Crisscrossing Vehicles

I don't think I can really ink myself into words the way an author prints his characters from his blood, gives them eccentricities and flaws of their own, and they spring out from prose like gorgeous butterflies and flowers. I just feel too nonplussed and alien too often, as if the air tastes too disparate on my taste buds, or the room I choose to ensconce myself in is home but not. I try to reach out for more words that could concisely articulate the way I am and become, but I can't, and there are always other people's words that do concoct me into being. And I feel too much like a machine. If I could thread my tears into sentences, I would, and I would sleep on them - a collected ocean of bewilderment and pain I hope not to drown in - because what I am beams through my pores but I am lost at sail with little to treat myself to.

I itch at myself like an irritating denouement that claws at the classy lass in the front row. My set is crazy and intriguingly perplexing and, actually, downright scary because nobody wants shows splayed out messy.

Emotions are pendulously reaching out in pantomime and non-pantomime masks and gloves, eerily mysterious. An actor runs pell-mell into her lover, but alas the curtians draw and the clock strikes the audience's heart with brash care. The lights flicker erroneously and people murmur in bemusement. Accusations of an erratically disappointing end runs through the night. And by the morrow, critics have published the unbelievable truth in their critiques.

The lass gasps in her vermilion blush, and things like these are embarrassingly unsatisfying and unwanted as she stalks away with only the imprint of a disgusting end in her head, and papers of blue ink tumble recklessly into the streets. To think she expected a grander end!

And to think she was so rapt in her seat! She had taken notes that glided fluently and mellifluously out till somebody struck the wrong chord, and now the news flies unlike her fresh reports that are left to dry negligently in the summer sun. People either choose to read the newspaper articles apathetically, as if stopping by only to read the first line with only a pint of interest, or confusingly.

The latter is a majority that sits on a sun-drenched table, and has been planning to take a night to watch the drama or has already ridden through the drama in some other town. These people let themselves gasp in the billowing steam of their coffee mugs. They care, even if not too much. They are famished and voracious for at least a more thorough and reasonable explanation for this mishap. They crave bouts of reasons from the production's personage - the actors, the director, anybody.

Here is my mistake. Take notice - I myself am not a denouement. I am still here, fourteen, earthly, and breathing, and prone to illness and accidents and naivette and whatever a teenager my age can catch, and will still be prone to obtaining when a teenager no more. I am not a show and I am not for show. People don't pay entrance fees to see me, and people don't write about me in rooms like I try to. I do not perform for them. But I am human, and I believe I consist of universes that hold stories I can't imagine, and I try to pour them out as soon as possible although I know this isn't the end. If I think there is an end, the end is not what I think it seems. It is a beginning.

So I release these feelings and curiosities out. Oh, I try my best. Let's say the process of wringing them out is over for a while. I publish, because I want my future self to know that these are how her fourteen self feels. These are all in text, but to me they aren't just text, or language, or vocabulary. This problematic flow of thoughts are coalesced from furor and envy and anxiety, and the aspring part of me crawls in this fetal position, and it is always too late for me to know that what is eating me up is myself.

Two of those paragraphs end in italicized words. And this is the comparison, or the similarity rather: I, myself, can be anybody. I can just be the memory of a face, a stranger, to you. You, who I am presuming is not related to me by blood, can detach yourself from my frustration and my garbling of my own actions. But I, a soul that dreams, am glued to this mind and the protocol of mundane life, unless something or someone changes it drastically as to twist it (which, I know, is highly improbable). I am stapled to multiplying series of connection and waking up and falling asleep and traversing through school. And as I write, here, in the strokes of time, I am my own audience. I regard you and I know you are part of everything and anything you choose to be part of; hey, you're reading this right now! But I am that stern part of the audience that is open but unmistakenly strict in the criticizing of the art of expressing oneself. I tense upon my own scrutinizing look.

I am the aspiring character in my blood (although it may just be a penchant and a penchant only), and the part that carries these cells? The critic. The entirety of this entry may as well just have been fueled by my bursting frustration for myself. I analyze myself too much, maybe, but that is what carries this whole parade throughout the streets of this blog. When an engine coughs out its last breath and the parade screeches terribly into the disarray of a stop, that is when I stop.

But the show must go on, right?

Affairs and Fevers

She rises up from the waves of her sheets with mist running from the windowsill and her backbone and neck treated badly, thus she misplaces herself first as she accidentally knocks over a few books when she trips forward. Looking down, after barely catching a crisp bestseller and J.D. Salinger, she fishes another book off from the carpet and deposits it back on its respective shelf along with the other two. Stretching her arms, she returns to proceeding to the bathroom, then to the kitchen where she shakes up coffee for herself, and for herself only.

Later she proudly dons her favorite pair of sneakers - the ones with traces of pristine white and laces of sunshine yellow. Like the wannabe stylist she is, she dolls herself up with a cardigan of red and white spots, choosing a scarf of light pink to conceal her rosy neck. She feels rather—this she won't convey to you over a loaf of any kind of bread—ancient, with a band of fake gold twisted around a wrist, a dangling clock laced around her neck, and the tattoo of her heart shimmering against her fabric, coffee pumping like a fever in her veins and the outside frost already dancing across her lips. She feels ancient, because this dormitory is cluttered with mummies—she knows it—and her sketchbook is ancient as she hefts it into her adroit hands, fables pressed and shaded into spirals and jaws. Ancient, ancient, ancient.

She wants to smell like roses before she does pancakes, so she meanders down the corridor, through the quiet campus, and through the front doors of her college and skulks stealthily around blocks and into her parents' garden. She doesn't knock on the door of her parents' house because they would still surely be soundly asleep, and she owns a key to their garden, imparted to her with trust. She enjoys the lilies and petunias for a few minutes, blindly touching them as if she could feel their color, then she passes by lovelier flowers and crouches before the roses, tempted to touch their thorns... but she doesn't. Stalking down a path and locking herself out the garden, she stares at the house awhile and takes glimpses back at the flowers, then leaves, hunching a little like a shadow in an alley.

The brilliance of the morning touches her. Her cheeks are hot and her heart is enamored with the wintry sunrise, the horizon fleetingly showing off pleasant hues of entwined purple and orange. Her breath meeting library glass doors spreads out as she enters to join in trysts of exasperated love and formidable dragons, her feet barreling her forward into a world of mystifying battles and benign mistletoe appearances (much to her chagrin). She dips her aching toes into the throes of stories, and in the middle of a delicious afternoon she signs herself up for deliberately written adventure and tantalizingly giddy romance. The clock in her heart is ticking by. She excuses herself from her friend, the librarian, and whisks herself into the skittish streets of New York, bearing a cup of chocolate on the way to art class.

