What a wicker sofa has to say.

Two days before I came home from my first semester of college, my grandmother moved out of her house. The last time I was in her house was when I came home in October. They had already put the house up for sale and were waiting on a buyer. This is the house my mother and uncle grew up in, and the one that I went to ever years twice a year—a week at Christmas and two or three weeks in the summer—until we moved from the East Coast to the Midwest, making the biannual plane trip unnecessary.

Today the moving truck came and brought pieces of her furniture that she didn’t take with her, and I'm rearranging what the movers left behind.

The furniture that she mostly is stuff I've known her to have my entire life, even though sometimes she and my mother and my uncle will talk about things as "that new couch" or "no, the new chair, Mom." Her favorite things, of course, moved in with her to her new apartment—all except her porch furniture, made of wicker and upholstered in a gaudy sort of watercolor floral pattern that we know so well that we don't even notice anymore. This moved in to our basement.

These are the cushions I'm rearranging as we speak. And it's interesting, because these are the most comfortable couches anyone has ever sat on, and if you lay down on one, even for just a second, you're almost guaranteed to take a half-an-hour nap. The little pillows, the ones you throw at the ends of the couches, are all sewn up different places along the seams because they've worn out. Most of the sewing was done by me, aged ten or eleven, because mom didn’t want the chore and Grandma couldn't see the needle well enough. I'm sitting on the love seat, and it doesn't fit. There isn't enough room for these sofas and chairs to be here comfortably, among the furniture my great aunt gave us when she passed away when I was probably five. Things I grew up looking at in my house near the East Coast. That, and the ratty old couch my mother is trying to throw away, because my brother and his friends slept on it one too many times, and it's full of old change and candy wrappers and the smell of teenage boys.

My grandfather's desk is now sitting in my room. It's made of blonde wood, it's got little shelves built into it and this interesting-looking chair, and it's probably from the late sixties. I never met my grandfather. He died of cancer before I was born. He smoked too much. I wonder what he did at that desk while he was alive. I wonder if anything I can do while I sit there will be worthy of his memory, but the strange thing is that I don't know the answer to that question. No one talks about my grandfather much. Sometimes he seems like a great man and other times it seems like he ruled with an iron fist.

It strikes me as interesting that I'm the one rearranging all of this furniture. I'm five foot two, probably a hundred and fifty pounds, and have never been very strong. But my mom and brother are still at school, and my brother has never had the same sort of sentimental attachment to things like furniture.

I spent half an hour trying to stay out of the movers' way. My uncle, who's fifty-something and graying, with bad ankles and a bad back, did much the same thing. We kept scurrying out of the doors the movers weren't using. We stood on the lawn, which is strangely not covered in snow yet, even though it's the middle of December, and we live in one of the snowiest states in the country. Usually. We talked briefly about college and grades, but mostly we just stood there, looking strange.

That's the kind of man my uncle is, very quiet and awkward. He isn't really sure how to talk to people unless he's trying to get something done. As soon as he turned to the movers and started directing them, his quiet history teacher's voice turned to something strong and authoritative. He isn't a teacher now. He was enlisted in the Army for twenty-some years, retired, and worked at a technology and computer company until two years ago. He got laid off in the bad economy and he hasn't found another job yet, although it's probably worth noting that he also hasn't had the need to try very hard.

Still, around these parts, my uncle has the authority. He's the one who bought our house. He bought most of the appliances in it, he owns our cell phones, and he bought us or lent us most of the other electronics we use from day to day. And so it got me thinking about power, and about how people who have it are often the people you'd be the least likely to suspect. Take the idea of my uncle having ultimate power: he doesn't live here, and my brother could win against him in a physical fight. My mother is probably more intelligent, or at least has a quicker wit. Both of them are around here much more often than he is. Yet, if he were to make a decision or give an order, it would be followed without question.

Me, I don't have the power here. I'm not yet eighteen, I don't live here most of the time now. I don't have a car, and my job is on hold while I'm at school. I haven't been here for more than two or three nights since August. It still feels like home, but I don't feel powerful here. I still feel like a child.

I look at my grandmother's furniture, scattered awkwardly in the open spaces in my basement, looking out of place and like it wants to go back. Back to the screened in three season porch that my grandmother used to sit on to watch the thunderstorms. And I wonder if I'm like this furniture—displaced. I wonder if people look at me here at home and see that. I wonder if I'll someday emerge from a part of my life—college, maybe, or my first real job—like a brand-new Ikea arm chair, waiting to be taken home. No holes, no stains, bright color.

Or if I'll be more like my grandmother's porch sofa, comfortable and safe and filled with memories, happily passed down to the next person who can enjoy it, something too treasured to toss away.

