Reject if seal is missing.

“Have a good one,” he says, and then he walks away without meeting my eyes, but that could be because I’m looking at everything--everyone--but him. He slips away, out of my field of view, and it feels strange, unfinished somehow. It’s not until I’ve helped another three or four people that I realize why. there was no sadness in his leaving, no longing. No lingering. No goodbye. And the last time I heard his voice, I was near tears, biting my lip, trying not to make things harder on us both.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says, and I have to say no. Because what else is there to say? Yes. Yes, that was hard. Harder than anything I’ve had to do in my life. Hard enough to make me feel like my lungs have stopped working and my heart is beating maybe half as much as it should be. I feel like I have more to say, like he deserves a better explanation, but he doesn’t seem to need one. Or maybe he just wants me gone.

“Goodbye,” I say, because there isn’t anything else.

“Goodbye,” he says, and that’s all. I leave his bedroom alone for the first time, holding back tears as I wave goodbye to his mother in the kitchen and, as politely as possible, declining the ride home his father offers me. The walk home is filled with fragmented song lyrics that once belonged to us, and the next time I hear his voice

is when he is wishing me to “have a good one.”

And I have to think, Is this what we’ve come to? Because even at our worst moments, even in the awkward days when he was the boyfriend of my friend and all I knew was his name, we always said more than that.

I wonder as I fumble through my next orders with shaking hands and a stuttering voice whether he’ll be in my dreams again. I never used to dream at all, and now that I’ve begun having visions in my sleep again, he’s the one recurring character. He hands me sheets of numbers that don’t make sense, and he tells me empty things that drip with the flavor of the past, and I wake up confused until I remember that the shape of those words is only a residue in my head, and that they are sitting comfortably in someone else’s now.


A few days ago, a friend of mine was recounting a conversation she’d had with someone else, and she mentioned considering herself as damaged goods. As I walk away from here, the brief encounter with him now an hour--maybe even more--in my past and my brain unable to stop playing it in an endless, painful loop, I wonder if that’s what I am now.

Damaged goods, ruined by the side-effect flavor of mistakes and regrets, and things I might wish, someday, had turned out differently.

We Are The Hopeful

Today is Christmas, albeit closer to the end of it than the beginning. And today I feel like saying I'm sorry, and saying hold on, and saying I love you.

I know that Christmas is hard for a lot of my friends. I know that many days are hard for many of my friends. But as I'm struck by a melancholy feeling I cannot explain in the quiet lull of after-Christmas, I know that today in particular is harder for them. For me. For us.

For those of us who sit and wonder, is this all there is? and have the question not even touch on presents and food. For those of us who miss holidays of years passed—years when loved ones were alive, when parents were together, when we lived in places we loved, when we were able to make a phone call and know that the person on the other end wanted to be with us as much as we wanted to be with them, wherever they were.

The great Jamie Tworkowski said today, “If you feel abandoned and haunted today, please know you're not alone. If you feel overwhelmed by questions and pain, please know you're not alone.”

And this is true.

I want you to know that if you're reading this, I love you. If you're hurting, I want your pain to stop. If you want something more, I do, too, and I know that we can fight for it if we want it.

So do you want it? And will you come with me to find it, even if it doesn't seem like it wants to be found?

There will always be despair. A friend of mine said to me today, “The bad guys always win and there is nothing we can do.”

And I told him, “The bad guys only win when we admit defeat. Remember that.”

This, I believe, is also true.

So will you join me? Will you step up and let our refusal, our denial of that defeat, echo in the bones of those who tell us we are, will always be, have always been nothing? Worthless? Hopeless?

Because we are not hopeless. We are only young, and we are learning. And we are fighting. And we will not let ourselves be trampled by our despair anymore.

We are the Hopeful.

Are you with me?

The New Voices Anthology

Earlier in November, I submitted three pieces to Bemidji State University's New Voices anthology. I got two letters in the mail today, telling me that two of my poems were accepted, and one of them had also won something called the Langston Hughes prize for poetry.

From what I know, there are over a thousand submissions for New Voices every year. Of that thousand, fifty are chosen to be included in the anthology. Out of those fifty, six are given awards. I'm not sure if this makes me feel very, very big, or very, very small... I guess it's a little bit of both.

There's a reading at the beginning of April, where I'll be able to read both the accepted pieces and receive my two copies of the anthology as well as pick up more (which I'm sure I'll have to do--every relative I have will want one xD)

I am so excited and so dumbfounded, and so speechless. It's never been more than a dream to ever be published. And now it's more than that all of a sudden.

The poems: Midnight's Concubine and Indigo

Indigo (New Voices 2011 Version)

On December 14, 2010, this poem was accepted into the Bemidji State University New Voices anthology for 2011. More information on New Voices can be found here.

It also won the Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry.

Who would have known that,
as we wandered in the wilderness,
our hearts were collecting colored sand
grain by
grain?
Purple dust filled
the gaps between
your ribcage and your lungs,
and tiny bits of royal blue
sifted through the cracks in my spine,
muffling the beat of my heart.
They threw us together and
while we collided,
the hinges of our bones must have broken and
rolled back our skin like the stone from the tomb.
Our hard-won sand went skittering along the ground and,
while we scrambled to reclaim it,
it attracted to itself,
mingling until we could no longer find our own.
So call it fate or call it
indigo,
it amounts to the same:
no one has called me a truer name
than the one in your eyes that you never speak.
Someday will we wear our finger raw,
picking apart the colors?
Leave half the grains behind and
emerging diminished,
but entirely our own again.
I doubt it.
Something changed in our collision,
and something became;
Rather than walking away from it
as halves of some whole,
we walked away complete.

The parchment's message was worn away by salt.

Professions of love are
glimmering shards of ice you can barely see,
heralding icebergs underneath;
seaman's stories told behind gnarled hands,
mixing hyperbole and truth;
confessions
usually made in the dark.

Speaking those words is somehow like
taking the anchor from your stomach,
back-swallowing the chain in great long chunks
of rusty metal
so that it slides away from you—
the stability of the secret
is no longer yours.

It never really matters if the ground you're over
is tearing up the hull of your heart.
You toss your compass over the side
and let yourself be bashed against the rocks,
to be lost.

