I should have a picture i should have a picture.
I should know exactly where her nose is in relation to her eyes.
All.The.Time

It’s been ages since I’ve written anything. Since I’ve opened up my head to a stream of consciousness I could let tumble through my fingers long enough to fill a blank page with thoughts. But I don’t regret the time I’ve spent away, and the motivations that I’ve found. So let’s start again.

 

Tonight I find myself wondering when things started changing, when that stillness crept into the place that is usually reserved for up and down spikes of emotion. Did it end with that angry letter that I wrote Stephanie in a fit of letting go? Did it start when  met Sarah and she kissed me without realizing it and I knew somewhere in that place reserved for up an down spikes that I didn’t want to let her go? Or maybe outside the bedroom, on the porch above the stair case in a city I get lost in but still felt like home. When for the first time I wasn’t seeing ghosts of past failures  looking down from all those pedestals wondering if I was lying and finally let it all go. Long enough to feel like I wasn’t running? Long enough to feel grounded for the first time in maybe forever? I don’t really know.

 

I keep hoping things are different, keep worrying over details of tiny strings unattached only to realize it’s already been ten months and for all intensive purposes things should have started falling apart ages ago and they haven’t. I’m still adrift on those declarations of I love you like the first time I have ever loved. I am still so lost in that beaming smile I get when I say it and remembering the beginning that I can’t imagine the length of time between then and now. It’s like blinking and waiting all at once. Can I love just for a moment that nothing has really changed?

 

26 years old, and how many times in that short life span have I found myself thinking this is the end, just to wake the next morning? Too many to think about without believing in angels or second chances. Maybe this is where it led? I can’t say; because this place is full of love stories but maybe just maybe when the man said to migrate, move to that new state of settling he was talking about you. And me. And us. And everything outside of that. Maybe just maaaybe this isn’t another pipe dream and I should close my eyes for a moment and believe that something could be real. Tentative steps forward. Without looking backward, forgetting the ghosts.

 

I just want to know, will you let me love you? When you look at me and say it like they are the best and only three words you will ever say again and my armor chips just little more, can I believe you? Can I trust this feeling in my chest beating against my ribs demanding to be acknowledged fearlessly? Or is fear part of the stillness, part of watching that unknown stretching out and out and out into a future where I could be hurt again. Where I could lie there wondering again if this is the end of me… because everytime it gets a little harder to shake off the past. Everytme it’s slightly more difficult to forget the ghosts. And if you were one of them I am not sure I could ever forget, could ever look past the judgment I’d imagine in your eyes when I risked happiness.

 

Fuck it. I was always meant to be that tight rope walker, risking it all for the thrill of the moment when balance is everything. And you are more then worth the fall. Just don’t let me fall and I’ll give you whatever I can. I swear. I’ll give you everything. Just don’t let this be another fall.

It’s funny being here. Not funny in a laughable way just… ironic.

I forget sometimes how easy it is to forget. How easy it is to slip into a pattern that’s comfortably making it easy to avoid uncomfortable memories. Moments. But I was thinking tonight, as I was standing on the balcony and smoking a cigarette, about all of the places I have stood before this one. I thought about the way the bars stuck there to keep me from falling felt kind of like a cage. I thought, maybe that's okay, for a minute.

But time, it passes too quickly in places like this, in-between places, and it also moves much much too slow. Already I feel myself beginning to pull quietly at it’s constraints. Is it to early, I ask, Is it to late? Regardless everything takes time.

So much has changed. I suppose it’s alright then to have a break, to be in a place for a little while where change doesn’t happen so fast. Maybe… maybe it’s okay to heal without the world tilting so much.

So what does this new version of my heart say to that? I miss you. I miss you.

I told you to write me a love poem on a whim.. while you were standing in the kitchen.. I demanded it while you were cooking  a hamburger. Tell me.. Tell how much you love me. Write in a poem, I said, write it for me.

You argued, you always argue a little bit. You said something about the rhyme scheme being to difficult to untangle in a kitchen while cooking a hamburger. You said something about rules and symmetry and then… and then you went quiet. In the background I could hear you breathing and the meat sizzling in the pan. Now. I kept saying in the silence, write it now.

