Suitcase

The suitcase is sitting across the room beneath a strand of Christmas lights
It seems as much as I try to build a home I'm always just a visitor
Maybe a lifetime of rented houses taught me to never take anything as permanence
But distance forces attachment from my hands like it's a glory I will never taste
Passing through folded clothes like the places in my heart left untouched
It's better this way
I tell myself and half believe it but all I want is somewhere warm to call home
I'm done with planes and staring out moving windows and feeling half empty
And mostly the goodbyes
Because even hellos are tainted by their bitterness and I can't arrive without a return ticket
And all I want to do is unpack this suitcase
And unravel all the tightly wound clothes like those parts of me but I'm not done
There's too much to see and I can't see it all
So I'll be a nomadic lonely satellite until this suitcase bursts and my heart overflows and I fall back into you
Until I figure out where home is supposed to be

futon

Best friends dead ends leaving in the morning nine hour flight across the world from you
In your eyes green like deep forest trees sun hitting leaves like leaving you
Fingers touching futon covers spread across fold up mattresses compact like suitcase on the carpet
Across the room distance separated like a split screen between us

Three a.m. alone and breaking darkness crushing barely breathing missing you
And everything futon beneath aching bones I wrap myself up in mattress sadness
Covers stretched beneath empty palms sitting up clock ticks by pipes groan empty blackness

Nervous flutter she's like you were on my futon in my eyes a begging need
Awkward tension I'm a child and she's separated fingers meet knees brush butterflies but is it just
Needing someone across from me
After all emptiness is bearable when shared with somebody and she'll never be you

Visitors

I sit here and I'm watching the sun set over Montmarte in the way that it does 

Shaking its head 

At the depicableness of those below 

The ones it has risen above again and again day after day and it continues this way 

Shaking its head as it slowly 

Bleeds into the buildings that are bonafide postcards ripped from the shaking hands 

Of beggars 

Postcards that coat the walls of us, 

The visitors

We are not permanent, none of as are, we are simply visitors 

And we pass through in and out in and out 

Through the doors to this place where dreams come to live and die with each 

Breath of the sunset 

We are beggars with postcards in our shaking hands pleading can someone show me where this place is because it sure isn't here. 

It is and it isn't because this is a funhouse mirror and what you see is never what you get 

I got lonely and I know that it's because there are lonely places deep inside of me 

And my mirror will always reflect lonely wherever I go 

And my lonely is framed by beauty but that doesn't decrease its gut wrenching singularity 

And none of this is permanent

We are scuffed 

Leather boots and cigarettes 

Burned down to fingertips and 

We are frozen hands and wine-stained lips and 

We are empty kisses and cold apartments. 

We are searching for that scene in that postcard that we will never find 

Because the directions they give us are all wrong 

Because they don't see it the way we do

The way you do, 

The way I do

We live in pockets, 

The hotels of the city nestled safely away 

In slate grey attics as the dusk descends upon us 

And we slip down creaking staircases 

We are buried

In the hidden parts and we pass through silently but you 

And your vastness and your leather and fur 

You and your champagne and 

Saint Laurent you are just as temporary as we are 

You just can't see it yet

And maybe 

When temporarity is staring you straight in the face, 

Maybe then you will see it but

I don't care because I see it now

I see the dying in us 

And I see the heartbreak and the lonely and 

I see joy in emptiness and peace in melancholy 

I see the way her eyes shine bright 

And youthful in an ancient way 

I see fire in the depleting tobacco 

Between your fingers

And maybe we're all just passing through

 But I would rather be a fleeting sunset 

Than an ever present winter moon

Remember

Try to remember
Knitted sweaters so big they drown you and your terrified heart
Red wine stains on the living room floor and the pile of corks that remind you of her
Webbing words together through the throes of midnight
Try to remember
The aching beauty of discovery and the way the rain sounds on your window pane
The feeling as a new train pulls into the station
Or the first sip of tea after a too-long day
Your own bed beneath your tired bones
And having someone next to you
Please try to remember
When your irises close against the day and every inch of skin is hurting
Remember music threading its way through your psyche
When you think nothing can touch you
Remember how it feels to be touched
Remember roaring fires and crackling record players
Remember christmas lights and happy days
Remember the slant of light just before the sun says goodnight
Remember chocolate and giddiness
Remember butterflies and feeling safe
And above all remember
We're all under the same sky and distance is always relative
Please remember this too shall pass

Aching

There is a certain and definitive helplessness in the dull ache of aloneness, that shadow that caresses the isolation of my skin, fibres reaching, always reaching. There is a pain, consistent and unavoidable, in the weight of miles pressed like bricks on the walls of my chest. There is a dishonesty in the brightness, lies embellishing the truth with crinkly wrapping and bright lights. There is a stripped down truth telling on nights like these, just me and the sky. There is an inability to communicate with the stars when they are wrapped in cotton clouds, opaque and unforgiving, uncaring towards the ache I feel. There is a distance up here, nestled in my pocket six floors above the street. There is an abandonment in the waiting, in the half-living. And it’s not permanent, I know that. It makes the helplessness all the heavier, the temporariness. Because amid the chaos, amid the empty-feeling and the aching is the guilt. The invalidity of the ache resulting from the beauty of the burning. There is a beauty here, between the layers of painfulness. There is an aching beauty, a startling glory which makes the hurting all the more unlivable. I’m here in all this grandeur and all this beauty and it still hurts. It hurts despite the beauty and despite the carpe diem and despite the glory. Because some nights I feel I’m just a shell up here, a shell unworthy of its ocean. And sometimes I resent it, the surrounding dishonesty of forced perfection. Sometimes I fall in love, but some nights I just fall. I’m still falling.

On Empathy

She had always been hyper-sensitive to it: the crushing imminence of suffering all around her. She had always noticed it: the slope of a stranger's lips in the downwards arc of sadness or the lonely man on the bus home from work reading yesterday's paper like there was no point in news because it wouldn't be good. At least if it had already happened twenty-four hours ago, there was nothing he could do about it. She noticed the people in Walmart with grey hairs underlining their Nice'n'Easy box dyes, shopping carts pushed slowly across the cracked linoleum floors under the manufactured brightness of the overhead fluorescents, a stark contrast to the eleven p.m. darkness outside. She had always noticed the sadness of the world, and she had always created the worst fiction out of possible stories: she had always imagined the people driving at three a.m. were either leaving their families or had no family to go to at all. She hated the failure of human trial: the girl next to her at the hostel kitchen who looked barely sixteen and hadn't been taught how to cook noodles, and whose fried egg stuck to the pan and crumbled into pieces as she tried to scrape it from the metal. She felt the heaving sigh of the earth in the pointless labour of existence, the threadbare families on the Parisian streets, scrounging for change with hole-ridden gloves as the carefully plasticized businessmen strode carelessly by. She had always noticed the unfairness of it. And still, she was not depressed, not so profoundly sad as one might expect of a person with this seemingly pessimistic nature. Her internal happiness was a contrast to the profound sadness of those around her, and so when she felt their suffering as she watched them struggle, she felt the reverberations of  secondhand melancholy like cigarette smoke wrack her insides, shake her bones down to the core. And in these moments, she was overcome by a crushing emptiness, like a vacuum had sucked the joy from her lips. But the extremity of these feelings: they were the reason she knew she wasn't like them. The reason she knew she wasn't sad, not deep down, not irrevocably, not internally. Because their darkness slipped into her as wind flows down the pressure gradient, high concentration to low concentration, their particles seeping into hers. And although it hurt her, although she wished sometimes to be sterile from it, to be sheltered from their pain, she was okay with it. Really. Because she knew that pain shared is pain less concentrated and she hoped her happiness would seep into them by osmosis the way theirs had into her.

