Can I tell you a secret?
Stream of consciousness, train of thought, words from another life (and my notes app)
I’ve been trying to be okay with spending more time alone. Reading, cooking myself dinner, taking care of my body. Not needing, or wanting, a companion at all times.
I have a scar on my elbow. 2 inches long, nearly white, at least compared to the rest of my skin. Crosses the softer, stretchier skin of my arm. Part of it is hidden by a tattoo of a snake now. Cosmo gave it to me when he was a puppy, when I was a puppy too. Probably jumped on me when I got home from school one day. He always did. He was just a baby and he didn’t know. Sometimes the way we show love to others can hurt, if we’re not careful enough. He wasn’t careful and I still don’t know how to be.
I am gritting my teeth. I am sunburnt through my windshield, bright red and aching. I can feel the fingers in my ribcage, pulling me apart, pushing me back together. I flinched when you touched me there because I have hurt myself over and over again in that same spot. You didn’t know and you didn’t notice. I have teeth marks on my shoulder. Scrapes on my collarbones. I can feel things differently now. In my mind, my hands are clawing at scraps of a quilt draped over the part of you that was broken less than a year ago. I felt like it was my fault then, in some cosmic way. I still do.
I picked up a peach at the farmers market down the street and I felt like I had held it before in a hundred different dreams. Each time it grew a little softer, a little sweeter. Sometimes it was a heart, sometimes a fist. I took a bite and the peach bled down my wrist. The juice caught the sunlight and turned to gold. Maybe I made that up. I was on the corner, between the two churches. Maybe god put something gold in the peach. It is impossible for me to allow things to be ordinary. They are either golden or nothing.
I used to pray without knowing how when I was a kid. Whispered bargains to the ceiling, forgetting no names, pleading for things I didn’t understand. I used to think if I stood in the right corner of my room and held my breath, a god might listen. I still hold my breath. I still find myself in the corner.
I had a dream about your best friend the other night. We were college roommates, fighting over the air conditioning in our room. I moved in and stole his bed and then we kissed. I woke up guilty and afraid. I don’t know if I should tell you. I don’t know if I could tell you. I still wrote it down, I always do, on the list next to your name. Yours is in there more than anyone else.
A girl I used to dance with died. I don’t know when it happened. She overdosed. Heroin, I think. She moved to California for rehab, last I heard. I hadn’t spoken to her since we were kids. Or thought about her, really. I remember her mom. I was afraid of her. I remember the layout of her house, how we played cards in the garage. She taught me how to be a girl. We spun around on her mom’s bed to “With You” by Jessica Simpson. I put on her makeup, brushed my face with her glitter. I don’t know if she had a funeral. I don’t even know her last name.
My knees hurt when I wake up sometimes. My back clicks when I turn too fast. I don’t recognize my face when the light comes in through the window of my apartment. Time has become a second person in my room, watching, aging me, keeping score. I scroll and I scroll and I scroll. I mute people I love. I don’t want to see them happy when I’m not. I send you things I find funny and wait for the typing bubble. I lie in bed and pretend the blue light is moonlight and that I will change with it.
I keep trying to be normal about it. I don’t let myself want anything from anyone else, and yet I still do, and I dream about it when no one is looking. I’m asking questions I don’t want to hear the answers to just to hear you talk. I’m nodding and smiling and laughing and hate myself for all of it. I hope and I hope and I can’t learn to not. It still makes my hands shake.
My grandma visited me in a dream the other night. She was dying in my childhood bedroom, trying to let go but one finger holding on. Walls pink, skin blue, breathing in tubes. She told me to get a tattoo of a goose. I’m still trying to make sense of it, but I will. Where did she go when she left? How does she always find her way back to me?
Do you still see me as a kid? Taller, but beneath you? It’s been 600 days, or something like that. Not that I’ve been counting. I had to Google it. Every day, I am punching myself in the face and spitting my own teeth into my palm. Chapped lips and weird teeth. Three years from now, it will be over. It should be. I hope it is.
I’m sleeping. Thinking less. Doing yoga, sweating, crying in public. Reading books. Walking alone. Making things weird and not apologizing for it. Making things weird and having to leave the room out of embarrassment. Taking criticism and not crying. Crying in my car later. Writing more, reading more, caring more. Loving more and less and more and less.
It is a certain hill.
The one I imagine when I hear the word “hill,”
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
if our five billion minds collapse at once,
well I’d call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful,
a place I wouldn’t mind dying
alone or with you.“Self-Portrait at 28” by David Berman
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed these words. Don’t ask me what any of them mean, because they don’t and they do. You know?
This is what I’ve been listening to this month. I’ve been taking pictures and running around and sleeping a little. It’s been good. I need a haircut. Talk soon.