Because my Windows finally roll down....

Keep playing that sweet song on repeat.

Aww, yeah. Just like that.

I am riding in your car, I am riding in my own. I am sitting in the back of a car sharing secrets with a boy with blue eyes. I am sitting in a black car singing songs written by women. I am singing one of the only 80's song I like. I am filling up my gas tank just to listen to music while driving a blue car that now belongs to somebody who soon will have to get close to the way death looks. It's nobody's fault. I am alone in my own car for two hours there, two hours back each weekend working to "make money" but really just because I liked to go. I was driving drunk people home. I was sixteen. I was eleven in a red car and Kristyn's sister is also blonde and she is telling us about correct stereotypes and learning to drive. I am in a car with somebody I barely know. I am in a cab for the first time ever in the middle of Italy. I am falling asleep to the beating of bus tires. I am believing my mother's most famous lie about seatbelts. I am crying, probably. I am nowhere to be found, because I don't talk on the phone while I drive. I don't break laws. I am in the backseat of a black car and my boyfriend almost gets stabbed. I'm not with him but I remember him. I am talking to God because I like my church on four wheels and no bucket seats. I'm driving a minivan. I'm best friends with Austin MacKain and we're going to Carrollton. I'm listening to Cara sing about the blood all over the floor while a dog sings in the backseat. I am smelling the ocean with my favorite Innocent. I am crying, probably. I am trying to drive a stick shift but I'm not meant for this. I'm watching the way Katie taps her thumbs. We're listening to Grateful Dead, every single morning. We're alive to something good. I'm parking funny because I loved that last song. I'm okay. Jim's taking me to waffle house because he has a license now. I'm scared because my cat knows my car is about to explode. I'm screaming because I realized somebody farted in my car. I'm throwing up outside of this rental one. I'm throwing up again, for different reasons. I'm waiting in line and every boy in this car is really attractive. I'm asking Tom if we can listen to that Jimmy Eat World song again. I'm kissing that blue eyed boy, but sometimes we're both crying, too. I'm going to Tennessee. I'm not going anywhere. I'm parked and missing you. I'm watching the state lines change with the landscape and thanking God for your grace, and His. I'm loud. I'm doing my own thing. I'm changing the station because I'm, okay, maybe just a little embarrassed. My mom is even singing on the way home from Six Flags--- it's Sunday so this song is exactly the right one. I'm holding hands all over America. Eric is my cousin: he reads all the signs. We are making up stories about the moon following us. We're listening to a book on tape. We hate this station. We grew up. I listen to talk radio alone. I listen to static on accident. I cry hardest in my car. I'm not afraid to be alone. I like having something to cry about. I'm not emotional, just awkwardly designed for a world that wants to define me by my tears. I let him kiss me in a car. I don't know why. We fell in love somewhere between blanket forts and an airport parking deck. There is fog sometimes. I'm not sorry about it. I love the way we were in cars, dancing or singing, or making a mess of who we could be, in favor of who we are. Britta cleaned my car. She made me a photo album. We are remembering that this is enough - we, the me in all of it, is realizing you can pick just one--- and it's a life. And it's all of the things. Like how Forrest had shoes. Like how other people have other things. Like I have all of them. Like how I am a lucky one. Like how I might be the luckiest. Like how good people are to me. Like how bad that makes me feel. Like how good it is to know that no matter what, you are doing a great job, and you're exactly where you should be. And you're so good. And this song is so good. And the car is so comfortable. And we can talk all night. And you can cry, even if you're a boy, and they tell you not to. Because this is my car. And we like it this way. And we're going places, forever, and ever, and ever.

what we call fiction, what you'll remember as truth.

Acts of normality to beats you didn't introduce to me, living a life I made for myself or maybe fully to the credit of God (let's be real here) --- but there's something sick about living life so smooth, like nothing's on the agenda, like I don't give a ( word ) about it. I still can't decide what I do give about ""life"" or something like it.

In the empty howling of the night, I am with you in complete boredom, which, unfortunately looks exactly like a good time if you are a very unlucky person. Years later, I am with a different you in complete misery, which unfortunately looks exactly like love if you are stupid enough to be a romantic. Decades still, I am with a new you wrapped in the divine laughter of what it is to actually want to care about somebody, even if you are immensely and unconditionally incapable of this.

I'm working on that part.

There's a stigma around girls of my kind. Okay, I lied. There really aren't. Maybe I just don't know them. Maybe I just don't know girls like me. Maybe I just don't know enough people who would dare say "girls like you" to a face like mine. What does that mean? LIKE you? Like, like similar, like the dictionary points, like the way all things are the same in the end anyway so why are we wasting our earthy times defining somebody else's opinion of what you don't care about anyway? Do you want me to just start back at the beginning?

