Monday, October 31, 2005

microcosmic melancholy

there is a siren moaning in time with the dusk.

downtown...
where the lights become more clear
with night, and faded, with the sun's rising.
where stones are crushed slowly
into dormancy beneath tires,
footsteps,
earthquakes. the earth
quakes, cries, for its lost youth.
rumbling in dissatisfaction,
revolting the only way it knows how -
to create chaos between its
restless limbs and the
creeping, crawling, cringing folk
upon it.
we cling, like wildfire to blades
of dried grass, blowing in the breeze,
wishing for the strength
to jump; from stands of
dried grass imminent in black sand,
surrounded by roaring, by
the sound and
the fury
of an ocean. an ocean
which dares to beat sea glass -
ragged, rugged, desperately
illigitmitely broken -
into submission. into
pieces of fragmented,
encapsulated emotion, lasting for
too long, hidden, ignored.
ignored in the grains of black sand,
in flecks of black granite, ground...
smashed, filtered and faded into
order.
flecks of black granite intermingled
with these gems of
viridian, cerulean, wonder -
laid quietly inside
the pavement, flickering
in recognition of the blinking
streetlights rising
into the air
downtown.

these floorboards are rotting, held together by the rusting, raspy voiced nails which moan and creak under his footsteps. these floorboards contain her tears, melded into the fine lines of the wood, still grieving for their lost roots as mournfully as her tears, as if the salt tinged words that stream from her eyes illuminate - magnify - release - all the secrets of the trees. these floorboards bend and warp with the whistle of the sea breeze, allowing themselves to be distressed, disrupted, because their uneasiness signals the gravity of their sacrifice; these are floorboards filled with malice towards their oppressors and heartache inspired by their daily dying, but they revel in their misery, their unrest. these floorboards are witness to the rise and fall of years, on an endless life, as the foundation present for monstrous rages, for exhausting depression, for calm. these floorboards live vicariously through the unknowing steps of her slippered feet, past the frame of the door and back towards the crumbling edge of the cliff, gasping in revelation of its height, teetering precarious upon the thought of the fall. these floorboards split in desperation, no longer carrying his weight, no longer able to bear her torment. these floorboards recoil at the spillage of blood, curling and protesting as it seeps, staining into the grains, into the knots, the imperfections. these floorboards burn silently, resigned to their reversal, return to ash, as she lies finally pacified beneath them, and he lies broken in the yard, bathed in the light of their flames.


i beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.




Tuesday, October 25, 2005

solitary state of mind

Something for your poetry, no? he said.

pretty sure i'm going mad. hugging trees, gathering leaves, running around like my head's been chopped off...and all i really want to do is hibernate and eat cold pizza. well maybe i'd like to read a little as well. ginsberg, eggers, caputo, maybe a bit of gowdy and heller. is there any real reason i can't just cease to function as a part of normal social society for awhile and be by myself? [not in the least bit depressed here, darlings. nor do i hate the world. i'm just in a solitary state of mind. which would be more fun if i were in new york. because then, i could also be in a new york state of mind and sing billy joel songs all night while holding aloft glasses filled with wine at pretentiously strange angles above my head and saying things like "ching ching" and "here's to you, dollface." it does not matter that i am alone in this apartment, except for the ferret named genevieve who lives in my dining room and the entirety of downtown new york, visible from my 9th floor loft. i will still sing and say strange things. alliteration!] emily clarified my life, in lieu of some very confusing boy situations. here [paraphrased] is her wisdom.
1) there are people who have a few close friends and there are people who have a lot of acquaintances.
2)relationships work like that too.
3) no one has to settle. no one is too picky. it's a heart we're speaking of, not a pair of shoes.
[emily didn't actually say the last sentence, but i'm sure she might have thought of it at some point in her life, because it sounds like something carrie bradshaw would say. and we all know carrie bradshaw is right about things of this nature.]

ready or not
here i come
you can't hide
gonna find you
and make you want me
[the fugees]


Thursday, October 20, 2005

i love it when you call me kiddo.

who is 'you'? anyone. everyone.

from [HOWL]:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to
holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all
drained of brillance...
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and
shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets...
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried...
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze...
who sang out their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot...
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz...
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation...
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death...
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.

