were you ever a falling star

where my writing goes

[beanboywrites]

❝When it rains, it is for me. I prayed for this. I stood outside knowing it was here for me. Here because whatever was inside me hated me and was ripping me apart and I couldn’t make a sound. Here because everything I felt unable to say was still something that needed to be expressed, somehow. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I stood outside in the rain and cried.❞

— moonsick

[beanboywrites]

❝for all my dissociative misery there were also all these odd moments of clarity, where suddenly the lines of my body and the lines of the spirit i had started to wear like a blanket around my shoulders met up again. i remember going to the mall once and buying a cup of mini pigs in a blanket because i thought it might help quell the sensation i had that i was eroding, but then after running across a busy street with them cradled in my arms i tried to eat one and my throat closed and my stomach churned and i remembered i don’t even like hotdogs. briefly, a light turned on. i’ve never liked hotdogs. i felt so dumb.❞

—poseidon's stupid horses

[beanboywrites]

i don’t know when exactly it started. maybe it had been building in me for a long time. the restlessness.

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.

am i a bad person if i do this? i wondered about every choice i made. i couldn’t answer. i didn’t know. and, subconsciously, i had already decided long ago that i was a bad person. regardless of what i did, my lived truth was built on top of the fundamental supposition that i was not, couldn’t be, and had never been good.

[beanboywrites]

❝sunshine shatters on your bathroom wall and it’s like something else, far away. a condo clubhouse. a framed watercolor painting of a mallard duck. the smell of chlorine and wallpaper glue. dust suspended in thick, still air. somewhere you lived for months after what happened. shampoo and water bugs in the big pool. somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore.❞

— strange sultry summer

[beanboywrites]

cicada trill in the blinding sun,

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

my hair falls into the sink and looks like straw viewed through uranium glass.

[beanboywrites]

observations from various airplanes

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.

—

mountain peaks fade into distant mist into the sky into nothing. larger than all of them put together is the volcano. i look to my right and think i’m in japan for a second at the pale blue feet of mount fuji, bowed before its crown of steam.

[beanboywrites]

I’m in Los Angeles holding a latte. It’s probably spring. I’m sitting cross-legged in this kind of booth-shaped tiled seat. I guess it’s a booth. There are regular chairs on the other side of the table. Anyway, the tile is the most interesting shade of aquamarine. In the sun, you might think it’s the color of Orbit sweet mint gum, if you spent three straight years buying only Orbit sweet mint gum, a fixation that your friends find funny in a sort of uncomfortable-feeling way. The air smells like honey and stagnant, sour water. I think something inside me is broken because I can’t stop thinking about running into the street or getting on another plane trying to outrun my own stupid shadow.

I had originally planned on going to Oregon. I have this sort of inescapable idea that Oregon might chase out whatever is living underneath my skin with me, but I hesitated while buying the plane ticket. I think I got scared that I might never leave Oregon. That whatever I found there would change me into something unrecognizable. So I bought a ticket to San Diego, immediately cancelled the trip, and then bought another to Los Angeles. I’ve never had any interest in visiting L.A., but now here I am at this café I don’t even know the name of holding this latte I can’t bring myself to drink. I wish I could just deal with my problems in a normal way.

[beanboywrites]

egg moon in a grocery store parking lot steam rising off black pavement reflecting yellow on my knees

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

i destroy every home i’m given and offer its ashes to egg moon

[beanboywrites]

i’m applying for a job right now but i would actually rather be dozens and dozens of glimmering white flowers blooming, scattered across a moonlit field no human has seen for many hundreds of years

[beanboywrites]

at three in the morning, you sojourn with the feedback of the universe.

[beanboywrites]

it’s so quiet i can hear my creaking knees as i readjust again and again

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. 

i stand and rock between both feet, and go inside.

[beanboywrites]

i am eating an apple and it feels magical.

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. 

i was reminded of that kind of pseudo-autumn and my neighbor’s apples by this one.

[beanboywrites]

The sun rises, broken into squares and then into triangles by panes of glass and the open door. A few hours ago, he screamed at you from the sidewalk outside your window, and he was bathed in sodium light and the morning’s first blues, and you stared down at him, mute, feeling how you imagine it must feel to be an empty jar, freshly washed.

Instead of going to French you buy a cappuccino and walk to the park. Dew rests on the edges of leaves. Briefly, time’s arrow slows. It’s the first day of spring.

[beanboywrites]

In a parking lot in 2015 there was a dip, gradual, in the pavement, and when it rained, the center became a black lake ringed by a black shore. It threw the quivering yellow reflection of streetlights overhead onto the fronts of your calves. This was the only place left for you after the librarian told you it was really time to go. You hunched in the shadow of a rooftop overhang with overflowing gutters, a cigarette between your fingers, a book tucked under your jacket. Plants with young branches, still green, bent under the onslaught.

[beanboywrites]

Sunday morning sun fell in shards, settling, trembling, at the bottom of the baptism pool. When they dunked you under, you opened your eyes. Behind your fractured pastor, baby Jesus stared down at you in stained glass. Rain is unusual in November, but that day you had barely toweled dry when warm water ran again in rivulets down your arms and legs. As it hit the ground, it rose again, petrichor and the sharp smell of fresh tar turned to glimmering steam in the watery light of the early afternoon.

[beanboywrites]

Yellow moon low in the sky. Its edges bleed out, paint on wet paper, refracting in blooming rectangles off sheets of rain. You’re crouched in the grass under a highway overpass. The din falls onto you. Below you, the thirsty earth drinks its fill.

[beanboywrites]

I’m afraid I peaked in college. The fear follows me everywhere, I feel it running down my arms when I pick things up and when I shower, and when I stand still, which is all I seem to do nowadays.

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.

This stagnation is self-imposed. My fear of how I have changed, of success and of expectations, prevents me from moving on. Am I scared that I have already peaked, or that someday I will?