me, me, me

The frequency with which I write has decreased so much since I started working full time. It almost parallels the frequency of which I think about myself. But I can feel that changing since I quit. I turned 24 three months ago, which means it has been five seasons since I last wrote anything on here. Kinda insane to keep paying the yearly fee to keep this site running, but I also want to keep pretending I’ll get back into making art someday.

I just drove across the country to move into the place that is supposed to be my new home. In an understatement, I’m feeling overwhelmed. I feel like ever since the pandemic I keep blinking and watching chapters flash by. And suddenly I’m here, and the first post I wrote on this blog was five years ago. And that post was five years after I started to even feel like a person. And honestly I feel like every time I write one of these I say the same shit, that the passage of time is terrifying and I’m struggling to make sense of my life. But maybe it’s okay to feel that, and to express it often. It is the truth, after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how it has been almost five years since I’ve lived somewhere alone. Like truly on my own, without a community or even one person I know. The summer I was 19 and lived in New York was one of the best times in my life. There is nothing that makes you feel more competent, or capable, or yourself than going somewhere alone and being okay. And I kinda miss that feeling. Actually I really miss that feeling.

I miss a lot of things. Being too young to be tried for real crimes. Not making enough money to pay taxes. Feeling like fifteen minutes was the longest amount of time I could imagine. Not needing to worry about the meaning or purpose or substance of my life because the entirety of it was ahead of me. Most of all, I miss feeling like myself. Or even knowing how it felt to feel like myself.

I read a lot of things that talk about how you’re the most depressed you’ll ever be between 24 and 26 because thats when your frontal lobe fully develops, so it’s when you’re actually “coming online” as a person. And coming online into a world that centers hyperproduction and exploitation is really, really depressing. I also think that having a fully developed frontal lobe means you suddenly feel afraid of all these things that used to not be scary. Which in some cases, is really for the best. Like it is definitely good for me to avoid trespassing on random rooftops or driving 110 on two lane highways. But sometimes, that fear feels more like an unnecessary gatekeeper.

In the dumbest and most cliche metaphor; as a kid, it wasn’t scary to get hurt. You could play the most aggressive sports, jump off ledges and treat your joints like shit and it didn’t matter. And now, those things that used to feel silly and exciting feel juvenile. And fucking everything will leave you sore the next day. And I hate sounding like a grandpa but thats how it feels. I have chronic lower back pain from working at an office. These are problems I’m not supposed to have for another twenty years!

But isn’t that the irony of life. The whole “youth is wasted on the young” thing. I spent my entire childhood waiting impatiently to be older. And now, I am an adult and I am desperately trying to dig my heels in the ground and stop time. I used to think all I wanted was to find someone to share my life with. And now, I am in (objectively) the most wonderful relationship on earth but I can’t stop thinking about being alone. Is it something about human beings being prone to dissatisfaction? Like are we biologically disposed to need? People are always talking about getting everything they ever dreamed of and still feeling empty. Maybe emptiness and dissatisfaction are the core of the human experience. I don’t know.

All I know is even on the days I am happiest, when I wholeheartedly feel I don’t need anything more in life, I can still feel that hunger inside of me. Like maybe some days, the itch is scratched, but it will always be there. Like an unremovable splinter or cicadas at night. I’ve run all over the world trying to satisfy it, but I’m still struggling to learn how we can coexist; me and my ambition. Me and my impatience. Me and all our impossible dreams. My life can be many things, but it can’t be everything.

I can feel time gnawing at my ankles. Coercing me to settle down. To give in to aging, to peace, to being nourished. I don’t know why I fight it so much. “Rage against the dying of the light” as Thomas said, rage, rage.

I have never been quiet. Or malleable. This present day domesticity feels just like another pair of shoes to try on. The older I am the more complicated the act of trying becomes. The strings are tangled, lives intertwined. It often feels now that the world is made only of consequences. Perhaps it is the frontal lobe’s wisdom, but these days I am no longer screaming me, me, me. I can barely hear myself. I think so much about the feelings of everyone around me, how my feelings imapct their feelings and I know a certain extent of this is healthy but it is also how we lose ourselves. Consequences, responsibilities, roles, jobs, structures, taxes, shoulds, shouldn’ts, all the things we make up to give the chaos order — they have been killing me, slowly. One day I was playing pretend as an adult and the next, I was digging my own grave at some cubicle ready to spend half my life doing work I hated. We are the executioners of our own dreams.

I suppose that was a somewhat unrelated tangent. And I’m not really trying to say anything in particular. More just practicing the art of attempting to articulate my own existence again, like I used to. Trying to parse out on paper what is running through my head. The pendulum flipping between wanting a quiet life with someone who understands me, or a life of wandering and wondering, alone. I just feel like there has to be a way to have both. To be both with someone else, and be fully independent. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

23

Growing up is a deeply upsetting feeling. Most of my day is spent trying to distract myself from falling into an existential hole as my childhood memories become more and more faded, like old film photos or browning newspapers. There is no way to preserve the past –– that's something I know and something I've come to love –– but it scares me when there's occasionally no way to find the past. Adulthood is an infinite subway ride between excel spreadsheets and laundry, measured by rhythmic substance use and the occasional workout. Time is slowly building peripheral blinders on my vision, like the ones they put on horses to prevent them from getting scared. The thing is I don't want to only see in one direction. I want to look around, not just backwards but across all the imagined possible timelines of all the people I am right now and all the people I could be.

The world we live in doesn't allow for that. If you want to survive, you have to push forward, look forward, think forward –– you have to have some direction. And I think that's fundamentally at odds with what makes us human. But isn't that capitalism? At odds with nature. Life –– and I mean real life, conscious existence, what persists regardless of societal constructs –– isn't measured in metrics of success or promotions or pay. Real life can't really be measured at all. It slips between the cracks of our organized routines, sounds like unconfined laughter and honesty.

One of my favorite feelings in the world is the sensation I get after sprinting. When your throat is dry and you taste blood, and you can feel your heartbeat in your neck. I never feel more alive than when I have the wind knocked out of me –– not in the gym, but outside. That feeling grounds me, reconnects me to my body, reminds me what I am and shrugs off all the strings with which we tether ourselves to faux life. I live for those moments, tucked between hours of being a marionette of shoulds and coulds, responsibility and order.

It makes me sad to know how much we all lack those moments of realness. How many people move through space and time without ever wondering if it's what they want, or questioning why things are the way they are. We are so impressionable, so adaptable, we so often accept the conditions we are handed without question. The grind, the routines, the five year plans and career paths don't leave us time to imagine new ways of being. And make no mistake, it's not a coincidence. We are exploited in our oblivious ignorance.

Once, I sat with my feet dangling out a second story window above a busy street. I was there for hours watching people window shop and walk. No one bothered to look up. No one knew I was there, except for one little boy who must have been four or five. He was wearing deep blue rain boots and an olive green rain coat, looking up at me in shock and awe while his mother guided him down the street. She never stopped to see what he was seeing, and him and I just stared at each other from twenty feet apart.

