regret is a revolving door.

When my youngest sister was six a boy in her class hit her in the face; leaving behind an ugly black stain like spilled ink on her tiny cheek. My questions of wonder and concern were answered only by giggles and silliness, leaving me only to reason it had happened by her own mischievous hand. 

Not an hour later, the boy’s mother called me to apologize on his behalf.

I crawled into her bed that night and held her close, to ask her why she hadn’t told me the truth. She said, in all seriousness, that they liked each other and so it was okay that he hit her.

I swallowed my fear – like acid that burned my throat – scorching my words; settling them curled in a smoking mess at the pit of my stomach.

As she nestled her head of soft tangled hair into my chest, I remembered the first time a boy hit me; and how the teachers – with lines of laughter crinkling their eyes, smiled – and said that it was because he liked me.

So when I was seventeen and my boyfriend gave me my first set of bruises, I thought it was because he liked me. When he threw his angry fists at my body, I’d been told they were hand-written love letters that he was sending me. Counting my breaths and tallying my sins and shattered bones. They had taught me that aggression translated into affection in the language of love; and all of those songs about love being a battlefield made sense to me for the first time.

Boys will be boys.

And all is fair in love and war.

I was taught to speak in apologies and broken teeth; to start every sentence with “I’m sorry” and to end every sentence with a mouthful of blood and shame.

I wish I had told her then, what I know now.

I wanted to tell her that she doesn’t have to be soft; that she doesn’t have to be the delicate flower with the ethereal smile, quiet and flowing on small feet from room to room with grace and poise.

 I wanted to look into her eyes and tell her that she can be an ocean rushing without means of stopping toward a cliff-side, that she can be a roaring wind barreling across the entirety – shaking everything in its wake, that she can be as wide and loud as a lightning storm. That there is a universe inside of herself, wanting to be explored – and that she can stand on her own.

I wanted to tell her that when she finds someone that is sufficient enough to deserve her; he should be in constant amazement that he is hers. He should think about how it is him alone who gets to kiss her each night, when the lights are off as the city sleeps. He should be one to stop, in the middle of the day, to imagine her laughter and allow his heart to skip a beat. He should find himself awed that out of all of the men wiping their feet at her door, she chose him to let inside.  

That this is the way everyone is meant to be loved – the way someone might stare slack jawed at the sun setting. Because you are a pink blue red and orange sky at 5:30 pm in January that makes you pull over the car and get out just so you can make sure what you are seeing is real. That love is not frantic or hard, but gentle and exciting; the kind of thing that you keep running your hands over because you can’t believe it is everything you dreamed of and never thought you’d get.

I wanted my little six year old sister to know that love shouldn’t exist hidden under make-up and excuses. That love should exist where the world can see it; in the smile so wide it hurts; in the strength
of her footsteps and the way her laugh becomes a song.

And I wanted my sister to know she deserves that;

And the person she should always love the fiercest
Is herself. 

~C

real truths and word vomit.

I sit complacently – watching unabashed at the sticky-sweet pair across the park lawn – their too-loud, high-pitched laughter echoing shrilly through the trees; drawing attention.  

Typical.

She runs away from him, and he chases her. 

This is his opportunity to show off his “strength and masculinity”, and her chance to torment the poor besotted potential love interest with the opportunity to hold her close.

I snort loudly; having seen this scene a hundred times before: cheap, old, unoriginal. I pity their pathetic ambition to have a love like a love the movies. 

You know the film(s). Guy and girl washing car, guy sprays girl, girl sprays guy, laughter filled water fight that ends with the two lying on the ground, soaking wet, gazing passionately into each other’s eyes.  Or a flirtatious food fight where the heroine’s hair always looks flawless even with pink frosting in it, and the hero’s visage wouldn’t ever appear unsightly, even by the dab of whipped cream on the tip of his nose.