Her thoughts are shrouded with unabated dragon fire, dashing around the seams of her sanity, which she has checked are not so grim with an okay disposition. She sits atop the cusp of a menagerie of puerile thoughts, illustrious words and elegant illustrations sighing in the wind and washing into her ears. And as magical and dizzying as it sounds, she wishes there were more so their number could pass the count of her sun-ups and sun-downs, her childhood acquaintances, and her pet bird feathers combined.

Prim as she is, she bends crookedly, and her smile is halfway perfunctory, the curls and lines of it being trailed with ragged accuracy and mischief. She has days of runny noses and days of sobbing that twist into dry, deserted pages and haphazardly tossed away assignments, but her tousled hair from the jungle of her plain bed is a halo drizzling upon her figure, and the roars, howls, and all there is in wildlife heaped in her windpipe are not useless at all. She is chiseled to become the warrior she is, just you wait. When you look at the clock and you gather it is midnight, a Rubicon, a incipient ultimatum, will shrivel up around her, and she'll no longer have to ready herself for the next round in the ring.

Because then she'll be the triumphant queen, looming over you, her hands—feeling mind-bogglingly too close and human—a guide and a touch of knowing, the glimmer in her frosty eyes a message and a tinkle of jest. Saying. Canting, in the same way she tilts her chin up. Painstakingly testing. Always trying. To render,

,
,
,

Fight.

One Solstice

Macabre sloshes of black and red, imbued with the sting of chlorine, crust the constellations on my fingers with death finely. This is the mirage I envelope through the mail, under the pretense of a cop. I sleuth easily through summer heat, sliding through windows with autumn leaves hanging on to me, graying through winter solstice. I flourish in tendrils of dreams and the hasty flutter of hands. I hoard a graveyard of past misery, and my name printed fresh in the obituary sometimes vexes me.

I sleep upon pinpricks of elusive hurt, but the fictitious touch of hot and unabashed skin against flushed ice makes it bearable by the hour. I skid, often utterly unintentional, in between monochromatic strokes of the taste of rain and night. I tend to scratch at the spines of chatoyant light, sighing out, shrieking out, prisms of need. But there goes the beckoning shadow of a once tangible sun—it slaps me at the back of my head and shovels me into the recesses of my mind. Exclusive, only to the sprites that have chosen to abandon ship. And I hear the resounding laughter of demons in my heart, where all my farewell letters always end up, shrinking, tucking, shivering, dissolving, into disease.

There is the sound of cracking wood, roasting in the fire, working up my heart. I'm in a site of warmth. There is a beauty that knocks on the doors of my atria. My breath falls like the first snowflake, crisp and hellish and kissable, and I tally the times I've ever felt like this.

Inked Identification

This is her domain.

Masqueraded by snowflakes in her eyes and gray earmuffs, she could see nothing but the wonder entailed in scripture and hear nothing but the wind chimes and the friends hanging from letters. Tiny, impish friends waving along, hopping off a point to a crushing page number. They tear at her soul, and no one really sees this as she taps her boots silently, madly, in precise rhythm. Her hanging breath tells the story of a blizzard. She sits as the quintessence of a good conversationalist—pure smiles, inquisitive replies, silence that acknowledges, a nice amount of gesticulation, warm body language, a teaspoon of idiosyncrasy.

And when she pouts almost inconspicuously, it drives strangers crazy.

She likes tête-à-tête hellos and how are yous, tries to linger on cliffhanger farewells. She is permissible to air and to playgrounds and to parties, yet she chooses to live with and to live because of her friends of houses and castles and fairies and spaceships. Freckles frame her eyes, and there shines mirth, beauty immeasurable and deep. Her voice, and even her mute entrance, fractures the moment, and isn't she shocking? The long gone tyranny of self-inflicted cruelty is a tiny bit silhouetted around the outline of her body, but it is, she says aplomb, gone—it is only a wry illusion that makes it happen.

And she lives on pliantly in your head.

The Beret Boy

The boy in front of you wears the brightest pair of owlish eyes. The quiver on his lower lip doesn't stop and his cheeks are pale with cold. His fingernails are sliced with fresh biting marks, the tension in his shoulders and the crease on his forehead laced with anxiety. The stammers falling from his red lips are remnants of a shipwreck washing ashore. His short screams (that only you can hear) are teeming with the melodrama of a violin, and the dust under his lids can't be blinked away. The corners of his mouth's gruesome shape—of hopelessness and the repetition and awaiting of a hundred yawns—are hurting. His eyes, as they peek around the ghostly room, are in a glinting sheen that reflects that rather sad blinking of a neon sword. His stomach grumbles and everyone else's eyes are indignant and judgmental as they turn to his crinkling forehead and his trembling pillars of legs that have been strictly instructed to stand straight. He closes his owlish eyes for one second, feeling embarrassment tickling up his pale throat, and he's still and he's just a small boy.

You hand him your coat. He peers up at you—a shy, curious inquiry swaying in his young shoulders—so instead of dropping the furry coat in the bowl of his uncurled hands, you spare a prompt sway yourself and carefully hover the coat over his shoulders and draw them there. He drops his hands and gives a half-flinch before you do, and after you set the coat he peers up at you more. A small 'o' shapes itself on his lips, and it's a change, like a mumble in a nap, like iridescent colors on a banally dull sketchbook page. You think you feel a barely there 'Hallelujah.' His nose then begins to color itself a cherry, and his lips set into a crumby line again, but his eyes blink more than usual and he shifts his feet across the stony space he's let himself have. Good.

Then people in the same room are murmuring—it's a clucking of a tongue, it's a nightmarish scream-whisper, it's a code, another language maybe. Your shirt is poor, ragged and sleeveless, and you bet the temperature is tumbling down deathly. You touch the wall with a breath, then a palm, and even the room feels glacial and feeble, but it is never bendable and always impenetrable. You shiver and you almost hiss because you mustn't shiver that great. You bow your head—your beret almost tips out of place on your speeding head—and it's hopeless! This place is ridden with wisps of nightmares. Gruesome. Dirty. Tight. Nothing here is palatable. Your spirits plummet, you can feel them.

These are your first few months, and already you've been kicked into the grayest jail like a rat. Every elder looks up only to receive food and water. When they do, you see vestiges of childish hope kissed on their coal-smeared features. You really try not to remember their faces. They work voraciously for anything edible, to quench their thirst, to kidnap their hunger. Their lips are stick-thin and their malnourished bones jut at every joint. Their fingers are nimble and experienced, picking at the crevices of the walls and the gaps between their teeth. You've tried to speak. They had replied with either grouchy silence or churlish monosyllables, so you attempt no more. Any utterance of any kind is hushed to the lowest volume, because everyone is afraid of the shadows and their henchmen.

