Something Happened Last Night

today i held a zippo lighter in front of your face today and sang out of tune with a toothy sort of grin on my face. the flame burns for too long until the metal grows hot in my hand and starts to hurt. that’s alright. i like how you indulge me and close your eyes to blow it out, scrunching up your face to think of a wish. 

today I sat down in the dark at home and starred at the wall until the patterns bled together into a blurred mess. everything around me is decaying faster than i can make sense of. it’s only been five months, but i’m already gripped by the paralyzing fear that the end too close for comfort. what happened before wasn’t sudden. it was slow and creeping. too slow and creeping. i didn’t notice my emotional limb had rotted to bone before I met you. a week later i cut it off and asked you out to coffee. 

I feel like i’m always looking for signs now, trying to avoid another late stage amputation-- like if i catch it early enough, expect it early enough that I can fix it before it gets to that. 

i wasn’t like this before. i was never nervous in the service-- shellshocked by every little gesture, word, and touch. im frightened by something that isnt even happening. i’m worried i’ve annoyed you past the point of it being charming and bringing it up will only get a halfhearted, frustered ‘you aren’t. dont worry’ in return. 

you’re all i have. and whats worse is i dont have anyone to tell about it. 

my family neuroses have reached a breaking point and any friends i had have chewed each other up and spit eachother out. there's nothing viable, identifiable left. just blood, and viscera, and whispering, and crying. any trust ive had for anyone around me is gone since my life has become a fucking game of telephone. 

I dont want to talk about it. i dont want to talk about me. about you. us. to call a dozen times a day when you know i dont answer. ill sit there and stare at the wall and hold the phone away from my body while your voice pours through the speaker, telling me what i ought to do about all of this.

i know where this goes. i know how this ends. the checkout date for the hotel is the 6th of may and i’m sitting on the bed flicking tv channels until its time to go. im bleeding out our time and watching it go down the drain. counting the days until its over. until i can breathe. because i know its coming and im done before the end has even come. 

we’re watching each other fade away and decay like spirits into the background of our own lives. ive pushed you to it. its what i wanted wasn’t it? is it fair to ask for attention in the dead of night when ive sent you to spend all day with someone else? but you still wake at midnight and murmur into the phone, try to ask more of something, anything just to get me to talk.

do you miss me, do you love me. we parrot back and forth

we are doomed

you lived in shades of fucking cool like no one i’ve ever known. that’s all i’ll ever think of you. this isn’t a poem, or a love sonnet, isn’t pretty or kind enough to be one. just a letter to a ghost that haunts the dark corners of my temporal lobe. you were the first guy i knew to fly off the handle like that and shave your head into that wild shaggy mohawk when things weren’t going well. foreshadowing to my shitty park bathroom bleach job after i lost my sister, right? i wished i was brave like you, knew how to say “fuck you all” or even just have the balls to tell them to lay off you. what didn’t they make fun of man. you couldn’t seem to do anything right. you couldn’t even open your mouth without having someone yell at you to shut up. and i remember the way my face would flush scarlet and i’d have to bury my head in my arms when you raised your hand in class, because I was already burning with enough shame for both of us. not that you’d know. i didn’t like my body or the way my clothes felt on my skin. i couldn’t stand my lisp that i never managed grow out of (it stops being cute after 6th grade apparently). when words left my mouth, i wanted to crawl inside of myself and disappear. you spoke like the world was ending, tearing apart and collapsing around you and you just had to. get. your last. words. out. 

and you’d smirk and lean back in your chair. arrogant prick. james dean. marlon brando. clint eastwood. i figure we can mock eachother equally in that department since you and I imitate the same men. same masculine swagger that comes off like a living, breathing love letter to old hollywood. swear i saw you in a leather jacket. unless that’s just who you are and i’ve been copying you. then this whole thing comes across like a different kind of love letter.

You tried everything. you skiied and played the flute and took karate and listened to metal and read Eragon and Harry Potter and every Tolkien book published. You ran a D&D table and I cleaned cafeteria tables because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know how I got it in my arrogant little brain that I was better than you. I was exhausted, ignoring adolescent mental illness bubbling to the surface, had trouble connecting with anyone my age, listened to the same five sad lana del rey songs over and over. 

I always liked how you lent me books. it made me feel smart. we were all pretty smart, I guess. top 1% of the school. the gifted class. cream of the crop. but your books were the only ones I read willingly. I chewed up page after page like a starving man just so I could come to you a few days later, give it back and say I was done. and you’d say “alright”, and I’d nudge my hand a little closer so we could touch and see if it made me feel something.

