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="">

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

god damn it, you've got to be kind: a playlist from 2013

1. Boy With A Coin - Iron & Wine
2. Like a Ritual - Title Fight
3. My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark - Fall Out Boy
4. Get Got - Death Grips
5. Army of Me - Bjork
6. If I Had A Heart - Fever Ray
7. Lovesong - The Cure
8. Thin Line - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
9. I Love It - Icona Pop
10. Tunnel Vision - Molly's Worst Enemy
11. Wake Me Up - Avicii
12. Figure You Out - Citizen
13. Mr. Movies - Pierre *
14. Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men
15. Brace Brace - Bonobo
16. Girl With The Red Balloon - The Civil Wars
17. Butterfly - Bassnectar
18. Glory and Gore - Lorde
19. Female Robbery - The Neighbourhood
20. Venus in Furs - The Velvet Underground

Download // Spotify*


*Pierre's track is unavailable on Spotify but can be found here.

Maybe my veins are made of wire.

When you find me in bed at three
in the morning and three
in the afternoon, you will ask me
what's wrong and I will tell you,

Hold everything this is:
a newborn elephant, a thunderstorm
in my temples. Take a look--
there is place for a wind-up key in my back.
My doctor says there are misplaced ribs,
but I know better.
It's pressed in the shape of every time
they threatened to die while I loved them.

Twist it once--
the newborn elephant comes to life,
squalling, trumpeting, calling a military march of wrinkled forefathers
named Worry and Fretting and Scared
to pound their feet into my stomach.

Twist it twice--
it turns the dust of mistrust into hardpack,
desert floors unwilling to move.
A bucket of kindness will not make flowers grow here,
but do not assume
that the thirsty ground is not thankful.

Twist it again--
again--
again--
until the muscles in my shoulder make my left hand shake
like my fingers did every time I wanted to touch
a lover lost,
a thousand miles from my bedroom.
Do not hand me your trust. I have been wound
too tightly. I will drop you like a wine glass
in the hand of a passed-out drunk.

Instead, ask me for my heart.
I will hand you a silver key on a chain and tell you,
Hold everything that this is.

Dear Law & Order: I am not a Bad Guy

Trigger warning for discussion of mental illness, fictional murders and fictional rape and sexual assault.

So when I was in the hospital I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This wasn't entirely a surprise, because I was once also told that I showed signs of this disorder but wasn't full-on Borderline. Nor is it my only mental illness diagnosis. However, it is my newest, so I really don't know much about Borderline Disorder at this point other than what the psych/med-student told me in the hospital, and what I read over on the National Institute of Mental Health website.

I also watch a lot of Law & Order.

If you're thinking, Wait, how are these two things related? then you and I are starting out on the same page.


I watch L&O as background noise when I'm trying to sleep or when it's late and I'm talking to my boyfriend (usually via Facebook chat--distance is a bitch) and I can't decide on music. Having watched all of the Special Victims Unit episodes on Netflix and then trudging through at least a season of Criminal Intent, I'm well aware that L&O, like most crime/police drama, is filled with problematic things. SVU especially, seeing as it deals with fictional rape and sexual abuse cases, and those cases tend to fall neatly in line with stereotypes and the occasional shock tactic plotline.

Criminal Intent is only slightly better. It's usually a murder case, and most of the time the culprit falls into "jilted (ex)lover" or "mentally ill serial killer" categories.

Last night I was watching a Criminal Intent episode entitled "Love Sick", which falls firmly into the latter category. If for some reason you're completely set on avoiding four-year-old L&O spoilers, I suppose you can stop reading now, since the rest of this deals with one specific episode.

In this episode, there was a series of murders--women who had gone to the ER and then later been brutally raped, murdered, and scrubbed clean, only to be "dressed as prostitutes" and left on the street. Lots of back-and-forth WhoDunnit stuff happened, but in the end, a woman and her boyfriend were arrested for the murders.

It became obvious as the episode progressed this TV woman that she was the instigator of these crimes. But what got to me was how her character was presented.

Not only did the writers, whoever they were, make her unhealthily dependent on her domineering boyfriend, extremely Other Woman Hating (you know, all other women are whores and trash who aren't good enough), but they heaped on an unhealthy side of Daddy Issues (also the typical TV kind, where there really is no reason for them but somehow all her present actions are tied back to him) and inaccurately portrayed the typical use of bondage gear (as well as perpetuating the idea that all submissive women are mentally ill, and/or that their submission stems from this illness, but damn, that's a rant for another time). At one point, the two detectives have this exchange:

"Some women dedicate their lives to making a man feel superior." 