The boy is sleeping. (You find this to be true because his head lulls down softly and his shoulders aren't too tense anymore.) He's almost got it this time—dozing off ramrod straight, just hanging there—but he fails and you barely catch him in the space you have. His appointments with sleep are scarce. It shouldn't be like that, with any child, really. He shudders awake, dimples that are rare and that aren't so traceable showing up in a hazy 'mmm.' He's alert soon enough. You don't lay a hand on him once again, but in his weary eyes you see hope he doesn't know how to feel.

It's funny, how the young—troubled or safe—can fill you with hills and hills of saving hope and wisdom.

'& every breath we drew was Hallelujah.'

Swingset Matchbox

I recoil at the thought of life being bound by a glass of transparent fragility—easy to twist and crush in between your fingers, easy to see the beams dwindle in brilliance. It's like this nightmare you try to struggle out of when sunlight is calling, but you can't, because apparently your head is a kamikaze pilot.

And it's bringing you down with it.

You see patches of undulating green, but the surface is hard and solid. You thought that you'd die again, one more time, and maybe you did. But here comes the bloody aftermath where everything is cool and hot and you're concisely underneath the iron. Every step is futile because you can't seem to catch the feeling with comfort and relief that maybe the worst has passed. Yet you still try and you sit silently, with only the creaks of a rusty swingset and your own sobs wrecking the whole ghost parade. Your hair is tangled in a frizz and the place is empty. You know you look horrible, but it's okay. Nobody's watching just now.

"What do I do?" you think as the air is buzzing with the dark. Only Christmas lights from afar and the unseen moon are generously giving the place light. You feel pent-up. You feel like you were dropped off here, prepared to get in touch with elementary friends in a kindergarten powwow, but your arms are vacant without anyone to greet with a hug.

Then there is the swing, cold and dusty with memories tonight, and you feel something oncoming. Oh there just go your eyelids, trying to hide back the tears. Your emotions can be taxing so this is healing, but still. There is a comely wind you smile at with lethargy. There is that breath of fire you begin to release but can't. You search, lost, for the moon, but the trees are concealing it. You think, you think, you feel a friend embracing your hands, embellishing your heart with stories you yourself can't make up. You feel a stressed dichotomy between you two that hacks the atmosphere with more tears of your own, but it's a fine difference, because for once you don't feel that alone.

And there's a moment with no dialogue, just a curt incision in the wind, a shift from swinging back and forth. There's an ignition here somewhere, a crossword puzzle prepared in the storage room of your heart, and you think you exhale the smallest of blue flames. There is a pause in the storytelling. And you can attest to the fact that you really are never alone.

To Know Winter

a cold froth.  ❅

requirements:

                           1. you must believe

                           2. the night is simmering

                           3. but only inside brick houses; outside it is howling with frigid air

                           4. it is December

                           5. you feel okay—nothing is missing

                           6. but, yes, there's a howl in the wind

                           7. it reminds you of something

                           8. you peek outside your window / your door

                           9. you realize it  is December

                           10. and you remember

what to do / how to do:

                            

                           1. if it doesn't snow, pretend there is snow, and pretend you exhale white puffs of ample carbon dioxide

                           2. listen

                           3. put a pair of boots on

                           4. then your coat—your best one

                           5. step outside (yes, out of your house and into the cold and dim, and there you go)

                           6. listen

                           7. listen some more

                           8. click your window, or door, safely shut

                           9. you can walk, you can get in your car, you can ride your bicycle

                           10. but don't bring music—no turning on of a radio, no earphones, no habitual humming

                           11. so: just listen (bring down the side windows if there are side windows)

                           12. hey, hey, what's that? you hear something

                           13. you stop, halt, get off, get out, walk somewhere vaguely tearing

                           14. to the heart (i hope you brought your heart)

                           15. you see a lake

                           16. come closer

                           17. it is frozen—you aren't frozen, but you may as well be

                           18. you feel a cold froth

                           19. kissing your heart (let it)

                           20. you are breaking

                           21. you don't find it easy, funny, how you could forget, then remember, then forget, then remember

                           22. winter

                           23. the cold seeps through your lungs (let it) and it is another

                           24. winter

                           25. remember

about winter / hypothesis, of some kind: 

                            it is a flood, an earthquake, a step on the ground, a splash on a puddle, a cold froth, an excuse to stay in, an excuse to stay out, a snowflake, the melting, the freezing, the crunch of boots on forgiving snowflakes, a furnace, a tear upon your face, a cup of hot choco

The Moon Told Me So

I was meant to make an analysis, but my thoughts—I cannot jostle.

I.  A cataclysm of curiosity arises, fresh from my appraising eyes. You are the cracking ebullition as you are heaved up, and I bet my spine straightens up and my brows cock up, too. It is intriguing how you draw forth, upward, dead but awake. Alive, new. Beautiful. Is that an enough word? You say you first saw darkness. Is it lonely down there? Do you remember fresh tears? Do they boil hot or naturally stream helplessly on and down your cheeks? How does the night sound down there? Are you stricken by nostalgic reminiscence as you float up? Your being here, your first day in sheets of ice that are in love with you, is a mystery waiting to be solved. Did life feel too unfamiliar? Gosh, I don't know. Would you know? Is your tongue roasting with fire. Is it waiting to erupt?

(I like the way you wake up, kiddo.)

II.  Or is your entrance mum with stroking breath? The air is new to your frosty lungs, aren't they? You have no luggage following you. Where do you come from? Is something trying to pull you back? Into the darkness? Is an end pulling you back, tickling your throat, strangling you? Are questions murmuring too loudly too soon? Does wintry oxygen knock in you bashfully? It is.... magic, eh? Breathe in, breathe out, choke on chilly gulps of a beginning. You seem sad, stranger. Alien. What are you, special snowflake? What is that beauty tracing out of that pretty face? Oh, nope, I am not mad. You are mad. You can't help but wake up from, what, a bad dream? Oblivion? Darkness? A strange boy with a pretty face—that's what you are. You are colors of frostbite. I like you.

III.  There you are. You're almost there. Oh, your eyes. Are glossy. You blink dreamily. I am befuddled with how sad you look, or I may as well be misinterpreting. You might just be drowsy. Is there such a thing as a misinterpretation, though? I digress. I can see you. Are you scared? You're undeniably suffocating—that is your beauty, and your expression, and your birth. You seem so alien, but you're so human too, I guess. Do you need more air? I'm beginning to think I have too much air supply. Your breath is a refreshing imprint in all of space. I can't think and it's weird. Naught flitters by without a wish to take it all in, like you're taking it all in. I know I'm not supposed to be sad, but I am, and it's funny because you're beautiful???? Is this a routine of yours, strangely mad and madly strange boy? Knocking under skinny and slippery ice and looking all mildly aghast? Why do I think you're mad? I guess you're not. Your emotions aren't dormant and they create elegant patterns on your face. There is something honestly and enchantingly intrinsical in you that makes me feel funny. I don't know it yet. 

