It’s
all
over. It’s all over. And I haven’t been too sad about it.
Life is just moving around.
It’s being stable until you’re not
and trying to find stability again
until you’re stable until you’re not.
And you’re told to believe,
believe,
believe in yourself,
believe in the way your arms swing at your sides when you walk,
believe in your brain all locked up in your head.
Believe in those glittery things you can’t really find.
Well, it’s hard to believe in being told to believe
when you’re taller and stupider and you also hear
people say “seeing is believing”
and most of this crap you’re supposed to believe in
is unseeable
Invisible
Existing somewhere beyond this place, past its cold-hard-truths beneath the 7 o’clock news and the poor little boy with his popsicle-stained feather-soft cheeks and glazed eyes being told the world is nice enough to wipe his face clean
under syrupy berries dribbled down lips that won’t stay smiling
It’s hard to believe
better ones around. Is it because something like “better” is too simple a word to judge something so complex, or is it because
if someone was the best at something we would stop needing people who are worse?
There are people who can click prettier things from their mouths. There are people who can twist language so solemnly, so seriously, so playfully it feels foreign even in my native tongue.
And maybe one
died
when she was a baby and she could have grown up to be better but it’s too late to know now
and maybe one
gave up a second too early but keeps etching poison into her notebook on her lunch break at work
and maybe one is there, still there, but missed her exit on the highway and he was just leaving at the exact time she rushed through the door handed in her masterpiece, her puzzle made up of 2000 tiny parts that took years to figure out, her pastel portrait of everything she’s ever wanted to be, and he was tired and didn’t feel like giving it an honest read-through so he rejected it on the spot.
And it can’t be about love
because she loved those scraps of paper like they were her children, like each sting of ink she’d let stain its pores was a new personality trait, a new stage of life to suffer through
and she suffered, too
It can’t be about love
and it can’t be about desire, or want, or will, or hope. It can’t be, because she loved, and she desired, and she wanted, and she willed, and she hoped so hard her hands shook when she pressed them together.
And if
it isn’t
about love
then why am I doing this in the first place?
They’re faded photographs
with some of the sharper lines blurred out
in paled colors, grayed around the edges,
desperately muted and begging to surface
to the present and breathe again.
They’re séances in graveyards of former selves
put to rest before their time,
ghosts of him who knock
and ask sadly to come back inside
but aren’t tangible enough to break the door down.
They’re the living dead and they’re
tired. They’re the living dead who can’t
seem to forget they were once
alive.
Christmas bells (I’ve never heard actual Christmas bells) ring
Oh happy joyous day! And I say
“It’s Christmas so maybe don’t tell her yet”
like as though you don’t want to ruin her day I mean it’s Christmas
But if it were tomorrow I’d let you ruin her day then
We took a test in a class in school
to see how moral we are and one
of the questions was “is torture ever okay” and I can’t
remember what I said but I realize now it probably is
She might feel tortured but her hands are at your throat
or at least one hand is at yours and the other is at her own
Some things have to be done
even on Christmas
because in her head it’s always judgment day and you don’t believe in god
What a poor girl
I guess I feel bad for her
Of course I do
She’s beautiful and young and sick
and dying and killing whenever she can in return
and that’s sad. So fucking sad
There’s nothing sadder than a
sick girl who won’t say she’s sick out loud
or even in her mind
You darling baby girl
It’s Christmas and your day is ruined
Better off now than tomorrow when it’s too late
and the Christmas bells are replaced with
something much less pretty
Some days it gets warmer than he thought it would and shit, shit, he’s wearing a sweatshirt and jeans so fuck I guess I’ll be hot all day and sweat in embarrassing places and when I enter a room everyone in it will see me like they saw that slug sucked to the cement in the parking lot
But they can’t pour salt on me to make me go away
Sometimes I wish they could
he thinks but he’s a little guilty for thinking something so morbid so he moves on to an easier topic. What about love? He loved a girl once he knew he loved her because when she said it to him he wanted to say it back. I knew I loved her because sometimes she’d talk to me and I’d light up and it wasn’t fluorescent and it wasn’t heat it was neither because it wasn’t artificial
I lit up! Can’t you remember how I lit up?
Well, no, I can’t remember any of that
I can only remember what I remember it was like
and that’s not good enough to remind me why I thought it’d be a brilliant idea to love a girl in the first place
Fuck, it’s hot in here.
I bet I wouldn’t feel any hotter if I were on the surface of the sun you know
Assuming of course we’re now in an alternate universe where the surface of the sun is considerably less hot than it is now
My sweatshirt is dark it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be black or heathered grey so it decided to be both and I didn’t exactly approve but it was too late for that
There are swirls on his fingertips he hadn’t seen before. They remind him of portraits, of people he saw on the street but never met
I’m so tired, so tired
“but you, i look forward to you
because you do everything that i wish you would do
and you hold my words in your hands and they look happy there
and when you laugh, i have to laugh, too.”
back and forth we go like puppets on strings
with hands that don’t know what to do with us
there is no
g
o
o
o
d
b
y
e
nothing to cut in half
no door to walk through and
slam shut
only the quiet of the phone
that doesn’t ring anymore
cupped my face and they
fit like the line of my jaw
was drawn the same
as the line of your palm
And our lips
well
our lips weren’t so lucky
at least not when teeth were involved
And I love you not only because
you see me
but because you fall asleep
when we’re alone and
still do
I don’t think we felt pretty – no, “pretty” is the wrong word for it.
“Pretty” is too…well…it’s too pretty. We weren’t feeling pretty, and we weren’t feeling sexy because “sexy” is too deliberate.
“Sexy” is mature. We weren’t mature. We were dirty, rubbed old for our ages, wearing liquor cabinet grins on our fresh-painted faces
and people stared as we walked by, and we tricked ourselves into thinking it was for reasons it wasn’t.
The city sun set and so did we, set deep down into the glittered pavement where we could lie our heads back
and maybe talk to a few strangers who called us baby and made sex jokes
and treated us real bad
and maybe it felt good
If it didn’t, I didn’t realize.
We crawled our way through faces we wouldn’t remember and coughed up strawberry smoke
so we’d have an excuse to pretend we were changed
and we spoke in low-light voices that bounced off our tongues in pipes and chords.
There’s something so false about the city at night,
like you’re looking at either a travel brochure or an anti-drug campaign.
My eyes were polished metal in the rain
but they had rusted by morning.