People come to gawk at shipwrecks, don't they?
Perhaps, with your makeup like ship's paint
running down your cheeks like an oil spill,
and your hair
plastered by the salt of tears to your face,
you will become something to remind them
of the tragedies in life.


Will you tell the tale of your once-great ship,
her beauty turned to mold in the gray-green storm—
or are you going to give up your grip to the threat of a storm
that might shatter you
or might put you back on course?
How hard can it be to navigate
by instincts like stars in the dark?
They've always been there,
after all.

Whisper it to the grains of salt that sting your skin,
to the water that is always shifting colors
just enough to keep it new.
It always knew,
and so did you.
So say it.

I love
have loved
do love
will always
love

you.

Nothing great is ever done alone.

This is an post to remind you all, and to remind myself, that I'm alive. And so are you.

This seems like it would be a given, but honestly, it's so easy to forget. To forget that you're living a life that's just as great and important and beautiful as all of the other lives you see around you. It's just harder to see your own life and your own actions in the same way you see the lives of others.

This is a thank you note. This is to say that I love you. This is to tell you to step outside, however cold it is, take a deep breath, and breathe out a dream, or a wish, or a prayer. And this is to encourage you to take that wish and own it, and to make it happen. Wishes and prayers are powerful things, but they're all the more powerful when you put your own strength behind them.

I think sometimes it's easy to look at the world around us and assume there isn't much we can do—this person is stronger than us, that person is better than us, these people have more charm or talent or skill or a better reputation than we do. But here's the thing: there's always going to be someone better in our own eyes. The trick isn't to be better than the people around you, but to do better with the people around you.

Nothing great is ever achieved alone. Unite with the people you love, and you'll be surprised at how much easier life can be. That's the point of having friends and allies, you know? So that they can life you up when you fall, and you can help do the same thing for them. And I think sometimes we, as young people, forget that. To us, friends sometimes become the people to hang with in the hallways and crack jokes with. We stop seeing them as people as full of life and depth and experiences as we are.

Here's a challenge for you, whoever happens to actually read this rambling of mine: take a second look at the people who are close to you and, as the great John Green says, imagine them complexly. Look at the people you love and realize that they have the same capacity for love and pain and happiness and hopes and dreams and fears that you do.

And then just love them.

Remember that wish I told you to make? Keep it. Tie it to your finger with a string. Don't let yourself forget it. Turn it over in your mind until you know it upside down and backwards.

Then turn to those complexly-imagined people that you love, and say to them, “There's this thing I want to do. Can you help me?”

And I bet you I know what they'll say back.

Just try it.

I dare you.

Believe in Dreams | Remember to Live EP | Flyleaf

A NaNoWriMo update.

Current word count: 36,109

Word goal before I sleep tonight: 38,000

Goal for Day 26: 43,334

Words behind where I should be: 7,225

Days left: 5, counting the 26th

Words per day to finish on time: About 3,200 or 3,300, since the NaNo word counter runs about 500 words lower than OpenOffice's.

I'm not feeling discouraged, exactly, but I'm a little bit worried about how far behind I am. I don't even remember how it happened, except that a couple of days' lack of writing was because of the Harry Potter premier...

Verification for winning novels started today (erm, yesterday? The 25th.) and I know a lot of people have won already...

If anyone, NaNo participant, or winner, or neither, has advice or encouragement to get me through this, I'd really appreciate it. I need all the help I can get.

If you're looking fr my novel, you can find it here.

Vlog: A Rant & Thanksgiving

Venting some frustration, and recognizing some of what I'm thankful for this year.

Before a Fall

There are some prolonged moments in time where I simply sit in awe and hope and fear, wondering where I’m going to be when the moment ends. These “moments” are sometimes very short--less than a minute, less than an hour--and are sometimes long, as long as days or even a week or two.
I’m finding myself in the grip of one of those moments tonight. I feel like I could cry at any moment, but that if I do, something in this moment will be broken, and I’ll never find what I’m inadvertently looking for within it.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to look back on this in the morning and paint it a bunch of over-dramatic philosophical nonsense, but right now it’s more solid than that.

I’m sitting here with a novel behind on its word count, a social life that’s minimal, eyes that don’t want to focus on the computer screen, and hands that want to find my phone in my lap and dial the number I just hung up with, to ask my older brother to stay up just a little longer to keep all the demons away.

I’m thinking of a million other different things as well, the most prevalent being that my friend, who I’ve called my brother now for years, could maybe give me a chance, if I tried hard enough... or if something out there took a liking to me.

This train of thought is dangerous and probably bad, but honestly, I measure the people I meet by him anyway. I’m most likely going to end up single for most of my life, and it will be because no one I meet will measure up to the immeasurable depth of potential and love and hope and humanness that I see in that boy. And I do see that in him, all of it. Every time I talk to him, I hear more of it in his voice, and every time I hang up the phone, which has been happening frequently in the past couple of weeks, I find myself wishing just a little bit harder that I could have him, just for a while. Or someone like him.

But that’s silly, isn’t it? Because everyone knows there isn’t anyone like ani.

And so I sit, torn between things, hung in a balance that I don’t dare disturb, but that I know will topple me eventually, probably into the cloudy waters of self-loathing rather than onto the shores of possibility. And I’ll fall into them unwillingly but drink of them with a thirst that I could wait to slake if I wanted, but that, in the end, is best satisfied when I am unhappy with myself.

I just want somebody to come up to me and tell me to forget about it, and ask me to dance.

O'Children by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us...

So writing this even though I won't be posting it until at least tomorrow. I'm typing it on Sheeps. What's Sheeps? The ten-year-old Toshiba laptop running Windows XP that I borrowed from Emily; the tool I will be using to compose a novel throughout the month of November. Sheeps is an interesting machine: it has no battery, and must be run from a power cord. It has a 9 GB hard drive with just less than 3 gigs of free space. It's got Open Office, Windows Media Player, and my image editing program, and that's about it. Oh yes, and this darling little binary .exe that Em installed:

This is where Sheeps got its name. These little guys are roaming back and forth along my taskbar and along the tops of my windows. They're adorable, and I'm sure they're going to be a distraction, but a small one and also the only one: Sheeps doesn't get internet unless I plug it directly into our router downstairs. This makes it the ideal tool for National Novel Writing Month. It's really not much more than a glorified word processor, and that is exactly why I asked to borrow Sheeps in the first place.

