i. you’re lying on your stomach, pressed skin-to-skin, and time has lost all its meaning. you feel as though your little twin mattress has turned into a life raft. as if your bedroom has no ceiling and you can trace the stars’ reflection in the water. you don’t think that the stars you’re seeing may already be used up and dead. that the tide you feel under your bed might be the beginning of a storm instead of the gentle guidance of the moon.

you roll over, hold him in your arms, shut your eyes and feel the rocking of your tiny boat against the tides of a world that made you believe you’d never find a life raft.

“Do you ever feel so happy you could die? That if your life ended right that second, you’d be fine, because you were alive to be that happy.” lips parted against warm skin to mask emotional intimacy. a lie of omission.

“Yeah.”

you have enough of a self-preservation instinct (and a desire to keep your life raft at all costs after having gone so long without one, truth be told) not to ask him if he’s happy enough to die right now

the simplest lie of omission.

ii. there’s more than that lol
    I love you
                                                                ­                                       No, you don’t

iii. a text I’ll never send:
you get a four month vacation in my heart. you get to use me as *** and a replacement for real human intimacy because you were always intent on leaving St. Louis. a convenient way of saying you were always intent on leaving me. you tricked me, duped me, trapped me, and you get an easy way out.

I would say you should have chosen someone more stable, but stability isn’t really what you’re looking for and you’re probably right, after all.

I have enough scars that at some point, I’m sure I won’t know which ones are yours.

iv. it gains more meaning the more you say it and the more you hear it.

“I love you.” three simple words that are a challenge and a call to arms against the rational mind. at first it felt like hitting a brick wall at 70 mph, but now it feels like getting in clean sheets after a warm shower.

you can say it when you’re choked up with an ****** or when you’re choked up with tears or with his hand around your neck and it doesn’t lose its meaning. it grows to the occasion, takes up space, fills silences that used to feel like chasms between you both.

he can say it when you’ve gone out of your way and when you’ve got tears welling up in your eyes for no reason again and when he’s falling asleep on you again and it doesn’t lose its meaning. It doesn’t feel heavy or like an apology.

or like a promise.

v. you’re worried you’ve caused a landslide in yourself by simple expectation.

“Is this okay?” with his hot breath in your ear and his body pressed tight to yours and his hand in your underwear. as if you could ever deny him.

as if it would get easier after repeated use.

as if it would hurt less every time he didn’t meet expectations you continually lower for him.

as if you didn’t open your legs every time his hands touched your bare knees.

but when he’s got you pinned to your own bed with your pants tucked barely under your *** after you’ve said, “No. I want to do this my way. For once, I am making a demand of you. For once, I am not lowering my expectations,” you know it’s kind of too late to slam on the brakes. there’s no reversing a landslide

it’s ugly and gross and demeaning, but only the tiniest part of you cares because the real crime happens back in April when you asked him, “Can we stay like this forever?”

he’s already taken your heart for his own like a conquering hero. the rest is just the spoils of war.

(love)

vi. if you could reverse a landslide, though, you probably wouldn’t.

vii. I’m now more sunshine
      (it’s happening. it’s really happening. you and your heart don’t factor into my plans at all)
                                                                ­                                                      yikes
     ­                                                               Fl­orida is such a weird state, man
               (do you have to throw it in my face? can’t you just pretend? lie)
only if you’re weird, man
(no)
                   negative. even the rain in Florida is weird. it’s like. sideways.
                    (I wish that it mattered to you that I’m hurting. I wish that I         was enough for you. You’re enough for me.)

viii. it’s all kind of about what you believe.

every relationship has a time limit. aren’t you lucky to know when the clock is going to run out?

there was a time in your life, not too long ago, when you would not have accepted being loved. you didn’t accept being loved over and over again. you would give all your love and ask for nothing in return. “The greatest gift is just to love. And to be loved in return.” Okay, that sounds fake, but you’re not as sick and sad as you used to be.

this is not unique. bad things like this, basically paper cuts as people on the surface of your life, happen all the time. you just board up all the windows and doors against further intruders, put a band aid on the surface of your life, and start again.

it’s all a matter of perspective. glass half full glass half empty.

a flip of a coin.

You think you’ve found a way to make self-destruction a social activity. You pick him up. He’s cute and he talks too much and you take him home because he’s nice enough. He ***** like he talks--too much, too fast, leaping ahead of where you’re really at. Which is on a mattress. On the floor. In your parents’ house. In a room that used to be your nursery.