So you did. On the back of a pizza box. You wrote how much you loved me, you wrote it all on the back of a pizza box.

I miss you.

I love you.

That's what this new version of my heart says.

Deep inside my heart and its splintered at its core
Molden curdle of milken puddle
Dreams of warm breasts settling in my mouth
To be my spouse make a babe and a house
Apple tree, drunken brawl domestically
Dirty dog dusty pawed bloody nose roses embroidered sheets
Dangle like women in the breeze
on a line above the yard

In my heart a flower dies slow like a campfire covered
In piss my love like snow fall
My love like a snow fall

Raphael you know just how
To take me in the swimming pool
Like a child being baptized
Beneath the starry sky we lie
Drowning in your watery thighs
Luscious eyed you a teenage player

In my heart an island sinks slow
Tears fall in the kitchen sink Oh
Don't speak I can hear you
Don't speak I can hear you

There is an elephant sitting on my chest. In the late night early morning moments when rapid up and down thought, left and right thought generally inspired by other people, shifts into fluidity with the emotions that are pulsing underneath. The Elephant sits on my chest, weighing me down with however many tons it takes and I am surprised…

“You are an idiot.” The elephant says with an elephant smirk and I wonder why my bones haven’t been ground into dust. “And you are impossibly selfish, in fact I worry that you will never grow up.” I don’t care that I am still breathing.

“You say these things, and you act like I don’t already know them.. haven’t already considered them.” I say, easily.

“That’s the way inner monologue works.” Says the elephant, very matter of fact.

“She hurt me. She hurt me and that just… fucking hurts.”

“Have you ever considered that maybe thinking that all of this was about you is what got you in trouble in the first place?”

“Obviously.”

“Alright then.”

“So I’m selfish. And I’m and Idiot, and sometimes I worry that I will never grow up. Maybe that’s why I’m lying here when responsibility dictates that I should be moving. Rising to great the day! Taking care of the business I think I forgot to take care of earlier in the week…”

“Looking for distraction, reconnecting with the people you have ignored for months, trying to scrape out the semblance of a friendship in a place you don’t belong. So they can carry you through this because you are selfish. Because you are hurt and feel like you deserve it, because it’s convenient to lie to yourself so frequently and so easily that you probably don’t even remember the truth behind anything you do or have done.”

“Ouch mister elephant, now you are just hitting below the belt…”

It laughs the way I laugh when I am trying to sound bitter. “Oh don’t pretend with me, if I didn’t exist you would just continue to delude yourself into avoidance of the issue here…”

“And what is the issue here?”

“Oh darling, I don’t know, pick one. We have so many…”

“I am selfish, I am an idiot, and to some extent I deserve every ounce of pain I feel, because it’s like karma… I’ve done this to other people therefore it should be done to me in the same way.”

“Action and reaction…” The elephant sighs and my chest feels heavy. I don’t care that I’m still breathing. “What did we learn?”

“What do we ever learn mister elephant?”

“That we shouldn’t do it again. That we can’t always be so paranoid and selfish, that we are smarter then the idiotic behavior that we have been displaying up to this point. That we should never.. ever… do this again.”

“But we will.”

“Probably.”

“We can’t help it.”

I close my eyes avoiding he numbers on the clock. “This is sad.”

“But don’t you know why I’m here, yet?”

“Do you?” I stare blackly at the spots blooming behind my eyes.

“It’s because you think she could have been it, it’s because in your less… vocal imaginings you think you glimpse the worlds of happy endings, where she met you and you met her and things came together in a beautiful collision of sparks without any of the extra. It’s because every time you spoke to her you saw the life you could have had and it kills you that you managed to fuck it all up all over again.”

“This was my second chance to make it right.”

“But you also realize it was never right from the beginning.. That she never loved you.”

“She loved me, just… not enough.”

“Or she loved you and you told her to go.”

“Or she loved me and I wanted her to be happy.”

