girls like me, we can't make ourselves stay.
i wish i could, i do.
i can't shake the itchy-skin feeling of being here
and i can't help but want to get away.

we have fickle and jealous hearts, girls like me.
we can't trust ourselves to be loved
because we love so changeably.
we're difficult, girls like me.
difficult to love, difficult to fall out of love with.

we're born with anger.
we have all the ghosts and the wisdom our hearts can hold.
i am difficult to please and it's no one's fault but my own
and i get tired of people and i get tired of places
and no matter where i am i always want to leave.

i don't choose to be as restless and as jealous and as jittery as i am,
and i don't choose to feel so old some of the time
and i don't choose to be so guarded, so hypocritical, so abrasive.

girls like me, we are beautiful and strong and ages old -
it has been since the beginning and it will be till the end,
spirits like ours.
we are breakable and irrepressible
afraid and invincible
and we are made to survive things and to know things
and we are made for the wildest of laughter
and we are made for the too-big types of sadness
and we are something to see.

i hope the world's just a little grayer without me,
and i hope soon i'll be able to see your hand on someone else and not think of your hands on me.
and i hope you remember me sometimes.
and i hope we meant anything.
and i hope that song makes you think of me
and i hope the world keep turning and my heart keeps changing and i hope this ends soon.
and i hope you don't leave forever
and i hope i don't leave forever either,
and if i do i hope to god that i come back.

no one told them it was the place
that we watched the water go by -
sat, for hours,
and watched the water go by.

nobody said it was the spot where i started to move on from the boy i loved
and where you stopped caring what your father thinks.

it's the spot where we sat in the roots of trees
and smoothed sand off of purple river stones.
it's the spot where the old lumber mill had been decaying,
and where the kids would go when they were too old for the playground.
it was where the stray dogs poked around in the rubble and the lumber scraps
and where the stray cats fought and made love.

no one told them it was where we sat
and planned out our lives together -
a pair of girls with too-long legs and our hair askew
whose clothes were covered in paint
and whose hands where used to climbing the tree behind the bakery.
no one told them it was our spot,
our best-friend soul-speaking spot.
nobody said that it was spots like these
that hold the heart of our little town,
our artistic-afterthought town
with its peeling-paint coffee shops and friendly passersby.

they built concrete trees over our spot on the river,
an ugly corporate jungle.
they put grey bricks in the sand and shoveled away the purple river stones
and dug up the roots of our trees,
and now we'll have nowhere to watch the water tumble by.

no one told them it was the spot, our spot,
and no one will remember it but us.

the electrical current
started in the top of my skull,
   and poured itself down the back of my ears and the nape of my neck
         and curled into beaded sand that tumbles through my vertebrae
             down to the small of my back and under the soles of my feet. it's a friendly current,

and it makes me think of
   a boy with freckled shoulders, whose eyes i used to love.
it makes me think of how
both our noses wrinkle when we laugh
  and we like the same songs by the same band for different reasons.
it makes me remember why we're always laughing in the first place,
       and it makes me want him in a way that i'd forgotten how to want a person.

it's making me brave, this muscle-deep current.
it's making me remember different shoulders and different eyes than usual -
which is good, healthy, you know.

it's making me brave and it's making me love again. it's making me want to stand up to you. say all the things i haven't.
blame the herb, my skinny love, it was the herb, not me.

You gave me the hostility,
your ******* priorities.
I should matter more than that. I had things to say to you today,
things I will not know how to articulate tomorrow.
You gave me the anger.
It's no one's fault but yours, the way I look at you.
Your ******* ego,
you don't care what I have to say.
You're not busy,
you're indifferent.
I would make time for you. I have made time for you,
even though it was you who broke me wide open.
You have no excuse, none I want to hear.
We'll talk tomorrow,
like you said,
and it will be on your terms,
like always.
But ******* it, I will be ******* heard.

i have sunk into a slow numbness,
perhaps because something broke over me
the second i saw you again.
i realized,
it's better to be in full-blown sorrow
than in a fragile happiness,
forever staving off the blackness.

but instead, i have sunk into a slow numbness.
perhaps because you look away from me now
the exact same way that i look away from you.
your aversion gives me numbness.
don't you see it?
that's all this ever was. a fear of the numbness. a fear of the pain.
your indifference gives me numbness
because who wants to feel it
when the ripping apart begins.

i have smoked to numbness.
i have cried to numbness.
i have raged to numbness.
i have laughed to numbness.
i have embraced the numbness.
i have dug myself into numbness
but you gave me the shovel.

you gave me the numbness.
and i feel absolutely fine. i feel nothing at all.