Windows

I cried myself to sleep last night.
I think I love you, he said
and I said I’m sorry.

Tonight I sleep with the window open
and ignore where his presence used to be.
The cold distracts me from his absence.

Passing cars substitute themselves
for the creaking of the mattress under his weight,
the wind a poor replacement for his breathing
from the other side of the bed.

Tonight I sleep with the window open
and remind myself
that there are worse things than the cold.

Rose Quartz

On the last day of class,
my professor gives everyone a small pink stone.
She tells us that rose quartz represents
love,
compassion,
healing from trauma.
Within seconds I secretly hope mine is
smooth,
unmarred,
perfect.
I want mine to be perfect.

As she sets the stone in front of me, a gift,
I'm already looking for the imperfections,
hoping they aren't there.
They are.
I don't want this, I think,
and feel shame because it is mine.

My fingers slide over the smooth surface of the stone,
my thumb rubbing at the imperfections
as if enough friction will make them disappear.

I set it back on the desk, face down to hide the scars.
Other people hide their trauma,
and I want to hide this too.
I didn’t ask for it.
I don't want my classmates to see my the imperfections.
Is my stone less than theirs because it is marred?

The more I search, the more scars I see,
but the less they bother me.
Like me, the stone has had its share of ordinary trauma.
Now, somehow, it is more beautiful to me, not in spite
but because of its imperfections.

The weight of the stone.
Unexpectedly comforting.
I roll it around in my palm,
enjoying the way it clinks
against the ring on my middle finger.

The rose quartz may be imperfect, but it is mine.
And it is beautiful.

Family History

Grandfather.
Middle child.
Cancer.
Father stayed home every Sunday while his mother took her children to worship.
Since the cancer, he only wears sandals to church — otherwise he gets too hot.

Grandmother.
Only child.
Hypochondriac.
Cleans compulsively, so the kitchen is always spotless.
When her parents immigrated, they changed their name to something more American.
Found her religion at 17.

Mother.
Oldest child.
Inferiority complex.
Compares herself to her sisters, who put more time into their appearances than she does.
Keeps it together for her kids.
Works twice a week to help pay off her husband’s student loans.

Grandfather.
Used to be a child.
Potentially abusive.
Plants a garden every year.
Sends visitors home with more fresh produce than they can eat before it goes bad.
Rarely shows affection, even to his own children.

Grandmother.
Youngest child.
Hip replacement.
Slipped on the way home from her son’s house five Christmases ago and her hip shattered.
Can no longer walk on her own.
Wasn’t there when her daughter died.
Older sister is the only sibling still living.

Father.
Youngest child.
Mostly deaf.
Probably depressed.
Called himself his mother’s favorite child.
Cried when his sister died.
May have been bullied as a child.
Losing control.

Daughter.
Oldest child.
Used to think divorce was the worst thing that could happen to a family.
Self-diagnosed with anxiety, some obsessive tendencies.
Doesn’t want children.
Chose to leave a religion that will damn her for her decisions.
Her brother learned to yell and her sister learned to conform.
Never stopped to think about why.

Arrhythmic

The doctor said something is wrong with my heart.
It beats out of time, pulses irregular,
slower when I exhale, but I can’t control that.
I’ve never been good at controlling my heart.
The doctor said I might have an arrhythmia.

Arrhythmia: any disturbance in the rhythm of the heartbeat—
but an erratic heartbeat is better than a silent one.

The doctor said her brain died.
I didn’t believe him.
When the clot stopped her breathing, her heart stopped too.
By the time the paramedics arrived twelve minutes later,
her brain had swollen too much for her to wake up.
She died a brain death, but it was her heart that killed her.
And then they took her bones, her eyes, her organs
so that someone else could live.
They didn’t take her heart.

The doctor said he needed to know my family’s medical history.
I didn’t trust him enough to talk about her.
I didn’t trust myself not to cry.
I didn’t trust him at all.
Condescending, corrupt, conservative.
He didn’t care about the state of my heart,
just the state of my mother’s bank account.

The doctor said I needed a 24-hour cardiac monitor,
more tests in a month or so.
His needles left a bruise on my hand.
No monitor will every properly diagnose me.
No treatment will ever give me control.

The doctor said something is wrong with my heart.
I’m afraid he might be right,
but whatever it is, he can’t fix it
because maybe I don’t want my bruises to fade.

The doctor said something is wrong with my heart,
and he was right. Whatever else might be wrong,
he can't fix what's broken inside.

Mourning

At first we think we’ll make it,
those beginning steps so promising
before we sink without warning.