Not everything is a cog in the gears of the cosmos.

I lay in his bed sometime in the middle of those hours that are neither night nor morning, my thumbs tracing slow circles in the muscles of his shoulders. I reflect on the fact that I really do love physical contact, and that I feel safer here, curled up against his back, than I've felt in months, since I last did this with someone entirely different.

It's strange, listening to the rhythm of our breathing, when I realize that I have no idea what he means to me. I don't know what to call him if I talk about him to anyone else. Is he a friend? A boyfriend? A fuck buddy? And then I ask myself if it matters, if choosing what to call him would change anything about how comfortable I feel right now.

And I surprise myself with an immediate no.

As if he has heard me thinking, he asks softly, “Why me?” And for a moment, I'm unsure how to answer, unsure of what he expects—and that is strange, because the last time I found myself in someone's bed, I could feel every emotion as it passed though him. With this boy, in the here-and-now, I can barely tell what he's feeling, let alone come anywhere close to reading his mind.

“Because you're stable,” I tell him after a second, writing disjointed letters in Japanese along his spine. “Because you can handle what people throw at you, but that isn't all you are. You're deeper than that.” But behind my words, there are dozens that I don't speak. Why you? Because you saw me, and you touched me. Because you focused on me, and sent me hurling into the stratosphere without needing to ask for permission. Because I don't love you. Because I don't have to love you. Because you don't love me, either. Because neither of us want that, or need it. Because, boy. Just because.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I say. “Why am I here?” Here, in your bed. Here, in your arms. Here, in your life, for now.

“Because you chose to be,” he says simply, and it is the best answer he could have given, because it rings out in the darkness with a tone of pure truth. I am here, sleeping in his bed, because I want to be, and that's all he needs from me—to choose this, for now.

We've combined in a tangle of teeth and tongue and touch because we both wanted to—not because of anything large and looming and hard to understand. I don't feel driven to be here, as if it is somehow out of my control. I don't see fate's line leading me from this point to the next. This is what it is, two human beings coming together because they want to. Because it feels good.

And I realize, as I drift off to sleep in the darkness of his bedroom, that sometimes, that's all you need. To feel good with someone else.

Sometimes, that's important enough.

Sidestepping (Like frogs and the day this has to end)

It's almost ironic that I'm posting this now. But I am.

You're soaking wet and getting
cold
dodging frogs on the sidewalk.
“You're my good luck charm,”
you say without thinking,
and you can't tell if you're talking to
him or to the
frog
you didn't step on in the dark.

It's the feeling of laughing so hard you
cannot breathe and barely even notice
because whatever was funny doesn't matter—
what matters is the way
your air
runs away from you and you
gasp
for the words to explain what is
shaking
all the demons from your
ribcage.

You are crying and it
doesn't
matter why.

And these are the only moments you're alive,
seconds like bare wires to unsuspecting skin,
filaments in a
light bulb
that ignite in a blast so strong they
shatter your perceptions like glass,
plunging all else into
darkness
deeper than the gaps between the stars.

Close your eyes and wait
for the flame in the cold.
It will reheat your blood the way anger does
the way summer does and you will
gasp
for
breath
and live again
in the moment your fingerprints fall in line
with the rhythm of his heart and the
song
of canvas-rubber footsteps rasping on
pavements
you do not know by heart.

You're my good luck charm, you think,
and you're not
talking to the frog—
only to an outline
in the dark,
a thousand miles away.

Cracking Eggshells

In the three weeks leading up to my departure to college, I walk around more of the city where I live than I have in the past seven years.

It's all because of this boy I re-met and talked to in a graveyard in the middle of the night, in the suburb with the partial picket fences. But specifics aren't important. I realize this—and more important things; realizations and acceptance flood into my mind like water down a hill—as my Converse-covered feet cross yards and yards of concrete, matching step with him.

When we aren't walking, we're in his car. When we're not moving, we're on his basement couch, watching The X-Files and crappy horror movies and Fight Club. And when we're not doing that, well, there are other things to do. Always, there are other things.

We avoid talking about the way the clock ticks more loudly with every day, and how, even when I come home, he will be leaving. Six months from now, he will be 1,300 miles and one timezone away from me. Add this distance to the six years he was alive before me, and you have one hell of a hole to try to fill.

Except we don't. There is no gap in the way we talk to each other, no empty space when our hands link. The only hole there is can be found in the silence, in the way we avoid talking about the inevitability of the word “end.” When we do talk about it, we treat it as if it's something that can be escaped, worked around, though we both know there is no such solution.

Four days and three nights before I leave, we finally crack the eggshells we've been walking on. The light is out and we are alone, lying on his bed, drifting.

