[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.

Dreams and things...

Let's face it.

I haven't been writing because I can't/don't want to deal with thinking about the things I need to really think about and maybe part of that is a lack of ability to do that on my own anymore. I can't deal with all of it on my own anymore. A word that comes up when I mention things I need to talk about is "strong," when really I feel like the strongest thing I've done the last few days is say "maybe this is not something I can handle on my own." I have been having crazy memorable dreams about deleting my livejournal, frying eggs in the living room, having some teenage boys stab silver polished knives through my front door, and most recently a dream about having a lucid dream about my teeth falling out. I am talking to myself all the time and it's exhausting me.

I feel as I write this that it lacks authenticity, like even now I am writing with a shield, hoping to keep myself safe from saying too much, from too much self judgment, too much of things I shouldn't worry about when I write but that I always do. I am not feeling 'poetic' lately... I just feel super human. Not like SUPER HUMAN. But like I am hyper aware of how human I am and I am working really hard to reconcile this.



Anywhere I Lay My Head...

Heartbreak Hangover Pt. 1

The walls are lighter now, less of you, less of me, less of the usness that is haunting me, less of the usness that is useless to think of now. The walls are covered now in nothing but what used to be but should never be again, covered in the reminder of how some things go on for so long after they should end, covered in your cowardice and inability to say how you actually feel. And that's okay. Because I already knew.

If I could erase anybody, it would have to be you. I would be Jim Carrey, and you would have destroyed me. But this is not a movie. This is just me and I'm just here with my cat realizing it had been there all along, and I was so stubborn to hold on, and I was dumb to think of hope around my wrist as having power. It is what it is, really.

This is all that I will write of you, at least on purpose. You are not like the others. You do not get a future. You are gone now, nothing but a dream, nothing but a very distant memory, nothing but the fuzz between the stations. You don't get to have me. You get nothing.

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.

WHERe.

In the middle of the night, I am alone with the sounds of ryan adams and cat rape. I am alone without you but I have these noises to comfort me, to remind me that if I do not want to become a Jahovah's witness, that's my choice---- that if there were a better way, I would take it, obviously. The sounds of my screen ripping from some feral creature trying to gain the juice of my kitten (no, like really, my kitten) just reminds me that sometimes we can have exactly what we want as long as we are willing to rip through window screens and conquer the kitten owners and know that you may die for what you want. the steve jobs Movie was just like that too. He ripped on so many kittens.

}}


 There's nothing secondary to being other than being in love or being caught up in somebody else's creation of a Big Fish. No-- growing up is something like the way your aunt always told you how much she liked your nose most of all and realizing that it wasn't just that you had a cute nose, but that you had a nose at all, that your nose was that of existence, that your very nose represented how glad she was to see you, just to know you, and just to know your nose was the nose of somebody she could love and be in the life of, etc, etc. Life is like that sometimes, but growing up is exactly that way, if you teach yourself to smile or laugh, or pray. Life, inherently, is more like when your best male friends are doing acid as teenagers and talking into the fuzzy tv station, understanding with one brain that the tv itself does not exist and that it is exclusively speaking to said best male friends, at the same exact time.

{{

If i die before they release the soundtrack to my life, make Sure you remember what song I have been dying to. Remind me in my casket. Make sure it is a song I like. It doesn't have to be a good one, but God, if you find out I am dying, put on a song I like, make the radio play. If it's just the How I met yOur Mother theme song, that will suffice. I will let these songs sing me to sleep for the moment between life and my death, the dying, the part I am looking forward to (but not in a negative way). I hope with all my heart that somebody else is there when I am dying, so that if they don't know how to stop it, they will at least know I liked a certain song and it will play, and it's okay if it's Justin Bieber's Die in your Arms because wouldn't that be appropriate and I could sing myself to sleep and I wouldn't mind if that's just how it is. It's not a problem to love or be loved. It's a problem not to know what to do when you feel unloved. It's a problem when you are scared or uncertain in love, a problem that can be fixed with hearing the right song, accepting you are one who accepts music instead of plays it. Do you know what I mean? It's not a problem. It's just a small girl, humming and wondering how long you can do this, wondering if your college professor who gave you a B in poetry is doing what he is doing because he, like you, didn't know what else to do, or if because he feels it is his right, his mastery, the thing he is, the thing he wants you to become. I'm not sure if I care, but it helps me to think about things, to think about the way it goes, to watch the words pop up along the fake pages without fake lines or real ones and at the same time to see my fingers getting bony as they reach to mark letters that will eventually pop up along the pages. This is the ultimate form of magic. Isn't this a gift?


I'm not talking about writing. I am talking about fingers. I am talking about bones. I am talking about the way it all sounds and how it all goes and how we sleep at night and how snoring is like death but also like falling in love and how when I turned on the news today, I could not find news but I realized I had seen this anchorwoman somewhere before, maybe in a dream, maybe somewhere else, maybe deep within myself I saw her reflecting in the pool that leans against the inside rims of my eyeballs, maybe she was throwing coins into the well. Maybe in that place we were both beautiful.

