Posts tagged "i have ~feelings today"
To The Girl From Massachusetts
I have been sleeping in the place where the songs off the mixtapes I made you go to rest, after you’ve put them in a box with my name on it and pushed it far into the corners of the darkness under your bed. I wrap myself in strawberry fields and close my eyes to the soft strains of a violin asking you to be mine. Each song is a headstone in the tape-graveyard of us, from the first time I saw your face to the last kiss and every pearl jam song in between, twisted and buried between the rock gods your father loved and the nineties pop music you hated so much. The bass rocks me to sleep on the nights when I dream of asking you to dance in front of everyone, and once every fourth chord a string snaps. The songs all end like you pulled the tape out before you pressed stop and I’m left with a tear across my lungs that makes it hard to breathe. I inhale the dust and the memories and the abrupt halt to a crescendo you never finished listening to. I want to stay this way forever, lost in the streets of Vienna, led through tiny shops by a piano man trying to sell me my memories back. When the heavy drumheartbeat goes quiet and the only sound I can hear is the tape turning over and over and over, I wake up, reach for you, and find a song that reaches back.
Another kind of cold
My heart is heavy like the winter coats I hang on the back of the rocking chair in the living room I cannot live in without you. The chair tips back and back with the weight of the coats and the memories woven into the sleeves, filling the empty spaces the buttons left behind. Soon, the coats will be too much, too heavy, too hard to hold onto, and the chair will tip, spilling them onto the floor where I will leave them until summer’s warm air blows them away into a place so dark and cold only winter coats and snowflakes on the tip of your nose could ever exist. My heart will grow too heavy with your absence and your lingering smell and your side of the bed, untouched, that it will spill into my lungs and spread to my fingertips and I will exist in cold places where not even the winter coats you left me can keep me warm.
To the thief formerly known as ‘mine’
Steal whatever you’d like, except my heart. Take the pictures off the walls, takes the letters I never sent you from the study desk drawer. Take my innocence, my happiness - you can have the laugh I save for the days when I can’t get out of bed. Take my coffee cup out of the cupboard and the library books I never returned, stacked by the door. Take the watch that my grandfather gave me, or don’t; it never tells the right time. Take back your words: the ones that I wrap around me every night as I sleep, and the whispers that I can heard in the loudest of crowds, and the secrets I promised I’d never tell. Take my favorite shirt. Take the sunlight with you. Take the stars, if you want them badly enough. Take anything, but not everything. Steal whatever you’d like, but leave my heart. Even if it’s the only thing here that belongs you.
Music is the most dangerous
It happens on days like this one: just a Tuesday in a month with 20-something days, in the middle of the day where the cold air bites the tip of your nose in the shadows of tall buildings but the sun beats through your coat to your shoulders in the middle of the quad. The buds pulse, snug and fit in your inner ear and you count your steps to the beat of the song you heard last week, that you can’t get out of your head. That’s when it happens, as you step off the curb to cross the street on your way to class. Your foot hits the pavement as this week’s dance song fades out and that song fades in. The one that doesn’t hit you right away. It’s a Tuesday in a month with so many days and the song slips into your head seamlessly, so quietly and unobtrusively that you don’t realize, until the seventh bar, until the first indication of a melody, until the first whisper of a lyric, that it’s happening. The piano and strings rise and fall in the background as people bustle around you. Your heart starts to race and slow and skip in time with the music and your steps falter. Your hand tightens around the music player in your pocket, as if you can hold the sounds and strings and feelings in. But your stomach drops and your heart swells and the people around you, they can’t hear a thing. They can’t feel your first heartache. They aren’t imagining your first kiss. They don’t hear the sound of the moment that changed everything. They run and stop and start and stall around you. They keep moving, unaware of the crescendo crashing against your heart and the adagio, slowly sinking into your bloodstream like the sweetest drug. People hustle and bustle past you, annoyed that you’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk, unmoving even as the beat of the song and the pulse of the memories rush through every part of you until you’re inside a moment that once happened: your first day of school, the first time she smiled, the last hug your grandfather gave you, the handshake before your brother left. It catches you on your way to class, on the drive home, as you cross the street, just as you’re turning the lights off. It catches you in a moment you’re not expecting it to and takes the air right out of your lungs, replacing it with something that feels like music and is harder to breathe in.
