Love, and that's all.

So yeah, I've thought about you recently.

I'm trying to be more careful with my love. Doling out tiny, measured bits to worthy strangers, shedding some feather-sized pieces to lay in the perfect corners nature makes, and saving the rest for myself. Except

there's someone captured in my photographic brain

that makes me want to free every last bit.

I have the feeling that this sudden rush of happy feeling and artistic energy will be sewn and painted and written into new projects and plans, mapped-out dreams brought to fruition by a sudden, nameless motivation.

All this wishing and waiting, and we were living in the trees all along. I feel so silly for not realizing it sooner, but then, there were so many veils obscuring my vision, so many hands blurring across my heart before.

There's something about 2008.

missed your call.

x

The world is a dangerous place. So many people moving between each other, passing glances and never looking back. So many nameless faces with scraps of sentences attached to their memories, lost among so many others sewn upon the patchwork quilt that is the makeshift file cabinet of my subconscious, stretching out for miles in every direction. Dangerous

and lovely. I have a feeling that my eyes are about to be astounded. Some beautiful, inevitable combination of colors will come to them and it will be the most perfect image that I have ever experienced, because behind it there will also be beauty,

genuity. Those passing glances turned to smiles, your lips moving to speak. Acquaintances made friends.

Things are so much better now.

the homeless man splayed drunk across the sidewalk, rambling life lessons in some angry new language, inventing stories as if it might stop someone on the street and hold them there, locked in momentary friendship. Spewing emotional bullshit with eyes wet and black, aglisten with the perfect orange of streetlamp glow, claiming to have reached some immaculate conclusion on the subject, but just full of shit. Just full of it,

and sometimes I walk the dark streets of these neighborhoods alone, sucking in the night air like a last breath and wishing I could solve your life with the simple brush of hair against skin, or simple words that simply float out of my mouth, or a not-empty wallet. Worrying about worrying about things, too many things, two people who can and can't and will and will, will, will.

x



Hello,
little girl lost in halos, traipsing through fields of cinnamon and snow, Christmas tree gardens beginning to grow under your little feet, breathing in childhood memory. How many empty hearts will you follow? How many empty bottles will you swallow? The numbers you collect jangle like keys in your pocket, if only you would take them out and spend them on so many waiting doors. Janitor of burdens, let go of your rusting collections piece by ancient piece, quit your job, flee the country.

x

Had I known you were going to holocaust me in a matter of minutes I would have finished that abandoned portrait of our love and filled in all of those tiny spaces with black paint. Instead I slowly turned in that trough of old feeling, thinking, this is leading to me walking off of the edge of a cliff.

When I was three years old, and this might have been a dream, my parents took me to a beautiful park and we hiked across the top of a waterfall. We looked down from a tiny perch of jutting rock and I was so afraid to die, but they promised not to let me fall, and I trusted them with my life.

Once in high school I burned a wide line of purple on my left arm with an iron. I distinctly recall not reacting fast enough, that moment when I knew I was stupidly causing myself injury, but was unable to immediately stop the cause due to lazy gross motor skills. Today I reacted far quicker, though my wound looks somewhat dire. It fascinates me how I manage to cover myself in angry bruises and puffy red scratches. For every scab or sunken purple mark that gradually fades to a more acceptable color of skin, a new dent appears somewhere. My body could tell stories.

You're head over heels, obsessed. I can't take you on, I can't add you to a list of names, I don't want you on my plate, I am lonely, leave me alone. Your company was beautiful until you ruined it, and now I just want to shut you out of all my windows and doors and sleep you away with medicine. Come back to the person that you were.

I felt something pure. It stamped its feet on my chest with such volume and shook me, shook me up all frightened and furious and filled my head with fire. And it was ugly, and it was mad, and when it left I felt brutally cleansed or robbed as if that thing which shouted such vulgar poetry inside me had erased a memory, scrubbed some written-upon part of me clean, and the remaining impossibility just lingered like a cloud of ash over the world, stinging my eyes with realization and the inevitable misery that follows.

You never showed me that poem that you wrote.

Cars flash by, peeking in through the windows with childlike, wildflower-like eyes. Sugar pours down my throat. My pink brain is coated with laughter soft like an electric blanket, with hazy field people and cold, spilled water.

I don't wanna live through winter. I can't stand to see everything ending.

Summer covers the water under the bridge in algae. The remnants of life show their bones. A park bench, chairs, a construction sign. Angels walk by and say their hellos. They stare at me, dangling my legs over the edge, sucking on a cigarette, staring down from the middle of nowhere, my favorite place in the universe. Knowing I wasn't going to die. I decided it was a stupid idea.

The world collapses and rebuilds itself around me. I can do nothing but watch.

Where did the storm go? Now, the sky looks kinda blue.

We can't decide what kind of weather we want. It's too hot in the attic, but she can't sleep with the fan on. I can't stop putting things in my mouth; I need something to fill it. I'm singing because it's too silent. Everyone is sleeping, or reading books.

I wrote today.
I'm writing.
I can write.

I've been writing poems. It's something new, because it's been so long.

I've finally reached back into something that I used to be, to pull out some fragments of a personality. I stumbled down so many steps, blinded by my silly doubts and tripped over that hidden heart, a place filled with words that I used to know. I found an old path that I loved to follow, a book stashed between walls that details a history most complex and enchanting. To read it is not to relive past moments, but to taste a familiar taste, only now I am able to appreciate the depth and richness of its flavor.

A new slant of light hits our subject. Or subjects. I suppose that would be more accurate. We've boarded up this window and created another with our fists, you, and you, and you, and so many yous. And I. It's an army of battling points of view, arguing over each other, shouting and then whispering, creating hymns of scattered harmonies that rise and fall and then suddenly crash, darkening into discordance, shaking my brain with war.

These eyes are just opened. The world is fresh and bright and clean and it stabs my pupils like sharp knuckles. But to look away is to fail, for it begs to be described and understood. Alone, it is only what it is, and cannot make itself what it yearns to be.

Will I feel this way forever, wanting this so completely, feeling right with the world, though my head aches from such discovery? No, but there is something reassuring in this knowledge. Perhaps its brevity makes it all the more valuable to experience. I know it will slowly vanish, and I will look on, wondering, as it slips into the folds of lost time, leaving only tiny traces of its existence in my mind. I don't mind.

They say, It must be a brilliant match; I think of striking the match and the immediate crackle of its lighting, the burst of light before it continues to burn. Is that us?

I'd like to write poems and poems, I'd like to carve into my walls so many words that they run over each other and begin to blend together until it's just nonsense, so many sentences running together into a great illogical synthesis, and it will mean nothing, because it will mean everything at the same time, twenty-nine contradictions existing in perfect harmony, or disharmony, depending on how you will decide to read it.

I think it's funny how you just fall short, by a mere number; just, just. It's another almost added to a list of almosts that stretches on forever into history.

I'm falling off the edge. I'm moving toward a revolution, a great sequence of losses and gains. I'm headed toward the Sun, I'll burn up before I get there. I'll run out before I've run the whole way to the other side of the world. I'll run out of steam. But I will go, and it's the going that matters, that's really the point of the thing. Do you see?

It doesn't matter. Everything has become forgettable. But I'm still teetering, here. Still waiting for an answer to escape your open lips, unexpected, filled with promise.

We might be alike. You're not talking much. I'm full of life.

Leaves are filling my mouth, so bitter, so gag-reflex. The moment before death, when everything becomes overwhelmingly vibrant, the catch just before the fall, the corrected misstep. That adrenaline rush, recreating the world, the transition from blurry instability to knowledge, to feeling, to names and shapes. I'm in it.

Turning into something.

And you. And you. You, you. Would you just. Will you please. I want to ask something of you, but it really must be you asking yourself, to... to.

Let go.

Yeah, sometimes, I can't speak. Sometimes I hide under blankets, letting myself suffocate, becoming warm with all the wishes I keep under there with me. But I throw them off, I write my fevers away, I carve them into memory, and they will, they will, they will disappear. I will burn them up of my own volition.

I can't take yours away. It's a vague thing, this; it's difficult to see everything clearly while in transit. But hear me, please, hear this, through the noise of traffic and look past the dizzy display of lights, the stretching lines, just understand. There's a melody out in the world, just playing over and over, quiet and clandestine, but you can hear it underneath the racket of everyday, and it's beautiful.

And I am in love. With the way the world ripens and blooms and bursts open, the velocity with which people will move, strangers becoming friends, friends, ohhhhhhhhhhh, everythinggggggg.

How the yous change and blend. How the days just keep ending, again and again, on good notes, or, perhaps, bad notes, and no matter what happens, I can't keep from smiling.

Wave goodbye. Make it a happy ending. Say hello, take my hand, let's go, let go. We'll never sleep, we'll never be alone. All that light inside, all that hope! It just beams. We all glow. Keep your eyes open! Get outside!

Love.

The world is muted. The pitter-patter of keyboard keys is very far away. From the other side of my window, something breathes, cool and rustling.

Should I wander, barefoot, into the night? Let it take my hair up on its invisible wings, soft against my face; let it scrape the soles of my feet and raise the hair on my arms? Follow the sidewalk until I'm good and lost, or stolen by crimes?

Hands on the grass, no keys, only paper. Tear it out with my teeth, strain through them a meaning, pull up those words from deep down, pull them out! Grab a handful of something, make it count. Words on my tongue, tired to get loose, will it satisfy to have my neck in a noose? Let me go? Throw you off? Dive into the water, black, gone under the current, "take that train underwater, then we could talk it through"?

This is a hallucination. This is a dream. This is a test, you're testing me, you're tapping into some psychological energy buried in a time capsule. Hidden in my wall. Some ancient treasure underground, under piles and piles of dust, locked in a safe. This does not exist, it does not exist. I do not exist.

But if you could read my mind (Abrupt ending).

My god, Summer is a thing of mystery.

She's fallen asleep on me, taken up the whole couch. It's alright, I took a caffeine pill, so it's not like I'll be sleeping for awhile anyway. My head is rambling, fragments trailing off in so many directions at once, like arms reaching out into blank space for something just beyond the colorlessness. Maybe it's a tiny, shining moment, lost in time. I haven't thought about it much lately, but now, I wonder, how come none of us can forget? How come we cling to that color, that blur of smiles and nameless feelings? So many nameless feelings, melting together into one, vague image of a thing we just can't get back to, we won't ever touch that, that, again. So much green. So much beauty. It amazes me how unclear it has become, and yet how important it remains.

This summer feels almost the same. The feelings are close. It's as if someone I have lost is breathing into my lungs, someone I can't possibly see. It's this ghost. Something, someone that vanishes as soon as you know it, or he, or she, is there. A mystery, a mystery, hiding in laughter and withering in picked flowers from my backyard. Perhaps we lost our lives in backyards, or in basements, or just in each other. I'll never really know.

Do you remember that night that I snuck out the back door, to sit outside under the clouds until the rain began to fall? I was out of my head. I was wearing the turquoise shirt, the one I wrote a poem on, and later ripped a hole in. I don't know where that shirt is now. I must have said so many ridiculous things, you probably don't even remember them. I collapsed later and you told me I asked you to go fishing. In my backyard.

What about that one perfect day, when we walked to your cousin's from school and jumped in her pool with all of our clothes on? I think all of us were there. We kept throwing things at each other. It started to rain, but it was the most beautiful thing, the sun was still shining down on us through the raindrops. I remember standing out in the road with those boys. Standing in the gutter as it filled up, feeling the warmest feeling. Feeling so full of everything that I could just burst.

And the next summer, they ripped the pool out.

My mom has reminded me, more than once, of how I used to beat her at games of Memory when I was only three years old. I played Memory a few years ago, I forget when and where and with who, but I know I lost. It's funny. I'm not sure how well I can remember now, or how well I remembered things then. Can we trust ourselves to remember anything purely for what it was? Can we remember anything, write or tell anything that relays a pure emotion, that getting-back-to, that one feeling that permeated our existence for a day, or a few hours, or even just a second? Can we recapture it, or is it gone?

