The only time in an ordinary life that dying seems beautiful is when you are a teenager. That beautiful time where your skin is tightly wrapped around you like Saran Wrap and your mind believes every tear you push out of your eyes matters, counts towards something. You cry because your heart got broken? That matters, put it in your portfolio of beautiful broken pieces. You cry because you did not make the team/the grade/the cut/the audition/the clique/the bus … all of these things matter when your book is full of hauntingly empty pages. What nobody tells you is that once you fill your book with these small slights, you have less and less pages left for the big stuff that’s coming. The big stuff that should really fill your book. By the time you have something to write in your big book of beautiful broken pieces, you’ve filled it with so much crap and nonsense that there is nothing left to say.
I have nothing for you then.
Stop readingStop mother ******* reading.
I have nothing.
I am ******* empty.
I have nothing.

I was 10
when I first started to
pray for the cabinet to swallow me whole.
To splinch my human body into something a deity won't pass up unworthy
to enter a magical realm where
I can meet a godly lion and a warmer sun.
I was 10
and, even then,
I wanted to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

I was 12
when I first started
looking out the window,
waiting for a temperate owl on a tropical sky. I twirled the wood chips I tore off my mother's dresser
with the pink lipstick stains, and thought to myself,
my god, my god, what a life I am destined to live.
I was 12,
and even then,
I wanted to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

I was 16
when I first started
distancing myself from the wardrobe,
from the wooden dresser,
from the creaks of the floorboard,
from innocence.

I flicked the ash off my 20th cigarette to the tear-soaked dishcloth I gauzed on my wrist to keep me from tracing the intersecting lines my father etched on the living room floor after a night of bowling and tears and tears and sadness.

I thought to myself, my god,
my god, my god,
what life am I destined to leave?

I am 20.  
I want to be more than just the creaks of the floorboard, more than the weight of my innocence, more than a mere disdainful stare.

Months after months calling your name,
I got no reply I'm stuck in the rain,
You're moving on growing in fame,
I don't know how much longer I can keep sane.

I'm climbing this hill getting over you,
Meeting new people seeing new things,
Footsteps rushing behind someone's breaking through,
Not looking back taking down my kings.

Crawling back I hear you yelling,
I've been through this too many times,
I have stopped dwelling,
I'm done with all your crimes.

I've met someone new,
My hand in hers and everything is calm,
Even though I still have your tattoo,
I'm no longer a ticking time bomb.

When its emerald eye glimmers in the shadow of the dusty shelf above
I pause,
I sense a presense.

It is not unlike me to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects.
Give them names and nicknames and quirky character traits based on how their forms bend.

In the flickering lights of a broke wicken sanctuary though, I do not do it out of habit.

I feel it and stare it back down and see my own reflection in the cracked gems that once were a soul.

A gaudy skull.

The kind you see in home video Indiana Jones tributes,
with hats stolen from someone’s parents,
and jackets stolen from someone else’s elder siblings,
and ketchup for blood.

The kind your quirky local manic pixie dream girl uses to hold incense.

The kind I’m about to waste my money on because I’m an adult now and I can use my millennial minimum wage however I want.

I do not become aware of the possessed nature of my new buddy until I take it back home and hear it snicker in the middle of the night.

I know it is the skull, for my roommate is not one to snicker.

(He chuckles when he’s hiding an opinion and has a villainous laugh when it’s coming from a place of sincerity, but that’s beside the point)

I know it’s laughing at me.
I know this for a fact.

It takes me three more nights to call it out on it because I’ve never been confronted with the issue of standing up to a haunted antique I took home from a secondhand shop, possibly owned by satan’s offspring.
But I’m twenty-one years old and still experiencing some firsts, I suppose.

The gaudy skull is exceptionally snarky.
In a way none of my named plants ever were.
Not even Gerard.

He comes for me for the garbage on the floor and the dust on the windowsill on which he’s propped up, and then later for my poor taste in chore-doing music.

I never ask for its name because I know for a fact he’ll make a game out of it
and I am not in the mood for entertaining ghosts.

I come to realise it all on my own a couple of weeks later.
Once the snark starts to wear off,
and domesticity settles in,
and shared quiet becomes comforting,
despite the circumstances.

It is Judas.

I know this for a fact.

You do not understand the extent to which I am certain that it is Judas.
I have never been so aware of someone’s origins in my entire life.
I bought this creepy item and it is now in my room and I’m developing a weird attachment to it and maybe occasionally use it as a paper-weight and it is Judas.

I feel it in my heart and know it inside of my skull that might be standing on someone else’s touchscreen windowsill
two thousand years in the future,
jade stones for eyes even though I specifically requested amber,
but you get ****** over by bureaucracy even after death.

How do I know it is Judas?

Because I feel him stare at me like he wants to kiss me late at night and sense him plotting my betrayal early morning.

I know it is that, for a fact, because I’ve felt this exact sensation before.

My **** edgy room decor is Judas.

I try to get him to admit it himself by talking of past lovers and reading aloud the surprising number of Jesus metaphor poems I have in my room.
I hate Jesus metaphors, but I do it for that sweet sensation of seeing someone trying to dodge the inevitable once it’s coming at them like a mule through Rome piloted by the son of god.

I know he’ll cave eventually and tell me
and I know it’ll be the same caliber of glorious news as Jesus coming out of his own cave of burial,
resurrected and preaching winning.
I know I’ll win.

And I think to myself that maybe I am in the mood to entertain and just haven’t found the right outlet yet.
Maybe history’s most infamous apostle is It.
The original sinner and the original rebel.