I know it's lonely.

I can't think straight.

Ringing Chimes

When you're downcast, and when you're crestfallen, don't look outside. Don't see the sun be the sun; it lowers into the trees and it boils down to the night. Think of the happiest things. Take a walk through the park, and see the people who sweat and breathe in the afternoon haze. See the hammers break the bricks down into miniature people and trains. And when the day kisses goodbye and the night is now a hue you try to digest, think of the quiet morning when you are all garbed in blank pages. The morning can be sweet. The morning can be a toothache.

Waking up, think of the happiest things. Rejuvenate yourself with dreams of bright flowers and lemon juice. Daydreams would be great, too. In the business of woolgathering, you better watch your hands. In the morning you yawn and everything is bleary, from the stretching of your limbs to the dawning of the sun. And it is now familiar—I know—the sadness that indents itself on your mind. It likes to stay awhile. But it will pass, like the day will. Your breaths may feel like they try to smother you every day. The day may feel inhuman. The world may feel bland. But these things shall pass, like your cough will. You'll escape the immorality of superficially happy walls. You'll find things worthy and terrifically nice. You'll find yourself feeling worthy and terrific and nice. There is light that can triumph the dark. It is the clipped secret of an eskimo kiss, but it is the most heart-warming and touching. And promising.

Don't you get it?

That Resurrection

You’re that redundant beat in my heart, that tickle behind my ear or beneath my feet, that blooming of rose petals across my face. You’re that whisper thumping the air, that clever spark of life, that missing spring of light and love in my life. You are those nimble feet of yours as the day leads on and the clouds part. You restart my heart in many ways as the tips of your boyish smile linger under my eyelids. You are that breath of life, that resurrection, that urgent need in the morning as I mumble in lethargy, as the sun rises but I still scramble for warmth tepidly. You are that cut on my heart, that published letter of a pillow case’s zipper on my skin, that rising of the hairs on the back of my neck. You are that fogged up circle on glass. You are that faint play of wind and childish laughter in the streets. You are that sway through midnight, that march from night to day. You’re that gasp, that hurt, in the hollow of my chest. You are that flurry of held back tears, that hiss I pretend to hear from time to time. You’re that impatient kettle clinking inside my ears, that travel barefoot, that flurry of nostalgia. You are that funny interrobang, that reasonable enough Oxford comma. You are that vintage set of records, that flame born anew. You are that goose skin, that tickle on my mouth, that ringing alarm. You are that unanimous vote, that recipient of my cheer, that zap in my backbone. You are that cunning smile, that delicious mess, that improperly proper presence. You’re that steaming hot, that precious cold, that dreamy bright light. You are that. Precisely, unmistakably, unerringly, inaccurately, invalidly, sickeningly that. You.

And I am but that girl in a queue of dangerously riled up pointing fingers. I am that puddle of freezing water after a snowflake dies. I am that embarrassing hiccup, that glitch, in a video entry. I’m that singular piece of repulsiveness, that slithering gust of wind in the backdrop of Snow White’s ugliest nightmares, that droopy, ersatz smile turned full-out grimace. I’m that lousy space of ennui in the past, present, and undeniably the future. I am that reduce of riveting words, that cutting out of a stalwart performance, that breakdown, that imminent thumbs down from a critique. I am that gushing blue of sadness, that trespassing outsider, that lawbreaker, that joy murderer. I’m that blindingly shocking call, that keen for something better. I am that. Typically, helplessly, unremittingly, unattractively that. Me.

Kindly wrap me away, covered and never dusted, in that lonely corner of your attic, just like I had been. Send me to the corners of your smile, if you’re kinder, although I am content with drawing out my solitary, it is exhaustingly dark and I am famished. You are so you, and I am so me, and I will always have little to no understanding and knowledge at all why our paragraphs are next to each other. And somehow it isn’t too bad. Never so bad. But also never so great. My penchant for wintry days is next to fictitious, because who knows how great a snowflake tastes.

                                               who knows if the moon's — e.e. cummings

who knows if the moon’s

a balloon,coming out of a keen city

in the sky—filled with pretty people?

(and if you and i should

get into it,if they

should take me and take you into their balloon,

why then

we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:

go sailing

away and away sailing into a keen

city which nobody’s ever visited,where

always

            it’s

                   Spring)and everyone’s

in love and flowers pick themselves

Quiet Intrusion

Can you feel my quiet? It blankets over the moon. Can you see my quiet? It hovers over your pretty heads. Can you hear my quiet? It drums in my heart. Can you taste my quiet? It bursts in color, but I am still gray. I am flying like a kite through December, and I am flipping the pages of my Literature book, and it is all I can do before I beat my drum harder and faster.

My quiet is the commiserating silence you would hear if you could hear it. It is the silence that reaches an air-conditioned room at precisely 5:30 PM and it is the silence that roams over my eyes when I am still clouded by drowsiness. It is the silence that comes in place of a nightmare's aftermath, and I am stuck swimming and trudging and kneeling, and my hands look for the end of the day too soon. My lips are drawn together and the ceiling is closing in when the alarm penetrates my bad dream, and I immediately gasp at the feeling of irrational depression I feel as I surface to the day. My rib cage is cramming in. My breath—it exudes throughout my limbs. My silence is a book of words, my silence is the crouching you see. I hunch over a book and I eat more silence. I reap it in the corners of the rooms, where the loveliest of books can be found, where the atmosphere and photosynthesis are chapters away. My quiet is an irritating rash reddening on the back of my neck, and I accidentally slap my throat. I grow quieter. I talk and still my lips are drawn close. I blink and see and laugh at somebody, but still I feel hollow and I feel complete.

My clauses cackle deep within. My neck cracks from the tension. The waves horse around my heart—I am an impatient insertion point.

Hectic Sequence

Beams of bright light that shimmer through his coat of red and orange fire up the yellow in his eyes and tingle my vision with a deadly maroon. I am on viscous water, drifting and floating in a stream of reverie and escapism. My ears can hear no other than the whirring of engines in the air. My skull rumbles and I juggle the possibilities in the haste transition of day to night.

Dear brethren, I have been beheaded, but my whole body is still intact? I lose myself in frenzied melancholy and steaming anguish and my dyslexia churns through the ripples of sea water, my mouth wanting tea and cucumber. My gasps hiccup in me and my story might as well end too soon. The wind prowls around my poorly bandaged skeletal frame and I am looping myself through hoops of camera clicks. Click, click, click! I speed down onto my bottom and sink. All I do is blubber... or shush. There's a screw stuck in my windpipe and I choke it out. It stumbles into the moon, and I am left seeing this from underwater, my eyes in salt water and bubbles trying to surface. Huff, huff, I cannot breathe. Hick hick, my inhaler is down here. Somewhere. My hair blocks my vision, and right after my thoughts strangle me. I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe, but I still hear a roar as silent as a meow. I am gone. The haze of Death comes upon me like sleep, like a spell. My memory is befuddled around cat eyes as I soar off...

