Polka-Dot Smoothie

by the way, boys & girls

2009-12-20T14:57:00.000-06:00

I still write. Sometimes. See Annachoic.

Mass Romantics

2008-12-31T23:26:00.003-06:00

No one loves you in winter? In the parlance of the nineteen-fifties, no one dates. We cross calendars, seek comments, lock in patterns, narrowcast to our narrow castes.

If you've never been worth the words, the glue and scissors, my time when you're not around — well, what hours are you counting down? You're on the lost list. I had to replace my little black book. I'll recreate that list, but I can't recapture the kissed. Time being, I've got one.

One, and we're talking mass romantics and Internet semantics. We're illicit but complicit, maybe a little horrific. Horrifically cute, though. Oh, you.

And then I don't like you at all. I feel as baited as ever and can't touch my thoughts. It's sending me on an existential trip until I can't remember why I went. You're breaking all the chemical bonds that tie us to ourselves. You're dropping oil in water and shaking and shaking. I can't bear being a macaroni noodle, but half of a whole. You've come by me and tried to combine me.

Last night, this morning, I want something like sound. I turn on the radio and women cry. There are cities dying like no one you've ever known to die. Is there a moment of peace before an explosion? Don't they deserve it? They, and their sons and daughters with them.

I can't know why this happens. I sympathize for everyone on all sides until I cry too. You don't know that this happens. They were sleeping, waiting for the power to come on so they could study for their exams. You're tracing dark loops through glaring commercial zones. You should be learning. You are dying.

Good morning Britain, because you run summer time and I stay up late in summertime, late into winter and late to the year. I'll tune to where it's already tomorrow. BBC, you're there and I'm not. I'm not through with this year. I'm not even really ready to hear. But when I touch the antenna you polarize all the static between my cells.

Inverse Antennae

2008-11-11T17:41:00.005-06:00

I clipped my clip to my shoplift shorts and lost it in the woods. I would've traded back. I couldn't go back. Every bite was becoming a great white welt, stretching my skin until I couldn't bend. The poison was spreading all the panicky folds of brain tissue. There was only one thing to do: cut my hair.

I lost it all and left it all behind. I have locks of Laura's hair still wrapped in foil. What would I do with my own?

The girl who kisses and tells and tells and tells could evade them no longer. Walking home I counted tallies: no, yes, not sure, yes, yes but straightened, no, yes, yes. Since then the count's up. One's the one I see but can't have, one's the one I have but can't see. One I stay in with, one I could go out with. I'm banking on minds beneath curls, but I am falling in love with falling markets.

The wind into the city is bold in my face. I hate pickles until April fixes them with chedder and tomatoes and I hate year's end until spring returns.

These Are Not Gypsy Premonitions

2008-09-09T19:47:00.000-05:00

“Hey, you know what?” When I speak, you are the perfect listener in perfect silence until I’m afraid you’ve walked away.

You are always still there. The attention can be almost disconcerting. Like this it’s almost refreshing to have to fight for a little. But like this, I’m impressed you can remember who you called.

“Am I connected to other people by bubble people?” you ask me. “Are we all connected by bubbles? I think we are... oh my God, I’ve uncovered the secret of life.”

There is a great, great deal about bubbles. “We use language to describe our bubbles of thoughts,” you explain, “because they’re just bubbles.” This is how it begins. It veers into vast thoughts of bubbles, everyone’s bubbles, a pool of our bubbles in which we all mix minds. I cannot write you down fast enough.

“You don’t even have to wish,” you promise me. “The universe will take care of you, as long as you want it in your heart.” I'd like to have you, but at first you seem not to understand the concept.

“Well, which part of me do you want? There is my mind, which you have right now, and there is my body.” There is something about the way in which our communication allows me to have your mind. It is so abstract I can't cling to it long enough to write it down. I am weighing my worries: fear that having your mind is factually impossible, fear that I will never be worthy of it.

“However, if it is my body you want, the universe will take care of that too... at our second meeting. Yes...

“I don’t know where my pants are. Or my boxers.”

I break into giggles again. It is dark outside and I can't see the leaves of the trees until I press my eyes to the pane. You are far, far away. It is as if I have magnifyed the map without moving. “Hey, you know what?”

“I want to fuck you.” Oh, I know. That wasn’t what I was getting at, but I’m there.

Again, I must convince: “Yeah, really. Why wouldn’t you believe me?”

For once ever, you do. “Now I want it really bad. I have for a long time.” What? “I’ve known you in spirit for a year. We were connected by the same bubble.” Really now? “It's our lives, and our frames of mind...”

You see ghosts, on your shelf and at the end of your bed. “Two ghosts, and they’re playing patty-cake with their two ghost-like hands," you say, engaging and mystical. "They’re hanging on fishing line, making patterns. These are not gypsy premonitions, they are warnings, Anna.”

I have them all out of order. “Uh oh! They’re coming! I think they’re evolving!" you cry out in fear, breathing heavily. "I have to hide under the blanket! They’re going to eat me! I’m going to die.”

I laugh, I want to cry. “You will,” I say. I don’t lie to you! “But not right now, so don’t worry. Don't freak out, you'll be fine.”

A tiny sad man with no eyes is walking on your wall. His name is Keith. There is another person beneath your skin, and you want to take him out and see what he has to say. I kindly convince you not to use sissors. It's a bad idea, I say. Just pop the bubbles with your fingers. Besides, why would there be another you in your stomach?

“Because that’s where my gut feelings come from!”

The mind is what the brain does. “I have a tic," you say, "that goes tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, take time, tick tock, tick tock, take time. It’s coming down! It’s coming down! It’s got long arms with light bulbs on the end like searchlights and they’re looking for my brain -

“I’ve lost my mind.”

Like this it takes a try to claim your attention.

“I’m going to fall asleep and slip away into a land of magic. Which you wouldn’t know anything about. I don’t know why, I just felt like saying that. I’m going to be naked, riding a horse bareback.” Like this it takes a try to claim your attention.

“What?”

“I’m sort of fucking in love with you.”

“Really?”

You don’t believe a word, sweetheart.

How hard for the covers,
To be pulled from the slumbers,
But a ghost never gives up its sheet

Tell me is it the same,
For the rattling chains,
Or whatever you wear when you sleep

You remember the time
I told you to take off your clothes -
You were as naked as a window

But I’ll take all that nothin’
Over nothin’ at all

Oh, I’m just a hallway,
For ceilings and walls babe,
And emptiness all the way through

You know you’re asking too much,
To be held and not touched,
But somehow that’s just what you do
- Josh Ritter, “Naked As A Window”

Shenanihanaflanigans

2008-08-22T00:04:00.000-05:00

Am I so conceited I would never notice eyes on me? I'm always in lower orbit, slow on the uptake or faintly clueless. Enough of you want a hand in my skinny jeans that I left behind my favorites. I ordered replacements and new ones, blue ones, which shipped here from Kansas and took all week.

I might have missed this before I knew I had it. I wear grey and black and brown and striped, but you haven't seen me in blue. I'm sorry purple is all you made it in. If it's consolation, you made good.

When I dream between pages too heavy to turn I wonder what I've missed, wake up and try to imagine where it is summer still exists. Can I say you get me off intellectually? In collapsed conundrums we dial names we were keeping to remember by, and speed speaks too: we never wanted to forget.

WTF? Conversation is enchanting. I'm making this up to you.

Magic Tricks

2008-08-17T01:13:00.000-05:00

In this bottle I strand attributed, a strand attributed to the head of Abraham Lincoln. The South breathes around her bloody edges and I'm so slow in museums - I'll never leave, and you'll leave me all behind.

All alone, my cotton candy crystalizes in the air, into long hair strands I can eat into like acid. Jen tipped a pharmancy onto the floor, Jack won his tickets onto the ocean, Jen is going to borrow him and never let go. I'm a future future figure, a radio stickler, and I'm afraid my inspiration is going to go with you.

Did the boat sink? I traversed enough highway to keep you close but you're already far away. I'm writing thoughts into eyes on her screen. Blue movie moonlight brings tears and Jen makes me laugh, so go faster! Twins in zebra stripes! Don't wait one second - this belongs in ink.

Warmth inbetween lines on pages can melt them to bend and before long I'm hanging in your hammock like it's been forever. I can't slow my fingers curling. On Sangamon Avenue I tried to steal proximity and now it multiplies the distance. When the ship tips the theme is in minor key and I'm sinking through summer into ice solitude.

I miss the moments in them and in moments I miss them. I want a living image stepping off trains, curls and coats of arms, and real letters until then. If I were you I'd take so many chances, but if you were electric I'd be your wires.

The sound of the engines and the smell of the grain
We go riding on the abolition grain train
Steven A. Douglas was a great debater,
But Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator
- Sufjan Stevens, "Decatur, or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!"

Charmers

2008-07-15T11:38:00.001-05:00

I fell through the floor of my great cement tower and beneath me lives a boy who looks like DiCaprio and acts like Dean.

And this kid with the skateboard is my emo boy. You don't even want to know where I dug him up. Poetry class.

So that makes two and with me it's three and that's company or at least a tight corner. But no one loves you in winter, and a rebel beside you keeps you safe in the city. I'm all wild or washed up and seductive apparently.

I can't bring back what I haven't written, but there are girls painting tiny pictures and everyone's messy rooms are so so beautiful. I'm all free, in sandals, in transit, in Chinatown, in this park where I kissed two boys last afternoon.

Another for the A-list: Depp is the King Cry-Baby and Edward with those sissorhands and herein lie the differences between my you-know-whos. Edward is all for this and fifties boy finds out after class. Hmm hmm.

So they've sexed me up and they're texting me back, and I'm bored and I dream - about motorbikes, and the College Board. Send me my scores, tell me your intentions, pose for my pictures, write me a poem, kiss my hair, stop time, and make me brave.

Should we get up
Let's wake up
Let's get dressed
I'll let you walk me up the street
Back home

Thank you
It was great
Let's make another date
Real soon
In the afternoon
- Cat Power, "Could We"

May Be Yet

2008-05-06T23:10:00.000-05:00

Oh dear, April. Am I still good at this? Hello, May.

This post was going to go down a bit differently a couple of days ago, but never mind. It starts the same and veers into difference, which is what I need anyway.

Have you really never spent a whole weekend holed up, incapable of action, thinking about someone? Don't try it again, okay? Mr. March will never happen, so I'm going back to last summer in every way I can.

I can't can't can't can't wait. I want skinny, scarred tan legs and saccharine strawberry melted milkshakes, tangy ocean salt behind my lips or tangly bleached hair knotted within itself.

Summoning summer means this is the course my thoughts will take. If I make it off the waitlist I might live a month up the city, shower late, skip meals. I could stay up at night if there's anything to do, sneak down on the train if there's anyone to see or to sleep with.

I'm getting plans, tickets, registrations, good scores, violently violet jeans, into Lou Reed, and the best bicycle. "Patience, patience, patience," writes Paul, who's my favorite source of advice for forty minutes every fifth hour. I can't can't can't can't wait, but I am and have and would for ever so long. I want to blow off but it means too much; you want to sink underneath and find it's too dense.

Summer's on my scarred bloody heels! The sun fades my slacks and warms me like toasting slow-motion meringue.

I've been waiting since I don't know when,
And now it finally seems about to start
I swear, I swear that I will do my part

July the third we stayed up late
Remember
And thought how long we'd have to wait
Remember
It'll be so long until it's soon
It'll be so long until it's June
- The Fiery Furnances, "Here Comes The Summer"

Saturday Night

2008-03-31T01:17:00.000-05:00

I like these soft, stubble-muffled kisses. You keep the count of boys above the count of girls. You are beautiful and I should keep this to myself.

That was clever, clever as a pirate - like Alison, like you don't even know it's happening. Did you? What do you mean? I was waiting all afternoon. "Nothing too crazy... maybe the Cell Block Tango?" I'll just go crazy slowly. I'd love a boy who will grin into my face and nuzzle. I'm afraid we started on the wrong assuption and that your liking me is no safe one.

Can simple lust be so loving? Couldn't it maybe stay like we made it? Secrets out? Secret's out.

Oh, love of mine, would you condescend to help me
'Cause I’m stupid and blind?
And desperation is the devil’s work,
It is the folly of a boy's empty mind
Now I’m feeling dangerous
Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad
Lead me to a living end,
I promised that I’d entertain my crippled friend
My crippled friend
- Belle & Sebastian, "The State I Am In"

The Effluence of Affluence

2008-03-17T22:57:00.000-05:00

I'm convinced perfect girls are getting it out of bottles and I think I should buy some more.

I like magazines fat and models skinny. You're not supposed to be able to see the lines below my eyes or even November from here. I bought red slingbacks, left a record somewhere, haven't cut my hair yet but keep listening to the Pavement song. "I don't care, I care, I really don't care - did you see the drummer's hair? Advertising looks and chops a must."

Naked quote. Goddamn sixty-nine in seventy-five makes me crazy. I like naked products and naked people, preferably in glossy pictures and holding enormous seven-thousand-dollar snakeskin handbags.

Sell your vicious snow and screaming toys; I want hundreds of dollars in cotton dresses and white boots. Exhaustive econ textbook makes capatalism classy, but the floral industry is in for the euphismic hard sell and tacky trade magazines. "Permanant botanicals" are made out of petroleum, which is surprisingly impermanant and also gathers dust. How much of an unblushing markup will it be for the "sympathy solution", real actual dying flowers on the coffin?

Here's what I've learned: they're close to indestructible. Pinch, cut, pierce, wire, drop, tape, squeeze, fluff, bend, ruffle, cut and recut. It's not design - that's a euphanism too. It's closer to rote, rotate, poke, pick, add and multiply. It's made out of fake ribbon, wax tape, too-shiny wire, and self-importance. It's sickeningly gaudy and instantly dated.

Flowers are free when they grow outside, free to cut and free in old bottles full of dirty water. I'm going to live to see them, free them, mistreat them, and bring them home to you.

The Nineteen-Story Tomb

2008-03-01T01:18:00.000-06:00

"I want summer," moans Lindsay, upstairs, downstairs, on the floor, under the lights turned out, dressed and shivering. We can almost sleep on blue mats over institutional cement.

Seventeen says stay slim, slices of cake no bigger than your Sidekick. (Did you know you're going to die?) Beth and I are sitting over residential cement, basement rug, tearing through the pages, flipping the LP to hear "Rebel Rebel". I'm never going to be Seventeen.

If they have no brain, let them eat fake. I don't know what these chemicals are, but I paint them into my eyes. I demand nuclear freebies, empty calories, and easy things not to do.

I bought shorts and found myself with nothing to write this time last year, too. I want to lie in my friends' beds 'til the sun shines on slingbacks and bicycles.

February Resolutions

2008-02-02T17:32:00.000-06:00

There's a split in the narrative as the level of my floor rises to meet that of my bed.

The first day of this year I spent thirteen hours in bed with Kat. I woke up staring into Siouxsie's enormously lined eyes. We ate breakfast past 3:30, toast and jam and egg and Simon & Garfunkel. A day at Kat's house is its own color scheme, epoch, towels, plates, publications, ERA era, French horn, prayer flags, poor lighting, nail-polish-painted sheet. Kat is purple and tomatoes and sunshine, Mediterranean teal and pink duct tape.

On that long, long train ride home I considered my future ex-boyfriend and how long that might take. I started in like it was a new year, taped up David Bowie and then Shakespeare.

I didn't finish the wall or the shelves and drawers or papers or the book about punk. All my friends are racking up their months together and it took me nineteen days. I don't know enough comic-book villians. He could have shared but there's snowny miles between and we can't fly. I'm picking them up elsewhere, going in other directions. I want to really fly back to the city all summer.

See It Now

2007-12-30T22:24:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure if we're supposed to talk on air, so I'll keep the loving piece in peace and quiet. I eat red onions I cooked in hot sauce because I go in for the little thrills, play Death Cab loud because I'm soft rebel.

Tomorrow night I'll tell the story to Jen, who spent summer on trains with me and listened to everything that never really happened. Jen is a superheroine, just to tell you; she understands teeth in the mirror, shows me to wear scarves, reads literature, talks philosophy and in French, turns Rubik's cubes like nothing, knits sweet fuzzy disasters, rips up cords from Lacoste, writes poetry and changes underwear without taking off her pants. When I'm through telling her I'll telephone and then I don't know what will happen.

