Smoke Signals

[Verse 1]
I am not okay
I’m barely getting by
I’m losing track of days
And losing sleep at night
I am not okay
I’m hanging on the rails
So if I say I’m fine
Just know I learned to hide it well

[Chorus]
I know I can’t be the only one
Who’s holding on for dear life
But God knows, I know
When it’s all said and done
I’m not okay
But it’s all gonna be alright
It’s not okay
But we’re all gonna be alright

[Verse 2]
I woke up today
I almost stayed in bed
Had the devil on my back
And voices in my head
Some days, it ain’t all bad
Some days, it all gets worse
Some days, I swear I’m better off
Layin’ in that dirt

[Chorus]
I know I can’t be the only one
Who’s holding on for dear life
But God knows, I know
When it’s all said and done
I’m not okay
But it’s all gonna be alright
It’s not okay
But w?’re all gonna be alright
Gonna be all right
Gonna b? all right

[Bridge]
I know one day
We’ll see the other side
The pain’ll wash away
In a holy water tide
And we all gonna be alright

[Chorus]
I know I can’t be the only one
Who’s holding on for dear life
But God knows, I know
When it’s all said and done
I’m not okay
But it’s all gonna be alright
It’s not okay
But we’re all gonna be alright
I’m not okay
But it’s all gonna be alright

December

I don’t know where 10 years went and I want them back as desperately now as I did then.

I still get mad at how the world keeps spinning. How things just keep moving forward no matter how hard we grip to memory. Still doesn’t seem fair that a world without you, that our lives without you in them are a thing that just IS so easily.

I’m still mad that M had to be the one to contain it all and tell the rest. I would never want that for his heart but it is what it is as he himself would say. I’m still mad that you didn’t hear us, hear me when I told you not to give up, to fight, to stay, in my own stupid little dark jokey way that last visit.

I hope you still pop around sometimes, if that part of the end is possible. I hope you like what you see. That you’re proud of us I guess? That we’re doing the damn thing ok without you despite the hatred down to our bones for having to do it.

Maybe this year will be better than the last…had to break out the A-list this morning. Reminding myself to hold on to moments because in the end, that’s all you’ll have.

What you can remember becomes gold. What you’ve forgotten, gutting.

Stabbing Westward, late night cigarettes and conversation. Confidence in me I could never have for myself (even now). LOTS OF BOOM. Terrible presents to find at 5 AM. Your van, the aztec. Driving back from Spine in the snow. Mario Party. Deathly Hallows release night. The chair. Slurpee runs. Picking up the gang from Cracker Jacks. Tunes at our apartment. Making you dinner. Best nights. Worst nights and days. Tiny moments at our apartments. The most mundane shit I’d give everything away just to have again.

Wanting to dip into the other timelines. If we’d bought that house with the upstairs apartment and that been yours. If the dice roll were different would we have just been the old biddy roomies? Statler and Waldorf for everyone else’s lives? That would have been fucking hilarious.

You’d think I’d be less inclined to go inward after you. That part, I’m working on it alright? Leave an old Eeyore bitch be. Ok, that’s just me being an asshole again because it’s easier than being honest.

Peopling is hard. Connecting is hard. Resting too hard on what was instead of continuing to nurture and build because I don’t think I’m wanted or worth it. That old chestnut never dies, no matter how many sessions I gab through. All the work can’t seem to crack that fucker. Still doesn’t make me feel any less like shit that I can sit here, think about my people literally every single day and say…nothing. I’m the fucking phantom of the opera of my friends. Just over here half behind the curtain cheering you on, having nothing but blind faith in you and saying fuck all about it. Ok that gave me a fun idea for a tattoo that would only be funny to me. Cheerleader with stitched up mouth. That’s horrifying and perfect.

Oh that’s a thought I could have gone without. The days you’d go to Em’s and leave your door locked and the alarm would wake me and M up. Knowing some of the why and it breaking my heart. Still does just in a different context with everyone else. And now I have fucking Kayne in my head from M’s alarm from back then too. Ha, remember my window leaking that first night…we were cursed with leaking homes with Oaks after that too. Actually shit that’s probably just me considering this house too.

