Wish You Were Here.

Listening to a song that used to make me cry, a song I still can't hear around other people, a song that reminds me of a man before my time, a song that sings to me differently when I am sad and much differently since I stopped missing you years and years ago. We are in another world now: we are dinosaurs. We are listening to rock n roll on cold cement driveways. We are in love somewhere in memory, but not here. We have never been in love here. We have maybe never been in love really, but somewhere in the memory if you look at things like I will, you will see my face and yours in the soft moment before a first kiss. We will remember the slowness of things. I wish you were anywhere but here, but I am still floating in this moment remembering how love can make you cry. I am in the same place with somebody new, a million miles away from where it all began, from where the cosmos first flowed from our finger tips and wrote the original language of love. We are alive in that place eating spaghetti for breakfast.

[p]

Your tattoo sings this song when you are lonely, and others when you are glad. Your tattoo cries when it remembers losing to drug addiction or denying it, or denying pretty girls with big eyes, of all colors, girls with Canadian blood, girls with good taste in music, girls with no taste in music, girls with no lips, girls like grandmas, girls like the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," girls like me, girls like me, some girls like me. In the middle of things, we are metal hearts and logical. But when things are in the middle of us, we are lost in space, we are dying, we are hoping somebody finds us and shakes it out of us and lets us go before we need you. There are books about this. There are classes for this. But there is no problem with this, no matter what people tell you. I guess I thought you were trying to be different.

This is the loneliest moment so far. This is the longest without you. This is maybe the least wonderful thing. This is what people mean. This is why girls eat ice cream, this is why they never come back, because of this moment, because of this hurt, because who could forgive a boy who lets them feel this way?

Because they love you.

Because that's the most important.

Wet Filters

Comparative, cruel. Something in between all of these things. Doesn't it get lost in translation? Even when you know exactly how you feel and you're with someone you know isn't there to judge you and you're telling your best girl friend about how it is and how it goes and she's giving her two cents and she's right--- but at the same time nobody knows. Nobody is in the quiet with you. Even the people who know you best don't know you but through filters of your willingness to share. Remember how she told you how you can never actually see your face? It's exactly like that. Only you and God who is in you already will ever know. You are sharing and being yourself and it means nothing. At the end of the day, we will always, always be alone. Unless we are dancing in the same light and our "selves" dissipate into something more "meant to be" and we will be together divinely and we will tell people about how there is no cruelty and nobody will know what they mean because they don't know what we're doing. And even when I see you, I know you will never see me.

There's no way to be clear. We are using soggy filters.

In the bottom of the barrel of gunpowder, I hid my softness. There was nothing more than that, nothing simpler. There's not much to anything at all, is how I feel, in general. About all things, I've always been sure. I know where they come from. I see how they are made. I see how things go, and I know my way. When I see the trails being covered in pebbles and leaves, I still see that trail. I'm not trying to blaze my own--- I'm trying to go down that trail, trying to find you, trying to sweep the trail so you're not afraid to turn back around once you've let it all out, whatever 'it' is, whatever you need to have happen, and after it happens, i will walk you back through the trail but I swear it'll be different this time, look different: "your love will be, safe with me."

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.

Pretend we've never met our demons, just in case they come to dinner.

I am 6 feet tall hiding in a doll house, dressed like Barbie's hooker cousin and missing how much you never missed a beat, small and my head bent sideways wondering how you could let me go and now bent sideways wondering what is missing here. There's a stuffed dog and a picture colored in from the back of a cereal box and Let Down by Radiohead is pouring from my ears like I am the stereo. I still believe you can hear me when I talk to myself. I wish I knew where that went. But I'm tired now, tired of remembering how much I wish I could make you love me harder and I worry about mixing paints because too many blues and one brown will make ugly. I remember asking myself with lipstick on why we never fell in love, only because he asked me sitting in that chair and I didn't really have a reasonable explanation. That's worth thinking about, maybe.

//

there was red wine that i wouldn't drink and people doing illegal things on top of tupac's face and we were rhyming breaths without knowing each other's middle names but i knew we were meant to be best friends forever or at least something more than nothing particular or that feeling you get when salespeople ask you if you're looking for something in "particular" because you're looking but you know it's not in this store or in any store, but hopefully just in store, coming soon. but more to the point i remember the way i couldn't tell the difference between light rain and tears even though I don't remember crying. i remember nikki singing the judy garland song in a whisper with her arms holding amber and me and her crying but not knowing why. i remember the way your voice was collected pieces of things you have read by other older people and a handful of black artists like maybe tupac and maybe one or two of your really good friends. i'm not grateful for a loss but i'm grateful that if things don't work out, i can hold onto this untainted memory when possibility was the thing, was the only thing, is the only thing, is the, the, only is, is only, only one.

//

Don't tell me what to do about a broken heart because I know it will never be good again in the same way and that's why I don't care. It will never be the same again even when I am happy again, even when I am not covered in darkness. I am not the type to sit and pitch fits but it feels like now I am clawing my way out of my rib cage because I remember the way you talked to me and don't you remember how at first you were the cold one? I think sometimes we forget where we are. I think sometimes we forget how we are. We remember me being the cold one because it's easier than reminding you that you don't know what you're talking about. I am realizing how cold I am feeling and every inch of me hurts with desperation for something specifically vague, something more than just feeling small in a good way, but more like that way you are next to him, holding back tears because you can't figure out what to be upset about.

How to Love You

Never good at doing things anyone else's way particularly, always needing to come around in my own good time, never sure when to speak up and when to let people just read my mind, never certain if snapping at hurt feelings is okay or just kind of inappropriate. I'm not one to care much when people go, more set on the moment than the missing, but I do feel it when things are breaking, when the sunlight is falling behind tree's calling arms--- I can't feel it when they go, but I always feel it as they are going-- and the footsteps you leave behind, trampling poems I've written for you in the grainy sand, it's not something I need you to ask about but I wish you had noticed, had taken a moment to pray for me as I screamed out for desperate salvation. There I go again, I'm thinking, begging people to read my mind and love me and leave me alone all at the same time.