Exquisite Inadequacy

I hang in the air between spaces, between phases of life, the ropes tethering me to the current fraying and snapping one by one by one. Who knows how much longer they will hold out? 

I never had a fear of heights, but I've always had a fear of falling, the empty sensation in the stomach that wrenches me from dreams. So I threw myself at the shallows, at the things that would not hurt me when I landed, inevitably without waiting hands at the bottom. I threw myself at the places where I could force myself back onto my battered feet, where I didn't have to be disappointed by all the helping hands I was not receiving. 

Now I regret my lack of recklessness. Because every time I pushed myself to my knees, to my feet again, I found that the pain was just the same. I should have spent it on the things that really mattered. 

But I don't know how to take off my training wheels. I spent so much time avoiding the edge, the deep, that I don't really know how to fall.

Downfall by the Unreal

Wrong. Wrong. The closer I think I am, the further I am revealed to be. I am a fool; a blind fool who sought to make you something out of fragments and passing moments and glittering illusions. I am a lost cause and I make my own misery. It bears down and emerges through the open cuts on my skin. 

Wrong. I cannot even talk to you. The thought of seeing you wrenches my stomach, threatens discharge of everything in it. Because I was wrong. And I thought I felt something akin to love, but it wasn't; you're a concept, a figment, an escape in a world of trappings, and I - stupid, stupid I - got caught in the trap of your eyes. I should have looked twice before I let myself even near the edge. Now I'm paying the price for something imagined. I'm bleeding for you and you don't even exist.

The Ongoing Storm

You're the tail end of a storm, the orange light tinging the clouds, the last echoes of thunder that roll across the skies. Distant and dangerous, beautiful to see but impossible to touch, you leave me with a strange sense of unease, like I just missed something awesome and rare, that you know of and I have no hope of ever experiencing; like the apocalypse is just around the corner and you know all the techniques to survive. 

You are wary, a wild thing with its heart in a cage, because it offers more protection than just your ribs. You hide. You hunger too, raw, bloody, for the things you'd never dare speak, confining them to the cage with your heart so they never get out. But they live in your eyes, in the way your hands curl into fists when you're not thinking. We're mere humans but there's something of the hurricane in you. 

The Exits That We Miss

I have loved many people in this life. But then there is you, with something unreadable behind your eyes, a distance, a void, a mirror which throws back echoes of me. This love is selfish, I know. I want you for me and none else, a single mutual exclusiveness that could snap my soul in two for the power it wields over me. Selfish, yes. 

I cannot have you. In the sordid, rotting core of my heart, nothing is more obvious. It is the poison that creeps through my veins and blurs my vision when I look at you. It is the tug that keeps me insane. If I could bleed it out, I could walk away, I could leave you and this selfish love in a shadow, forgotten and lost to time. 

But...

There is always a but. And this one whispers tales of the look you give me when I look the other way, that I catch the tail end of out of the corner of my eye. It's not longing, it's not love, but it is not the look you give to someone who is merely a friend and nothing more. Is it? Who knows? Only you, and you keep yourself close.

And it doesn't make any sense, this restless endeavour for a cause, a possibility, a hope. Because at the end of the day, you're going to walk away, keeping your silence and the unreadable look behind your eyes. And I'm going to be left with a selfish love and a self that feels nothing but self loathing. 

Norms

Frail wisps of blonde hair ran up the pale legs that poked out from beneath the hem of a skirt the colour of blood. Of all the things I thought in that moment, the one that prevailed was the distraction of the itch in my fingers that wanted to run up her legs and see if they were as soft as they looked. 

Summer Elegies

Beneath the dew caressed leaves, in the warm dappled light of a dying summer, a group of you danced in the air, flitting and fluttering and flirting in and out of the heavy rays of light that filtered through the branches. In humid air you wove a song with the twisting of your wings, a reckless elegy to yellow days beneath the arc of a perfect blue sky, to the height of life, to unbreakable togetherness. Humming, you came close, inviting, and promising renewed life after the winter.

I, little, lost, confused soul, watched from within an enclosed house and beat desperately with my wings to be there with you in your glorious summer dance, but I could not find the cracks in the glass of my window.