The truth is nobody likes to have bits of mashed up food on their clothes and in their hair. Nobody likes being sprayed in the face with a pressurized jet of ice cold water, or trying to take off wet jeans after getting soaked. It's all fake. It isn't real. So when I see lovers attempting to re-create a story emulative to the thoughtfully scripted and repetitiously filmed to perfection anecdote, I can’t possibly help but roll my eyes, and come to the immediate prejudice that what the cat-and-mouse lovers had, isn't real or lasting.

So, I close my eyes, allowing the corners of my mind to envelop me like a cocoon, and bring to recollection of a memory of something so real; so intense and vivid, natural and new.

True love; real truth.

My belief system was simple: true love – as I myself had come to discover over a great deal of time and obsession – is not a college experiment, or a midnight hypothesis, or mouth-to-mouth ways to make a past suitor jealous. It is not merely yearning for beauty, undressing. Or simply wanting to kiss your way across their milk-flesh, or wanting with a fervent passion to taste and feel it all. It is not a flick-worthy “how I met you” story, or dry moments like staying up late under the stars, sunny picnics in the park, or long walks on the beach.

Not a single one of those things matter.

Do you hear me? 

Not a single one.  

Because you cannot put all of the building blocks of what the media brainwashes you to believe is “true love” in their places, and then expect that from those blocks will magically create a love that is endless.

The blocks are cold, lifeless, and square. 

Love is so much more than that. It takes its own shape not otherwise specified, and takes you in different ways if you let it. It is the spaces between your fingers eternally filled – never to be empty again. It is a raw boldness, shamelessness, a feeling of power in togetherness; such a force as to block out the sun, and all rational thought, ripping through your bodies as one.

I am a hopeless romantic in the worst kind of way. Because I see truths, but despise reality.

I am blind.

~C

deep lakes and other eternal resting sites.

This place feels so forlorn;

like the small childhood house I used to live in but now revisit with a sad smile curling the corners of my lips, and a heavy lump in my throat. I drive by slowly, remembering it to be so much larger than it looked. With green shutters and a red picket fence – now painted black, with a yard cluttered with garbage and my climbing trees torn out – leaving only brown splotchy dirt behind. The lump grows as I remember the wonderful girl who lived with me there. Her name was Courage. She taught me to feel my soul exhale each time I laughed from the pit of my stomach, to dream as big as I can – and if I couldn’t quite touched what I dreamt, to imagine it and to be proud of that – and to lie with curiosity in my eyes to look up at the flowers instead of down at them, in order to see just how new the world could be with a different point of view.

I’ve moved, in a sense, to another place. But this will always be my home. A small forgotten dwelling, in an insignificant cluster of tired looking houses, on the outside of a town looking in. Courage is always with me, though others shake their heads disappointedly and whisper that I will never find a husband because my standards are unrealistic, my dreams are impractical, that I need to grow up, get a “real job” and a “real life”, that the world revolves around money and that if you don’t have enough of it then you are a nobody going nowhere.

But I don’t want to believe them because I have to embrace these dreams, imagination, curiosity and courage as a part of my humanness, of who I am, and how sincerely and fully I love.

I don’t care if those who have it all figured out tell me that the way I see things is abnormal, or unreasonable. Because I guess I feel that it’s the most beautiful part of who I am.

I wish I could speak words as elegant as the ones that bleed from my fingers into my pen and onto my paper.

I don’t want to go to a movie, or eat overpriced food.

Take me to your favorite place, and let me find the reason in your eyes. Take me home and show me where you sleep – and I’ll promise not to laugh at the mess. Show me the window you stare out of most, and show me what you see, so I can see it too. I don’t want you to impress me, or try to move me to amazement. I want you to love me, and to know you’ll stay when it’s hard. I want you to laugh at my bad jokes and understand that I am just as messed up as I promise I am and simply not care.

