It comes and goes, my adoration.
The difference now is he needn't know.
The beautiful boy of years past is pursuing me again,
and the weather has turned my skin transparent,
as whatever we had shared to eat or the novels I'm assigned to read.

where do you go my lovely?

Let me reiterate that statement. I DESERVE to fall in love entirely.

I had a panic attack last night. For anyone who hasn't been fortunate

enough to experience such, this is what it feels like.

"Well we can always just make out instead?" It'd been months since

I payed him the slightest glimpse of attention and yet he was still

hopelessly attached. Of course he was still hopelessly attached.

There were more than a handful of men who longed to make me

smile and all I ever did was laugh. I am indulgent in things that

are not of my picking; Saturday Night Live in the distance and

computer screen rubrics, my body slowly becomes Numb as the

1970's. Mattress, eyelids clinging to stay open. Everything is

just the same, everything is as it's always been. And then my

mind begins to taunt me. Sweat dripping from my tongue and

chest. And everything is spinning, was I spinning as well? I

must have been, in some unmarkable sense. I contemplate

ripping locks off of my scalp or eyelashes that somewhere

in this mess became soaking wet. "This is not your fault."

I begin repeating inside my head, but there's no use in

arguing with something that made so much sense. "You

are so beautiful." I remembered my hollywood muse

writing me, yet what did that matter; beauty in a world

with so much suffering? My overlapping thoughts were

now typed across my telephone. Maybe one of the men

who lusted after me would not be asleep, and they would

compliment me and remind me how to breathe. And of

course, Tommy, the one whom with constant rejection

I've come to despise, was the only one who was at this

hour still alive. This made me sicker than I could stand.

I imagined him fucking a girl more or equally naive as

me and laughing at this entire thing. "A panic attack?

What a loon!", she would say and they'd take a hit and be on

their way. And soon I was dreaming while I was awake.

And now it is morning. Is it just the same?

You aren't giving me anything to hold onto."
I want to fall in love entirely.
no seond guessing anymore.
I can't fill the vacancy of
someone who was never
mine to begin with.

killin' time with gin and lime.

"Buddy Willard was a hypocrite. Of course, I didn't know he was a hypocrite at first.
I thought he was the most wonderful boy I'd ever seen. I'd adored him from a distance
for five years before he even looked at me, and then there was a beautiful time where
I still adored him and then just as he started looking at me more and more,
I discovered quite by accident what a horrible hypocrite he was..."
( The Bell Jar, page 63)



"Just Hit it Kim!" I hated smoking with him because we became
zombies at best spinning towards the distinction of whatever it
is we were and I preferred to stay still and aware that nothing
had or is or will ever become of it. "And there's this crazy old lady
who hangs out with Marie." What in god's name was wrong with
him? That name sent shivers up my spine. I had never met her
in my entire life yet I loathed her with every inch of my being.
I had seen photographs through mutual friends and she was
beautiful and natural and branch-thin and smiling. I knew
that they strummed guitars together and I figured she was
athletic as well and his same age and anything else he had
patronized me for not being. How the fuck was I to compete
with that? I was a crumbling statue buckling up a pair of
Manolo Blahniks and choking on a cigarette. "She just
always pops up at Marie's house and it is so funny. "
I figured if I had been paying attention, this is the
part where I would laugh. I stifled a giggle and
peered outside the window and began imagining
each flake of snow as someone I had met, a vice
sticking to my peacoat, a stranger suitcased in
the breeze, a colleague sliding down the glass or an
outdated muse slushed beneath the tire tracks.
"I don't like much wine except Pinot Grigio." he
rambled on. "You like penis?" I smirked. My god,
was I just the same? I acted silly and awkward and
passe and dumb because after filtering our initial
thoughts, that's what we become. "Do you ever lie
awake at night and worry about just about everything? "
This was my cue, my chance, the truest invitation to
who I really was. "No, but sometimes I stay up all night
or stay out all night." That wasn't what I meant at all.
I knew then that as much as he was a fan of it all, the
soundtrack of a wandering and wondering mind, he
was just that; a fan, and not someone who shared the
suffering and beauty and exhaustion of it all.
Why would I bother with anything past related
stories or ordinary response? It would merely allow
him to think less of me or completely scare him off.
Perhaps this was a blessing, the last thing I was looking
for was a reflection of myself to lay beside me at night.
My mind flooded with images of Amy Winehouse and
her soon to be annuled husband injecting heroin inside
their veins and Kate and Pete in a cocaine daze.
"Do you remember this time last year?" he smiled infantly,
pulling into that familiar street. I knew exactly what he
was referring to. " I remember everything about that night.
"He's gonna piss his pants, Kimmy, because he thinks your dad
is going to wake up and find us. What should we do!?" Amanda
wrote inside a text message. "Ask him if he likes me." I replied,
comfortably numb and close enough to being asleep I could
literally develop polaroids from inside my dreams.
"He does! He does! He does!" I professed to Zach,
clutching to a cup of coffee on our ride to school
the next morning. "And Jesse had to pull us out
of your ditch...." He continued, and then I was
home. And then he was gone. And again I was
caught between the fear he'd moved on and an
even greater fear that I had too and we were better off.