If only there were bottles for these things. Bottles for sunshine, bottles for bonfires, bottles for the color green and for the smell of a basement full of kids in love. I would have a collection.

But I know we can all be new. Green doesn't get any less green, no matter how many times it reappears. The Sun doesn't die. My backyard might fall off of a cliff, but I'll have you all in my heart, and I'll never let you go, no matter how my memory degrades over time. You're as shiny as ever, do you know? I keep writing about you, over and over and over. I'll keep thinking of you, every summer that begins.

I love you. Every one of you. And I don't think, anymore, that it really matters why.

You still look like God, you're built on stilts. Face in shadow, towering above, carved out of soap. I want to grow up to meet your eyes. I want to reach up and pull you down to my face, so I can talk into you. I'll learn to be tall as the Sun and to shine down over you, pouring light into your corners, seeing all of you at once. I'll bring myself to your height, and suddenly, we'll be like waves crashing into one another and settling back into the sea. Swimming in mirrors, your image and mine pressed like silhouettes onto an endlessness of white, dividing the world in half.

To catch a wisp of your hair in my fingers. You're the picture in my locket when it opens to a heart. I'm always looking for you in the rooms of my head, turning on the lights at night and whispering your name into the space. Are you there? Are you listening? I wait for the reply, the echo of my lonely notes upon the air. You are there, some hidden, lurking presence existing on the edge of every feeling like a slipping memory. I want to touch you before you're gone. I knew when I first met you that if we would end, we'd end violently. Flames in my head, everything exploding, apocalypse. Fire, fire, fire.

You're sleeping now, and I can see the way you look with closed eyelids. I hope I always wake up before you, and can watch them flutter open, smile spread across your face.

Always waiting for that tiny little smile to turn up the corners of your mouth, make you crinkle like paper once flat, now new. Your silences fill my mouth with sweet stones I crush between my teeth, tastes so feathery, the branches I climb when I reach up to the sky to feel the faces of the clouds looking down at me, so sweet. The breath of summer fills my eyes with air and light and it holds us together, hands clasped, blind. All the pages that I write could add up to hundreds of little rhymes, they fill my time with frames of mind and feelings held close to a heart or two, but they don't hold on to you. There are only numbers to chase after you, clinging feebly to those memories caught like fireflies in sparkling jars that dance between my dreams, all clambering and green as grass. And why? you ask, it's something that climbs crazily up my spine, that pulls my face into that lovely shape. It's you, it's you, words slide off like water and pool, and nothing sticks. We're oblivious. We're a blur, millions of fast colors drawn up into some shiny, swimming handful of adjectives.

My feet are tired but my heart is beating and bright and full and it will carry me for as long as I will it.

Sometimes you must sharpen your needles and swallow your tongue and sew those holes up so you can't crawl into them and hide any longer, trying to hurt yourself inside of them. I found the way out and I've blocked it off until it explodes open again. And I'll keep running to the light, wherever it goes, however dim it becomes.

I want to see. Peel back my eyelids. Inflate my crushed lungs, free me from the debris my hands make. If we create our own misery, we can kill it just as easily.

"My body is a cage... that keeps me from dancin' with the one I love, but my mind holds the key."

Things have been ripped out of me.

I hope I can sew myself back together.

I was never good enough for you, and I never will be.

(So many times, I'd try to make you understand, explain it forwards and backwards, a million ways, but you just weren't there. We were never on the same plane. Disconnected, I'd just curl up next to you, just wishing, wishing, wishing you'd just know.)

So fuck it.

(No! No! NO! I didn't want to let you go, I didn't want to just.)

I'm a ghost. Why don't you listen? Why don't you listen? Why don't you

(I finally did it, I finally, finally said something, it was easy really, it just spilled out of my mouth, these brave words just spilled out before you and you said, no. You said, I do not accept your sacrifice. I do not accept your, this.)

listen?

I can never talk to you, why don't you ever tell me? You never TELL me! You never tell me.

(Never, never, never, never, no, there can't be that many, I just. What? I just, just, I'm trying to sort things out in my head, but they're so... something, there's no, words, there's no, logic, there's no beginning to the story, no anything, nothing.)

Goodnight.

All of a sudden, everything just falls into place. Friends fall down, but they get back up. Dust off your knees. Chin up. I think I can almost hear your smile through the phone, it's like, finally, finally, finally, F, R, double E.

I don't know where I'm going. Don't know where I'm going to be next month, this summer, next year. I might just up and get outta here, but hey, you know, I don't really mind not having a plan. Let's play it by ear, let's just let the days stretch out in front of us like blank canvases we'll cover in paint.

The rain is washing all signs of winter away. Lights breaking through the sky, it's beautiful. Everything is gonna get clean again. All of us are going to feel new.

Today I saw purple flowers shooting up through the mud, and it reminded me of something long forgot. A flower at the top of the Alpensee, so blue and tiny and perfect. I remember all of the cow bells ringing, a chorus of chimes, and the clouds slowly rolling, and the water, smooth and shiny ripples calmly billowing in the breeze. We had reached the end of a journey, and it was so unbelievably satisfying, just undescribable. Sometimes photographs just can't even capture that moment, when you don't know something has happened that will change you, but later you look back and you realize how happy you were, and that means something.

So maybe this means something, too.

Some songs, I play on repeat for hours and hours. Just listening to it over and over, letting the words sink into my brain, get absorbed forever, attached to a memory.

I'm just a person. Anyone could be like me. Whose love am I worthy of? I-I-I, I just don't know.

Sometimes I just wish for a postcard from a faraway place, "I wish you were here"; sometimes I wish I was sendin' one to you. Sometimes I wish our brains were connected so you could just know everything that I feel. Sometimes I wonder if you can read my mind but you would never tell me, never let me know your secret. I'll never tell you that one of mine, never ever ever. You'll never know. But I wish you could. I wish you could just know, I wish, wish, wish, you could just know.

(Big long slur of mixed-up mumblings.)

Pan the images 'cross my crossed eyes. Line them up like criminals and cross out our smiles. Slice open my chest and pull out a heart, weigh it on the scale, how much is it worth? (Make some calculations.) Ahh, that's all good and well, but how can you tell, can you tell, can you tell, what it means? What's inside of that bloody, purply thing? That mangled pulsating mess? That collection of dripping tubes?

(A Libra with Virgo tendencies and unstable mental/emotional/physical/psychological/social processes.) Less than threes, paths lined with trees, so many, too many mes. Walking through the memories, viewing them from a distance like artworks in a gallery (Don't touch!). See the detail, see the artistry? The paint daubs, the brush strokes, the little intricacies?

It's flyin' by. Fast and slow. Play. Stop. Go. I thought once, Life is such a movie; a whisper I wrote, a secret only you can know. Clutch it close, keep it deep inside; so many things to hide, hide 'em in those lines and lines.

I left you behind. All the stutters and smudges in you added up to this great big unanswered question, still unanswered; you've got some blank space in you, think maybe I could fill it up. Maybe I could sum it up somehow, gather up the loose ends and tie them in a knot. No, no, you've rotted away on my bookshelf, and you're an old self, an I-don't-want-to-return-to-that self.

I am sorry.
I am sorry.
It is very difficult.
Stay afloat. Keep your eyes open.

I'm nervous, now.

It was simple enough. You reached in and pulled something out; I got curious, maybe even addicted to the feeling. Then I shut up, closed like a box, don't I always do that.

A pendulum swinging from spontaneous to predictable.

Finding things around the house. Little lost trinkets, scattered about like heaps of debris left by a tornado. Your hair. Your eyes, subconscious images floating to the surface of this black pool I'm swimming in. There was a dream, I remember, in which I lost things like this, and drowned in them, beneath the incomprehensible weight of them. I choked on the water and gave up, I held all of your burdens in my arms like I said I would, but I was too weak to stay alive. You cannot even begin to imagine how sorry I felt then.

The guilt wraps me up like a cold cloak. The feeling of not being enough, of not being ____ enough or _____ enough. "Fuck you!" In that dream I had, I remember telling you, and it didn't even matter. You know I've tried to throw this off but it clings to me. This feeling of constantly being freezing, barely there; sometimes, I completely disappear. You say something, I don't answer. I've left the confined space of thoughts and wandered off. I've gotten myself lost.

I can't be certain of anything now. As if I have been at all recently. Time slides through my fingers, I sleep it away. Stare at the screen, hide under blankets and pretend I don't exist. I was sitting at the breakfast table, my head cocked to one side, looking at that thick-bladed knife, thinking, Left hand picks it up, jams it into the left side of my neck, slit my throat open. But I'd be okay, we'd all laugh about it later. Whenever I talk to you about suicide, you say, Don't do it! Don't do it! We joke about it; makes it easier to forget those thoughts. You didn't say anything this time, probably because I just blurted right in front of everyone, so violent and yet not really shocking. Nobody really said anything.

I lied about that, I avoided it first when you asked me and then I just nodded, 'cause I didn't feel like getting into it. Maybe it would've creeped you out, or made you sick. Maybe you would've been upset with me, thought I was stupid, anything. I used to hide it under tape, but now I don't really care. I just get bored. It's not a big deal.

I said I might take this out on myself. I might throw it around; maybe hold it in, maybe let it go, maybe explode. We'll see how it goes. I can imagine my diet fluctuating, walking alone, scribbling in a ragged hand pages and pages of angsty nonsense, seeing things vividly and tuning out and losing focus and tripping over things. Who really knows. I'm not getting into a habit; I'm not going down that road. I'm not alone, I know, I know. It's just that there's all these things I have to say that I know are going to come out wrong, and I get all jittery and lose my tongue and fuck it up. I tear down tall walls with my stupid hands, watch them fall, build them back up again. Tiny little hands, but they'll douse this poor excuse for a home in nail polish remover or gas and throw a lighted match in, walk away.

That's my account, minus the sweetness or joviality or friendliness caught inbetween. Minus any important lines of speech, minus any touch or movement or gasp of air or slant of light. It's not really an accurate account at all, it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't truly describe how I feel. So there it is. Not going to try to organize or take any conclusion from it. I suggest you don't try to sort out who the you is, because it's going to be a tiresome task, and there's more than one you that I'm speaking to, and if you guess at it, you'll be wrong anyway.

Maybe I'll have another try at this later. It sure isn't sounding like anything right now.

I miss you.











I don't know what to do. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What do I do? Can I call you? Or you? Where you are, what you are, I just can't figure out. Notes rise like snow blown up above me, cold and strange and I can't decipher what anyone is saying, and I'm swimming in this inbetween, gulping it, living in it, like I used to swim in your veins, and I miss you. Gettin' caught up in this storm, it envelops my ankles, think I'll get lost in this, lost in the white. Send me away somewhere I don't have to decide, send me away in a block of ice. And then someday I'll thaw and be discovered like some precious stone mined from deep in the Earth. And I'll walk away like a prophet and swallow up the world. Eat everything, eat it all and be full.

But now, so empty. So eyeless. I used to watch them moving to and fro, I used to catch the delicate gestures, the elaborate mechanisms of communication, bodily mannerisms. I used to watch this all and sigh and write and smile from a corner. I used to take it in. And now I watch from the middle as the seas part from me, billowing waves stretching so far across the end of them is endless; and I am left empty. Lines and shapes blur, dim, pass away. I. Can't. See.

What is happening to me? What is happening?

Shuffle your feet, girl. Get back up. Throw off the blankets and walk. But I don't know if I can. The habit's back again. Quell it, quench it, but I don't want to run away, but I want to; and I'm so confused. Where do I put these hands? Where do I place my feet? So clumsy. Walking disaster. Walking mess. And at the end of this?

The bridge? The creek covered with ice, beckoning? My tiny hands, scribbling, pleading for some chance verse to save them? They're cold and bony and dry and covered with scratches. They reach for unnamed objects in the darkness, things that are gone, things that are broken and discarded.

But what is left?