“Or she didn’t love you at all and you couldn’t handle that… the world of things that didn’t revolve around how you felt.”

“So we’ve come full circle.”

“So we have.”

There is an elephant on my chest, and it is weighing me down with however many tons it takes, and I am still breathing despite the fact that together we are heavy.

I missed you yesterday but I think today I’ll let you go. With lips touched to fingers and folded unfolded pieces of paper in my hand. I’ll give it your name and your name and then let you go.

One into the wind of all I could think about was…

Two into the water of all I could breathe for went…

Three into the fire of why did I do that gone…

Four into the sand.

But I’m not the one who’s buried here.


I’ll rise up with passion. Brush my jeans off with that last sliver of remorse. I’ll whisper the goodbyes into the palms of my hands as I walk this way and you, and you, blow me goodbye that way.
 You made me more and the only thing I’ll regret is that we lost the chance to say the final words or to take our final bows.

But I’m okay with ending it on “I love you” I’m okay with those three things being the last things we said in a secret sacred whisper outside of letting go, before the world turned me and I decided to let go.

We live like sailors... drifting over waves of whatever love storm rises to greet us, powerless to change, the weather. She said she didn't want to try again, she said she's been saying that for two years, I said love is like aging.

No matter how much you don't want it to happen you can't ever really escape.

Because it'll sneak up on you. And you'll look in the mirror one day and you'll see that you love her, and it will be written all over your face.

So yesterday morning I was sitting in my car feeling sick. Sick in a way a body feels sick of being the body of being a girl sick… indescribable lacking enough words for stomach discomfort sick, and this song…

This song came on.

This song came on and cut through the sick and suddenly I was so far away with those diamond eyes waiting for me somewhere near the ocean. With your body full of sunshine that is almost to much but my eyes are squinting and I can’t take them anywhere else. I look at you.

And there are no words to describe that kind of burning burn, that kind of exploding burn that starts somewhere in my chest and expands to my hands and my head and my stomach that was fighting off discomfort yesterday morning in the car.

Yesterday I ate breakfast with a stranger...

She was sitting across from me in another booth, in a restaurant that smelled like cooked eggs. She had this purple visor, these thick sunglasses, and a well worn once blue shirt. I think it may have been coffee in the cup she kept stirring with a spoon as she toyed with her cell phone and wrote things down with a yellow mechanical pencil.

My coffee was full of cream and sugar and had to sip it before it was sweet enough, to keep it from overflowing over my hand. I think I may have stained my t-shirt when a couple of drops escaped down my chin.

When she saw me looking she met my eyes fearlessly. Letting me see the worn wrinkles etched into her skin, the strands of grey hair that she didn't bother covering up with fake dyes and hair products. The wise contented smile on her face that said “I see you seeing me and that’s just fine.” All of it made me think..

I want to be just like that when I grow up.

When I am old I want to look like I’ve lived my life. I want the grey hair to show, I want the wrinkles on my face I want the stories of places and people and time to be heavy in my old eyes.

I’m sure she was a traveler.

I think maybe she was just passing through this place and that diner on her way somewhere else. And I wonder if she had ever been to Prague... if she had ever fallen into lust on the steps of one of its old world cathedrals, if she’d ever stuck her fingers in the bullet holes in Berlin. Maybe… maybe she danced the charleston with a lover in Spain. Maybe she was here to visit her son before slipping off to her quiet house, with a garden full of mismatched wild flowers and the memories and the goodbyes that made her eyes look so heavy and her fearless smile look so content.

I am tied together with string. There is a network of patchwork hidden under my skin all branching in different directions, coming together somewhere in the middle… of my chest.

It’s a lazy afternoon but I’m waiting patiently for these fine pieces of thread to catch fire.

 I can hear the whispers when I lift my arms above my head. When I let my fingers stretch fully and feel myself rise with the ins and outs of deep breathing. I’ve weathered all the storms, what makes you think I can’t survive you too, darling?

The free fall days ended with me standing someplace quiet, looking over the edge to remember, and it’s almost too still here. The trees are frozen without the wind, branches hanging oddly limp in space, waiting for movement... aching under the lack thereof, stillness is deafening. If you can’t say you’re sorry at least say goodbye.

