Why I feel I need counseling.

this was her life, this was a little girl in a magical place and this was a young woman in a dreamland and this was an old lady trapped in a different era, looking back on all of these things. this is the saddest that you'll ever get - wrinkled and brown and hairy in places you shouldn't be, eyeing the oldoldold photos of a straight porcelain nose and cheeks that blush in a way poets called 'prettily'.

but the poets are all dead, the poets are born dead inside, that's the way we write and that's the way we see and that's why we can't smile like the rest of society. we don't fit in right, we don't mesh on the edges - we have eyes and brains and teeth and legs and arms like everyone else but they all are programmed so simply, so rigidly. party tonight and trust given to everyone and appearances are everything and we poets are stuck in the back of the room, staring at the ruins of what was once a human girl or a human boy and is now just a slut in everyday clothes.

and we stare at you and we judge you and i judge you harshest of all because i am a person, not a girl, i am a person with nothing left to live for. i have lost hope and i have lost passion and i have lost fuel and there is nothing driving me now. i am coasting on empty. i am on auto-pilot, some days go better than others and some days are worse, some days hurt more than anything i've ever experienced and all i can think of is the brown eyes that never closed even after the life fled from behind them and i think of my own brown eyes and i wonder how soon the life will be gone from behind them and i know it's not long, not long now. i have been feeling the emptiness for days for weeks for months for years and years and years, since the first pair of brown eyes closed.

brown eyes like my father's brown eyes like mine brown eyes like my girl's and brown eyes like shit like dirt like fallen leaves and fucking autumn and nothing good ever comes from brown eyes. the heroines of all the best books are blue-eyed. green-eyed. some are majestic some are more than anything some have silver eyes and gold eyes and some call it hazel and some are obsessed with pretending their stupid plain eyes are something better than what they are but we all know, at the end of the day, they're just fucking brown.

last night I rode bareback during a lightning storm in the pitchblack summer winds and I felt alive

The sky is black but the clouds are rolling in gray waves over the west, and the flash white-blue of lightning streaks behind them like a sin. I can't help but smile in this moment, and this is everything. Florida summers feel like torture, the way the afternoons melt by, honey in the sunshine. The way the mornings disappear in a heat haze of barely opened eyes and blankets kicked off and sweat behind your knees. But the summer nights in Florida are something else entirely...

The way the breeze blows through your hair, you feel naked. It's a warm breeze and that changes everything. And Florida is so flat, you can see everything, the way I can see the lightning in the distance like it's a picture-book held under my nose, it's that close.

My hand traces down your mane, braided tight and black against my favorite shade of copper brown. No saddle tonight, just your skin, that perfect coat, against my cheap jeans. It feels like we're together, now, the way we were together when the judges decided we were the best in the nation in your specialty. I remember the announcer, remember the way I fell onto your neck, because gravity was nonexistent and the sense had left the world and oh my god, it was just you and me and we did something impossible.

We made a dream come true. My dream. Our dream, maybe. But maybe I've had it wrong this whole time, my little sparrow. Are you a Jinn, perhaps? Hiding your flaming eyes somehow? How else have you given me dream after dream, with so little in return?

So last night, let's call this an abstract dream, let's call this being alive. Because that's how I felt, my lungs actually moving and my heart beating, wet and strong and this. is. everything. And sometimes I forget that I've taken riding lessons for years, and I forget that you're by far the most well-trained horse I've ever ridden, and I realize that if I just let go, we're fine. We move without thinking and we agree on everything and there is nothing better than being with you. Nothing.

Indiana

it's the earliest hours of the morning, the seasons crushing between unending summer and an autumn that could never really matter... summertime in florida means a fictional kind of heat pushed through water, always water, always moving. and here i am. here we are.

i'm nineteen years old, wearing a ballgown and a corset and the black leather boots that have always played a part in my worst decisions. the noise the rain makes when it hits the roof is painful. it hurts me in a way i can't really describe. it hurts me everywhere. the feeling of the rain when it hits my hands, when it falls into my cupped palms, it makes me think of love. the strangest thought comes to me, then. "who would ever want a girl whose hands are full of rain-water?"

the door opens. enter stage left, enter you with your whiskey and water, looking at me with the rain. you ask if i'm okay. i am, sort of.

this conversation is going to take a while. and it's a long time until i can finally say, can finally voice, "okay. cards on the table. how do you feel about me?"

and when we realize we're at a dead end, when we realize something would have to change ifwhenif...

you put your arms around me, and hold me against your chest, and i... i love this. i really do.

and then we sit, and i twine my fingers through yours and you brush your thumb up and down mine. and just sitting here next to you, legs against legs and my hand on your hand, this feels right. it feels close to right, anyway. you put your arm around me, and you call me "my dear". you tell me a hundred things that feel like confessions, things that push you farther and farther into my heart.

and - the height of this - you put your arms around me a second-to-last time, the last while we have this stolen time between us alone, and you press the lightest, chastest kiss against my lips.

before i leave? you hold me again, in front of everyone, and in the tightest space with the most telling of companions... you kiss my hair. it feels like a felony.

(i love you.)

Of maple leaves and dirty knees.

"How long have you been apart?" asks the Samaritan, his eyes lined, his features careless.
"Three months."

Do you know what can happen in three months? Do you know how a stranger can tell that two people have been without one another for that long?

There is an answer.

Let's pretend this is wartime the way you know it ought to be - some demon of a man behind a podium bearing Hell's own colors. He preaches and the crowd jeers and they love him for every bead of sweat on their foreheads, for every moment of their lives that they give to him and his cause. They move as one, they think as one, and they are all of them his children.

On the other side of the wall, there are others. Others who are too dark to show their Anglo pride. Too dark to blend in although they are allowed at the edges, usually. It's just that the words they speak are never truly theirs. It's just that they are the ones who have seen ghosts, who have heard the angels speaking in a language they could not understand.

So when this power moves like thread, like blood in water, the way it infiltrates and snakes in and around is permanent. One heart to another to another and unbreakable as an airplane, unforeseeable as a tragedy.

What I'm saying is, stand by your own. What I'm saying is, I'm a teenage girl in dirty blue jeans with the kind of voice that makes people nervous, and I just want to see your fucking eyes again.