I'm going to Hobby Lobby now, even if it takes me 45 minutes!

Things that move and things that are harder to move

Growing up is like a sore thumb, or forgetting, or taking out the trash, or like---
well, I guess it is like all things, like most things, how when things start to change
you are changing, like growing, like how your chest starts hurting and your mom
can't explain why something inside of you is allowed to grow bigger than the thing
holding onto it. My outsides never caught up, like for most people, and my insides
are still big but growing up makes me feel like they are dying, like how the fat in my
cheeks is dying too, like how people move away and it makes you cry even though
it's not the regular kind of sad, like how you can still get sad about somebody you
used to love when you hear a song but how you love somebody else a lot and it doesn't
change it just because you cry from a feeling, like how when you planted the seeds it
took more dirt to fill the pot than you had originally thought it might, like how I cry
regularly in front of people I don't know but how I have a hard time communicating
my actual feelings, like how I remember being in the kitchen with small hands, like
how I remember being great at college and not great at most other things, like how
I forget that I wasn't always good at things, like how people think I'm a writer even
though nobody has ever seen proof in my entire life of that, like how writing almost
always makes me cry but only sometimes I will actually do it, like how I can think
about things and feel sad and hear a sad story and get annoyed, like how my horoscope
makes my heart sound both big and cold and that sounds right and hurts my feelings,
like how people can do things when they have the means, like how I just want to
do things my way. Like how I think I'm the exception to the rule. Like how I am.
Like how I think you are. Like how I think music is. Like how it is reading a book
when you're standing in line for birth control refills and everyone around you is
really, really grumpy even though we're all getting exactly what we want--- and how,
no matter how much things work out, there are so very many things that do not-
and how we hold them next to our big, cold hearts and talk to God and cry about it.
Like how it's okay, but that's just how we feel. Like how making changes doesn't
always make the changes you thought it would. Like how you always ask me how
I feel and lately it's never good like I wish it were. Like how I hate the thought of
giving you my blues. But like how I don't know where to put them anymore.


Like how when I was young and my dad was drunk and talking about music with me,
I understood slurred words and sad smiles and I knew what he meant, even when
he didn't know what he meant, and we both shake our heads now and say "okay."

Tired of fighting and working in this way, needing to work it out my own way, needing to know my reaching is enough, needing to know I'm validated by something, needing to know somebody's got my back, needing to know I'm loved. Needing like a baby, desperate and crying when I feel like nobody understands me, falling apart for moments every day because that's just how it goes, how it goes like I have no control, how the wind is soft in the moment on the grass when my legs are crossed like a first grader and my eyes are closed to the sun: this is the moment I am drinking in God's peace.

I am a closed book. But my heart is open.

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."

The way the cello happens

And there are black and white parts of music, but music is not a color. It's all the colors. Is that white kind of? I guess, but mostly it is just there like how sometimes things just are there and you don't know why or what they mean and you don't care because sometimes knowing is just enough-- you know? It's important to remember those kinds of things so you don't get too upset thinking about them. The way her hands move and her brain can pay attention while her fingers are doing so many things while she has to be able to listen to all of her own sounds, listen to the way her and the cello and God are dancing all together to make something that is not just noise but the divine presence of and all of those things makes me feel, for a moment, inferior--- but when that moment passes, I remember my soft light and how it was once glowing inside of me next to you, lighting in a dim way to the instrumental version of George Harrison's solo "Something" and we are holding hands and not talking about anything in particular and I am missing people but that doesn't mean I never loved you the most. I'm still deciding, but I know that if I take a deep breath of air, I can still type and listen to her fast cello and even maybe repeat the beat back to you once the song and my words are done. This is not a miracle to almost anyone, but I know that if I were crying by a body of water on my day off and it would just be me and the earth noises, God would lay his hand on my shoulder and tell me that He's impressed. Softer lights, softer. All of it is something we belong here for. There is nothing that makes any of us matter less. We're here for different things. Some of us to play the cello, and some of us, born to listen, to reflect, to play her song soft back to you in a reflective and collective way --- this is how WE FEEL. It's not the same,  but it's still important.

And it's sunny out now and we're in a courtyard. I say I'm not impressive and you mean it when you tell me not to think like this. I know you mean it because I've heard the music. And it's still playing in me. And I'm typing these words listening to all the songs and remembering her cello and remembering the heat between bodies sharing secrets in nonseductive ways, remembering that true love is looking into another person and being able to tell them how their song sounds, not just how they wrote it, not just what somebody else heard, not just what it made me feel---- but the exact sound of you humming into life the way we all want to be.

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.

Stuff and Nonsense

I can't remember how the words fit inside the quotation marks, but it's something to the rhythm of -- What they say, 'write what you know' is silly. Write what you don't know. Write about the yous you have not been yet, or almost were, or could have been, or could still be. Write yourself born into another body, write yourself into the nos of you and the way you might be still if you are late to work, or late to marriage, or late to your whole life. Write you happy. Write you a way you do not know yourself. It's all within you anyway. Writing what you know is silly because you know all of it--- if you are aware of your essence, you can be aware of you in the midst of anything. It doesn't mean you make those choices. It just means know your character enough to throw them into anything- and know how they would respond.

