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.