You’ve learned to hate yourself enough to not even be hurt that he stops texting you the next day. You’ve finally understood the nature of these transactions.

You don’t even know his name. He drives forty minutes to ******* and he pushes you down the way you’ve always wanted and he smells nice and he kisses like he wants to be kissing you. You know by now that doesn’t actually mean he wants to be kissing you.

He’s got big, strong arms you can dig your fingers in and the mattress creaks with every strain of his knees and you think maybe it’s not that important to know his name.

This guy has a nice bean bag chair, but it hurts a little when he ***** you and you realize no matter how many times you do this, you don’t hate yourself less. You hate yourself more.

You can **** your way through the greater St. Louis area and convince people that you’re happier for it, but you’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. An unreliable narrator when it suited you and when it didn’t.

Self-destruction is self-destruction whether you use another person to do it or not.

And it’s not the difference between being lonely and being alone. It’s ensuring that you will be both.

You like him. You’re swimming farther and farther away from the shore you’ve built your ramshackle shed on and you’re going to forget how to get back because he’s funny and sweet and you believe him when he tells you how much he wants you.

You believe him when he tells you how much he wants you and you’re surprised that myth becomes the gale force wind that tears down your shed on the shore. And once you’re back on the beach, you know without a doubt, “I can be lonely even if I’m not alone.”

His smile is crooked and he’s cute in the way that makes your heart feel like it’s falling through the floor. You get down on your knees and you’re good at that, have always been good at that, and he tells you so. He seems genuinely sad that he can’t give you anything back, but he’s one of those guys that wants you to take him all the way and refuses to kiss you after.

You sit down on the beach and decide there’s no point in rebuilding the shed. You should probably take some time to listen to the waves.

But you’re nothing if not gullible and this whole twelve weeks or so has only taught you that you are unable (unwilling) to learn from your mistakes. Just because you mean what you say doesn’t mean everybody (anybody) else does.

He gets you to talk on the phone, a Herculean task in any right. He’s from New York and he talks baseball as well as you and he puts his mouth on you for so long, your face starts to go numb.

You held him for hours and stroke his hair and tell him some demons that live in your heart because you trust that what he’s telling you he likes about you is the truth. That when he says he could do this forever, you’re not going to have to be lonely. Or alone.

Time will tell on that one, but as gullible as you are, you aren’t dumb. You are a good story to tell, an invention, something he’ll tell his friends about over a drink back in New York. Never mind that you met his mom. He’s telling you, without a doubt, no matter how unreliable a narrator of your own story you might be, you are not the kind of you bring home. Or give a shiny ring to. Or even text back.

he touches me and asks, “Is this okay?”

is it okay to burn down my whole life in a single moment, a single decision, a single action, a single question?

is it okay to make the sun rise and fall with your breath in my ear, your kiss on my neck, your tongue in my mouth?

is it okay to make my chest feel constantly on the verge of caving in--kicked in with force when I’m without you and falling and crumbling when I lay awake next to you at night and when I’m looking into your eyes and watching them turn green?

is it okay to tell me with your body that I’m safe with you, that you can stop the world for me as long as we’re together?

is it okay to make me, who’s biggest fear is things going right, feel like there are no more rainstorms as long as you’re right there in my passenger seat?

is it okay to make an earthquake start in my stomach and spread like a lightning bolt all the way to my toes, to awake my very cells when I didn’t even know they were asleep?

I have every right to say no. No, I will not jump. No, I will live with the rainstorms and the sleepless nights that I’m familiar with. No, I will shut you out now and always because I am uncontainable, a steel trap, fireproof, the creator of my own pain. No, this is not okay.

instead, I breathe, “yeah” like my lungs are filled up with smoke and brimstone, the hellfire of knowing that this but might not hurt now, but it’s going to hurt later.

I miss you, I say. I miss the earthquake and the lightning and knowing without a doubt that wherever I’m going, even if it’s straight to the hell I’ve always been running from, you’re coming with me.

I miss this. you asked me if it was okay and it was. but what am I supposed to do now that it’s not?

You gain a deep understanding of the future of being lonely in a bar in Fenton in the rain with a man ten years older than you. You swallow down the three dollar beer he bought you ‘cause everyone in the bar, singing a country song you don’t know at the top of their lungs, knows that’s all it takes to get “those” girls out of their pants.