As I soar closer... and fly helter-skelter and raise my weary arms to touch
the close of a dream. And still, my hands are drawn to hectic streams and lines of your majesty.

Shy Spine Steps

You owed me the hands of the clock and you owed me my breath. You knew the steps of my spine, and you filled the crevices of my lungs. I was hallow so I inhaled deeper, even as my breath fogged up the glass. It was winter when you appeared, one more time from across the world, and your smile and your laugh and the rising of red in your neck was the summer before. I spilt my cup of choco down the drain as your laugh came cascading down my heart, and like a knock on hard mahogany you hacked that part of me and talked away my darkest dreams, whispered them away from my heavy lids. You distracted me from the television show at twilight and in lieu showed me our garden. You hopped down from the sheets and attacked me across the room, tickling my frown away and kissing a bashful smile in sight.

We nailed postcards of your words on my map. And we reinvented the world and dove into stories and memories till midnight took place and your funny snort came punctuating your laugh, and there came my laugh. I almost forgot about it. I gulped at how atrocious it was. Your face was of stone, but it was not stony—it was still and afloat. Your palms were of warmth, but I began to pay more attention to the cold through the allowance we gave the window. Our room was a cavern. I blinked dust off my lashes. You breathed like the lonely streets, but it was not like that because your eyes were twinkling like the vast ocean, keeping aquatic animals of days and nights—just like that summer again. And I liked you first. Then loved you, because you didn't stop me. And now I think you were peculiar. We were clauses and question marks. I hunted for explanations, for deep, more reasonable essays—because you were that, a winning essayist; you became your letters. But what I received was a simmering kiss under the gaze of the watchful moon. I shivered as my fingers scrambled for warmth—they were so skinny and white—so I shut the damn window and relinquished my cowardice, and then you swore it was my courage that you loved most about me. You were brimming with humor. You iced me with words I couldn't take so openly. You garbed me in them, and you shrinked my crevices into stitched patches. Your hands mapped the dark behind my ribs away. You were a hushed tone as I became a rising flush of red. Unfettered you made me as you let me grow wings.

You pulled down my lids at night when they were bright with nightmares. You brought them open the next morning when they were bright with dreams and happiness. Your whispers did well, and your stitches excellent. Your arms were open and your eyes were an experience. I hope I did funny things to your chest too, and I wish your heart still stupidly and superfluously roars when you think of me—like me you.

An Overwhelming Visit

Verklempt, she jutted her bony palms into the sockets of her eyes, pushing back in the light and the truth... and what was left of her tears. The sun was right in front of her, and she could feel her short ponytails tickling her neck as she swayed in search of a frescade, and somebody's steady hand lengthened over her shoulder. She felt the tunnels under her toes and the rays of light trying to shush her up, warming up her cold, wet lips. Her blood dripped helter-skelter around her bones and her amber eyes sunk down and down and down... and over the sun and out of space.

She drew the constellations and colored them a clear violet. She was a shy woman, and a queen among her subjects, the Stars. "Lo and behold, she pirouetted with her emerald cloak and vanished," the 12th of October, 2042 smacked the eyes of old grandpa via headline, and he spun around almost too recklessly in his seat and clicked on the television with a nearly violent crack in the air, flicking to the morning news, then coughed with the biggest set of egg-white eyes, "Lenny, you better come hear this!" It was the beginning and the peak of a fairy tale. This was the newest bedtime story throughout the world. Children climbed laps and parents forced up tents, and all adolescents gave up on gossip and game consoles and sneaked out of glass windows. The jobless rode the skies with their eyes and wished all night. They wished every night. Journalists hushed their papers and drew the colors of Miss Verklempt with the most stellar of words, dreaming and downing bottles of champagne, celebrating what was left of the apologies of vainglorious scientists, laughing laughing laughing. "Ha ha ha! They store all their findings, whisper hastily and ostentatiously about them when we're milling about! There isn't anything left to lionize to that extent!" The hidden are unmasked. Evolution among the young ones runs through the streets because of this. What have we been thinking?! Writing?!?! You need to see! 

Oh but they still did write. Their personal discoveries were cluttered throughout the corridors, banging against business buildings, and they would still pause other times. She had come swinging between the buildings one more time, and the light promise of her warmth swept the autumn leaves, swept open the windows, and heads poked out as sirens flashed. Eyes were as curious as ever and hearts were pumping greedily. A cry flew in, and there she was again. Her cloak was a pristine white and a crimson red that time and her eyes released a downpour of light and water, and she was so so so beautiful. But she was also so so so pained. Her mouth was open in a shriek of distress. Viridian trails of constellations were written furiously under her fingers. She was a mural forgotten under rambunctious graffiti. And the white lab coats couldn't cognize her reasons. The hopeless grew hopeful and the lions roared once, then twice, then thrice. Every breath was stolen as she ran through the cloudless heaven.

A mother rocked her baby back and forth, oblivious like many were, and her firstborn son who was already ten almost drooped out of his bedroom window, saying, "What a secret. Feel better. Strange lady."

Dear Adam

THE MIDSUMMER STATION TOUR. Concert in Tennis Indoor Senayan, Jakarta, Indonesia. Approx. 8.00 PM. This was on November 14th, 2012. 

This is my reaction, or review, or letter. To Owl City. On here.




Dear Adam,



I don't understand. I cannot begin to fathom why it bleeds with rich abundance, why it hurts so much. I can't look for clues. I can't unveil the definite, the rational answer to my imploration, to my emotional dilemma—why I feel so strangely alone. I am left lonely and forlorn and I don't understand why because there are many, so many people, and yet my body controls me and isolates me in my frigid and murky mind. And even as I had waited  out to meet you—to ACTUALLY meet you—I was smothered with the worst of thoughts and the greatest of absurd and stupid dilemmas that didn't seem so much like that in the eye of a bystander. I did not deserve to see you and I was not destined to hear you but I had been ushered in, and all I became was a blubbering mess. Twice a camera clicked as I helplessly stained my cheeks with more tears. You reduced me to noisy mewls and whimpers I besought to silence. You were the reason why, too. Because. BECAUSE, for long you had been my savior. And I thank GOD for you.

I am stuck in the noise and the hallucinations and the temptations, and you give me hope, and blinding lights... and tears I easily taste on my lips. I couldn't see you well through my hands and my tears but you were there, and you were of enormous height and you were glowing with brilliant effervescence. I heard people gasp and my sobs worsened. I do not know why I am like this when everyone else is not. You had rained on me and nurtured me. Your music has done this to me. You grew me into something else again; I can feel it as light as a feather but also as heavy as the world. I can feel you. And GOD; if that is Him. My feet ached SO MUCH and I begged them not to, but I felt the necessity to jump for you and for everyone, along with the crowd, alongside the beautiful sound.