The headstones are too far away,
every one a panic-inducing reminder
of our own fragile mortality.
Do we care enough to keep going?
Yes. We have to.

But sometimes you can’t control yourself.
The pain and fear and helplessness
swallow you,
exterminating everything
in the wake of your loss.
‘What if’ changes nothing, and yet—

We’re standing at the graves.
Meant to bring solace to the living,
they never really do.
They allow us to more easily hold on
rather than let go.
To pretend that worlds don’t end
in a matter of minutes.

Grief and rage well up inside me,
some pity but more than that, hate.
Fuck fuck fuck, my insides scream.
But nothing helps.

We carry the things that matter,
but we can never carry this.

They say love triumphs over death.
I say bullshit. Love is death.

Sunlight heats the right side of my face,
but although we leave,
the chill never seems to.
No matter how many times the world ends,
the sun still comes up.

And yet—

Next Window Please

unused postage stamps
and empty envelopes
the only signs of his past presence
people quickly forget
it was the cancer that took him
Next Window Please
says the sign on the table

Fathers and Daughters

Pink sweater,

dirty blonde hair

falling out of a headband

she probably put on herself.

Around six or seven years old,
holding her father's hand

with the kind of smile that will

break someone's heart someday.

I wonder what will happen

before someday.

As she bounces away, 

I imagine a girl

fifteen years older.

The same dirty blonde hair,

longer now,

pulled back. 

A girl who can't sleep in the same room

as another person. 

I wonder what will make her this way.

No Angels In London

They called her fallen,
and she can't fight what they say;
she will never get back up.

Children cry in the streets, not knowing exactly why,
not knowing that it could be so much better
than they've ever known.
The angels can't do anything to help.
Their wings are torn, their hands scarred
from dealing with the pain so no one else has to.
They hide their bruised arms and red eyes
with long sleeves and makeup.
They keep it together so no one else has to.
Because anything short of perfection is the same as damnation,
and anything less than what's expected isn't tolerated.
And so they struggle to maintain the imperfect, impossible ideal.

Identity is lost in a uniform congregation,
and it's difficult to separate the corruption from the institution.
The hollow reflection in the mirror becomes a shadow
as personal histories become suicide notes.
No one escapes unscathed.

While desire is a sin for women,
it's expected of men.

Our purpose is to purify those men
who can't control their own thoughts.
Their privilege is to tell us how to live,
but they can only do so because we let them.

Forgotten suit jackets hang over chairs
and the men turn the heat down
although the women are still cold in the skirts
they've been told to wear as a sign of devotion.

Wealthy old men grow richer on the pockets
of devotees who can't escape their circumstances. 
Senile old women babble on about a time no one remembers,
not even those who lived it alongside her.
Proud young men lose their self-control to obsession,
believing that everything will be just fine.
Battered young women never learn to expect
anything better from themselves or their lives.

Caged birds may sing of freedom,
but women sing because they are told to.
If they stop they lose the only acceptance they have ever known.
To be free is to be irredeemable.

God forbid a woman think for herself.

All they had to do was leave London,
but they can't.
London is everywhere, and
there are no angels to be found.

Untitled

It's almost funny,

how you think it will never end,

and suddenly it's four years later. 

It's almost funny,

how much it still hurts,

even after all this time. 

Entitled

He fears the changes he's seen in me,
and maybe the ones he hasn't yet.
I fear his anger over my decisions,
the ones he doesn't agree with.

People fear what they don't understand,
and we both fear what the other could do to us.

I finally understand what he meant
all those years ago,

and I'm afraid it might cost

more than I'm willing to pay. 

Satin

It was a week before the holiday.
When I left, I lit a candle.

We drank wine and whiskey.
I could see his heartbeat,
feel her voice,
taste our liquor.
We said that we are
a beautiful existence.

A woman waits on the wall
reaching out for something,
the lines of her fingers stark
against the black fog that surrounds her.

We tasted like wine and whiskey.
Beneath soft blankets
we shared a pillow,
pressed close enough that
three days later his cologne
still lingered on my shirt.

I held my heart in my collarbone,
my body thudding with every beat.
All I heard was silence,
the fire gone out of my fingers
although his still burned.

We put a lot of power in firsts.
This one didn’t have to mean anything,
but that doesn’t mean it meant nothing.
The way his shirt stretched
across his shoulders,
over my skin,
his hands in my hair.

When I leave, the woman on the wall
beckons me to stay.
I go.
Maybe I’ll find what she’s looking for.

When I returned home,
the candle still flickered.

I wanted to tell him I'm not sorry,
but those words could ignite.
So I walked out,
listened to him lock the door behind me.

