I would get off at 57th and 7th Avenue (I was very well acquainted with the Q train), accessorized with my pink backpack full of Moleskins and errant pens, my hand stitched cat face purse which contained only my money and precious weed kit (double sealed in ziplock bags, of course), dressed like a confusion of boyhood and girlhood at the same time. I’d shaved off half my hair at the behest of that producer I was in love with, and I’d taken to dying it deep purple. As you’d imagine, I’d get stopped by a lot of weirdos, and a lot of policemen. The weirdos ranged from psychics to pedophiles (I looked 12 when I was 19). I’ll never forget the woman who ran out of her crystal shop while I was walking to the Universal building and told me she had a message for me. “You are meant to heal the world with words.” And god, how badly I hoped she was right. At that point in my life, words were all I had, and I needed them to heal me, too.

I’d push through the revolving door, reeking of marijuana and cigarettes while beautiful women in businesswear and heels that clackclackclacked rotated through to the world outside, parallel through the glass like my inverted mirrors. They were put together and lipsticked, gorgeous as I wanted to be.

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there is no why in being chosen by you,

you get bored,

love is, formlessness absorbance and the absence of agency, a spinelessness sympathetic seraphim with perforated boundaries and performative pick me tendencies and the willingness to ignore your abuse,

love is just how much anyone is willing to take of you, or…

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It was a lot of work, to become no one.
It started with the isolation. Haunting my own apartment. I wouldn’t get out of bed til 2 PM. Sometimes not at all. I stopped going to my piano, as some sort of punishment. I had failed my instrument, and therefore I no longer wanted to bother her. I became interested only in rebirth by way of oblivion, erasure.

The best way to become no one is to become an addict. You can take on the shape of a substance, distort the world around you with the myriad affects of each one. You start collecting each substance one by one. It does not happen all at once, and it happens when reality becomes So Fucking Unbearable you need to access increasingly more distorted dimensions of time and space. My favorite dimensions were the ones that slowed everything down, forever.

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Fourteen years and four suitcases later, I still don’t. Four addresses. Four failed relationships. Four medical diagnoses, and four medications I’m not even sure I need(Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Zoloft, and Monjauro, respectively). I wouldn’t know where to start, man. I have no idea how I’m still here.

The anemic streets o…

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I did it anyway.

Against my best intentions/ for awhile you felt like what love is/ your gold Tacoma was Heaven/ or a piece of it/ maybe/ I thought your mouth could save me/ loved looking at you while we were driving/ loved you talking to fill up the silence/ showing me songs that kept you alive since you were just a kid

Your world was so big it swallowed my world whole/ I never showed you mine/ you never asked at all/ maybe you never cared about my life cause we were too busy living yours/ then you talked over my mother/ you never asked me about me at all/ not even how my day was/ and I knew everything about yours/ I knew your every waking feeling/ your every passing thought.

For awhile you were what life felt like/ til tried to bring you into mine/ and I realized how much smaller I was getting/ all the time.

Not alcoholics or addicts. Just normal. No bad childhoods to inform our shitty attachment styles. No huge ambitions to change the world with our music. Right sized heads and less ego. Maybe then it could’ve worked. I imagine folding your clothes and ironing your shirts. And sitting on the couch with you after a long and normal day. Enjoying a glass of wine together and not going insane. I imagine your eyes warmer and more human and deep brown, looking into mine and feeling like you’re finally found. Neither of us have deep longing to experience more, and experiencing it all. We could’ve been normal. But we’ll never be that now.

In another life, or maybe even just this one, things worked out. You come with me to AA and we get better together. I save you a seat at big meetings and you do the same for me, or we go to our separate meetings and come together at the diner with all our friends after. Hold hands under the table. You drive us home. We talk in the dark in your room until 3 am because neither of us are very good at sleeping. You hold me when we finally do. You kiss me in the morning and we walk the dog.