“What do we do next?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” he says, but I hear it in his voice anyway: he knows exactly what I mean. Or maybe I just feel it inside his head. We're both good at answering things neither of us asks out loud.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and there it is again—silence. The only place where there's a hole.

We do talk about it, though. Finally. We fill the hole with ideas too important to splash on a page, and half an hour or so later, I am crying, a sort of slight thing that's interrupted by laughter. I have no idea where this laughter is coming from, only that it doesn't seem wrong, and it doesn't feel cynical. It makes the crying bearable.

“What?” he asks, the sound so different from the tears.

“I just... When I miss someone, I imagine them happy. That's what I'm doing to you already. I want you to go out to Boston and meet some spectacular artist and be happy—“

He shushes me. “I'm going out there for selfish reasons,” he says. “It's for me and for my music. I want you to know that. I'm not going there to meet someone.”

“I know.” But it's so quiet, even he can't hear me.

The conversation spins on, surreal, covering anything and everything. We are grasping at handholds that seem to be shrinking, and our words become melancholy, but not hopeless.

I just want you to be happy.

See other people.

You know it will happen. You know.

Can we talk, still? Please? I can't not talk to you.

We can stay friends. We can work that out.

This is going to hurt. Don't have any illusions about that.

And I don't. No illusions. A week from now, maybe a little more—but certainly not much more than two—I will be lying awake at night, listening for the heartbeat that is not there, waiting for the next visit that will not come, unable to touch the newest music on my computer.

“Don't forget me,” I tell him. “The important people in my life are like pins in a carpet. You can't find them, so they keep stabbing at you at odd moments, and the worst part is that I am not as important to any of them as they are to me. Don't forget me.”

“I won't forget you,” he promises. And I believe him, something I could never have done a month ago.

And there is more, but the details are not important. To confine them to words would be to ridicule something beautiful.

We both will remember. And that is enough.

The Last Rites of a Sparrow-Bird

Three days after I get hit by a car, a friend of mine asks me to help her move.

She picks me up three hours late, after being called in to work her second job. We go back and forth from her old house about a dozen times, trading her car for a truck, going to her boyfriend’s current place and back, and retrieving forgotten objects from her glove compartment so we can make the hour and a half round trip to her boyfriend's parents' house to pick up a couch. In the midst of this, we meet up with her room mate who she isn't dating, who helps us haul in a mattress, and eventually we're on our way.

The drive there is filled with a discussion on the boy who my friend and her boyfriend have been living with, a co-worker of mine.

“I feel bad for him,” she says. “He's hopeless. He's almost 21 and he's still living with his parents. He makes excuses when he leaves his dishes in the sink, every single time. He believes he's a wizard, you know. That he can change the temperature in the room and shit like that.”

“Does he have his GED?” her room mate asks.

“No. He's using the college money his grandmother saved for him to move out to Illinois. He says it's his, and he can do what he wants with it.”

“You have to wonder if someone like him will ever come to their senses,” I muse.

She says, “He won't. He's fucked, and he's going to stay fucked. There's this threshold, and once you cross it, you're stuck. He's always going to be fucked.”

And I, in all my capacity for seeing the best in people, have to wonder if she's right. If there are people who can just be written off as lost causes. Or if there's always at least one more chance if they look for it hard enough.

- - -

We make it out to the suburbs of the suburbs, where eight miles means “close” and there's practically farm land in between the townhouse complexes, and as we pull into the driveway, it's after midnight. The streetlights are a disturbing shade of orange-yellow, refracting light onto the slim evergreen bushes that stand like guards between houses with straight-line yards and, believe it or not, honest to goodness white picket fences. If you can even call them fences—most of them are twenty pickets across, if that.

Every single window in this cul-de-sac is dark, and I repress a shudder as I hop down from the truck that's only partially because if the pain in my knee. Everything around me is whispering flat and fake and dead. Or maybe it's only dead end; the mutterings of premonition are sometimes hard to catch.

“If I ever end up in a place like this,” I say. “I'll go crazy. I mean, I can't do it. I couldn't handle it.”

My comment slides through the darkness unnoticed, and I let it, opting to help haul the worn-out green couch out of the garage and onto the truck bed.

When we finally get it strapped down, using a combination of trial and error and knots the most inexperienced Boy Scout would laugh at, all of us are more frustrated and less awake than before. Our drive back into our town is quieter than the drive there, but we still manage to strike up some conversation about a friend who's self-destructing. The boy who'll be living with my friend mentions trying to make plans. “She'll probably blow me off,” he says.

“That's all she ever does,” I agree.