I always liked how you’d tuck your feet in close when I walked by. you were always lounging, feet outstretched while you were half asleep, but you still saw me. acknowledged my presence. like you wanted to make my life a little easier even when I was just a passing shadow. I think of you every time some does that for me-- moves their body to make room for mine. 

I feel like such a freak, thinking of you like this even now. it’s been so long. we weren’t that close. and i don’t think anyone will ever truly get it and that tears me apart inside. But I wish I’d held you a little longer if i’d’ve known that was really the last time. first and last time i’d ever been that close to you, i think. I think I felt something for you that I can’t ever hope to understand.

this little yellow house on display for highway rats scurrying this way and that. to school. to work. or back. the wrap around porch had a blanket of white latticework to shade the little old man inside from the choking California sun. there was a chain-link fence too, these lush dark vines of every kind threaded throughout the gaps in the metal. it was barely waist high, a sorry attempt at keeping anyone out since the gate was always kept open wide. it was mostly for the sake of the fat little tabby cats that wove their way in and out of his garden during the day. i’d spy their grey, tiger stripped bodies lounging about on the stone walkways or trotting after the little old man as he hobbled to prune his joy and pride.

the garden. god, the garden. the rose bushes had almost entirely taken over the yard, growing wild and out of control. they climbed up and over the walls of the home and wormed their thorny fingers beneath the roof tiles. the flowers bloomed in agony, pouring every last ounce of love they had for the man into their short spring time lives. 

“we adore you!” the red flowers, as big as my open palm said

“you’ve been so good to us,” the pink flowers crooned.

“we know you’ll get better soon. we know it, we know it,” the white flowers said in shaking whispers, as their petals had already began to fall. 

Peppermint had invaded the yard, springing up in every pot and darkened corner of the yard, but it too hid away dormant in the warmer months of the year. It would return in the winter with the slyness of an old, always welcome friend.

But the lavender, the beautiful tangled mass of lavender couldn’t seem to get enough of the heat. It reached its spires of purple buds up to the heavens. “look at me,” it said “look what I can do. i do it for you, for our home! i love you, i love you!”. only when sun grew hot enough to create a heat mirage on the highway would the buds burst open into a million tiny, indigo flowers. The woody, sweet, and spicy scent of the blooms would fills the air and drift over to the neighboring homes with the nighttime breeze. along with it I could heat the creaking of a porch rocking chair the padding of tiny paws on its old boards. 

the day it happened the grass went brown, from wild and green to a shriveled mass of brown overnight, they figured he’d been so sick that he must have forgotten to water. forgotten fertilizer. forgotten something because no matter what they tried; nothing could revive the earth. i knew better. 

the garden mourned for a year, bushes and planters slumped over with the weight of grief and overgrowth. ‘father’ i heard the ground whimper ‘father, father, father’ unsure of where it was the little old man had gone. it turned to a rainy winter and the tabby cats yowled at the back door to be let in most nights. they wanted to curl up by a woodstove that no longer burned, by the feet of their man who was no longer alive. i watched them turn skinny and feral with wild, untrusting eyes. their shiny coats became matted with burs and underbrush. their dinners came from blood and sinewy instead of the man’s old china plates. by the time anyone had thought to do anything about them, they were already too far gone. too wild. too untrusting of any hand resembling that which abandoned them. 

a family bought the little yellow house a while back. i know now just as i knew then that the land can hate just as it loves. i felt the flowers cry out in disgust as the overfilled station wagon trundled up the driveway. ‘not you, not you. you don’t belong. not you’. 

the roses were first to go. the father began amputating the limbs of the bushes that had wrapped themselves around the house. too unclean. unruly. he lopped them off one by one until the ancient giants had been cut down into knee high shrubs. they turned a sickly yellow, wilted, and petrified into a decaying black within the week. they had to be torn out by the roots and burned come fall.

the raised garden beds were neglected and shrived into dust while the family spread their empty boxes and plastic bubble wrap around the yard. the mother came our with a barrel of Round-Up and sprayed at the vines in the fence until they too choked to death and rotted away. the trash only piled up, turning from boxes to old tires and styrofoam blocks and sickly, bulging garbage bags. An ugly plastic children’s slide. disembodied Barbie arms. the lavender turned pale and anemic when an old, rusted up project car was parked in front of it, next to the abandoned pop-up camper van. the only sun it saw came from the splash of evening light, seconds before it disappears behind the mountains. so it no longer bloomed or spread its sweet summer scent. 

