And while I unravel

“Someday, you will ache like I ache.”

My wrists 

            are in stitches

I’m running

            out of skin 

//

I bought Courtney Love's diaries

secondhand at a Booksale

Kept a torn-out picture of Frances Bean

profiled in Harper's at age fifteen

dressed as Betty Rizzo from Grease between

the pages of my favorite part,

which I thought had said: 

            I can grow a new heart

But I should have been reading more carefully

//

I feel my body 

work to fix itself like 

always

            when all I want 

            to do is destroy it 

            completely

It stings

            and it stings 

//

Books, too, in slow decay

You hardly even notice

I picked one up this morning—

it had ghosts 

            (and a love story)

And, now, spores along

its lavender spine

i just don't know where i can be found

i'm looking at job openings and i can already feel my chest tighten prematurely at the thought of meeting new people

i looked at xxx's and xxxxxx's tumblrs from when they were 21/22 and they were exactly the way i am at this very moment, idealistic and excited and eager to overshare, but it's still so them, the essence of them i mean, and it got me thinking about how someday i'll be 27 and the virtual world i live in, this safe space i've always had, will be vastly different and i'll be different too

i don't know how i feel about that

i'm scared i'll stop being this vocal about the things i love and i'm scared i'll stop caring about them altogether

a couple weeks ago i found out about an artist called bunny rogers and she wrote this

and like same

maybe i should get a job at phoenix publishing house because it's so close by and maybe i'll get a meghan daum/joanna rakoff-esque essay out of it

i keep reminding myself that christina kelly, definitive sassy magazine writer and ellegirl editor-in-chief, started out at footwear news

i'm about to watch and cry to titanic for the second night in a row

every so often i become obsessed with the histories of shipwrecks

2008 was the year i started becoming who i am now and i think i've always used it to measure the passage of time and this year it hit me just how short, and just how long, a decade actually is

in fact we're three years away from a whole new decade think about that

Unceremoniously

Or, This is why we stopped speaking

I.

I think you got tired of always having to initiate things. (I don’t blame you.) I could never get my nerves to calm down enough to do it myself. You’d pick me out of a crowd and let me know you’ve seen me. Two-finger salutes, references to our late night IMs. And I loved you for that, I did.

It was never that I was pretending not to see you—I was pretending not to exist.

II.

I lied and turned down your invitation to go to your band’s show because I knew I didn’t belong.

III.

There was so much left unsaid between us and it felt cheap to me, trying to cram them all into one word mumbled in passing.

Your name—three letters, four—had never been so heavy.

IV.

You kept telling my friends you missed me and not doing anything about it.

V.

And I don’t know if you know this, but I tried. You were never there. It made me feel strange, asking for you at lunch, afraid people would see through me.

“Have you seen him?” They hadn’t.

I doubt anyone ever really knew we had...this. Sometimes I relished it, that we had some secret togetherness. But every time I sought you out and asked where you were it made me feel small and discombobulated.

VI.

You might have been trying to tell me something once. And I got ready for a confrontation, to try the truth out for a change. But then my overthinking got the better of me, and I froze and walked away.

You didn’t follow.

Maybe I did ruin everything.

VII.

Nobody actually saw through me those days, I’m almost certain. But when we ran into each other in the hall, you acted like you did. I just followed suit. Or maybe it was a mutual decision we didn’t even realize we were making.

God, I’ll never know.

VIII.

I used to think I was sad for us, and for a while, this might have been true. I still get sad thinking about it, if I’m being honest. But I don’t think it’s about you or me anymore. I feel for people, how we drift in and out of each other’s lives, how it just happens. How it hurts, and how it stops hurting.

The truth is, it stopped hurting for me long ago, but what I got stuck with is this emptiness I can’t define that’s lost its shape. Sometimes the emptiness looks like you. But the pining never does.

do-over

let’s do this again
play it again
go dancing again
sing to me again
hold me again
ask me again
have me again
write me again
read me again
tell me again—

      (i promise i’ll 
      say it back this time)

see me again
see me again
see me again