when i lick into her mouth, it is gritty and grainy. it tastes like me and sand and death.

i still dream of her at the kitchen table. the one that isn’t mine anymore and never really was. in the dream, we’re spilling on it. beer and spit and cum and the oozing weight of every accumulated drop of nothingness and everythingness.

everythingness.

she would laugh if she heard that. tell me i made that shit up and i’d say i did and she would tell me that i’m just saying shit and i’d say that i am and she’d tell me i’m brilliant and i would rip my heart out of my chest and feed it to her.

anyway.

where were we? oh, yes. at the kitchen table with beer and spit and cum.

dean tells me to stop biting my tongue. to find someone who finds my venom as a cure instead of poison. i kiss him on the lips when we say goodbye and i hope it’s sweet, sticky, sublime.

sometimes, in that kitchen table dream, she’s wearing my mother’s dress from the 80s. the one that’s heavy with shame and never quite fit me right. it’s purple in some lighting and pink or blue other times. it’s not fit for breakfast but it looks like it’s started to meld to her skin, so i don’t ask her to take it off.

i start to laugh when i realize that she’s shrouded in the salt that i’ve rubbed into my open gashes. blood bubbling like a chemical reaction. i think if i touch her it’ll leave boils on my hands and if that’s true when i press the heels of my palms into her sides they’ll burst. wet, oozing. all over the dress. all over her.

i think i’ve stained enough.

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That’s when the Ganorfs crawled out of a filing cabinet in my head for the first time in years. I mean that literally. I was tripping and the inside of my head looked like the Brain Office in that one episode of Spongebob.

My older brother Jake first told me about the Ganorf pit when I was around five and he was nearing seventeen. “The Ganorfs are snarling creatures,” he explained, “that eat badly behaved children.” They were mean, scrappy, and they, lucky for me, miraculously lived in the triangular cavity created by the sectional and the wall in our living room. I was terrified, trembling in my Aristocats shirt.

Jake was perpetually stoned, always listening to Sublime and playing Grand Theft Auto (and I thought he was so cool). I doubt it even crossed his mind how he scared the absolute fuck out of me with this story.

I used to peer into the depths of the pit, looking for them, but all I’d find was the gray carpet and stray Kit-Kat wrappers that I’d throw back there when I didn’t want my mom to find them in the garbage. But what if the carpet split open? What if they clawed their way out from a hole to come for me while I curiously stuck my head in their home? A rabbit looking into the burrow of a red fox before meeting its demise.

I decided that if I didn’t look for them and I was really, really good and didn’t beg my brother to play Zelda: Ocarina of Time, they couldn’t get me. It didn’t quite work because I had bad impulse control and thought Princess Zelda was hot, so the Ganorfs remained a threat. Both of those things are still true, actually.

While I was scared of the Ganorfs, I was much more scared of the DVD case of The Exorcist. I didn’t even have to see the movie to be horrified by the little girl on the cover. After catching a glimpse of her, I couldn’t sleep for most of the night and once I did fall asleep, I woke up from a horrible nightmare at 3 AM which I heard at school is the witching hour. Eight year old me burst into my sisters’ room. The twins were fifteen and still awake, texting on their Envy phones, the ones that slid open with the full keypad that beeped every time they typed. They lovingly told me to go the fuck back to sleep. I laid awake that night and realized that no one was coming to save me. After a few nights of restlessness, I came to the conclusion that maybe I could rewrite the story. Maybe the Ganorfs could be my protectors. The Ganorfs went from a tale my brother created to make me behave to a safety blanket.

I like to think of this as the first time I practiced the art of lying to myself. I’d tell you that I come from a long line of storytellers, but that’d be a lie, too.

My mom is adopted and has little to no connection to her biological family. Like me, she’s the youngest of her siblings with hefty age gaps between them. It’s lonely to be tethered to so many people by such a thin thread. The familial isolation and adoption trauma weren’t the sole reasons she had a fucked up, sad childhood, but I’ve only heard about it in broken fragments. The edges are sharp and I haven’t been able to piece them together without slicing my fingers.

I don’t know when she discovered that lying to yourself can act like a pair of thick gloves, a way to handle shrapnel safely, but based on stories she told me, I think she figured it out around nine. When I was around the same age, she and I were taking a walk behind the historical society that was across the street from the puke green house we rented by the lake. We strolled through a manicured garden with flowers and buzzing bees, and a stray black cat that we called Midnight trailed behind us.