Eden has turned to a valley of barren ash and the Millers wonder why nothing will fucking grow from their earth. Wonder why they had to pay thousands for their fluorescent green lawn of AstroTurf. Wonder why no matter how many times they paint the home, how the white always peels away from the walls. Wonder why the animals circle the home like vultures, but never step foot on it. 

Shame about the christmas fire. 

Horrible

Dreadful. 

Hear the family had to move away, the flames burning so high and bright that nothing remained. 

you create small mountains beside you, what was once sheltered from the sky is now sitting right beside you. you get lower and lower. you bore and burrow. you wonder why, what you would say if someone really cared to asked. it’s easier that way, it’s your go to response. it’s easier to kick a pillar when you’re crying, to change the emotions into something physical, for the hurt to travel from your head to your foot. it’s easier to bleed. you’re not there anymore, you’re clean. you’re good and you know it’s not easier, but it is, so you dig. your body is shaking and you look at your arms, the ones that have always been weak.

you’re thinking about everything except what you should be doing, and before you notice it, you’re at the bottom. you’ve gone too far, you’ve done too much. you think you can feel the heat of the earth’s core, of lava scorching away your history-laden skin. you’ve wasted your energy and your time today. you grasp at incoherent nothings, at dirt, stone, and the bugs. you try to pull yourself back up. you could’ve done it five years ago. you were so strong, you did it all out of spite. you’re so dreadfully frail now. you run on nothing. you sit and take it in, you do it to yourself.

you’ve dug another hole, and you don’t know if you can get out of it this time. you wish you were still smart. you think that if you were anywhere near the person you were so long ago that you could. gifted, intelligent, beautiful, strong, fast, a real star. where did you go wrong? where along the line did it all become too much? just pull yourself out, you can’t afford to fuck things up yet again.

you’re tired, you close your eyes and find comfort in a grave far too deep. you think about all the times you’ve done this before, and you wonder if it’ll be the last time. if you’ll free yourself from what unwillingly follows, of what seems to haunt you when you’re alone. it seeps into your brain when you’re with friends, and it’s not as easy to shake off anymore. your body is heaving, your breathing is faint, and you laugh. it’s ironic, you’ve never been where you’re supposed to be, where you said you’d go. build a future on a shallow base, something from nothing is what you’d say. you ramble on about everything to no one, but you continue.

this sucks

i hate ants

i hate second person pov writing but i love it

i hate ants so much

i’m a bad person for killing ants

wow

it really isn’t that deep

i am so sad

what happens after we die????

I am my mother’s bearer of rage. I feel the vase of it in my chest, filling, filling, filling and overflowing up into my throat like bile. It’s the yolk that trauma daughters must wear through their days. You could be the most beloved creature in the world, exalted by the father, mirror image of the mother, and you’ll still wear that anger like an heirloom coat you haven’t the heart to shake. If not you, then who?

We wear the same clothes you and I. Same worn in jeans hiked up to our waists to hide the little pudge of stomach, buttoned up men’s shirts and keen and sharp eyes. We wear the same perfume, sit the same, smile the same, cry the same, scream the same. I know he doesn’t see me in you, you in me. Somehow convinced I was ripped from another womb.  

I think sometimes that I’ll tear his fucking throat out with my teeth when he speaks. He talks about a halcyon, rose colored past. He rescued you, saved the damned dirty red-headed stepchild from a one room house without running water like you weren’t half his. He grins with crooked teeth, all cloudy eyed and hunched over. I look at him and I see you, skinny and frightened and dirty. You’ve got a shoebox of clothes and bracelets of black and blue up and down your arms.  And I’ll cry myself to sleep in empty stairwells, in nooks and crannies where I’m sure he won’t see me. When he says “She was so beautiful. Had the most beautiful hair,” I feel my stomach seize up enough to vomit.

I wonder if pain can be handed down the same way rage can. Like the memory of it is stored deep down in the marrow of my borrowed bones. I wonder if your fear has made a home in my muscles and that’s why they coil up like a frightened rattlesnake in his home.

But he’s not my father, not my family. I won’t cower, won’t bow. I’ll do my duty for your sake and pretend I’m glad when he asks for his afternoon pills. I’ll answer his questions again and again. I’ll help his wife to and from the bathroom, sing her to sleep while she drools and mutters to herself. Sometimes I’ll even stare at her, chewing on if this is the same woman that chased you through the house shrieking like a banshee with a kitchen knife. 

