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.