"Yeah. [The female suspect] has markers of a borderline personality. Borderlines are dominated by an overwhelming fear of abandonment. They're needy, desperate to belong."

Now, it's worth noting that as I was watching this episode, I was literally rolled over, lights off, not looking at the screen, and half asleep.

This exchange not only woke me up, but kept me awake for nearly two hours afterwards--well past 3 AM.

As someone who's always struggled with being identified as "the weirdo" in one sense or another, I've battled against mental illness diagnoses for years. I had--and, in many senses, still do--the idea that if you can't point to me with a label-maker and print out an accurate term, there must not be anything wrong with me, and I can go on living life as usual. In the past year or two, I've narrowed that rebellion against diagnoses down to a few key reasons, the most evident being this: as soon as someone has a label for you, they tend to be less interested in hearing what's actually going on.

Of course, that statement does not apply to everyone. Several of my close friends either struggle with their own mental health and so understand that a label is not a story, or are entirely willing to listen, diagnostics be damned. But what kept me awake last night was the idea that, had I not done a tiny bit of reading of my own about Borderline Disorder, this fictional quip about a fictional serial killer might be my introduction to my understanding (or lack thereof) the diagnosis. In fact, thousands of people have seen that particular L&O episode, and of those thousands, odds are that for many of them, that is their only information about BPD. That, or some other television dramatization used to villify a fictional serial killer or other Insane Bad Guy. (Or in this case, Bad Chick, since most sufferers of BPD are women, and I would wager my next paycheck that all those depicted in fictional crime shows are women.) So if I meet someone, and become close enough to them to even want to maybe explain the chemical imbalances and disorders that sometimes make me difficult to live with, their first association might be of a fictional serial killer who was willing to literally clean up after their boyfriend after he raped and murdered multiple women.

That scares me.

There has been a lot of campaigning recently about not keeping your mental illness silent, in order to de-stigmatize it. While I whole-heartedly agree that this is an extremely important part of dismantling preconception about mental health, I would hasten to add that there is another half of the issue that is being ignored, and that is how serious mental illnesses or mental health issues are thrown around as cheap plot devices, most often in order to demonize villains. After all, how do you know the Bad Guy is the Bad Guy on shows like Law & Order--as opposed to Breaking Bad, for example, which is a wonderfully shining example of real-life moral ambiguity, and how who's Good and who's Bad depends incredibly upon your point of view?

I would argue that shows like L&O do one of two things: they make your empathize with either the victims or the Good Guys (often by throwing in an Underdog Backstory or something similar); or, they make the Bad Guy distinctly Other. And what's the most common way to make someone Other in the TV Crime Show Universe? Slap a mental illness diagnosis on them. The more serious-sounding, the better. No matter what they've done, their actions will now be attributed to their Incurable Mental Disease or Disorder. They're no longer a character that can be changed for the better, or reasoned with, or given hope of redemption. They're also no longer someone the audience is supposed to feel connected with. Joe Blow and his wife, Jane Doe, are supposed to react to the idea of Mental Illness with an emotional and mental drawing-away. Take a metaphorical big step backwards. Cheer when the Bad Guy ends up giving their confession to that episode's crime--be it rape, murder, kidnapping, or some other horrible event--with dull eyes and a sick smile, as if now that their illness has been found out, they can stop pretending to even interact with others in a normal fashion. They're carted off in handcuffs, the TV Cops high-five and leave to go get a drink, and the screen cuts to black. Joe Blow and Jane Doe are supposed to be left with the sense that all is now well in the TV Crime Show Universe--until next week, when the next Bad Guy comes through. Odds are he's got a diagnosis too.

I'm not saying that mental illness has no impact on people's negative actions, nor am I saying that it is not, in some cases, the cause of things like murders. What I am saying is that, if anything, my reaction to receiving a new diagnosis is not setting me on the path to self-help and mental wellness--not as a first reaction. No, because of the constant bombardment of negative portrayals to an increasingly desensitized audience, the idea of a new Mental Illness Label terrifies me. In fact, the description of people with BPD as "needy" and "desperate to belong," obviously used in a negative sense, actually heightened many of the fears that Borderline Personality Disorder hands me to begin with: constant, irrational fear of being abandoned; the sense that I am not as good or capable as my peers; paranoia that I am not myself, not real, or not operating the same was as Everyone Else. Rather than helping me understand myself, the new diagnosis is feeding back into itself, all because of something a TV character said to no one in particular in the middle of the night.