The story goes like this: she was outside of a pancake house, not to be confused with Waffle House, in Northern New York. It was on the way to my grandparent’s cottage. While she was waiting for her family, alone in the parking lot, a tall figure dressed in all black approached her. He wore a hood, so she couldn’t see his face, but he reached out a shaky hand. His fingers were twisted, spindly things. When he placed his hand on her shoulder, her entire body went cold—an unwanted touch that turns your bones to solid ice. Then, he disappeared. I wanted to ask her how long it took her to unfreeze, to defrost. I said nothing.

She told me that the Man in Black, as she calls him, followed her around her whole life. Different instances of him lurking, stalking about. According to the story, when I was born, she stopped seeing him. Her saving Grace, she called me. As we crossed the street to go home, the black cat following us, she told me not to tell anyone, but I was young, so I immediately told everyone in the locker room the next day at school. My best friend told me that my mom made it up. I said, “So?”

There are dozens of other stories like this that my mom has told my sisters and I. Never my brothers. But this one in particular stuck with all three of us. If we didn’t have the DSM-5, it probably would’ve become a folktale in our family.

Some March, many years later, my mom was texting me and I held down the text to forward it to my sister Shayla. Translate came up as an option. Yes, yes, I thought to myself. Please translate our mother’s manic nonsense.

Later that week, I picked Shayla up from her shift at the bar. She got in the car with a red solo cup filled with White Claw, a shot of vodka, and an assortment of citrus. We sat in her driveway and tried to decode the stories that Mom told us like they’ll suddenly give us the answer to what she’s been protecting herself from. We compare and contrast, and sew together the scraps of lies we’ve told ourselves about her, about our childhood, but we aren’t looking for answers. Just connection. We know the monster in the closet regardless of what name it goes by.

Shayla was slurring her words when she brought up the Man in Black. I should’ve expected this. He haunts us, too.

I told her that I assumed that Mom pulled the Man in Black from Johnny Cash, one of her favorite artists. We used to ride around in her astro van singing Delia’s Gone, a song that tells a story about a man who shoots his lover and goes to prison.

Shayla said, “It’s from a Stephen King novel, dumb ass.”

If I can create a story about the story to make the story more tolerable, am I a writer or a liar?

I think about writing all of her stories down, kind of like this, and maybe someday somebody will publish it. They’ll call it a searing portrait of mental illness. Reviewers and critics will dissect it, patch together the narrative for me.

I call it nonsense, I call it lying, but isn’t that what all stories are? Some version of the truth that might be closer to a lie, but really, does it matter if it acts as a lifeboat? In The Things They Carry, Tim O’Brien says, “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

I’m visiting my hometown and my eight year old nephew is hitting me with a pillow. It was cute, maybe even a little fun, the first ten times, but now I’m over it. I say, “Look, if you don’t stop, I’ll send the Ganorfs after you.” I watch his eyes widen and see my own. Then, he says with the confidence only kids have, “Ganorfs aren’t real, so they can’t do anything to me.”

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whatever. i’m going to eat tofu now.

because i am the type of person who eats tofu now.

and i have to announce it.

but please don’t tell anyone (specifically my dad).

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i’ll quit soon. i promise. just not yet.

i blocked your number yesterday. i’ve always considered myself to be irritable, if not downright temperamental, but i’ve never been one to block. lots of my friends are dedicated blockers. sent a volatile text? block. saw a photo of your ex’s new girlfriend? block. went on a bad date? block.

i never really understood it. maybe i’m just a devoted voyeur—watching from afar, observing lives without me in them. maybe i’m leaving the door slightly ajar—just in case someone decides they can’t handle my absence. but in the last few months, i’ve wanted to shut my eyes, slam the door. i’ve been envious of my friends and their ability to cut the rope. i had been holding on so tight that it’s been leaving burns on my hand, slowly fraying as i tightened my grip and you pulled on the other end. i wonder if you even felt the tension.

i’ll try to let go soon. i promise. just not yet.

the letter is a bridge burner. my hands shake as i jab it into the wrong part of the mailbox. i haven’t sent a letter in a few years. the last time i did it was a love letter.

my friends send me money to buy celebratory cigarettes. isn’t it funny how i commemorate this grief with something that will slowly kill me?

your former friend, now my new friend, and i become detectives. we piece together fragments of shrapnel like it’s a puzzle. one pulled from her side, one pulled from mine. it starts to make complete sense and no sense all at once. she sends me a text to tell me that her mom said maybe you and her were supposed to meet so that her and i could become friends.

