I want to wake up next to you

Terror Watch

I don't know if you remember my piece Cut and my even earlier piece Pistol to the Forehead, but I've been ruminating on those characters and their story quite a bit lately and I'm really hoping to expand on the concepts I'm working with. I've decided this is how they meet:

Caren meets James at a small house party after her performance and she is unimpressed with how he styles his hair. He tells her his band is called Terror Watch. Caren says, “Of course you’re in a band,” in the practiced way she has to make people wonder if she were being glib or rude, but not quite know. His response is just to smile; he smiles with his teeth and his tongue is devious.  She thinks sure, he’s mildly good-looking, but he acts like he’s more beautiful than Narcissus.  But there’s this way that he looks at her.

Caren is waiting in the doorway, coat on and purse hung militarily from her shoulder. Celeste is slipping into her pumps and blazer, but is otherwise ready. They’re just waiting for Diana to find her panties and say goodbye to Led Zeppelin Shirt Guy. Celeste goes to the bathroom since they have to wait to anyway, and she passes James on the stairs. At the median level between the two stories, in front of the door where all the shoes are, James stops and stares Caren down. He’s not much taller than her, so meeting his gaze is easy. His eyes narrow slightly and hers match. She feels like she’s won the challenge when, suddenly, he flashes a small smile and turns abruptly up toward the rest of the party.

 How is she to know when she leaves the party, too bored to stay of politeness, she has just met the love of her life?

“There were no hot guys,” Caren complains as Celeste helps Diana, too drunk to drive her decade old Corolla, into the back seat.

“I love guys who are into Zeppelin,” Diana murmurs, then chokes on phlegm which she spits up onto her cocktail dress.

“Shit, girl,” Celeste slams the back door and slides in passenger side. She mutters to Caren, “Every guy in the world likes Zeppelin.”

They drop Celeste off first, Diana throwing up out the window all over Celeste’s tiny trio of garden gnomes. Considering Diana lived much closer, Caren decides she’ll crash on Diana’s couch to make sure her friend hasn’t suffocated choking on her own waste throughout the night.

Why I Have Writers Block

1) My characters need a tangible universe.
2) My content affection for someone has made my thoughts boring.
3) The characters need to be working toward a goal, they need external drives, ambitions, and conflicts and I haven't thought of what they are.
4) My days have become studies of nonverbal communication and behavioral psychology. Social psychology.
5) Planning a plot is more precise. I have tools but I've lost the directions.
6) I can't create a world when I'm always directing my thoughts so far inward.
7) I refuse to let my work be inspired by certain people in my life because I refuse to put it out there for them to see it, like I'm a kleptomaniac of my loved one's stories. Like I'm picking through their dresser and taking what I like best, dying it and putting sequins on the hem, trimming it shorter, changing the lining, then wearing their story in front of them,

only its worse with some people, because they're our stories and there are some lovely details I want to steal from my shared experiences; I just don't think a person could understand the implications of what I'm doing when they see me picking and choosing from stuff that should be private between us and lending it to a faceless moment of fiction.

8) Fucking Netflix, man.

It devours me completely

i wish my life novel was told in 3rd person rather than in 1st, i make a better narrator than main character

it's important to be the perfect girl

It’s that there are no words,
not that we haven’t found
the right ones

Like how this tiny shadow of a moon
can eclipse the entirety

Of the sun

This bleeding cosmos unravels

Into old red bandages,

loosely knotted together:

Our wounded fates

As if my bones are inside out,

Made of clay,

Malleable and I just need you

To knead out my kinks

Because you always told me "the best

Way to teach is to show by example"

I would transfigure you from lead into gold
and it’s not that I don’t like you as lead
but I know you’d rather be transformed

You need me to heal you and I look at it like I am

meliorating the person you will become

Rather than changing the person you are

Oblivion Dust- When You Say

When you say...

Maybe there's no reason we're here
You're trying to find some meaning in it all
A little spider in your head don't want you to see
So he keeps you in his web
A little too close to an emotion that won't let you glow inside
So tell me, baby, what can I do about it?
I want you to see there's a better way for you

When you say that the morning never seems to shine its light
When you say that the stars are there to keep you warm at night
When you say that there's no one there to ever hold you tight
I'll try and find a place that's safe for you
And I won't ever leave you there alone

When you say...I wanted to believe...

