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.

happy, or not?

Maybe you have to be perfectly miserable in order to be perfectly happy.

“Carrie and Mr. Big are still together.”

In Sex & the City (the book, not the hit HBO series that I am absolutely addicted to), it didn’t appear that there was any hope for Carrie and Big. But no- flip to the epilogue and you will find that unbelievable little sentence. “Carrie and Mr. Big are still together.” Sure, I’m okay with that. That’s how the show ends. It’s how it was always meant to be. But throughout the entire book, these two characters were projected as almost completely apathetic to each other and were not illustrated as if there were any lasting qualities to their affections. That’s not how true love is. True love isn’t apathy; true love doesn’t leave your stomach hurting.

So what does this mean for those of us living outside of the pages of crisp library books? Is it possible to live your life in a relationship that has your feet nailed to the floor beneath you, but still end up with a happily ever after? Or is the fact that “Carrie and Mr. Big are still together” just making a statement about how easily we allow for ourselves to get trapped in situations and relationships that are more apt to destroy us in the end than make us happy and provide us with what we really want?

I guess what it really comes down to is whether or not you’re happy. And as long as all of the happy outweighs all of the bad, then everything is okay. But when the scales start to tip the other way, and the nightmares and stomach aches start to hang around more than the butterflies and smiles…
                                                      Well, you know what comes next. And it isn’t pretty. And it hurts and it rips your heart out, and you wish you could change the circumstances of the situation, but the fact of the matter is that you can only give so much of yourself, and if that isn’t enough, then you need to find someone new to appreciate who you are and what you have to give.

Maybe you have to be perfectly miserable in order to realize what it is going to take to make you perfectly happy.

please say you do not mind

 

At this moment, sitting in my room, with this sad song playing out of worn out computer speakers, and no one to keep my company but a cat, I remember what alone feels like.
Hello, it has been quite a while.
Being alone is one thing, but the alone feeling that is draped over me like a thick wool blanket- it smothers. It suffocates. It’s itchy, and all you want to do is escape, but you need someone else to pull it off of you, because it is just far too heavy for one to tackle on one’s own. I can do nothing to save myself. In the past, there were months and months of this feeling. And now that I can look upon my experiences and relate them to the present, I’m realizing that this lonely feeling is really just a miserable process of waiting. I’ve never had much patience, and when I’m required to practice the art of sitting around, tapping my feet, and watching the clock, it makes me miserable.
The fact of the matter is, I know that someone is going to come into my life and shake things up. I know what comes next. I know that my suffering will be rewarded.
But the pain of patience? It is unbearable.

The worst of the situation is that the waiting isn’t what is hurting me the most. It’s the loss. The devastating, heartbreaking, temporary- but somehow still paralyzing in nature- loss.
I can’t say anything more about it.

Sympathy isn’t what I want, but what I do want is someone to save me. Sometimes it feels like far too much to ask for.

here’s to taking chances.

“Perhaps that was the curse of Jack Burden:
he was invulnerable.”

I am who I am because of what happens to me. The harsh chemicals that have been smeared across my head transform by ringlets into a bleach blonde halo. The sun beats on my skin; I am burned, I am red, and it is me. The conversations I have, the words I hear, the words I speak- they are all knives sticking into the corpse that is me, cutting me open, changing who I am and letting my core flow out into the world.
                                How about if we take that all away?

Take away all the knives, take away all the chemicals.
Take away the sun.
Take away all the other people.

                              What if you were invulnerable?
To me, it seems as if invulnerability would make life worthless. Change is the only constant, and if you were immune to change wouldn’t life lose the thrill and the meaning? Our vulnerability, and our ability to be hurt and be altered, is what makes life real and genuine. Furthermore, our vulnerability is what opens us to not only heartbreak, but the joy that comes when our bare skin is greeted with a warm caress instead of the searing pain of a red hot poker.

We are not invinceable for a reason. We are food for worms, and that fact should encourage us to seize the chance to let someone in, underneath our skin, and make life worth every passing moment.