i tell my mom that we aren’t friends anymore. she asks me if i’m okay or if i’m sad. i tell her both. she doesn’t ask anything further. she doesn’t have to.

i tell my dad that we aren’t friends anymore. he’s devastated. he wanted to show you a motorcycle that you might like if you ever wanted to learn to ride. i try to explain while leaving the details out that he won’t want to hear. he tries to understand. he always tries.

it’ll get easier to be cavalier about it, i tell myself. i promise. just not yet.

the waiting is the worst part and i’m not a patient girl. i do what i can to quell the fire in my stomach and the moths fluttering around my head. you know what they say. something about busy hands and idle minds. i figure out ways to pass the time.

time is a forgiving lover. she drags her fingertips along my hip—soft, delicate, light. she makes it a little easier to breathe, even if only for a moment. her grip tightens, becoming oppressive and heavy. her movement slows until it’s completely still. i’m both rewarded and punished for my patience.

hey, is it okay if i’m not ready to write about what you said to me? i’ll get to it soon. i promise. just not yet.

i don't remember if the black frosting on the cat shaped cake had stained my teeth, but i don't know if something like that would have bothered me Before. in the photo taken at the dining room table, the cake wasn't black. there are too many candles for it to be my birthday. i'm not wearing a turtleneck or even a long sleeve with elastic on the cuffs.

i don't remember which corner of the house those details were hiding in. all of the rooms look different than they did Before. i don't remember the furniture moving around.

i don't remember when my mom stopped working at the diner. maybe we stopped eating fish fries on fridays before that. i used to dip the beer battered haddock in ketchup. the breading would slide off, landing in a pool of red. i'd fish it out with my fingers. i don't remember when i stopped ordering chocolate milk at dinnertime, or when it started to hurt my stomach. i don't remember if my mom's apron said kathryn or kathy or anything at all. i don't remember the time Before she was something besides mom to me.

i don't remember when i stopped believing that having a period meant laying a bloody chicken egg. except there was no shell—just a yolk, but more solid. like an eyeball. tampons always confused me. why would someone want to plug the hole and trap the egg? i recently told my sister that her clinical explanation of menstruation was too complex for my seven year old brain (i don't remember if i was seven—maybe i was younger). my sister said that i probably thought that because we had chickens, but i think that i just thought that because she used the word egg. i don't remember if we had beheaded all of the chickens yet. things were bloody Before. the rooster had nearly severed my dad's achilles' heel.

i don't remember if my sheets had winnie the pooh on them or not. they were soft, though. flannel and worn, handed down from my sisters to me. the other night, i spent over an hour on ebay searching vintage 90s winnie the pooh sheets purple blue. i spent even longer lying in bed, gnawing at my memory and hoping certainty would settle in next to me. it never came, but maybe it hadn't ever Before.

i don't remember Before, but i live there sometimes. my dreams are scrapbook pages. the canopy above my bed doesn't have any small tears in it. across the street, the freight train is singing and i'm dancing to the tune. i don't have to rewind the vhs tape of the lion king because someone else already did it. my siblings and i are lying on the floor with our blankets and pillows in the living room on christmas eve. they let me play monopoly and life with them earlier. i beat my brother in the sock game. my mom isn't working at the diner tonight and she made breakfast for dinner. it snowed and my dad let me carve out figure eights in the backyard with the snowmobile. it's quiet enough for me to sleep at night even though i can hear the sound of cars passing by and my sisters laughing in the kitchen. i don't know if it matters if i don't remember or if i made it all up. there was a time Before.

an excerpt from an exercise written during chloé caldwell’s writing with intuition class.

the body pillow supporting my back has lived in nine different bedrooms with me. under the pillow case, it is stained from sweat, makeup, tears, and probably chocolate milk. i got new sheets and a new bedspread after my ex and i broke up. cum stained and worn, i needed a reset. i wrote a piece about these new sheets, and read it to strangers and posted it on my substack that my ex subscribes to. he said he doesn’t open my emails, so i texted it to him.

