everything all the time

I'm cipher :]

this is mostly a place where i can share my poetry or prose or whatever i decide to call it

my fandom/personal blog is @thatonecode

they/them trans, nonbinary and aroace

im 18 !

i write things as a way to vent !! im doing fine 👍

written February 8, 2023

Impossibilites shift when I close my eyes-When I close my window-When I close my closet door.

I will never kiss someone and mean it. I will never fly from my rooftop, sing like a bird at midnight. I will never make it, run away Sunday night to the blue LED lights of a bus instead of a theatre. 

I hope my body ends up in the ocean, I hope it’s torn apart because I can only forgive so much. Depths of water, pools they contain me in, will never match where I was already drowning. The ladder was too high up. There are no handholds on the inside of a well. Caution tape around my body drifts away to sea like forgiveness. It smells like salt and an open wound. 

The things I cling to with my nails. A cliffside-a sandpapered ladder-a sense of normality.

Time is measured by how much weight is on my shoulders, but how many nails break off between scene changes and standbys. The blinking light outside the dashboard window and the length of my hair. Days are measured by how they end because they all end. It all ends. 

There are no stars here, but they are not dead. Florida has dead stars, a sky close enough to crush me, and a reckless joy. Islands have too many stars, too close together, cold water, an emptiness that comes from being trapped in a place everyone else loves. 

Write another metaphor, godless kid, foolish boy. Walk down the hallways and pretend like you’ll push this time, like you’ll do anything but fold into nonexistance. Talk about the day you were born like it happened in August instead of end of September sitting on your bed watching it all fall apart. Pick your laptop up from its hiding place and figure out your life, all by yourself, all by yourself. 

(It hurts

Because

It doesnt go

away)

Fear and not much else, dulled anger like a sword stuck in the stone. Brief reckless wild joy. The silence of 3am’s but your watch reads 7:50. The bus left without you. 

Find yourself. In words half written-in sleepless nights-in the corner of rooms you never want to see again

It all needs a name, these feelings and you, newly brought into existence by happenstance in a mall change room. Falling down like tree leaves, settled in a pattern of tea leaves that read death, and unbecoming, and rebirth. 

You’ve never felt more out of place than in the middle of an english classroom, hair too long and voice too deep. You’ve never felt more afraid than in your own home. You’ve never felt more alive than when the sun goes down. 

English years ago taught you the words but not their meanings, you grew up in french, it only makes sense. It is only years later you will learn “boy” means something soft and locked away. It is only years later you will learn “girl” means anger and rebellion. Years after that you will take them both into your hands, replace all your knuckle bones with girl and all your ribs with boy and become something other. 

Hate and love are funny things because you could never understand one without the other, and yet you claim to understand both. Loveless thing, how could you understand? Your heart beats in unfinished rhythms, half written and staccato. Spiteful, you say, with shaking hands. I will make myself out of something that cannot be undone. Families and love you don’t understand. Lies you tell everyone because you want them to be true. You catch yourself and wonder if they look through your eyes and see you properly. Who is it for? 

It all unplugs like life support, like a headphone cord.

written july 11, 2023

Does it matter that I’m in a car instead of a bus if I’m still just crashing? There’s blood on my face, on my hands, I loved you and I worried we were going to crash the entire time. Found myself in PDF files and walks without shoes on, 10 over the limit at 2am wondering how, and why now, and does it have to end. You tell me I’ll get through it, and everything about you makes me want to cry. 

We walk home together in the dark, and if we’d had a before it would look like that. (But there is no before, for all the time we grew up together I still was facing the back of your head. This is the first time in our lives we’ve been side by side.) Our before is the precursor to violence. A threat that never was (and you still say that you’re afraid of me). 

You drive me home in the dark, and I ask if I really need to go home, and you don’t care so we go anywhere else. Talk about anything and everything and I turn my phone off and forget that I need to exist outside of the car. I can breathe, on the freeway at quarter past midnight. 