Inalienable

 I cannot stop thinking about touching her. Not bare skin against bare skin, chest against chest, though the thought does not escape my mind, but her, close enough to emanate warmth through layers of clothing. My imagination overloads on the ghost of her in my arms, the ridges of her ribs rubbing my forearms, and I cannot envision anything but the palms of my hands against her hips, her head close enough that the scent of her hair is all I can smell. 

And what of the explorations of my fingertips? They shall trace every part of her; the knobs of her spine after she has lost her shirt, the valleys of her ribcage, the downy hairs on her arms. I want to know if she will shiver, if her breathing will hitch and adopt a desperate arrhythmia. My body will have hers, and she mine, and we will lie on the precipice of recognising something inherent and inalienable, human conquistadores in a familiar, unexplored landscape.  

Prison Bus

A smile and a volley of heartbeats. A faded memory folded and kept in a breast pocket. A rattling bus weaving through debris littering a long abandoned road. The grass on the side of the road is tall, wild; anything could lurk there. Anything but you. 

The bus seat is sticky beneath my fingertips, gluing itself to my my t-shirt. I would have followed you across the universe on my knees if your smile had ever meant anything. Instead I took a sparsely packed bag and took the first bus out of town; this bus, where you could get venereal diseases off the seats, and lose everything you have to the guy with a battered cap pulled low over his eyes. And all I have to give are the bruises on my knees that refuse to scrub off and a faded memory that I refuse to show anyone. Because it's the only real thing left. In the light of day, folded out to be seen by everyone, it would be nothing more than another dream of a lost lifetime. 

Alternatives

Inside a crowded imagination, the possibilities were endless. Faces flashed and fanned out before me; people I'd met, or merely passed in the street, people I'd never talked to, and people I wish I had. Girls with coloured streaks in their hair, girls on skateboards on sidewalks. Girls in cafés, girls with books tucked under their arms. Girls blasting music into the atmosphere, points of vivid nose, and girls who barely say a word. Boys with neatly done up collars and suspenders over each shoulder. Boys with big glasses and curly hair and neatly trimmed beards. Boys with tattoos creeping over their skin. 

I thought on these, on the things I was drawn to in people, out of the infinite possibilities. And slowly, without realising I was developing it, I found that I had a type; and the realisation hit me without preemptive warning. A slap in the face, a punch in the gut, the hollow feeling of falling. Because time and time again, it turned out they were all reflections of you. Without knowing it, I was falling for the bits of you I recognised in other people. Two years and a hundred people, and the only person I can think about is you. Inside a crowded imagination, everyone else is just a figment.

Company We Keep

Here, there. Near, far. Distance is the only company we keep. We're back to this shyness that forces us to avert our eyes. But every fibre of me screams to look over, to see if you're pretending not to share the glance too. We entertain ourselves with fancies and longings. We destroy ourselves on the sharp edges of reality. 

You're there, and I'm here. And one of us is in the wrong place.

Even the Small Things

Sometimes it feels like problems are tattoos sunk into my skin, irreversible and uncounterable. Most of all, they're inescapable; they are everywhere I am, and everywhere I will be, waiting, demons in the shadows. Even small tasks go inconceivably wrong. I don't doubt that other people are not so plagued, for who, trailed by these, ambushed by them, would ever leave the shelter of their house?

Anywhere But Here?

I feel like I've lived my whole life on the run, or on the brink of running. When I pack a bag, I pack everything I might need for life in transit. Unsettled; that's me. For no apparent reason, I'm always prepared for leaving, for a quick and easy escape.

Sure, I may have felt the need to escape from my life before, when the weight of existence comes down with crushing force, when I feel like a tiger, or a bird trapped in a cage, pacing back and forth behind bars. But I never noticed it as being so; agitation was something I carried around with me in my back pocket, like the things I carry in my backpack that are probably not necessary to have on a day to day basis. This is the first time I've looked it at with a modicum of self awareness that's made me worry about my mental state. After all, I must admit that I don't have a particularly trying life. Certainly one that I don't have to run from, though it could use some changes. So why the flightyness? What is in me that cannot stand the thought of being settled? Why is it that nowhere truly feels like home - safe and secure and permanent? What perversion plagues me? What monsters knock in my nightmares? And why is it that I can not answer those questions? 