“She's scaring me,” my friend says. “She won't talk to us, and she's all over the internet, talking with strangers.”

“She can do what she wants,” I say, partly in defense and partly out of exasperation. “In the end, she's going to leave and do what she wants. And we won't matter. And there's nothing we can do about it.”

And they agree with me, because what else is there to say? People reach a point where nothing matters other than the decline they've found themselves in, and no amount of wishing for them back will ever be able to reach down and help them up.

I learned that the hard way.

- - -

We swing by Wal-Mart at two in the morning, on the way home. Directive: obtain a shower curtain. We're all exhausted, the kind of exhausted that makes everything seem impossible, and everyone else's head seem like prime material to bite off.

It takes half an hour and a lot of strange looks from the staff, but we finally complete the laughable mission, tossing a shower curtain, two packages of Ramen, some toilet paper, and something else that was important when we got it, but which I've already forgotten.

We get the couch inside their apartment with a little help from a nocturnal neighbor, outside for a late-night smoke, and drop the not-boyfriend room mate off to make food and maybe catch a couple hours of sleep. It's almost three, and he works at six o'clock.

I ride along with my friend to drop off the ever-helpful truck and retrieve her own car, and make one more trip to her boyfriend's place, the one with the wizard room mate, to pick up a few more things. We chit-chat a little, mentioning my impending trip up to college, and somehow my father gets brought up in all of it.

“What's up with your dad?” she asks me. “He used to be cool, didn't he? He seems... off.”

“It's all his ex's fault.”

“The one who lied about having cancer? The alcoholic?”

“Yeah. He never liked people. But now he just... he hates them, and he hates the world, and everything.” And himself, I think. Can't forget that. Most of all, he hates himself.

And suddenly, that's my worst fear, driving through empty roads at three in the morning: that I will end up like my father, fifty-five and alone and angry, and not even willing to admit to myself that I am one broken son of a bitch.

- - -

When we get to the wanna-be wizard's house, I'm already half-crying. I'm tired and it's late and I'm having some sort of existential crisis, and part of me wants to ask her to just take me home, regardless of the kind of fit my mother would throw if I came through the front door at four a.m. The bruises on my knees from my bike-meets-car incident are throbbing and turning more colors than a Catskill sunset, and I just want to sleep.

As soon as we pull into the driveway, though, plans change. I miss what's going on at first, but when things that I'm seeing start making sense, I realize that my friend is kneeling on the concrete, trying to catch a flailing bird. I'm just staring stupidly, trying to figure out what happened. Did we hit it with the car? Did one of the wizard-boy's cats get it?

It turns out it was probably neither. There's no blood, but the bird's got its neck held at on odd angle. At first we say, in quiet, shaking voices, that maybe it flew into something and broke its neck. Later, we think maybe it's a seizure. Maybe a stroke. We stand there, staring at the small, brown thing cradled against her chest. I have a momentary flash of memory—the same friend coming to school with a baby bunny tucked into the front of her shirt, bleeding and blind in one eye because her dog attacked it. She brought it in hoping one of the science teachers could help it.

We can see this bird's heart beating, hard, as she examines it from every angle she can think of, looking for the cause of its distress. She tries setting it back down; her reasoning, muttered mostly for her own benefit, is that maybe it hit something and was in shock. As soon as the bird is out of her hands, though, it's rolling around and chirping and flailing, getting its feathers bent and tangling its talons in its wings.

She picks it back up, and she's talking to it, as if it's one of her dogs, an animal that knows her and understands that she's only trying to help.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I'm trying to help you, shh, it's okay. No, no, hold still, please, it's okay!”

I look down and see that the bird has its two feet reached out, grabbing her finger, the way the hands of a pre-mature baby will reach up and grab a nurse's gloved finger. Wizard boy and I sit there, watching her, helpless. Finally I see her face change, and I know she's made up her mind to take the only option we have other than setting the poor thing down and turning our backs. Her hands move, one gripping the body tightly, the other covering the nostrils and holding its beak shut.

It takes maybe five minutes for the bird to die, and the whole time, we watch it—watch the way its breathing speeds up, slows down, then stops; the way the little thrumming heartbeat tries to break through the feathers, only to give up and stop. I'm sitting on the pavement with my friend, gripping her knee, knowing that my efforts to make her feel better mean nothing. There is a life in her hands—a small, hot, injured life—and she has commandeered it, gripped it and changed its direction, albeit for a good enough reason. I can practically see the thought pulsing like bloody neon in her head.

I'm killing it. I'm killing it. I'm killing it.

When the bird is finally gone, I know that she had the same memory as I did earlier, of the wounded bunny. “Why do animals always die in my hands?” she asks.