It’s Sunday morning and the sun is shining through the window but the snow on the ground is brighter than the rays slipping in through the curtains and there is so much to do (like grocery shop, clean the bathroom, sweep the kitchen, call my mother and pretend it doesn’t hurt when yours doesn’t pick up the phone, fix the garbage disposal, take out the trash, plot out our future and do laundry), but can we just stay in bed? Can we just stay tucked in the warmest corner, by the window, and listen to sad songs all day and watch John Cusack get the girl and pretend that the world doesn’t exist outside of these walls, outside of these covers, that the window is just a large picture frame and it is our favorite one to look at on mornings like this one: quiet, sad, bright-warm mornings where the only place I can see myself is in your arms and the only sounds I can hear is the echo of a crack in a heart in a place far, far away from us.
(via yowuut)
You ask me, “why do you act like a goof all the time, singing off key and playing air guitar and making faces at me from across the room?”
I tell you, “that’s just how I am.”
But really, I just like seeing how many times a day I can make you smile.
And one day, I hope it’s so many times that I lose count.
A perfect lazy day
She asks what your perfect lazy day is, but her words sound mumbled and jumbled, like you’re underwater in this sea of blankets on the blue-couch island in the middle of the living room. You almost want to answer but breathing too deeply will unlock your puzzle piece-shape and dislodge her head from where it’s resting against your shoulder and anyway, the whole room has a hot chocolate haze that settles over you the way the fog settles around the house so early in the morning in January. Her hand slides against your hip as she reaches for the remote and finds the hem of your shirt instead, then the curve of your skin, and it settles there, lighter than the soup you made for lunch but just as warm. Your fuzzy socks poke out from under her blanket, which used to be yours before you met her - like your favorite mug and your old college sweater and your heart and the right side of the bed - and it’s only noon, but you’re too lazy to throw the life-vest of a blanket back out and rescue them from the slightly less-warm room air. They won’t even get cold. So instead of answering, you brush your mouth against the crown of her forehead and sigh softly when she burrows closer and drift to sleep listening to her heartbeat match the soundtrack of the Sunday afternoon movie classic marathon.
This place is a junkyard
I keep finding pieces of you in this 12x12 room I used to call “ours.” It’s like this place has become a junkyard for the broken hearts. There are piles of scrap metal lining the walls, a collection of the shiny, sharp edges of my crystal heart you once held in your hand, tested its weight and heaved as hard as you could, against the wall that now has a hole where the dark hides during the day. I am the silent watcher of this place, and every night, I lock the doors tightly to fend off the pickers - the ones who sneak in and try to steal the rest of the best parts you’ve left behind. At dawn, I comb through each new piece I find, cataloging them all and separating them according to the system I’ve devised in your absence. All the strands of hair in one pile, all the times you laughed in another, next to the once-pretty-now-dull promises you made, stacked high against the far wall by mixed tapes you never listened to. There are piles for each one of your different types of smiles and a large bin that holds the lies you told me. Every night, I lock the doors tightly to fend off the people trying to take you from me and I work, welding and shaping and molding different pieces of me to different pieces of you, trying to mend what you have broken. And every night, I find another hole you’ve created that I can’t fill without replacing it with everything you took when you left.
This is how it goes (ii)
Girl Meets Girl.
Girl Likes Girl.
You go out your way to make her smile. You take a night off of work and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her at a Blues Festival because she said you would like it and what’s money when a pretty girl smiles and asks you to be her date? You cut out on your friends and finally watch that movie you swore you would never see just because she asks, with that look in her eyes, the one that makes you feel like you’re on fire and drowning all at once. She brushes her hand against your shoulder as she leans in to tell you a story and you never hear the words but you can remember how she smelled and the way that her breath felt damp against the side of your neck. In bed at night, underneath the Christmas lights she strung up for you, a nightlight to fight away the monsters under the bed and in your closet, you catalogue what she was wearing and what she said in a notebook you keep in your head. You make a tally for every time she smiled, two for every time she laughed, and three for every time she leaned closer. Every day feels like a good day, every joke you tell doesn’t sound so bad, and you wonder: did the sun always look this bright or does it just shine a little more when it’s reflected in her eyes? Every morning you wake up on the right side, to a text that says, “Good morning,” and things fall into place like a dominos game, like yahtzee on every throw of the dice.
She keeps smiling and you forget what bad days are.
This is how it goes (i)
Girl Meets Girl.
