4/17/2012

The night was strife for disaster.
An attempted blunt roll, watch the master.
She'll teach you.
Her fingers exact, her spit against tobacco leaves.
Too many stoners in a red Jetta.
The beginner, with our wisdom.
We're getting pizza and I cannot speak and we laugh like life has been injected.
We look happy. What a concept.

Double-inhaling, and I'm gasping when she bites there.
And a high drive isn't complete without contemplating if I'll live or not.
Thoughts striking on the East walk.
I rather live, be happy, and die young, then live long and without completion, without satisfaction, without that sort of fill.

It's the class you're intent on skipping.
It's the Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals and pressed kisses.
It's tangling the sheets and the legs and the equivalent arms.

As the boy in band shirts runs his errands, we fuck on his bed.
I'm grinning and murmuring into your ear.
Something about how you rock the sweatpants and v-neck.
And something about at what point the sweatpants came off.
We're exchanging marks, and the bruises you have to work for.
And you're breathing against my ear.
My neck's bent over your breasts, the sweat building up.
The liquid coating my fingers and you're tapping into potential.

Your arm is tight against my torso as we come up with excuses.
The two-hour delay.
But you hold nothing back.
Sensitivity shattered.
But you're teaching me illusion is for the weak. Truth.

You're smiling, it's a toothy grin of sorts. The one you're apt to make.
The tilt of the head and how are we all doing.
You bring me to the verge of death and letting go and feeling purity wash over me.
And time again, you'll back me up against an empty closet.
We learn each other's bodies on a boy's pastel sheets.

He's away playing the bass.
He's doing favors for the girl he loves.
And we're on his bed, gripping hair and hips.
Bumping our head on wooden limitations.

Beginnings of Things

There was always this fear, that had come to haunt me with any other girl. What happens when I get what I want? What then? When I get the girl, when she falls in love with me - what more is there to achieve? I know, that's a terrible way to look at a relationship with someone you supposedly care about. But then again, when I look back, how many of these women did I actually care for?

It was a feeling of stagnation. Of no moving forward. If I wasn't working towards something, why put in the effort? Why would I even consider it worth my interest?

Apathy in love.

So maybe part of the reason I took so long to make my move on Nichole was not just because I was "enjoying our drawn-out courtship" - although I certainly did. Maybe there was a fear, rooted deeply in me, of the possibility that once I had her, I would no longer want her. Talk about a vicious cycle.

Years later, I would feel bad. I would look at these once-innocent girls, who no longer annoyed or frustrated me as they had in our relationship. I would hear about what I had done to them, how I had broken them. How I had changed them, to be less vulnerable. We had moved past each other, but I was forever the man that had changed them into someone more cautious, less trusting. The first heartbreak, if you will. But they meant nothing to me, although my heart - or my head, who knows - had once told me they meant everything...Before I got them, of course.

And that couldn't happen with Nichole. I could have never looked myself in the face if I had done that to her. Here was someone whom I genuinely cared about. Someone I loved and adored. My best friend. The only one, not related by blood, who would never turn me away. My passing flings with other girls did not even affect me as much as one of her smiles. I suppose that says it right there.

Nonetheless, the fear existed. I was so afraid that it would turn out like every other relationship that I was paralyzed from even trying.


The fact of it was that we had never had the chance to simply be together. Which makes me wonder if this particular fear is just another thing that we share. When I think of her past relationships - not something I make a habit of - I cannot think of one that meant something to her, that affected her the way it did whatever boy she was with. We seemed only to profess our love in the ending moments, the last chances. I think that both of us are so afraid, so scarred by what has happened before, by what we assume to be our own fault, and so deeply dependent on one another that we rather flirt out our unrequited love than risk losing one another to this...infection, this brain and heart disease.

Now and then, I'm struck by the thought that perhaps no other relationship has ever been able to fulfill either of us because we are meant for each other. Maybe it's not something inherently wrong with us, but rather something that our hearts are trying to express. Maybe, as our friendship has seemed to prove, there will always be a desire for more, never a feeling of boredom. Maybe, with her, I can simply be. Be happy.

