Flight Risk

I am living in this paradox of normalcy and drinking Club Soda from the mouth of the bottle licking germs from strangers. I'm reading biographies of men I've met in another life; men with such strife and stubborn convictions they bring their own young to their knees. I keep referring to the same random fact: Kangaroos eat their own offspring.

These instances stay with you; the experience doesn't follow you but moves along beside you. While I think of this, I look down and see that my hands are the color of summer rain in a satin base.

I will look back at this point in my life, when I was sleeping just to smell familiarity woven into cotton threads and feel overcome with a tiredness I will never learn to articulate. But by then, no one is asking me to. I'm offering a stuttered explanation to drawn, bored faces.

Those months were a time when strangers remarked that I was what you call a flight risk- only months had gone by and even the post office was having difficulty keeping up with me. In this same time of awakening, I started straightening my hair and using sand paper at a rate that alarmed both my roommates and my landlord. When the dust settled, so did a mess of curls against my shoulders. 

Three Days

They sat around the table with their heads hidden in their hands, almost more embarrassed than sad. The lights were off because the sun had not quite set and a small dog is whimpering in the corner. I feel his pain and his fear with such a force I search for a bruise for the following three days.

Noah

We're sitting around two benches that pass for coffee tables. The lawn furniture is cracking but we've put pillows over the plastic to make everything feel a little more dignified.

My keyboard is covered in teal and green paint. I stopped counting how many times a day I stop to think about what it must feel like to be you. And the calendar has slipped completely away from me. All that I grasped on to before has fallen the way we missed that sunset in mid September.

On the beach, I'm looking towards the horizon while ships pass. The under tow is strong but so am I. I am squinting and in the distance I swear to no one that I see it but as the waves crash and the currents pulls nothing towards me.

Started out Good & then Went to Hell

It’s the end of the year and everyone is rushing around trying to fix their lives by midnight. We’re all checking off to-do lists and trying to lose 10 pounds before the ball drops, marking the end of another year and asking what we have to show for the last 365 days.

Between old resolutions and new the hours in a day don’t seem worth it anymore. The year feels tight and by December most of us are feeling so claustrophobic we’re afraid to go to bed.  We regret the most particular things; a cupcake we ate on St. Patrick’s Day, spending $20 on a shall we only wore twice {but looked so good in}, 2 tickets to a Bills game we never went to - the list goes on until our regrets have become this year’s resolutions and we’re reciting them in front of the mirror on the last Thursday in December.  We’re talking to ourselves and driving down one ways, the wrong way, tweezing our eyebrows in traffic.

In my old apartment I would sit on the floor in-between the coffee table and couch and write the same way I do here, in this new apartment that is now mine. But here the walls are smaller except there are more of them, and the hallways feel wider and I feel smaller but my legs are cramping and my arms still can’t stretch out fully. 

My memories are different here.  You’ve been here but I don’t like to remember it. We’ve slept in my bedroom but after you left, I had to paint the walls and move the furniture to try and forget you. It got so bad that I started leaving my window open at night and shiver beneath blankets so your smell will be pushed out. I wake up and am greeted by the door you walked out of. The door I let you walk out of. I'm constantly reminded that there will never be a you & I: it’s just a you and then a me. Separate entities.

I’m choking on my coffee and that brings me back to reality. With only a few days left of the year, this is how I’ll go – death by my pumpkin spice.  Everything I was just dwelling on seems less important as I gasp. Elaina is laughing and I’m signaling for help but she doesn’t move.  It is moments like this that I wonder if she’d let me die if I was choking on a chicken bone and not a liquid. 

I’m writing prose on my walls, on my bathroom mirror and my dashboard. This year I’m going to change, I’m going to fix my shitty posture and paint my nails every day. I’m going to forget all about your soft expression. This time I am writing declarations not resolutions. And this time, I'm telling Elaina they will stick. I tell her that they say desperation leaves us empty and hollow. He told me it made him crazy, it left his soul in his gut and his pockets empty. Elaina says it was Global Warming that sent us all up a wall this year. I say it was the fact that I wore the wrong shoes on our first date.

The Truth

In New Jersey just outside Paramus, three people were trampled outside of a JC Penny midnight madness sale, the woman who’s son was taken to the hospital,  told reporters “ I got this sweater for 14.00, originally 47.50…. what a steal!”

She only held it up for the cameras after offering to try it on.

Rest Stops

The same way the roads unite us, they pull you away from me. I head south, you head east- when we almost could cross paths again along Route 83 in Pennsylvania I move through the night slowly and you wake up to wonder where have you been and where I have gone.

On 95 heading north, you stop at a rest stop near Norfolk, it's dark but it feels like morning. A man is drinking coffee and reading a newspaper as he stretches his back from left to right, to left to right. His beard looks dirty, it's graying in spots so vividly that you can not decide if its the shade growing in or the shade being consumed. Watching him, time passes but the sun doesn't come up.

Heal, Toe

Everything has never been this exciting and this terrible at the same time. My tongue is numb but so is my head and the empty hollowness echoes while I try to sleep keeping me awake until dawn. I drift off only to wake up groggy in cold sweats, clutching pillows as if they were life vests- as if feathers and cotton could save my life the way the perfect shade of Perfectly Pink has saved so many first dates.

Distraction is the best medicine for a shattered soul. I tell her that staying busy is the only option. Elaina counters that rest will keep me alive. That my body is literally crying for it. I tell her to grab a brush, I’m painting my room, I’m pulling up carpeting and paining over old picture frames. Boy Meets World is playing in the back ground and it’s the season Topanga and Corey break up, he's saying true love conquers all. I’m slopping paint against walls as tears drip into the bucket.

A heaviness has taken over that I can not shake. From across the room Elaina is telling me that my expression gives me away immediately. My face is so drawn she has to stop herself from coming over and hugging me to make sure I am warm.

I run along East Avenue in the evenings, making a left on Goodman and I head towards Monroe Avenue and jog past the Park Bench, past Church Street Pub, the wind whips against my thighs and it stings. My heart is pumping against my chest and I'm still alive. I can feel the life in my bones.