free write 1

His eyes wrench me open, asking everything I never will. Answering their own questions before a word can leak like honey out of the grooves between my teeth. The shining example of masculinity I was born to is nothing more than a plastic army toy masquerading as the real thing. But his camouflage has been eaten away by the Coke stains that still spill down his cheeks from years ago. My cherry lips lose their color slowly each time we speak, all the blood from them rushing down into my gut and turning with the bile that lives there. I am nothing of this man, even if his DNA tattoos itself into me, my middle name his bastard child.

On the other hand, we have the boy I barely know. The boy I've spent a mere hour with and yet hear in all of the weeping notes of my favorite ballads. His glossy hair and curious voice. Whatever void I am trying to fill, it's ripping further open by the second. When I am nothing more than raw flesh, let's see whose blood will rush back into my lips.

injection

I missed him the way you miss Novocain after the dentist; I didn't miss how numb I felt, how odd my own tongue felt in my mouth. I didn't miss anticipating when the numbness would end. But I did miss the lack of pain. The ability to chew my cheeks to ribbons without feeling a thing.

There were days where nothing made sense but to lie in bed and let the power of him drown me, covering my head and running down my throat. It was in those chokingly silent moments that I'd feel his hands around my neck and around my chest, pressing the air out of me until I thought I was nothing more than an empty bag of bones waiting for this Frankenstein of a man to spark me with seeming life again.

But that love was a lie, a masquerade I created for myself out of whimsical girlish fantasies and vinegar lies that dripped from his incisors. The blades at the ends of his fingertips cut one time too deep and suddenly the numbness left and I snapped awake. People will tell you that being numb is better than feeling too much. But why would you choose a prison of paralysis when the kingdom of consciousness is trying to welcome you home?

via *

drifting

With his name resting on my tongue and images of a night soon to come on my mind, the city lights drift by as the melodies brush through my hair. The car drifts cooly and we laugh together, laughing with the comfort of close friends and knowing we are young and beautiful and strong. We know we will cry, we know we will be hurt, but tonight in this car, nothing hurts and there is nothing but hope and stars.

via *

charm and fury

The lake was lovely, dark, and deep, the promises promised in Robert Frost's poem lurking somewhere just below the surface. They were tangled in the water lilies and spread with the algae on the slimy surfaces of the stones that created a mosaic on the floor. A gentle hand found my gentle waist, an ever softer fingertip rested against my parted lips. I could taste the memory of your tongue on mine. I could feel your hand pulling me closer and tangling in my dress as you kissed me. We were so young, my darling. So young and out at midnight sneaking onto private lakes to skip stones.

You were cigarettes and moon dust. You were charm and fury and mine. You spun me round and we stood facing the lake, standing together and pressing our bodies together until the only barrier was the air. Hands clasped, we skipped stones caked in neon across the water, your voice whispering snatches of old tunes into the curve of my neck. The stones pulsated on the lakebed, a beating heart of the Earth, the beating heart of us. In our now frozen and forsaken town, the heart is beating too still, too faint for the ears of strangers. With you far from me, and I in my bed, I still feel our hearts combining and diving below the murky depths of the past.

via *

in restless dreams I walked alone: 3

F. Scott Fitzgerald always feared oblivion and losing his voice amid the voices of others. He couldn’t stand the thought of owning a mind made up more of the thoughts of others than of his own. I understand his fear and by God if that’s not the most debilitating fear a writer can have. There are those books you read that fill you with so much inspiration and so much fire that you cannot wait to write your own. Your thoughts race with new stories and new ideas and your hands fly like crazy until it feels like they are going to snap off from overuse. But then there are those other books. Those books that are so life changing, so unbelievable to even be real, that makes you think that you could never in your wildest dreams create anything new or important. Everything that could ever be said has already been said in the perfect words of someone else. Not only will your own writing never compare to theirs, but you don’t even want to compete because their work is too golden to even approach. What is a squeak of mine compared to the shouts of Gatsby? 