Racing Morning

She sprinted towards the hills rising swollen and pregnant with thistle and overripe blackberries, her determination creasing the space between her eyes. The sun was not yet risen but she couldn't quite tell, the clouds swaddled the sky in grey-soaked cotton and hid any brightness from view. Beneath her, the New Town's lights were still blinking through the early morning darkness and she felt caught in the limbo between night and not quite waking. She was racing the sun; she wanted to see it rise above the extinct volcano as if it were acknowledging her presence, as if the brightness would blind her like the fireworks over Montmartre and it would all make sense. She wanted immediacy, she wanted the suddenness of beauty to stun her out of the cotton wool fog of greyness that she had been wading through for years. She wanted the sun to be brighter than gold, and she panicked as she thought she saw the darkness lightening. She was at the foot of the hill now, the winding path snaking like an unkept promise to the rugged tower of broken lava rock. She walked faster now, her lungs accepting the cold air, in and out, in and out. She remembered the last time she had been someplace like this, the last time she had seen never ending fields strewn with tall, dying grass and the way the clouds enveloped the landscape. She remembered that place, months ago, a different season, the height of summer. She had been with them, and they had laughed and ran and rolled through the dead grass and rocky paths. She was alone now, a singularity in a world of pairs. She walked slower as the realization settled upon her like gravel dust. She could handle being alone, liked the way she wrote her future like she could decide which adjectives would loop together to form her life. She liked the way the air felt around her, clean and open wide like possibility. But she hated the moments like this, the ones bursting with nostalgia, the inches between the seconds when she needed somebody, someone next to her to fill that open space, someone to save her from simply talking to the wind as it ran long fingers through her hair. So she climbed faster towards the crest of the rubble, to the spot where the clouds seemed to be breaking like hardened magma to reveal the brightening sky. She had missed it, she thought, the sun already risen and her hopes for sudden beauty dashed. She breathed heavier against the sharp incline, losing her footing on the rain-soaked grass and slamming her right leg against wet rocks. She looked upwards toward the taunting cliffs and her cheeks flushed rose.

           And then she turned around, catching the breath escaping from her tired lungs faster than the sun was climbing in the sky. She saw the sea, stretched out like surrender to the way the clouds were still heavy like a blanket. She saw the islands, far off and broken up like jigsaw pieces scattered by the wind. She saw the city, geometrically architectured and punctuated by the castle crumbling to the left and the pillars of the national monument dwarfed my her position on the hill. She noticed everything quickly, all at once, then little by little, gradually, her eyes registering every detail of pleated landscape and gold-shedding autumn tree. She noticed the swans, crisp white by the shimmering loch, the way the crows (or were they ravens?) arced and swooped against the sky. She noticed the varying shades of green and yellow in the grass. And she realized that's the way it was with beautiful things. She realized the sky had been lightening like a watercolourist adding water to his paints, the fabric of the sky slowly being washed out from the indigo of dawn to the azure of morning. She realized it was a process, this beauty. It didn't happen with suddenness, with a breathtaking moment of realization.  It took hours for the night to bleed into morning and she realized darkness had so many layers to shed before light. And she saw the sun, peeking out from a rip in the clouds. And she wasn't at the top yet, but it didn't matter. She was breathing and the sun was rising and the landscape stretched around her and she had made it. Not to the top, but here. She had made it here and she was alive and it was okay. She was okay.

        She climbed to the top and the wind whipped her face and sucked tears from her eyes and she climbed down somehow more whole than he had been before. She was no longer a shell of failures and fading scars and rising loneliness. She was no longer a strip of tattered fabric racing the sun for a place in the sky. And she was no longer empty. She skipped at one point, running down the steep slope, her black sneakers hopping over rocks as the smallest thread of laughter escaped her lips.

highs and lows

I am all at once breathless from the sheer beauty of everything around me
And fighting for breath in the chaotic whirlwind that has been the past two months
It's all little things
It could be worse
Alone, these things are manageable
Trivial, almost
But piled up on top of each other and on top of me
They seem insurmountable
Inconceivable
Giving up seems reasonable sometimes
When little failures add up and I feel like everything is too hard
But all the little moments of breathless beauty
All the little moments of satisfied happiness
Of I did it
They make the lows worth it
Because at the end of the day I am alive and I am writing this and I am happy
Deep down, in those internal caverns where it really matters
I am happy

Daylight

We climbed the stairs like pilgrims to my temple and my tears were still inked in salt
They infiltrated my cavern with light held in the pockets of the bubbles in the sparkling wine they poured
Into glasses with the fizz of comfortable things like the way she sprawled on my mattress
Comfortable things like barriers down music up sufjan dancing in melodic circles around the kitchen light our warmth
Fogging the glass window
Looking out over the rooftops of our Paris
Behind which the moon was almost full
Almost
Like I was almost happy
Almost perfect
They way Paris is almost perfect
But they were here and they were laughing and oldies warmed the stone floor of my studio like hot coffee and we spoke and we laughed and we cried and we held on to each other like we are holding on to Paris
And the stars shone barely visible the way the Eiffel Tower hides beneath fog like it's bashful
And I saw the way her eyes flicker the same as mine when we speak of love and being fourteen
And they left three bottles of cheap wine on the floor and everything feels warmer
It's like how everything feels easier in daylight
They are my daylight
The way the moon brightens the lives of stars

Stars

I live in an attic under a slate grey roof that skims the sky of Paris with its fingertips
And the hallway leading to my front door is peeling and the pipes snake like
Creatures out of the damp-smelling walls
And my sink is plugged and my fridge is sparsely furnished with three eggs, tomato-basil pesto, butter, avocados, oranges, lentils, and milk
And my apartment is cold in the morning when the sun wakes me with its stabbing brightness
And the construction workers down the street pound away at the resistant pavement with power drills and sledgehammers
And my stone floor is unforgiving to bare feet out of my shower in the middle of my kitchen
Yes, my apartment is fourteen square meters and I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink
And for some reason the savings I gathered last year living in my parents' house have all dissipated into the expensive Parisian night and I am getting by but just barely
And yes it's scary and lonely sometimes and full of bursting disappointment and sometimes I feel failure like I have yet to accomplish anything at all
But sometimes I look out my window at the densely packed rooftops poking the sky with their attic windows and I gaze at the orange glow of the streetlights and
I have achieved this
It's not perfect, nor is anything worth having, because nothing real is perfect and what good is an empty, perfected fantasy?
All this is real and flawed and scary and exhilarating
I am here and I am breathing and maybe my cold little attic is just a pocket in the Parisian sky
Maybe the lifeblood of the stars I see when I'm falling asleep that seem close enough to touch is dripping in through my cracked window and infiltrating my ears with the kind of stuff that births creation
Maybe I'm close enough to hear the clouds rub together in a symphony of almost-rain that swells the pregnant sky with threats of a deluge
Maybe I'm becoming less scared of downpours
Because all this is temporary and soon my attic will be a memory and all these nights will be strung together like bottle corks and all the faces and midnight bottles of wine and laughter reflected in the shimmering canals will all feel like dreams in an attic almost touching the stars and the moon and we will all feel like a perfected fantasy
All this is beautiful and I'm trying to hold as much beautiful as I can between my trembling fingertips as I beg to touch the stars
And we talk of possibility like we are dancing on slate grey rooftops to the sound of the clouds
And for a moment we are the rulers of this city up here in our attic kingdoms
For a moment we are more than overdrafts and feeling scared and feeling empty
For a moment we are full of sky

