"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.

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.

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.

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.

Black collars and red doors.

You admit yourself into the psych ward two days before Thanksgiving. Your mother drives you, after an argument-turned-tearful-moment at one in the morning and seven hours of fitful sleep. They take your blood pressure no less than three times, ask questions you mostly don't know the answer to, and then there's lots of waiting between this nurse, that consultant, and the other doctor.

You fall asleep on the emergency room bed, fully dressed with your boots on. When they come in to take your blood pressure again, you have a fast moment of vertigo.

For a second, just a second, you thought you were asleep on the Ramapo Health Center floor, the Ramaplague 2.0 kicking your sorry, sleepless ass, your favorite camper whining your name in your ear. Stomach flu or no stomach flu, in that moment, you were happy. You knew who you needed, and who needed you.

- - -

One of the people you talk to that morning asks you what your stressors are. You stare at her blankly for a second. My whole if is a stressor, you think.

“She dropped out of college,” your mother replies helpfully after a few seconds of silence.

“So you're feeling... abandoned?” the woman asks. You must have mentioned your long-distance boyfriend, the camp friends no closer than 300 miles away, the friends in Chicago who graduated. The idea that everyone is gone, gone, gone, gone.

The quizzical look you give her is real. “Why would I feel abandoned?” you ask. “I'm the one who left.”

- - -

When you go up to Station 20, which is where you will spend the next 24 hours, they make you change into burnt orange scrubs that are the same color as your ex-boyfriend's old car. Most of the things you brought with you, you cannot keep. Your journal has a spiral wire binding. Your Fair to Midland sweatshirt has a drawstring. Your belt is a potential weapon. They don't make you take your rings off, which is nice, especially since you don't think you could take out all of the ones in your hair.

You're almost ready to leave, brushing a stray dreadlock or two back with your left hand, when the nurse notices the black double band around your left wrist.

“Is that a belt?” she asks you.

You unbuckle it and hold it out to her. “It's a—” You choke on the word collar, as if mentioning your sex life—your kinky, happy, comfortable and currently-on-hold sex life—in this place is somehow unholy. Or maybe you're just not ready to try and explain a black nylon dog collar to this nurse. You're hoping that holding it out to her, unbuckled, will let her see that it's already cinched as tightly as you can get it, and it can't be a danger to anyone—especially since you've worn it exactly like this on your left wrist for the better parts of the past year and a half. Wearing it around your neck without Lynx around would be uncomfortable, unnatural.

But you don't say any of that, and she takes it from your hand cool as you please. Well, you think with a slow and sinking sense of inevitability. I suppose it's better to take it off now. He'll be gone when I get back, anyway. I had a meltdown on him and his girlfriend, it's only a matter of time. You take your now-harmless clothes back and step out into the unit wearing your scrubs and the feeling that something crucial to you has sloughed away like dried glue from a five-year-old's fingers.

You couldn't have felt more naked if you stripped all over again.

- - -

You play too many games of chess with a boy with the same name as someone who once treated you like a commodity he'd earned. There are not enough black pieces. You play with some that are a gray a shade darker than his white pieces. This leads to confusion and makes your forehead furrow, but you still manage to stalemate him at least twice.

The games keep being interrupted by doctors, nurses, and consultants. They ask you the same things. The conversations gain a rhythm.

Why are you here?

I don't really know.

Do you feel like hurting yourself?

Not right now.

Do you feel like killing yourself?

Not anymore.

How can we help you?

I don't know.

Your father even comes to visit that evening. He asks you the same things. You give him the same answers. You try not to be angry when he hints that you haven't been looking hard enough for solutions, and he tries not to let you see him tearing up.

After he leaves, you sleep like the dead, waking up once during breakfast to shouts and yells that make you think, I do not have to take care of this. My job is not to control this behavior. Today, I am a camper.

The thought gives you comfort you haven't been able to find in months. There's nothing quite like understanding your role in a crisis, even if it's completely opposite than usual.

- - -

Your mother picks you up at noon. You turn your phone on when you walk in your front door, braced for the texts from your two best friends inquiring after your well-being. What you don't expect is the text from Lynx, from 6:17 pm, right around the time your father started playing with mismatched plastic chess pieces instead of looking you in the eye.

I miss you and I hope you're doing okay. ♥

You stare at it for a good ten minutes before you can even think about answering. You feel like you are an axis and your world just rotated around you like a secret door.

He did not leave you. Between the time you hung up on him in a hiccuping, hyperventilating panic, and the time he got on a plane that would take him away from the other woman he loves, he was thinking about you.

When you get up to your room, you buckle the collar back around your left wrist. The snap of its clasp feels like the click of machinery in fine working order. When you go out into the kitchen, you play Scrabble with your brother. A couple hours later, your best friend in the world comes over. You finish Lynx's Christmas present and she paints a red door in the fog.

“It's a sad picture,” she says by way of explanation. “But it can have a happy layer.”

“Do you like it?” you ask her.

“Yes.”

When she leaves, you sit for a while, thinking. You think perhaps you're the Short-Haired Tornado's red door. You think that all the things you've spent so long believing about why people stay with you might be wrong. For the first time since you found yourself in a hammock in the woods in upstate New York in the middle of July, you think you know something.

You think you know who you need, and who needs you.