And my first thought is,
You're fucking kidding me, right?

This is a dream?

No.

-

I woke up this morning and pried my eyes open with my fingernails. I pulled on my clothes, and in a stupor, I drove to school. I was going to return a book. I pulled the door towards me, and it was heavy, and as I strolled through the library, I noticed her hair.

"Hey."

And when I turned to face her, I immediately saw it.

The blood dripping from inside her shirtsleeves.

-

I blinked. Once. Twice.

It was suddenly gone. The initial shock subsided, wore off. I put my books on the table and looked into her face. Nothing wrong there. No signs of upset or stress.

We talked for a few minutes, and then I did what I had come there to do. Nothing extraordinary happened. It was just normal.

But I still don't get it. I can't get my mind around it. I think that it will just go away.

-

I sat down on one of the benches. I figured I'd just hang out until someone came along that I could talk to.

I scribbled down some lines. Things that were stuck in my head. I didn't think about what I was writing too hard when I wrote it, but I went back and read it later, and it seemed quite jumbled. Nothing spectacular.

I heard the click-clack of heels or boots or whatever from some distance down the hallway, and looked. Her hair. She came closer.

Then, I saw her face, hidden underneath. The streaks of smeared makeup, the bloodshot eyes, puffy cheeks. She had obviously been crying hard.

"Hey. What's wrong?" She looked up.

And it was the strangest thing, her face was perfect. No tears, no vestiges of sorrow. I said, Nevermind, but I felt funny saying it. It was just strange.

-

The obituary appeared in the paper a few days late, as if nobody even noticed it had happened. I've been trying to talk to people about it, but they avoid the subject.

Sometimes, when I'm alone and I let myself think, I wonder if it really happened.

I'm not sure of anything at all. I've been questioning my perceptions. I've been tripping over things and running into walls and doors, lost in thought.

All I know is, this is something. This is different. I'm going to write everything down, no matter how little sense it makes. I just have to sort it out in my head.

I dream of horrible mishaps. Mangled limbs and machine parts, smiles crossed out with red pens, losers, trapped in the gap between life and death, clinging to a tiny bit of happiness.

You're all photographs, strewn and wilted in some flooded basement, underneath the weight of some decaying, endlessly empty house. I worry that it will collapse while I am gone, and when I come back I will have forgotten everything.

I do not want to forget. I carry it as far as I can, and it is so heavy; these nightmares and stories are stuck to me like leeches, and they're not mine, they're not mine.

I was born into an empty space, and as I tried to fill it with memories, it expanded and grew to some incomprehensible size. It drips with water, and my head gets heavy, and when I fall asleep, the sea comes back to me. Between murders and death cries, the waves collide, soft and powerful and cold, white hands pressed against my face, filled with winter. They only speak in backwards whispers, calling out to me. The sea, the sea, the sea. It keeps coming back to me.

I hide under rocks, and my hair turns into seaweed. My hands turn into sand. Someday I'll eat shells and carry children's feet across the beach, to the water, where they'll laugh so loud against my ears, I'll laugh back. And I'll never eat my words again, and there will be no vacancies to fill, I'll just be full of the world with the water in my mouth and the Sun filling me with light. And I won't dream at all.

Muted, you're a solid dark eye that marks the world cold and strays. Take a tape player and catch the leaves in a steel-stringed net, they burn silhouettes onto your memory. You're loud and old and used-up like headlines in a newspaper. I remember you, I remember when you said you were sorry and cried so hard I felt your sorrow rattle through me. In the gutter, you left me a relentless storm of consciousness, battling your dreams into the freezing black water. Didn't I hold your hand once, and say, You're okay, You're okay, You're okay, so small, like a prayer under a shoe. I told you then, and you knew.

Ashes fell and covered your hair like snow, haloed your head with the arson you committed. Born again under the Sun, you roared forward, proclaimed this page written in some witch-cat's book. You melted like a flower into the foliage, I think you were always a child of the forest. Green dawned on your lips one day and you were in your place, under the flash of a camera with a half-smile. I chased and chased you, keep on running until my legs break, but you're far away, high up like a clever butterfly and I just can't reach. I send you love letters in your sleep asking you to come back to me someday, but I think you're lost in the music that your mind makes, tangled in the rocks and dirt and grass and all your mirth that maybe we're just separate, muse and poet, disconnected.

Moving too fast, way


too





fast.





Sometimes, I catch the scent of some memory lingering in my subconscious, long forgotten, long neglected. It's as if some season or day or certain kind of weather or certain epiphany or other is just wandering about in me, and for a moment, my new eyes look into my old eyes, and I can see something amazing, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of...

... of what? God, nowadays I can't even be bothered to explain anything. I feel like a character in a novel, being pulled along by a pen that I used to love to use, but by now it's a tired chore that I just do, and try not to think about.

But, once in awhile, some little wisp comes tickling my nose with a scrap of an emotion I can barely recall, and I feel something beautiful and otherworldly. I guess it's a way to travel back in time... maybe it's some kind of miniscule escape into a dream. Just a tease, an easily lost impression. Lost out of the window, lost out of the ends of my hair, lost out of the shadows underneath my bed. Tiny fragments, of what I don't know.

On another note, or maybe not so much, I understand why, Esther Greenwood. At least, I think I can understand. I've been trying to piece it together, been thinking it over, and it makes sense to me why. I wish I knew if there was a word for it, because I feel it, too. "The Problem That Has No Name." I don't know if we're reliving any certain overly domestic era, and I don't even believe that it was only then that it happened. I think that it just always is. Everything just hanging over your head, inadequacy like shackles, and everything fake. Living in a Surrealist painting, only the beauty is the evil, and it isn't really real, and you can't be part of it. You have to melt, down, you have to fall into the cracks like dust. Ahhh. Who knows if I'm making any sense. I never do, anyway. And besides, it's a futile thing to think about. It's a point that's impossible to make and be certain of, a totally useless problem to solve. Because everything's not mathematical, and I know I'm rambling by now, but I just can't ever figure things out, and have them stay that way. They unravel, like the most perfect red sweater caught in some ugly steel machine.

Je ne suis pas certain que j'existe. Peut-être je suis seulement air, et tout ce que je fais est se déplacer. Un fantôme que personne ne peuvent entendre. Tous le temps je cherche des horloges afin de mésurer moi-même. Mais pourquoi? Je ce fais, pourquoi? Je ne sais pas ce que je suis! Ah, je suis stupide, je suis confuse. Je suis la fille qui ne peut pas décider. Un moment, je ris, et le prochain, je disparais.

(I wrote you a poem, just for you, just for you, and I never read it. I never told you how I felt, and I think I have to make up for it... it doesn't make sense. One day, I was walking, I was just walking down the street, watching all of the people swarm the crosswalk like a mass of insects coming after me, and I felt like I was somehow gone, had been gone for some time. Perhaps I had disappeared before I even started to be deathbed-philosophical, before I realized that j'avais oublié la douceur de monde. And then I was erupting, but I didn't let it show, because nobody would have seen it anyway. The phone calls, the tones of and the hints in everything; I wondered, had some monster crawled out from underneath my bed and devoured my soul as I slept, unaware? J'ai été frustré. Drowned in that notion, and others. Et maintenant? Rien. Non, je ne suis pas correct. Pas rien. Seulement les poèsies.)

A letter, so feathery, so many letters... I tried to write,

I am so frightened.

I had a dream that I skipped school, but that I could see everything that happened while I was gone, my professor checking to make sure that I was absent, my name a shred, a lick of dust stirred by artificial light fixtures. So much paper, so many words, falling between faces and getting lost. I remember I used to rip the pages from those books, and replace them with my own, lesser versions. It seems useless, though. Too much text for too few feelings. Now, a four-word sentence, subject, verb, adjectives, seems to hold more weight than anything I've ever read or written. I am so frightened. I am so frightened.

Blood in my mouth, and everything's so dark, and heavy, and I can't help but think,

I dreamt.

Black clouds in a white sky, God had dripped ink upon the air, chuckling. Lightning whispered through like arrows. The creek was freezing, and I was in its deep black ripples, between ice cubes. A test? Anyway,

A wide wooden church, lofty-ceilinged, is known by the obsessed. The obsessed, are obsessed almost to the point of possession, with religion, their religion. I do not know what kind of religion,

Rituals. They pray and pray, not to die in the storm that arrives.

The part.

You always say, I would give my right arm for, I would give my life for. I would slice my hands clean off if I saw. I would slit my throat if I knew. If you broke my heart. If you broke my mind. If you tore out my soul, I would hope to die. I would hope that my body would just disappear.

And parcel.

You keep a little to yourself. Your gifts and offerings hang on strings in the air, all floating baubles bobbling and twinkling, all starry. You say, This is enough. You think, Is this enough. Is it enough for you? You wish you could give, more, even though you're holding it all in. Hypocrit, cursing and praising yourself all the time, pacing back and forth wondering how to do two things at once. Is that selfish or lost? You try to make it enough. You think hard, and you give the most of you.

All the musing is a shiny tear in a tiny bowl. You could stare for hours at yourself, trying to figure it out, trying to solve the mystery, but then you'd be accused of vanity. You could stare into the television pixels, you could discover puzzles and harmonies hidden in everyday noise, but then you'd be accused of lunacy. You could sit on the edge of everything and comtemplate for hours on end, staring out as if from behind a plate of glass, but oh, that's so awful lonely.

All that sound underneath you has got to be so heavy. Who holds it up must have red and scratched hands. An underearth God full of red sweat. I watched a moth die, it was white as noise.

I imagined a cloak made of milk jewels. It was following you into the mirth, but there was no one inside it. When it realized it was floating, all the crinkled bag laughter stopped, as if washed away in the silk of tide waves. I wonder if the moth was lost, I think it was scared.

You wake up with your face close to the dirt and the mud. You have dry leaves in your hair the color of life and sun flooding your eyes with silver flecks. It rises up over the world and falls straight into you, but you're like a mirror, it makes you almost heaven, like I could almost reach through you but if I only had more faith. You are whatever animal you choose to be, today. Maybe a happy bear, or just contented, maybe something that lives in the sea. I would want to be a bumblebee, today. I often am wondering, what is it like to make love upon a flower?

(And I knew that it was lovely to have a Black Bear thinkin' of me... )

I wrote something for you.

All I can think about are invented comic superheroes with personality defects and stuffed narwhals hanging from ceilings, horns painted chalky white. I want to buy a book and tear it apart. I want to waste my money.

Sleeping on the bus, I could hear through the unstable waves of consciousness each bump and scrape, and felt under my head the bounce and settle of travel, and it lead me to strange places in my mind. It amazes me how many things are you. A color is you, a scramble is you, a collection of grass and sticks and twigs is you. Will we run away someday and have all of our dreams come true?

I'll write these days down and paint them into pages and pages. Someday, they will be a book, and someone will buy them and rip them up.

There's a field full of thistles at the end of my street where my feet would be pleased to be placed. The tall stalks shine and sway only in the moonlight, lifting their smiles to the sky. Curled ends are frames for faces, pretty like old hand-colored family album portraits locked in dusty trunks. It's beautiful, the present; all the moving air breathes with new life and the life of memories.

I try to reach back and touch the veil that covered our eyes. Maybe I am checking to see if it is still there, surviving the decay. It is pale, papery gold. It is grease on the fingertips. It disappears when you wash the day away, and stains your skin again with stray stars if you let it. Whispers in the dusk bring its rusty rustle to my ears. I feel funny, but not afraid. This is what we were. Sticky little bugs cling to our eyelids, and every summer lurks shadowy, and torches stand high in the dirt, story-telling and glowing fire while sighs haunt the corners of the sleepless child's chambers. Winking galaxies peek into the windows, calling.

Take a walk.

All the tiny cracks in the cement make maps. Leaf clusters nod in the breeze as you pass, scratchy on your arms and legs. There are streetlamps. An undescribable glow spreads down across the flat blackness like a halo; it's an orange ghost you follow. Tip-toe. Everything is still but you. Hushed houses purr, slumbering, fuzzy squares disintegrating into hazy dark fur. If you run, you might just slip through time; you could just cut through time and space and meet a stranger on the other side of the world. Everything is possible.