I can't wait, can't imagine, can't think what else I could do. Jen and I are there for the planning and the tickets. You and I are together for the asking and the affection. I'm all affections, in the sense of airs and acts and Pride and Prejudice pretenses (I read that on summer trains too). I think you see through them, see something I can't, saw it then and see it now. I think you told me you liked me since you found what I'm about, in those words, "since I found out what you're about". I think we share a wavelength and I think you'll look like Edward Murrow someday.

And I do believe it's true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you,
Then I hope it takes me too
So, brown eyes, I'll hold you near
Because you're the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
- Death Cab For Cutie, "Soul Meets Body"

C'mon Eat Your Covers

2007-12-26T21:03:00.000-06:00

The world's shrunk horizontal, into empty endless high times. I take happiness so throughly as to never leave myself anything to say. I'm a bundle of nerves and a parody of rationality. It exposes my fear, caution, and artifice. If you can love the self-restraint of shallowness, the early-spoiled secrets, the semblance of single-mindedness, the self-conscious shut-in, all's more to you, sweetheart.

This instant connection is faster than the gravity, paranoia, and orders holding me by the way it goes. I can't wait for it all to be new tradition, old hat and I hope it takes us as damned long to fall apart as we took putting it together.

My baby loves me, I'm so happy
Happy makes me a modern girl
Took my money and bought a TV
TV brings me closer to the world

My whole life
Looked like a picture of a sunny day
My whole life
Was like a picture of a sunny day
- Sleater-Kinney, "Modern Girl"

Beauty Is A Sin, Oh God

2007-12-24T17:53:00.000-06:00

I want to be hit in the head and pass out dramatically more than I really want to play volleyball. I try to imagine the tape lines and the net without the sneakers and fat idiots that play with them, but I haven't got nearly the wherewithal to avoid it all. Clearly I'm too goddamn pretty for this and it breaks my heart.

Lauren breaks my heart. She's 'round for Christmas and I assume our eyes might have met. I hope she's keeping all in, going to chapel every school morning. You can wonder if she'll keep the lie or let it grow out, faith or unbeliving, and how deep it goes. As deep as how we were friends in June. She deals with what is necessary and I'm not.

That's the mindset that makes me cry. I'm not sad, not suicidal, not even really upset, just alone under that crazy swaying leaky roof.

Friday was warm and thin like the oldest flannel nightgown, three hours of the sixties in school and all afternoon invisible in bed. It's hard to turn me around when I think I'm good for being up to nothing. My fear inspires me to imitation and I could never really pass you up. I spent eight minutes trapped at a red light that wouldn't let me go.

We went shopping, which is mostly shoplifting anyway. (You're the magnet of my cheap moral compass, dear; sometimes misdirected but attractive nonetheless, not to mention worth the price paid.) Kurt Vonnegut hates semicolons, which I use a lot. I talked and talked. I don't know what I did all night really; there was discussion and dinner, prayer and jealousy, ice cream and sleep.

I got disoriented in my dreams and woke up to see them broken like the unbreakable are, spider-webbed and unshattered, car glass in a cellphone screen. Oh, you know. Someone else kissed someone and he happened to be the regular boy you would have liked. It happens. It happens to me all the damn time and I find out in typescript and the middle of the night.

"How goes it?"

It goes by too fast, I suppose. It's just too late in the year to complain about summer and summer before.

So I heard it's no good to run,
But it feels so much better, now that it's done
And tonight I have to leave it
Yes, tonight I have to leave it!

So I heard you know how to write it,
Does it mean you're good at putting things on paper?
And rumours say that you're very sorry
Oh no, you're not sorry, no you're not
- Shout Out Louds, "Tonight I Have To Leave It"

Write Telepathy

2007-11-13T22:50:00.000-06:00

I'm the schemer and you're the dreamer. We're countertactics, Lomographic, telepathics. It's in my head, but you hold it in your hands.

My mind's all for diagrams and the telephone wires. I want to whisper, dearly give you the wrong idea. This cannot come out to be my fault, so let's slip back into my third secret. Do you remember how we swore never to tell such a little thing in the scheme of things? It's not so difficult; each box is a day and each boy is a way.

I thought FM came through clearer at night, but I've got nowhere to go and nothing to wait for. I can hear you everywhere and altogether the pulses of matter in the dark don't scare me so much as do I.

Lately Departed

2007-11-04T15:06:00.000-06:00

A bit of an apology now don't you, dollface? For being my little bit of cheap attention, you know. I don't really mind, but hell. If it could only be me, I'd offer you an explanation at least.

I've got that feeling like they're secretly avoiding me and you're just the latest. I dreamt of posing you with my skeletons and running alongside in haunted houses. Why this flair for the lurid, and not even death? It would have been right up your alley but I lost the map and it doesn't matter because everyone smokes too goddamn much anyway.

Nakedness,
A flying lesson
Tattered dress,
Sunburned chest
You will pay for your excessive charm

With a boy who knows less than he thinks
Drinks up his expensive drinks
Be careful with the details of the war
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Details of the War"

Irony & Romance

2007-10-22T22:23:00.000-05:00

Can I borrow something from the future? I could do the same for the past and it would save me so much time in the present.

The breath leaves John Kennedy's mouth like I can't even see. I don't know that much about Communism and neither do you. I'll write you a story about super-heroes' villians and how I feel every minute of all day.

My boy's back on my side, and yours never left you. Twist, apropos, apple, Acropolis, benthic, body politic; I don't know that kid in the least, but he lives in the corners of my eyes.

I'll trace you like a crime scene, speak to you like my superspy microphone. We'll wait in the park, listen for the numbers station on the shortwave radio, spin the decoder ring and swallow the evidence.

I used to with Mars in the fake and the lie. I can't tell if you're a lowering of my standards or just scary or far too bad for me. I thought the same of Alex, though, and he wasn't even at the time. Let's cram all our ex-lovers in one short paragraph, sing along to something, and lie around all the afternoon falling into fainting couches with Daisy and Gatsby and you and me.

You could die any old minute, darling, and all I'd like to know if the end is before the start. You pack me up and unwrap me like Christmas ornaments. Maybe I was pretty, but I'm all false advertising and turn of phrase. You'll come 'round or drift away and I'll think and think and sweat into my silk until all my clothes are threadbare.

I know I'm alone if I'm with or without you,
But just bein' around you offers me another form of relief
When the loneliness leads to bad dreams,
And the bad dreams lead me to callin' you,
And I call you and say, "C'mere!"
- Rilo Kiley, "Portions for Foxes"

Lovely Offhand

2007-09-19T01:05:00.000-05:00

Loosen up and write it out, write to Alison, write in French, write lovely long sentences with your prettiest handwriting, news of your life and the subjunctif. The sale won't take you out, the draft won't let you up, the let won't set you in; fill up three pages double-spaced and pass the time as fast as you can.

I love riding shotgun and I can almost see how I'd like to see it go. I'd be my own greatest hits, acting out, acting under, maybe crazy, weekends until we hate each other to death. I want to analyze your handwriting and disprove your conspiracy theories. I'm more attached the less likely it seems.

Well, affection is lovely, and lovey, you make it sound like we'd make it, easy. I think about time, sealing wax, and sex to speed through the sermon - I'm just the worst. You surface as I slip to sleep, name as I can't see the face, come for me some afternoon.

Fifteen-Love

2007-09-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

Well, surely the sun is brighter than it has been any other day. It's not radiating off the singles sideline and I'm not sick and senitive to light. And truly, that ball is greener than all the rest. It's not the same and that's how I can see we've hit it out.

So that makes it something to think about on my way to retrieve it, and what I'm thinking is that the sun shines every day and I wouldn't be walking here if that ball wasn't just the same as always. And that, you understand, disproves what I was thinking to begin with.

I used to think I'd be better off playing for keeps, but as you'll see no one's got any and I haven't learned to keep score anyhow. Well, if I keep opening doors, I'll surely get out. Well, if I say I'm feeling well, well, will that change a thing?

Subtractive Philosophy

2007-08-27T23:29:00.000-05:00

My brother's gone to the movies and I'm curling up to watch the small screen. The homemade song on the radio made me cry because I'm afraid there's only one reason I love what I say I do.

I'm sleeping and stapling, stalling, playing tennis with Jenni until it all goes away. The clouds are rolling in again. All the trees are waiting until they outgrow the sidewalks or until someone comes to cut them down.

The actor playing the newsman reminds me of the boy I passed up. I've been in love for so long it's breaking me to pieces. I should be swimming but I'm wearing boys' track shoes with the spikes off. My imaginary friend is a skinny blonde Sebastian I'll never meet.

The only place I've seen that name is on a tombstone. I can't decide if I ought to buy black or gold or boots or the same shoes again. Can I tell you, can I show you, will you understand? No? Well, I didn't think so, and it won't hurt you, anyway.

Secretly

2007-08-19T17:14:00.000-05:00

By the little are equal to the large we don't mean the large are the same as the small. You you think I'm going to believe in you when you're as tasteless as all that?

Get ready to hew to the labels, sew to the styles. I regard tops and bottoms like personalities, press and hang. Am I better than the last? Would I have found you if I had walked some other way?

Trust your new muses, darling, and there you go. You're off, dirty hair and clean dress, younger and older, fatter and thinner.

I love her oldest clothes, those that still smell of sweaters. She was my reassurance. She's more an indulgence these days, and smells like blonde brownies.

But on we go. Tell me again what you told me and this time I won't call for my line. I'll tell you you're the one I want. I didn't and I regret having to regret it and I'm so very sorry.

I can feel the end of the summer inspiration coming on like the chill. Rain in the rural is for the grain and the cotton and sun in the city is for me.

She had a name, she had a spirit, she had a line in the play if you waited to hear it
But the master of disguises, her demise was her design, they said
-Sunset Rubdown, "The Mending of the Gown"

Cruella de Vil

2007-08-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

You can see the blue in her veins just like the red in her hair. Here's a sachet of energy, renewal, and protection for her skin. I wish it worked on the rest of me.

I overheard her voice singing. Does it not count because it was amplified? Is it real if it was only on a screen? Is it over because no one told me?

I went to listen to bad teen poetry instead. Sex, drugs, drama, oh my! We're young and we have bright futures but we're cutting and fucking and starving and smoking and killing ourselves and reading thesauruses trying to make it obscure like it means something. It hasn't changed me.

It didn't fool me, either - it just makes me look like one. I'm an outsider. My ticket's expired and now I can't go back. Of course it changed the day you sorted out his change into the rest. It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't the only one. I'm cozy in fur, Playboy in 1964, smart of course but weak and lonely.

I've seen the company you keep,
You're on the sofa hidden deep
While on the telly Sid James speaks
To you like God

You're always looking for a sign,
But boy you blow it every time
You hear a voice begin to speak
You ignore it and go softly to sleep
- Belle & Sebastian, "Put The Book Back On The Shelf"

In Chic Long Ago

2007-07-22T12:34:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot of elevator certification certificates. I nearly stepped on a little robin, half fuzzy and half feathered. I thought I'd call him Benny and hoped he'd still be around the afternoon. How far can a bird that can't fly get? Plenty far, I suppose - look how far I went.

Surely stilletto heels get stuck in the sidewalk and the grates. There must be a whole layer of greening pennies and expensive pens at the bottom of the river. I'm dreaming about banana-cherry-blue Slushies, my red sheets, Lord Voldemort and the way I'll kiss everyone forever. There was dirt in the cracks of my lips; it was beautiful.

If I'm soaked head to bare toes, again, will I be electrocuted on the escalator? Best to take the stairs, I think. I can see the changes in the light through my closed eyes. Tomorrow didn't go like I planned in the least.

Seven weeks of river walkways
Seven weeks of reading papers
Seven weeks of feeling guilty
Seven weeks of staying up all night
- Belle & Sebastian, "A Summer Wasting"

Today Starts Tomorrow

2007-07-09T22:18:00.000-05:00

I'm wearing sunglasses underground and Jen's sunglasses look like Warhol and the Underground. If you read the stairs in reverse, they'll tell you a little about how I'm feeling.

I'm a little ahead of myself and I'm a little afraid I'm going backwards. I want to make out, to make something that doesn't hurt yet.

I got utterly drenched - it washed most of the plaster off my clothes. I forgot my camera. I couldn't pick a song. I had a fun coincidence. I may never tell anyone who wasn't there. Did you know? No one I've told really knows.

I'm sick of being alone and talking about myself. I'll work on today tomorrow.

Adventures In Moving

2007-07-08T01:04:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking about the surely dangerous, my old friends chain smoking and me tasting photo chemistry on my fingers. I've found a mood to fill my space and a space to fit my mood. I love the afternoon and the dusk and all the safe in the dark at night.

"Get action," Theodore Roosevelt maybe said. I'm shaky ridiculous - is it alright if it took me until now? I think I've caught that divey rooftop feeling. I was lying when I first wrote it, now I'm thinking hypersonic. They mailed me two fives, text I won't read and fees I won't pay. I don't understand how brainy people live. I want to meet the deaf girl from the concert and learn how the colorblind play Twister.

I saw three weddings today. I'm thinking about sending postcards, taking the Electric Line, eating ice cream, being kissed.

'Cos my friend said he'd take you home
He sits in a corner all alone
He lives under a waterfall
Nobody can see him
Nobody can ever hear him call
- Oasis, "Supersonic"

Walk With A Purpose

2007-06-23T00:44:00.000-05:00

Where did you go? How'd you know which way to go, how did you keep going when you doubted yourself? You have no sense of north and east - how'd you get home?

Your feet sound like four and the trees sound like rain. The streetlight blinks on after you walk under, so you can look back and tell them how you went. There's broken glass in the street that pulses like downed fireflies as you move. Follow, follow, I miss you and I promise you'll feel at home. I daydream at night and I drempt we strode up, met at the corner.

Touch all the leaves you can reach because the textures feel like shaking hand after hand. Run your head thorough pine boughs because the sting on your scalp feels like being alive.

Alpha Beta Cicada

2007-06-06T19:31:00.000-05:00

The book in the library advises against blogging for personal reasons. Best save it for the privacy of therapy, it advises. Busy career-builders like yourself must be careful. The personnel can hear about the personal, and they will both come back to get you.

My personal's got my back, and I wish you wouldn't mock.

I'm all titles and subtitles, afraid to tell you what's inbetween. I count the pages until the end of the chapter in all my books, then start reading the next one anyway. I'm thinking short thoughts. I'm thinking it might be best if I wrote short too.

About that, and how.

I'd be happy to have you. What can we do together?

This song sounds like Daft Punk rolling on the carpet at your party playing "Twist and Shout". I can't really make out the words. The made-up girl in the reading on my French exam went to see Daft Punk. You'll love it, let's dance.

The stock market's rising like the 1920s, and if it's good for everybody, why should it ever stop?

I'm in love with the city, hey hey hey
Shop down to the pavement (?), no no no
I can't leave you, no, in the summertime
- Coltrane Motion, "Summertime"

The New ERA

2007-05-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

I bought a little boy's skateboarding t-shirt that smelled like Alex, paid for it with a dollar bill that smelled like him too. I think that's his smell, worn paper money, fiber and grime.

I wore the shirt, to the benefit concert and to the movies, until it smelled like both of us. I sweat kind of citric, more than a girl should.

I washed it Sunday morning, thinking of the day I washed Alex's socks. They probably weren't really his, and I suppose that's only the beginning of the pathetic and the sordid. Out of the wash the shirt smelled like an empty take-out carton.

Last year I wore the same two yellow tops all the time. This fall it was the blue tank I dyed a sick grey since. I'm wearing this shirt instead of the boys' red ringer tee now. It's faded black, with a green Irish angel whose wing is a harp and trumpet a Hurley logo. I want to dress like the kind of boy I still want, slim-fit t-shirts, straight-leg jeans, stripey thermals and battered shoes.

Suburbia's no savannah. I don't think they'll be fooled.

If You Want Nothing!

2007-05-21T01:18:00.000-05:00

I planned to relax and enjoy the excitement when I was on our way, when anything else that went wrong - traffic, getting lost, spontaneous human combustion - could no longer be our fault.

Why'd you change your mind and change back? I would always come back. My friend saw you downtown, thought you were supposed to be with me. My parents hate your guts again. Who'll ever teach me to dance?

Jerk, selfish, selectively immature, asshole, darling, I think I said all those things yesterday.