Even though those last few random stop outs and all night movie sessions came from a place that I wish they hadn’t, I hope you know I loved them. Those were some of the few times I felt like you were my friend too. Not just another one of M’s friend that tolerated me. Oh the dumb ass shit we watched and some that linger. Ha. Linger, get it? We were so dumb, I love it.

I miss you buddy. I wish we all had you in our lives still. There’s just something gone in varied trios without you I can’t quite put my finger on anymore. Like you were this perfect in between. Lil bit of Polish glue.

It all went too fast and it scares me that the runway ahead of you is growing little by little longer than the one behind.

I’ll keep remembering, I promise. You don’t die here. I refuse. Don’t Die.

Status

Golden Hours

In my head you’re out in the sun wearing a yellow sundress (is that too cliche?). Hair braided but wild, wisps blowing in a bit of summer breeze. Barefoot running through wildflowers, nestled under a tree with a pile of books around you.

This is what I hope after is for you. Wild, free, happy, comforting. Happy birthday dearest person of mine. I miss you like hell.

9

My heart still drops straight to my shoes sometimes. I don’t know that I’ll ever really get used to this process. The repetition of loss. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe a part of me is numbed a bit between you, Jess and Grams. Yet I know there’s more big ones to come, that will gut me all over again. That the people left to help me stitch back the pieces will be less and less because that is the very nature of loss.

I don’t want to be our Mark. I don’t want to be the witness.

Course I never thought I’d outlive either of you and yet here we are.

There is a matter of luck in all this. Luck that out of all the collections of atoms that could meet and become friends on this hunk of rock hurtling through space, mine got to exist by yours for a while. Luck that Marty remembered my phone number after our years apart. Luck that Amy and I decided to go to that show. Luck that I went to Denny’s that day. Luck that any of us every got to exist at all. You’re a gift. You all are. To me, to each other. To our little circles that cross in just the right little venn diagram that is life.

In my head, I hope the end is like Supernatural. Everyone gets their own version of the afterlife. I hope you got your ice cream cone, that you’re working on your parents convertible at a country home in the hills and you know why.

The ebbs and flows of try are for you. All of you. I have a harder time being brave if it’s just for me. Despite all the work it’s still hard to see the worth in that.

I just want to go see a show again and feel the way we did back then. Stupid, young, free, a little bit dumb about so many things and so smart about so many more.

My heart misses you, my head even more. Sometimes I wonder what the alternate universe of us could be. Where we’d fit in everyone’s lives now.

Could we love as hard as we do if we hadn’t had to lose you? I don’t know, but as much as I try not to take that for granted it is what humans do best after all.

Don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. These are the good old days. Wish somebody would have told me then that ours were too.

Go see Jess and Gram for me. Have her make you the brocolli soup and some potato pancakes. Trust me, they’re amazing.

Miss you, A2. Always.

Lift the Weight

I’m so out of practice at this we’ll see where this goes, where it flows, where the river leads me. Great Loves playlist let’s do this.

My thoughts have been Aaron and Jess heavy as of late. I want a peek into the past, a moment in their presence. To dance with the devil, make it through it hell and see who survives this time.

Sometimes I wish I could just record exactly what my brain says, but then again, that’s a can of worms no one needs access to. That’s a fucked thought, about people who use assistive tech to talk, if that gets wired straight into your brain imagine the slips that you couldn’t stop from loosing out to the world.

Sometimes I wish it was me. Most of the time I wish it was me. The world would be better if it were them here and not me. What am I really doing with the shell of a human that is still here that makes that trade worth it? Them or me? How are we different, I did and they didn’t and it doesn’t feel right.

Not always that dark, it really isn’t but some days. Some days. Wonder why we’d bother with all this when it never lasts but yet here we are. I can see it now. Do you remember we were sitting there by Vandercook Lake, smoking and telling tales into the night? Dreaming dreams we’d neither ever make real. What could you be with a different roll of the die? Who would you be if one of us had just put out the branch instead of assuming you’d be fine?

