been on this earth a whole 18 years and truthfully it feels longer. i'm set in my ways, set in the rhythm of rigid days, set believing morality is an endless maze and people are never who they say.

break! monotony is a dream! monotony is only real on the days you don't scream

“i shake when i talk to you,” i say, my gaze fixated on the off-white kitchen tiles in front of his feet, my feet planted on those same tiles, my hands winding around each other and my nails digging in my palms. i see him stepping closer, closing the distance in 3, 2, 1---

“i shake when i’m not talking to you,” he whispers.

he kisses me. we don't shake.

you know two months ago i was still trying to make these rhyme and now i'm using a scalpel just to extract the words from my lungs, fumbling and failing to fit them together on the page, wondering if writing is killing me or keeping me sane, fitting thoughts into so-called poetry almost as easily as the rings i fit on each finger before i leave for the party i'm not wanted at. i could keep drafting these and waiting a day to publish each or i could accept the fact that my habits and realities will never coincide with the apathy they hope to see in me (even though really they hope i'm never wanted because then i'm a threat, or a tease) and while i may never be self-aware enough to cease i see enough of me in your eyes to know i shouldn't care anymore what you think of me.

the blond boy throws his head back laughing, and for a few seconds, i can’t breathe. sheer happiness radiates from his entire body as he laughs--he doesn’t just smile, or chuckle, or scoff, like the other boys do. this was a full-on belly-laugh, the kind that either says i am warm and my joy is rich or my life cannot contain this energy in my veins. i do not know him, but i feel his energy. i hear his laugh.

“look, i’m not saying this to sound cool, or edgy, or to put you off, but i guess i’ve just always been a bit of...” she trails off and looks down, then shrugs. “a loner. and not like a ‘lone wolf’ kind of thing, i just feel like i have a hard time connecting with people, or that maybe people have a hard time connecting with me.” esmeralda half-smiles and looks up into his eyes. “but i’m sure you don't have the slightest idea what that’s like, do you?”

i suppose sometimes you just have to start writing. even if the words fall in fragments, leaving letters and half-thoughts strewn across the page, the important part is that you write.
right?
when writing about themselves, many writers deem it appropriate to start from the beginning--with “the beginning” meaning many different things. for me, i don’t know when it really started, but i do know when it began to end.

it's not that i love you but i really think i could

i am sitting and pressing green paint in misshapen swollen dots on my nail beds and thinking what if i mess this up? i am notoriously bad at fingernail painting and i ruin it and i am also afraid i will ruin myself by loving you.

yes, yes i hear you like a train. my head is all railroads and oceans, but i hear you puffing and whistling he does not love you, he would not love you, he loves her. long hair hazel eye i am not her i cannot be that girl i do not want to be his girl

but i want him to want me
oceans
trains

I can hear him knocking at the door
I feel the rhythm of the beating in my chest and head.

It overwhelms me, bleeding down into my core,
my heartstrings hanging by a single thread.

I cannot handle your lingering presence anymore.

I am exhausted from a constant state of dread;
an endless game of tug of war
contemplating all of the things I’ve left unsaid.

Compiling a collection of unfinished memoirs
abandoned and stranded in my mind instead.

He is here, choosing which wounds to reopen into deeper sores
I lay awaiting the temporary passage of this bloodshed.