what if i deleted this blog

i have been thinking about chaos, lately. how there is a quiet, an ease. i have been thinking about the calm before the storm.

this pen is my room and i have been nothing but a romantic in the window. i have loved and lost and loved again and - well, ambiguous - and i have bared only the facet of my soul most desperate to claw out. lately, i have been thinking about the crushing loneliness of being eleven years old. how do i write about her? how do i write about anything except the reef of wanting for other people, and never for myself? how do i tell you she is buried in the bones of all the roots of the pando of my love. how do i explain that i want you like an eleven year old girl wants to die.

i have been thinking about... whispers in the dark. i have been thinking about a kiss in a quiet room. you pressing me into the pillows in a wordless wonder. i have been thinking quite a bit about the possibility of being in love with you.

it always comes knocking and never sticks around. i think about loving you and a winter full of softness and lights. i think about loving you and a summer full of tar. i think about you at four a.m., for the first time, instead of someone else, except i know someone else expects me to be thinking of them, and now i am back to square one: we are writing about romance again.

i think about being eleven years old. i think about dying to grow up. i think about the ocean and how it makes me think of you.

something about chaos and drowning and dark rooms. it could be a metaphor if you squinted, maybe. if the sand doesn't get in your eyes. i went to the beach for the first time in over a year yesterday and was so abruptly overcome with the idea of kissing you - here, now, on this beach, in this water - and i was so startled at the suddenness of it i got bodied by a wave.

you are out of nowhere, like a shadow on the wall, is the thing. you are in the low lamplight. i wrote a poem about a fire, which is to say i wrote a poem about you kissing my neck, and i can't find it anywhere now. i am writing in circles to avoid addressing the skeleton in the room.

whispered in the quiet: i could crawl home if you'd be willing to bury me. whispered against my neck in the dark: i could be in love with you.

it's just - the way you were, the way that you got, back then. the bad rush, the oil spill so high up your neck that your teeth swam in it. what you needed back then was a barn raising. what you needed back then was all-hands-on-deck.

it's just - you needed a village, is all. you needed your parents to actually just cool it for a second, because for one minute if you were very still, in the middle of the act of being roadkill: you could feel it. the edges of that sharp thing, the other-world, the promised land, the bird that was supposed to be born in your throat.

if you'd just - if any one person had just - noticed. maybe that would have been enough. you could have convinced your body to do a strange form of necromancy: you could have come back with the rope ladder. you were an emergency flare. you were morse code.

it's okay. come home again. us do-it-yourself undead, those of us who broke the book and still found our way out of the grave again. we never got the return flight. we never got the party. we just got up. we got up and then we kept going, because nobody else was gonna clean the mess. we might as well. we just... exist here, half-ghosts, barely-made it kids. no medals, except the strange serene rush of spreading jam on perfect toast. of moving a paintbrush. the silence that knows about the danger of sparks. the little candle of our heart not a stormbreaker or earthshaker. just the persistent lick of hope.

it is a quiet reward. we will not get the barn, but we do get each other. a night sky of little lights made from the gruesome survival of blood and bone. the life we made in the dark. a little somber radiance. a spellwork that's all our own.

in the end - despite it all, we built ourselves a home.

oh i miss you so severely. i miss you like a phantom pain. i miss you like a piece of me, like something far from the sea.

What died inside of you?

/

hating the way it ended isn't the same as wanting it back.

What is obvious now that wasn’t before?

Will you ever be together?

there's this way i think of you like a lighthouse. a ship run ashore on the columns.

i talk to her about you like a whisper. i talk to her about you like a roar. do you know what kind of a sound a riptide makes? you remind me of the way a wave looks from beneath the water.

i think of you like a lighthouse. a poem in a jar.

do you ever think about the way the ocean is alive? do you ever look at her and know, deep in your bones, that in her teeth is where all your dreams are going to be cradled? do you think touching her is like touching a star. if you pressed a fingerprint to my face would it clink like glass.

there's this way i think of me like a whalefall. a body singing as it sinks. maybe it's because i want to die in the sea but maybe not. could i let another hundred years of teeth tear at my ribs and settle around the halo of my palms? do you think about being an ecosystem.

guiding lights and greybeards. what's a sun outside of you? i watched a ship disappear on my way home from hollywood once. if i run aground on the rocks would i even notice or would it be just another saturday night?

the lighthouse and the lamented. the savior and the sinking.

have you ever stepped off a pier like you're falling into a body? if i curl around the shell of you would you promise to make a pearl of me?

summer's closing in but the waves are still. i'm kicking my feet and waiting for a shark to notice the splashing.

when do i get to stop drowning? when do i get to think, i wish you hadn't left, and be able to hold it against i don't even want you back anymore, baby, when will i be able to stop wanting things to be different than they are?

how many more months until i can be happy for you? how many more nights thinking the girl you love doesn't even know you exist, thinking, the girl you love is getting married, thinking, the girl you love has everything she wants and you are not on the list.

just. how humiliating it is. to wish you missed me and know you never do. am i really as forgettable as your silence is making me feel? to never be able to ask, what do you think of me? because i know your answer will be:

i don't.

at once in the crowd and on the stage.

what does it make me, beloved, that it's been so long now? what does it make you? the understudy and the spotlight: this was always your story; i was the one naive enough to look at you and think oh, i could be brave enough to sing if it were for you.

what does it make me, to you, that it has been over a year now, of me alone on the stage after everyone's gone home: playing these notes in the empty auditorium, begging for you to hear me from wherever you are. thinking, if i just play loud enough, you'll come looking.

i don't even want you back, is the thing - this awful, rending feeling of why can't i stop missing you? to be tearing at the seams with it: when will i be able to breathe around the thought of you? to be screaming but no sound comes out: why don't you miss me the same?

