I was his worry stone.
he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,
Or name a single interest of mine;
he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,
Or put the coffee on in the first place;
he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,
Or untangle the nest he made.
All he could do was rub his hands together,
And wonder where I’d gone,
after eroding me away.
You killed my chicken.
Your digital chicken. It’s a game Heather.
You killed my chicken. And didn’t apologize.
It wasn’t on purpose.
You didn’t apologize.
It’s not a real chicken.
You didn’t apologize.
I’m not apologizing for killing a fake chicken in a fake world. It’s not real babe. It’s just a game, please stop acting crazy.
Don’t call me babe when you don’t care about my feelings. You killed my pet in the game and didn’t say sorry. Even when I’ve expressed it so openly that this matters to me.
It shouldn’t! That’s the whole point. This should not be a big deal it’s pixels on a screen!
You’re being disrespectful.
You’re being insane! Get over the bloody chicken!
I’m done.
Thank god.
With us. With this. You don’t take anything that I care about seriously. You’re so above it all.
You’re breaking up with me over a stupid fucking chicken?!?
I’m breaking up with you because you’re mean. If you killed it and said you were sorry, everything would be fine. You choose to act like a dickhead over so many little things like this and I’m tired of it. You try to convince me not to care about something instead of caring about it with me.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
This isn’t the first time you’ve done this. Remember the cat puzzle?
Oh how could I forget the stupid cat puzzle.
Even now you get so incredibly upset whenever I’m upset about something. You try to shut me down before I can express I’m unhappy. According to you, I’m not unhappy, I’m just crazy for no reason!
You said it, not me.
Oh, goodbye Dereck. Goodbye.
This won’t bring the chicken back! You’re such an idiot.
Right.
My skin prickles hot; I asked the old man a question and he answers with a story so far unrelated I had to turn around and see just who in the hell he was talking to, because it certainly wasn’t me! Yes or no will do just fine, I kept hearing myself say in my mind, my voice gentle like a kitten’s fighting tooth and nail to drown out his gravely droning on about airplanes and the war. Outwardly I must’ve been screeching fake niceties and not pulling off my polite half assed head nods because his eyes were wide, and albeit dull as ever but he seemed perturbed. And that’s saying something because men like Robert don’t seem anything, they’re simply half dead elderly men roaming the earth to challenge God. Look how long I’m living! Keep knocking Jesus, I’m not opening the door! I can’t imagine being a gold digger and accidentally marrying a Robert. Undying so much as they are unriveting. Later I looked in a mirror and saw my face, still plastered up fake happy from our little conversation if you could call it that. I understood instantly why he seemed so off-put by me, I looked clinically insane. This fake it til you make it crap has got to work for somebody but it is undoubtedly not me. Unfortunately God put me here to be as authentic as possible—to punish me of course.
Isn’t it cruel that true recognition demands separation? That we cannot have night and day without the horizon keeping them forever apart, that I cannot join souls with you without losing you and myself in the process.
She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.
Is that why people write? Because no one will listen?
Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.
It is between worlds that I sit, holding the hands of the future. Virtual realities spin before me as threads in a spindle endless, and I marvel at the fabric of us changing. Breathing life into our imaginations. It is here teetering on the tightrope above oblivion that we navigate ever forward. Lead by our ability to imagine something new, something better that what we have now.
I’ll figure it out, I always figure it out. Why not now? What’s wrong with me?
Nothing. Maybe this is a problem that can’t be solved. Not even by you.
Life is happening, life is happening all the time. I can’t seem to catch it in between my fingers, elusive as rays of light. I cannot keep it high in my lungs, it leaves me like a breath. I am a meager stone in a fast coursing river and I watch what erodes me away. Life is cold. Invigorating. I wish I could hold its hand and study its face before it escapes me again.
Building empires on falling sand, when we sink it is by design. Pinnacles dull, golden eras dust as they live on in old men’s memory and no where else.
