It’s spring outside and the days are long and it gets dark late at night, past 8:30 when I’m home. I’m happy stomping my feet in the fresh clean grass and I don’t mind the back sweat clinging to my T-shirts and the way I can’t help but hate my body. I don’t care, as long as I can prop my hand up through the window to feel the breeze and as long I can see the sun glint the sideview mirrors of the car, I can feel all cheesy and soft inside. I like to watch the college students share picnic dinners on the grassy shore of the Charles; I like when they sit in circles and wear bandanas and sunglasses, smiling with their 6pm rosé smiles and glinting teeth and whisper to each other, and sometimes I’ll see someone scurry by on the cement on a pair of roller-skates or a bike, and the sunlight dances shadows through the trees, the trees that are impossibly green. Green, shiny, and full of life they swell with the late spring breeze, and they lazily hang over the road so I don’t see the blue of the sky when I look up through the sunroof, only leaves of green. Today I walked home after I saw the fish and I filled a cup with frozen cherries and I ate them with a plastic spoon while listening to Josephine Foster and I felt rather pleased with myself. I am going to read now.

In this time I think of my life six months ago; lest I forget the burning cold of winter, the gray that envelopes Boston in a ceaseless ashen fog. Even in that winter though there is still beauty; I watch dark birds flee the sky and little children cross the street bundled up in red, blue, green, and I feel that same tug of love in my heart for the world I live in. It’s melancholic, the connection I have with this world, and yet it finds its own balance [I find my own balance], between the anxiety of what could be, the anger of what is, the hope for what could be, the satisfaction for what is. I wish I could do more.  

Of course, we say goodbye to some things (like winter), and forget we say goodbye to others, perhaps for good reason (like the ashen fog), and some things we don’t want to say goodbye to but must anyways (like friends), and there’s a balance somewhere in all of that, I imagine. Something like a hallway between open and shut doors, or perhaps the door itself is the pathway between one state and another.

I am sixteen now. and I will say goodbye to some things soon and other things later, and perhaps a hello or two will be mixed in there. For now though, it is late spring, and I am here, here in this moment when I am listening to Billie Holiday and my empty cup of cherries is resting on my bureau. For now, I am here in a room that is not too small for me nor too big, and I will be here now, I feel like I will always be here in the way that most things continue for a long time until they don’t. And I am okay with that.

In The Secret Garden,
Unseen by human eyes,
Are Elves and flowered Fairies,
Near where Crystal Fountain lies

To find this hidden place,
Follow the Rainbow Tracks,
Look out for Goblin Mushrooms,
Just beneath the Mountain Cracks

'tis here that you will hear,
Music from Nightingales,
The Mystic Door will open,
Only when the twilight pales

I am freaking out on the interstate
Freaked out I am, out of freaks, (I’m the freak)
and I’ve been freaked out on the interstate for 15 minutes now,
sitting in my car with my hands on my knees and
I don’t know how to make it stop
and I am freaking out on the interstate, on I-95, East to be specific and the cars keep whizzing by
and I'm dizzy with adrenaline, I'm hot-wired now  
and my hands are on my thighs and I’m sweating now, I'd swear but I can't make out the words, any words and I swear I'm telling the truth
and I pulled over the car off the highway onto the shoulder, my shoulders are tight in their sockets, tensing, preparing my body for battle
because I’m freaking out on the interstate
and I’m a freak!
on the interstate
in this state
of Massachusetts,
I am in no state not to freak out and
it’s sorta funny because
I can’t breathe and I don’t know what to do next
And I see the highway trees and they are blurs of green, there are no more birds here, only me and the sky and one sheet of metal, one frame of glass keeping me from certain, unflinching death, that ostentatious word.
That stupid, indelible word that will not escape my temples,
but I'm a freak and
I can’t
and I won’t
and I don’t stop
freaking out on the interstate.

I know that life is complicated and often hard, that things are not simple, and that most of all they get better but why can’t I pack up my stuff tonight? and start going I’ll walk all the way down into Boston from the hills and I’ll sleep outside and catch the train in the morning and I’ll ride it down to the coast, so I can swim in the ocean again, so I can feel the salt in my toes and the wind in my hair and I will cut my hair shorter than it has ever been, not to symbolize Change! or even the wayward meanderings of a capricious young person’s heart, but so I can feel the sun sink into against my scalp, so I can sweep my hand across the bony cusp of my skull and know by heart the fissures, the crevices, the fastenings of bone and tissue and muscle that make up me. I

make me up! to create myself by wandering, to beam a smile and open up my mason jar of love to the world. I have lived enough life to write, and I've more than enough love to store for a lifetime, so I can give the extra to the flowers and the strangers on the street.

and maybe if the spirits inside are feeling particularly kind, they can bring me to the white space, or the dark honey corner that the lamplight grazes, when i can walk barefoot and feel earth below me. Maybe if they are kind, they will allot me two extra hours to explore Madrid, or to adjust my binoculars, dip my hands in Lake Erie; gasp and sigh; and ramble on.

Grabbing for rocks in indigo waters, searchlights gleaming against the waters illuminating darkness, illuminating those depths.

The center of an explosion, a heatwave ****** into a sink drain, evaporated, muscles relaxed and honeysucklesweet liquid deep in the veins, sharp crystals forming in lungs and a hard breath, cold condensation; exhale and release.

I am, she is, we are
In spheres of consciousness, orbiting the dark side of the moon
waiting for death by a bus stop.

Lazy whiskey sky balancing on telephone wires, slipping, stagnant then pulsing for life, for air, for peace. There is nothing as clean cut as a saturday morning in September. Nothing as urgent as a windswept pane of glass, cut sharply by the salt of the shoreline.

An old woman enumerates; this is addiction, this is addiction, and she’s blown away in the wind of yesterday. This is the new age of sycophants and petulant masters; it lacks heart! It lacks love. It is cold like concrete, like a highway stop halfway to midnight, pulsing and cimmerian. Vitriolic stillness, stinging remains beneath penetrated skin, releasing passion with every exhale.

Climbing through a toilet drain, stopping to gasp and pushing on through biting cold, realizing the world is not as you remember it. Crawl into the sanctum, collapse for forgiveness, repeat.

For this is it, the eternal sprint.