She fell out of love on Christmas Eve.

She doesn't dream often, doesn't
sleep enough to miss it. She
is always on earth, throat sore with smoke she's
not quite sure if she wants,
seeing the world in purple and blue,
in strokes of seafoam as the sun rises.

She finds him like cold embers in the middle of winter,
burnt orange.
He tells her he lives in a dream that is too often a nightmare,
says one day he will get the courage
to wake up and do it for real.
She lays his dream on her tongue,
lets it melt,
wonders if it means she is too good to have been real
or not real enough to be worth keeping.

Six months later she tangles
in his brown-red forest feeling,
wondering how they traded seasons,
and when he tells her he'd rather go to sleep,
live in the dreams where he is happy,
she spends too long trying to think of how to argue,
to tell him he needs to stay with her,
when all she can really say is,
I wish I knew the feeling.

She tries to think of them as men, tries
to remember that they're all grown up,
all captains of their own ships these days, but that
means she has to think of herself as a woman and
she feels too much like a lost little girl
chasing the balloons she doesn't remember letting go.

She uses all her best words on them,
one at a time, wonders
if they realize that all her best poetry is sent to them
in the middle of the night
to minds too numb to feel it.
They drink too much to remember conversations she's a part of,
turn her into ocean dreams they say they never had.
She doesn't have the luxury.
She puts their forgotten promises in glass bottles
and wishes real life had commercial breaks.

She always wants to ask them what it means
if dreams are better than the here-and-now
and she has none—if she chose that other life
trapped behind eyelids and midnight thoughts,
would she even exist? Or would she disappear,
fading from their minds
as they woke up and she
finally
fell asleep?

Blue Moon: A Swan Song

I wrote this for class last fall and never put it up. A few minor edits, and I've decided to gift it to the internet in honor of the impending apocalypse. xD

Trigger warning for body horror, mortal peril, and general world dysmorphia.

The moon rose full and bright blue the night it happened. People all across the globe started shouting—Look at it! You can see its face! Its dark, pockmarked grin was bare and overly evident on the unnatural glare of the surface. Everybody felt it when they saw that smirk, a pull inside their gut, as if the blue-raspberry man had sunk his teeth in just behind our stomachs. Religious fervor overtook some—they rushed to the streets, weeping, falling to their knees, crying out that the time had come. They never answered those of us who asked, the time of what? Perhaps they didn't need to. Perhaps they thought the evidence spoke for itself: sea levels rising and falling as if someone was playing with a cosmic faucet, animals all around the world howling and shrieking, flocks of birds swooping blindly into skyscrapers and rock faces. Those who doubted the fanatics screamed just as loudly as the believers; these were the ones who had been called dirty and Godless.

Except, by the end of the night, we were all Godless. It was just that no one ever entertained the thought before that God could die, and leave us all here to fend for ourselves.

- - -

Evan turned off the television after two hours of listening to horrified reporters try to pretend everything was having “technical difficulties” and they were sure they'd regain contact with their affiliates soon. After a while, it turned into static with the occasional burst of news, as opposed to the other way around. As opposed to the normal way.

“Why did you do that?” I snapped as he blackened the screen with a touch to the remote. I felt something akin to panic with the constant sound of the news gone. It had been normal, even in chaos. It had been a way to escape. We had both tried calling our families to no avail. His mother in Orlando was just as unreachable as my brother in Portland. We'd kept the broadcast playing to try and glean something about them, to begin with. “I was watching that! Can't you see that this is important?”

“You want to see something important, you just look out the window, Anna,” he said. His voice was too calm, the kind of tone that people adopt when they're just on the right side of shock, and so I followed him to our fourth-floor apartment window, hoping he wasn't going to make me look at the moon again; that horrible, unnatural moon.

The view of the street I was so used to seeing was wrong somehow. At first it was hard to put a finger on why; instead, it was just a feeling of wrongness that got behind my eyes and buzzed. But after a minute or two, my eyes adjusted, like they did when the power would go out, and I'd stumble through the kitchen in the dark.

The buildings weren't standing straight anymore, that was the first thing I noticed. There was an angle there, as if there had been an earthquake, but in the two or three hours I'd been sitting and watching the less and less reliable news, I hadn't felt a single concussion. Not one. When I looked at the paintings nailed to our walls, though, they were angled, too, as if someone had gone through and made them all the same degree of crooked. I didn't notice the people until after I noticed the way cars had been abandoned along the street, as if for some reason, they had all stopped working. Maybe they had. Still, as soon as I saw the cars, I started looking for their drivers; and when I found them, I wished that I hadn't.

