07/04/2018

nothing compared to the unabashed, intoxicated fun we had at three in the morning on independence day when we sat on the front porch at the patterson's house and played the music our parents raised us on. we sang to every word without fail, a constant cloud of smoke lingering above our heads and the fire in the middle of the circle reflected in everyone's eyes, everyone was glowing, everyone looked ******* beautiful. i told jj to play "pour some sugar on me" and he asked me if i really wanted everyone to sing, but he didn't need an answer. he knew he had to do it. cal took a swig from a bottle of camarena and grabbed my hand - we whipped our sunbleached curls in rapid synchronicity and for four minutes and twenty seven seconds, the only thing that mattered was our music and the neon explosions in the sky.

05/16/2018

i ******* hate structure in every sense of the word. always have.
any expecting mother, upon finding out that she's going to have a baby girl, suddenly begins spending all of her life's work on gingham overalls, and gigantic, faux-velvet bows to adorn her newborn daughter's bald head. my beautiful persian mama had nothing to worry about at first, she had it her way, and for a while, i was the baddest baby on the block, except i didn't have a block. i grew up on a dirt road on an island called whidbey in the north puget sound. much to fatima's dismay, all that little me wanted to wear once i turned six months old and developed a personality was big t-shirts with logos of bands whose music would keep me sane and my heart only half-broken seventeen years later. i wouldn't let her put pants on me. i would crawl around in my backyard in little more than an alice in chains shirt and a diaper, sometimes riding on my beloved golden retriever's back. i was young when my parents realized that they could try all they wanted, but their child, born on the cusp of gemini and taurus, was too much for them to handle.
i started skipping class when i was in kindergarten; i would run out into the acres of heavy forest behind the playground during recess, and i'd be ****** if i decided i wanted to come back. in middle school, i would skip because growing up middle eastern in a post 9/11 society was enough for me to be bullied to a ****** pulp. in high school, i would skip because i wanted to smoke cigarettes behind the football field with my friends who couldn't go to class because they were tweaking too hard. we would make daisy chains and listen to everything that mark lanegan ever made. i was throwing my life away; well, at least that's what they told me, but i was happy. and it was cause i had been successfully fighting the man since before i could walk.

05/25/2018

i think that the crippling, 12 month long period of dissociation that plagued my ability to do everything that i once loved is starting to go away. i drove the thirty miles to the point of the island where there are no more bodies of land for as far as the eye can see - i rekindled my friendship with the ocean today. i built a fort out of all of the driftwood that had gotten caught in the swell and swept to shore, i smoked my spirit blind, and when the sun went away and it started to rain i cried and i cried.

04/25/2015

i skip classes until 12 PM to lay in my bed, watch gossip girl, and eat chocolate chip cookies. i like to go to punk rock shows in basements and headbang until my neck starts to ache. i like taking occasional breaks from contemplating my life to dip out to my neighbor's backyard to smoke cigs and talk politics. i really wish that people gave a **** about the seattle mariners. i wanna be a play-by-play radio announcer for the seattle mariners. my counselor tells me that i'm unbelievably driven for someone who's failing 3 out of 4 classes. black is my favorite color.

i like conspiracy theories and pretending that i'm in an alternate universe where the most remote islands on earth are easily accessible for whenever i wanna get the **** out of this place. i wish i was a visual artist because words emotionally drain me. i'm not what anybody wants. i wear hawaiian shirts that are 4 sizes too big for me with cutoff levi's and red lipstick. i still want to drop out of high school. i have a crush on someone new every week. i cry a lot but i'm the happiest ******* the west coast. i need to get my **** together.

if we would've met at 16 our lives as teenagers would've been worlds different. we'd meet in the parking lot after school and we'd drive for a little, then hotbox in front of the pacific ocean. i'd play you all the stuff that i played on my weekly radio show and i'd ***** to you about how i was done with the world and every single lululemon wearing, frozen mocha drinking girl who thought i was inferior to her because i wasn't conventionally pretty, listened to anti-establishment punk rock of the 1970s and refused to straighten my hair even if my curls wouldn't quit that day.
i didn't know you four years ago. you were the exact opposite of me, and honestly you probably would have avoided me  - you put gel in your hair and you played sports, but you seemed like you might've been angry and sad for no apparent reason too. you were the same as you are now in some ways, you had the 24/7 off-duty model thing, you were smart, you bumped old school tunes, you knew old school sitcoms. i would've 100% been in love with you but i never would have done anything about it. all i wanted was someone that i could tell everything to, but nobody cared. knowing you could have eased the pain of the period of time in my life where i spent all my money on dime bags and twelve dollar packs of cigarettes and stability was the last thing on my mind and all i really wanted to do was dig a grave for myself. you probably would have never talked to me, but we would have been the coolest kids in the parking lot.
and can i tell you like, the cheesiest sounding thing in the world? yeah? okay. i can't wait to run into you on a beach on the north shore of kauai in 50 years. "shawshank redemption" style. i hope we're friends forever.

my best friend and i go grocery shopping together almost everyday. he has his hair up most of the time but i love it when he leaves it down and it's all curly and wild and the wind blows it across his face when we're sitting on a tailgate finishing the pack of cigarettes that we got the day before. we haven't left each other's side since the last full moon.

my best friend loves the beatles more than anything in the world and i love it when we get high late in the afternoon and we can see the sunset from my living room window while looking at memes and listening to track six off of abbey road. i never thought someone who loved dead musicians as much as i did existed until i met him.

my best friend and i sit next to each other in music theory on mondays and wednesdays. our weekdays feel like weekends because we have so much fun doing nothing even if we have class the next morning. i love it when he smiles because it's the most genuine thing i think i've ever seen.

my best friend holds doors open for me and he lights my cigarettes for me. normally i would take a feminist stand by saying thank you, but i could open my own doors and light my own cigarettes but with him i forget all of that and i actually think there's a 15.6% chance that he might be the love of my life. it's really hard to be myself with all these post-teenage emotions that have made me batshit crazy.