And for the first time in a long time, you feel those things balance, like your weight in a hammock between two oak trees, or the pressure that pulls on the ring of your collar when it's clasped around your neck. Yes, it's nice to know your role, even when it's completely opposite than usual.

Sometimes you take care of others. Sometimes people take care of you.

The balance there is the part where you take care of yourself.

Heartline Cartography

For four days and three nights, I found you in the pockets of the real world, and we stole hours that burn brighter than any days outside of the ones we found in a forest in upstate New York, naked and laughing on a wooden floor because we couldn't quite do it any other way. The map etched into my collarbone says home, and it occured to me over and over again while you smiled at me that you are the only person in my life who has a grasp on what that means. You stood in the tiny, black ink star with me and we lived, together, through stories no one else quite believes.

You are my battlefield lover, and somehow that has always made your kisses taste sweeter. I curled up against your chest while I spun on wine and tiredness and you let me sleep with a smile on my face. The bed was too small, but it was yours, and in the morning I thought to myself that there was none more comfortable in that moment. When I met your other girlfriend, a student of the sword with eyes the size of the moon, the way you lit up made me want to cry. It wasn't until later that I realized you look at me exactly that way, as if I hold something bright and alive, as precious as sunlight or late August nights. It wasn't until now that I realized maybe I do.

You tied me up and set me free the night before I left. We slow-danced naked to songs that make me cry. When I bit the back of m hand to keep from shouting for you, I wondered if my skin could absorb your name like sunlight on oak leaves, to help me grow. I wonder if it already has.

When I told you there was a utopia inside my head, you asked me to share it. When I said it was you and me and lovers neither of us had met yet in a cheap apartment, its barely-not-empty walls echoing with laughter, you didn't ask me to stop. You told me you smiled, and asked me, "In this picture, are you wearing your old collar, or a new one?" and the tears I'd been holding since the back of a Greyhound leaving Milwaukee spilled onto my face like too much rain in a crystal glass.

I've tried to catch the light in you so many times. I've tried to keep it on the backs of my eyelids so it burns up the long nights when I'm not sure why I am. I've pointed my camera at your smile and click-click-clicked until I gave up with a frown and the thought that whatever you have in your heart is too big for a glass lens. I put pencil to paper and tried to draw the sun in your eyes and the lunar shine of the student of the sword, and all I got was graphite on my cheekbones. You glisten outside my lines, refusing to be tied down by anything quite as simple as art pouring from my shaking hands.

Listen--you are the fable in the back of my head, intricate and steadfast, reminding me of all the reasons I am. You catch my stutter in your lips and when you smile, it flees, like mist at dawn. My imperfections look like freckles that turn to constellations you are teaching me to read. When I see you looking at me, I wonder if perhaps I am the lines of a book and no one else bothered to read me long enough to say if the story is good.

This story is good. It's slow and it's strange, and sometimes I wonder if we're in the middle of a chapter or the end of one. But here it is, spinning out on pages made of question marks and maps no one has labeled yet. There are oceans we want to swim in and turns we want to take, only to double back and go the other way. What else is there to do? There are uncharted territories to draw lines in and sights we don't even know we wanted to see. Here we are, sometimes together, sometimes alone, making a map to answer all the questions no one ever wants to ask. When we see go no further, here be dragons, we look at each other and laugh.

After all, who doesn't want to see a dragon?

I am the Tinman and you are Dorthy with an Oil Can

We have a list of things to do when we're within touching distance. It goes something like this:

1. Cuddle
2. Watch stupid movies
3. Tackle and be tackled
4. Enjoy beds
5. Fuck each other senseless

Late at night, it tends to be the bed I look forward to the most. Half-nights spent in humidity and bug-bites don't exactly end up rating high on the list for best afterglows. I have only slept one full night curled up next to you in the year we've known each other, but I remember it well: swimming out of sleep and muddled, half-remembered dreams only to realize that I was safe, not because the children I was dreaming of had all gone home or because the next morning I was flyign home, but because I was there and so were you. I could feel your skin, and you had never let anything hurt me.

It's a ten hour bus ride and a fair chunk of money to take a Greyhound to you, but it's not even a second thought to either of us at this point. (A car would make things easier, but a car means money, and money is something I don't have, at least for a while.) I'll gladly do it for a night or two with you and some daylight in between. I'll probably even end up doing it more than once before it gets any easier. To me, it's worth it. So far, it seems like you think so, too.

Still, there is an animal clawing at the walls inside my chest. It's one I've known for a long time, and one that has been fed more often than I wish. It lives on lies and mistrust, and perceptions that are both real and heavily denied. It exhales anxiety and doubt into my lungs when I'm not looking. Its claws are what-ifs and not-good-enoughs. It laughs at my hopes in the dark.

I want you to kill it. I want you to open up my chest like a birdcage. I want you to see its crooked teeth and glinting eyes, its hunger for fear and disappointment, and I want you to laugh at it. I want you to laugh until tears stream down your face, laugh so loudly it tries to cover its ears, and for so long that it can no longer stay and bolts, hissing, from its home behind my lungs. I want you to swing my ribs shut like a garden gate and padlock it with promises you'll actually keep. To watch the light shine through the cracks it made in my skin and tell me it reminds you of summer sun.

I hope you're the person the others were not, and that when my back is turned, you're not feeding the monster my scraps. And I hope your name never turns into a snarl the creature whispers to me in the dark when it tells me it's the only trustworthy lover I will ever have.

