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.

The thing about me is I knowingly don't listen to anybody else. It's not because I don't value other people or respect their successes or wisdom. I don't listen because only I know what I need, what's good for me. Only I know in my heart what I need to do, how I need to do it.

Call it stubborn, or stupid, or being a control freak, but this is who I always have been. It's not a lack of willingness to change. The truth is, I have never exactly steered myself wrong.

I believe the divine light inside me is the guide. That is what I follow. Not some self-help book by somebody who has never met me before. Thanks, but I'm going to finish my teen fiction novel and get soda drunk.

How to lose a guy in less than 600 days, results guaranteed

Fall in love first.

Things that are the Same

This song, like a strong handful, remind me of being lonely in Germany, remind me of holding on so desperately to something that wasn't even officially mine. I remember the bed being uncomfortable and needing to wear a sweatshirt even just sitting in my room in the middle of the day. I remember, where everyone else remembers joy and this amazing connectivity, really heavy sadness.

It's more than 3 years later...

Things are so different and my life is very different. I am much the same.

Blood Bank is playing on my favorite pandora station and I've never heard it on there before but I have heard this song at least one thousand full times. I am sad for other reasons. It's funny somehow too. It's the same thing with different people, the same pattern even when the outside looks so different. It's one in the morning and I'm crying to sad songs by my computer's light, listening to my kitten purr and hold her small paw to my arm. It's hard because it's so easy. It's hard because for me it's never hard. And it's hard because for me, I should have known better. How can it be so easy for a good thing to fall apart? How can it be so easy for things to melt this way? I am listening to all these familiar songs that I love because the hurt runs through them soft and delicate, like this is the way life is when you have a hard day, like this is how life is when you were born more sad, like this is how life is when you fall in love with boys who can't love you. I am building you things, I am thinking of you. I can't sleep. You are ignoring me. You are feeling annoyed. You are growing colder. I am remembering a you that does not exist. I am knowing better. The part that kills me the most is this: what kind of ironic tragedy is it that the toilet paper castle is going to outlast the relationship? Ouch.

Why didn't you just call....

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.

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 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.

early stages

Tuning the radio between the tears to find you,
to hear you crying back for me, asking me to
(in the blackness of night) turn around, don't be
stupid- just turn around. You are not hip-hop
like he was, you are not loud noises, or even
crooning old country like I hear in my own
quiet. You are not the contemporary Jesus
tunes I will listen to on repeat without noticing.

And you most certainly are not a quiet drive
half past two or a quarter to the world ending.
You are a soft song, the peace between acoustic
waves. You are the quiet at the beginning of a slow
love song. You are the way slow dancing feels,
the way I can't remember being born, the way
love happens slowly and heartbreak turns into
a distant hum, hours away.

When I finally hear the right song, I am with you
again in a parking garage, fogging windows with
laughter. I am singing the words to the song of
you.

Having a hard time trying to say what I need to say without going too far, without losing it, without saying too much, without finding a hook caught to the inside of my cheek, without being up the creek without even a boat: something about the way things feel is killing me.

I've never had trouble doing things my way. Right now, I'm figuring out which way my way is.