It’s still dark and I’m calling lights up on you on stage, and maybe that’s where it started. I walk into that theatre and they know my name, but he still looks at me like he doesn’t know what my next move will be, and sometimes you look at me like that too. Like you’re still seeing the kid I was, like that’s how you’ll remember me. Jokes about quitting turned into not quite jokes, and I remember that I didn’t know how to make you stay. In the end I had nothing to do with it. 

You’re in front of me, and I’m holding hands with your girlfriend and she’s important to me too. She sat with me and walked with me and she didn’t change like I did from when I knew her. I have a before with her that I don’t have with you. We take our shoes off and I tell her I don’t quite feel real and she tells me it won’t last forever. She’s in the car with us and we’re at the end of a pier together, all holding hands. We’re sitting on the beach, all leaning on eachother. We’re in her house, knocked over like dominoes. 

It’s easier to pick yourself back up when someone else can see the picture you make. It’s easier to put myself in your hands, in your car, and focus on breathing, focus on squeezing her hand, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2. Three of us in a car, on a dock, in a park, on a freeway. It’s the second time I’ve felt like a teenager in my whole life. I feel like I am 17 finally, after years of being in my 20s. Time is crawling by and if it moved faster I fear I’d break beyond repair. 

I go home to my half empty house of closed doors and expectations, and it’s late and they don’t ask where I was (they know I’ll lie anyways) and I tell my mother that I’m anxious, but she’s only been good at taking care of me when I’m taking care of myself. I sit with her and nothing changes. I live with her and nothing changes. She asks when I'll be back, and I look at her and I say “mom.” and she says “okay” and I know I am not making it easier for her. In my dreams, her best friend tells me that they deserve it for what they put me through. 

My shadow and yours on the pavement down the road I walked four times each day. The streetlights bend towards me, and I need to make sure that I’m still here. It hurts, in a muted sort of numb-feel-nothing way. It’s only the rest of my life ahead of me. We stop at my driveway, red light ominous behind us and you tell me it’ll be okay, and ask me not to text you once I’m inside. Everyday I might never see you again, that’s what this means. We’re all freed from this town, and I’m certainly not sticking around. I wish you were. I wish I hadn’t started this now. I wish I had time to explain what I mean. 

If I could write us an ending I would still be sitting in your car. I’d be sitting in your car at a stoplight, and I’d look over at you and tell you I love you, I can’t stand you, I’ll miss you, I love you. In my version we still don’t get a happy ending. The car hits us headon and only one of us survives. 

When you’ve been waiting for one moment, for 13 years, and you expect it to happen in one day and it instead happens over the course of several months, what does that make you? A liar? The perfect vibrant painting of the woods you hung over your window to a parkinglot. You’ve ripped through it now, too eager to see the stars from the roof one last time. To look over your shoulder like a thief, in the red light of your window. Remember the sunrises? Remember the years spent here? It will stop meaning anything soon. 

Todays still just a mondaytuesdaywednesday. Tomorrows still just a thursdayfridaysaturday. Sunday doesn’t exist. Unless you text me about it. 

I’ve been feeling a lot like I’m 12 again. Brand new in a world that hurts. Hiding, packing for a half-baked plan. Waking up to empty houses and notifications from everyone except you. I drove past your house, and your car was there. I drove past the house that used to be mine, and I didn’t stop but I wanted to. I drove past the house I grew up in and flinched. 

I take in every moment like a polaroid camera. One second and then it’s gone. Everyday feels like years ago, time stretches behind me, and I can’t see the future at all. You remind me I’m real, and I punch you on the walk home to confirm it. Otherwise the shadows look like me by myself, in the dead of May. 

I can’t see the ending. It’s a car crash, and the lights go down. It’s another car crash. They’re all car crashes. It’s you, it’s me, it’s both of us and neither of us all at once. Violence and a single moment, and then pain that stretches like the past ahead of me. I’m sitting at an intersection and I want to tell you that I love you, but I don’t know who I am. I wonder if you know anyways. (I call a standby. There’s another car crash). 

written July 17, 2023

Lately I've been watching 4am like an old friend. 