The part I'm trying to remember is that I think you are. I think you're all these things. I think you're August moonlight and morning fog, all-surrounding and impossible to lose. I think of you like old rock walls and oak trees, imperfect and strong, steadfast and beautiful. Sometimes you are a waterfall, washing my mind clean--others, you are a carpenter, mending things that you were not the one that broke. Always, you are safety--the untouched page, the unopened door, the unbroken string. Your hands are what I've been chasing. Your mind is the scent on the air I needed to breathe before I knew that I had made it.

And wherever this goes, I hope you know that. More than anything, I hope you know.

Turkey Song

Wrote this while I didn't have internet and didn't have a chance to post it.

TRIGGER WARNING for animal death and some related psychological horror. 

A week after spring finally came to northern Wisconsin, her lover—if she could call him that still, sitting at was probably an unchanging month-long dry spell, with only scattered appeasements offered to get her off his back—went turkey hunting.

Her phone, in a show of horrendous but not entirely unexpected bad luck, jumped down into the porcelain gullet of a toilet an hour before he left. She cursed it thoroughly, only thankful later that she had been entering the stall as opposed to standing up to leave it. She disassembled the old silver flip-phone and left it on a windowsill to dry. No one she asked had bags of rice—the semester was winding down, and food was being eaten so as not to leave any leftovers. When she tried plugging it in, the cord sparked in the socket and the screen bled to a blank and glowing white that reminded her, somehow, of insomnia at four in the morning. She emailed her lover, along with her mother and best friends, with exasperated sarcasm. My phone went swimming, she said. I'll have a new one in a week or so. Until then, I have scattered internet and you guys just have to await my return.

Not long after that, her lover vanished off the map.

He returned some nine hours later, exhausted and impatient, but not in bad spirits. She just happened to catch him on her way down the stairs for a cigarette, meant to calm her nerves before she tried calling him and, if necessary, finding a way back to the cabin in the woods to take care of the chocolate-colored, curly-haired spaniel they had left at home.

“We should go, the pup's been alone for fourteen hours,” he said as she gathered her things.

“I know,” she replied. “I was about to go get him.”

He nodded at her, as if he hadn't expected anything less, and she wondered what that meant.

*

There were two turkeys in the back of his burnt-orange Caliber. They weren't his, but belonged to his hunting partner and her father. “I'm going again in the morning. At three. They only wanted to hunt if someone would take the meat and I told them I would. They want the feathers, and the tails and beards. I'll pluck them and get the meat tonight—I'm a functioning insomniac. It's only ten thirty. No need to sleep. I gutted them in the yard earlier anyway. It shouldn't take too long.”

“I'll help,” she offered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it'll go faster that way anyway.”

She got almost entirely through the first bird before she backed off, revulsion clamoring under her tongue and somewhere at the base of her neck.

She had watched him pluck, unzip, and cut the meat away from the turkey with no problem. The gamey smell seemed frighteningly appetizing, and she felt her stomach growl more than once, even while she watched the blood ooze from the places where the bird had been shot. She marveled with him over the feathers, hoping that he would get a bird of his own the next day and give her all the feathers his partner and her father had asked to keep from these two. She even helped him pluck the feathers, though her touch was decidedly too prudish, and his own grip was much firmer, his work more efficient. It wasn't until he was vacuum-sealing the meat and she was trying to pluck the remainder of the neck feathers that her will gave out.

At first, it was the smell. She tried for the wing feathers, the big, long ones that looked like old-time quill pens begging to be shaped, but when she drew the wing back, the smell that rose from the hollowed-out bird was no longer appetizing—it was stomach-turning in its subtle rot. She folded the wing back over the bird, feeling, suddenly, the smooth motion of it in her hands, the way it must have flexed and spread and flapped when it was alive. She made a disgusted sound and moved to the small feathers on the neck instead. She got a good strip of them gone, too—five or six inches long and maybe half an inch wide. She kept getting distracted, however, by the head.

Its eyes were half-open, and she could see the wet, black beads it had seen through until sometime that morning. The skin, wrinkled, was mottled with reds and blues. She had a sudden, vivid memory of watching wild turkeys just like this one strutting behind her uncle's house on Easter, Mothers' Day, Fourth of July—every and any holiday where turkeys would be out, she guessed. She heard her mother's voice in her head, and for a moment, she was standing in her uncle's bay window, looking down at them. Look at those colors, her mother's phantom voice said. Aren't they beautiful?

She snapped herself back the the present and sighed a long breath through pursed lips. There are more of them, she told herself. And you eat turkey all the time. I bet all of them are beautiful. So what? She moved back to the neck feathers and began to pull.

The skin tore unpleasantly beneath her hands, and the feathers refused to come free. She made an urking sound and tried again, feeling moisture on the feathers. Water from his hands, she told herself. Not blood. There's barely any blood. Still, she readjusted her grip and decided to finish the strip she'd begin earlier—all the way up to the head this time. There were no more feathers behind her fingers to press down on, and when she pressed to the pale, dead, pocked flesh of the bird, it felt uncomfortably warm. She tried pulling the feathers with her eyes closed, but her fingers kept slipping. She sighed again and opened her eyes.