 I’m remerging from strolls down memory lane. My eyes are closed and Trent Reznor is promising never to let me fall apart. I know his voice is a lie, but it’s held these tiny threads together for so long I wonder if I shouldn’t believe him this time. I should have begged you to tell me everything I don’t want to hear.

Sitting quiet in the car, the windshield blocking out the rain and humidity. I am watching dots flower outside of my body. Making patterns that quietly refuse to be mechanically wiped away. I am playing connect the dots at random and the only picture I can see inside this chaos is your face, your eyes, your lips, your nose, your ears.. I could memorize you in the rain and let you slip backward into puddles until my outstretched hand couldn’t reach. And there is that song about an engine driver I can’t quite get out of my head. “And if you don’t love me let me go… and if you don’t love me let me go. And if you don’t… love me… let me.. goo…”

Don’t say you’re sorry. Please. Don’t keep me out of some deranged responsibility you feel for my heart. Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid… come here love. Cut the strings, love. Let me fall apart.

We live in a world where nothing is permanent. We keep everything on machines and the machines break and we lose it all. This happens over and over again, until we get used to losing everything. Until we begin to expect it.

 

Waking up it's 11pm but my eyes have technically been open for an hour. I've got this disjointed feeling in my head kind of disconnected and it's taking longer to completely reaquaint myself with myself.

I hate the bitter taste on my tongue. I hate the way things smell and the way my eyes look so tired in the mirror.

I'm not hungry and I don't want a cigarette but I feel my body craving something. 

It's strange when the first thing you see in those half aware moments is an old version of yourself reflected through someone else. It's an odd feeling or form of dissection that hurts but doesn't hurt for the reasons it should. It hurts like deep but long covered surgical wound. Not because she's looking. Just because I want to read along so this pain... this sort of dull ache of a mostly healed wound kind of pain brings me back. Maybe for the first time in a long time I feel like I am myself and I haven't changed that much/maybe for the first time in a long time I am alright with myself and perfectly happy being the same person and completely okay with the ways I've changed.

I don't know, it feels early in my body but the sky tells me it's getting late.

So I find 5am kind of funny.

I find that rush of thoughts that happen at a time of morning when all the sane people are either sleeping or just waking up, amusing. I find the strained clarity, humorous.

I find the odd nostalgia distracting.

The tension in my muscle tiring. But not tiring enough.

Because it’s five a.m. and I’m awake and I haven’t slept.

 

In my apartment everyone is sleeping.

The clock is dutifully glowing it’s numbers at me, while I stretch myself out on the couch.

The Walls are an off white color, but in this lighting (or lack there of) they look kind of grey.

The Doors to the patios are closed. I can’t smell the taste of old cigarettes drifting inside, pulled by the breeze.

My dog is chasing an awareness between wanting to sleep and needing to protect the member of his pack that is still awake.

He’s decided to settle at my feet in a kind of daze.

I swear he’s glaring at me every time I move.

 

It’s 5am.

I left you exhausted and stretched out on your couch two hours ago.

If I try hard enough I can smell your declarations of ‘I love you’ on my finger tips.

It’s been two hours since I told you I should go.

I still haven’t been able to close my eyes for longer then five minutes.

You are the most beautiful thing I can find in this half grey place.

And you still tell me “Don’t let me go.”

And I can almost hear you saying “Don’t fuck this up.”

 

I don’t know what promises I should make.

I know that I can’t tell you never, or always or even next week.

I know I’d be lying if I said uncomplicated, or trust.

I know that I am like a broken record when it comes to love.

Maybe this time…

But I can’t even let myself think it without a wince of guilt.

 

So I’ll just keep it going straight ahead.

I’ll just let it Happen.

 

It’s 5am. And I’m going to stop trying to control our outcome. Even when I feel myself begin to protest.

How could I forget you.

I suddenly understand what she said about mix tapes. I'm going back and listening to the songs i used to listen to back in 2002.

