text message pen pals

a stranger accidentally text messaged me the other day. this is how it played out. this is 100% from real life.



309: Omg, kate really does get on tom about everything! Its weird...like how she tells him what to do and then tzts kam and tells her what he's doing.
me: omg yr so right tell me more. Tom...tom...tom
309: So, I didn't mean to txt u and i have no idea who u r. Sorry. Awfully odd response tho.
me: Wanna be frenz?
309: Not especially. Who r u?
me: This is your subconscious speaking. LOL.
309: lol. Nice.
me: Think about it, we could be penpals. This could be the next big thing, random text yo area code.
309: haha. R u a boy?
me: Do i sound like a boy?
309: U sound like a creepzilla!
me: I am not a creepzilla i am a human being i deserve my rights u sound like a tween dude.
309: mwahahaha! I'm a lady. 25. U sound like an art fag.
me: I am a 24 yo woman and i am totally an art fag.
309: I knew it! Still wanna be penpals?
me: Um like duh. Who else is gonna listen to you bitch about Tom.
309: tom's my husband's son.
me: How old is he?
309: 10. I was bitching cuz his sister gets on him for all the weird shit he does and its stifling the kid.
me: Maybe the shit he does is really effing weird tho, amirite?
309: He licked the cat's tail. Sure, he's fuckin weird but its a good thing. sure the cats get tired of cleaning themselves all the time.
me: Who hasn't wanted to do that. Although recall the tail's proximity to the asshole, which is at least a psychological concern.
309: Indeed. But hey, its fun as long as its just the tip. Joking...or am i. U know peter, by chance?
me: If course I know peter! ...grl u serious? wtf.
309: this is rachel.
me: Yeah we totally went to high school together!
309: lyzz? U gonna keep me guessing?
me: Don't you have any sense of mystery? 309 covers a huge amount of central illi.
309: you're right...where IS my sense of mystery?
me: You sold your soul to the devil.
309: Hah! U sed it, man!
me: Godspeed.
309: nice talking w ya, lil lady! Take her easy!
me: Likewise. Peace.

Picking Up Items and Putting Them Back. Lena, Mark, an Unnamable Lover, and an Unknown Listener.

>>>>>2005.

Lena asks her roommate if he can stay the night somewhere else.

"I have plans here tonight," she says.

Lena's roommate is sad but obedient. He secretly records the sounds that drift from Lena's bedroom walls and sells them to a stranger on the internet. The stranger pays two-hundred dollars for each hour of audio. Sometimes the roommate gets excited by the audio but he is a man of god goddammit and he must save himself for a moral whore. Ten percent of each two-hundred dollar hour goes to the poor, he tells himself goddammit. 

Tonight is a six-hundred dollar night. Tonight will surely be symphonic. Lena has already tossed the lingerie she plans to wear over the armchair in the hallway. It is close to the color of her skin, which makes it very light and almost transparent. The roommate does not mind Lena's obvious promiscuity but wishes she would wear red sometimes. She would look goddamn better in red, he thought. 

The roommate enters Lena's room while Lena is  showering. He walks to her nightstand and places something underneath it. It is a tiny device that can record three hours of audio before having to be recharged in a wall outlet. The roommate sets the device to begin recording at 10 PM. It is 8:40 now.

The roommate is distracted by a piece of jewelry Lena has left on her nightstand, a single bone-shaped earring. It doesn't look like anything she would wear. The roommate picks up the earring and finds it quite heavy. 

"It's not for your ear."

Lena's roommate turns around. Lena has been watching him but there is no way to know for how long unless he asks her.

"How long have you been watching?"

"Nine seconds," she says. "Are you looking for something?"

Lena walks over to her roommate and he notices that she has managed to get into the skin-colored lingerie between the bathroom and her bedroom. She smells like her own cum because she always masturbates in the shower, but the roommate thinks Lena smells like shampoo.

"Just checking if you have any dishes in here before I run the washer. I saw the earring on your table."

Lena smiles. "It's for your tongue."

The roommate blushes in revulsion. He sets the ring back on Lena's nightstand. "I thought it looked weird," he says. 

