Tuesday, October 14, 2014

I'm moving locations!

So this blog has served me well for... wow, a long time. BUT, I'm moving locations!

Tumblr is easier for me to use, especially on the go, and it's also easier to reach a larger audience.

From now on, any/all new writing will be posted over at Awake & Still Alive, She Said.

If you're reading this--thank you so much for being interested in my work. It really means a lot, and I would not be writing if no one ever bothered to read it.

Much love,

Crash <3 p="">

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

On being the ugly duckling and never turning into a swan.

The problem with being an ugly girl
in love with pretty boys
is that every time they talk to you,
it turns out to be a joke.
By the time you’re eleven you know they’re the comedians
and you’re the punchline.

The problem is that at twelve you
are not suave enough to be one of the boys
but not pretty enough
to be someone they lust after.
The problem is that at thirteen you date a beautiful girl
and you’re still worried about what the pretty boys think of your hair.

It’s that at seventeen you give yourself up to a man
who is twenty-three and more gorgeous than anyone you’ve ever dated
and at eighteen he tells you
you’re not pretty enough to keep
and that’s what’s keeping you apart--not
the thousand miles between you
and Boston.
The problem with being the ugly girl is that you believe him.

The problem
with being an ugly girl and loving pretty boys
and pretty girls
is that when they treat you wrong
you let them
because they remind you how hard it is to find someone who will keep you.
It’s that the pretty boys will sleep with you now
and won’t meet your eyes the next morning.
It’s that you spend the night with a beautiful fool
and still can’t figure out why he chose to sleep in your bed
and the idea that maybe he likes you
for you
never enters your mind.

The problem is at twenty you have more notches in your bedpost
than years on the Earth, and your lovers
tell you they love you and you
question.
They tell you you’re beautiful
and you tell them to hush.
You still expect to hear laughter.

The problem
with being the ugly girl and loving pretty boys
is that somewhere you think you became a pretty girl
and you’re not sure how.
The problem is you spent so long loving pretty boys
that you never stopped to love yourself. The problem
is that maybe you loved too many pretty boys
who called you ugly
and now the word “pretty” tastes funny on your tongue.

The problem
with ugly boys who look pretty
is the way they make you think you’re not. The problem
with ugly boys is the way their words scar.
The problem with pretty boys with ugly hearts
is that they don’t see the way your smile blooms like flowers,
the way your laugh fills a room. They don’t see you
bursting at the seams with light.

The problem with being an ugly girl in love with pretty boys is that
you are not
an ugly girl.
You are a warrior
full of battle scars where they touched you.
You are a lion,
and gazelles are pretty, too.
You are an earthquake,
a firework, a
lightning bolt.

Now strike.



Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Falling in Love with a Vagabond

I once traced the freckles on your arms at two in the morning. I said,
You are the sky, and apologized
for covering you in black lines. You said
not be sorry. You said
that you liked it.
When you fell on your longboard and lost
half the skin on your left arm,
I could still see the constellations underneath.


Every time I said fuck you for three months, you said
We already played that game, and you
smiled.
The night you left you never said goodbye,
only looked up at me from that rock in the parking lot
where we'd spent so much time avoiding work
and other people,
and said, oh, fuck you,
and I think maybe that meant I made you feel something
other than the emptiness you try to fill.
So I said that we already played that game
and you hugged me
and as I walked away, you shouted out,
rematch, next year! and all I could think was, oh,
fuck you,
too.





Sunday, June 29, 2014

"These, our bodies, possessed by light..."

Title by Richard Siken. Written the night of, posted late due to lack of internet.

You bring in the summer solstice in style without even trying.

Every time you go into the middle of the woods and your lovers make you shout, you leave another piece of yourself in the bark of the trees. When you're shaking and cold and exhausted, and the girl with the waterfall laugh is screaming and you don't know why, you feel like you are a superhero and then like you're an earthquake. You shake like cottonwood leaves without the shimmer to redeem you and the boy with the lakefront smile sits with you as you cry and cry and cry. He tells you to sleep and you tell him no. He tells you to sleep and suddenly you are burrowed against his chest, drifting in an out. I'm sorry, you try to tell him every time you break the surface of awake-asleep-awake. I'm sorry.