“Because you always pick them up,” I tell her. And there is a metaphor here, but I can only see the edge of it as we trudge, wordlessly, to grab the few remaining things from her boyfriend's room.

While we're driving home in silence, I notice that my nails, long and painted as of a few hours ago, are thin and shredded, gnawed into shortness by anxiety and exhaustion. They remind me of the feathers on the wings of the bird, bend and cracked and torn from its flailing against the cement.

As I stick the remainder of one of them between my teeth to try and even it out, I realize that this entire night has been some sort of karmic lesson on lost chances and dead-end streets, withered dreams and hopes so high they're unreachable. Broken people, broken necks. Things too lost or wrecked to salvage.

And I wonder if the Universe is trying to remind me... or warn me.

Warn me that I'm destined to become one more hopeless, damaged soul who has no way out, and who will live their days unable to escape. Unable, in fact, even to remember what it felt like to be whole.

To be happy.

The thing about plants is they're stuck where they are.

Premature night behind your eyelids,
pulse points throbbing like
music like
bass more felt than heard.
All taste, no vision,
mental images warring for acceptance behind
crimson over black.
You wonder if his skin will taste like
the cartridge of a ball point pen
because of his tattoos
and if he'll smell like what you imagine
is summer in the south—
lilacs and bonfires.

If he heard what you were thinking,
he would laugh—
or maybe start making promises
rooted in the here-and-now,
set to bloom into short-lived glory
and decay into regret.

You heard it smells like pavement
in the rain.

Fragments: Ends and Starts

The hardest thing to do as a writer is to try and capture those things that no amount of writing can ever do. Even the act of explaining your silence to the paper turns itself into a cliché, as if it is defying any effort you could ever put towards making any of it legible to the rest of the world.

But nothing can ever be read the way you mean it to. Every single mind that drinks it in will take it from the vessel of their own lives, and its taste will be altered by the experience in which it's found.

- - -

My friends enjoy drinks filled with alcohol that taste like forgotten childhoods, and I can't help but wonder if maybe we all want things to act like wheels—carrying us forward while returning to the same spot again and again. Perhaps we do what we do because we're hoping that repeating our actions will somehow bring us peace. As if replicating happiness will cause it to stay.

A mark of experience is recognizing these motivations.

Another is realizing that even wheels move on as they circle back

- - -

It's hard, contemplating the idea of leaving all these beautiful souls behind. There are so many people I've been promising to see this summer, and I know I can't follow through on all of those promises. I have two and a half months, and for some of that, I'll already be gone.

Still, the idea that my choice to go away to school means losing these connections temporarily... it's a scary thing. I feel like, perhaps, without their influence, what makes me a better person might fade. They are such a part of who I am, and they have been for so long. I have to wonder if I can be who I am now without them.

And then there are the people who I just started to know, people like the one who left poems (which you can find at the end of this post) tucked into the back of my yearbook, who I stayed up with until odd hours last night, discussing philosophy in metaphor so thick, I'm shocked either of us got out alive.

It has always been the idea of letting go that scares me.

- - -

So this is what it feels like to start—infinite potential plus infinite choice, fanning out like so much awe ahead of you, to be compressed one step and one choice at a time.

It's fragile. Potential is only valued if you can use it, and sometimes choices slip away before you get a grip on them. But it is also beautiful. Can you see it shimmer at midnight, trembling lightly with the sound of laughter from the backseat of an over-crowded car?

This is your life. This is your life, spread out like gossamer dreams behind the darkness of your eyelids. You only need to shut your eyes to see what you're becoming. Take a deep breath. Let it out.

You have your entire life ahead of you.

Start moving forward.

- - -

These are the two poems left in my yearbook. The author gave me permission to link to his blog. Aaron, has other pieces on his blog. You should read them. They are beautiful.

Prism and Passage by Aaron.

A Splash of Change: A Playlist

1. Karn Evil 9 - Emerson, Lake, & Palmer
2. Love You Madly - Cake
3. You Don't Know What Love Is - The White Stripes
4. Ships With Lights - Healamonster & Tarsier
5. Here In My Room - Incubus
6. Mouthful of Diamonds - Phantogram
7. Civilization - Ocelot Eyes
8. Black Cadillacs - Modest Mouse
9. Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow - Fair to Midland
10. We Believe - Red Hot Chili Peppers
11. Pretty Buildings - People in Planes
12. Would You Be Impressed? - Streetlight Manifesto
13. Time to Pretend - MGMT
14. A Matter of Trust - Billy Joel
15. Letters and Packages - American Football

Download.

May 22 Vlog: On Education as an Opportunity

On being trapped.