Night is a beautiful and kind creature that covers you, wraps you in darkness and hold you against its bosom like a mother. ‘You’re alright, love. No need for all that nonsense’ she seems to whisper. And his lips quirk up in a funny sort of grin, lantern light flickering against glistening of kohl and sweat. His vision swims and sways with the motion of the water and he leans a little more heavily up against the railing.

How far down is it? How long would it take for him to reach the bottom? Live and breathe and die beath the ocean’s chill. It isn’t cold tonight though. They’ve gone south for the winter, uneasily docked near a tropical Haitian island to sell in the morning. The air is warm, sticky and damp. It clings to his skin. There’s even steam that bubbles up and rises from the water, like there’s some great big creature breathing just beneath the surface. 

Only a difference a temperature that causes it. He knows that. Of course he fucking knows that. He’s fucking Blackbeard. But still, it makes something inside of him give an uneasy lurch. At the thought of tentacles and a great, gaping maw down there. Waiting. 

Ed, Edward, Edward Teach-- Not Blackbeard who has long since sunk deep down into the land of dreams for the night. Ed runs his hands up and down his bare arms, tracing the patterns black ink just beneath his skin. He’s sticky. He’s grimy. His pants are soaked down to the skin and stiff with other men’s blood. He stinks. He makes a face to himself, grimacing as he tries to remember the last time he bathed. His mother would have been horrified. They didn’t have much, but she always kept clean, always kept Ed clean. She never would have let him out of the house like this.

He could ask Izzy. If he asked the man to cut his own throat and bleed into a tub for him to wash in, he’d do quickly, cleanly, and violently. And he’d thank him for the opportunity to serve him.

Wasn’t much good for getting clean though....

Ed sways uneasily, the warmth of liquor in his body still gently warming his torso and weighing down his limbs. He takes a moment to pause, look around him. He must look like a guilty schoolboy, afraid he’s done something naughty to get scolded for. The deck’s deserted. It leaves only him and the quiet sloshing water while everyone else rests below.

He reaches into his jacket and paws at the little square of red silk tucked close to his breast. He pulls out the handkerchief and runs it over his palms, feeling the fabric slip through his fingers like water. He runs it around his hands, twines it over and under the bare parts of his arms. It feels fantastically indulgent, something not even he feels like he should be doing. To be touching, pressed up against such a fine thing nearly overwhelms him. A swell of emotion that he blames on the rum flooding through veins fills him, leaving him teary eyed. 

He takes the piece of red silk and runs it over his face, careful to avoid the dirty parts. It catches on the stubble at the edge of his jaw and the dry skin of a healing cut. Then he moves it to his mouth, gently rubbing his lips with the buttery fabric. He looks around again, frightened. No, not frightened. Blackbeard is never frightened. He’s the terror of the ocean with eyes made of burning hot coals and a beard made of dark, billowing smoke. 

Ed is frightened though.

When he sees the emptiness around him, he can feel his muscles begin to relax, but it doesn’t stop the sharp coiling of shame in his gut. 

He holds the silk back to his face and imagines it as the touch of a lover. Someone kind. Someone soft. He’s gentle as he does it, his hand just as careful as he would have preferred it. Maybe they’re the type of person to wear silk gloves, a velvet coat, other fine things that Ed could feel as he curled up against them in the night. 

He inhales sharply, feeling the acrid sting of gunpowder, smoke, and human filth fill his lungs. He couldn’t imagine a lady like that. No, not properly. It’d have to be a man. A man just as vicious as he is beautiful. A man who shined bright and warm and sat in a bath of scented oil to wash the blood and dirt from his skin. 

Ed moved the piece of silk to his neck, rubbing it back and forth along the tender flesh there. He would touch Ed’s neck, gently, carefully. He’d run his hand along one side while he kissed and nipped the other. He could say “Ed, you’re the lovilest thing I own. The finest piece in my collection. Let me dress you. Let me feed you and love you”. Ed let out a whimper, eyes shut tight and damp. 

Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Wouldn’t it?

“Captain?”

It startles Ed-- Blackbeard enough to make him jump. He feels sick, a cold stone settling in his gut while he stuffs the piece of red silk back in his vest. 

“Izzy,” he responds, equally as gruff. He doesn’t turn around and continues to face the ocean. It makes him seen cool, uncaring rather than startled and ashamed. He knows it does. Izzy comes close, reeking just as much of foul things

“I’m here to...relieve you of your watch.”

“Alright.”

Reformatted and refitted and reuploaded and retrieved. 