The head of the bird was pressed oddly to the small refrigerator at the end of the table, its neck bent. She could see the soft folds of its skin again, the black shine of its eye, and for a moment, she was sure it was alive. It must be uncomfortable, she thought nonsensically. I know I'm always uncomfortable when—

And then her mind crossed wires, and she made another nauseated sound, pushing back from the table. “I can't,” she told her lover. “I can't, I'm sorry.”

“You made it farther than I thought you would,” he told her kindly. “It's okay. Go out to the bath house, wash your hands. It's fine.”

She left quickly, shuddering in the dark. When she reached the running water, she turned the tap for the hot water and didn't touch the cold. She washed her hands three times, until they were red and stinging, and then practically raced back to the cabin. Her mind yammered the entire way there.

Uncomfortable, it must have been uncomfortable, I wonder if there's a kink in its neck, I know there always is one when my head is pressed against something like that, when someone is on me, fucking me, when they don't notice and my neck feels like snapping and they're fucking me, fucking me, I wonder if I'll feel its claws on me the next time he's fucking me—

It was all she could do to keep from crying as she locked the cabin door behind her and lit a cigarette. Her lover was finishing the bird, and she tried to pull herself back up onto the edge of logic. Besides, she had an uncanny knack for knowing when she would never sleep with a man again. It was a sense of deep resignation, a morose acceptance that settled into her chest and made a pit in her stomach. I already know he won't have sex with me again, she told herself. I even turned my claddagh ring around. He isn't going to touch me, and I'm going home in a matter of days. I heard our swan song weeks ago.

But her mind wouldn't rest. Turkey song, it sang madly, between images of its wrinkled blue and red head and the way the skin tore under her fingers. Turkey song, turkey song—

She pictured its ribcage, broken open; and felt, the way a mind has ways to feel, her lover's hands on her skin, over her breasts, along her back—

Turkey song, turkey song, you heard the turkey song—

She tried not to think of the flesh between her legs like the wet, pink meat being torn from the bird bones, slapped wetly into an enamel pan, slightly bloody—

*

She was still awake when he left for his hunt again at three that morning. She smoked another cigarette and didn't sleep until the sun came up.

She heard the whisper of feathers in her dreams.

On money and motivations.

     We sat in the cabin at nine o’clock on a Friday night, coming to terms with what it meant to be broke.

I had been broke for weeks, out of the last fifty-dollar installment I occasionally got from my father as his only means of assisting me with school and life in general. My boyfriend was dry until payday, and the half-check was slated to go to rent first. And then cigarettes. Always cigarettes. He was already smoking mine, but since his pack-a-day habit was much more of an addition than my own, I didn’t mind. His artist neighbor existed solely on what he got from his father, and his bank account was also empty.

“Would your ex have money for weed?” the ravens’ wings asked the starving artist.

“Maybe. But I don’t want to talk to her. You’d have to go alone. Plus, no promises on whether she’d actually buy.”

“That’s the problem  with campus being closed,” TRW griped. “Even if I had more to sell, there’s no one around to buy it.”

A few moments passed in silence. I had nothing to say—I knew the ravens’ wings’ lack of funds was partially because I was all but squatting at his place for another three weeks, and I had nothing to contribute to the scrounging of theoretical money except a meager jar of change hiding in one of my boxes sitting on top of each other in the back of his truck.

“I might have laundry quarters I never used,” the starving artist offered. “There’s probably like… five bucks in there somewhere.”

“Yeah, but then we’d have to make a decision between nicotine and brownies.”

“True. Or we could go hold up a convenience store.”

“For a single pack of cigarettes?” I asked.

“Sure,” the ravens’ wings joked, his voice thick with frustrated sarcasm. “We could see how much jail time they’d give us.”

“This is why being a creative person sucks,” the starving artist lamented, slouching back in his chair.

“And why’s that?” I asked.

“Because we fuel ourselves with shit.”

“Like your drug cocktails, and nicotine and junk food?”

“Well, that too. But like, hey, TRW, when life is good, is it easier for you to write?”

“Not at all.”

“See? We just fill ourselves with crap. There’s no other way for us to create.”

“And we’re still broke,” I observed.

There were mutters of commiseration. Shortly after that, the ravens’ wings began to search his cluttered corners for change or some sort of money he had misplaced. I figured it was probably more to distract himself from mood shifts and nicotine cravings than anything else, and the fact that he emerged with fifty-two cents and an old MP3 player he insisted on showing the starving artist proved me mostly right.

I found myself wondering what it would be like not to worry about money. Not to have those days between paychecks where even the rice that sits in the pantry for three months, mostly forgotten, gets eaten in a last-ditch effort not to exist on nothing but tea and peanut butter for a week. And I wondered if what the starving artist said was true, that we could only create when being filled with shit and chemicals and broke-to-the-bone weeks and depression and the short end of the stick.

And I wondered, if that was true, which life I would choose, if I could

Time limits are the world's way of saying, "Please, pay attention."

You wake me up at five-thirty to chicken and garlic pasta. I've been asleep most of the day, and in any other place at any other time, I'd be filled with dark cobwebs, wrestling with the emptiness of a mostly-wasted day and the desire to succumb to the ease of slipping back into sleep. Instead, as your dog hops up on the bed to give me a belated good morning sniff, I slide out from the covers. You pour me wine, and as we sit with full stomachs and cigarettes afterward, I have a thought that is becoming increasingly frequent and exponentially more pressing. This is too good to be true.