Though I'd like to be the girl for him and cross the sea and land for him,
In milky skin my tongue is sand until the iridescent band begins to play

He's my Brandy Alexander,
Always gets me into trouble
But that's another matter
Brandy Alexander
- Feist, "Brandy Alexander"

I'm Always So Far Behind

2007-05-04T23:54:00.000-05:00

At the bottom of the backend, fifty posts down, are the things I wrote a year ago. "I Can't Act Blanche", and today I couldn't act Fantine either. I always pronounced "Tearstrip" like tears - today is the first day ever I've seen it could be about tearing apart.

We always were too much like a romance. I feel like I always knew it. Do you remember "Superficiality Hates Beautiful Things"? We traded things too beautiful, and I know you never, ever wear my earrings, never did, don't care to fake it. We had hip, heart, hair, total strangers, and "something so special that it can only be discussed late at night in quiet places" - I know we did! I can't remember, I've blocked it out so I won't cry at night, but I know we did, I know we did.

I hope you're enjoying the most one-sided ending ever. Read what you wrote yourself on "I Don't Care If You Don't", for the love of God! You're all poison. If I could I'd break into your laboratory, search until I found the antidotes you've lost. Sick to our stomachs, rolling down hills drinking soda, it's the sort of thing only I miss. What are you rolling now?

So mock the people who want to be with me. I used to draw people I didn't like as murky-colored essences, bubbling in flasks. You've got somebody beautiful trying to swim in acid. I still dress like your paper doll, still act like your marionette. Let me tell you, they've been loyal.

Are you my friend when I need one?
I need someone to be one,
Take anybody I can get
Sometimes I wanna call you,
And I feel like a pet,
And I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet
- The White Stripes, "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)"

Circular See-Saw

2007-04-26T21:24:00.000-05:00

Head-to-toe red, when'd I turn this color? My gym shirt is a fair pink now. Will I get in trouble?

I almost think about writing it down and decide to save it and forget it instead. I've got nothing to balance out my mellowness, nothing to match up my happiness. I can't find any picture pretty enough. I'm emotionally detached - me?

No, I'm not. I can convice myself of anything, I'm telling you. Alexis is alright, I'm well-loved, S-B M is dead, sexy boy smiled at me, Alex is a pixie. Alex, you're a, I won't even say - you'd care more than I would! I'm the more apathetic! I'm emotionally detached - me? No, I'm not. I can convince myself of anything, I'm telling you.

One-time-only special! It rains as soon as I sit down, it pours in the sunshine as I sit for hours. I don't know where all my time goes - listening to the same songs over and over, maybe. Nothing in the whole world is relating to me. I'm emotionally detached - me?

No, I'm not. I've got nothing to balance out my mellowness, nothing to match up my happiness. Lesser's coming round to pick up the stuff of his I've got, stuff I've had since we broke up two years ago. Alex's staying away to practice at the dream-shooting range, practices strumming bowstrings in his free time.

All the books I read reviews of are based on the authors' childhoods, as if grown-ups can't relate to fiction. I do understand - I'm pretty emotionally detatched myself.

One, two, three, four, tell me that you love me more
Sleepless, long nights, sighs, what my youth was for
Oh, teenage hopes arrive at your door
Left you with nothing, but they want some more

Oh, oh, oh, you're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh, you know who you are

Sweetheart, bitter heart, now I can't tell you apart
Cozy and cold, put the horse before the cart
Those teenage hopes, who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to run off, to one little lie
- Feist, "1234"

You Are Almost There

2007-04-24T00:37:00.000-05:00

I remember an assignment last year to write about a special place. I'd left it 'til the middle of the night. I'd already done three pages in verse about my perch on the the third-floor balcony, already tried writing something about London. I was doing something with Alex the next afternoon - getting in trouble, I think. I love wordplay. I wrote about the state of anticipation.

"It has unpredictable music in days weathermen will never attempt," it went. "It steps from long-awaited jet planes, waits beside me in carnival queues." It felt like missing the last step, like déjà vu. It made little sense at the time, hardly any now.

Time flies when you're looking forward to something, I thought just the other day. Don't they usually say, "Time flies when you're having fun"? I think I like it better my way.

I almost always do. I'm thinking I'm at my very best when I might get what I want. I know exactly how to make package-tracking numbers work. I can't help but manipulate personality tests. I'm endlessly flexible if I think you're going to be bending with me.

Don't be impatient. I'm preening and polishing, passing for something better until the day I really do it.

Où est Pantoufle?

2007-04-06T19:51:00.000-05:00

Chips broken in the dip make me think of sinking ships. Playing Sigur Ròs for anything either-pole-of-the-world-themed is like cards with penguins and polar bears. I'm faking data that's not worth lying about, finding things I don't need, a wooden soldier, a hair elastic, a dime, a peso. My engagement ring's on the table where my little sister left it. Everybody thinks about eggs with the wide end down, but they don't stand up either way.

One-twenty yesterday was the most wonderful time, when Roux returned and the movie ended and Hanting said she had chocolate and asked if I liked caramel and I couldn't even believe her and she gave it to me and I back to her and to that other kid and walked out of class licking it off my fingers and planning to hug anybody all day, not that creep who asked me out last year but maybe Alex's girlfriend, when I thought -

Alexander, it's Easter Sunday and he can't possibly take me to lunch! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, it ruined my mood completely.

I got a ruined shirt today and I can't remember where I put it. I was thinking about writing something in the bleached-out patch, something clever... "Colors are bright but they aren't very fast!"

I used to be less cute and a better writer. January last year was really good. That was when I wrote, "no prophet but the past," and, "kiss their kickass shoes," and, "your head is full of canal locks". I had no close friends, wasn't in love with anyone at all, and now even I can't remember the perfect note of insane poetry in the post about cleaning that refrigerator. "Can't use the bookmark without opening the Bible"! It's fabulous -

Can't use the bookmark without opening the Bible
Can't close the door before they hold me liable
Can't show you what to do, who you ought to listen to -

And that's as much as I can come up with.

Rusted Nails

2007-03-31T19:36:00.000-05:00

I'm wasting my life
You're changing the world
I get drunk and watch your head grow

The sidewalk between me and home says "A.M. '06", and I step on the crack. "Good times, bad times, sweet wines, bad wines," goes the song I'm playing, becuase I listen to Dark Reactions, if you don't.

I dreamt a film. I was the actress, the cinematographer, and the emotional moviegoer, crying in the cinema as I focused on myself and Alison, sitting on a orange sofa. We were comparing carbon-copy forms you fill out when you lose someone. Alison filled in the circle for "No longer friends". Anna filled in the one for "Would like to be friends", but in sky-blue colored pencil that didn't show on the canary copy.

Earlier, she and I and some other girl were dancing in a rainy courtyard at a sophisticated pary, wearing voluminous ivory dresses with violet and green trim. The third girl and I were dancing it backwards; she figured it out and turned around to match Alison. I knew if I turned I'd still never get it right, and I didn't try.

Three diplomats came to watch and Alison told them she was Secretary of State under President Beck. "Oh, really?" they said, and laughed, even though I'd believed her.

In the stone-flagged living room with the tangerine sofa, I zoom the camera up on the DVD case on the mantelpiece. The movie's called Don't Break My Heart With Rusted Nails. The final scene is the letters TIL, tall and white on the DVD case's black background, filling all the screen. TIL, TIL, TIL, 'til what? Those letters don't even appear in that order in the title. "A six-year-old's choice for a favorite movie," scoffs Annie's little sister from another sofa.

Your favorite imaginary friend lies awake mornings having flashbacks, nights thinking of mean things to say. I hope you go deaf and blind - then you wouldn't have to hear the way I talk or see the faces I make (and then maybe you could be nicer to me).

Well, it's been a long slow collision
I'm a pit bull, you're a dog
Baby, you're foul in clear conditions
But you're handsome in the fog
- The Cardigans, "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer"

Same Girl You Used To Love

2007-03-17T22:47:00.000-05:00

Anna sits up in bed at twelve noon, more or less, all three buttons on her Diesel jeans undone, skimpy blue racerback top alternatingly clinging to and hanging off her torso. Her pink-striped bra and the smirking Pink Panther on her thong - thanks, Shelby - are clearly visible. Her stack of bangles is on the floor to the left side of her bed, her earrings to the right. She's slept seventeen and a half hours, recovering from her hectic schedule of procastination, phone calls, and public radio.

She's been reading Vogue, and narrates compulsively in the tone of haute style. "I'd like to try writing as Alex, you know, 'You're so caught up in yourself,' all that rubbish," she says. "I was going to do Victor Hugo first, though. Do you think anyone would understand?"

She rarely brushes her teeth as soon as getting up - that comes after her shower, clothes, and makeup. She arranges tasks in order of decreasing number of body parts involved. This morning, though, she has no real memory of what she may have eaten the night before, and she's guessing she didn't brush her teeth.

She's disorganized mentally, she tells me. She takes off everything before getting into the shower, even the embroidery thread around her wrist. In fact, she's already got shampoo in her hair when she remembers what today's the anniversary of.

She remembers what she was wearing that day - yellow racerback, Forever 21 jeans, green flats. She almost knows what underwear (blue-and-green, Victoria's Secret, perhaps) and bra (same one, she thinks). She may never be quite so enthused about being Irish again.

The White House, 1814
Moscow, 1812
San Francisco after the earthquake
I loved you then as well
The library of Alexandria,
And all of Rome at least twice
And I know this is the biggest blaze
I've ever seen in my entire life

A million firefighters
And ninety-nine alarms
An ocean full of water
I will burn through it all unharmed
I will burn through it all unharmed
I will burn through it all unharmed
For you, you're so beautiful
Goddamn, you're so beautiful
- Bishop Allen, "The Same Fire"

I Wanna Be A Suffragette

2007-03-15T00:58:00.000-05:00

I'm deathly sick of that picture of the goddamn dead sunflowers. It's at least three years old, it's been seen before, it's a terrible way to think about beauty in death. It's not part of my color scheme.

I keep thinking of the greatest titles and no content to go with, which is fine because I keep forgetting the titles. I wish I'd been born in 1902 or so. Fountain pens and streetcars! Brownie cameras! I could grow up to be a flapper!

I want massive collections of vibrant color. I spent hours and hours at a lecture today, drawing a huge collection of patterns and taking no notes. I spent all yesterday afternoon singing, "get out of the office, and into the springtime!". I haven't seen so many people in public for months.

I'm wearing maroon brocade pants. I dropped my coat in the mud to chase a boy up my street. I numbed my toes wading in the river. I fell over on the stairs. I ordered a sundae and got an ice-cream cone. I'm getting a tetanus shot next week. I've been worrying for weeks about how I'm going to explain that I will not be able to put on a Band-Aid.

I've had this romantic image of going running. I'm going to try and appreciate every warm day this year. I wanna go kite flying.

The springtime is the season
Where everyone's a friend
Loneliness and desperation both come to an end
No matter how you died through winter,
In spring you're born again
Your life might not be going good,
But spring helps you to pretend
- Of Montreal, "Springtime Is The Season"

Let's Hear It For Pipe Dreams

2007-03-12T00:04:00.000-05:00

I like old-fashioned anatomical diagrams of hearts. If you have some, I want to learn to draw a heart from memory.

Let's hear it for the people you would kick out if only they lived with you.

My eyes are stinging, have been for hours. There's always been salt in my tears, so why does it hurt now? There's salt in the sea, salt in the bath, and salt on pretzels.

I hate pretzels. Let's hear it for tables of junk food you can't bear not to eat. I was sick and asleep all Saturday, and I'd like to go crawling right back.

Let's hear it for waiting all day to get a pile of junk mail on your welcome mat. I'm thinking of writing you letters, but I'm sure I'll come to think better.

My wrist - "nails driven through the palms will strip out between the fingers", and I hope that image haunts you - my wrist, it has stars, curvy brackets, ivy, birds, flowers, and "DENIAL DENIAL DENIAL DENIAL" drawn on. I did it reading Kafka in church.

Let's hear it for long-term deception, for decades of repression, for bad reception, and for concealing depression.

On Monday evening,
The cloudy skies
On Super Tuesday,
I wanted to die

And so you love me,
Sometimes I'm fun
But you only need me 'til
The darkness takes the sun

Away from me,
I've lost you
- The Submarines, "Vote"

Empty Emotional Life

2007-03-04T14:17:00.000-06:00

The memory of a movie from biology class chills me still. A woman in a lab coat was opening little taupe drawers, years' worth of flu strains, all ice-encrusted. I'm shivering remembering the creaking and scraping and crunching. I kicked a piece of ice down the sidewalk Friday night and spilled my hot chocolate at the cold clattering. I crave warm weather.

I've had nothing to write about for ages. The "with girls" is rubbing off my low-tops and they're getting to say "You're gonna have to change or you're gonna have to go". Just where?

I bought plaid short-shorts. I want to learn to cartwheel on the lawn at the middle school where Stefanie tried to teach me years ago. Her brother, the one we were at the middle school to pick up, he's in college.

I need to find a box, pack up all the rest of the cookies, have a shower, pay Vogue, re-red my hair, find my hemp and beads and Neko Case album and clean socks. I'm running my lips over a quarter that hasn't been clean since 1976. It's getting to the point at which I'm willing to just round up and say I haven't had a boyfriend for a year. Seventeen and Jamba Juice and professional blonde and Tiffany silver and Gwen Stefani would probably win me one. Fake it 'til you make it? Take it 'til you break it?

I always remember a phrase from the days when I got teen-girl magazines, some terribly typical list of ways to get the attention of "that cutie in biology". I thought it was silly, because I wasn't in biology, and there wasn't a "cutie" anywhere, and I tell everyone how much I like them and they ignore me anyway.

Working the village shop
Putting a poster up
Dreaming of anything
Dreaming of the time when you are free from all the trouble you're in

In the mud, on your knees
Trying hard not to please
Anyone, all the time
Being a rebel's fine
But you go all the way to being brutal
- Belle & Sebastian, "Lazy Line Painter Jane"

Hours at Hand

2007-02-07T21:12:00.000-06:00

I really thought I wrote something called "Be My Muse" once. I stay up late, using old hairspray for varnish and a Barnes & Noble Music bag as a dropcloth.

I aspire to be someone who isn't unbeautiful. I've seen one bad picture of Gina ever. There's a girl with long cherry hair who plays serviceable hymns on the piano and has the most fabulous nose, like a glacier descending from her forehead. There's a substitute teacher who reminds me a little of Pocahontas and who told me to give TV on the Radio's new album a real listen. There was a boy in school today, looking down, silent, mysterious-looking in a suit and fedora. There was a friend of my brother's here with the skinniest torso and great strong fingers.

Models don't have to dress themselves and these days I hardly care. I thrill to the feeling I get opening Vogue - appreciation, admiration, bedazzlement, disbelief, suspension of the former, jealousy, wonder, ambition. Some late night last week I felt completely the part. My head's crown was suddenly as close to the ceiling as the hour hand of the clock, my bare feet sticking to pages torn from the Bible (September issue). I was on my fifth time through If You're Feeling Sinister in two days.

I cut girls' waists slimmer for effect, eat a lot of cake for the frosting, write myself notes on ripped-up bits of Chanel ads. It's the cheapest, the easiest, the lovliest glamour.

There’s a mouse in the cupboard that nibbles your crumbs,
And you talk to him every night
You say, “Hey, Mr. Whiskers, I’m bored and I’m numb,
You can stay if you just treat me right.”
- Bishop Allen, "The News From Your Bed"

Kinda Epic

2007-02-02T22:39:00.001-06:00

Take Your Life

2007-01-30T23:30:00.000-06:00

Darling, dry your eyes
With the black lace you despise
You're too late to cry

Now, compose yourself
It's late, it is time to take
Your own life (in pictures)

Neverripples

2007-01-23T23:32:00.000-06:00

Taller than five-four, shorter than five-five; five and a half inches circumference at the narrowest (wrist), thirty-six at the widest (hips). Such are the limits of my body and do not begin to measure the limits of the mind.

I don't know when the sun sets. If there were a real beach around, I'd sit and watch the water every chance I had. The ocean affords a lot of second chances. Waves wave on without a ripple.

That was very last day of first semester there. You were in school. I was reading the Washington Post on the beach and taking on sand through those side eyelets. I've taken a lot of pictures of myself in the last year and I shook out all my ballast.

The ten cuts on my shoulder - left shoulder, because I'm right-handed - are yellow, specked with red, blushed with pink. I'm not interested in watching them bleed. They hold pain I only must feel when my bra strap bites into my skin. I want to watch them heal. It's a failed abstraction. I was trying to draw an X because I thought it would be beautiful. It's an abstraction on failure.