My flame burned out with the candle—
whether or not I did the smothering,
it was always going to suffocate.
I should have known better
than to let it burn so long.

Maybe the woman on the wall
was never looking for anything.
Maybe she isn’t reaching,
but letting go.

The Scent Of Fallen Leaves

A fractured piece of light
I still see the way the leaves ripple in the slight breeze
In the patterns of light behind my eyelids

I reveled in that weather
The potent wind blowing leaves across pavement
Rain that scuttles instead of falling

Hugs in bathroom stalls
Every day the same boy gets on the bus
just one stop before I get off

November came and went
But I don't see him on the bus anymore
And the leaves are gone now

Just For You

I wanted to write about sexual masochism, but I can't write what I don't know.

What I do know is how it feels when every day is the same.

When you make it to campus and the one person you want to avoid

is the one who won't let you leave him alone. You should respond when spoken to,

but you really don't want to.

When you just remembered that on top of the homework you've written down,

you have groceries to buy, money to make, emails to respond to, the list goes on—

a hydra of tasks that multiply endlessly when you cross one off

but you can't leave your list untouched; sanity is already on the line

and you can only try to salvage it by acting like you're doing something.

It doesn't matter how much you have to do as long as you have to do something.

When you want to skip class but that would require admitting the unspeakable.

The routine goes on and takes you with it and you pretend it's okay

but it's not, damn it, it's not.

When your scrawled future plans choke you and you feel the weight of

decisions you haven't made and this is the hell of a reality you don't want.

You don't want to add to his worries but you tell him anyway,

and when you leave you feel sorry for doing it and you worry.

You don't know if he knows that you love him not in spite of his past

but because of who he is and you want to help but you don't know how.

When you drag yourself to class anyway because if you don't go

you'll worry you missed something important. Your insecurities hit you

right when everything else crumbles and you've got to hold it together, damn it.

There is no other choice.

When you have more to write but this math will never make sense

unless you pay attention, because the last math class you took was in high school

and that was a long time ago and you need a break.

So you just keep writing because you love your life but not today

and you are going to lose it. Damn it, you're losing it.

When you've got to keep your shit together because you have to peak publicly

in seventy-six minutes and it will suck but you have to do it.

You wouldn't have missed anything if you hadn't gone to class,

except you missed what was said and you miss the days last week

when you thought you had it together and you've got to keep it together but

today isn't even halfway over—in six more weeks you'll get three off

but that's an eternity away. You hope it's glorious, but who knows.

When you want to take a mental health day but you can't, damn it, you can't.

You can only blame your watery eyes on the change in the weather,

and write what you know.

Typewriters and Rotary Phones

At thirteen, death was something to be embraced.
We sat on grassy hillsides under blue skies and a warm sun,
telling stories of spaceships and tigers and all the
hilarious, heroic, glorious ways we would die.

We wrote each other stories about royalty,
locked in an epic struggle to take back a kingdom that had been overthrown.
The short kid who sat behind us always asked if they'd succeeded.
Then the year ended, even though our story didn’t.

We heard stories about what life was like before the present,
before we knew each other. We talked about how lucky we were,
but then laughed and said luck had nothing to do with it,
that this was our destiny. That we were meant to be.

We lived stories of adventure, romance, and bravery
from the safety of somewhere that used to be home
before we had to exist outside of it.
It's harder to be brave alone.

That was seven years ago—I had forgotten until now.
A man spoke to me while he paid for his groceries,
but I wasn't listening to his story until I was reminded of mine.
"I want to bring back typewriters," he said. "Typewriters and rotary phones."

Leaving

When you left,
I didn't cry.
"Two years, no tears,"
someone said,
and so the tears I shed
were not for you.

I wrote to you often,
but I thought of you more.
When you returned,
I was scared.
That while I continued
to care,
you moved on.
Those fears remain
unrealized, but still.

I finally cried for you.

I cried when I was the one
who had to leave. 

False Sympathy

Assholes are easy to deal with,
but the nice customers?
Those are the worst kind.

I said, I can't sell to you if you're buying for someone else.
She told me to give her the damn cigarettes.
I said to myself, I don't like my job,
but it's still worth more than her satisfaction.
She left. I was fine.

The next customer was sorry that happened to me;
so was the next one,
and the next one, and suddenly
I was not fine. I ducked down to wipe my eyes,
because their well-intentioned sympathy
upset me more than the offender herself.

I don't care until they do.
Not until the hesitant remarks on
how sorry they are,
and I come perilously close to caring
what other people think of me,
even if they're strangers.