-allen ginsberg.


buying used books at half price, eating ice cream in the wind, being remembered by a boy with adorably curly hair and intelligent eyes.
making scrambled eggs with cheese, 'then laugh, leaning back...', discovering that osyrus the beared mountain man is actually incredibly sweet.


i haven't been sleeping well. not that i always have in the past, but this time, it's more disruptive, more fragile. i know why. but the knowing makes it all the more difficult to remedy the sleeplessness, as it breaks my heart to be aware. what i wouldn't give to be ignorant again, just to this one thing! what i wouldn't do to have those moments back, in which everything was not tainted, in which my rose colored glasses [already missing half a lens and smudged] were still at least in one piece. i have that time trapped beneath clear packaging tape and under a dried autumn leaf, smashed between the pages of my journal. those precious few seconds float - eternally taunting me to take them in, take them up in my lungs and breathe them in so deep as to hope that their life will fill every inch of my being and give me back their meaning. but as soon as i release them, those precious few seconds... they will go drifting away like specks of infintesimally tiny tears, irreplaceable and unattainable and lost. what i wouldn't give to undo that day.

an elevator made of glass goes up into the sky for miles without end, but there is no top and there are only sides, so it really isn't an elevator at all. at least not an elevator that could conceivably hold people. there are people in the elevator though, somehow, and they're all yelling at the top of their lungs. they're yelling about how the earth is shrinking and that there isn't enough space in the whole universe for their love and about how there is no bottom on their elevator made of glass. they're yelling at the top of their lungs as they rocket into space, but you can hear a faint melody in the caucaphony their voices are creating. while they're yelling the timbre and the pitch and the verve of their voices seems upon first listen to be chaos, noise, pure and simple. but it is not just pure, one note one melody, it is five chords and a crescendo, three flats and two sharps stemming from the minor key their voices are creating while their elevator made of glass is rocketing into space.

1 day. 364 days. i still miss you, kiddo.

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices -
in and out, illuminating

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Invisible Blackbirds, elongated.

updated for the 3rd time...this may be the final-first draft. if that makes any sense at all. which it probably doesn't. ooo workshopping makes me nervous!

i wrote this for my creative writing class - thanks to three images, an obsession with Vietnam, and the abundance of blackbirds on campus.

INVISIBLE BLACKBIRDS.

My body jolted awake, and I realized I had fallen into a trance. Somehow, I had made it down the hallway and to the doorway of my room. I paused, letting the darkness wash over me, letting it seep into my harried thoughts. It provided a surreal calm in juxtaposition with my labored breathing; I always felt as though a freight train had run through my body after falling out of a flashback or waking from a sleepwalk. As if the crossing of time waged some sort of war on my bones and everything else that surrounded them. My consciousness fights to come back to the now, but I have to struggle against the hands of my demons, clawed and snarling, and they leave bruises in my flesh and in my mind. There was still the faint sound of the TV in the back of my ears, even though it was no longer on, and I could feel the voices coming across the space in surges – rays of copper wire twisting and wrestling for their way in to my consciousness. I struggled to ignore them as they cut through the layers, but those metallic symphonies were stronger, faster than I, and they infiltrated deeper and deeper until I could no longer feel their roots to stop them.
Gunfire. Voices – angry, urgent, hollow. Rain whistling, screeching. Explosions. Agony.
In the reflection of the window, I could see my body, its angles and edges disfigured and ragged. My face was obscured, like the men in the story Mirello always told – no face, no reality, just the phantom of a man left behind by a pair of raven wings. Yet as the door closed, a spear of light shot through from the hall and found my eyes on the enigmatic surface of the glass, illuminating their presence as though a fire had been ignited inside the base of my skull. I knew it was only a reflection, a trick of the light, but the evocation of that image brought one memory racing to the forefront of my mind and I could not force myself to forget it. My eyes were there, staring back at me and demanding that I remember. My eyes were his eyes, and his eyes were haunting. His eyes were filled with broken soul.