Concrete

And you're upstairs in your glass castle looking down on us like we're specs of dust on your chrome appliances

Your chandelier hangs oversized and overrated from your vaulted ceilings void of warmth

Diamonds glisten against the black of bone-chilling emptiness

You pour your wine and you look down on them

Neatly packed dominoes, a row of sleeping bags like chrysalises 

Bled together like a friendship bracelet, woven for warmth

You can't smell the acidity of ammonia dripping down the drain beneath your feet

The drunken snores of sleeping men awaiting death like a sentence

It's cold down here

It's cold down here where concrete is a mattress and the city is unforgiving

Cold walls threatening, angry like the winds that chill us without fake fireplaces roaring with forced heat

An illusion like the security of your gold plated kingdom

Because stripped down naked to the bones of your existence you are no better than them

You are a breathing producing consuming machine

Just trying to imprint your footprint deeper into the earth's surface

The only difference is they aren't scared to face the reality of concrete,

The lifelessness of architecture

The flatline of a manufactured city's still heartbeat when the power is cut

Persistence

I'm constantly thrown back to myself twelve years old fallen to my knees in the snow
Because the amount of As on that piece of paper didn't correspond to what I thought I was worth
It's every time guilt cripples me into a shell of skin that only wants to erase itself
It's every time I doubt the air I breathe and it's all too big for me
It's swollen eyes and breathless cries because failure clips wings and flight is futile
Because failure is deemed irregularly, indescribably, incoherently
It's the need to dissolve because dissolution is the only antidote to the inability to be great
A life stretched between extremities
It's craving arms to hold me up like a skeleton
And hating my skin for sticking to another's in the morning
It's the persistence of heated arguments inside my brain that births the persistence that drives me
It's evil but necessary
And sometimes the night is too dark and the rain is heavy
On lungs that crave recovery
Sometimes expectations drown out reality
And I'm twelve years old with a piece of paper on my knees
I'm a child building sandcastles beneath the waves

Breathing Rhythms

because we're lying here barely breathing lungs compressing the need for touch
because aloneness is more manageable when I don't linger on hollowness
the disease that capitalizes on people's need for togetherness
hunger for familiar skin and identical breathing rhythms
creatures of habit we run into each other over and over again
until stripped of one another we are whole in our nakedness
left alone with empty sheets and the singular melodic in and out of breath in an empty chest
empty air beside us
and the world feels large and hollow
and strange void of familiarity
sometimes sheer time stripped of all pretenses is unmanageable
it presses on stronger shoulders with the heaviness of hands once gentle
steals the breath right from my chest
and the humming of electricity in an empty bedroom is shrill against the backdrop of silence
because only crazy people mutter to themselves and we need each other for communication
simple in its innocence
I need you for your simplicity
because breathing alone is harder than crying together
sometimes lying here alone outlines all the places you used to lie next to me
and breathing rhythms are shattered by a loss of harmony

Feeling Lonely and Grasping at Thin Air

I guess I'm just grasping at singular particles of thin air trying to
Feel less alone
Breathing out the need for touch because
At the end of the day I just need someone close by
Someone to lace words around the edges of midnight and
Someone to make me feel human
Because we're all just human and I'm only human
But sometimes I can barely breathe beneath my self-inflicted pressure
And I'm not good enough for the way your eyes are
And maybe it's not even you I want but just someone
My head is filled with cobwebs of thoughts like grenades
And I'm waiting here for you to pour light into all my dark places
Maybe waiting is futile

It's Because of This

It's because I was there when you emerged into this world mouth wide open, wailing the house down
One hand stuck in a thumbs up and one in a 'live long and prosper'
It's because I was there when you rode your first bike
Had your first Christmas,
Lost your first tooth and your first best friend
It's because we were teammates like warriors
We battled parental supervision and bad teachers like soldiers
It's because we were covered in mud climbing trees and making forts and
Jumping through sprinklers with Mr. Freezies dangling from our lips
It's because we bounced along country roads in the dead of summer on the longest road trips
With only ourselves, a sketch pad, a pencil, and a roll of toilet paper to keep us busy
It's because I was there when you fell down and won big and worked hard
Through mishaps and running jumps
It's because you were always there for me too
You were the youngest one, but I wasn't always the one doing the helping
You saved me more times than I can count
It's because of all this that we're intrinsically bonded
It's because of this that you will be the hardest to leave behind

Consciousness

I guess I just try so hard to be whole, to glue pieces of other people and other places and other things on to the skin that only wants to rip itself to shreds. Because deep inside I'm still that fourteen year old girl that never died and she's still alive inside of me. Deep inside I'm still angry and I'm still hurting and sometimes I still hate myself. Because after the storm subsides it does get better but it doesn't get easier. There is still struggle and a post-war landscape is always left riddled with scars that conjure memories of bullet wounds. And as hard as I try to prove to myself that I am okay, that I am a different person, that I need to be whole to do the things I want to do... as hard as I try to cover that landscape of fallen trees and trenched ground that fourteen year old will always resurface. And I guess it's because we can never cut a part of ourselves out, remove a piece of our existence because then what would we be? We would be incomplete, so the removal of our past to feel whole again represents the paradoxical nature of human consciousness. That's what I hate about it all sometimes: the consciousness. The awareness that I am not like everyone else, the awareness that nothing is guaranteed and happiness often arrives with strings attached. It's that unwillingness to drift that gets me, the unwillingness to succumb to passivity. Struggle leaves scars but develops muscles and nurtures thoughts. And that's what I'm blessed with: thoughts. Consciousness. Awareness of imperfections that allow me to criticize drifting. And it's scary. It's a 3D movie in high definition with the volume cranked and it's skydiving without a parachute strapped to a lover and it's climbing a mountain without a cable safely fastened to the ground. It's free-falling and it's anxiety. I'm constantly scared, perpetually thinking of all the ways it could all crumble down around me. I'm constantly sad, the dull pulsation of uneasiness that comes with seeing the shadows when we're only meant to notice the sun. The ache and swelling of internal tears because I feel everything magnified, and I feel his sadness on top of it. And I feel the collective ache of humanity as we sway in our drunken dance of semi-consciousness. And I'm constantly angry, angry at the people who don't have to feel these things. But I'm happy, too. And this is the great paradox. Because my ability to feel anxiety and sadness and anger and compassion permit me to feel happiness to the same intensity. And without these emotions the world would be shades of grey and writing would be verbs and nouns and sentences and he would just be a pronoun. And stories would be narrative essays void of feeling and love would be comfortable. And maybe life isn't ever going to be comfortable but  nothing good ever is. "Nothing gold can stay" and the only permanence is derived of simply comfortable things. Comfortable things with no definitive endings but an infinity of comfort is nothing compared to a brief and intense burst of feeling, nebula to supernova a fleeting vision of stardust and galaxies. 

All I know is things will work out.

We gather scars and scars fade and we hurt again and this cycle continues and at the end of it the supernova remnants will illustrate our story and spell out the beautiful psychosis that was our lives.

I Do Love You

 We sit in the blackness of my darkened car, the last inches of sunset receding below the place where the trees join the freeway. I look at him as I pull the keys from the ignition, the engine rumbling to a halt. The emergency brake clicks on and I switch off my headlights, shutting out our last inches of light. His hair is outlined by the shivers of moonlight floating through the passenger window and it curls wildly around his ears. He's focused on something, god only knows what, as he continues to stare out the darkened window, reflecting his face back at us.

We were just kids, alone in a blackened vehicle as we flew through freeways with newfound freedom. We were just kids then, alone with lips flooded by stories we both craved to release. His words flew out faster than mine, I guess he'd had less time to work on the webbed walls we wore over our lips.

