were you ever a falling star

i’ve never been comfortable. not in my house, not in my bed. not in my own stupid skin. but every time i moved i began seeing it as a mistake. every choice i made felt wrong. i fought myself constantly and didn’t know why.

i was twenty four and it was confusing. why didn’t i know what i wanted? why did i feel less like a person every day?

when the perpetual evening in my own home started making me cry i started looking at apartments in baltimore. something wound up tightly inside of me. i just need to get out of florida. i just need to go somewhere else.

i theorized that what i was feeling was the fear of settling. not knowing what i wanted and experiencing the premature, unearned shame of not wanting more.

leaves outlined in white.

i’m more tenderfooted since moving to maryland.

i realize this while navigating the pebble drive of my best friend’s house pushing my bangs out of my eyes

when i’m inside again i cut them in the dusk light with those heavy duty kitchen scissors and i remember why i started to hate this place

all day the windows filter the sunlight into something greenish and faint, everything cast in sickly shadow

the tops of trees are blushing. a little boy crosses third base in a little league game. two blocks away, a man dressed in black lays in the grass twenty feet from the road. from the sidewalk, and in the faltering light of the setting sun, you would never know he was there.

—

there’s a lake down there, colored in whites and yellows. a giant eye blinking on the surface of the earth. an odd angular road cuts through squared pasture and in the distance, level with me, hundreds of clouds are silhouetted by pale blue sky.

—

underneath me rests a great ocean. at first it looks like a desert, but we keep ascending until all its texture fades to smooth noiseless slate. i don’t really understand why we’re over the ocean if we’re twenty minutes out from orlando like the pilot said we were. the clouds cast great sharp shadows. it’s like everything on earth is paused, and i am the only one moving.

there comes a point where, if i look down, it looks like the ocean expands out in all directions, as if water is all the earth is and ever will be.

—

most deaths aren’t noble. if this plane goes down right now in the atlantic ocean how much better is it for me to be in the bathroom with my pants down than asleep in my stupid little seat. i can imagine all these scenarios where somehow by hanging onto the right bar or being in the right position i come out the sole survivor of a plane crash, but really all that would happen is i’d be crushed to death. idk. i might as well be in the loo.

—

the water below us is smooth like the surface of a marble, except for shining slices cut into it. i’ve never seen this before. it must be the currents. it makes me think of the crepey soft skin in the hollows of my grandmother’s cheeks, of striations on wood.

—

on an old tire swing i will never see again egg moon confettied across my open palms

seagulls crying, and egg moon in my window asking me to come home

waking over and over to nails on glass

the sound of waves glimmering algae beneath my fingers egg moon’s cold hands on my shoulders

the air is heavy and damp. the moon reflects off of the pavement and hangs around me, and where usually it might curl around me like an old soft blanket it’s unfamiliar and cold; a glittering stranger in my outstretched hands.

i never want to go home again. whatever i owned i could lose for this. i could stand up now and disappear. could someone find me? would they? can they please 

i spend a week begging and no one says a word 

no one knows that i am being dragged into the ground. that hands are clinging to me. that the earth tethered itself to my ankles when i was born. no one knew. now i do. 

i wonder if when someone who loves me looks at me,

if they know

if they could know

about these catacombs.

it’s so quiet outside that i can hear my body keeping me alive. my palms are dry, and warm, and blue. the moon rests in my hands. 

this apple has a beautiful hold in the hand. the honeycrisp apples sourced by harris teeter grocery company are unruly and large; i cannot hold them in one hand. they are a two-hand apple. however, this apple, from the wegman family market corporation, is of natural size and is a beautiful color.

i left this apple on the counter by accident. i am usually a fridge apple girlie, but i have found that in being room temp, it is like i just pulled it off a tree and took a bite. it smells very sweet. i can smell it from a couple feet away and it smells like martinelli’s apple juice.

and the taste.

when i was little, i used to visit my neighbor’s dog and lay in the grass with him. my neighbor would come out with apples for me that he kept in the garage, and i would eat them in the sun in the grass with his dog.

there was a year that the leaves changed color in my neighborhood, which was weird. it must have been like, cold in january for once. 

After cutting my finger in half, it healed. But it is new, and it is different. It’s harder now to play piano, and I am still working up the courage to touch my flute again. I am so afraid that in some way I’m degrading, that I have somehow become innately less. My fiancé tells me I’m being dramatic when I wonder out loud if I’ll ever again be the person I once was, but for my whole life I have been asking myself who I am, and searching for myself in others, and trying to learn more about me from people who may never know me as well as I do.

When I pick up a glass or squeeze someone’s shoulder the ridge of my own scar reminds me of a time it wasn’t there, and I wonder if I will ever move on from longing for who I no longer am. I resemble who I was. My thumb looks somewhat like it did. But we are new, and we are different.