For I have known men who could hold my hand without touching me, and kiss me from the other room. I have known men who knew punk rock better than they knew the feel of my fingers. I’ve known men who didn’t hear my voice until I said goodnight at the door per the conclusion of a yawn swallowing evening. I have known men who grew up too soon, cared too little, and drank too much. I’ve known men who were artists, tech masterminds, and professional jerks wearing suits of insensitivity and brass buttons.

I don’t need love, but it’d be much appreciated. I can put layer after layer of blankets atop my bed, lay upon the mountain of insulation and keep myself warm, but I’d also love for you to gently fold back the covers and invite me in so that I can wrap my legs around yours to keep warm. I can watch Wuthering Heights alone and dry my own tears, but it’d also be nice to press my face against your chest and dry my tears with your soft cotton tee while you hold me close and stroke my hair. I don’t need love, but perhaps it’d be much appreciated.

~C

how easily time slips through our fingers.

i. An eco-friendly covered cup sits next to me. It’s been empty for a while now; I've waited all afternoon to say: “Oh this? Just a novel I’m working on.”

ii. I want to write as I wrote last year – of the goodness in the world, of infinite faith, and brief captured moments of beauty – rather than to write just to expunge the bitter tastes of life. I haven’t written in a while – yes I realize what a bad joke that statement is; seeing as I hardly ever put my pen to the paper anymore. A great many adventures have ensued recently, but every time I begin to write them down, I end up hating my words and scrapping it all frustratedly. 

Perhaps I don’t wish to print my happiness in permanent ink, if it is in fact merely impermanent. For I know that if it all vanishes back into long work days, and short cold nights, then I will re-read these words and be drowned by the tidy little paragraphs – caught up in a better time – and forget to open new windows and doors that happen to present themselves. 

iii. This year has been a year 

of faking it, wearing burgundy lipstick and dark winged eyes, making detailed lists, ensuring my voice-mail doesn't get too full, watching my weight and flipping off my scale each morning, learning to smile without permitting my lip to fold up, looking in the mirror and accepting that my forehead has frozen into my thinking face and left a permanent thoughtful crease between my brows.

a year full of nights. Of sleeping with windows and hearts dangerously open, letting the sometimes biting breeze makes its home beneath the cracks of my eyelids, recognizing that blankets are never enough to warm my cold cold bones, staring emptily at the pages of the journal I never really seem to fill, watching my pile of feathered pens dry up, wondering to myself if the life I live now is all it will ever be, and fearing the rapidly turning pages of the calendar as I watch fearfully with eyes wide open

a year of staying focused, trying to be the adult that I am expected to be, ignoring my internal monologue of endless questions asking me what I am doing, struggling to never let on that I am somewhat lost and sometimes lonely, and often so confused. Tasting the blood as I bite my tongue to keep from screaming, and struggling not to ask strangers to tell me what it is that I am supposed to do next, and where exactly I am supposed to go from here. 

vi. My writing had become a reflection of my blind ambling through an empty existence; the only light in the darkness were my dreams of another life that was not mine and wistful thinking for romance painted with a golden brush. 

I had forgotten that life is far larger than the drive to work with sleep filled eyes, or the rush to complete a task minutes before it is due. I had forgotten that keeping friends was more important than making money, that my soul was more important than my body, and that there is always love waiting to be found in the most unlikely of places if I only took the time to seek it out.

v. Forget about the things you had, And all the things you lost. 

Before you let your heat drunk breath, Grow cold and turn to frost. 

~C

dear diary.

If I could, I would tie swings and tethers from the tallest trees in the thickest forest for us to settle upon. 

Away from the lined roads, boxed buildings, and neat rows of cement blocks of cement blocks -- a cradle in a wood that isn't graphed by a man with a map and a hard hat. Away from the corrupt; where the treacherous lie in guided halls and warm corridors, and the saints die in dark alleys and forgotten corners. Away from the lips curled in pretty vengeance, glimmering eyes in a state of inhumanity, and sharp, ruthless laughs. 