What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.
Time keeps passing, I fight hard for change. It does not yield to me, wind against a mountain. I carry on, I carry on, still. There is nothing left for me to do but die.
Let her down softly, I say. Let her down softly. The little girl that lives in me enduring this world confined by rancor deserves a gentle bed to die in.
Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.
If I must abandon myself to earn their smiles, what are they worth to me anymore.
And I am content to keep hurting. I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing.
Depression is driving a car dry, no oil, no gas, just habit. Nothing slows, people die, jobs disappear, experiences pass. Everything is a miraculous colorful blur that illicits no feeling in you. You remember that it used to and this pricks your fingers with drops of sadness. It grinds you down, your body grows weary. What doesn’t kill you right away doesn’t make you stronger, it just takes it’s time. And that’s all you have, sitting in your hands like a steering wheel stuck straight, propelling you ever forward. Never caring to ask if you’re ready, if it hurts. Depression is driving a car dry because that’s all you know how to do. To keep going even though you’ve nothing left.
Facism rises, having not been put down. Like hot air in feverish men’s chests, pounding their rib cage with the old adage, me before all, me before all.
I am fickle with happiness. They say you don’t know a good memory is happening until it ends, but I do. I’m acutely aware of how precious the good times are—pair that with the odd feeling I get of being watched by my future self, having dealt with the deaths and tragedies that growing older brings, seeking refuge in the past. I feel anxious knowing it will be over, and that no matter how deeply and fully I cherish the strong legs beneath me, the wind on my face, my parents by my sides, it will end the same. All happinesses are doomed to be memories. And that bitters them for me; when I am at my happiest, and my smile is wide as it is earnest, I still taste the rancor in the back of my throat.
My sister drops her head underwater and I follow shortly after. I close my eyes as tight as I can and with cheeks full as balloons, I hold my breath. We both breach the ocean surface and look for each other. And we’re right where we left one another, of course. I miss that feeling of certainty, of knowing who I’m swimming with. Now we are grown and childhood is a twinkle in my eye. I see broken pieces of it if I look hard enough, disappointed at friends that don’t keep their pinky promises, at my husband for leaving the chores to me when she never would. She hated the dishes, the dirty refried beans dad would let soak in the sink and float into patches of dark pinkish slime. But she didn’t let me do them alone. I sit at the beach with my legs long and in the sun. I am warm but not complete. I look around at the flurry of faces, the assortment of multicolored swimsuits striped and polka dotted. It’s charming, but I don’t think I’d know where to look if I put my head under like I used to.
Lucky for you, there are people far more forgiving than your inner critic. May they find you and show you the softness you cannot show yourself.
Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.
Am I denying myself happiness because I do not deserve it? Or because I am afraid that if I do, it will end anyways.
I want to know peace for while, if that’s alright. If the world can spare it for someone like me.
It does not matter the school you come from but your passion for your subject. There are private school boys who have never lived life, slept through it as it is but a dream to them who will never know the endless strife of the girl from nowhere trying to make it in this world on grit and determination alone. No money in her pockets to cushion her falls and catch her when she is pushed back from the gates of academia. Only the belief that she will get back up; propelling her like north wind on a shanty sail.
Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.
The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.
I’ve had such wonderful times. I wish I could remember them easier. I wish the brain wasn’t programmed to cling to the worst things we’ve ever experienced, to keep us safe I know, but some things no matter how long you dwell on them you cannot protect yourself from. It’s torture.
I never knew nothing could be so heavy as it is now. Air rests in my hands like handlebars on a bike to nowhere. Chain links of silence drill their fingers into my ears, it is all I can hear now. My muscles weary from carrying do not rest now that he is gone. They anticipate the next departure. They cling to routine, clutching, clutching, unable to let go. All they’ve ever known is hanging on, just another day. What is there left for them now but emptiness, slopping down like wet concrete. Frozen in time.