Anyway. This is probably going to be my last blog until the end of November (not that I've had a lot to say recently anyway!), unless I really need a break from writing or something spectacular happens.

Anyone looking for my NaNo profile can click here. You can also keep up with my NaNoWriMo novel on Blogger. Just check out Our Eyes to the Stars.

An influx of natural and man-made disasters in the early 21st century sent the country into chaos. Nearly unanimous in their panic, the United States relinquished their Constitutional rights and fell gratefully under martial law... a set of temporary security measures that never lifted. Now, a century or more in the future, the Bill of Rights lies forgotten, and everyone is said to be exactly the same, no matter who you are or where you work--which is about the only important thing, because race has been all but forgotten due to pre-birth injections to mute pigment in your skin, and there's no such thing as a religion, except in outdated history books, which are even more outdated... when you think of the fact that there hasn't been a real, new, ink-and-paper book published in over sixty years.

Can you picture it? Can you see it? Good, that's important. Because these stories are to be a teacher, and a warning.

The future brings more trouble than you know.

With that said, I wish you all a wonderful month; and to all of you Wrimos out there, the very best of luck! I know we're all going to need it!

Captive

She licks her lips, dry like the autumn leaves that fall spinning from the trees. She is standing there, just standing, as if she is waiting. Her eyes dart to the hilltops, scanning, flickering, watching. She thinks they are coming.

She is right.

They come running, pouring down the slopes on all sides. They are shouting, accusing, clutching at her clothes, her skin, her hair. They rake their nails down her arms as they shout in her ears.

“What have you done with your life?” they are asking, screaming. “What have you done? Who have you helped? Who have you saved?” They dance around her, cackling, and they answer their own questions. “No one!” they sing. “No one!”

“Stop!” she begs them. “Stop! Please! Don't you know I can't save everybody?”

“You have saved no one!” They scream, high and loud, their voices cracking in a hundred places. “You only watch them die. Watch them as they melt away their insides, as they carve into the marrow of their bones. Watch them as they tie their veins in knots. As they exhale dead breath like smoke. As they fade in and out like a failing siren! You watch! And you cry! Hah! What good are tears?”

She is crying now, tears running hot and wet like blood from her eyes, and she pleads with them to listen.

“They don't hear me, the dying ones! They smile and their teeth are like glass, their breath like flame, burning them from the inside out, but they chose not to look. It's easier that way. Nothing I can do can make them look, make them see! Nothing!”

Her attackers refuse to concede. “Do more,” they insist. “More! Don't let her bleed, don't let him fall, don't let her get lost, don't leave him all alone. GO!

“This is who you are,” they say, the sneers shining on their faces, their long fingers caressing her skin with something like love, but more like ownership. “Go and save them,” they say. “Go and fix them!”

“I can't!” she protests, but even as she clenches her fists in defeat, she is moving, being carried across the dead and crumbled leaves. “Nothing I do will save them!” she cries as she is borne away by other wills, other powers besides her own. She shouts to them once more as she is whisked away over the hills. “I can't!”

And they, in their brutal assembly beneath the hills, whisper their answer.

“We know.”

Nihilism and Narcissism are too close for comfort. Someone should tell their mom.

Preach love and practice
nihilism
so strong that it ferments into
narcissism,
a selfish regard that ages
and goes over
from a wine of acquired taste
to the vinegar of a sociopath.

“Nothing works,
nothing mattes.”
Take it further:
“Nothing's real.”
Take the dogma,
twist it
into a shape to fit your liking.
Freeze your smirk into its
bitter
shine.

Drift through life
touching everything, feeling
nothing,
curdling the blood in the veins of your lovers
and piercing the hearts
of the fools
who dream you a hero,
a Ghandi,
a god.

They look at you with hopeful eyes
that brim with a recipe that's
four parts awe,
three parts admiration,
two parts imitation, and
one part each of
fear and distaste
—for a soul so distant,
so vapid—
as they bleed to death from wounds
they cannot see,
wounds
that are half of your knife and
half self inflicted.
After all,
they chose to love you,
didn't they,
in the end?

Your smile never changes.
Nothing works and
nothing matters.
In the end,
nothing is real.

Not even you.

Family, Friends, and Allies

Alliance (noun): a connection based on kinship or common interest

I walk into the room with my hands shaking, which is most ridiculous thing to have happen, and the rational part of my brain knows it—I've been walking into this same group for nearly three years, and we've been meeting in this room for two of them. Still, the prospect of walking through the door this morning scares the living daylight out of me, and the argument I had yesterday afternoon doesn't help.

My best friend walks up next to me as we wait for the room to empty out, and I see the same look of apprehension on her face.

“I feel like I'm about to barf,” she tells me, and I have to agree. We have never been in charge of this before. The sense of impending doom and drama, as well as the weight of a huge responsibility, seems to wrap itself around us like a wet wool blanket in the middle of the summer. We share a sparse, stressed look, and then another friend comes up and bursts the bubble of swelling tension.

“Isn't the Gay-Straight Alliance meeting today?”

Somehow this makes us feel a little better, or at least reminds us that our focus is on them, not ourselves. I feel her take a deep breath in unison with mine.

“Yeah,” I answer. “We're just waiting for the room to clear.” It does so a minute or two later, and at this point, our regular group is beginning to congregate around us. Our third leader and the last part to our own personal Three Musketeers joins us just as we start through the door.

We storm the room and set the chairs up in a circle in record time. As we do, I see a stream of faces come in to join us—some I have known for three years, some for less, and some I have never seen before at all. Five minutes later we're sitting in a circle and I'm trying to tear my eyes away from the flat purple-gray carpet and make myself look at the people who are sitting in a spread-out circle with us. They are all looking at us with some degree of expectancy—they are here to listen to us talk to them, at least for today.

We do talk. For a good eight or ten minutes, that's all we do: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the group? What are the rules? During this entire thing I alternate between wanting to continue staring down at the floor and wanting to speak a million words a minute. Finally we are done with our spiel and can hand it over to them, let the words we all know are waiting there be spoken to a room of people that will actually listen.

