here we are

“sweet disposition
never too soon
oh, reckless abandon
like no one’s watching you
a moment
a love
a dream
aloud
a kiss
a cry
our rights
our wrongs
a moment a love
a dream
aloud
a moment a love
a dream
aloud

so stay there
’cause i’ll be coming over
and while our blood’s still young
it’s so young, it runs
and won’t stop ’til it’s over
won’t stop to surrender

songs of desperation
I played them for you
a moment
a love
a dream
aloud
a kiss
a cry
our rights
our wrongs
a moment a love
a dream
aloud
a moment a love
a dream
aloud”

Him & Her

(I think this is a short story in progress. Whatever it is, it isn’t finished and it needs to be edited, but I wanted to put it up. I need to know what you think. So if you read this, can you actually comment it and tell me where you think it should go or what needs to be done? Thanks.)

You’ll do your best to forget about me. Walk away, and don’t look back. I’ll take a picture of you with my hands and smile knowingly. The steps that I take across the hard floor make clicking noises, and the steps that you take across the hard floor make soft stomps. We have walked away from each other and you think it is over.
You thought it was over, but a few days later you hear a song and for a split second you can hear my voice flowing into your right ear and you miss me. You dial the first four digits of my phone number, and then pause. Set the phone down. Pick up the guitar. And once again, I am forgotten.
I walk home and count the bricks in the pathway leading up to my door. There are 58.
I undress, pull my hair back. Lay on the kitchen floor with my cat. Call my mother. Try to remember all of the things that I should be doing, but after I remember that I still need to finish painting the bathroom, I pick up the guitar. And once again, it is forgotten.
You are driving down a road. Staring ahead of you. Thirty miles over the speed limit, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no one around to judge. You are alone. You remember me. You pull over. There are trees, and you walk to one and wrap your arms around it. As soon as you’ve realized you need something, there is nothing to embrace that can wrap it’s arms around you and let you know it’ll be okay. You get back in the car and turn around.
I am on my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest, staring at the phone that lay next to me. It remains silent.
As soon as you get back to your street in your quiet little town, you look around and remember why you began to drive away in the first place. You walk inside your house, tell your mother you forgot something from your room, and within 2 minutes and 48 seconds, you are gone again. Smoke pours out of your car and drifts upward into the clouds.
I begin to cut things out of magazines, out of books, out of my life. I am doing my best to forget you. There are new pictures on my walls and I like to think that they help me, when really all they do is make me think about the things I knew we would have had together. I sit cross-legged in the middle of my room and stare out the window.
You go new places and learn new things, and you’ll think of me once a day and then shake your head to make me go away; your hair lifts and flops back down into place. I can see it. I took pictures. You never realized how many I took of you, and you only have one of me. The one where I am in the red dress. My hair is down and it is wild, and I’m just looking at the camera. Just looking. There is barely any expression in my face, but there is love in my eyes. You only ever liked to look at my love, but never who I really was.
My fingernails chip, my hair gets overgrown, my eyes grow musty. I never leave the house. If I venture out, the minute after I leave will be the minute your feet step across the 58 bricks leading to the paint peeling off of the door. I am trapped here.

Trapped here.

no title no title no title

I survived;

I survived the two-year anniversary. I thought of you, I almost called you. I wanted to cry, but I chose not to. I thought about what happened, I couldn’t breathe for a moment. I laughed. I regretted it. I took back the regret and accepted, once again, that what happened has happened and there is no taking it back. It is there, in my past, quietly collecting dust but still looking lovely as ever as it hangs on the wall, surrounded by all my other beautiful little mistakes.

I have survived. We both have. Now we can shake hands, breathe in each other’s scents once more, and go our separate ways.

You are-

the most terrifying thing to happen to me, because I’m not sure if you’re going to destroy me or if you’re going to make me happy and feel really truly alive again. You could so easily do the first, but the hope that I am holding in my hands right now is beating its feathers so rapidly and so eagerly that I would really love to believe that this, that you, are what is right, and that maybe we can bring the best out of each other.
You seem willing.
It’s enough to make me laugh so hard that I cannot breathe.

baby, baby, I am in love

he tells me he loves me, only me, only the softness of my skin and the curly tendrils of blonde that attack his face as we lay in bed together
         “only you”
he tells me that he’s never done this before, never felt so deeply and got lost so completely in the everything we are
          “only you”
he tells me he loves when I laugh because each time I do he can hear every memory and see every smile he has ever brought to my face
          “only you”
he tells me this is our song and I begin to live to believe that I have finally found what I have been looking for
          “only you”
he begins to hold my hand less and leave to go home before he falls asleep more
          “only you”
he tells me he is leaving, he is sorry, but he can’t breathe when I’m around
          “only you”
he tells me I’ll be fine
                   & now it is only me without you

excerpt

His favorite time of night was when he could never really decide what color the sky was. It was velvet black, it was deep blue, it was rich purple. As he kept his head turned upwards and his eyes open to the heavens, the color kept changing and all he really wanted was to fall ino the dynamic infinity.