"That's because - " Lena takes the ring off the nightstand "- you are used to seeing pairs." She opens her mouth and pushes the ring through an invisible hole in the center of her tongue. "Now get out of here Mark. I am barely dressed."

Mark leaves the room and doesn't run the dishwasher and leaves the house and doesn't lock the front door. He will stay at his girlfriend's tonight, even though he still hasn't been able to explain to her why he lives with such a crude woman. But his girlfriend loves the one-hundred-and-eighty dollar shoes he buys her so she asks few questions except "how ever did you afford these?" She will then give him a bad handjob. While she does it, Mark closes his eyes and pictures his girlfriend in red lingerie. Unfortunately she only wears white underwear. It reminds Mark too much of Lena.

Lena is polished when her lover arrives. It is 9:31.

Her lover motions to cup her breast after they have had a glass of wine. He squeezes it and likes how it is the perfect size for his hand.

"You're filthy," she tells him, but thrusts her chest forward and deeper into his grip. Her lover gets on his knees and lifts up her slip to kiss her stomach. The position puts him eye-level with Lena's desk a few feet away. It distracts him.

Her lover picks up several pieces of red-stained paper from the desk. "Your writing is covered in blood."

"It's only wine. I spilled it accidentally."

The lover holds the paper close to his face. The blue inky words bleed into the stained paper. A string of them he can make out: "the satisfied cunt will suffer my trials."

"You're going to kill one of your characters," he says. "A girl."

Lena takes the paper from her lover and replaces it on her desk. "No. She just needed to get dirty. But she'll be alright. You, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. You are filthy."

Lena walks to her bathroom and turns on the shower. "Come here and take off all of your clothes," she instructs. "I am going to watch you clean yourself." 

The shower is clear glass with sliding doors. Lena's lover slides one of them aside and steps in. He begins washing his hair and the shape his arms make when they are above his head does something strange to Lena. She sits on the sink that faces the shower. She draws one leg up to rest her foot on the sink and lets the other dangle. 

Lena begins to touch herself and when her lover notices what she is doing he also reaches for himself. For several minutes they refuse to meet the other's eyes, suspending the illusion for as long as possible that neither knows the other is watching. 

"Get over here," he says finally.

Lena obeys, not bothering to remove her slip. When wet it clings to her body like another skin, so when her lover puts his hand underneath it he feels like he is penetrating her already.

He attempts to pin her back against the narrow wall of the shower. He wants to fuck her standing. but the wall is wet and she slides down a little when her feet lift from the ground. As he pushes harder she slides further down. With her left hand Lena grabs the top of the sliding glass door and distributes her body unequally. She positions her right foot on the soap ledge and her symmetry is recovered. Now her lover is able to fuck her harder.

He does and when she is about to come, Lena's foot becomes dislodged from the soap ledge. A tremendous pressure is suddenly applied to the glass door Lena clings to. Her lover thrusts forward to deliver the concluding orgiastic movement. Lena screams, the glass door shatters, and the two lovers fall out of the shower onto the bathroom floor, still connected to each other and now also connected to several hundred shards of glass that beat them to the ground. 

Lena and her lover quickly survey their new surroundings. Then their eyes meet, both pairs still raw with desire from orgasm. The lover's body, covered in blood and glass, starts to shake with laughter. Lena, equally bloody, equally glass-covered, is equally amused. Lena and her lover cling to one another, closer than any two humans have ever been before, two laughing humans fucking on a pile of broken glass while their blood clots and skin breaks.

"I think about you all the time Lena," he says. 

Lena stands up and brushes bits of glass away from her body. Her slip is torn but nothing is punctured. 

"We're lucky to be alive," she says. Lena pulls off her slips and leaves it in the sink. A combination of water and blood coats her skin. Her lover has never seen anything so arousing. 

"Let's go to bed," he suggests. 

Lena nods and helps her lover off the ground. The pair enter Lena's bedroom and Lena begins to pull tiny pieces of glass out of her lover's skin. They take turns digging out little pieces from flesh and placing them in a coffee mug. With every freed shard comes a gasp of relief. When they are emptied of glass, Lena's lover puts two fingers inside her and she moans at the unexpected sensation of being filled. 