Last night I dreamed of you. In this dream we weren't parting and I wasn't leaving you behind. In this dream you loved me as I love you and in this dream you held my hand when I reached for yours.

I tell him of you as we sit there, my face turned away as "Futile Devices" plays on his ipod and he asks me if I want him to change it but I don't. The riffs and falls of I do love you replay in the darkness as I remember the way we walked forever, faces creased with laughter hysterical like falling in love.

"It's the loneliness, you know," he says, voice cutting through the darkness. Yeah. I do.

"It's the summer, the empiness in hot sheets. It's hard to fall asleep."

I can tell from the marks on his cheeks where tears have carved bloodlines that he has felt the hollowness that gnaws in the night.

 "It's the nights that are the hardest." His silence agrees with me. In the night I see the way your hair flopped over your eyes and you smiled at me under orange streetlights. At night I hear the way your laughter floated through the streets of this city like kites held down by the strings of our differing plans.

Some Days

I guess some days are better than others.
Some days I feel the very un-noticeableness of me, the infinity of forever and the imperfections in our perfection. Some days I feel you forgetting me. And everything feels unachievable and I'm not good enough and everything bleeds struggle. I cannot accept things as they are, the easy ebb and flow which used to control my thoughts. I worry. I worry that I need everything that is simply a want and I worry that I am unwanted. I worry that I will disintegrate into the void of nothingness without a trace. Some days I feel the crushingness of missing you and life apart from you seems impossible. And the length of our time apart feels insurpassable and everything is too much. Sometimes all the people I've loved and who've loved me only make me more acutely aware of my aloneness, my singularity.

Some days I'm drowning in this fear and aloneness and desolation and some days I forget that I am covered. I am not alone nor am I desolate. My greatest fears are diminished when I remember that I am only a star in a network of constellations and I have everything I need. I am safe and I am loved and I am breathing. It is enough to be breathing. And nothing I feel hasn't been felt by others to greater degrees and that makes me feel less alone. Because there's always a way, you know. There's always a Plan B, and you'll always be there when I need you. And preemptive worrying is only self-destructive because a rocket scared of never breaking the atmosphere will never ignite the fire of its engines to try.

I guess that's all we can do in this life. Try and breathe and work until our hands bleed and our lungs ache and we are tired and happy and fulfilled. And the fruits of our labour may vary and come disguised as thorns in our sides but they will be fruits nonetheless. Because hard work will never be met with nothing and there is always a way.

Some days are better than others. Some days remembering you hurts and some days it is the only thing that keeps me going. Some nights the quiet blackness brightens every memory of you and I am aware of every inch and second of the distance and time between us.

But some days I am okay. And some days, most days, I am happy.

You showed me happiness.

Fingertips

It's like all the faces of every kind and comfortable person are falling in shattered mosaics over the sun stretched membrane that has dried over my scorching heart and I'm craving rain like her soft fingertips that shudder my heart with their gentle tapping. Persistent, melodic down beats that ground me, pull my roots deep deep down back to this place where I have grown, my branches stretched up to the open sky bleeding down infinitesimally. And it's like I know how it feels, the emptying release of a thousand raindrops falling over dried skin. The pain that burns like summer heat, dissolved in the monsoon of tears. And it's comfortable, and I'm home. And I remember what closeness feels like.

Sleep Until It Stops Raining

And everything hurts in all the cracks where daylight stopped shining three years ago. Because you were left here with nothing but a bad taste in your mouth and a nauseous stomach. You were left with creased skin and hollow arms and ghosts touching your bones. So you slept until November stopped raining and you wished for sun. But when it came it burned your skin and you swore never again until tomorrow when you went looking for fire. And your bones ache for someone next to you in bed just breathing because sometimes you're scared you'll stop breathing. And you carry on like this and you try to breathe through the animals clawing at your stomach and the sadness. The sadness that is an anchor tied to both of your ankles and you're scared of deep water. The sadness that is cold when your skin is burning and November in the middle of summer. And you close your eyes and dream of sharp objects and being loved until her eyes are razor blades and her skin burns to touch. Because what is the difference between your masochistic tendencies and loving someone you will never have. So you fall asleep hollow and hurting and lie on the floor until you're barely a whisper of sweet nothings and you talk yourself down again and you're okay and the tears don't hurt.

Two Hundred Feet Below

And she looks at me and her face is creased in that way it gets when sleep is sound

I wish I remembered what that felt like

Anyways she looks at me with her rumpled skin and her hair like it went through

The wrong washing cycle

And her eyes are blurred edges and grey areas

She’s holding a cup of coffee and the steam curls around her nose and tickles the

Sand of her freckles

And I scratch sand out of my ear

There’s salt in my hair and salt on our skin

Sunburned

So she looks at me with her rumpled skin and frayed hair and grey eyes and coffee

And her lips are chapped from windburn

Or salt kisses

And she speaks softly like waves lapping my edges

Her voice is thick like salt water and rough like sunburned skin

“It’s just how close it is, you know? The end of it all.

We’re just so close.

Just peering over the edge.”

And I know

I’m staring down into her ocean

Two hundred feet below

Fear

I guess it’s always going to be a struggle, the fear. The fear that everything’s going to end, at some point. It’s inevitable, you know. We’re walking along this bridge and the sun is slipping below the horizon and our feet are balanced precariously on the tightrope above the ocean. The fall is lethal, the waves rigid like cement. We’re so close to death, yet we have no inkling of what lies after. It’s just a big empty nothingness, a black hole that is all at once void of everything, a never-ending expanse, and full of crushing everythingness. But I guess it’s all in what we choose to do with this struggle, the fear of being blown overboard by the smallest gush of wind. We can collapse beneath the weight of being scared, stay nestled beneath the safe comfort of our kingdoms, plan out or days to annihilate any space for mishaps. We can choose not to breathe a word outside what is expected for fear of unacceptance. We can succumb to the crushingness.

 Or we can say fuck it. We’re given one world, one heart, one set of lungs to breathe in every molecule of life this world has to offer. It’s right there, lying before you. It’s stretched out and its arms are open. It’s not too scary, either. It won’t hurt you, not too badly. Not in any way you can’t handle. Not in any way that’s not meant to be. Not spitefully. We can choose to explore every corner of this beautiful planet; meet as many people with as many beaming smiles as we can. Because screw fear. It’s only going to keep you walking the same route home; it’s only going to keep you filled with longing. And eventually it’s going to eat you up. It’ll consume you as you get older and you live longer because you’re safe and you’re home and you’re swaddled in regret. And your hair greys and maybe you think of that missed chance you had with that one person that you were too scared to take. Maybe you wish you had taken that flight, made that move. But I promise you, if you succumb to the fear, if you do not use it as fuel to burn you, to propel you ahead, you will die empty. You will have fallen off the bridge anyway like everybody else but you will not be pulling your memories down with you. You will have nothing, and your empty-handed tumble into nothingness will be unnoticed. Don’t be unnoticed.

Diamonds

The sun is bright like a meteor shower
Playing diamonds across our backs
We've been starved for light all this time
Chasing tendrils of sunlight like a kite in the darkness
We ran blindfolded by sheets of rain
Until summer's arms held us close
It breathed light into all the hollow places
Where chasing feeling left marks
We were numb like November
And dying like September
I needed you like a blanket
Of sand and waves that
Wash over me now
I'm not scared of waves
Only the depths of winter

Awake

There is something so profoundly sad in those hours after the night ends and before morning arrives. All the lonely people searching for togetherness in the rips and frays of empty sheets and the way the redness of the alarm clock penetrating the pitch black resembles your eyes burned from crying because you danced too close to the heat. There's a light coming from the kitchen and maybe it finds its way into your bed. And no one's awake except for the anonymous cars that send the sound of ignition through your window panes. And you think of calling but you know that they're already sleeping. So you tell yourself that soon it will be morning but everything is harder to rationalize when ghosts fill your bones and there's no one there to reach out to in the darkness. So you curl around the emptiness and tell yourself again that you'll be okay. But you're starting not to believe yourself anymore. Your back aches and your lungs ache and the world is sleeping without you. There's a profound sadness in those hours as three turns to four and you're still lonely. And you're always awake.