The path to mental health and mental wellness is unique to every individual and their situations and problems. There is no Magic Answer to help any/all mentally ill people at once. But there are things that we as a society and as creative individuals can do to make the road to recovery and wellness easier for ourselves and our loved ones who struggle.

I think that taking a serious look at how casually we use our own and others' illness as a cheap plot trick might be a good place to start.

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.

Of monsters and men.

TRIGGER WARNING: horror, gore, anxiety & anxiety attacks

You never get used to looking monsters in the eye.

You've been dodging them right, left, and center since you were twelve and you know how to do everything else--how to avoid the claws that change length and strike when your guard's down. How to go-go-go-go for hours with their rancid breath stinking like wet coffee grounds and mold on the back of your neck. You've memorized the escape routes, mapped refuges in your head like the way you spell a lover's name. This book, that movie, the album you know all the nuances to. You can hide in the patterns and basslines for a while.

You learned how to take the hit with someone else, minimize their pain, share it like the more you bleed, the less they do. Sometimes it even works. Emergency emotional sutures are your specialty, followed closely behind by the Magic Words to Talk Someone Off an Emotional Ledge. Both work best on no sleep, 4 AM crisis calls, Diet Coke and Excedrin to keep your mind sprinting away from the demons faster than they can catch you, or anyone else. And then the danger has passed, somewhere between the desperate, panicked sobbing that took root in your chest and your partner's words shifting from desolate to somewhat acceptable in the real world. They cut you loose and slip into sleep or their own Anti-Monster Routine, full of chemicals and secrets they won't share, not even with you. You let them go--wasn't that the idea this whole time, digging your bitten-off nails into the rotting flesh of someone else's insecurities?--and the stares of the creatures from the insides of both your heads come back to haunt you.


Your hands shake too hard. Your chest is too small, heart too big, lungs suddenly incapable of normal functions. Gasp. Try and focus your eyes. Fail twice before you find enough presence of mind to realize your glasses are off and discarded on your floor somewhere because they were in the way of your tears. How long has it been since you breathed? Twenty-five seconds? Forty? Your chest is frozen shut. You tell yourself to gasp, inhale, god dammit breathe or you won't get the chance again, breathe already, BREATHE you mother FUCKER.

And you do, eventually, just in time to notice the way your head is spinning and everything is either too dark or too bright, nothing in between. You taste your last cigarette on the backs of your teeth and bite half-moons into your palms instead of standing out in the cold and repeating it won't work, it won't work, it won't work into the puffs of smoke rising from your cracked and bleeding lips. You close your eyes and try not to spin too much, but that only makes it worse. Imprints of danger on your closed eyelids. Panic hanging in imperceptible droplets from your lashes.

You don't have your own Anti-Monster Routine. You've spent too long patching up the holes in everyone else's. Your adrenaline leaves you in a rush as you remember that you never found a replacement for that kind of fuel. The collapse to your bed is too long for dead weight falling three feet. The press of your body, slowly betraying you into trembling that is bone-deep below zero, is too much to pull to the right place on the bed. Find a corner of a blanket and try to pull it over your like a shield. Try not to think about how much safer a pair of arms would be. Gasp--when is the last time you breathed, again?

Keep on the artificial lights like witches' lanterns. Pretend you did something to make them powerful. Pretend someone else found your Magic Words, the ones that etched themselves in wrist-bones and ankles to keep you safe. Pretend the war you just waged was for you, that the demon-spawn won't be back the day you think to yourself, Maybe we've both recovered from the last round.

Most of all, pretend you know how to forget. How to let all of this fade into fairy-tale and once-upon-a. Pretend you never looked a monster in the eye, that the eye never grew to twice its size and reflected your face and your fear and your life and made it look more terrifying than any set of crooked teeth and armored, swinging tails. Pretend you don't dream of that reflection swallowing you in the middle of the night, opening up like a sinkhole and eating you alive, that you are safe and sound in your bed and you don't have to fight this battle again next week, next month, next time you haven't slept and have spent eight hours listening to your little brother trip on acid. Pretend that it's over. Pretend it's all okay, now and forever, world without end, Amen.