Falling asleep to the purr of your snoring, I am reminded that no matter how exciting it is to remember being miserable, my closeness with God is not to be confused with an admiration of a smart man's mouth. We are children of the sky, of the way the stars look when they start to disappear, the way the waning gibbous gets to have such a very cool name: for me, you are these things. And the rest of them are the fading stars themselves, are the way you smell after a long day of not doing anything important, are the way judgment falls into a place in your brain that you store only in times of complete and exact boredom as you are falling apart, desperate to be a sadder person. If we are being completely honest, I'm not afraid to tell you that preaching proverbs you have created does not make your heart holy, but only full of holes, broken and cracking and being filled with cement and the tears of somebody you may never meet. I am impossible sometimes. And I am stubborn more than that. And sometimes I love watching tv. That's just the way my life has been built and that's the way I like it. I'm not looking for your words to build me up and take me away. I am looking for the softness in the night that I have heard about when my friends tell me stories about when they get in fights with their blonde boyfriends or the way I remember her saying my name when we were alone the first time or how water can be when it's not in a hurry. I'm just saying things the way they are coming out of me, but if you need to know the truth, I will never be an articulate woman. I came here to sing and miss people, came here to cry my way into something good. I am going to stand on the street watching the lights change and hoping someday you come to your senses.

too truthy

Bringing it back to the way I like it, windows wide open and a kitten running around, making a mess of all material things because this is my room and this is the way I like it, Joni Mitchell calling me home and telling me none of it matters anyway, or maybe that's God filtering down because that's how He's wanting me to hear it, but that's the way I like it. I like it when I am alone. I like it when I am alone. I like it when I am alone. Something like a mantra or maybe it's me trying to convince myself that that's actually how I feel. Something like that is more about right.

I like it warmer with the roses in my way, I like crawling through the darkness to laugh with you in the mornings and I like the way it is when there is a quiet after it all and you are telling me I am pretty even when we both know there is a long way to go before that's true. I like it when I can feel you wanting me forever even though I'm not sure how either of us feel about that on a practical way. I don't want you to feel differently even if I talk that way to myself sometimes because I can't imagine long-term pain and even with all of you surrounding me and all the voices inside of me from love songs I use to navigate the way I feel, I could never know how to hurt you that way and the only thing about you that could make me cry maybe is that--- is fear, is us, is our fear, is our lack of being able to imagine something possible. I'm not asking you for a way in, all I am asking for is a way to settle my stomach when I am in the middle of thinking things big girls might think about (not that I would know even what that resembles). I am not sorry. It's just weird to be honest with yourself. I'm not sure how I feel about honesty because the only policy I have found that ever works is listening and then keeping everything to myself. It's not a good policy but it seems to be working better for me than saying what I mean.

//

Laying naked under a willow tree, I am crying.
Sad things make me cry. Sad people make me
feel at home. Something like forgetting is the way
I feel best. I am glad to be under that tree in 40
years with bare feet, whether I bring someone
along is not up to me--- up to up alone and alone.

Because of You.

Floating in something less than spacious and singing Britney Spears songs at 9 in the morning, I am more in love with my happiness than I ever have been comfortable with before. Not all things are reconciled, but I am reconciled with that fact of my life. I am not seeking out a finite peace, but I am at peace and in love with the chaos within me. Though this is often the source of my lows, or something like that, it is not something that bothers me--- it is something of me that I have grown to love and not feel consumes or drowns me, but inspires and awakens me. I am tolerant of this mechanism, long limbs reaching out like sun through pines behind my house back in Georgia to wrap around and hold me until I am aware of my exact darkness. I am walking with God through the places  I have been and telling Him what I can remember of those places, and trying to express my side of the story without explaining myself too much. He laughs at the way I say certain words like "you" and "fear" but we are already ten steps ahead of anyone who wouldn't want to understand anyway. Don't worry. It's not a big deal.

(This is the part where we just have a conversation, and learn not to tell anyone else about it. People sometimes wait for you to say something they can judge. Some people...)

 I am just like you sometimes. I see this in blue and brown and green eyes all around me and I can't seem to explain to anyone else that there is something so dear to me as the way somebody looks at you when they see you for the first time, really.

Aquarian blood

Sun drops falling like how raindrops would if this were anywhere but this exact place in northern California and I am drowning myself in things I wrote but never said to people I should have just said things to. It's this thing attached to my wrist, says "courage," says try harder, says make an effort, says stop making promises, says stop making yourself so sad or so sorry or so and so's hardest memory. Stop starting things you never finish or finish the things you start thinking about starting but don't let anyone tell you to start or stop doing things you feel like starting or stopping like hand making clusterstuffed pillows with amanda poss as a career. If there's a place I can see myself, it is standing next to you in the pouring rain on a sort of sunny kind of day in the Marina, holding hands, dressed in rented skin and original content. There, and being 37 and running a successful pillow stitching company with Amanda, and knowing you like being around her for a lot of reasons like her sense of humor and knowing she liked your more recent blog posts. Sometimes I struggle finding myself in words I have written and boys I have loved. Hank told me we are cold by nature, Aquarians, piled in this triangle of shoes and stories on and on and how do we even know each other? He told me the only important thing in the world is to learn how to love, how to love is the only important thing in the entire world and I am standing in that shoe department with this person who is somehow a stranger and somehow a friend and I want to leave just because I feel a little bit like crying. The thing about heartbreak is that when you don't talk about it, you have to deal with it and even when you are over things, you still have these little cracks in your heart. I am having these conversations and thinking about how sweet you were in the pouring rain and how when you threw your head off all I wanted was to kiss you with the rain falling on our faces like how my mascara ran down mine the first time I heard/watched somewhere in the bottom of the rain. Water is different, but I wonder if I ever will be, if I ever will be always warm, and if I can learn to love, if i can ever be something more than a hollow chocolate bunny on my favorite day of the year...