When I was young and strong and filled with ambivalence towards the jungle I was trapped inside, a man I knew used to tell a story. Mirello smoked too much, and his voice was hazy and rough – the kind that so often accompanies wizened philosophy and a jaded sense of apathy. He had the mentality of a seventy-five year old man and the body of a twenty-two year old, neither of which were false, and both of which he carried well. Mirello used to tell a story, or maybe it was more a nightmare, about a field full of invisible blackbirds,
“Except they weren’t really blackbirds,” he would say – as he told the story often, “they were men. Men wearing black woolen suit jackets carrying large black umbrellas through blackened naked forests. They were the kinds of forests in which all the trees were dead, merely remnants of their living selves. The kind of trees that looked like the skeletons of men, waving their branches like arms in the wind, as if they wanted you to dance with them…”
“That’s pretty fucked up man,” O’Dell would say, just under his breath, as he always did when he heard the story. “Pretty fuckin’ macabre if you ask me.” He had these eyes, big brown eyes, that betrayed some inner sense of emotion that he tried to hide from everyone. Something that meant he was only acting tough because he was too scared to admit he was terrified. The kind of eyes that are the only thing anyone can ever seem to see. “His eyes!” they’d say, the breath catching in their throats, gasping. He was around the same age as Mirello, maybe a few years younger, but the difference between them was astounding. The sound of Mirello’s voice was like the ultimate ruse that everyone allowed themselves to believe; the look in O’Dell’s eyes told us the truth he never wanted to expose.
“But these men just kept marching,” Mirello continued, as if he hadn’t heard O’Dell at all. “They just kept moving, going through the skeletons of these trees. And the light – the light was shifting, squinting, blinking between the crooks of the branches. It was streaming through the branches just like it does here,” and he would gesture towards the sunlight shining in patches through the damp, humid air of the jungle “and it would catch and cling to the edges of the trees, and the outlines of the men. They would glow in gold and bronze and amber light, as if visible emanations of their souls were drifting slowly away from their bodies – from the trees. And the men, the men never had faces, just places overflowing with empty space.”
Mirello would always stop telling the story there because he knew that everyone was paying attention, no matter how many times he had told it before. O’Dell would always scoff and feign disinterest as the rest of us clamored for the conclusion, but we all knew he wanted to hear it just as much. Some of the guys thought that O’Dell hated Mirello because he was stronger than him, more popular, less fidgety. I always thought that it was something different than that.
“These men,” Mirello would continue, his voice growing deeper, “were all striding towards a staircase – right there in the middle of the woods – and they would just march up the stairs, one by one, closing their umbrellas and heading into the sky. There were stairs missing or crumbling, the boards decaying or gone. Cobwebs hung from the walls that surrounded the flight, but there was no ceiling. The ceiling had been gone long before the men had ever been there. They’d stop at the top of the staircase, because there was a door, but none of them ever opened it. They just stood in their black woolen suit jackets, with their heads tilted upwards, waiting for something to change.” The story always ended there, and even though we all felt like there should have been more, no one ever made a sound. I heard the story maybe fifteen, twenty times over the course of that year, and it changed a little every time…but the men never had faces. And they always started out being blackbirds…


Mirello and O’Dell really didn’t hate each other, much as everyone assumed. It was just one of those relationships that never smoothed out, never quite seemed to fit. Mirello was a big man, with stocky Italian features that accentuated the gravelly quality of his voice, and the thing about him was that when he talked, everybody listened. He didn’t ramble on, didn’t speak just to fill the vacant silence; his words had purpose. O’Dell seemed much smaller than Mirello, regardless of the fact that he was only a few inches shorter. He didn’t talk much, except when it was to himself, so when he started speaking up to Mirello, no one knew what to think.
“Why you always tell that story Mirello?”
Because people like to hear it, he said, leaning against his pack, arms crossed and eyes closed.
“But what’s so cool about this particular one? I mean… it’s not funny, and its not that exciting…”
Sometimes it’s just a story kid, he said. Eyes still closed, arms still crossed.
“These men, though,” O’Dell said, “why are they carrying umbrellas if it’s sunny? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Mirello gritted his teeth and opened his eyes. “Well none of it makes any sense. That’s the point. They’re goddamned blackbirds…invisible goddamned blackbirds for chrissakes. What does it matter the weather?” He was sitting up now, staring right at O’Dell, sneering. Then he stood and walked off into the brush, said he couldn’t explain everything to everyone. Some people didn’t know when to just listen, he said. O’Dell was silent again after that.
We all told stories in the dank and the dirt…it was the only way to stay sane. Even then madness would come creeping up, and half the time when I slept at night I dreamt of everything that had happened during the day. But stronger somehow. Like the pictures of the moments in my head had been hidden under a microscope and magnified, shoved into focus. As if they had been infused with clarity while they were fermenting in my memory. The colors were always more dramatic, like someone had taken cans of paint and splashed green and gold and ivory across the whole thing. Not that the colors in the jungle were drab; everything now seems washed out and faded in comparison. But in my dreams, they were almost surreal. Funny, how colors could be so vibrant in a place so overgrown with death.


