January 2012
1 post
to be heartbroken assumes you gave your heart to someone and they didn’t care for it the way you wanted them too. but you were brave enough to give it - which is half the battle, I think.
I wasn’t happier being heartbroken, and I wasn’t happy always wondering what they were thinking, what I was thinking, how they felt, how I felt, being nervous and then being euphoric, then...
October 2011
3 posts
I wake up and he is in my kitchen with our friend and my mother, unloading groceries. The part of my brain that’s organizing and directing this makes me remember that, of course, he and Simon are going to Pittsburg and stopped to stay the night on the way. But then that part gets muddled, I remember them coming and arriving but now I remember packing for Shakespeare and looking at dresses...
it has been two weeks. I started something like this once before - “it has been two weeks.”
not the same two weeks. now I miss him and thinking about him makes me look up and tighten my lips together and push my fingernails into my palm and try not to sigh, but I sigh anyway and then I look right down at the ground, the only safe place.
I’m just missing him and us and the...
“Her beauty is not just—or even primarily—physical. In her face, I see her...”
– Dean Koontz, Seize the Night
September 2011
5 posts
what just happened.
he calls me, tells me he slept with his ex. I know this is happening as he says it, but I think about the ten minutes before this and remember how I was feeling. I try fiercely, savagely, stubbornly to hold on to that - to make myself not know this is happening. but it is.
he doesn’t care for me romantically. what does that mean? does it mean he doesn’t kiss me on...
“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye...”
– Macbeth, act I, scene iv
1 tag
i had the weirdest fucking nap dream and you were in it. we were at this house after a party and everything was super quiet and it was a pretty big group of people and we were all really fucked up looking, but we had to leave, we just had to leave, and we were all going somewhere else and i was supposed to drive, but i couldn’t, i was too fucked up. so you said you would take me, and you and...
glorious summer
extremes, extremes, instances, rainstorms, heat heatheart, typos and italics and strikeouts, but -
glory.
a twisting, charged, rankled glory that claws it’s way through veins and thudsthudsthuds against heartbeats in competition.
a lie. a little lie, a big lie, a lie that suddenly isn’t a lie anymore, a bond. blood. brothers. family. real family. the honeymoon period. bloody bloody...
August 2011
2 posts
I think I like him.
He’s on a chair and I’m on the floor and it doesn’t mean anything, of course, but my whole body urges to stand up or pull him down with me. No strings, we say. This isn’t some silly story where we are going to fuck and then decide we actually like each other. This is what it is, an agreement, with little room for change. He has just been left after...
Two weeks and we are… people. Together but not together. We are simply a deal, an agreement, which I employed and you agreed too. It’s nice, the security of having someone who likes to touch you and likes to be touched by you. It’s calming to realize that this is nothing. You don’t have to share your secrets and neither do I.
But we still did. And I don’t know...
March 2011
1 post
“love is when your breath catches in your throat and lands on another’s...”
January 2011
1 post
my brother
dear zach,
i’m writing this on the 4th, the night you wouldn’t eat dinner with me because mom tried to talk to you. and i know if i tried to talk to you, you’d just shut the door in my face or blow me off. but i’m headed back to school and i won’t be able until the end of april so i needed to tell you these things when you couldn’t hang up on me or delete a...
November 2010
1 post
really scared.
what do you do when you are told something so horrible and frightening and terrifying about someone you love and you have no one to talk to or to hold you or to be scared with you when someone you love is really, really broken inside and you are too far away to help them and you never knew it was this bad. when you can’t figure out what is happening or how to fix it and you can’t...
September 2010
1 post
another other me.
can there be two of a person out there? can there be another me, another girl with chipped nail polish and cloudy eyes the color of the sea… is she me, or is she some other me - some different choice i made, some road no taken, some mistake undone?
does she feel the way i feel. does she feel this roaring challenge in her breast and feel her bones rub up against each other under her skin....
August 2010
1 post
“i wrote the story myself. it’s about a girl who lost her reputation and...”
– mae west
July 2010
1 post
"see."
i don’t really like the girl i am sitting across from, but i have chosen to do this - to open myself up to the world, to shut myself away from it, to throw my heart over the bar and trust my body to follow.
dropping in is just as frightening as it sounds. it sounds sudden and freeing, heart stoppingly quick. these are just words, but every time i repeat them, they taste differently. i did...
June 2010
2 posts
9 tags
year two.
habit forming is dangerous and i like this sinkingfloatingmagic feeling inside my rib bones too much to stop. every rustle fills me with a mix of dense honey slow moving sludge of blood and yet the quickquickquick heartbeat matched with overloud breathing almost overpowers the music of the earth - the tall old people trees that brush up against each other, that frictionate their leaves and...