Yes, I had dreamt with eyes open that you were effervescent. You were glowing with the atmosphere of an angel, and it feels too surreal and I cry because I feel silly and rude and I somewhat hugged you or you somewhat hugged me.

You wore blue and white stripes. You wore—oh—a handsome face that even brought my mother gasping. You wore the orange, the purple, the red, the white, the blue, the green lights. You wore wings. You wore faith. You wore the air we gulped down. You quenched me with ecstasy. AND I still haven't resolved how you could pull apart the glued pieces of a haywire heart and stitch them back together with elite but humble words and glimpses, doing it all over again in that exact series of brusque but tiresome events.

For many moments I let my head hang and my eyes click shut, just for a moment, so I could bask in the moment while you, Breanne, Daniel, Steve, and Jasper gave me dreams and disasters. I have more and more to write, to you, but I've been silenced with awe and worry I still need to get rid of. Thank you. Singing and dancing in sync with you from the middle of the audience was love, war, and pure insanity. I'll try not to forget.

It leads to this. God bless you, Mr. Adam Young.



With gratitude and admiration,

Amber

Pacific Before Tiger

For the past few days I have been reading my way through LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel. I am only more than halfway through by now as Pi continues to lather my eyes with an astonishing view through the lens of his memories. I am grateful, for this book has been a poignant escape for me even in just a few days.

It has been developed into a film. I am not eager to dive into spoilers, but I've scrolled through a miniature line of comments across the Internet and these opinions and small talks have been spoiler-free and reassuring. I hope Ang Lee excites readers and non-readers enough to make us gasp (and maybe laugh) collectively in the theatre, but for now I'm giving him the side eye.

I promise that I was just perusing through the National Bookstore branch in SM Marikina till I found a book deemed interesting enough by their summary. Then came fate when I hit the teenage fiction area further into the bookstore and tickled the book's spine before tipping it toward my curious hands and eyes. I honestly did not know its film would be out around November... or December, but, yes, a gold stamp informed me of that exactly. And now I am stuck in Pi's whirlwind of an experience, and I've never felt this funny inside since THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak. I wasn't expecting so much vividity and sympathy and humor for one wise believer who, in the arousal of emotional intensity in his entire life, was only a sixteen-year-old. Martel gives us tastes of sensitivity and wonderment throughout Pi's challenges. Pi's thoughts—from worrisome to sunny bright—knock the breath out of my lungs, and wow that sounds so cliche but it is one of the crumbles of compliments I can poorly give.

Yann Martel is dazzling. His chapters leave you hungry for more and his words flow sweet with abundance. He offers a keen demonstration of the way of animals and gives Pi his own opinions and weaknesses that turn out to be strengths. Pi's relationship with God also doesn't forget to shine. What an awesome connection to behold.

Oh boy, I have some more reading to do. (But I've already went through this image via text.)

ETA:   lifeofpimovie.com

Italicized Love

Just let me twist your arms, your legs, and dissect the ensemble in you. Let me rummage through your bones, and unscrew all your joints, and tickle your mouth, and finally feel your heart. But don't push your heart into my hand. Let me inspect it first, let me play with your keys, let me joke with your peeves. I can unceremoniously discard you from the spaces between my fingers, but I won't. Let me bend your knees and your elbows, let me see through your contact lenses, let me breathe through you. Leave me in your library. Leave me in your lexicon. Leave me in the depth of your consonants and vowels. I'll drum my fingers on your freckles and tickle your spine without you knowing it. You're funny.

But, darling, as I backspace through my nonsensical jargon, don't let go of me. You'll be my beacon for some time. You'll be my safeword through the coughs and headaches. Be my anchor—make sure I don't always lose myself in these crosswords. Magnify my movements, italicize my locomotion, lazily drawl your analysis of me as we daydream in camouflaged pillow forts, but don't treat me like a pet. Play me whimsical music in the silence. Don't let me dangle alone from my noose. Join me in my frescades, but not always. Look through my telescope when I ask you to, and I definitely will. Be my poet and be my daily news. Give me permission to tattoo litanies and fairytales on your milky ribcage, and under your wrist, and somewhere on your ear. Be my duet partner, and come rushing with me through the forest. Pen me with undivided attention and undiluted love. Don't argue that I'm impassioned about this—don't take it away from me, and don't abuse your freedom. But—and there is always a but—feel free to clamor with me. Opine about my lifestyle, my wardrobe, or the way I laugh. Frustrate me, frustrate yourself. Be human. I won't hold you back if you be you.

photo disclaimers—credits: x x

You and Your Six-Shooter

So he's been absent for a while.

His movements are cool, but his shoulders are set high and his eyes—those unreadable hazel eyes—are unusually bloodshot. He casually scans the room, then hunches down to forge something from his beat-up backpack. Sitting on his head are dark curls vamoosing away from his plastic headphones. Right now, it is lunch. I am four tables away from his lonely one.

I don't think he sees me looking.

But I may not be looking so closely, really. Because when he pushes his chair back and it creaks harshly—and nobody still takes note of him—he apprehends everyone. Everybody in the cafeteria doesn't observe back, and in that second he begins to carry himself up with his arm still deep in his bag he looks in my direction. This is the first time I look at him in the eye, and when I do his eyes are brimming with tears, and something clicks. He tears the moment away; I am bewildered. He stands up, drops whatever he was holding back into the abyss of his backpack, zips it close, and walks to the exit as he turns his head away.

Something churns uneasily in my stomach as he strides out of my vision and out into the hallway. I heft crumbs of my lunch into my mouth and stand to throw plastic into the nearest bin. As I deposit my tray, I can't help but think of what he was reaching down for. Probably just a book, or money. But he seemed so hesitant... and angry.

So I march to the restroom to make myself more presentable for the next class—thoughts still running through me like a sickness—when there's a scream.

A scream.

It reverberates through the room—a majority of us either sits or stands still, and one scream multiplies into half a dozen. Then I think everyone can hear them now. The bloody screams flood our ears like urgent knocks against expensive wood. They rain down and through the air in a staccato beat. I am trembling in fear before I know it.

Then the first shot rings in our ears so vividly, disrupting the ice among our stances. In a syrupy second my heart thumps dangerously in my ears. I see people panic.

Another bullet cuts the air, cuts through somebody's body. Somebody's life.

I run. Jesus Christ, I run.