They were disintegrating. Not all of them, and not all the same way, but they were. I watched a man with graying hair and a bald spot at the top of his head stumble from the driver's side door of his Volvo, and as I watched, his bald spot caved in, like a pumpkin two weeks into November. I opened my mouth to scream, but the touch of Evan's hand on my shoulder stopped me just long enough for me to whirl and face him. He was holding his right arm with his left, his right hand in front of his chest, except that it wasn't his right hand anymore. It ended in a ragged, bloodless line just above the joint of his thumb, as if something had cut it off.

That was when I started screaming.

- - -

I stayed locked in the bathroom for a while, back against the flimsy wood of the door. I could feel Evan's weight pressing on the opposite side, but some providence was on my side. He didn't ask me to come out. After the silence started getting comfortable, he broke it.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe. I don't know.” I paused. “Are you? I mean, is your hand...?”

“It doesn't hurt,” he said dully. “Doesn't even itch or anything, the way amputations are supposed to. It's like it never existed.” I waited for him to say more, but he didn't.

“What's happening, Evan?” I asked him.

“I don't know, babe,” he said, and I heard him sniffling. I unlocked the door and pushed it until he moved so I could step out beside him. I sat next to him, leaning against the wall, and let him wrap his arms around me. I tried not to think about the way his right arm seemed to tremble against my back, and when he kissed me, I kissed him back.

I wondered how many more times I'd get to do that.

- - -

I don't remember who the first person to suggest it was, only that it got into our heads and spread like a wildfire crossing California, or like the abhorrent disintegration that was striking people at random. The news anchors must have heard it whispered in their ears before the TVs stopped working, because they relayed the words in wide-eyed surprise. Nietzsche was quoted with shaking voices. God is dead. So was Shakespeare: Hell is empty. All the devils are here. I heard people on the street below shouting of the End Times, and I listened the way I had been absorbing everything since the moon rose: under a feeling of numbness that refused to lift, lest my mind crack under the strain. “Do you see now?” someone was screaming from the street, their voice tired and bleeding at the edges, like a scabbed wound scratched open. “Do you see where our evil ways have led us? God will come down and he will give us all what we've earned with our wickedness, and he will take those who are worthy away to our promised land!”

I didn't see Evan come up behind me. I only felt him shove me roughly aside to reach the window and yank the curtains all the way open. He pressed himself against the screen, shoving at it with his good hand, and he shouted back down to the sooth-sayer, “God is dead! Don't you see it, you crazy fuck? This isn't a test! It isn't punishment! No one is coming! Your god is rotting away, and this is what he left us! Your god is dead!” Somehow, in the blue moonlight, with the right arm of his checked flannel shirt now flattened to the elbow and his face contorted with something I at first thought was despair, but then realized was closer to insanity—well, he was hard not to believe.

- - -

Time was hard to keep track of. The clocks in the apartment—all digital—had ceased to mean anything. Some of them moved too fast, and others flashed impossible times in useless neon lines. Sometimes the power went out, but it usually came back, bringing the whine and static of the TV with it. I kept it on anyway, just in case.

Some hours after the candy-coated moon had sunk away, and the sun, blazing orange and just barely too big had risen in a sky more green than blue, I stood at the window, watching the riots and the screaming in the streets without really seeing anything at all. I was trying vaguely to count the number of dead people when Evan called my name from the couch, his empty right sleeve dangling like a dead thing over the edge of the cushions and trailing limply onto the floor.

“Anna,” he said and he waited for me to turn around before he continued. “Anna, what was your mother's name?”

“What do you mean, what was my mother's name?” I asked, annoyed.

“Anna, what was your mother's name?” he repeated, and as I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth to spit her name at him like a projectile, I found myself choked.

“I don't know,” I told him finally, the shock of the statement numbed by the concept itself.

“I thought so. Ask me what two plus two is. Go on. Ask me.”

“What's two plus two?” I repeated mechanically.

“I have no idea,” he said, and he laughed, a horrible, broken-off sound. “Do you believe that, Anna? I don't know.”

“Five,” I said with certainty. “Two plus two is five, Evan.”

“Is it?” he asked me, and he held up his cell phone in his left hand. I leaned forward to see the screen, set to the calculator tool, and read off the display: 2 + 2 = 4

“It must have messed with the electronics,” I said as he pulled the phone away, but my voice was hollow, listless. “Like it's messing with the clocks. It must have.”

“Sure, Anna,” he agreed, but the words were reflexive and empty.

“This is it, isn't it?” I asked him.

He didn't ask, This is what? only repeated himself: “Sure, Anna. Why don't you come sit down?”

“Okay,” I agreed, and I decided not to tell him about the way his eyes had turned black, pitch black, and that his smile somehow was starting to stretch from one eye to the center of his neck, because that couldn't be right, it couldn't; or maybe it was, and I was wrong, and this was how he had always looked, his face dripping over itself like wax.

And so I went over to him and sat down, and I closed my eyes and thought of strange things, like the way Evan's eyes had been brown once; the color of bright green grass in the summer; the shape of the man in the moon.

