girl help, I’m literally trying to gaslight myself into believing my feelings for them are only platonic as I’m actively smiling with my heart beating fast while fantasizing about us having one of those first kisses in the movies where we’re having an intimate conversation while laying beside one other and just can’t resist the urge anymore

you're sitting next to me on the couch, and old beatup thing i bought after moving out with my parents into a one bedroom apartment - close enough to the college campus that i don't need to worry about a car yet, but far enough that i have my own street, home, place to breathe -. it's red and got three holes in it, but it's well loved and i got it from facebook marketplace for forty dollars.

you're sitting next to me and you're singing under your breath as the commercial plays, interrupting old reruns of i love lucy. you're sitting there and humming and i wish i could take this moment and photograph it and hang it in my mind for the rest of me to remember when i need it; record the sound of the apathetic infomercial, of the dishwasher churning, and of your harpsichord voice, smooth and sweet and harmonic, to hit repeat on over and over again, with earbuds in it so it's just for me to hear; bottle up the feeling of your prescense, your hand tapping against my leg, your shoulder brushing against mine everytime you lean slightly to your right for me to open and drink up.

i want to keep you close to me, as close as you will allow me, and spill the truths that i keep in an island of my mind, under lock and key, away from other thoughts so i don't accidentally release them too soon. i love you, i love you, i love you, i want to say, but i cannot. i think i start too - i open my mouth and i love comes out, but i follow it with i love lucy, and you laugh a little, that one giggle thing you do when something is just amusing enough for acknowledgement.

me too, you agree and i smile, take this moment to lean to the left, lean into you. i will not tell you, not now, maybe not ever, but if this bottled photographic recording is the only thing i can cling this tightly too, then i will take it each time it's offered.

| k. - @nosebleedclub prompt xv. harpsichord

you looked at me with softened almond eyes, edges wrinkles up in the way only smile lines can. your eyes always reminded me of those sour apple rings – sugary on the outside, sour on the inside, and I think if the only person you were ever kind to was me, that is all the motivation I need to stay on earth.

your twizzler red lips curled into a smile, chewy rope tilted up and I thought if I leaned over and kissed you, it would be entirely too sweet. I’ve never liked twizzlers, but I’d eat them everyday if it meant just one moment with you.

your laugh is unabashed and loud, the savory butter to your smile’s maple syrup. cozy, warm, and confectionary, I think I could drown in your presence if you weren’t my anchor.

freckles span across your skin like they could tell a future of us. you and me, me and you. maybe laughing at something stupid I said. maybe sharing a bowl of candy. I always thought they were too sweet, but it’s okay – it’s the perfect excuse to give you half anyway.

| k. - I tried to write you something, but I had a reese’s in my mouth and you were smiling so big, I got distracted. - @nosebleedclub xxii. maple syrup

when does a man become a monster? my love, i fear he already is one.

if there was a biopsy on my brain right this moment, the neurons would spell your name. forgive me if i fumble over my words trying to describe how you make me feel. what i'm trying to say is, if i had to choose one thing in the whole multiverse, i'd choose you.

i think i just want you. it's awful. it's skin-rippingly painful. it's mind-melding. it's the closest i've ever felt to any sort of heaven. i didn't think people were serious when they said they didn't know they were missing something until they met someone. i love the deep, sudden calm, and the sudden exhilaration when i'm with you. it's like a juxtaposition of the universe itself.

i feel like my hands can't craft the kind of wholeness you create in me. i remember vaguely thinking you might be the purest thing i'd ever touched, but now i know i was entirely wrong; you are the most human thing i've ever touched. i struggle to grapple with my feelings around you. i admit, my words here are just pretty lace atop guttural human emotion, but what is language if not the decor of the mind?

you've become a sort of muse, to be honest. all my words and art have been tainted with you. i can't not see you all around me. you are utterly electric; i'm afraid i'm a tad dull in comparison.

did i ever really like you? or did i just like the fact you were nice to me?

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

Beautiful from Ordinary Days

I LOVE being alive so I can be mediocre at SO many different hobbies

when you start reading again and it's like oh. oh . the sun actually does still shine.

thinking abt when someone rests their head on your shoulder and suddenly you're barely breathing because you don't want to disrupt their comfort by moving. will never get over how there can be so much love held in silent gestures.

i have never loved gently. i eagerly rip apart the pilth of my lovers and cry when they bleed.

i am rarely happy with what i find.

Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaption by Martin Crimp

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy // Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women // Robin Roe, A List of Cages // Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki's Delivery Service // Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 // D. H. Lawrence, The Plumbed Serpent // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart // Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice