Category: Prose

i’m reading words that belong to other people loudly when i look up and catch a veiw of myself in the mirror. i have grown up in this computer sitting much the same all my knees bent against this desk and my foot a little smashed, i suppose i was shorter the first time i sat here. i like to think that i was younger and stupider: only because it would infer that i am now older and smarter. but m y face isn’t the same. and when did i start looking eighteen? i remember being 14 and driving around on your birthday while you were in wichita and i was wondering about our first time, and what it mean that it was my first time and i was fourteen and now here i am. i just sit and i wait and i wonder for something to happen. but the mirror shows my face and these words are my mirror. i’m terrified. i’m constant. i’m not quite constistent. but i’m kind of looking forward to looking nineteen. i’ve always prefered odd numbers. and you and i were an odd number, am i right?

you call at weird times, when i’m expecting no one to know where i am or when i’m sleeping or when who knows. but suddenly. there you are. waiting on the line for me and i don’t answer because my phone doesn’t ring. but i get the message later and save it because i never hear your voice anymore and wonder if i’m doing anything right.

you chatter over the phone anxiously and i wait patiently on the front step where i have to shake, so cold, just to hear you speak. but as i listen to you voice and you use little words that make it sound okay dear, hun, sweetie i start to believe you just a little. but i have no idea what could make it all okay or what i’m doing talking to you again anyway. maybe this is some big mistake or maybe it isn’t.

we rush behind walls in open classrooms and we freeze there. did you ever notice how silent it gets when we’re alone? like perhaps we need him there to break the ice. (when the ice melts and the water evaporates; i’ll only have the storm to remember you.)

don’t i look like the stupid one who’s about to get her heart broken again?

this is how i feel when you’re seeing someone else.

title this one everything i could say to your face: maybe i’m just afraid of you and everything that surrounds you. because something that beautiful is by automatic nature intense and i just don’t know what to do. did i tell you no, i didn’t that i talked to him today and i told the story of you and i, for the first time, in my own words. sometimes you just love someone so much that it not working out, again, could mean that love is false. and i just don’t think i could handle that i’m just a piece of pussy. i always have been. and you knew that all along, i can’t handle myself around things that matter. i use words like love, because words like that do matter, but don’t look so offended you know you should be flattered. i’m so fucking sorry for all of this. and i didn’t fuck him. it was much much more disgusting than that. maybe love is real and christians are right and we don’t deserve it. you have to understand how terrifying it all is.

we wandered around there blank and meaningless wondering all the while what happened to our faces after we lost sight of each other. and then there you were, walking menacingly toward me, with an evil look in your eyes like maybe you just stole my heart, like maybe you just stole something. and i was just wandering by you absently pretending you weren’t there when suddenly i heard my name on your lips and i melted all over again.

maybe yellow makes us crazy and women creep outside and crawl out of the walls, but on you its a comfort and always has been. i keep remembering the first hug you gave me and fall into you in dreams where i become silent in your hollows. i remember how you felt and i go crazy inside the yellow in my mind.

here we are again in the same place as before and somehow everything is different, everything is difficult. it seems easier than before to stand her next to you and i don’t care what anyone thinks, just that you feel better. i raise my fingers to my mouth and start to bleed the cuticles, letting out the part of my blood that makes me hurt you. i see it in your eyes that you hate me just then for hurting myself. but all i ever do is hurt everyone, and that means me too.