“Usually we start meetings with a check-in,” I say. “But today's a little out of order. Our question for today, though, is 'why are you involved with GSA?'”

The question travels around the circle, and after each person speaks, I am more and more sure that my case of the jitters was for nothing. “We want the support,” they say. “We are the support. We love in different ways. We are comfortable here. We love it here.”

The new, glittery talking-stick that has made its way around the circle comes to me, and I am so overcome that I can hardly speak.

“I'll say it the only way I know how to,” I say, and I'm slightly alarmed to hear a tremor of emotion in my voice. I pray that I won't choke up completely. “I want to be here for anyone who's ever felt like the freak in the room.”

I pass on the glitter stick to the other leaders, and I feel bad later, because right now I'm not listening to what they're saying. I am looking around the circle and seeing the people I love, people I've known for years now. People who were with me on my own journey of self-discovery before I even know that was what it was. People who have seen me laugh and cry and scream and hurt. Suddenly my anxiousness is gone, not as if it never was, but as if they have all been sending me a silent reassurance that they love me and trust me and have faith in me.

The bell rings and we put the room back together, laughing and talking as if we had never been apart, and as I leave the relative quiet for the surge of people in the hallway, I am smiling—I have a family here.

And I am so proud to have them by my side.

The human heart is a galaxy in miniature.

No one ever says
what happens after “the end”,
all concise,
no loose ends.
No one says
how the moon turns to dust
as you lie and defend,
lie and defend.
But you're already dead and my eyes
bleed in green,
not in envy but because blue
is unbreathing, unchanging.
It is lifeless and cold and this
acid
in me
is very much alive,
eating away at the rings of a planet,
while lusting for its core.

Crack open your skull to let the smoke out.
Let the layers slough away like
skin, like
the dirt on ancient ruins,
built and silent on alien soil.
Let it leave and expose the once-live shell beneath.
But there is nothing to see here,
no tourist attraction built on old remorse;
only hollow spaces in this wreckage,
begging
to be filled with something
a little more substantial
than the ashes and deceit—
ashes of the moon that
burned up in its orbit
waiting for a truth
that never came.

This is the reason we are family.

It’s two-thirty in the morning, and I’m sitting here, shaking, angry, tired, trying to write a letter full of all the things I need to say to my ex and feeling like the world's most fucked-up person on the planet, and suddenly my phone buzzes: a text from my older brother. Just the normal hey, what's new? sort of thing. This is an event in itself, since he is extremely picky about who he talks to and when.

His text is not entirely surprising; I have been thinking about him a lot recently, and he always seems to get in touch with me after I’ve been letting my mind dwell on him, as if I’m broadcasting some sort of signal that he pick up on. I have never entirely ruled this out as a possibility. There are too many coincidences.

So I text back, Hey, not much, just writing an angry letter. You?

And I put my phone back in my pocket and forget about it, my twisted emotions fighting with each other for adequate coherent space on the virtual page.

Ten minutes later my phone buzzes again... and again. My first thought is Oh, cool, a two page text, which is awesome since he sometimes doesn't text back at all; and then it buzzes again as I'm taking it out of my pocket.... and I realize he's calling me.

So I sprint into the other room and pick up.

“Hey,” I say, and I notice my voice is warm and happy, with no trace of the shaky sadness or anger that would have possessed it only seconds ago. Just the sight of his name on my phone lifts my heart. “Why are you up so late?”

“I’m up at the cabin,” he answers. This explains a lot to me: he hates it there. It also causes a genuine smile to break across my face. His voice always does, because there have been so many times where I’ve been sure I will never hear it again.

“That’s always nice.” The sarcasm in my voice is evident.

“Yeah. It’s cold up here.”

“It’s pretty cold down here, too,” I assure him.

There is a pause, and then he says, “What a fucked-up year.”

I am speechless for a moment--the same exact thought crossed my mind while biking home just yesterday. But my surprise doesn’t last long. He and I have always been connected like this. “I was just thinking that, actually,” I say, and my voice is low because most of the effort spent in speaking is spent holding back tears that could be either joyful or sorrowful but are actually neither, since I never let them past the tremble in my words.

We talk for a moment of his ex--he wants to make amends.

“Will she talk to you?” I ask, and the question is honest.

“Probably not, but I’m going to try anyway.” That could easily be his motto, used in both good and bad contexts: No, but I’ll do it anyway.

“Will she be making the amends, or will you?”

“I will. I was a bastard for the last part of our relationship.” My heart swells with pride in his ability to see himself clearly, and the feeling is untainted by his next words: “She was a bitch, though” because I know that even if he means them, they don’t change his view of himself.

“Isn’t it incredible how your opinion of someone can change so much in such a short time?” I muse. I am thinking of his ex, who he had been with for over two years, albeit on and off; I am also thinking of mine, and the letter filled with anger sitting on the abandoned computer screen.

We are quiet for another moment, and I reflect on several things: one is that I was staring out the very same window I am looking through now on a terrible May weekend three years ago, a weekend I will forever associate with him and his strength and kindness; the other is that he is the only person I know of that I can be silent with over the phone and not feel the need to talk to fill the empty airwaves.

“We should hang out when I get back to town,” he says.

I’m caught off guard, but in my happiness, I don’t skip a beat. “When?”

“Tuesday.”

“School starts on Tuesday. But afterwards?”

“Sure.”

We sort out details for a minute, and then he says, “Well, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”

“Alright. Sleep well, ani.” The word is Japanese, the language I only took because he asked me to. It means my older brother, and I've used it as a term of affection for him for years. For the first time in a long time it doesn't feel awkward leaving my mouth. In fact, it feels like it fits perfectly, like a favorite shirt or a familiar smell.

“You too. Keep texting me, alright?”

“I will, definitely. Of course.”

“Goodnight, Sarah.”

“Goodnight, Joe.”

I hang up the phone, and when I sit back down at the computer, my anger is gone. My hands are not shaking. Even my fingers have warmed up from the icy temperature they tend to take when I’m stressed out and haven’t slept. There is a feeling in my chest that can only be described as peace, and as I open a new tab and start to type, it is that feeling that carries me through my words.