I dash to the door with everyone. It leads to the trellis. The guard isn't by the gate but an alarm is on. People hurry into the laboratories, the library—anywhere—while I fumble for my phone somewhere in my satchel. Just then my phone vibrates in my hand, kind of matching my distress. I take the call in the art room, falling under the teacher's table on impulse where I hear nothing but my serrated breath and the door sliding shut, just like my eyes.

"Hello?" I answer the call.

"Mel? Mel? Where are you?!" It's my friend, Krista, whose voice screams fear. I understand.

"Krista, I'm under a table. Art room. Where are you? And what the hell is happening?!" But I think I already know. And I think I already know who.

But why?

"Frigging boys restroom." A delirious laugh. A breathy pause. Stay calm, Krista. Keep it. "I'm with Reese and his friends. I think Jill is here, too. There's a psycho on the loose, Mel, and we're presuming this psycho's a friggin' student." My breath hitches. No. I begin to say something but she cuts me. "Now listen, Mel, I—"

And she's gone. Too fast.

I don't want to listen to her screams. Or Reese's. Or Jill's. So I turn my cell phone off although I could just dismiss the call, and I imagine how she must have looked like in the restroom along with her boyfriend—who I know must have been holding her tight—and Jill, who just wanted to get out of high school like most of us do. Then the image fades. I rub my palms on my jeans and dig for my inhaler.

Then I realize I should have locked the door, and now I'm in the middle of muffling a colossal cry. The art room is seriously stuffy. It's located by the garden, and there aren't much trees to obscure the view from the window. I remember how the garden looks like as I shut my eyelids close. Its beauty sits there peacefully as the student population dwindles in a massacre. The world for now is a terrible furnace, an oven, and the witch is looking for some kids to eat. To destroy. I try to recite a silent prayer, but I stumble clumsily on my own words. I've heard some pastor once say that your vocabulary doesn't matter while or when praying, but my tongue is dry, and my beliefs are in a heap of ash. I may be dizzy, and I freeze once again.

People scream by.

People come in.

Hide, hide, hide, I think. Jesus, people, hide. 

We all hide. We are all one breath.

Our predator still arrives, of course. It's inevitable by now. And all I can think before I die is, Why, Robert?

Why?

Your Science

So I'm going to be violent.

I dip your framework into white paint, and I dangle by your side, my nose almost dipping with you. The walls tremble, and the can of paint sways with my profanities as I stammer to call, "STOP!" You're almost there, because I hear you singing. I stand back and watch you shoot through and spin around, downing all the paint like you said you would, and soon you will be ivory. We are ivory, now. I clamber up the blotches of black, and I actually feel your reaction in me. My pulse tickles my ears, and your eyes trek through mine, and I feel like dynamite, and I feel pretty. Your tongue is a lexicon as you whisper the world to me. You plead me to come to life, and I do — I've wailed through the process, and now you're my bones and my flesh and my blood, zipping and zapping through everything in my system, in my systems. You drive my mitochondria, my cells, you are my neuron, and I bury my words underneath butterfly kisses. I am light and happy, true and quixotic, fond of your science. I trample down the stairs and find my hastily discarded words. I dance myself through and in them. You strip me of them, and I am still whole afterwards.

So here's a short description. Of you. Your eyes are illuminated with warmth, and I can't hear ANYTHING — it must be twelve, where is my clock? You are my alarm. Your lips are rushing with blood and keeping down words, but don't shorten your dictionary! I am in awe of how your lower lip is cherry, and how it can keep all... those... words... Your words are foolish and young, but I am trapped on my own consent. Your palms... your hands are gauche. You know how thin-skinned I am, regardless of what that means to you. Your hands are my phantoms. They ghost over me, and I am almost overpowered by your presence, but your palms are gentle when they land. They land to soothe me, to erase the tears, to accompany my hands which, no, you do not ignore. I like holding hands. I like holding your hands.

inspired by this

from

Prayer

It was the bothering humidity that had tried to push her eyelids down, but she couldn't feel them lock into place as the day shot down into night, and the moon was alive and the humidity, yes, still was too. She laid her heels down next to her pale feet, and her hair dangled sadly around her face and down her shoulders. The wind blew through the windows and the entrance, the tree giving her music as its leaves rustled in her ears. Her makeup was a mess, she knew, with all the tears and rain. But she will never know how she had always triumphed an ugliness people anticipated to see, because when she dashed away and sobbed and felt utterly and devastatingly alone she was still pretty. No, not pretty, but beautiful. Never... plain. Her gown bled raindrops, and as she gasped for air she tore off a part, and another part, of her infamous gown.

Her lower lip quivered as a breakdown hummed around. Her breaths were commas, and they were ragged ones. Trying to collect herself, the leaves rustled on some more, and she relinquished almost half of her meticulously prepared attire for comfort. Her canvas has been brushed with violent colors, and she couldn't shield it. She couldn't improvise a cover. So she ran. To his—their?—tree house. She had spun around streets and found it in the midst of an unpleasant drizzle accumulating to rain—a whimper accumulating to a wail—and nimbly but carefully rose up the familiar ladder after shooting her worn out heels through the entrance and into the blank half-time abode of a dearly missed face. She had breathed the strong panels of wood around her, hoping the joy of a hundred memories would come tend to her, and yet—she almost expected this—all she felt was nostalgia as the boastful rain tumbled down from the clouds. And she wished all the melancholy she knew would vanish down all the gutters throughout the street. 

The rain came on some more for quite some time. She tucked her knees under her chin, and although the heat felt almost lost and unusual beside the rain's gloom, it felt golden. The world felt golden, and she wiggled her toes as it tickled the wooden floor. This was the dance floor she knew. And hey, it had no disco ball, no Top Forty either, but it was home—it was the sight of droopy trees and the soundtrack of her thoughts. She had abandoned it. He had then later abandoned it, too. But she had sped back to each and every moment spent in the funny, sticky heat and humidity of this treehouse. She wasn't weak, but she was troubled, and she missed out on everything too damn soon. She missed this, missed him, and just sitting down inside felt like a dream and a wish. Wiping her face with clean cloth, she scooted closer to a window and drank the tears of the evening sky, praying—oh, so, praying—for freedom. And a chance. A chance for what? For the space around her to stay there, and strength—dear God, strength—to know better. And she felt like she did... But then she wanted all the acid off her tongue. Please.

A mutter. A whisper. A half-broken cry. Then a silhouette crushing down into a fetus, and breathing, then sleeping. But not forever, not yet.

"Amen."

Amen.