I think, boiled down, it's the feeling of helplessness that gets to us. And I think this is the truth—people who have been independent for years, or even decades, have forgotten the feeling of being under the control that binds you more firmly than any chain. Because it isn't oppression and anger that wraps us up in folds of confusion and angst and sadness and anger. No, that's not at all what binds us into this feeling of being lost in the middle of an ocean with no way to see.

It's the love that does it.

It's looking at the person who is hurting us and understanding that this is worse than anything, because if someone who hates us hurts us, we can turn away.

When it's someone we love, all we can do is turn towards their razor strikes and pray that we are strong enough to survive the beating.

And we know that we will embrace the blades of their pain, even if we aren't.

Eventually, even the smoke screen leaves with the spring wind.

It's eleven thirty when I get out of the shower, oddly awake even though I've just gotten home from another long shift at work—five hours of “Hi, can I help you?” and “No, sorry, our vanilla ice cream is broken... No, I'm not kidding” should have tired me out, but if they did, the shower has woken me up. I feel energized—not anxious or twitchy, but like I will be soon. Despite the fact that it is almost curfew, I decide a late night walk is in order. The weather has, just today, warmed up enough to traipse around after dark without fear of freezing.

I send him the text without thinking; it's already a habit to just update him on the miniscule things in my life. I think it's warm enough to take a midnight walk!

His reply pinging in my pocket a moment later takes me by surprise. I'm still unaccustomed to getting answers. For so long, sending a text to the person I loved was like speaking to the air. Hearing that static speak back is enough to give anybody a shock.

I was actually just thinking that, he says. Would you care to join me for a midnight walk?

Ten minutes later we've met each other, slightly breathless from paces that are somewhere close to quarter-runs, on the sidewalk, bathed from head to toe by the yellow eyes of streetlights.

“Hi,” I say, and I realize I've broken into a smile effortlessly. “Where are we going?”

“I dunno,” he replies, and I hear in his voice that he is also smiling. I don't see it, exactly—I'm too busy hugging him before twisting off into silly skipping circles, still gripping his hand. I feel like a child when I'm with him sometimes, but not in a bad way. He makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, it's okay to be myself all the way. He makes me feel safe.

“Come this way then!” I say, grabbing his hand and leading him down the sidewalk. “Unless my sense of direction is seriously gone, there's a shortcut in the sidewalk that leads to the not-park by my house.”

“A not-park?”

“Yeah. Swings and monkey bars and shit.” We walk in silence for a moment, and when I speak again, I'm not sure if I'm informing him or reminding myself: “A lot of important things have happened there.”

“Like what?” he asks, and I ramble on for a while about old half-friends and over-blown enemies; but all the while I'm thinking of other things.

This is where ani and I weathered our thunderstorm. Where I realized he was less than sober around me for the first time. Where I found out he was in rehab. This is where my sister and I danced in the rain, singing songs that reminded us of him, but really were reminding us of life. This is where I walked on the night I listened to the moon and realized for sure that my fireworks boy and I were never getting better. That it was over. That I needed to walk away. And that I wanted to.

But I don't say any of this to him. Instead, I lead him into the not-park, where we sit on the yellow-painted monkey bars, washed colorless by late night and streetlights, and talk about our childhoods, filling our stories with little details, as if we each want the other to feel like there is nothing we have missed. Like we want to feel that we've known each other our entire life.

We end up walking again, and I find myself heading towards what was once, in the long-ago days of a gang of five and neighborhood rivalry, called the Football Field—a big span of grass between sections of houses, buffered from everything but the neighborhood street by a few feet of trees on all sides.

“I love it here!” I tell him, suddenly excited, and somehow we're both laying on the ground, staring up at the oak branches waiting for the buds to form on their fingertips, and we're laughing. Later I won't remember the joke, but perhaps there wasn't one; perhaps we only needed the night air and the feeling of almost-spring to make us just a little high. Just a little giddy.

Finally we admit to ourselves that it's late—we're almost an hour past curfew already, and both our mothers could be angry. We walk the long way along the quiet sidewalks, but we can't resist one last ridiculous stunt. We both roll down the grassy hill that leads from the main road to my street beneath, trying (and failing) to hush our giggles in the dark.

We do part, eventually, with a kiss and a plea. “Don't fall,” we call to each other, a phrase which is already starting to mean so much more: be safe, be smart, be careful. Be there when I talk to you next, and not somewhere bad. We turn our backs on each other reluctantly, and as I watch a solitary car go by, its passage like a hoarse but welcome whisper in the dark, I think, This is what I wished for when I was dealing with the fireworks that looked more like explosions and misfires. This is what I want. This is always what I've wanted.