Is that what I really worry about with me? That everyone thinks I’ll be fine because I’ve always survived everything else? Adjusting to this very real thing that might kill me is fucking with that so hard. I’ve never been afraid of my own mortality but I am pissed at the idea that I don’t get to decide how I go out. When you spend most of your teen years dreaming of the day after someone finds you gone it’s hard to take that power from yourself.

Yeah, yeah I know that’s not normal but when have I ever been good at that shit? Where’s the fun in that?

That’s why I can’t be mad at either of you, you went on your own terms. Well probably, we’ll never really know that will we? I feel nothing sometimes, certainly not brave, not sane. Not always. Random acts of hopelessness. Wish you could stay here but I think you’re already gone. I want the veil to be thinner these days but most of the time I know the energy you held is not hanging around for me. No matter how much I’d like it to. I’m not the great love in that story, I’m not sure I am in anyone’s despite all the love I do have. I know it’s not a void that I once felt it was but it’s not the same as what I feel I sometimes pour out to the ether either.

Where can the love go when the people you need to give it to are gone? You gotta help me out. Cash out and get the hell out of town.

It’s like I’m stuck, like I’m running from me all the time. I know I let things have all the power. I’ll get there, I’ll get out, but then what? How long before the same old cycles repeat and I just find myself in the exact same place again?

Human beings can’t have been meant to live like this. These small insignificant things who are the world to the people they touch. Such a weird thing. My world grows smaller the older we get, only bits of people know me to the depth that make me more than a shallow little puddle of a person. How I wish I could see me all the time they way they do. I’m working on it, always but undoing the damage is work and some days I just don’t have the energy to fight myself.

I’m hooked on it I need a fix, I can’t take it
Just one more hit, I promise I can deal with it
I’ll handle it, quit it, just one more time, then that’s it

That song used to be Brian, then Jess, today it’s Aaron. thinking of your last moments and what drove them. So many questions unanswered. Same for you as Jess. I’m not mad at you for leaving, but I really wish you’d stayed.

Funny I can say that about everyone but myself with full certainty.

We were laughin’ until we were breathless
Never felt anything so reckless
We were all lit up and restless
And coming alive and we were

Up all night and we were feelin’ so good
Yeah, we got a little higher than we probably should
We were in a hotel singin’ in the hallway lights
We were strikin’ the matches right down to the ashes
Settin’ the world on fire

Trips to nowhere, no plan, just go. See what comes of it. That was what you brought me and I miss it so desperately sometimes. How stuck I feel in the same day on repeat without you to come shake me out of it, to bring me some recklessness for a little while. I miss you so much and I don’t even know if you thought of me as a friend by the end. Maybe I was an enemy to your heart by then because I threw up a white flag and flimsy rope instead of a solid ladder.

Yet I wonder if we really knew each other at all. Do any of us now? Are we just comfort food to each other. Familiar curves of a road traveled a million times over. Grooves warn deep in a record tried and true. Sometimes I don’t think you know me at all. One too many times to remember I heard your voice speak of intellectual inspiration. I hope that you make the right choices. I feel you in my solitude. Am I wasting my time?

Half the fun in my writing now reminds me of LiveJournal style entries I used to do. Mix my own poetry in between song lyrics and movie quotes. If that ain’t the most ‘us’ thing ever babes I don’t know what is.

That’s enough for now, back to the music, let it all carry the things I can’t always put words to.

Zero Point

I’m thinking about every friend I’ve had that had a hard pregnancy. So many of you, my own mother included. I’m thinking of all the stories I’ve shared over the years trying to make you understand that what you wanted to destroy would do so much harm to so many. You didn’t care then, you won’t care now. You write all loss and pain off so easily with your god’s will. Must be easy to live in a world you can push responsibility for suffering and pain off onto another over taking any yourself.


