Movements

1. In my dream last night, you kissed me. My arms were winding all they way around you (I was holding my own elbows) and then my hands were on your sides and I could feel the cotton of your t-shirt sliding like silk against the pale skin underneath.
2. Your hands were on my back and I couldn’t stop feeling the way I felt through your hands. I didn’t want you not to like it, so I held my breath and tried not to move. Your hands continued to wander like you were memorizing my topography.
3. I tried not to touch your hair; I know you don’t like that. You were kissing me in a corner—good kisses. Slow ones that tease and leave other kisses to the imagination (for now).
4. We were both smiling so wide that it was hard not to laugh at each other. And I held you with my hands clasped behind your back. And we whispered and giggled into each other’s mouths, drunk on wine and affection.
5. I hooked my fingers through your belt loops as though the only way you could ever be close enough would be for you to melt with me (and I was melting).
6. You tried to do the same, but I inched away because feeling is believing and I wanted you to believe that my stomach was smaller than it was. And then I knew it could never work.
7. I could never love me so neither could you. But that wasn’t what this was about.
8. This wasn’t about anything.
9. You saw that I was scared of me and you whispered to my teeth, “I know who you are.” And I thought of a line from a poem I love: I did not want her for her body. And I tried my best to believe that that was what you meant to say. To believe that the author meant it about whomever he wrote it for. To believe that it was possible for anyone to mean.
10. So I pulled you closer still. My shoulder blades were bursting through the wall and the cinder blocks were crumbling around our feet.
11. I touched your hair (sorry, I couldn’t help it) and you kissed my neck and I opened my eyes as wide as I could to vacuum up the view—the opposite wall, the door, the ceiling. And I started to cry.
12. You kissed my cheek, tasted salt and drew back.
13. “What’s wrong?”
14. “Nothing.”
15. “Why are you crying?” your hands moved down my shoulders.
16. “Because nothing has ever not been wrong before.”
17. “Everything is right then?”
18. “No. Everything is just you and me.”
19. And then you cried too, I think, touching your lips to mine, breathing into me and nothing else and we held each other and I felt your breaths leaving and I felt you puling in new ones.
20. I woke up.
21. And when I woke up I thought it was real.
22. And when I realized it wasn’t, I thought maybe I wasn’t either.
23. And when I realized that I most certainly was, it dawned on me. I began to understand that it was indeed happening: I was going to break. I was going to destroy myself in reality to make my dreams the only escape.
24. I took a blue pill and I grabbed a red pen and I wrote all of this down on white paper with blue and red lines and I had to smile at what was left of my youth. How turning time and fresh starts bore no importance to me.
25. Then I think to myself, “Now’s as good a time as any to start dying."
26. Then I say out loud, “Dreams are for the dead."
27. And I will start to look for affection wherever I can find it. And each person I touch will take a piece of me until there is absolutely nothing left.
28. And I will tell myself, “This is what you wanted all along.”

Inspiration comes dressed as a pterodactyl.

But this, we'll get to later.

Waste Your Time With Me

"Could we talk about something else? How is the cat?"

"The cat is doing so much better. His eyeball is looking beautiful."

"Good. Good."

"Baby, stop crying. Everything is going to be fine. It's normal to get sad around your birthday."

"I know everything will be fine. And no it's not."

"You're father would like in on this."

"Well, I don't want to talk to Dad right now. I called to talk to you."

"Okay, okay. Well what do you want to talk about?"

"Nothing anymore."

"How are your classes?"

"I just can't talk about anything right now, okay?"

"Okay. Have you been getting enough rest?"

"Yeah. Jesus Christ."

"Don't say that."

"We don't believe in him anyway."

"It shouldn't matter."

"Should I say G-ddamnit instead?"

"No. Christ, baby. Now stop it."

"I don't believe in him either."

"Oh really? Why do you still not write it out?"

"I figure not believing in him is offensive enough."

"You're so young. You'll believe. You'll believe when you see a beautiful daughter of yours turn eighteen someday. You'll believe when you can close your eyes and see her when she was only six pounds."

"Well I'm sure not that anymore."

"Honey, honey, honey."

