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.