my bed is pressed against the aforementioned drafty window. on my windowsill, i keep three grinders. i haven’t purchased weed however long, so i’ve been scraping the kief out. two of the grinders are old. one i’ve had since 2019. the other since 2021. the kief is brown and sticks together. sometimes i get so high that i lie in my bed with the spins. when this happens, i pull my blue blanket up around my face. i bought this blanket from the target in union square while drunk and stumbling. i hauled it back to brooklyn and didn’t wash it before i threw it on my bed. i wonder how many hands brushed it in the store. i feel gross when i think about this. i’ve washed it since then. obviously.

i also wash my stuffed animals sometimes. okay, really only the one i hold each night. when i was a child, maybe six or seven, my mom took me to build-a-bear and we stuffed a bunny rabbit. i named her felicia after a cat my mom had when she was a kid. my mom told me that felicia ran into the woods and died. she liked to tell me morbid things and i think i liked to hear them. a few years later, my cat peed on felicia. no matter how many times we washed her, she smelled like cat piss. i cried as my mom put felicia into a plastic bag and threw her out.

when i was a teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen, i went to build-a-bear with a friend before our senior trip and i stuffed a bunny rabbit. i named her georgia for no particular reason. i brought her on the coach bus and let a boy in my class make fun of me for having a stuffed animal. i still have georgia. she’s lived in eight different bedrooms with me. i wash her often. i like when she smells like dryer sheets.

next to my bed is a nightstand that i built over thanksgiving break. the twenty minute assembly was bullshit. it took me four hours. on my nightstand is a plastic cup with melting ice from the latte i grabbed before class. there’s a glass of water that’s been there for a few nights. i’ve been having weird dreams about a former friend. i wonder if i’m in love with her because she’s always in my dreams. i told someone this one time and they told me that i need to empty the glass of water on my nighstand, that i keep having these dreams because the water is trapping them. when i empty it nightly, i don’t dream as much. i’m happy in these dreams where i’m in love with her, so i haven’t emptied it in days.

my medication is also on my nightstand. if i don’t see it right when i wake up, i won’t take it. if i don’t take it, i get a little crazy. if i get a little crazy, i lose things. i’m really tired of losing things. i have aquaphor next to my medication because my lips crack in the winter. next to the aquaphor and the medication, i have a stack of books. my friend mia’s galley that she stamped with her lipstick, when things fall apart by pema chödrön, jailbait by ruralisolationshortie. my journal sits under my books. i haven’t opened it in awhile because i haven’t felt the need to submit and cement my complaints. the pages of my journal are filled with me whining. i love to whine, to complain, to bitch. maybe i’ve just been doing it out loud lately. the bottom drawer of my nightstand holds my sex toys. a dirty dildo that i really should clean soon. any toys that go in someone’s ass are clean. because i have standards.

an excerpt from an exercise written during chloé caldwell’s writing with intuition class.

my checklist is checkless. 

like every other 20-something (thank you, sza), i’m looking for the cure to feeling like i’ve done nothing except shake shit up in my life for the sake of it. it’s not groundbreaking to search for meaning, and i don’t really have anything new to add to the discourse. i’m yelling into an open pasture while i can. while it’s still amusing to be a disaster and wanting to believe in something is hopeful and not naïve. 

i am waiting for The Shift. i turn 25 tomorrow. my brain is supposed to finish developing this year (although, studies have found it happens gradually over a course of a few years and that varies from person to person, but i’m choosing to ignore that). a few friends have told me that they woke up one day and it all clicked. none of them have been able to nail down what they mean by that. they talk about it in the same way people talk about love. when you know, you know. i texted chloé and asked her about this. she said, who says that lol. she said, you can’t believe in stuff like that.

as a kid, my mom told me i wasn’t allowed to leave the house with wet hair because it’d make me sick. i figured out that’s not true years ago, but i still find myself blow drying my hair before going out for a smoke in the morning. if i don’t, i feel congestion creep in. my nose drips. 

i was walking down bushwick ave with damp hair, wiping snot from my septum ring, while asking myself what i’d buy into this coming year. maybe The Shift. i can already picture the figurative chart that i’ll put a gold star on every time i respond maturely to whatever’s thrown at me instead of doing something like dragging someone out of the bar by their shirt. i’ll pat myself on the back, and then text my friends for their validation. if a bad decision wields a good outcome, i’ll attribute it to The Click instead of dumb luck. if i can convince myself that the supposed development of my brain will save me from being ill-fated, maybe it will. i’ve already started to get down on my knees and close my eyes. a prayer to The Shift is playing over a speaker in my head.