I will sit on your lap with our feet dangling high above the ground, your arms will wrap around my waist, your chin will rest comfortably on my head, and we will watch the leaves change colors together. I will watch the fleeting kiss of the leaves meet your dirt-flecked toes as we swing back and forth. I will watch the rainwater gather in the pearly gray sky, to lightly trace the curves of your skin. I will watch as your long fingers and warm hands crawl without word into the crevices between mine. 

You whisper in my ear that I am too young to be this old, this sad, this aching; and make me laugh through my tears when I simply want to mourn at how cold and dark the world can be. 

-- 

i. My ears are so full of your words that I wake briefly in the night, run my lonely hand lightly across the pillows, fingers searching for the mess of hair and the rough edges of your jaw, but you aren't there. When I am half asleep it as if my soul keeps forgetting that you are not mine yet. 

ii. The clothes I wear are so loose, so that others don't notice the traces of your absence mounted on my skin. 

iii. In the day I allow my mind to wander with thoughts of you, and catch myself staring intensely at a speck on the floor. A question hangs in the air for a moment too long from the boy(s) that sits across from me: asking me what is making my eyes twinkle so brightly, and the curves of my lips blissfully arrange. All I can do is hide my secret smile by covering it with a dainty sip, and simply say "nothing at all". 

iv. I dream of you crashing through me -- so I will no longer have to walk the many miles to close the distance that separates us. 

v. In the past, my hand has become sore from being clenched shut so tightly, that I opened it to anyone who wanted to see just how empty it was. Like many television screens showing a movie at a department store. 

vi. It aches not to hear your voice or to feel you close to me, but it also ached when I was touching the face of another body that was not yours. When I ran my hands on the shoulders of a boy who was not you. But they leave me once they realize that they have merely rented me from you for the day. They leave angry for all of the ill invested time spent trying to take something that was never theirs. 

~C

waldeinsamkeit.

My covers are shoved unceremoniously onto the floor, my limbs splayed haphazardly, and the thick curls of my dark hair sticking to the nape of my neck.  My heart won’t stop beating, and I can’t help my incessant exasperated sighs.

I’m too exhausted to get up and turn off the blasting heat (turned on by the nimble fingers of my ‘must be undeniably mad’ flat-mate) but I know that I will have to do it eventually before my skin becomes only tender sweat seasoned flesh encasing my slow-broiled organs.

If my tale was a book, and every life experience was to be labeled with a chapter title, I suppose this particular time of my life would be called: “Conscience”, or maybe “Finding truths”. That is if a poet or someone who has a tendency to lean toward the love of prose is penning my tale. However, a more than likelier title would be: “So tired of hiding the truths from the people I love, and purposefully isolating myself in fear of judgment, that I could just spit.”

But that would be too long of a heading to make a very good title.

I never wished to tell anyone the truth, not a friend, nor a relation, or a supposed love. If I fabricated my life, bending the truth to create a persona of an individual that is entirely its own -- unique, yet undeniable in character -- then how could I possibly become attached? I would smile inside and chuckle to myself. What a good jest. No one knew me. Not really. And that alone made me untouchable. For those men with long metal fingers could thrust their cold hands down my throat to extract what they believed to be my essence, my soul, the clock that made me tick. But the joke was on them. Because they had nothing to hold over my head to hurt me, because what I allowed for them to know was controlled and calculated.

Why can I not love them? Because they do not love the real me, therefore, they cannot love me at all. And it is easier to not love someone who does not love you, than not love someone who does.

I remember when I was barely twelve, sitting in an uncomfortable wooden box desk in the portable classroom just outside the main building of my middle school. I recall my eyes following the veins of the crude sketch on the white board of a human heart, only half listening to her as I imagined the different colors I would have used if she had asked me to draw it instead.

While rustling through my bag to find my plastic box of colored pencils to map out the idea on my homework, she said something that caught my attention.

The human heart is approximately the size of a fist.