I wish we could’ve had something instead of all this nothing. I wanted a life with you more than I wanted anything. I want to know why I can’t have a life with you. I want to see how it will be better than the small simple thing I imagined ever since I met you seven years ago. I want to know why I couldn’t have you. How is my life going to benefit from never ending up in your arms? I need to know. It needs to have meaning or all this suffering was for nothing. Why isn’t a spiritual question. And I ask it all the time.

When I die I know that will be my heaven, laying in the onion grass, the sky caving in with blue twilight and humidity, a smattering of stars flung across it, and then there’s me. Fist full of blueberries, crushing those small globes of sweetness between my fingers, between my teeth.

I used to pull the petals off the roses, does he does he not love me? What I wouldn’t give to sew each and every one of them back on, who was I? Naive enough to desecrate perfection in the name of schoolyard love.

That was the only true place in the world. It still is. I didn’t need much. I was love, laying there, bewitched by all it was.

My mother grew wild strawberries one year. I would kiss them bloody, stain my lips, play at being pretty, and lipsticked. Fireflies descending drunkenly on the garden. I’d let them crawl all up my arms and cup them in my hands. Peer into that space and watch them illuminate me red, and shut off like storefront neon. More innocent.

I thought I was only dreaming of a life

Never knew that was actually living.

Once, when you were depressed, you told me you wished someone would show you love the way you show it, that you feel like no one notices, you give, you give, you give. I felt ashamed, was I not, giving back enough? So I planned the party. And the night before it we broke up.

That was a month after you bought the gun. With the money we won in Vegas. You wanted to be a cowboy, like your dad, like your grandpa, even though I begged you to just save it.

Because I knew what a gun could do in your hands. And I had plans for us.

I had plans.

You were laying catatonic, crying, looking at your phone. I reached out to touch your face and you said “leave me alone”, you said you wanted to die, and I knew that it was true, and I screamed, and I cried. You returned the gun. You knew it too.

“I just blamed it on you. Said my girl didn’t want it around.”

Did you tell them I imagined finding you one day, on the ground? Maybe not this week. Maybe years from now. If I built a life with someone who doesn’t want life, even now?

They say I dodged a bullet.

Well, I did.

You aren’t allowed to bring any more women home for Christmas because your mother forbids it, so you brought me for Thanksgiving. That was your little joke with yourself. Did it ever occur to you I was even someone else? Someone who doesn’t meet a lot of parents, or spends holidays by herself? I thought it meant something, did you ever really see me? We played your grand piano while your cousins drew me turkeys. Did you ever really need me? Was I just another body? Was I just anybody to you?

I knew I wouldn’t marry you the first time we were in Vegas. You were laying in the bedroom, broken from how long the day was. I knew I wouldn’t marry you when you showed me Perfect Blue, and that rape scene was my rape scene and you fucking knew it too. I knew I wouldn’t marry you when Annika threw her bouquet, and you yelled at me to catch it, and no one did that day. It got stuck in the string lights. Hanging helpless overhead. And I watched it dangling like an awkward question, tentative. And I took it as an omen. Smoked a cigarette, started choking. And it wasn’t just that moment.
I always knew.

Unparalleled shift from heaven to hell.

I guess I lost myself.

Your world seemed

Pure.

And boyish.

Your brown eyes went soft when you cried.

Is it crazy I miss holding you in the pink gloam of your old bedroom? One time I asked how happiness could grow in a place like that,

And you said,

“It doesn’t.”

And you burst into tears. Confirming my worst of fears. That I could be here but you’re not really here at all.

I’d kiss every track mark scar on your arm, give my own, to say sorry.

So here you go. I am sure the little narcissist that controls your hands and mouth will be so pleased to read this story. It’s a good one. And you are the gorgeous antagonist of my dreams.

It is a disgustingly, unusually warm night in September. Los Angeles. Edendale. I am riding shotgun in Sally’s vomit yellow convertible. The vibrations from its ignorant carcass are sexual at best, and I allow myself to romanticize the banal vapidity of cars as women, ownership, blah blah blah. We were so much younger then. Night buzzing loudly like neon storefronts, glassy eyed blondes at the bar. We push past them. I’m all “sorry”, and “scuse me”. Ugh. The east coast in me died. I became timid that year. Clutching my cigarettes with a deathwish, one hand on Sally’s shoulder as she carves a path through the bodies to the backyard. Her friend Lucas waves us over. Center table. Between the bimboified debutantes taking selfies.

