trixel

"A dreaded sunny day,
so I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine"

-Cemetry Gates by The Smiths

I own the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Appropriately enough it's beat to shit. It was THE book of my teenage years. Yeah, I was a poseur of the worst kind. Guess that never really changed.

I went to boarding school on top of a mountain in South India. Before you ask, aside from important words needed to acquire matches or somesuch, I do not know any Tamil.

In 7th grade, my all girls dorm decided to put on a production of The Happy Prince. I got to be the Prince. I was so proud of being able to do drag in front of the entire school at the Christmas Variety Show. My love of Oscar Wilde began then.

I owned a black leather trenchcoat from the '70s, my dad's in fact. It was floor length on me. Big glam lapels and huge buttons. I adored it. I'd wear it around like a dress with nothing underneath. Picture gothy girl with '80s hair, partially shaved with stripes, fanned out, in my face, black. *wince* Ok maybe DON'T picture that.

Anyhow, Astrid (mentioned a few journals back) and I would pack a picnic and hike up into the hills. Clouds rolled in and we'd walk through, barely able to see. We'd go to this rundown Victorian graveyard and hang out. There was a 14 yr old girl's grave there, Elinore. She died of cholera. We'd leave her flowers. We'd read Oscar Wilde. Yes, we really did that.

Sometimes we'd meet up with our friend Baz (Sebastian). He was a hippy kid. I have no idea what his mother did, except maybe drugs. He wasn't enrolled in school. His father had killed himself a few years before. I remember the first time I saw him. I was intrigued: this tall pale creature with short dark hair in the market, sad eyes, high cheekbones. His bones jutted out everywhere. I couldn't tell if he was a boy or a girl. That suited me fine. He worked for awhile at this local hippy vegetarian restaurant as a waiter.

I'd stop by the restaurant frequently to smoke cigarettes and flirt. Eventually we got to be friends and he turned out to be my lifeline to British music. His mom had been shipped out of Europe by her rich family. I met a lot of semi-disowned black sheep in India. He got regular shipments of music from the UK. He introduced me to the Sex Pistols. I got all the old Cure. Psychedelic Furs. Japan. New Order. Bauhaus. The Exploited *laugh* We'd walk around going: "Maggie, you cunt, Maggie, you fucking cunt!" Ah the good old Thatcher days

The school was run by American missionaries. The girls' dorms had bars on the windows, razor wire and locks. OH and security patrols. The boys' dorms? Nothing! I managed to replace a lock and we'd go on night time stealth missions. Often to a place deep in the woods we called Dragon's Lair because of the way the tree trunks looked like claws.

I remember lying on the grass in all that deep green with clouds rolling over us. Everything moving while the trees stood still. And then, everything stopped. The trees danced.

Oh. I just pulled my book from the shelf. I was looking for a quote I wanted to end this with. Inside a note on hastily ripped paper. It's something I've never seen before. It's next to a poem called Glykipikros Eros. It's a note from my ex-fiancee, Andy. He lives in nyc. I have no idea how it got there. *looks around* It talks about accountability and ends with:

"We live, we feel, we hurt. The world makes no exceptions, not even for you or me. Glykipikros Eros. Sweet, I blame you not."

I thought he hated me.

I feel as if a ghost has been here.