into his gift, ripping the wrapping paper away quickly and decisively, revealing a corkscrew and bottle-opener in an expensive-looking wooden box. "Oh nice! Thank you, Diane!" he said, turning to my mom, "Fancy!"  Fancy?  Well, I suppose.  He had been calling everything fancy since I picked him up at the airport -- the leather seats in the car, my new haircut, the Christmas tree, the iconostasis at church, chicken wings, the symbolic Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner, a transistor radio, $5.99 Funky Llama wine, a Viagra pen, brandy-flamed saganaki, the Greek waiters who bellowed out "Opa!" every time they lit the brandy on fire for the saganaki, the beautiful voice of the French girl who sang us lullabies on New Year's Eve.  He could have used cool, or nice, or beautiful, or lovely -- but time after time, he would encounter something slightly new and unexpected, or charming and intimate, or exciting and stimulating, and the same syllables passed through his lips always followed by a beaming smile--- FAN-CY!

Some were struck by its inappropriateness and dismissed it as a foreigner in love with a new word.  Others were pleasantly surprised to see him elevating their tube socks, zippers, and rolls of toilet paper to such sublimically lofty levels.  But as we traveled to place to place and I saw more and more objects touched by this wildly adventurous adjective, I began to see what he saw.  This feeling somehow couldn't be described by such routine concepts like coolness or beauty because this was something that his own radiant personality illuminated itself.  It was something that didn't exist until he found it, here in an old blanket, there in a refrigerator magnet.  Like King Midas whose touch turned everything to gold, it was he whose touch made the world around him Phancy.

2 January 2009

Introduction to Vol 2

New Beauty in the New Year:
An Introduction 

After collecting and publishing our first collection of short stories, poetry, and art, T and I were amazed at the life-giving properties of pushing ourselves to write a story-a-day.  But after laughing, joking, and drinking over the success of our first experiment, we were also struck by a sobering realization -- our stories largely were focused on ourselves.  It may be a surprising to some why two egotists would be troubled by the egotism of their own artistic work, but because so much of the happiness that we found in writing arose out of people we met, remembered, or shared our work with, we decided that the task of our second challenge ought to be to usher the beautiful people who touch our lives everyday into the magical land of prose and poetry.  Some of these people may be about our family and friends, for our ever-present desire to affirm the goodness and beauty in life is so closely tied to those who inspire it in us everyday.  But more importantly, we hope to use the task of writing as a means to meet new beautiful people, to throw our social nets widely and find beauty in all of its variations and incarnations.  So come and share your beauty with us and give us the chance to appreciate it.  

The Authors
1 January 2009