I love the feeling
when a song
comes on
and suddenly
you find yourself
lost deep in a
memory you
forgot to
actively remember
until now.

The soundtrack to
the summer of '09
when I would
drive 6 hours with the
windows down,
the wind and
the bass from the speakers
in my Honda Civic
creating harmony
in G major,
the hot
sun beating against my
sweat-speckled skin.

And a couple notes
strung along my
eardrum as I
reappear in tears after
you told me you'd
leave me if I
refused to give you what
you wanted,
a melody mixed with
my pathetic, incurable
obsession with pleasing you
and some serious self-loathing.

And then I hear a tune
that sounds reminiscent
of the soft ripple from the
waves the river made
as I smoked a J and
wrote about my days
away from home,
desperately seeking to figure
out who I really am
when I'm completely alone.

Songs that remind me
of sunsets and
old jokes and
the sand between my toes;
rhythms of
bare feet pittering and splashing
in sprinkler water on squishy,
damp grass,
of  French phrases and crunchy baguettes
that I chewed on
in Dijon,
of day parties with plastic
cups and ping pong *****
where we used college courses
and boy drama and
undefeated seasons as
reasons to binge on
cheap ***** and beer.

I hear a bridge,
and I cross the river
where I tread water
for 4 years as I waited
for you to meet me
halfway,
and I drowned
in your lies and mind control.

Chorus of Christmas mornings
with homemade cookies,
joyful jamboree
of after-school
dance sessions in my parents' kitchen,
prom night poses
and people we still
laugh at.

First kisses reverberating
in headphones
and mouths belting
names of forgotten friends.

The soundtrack to my life,
a collection of good time
genres and painful
classics,
number one hits and
one hit wonders I
cherish equally,
my taste as vast as
the memories
contained in the
music.

White.
Female.
Middle Class.
Heterosexual.
Agnostic.
Libertarian.

Yeah.
That's me.
That's that first layer,
thin as the paper you could
read it on.
Just a
Jane Doe,
a nameless, faceless
demographic.

But peeling back the layers,
ripping through page on page of a complicated novel,
digging
down
into
a
bottomless
hole
to
China,
unravelling
­the intricate
web of
stereotypestruthsliesassumptionsprejudice
and
there you will find
me,
a colorless genderless asexual
spirit whose frame
is crafted and molded
not with how the world
chooses to see me and
who "they" deem me to be;

no.

A guy that didn't know me well
once told me that I
spoke more urban than he
expected,
and I couldn't help but wonder why
someone from an urban area
couldn't speak like they were
from a city,
like somehow what he saw in my
whitefemaleheterosexualmiddleclassagnosticlibertarian
prolog­ue forbade me
from speaking in colloquials and
abbreviations.
Oh, I apologize,
I laughed later to my friend,
law students are supposed to speak
with an ostentatious vocabulary and
an heir of
(superfluous) arrogance.

I am rarely a prototype
of what it means to be
White,
of what it means to be
female;
middle-class* or not,
my parents insisted at age 8
that I begin to understand
the value of a dollar;
my sexuality indicates little
about my level of attraction
to the world around me;
agnostic is really just a term
I put because I'm still trying to
figure out whether I really
believe everything I was forced to
learn at Catholic school;
and isn't Libertarian just a fancy
word for I don't want to
choose liberal or conservative?

It's insulting to
ingest how much is
insinuated about
my depth in
the shallowest of pools.
My cheeks burn hot
with frustration as I
try to balance on a beam
cracking underneath the weight of
a world that is constantly begging me
to go back in the neatly
wrapped package from which
the world would prefer I
came.

I'm not someone
you can put in a *******
box and
label;
you can't contain my
shine behind
blackout blinds;
I will burst out of your bubble
and break your glass ceilings;
I will scream at the top of
my lungs in a soundproof room
until you HEAR me.

I'm not meant to be judged
by my cover,
and neither are you.

We are meant to be read.

I used to always
threaten to leave
just to see if he would
chase after me.

He did and he did until
he was done and
we were done and
no one has
chased after me
since.

we are abiding
she has abode
I will abide
we will have abode

we are breaking
she has broken
I will break
we will have broken

we are going
she has gone
I will go
we will have gone

Taste of freshly picked
honeysuckle melting on my tongue,
diving head first into the
smells and sounds of spring,
croaking of insects as they
happily hum on blossomed branches,
I bite into ripe fruits and
frolick under a sun who fights
slumber till late,
my arms tickling against the fresh
green grass as I lay
in the park with my notebook,
dogs barking cheerily as they
run in the open space,
dusting me with pollen and
peacefulness,
the earth
soaking in a warmth about which
I've been dreaming for
months.

Loving you was the emergence of spring,
and thus without you I remain
frozen in a winter that
seems it will never thaw.

Sometimes I fear
I have become too good at
being alone.

I basque in the hours
spent locked by my
lonesome in the confines
of my apartment,
surrounded by nothing but
brick and cement and the sounds
of the television or my iPod speaker.
Tranquility seeping in through my
isolation,
I yearn for the moments I am
privileged to spend without
the duty to perpetuate conversations
or offer advice to someone I consider
merely an acquaintance.

Sometimes I worry I am
too comfortable with solitude.

I get a thrill off of
being needed without needing,
being sought out without seeking.
I let others let me in
without having to give a shred of
myself in return,
for people love to go on
about themselves
without inquiring about
the person to whom they
narrate their autobiographies.

Sometimes I am scared of
the ease with which I can
let someone go.

So often have people come and gone
that now I comprehend, perhaps
too deeply,
that nothing in life is guaranteed
and most people are meant to be
lessons rather than
permanent.
There was a time where I wept
with sordid frequency for the people
I was forced relinquish,
clinging tightly to the empty void,
wallowing in a glass half full of
skewed memories.

Sometimes I am terrified that
I only really know how to
be alone.

It is almost impossible for me
to recall a love not
unrequited.
I stare up at screens and strangers
all screaming that love exists,
and there I am fighting
insane laughter because I just
can't see it,
as if my eyes have become colorblind,
for it is black and white that
all I've ever had is
gray.

Sometimes
I am afraid
that this is
Always
how it will be.