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她说去你妈的花海/我说你这么说好帅 0728

Mike put sunflowers in the cart today and it made me want to cry but like many things I only really had myself to blame for it- we had this talk before, he doesn't like flowers bc they just die anyway and this is true, I went through bundles of them for a while a year back or so when I'd sit at night with the overhead big lights on, trying to paint them. Leave them in their glass jars for a week and watch the withering take hold, the way the stems come apart at the bit where I cut them, bloated with water and slimy. Where the hell was I? Right, the fact that flowers just die after a bit... And I said yes but that's why I like them (it's important to like them) and I did, the way they sit like a little timed bomb on my desk waiting to be captured (futile) for a bit, imperfectly, moldering so fast I can see the rot in real time. There's a weird feeling looking at yourself through the glasses of well.. hindsight. I appear stupidly naive but with a kind of optimism I envy. Every morning I wake up and try to be honest with myself, measure the needle, the distance between what I wanted to be and what I'm really feeling. Pushing that box into the boat and rowing it out into the middle of the lake under an overcast sky- it's not so bad but it's not, well, it's not so good either.

I think I want to ask what is the use of remembering the way the cellophane wrapped around the flowers looked in that moment, thinking oh wow I'm so triggered in the grocery store, standing like a stranger beside the frozen shade of myself watching her watching the flowers. Who the hell cares what the light looked like? The crisp planes I started folding in my head without really meaning to, how I would solve this or that problem to make it look like what cannot be captured at all. And the same person says I care, even though I hate that I care, even though I want to believe it doesn't matter, even though I believe it matters and I cannot make it un-matter, no more so than I can turn time back and smooth out wrinkled petals. I don't want to want to keep things. I want to keep things.

Well, when you're in grief- I just want to tell you about it, music turned up loud on the bridge where it says YOU MATTER in orange lights. I just want to tell you about it. I still just want to tell you about it.

between the glass and the flame

the way things make you soft, like longing plain in the lyrics on a guitar song. It's all love, you're shouting at the world, it's all love, impatient like someone trying to chivvy along understanding, taking the child's triumphant fist and uncurling it and asking and then what? It's all love, and then what? what's more interesting then that? What's more interesting than taking the whole would asunder, trying to break it into pieces you can understand but always hoping that you wouldn't be able to, that someone will come along and show you something you don't understand and thus, change your world forever.

you want there to be someone to sing to. You want someone to understand you. it just doesn't make sense, doesn't it? More and more i feel like I can't read stories that have an end to them that's just grief that's just here it is. the end. What you learned will have to do. I don't care about that, spelled bluntly. I don't care about hopeless stories that have love in them. What about what happens next? I mean we all receive our allotted times spooled out into paper chips, the date and hour, the sound of bells and clocks ticking down. Doom spelled out. I don't care about the doom, there's always doom, in the story, in you, in the bread you eat and the water you drink, breaking down slowly. Getting impatient again like well what else? What else is there except grief, doom, simple things when you come down to it, simple like an ocean is simple because it's only made largely of salt water. Well. What there is I can tell you like this:

fortune cookie shape. the way cushions get. Sometimes you squat down level to a cat's height and imagine yourself enormous and breathing loudly. Sometimes you remember a friend passing a hand over your forehead and heat like summer beating down. Another hand; easy reaching. You quantify love in many different ways, some of them serious. Smile around your open hand, make him step into the rain. make her say, i still love you, make yourself breakfast, im fixated on the shape of things, on the moment of things, on this exact moment in fact, typing with my chin on my knee on my laptop like i did as a teenager on the floor of my room in that Stewart avenue house, between the doorway and the bed. On the moment I can make you laugh, make your eyes widen, make you do a stupid thing just to show off, there is only this, right now, before the doom comes. There is only what you choose to do when the price is already paid.

a friend's hand in mine and the snow coming down, cold. I am not alone.

二十三号病床

I broke a bowl today. Miles and aeons of time between the fall and the breaking. So much time that's why my brain gets stuck on, frog walking across the kitchen floor all the way to the bedroom with a roll of packing tape in my hands, sticking bits of ceramic, picking the big shards up carefully between finger and thumb. M hands me the paper bag wrapped in plastic, there's pasta cooking on the stove, there's half an hour between now and when he has to go back upstairs to the meeting.