(I’m aware it’s technically Cain, the jealousy-ridden son of Adam and Eve, but I only ever count the gays)

Judas and I have bonded.

And I can tell he’s on the verge of telling me his dark and twisted backstory. Again, I have felt this sensation before.

And when it happens, we can talk
about what it’s like being demonised by the one you love
and being the odd one out in your devotee friend group, even though you eat bread and drink wine and worship metaphor just like them.
And how patriarchal institutions distort history to pedal the same tired spiel of everything having a place and everything being there for a reason.

But we both know that isn’t true
because neither of us feel like part of god’s plan or created in anyone’s image.

And we can listen to sad music about wanting to kiss the wrong people together.

And that’s all I ever wanted from a friendship.

I could hear a pin drop.

No, a ball of cotton lightly float and touch down.
Upon a silk sheet.

A speck of dust land on another speck of dust thousands of light years away,
where the colours are inverted negative,
and creatures communicate in a way that doesn’t require poorly worded drunken blurbs
converted into electrons
travelling from one annoyingly loud metal chip to another.

I can hear the electrons converting
and I can hear them laughing at me.

I am a speck of dust upon a speck of dust.
Ungracefully, heavily falling onto my creased sheets.

Alone.

she's not here
she went away
she'll be back soon
i hope
i pray

i think
i knowbutdontknow
****
that hurts to think
it doesn't hurt to drink
so i'll just drink that thought away

i’m drowning in new york city.
i want to die, again.
always! why is it like this?
i hate everyone; i want my ****** dramatic burlington life and friends back.
her, him, those two, even them…
i want it back.
i wanna be no one.
i wanna be everyone.
i;m full of emotions that i don’t want because everything is so different except for them.
no matter what i do the doom and gloom is always there.
i wanna change my name
i wanna get a dog—auggie or esme, a red border collie—and flee to the south.
I WANNA DRINK MYSELF TO DEATH.
i see these visions of a stable, happy, healthy version of myself but i also see these visions of me literally not making it past age 21.
i’m eternally stuck on self destructing.
but why?
why!
everything is good but it’s never enough.
i’m never enough, it’s never enough, he’s never enough (whoever he is at any given moment)
sam says he’ll fly me back to santa cruz and my insanity says do it but the small semblance of “morals” i still possess tell me not to…
only because of my parents. because of joe.
i don’t want to hurt them.
i don’t want to hurt anyone. but i’m hurting. always. forever. unless i’m drunk. no, wait…even when i’m drunk. i learned that the hard time this last run.
but life is meaningless (words are meaningless and forgettable) and time is a flat circle
blah blah blah
i’ve been here before
i’ll be here again
everything i do i’ll do over and over til i die.
if i don’t get drunk anytime soon i will eventually.
eternal return; the emo version of destiny.
remember when caroline myss’ book told me my highest potential was “victim”?
i’ll be drowning forever.
i’d rather be drowning in absinthe than drowning in aa meeting coffee.
i ache at the beauty of the world; the beauty which i will never achieve or be a part of.
i cry and i cry and i cry.
i want to be beautiful and pure but it’s all so dark.
all the people i’ve loved and who love me…i weep and i weep and i weep.
i can’t breathe fully; why do i wish i could not breathe at all?
i look back at all my pasts as if they were yesterday, and yet they all feel as if i’d made them up entirely.
disconnected and yet fully involved with each and every era of my evolution…
and yet i swear, i haven’t truly changed a bit.
the details change—the scenery, the faces, the dreams…
but all the emotions…all the thoughts…they stay the same.
“i won’t change, i’ll stay the same—darling, fade away…”
fading & falling & then blooming for a single lovely night
time is a flat circle.
i ache, i weep, i cry.
i naively hold onto the hope that someday…someday i’ll be okay.
please, god.
i have to be okay.
i have to turn off the bon iver.
i’m just trying to breathe.
maybe someday.

I'm going to tell you a story.
It's my favorite, full of magic and pretty things and color.
Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was a very sad girl, and she never seemed to fit in very well with other kids.
or other people.
or other anything, really.
Her friends never loved her very much, and her parents didn't either.
They didn't much like that she liked other girls,
Or that she gave them nothing to brag about.
Her parents wanted a businesswoman, who would meet a nice man and settle down.
This girl was far from businesswoman material.
So she grew distant.
And drifted further, and further, and further into the dark.
Her candle blew out, and she was alone.
And she was tired.
So, very tired.
And so she wrote down a goodbye on a slip of paper,
And she walked towards the edge of town.
The edge of town, towards the cliffs that overlooked the sea.
She wanted to sleep.
As she was walking, she saw a girl.
This girl was the prettiest she had ever seen.
The pretty girl looked as sad as she did, and so she crumpled up the goodbye she had written and vowed to never let the pretty girl know the emptiness that she had.
So she brought the pretty girl back to life, spoon feeding her soft words and flowers.
Flowers, like calla lilies, for magnificent beauty.
Or Lilac, for the first emotions of love.
But she almost lost the pretty girl.
and then she realized how much she loved her.
and she held the pretty girl in her arms and made her swear to let her help her, and she accepted and then
our girl saw color again.
the pretty girl had brought the feeling and the love and the color and the hope and the light back into our girl's life,
and the pretty girl smiled.
and our girl decided that her work was done.
One last kiss goodbye,
And she would fall out of the world with the stars in her eyes and snowflakes on her lips,
and so she fell asleep after all.