Soup

When I look out at the sea, though, with its majestic foyer of blue-green waves that runs throughout the panorama, I almost fall off from the crust that locks my toes down and my breath breaks into ice before I need to cough it up. It’s like blood gushes everywhere and my seams fall apart till each crevice of my body falls into the sea. I can feel the soles of my feet tingle with the salt, and my eyes burn as I bask in the midnight moonlight. My watery stutters are closing in on me and summoning me further into the sixty seconds before it is actually a minute after twelve. My lonely lips sting with delight as I get to sip the debris of mermaid songs, and my chest heaves with my limbs and my limbs crawl through the dark blue sweaters knitted together around the swollen statue of me. I am a phone call at 1.38 in the morning in between an interlude of cookie bites and coffee, coffee warmth. My tongue tangles in the salt, my gums bleed in effort. My teeth dance in harmony. The juxtaposition of my skin and of the ivory light of the goddess that floats on the bellies of my friendly clouds rises in comparison. My lungs are a choo-choo train. My eyes are struggling men looking for their train to France. I clamber on wave after wave, I reap my goddess’ light. A warmth not too far from those early morning coffees steels my hands and my feet, crumbles the ice down to my core from there. I am a sudden conundrum within very little time; I think I trouble all those people watching in the sidelines! I am coming back there, my dearest – that is what I say. I talk to this girl in a sunny dress, her hair a surprising combo of lovely dawn and mesmerizing sunset. I gulp with difficulty before the walls till I find my footing on hangers and hangers of winter clothing. Winter? It isn’t here yet, ma’am, I say. I am caught off guard when a merman rises from the sea and steals my feet. I have lost balance, I am slipping from my dear consciousness, I am soaring away from the cookie bites and coffee till I am not a 1.38 phone call. I am a house, this is my house. I am in a world of sea, finally. I can breathe without irritating my neighbors with a cough of ice and nothing but contemptible ice. I am rusting into water, huffing and puffing into salty sea. My eyes are the sea and my feet are the sand, and the corals, and the land. I am going to France, and I will bring you there… maybe? Maybe.

September's Finale

Last Friday the Avatar: The Last Airbender’s spin-off THE LEGEND OF KORRA had aired with surprisingly two episodes across Asia while I incoherently tweeted about my favorites’ debuts on TV. Not less just fifty minutes before the premiere the cable was pretending to be dead and I was plunged in an ephemeral pall caused by the pessimistic feeling that it would not come back before the very much hair-standing series of which I have been awaiting for months and months. Now, I am supposed to be reviewing for an emphatically long quiz on cells for tomorrow, but I wanted to record a few happenings of which were quite enjoyable, and the record had already started with Korra’s heavenly intro pre-October. But I will still study afterwards this update!

My mother and I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and I had awkwardly yet almost boldly explained the reason why Perks is rated R-13. Basically the book would be the same if they were rated like movies were. I also rambled on about how people should not act immature about the scenes in both the book and its movie adaptation, because seriously. Anyway Perks was emotional and by “emotional” I mean exhaustingly enjoyable and captivating. And as two older teenage girls giggled on about how cute Logan Lerman is and why this and why that (since one of them apparently did not read Stephen Chbosky's work of brilliance), I clung to my mother’s arm and thought of many things, which I admit did not exclude the attempt of figuring out what personality type Charlie has and the probability of a high wave of the online statistics of Harry Potter/Percy Jackson crossovers via a number of writing sites I admittedly tarry around for fanfiction from other fandoms. I argue that some aspects from the book weren’t so stressed about or did not even appear in the adaptation, but overall I’d given Stephen a thumbs up and a friendly smile. I should also mention how beautifully blessed Ezra Miller is with the audience’s obvious infatuation with him summed up by their cheers, but I’m handing it over to you to dream about until you see the movie (if you haven’t seen it yet).

But before Perks had caught my full attention I was at Fully Booked, hissing around lest someone grab the SIGNED COPY of John Green’s bestseller The Fault in Our Stars. My mother was of course hesitant about getting it for me since I already own a NOT SIGNED COPY of the book, but she eventually did. I wriggled around with my hands across my face, a tingle of the Nerdfighter sign racing through my fingers. Then en route to a nearer mall after a quick respite in the house, I replaced Owl City’s The Midsummer Station with Ocean Eyes. It was a bound to safety and relief, for I had needed it.

One significant character from TFiOS is Augustus Waters, and I just had to add: I also love metaphors and fear oblivion, Gus. I feel comfort through your sentences through Hazel, so thank you.

Today a book and the cutest bookmark were purchased. Think Shakespeare and a flower, getting ready for October. With a new month comes this kind of unpredictability I both dread and dream about. Let's do that together, hopefully with less worrying.

The following month, again, okay! Good evening, good night.

Blind Them With This

Despite how perilous it would be if it continued on pouring, I like the rain. I like rainy days and petrichor. Although nights sabotaged by rain may worry me at times, I can never say I do not enjoy the company of the sound of water falling from the sky and the smell of it, the atmosphere. The rain is an inspiration, and when thunder starts knocking on the front door, I do not fear. I like the shout of the heavens. Oddly it comforts me more than it should.

An archive for my feelings - that is what I desperately need. I can't seem to collect them all, tuck them in somewhere safe and private every other day. I am a scattered mural stretching my arms as if they were wings, but I am apterous, and it couldn't suffice! I dream of sunny mornings of plates of bacon but I also do dip my head into reveries of tucking myself in a bed of handwritten journal entries, cotton blankets, and a hazy whisper of elsewhere. I don't really know, I really don't know. I'm just a bundle of question marks. What happens if I fall from a cliff to a pit of flames and waves? Will I ever redeem myself from letting it happen? If I could blame the propinquity of madness, I would. But I can't for I had promised myself that I am in control of my own steering wheel. I could parry these haunted circuits, but I did not and I do not know why.

Run, they told me. Run like the wind. I ran into pale moonlight and whirls of claustrophobia. I fell apart under a garden of pending ambition. What do I do now? Do I dream?

Yes. No.

I feel defeated. My hands feel defeated. Marks of teeth and cold calluses wind around my hands and arms like my conscience. I can't fathom, I can't let science explain this one. I spot a fortress of breathing blood in my body. I sniff a scarf of trees and rivers, and it is never the same. Yet I could not be the same. My veins burst with adrenaline and my cough plans to outrun my heartbeat. And my smile, dear, is terrible. I, people, have scarred it maliciously and have planted battles on it. I cannot cancel my dreams; I cannot cut them in half and save the latter part for later. I do not go back. My spine is aching. My eyes are lost. My lips are searching for a kiss I've never won. I had no competition but the foretold way of how events sequence. I am in bliss somewhere in between these lines, in between these mad trains of thought. Dear God, my thoughts are malarkey! My doings are its quintessence! I am but a figment of a girl's imagination, aren't I? I am spiraling into her disappearing childhood memories. Bring me back! Am I not of import to you? Haven't I nourished your mind and heart in lieu of leaving you with blank pages? Do I not give you something to think about? Oh, my panic. She must have felt it, and it should've been heavy on her, so she had unceremoniously burned it to the ground.

But it's still here. With me. In the ashes of her memory.