we're not going to the town; we're going to the city

something something how the mind moves faster than thoughts can catch up on. How at first the sorrow is like a flower you can hold, flash frozen so it is beautiful but hurts you when you hold it, cupped in your palms. The sense of things falling apart, falling together. an ugly way of existing. Typing things out, no writing things out just to test how they look on the page, but it's never been like that, it comes to you fully formed and you're only listening to it with your ear pressed hard against the door and then all you need to do is transcribe it. never really wrote that before, the writing of the writing. the way you're only a transcriber and the words are already there, although sometimes you do have to do the job of putting them in the right order or guessing at the words that never made it over, so all you have is a gap that kinda goes like


soft ___ in the snow ____ light ___in his eyes ___ burnished___ he turns and


and sometimes the words you guess don't quite come out right, and the wrongness feels like a toothache or your feet in too tight shoes. but theres a lot less uncertainty than what you'd assume. This is what you assume: you've left the coffee balanced on the counter next to the sink while he's shaving, too narrow everything, something illicit about it, coffee in the bathroom, something unhygienic certainly, but you want things like this- three types of shampoo in the bathroom, wrinkling your nose at the sporty smell, iced mountain lake or something. coffee on the sink, speakers on the sink played loud over the water, laughing into his neck in the middle of a handjob when the radio plays a country song. Thinking how many lovers before I find the right one? I am just joking. I keep crawling into bed with friends and hoping I am close enough to touch, the downward spiral of a minor note. I am not myself somedays, I am someone I used to be, but in a way where the stitches don't fit right. if you've decided to wear a mask, you better keep that mask on all the time.

you better never let anyone see you take off the mask again, see your face underneath. A shelled creature, like a boiled egg, fragile. you better never take that off.

blood on the edge of a knife. Death in many ways, most clearly on the brightest day you can remember, a bridge you can draw over and over, the air turning into bubbles before your face. I am stumbling to the car, stumbling into bed, the pills are working, the pills are still trying to work, how pathetically grateful, slide the covers to your face, slide the blanket over your eyes. Go to sleep.

I want to keep going until the past becomes clean and I can take it all in one swoop somehow, like a blanket to unfurl into the wind and then wrap around my shoulders, but i'm not so sure where to go