That moment has stuck with me for the last six years since it happened. I like to climb roofs, and trees, and be perched in general. Every time I do this in a public space, only kids see me. I've always felt like there's something profound about that. Only children have the time and "lack" of preconceived societal "rightness" to truly see the world for what it is. The older we get, the more we hold on to ideas we've made up about how things are. The less we see because the more we've seen.

In my next year of life I hope to reclaim some of that childish insight. I want to see the world again as it is, not as a mess of borders and rules. I find so much joy in the small moments where I am transported back to my childhood; eating strawberry shortcake or getting hit by sprinkler water. I believe random acts of unpredictability are a form of time travel, bringing us back to our pasts and repainting them in hues from the present. And perhaps, if we chase them, the past will begin to recolor the present as well.

thinking about michelle yeoh

There's always a million things going on in my head. My eldest sister said something recently that I keep coming back to, about how alcohol is like a warm blanket for people who think too much. It dumbs us down enough to feel understood, or to get along with people, when most of the time there is a concrete wall between the raw, unfiltered tornado of emotional turmoil that we call consciousness and everyone else.

I feel like I've gone from talking about drinking a lot to drinking a lot. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's not something I'm afraid of either. Alcohol almost feels like a distant, estranged relative, and that might sound weird or scary, but to me it's more of a familiar disappointment. I have to keep it at an arms length, and I know that, but I also always want to invite it back in. I like the way alcohol turns the world into a river. The way my body loosens into waves. The effortless flow I so rarely feel in my life anymore.

The truth is I'm way more tense than I've ever been in my life. And I'm starting to wonder if this is a symptom of aging. Tightening; like live wire wrapped around a finger, trapping all the blood until it goes numb. There is no more release. No more trespassing at 1am, running from the sound of shotguns, sprinting bare naked into January lakes, blowing out the speakers in the king soopers parking lot eating dollar fries and exchanging romantic horror stories. So many of the things that reminded me what 'alive' means are gone. They haunt me like ghosts, flitting in and out of my dreams. I see remnants of my life in reflections. I never thought I would be my own shadow. Actually, I never thought my shadow would outgrow me.

There was a time in my life when I would do almost anything. Stupid things, silly things, dangerous things –– but most importantly, things without reason. Driving six hours to arches, stealing my calc teachers ID, throwing my textbooks in the study lounge, slapping boys across the face; none of it mattered. That was the best part. That was the beauty of it. Meaningless, improbable, unpredictable, irrelevant, ridiculous and strange things filled my life. And for all that I was hurt, and confused, and broken, and lost, I was also happy. I was alive. I was whole. Not just one shade of myself but all of me. Strange, giggly, unsettling, soft, hopelessly yearning, occasionally violent, over-the-top, too much, me.

I miss that. Knowing myself. Feeling like a whole person rather than a shell. I miss feeling allowed to make mistakes. Not just allowed, but encouraged. I miss carelessly knowing something was wrong, and doing it anyway. Now I just simmer. I marinate in choices and potentials and hypotheticals and it all feels so lukewarm. I miss boiling over.

I've begun to suspect that's why I feel so unable to create art these days. Art requires passion, and a level of intensity I feel like my life has lost. Really good art, I mean, the kind of art that can catch you in a moment and hold you there –– I think that shit is made by the force of emotions themselves. There have been times where I feel like I am just a vessel for some natural phenomenon to materialize in a way other people can sense and feel. That is to say, I think artists are just a doorway between the tangible and the unspoken.

Art is walking a tightrope, being a bridge, balancing reality and possibility. I miss making art unconsciously. Now, when I create, I feel like I am thinking too much. About everything. Michelle Yeoh's oscars speech, tomorrows work shift, chores I haven't done and the soap I keep forgetting to buy and two million other mundane anecdotes that litter the highway of my brain, getting kicked up anytime something else goes flying by. It never fucking stops. Even in sleep, I have the most cluttered dreams. I guess perhaps the reason for all of my troubles at the moment is that I'm trying too hard to make sense of it all.

Ultimately, that's what I keep returning to. I think aging pushes us to seek out order, and meaning, and sense. But that's not how life works. It's random, unforgiving, and never what you try to make it be. I don't mean that it's meaningless; I think that's an easy mistake to make. But you have to find meaning in the senselessness. I want to figure out how to do that again. How to let myself exhale without being afraid the house will collapse.

loveland

I could write a thousand odes to this place, even though I hate it. The fullest definition of bittersweet I have ever found is here, where the mountains meet the plains and everyone gets stuck. Where days stretch into weeks into a lifetime of melancholy and renaissance painting sunsets.

I always write about loveland. I always think about loveland. I guess people always think about their hometowns. I marinate in mine. Today, I took engagement photos for two of my best friends. And being with them brought back the feeling of growing up here, which tastes something like cereal and insomnia and the smell of wet dirt. I don’t know what I’m feeling or what I’m trying to say. I guess it felt nice. To be here, again, fully. To feel here. I am always between places when I am here. And today, I felt really, truly here. I forget what it’s like to know people. The certainty of seeing them every day. Like, we would stay up and out so late always talking, even though we would see each other again tomorrow. I miss that. And now months, even years pass without even a quick text. How can we know people and forget to keep holding them? I hate drifting apart. I hate that we are holding on with our pinkies, with happy birthday texts and social media posts. I miss being so close to people that I could feel their pauses, that we could have entire conversations through what we didn’t say to each other. That’s what being in a really deep romantic relationship is like. And I wish we had all the time in the world to have those relationships with more people. To hold each other through our silences, to understand meaning when it escapes only through the eyes. I will always regret taking daily interactions for granted. There is no substitute for that kind of proximity. No amount of phone calls or texts can ever amount to the 1 minute walk from calc class to the parking lot when that walk was routine. Now it’s like, novels of lifetimes to catch up on and then we disappear back into our separate voids of space.

Anyway, this website is going to drop out of commission soon because I am unemployed and can’t pay for it. I’ll try to set a new thing up soon.