Every breath of air I’ve traded out, every kiss from my father, every time I’ve driven too fast through veins of my city and hemorrhaged out into the streets- a 127-terabyte file. I’m an open document and every day I get up and add another page. Then they’ll plug me in and turn me off and upload everything I am to a silent room, humming and heating up the space with its towering wall of servers. And then it’s all turned to numbers I suppose. Every thought and feeling I thought was special, was private to me and me only, just turned to 1′s and 0′s by some machine smarter than me. When I fell to my knees, shrieking and crying tearing at acrylic hair while my insides began to shred themselves apart- they told me with a funny sort of chuckle it was worth 5 megabyte of processing. 

when my mother died they told me it was worth 7. that’s all. the pain and richness of all living things turned into a number. 

I don’t feel the way I used to. Don’t smell. Don’t taste. I can see just fine, got the update for that. I wake up in the morning and I swear to god the world reeks of plastic. It’s all in my head, I know that. It doesn’t stop though. I can feel that clean, sterile stench filling up the back of my skull and bleeding the rest of the color out of the world. White plastic. Hard plastic. 

A patented soft polymer blend with new and improved SkinTouch technology! It feels just like a real woman! You’ll notice an exponential difference in comfort and aesthetic pleasure. You’ll look just like how you did before the accident!

The accident?

The accident.

It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I should have know...nothing good burns like that going in. It was beauty beyond beauty. I felt like i was being born again, watching stars live and die. By the time I reached out to touch them, fingers aching and grasping, they’d burn out behind my eyelids. And I’d never felt so loved in that moment; my mama came up behind me and brushed through my hair with her fingers. said “baby of mine let’s be together. i love you i love you i love you, it’s time let’s leave”. And it was so fucking bright it just about burned my corneas up in their heat filled supernova. She held my hand in the dark after, running her thumb over my knuckles “it’ll be okay baby mine. i’ll show you were we go.” They woke me up ten years later in a cold bright room in a cage of silicon and aluminum. 

But see there’s this hole in the back of my head at the junction of my neck and my skull. Hovering just between my medulla oblongata and a coolant reservoir. I feel like a fucking creep when I do it. I know what happened. I know I need to clean myself up. I know it’s not right. Just cross my fingers and close my eyes and pray that the batch is clean. 

But see there’s these little green and black flash drives you can buy out behind the bodega that will fit into the hole in the back of your head at the junction of your neck and your skull. And it feels like sleeping on a bed of water. like you look up and all you can see are refracting prisms of light flickering and pulsing. the water reaches up to greet you, wraps its warm arms around you to tug you a little deeper within it. to love something so much you wish to craw inside of its chest, make room to live there and never return. Or sometimes you can lie back on the earth, feel the sunlight on your face and chest. I’ve always liked that one best because there’s always grass, swaying and rusting around. And you can smell it. That fake scent of sweet, damp earth that’s nothing more than incorrect signals bouncing around my olfactory center. I know. I know. 

i bought myself a pool for my birthday. one of them rickety above ground pools held up by white metal poles. id buy a real one if i could. shit, i sure could afford it, but we don’t own the land. i got more money than i know what to do with. sometimes I’ll go out and buy myself a TV, a real nice flat screen, just to beat it to a pulp with my brother’s louisville slugger. hearing the glass shatter makes me feel a little more awake, a little more excited. sometimes i’ll plug it in to the outside outlet beforehand, half hoping the bat’ll get electrified and shock me out of it. hasn’t happened yet but i’ll give it another go tomorrow.

But i bought myself a pool. and i took him out back to show him the goddamn thing. my heart just about beat out of my chest. he didn’t much mind that i stood too close, talked too loud and too often. he saw me that day i broke my nose-- smacked my head into the butt of my steering wheel and blacked out. my blood sprayed and dribbled all over his white shirt while he tried to pull me out onto the ground. he cleaned me up, scrubbed the crusted over spit and blood off my mouth like i was a kid again. i dont think anyones every loved me that way before. 

it was a fucking mess. asked them to do one thing for me before they ran off again. i just wanted them to keep the pool clean. our ma came home monday, threw herself a party for a few days, and left with our dad on friday. 

pabst blue ribbon cans bobbed up and down in the murky green water and crumbling cigartte filters were startling to form a layer at the bottom. chunks of algae drifted along the surface of the water uneasily. there was something furry and dead too, half rotted and waterlogged among the mosquitos making their home there. i just wished theyd cleaned my pool. 

he sat there, cool and strange, eyeing the water. he didn’t say nothing. didn’t make no face. just stood there. then he looked at me. when he rested his hand on the back of my neck i felt every nerve in my body light up like id just be shocked. it was just like poking at a live wire inside of TV i was beating.