When I am fond of someone,
I've always hidden.
Locking eyes with someone I'm so curious about
just has this feeling that makes me want to hide.
I've always hidden.
Behind mom's leg,
behind my locker,
in the details of my lunch,
in my comforter,
in my headphones,
in my fantasies.

shame shares a tight border with shyness
both remind me of being a skittish mutt

I keep hearing that
in order to exist properly
amongst your peers
you need a strong sense of self.
I think that
the stains on my shirt
melancholic playlist in my ears
grumbling tummy
and agitation with self help websites
might be as good as it gets for my early 20's.

and I'm tired of trying to be perfectly healthy all the time.
and I think capacity for constant self awareness is a privilege.

Reverberations are the hardest part.
Navigating something that will inevitably flow through you
as if you have any control.
Think about it.
Someone jumps in the pool you’re in,
you have no choice but to let the waves and molecules
orbit around you.

It is what separation feels like. Jumping into a pool. Waves lapping out until finally they blend in the whole again.

I've lived somewhere over 50 homes by now.

The ones that stick out?

In Portland I rented a micro-studio. My first apartment I signed a lease on by myself. It had no in-unit kitchens: there was a communal kitchen on floor one. Bed came out the wall. best description: trendy, affluent, hipsters who want to live communally in theory, but eat out every day instead. Communal kitchen was empty. No one was ever home. We all went to the food carts across the street, later replaced by a hotel.

in Florida we had a pool (even the poor have pools in Florida) and the neighborhood ice cream truck sold drugs. That’s not important. It was the pool! I lived like a mermaid and it was the same pool I had my first kiss next to.

In Wisconsin we lived above a bead shop that turned into a dress shop that rented out prom dresses to the town. I watched the cozy middle-class flock to the shops beneath me. For being a town of 1,000 we had the coolest apartment since I could spy on the whole town and their frequent trips to the bakery.

In North Carolina we lived in a neighborhood called 'beverly hills' in Asheville - the house was interesting, not very bourgeois as the neighborhood title suggested. I wanted to turn the basement into a gaming center for kids. I spent a few days sweeping the spiders away and saved all of my summer allowance to buy Rock Band. We moved before I had anyone over.

My favorite house will always be my grandmother’s - somewhere in the middle of 20 acres in Eastern Oregon is my own version of an oasis. It is dry land, full of tumbleweeds and prone to wildfires, but something about the smoke stained carpets and 24/7 television noise feels most like home.

Everything I did was viewed through the lens
of some sophisticated world traveler.
You really critiqued me, from how I got on the bus,
your eyes checking my intuition of how to stand while it moved,
seeing how I engaged in conversation with strangers,
scanning the clothes I've curated,
and gladly noting how "little I seemed to care about them",
chalking everything up to "american ignorance",
to scoping my bookshelf for your overrated preferences,
you are prying into my music taste,
my palette,
my body.

Meanwhile,
I get on the bus per usual,
wide stance to balance the stop-and-go motions,
I tell people have a nice day and make small talk about most everything!
especially the weather,
my collection of clothes is a museum themselves,
I care and tend to each piece carefully,
I think American's are happy-go-lucky double edged swords,
My bookshelves,
music taste,
pallet,
and body
are all full of volumes
unreachable by those who try to see me through
their narrow monocular.