Blue bottles

I’m standing at the doorway, leaning against it’s frame. I’m watching two people dancing in the periwinkle kitchen. Her on her toes and him with his head bent. Slowly, turning noiselessly on the floor.

Something clenches in my stomach. My throat fills up. They turn to look at me. Like they knew all along that I was there. Not minding the intrusion. I see her face. It’s smiling, the brown eyes crinkling up at it’s tip tilted corners. One eye slightly smaller than the other.

My heart suddenly leaps. I can’t look at the man. I know who he is. But can’t admit to myself. Dare I?

The Purple summer sky. I walk out barefoot on the dry mud. I can smell the rain come in. The first drop hits my tongue. A spash of cool water. Spatters of precipitation all over the dry mud. All over me. In my hair. My eyes. Down my spine. I shiver. I smile. I laugh. I cry. A beautiful Ray of Hope. A sign of life… A life Free…

I walk back home, the mud steaming gently behind me…

My idea of heaven…

On a cold rainy day, curled up at a Window seat, with the softest throw at socked feet and a warm puppy sleeping on my stomach…. eating a crunchy apple and reading a book. Chris Botti playing softly… Subway sinlge choco chip cookies on a white plate… chilled mango juice…

What’s yours?

She sat straight on the chair overlooking a sullen boy. A beautiful boy, but an angry one. They sat at a small table near the kitchen. The kitchen doors swung open and close and smells and noise wafted in and out. It was a tiny unhappy table.

The man tried. He really did. But how could he do anything more than bring two people he loved together hoping they could see a connection? Nervous and disappointed, he tried to bring into conversation his son and his girlfriend. It was a tiny, unhappy table.

Why was she here? They didn’t need her, really didn’t. She wasn’t even all that pretty and she looked bored. There was no way he was going to like her, like his father promised. He looked away, tears gleaming on his long eyelashes. It was a tiny unhappy table.

She folded the napkin nervously, her fingers twisting the expensive fabric. A large diamond shone brightly on her finger. Then the phone beeped. A welcome distraction, she thought. But it wasn’t hers. The table vibrated and shook.

The Hospital? Why would they be calling now? He flashed apologetic looks at both and excused himself. The chair scrapped back and the man left to talk on the screechy phone.

Oh NO! It was he and she. Alone? He fiddled with a water glass, it’s rainbow colours catching the light and then getting swallowed up by the water. And suddenly it slipped and crashed to the floor.

Oh Dear Lord! Did she have to deal with this silent tantrum? She looked on at the snobby waiter who glared at the little boy whose bottom lip trembled. Oh really, to chastise a child! She dismissed the waiter with a cool look and held her hand over the little boy’s.

He withdrew his hand. She didn’t have to do that. He didn’t like her yet. But he saw the look that passed her face when he did that. What did that mean? They remained quiet.

Nervous and very close to tears, she folded the serviette into a bird. But, its wings drooped and the neck was bent. She shook the square of cloth open and began folding it into a boat. She looked up, and saw the boy watching.

Can she make a frog?

She summoned the waiter and asked for some paper. And wordlessly, tore them into paper squares, a diagonal fold in each little square. And she looked up and raised a kindly eyebrow…

What do you want?

He stayed quiet. But then the words came bursting out. A frog? with a challenge in his voice.

She nodded. And then bit her lip as she tried to remember how to make it. Then she bent her neck, her fingers folding the square into perfect geometrical shapes.

He waited. He watched.

And then, she held in the palm of her hand and told him to touch its base. She set it on the table and he touched its base, gingerly. The paper frog leapt.

A startled silence later, he burst into laughter and it reached his eyes.

She smiled. And began folding another square. And then another.

He waited and watched. He smiled.

Sometime later, the man entered, worry lines on his handsome face. He saw the elegant lady with a paper flower in her hair and his little boy, in a Viking hat made of the smooth serviette laughing over a shivery snake. He smiled and made his way through to the table. And was offered, a perfectly folded paper heart.

How homphobic are you?

Take the Sexuality IAT test to find out.

A post coming soon…

“There’s neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain–just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.”

“Yes, it’s the gay cowboy movie. Get over it.

The reason to see Ang Lee’s ”Brokeback Mountain,” and see it you should, isn’t its hot-button topicality or its cultural cachet but simply that it’s a very good movie, with a staggeringly fine performance by Heath Ledger.

It’s an Ang Lee movie: a chamber drama about inarticulate desires from one of the cooler and smarter customers currently working. The intimacy just happens to unfold against an epic Marlboro Man landscape (breathtakingly shot by Rodrigo Prieto), in ways that bring tragedy to the surface while keeping the audience at a certain remove.

‘Brokeback Mountain” is based on the 1996 short story by Annie Proulx, and the script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana honorably expands on the writer’s weathered prose. In the summer of 1963, two hard-luck young ranch hands named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) sign up to work a flock of sheep in the high country of Wyoming; one is assigned to stay at base camp while the other baby-sits the sheep higher up — it’s Forest Service land, but rancher Randy Quaid is tired of having his stock picked off by coyotes.

