Sitting here somewhere unfamiliar, surrounded by worn in arm chairs and Spanish moss, pretending the chairs are like hugs, pretending the trees are weeping willows, practicing my disappearing act by morphing into the background of a stranger's scenery, how many layers of clothing do I have to bury myself under until I dissolve, can you hear my screaming, did I say that out loud, sorry for stepping on your foot, have you seen that episode of this show, i can't hear you, repeat yourself, what did you say, in a state of constant emergency looking for the panic button and panicking because maybe this is what life looks like, like does it just look like this, how do you hide from the very thing you are, how does your face not constantly hurt, why can't i find my way out, why does my whole body feel like a migraine, is my skin becoming see-through? does everyone thing about death all the time, does anyone wonder what it feels like when someone cuts off body parts, do you know how hard it is to eat, have you ever had trouble swallowing, do you know what it's like to be worried to be alone --- not wanting to be around people but the real fear of what you are capable of when you are left alone? Do you have any idea what i mean? do you think about how uncomfortable it would be to bleed from your pores, do you know the meaning of life, are you afraid of every small thing, have you ever taken lexapro, do you want to know what the stars feel like when you touch them, whens the last time you called your mother, does she know you're lonely, how do you feel today scale of 1-10, did you forget how to count that high, do you think the blonde girl sitting across from me is watching me or does she just happen to know exactly what i look like, why can't i cpitatlie catiske capitalize my words, i can't see the computer anymore, i can't do my job anymore, autocorrect is the only thing keeping me alive, i can't punctuate, it feels like daggers to press shift before pressing other buttons don't make me do it the rose chai i just drank reminded me of a bubble bath but it didn't taste like a bubble bath do you have any idea what that means have you ever been anxious have you ever drowned yourself have you ever wondered if you could become a bug have you ever cried yourself to sleep have you ever believed in god are you afraid of him are you afraid of yourself do you know the muffin man can you handle your mind are you sick are you ready do you know how to get out of here can you reach the orange juice for me do your fingers hurt how do i make it stop

Writing from an empty room, or a room emptying at least, thinking about how the towels are all still so wet, thinking about how it was with you, thinking about you, thinking now about how I still don't think much about you and wondering if that means I am sick or if I was just confused before, wondering now what that says about the way I love, wondering if I even know how to love or if I am just confusing love and romance, not doing any worrying, but knowing there is much to worry about.

This is good. This is something good. The room is full but there is nothing here. I keep telling people that but they don't believe me--- or maybe they do but I don't think they know what I mean. It's all out the door. It's all out the window. It's all buried in Golden Gate Park under the bench where the old lady is sleeping. It's somewhere we have been together. It's something about always being in love with somebody or the missing of somebody or the way it feels to be alone. Addicted but okay, in some ways reminding myself that nobody is as independent as they think, or as selfish as they feel, or whatever or however or whoever. Things just go this way sometimes.

In this empty room, there is a lack of silence. The way air moves, it has that affect on things. It also has that effect on things. It also can create suspect or maybe you don't even remember the way this room looks. It helps me to know how easy forgetting is when you are really good at it.

What Comes is Better Than What Came Before

I'm laying flat on my stomach with my shoulders poking into the back of me- a posture I know will probably kill me when I'm older-- and I'm listening to a Cat Power song I remember hearing for the first time when I saw V for Vendetta in high school. When I love a song, I actively listen to it repeatedly until there's no way for me to keep count. This was one of those songs at another time in my life. But, like I said, now I'm on the floor and it's today and everything is much different now.

It's just Clarissa and me in this living room like it was in the beginning.

The last few years passed in a way I can't explain and it makes me sad now feeling like I can't remember those years. I can barely remember California now-- and I wonder if I'll ever remember anything. I read over myself again and again sorting for any kind of honesty but I think I was just trying to survive. If I remember too hard, I remember everything and feel sadness start to pulse through me. I keep getting older and I can't stop remembering and then forgetting again and remembering and pushing it out of me and hearing her voice tell me I wanted to kill myself when I don't think that's true at all or remembering how I just wanted him to go away or remembering the softer hurt of just being left behind without some kind of explanation. I just want to stop remembering those things. I'm not sad about them anymore, but I can still feel the sadness if I let myself. I think this is probably similar to drug addiction - you just keep seeking the same things. Even when you're healthy, you remember yourself as sick. I think I'm fine. I'm just being dramatic. Moving stirs up feelings and dust.

#

What about something that someone else can actually READ, Kate?

