On money and motivations.

     We sat in the cabin at nine o’clock on a Friday night, coming to terms with what it meant to be broke.

I had been broke for weeks, out of the last fifty-dollar installment I occasionally got from my father as his only means of assisting me with school and life in general. My boyfriend was dry until payday, and the half-check was slated to go to rent first. And then cigarettes. Always cigarettes. He was already smoking mine, but since his pack-a-day habit was much more of an addition than my own, I didn’t mind. His artist neighbor existed solely on what he got from his father, and his bank account was also empty.

“Would your ex have money for weed?” the ravens’ wings asked the starving artist.

“Maybe. But I don’t want to talk to her. You’d have to go alone. Plus, no promises on whether she’d actually buy.”

“That’s the problem  with campus being closed,” TRW griped. “Even if I had more to sell, there’s no one around to buy it.”

A few moments passed in silence. I had nothing to say—I knew the ravens’ wings’ lack of funds was partially because I was all but squatting at his place for another three weeks, and I had nothing to contribute to the scrounging of theoretical money except a meager jar of change hiding in one of my boxes sitting on top of each other in the back of his truck.

“I might have laundry quarters I never used,” the starving artist offered. “There’s probably like… five bucks in there somewhere.”

“Yeah, but then we’d have to make a decision between nicotine and brownies.”

“True. Or we could go hold up a convenience store.”

“For a single pack of cigarettes?” I asked.

“Sure,” the ravens’ wings joked, his voice thick with frustrated sarcasm. “We could see how much jail time they’d give us.”

“This is why being a creative person sucks,” the starving artist lamented, slouching back in his chair.

“And why’s that?” I asked.

“Because we fuel ourselves with shit.”

“Like your drug cocktails, and nicotine and junk food?”

“Well, that too. But like, hey, TRW, when life is good, is it easier for you to write?”

“Not at all.”

“See? We just fill ourselves with crap. There’s no other way for us to create.”

“And we’re still broke,” I observed.

There were mutters of commiseration. Shortly after that, the ravens’ wings began to search his cluttered corners for change or some sort of money he had misplaced. I figured it was probably more to distract himself from mood shifts and nicotine cravings than anything else, and the fact that he emerged with fifty-two cents and an old MP3 player he insisted on showing the starving artist proved me mostly right.

I found myself wondering what it would be like not to worry about money. Not to have those days between paychecks where even the rice that sits in the pantry for three months, mostly forgotten, gets eaten in a last-ditch effort not to exist on nothing but tea and peanut butter for a week. And I wondered if what the starving artist said was true, that we could only create when being filled with shit and chemicals and broke-to-the-bone weeks and depression and the short end of the stick.

And I wondered, if that was true, which life I would choose, if I could

When you realize Odysseus never really loved you.

(Or, Calypso's Closure)

Swallow the sea
when your eyes go dark
and your ribs fill with sand
made from all the broken glass from every shattered dream.
When your heart is heavy as whale bones left to rot,
find the abandoned ports,
the empty shores without a lighthouse.
Shed your clothes, shed
your memories.
Shed the world you made inside your head.

Listen to the gulls screaming,
Maybe he was right and
all of this was
a myth inside your head.
Maybe he was right, maybe
he was right.
Then tell them
they are wrong.

You hold the ghost of a little boy in your stomach.
Vomit him up
with the salt water.
Scrape his would-be father from the inside of your skull.
They will lie black as blood in the moonlit sand.
Leave them.
Let the tide come in and take them away,
the way your first lover once took away your fear.

Swallow the sea.
Realize that the inside of your mouth
has tasted like vodka and regret
for far too long,
that three-AM secrets were never what you deserved,
hidden in blackouts and Bermuda triangles,
in the landlocked cities he hid within his head.

The salt will burn your wounds,
make them easier to find,
to stitch up with driftwood needles and seaweed thread
and watch them tattoo you with the coast as they heal.
Leave your demons on the beach.
Take only
the image of your footprints
as the ocean
washes them away.

Swallow
                the sea.

Time limits are the world's way of saying, "Please, pay attention."