lowell

It has been over a year since I wrote anything here. It’s probably been that long since I wrote anything in general. I don’t know when I stopped, not just writing but feeling the way I used to. Maybe it was the pandemic, because the words are starting to come back to me in small lines and melodies. They slip between the blocks of occupied time in my day, repeating themselves like a beating drum. There’s a thought that keeps tugging at my conscious. In the back of my mind, always, that I wish you were here. Another era ending, another time leaving, and I only get further and further from the colby and the winter and the back roads. And I know it’s healthy, I feel how much easier I breathe these days. How much more whole and safe and comforted I feel within my own body, with my identities. But the further I get from the dark places of the past the further I get from you. And I hate that. I’m sitting outside my favorite cafe at college, a place I took Izze and my mom and a place I will never get to show you. I contemplated ditching class for so long today, and I miss when I felt compelled to do things not by logic but by emotion. When we would just go because it was high school and who gave a shit and the world was outside of those walls not within them. Now the world is beyond and within here, but you are back there and I spend thirty minutes trying to make an inconsequential decision that has no effect on the future. I miss just going. Just doing. That was how the world was when we were sixteen. And now I think first. Think hard. Think too much. I overthink overthinking, and I’ve gone from being dangerously reckless to dangerously calm. And I feel like that has to do with losing you. Because I swear it’s not just growing up. I drift towards and away from your spirit and I am so afraid of the dark because I know I couldn’t survive it again. I don’t know how we ever found the strength to survive that place because now I feel like the slightest cut would crumble me. So I stay calm. I stay away from everything that could hurt, even the things that are exciting and liberating and the other night I climbed out of my girlfriend’s car window, the way we used to when you first got your license. Six februaries apart, I felt so alive in that icy air hanging out of the red colby and the other night I was smacked with a brief fear that I would tumble out of that window and die. Is this what aging is? Forgetting that the we once held time so tightly seconds were hours, that we once held the world so close our blood was the snow and the dirt and the sky. I found old letters I wrote you in a notebook I decided to use for class and I feel like I speak a different language than I used to. My words now are so forced, so chosen and thought-through and I miss the way poetry used to flow from me like water from a riverhead, the way words used to dance aimlessly through my mind no matter the time and there were always footprints of feelings I wished to express waiting to catch my tongue at the right time and I have never been as quiet as I am now. As quiet, wanting so desperately to be loud again. I feel like I am in the halfway place, in the reversal of the world we built together, at the exact midpoint on my way back full circle. I wonder what happened in all the other places, in every other lifetime where you didn’t die and we left that place together. Would sanity feel less like a forgery, if I was sitting on this patio listening to lowell with you.

the theater of the absurd

My first week of college I went to the Cesar Chavez student center and found a box of free books on the ground. One of them immediately stood out to me because it concerned the theater of the absurd. I took the book, took it on our orientation trip to the lake, wore jeans, sat in a hammock and read the first chapter. I have since lost the book. I never read it again, just talked to a friend about it.

Kati died my third year of high school. Sometimes I feel like everything I write is about Kati dying, and it makes me wonder if anything else has ever happened to me. But her death is like a black hole. Slowly consuming all my thoughts until maybe one day I’ll fall in too.

My parents really love me. I can see it on their faces. I can feel it, too. I am the kind of person who loves people beyond my own capacity to, and I know I got that from them. My mom comes in and cries, tells me she misses me. Tells me I belong here. My dad says “You can’t change how other people feel, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much I want to” And I know he means he wishes he could have spared me a lifetime of sadness.

I could have spared myself a lifetime of sadness. If I ever really let go. If I stopped clinging onto the idea that maybe there is a purpose for me somewhere. That maybe someday something I make or do will feel good enough to make my life worth living, that maybe someone I love will love me an equal amount instead of so much they drown me or too late for it to matter or too cautiously to survive. But nothing is ever created or destroyed, sparing myself a lifetime of sadness only means distributing that pain on others.

And it gets heavier. The sadness is exponential. That’s why community is essential, but we’ve forgotten.

Kati posted something on instagram the day before she died, something that mentioned the theater of the absurd. Nothing particular, probably just a song lyric, but once someone is dead doesn’t it start to mean so much more?

I sat in a hammock at the beach and read because that is how I wanted to start college. I didn’t want to throw myself into the center of everything like I always have my entire life. I wanted to watch, I wanted the quiet, something different. I regretted wearing jeans to the beach because the lifeguard was cute but I. didn’t want my life to revolve around relationships anymore. I went to college wanting to find myself.

The theater of the absurd is a kind of collection of plays that follow in the footsteps of Albert Camus’s philosophy that life itself is absurd and devoid of purpose. The plays don’t have traceable plots, and they hinge less on the understanding of beginning-middle-end and more on something deeper, something we don’t have order or understanding for. Something I don’t even think we could name if we tried.

I got lost in it. Wanting a feeling blindly. Replaying the same songs, retracing the same steps, trying to recreate the magic. I got lost in wanting a life with purpose. Thinking too hard about what that would look like. It’s so easy when you have a friend, and you don’t realize how meaningless it is until you lose them. I kept finding purpose in other people and kept realizing other people find purpose in things. Other people find purpose in jobs and places and money and names and these tangible accomplishments that could be achieved, that they could make time for by setting me aside.

Tonight was the first time my mom actually referred to my girlfriend as my girlfriend. Telling me not to feel out of place, telling me I belong to them. Belonging is a strange word. It’s one sided, and really only you can decide who and what you belong to. But people forget that. They think they’re bound or obligated. They obscure reality to make it survivable while I keep drifting closer and closer to the black hole, overthinking myself into purposelessness, losing myself in the big picture.

We don’t have purpose, we’re just here. I’m still waiting for someone who knows that to meet me halfway.

i dont have words anymore just overwhelming feelings !!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten caught up in the strange push and pull but I know it feels different. Maybe I’m older, maybe I am more real, either way every word or sentence that comes out of my mouth feels terrible and overspoken and so simple and ingenuine and awful and I am starting to feel like i feel more than i have the words to say, and i dont think i can be a writer anymore. Which is beside the point but, i dont know, life is so bizarre and chaotic and i’ve always felt and known that but it feels so much more now— like i cant even fathom trying to bottle myself into pages or explain anything that goes through my head and every time I think about sitting down and writing it feels a little counterproductive to stop experiencing just so I can try to convey. I almost always feel like I would rather be living than recalling and I think that’s new, or at least it has been a while since I felt that way.

so i’m not really sure what I’m doing here, other than waiting for my flight to board, waiting to be disturbed and resettled like sand being tossed near the shore, waiting to move and move again and fall asleep to wake up and wake up to sleep and do all the things i do, over and over again until i die, which used to feel really gross and pointless and sometimes still beats the shit out of me like the waves in cardiff but I’ll sleep and move and move again and next time my forearms will be stronger and every time I will be more than i was because there is no backwards momentum to being alive.

and isn’t that what i’ve been getting wrong this whole time? that there is no getting wrong; there is no losing muscle only gaining air, no losing people just gaining space because they are always here, always in the spaces between where i look and what i see and i don’t know, none of this makes sense when i read back on it but life is completely nonsensical and the only way i can fathom fathoming anything is without sense or rules or reasons. so here’s a small series of photos without context or understanding— here is the world turned inside out on a silver platter, & isn’t she so beautiful?

you have always been enough and i'm the problem

Do you remember the day my dad told me martial law might break out here, and that houses might start getting broken into? All I remember is how much I was crying, how hard my body was sobbing, how you drove when you could barely walk and how you walked in and just held me and how I’ve never felt safer than that moment. How you called when I was breaking down, no matter how far, how you always checked in on me and I wish I hadn’t messed those things up. I wish I could undo every nasty reaction that comes out of my body and I wish I could stop painting over the good feelings with ugly shades of myself because I can feel the way I drive people away. I can feel how unbearable my emotions are, how exhausting my words are, how difficult it is to love someone who never appreciates you for the way you love and I wish I had a million good reasons you should stay with me and stick it out, but there are a lot of days I can’t even convince myself of that.