I worry about myself in romantic relationships because my positivity makes it hard for me to distinguish whether or not how I feel is actually real or me being hopeful and looking on the sunny side. I always love these people so hard it kills me -- and then I remember how internally I have been saying all along how I thought he was arrogant or kind of rude or an alcoholic - whatever. But I tell everyone around me how good everything is and then I can't figure out what parts of it are lies. And I think a lot of this is where my Aquarian nature comes into play and I shut down.

Now we arrived together in this moment where we can decide either to jump in together or to keep shuffling around until we're forced together and we are deciding to jump. I keep wondering if it will get dramatic or if it will always be this quiet, wonderful way with you where everything feels okay almost all of the time - and when it's not okay it's only because I'm freaking out that it's overall pretty good and I just panic. I keep wondering how you are growing kinder, getting more handsome, loving me more. I keep wondering why. I keep wondering when we are supposed to get crazy or if we are supposed to do things this way. I can't even process what's going on because it just feels like we're moving in the right direction the right way. Is this okay? Are we okay? Now I'm not asking because I'm trying to go somewhere else - it's more like quiet dancing and we are alone.

What I'm saying is that I love you. And I will really do my best. And I'm all in.

Been a while, y'all

"What happened, happened once. So now it's best/ in memory--- [...] Love's/ merciless, the way it travels in/ and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove/ we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers/ on the table. And we still had hours." - from "Stolen Moments" by Kim Addonizio

What's the point? Love, merciless, sometimes breaking, sometimes bind-

ing together blind-

ness or nesting itself inside my insecurities--or better yet, can you help me think?

I need words big enough so nobody can actually understand how I feel about anything because life is

inherently

boring. Don't think

that this is going to work out, and I am thinking about being bent over

a balcony

23 stories above with someone I don't know

but maybe we will get married instead of all the other plans I've made. My concern

feels light.

What's happening now?

There's no light here anymore. Nothing anymore, there is is more

than the light just traveling out of me, more than ever

mercilessly I am cutting

you off. I am not explaining myself. 

Time's up. Timing was a word

explaining nothing instead of all the words

I should have given you. We only had

a balcony. And hours.

"You know, I probably did meet somebody like that. I probably wasn't paying attention."

When I met you, I started paying attention. Saying that out loud changed my life, and maybe it has been changing other lives too that aren't just mine, people who are close to me and they are close to other people and you are helping in ways you don't know because you don't know them yet. I wonder about what he said to me, that the next boy would be the one I marry, and now that that boy is you, is that still something he believes and what does it say about me that i want his opinion founded in nothing but a gut feeling to be so true? I remember how you stood and you were like a tree and you were so beautiful in a really masculine way and when you showed me pictures of your cats I couldn't believe how I already knew you were going to be mine, even though for weeks and then maybe even a few months, I convinced both of us that wasn't going to be true. How can we be so different inside ourselves at the same time? How can olivia wilde's bra size be a 32B? How am I living in a world where I can find that out?

Why would we give this away?

And, at the same time, what am I supposed to do to make sure I hold on?

Hard sometimes to be able to understand whether I am sad for the inherit sadness of a sad thing or sad because I have, again, of course, failed. Feeling confused more than ever, feeling like I don't understand why I can't make anyone stay, feeling the most sad because I couldn't make you stay. Or maybe I can. I know it's not over yet, but everything leading up to this feels just as bad as everything else.

I guess I just don't know what else I can do.

Just words

Starting over somewhere

maybe, or repeating patterns,

or worrying about losing my job

or doing things wrong

or how all the people in Dolores Park let their dogs run wild around me like how I am always wondering about how other people are waking up every day and if they are bored like how I am bored

or how about bus roars

and that initial crack of a cigarette.

Beginning the fatigue of a good girl

is smelling that cigarette by a pool

and remembering that boys never

love the exact you-- just portraits and

words and how she doesn't do drugs

but how she doesn't care if you do

and she even likes how you used to do too much coke and spend a lot of money on Ikea furniture. 

She is sleeping through panic attacks,

she is tightening her throat,

she is instrumental in you forgetting

the brunette who hated music,

she is reminding you about leaving,

she is choosing words, and she is

somewhere like salt on your cheek.

I am really glad I did not give up.

I've reached a moment in my life where I just have wanted to be alone--- and I don't mean alone like away from other people.. I have wanted to be alone from my own self. I haven't wanted to write, have consciously resisted it. Truth is, I would love to say I know why but I don't. I have barely cried at all since November. I didn't cry more than for a little while the entire time I was driving across the country with Bryan. When I think about that, I wonder about all of this. I wonder why I don't feel sensitive to anything anymore and I hope that it's just a phase like everything else, I hope there's something left, I hope there are always more tears. I don't want to be sad--- I just want to feel something enough to cry over it.