There was a depression between the roots of three massive trees, holding water from the storm earlier in the morning, and I collapsed right there against the trunk of one. My body sank deep into my bones, too weary to support my own weight. O’Dell came over slowly, his mouth open vacantly and his eyes glazed in exhaustion. His face was ruddy from tan and the reddish brown dirt that seemed to collect in every crease and fold of skin. Underneath the color, though, I could see his pallor. Streaks from his tears laced through the dirt, creating trails that reinforced the story the bloodshot quality of his eyes told. At first he just rubbed his palms together, his lips still parted in consistent silence. Dipping his hands in the pool, he began to scrub and scour, beneath his nails and in the cracks of his knuckles. Faster and faster he pushed the water against his skin, until I noticed he was dragging tracks of flesh from the backs of his hands, drawing blood like cat scratches. Stop, I asked him, but he kept at it, his reflection staring up at him through the disjointed surface of the water. Stop O’Dell, I said, and leaned forward to grab one of his wrists.
“I can’t get it off,” he whispered quietly, still fighting to cleanse his hands.
“You’re scratching the shit out of your hands, kid. Stop.”
“I can’t get it off. I have to get it off.” I could see his eyes clearly in the turbulent veneer of the water, so blank and listless, staring without seeing any sort of reality.
“I can’t get it off,” he whispered again, though I knew he wasn’t speaking to me.


I can see O’Dell’s eyes like they were mine – and they were. They were my eyes, are my eyes, the same except for the crushing sorrow that was buried in their depths. I’ve never seen eyes that go for miles like that before; they literally contained distance so great that the intensity was overwhelming. I couldn’t stand to look for very long, for fear of getting lost. Yet they were soft, and tired, weary of the blood he’d seen every day for a year…the jungle was sucking the life out of his eyes one step at a time. They watched where his feet went, though they never saw anything but the light shining through the canopy. Twisting into fragments and bits, as if it could be changed into something physical, as if it could be caught and held in his hands. Held together, like he’d done for me, like he’d tried to do for Mirello. There was just too much energy there to keep within the confines of a body, and Mirello spilled out like the light, and he’d scattered in pieces across the whole length of a year in a moment. All of him, only just there and then suddenly gone; as that energy too great to be contained, Mirello burst open and into the tropics, inexplicably and all together too fragile. I watched O’Dell’s eyes crumble in that moment, when Mirello was ripped from his arms and carried away like the light when the clouds had converged. I watched him break down.