Car Seat

                We sat side by side in my car on top of a hill overlooking the city. And the lights glittered like dragonflies and they didn’t remind me of your eyes. And he spoke of longing I no longer felt and I wondered why. Because you used to make me feel everything. And we’re sleeping side by side on reclined black seats and the steering wheel points to nowhere. And we’re poised on top of this hill and the moon is full and bursting and I miss you. But you’re just a city stretched out like a lover and your eyes are dark like the night and they glitter like city lights. It’s harder at night darling because at night emptiness is free of preoccupation and there is nothing to think of but lost closeness and empty wishes. And I wish you were here. But I don’t think of you then, no, I think of the way his voice ripples over the stereo and I’m not lonely because I can’t long for something that was not mine to love. We’re poised on this hill overlooking doubts and fears and reasons for leaving. I have plenty but he has none. My hands are empty and his are full and I used to be full of you. But your dress is ripped and you’re staying behind. And soon I’ll be looking down over glittering city lights and I wonder if I’ll be able to miss you.

                And I wonder if I envy his sadness because it is the kind of sadness that is full, swelling like the moon and bright, the light that blinds your eyes in the morning and pulses into the depth of the night. And mine is a resigned throbbing of constance that is deafening and intoxicating and barely noticeable so you think it’s just a part of you. And maybe that’s why I think I don’t miss you because missing you has just dissolved into the sadness that was there before your bright eyes and ripped dress and crinkly eye smile relieved me like a lover when you weren’t mine to love. I’m just drunk on what we could have been and I don’t think of this in the day, only when the city lights touch the parts of me that you left empty.

                So I curl up on the black seat of my car and it’s tilted back under the full moon and city lights and I look at the cds overflowing and the dirty window and him next to me, the way he reminds me of how I used to be.

                And sometimes I think I miss you.

It's not my fault

And it's not my fault
But it is, because every
Fault that creases my skin
In all the hollow places
Those fault lines were self-inflicted
And every time my voice
Echoed down the hallways of you
Because I was just too loud
That loudness was of my creation
And every time wasted days laced with anxiety
Tense like the suspension bridge of instability
Dissolved into the blackness of endings
That waste was of my own fabrication
And I know
None of this was my fault
I am a victim of chemicals and circumstances and
Everyone else
But I'd rather live with infinite guilt
Than succumb to external misery

"The future arrives without warning"

"The future arrives without warning"
Maybe that's true
Or maybe it's in all the little things
Maybe it's in the way you don't tuck me in anymore
Because sheets like security are now my own responsibility
Maybe it's in the way I stay
Out past midnight now
And you're asleep when I come home
Maybe the future arrives gradually
A slow burn of age eating away at all the times
I called you just to tell you
That I still need you
Sometimes I think the future has come too quickly
I'll be on my own without you there to wrap me up and hold me
So close my tears are enveloped by the warmth of the tea
You bring me when it's all too much
I have to fight for myself now
And all these faces, all these rocks that have been my support when my
Backbone was made of clay
Soluble
We will be separated by oceans and landforms and
Maybe
Maybe the future does arrive without warning
I sure as hell don't feel prepared
For the way it will feel when your arms release me
Maybe one day I used to want this

Smirking Sun

This kind of sadness
Curls up in all the hollow
Coves of the barren carcass
Of a beach that is your comfort
Your beach
Waves pounding away, the melodic
Rhythm of erosion,
Constant
You were a hurricane, you fed off the warm waters
Like an animal
Finding solace in surrender,
You threw your body off the cliff face
Just to feel the splash
Waves encompassing the hollow bones of your grief
You swam
Until your legs ceased motion with abrupt
Confusion
You could just see the shore
But you sank, deep deep down
Staring up at the smile
Curved into the water by the sun
Smirking
But now the seaweed was holding on to your
Ankles and your hair was
Full of sand and piranhas
Your skin pruned and
Dissolved, solubility in the
Way you gave in to
Disintegration
You think too much
You think maybe there's a life raft out there for me
You wait and you sink and
You remember hurricanes
And cliff faces
You only wanted to test the water
You think too much
You dream too often of the smirking sun and you ache
For completion, a resolve
To the loneliness
Enveloping you
You're sinking

Jumper

We idolize the jumpers because they had the courage to fly
When we should be learning from the ones who tied makeshift wings to backs
Because they had the courage not to die

Once I feared vertigo like a lullaby
Felt iron beneath toes, poised to release
Spring-loaded hatred for the shackles on my wrists
For tying me down to what I would leave behind
I only wanted to fly

Once I stared down to the rage of turbid waters
I wanted to be swirled into blackness
Feel cold beneath bare feet on railings
Limbo between potential and kinetic energy
The last breath of suspension
I wanted to feel air beneath empty wings

I would be a jumper, I said
I would be free for an instant
I would experience flying
Weightlessness of release

We idolize the hopeless because they lacked shackles to earth
They rose above planets, freed from orbit
We idolize the jumpers because they had the courage to fly
But freed from orbit I thank the shackles that reminded me of
What I would leave behind

Insanity

Although scars have faded
Like clouds dissolved into summer skies
Skin enveloping holes
Inflicted by emptiness
Although I've been
Breathing heavily for so long now darling
I'm unaware of how much time is left
My mind is thick like cobwebs sometimes
I get lost in the cracks and facades of
My imagination
Sometimes tears leak from me like bloodlines
And I'm crawling now
Insanity is beautiful
I just don't know how much I can stand

Whirlpool

Fingers beating

On dragon skin drums

We were tribal like loneliness

We ran like warriors

Cheeks stained with the juices of our crushed innocence

I held your hand

And told you not to be scared

And when they came for us

We were quiet like forgiveness

Sometimes in the dark of paradise

I hear the way your voice was ripped and frayed

Torn like our clothes as we jumped from waterfalls

We didn’t look down because we feared whirlpools

But now you’ve been sucked down

Swirled beneath the weight of blackness

You and I

Sometimes I gasp for breath
You know that feeling,
I can see myself in the emptiness of your eyes
You know how it feels to need
To need touch, heat, lifeforms
Breathing, pounding
Against the walls of your chest
To need flesh, rough and jagged
To need burning to feel alive
You and I, we feel everything
Magnified
We don't fall in love, we plummet
Face first, arms outstretched
Grasping at thin air
We don't walk into oblivion we
Run
Toes pressing off pavement like panthers
And we don't ache, we bleed
We burn until our supernovas
Are dissolved into blackness

Sometimes I forget
That we are the same
Sometimes I ache to feel human
Again
Sometimes air is crushing
And ghosts press cold and threatening
To paper skin
And life feels too big

But you are my oxygen when
Air is void of sustenance
You remind me of reality
When I get lost in me
You are a river when tears burn
I see life in your eyes when I have none

Passenger Seat

He sits in my passenger seat
Eyes fixed on the place above the dashboard
Where evening sun bends around the horizon like an embrace
We're plummeting
And time is rushing all around us between home and where the heart is
He sits in my passenger seat
Tongue laced with demons as he speaks of the times we've both been cursed
The words rush out the cracked window and
His eyes are filled with emptiness

