-another untitled-

I wasn't sure what I was looking at anymore. And hours later wasn't sure how my overactive imagination would insist I felt in the moment. Because as it happened, right then with my eyes blinking slowly at a night growing deeper, I was distant and safe; reserved and aloof. Unattached and uncaring.

And then tomorrow came.

And in the light of today all the truths were gone, replaced by the ache of what I can't have; what I don't have. What I won't have. What I've spent months understanding isn't coming down that road, but another I've yet to cross. Remembering taxes my emotions into believing a reality I knew at dusk wasn't so.

And yet I sit wishing, knowing then I was unfeeling, that life could continue its course underneath like water under the bridge, and I could stay stagnant observing all the Hundred Acre Woods creatures floating by on their backs and in sauce pans, knowing I'd come out of this unscathed and alright.

But doubt, and a series of rehashed thoughts, have me spinning in the current with the owl.

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." -Guildenstern, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead; Tom Stoppard

I wish I was worse at throwing boomerangs so you'd stop coming back.

This Is What I Look Like Today

Sometimes I think that if I was the only girl around you'd have no trouble in choosing me.

I guess I forget that the beauty in being chosen is that, to the person who chose you, you're the only one that matters. Regardless how many girls are around.

**

Excuse me for wanting more from this
Than a secret kiss
And dial tones.

**

I imagine you like the cloud of melancholy from every cliche cartoon. The ones that hover overhead or slightly to the side, constantly contributing to the woebegone atmosphere of the victim. I always thought that if the cloud would just go away and stop raining and reminding them of their discontent that they could get over it, move on, happy up.

But they always lingered. They always hovered just close enough; and that was the point. Out of sight out of mind. Perhaps. But even having stuffed you in the cardboard box I emptied yesterday, along with the residue of dust and fragments of lint carried by a season occupying space, even having wedged you in the corner under my dresser beside the stack of notebooks from junior high I can't bare to part with because some day I'll take the time to read the evolution of my literary tactics, even in the dark garnished in mistrust and seclusion you manage to materialize as a cloud. Even out of sight you find a way to my mind. Even, dehydrating in the dust, you find a way to vaporize and congeal into the little black rain cloud hovering over my honey tree.

I suppose it's my own fault. I doubt you sit across town in your car with binoculars trained on my window with the shade drawn and lamplight spilling out thinking to yourself memories to telegraph to me like Casper through the electrical lines. I doubt you're consciously the cause of this.

But this is the trouble, the trouble I've hit with celebrities and all of the "for sure" "romances" I've hitherto encountered: I've internalized you. I've taken all I know, all you shared, all the moments between us, all my overly optimistic hopes, and constructed an understanding of you in my heart. Enough so that you live there. You breathe there. You occupy space there and leave candy wrappers and dirty laundry there. You've moved in. I moved you in. I unpacked your dufflebag of video games and the boxes with the picture frames and posters and the bracelet you thought you lost. I helped you set up camp and then sheltered you in with a lean-to that eventually became a hope house because I didn't have the funding to build above the ground. And perhaps I sheepishly thought you'd stick around long enough for this to become something, for me to have causation to purchase the lumber and construct a castle where you could wander the airy halls and sing all the songs I know only well enough to recognize.

And in reality you are in your car, driving to some date with someone else, or leaving work or buying a pizza. You have no mind for me, you take no thought for me. And that's why it's not awkward for you. To you our relationship is what you apply to it, and as you apply nothing more than the occasional eye contact and half-hearted smile, there is nothing between us. Nothing to get in the way of your plans and ambitions, nothing to hinder your pursuit of everyone else of the female gender.

And that's the case, outside.

But I internalized you. I've taken you to heart.

So I'm shadowed by a cloud.

And it's been raining a lot today.

Burning Bridges

Someone broke my glasses when I wasn't looking.
Which is a feat, as they were perched upon my face.
The rose colored lens were popped out and discarded
And reality came with a sharp focused harshness
That I had no capacity to fathom,
For to my eyes all was still filtered rose.
To my perception all was still pristine.
Or all should have been.
I expected to be as ever;
But the lenses were gone,
Leaving me with the illusion an illusion was still maintained.

And that's why it hurt.
That's why it stung with confusion
And misconstrued belief.
That's why the picture stopped making sense.

Why do we hold this sand?
Why do we expect to lose not an ounce?
Why do we convince our minds to see so clearly
What is so clearly wrong
Until the time comes
When the sand has dripped too thin
To ignore it has changed,
And the view so out of context
That it comes to light the lenses went missing long ago?
I started seeing reality,
And interpreted it through rose tinted ideals
That no longer applied.

The time had changed.
The sand had fallen.
I can't keep believing this trick of the eye.
If they ask, I'm okay now.
If they ask, I understand.
It took time to set in this goodbye.


**


This is another of those poems that I fear only makes sense to me because I...I know what I'm trying to say.