I want someting to record people with. I have empty shelves I could fill with discs of interviews. I'd need a typewriter to write up transcripts. "What's your best memory of your grandparents?" I'd ask my subjects. "When you're trying to make a pen work, what do you draw? Do you get premonitions? Who am I? Do you eat a lot of cheese? What kind of animal would you like to be?"

I've long fancied being a fruit bat. Bridget said I'd be an ocelot. I think she's an otter. Yesterday was about narwals and tomorrow's shaping up to be a panda. Today is an inchworm. Put your thumb and middle finger on a table and do the inch.

Don't you know,
After wiring the thing to explode
Wired for sound,
Wide awake here for days in a row
- The New Pornographers, "Sing Me Spanish Techno"

Take Your Time

2007-01-09T23:19:00.000-06:00

I'm not seeing a way out of this, which scares me in a purely claustrophobic way. I'm not actually concerned at all. I've wondered if this the manic part of the cycle, my carefully slow overcaucious mania of rash and restlessness. Whenever I've had occasion to wonder, I haven't cared.

Here you are in your last bathhouse with fake mirrors. The line from Lolita that's had oppertunity to stuck with you most is Humbert's "perfectly blended shower". Time to find your dictionary, time to reread.

Here you are getting your first glimpse of those two skateboarding blond boys who speak French and whom you desperately want to meet. Here they are on the street the next day! Here's you not daring to smile at them. Here you are blowing past the men outside the bar hitting on your ice cream, back to the crammed boutique Duval Street to fetch a wrinkly, baggy brown sundress out of a cardboard box in the back corner.

Here you are on a bus full of drunk crazy old men who all know each other, like the one who ran his face down a cheese grater and tells you he's a fisherman and was in an accident, then falls asleep and is woken by the bus driver and then tells Stevie (who wears a straw hat with a ribbon and a feather and says he lives in a sailboat) he was beat up for his money and then asks everyone in turn why weed was outlawed and whether they've got any and then starts to warble and mix old songs about West Coast cities and flowers.

Here you are, is it that same night? because it's running together smashingly, with a boy from Montréal, a sixteen-year-old Alex - watch it, it's Aleex - sitting on the pool table, feeding in quarters, failing miserably shot after shot, making embarassing mistakes with the alphabet and mixing up tenses. "Take your time," he says. He can't remember the English word for "aim", but it's what you need to work on. He wrote this thing, this little thing that's like your mental magic chant. L'universe est mon imagination..., it goes. You wrote your address with the "USA" at the end in his book and jumped on the wall to look back on him and his brother before you went away.

Here's you buying VOGUE and your newspaper, here's you a day and a thousand miles away writing the pronoucation of your last name on the back of the receipt. That girl's name is Erin, remember to say hello tomorrow.

Here's you listening to "Chicago" in the taxi before you make it out of city limits (you heard your little sister singing "all things go, all things go" once, you didn't call her on it becuase you didn't want her to stop), here's you cuddling under the icy covers and finding a better song for David Bowie's 60th birthday than the radio did (hmm, a birthday marks a change, what Bowie song could we play about things changing?).

Here you are in the morning, wondering if that sailboat of Stevie's is actually afloat or beached somewhere. Here's glamor you'll be soaking up until you cut it to pieces on Friday, here's Anna Wintour's name where yours could be. Here's Jenny with a big smile, here's Ophelia moving to your table, here's Hannah giving away gingerbread, here's your favorite teacher saying here's the guy who never shuts up, here's the guy who brings only a pencil, and she, she's artistic. And her hair changes color. Here's people being nicer to you than you expected.

Who taught you to expect the treat to be bait on the hook, I wonder?

How Loose So Many Nations

2006-12-24T02:07:00.000-06:00

I left the house Friday morning without the intended can of green tea, ten-dollar bill, and green sweatshirt. That day fell apart and that night I froze to death.

Tonight I rediscovered Donkey's wonderful red chocolate fudge hearts, and out of nowhere there was an hour about the early years of Bob Dylan on the radio, and I spent this evening sewing cheap vintage curtain rings and old buttons to my bag.

I understand now what Diana Vreeland was gushing about, how badly she wanted wonderful pictures blown up. Images of Warhol prints three inches square aren't enough! I wish I could show how big seeing the reflection of my reflection was.

That night I'd gone several without sleeping. I saw a lovely woman's hand snatching at the doorframe and a cricket jumping the same jump again and again and I read the introduction of an old art history book that blew me up thinking about creation and entropy.

Official divisions between time periods always make me expect something new. I can't remember it ever really working out. I'm hoping everything will change with the date regardless. This year should have taught me something, but I can't remember ever learning from a mistake. When you can't bear Band-Aids, you just avoid getting hurt.

How do you like bright scratches and shapes and scars?

This can be the bitter end
I know it won't

Well, some would say I'd made a mistake
Kept looking forward on paths sideways
It's everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand

Well, seasons always shift too late
Spent too much time now on paths sideways
It's everything that is connected and beautiful
And now I know just where I stand

Thank God it's over
- Silversun Pickups, "Kissing Families"

Little Parts of Posts Never Published

2006-12-10T23:35:00.000-06:00

I've known four or five Nicoles, and not a one has ever liked me. I think of the name that way - Nicold&haughty. Not only am I not a popular person, I'm simply not a popular person.

Words I've said this evening include "junction", "please", and "neologies". I'm just quietly organzing my music, reading A Streetcar Named Desire, and making little arty scraps.

One of this couple is bound in a wheelchair,
But she walks alone, he won't let her push him there

I've just never been moved to wish for equality or justice or world peace. I'm just selfish.

[Hysterical, emotional screaming:] I'm no comfort!

Today my aspiration is less worthy and more predictable. Try not to judge me too harshly for it.

I can only write about epic confusion so many times. Sensory overload tends to be a bit much after a while. Right now I'm not comprehending much of anything one hundred percent. I know I've exhaused everyone's sympathy, really, but none of that is to say it will ever work again.

Oh, that wasn't what I meant to say at all
From where I'm sitting, rain
Falling against the lonely tenement
Has set my mind to wander
Into the windows of my lovers
They never know unless I write,
'This is no declaration, I just thought I'd let you know, goodbye'
Said the hero in the story,
'It is mightier than swords
I could kill you sure,
But I could only make you cry with these words'
- Belle & Sebastian, "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying"

Earthquake Groundling

2006-11-21T01:54:00.000-06:00

Usually I miss all the radio shows. Everything's easy to find in cold, Saturday morning light.

I can't remember ever being as scared as the night before. You proved sick with jealousy to me, and I wish you'd been there to believe shaking with fear. I woke up in the dark and felt like I'd be sick no matter what. I woke up in the dim and spent three minutes trying to figure out what was wrong. I woke up in light and couldn't think of what possibly to do next.

In the morning, here's a fizzless glass that was soda I poured myself before the terror. In the shower, I'm already back to all the usual dilemmas. On the phone, I hear about the highest standards, but I wish I knew the opposite side of the story. All day long, what will I say to you?

When the phone rings hours later, the tension that took hours to leave me snaps back for just a moment.

It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
- David Bowie, "Life On Mars?"

Ever Been In Love, Hornbeck?

2006-11-05T16:20:00.000-06:00

Yesterday morning I wanted to be productive and improve myself. Today I want to duck and cover, to lie still all day before I throw up.

That's Sam, standing, on his cellphone. He had two, and they were always ringing. For a while I remembered the sound and cringed when other people's phones made the same noise. Not even I remember how wide-eyed lonely I was over him. I sent that postcard weeks and weeks ago and he hasn't written back.

I found my eighth-grade binder with the quote from Inherit The Wind written in washable maker - "Only with the sound of my own voice, thank God." I wanted to aspire to that, the proud detachment. Then Sly added an arrow with, "Does not apply to Anna." I don't remember who I was in love with at the time. We should have seen the other play.

I can't stand a word out of anybody's mouth. I have no one to try and impress. Alison forgives me anything and Alex holds everything against me. They both make me superfluous and sick with jealousy.

I feel like I'm trying to chew gum. For me it's always been like reverse claustrophobia. There's something in me I can't swallow, with all the rising fear and desperation. I'm constantly turning down people offering me gum and they probably feel I'm rejecting them.

Sorrow drips into your heart though a pinhole,
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound
But while you debate half-empty or half-full,
It slowly rises - your love is gonna drown
- Death Cab For Cutie, "Marching Bands of Manhattan"

Clipping Words Out of the Radio

2006-10-29T23:39:00.000-06:00

Cleaning out songs that have stuck around because a friend used to like them. Trying to read three books, four textbooks, two newspapers. Requesting magazine subscriptions. Planning a set of chemistry-themed calling cards. Avoiding math and science. Hating being told that's conformity. Turning everything into collage materials. Thinking ahead. Re-scheduling. Being alone.

I used to picture my friendships as smooth red strings connecting other hearts to mine. The better the friend, the thicker the string. Romance had the circumference of a fist.

I accept I will not have very many friends here.

Learning more and more about less and less and less
On the edge of your seat in some dark movie
Can you memorize the scenes?
They'll be different next week
- Cat Power, "Love & Communication"

This Song Is Everywhere

2006-10-22T20:17:00.000-05:00

She says she'll be going out with a friend today, a friend with a girl's name. Here's the song on the radio in the car. The volume goes up.

Her phone rings. It's her friend. The volume goes down.

I know who it really is. It's the same friend, the very same person she was with, drunk in the woods, the night before. Maybe if his voice were deeper I would be able to hear him. Maybe it's lost in the bass. She says she can't meet him at nine, she'll have to be home. She sounds so harmless on the phone. I can hear that little layer of winking that means what they were up to twelve hours ago.

She's creepy and calculating talking to me. She says she failed the test and my ex-boyfriend was smoking pot. Maybe she did, and she doesn't care. Maybe he was, and it would be a waste of my time to care. She says there's no reason to live free of that terrific tangle of drugs and sex. She's so caught up that she's not responding to questions. Maybe she would be jealous of me if she believed I exist. I'm picturing her twitching on the floor with her sweatshirt unzipped. Every one of her ribs would show.

Her phone call's over. I'm the only one wearing a seat belt. The volume goes back up. We're going to crash and I'm going to leave her.

When we were young, I respected her and we pushed each other around the basement on rolling chairs until we fell over.

I said he doesn't look a thing like Jesus
He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But more than you'll ever know
- The Killers, "When You Were Young"

Pretty Boys? I've Heard Rumors

2006-10-16T00:11:00.000-05:00

When the chimes ring,
That's wind through her coat
The leaf scuffles,
And when the train calls
That's people going
Where you want to go

It's happened again. A creepy, immature boy who is nowhere near cool enough to be a theatre kid is after me.

On the way in, my phone's dead. I was too tired Friday night to turn it off before I went to bed.

"There's always mine," mumbles stunted, friendless, and ferociously ugly boy who was in my medieval history class last year. He raised his hand constantly and lisped passages of the book from memory. A girl abandons her suave novelist fiancé to marry his character. Maybe no other boys tried out.

My phone comes to life afterwards just long enough to give me hope. I lick the battery and quickly ask three friends.

"He-uh-y, you can use mine." Not quick enough. His phone's been in his jeans pocket. It's hot and clammy, the way I know his hands would be.

I call, give it back, thank him.

"He-uh-y, you said my name."

A mistake, I'm thinking. "Wh-uh-t's your name?"

I'm out the door as quick as possible. "S-uh-ee you next rehersal."

Foul-Weather Friends

2006-10-01T23:36:00.000-05:00

So tell me how on earth that happened!

How did we think the boy with an opinion on everything didn't care about us? Why did we pull that trick in the spring in and the autumn? It was warm during the summer! What are we up to and why and how and where is it going?

I have the faintest idea I've always had the foggiest notion. This is about my third time rewriting this post. Have I got it right yet? It was sexy and tender. Do you know what I mean? Can you imagine it at least? I'm not asking because I want to know, I'm asking because I want to find out. You dig me? Really?

I know how it used to feel: immature. It still has its nubile moments. We're young. What we haven't figured out by now doesn't matter to us yet. That's so sweet.

How are we such friends? Especially through all that and after everything? Tell me how we managed it.

I think you have to be young and hopeful to do that.

My dear, you've been used
I'm breaking the news
Well, love nearly beat us
I'm thinking like you
Well, I'm thinking of you
Well, love follows near us
Can love really steer us?
Oh, can't it be true?
Oh, can it be true?
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Dudley"

What A Dreadful Idea

2006-09-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

I've been spending too much time with my collages. Nothing comes together anymore. I just keep trying to think of ways to use "vainglorious" and coming up with little collections of words, like:

That's an awfully cruel observation to make from across the street.
I've just figured out what everyone else does, and now I will rebel.
If he were completely unique, you would call him crazy.

I utterly missed the anniversary of the blog, and then that of meeting Necker. I didn't meet him last October - what was I thinking? And that's just it. I don't remember anything anymore. When'd I start blogging? I think because of Belle du Jour, actually, and I don't think I've ever told anyone that. The first one ever had a black background with a photo of hot pink boots and tiny hot pink text. I don't remember what I wrote about. It's all in the images these days.

I've been out of the house so much that there's still torilla chips left. I read "chaos" as "ghosts", and I wrote "but's" instead of "but it's". Homecoming's tonight. I didn't go to any one of "the game"s, and I'll be falling asleep studying.

The third grade, I've realized, was a complete waste. I could already add and subtract, I couldn't multiply and divide anyway, I was reading The Lord of the Rings on my own time, I already hated science, and I haven't written cursive since. I had no friends. I took riding lessons and I wanted to play an instrument, but I gave it all up.

I can't remember what I was thinking a month ago, and I hate who I was last week. Tuesday night was amazing, and I'm already forgetting what I promised to remember. Yesterday afternoon showed me that summer's really good and over. Alex, I'm sorry I didn't find you. You missed one great reading of a picture book.

If you can be imitated, you're not worth it. But if you're not worth imitating...!

Meaningless Miss Misanthrope

2006-09-16T13:58:00.000-05:00

She exaggerates tripping up, skews her limbs, holds the pose, invites your eyes up her gym shorts. She doesn't remember why she signed up for this stupid class. She's hoping for something co-ed in the pool next round. She's been lying on the floor with her legs spread for a few seconds now. She starts to sit up, carries out a blonde flip, grins and flutters eyelashes. Her eyes shift to her own reflection in the dance room mirrors, and I've got her game all figured out.

She kicked her friend between the legs during basketball - no intent, pure airheadedness. They both stormed out of the game.

Too Many Self-Portraits

2006-09-08T00:14:00.000-05:00

Everyone, hit the floor
It's penetrated the door
Slowly creeping past your barricades
Setting off the warning raids

I wake up at one thirty, full dressed, crunched in ball on the pillow, and I hate it. The comforter is coated with papers and textbooks. There's a stack of novels at the bottom left corner. There's the pen-and-ink library, the net curtain knotted the way Alison left it, and bags and pens and bras on either side of the matress on the floor.

I've got to sleep, and I've got to stop doing homework in bed. I picked fourteen, fifteen, maybe it was sixteen, red hairs off of things today, and that's the only meaningless fact I can tell you anymore. I thought of something great, and I thought about writing it down. I need to rest up, then cuddle up with my biology book. I'm restless and I want to run somewhere dangerous and sleep. I'm lonely and I hate scraping cracked flakes of black off my eyeballs.

I'm not so sure I'm capable of studying anymore. Maybe after all these years taking great notes I've finally cracked. I'm hating modernity, I'm too tired to scam this instant-win game, and I keep listening to this same song. I suspect I'm annoying everyone I touch. I need a few hours just to read and a few people just to say they adore me. All the airplanes lately have been deafening.

Everyone, hit the ground
But never make a sound
Sending out the troops to take
All the lives that went to waste
- The Foundry Field Recordings, "Warning Raids Over Kiev"

Girls

2006-09-05T23:36:00.000-05:00

Laurel
There you are again! I remember in December you were falling in rivers, and here you are running up with your phone. Yes, we just saw your then-again boyfriend go crazy, he went thattaway. My, doesn't your world spin a bit fast for you? You're welcome, now. Good luck.

Jen
There are people and noise everywhere in the busy dark street and you're the twentieth person to say my name at least. Jean jacket, leggings, shiny auburn hair - I know you. And then - no, I knew you, because you're gone now, and I took home your French workbook and didn't tell you until now because it would sound so silly. I barely knew you and I miss your silly embarrassed laugh. Maybe I'll cut out the black-and-white pictures of France in the eighties and paste them into things.