I said, I can't accept this ID. Do you have another?
He didn't. His prison ID had expired.
I wasn't afraid until the next customer in line
started talking.

The time I called my mom on break,
I cried the entire 15 minutes.
Then it was back to work.
One man said, You've been crying.
I had been, but I didn't want to talk about it
because I didn't want the tears to start again.
I wanted to be left alone.

I wanted to say this:
Their entitlement is not
your
fault.
Just talk to your kid,
text your spouse,
chat with your friend,
and let me move on.

Ignore me, and I'll be fine. 

Summer Haze

Nothing compares to stepping outside in late afternoon and
seeing, hearing, smelling summer.
As a kid it meant freedom, three months to be
worryfree, carefree, schoolfree,
but now it symbolizes time I don't have because I have to make money,
which I also don't have.

I stepped out to get some fresh air --
I would have worn better shoes if I'd known my walk would be so long,
but I didn't know anything except
that I needed to leave my apartment right now
to avoid suffocation.

A couple on a stroll in the park, holding hands.
A couple reading together out loud, in a hammock.
A couple having a picnic under the pavilion. 

So many couples, but I'm all alone,
and I'm still suffocating.
I hope once summer ends I'll snap out of this.
It won't feel strange to say hi to the people I know
and I'll enjoy the time I spend with others.

For now, though, I'm stuck here
in the hazy
summer
air.

Never A Bachelor

Take me out of context
and I make no sense.

A conglomeration
amalgamation,
combination
of thoughts,
actions,
emotions,
experiences,
hopes,
dreams,
and other cliche things. 

I wanted him
because he was forbidden.

But eternally single or eternally not,
the fact remains that I am
never a bachelor.

Severely Homesick

The new break room is a lot fancier than my old one.
It's much bigger and there are even couches --
the reclining chair in the corner is the most comfortable.
But I don't care that there are three fridges and a toaster;
I miss the one with with just one fridge and no toaster.
I'd even prefer the hard chairs and bare tables
to the slightly less hard chairs and table decorations
if I just knew the people I worked with, if they were my friends.

Maybe there was a toaster and I just never noticed before
because I never needed to use it.
I used to go home home for my meal breaks.
Now I sit alone and read.

My energy is spent fighting months of muscle memory
that I didn't think would need fixing,
erasing all that is familiar and friendly in less than a night,
replacing it with more people, more insecurity,
more silence.

The weariness in my feet and the pain in my dry cracked hands
are reminiscent of retail, echoing with hollow hopes of a
more promising future and less painful past, as

past becomes present becomes endless becomes

there is no such thing as future,
just a perpetual now here at our disposal, and right now
my present is significantly less than I want it to be.

A nose-ringed woman and long-haired man told me
my name is lovely, and I thought of
how it rhymes with a country in the southern hemisphere,
one that's warm and sunny and nothing like me.

My sentiments taste bitter and hot, choking me.
Not unlike my afternoon meal, they burn my tongue --
but I swallow anyway, and I can no longer taste the good.

Routine breeds malcontent, and I am suddenly more
restless, peaceless, and hopeless than ever before
because I can't name what I'm feeling or the reason for it
and I don't know how to fix it. I don't even know what I want.

I just know that I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'll never be happy.

I try to purge myself of my negative emotions
but even when I'm filled with love I still feel a twinge of pain
because I can't express the full extent of what I feel,
and because eventually one of us will lose the other.

That's why apathy seemed like the easier route.

Apathy breeds contentment with the routine,
and it helps to shrug off discouragement and doubt,
or at least to not care. People don't affect you, and
it doesn't allow for worry about the direction of your life.

I asked Siri what the purpose of life was -- I thought he might know --
but he said he's never thought about it, which makes one of us.
Maybe it's not to break the routine, but to learn to enjoy it
(as if I know anything about that).

Damn apathy for leaving me helpless.

For letting me hurt on the hardest days
until I finally look down and remember that I matter.

Shelf Life

This afternoon I went to the library,
and lost myself in problems not my own.
Then I returned to reality and walked
back to the bus stop.

For just a moment
this small town felt like a city. I think
it was the smell that did it for me.

And then I passed the pizza place,
the one where I finally acknowledged
the lack of a future between us. It was only
weeks ago, but it feels like eternities
have passed since then.

My sandals continued to thud on cement
as I averted my gaze and walked by,
but I didn't hear a thing.

It's something of a relief now,
that I can no longer
watch the parking lot
since I know that car won't be there.

I wish I didn't feel bitter at the word
beautiful. I'll have to put that
dusty worry on a shelf
for now.