In him I've found a home, nested my heart right next to his
Our beats are intertwined because
Their ventricles have struggled against identical constrictions
We're caught in a limbo between here and now
Between staying and leaving
That vertigo in the way we're suspended, potential energy

He sits in my passenger seat
Darkness of the last hours of day all around us
But I'm warm
He pulls from me the stories that have webbed so tightly around the walls of my heart
The vines creak as they release
My words come slower than his
But in those hours before midnight in my car, I understand
The way he has felt the pull of pain like I have felt the caress of emptiness
And beneath sleeves our snakelike scars are identical

He is like rainfall
The beating of my heart finally matched
Syncopated with another's
Melodic like the feeling of being found
Of being seen
I don't know why we met right before parting
Why we came together only to be blown apart
The expansion between us imminent
Unforgiving

All I know is he's in my passenger seat
And in that moment of darkness and heartbeats and rain and stories
Nothing and everything matters
We are nothing and everything
And maybe we met to be blown apart

Loneliness

Today I saw an old man

Walking with laboured steps

The weight of breathing heavy on his grey jacket

Sun beamed happiness on briskly stepping walkers

Phones pressed to closed ears, suit jackets bared against April winds

Smiles turned away,

Involuntarily or

Otherwise

From the gentle frown carved into his weathered skin, rough like a lizard’s

But I watched

And there was something so gravely saddening

In the way he walked so slowly

As if every step was painful

He stopped once at the garbage can down the path from the fountain where I sat

To collect some more bottles for his swelling plastic bag

And one at the bus stop

Just to rest awhile

I watched as he walked on

Slowly curving out of sight

And I was filled with a deep loneliness

Too deep for the even the sun to melt

goodbyes

just a little one because I'm scared to leave you all behind

reasons why goodbyes
seem to tremble facades I've built with anger driven hands
escape me
words carved from runaway fourteen year old plans forged from the fires of
'we could be'
it's just a word, two syllables pressed between here and gone,
limbo in the seams of staying and leaving you behind
that time and place where no one really wants to leave
immediacy of parting inescapable
in the way I need roads like snaking skeletons across maps of skin and bones
but the way your face falls
like the crumbling of cascading cliffs
trembles my self-solidarity like a weakness,
something I refuse to give in to
I only hope we meet again
after travels have quelled our mutual need for escape
and plans have turned to stories
all these plans will become stories
I can only hope your face
regains familiarity
and time doesn't mark the beauty of us

Rib Bones

Inhale
The soft-spoken lips of morning crackle like
Dusty vinyl over the skin of your cheekbones
Exhale
Tattered breaths ripped by dust motes
Balanced precariously on tendrils of honey light
Inhale
The space between
Limbo of what could be
Exhale
Remember me
A ghost hand plays across rib bones and
You start to breathe

Lani's Poems #2

Newness opens up before me like clean paper

Void of superficial and intrinsic scars

I am silenced like new snow fallen upon softened leaves

Fear of breaking virginity

Untouched whiteness

Overwhelms me like insanity

Lani's Poems #1

Hey all,

If you read my book sneak-peek-y thing, you will know that my character Lani writes poems from her perspective. I'll be sharing a few here :)

#1

To love a girl

With every ounce of feather

Softness between my fingertips

To hear the tinkling of laughter as

She tosses the cashmere of her hair back

The arc and swell of cresting strawberry waves

To count the freckles on her back and

Connect the dots like constellations

To build a fort of dreams laced

Between sheets

I wonder

If I’m drawn to feathers to evade past bricks

Her

I needed her like
The ocean needed the shore
In a pulsating way
Eternal desire
A gentle throbbing, persistent and infinite
My tears like hurricanes raised over
Her white ocean back
I stretched like vulnerability
To the way her eyes creased when she laughed
I'm a shipwreck on her unblemished sands
But still our roots have the same fibres
She knows me like the sand knows
Every crest and fall of the water's melody
She understands the need to run until
Legs cease their function
The search for newness escapes her lips
Like a prayer
And I watch her mouth form around an infinite desire
We crash into each other
Her and I
Two oceans searching for the same shore

Rain-drenched Happiness

Pregnant droplets heavy with desire

Pummel the pane of overhead windows

Through double-walled tenacity of shelter

I am protected from the storm with a warm heart and a scorching fire

And the promise of sunshine blending out the grey areas

To stop dreading greyness and to cease hatred of rain

Opens skin to sunlight unseen, unheard of

Whispers tiptoes of happiness on the backs of despair

Leaving footprints of comfort in the protection from coldness 

Pregnant droplets heavy with desire

Dance on the pane of my overhead window

And though I should fear an imminent flood

A soft smile plays on lips refusing to be drenched

Summertime

I want to run my hands along your back
Like sailboats on swelling waves of ocean
I want to run my fingers through your hair
Like golden fields of copper wheat
In blistering summer heat
I want to run away with you
Maybe sleep against the mouth of the ocean
I would hold you like you mean something
Because in the curve of your smile I've found happiness
In the palm of your hand I placed myself
And I will lie here as the ocean
Breaks and cracks over my skin
And wait for the summer, wait for endless time and infinite nights
I placed myself in the palm of your hand
And I'm waiting for your fingers to close over mine

'Scarlett' Chapters 2 - 4

Alrighty, folks. After much internal debate, decided to put a few pages of my newborn story here. Please no copying and pasting. Ack! Kind of scary sharing such a new idea, but it's going pretty well and want you guys to give me feedback, in the comments section please! Constructive criticism highly welcomed. Basically, the story revolves around Lani (18) and Scarlett (25), alternating perspectives, who grew up in the same town but never meet until the last chapters, after both having left their hometown to travel when a shooting devastates Lani's highschool. Lani struggles with the homophobia of her small town in these chapters, before she decides to leave home, where she lives with her psychotic stepbrother, Bryson. Scarlett is questioning everything about herself- from her relationship with Ben to her job to her sexuality. Being the beginning of the story, both characters haven't developed much. So grab a cuppa, read on, and let me know what you think!
xo

Lani

August 3rd

Red pricks on white skin

Blood red roses against the pallor of new snow

Snow White has been sleeping inside me for

Too long now

To retreat from this crimson bordered ivory coast

Contrast of harshness in the stark red lines

Against the virginity of untouched flesh

I always go far enough into the redness

For a sharp burst,

But never enough to let the whiteout win

      

     Control is a funny thing really. There are certain things in life that some people believe you have complete power over, but in reality, you are a slave to a brutal mix of fate and hormones. Brain chemicals, like an army working against your every will power. Things in your life like grades and jobs and friends you can decide on. But other things, like sexuality, you can’t.

     I knew I liked girls when I was fourteen. But I pushed those desires to the corner of my heart where daylight can’t reach. I feared for my own lusts, my own heartbeat. I felt wrong, dirty. Girls my age were supposed to like boys. And I did. I mean, I liked how they all liked me. I’m pretty enough, sexy some might say. I have the sunset golden skin and big brown eyes. I have the gloss-covered hair and the curves that swell like cresting waves. I liked how my boyfriends’ hands fit perfectly over them, protective, possessive. I liked how they wanted me, needed me. That gave me power.

     Control.

     But there came a time, last spring, that I couldn’t push my feelings into the background anymore. Her name was Laura. She had black hair and blue eyes and skin like blushing roses. Baby soft. We met in a cafe on the other side of town and spent a whole summer drenched in lust and dusted with love. We were blindly searching each other’s bodies for fulfillment, satiation. I needed her like a mother and she needed me like the ocean needed the shore.