Brit
Thankfully, I've had to acknoledge you twice in person all year. Sometimes I find myself behind you in the hall, and turn so you can't get your claws into me.

Lucy
I don't remember when I first saw you. Too often I'm frightened of strangers. I'm getting over it, in a big way. You were the first of two new awesome people I've hung out with in the last week. I do remember the skipping, but I'm not sure how we wound up with candy under the bridge with all the things Alison's written. You're as alone and crazy as me and it's fabulous. I hope you and Necker don't sit on either side of me forever.

Alison
From the driveway in December your house looked warm and cozy. I wonder which is her room, I thought, and, I wonder what it's like in there. The play was a downer, the teenage drama was wild, and Emma's still a mystery, but the consequences are far more interesting. Lots of lovers aren't friends. We're absolutely outrageous, but it happens to be great.

Tonight I'll dream while I'm in bed
When silly thoughts go through my head
About the bugs and alphabet
And when I wake tommorow I'll bet
That you and I will walk together again
'Cause I can tell that we are gonna be friends
Yes, I can tell that we are gonna be friends
- The White Stripes, "We're Going To Be Friends"

Anna and Alcedo in 1994, or, Your Face Is Going to Freeze That Way

2006-08-31T23:23:00.000-05:00

I've still got that goose, of course. Until I took that picture out of its frame tonight, I'd forgotten he had a name. I'd begun thinking he was a she. Sorry, Alcedo. I owe you more loyalty than that. Mostly these days I knock my guitar over with you when you fall from on top of the boxes - yeah, those boxes - and off the shelf. We've been together a long time.

I make that face a lot in pictures. Remind me not to pout so much. I know I can get my way without having to beg for it. My heart pounds when I say the Pledge only because I rushed to get to class. I was ugly from age seven until the day I cut off my hair. I wish more people remembered the day I lost fourteen inches of the worthless past. "It's My Life" was playing in the shop. I hope whoever got the wig made a great future with it.

On the catwalk above the auditorium there's a lot of dirt, a lot of people, and me. I say, "I'm not scared of heights, I'm not scared of heights, I'm not scared of heights, I'm not scared of heights, I'm not scared of heights."

Ben says, "I don't believe you."

"Actually, I'm not," I say, and honestly. What I am is good at convincing myself of anything. Every time tawny fighter jets scream over the castle, my ghost appers on the wall of that balcony, flip-flops dangling three floors above the stone patio, screaming, "Wow! Wow!", because of the roar and the dead people and the danger and the carelessness. She's alive, she's so damned alive, screaming into the noise and the silence. I'm not afraid of having ever been so happy. I'm just afraid I'll never make it back.

There's eight hundred empty red seats a long way under the cracks between the boards. "It's not the height you should be scared of," says Ben, "It's the ground."

Faut qu'elle crève de bonheur
Ou qu'elle change de godasses
Faut qu'elle croule sous les fleurs
Change de couleur
Je vais prendre ta douleur,
Je vais jouer au docteur,
Je vais prendre ta douleur
- Camille, "Ta Douleur"

(Alex's concert pictures)
orginal one | arted one
orginial two | arted two

Hate to Say (I Told You So)

2006-08-29T00:10:00.000-05:00

No, there really isn't anything I don't know that I can't at least make up.

There's a girl who hadn't given away her armsocks or her heart. The orange goo one on my shelf spread into a sticky blob overnight. The point of the heart I drew in the fog on the school bus window started to cry rain. The boys and girl behind me condescended and fought viciously for their cool. When I stood up to leave their infuriatingly four-cournered little world, they complimented fomerly Alison's fedora. Fake young suburban dandies ridicule the weaker of mind and ignore the braver of action.

I've gained deep respect for the talent jelly beans have when it comes to sticking people together. Last weekend I watched two and half movies at listened to six or seven entire albums at least. No wonder I didn't write anything about the Federalist Papers. I'm most interested in the rights that didn't make it in the bill. The only things I've ever written in church are an Elvish tirade and four more lines of the Epic of Riley Dakota.

Your preacher left when his liberties became too few,
Left when collection plates went empty through every pew.
And you, Riley, you left when the pulpit's new man came -
You up and left, because it's really all the same.

Brilliant young beatniks have a flair for the most wildly understated theatrics. Don't let me lose track of this. Next person who sees Jarod, make sure he has my number. I still have the receipt for those armsocks, back when they were still the knee variety. Mmm, knees. I've still got a blue-and-white striped pair. The house ate the pink-and-white pair. What happened to my paper bag and my pirate gold, hmm?

Five words sung make us stick clover and goldenrod in statues, and where will it stop? We're got sparks seething through our skin and we've got to singe strangers while we can.

These lyrics can be snarled and might lose Alison five bucks for all her trouble. (He didn't bet on the parentheses, dear. But you might buy me a sandwich.)

Hate to say I told you so, alright - c'mon
I do believe I told you so...

Do what I please, gonna spread the disease - because I wanna
Gonna call all the shots for the "no"s and the "not"s - because I wanna

D'yeah!

Ask me once, I'll answer twice, 'cause what I know I'll tell - because I wanna
- The Hives, "Hate To Say I Told You So"

And Your Enemies Closer

2006-08-22T23:44:00.000-05:00

Don't I just feel like a teenager. Love drama drama! I think it's mature of us that we're all so damn sorry, and young that not a one of us is going to stop. I could fix it all if I could, couldn't I? If I could control myself the whole untamed thing would be over. I can't. If I could, I don't know if I would.

Looking at any other boy I can't have, I find that I don't want them anyway. I'm distanced from everyone. I'm fond of nearly everybody, but I don't need hardly anyone. Am I adjusted? Mellowed? Just lonely.

The words "he doesn't love you anymore" have resurfaced recently. I'm avoiding clasping my hands again. Well, someone else will have a much easier time getting to Indianapolis than I would. Could we still run to meet each other?

My eyes are itching again and tears aren't helping. I touched something in a plastic bag from chemistry last year and the stings haven't left my fingers. I was going to throw away some old orange goo, but I made a heart shape with it and decided I'd keep it. Maybe you will have somebody to give it to, I thought.

An orange goo heart, annA? I know you fell, but I thought the scars on your knees were gone.

I'm faking it, dear, because I have to.

I suspect my stomach and heart might have traded places when all the little things on my desk started to remind me of when I wanted you to touch them. I broke out in a sweat so cold I had to take off all my clothes. I should have known love and hate can fuse.

Oh, quit crying, both of us. When I stop listening to this song I'll remember that this year is starting so much sunnier than the last ended. Every ounce of my crazy cocky confidence is back. I can make faces like that one. I'll get what I want, and time isn't any object. That's even funny. Time is intangible. I'll be nicer, I'll do well in every class, I'll look great, and I'll have friends from eight til three at least. Don't watch the lines under my eyes, because I want to be the only one who knows that I'm living on three hours of sleep.

I really do think you're impossibly cooler than me. Did you know there are Decaturs in eleven states? Good luck finding out what happened in 1922. Thank you for showing me you're not perfect. The Little Engine That Could said, "I think I can". I think I can? I will. Eeoyre said, "It's not much of a tail, but I'm kind of attached to it." Ours isn't much of a tale, but we'll both win in the end, and I love you to death.

Well if I remain passive and you just want to cuddle,
Then we should be okay and we won't get in a muddle
- Belle & Sebastian, "Seeing Other People"

Look At Me, Tragedy

2006-08-22T01:14:00.000-05:00

Well, we all want our names dropped. But the Internet doesn't write in blood. Great Scott, worst of times, the best of times never expected this out of you!

And I didn't. I wouldn't tell anyone some of the thoughts I've had, but I'll tell you all that I've never had this one. But now even Wednesdays are conspiring against me. Wednesdays!

Look at me, tragedy, the levity hasn't left me yet. Now my hair is flaming and I just look desperate and used, again. Again again again again. This is enough to make me wonder if the depths of despair have got it out for me, except that I know it's really truely my fault. What a bitter business that's still soaked in sadness.

I hurt people to own them. The Ex-Guyfriend showed me that, in that fake way he does anything. Alex showed me again, and worse. And, here you're someone I love that I tried to always be nice to. I still feel bad about showing my reaction to your scar. Even remember that? That was two years ago, my real good friend. How is it the Ex-Guy is tangled up in that one, too?

I was going to quote "What You're Doing", but oh, when I've get the chance to be vicious, why not? I'm wicked to have caused this, I'm wicked to be jealous of it, I'm even jealous of how wicked you get to be. We're eating each other's misery. So just turn this song on its head, take it at straight face value, and maybe I've got you crying too.

Well I'd rather see you dead, little girl,
Than to be with another man
You better keep your head, little girl,
Or I won't know where I am

You better run for your life if you can, little girl,
Hide your head in the sand, little girl,
Catch you with another man,
That's the end... little girl
- The Beatles, "Run For Your Life"

I'll tell you a secret.

I'm sickly documentary.

That's a picture of the first heartbreak.

You broke me again, but it's coming back.

What's that?

I'm sorry it has to get so bitter, but I'm going to be happy, and you know what I mean.

I'm going to have my way.

And we all know what that means.

Revisions in the Middle of the Night

2006-08-19T17:59:00.000-05:00

Something's fanning my spark for outfits. Those pants I've only worn once, the ones that got me my favorite compliment ever - "Hey, Halloween was last month!" - those look great rolled up to knicker-length. Homemade ankle chain, and I can join the shoeless train. I'm enough style to look like substance, and I'll have to look out for glass.

You're kissing Rafe and there are butterflies in your street.
Riley, you promised the mirror you wouldn't cheat.
Do you remember your girl back home? She remembers you,
And you'll come to me when you see what you're about to do.

I'm the face in the smudges and the girl in the moon.
You tell me what you'll do and I say, "Not so soon."
I know I'm in at least one photo on your phone,
And once upon my bed you called my house your home.

Ooh, it gets worse and worse. And wow, the puncuation is just the same in both stanzas, and that came totally on its own. If I don't watch out, this is going to be a running joke.

The bigger the messes I make, the less there is to clean up. Can I get some life-sized mannequins so I can let loose all the personalities I've got chained to the wall? Can I get some strips of blank speech bubbles so I can write down the dialogues I trace on the ceiling? Can I get a pea to see if I'm a princess or some frogs to see if they'll be mine?

Oh my, am I getting lyrical and wacky.

I had a conversation with you at night
It's a little one sided, but that's all right
I tell you in the kitchen about my day
You sit on the bed in the dark changing places
With the ghost that was there before you came
You've come to save my life again
- Belle & Sebastian, "Funny Little Frog"

Alone With Somebody

2006-08-17T20:13:00.000-05:00

Summer is ending for beautiful kids I'll never meet in places I'll never go to. Well, doesn't that just come down to changing leaves and being unique.

Tonight, Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday night I'll be dying my hair. My bathroom will look like a body washed down the bathtub. My hair will look like I shower in strawberry juice. Salon people look the whole long way down their noses at me.

A old mouse-nibbled paperback is lying around the house. It's Of Mice And Men, and that's deep irony for me, anyway. I met a mouse. He poked his head out the space under the ceiling tile whose twin is in the Tavern, turned around and scritched all over in the dark up above. I didn't name him in case I saw him in a trap in the morning. All kinds of things get scary in the night. Excitement and fear wear big grey ears and a strong tail.

Nothing's made it into the poetry notebook for a while. Those polka dots up top, those are, or were, a photograph of the cover of my poetry notebook. I'm so glad I've finally got lines to put in that book, it's so darn cute.

Have you ever bought drugs just to think about hands they've been through?
Ever thought about how they grew up on a farm somewhere too?

I haven't, but I didn't. Have you? Did you? It's about some pretty boy who won't admit life has changed yet, I suppose. I need somebody to name Riley, and a hero's as good as anybody, isn't he?

You're kissing Rafe and there are butterflies in your street
Do you remember your girl back home? She remembers you
Riley, you told the mirror over the bar you wouldn't cheat
And you'll come to me when you see what you're about to do

Now where did the "I" come from in this story? Just sympathetic narrator, I suppose. But how did things get so damn personal?

I mistook a Canadian dime, a Mexican dime, and two coins that are at least partly Greek to me for American dimes. I need to pick a color of thread to sew a scarlet button to a scarlet ribbon. I decided The Scarlet Letter was a bit dense for me. For all of Monday, school will seem fresh and relevant, and then that will be the end of that.

You're here, but you're so sweet in denial
You're like Amish kids trying modernity
And is it worth their while, and is that a fair trial
And what does it all mean to you anyway?

Keep Trying

2006-08-12T00:41:00.000-05:00

Topic: What Anna Did Last Night
Why rejected: Is of no interest to anyone except annA, the people she was with, and the girl in front of us in line who gave us the weird look when Alison tried to walk through the wall.

Topic: annA's Inexpressible Love Of Alison
Why rejected: Is inexpressible.

Topic: Why annA Has Taken To Spelling Her Name Backwards
Why rejected: I'm not spelling my name backwards, what are you talking about?

Topic: annA and Alex
Why rejected: Subject has been declared dead in fifty-one states and Puerto Rico.

Topic: Where annA Is Going To Be From Tomorrow Until Next Thursday
Why rejected: It's so boring even she doesn't want to talk about it.

The Last Thing Anyone Needs Is Two of Me in Neckties

2006-08-07T16:30:00.000-05:00

Things I will say if, during the next year, you ask me, "How are you?":
• "Super-duper!"
• "Tickled pink."
• "I'm gear!"
• "Positively peachy keen."
• "Just ducky, what about you?"

I'm hoping to have enough to say something different every day. Of course, that's no good unless I have friends who ask every day. What d'you say?

What's that you say? "What if you're not in a good mood?"

...What are you talking about?

I suggest everybody grab one of those rediculous picture and stick it on their desktop so they can see the thumbnail. It looks like I'm kissing a handgun. Or that's what I think, anyway. Once you've finished admiring how fab it is when really small, you can change the filename to "my pet annA", and just let me live there. Don't worry, you won't be the only one. I have a sulky punk named "brodie08" and a retro pansy named Ollie who live on my desktop.

Apologies for the post previous not having a picture sooner. It does now, so get scrolling and take a gander. It's one of those moments that's like the short seat in the back of the bus. Everybody at some point thought it was their very own. Hey, Alison, even this guy doesn't say "sooof".

Put Sufjan Stevens on,
And we'll play your favorite song
"Chicago" bursts to life and your
Sweet smile remembers you, my...

Hands open, and my eyes open
I just keep hoping
That your heart opens
- Snow Patrol, "Hands Open"

The Sweetest, Most Adorable Boy I've Ever Met

2006-08-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

Alex, you're going to have to tell Jared to read his namesake post.

Jan (~~Gracie~~, whoops, Ginger the golden retriever not pictured); Max; girl I don't know; one guess who; don't know; forgot; Jared; my fellow barefoot groupies, ~~Kelsey~~ Chelsea and ~~Alison~~ Hat Lady.
I woke up before 5:30 this morning and I know just why. Sunday, of course. I sometimes write about misery like nobody's going to understand me if it doesn't read just as horrible as it feels. I know what it would feel like if I had not only to cry myself sleep but awake, and every night and day. I'm going to have to find some way of watching my stupid comments dig me deeper into my demise every day of the week and living with it.

Could I really have been prettier last night than months ago? The only difference was how mussed and gunked up my hair was. Still is, because I haven't washed it. I like this better, with my banana-blonde streak showing. My hair's never liked being combed and correct. I thought it had to be. And what about less irritating that I used to be? Maybe my personality has changed. Maybe Alex just needed an excuse. "You're ugly and aggravating" works as well as anything. I still annoy myself. I'm working on it.

Calling me obsessive just means I'm loyal. Is that so bad, really? Someday I'll be fabulous enough to bounce off the reputation he's given me. Oh, those days when the light at noon is hardly better than the light in the early morning that's less sunshine than milk. Yesterday was sunny.

This song made me think of the Ex-Guy, back in the day. It's taken me a while to feel it applies to me now. I didn't feel I'd started this story sappy or pathetic. Well, of course I did. I even tried his shoes on. If only you knew how I'm trying.

I know who I am, but who are you?
You're not looking like you used to
You're on the other side of the mirror
So nothing's looking quite as clear
Thank you! for turning on the lights
Thank you!, now you're the parasite
I didn't think you had it in you,
And now you're looking like I used to!
- No Doubt, "Sunday Morning"

Live, Motion, Camera

2006-08-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

Today I got up, fell in love, and got dumped, all before breakfast. I'm considering a change in lifestyles.

