Do you remember when you were in grade school and, in a fit of boredom, you would slather Elmer’s glue on your palms, filling the deep grains between each of your fingers? How you would get a shiver not only from the chill of the paste, but from the thrill of doing something that was ill-advised. When you would peel off this layer of skin, looking at the fingerprints you were told were only your own, a memento to take with you everywhere you went. Do you remember when in your sophomore year of college, when all you wanted was to fall into the abyss of folded-until-soft papers and exams and Bic Cristal pens; when all you wanted was to fit in? Do you remember that time that you went to that party, the first one you let your feet carry you to with the puke green flyer in hand foreshadowing the night’s events ahead? Do you remember when you took out your worn deck of cards and a little tube in your pocket that you always kept “just in case”? You had meant to impress them with your card-stacking prowess, because how else were you to make yourself memorable? You told them to give you five minutes. In about two and a quarter, they went for their ninth round of some kind of sickly sweet alcohol. You took out your tube, a faded label that distinctly read Krazy Glue, and took the Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Spades in between your fingers with their unique fingerprints. Do you remember when you built that house of cards with small drips of the adhesive seeping out of the seams, but the people you sought out were too intoxicated to see them? They clapped and cheered in drunken awe and you became the “party giraffe with those big sparkles - the things that never leave your face. Trust me I’ve tried.”, as one of your new comrades had said. Do you remember what happened when you went back to your dorm that night on seemingly transplanted feet, weaving between the bushes hoping not to see that shade of green on your shoes the next morning? You put the contents of that tube all over your fingers, in between them where your Texas-shaped birthmark laid. And you ripped it off. Without mercy. The process wasn’t as pleasant as you seem to have remembered. It stung, but at least your unique fingerprints were gone, or so you thought. At least you could be that “party giraffe” like you’d always wanted, I guess. Do you remember that by the next morning the tube was empty? Do you remember that when you tied your shoes at 7:43 a.m. that morning for your Intro to Psychology course, the lines across your joints felt as if they were on fire? Do you remember when your new comrade “gave you five” and, despite the pain, you smiled and laughed with him? Do you remember your trip to Staples that afternoon, when a mousy employee asked you if you needed help finding anything and you said no because you’d been to that aisle a million times before, in grade school and now in sophomore year of college? But today you walked past the shelves of Elmer’s glue: “dries clear”, “now with purple glitter”, “turns your hand blue where it touches, sponsored by Smurfs 4”. You walked right past these plastic bottles and to your trusty tubes of Krazy Glue. Red and green and reminding you of your beautiful house of cards, the drips of adhesive no longer a figment of that memory.

“When the skies are grey,”
a soft voice sang,
“think of the sun that lights every day.

If you see the mischievous fey,
dancing by the babbling, babbling brook
when the skies are grey,

Should they serve you tea and biscuits on a silver tray,
never believe their false saccharine, but
think of the sun that lights every day.

Think of the mermaids who lay on the bay,
Tails iridescent in the summer sunshine
When the skies are gray.

Think of the dormouse with his waltz and his sway,
holding his tiny paws aloft on another’s tiny shoulders.
Think of the sun that lights every day.”

Her voice would float through the nursery, gay
as the blooms in the springtime when she sang
“When the skies are grey,
think of the sun that lights every day.”

At approximately 7:43 a.m., when perfect cars with perfectly tinted windows spewing their perfect, cancerous smoke rumbled past on the busy streets between chain coffee shops and designer pumps clicking on cold pavement, the coins would clink in my ruddy can at the highest pitch. This was the time at which wrists wrapped in non-cracked watches and nails painted with calculatingly  precise white lines would help flip dimes or nickels or pennies from mountain rain - aloe vera - citrus burst scented hands. They would flood the bottom as their eyes flooded with pity, their shoes chuckling harshly as they walked away, my holey-socked feet mottled with embarrassment. And this would continue, as long as I kept my teeth bared, instead of behind my thin lips, and my eyes fresh with sea water, as if I had just seen a kicked puppy in this lifeless part of the neighborhood. Chain link fences would warble woefully with the wind, caging me into my “office”, if you could call it that. Just a ratty Coleman sleeping bag, stolen from the scraps of the others in the streets, a small bottle of water, and a couple of pieces of bread a woman had given me. Her hair had been perfectly curled, pale fingers entwined with the auburn strands. Her coat had been freshly laundered, but her bread was moldy and stale. One day, in the middle of the summer, humidity wrapping my skin in horrid sensation and soaking me to the bone, I thought just how much I was like that puppy. I lived off of bread crusts and orange peels, droplets of water from discarded water bottles and sugar-loaded frappuccinos left on the sidewalk in the morning rush. Those with perfect manicures and bad-mannered stilettos might as well have stuck a post-it note, maybe bright blue with spots of sun fading, on my can saying “low budget beast”. Because that is what I was. I was a zoo animal, flaunting my aggression to have a photo snapped of me or a little treat, maybe a few coins. Thirty-seven cents could put light in my eyes like some who saw the subject of their addiction for the first time in hours. I could attack, sure. And that’s what they expected. They could donate two seconds of their lives and be thrilled by the spectacle that was me in my holey-socks and stained American Eagle sweatshirt. I thought I was human, perfect like them, but maybe I truly was an animal.