And you kiss him like you’d rather not and you **** him like a teenager because that’s the person you think he wants instead of you. He’s the first guy to ever put his mouth on you and it’s electric, a live wire, but everything else he does, every touch, every hissed word under his breath, every time his eyes meet yours is just another way you’re both lying to yourselves and each other. “I’m with you, so no, I’m not lonely. If you’re not alone, you can’t be lonely.”

You lay in his bed for awhile. You don’t want to be with him but you don’t want to go home, either. It’s raining outside the truck and it’s raining on your face because you don’t want to keep doing this until you’re his age, but you fail to see any other alternatives when you’re still not looking people in the eye.

He’s not your type, but you’re drunk and you’re desperate and all the couch cushions are already on the floor. You pick him up in person, which is new, but instead of making you feel like you’re in control of this speeding train with no brakes, you feel like it was all out of your hands. Like you have no choice but to keep building this story so you can be one of “those” girls.

Like if you’re going to try to get to know someone, you’re going to do it with your clothes off.

And he says it doesn’t have to be a one time thing, which is sweet in a way that makes your skin crawl, and his number is in your phone, but you already know you needed to know about him laying flat on your back on the floor of your friends’ apartment with a towel in your mouth so you won’t scream existentially or otherwise.

And the new one? He’s kind of like the old, except he’s ticklish and wears glasses and has crooked teeth when he smiles. The *** should by all rights be bad, but he left ringlet bruises around your wrist and pulled your hair hard enough for you to remember that this is real, that it’s really happening, that your heart is still beating in your chest, that no matter how lonely you are, that doesn’t mean you’re alone.

Make no mistake. The new one is not love. You’re not going to sign off on that again. He’s leaving in a month and you’re going to feel your heart beat against his chest as often as you can to remind yourself there is a real difference between being lonely and being alone.

There’s a difference between being lonely and being alone. I’ve been lonely my whole life. It’s probably time I learn how to be alone, so I start myself on a sharp and slippery ***** with the knowledge that my brakes have always been faulty and see what it’s like to be alone.

How did we end up here?

You pick him up by the speed limit sign (ironic) and you take him home. No makeup, wearing sweatpants and no bra. He ***** you like maybe he’d be something worth keeping, but there’s still blood in your underwear and on your twelve year old boy sheets and on the back of your tongue.

But if your body is a temple, how you can you deny it the sacrifice he gave? There were choirs inside you, tolling church bells, the all consuming ecstasy of a Southern Baptist.

It’s never like that again with him again. It all sours like milk because you were naive enough to ask out loud, “Can we stay like this forever?”

Only if forever is 3 weeks before your body is a temple with all the doors slammed shut.

Then you end up on the ottoman with your legs spread, two hands tight on your waist and two hands tight on your head. You’re drunk.

This could have been worse, you think. But it definitely could have been better. You don’t feel used or taken advantage of, but it’s not till later that you realize you’re still chasing that first time in your twin bed and that’s not how you’re going to find it.

You throw up in your car. You throw up in your twin bed. But you’re still going to maintain that it could have been worse.

You end up laying awake in his bed, hot and sweaty and stuck to his skin. The *** was good, but too intimate. It’s happening to someone else, someone you’re pretending to be. The kind of girl that spends the night.

When really you’re the kind of girl that drives home and grabs a McDonald’s breakfast and promptly blocks him on her phone. A professional escape artist, denying what could have probably been true temple worship if you’d ever had the courage to look him in the eye.

And finally you make the decision that you’re probably better off alone than doing this when you’re in a stranger’s mother’s shower (a mother you will never meet unless you count swallowing half of her DNA) and you know you’re using people to fill a hole that wasn’t there before you decided you didn’t want to be alone.

The *** is fine, perfunctory, a performance, and his **** is bad and you drive home feeling no better or worse about yourself than before, but if you’re going to keep doing this, smashing your body against another human being for twenty minutes to an hour, you’re going to have to choose better ‘cause he was just sad. Sadder and more lonely than you and you’re not in this to do favors for lonely people, you’re in this to find a new and different way to self-destruct.

You know now that “those” girls are a myth. Because if they were real, you’d be one of them. “Those” girls exist because other girls created them to feel better about the choices they’d made to make sure they don’t have to drive home alone.

I’ll drive home alone, get drunk alone, *******. Alone. Because I’m lying to myself about being lonely.

I wanted to love you so badly, I pulled the wool  over my own eyes and I’m sorry I did that and I’m sorry I put the blame on you. I fell in love with you, I will always say that, but I did it with my eyes closed, wishing wishing wishing no one would wake me up.