We had been marching just like we always marched through the jungle, our necks drenched in sweat, our limbs aching from exhaustion and frustration and anxiety. Most times the only way to identify anyone on the move was by voice – when we marched our fatigues camouflaged our bodies and our flak helmets covered our faces. Mirello was about fifty feet ahead of me, his body blending in with the trees so much that I lost sight of him without even trying. I was looking into the dying sunlight, watching the last of the morning filter through the foliage before the rain clouds solidified, when the raspy bark of his voice pierced through my daze.
“Hey, guys, hold up a minute. Hold up! I thought I saw something move over there. Heads down!”My body stiffened immediately, instantaneously awakening because of the surge of adrenaline feeding from my fear. Our feet moved more quietly and our backs were further hunched as we shuffled in the direction of his voice, following him towards whatever he had seen. Suddenly, there was an opening in the forest and the ruins of several wooden hutches appeared before us. They had been burned, gutted – cleared of any former inhabitants by the ravages of flame. There was nothing else around, no bloodied corpses or hastily made shallow graves, so we all assumed that the village had been deserted for a while. Even if there had been evidence to the contrary, we would have forced ourselves to deny the truth; no point in imagining anything more horrific than necessary. A rain drop landed on my arm and I looked upwards to find the sky hadn’t totally clouded over yet. The last desperate rays of the sun were caught like prisms in the scattered rain, and the light was refracted all across the clearing. The monsoon cometh, I thought to myself. We stood tensed, surveying every shadow for signs of disruption, suspicion, but after a few minutes we had all begun to lighten up. One man made a joke about wanting a refund from his travel agent, and another chimed in with something concerning his insurance policy. A few of us were peering into one of the huts when Mirello said
“Except they weren’t really blackbirds.” Most of the guys within earshot chuckled, and a lot of them begged jokingly to hear the full version of the story.
“Yea, asshole, finish the end. You can’t just leave them there in the staircase, staring like a bunch of idiots at the sky,” came O’Dell’s voice from behind me. We were all shocked. We had never heard him say anything so ballsy to anyone, let alone Mirello.
“Don’t call me an asshole, shitface. Who says they can’t end up staring like a bunch of idiots? I see people doing that all the time…” Just as O’Dell opened his mouth to respond, a sound like the crack of lightning rang through the clearing, and then everything was chaos.


He watched as Mirello died in his arms, life slipping through his fingers like grains of rice; too small, too delicate to hold. I watched as he watched Mirello disappear – his body mangled and quaking, begging for release. Like a single pulse of electricity, he jerked once and went still, shallow eyed and silent. It was if he began to decay right there, traces of his flesh vanishing as the rain slid across his skin, his muscles dissolving and sinking into the mud, leaving O’Dell holding only his bones. Leaving a man who had witnessed life stolen. It was only after Mirello’s eyes closed that I heard it. The sound came from deep within the cavity of O’Dell’s chest and rose up, and out, streaming into the air like toxin. It grew louder and more empty, more lonely until finally, as if he could no longer hold it in, the moan broke open and he sobbed. Those big brown eyes became like orbs of molten glass, shimmering and screaming in anguish. It was not wailing, for this pain was more powerful, deeper and more intimate than that. These were wracking sobs, soon morphed into roars so intense that I too began to cry, feeling that my heart might explode like the pieces of Mirello if I didn’t open my mouth and allow it to escape into the sky.
O’Dell cried as if it was the only way to relieve himself of the immense pain threatening to crush him, as if the harder he bawled, the more he would empty his heart of the fury and the sorrow that had suddenly ruptured in him. There was a sense in me then that the whole of the earth’s weight was bearing down upon me, and my knees gave without realization, and I found myself on the ground and howling. I couldn’t hear anything anymore – the screams of injured and dying men, the moaning of those who were clutching their friends’ bodies like rag dolls, the whistle BOOM! of grenades, and the sharp retort of the machine guns… none of it existed in my ears any longer. Wild eyed, I gazed around, bits of bone and jungle mingling together until I could no longer differentiate the limbs of men from the limbs of the trees. One by one everyone but Mirello and O’Dell disappeared from view, blurring into the background, and flickering out of my awareness, as if they had become invisible.
And so we were, O’Dell holding Mirello, both of them broken, and me kneeling in the mud and drowning in my tears. Watching as they became something wholly different than men, and waiting for something to change.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

an obsession with seaglass and caramel

so i guess it's cold now.

thursday study sessions that sweep my entire being into the understanding of a single class; talking and talking and talking, in circles and in arcs and around and over and through everything there is to say about hierarchy theory. but the walls of fair trade held us in and the cold night air allowed for some respite of sanity, leaving me adoring boys in plaid and waltzing [in my head] towards 137 gilman. with the knowledge that some people deserve each other and even when i'm enamored with the wrong person, that too shall pass. girl talk, late nights in the den, sleeping in a room all by myself. more studying at a table full of breakfast: mint chocolate and blue moon ice cream and (brueggers!) bagels. there is a sense of camaraderie as we all slowly let the inevitable wash over our faces, give in to the fervors of the midterm...the midterm from hell, bearing tooth and claw, and snarling as only ferocious beasts can snarl. yet! it was not as bad as it threatened, and as the bell rang, we all looked to one another as if to say 'we're done, we made it...time to be going.' the camaraderie may not last forever, or it may turn into one of those fabled anecdotes "remember when we first...". either way, it was good. my guess would be that it is a fleeting bond, one forged over the fury and the panic and the fascination. can't say that i would mind if it continued though, if that were the case...