So all I can do is say I’m sorry, over and over again until the words lose meaning, until my apologies become as exhausting as my outbursts, all I can do is slap my personality on the concrete like a wet towel and hope someday I stop being so fucking heavy and sad. All I can do is tell you that I’ve never been happier than the week I woke up next to you, that my whole body feels like a contortionist knot when I imagine not seeing you for months. I just want the world to revolve around the afternoon we drove across the bay bridge to see sadgirl, and I want to stop being such a fucking mess because I know I’m going to lose you and I can’t stand knowing it’s my fault.

I can feel the way I test your limits and I feel myself pushing and pushing and pushing too hard and I know you deserve better, and a lot of days I don’t even know what about me is worth keeping in your life because most days I don’t want to keep myself in my life. I spent years avoiding relationships because I know I do them wrong, and I know no matter who it is or how I feel I’ll find a way to fuck it up. But I think about the way you held me the day we drove to get my tire fixed. I think about how you always came to the things I was in, how you don’t ask me when’s a good time to call you just call and you call back and I knew I was completely fucked the night I met you because you’re the kindest, most interesting, most good hearted person I’ve ever met and I am just trying to measure up with words, and poems, and doodles, and pictures, and paintings I am just trying to offer you something that could possibly ever be enough for you to stay when all I do is crumble.

I think mostly that’s what I’m afraid of. That you’ll realize I’m not as cool as you thought I was, that I’m just fucked up and loud and lonely. I’m afraid of the moment you’ll see me sobbing and you won’t want to hold me anymore. I’m afraid because one day you’re not going to look at me and see something right, or real, or good, and I’m afraid that day might have already passed.

I feel like putting on a sad playlist and not moving for days. Like, completely unmotivated to do anything remotely productive. I just keep finding myself months deep in my thoughts, and theres nothing really pulling me back anymore. I miss biking to campus. I miss walking to class. I miss lying in the sun under the campanile, climbing the three flights to Lauren’s apartment. I miss when Clara would reply to my messages. Whatever world I lived in six weeks ago is just gone now, and it’s really breaking me.

I hate admitting it, I hate feeling it, I hate the places my brain goes and how I can’t function like everyone else can function because sometimes I feel like I’m already dead. I know everyone is really suffering right now, which is why I shouldn’t feel jealous or anxious whenever anyone else is happy, like I shouldn’t feel that way ever when anyone is happy during normal circumstances, and I should be able to exist fully in the world without worrying about other people, but it’s kinda all I do.

I just really like the feeling of things working out. And I had that before this, kinda. I had my normal anxieties and fears and whatever but this is like, sometimes I want to put myself into a coma until this state of the world can be over. And I’m hyper anxious, and hyper paranoid, and I feel chest pain simply by looking at other people’s social media, or by a message being ignored, and I want everything to feel like it did six weeks ago when I didn’t cry every time I imagined other people existing without me.

I don’t know why I feel like this or what’s wrong with me and sometimes I just want to curl up in a ball under my comforter and fall asleep for a really, really long time. I am trying not to text people, because I know it will hurt me when they don’t text back. I want nothing more than to spend every waking second with the person I was seeing before all this happened, but it’s not happening and so instead I’m trying to hold myself alone and sort out why my stomach sinks and my heart pinches every time her name pops up on my screen.

Maybe it’s the distance, or old anxiety, or just the way I am— constantly afraid other people do not have the capacity to love me in the way I can love them. But on top of living completely alone in a world that feels like sandpaper, I can’t be trying to figure out how I fit into someone else’s life. So I know I made the right choice, that I’m giving us a better chance by waiting, but it feels so fucking awful. Like, every time I think about it I want to cry, and I kinda always want to cry anyway, and I know things aren’t perfect for her but I know she’s in a better place than I am and that makes me feel sick, which is dumb because I have to stop feeling like every emotion felt by anyone else on earth has to do with me. She can be happy and miss me as much as I miss her, she can feel okay and care as much as I do, she can keep her distance and want to abandon it all the same. And all of that could be wrong but regardless, I need to stop worrying about it, & stop thinking about it. I need to find a way to let someone in without whittling them down.

I feel like I cry every day now. It’s like this game I play with myself. How long can I keep it together before I fall apart, usually over dinner, around 7 or 8pm. But I called my parents sobbing and my dad was trying to tell me what a beautiful thing it is to feel as much as I do. And sometimes I think he’s right, when he says “it’s the stuff of great works of art, your emotions” but sometimes I’d also rather never feel it again. I could keep growing, and thinking, and changing, and watching the world revolve around me and accepting and accepting and accepting over and over again that maybe things will never be what they were but that’s so exhausting and sometimes I just want to wrap my happiest memories around me like a safety blanket, and I want to pretend 300 miles can’t change how she feels, that somehow even if I don’t see her for a year she’ll still want me, that time won’t erode our feelings like time always erodes everything I think will last.

And beyond that, there’s the fear that the way I imagine it before isn’t even how it is. She said she worries that I don’t know she really misses me too. And that’s true. I feel like I’m so used to pouring myself into relationships and receiving nothing in return that I interpret every action as a sign. I’m hyperaware of how much more I send, how much more I make, how much more I worry, and talk, and mail as if the tangible objects between us are an accurate measure of our feelings. And I know they’re not, and that everyone shows love in different ways. But I’ve always been the kind of person who shares everything with the people I love. Because I never want anyone to doubt how much they mean to me. Just like when I’m angry, when I feel hurt, when I’m broken— I show that in silence. But now I’m trying to be silent without the bad feelings. Because unfortunately now just isn’t our time. Right now I need to figure out how to get through this semester, and the summer, and maybe the rest of the year without anything that grounds me.

Clara told me she started just disconnecting. Letting time pass her by and that she stopped comparing now to then, and she just let herself fall into it. I’m so bad at that. All I want to do is hold on as tight as I possibly can to what it felt like in early March— how alive, how exciting, how colorful in every sense of the word and I know I’ll hurt less if I just let it go and accept that maybe things will be like that again, and maybe they won’t, and regardless time keeps moving. So I’m going to try to surrender to the not knowing. Accept, for the first time in years, being in a situation in which I am not the happiest, and force myself to stop trying to change it or obsess over what was.

The sun is coming out and it’s supposed to be nice the next few days. I might try to see the ocean this weekend. I just need to get through a few more weeks and then I’ll start a new routine. Maybe I’ll send her something later, even though I’m afraid. Maybe today I’ll get over it. Maybe someday soon I’ll get to see her again.

on growing

I keep thinking about the day after I lost my virginity.

We were sitting in perkins with a cup of hot chocolate between us. Kati was working. She couldn’t stay to talk because she was getting pulled away to serve other tables. The sun was setting. It was August. I haven’t set foot in that perkins since then. I’m pretty sure.

I’m only ever about 86% sure, and what I really want is to write a poem about that moment. About the sun setting and how I felt like smiling even though it had honestly been an unpleasant experience. I want to write a poem about all the times I thought I was older, an the clarity of surviving something dawned on me, and that feeling of a silver lining piercing through the windows of the sky. But I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently and I think what I need to do is not hold myself to that format so I can figure out what I really want to say.