when my belief in The Shift and The Click inevitably starts to waver, i’ll do as i always do—close my eyes with my hands outstretched, grasping. i’ll watch videos of internet astrologists telling me what the planets are doing. i’ll let tiktok tarot readers give me my 24 hour message (yes, i’ll take what resonates and leave what does not). the other day, a song that my ex girlfriend showed me came on shuffle and less than 30 seconds later, she liked one of my instagram stories. we haven’t spoken in over a year and i’ve been thinking about reaching out lately. i took this as a sign that i should pull the trigger, but still haven’t. i’ve been having dreams every night for over a week that i’m in love with one of my friends, and i was telling sarah about this on the phone a few days ago. she told me to empty the glass of water that’s been sitting by my bed for days (i don’t know how she knew this, but sarah kind of knows everything). she said that when i do, i’ll stop having those dreams. i followed her instructions and didn’t dream about them that night. 

it’s a consistent kind of aching—this need to believe in something, this need for everything to mean something. we could probably chalk it up to bipolar disorder, but i’m going to give the human condition some credit here. it’s an ebb and flow, oscillating between nihilism and existentialism. 

in her work when things fall apart, pema chödrön writes, “the off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.”

i’ve never been very good at that. maybe that will be the first thing on 25’s checklist.

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at home in your solitude
i sleep in the backyard
vagabonds float in and out
of the guest house

breath laced with celadon
i lie in your arms
a blanket or dead weight
afraid to ask if it’s all the same

bluegrass band playing a sad song
i listen as you sing 
a prophecy of some sort
preacher man has it wrong again

tape rewinds and unravels lost time 
i forget the path to home
lead legs carry along
when did the porch light get dim

in this lifetime and the next 
as birds or as forest leaves
i’ll always pick all parts of you

i used to play with photos of dead people all day.
catalog their memories,
organize their happiness and heartbreak.
sometimes by year.
sometimes by address.

i read their diaries and journals.
a gentle yet hungry voyeur.
the dead didn’t choose to talk to me.
i was eavesdropping.

i took sides in foreign feuds,
watched their birthday parties
outside, from the window.

this was all practice.
pain management for a thousand
pinprick deaths.

the acid free folders in my head remain
untouched by oily fingers and silver rings.
the drawers squeak and scrape.

but i like to open
box one
then
folder nine.

you exist only in soft november light.
laying against my headboard,
waist trapped between my thighs.

outside, snow settles on the porch.
when my car gets stuck tomorrow
you’ll shovel me out
while i wait in the warmth,
your face caressed by headlight glow.

there are months that are off limits.
addresses that i can’t go back to.
but box one, folder nine.

if i showed it to you,
would it feel like coming home?

                   “this whole world is dying. don’t it seem like a good time for swimming 
                                                 before all the water disappears?”

i woke up on new years day hungover from a manic episode that had lasted for a few months. i didn’t get out of bed for most of the day and when i did, i cut my foot. bleeding from the broken glass on the floor, i called someone who doesn’t pick up the phone anymore. the worst part about being the storm is having to clean up the aftermath of yourself. i started to pick up the pieces.

my favorite thing about being bipolar is knowing that it’s cyclical. one phase will end, ushering the other in. there’s a billboard in the back of my mind that reads: 

                IT WON’T LAST FOREVER—THE END IS ALMOST HERE. 
                                         AND THE BEGINNING, TOO.

it’s always there, but i can’t see it when the fog rolls in.

for most of january, i felt mechanical. i did what i was programmed to do: go to work, spend $17 on a pack of cigarettes, take my medication with the glass of water that had been sitting on my nightstand for three days, etc.

but then it was a tuesday and i sat in the last stall in the bathroom of my office job while sobbing into my hands. there’s something dully torturous about being devoid of genuine emotion, like there’s an aching splinter under your skin that you just can’t get to. it inched closer to the surface with every tear until i could pluck it out. i had never felt so relieved to be in pain. it was remarkable enough to write down in my notes app (resting atop of a list of everyone i’ve ever had sex with and a grocery shopping list). i titled the note “moment” and it read: cried in the bathroom at work. 

later that day on the train, my gold medal of triumph faded to gray when i realized the Great Feeling was Grief. how do you celebrate Grief? how do you feel at home with her? i decided that i couldn’t. i decided that i’d get back to my apartment, lie in bed, and rewatch girls for the tenth time. 

when i got home, my roommate was in the living room and he asked if he could play me a song he just wrote. i listened to the banjo as max sang something about clouds and a teacup. i felt Grief sit next to me and she held my hand while my cat purred against my leg. everything that was gray started to look gold again. when he finished playing, i opened my notes app and added another moment. 

that same night, i laid in his bed and listened to adrianne lenker’s new song with his nice headphones. i cried as she sang, “you could write me someday and i think you will. we could see the sadness as a gift and still feel too heavy to hold.” i wrote down that moment, too.

over the course of a few days, i added more to what was becoming a list of things that made me feel. if a moment passed and i didn’t write it down, i worried that i’d forget it happened or that i felt anything at all.

it’s been three months of being the historian of my own life. here are a few from january through march.