Actually, I didn't get up until after lunch.

(I'm considering anyway.)

They tell me I'm getting too opaque. Anything I do for long enough turns into art. I think that's how it is for humanity. The Art of War, The Art of Love.

I want a reputation. It's going to be like an attic. Anything that needs to fit, can. Remember what success comes in?

A mind shows your deepest wishes asleep. I dream, again and again, but it always turns out not to be him. It means keep searching. You always find it in the last place you look. Quick, tell me you recognize that opening line. Those were my first words on the subject.

I am finally getting some big white sunglasses. Even flat plastic gives me headaches, and I've broken every pair of sunglasses I've ever owned. I had a pair with gold lions, a pair with gold frames, a pair with purple lenses, an expensive and boring pair.

Now I need red hair, green tea, red shoes. I'm considering a change in favorite colors.

And I am so never, ever dating anyone who doesn't appreciate Oasis.

Maybe I will never be
All things that I wanna be
But now is not the time to cry,
Now's the time to find out why
I think you're the same as me
We see things they'll never see
You and I are going to live forever
- Oasis, "Live Forever"

Psst! Look at the pink box, kids. No. one is my favorite band. Nos. two, three, and four are the favorite bands/artist of the last three guys I've fallen for. In order. [Note for posterity: They were The Libertines, David Bowie, Weezer, and the Beatles. - August 7]

Rather Than Hurt You

2006-07-25T23:03:00.000-05:00

She learned what guitar means this morning. "Tar" means string, "gui" means how many. That's why there's also things like sitars and seetars. Guess bass guitar's a misnomer, she thought.

Then tonight her guitar died, or rather her connection to it. She cries at its base as it leans against the wall and listens to the out-of-tunes noises it makes when she picks it up to hold it. Wood and electronics aren't cuddly. Why doesn't it have a name? She at least loved it that much.

No more lessons. There's just one chip in the varnish. She never would have been good, but now she never will. Perhaps she could fight it. More likely she'll give up. The instrument's already become part of the wall.

It's betrayed her because she betrayed it. She hasn't played since the night before the morning she answered the phone. "Hey, Anna, this is ------. I don't want to tell you this, but I know you'd rather hear it from me." Why does that moment have to surface now? she wonders. She wants it to drown forever, to wither in the morning light until it's bleached away entirely. He and she belonged to the night.

Do you remember, Alex? This is the song I said that you would wish you had written. Find another feather for your fedora, because you did.

And all the memories of the fights and nights
Under blue lights and all the kites
We flew together
Love thought they'll fly forever
- The Libertines, "Music When The Lights Go Out"

Four Sculptures

2006-07-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

Pose One
The bread tastes like heat, dense and warm as it stings her fingertips and smears melted margerine on her palms. It burns just behind her top teeth, the sensitive flesh that delights in being kissed. She misses that, the feeling of having just made out. The clock read "10:00", straight across, in green. Now her plate is empty and she's feeling predictable as she tries to find out what it is about "Ziggy Stardust" that makes her feel she's heard it a hundred thousand times before.

Pose Two
She's getting altogether too tempermental. She doesn't meet her own standards. Sometimes she's above them, feeling fabulously, famously improbable with her friends under the skyscrapers, trying to meet the eyes of the Sears Tower. She cranes her neck as she walks, until the building beats her and she looks away, dizzy. It's not altogether unlike the screaming jet planes, one of a few soaring moments she can crawl inside of precisely, entrace herself with, any time.

Pose Three
More often she's less than she expects of herself. Just now, writing without forming a single letter. She should be grateful she has nowhere to go and no songs to sing - after all, she has work to do. It didn't used to be this way. She knows just what, just who, changed her standards. Now she's lonely at the poolhouse, lost in the gallery, alone with her newspaper. As for what it looks like, she's not even sure. It's forgettable.

Pose Four
She can see the magic in the beautiful people who scare her when they catch her eye, and in the line of maple helicopters she drops in the river. At her flamboyant, outgoing peak she's Drama, confident on kitten heels, but at home she's Tragedy, tearfully fighting the losing battle and retiring to keen on the floor. She'll never speak to the beauties, and no one will ever see her filmy floating leaves.

You look like David Bowie
But you've nothing new to show me
Start another fire, and watch it slowly die
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Over And Over Again (Lost & Found)"

I Don't Care If You Don't

2006-07-13T19:56:00.000-05:00

There's a motto. I don't care if you don't. Say something cruel, say something behind my back. I'll know you don't care about me. And since you don't care, I don't care either.

People with strong wills take it that way. I sleep when I should shower, eat when I shouldn't, drag when it's to my pride to run. Maybe you stay away from me for iffy reasons. Maybe they boil down to poison. Maybe you embrace that, bottle up the colors and shelve them in your diary, you heartless thing, you.

Maybe I feel just the same way. Maybe your vitriol is in my veins. Maybe we're explosive. Maybe I have a tonic for every way you treat me.

Then again, maybe I'm still water to your oil. Maybe I'll always love you regardless. Maybe you don't want us ever to mix, but I don't care. Maybe you don't want me around, but I don't care. I'm in love. And I don't care if you don't.

I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't care

I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't care

I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't care

I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't
I don't care if you don't care
- Green Day, "I Don't Care"

Fake It If You Have To

2006-06-29T18:40:00.001-05:00

I wanted to send a card to Sam postmarked June 28. I didn't, and now I've lost the postcard. I suppose it serves me right for buying it last August and still not having sent it.

Of course I'm reeling from this anniversary of the happiest time of my life. I've known for months that it would be heartbreaking. Maybe that's what's dulled the pain a little. Maybe I've fallen on that bruise unexpectedly so many times that it can't hurt when I expect it to.

I know I've never really written about Britain, what happened there - the events of each day that sunk me so far in love. I wonder if it's requited. I will write it, soon. Tonight, I think. "Soon" always needs help. I'll go back to England soon, too - within ten years, I think. What a long time, mon dieu. Et mon droit.

But Yours Is Like The Moon; Every Month It Changes

2006-06-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

Cleaning my room frightens me. I'm afraid I'll find all the horror that's just a few inches down from the surface. Love notes, candy wrappers, unsent letters, life plans on lined paper. There are logs of chats with the Ex-Guyfriend buried in my hard drive, encrypted behind an old password. There are forgotten telephone numbers taped to my walls and in my purse. Perhaps all together, these little privacies would make one big, dark secret.

At least it starts as a game. Imagine he came back, I laugh. Would I forgive him? What would happen? I think about what would be said. Don't speak until after I tell you that I love you. I love everything about you. Come here so I can touch your face. I open the window. It's nothing. A gesture. A chipmunk rustles leaves outside. It's nothing! It's a gesture, my God. What am I doing to myself?

Last night I had to find my school planner. Saturday night, I whimpered. I looked at the clock. Twelve oh two. Not even Saturday night - Sunday morning! It's Sunday morning! The CD is just there on the floor, celebrating all this time and five minutes ago and how much it meant to both of us. How many weeks has it been? And I needed to find my planner.

I knew where it was, so I aimlessly shifted things around in other places. After I'd found it I still felt I had to search for it. Instead I counted weeks, still with that feeling of being sucked to conclusions against my will.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.
Five.
Six. Seven.
Eight. Nine. Ten eleventwelve.

Twelve.

And sometimes when you're on,
You're really fuckin' on.
And your friends, they sing along,
And they love you.
But the lows are so extreme,
That the good seems fuckin' cheap,
And it teases you for weeks in its absence.
- Rilo Kiley, "A Better Son/Daughter"

The Only One There Is The One Who Doesn't Live There

2006-06-17T17:53:00.000-05:00

Four forever,
Two together,
We'll play dead,
We'll play dead,
We'll play deadly
- Architecture in Helsinki, "Wishbone"

I get lost everywhere I go. Thursday evening I turned a corner and saw Blue and Purple's old house. I didn't want to see other peoples' cars in the driveway. I wandered up into the field. S-B M yelled something about Caroline and walked in his back door. I lay and stared at the sky. A man drove up. "Dad!" yelled a little girl on the playground. A few drops of rain fell. Airplanes quicksanded into the clouds. "London?" I inquired of each one. A tiny blonde chit was loosed from her mother's van and ran her little wobble for the woodchips. I marveled.

Surely my younger self was hanging around here somewhere. Being taught to play the games I had never had friends for. Ice skating in sneakers on the frozen grass. Piloting scooters up the bumpy sidewalk. Watching Purple unicycle up that same sidewalk. Running away from older kids who were setting up fireworks, or smoking, or something. Trick-or-treating, year after year. Gazing out the window at the yellow streetlight that lit the big dark. Those huge stalks the Ex-Guy hid in didn't look so big anymore. Was that my idea?

I really did expect to see the ghosts of us four girls there. We didn't show up. I guess we're still alive. I raced a runner and beat him. He didn't notice.

I Love You, I've A Drowning Grip

2006-06-15T17:10:00.000-05:00

I can't you tell how bad it's been, the last two nights. Last Friday, Monday night, I was happy to laugh over something painful. Sitting on Swimmerette's lawn confusing Hannah, cracking up behind ice cream cones after the R movie. I'm pathetic, it's amusing, and I know it.

And what a wreaking it was on Tuesday night. Watch the girl fall to pieces over the CD she was so glad to snag. It starts with the delight over the reference to Harajuku. There's the little inkling that this song was written just for her, that maybe she should be a bigger fan. Then tears come, can't stop playing and replaying.

But she's done all this before. It's nothing new. She's the only person to whom she can't keep promises. How in the world did this happen? she wonders. Her memory's fading. She can't remember what she has done wrong. More and more these days, she has to say that she doesn't remember.

She's lying on the floor. There's a terror cinema on the ceiling. "There's tears in your eyes," says the memory of David, and tears roll down into her ears. When was I happy? she asks herself. There's just two answers she can think of. You know them, don't you?

Sound tumbles from her shelf. She's listening to British music, and she starts to wither in horror. She's in love! She's absolutely drowning in it. She loves a place thousands of miles away. She remembers with every airplane.

When she wakes up in the morning she hasn't changed clothes. Her makeup's still on. She remembers curling under the covers, screaming. Her ragged breath the only sound, until she couldn't breathe anymore. What was that? She can't remember. I suppose that was sort of silly of me.

Oh, how I wish there were a happy ending. I wish I could tell you that last night, she washed her face and went to bed the way you did. That when she woke up this morning, she had forgotten about how that horrible way Tuesday ended.

"White Flag" was playing at the dentist's. That was always the Ex-Guyfriend's song, wasn't it? That was the CD she put on at Rachael's house. That was the first song she played on her iPod. It was an accident. Accidents, that's how she wound up in church that evening. There was a Friday night, once upon a time, when she realized that nothing was more important to her than her boyfriend. She promised to go on Wednesday nights. By Monday it was too late, and every Wednesday since she's gone for no one.

I know why my shoes don't get worn out, she thought late that night, on the floor again. I don't do enough in them. What's that line, from that song? The girl with the holes in the soles of her shoes. That's "Story Of A Girl", isn't it? The one who drowned the whole world. Is it true that everybody likes that song?

The empty spaces started to scare her. She tried to sing to herself and it sounded horrible. She put on music. The song began, "Elope with me Miss Private and we'll sail around the world." It reminded her of another: "Still my heart, and hold my tongue." Her invisible friend was indifferent. She clenched her hands and cried harder at the sight: she's the only person who will hold her hand.

I'd like to see you
But really I should stay away
And let you settle down
I've got no claims to your crown
I was the boss of you
And I loved you
You know I loved you
It's all over now

And I was there for you
When you were lonely
I was there when you were bad
I was there when you were sad
Now it's my time of need
I'm thinking, do I have to plead to get you by my side?
- Belle & Sebastian, "I'm A Cuckoo"

You Smiled Before the Cemetery

2006-06-11T17:38:00.000-05:00

Thursday went on and on.

I showered too long and fixed my hair too fast. I'm enjoying the crumpled, frizzy, and voluptuous things my hair can do. Before me, the slightly attractive guy in church on Wednesday night might have looked unkept in a red t-shirt. I'm slipping straps and heeling high-tops. He looked right past me.

My crazy hair, my tiara, and I sail up, down, and around. Necker and Fai are suitably impressed by new Beatles paperback, from 1964. Brittany didn't understand the signifigance of the year. What has she spent her whole life doing that convinced her that gays are disgusting, drugs are sexy, and anything popular is great?

Necker has Trivial Pursuit Junior. "Dork," says Fai. The two of them are so good together that they've worn it out completely. It's a nice rut, even if they could stand to break it sometimes. Zebras are black with white stripes. Who knew?

I fail an examination, pass one, and walk upstairs. Our locker's shockingly empty. I cram my bag with the last notebooks. Those fugitive shoes of mine are still in residence, but there's not much chance of my being able to find Fai and appoint her their steward. I stuff them into my satchel.

Every one of my pictures are still taped inside the door. I try to get them off. Corners rip. I know I won't have time. Cursed desperation sticking down my escape. I tear out the ones I feel shouldn't be left. Sam. Alexis. Bouncy, Blue, Purple, and I. Then I take off.

Hours later I'm wearing new shoes and walking. "Have a good summer," says the neighbor boy on his bike as he sails past me. I've hated him. I wonder where he's been. Could that have been six years ago I loved him? We don't mention it. Look at us now, talking loud to make sure we hear each other behind our earbuds.

I'm dressed like the kind of girl who would beat you up. I couldn't. "You too," I say. The businessman who waits for me to cross the street is sort of fascinated when I wave to him. The old Indian woman is speaking loud Hindi to her plants as she turns the hose on the garden.

Sitting inside the doors of the library is Prissy. It's been a year to the day, and what a day it was, a year ago. Thursday, different people were shedding my same sobs. I check out Madonna's picture book.

It's summer. I can relax. It'll be good for my skin. I've been sunburned already, sometime inbetween jumping in the fountain, the cream soda, and that Beatles book. By Friday, I lost track of the date. Lots of people told me my hair smells nice. The weekend's gone on and on.

Le Savoir-Vivre

2006-06-01T23:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was singing off-key in the mirror and learned I haven't lived.

To live, one must want to die. There's a poem creeping around in there that I'm not lyrical enough to see yet. I was trying to come terms with that. I wanted to want to die. But I don't want to die, I said. I can't die! I haven't lived!

"Damn straight," said my soul, very quietly. She said it spontaneously just like that too, and left me more frustrated than ever.

And to those of you who mourn your lives
Through one day to the next,
Well, let them take you next!
Can't you live and be thankful you're here?
See, it could be you, tomorrow or next year.
- Guillemots, "Trains to Brazil"

So today I woke up in chemistry and learned to understand life.

The topic in chalk may have or may not have been free energy. The thoughts in my head pertained to life not being all it's chalked up to be. Is it, "Don't lie"? asked my fuzzy sleeping brain. Is that how to live?

"Can't be," remarked my soul matter-of-factly. By the time she came through the reception was a bit fuzzed, as if I were asking myself. "No, it can't," she assured me. "Everyone has to do an awful lot of lying."

How do you decide who deserves how much of the truth? I asked, and lapsed into sleep over empty blue lines.

It might have been half a second or half a dozen minutes before my soul had something more to say. That type of thing transcends time. "Remember 'respect for worthy life'?", she asked gently. "You wrote that yourself, Anna. Respect for worthy life. Respect for worthy life."

I think I do remember that, I thought. I think I was crying. I remember it was sort of blurry. I think I may have been really happy. But -," broke the thought, starting to foam, " - but that's hardly enough have a go on! Worthyness! What about changing minds? What if it twitches, what if it comes in tumults and turmoils? What if it chains me and walks me seaside by sheer force of will?

"Oh, Anna, don't worry," quoth my soul, a little tiny bit fed up, and retired. I sat, a little tiny bit uncomfortable, most of the way wide awake.

My soul came back for a moment. "Oh, Anna," she said. "Anna, oh, isn't that just it? Oh, Anna. Don't worry."

Tearstrip

2006-05-23T00:07:00.000-05:00

He said coming to my house was an attempt to prove to me he loved me. I asked if he had. "I guess not," he said. Did he mean he hadn't proved it? He did. What I'd asked was if he'd loved me.