I chose to move back to Berkeley even though none of my friends are currently here, the Bay Area is one of the worst places to be health wise, and I’m literally sheltering in place alone, 1400 miles from my family. And I feel like my mind keeps returning to that decision, like I’m in orbit around it. Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here?

I kept trying to make myself feel stupid for choosing isolation over my childhood home because that was the choice everyone else seemed to be making and I’m frustrated I always treat other people’s choices like a how-to guide because the truth is no one else knows jack shit. There aren’t right answers, or right ways to live, or universal choices that can be applied to everyone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I grew up. About being twelve and walking a mile from my front door just to pretend I was running away. About stealing the car when I was fifteen and only had a permit. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I am living 1400 miles from home while everyone I know would choose warmth and security in a heartbeat. And I want to say that it’s not my family. I grew up with parents who are together, and loving, and supportive, and my decision to be here has nothing to do with them.

It’s about me. I’m here, and I’m eleven, perched on the edge of the roof of our house, trying to see past the rocky mountains. I’m eighteen on the roof of a fifth floor apartment in Lyon calling my father on the phone. I’m fifteen hanging out the window of Kati’s red colby, sixteen wandering birmingham palace alone, I am watching my long hair blow out the window as we fly down county road 21 to make my curfew, watching the car windows unfog from the heat of our bodies; I didn’t cum the night I lost my virginity. But I felt alive.

I felt myself, making a choice. Like the roughness and the pain of my first tattoo, or getting my nose pierced, running for my life on baker beach in november or linking arms outside of wheeler in protest. I have never felt alive in comfort. And maybe it’s because I’m mentally ill, or a writer, maybe I crave experience because I need something to draw from but I only feel real when I’m making choices with consequences. When I’m pushing myself to be more than I am. When I’m deciding I’m going to live in complete isolation for six weeks and it’s gonna fucking suck but the things that fucking suck are what push me to grow, to learn, to challenge the way I see the world and I’m not saying you should choose to suffer, because that’s not what I’m doing. No one should choose suffering. I’m saying you should lean into discomfort, because otherwise you’ll have no fucking idea where your body ends and the world begins.

quarantine and other magic tricks

Well, I’ve been inside for almost three weeks now. It started out okay, being in Berkeley with everyone. Then the state started to shut down and everyone started going home. And then that was still okay, because I stayed in Irvine for awhile and that was really nice. And now I’m in Colorado, and I’m probably going back to Berkeley in a few days because being in my childhood house during the spring reminds me of every awful thing I’ve ever experienced and I don’t think I can be here.

I’ve been really angry recently, mostly because I know I’m going to basically be in Berkeley alone since no one else is coming back. I feel like college was finally everything I wanted it to be, and I sorta lost that to this strange dystopian chaos. Which is fine, because I’m really suffering very little in contrast to a lot of people. I lost my job, but I don’t really rely on it for much and so I can afford to be laid off, which is not a privilege most people have.

So really, my anger is misguided and everyone is really emotional right now so it’s not a great time for me to think everyone else is neglecting my mental health because the truth is we’re all suffering and I can’t rely on anyone else to hold me up. So this post isn’t really going to be poetic or profound or anything, just an update I guess because I haven’t written anything like a journal in a while.

I guess in general I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to come out of all of this. Like when this virus ends, if it does, what do I want out of my life? What matters to me and what do I need to feel alive? I’ve really been missing the person I’ve been seeing, and I don’t really know what our thing is but it makes me happy and it’s nice to love someone who actually cares about my wellbeing. I kinda just want to go back to falling asleep and waking up next to her because that was really… the best thing ever.

I think I’ve felt extra sad recently because I’ve been thinking about all the ways we’re different and our lives are moving in different directions and I’m bad at letting people go and even worse at not worrying about the future before it arrives so here I am, thinking about how I want to drive around the US aimlessly and record myself reading poetry in national parks and how she wants to go to med school and is very driven and dedicated and I literally give up on everything that doesn’t make me happy.

But like, it’s so good right now. Or it was, when we were living together. And I don’t know when I’m going to see her again which obviously fills me with so many negative and bad emotions but it’s something I need to accept and figure out how to deal with because this is the world right now, and I can’t rely on anyone else to be my backbone. So I’m trying. I’m going to figure out what I want and hopefully come out of this alive. It would suck if I crumbled just when I was starting to figure things out. Such is life though. And that’s that.

human beings are the only creatures capable of dehydrating with a glass of water in front of them

On the one side is a a boy, with skin that reminds me of lined notebook paper with eyes that fade from freckled green to ocean blue, like the waves in encinitas and hair the color of an exploding tangerine and I wish

I could hold him in the moment when his face was inches from mine and all I could see was two tunnels of light escaping our cheekbones and his smile 

And how I believed it

On the other side is a future, filled with queer potlucks and girls with sun-rich skin, hair done in braids with colors reaching towards the earth, with people who look like anyone except my father and I wish

these images were not mutually exclusive.

I wish I was not crying over spilled conversation, about the world the white men I sleep with live in

But from the moment I was born I have been trying to be someone, and I could never put my finger on it. I still can’t. But I feel like I’ve broken all my own bones trying to make myself into a particular kind of beautiful, one for other people, one for white men and time and time again they just see right past me.

And this really shouldn’t bother me, because the truth is this has been happening all my life. But maybe I don’t have the mechanism to explain something that is stuck inside me. Maybe that’s why his words leave me dry heaving in the bathroom during lecture. Because I am half the girl from a nice suburb in a small town, because I grew up reading books about girls like Holly Golightly, Daisy Buchanan, Margo Roth Spiegelman, Alaska Young, Summer Finn, Sam from ‘the perks of being a wallflower’ and I guess I really didn’t realize how much of that defined me until I got here. 

I’m almost 20, and I’m this shade of myself I never thought would be a real thing. I literally dj on the radio in the middle of the night and I have a room decorated in postcards and apple cider packets and I drink tea with every meal and I just submitted a print pitch to a magazine about sex four minutes before the deadline and I do cartwheels in the busiest part of campus I severed my headphones yesterday in my bike chain I teach a poetry class and I drive too fast and I wore a flower crown to class one day and everything about me is tied to this one moment I remember with vivid clarity when I was in the 7th grade, and I was outside on the track during practice and I remember the dead green brown color of Colorado in the winter and I remember thinking 

I want to be interesting

I want to be the kind of interesting that brings men to their knees and so 

Here I am.

Except I am the one so often on my knees and I am the one constantly feeling broken and looked past and 

I keep wondering what I do wrong.

Maybe the mistake is in not being hollow. In being a complicated mess of experiences and emotions, in being a hurricane of watercolor pastels, so much so that we are sitting outside yali’s at 9:43 and he is telling me about julia fox, and how julia fox is “pretty hot” and I really can’t stand these men I sleep with telling me about the white women they find attractive because I am not those women

I am me, I am me without makeup in a sweatshirt in the morning for you

I am me naked between the sheets of my bed for you

I am me, making space in the gaps between all my commitments for you and is it not enough?

Is it never enough? 

My body and my words and my spirit and all the wild and beautiful things I say how do you stay untangled

How do you see me, and not see the world?