And there you are.

Black hair brown eyes brown skin blue Camels; you have two empty pint glasses and a third threatening to join them. You are gaunt, and golden, and awful under the glow of glass bulb string lights. They murmur over your skin, your skin, this whispering, angelic thing, auric, a prayer.

You are instantly British and horrible like cold water to the face. I am blushing deeper than scarlet when I ask you for a cigarette. You point to my pack and raise your eyebrows, “What for, tiger? Seems you’ve got them,” I am fumbling cosmically for any reason to make any request of you. You hand me one anyway and I palm it, place it behind my ear. You go back to swilling the dregs of your drink; you are already bored.
And I am in awe. At how nonchalantly you can cut into a stranger in so many infinitesimal and conversational ways. Every small offering of words I put together, you’ve designed some perfect, dismissive retort to cut me down. So I stop talking and start watching. The smoke escaping your lips could kill me. I fell in love with that mouth so full of so much poison.

I went home to my mediocre boyfriend and crawled into his king sized purgatory. I thought about your mouth for a week.

You scare me into becoming something else.

I didn’t even know your name. So when you come up on my calendar as a person I am supposed to write a song with that day months later I don’t even blink at it. I don’t know it’s you, the mouth, til you answer the door.

”Oh. It’s you.” You drop the sentence like a rock. “I didn’t know you were a musician,” you say.

”I guess I didn’t know you were one either,” I’m burning. I burn.

”Pretty rude of you to ask me for a cigarette and not ask me any questions, not very ladylike are you?”

I burst into flames. Somehow saying anything to you feels wrong. This has never happened to me before. It’s also never happened since. Like I am in the punishing presence of a punishing God, and in this moment you are. You wordlessly cross the room, pick up a black mug and scrounge up another one.

”Coffee?”
I nod.
”How do you take it?”
”Black.”
”Ah, a serious one, ey?”
You even despise the way I take my coffee, pouring cream into yours. It’s amazing to me I’m even breathing, I stand up straighter, “Cream is disgusting. Where can I smoke?”
You raise your eyebrows. “Roof, I’ll come with.”
”Whatever you want, sure.”

Yeah… and this is the moment. Both of us in all black. Smoking on the slope of that roof overlooking Hollywood Forever. A dingy, dirt patch of a parking lot. You look at me sideways. I know you know you’ve met your match and I know you’re gonna give me a hard time.

I just didn’t know how bad it would get.


(to be continued, maybe).

I wish I never let you touch me. I have no shame about my body. I am small and beautiful and golden, I am a small church in a garden, I am the blue-dark of the summer night threatening to cave to black. And I am even more than that. So when I say this, what I mean is, you did not deserve to see it. Loving me is not pulling teeth. It’s obvious. And easy. And you were nervous like a teenager, trembling and twice as sober, impossibly thinking it in your power
to diminish
all I am.

But you can’t even see it.
You cannot distill my meaning.
And like a coward,
make me An Experience.

I am small and beautiful and golden. Jasmine strangling a garden.
And I grow, still, long after you left.

I am leaving you here/ where I found you again/ There was another backyard/ There were a thousand cigarettes/ It took six years for this moment to come back again/ We were still in LA/ Back together like this/ I tore myself down for two years when you left/ shook my small head at God/ hoped that we’d still exist/ in another backyard/ where we were still talking shit/ But now I’m leaving you here/ There is nothing to miss.

I clawed my way back to you/ kissed your beautiful mouth/ and you told me/ that’s not/ what you were talking about/ But you spoke in infinities/ and indefinites/ You do not like closed doors/ Only keeping me in.

So I am leaving you here/ In your two-bedroom house/ With your dog on the floor/ With your beautiful mouth/ With your brown eyes like black knives that stare far too hard/ With your slow-graying hair/ With your threadbare backyard.