By the end of the year we will have known each other for six weeks, dated for six weeks, and been apart for six weeks. That's three sixes, and maybe we were cursed from the beginning.

He wanted to make me more emotional, less neutral. I don't think I've held the same feeling for a single day these last three weeks. I cried over his photograph, I cried over his notes, I cried over "Fix You". I'm shattered because I haven't got anything to hold together for. He lifted me from desperate lovelessness. I wanted to be stable because I thought he needed it. Does he remember, "I can't imagine breaking up with you"? That rips me.

Rachel, you thief. The first time he ever mentioned you I accused him of love. Isn't there anyone else for you? I wish you would die, but I wouldn't kill you. I have this sinking feeling that I'd probably like you. Do you have those feelings that tell you exactly where you need to be? Like me and London. Does he remember me, staring at the jet planes, my voice cracking into a sob, saying I'd be a beggar on the street if it meant going back there? If you fell in love with my town, it would still be big enough for the two of us. Why did you feel you had to take the only other thing I've needed that badly?

He's the voice inside my head, and it's so scary when I hear it slipping out. I think I need to control myself, but I don't trust what I think anymore. That's got something to do with not writing for two weeks, not touching my guitar for even longer. I'll get back to it. Maybe I'll discover some sort of love for it, but I doubt it. I wish he could be my religion. I wish I could stop him from ever saying he's not worth my time. I know he doesn't really mean that.

What's my biggest flaw, Alex? Superficiality? Materialism? Compulsiveness? I know yours. Watching your back and your hands in that practice room - that's how I know you're worth it. You fled because you said you were embarrassing yourself. I know the secret ways you wrench your own rusting rivets. You may make better beginnings, but you're a quitter.

As life gets longer, awful feels softer,
And it feels pretty soft to me.
And if it takes shit to make bliss,
Well I feel pretty blissfully.

If life's not beautiful without the pain,
Well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again.
Well as life gets longer, awful feels softer
And it feels pretty soft to me, yeah oh.
- Modest Mouse, "The View"

Superficiality Hates Beautiful Things

2006-05-07T23:58:00.000-05:00

Let's specialize in collecting things too adorable to part with and trading them.

Let's tell the whole world that we are each other's most important thing, but let's tell everything else only to each other. Let's be famous for being the closest pair there ever were. Let's be totally different. Let's buy each other things. Let's hate the stuff we get from each other but use it because we love the one who gave it.

Let's be together all the time.

Let's be unquestionable, let's be invincible. Let's go to the Statue of Liberty, let's go to the forest, let's go to the mall. Let's been seen everywhere. Let's be desired by everyone, let's need nobody else, let's know we never will. Let's both of us sign up for anything one of us does. Let's be joined at the hip, let's be joined at the heart, let's get a pair of everything.

Let's look completely different, let's laugh at the others' drama, let's cut each other off to finish each other's words. Let's do anything for each other, let's get rich, let's close our eyes when get haircuts together and cry about them afterward. Let's be remembered by strangers for nothing in particular. Let's have something so special that it can only be discussed late at night in quiet places.

Let's please do it soon.

Scarlett

2006-05-03T00:51:00.000-05:00

I hate how I keep starting my days with confidence and am ruined by the end. What I am doing sobbing in a stairwell when most of the building is empty? At least I, finally, don't care what anyone thinks of me for it.

Oh, and you're all right, he's horrible, and I love all the trouble everyone took to comfort me. But you're all wrong, because his reputation doesn't speak and it's not me that he doesn't deserve. I'll only ever hate him for abandoning me.

I love how we agree we'll be together again - or is he just saying that? Quieting me, the crazy crying ex-girl? You should trust him, you should trust him. He can make you laugh through your tears. We won't fast-foward through the intermisson. You'll see, if not this day, then tomorrow, which is another.

And as I sit here in this dark room,
All I seem to feel is light
And I see color,
I see the dull maroon
Of the blood... of this life... that's ours
- Vanessa Carlton, "Afterglow"

I Can't Act Blanche

2006-04-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

Despair makes me see coincidences. The phone woke me for the second time this morning, and you and I know you did this before. I left my iPod on "Don't Look Back In Anger", and now the song I want is "Don't Speak". It's raining. I just hate how you don't realize that this is what I was most afraid of.

Last night I drew the fangirl Pete Doherty injected heroin into as she lay unconscious on his floor. In my sketch, six strings stretch from her joints, cross a fret, and sail off the top of the page. The caption says, "i'm afraid even paper dolls and marionettes are loyal." It hurts me now to admit I love you still. It hurts me to admit that I wish I were that girl, that not-so-innocent creature on her idol's kitchen tile.

My friend told me you were on heroin. She was exaggerating. Worse, worse, it's worse. You don't know I know. I need you to, but I can't tell you. What could I say? "You shouldn't boast to people who actually do care about me." "You should have known better than to have introduced me to her." "The first time, I believed you were sorry." "Here's your Sufjan Stevens back." "What the hell were you thinking?"

I'm not afraid I'm going crazy - I'm afraid I've been crazy all along. Look at the psychos I've fallen for. They way they've sucked me in, convinced me they're all the earth. The way the Ex-Guyfriend dropped me hard again and again. You're not planning to conquer Africa, but are you just subtler than that?

Either way, just thinking about you today, you've won me back. I won't steal your CDs. I'll put your socks in with my laundry. I won't tell anyone how bitterly we fought about spontaneity or how sincere you sounded when you said I was the most adorable thing in the world.

Or maybe I will. Maybe I'll call up that girl you kissed last week, the girl who agreed it could go no farther. Maybe I'll put on my rhinestone tiara and sit up all night. After all, I'm crazy.

I dreamed I was dying, as I so often do
And when I awoke, I was sure it was true
I went to the window, threw my head to the sky,
And said, "Whoever is up there, please don't let me die."
- Stars, "Calendar Girl"

I Can't Believe It

2006-04-18T05:29:00.000-05:00

I suppose someday I'll get to say, "I ran out of church on Easter." By then enough time will have passed that it won't matter that the service was technically ended a second before, or that I didn't full-out run until I was down the front steps. Time fuzzes out details, and important things, too. The reason I sat through that service was hope there would be something said I could run out in protest of.

So hey Mom and Dad, let's make a Crusade date for next week. Let's do it all again: carry me out of the house, drag me into the building. What do you mean, they won't think I'm pagan? Unshowered, hair not combed, wearing a seven-year-old boy's striped button-down shirt. A female in pants! To them that's a man who cooks, a Goth, or anybody gay. You can be Dick Cheney and I'll pretend to be a lesbian. How could you overlook that? People show in their details.

You and I, all we share is this house and mistrust. I tell you my dirty lies because I hate you. You tell me your religion because you love me. "Think deeply please" - there's a reason I wrote that on an Easter egg. But there's none for why you hid it in the rain and let God brainwash the sincerest one I made.

'Cause institution's like a big bright lie,
And it blinds you into fear and consuming and fight
And you've been in the desert underneath the charging sky
It's just you and God,
But what if God's not there?
But his name is on your dollar bill,
Which just became cab fare
- Jenny Lewis, "The Charging Sky"

"From 12:57 Until 5:27", Say the Green Digits

2006-04-09T20:06:00.000-05:00

I'll never forget that noise, my awakening and fear. I wish I could see you smiling when I sat up in bed - on the edge of my seat, as it were. Your dark outline, blacker than the night - why, it could be anybody. It's so far in the cold - you're out of your mind. You steal me out of my mine. You've done it many times before.

Bang, thwang, says the screen. Crrreak, squeeeak, creeeak, says the crank. "You amaze me," says I, and kiss you. It will be the first of so many. I'll sleep and wake again and taste you still.

It's hard now to believe that you were here, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours ago. I knew it would be. It was such a relief to me to find your belt on my floor just after you'd left. I picked it up and coiled it around my hand, hung on to it as the sun rose and I went back to bed.

I'm glad you got back okay. I'll bet you're even more reckless in crosswalks when I'm not around. I'm sorry you got in trouble. I hurt half my fingers replacing the screen. I couldn't call you in the morning because they took me to church. They hope it will be a rekindled first of many times. There I am wearing the same skirt and legwarmers and only you and I know. "If they take you back again, we'll walk home," say my sandals. You'd be proud of their spontaneity, and I would be, too. Now I almost want to, many times.

But we notice that home is because we're together. "He was here," say the 40¢ from your jeans pocket on my closet floor when I found them. From Thursday, right? That's simply amazing.

We're not like a pair of socks. Imagine if right and left didn't even matter. That's ridiculous. We don't fit like a zipper, only working if we're facing the right way. That's snobby. Maybe we're more like buttons and buttonholes. We match in all the important places - and together we cover it all. It's so good to have someone real to believe in.

Status Quo

2006-04-03T22:50:00.000-05:00

I kissed his name where he wrote it for me on in the back of my notebook. It tasted like paper and graphite and I knew I needed to be home. The radio's crackly and the water's bitter. The sky's gray, the air's cold. Lying and sobbing in boredom can't do for long. I was sick for so long I hardly believed I'd be well.

I used to pretend the grandest things to get me through miserable weeks in the country. My bed was a bunk in a ship that was sailing somewhere I dearly wanted to go. I was trapped in a castle's furthest tower, communicating by pigeon through the window. This time it couldn't work. I was too ill, too hungry, too tired. The wind was howling too hard to believe I was going anywhere. Or perhaps I had simply spent the week before too cheery to ever pretend.

So picture the place in front of the the hardware store where the Amish tie their carriages, with Donald Trump strung up next to it, plastic half-circles fluttering in his suit. The field with the winding creek and the pair of mares, full of rusted crap and a sunken old teal car. The railroad museum, honoring the reason for the town's birth, and silently questioning the reason for its continuing existance. The front yard of the old-fashioned white house, sloping down to the narrow sidewalk, all mud and tufts of brown grass, choked with pinwheels, garden balls, and flamingos.

I'm so happy to be back. He's right, I am wasting my life here. But I have a door to shut and lights to turn out. I have a whole day's worth of things to do.

There's a window of time, you're in the nick of it
You look at the view and you're sick of it
You get the urge to throw a brick in it
Go ahead now
- Brendan Benson, "Spit It Out"

Don't Worry

2006-03-18T23:51:00.000-06:00

"Alex, where the hell are we going?"

Risky crosswalks and an alley after electrical workers are glancing at us as we climb a fire escape. It's a nice fire escape, bronzy and not rusty, and we go up three stories. At the top of the fire escape is a silvery ladder with a skinny round rungs. He doesn't ask me to follow; he hoists his bag over his neck and climbs up out of sight.

I pause. If I left, how long would it take him to notice?

That thought didn't occur. I stash my purse in my satchel, hoist it up, and climb. The tops of ladders are awkward places, but I get onto the roof. It's like mine, flat and silver. I haven't been on my roof in ages. There's little funnier than waking up to the sritchy stomping of feet overhead. That thought didn't occur either. I'm not thinking of anybody who might be below us. We're the only people listening to this roof.

He sits contemplatively, still yards away but now so within my reach. The sun's warm if you're really feeling for it. Imagine it. The world's empty because you're above it all. Time stops when I cross the gutter. How long has it been since I was in love on a sunny day? What I'm thinking of are so many other moments that have made the universe improbable. Last weekend, jumping off the train. Years ago, jumping fences with don't-you-know-who. Don't you know, I've jumped it all.

I give him three weeks; he gave me three days. For all that I'll trust him anyway. Eat your heart out. I'm delighted. (Evil's disgusted.) On top of a ceiling, what a place.

Time without you drags me down,
It all feels right with you around,
It all feels light with you around
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Let Me Know"

I'd've Picked Peach

2006-03-14T00:17:00.000-06:00

I'd have left them on the bush, though. I'd have run in to grab you, pulled you back out to see. Then it would start drizzling, like mist on sweet fruit, and we would stand out there long enough to be both soaked. Maybe after that we could go inside and light candles.

I'm wondering now if we ever will, if you're really like that anywhere and you're not just saying that. I've wanted to trust you since you first asked me to. You fit my gloves - and ruined them, too, damn you - and I'm suitably impressed. I think you could fit right into me.

Now just look at me long enough to see I'm the best and freshest. I am stability, I am sincerity, I could be so good for you. I am yours, don't forget to claim me.

The Rebellion

2006-03-12T20:36:00.002-06:00

Nothing will surprise you, because you're afraid of the new.

You don't notice how often my power comes from being unavailable.

Your self-perserving knee-jerks were tired to begin with.

It's funny that you'll lock me in and trust me with the key.

You're stupid because you make the same mistake with God.

It's charming how my time is worth so much to you, when I so clearly don't mind wasting yours.

I love how you underestimate me, because it means that I'll beat you.

So I'm alone. I wish it could last. My music plays into the quiet and for me alone. I can listen to the obscenely-tongued without question, the classic without teasing. Why is that funny, anyway?

I'm sorry, Necker, that I'll never understand how your family was cut from the same cloth and sewn into the same quilt. I hope you understand that you'll always be a little warmer than me.

You're keeping in step
In the line
Got your chin held high and you feel just fine
'Cause you do
What you're told
But inside your heart it is black, it is hollow, it is cold
- Nine Inch Nails, "The Hand That Feeds"

Regret Isn't Fair

2006-03-11T17:48:00.000-06:00

Suppose you fell for someone. You're absolutely crazy. Everyone would tease you about it. (You know it's because they're secretly in love, too.) You resolve never to tell a soul.

Then Evil A sits down next to you and figures it out in fifteen seconds flat.

I'm wondering what fifteen seconds would be like curved. When he rested his hand on my hip, all I had to do was touch it. That's all it might have taken!

When's my turn? He laughed when I said I was timid, but he shatters hearts like a whole tray's worth of shaky-handled teacups.

Lights Up

2006-03-05T08:35:00.000-06:00

Information spreads ridiculously well. No, watch it. It's all over every paper all around you. It's humming all around your telephone and all around your keys. It's waiting behind the dark screen of the television. It's in the air, invisible, audible, or flying.

It's been duplicated again and again. What's going to become of all that paper? Thrown away? It'll grow into more paper! Recycled? It'll get there faster. Where are all the radio signals going? Every word anyone says, it goes out forever, weaker and weaker. What information created who you are? What was written on your page before it became yours? Does it make a difference? Don't you wonder?

It flows out of nothing. How do we know where you are when we've got your phone and it would electrocute you right now, anyway? No, really, how do we? Why do new things keep coming to light when we're all sitting in the dark?

It's mostly rubbish and it's mostly mystery. There's people behind every stupid infomercial! Can you hardly believe that? There's something that will always make me laugh. So many people working together, throwing energy all over the place. Look at all we have to show for it.

Unholy Octoparrot

2006-02-27T23:53:00.000-06:00

I swear up and down the tallest thing you can find that I read about Necker and Fai's band on some music blog. But if I can find it now I'm Robin Fleshman, and it's making me crazy. I had one scrappy draft post about that. Envy Week being just past (it began, completely unsolicited, on the stairs last Monday), I had a devastated, jealous snippet written about some boy. And, I realized they were remarkably similar. Could it be true that I really do experiance just one emotion for two completely different events? The smooth bleeding together suggests the worst.

You always find it in the last place you look. Quick, come up with a reason to make that right. It's just a matter of not having looked there yet. Mmhmm. I get what I want and I want to find it.

Or maybe I'm really losing my head. This hasn't happened in a while, you know. Not since the days of the Ex-Guyfriend have I ever been so doubtful that something happened, nor so convinced that it should have. Memory may be tricksy, but life is an awful lot like a boring science experiment, you know. A little different every time, but horribly repeatable.

I did spend hours upon hours telling myself it was hopeless, but of course that didn't make any difference. Like an interior rhyme, it makes sense in my head and it was probably a bit too obvious in living color. I live in my head, don't you? If I can think on my feet, it's because I've been thinking with my chin on my hand, too.

Well, I did spare you the hysteric love poem.

And tonight, if I could sleep tonight,
We could walk on through,
I could drive, this evilness that reeks
Oh, I can try, but only you can free...

What's inside of me
- Starlight Mints, "Inside Of Me"

Destiny Drawer

2006-02-20T16:26:00.002-06:00

Lately it's been securing somebody else's secrets. Why am I bearing that cross, still? Not to pass the buck, but it hasn't been mine for a while now.

I mean, who looks at the little basket under the hot air balloon? I've realized conceit's the real reason people hate emo kids. With that bright red balloon of connotations and memories, I forgot what else that drawer has in it. So I took a pin to the balloon, stashed it someplace else, and scraped the drawer off its high shelf in my closet.