And now I am here, riding on waves of warm contentment. Because when my older brother is here, nothing can ever hurt me.

And right now I think I trust in that more than anything else.

Secrets.

Apologies for it being hard to read… =/ Fullscreen helps I think. Also, if the number by the full-screen button says 360, change it 480. =)

Thanks to Maggie for the inspiration.

I've got such extensive plans for NaNoWriMo this year.

If you don't know what NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is, click here!

It's so crazy. I'd heard about it for two or three years, and when some of my friends were doing it last year, I decided to try it at the last second. I actually think the oh-what-the-heck decision happened on November first.

The result? It sucked, and that's probably being way too nice. The idea was half-developed and not planned, and all I did was stress myself out, because everyone else's projects were so lovely.

This year I've decided to re-write a very old project—my first serious prose project, in fact, entitled The Red Smog. The original was started when I was ten or eleven and was finished about six months before I turned thirteen. So, of course, it's horrendous. When discussing the old material with my friend, who has long nursed a soft spot for it, I believe I said something along the lines of, “Ugh! Burn it to shreds! What in the name of my life is my life? What was I thinking?”

Don't believe me? Here's proof: the entire thing was written in... *gulp*... Comic Sans font.

Yeah. I was that stupid.

Anyway! I've always loved the basic story of the piece (even if the writing itself is worse than three-year-old gorilla words) and some of the ideas and spin-off chapters I came up with after The Red Smog's completion were actually okay to look at, so when I was consulting that same friend about ideas for NaNoWriMo earlier this summer, she immediately suggested I use The Red Smog, and I agreed.

It's kind of frustrating that November is so far away! I've never made myself wait to start writing something before. It's always been a take-it-as-it-comes sort of deal. So I keep getting these ideas and random flashes of what I want to happen... and I have to keep squirreling them away! I think I sort of like the outcome though. Since it's a Sci-Fi story, I can draw inspiration from everyday life and just run with it—for example, for the past two says my house has been getting phone calls where the caller ID reads MINNEAPOLIS BUS. This inspired me to mess with the transportation system in the story, so that it would call you and tell you when you had to leave to catch your bus or train based on your location!

In short, making myself wait to start writing this story is giving me more time to think and more material to work with.

I can only imagine where it'll end up.

Anyone else planning on participating in NaNo this year?

August 20 Vlog : Lacking Closure

Because none of my blog posts seem to come out right when I start to write them.

Midnight's Concubine

On December 14, 2010, this poem was accepted into the Bemidji State University New Voices anthology for 2011. More information on New Voices can be found here.

She has nebulae embedded on her fingernails
so you feel
as if you've seen the very edges of the Universe
when she gouges out your eyes.
Her lips spread red lace that
leaves its empty spaces
on the dark side of your sternum.
Her tongue licks a line of shining promises
up and
d
o
w
n your spine,
and they sink their needle edges
into the spaces left behind
by the movement of your backbone.
In that moment,
when the impossible is true,
she bids you
fly
and the moment that you jump
she is waiting at the bottom,
laughing as your bones
break
against the pavement.
It was never your body that she wanted,
no.
It was only your soul.

Change, Part 2

Change, Part 1

In the aftermath of my break-up and its related fall-out, I've been plagued with all of my self-depreciating thoughts and ideas. These things aren't new-comers to my head by any means, but they'd taken a leave of absence, and I wasn't entirely equipped to deal with them when they returned. The shapes and forms of these thoughts vary, but what they all melt down to in the end is I am worthless and nothing has changed.

For some reason, the second one has been a lot more prevalent, possibly because a year ago I was so certain that everything would change, and so my worst fear at this moment is that everything from the past year is a waste.

My friends have all been trying to convince me that this is untrue, and while I was thinking today, something my friend Sam said stuck out the most.

You look in the mirror every day and see the same person; never noticing the microscopic changes and growth. When I hang with you once every week to a couple weeks, each time I see something new that you've developed and learned that makes you an even better person than you were before. Nothing you say can convince me otherwise.

This has been a long time coming, but she's right.

For the past two days, I've been applying for jobs. This alone marks a change—a willingness to give up free time and do something that requires more effort—but it's the application process itself that, for me, really measures a change. A year ago, I never would have been able to just walk in to a store or a restaurant and ask, “Are you guys accepting applications?” It sounds like an easy thing to do, but a year ago I would have locked up, panicked, and never actually asked.

Sam, and all the other people who have been trying to convince me for the past few weeks, are right. Change isn't something black an white, Before and After. It's gradual, like looking in the mirror one day and realizing my hair is long again (which it is, but that's beside the point.) Change doesn't happen over night, and sometimes that's good—too much change all at once is likely to short out our mental circuits. But that also makes it harder to see, harder to measure.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's not supposed to be something that's easy to measure and quantify. Maybe change is gradual because it forces us to take good, hard looks at our life, both in its current and former states. Perhaps the Universe made change move slowly, simply so we would never forget to look for it.

Because the only thing that never changes is that everything does.

Back-pocket Jawbones

We scrape our nails across our wrists
to bring the scent of blood,
to call the beasts we see in the corners of our eyes.
We chew holes through our pretty lips
hoping to force the truth
through a bigger outlet.
[It never seems to fit through the spaces
in our plastic-metal smiles.]
We've never even seen our own reflections;
it's the images in others' eyes
that show us what we are.

We are
wraiths
of flesh and bone,
laughing in the night,
cigarette smoke weaving through
the empty spaces
in our ribcage.
Our veins are full of alcohol to keep us going.
[What fun is the world without blurry edges, anyway?]
We hide beneath the warpaint and the shirts
of boys who pretend to wish they loved us
and we dance to the music
that we liken to the insides of our skulls.
[But really,
it's only an echo of the expression on our faces.]

We break our spines to tell the story of the scars and
clap our hands together
just to hear the clatter of our bones.
[We are so proud
that you can count them through our skin.]
Our eyes are rimmed in black and
our mouths speak in only red and
we dance,
breaking our hearts as soon as they heal
so our distress signal might
just
reach
your ears as you pass
and your eyes
might light up with lust
for the ghosts of who we think we were.