You’re holding too many things at once and trying to remember if today is Thursday or Wednesday. You turn right here, if it’s Thursday. But it feels like a Wednesday and you’ll have to turn left instead. The wind takes you to the right and then catches the top sheet of your stack of papers. An excerpt of “Beowulf” flutters across the quad, lazily, as if it has all the time in the world, as if you’re not late for class, landing at her feet. She reaches down, her yellow sundress grazing against the ground, brushing across the grass as she plucks the paper from the weeds and dandelions. You trip over your perpetually untied shoes and you stammer your way through a bad joke to see her smile. And you knew it. She has that kind of smile, the best kind. You feel the back of your neck start to sweat and itch with embarrassment as the words fall from your mouth quicker than you can shut the floodgate, but she calls you charming anyway. (You won’t come down from that high for a week.) It’s girls like that, who call people like you charming, that create these messes: bumbling, fumbling, balls of Peter Pan fantasies and childhood action hero watches with the natural ability to make any situation awkward. She takes your coffee as it tips precariously in your hand, cupping her hands around it the way you do, sucking the warmth out of it, no matter that the sun is warming her bare shoulders.
She smiles again when she goes right and you go left (it’s a Wednesday, after all) and it feels like a good day would: your favorite shirt is clean, the coffee is brewed perfectly, your car turns over without making that gurgling noise it likes to make, there’s no traffic and your boss doesn’t care that you’re completely useless to production.
You want as many good days as you can get.
Just give me tonight
I’ll get over you.
I’ll stand a little taller, shoulders square, feet leading me in every direction except for yours. I’ll smile wider and brighter and laugh at myself when the commentary in my head is just too funny not to share. I’ll go out with my friends and lean against tables in the dark corners of bars. I’ll let a girl buy me a drink and I’ll let her stand a little closer and lean in a little farther to tell me a story I won’t be able to hear anyway. I’ll turn the music up when I drive and sing even louder. I’ll leave my towels on the floor because I can, but I’ll pick them up before I leave for the day, if only because that was me, not you, who hated the idea of the towel being damp all day. I’ll leave my coffee mug in the sink. I’ll uncap the toothpaste, who cares. I’ll sleep across the bed from one side to the other and I might leave a light on if I want to. I’ll flirt with the girl at the ice cream counter and let her fingers graze mine as she hands me back my change. I’ll go back to my friends and let them laugh too loud, attracting too much attention. I’ll look back at the window and smile at her and maybe tomorrow I’ll give her my number and tell her to call me sometime. I’ll drink a little more and worry about the consequences tomorrow. I’ll throw out the emergency pack of cigarettes because I won’t them anymore. I’ll finally throw out the pillow in the living room that never matched anything else, the one you refused to give up. I’ll get over you and you’ll be a small, heart-shaped tattoo on the inside of my wrist that will fade over time. I’ll get over you, tomorrow.
Just give me one more night to remember.
You know that place between sleep and awake?
The sounds filters in first, slowly. Wendy can hear John snoring on the other side of the room and the soft whining sound of Michael breathing into his pillow. She can hear the faint twinkling sound of the bell around Nana’s collar, in the distance. She’s aware of the morning light on her eyelids and face, warming the tops of her cheeks and dipping down until the heavy blanket she sleeps with stops it. She knows in a few moments, Nana will come through the door with slow, steady footsteps, nudging her with a morning-cool nose until she sits up and rubs her eyes and let’s the room come into focus. Mrs. Darling will slip into the room and Michael will be next, grumbling and shaking his head until Nana tugs his teddy bear from under his arm. John will be awake before Nana gets to his bedside but not a morning before. They’ll wake and dress and Mr. Darling will tell them to behave and not to have too much fun, a strange twinkle in his eye. Mrs. Darling will shush him and usher the children to the garden. Every day is the same since they returned. Not a single children out from under the watchful eye of Mrs. Darling from sun up to sun down.
But for now, with Nana in the kitchen, so far away, the darkness behind Wendy’s eyelids is fading away a faraway land: mermaids and pirates, a tiny girl with a feathered headdress and a boy, crouched above the windowsill, his smirk stretched from one ear to the other, a small shadow of light flitting from one shoulder to the other as he hovers over the landing.
“Come with me, Wendy,” he says, his arm outstretched towards her.
Nana always nudges her awake before she can reach his hand, but she’ll keep trying until the night Peter comes back and she knows she won’t miss then.
