How beautiful this all is — the language between bodies. Not touching, necessarily. Not speaking, really. What I’m trying to talk about is the conversation that falls into that empty ether between human beings. What I love, even more than falling in love, is falling in love with that space — with that quiet, precious, virgin sanctity between two people who are too scared to talk about all the strings that pull them together. It’s so easy for me to fall in love with every human being I meet because there’s just so much there, so much hope, so much untarnished promise. Still gold. Still reflective and new. I am fickle with my heart. My father taught me how to love the best way that he could, and now pain and love are irrevocably braided together in such a way that I can’t associate one without the other. Let me hurt you. Let me love you. This is all so much a dream. The black and white get muddied and now all I have is this grey area. A slush of grey that comes a day after the first snowfall. Goodbyes make everyone sentimental. It makes everyone want to remember, all at once, all in one night, as if we could land on any point in history that we want to remember. Everything is repeating itself and it’s all coming back fast, and past selves keep resurfacing and I don’t know if I like who I once was, or if I like them more than the person I am today. There was Shinji at fourteen who’s dangerous to remember. The one with the pills. The one with depression. The one who no one would tell the truth to, because the truth comes crumbling, and what they didn’t know is that all I ever needed was that. The truth. It’s all I ever wanted. My father showed me the divorce papers over blueberry cheesecake one morning not so long ago, and I didn’t know what to do with both sides of a story. There were so many holes that I kept falling through. What I wanted were facts, for black and white and anything but that grey. What I want is for all of the everything from before everyone touched one another — before we got so deep into ourselves and each other’s skin that we could no longer be alone without feeling a hundred different hands and a hundred different hearts pummeling through our own. I told my mother that I wasn’t fourteen any longer. I wrote her a poem about what she has taught me, and all she could see was how I offended her by saying something that is my truth but not hers. The pain. The love. It’s so irrevocably intertwined. Myself at sixteen fell in love with a boy four years older than me who made fun of me because I couldn’t pronounce almonds correctly. He taught me that it was okay to love my childhood, that it was okay to love where I came from. I showed him the places. The map of my old home. The apple orchards. The prayer rock. Tudor house before it was burned down. He believed in me, and he taught me that it was okay to believe in myself, in my heart and my words and my language and my tongue and I cut off all of my hair because I no longer wanted to hide behind twenty inches of shadows. Sometimes when I can’t write I start all of my journal entries as letters. I was growing so much then, trying on so many different skins. I had just started wearing heels. I had just started to love to draw. I had only started write poetry. And there was a reason, suddenly, to romanticize the moonlight.

The other night I chipped a tooth while biting into a pretzel and I sat, in somber acceptance, staring at the little piece of evidence that my body was trying to tell me something. The space between your ribs is intercostal. I have memorized all the bones of the human body because I need to look at human beings as skeletons and flesh and muscles and veins because if I don’t everything becomes too complicated. Everything becomes too real. When I see humans for what they are — just hunks of meat with misplaced emotions — I can breathe easier. I no longer feel like I have to save everyone’s lives. The first time I dreamed of Mitsuyo dying I couldn’t sleep for weeks. When I told her why I couldn’t look at her anymore I was fourteen years old and she just held me and cried, too. What she knew and what I didn’t is that she was going to leave me months later. Sometimes, the body knows so much more than you. Dreams can become reality. The way I wanted so badly to wear all of my jewelry the morning before I left for school makes me feel that somehow, my body knew my house was going to be robbed before I did. Sometimes, your dreams try to tell you things that you can never figure out for yourself. On Saturday morning I woke up with my journal splayed over my chest, with the words: “I think you’re right. This is all just misplaced energy. Maybe I shouldn’t smoke a cigarette with you” written on a blank page in sloppy handwriting. Underneath, I had written a note: Shinji. Remember this in the morning. This is going to be so important one day. There are so many things. So many words. I don’t want skin as much as I want my vowels to be touched, my consonants to be traced.