guitar strings and the musk of january.

"I want to be a lawyer." She decreed, as I watched dollar bills replace her teeth. "That's wonderful!" My professor smiled, filing her nails with the remainder of a grading sheet. "I used to want to be a doctor, but now I just want to be a nurse." another revealed. "What a great way to help people." she smiled again. This felt to me a rather rehearsed placement of words, the way a mother answers her child when she is knee-deep in the contents of a filing cabinet and they're inquiring about the hue of the sky or the motion of the sea. I contemplated experimenting in my response, a coked-up supermodel, drug-muzzling lyricist or any of the other new American dreams, just to see if she would regurgitate the exact same reassurance. It reminded me of "WHAT A GREAT QUESTION!", which every instructor I've ever had cleverly used to make the one asking it feel intelligent, regardless of it's relation to the subject at hand, and therefore making it much easier to mold their concentration and ability to pay attention. I always lacked such an ability. "You're a daydreamer," my second grade teacher scowled, "This is not a good quality."
"Your turn, babe." the admirer next to me said urgently. I couldn't help but venerate the fact that he took every chance imaginable to talk to me. "I like your Native American boots, Kimberly." "Did YOU like the movie Kimberly?" " I saw you walking down Greek Row this weekend Kimberly!" For whatever reason, all of my responses were limited to three or less words or a series of head movements; I suppose it was his slate blue eyes. Anyone I'd ever known who exhibited them might as well have been a vacuum between all the things I had planned on saying and the feeble text that managed to muster out in actual dialect. "Oh, sorry. Um, I'm going to write," I spoke, realizing then that I'd been the only one who started my statement with I'm going to do this rather than I'd like to or I want to do this. "Writing is a nice hobby," she garbled, moving instantaneously to the future Policeman to the right of me, or what was still intact of my pride at least. A hobby? "It was as if she had limited my entire purpose along the likes of a collection of postage stamps or garden tools." I vented to the floor mates who flocked to whichever dining hall table I found myself at, unbuckling a corset-waist belt and throwing it into the trash can beneath my feet. "Well I mean, she's just trying to help you out, Kimbo. It's not the most practical thing in the world." There it was again, a beautiful buzz and an empty carton of nicotine, the pitch of an alarm clock on a holiday. What was "practical" anyways? I loathed that word in quotes more so than final exams or paintings I'd never had the patience to complete.
"It's two sided, you know?" He announced through the telephone, as I stripped out of that little black dress he hadn't the schedule to see me in. "No dear, it's not, It never will be." I wanted to scream in unison all of the suspicions any and everyone had lectured me towards. But I could not. It was then I realized I had swam out too far. I was past the chalk lines of logic and reality, but I felt and ached more than a wall to wall museum of evidence and history. I could not by any means make out the shape or form of the other shoreline, but I dreamt of it just fine. All I knew was that I had to keep swimming or everything I'd every believed in would run out of oxygen, of life, of time.