7 tags
May 2010
4 posts
old soul.
you: i will not be in school today and possibly not tomorrow. my heart is broken and i can't function. i can't talk about it. i need some time to get myself together.
you: i am so sorry.
me: what has happened so suddenly? i wish you would talk to me, i am so worried for you and you are frightening me.
me: you said you would come find me when you needed me. we don't have to talk. we could wander or sit or do nothing. please be safe.
you: i have never been so sad, liv. i am shaking i cant eat i can't sleep and there is nothing i can do about it.
me: why? what happened?
you: the man i love told me that we would never be together even though he loves me and is with a woman he says is not compatible with him and he does not love.
me: what? when did this happen? i am so sorry.
you: yesterday.
you: i am an ass hole. i don't know what i thought would happen. he crawled into my soul. and just like that he is gone. and i have to see him EVERY DAMN DAY.
you: AND he leaves telling me how much he loves me and that he thinks we belong together but he just can't do it.
you: i don't believe in anything.
me: you do believe in these things, which is why you are so broken right now. love and magic and light are such a part of you that they can never leave you, eve now in some of your dimmest days.
you: this is not to scare you and i a not going to do anything but i wish i were dead. how can the gods expect me to survive two such heartbreaks in this lifetime. there is no magic. at least not for me.
me: stop that, you are scaring me. men come and go. love is not so limited and magic comes from everywhere, not just our loves. you had magic and love before you even knew what either of those were. the gods don't expect anything, the path unfolds as we will it, and we have to continue along it. you love deeper, see wider, feel so much more acutely than 'normal' people. those are gifts and burdens and they will and have marked you you're whole existence. this lifetime is not as short as it seems. there is so much more beyond this moment.
6 tags
“play acting is a dangerous game, for it oft brings the truth out of such...”
– thoughts in shakespearean lilt.
erosion
how did i get so far from where i threw myself against the wind? how have i stood so still for so long, but no roots grow to wrap around my stone feet, to plant me here. does nothing hold me here anymore?
there are days when i feel the rush of the sea in my body, when i understand the rage that she summons to banish all those in her pathway. there are nights when i feel the aching loneliness that...
April 2010
1 post
“i feel her presence in the common day,
in that slow dark that widens every eye....”
– theodore roethke
March 2010
1 post
2 tags
wax.
they can capture the scent of pine trees and peaches and summer nights, but they still can’t make fire smell the ocean. the scent of laundry detergent is not the stinging salt of the sea, and that’s what i really want.
January 2010
2 posts
hello, i am olivia's darkness.
i am the outside that she imagines as she goes through her day, always presenting herself as if someone is watching. she walks one foot in front of the other, thinking it will make her hips twist in a way that makes her seem shapely and alluring. her footsteps are defined bits of heel to toe and they seem so loud, so strange and foreign against the mottled tiles.
she presses against the keys with...
4 tags
choices
things you’ll pass by in the snow that you should remember. winter caps, tired gloves, once a pair of lacy red panties.
things you try to remember. so hard, you try. a lingering first kiss with a boy who was grateful in the first grade. the color of your first room. the taste of a mango ripped off the tree. things you try so hard to imprint on your skin, on your tongue, the ripples in your...
October 2009
1 post
captains
she misses her people.
she misses [girlshelovedinclosestwaypossiblefriendbeloved] and she misses [boyboyohboy i still love you, do you know that?] and as she lies flat on her back, heart pounding in her chest, stranger pounding in her core, she doesn’t think about sweet nothings or tip toe mornings or foggy memories, she thinks about them. separately and together and like the strings of her...
August 2009
5 posts
siren song
tides they came and gone but you have always stayed the sea it calls to me so i must go away summer rains will fall but they are not the same they lack the taste of brine that fills my pulsing veins i thought i found where i belonged the ocean was only a view but i can feel it calling to that siren song secretly, i always knew and sand in my hair and shells in my blood i cannot face the past or...
5 tags
“so I ran like the wind to the water
please don’t leave me again I cried...”
– Sarah McLachlan. I Will Not Forget You.
5 tags
however will i get out of this labyrinth?
Alaska: He’ - that’s Simon Boliviar - ‘was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finishing line. The rest was darkness. “Damn it,” he sighed. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
Pudge: So what’s the labyrinth?
Alaska: That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape - the world or the end of it?
“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”
– Brendan Gill
July 2009
5 posts
conversation with god
when it rains, i cannot cry.
i cannot breathe either.
i take my keys and i drivedrivedrive [windowsopen] and then i stop and i get out and i think maybe now i will cry because i am so desperate, so disgusting, that only rain and tears will make me clean and pure and clear.
but rainwater mats my hair. and my eyes run black, not salt. and my feet have grass and dirt and blood and slivers of...
molecules
the time in between the lightning and the crash. i feel this holding my breath then let it go and i drift away and then the sky splits and the moment of respite and perfect fit is over and i jump into the heaviness.
“i believe in a god.
sometimes.”
– tinkering in the musicbox.
3 tags
weather is here, wish you were beautiful.
“Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses’. Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there is a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because...
4 tags
dear thirteen-year-old olivia,
you will love fairy tales for the rest of your life, even though you have always had more comic books than any boy and dirt was a staple in your diet for years.
this may be your undoing
…with love [listenlisten to me, burn the books], olivia.
[not older, not wiser, ripped at the edges and faded in the middle.]
once upon a time,
fairy tales, fairy tales, light and hope and sweetness...
June 2009
6 posts
skinny
skinny arms and legs and thighs that don’t touch and wrists that sway in the breeze. fingers you see light through when you clench your fists. hair that tangles around your neck and you don’t have breasts but your hips are so sharp they cut me almost as deep as that tongue of yours.
it cuts me when we kiss and when i hold you my hands come away stained with red.
where you are...
3 tags
sandbar
i cry. all the time now.
salt storm.
stormy. bitter. sad.
i am none of these but all of these, and in the exercise during my favorite class today, those were the words to describe me. words escape me, for i am not a master word-er. i am not a master speak-er or hear-er, or anything. but i am a master see-er.
i see how they see me.
1 tag
“i’d compare them to your eyes, but the tide comes and goes.”
1 tag
1 tag
wind.
the wind is warmer than the air like the sheets
are warmer then me and you are oh like the breeze off the sea.
bitter. briny.
and sweet.