I'm slowly mulling over the gaping empty spaces we all left, ones that I helped dig hollow myself.
Is any standstill a pleasant one as this,
Times frozen without vindication.
Addicted to those tiny jubilant, fuzzy but blissful moments.
Tiny coping mechanisms
Altered memories that will somehow glue together simplicity.
Lets try and forget the vastness of it all
Lets keep dancing this dance, and pretending that the smoke that fills our lungs doesn't make us spit in the morning.
Tiny snippets of modified memories I can handle rather well.

You are having a hard time,
said in quotation marks.
There are echoes from no mans land, but they are understood universally.
What happened to you?
I open my mouth where a dried root lays.
We revel in the sand and my skin becomes paper,
We circle round the uprooted valley.
Round and round we go.
You are having a hard time,
you say in quotation marks.
Like a cartoon.

Nana thinks the magazine is the devil.

“THE PEOPLE WHO DREW THE BLESSED ****** MOTHER OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST IN A BIKINI ARE GOING TO HELL.”

Whatever you say, Nana.

When we left my Nana made us tacos and tamales. She gathered all the food in the house to send us off and took all the cash she had and stuffed it in my pocket. She purged the cupboard of all the bananas, plums, nectarines, and apricots and placed them in a bag with two bottled waters a coke, a diet coke and sprite.

She told me that she loved me and that she hated to see me go. That, “I had just gotten there” and that she would “miss me so much.”

Before we left she sent me with a card that was “very important”. It was a picture and a coin embossed with my guardian angel that she bought at the church gift shop.

My nana loves me more than anything else in the world.

My nana still calls you my friend.

and not in that pathetic delusional fat girl kind of way, and not in the fact that he is corny. No, my boyfriend is like a corn-dog because there is a big layer of nutritionless fried spongey batter that covers his insides. That batter is made up of three level cups of nice. Which is not to be substituted with "honest" or "real". No, nice is the only ingredient that can produce such a meaningless spongey layer to cover up the "love" "sincerity" and "caring" that makes up the center. That golden brown skin enticed me. But, it is what is inside that gives me substance.

When summer made its final touches
On our far-from-senior-souls
We packed bags and stuffed away memories

We folded away track t-shirts
And cheer leading skirts
We tucked away trumpets
And color guard uniforms
Pressed against the back walls of our closets
Underneath a teal box
Of all-but-blue memories

We reopened our backpacks
Our boxes
And our trunks
To fill a room with newfound youth
With untouched purpose

We created laughs
Where there had not even been empty echoes
Bound by immaturity
Searching for our selves
On a journey we had yet to even recognize

And it was about to be summer again
When sunshine would spin our spirits

So we made some tears
Over lost grades
And missing friends
Over newfound hope
And uncertain tomorrow.

I spent my last eleven dollars on a plastic bottle of ***** sitting on the refrigerator.

It is right next to the ibuprofen and the giant salad bowl.

Last night we drank our plastic bottle of ***** in glasses.