"What?"

"Well, I can't make you love yourself."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Oh, I'm so powerless."

"You're pissing me off. You're not making sense."

"I just love you so much."

"I love you too. And I'm not eighteen yet."

"I know. Trust me I know. I don't even want to think about it. Let's talk about something else."

"Yeah. How's the cat?"

"Well, like I said, his eye is going to be beautiful. It's starting to look green again."

The Right Questions

They very next time I sit with you for two hours and some minutes at the top of a stairwell, crying alcoholic tears as you talk about your mother, you will find yourself kissed.  

Like the skin of a lady by the summertime sun.

Or my brother by my mother after every basketball game.  

Yes, the very next time, I will put my hand on your shoulder and kiss you with my eyes closed.

And you

will kiss

me back.

Because that's how I want it.

I was talking to my Dad once

"Do you ever wish you could see?"

"Yeah. I wish a lot of things."

"Sometimes I get so fixed on what it would be like to wake up and be able to see."

"Yeah..."

"The doctor says one day I'll be blind like you."

"I'm not blind, baby girl."

"But you almost are."

"Yeah."

"What do you wish?"

"I wish I had some of my youth back."

"Like what parts? You seem pretty youthful to me."

"I don't know. I'm getting too close to a hundred."

"Me too."

He kissed me on the forehead and his lips were cold from the ice cream.

Am I doing this right?

She grew up snail slow in a too fast town. She wanted to watch leaves fall and inhale exhaust from the cars that drove by. She wanted the time to fixate, to burn holes in things just by staring at them.
And there were these things she'd get about her face. These feelings. These
things
she'd get, about her face. These allergic reactions to her adolescence, these blinding red assertions of insecurity. The bane of her physical existence, the reason boys wouldn't even look at her when she wore that purple push-up and tried extra hard to purse her chap-sticked lips.
And he grew up too fast in a super slow town. He wanted to write books and build rockets that would launch the pages into outerspace. Whatever was out there could read them, too.
But he'd get these things about his shoulders. These
feelings
about his shoulders that went straight down instead of out like he thought they should have. The things he stared at most in the mirror after a shower, the reason he would never take his shirt off in public, or go shopping with his mom who offered to sew padding into all of his shirts.
And together, they would silently agree not to the notice the doubt in each other's eyes. They'd hold hands and buy each other presents when it wasn't any kind of holiday. They'd kiss and wonder if they were doing it right. They'd kiss and wonder why anyone would ever want to touch those cheeks with the scabs and scars, or those bony shoulders that no real man would have.

"Do you love me?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"I don't believe you."
"Do you love me?" she said.
"Yes," he answered.
"Well I'm dying. I've got cancer."
"No you don't."
"Would you love me if I did?"
"No. I don't think so."
"What a terrible thing to say."
"Okay, it's not that I necessarily wouldn't. I just can't imagine a time and place when I'd have to decide."
"I don't love you," she whispered.
"I don't believe you."

They'd lie in each other's arms and talk as though there were an audience.
But there were these things she'd get about his shoulders. These feelings about how they went straight down instead of out like she knew they should. He would never take off his shirt unless the lights were off and all of his clothes had pads stitched into the shoulders.
And there were these things he'd get about her face. He'd get feelings about the bumps that only seemed to multiply. All the make-up she wore and that ever present purple bra that somehow made her boobs look bigger, and closer together than they actually were, or something.
But when together, they would silently agree to live like question marks, sympathizing with each other's incomprehensible need for reassurance.

You're Just Like Your Mother

"I always thought that if you had all the right thoughts and did all the right things you'd be okay."

"No, you've got to do more than that."

"Tell me."

"You've got to try as hard as you can to be like other people."

"It can't be that simple."

"It can. Because it is."

"Then why aren't you okay?"

"Man, how can I be like other people when I can't even look at them?"

"I think I know what you mean."

"You think you know?"

"Yeah."

"You don't know."

"I do. People are hard to look at. Not like they're scary, but like their insides are so ugly."

"You can see their insides?"

"Can't you?"

"I guess. But that would make us ugly, too."

"No. That would make us aliens."