And so I went through the next phase of my life with my eyes so willfully closed, it’s a wonder I didn’t drown as many times as I walked to the water’s edge. I said it was you I wanted to fill my lungs and choke me and maybe it was, at first, but more than anything else, I didn’t want to open my eyes.

It’s not like that anymore.

I’ve loved him with my eyes open the whole time. I know that I’m doing and it’s a calculated risk--letting myself love someone with all the lights on, with the sun up and coming through my blinds, with all the parts of me I kept deep in the shadows away from you.

They say love is blind. Only if you want it to strike you down, melt your wings, dash you against the rock and the hard place.

They say love shouldn’t hurt and you know what?

It doesn’t. It’s kind and slow and patient and it’s growing like roots around us in my twin bed.

It’s like this: No urgency. No need for labels or roles or fitting into my life like a puzzle piece--he fits where he fits and I can see where he fits with my eyes open. It’s easy in the way you never were. No tripping around him in the dark. No poems about wanting to die by his hand. No torture but the sweet torture of knowing that nothing gold can stay.

I can still feel your touch like you’re pressed against my leg, even now. So careless and reckless with my fragile and cold body, all your warmth seeping into me and threatening to make me rise from the ashes and love you like a phoenix.

Again and again and again I turn myself to ash to escape you and again and again and again you cruelly, unwittingly, find my eternal flame.

You smile at me, a lot, so patient and kind and I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t think you would if I was transparent, if your smile could go right through me to the other side. I don’t think you would if you knew how much I love you even still, so willing to take your smile as a siren song and shipwreck the whole crew without a second thought.

I’m getting better, you know, fighting hard to crawl out of the same cave I’ve always been coming back to, way before you. But I can see some sunlight through the clouds and for once, you don’t control when it rains or shines.

That’s the definition of getting better, I know it is. So why is every single thing you do as sharp as an arrow to a heart I’ve been trying to **** all this time, another stone in my pocket as I debate drowning myself in the river?

You know, I don’t even like the city because of you. Because you hated your life with me so much, you get to relocate and start over. Burn down everything good about the time we spent together.

I’m green, so green all over, I know it. I don’t even miss you, but God, I hate Kansas City.

I want to hate him as much, too. I have it in me to do that. So willing to give into the darkest part of myself and blame you for it when I know it’s been there all along.

I can’t. I can’t hate him. Because he seems like everything I couldn’t be for you and I can’t hate you because you’ve always deserved to be with someone who could return your smile. Who you would smile for even if they were transparent and you could see through to the other side.

All I can really hope is that you’re not in love with him.

I loved you first, indeed.

Looking at you has always been so oddly like staring into the sun. Being around you a unique and private pleasure I did not deserve. So I guess it would make sense when I’m stuck in this eternal twilight, waiting for your too bright sun to set, I would want you more than anyone else.

I’ve been trying. To stay away. Because I know this burden of unrequited love is not mine alone to bear. But nothing is helping. Not a thing.

And when the sun sets--if it ever does--I’ll probably be thinking of you when the sun rises again. I know people say the night is always darkest before the dawn and I believe that, I do. But you have become the dawn, the mid afternoon sun hanging so heavy in the sky, all the pinks and oranges of a sun that never sets.

I don’t want you to be a sun that never sets.

A prisoner of my covetous heart. I’m sure the stars and the moon are probably pretty good to look at, too and I haven’t seen them since the moment I saw you.

But you can break my heart a million times and still I won’t let you set and it’s tearing me up from the inside out. And it’s out. I’ve become some bitter, selfish shell of the person that fell in love with the girl who was too bright and shining to look in the eyes.

And I know that’s all you see. The shell. But I can promise that inside me is that stupid eternal summer. Beaches and sand and a boundless heart with your name on it. And how am I supposed to destroy my last best thing?

You always act so hurt when I turn away from your blinding light, but friends don’t break each other’s heart.

Please please please please help me make this sun set. I’m ready to sleep on you.