I’m tired of trying to create empathy where there is none, trying to create it for me as a person, a woman, a bi/pan person, co-parent of a non-binary gem of a human. I couldn’t make you care about my life, our lives enough to vote differently and what does that mean? What I came to realize is that doesn’t say anything terrible about me, but it sure as shit does all of you. You are no friend, family or loved one of us if you vote to dismantle our lives. You do not love us, do not claim to. You are not my protectors, many of you that should have been never were to start.


I have no will left to try to change you, it’s been burned over and over. You will tell me that you love me while condemning me to a hell I don’t believe in. That I am a good whatever I am to you while your faith dehumanizes me. I no longer care to live within the confines of your hypocrisy. We are loved and we are good, without you. Always were. Always will be.


I see you in ways you probably haven’t even considered, in lights from brightest white to deepest midnight. Given you the grace to learn, to question, to discuss. No more. Fight for us or fuck off.

…sigh

I find it aggravating, amusing and ultimately heartbreaking that if I can’t remember how old you were when you died both your obituaries are just a google search away.

Fuck that’s annoying…your entire lives boiled down to two paragraphs that don’t hold a candle to who either of you fully were.

Is that all we are in the end? A couple paragraphs of who died before us and who’s left to carry the torch?

8 of Swords

Eight of Swords Tarot Card Meanings tarot card meaning

UPRIGHT: Negative thoughts, self-imposed restriction, imprisonment, victim mentality

REVERSED: Self-limiting beliefs, inner critic, releasing negative thoughts, open to new perspectives

Still just out here trying to find meaning where there may be none at all and missing what could have been.

June Jams

Books

  • Fire Keeper’s Daughter – Angeline Boulley
  • Billie Eilish – Billie Eilish
  • Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey
  • Girls to the Front – Sara Marcus

Games

  • Cozy Grove (cont’d)
  • FF7 Remake Intergrade – Intermission (started)
  • Tangle Tower (finished)
  • Neo Cab (started)

May Misgivings

Books

  • Broken Girls – Simone St. James
  • Forever Words: The Unknown Poems – Johnny Cash
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • The Office of Historical Corrections – Danielle Evans
  • What Comes After – JoAnne Tompkins
  • How Thin the Veil: A Memoir of 45 Days in the Traverse City State Hospital – Jack Kerkhoff

Games

  • Cozy Grove (continued)
  • AC Valhalla (continued)
  • What Comes After
  • Lost Words – Beyond the Page
  • Old Man’s Journey
  • Tangle Tower (started)

Year 2

I made this in the morning of your D-day before I did a mix of chilling and getting out a bit for adventures/random driving.

I wanted to write more on this trip but the bits and bobs that have been floating in my head the last few weeks now that I have the time are stunted. Stuck. Trying not to read too much into that.

I miss you, my person. Always.

40

What would you be like at 40?

Knowing how all of us have grown, mostly I just think you’d be a solidified version of exactly who you always were.

Let’s be real, no one really walks away from our neurosis around here. We own them more, know how to work them more, but yet, they remain. Just me? Maybe just me.

A little part of me wonders if another year of vanity would have slipped in there somewhere between 35 and now. Hard to live with the fact that you never even saw 35.

So close, and yet so far.

April Antics

Books

  • Later – Stephen King
  • Saint X – Alexis Schaitkin
  • Shine Your Icy Crown – Amanda Lovelace
  • Broken – Jenny Lawson
  • Looking for Miss America – Margo Mifflin
  • Shot Glass Confessional -Parker Lee
  • The Desolations of Devils Acre – Ransom Riggs

Games

  • When the Past was Around
  • Cozy Grove (started)
  • AC Valhalla (cont’d)

March Munching

Going to attempt to do a thing this year and write up the media I consumed (hench munching, har har har) during that month. No reviews, just what I read and played. I would do music but that varies too much to remember a single month. So yeah, lists. Lists are fun.