The school - not mine, never mine, not anymore - sits unmoved, and across the field is the worst place I’ve ever been, and in between them is a dead bird. I sit at the school and I wish someone would call me. I don’t want to talk, please don’t answer my calls. 

Lie on the ground, lie in it. Lie six feet under, lie to your fathers face. Lie in bed, tell yourself you prefer this. 

(You’ve been changing out pieces Theseus, your actions have come back to find you are not the person who committed them, but you bear the consequences anyways.)

Lately I’ve been 17 and scared. I’ll die the same day, the same way my 16 did, the same way my 15 did before them, and my 14 before them. I don’t remember being this scared at 13, at 8, at 6. Wake up everyday and walk a step closer to my death, to 18. (The death comes sooner this year. It happens slowly as you cut tape off your posters, and stack books into boxes, and avoid telling your sisters you’ll come back).

Foolish boy, the sky won’t answer if you keep staring into it. The clouds know, but they’re running from you, you’re chasing them. Your sisters are behind you and it’s your mistake on their hands. They want you to stay. They want you to stay. They want you to stay but it’ll kill you. The world might kill you too but at least it won’t be in this house. 

I’m the deer, and I’m the car swerving too. I’m the car crash. It’s all a car crash. Most car crashes happen from behind but I’ve been staring this one dead in the eyes for 13 years. I’m 17 and dead as the deer the car hit. I’m 17 and terrified that tomorrow won’t be more than another day. Terrified it will be. I’m 17 and ignoring my alarms because 18 will come for me whether or not I get out of bed.

Talk of flesh and my mother. Tell me she can’t let go. I’m prying her fingers off of mine and all she ever wanted was to not see me hurt and I can’t bear to tell her that she hurt me, that I hurt myself, that this world will hurt me anyways. I leave and I don’t tell her when I’ll be back. I get into your car at the end of my driveway and I don’t look behind me. 

The next time you take me out to to the city I promise I won’t say I love you. It’ll ruin me more than you. I’ll hold your phone and you can tell me about whatever you want and I promise I won’t say I love you. You’ll look like 2am, and I’ll be a shadow. 

If life weren’t so specific I would be fine. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re driving us home, in your tiny car with chip bags on the floor, going 20 over the whole way, while I’m holding the 4 litres of five-alive you bought earlier, I’d be a wreck. I get in your car and I don’t say ‘take me anywhere’, and you do. In a movie we’d get to do the whole thing over. In a movie, maybe I’d be allowed to say I love you. It’d be a medium shot from the backseat of your car, and we’d be stopped at a red light just outside the next town over, and you wouldn’t look at me as the car hit us headon. There are no credits, but the movie still ends. 

It’ll be a sunday when the world ends, or maybe a thursday. It’ll be 4am when the world ends, and everyday after that. 4am and slushies and paperwork and unanswered calls. Newly empty corners of my room look like 4am. In the mirror, I am 4 years old again. In the mirror I am already dead. 

It’s easy to forget these trees raised me. I lie on the pavement in front of them, and I wait to get picked up (one part I cannot bear to get up, two parts I miss the summer you bring me) and they look the same as they did from a hundred different angles on a hundred different days. How many kids have sat here? How many have tripped over the roots, scraped themselves on the bark? The sky seems too wide here- reach out and grab it, foolish boy with the unclean room. You’ll make it this time I promise. 

Claw your life out from the fog. Hold it so tightly it has scratch marks. Never let anyone else have it. Snap out of it, twice on your right. Save it for when you stop finding threats down the hall. Save it for a therapy office as you stare at the horizon behind the clock when you admit that it’s fake most days, you’re fake most days. Do your best to act like a real person anyways, and they won’t be able to tell the difference.