It's not, not really—the food in my stomach and the warmth of the fireplace tell me that—but when you leave, I hear the ticking of the clock. You keep it in your mother's old secretary desk, the one you held for your brother in a storage unit after she died, and when you're out in the snow for wood with your canine companion, it seems incredibly loud. I try not to look at my watch or the clock on your wall, try to forget that the days are slipping towards spring and towards the day I will pack up all my belongings, load them into the back of your truck, and take the last drive down the highways, away from my northern haven and back to the place I lived the last time I felt like this.

There is always a deathclock for lovers, I tell myself. You just happen to always be able to hear it.

Still, as I try not to memorize the patterns on your ceiling and the way the wind sounds outside, the ticking of that clock seems very, very loud.

- - -

The night I tell you about the scientist, and the way he took advantage of me, you get angry. Not at me, I know, but either at the idea in general or the scientist himself. I keep you awake until six, half-yelling in the dark and trying not to shake. You search for my hand and hold it, and I think that you might be the first person I've been with since him to actually understand how often he enters my mind.

A few days later, the kokopelli boy sends me an article on the Steubenville rape case that you already read to me. There is no comment, no note, nothing, and it is the first thing he's said to me in two months. I stare at it, dumbfounded, wondering what he's trying to say, and if he thinks current events are really the way to get me to answer him after a year and a half being in love with him and almost three months of stone-cold silence.

Does he want a gold star for being a decent person? I wonder. For understanding rape culture? For knowing how much I hate it? Well it'll take more then social commentary from someone else to get me to decide to talk to him after he told me he wasn't sure our friendship was even worth the effort.

For the next few days, though, I find myself marveling at the circle I've gone in. Here I am again, finally happy and counting the days until I leave it all. Soon, my days with you will be even with the days I had with him. Don't think about it, I tell myself. This isn't the same. There is so much difference here.

And there is, but as I sit in my dorm room with too much time on my hands and no warm touches to break the monotony, I swear I can hear the clock ticking away on the shelf of your desk, miles away.

- - -

“I thought I was done with sex before I met you,” you tell me.

I try not to laugh and probably fail. “I'm sorry?”

“No, don't be. It's a good thing.”

And it is, again and again. You told me once that I have an easy on switch, and I laugh about it, but I wonder if you can tell how easily that on-switch is turned off, and how much it takes for me to trust you the way I do, to always leave my defenses down. I have never been afraid of you, never had to pull myself back to Earth just in case. When you press your thumbs into my hips, I don't feel strange about letting you know how perfect that is, or adjusting your grip the way I would if I was digging bruises into my own skin. When you steal my breath, pressing your hand over my throat, I'm not thinking of proving myself to you, or of what the woman you usually sleep with would think of me.

At one point, we fuck twice, and fall asleep naked. This is the first time I've slept naked next to anyone since the scientist—the first time I've felt safe enough to. Right before I drift off, I hear the clock ticking steadily away, counting the seconds until I'll have to start thinking about how hard it will be to leave you behind and start all over. Maybe you don't have to, I find myself thinking. Maybe there's a way to—

But I cut that thought off before it finishes. The last time I decided to fight fate, I spent a year and a half sleepless and ripping my heart in half every few days. This is different, part of me insists, and I think it's that very heart, scarred and still bleeding sometimes over a confused and battered guitarist halfway across the country. This is new.

But the clock is still ticking, and when we wake up later, I still can't bring myself to admit what it means that I am so intent on denying its sound.

When we sleep for real that night, and your breathing turns deep and heavy next to me, I find myself spelling all the things I can't say with the hand not tangled with yours, over and over in letters you can't see or understand.

I wonder if I will ever say them aloud, or if I've finally learned that no amount of emotion, no matter how strong, fixes expiration dates.

The deathclock is still ticking, and I am still leaving. Still, despite all of that, I am happy—then and now, here or next to you, and I am hoping that will be enough in the night to remind me that the second-hand means nothing compared to yours.

On unwanted healing.

Once there was a part of me that fell in love with concepts, with potentials, with the insides of minds I only barely got to see. I made mix tapes in the dark and wrote letters I never sent. Once, I knitted my dreams into a scarf. It’s half-finished, gathering dust, and I don't know where. If I ever finish it, I might wear it myself, just to prove a point. But that part has gone away, to parts unknown, and it didn’t leave a note.

I lost the part of me that wrote poetry in my sleep, the one that devoted every spare moment to dreaming. It wore away somewhere in between the dashboard of his car and the cold air of his garage. If I looked, I think I would find pieces of it tangled in their Christmas lights, in the way I looked in their mirror. Traces would be found on wooden floors in the middle of the woods. It’s tangled in his hair somewhere, caught in the chain of her necklace, on the fabric of his grandmother’s quilt. It drifts up in the smoke of his pipe in the small apartment bathroom, in the clouds of mint smoke from a long-shattered hookah.

I am trying to find it. I’m digging for it in the footprints I leave outside of his cabin. I search for it in the whorls of his ceiling, and find only faces that look like the ones that flow in ink and color from my brother’s hands. This is you. I thought maybe I’d find it in the Boykin spaniel’s golden eyes, in the griffins on the backs of his calves. There are times I think I’ve come close: his head pressed on my chest to hear my heartbeat as he touches me, our voices vibrating through the springs of his mattress in the dark, the way his pulse is the strongest I have ever heard, and I don’t even have to be touching him to feel it.

