I go to the woods,
The woods go and I see them going, I’ve gone
to the forests of my home since autumnal glow is high in season,
these are holy, golden days and the leaves are blushing in the brook,
but the pond’s gone dry from no rain, it’s all muck. There are no fish and there never were any, but
snapping turtles, bullfrogs with eyes that peek above the surface, water boatmen that skit the glassy surface of the pond avert my eyes. When I was younger, I caught tadpoles in a mesh net and I let them go. Now we have forgotten each other.

Tough green shoots erupt from the soft earth, choking the softer crab grasses, there is blood and lambs in the high days of their short lives, rambling in the pastures of youth.

The pond is blanketed in duckweed, in the sunlit clearing of eleven cottonwoods.

Like red hot coals, the jewels glow in the night,
they’re tucked into the tarmac in the rugged mountains spotted with evergreens.

the City in the valley has materialized, turnt to silver under the stars. Riverbeds dry up, caustic machinery acidifies the soil.

There is a dizzying flash of lucrative indigo, beneath the flashing crimson that signals take-off. 
An orange streak hangs in the distant horizon, above it an oppressive navy sky turning to night.  
The window across from me reflects something I’d imagine in a spaghetti Western,
in the final moment of triumph when the hero declares himself victorious and all forces bow to him. He is the indomitable, conquerer of man and nature.
Day is done, it retreats into faded pink and night falls, the mountains gray. It’s almost beautiful, but it’s burning. It's smoldering. A quiet fire, is it even burning if none care to witness it?

I write more about what I see when I close my eyes than what’s right ahead of them; I try not to, but it's inevitable; imagination is how I feel something raw and true, pull myself back to a computer or a notebook and empty it all out, or rather empty most of it out and leave the rest, leave the bits I forget and forge new ones as I write.
Everything though, behind the delicate eyelids I call my own, that black sockets which contains the trailing optic nerve that carries precious messages to my brain nestled in darkness (my whole body is illuminated on the outside) is produced from what I see, every-day, monotony and then some strange sweet beauty that sticks out of all the d’habitude, sticks in my brain like chewing gum, ready to be ****** and pressed against the walls of my brain, pulling and tugging at itself like taffy trying to figure itself out. I translate this to written thought, awkward and jumbled words, sometimes something that fits together. It wants to be something, each thought wants to be released into the world.

In a way, each word I write reflects life, but it breathes life into something ordinary, changes the filter setting on the photo perhaps portraying something more alluring, or I’d hope it does, hope that I could make someone feel the way I do when the night is blue, the trees are darker and the hazy glow of streetlights lap my window, dancing in the cool glass pane that separates the world inside from the world outside, the day is not ready for morning, everything's at once still so one could see how heavenly it all was. Maybe I am a newscaster, maybe I am a conspiracy theorist, I say “In case you haven’t seen for yourself, here it is, 5am in the Northern Hemisphere, in a bedroom with pink walls and creeping ivy vines hung across its ceilings, with a warm lamplight that leaves gentle gray shadows on the bed stand that has been painted white, so lovingly, by my mother’s cousin….. this is what it’s like (to me, to a fool, to a nobody) but this, this is from your friend, and I want you to imagine it in your own head and I hope it’s beautiful in your head, as beautiful as it is to me.” I don’t wish sleepless nights on you, but I hope that life blesses you with something of the sort, maybe it’ll change your mind.
not always though
not always do I write about beauty, and sometimes I learn what I think when I write it out
it all feels random but it can’t be, it might not be, there must be some self within me that writes these words with true intention, first thought, best thought.

I cannot write myself into self-hood, existence through some physical tangible proof that is these words on this paper
because my brain knows better
I must be something more than words on paper, I’m a physical body and I am a soul and I am I am. I inhale cold air in the dead of winter and feel it sit like a weight in my lungs, like a punch in my stomach, I taste blood in my throat when I run too far and too fast for my own good and my heart tries to catch up with me, and my sturdy legs buckle at my knees when I’ve walked too far. In some way, these sensations, these memories affirm my livelihood, my existence, my place in the world. I do not have to be great, I do not even have to be good, I am, I am, I am, I create for myself and if I find something valuable in the stale-clumsiness-that-is-sometimes-kind that is my perspective on affairs, my World, then I will give it to you dear reader, not so you will love me or so you will care, but because I like to share wonderful magical little things with the world. Through specificity, of location or experience or taste or shape or color, we find our human universality within one another. We understand that they understand.

I’m making a folder of tiny intimate photos I’ve collected from my camera roll, some are collage bits, one in fact, is a note from a book I found in Rennes with my roommate at the time.

We stopped at a bookstore in town where everything was under 10 Euros, and there were vintage films and books of collage and small chapter books, pocket sized ones (they were 2 Euros), and three men ran the store in rotating shifts, they sat on chairs and played chess and smiled at the onlookers as they passed by, never once advertising their goods. They knew whoever stopped at the stands would care and there were a lot of people who cared in Rennes, about literature and art and love and things that are so often overlooked in the States. I don’t mean to make an indictment of Americans and their culture and their loud cars and silver cities, neither do I condone the French…

I’m getting ahead of myself. The note in any case; it’s written in old French cursive, I couldn’t read it if I tried, but I haven’t tried yet. Maybe I will someday. one day.

I went whittling
and smoking in the woods
When I finished cutting my three pieces, all unique, all distinctive, all pale and soft with  
white wood underbellies that exposed their grains and knots,
I paused and smelled my hands
They smelled of smoke and wood and sweat, and dusky summer air
I rather liked it that way,
my scent.

Today is 
so very important my darling, today is
the start of the rest of your life
It is the end of a road, for
two roots of an aching tree called time have joined themselves to make today,
yesterday and tomorrow, but the beginning of a new road too, a new path forged by you.

Today is everything and it
nothing and it is whatever you make of it, my darling.  

Today is full of possibility for
it is Tuesday today and the sunrise is waiting for you to stretch your arms
yawn and smile, place your feet on the rug so gently,
because you are so pretty, the sun could not rise without you after-all.

And the sky is waiting for you too, to
open your front door and notice how blue it is
and the bluebells the bleeding hearts they are
calling to you, the robin is perched by the doorstep, it will not flutter away for some time, it waits for you.

I cannot give you the world, I cannot give you much, but I give you word. I give you today and all that it can be, and all that it ought to be.

Because today is lovely
today is all yours, my darling

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.