You wake me up at five-thirty to chicken and garlic pasta. I've been asleep most of the day, and in any other place at any other time, I'd be filled with dark cobwebs, wrestling with the emptiness of a mostly-wasted day and the desire to succumb to the ease of slipping back into sleep. Instead, as your dog hops up on the bed to give me a belated good morning sniff, I slide out from the covers. You pour me wine, and as we sit with full stomachs and cigarettes afterward, I have a thought that is becoming increasingly frequent and exponentially more pressing. This is too good to be true.

It's not, not really—the food in my stomach and the warmth of the fireplace tell me that—but when you leave, I hear the ticking of the clock. You keep it in your mother's old secretary desk, the one you held for your brother in a storage unit after she died, and when you're out in the snow for wood with your canine companion, it seems incredibly loud. I try not to look at my watch or the clock on your wall, try to forget that the days are slipping towards spring and towards the day I will pack up all my belongings, load them into the back of your truck, and take the last drive down the highways, away from my northern haven and back to the place I lived the last time I felt like this.

There is always a deathclock for lovers, I tell myself. You just happen to always be able to hear it.

Still, as I try not to memorize the patterns on your ceiling and the way the wind sounds outside, the ticking of that clock seems very, very loud.

- - -

The night I tell you about the scientist, and the way he took advantage of me, you get angry. Not at me, I know, but either at the idea in general or the scientist himself. I keep you awake until six, half-yelling in the dark and trying not to shake. You search for my hand and hold it, and I think that you might be the first person I've been with since him to actually understand how often he enters my mind.

A few days later, the kokopelli boy sends me an article on the Steubenville rape case that you already read to me. There is no comment, no note, nothing, and it is the first thing he's said to me in two months. I stare at it, dumbfounded, wondering what he's trying to say, and if he thinks current events are really the way to get me to answer him after a year and a half being in love with him and almost three months of stone-cold silence.

Does he want a gold star for being a decent person? I wonder. For understanding rape culture? For knowing how much I hate it? Well it'll take more then social commentary from someone else to get me to decide to talk to him after he told me he wasn't sure our friendship was even worth the effort.

For the next few days, though, I find myself marveling at the circle I've gone in. Here I am again, finally happy and counting the days until I leave it all. Soon, my days with you will be even with the days I had with him. Don't think about it, I tell myself. This isn't the same. There is so much difference here.

And there is, but as I sit in my dorm room with too much time on my hands and no warm touches to break the monotony, I swear I can hear the clock ticking away on the shelf of your desk, miles away.

- - -

“I thought I was done with sex before I met you,” you tell me.

I try not to laugh and probably fail. “I'm sorry?”

“No, don't be. It's a good thing.”

And it is, again and again. You told me once that I have an easy on switch, and I laugh about it, but I wonder if you can tell how easily that on-switch is turned off, and how much it takes for me to trust you the way I do, to always leave my defenses down. I have never been afraid of you, never had to pull myself back to Earth just in case. When you press your thumbs into my hips, I don't feel strange about letting you know how perfect that is, or adjusting your grip the way I would if I was digging bruises into my own skin. When you steal my breath, pressing your hand over my throat, I'm not thinking of proving myself to you, or of what the woman you usually sleep with would think of me.

At one point, we fuck twice, and fall asleep naked. This is the first time I've slept naked next to anyone since the scientist—the first time I've felt safe enough to. Right before I drift off, I hear the clock ticking steadily away, counting the seconds until I'll have to start thinking about how hard it will be to leave you behind and start all over. Maybe you don't have to, I find myself thinking. Maybe there's a way to—

But I cut that thought off before it finishes. The last time I decided to fight fate, I spent a year and a half sleepless and ripping my heart in half every few days. This is different, part of me insists, and I think it's that very heart, scarred and still bleeding sometimes over a confused and battered guitarist halfway across the country. This is new.

But the clock is still ticking, and when we wake up later, I still can't bring myself to admit what it means that I am so intent on denying its sound.

When we sleep for real that night, and your breathing turns deep and heavy next to me, I find myself spelling all the things I can't say with the hand not tangled with yours, over and over in letters you can't see or understand.

I wonder if I will ever say them aloud, or if I've finally learned that no amount of emotion, no matter how strong, fixes expiration dates.

The deathclock is still ticking, and I am still leaving. Still, despite all of that, I am happy—then and now, here or next to you, and I am hoping that will be enough in the night to remind me that the second-hand means nothing compared to yours.