I distract myself, back to imagining the way it felt to kiss her. There is a feeling of joy. Words like 'content' and 'satisfied' do not convey the emotion. They wouldn't cover the raw feeling of hunger and insatiable desire for move, as if after exploring every emotion in her heart, every thought in her brain, and every inch of her body, there was still more to discover.

Sunday Morning

It was early on a Sunday morning. 4:27 as the clock ticked away from light beer and heavy blunts.

I had stayed awake for several reasons. No one had bothered to turn off the light yet, and the fluorescent was burning into my retinas. My roommate was watching returns of Blue Mountain State. I had napped earlier, sometime after the concert but before I knew what to make of it all. Lying down would have meant thinking of the girl and her friend whose bed was always open.

The last time I wore those jeans, with small hands tracing black waves. You're glancing at your white watch and you only have so long to be teased.

I'm waiting for a long car ride in the afternoon, as we burn papers and step on forgotten drinks.

Didn't we decide that no feelings would be involved? I'm retracing to a quote, about how no battle are ever won. They're not even fought; they only reveal to us our own folly and despair.

I want to write my fictions, but where to start and how to frame it is too puzzling, at this time, at this place in life.

All she wanted was a friend to listen, but the reciprocal was too damaged and already gone.



I'm tracing the scars back to a summer day. As fireworks beckon, as I'm reliving picnics and pools, a boy with California good looks blows smoke into your face and takes away that burden you've been carrying. You can't even recall his last name, but what does it matter, anyhow? We're reaching the peak of apathy.

As all our music cries out in the name of love, we close our eyes and let the bass reverberate through us, finding passion in the vibrations. You've reached a lawless place where love does not exist, except for in our memories and fictions.

MM

I couldn't allow myself to dwell on it.

That was the conscious decision.

Something about how it took years to build up trust and only a few seconds to destroy it.

But trust wasn't the issue.

It was that she didn't seem to care at all.

It had always been an up-and-down kind of friendship and the truth of it was that I had never quite expected to fizzle out as had been the case.

A polar relation and it ended in silence.
From the closest friends, from long drives and shitty TV shows.
To sarcastic well-wishing, to spitting words and overdosing too late in the night, too early in life.


Years later, when I got tired of the effort, when it was too much trying and not enough reward, never any give-back, when I gave up.

There's no emotion in it any longer. We have both moved forward in our lives, found others to replace that place in our hearts. I am okay with it. I am at peace. There is no hurt, nor does any ache disturb my sleep at night. It just happened; life happened. We grew busy and dedicated time to what was important. To what we believed was important.

The mood only strikes when my mind wanders to the past. When I think of what had once been. What was good, what got ruined by a crush, what we rejected, what angered her, what we reconciled, what was good again, what were all the ways we changed yet still fit, and what slowly but unmistakably passed us by as she found solace in an old boyfriend and I found passion in intellectualism and hallucinogens.

The West Winds

This isn't home.
This is West, blowing winds.
Connecticut, missing everything we ever knew.
The orphan period, the music at 4 AM.
Waiting for a soul to pass by, to ask where your memory was left behind.
Semblance of privacy.
And tears too public.
Take a tissue from the boy's roommate.
The one who's drunk and spewing out words he probably means all too well.
The smell. Legs spread and alcohol in cubicle-sized rooms.
And you strive to get a moment of yourself.
If you even remember who that is.

Sugar and nature.
And the words of what mattered most.
You can walk back.
The rest of us have the pain of a million miles.

2/17/2012

At some point, I had realized that you were no longer the girl I had fallen in love with. And slowly, I started to come to terms with it. We all grow. I admit, I am probably not the same kid you found yourself loving. For the better and for the worse. A part of me still ached for your care and your adoration, but each day, that piece grew smaller and smaller.

Along the way, I came to understand that I would never get from you the gratitude I felt I deserved. There wouldn't be attention paid to me, as I had done for you.