to be in the crowd and the chords all at once. the understudy, the expendable, the replaceable: to watch you have all you want and more in them, to hear their perfect lovely tone and their perfect lovely promises and their perfect lovely life with you. i mouth the words along, and i could say it better, i think: i do, i do, i do. but you will not hear it, not now or after all the audience has gone home, so i memorize the lines and perform them for you, only you, in the only way i know how: the way you will never see.

alone on the stage and losing grip on all the lines. at once burning in the spotlight and waiting in the wings. to be screaming on the empty stage: why don't you miss me? to be screaming but no sound comes out: why am i not something worth missing?

call me in the middle of the night and tell me you can't sleep without me. you took the moon with you when you left, and the silence is so loud.

is it a secret if i never told you that i stopped, though. does it count if it's something we don't talk about but not because it isn't there.

lilyflower, you're the one that left. we didn't ever really talk about it. even when the floors were sliding out from beneath us, it was always too-busy or too-tired or too-in-love-with-them. my darling you walked away, my one and only you're the one that fell out of love with me. you're the one covered in summers now. silver bands and sunflowers and i-do's two thousand miles away. light of my life you're the one that left me here with all these unspoken things spilling from my lips.

lilyflower, you knew i loved you like a promise. it doesn't make it a secret if you never bothered to ask if i kept it.

Are you secretly in love?

i. there's this phrase: bloom where you are planted.

ii. something i should maybe talk to my therapist about is that all of my daydreams involve me helping people. when i picture meeting celebrities, i'm usually just suggesting therapy to them. there's just not a lot left for me to get out of this world, i feel like - like with this time left i might as well use it for kindness.

iii. according to the gardening map, i was raised in Zone 6 of plant hardiness. i think that's kind of funny. i am good with plants, and keep too-many of them. i learned young about the colors of hydrangeas - how you cant tell the pH of the soil by it.

iv. they tore down both of the schools i attended as a kid. most of the forests we walked in have been turned into apartment complexes. there's nothing really left of the places i've been.

v. tumbleweeds are liminal things - they are carcasses that carry their seeds along with them. a plant that evolved to move. we have so much to learn about nature, and the way that happenstance creates miracles. can you imagine the beauty of that? i think so often about how the roots of a tree often take up the same shape and circumference of its branches. i think so much about carnivorous plants; those that eat with no stomach. about where plants store their "knowledge."

vi. i'm not going to write about who i was or what i did to myself before i left. only three things, which will make sense if you are the type of person i buried in that ditch. the first is that i ended up getting tattoos to cover it. the second is that setting boundaries still makes me uneasy. and the third is that i am constantly shocked at the fact i have actually made it to the place where i'm happy.

vii. there's this ongoing joke amongst those of us who keep plants: you don't really get a say in whether or not the plant wants to be dead. i'm excellent at orchids, but i kill every ivy i've ever met. i have been rotating one particular rescue plant around my apartment, trying to figure out what exactly is the right amount of sun for it. the truth is that sometimes things will never survive being kept.

viii. i used to daydream about joining the circus. about an alien abduction. i used to picture meeting celebrities and whispering please fucking get me out of this. did you know the quote originally came from a bishop? when i googled it, google told me the meaning is don't take what you have for granted. make the most of what you are given.

ix. sometimes i think about my 17 year old self. it's been happening a lot lately. i keep watching her through my memories, how she clawed herself raw, scratching at the walls. we got out, is the thing. i know we thought about staying. but oh, fuck dude: we could have never bloomed if we'd stayed planted.

i don't know. what does it say when i write about you, not because i need to, but simply because i can't write about anything else? what is a winter full of lights when you're waking up with them on new year's day? what do the lost things do when the place they want to go back is the hand that cast them adrift?

what does it say about me that i haven't cried about you in weeks but i still feel like a grand piano in an abandoned manor. why won't you come play me? you're already so good at it. at least this time you might hear me. i wish you'd lay your hands upon my keys and make me sing for you, if it only meant you would just listen.

the hardest part isn't even the being alone - it is that i know i have all this love fossilizing in me, a pearl. a plum stone. it's that i want to find someone to fissure it out into; my palm an open cup.

i know one must love oneself first. i know friendships are real love. i know i know i know. but i also - so timidly - i keep picturing my life as being with someone. to hand them my heart and have them say ah, this is the kind of thing i was dreaming of.

sometimes you think about how you can feel your pulse through your hips. you know cognitively that your femoral artery runs through your thigh - but how often does one reach for the legs when reaching for the heart?

when you were younger you used to picture the worst of you being bottled behind a stone-and-iron door. almost like something from a tv show or a book. it would slip mist over any gap you left open, pushing you towards an opening like a grave. you would check, obsessively, none of it had escaped. come back at night to shore up the walls. know it was only a matter of time before you turned your head and that thing would come out instead.

how ugly to ooze through your life, a mucus trail of depression. your anxiety seeping, spraypaint through styrofoam, melting your relationships. whenever you try to scoop up the pieces of your life, you find they turn into gelatin.

it is easier to coax yourself into a tight container. stretch the canvas over a different frame. force your body into a sculpture by a different artist. like this, you are funny and lighthearted. like this, your anger can be defanged.

like this, the panic attacks only belong to the night. they belong to that same animal handler you raised so long ago - her tired feet pacing your horrible little menagerie of ever-growing danger zones. you don't look the mirror in the eyes anymore - you see that ghost you captured so long ago; and she is hungry.

oh, you're tender in the daylight. it's all hard-won.

one day you will run out of things to feed the beast. one day it will scratch itself free. and oh god, what you'll lose, once it finally starts to run.