His fingers were in her hair,
gold twine wrapped around ivory stumps.
Their legs were thoughtlessly intertwined,
ivy twisting and curling with ease.
Together,
they moved so gracefully;
at the quiet melody of Bach
or the deafening sound of cannon fodder,
they would never miss a single nuance,
a single chance to lay limb and limb.
His eyes, silvery taupe,
laid upon her languidly,
skimming over her sweet cream skin
and thinking of its syrupy taste
while she only thought of his bitter coffee mouth
and Daniel’s breath,
heavy on her face around two p.m.
And with that,
she thought of when she would come home
from whatever she had been doing that day,
a grin in her often somber eyes.
but when she would feel the mechanism click under her skin
and the metal would grind to open,
the light would be lost to pure black.
Shot glasses would be stacked like a house of cards on the coffee table.
pots and pans would be piled in the sink haphazardly,
like shrapnel from the afternoon’s disastrous activities.
And she would sigh,
a honeyed tone fogged with realization
as she would collect the bricks of his card house
and ran the water to dissolve what could be
from the collection of sharp tin in the kitchen.
Her eyes ringed with mascara,
she would shake him awake,
shaking herself like a leaf without the stability of its branch.
Once she saw the gunpowder eyes,
her fire would be extinguished.
He would groan and ask where she’d been.
She would say at work.
He would ask why she went.
She would tell him she didn’t want to,
didn’t want to leave him.
But in truth,
she had wanted to rekindle her flame,
to let it roar in the open air
instead of it being muffled by his touch.
She would apologize,
Her honey scent now sour
with guilt, forced upon her by the guard
who held a pistol to her head,
which held, without her knowledge,
no bullets.
To make it up to him,
to make it up to
anyone else she had hurt that day,
She let him wrap his ivy limbs around her frail body
and consume her -
adorn her with thorned roses
and stinging nettles.
He said they looked beautiful,
made her taste even sweeter,
smell even nicer
and she believed him.
The ****** marked her skin,
leaving red streaks along her arms,
but she thought of them as her flames
finally making an appearance.
She was satisfied in her forest,
where no one would hear her fall,
but everyone would see her burn.

She wove a crown of nettles, guarding her thoughts and threatening tourists who flocked to this grand garden. Roses made a home in her auburn locks, wrapping her mind in a cloak of impenetrable flame. The things she had fallen prey to, the things that had turned her world upside down, were ironically the best guarded - intrusive verdancies her intrusive sentinels. Little did she know her knight in shining armor was lost in the brambles, collecting a bouquet of roses she would never receive

From within the darkness,
the shadows and the dullness and the anonymity,
lay the darkest being of all;
her name was unknown,
but her effulgence was told in every storybook
and her raven tresses held the most impossible light.
She would sing amorous hymns,
luring in princes from the four corners of the world.
Their hearts throbbed for this uncertain triumph,
their deceiving prize,
while she sat prostrate upon the cobbled earth beneath her
and prayed for this darkness to consume her.
The light, indulging in its golden treachery,
had left her chained for centuries and eaten away at her true intentions-
to fall into the darkness riddled with indifference.
The darkness had always been kind while the light had abused her,
taken advantage of her innocent nature to collect shiny trophies
who begged for her heart and for her hand.
Her throat had become raw and she now prayed for silence,
a moment without the promise of such a cacophonous ache.

To tell the truth, I am a huge book nerd. Or so I’ve heard. Ever since I was eight I have been reading Dickens and Alcott and Fitzgerald, Melville and Steinbeck and Bronte.
In the early months of my nines, I could be found in the closet, eyes scrunched hard and every muscle in my body straining. This was after I had read the Narnia series for the first time and tried to reach the Dancing Lawn, wanting to waltz with a prince and play chess with a dame. I would put on a flowy skirt and hobble around in my mom's wedding heels, pretending to be a Victorian lady. My shoulders back and neck held painfully high, I still have never felt more  confident. So weightless.
The relationships I made with Holden, my always childish best friend, Moby ****, my pet whale who barely fit in the bathtub, and Jo March, the spiteful young woman who taught me how to write freely, built me to a place I thought unattainable. Occasionally, the words would fly over my head, leaving a slight breeze of understanding to push back my curls, but the confusion was alright with me as long as I could immerse myself in the world that the current characters lived in. And sometimes even these worlds seemed so horrid that I couldn't imagine the lives that would have been lived in them, my largest difficulty being a scraped knee or a paper cut from my latest read. The characters that I had thought of as beautiful and honest were truly insensitive and materialistic (speaking of one particular Amy March).
Although I may be a book nerd, the books that I have read have allowed me to look into the true nature of the people around me, their values and their motives, and the state of the world around me, whether it is lying in shambles or standing amidst the distant stars.
Written works have this odd power, maybe a little too much for such subtle things, where they can touch the edge of what we thought we knew and turn it upside down. And that, in short, is why I love reading so much. So, yes, I am a book nerd and, maybe, so are you.