#rllyalone

And they touched and touched and touched. They rubbed their lips raw; till their hearts were practically dripping on the hardwood floor. But no matter the pain or heartache, they kept consuming each other. Growing more and more fascinated with the idea of finding the end of the rainbow. Minds filling with dopamine, hands rushing to the finish line, eyes burning with dangerous need. One twisted their way into the other’s soul and started putting up picture frames and vases filled with flowers in the window sills. The other wormed inside their partner’s heart and put bear traps on the floor in a desperate attempt to ward off visitors. They put night lights in their lover’s mind to keep them from going dark. They both put up glow-in-the-dark stars from their childhood on each other’s skin to serve as a constant reminder of the little universe they’ve created.  Maybe, if they both fight a little harder for each other, they'll also realize what it means to fight for themselves.

The drought is over. There was a blackout and a rumble, the thunderstomached god sucking his misplaced angel off of the playground. The sticky fingers and bobbled pigtails disappear from the teeter totter and the balance is restored. The fields go green overnight, like a bone snapped. Hound Dog comes on beneath static and rain, rising like a new born zombie, I am decoding nothing except the pins and needles in my chest. Hearts are like dogs sometimes, they know a ghost when they see one. And this is the song that makes the spirits under my bed come out and dance with me. This is the one that makes the bogeyman get electric all night long. I pressed my nose against the glass at the snake exhibit, and wiped the green snot from my red nose with my blue sweater. I wished I could take you home with me. Slide you into the cubbie holes of bullies, and let them feel the venom like I feel the venom. All my sweaters are black now. That was not a choice, that was a prophecy spoken by you alone. The red eyed, the ancient skinned, and colder than your swimming pool in half naked january. We are moving fast, and ignoring the signs. Some of them use letters, mostly though just roadkill. We are mixing the taste of squirrel blood and skidding tires into truth or dare at sleepaway camp, sneaked out and hopped up, and smacking this broken flashlight into a spruce tree. The mist carries the smell of deer carcass and marsh flesh, into your socks, between your toes, curling around your sprained ankles like a one eyed cat. Beckoning bad luck. A scream from the woods cuts the sky open. We all hear it. We put our tongues out for the rain. The drought is over. The geek down the street slipped and busted his asthmatic lungs at the edge of the lake, that’s the end of the story, ok? Ok. The drought is over, we wake to dew on our eyelashes, and the roses outside the town asylum yellow instead of brown. The grass is green now, the dryads are drinking wine with their sisters, the woodland fairies are alive and tearing their struggling food to pieces, green wrigglers and powdery moth flesh between their pink jaws. Three weeks of rain and for once in neighborhood history everybody kept their tongues in their mouths. He just slipped. We got our sacrifice, we aren’t savages like our fathers, but we got our sacrifice, even if we didn’t ask for it. We throw the evidence into the river, and hope for a good summer.

1. He kisses me the way honey flows off of my spoon into my morning tea: soft, steady, and viciously slow. 2. When I wake up in the morning, I wonder which archetype I’ll put on next. Will I become the sad girl who wears all black in anticipation to mourn a day that has just begun? Or will I try on the haggard honors student, who’s backpack is filled with half-eaten breakfast bars and overdue library books? I ask myself, “At what point do I decide to stop kidding myself? When do I become the person I want to be rather than using the bits and pieces to reflect all of me?” My alarm goes off again. I’m late for school. I decide to try again when I have more time as I slip into the old skin . 3. Despair, my old friend, how I wished the last time would have been our final meeting. 4.  I’ve stopped trying to calm myself down. I run off of stress, nerves, and constant self-doubt. My fingers have stopped hesitating more often. Instead, it’s like they have a mind of their own. They choose decisions with out a second-thought and recklessly create without any thought to sleep. 5. My mom now thinks I’m a robot. 6. Who’s gonna break the news to her that I got it from mommy dearest herself? 7. I miss the snow. I miss the way it would freeze the earth and everything that lived below it. I miss the way the trees looked when the frozen water would hang dangerously off of each bare limb. I miss the soft and golden glow that filled my home. I miss the innocence that existed in my heart. 8. But I don’t want to go back. 9. He kisses me the way honey flows off of my spoon into my morning tea: soft, steady, and viciously slow. 10. Sometimes, I worry, that I’ll get tired of honey.