And if you see me, blurry in the dandelions and the dust, then maybe we'll be friends. Do you remember? We held hands. In the creases, you held your thoughts, and I traced them through the universe. Our mirth rose to the treetops, draped in green leaves and light beams. Sunset came, and left us staring blankly for its color, but we discovered in its absence hole-punched realms of mystery. Do you remember? It was not so long ago.

It's just down the road.

Are we aliens?

I have decided that I am going to make a music video for "The Adjustor" in my Videography class, and, if I have time, perhaps "The Bends" or "Cremation" as well. I think that I picked these three songs because for the most part, they do not have any vocals ("The Bends" has a phrase here and there, and "Cremation" has only breaths) and therefore, I have a lot of options for shots, and room for interpretation. That's always helpful when you're scrambling to fill space at the last minute, and besides, I already have stories waiting to be filmed up in the dim, dusty attics of my mind.

I have to say that this video project seems like the only exciting thing happening recently. I am excited for the party tonight, but, as usual, I am picturing the worst-case scenario. Ahhhh. I will try to be optimistic. I will try my darnedest. I probably should stop harboring all of these conversations with myself, I should probably stop arguing with my conscience and just do what needs to be done. I just wish there was more time. Things will be better though, I know they will. After a talk with a good friend, things look a few shades brighter. My eyes have opened a little wider, and my weight is easier to carry. Everything will be better.

From here, you can see wide white lights and computer screens. You can hear clicks and clacks and rapidly-tapped keys, sniffles, the jingle-jangle of chains or house keys or car keys; there is a comfortably muffled buzz, words said everywhere; here, you are surrounded by soft blank jungles of harmless noise.

Though I cannot see out the windows that lie beyond this room, I can imagine the tennis courts staring in through them, soaked red and green and dreary. Oh, we are all complaining about the state of the weather, oh how yucky, oh how ugly it is. But I wonder, is it any better out there, would it perhaps be a refreshing journey to stroll along the perimeter, to visit the lonely courts simply to be surrounded by something cold and wet? something concrete, something bitingly, insistently, existent?

Our environment is being invaded by so many housing developments and commercial ventures and ugly complexes and plazas and structures and oh! who wants to be out in the world when it is raining? I wonder, is it so wonderful to be enclosed? I have been leaving my windows open at night, just to let in the frigid midnight air, but every morning I am asked to close them. Stifled, stifled, always pushed into some tiny compartment of expectations and conformities and standards. Take a walk at night, the police stop you on the sidewalk. Go home. Go to bed. Well, I might just take the longest walk I have ever taken. I might just not come back. Every day, I feel farther and farther away from this created sense of place. I wonder if I belong. Anywhere. It becomes more and more difficult to speak about anything of value, even to that perpetually haloed boy or that forever-smile or anyone admirable. I have been so brave, but I cannot name this current mindset. Cannot categorize it, and I have spent so long pondering upon it.

Still, when I see the sunset across the field from your front yard, I wonder, "How can anyone possibly want anything?"

It is all such a knotted mess of things.

Elephants,



Not all those who wander are lost

I have the fondest little memory of sitting in the backseat of my mother's bright red 1988 Nissan Sentra, listening to Fine Young Cannibals and laughing with her as we became airborne speeding over railroad tracks in that middle-of-nowhere world we lived in when I was a kid. It felt so endlessly exciting, as if the Earth was a still, soundless place that we had molded ourselves into a happy ball of neverending country roads.


We moved away, and I sort of lost my identity when we left behind the tiny apartment and the four big, beautiful horses and the labyrinth of a stable and the scaredy-cat barn cats and the pond and the acres and acres of gorgeous, empty forest that never really belonged to us. It is a funny thing; it felt like everything just fit together so perfectly then, just dovetailed completely, a masterpiece of a puzzle.


A few of the pieces have gone missing since. I hold the weathered handful that remains in an unsteady palm, worrying that eventually every last one will be misplaced. Eventually, everyone will be misplaced, and I fear that day the most of all. I wonder where we will all end up, and in my wonderings, I come to an excerpt of an A Silver Mt. Zion song that Kevin has had in his profile forever.


"Lost a friend to oceans
Lost a friend to hills
Lost a friend to suicide
Lost a friend to pills
Lost a friend to monsters
Lost a friend to shame
Lost a friend to marriage
Lost a friend to blame
Lost a friend to worry
And lost a friend to wealth
Lost a friend to stubborn pride
And then I lost myself."


Where will we go? How will it end? Are we doomed to die alone? I feel so helpless, asking these questions. And I want to tell everyone how much I want them to feel happy, to be happy remembering what was and what is, and that I would do anything that they asked of me that would make them feel that way, because I love them. I really hope that everything works out for the best. I hope that they are happy.

The color of God that lived happily in the sky for four happy days has run away. Its vanilla breath lingers yet in my mind, its long-ago leaves rushing past my face; too ancient and too whimsical to hold. Oh, but the sweet transient fragrance still tingles in my nostrils; pins and needles in my head, a heavy, dizzy, meandering weightlessness.

The crows cried on that fourth day, screaming murderous, desperate wishes to the collapsing air: "No! No! Do not leave us alone!" The circles they flew over my head were hypnotizing, a mad cycle of hopeless movement and shouts, trying to perpetuate a dream.

I had a dream... I had a dream that we were running through an airport and I was pulling on your arm, hard, holding on as if an apocalypse awaited our disconnection. Our bodies were pulsing and shaking with the anxiety of impending grief. I felt it wrinkle through my panting face, I saw it in a glimpse back to yours, I felt it in my scissor-legs cutting through lines and frantically searching, blinded by numbers and people and luggage. The brush of that approaching separation, the doom at our fingertips, it drove, pushed, prodded us onward in a frenetic, insane way. Every face and figure a blur, we tripped across floors, running...

It struck a nerve. It really struck a fucking nerve. It has been nearly a week now, but between every voice hides that soundless, hectic dream, almost a whisper in my ears, but too slippery and too flimsy to hear. My thoughts chase after it, inventing and inventing like slow animals bumbling about every which way. I am confused; what to say? Where to put myself? I feel too big and awkward to fit anywhere, a mess of pointless limbs.

I tried to invent an escape. Contemplating the water, I found new dreams... dreams of drowning in each folded ripple, dreams migrating about me... away and back again, moving against my flesh like soft blankets soothing me into that sleep. That content sleep. I want to be free. I want to be free of this face and its crumpling, free of lockered hallways, free of curtains and televisions and these backward feet. Free to roam this lovely tectonic field teeming with hums and rattles, free to roll over it all, free. Free in the wind, free atop a bicycle seat, free living in a treehouse. I wish I could have written you this letter.

I'm sorry.

A blank office, a clipboard of sharp clean paper... the light in the rectangles above trickles over my forehead in shiny little squares, geometric and white. It is busy here, filled with traveling voices and the tap-tap-tap of shoes on stairs and carpets. The stained glass eyes stare out from berry-blood sockets, aristocratic and pretty; below them a long grey tongue descends in steps and pools out across the interrupted footspace. The bodies enter and exit, content but full of rain, exchanging brief greetings with whomever looks through the glass to speak. I can barely feel my frozen toes in their canvas sacks as I breathe in the cycled air that circumvents my heavy heart, clasping and unclasping my sweaty palms.

I was thinking about the holes in your socks as I disappeared into the fabric of the passenger seat, and it almost made me smile.

This week is sucking up eternities trying to begin, leaving me senselessly little and yet horribly fat with bursting phrases. Will the seams holding together the blanket-hush of clocks snap and collapse like unstable haystacks? Will time topple and crash, a car wreck? I can see the twisted metal carving lines into the landscape of formal silken flesh and I feel so impatient. I wonder if the genuity of the tragic hero's tale has been replaced by the useless sophisticated sound of your unhappy laughter. What has become of song? Oh, I am lost in this sudden mind-trap. It is isolate here, between crowded dialects and desks and balloon hearts floating invisibly up. I hear each one pop, pop, pop... bombs of disappointment exploding in my pulsing chest; I run and run and run, thoughts slipping and tripping through the cold wet world as I chase your outline home. Every moment melts together like some ugly volcanic rock forged in fire... they blacken into one as you fall out of my hands, as my torso scrapes some windy attic floor, tossed like a threadbare ragdoll into this realm of nerves and night.

The chalk-blood of snowmen covers the lawn-boxes like a papery rust. It powders my jacket with the residue of murder as I stand silent and still at the top of the treacherous stairs. I could take one step... a slip of the sneaker and my sad spine could snap in half, and my grave, too, would be covered in a coat of ash.

Each slow cerulean drip curves over the desert of tarnished skin, journeying a path to the caverns of a chin. This wound is a movie, and I see the girl with three knives in her face, bleeding blue as if made of tears. Those lines arc down, down; she's picture-perfect colorless but for a bite of angry sapphire; a self-mirror, gorgeously destroyed.

Will I let you die? Will I let you vanish like an icicle in March? I will pursue your memory down that dark, long street until my brittle bones break, until I lay prone, demolished in the empty universe under that lonely streetlamp. I will clutch your body and cry.

There exists this ravenous eater of sorts, this stabby-beaked blank-eyed fuzzy grey body, a long-legged lump, dirty and clutchy and musty. This eater, this surreal depiction of a satanic feathered skeleton, cuts through the tangled cords with its lashing mouth. They spark, shock its dull eyes further into blackness, pulse through its dangling open claws, shaking, shaking, strangling legs and tiny ugly wings with tiny bursts of lightning. There is little feeling left, the electricity is dead-alive-dead-alive-dead. Every prong on every plug is bent, and every outlet hangs skewn on jungle walls made of paper and string. An ugly bird in a fake falling-apart forest, stumbling jaggedly through seas of beads that roll under its deformed talons, an ugly bird exists. Like some small disgusting error, it limps through this green melting world, horrid, ugly, ugly, shaking, shaking. The only thing it wonders, the only words it imagines in its broken, crackling skull, is why, why, why! as it treks ghostlike, aching, numb.

Today, today... oh! To keep today stored in a treasure chest.

Today, I am the bright red amidst the dead yellow. The bright blue brought up by the sun; the child born of space and stars. The elusive dancing life, laughing with the skeletal remains of the corpse of summer. Today, today I am the burning essence of my sky-parent, a swirling mix of fire colors, and nothing can drown my happy shouts! Not the frozen oceans deep with purple mysteries, not the white stacks of ice floating in their dense waters. Oh, that flaxen circle emanates blithe light like an infant filament, and I reflect every particle. My eyes are so filled, my legs are so merry, even in sleep I will not stop singing, skipping, ecstatic with the kinship that filters through the scattered empty branches of the trees and warms me to my soul. And oh, I will sleep smiling, with this jubilant heat in my heart, clutching today to my chest!

The world in the window is grey. It is so, so, utterly grey, bloodless, devoid of color. The white sky pours its light into the branches beneath but it falls through, dies beneath the ground that is weak, crumbling, lifeless. Nothing is held by the day... it is meandering, moving haplessly across the Earth without enthusiasm or hue.

I wish to ask you what I cannot bring myself to say. Why do you ignore what tries to love you? Why do you remove yourself from the words I try to give you? Why do you hate so deeply what has never meant any harm when doing just the opposite would bring you the happiness you are searching for? Why do you simultaneously push away and yearn for something easily within your reach? You are echoing the world, you are conforming to the likeness of its directionless motion. Do you not see that you are forcing your life to fit into a mold, to become a paper cut-out that is blank and vacuous and destitute? It is not what you want, unless what you want has twisted itself in your mind and faded into something selfish and ugly.