I had to come to accept that the girl I had known was gone. Erased and replaced, the consequences of too many heartbreaks, far too lonely for the girl I had loved. And despite all my attempts to stick around, to fix you, to be your knight in shining armor, you would never go back to that gracious girl. Realizing that I could always try and be there for you, but that I had to stop giving out piece of my heart to someone who would only toss them away. Someone who took me for granted. And it was blow after blow. Because soon after I recognized that I could no longer love you, I was forced to realize that I couldn't even consider you my best friend, not with the way you consistently treated me.

And as much as I could tell myself to accept it, and as much as it grew easier each day to live with that knowledge, I didn't know what do with that feeling. I couldn't help but feel regret over something that had so narrowly escaped my grasp.

Rich Grace

A woman originating from a Dineh tribe,
"I remember only a small part,
But this is what I remember."


He begged his case to a girl that didn't care.

I love her.

But that was not enough. Those words alone could not encompass the depth of his feelings, nor the span of his emotions.

I can't live without her.
She's all I ever think about.

But the words just sounded trite, like anything he could have picked up from a soap opera.

The feel of her hand when it's grasped in mine. Her skin is the softest I've ever felt, with all the calluses of an artist. Her blonde hair of silk. Her eyes, blue as the piece of sky that rests upon a glacier.

And it's not just when I'm around her that my heart accelerates. It's the very thought of her - the memory of her body beneath mine and the way I felt my very being explode kissing her. It's the imagination of repeating those movements. It's the anticipation to spend as long with her as this life allows me to.

The words of an aghast, exhausted, lost boy who just wants to find his girlfriend echoed in his mind.

"Nothing works without her, none of this.
I need her now.
It fucking hurts, so much."

And while that got close to the magnitude of his emotions, it could not cover all that he felt. The words were not his own; they bore the distinct taste of having been borrowed.

What was his? Well, it had always been her.

She is my best friend, my other half. She sees into the workings of my mind and the strings of my heart, and she understands.

She is every wandering thought, she is every note that graces my ears, she is every taste to pass my lips, she is every vision behind my closed eyes. She is sensation itself.

I've never been one to espouse the idea of the human 'soul', but when I am with her, there is a part of me - separate from my mind and my body - that comes alive. She makes me want to believe, not only in the best of myself, but in happiness and the very vibrations of life.

December

It's not like in the movies.

When you realize you love someone, you imagine yourself running to find them, desperately calling them. In your mind's eye, you see a declaration of love, a kiss, and a walk off into the sunset.

Needless to say, that's never how it happens.

You stumble over the words. It's not graceful; it's nowhere the epic, beautiful sentence you had planned out in your head. You can't look at her face, for fear that it will give you all the wrong signs, that you'll know by the look in her eye that this is no longer what she wants.

You should have looked. If anything to save yourself from the embarrassment.

You give up on words, go in for the prince's kiss. Sentences fail me, but there's no way she can mistake my meaning here.

But in this fairytale, you're the frog's fool.

She rests her hands firmly on your chest. Doesn't succeed in pushing you any further away, but the intent is clear. This is not the happy ending you envisioned.

"No..."

You're aghast. You look at her, as if searching for clarification. She must see it in your eyes. She's always had a way of reading the brown that seems to keep everyone else out.

"I'm seeing someone," she continues.

You continue to stare. Absent is the usual response that would come in conversations with other ex-girlfriends. There's no demand to know whom, or where, or when. You continue to watch, because you know no one could mean as much to her as you do. This isn't cockiness, you tell yourself, this is experience. This is four years and falling in love every moment we got the chance. And she knows all too well that her reason isn't good enough.

"Remember what you told me a year ago?"

You raise an eyebrow, cock your head to the left.

"Not too long after I returned, when I came to you, ready to pick up where we had left off."

And doesn't it all come back flooding now.

"I love you, I always will. My best friend, my boy." Her fingers graze your cheeks. In this moment, her contact seems to mean all the more.