And I hate it because I am still half that girl who grew up wanting to be a girlfriend. I am that girl who was hypnotized by white hollywood and led astray by my sisters, by the way I saw my father in such glory

But I am half Berkeley-chick, as the man in the dinosaur costume would say. Half ethnic studies major, half watching women through the lecture hall windows and wanting to touch them the way men touch me but

Men don’t touch me the way I want to be touched, men don’t hold me just to hold me and white men don’t see in the world what I see in the world. They don’t notice the bodies that have been burned to hold them up, they don’t smell the burning flesh when we’re making love, they have no idea what it’s like to be the housefire. They live in a world I cannot afford but I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t always trying to belong to it still. That I don’t drop everything and give my whole being to every open car door or half assed attempt at romance. That I don’t speak as much as I’d like to spare you the discomfort of my truth. That I was so much more before you whittled me down with your lips and I hate that I am always letting white men split me apart like this but I am half 

Daughter. 

And some part of me will never feel whole unless I am validated, held, cared for by someone who reminds me of the man who validated, held, and cared for my mother. I ate white savior cereal for breakfast half my life and most of the time I still want to be saved

I want to wake up not having to think about the bodies

About my body

About the smell of burning flesh when he fucks me 

I don’t want to think about the guilt, about the disgust, about the filthy insides of my intestines that betray me time and time again for not doing better. For settling for men who don’t see me

In all my glory.

So I’ll keep waiting for apologies that don’t come I’ll keep 

accepting mediocrity as effort I’ll keep

Dreaming of a future where I can love someone who doesn’t look like my father and feel whole.

Where I am not a mess of stained bedsheets being left in the morning, but the gentle warmth of a blanket to which someone clings at night and maybe that someone will look like the men I grew up being taught to love maybe, they will look like me.

Maybe I’ll find a way to fit my person inside my body, write a poem that feels more like a poem, make something other than love with my broken, hollow bones.

ginger

I just discovered ginger candies and they’re probably my favorite things ever.

I wish I had a better way to start writing but I honestly feel like there’s no blood left in my body and I’m having a hard time trying to say anything more than I want to which is that I am tired, and I keep wanting to collapse into someone. I want to give into gravity and let someone else hold me and put me back together and this is so funny and ironic considering my last post but I guess on really long days it is hard to keep myself together.

I feel all my bones pressing against my skin and sometimes biking home I don’t care if a car hits me. I don’t really know when I have class and I honestly feel like I am floating blissfully through 18 hour days as if I am already a ghost. I want people to stop telling me how I should act, who I should be, what I am and am not and where I fit in it’s so fucking exhausting and I honestly feel like there are maggots or cockroaches or something peeling all the skin off my body because I am beginning to no longer exist outside of the way other people see me and sometimes I look for my reflection in passing windows and expect not to find it.

I guess I’m tired. And my mind keeps returning to Friday night. To sitting on the back of a bicycle and feeling like I was flying. And maybe I was drunk and the yellow flower left in the hedge wilted in less than a day and maybe I can’t spend my saturday mornings making pancakes and making out but sometimes it’s nice to pretend like I can just exist without worrying if liking a boy delegitimizes my queerness, or if the fact that he’s white means I’m regressing to my middle school mindset of internalized racism. Because I am happy in those moments. Sneaking in and out back doors and pretending it means less than it does to me.

On really long days, where my google calendar is literally a rainbow of events that honestly don’t fucking matter and will suck the life out of me, I just want someone to rub my back and make me tea. Sometimes I just want to wear cute panties with chili peppers on them and be able to show someone without it having to mean anything. Which is kinda difficult when you literally agreed to partake in a non-romantic sexually intimate relationship, especially when the person you agree to not be emotionally attached to opens your car door and brings you succulents and is kinder than anyone you’ve ever dated— and not because they like you, or because of anything specific about the situation, but simply because that is just the kind of person they are.

So yeah, I’m alright. Trying not to lean where there is nothing. Trying not to be like a clematis; needing the support of something else to bloom.

At least I have ginger candy.

if we were vampires

There’s a song I’ve listened to probably 192 times this year called “When Love Loves Alone” by Madison Cunningham, and I am listening to it now. Walking home in the rain I listened to “If We Were Vampires” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. It was really peaceful.

I went to a staff party for the radio station tonight, I walked with a boy I took my training class with and it was really nice. To just talk to someone, eat a bunch of garbage, feel like I was part of a place. We got to an intersection on the way back and he said “my house is this way, but you’re welcome to come by” and my gut tightened like it always does, in fear, in anxiety, because it has been two years since I’ve fully hooked up with someone, and even if that wasn’t what he was implying I’m always afraid now.

“I think I’ll just go home,” I replied. And there were no hard feelings, I think. We just have never really hung out before this so I don’t know if we will again. But I liked him. He made me feel funny and interesting and I feel like it has been a really long time since I let myself sort of be cute and flirty with a guy, and it’s nice to reclaim that I guess, since so much of high school I felt like I couldn’t control myself.

I guess I don’t know why I’m writing this. It was just something about turning away, pulling out my umbrella and putting my headphones in. Something about the way everyone around me is looking for something, someone, how the street corners are plagued with kissing couples and most hands are interlocked and how I walk home alone lit by headlights and street lamps and the moon. Because I don’t want anything right now, and it’s weird because I’ve spent my whole life desperately fighting for the attention of other people, romantically or platonically or in any way whatsoever. And suddenly I’m happy going home by myself and watching victorious or making dinner while singing frank sinatra or dancing high in my room.

It’s weird because I never thought I would get to this point, never thought I could get to this point, and I sometimes wonder if I just told myself ‘I am enough’ enough times that it came true, or if it’s the meds. What I really hope is that I’m growing. Which I think I might be. My room here in the white house with the red door feels a lot more comforting than my dorm room, and my body feels more like home now than it ever has before in my whole entire life.

I guess I’m scared, because I know that I have been able to heal and grow because I have been avoiding getting close to other people. And as much as I want to go home with that boy, as attracted as I am to him, I still have to close myself off and open my umbrella and walk away. Because I’m scared, and nothing will ever be that easy again.

Survival is not an isolated event. In that moment, I am still seventeen and bleeding on the seat of my car. I am still sixteen and wincing. I am always scared, because even though the swelling stops there are still bruises. I don’t have the time to explain to some random guy every sexually violent incident I’ve been through, I don’t have the time to wait for someone I feel comfortable with. I tried that last year, and he left.

I am always struck by the audacity of my friends, who can move through the world so freely, be with whoever they want. My friends who complain about not being able to ‘catch hookups’ or be liked back, because I remember I was once like that. The most awful thing in the world was that the people I wanted didn’t want me. And then a boy turned my body into a complicated knot I haven’t been able to untangle; men robbed my dignity from me, boys broke me, my bones, my insides, I put my hands in hands that failed me, I loved someone who lost my heart in their dirty laundry and I swear it never gets easier. Being alone gets easier but opening up never does.