Where is the care that you used to show? I am lost as to whether it has been deleted or is desperately missing. My own has been stumbling drunkenly along in this dying universe, where even the stars have been obscured and the cats' claws are too dull to scratch. But I know, I know it is there and is hopeful and faltering, for these questions arise searching for your own and for you. I stare into your soul because it once glittered for me, and I cannot let that rich mystique that held me slip away. You were brown and orange and red and warm and ardent when my eyes stole the image that was in yours, you were energetically fecund, the farmer's perfect fertile soil, vivacious, resplendent! Where are you, where have you staggered to? What has enshrouded your exploding brilliance and stunted your frenetic growth?

I wish to ask of you what I cannot bring myself to say. I long for you to stay. I wish you would consider what seems too abstract instead of throwing it away. I wish you would see what is little. I wish you would comb through me with the confusion that plagues your steps, because I don't want you to be alone, I never want you to be alone.

My wish bracelet fell off today.

It was such a short day. It was a calm day, a carefree day, the type of day that you just can't plot on a calendar. It makes you feel so lucky, and so free, to roam through this type of day, to walk where your feet go and not where you tell them to.

Today, when I glanced at the sign on the door before I pushed it open, it meant something different to me. "Protect me from what I want"... with the image of those six words inside my head, an entire play suddenly made sense. What was the author trying to convey? Well, it's a bit too late, but I'll tell you what I think. I think he was trying to convey something that wasn't quite there, something more implied than actual. He wished for the viewer to see the negative space, the no man's land, the maybe pushing the yes away from the no. Even in his writing style, he showed us what was subtle, what was sweet... though making sure to tuck it underneath all the brutality and volume of this world. Among the empty and the lost, he found the rare and beautiful, and chose to write a play about them with little inclusion of their existence. How sensical that they should be nearly absent in our material realm due to cruelty and ignorance, and equally so in his literary realm due to the same things...

The auditorium was a muse for my camera today. It performed with unfilled seats, with closed curtains, with a deserted stage. It was perfect, flawless, met without cheers and cries and hands applauding. But maybe it was better that way.

Kevin and I took a nostalgia trip through the elementary school. It must have been exactly the same. I felt like I was intruding on my own past, as if stumbling over the footprints I had not yet walked. Aren't I still in first grade? Aren't I still in third grade? And fifth? I remember where each room is. I remember how the lunchroom was painted, and I remember pouring out the change in my film canister to pay for the food I ate in it. I remember crying in the office, and running up and down the stairs, and dragging my toy dog around as if it were a pet. I remember being friendless and happy and little and odd. Aren't I still?

Friend walked home with Lee and I once again, and I was glad for his company. Somehow, it put everything in its place. The smell of the sidewalk reminded me of Grimes Glen, and I thought of its pebbles and cold clean sharpness. I think that, perhaps, its frigid water rained here, because I swear I almost felt the wonder of that distant place in the air between the droplets.

Today is fluttering softly through time, jagged and wonderful and subtle and sweet.

It seems that the meager light that invades this room on this shadowy and subtle morning has never looked quite this way. It touches the furniture with a dim hint of light, illuminates the reflection in the television screen only enough to see that it is there, nothing more. As if it is on the edge of brightness... too weak to become more, but enough to satisfy.

The window that it enters from is large and clear. The white lace curtains that hang lazily across it hardly obscure the image seen through them: the great leafy majesty of a towering maple. Its branches, loaded with green, are becoming yellowy around the edges. Beyond, the greyness of the sky reigns its dim light over the ancient royal being. Silently, the clouds swirl, looming ominously as if waiting for the perfect moment to unleash their hidden, unimaginable power.

Everything is still and unbreathing. Not asleep, not unaware, just... paused. As if the entire world has entered a lobby, signed up, and sat down, listening for when its name is called. An indefinite standby mode. Just nearly time, but not yet...

And though enjoying this momentary change in pace, I wonder... why delay? Why this unsettling calm? Perhaps it is a build-up of some sort... a gathering of energy before the full and awesome force is set loose. An instant to replenish, to watch and to know. Well, I know what comes next.

And I just can't wait.

Is it possible that one may assimilate to a personality that is not their own, perhaps even fiction, perhaps even formerly overlooked by the very person who adopted it? Could it be... that I have become a character in a tale filled with magical despair?

If I have the intuitions of that blue-eyed boy, they are floundering now. These memories, once submerged, now resurfacing, are dragging their claws across the tattered landscape of my subconscious with a renewed gluttony. It must be now, in this anxious expanse of time, for once October falls into November I have passed the checkpoint. Then, I have won... that is, unless those sharp curved nails rip through their cage of flesh once more and transform my think-vessel into that of a monster. This happened before, it happened so suddenly and with such voracity, a raging fire that tore and tore and left barren what was once fruitful. I do not want to do this to you, to any of you. I do not want to leave you alone...

But how to defeat it? It seems that there is only solitude. This tunnel pulls me through it unwillingly, compressing my insides with a torturous crunching feeling. I cannot grasp at it, for it is fictional. Over and over again, this occurs. These dreams, these vicious reminiscences; I cannot calm them, cannot force them away. Life and its words become repetitious, each event a mere reflection of something that took place a long time ago. And the deeper I delve into the mysteries within and without my fragile, faltering frame, the closer I come to discovering that the wound is still there, is still soft, is still as purple and ugly as it was when it was made.

It is like the nostalgia plague. Nothing changes, everything stays the same. Evolution deceives us; only advances in technology are made. We have left our principles and morals to the dust, to the hungry moths, to the shadows and the corners. Why do we feel so destitute? This is why. We are characters in a novel. We are waiting for the destruction of all that we know as truth. Have we forgotten its value? Is it no longer a shimmering jewel, but an option, a choice that we prefer to ignore? What do we choose, then? Temporary joy?

I would like to experience some genuine happiness, the sort that destroys the memories permanently. I would like to experience something pure and unadulterated by the decay and disease that lurks in our current world. Would you help me make it? Would you take the chance to make something beautiful out of something carnivorous and false?

Kind words are all lost in the soundwaves that sweep over this evening, the soundwaves that envelop this room in deepening frigidity from the blaze beneath the cream-colored lampshade to the tips of my skinny digits. Whatever wanted to be said has been washed away by the bruiselike blueness of the clouds as the sun fell into the highway. Lost in the lights that flashed past on what seemed like the opposite side of the world. Caught in the bottom of my throat, pushed down, down into the chasms of my empty shell. Why do you use your words like knives? Why do you delve into the unknown with hate on your tongue? I did not make you understand, did not say enough, did not say anything. I can't describe the moments that fly across my lips and fill my lungs with laughing butterflies. I can't describe to you how my psyche squirmed unsleeping as I wished for your presence, not when your pointy finger is in my face. I love the sometimes, the sometimes inbetween the now and the never, when I feel like I know we are both happy, simultaneously, syncopated. But lately, lately... what the fuck has happened? These remarks are so unexpected, so offensive. And I have nothing to say back, there are only thoughts that slide back and forth, black oil on a grey ocean. Are you sincerely telling me that the human race is hopeless? Hopeless to its own flaws and mistakes? That the kind words were never there to begin with, were illusions that the night put on to dazzle my eyes before the sky crashed and fell upon my unsuspecting head filled with dreams? What are you telling me? That there is no purity of heart? You are lying to my face. I tried so fucking hard to impress you, but now I am left astonished, my open waiting hands filled with nothing. Do you understand what you have done? You killed a love. You burned chords out of the mist that hung over my vision. I am displaced because I believed in something greater than being cynical and fake, something higher, better. Yeah, what the fuck is wrong with me? What hope does a mute have for poetry?

Where is the cyan heart? Where is California pen pal? Where is he? Where is the friend that I will never have? Where is the best friend? Where is the laughing girl? Where is the saint? Where is the spider? Where is the twenty-nine-fisted rebel, anxious at the portal that leads to the truth?

Even the employees of the morgue are lost, opening and closing empty drawers one by one in the search for absent bodies. How do people disappear so easily? How do they slip past like whispers, so covertly growing distant and blurry with each muted misstep? Names once chanted are mispronounced and once vivid faces are eroded by waning memories. Why the ship of dust must come to claim souls in the pale grey of evening will always, always, always be a mystery... but such a frustrating one! There are questions upon questions that build and linger and fester around each missing life, piling up unanswered and stationary. With each season that passes, they remain silently, unattached to images or sounds or anything concrete, anything substantial. They are gone. They are not gone. Where, then? Where are they?

"The purple trees are all agape at the saturated blanket of green where they slumber! The vividity has shocked them awake! The green bright shining trees bow meekly to their eggplant-hued leaves! O, for pigments rich and true! Rain makes the Earth hum with a flourishing quenched health!"

Whatever I found this dusty respite, I am now disposing of in favor of ferocity. Waiting has churned my insides. I've noticed that the walls are much too white on the edges of sleep, and that the softness beneath my aching body is too warm, too close. I am wrecking these broken shades with my determined fists and replacing the monotony there with the bright red of my torn throbbing knuckles.

Let's see if ripping things to shreds doesn't make me feel better.

"For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you...

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth."

I had the most beautiful dream a few nights ago. I do believe it was the sweetest nightmare I have ever experienced... it was so hauntingly lovely, so tender and piquant. Upon waking, my mouth was full of this; my shoulders felt soft and my back felt perfectly aligned, as if I had never fallen. I felt relaxed. I have not felt that way in what seems like a very long time.

It began with insignificant images and faces, all of which were almost completely irrelevant to the real core of the dream. When it finally began, I was laying in a room of cool neutral colors, filled with an evening light that was dim and just right. The ceiling was gone from the room, and a storm brewed above, but no rain fell. The bed was familiar though I am quite positive I have never seen nor slept in it... but perhaps it was so comfortable, the air so gentle and sweet, because my love was resting beside me, propped up on his elbows. We were speaking quietly and solemnly, maybe about memories, or maybe about nothing. It was all very calm and still, oh it was wonderful. Soon enough, however, I slipped away from the contentment of serenity, and off of that blanketed island of safety. Into the center of the room I traveled, silently, drawn to that invisible place that held the indefinite stares of four shadowed walls. When I reached it, I was struck by a bolt of quick yellow lightning, and the resounding shriek of someone instantly devastated filled my ears as I fell and was lost in light and sound.

Slowly, death faded, and I found myself ascending from blackness into a golden universe. Heaven appeared to me as an infinite expanse of honey-colored land, bright and warm... breathtaking. It resembled Delaware Park, in fact. I was viewing it from above, for of course, I had the power to fly. I saw people walking their dogs, jogging, sitting near the water's edge... as if death had not changed them at all. In my mind, I wished for a sanctuary, a high place where I could enjoy the solace of the afterlife, where I could be at eye level with the glorious rainbows that appeared in my midst as I floated lazily above the blue ripples and waves. My new home was not far. A small cottage on a mountaintop materialized to my eyes, as if it had been chosen... it awaited my arrival, already furnished, mine. I entered through a broken garage door, and was glad to be able to go upstairs and have a lengthy nap. Next day, I awoke to hushed happy voices and found sunlight in my kitchen. The doors had disappeared from the one-room first floor, but many windows graced its busy walls. It was a bakery. One large window encompassed the entire storefront, another existed near the stairs, there were two in the back, and none on the remaining side (appliances filled the space). Each window told a different story... one was a glowing red sunset; its twin looked out upon the trees and flowers that grew in my yard. The window near the staircase was closed and probably boarded up, for I was unable to open it. The storefront window looked out upon a dirt road where children ran and played, and across the street were other buildings and shops. The town was ancient and innocent. It gave me much pleasure to sell pies and cookies to the giddy youths who never talked but always smiled and giggled, forever skipping together with no real destination. My specialty was chocolate cake. I made immense, rich, elaborately decorated cakes; they must have been delicious. I can't be sure... I never tasted what I made.