We slip through the days
hoping that you'll find us,
pity us,
pick us up and
sew us back together.
We conspire in silver whispers,
conversations held behind the gauze.
How do we entrap you?
How can we call you closer
so our legs can wrap around your hips,
blurring the line between animal lust and
fear
of the dark.

We chatter together like teeth in the cold,
avoiding the jutting points of the truth
in our smoke-and-candy voices.

The truth is,
we are never broken enough to be fixed.
We are only dead things shouting out in the cold,
refusing to admit the simplest facts
traced on the roofs of our mouths.

We are broken because we can hide
our ugliness behind the scars—


—and call ourselves perfect.

Saying Goodbye: A Playlist for the Silence

1. Every Time We Touch (Acoustic) - Cascada
2. Hide and Seek - Imogen Heap
3. Golden - Fall Out Boy
4. Roadside - Rise Against
5. Broken (feat. Amy Lee) - Seether
6. 9 Crimes - Damien Rice
7. Misguided Ghosts - Paramore

Download.

July 7th Vlog - Breaking Up

I'm posting this video before it's done processing, so hopefully it'll work right when it's done. If it doesn't work in the morning, someone should let me know.

EDIT: I re-uploaded. It should work now

Uncomfortable Revelations

I'm sitting in my bedroom under the glow of the Christmas lights that hang from my ceiling. It is one thirty in the morning in the middle of July, but it could be ten-thirty at night at the beginning of January. The lights seem to freeze time. Perhaps that's why I turn them on when I wish time would stop. Or maybe run backwards.

I'm wondering what kind of person I am, what kind of person I truly am. It seems like an odd question to be asking at one-thirty in the morning, but what the hell. I need to ask myself sometime, don't I?

I think the problem is that I already know my answer.

I am, and always have been, a selfish, spiteful, manipulative person. I worm my way into people's hearts, use them, and cast them aside when I feel I've had my fun. I am a living, breathing vampire, nothing more. It reminds me of Marissa, and the irony is not lost on me.

After all, we hate most in others what we see most strongly in ourselves.

When the after-image fades, you can finally smell the sulfur and smoke.

We sit on the grass with our friends, watching the fireworks, and his knowledge of the inner-working of pyrotechnics simultaneously makes me giggle and annoys me. I push away both emotions in favor of enjoying the show. I have always loved fireworks, ever since I was young and we could see them from my parents' bedroom windows.

“They're so fucking beautiful,” I say, and this solicits no more than a vague murmur of agreement. “And,” I persist, thinking as I speak and wishing that it was easier to share things with him. “They're only this beautiful because they are in motion. Because they're so temporary.”

I feel like I've stumbled onto some profound insight on the human condition, yet the boy beside me barely notices, instead content to know the technical names of the various types of light in the sky, and to correct our neighbor's assessment that the ones spraying sparks lower to the ground are duds. They are, my boyfriend informs him, actually called fountains, and they are done on purpose.

I reflect on the argument/discussion we had before walking over here, the one that we've had too many times to count now, and on that sense of something's missing that's been hovering over me for days. Weeks, if you want to cut the bullshit. And I feel like crying, because I am sitting here, beneath some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings, and all my boyfriend can say is that they're wired electrically, but that every rocket in them was made by someone, and he is pretty close to being certified for that.

Somehow, the entire thing is summed up in the one accidentally-profound thing he tells me that whole evening.

“Someone in the Pyrotechnics Guild was cremated and put into a firework,” he says at one point. “A willow. The ones you call waterfalls.”

This distracts me, and I turn to look at him, eyes wide. “Really?” I ask.

“Really.”

A pause. Then, “I want to do that. When I die, I want to be something beautiful like that.”

And somehow it hurts when he doesn't say a thing in response, even though there really isn't anything to say to something like that.

I think, It feels like there's an hourglass slung around both of our necks, and the sand in it is slowly running out a hole in its long-broken bottle.

I think. If only I could fix this, and then, on the heels of that, I don't want to fix this. We can't fix this.

I'm not sure which is worse: knowing what you have is broken, or knowing you might not care enough to repair it anymore.

To Know a Secret

We're blasting down the quiet weekday road, with the last dregs of summer light still clinging to the sky, at a speed that's probably too high and feels even higher to our rushing veins and beating hearts. A smile paints my face like something bright and unexpected, and I think—not for the first time tonight, either—that this is what I want. All of this is what I should have found so much earlier.

All of the windows and his sunroof are open wide, and Rush's “Tom Sawyer” is blasting from his iPod through the car speakers. It's already been mistakenly identified as a Journey song instead, so that later I will have trouble finding it when I go to look it up, but in this moment it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we are flying down the street with it singing in our ears, and I am smiling and maybe laughing, because who would have thought I would ever be in the back seat of this boy's car, with someone else holding my hand? It's incredibly surreal and a huge indication of just how far I've come. I look over at my boyfriend and—

And I'm struck by the feeling of something's missing. This moment is so beautiful, so purely happy, so alive, and as I look over to share it, I falter. It's not that he doesn't feel it. It's more like it doesn't count for him quite as much. Like there are other things that make him fly, things that summer nights and fast cars can never, ever touch.

My smile doesn't slip, but a small, hard pang of that same feeling—something's missing—settles into the middle of the moment and sticks there until long after he's kissed me goodnight and they're blasting away again.

I don't say a word about it to him later, either.

- - -

We've already sneaked him in and then out of my empty house. The timing was perfect and we've got all of our clothes in order again, but my nerves have gotten impatient, and we've slipped quietly out of the house just in case of a quick return of that shiny white Kia that isn't really all that new anymore. That missing feeling is back in the middle of things again, but I ignore it as we sway idly back and forth on the twice-mended chain-held swings.

“I haven't been down here in forever,” I reflect, gazing idly around from behind sunglasses that feel ever more foreign on my face. I can see the worn-out places underneath the nearby oak tree that we—a gang of five that no longer exists except in memories—made three or four summers ago, simply by sitting too much in the same places. The plain yellow monkey bars nearby, like a square with no bottom, are the site of lots of truth games and deep conversations between me and many, many different friends. I think of this with a muted degree of amazement as the list of names grows longer in the back of my mind.