But I’m starting to think the piece will always be missing now. There are times I reach inside myself to find it and feel something that’s like new skin over old wounds. I feel like I lost a key to a lock I hadn’t yet found, and when I reach it, I will be barred, stuck forever on the wrong side of a gate I never knew I needed to open. I wonder if I gave myself away too early, if I was supposed to ration the love songs and heatbreak so I had some left to give when I finally learned how.

I look for songs to break myself open later, ones that will remind me of fire-heated rooms and long nights full of cigarettes and too much Diet Coke. I look for the lyrics that will remind me of the smell of bourbon and thunderstorm cologne and the cold air of mid-winter. I can’t find it. Not a single song clicks home.

I cast my net out for the memory that will belong to him, months from now. The one I will remember when I think of him, the way I remember music on a ratty couch and a hand on my shoulder as a fire blazes. Every time, I come up empty, and I am afraid. I’m afraid to forget, but more than that, I’m afraid I’ve numbed myself to the urge to remember, to cling to details like lifelines, proof like carvings in my heart to remind myself, This was real.

I wonder what it means to know that I would rather have that broken place, full of all its shattered memories, than to lose it and all the things it held

As the ice thins, so does your certainty.

The prodigal son returns to you as you sit in a cabin in the woods. Two months ago, you gave away his medallion to the brother who stayed. When you cry on the line to your best friend, you find yourself wondering if you will ever actually pick up the phone to call him. You have lost him so many times—surely there comes a point where lost things should remain that way, forever floating in if-onlys and the mistakes you wish neither of you had made.

- - -

The man you're seeing—the ravens' wings—is more like the tide than anyone you've ever met, and you wonder what it means that you have always been so attracted to the ocean. Sometimes you think you've never met anyone better. Others, you're certain you are destined to fall for the people who don't fit you in just the right way.

You find yourself crying at the foot of his bed at 4 AM, and, like so many other times, your mind is pulled back to the boy with the kokopelli tattooed on the worst of the scars on his left wrist. He once held you as you cried at the end of his bed and told you not to be afraid. Until a few weeks ago, you thought you would somehow end up spending the rest of your life with him. Now, you are only nineteen and confused. You have no destiny, and the red thread you have been following through the dark has reached its frayed and broken end. The kokopelli boy is not there to meet you. He never was.

The ravens' wings asks what' wrong, and you words catch in your throat.

I miss believing in a god, you try to say. I miss when I thought I wasn't going to end up alone like my mother, filled with delusions like my father. I miss thinking there were forces in the world that cared. But even you have to admit that isn't all of it, not really. As you lay on your stomach on his bed, head in your hands, you try to tell him that you miss the feeling of wanting to be alive. You have never felt this happy and this empty at the same time. It's a hint, as if you ever needed it, that you are destined for this for as long as you're alive—discontent and unrest, and happiness that never quite reaches the places it's trying to heal.

An hour and a couple cigarettes later, you turn off the light and go back to bed, because it's easier than trying to explain this to your barely-lover, and you're not sure you can stand the desperate attempts to make you laugh much longer. Besides, sleep is better than sitting there and wanting to be dead.

- - -

Your chosen brother weighs heavily on your mind for days. You still have yet to pick up the phone. Part of you wants to, the way it always has. It's the part of you that felt that you would always be okay, if only you could find him and talk to him. It's the part of you that was born in a room full of holes, of paper wristband, of Enya played too fast on an out-of-tune piano.

The rest of you is not so sure. You're afraid of hearing the drugs in his voice again. Or, maybe worse, you're afraid he will be entirely sober, and entirely unfamiliar. You're not sure you could handle that, not while you're spending most of your time sleeping to keep the thoughts of pills and sharp things at bay.

If you're being honest with yourself, he has always been the one person in your life with total power to break you, and you have spent six years letting him, in one way or another. Your walls are stronger now than they were the last time this happened, and you know you will never be in love with him again, but you think that if anyone could tear you down to nothingness, it would be him.

You stare at his number in your phone for a long time, but you don't press the button. You flip it closed and swap inane videos with the ravens' wings instead.

Sometimes it's easier to just let things continue as they are. You think, If there's a brick wall at the end of this straightaway, at least I'll have an excuse to be a little broken.

Yes, sometimes it's easier to let things continue as they are, even if that's full of a muted pain in your chest and tears that come without warning. Even if that means lying through your teeth to every other person you have to speak to. Even if it means you've started not being able to leave your bedroom without makeup for the first time in years. After all, continuation, however mediocre, is better than the alternative.

And that's what you tell yourself every time you realize, all over again, that you want to die.

So far, it's working.

Choking on pomegranate seeds and kokopelli shadows.

At two in the morning, you send me a text asking if you could call me. I say of course you can, and when the phone rings I am already in my closet, pulling on clothes one-handed so I can go smoke a cigarette and maybe catch a glimpse of the stars.

You're on the verge of tears as my lighter flares in the dark. "It hurts," you say.

"What does, baby?"

"Me. Life. I'm trapped."

"You're never trapped," I say, trying not to sound as desperate and uncertain as I feel. "You can always change something."

"There's nothing to change," you say, strained.

"What's eating you most right now, babe?"

"Everything. Just everything."