     But like all intense, leaves-your-heart-throbbing summer romances, ours ended in a downpour of autumn tears this fall as the leaves tumbled to the ground around her onyx hair in a spill of gold and ruby. She left me to the harsh October winds without protection, robbed of comfort.

     

                              Scarlett

August 5th

                I roll over in the queen size bed, my arm wandering across Ben’s broad chest. I watch as the skin expands as he sighs, stretching his white tee shirt and raising my hand. I look at the creaseless-ness of his face; the smooth skin and long eyelashes. My hand inches towards his neck, and I kiss his shoulder. He rolls over and sits up in the dark. The alarm clock shows five o’clock in red letters. It’s too warm in here.

                “What’s wrong?” He turns to look at me, his torso still facing the wall. His eyes look annoyed, deprived of sleep.

                “What do you mean what’s wrong?” I’m confused by his worry.

                “Why did you wake me up?”

                “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just-“ I trail off, realizing that it is a lost cause. “Why don’t you reach out to me anymore, Ben? Why am I always doing the reaching?” His face is blank.

                “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He gets up and pads to the bathroom. I roll onto my back and stared at the wood-planked ceiling. Five years. My mother had always told me that five years would be the be all and end all of a relationship. That’s when the heart-wrenching desire fades to television watching and who’s going to turn off the bedroom light. I remember her saying, her eyes somewhere distant.

                No. My relationship with Ben is not going to dissolve, a mere victim of time and circumstance. What we have is too special, too rare. I searched long and hard for Ben and I’m not about to give him up now.

                He returns and slips beneath the covers. I look out the window at the pinkish light of dawn. Suddenly, the five o’clock morning looks more enticing than staying here in this too warm bed.

                I release myself from the warmth of the suffocating covers. Release my mostly naked, save for Ben’s oversized button down, skin from the entrapments of cotton and linen. Walk, feet pressing on hardwoods, to the window. Peek through the opening in the layered curtains, rose gold light meeting my tired eyes like espresso.

                In a flash of lightning, I am downstairs and out the door, dressed in white shorts and a loose camisole. My auburn hair falls in bed head, last-night curls, around my shoulders and my brown purse is slung across my right shoulder, cross-body.

                The cafe is mostly empty at this time of morning. There’s the odd workaholic in suit and tie, and collegiate with a paper due at nine, bags swelling under their eyes. The bll tinkles above my head and coffee machines whir behind the bar, the scent of roasting beans wafting to my nose. I step up to the counter, to be met by my favourite barista, Shelley.

                “Hey there, love, what can I get for you this morning?” Shelley asks in her usual fluorescent voice.

                “Um, I think I’ll have the vanilla cappuccino, please.”

                “Coming right up,” she moves behind the coffee machines and starts steaming milk and pumping syrup.  “How are you these days? Enjoying the summer break?”

                I pause before I answer,

                “Yeah. Yeah I am. I’m working part time at as a columnist for the Mitchell Times, so that keeps me busy. I go in Monday, Wednesday, Friday.” Today’s Tuesday, so Shelley looks at me with a hint of suspicion as to why I’m up so early. “I needed some air,” I feed her, and she nods.

                “So how are you and Benjamin doing?” She always addresses Ben by his full name. Guess that’s what happens in a small town like Mitchell.

                “Good. He’s good. We’re good.”

                The same suspicion etches in her eyes.

                “I’m glad to hear it, honey,” she says as she hands me the cappuccino, extra hot with extra foam.

Lani

August 7th

Pressure

Expand

Contract

Try to breathe beneath the weight of his secret

Transferred onto you by osmosis

Of deceit

Breathe in

Breathe out

Don’t think

Obey

     Bryson’s couch is prickly under the bareness of my thighs. I wriggle to find comfort in the hell hole of a living room, not much living going on here, but I only cause the red chafing to increase. I’m uncomfortable in the silk and mesh of the baby doll he pulled over my head.

     I take in my surroundings. I haven’t been in Bryson’s house since I was young, maybe eleven or twelve. I know his games, or tricks, I should say. I’ve been living without parental guidance for a while now, and things were never PG for me. At least then, my mom was still around to look for me. To send the cops bang bang banging on his front door. To pull me from his claws like a princess. Now I’m eighteen and there will be no one looking for me.

     I know the deal. I wear the lingerie, I paste the makeup on the dry skin of my face, hide the chapped lips with the richest red of lipsticks. I sit on this couch or that bed and I wait. I wait for him to bring in the men with wandering hands and devious eyes and unfulfilled lives. I lie back and wait until I am covered with their release and then I clean.

     But I will never be clean.

     I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the dresser. My dark brown hair is spiked in its usual pixie cut, and my eyes are traced with kohl. My lips are red like snow white and I have the skin to match. Three dollar bronzer could never hide the pallor of ghosts behind my skin.

     I hear a knock on the door. I whip around, ready to face the next suitor. But all I see is Bryson, alone. When he opens the front door of the small rancher he brings in the night air, and it swirls around me. I can picture the stars if I close my eyes long enough. Bryson is my step brother. He trades a place to sleep for whatever he wants. Unfair, but such is life.

     “Hey honey.”

     “Bryson.” My tone is colder than ice water, trickling over the smirk on his lips.

     “What’s with the face? No johns tonight, thought you would be happy. I had a cancellation,” He brings out his diary, all professionalism, “so we get to discuss The Plan.”

     I hadn’t thought about The Plan since I was fourteen. That’s when he went all quiet and didn’t tell me anything, not even me.

“Now,” He chuckles to himself, a horrible cackle of a chuckle that chills me to my bones. “Now, we take it to a whole new level. We will have the whole world seized by terror. And this is the key; this is the key, honey.”

     “Stop calling me honey,” my voice was whisper soft, like footsteps on damp pine needles.

     “What was that? Honey, you are going to be The One. It has to be you. It will shock them more than the act itself! A girl, a girl with small bones and a small stature. A girl! This will be the best plot the world has ever seen! A little girl, that’s you honey, staring at them down the barrel of a gun!” He grabbed the skin of my bicep and pulled me into his bedroom. The tears pricked through the barrier of my mascaraed eyelashes and poured rivers of blackness down my cheeks. He flipped on the dirty light switch and illuminated the horribleness. Newspaper clippings and hand-drawn sketches adorned the black walls, covering them like morbid wallpaper from floor to ceiling. My breath was coming in short spurts, just enough oxygen so that my head would not explode. There were pictures of me, from a two-year-old up until now. He had drawn handguns and stuck them onto my hands in every single picture.

     “I am not a murderer!” I screamed into the room.

     “Oh honey, you will be. You will be. Just you wait.”

Scarlett

August 9^th

            This summer seems to be going on forever.

            I mean, at the end of June, I couldn’t wait for long, hot days without any screaming children. Without any books to read or quizzes to grade or parents to meet.

            But I’ve realized that my teenage years of hot, sticky summers are long behind me. And now I’m left with a boring job behind a grey desk with a flashing cursor begging me to write boring articles. And when I come home, I’m met by a man who has tricked me into a five year relationship of the same week on repeat.

            Okay, I guess he didn’t trick me into it. But all the same, I resent him for it.

            When I was sixteen or seventeen, I used to dream about being in my twenties. All the things I would do, all the people I would meet, all the life experience I would gain. Instead I caved beneath the pressures of my high school teachers, my friends, and my parents, and I settled. Instead of taking my full scholarship to an arts school in San Francisco for painting, I chose the monotony and comfort of becoming a teacher in a good school. I would have a solid job for as long as I wanted, with good pay and good benefits. And I told myself that I would be fulfilled, helping kids. But really, I wished every single night that I was still painting, that I had held on to that ultimate dream of being able to make a living on a paintbrush and canvas.