Where'd it come from, anyway? I may have it had it the better half of my life. It's hideous, it's dark brown, it has two tiny wheels, and it may have been an unremarkable part of someone's very ugly kitchen. And mostly, it's full of doll clothes. There was the one lacy, polyester dress she came in, but I made all the rest. Dresses and sashes and jackets and capes and lots and lots of bonnets. This calico dress is for school, this satin bonnet is for a party, the white cape edged in blue and red matches the blue dress and is for the Fourth of July. The sorts of things every girl and her doll does, but lots of it.

None of them were good constrution, really. I'm too impatient to be much for sewing. The doll has tangled, matted blonde hair and no name. She isn't really very beautiful.It was about the clothes, putting them on and taking them off. Her limbs are bent from it. It's sort of nice, you know. A little bit of preordainment. You could write it in my biography. Right?

And yet - I did lots of other little girl things, without the doll. I took ballet and riding lessons. I had playdates and I read lots and lots of Nancy Drew. I wandered around outiside for hours and hours. What gives, what gives the future?

Fuzzy Logic

2006-02-14T23:05:00.000-06:00

Remember grade school, when high-school students gave you those fuzzy yarn pom-poms on yarn strings to hang around your neck? Every time you were nice to someone, you were supposed to pull a little piece of yarn out of your pom-pom and tie it to the other person's string. By the end of the day, your pom-pom would have just a few strands left, and little ties in many colors would be knotted to your string.

You know me. I was not going to see my perfect, round pink pom-pom limp and depleted. I pulled out maybe a yarn or two, and got as many ties from other people. I must have avoided everybody. That afternoon, I hid it under the racks of clothing on my closet so I wouldn't have to explain it. I knew no one would understand.

I have elementary-school Valentines in my closet. Ah, the sweetest of diluted loves. I never did explain the pom-pom, but I threw it away ages ago.

It's the sort of day when you could love everybody. Good news! Far more people than you expected are willing to give you candy. I haven't eaten this many sweets in a day since finals week. Ribbon-bedraped pigtails get people looking at me I never realized didn't. It makes me look girlish, I know, but that's just the point. Today, I'm still too young to be cynical. If the cavity of your chest is bigger than your heart - never fear, that's room for improvement. You've got time to grow into it. It's an excellent excuse to be as bubbly as Cherry Coke. It's a big party, and warm out, too.

Fire on the hill
Fire in me still
I feel out of my league
But you turn around and you say to me that

I love everybody here
And I agree
I love everybody here
- Athlete, "I Love"

Damsel In Distress

2006-02-07T23:12:00.000-06:00

There's afternoons where I feel like my head is full of air. My intelligence is gone, particularly on days with math tests.

My head may be empty, but my feelings are from the heart. When there's a chill from within, what can the contents of my mind do but condense? And now I'm biting my lip, and now I'm trying not to think, and now I'm all alone and I'm watching him and now why can't he see?

I'm usually hiding in plain sight, you know? And surely you've counted yourself up pretty high. I want to see you lose all your arrogance, just once. The sun is so bright in my face that I wouldn't recognize you when you stop to save me. When I tell you that I'm crying over you, I would be doing it to be nice.

It'll be a lie, sort of. When my skull is empty, what can you expect? I'm crying because you've stolen my head and I'll never capture you. I'm crying because I'm sure I deserve to be better and to love you more than anyone could.

And the accusations,
Quite a sin
And the obligations,
They're gone with the wind
And the tribulations,
Of a day gone bad

Just the condensation,
On a glass we just had,
On a glass we just had,
Of the bitter truth,
Of love
- The Dalloways, "How Can I Explain?"

Partial Undress

2006-02-02T00:59:00.000-06:00

Remember that idea I had about asking someone out via telegram? It would be unusual. It would show uncommon affection.

It's too late. Western Union discontinued telegram service last week.

And I don't blame them, of course. It's my fault. I held the idea too tight and the life dried away. I never asked anyone out, and certainly not by telegram. The tiny, adorable bottle of blue Korean perfume on my shelf is evaporated into dust. Regret it? You bet I do.

Tomorrow, I'll use some of the fast-dissappearing pink perfume. Or maybe I'll run out of time, or maybe I'll lose my mind, or maybe I'll do it the day after tomorrow.

I don't want to read a broken wall like a textbook. If I do it now, it might hurt. If I wait too long...

What better time to make it better than when everything's alright? If I can never live up to history... Carpe diem, carpe diem.

Don't Sell What's Mine

2006-01-24T23:37:00.000-06:00

You can sell all your childhood playthings. You can sell the patches off your clothes if it brings you profit. Is the icy wind on your skin going to make you happy?

I thought not.

What holds my words? My brain can't. My paper can, and so I save old notebooks. What lets me write in every color? My pen can't. Seven or eight or nine couldn't, and so I need every marker and colored pencil and crayon. What keeps treasured remembrances warm? My memory can't. Letting a forgotten object wander back in time to its most treasured place can, and so I keep all sorts of things.

Who can predict the future? No prophet but the past. Where is my future? Where is my past? They're all around me. They burn out of my head and enflame my desk. They're branded all over the walls. They smoke into my pages and smolder on the floor. You call me sloppy and you say I'm a hoarder. I'll never be a simple person. How could I be? I'm alive.

Maybe your mind made you all that you are. Perhaps your psyche is perfectly organized. But is your inner self is a mosaique that lives in full color, that blazes all around you? Are you part of your room? When your foot brushes a tile, does it explode and become your very own? Do you inhabit the very air? Do you blaze in my pupils, do you sunbathe in the very word you write?

I thought not.

Your head is full of canal locks. Your soul isn't worth as much if it's shriveled from the cold, you know.

The Value of Nothing

2006-01-20T23:59:00.000-06:00

Today is terrible. Oh, it was, it was!

So it's a refrigerator. The meat drawer's a "deli chiller". A delicatession cooling off in your refrigerator! Yours! Yours, with all its useless grooves, dinged metal trim, and five-sided corners full of old crumbs. It would make me laugh if I didn't have to wash the whole damn thing. The produce drawers aren't even nouns. They're labeled "garden fresh". They're adjectives!

They're adjectives! They're stupid adjectives and I'm glad it's not my refrigerator. Garden fresh came to your state in a truck and to your kitchen in a plastic bag. "Garden fresh" is a stupid yuppie adjective for stupid wannabes who wish they had a garden. They don't even wish, they wish they wished and they'll never be seen with a trowel. Victory!

Victory! Ha. You say they look better. What you mean is that they're white. Refrigerators are white, too. You'd never think of thinking that, but I know you better than you do and better than you'll ever know. The extrovert's metacognition! And you would say that you know me better than I do, in your fashion. I know your fashion! I do!

I know, I do! I can see your socks, and your lock doesn't match your knob. Both our Bibles have the same stupid plastic binding, but mine was lost on purpose years ago. I dumped it in a drawer and left without it. It's not garden fresh! No one sent a truck after it! It's there still, with its stupid four-ribbon bookmark. I remember making that thing. I was disapointed that we were only supposed to use it in our Bibles. I tried it in other books, but it didn't work. Victory, victory!

Victory! Can't use the bookmark without opening the Bible. They won that battle. I won the war. If I cared, I would be crusading for you. I don't care! Ha! You're think you're being fed from the Garden of Eden, but it all came in plastic bags. It's all stale, but you can't tell. You're being fed hard plastic! That's an oxymoron you've never even thought about. You hypocrite!

Ces cocons plastiques! Rien! Mon Dieu! I never hit left shift. I have a left brain. I'm always right! I'm always right! Non! Non!

Si, I'm always right! Sit and dine on your garden fresh tomatoes. They're white in the middle and you're pretending the red is for sacrifice. Candy cane, candy cane. Who was it that said bloody steak was full of colored water? That's twisted, they are, and you are too! Hypocrite, you hypocrite! Twist and shout, because my head's been screaming all day.

You bought a new van the first year of your band
You're cool and I hardly wanna say, "Not!", because, I'm so bored
That I'd be entertained even by a stupid fuckin linoleum floor, linoleum floor
Your lyrics are dumb like a linoleum floor
I'll walk on it! I'll walk all over you
Walk on it, walk on it, walkin, one, two

Who? Who? Who? Who?
-Le Tigre, "Deceptacon"

Drift

2006-01-16T17:30:00.000-06:00

It's been one of those weekends in which I sit around in my pajamas and go hunting for indie bands and can't seem to write anything good at all. I've considered my knack for falling for punks, emo boys, and gay guys. I really don't know why. I've considered what a strange little kid I was - the marriage between the my dollhouse people was breaking up because Dad had a drinking problem. I've reflected that math, like other people's self-injury problems and the Pussycat Dolls, is just something that I can't fix. I've thought about my loathing of bathing suits and my love of salsa and flamenco dresses.

I've considered my love of new notebooks, and my total inability to come up with anything to write in them. I never come up with start-to-finish story plots, but I can't write without them. My drawing talent is sporadic. I'm not a great poet. I'm a terrible songwriter. I can't write about myself, because that's what my blog is for. I can't write about boys, because I'll have to tear up the pages into confetti later.

Confetti, that's what I'm like right now. Boring in small pieces, but altogether pretty cool. By tomorrow, I'll be vacuumed, recycled, and repackaged.

Go Away

2006-01-07T22:48:00.000-06:00

There's people you meet and hate. Watch your daily parade and put on Jackie's sunglasses when they come by. When you can't stand their antics any longer, stick too many stamps on boxes of styrofoam peanuts and send them away.

So when you meet people you love, fall down at their feet and kiss their kickass shoes. When they're gone, keep your eyes down in sorrow. When you see those same shoes, trim a different color this time, look back up to meet the new eyes.

And when there's someone so fabulous, someone whose shoes don't begin to cover his mind, reach out and hang on tight. For pure soul is vapor, and you'll find yourself hand-under-hand to catch the falling star.

And hey, you, you, I know you, and we were such friends. I'll keep on apologizing, if that's what it takes. You, you might have asked, I wouldn't have held back. I've defended you from your rumors, and I'd fight off your demons, too. What's a girl to do when you won't let her speak?

Secretly, I want to lie in the grass outside your house until you come out barefoot and replace the sun. Stand over me and apologize - you should know that's what I really deserve.

Eloise Absolutely Loves

2005-12-31T01:25:00.000-06:00

I haven't had a best friend since first grade. And then, she was my only friend. These days I have piles. I need someone to be best. Someone completely different but just like me. I need another soul that fits my skin.

So I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll go to a supermarket and buy baby carrots, ranch dressing, Capri Sun, and sugar cookies. And then we'll get on a train and go to Saint Louis. It'll take hours, but you're my best friend. Skater K said rent a car. Maybe that. But I've loved trains since I was little, platinum-blonde and blue-eyed. I always wanted to sit on the second level, hand down my ticket from above the condutor's head. They would give me boxes of Good & Plenty.

We're going to the hotel nestled in one end of Saint Louis's Union Station. It used to be the busiest train station in the country. It's a shopping mall now, huge, with marble floors and brick walls and big windows. Would they let minors check in? We can say we're older and laugh our heads off afterwards, in the elevator. You can push every button.

Here's another thing Anna loves: subways. Like trains, but dingier. Down-to-earth, as it were. We'll fix our makeup and promenade all the way back through Union Station and take the Metro to the riverfront. We'll duck into another train, the tiny tram that goes sideways and up to the top of the Arch. Don't think too hard. We're on top.

And we'll do all the normal stuff. The Historical Society. The Old Courthouse and the Old Post Office and the Old Cathedral. What makes a church a cathedral? We can walk - better, skip - to City Museum. I'm growing up too fast when I envy the little kids but wallflower for the sake of expensive jeans. Wear some that don't fit right, and we'll crawl through every tiny dark tunnel like seven-year-olds.

We'll stay up every night and have pillow fights and watch TV. We'll leave wet towels on the bedspread and nose smudges on the window and powder on the bathroom counter. We'll wash our hair and dry it and hate it and re-soak it and do it perfect. You can pick the music, because we love all the same songs.

And oh, expensive jeans! We live in a mall this week, darling, and we're going shopping and buying everything. I do wish I liked coffee, because Starbucks would be like a small heaven. But my best friend is everything I want to be, of course, so we'll sit in the window and watch all the people and I'll buy you any configuration of coffee chemistry you like.

We'll link arms and speak gibberish and laugh because we're looking at each other and fix each other's bra straps and trade clothes and trade names and you're mine. When it's time to leave we'll find the lipstick you thought you lost and my other shoe. We'll stock up on sugar cookies and Creme Savers and go home and never forget. You're my best friend and completely imaginary and we'll be young forever.

You could be my best friend,
Stay up all night long
You could my railroad,
We'd go on and on
- Oasis, "Guess God Thinks I'm Abel"

Four Thousand "I'll See You"s

2005-12-22T02:17:00.000-06:00

I don't know why it took a week short of six months to happen, but today I went down the same street that took me to the airport the day I left for Britain.

Surely I must have travelled that road between then and now, mustn't I? Tell me I must. I've ridden down it so many times in my mind, looking out from the collar of my polo, beneath my I'm-going-to-South-Carolina-let's-buy-a-hat hat. For a June day thinking of July, there's air conditioning and I'm cool. There's excitement in my heart, heavier than the pile of books I dropped on that librarian last spring break, lighter than the little girl who couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve.

It occurs to me now that there's nothing, except all that was part of that trip, that I wouldn't give to do it over again. Of course, because what wasn't part of that trip that I love? Friends and music and late nights and sheer joy.

A world without golden friends could only be as lonely as one of nothing but evergreen. Let me touch green into each dead leaf and put every one back on the trees. I'll breathe on an icicle and scrub every bit of slush from under my fingernails in the melting trickle. If my heart is the only cache, I'll paint the street with blood.

I'll swim, or swallow the ocean and walk. I'm licking my wounds and I'm used to the taste of salt.

She's gone two thousand miles, it's very far
The snow came falling now,
Gets colder day by day, I miss you

I hear people singing,
It felt like Christmastime
- Coldplay covering the Pretenders, "2000 Miles"

Gingerbread Men

2005-12-17T20:15:00.000-06:00

Note
To self:
Don't walk,
To Starbucks,
In ballet flats and legwarmers,
Through mud,
Snow, and slush,
In a thin skirt and bitter cold,
Downtown,
Especially
When you've always hated coffee.

Hot chocolate does just as well. The partially-decorated Christmas tree is heavy on the front bottom section. My brother is taking a metal detector to his unopened Christmas presents. Cookie-Baking Day, the reason that the Ex-Guyfriend's mother never knew me as any more than "cookie girl", is Monday. Finals are over, as I remembered when I caught myself factoring differences of cubes in my head. Save that for when you're penned up in a pew Christmas morning.

Your friends won't ever hear your prayers for them. I love not being able to get from my locker to the cafeteria without being handed three different kinds of candy canes. No matter how much I aspire to have none, religion affects every part of my life. Just once every year, the least it can do is give me stuff.

In another sense, it's vacation. I've never actually had all three volume controls on my guitar amp all the way up simultaneously. I've got heaps of podcasts I haven't listened to. My closet floor is an explosion of ribbons and hangers. I'm going to fulfill a months-long urge to bake gingerbread men. (The recipe said "gingerbread people".) I'm going to listen to "Hung Up" two or fifteen more times, eat quesadillas, and watch The Return of the Jedi.

Cherish the things you love, right? I'd rather be walking under bright lights in a big city, but when my mouth tastes like egg nog and stollen I can't be quite so bitter.

Oh, when the sunshine beckons to ya,
And your wings begin to unfold,
The thoughts you bring and the songs you sing
Are gonna keep me from the cold
- Oasis, "She Is Love"

Peppermints

2005-12-12T23:12:00.000-06:00

I have hair dyed red. I have No. 2 pencils, erasers, and my choice of purses to pack them in. L.A.M.B.? Gap? My British bag? My Taiwanese bag? I haven't studied enough, but I do have peppermints and a library copy of Elephant. Finals week? I am so totally set.

Mmhmm.

This isn't anything like where I truely want to be. You know I know. Every second I pass through brings me closer to my dreams and death. But everyone is living, all the time.

You know where to find, if not an A+ student, at least a heartfelt hug and a peppermint.

And that ain't what you want to hear,
But that's what I'll do
And the feeling coming from my bones
Says find a home
- The White Stripes, "Seven Nation Army"