So this is me, walking home alone in the rain. Enough for myself. It is lonely, sometimes, but more importantly it is safe.

willard park

smthng.

october, 2019

backwards kneecap

That would be such a good album name. I did some fucked up thing to my knee tonight playing futsal, and it’s like the 17th time i’ve gotten injured and I feel like some force in the universe is just telling me to stop trying. And it hurts, and my leg keeps bending the wrong way, and it’s honestly really funny other than the pain and the fact that I now can’t walk or bike and that gets in the way of my ability to do literally everything.

I really really hate being injured, just like I really really hate being sick. And I don’t know what it is. I am always so afraid of being less capable than the people around me and so I desperately try to keep up. And I have no idea where that fear came from but it has shaped everything about me.

My first instinct when I get hurt is to walk it off. I feel like I have to just get up and get better and I hate ever feeling like I’m weak and being injured makes me feel weak. I hate having to limp and I hate having to sit out and I hate being a burden to other people. And that’s how I felt tonight.

I think since I was a kid I’ve always felt like I have to pick up after myself and take care of myself and those are really good things, because I never want to be beholden or dependent on another person, but in a weird backwards paradox girls are also socialized to search and strive to be dependent on someone. And i realize this all probably sounds dumb and it’s 1am and I always say everything I write sounds dumb and I’m sorry. All I really wanted to say is this:

Someone opened a car door for me tonight. Someone ordered me a lyft and opened the door and closed it for me. And it has been so long since someone has done that. The last not-my-father person to do that was my high school boyfriend, who only ever did it because I talked about how much I loved that. Tonight someone did it like it was nothing.

The shitty thing is I know it was nothing. I know this boy, and I met him at a party and all he did was ask me about another girl. I remember feeling kind of dumb-drunk offended then, but I didn’t really care, until he closed the car door and I sat there thinking this might have been the nicest thing someone has done for me in a long time. Which is pretty depressing, and also probably wrong.

The whole way home I felt warm because of this simple act of kindness, because another friend volunteered to ride my bike home, because here were people, not leaving me behind even though I am weak, even though I am a burden. And the honest truth is it probably means nothing, and it is so fucking stupid that I’m even writing this and I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish but I guess I’m tired of constantly trying to accomplish everything.

I have quite literally broken my back trying to work three jobs and take the hardest class load I’ve had here yet, and I know I can’t stop because if I do I’ll feel idle and useless. Something about this stupid profit driven school has turned me into a capitalist cog and I feel like I have to be productive all the time every day until I literally collapse. Which I tend to do.

I get home panting from wherever I was, I pour myself water, I make myself food, I tuck myself in and cry myself to sleep and honest to god I have found a way to make myself into enough of a reason to keep living but some nights I’m really tired of being my own 3am. I feel like, ever since I was eight I’ve wanted to find someone to hold me when I’m cold, to let me fall asleep next to them, to open my car doors. But all I’ve had is a lifetime of disappointment.

I wrote a poem the other day, and it started “I want to tell you a story about womanhood,” and it was quite powerful (I think) but it wasn’t really the story I wanted to tell. The truth is I feel weak. I feel exhausted and ragged and powerless, like someone has thrown me into an infinite wash cycle and not on the delicate setting. All I’ve learned is that it is possible to be let down 100% of the time, it is possible to fall in love with the wrong people, it is possible to think someone who abuses you cares for you, and the only way to stop being beaten to the pavement is to give up on ever finding someone that defies all those truths.

So when the boy opens my car door I feel the flicker of hope in my heart, a ‘maybe’ echoing in my bloodstream. When the girl cooks me salmon made with fresh lemons off the tree in her backyard, I wonder if there’s a chance. But I see her kissing other girls, and I remember the way that boy looked at another girl while i spoke and I remember that I am me. Loud, jagged, annoying me. I am not the kind of girl nice people fall in love with, and I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself someone other people fall in love with. So I don’t know what the fuck to do now.

I’m so beyond the point of fixing it I feel like I just have to walk it off until maybe I’ll be reincarnated as like a cool, socially conscious, smart, artsy blonde girl who can play the bass and also hack into nasa or some shit. I don’t know. Some days I love the way my sharp edges don’t fit anywhere clean. But it’s honestly quite lonely, and trying to do anything with a backwards kneecap and a herniated disk is painful and nearly impossible. So I’m gonna drink ibuprofen and tuck myself in and pretend someone else is keeping me warm.

Goodnight.

space and constellations

I get lost in the hours between waking up and falling asleep. I feel like I don’t know where I go anymore, but I end up at class and in cafes and somehow all these tangible places and moments are connected but I’m never sure how. There’s concrete awareness and understanding and consciousness right when I wake up and right when I go to sleep, but everything else is a meaningless blur of colors and temperatures.

And I’m not sure when it started being this way, whether it was before or after the meds, before or after kati, before or after leaving home. All I know is that one day I’m on the subway and the next I’m here, that three years ago I had a best friend and now she’s dead, that eight months ago I loved someone and two years ago I loved someone and perhaps those feelings never go away they just get lost in the motion.

And every now and then I learn that my closest friend here has been in a relationship for three months I didn’t know about, or that someone I used to date is getting married, or that my brother got his license and I am 1500 miles away writing things no one will ever read on a five year old laptop in a forty four year old building and all of our lifetimes are simultaneously moving and shifting through space and saying anything at all is like screaming desperately into a vacuum.

And that’s what meds feel like, I think. Like nothing matters enough to be sad but nothing matters enough to feel happy. Like I just got hired and saw someone I love but I still feel as empty as I did when I left the house this morning. Like I wish someone could hear me, because I tried to kill myself last year and the world moved on around me. And the meds have restructured my gray matter or pink matter or neurotransmitters or whatever, so that I won’t run into busy intersections or trace lines on my wrists, but now the world looks different.

All the nooks and crannies that were once magic are now void of anything meaningful, and I keep trying to reach out and hold on to anything at all but I’m surrounded by imaginary context. All I see are the lights over Lake Merritt, the sun rising over England, this couple making out next to me while I type this and wonder how people live without having all these thoughts I’m constantly having and trying to stop having.

My brain is filled with broken cassette tapes replaying details of everyone I’ve ever loved and lost. And I get migraines every afternoon because the memories feel like maggots crawling on the inside of my skull. All I want is to open a door to the past and curl up like a cat at the foot of a bed and never leave. I want to build a single day made up of all the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and it would start with a sunrise and end with the sound of a heartbeat.

Last year a lead bullet shattered in my chest. The muscles have regrown around it, but the beat has changed. Every time I breathe I can feel the metal pieces cutting into my organs and I have no idea how to take them out. Like the barbed wire bruises on my shins and the suicide jokes made by the people around me, some things will never change. Letting go is an illusion I can’t seem to figure out so I’m stuck using memories like a crutch for the happiness I can’t feel, for reasons I can’t understand.

It’s some kind of strange constellation, shining light across the universe from a million galaxies away. And I’m stuck with my feet on the ground, breaking my neck from staring so long. So anyway, this has been ridiculously long and vague and probably terrible and nonsensical to everyone else, but I’m not going to re-read it before posting it because it is what it is, and it doesn’t really matter anyway.