But to some extent, the realisation that I always stand ready to leave has helped bring to light the realisation that many aspects of my life, heretofore empty, are because of that. What relationship - romantic or platonic - can stand when one person always has one foot out the door? And what creativity is fruitful when the mind is pillaging itself? And how can anything once started ever be finished if you're constantly throwing yourself from project to project because it gives the illusion of movement? 

Perhaps, just perhaps, I'm not meant to stay in one place. 

That, or I have not yet found the right place. 

So I'll keep my bag packed and hope. Because illusion or mental illness, somehow here doesn't feel like the right kind of here for me.

Unshakeable

My hands don't shake anymore. Hope still burns as fiercely, more, even, than before, because the things I once thought impossible are tranpiring. Now we're more than just a smile and a glance away from each other. Now we have words, moments, memories. 

I think of a time when I didn't know you and find the absence of you strange. Was life really different once? Did I care for different things, different people and different dreams? What does that mean for the future? The idea of a time without you is unbearable; I would rather peel the skin from my face and bathe in a sea of salt than take a breath on a day in a life that doesn't involve you. I can't help but be glad that the feeling I had then didn't change. Maybe some feelings, once felt, are felt forever.

There's still a distance between us. Awkwardness and uncertainty cloud judgements and batter our hearts with doubt. You saw me today, were going to say hello, but the idea of pulling me from the pages of Whitman stopped you. You don't know that I would burn all the poetry in the world for another moment with you; any moment. 

It's strange because once you were a phantom, a ghost among bookshelves, a far off photograph - gorgeous on the outside, but showing nothing of the infinity you hold within. And now...now you're a person stepped right out of a fantasy, perfect even with all your imperfections. I knew I was never the type to judge by the superficial, but there are some things I thought would always bother me, put an end to fantasies and hope. And then I met you. You're not perfect, yet your flaws hold you together better than perfect seams. Almost everything I thought of you was true, though smudged now by the reality, the details I got wrong. And I love it anyway. 

My hands don't shake anymore, but I think I found something more profound. I could turn my fingers into bloody stumps writing of you. 

The Persistence of Memory

A race car in a videogame. The controller in your hands. You standing a little to the side, staring intently at the screen. Me right in front of it, staring at the car as it overlaps the others, swerves around corners and crosses the finish line. Though I wanted to be staring at you, I settle for the sliver of you I get from the corner of my eye. 

Don't ask me about anything else, like if anyone looked askance at us, two girls standing in the middle of a shop, playing a videogame designed for boys, and wondering if it was a date or just an outing. And don't ask if I remember what we talked about in those few minutes, or even the other hours we spent in each other's company, because the few days that have passed since then have robbed me of the pleasures of remembering. But I remember that moment so clearly; two girls in a busy store, one of whom directed a fast car on a screen while the other watched. And I would have been content to watch forever. In that moment, unexpected and unguarded, I fell in love with you more than I expected I could. It was a perfect moment in a perfect day. While everything else melts into Time, I will forever have that moment of you. And that is everything.

Something in the Way

It's all air between us; air and something else, like half smiles that turn to grins and beating hearts that start to race. Resistance stands in the way, bearing down on us with a malicious sneer, daring us to step closer to one another. This is fear. I know it is. But it's hope and it's wonder and it's the way your pupils dilate and your mouth twitches with amusement and it's the way hours pass like minutes and sunlight fades in the evenings. It's wanting you close without you ever being close enough.

Some Times and Some Days

Sometimes I'm lost, crawling through a heavy fog that dampens my senses and steals my sense of direction. Sometimes I run and wake up in the morning with bruises. Splotches of purple and blue and red, splattered across my skin, and I'm reminded of the time I spent with you. Before you went away.

Sometimes I scream. I turn the music up too loudly, letting it thrash the walls and burn my ears and cascade around me in broken fragments of melody. The neighbours don't hear anything but the beating drums and the guitar riffs that scratch the calm from the air. Eventually I lie down on the mattress on the floor, the place you wanted it to be, and try forget that my head throbs with words that remind me of you.