There was a moment in the airport... My mom was drinking dunkin donuts next to me, we're just sitting waiting for two hours to board our plane, and I think of how alone I felt the second you said bye, and it was like my heart just stopped. I remember looking at my mom with wet eyes and her looking at me and she didn't ask me if I was okay... she knew just to let me be. She knew how I felt, somehow, without me saying anything. I think of this and I think of my mom's big blue eyes and I think of how for the first time she was seeing me in the middle of romance as opposed to in between it or somewhere around it- she saw the separating, the part that I had always just dealt with alone. And it was new for both of us. In a good way. Even in the sadness, there was so much undeniable love.

It's hard for me to say what comes next because I don't know. I just know that this time, like every time, I am all in as much as I know how to be. I am just praying that this lack of tears doesn't mean that I've stopped feeling as much or that I've lost my way. I am hoping I am just stronger in new ways. And that when I do finally face myself, I will feel it all and somehow I will be better because of it. Better than what, I don't know. I am not sure what to do other than just keep trying.

There's no way to know for certain, but I think I am happy.

Somewhere between doubt and magic, I am manic for you; yearning

for something more, he tells me. Stimulating commitments, he tells me. It's you, he tells

everyone. It's not his fault. It's the way things work best. It's best, for me, to keep them

far away--- across oceans, across deserts, anywhere but here. Because here, I am sad

or scared, usually. There is always darkness. Sometimes there is fog. And, of course, 

there is happiness. But the hard part is not the change itself, but the changing, the shift, 

the look on my face as my eyes roll to the back of my head and I am fainting into another

place, a place where it is cloudy and soft, and easy to get lost. So, I do my best to keep

my distance, to keep distance, to keep distant-- just enough to be in love and just enough

to destroy everything I love. This is the way of my world, the way things go here, the way

you and I only needed to meet one time for my entire life to change. This is the way things

go in a perfect world. I am still left crying.

It's not that I haven't written anything, it's more like I don't know how to finish writing any of the things I've started to write. I feel good about my life, I feel good about the way things look, I feel strongly that leaving California was the right thing, I feel like I miss the weather there but it wasn't worth my loneliness or mental health, I miss being alone kind of but I am so grateful to see my sister and my best friends all the time and I never have to be alone. I am bored in a lot of ways but also grateful for this time of peace because I think pretty soon my life will be crazy again and really it was crazy for a minute there when I was an elf. I am not interested in giving of myself right now because I can't, because I am still weak, because I am still recovering, and I hope that what comes of this process is good, and maybe important. For now, I am grateful grateful with hands in the air and also extra hands to hold the people who have been holding me and extra hands still to type with and to write with and to make spinach salad with every single day. I have learned how to make coffee, and I've written a poem, and I've accepted a job. And for the first time in so long I feel truly happy to be alive in my body and in my self because of who I am. Being miserable is so confusing when it happens for so long because you begin to wonder if you existed in the first place. And after a very long time, it begins to feel more and more like you never did and you just watch yourself doing all these things and you hear yourself talking to all these people and it feels like nothing. Nothing is still something though and I hope that that somethingnothingness was for something. Okay.

what smiles make me think about

Living the life that made me again but I am different now even if I don't feel that way. It is undeniable. It is the way of the world. It is the way the earth moves. It is the way bodies sway. It is the way the world has unwound before me and as I walked in circles, new paths formed but I didn't take them, even the ones I did take never met my footprints, hopping on stones like a child, like the child, like me, like how I am never growing up, like how I see that in you, like how I hate that I don't even know you at all. In the way things go, this is how we ended up, and I am looking at the sky and seeing a reflection of the way I didn't go, the way maybe I ran away or maybe, for the sake of my sanity, I walked slowly in the direction of what I needed. I'm not sure yet how I ended up here or what it was exactly, just when you told me we belonged there, I knew I had to go. Constantly on a mission to prove I am air, I am movement, I do not belong anywhere, I am unchained, I am untrainable, I am in the wide sky with wings spread and when I look down, I will not see you holding me by kite strings: I will see the world looking up at me shouting "glorious birds, glorious birds!" and they will know what you never figured out. The world is waiting for your miracle and I am just sitting in the living room wearing sparkle tights and being happy to know that I know nothing. If the sky chooses to fall into my chicken soup, I will just be glad to have anything at all.

Blurbling.

There was fog then, in the darkness I could still muster a semblance of a face, a face like your face but I didn't know what it looked like yet, in the middle of the day, the way I know now, and now I see it all the time without a body, without anything but falling and it's just not that way. And we are with other people sometimes and we are alone so much more often without anybody knowing, without me knowing for sure. And I'm not sure yet that THAT is what is going on and I am not sure yet if I know who I am talking about, but when I woke up one morning, the fog lifted and God's golden stare came shooting out of my pores exactly like how you would hope it would.