Shh, he says. You're okay. Sleep. Maybe I'll sleep, too.

You are sleeping in fits and starts, sitting up and hiding in his heat. When the sun is finally up and the trees don't look like Disney villains anymore, he brings you back to bed, such as it is. You curl close to him and revel in the scent of his skin. His arms around you feel much like home, and you wonder if it's because your roots and his have grown I the same place. You wonder if they are tangling. You wonder what that means.

In the morning, the man with the ember heart leaves before the rest of you are awake. You wake up just long enough to feel a pang of wishful thinking. You want him to stay, to touch him in the early morning light, to watch the sparks in his wide green eyes. You mutter a sleepy goodmorninggoodbye and move closer to the boy with the lakefront smile.

You all wake up later than planned, and you fuck the boy with the lakefront smile as the girl with the waterfall laugh has another cigarette. There are moments as he fills you that his face lights up and you think again, as you always do when confronted with his smile, of bright golden sunlight; of midsummer breeze; of a perfect moment cast in glass, a cottonwood puff caught in resin.

You wonder what he thinks of when he looks at you. You wonder if it matters. You wonder why everything needs to matter or to not, but no answer comes to you.

Later, when you find out you are bleeding, you are not surprised. They have entered you and something has shifted, as it always does. As you slept against old logs and cold dirt and the boy with the lakefront smile's chest, something broke, just like it always does. Your blood does not surprise you.


You have been hemorrhaging emotions for years.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Lessons from a Godfather

Or, Does This Change Anything At All?

You step out to have a cigarette and the grass looks like AstroTurf and the moth hitting the porch light is big enough to be an alien. You have the refrain to "Killer Queen" playing through your head and could anything be dumber? You don't even like Queen, have maybe heard the full song twice in your life, but there it is on your internal speakers like a drunken college party sing-along that can't hit all the notes. It's 12:30 in the morning and no one is around to tell you not to have another cigarette, and so you do, casting around your head for real and finding only fragments of a dream you had where the basement lighting was Tungsten yellow on wood-paneled walls and the carpeting was soft green shag. There is soap on your hands but you can't feel the water from the faucet.

I have to finish that conversation, you think to yourself, unable to remember what the conversation was or why it would be so important to dive feet-first into dreamland to speak to someone you've never actually met. You search for real and think of sparklers on a campus lawn in Vermont where you have never been. You try again and there are scenes from a vast and towering skyscraper you know you have been to in your sleep. You can hear the murmur of the crowd but you can't feel them pushing their way past you.

Your boyfriend is here, a blinking name on the other side of a computer screen, and you think he's real but you can't see his face. It's getting scrambled with an orange bedroom and laser lights on apartment walls and all the times when between sundown and sunrise stretched on forever. You remember the first time you stayed up until dawn and it felt like a great illusion had been ruined, and all that blank expanse of night-time was really just hours ticking away on a clock, just like always.

You are elbow-deep in deja vu and just writing that down drags you under some more. Black type like small cracks in cement aligns in blocks as if prophesied to be this way half a dozen times before and you're wondering if you're writing this all down or just scrubbing away the blank space to find the words where they always were.

You see time like a glowstick, all lit up at once, filled with bubbles and phosphorescence, and you are in three apartments, a townhouse bedroom, and a picnic table all at once. There are voices around you but you can’t place them, and you are about to get up to do something important but you can’t remember what it is. You turn to the person next to you to ask them but their face is angled away and all you can do is think of the outline of their profile in the artificial light.

You’re in bed and you can’t quite remember if you were about to get up for a smoke or if you just came back inside. You look for real and find the first night you took a hit from a bowl and spent twenty minutes touching the pole of a swingset, convinced at once that you would feel it and you wouldn't, and being proven wrong twice. You find yourself in memory, slipping a yellow Bic lighter into an older man’s pocket, and for the first time you find something to grab on to. Time slips.

You are sitting with this man on a bench and he’s telling you something. You’re either crying or trying not to, and you’re sure you’re answering but you have no idea what you’re saying, but when you look for real you find yourself on the bench.

Does what you feel match what happened? he’s asking. Think about it. Does this feeling change the way the world just worked? Are you upset because of what happened, or because of something you thought was happening?