"I'm not arguing, lover. I just don't know what 'everything' means for you. You need to talk to me so I can understand." You are the first person I have ever called "lover" out loud, and every time I say it, it feels more like a lie. I can never be sure if that's the truth ringing in my mouth or my own fears making me taste the warm metal of untruth.

"Work. People at work. The red-haired girl. Me and you. Me and Persephone," you list off, your voice scant inches from shattering. "It hurts. Everything hurts. Mostly my chest, and my head. They just hurt."

I have to remind myself that crying will do you no good. I bite my lip between cigarette drags and manage, tearlessly, "I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry. Is it better for you right now if you talk, or listen?"

"You should talk," you say. "About anything. It hurts for me to do it."

I bite my I-knows between my teeth, remembering how much R used to hate them, as if I knew things he didn't, or at least was pretending to. That was never true, but it doesn't matter now. Instead, I ramble about life, the most trivial things I can find at the top of my head. I cut much of my life out--anything glowing in the pomegranate-red of your Persephone. I talk about class, and how I wish I had a telescope. I talk about my little brother trying to date girls who are no good. I talk about how damn cold it is, and how I've been dreaming about New York again. In the middle of all this, I finish my cigarette, and in the echoing confines of my stairwell, I say, "I hope I'm helping at least a little bit."

You mumble on the other end of the phone, and before I have a chance to ask what you said, you continue, "I'm just tired. I think I want to sleep."

"I can let you go?"

I can almost feel you shaking your head, minutely, two hundred miles away, and when you say, "You should keep talking. I like the sound of your voice," it feels like I expected it. And why wouldn't I? I'd watched your Persephone fall asleep on the phone with you at least a dozen times, and heard tales of at least a dozen more conversations that ended in your unconscious breathing and her quiet laughter. This thought hurts me, in a way it has no right to, but I don't tell you that. Not yet.

I talk about nothing for the next ten minutes: there's a mix CD on my desk meant for you. I've been skipping class, and will stop doing so. Soon. I hope. I come home next weekend, and I hope that I will see you. I probably won't. I forget you're nocturnal sometimes. I hope I don't cry during work this week. The list of unimportant sentences, filled with long pauses and lots of ums and ers goes on, until I realize you are definitely asleep. I pause for a moment, wondering if you are awake enough to notice the absence of sound, but you say nothing. I say your name, twice, quietly. Still nothing. Part of me wants to hang up, but I can't quite bear to let go of the sound of your breathing on the other end. I have not felt this reluctant to sever a connection since R, and that was a long time ago. So instead, while you sleep, I tell you all the things I cannot say while you're awake.

"I'm glad you're sleeping," I start, softly. "You don't do that enough. And it's odd--I don't usually get to tell these things to people straight out while they're asleep. But you can't hear me anyway. I'm probably talking to your shoulder.

"I miss you, and I'm sorry that I'm part of what's making you hurt. It isn't supposed to be like that. And I hope it stops hurting soon, and the things that can be fixed will be fixed. I hope time heals the rest, quicker than it usually does.

"I always say these things too fast, and I regret them... but I regret them more if I don't." My voice catches for a moment, and even though I know you are dead to the world, and won't remember a single thing I say in the morning, it takes a second to get my throat to unstick enough to keep going. "I love you. I really do. And I know that doesn't help, and it's not making anything less complicated, but I love you very much. I'm sorry that you're hurting. I hope that you'll let me help. And I know you can't hear me, which probably makes me a coward, but I want you to know how much I care about you, and how I would give anything to take that hole out of your chest. I'd even put it inside my own if there wasn't one already there."

I am thinking of R, of all the scars--intentional and not--he left inside my head. Of all the times I thought I would grow old with him. Of the dark-haired, green-eyed baby boy who only existed in my nightmares, crying for me. I am thinking of Persephone, and of pomegranate seeds shriveling on a cold tile floor, with an aquamarine ring that is gathering dust in a box somewhere. I am thinking of all the reasons I am not good for you, and all the time I will spend missing you anyway. I'm thinking of your lips and your hands and the way you kissed me for the very first time on Christmas morning. My voice is the one on the verge of breaking now.

"I love you," I say again, to ears too deep in sleep to hear. "And maybe, eventually, I'll be able to say that to you when I'm awake, even though it doesn't mean anything. Until then, sleep well. And have sweet dreams, lover. The very sweetest of dreams."

I hang up, and it isn't until an hour later, when I have tried to fit all the pieces together, to line them up like books on a shelf, like words on a page, that I actually begin to cry.

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.

How to fall in love with your best friends.

There comes a time when you realize that your life is the weirdest thing that will ever happen to you. The moment you think this thought, you must do three things: find a mason jar; fill it with lights; and admit to yourself that you have no idea what you're doing. Trust me, it's better that way.

I think that everyone should spend a day writing the names of the people they love on the sand, and watching as every single letter washes away with the tide. After all, it's only an echo of the way those people will someday leave you. This is the truth: no one can every really stay.

A boy once gave me a dog collar. It was the sweetest gift I ever got. I sometimes wonder if he gives his girlfriend roses, and if she liked them quite as much.

One night in mid-October, I slept with my boss's boyfriend. Don't worry, my boss was there, too. No one ever teaches you about post-threesome McDonald's runs—you have to learn them on your own. It's also your job to reconcile yourself to the fact that chocolate and condoms will never be the weirdest things you put down together at a Walmart checkout. The six feet of rope, PVC pipe, rubber bands, and clothes pins with condoms will be weirder.