i. My tits are getting smaller. ii. If you don’t know what it is to be 56 hours without sleep in a daisy field of war torn sleepwalkers, clutching a young goose to your side, convinced with brine blanketed sailors rope reddening your gums that the sausage fat flies buzzing holes in your cheeks and planting their larvae in your ears is the raw definition of love, then you don’t know what it is to be a girl. iii. My clothes are falling off me like witches off of their broomsticks. Waning with the skeletal crescent moon, I crouched behind Orion and drew a shooting star with it and killed the dinosaurs in one fell swoop. They’re getting smaller. My honey swollen girlhood spiraling down the kitchen sink. The water bugs feasting on it like city bound men. iv. All she wanted was a friend, what a pity, what a shame. What a South Dakota basket case, what a goddamn waste of breath. v. I should’ve made an anthem from that flatline. I should’ve ended up on the MISSING flier with a pushpin in my forehead, a cautionary tale and a dare all at once. The urban legend standing like a waterlogged scarecrow between two pairs of young hips. the reason for your vomit in the gutter, and your little brother whimpering not knowing how to help you out of this. A psych ward hallucination climbing your walls with my porcelain head screwed on backwards, just that girl from your high school who killed herself. I should’ve just stayed that way, sipping graveyard nettle tea with a corpse bride and my grandpa in the cemetery where we lay to rest. vi. a knee knocking sense of fight turned my cotton afterlife inside out. My heart. Alive and kicking and thrashing like a fish inside the dishwasher. I was supposed to break my neck on a bus bench when I fell from that rain cloud. Now I’m just a girl with wings too small to take me anywhere but a freak show. vii. There are brambles in my best socks, broken lantern oil spreading between my cold toes. Isn’t this how hypothermia sets in? Heart beat like a frightened rabbit, then just kind of numb. I almost died once, and sure, I thank my lucky stars the upstream current didn’t want me, the chlorox didn’t love me back. I wasn’t ready then. But this is now. And I left the milk out and it’s getting sour, it is attracting flies. viii. There’s a witch in the woods I think I have words for. ix. She climbs the fat bellied sky with nothing but her teeth and sanity as you barely outrun that seasonal depression everybody’s talking about. Happy? Sad. Or something in the middle. Like when you read me the letter you were going to send to your mother in Heaven. Like the bike ride distance between our houses. Like the magnolian summer storms we hid from under a firefly infested pillow fort. Our chalk drawings washed away, our knees black with lighting stings. there is no such thing as me and you. only a stinging sensation, and then pulling out the thorn. the whistling sound of my mother calling me home for supper. x. You let go of my hand by morning.

i. She lays on flower beds saturated with two year old morning dew. Waiting for the fates to feed off of her wayward heart. Damned to an eternity of misery, she, unsuccessfully, tries to hold her gaping chest shut. It's no longer a question of when the pain will end, and more of a never ending cycle of wondering when she'll stop being surprised when their screeching fills her ears. ii. Boy looks to his mother. He grasps her hand and tries to sound certain as he speaks to her; the sound of his maturing voice unfamiliar to his ears. "I'll make father pay for the wrongs he committed." "I'll make him want to dig his own grave and fall on his sword." His mother dries her nonexistent tears and looks at her baby boy. "You, my boy, deserve the sky." iii. My boy drives a 1965 Impala that he fixed up himself. He buys me blue raspberry sulshies at the gas station when gets himself coffee and a pack of double mint gum. He got a smile as big as heaven and a mean streak that he inherited from his uncle. He's the slacker of my dreams when he's strumming his guitar absentmindedly. The boy speaks in sonnets and'll stare at you like you're the only person in the room. He's got sunshine in his veins and I wouldn't love him any other way. iv. You can't kill the immortal. You can injury them, lock them up, strip them of their pride, of their title, of their power. You can anger them, you could crush their heart, make them wish they were dead. But the immortal can't die; they can only be forgotten. v. A fate, you can say, that is worse than death.