I once weathered a summer thunderstorm here, a decision that I have never quite been able to bring myself to regret. I once ran through spring-time rain with my sister here, singing his songs and crying, sometimes doing both at the same time.

It seems fitting that my boyfriend tells me the news here. I am not supposed to know. He is not supposed to know, either, and I swear not to tell, but by the end of the night, after he's left us for the cloud of pot smoke in an over-crowded kitchen, I have already broken down and told somebody else. She listens to me cry in the middle of her kitchen while we make tacos for ourselves and for her boyfriend, who is in the next room. She tries her best to help, but I can't quite explain this odd cocktail of emotions that start mixing themselves here, on these twice-mended swings. I am happy and sad and desperately confused, and that is just the beginning.

A friend of mine—more than a friend, really, and I have to admit that, because for better or worse we are family, have always been family—is somewhere he does not want to be for reasons he doesn't think are reason enough. Someone finally did what none of the rest of us could do. He is unhappy, and I have been feeling it for a week or more. Feeling it like I have been unhappy, and like I have been running from demons which, in reality, I have already conquered. But he has not, and so they groan and roar and whisper in the back of my head as they do, at a much louder volume, in his.

My boyfriend keeps talking and I hear more, but I am not allowed to repeat it, because I am not supposed to know. I have already said too much, both to my friend making tacos in the kitchen later tonight, and as I write these words in what is, from my spot on the broken swings, tomorrow afternoon. I have said too much, I always say too much, but I know that it will never truly be enough. It has never been enough, not with all of the word I've written for him, to him, about him. There is always more to say, and maybe that's why I've never been able to give up hope—there is always more to say about him. His story is nowhere near over, and I wait now, on bated breath, to hear more.

- - -

I'm going to a party tonight.

I am going to a party, and for some reason or other, this is the first party that I can say I am going to and feel like I have chosen the right words. I know there will be people upon people upon people that I have never met and never heard of. I know that there will be alcohol; not under the table and in the closet, hidden in a we-will-not-speak-of-this kind of way, but a secret in plain sight, courtesy of a parent with the I'd-rather-have-them-in-the-house philosophy. I know that my friends—many part of my chosen family—will be there, and I know that my boyfriend will be there too. I am excited, and I am sort of nervous, and I am also a little bit scared. Because there is a voice in the back of my head that keeps speaking up at odd moments, the little voice that speaks in the familiar tones of my brother.

I'm sure the voice would have been there without him, but it has stolen his vocal cords, and that makes sense, because right now that voice's litany is relatively short and sweet and almost makes sense. One drink, it says. Just one drink tonight. You've never done it before, and you deserve it now because you're not emotionally fucked, but you're being stronger than anyone expects you to be right now. Just one drink. A reward. For everything you've done for all of them. Just one drink. Just one drink. I let the voice talk, because in all honesty, I can't find it in me to completely disagree. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I will answer, or that the answer I give will be no.

And I wonder if my friend, my brother, had a voice like this once, saying the very same thing, and if he listened to it begging him, and that is why he fell so far.

Because maybe it all started with just one drink.

A Rescue Misson

I sit on my best friend's bed weaving a bracelet, and somehow, all of the frustration surfaces again. Maybe it's seeing his bandana on her bookshelf, and maybe it's because I know how much she loves her husband (yet another mutual family term. Her husband and my brother are one in the same). We speak of our mutual frustrated desperation that we feel for him, and how we see the vast potential for him to topple over the edge.

“Is he still taking all of those at once?” she asks at one point.

“No, my boyfriend says he stopped because his tolerance is so goddamn high that they don't work anymore.”

“Oh. That's... good, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“But...”

“But we know him," I say almost angrily. "I know him. He isn't even going to really stop because he's never solved the problems that make him want the drugs, so he keeps going back to the drugs, and so he never fixes anything.”

We're talking in the same circles that we've been going in for years now—years of wanting him to stop and wishing whatever caused him to hide inside the chemicals could be fixed. I reflect on the fact that when I'm with her, the problem seems more pressing but also more manageable, as if the solution is just out of our reach. I find myself wracking my brain for something—anything—we can do, and I feel like the sentence in my head has progressed even farther from I want to to I have to.

Maybe it's because the biggest reason she loves him is because I made her love him, with stories of faith and hope and love.

It hurts so much to look for words to describe what I lost when I lost him and to find only those three, the three that he taught me in skipped classes and piano covers and poetry. Hope, Love, and Faith. Sometimes it hurts most when I wonder, When did he lose those? When did he go from teaching them to me to losing them in himself?

And I think the worst part is not having answers, because he doesn't tell me like he did, once upon a time, in a room full of holes in its walls, with people who had holes in their hearts, and lives that had holes in their very fabric. We were all full of holes, once upon a time, and now I'm on the other side of the river that rushed by and scared us nearly to death, with all of my holes healed but one—the one that's there because he still carries every single one of his.

I keep running into the same thought, no matter how I start out thinking, so it must be the only answer: We have to do something.

The question is... what?

Turning Point

We're laying half-naked on the bed, not really thinking about anything in particular except each other, when he mentions casually, “Your brother and your wife are dating again.”

I don't remember what we were talking about before that, only that this particular sentence makes me snap partially out of the drowsiness I've floated into. The boy isn't actually my brother and she obviously isn't my wife, but the family terms are mutual, and they stand for a damn close relationship between us.

“Really?” I ask. “I thought she and her ex-boyfriend were going to try again. She was all screwed up over him a few weeks ago.”

“No. They fucked the last time he was in town, but he lives out of state. He doesn't have plans to come back. So... she went back to your brother.”

“Oh.” A moment of silence to contemplate this bizarre and somehow irreverent turn of events. Then, “Is my brother still all screwed up?”

“Yeah. We got him to stop doing it back-to-back nights, and his brother and I—” This is another mutual family term. My brother doesn't have an actual brother, only some old, close friends. “—we've been trying to stay with him when he's high so he doesn't do anything more stupid while he's up there... but he's still taking about twenty at a time.” His voice quavers, and I look over at him. “I'm worried about him,” he says, and I can hardly stand the emotion in his voice. It's more than worry. It's fear, a fear so strong that it's got him literally shaking.