I remember singing to you so long over the phone with static in my voice.
i called a little spoon, and a hippie i said you make smile with flowers in your hair.

The other day you sent me a message i wasn' ready to read. i sat there staring at the screen feeling that time all over again. But it wasn't you, it wasn't real it was all of the things I would rather forget. But that wasn't you, until later. When I realized I wasn't enugh to save you from yourself.

But now.

You're a little spoon, you're a hippy, you make me happy, with flowers in your hair.

Why did I forget you.

Why didn't I cling to you when everything was coming apart at the seams, why didn't I believe you when you said I was good and it would be alright.

Why did we stop talking?

Why did I run when you needed me to stand still?

Voice of Woman: As a child, I was always filled with the uncharted success of what my future held. I was confident, (Voice of FIGMENT joins in the medly as WOMAN keeps talking) some might say cocky. I didn’t stop to question the fact that I might die prematurely, that I didn’t have a purpose in life…I was lead on, fed by a knowing fire that somewhere, there was a life for me. And even if I didn’t know it yet, I would fall into it like a bear foot in an iron jaw snare.

Voice of Figment (starts talking at WOMAN’s que of "I was confident"): As a child, we were always filled with the uncharted success of what our future held. We were confident, some might say cocky. (Voice of DEATH joins in the medly as WOMAN and FIGMENT keep talking) We didn’t stop to question the fact that we might die prematurely, that we didn’t have a purpose in life…we were lead on, fed by a knowing fire that somewhere, there was a life for us. And even if we didn’t know it yet, we would fall into it like a bear foot in an iron jaw snare. All it took, was a matter of time.

Voice of Death (starts talking at FIGMENT’s que of "some might say cocky."): As a child, she was always filled with the uncharted success of what her future held. She was confident, some might say cocky. She didn’t stop to question the fact that she might die prematurely, that she didn’t have a purpose in life…she was lead on, fed by a knowing fire that somewhere, there was a life for her. And even if she didn’t know it yet, she would fall into it like a bear foot in an iron jaw snare. All it took, was a matter of time. And all she got were the cold, eternalized facts.

It's my favorite time of night, and this is what I'm thinking.

I kind of want to finish the update for my story but for some reason my muse is still not quite ready to stir, so instead I'm stretched across the couch, balancing a snowman mug of coffee on the upper part of my leg. My darling girlfriend was keeping me company until about an hour ago when she shuffled off to bed in her pink fuzzy slippers, and she was doing that thing that she does to get my attention. Making noises but not talking, gesturing at things but not telling me what she wants, then pouting ridiculously when I don't understand. It's cute, but also annoying.

She had a headache when she got home from work. When I walked in all of the lights were off and all of the blinds were closed and she was already in her PJ's lying on the couch. It was cute and sad watching her lie there balancing the cat on her chest looking utterly miserable. I made us tea, and I tried to sit beside her but at her hissing decided it best if I just leave her alone.

It kind of reminded me of the night before, when we were both just stretched out on our respective couches, doing our own thing with barely a glance in the other's direction. And the night before that. and I wonder when did things get so quiet between us? When did we stop needing closeness and long intense conversation? When did love that bordered on obsession become so… domestic? And am I fine with that?

Not really.

I think when it's all said an done I'm more stifled by it.

I was never comfortable with a 9 -5 life.

I miss myself, I miss being passionate about things, I miss staying out late and stumbling home early and never having to tell anyone where I was. I miss the thrill and excitement you get from a random weekend road trip when you have nothing but your friends and the car and the wind running through your fingers and the music vibrating through the plastic fake leather interior.

I think I'm too young to be old just now. And I am pretty sure she is too old to be young just now. So I wonder why I'm here.

I can't remember the last time i was happy in this relationship. And when I am honest with myself I think it was long before the two of us decided to move in together. i think it might have been in the days of endless phone calls and possibilities before either of us really knew who the other one was, and it was 50% fantasy 50% curiosity.

So I wonder what am I doing?

How long do I want this to be my life? How long does she want this to be her life...

Maybe now it's time to write my story. Yeah…

This is a new chapter.