For the first time on that bench someone is asking you, real or not real? and for the first time out loud you have to answer not real, and it is something of a relief.

It is 1:30 am, and the grass still looks like AstroTurf, but you are forgetting the words to “Killer Queen” and you are quite convinced, face or not, that your boyfriend is real--so is the presentation he hasn't finished tweaking yet. Somewhere there is probably a basement with paneled walls and Tungsten lighting, but you have never been there. Somewhere there is a bench where you sat with a man who lent you a yellow lighter and made you see a moment as it was.

Real or not, the rest of the world goes on, insistent of its existence.





Saturday, May 3, 2014

The kindest hands leave the darkest marks.

Trigger warning for mention of death and suicide.
The internet suggested I watch Michael Lee's "Pass On" tonight and I almost clicked it. I hovered over the small and unassuming thumbnail with every intent of watching it, and probably crying.

I didn't.

Instead I spent half an hour replaying our first kiss over and over in my head like somehow if I thought about it long enough, it would make me smile.

Instead it just made me think of how when I kissed you, the chair rocked back, and how three months later it was that chair you sat in while you cried and told me you had left me alone in the cabin two hours ago to kill yourself and the only thing that brought you back was that you'd forgotten to feed the dog, and you weren't sure that I would remember.

There are nights when cold air makes me think of you and I, and the edge of a lake that couldn't quite stop being frozen. I think of the stars and the window of your truck rolled down and how somehow you made an extra six weeks in a frigid wasteland seem like a vacation.

And then there are nights when I can't sleep and I do almost nothing but think of all the nights you couldn't sleep and all the cigarettes we smoked, and all the ones we wanted too but couldn't because we were too damn broke to buy bread. Somehow we always had to empty the ashtrays, even when we didn't fill our stomachs.

It was almost a year ago when you brought me home and your truck broke down and your dog fought me while I picked him up so he didn't burn his paws on the new asphalt they were putting down in the parking lot. He'd caught your scent and all he wanted was to find you again. The other day I caught the scent of the cologne you hid in my laundry bag before we left even though I hadn't sprayed it for six months and all I wanted to do was find you again.

Sometimes I wonder if you tell your new girlfriend that your mouth is full of worms and that the only reason you don't die is because the puppy with the golden eyes is waiting for you. I wonder if she understands better than I did. I wonder if she is the reason you don't die now instead.

I'm still convinced that someday I will hear news that says you've killed yourself.

Maybe then I'll go find the bottle of thunderstom cologne, and play "Pass On" and close my eyes and remember the first time we kissed. Maybe then I'll smile.

Maybe then I'll understand.


Monday, March 3, 2014

On the jurisdiction of ghosts.

When you meet a boy that's too good to be true,
run fast and hard
in the other direction--
things that are too good to be true
are not telling you the truth about their goodness.

When he tells you he loves you,
do not say it back.
Do not be enthralled by the way he is best friends with Death.
Death was never supposed to be a wing-man,
first encounters should not be held in graveyards,
and first kisses seen only by cinema psychopaths
are a terrible omen, indeed.

When he is drunk and afraid, he will tell you
that parts of him belongs to you, that you hold his heart in your hands.
Tell him no.
Give that part back.
Reject the very notion that you are anything but you,
yourself,
in all your naivety and youth.
Don't let him under your skin,
like a news story of a drunken car-crash
that he could have been a part of.

When you drive in his car,
and he tells you, I loved you in a past life,
I know it,
tell him to fuck off--
that you do not owe him the smiles,
the kisses, or the love that you are giving him
just because some woman in the past loved someone else.
Tell him
that you are not a reincarnation, a rerun already known by heart. Tell him
that you are an unfinished novel
he has not yet bothered to read.

When you leave that boy who's too good to be true,
do not hold on to him.
He is too much to carry to a new place.
Do not let him hold on to you.
Sometimes goodbyes are for-nows and see-you-laters,
and sometimes they are just goodbyes.

When he tells you that he misses you,
do not say it back.
When he calls you on Skype at two in the morning
to tell you that he wants to die,
tell him, This is not my problem. I
am not your solution.
Hang up on him. Do not
call him back.