            And with the monotony of my job came the security of Ben. The strong comfort of his embrace and the sureness of his deep brown eyes.

            We were on the path to having it all, and we talked openly of having kids. Of getting a dog and going for Sunday walks, watching a movie with the family on Friday nights, and going for brunch.

            So why, when I saw that unmistakable plus symbol on the pregnancy test a year ago today, did I suddenly feel a knot tightening in the pit of my stomach? Why did I start trembling with panic, my hands shaking and tears welling up in my eyes? Why, instead of rushing to tell Ben, did I rush to Planned Parenthood and wash the embryo right from my uterus?

            I remember that day like the sterile bed was only hours ago beneath my shaking body. I drove to the clinic, no tears, all business, without even a thought of calling Ben. Okay, maybe the thought raced through my mind once or twice. But every fiber of me screamed not to tell him. So I didn’t. When I got to the centre, it was mostly empty. Pro-lifers in this town have been itching to shut down the dilapidated clinic for years now. A single pasty grey haired lady sat behind the front desk, issuing me a form and assigning me to a cold plastic chair. The inhabitants of the clinic consisted of a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, nervous as a butterfly. There was also a couple, around twenty-five or so. The last party was a girl, around sixteen or seventeen, with layers of cheap eyeliner surrounding her large brown eyes. A suspicious could of blue edged its way towards her temple. Her short hair curled timidly around her ears.

            My name was called and I was ushered into a procedure room, where I was given a gown and told to lie back.

            I waited, staring at a poster on the wall of the digestive system. I remembered my high school teacher discussing the various purposes of the liver and I remembered how I wanted to throw my textbook at her all year long. I remembered the chiseled football player who I had a huge crush on for a few months, until I found out he was dating a complete airhead cheerleader.

            That’s what was running through my mind. I wasn’t thinking of the tiny life forming inside of me, of the way Ben’s face would inevitably crumble when I told him months later, of what getting rid of this baby revealed of our relationship.

            I should have known we were doomed right from that day.

            But instead I pushed, I tried to make our love work because ‘love isn’t found, it’s made.’

Lani

August 11^th

     

I don't wear rainbows on bare skin to spite you

To threaten your community, your wife, your children

I don't fight for my rights against you

Against God, against trust, against family

I don't love someone in order to offend you

To scare you, to threaten you

I wear rainbows because sometimes the darkness is so black

So opaque from the way you stole my rights from me

That I need something bright, something hopeful

I need something to show me that one day,

One day our love might be equal

“Hey Lani,” Matt Grant’s voice floated toward me across the warm wind currents of the Mitchell Pier. I was seated on a wooden bench, my arm resting on the round metal armrest. A journal was propped on my crossed knee, and I was peacefully staring into the dark blue abyss that was the ocean. I loved watching the ocean, of being so close to something so infinite, so endless, with so much potential, so much freedom.

     I jumped. Snapped my leather journal shut.

     “God, Matt, you scared me.” I looked into the eyes of the tall football player that, if I was so inclined, I would probably get lost in. Matt never seemed to catch the drift, or maybe he just thought that I needed the ‘right kind of guy’ to put me straight. Or so to speak.

     He winked. God, I hated that wink.

     “Enjoying the sunshine?” His voice was heavy with insistence.

     “Yeah, I was.” Emphasis on the ‘was’.

     “Well, how’d ya like to join the guys for a smoke? I know a really cool place near the trees where some real entertainment goes on later tonight.” The way he said ‘entertainment’ made my skin crawl. Seriously, the guy’s had one too many concussions.

     “Matt, honey, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I need to tell you. You know I don’t roll that way, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be rolling with you.” I couldn’t resist adding that last bit on there. The way his eyes drooped almost made me regret it. Almost. Because sure enough, they quickly turned from grey to red-hot. He put up that muscle-head wall and looked at me with eyes of stone, of steel.

     “God, you Lesbos are so fucking unbelievable. You’re such bitch teases, making us watch you all girl-on-girl. Seriously. You’re fucking lucky I invited you to join us. Normal girls would kill for that position. Fuck you, Lani.” With that, he grabbed my journal and hurled it off the edge of the pier. He stormed away, back to his buddies in the trees.

     That’s the common attitude around here. There’s no such thing as just loving someone of the same sex. If you’re a girl, you’re a dangerously sexual tease who just needs to find the right man. If you’re a guy, you’re a pussy who needs to man up and grow some balls. Either way, there’s something broken in you. And the citizens of this godforsaken town have taken it into their own hands to fix you.

     I look over the edge; don’t see my journal anywhere near the surface. Fucking idiot, I had just written some really good stuff in there. Oh well. I grab my sweater and leave the bench, not looking behind me as the sun recedes below our horizon.

     I’m walking up the grey pavement of the beach parking lot, my mind on my lost words and my heart lodged in a strange place between indignation and embarrassment, when I see her. Laura, walking along Main Street, her black hair cascading down her back, over her white chambray shirt, as she laughs and curls her hand around a blonde girl’s. Wait. She’s with a blonde girl. I walk toward them without meaning to; the girl has long light blonde hair and huge blue eyes that seem to hold galaxies. It is a stark contrast to my dark brown pixie, and suddenly I want to hide my plain green eyes away from the blistering sunlight.

     “Lani?” I look up. Crap, I must have walked right up to them. Subtle.

     “Oh, Laura, hi,” I stammer, looking up into her matching green eyes, the same as mine, like I used to look into them for countless days and not nearly enough unremembered nights.

     “This is Elizabeth,” She gestures to Blondie, their hands never breaking contact.

     “Call me Lizzie,” Blondie speaks.

     “Hey. Um, I was just-“

     “How are you?” Laura looks into my eyes with concern, but that store-bought kind of concern you save for the mentally ill and strangers, that more concerned-for-yourself kind of concern. What happened to us?

     “I’m good.” I start to turn away.

     “No, really, how are you,” she grabs my wrist, pulls me toward her. Lets go of Blondie’s hand. And it’s last summer again. I look up at her and betray the tiniest bit of truth before pulling away. But not fast enough. Her eyes catch the ugliness protruding from my sleeve, angry red lines proving that I’m far from okay.

     “Lani...” Her voice trails off, because I am no longer hers. No longer hers to protect, hers to keep safe, hers to harbour from the storm. I am my own, and she is Lizzie’s. Blondie makes that clear as she regains hold of Laura’s hand, and pulls her slightly away, retracing their steps. Retracing their steps away from me.

    

                                Scarlett

August 13^th

            I could leave him.

            Pack up my bags; leave my key on the counter, maybe a note for good measure. I could walk out of his life and maybe just find what I’m looking for, maybe just find a heart that completes mine like they said they do in the movies.

            I remember when I was little and my parents were in love. I remember the stolen kitchen kisses when I wasn’t looking. I remember hands placed on knees while driving on long road trips with no drama, I remember love notes and small smiles and surprise chocolate bars.

            But I also remember the sunlight giving way for thunder clouds, the greyness seeping into our lives and driving a wedge between the two most important people in my life. I also remember screeching tires and separate homes and anger.

            And then I remember the final, resigned friendship that they both agreed to, for my sake. I remember how they said barely a word to each other in passing, how they barely acknowledged the other’s existence.

            I didn’t want Ben and I to become like that, living out our life because marriage vows tied us to it

I could quit my job, drive far away, not looking back as my tires screeched out of the driveway, like my dad’s had done so many years ago.

I think the driveway still wears tire marks like scars to remind us of that night.