You really could use a woman like me around/ Someone who can sit up, straight/ Dark hair tumbling down/ And my eyes green like knives, seeing all the way through/ You abused my best try/ I was kind/ you were cruel.

And I’m leaving you here/ In this silent ballroom/ Where the music we made/ somehow one day dies, too.

Oh, goddamnit/ I gave you too much again/ You gave me mere words/ and I hurled sentences/ You were charmed and then bored of me in the same breath/ You tire of me so easily/ I always forget/ You’re too cool to care/ I’m not a challenge/ I drank too much and I threw off the balance/ And now you’ll never have me/ You just can’t get past it/ Too honest in my drunken state/ And you can’t handle it/ I miss you/ And I didn’t even have you/ I miss you more than any man I ever called my own/ The virtue in truth feels far and too few/ I gave you all of me and now I’ve got none of you/ Where do we go?/ Is there some archive we exist?/ Is there some backyard where we’re smoking cigarettes and still talking shit?/ Is there some place in memory where I gave you any bliss?/ Or am I just some kid sister you can easily quit?

something in the sweet greener-smell of summer just takes me to sixteen, the year of bicycles and believing in anything that felt like truth, bloody knees and sidewalk bruises, stumbling drunk on effervescent drink, too sweet to the tongue, tripping over the tongues of converse (tm); walking train tracks to the supermarket parking lot to watch boys turn tricks in their white t’s, low low low, I remember

taking two fistfuls of earth in my hands, damp and deep, rich, lush, wanted to surround myself in it, cool like a comfortable crush of bliss. there isn’t anything between us except sunglasses, fabric, it’s all happening. the half-moons of our smiles too bright in the middle of the field touching trying to figure out how to feel- god- I felt too much, heart broke and drunk on some nobody always. life was more vibrant when I didn’t know any better.

Were you expecting to be entertained?
I wasn’t some party favor, not meant to be wadded up in your cheek,
pushed around by your tongue, the flavor fading out of me, all your incessant prodding and protestations, the exasperated proclamation that I was Doing It Again.
You know. Being a woman? I’m a woman, though, not a wind up doll. It’d be one thing if you liked to lay me down and toss me around a bit more but even my limbs didn’t interest you. I was all peach-skinned and perfect and you’d barely even touch me.
Was this your idea of loving?
Cutting me apart on the dotted line?
So dull, so dour, I wish I could move backward through every hour I spent lamenting on your couch, passionless and clinical, and cynical, like
you.

I tried so long to force love between us I forgot what it was. Forgot that shit is supposed to come so easy you hardly notice. And now that I can’t see you anymore, all of that’s come into focus. I was clutching so hard at the strands holding us together, I ended up holding myself back. Even as they frayed into dust, I was stuck holding the bag.
I wanted to go back.
Back to the second I saw you in the kitchen,
drunk and grappling with the affects of a key bump,
and just getting sucked into the black vacuum of your eyes.
A gaze so wide I thought I could die.
Dark like that night downtown and you lifted me and pressed me up against a building to kiss me,
drove me home, drove me crazy,
like, something like that could happen to me.
Like something good was finally happening.
I wonder if that was the minute we started unravelling,
right then.
Like, what if that was the height of our existence?
Eventually, you started to see the imperfections,
like, mismatched socks.
Like smears of lipstick.
Like maybe I wasn’t what you said.
Like maybe we knew it’d never work,
even then.

You stay unmoved by the absolute mediocrity of your own excuses, even as you’re handing them to me, right now, I can feel the white-hot embarrassment of the regret of your brashness coming up in your throat like bile, as if it were mine, I feel so intrinsically linked to you, fortune’s fool like that.
Your car is all coat hangers and plant propagations, several spiders and a cross-stitch your ex girlfriend made you.
You tell me you’re seeing her again, as if i am too slow to keep up with the shadow-story. I’ve been followoing it like a weekly TV show on my own time, refreshing my fucking phone, a slave to my own masochism, I can’t cut it out. And you know it. You paw me the way a cat does a dead bird. At this point you’re just playing with your food.