Someday it'll be gone, those last slivers of you. Someday I'll not lie in the dark and remember all the times you smiled at me, or the way it felt when your arms enclosed me. Someday I'll forget.

Intangible Losses

We all lose things along the way. Sometimes they're small things,  like toothbrushes and pens and socks that disappear without a trace. Sometimes they're larger, like car keys or credit cards. But the worst things to lose are the immaterial, the things that were almost palpable, but hovered just out of the reach of your fingers. Sometimes it's deliberate.

We shed, you see, the way snakes and cicadas shed their skin, leaving imprints of ourselves behind, even as we venture on, altered. Humans are volatile things, and sometimes will try rid themselves of things that aren't ready to be gone; those people are left with gashes through their flesh and thoughts that run around in circles.

But sometimes people will lose things they weren't aware they had, those intangible things that sit in the back of the mind, ghostly companions to the conscience. And those people have lost the most grave thing of all: themselves. But not all who are lost need to be rescued. Some just need time to reorient themselves.

Tabula Rasa

It used to be there, hovering in the periphery of your mind, a blank shape in a squalid landscape. You used to trip and stumble and find glittering things in the grass and hold them up to the light to catch the colours. Now everything is being erased. Because that thing that used to hover is growing, rolling over the desolation and swallowing every blade of grass and every glint of silver and every hint of sky. It's washing away everything. You're turning into a blank slate.

Same Coin

Mistaken and Hoping are the two friends you wish you never made; one is a certainty you would rather not face, and one is the impossibility, waiting to happen.

Organic

An organic mess curled up in the dark, weeping tears of tar. Because nothing produces darkness like a fragile, broken soul. Held together by tape and weak glue, your soul's leaking out the edges and pooling around you on the frozen cement. You don't know what day it is anymore.

Weekend Midnights

If I could sit outside in the freezing cold every weekend midnight, I would. And we could talk about books, literature, travel, the corners of coffee shops and the niches of ruins, the gibbons in the trees and the rivers you can kayak up in the Pacific.

But whatever you do, don't mistake it for something it's not.

Because while I'm sitting there, shivering in the cold and laughing and talking and theorising, I'm waiting for the morning, when I'll see her.

Pretty Misery

She's the kind of girl you fall in love with, over and over again, until your heart is so full of it that your chest constricts and pain shoots through your lungs. And it's the kind of love that will slowly kill you, because you're a statue to her, a furnishing, not a person to be considered as a lover. Because you're you, steadfast and protective, and she's flighty, a butterfly that flits from beautiful thing to beautiful thing, and sometimes even to the bad things, so that sometimes she finds herself crawling back to you with broken wings. And you always heal them. Because you're in love with her and that's what you do; you heal her and you hope that she'll thank you in kisses one day instead of smiles.

And you hope that the restless soul in her finds what it's looking for, because she's down in her pretty misery and you can't lift her out of it, though you try and try and try, tugging at the ropes that she reluctantly allows to bind her to reality. But really, she's gone. Some days she doesn't come back. You worry that one day will be the last day you ever see of her. And you know this should carry you backwards, away, but it doesn't; you're drawn ever forward. Because you too are drowning in your pretty misery.

Straight On

You're just a mess that needs cleaning, a shriveled heart that needs watering. A ticking brain that needs winding. And an empty soul that needs illuminating.

But you walk down a road with weeds growing through the tarmac, and no one seems to get through. So you're alone in the middle of the highway, and you're not sure if the way you're going will lead you straight to hell, or to another dimension, but you know it's too late to veer off it now.

Capture the Flag

Oh, you clever girl. In the game of subtlety, you're winning.

Roads That Lead

I'm  sorry if you ever felt that I left you on the side of the road, howling at the tail lights of my car as they made white streaks into the distance. But the truth is that it would have been you leaving me sooner or later. And then what would I have done? It is the manner of my existence that I cannot bear the thought of being left alone by you.

In a list of things that would kill me, that would grace the top spot. So excuse me if I seem distant when we talk, because I'm really dreaming about a world where you and I coexist as entities free of the fates of one another. But I'm also dreaming of a world where I wake up next to you and not have to wonder if we'll share the same bed again.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a deer caught in your headlights. And you're hurtling right at me.