So let me take another route:

I woke up last night. In a metaphorical sense, meaning the lightbulb came on and I understood. I wasn't in that dark clouded haze I must have been spinning through leading up to that moment, because suddenly all was illuminated and bright in a way unlike before. And I realized my problem with the circumstance was that I wasn't looking at it with a present eye. I wasn't beholding it as it was unfolding. I was filtering it to a thing of beauty, shifting it through rose colored glasses. Because there was a time when my ideal, my image in rose, was the reality. There was a time when the rose was truth. But I failed to recognize the change, failed to determine the falling away, and continued to pass reality through the rose, mystified and destroyed that it didn't fit anymore. That somehow the way things were going wasn't the way I could see, wasn't as softly tinted and peaceful. Suddenly reality wasn't rose.

But my perception of it was.

Naivety? Ignorance? Synonyms of the feeling.

I didn't evolve with my surrounds, is what I suppose I'm getting at here. From the starting gate I saw rose and in truth it was rose, but as we pressed on and the color changed to my surrounding circumstance, I remained plateaued on rose. I stayed stagnant with a fluxing world. To call back an old metaphor, I expected the painting to stay the same as my vantage point changed, expected the dimensions to be as sure and strong as they had been headlong.

And once I realized the world wasn't rose anymore, once I stopped trying to wedge reality through a lens no longer made to fit it, I was at peace. Almost instantaneously.

I mean, if I think about it and hash it out and pull at all the details to support the rose hypothesis, I start to break down and wallow in this bygone confusion and... Those rose moments were an island of goodness in an ocean of diarrhea  The island, the hiccup of hope, doesn't change what life in this space had fundamentally become.

I realized there was no need to be jealous or bitter or depressed that it was someone else and not me. It hadn't been me for a long time, and if I'd been tenacious enough to take the glasses off sooner I would have seen that.

As I said of it in my journal, "It's time to officially close the case and lock the file, to remember it but not riffle through it and dwell on a past hope."

Desire can cause heart attacks. Desire, it won't bring you back.


But you don't have to worry anymore. The glasses are gone; I see truth as truth and I'm strangely accepting of it. We're still good.

Now to move forward, into the dark of tomorrow.

An End

I stifled my breath for you,
For a moment,
Until the wind gushed by
And my lungs were opened
Like the understanding held within my eyes.
These silhouetted pictures,
Crafted from the sheepskin
With driftwood frames
Falter in their masking
The walls.

I see now and breathe
And lay in wait
For the stuffy air to
Dissipate. Open the window.
Shut the damn door.
Leave me to lie
And to live.
This dust isn't keeping me;
You're not boxing me in.
I'm gone whether you care
Or notice.

To be cordial would be nice.
To recompense would be better.
But you prefer neither,
So I suppose I'm the same.
I'll see you the other side of never.

Monologue: Stay

I'm not tethered to this place, freed by the limitation of falling. There is breath that fills my lungs and alleviates my heart, there is a shaking of foundations that oysters up new birth.

I am free, I am calm, I am at ease.

I think I'll write a monologue:



I'm not playing this game anymore. I'm not chasing you like dogs allegedly chase cars. I'm not...wasting that much time on you. The hardest thing about this is that I'm not mad. A little annoyed, but not mad. I wish I was. I wish I could curse your name and fume to my friends. I wish I could despise you. Anger makes it easier to let go. It's easier to overturn tables and bite my thumb at you than it is to stay here.

But that's what I have to do. Stay. There's no one to blame when things simply fall apart. No one was wrong in us not being right. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt... This is the life I get to lead now, watching you roam with that harness on, safe and secure while I fall, watching you live and breath and experience all the things I'd hoped for us...all things I hope for with someone else if someone else would call. If anyone else would call. Because after you, no one's called.

The universe has a system of give and take, and often it all comes at once. One good opportunity is handed over and suddenly dozens more are at the door, but a week before all was nothing. The road led nowhere, all was vain and pointless.

You left and took it all with you. You unstopped the drain and everything the universe could have been handing me swirled into oblivion, vanishing from beneath my feet and between my toes. And I can't hate you for it. And that's the hardest part.

It's when you look back and see yourself as a different person that you know you've moved on. 

I never really had one of those moments. I had the experience of reading a journal or school writing assignment from early adolescent days and smiling at the immaturity and stupidity of that little girl. But I've also had the experience of reading something less than a year out of date and cringing at my youthful way of seeing the world.

And then I had this, reading words penned less than three months ago, and realized it's nothing to do with the wrongness with which I viewed the world in that space, but rather the difference with which I see it in this moment compared to then.

It's the disconnect, the Brechtian breech of the fourth wall. Those memories, writings, stories sound so distant and strange because I'm not the girl that wrote them anymore. I stopped reading the book for a few months and tried to pick it up where I left off, without reviewing context. I paused the movie for a day and came back to watch the end.

Alienation. 

That's the term. 

I felt that way when I wrote it. I believed those ideals when I scribed them. I see them as ridiculous or odd now because I don't look at life in those eyes anymore. Times have changed, my situation has changed, and my eyes have had to adjust.

Does this make sense? I feel I'm losing factuality in my vagueness.

I don't know if this is a thing, and frankly I'm too lazy to look into it, but in my creative writing class in high school, the teacher dedicated the month of April to poetry writing. Allegedly it's National Poetry Writing Month, or something. (That's the part I'm too lazy to look up. Go forth and discover.)