Lena's lover is happy and surprised with how vocal Lena is tonight. She tells him she masturbates to him all the time and orders him to come on different parts of her body. She is louder than usual and he responds proportionately. When he becomes too exhausted to continue, Lena waits for her lover to fall asleep and then cleans his wounds with alcohol. She reaches under her nightstand and takes out the audio-recording device. 

"I miss you," she says into it. 

Lena shuts the device off and leaves it under the nightstand for her roommate to retrieve in the morning. It is 12:57 AM.

>>>>>

filters of my house

>>>>4.30.11

The Next Chapter of Lena: Confession

aren't you getting tired of seeing no updates? yet you return, day after day.


depression feels like desperation, and I refuse to submit a dishonest post.


Lena: Return.






Lena walks back to a place she has been before. A scaled-down Babel pierced the sky. A sound came out of the rip - bells. A woman in an ugly hat walked out. The church.


Entering the confessional, Lena walks back again to a place she has been before. 


"When was the date of your last confession?" the virgin asks her.


"Age fourteen. A requirement before Confirmation."


"And how many years do you have now?"


"Twenty-Four. So ten. Ten years since my last confession."


The virgin says nothing. Lena decides this silence is the least offensive prompt of all possible prompts which are directed as instigating one's admission of vulnerabilities.


"My first sin is that, when I was younger and forced to participate in this sacrament, I made up sins," Lena says. "I never felt as if I had done anything wrong."


"And now, you feel you have done wrong?"


"No, not really."


The virgin says nothing, and then says, "Why don't we continue anyway?"


"Why not I suppose. My second sin is not believing in God."


The virgin automatically responds, "Mother Theresa was plagued with doubt until the day she died. She wrote of it every night in her journals."


"I guess I don't see what that has to do with me, because I don't give a fuck if God exists or not. I write about interesting things in my journal."


The virgin clears his virginal throat. He reswallows the virginal mucus he has just worked so hard to dislodge, virginally. "Perhaps confession is not the right step for you at this moment."


"Jesus man. I'm getting there. I'm just fucking around right now."


"So you do have something to confess which burdens your soul?"


"No, but one of my characters does. Do you mind if I read a part of her confession to you?"


"I'm not sure I understand." Virgin clears his dumb virgin throat again. 


Lena clears her own de-virginized throat. "Her name is Aletea. She is conflicted right now because she is having an affair with her cousin. They played the 'show me' game when they were young, and now, their paths have mysteriously intersected again many years later. Their attraction is magnetic and natural and mutual. Yet of course it is wrong."


"Is this you? Are you talking about you?"


"No, Father. This is Aletea. She is one of my characters. From my journals."


"Ah - I think - "


"Anyway Father, may I please read you her confession? She is quite a devoted Catholic and I need to know what penance you would give her. For contextual accuracy."


"Er, alright then."


Lena opens her purse and removes a small red notebook from one of its compartments. She turns to page 17 and begins reading. Slowly.


"When he finally touched me it was how I remembered touch felt. It was bare sex, elementary sex. Everything else has since him, a footnote. Like I tapped into the center of a system. Its maxims. Its gears. At one point I said, as he was cautiously reacquainting himself with me, I said, in a last attempt to salvage my ethical self, to squander his carnal appetite, I said, 'Don't do this to yourself.' He said, 'But I'm doing it to you.' And god. I just fucking let him."


"Is that it?" the virgin asks after a few moments of dead air.


"Yes. What are the damages?"


The virgin merely swallows. "15 each Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary."


"Is that really it?"


"And a tremendous effort to change."


Lena frowns. "But if she changes the plot will be ruined. I have many more pages after 17."


"Well, then I guess she's not really sorry."


Lena ponders this a moment. 


"I guess you're right."

November

Blotmonað


lit. "blood-month;" "month of sacrifice." (Old English)


Thus an appropriate finish, with both blood and a sacrifice. 





Observations of November:


1. steering wheels of vehicles may control nothing
2. people I have never met know I exist
3. solitary joy
4. bad timing is good timing on a larger scale of time. 
5. "the chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want for what you want now."


>>>out