Those books are the ones I’ve read so many times it almost feels as though I’d written them. I’ve walked each chapter like a hallway in my childhood home. Holden’s hunting cap hangs on a hook in the front room, Gatsby stands in the doorway looking far off into the distance with an empty champagne flute in his hand, Scout and Jem elbow past me toward the back door, Atticus following close behind reminding them of their manners. And there in front of me on the dining room table: a typewriter. Although the world seemed so full of voices, none of them were mine yet. I could tell the characters surrounding me were begging for more people to fill the house. It was up to me to give them life. My voice needs to be shared just like theirs did. In my mind I sit at the typewriter and my fingers drift coolly across the keys. Even when they are a bit more stilted in reality, that dream pushes me forward. 

So I sit cloaked in sad music in a bed full of broken spines and well-loved pages, wrinkled from repeated visits through the ages. My mother worries that I’m not sleeping enough. My father hopes I can make a viable career out of late nights, coffee, and words. My roommates are just grateful I take time out of imaginary worlds to pay rent in reality. People stare at the dark circles under my eyes and think they are simply marks of one person’s tired night. Little do they know they are footpaths carved into my skin by the endless running of my mind. 

via *

in restless dreams I walked alone: 2

Since I can remember I’ve been immersing myself into the minds of other people; when I was younger I’d invent a new person for myself to be and let them take over my brain for a day. I used to think that meant I had the makings of an actress but it was really the makings of a writer. I had more characters than I could count ready at my disposal, begging for their stories to be told. I would sneak into corners of rooms and talk to these people and write swatches of stories down in the margins of well-loved books. I started collecting the lives of those I’d imagined around me and soon moved into collecting the lives of those I knew and watched.

When the time came for me to have my own life, I wrote down every detail of what happened to me, experimenting with new words and trying with all my might to capture exactly what every single event in my life felt like. How the summer sunset’s look like melting sherbet wrapped in crushed velvet while the September sun looks like warmed honey seeping out behind the mountains and smelled like marmalade. How my first love’s hands reached at my sides like shy little tree roots, nervous to spread out and claim the forest floor. The more I wrote, the more I read, the more I saw, the more I kissed, the more the words demanded to be let loose onto paper. I felt more like myself when my eyes were peeking out between ink on a page.

via *

in restless dreams I walked alone, narrow streets of cobblestone

My mother used to come into my room while I lay completely still on my bed, letting melodies drift across my skin and tattoo themselves on my arms and legs. She asked me why I always had such sad music on, letting my room turn a dusty blue as each sad song crooned through the night. Why did I need Jeff Buckley to hold my hands? Why were The Smiths brushing my hair off of my face and out of the hot tears that were plastering themselves onto my cheeks? It felt good to feel so much. If felt good to lay paralyzed by pain, remembering all of their voices and their promises, watercolor tears streaming down my cheeks. It made me feel more alive, this addiction to nostalgia. I’d let the chords swell until nostalgia was sweating itself from every pore. That’s when I’d pick up my pen.

Everything went numb. It was like the blood in my veins stopped flowing and all I could hear were ghostly laughs bouncing off the walls, just out of reach. There’s only so long that a heartbeat can sustain you before the blood stops moving and you need more. My blood sat there in my nail beds, gathering in crystallizing pools and freezing over, waiting for the spark to set it on fire again and set my pen in motion. Letters lounged on my cuticles begging to leap onto the page. That’s why I needed their voices. I needed to hear someone sing sadness so I could get lost in my own head. It’s amazing the trigger moments that happen when you surround yourself with the art of others.

via *

June, she'll change her tune

Six months in. Sun is out, feeling fine. 

Here's my summer song.

Your lips are nettles,

Your tongue is wine.

Your laughter's liquid,

But your body's pine.

You love all sailors,

But hate the beach.

You say come touch me

But you're always out of reach....

In the dark you tell me of the flower

That only blooms in the violet hour.

Your arms are lovely,

Yellow and rose.

Your back's a meadow,

Covered in snow.

Your thigh's are thistles,

And hot-house grapes.

You breath your sweet breath

And have me wait.

In the dark you tell me of the flower.

That only blooms in the violet hour.

I turn the lights out,

I clean the sheets.

You change the station,

Turn up the heat.

And now your sitting,

Upon your chair.

You've got me tangled up,

Inside your beautiful black hair....

In the dark you tell me of the flower.

That only blooms in the violet hour.