And the stunned realization that I don't have to wait for it anymore is what carries me home.

I'm stuck in a holding pattern.

I am all but stumbling down the hallway of a school that reminds me way too much of my past, ready to just stop walking and collapse on the linoleum floor—the day started fourteen hours ago, and in less than twelve hours I'll be waking up to do it again.

As I trudge back to the cafeteria where the rest of my team is milling around, waiting to leave, I can't help but reflect on the irony: I can spend all day dressed in a suit, speaking other people's words like scripture, ready to accept a rank and judgment on everything from my clothes to my gestures to my pronunciation; but I cannot call the person I might just love most in the world from my bedroom, dressed in my pajamas, to tell him all the words that I have done nothing but infer for years.

My friend told me last night, “You have two choices—you can pursue him until the feelings either leave or are satisfied, or you can decide that whatever you've done so far is proportionate to those feelings and let it go.”

“Nothing I do,” I said, typing the words as I thought them. “Nothing I do will be proportionate to how I feel about him, short of maybe marrying him.”

And I realize that, while the last part might be an exaggeration, the general sentiment is true. I can't think of a point where I would just... give up and not have feelings for him anymore. If that breaking point existed, I would have hit it already. I watched pot twine into his breath when we were thirteen, alcohol claim his sleep at fourteen, marks fade to scars at fifteen that will still be visible a year later. At sixteen the pills had been placed on their pedestal, and by the time I turned seventeen he had gone into and come out of treatment, and the medallion he got when he got out sits on my bookshelf, to be picked up and turned in circles like a con man's trick whenever he's particularly prevalent in my mind.

I've seen him when he's happy and when he's in tears. I tracked the cuts he made on himself and he bandaged mine for me more than once. I've spoken to him while he was sober, drunk, on uppers and downers, without sleep, with a broken heart. He's one of the people that I will answer the phone for, no matter how late at night it is or how long it's been since I've heard from him.

Yet I can't tell him straight out, “I love you. I love you like I've never loved anyone in my life and I'm not just going to repress that.” I bite my tongue and let him talk about whatever girl he's been messing around with, each word about their bodies burning like acid into my mind. I feel like I must be biting my lip hard enough to tear through every time he mentions a new fuck-buddy (although they can't really be called that, can they, if he never sleeps with them?)

Every time he talks about his fallen angel-girl, I want to scream at him. And at her for hurting him, yes, but mostly him now. She's not your only shot. You were thirteen when you started and sixteen when you ended for the last time. You're a different person now, in good and not-as-good ways, and nothing you do will bring her back to you. She dropped you more than once and left you there to pick yourself back up. But I've been here the whole time, and I love you more than life.

“I've been here the whole time.” This idea reoccurs to me a lot when I'm thinking of him, as if it were a justification for my feelings, for my sense of betrayal every time he talks about his escapades with someone else. As I turn his ever-expanding list of mess-arounds and crushes over in my mind, I have to wonder—why does he mention them to me? He knows I have feelings for him, at least a little. I did ask him out once, and he said no. But I did ask. So why does he throw their names at me like pebbles at a window? Is he waiting for me to tell him, Stop. I don't want to hear anymore, because all I want to be is where they are?

I am exhausted. I'm writing my brain out onto my computer from the back of a school bus, where the first real rain-drizzle of the year is hitting the windows—though by the time I'm done, it'll be snow again—and I could say all I want to do is sleep, but it isn't true. I want to call him first, to see if he answers. And if he doesn't, then I'll sleep.

If he does, I know I'll stay up until he pries me gently off the conversation like Velcro from a sweater sleeve, or until the pure need I have for him to love me when he doesn't boils over and burns me, and I hang up myself.

But probably, I won't even hang up then. After all, at this point, what's the difference of a few more burns?

Your adhesive is failing.

A poem I wrote in December and just found again.

The thing you never understood, my
once-love-now-something-
altogether-
indescribable,
is that words are
ten times more powerful
when spoken by someone you love
and words
when handed to a lover like a gift
cannot be taken back and recycled like
thrift-store posters hung on the crumbling plaster of your bedroom
where we once almost
awkwardly
but never quite really made love.
It was something more like
lust combined with
false hope and maybe
idealistic desperation.
(Thank God the culmination was caught hold of and
strangled
before it could take life.)
Call her what you want
and she can do the same.
In the end,
the tape you use to stick those terms to
however many
broken and hopeful once-bright girls,
girls you end up taking
into the cluttered electronic smoke-glow of your life,
will wear out,
and you will be left standing there,
the bare beams of your life and your soul laid open
for all to see,
asking yourself,

why?

I gave you Excedrin instead

For Peter.