Maybe there's a reason we're here
I'll find it if it helps you leave the web
There's sweetness in everything
Just hold on to me and whisper in my ear
Oh, I'll take you far away from all of that hurt you feel
So tell me, baby, that you believe and want it (Say it back to me, baby, say it back to me)
And you'll finally be where you're meant to be

When you say that the morning never seems to shine its light
When you say that the stars are there to keep you warm at night
When you say that there's no one there to ever hold you tight
(You're hiding up inside it, you're drying up, so leave it)
I'll try and find a place that's safe for you
And I won't ever leave you there alone
No, I won't ever leave you there alone

but ya know there isn't

If only there was a way to know if you did and said all you could for someone in any given situation, rather than having to wonder and hope that you were all they needed you to be.

If only there was a way to turn off your morals and stop caring either way if you were or weren't a good person.

If only there was a way to be happy without it being at the expense of any other individuals happiness.

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Uroboros And Its The Same Every Time- freewrite June 2011

You like someone.

That doesn’t mean you’re planning a wedding, or even planning being with them a month from now. It just means you smile when you think of them.

It doesn’t mean that you’re going to start writing them romantic sonnets or drawing pictures of them or making remixes of all the songs that remind you of them. But it does mean that until you don’t like them, they’ll be peppered through everything you create. That scares you.

It doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped flirting with other people- oh no, no no. No. Not until you’re sure the person you like likes you back. It does mean, however, that for the most part you’ve stopped initiating the flirtatious contact with other people.

It means that when your phone vibrates, it’s always slightly disappointing that it’s not them, but at least other people are trying to hit you up. It’s cool to actually be telling the truth when you say, “I’m busy tonight, how about Saturday?” ‘Cause it’s important to be breezy. It’s important to have your own life.

You like them enough to worry about whether or not it’s too early to like them. You like them enough to worry about daring to factor them into later plans.

You like someone. This means, now, that there’s one individual who cannot come on too strong, and every other individual has to be kept slightly at bay. This means that when they’re not online, there’s no one to talk to.

You like someone. This means you’ve found someone who reminds you enough of yourself to satisfy your narcissism. That means you found someone that, so far, fits well into your pre-existing fantasies.

You like someone. This worries you only slightly more than it delights you. This means you will be second guessing the things you do, trying to play it cool. This means you will pay more attention to tiny things you do, and every word you say will be 10x more important than it actually it is. Just be aware that you’re the only person playing that close of attention to yourself. It is because, when you like someone, you wish they’d be looking close enough to see the things you try to hide or pass off as menial.

If they like you back, it doesn’t matter how you stumble over the things you say.
If they don’t like you back, it doesn’t matter either.

You like someone. This means that you could get a fucking Emmy for playing the version of yourself that you think they’d like in return. A genuine representation, just selective. 

When you like someone, you want to tell them all your secrets. You stroke their skin and wonder what you’re going to leave out if you ever get a chance to spill your guts. You wonder how you’re going to phrase the darkest parts of your past so it can make sense out of context.

When you like someone and you have memories of them that make you swell, the mundane becomes more tolerable.

Diggin it

I wonder

If you talk about me during therapy

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ume playing in the snow

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1/18/2012

The summer Sarah leaves is the summer I get torn apart by mosquitos. Itching is the neurological opposite of pain. I think about that while I scratch the fuck out of my legs. Sometimes they bleed so much I have to tape tissues to my calves.

 I don’t want to be a person that doesn’t have scars. 

Maybe my blood is so sweet because it tastes like binge-eating, ink, and longing.

       

What can I say about Sarah, how I feel about her, that she doesn’t already know? I can say “I love you, too,” a million times over but I could never quantify it accurately. That I am not really alive but not really dead and it’s both and neither and

                I

                feel her

                solid in my veins.

                Now she’s gone and the want is there and it grows more and more and more each moment, each joke I can’t just lean over and whisper to her.

        How can I say that normally, I feel trapped inside my own head, trapped inside my own body, stuck inside myself and my routines and my way of thinking. How can I specify that when I’m around her, when our fingers interlace, suddenly I’m thrown into the space between us.  I exist entirely where my skin meets hers: entirely in the molecules of space between my hand and her hand.

She told me once that when we kiss, her soul hangs out between my mouth and her mouth and she said, “I don’t feel like you complete me or anything I just feel like.. I’m more than just myself when I’m with you. Like I’m anything I want to be, like I’m anything you want for me.”

       

                Can I say I’m a strong person when I’m so needy? It’s self-delusion to think I’m an independent fellow when the thing that makes me happiest is when she slips into my bed and puts her hands and teeth and lips and tongue all over me. When I can grab her and pull her into me. When her fingers are in my hair and my legs are between her legs for her to rub up against.