                                                                january

• getting a new couch

• watching mia eat a garlic knot while walking down the street

• listening to linda ronstadt’s long, long time at the chauncey J stop

                                                               february

• talking to a woman on the bus about her teenage sons and pizza

• kissing during the bluegrass show

• getting anti-valentine’s day piercings with max, eating takeout, and singing songs on the couch

• a beautiful sunset on the walk home from the train on february 23rd at 17:46

• sitting on a stoop with mia and talking about poetry, our exes, and our horoscopes for that week

                                                               march

• going to the birthday party of someone i met the night before and dancing with strangers

• 50,000 protestors in the streets of manhattan for gaza

• eating a ham and cheese croissant so quickly with max that we got stomachaches on our way to a clothing swap in maria hernandez park

• strangers joining my friends and i while we play “ride the bus” on st. patrick’s day 

• elly, liv, and i giving each other back massages topless 

it’s april now. the sun is coming out more and it’s been raining a lot. how good it is to feel it all.

                           “now our love is dying. don’t it seem like a good time for kissing? 
                                         one more kiss, one more kiss to last the years.”

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*the italicized lyrics in quotations are by adrianne lenker and are not my work

i don’t need a statue 
you’ve already memorialized me
writing a hagiography 
feverishly 
on your flights to and from

sketching the pattern of 
my bedsheets in your journal
branding them in your memory
since imprints will fade
from your skin

“no one has ever been 
this
nice to me”

a shattered illusion
from honesty
as an act of kindness

i’m a burning house
in the greatest city in the world
you used my flames
to keep yourself warm
and ended up getting burnt

i’m so good at playing the villain
and you’ve got the
eyes of a doe
did i catch you in my headlights
was i even driving the car

i like when the clouds look like
broken cobblestone.
always searching for something higher,
standing on my tiptoes
with an arm extended.

but if i were up there,
i would trip all the same.

i sing in the trees,
songs of delusion.
in hopes that you’ll somehow
find your way back to me.

a siren damned to land
and i think you’re somewhere
far away.
maybe even floating in the sea,
a home i can never return to.

even in the heat of summer—
i know that
it’s always been march.
my back,
sweaty and sticking still to 
the leather of that worn couch.

and i was never good.
never selfless with my touch.
you should have recoiled.
should have run the 260 miles—
back to the trees.

somewhere where it’s
never march.
somewhere that my songs
can’t reach.

the threat of May nestled in my throat until i gagged on the roof, expelling the thought of an endless summer and her stickiness. when we met, we played a game of tug of war, and i had gravity on my side. never an even playing field. during the slow birth of spring, i stumbled downhill and sliced open my knees.

we played house in different cities and we drank until i cried, talking myself in circles. you walked a straight line while i tried to catch up with a blindfold on. i hated you as much as i needed you, and i loved you somehow more than all of that. we made dinner every night. i danced while the kitchen was on fire. we bickered over who was washing and who was drying. neither of us talked about who was going to put out the fire.

we delayed the inevitable by sleeping in a mausoleum, tangled together. two white-sheet ghosts. i pictured us dying all the time, but i didn’t think that our final resting place was in the first apartment that we called ours. it took two months for you to peel the adhesive off of my skin. i watched as chunks of my flesh stuck to it, leaving open sores that you soothed with a kiss. it’s been over six months, and i’m still trying to make the scars fade. i think you’ll be a part of me forever.

i don’t want to write about our last night together. it feels like the only thing that’s still ours. so, i guess i’ll talk about sleep walking through the months after, when i woke up with cold sweats and spent the next day turning it over in my head. there’s this recurring dream—yes, i’m still having it. i’m out with my friends, the ones that you’ve adopted (so i guess that’s another thing that’s ours), and they’re all looking at me as you walk in with someone new. you kiss her. i think about throttling her, but i can’t move. when i wake up, i reach for you and find nothing but emptiness that lingers to the point where i think i’ve invented a new emotion. a level of sadness so deep that it’s unique to me. there is nothing new about this. i am not an exception, and for the first time, i find comfort in knowing that.