November is National Novel Writing Month, but this past November I resolved to merely write something every day, as my novel was not fresh enough in my mind to flesh out. So I did. I carried a notebook with me and wrote something every day, a practice I have for the most part carried on through these intervening months. With regards to April, I had an idea.

I've been writing a lot of poetry lately. So I'm not going to do that for April.

I'm going to write monologues.

A few months back I was searching for a monologue and I stopped by my blog, with monologues on the mind, and realized a lot of my musings are structured as theatrical pieces, which only makes sense when you consider what I'm wrapped up in constantly. I've written and performed a few monologues for school that have turned out quite well, and each time I've thought "Write more of these."

So I'm going to.

I don't promise to post them, I find I get more slacker-ish if I give myself strict requirements like getting on the computer to type a thing every day. But, undoubtedly, like I do with most everything else, when I write something I'm very much pleased with, I will most likely post it here.

So...yeah. I just felt like writing a blog post that was actually a blog post and not some sentimental/poetic/prosetic piece. 

My Inevitable Letdown

"It's empty." He said as we stood shoulder to shoulder. I watched with eyes cast down, contemplating all the hype we give these moments, all the expectations that ultimately end in ruin.

When has reality mirrored my mind? When has the outcome exceeded my expectations and dreams? When have these things gone right?

I slowly came to a squat and brushed my fingertips against the jagged wood of the chest. I felt him sink beside me.

"I guess that means we fill it."

He took my hand and pulled me up, the warmth of our touch lost in the wind, my eyes somehow seeing what they've always seen, forced now, by my inevitable letdown, to take the sight for fact. We gathered up our things.

I helped him fill the box, did my best to contribute, but it boiled down to the fact that he had the most to add. He brought the nic-naks and souvenirs we could bury for decades; the things we want to remember but will come to forget. I hid the few I wanted, the things I couldn't bury, the things I need to keep though they haunt me with their memories and gather dust before my eyes. I slipped them in my bag as he hunched over, arranging the box.

He looked up at me and smiled.

I received it emptily, finding a disconnect with each article we piled in the box; drained of all empathy in the act of packing it away. He smile faltered for a moment. He stood.

"Would you say we're done? It's full."

I touched my bag lightly with my foot, an affirmation it was real. "I can't imagine what else we have to bury."

He smiled with heart and clamped the chest shut. "Let's throw it in the sea."

I let him take it, trailing behind, a melancholy seeping in with each step, the bag on my shoulder dragging me down and stopping my steps. He walked to the edge and heaved it over, letting go before I was near enough to watch it plummet and crash to a watery grave. He turned as I reached him, and smiled with ease.

I wonder who will find it. I wonder who will know. I wonder if the box will beat, if it will thump a rhythm of the lives contained from its place at the ocean floor, or creep its way underground to be dug up by a boy with a bike.

I turn to find him gone; I stand alone at the edge of the sea, knowing it won't be the same. The box is full but my soul is empty, save the pangs the weigh my purse. It's time to find another chest, to invest in another container and hope and pray there's something more within than air.

I've taken too much of me to fill more dead space. I've taken too much of me to have any to spare.

I'm closing the window, Peter.
I know I said I never would,
But it's becoming painfully clear
That the only thing an open window gets me
Is a draft.

Paradox of Seven

I stopped believing. Journey would be so dissapointed. I know I'm not supposed to write off love -that's just a thing Taylor Swift does to make music. But I honestly can't...

I swung my feet up onto the window seat, still wearing my calf-height boots wet from the rain. On a normal day I'd kill myself for risking mud on the soft pink cotton of the window seat cushions; but today I didn't care. They say there're seven stages in crushing on a person: 1) twitter-pated, 2) anger toward person crush is "seeing", 3) anger toward crush, 4) crush never leaves your mind, 5) you claim you're moving on from crush, 6) the time spent between any past stages, and 7) actually moving on.

But what if you moved on not from the crush but from love in general?

My conscience forced me to remove my boots.

No doubt this is part of stage seven, feeling you could never love again. But I'm not certain: this feels deeper, more real. More... empty. It's not absence of reciprocated affection that plagues my mind to muddle out reasoning. It's absence of affection in general: I just don't feel it.

I curled my toes under in a pathetic attempt to keep them warm. Cold seeped past any warmth-providing article and embedded itself in my pores.

I wonder if he intended this,that day he made me stop believing. I wonder if he meant to give me that sexual look of love that belittled me as much as it pierced my heart. I wonder if he meant to make a mockery of seven months.

Seven months.

I pulled my knees to my chest, the cold sticking to every gland regardless of my huddling.

Seven months to love and lose. Seven months to live and learn. Seven months to abolish all faith in the male sex for the rest of a lifetime.

The rain outside is lightening, becoming more confident in returning as vapor to the atmosphere of the clouds.

Or maybe I just need seven more months to fall back into love. Or seven days.

Or seven years.

Or maybe I broke a mirror sometime back, and I must repeat the "crush" cycle of seven a total of seven times before my curse is demolished.