Thinking of this as I am writing you into a book I have not written yet but am writing every day. I am thinking of you and eyes so bright and the world so dark but only because it was night time and we were speaking in circles. We knew what was going on. We still do. We do forever. I am just saying there is something beautiful in the possibility of what could have been when you know you never really wanted it. I can have it, in a different way, exactly how I want or picture. It's no matter. It's fine, even.

I am working on working it out. Working on making it better than I knew it might have been. I am working on a better me, buried inside of a me I have been desperately trying to shove down into the belly of my own definitions.

Something about all of this makes me want to buy a Roladex. 

I am already the person I was born to be. But what am I doing with that?

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.

The sounds I cannot stand...

If there were ever a thing, one of those things other people talk about, maybe like what they call "trigger," maybe it would be this--- this list, these songs, the soundtrack to solitude, the soundtrack to a life I was never sure how to live but that felt natural, raw, something like I always pictured nudity feeling like. I'm still not sure what to call it when I turn around, when I excavate my own languages from that time before, when I think about crying a lot, when I remember silence, when I remember the first night on a weird bed with open windows and no pictures and everything feeling distant and just like the time before it. I still don't know how to explain to anyone else what it was--- just that, oh, what a something it was...

It's years later now in the way we count time. It's something I'm not sure of. Not just that time with the weird bed but this whole chapter I have forgotten when I was quieter, when I was sadder maybe, when things were not what they are now--- full of lightness and ease, full of worldly frustrations and problems that do, in fact, have solutions (let's be honest: life is easy).

I am sorry for the way this soundtrack makes me remember. How I could not fall asleep without these beats. How this was the answer to my entire life. And now I don't know how to get back to the girl with a heart. I am frozen in the center of a lake on fire and I am not sure how I got here. (Author's note: happiness is hard to accept if you are born uncomfortable. But don't misunderstand my expression for anything other than that.) I just get sad remembering that I knew how to get to that before, somewhere deep inside of my own self (Author's note: sorry I write like a douche bag). I don't know why it takes this to make me cry anymore. It's not a bad thing. It's just confusing. And I wonder if the price we pay for happiness is some part of our soul/spirit/sadness. I am not sure how ready to give that up I will ever be. I am still trying to figure out if it is my way that I've lost or the desire to find my way back to never feeling like I would be home.

I can't write in silence because everything starts sounding too loud. If I have forgiven myself, what is this rattling? What is this? Do you remember what it was like to not be in that weird bed? Do you remember what it was like when you were not walking the woods with me? I remember the goblins. I remember not being able to make friends. I remember being the only one who would speak up and I remember hurting people who are older than I am. I remember that feeling hurt me. I don't know why I can't remember where I put those tears, though. Or where the girl is crying alone in the middle of the first room I got to have all to myself (that i still never slept in), burning candles to crappy music I still don't feel bad about listening to.

I hope that in some of this you can find yourself.

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.

"If you are born January 21st..." and other important details

Neglecting my knack even though I've got nothing better to do- thus informing my peers about my lack of damn to give, not really to sound critical or serious or even like I mean anything I say- basically, I'm just saying. Something that comes out when I press tips to keys is this rhythm of repetition that I use all the same words to say really different words and I like saying the words they kept telling me not to, words that are weak, not curse words but worse than that - things like beautiful and different, really and amazing, happening and being, and all these other important meaningless things. I don't know. I just start spitting and this is what comes out- this, and something like the way it's just nice to have the pillow between your knees when you sleep even though you're not old enough yet. Basically, I am just trying to not talk about a lot of things maybe I should be talking about just because I don't want to think about those moments and that coldness and how I am so cold. You know, in that big book of birthdays, one of my flaws is "lacking self-criticism" which behaves in different ways in my life like allowing me to live more according to me doing whatever the heck I want to do because I don't let myself/others judge me/I don't care. But there's this big part of me resistant to that phrase because I feel like where does all of this come from then? How am I so upset? I am cold and worried about freezing in the middle of a heat rash in a consistently sunny city in the most radiant life of my light. I don't know. Something about being this autobiographical makes me feel like a jerk and also uncomfortable, because if I am being honest, I just write in circles. I don't know what I'm doing here any more than anyone else. I truly don't believe I have much of a purpose other than to just speak my truth (#selfish?). But the worst is that I just do it anyway. I don't care. If I am being honest, I could sit alone between the roses for a hundred years and feed off the way it feels to not care, to not worry, to not be bothered with any of this stuff I worry about normally that I'm aware doesn't matter, and I would just gravitate toward the love and listen to God and feel the way things are and not think so much about the "right thing" or the "way" or any of it.

I hope for your sake you don't know what I mean, you know?

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.