People take up each other’s air. Oxygen mingles. Carbon dioxide interweaves. We breathe into each other and everything is the color of what we exhale and I can no longer differentiate between two people. But all I want is that space. The purity between flesh. The virgin intercostal area between your ribs. What I want is for someone to hold me over coffee, to charm me with language, to talk me into their history so deep that I don’t want to escape. Skin is so shallow. Touch is not the intimacy that I want, and I don’t know how to put that into and out of words. I just want to lay here, with the boy that I trust, and not have him kiss me. All I want is a bedtime story. All I want is for someone to give me as much as they ask of me.

Imagination

She saw a goddess, they only saw the moon. She reached high, and tried to take all of the stars that sparkled at night. Instead, she accidentally, pulled down the velvet sky It draped her, like her own sadness. She let it encompass her soul. She was used to dark, heavy, things blanketing her. She climed trees in hopes of being closer to the birds. She would whistle to them, a tune, unheard to anyone but herself, and the nature that surrounded. The month of May arrived, and bought with it, grey, supulchural storms. Mean, angry winds. Cries, calling down from the dusty skies. she saw it as May being a bad month for the earth, and instead of a tornado, she saw it as an elegant tragedy. Instead of bad weather, it was the earth, having a break down. It was the earth, depressed, and hopeless. But when the sun came back out. She saw it as the earth being able to cope, for a while. But, September rolled around, and, the skies became the colour of mud, and the trees began to bend in exhaustion. The air held within it, an edge of icy stillness. The earth was sad again. 

In December, she dreamt of the Fourth of July. She thought about the fireworks, and imagined that the sky was actally on fire. During winter storms, she liked to think of the way she would sing Karen Carpenter’s “Merry Christmas Darling” while the heat of summertime, weighed her down. Everyone thought it was an odd thing to do, which is exactly why she did it. When the snow piled high, upon the ground, she thought of it as sugar. She liked to believe that, the earth was trying to make life sweet. But, the sugar only melted, in the hot water of the world. It dissolved. The world, was the solvent, and the earth’s sugar, a hopeless solution. She felt sorry for the earth, how nothing ever worked. Nothing cured the madness. Nothing cured her abrupt break downs. She felt very much connected to earth. The rain, tears. The wind, screams. The heat, anger. The cold, sadness. She always thought that, because nightime was dark, and silent. It was disliked, exactly for those reasons and that, is why everyone slept when it arrived. But, daytime was bright, and noisy. Bees buzzed, and car engines hummed.That is why the world was alive, and seemingly unstoppable, during the day.

On windy days, she liked to close her eyes, and breathe, deeply. It was thought, to only be wind. But she knew that, she was filling her lungs, with the earth’s screams. The coldness within it, its sadness. The strangeness, her imagination.

The Onions Were Fine.

Why are people always telling us how good we look in colors we hate or how tired we look after a full nights sleep?  Why can’t they just let us pass them in the hallways or stand behind them in line at the bookstore without feeling like they owe it to us to share their impromptu opinion of us?  

I drove to the farm stand on the edge of town and I parked in the dirt lot.  My shoes gathered dust.  My hands gathered beets, onions, red peppers, dark chocolate (shipped in from the city, $1.09).  My tongue was covered in the thick fuzz that comes with a hangover.  

Why aren’t I as skinny as the teenage hippie working the old-fashioned cash register?  Why doesn’t she have to wear make-up?  Why do I care?

I set my purchase on the wooden, beaten counter top.  She picks up the chocolate first.  

How did that get in there?  I say.  I try to look perplexed.  I can feel the crows feet at the corners of my eyes.  They’re scratching and clawing me raw.

I try to buff the dirt off of my shoes with the back of my legs.  I am sweating and now there is mud.  One red pepper has a soft-spot near the bottom that I hadn’t seen before.  I say nothing and let her place it into the re-usable shopping bag with the rest.  With the chocolate.  

Why do we always assume we’re hated immediately by strangers simply based on how we look?  Why can’t I buy $10.73 worth of farm stand goodies and why can’t she just ring them up and why isn’t that just the end?

I try to walk backwards to my car so that she doesn’t see the muddy sweat streaks on the backs of my calves.  I try to smile sweetly at her while I’m doing this.  She is reading a magazine.  

How to get the perfect summer body.

Why can’t I tear the paper from a bar of chocolate before the car is even on the road?

Why can’t I have the perfect summer body?