angels in the outfield or in hell or anywhere but where you would expect to see them

The frustrations of normal people getting to me, wondering when things got to be so overwhelming without me noticing, me noticing things have generally always overwhelmed me and not knowing what to do about it, it being something or some things or most things that I happen to catch on to faster than most people but not having anything to do with things that I necessarily want to have anything to do with. It's just ideas, and things happening, and hoping that the things I think about are going okay but I feel like it's easy to forget how heavy boots are when you aren't the one who wears them and maybe you weren't even there when I picked them up and maybe it's me forgetting how easy I have it or maybe I still feel those weights no matter the problem. I don't know how better to express myself than clouded verse and tears of anxiety and a lack of clarity. When I look in the mirror, I am staring down the ugly cousin of self awareness and a sense of inability or inactivity or institutionalized misunderstanding. I am staring myself down until the glass starts cracking, until I break my knuckle bones from the thought alone, blood or something less gruesome spreading like silk against melted sand. I know you don't know what I mean and I know I shouldn't be complaining. I think it would be a lot easier if I either just let go or said something but it gets so hard to disappoint people when you don't know who would be willing to celebrate you for doing exactly nothing. I speak in tongues because it takes away some of the pain when you are misunderstood if you don't say what you mean in the first place. It's not anyone's fault but my own if there's anyone to blame at all. I just feel like it's anything now, anything pushing me and I know my job is so small here but why do I feel like that angel, the one who had to pour the fire over the people on the book of Revelations and he/she/it didn't even get a NAME in the book. He didn't ask for that job, just happened to be strong enough to carry a really huge ass bowl. I think they forgot to put the part in about how the angel was crying, crying so hard he believed he could put the fire out that he was pouring over the sinful people, because he didn't want to hurt anyone, and it wasn't his fault, and he didn't know how to just tell God he didn't know if this was maybe the very best plan to make things better. I don't know if that's exactly what I mean, only that sometimes the best way is being the best for something and other times this is the most difficult thing if those things you are brilliant at feel like fire against your own fingertips, burning your face by distance and default, leaving you to look in the mirror with a face you can no longer look at without remembering the screaming of all those people you didn't want to scorch, remembering yourself how you were when wrinkles were still for grandmothers and you, alone, were at least worthy of the quiet.

Millermania

 "Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away.  As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to heighten and enhance the reality of everyday."

Henry Miller from Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch

There was something insane about the carpet floor, about the way you said her name, about how softer the world seemed when we were able to look one another in the eyes, for the first time, as friends. And I'm just grateful for the grace of forgiveness. Not only toward you, but the way I felt as if I'd forgiven myself, something I could not know how to do without you. The world, even softer still, growing soft and soft and cotton and clouds. I'm happy. This is something I need to accept.

And there was something about the time of night, my new "you" pushing my back along the hardwood, our lips holding back stifled laughter, and the music playing, and the look in your eyes, and knowing I love you. The way you say my name and the way you ask me questions. Something about how you are Something, my George Harrison, about the way you move me, about the way I push back and you don't let me, about toast and chirping birds and a really well formed sentence and seeing and old friend and a perfect frame for an okay picture and the way my handwriting looks right after I wake up and the day you can finally just leave your window open. This is what you are for me.

My heart moves fast and with you even faster, and you gave this to me, this ability to open it. Because it's never been quite this way, I still am constantly fumbling to figure how to be this way, how to enjoy without question, just how to come up and meet you for air at a normal person's requirement. You are teaching me how to breathe... but I'm a stubborn student. Learning to "let go" is something that makes me very nervous. But, for you,  I'll try.

"I respect you for challenging me." ... Marilyn Manson said this in an interview I was randomly watching and I loved how he put this. Dita Von Teese was the featured guest on Love Line last night and I ended up just researching her all night and that inevitably lead to me looking into Marilyn Manson interviews... wacked out night, but in a good way. Interesting cats, no doubt.

Anyway, rando shoutout to this fantastic makeup artist, because of a completely non-makeup-related video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8rVg3mT7Y8&feature=g-all-u&context=G2b9669fFAAAAAAAAVAA I loved this.