He’s got hitchhikers eyes and callused hands from sandpaper tracing all of his highway point markers. He tells me that the feeling of dying comes, not with every needle, but when he stops to listen to his mother’s heartbeat. He says he can count how many day’s he’s got left, string them through his guitar, and play time like a con-artist. This does not worry me. When my mother would pick up the pixie dust bottle and crawl into my bed late at night, she exhaled nothing but dried flowers, exhaust fumes. The best people in this world are the closest ones to death, she’d say. We were given special instructions. Ones mommy wants you to be strong enough to ignore. On the morning of her death, there was purple. I could see just where all the past lovers had gone digging for this treasure map. Her veins held up each shovel scar and rock grinder with pride. Look at me; look at how I never disclosed your secrets. Her body fought so hard to keep the whispers encased in stretch marks and green eyes it decided to turn on itself; kill or be killed. He always had one foot facing away from you like at any moment the weight of his Doc Martens wouldn’t be enough to hold him down. He collected state signs, stuffed yellow-dotted lines in hand sewn plaid pockets and always carried change. He was wind chimes. Everything about him said air, said vanish, said constantly disappearing. I suck down impossibilities like cigarettes, let the ash sprinkle over every muscle of logic in my hands, till I am so bruised, I am asked what has happened. I cannot say that just last week, I was sitting in an empty bathtub, trying so hard not to become my mother that I broke the bottle for blades. We each cut lines. His are powdered on bathroom tile, mine stain porcelain. He treated life like the challenge of running fingers through flames, had an ax at the base of his wrist, and my cymbal heartbeat of worry, turned forest fire, has every song he ever sung, but I forgot her voice a long time ago. He stole my pistol throat, traded it for the belief that carving promises into skin can force accountability into fingerprints. Denial is never more comfortable than in the spaces between your teeth. My tongue wandered through the graveyard that was once his mouth. And now I am left to clutch the memory of a t-shirt, I never had the nerve to steal, and just because he never stopped singing, doesn’t mean he didn’t stop breathing. Wind chimes are not meant to hold in air. And denial is never more comfortable than in the spaces between your teeth ✱✱✱
with vodka that the bouncer picked up from the Station brought in he tucked it into his leather jacket as if he did this all the time and it was nothing to him he was not afraid (or very good looking) they would catch him with it and after they were inside he handed it to her too—yuck loud the music of Heart a band from Seattle and REO Speedwagon Can’t Fight This Feeling loud and exciting but she didn’t drink it anymore it wasn’t worth sneaking in she thought ✱✱✱
i want to do something grand like take a picture of the sunset every day for 50 thousand days. i want to be 150 years old so that i can do something at 150 years and it be more amazing for it, like climbing a small mountain. throwing crab apples at passing cars. getting up and making breakfast. for weeks at a time i think about how maybe when i go deaf you could kiss my ears and they'd be fine again. do you want to be alive at the end of the world with me ✱✱✱
The summer rolls on, chugging slowly away, one of many compartments on an old train crossing the southern shores of Africa.12 hour nights tumble into sunny lawns back into warm stars drifting across the wild quarter sky. We find ourselves in the same places, sitting still while the world gently moves us. Here, in this cup of time that’s been reheated over and over, every move is deliberate. Not forced in any sense of the word, but slow and saturated with purpose. I hold it in my hands and my fingers close around tightly with predetermination. This is not an accident. This is a current filled with iron energy, no room for blank space or hesitation. You can look behind you, but you only move in one direction: North, if North is forward and if the makeshift magnet floating deep in the woods of your heart hasn’t steered you wrong. I know I can’t ask everything of you. All I ask is that you carry love and tenderness with you, as you always have, across tens of thousands of miles. Allow me to keep your smile hidden, held inside a flannel pocket, to bring out when I have almost forgotten what it looks like. Love familiar, well-practiced and easily carried out, love as truth realized too late to be enjoyed fully, but enjoyed anyway and sent to past versions of ourselves. They will find it along the way. Can we do that? Can we keep and carry love for each other like postage stamps, traded back and forth across the world, worn and faded, but still lovely by the time they arrive? Secret messages in the margins of maps, single lines to each other that only we can translate, messages that can’t be packaged in any other way—the weight of empty rooms and half-remembered songs? To tell you the truth, I think we can. I don’t see any other way down the road. ✱✱✱
watching my toes flip-flop on the subtle mud marinating in the poached egg of a sun sizzling in silence as it watches me spill mascara all over my new white flamingo crop-top from a store that uses bangladeshi sweatshops watching my crimson-red nails swallow all the golden memory the sky’s embraced over nineteen years of tears and puddles of blood leaking from my nose because i can’t drink enough water because when i collect every crystal-clear drop to drown in sorrow and not even a sip goes into my dehydrating body watching each bespeckled pebble soak the heat like it was born in a flurry of confusion and sweat and grew up knowing its path around the milky way, cycling around the globe on an eternal journey for the perfect shoe to cross its path watching the eyelashes i blow into the air thinking that wishes are thoughts you can shed like stray hairs and antidepressants strewn into toilets, flushed into a dying blue-and-green planet i’ll never have to face watching this destruction as i walk forward, and forward melting into the summer glare my parents tell me is only temporary, and soon i can go back to wallowing in gray, rainy portland days that sink beneath the moon and surf under the starlight watching my body lay in bed like the socks in my empty, empty college dorm room that are unclean and unloved like the red high-tops in the corner of every teenage girl’s closet and the simple sound of ripping a sheet of paper from a sketchbook you’ve kept for ten long years, technically a decade but using synonyms doesn’t feel right when you’ve already got the words on the tip of your tongue while you’re watching the planet spin ‘round and ‘round on its permanent axis in a very non-permanent life as your red high-tops are shifting so quickly forward and your eyes are a little glazed as you remind yourself this is only temporary ✱✱✱
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