there’s a similar solace that caresses me when i’m on my stomach, pressed into a mattress. crimson will stain foreign bedsheets. a mark—finally—a wound that isn’t left by what you call mercy. in a few weeks, it will fade. and all i’ll be left with? rivers of you on my skin. i don’t know how to reclaim my body besides letting other hands grab at me. 

it’s not lost on me that we kissed for the first time since July at a bar named purgatory. i didn’t know if you were in or out, but i knew that you would be able to turn me inside out. i know i will always let you. 

i have nothing new to say. i am not an exception. but i will always want to be yours.

specks of dust driving
into the mouth of morning 
heavy shadows over irises
propelled forward only by 
an infatuation with a hero’s journey 

trails of cosmic ice through a metal tube
brimming with want, to reach out
to bottle it, wear it on a chain
as a collar or a gold medal

i’d pour concrete over my feet
and wait here
for another hundred years 
just to live in the fleeting moment

                                                    all 
                                                       over 
                                                    again

i feel her behind me at times—
cocooned between flannel sheets.
fingers dancing across my back,
spelling out words she can’t understand.

she taught me how to sleep—
through walls vibrating with
joy or heartbreak.

and so i forgive her—
for trembling hands on the train,
adorned with torn cuticles from the
puppet strings sewn under my fingernails.

it is for her that all this existing—
exists,
after all.

i scrubbed my skin in the shower until it was raw and red. burning myself, trying to boil your touch off. i did this until the water ran cold. i still feel your hands on my hips and my thighs and my neck. you were the first person to ever make me come. i think of this when i masturbate. i think of this when i’m in bed with strangers. i think of this every time i go home and masturbate after fucking strangers. 

swiping on dating apps is like window shopping for heartbreak and disappointment. when i saw you on tinder, the same place i saw you for the first time three and a half years ago, i threw up. i cried. i sent voice memos to my friends, infuriated that you used photos that i took of you. i wanted to ask you how dare you let other girls see you how i saw you. i super liked you instead. we matched. you messaged me. i made a joke. i got dizzy from déjà vu. i threw up again. 

everyone keeps telling me to give it time, that it won’t feel as bad after a few months. usually, i’d agree, and sometimes i do. there are days that i’m on the b26 and don’t even think about you when the bus passes our old street. when my phone makes a cliché slideshow of us, i can watch without feeling like someone punched me in the face while wearing metal knuckles. sometimes, when someone fucks me with my legs over their shoulders, i don’t see you when i close my eyes. i don’t wait for you to text me that you’re outside of my office building at noon anymore. i’m used to having to order my own drinks at the bar. when we talk on the phone, i don’t think to tell you that i love you before hanging up. i don’t call you often anymore. i take my meds without you there to remind me. 

but i still think about you when i go to buy my dark green american spirits and the deli is out, so i have to get your light blue ones instead. i can taste you when i smoke, and considering the nicotine addiction you gave me, that’s at least five times a day until i run through the pack. i text you when something really good happens to me (“i took a nap and didn’t wake up feeling like i was just in a different dimension”). i text you when something really bad happens to me (“my chopped cheese isn’t as good as it normally is and now i want to kill myself”). i think of you when i find a sweater at the thrift store that i know you’d look good in. i check your location on find my friends at least twice a day. i feel a crashing wave of anxiety when i see you somewhere that i don’t recognize. i want to cry when i think of you fucking a girl that’s skinnier and prettier than me. i hope you still jerk off to my nudes, but i know you probably go on reddit and look up amateur porn. i wonder if your family asks about me on holidays. when i go to bed, i think of every time you didn’t hold me as we fell asleep. i hope you regret not holding me more. i wish i didn’t ruminate on the thought that you might not regret anything at all. 

i dream between my new sheets of all the future lovers that i will, at some point, try to forget. i wake up wondering when these new sheets will become old sheets, stained by my heart oozing between somebody else’s fingers like a crushed grapefruit. i’ll press the fabric to my mouth, sucking any leftover juice in hopes of getting some remnant of myself back. we are forever in a cycle of losing ourselves in love and searching for our past selves, realizing that they are too far gone yet not gone at all. but at least we can buy new sheets.

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