It’s just part of the current.

l.i.f.e.g.o.e.s.o.n.

is the title of this song by noah and the whale that I’ve always liked, because it’s true. Life never stops going on, and I’m pretty sure it goes on while we stand still. Like different parts of our bodies are trapped at different ages.

Imagine having an eight year old heart and hundred year old bones and the eyes of middle age but the mindset of a teenager. That’s how it feels a lot of the time. My spine is crooked and my feet are disgustingly calloused and perpetually dirty and I wake up sore but I go straight to the gym anyway.

Right before I go to bed, I always think of this one night when I was eight and how I wished I would grow up. And I think this is it, I’ve seen the other side, I’ve learned my lesson, and when I wake up I’ll be young again. I like to pretend I can wake up knowing what mistakes not to make and who to not trust and all the dark corners of the world to not get cornered in again.

But then somehow it’s always 8am and the light is coming through the white curtains in the new house in the new town with the old memories and I am still that girl who hyperventilates upon seeing him. And I wish more than anything there wasn’t still some obscure ‘him,’ another boy I confused for a reason that I can’t seem to get out of my system. I think about how long it takes to get the insides out of my body. Seven years for skin, childhood for teeth, a few hours for piss and a few days for bad seafood. Some people replace kidneys or lose tonsils but mine are all still in place. How long will it take to get him out of my system? Blood remains forever, as do most hearts.

I imagine myself getting rid of him in pieces, the way we clip nails and trim hair. It takes so long but bit by bit he goes. Until it’s an innocent sunday morning and I spot him though a crowd in moments. And he never sees me, never looks, the same as ever. He lives unchanged in the world of people with normal brain chemicals.

It’s like I have a sixth sense for the way he walks. New sunglasses will never hide the crinkle when his eyes smile, and there he is smiling while I try desperately to breathe evenly. While I try to stop noticing him without looking away. What age is my heart trapped in, to be so reeled in?

Time slips through my clenched fists as if it were his hand dropping mine. Every opportunity to say something filled by radio silence. I was the girl of his dreams and now I am a ghost in the background. And he is the elephant in every room, the back of stranger’s heads that feel familiar, the feeling of missing a limb or a lung if it had run off on its own and been better off alone.

I knew, the night I took a cab to the city and collapsed crossfaded in the back seat. I knew without a doubt what the feelings were, what I saw, what I still see. I remember thinking somehow I had to keep knowing and bury it, because he doesn’t know. Because sometimes the things we know are wrong.

And knowing aside, the truth is I deserve better. He is part the person making me mac and cheese at midnight, staying up to talk me down, and part the person ending the call, shutting the door, dropping my hand. I give everything I have to the people I love, always. I sometimes forget to take what I need for myself.

I am trying, to rest my back and stretch my arms further. To ask for what I need and close my eyes when we cross paths. We don’t get to choose who we love. We don’t get to choose who loves us. All we can do is make the best with what we have. I’ll still go to bed every night thinking about that shooting star I saw when I was eight. I’ll still wake up every morning knowing time is a one way road to the future and the only way around is through. Between inevitabilities I dream with my heart, wrapped in arms that I’ve lost to the past, that I’ve probably lost to other girls, that I most likely never had to begin with. Sleep sings melodies of softness, because that is what it felt like to be together. I, a woman of edges reduced to silk by the sound of his heartbeat.

Reality is not as poetic. He was never perfect or close to it, I cried myself to sleep almost every night. I woke up afraid. I lived with my heart in my throat and my hands wrapped tightly around my chest. I knew what was coming from the moment I saw him. I am prone to confusing mutual loneliness with love and infatuation with affection and to him I was never more than a cute girl, who was occasionally difficult and a little crazy. But some nights I swear he hand painted the big dipper in the sky just so we could drive up to see it.

Moments of transition are always the most difficult. There we are, passing though different doorways in different rooms in different houses but I still see him across the space. I still stop breathing and shrink into my stomach. There is an alternate universe where we live in polaroids and super 8 home videos and he never did all the stuff he did that hurt me. I know because sometimes I see it, as if looking through stained glass in a dream.

But here, he is still some guy in a lifetime of guys who have bruised me in one way or another. He is still the person who looked at me wide eyed as if he had never seen someone more beautiful, only to give up without trying. He wasn’t willing to put in the time. And I deserve time.

So it hurts, to see him smiling in the sun playing the sport he chose to prioritize over me. It hurts to watch my birthday pass without even a text, when I stayed up cutting ribbon and annotating and writing and rewriting and repacking everything so it would be perfect when he came home on his. But what hurts the most is that I ever expected more out of him. He is an imitation version of someone my heart has been looking for for a lifetime. Like a virgin cocktail, he lacks the most important ingredient.

The aftertaste will fade with time. One day my heart will catch up with my brain will catch up with my legs. L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N., time does nothing more than go on. And it will leave him behind me.

as islands

There’s a John Donne quote that goes “No man is an island entire of it self; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” (Devotions, 1624). And the only reason i know that is because I’ve seen the Carrie Diaries episode about it, where she realizes that manhattan is this island full of islands, and everyone is somehow packed together and also completely alone.

I’ve found this to be true. And I don’t know why that doesn’t terrify me, because I spent the last 19 years of my life depending on the presence of other people to get me through the day. But it doesn’t. I went out tonight and ran a 5k to Hudson River Park at 10pm, well into the night. I was alone. One of my closest friends is in town to see me. But being here alone for the last month and a half has made me appreciate the time I spend with myself.

This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been this alone, and the first time I’ve ever wanted to be alone. I like walking eight miles a day by myself. I like getting to choose where I eat and what I do and not having to run my thoughts by anyone else. I keep thinking I should call my dad, or reply to some message I got four hours ago but none of it matters. I’m not afraid of the future because I’ll deal with it when it gets here.

I know this rapid, radical shift in my introverted-extroverted-ness and life views is due largely in part to prozac, and to suddenly not dying daily under the crippling weight of chronic depression, but I also believe that I’m not some new person because I’m on meds. I think this is the person I have always been, beneath the layers of sadness and the chemicals I can’t control, and I really don’t want to be on meds for the rest of my life but right now I need them. And I’m okay with that. College was rough. I woke up almost every day and did not want to be alive. But I also know I couldn’t be here, living here, in the city of all cities if I hadn’t gone through those things.

I always want to pretend it’s as easy as wishing the past away, but it never has been and it never will be. I am me because of the things I’ve gone though. I am me because I lost Kati, because I lost Eli, because I decided when I was 12 that every summer I had to live somewhere completely different. I am the child of my parents, of my family, of my shitty high school and the nowhere-ville town I grew up in. I couldn’t exist without the worst parts of my life.

Isn’t that how everything works? We define and understand things in relation to other things; our perspective of reality is comparative. So, there can’t be light without shadow, green without magenta, day without night, west without east, etc. Solitude is the yin to the yang of coexistence. I am only here, feeling like I belong in a city of 20 million people because I have finally learned to belong to myself.

Most days, I really like being an island. I like the quiet. I don’t need a continent anymore. I could drift forever and I’d always be at home, because home is where the heart is and for the first time my heart is with me.