I don't know how many weeks I spent in that cottage alone, baking all day and spending my evenings upstairs in my tranquil mahogany bedroom. It was high-ceilinged and filled with soothing blues: a perfect room to study in, to enjoy the crackling phonograph, to gaze out the window that always contained a steady rain, and to truly, peacefully sleep. It must have been quite a while. One morning, I trudged down the stairs in a dress and a robe, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I stepped into the kitchen to see Adam, sitting on the floor in a corner where two cabinets converged, looking overtly forlorn. I was frightened and surprised, but I ran to him, kneeled down before him in wonder and awe. He peered up into my face. Without a word from me, he initiated a detailed explanation of his life on Earth from the moment of my death to the moment of his. He told me that he had screamed and screamed. He told me that he had locked himself in rooms, that he had starved himself over and over again, had written pages and pages of mad words. He said he had had fits, by himself, had ranted and ranted, to himself. He told me that my absence made him insane. He couldn't bear to be alone with all of the nostalgia that had overtaken him. He couldn't stand the images that plagued his brain day and night, the memories and illusions that he could never catch and hold, but only watch and brood over. The confessions fell from his lips easily... we were both so upset and ecstatic. It was unbelievable to feel that. He concluded by pushing the hair off of his forehead with his left hand, revealing an ugly black scar. He had stabbed himself. In the head. It was too overwhelming to look upon for very long, and Adam knew this, for he took his hand away swiftly and let his hair fall back into place. He fixed his eyes upon the floor, waiting for me to reply. I finally sat, facing him. I'm not sure that I said anything, but I assured him that he could stay, that I was not worried, that I regretted his suicide but that things were fine now. We were reunited. I stroked his hair a little hesitantly (but so eagerly), touched his anxious face. He knew that I was astonished. The kiss that ensued held all the beauty that the Earth could never have given us. It was... beautiful...

I think that's why I never tasted anything I baked. It tasted far better than any food could taste. It was, simply put, divine. The dream ended with that scene, but I know that we spent our eternity in that sweet and merry place. It was all so perfect.

I hope I do go to that heaven.

Red, white, orange, yellow... the lights blinked like eyes as the shadows of night passed over them. Staring through the window of a car filled with headaches and fatigue, I watched it all pass by... the city, the highway, the endless galloping cars. And I realized how much I wanted to be out there, rather than trapped in something fast and microscopic. To inhale the open air with my nostrils, to breathe the trees, the grass, the roads, the concrete, the gaudy neon signs of businesses, restaurants and hotels. To run until the sidewalk disappears from under my feet, until I fall into the velvety carpet of midnight blue, until I step on the stars.

I want to disappear. I'll throw myself out the door. Whether you follow me or not, I have these memories. They will keep me safe.

"I love you like a thousand white horses with wings."

So many conversations that never take place, so many motions left undone, words unsaid, all forgotten in yesterdays. I could reach out and touch you, I could let my voice caress your ears with compliments, with the songs my mind sings to me in the silence that drags on, with the feelings that cause the tumult in my stomach. I could tell you. I could burden you with it, all of it. Why not?

I don't know.

That part of me, the part that gives, that throws secrecy to the wolves... that part never works.

And the space that consumes what never comes into existence makes me think harder, until my brain hurts, until it's painful to hold everything in. But something doesn't let me go, something makes me stop myself. I try and try, but often nothing comes of it. I look, I listen, and my eyelids tremble and my lips move to speak, but my tongue is stuck, my teeth are numb, my throat dehydrated and my face just won't work. The expressions it makes aren't mine; don't tell me to smile. Please, read my eyes, read them and know that I am this way.

What I desire more than anything? Freedom from this, from walls and ceilings and floors. Freedom from a body that is too clumsy and too frail to possess the organs pulsing inside. I want to live like my brain tells me to. I want to be myself, for you.

"Where'd you go?"

Shadow-black curtains veil this night with uncertainty. The room that excludes it is dark and cold and desolate, save for a lukewarm soul and a white box. Inside, I am shaking. Inside, I am a jumping bean, I am exploding with art. A firework trapped in an aphotic, half-hearted casket. I am the blinding glow that waits to pierce the dim air, just as this living screen breaks the tiny space into millions of writhing pieces.

I will escape. I am expectant.

It appears that something in the juices of contained rage has revived me, some sour ingredient has caused me to claw at life once again with the fervor of a rebirth. Am I recreating my decrepit personality? Repolishing the bulb of brilliance that once gleamed under that hard cranium I used to own? Have I pushed up the soil that covered my grave?

Is this it?

I feel that I am pounding on the door of reason with twenty-nine fists. Thrashing the portal of logic with as much muscle as I can muster, and still more. What's behind that aperture? My hands are eager to know, to discover... my lungs are gasping for the sweet cool air it promises. Soon.

I'll slip into the illustrious universe of street and stars, of the orange ambiance of tall lamps and the excitement that underlies the deep moonlit hush.

I caught an earful of a radio program about self-esteem today. Two men, discussing the effects of self-esteem on productivity in the workplace, about the factors that cause people to bring themselves down and whether that is good or bad for business. It seemed so casual, so matter-of-fact; something scientific, like medicine, that should be looked at ostensibly. I did not listen long enough to find out whether they bothered to mention the danger of its extremes, or if they even spoke of the people it affects. Perhaps now, having abnormally high or abnormally low self-esteem is considered a handicap or an asset for employment, depending on the circumstances. Do employers actually take that into account?

The nightmares continue. Recently, they are of a more violent nature, and still as real as ever. Last night, I dreamt about a strange game played with strange characters. It involved rolls of coins with odd symbols painted on them and intricately designed, vibrant tokens. Gameplay required a thick deck of dark cards. I distinctly recall an ancient, wise African man having a fit of rage that I won a round. My prize was some sort of flexible, tough-skinned vegetable, which, when opened, revealed many different types of coins, all of currencies I doubt exist anywhere on the planet. At the bottom, beneath the money, were many small pods resembling badly bruised bananas. They were rumored to be delicious (the old man kept complaining that he wished to eat them) but they also spoiled remarkably quickly. They were exposed to the air for minutes and had shriveled, nothing but hard grey wisps remaining. The other players kept threatening to sacrifice this man, and eventually, the vicious arguments erupted into a bloody mess. I'll spare you that part of the dream.

The previous night was filled with subconscious visualizations, some frightening, others tedious. The most poignant dream in the mess was of a death most disturbing... and if it's in any way linked to the world of waking, I am deeply sorry to have imagined it myself. I would never wish such a demise upon this sweet young person. I strongly regret what my mind conjured in this instance.

Apart from dreaming and pondering, in the past couple days I have had one dazzling conversation, sewn a garment that pleased me in its completion, and baked a luscious chocolate cake with help from a knowledgable friend. Yet I feel unaccomplished somehow. I haven't been wasting much time lately... but I have been yearning to go on a long journey for some time now, just go, just leave on my bike and explore. I want to roam about, writing in my journal, photographing various places and people; I want to experience the unknown. I want to move past the boundaries of the miniscule realms I walk through daily and break the mundane cycle that dismays and bores. I want to be free, I want to get out, to let that other, wilder world guide my wheels and my brain.

Maybe I'll disappear tonight. Take my feet away from here. I am finished feeling as if I am starving for excitement. I shall travel.

These past few days have left my eyes blank and staring.

Speech has moved too quickly, the words pushed up against each other as conversation dwindles on. Mouths are blurred and faces grainy while the voices behind them collapse in waves, crashing again and again like a trail of dominoes in an infinite circle. Everyone indistinguishable; phrases and sentences like tangles of transparent thread that fall and lose themselves amongst the cobwebs and dust. I do not follow the motions of the players as they straggle, laugh and triumph, it is all too distant. I sink past this theatrical spectacle, a viewer confused. My skeleton continually detaches from muscle, tissue, and vessel: I am deconstructed, I am losing my composure. My senses are failing, unappreciated and disobeyed. I can't help but wonder whether I am going blind, searching the images hopelessly, that which searches becoming weary and bloodshot with all of the wandering and pondering. Or perhaps I am going deaf instead, for all sounds are defeaning or muted to these ears, too fuzzy to discern the source though they strain to hear. I am merely a stunned participant; my lips zipped shut, eyes sewn closed, appendages in disorder and innards in disarray. I can't move, I can't see, I can't tell what's going on. I feel glued to the spot. I've missed the point, and I'm missing the present trying to decode what's already gone. Dwelling on memories and dreams, I do nothing but dawdle off-center, lost within the hollow cavity I inhabit. Every inclination I create, every thought or theory that evolves in my time-stopped mind flies off into the darkened clouds before I can grasp its meaning, before I have a moment to react. I am dissolving in the solution that surrounds me; fading from the screen where what I can't decipher manifests itself.

And what plays on this distorted television! Chimeras, vivid and terrifying! Reveries of faceless lovers, frantic games involving the capture of eggs, worlds of paper, decrepit arcades, lost hands, millions of sad-eyed kittens, jealous friends, swimming corpses and blue glass rooms... not one night of peace! These symbols plague me needily, grabbing at my head while I slumber and twisting the grey matter contained within into knotted masses of frightening surreality. What do they mean? Anything at all? How can I think about them and continue to eat, to talk, to see or hear? It is all abstract! It is false!

Meanwhile, an ancient battle still wages encased in my white skull. An identity crisis, maybe; a mental fistfight with personality. It's hard to describe, really: I keep experiencing these awkward phases where I travel outside of myself. I've been avoiding evaluation of anything I do, I have no sense of who I am any longer, only who I used to be. And I want so desperately to be that person, to be myself, but I feel like an object. I feel faceless and common. I can only remember and reminisce, I can't see anything ahead of me. The future is soot and ash, reminders of what has been destroyed, killed, erased. I am not plunging forward into the monochrome unknown, I am hanging back and letting it move away. I don't understand why it is that I am like this, why things must be this way now, but my questioning has only led me further astray. What can I do? I am bound and gagged in a musty basement of philosophy. When I clamor for answers, the chains dig deeper into my sun-starved skin. I try to scream but my throat is dry, and my will is leaving me.

I have said that I am happy, that I am fine, alright, good, you know. I suppose I've been keeping what's lying underneath that reply away from you. It's this: we say too much and too little. Often, what is said is less than what is meant, and what is unsaid means more than any mouth can utter. Most words are used senselessly, thrown about without care, while other words lay trapped in teeth and tongues, unable to escape. What is wrong with you?! Why can't you say what you feel? Why must pleasantries and etiquette get in the way? What happened to honesty, to truth? What happened to phone conversations that go on for hours with laughter and tears, jokes and stories and audible smiles? Is it carelessness? Laziness? What acceptable excuse is there for lack of genuity?

I am tired. I have said that before, and I mean it. I ache. I bleed. Though I am frozen, I feel feverish and faint. I'm never let alone, though I am frequently solitary. There has been all of this thinking, all of this planning... so many plans that never come to fruition. It wears me down, along with the rotting summer. The cool draft is comforting, but I feel it is late. It is always late. I am already upset, already shaken. Is this a signal of change? I wish I knew. I'm so uncertain as of late.

Please spare your sympathy and your kind efforts to relate. Just this once.



Though some answers would cheer me up...

In a Past Life...

You Were: A Mute Astrologer. Where You Lived: Peru. How You Died: Suicide. Who Were You In a Past Life?

Yay.

Well, court was boring Wednesday. All I could think about was the kleenex box on top of the judge's stand, and how we have the same one at home. There was a lot of waiting, and a lot of watching a fly buzz about the room. Leeanna got off easy; that was a relief. We celebrated with popcorn and watched TAPS. I fell asleep early.

Yesterday was a wasted day. I had the strangest breakfast (popsicle, peanut butter toast and root beer), watched something about funky animals, and then returned home to do nothing. Fell asleep at midday after reading a bit of Harry Potter, talked to Adam on the phone awhile. Blobbed around on the compy, read, ate, nothing too interesting. I could have spent it many better ways... ripping the walls out... painting... but I've had a terrible on-and-off headache since a few days ago due to lack of sleep. So I was incapacitated, in a way. Though I still don't think it's a proper excuse. Oh well.