Jack is a rodeo wannabe, just shy of a clown; Ennis is a taciturn piece of work engaged to a small-town girl named Alma (Michelle Williams). What happens between the two men builds slowly, then explodes, after which they retire to opposite corners. Their rough, impulsive coupling could have been a fight. It almost is. Lee films it with the studied frankness of a boxing match or a nature documentary.

The two share a blissful summer — again, never speaking of what’s happening between them because, as Ennis insists, ”I ain’t no queer” — and then return to ”normal” lives. Ennis marries Alma and has a couple of kids, while Jack hooks up with a rodeo-riding daddy’s girl (Anne Hathaway, defiantly kicking over the traces of ”The Princess Diaries”). That retreating idyll looms larger and larger for both men — the one true moment of human connection that neither can fully grasp or let go. They begin to take biannual ”fishing trips” up in the mountains.

”Brokeback” proceeds to edge forward over the course of two decades: children grow, wrinkles appear, the gulf between husbands and wives widens. The film quietly acknowledges an entire subculture of men who keep their sexuality (gay, bi, whatever) tucked carefully away while toeing a straight line. The perils of straying off that line are manifestly clear, even without Ennis’s anecdote about the fate of a ranching ”couple” he knew in his childhood.

The film asks a lot of an audience — not that cowboys might have physical feelings for each other but the more prosaic business of watching young actors age with the aid of make-up. Gyllenhaal and Hathaway get the short end of the stick; you’re painfully aware they’re 20-something stars wearing middle-aged hair. Gyllenhaal also plays the more callow of the two men, and, coincidentally or not, his performance doesn’t dig as deep as you want it to.

But maybe anyone would look thin next to Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar. The actor hunches over and pulls his emotions under his canvas coat; he doesn’t age so much as slowly cave in. That’s fitting: Ennis is both ennobled and shamed by feelings he doesn’t possess words to describe. ”This thing we have” is the closest he comes, and yet it’s the only real part of his life, despite the damage left in its wake. Ledger turns the classic iconography of the Western male — a cowboy hat pulled low, a measured drawl that says no more than it absolutely has to — into protective coloring. The genius of the performance is in how little he shows and how much he suggests.

The third sharp point of the movie’s triangle is Williams as Alma, whose youth and spiritedness slowly drain away in the face of an infidelity she can’t encompass. There’s a beautiful low-rent weariness to the performance — like something out of an Edward Hopper painting — and with any justice this long-underrated actress will finally get some mainstream recognition.

”Brokeback” may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion. Its final image insists rather bluntly on the closets we build for ourselves. The movie sticks with you, though, as does its belief that love is more important than gender or culture or anything — that it’s important enough to be treasured in secret if necessary. Lee stays true to the cowboy stoicism of Proulx’s final lines: ”Nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” That’s the tragedy here, and the strength”

Have you ever felt you had to die once just to see what’s on the other side?

Can you summon up the truth in your life for one brief moment to simplify the reason of your existence?

She knew she was dying. It was a thought no more. No more a fond hope, bleeding optimism in tiny trickles. It was a certainty. All her life, she had shied away from any thing that was final. Life’s opportunities swam by ungrabbed. Loves lost. Lives lost. And in the deepest irony, the finality of it all slapped her vapid life. Death. And dying.

She breathed into the transparent mask. Swirls of the life still left in her fogged it’s hard surface. Every breath she took was painful. Every move she made watched. People looked on with morbid fascination or clinical indifference. She found she didn’t care for either.

Life wasn’t flashing by either. It made it’s presence felt lightly and left, like tiptoeing guest in an alien bathroom… A smile here and a tear there. Song lyrics, love songs, broken fragments of a nearly forgotten conversation, fights, smells, rain, shells, French, taste of his shoulder, the silkiness of the throat of her dog….

Every rasp of her breath brought fresh pain. And a masochistic happiness. A sullen rage. A deep calm. An unstoppable despair. She was dying. No more patterns of the soul fitting into someone else. No rebirth. No Nirvana. Nothing. Dying. Final. A checquered flag waved to signify the end. Goodbye.

The monitor beeped along merrily. Merry was hardly the word that could be used. But she couldn’t think of anything else. Le mot juste. Her thin arms shook with the effort of her trying to rise. Immediately, a nurse leapt to attendance. She shook her lovely head and the nurse backed off, perhaps seeing the broken life or cool insanity in her eyes. Whatever.

She reached over to a well-thumbed book, it’s spine cracked and pages dog-eared, pages automatically opening at beloved parts. She turned to the last page and read…

There is always a tomorrow.

She smiled. And closed her eyes to prepare herself to reach the lotus feet. Or pearly gates. Whatever. Organized religion wasn’t her scene.