You are so
angry.
You are so angry that your fist
collides against your skull like a wall
for lack of a better vent for your frustration,
and when you see the bruise on your reflection you
blanch
the way she did when you told her
you didn't love her, and you
didn't think she loved you either.
You didn't think she could.

You butt the edge of your discontent
on every eccentric soul you come across,
wondering
why
they don't make sense to you,
but never bothering to wonder
if you make any sense to them.
I can't help but smile—
sometimes you're so horrible you make me laugh—
but sometimes
you are so deep I can almost feel myself
sinking.
So why don't you make up your mind?

You tell me you drink to escape the things making you think
too hard,
like how your mother is still moved out and your father
prides himself walking around the house without a shirt.
He's lost ten pounds since your mother left and
since she left
you're the only one around to see it.

Sometimes I watch your expression from across the room
and have to keep myself from
laughing.
I see the echo of my own thoughts flicker across your eyes.
But there are other times when I can only
wonder
what goes on
as your skull begins to crack
under pressure.

I watch your thoughts spatter from the fault-lines,
looking for someone to calm them down
or at least give them the go-ahead for murder.
I wipe your anger out from under my eyes
to watch you walk away.
The only thing I couldn't bring myself to say was,
Please.
Stay.

Indian Winter

If it were fall, we'd call it Indian Summer, but since it falls in the middle of February, it's something like a psuedo-spring, a stretch of about a week where the temperature shot up to above freezing, then climbs slowly to 50—a monumental event in a place where the temperature hardly gets above zero let alone above freezing between December and March.

At work, a boy I know is teasing me, calling me nicknames I've told him I've hated and poking me in the side when he walks past. I stick my tongue out, but I make sure to walk past him often, and I wonder if my face turns red because I enjoy the attention, or I enjoy the feeling of my face turning red. It hasn't happened for a while. I didn't even realize I missed it.

There is another boy with which I'm trading pixelated pokes. It's juvenile, which is funny rather than annoying. He's two, maybe three years older than me, and we've only met once. Our longest conversation has happened on Facebook, and it was spawned by a joke comment by another friend on one of my pictures. Something about boobs, which turned into a half-joke/half-flirty conversation and subtle comments traded back and forth across the airwaves. My friend Sam laughs and tells me I'm cute. She wants to set us up, and I laugh too, though I wouldn't mind. No, I think as I click idly across his internet home. I wouldn't mind at all.

There is yet another boy. I've known him for years, and he's always paid me some attention. Nothing more, nothing less. I doubt his thoughts go farther than sexual attraction, but I've never really been close enough to him to find out. He is, like most people I find myself allied with, a little strange, a little on the fringe. He grinds people's gears, he gets on people's bad sides... He gets on my bad side sometimes, truth be told.

Somehow he decides to test something. Today at lunch, he ends up with his hand behind my knee. I lose my train of thought mid-sentence, and I can practically feel the grin on his face.

“Stop that,” I stammer, feeling the blush creep up my neck.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Why?” he asks again, a smirk on his face.

“Just because,” I say.

“It's opening the floodgates,” another friend says. This comment could be innocuous—he's known for non sequiturs—but if it's meant randomly, the timing is a huge coincidence. He's not all that far from the truth.

Later that night, we're talking, and somehow we've progressed into unfamiliar territory—hints and ideas, molded around the clarification I spat out like a life preserver into choppy water.

“I'm not looking for a relationship,” I tell him.

“I'm not either,” he says. “If I was, trust me, you'd know.”

And so we swim on from here in the chill-warm air of an Indian Winter.

Persons reported missing remain to be found.

You were once a lighthouse,
flashing purple flames of clouded guidance across a sea
you had never seen the other side of.
When the storms came, you would slice apart the fog
with your certainty of better days and quiet, painless nights.

Then one day you
just
gave up,
your shining salt-washed stones tumbling
one by one into the sea.

You became a tide of your own, unmeasured, untimed,
calling not the ocean but only the blood
in my veins.
You call with a force like silver cords
bound to the fibers of my soul.
I come to your spirit like sand
pulled helplessly into the waves,
only to be shoved
away
without warning,
without reason,
scrambling for purchase;
begging you,
“Please,
let me stay.”

Time must have changed you when you fell.
You never answer,
only push away with tidal power
that always turns again
just when I decide to let it carry me away.
Oh, remembrance—
for I can see your foundations buried beneath the sand,
a testament to your once-outstanding stability,
the hope within your guidance that once brought sailors in from sea,
sailors like me
who followed your light.
Shh!
If you listen,
you can hear us
as we sing:

it is,
it was,
it will always-and-forever be
too long
too late
to love.