naps. sheer mental exhaustion, leading to the complete and total shut down of my working mind. i cease to function. wake up, confused [is this new? no, of course not. the frazzled, disorientated state of newly waking is one constant in my life. i must learn to use it to my advantage, as in appearing cute and in need of care. so far, it just garners funny looks and laughter. oh well.] hockey! illegal chinese food on buses, amazing seats, amusing cheers and adorable peewee games...thanks, kiddo. onwards to the theatre (meant to be said in a snooty british accent, although it is wildly inappropriate). and to GREENBUSH. yum. sleep, yet again.

after the dissipation of my brain on friday...this weekend was highly unproductive, save for the creation, celebration, and consumption of a most sublime salad. this is quite all right with me. to the faahmer's maahket [i am in boston, apparently. first england, now the east coast. i am a world travelling floozy! except, i'm not a floozy. and i wasn't actually travelling. not that it matters.] to buy cinnamon rolls and veggie bread and victuals of all kinds (mainly green onions and peppers and beans, as well as raspberries and carrots.) sex and the city, and billy joel, and dancing with vegetables, oh my! not kidding. washing dishes, doing the laundry, wearing sweatpants with longsleeved shirts, cleaning house while watching war movies...these are my favorite kinds of saturdays. not kidding again. FRIDAs. feeling antisocial. clippings from magazines. turquoise piles of seaglass ... rosy brown seaweed frozen in crystal ... cherry wood covered in black sand ... lilies in white and pink and green ... books filled with recipes calling for oils and spices and tuscan things.

the fragile quality of wilted flowers, ten days old, the color fermenting in their petals like the etching of ink in parchment. chats with aki and emily...always making me feel more myself, more assured that i AM doing something right, that i don't have to worry about being lost in the shuffle or thrown aside. hugs. caramel macchiatos. making mixes and creating soundtracks for my days...days are always better with soundtracks. wouldn't it be amazing to have a constant stream of music for every profound and essential (or even the most demure and meaningless) moments in your life? that's what my ipod is for. i wonder what my soundtrack will be in five years? writing in fragments, single word thoughts, phrases. so opposite of stream of consciousness...and yet these are my two favorite forms for words. i am a walking paradox.

brooklyn [mos def]
getaway car [audioslave]
you got the style [athlete]
i woke up in a car [something corporate]
booty [erykah badu]
for the widows... [sufjan stevens]
oh what a night [billy joel]
how sweet it is [madhatters]
celebrate [wyclef jean]
love song for no one [john mayer]
big brown eyes [old 97s]

If I should never find you in this life, let me feel the lack. One glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

like black cherries

'cuz i'll reverse the earth and turn your flesh back to dust.

i've been reading love letters again, and hearing love stories, and seeing romance around every corner. which only leads me to think...

when's it my turn?!

i deserve this too! i swear it. i am a girl with flowers in bottles and boxes made of brightly colored words. i have art on the brain, literature streaming from my ears, the world exploding inside my dreams and beyond all that, i hear i'm a pretty good kisser. i'm a little bit crazy, a little bit hard to define, and i like it that way...but why doesn't anyone else? i've gotten a few to notice, don't get me wrong - but it always seems that the timing is off, or the distance is too much, or maybe it's that i'm just too goddamn picky. is that it? maybe it's all my fault...i'm driving myself into a lifetime of loneliness because i don't know how to relate to someone in that intimate of a way without scaring myself. maybe i should just throw my heart into the next pair of arms that beg me to rest inside them. but i don't want to settle! i'd feel bad, and it wouldn't be real. verdad. TRUTH. maybe i'm incapable of love. i swear that i'm a hopeless romantic, but maybe when it comes down to it, i'm just terrified of anything real actually happening to me.

being in the library for 6 hours straight is bad for your sanity. example? i go crazy, eat bagels and juice, run around in the hallway and bounce about like a squirrel. while scaring half the inhabitants of my hall into thinking i'm a lunatic. which is entirely possible.

i dare you to love me...i know you want to.

and he tasted like black cherries.