They were such strange and lovely dreams.

On Recovery and Serenity

Trigger warning: Self-harm, mentions of addiction

My phone went off at four o'clock today to remind me to do something important. I paused the video I was watching and went to the window sill, where a small army of plastic bottles with childproof caps sit in the winter sunlight: melatonin, for insomnia, which I will leave untouched until somewhere around midnight so that I can maybe get to sleep by two; a plastic jar of Vicks, for when my sinuses decide the best thing in the world is to stop working, usually when I already have a migraine; Excedrin, for aforementioned migraines—it isn't my only bottle, either. There is another in my backpack and probably a third in one of my purses; vitamin D, for the severe and long-lasting lack of sunlight in the middle of Minnesota/Wisconsin winters; a multivitamin to try and make up for the foods I never remember to eat; and a small, orange bottle of antidepressants, newly prescribed to try and cure me of both my unending anxiety and my frequent loss of hope in the world.

I take one of each of the last three, and two Excedrin. The pills leave a tang of aspirin and pill-forming jells in my mouth, and for a moment, I'm filled with distaste. How can it be that I live in a world where I need to pump myself with chemicals just to function? I wonder.

But I'm quickly brought away from that idea by the thought of how much better I've felt for the past week. I've only been on my antidepressants for six days, and already, I can tell they're working. There is a good eight or nine inches of snow on the ground, and the temperatures have been easily under freezing for two days, but I don't feel like curling up into a ball and either crying or sleeping, the way I normally do when winter hits. Finals week has not driven me to frustrated tears or anxious pacing. I've been smoking fewer cigarettes by half.

It has also been four years today since the last time I cut myself.

It's surprising to me how easy that is to think about. There was a time when elevenths—monthly anniversaries, celebrated ecstatically by my best friends—made me uncomfortable and unhappy. They reminded me of how messed up I felt I was, and how little I could do about it, since I'd lost my most effective coping mechanism. There was a time when every eleventh made me feel unstable and on the cusp of a relapse, the thoughts of hurting myself brought to the forefront of my mind by the celebrations of my friends—well-meaning, but the last thing I wanted.

It's also interesting to me that I can no longer remember the reasons I stopped. I remember the decision, and the subsequent relapses afterward, and I definitely still remember the self-injury itself, but my original determination has faded from my mind.

I still struggle with it. There are times when I fight with it almost every day, and when I still need to go to my friends and literally ask them to keep my away from anything sharp enough to hurt myself with. At any given moment, I can inventory nearly everything visible in a room that would be capable of drawing blood. I still keep my nails short—usually bitten out of nerves—so I don't dig them into my hands or my arms when I have moments of roiling anxiety pop up out of nowhere. I'm still triggered by images of injuries that bleed. On the bad days, even Tumblr-artsy bloody nose pictures can make me feel tilted and shaky. (I still don't know why people like to post bloody noses and skinned knees, either, but to each their own.)

There are moments when the only thing keeping me anchored to safety is the ring I wear on the middle finger of my right hand. It was a gift for my two-year anniversary from my best friend, and engraved on the inside are the words Arise and Be. At the worst times, I take it off and watch the light reflect off the engraving. I think of the first time I heard the song, in a mostly-empty bar at the album pre-release party with my best friend, tears rolling down my cheeks and powerful shivers running up my spine. I think of the time I heard the band play it live, at a concert we drove four hours to get to, standing in the front row. Tears rolled down my face then, as well.

On the windowsill where my pill bottles sit, there is another memento, taken from my jewelry box a few nights before, and as I went back to my computer and started playing the song from my ring, I took it with me. Two years ago, a friend I still think of as my older brother went into rehab for drug addiction. The first time I saw him after he got out was my 21-month mark. Out of nowhere, he took something from his pocket and tossed it at me. I dropped it, and when I knelt down to pick it up, I saw it was a coin. About the size of a half-dollar, and bronze in color, it had writing on both sides—Physical, Mental, Spiritual on one side, and the Serenity prayer on the other.

“I got it when I got out of treatment,” he told me, and when I held it out to him, he shook his head. “I want you to have it. I want to give it to someone who knows how important it is.”

I kept it. I never went through treatment for my own addiction, and while I will never say I did it by myself, I can say I went through much of the worst of it alone. The coin has become a symbol not only of him, and the struggle we once went through side by side, but also of my own healing. I consider it now as much a symbol of my own recovery as it was supposed to be of his. I've often thought that someday, I will find someone close to me who deserves it, and I will pass it on. But until then, I keep it with me, occasionally taking it from the recesses of a box or a drawer and spending a few days flipping it between the fingers of my right hand. When I remember, I make myself read the prayer on the back—really read it, as if I had never heard it before. And when I do, I am nearly always struck by its truth.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.