Three years later, when you meet a boy
who is too true to be good,
examine that thought. Ask yourself
why honesty is inherently aromantic.
Ask yourself why I love you means less than I can't promise,
in case I am wrong. Ask yourself
if you are going to let a ghost of a man
who never bothered to read your story
write the next page.

Tell yourself no. Tell the honest man that you are trying,
because you are.
Tell him that you love him,
because you love him.
Do not ask him to trust you, or to love you back.
Let him do both things by himself.
Do not think to yourself, he is too good to be true.
Love him, instead, without pedestals and judgement, without
expectations that make you both afraid.

Because when you meet a man that is true
and is good,
do not push him away.



Monday, February 24, 2014

Spike Jonze has got nothing on us.

I am watching surrealist romance movies and thinking that almost every lovestruck person in the world tries to make their story big. They want it splashed on a silver screen in indie music and vintage, oversaturated/strategically faded colorings and they want it to touch people's hearts the ways theirs have been touched. They want to fill them like ink in water, swirling, sloshing, touching the edges, leaving stains in hues that mix as they move. They want these feelings, deep like the drop-off in a lake you weren't expecting, to make your emotions shift places in order to make room.

But love doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to wait for a hundred years for a spell to break. It doesn't have to be crossed fate-lines and tragedy.

This is how I love you at 2:53 in the morning on a Sunday-Monday night:

I am thinking of your smile, and the way it makes me see joyful tears etching riverbeds into human faces. I am thinking of doing dishes in your House's kitchen, and how much I hate doing dishes, but how I never thought twice about it when I did it two-dozen times the last time I was close enough to see your eyes. I'm missing your snore--uneven, resonant, reassuring, telling me in my insomnia that you are there and alive.

Once upon a time I drove to nowhere with a man who told me I had pieces of him in my heart. We thought that maybe we had been in love in a past life, always destined to come back to each other. To a seventeen year old girl about to leave the only town she really ever knew, it felt like the truth. What I didn't think about then was that past lives are not this life. What I didn't think about then was that "destined to find" did not mean "destined to stay."

Your kisses never tasted like jade-and-lilac destiny. They never whispered tangled promises torn from the pages of tortured coming-of-age tales. You have never once felt like a fairytale, a myth, or something too good to be true. The first time I kissed that man, on a ratty basement sofa, I knew it was going to happen. But the first time I kissed you, I was tied to a fence post in the middle of the night, and when I leaned forward, at first you darted away. When you finally kissed me, there were no cosmic fireworks. The planets did not realign. My mind did not freeze time. We moved on, in the dark, in that strange place with all its strange circumstances. It was, as kisses go, utterly unremarkable.

Except for the fact that it was you and I, and that I remember it.

Once upon a time I told a girl I was in love with her. She told me, "You don't know what it means to be in love. You can't be in love unless the other person loves you back." And she didn't know it, but with those words she changed my heart, and my head. Years later, when that boy on the ratty old couch stopped loving me and started using me, I said, "I'm in love with you," but in the back of my head a voice chanted can't-be-can't-be-can't-be. To this day, I am convinced I will never be in love. There is no cynicism tying this to my heart with rough ropes and I am not the cracked stone of a jilted twenty-something. I am only certain that, however much I love someone, they cannot love me back.

But the other day I drew an apartment with a dreamcatcher in the window and sex toys on the bookshelf. I sketched your posters onto the walls under my banners and left my journal on the graphite bed that I thought, if I could just sit on it, just for a second, would smell like you. I thought I heard cars on the street that existed somewhere behind and below the copy paper. I thought maybe, for a second, I could hear a key--your key--in the front door.

In my room that is not an apartment drawn on paper, where you are not going to come through the door and the sheets don't smell like you, I say to myself, "I think maybe I'm in love with you." My mind shuffles memories like cards. There's a wooden floor lit by flickering flashlights and an apartment filled with books looking out onto Central Park and a basement full of cheering people and your hand in mine. There are tears and there is laughter and there's a dozen stupid inside jokes that can still make us double over, gasping for breath. You are hugging me goodbye on a New York street corner, a gravel parking lot, a dormitory lounge, a public library. I say again to myself, "I am in love with you." This time there are no can't-be's.