       

                Happiness is a solid thing traveling through my bloodstream through my brain and my heart out to my limbs. Happiness seems to have left when she did.

                She brings something out of me, something intense and visceral and wonderful. I’m an animal, but I’ve also transcended into a higher spiritual state. Maybe humanity is just the mix between the two so maybe, actually, she just makes me feel human.

I like myself better around her.

I take her positives into my heart.

I grow toward her like a plant grows out, tall, toward the sun. Sarah, everything wonderful about her, grows in me and is nurtured by her presence and I try to think of all the things plants and human children need to grow properly.

I wonder if I should start to meditate or start drinking more often.

I see her in cigarette butts and I hear her in guitar solos and I feel her when the bass is turned up. I see her in blonde girls at the mall with JUICYYYY across their preteen asses. I smell her in the iron of my blood when I bleed.

“Why do you always treat me like I’m more important than you?” she had asked me once, after an argument we had a long time ago. At the time, I remember fantasizing (or just picturing?) getting super mad and pushing her into the wall and banging her skull against the wall again and again like when we fuck sometimes. “That shit is bananas and it makes me fuckin nuts.”

“Why don’t you treat me like I’m important at all?” I countered. It wasn’t relevant to the way she treated me, but I liked the way the retort sounded. I could look back over our relationship and come up with examples of how that was true, even if I didn’t believe them.

“There’s no space for me to turn around and return any favors at any time if you just keep giving and giving and giving.”

“I started studying behavioral psychology around when we started dating and I began to be very, very receptive to you.”

“I started studying Marxism,” she said, “At the time. The Communist Manifesto and Animal Farm, but then I remember I read Fight Club and Brave New World.”

“That’s a very different mindset to start a relationship in,” I concurred, beginning to ponder what she must have been thinking about during those early months of us being a couple. At the time, I was paying attention to the way she reacted and changed her behavior depending on the stimuli I provided. All the things we talked about in my head when we were apart must have been so much different from all the things we talked about in your head.

“It’s like sometimes, you’re in a great mood and I’m a horrible mood and then you tell me you have a great song stuck in your head and suddenly I realize that you’re in a totally different perceptive world than I am,” she said next, as a tangent or I guess it was relevant in a convoluted way. She continued, “Then, I just start concentrating on getting a brighter soundtrack, focus on seeing the world as beautiful as you must be seeing it right now.”

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “I love you.”

I said, “I love you, too.”

Now she’s gone, and I don’t feel her thoughts in my head as loud as I used to. I don’t always predict her reactions to things with the accuracy I was once able to. And I wait for her. I feel like I’m always waiting for her. Like I’m supposed to hear from her as often as I used to. Like we’re supposed to stay connected.

I no longer believe in a soul, because our transcendent souls should be together in the 4^th dimension even if our bodies are so far, far, far apart in the 3^rd.

I feel like they aren’t. I feel like my soul was looking for hers and got tired and passed out, comatose, of exhaustion somewhere deep in my abdomen. I feel like she took my throat with her on the cross-country flight and maybe she forgot it in the seat pocket of the airplane.

I wonder if she waits for me to call her the way I wait for her to call me. Part of me hopes so and part of me hopes not.

“Come back,” I want to say to her. “I haven’t been me since you left. Who am I going to become if we’re not evolving side by side? And who will you become evolving and growing in a whole other world? What if when we meet again I’m not really me and you're not really Sarah?”

I wonder if she thinks about this kind of thing at all. I wonder it while I doodle angry stick figures in the margins of my notes while my teachers lecture about the difference between race and culture. I wonder it while I’m masturbating in the shower and I wonder if she thinks of me while she does it. I wonder if she’s met other beautiful guys. It’s okay if she has. It’s okay if she’s done things with them. I know Long Distance Relationships are supposed to crumble apart.

I know all I can ask of her is to remember me fondly and fuck me super hard when she’s back in my state. And all I can ask is that when she does, she still pants out, “I love you,” even if it’s a lie just so I can still say, “I love you, too.”

                I hope it never comes to the point where: I long for her, but I am every other guy.

Ohh my god get out of my head I'm trying to sleep

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Want, want, want

This song has been a favorite of mine for a long, long time, but I can still remember how my bedroom was set up the first time I heard it, how short my hair was, and who I had a crush on at the time.

once upon a time

 and several times after