There comes a time in your life when you're forced to realize that you are nothing your ten-year-old self could even have imagined. It's not your fault—no one ever teaches you how to deal with falling in love. Even worse, they never talk about what happens if you don't. Or if you suddenly find yourself head-over-heels for no less than four people at once.

When I was young, I once asked my father what to do if I liked two boys equally as much. He said, “Choose the one who treats you most like I do.” He never mentioned what to do if I discovered I liked the boy who hit me in the bedroom, or if the person in question was actually a girl. He never taught me how to be good to a woman. He never said what to do if I found myself as a welcome third wheel amidst a couple so in love, it sometimes made me sick, in the best possible way. I guess these are all the things life gives you to test if you're going to go crazy.

These are the moments I hold on to: the time we lay by the lake for hours, doing nothing but running our fingers of each others' skin.

The way the scar on the back of your hand felt when I held it.

Kissing you as you sat on the curb, hoping I could do it again.

The way your hand once found mine on the console of your car, driving one-handed through the dark.

The curve of your back under my hand as the streetlights shone through the living room curtains.

The rough fabric of your gloves, tracing hard lines along my jaw.

The time you carried me down the hallway, legs around your waist, and I wasn't once afraid you'd drop me.

Your profile in the half-light, freckles shining like constellations.

Your hands on my tattoo, the only one to understand why it was really so important.

Bird-like kisses melting into something that felt closer to home.

Your hands on my skin in the firelight, losing time after midnight when we should have been sleeping.

Your body under mine as I saved from the cold night air of late August

The way you said my name, half-laughing and half-begging me to follow you.

Your hands on mine, mirroring movements, as if maybe you already knew I would never remember you if I couldn't feel you in my head.

These are the things they never teach you, the things that you find behind your eyelids in the dark. They never teach you how to fall in love.

And they never teach you that it's when you love the most, with all you have, that you realize how alone you really are.

Of lip-gloss and one night stands.

The night my little brother ends a five-day stint in the hospital, I find myself in a friend's room with the most beautiful man I've ever met. He is the personification of Bill Weasley, lithe and freckled, with beautiful red-auburn hair in a low ponytail. I met him last year and slept with him twice. For reasons since forgotten, I call him the Fool.

This is maybe the second time I've seen him since he left my bedroom just before Christmas, and I greet him with a hug that is a little too exuberant. He smiles at me, and I take refuge in his energy. He is one of those people whose aura I want to crawl inside of, an eye amidst a hurricane. We banter like old friends, and though I'd like to think I'm a special case, I know I'm not—he's that kind of person, comfortable and safe. At one point, I make a comment about going insane, and he tugs one teal-and-purple curl and says, “Yeah, and you dye your hair to match.”

Later, the girl with the rainbow necklace joins us, and as people begin dissipating and sliding into sleep, we decide to wander away. I say goodbye to the Fool, jumping up and hugging him fiercely. I would give anything to kiss him again, and as I pull away, I swear he reads it in my eyes.

“You little troublemaker,” he says softly, and it feels like somehow he has given me both approval and permission to take the flirtation and the energy, the banter and the smirks, and use them. I know I'm probably reading too much into things, but his fictional approval touches something in me, and I walk out with the girl with the rainbow necklace, smiling.

Half an hour later, I find myself on the grass of the soccer field, the girl wrapped around me. We speak of stars and childhood friends, and I find myself kissing purple gloss from her lips. An hour later we are tangled in her sheets, and when we are interrupted by a knock on her door, I leave with a sigh.

Walking across the grass to my own room, I wonder if I will ever have the capacity to love anyone again, or if my heart will always be haunted by the ghosts of old soul-mates and one night stands and people I never had the courage to fuck.

All the things you need to know and refuse to see.

Here's the thing. When I met you, I didn't love you, the same way I didn't love him when I met him. It doesn't work like that, and that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that everything is destiny. I'm not saying that everything is cosmically important. What I'm saying is that I can't love you—and it isn;t because of him. It's because of me and how I work and what I need. But mostly, it's because of you.

I'm telling you that there's a difference between where we are and where we should be.

There was beauty in your brokenness on the night we first collided. There was mystery in between the tremor in your voice and a space for sympathy in the tiredness resting in your eyes. But the deeper I dug into the gaps in your skin, the more I learned that the space inside was made up of walls and metal spikes—defense mechanisms I hadn't known were there, and that you had no intention of letting go.

You have a habit of closing in around me like a box, like you're trying to keep me within reach, and the inside of that box is painted with all my favorite colors and all my favorite words. But they don't mean a damn thing.

I should have stayed away the first time I left, but you called me back at my weakest, and I went, because I had nowhere else to go. Because I guess I thought I owed you.

But I don't owe you, because you never gave me anything I needed. You sing your flaws from rooftops as long as it will tie me closer to you with tattered strings of pity and guilt for breaking you.

Here's the thing: I'm not breaking you. I'm trying to separate myself from what you want from me. I am trying to unstick your eyes from my body. I'm trying to get the smell of your alcohol breath off of my lips.

Nobody deserves to feel trapped around another person, and while I may not like myself, even I know when to run.

You sealed my choice when you ignored my voice in your face, shouting no.

I am more than gone, and I refuse to say I'm sorry.

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.