I remember stopping my hands from their quest to examine them; curling my short fingers tightly into my small palm.

I remember thinking that this was indeed an impossibility; that the way I could feel so ardently and love so passionately must be larger than my frail hands, something more powerful than my twelve year old fist.

When I rode home on the bus that day, instead of staring out the window per my normal routine, I stared intensely down at my hands. When I got home I ran into the bathroom, tore off my shirt and climbed up onto the vanity to look at my reflection in the mirror. I held my fist over the place I imagined my heart to be. I could feel it beat beneath my fingernails. It was then that I noticed the split and broken skin on my pinky finger, and upon closer inspection of my hands I found scars, callouses, and thick veins protected only by a thin, near-translucent layer for protection.

I was afraid. I knew with my fervent and desperate love, I would not last long in ‘the real world’. I would soon take a bad fall and shatter to pieces, never to recover.

So now, older, through an impenetrable shadow I often sit in a grimy corner. No one put me in that corner, but I chose it for myself long ago.

 “I lie, you know” I warn them, a smile tugging at my lips. I never tell my own origin story, and if I do – not accurately – and never the same way twice. Rumors are started by people who watch what I leave behind, perpetuated by those who wont know the truth or find closure; and spread by those who didn’t know more than what they were told. What is truth? Never trust the truth. A lie is simply a lie, but truth is subjective.

“Stay away from this corner,” a sign cautions, “its awfully cold there.” But men read it and laugh arrogantly, saying that they will wear a sweater.

Then after their visit, they leave shaken, and their friends will look at them, shaking their heads with pity, and say that they look so cold now.

I lie because I am so convinced of my own destruction, that I’ve never taken the risk of being destroyed.

This personality characteristic I was always so certain of. Until a few evenings ago. I found myself caught up in a conversation with a soul that I didn’t know very well, when this individual asked me a personal question. I had answered it a million times before, a thousand different ways. But as I confidently started to speak, I gagged, choked on and then swallowed my pre-conceived story. I found that suddenly, I had no desire to act, or to pretend. I simply no longer cared.

Something happed a few days ago when I was on my knees, talking with my best friend.

I believe that he changed my heart.

A character flaw that has plagued me since childhood – an anxious desire to keep my secrets hidden in a locked box, and an avid need to escape the judgment of others – disappeared so suddenly and drastically overnight.

And for the first time in my life, I am discovering myself through truths, however subjective. And although I may not be the desperately mysterious,  tragically poetic and heartbreakingly misunderstood dark beauty that I have always wanted to be, I’m learning that I’m actually okay with simply being me.

I still have so much to learn, and so far to go, but I feel like I have not just taken a single step forward on the path of self-actualization, but perhaps I flew a few miles instead.  

~C

stop here.

“I’m not sure what I want to do, but – well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A few weeks ago I spent the weekend in a house by the lake that was the color of sage and murky skies. With white shuttered windows that lined the walls; that with the sunrise – tinted the room a dusty rose. It had a feel of a cottage, yet with its gentle nautical décor, you could almost taste the salt of the sea.

 Each morning I woke early in the sleeping house, wrapped myself snugly in my blanket with only my eyes and nose peeking out and walked with stealth out the back door, sitting comfortably on the stairs of the porch to watch as each star was blown out by a somnolent wind. I am but an invisible cloak, lucid drifting like warm waters dancing along the coastline, salt kissing washed pebbles without romance, transparency burning into the core of my vacuum.

 I caught myself sighing as I gazed longingly across the landscape, and found that I had indeed fallen in love with the hazy fog that settled stagnant on the grassy fields, as well as the wild lavender that grew – compelled – into the cracks of unkempt asphalt of a forgotten time.