Instead, I am thinking of your smile.



Friday, February 7, 2014

Someone gave me a jigsaw puzzle and no picture to match it to.

At 2:45 AM on February 7th, there is dissonance.

There is a red door I have never seen that screams life and pain at equal levels. There is a feeling like the ones wind chimes give me--deep, resonant, and hollow.

I am not inside my body. I am on a front porch with a girl whom I love more than anyone I have ever met, and I cannot explain why. I am telling her that when she laughs at me, it hurts my feelings, and she laughs again, and I love her more. God help us both, I love her more.

I am not inside my body. I am standing in front of that red door, with its broken telephone dangling from a stretched cord, waiting for my best friend to come back. She won't. She has fallen in love and in need with the people inside that house. I can't even say I blame her.

I am not inside my body. I am watching my loved ones cry. I watch my brother as he watches the world end and inscribes it in ink in his sketchbook. I can't say that I've ever seen an apocalypse myself, but it doesn't matter--he has. And that dread is more real than any life I will ever try to lead.

I am not inside my body. I am not outside of it, either. I am barely a soul, existing on simple, failed dreams and a desperate love so strong it rips me to shreds every time I dare to probe it. I want to be a lighthouse, even after all these years. I want to be a harbor. I want to be the shore. I want the hurricane inside a five-year-old girl to pass above me over and over and overandoverandover until it stops. Until the clouds clear and maybe she can do better than me.

I am not inside my body and I wonder if that means there is space for someone else's fears to nest in the bowl of my pelvis, or roost on my sloping shoulders. Can the people I've met with no voice borrow my vocal cords? Can they find peace in the newfound silence of my inner ears?

I am barefoot on the porch with the girl whom I love more than anyone, and when I watch her reach for my hand I am filled with vehement passion. I am filled with poison. I am filled with the question of existence--hers and mine, here. Someone loved someone else, and neither person was us, and now here we are, the Big Dipper shining pin-point bright over our heads, and we are here. We are here because someone else decided we should be, with not a single thought spared to what that means.

I watch the hurricane-girl spin and spin and spin and I am filled with anger. Because here she is, volatile and beautiful, and no one ever thought about what that would mean for her. Only for themselves. Only in her creation. But she's the one who will deal with the storm inside her small and hurting head every moment from now until her world ends. Until she is not inside her body.

I love them. With the atoms in my blood, I love them. With the neurons in my head, I hate that they are here. That I am here. That someone else pulled us all from the void and said, it is your job to exist.

There is dissonance.
I am not in my body.
There is dissonance.
I am in one someone decided should be mine.
There is dissonance.

There is love.

Even here, where there is no choice, there is love.



Thursday, January 30, 2014

Psalm of the Traveler




Give thanks to Dwight D. Eisenhower,
god of the interstate,
creator of black stone veins to cross a country
too big to be captured.
Bless yourself with motor oil,
the sign of a shield on your forehead.

Our acolytes wear dark blue windbreakers and red ties,
wool caps to keep their ears from freezing in the cold,
have muscles in their shoulders that strain
to send our baggage across the counties--
even the pieces you wish could stay behind.
(You cannot escape your heart’s past).

Our clergy are tired and dirty,
covered in cement and exhaust, working
in the glow of floodlights. They genuflect to earthmovers,
flash by our windows in a glow of hunters’ orange and hardhats,
risk their lives
to put us in motion, another hundred miles closer
to happiness.

Our temples are hurtling down highways faster than the beating of our hearts
(but not by much)
and we sit in accepted silence with travelers
who are stuck with us in the asphalt arteries
like the bluish veins on the back of a lover’s hand
while someone else makes their fist clench in pleasure.

We live outside state lines,
the titles on our IDs only serving to proclaim how far we’ve traveled
to meet our heart’s home.
We worship in late-night gas stations,
baptize ourselves with ice-cold water from the bathroom sinks,
let our cigarette smoke
drift to the sky like incense.

Send prayers to Saint Anthony,
patron of lost things.
Thank Mister Eisenhower, who somehow knew
one day we would need pathways
to other people’s hearts.