“I know,” I say softly, because to say me too would be to trivialize whatever it is that's grabbed hold of him. I lay my head on his chest and I ask even more quietly, “What's scaring you, babe? What is it?”

“That he's killing himself! He's killing himself, this shit puts holes in your brain, and he knows it, and he's going to be dead before he's thirty, and he's doing it anyway. He won't stop.” His voice cracks again on that last part, and I'm whispering inconsequential it's-okays against his bare chest, wishing I had something to say. The tears are ready to leak from my own eyes. He's talking about cold medicine, I think, and part of me is stuck in numb disbelief. Fucking cold medication. Sudafed. My brother is de-congesting himself to death. Twenty a night. Jesus fucking Christ.

“We need to do something,” I say, and my voice is shaking through the spaces between my clenched teeth.

“What can we do?”

“I don't know! Something, anything! We aren't the only ones who see this, we aren't the only ones who want him to stop, so maybe there's something to be said for a stereotypical intervention. So he can see who loves him and who he's hurting. To see who wants him to stop.”

“Maybe...”

“We have to do something.” I'm turning into a broken record, but there's not a lot else I can think of to say about my brother anymore.

“Who, then?” he asks, going back to the intervention idea.

I tick off a pitifully short list of names, and suddenly my desperate frustration with it all—with the situation, with my brother, with the fact that there's nothing I can do—explodes. “We have to do something, Nathan! Anything, something, I don't care! We have to try! I can't watch him get lost again and not do anything, again! I can't!”

The tears are pouring down both of our faces now, because somehow seeing the other person cry about it too makes it okay, and we press our eyes to each other's skin, as if the pressure will make the waterworks stop. I recover faster, perhaps because I've done this before over the same boy for the very same reasons, and I'm whispering I knows and quiet Heys against my boyfriend's neck, as if they will make everything better, and suddenly I have to say it, even though I've been fighting with myself about it for the past minute and a half. It's too big not to talk about.

“This is what I've been saying for four years,” I say, and my voice is too agonized to be held in a whisper now. I roll from my side to my back and stare at the textured white ceiling of his bedroom so I don't have to look at his face. “It all kills you, not just his stuff, all of it. Every single thing you take or do or smoke does something like that to some part of your body, do you get it now? And it doesn't matter right now, and I know that, but how do I get you guys to see it like I do? It doesn't matter now, but in fifteen, twenty years, it'll matter to your fucking wife and kids! I'm watching my friends kill themselves in front of my face and there's nothing I can do about it. And so I just keep talking.”

There is a long moment of shell-shocked silence that probably isn't long at all, and when he talks to break it, his voice is as choked with tears as mine was.

“I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to kill myself anymore, I don't want you to have to watch it happen.” He tries to keep going, but he doesn't know how. I turn to look at him again.

“So stop.” I would be surprised if he heard me, my voice is so quiet.

“I don't know how. I... I have an addiction.” It's the first time I've ever heard him say it. He's agreed with me in the past, but he's never said it out loud before, not like that. He's practically sobbing now, the realization having finally hit him full-on.

“I know,” I say, and I feel like I've said that a lot in the past twenty minutes, but I don't know what else there is to say.

“I want to stop. I don't know how.”

“So find someone who does,” I suggest, and he nods. I bring up a friend of his who quit for an extended period of time before, and he agrees that's probably the best person to talk to. We discuss the issue in small circles for a few minutes, until we're both crying again. I don't think either of us could stop if we wanted to. Now he's the one staring at the ceiling. Maybe it's to keep himself from breaking too much more, I think. I move my head from the pillow to his chest so that he doesn't have to worry about me staring at him while he's crying.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you too.”

“I know, and that's why I want this to stop. I can't keep hurting something that you love. I'm sorry.”

I move back to my spot on the pillow. “Hey. Hey, honey, look at me.” I take his face in my hands so his eyes, flowing rivers onto the tanned planes of his cheeks, are looking straight at my face. “Do you remember what I told you about saying sorry?”

That particular mini-lecture happened about a week ago, when I was with him and his friends. He went to go light up, and he made an embarrassed face at me and apologized. I remember giving him a sort of sarcastic smile and saying, quite honestly, Sorry means you regret what you did. Don't say “I'm sorry” and then go smoke up anyway.

I never thought about it that way, he'd answered. I guess I take it back, then.

“Yes,” he answers in the here-and-now. “I remember, and that's why I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to stop.”

“So try,” I say, and I can't decide if I feel like smiling or crying. “Try.”

“I will,” he says, and whatever reply I was going to make is lost under the soft press of his lips, begging me to stay with him, help him, believe in him.

I answer him the only way I can think of: I kiss him back.

To speak the truth, you need to learn it first. (Or, The Calm Before the Storm)

The light hangs green around our eyes like
some hideous parody of rose-colored glasses.
The trees
bend their backs
in a terrified homage to the storm
that encompasses them and forces their limbs
to stretch.
The sky
taunts us with images of daylight and rising suns
when in truth,
the sun is sinking ever further
towards the dark water of the horizon that we cannot see,
and all of our demons
and all of our fear
and all of our nightmares will come out tonight,
screaming,
shrieking.
Somewhere in there we might realize the truth:
the rotting, swaying zombie traipsing towards us
has our face.

The flowers have no color.
The world is coated in a wash of yellow and green that reeks
of lies and mistrust and deception.
It is a color that can never be equaled.
It is the shade of before-the-tornado and
as-the-fever-kills-us
that haunts us in our very darkest hours
and makes us wake up
screaming
with no memory of what we dreamed,
except that it was terrible.
So
very
terrible.

We cannot see clearly in this washed-out, flipped-around twilight.
All of the lines blur together and
all of the pieces overlap and
every word we hear splits into thirds—
the lie, the truth,
and the reality behind them both.
We wander in confusion,
bumping into things that may
or may not
have sprung from our hearts' greatest holes,
never knowing if that brush along our spines was
a dry, dead finger,
or only a tree branch caught in our shirt.

Perhaps that is the wort of it:
never knowing.
For the tinge in the sky cackles laughter
whenever we try to discover the truth,
filling our ears
and downing our thoughts with one sheer certainty,
one thing that never changes:
nothing is ever honest now.