What if I started calling you what you really are? Here are some possibilities:
the ashtray taste in my mouth after three cigarettes
the calculations of how tired I’m likely to be when my alarm goes off at seven in the morning without you
that acid taste when my heart climbs up my throat with the alcohol
the gnawing crawling insomnia that’s partly about you but can certainly be traced back to thinking about the way you smile when your face is really close to mine
the potential liver failure or at least what my liver has been processing straight into my bloodstream every hour
the warm hum when I turn my truck on to drive you home--you’ve stopped asking me, I always drive you home, but you don’t call me chauffeur. In fact, you pointedly don’t call me anything but my name, my whole ******* name
your arms tightening around me in the back seat and your face--your smile--pressed against my shoulder
your throat when you swallow Fireball like it doesn’t burn you inside out (you burn me inside out)
you apologized to me twice and I know you don’t apologize
the queen of wands the queen of wands the queen of wands
the fact that all my pooled, vague desire has started calling you by name. I’ve never felt it say anyone’s name and it won’t stop talking about the small, quiet, beautiful things in my life that have everything and nothing to do with you

About what?

I’m still bleeding internally from every time I’ve crashed into you like a wave, picking thorns out of my side that you’ve stuck there by omission, spitting my teeth out to show you everything I say is the truth, pressing cigarettes to my bare skin because you still want to be in my life.

In my life.

Despite the fact that you were cement on my ribcage and I ripped you off with my own bleeding hands so hopefully, at some point, I could jump back in the water without drowning on you, and you-- you keep calling me back to land, ensuring that I will never be capable of swimming until I’ve “talked” to you.

I have talked.

Drunk, high, so sober it brought tears to my eyes. If you doubt that all of my cards were always on the table, you don’t know me well enough to sink me like a stone (and I’m still sinking every minute of every day. I’m just teaching myself you’re not going to be the one throwing the life raft).

I am raw, transparent, hard to swallow around, and I have told you how I felt. I stopped sheltering you from the depth of my feeling the second you read me like a book and sitting in the back of your car, this bright white distance between us (that’s always been between us) I didn’t even hide this grating, dragging, bleeding rage. And I said what needed to be said-- you have not and will never love me.

And if that’s the statement you’d like to talk about, I’d rather not so I don’t have to go back and retrace it in every single word you’ve ever said to me since we met.

But you are also a vice--the clapping kind, the suffocating kind, the tethering kind, and the sooner I figure out how to make my own key, the better off for both of us. This is not solved by talking.

In fact, all we’ve ever done is talk.

Frankly, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.

I spend so much time thinking love is being a kamikaze pilot--if I am so willing to destroy myself for you, surely you see the depth of my feeling.

But you’re right, I bet. Right to avoid the people so willing to burn themselves alive in enclosed spaces in your name. Who’s to say that I wouldn’t nosedive with you on board? Just because I have no concept of self-preservation doesn’t mean you don’t either.

And a friend said, in the dark, with flickering fire shadows all over her face, that I know what I want in love and I believed her--believe her--but I don’t know what that means about wanting you.

You are nothing like what I want in love--careless where I’m careful, free where I’d like to be still, sensitive about things I’ll needle, not a cuddler, stamping on all the fires I want to ignite in you and me.

And if I know what I want, why do I keep crashing against you hoping the result will change? I keep thinking crash enough times, one time you’ll break, but I’m your eternal kamikaze pilot.

And I know all about the supposed virtues of persistence, but if you don’t love me and you never will, watching me die for you over and over again has got to be terrible to watch. I can’t promise I’ll stop doing it, but I can promise to keep all deaths out of eyesight and keep my mouth shut. Even when I’m drinking. Even with my heart on my sleeve. Even when I’m asleep and should be allowed to dream about crashing into you.

I love you, but I need to learn that it doesn’t have to be a death sentence.

I don’t know why, above all things, love should be fair to me.

To me.

Who has probably never been fair to anyone who’s cared for me in my entire life. I’m far too blind to wait for anyone that’s been trying to catch up with me and far too impatient to work and get anyone to slow down enough for me.

And I still cling to the idea that love should be, above all things, fair to me.

And, really, how do you say, “I look at picture of you and it hurts my chest how badly I want you. Any of you you’re willing to give me and I don’t mean to beg, and I don’t want your pity, but I want you so badly it feels like it’s burning my skin inside out.”

And really, how do you, in turn, say “I genuinely like your attention and your regard for me and I wish I was a good enough person to love you the way you love me, but I’m not and likely will never be, but don’t stop because it’s worth it to me to keep you hanging around.”

Love shouldn’t make you a terrible person, but I’m a worse person the more I try to reach out and pull people down because I catch all the wrong ones. I don’t let them go and I say things I will never mean. Because I just want to someone to hear me so badly. Not even to listen, just to hear.

But my chest really does cave when I’m unprepared to see your face. It’s not a heart racing thing, that’s all fine and well, it feels like my heart just ceases to be when I can see her.

And when has that ever been fair?

To me.