Robert Hass

Forty Something
She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me;
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”

Sonnet
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one
but horticulturalists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

the streets have no name

There’s a lot of late nights. Each of them end with me pulling into the driveway. I park, I turn the lights off. Pull the key out of the ignition. Sit for a moment. The dark that sits outside of my house is terrifying.
I get out of my car, walk up the driveway. The feeling in my spine is always there; an itch, a sadness, a fear.

Someone is going to get me. Someone is going to grab me, hand over mouth, and pull me into the dark. Someone is going to take advantage of me. Someone is going to take all my breath away and silence me forever. Someone is going to make me cry. Someone is going to make my worst nightmares come to life.
Even when I get into the garage, the fear does not leave me. I am where I should feel safe, and my hands still tremble.

Relationships, to me, are walking up the driveway in the dark.
I’m still in the car.
& there is absolutely no one to walk me to the garage.

the product of a monday math class

The one day that I start singing that song as loud as I can inside my head, & that is the day that you reappear & my heart falters for a moment.
I refuse to believe in coincidence.
I do, however, believe in all of our yesterdays. They were brief & sweet & lovely, like an October afternoon. There is no longer any use in pining for them, longing to grasp the past & relive just one night, or one hour.
                   It is gone, I hope that you are happy. I hope that you spend most of your time    
                   smiling & falling for someone new. I hope you have someone to kiss & hold hands
                   with & sing to.
                    & I hope you remember me.
                    & I hope that it feels okay when you do.
Things are getting a lot better for me, & I wish I could tell you that, but I know that it is out of the question for right now. Maybe someday you’ll treat me the way I deserve and grant me the kindness of at least one long conversation. & if that happens? I promise, cross my heart, that I am going to tell you everything. I want to make you feel deeply every wrong feeling that you threw at me. I’ll tell you all about every single one of my tears, all their names & favorite colors, & which ones are now permanent smudges on my pillowcase you’ll get to look at me & know that it took me way too long to let you go.
                                                & you’ll know that I would do it all again if I could just to get you back.
What really kills me is that you’ll never read this & I know we won’t ever speak again like we used to. I’ll never listen to that song without my heart aching & you better never sing it and feel fully happy. I never want to sharpen this pencil again, because this is the most I’ve ever brought myself to write about you & maybe if I sleep with it under my pillow the nightmares might stop & my heart will stop hurting.

I’m so scared that I’m going to see you. I’m scared that I’ll be wearing sweatpants with my curls pulled up into a knot on the back of my head, & all of the sudden it’ll be you in front of me, which is something I have not had in quite a while.
          It scares me, because I really have no idea what will happen. We could look at each other & share a small, secret smile. We could avoid the gaze of each other’s eyes & pretend it never happened, I never knew you, we never knew each other. I could call out your name & wait for my heart to break one more time- just once more. You could take it all back & make me feel whole for the first time in months. (That won’t happen.)
I know you won’t look at me. I know you won’t.
& by the way, you’re every 11:11 wish. Every single one.
That is two times each day that I stop to think about you. Just you. Just you & every time you made me laugh, every time you sang to me, every time our skin touched, every time you made my heart race, every hug, every kiss, everything.
                              The day we met, the day I fell for you.
                                                   Everything.
                              The day you left.
                                                   Everything.

Thank you for being in my life for as long as it lasted.

anything looks peaceful from 1,353 feet

Will our story ever end? I thought it was over so many times before. You had left me & taken the best of out love with you. All I had left was empty memories & old notebooks.
          & then, like magic, you came back to me.
It was the strangest feeling. It was like I had been drowning & all of the air had left my lungs & I was dead. But then the sun hit my body & cured me of the cold, & I was warm & whole & alive again. When you are brought back to life from something like that, you live with a renewed energy & you love with a fervor that you did not know before. So in my revival, I fell in love & gladly wore a blindfold of trust & let you drag me deeper into the story of me & you.
          & then, a punch to the stomach.
                                       You left me again.
The pain was so much more worse this time. It was worse because it hit hard & fast & heavy, exactly what I no longer had & the crippling, staggering effect that it had on everything I was. But when you lied & told me that you really did still love me- that was my downfall. Because I let myself believe it, & I let myself believe that everything would get better. Seven days later, and you were with her. You were with her & I was at the bottom of the ocean, & sharks were the least of my worries. 
I continued my stifled breathing underwater until you pulled out a ring & asked her to marry you.
          Then I really was dead.
                   & then, like magic, you came back to me. This time was so much less magical. 
                             & it was hardly a heartbeat or a flutter of eyelashes.
                   & then, like magic, you came back to me.
                            & told me that I was the one & that you loved me.
No one has pulled me out of the ocean yet, and you wonder why I am so still, cold and blue to you.