My Moleskine

When you say you like me / I am inclined to tell you that you are lying to yourself / And in doing so you are lying to me / That you don’t know what real “liking” is because you are stuck on me / And that when you think you like me, you really think you can’t do better / Which may or may not be true, but the fact is that has nothing to do with me and who I am and my personality / That when you say you like me still, you really mean you can’t see yourself with anyone else / But that doesn’t mean that a world doesn’t exist beyond your vision / You mean that need me to leave - graduation can’t come soon enough / And then we can both just move on with our lives.

  When you say you like me / I am inclined to tell you you’re wrong / That liking someone means you are willing to fight / And if you can’t see you with anyone else, then why do you not care to see me go? / If you liked me like you say you do, you would not be satiated / You would be hungry for more and not be able to stop wanting, and every step towards having me would feel blissful and right / You would fight for me to stay. / You would fight for me to stay and make the plea that if I leave you can’t be whole, in which case I would agree and say that you are certainly not whole without me.

  But this is untrue. Because you don’t like me like you say you do. / You like me like a fish likes its lake / It’s the only thing it’s ever known, so how can it compare it to another home? It can’t. / And maybe the lake is poison and makes the fish sick but without venturing to try life in another lake, it will never know.

If you liked me like you say you do / You would come to me because just seeing my face would make you happier / And you would call me to listen to my voice and hear my words because you enjoy them / And you would feel badly when I was mad at you and try to make it up to me in any way you could. / You would lie awake at night wishing I was next to you and caressing your pillow wishing it was me / You would try to sit next to me, and inch closer / Grazing your hand on mine, and your heart would feel electric and alive. / You would want to tell me when something good happened so I could share in your happiness / And you would want to tell me when something bad happened so I could console you because the things I say have power to you.

So when you say you like me / I am inclined to wonder how you can be sure such a feeling exists / When in my view of the world no physical manifestations from you mean there is nothing / If the thoughts only exist in your mind how do I know they are there? I don’t / And if your emotions peter out somewhere between the neurons in your head and the muscles in your hands then how can I prove they were ever there? I can’t / Whatever heart palpitations you may or may not feel blend into the ebb and flow of the universe / And I am left with only the capability to deny these “emotions” ever existed.

  And when you say you like me / I am inclined to say that you are lying to me / That you love me / And the fact that you use the word “like” is part of some self-conscious scheme to hide your true self / You can’t even acknowledge your own emotions, and you think you giving me some half-assed explanation of what is possibly going on in your head is going to cut it? / You love me like you can’t see yourself with any one else and when you think of girls you love you think of one girl and that girl is me / But acknowledging such a truth would make you vulnerable and open to be cut / As if you have not been slashed so deeply already by your inability to make yourself whole again.

  And when you say you like me / I am inclined to believe that you love me so much you think you don’t deserve me at all / And you see that your actions hurt me / And that I find you debilitating, and you feel awful / So you sit back and watch as your intestines turn and your soul hurts as I just look at you from across the room and wait and wish for you to do something / And when I finally decide your feet are paralyzed and your brain comatose and your heart numb to sensation I leave / Because at some point there has to be a decision to pull the plug / Because it is cruel to keep someone in such a non-living state for so long / And maybe life for both of us can move on if we both just accept our fates

entropic collaboration

cross-cultural mashing and blending and barrier-breaking

connecting

discovering, learning, bending, re-organizing, shifting, changing

exposition and humanity and helpfulness and comfort recognition of reality and raw existence uncovered from social expectation

being animalistic and thoughtful and philosophical and real and natural

seeing and feeling and breathing and absorbing pulling stretching growing hurting learning repairing