Today should be awesome. We're going to Prattsburgh for the weekend to see my cousin from England. Hopefully I shall return on Sunday with such fruits of creativity as the last visit produced. Or maybe I'll have finished my book. Either way... I am excited! Amish people! Hammondsport! Spanky! Dominoes! Adam! Berry-picking! YES!

I remember weighing 88 pounds.

Like a clean-picked bone; jutting glass-shard geometrics poking about in that see-through linen skin. A white light feather, gliding on air currents; a paper doll; a failing hologram about to fade out. A dusty sepia print; ashes poured into a linear mold, tempting death. I was a dancing flower on a breath of wind, torn apart easily by the merciless withering inevitable with time. Nearly nothing, hardly there. Blank and skeletal, dark-eyed, soulless. It was not quite existing.

"As I dropped and dropped pounds, I began to feel cold and weary, as steam makes my head spin and my eyes dizzy, woozy from light and sound like a tunneling migraine through my nerves or a dream on a string, pulling up into black wisps. It all became distant, my movements slowed, the sand fell less enthusiastically in the hourglass than at first it had. Visions came to me masked and in bottles, a hazy and distorted vapor to confuse my senses, all was a dripping consciousness devoid of anything defined or absolute. It was an estranged existence, one like brambles or tendrils, every which way, creeping in and out of numbness. Sometimes it nauseated me to feel the aching in my sharp ribs, to watch as my body became concave and scarce like a burned and barren field. I was dark and sunken, ravaged by years I had not yet experienced. I felt too stretched and scratched like white noise, like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. It was an unbelievable feeling, almost ghostlike, I would float through the silent halls of my house like a spirit, so quiet and flowing, almost as if made of fragile glass or still water. It was a purity I will never quite understand, as I did then."

It was the falling down of the living, breathing structures that supported me at that point that made me lose my head. That what I depended on for a stable life could be so heartless as to relinquish itself of its duties and suicide when I clearly needed it to survive was not sensical to a girl already deranged. There was no pillar left standing to hold up what was once the triumphant happy Parthenon of sanity and truth, and all immediately became desperately skewn. Family burst. The shoulder to cry on disappeared. There was no one to confide in. The only person available was a mirror of myself, only different in some ways. So it was then that we made this pact, this silent oath never actually agreed upon; two beings separate but able to understand. So much resulted from this particular year that what I excerpted from my notebook barely covers anything. I suppose you could call it a brief summary of one aspect, but then, words don't even come close. They're just memories, dwindling now, but they flashed past me and I caught them. A movie. A photo. A souvenir of something I'd just like to forget.

A double feature occured tonight in this white-walled apartment with jewel-tone rugs (muted emerald and sapphire and diamond, oh the colors are so deep and rich) which for once in a summer is cool and not sweating. To Kill A Mockingbird was first: as I have stated twice already this night, it is the best movie based on a book that I have ever seen. Ever. The acting was... the acting... was art. Truly. The English Patient was last: a good story, if a tad unbelievable and a touch dramatic. No matter, I still liked it. 'Twas an astral representation of love.

I went with Adam yesterday's eve to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. An absolute eye treat. (Eye candy, if you will... haha, sorry.) Depp was fantastic, as always. I liked the organization of the new version better. The changes were handled well.

We hung out afterwards for a little while. We looked at the orange moon through his telescope. Telephone calls and Jeremy and dogs and the desire to sprint that the cold night air produces made things hectic at first, but later it was deathly quiet, and I wanted to stay at his house forever. I missed him before I left.

Today passed slow and fine. I overslept, lazed about contentedly. Made peanut butter toast in the morning: the breakfast of turquoise-sneakered arsonist poets. I downloaded Limewire but haven't had the chance to use it yet, as I traveled to Mother's following its installation. Stopped at Timmy Ho's on the way over; always a good idea. There were happy vibes between my dad and I, and when I arrived here there were laughs among Jerome and Mother and I. We soon departed to our neighborhood Blockbuster, with titles in our heads and garlic bread in our stomachs.

I wish I had stayed on the phone longer.

This is just right. Atmospheric. Gentle, warm. I am comfortable. The fan is softly blowing, the smell of nutmeg fills my nostrils, the screen blazes black and white and the candle glows golden rays that reach around the door of the chamber adjacent. My hand keeps finding my cheek, attempting to furnish a place for my heavy head to rest, and each time it does this I inhale the subtle scents of nail polish and water. I sit cross-legged, wrapped in a blanket, atop a pillow. I feel clean and tired and friendly and hungry, and it all feels so new and opportune, so timely. Ah, yes. Home.

A lovely discussion about dreams and dreaming was had tonight. It made me smile to remember some things, and to hear of another's experiences with the subconscious mind. Dreams are so personal and yet we all have them; they are such an exciting and interesting thing to share. So thought-provoking and so deliciously strange... especially those discussed. It astounds me sometimes the way dreams bottle certain emotions and release them in the mind in the purest of forms. It astounds me sometimes the way dreams can become more real than reality... how they compel one to believe or disbelieve, or both. They really are extraordinary things.

I suppose I shall conclude this entry with a sweeping generalization: it was a nice day.

Yesterday was fun. Lee, Alissa and I went to the park, climbed rocks, found our own personal tour guide. I took a few pictures. It was way too humid for me, but I enjoyed the wilderness anyhow. I haven't done anything outdoorsy in awhile, and I guess that will have to satisfy me for another while, because I can't stand the heat. We were all contemplating sliding off the rocks into the water, which would have been fine had Alissa and I brought extra clothes. And we had the walk home ahead of us, and from where we were sitting the water didn't smell very pleasant. So that idea slipped away from us easily.

We watched Dodgeball (sort of) when we returned; we missed most of it because we were in the kitchen coloring phone cords with Sharpies and eating chips with stinky bean salsa. (Mmm... stinky beans...) Later, we watched Donnie Darko as well, which I fell asleep during. I managed to draw a pretty picture somewhere in there, with a harp and noodles and little black jelly creatures with multiple eyes and toast with legs and a spool of thread and many other amusing creatures/items. Lee painted the moon with sparkly blue nail polish to add the finishing touch, and I gave it to Alissa this morning. When we woke up, the television was still alive; some old-time movie or show was on. It was actually quite awesome; there were tap dancers and singers and piano players and other musicians. There was a wide variety of talents. This began a discussion about talent and how it is lost in the media these days because beauty is often the deciding factor in the achievement of fame. It is so disappointing that this is so today, for there are many people who are considered beautiful but far less who actually posess talent. If only things were as they used to be: talent first, looks second. It makes so much more sense.

Leeanna is making pancakes currently, as I sit in this computer chair, spinning in the mundane Monday air that moves through this house. I am thinking about the movies: Adam and I are possibly going to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory later, which would be fantastic. I am hopeful.

So, things are calming down. They were teetering for a day or two there, and I was afraid of becoming too bitter and caustic. But now, I can breathe. For a moment.

Pancake time!

I'm such a geek.

Yesterday was my Uncle Stan's 75th birthday bash. It was horrible. There was hardly anyone I knew there, and it didn't matter anyway because as usual, I was invisible to them. I could have handled that, sure, but no, I had a migraine AND a stomachache, and I forgot my notebook. I tried to amuse myself with my camera, but it ran out of batteries. My relatives kept telling me, "Go in the pool!" and "Eat some cake!" and I just wished I could lock myself in the closet. A little girl (whose I can't be sure) took a liking to me and asked me to play all these games with her, to get toys for her from the basement, etcetera. Her name, I learned, was Anya. Though I doubt I'll have to remember it, since I never see any of that part of the family. The exact reason I didn't want to go in the first place.

And now we can't sleep in the treehouse tonight. Leeanna and I are meeting our new friend, Alissa. Lee planned it all perfectly: bonding, fun, the three of us treehousing. And the plans were destroyed at the last minute. Ugh. I'm sure we'll still have some fun, but not nearly as much.

And I've already hurt his feelings, and am probably hurting them more and more excruciatingly as I type.

FUCK.

I need some downtime.

Mmm, I love cookies.

So, yesterday. I went to Rochester to visit my grandmother, who lives in a little green house. When we arrived, we were greeted by her smiling white face and flashing glasses. And we went into the little air-conditioned house, exchanging pleasantries. We decided to go to The Lamplighter, this amazing upscale restaurant nearby, after recent news was shared in the cool dim livingroom. So, we went, everyone there knew her ("Hello, Loretta! Who did you bring with you?"). I ordered haddock with a crabmeat soup... oh. My. Goodness. It was SO good. Delicious doesn't come close. It was really gourmet. They served my chocolate milk in this glass that could have been used for a sundae! It was... wow. It was awesome. As we ate, my mother and grandmother talked about the family; the latter asked how my grades were, and so on and so on. Somehow they eventually reached the subject of my deceased grandfather, and my grandmother turns to me and awakens me from a soup stupor: "You never knew him, did you?" I shook my head. The next ten minutes were spent listening to both of them telling me how smart he was, how clever, how witty, how much he would have loved me and how much I would have loved him. I sit there, taking it all in, listening to the reminiscences and stories, and my grandmother finally ends with, "He was such a gentleman; really, a gentle man." I don't know why this affected me so much, but it did. They made him sound like the nicest man, nearly angelic. I could imagine him laughing, reading, proposing riddles, walking through that little green house. And even though I was never able to meet him, I became teary-eyed.

Later, we played Scrabble at my grandmother's for a few hours, and she became extremely frustrated because she couldn't win. And she is good at Scrabble. It was actually quite comical the way she acted. Afterwards, we had egg salad sandwiches, and while eating we realized it was raining buckets, so we figured we'd stay until it let up a bit. We watched the news on TV. The downpour subsided slightly. We took the chance. On our way out the door, my grandmother ran upstairs and appeared momentarily with a small brown envelope. She handed it to me and both my mother and I hugged her goodbye ("I love you! I'll give you a buzz when we get home!").

I fell asleep in the car. When we reached Buffalo, it was still pouring. I dragged myself upstairs, threw off my boots and wet clothes and collapsed on my bed. My sleep was filled with strange dreams about a mysterious person that I knew but did not know, and in the middle of the night these dreams stirred me out of slumber and suddenly I heard the fan, I heard the windchimes, and I realized where I was. The envelope was thrown carelessly on my floor, and staring at it made me curious, so I opened it. It was a picture of my grandfather. I recalled my grandmother saying something about giving me a photograph but I had lost it between phrases and savory fish inside that dark restaurant. So I looked at it, and looked, and I just liked holding it in front of me, because I didn't really know him and yet I could see his face, as if he still existed. As if just by holding his photograph and looking at that half-grin and those happy eyes, I could make him real again; I could bring him back to life. Soon fatigue nagged at me once more, and I fell back asleep, and back into dreams where faces were familiar but places and behaviors weren't.

I rose late. Ate some Teddy Grahams, lounged around; I wanted to go outside, but it was much too hot. This apartment is just too hot. My mom was home subsequently, raving about some new cafe. She forced me to sample a caramel-flavored coffee-ish substance. Jerome left for the studio, my mom fell asleep, I took a shower. She bought me a shiny new straightener while she was out, after I had scrubbed myself squeaky and she had rested adequately. Jerome just returned with the portrait he is working on, of a young girl with black hair and blue eyes and pale skin, holding an acoustic guitar in her naked arms. It is me. He is a fantastic artist.

In about nine minutes, we're leaving to go see Howl's Moving Castle, an anime film about a wizard. I don't know much about the plot (and I'd rather not) but from what I hear it's splendid. I can't wait. I must gather my snackages.

Injection, entry, blood shockwave.