Books

  • The Other Inside – J.M. White
  • The Ghost of Normandy Road – John Hennessy
  • The Wisdom of Wonder Woman – Signe Bergstrom
  • The Final Revival of Opal & Nev – Dawnie Walton
  • This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories – Carla Valderrama
  • The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Fronteir Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch – Miles Harvey
  • Obviously: Stories from my Timeline – Akilah Hughes
  • The Lost Apothecary – Sarah Penner
  • My Sister, the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

Games

  • Shady Part of Me – Nintendo Switch
  • Forgotten Anne – Nintendo Switch

7 Years Has Gone So Fast

Forgive the Green Day but there are only so many instances in life where one can use that line and have it mean something.

If there’s any year where I think all of us really would have liked to see how you would handle things, it’s 2020. This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to the kind of world in which your prepping tendencies would have been incredibly useful and also I’m sure a point of ego boosting for you. I can almost hear the I told you’s and I kind of love that.

This morning, as has somehow become more routine for me, an intrusive thought popped in. One I have a lot, but I wonder more and more one I think maybe you and Jess had too. You were wrong, just so you know. Maybe I am too but that feels less real than being able to say both of you were because I can see it for you…just not for me.

Remember those WWJD bracelets? You don’t even want to know how many times WWAD has come up in conversation. Actually, maybe you would. Nevermind.

I still miss you. I still think of you every day. I really do feel like that’s the right way to live with grief. Letting go and not thinking of the people you lost doesn’t solve anything. Forgetting doesn’t help, facing does. I’m glad I stopped seeing that therapist. My current one would never suggest such a thing. If anything she’d ask what action I was going to take with my feelings. Ok, you feel it, what are you going to do with it?

Today, what we’re going to do is go grab your copy of The Fountainhead that M was so kind to let me have for awhile. I’m going to go through it and grab lines you marked and make a little art with it. Let’s see just how bad at Photoshop I’ve gotten.

Channeling another dead person I so admired today. Let’s see what we do.

“Take your broken heart, and turn it into art.” – Carrie Fisher

I’m not okay. I hope you finally got to be. Miss you, always.

Year 1

I wrote a piece about grief for year 5 with Aaron, but I think so much of it is true for you too that I’m going to roll with a variation on it. Hope that’s ok.

There are so many things about grief we don’t talk about. So many tiny elements in our minutes in the after that go under the radar unless you’re also living them. 

There is a connection felt with those who carry loss with them. Our atoms feel each other. 

The stages of grief are bullshit. You’ll feel every one of them on and off from day to day, month to month, year to year. Monday I might accept you’re gone, Tuesday’s denial and Wednesday too, Thursday I’ll be angry at you and Friday I’m back in shock. 

Other people live in a timeline where there are limits for your emotions around your loved one. Fuck that. You feel whatever you need to feel when you need to feel it. You’re not wrong for laughing two days after you lose someone and you’re not wrong for being a blubbering mess years after. 

You’re never the same after you lose someone. Death changes you. Your life becomes a time before/time after split. It sucks. 

Memories you make after get this really fun new layer of guilt with them because inevitably you think at some point ‘man, I wish X was here/could have seen this/done this/existed in this moment’.

There will be an insane amount of pressure from outside forces to move on. I’ll always question people who suggest that, and wonder why they’ve never loved as fiercely as I’ve loved. There is no moving on, there’s just moving.

You will hurt. Mentally, physically, emotionally. You’re going to feel some shit. You’re going to learn to carry it with you, you’ll earn the strength to do it, but it’s a bitch of a journey. 

Closure is complete bullshit. I’ll never stop wondering if one small outreach could have made a difference.

Your last moments with them alive will replay in your mind. A lot.

Life events and milestones will be bittersweet. Places you go will have a tick mark of before and after.

Why are entire years strewn
On the cutting room floor of memory
When single frames of one magic night
Forever flicker in close-up
On the 3D Imax of my mind

No day but today. 525,600 minutes. Out Tonight. There’s only us, there’s only this and then, it’s gone.

Facebook memories will not be as fun anymore. OneDrive ones, even less.

You will find an exorbitant amount of things in day to day life that will remind you of the person you lost. A butterfly, a bird, just a stormy sky feels like a hello or a hug sometimes.

Finishing a book will always have a moment of sadness that I can’t pass it on to you to read next, or that you didn’t tell me about it in the first place.