"I love you, Nichole, I always will. You're my best friend, my darling girl." One hand in hers, the other under her chin, ensuring that her eyes meet yours.


"But I want to see where this goes, even if it may be nowhere."

"But I want to see this through. I don't think it'll go anywhere, but I started it, might as well finish it."


"He's nice. He's given me no reason to hurt him like that."

"She's nice. I can't fuck with her like that."


It's implicit now, just as it was then: I can't drop everything just because you've come running back, even if that's all my heart is telling me to do.


"But Nich, even then, I knew that I'd eventually come back to you."

And for a moment, you wonder if that was the best choice of words. Because she might storm out in anger, demanding why, if that were the case, you didn't have the decency to let her know.

But as she sighs, you know there won't be anger. Your relationship has never been one of arguments and fights, and it won't start now.

Her hands trail down your cheeks and brush against your sides as she grasps your hands.

"I suppose that somewhere deep-down, I knew that as well."

The pause lasts several seconds. She's looking down now, no longer at you. Her memory is far in the past. You stay silent; even if you wanted to disturb her thoughts, you would have no idea where to begin.

She hesitates, struggling with what she is about to admit, weighing it in her head, then continues slowly, "So, deep-down, what do you believe?"

You nod, afraid of letting your voice betray your disappointment, your impatience, but allowing her to know that you understand. That deep-down, you know - as she did - that you would ultimately find your way back together.

Cycle

It's a cycle.

Of compulsion.
Of terse replies.
Of the wondering.
Of the refusal to beg.
Of everything I didn't think you would become.

It's a break.

Of what we once were.
Of who we should have become.
Of your worst fears infecting my mind.
Of the best friend who can only take so much.

It's a recapture.

Of the hidden smiles and the carefully placed words.
Of all I have ever felt.
Of a rocky love.

It's the inability to admit.
And the way it ruins us.

It's the fact that there is no us.
The inversion of always have, always will.

It's the split in my psyche.
The crack in muscles pumping blood.

It's the creeping up.
Of a distancing, that old familiar friend.

It's the mountains and the desert.
And all the space in between.

It's what becomes all-consuming.
And soon to follow, all-destroying.

It's the clench of my frustrated fist.
And the tears of a girl who can cry no more.

It's the tireless effort, the push.
The lack of reaped reward, the refusal to give.

It's everything shorter.
And soon, I'm gone.

Dance

November 13, 2011

It's the same show. You appearing unexpectedly. Down that runway you strut, up the sidewalk you run. Your smirk. Your smile. You pose. You jump up. It's the difference between the confident model and the closest friend. Everyone's eyes are on you. Our hearts aflutter, if only the dress would hitch up a few more inches. Our vision connected. You're the only girl to have ever looked me in the eye. The dancing music blasts, but all I hear is our favorite song. The one that played that last night. It's always an allusion, forever a reference. It's a bond never broken.

The last night. The first night. They all revolve around one big mass, one gigantic mess. Isn't it the not knowing that kills us? What could have become, what should have been done. We're anything but blameless. Faults never spoken of, but they're on the tips of our tongues. We want to throw books, to blame, to cry, and wonder why.

A dance. That's all it took. That black dress of yours, bending knees, and a momentary glance. Partners fall away, forgotten. Air wraps itself around us and we're removed, disconnected. Senses fail. Senses electrify. It's only your touch that does it. The smile is all the same, the hair thrown back. Only we exist. It hasn't changed.

That night, I whispered. Save the last dance for me. You broke all other promises, but you kept that one. It's an instant reflex, a memory that flashes and fulfills.

The phone rings. Your hands never leave mine. Ringing. Body shots and toasts to a friendship. Ringing. Collapsing onto your bed after the longest nights. You were the best part. Sometimes all we need is someone who understands.

It's you. Whatever damning story. Your voice flows out the speaker. Whichever mistake. Your voice never cracks. No matter the pain caused. Except this time. You're always there. Just this once.

Come dance.

Because this is the last one. And you saved it.