Remind me--when is the last time you remembered to breathe?

When you draw your gun, think first. Shoot anyway.

When you become the people you hurt to keep from hurting anyone else, you've failed.
But that's not new to you, is it, sweetheart?
You're sitting alone and you're hungry, and you listen to the way your stomach clenches around itself
like it's trying to salvage something that isn't there.
          It isn't there. The things in your life that you love
are few and far between and while you're in the land of much
    and close together,
nothing matters anymore.

Let your head hurt. Let your stomach growl.
Once upon a time you were going to be something.
You ran away to the woods and thought, This 
is a good place to become. You unraveled instead.
They'll find you in the scum under the bridge. You freeze in the winter.
When their feet slip over you,
don't pretend you're holding back your laughter.

Crack under pressure.
When your stomach growls,
     pretend it's a roar.
Pretend it's a battle cry. Pretend
you have something worth fighting for
and something inside you left to fight.

When your enemy kills you, laugh
to the beat of the pulse in your temples.
Look into your own eyes like a lover's,
like they belong to the people who ripped you apart.
And they do, honey. They do.
You are your own worst enemy.

Surrender without fuss.
When your own back is turned,
take the poison.

The only honor you've got
is in the way you're giving
up.

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?

In the face of anxiety.

Written in Gaming House, Lawrence University. October 25, 2013.

I've never seen glasses with rose-colored lenses.

For Ashleigh

Throw out the metaphors.
Send them through your shredder and toss them in the trash.
Repeat them like the word "apple" or "door-frame" or "love"
until you forget what they mean.
Your heart
is not an animal or the pound of the tide or a half
of a whole, it's
a muscle
beating hard and sending blood through your body and when it feels
like it's breaking--well,
I promise you it's not
because you are still around to feel it.

His hands
were never fire and smoke, never
sledgehammers on stained glass. They
were hands.
Human hands
that sometimes touched you so kindly, you cried.
Hands that had bitten nails and callouses and sometimes
shook when the world was too, too much.
Hands that held too tightly
and sometimes
hit
too hard.

Your lips are not poison and your words
are not holy water.
You do not build and break with sound alone.
You have in your throat
the incredible power
to say what you mean
and nothing more.
Your voice echoes in an empty room
just the same as it always has.

Love is not a red string that cannot fray, not
puzzle pieces
made to fit together.
Life is not a merry-go-round, a dance, a
masquerade.
It is chaos and heartache.
It is hard work and boredom so strong
you lose sight of what it means to feel anything else.
But it is not fiction, not
words spun into something beautiful and hollow.
Your world is not a snow globe,
and it cannot break.

Your lover is not a miracle.
She is you,
and she is not. She is fragile
and strong,
and the muscle of her heart pushes blood through her veins
and sometimes feels like it's breaking.
But it is not.
It's only hurting and beating
and keeping her alive
to be with you--
or not to.
Her heart is not a compass,
and you are not true north.

Take your metaphors and burn them.
Erase them until all you can see is real,
and harsh,
and much too bright.
See the world the way it is,
and love it
even so.

A letter to myself.

Throw away the stuffed puppy that your first boyfriend gave you and
get rid of the letters from the boy you dated for ten days
before he went back to his girlfriend.

On your bookshelf you have conversations from thirteen-year-old you's 4AMs.
Gather them up and burn them.
The forgiveness they hold is ancient and just because you no longer have proof
doesn't mean it wasn't real.
Besides,
you never should have needed contrition for caring too much.

Delete the playlist you made for the boy you fucked last winter.
You never gave it to him
and listening to something that makes you cry doesn't make you stronger.
It just makes you sad.

Crop the man who took your virginity from the portrait you drew.
Keep yourself
and the way your hair turns to the ocean.

Put your ex's cologne in a drawer somewhere until you forget what it smells like.
Don't open it until the next time you have a date--
put it on to remind yourself how gentle hands can be
and that his were not the only ones.

Repeat after me:
You are not
defined by the trinkets you keep.
You are not defined
by the things they deemed worthy to give you,
nor the things you created because of them.
You
are defined by the way you loved them,
and not by the way you hoarded it.
as if it would turn to smoke and slip through your fingers.
You are defined by the way you smiled at them and
the nights you spent with them but you are not
a souvenir.
You are not
a museum for them, you
are not
defined by the way you loved them.

You are defined
by the way you let them
go.