People will play grief Olympics a bit. Let them, you know how you feel, love is not a show you have to prove to anyone. 

You’re going to feel numb sometimes and raw others. 

Meeting new people who have never/will never know your person is weird as hell. You’ll never feel like you describe them effectively or give their personality justice. 

You may buy movies and never watch them purely because they remind you of them. 

Explaining your person died doesn’t get easier. If anything it gets harder to hear ‘I’m sorry’ or worse yet no reaction at all to this information.

Sometimes, you’re just going to need to throw up. 

Anyone that judges your grief process deserves swift removal from your existence. 

What you lose with that person will sting. You will learn things and be pissed you cannot share them. You will hear songs and be pissed they will never hear them. 

You will wish you had taken more photos, more videos and that you’d saved voicemails just to hear mundane words from them again.

Loss is loss. There is not a scale for worth that differs between friends and blood. 

You will blame yourself. You will reply conversations wondering where you went wrong. You will blame others. You will blame yourself for not noticing the mistakes of others. You will blame science, religion, existence itself.

Nothing you do or that you learn about them after will really change the love you hold for the person that died. They earned it. They get to keep it.

Everything really is pretty fucking awful. 

Music will run the gamut between healing and breaking you all over again.

The dead never really leave us completely. The indents in our hearts they built carry on in every tiny thing that reminds us of them.

Traditions will continue or be built from the ashes. You’re so special you get two holidays in my life now. You both do.

You really don’t get over it, you don’t even get used to it. You just learn to survive it. 

You will cherish every hug you ever shared. Every cup of coffee, every silent afternoon reading books. Every failure, every success. Every tiny and huge moment.

Buffy will never be the same. My Anya with a healthy dash of Glory. One-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind.

Cliche bullshit will become amusing.

Gas pumps will always make me chuckle a little. The fact that I brought you Red Bull after giving birth will always be amusing. Yellow will always make me smile remembering the cavy and how proud you were and I was of you.

Armadillos, hostess cupcakes, sweet dream cigarettes, more stories by the lake, more moments, more tequila, more love, more anything. More is better.

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.

Thank you for being there for me in some of my darkest moments. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for all of yours, but I’m forever thankful for the one that solidified our friendship. I’m glad I decided to follow you home and sit on your porch with you.

You will always be my person. Always.

Year 6

Not even 5:30am yet and here we are. Josh is snoring, Jinx is laying next to me flicking his tail as he dreams.

Me, I’m just thinking about what that day was like before I knew our entire world was different.

A phrase has kept running through my mind this week,

“tears write letters to the stars”

The last bit pulls from the tag I created here for my letters to Jess, the variation on a theme for letters to A2 that I started for you.

I guess that phrase about covers it now. There’s not always tears but there are things in my daily actions that say hi to you, that I’m still here, that you’re still thought of.

You are loved. ARE. Never WERE. Always ARE.

I hope that’s enough.

To Be Free

Glory: I look around at this world you’re so eager to be a part of and all I see is six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who’s not crazy? Look around, everyone’s drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out ’cause they don’t want ’em anymore. I’m crazy? Honey, I’m the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind, ’cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts.

Feels really stupidly fitting that today is World Suicide Prevention Day. I feel like you’d laugh if you knew that. The dark humor is palpable.

I miss you my person. So much. I still don’t care how fucked up we all are. We had each other and that was enough. I thought. Maybe not. Maybe someday I’ll know. I’ll be up near our place this weekend, think I may have my cards read so ya know if you have something to say feel free to pop in there.

Storms at lunch today seemed fitting. Happy Birthday.

Anya: “I guess I just realize how amazingly… screwed up they all are. I mean, really, really screwed up in a monumental fashion. And they have no purpose that unites them, so they just drift around, blundering through life until they die. Which they-they know is coming, yet every single one of them is surprised when it happens to them. They’re incapable of thinking about what they want beyond the moment. They kill each other, which is clearly insane, and yet, here’s the thing. When it’s something that really matters, they fight. I mean, they’re lame morons for fighting. But they do. They never… They never quit. And so I guess I will keep fighting, too.”