As the house would slowly shake itself from the cobwebs of the night to greet the rainy days, I watched settled at a contentedly comfortable distance. The entire adventure had ultimately been a new experience for me. It had been quite some time since I had allowed myself to spend time in a curiously large group of individuals. Large groups had a tendency to intimidating me. There was always too much to look at, too much to take in, too much to experience; not to mention that I never quite knew what my role was in them. But I spent those few precious days sitting blissfully on the beach, draped in a damp towel; my wet hair trickling cold water down my skin, and my feet buried in warm piles of sun-soaked sand.

Now I sit hunched over my notebook, hiding huddled under my bright yellow covers; to create a camouflage from the evasive sunlight, which peeks uncertainly through the crack between my curtains to see if I’m awake yet.

One night a few weeks ago I drove around the city with a friend. I sat in the passenger seat, pushing myself against the door and nervously biting my nails as I always do. The night was warm and the windows were down; and I wanted to stick my head out into the rushing air like dog but was afraid of losing my self-controlled demeanor. I chattered about nothing in particular, my mind all too self-aware as I tried to decide how to position my legs to keep me from looking uncomfortable. The music was loud and kept causing me to lose my sentences, and then panicking as I tried to find where I had left off once again.

Suddenly I found familiarity in the landscape and the turns of the road and told him quickly to stop here.

We sat idling on the outskirts of the small town I grew up in, where the highway winds off into a dirt path with not quite enough gravel to cover its dusty canvas. There isn’t anything past this point but the dying wind combed fields, besides the muted colors and the near purity of the atmosphere. The headlights of the car beamed across a field, as if in a scrutinizing fashion. I unbuckled my seatbelt to step out of the discomfited air of the car and into the cooling breeze of the night. I ran my fingers over the skateboard decal that had been slapped onto the face of a no trespassing sign hanging on a splintered fence that read: “stop here.” It’s bold and hard. It hasn’t been worn down with the weather like everything else here seems to have been.

Stop here.

 An angry black X had been spray-painted onto the back of a fallen lawn chair, and someone had scribbled permanent marker faces all with dull flat eyes.

I knew this place. I had a story here. I walked out into the beams of the lights and into the field without as much as a glance behind me. I pushed through the tall grass; remembering it being much taller than this. I heard my friend call after me, and paused to ask myself why I was so impossibly head-strong and willful before continuing forward without a sound; feeling the warmth of the lights slowly melt into the darkness. When I reached the clearing I smiled. Because although it was not exactly as I recalled it to be, I knew it was the same place.

I dug the toe of my shoe into the dirt and scraped it around – waiting patiently for my frantic friend to find me – my eyes drifting along the edges of the clearing, the corners of my mouth twitching. My eyes settled on an old shirt, and I allowed my mind to wonder who the owner was. How old they were, why they left it lying somberly in the dirt, whose name was written on their heart, how their tears tasted, if their mother was kind, whether they belonged under the sunrise or the sunset, or if they were more alive in the lake or the ocean.

Noisy rustling from behind announced my friend, and pushing through the grass started loudly spouting frustrated questions.

 I wanted to put my hand over his mouth and tell him to be of a more respectful of nature, that this was a happy place.

I ignored him, and started pointing excitedly, and talking animatedly. I told him about my pink unicorn kite, and how my older sister had a dragon kite that I was jealous of. I told him about how years ago after church my Dad would drive us over here and fly kites all afternoon to keep us from going home and waking my sickly mother. I told him that my Dad used to tell us over a mouthful of tuna fish sandwich that the wind was magic here. And I realized when I said it, that I still believed it. I told him of the time when my little sister’s kite blew away and we split up to find it, but spent the day playing marco-polo instead.

When I was finished I looked at him expectedly, waiting for him to say something – although I didn’t know what would be the ideal response – instead he seemed annoyed about my running off, and commented how we should probably be heading back to the car now.

I felt a little disappointed, but I don’t know as to what I was expecting. I walked formally behind him, and with a nostalgic glance behind me, I wished for that different, happier time so long ago.

I shut my eyes tight. Pulled in a hard breath; fast.

Stop here.