It's weird to fixate on things, weird to come back to this habit I thought I had long discarded. Find myself wading in the shallows and looking at things very carefully. And not just looking- writing things down. It's easy to keep conceding ground, saying: I am having some trouble. At first I think it's I have some trouble feeling, which is only partially true. It's more like a dog chasing it's tail. I feel, I deny myself the feeling, I feel, I deny myself the feeling. Even the most honest person, me holding a knife up to my own throat, do it or so help me god, sometimes when you're your own enemy for so long it's hard to put down the knife. I let the wolf in, I let her wear my skin, I wash my hands twice, three times, different sinks each time.

Thank god the bowl wasn't glass at least. The ceramic shards glint dully every time the light passes over them, easy to spot. Easy to pick up. It's a bowl from the college days. I don't remember ever breaking a bowl in my life, at least not by accident. I go to get my packet of tea and drop it, spilling the whole thing on the ground, but it's easy clean up. I just shove all the individual packets that spilled out back into the big box. Everything is like that, like little inconveniences that don't quite take effort to correct but somehow leaves a weird little shadow in the mind.

I am thinking a lot, but it all makes sense, spooling out thread by thread, slow and calm instead of feverish. I feel more like a dog on a treadmill instead of a dog chasing it's tail- not quite believing I'm getting anywhere, but no longer looking only at myself with that fixated, brutish quality.

take me to the ball game

You ever get tired of saying the truth, and nothing but the truth? In the car you start wondering if your hands are shaking and if it's perceptible, knowing with this completely alien feeling that if you were asked to lie now you would not be able to. Just sick with it, drenched in horror, unable to do what you have always been so good at doing. If asked the question, you would not be able to lie convincingly.

That little voice- you have grown weak. Easy to pick out now, like an insidious little worm crawling on the patchwork of your brain, but now that you are trained you can pick it up between thumb and forefinger, examine it when you hold it to the light. You cannot quite explain why it makes you sick, having to lie for a secret that isn't quite yours, too many things not told and assumed and held in the dark.

Go back. Sit in the entrance to the shopping mall and your hands are clenched and there's something peculiar inside you, like a fish grown too big for it's pond, which now you can recognize as trauma. You ever wander what it's like to have the sharingan but not the Uchiha genes?
Borrowing a metaphor for something I have no words for, able to watch the harm coming and unable to dodge it. At least you can see it coming. At least you can see.

Go back. Coming down the mountain bleeding all the way, not just physically but somewhere, again, inside you where the words will not reach. Sick with the bleeding and dizzy with the desire to pee so bad you're spending most of your willpower there and she reaches out and holds your hand. You're the same build so you shouldn't quite find it so comforting. You make jokes about your dead grandfather yeeting you off the mountain- yeeting is the exact word you think very loud but, again, impossible to translate- all the while feeling like you're about to fall off these infinite stairs, bouncing on every gravestone you see. Grandfather. You miss him only in the most abstract of ways. The wind in the trees. You miss him for yourself, the emptiness and uselessness of grief. Somewhere inside you there's a voice that suggests; perhaps it isn't so bad to give in to this kind of self pity. Graves are for the living, anyway.

Go back. Hugging over the excitement of getting the right figurine from a blind box.

Go back. Things I cannot say. There you go, the first time you say I. You want to erase it, make it a story that belongs to someone else. Going in the CT scan with your eyes screwed tight and the doctor saying there's nothing wrong. But there is, and now you know what it is. The dizziness, the slow headache that builds up in your right eye like storm blowing in over the mountain.

One person in the world who knows how you really feel. You've changed so much. But not enough. You think the word is trauma bonded, as in the dictionary definition, not the popularized version. We spies, we slow hands. Wandering the mall with your fists clenched tight and your shoulders bumping, wondering what to say, how to say it. Don't you need to write a diary? Don't you need to write things down? Sometimes the rage takes you by such surprise you have no idea how it happens, and then it's in the room with you and demands recompense, like a ghost that gets resuscitated at the strangest of times. Now you can see clearly. Now you understand a lot of things. Now you make choices as you should've done, and still.

I can still see her, you know? I am still her. I look at the photos and think that's a child, but in my head is the same voice there's always been, the same girl I've always been.

Weird. Now I have to walk apart. Now I have to stand up and detach. Now I have to put a hand on my on her shoulder, tell her it's alright. And I really believe it.

I still wish I could burn it down somehow. Erase it. Cut the threads completely. If the right people die, etc. But the right people never do. What could /I/ possibly do? The uselessness of my westernized thinking. It's not so bad, I think. But the fish is still inside me, silent. And the harm remains the harm, which no fire could ever wipe clean.

Current Music: yes- halicali

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