So now I ask you this: LET ME IN.

Sometimes, when I am with myself in words like the way I am now, I am away from fog and from me but I am always in it except for months it was somebody else writing and hoping I would catch up. I remember when you wrote all the negative thoughts you had thought and threw them away, I could feel myself being ripped up and thrown away--- and it was weird because I don't even know what you wrote. And I am not mad about it. It was just something I could feel.

I am still sorting things out, but there will be a small apartment and a place where I can write. And there will be a stillness and a sound here. I will invite you over and even a casual conversation will feel exactly like cuddling.

“Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.” 
― Nicole Krauss

Feeling better.

For the second time in my life, I begin a cross country trek with Bryan Wilson Bramlett. Shy of one month, three years ago we did this trip the other way, taking the long way, taking our time, taking in one another. The dynamic has changed in many ways and the relationship I share with him now is different, too. It's not something I can easily explain to people, but the people around me / close to me seem to have it figured out on some level, the level of acceptance I guess, and that's good enough. He's kind enough to co pilot this journey for me, which feels like it will likely be more emotional than the reverse, and I am grateful for his friendship as I fumble my way back to the dirty south.

I don't know how to begin getting into how this happened, really, or what made me feel like returning. I could give a million reasons of why this is the right thing to do. Somehow, though, my natural self judgment is embarrassed--- though near everyone in my life has been ultra supportive and understanding. I'm not sure how much I support me yet, even though it's the right thing. Life is just so big, and it's scary to think you might be missing out on something by leaving, or like you missed out on something by being gone. 

I keep reminding myself that I'm not who I was back then, which is a blessing and also part of the problem. My joy levels right now are what feels like at an all time low but my optimism is high, surging through me like love, like heat. I'm counting on that to help me as I process another one of these adventures.

As I read back on what I wrote already, it's hard to see myself in it. I can't feel myself at all right now, out of touch with everything but on the right track. I don't know. I just felt like I needed to get a little of this out before beginning. The past two weeks have been the highlight of the last year for me, feeling loved and taken care of living with Sara and Julie, feeling valued with all the goodbyes and sweet words, feeling so sure about this one life choice even if I have no clue what I'm doing next. It's really important sometimes to just not know what the heck you're doing, just follow, just listen, just go. Sometimes, that's all. Just go. I still have stuff to cram into my itty bitty trunk, so I'm going to do that. And I'm going to be okay.

See ya on the other side 

It's hard to get to how I feel about things because this whole thing isn't about how I feel so much as how I am. You see, for once, not based in emotions, but based in a state of things, the way things are, the way we are, the way I am, the way I have been my whole life but so very out of context. Do I have the nerve to just say it?

I need help.

It's without a doubt one of the most confusing things to say out loud because things are fine. Everything seems fine. I go home and my house is here and it's good and things are fine and we have running water and I feel selfish for sleeping for 14 hours but it just is what is happening. And I'm not eating or I'm eating too much. Or I don't know. In the middle of all of this, I have just been hiding from it. It wouldn't have been easier two months ago and it won't be easier two months from now-- sometimes things just are. And sometimes things are at the risk of what you need. And I see potential for a downward slope and so I do what I can to be stronger than I have been in my life. I don't know. It helps to know it's not anyone else's business and in some ways it helps just not to talk about it, helps to know I know I am doing the right thing, helps to know I am headed to safety, helps to hear that it will all be over soon, helps to know I am not alone. Helps to not be alone.

I have to keep my mouth shut.

[I prefer you]

The question is not

did we make a mistake?

the question is not
at all, more like I have a
question
in general, but i don't know what that means.

I guess we are like that, soft
usually. I guess I forgot some things though,
like the way that feels or how it can be
to trust
a human.

But the way you are is like the way your throat feels better after you drink tea when you are sick, even when you are the person who does not like tea, like we don't. Something between what things usually are like. But I remember and I know differently. But this does not change

how it feels
when humans love.

Folk Tales

I once heard a story about a girl who felt sadness and she wasn't a sad girl but she felt sadness and she had blue all inside her so when she cried for the first time ever she cried blue and couldn't stop. She cried so much it made all the oceans and turned them blue. She cried so much the oceans got full so the water turned to vapor and fell into the sky and turned the sky blue. She cried so much that when she stopped, she had no more tears left ever again. But when she went to the ocean and she looked at the sky, she remembered sadness and remembered being blue and felt warm again, knowing if nothing else, her sadness filled the whole world with something it needed.