mccaartiin:

strange-eyes:

(via lowpresssure)

I want to hold your hand with your slight-sticky nervous sweat, and think about artificially pink ice cream melting from a cone on that day in summer fifteen years before I even knew you—the sun-warmed sticky-drippings on my fingers.

The floor of the kitchen was an earth-mustard linoleum that was slightly sticky on the soles of our bare feet. There was a Formica table with a circle of chairs around it and the table was always covered in half-empty mason jars and half-full coffee mugs. Nearer the window was a card table holding up a coffee-maker and a pineapple. The window had bars over it, and never let the sun in right– it blended the light with the air so that the dust was radiating. There was a pistachio colored tea kettle on the left, rear burner of the stove; one of the old kettles that whistles murder when the water is done.
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The living room was more of a hallway choked by a sofa and a half dozen bikes in various states of assemblage. After you dodged through the tight-rope of walking space there was a bookshelf: old cook books with the tea-stained leaves falling out, huge hardback architecture books with glossy photographs of buildings that looked like this one, and new, slick anthologies of literary theory. The walls were dressed with reprints of the once avant-garde and xeroxed flyers from rallies the week before. It was poorly lit for the most part, with yellow light bulbs in archaic lamps salvaged from thrift stores. Just bright enough for tripping on the pastiche of rugs that littered the floor. There was a sewing machine, unused or just misplaced, beside a large chest-of-drawers.
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The rest of the apartment was bedrooms. Three of them, each furnished with two beds, two desks, and two sets of posters featuring leftist causes and bands from arcane genres only six people have ever heard of. The windows in the bedrooms looked out onto 115th; closer to Riverside than Broadway and quiet. Books were stacked on window ledges– cracked spines from tough love.
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The bathroom was tiny, yellowed, and spartan except for the plethora of plastic bottles with flowery scents that barracked along the windowsill. The shower curtain was a frosted green. The sink gave away its age with the greco-esque pillar it sat on—kitsch that used to be class. It had only a single, white bar of soap with the letters rubbed out from use.
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There was history in this place, flitting between the ten foot ceilings and our scalps. Lukewarm coffee after Brooklyn. Dinner parties before the dive bar. Four a.m whispered conversations over the Formica table: living in the city, moving to the country, liberation.

ironic “misogyny” from the gender neutral spot?

The first facsimile machine