Yesterday was dynamic, to say the least. A mediocre morning, a better day shared with a wonderful boy, and the evening and later hours... magnificence. In one period of time, everything I cherish has returned to me somehow. There's still sorting to do, but I have what I need to sort, and this is something I feel deserves celebration. (I made popcorn. And tea.) Three conversations, three real conversations! And amazing ones at that! Perhaps not extremely intelligent, perhaps not even that interesting. But after all of this waiting, the reward is so sweet and succulent. Words that drip with hidden definitions, sentences pleading and kneeling and screaming... this is what I love. My heart has leapt up from its sooty crater and now beats eagerly. I found that my tear ducts still exist. And reaffirmed what I never needed to reaffirm, because I always know this in my deepest of souls: I don't want to lose these people, they are irreplacable. I will break myself in half before I let them go.

I don't know how all this happened at once. The only thing that can explain it is a stroke of good luck. I've called on logic but it fails me here, as it has for awhile now. I must have been touched by some outer force; I haven't done this myself. Thanks for the help, you kind nameless spirits.

For once, I can say "No one understands" without feeling like it's teenage angst. I am right this time.

I am angry and hostile, I can feel it in my stomach. I don't control this; it's something adrenaline-powered, one of those instances where the cure involves running and/or smashing things until I collapse.

I don't talk to you. I don't talk to any of you. Oh sure, I say things, but what do they mean? Do you feel any meaning behind them at all? There's nothing. The last real conversation I had was with Joe through a night of dullness and solitude; it was for comfort, for company. I actually felt like a person talking to a person. But recently? There has been no conversation of this sort. At Roger's I watched as others DID talk, and wished I could join in, but I interjected seldomly for I was dumbfounded at my revelations. I had not realized I was so far gone inside myself.

And I tried to come out with it, to reveal this to you, but what does it get me? It's obvious that I have not said what I meant to say. That the message is still not what it is supposed to be. When will I talk? When will this end?

I could go on and on, but what will that do? I'm not going to try to explain or prove anything to you. I'm not going to entertain you with my theories or delight you with my stories. I'll tell you one thing that I've said since that conversation with Joe, that I meant:

It's pointless.

I was wrong.

Whispers float in these rooms on disabled air currents where your voice used to roam. They somehow find electricity in this stagnant atmosphere, separating their victim from reality like a film from hot milk.

I am dried glue, papery and unsubstantial.

I am tired. I am not worn, nor am I exhausted; it is some residual emotion that merely exists, deleting others as it pleases much like cancer. It grows and expands until eyesight is questionable, until every sense is questionable. I see black shadows in corners and niches that take the forms of, most often, cats or crows. Every sound becomes a song, every rattle an instrumental quiche that feeds my ears with nonsense and false noise. Words become vortexes. Silences become caverns. I am a grey being on a hazy plain, staring off into the distant horizon behind the glowing white screen of mechanical nothing.

I haven't felt anything in what seems like forever. For some reason, being in the company of people who truly appreciate one another brought these new insights to light. It is unexplainable how powerful friendship can be, even if it falters, even if one of a pair falls off of a mental cliff into a sanity-eating hole. And how, even if the other is not there, they can save this decrepit person who has mistakenly stepped off into another world without realizing. It awes me that the memory of something real and old can triumph over an imaginary realm that loses you in the present, that fools you with illusion until you are shocked back into yourself. I know I've not completely returned yet, I'm not wholly here. But I admit my mishaps.

I don't want to be like this. Not now. Visiting Roger's last night revealed this to me. It was the entanglement of laughter, it was the enchantment of the stories and the lush language exchanged by happy mouths. It was hidden smiles and something subtle that was understood there; acceptance or respect or a rare type of gratitude. I can not explain it. I can never explain things.

This is what I know, for now. It will have to suffice.

"By the way, it seems my notebooks have all been misplaced..."

I was reading my notebook from last summer.

"Ouch, I am having a grilled cheese sandwich."

On the way home this morning, I was talking about literature with my mom, and I realized how much I miss her and how much I wish I didn't feel like I don't live at her apartment when I'm there.

It's ridiculous how much enjoyment can be derived from a thought-provoking short story.

"I feel ghosts creep slowly over the grass and clover, hesitant to reach out and touch what intrigues them. When I turn my head, they disappear with the wind, phantoms that dare not linger for fear of being discovered. Then, a few seconds later, I dismiss these happenings with my perpetually useless logic: ferns scraping against the cement steps, branches blowing serenely in the rare breeze of today.

I chew on my pen as usual, thinking, running my lips along it as if that will bring ideas to mind. It tastes routine, like water or crackers. The cold smoothness is expected.

Where are you? I miss you."

I want these dreams to stop. I want this nostalgia to stop. I'm taking some time off. You won't be able to call me, you won't be able to talk to me, you won't be able to touch me or get to me. I am gone.

Gone or lost.

From what I can gather, you want two extremely different things. Two things that cannot possibly peacably coexist. You're chasing butterflies you will never catch, and it's beautiful, and sad. I can't interfere. You'll fall on your own, and I'll help you up, but I won't hold you back. Not ever. I'd rather see you smile, hoping desperately that you're not too far behind those fragile perfect wings.

Oh, if I could transpose these brainwaves, I'd give you every thought in chords and verses. If I could, I'd be a mirror. I'd be a lioness. I'd live inside a daffodil.

Why does this happen? Why do these things pile up, these meandering, questing philosophies, this useless data? Why don't we talk? I never have conversations anymore. There's all this nostalgia that hangs like dust and cobwebs over my social skills, and I'm too upset to sweep it away. Why can't I let go? Why can't I forget? Why this constant remembering? I can never tear myself away; the thoughts eat at me. I'm in an acid bath that dissolves reaction time slowly but completely. Soon I'll be so aloof I won't notice myself. I already trip over nothing and bump into walls because I'm too immersed in the concepts and theories that evolve in my head.

And these nightmares.

They make me feel like a stranger when I wake up.

Once in awhile, it is exhausting.

Once in awhile it is so exhausting that you lose your footing, you trip, you scrape your knees and hold them as they bleed through your bony fingers. And you sit and watch the rust red darken as it dries and crackles on your skin. What else is there to view? The sky above is endless and uncaring, oblivious and scattered with clouds that bounce over you comatose. The ground is a bowl that holds you in on all sides, walls sloping to meet up with the blue that hardly acknowledges its own existence, much less yours. And though the horizon beckons with the prizes of the faraway, how much of it truly exists? And why go there?

The light I clasp now in my lungs is aching.

I promise I will breathe fire again; I will hoist myself up on these arms as soon as I can tear my eyes from the crimson and purple my knees ail from; the cuts and bruises that hold me blankly as I imagine the sky is held by anything.

I'm falling in love with a thesaurus, I can feel the hot sand in my eyes, the desert rising up to eat me with dust-knives, and those words just spill, just pour from the pages into my mouth and suffocate what I really meant to say.

I'm in a Mars Volta kick, poems attack my brain like grenades, I'm making my own crossword puzzle, I got accepted into AP English and I have a crush on a spider.

Can you see us dancing?

Twirling in the limelight, swathed in blood-colors, black and red satin dress-robes and bindis all-amatch. Feverish silk dancers, don't you break that circle, oh you'd better not. On and on and on and on at the bottom of an escalator, businessmen walk by, we don't move but to dance. I suppose it was a subway station, all greys and tile and silver and not quite white. Oh, but we are dancing, dancing fast! There is no pause, no give, no slack! We are movement! Faster and faster without a misstep, building to that unreachable climax when we will all collapse down into the linoleum but we never get there, we never stop dancing. We are alive, we pulse, we flash, we need no music. We are free.

I mean, can you?

So, lately? Well then, let's see here.

Last night I went to Adam's house; we embarked on numerous adventures! We went to Wal-Mart and ran into Jen Lobur, what are the chances? So she showed us some prom pictures. I bought a CD (and a purple glowstick yes!) that I had been pondering purchasing previously (alliteration yes!) but which actually I don't like and am thinking of returning. A tad too sappy, and the lyrics aren't impressive (Straylight Run if you were wondering). Yeah, so maybe I'll return it (but I'm keeping the sampler they threw in there for free, oh I know, sneaky sneaky). Adam bought a CD as well (Lazy Boy, was it?). That turned out to be an interesting listen; very informational. And he bought a sweet dragon puzzle. Shaped like a dragon. Just absolutely sweet.

Yeah, and I wrote on my arm a lot yesterday, and since a few days ago have had pretty much every song on Letting Off The Happiness stuck in my brain. But that's not a bad thing. I'm feeling happier than I have in a long time, and even though it's raining, and I haven't had any sleep because I was up coughing so hard that I had tears down my neck pretty much all night, and my nose won't stop running, and my knees are breaking, and I'm hungry and I missed breakfast again and I forgot to bring in my nori maki and I miss my mom, I can smile. It doesn't bother me today, for I am turquoise and lovely and I want to sing like a small vibrant parrot about how beautiful people are and how lucky I feel to be feeling this, oh yay! To be full, full of the world and its music and friends and love!

Alright, alright, okay. I will stop. Like that really awesome article in that underground Iroquois high school newsletter said, "No one wants to read 'I Love Love' by Happy McSmilington." So I'll go write in my notebook, which adores and begs for words.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	Very High
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Very High
Histrionic:	High
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Very High
Dependent:	Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

What if this is a lie? Everything between us blurred, the lines frayed like wires, snapped, ripped, shredded; the very fabric of our existence some frail fraudulent epic on the edge of some vicious tongue? Do you believe me still? Can you, without proof?

Oh my do I feel better. A bike ride and a cheese sandwich can always save a day from total ruin.

I'm thinking I may go through some old notebooks, pull out what I can, make some sense of it.

Yeah, and I'm thinking of doing some research tonight (after studying history, of course), thinking I might look into publishing. Not getting my hopes up or anything, just checking it out. Seeing what it's all about, that kind of thing. You know. Stuff.

I'll walk into the air and float away, a glittering pair of feet, a golden patch of sun eye patch over my eye. I'll walk into the air and vanish.

Where the fuck did all the food go? Oh, the tum-tum tumbles.

Why am I so sensitive? I wish it was something I could turn off, even only once in awhile. Oh, ack.

Today was a great day, quite wonderful in fact. I was excited this morning because I finally finished putting together the things I want to send to my pen pal, Elton, and I was planning on going to the post office afterschool. Which I did. And I got a free cookie in lunch from the police officer! He is cool. He gave Lee and Adam free cookies, too, because we are awesome! And I helped Lee with her Spanish project by drawing some unicorns. The last two periods of the day, two that I wasn't looking forward to, were study halls! And we had two substitute teachers! In the right classes! It was amazing. And I found a lucky penny on my way home. So, why am I glum? I miss my love.

I went on my first bike ride this Spring. The weather was perfect; gorgeous day. Adam and I spent the day together, and even though we did pretty much nothing, it was a wonderful day. Leeanna called me, worried, but now I think we're okay. I am. I hope she is.

I noticed a lot of things today. I keep observing. It's strange, yet so like me, to do this. To notice the littlest gestures, the slightest of expressions. The way my bike hits the grass when I drop it carelessly, how statuesque someone is when they sleep, how in love I am, with this time of the year, with everyone, everything. And how easily and quickly one forgets their entangled thoughts, caught up in the grace of the surreal present.

If only I were a ballet dancer, I could dance and dance and dance, and spin and spin and spin, forever, in this current mindset. Sigh.

Have I let you down somehow? Did I say something offensive? Do something? Go overboard? Am I grating on your nerves? What did I do?

I'm confused. Baffled. And altogether not so happy.

The day started off right; it had to, it's Friday! I was enjoying myself, quite a bit actually... then happy plans fell through, of course, they always do, I half-expected it, but then me, I always hope they don't, because happy plans are... well, I was excited. Stupid me and my stupid happy hope. I acted like I wasn't disappointed, like I always do, because I'm not expected to mind.

I don't remember the last time I talked to her, and she left for the weekend, and didn't even call to say goodbye before she went. I doubt if she'll even call when she gets home. I've lost importance. I want to see her, I miss her even. It doesn't matter, I suppose. I can't change anything.

I'm such a fucking weakling. Why can't I speak? Mute as well, how perfect. Useless.

And the one person who listens, that one who drinks my breath like wine, I cannot find words for.

My apologies.