I’ll keep fighting, at least I’ll try. Sigh. This never gets any easier does it? Hasn’t with Krausie, probably won’t with you either. Your rituals are different as you were but I’ll carry the torch until I can’t anymore.

The Maggie Wall

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa ask Homer and Marge why there are no pictures of Maggie in the house. Ultimately this culminates in Homer telling them he has all the pictures of her where he needs them the most to lift him up, work.

My cube is pretty much my Maggie wall, even more now that I’ve re-printed some old favorites with Jess and Aaron in them. I can’t physically see you guys anymore, at least I can have you here with me I guess.

I don’t hate my work or feel stuck in it nearly the way Homer does, but having these visual reminders of the times past and the people I made into my family helps.

Especially lately, I need em. I need youse.

Midnight

I’m going to put this here because I don’t know what else to do with it at the moment.

She’s really loud today. She’s angry, and mean, and biting. She wants to lash out that nothing matters and it’s all pointless so why bother making plans or trying to make connections anymore?

What’s the fucking point? All the lines repeating over and over. How I won’t be missed, how people move on because you’ve already seen it, how much easier it could be. Maybe you could hug your friends again and then just not exist anymore.

These days are hard and it’s getting harder to shut her down, to find the light.

I know I should reach out, but I won’t. I don’t. No one needs this person. No one needs THIS me. This is not the me that has any use.

The thing is even the me that might have some use won’t reach either. For the same reasons. I don’t feel needed/wanted/cared about enough for anyone to seek me and my continual not reaching out and not making connections only exacerbates that and I fall into the same thought cycle over and over.

I should probably try therapy again, at least try something, anything. I don’t know if it really helped before or if I deluded myself into thinking that.

Maybe that’s all anything is anymore, delusions to distract from the shitfest that is reality.

Does not help at all that finding the light in the world at large grows a more difficult task with every passing day.

I’ve always had a distaste for humanity at large, it’s only getting worse so it’s quite simple to turn the knife on myself.

I miss my friends. Not just the dead ones.

Steven Spielberg, it’s your turn again.

I’m writing this down with what little I can remember of it so I don’t forget it, again.

The universe brought you to me. I don’t need to know why or how, it just did.

I think Heather and I were at Denny’s. Smoking, drinking coffee, talking as much as we could because neither of us wanted to go home. For different reasons. As we did when we’d get to a point we didn’t want to talk any more, we started playing the Celebrity Name Game we did often then.

The game is simple. One person starts by saying a name of a person (we pretty much let everything roll, fictional and non) and the next person has to come up with another person who’s first name begins with the first initial of the last name of the previous one.

We could, and did, play this game for hours.

You piped in at a lull, and we just took you into the game. You moved your coffee and ashtray over and that was it. You were in.

Months later, I’d sit with you in the wee hours, keeping you company in a moment I just didn’t want you to have to live alone. That was it, you were my person from then on.

I hope you knew that hadn’t changed. I may have been mad at you for pulling away, for what I likely misconstrued as shutting me out, but had you come by even just to get your book that would have melted away in a second.

I shut you out too, I know that. We had a weird thing where we never wanted to burden each other even though neither would have seen it that way really.

Humans are weird. I miss yours.

Track Five

She jumped from one happiness to the next.
(You’re the only one.)
They made her smile (You’re beautiful)
until they made her cry.
(But I’m not looking to settle down.)
They broke her heart (This isn’t working anymore,) and her spirit (But let’s still be friends.)
Over and over again,
she trusted the fragments of her soul with others
(I’d never hurt you like he did.)
she thought they could fix her.
Once they inevitably abandoned her
(It’s not you, it’s me) she would end up
leaving with more of them than of herself.
And this is how a person’s own reflection
Can become unrecognizable.

Currently Listening To:
O.A.R. “Shattered”

  • Alicia Cook – “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately”

The poetry thing is getting me through again, though as of late it’s rarely my own. The conversations we could have from this collection. Fuck. I miss you like mad.